- The Inter-Election Period: A Breakdown Of This Strange Moment In US History
The Inter-Election Period: A Breakdown Of This Strange Moment In US History
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 23:40Authored by Tim Kirby via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
Right now, the entire world sits in waiting for the final declaration of the victor in the 2020 U.S. Presidential race even if they have already officially congratulated Biden. This still technically ongoing electoral process has exposed many truths and confirmed a wide range of suspicions about what is actually going on inside American politics. How “the game is to be played” going further down the road will be determined by who wins or maybe better yet how they win. Let’s break down everything we should have learned from this very unusual voting year during this brief window of uncertainty.
Democratic calls for “Healing and Unity” prove Trump has a strong case
The American Left is now crying out for “Healing and Unity” across the country which is an obvious middle school ploy to make any attempts by Trump to get fair final election results look pathetic and divisive. On the surface one would think that this is an offensive strategy from the dominant side to get the other to break, but calls for peace generally come from the one with the weaker hand.
If the Democrats were sure that Trump lost, then there would be no need to call for peace after years of demonizing anyone who doesn’t agree with them. This rhetorical change is not one of triumph, but of fear. When the first partially Black President of the United States came to power the Left boldly rode this wave of political inertia starting their transformation into hardcore Progressives and while showing zero concern for the losers and “unity”. For them this was a smug moment of victory, much like Trump’s 2016 victory was for the right. So why would they choose to become so much more friendly all of a sudden this time?
Image: After years of hateful rhetoric why call for healing and unity now?
It seems more likely than not that this guilt tactic is being used because Trump may actually have a case and be able to get the votes counted accurately, i.e. in his favour. Moral high ground attacks from the Dems are unlikely to work as Trump has been compared to Hitler since the start of his previous electoral campaign. Appeasement for the POTUS has thus far completely failed, why would it start working now?
A Color Revolution in America is possible and may have occurred
The Old Russian joke that a revolution could “never happen in America because there are no U.S. Embassies in Washington” has now become obsolete. The media, including even the supposedly conservative Fox News, has completely and totally given the election to Biden despite many irregularities. Not to mention, the fact that as these words are being typed – the election is not officially over.
Image: High journalistic standards in practice in the EU.
If there is one key element to a Color Revolution that must be in place for success it is control of the media. If every TV channel and news site says candidate X is the winner, then he has won regardless of votes and regardless of how many people still use said dinosaur media. They ultimately cast the big final ballot.
The rampant tampering and falsification witnessed (and often self filmed by the perpetrators) during the election looked like something you would expect to see in a “backwards third world hellhole” type of country. The manipulation was rampant, blatant and primitive.
This fact can and should be used by the nations at odds with America (Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Syria, etc.) in perpetuity as proof that the U.S. never had, nor should have, some sort of democracy-based moral authority over anyone else. America’s own Color Revolution delegitimizes any attempts to spread regime change via media elsewhere across the globe.
The Dynamic between the Republicans and Democrats has changed forever.
Donald Trump has changed the Republican Party, from the party of Businessmen and a defensive Upper Middleclass with a sprinkling of Social Conservatism speaking almost exclusively to a White audience into a populist party that offers a Right Wing emotional vision to the multi-ethnic America that we live in today.
The shift in concept of the Republican Party is so severe that Trump’s influence has had the same or maybe even a greater effect that “The Southern Strategy” ever did. Around ten or fifteen years ago it looked like America would evolve into a one-party state due to demographics and the inability of Republicans to appeal to non-Whites. If polls can be trusted, at the very least Trump has doubled the amount of Black Americans who voted for him last time and was able to persuade ⅓ of Latinos to vote for him despite building “The Wall”. Looking back on the 2016 election it is easy to see these huge gains, in groups that the Democrats took for granted as “theirs”.
In contrast to Trump’s vision of a pro-Consitution, somewhat Libertarian populous party the Democrats have doubled down on hardcore Progressive positions. If the Dems used to represent the working man in a White vs. Blue collar America battle, they have now shifted over to being a Postmodernist circus of race, gender and sexual orientation baiting with a sprinkle of environmentalism via taxation as icing on the cake.
These are two radically different messages in direct opposition to each other, and the parties are no longer “two sides of the same coin”, being two slightly different takes on the Liberalism laid down by the Founding Fathers. This is probably why things have gotten so unusually ugly, American politics may have become truly “winner take all”.
Enemy Lists are Proof of Extremism
When Richard Nixon’s enemy list was discovered it shocked America. How could such an important politician try to crush those who disagreed with him? Those are the actions of a monsterous dictator, how horribly unamerican! Well the Overton Window has certainly shifted since the 1970’s and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call to create the same type of political repression of her enemies was met with mostly applause over Twitter.
Image: The Enlightenment is dead and we killed it.
Now a “Trump Accountability Project” has already sprung up based on her words to make sure that everyone who supported Trump will be somehow punished. From having their noses rubbed in it, to having their lives ruined by being doxed, harassed, etc.
This idea of creating a Black List of people to punish, is the line where passion for an ideology turns into a form of Extremism. This along with the intimidation tactics used by Antifa are proof that the Democratic Left now has demonstrably Extremist views.
The key issue with Extremists is that you cannot make any agreement with them as they see their opponents as subhuman and/or evil. Trump over the last 4 years has made the massive mistake of trying to “playball”. The problem is that one cannot do so with people who have fanatical views. Making concessions to those with Extremist views is basically just tightening the noose around your own neck. Trump, if he survives this needs to understand that this is political war not political games.
Image: The election results are “counted” by those with the money to broadcast the results. Trump needs to break the monopoly.
Trump & The Right need to invest in a Media Empire
The homogeneity of the American news media has become Orwellian. Trump and other like-minded billionaires need to put together a countervoice on their own dime. The Trump Presidency would be doing much better if a billion dollar news outlet was on his side fighting back. There are many media experts with the experience needed (including and especially the author of this piece) who could get this done quickly and effectively.
The Million MAGA March will surely turn violent and that violence will be exploited for political gains.
Image: The big march is coming, but who would honestly expect it to go peacefully?
Leaders that have survived Color Revolution attempts like Venezuela’s Maduro and Belarus’s Lukashenko have one thing in common – massive public support. At the very least a massive public showing for the Dear Orange Leader wouldn’t hurt but if Antifa were to show up to fight, the event could be exploited by the Right for all sorts of political action. Just because Trump’s views seem much more human and reasonable compared to SJWs does not make him a saint. This event will be manipulated to the utmost.
Congratulating Biden is proof of approval of or submission to Washington.
Image: Weaker and more loyal “allies” jumped at the chance to acknowledge Biden’s victory.
Some nations have already congratulated Biden, whereas America’s two “big dog” enemies, Russia and China, and many other disgruntled parties have not [ZH: China has since congratulated Biden]. This willingness to congratulate Biden, supporting the legitimacy of the elections as the Mainstream Media reported them is very telling to say the least.
- Air Force Wants To Arm Stealth Jets With Laser Cannons By 2025
Air Force Wants To Arm Stealth Jets With Laser Cannons By 2025
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 23:20National Defense reports Lockheed Martin is developing a directed energy weapon for stealth fighter jets with deployment expected around the mid-2020s.
“We’re committing to putting a laser pod equipped with a high-energy laser in the air within five years,” said Mark Stephen, business development lead for strategic technology development at Lockheed Martin’s missiles and fire control division.
Stephen said Lockheed is a “core” member of an industry team working the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Self-Protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) program, to develop a directed energy weapon that will eventually be molded into an aircraft pod.
The laser pods will be a game-changer for stealth aircraft and or drones, able to zap threatening surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles with laser beams. Readers may recall (see: here & here), we’ve covered AFRL’s program to design, develop, test, and eventually deploy laser pods on fighter jets.
Stephen said the new jet-mounted laser gun would likely be deployed around 2025. Stealth fighter jets, such as the F-35 or F-22, will probably be the first aircraft to receive the new weapon. In 2019, US Air Force officials revealed ground-based laser tests of the new weapon successfully downed “several missiles.”
By 2025, the projected year of laser cannons entering the modern battlefield – the Air Force will likely have a new sixth-generation prototype stealth fighter – with operational timelines around 2030. Air combat’s future is rapidly changing as stealth fighter jets in the next 5-8 years will likely be armed with not just laser cannons but also hypersonic missiles.
Besides the Air Force, Lockheed has also patterned with the Navy and Army to develop other directed energy capabilities.
Stephen said the defense company “established a new directed energy system integration lab in Orlando, Florida, to test high-energy lasers and beam directors as it integrates them into pods.”
“By 2021, this lab will be certified to test high-energy laser outfits up to 50 kilowatts and will allow firing of 150-kilowatt class lasers by 2024,” Stephen noted.
The world is becoming a scary place – a top UK military commander warned this week how the coronavirus pandemic is a “real risk” of sparking another world war.
- "Watch This!"
“Watch This!”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 23:00Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,
There are times in my career as a collapse observer and systematizer when my running commentary can quite reasonably be pared down to just two words: “Watch this!”
The current severe stage of the financial and economic collapse sequence that was initiated in 2008, which is being artificially masked (no pun intended) by the Covid “pandemic,” and now a hung and fraudulent US election on top of it is just such an occasion: why not just sit back and watch the world burn?
But I happen to be in a particularly good and sprightly mood today, and when I get that way few things can hold me back from holding forth and bloviating prophetically.
Let’s start with a quick jaunt down memory lane. I first realized that the USA was going to follow the general trajectory of the USSR back in 1995. I also immediately realized that the USSR was rather well prepared for collapse whereas the USA was about to be blindsided by it, and so, as a public service, I thought I should warn people. “And a fat lot of good that did!” some of you might immediately exclaim. But you would be wrong: lots of people have written to me to say how much better adjusted they are psychologically now that they have heard and accepted my message, for now they are ready to accept collapse with equanimity and poise. This is sure to make their company less tedious moving forward.
And so I had my “Eureka!” moment in 1995, and a decade later, in 2005, I went public with my observations. I got a surprisingly sympathetic response from some particularly enlightened people (even if they said so themselves). And now, a quarter of a century after my initial insight, as the US enters national bankruptcy and institutional collapse, the whole world is being treated to an end-of-empire spectacular election extravaganza starring none other than the consummate showman and impresario extraordinaire Donald Trump. He used to run beauty pageants, while this one is more of an ugliness pageant, but then beauty is rare and always fades while ugliness is commonplace and usually just gets uglier, making it a much safer bet. And so let’s accept it as a parting present to the world from a vanishing nation that gave us horror flicks, reality television and three-ring circuses with sideshow freaks.
Within the sweeping panoramic tableau of the 2020 election, Trump (our hero) appears bathed in a golden sunset glow of nostalgia for lost American greatness which he forever promises to rekindle. Rest assured, Trump or no Trump, America will never be great again. But Trump’s magic halo extends out from his resplendent orange cranial plumage and enfolds all those who pine for the lost Pax Americana and fear and loathe what America is fast becoming—which is, to put it bluntly, a holding tank for degenerates of every stripe presided over by a freak show. They pine for a time when men were manly and women womanly, when secretaries were flattered when their bosses took time away from their busy schedules to rub up against them, and when everyone was either a WASP, or worked hard on trying to look and act like one, or kept to their assigned station in life and knew better than to get too uppity. They want to believe that the ethnic melting pot can still produce noble alloys, preferably Corinthian bronze, and certainly not clinker or slag.
Arrayed against our fearless orange-hued leader, who at 74 is no spring chicken himself, is a ghoulish gaggle of geriatric gerontocrats.
There is Joe Biden, 77, whose brain ran away and joined a circus some years ago but who imagines himself to be president-elect, or senator, or vice-president, or something. Having spent eight years lurking in the shadows as Obama’s VP, Biden is as fit to lead as a pig is kosher after rubbing its side against a corner of a synagogue. To assist Biden in his dodderings there is his party-appointed nanny, Kamala Harris, a mere slip of a girl at 56.
Also haunting the balcony of the American mausoleum is Nancy Pelosi, 80, who still runs the House of Representatives even though proper employment for her at this point would be up on a pole keeping the birds off the corn. There is also Bernie Sanders, 79, a sad pagliaccio whose permanent role in the political Commedia dell’Arte that the Democratic Party stages every four years is to simulate democracy by cheerleading crowds of young imbeciles in Act I, to feign death after falling off his pogo stick in Act II, and to stagger to his feet, wave and smile for the curtain call.
Last but not least, there is the horrid harpy Hillary Clinton, who is relatively young at 73 but whose putrid smell and cadaverous, ghastly visage are not longer fit for public display except in most delicately contrived circumstances. Hidden even further backstage is the suppurating cadaver of George Soros who, at 90, is still pulling the strings and wreaking havoc in the US and around the world. (His minions had recently spread color revolution to Armenia, in turn causing it to “elect” Pashinyan, a choice imbecile and a traitor, who then lost a big chunk of Armenian territory to Azerbaijan.) I could mention quite a few other financial corpses and oligarchic cadavers, but will refrain, to avoid giving you nightmares. Nobody lives forever, not even Henry Kissinger, 97, and so all we have to do is wait.
In healthy societies, older leaders age out and make room for younger leaders who take over for them after a lengthy period of study and apprenticeship. In sick societies, older leaders cling to power with no one competent there to replace them and once they die are replaced by traitors and criminals. The USSR and the USA are two such examples. The late Soviet serial gerontocracy of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, who for a time haunted the balcony of the Lenin mausoleum and, once dispatched to the netherworld, were swiftly replaced by the traitorous duo of blabbermouth Mikhail Gorbachëv and Drunk President Boris Yeltsin, was a tragedy for Russia. The resulting die-off was of the same order of magnitude as the losses incurred during World War II. In accordance with the worn-out cliché about history repeating, the current American gerontocracy is more of a farce than a tragedy, but its results are likely to be no less lethal for the population.
To complete this ghastly tableau, in the ongoing US presidential election, an almost-dead candidate and his charming assistant have been voted for by an army of the undead: voters that have mailed in their ballots in spite of being deceased. I have spot-checked a bit of the incriminating evidence myself, and I am pretty sure that there were over 11,000 such voters in a single Michigan county alone. But this is by no means a local scam: among many other vote-counting shenanigans, it appears that there was a nationwide effort to order mail-in ballots for dead people, fill them out for Biden, and mail them in. You might say that this is a human rights issue: why deprive dead people of their right to vote? Isn’t it about time to stop discriminating against the dead? Perhaps LGBTQ should be amended to LGBTQD for “Dead.” But why stop there? Why not also add a “U” for the unborn and stop this unpardonable discrimination against abortions?
In any case, dead voters for Biden turn out to be just the tip of an entire iceberg of election fraud. There are also the over 1.8 million nonexistent yet registered voters discovered by Judicial Watch back in September. Add to that the faulty voting system, creepily named “Dominion,” which miscounted votes to favor Biden. Add to that the undeservedly kid-gloved and fawning press coverage afforded to Biden and the US mass media’s overwhelmingly hostile attitude toward Trump. Add to that the fraudulent poll data which, just as prior to the 2016 election, was contrived to make a fraudulent Biden victory seem plausible. Add to that the amply funded organizations such as BLM and Antifa (in which the “Anti-” prefix is gratuitous, this organization in fact being very much “Fa…”) which have been ordered to protest, loot and riot in many major US cities, moving their mercenaries from location to location, where they then recruit useful idiots among the locals. What this adds up to is a vast, brazen, carelessly self-incriminating conspiracy to overthrow a sitting president through election fraud.
If you believe even for a moment that I am scandalized, disgusted and outraged by this trampling of the sacred principles of democracy, then pardon me while I shake my head sardonically while quietly chuckling to myself. No, I am not the least bit upset. In fact, this development fills me with optimism for the future. I believe that this ghastly institutional failure is a wonderful development that offers great hope to the rest of the world, and perhaps even to the US itself, although the political environment in the US appears to be rather hopeless irrespective of how horribly or wonderfully its ridiculous electoral system can be made to function.
In any case, it would be futile to try to give the US some semblance of a democratic election system. It would be like trying to clean up a beach by picking up empty beer cans around a beached whale. The presidency, after four years of ham-handed efforts to unseat a president using false evidence, is a failed institution. Congress, which now nonchalantly overspends federal revenue by a factor of three, is a fiscal zombie. The Federal Reserve, which is now a pure pyramid scheme, is a financial zombie. And then there is the rest of the ridiculously bloated US economy, which is waiting for a stiff gust of wind to cause ephemeral wealth to flood out of stocks and bonds and into cash, much of it evaporating in the process and the rest causing a tsunami of consumer price inflation.
In the course of this spectacle, the false image of the US as a shining city on a hill, a beacon for huddled masses yearning to breathe free and a beneficent global policeman safeguarding “universal human rights,” enforcing “universal human values” and spreading “freedom and democracy” around the world is being stomped into the dirt, having excrement poured all over it, and being stomped into the dirt some more. As the curtain descends on this final act of Pax Americana, the image of the orange enfant terrible and the senile puppet with his child-nurse in tow playing on the teeter-totter of electoral dysfunction on the playground of second childhood will forever remain etched into the retinas of the whole world. The whole world will then be able to move on and look for worthier role models and for less corrupt policemen. And that’s progress!
The collapse of the USA will make the collapse of the USSR look like a stroll through a leafy park and a boat ride on a placid pond. I’ve been saying this for 15 years now. My message is still there, for all those who wish to understand what’s been happening and to keep their sanity.
- Interest In Sherman Tank On Popular Auction Site Soars With America Trapped In Chaos
Interest In Sherman Tank On Popular Auction Site Soars With America Trapped In Chaos
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 22:40When it comes to the virus pandemic in America, and the resulting socio-economic implosion, millions of folks have been panic buying food, guns, ammo, and gold.
Americans Are Panic-Buying Military & Survivalist Gear Two Weeks Before Election https://t.co/Dm5wVJxSUF
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 24, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
By the day, violent crime is surging across major metros as depressionary unemployment has left more than ten million without jobs. Demand for armored vehicles indistinguishable from an ordinary Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Range Rover, Cadillac, and or Lincoln have been increasing, but why stop there?
Up for auction this week on Bring A Trailer is a 1943 M4A1 Sherman tank, “one of fewer than 20 known-running M4A1s,” according to the listing.
On Wednesday morning, the tank had a bid of $300,000, with eight days left in the auction. An impressive 3,581 watchers and more than 125,000 people have viewed this online auction.
This is one of the most famous second world war tanks serving the Allied Forces; nearly 50,000 variations of the tank were built. The tank has been “demilitarized,” according to the listing.
“Additional equipment includes a Spicer five-speed manual transmission, a demilitarized 75mm main gun, a propane-fired .50 caliber replica machine gun on the turret, and a dummy .30 caliber machine gun in the forward hull,” the listing said.
Watch: Sherman M4A1 – Running, Driving And Walk Through
A big question certainly going through your mind is if it’s legal to own a tank in the US?
According to DriveTanks.com, the answer is apparently “yes.”
“There are no US Federal restrictions to owning a tank with a demilitarized (disabled) main gun. You may operate it on private land without restrictions. You will also need to determine if there are state or local laws prohibiting tank ownership. If you can own a tractor, you can own a tank!”
Hiding in an undisclosed warehouse in Baltimore City, or at least somewhere in the Baltimore metro area, Under Armour founder Kevin Plank apparently owns a tank. As to why? Well, that’s an excellent question.
American CEOs are trading in their corporate jets for corporate tanks.
- The Racial-Justice War On Merit-Based Schools: It's an Injustice Against Excellence, Critics Say
The Racial-Justice War On Merit-Based Schools: It’s an Injustice Against Excellence, Critics Say
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 22:20Submitted by Vince Bielski, of Real Clear Investigations
At a virtual town hall in Brooklyn about how the pandemic will change admissions to high-performing selective schools, New York City officials got a lecture on systemic racism.
“Racism is foundational in all of our institutions, in our government, our economy, our health-care system, our legal system and our education system,” Ayanna Behin, president of a school district council, said at the June meeting.
“It’s our recommendation that we prioritize the end of racial segregation in our schools.”
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology: Pushing through changes to competitive admissions Behin’s comments reflect a racially charged debate in New York City and across the country invoking Jim Crow-era language to describe an education flashpoint more recent than old-fashioned enforced segregation. The conflict — influenced by critical race theory, the idea that racism is embedded in the structures of society — is over disparate racial and ethnic admissions, which critics deem so pernicious that seemingly neutral yardsticks like grades and test scores are actually reinforcing them. These critics aim to integrate coveted, elite schools by removing the performance barriers that many white and Asian parents defend as fair and objective measures of achievement.
In one of the recent conflicts, the school superintendent in Fairfax County, Va., is pushing through changes to the competitive admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the nation’s top-ranked high school, over protests from Asian parents who say their kids are being penalized for working hard. At Lowell High School in San Francisco, a plan to drop merit-based admissions for next year because of the pandemic created an uproar at a virtual school board meeting in October from parents who want to protect its reputation for rigor.
In New York City, advocates, backed by hundreds of staffers in the Department of Education, are demanding more sweeping changes in the nation’s largest school district. They are calling for the end to admissions screening for almost 200 selective middle schools, or more than a third of the total. And a mayoral advisory panel has also urged the city to rid elementary schools of gifted and talented programs and erase the “gifted and talented” wording from the system because it’s not in keeping with the spirit of integration.
New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza and Mayor Bill de Blasio: Pushing sweeping changes in the nation’s largest school district. “I strongly support the elimination of middle-school screens citywide,” says Miriam Nunberg, a civil rights attorney and leader in the movement to desegregate schools. “I found the admissions process we have in our districts to be so discriminatory.”
In this polarizing battle, parents who support screening for accelerated education are tarred as racists on social media. The idea that all students benefit by vying for admissions to top schools because it nurtures a drive for academic excellence is dismissed as a tool of segregation. Even moderate proposals to expand gifted and talented programs and make them more diverse face strong opposition.
“Our culture and economy thrive on excellence. When I think of New York, I think of artistic and intellectual excellence,” says Jonathan Plucker, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who focuses on making accelerated education more accessible to disadvantaged students.
“And now, particularly in urban districts we are seeing a backlash, where the ideology is turning against excellence. We are institutionalizing anti-intellectualism, and that has long-term implications for us.”
Critical race theory provides the underpinnings for the backlash against selective schools. According to the theory, first developed by legal scholars, curriculums, teaching methods, assessments and much else are designed to reinforce dominant white culture, mute the voices that challenge this supremacy and cast black students as deficient, according to a paper in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. To help these students, teachers need to enlighten them about the harmful effects of racism and prod them to succeed “as a form of counterinsurgency.” In New York City, critical race theory is leaving a mark in the rollout of a new culturally responsive curriculum.
While the term segregation harkens back to a time when kids were forced to go to separate schools, today the highly fraught word is used to describe a statistical reality in many districts around the country.
With 1.1 million students, New York City has one of the most segregated systems in the country, a result of entrenched housing patterns and the proliferation of selective schools. Today blacks and Latinos make up about two-thirds of public school students. But in more than half of city schools, they comprise over 80% of the students and sometimes beyond 90%.
In this system, achievement gaps have remained remarkably wide. In 2019, only about a third of black and Latino students reached proficiency on math and English state tests for grades 3 through 8. That compares with roughly two-thirds for white and Asian kids. But the question of how to improve academic achievement for blacks and Latinos defies easy answers.
Advocates say greater diversity is the remedy. They are pushing the city to replace test, grade and attendance-based admissions with a system designed to mix students of all backgrounds and academic abilities together. In such integrated schools, low achievers rise partly because of the influence of high achievers, who don’t regress academically, says Halley Potter, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who researches education policy. What’s more, students from different racial and ethnic groups build bonds at a time when America’s social fabric is fraying.
Parents fighting to keep selective schools in New York City reject the everybody-wins narrative as naive. Yiatin Chu, co-founder of Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education (PLACE), says students of all groups have a wide range of abilities and lumping them together in classrooms makes it impossible for teachers to challenge all of them at once. A 2013 study, published in Gifted Child Quarterly, of five diverse elementary schools in several states found reading levels in classrooms ranging from about two years below grade level to about six years above it.
“I see a huge disparity in terms of abilities, and is it reasonable to expect our teachers in big classrooms to differentiate the teaching to really meet the needs of all students in that class?” says Chu, who has a child in public school.
“The truth is no, they cannot.”
PLACE is fighting an uphill battle against the education department. New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has called screened schools “antithetical” to public education and has talked in vague terms about changing gifted-and-talented programs. Last year, as PLACE was advocating to keep admissions screens, the department reached out to integration groups, telling them to “make more noise.”
While advocates say academic research overwhelmingly shows the benefits of integrated schools, there is in fact significant disagreement among scholars. Their findings vary widely largely because of the difficulty of isolating the effects of peers and schools on performance from other powerful influences like family and its socioeconomic status, says Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
David Armor of George Mason University carefully controlled for students’ backgrounds in a robust 2018 study. He found that the socioeconomic composition of schools had a negligible impact on results in math and reading tests in grades 3 through 8 across three states and over multiple years.
Even scholars who support policies to make schools more diverse do not stress short-term performance benefits. Gary Orfield at UCLA says 50 years of research has produced a preponderance of evidence of a small gain in test scores. The bigger benefits come as poor kids of color learn personal skills and make connections with successful students and college counselors in integrated schools, boosting their chances of getting into universities and finding good jobs.
“If you’re in a school that’s connected to information about colleges and jobs, you’re much better off,” says Orfield, who co-directs UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, an advocacy group.
“People in our society get jobs through contacts.”
For his part, Armor says he opposes mandatory desegregation because it causes middle-class flight, making segregation worse. He points to Jefferson County, Ky., where the number of white students plunged from 89,000 the year after a mandatory integration plan was rolled out in 1975 to 48,000 four decades later, creating a district where the majority of students are black and Latino.
“New York City would be making a very big mistake by getting rid of its selective schools,” Armor says.
“It will probably lose another chunk of its middle-class population. If they would just look at the data.”
Admissions Based on Economic Status
If the city does stop screening for middle school admissions, it could follow other districts around the county that have assigned students to schools based on their economic status to spread out poor kids more equally and reduce segregation. The number of school districts and charter networks pursuing a form of economic integration has grown from just two in 1996 to more than 100 today, according to research by The Century Foundation. The most common approaches to integration, such as redrawing district boundaries, have mostly kept students closer to home and reduced the need for the kind of busing that ignited protests several decades ago.
Foundation Fellow Stefan Lallinger says the current outpouring of support for Black Lives Matter is adding to the momentum for school integration.
“We can’t tackle racial injustice without addressing the fact that our public schools are very segregated along lines of race and class,” says Lallinger, a Ph.D. from Harvard.
“I absolutely anticipate that more districts and organizations across this county will be committed to this issue.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned on a pledge to reduce inequity, waited several years before tackling the contentious issue. The mayor’s efforts to end the use of a single test for admission into the city’s elite specialized high schools, including Brooklyn Tech where his son attended, were stymied by state officials amid a flurry of protests from parents.
Last year, the mayor’s School Diversity Advisory Group took aim at somewhat easier targets — selective middle schools and gifted and talented programs that cater to “economic privilege.” The group’s report said families with the means to prep their young kids – including many relatively poor Asians who scrimp and save to pay for test classes — give them an advantage over black and Latino students. Together they received only 18% of the offers to join elementary gifted-and-talented programs in 2017.
Brooklyn’s District 15, a politically progressive area that integrated its middle schools in 2019, is touted as a model for the rest of the city. Nunberg, the civil rights attorney, joined a working group of parents, educators and community organization members that led a series of public workshops to build support for the plan.
Students from low-income families made up about 52% of the entire district but were heavily clustered together, constituting almost 100% of students in two schools in a Latino neighborhood. At the three top-performing selective middle schools, poor kids made up less than a third while white students were more than 50% of enrollment.
To integrate the schools, screening was ended. Students entering the sixth grade ranked their school choices and entered a lottery. Seats were prioritized for low-income kids to distribute them out more equally at the 11 middle schools. High performers could no longer expect to get into a top schools, but only a small number of parents pulled their kids from the district.
The plan led to a big drop in segregation. But the district’s political bent was a key to its success and finding support for similar shifts in school demographics will be harder in the city’s more moderate and conservative districts.
The Montgomery County school system in Maryland touts its “equity journey” on its website. New York City could follow its lead in widening its outreach for low-income “gifted and talented” students. The big question is whether the performance of the disadvantaged students in the Brooklyn district will improve. Potter of The Century Foundation points to several cities including Cambridge, Mass., where integration improved academic outcomes. Other areas, like Jefferson County, have struggled to close the achievement gap.
The disruption from the pandemic, particularly on low-income students, would complicate any attempt to measure short-term academic effects in the Brooklyn district. But the long-term impact may never be known either. The diversity plan didn’t include a method to evaluate whether it will improve academic performance over time.
“That’s educational malpractice,” says Plucker of Johns Hopkins.
“If you are going to do this, you have to have systems in place to study the effects on achievement.”
Asian parents in New York City mobilized last year to protect the selective education that’s been a gateway to the middle class. PLACE, which now has 2,000 supporters of all backgrounds, and Plucker seek to change the debate that pits equity against excellence.
“We can have a system that provides equitable opportunities for students and also promotes excellence,” Plucker says.
For instance, instead of snuffing out accelerated education, Chu says, the city should expand it to achieve its laudable diversity goals. Today, less than 15% of the city’s more than 700 elementary schools have gifted-and-talented programs. By spreading them to all elementary school, more kids from every community will get seats, setting them on a path to selective middle schools. The single-test G&T admissions process also has to change to allow more ways for all students to be selected.
“Parents want these programs to challenge their kids,” says Chu, an immigrant who attended an elite specialized high school in New York City.
“Why are we not creating more of them?”
New York could follow the lead of Montgomery County in Maryland. It used to depend on parents to apply for elementary gifted-and-talented spots, which filled a handful of magnet programs with about 750 mostly Asian and white kids. Once educators began universal screening of all students, they found thousands of kids, many of them black and Latino, who would benefit from accelerated education and won seats through an assessment of report cards and tests. Since the 2016-17 school year, the program has spread to four additional magnets and more than 40 elementary schools with classes serving over 4,000 kids, says Kurshanna Dean, supervisor of accelerated and enriched instruction.
“My advice to New York is to expand your programs, not remove them,” Dean says.
The pandemic has now brought the controversy to a head. The cancellation of state tests and modification of grading means that selective middle schools don’t have the data for fourth graders that they typically use to determine admission. Less reliable measures of future performance, such as third grade test scores, are available.
The department is now devising a new admissions policy for the next school year, Deputy Chancellor Josh Wallack said at the Brooklyn town hall. He made clear that the disproportionate effects of the pandemic would guide the department’s decision, which is expected to be announced soon.
“Black and Latinx New Yorkers have gotten sick and died at greater rates than others,” Wallack said. “These forms of discrimination have deep historical roots and we must reckon with them as we make policy.”
Advocates see a win for integration in the making. If the department ends middle school screening for next year, that’s a big step toward a permanent ban.
“The city should absolutely end middle school screening for this coming year,” says Lallinger, who recently served as a special assistant to Chancellor Carranza. “And going forward it presents a wonderful opportunity to rethink the way certain schools get to select which students they serve.”
- These Are The Last COVID-Free Countries On Earth
These Are The Last COVID-Free Countries On Earth
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 22:00Surprisingly, there are still some countries out there that have not reported a single case of Covid-19.
However, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the two most dubious candidates are certainly Turkmenistan and North Korea, authoritarian states that still deny the pandemic has spread within their borders. Observers do dispute that, however, stating that its almost certain both countries have experienced cases of Covid-19. In Turkmenistan, there have been reports of people experiencing suspected coronavirus symptoms and dying while the government has remained silent. In North Korea, there was a suspected case in the border city of Kaesong which prompted Kim Jong-un to impose a three-week lockdown on the region. It was lifted while state media never commented on the outcome.
Back in April, a lack of public appearances by Kim Jong-un led to rumours that some form of crisis, possibly Covid-19, had indeed gripped the country. He later reappeared at the opening of a fertilizer factory, alive and well, after a 20 day absence. While experts dispute North Korea’s claim that it has had no cases, it is entirely possible that its isolation from the rest of the world is now working in its favour. The country was also one of the first to close its borders in response to the threat and that early action may have proven effective in containing the spread of the disease. Excluding the censorship and secretive nature of the regimes in North Korea and Turkmenistan, eight other countries have reliably reported no cases of Covid-19.
You will find more infographics at Statista
They are all island nations located in the South Pacific: Palau, Micronesia, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa and Tonga.
Again, this is a case where isolation is the best defense against the pandemic, though the countries are still reeling from the virus despite the lack of physical cases. Tourism is hugely important in the region and hotels and beaches are lying empty.
With Vanuatu reporting its first case of Covid-19, along with cases in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, the global pandemic is inching ever closer to the few countries that have escaped its wrath so far.
- A Biden Presidency Would Be A Dream Scenario For Our Corporate Overlords
A Biden Presidency Would Be A Dream Scenario For Our Corporate Overlords
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 21:40Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
One of the biggest reasons why the elite hate Donald Trump so much is because they can’t control him. But if Joe Biden ends up in the White House, that won’t be a problem. Our corporate overlords know exactly what they are getting with Biden, and that is why they backed him so strongly during the campaign. In fact, if our corporate overlords could create a perfect president from scratch, they would end up with someone that looks very similar to Joe Biden.
Let me explain what I mean. One thing that the elite value in any politician is weakness, and today Joe Biden is very weak. At one time he had a little bit more of a backbone, but at this point he has deteriorated very badly and his physical, mental and emotional weaknesses are apparent to everyone.
But a president can’t afford to be weak, because pressure is put on the White House from a thousand different directions on a daily basis. Any sign of weakness from a president is like blood in the water, and the political sharks are going to be all over him.
Ultimately, Biden will be exceptionally easy for the elite to manipulate because of how weak he has become, but the downside for the elite is that Biden may not last that long in the White House because of how rapidly he is physically and mentally falling apart.
If our corporate overlords were creating a perfect president from scratch, they would also want someone that owes them favors, and Joe Biden owes them big time.
In the months leading up to the election, the corporate media and the big tech companies made sure that any negative stories about Biden were suppressed, and ultra-wealthy donors all over the nation absolutely showered him with money. In fact, Biden raised money from the megadonor class like we have never seen before. The following comes from the New York Times…
From Hollywood to Silicon Valley to Wall Street, Mr. Biden’s campaign has aggressively courted the megadonor class. It has raised almost $200 million from donors who gave at least $100,000 to his joint operations with the Democratic Party in the last six months — about twice as much as President Trump raised from six-figure donors in that time, according to an analysis of new federal records.
Without the backing of the elite, Biden never would have won, and Biden understands this very well.
The Wall Street crowd was particularly generous this campaign cycle. In late October, CNBC reported that they were on pace to give a total of 74 million dollars to Biden’s campaign…
People in the securities and investment industry will finish the 2020 election cycle contributing over $74 million to back Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, a much larger sum than what President Donald Trump raised from Wall Street, according to new data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Needless to say, you don’t give someone 74 million dollars without expecting something in return.
And some of the names that shelled out big money for Biden are quite recognizable…
Tim Geithner, former Treasury secretary under President Barack Obama and current president of private equity firm Warburg Pincus, contributed $150,000 to the Biden Action Fund in August. Antonio Gracias, founder of Valor Equity Partners, and Jonathan Shulkin, a partner at the same firm, each shelled out more than $300,000 that same month to the committee.
John Doerr, chairman of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, gave over $355,000 to the Biden Action Fund last quarter. Stephen Mandel, founder of Connecticut-based hedge fund Lone Pine Capital, contributed more than $310,000. Pete Muller, founder of investment manager PDT Partners, gave the committee $360,000. Jonathan Soros, an investor and son of billionaire George Soros, gave just under $145,000.
In America today, it takes a tremendous amount of money to win elections on the national level.
When I was running for Congress, I did not get even a single penny from PACs, and the guy that ended up winning was absolutely showered with PAC money. I learned a very hard lesson about how our system works, and it is a lesson that I will never forget.
Thirdly, if the elite could create a perfect president from scratch, they would want someone that is deeply corrupt.
I know that may sound strange, but this is how politics in America works.
When a politician has skeletons in his or her closet, that gives the elite leverage, and our corporate overlords absolutely love to have leverage on our politicians.
As far as Joe Biden is concerned, I don’t even have to say anything. Everyone has seen the hair sniffing videos, everyone has heard the Tara Reade allegations, and all of that Hunter Biden stuff is still out there.
If Joe Biden falls in line and is always careful to do what they want, the elite will make sure that Joe Biden’s skeletons remain buried.
But if and when it becomes necessary, they will nail Biden with all of the dirty stuff from his past.
Many Americans wonder why it seems like we always have so many deeply corrupt politicians in Washington, and of course the truth is that we have so many corrupt politicians because the elite want it that way.
If Trump’s legal challenges are not successful and Biden wins the presidency, the elite will be greatly relieved.
It wasn’t Donald Trump’s policies that enraged the elite so much.
It was the fact that they didn’t have control over him.
But under a Biden administration things will be dramatically different. His transition team includes executives or former executives from Airbnb, Amazon, Booz Allen, Capital One, Dell, DropBox, JPMorgan, LinkedIn, Lyft, Stripe, Visa and Uber. And his agency review team for the Department of Defense contains eight individuals with direct links to the weapons industry…
On November 10, Biden announced his agency review teams, which he says “are responsible for understanding the operations of each agency, ensuring a smooth transfer of power, and preparing for President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris and their cabinet to hit the ground running on Day One.”
Of the 23 people who comprise the Department of Defense agency review team, eight of them — or just over a third — list their “most recent employment” as organizations, think tanks or companies that either directly receive money from the weapons industry, or are part of this industry.
What I have covered in this article is just the tip of the iceberg.
After four years under Trump, the elite are extremely eager to be back in control, and they are almost there.
The Biden administration will likely be a wonderful time for them, but things won’t go so well for the rest of us.
* * *
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
- Saudi Crown Prince Vows "Iron Fist" Against Extremists Targeting Western Interests
Saudi Crown Prince Vows “Iron Fist” Against Extremists Targeting Western Interests
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 21:20On Wednesday of this week a terror attack targeted a World War I commemoration event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia resulting in several people wounded. The ceremony was attended by Western diplomats at a French Catholic cemetery on the occasion of European countries observing Armistice day or Remembrance day, November 11, which this year marked 102 years since the end of the war.
The Islamic State terror group has since claimed it was behind the IED attack, with its propaganda arm Amaq describing the attack which “primarily targeted the French consul”. However, there’s been nothing that’s clearly validated that ISIS conducted it. Two weeks prior to this, a guard protecting the French consulate in Jeddah was injured during a knife attack which appeared “retaliation” for controversial statements made by President Emmanuel Macron in the wake of recent terrorism targeting French citizens.
In response, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) has vowed to strike at extremist targets with an “iron fist”.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, image via PBS. “We will continue to confront any extremist… behavior and ideas,” MbS told a gathering of the Shura Council, considered the highest government advisory body. The Thursday remarks also come after MbS, next in line to become king and already considered de facto ruler, has for years sought to present himself as a “reformer”.
He’s also tried to restored his severely damaged reputation and international standing following the October 2, 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate on Turkey, widely believed to have been personally ordered by the crown prince.
“We will continue to strike with an iron fist against all those who want to harm our security and stability,” MbS said in this latest address. He further vowed “painful and severe punishment” for jihadist militants caught in the kingdom.
On the very same day (Thursday) there was another incident, but this time targeting the Saudi embassy in The Hague. A Dutch man was arrested after firing multiple gunshots and the diplomatic compound, which lightly damaged the building while causing no injuries.
#JeddahAttack – Update#France says “cowardly” Remembrance Day attack in #SaudiArabia city #Jeddah wounds several.
#French Consul & Western (#European) diplomats were at the event.#تفجير_جدة #العربية_السعودية #فرنسا pic.twitter.com/kvHB7DIQe7— Mourad TEYEB (مــراد التـائـب) (@MouradTeyeb) November 11, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Terror attacks inside Saudi Arabia on Western targets remain relatively rare, and signal domestic groups are likely stepping up efforts to sow chaos inside the kingdom, potentially disrupting Riyadh’s economic and diplomatic initiatives with the West.
Riyadh’s prime security interests have also been to protect the kingdom given any major terror attack could severely disrupt deepening Western economic ties and major infrastructure projects on Saudi soil.
- Las Vegas Columnist Ran A Test And County Officials Accepted Fake Signatures On 8 Different Ballots
Las Vegas Columnist Ran A Test And County Officials Accepted Fake Signatures On 8 Different Ballots
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 21:00Authored by Victor Joecks via The Las Vegas Review Journal,
Clark County election officials accepted my signature on eight ballot return envelopes during the general election. It’s more evidence that signature verification is a flawed security measure.
For months, election officials have told Nevadans not to worry about ballots piling up in apartment trash cans or sent to wrong addresses.
“Discarded mail ballots cannot just be picked up and voted by anyone,” a fact sheet from the secretary of state’s office says.
“All mail ballots must be signed on the ballot return envelope. This signature is used to authenticate the voter and confirm that it was actually the voter and not another person who returned the mail ballot.”
I wanted to test that claim by simulating what might happen if someone returned ballots that didn’t belong to him or her. Plenty of people had this opportunity. Billy Geurin, a 10-year Las Vegas resident, found five loose ballots in his apartment mailroom. A reader emailed me a picture of a pile of mail on the side of the road, which included loose ballots. There are numerous pictures of similar examples on social media.
Nine people participated in this test. I wrote their names in cursive using my normal handwriting. They then copied my version of their name onto their ballot envelope. This two-step process was necessary to ensure no laws were broken.
On Monday, I asked Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria about this scenario. If ballots signed by someone else “came through, we would still have the signature match to rely on for identity,” he said. Asked if he was confident the safeguard would identify those ballots, he said, “I’m confident that the process has been working throughout this process.”
He was wrong. Eight of the nine ballots went through. In other words, signature verification had an 89 percent failure rate in catching mismatched signatures.
This could explain how a ballot “signed” by Rosemarie Hartle, who died in 2017, made it through signature verification, as reported by 8 News Now. It could explain how Jill Stokke, a longtime Las Vegas resident, was told the signature on her ballot matched, even though she said she never received it.
County officials aren’t working proactively to determine whether unscrupulous actors abused this vulnerability in a widespread fashion. Gloria’s office doesn’t “have an investigatory team.” He said his office catches fraudulent votes “when they’re reported to us.” So if a criminal doesn’t admit he committed voter fraud, Clark County is unlikely to find out about it. Willful ignorance isn’t an election security strategy.
Leave aside the presidential race. Fewer than 200 votes separate the leading candidates in Senate District 5. In 2018, state Sen. Keith Pickard won his race by 24 votes. Even small amounts of fraud can swing results.
It’s unclear how much voter fraud took place in Nevada. But it’s clear signature verification isn’t the fail-safe security check elections officials made it out to be.
- Time To Go All-In The "Big Short 3.0"? 80% Of New York Hotels On Verge Of Default
Time To Go All-In The “Big Short 3.0”? 80% Of New York Hotels On Verge Of Default
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 20:45Now that hedge funds have finally started piling into the “Big Short 3.0″ trade, which as we first explained back in June is basically shifting the CMBS short from malls to hotels (via the overexposed CMBX Series 9 index whose BBB- tranche is the fulcrum), every incremental development in the sector is closely scrutinized.
And judging by the lack of appreciation in the BBB- tranche of the CMBX Series 9 index which has the highest exposure to hotels – despite a very modest rebound earlier this week on vaccine hopes – developments continue to show accelerating deterioration with little sign of recovery on the horizon.
A recent tailwind blast for the CMBX 9 shorts came from a September report from NorthStar according to which, without aid 74% percent of US hotels said they expect to lay off more employees, with a whopping two thirds of properties warning they won’t be able to last another six months at the current projected revenue and occupancy levels. Needless to say, should two-thirds of the US hotel industry fold, shorting the CMBX S9 BBB- could well be the most profitable (institutionally sized) short in recent history when the Fed has effectively made shorting impossible.
Since then it’s only gotten worse for the hotel sector, which as even the FT now writes has hit New York hotel industry especially hard with four out of five properties underpinning commercial mortgage bonds now on the verge of default.
Normally among most vibrant of global hotel markets, New York has been hammered the coronavirus pandemic has left business travel and tourism deeply depressed ravaging cash flows. The effects have ricocheted into financial markets and hit the nearly $4bn of hotel mortgages in New York that are bundled into commercial mortgage-backed securities particularly hard.
The virus has also compounded years of overbuilding and created a glut of vacant hotel rooms. And while the prospect of a coronavirus vaccine, following this week’s breakthrough by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, offers a glimmer of hope, it is unlikely to come soon and avert a bleak winter for hotel owners and the investors that lent them money.
How bad is it?
According to Vijay Dandapani, chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City, if half the city’s 640 hotels survive it will be a “great” outcome. While occupancy rates have recovered from their worst point in April where occupancy was down more than 60% year on year, they remain 20% lower than for the same month in 2019, a level which means much of the debt backing the properties will be impaired (i.e., default). Should New York impose a new round of draconian lockdowns, it will only get worse. Dandapani said that a best case scenario in which a vaccine is authorized would have “zero impact” on the hotel industry for the rest of the year, and possibly lead to the return of some tourism-related business in early 2021.
“But it’s fickle,” he said. “Realistically we aren’t going to see any improvement until the second quarter . . . The industry is really bleeding. It’s not just on life support, it’s comatose.”
For proof look no further than the latest data out of CRE consultants TREPP, according to which 37.7% of all New York hotels underpinning CMBS deals now sit on a watchlist meant to warn investors a mortgage is about be transferred to debt collectors known as special servicers. A loan may be added to the watchlist for a number of reasons, such as if the borrower’s income has dropped or they have recently missed a payment on their mortgage. In any case, once it hits special servicing, the loan is effectively in default unless the debtor and creditor manage to work out some agreement where the debt will remain “whole” after some pre-agreed restructuring.
What’s scarier is that a further 44.7% of loans have already been transferred to special servicers to either find a way to get borrowers paying their mortgage or to foreclose on the properties.
Together, it means more than 80% of the city’s hotels backing CMBS deals, approximately $3.1bn, are impacted adversely from coronavirus, far more than the national average of 71%.
“It’s terrible. There is no demand right now,” Manus Clancy, head of research at Trepp told the FT. “We’re going into a period of time when you would normally expect demand to be high. It’s the holiday season. People want to come to New York. They want to see the Thanksgiving parade and see the store fronts and go to Broadway. It’s now going to be a very dark time.”
One place that is already dark is the 476-room Hilton Times Square, which hotel closed permanently last month after its owner, Sunstone Hotel Investors, handed back the keys to lenders. The property backs a $76.5MM loan that makes up 17.4% of a 2011 CMBS deal. The mortgage on the loan had already been over 90 days delinquent in August. Sunstone Hotel Investors recently valued the property at $61m, down from $246m in 2010. This means that the Loan to Value is now well above 100% and – all else equal – the creditors are looking at losses of at least 20%.
The Hilton Times Square closed last month after its owner handed back the keys to lenders. Another Times Square hotel, called The Hotel, admitted that revenues had become “nothing short of catastrophic” when it asked for 90 days’ forbearance from paying its mortgage, according to the special servicer’s report. S&P downgraded the previously triple B minus, investment grade-rated tranche of the deal — which is also heavily exposed to retail properties — to the junk rating of B plus. It will be in default as soon as the forbearance expires and is not extended.
Ironically, even one of Trump’s own properties was also caught up in the turmoil. While all of Trump’s four properties bundled into commercial mortgage-backed securities are current on their loan payments, Trepp placed one – the $6.5m mortgage on the Trump International Hotel at 1 Central Park West – on its watchlist after the property’s income fell substantially.
“I think New York is going to struggle for a while,” said Jen Ripper, head of CMBS at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “It is highly dependent on tourism and business travel.”
The Roosevelt hotel in midtown Manhattan, which opened in 1924, is to close. As the FT concludes, “coronavirus has upended the investment thesis for large cities such as New York. Tourism has vanished and analysts warn business travel may never return as companies realise they can function without spending money on expensive business trips to big cities.”
It’s also why, as we said as early as June, shorting hotel-exposed CMBS is now the latest Big Short (version 3.0) in credit, after the Big Short 2.0, which focused on malls, made billions in profits to investors such as Carl Icahn.
Dave Goodson, head of securitized fixed income at Voya Investment Management said “urban core” property has moved from the area that owners sought exposure to being the sector of greatest concern. “It’s been turned on its head,” he added.
It’s also why until there is a widely accepted covid vaccine and until tourism make a complete return, shorting the fulcrum BBB- tranche of the CMBS 9 index will be the best way to profit from the devastation unleashed by the pandemic, especially since the Fed has so far refused to intervene and purchase any commercial real estate-linked securities. Of course, if and when Powell does step into the CMBX market, all bets are off.
- FEC Chairman Says He Believes 'There Is Voter Fraud' In Key States
FEC Chairman Says He Believes ‘There Is Voter Fraud’ In Key States
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 20:44Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,
The chairman of the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) stated that he believes there is evidence of voter fraud and other alleged irregularities.
In a recent interview, FEC Chairman Trey Trainor said reports of fraud in some battleground states are credible “otherwise they would allow the [poll] observers to go in,” referring to reports of some polling areas refusing to allow GOP observers to check on the process on Election Day and the days after.
“When you have claims of, you know, 10,000 people who don’t live in the state of Nevada having voted in Nevada, you have the video… they’re (poll workers) either duplicating a spoiled ballot right there or they’re in the process of just marking a ballot that came in blank for a voter,” Trainor told Newsmax.
“That’s a process that needs to be observed by election observers.”
In the interview, he agreed with Trump’s campaign lawsuits, while saying that questionable actions by elections officials in several states could make the election illegitimate.
Check out the statement from the chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
pic.twitter.com/FBdZCGp5y9 https://t.co/wHlscfN1Xk— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) November 11, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Trainor, an appointee of President Donald Trump, noted that state laws allow those observers to be there, and “if they’re not,” then it’s an “illegitimate election.”
“Our whole political system is based upon transparency to avoid the appearance of corruption,” he said the interview while alleging that Pennsylvania and other states have not been transparent. “I do believe that there is voter fraud taking place in these places,” he added.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat who is in charge of the state’s elections, has denied claims there is fraud or irregularities in her state.
“I swear an oath that I am here to represent, to oversee elections—fair, free, safe, secure, and accessible elections,” Boockvar told the Morning Call newspaper.
“I don’t care who is on the ballot. I don’t care who is running against them. I want to make sure every candidate has an opportunity to run and win and make sure that every vote for or against them is counted accurately.” She added: “And I will fight to the end on behalf of any candidate. I don’t care whether I agree with them or I don’t agree with them.”
Joe Gloria, the registrar of Clark County in Nevada, rejected the Trump campaign’s allegations of voter fraud as well as the claim that 10,000 people voted out-of-state in a news conference last week.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday concluded that the Nov. 3 election “was the most secure in American history,” saying that “election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result.”
- Watch: Firefighting Robot Helps Extinguish LA Warehouse Fire
Watch: Firefighting Robot Helps Extinguish LA Warehouse Fire
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 20:40In October, the Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) deployed America’s first robotic firefighting vehicle, putting out a fire on the first day.
Weeks later, Thermite RS3 (manufactured by Textron: Howe & Howe Technologies) continues to battle blazes, this time over the weekend in Alhambra, a city located in the western San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles County.
RS3, shaped like a mini-tank with a v-shaped plow capable of pushing debris – and a frontal nozzle can shoot or spray either water or foam at 2,500 gallons per minute – was deployed at a warehouse fire packed with wooden model ships.
“Because firefighters had difficulty getting access to the basement,” RS3 was deployed by LAFD, said ABC7 Eyewitness News.
A video of the blaze shows RS3 appearing on camera around the one minute mark. The robot, armed with the plow and water nozzle, makes its way down a service ramp to the building’s basement, where it begins to extinguish the fire.
LAFD appears to be leveraging technology to enhance firefighting operations, a move that is reducing risks to firefighters and saving lives.
However, when it comes to the impact of automation (robots, AI, etc.) on firefighter jobs, these robots, in the meantime, will assist LAFD, though, down the line, it will result in the need for fewer firefighters.
- "Great Reset" Of Capitalism A Threat To Our Way Of Life: Australian Senator
“Great Reset” Of Capitalism A Threat To Our Way Of Life: Australian Senator
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 20:20Authored by Caden Pearsen via The Epoch Times,
A motion by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson calling on the Australian government to boycott the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Great Reset agenda was blocked in the Senate on Nov. 11.
Powerful international leaders want to take advantage of the current economic chaos to “remake nations across the planet, because desperate populations are now ‘more reception to big visions of change,’” Justin Haskins, the editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com and the editorial director of The Heartland Institute, wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times in July.
Hanson said the policies of the Great Reset would destroy Australia’s economy, “push socialist and neo-Marxist policies” onto Australians, and “pave the way for big controlling government, suppression of free speech, and reduced property rights.”
The proposal was defeated 2 – 37 after the Liberals and the Nationals allied with Labor and the Greens.
“It is an absolute travesty that the Australian Government has sided with the globalists of the World Economic Forum and their Great Reset agenda against the interests of everyday Australians,” Hanson told The Epoch Times in a statement.
“This is a group of global lefty elites—billionaires, business executives, and celebrities—who think they know better than us how to run our own country,” she said.
However, South Australian Liberal Senator Anne Ruston rejected “the notion of boycotting discussions” on the Great Reset.
She said the government participates in a variety of international forums designed to enhance collaboration but would not be part of any agreements that don’t reflect Australia’s values or interests.
Victorian Greens Senator Janet Rice also rose to express opposition to the motion where she accused Hanson of “running scared of Agenda 21, the Illuminati, and the shadowy cabals that supposedly control the world.”
Rice described the Great Reset agenda as a modest WEF initiative that aims for global cooperation to manage the direct consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The truth is, unless we take this pandemic seriously and cooperate globally, dying of coronavirus actually has a much more serious impact on your individual freedoms and your economic freedoms,” Rice said.
But what Rice described as a modest initiative, Prince Charles—a strong proponent of the Great Reset—described as “a chance to remake nations across the planet.”
For Hanson and others, the Great Reset agenda is seeking to capitalise on the pandemic to “overturn lives, push control agendas, and meddle in social systems in countries across the world.”
“This so-called reset is absolute rubbish and we should make a stand to play no part in it, to protect Australians and our way of life,” Hanson said.
What is the ‘Great Reset’?
In his op-ed, Justin Haskins wrote that global leaders, including Prince Charles, met at a virtual meeting held in June to call for a Great Reset of capitalism.
Haskins said that many of those at the meeting support the elimination of the world’s current capitalist system and have promoted socialist policies—such as wealth taxes, Green New Deal-like programs, and national job guarantees and government incomes.
“Among those who spoke at the event or expressed their support separately for the plan were Ma Jun, the chairman of the Green Finance Committee at the China Society for Finance and Banking and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China; António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations; powerful union leaders; activists from groups such as Greenpeace International; CEOs and presidents of large corporations such as BP, MasterCard, and Microsoft; and officials from the International Monetary Fund.
“But the person who has most clearly articulated the vision of the Great Reset is Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum and one of the Reset’s most ardent supporters,” Haskins wrote.
“Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed,” Schwab wrote in an article published on WEF’s website.
“In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”
Schwab also said that “all aspects of our societies and economies” must be “revamped,” “from education to social contracts and working conditions.”
Haskins wrote that as terrifying as this might sound the worst was yet to come.
At the June event, the WEF announced that the Great Reset agenda would be the focus of its next annual event in Davos, scheduled for January 2021.
“At the Davos meeting, powerful business leaders, government officials, activists, and academics will promote the Great Reset and coordinate a massive worldwide campaign to promote their agenda,” Haskins wrote.
For Haskins, the Great Reset agenda is a “dangerous moment for freedom, both in the United States and across the planet.”
“Not only has government used the COVID-19 pandemic to increase its power, world leaders are now planning to expand it dramatically in the years to come through their Great Reset reforms,” he wrote. “If we don’t stop this radical move toward collectivism and the decimation of capitalism, the world’s freedom movement might never recover.”
- Which Online Retailers Have The Lowest Prices
Which Online Retailers Have The Lowest Prices
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 20:00While over the past two decades, Amazon gradually became the world’s largest online retailing monopoly by constantly undercutting its competitors on prices, resulting in deeply negative profit margins for years (offset by AWS), that changed in recent years when Amazon started flexing its monopoly muscles, gradually raising prices which it could do thanks to its dominant market position.
As a result, when it comes to most prices in the electronics bucket, Amazon has some of the highest online prices now compared to such upstart online competitors as Walmart and Target, which are now in the unenviable position of having to undercut Amazon’s prices to win market share.
So is it indeed the case that Amazon’s prices are now above its competitors? Not necessarily.
This morning, Goldman published the takeaways from week 3 of its annual holiday pricing survey in which the bank captured the online prices of selected baskets of goods at WMT, TGT, AMZN, KR, ULTA, M, KSS, WSM, BBBY, JWN, DKS and Sephora as of November 10th. The product categories captured in this survey encompass consumer electronics, toys, HPC & consumables, kitchenware & houseware, activewear, and beauty (because of the earlier start to the season, the bank is comparing the third week of holiday deals this year, November 10th, to the third week of deals last year, December 12th).
Here are some of the key observations:
-
Much of the shipping related promotional activity seen start in Week 2 persisted into Week 3, with some companies starting new offers, including Ulta’s offer of free shipping with no minimum and Macy’s $5 discount on same-day delivery. With capacity constraints and shipping surcharges, this dynamic is likely to be a headwind to gross margins this holiday season.
-
From pricing standpoint, there were higher promotions across all categories (particularly toys and kitchen/home baskets) on October 13th (which was day 1 of Prime Day) versus November 10th and October 27th. The pricing activity was mixed when comparing this week’s prices with October 27th as toy prices remained unchanged on average, beauty and HPC were higher while activewear, CE and kitchen had lower prices. Overall, as we get closer to Black Friday/Thanksgiving, promotional activity is expected to intensify once again.
-
There was a better availability of Consumer Electronics SKUs especially at AMZN vs. October 27th, however, out of stocks were more rampant at TGT for the toy basket. There were “higher out of stocks” on October 27th which was likely due to inventory sell through during Prime Day and the rival big sale events.
For the purpose of this analysis we focus on the one consumer category that is most representative of current consumer demand and pricing trends: electronics; this is also the one category where hedonic “deflation” is most prevalent due to the constantly onslaught of new and improved products.
The survey of prices included 38 selected consumer electronics SKUs from AMZN, WMT, TGT and BBY. Overall, Goldman’s survey found that the consumer electronics category was slightly more promotional as of November 10th compared to October 27th, as prices were 2.7% lower than the simple average. However, when considering how prices have changed since the beginning of our study, it is clear that prices are higher since Week 1, having risen an average of 2.9% since October 13th.
What were the survey’s findings when broken down by retailer?
-
AMZN had listings for 36 of the 38 products surveyed and had prices that were 0.1% lower than the simple average, and 0.7% higher with the price-weighted average. Of the 36 AMZN products surveyed, 29 were sold first-party by AMZN, while the other 7 were sold by third parties on AMZN’s website. Compared to prices as of October 27th, AMZN’s prices were 3.6% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
WMT had listings for 28 of the 38 products surveyed and had prices that were 1.4% higher with the simple average, and 1.1% higher than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, WMT’s prices were 2.4% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
TGT had listings for 31 of the 38 products surveyed and had prices that were 1.2% higher than the simple average, and 2.1% higher than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, TGT’s prices were 4.4% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
BBY had listings for 34 of the 38 products surveyed and had prices that were 2.1% lower than the simple average, and 0.8% lower than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, BBY’s prices were 4.5% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
How about some other product categories like toys?
The Goldman survey of prices included 57 toy SKUs across AMZN, WMT, and TGT. In terms of simple average prices, the toy basket was flat on November 10th as compared to October 27th. When considering how prices have changed since the beginning of our study, it is clear that prices have increased across the board since Week 1, having risen an average of 6.9% since October 13th as of November 10th. This increase is primarily driven by the subsiding of discounts from Target’s Deal Days, Walmart’s Big Save, and Amazon’s Prime Days since Week 1. As we get closer to Thanksgiving / Black Friday, discounts will intensify once again. Out of stocks were also a factor this week. Of their 52 products listed, Walmart had 4, while Amazon had 2. Target had 8 of its 46 listed products out of stock.
And details by retailer:
-
AMZN had listings for 52 of the 57 products surveyed and had prices that were 1.1% lower than the simple average, and 0.8% higher than the price-weighted average. Of the 52 AMZN products surveyed, 39 were sold first-party by AMZN, while the other 13 were sold by third parties on AMZN’s website. Compared to prices as of October 27th, AMZN’s prices were 1.1% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
WMT had listings for 52 of the 57 products surveyed and had prices that were 1.5% higher than the simple average, and 1.2% higher than the price-weighted average. Of the 52 WMT products surveyed, 39 were sold first-party by WMT, while the other 13 were sold by third parties on WMT’s website. Compared to prices as of October 27th, WMT’s prices were 2.0% higher on simple average as of November 10th.
-
TGT had listings for 46 of the 57 products surveyed and had prices that were 0.4% lower than the simple average, and 1.5% higher than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, TGT’s prices were 0.8% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
Next, we take a look at Kitchenware/Home products. The Goldman survey of prices included 15 Kitchen and Home SKUs across AMZN, WMT, TGT, M, KSS, BBBY, and WSM. Overall, the Kitchen and Home category was slightly more promotional as of November 10th compared to October 27th, as prices were 1.8% lower than the simple average. When considering how prices have changed since the beginning of our study, it is clear that prices have increased slightly since Week 1, having risen an average of 5.1% since October 13th as of November 10th. In this particular basket, out of stocks were not overly significant, as 2 of WMT’s 9, and 1 of AMZN’s 10 listed products were out of stock.
Data by retailer:
-
AMZN had listings for 10 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 2.8% lower than the simple average, and 4.6% lower than the price-weighted average. Of the 10 AMZN products surveyed, 7 were sold first-party by AMZN, while 3 were sold by third parties on AMZN’s website. Compared to prices as of October 27th, AMZN’s prices were 3.1% higher on simple average as of November 10th.
-
WMT had listings for 9 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 5.2% higher than the simple average, and 11.1% higher than the price-weighted average. Of the 9 WMT products surveyed, 2 were sold first-party by WMT, while 7 were sold by third parties on WMT’s website. Compared to prices as of October 27th, WMT’s prices were 0.4% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
TGT had listings for 6 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 8.3% lower than the simple average, and 0.4% higher than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, TGT’s prices were 1.9% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
M had listings for 6 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 13.0% higher than the simple average, and 16.8% higher than the price-weighted average. It is notable that 3 Macy’s products listed on October 27th were no longer listed by M as of November 10th, which likely influenced the results of its price comparisons. Compared to prices as of October 27th, M’s prices were 4.2% higher on simple average as of November 10th.
-
KSS had listings for 11 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 4.8% higher than the simple average, and 5.3% higher than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, KSS’s prices were 13.8% lower on simple average as of November 10th. This price decline is likely driven by KSS having sale prices listed for 9 of their 11 items.
-
BBBY had listings for 10 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 7.2% lower than the simple average, and 5.7% lower than the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, BBBY’s prices were 3.5% lower on simple average as of November 10th.
-
WSM had listings for 6 of the 15 products surveyed and had prices that were 4.7% lower than the simple average, and 3.1% lower compared to the price-weighted average. Compared to prices as of October 27th, WSM’s prices were flat on simple average as of November 10th.
There are several other categories in the full Goldman survey but a bigger picture emerges: while there is some fluctuation, Amazon continues to be the dominant price leader in online shopping, which means that its biggest competitors WalMart, Target and others will have their work cut out for them if they wish to compete on price as any further discounts from here will leave virtually nothing for profits.
Finally, some thoughts on shipping
As Goldman writes, in retail, several companies have pointed to concerns around higher transportation costs driven by (1) meaningfully higher surcharge rates, (2) higher per-package shipment costs, and (3) a material increase in digital penetration. While the shipping cost issue will be more pronounced during the holidays as the freight market remains capacity constrained, there is also room for freight to remain a headwind into 2021 and beyond as the annual contracts, which have insulated retailers to-date, are likely to renew at an elevated level.
In the past few years, several retailers have offered holiday-special shipping policies. In Week 2 of the pricing study, Goldman began to see shipping related activity pick up, as COST, Staples, West Elm, and WSM all began shipping promotions. During the week of November 8th, we saw several of these promotions continue and several new ones spring up, including Ulta’s offer of free shipping with no minimum threshold and Macy’s $5 discount on same-day delivery.
-
- One Third Of Biden's Pentagon Transition Team Funded By Weapons Industry
One Third Of Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team Funded By Weapons Industry
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 19:40Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
Earlier this week Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.
The team is led by Kathleen Hicks, who worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration. Hicks most recent employer is the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank that receives contributions from arms makers like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, to name a few.
CSIS also receives contributions from governments. The think tank’s top government donors are the US, the UAE, Taiwan, and Japan. Two other CSIS employees are on the transition team; Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, who both worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration.
CSIS employees author policy papers and Op-Eds that generally call for more US involvement around the world. In August, Hicks co-authored an Op-Ed in The Hill titled, “Pentagon Action to Withdraw from Germany Benefits Our Adversaries,” a piece that slammed Trump’s plan to draw down troops from Germany, which Biden could to call off.
Two members of the transition team come from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon employee, and Ely Ratner, who served as deputy national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017.
CNAS is another think tank that enjoys hefty donations from weapons makers, major corporations, and governments. From 2019 to 2020, CNAS received at least $500,000 from the US State Department and at least $500,000 from Northrop Grumman. Other donors include Google, Facebook, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.
Three more team members list their latest employer as the RAND Corporation, Stacie Pettyjohn, a wargaming expert, Christine Wormuth, who held a few roles in the Obama administration, and Terri Tanielian, a behavioral scientist.
RAND is another hawkish think tank that receives the bulk of its funding from the US government, including the US Army, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security. RAND is also funded by the UAE, Qatar, and NATO.
A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skelly, from CACI International, and Victor Garcia, from Rebellion Defense.
- "Lockdowns For Thee, But Not For Me" – Newsom, Pelosi Attend Dinner Parties While US COVID Cases Explode
“Lockdowns For Thee, But Not For Me” – Newsom, Pelosi Attend Dinner Parties While US COVID Cases Explode
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 19:20As Joe Biden’s camp continues to try and walk back talk of another national lockdown, Democratic leaders are once again exhibiting via their behavior that social distancing restrictions and lockdown rules are “for thee and not for me.” In an incident that may remind readers of Nancy Pelosi’s quarantine-time visit to a San Francisco Hair Salon, California Gov Gavin Newsom has been busted attending a swanky party at one of California’s top restaurants.
According to the SF Chronicle, Newsom attended a birthday party for one of his top advisors at the French Laundry, the Michelin-starred restaurant run by Thomas Keller The paper noted that the party included members of “several households”, in violation of the recommendations delivered by Newsom’s administration, which has urged Californians to retreat to their personal bubbles and only leave for “essential” purposes. Current state regulations limit any type of social gathering to members of no more than three households, tops.
The dinner the night of Nov. 6 at the famed French Laundry in Yountville in Napa County brought together at least 12 people to celebrate the 50th birthday of Jason Kinney, a longtime friend and political adviser to Newsom who is also a partner at the lobbying firm Axiom Advisors. In addition to the governor, his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, was in attendance. State guidelines limit gatherings, defined as “social situations that bring together people from different households at the same time in a single space or place,” to no more than three households. Representatives for Kinney and Newsom declined to specify how many households the diners represented, but did not dispute that it was more than three.
[…]
Click said the birthday dinner for Kinney was permitted because state guidelines require only that restaurants “limit the number of patrons at a single table to a household unit or patrons who have asked to be seated together.” A spokesperson for the public health department was unable to answer questions about whether the state considers it acceptable for residents from an unlimited number of households to mix if the gathering is at a restaurant.
At a news conference Friday, state Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly reiterated that activities where it is difficult to wear a mask the entire time, such as dining, and mixing with people from other households are higher-risk situations during the pandemic. “As we look at surging cases, we have the guidance and the tips for a reason,” he said. “We believe they are the strategies to keep ourselves and our communities safe, and we hope and expect people to take them seriously.”
When first approached by the Chronicle, Newsom’s camp tried to deny that the gathering violated the state’s guidelines. But after the story was published, Newsom released a comment saying attending the party was “an error in judgment” (just in case you thought President Trump and his team were the only ones who lie to or mislead journalists).
The California Department of Public Health issued guidelines on Oct. 9 allowing small private gatherings for the first time during the pandemic. Under the guidelines, gatherings that include more than three households are prohibited.
The state also requires that gatherings be held outside, where experts believe virus transmission is far less likely.
Amusingly, Newsom wasn’t the only California politician to attend a social gathering this week while governors around the country are imposing new restrictions and even moving to move schools back to remote-only.
Nancy Pelosi held a dinner for incoming Democratic members of Congress. She told reporters that the venue was “very spaced” with enhanced ventilation.
House Dem and GOP leaders are holding respective dinners for new members.
.@SpeakerPelosi told me it’s safe. “It’s very spaced,” she said and there is enhanced ventilation and the Capitol physician signed off. pic.twitter.com/ZXjf72lnrP
— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) November 13, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Newsom also joined with the governors of Washington State and Oregon to urge Californians not to leave the state unless it’s absolutely necessary, until things get under control.
Maybe now he’s overcompensating?
- Trump Must Out The Deep State
Trump Must Out The Deep State
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 19:00Authored by Steve Brown via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,
Whether the US 2020 election was truly stolen or not we will likely never know. The president himself doesn’t know since he failed to purge the palace that embarked on the palace coup that has seemingly toppled him.
Booting Mark ‘Raytheon’ Esper after the fact simply highlights this fact.
Now, Mr. Trump will have to put on his thinking cap and grasp the Machiavellian reality of the perverse Washington cesspool he has presided over for nearly four years – and come up with a plan.
Trump can use his deal-making skills to court the Evil Empire’s titular head, but what sort of deal would that be? And if Mr. Trump truly is the visionary and rogue his base believes he is, then he could disembowel the Deep State with an adroit stroke or two instead. However, with Jared Kushner as his top advisor, that’s unlikely.
But if he chose to, how could Mr. Trump out Washington’s Axis of Evil while avenging himself on the Beltway’s swamp creatures?
Well, one major hurdle for Washington’s corrupt coup class is the upcoming government shutdown. The central government runs out of Federal Reserve just-above bog roll – ie funding again — on December 11th. The president must reliably engage Mitch McConnell in withholding any new funding agreement, and since McConnell’s position is secure there is little motivation for him to provide favors now, especially when Trump is supremely vulnerable.
During the pandemic a Trump government shutdown would certainly generate massive public and major media outrage. Likewise, Mr. Trump has been most interested in keeping his promises to the people, so a government shutdown is unlikely to be in the cards.
Another option, Trump could issue executive orders to end the endless US-initiated conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq. In such a scenario, Congress would have to scramble to keep its wars going. However the new Zombie-head, major media, and US congress would certainly howl to the moon all the while. Even so, Trump could leave office with some satisfaction, knowing that he did what he promised to do, regardless of opposition from the warfare state cancer infesting the Beltway.
The United States funds about 70 percent of NATO’s Cold War dinosaur existence too, with member states contributing the rest. Trump jousted with Esper over NATO, their most significant point of difference. Now the president can defund NATO with an emergency executive order – perhaps on a government shutdown basis? – at a stroke. Like ending America’s endless wars, the new Zombie leader (Biden) major media, and US congress would howl to the moon all the while… and ditto on Trump’s satisfaction.
Now think of all the secrets Trump knows on so many issues, from Huntergate to Russiagate. Trump knows who setup George Papadopoulos and why. He knows about the Steele Dossier. Trump knows the Deep State’s secrets and where the dirty laundry is hidden. If Trump truly were a visionary – as well as a rogue (not to mention patriot) – he could easily out the dirty laundry in one go. But that may be too much, creating risk for himself and his family. A more practical idea would be to covertly get the information out for “plausible denial” release later. All that’s left would be to admit nothing, deny everything, and make counter-accusations.
In such interesting times, Mr. Trump has other options – even seemingly frivolous ones. He could out the facts on Hillary’s emails and the related alleged FBI cover-up; or undermine any deal the Zombie’s regime intends to make with Ghislaine Maxwell in order to protect powerful interests. Trump could even release all the documents, unredacted, on the John F Kennedy assassination, showing that elements within Langley’s unconstitutional Criminal Intelligence Agency were involved and that the assassination was not just the work of a “lone nut” who got lucky.
In brief, Trump’s options re outing the Deep State are virtually limitless. Washington’s detritus and the grifters who infest the Beltway’s infernal swamp – like Biden – are of course aware of that, too. So there is a good chance some sort of deal will be cut for Trump’s graceful exit, especially if rumors are true that Trump will run again in 2024.
If not… then watch out below!
- Daily Briefing – November 13, 2020
Daily Briefing – November 13, 2020
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 18:55Real Vision CEO, Raoul Pal, and senior editor, Ash Bennington, discuss the growing shutdown measures in the U.S. even as the S&P 500 makes all-time highs. Looking at declining mobility data, Pal explores how the prospect of a full lockdown in the U.S will depress economic activity as well as perhaps markets. He and Ash then discuss default risk and the stock sales of Pfizer’s CEO before zooming out into macro issues such as how stagnant money velocity affects retirees and how rise in the monetary base could buoy precious metals and bitcoin. In the intro, Jack Farley reviews price action, evaluates the distress of cruise liners, and the looming expiration of the Fed’s emergency lending programs. - Militia Leader Tells Alex Jones He Has "Armed" Men Stationed Around DC Metro
Militia Leader Tells Alex Jones He Has “Armed” Men Stationed Around DC Metro
Tyler Durden
Fri, 11/13/2020 – 18:40Earlier this week, Oath Keepers militia leader Stewart Rhodes told Infowar’s Alex Jones and Owen Shroyer that his members are “armed” and positioned around the Washington Metropolitan Area to prevent a steal of the 2020 presidential election from President Trump.
Alex Jones (left); Owen Shroyer (top right); Stewart Rhodes (bottom right) Oath Keepers claims to have thousands of members of former law enforcement officials and military veterans as members. While the militia claims to be defending the Constitution, it has also shifted over the years from opposing the government to instead supporting Trump.
Rhodes insisted that Trump must declassify information about members of the “deep state” if he wants to prevent the election from being stolen. He said the American people have a right to “know exactly who the pedophiles are.” From judges to politicians to academia to media, Rhodes continued to stay these people are all part of the deep state.
Donald Trump Jr. tweeted Sunday: “DECLASSIFY EVERYTHING!!! We can’t let the bad actors get away with it.”
Rhodes said Trump should task special forces officers to secure information about the deep state because the president “cannot trust the normal military intelligence services.” In previous statements, Rhodes has been opposed to military intervention in domestic matters, but in this case, he said Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act.
In support of the president, he also said, “we have men already stationed outside D.C. as a nuclear option in case they attempt to remove the president illegally, we will step in and stop it.”
Rhodes then said: These men are “armed” and “prepared to go in if the president calls us up.”
He said Oath Keepers would be inside the metro area to support Saturday’s planned pro-Trump demonstrations.
Here’s the interview (via Media Matters):
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/525799_5_.png?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/480223_5_.jpg?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/525952_5_.png?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/mbsnew.jpg?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/hilton%20cmbx.jpg?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/the%20roosevelt.jpg?ssl=1){kind=link}
![<!–[if IE 9]><![endif]–>](https://i0.wp.com/zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/2020-11-13_08-08-51.png?ssl=1){kind=link}