- Iran Has Begun Assembling Key Material For Nuclear Warhead Production: UN Report
Iran Has Begun Assembling Key Material For Nuclear Warhead Production: UN Report
Israeli officials are once again making threats to launch preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear development facilities amid new reports the Islamic Republic is ramping up efforts to manufacture materials necessary for the production of nuclear warheads.
“In one of the most forceful statements made by an Israeli official, the Likud’s Tzachi Hanegbi, considered an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened that Israel could attack Iran’s nuclear program if the United States rejoined the nuclear deal, as US President-elect Joe Biden has indicated he plans to do,” The Times of Israel reports.
And crucially a new confidential report by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) alleges that Iran has initiated a major final step in the process necessary to make nuclear weapons.
Getty Images The secret IAEA document has been seen by The Wall Street Journal and is focus of a bombshell Wednesday report, which says:
The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a report for member states viewed by The Wall Street Journal, said Iran has told the watchdog that it has started manufacturing equipment it will use to produce uranium metal at a site in Isfahan in coming months.
Uranium metal can be used to construct the core of a nuclear weapon.
The manufacture of uranium metal is prohibited under the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal which Biden has vowed to return to. Iran signaling its intent to carry on with it may be a dramatic move aimed fundamentally at increasing leverage with the incoming Biden administration. However, still with a week to go in a turbulent Trump presidency, such declarations may trigger a last-minute US or Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic.
Kazem Gharib Abadi, Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, caught the West off guard in a surprising Wednesday tweet affirming the provocative step:
R&D activities related to the design of an improved type of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor started. Natural uranium will be used to produce uranium metal in the first stage. @iaeaorg received the updated DIQ for Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant and conducted an inspection.
— Gharibabadi (@Gharibabadi) January 13, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Here’s more on the unprecedented move to potentially produce uranium metal, according to the WSJ:
Iran hasn’t made uranium metal so far, senior Western officials said. The IAEA said Tehran had given it no timeline for when it would do so. Still, the development brings Iran closer to crossing the line between nuclear operations with a potential civilian use, such as enriching nuclear fuel for power-generating reactors, and nuclear-weapons work, something Tehran has long denied ever carrying out.
Last July the Isfahan was hit by a mystery blast near in time to when the nearby Natanz facility was also damaged.
While Iranian officials blamed the Isfahan incident on a faulty “worn out transformer” that exploded, Tehran pointed the finger directly at Israel for the Natanz bombing.
But some think both #Iran‘s claimed purpose for producing uranium metal is different — keeping nuke weapons options open and pressuring the @JoeBiden team. And some think timeline may be much shorter than #Iran has told agency https://t.co/IWvX8LPRvU -3-
— laurence norman (@laurnorman) January 13, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Given the new UN/IAEA report has identified the facility involved in pursuing uranium metal production as Isfahan, it’s more than likely that Israeli military and intelligence is eyeing it for an attack, or some level of sabotage operation.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/14/2021 – 01:00 - A Nation Imploding: Digital Tyranny, Insurrection, And Martial Law
A Nation Imploding: Digital Tyranny, Insurrection, And Martial Law
Authored by John Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”
– Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
This is what we have been reduced to: A violent mob. A nation on the brink of martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. And a Constitution in tatters.
We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.
This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.
Just to be clear, however: this is not a revolution.
This is a ticking time bomb.
There is absolutely no excuse for the violence that took place at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Yet no matter which way you look at it, the fallout from this attempted coup could make this worrisome state of affairs even worse.
First, you’ve got the president, who has been accused of inciting a riot and now faces a second impeachment and a scandal that could permanently mar his legacy. While the impeachment process itself is a political beast, the question of whether President Trump incited his followers to riot is one that has even the best legal experts debating. Yet as First Amendment scholar David Hudson Jr. explains, for Trump’s rhetoric to be stripped of its free speech protections, “The speaker must intend to and actually use words that rally people to take illegal action. The danger must be imminent – not in the indefinite future. And the words must be uttered in a situation in which violence is likely to happen.”
At a minimum, Trump’s actions and words – unstatesmanlike and reckless, by any standards – over the course of his presidency and on Jan. 6 helped cause a simmering pot to boil over.
Second, there were the so-called “patriots” who took to the streets because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. Those “Stop the Steal” protesters may have deluded themselves (or been deluded) into believing they were standing for freedom when they stormed the Capitol. However, all they really did was give the Deep State and its corporate partners a chance to pull back the curtain and reveal how little freedom we really have. There is nothing that can be said to justify the actions of those who, armed with metal pipes, chemical irritants, stun guns, and other types of weapons, assaulted and stampeded those in their path.
There are limits to what can be done in the so-called name of liberty, and this level of violence—no matter who wields it or what brand of politics or zealotry motivate them—crossed the line.
Third, you’ve got the tech giants, who meted out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship. Yet there can be no freedom of speech if social media giants can muzzle whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. As Edward Snowden warned, whether it was warranted or not, the social media ban on President Trump signaled a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech. And that is exactly what is playing out as users, including those who have no ties to the Capitol riots, begin to experience lock outs, suspensions and even deletions of their social media accounts.
Remember, the First Amendment is a steam valve. It allows people to peacefully air viewpoints, vent frustrations, debate and disagree, and generally work through the problems of self-governance. Without that safety mechanism in place, self-censorship increases, discontent festers, foment brews, and violence becomes the default response for resolving disputes, whether with the government or each other. At a minimum, we need more robust protections in place to protect digital expression and a formalized process for challenging digital censorship.
Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Once you start using social media scores coupled with surveillance capitalism to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society, anything goes. In China, which has been traveling this road for years now, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.
Fourth, you’ve got the police, who normally exceed the constitutional limits restraining them from brutality, surveillance and other excesses. Only this time, despite intelligence indicating that some of the rioters were planning for mayhem, police were outnumbered and ill prepared to deal with the incursion. Investigations underway suggest that some police may even have colluded with the rioters.
Certainly, the lack of protocols adopted by the Capitol Police bear an unnerving resemblance to the lack of protocols in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when police who were supposed to uphold the law and prevent violence failed to do either. In fact, as the Washington Post reports, police “seemed to watch as groups beat each other with sticks and bludgeoned one another with shields… At one point, police appeared to retreat and then watch the beatings before eventually moving in to end the free-for-all, make arrests and tend to the injured.” Incredibly, when the first signs of open violence broke out, it was reported that the police chief allegedly instructed his staff to “let them fight, it will make it easier to declare an unlawful assembly.”
There’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention: Instead of restoring order, local police stand down. Without fail, what should be an exercise in how to peacefully disagree turns ugly the moment looting, vandalism, violence, intimidation tactics and rioting are introduced into the equation. Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in.
All that was missing on Jan. 6 was a declaration of martial law.
Which brings us to the fifth point, martial law. Given that the nation has been dancing around the fringes of martial law with each national crisis, it won’t take much more to push the country over the edge to a declaration and military lockdown. The rumblings of armed protests at all 50 state capitals and in Washington, D.C., will only serve to heighten tensions, double down on the government’s military response, and light a match to a powder keg state of affairs. With tens of thousands of National Guard troops and federal law enforcement personnel mobilized to lock down Washington, DC, in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots and in advance of the Jan. 20 inauguration, this could be the largest military show-of-force in recent years.
So where do we go from here?
That all of these events are coming to a head around Martin Luther King Jr. Day is telling.
More than 50 years after King was assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of racial unrest and injustice, police militarization, surveillance, government corruption and ineptitude, the blowback from a battlefield mindset and endless wars abroad, and a growing economic inequality between the haves and have nots
Making matters worse, modern America has compounded the evils of racism, materialism and militarism with ignorance, intolerance and fear.
Callousness, cruelty, meanness, immorality, ignorance, hatred, intolerance and injustice have become hallmarks of our modern age, magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality.
“Despite efforts to curb hate speech, eradicate bullying and extend tolerance, a culture of nastiness has metastasized in which meanness is routinely rewarded, and common decency and civility are brushed aside,” observed Teddy Wayne in a New York Times piece on “The Culture of Nastiness.”
Every time I read a news headline or flip on the television or open up an email or glance at social media, I run headlong into people consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism. Donald Trump is, in many ways, the embodiment of this culture of meanness. Yet as Wayne points out, “Trump is less enabler in chief than a symptom of a free-for-all environment that prizes cutting smears… Social media has normalized casual cruelty.”
Whether it’s unfriending or blocking someone on Facebook, tweeting taunts and barbs on Twitter, or merely using cyberspace to bully someone or peddle in gossip, we have become masters in the art of meanness.
This culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nation’s governmental and social policies.
“Meanness today is a state of mind,” writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, “the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.”
This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides us—race, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc.—rather than what unites us: we are all human.
This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as “the politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as the cult of otherness… It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.”
This is more than meanness, however.
This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.
As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.
This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.
Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.
Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.
By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world – not so different from how Trump is often depicted – historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.
Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized.
The darkness is winning
It’s not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning
The darkness is winning in our communities. It’s winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. It’s winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. It’s winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.
John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin’s bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been “passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts.
This fire is not liberating; it is destroying.
We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.
We are on the wrong side of the revolution.
“If we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution,” advised King, “we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.“
Freedom demands responsibility.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
Martin Luther King Jr. dared to dream of a world in which all Americans “would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
He didn’t live to see that dream become a reality. It’s still not a reality. We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.
But imagine…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against the evils of government despotism.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/14/2021 – 00:05 - Israel Launches "Deadliest Airstrikes In Years" On Syria With US Intelligence Coordination
Israel Launches “Deadliest Airstrikes In Years” On Syria With US Intelligence Coordination
The Washington Post is calling the latest overnight Israeli airstrikes on Syria an “unusually intense” attack on “Iranian positions” there, while The Guardian is reporting “the deadliest airstrikes on Syria in years” which killed 57 Syrian government and Iraqi militia troops.
The airstrikes reached deep into the country near the Syria-Iraq border in Deir Ezzor province, with the targets said to have been arms depots and military positions. The site is also considered a key weapons transit point between Syria and its allies in Iraq and Iran.
Explosion from suspected Israeli airstrike in eastern Syria on January 13, 2021. Via Times of Israel Syrian state media identified the area as in the vicinity of Albu Kamal while saying damage is still “being assessed”.
The Israeli operation appears connected to Trump’s continued pressure campaign against Iran during his last week in the White House. According to an American intelligence source cited in Fox News:
A senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the attack told The Associated Press that the airstrikes were carried out with intelligence provided by the United States and targeted a series of warehouses in Syria that were being used as a part of the pipeline to store and stage Iranian weapons.
The official said the warehouses also served as a pipeline for components that supports Iran’s nuclear program.
The casualty count is uncertain and varying, but Fox also confirmed it as “massive” with up to 18 missile strikes along the border targeting several arms depots.
It’s been widely reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently met with the head of Israeli Mossad, possibly to coordinate just such an attack.
Wait, so Pompeo actually discussed the strike that killed 57 people on the #Syria-n #Iraq-i border in a cafe? https://t.co/ux0uFRi9Ch
— Nabih (@nabihbulos) January 13, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Israeli sources further called it a clear “message” to Iran before Biden enters office:
The head of the Israeli National Security Research Institute, Major General (res.) Amos Yadlin, said that behind its bombing of Syria’s Deir Ezzor Governroate, Tel Aviv wanted to convey a message to Iran.
In a statement to Israel’s official Kan news channel, Yadlin said that the attack carried out by Israel in the Deir Ezzor Governorate is “important and the message to Iran is that Israel will not stop working (against Iran and Syria) even during the era of (US President-elect Joe) Biden.”
“Tonight’s attack in Syria has unique characteristics – very long-range attacks in Deir Ezzor and Albukamal, a wide range of targets, including in an urban area, many casualties,” said Yadlin, who is the former head of Israeli Military Intelligence (AMAN).
“Israel is determined to continue dealing with the military capabilities that Iran is building in the Syrian region, and with the infrastructure to transport weapons,” Gen. Yadlin added.
Meanwhile, top Israeli officials are now warning the world that should Joe Biden reenter the Iran nuclear deal, the Israeli military would likely launch a preemptive attack on Iran.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 23:45 - How COVID Paved The Road To Serfdom
How COVID Paved The Road To Serfdom
Authored by Rob Sutton via TheCritic.co.uk,
Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom maintains a near unrivalled influence on the political imagination of conservative and classical liberal thinkers. Published in 1943, at the height of the Keynesian consensus, it elaborated a worldview considered intolerable within academic economics.
The central thesis of The Road to Serfdom is that descent into tyranny is the ultimate and inevitable trajectory of a society in which the sovereignty of the individual is subverted in the accumulation of economic power by the state. Central planning leads invariably to authoritarianism. Hayek is not timid in making these claims.
Studying the seemingly disparate political systems which dominated Europe in the run-up to the Second World War (communism, fascism, socialism), Hayek concluded that they each had a common endpoint – the development of a totalitarian state. Despite their contrasting social and economic goals, each necessitated the central consolidation of power and the explicit planning of an economy to achieve those goals.
As such, their distinct political flavours were largely irrelevant to their ultimate destination. Position along the political axis was less important than most commentators predicted. The binary Hayek was interested in, rather than left wing versus right wing, was whether the state uses its authority to promote individual freedom or to restrict it.
Hayek saw that the wartime governments of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and communist Russia all fell within the latter category: they sacrificed the freedom of individuals to empower the state to achieve its own goals. In doing so, their citizens suffered similarly. Repression, poverty and death are the consequence of a government which has taken ownership of those responsibilities previously held by individual citizens.
Hayek’s argument faced an uphill struggle. Despite its enormous popularity among classical liberals and conservative policymakers, we continue to view the political machines of the first half of the 20th century through the lens of their self-assigned labels, rather than under Hayek’s consequentialist umbrella of totalitarian collectivism.
His criticism of socialism is not a left versus right argument, but a general observation of the tendency of systems of government who accumulate economic power to achieve social goals to veer towards repression. The different political labels are just different positions along the road to serfdom, valuing centralised economic planning over individual liberty.
By transcending traditional political labels, and regrouping governments in terms of how they wield the formidable power of the state, The Road to Serfdom gains its enduring appeal. Its lessons are a stern warning to any who believe that a government can accumulate vast powers and maintain them for purely beneficent purposes.
The road described by Hayek, one in which citizens entitled to commercial freedom, private property and the rule of law might ultimately see their individual sovereignty become secondary to the aims of the state, is worryingly benign in its superficial appearance. The transition is not particular to any time or place or political position. There is no discontinuity or abrupt transition of power. The passage by which individuals find themselves subservient occurs gradually, and often in places where commentators would not believe it possible.
To Hayek, economic freedom is as inseparable from individual liberty. When the economic freedom of the individual is handed over to the state it is a key step towards totalitarian government. Economic freedom is a necessary condition of individual liberty. Individual liberty cannot long exist without economic freedom.
Hayek observes that the transition of power from individuals to the state is almost always voluntary, at least initially. Military coups and political assassinations generally happen late along the road, after the state power has already amassed considerable power, and are more symptom than cause. More important is the steady and insidious sacrifice of economic liberty performed by citizens in exchange for security. Individuals expect their government to fill an ever-greater role within the economic function of their country and as such within their lives, and those in government desiring power are all too happy to accept.
The transfer of power is too slow to set alarm bells ringing, but it is never without cost, and when it occurs steadily it allows the state to gradually acquire instruments of enormous social and economic influence. The nature of society is such that it eventually becomes psychologically reliant on the state; with every new problem its citizens turn to their central planners in expectation of a solution. Expedience takes precedence over personal responsibility.
And as this power is accumulated, instead of the instruments of the states serving their citizens, a change begins to occur. Citizens are increasingly asked to serve the instruments of the state, rather than the other way around, often to fulfil some vague goal of general welfare.
We have seen this during the current pandemic with the ever-present “Protect the NHS” slogan. Yet few have dared to ask why we are being asked to sacrifice those hard-won liberties in the name of a state institution. To those who would point out the apparent selfishness of such questioning, Hayek notes that those crises which precipitate the transition of power from the individual to the collective are often driven initially by conceptions of the “public good” in which a unified national response is demanded.
The NHS was, of course, founded with the most noble of intentions. But that does not mean we should not question why we have now, over 70 years on from its birth, found ourselves in a situation in which every facet of public life has been redirected to protect an instrument of the state, to which the political careers of our central planners are intrinsically bound.
The path towards an oppressive society generally begins with protective measures enacted with good intentions, as has happened with Covid-19. A common early step on the road is national emergency. This might be war, economic depression, political gridlock, or a pandemic. Citizens are willing to accept that a temporary curtailment of individual liberty is necessary to overcome a national crisis.
An asymmetry between the urgency the initial crisis demanded and the public’s hunger to protect their personal liberties is exploited. There is an assumption that freedoms lost will be quickly regained. This asymmetry, taken at the flood, allows early sceptics to be easily smothered. Yet power remains centralised even after the initial crisis passes. Arguments that “what’s good in wartime is good in peacetime” arise. Those individuals who might personally gain from the accumulation of power are reluctant to hand back controls to citizens who previously relinquished it in good faith. An exit strategy is not forthcoming.
These difficulties are exacerbated in “advanced” nations. The institutions of the state in Britain have reached such a point that these is little aspect of public life not regulated by departmental oversight. Substantial influence is held over increasingly high-resolution aspects of individual lives. The bloat of party manifestos at each election is testament to this, and the growing intrusion of the state into our lives primes it for an executive who is willing to wield that power without restraint.
A state which readily accepts responsibility for the minutiae of the lives of its citizens will inevitably infantilise them to a certain degree. And when new difficulties arise, citizens are emotionally conditioned to expect the state to intervene again. The individual’s sphere of influence is whittled away as the collectivist sphere of government expands to form an increasingly comprehensive political and moral narrative.
Rather than face the difficulty of building a policy consensus during Covid-19, we have instead seen the concentration of executive powers outside the reach of parliamentary scrutiny. The policies implemented have no clear goal (“save lives” is vague, unhelpful, and, one would hope, the natural default goal of policy anyway) and no clear exit strategy.
The scope has expanded beyond measures which might be considered within the realm of public health to absurdly detailed prescriptions for how we should live. Where we should go to work, what kind of businesses are sufficiently important to continue, who we should socialise with and within which hours, how democratic institutions can assemble, which causes may be legitimately protested.
These goals clearly reach well beyond what could reasonably be described as within the bounds of public health. And with this amassed power, governments seem to implement pitifully detailed restrictions as they try to substitute themselves for common sense: which way to walk within a supermarket, which products are deemed “essential” by the government’s planners, how far apart we must stand, where grandma should sit at the dinner table.
The measures rolled out in the name of a public health emergency are not public health measures. They are, instead, an all-encompassing social and economic prescription for how we must live and work, authorised by an executive using extra-parliamentary measures which they argue that the complexity and seriousness of the situation have necessitated.
Any system of central planning is necessarily a poor imitation of the innumerable complexity captured by a free market economy. The attempts of central committees to assign to products and services values which can only be truly assigned by citizens introduces inefficiency. But Hayek is not advocating for laissez-faire economics. He argues that there does exist a natural duty of government “planning”: to level the playing field for those engaging in commerce and reduce barriers to market entry. This in opposition to a view of “planning” which uses economic control to achieve specific social goals.
These two categories of planning are necessarily exclusive. Planning cannot be performed with a goal of some social intervention without necessarily distorting markets and producing barriers to free trade, regardless of the purpose. The sweeping measures introduced to reduce the transmission of Covid-19 demonstrate this clearly: small businesses have suffered terribly, while corporate giants such as Amazon have consolidated their grip on the market.
Britain is generally a nation of political consensus. Since the Second World War, with the exception of the advent of Thatcherism, there has been a unidirectional and steady transfer of power from individual citizens into the hands of government. Being so willing to accept the prescriptions of government in regulating the most minute of aspects of our everyday lives, we prepared the stage for an event such as this current pandemic, precipitating a dramatic shift from a society in which the individual is sovereign to one in which their needs are secondary to those of the state and its institutions.
Hayek’s ultimate message is that, as far as the relationship between the state and its subjects goes, nothing is free. That which the government gives us necessarily requires the sacrifice of individual responsibility. Security is not without cost, and freedom can only be protected at a price. The only truly progressive system is one which respects the individualism above collectivism.
Those lives we might save by reducing transmission with lockdowns will ultimately be paid for down the line. Either through those conditions which we have decided secondary in priority to Covid-19, those heart attacks, strokes and cancer being diagnosed and treated too late, or through the innumerable opportunity cost of stifled innovation in a society whose government has obtained greater economic and social control since the Second World War. Freedom, hard-won, is easily lost.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 23:25 - Chinese Autos Continue V-Shaped Recovery To End 2020
Chinese Autos Continue V-Shaped Recovery To End 2020
It’s almost as if life is back to normal in China…
The recovery in Chinese auto sales continued strong through the end of the year, with vehicle wholesales rising 6.4% and passenger vehicle sales rising 7.2% in December 2020. See if you can spot the V-shaped recovery below:
According to data released on Wednesday by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, passenger vehicle sales totaled 2.375 million units while vehicle wholesales totaled 2.83 million units.
Heading into 2021, the CAAM expects the recovery to continue. They believe vehicle sales will increase 4% to more than 26 million units total in 2021, according to Bloomberg. This prediction is despite a current semiconductor shortage in the auto market that is causing production disruptions across the globe.
In December, new energy vehicle wholesales were up a massive 49.5% to 248,000 units.
This comes as we continue to note that the market for EVs in China continues is ripe. EV sales from January to November of 2020 were up 4.4% this year versus a decline of 7.6% in overall passenger cars during the same period. Chinese auto sales had seen a full V-shaped recovery by October of this year, we noted at the time.
Recall, we noted in November that NEVs will be 20% of China’s new car sales by 2025. The “new energy” category includes battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Sales will rise as the country’s “NEV industry has improved their technology and competitiveness,” according to a new policy paper reviewed by Reuters.
In the country’s 5 year plan to 2025, the State Council has pushed for improvements in EV technologies, building more efficient charging and implementing battery swapping networks. The Chinese government will also adopt quotas and incentives to to “guide automakers” (i.e. force them) to make EVs after Federal subsidies end in two years.
The government is also looking at ways to implement EVs for public uses, commercial use and mass transit.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 23:05 - Eye Of The Storm: United States And Iran Flex Muscles Expecting New Confrontation
Eye Of The Storm: United States And Iran Flex Muscles Expecting New Confrontation
Submitted by South Front,
U.S. President Donald Trump and his entourage have evidently lost the “war at home”.
The internal struggle is all but entirely concluded, and the victors are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.
However, Trump and Co., in their last days in office are still dead set on proving they are in charge of the Middle East, and on guaranteeing that their “maximum pressure campaign” on Iran continues. And both sides are flexing muscles showing that they are ready for military confrontation at any moment.
Tehran revealed its new helicopter carrier – the Makran, as well as a brand-new missile launching warship – the Zereh. Iran continues amassing forces along its sea border in the Persian Gulf and is tightening its grip on the Strait of Hormuz.
US Satellite imagery has revealed an increase in activity by IRGC vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.
In just the first days of the year, Iran carried out a large-scale drone drill, showcasing loitering munitions and more, closely followed by a naval exercise.
The elite Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps revealed their own underground missile base near the Persian Gulf, promising to realize their threat of turning the US aircraft carriers into “sinking submarines.”
On its part, the United States sent their nuclear submarine, the USS Georgia, loaded to the brink with Tomahawk missiles, accompanied by two guided missile destroyers, to the Persian Gulf.
They joined the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, which was initially set to depart, but which has instead remained.
To top it all off, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the new “home base” of Al-Qaeda is Iran and went pretty close to claiming that Iran was even behind the organization of 9/11.
That took place just days after Pompeo vowed to designate Yemen’s Houthis, longstanding Iranian allies, as a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is also on high alert. Its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah vowed to support Iran and thanked it again for its support.
Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabiei warned the US against “extraterritorial adventurism” and its actions do appear to be evidence of that.
At the same time, Donald Trump is desperate for a “win” or at least to show himself as a decision-maker, after being banned from all social media. It could also be his aim to damage the relations between Tehran and Washington beyond repair.
Incoming President Joe Biden is expected to attempt to rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal in one way or another, which could lead to improving relations between the two sides and bring a semblance of calm to the Middle East.
There is no certainty that this would happen and, depending on which actions would be undertaken by both Iran and the USA, this could also contribute to a deepening rift between the two.
In regard to the conflict between Iran and Israel, the parliament in Tehran voted on a resolution to end the state of Israel by 2041. While Biden is expected to be less supportive of Tel Aviv than Trump, the United States will remain Israel’s key ally. Therefore, an end to the conflict between the sides is as unlikely as ever, but Israel may, for the first time in a while, be on retreat.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 22:45 - Facebook Played Major Role Coordinating 'Capitol Riot' As Sandberg Deflects Blame
Facebook Played Major Role Coordinating ‘Capitol Riot’ As Sandberg Deflects Blame
Over the last week, Twitter alternative Parler was summarily executed by Amazon, which kicked the conservative social media platform off of its servers due to ‘far-right’ users coordinating last week’s protest at the Capitol which turned into a riot after a small group split off, gained access to the Capitol building, and ran amok.
Now we learn that Facebook also had a giant role in coordinating the so-called ‘Capitol Riots’ which President Trump was just impeached over on Wednesday for allegedly inciting the incident.
According to the Washington Post, a “growing body of evidence shows that Facebook played a much larger role” than COO Sharyl Sandberg claimed in a Monday interview livestreamed by Reuters, in what the Post described as ‘deflecting blame.’
“I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, don’t have our standards and don’t have our transparency,” said Sandberg.
She noted that last week the company took down content affiliated with the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory and the Proud Boys extremist group, as well as content affiliated with the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement seeking to delegitimize election results. She said there was likely to be some content on Facebook because the company’s enforcement was “never perfect.” –Washington Post
Au contraire Sharyl, it’s far more than just ‘some’ content.
According to the Post, the hashtag #StopTheSteal was still widely in use as of Monday, when a search revealed that 128,000 people were talking about it, and in many cases using it to coordinate for the rally, according to Eric Feinberg, Vice President with the Coalition for a Safer Web.
What’s more, two dozen GOP officials and organizations in at least 12 states coordinated bus trips to the rally via Facebook, according to Media Matters.
“BUS TRIP to DC … #StoptheSteal. If your passions are running hot and you’re intending to respond to the President’s call for his supporters to descend on DC on Jan 6, LISTEN UP!” wrote the Polk County Republican Party of North Carolina in a Facebook post which has since been deleted.
Amazon, Apple and Google now have an ethical obligation to ambush and shut down Facebook-
That’s how we were told this works. https://t.co/eNZXhzNqQF
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) January 14, 2021
Facebook is now backpedaling, with spokeswoman Liz Bourgeois saying in a statement that “Sheryl began by noting these events were organized online, including on our platforms — with the clear suggestion we have a role here,” adding “She was making the point, which has been made by many journalists and academics, that our crackdowns on QAnon, militia and hate groups has meant large amounts of activity has migrated to other platforms with fewer rules and enforcement,” while denying that Sandberg sought to deflect blame.
Feinberg’s searches for the banned hashtag #StopTheSteal and the affiliated hashtags #DoNotCertify, #WildProtest and #FightForTrump on Facebook and Instagram as recently as Monday revealed hundreds of posts promoting the rally, according to a review by The Washington Post.
Some of that promotion included Instagram posts with detailed maps of the Capitol and a guide to the speakers there.
A meme posted on Facebook on Jan. 5 called for “Operation Occupy the Capitol” and promoted the hashtag #1776Rebel, according to a screenshot posted by Media Matters, referencing the year America freed itself from British rule. The post also included a quote from Abraham Lincoln: “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution.” –Washington Post
Based on recent precedent, this means Facebook should be shut down – right? Since they’re large enough to run their own servers, however, it may prove difficult even for the wokest of cloud hosts.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 22:25 - California Is Worse Than You Think
California Is Worse Than You Think
Authored by William Anderson via The Mises Institute,
My colleague from the philosophy department was becoming increasingly angry.
He was trying to be polite, but it was clear that he was raging inside. After a few minutes, he smiled a very strained smile and excused himself.
Our conversation was about California, or to be more specific, California governance. As readers can imagine, he was bullish on how the Democratic Party governs the state, California being perhaps the most one-party state in the USA. Every statewide election has gone to a Democrat in the last decade, and Democrats have a supermajority in the state legislature, which means that there is no meaningful Republican opposition and whatever the Democrats want, they get.
Not surprisingly, California governance is squarely progressive. The unions representing government employees effectively run the legislature, and as a result, pay, benefits, and pensions for those workers increasingly are straining the state budgets. (Steven Greenhut, a libertarian journalist based in California has documented the unsustainable growth of government in that state for nearly two decades.) Yet, the state continues to march politically and economically in the progressive direction as though the laws of economics didn’t matter.
For the most part, I have observed progressive California from far away, but my life took a different turn a few years ago, and the state is becoming my new home. I married a retired nurse from Sacramento in 2018, and because of health issues with her adult daughter, she has had to remain in that city, something not in our original plans. Because our campus either has been closed or severely restricted during the covid-19 lockdowns, I have spent most of the past year working from my wife’s home.
Living and working in California has offered me the opportunity to observe California progressivism up close, and it has been an interesting experience. Yes, the state where I officially reside, Maryland, is famously one-party and progressive, but the progressivism of California makes Maryland’s legislature look almost red state by comparison and surreally so in some ways.
For example, the California legislature in its progressive wisdom effectively decriminalized theft as long as thieves take less than $950 worth of merchandise, officially reducing such theft to a misdemeanor but in effect making it legal, since progressive California prosecutors don’t like to be bothered by petty criminals. In practice, that means consumer goods are much harder to find in California stores than one might experience elsewhere. For me, the difference was quite revealing, as I recently returned to Maryland after spending close to nine months in Sacramento.
When I go to the Walmart near my wife’s home, I find that many things that openly are on display in Maryland are behind locked cases in California. Furthermore, California’s draconian labor laws mean Walmart has fewer employees, so if I wish to purchase something I easily could buy in Maryland, I have to wait for a long time and often I just walk away because no one is available to open the glass case. Yet, even with these provisions, shoplifting losses for California retailers are enormous, and the state’s protheft laws have encouraged organized grab-and-run rings.
My progressive colleagues, like my philosophy professor friend, see no problem with such developments. To them, the real thieves are the capitalists, the retailers like Walmart that refuse to pay “living wages” to their employees, and, according to Senator Bernie Sanders, the capitalists have “been looting” Americans for years. Thus, the wave of theft in that state is a positive development, according to progressives.
I can go on, but it isn’t difficult to expose the vast array of sins (economic and otherwise) committed by the California political classes, and I liken this kind of punditry to swinging a bat in a room full of pinatas—one simply cannot miss. Steven Greenhut has been exposing California’s follies for years. However, perhaps the best recent commentary I have read on the progressive mentality that governs the state comes from blogger Mike Solana, who deftly skewers progressive politicians from the Golden State who now are accusing the tech industry of having “extracted wealth” from California and then left for the greener pastures of lower-tax havens such as Texas and Florida.
Solana’s rip is worth the read if for no other reason than that he exposes the cluelessness of progressive politicians and pundits, and one can be assured that progressive politicians will fit Tallyrand’s description of the Bourbons: “They had learned nothing, and had forgotten nothing.” Yet, Solana also is puzzled as to why Bay Area politicians who fail spectacularly also win landslide elections:
Nothing in San Francisco can be set on a path to slow correction until at least six of the eleven district board seats along with the mayorship belong to sane, goal-oriented leaders cognizant of our city’s many problems, and single-mindedly focused on solving them. These politicians will likewise need to be extremely well-funded. This is to say we need a political class, funded by a political machine, neither of which currently exist. Even were both the class and the funding apparatus to rapidly emerge, and even were the new political coalition to win an undefeated string of miracle elections, it would take four years to seize meaningful political power from the resident psychotics in charge, who, as per the last election, appear to be very popular among close to ninety percent of voters (a curiosity for another wire). This is to say nothing of the broader Bay Area political toxicity, nor the state political dynamics, which are poised to exacerbate every one of our problems. It is a multi-front political catastrophe.
During the covid-19 pandemic, which California politicians—and especially Governor Gavin Newsom—mismanaged spectacularly, California voters overwhelmingly chose the progressive status quo. While writers go on and on about the mind-boggling politics of California, the voters continue to send the left-wing progressives into office at all levels of government. While some might believe that “education” is the key to the so-called self-governance of democracy, voters in California clearly are choosing their candidates for reasons other than demonstrating wisdom in office. Indeed, why voters insist on putting the worst on top is perhaps the most intriguing question one asks about California politics.
Typical wisdom says that voters “vote for their pocketbooks,” but the progressives whom the lower-income voters overwhelmingly choose to elect are responsible for California having the nation’s highest poverty rates. Furthermore, for all the antiwealth rhetoric that California’s progressive candidates spew out, the very poor and the very rich voters in California tend to choose and support the same candidates, and the Democratic Party is the party of choice of the state’s large number of billionaires.
There is little or nothing that the current progressive state government has done that promotes the promotion of real wealth in California, yet even as state authorities actively destroy economic opportunities, the voters respond by demanding more of the same. That would seem to be a mystery, but maybe not. Let me explain.
In the past few years, wildfires have ravaged huge tracts of mostly public land in California (and in much of the West, although California has been hit the hardest). There are many reasons for the fires, the most obvious being that most of California receives little rainfall and many fires occur in mountainous terrain, where it is difficult to fight them. But there is much more, and most of it has to do with progressive policies. Even the George Soros–funded Pro Publica recognizes the role of fire suppression-based land management practices in making the fires worse:
The pattern is a form of insanity: We keep doing overzealous fire suppression across California landscapes where the fire poses little risk to people and structures. As a result, wildland fuels keep building up. At the same time, the climate grows hotter and drier. Then, boom: the inevitable. The wind blows down a power line, or lightning strikes dry grass, and an inferno ensues. This week we’ve seen both the second- and third-largest fires in California history. “The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” (Tim) Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load.”
Yet, the progressivist religion that defines the Democratic Party in California cannot acknowledge that the leave-nature-alone policies could have anything to do with the scope and intensity of the wildfires. Instead, the powers that be have decided that climate change—and only climate change—is responsible, and the way to deal with the problem is to impose draconian rules that make life difficult for most people living there, from outlawing new natural gas residential hookups to its infamous “road diets” imposed to discourage people from driving cars. Despite the fact that California politicians, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom, claim that these policies will significantly reduce global temperatures and make wildfires less intense, the reality is quite different, as California accounts for less than 1 percent of so-called greenhouse gases in the world.
Perhaps the most symbolic action by California’s government of progressive arrogance is the continued development of the “bullet train,” an ambitious (to be charitable) project to build high-speed rail from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Under urging from then governor Jerry Brown, voters in the Golden State in 2008 agreed to permit a bond issue to begin funding what Brown claimed would require a maximum of $33 billion. California’s mountainous terrain forced design and route changes, turning the LA-SF “dream” into a train that would run between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities in the flat Central Valley. To make matters even worse, passenger rail service via Amtrak already exists in the valley, and even if everything were to go to plan (a heroic assumption, one might add), the bullet train would save only forty-five minutes in travel from the existing route.
As the proposed length of the bullet train becomes shorter, the costs continue to skyrocket. The original $33 billion estimate now has ballooned to more than $100 billion—if the project even is completed. Yet the project continues to live. Last year I spoke to a former coworker of my wife who enthusiastically supports the rail project. When I asked her about the cost and the fact that there really is no demand for this service, her response was instructive: “But we NEED trains!” Never mind that this is a boondoggle that dwarfs almost anything else we know as government waste; never mind that California taxpayers are being forced to fund a massive wealth transfer to politically connected contractors in which there are all costs and no benefits. The state “needs” trains.
My faculty colleague also became angry at my panning the California bullet train, and I have wondered why progressives are so defensive about this project. There is no doubt that it is a huge waste of money and that the passenger-mile costs are well above anything else that exists in public transportation, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One would think that “good government” progressives would see the disconnect here.
One possible explanation comes from Murray Rothbard, who recognized that progressives ultimately are at “war with nature.” While Rothbard was writing about egalitarianism, nonetheless one can argue that progressive policies are aimed at producing very different outcomes than what would happen if people were free to make their own choices, and especially choices with their own money.
Because of the rise of the tech industry, California has seen an increase in wealth that probably is unprecedented in the history of this country—and maybe the world. Not surprisingly, the state’s tax take has massively increased in the past two decades, with the percentage of income tax revenues rising dramatically as tech entrepreneurship has created a new billionaire class. While one can think of these new billionaires as a new class of wealthy, in many ways their outlooks (at least after they become wealthy) often reflect the outlooks of the wave of entrepreneurs such as Andrew Carnegie who developed new technologies, put them to economic use, created vast amounts of wealth, and then created the foundations that ultimately would be governed by a wealth-destroying philosophy of progressivism.
In part, the wealth created permits foundation-financed “visionaries” to demand that resources be directed in a different way than would be done in a market economy, with “serve the people” and “make a difference” as mantras. We see that time and again in California, where tax-engorged “visionary” progressive politicians seize wealth created by private enterprise in order to pursue their own causes such as environmentalism.
Of course, as we already have pointed out, progressive policies tend to make the original problems worse. Not only have progressives made mass wildfires more likely, but they also have been behind the rise in homelessness in California. In the late 1970s, the San Francisco city government instituted rent controls. Not surprisingly, housing shortages followed, and the real price of housing skyrocketed. As shortages became worse, progressive politicians doubled down on the controls. Today, more than five thousand people live on the streets in San Francisco, and the government—bound by its own progressive ideals—is helpless to do anything but hand out money and defend its policies. And this in the city with the most billionaires per capita in the world.
There are three reasons why California governance will not change even as it heads toward a fiscal cliff.
First, and most important, progressive ideology is intractable and does not yield to the laws of economics. Progressive politicians are feted in the mainstream media and in California’s left-wing education institutions, and voters don’t seem to want any alternatives. (After all, California “needs” trains.)
Politicians who raise questions as to this model of governance can expect to be demonized in the media and will face violent protests if they show up in public venues—and especially on college campuses.
The second reason is that California voters are drawn to progressive Democrats no matter what disasters these politicians might inflict. The highly educated voters do not support progressive Democrats just on economic issues, but also on the highly contentious social issues, and with the 2020 “revolt of the rich” dominating Democratic Party politics at the present, it is doubtful that this current wave of progressive-favoring voters will change direction.
Democrats also have the immigrant vote in their back pockets, and California has seen a wave of immigrants help turn it into a one-party state. For now, the numbers are just overwhelming, and we can expect California to move even further to the left as its housing and poverty problems become worse and Democrats successfully convince voters that free markets are cause.
The third reason things won’t change in California is that progressive government creates its own sets of monopoly rents that are distributed to politically connected interest groups. In the case of the Golden State, state-employee and municipal labor unions are by far the most powerful political entity, and they control vast blocs of voters. Their power was recently demonstrated by their support of the covid-19 lockdowns in the state—during which public employees continued to draw full pay even as the lockdown policies ravaged the state’s tax base.
Should one doubt the power of California’s government-employee unions, witness the “success” of what was called AB 5, the law that almost killed the “gig” industries in the state, putting thousands of freelance writers and musicians out of work. Written by the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations) as a means of ending the Uber and Lyft rideshare services (and protect unionized taxi and public transportation workers), the fallout was so bad that even the legislature had to back off some of the restrictions. Voters did the rest last November when they beat back most of the most onerous provisions of the law. (One doubts that the musicians and writers that lost their jobs changed their progressive voting patterns in the most recent election. Such is the staying power of progressive ideology.)
If one believes that perhaps the wave of progressive voters will become “converted” to a “free minds and free markets” approach (the “left libertarian” position), the experience of New York City should be instructive. In 1975, the economy was in recession, businesses were fleeing the city’s onerous tax rates and antibusiness climate, and city officials were fraudulently selling capital bonds to pay for previously issued capital bonds. (William E. Simon, the US secretary of the Treasury in 1975, laid out the entire scenario in his blockbuster A Time for Truth.)
New York’s problem was obvious—except in the minds of progressives. Where most of us would understand that having unions running away with the budgets while suppressing productive private enterprises is a losing proposition, progressives see a nefarious capitalist plot. That New York City had a relatively brief renaissance in large part because of the deregulation of banking and finance (which was begun by President Jimmy Carter) plays no role in progressive thinking at all.
Unlike New York City, California does not have an economic ace in its pocket. Even though much of the tech industry has prospered during the state’s draconian pandemic shutdowns, the state government (not to mention cities and counties) is facing the worst financial crisis perhaps in its history. Not surprisingly, the progressive response is to increase incendiary rhetoric toward wealth creators and demand even higher taxes and more business regulations.
Progressivism is a utopian philosophy of governance that will never find nor create its utopia. If California voters and politicians do not understand the current crisis and how it came about, they probably never will understand. Instead, we will see the continuous march to perdition as California politicians refuse to acknowledge that they are killing the geese laying the golden eggs.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 22:05 - Yields Surge As Stunned Traders Learn Biden To Propose Massive $2 Trillion Stimulus
Yields Surge As Stunned Traders Learn Biden To Propose Massive $2 Trillion Stimulus
Last week, Goldman sparked a buying frenzy in the market (and selling in treasuries) when the bank said it expects the Biden admin would unveil a “modest” $750 billion fiscal stimulus plan, including some $300 billion in “stimmy” checks to Americans.
However, as bank after bank tried to upstage Goldman and threw around stimulus estimates as high as $1 trillion or even more, the market barely noticed when late this afternoon, incoming Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer reportedly “pressed” (in Bloomberg’s words) Joe Biden to propose more than $1.3 trillion in spending for his initial round of Covid-19 relief.
According to Bloomberg, “the two have discussed Biden’s plans ahead of the president-elect’s announcement on his economic-rebuilding proposals… Biden is set to speak at 7:15 p.m. Thursday to outline “his vaccination and economic rescue legislative package,” his transition team said in a statement.”
But if markets ignored the Schumer report, they sure as hell noticed the CNN report which hit just after 9pmET, which prompted traders to take a double take because apparently Schumer “pressed” Biden so hard to expand the next stimulus round, he literally squashed the president-elect, who is now “expected to unveil a major Covid-19 relief package on Thursday and his advisers have recently told allies in Congress to expect a price tag in the ballpark of $2 trillion,” CNN reported citing two people briefed on the deliberations.
The Biden team is taking a “shoot for the moon” approach with the package, one lawmaker in close contact with them told CNN, though they added that the price tag could still change.
The proposal, which is just shy of the Democrats’ demand late last year when they sought a $2.2 trillion stimulus, only to agree on a $900 billion enacted last December, “will include sizable direct payments to American families, significant state and local funding – including for coronavirus vaccine distribution and other emergency spending measures – to help those struggling during the pandemic.”
It wasn’t immediately clear just how big the “stimmy” checks would be, but it is safe to say they will be at least $2,000 and perhaps much more…. which while great news for stocks as much of this money will quickly find its way into Robinhood accounts, is very bad news for bond yields as $2 trillion is a number which just might spark the runaway inflation the Fed has been dreaming of all these years.
Oh well, yields about to go bananas again https://t.co/57kSq3Be32
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 14, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Brian Deese, Biden’s pick to lead the National Economic Council, said Wednesday at a conference that the package will include $2,000 stimulus checks, and address other relief measures like unemployment insurance.
And sure enough, even after Clarida, Brainard and countless other Fed speakers jawboned mightily all day to talk back expectations of an early taper today, sending yields sharply lower, the 10Y soared almost 5bps in minutes, from 1.07% to 1.12% amid fears that $2 trillion just may be a “big enough” number. What is curious is how slow Treasurys were to react to the news: it took them about 3-4 minutes to realize the gravity of what Biden was planning.
Brian Deese, Biden’s pick to lead the National Economic Council, said Wednesday at a conference that the package will include $2,000 stimulus checks, and address other relief measures like unemployment insurance.
The yield spike predictably unleashed a jump in the dollar…
… which coupled with the rise in real rates, hammered gold (which makes zero sense since the US deficit is about to explode, but that’s just how mechanistic algos roll)…
… and while S&P and Nasdaq futures dipped, small caps – i.e., value names which are boosted by the reflation them – exploded higher.
Biden is set to announce the details of his plan in Wilmington, Delaware, Thursday evening, and there is a chance the number may increase still.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 21:55 - Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Explains Why Trump Ban Was "Right Decision", Admits It Sets "Dangerous Precedent"
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Explains Why Trump Ban Was “Right Decision”, Admits It Sets “Dangerous Precedent”
Heavy is the crown.
That is probably the best way one can describe the belabored, meandering justification posted on twitter by its CEO Jack Dorsey, moments ago explaining why banning Trump was “the right decision” due to his “focusing all actions on public safety” yet one which Dorsey does not “celebrate or feel pride in.” Then after several sentences oozing with “virtuously” righteous self-flagelation, Dorsey laments, without a trace of irony, that banning Trump “sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.”
He is, of course, referring to himself because, as far as we know, the buck – and the decision to ban the sitting president of the US – stops with him. Here we won’t point out the immense monetary benefits twitter reaped for as long as Trump was president. It is only after he was literally one foot out of the door, that Twitter decided to play the ultimate virtue-signaling card, and succumbed to the calls so-called liberals had made for the past four years – to shut Donald Trump up. Permanently. And no, the timing of the ban is not lost on anyone.
Jack then tries to deflect blame for his decision, reverting to the oldest excuse in the book: “If folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another internet service” which of course is wonderful… until the tech and media titans which effectively control the internet gang up on said “another internet voice” and shut it down overnight… as Parler found out the hard way can happen in less than 48 hours. Jack, himself, found the irony in this approach when in the very next sentence he said that “this concept was challenged last week when a number of foundational internet tool providers also decided not to host what they found dangerous. I do not believe this was coordinated. More likely: companies came to their own conclusions or were emboldened by the actions of others.”
Alas, poor yorick, er jack, it was coordinated from the very top, but we certainly appreciate your delightful attempt to feign childish innocence as you unleashed a historic purge of conservative voices on twitter, or as it is now better known, a “blue check” echo chamber.
Curiously, this was followed by moment of genuinely lucid clarity, when Jack claimed that while such a historic purge might be called for in “this moment in time… over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet. A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.”
Almost as if Jack anticipates that moment in the not too distant future when his Democrat friends won’t be in power any more, and a far more aggressive “government” force finally shuts down twitter.
So in anticipation of such a moment, and to show his piety for his decision, Jack then veers off into the bizarre and argues that what the internet really needs, is a decentralized social media, not controlled by anyone or any thing: something like bitcoin:
The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.
Jack may be shocked to learn that just 2% of bitcoin addresses account for 95% of bitcoin holdings. Or maybe not, because in the very next sentence he admits casually that he would be delighted if he could also be in charge of said “decentralized” technology: bluesky.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard
And that in a nutshell is Jack’s expiation: he may have done the wrong thing by banning Trump (even if he thinks it was the right thing), but going forward he would much rather not bear the burden of this oh so heavy crown, and would much rather pass the decision to ban the president of the US on to someone else: in this case a simple majority… one which we assume will be shadowbanned just as twitter quietly mutes out all those voices it disagrees with, as even Jack admitted to Congress when he said Twitter’s shadow ban “was not impartial”. But fear not: bluesky – whatever that is – will be absolutely impartial.
Jack’s conclusion was the same as the conclusion of any authoritarian who faces backlash over his actions – while such backlash is still permitted – whatever happened was for the common good, to wit:
It’s important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world. Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth.
Finally, to deflect the fury unleashed by banning public conservation because a group of ideologically biased and unchecked moderators felt that it was for the “common good”, Jack reverts to the oldest trick in the book: claiming that the only way out of the mess he created is by pretending it never happened:
I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.
Good luck with that, Jack.
* * *
His full twitted statement is below:
I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?
I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.
That said, having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications. While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us.
Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.The check and accountability on this power has always been the fact that a service like Twitter is one small part of the larger public conversation happening across the internet. If folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another internet service.
This concept was challenged last week when a number of foundational internet tool providers also decided not to host what they found dangerous. I do not believe this was coordinated. More likely: companies came to their own conclusions or were emboldened by the actions of others.
This moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet. A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.
Yes, we all need to look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement. Yes, we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm. Yes, we need more transparency in our moderation operations. All this can’t erode a free and open global internet.
The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky:
This will take time to build. We are in the process of interviewing and hiring folks, looking at both starting a standard from scratch or contributing to something that already exists. No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency.
It’s important that we acknowledge this is a time of great uncertainty and struggle for so many around the world. Our goal in this moment is to disarm as much as we can, and ensure we are all building towards a greater common understanding, and a more peaceful existence on earth.
I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 21:25 - Bagholder's Row: Condo At NYC's One57 Sells For A Record 51% Discount
Bagholder’s Row: Condo At NYC’s One57 Sells For A Record 51% Discount
Exemplifying just how bad things in New York have gotten – and just how willing many are to simply get out of Bill de Blasio’s city – a condo on NYC’s famed Billionaire’s Row sold for a record 51% discount this week.
The property is a 58th floor apartment in New York’s One57 building, according to Bloomberg. The building was once viewed as a symbol of a luxury development boom in New York – a “boom” that ran face first into the Covid pandemic, as we have written about on Zero Hedge for the last year.
The condo in question is a 4,483 sq. foot parcel that was purchased in 2014 for $34 million. It was sold this week for $16.75 million.
The deal is the biggest loss by an owner at the building since it has been erected. In 2020, there were four other sales in the building in which the owner took a 40% loss, at least, according to Bloomberg.
Development for One57 started in 2009 and the building became iconic in representing Manhattan’s luxury condo boom that has played out since the Great Recession.
Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel said: “It’s a pricing reset for this building. It shows that the market is continuing to adjust for these properties and it suggests that there’s potential for more.”
Gary Barnett, chairman and founder of Extell, said: “Clearly, over six years ago the buyer understood the value of this unit, Unfortunately, this was an estate sale and they decided to just dump it.”
“It will affect the value in all the surrounding buildings,” he concluded.
Similarly, Forbes had estimated this summer that unsold units at The Getty Residences, at 503 West 24th Street, had seen sharp price discounts of more than 40%, as demand collapses.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 21:05 - Blue Lives Matter Organization Calls Out Democrats Over Their Sudden Change Of Heart
Blue Lives Matter Organization Calls Out Democrats Over Their Sudden Change Of Heart
Authored by Joe Saunders via The Western Journal,
When it comes to Democrats’ newfound support for police officers, Blue Lives Matter isn’t buying it.
The pro-police group has rarely been shy about sharing its feelings with its 79,000 Twitter followers, but recent statements by Democratic leaders regarding law enforcement after last week’s violence in the nation’s Capitol left no doubt where the organization stands.
And it’s safe to say that it’s not on the left.
In a tweet Monday night, the group took aim at public declarations of appreciation for police from members of the same political party that stood by for most of last year as law enforcement officers nationwide were attacked – either physically in the streets or verbally in the mainstream media.
Some Democrats even joined in, with ludicrous calls to “defund the police” and painting all men and women who wear the badge as potential white supremacists operating under cover of law.
The showing of love & compassion today from Democrats & Liberals for the welfare of police officers is amazing. Too bad it never showed up while cops were being murdered by #BLM crowd while cities were being burned to the ground for months on end. Why now? Nevermind. We know. pic.twitter.com/nv5uWGvKNH
— Blue Lives Matter (@bluelivesmtr) January 12, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“The showing of love & compassion today from Democrats & Liberals for the welfare of police officers is amazing,” Blue Lives Matter tweeted. “Too bad it never showed up while cops were being murdered by #BLM crowd while cities were being burned to the ground for months on end. Why now? Nevermind. We know.”
It wasn’t clear if the post was referring to a specific event Monday or the general air of indignation that’s emanated from the left since Wednesday’s incursion into the Capitol by a mob of President Donald Trump supporters bent on disrupting the session of Congress intended to certify the results of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joe Biden.
One member of the Capitol Police force who was on duty during the violence, Officer Brian Sicknick, died Thursday night.
The circumstances surrounding Sicknick’s death are unclear. While a New York Times report, citing unidentified “law enforcement officials,” stated that he was injured being struck in the head by a fire extinguisher, no official cause has been released. The officer’s family has asked that the death not be politicized.
ABC News reported Friday that an underlying medical condition had “driven” Sicknick’s death, though it’s being investigated as a homicide.
And there’s been no shortage of Democrats willing to take a stand now on behalf of police officers in a context that it can make the president — a man they’ve despised since before he even became the Republican nominee in 2016 — look bad.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s statement was particularly cynical in this regard.
“The violent and deadly act of insurrection targeting the Capitol, our temple of American Democracy, and its workers was a profound tragedy and stain on our nation’s history,” the statement said. “But because of the heroism of our first responders and the determination of the Congress, we were not, and we will never be, diverted from our duty to the Constitution and the American people.”
Funny how the “heroism of our first responders” wasn’t exactly high on Democrats’ list when the country was being rocked for months by riots by Black Lives Matter groups triggered by the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police in May and the fatal shooting of a Louisville, Kentucky, woman during a police raid in March.
“The sacrifice of Officer Sicknick reminds us of our obligation to those we serve: to protect our country from all threats foreign and domestic,” Pelosi added, with an implicit accusation that Trump and his supporters are a “threat” to the country.
Meanwhile, Rep. Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, issued a statement on Sicknick’s death praising the officer as a “constituent who made the ultimate sacrifice while protecting those trapped in the Capitol.”
This is the same Rep. Beyer who released a statement praising the passage of a police reform bill in June by invoking the implicit stereotype that police departments are racist organizations that pose a particular threat to black suspects. Research by the Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald has shown that black people actually make up a smaller percentage of police shootings than the crime rate would predict.
“All lives will not matter until Black lives matter. I thank the Congressional Black Caucus for their leadership drafting strong, ambitious legislation that our country needs right now,” Beyer’s statement said.
There was more, of course. Democrats, ever alert to a chance to attack the president and his supporters, would like nothing better than to pretend to love law enforcement while at the same time championing a strain of progressive liberalism that has made attacks on police departments part of its playbook — with disastrous results.
But Blue Lives Matter, a “media company founded and run entirely by active and retired law enforcement officers,” wasn’t fooled — any more than any sane American should be.
It followed up with a tweet tagging Trump’s Twitter account (the one that’s been permanently suspended by the social media giant).
“You stood by us through it all and still do,” the tweet stated.
@realDonaldTrump You stood by us through it all and still do. #BlueLivesMatter #BackTheBlue #lawenforcement #PoliceTribune @TomiLahren@LtRandySutton
— Blue Lives Matter (@bluelivesmtr) January 12, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
It’s worth pointing out here that not even the death of a Capitol Police officer could prevent the Democratic president-elect from telling a national audience that the largely white men and women who made up the pro-Trump crowd at the Capitol would have been treated much more harshly by the force if they had been with Black Lives Matter.
“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently than the mob of thugs that stormed the Capitol,” Biden said Thursday.
“We all know that’s true, and it is unacceptable. Totally unacceptable. The American people saw it in plain view. And I hope it’s sensitized them to what we have to do. Not many people know it.”
Actually, we all don’t know that that’s even close to true. In fact, the evidence of the 2020 riots — when police stood by while anarchy reigned — suggests just the opposite.
But a demagoguing Democrat can’t help being a demagoguing Democrat — even when he’s president-elect.
No American who was awake for the second half of 2020 has any doubts which political party supports the police and which defames them, just as no one doubts which political party supports Trump.
There’s a reason Trump’s re-election was endorsed by a host of law enforcement groups.
Just like there’s a reason Democrats are trying to present themselves as champions of the men and women in blue.
But Blue Lives Matter isn’t buying it — and neither should the rest of the country.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 20:45 - In Final Act, Trump Admin To Present 'Bombshell' Findings Blaming Wuhan Lab For COVID-19, WHO Cover-Up
In Final Act, Trump Admin To Present ‘Bombshell’ Findings Blaming Wuhan Lab For COVID-19, WHO Cover-Up
The Trump administration will present ‘dramatic new evidence’ that the virus which causes COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab, according to the Daily Mail, which adds that outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will make a “bombshell” announcement that SARS-CoV-2 did not naturally jump from bats to humans through an intermediary species – and was instead cultured by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where both Chinese and foreign experts have warned of shoddy bio-security for years.
The Britsh government (Daily Mail and all), meanwhile, dismissed the claims in advance – saying that ‘all the credible scientific evidence does not point to a leak from the laboratory.’
This is of course patently false, as several prominent microbiologists – including one who worked in the Wuhan lab – have said it was likely created there and likely escaped. Two weeks ago, US National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger said there was a “growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus,” while French intelligence warned of the possibility of a ‘catastrophic leak‘ from the lab due to poor bio-security over a decade before the outbreak.
The lab’s highest security ‘P4’ section was built with French help in a deal signed off by Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier. But after it opened in 2015, the French contingent due to work there were pushed out by China’s military. –Daily Mail
Meanwhile, China scrubbed “hundreds of pages of information” spanning over 300 studies conducted by the WIV, including some which discuss passing diseases from animals to humans. Totally normal behavior from innocent people, we’re sure.
Pompeo is also set to cite close links between the Institute and the People’s Liberation Army.
He will point out its highest security section has always had a ‘dual use’ military and civilian purpose.
He is also expected to accuse the World Health Organisation of assisting in a Chinese cover-up by refusing to probe the lab’s possible role.
Its ten-person team tasked with investigating the pandemic’s origins will arrive in Wuhan tomorrow – but there is no mention of the lab in its official terms of reference. –Daily Mail
“We don’t know whether this virus was natural or artificially created, and if it came from the lab, whether this was an accident or deliberate. It would be immoral and foolish to allow any sort of cover-up,” said former Brexit Secretary David Davis, who added that it was ‘vital’ that the WHO team investigate.
“If it emerges the virus did come from the lab, China will become the pariah of the world,” he added.
That said, MIT / Harvard doctor Alina Chan, who has been investigating the origins of the pandemic, doesn’t think the WHO is suited to conduct any investigation.
“We have to take the necessary steps to do a proper investigation and, based on the available information, I don’t think the WHO is up to the task,” said Chan. Stanford professor of microbiology David Relman, meanwhile, has voiced fears that the WIV was genetically engineering natural viruses to make them more transmissible – writing in November that “If SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab to cause the pandemic, it will become critical to understand the chain of events and prevent this from happening again.”
According to Sam Armtrong, China expert with the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, “The global public has a right to know exactly what was going on prior to the emergence of this deadly pandemic. The question cannot be shirked.”
And as Edward Lucas writes via the Mail, “All the evidence points to cover-up…(but the truth can’t be hidden for ever):
* * *
Secrets, lies and thuggery are the hallmark of the Chinese Communist regime. And in the mystery of the devastating Wuhan virus, all three are combined.
The strongest evidence of a crime is a cover-up. And the Chinese authorities have provided that.
They have fought ferociously to prevent an international inquiry into the pandemic’s origins.
Their repeated obstruction of the World Health Organisation’s fact-finding missions has provoked even that notoriously supine body to protest.
Even now, WHO investigators are being prevented from accessing the vitally important laboratory in Wuhan that is likely to be at the heart of America’s allegations.
Experts have been questioning the Chinese authorities’ account of events for a year. Now, it appears, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is to make a direct accusation.
Was it really pure chance the virus first attacked the human race in the only city in China with a research lab specialising in manipulating the world’s most dangerous viruses?
That would be as odd as a new disease emerging in the surroundings of Britain’s top-secret biological defence research establishment of Porton Down in Wiltshire.
To this day, scientists who support the theory that the virus is a mutation that emerged from Wuhan’s ‘wet market’ have not been able to find a convincing candidate for the animal in which this mutation actually occurred.
The official explanation is the new virus was 96 percent identical to a bat virus, RaTG13, found in Yunnan province in southern China.
But as Chinese professor Botao Xiao pointed out in a paper in February, no such bats are sold at the city’s markets. And the caves where they live are hundreds of miles away.
That paper disappeared from the internet. Mr Xiao — perhaps mindful of the fate that awaits those in China who promote inconvenient truths — disavowed it.
Many scientists privately assumed an engineered virus released via a laboratory accident was at least as likely as the idea of a series of stunningly unfortunate chance mutations.
After all, Shi Zhengli, the Chinese scientist nicknamed ‘Bat Woman’ was a regular visitor to those caves. When news of the outbreak broke, she initially feared that a leak from her research institute was to blame.
That thought alone should have prompted a full-scale and searching inquiry. Instead, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a diktat: ‘Any paper that traces the origin of the virus must be strictly and tightly managed.’
But even the Chinese regime cannot hold back the truth forever. Over the past twelve months independent research, official leaks and news reports have strengthened the lab-leak hypothesis.
In February a Taiwanese professor, Fang Chi-tai, highlighted a curious feature of the virus’s genetic code, which would make it more effective in attacking targeted cells. This was unlikely to be the result of a natural mutation, he suggested.
Much scientific research involves modifying viruses to understand how they function. Many observers have worried for years that the risks of such experiments are not properly thought through.
Lab safety procedures are riddled with potential loopholes and flaws: breakages, animal bites, faulty equipment or simple mis-labelling can all lead to a deadly pathogen reaching its first human victim. If so, such carelessness has now cost tens of millions of lives.
Yet we should be clear. The Chinese authorities are ruthless. But even they would not unleash a global plague.
Only in the fevered imagination of conspiracy theorists is Beijing deliberately waging biological warfare on the West.
Paradoxically, such speculation — promoted by among others President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon — may have hampered the search for the truth, by making the lab-release theory seem racist and politically toxic.
In February, in Britain’s politically correct medical journal, the Lancet, scientists published an open letter denouncing ‘conspiracy theories and rumours’, urging solidarity with Chinese colleagues.
Yet it was just those colleagues who were bearing the brunt of the regime’s frantic attempts to censor the truth about the outbreak.
The Chinese regime prizes self-preservation above all — certainly over the truth, or the health of its own people, let alone the lives of foreigners.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 20:25 - Another Mutant COVID Strain Discovered In Ohio
Another Mutant COVID Strain Discovered In Ohio
As public health experts around the world issue warnings about new mutant strains of SARS-CoV-2, it appears a new variant has been isolated in Ohio, likely originating from somewhere in the Midwest.
One of these variants, dubbed the “Columbus strain,” has three gene mutations that haven’t previously been seen in other SARS-CoV-2 strains – the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a statement from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. These mutations occur in the so-called spike protein of the virus, which enables the virus to bind to human cells more quickly.
This strain quickly became the dominant COVID strain variant in Columbus over a three-week period between late December 2020 and early January, according to the researchers, who hope to post their findings soon on the pre-print database bioRxiv.
A second variant found by the Ohio researchers has a mutation dubbed 501Y that is identical to one seen in the UK’s B117 variant. This mutation affects the receptor-binding domain, or part of the virus’s spike protein that latches onto the ACE2 receptor in human cells; in lab-dish experiments, the mutated receptor-binding domain binds more tightly to the ACE2 receptor, past research found.
However, the researchers believe the Ohio-linked mutation independently evolved from a similarly mutated strain that was already a strain already in the US. So far, it has only been found in one patient from Ohio, so the researchers don’t yet know how prevalent it is in the population overall. A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told CNBC that the agency is reviewing the new research. But the researchers believe the Ohio variant independently evolved that mutation from a strain already in the U.S. It was found in one patient from Ohio, so the researchers don’t yet know how prevalent it is in the population overall.
Of course, with so many new “mutant” (deadlier, more contagious) strains of COVID-19 spreading around the country, the Biden administration will have the perfect excuse to extend lockdowns nationwide into late 2021 and beyond… reinforcing Americans’ dependence on government welfare (and implicitly the Democratic Party) even more.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 20:25 - Fed President: We Should Have A Discussion About Guaranteed Basic Income
Fed President: We Should Have A Discussion About Guaranteed Basic Income
Earlier today we briefly touched upon the recent chaos in 10Y yields and Eurodollars, sparked by growing source of much consternation and confusion at the Fed, namely the timing of the next QE taper, which if the 2013 example holds, would lead to a catastrophic market crash. We quoted DB’s Jim Reid who wrote that “we’ve only had 7 business days this year and we’ve already had a full 360 degree tapering debate played out by the Fed.” It’s not just tapering, mind you: the same clueless hacks who brought the global economy beyond the edge of collapse and only the injection of $4 billion in liquidity per day ($120BN/30) is keeping everything from imploding, are just as confused about when to hike rates. Consider the following recent statements:
Bloomberg also picked up on this point and echoed our observations, writing that “Federal Reserve officials are beginning to split over when they may need to start pulling back on their massive monetary stimulus, drawing nervous glances from investors who remember how markets were roiled during the 2013 taper tantrum.”
In the past week, four of the Fed’s 18 policy makers have publicly raised the prospect they may discuss reducing bond buying — currently running at $120 billion a month — by year’s end. In contrast, several others have called the debate premature and Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida, the most senior central banker to weigh in, has said he doesn’t expect any changes before 2022.
He may not expect it, but traders are: investors ramped up yields on Treasuries to nearly 1.20%, before two strong auctions helped ease rates which were redlining to the point that stocks started selling off. It also prompted coordinated verbal intervention by two of the Fed’s top three officials: Fed vice chair Clarida and governor Lael Brainard spoke on Wednesday and each sought to assure markets that no tapering, and certainly no rate hikes are coming any time soon.
To wit, Brainard pushed back against suggestions the central bank could taper its bond-buying program later this year, arguing the U.S. economy will need that monetary support for “quite some time.”
“The economy is far away from our goals in terms of both employment and inflation, and even under an optimistic outlook, it will take time to achieve substantial further progress,” Brainard said Wednesday in a virtual speech to the Canadian Association for Business Economics. “Given my baseline outlook, I expect that the current pace of purchases will remain appropriate for quite some time.”
Clarida went further – as in beyond the purposefully nebulous “quite some time” – and said that the Fed will not raise interest rates until inflation has been at 2% for a year.
“I went into this quite skeptical about makeup strategies as a practical tool for central banks. And you’ll see that there really is not much of a make-up element in this at all, other than we’re not going to lift off until we get 2% inflation for a year.”
Those two are the doves. What about the hawks?
One among them is Atlanta Fed president, Raphael Bostic, who felt the need to make amends for his blasphemy from last week when he said last Thursday that the U.S. economy could be stronger than expected by midyear, which could lead to an earlier-than-expected tapering of bond purchases.
“In our statement, we said we wanted to make significant progress towards the goal. I don’t think we necessarily have to get to the goal,” Bostic said in a televised interview with Fox Business recorded Wednesday and broadcast Thursday.
He then shocked markets when he said that “I’m definitely open to the possibility that we may pull it back sooner than people expect” and added that “coming into the summertime, going into the fall, this economy should be rolling pretty well, if the vaccine distribution happens in an appropriate way. If it rolls well, we may see a lot more strength than I think some people are projecting.”
The implication was clear: tapering could begin as soon as this fall.
Oops: bonds immediately puked at this mere hint that tapering could start in just a few months, and sent 10Y yields surging until the Fed entered full jawboning and damage control mode.
Yes bizarrely, not having learned his lesson, on Monday Bostic once again hit the newswires with his surprising forecast that the Fed could hike rates as soon as mid-2022 or early 2023.
“I do think there is some possibility that the economy could come back a bit stronger than some are expecting,” Bostic said on Monday.
“If that happens, I’m prepared to support pulling back and recalibrating a bit of our accommodation and then considering moving the policy rate. But I don’t see that happening in 2021. A whole lot would have to happen for us to get there. And then we will see into 2022, maybe the second half of 2022 or even 2023 where that might be more in play,” Bostic says in virtual discussion hosted by the Rotary Club of Atlanta
And since tapering would need to take place at least 6-9 months before this, the rates selloff resumed. It’s also why both Clarida and Brainard had to step up today and explain there would be no rate hikes until 2023 at the earliest.
Well, since “three times is enemy action”, Bostic – who wasn’t done – and made a third appearance within a week the very next day, took every precaution not to screw it up again, which is why – wearing his best viral expert hat – he said that the distribution of vaccines in the U.S. is off to a slow start and continued delays would lead to a weaker, more protracted economic recovery.
“This is a huge logistical challenge and there have been hiccups to start,” he says. If there are delays, “then that real recovery is not going to start for that much longer and it will be more difficult and more protracted.”
“Until the public-health issues get resolved, the economy will not be able to just move forward in a robust and strong way as possible” he said adding that getting the population vaccinated is “hugely important.”
“We might actually see rebounds in inflation that are stronger than what people are expecting and we have got to leave ourselves open to that possibility. I’m going to be watching very closely to see how strongly inflation rebounds and I am hopeful we will get to our 2% target faster rather than slower.”
Yes, yes… all predictable damage control for a central bank which is only obsessed with keeping risk assets high and yields low.
But what did surprise us, is what he said at end of that presentation – which incidentally was in the form of a virtual Q&A session hosted by none other than Goldman Sachs. Because what the Atlanta Fed president briefly touched upon next, is precisely the endgame: namely guaranteed government income to those who want it… for life. Also known as Universal Basic Income.
While Bostic was laconic and did not say much, what he did saw was sufficient revealing to know what’s about to come next:
“The guaranteed basic income discussion is an important one. I think that conversation is one we should continue to have and think about.”
What’s universal basic income, you ask? Think helicopter money and magic money tree, on steroids.
And with that all discussions about rate hikes, “taperings”, or anything else for that matter is moot, because the only way the conversation about guaranteed basic income – where the Treasury sells unlimited amounts of debt to “fund” UBI, debt which is purchased by the Fed – makes any sense is if the Fed ensures that rates can never again rise. Which is why all those traders panicking about rising yields, or CTAs who are now shorting 10Y yields, and as the following chart from Goldman confirms, they are – just as we said they would once yields rose above 1.10%…
…can relax: yes, yields can go up, they may hit 1.50%, even 2.00% or slightly more, but that’s it because at that point the Fed will have to regain control, and it will, as the alternative is the bursting of the biggest bubble in history and the end of the western way of life.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 20:16 - Nomi Prins: War Of The (Financial) Worlds
Nomi Prins: War Of The (Financial) Worlds
Submitted by Nomi Prins via Tom’s Dispatch
War of the (Financial) Worlds… Or Let the Markets Go Wild While the People Go Down
Sometimes things only make sense when seen through a magnifying lens. As it happens, I’m thinking about reality, the very American and global reality clearly repeating itself as 2021 begins.
We all know, of course, that we’re living through a once-in-a-century-style pandemic; that millions of people have lost their jobs, a portion of which will never return; that the poorest among us, who can withstand such acute economic hardship the least, have been slammed the hardest; and that the global economy has been kneecapped, thanks to a battery of lockdowns, shutdowns, restrictions of various sorts, and health-related concerns. More sobering than all of this: more than 360,000 Americans (and counting) have already lost their lives as a result of Covid-19 with, according to public health experts, far more to come.
And yet, as if in some galaxy far, far away, there also turns out to be another, so much more upbeat side to this equation. As Covid-19 grew ever worse while 2020 ended, the stock market reached heights that hadn’t been seen before. Ever.
Meanwhile, again in the thoroughly cheery news column, banks in 2021 will be able to resume their march toward billions of dollars in share buybacks, courtesy of the Federal Reserve opting to support such a bank-and-stock-market stimulus. The Fed’s green light for this activity on December 18th will allow mega-banks to return to those share buybacks (which constitute 70% of the capital payout that they provide shareholders). In June 2020, the Fed had banned the practice ostensibly to help them better navigate risks caused by the pandemic.
Those very financial institutions can now pour money into purchasing their own stocks again rather than, say, into loans to struggling small businesses endangered by pandemic-instigated economic disaster. As soon as Wall Street got the good news from the Fed as 2020 ended, JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s biggest bank, wasted no time in announcing its intent to buy a staggering $30 billion of its own shares in the new year. And as if by magic, those shares leapt 5% that very day. Other mega-banks followed suit, as did their share prices.
Now, for reasons you’ll soon understand, take a little trip back in history with me to the eve of Halloween, 1938, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre dramatized his adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 sci-fi-meets-dystopia-meets-imperialism novel, The War of the Worlds, on the radio. As Martians “invaded” New Jersey (it had been London in the novel) with mayhem in mind, panic evidently ensued among some radio listeners who thought they were hearing perfectly real reports about an alien invasion of Planet Earth. Later accounts suggest that the media blew that reaction out of proportion (“fake news,” 1938-style?), yet people who tuned in late and missed the set-up about the fictitious nature of the program did indeed panic.
And it’s not hard to understand why they might have done so at that moment. There had already been surprises galore. The world, after all, had barely recovered from the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. It was also still reeling from the fiery Hindenburg disaster of 1937 in which a German airship blew up in New Jersey, as well as from the escalation of tensions and hostilities in both Asia and Europe that would lead to World War II. Perhaps people already equated or conflated the Martian invasion on the radio with fantasies about a potential German invasion of this country. In some papers, after all, reports on the reaction to Welles’s performance were set right next to news of war clouds brewing in Europe and Asia. With or without Welles, people were on edge.
Whatever the case, fear has been both a great motivator and an anxiety provoker when it comes to the media, whether in 1938 or today. At the moment, the focus is on economic and health-related fears in all-too-ample supply. It is also on the disconnect that exists between the real economic world that most of us live in and turbo-boosted stock markets. These distorted markets are the result of wealth inequality that once would have been unimaginable in this country. In a way, economically speaking, you might say that today we’re suffering the equivalent of an invasion from Mars.
From the Financial Crisis to the Pandemic
It’s not hard these days to imagine the chaos people would feel if their lives or livelihoods were threatened by an external, uncontrollable force like those Martians. After all, we’re in a pandemic age in which the gaps between the rich, the poor, and the middle class are being reinforced in endlessly stunning ways, a world in which some people have the means to remain remarkably safe, secure, and alive, while others have no means at all.
Covid-19 is not, of course, from Mars or sent by aliens, but in terms of its impact, it’s as if it were. And the pandemic is, in the end, only exacerbating, sometimes in radical ways, problems that already were bad enough, particularly economic inequality.
Remember that, long before Covid-19 hit, the financial crisis of 2008 was met by a multi-trillion-dollar Wall Street bailout. At the same time, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to zero, while purchasing U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds from the very banks that had sparked the disaster. Its own assets then rose from $870 billion to $4.5 trillion between August 2007 and August 2015. On the other hand, the U.S. economy never quite reached a growth level of, on average, more than 2% annually in the years after that near collapse, even as the stock market regained all its losses and so much more. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, aided by an ultra-loose monetary policy, steadily rose from a financial-crisis low of 6,926 on March 5, 2009 to 27,090 by March 4, 2020, which was when Covid-19 briefly trashed its rally.
However, within a month of the market dip that followed widespread shutdowns, its climb was refortified by similar but larger maneuvers, as Federal Reserve policy was once again deployed to save the rich under the auspices of saving the economy. Rally 2.0 took the Dow to a new record of 30,606.48 as 2020 closed.
On the other side of reality, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to recent Federal Reserve reports, the U.S. wealth gap continued to widen dramatically as economic inequality increased yet again in 2020 thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. That’s because the health and economic devastation it inflicted affected low-wage service workers, low-income earners, and people of color so much more than the upper-middle class and elite upper class.
Meanwhile, as 2020 ended, the richest 10% of Americans owned more than 88% of the outstanding shares of companies and mutual funds in the U.S. The top 1% also controlled more than 88 times the wealth of the bottom 50% of Americans. Simply put, the less you had, the less you could afford to lose any of it. Indeed, the combined net worth of the top 1% of Americans was $34.2 trillion (about one-third of all U.S. household wealth), while the total for the bottom half was $2.1 trillion (or 1.9% of that wealth).
And yet, American billionaires scored monumentally during the pandemic, due particularly to their lofty position in the stock market. The planet’s 2,200 or so billionaires got wealthier by $1.9 trillion in 2020 alone and were worth about $11.4 trillion in mid-December 2020 (up from $9.5 trillion a year earlier). Twenty-first-century tycoons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos raked it in specifically because of all the money pouring into shares of their stock. Even bipartisan congressional stimulus measures meant for necessary relief turned into a chance to elevate fortunes at the highest echelons of society.
If you want to grasp inequality in the pandemic moment, consider this: while the market soared, more than 25.5 million Americans were the recipients of federal unemployment benefits. The S&P 500 stock market index added a total of $14 trillion in market value in 2020. In essentially another universe, the number of people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic and didn’t regain them was about 10 million. And that figure doesn’t even count people who can’t go to work because they have to take care of others, their workplace is restricted, or they’re home-schooling their kids.
The Martians and the Inequality Gap
In The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells evokes a species — humanity — rendered helpless in the face of a force greater than itself and beyond its control. His depiction of the grim relationship between the Martians and the humans they were suppressing (meant to remind readers of the relationship between British imperialists and those they suppressed in distant lands) cast an eerie light on the power and wealth gap in Great Britain and around the world at the turn of the twentieth century.
The book was written in the Gilded Age, when rapid economic growth, particularly in the United States, bred a new class of “robber barons.” Like the twenty-first-century version of such beings, they, too, made money from their money, while the economic status of workers slipped ever lower. It was an early version of a zero-sum game in which the spoils of the system were increasingly beyond the reach of so many. Those at the top ferociously accumulated wealth, while the majority of the rest of the population barely got by or drowned.
A crisis of inequality had been sparked by the Industrial Revolution itself, which started in England and then crossed the Atlantic. By the late nineteenth century, America’s “robber barons” were insanely wealthy. As economist Thomas Piketty wrote, there was a steeper increase in wealth inequality during the Gilded Age than ever before in American history. In 1810, the top 1% of Americans held 25% of the country’s total wealth; between 1870 and 1910 that share leapt to 45%.
Today, the top 1% of Americans possess more wealth than the whole of the middle class, a phenomenon first true in 2010 and still the reality of our moment. By 2018, about 75% of the $113 trillion in aggregate U.S. household assets were financial ones; that is, tied up in stocks, ETF’s, 401Ks, IRAs, mutual funds, and similar investments. The majority of nonfinancial assets in that mix was in real estate.
Even before the pandemic, only the richest 20% of American households had recovered fully (or, in the case of the truly wealthy, more than fully) from the financial crisis. That’s mostly because since that crisis, fewer households had participated in the stock market or owned real estate and so had no chance to capitalize on increases in the values of either.
Much of the appreciation in stock market and real-estate values has been directly or indirectly related to the Fed’s actions. By the end of December 2020, its balance sheet had increased by $3.164 trillion, reaching a total of $7.35 trillion, 63% more than its book at the height of the decade following the 2008 disaster.
Its ultra-loose policies made it cheaper to borrow money, but not as attractive to invest it in low-interest-rate, less risky securities like Treasury bonds. As a result, the Fed incentivized those with extra money to grow it through quicker, often riskier investments in the stock market or real estate. By 2020, there were bidding wars for suburban houses by urbanites seeking refuge from coronavirus-stricken cities with all-cash offers, something beyond the reach of most traditional buyers.
Though Congress passed two much-needed Covid-related stimulus packages that extended unemployment benefits, while offering two one-off payments and a Paycheck Protection Program support for smaller businesses, the impact of those acts paled in comparison to the tax breaks and power of investment the stock market provided the well-off and corporate kingpins.
While markets leapt to record highs, poverty in the United States also rose last year from 9.3% in June to 11.7% in November 2020. That added nearly eight million Americans to the ranks of the poor, even as America’s 659 billionaires held double the wealth of the 165 million poorest Americans.
The Martians Are Here
The gap between incoming and outgoing federal funds rose, too. The U.S. deficit increased by $3.3 trillion during 2020. The size of the public debt issued by the Treasury Department reached $27.5 trillion. Total federal revenue was $3.45 trillion, while the corporate tax part of that was just $221 billion, or a paltry 6.4%. What that means is that in an ever more unequal America, 93.6% of the money flowing into the government’s till comes from individuals, not corporations.
And though many larger and mid-size corporations filed for bankruptcy protection due to coronavirus related shutdowns, the brunt of absolute closures hit smaller local businesses — from restaurants to hair salons to health-and-wellness shops — much harder, only exacerbating economic disparity at the community level.
In other words, the real problem when it comes to inequality isn’t the total amount of taxes received versus money spent in a time of crisis, but the composition of federal revenue that’s wildly out of whack (something the pandemic has only made worse). Take the defense sector, for example. The U.S. government doled out $738 billion to the Pentagon for fiscal year 2020. The contracts to defense-related private companies in the last year for which data was available, fiscal year 2018, totaled roughly 62% of a full defense budget of $579 billion, or $358 billion. Now imagine this: that amount alone dwarfed the total of all corporate taxes flowing into the U.S. Treasury in 2019.
Inequality is about the disparity between people and countries with respect to income, wealth, or power. The more that corporations keep relative to their bottom line when compared with ordinary citizens, the more the stock market rises relative to the real economy. The more that individuals, rather than corporations, shoulder the burden of tax revenues, the greater the inherent inequality in society. The more that financial assets appreciate on money seeking to multiply itself in the quickest way possible (think of it as like a virus), the greater the distortion created.
The Fed can focus on its inflation-versus-full-employment dual-mandate all it wants, while pushing policies that distort the value of the real economy compared to financial assets. But the reality is that the more those Fed-inflated assets grow relative to real ones, the greater the inequality gap. That’s plain math and it’s the ugly essence of the United States of America as 2021 begins.
The market doesn’t care about politics. It’s a creature that acts in accordance with the goals of its largest participants. The real economy, on the other hand, requires far more effort — planning, prioritizing, and executing programs and projects that can produce tangible profits. We’re a long way from a world that puts investment in the real economy ahead of those soaring financial markets. That gap, in fact, might as well be like the distance between Earth and Mars. In the midst of a pandemic, as billionaires only grow richer and the markets soar, can there be any question that we’re experiencing a Martian invasion?
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 20:05 - Pompeo Tells Taxpayer-Funded News Outlet: "Time To Put Woke-ism To Sleep"
Pompeo Tells Taxpayer-Funded News Outlet: “Time To Put Woke-ism To Sleep”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged a major US government-funded news outlet to smash wokeness and censorship early this week at a moment Silicon Valley tech companies are going after pro-Trump media by taking down thousands of social media accounts.
In a controversial address to Voice of America staff on Monday — controversial given some staff members objected to it being broadcast live on the VOA network — he defended Trump and his foreign policy at the taxpayer funded media organization.
“Censorship, wokeness, political correctness, it all points in one direction – authoritarianism, cloaked as moral righteousness,” Pompeo said.
He then called out major US social media giants by name just days after Twitter and a host of other platforms moved to ban Trump permanently:
“It’s similar to what we’re seeing at Twitter, and Facebook, and Apple, and on too many university campuses. This is not who we are, as Americans. It’s not what Voice of America should be. It’s time to put woke-ism to sleep.”
“The Trump Administration isn’t trying to politicize these institutions,” Pompeo said. “We’re trying to de-politicize them.”
During the remarks Pompeo also chastized the VOA for having “lost its commitment to its founding mission” under past administrations. He said the broadcaster should focus on preserving and advancing a sense of ‘American Exceptionalism’ – however much of VOA’s focus is “too often about demeaning America,” he said.
In response a group of staff members had attacked the speech as amounting to “propaganda” aired over taxpayer funded channels in a letter to VOA director Michal Pack. They attempted to prevent it from happening but to no avail.
Pompeo’s remarks were in part aimed at these VOA staff dissenters too:
“I read that some VOA employees didn’t want me to speak today,” Pompeo said. “They didn’t want the voice of American diplomacy to be broadcast on… the Voice of America. Think about that.”
“It’s morally wrong. And it’s against your mandate…”
Meanwhile Joe Biden has promised to review a recent shake-up at VOA under Pack’s leadership, a close Trump ally who serves as head of the Global Media Agency, which oversees Voice of America.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 19:45 - "655 People Have $4 Trillion In Wealth, But 200 Million Can't Cover A $1000 Expense"
“655 People Have $4 Trillion In Wealth, But 200 Million Can’t Cover A $1000 Expense”
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
The COVID pandemic has caused the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us to grow larger than it ever has been before. Thanks to the hyperinflationary policies of the Federal Reserve and our politicians in Washington, stock prices have soared to unprecedented heights in recent months. This pushed the wealth of the uber-rich to dizzying heights, but for the rest of the country 2020 was an unmitigated nightmare. As I have discussed previously, one survey found that 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans. More than 110,000 restaurants shut down permanently last year, Americans filed more than 70 million claims for unemployment benefits, and tens of millions are potentially facing eviction in 2021. But even though we are mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, those at the very top of the economic pyramid are laughing all the way to the bank.
Earlier today, I came across a tweet from Sven Heinrich that really struck an emotional chord with me…
655 people have $4 trillion in wealth.
200 million can’t cover a $1000 expense.
I certainly don’t have any problem with people gaining wealth by working extremely hard and making society a better place in the process.
But most of the people at the very top of the economic pyramid only increased their wealth in 2020 because the powers that be decided to open up the firehoses and rain obscene amounts of money on them.
That isn’t right.
As a result of the deeply flawed policies that were implemented because of the COVID pandemic, the gap between “gains in financial assets and the health of the economy” was the largest ever recorded last year…
But as stock market indexes staged a huge rebound from the lows seen in March when the pandemic first hit, the gap between the wealthy and the poor extended an already widening trend to historic proportions.
A report via BofA Global Research published on Friday notes that a measure of the differential between gains in financial assets and the health of the economy hit a record at 6.3X in 2020.
My regular readers are probably sick and tired of hearing me say that the stock market has become completely divorced from economic reality, and now we have a hard number which backs up what I have been saying all along.
As I write this article, the Dow is sitting just above 31,000, and that is utterly absurd.
If the Dow were to fall to 15,000 it would still be overvalued.
Meanwhile, a brand new survey has discovered that only 39 percent of all Americans “would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense”…
Just 39% of Americans would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, according to a new report from Bankrate.com.
That’s down from 2020, when 41% of people said they could cover a $1,000 cost with their savings.
If only 39 percent of Americans currently have enough money for such an unexpected expense, that means that 61 percent of Americans do not.
According to Google, the current population of the U.S. is 328 million, and 61 percent of 328 million is just over 200 million.
So that is where Sven Heinrich got that figure from.
200 million of us have so little money that we are just barely scraping by from month to month.
And according to one of Walmart’s top executives, many of their customers do not expect “any kind of speedy recovery”…
Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside said Tuesday that many of its shoppers don’t expect the economy to quickly bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic.
Almost half of customers surveyed in November told Walmart that they were worried about the current health of the economy, she said when speaking at the virtual National Retail Federation conference. She said 40% said they didn’t expect “any kind of speedy recovery.”
Unfortunately, those that are pessimistic about how the U.S. economy will perform in 2021 are right on target.
It is going to be a very painful year.
Of course it isn’t just consumers that are concerned about the year ahead. Small business optimism is falling as well…
A popular gauge of small-business confidence in the US sank to a seven-month low in December as stricter lockdown measures and climbing daily case counts cut into economic activity.
The National Federation of Independent Businesses’ index of small-business optimism fell 5.5 points last month to 95.9, according to a Tuesday release. The reading lands below the average index value since 1978 of 98 and marks the lowest level since May. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected the gauge to dip slightly to 100.2.
Americans generally tend to be quite optimistic about the future, but looking ahead there just aren’t any reasons to be optimistic about the U.S. economy in 2021.
The COVID pandemic continues to get even worse, new lockdowns have been instituted all over the country, our federal government is in a state of chaos, and there will inevitably be more rioting, looting and civil unrest in the months ahead.
Plus, there will undoubtedly be some additional unexpected surprises that most people are not anticipating.
Before I wrap up this article, there is just one more thing that I wanted to mention. A programmer in San Francisco named Stefan Thomas is the proud owner of 7,002 Bitcoin, but he can’t access his fortune because he forgot the password, and he only has two more tries before he is locked out permanently…
Take Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, who told The New York Times that he has 7,002 Bitcoin tucked away – currently worth about $236 million, nearly a quarter billion dollars — but that he has no idea how to access it and can only guess two more passwords before being locked out forever.
Even setting aside the long term prospects for crypto, the key message of these horror stories is that taking digital finances into your own hands is a huge risk if you can’t manage your passwords.
Can you imagine how you would feel if that happened to you?
Sadly, it could be argued that essentially the same thing is happening to the nation as a whole.
America has “forgotten the password” to what once made us so great, and we are running out of chances.
Let us hope that we wake up before it is too late, because time is not on our side at this point.
* * *
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
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 19:25 - In "Staggering" Lack Of Self-Awareness, Twitter Lectures Uganda On Principles Of 'Open Internet'
In “Staggering” Lack Of Self-Awareness, Twitter Lectures Uganda On Principles Of ‘Open Internet’
Twitter decided that now would be a good time to weigh in on how things are going in Uganda of all places, where Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has taken the drastic action of temporarily banning Facebook and Twitter in the final hours leading up to Thursday’s general elections for the presidency and parliament.
Museveni argued that the US-based social media platforms are engaged in censorship that unfairly targets his campaign while propping up opposition frontrunner candidate Bobi Wine. After being on a days-long massive purge of pro-Trump accounts in the US which began when the president himself was permanently banned, Twitter had this to say, and without irony:
“We strongly condemn internet shutdowns…”
The lack of self-awareness is staggering. https://t.co/f9Xah4Su7Q
— Clifford Asness (@CliffordAsness) January 12, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Billionaire co-founder of AQR Capital Management Cliff Asness immediately said exactly what was on everyone’s mind: “The lack of self-awareness is staggering.”
It is indeed yet another example of Twitter being completely blinded by the hypocrisy as to the way it exercises its immense power in its own backyard (or worse, the major Silicon Valley moguls are quite aware and simply don’t care).
This also after Amazon, Apple and Google agreed in unison to destroy Parlor as it was politically expedient, apparently. And now Twitter is actually lecturing the head of a foreign state on not violating the “principles of the Open Internet”.
So much for that “open” internet….
“No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians.” pic.twitter.com/kzRKcjnPRh
— La nuit sera calme (@NuitSeraCalme) January 12, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As for Uganda a long list of online platforms are currently down alongside Twitter and Facebook ahead of the election, including WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat, Viber, Google Play and others.
Facebook actually admitted to the AP that it indeed took down many users promoting Museveni as it alleged his campaign “used fake and duplicate accounts to manage pages, comment on other people’s content, impersonate users, re-share posts in groups to make them appear more popular than they were. Given the impending election in Uganda, we moved quickly to investigate and take down this network.”
In response to the conduct by @Twitter and @Facebook‘ s decision to suspend and block government leaning user accounts, the President of Uganda @KagutaMuseveni said that there is no way anybody should come and decide for our country. @OfwonoOpondo pic.twitter.com/MFPqqj7Rba
— Government of Uganda (@GovUganda) January 12, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Museveni responded by vowing “there is no way anybody should come and decide for our country” – in reference to the US tech oligarchs during a national address over the crisis.
Again, Twitter is now oh-so-worried about principles of free speech and #OpenInternet – as it stated in its official message – in far away foreign countries like Uganda, but is not batting an eye while simultaneously shutting down thousands of conservative accounts.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/13/2021 – 19:05
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
