- Anti-Globalism Is Going Mainstream – Which Means Engineered Disaster Is About To Strike
Anti-Globalism Is Going Mainstream – Which Means Engineered Disaster Is About To Strike
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us
I have noted in the past that criminals tend to brag about their criminality when they believe there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Frankly, in their narcissism many of them can’t help but revel in the moment and let everyone know how “superior” they are to the rest of us. We witnessed many moments like this from elitists within globalists institutions the past couple of years at the height of the pandemic pandemonium.
There were people like the globalist academics at MIT proclaiming that we were “never going back to normal” and that we were going to have to accept the loss of many of our freedoms for the rest of our lives in order to combat the spread of covid. There were people like Klaus Schwab declaring the beginning of the “Great Reset” and the launch of what the Davos crowd calls the “4th Industrial Revolution.” There have also been MANY political leaders like Joe Biden that strut around on the media stage accusing ideological opponents (conservatives mostly) of being “enemies of democracy.”
If their vision of “democracy” is medical tyranny and the forced expansion of cultural Marxism, or if their idea of democracy is government cooperation with corporate monopoly and the erasure of our country’s founding principles, then yes, I suppose I am indeed an enemy of “democracy.”
The globalists were really basking in the glow of their assumed victory. They thought they had us peasants by the scruff of the neck and that their agenda was all but assured. But as I have been arguing since last year, the money elites may have celebrated a little too early.
The covid agenda utterly failed if the goal was to implement longstanding mandates and restrictions across North America and Europe. If you want to know what success for the globalists would have looked like, just examine China with its endless lockdown cycles and digital vaccine passports. The elites wanted that outcome for the west and they didn’t get it. They came close, but millions of Americans, Canadians and Europeans stood their ground and the cost to force us into compliance would have been too great.
Even Joe Biden has openly admitted that the pandemic is over. They dropped the mandates because they knew if it came to war, they would lose.
If the goal of the pandemic fear factory was simply to get the population injected with the mRNA vaccines, here they also failed. With many states in the US 40% unvaxxed (according to official numbers) and many parts of the world with large unvaxxed populations, there is a massive control group for the covid vaccines. If there are going to be constantly developing health problems associated the mRNA vax (like Myocarditis) then the public is going to know what caused them because of this control group. The globalists needed near-100% vaccination and they did not get it. Not even close.
There is no escape for them – They greatly overestimated the public’s apathy when it comes to authoritarianism. The rebellion is too large and they will eventually be held accountable for their trespasses.
Case in point: The latest election in Italy has resulted in a landslide win for the conservative coalition and the new prime minister (and first woman prime minister), Georgia Meloni, gave a rousing victory speech this week which directly exposed the far-left invasion of western nations, globalism and the poisonous collusion with woke corporations to silence dissent. She called for a return to freedom, and what was the mainstream media response? They are calling her a “fascist.”
The Italian election is just a small part of an ongoing trend, an awakening of the people to the imminent threats presented by globalists, and the globalists can’t stop it.
The fear among them is palpable. Anti-globalism is now going mainstream, and as it does people are going to start looking for answers. Why have our economic conditions been so degraded? Why are we facing stagflationary crisis? Why are prices on everything continuing to climb? Why did we almost lose all of our civil liberties in the name of fighting a virus with a tiny 0.23% official median Infection Fatality Rate? Why are pointless carbon controls being instituted in the middle of a supply chain crisis? Why are politicians and banks making everything so much worse?
The public outcry for a reckoning is growing and it’s the heads of globalists that will end up on the chopping block. All roads to destruction lead back to them and the policies they have forced upon the populace.
Of course, when criminals feel like they are being cornered they will sometimes set fires and take hostages in a last ditch effort to stay alive and slip through the net. I believe we are closing in on that stage of this terrible drama. It’s important to accept the conditions of the battlefield as they are and not underestimate the enemy. The truth is, globalists have extensive means at their disposal to wreak havoc and they have already set some of these disasters in motion.
As I warned many years ago (way back in 2017 in my article ‘The Economic End Game Continues’), tensions with eastern nations are being used to diminish the role of the US dollar as the world reserve currency and the petro currency. The conflict is also causing resource shortages and supply chain weakness, not to mention an energy crisis in Europe that is now irreversible with the sabotage of the Nord pipelines.
I also predicted in 2017 that the Federal Reserve would repeat a pattern of raising interest rate into severe economic weakness causing increased economic turmoil. They used a very similar tactic at the onset of the Great Depression, which former federal reserve chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted was the cause of the long term deflationary collapse.
From my article in 2017:
“The changing of the Fed chair is absolutely meaningless as far as policy is concerned. Jerome Powell will continue the same exact initiatives as Yellen; stimulus will be removed, rates will be hiked and the balance sheet will be reduced, leaving the massive market bubble the Fed originally created vulnerable to implosion.
An observant person…might have noticed that central banks around the world seem to be acting in a coordinated fashion to remove stimulus support from markets and raise interest rates, cutting off supply lines of easy money that have long been a crutch for our crippled economy.”
The Bank for International Settlement’s, the central bank of central banks and the institution that writes global policy initiatives for all other member banks, called for MORE rate hikes last week. Aside from a minor intervention by the Bank of England, the evidence shows that the globalists WANT a crash and are engineering conditions of instability. They set up the dominoes in advance and now they have decided to knock them down. I think this is a fail-safe; a panic trigger in the event that they did not get the control they wanted from the covid pandemic.
They will blame Russia, they will blame China, they will blame conservatives, they will blame anything and anyone besides themselves in an attempt to divert public attention away from the international banking actions that created the crash conditions in the first place. We can’t let them. Whatever happens next, it is vital that people remember who really did this to us and who needs to be punished.
Over the course of the next couple of years the establishment power brokers are going to attempt to use a chaos screen in order to sow seeds of fear in the population. They are going to try to exploit that fear to gain even more centralized governance and change the very foundations of our society while suffocating what’s left of our liberties. It’s the only play they have left, but at least we now know for certain that there are millions of us out there – millions of people that will not comply and that will fight back. And, we know that the globalists are afraid; if they weren’t then they would not be falling back to such drastic measures.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 23:45 - Global 'Unhappiness' Is Soaring
Global ‘Unhappiness’ Is Soaring
Last year was a difficult period for many people, and as Gallup’s latest Negative Experience Index indicates, unhappiness continued to rise worldwide in 2021, “as the world overall became a sadder, more worried and more stressed-out place”.
But, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong details below, in two countries – Afghanistan and Lebanon – more people were living in misery than anywhere else on the planet.
In the 2021 survey, the two countries recorded the two highest scores in the world on the index, which is based on people’s daily experiences of sadness, stress, worry, anger and physical pain. Higher scores on the index mean more of a population is experiencing these emotions.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As summarized by Gallup, “most of the countries with the highest scores on the Negative Experience Index were contending with some type of economic or political instability in 2021”.
On Afghanistan specifically:
“When Gallup surveyed Afghanistan as the Taliban retook control last year and as the U.S. withdrew its troops, Afghans’ emotional state reflected the chaos and uncertainty. 80% of Afghans were worried, 74% were stressed, and 61% were sad.”
Tellingly, “no other population in the world has ever reported feeling this worried in the history of Gallup’s trend.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 23:20 - 'Libs Of TikTok' Threatens To Sue Twitter Over New Suspension
‘Libs Of TikTok’ Threatens To Sue Twitter Over New Suspension
Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Twitter temporarily suspended the popular Libs of TikTok account on Sept. 25, which boasts of around 1.4 million followers, accusing the account of propagating “hateful conduct policy.”
In a blog post on Sept. 29, Libs of TikTok stated that Twitter had wrongly imposed a seven-day suspension as a result of a “targeted harassment campaign from the Left” to deplatform the account. “The truth is I haven’t engaged in hateful conduct. I’ve just exposed the Left’s depravity by reporting the facts. There’s no rule against that, so they have to make up violations I’ve never committed. But I’m not taking it lying down. I’ve vowed to sue Twitter if they permanently suspend me, and I meant it,” the post said.
Libs of TikTok is run by former real estate worker Chaya Raichick. The post goes on to point out that a lawsuit against Twitter will be “extremely expensive” and that litigation could drag on for months and years.
To support Libs of TikTok’s fight against Twitter, a legal fund has been established whereby donors can send tax-deductible donations to cover legal fees and other expenses involved in the lawsuit.
The Twitter page of Libs of TikTok (LOTT) is currently accessible publicly. However, the last post on the account was made on Sept. 25.
On Sept. 27, Envisage Law, which is representing Libs of TikTok, sent a letter to Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter, asking that the platform reinstate their client’s account.
“Many Americans are tired of listening to your company talk the talk of free expression while walking the walk of censorship,” the letter said.
“If Twitter refuses to live up to its own words and aspirations and permanently bans our client’s account, LOTT will have no choice but to ask a court to order Twitter to live up its own statements.”
Censoring Content
In the letter to Twitter, Envisage points out that this is the “second wrongful suspension” of their client’s account. The law firm had written a similar letter to the company on Sept. 1, when LOTT was earlier suspended.
In the letter of Sept. 27, Envisage affirmed that though their client’s reporting might be “offensive” to some Twitter users, this is not sufficient enough to cut LOTT from the platform. Similar to the last suspension, Twitter failed to specify which LOTT content is blamed for violating the platform’s “hateful conduct policy.”
The law firm pointed out that Twitter has sent emails to LOTT on “numerous occasions” in the past, saying that the account’s posts did not violate its harmful conduct policy. The letter contained images of LOTT content that Twitter reviewed and concluded, and subsequently decided were not “subject to removal” under the company’s rules.
LOTT’s most recent reporting is not “materially different” from any of its earlier posts. At the same time, Twitter’s speech code has not changed, the law firm noted.
The letter cites a recent case, NetChoice LLC v. Paxton, in which the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas rejected the notion that “corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”
“Twitter’s current censorship of LOTT violates Texas House Bill 20 and, if necessary, our client will not hesitate to seek injunctive relief under this statute if Twitter permanently suspends LOTT’s account,” the law firm warned.
Texas House Bill 20 prohibits large social media platforms from censoring users in Texas based on their viewpoints, unless such viewpoints are considered illegal according to federal law or if it falls into exempted categories.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 22:55 - How Do Americans Spend Their Money, By Generation?
How Do Americans Spend Their Money, By Generation?
In 2021, the average American spent just over $60,000 a year. But where does all their money go? Unsurprisingly, spending habits vary wildly depending on age.
As Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, with the graphic by Preethi Lodha using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, how average Americans spend their money (and annual expenses) varies greatly across generations.
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A Generational Breakdown of Overall Spending
Overall in 2021, Gen X (anyone born from 1965 to 1980) spent the most money of any U.S. generation, with an average annual expenditure of $83,357.
Gen X has been nicknamed the “sandwich generation” because many members of this age group are financially supporting both their aging parents as well as children of their own.
The second biggest spenders are Millennials with an average annual expenditure of $69,061. Just like Gen X, this generation’s top three spending categories are housing, healthcare, and personal insurance.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, members of Generation Z are the lowest spenders with an average of $41,636. per year. Their spending habits are expected to ramp up, especially considering that in 2022 the oldest Gen Zers are just 25 and still early in their careers.
Similarities Across Generations
While spending habits vary depending on the age group, there are some categories that remain fairly consistent across the board.
One of the most consistent spending categories is housing—it’s by the far the biggest expense for all age groups, accounting for more than 30% of total annual spending for every generation.
Another spending category that’s surprisingly consistent across every generation is entertainment. All generations spent more than 4% of their total expenditures on entertainment, but none dedicated more than 5.6%.
Gen Zers spent the least on entertainment, which could boil down to the types of entertainment this generation typically enjoys. For instance, a study found that 51% of respondents aged 13-19 watch videos on Instagram on a weekly basis, while only 15% watch cable TV.
Differences Across Generations
One category that varies the most between generations and relative needs is spending on healthcare.
As the table below shows, the Silent Generation spent an average of $7,053 on healthcare, or 15.8% of their total average spend. Comparatively, Gen Z only spent $1,354 on average, or 3.3% of their total average spend.
However, while the younger generations typically spend less on healthcare, they’re also less likely to be insured—so those who do get sick could be left with a hefty bill.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 22:30 - Stockman Slams Washington's Pointless War On Behalf Of A Fake Nation
Stockman Slams Washington’s Pointless War On Behalf Of A Fake Nation
Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
The messages are coming in loud and clear today – from the crashing pound, to repudiation of establishment governments in Italy, Sweden and more to come, to Hungarian Prime Minister Orban’s call to end the Sanctions War and do so pronto.
So let’s be clear: Washington’s dunderheaded intervention in the intramural spat between Russia and Ukraine and the accompanying global Sanctions War is the surely the stupidest, most destructive project to arise from the banks of the Potomac in modern times. And the architects of this perfidious folly—Biden, Blinkin, Sullivan, Nuland et. al.—cannot be condemned harshly enough.
After all, this madness is being pursued in the name of abstract policy norms—the rule of law and sanctity of borders—that make Washington a laughing stock. More than any other nation on planet earth (and by a long-shot), it has serially and blatantly violated these standards scores of times in recent decades.
Among other actions, Washington’s interventions in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia etc were not only pointless; they were also a self-evident violation of the very rule of law and sanctity of borders upon which Washington now beats its breasts ever more stridently.
Moreover, by wallowing in this unhinged hypocrisy Washington has abandoned every semblance of commonsense as to why this conflict happened in the first place and why it is wholly irrelevant to the national security of the American homeland, or, for that matter, Europe, as well.
The fundamental fact is, aside from the historically short interval of iron-fisted communist rule during the Soviet era, Ukraine had never been a nation-state within its post-1991 happenstance borders. In fact, for upwards of 275 years before 1918 much of its territories were borderlands, vassals and outright provinces of Czarist Russia; and before that constituents of the Polish-Lithuanian Empire and others.
So we are not dealing with the invasion of a long-established, ethnically and linguistically coherent state by its aggressive neighbor, but with the left-over potpourri of separate tongues, territories. economies and histories that were smashed together by brutal communist rulers between 1918 and 1991.
Accordingly, the fast-approaching dark, cold winter of stagflationary collapse in Europe is not being done in heroic defense of the grand principles proffered by Washington and NATO. To the contrary, it amounts to the pointless and grubby business of preserving a vile status quo ante that was confected on the lands north of the Black Sea, not by the ordinary course of historical evolution and nation-state accretion, but by the bloody-hands of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev.
In any event, the staggering economic costs for the everyday peoples of Europe in pursuit of such a threadbare and illegitimate purpose is starting to register among the long-suffering victims of Brussels’ elitist rulers. Hence the thunderbolts from the Italian elections this weekend and Viktor Orbán’s parallel appeal to the European Union to lift sanctions and thereby potentially reduce energy prices by half in one swell swoop.
Nor is Orbán the only one calling for an end to sanctions, with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki calling for a repeal of Russian sanctions as well. Other political leaders, such as Matteo Salvini, who leads the conservative League party and will be a major force in Italy’s new government, says that Europe needs a “rethink” on Russian sanctions due to the harmful economic effects.
Likewise, the conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has also been pushing for an end to sanctions and an re-opening of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines due to soaring energy costs in Germany. AfD member of the Bundestag, Mariana Harder-Kühnel, for instance, recently echoed Orbán’s call.
“The EU bureaucracy has turned the screw on the sanctions, and now we are paying the bill,” she said.
In this context, the ructions since Friday in the FX market for the pound sterling speak more powerfully than anything else.
The British pound briefly plunged to its lowest level ever early this week, touching $1.0349 during Asian trading hours, breaking through its previous record low of 1985. Moreover, today’s cliff-dive followed a tumble of 3% on Friday, after the new Truss government announced sweeping tax cuts and a massive energy bailout for businesses and individuals.
Likewise, the price of U.K. government debt has fallen in tandem with the pound, with yields rising sharply again today. The 10-year government bond was yielding 4.11%, up 28 basis points from Friday and a staggering 342% from the 0.93% yield of just one year ago.
For want of doubt, here is the path of pound sterling over the last twelve months. That’s a massive thumbs down by the FX markets if there ever was one.
But the relevant point here is not all the Keynesian palaver about the “mistake” of lowering the 45% top income tax rate and removing other disincentives to work and investment that take UK marginal rates as high as 60%. These reductions in the crushing tax rates that Conservative and Labor government alike have erected atop the UK’s lavish Welfare State are long-overdue and will, in fact, stimulate compensatory economic activity.
What’s actually going to destroy the remnants of the UK’s fiscal sustainability is Truss’ utterly foolish plan to freeze all energy prices for all citizens and businesses at a cost of upwards of $200 billion per year or 5% of GDP. But that’s neocon insanity run amok.
If London wants to relieve its consumers of onerous energy prices and utility bills it only need follow Orban’s advice and terminate its Sanctions War against Russian energy, food and other commodity exports. And it wouldn’t cost the Exchequer a dime.
That is to say, the pound’s crash ought to be a general wake-up call to Europe and Washington, too. By declaring war on the productive and peaceful commerce with Russia that previously prevailed, Europe’s leaders—-especially the new government of United Kingdom—have sacrificed their own prosperity and the living standards of their citizens in behalf of a prodigiously corrupt, anti-democratic regime in Kiev that is dedicated to preserving intact nothing more noble than the dead hand of the Soviet Presidium.
Or as our friend James Howard Kunstler rightly summarized:
Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project. They engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr. Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia, Russia!
So we return to the question at hand: Every Ukrainian presidential election since 1991 has revealed a nation radically split between pro-Russian populations in the east and south and anti-Russian nationalists in the center and west. When the mailed fist of communist rule was removed, in fact, Ukraine became a territory yearning to be partitioned into more amenable jurisdictions of governance.
For instance, here is the results of the 2010 election that put a pro-Russian politician in the president’s office and at length gave rise to Washington’s putsch during the Maiden uprising that soon drove the country into civil war.
The above map barely does justice to the actual figures. In many of the yellow Tymoshenko-supporting areas the vote was 80% or higher in favor of the latter’s nationalist candidacy, while in much of the blue area the pro-Russian Yanukovych won be similar massive pluralities.
Yet this wasn’t a one-time fluke of short-term electoral politics: It was actually the recrudescence of the manner in which the fake nation of Ukraine was put together during the last three centuries.
Prior to the end of WWI, there was no Ukrainian state. Like the artificial and unsustainable polities of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which were confected by self-serving politicians at Versailles (especially the domestic vote seeking Woodrow Wilson), Ukraine was a product of geopolitical engineering—in this case by the new rulers of the Soviet Union.
Indeed, the historical provenance of “Ukraine” can be described in a nutshell. What was to become Ukraine joined Russia in 1654 when Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, petitioned Russian czar Alexey to accept the Zaporozhian Host into Russia. That is to say, Imperial Russia spawned the latter day polity of Ukraine by annexing into its service the fearsome Cossack Warriors who inhabited its central region.
The army and a small territory then under Hetman control was called “u kraine,” which means in Russian “at the edge”, a term that had originated in the twelfth century to describe lands on the border of Russia.
During the next 250 years the expansionist Czars annexed more and more of the adjacent territory, designating the eastern and southern regions as “Novorussiya” (New Russia), which territories included Catherine the Great’s purchase of Crimea from the Ottomans in 1783.
That is to say, at the time of America’s own independence the heart of today’s Ukraine was ruled by the long arm of Czarist autocracy.
After the Bolshevik revolution, of course, the map changed radically. In 1919 Lenin created the socialist state of Ukraine on part of the territory of the former Russian Empire. Ukraine officially became the Ukrainian People’s Republic with the capital of Kharkov in 1922 (moved to Kiev in 1934).
Accordingly, the new communist state swallowed up Novorussiya per the eastern and southern portions of the green area in the map below, including Donetsk, and Lugansk regions, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions bordering the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea that are the sites of today’s Russia-sponsored succession referendums.
Then in 1939, as a result of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin annexed the eastern territories of Poland, as designated by the yellow areas of the map. Thus, the historic territory of Galicia and the Polish city of Lvov were incorporated into Ukraine by the joint decree of Stalin and Hitler.
In June of 1940, Stalin next annexed Northern Bukovina (brown area) from Romania. And then at the Yalta conference in 1945, upon Stalin’s insistence to Churchill and Roosevelt, the Hungarian Carpathian Ruthenia was incorporated into the Soviet Union and added to Ukraine.
Taken together, these Stalinist seizures are now known as Western Ukraine, the people’s of which understandably do not cotton to things Russian. At the same time, the 85% Russian-speaking population inhabiting the purple area (Crimea) was gifted to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954 for the very reason of extending his own accession to the communist dictatorship.
Nevertheless, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited these communist-confected borders within which there were upwards of 40 millions Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Tartars and countless lesser nationalities—all trapped in a newly declared country in which they didn’t especially wish to reside.
Indeed, the reason that the hapless state of “Ukraine” needs relief in partition, not a war to preserve the handiwork if Czars and Commissars, was well summarized by Alexander G. Markovsky in the American Thinker:
Today’s Ukrainian civil war is thus greatly exacerbated by the fact that unlike pluralistic societies such as the USA, Canada, Switzerland, and Russia, which are tolerant of different cultures, religions, and languages, Ukraine is not. Unsurprisingly, devotion to pluralism proved not to be her forte. Even though the Kiev regime had no historical roots in the real estate it inhabited, it imposed Ukrainian rules and the Ukrainian language on non-Ukrainian people after declaring independence.
As a result, pro-Russian sentiments – ranging from the recognition of the official status of the Russian language to outright secession – have always been prevalent in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Western Ukraine has always gravitated toward its Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian roots. Emphatically anti-Russian, Poland may not miss this strategic opportunity to re-acquire its land and avenge the humiliation inflicted by the Yalta Conference.
The West’s insistence on maintaining the status quo of the Ukrainian borders established by Lenin, Stalin and Hitler exposes the disconnect between strategic doctrine and moral principles.
Indeed, Poles make no secret of their ambitions. Polish President Andrzej Duda, recently declared, “For decades, and maybe, God forbid, for centuries, there will be no more borders between our countries – Poland and Ukraine. There will be no such border!”
Romania is not far behind, especially in light of many inhabitants of former Northern Bukovina already carrying Romanian passports.
The territory of Ukraine is a mosaic of other people’s lands. If we want to stop this insane war and ensure peace in Europe, instead of calling Russia’s sponsored referendum in Eastern Ukraine a sham, we should conduct an honest referendum in all the disputed territories under the auspices of the UN and let the people decide what government they want.
Needless to say, partition of the fake state of Ukraine is not remotely on Washington’s mind. After all, it would remove the latest neocon reason for spreading the blessings of Forever Wars to the fairest parts of the planet.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 22:05 - Exxon CEO Pushes Back On Biden's Plan To Limit Fuel Exports
Exxon CEO Pushes Back On Biden’s Plan To Limit Fuel Exports
First it was Chevon’s CEO reaching out to warn President Biden about the administration’s action again oil companies. Now, it’s Exxon warning the President about limiting fuel exports.
Exxon is “pushing back” against the idea of reducing U.S. fuel exports, telling President Biden’s Energy Department this week that such actions would lead to continued volatility in oil prices globally, and at the pump domestically, according to a new report by the Wall Street Journal. Exxon said that “the oil industry should not slow fuel shipments in favor of putting more in storage tanks”, the Journal report says.
Exxon argued that cutting exports would lead to a glut in the Gulf Coast which would then, in turn, prompt output cuts.
The concerns were laid out in a letter this week signed by Exxon Chief Executive Darren Woods. Woods wrote: “Continuing current Gulf Coast exports is essential to efficiently rebalance markets—particularly with diverted Russian supplies. Reducing global supply by limiting U.S. exports to build region-specific inventory will only aggravate the global supply shortfall.”
Biden’s Energy Department responded by pointing out parts of the country that have oil and gas levels near five year lows heading into hurricane season. A spokesperson said: “The administration has impressed upon the oil and gas industry that it must do more to ensure fair prices and adequate supply for all Americans, while meeting the needs of our allies.”
Woods argued that the East Coast had 59.3 million barrels of total gasoline and ethanol in storage, 1% lower than usual for the time of year. He also noted that demand for gasoline though June was about 9% lower than the three year average prior to Covid. He noted that pipelines that carry the fuel from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast are full and that there aren’t enough ships to move U.S. made fuel to the Northeast.
“Free market incentives remain the most efficient way for the industry to address these problems,” Woods said.
The pushback follows a letter by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in August, where she urged oil companies to slow exports in order to refill stocks in the East Coast.
She wrote: “The most effective way to resolve this issue without having to deploy emergency actions is for industry to prioritize building inventories during this critical window. The data clearly show there has not been sufficient progress in building inventories ahead of peak hurricane season.”
She also took the step of threatening to limit exports if oil companies didn’t follow suit, stating that the Biden administration would consider “additional federal requirements or emergency measures.”
In September, after discussing the idea with industry executives, she said the Biden administration was not “currently weighing any restrictions”, the Journal report noted.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 21:40 - Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, While Protecting Their Handlers: Sperry
Durham Prosecutes FBI Informants, While Protecting Their Handlers: Sperry
Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClear Investigations,
Since being named special counsel in October 2020, John Durham has investigated or indicted several unscrupulous anti-Trump informants. But he has spared the FBI agents who handled them, raising suspicions he’s letting investigators off the hook in his waning investigation of misconduct in the Russiagate probe.
In recent court filings, Durham has portrayed the G-men as naive recipients of bad information, tricked into opening improper investigations targeting Donald Trump and obtaining invalid warrants to spy on one of his advisers.
But as the cases against the informants have gone to trial, defense lawyers have revealed evidence that cuts against that narrative. FBI investigators look less like guileless victims and more like willing partners in the fraudulent schemes Durham has brought to light.
Notwithstanding his reputation as a tough, intrepid prosecutor, Durham has made excuses for the misconduct of FBI agents, providing them a ready-made defense against any possible future prosecution, according to legal experts.
“Durham was supposed to clean up the FBI cesspool, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to be doing that,” said Paul Kamenar, counsel to the National Legal and Policy Center, a Washington watchdog group. “He started with a bang and is ending with a whimper.”
In the latest example, critics point to a flurry of pretrial motions in Durham’s case against former FBI informant Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the false claims regarding Trump and Russia advanced by the opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign known as the Steele dossier.
Next month, Danchenko faces charges he lied to FBI investigators multiple times about the sourcing of the information in the dossier, which the bureau used to secure wiretap warrants to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. Relying on Danchenko’s reporting, the FBI claimed that the adviser, Carter Page, was a Russian agent at the center of “a well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Kremlin to steal the 2016 presidential election.
Igor Danchenko, dossier fabulist: Trial upcoming. “The defendant was providing them with false information” as part of “a concerted effort to deceive the FBI,” Durham alleged in a recent filing with the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., where the trial is scheduled to be held Oct. 11.
Had agents known Danchenko made up the allegations, Durham asserted, they might have asked more questions about the dossier and not relied on it to swear out the ultra-invasive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to electronically monitor Page, a U.S. citizen who was never charged with a crime.
But Danchenko’s legal team points out that he turned over an email to the FBI during a January 2017 meeting with agents and analysts that indicated a key dossier subsource may have been fictionalized. Stuart Sears, one of Danchenko’s attorneys, argued earlier this month in a motion to dismiss the charges that investigators “essentially ignored” any concerns they may have had about Danchenko’s sourcing, because they continued to renew the FISA warrants based upon it. Therefore, he argued, any lies his client allegedly told them were inconsequential, making them un-prosecutable under federal statutes requiring such false statements to have a “material” impact on a federal proceeding.
While Durham did not dispute the FBI’s apparent complicity in the fraud, he waved it aside as immaterial to the case at hand. “The fact that the FBI apparently did not identify or address these inconsistencies is of no moment,” he said in his filing.
At the same time, Durham acknowledged agents allowed the fabrications to contaminate their wiretap warrants – noting they were “an important part of the FISA applications targeting Carter Page.” But he stopped short of blaming the FBI, even for incompetence. According to Durham, the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency was misled by a serial liar and con man.
“He’s painting it as though the FBI was duped when the FBI was more than willing to take the initiative and go after Trump,” Kamenar said, adding that though Danchenko may have been a liar, he was a useful liar to FBI officials and others in the Justice Department who were pursuing Trump.
The special prosecutor’s indifference to the FBI’s role in the scandal is more remarkable in light of what Danchenko admitted in his January 2017 interviews with the FBI. He told investigators that much of what he reported to Steele was “word-of-mouth and hearsay,” while some was cooked up from “conversation that [he] had with friends over beers,” according to a declassified FBI summary of the interviews, which took place over three days. He confessed the most salacious allegations were made in “jest.”
Still, the FBI continued to use Danchenko’s claims of a “well-developed conspiracy of cooperation” between Russia and Trump to convince the FISA court to allow investigators to continue to surveil Page, whom the FBI accused of masterminding the conspiracy based on Danchenko’s bogus rumors. Agents even swore in FISA court documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations that Danchenko was “truthful and cooperative.”
Carter Page, junior Trump campaign aide: Spied on without justification. The combination of Danchenko reporting a “conspiracy” and the FBI vouching for his credibility persuaded the powerful FISA court to continue to authorize wiretapping Page as a suspected Russian agent for almost a year. In addition to collecting his emails and text messages in 2017, agents were able to sweep up all his prior communications with Trump officials from 2016.
If the FBI were skeptical of Danchenko, it didn’t show it. The next month, the bureau put him on its payroll as a confidential human source, or CHS, making him part of the bureau’s untouchable “sources and methods” sanctum and thereby protecting him and any documents referencing him from congressional and other outside scrutiny. It made him a paid informant in spite of knowing Danchenko was a potential Russian spy threat who could be feeding federal agents disinformation. The FBI had previously opened a counterespionage probe of Danchenko from 2009 to 2011, and as his lawyers pointed out in a recent court filing, agents who were part of the case probing Trump/Russia ties, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, “were well aware of the prior counterintelligence investigation” when they were supposedly conned by their informant.
“It stretches credibility to suggest that anything else would have caused the FBI to be more suspicious of Mr. Danchenko’s statements and his potential role in spreading disinformation than the very fact that he was previously investigated for possibly engaging in espionage on behalf of Russia,” Sears said. “Armed with that knowledge, however, the FBI nevertheless persisted” in using him as a source – while never informing the FISA court of the prior investigation.
The FBI didn’t terminate Danchenko until October 2020, the month after the Senate declassified documents revealing the FBI had investigated him as a Russian agent. It also happened to be the same month Durham was appointed special counsel.
On Oct. 19, 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr tapped Durham “to investigate whether any federal official, employee, or any other person or entity violated the law in connection with the intelligence, counter-intelligence, or law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns, individuals associated with those campaigns, and individuals associated with the administration of President Donald J. Trump, including but not limited to Crossfire Hurricane and the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III.”
So far, Durham has focused on the “any other person” part of his mandate. Federal officials and employees appear to be getting a pass.
Kevin Clinesmith, FBI lawyer: Doctored exculpatory evidence. Though Durham prosecuted former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith in August 2020, when he was acting as a U.S. attorney, he did not initiate the case. Rather, it was referred to him by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who first exposed how Clinesmith had doctored exculpatory evidence in the Page warrant process. Even though Clinesmith admitted forging a CIA email to make it look like Page never helped the agency monitor Russia, when in fact he did and clearly wasn’t acting as a Russian agent, Durham failed to put him behind bars. Clinesmith was sentenced to 12 months’ probation and 400 hours of community service, which as RCI first reported, the registered Democrat satisfied by researching and editing articles for his favorite liberal weekly newspaper in Washington.
Kamenar said the Clinesmith case was a “bad omen” for how Durham would handle dirty FBI agents. He pointed out that the prosecutor could have charged Clinesmith with the more serious crime of altering a CIA document, but instead negotiated a deal letting him plead to the lesser offense of lying to a government agency, which Kamenar called “a garden variety process crime.” And “now he’s got his law license back.”
Clinesmith worked closely on the case with FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten, who was singled out by Horowitz in a 2019 report for cutting a number of corners in the dossier verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into the FISA affidavits and mislead the court.
Auten met with Danchenko at the bureau’s Washington field office and helped debrief him about the dossier in January 2017. And he wrote the official FBI summary of those meetings, which noted Danchenko “contradicted” himself several times. Auten learned firsthand that the information Danchenko passed to Steele was nothing more than bar gossip, and that his “network of subsources” was really just a circle of drinking buddies. Also at those meetings, the analyst received an Aug. 24, 2016, email revealing that Danchenko never actually communicated with Sergei Millian, the Belarusian-born American businessman whom he had identified as his main source of Trump/Russia connections – the all-important, albeit apocryphal, “Source E” and “Source D” of the dossier. It turns out Danchenko attributed the critical “conspiracy of cooperation” allegation the FBI cited as probable cause for all four FISA warrants to this made-up source, meaning the cornerstone evidence of suspected Trump-Russia espionage was also made up.
What’s more, Auten learned that though Danchenko was born in Russia, he was not based there and had no access to Kremlin insiders. On the contrary, he confirmed that Danchenko had been living in Washington and had previously worked for the Brookings Institution, a Democratic Party think tank whose president at the time was tied to Clinton.
Yet Auten and his Crossfire team led the FISA court to believe Danchenko was “Russian-based” – and therefore presumably more credible. They used this same description in all four FISA affidavits, including the two renewals that followed the January 2017 meetings with Danchenko.
Internal FBI emails from two months later revealed that Auten knew that using the term “Russian-based” was deceptive. While tasked with helping review Crossfire documents requested by Congress, including FISA applications, he worried about the description and whether it should be corrected. He discussed the matter with Clinesmith. But the falsehood reappeared in subsequent FISA applications.
It was also in January 2017 that Danchenko revealed to Auten and his FBI handlers that one of his subsources was his childhood friend Olga Galkina, whom he said supplied him the rumor that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague during the campaign to hatch a plot with Kremlin officials to hack Clinton campaign emails.
Michael Cohen, Trump lawyer: Baseless rumor victim. The FBI already knew from intelligence reports that Cohen had not, as the dossier claimed, traveled to Prague to conspire in the alleged Russian hacking of Democrats, or for any other reason.
On Jan. 12, 2017, Auten and his Crossfire teammates received a CIA report that warned the Cohen rumor was likely part of a Russian disinformation campaign. The agency had discovered no such Prague meeting took place after querying foreign intelligence services, shooting a major hole in the dossier. The CIA report should have led the Crossfire team to treat any allegations sourced to Galkina with caution. But on the same day, the FBI got its FISA wiretap on Page renewed based on another groundless claim by Galkina – this one alleging the Trump aide secretly met with top Kremlin officials in Moscow to discuss removing U.S. sanctions. The falsehood showed up in two more FISA applications, which alleged “Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. policy were likely being coordinated between the RIS [Russian Intelligence Services] and Page, and possibly others.”
Galkina also had a relationship with Charles Dolan, a Clinton adviser who figures prominently in the Danchenko case Durham is prosecuting.
It turns out Dolan was one of the sources for the infamous “pee-tape” allegation about the Kremlin supposedly having blackmail evidence of Trump consorting with prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, which has been debunked as another dossier hoax. But according to Durham, Danchenko tried to conceal Dolan’s role in the dossier from the FBI. The special prosecutor argued that the deception deprived FBI agents and analysts information that would have helped them evaluate “the credibility, reliability and veracity” of the dossier. He said if they had known Dolan was a source, they might have, among other things, sought emails Dolan and Danchenko exchanged exposing their Ritz-Carlton hoax.
“Had the defendant truthfully told the FBI that Dolan played a role in providing certain information for the Steele reports the FBI might well have interviewed and/or collected such emails from Dolan,” Durham speculated.
In addition, the prosecutor said, investigators might have learned of Dolan’s “involvement in Democratic politics” and “potential bias as a source for the Steele reports.” Except that they already knew about Dolan and his politics – as well as his involvement in the dossier. It’s also likely they already had his emails.
In another interview with Danchenko about his dossier sources, which took place June 15, 2017, FBI agents asked Danchenko if he knew Dolan and whether he was “contributing” to the Steele reports. Though Danchenko acknowledged he knew Dolan, he denied he was a source. Agents didn’t ask any follow-up questions. (They also never sought to charge him with making false statements to federal agents.)
How did the FBI know to ask about Dolan? Because he was well-known to the bureau’s Russia counterintelligence agents as a businessman who frequently traveled to Moscow and met with Kremlin insiders. But more importantly, his friend Galkina was under FISA surveillance as a suspected Russian spy at the time, according to declassified records. The FBI was collecting not only Galkina’s emails, but also those of Dolan and Danchenko, all of whom regularly communicated in 2016 – which suggests that at the time the FBI asked Danchenko about Dolan, it had access to those emails and was reviewing them.
This may explain why, as defense lawyer Sears noted, “the FBI never asked Mr. Danchenko about emails or any other written communications with Dolan” – and why it never interviewed Dolan.
While Durham acknowledged that the FBI knew about Dolan’s troubling ties at the time and neglected to dig deeper, he said he’s not bothered by the oversight. “The fact that the FBI was aware that Dolan maintained some of these relationships and failed to interview Dolan is of no moment,” he maintained dismissively in a court filing. All that matters, he suggested, is that the FBI was lied to.
One of those emails was particularly alarming. In an Aug. 19, 2016, email to Dolan, Danchenko made it clear he was compiling dirt on Trump and his advisers and sought any rumor, no matter how baseless and scurrilous. He solicited Dolan, specifically, for “any thought, rumor, allegation” on former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Such emails called into question the veracity of the whole dossier and further tainted the credibility of Danchenko’s “network of subsources.” But on June 29, 2017 – two weeks after the FBI asked about Dolan – the FBI renewed the FISA wiretap on Trump adviser Page based on, once again, the dubious dossier.
From its wiretapping of Galkina, moreover, Auten and others at the FBI who sorted through such FISA collections would have seen communications showing her strong support for Hillary Clinton, and how Galkina was expecting political favors in exchange for spreading dirt on Trump. In an August 2016 email to a friend, Galkina expressed hopes that Dolan would help her score a State Department job if Clinton won election.
It was a major red flag. But like all the others, the FBI blew right past it. Agents continued to vouch for Danchenko as “truthful” and his subsources as reliable, and continued to cite Galkina’s fabrications in FISA renewals.
Under FISA rules, the FBI had a duty to “immediately inform” the secret court of any misstatements or omissions, along with any “necessary corrections” of material facts sworn in affidavits for warrants. But the FBI failed to correct the record, even after it became obvious it had told the court falsehoods and hid exculpatory evidence. In August 2017, agents finally got around to interviewing Galkina, who confessed the dossier allegations attributed to her were “exaggerated,” according to the Horowitz report.
Scammed by the Alfa Bank Scam?
Last year, Durham also painted the FBI as a victim of the 2016 political machinations of two other anti-Trump informants – Michael Sussmann and Rodney Joffe, who conveyed to investigators false rumors about Trump allegedly setting up a secret hotline with the Kremlin through Russia-based Alfa Bank.
Michael Sussmann, Clinton lawyer: Acquitted. Durham charged Sussmann, a Washington lawyer who represented the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, with lying to the FBI’s top lawyer James Baker when he told him he was coming in with the tip – outlined in white papers and thumb drives – all on his own and not on behalf of Democrats and Clinton, whom he was billing for the Trump-Alfa “confidential project.”
“Sussmann’s false statement misled the FBI general counsel and other FBI personnel concerning the political nature of his work and deprived the FBI of information that might have permitted it more fully to access and uncover the origins of the relevant data and technical analysis, including the identities and motivations of Sussmann’s clients,” Durham maintained in the indictment.
But evidence emerged at the trial of Sussmann, who was acquitted, that bureau officials already knew the “political nature” of the tip and where the data came from, but withheld the information from field agents so they would continue investigating Trump through the election.
For example, in a Sept. 22, 2016, email describing the “special project,” an FBI official in Washington stated that “Counsel Baker provided [Supervisory Special Agent] Joe Pientka with 2 thumb drives and identified they were given to him by the DNC.”
“Everybody at the FBI actually thought the data came from a political party,” Sussmann lawyer Sean Berkowitz argued, according to the trial transcript. “The (case) file is littered with references to the DNC.”
But Durham kept offering explanations for why FBI brass bit on the politically tainted tip, opening a full field investigation based on it.
“Had Sussmann truthfully disclosed that he was representing specific clients [the Clinton campaign], it might have prompted the FBI general counsel to ask Sussmann for the identity of such clients, which, in turn, might have prompted further questions,” Durham argued.
James Baker, top FBI lawyer: Close friend of Sussmann. “In addition, absent Sussmann’s false statement, the FBI might have taken additional or more incremental steps before opening an investigation,” he added. “The FBI also might have allocated its resources differently, or more efficiently, and uncovered more complete information about the reliability and provenance of the purported data at issue.”
Headquarters, however, did know the identity of the clients. Problem was, they blinded agents in Chicago, where a cyber unit was assigned to the case, to the fact that the source for the information was Sussmann and Joffe – a federal cyber-security contractor who was angling for a job in a Clinton administration. (A longtime FBI informant, Joffe was terminated last year after he was exposed as the ringleader of the Alfa Bank scam.)
“You were not allowed to speak to either the source of the information, the author of the white paper, or the person who provided the source of the information and the data?” Berkowitz asked Chicago-based FBI agent Curtis Heide during the trial, according to transcripts.
“Correct,” Heide replied.
Another Chicago investigator was led to believe the tip came into the bureau as a referral from the “U.S. Department of Justice.”
Rodney Joffe, cybersecurity contractor: “Remains a subject.” Still, field agents were able to debunk it within two weeks.
The FBI was not fooled by the hoax, yet nonetheless went along with it for the next four months. The case wasn’t formally closed until Jan. 18, 2017, just two days before Trump was inaugurated. But then it was soon reopened after Clinton operatives again approached the FBI – as well as the CIA – with supposedly new evidence, which also proved false.
“Comey and crew kept the hoax alive,” former FBI counterintelligence lawyer Mark Wauck said, referring to then-FBI Director James Comey. They welcomed any predication that allowed them to open investigations on Trump, he added.
Pientka testified that Comey was “fired up” about the tip, despite the fact nothing had been corroborated. Comey even held senior-level meetings on the Alfa investigation in his 7th floor office. (Pientka, who led the “close-hold” investigation from headquarters, also helped supervise the Crossfire Hurricane probe.)
Ironically, no one knew better that Sussmann was a Democratic operative with an agenda than Baker – the official Durham claimed was the direct victim of the scam.
Baker, a fellow Democrat, was a close friend of Sussmann, who had his own badge to get past security at the Hoover Building. Sussmann had Baker’s personal cell number and Baker cleared his busy schedule to meet with him within hours of Sussmann calling to discuss his tip. Baker was well aware that Sussmann was representing the DNC, because Sussmann entered the building numerous times during the 2016 campaign to talk with top FBI officials about the alleged DNC hack by Russia. In fact, Sussmann had just visited headquarters with a delegation from the DNC on Aug. 12, 2016 – several weeks before he approached Baker with the bogus Alfa tip. They were there to pressure the FBI into concluding Russian intelligence was behind the “hacking” of DNC emails.
“I understood he had been affiliated with the Democratic Party, but that he had come representing himself,” Baker testified during the trial.
Why didn’t he tell investigators about Sussmann? “I didn’t want to share his name because I didn’t want to color the investigation,” he said. “I didn’t want to color it with politics.”
In his closing argument, Durham prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis told jurors the FBI’s conduct was “not relevant.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve seen that the FBI didn’t necessarily do everything right here. They missed opportunities. They made mistakes. They even kept information from themselves,” he said. “That is not relevant to your evaluation of the defendant’s lie.”
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton complained Durham and his team have been acting more like apologists for the FBI than potential prosecutors of the FBI.
“The FBI leadership knew full well the Clinton gang was behind the Alfa Bank-Russia smears of Trump,” he said. “Durham tried to pretend (the) FBI was a victim (when) it was a co-conspirator.”
Wauck agreed. “The FBI-as-victim narrative was a bit of a legal fiction that Durham deployed for the purposes of the trial,” he said. “The reality that emerged is that the FBI’s top management was complicit in the Russia hoax that Sussmann was purveying.”
Folding Up His Tent
Durham was first tasked with looking into the origins of the Russiagate probe in May 2019, before his formal appointment as special counsel in 2020. Trump and Republicans have expressed disappointment that after a total of more than three years of investigation, he has not prosecuted any top former FBI officials, including Comey and Andrew McCabe, who signed some of the FISA affidavits, or Peter Strzok, the biased leader of the Crossfire Hurricane probe who assured McCabe’s lawyer in an August 2016 text that “we’ll stop” Trump from becoming president. None has received a target letter. In recent months, McCabe and Strzok have gone on CNN, where they work as paid contributors, and smugly bashed Durham for running a “partisan” investigation, while at the same time gloating he’s held the FBI up to be more of a victim than a culprit.
“Comey and Strzok and McCabe have gotten a free ride out of all this,” Kamenar said.
James Comey, FBI director: Not prosecuted. Also, Durham went easy on Baker, another top FBI official, even after he held back key evidence from the special prosecutor before the Sussmann trial, a blatant lack of cooperation that may have cost Durham a conviction in the case. Comey’s general counsel has received “favorable treatment,” Wauck observed.
Baker, who reviewed and OK’d the FISA applications, never told Durham about a damning text message he received from Sussmann on his cellphone. Durham had already indicted Sussmann for lying to Baker, and he could not use Sussmann’s smoking-gun message – “I’m coming on my own – not on behalf of a client or company” – during the trial to convince jurors he was guilty of lying about representing the Clinton campaign. Legal analysts said it was slam-dunk evidence that would have sealed his case.
Baker testified he didn’t turn over the text to Durham because no one asked for it. He proved a reluctant witness on the stand against his old pal Sussmann.
Andrew McCabe, deputy director: Not prosecuted “I’m not out to get Michael and this is not my investigation. This is your investigation,” he told DeFilippis during questioning. DeFilippis has since stepped down to take a job in the private sector.
(Demonstrating the incestuous nature of the Beltway, Baker also happens to be an old friend of Bill Barr, who hired Durham. Barr hired Baker as his deputy when he ran Verizon’s legal shop in 2008.)
In another sign Durham has not lived up to his billing as an aggressive prosecutor, FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested in recent Senate testimony that Durham’s team has not interviewed all of the Crossfire members still employed at the bureau. In lieu of face-to-face interviews, he said Durham’s investigators have reviewed transcripts of interviews of the agents previously conducted by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the FBI’s in-house disciplinary arm.
Recent published reports say Durham is in the process of closing up shop and completing a final report on his findings by the end of the year. Republicans have promised to seize on the report if they win control of the House in November and take back the gavel to key oversight committees on the Hill, along with subpoena power.
Peter Strzok, Crossfire Hurricane leader: Not prosecuted. Some former colleagues who have worked with Durham and are familiar with his inquiry blame COVID-19 for his relatively few prosecutions and lackluster record. They say pandemic-related shutdowns in 2020 and 2021 set back his investigation by limiting travel, interviews, and grand jury hearings. As a result, they say, the clock ran out on prosecuting a number of potential crimes. The last FISA warrant, which according to the court was illegally obtained, was approved June 29, 2017, which means the five-year federal statute of limitations for that crime expired months ago.
Though Durham hinted in the Sussmann case about investigating a broader “conspiracy” or “joint venture,” there are few signs pointing to such a massive undertaking. Bringing a “conspiracy to defraud the government” charge, naming multiple defendants, would require Durham adding staff and office space and beefing up his budget by millions of dollars, the former colleagues said.
According to expenditure statements, Durham continues to operate on a shoestring budget with a skeletal staff compared with his predecessor Mueller’s robust operation, which indicted 34 people. And one of the two grand juries Durham used to hear evidence has expired. It recently wrapped up work, apparently without handing down new indictments (though some could be under seal).
“If Durham were building toward an overarching indictment alleging a corrupt conspiracy between the Clinton campaign and the FBI to deceive the court, he would not be charging people with lying to the FBI,” former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said.
If there are any investigations still open after Durham retires, they could be handled by U.S. attorneys, the sources said. At least one of Durham’s prosecutors works as a trial lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C.
According to a court exhibit, Joffe “remains a subject” in the Sussmann-related investigation into alleged attempts by federal contractors to defraud the government with false claims about Trump and Russia. Joffe invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify after receiving a grand jury subpoena and has not cooperated with requests for documents. His lawyer did not return phone calls and emails.
The Special Counsel’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
The FBI declined comment for this article, but issued a statement last year saying it “has cooperated fully with Special Counsel Durham’s review.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 21:15 - "Globalists Are Marching Us Relentlessly Toward Nuclear Armageddon," Warns Former Senator
“Globalists Are Marching Us Relentlessly Toward Nuclear Armageddon,” Warns Former Senator
Fears of nuclear war are increasing across the West as Russia mobilizes hundreds of thousands of troops and declares annexation of parts of Ukraine. Meanwhile, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine is applying for membership in NATO. These two developments could be the most significant escalation since the war’s start.
Today’s developments are a sobering reminder that nuclear war threats are mounting. Retired Virginia State Senator and retired Marine Col. Richard Black addressed members of the US Congress in an open letter on Tuesday about “globalists are marching us relentlessly toward this nuclear Armageddon.”
Black pointed out:
There would have been no war had we not overthrown the democratically-elected government of Ukraine by violently ousting President Yanukovych in 2014. We promoted war by flooding Ukraine with massive arms shipments afterwards.
The former senator said, “the US could have achieved peace by simply pressing Ukraine to implement the 2014 Minsk Peace Agreements which it had signed, establishing a clear framework for settling outstanding issues peacefully. Ukraine promised to implement the Minsk agreements, but chose instead to make war on the Donbass for the next seven years.”
He said NATO could’ve sought peace but chose war instead.
NATO had ample opportunity for peace but deliberately chose war. The US realized that, with Russia’s back to the wall, it would have no choice to but to attack. In 2007, US Ambassador to Russia William Burns pointedly warned that movement toward absorbing Ukraine into NATO might well trigger war between Ukraine and Russia. Nonetheless, the Obama administration overthrew the Ukrainian president and flooded in weapons, knowing that doing so would trigger war.
Black said billionaire elites who have an interest in the region are making “war profits even if it means gambling the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe.”
“Should we annihilate the world’s population to intervene in a border war where the US has no vital national interest?” the former senator asked.
Black called for an immediate end to this war by making Ukraine a neutral, non-aligned state, “just as we did during the Cold War with Austria in 1955.”
But it appears the former senator’s plea to avoid further conflict went unheard after Zelensky’s declared intent to apply for expedited NATO membership as President Putin proclaimed the annexation of 15% of Ukraine.
Based on Article 5, any acceptance of Ukraine into NATO would automatically trigger a Russia-West world war (WWIII).
In a speech Friday, Putin said the US created a “precedent” by using nuclear weapons against Japan during WW2.
Last week, Navy Admiral Charles A. Richard – currently serving as the US Strategic Command chief — warned that “possible direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer” could be ahead.
Here’s the former senator’s open letter to lawmakers on Capitol Hill:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 20:50 - Canada Has A Food Affordability Problem
Canada Has A Food Affordability Problem
Authored by Sylvain Charlebois via The Epoch Times,
Did you know that there is a global food security index? The well-known magazine The Economist has just published its 11th edition.
The Global Food Security Index comprises a set of indices from more than 120 different countries. Since 2012, the index has been based on four main pillars: food access, safety, sustainable development, and affordability.
The approach is quite comprehensive and robust. Index indicators include nutritional standards, urban absorptive capacity, food consumption as a percentage of household expenditure, food loss and waste, protein quality, agricultural import tariffs, dietary diversification, agricultural infrastructure, volatility of agricultural production, public spending on agricultural resource and development, corruption, risks to political stability, and even the sufficiency of supply. In short, anything goes.
Finland ranks first this year, followed by Ireland and Norway. Canada is well-positioned compared to other countries around the world since we are ranked seventh globally, the same as last year. Not bad. The United States is 13th.
In terms of food access—which measures agricultural production, farm capacities, and the risk of supply disruption—Canada ranks sixth, which is not too surprising. Despite our recent episodes of empty shelves and stockouts, Canada can boast about its food abundance. We produce a lot and are part of a fluid North American economy focused on cross-border trade, which allows for better food access.
Another pillar focuses on sustainable development, the environment, and climate adaptability. This pillar assesses a country’s exposure to the impacts of climate change, its sensitivity to risks related to natural resources, food waste management, and how the country adapts to these risks. In this regard, Canada is ranked 29th, far behind Norway and Finland, who are first and second in this category. Food waste remains Canada’s Achilles’ heel, as we waste more than just about anyone else on the planet.
But with higher food prices, more than 40 percent of Canadians, according to a recent study, are wasting less than they were 12 months ago.
When it comes to food safety and quality, Canada ranks first in the world. Canada is ahead of everyone, even Denmark and the United States, both renowned for their proactive approaches to food safety. Food safety in Canada is perhaps the facet most underappreciated by consumers.
Despite a few momentary failures and periodic reminders, sanitation practices in the country are exemplary. Canada has consistently ranked well for years, except perhaps when traceability is measured. We have a long way to go, but the industry and public safety regulators are performing relatively well.
But the area where Canada’s performance is of some concern is food affordability. This measure is dedicated to consumers’ ability to purchase food, their vulnerability to price shocks, and the presence of programs and policies to support consumers when shocks occur.
Canada fell one spot again this year and sits at 25th in the world. Australia, Singapore, and Holland top the list for affordability. Given the resources and food access we have, Canada should do better. Since July 2021, food inflation has always exceeded general inflation in the country, and everything is already costing more these days. Higher food prices at the grocery store over the past year have been difficult for many of us to accept. Canada needs a food autonomy policy, a more robust food processing sector, and better logistics domestically.
And with winter coming and our dollar visibly weakening against the U.S. dollar, we could see significant price jumps again, especially in the produce and non-perishables sections. As wages stagnate and food prices rise, it’s hard to predict when Canada will do better in terms of affordability. Specific fiscal measures such as tax reductions to help consumers would be more than timely.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 20:25 - Progressive 'De-Prosecutors' Disrupt Criminal Justice System, Experts Say
Progressive ‘De-Prosecutors’ Disrupt Criminal Justice System, Experts Say
Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times,
A new breed of local prosecutors has taken District Attorney offices around the country by storm in a coordinated campaign that is tearing at the foundations of American justice system. The ideology that underpins their agenda is antagonistic to the traditional conception of criminal justice and, if taken to its logical conclusion, demands its destruction, several experts told The Epoch Times.
Such DAs have been variously called “rogue prosecutors,” “de-prosecutors,” or “Soros prosecutors,” based on the fact that progressive billionaire George Soros has prolifically funded their campaigns and support structures. They started to enter the scene around 2014 and have quickly become a major power block, controlling at least 75 DA offices with jurisdiction over one in every five Americans, including half of the country’s 50 most populous cities, according to research by Sean Kennedy, a criminal justice expert at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, a liberty-oriented think tank.
“They believe that the criminal justice system is excessively punitive and racially biased and that it is irredeemable,” he said.
“And so they’re trying to undermine it from the inside.”
The “rogue prosecutor movement” traces its roots back to the “prison abolition movement,” according to Zack Smith, former federal prosecutor who’s been writing extensively on the phenomenon as a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“There is actually a movement; it’s a Marxist movement that believes we should abolish prisons in the United States,” he said.
“Many members of this movement … bought into the idea that our criminal justice system is systemically racist, that we have a problem with mass incarceration, we arrest too many people, incarcerate too many people. And so because of that, they want to lower prison population and they want to basically make many, many things that have traditionally been crimes either not be crimes or make the punishment for them very minor, like a speeding ticket, civil infraction.”
Proponents of this idea, however, must have been aware that it would be very difficult to convince legislators to enshrine such a policy in law, Smith suspected.
“What is very clever about what George Soros and others figured out is, rather than doing the hard work of getting the legislature to actually change the laws, decriminalize certain things, … they figured out they can elect District Attorneys to office,” he said.
“And if the DA won’t prosecute crimes, they won’t seek sentencing enhancements. It doesn’t matter how many arrests the police make, the criminal won’t be held accountable.”
The most common tactics of the DAs include establishing policies to not prosecute entire segments of crimes, such as theft under a certain threshold and non-violent offenses more broadly, as well as undercharge crimes to avoid mandatory minimum sentences. They also tend to avoid charges that would lead to “immigration consequences,” meaning serious charges that could trigger deportation of a criminal alien, according to Kennedy.
“Victims are particularly ignored and disregarded by these offices,” he noted.
Efforts of the DAs are sometimes amplified by state or local legislations that make it more difficult to put a criminal behind bars, such as by preventing judges from setting a bail.
Fallout
Implementation of the policies tends to coincide with increases in crime, though not necessarily across the board or right away. It appears it sometimes takes some time for criminals to learn the ropes of the new regime. Sooner or later, however, they start to take advantage of it, several experts have pointed out.
“The message these individuals are receiving is that there’s not going to be any consequences for their actions. If they’re not going to be held on bail, if they’re not going to be prosecuted, then what’s the incentive for them not to keep repeating the same actions over and over and over again?” Smith said.
The policies also tend to demoralize police, who may see their work as pointless if, upon arrest, the suspect is quickly back on the street.
“Taking somebody to jail is a hassle because you have to get off your beat, get them in a car, take them down to booking, potentially spend hours filling out paperwork, all for what?” said Thomas Hogan, an adjunct fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and former federal prosecutor.
Some departments have simply ceased to arrest people for the crimes they know won’t be prosecuted anyway, he said.
There are exceptions, though.
In New York City, crime has increased but arrests have gone up too. That’s because the NYPD deals with five different DAs, one for each borough, according to Hogan. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg falls into the Soros-backed ranks, but the other ones are not necessarily onboard with the de-incarceration agenda—or at least not to the same extent. Moreover, the NYPD is large and powerful enough that they “do their own thing,” Hogan said.
“NYPD’s response was, ‘You make your decisions what you’re going to do after we arrest them, but we’re going to arrest them anyway,’” he said.
To some extent, the influx of Soros-backed DAs has “caught pro-public safety organizations, individuals, and the public off guard,” Kennedy said.
“These are very sleepy races. Prosecutor races are low-attention, low-spending, low-on-the-ballot affairs.”
Soros, however, went in with duffle bags of money.
“It’s just unprecedented the relative amount of money he gives,” Kennedy said.
“Giving a million dollars to a local DA candidate, what has occurred here in Northern Virginia, and millions of dollars to Philadelphia and Chicago and New York and Los Angeles … that is unprecedented and almost unfathomable.”
Over the past decade, Soros and groups he substantially funds dished out over $40 million in direct spending on DA campaigns, according to a June report by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), a Virginia-based nonprofit, which Kennedy co-authored (pdf).
Before any formidable opposition could mobilize, Soros-backed candidates were sweeping up elections left and right.
“He caught people off guard because nobody expected anyone to do that,” Kennedy said.
…
Countering the progressive DAs is no easy task, according to Kennedy, who’s personally helping with one recall effort in Northern Virginia.
“And a lot of the jurisdictions where these prosecutors won, they are very difficult to dislodge because they are liberals in big liberal cities where the Democratic primary is the only game in town and all you have to do is appeal to very liberal Democratic primary voters,” he said.
“If you have a lot of money and strong ideology, convincing that narrow subset of voters that your policies are just or working, or [that you] just need more time or whatever, is very easy to do.”
Indeed, a number of the Soros-backed DAs have easily sailed through reelections already, though they did so “before crime really got out of control,” Kennedy said.
“We will see what happens in the next few years if crime stays elevated, especially in these jurisdictions, if the public gets sick and tired of it.”
In recent years, though, there has been some successful resistance to the progressive DAs.
In Suffolk County, Massachusetts, a more law-and-order-minded DA won against the Soros-backed candidate in the Democratic primary, de-facto guaranteeing her election.
In Baltimore County, a “tough-on-crime” Democrat defeated a Soros-backed challenger, Kennedy said.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, a Republican defeated the Soros-backed Democrat for the Pulaski County DA office.
On the other hand, Soros-backed candidates won in Portland, Maine, and rebuffed a challenger in Burlington, Vermont, earlier this year.
Still, Soros’s success rate has dropped significantly, according to Kennedy.
“Finally, the tide is turning where these Soros prosecutors don’t just waltz into office every time they go on the ballot,” he said.
“When there’s organized opposition—and a good candidate to be honest—to oppose the Soros prosecutor, then we’re seeing success.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 19:40 - 'Just Kidding': Biden Yanks Student Loan Forgiveness From 770,000 Borrowers
‘Just Kidding’: Biden Yanks Student Loan Forgiveness From 770,000 Borrowers
In a jarring reversal, the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday quietly revised its online guidance on who qualifies for the $10,000 of student loan forgiveness that President Biden announced in August. In doing so, it pulled the rug out from under at least several hundred thousand people.
At issue: Borrowers who have Perkins loans and Federal Family Education Loans (FFEL). Those earlier-generation loans were guaranteed by the federal government but were issued and are managed by private lenders. The FFEL program ran from 1965 to 2010; Perkins loans ended in 2017.
People who have FFEL loans are older, have families, many obligations and are being crushed by this ongoing debt. Retirement? Gotta keep paying those student loans. New car? Appliances? Kids college? Nope. Nope.
— as the crow flies🐉🌻 (@anandasara) September 30, 2022
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Previously, the Department of Education’s online guidance said Perkins and FFEL loans could be consolidated into federal direct loans and then qualify for debt forgiveness.
On Thursday, however, the Department of Education — without fanfare or a press conference — changed the rules by adding this content to its website: “As of Sept. 29, 2022, borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED cannot obtain one-time debt relief by consolidating those loans into Direct Loans.”
This is no marginal change: An anonymous Biden administration official told Reuters it will affect 770,000 borrowers. That estimate relies on the fact that many of the 4 million total FFEL borrowers also have direct loans and can still qualify for consolidation.
“This is a gut punch, to say the least,” tweeted Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors. “This is one of the most harmful decisions I’ve seen come out of the Ed in a long time.”
The @FAFSA just updated their website to say that ffel borrowers who didn’t consolidate before 9/29 aren’t eligible for debt relief. As recently as yesterday the site said they were working on a solution for these borrowers. This is a gut punch to say the least…
— Betsy Mayotte (@betsy514) September 29, 2022
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The Education department says it’s “assessing whether there are alternative pathways to provide relief to borrowers with federal student loans not held by ED.”
The harsh withdrawal of the debt forgiveness from nearly a million or more Americans came on the same day that Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina asked a federal judge to impose an immediate temporary restraining order on entire the debt forgiveness scheme.
The suit specifically attacks the forgiveness of FFEL loans, arguing that doing so deprives private lenders of assets and “the ongoing payments that those loans generate.”
In their lawsuit, the states also more broadly allege that Biden is overstepping his authority by using the 2003 HEROES Act to wipe away the debt. That legislation focused on aiding active duty military service members serving in the war on terror.
“It is inconceivable, when it passed the HEROES Act, that Congress thought it was authorizing anything like the Administration’s across-the-board debt cancellation, which will result in around half a trillion dollars or more in losses to the federal treasury,” the six state attorneys general wrote in their filing.
The estimated cost of the debt forgiveness scheme has already soared in just the first month after it was announced. The Congressional Budget Office says it will cost at least $400 billion over three decades, far above earlier estimates of $300 billion.
Biden’s loan forgiveness proclamation was in keeping with a 2020 campaign pledge, and the announcement was clearly timed to maximize its impact on the midterm election. However, after Thursday’s jolting move by the Biden administration, some 770,000 to 4 million borrowers may be feeling a little less confident in Democratic governance.
Nigga said that student debt relief was a Labor Day Sale only https://t.co/8Zr7jQOMmq
— Roadkill Ricky (@tkm11218) September 29, 2022
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 19:30 - Libertarian Group Sues To Block Biden Student Loan Forgiveness
Libertarian Group Sues To Block Biden Student Loan Forgiveness
A California libertarian group has sued the Biden administration over its plan to cancel student debt, calling it an illegal overreach which will end up taxing some Americans whose debt is forgiven.
“Congress did not authorize the executive branch to unilaterally cancel student debt,” said attorney Caleb Kruckenberg of the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the lawsuit – believed to be the first targeting Biden’s plan, AP reports. The Sacramento-based legal advocacy group filed the suit in Indiana, which is one of several states that plans to tax those whose debt is canceled by Biden’s plan.
Kruckenberg says that it’s illegal for the executive branch to create such policy “by press release, and without statutory authority.”
(Meanwhile, Biden is yanking student loan forgiveness for more than 750,000 borrowers who took federal government loans that were issued and managed by private lenders)
The suit’s plaintiff is Frank Garrison, described as a public interest attorney who lives in Indiana and is employed by the libertarian group.
Garrison is on track to get his student debt erased through a separate federal program for public servants. Although most borrowers will need to apply for Biden’s plan, Garrison and many others in that program will automatically get the relief because the Education Department has their income information on file. -AP
Garrison, the plaintiff, says that Biden’s plan would automatically cancel up to $20,000 of his debt, which would trigger an “immediate tax liability” owed to the state of Indiana.
“Mr. Garrison and millions of others similarly situated in the six relevant states will receive no additional benefit from the cancellation — just a one-time additional penalty,” read the suit.
Other states which plan to debt forgiven debt under the Biden plan are; Arkansas, California, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina and Wisconsin, unless lawmakers act to change their current laws.
When asked how people could opt out of the debt forgiveness, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who said ‘anyone can opt-out’ had no answers, after previously saying that roughly 8 million Americans would automatically receive the debt relief.
“The bottom line is this — no one who does not want debt relief will have to get that debt relief,” she said.
The White House has called the lawsuit “baseless,” suggesting that it’s nothing more than political opponents who “are trying anything they can to stop this program that will provide needed relief to working families.”
Biden’s plan will cancel $10,000 in federal student debt for those making $125,000 per year or less, and $250,000 per household. Pell Grant recipients are set to receive an additional $10,000 benefit.
Conservative groups have called Biden’s plan legally questionable, and point out that the debt forgiveness unfairly cancels student debt at the expense of Americans who didn’t attend college – or paid off their loans.
The Biden administration has repeatedly argued that the plan is on solid legal ground.
In its legal justification for debt cancellation, the Biden administration invoked the HEROES Act of 2003, which aimed to provide help to members of the military. The law gives the administration “sweeping authority” to reduce or eliminate student debt during a national emergency, the Justice Department said in an August legal opinion.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has said he has the legal authority to cancel debt for people who faced hardship during the pandemic. Cardona says Biden’s plan will ensure borrowers aren’t worse off after the pandemic than they were before. -AP
“Nothing about loan cancellation is lawful or appropriate,” reads the lawsuit. “In an end-run around Congress, the administration threatens to enact a profound and transformational policy that will have untold economic impacts.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 19:20 - Opioids At Work: Hidden Scourge Sapping The Economy
Opioids At Work: Hidden Scourge Sapping The Economy
Authored by James Varney via RealClear Wire,
Strung out on drugs half her life, Brandi Edwards, 29, said the longest she held a job before getting sober four years ago was “about two and a half months.”
“I worked at an AT&T call center, a day-care center for a month, fast food places, but I had to take drugs to get out of bed in the morning and when I did show up, I wasn’t productive,” the West Virginia mother of three told RealClearInvestigations. “The first paycheck came along and I was out of there.”
Fentanyl. Image 4 of 17. United States Drug Enforcement Administration In jail for the ninth time on drug-related charges, and separated from her children, Edwards had an awakening in “looking hard at what I’d lost.” Now clean for four years after rehab, she is married and back in her children’s lives with a home in Princeton, W. Va., and a steady job.
But such success stories are too infrequent to offset the massive cost of the opioid epidemic to the American workforce. Only a couple of people in her former addict circle have returned to productive life, she says, while most are dead or incarcerated.
That toll on labor, haunting America’s working present and future probably for years — if not decades — to come, is largely invisible and underreported because it is difficult to measure, according to physicians, counselors, economists, workers and public officials. But its staying power is suggested by other lasting national challenges, including the porous southern border — a major conduit for smuggled, Chinese-made fentanyl — and economic and social traumas set in motion by the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to untold years of productivity lost from fatal overdoses, the nation’s labor participation rate has shrunk steadily since 2000. Precise correlation is elusive, but any graph of that decline would stand in sharp contrast to the rise of opioid addiction in the U.S. And while it is difficult to calculate just how much drug use has caused absenteeism, tardiness and stretches of disability, the connection is strong, as Brandi Edwards’ experience suggests.
“We’ve been writing about this for years but it doesn’t seem to get a lot of traction,” said Dr. Gary Franklin, a research professor at the University of Washington who served as the medical director of the state’s Department of Labor and Industries. “People have not realized how much opioids contribute to disability and lost productivity, and I don’t know if anyone has been able to put a number on that.”
Headline figures on lives lost in the opioid epidemic have been fairly clear for years. In 2021, more than 107,000 people died from drug overdoses, a nearly 15% increase from the year before and more than double the grim tally recorded in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control. All told, overdose deaths are seven times higher than they were in 1999.
Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which law enforcement has tracked from labs in China along trafficking routes through Mexico on the southern border, are now driving the overdose epidemic. The CDC attributed 69,000 overdose deaths to synthetic opioids in 2020, 82% of the nation’s total that year. Heroin overdoses, meanwhile, went up 7% in 2020 to 13,000, according to CDC figures.
That means synthetic opioids and heroin dwarf cocaine and methamphetamines, although totals for both of those have been rising for a decade and often cause overdose deaths in combination with opioids. The National Institutes of Health shows fewer than 5,000 people killed by cocaine alone and fewer than 10,000 by what it dubs “psychostimulants,” which includes methamphetamines, in 2020.
Less precisely, economists since at least 2017 have pegged at over $1 trillion the epidemic’s annual dollar cost in terms of deaths, law enforcement and “lost productivity.”
But the amount attributable to deaths – $550 billion of the $1 trillion – is largely conjecture because it is derived from actuarial estimates for lost years; for example, the decades cut from what would have been a normal working life for someone who fatally overdoses at age 45.
Then there is the less lethal side of the equation — one that workers and employers grapple with daily. Roughly 8% of workplace fatalities in 2020 – 388 of 4,786 – were attributed to “unintentional overdose from nonmedical use of drugs,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, the agency said it is unclear “how many of these deaths involved opioids specifically.”
A post on a neighborhood social media platform asking about opioids’ dire impact in the workforce unleashes a barrage of firsthand horror stories. Homeowners speak of an inability to hire handymen, painters, landscape workers and the like.
“If I’m lucky enough to have an employee that can pass a [urine analysis] the chances of them doing so after the first check is slim,” wrote a tree surgeon in suburban New Orleans. “Tree men get a terrible rap. People think we are all crazy, wild, no fear having, hard working dopeheads.”
But he acknowledged some truth to the stories of workplace abuse of prescription opioids, mentioning laborers’ common habit of relying on increasingly higher-milligram dosages of pain pills like Percocet.
Workers “didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Hmmm, great day to go down a road that will cost me it all,’ ” he wrote. “Then it’s inevitable. We get hurt. Usually pretty badly. So we start out getting a few .5 [mg] maybe 7.5. Later, as our careers go so does the pain, so do the amounts needed to consume to keep it at bay.”
A National Safety Council study reported that more than 75% of U.S. employers have been affected by employees’ prescription drug use, according to congressional testimony, and the National Institutes of Health estimates some 3 million Americans, including workers, are addicted to opioids.
Edwards managed to break her addiction and return to the workforce with the help of Jobs & Hope, a statewide West Virginia placement initiative launched in 2019 that claims more than 1,500 success stories. But with a budget of $3.1 million it cannot handle all of the 200-250 addicts referred to it each month, said Deb Harris, the group’s lead transition agent.
Businesses have been largely receptive to such programs, but the state is still trying to regain its footing from the “flood of pills” that hit it early in the 21st century, according to Dr. Matthew Christiansen, director of West Virginia’s Office of Drug Control in the Department of Health and Human Services.
“We don’t keep a running tally at the state level, but the numbers have probably stayed pretty consistent or maybe gotten a little bit worse because of an increase in overdose deaths due to fentanyl,” Christiansen said.
The Centers for Disease Control does keep a tally, although it hasn’t publicly updated the grim numbers on its “opioid dashboard” since 2017. The figures from that year show that the biggest economic hit has come in the Appalachian states around the Ohio Valley and in New England, two regions where opioids and synthetics have torn a hole through the workforce.
For example, West Virginia, long considered ground zero in the opioid epidemic, had the biggest annual per capita loss due to opioids at $7,247, according to the CDC figures that include overdose deaths. That tops Ohio, where the per capita cost in 2017 was $6,226, and New Hampshire at $5,953. Ohio saw the highest overall economic cost, at $72.58 billion, followed by Massachusetts at $36.91 billion, according to the CDC.
Fixing opioid disorder costs is complicated by the fact much of it is now driven by black-market synthetic drugs like fentanyl and thus can no longer be tracked through prescriptions. Nor is substance abuse a topic that workers – or many employers – are comfortable quantifying. All those involved in coping with the epidemic, however, peg the cost as staggering.
“It’s difficult to measure these things but it’s likely a substantial part of the labor decline,” said Michael Betz, an economist at The Ohio State University who researches opioid disorder issues. “You’re piecing together different pieces of evidence, but when you look at the decline in labor participation rates and opioid disorder figures, they match up pretty similarly.”
Franklin’s team did calculate the odds opioids influenced the disability bills Washington state taxpayers foot each year for roughly 100,000 workers, a relatively uncomplicated tally since Washington is one of four states with a centralized government system and not a private workers’ compensation insurance market.
“We found that two prescriptions of opioids for more than 7 days in the first six weeks after an injury doubled the risk of a worker being on disability one year later,” he said.
Answers to broader questions on opioids’ baleful economic impact, however, are scarce.
“Productivity losses due to anything is an extremely complex analysis and is not routinely tracked,” Franklin said.
To date, the nation’s prime age labor workforce has not recovered to where it was at the beginning of 2020 and is now the lowest it has been in 45 years. The hit has been especially pronounced among older adults, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Between 2015 and 2019, adults 50 years old or older “were an estimated 22 percent less likely to be in the labor force (either employed or actively seeking work),” a GAO report found. In addition, people in that age group “were an estimated 40 percent less likely to be employed; and employed older workers who misused opioids were twice as likely to have experienced periods of unemployment.”
Once again, however, pinpointing the precise connection between opioids and lost productivity remained elusive, as “the data did not allow GAO to determine causality.”
Middle-aged white men have long comprised the single biggest group of annual overdose deaths, but between 2015 and 2020 the rate among black men skyrocketed to 54.1 per 100,000, topping white men’s 44.2 per 100,000, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Local economic conditions play some part in all this but they aren’t the key role; the main driver is the increase in supply,” Betz said.
That leads some experts on the topic to conclude that opioids’ catastrophic hit to the United States’ workforce has been misconstrued. For a time, as deaths rose early on, particularly among middle-aged white men, and labor participation rates began their decline, the phrase “deaths of despair” took hold among some researchers.
Under this theory, the opioid epidemic fed on declining economic prospects, particularly for middle-aged white men facing unemployment or shrinking incomes.
But the “deaths of despair” theory reverses cause and effect, according to some physicians and people dealing with the fallout from opioids, including their more deadly synthetic cousin fentanyl.
“We’ve debunked that,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a faculty member at Brandeis University whose practice has specialized in opioid addiction. “Rather than economic conditions leading to overdose deaths it’s really the other way around – it’s not the economy driving them to death, it’s the opioid crisis affecting the economy.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 19:00 - "Full-Fledged Ice Age": Semiconductor Companies Slash Output On Supply Glut
“Full-Fledged Ice Age”: Semiconductor Companies Slash Output On Supply Glut
Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest memory chipmaker, provided more insight into the worsening slowdown for semiconductors and the bust in global PC markets.
Korea Economic Daily reported Samsung “lowered its semiconductor sales forecast for the second half of the year by more than 30%.” The newspaper attributed slumping semiconductors demand “as the economy froze due to central bank rate hikes caused by global inflation.”
The paper warned: “As the semiconductor industry has entered a full-fledged ice age, there are many forecasts in the industry that the recession will continue until the first half of next year when semiconductor inventories are eliminated.”
Earlier this week, Samsung’s Device Solutions division said they “lowered our sales guidance for the second half of this year (the company’s internal forecast) by 32% from our April forecast.”
None of this should be a surprise as we recently outlined PC Demand Suffers’ Steepest Decline In Years’ As Chip Shortage Turns To Glut.
“Both DRAM and NAND flash suppliers and customers are holding too many semiconductor inventories,” an official told Korea Economic Daily.
Another top semiconductor company, Japan’s Kioxia Holdings Corp, announced it would slash wafer production starts by 30% next month, according to Bloomberg.
“The deep cuts stem from weakening demand for computers and smartphones, and the wider semiconductor industry is likely to follow the trend.
“Hard times are ahead for the industry, except for a few,” said Kazunori Ito, an analyst with Morningstar.
These souring developments in the global semiconductor market come as the largest US manufacturer of memory chips, Micron, reported revenue that missed (despite a slight beat on EPS and margins), but it was the forecast that again was a total disaster.
Micron offered one of the most significant recession warnings so far from a large corporation: “results were impacted by rapidly weakening consumer demand and significant customer inventory adjustments across all end markets.” It added that due to the sharp decline in near-term demand, it expects “supply growth to be above demand growth in calendar 2022.”
“Yes, we have a challenging market environment, but we’re responding rapidly with actions … fiscal 2023 is, of course, an unprecedented environment, but the long-term drivers are intact,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in an interview.
But it’s just not memory chips. We pointed prices of graphics processing units (GPUs) have plunged to their lowest levels ever in China, and chip deflation was already washing ashore in the US.
The iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) has fallen 40% since peaking in late 2021, and the weekly 200-day moving average is being tested.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported Apple ditched plans to increase iPhone production due to a lack of demand. Weeks ago, FedEx warned that the global economy is “going into a worldwide recession.”
If both the semi-industry and top shippers are warning about economic turmoil ahead, then it’s probably time to start preparing for a possible recession in 2023. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve continues to hike into a slowdown aggressively — this is a recipe for an epic policy error.
On the bright side, now, or at least in the months ahead, it might make sense to build a computer as it seems components, such as memory chips, GPUs, and CPUs, could be heavily discounted.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 18:40 - Stagflation Is "Just The Beginning" For America's Economic Crisis: Peter Navarro
Stagflation Is “Just The Beginning” For America’s Economic Crisis: Peter Navarro
Authored by Tom Ozimek and Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times,
Economist Peter Navarro, erstwhile adviser to former President Donald Trump, told Epoch TV’s “Crossroads” program in a recent interview that the current stagflationary downturn stalking the U.S. economy is “just the beginning” of America’s economic woes, and that Trump is the one who’s best poised to pull the country out of a dire slump.
Navarro said in the interview that he believes the United States has fallen prey to the destructive force of stagflation—a toxic combination of high inflation and sluggish growth.
“That’s what we’ve got now because of the fecklessness of Joe Biden, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, and this administration,” he said.
There’s been fierce debate about what led to prices accelerating at their fastest pace in decades, eroding purchasing power, and squeezing American households.
Some, including many members of the Biden administration, have mostly blamed supply-side constraints and external shocks like the war in Ukraine. Others, including many Republicans, have pointed the finger at unprecedented levels of fiscal and monetary spending.
The inflationary wave that has swelled into a persistent cost-of-living crisis for many Americans was driven mostly by a stimulus-fueled demand surge, although supply-side bottlenecks made the problem worse, a team of economists concluded in a recent study.
Soaring inflation, which Fed officials have admitted is far more persistent than they initially believed, has come alongside deteriorating economic conditions. The U.S. economy contracted for two consecutive quarters this year, according to updated figures released by the government on Sept. 29, which meets the rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.
‘This Is Just the Beginning’
Navarro argued in the interview that the United States is already experiencing stagflation—and that it’s going to get worse.
“This is just beginning. This economic crisis is just beginning, and it’s going to be as bad or worse and as long as it was during the 1970s,” Navarro said.
The dreaded toxic brew of high unemployment and high inflation plagued the U.S. economy for over a decade in the 1970s. America’s unemployment rate doubled to 9 percent between 1973 and 1975, while inflation peaked at around 14 percent in annual terms.
Inflation didn’t fall substantially until the early 1980s, and only after the Federal Reserve jacked up interest rates to around 19 percent, leading to two back-to-back recessions in 1980 and 1981–82.
In the interview, Navarro offered a lookback on the Trump administration’s economic policies and credited them with low unemployment and low inflation.
“What we did was structural in nature, designed to increase the real wages of American workers, the productivity of American workers, the prosperity of the middle class,” Navarro said.
“And we did that beautifully through structural elements, not just the traditional Republican tax cuts and lower regulatory burdens, but by securing the southern border, which prevents a flood of uneducated, low-income workers coming in,” he said.
Navarro added that Trump’s policies on re-shoring manufacturing and bringing supply chains back to the United States helped boost wages for blue-collar Americans.
The economist further argued that bringing back Trump-era policies is key to pulling the country out of stagflation.
“I think the only one who fully understands how to get out of that is Donald Trump,” Navarro said. “I don’t see anybody else in the Republican Party who has that kind of sophistication.”
His take on the trajectory of the U.S. economy dovetails with remarks made by other economists, who see darkening clouds on the horizon.
‘Stagflationary Debt Crisis’
Economist Nouriel Roubini, for example, who’s been dubbed “Dr. Doom” for his pessimistic, yet accurate, prediction of a financial market meltdown in 2007–08, told Bloomberg in a recent interview that he expects “a real hard landing” for the U.S. economy.
Roubini also said he continues to believe that it’s “delusional” for analysts to expect a short and shallow recession, arguing instead that it will be long and severe.
In an op-ed for Project Syndicate, he also warned of a looming “stagflationary debt crisis” with “some of the worst elements of both the 1970s and the 2008 crash” as public debt levels have become unsustainable and most of the fiscal ammunition already used.
“Things will get much worse before they get better,” he predicted in the op-ed, adding that he believes the economic downturn will come alongside financial market turmoil.
Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller said at a recent investor summit in New York City that he’s worried that the economic downturn affecting United States could be worse than an “average garden variety” recession.
At the same time, investor pessimism has hit levels not seen since the financial crisis of 2008–09.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 18:20 - Apple VP Of Procurement Fired After Joke About Fondling Breasts Goes Viral On TikTok
Apple VP Of Procurement Fired After Joke About Fondling Breasts Goes Viral On TikTok
Apple’s Vice President of Procurement, Tony Blevins, is out at the company after making a “crude comment about his profession” in a TikTok video that was published on September 5.
Blevins joked that he fondles “big-breasted women” for a living in the video, Bloomberg reported this week. He had been approached by TikTok and Instagram creator Daniel Mac to participate in a series where owners of expensive cars are asked about what they do for a living.
He was stopped when parking his Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a car worth “hundreds of thousands of dollars”, the report says.
When asked about what he does for a living, he responded: “I have rich cars, play golf and fondle big-breasted women, but I take weekends and major holidays off.” He also joked that he had a “hell of a dental plan”.
As Bloomberg noted, the line is an homage to the 1981 movie Arthur, where the main character describes his career by saying: “I race cars, play tennis and fondle women, but I have weekends off and I am my own boss.”
The video was taken at a car show in Pebble Beach and it garnered more than 40,000 likes on Instagram and 1.3 million views on TikTok.
Blevins’ actual job is striking deals between suppliers and partners for Apple. Recently, he helped navigate deals for the company with Globalstar, Qualcomm and Intel, the report notes. He is in charge of “driving down the costs” of the critical supplies Apple uses for its products.
The company conducted an internal investigation into his remarks and removed his team – including about 6 people who reported directly to him and several hundred others under them – from his command.
He had been at Apple for 22 years prior to being let go. He was part of a group of about 100 VPs at the company, and just one of about 30 executives, that report directly to either CEO Tim Cook or COO Jeff Williams. Williams ultimately made the call to let Blevins go, the report says, and he will oversee Blevins’ team for the time being.
In a statement, Blevins said: “I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize to anyone who was offended by my mistaken attempt at humor.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 18:02 - Memory Holed, Part II: The "Rigged" Election
Memory Holed, Part II: The “Rigged” Election
Authored by Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea via TK News,
Matt Orfalea’s follow-up video his “The Russians Hacked the Election” piece rescues for posterity another key piece of history likely to be suppressed: the fact that both Democrats and Republicans raised doubts about the legitimacy of the election process. This took place not only after 2016, but both before and after the 2020 vote.
These campaigns were two sides of the same coin. Trump raised doubts about the reliability of mail-in votes, and admonished supporters ahead of time that a Trump loss should be understood as a fix. Meanwhile, Democrats and media figures — as well as a seemingly endless succession of named and unnamed intelligence sources — argued Russians were bent on corrupting the vote. Hillary Clinton went so far as to say Joe Biden shouldn’t concede “under any circumstances.”
It was not just a Republican-versus-Democrat issue. Both before and during the 2020 Democratic primaries, voters were also told repeatedly that Vladimir Putin preferred Bernie Sanders and was planning to interfere on his behalf. Even GQ did a story: “Why Does Putin Love Bernie?”
Sanders undermined his own campaign by giving these accusations weight, while Trump was criticized for pushing back against them. This video offers a crucial takeaway for anyone looking back to decipher what happened in 2020: both parties, and crucially our own intelligence authorities, worked hard to undermine election results in advance. And, they’re still doing it.
Subscribe to TK News
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 17:40 - US Hits Chinese Firms With New Sanctions Over Iranian Oil
US Hits Chinese Firms With New Sanctions Over Iranian Oil
The US has slapped new sanctions on Chinese firms related to Iran’s petrochemical and petroleum trade, after years of reports of Chinese tankers engaged in sanctions-busting activity, and at a moment that a finalized restored JCPOA nuclear deal has all but collapsed.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced punitive measures Thursday against two China-based companies, Zhonggu Storage and Transportation Co Ltd and WS Shipping Co Ltd, which stand accused of sanctions evasion.
Via Tasnim The former has been identified as overseeing a commercial crude oil storage facility for Iranian products, and the latter operated a vessel which was caught ‘illegally’ transporting Iranian oil and fuel products.
These companies were said to be involved in the “sale of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Iranian petrochemicals and petroleum products to end users in South and East Asia.”
And further according to the US Treasury readout, the actions target “Iranian brokers and several front companies in the UAE, Hong Kong, and India that have facilitated financial transfers and shipping of Iranian petroleum and petrochemical products.”
“These entities have played a critical role in concealing the origin of the Iranian shipments and enabling two sanctioned Iranian brokers, Triliance Petrochemical Co. Ltd. (Triliance) and Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industry Commercial Co. (PGPICC), to transfer funds and ship Iranian petroleum and petrochemicals to buyers in Asia.”
While Iran has been subjected to crippling oil-export sanctions for the last several years, it hasn’t stopped China, whose imports of Iranian oil have only increased by the month.
Much of the buying comes from independent Chinese refiners (otherwise known as “teapots”), who, traders said have embraced Iran’s cheaper crude as Brent prices soared globally amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and energy sanctions against Russia.
The official position of China’s foreign ministry has long been that normal business dealings between China and Iran should be respected. “China urges the US to lift the illegitimate unilateral sanctions as soon as possible,” the ministry has long repeated in various statements.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 17:20 - Watch: Yet Another Democrat Witness Claims Biological Men Can Have Pregnancies
Watch: Yet Another Democrat Witness Claims Biological Men Can Have Pregnancies
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,
For the umpteenth time, a witness called to testify by Democrats during hearings on abortion laws claimed that biological men are capable of getting pregnant and giving birth.
They’re the party of science!
During a House Oversight Committee hearing Thursday, Planned Parenthood’s Medical Director for Primary and Trans Care (yep that’s a thing) made the claim.
GOP rep Andrew Clyde asked Dr. Bhavik Kumar “So can biological men become pregnant and give birth?” to which Kumar replied “Men can have pregnancies, especially trans men.”
Clyde followed up, “So, are you saying that a biological female who identifies as a man and therefore becomes pregnant is, quote, a man? Is that what you’re saying?”
Kumar responded, “These questions about who can become pregnant are really missing the point, and I’m here to talk about what’s happening in Texas.”
“This is me asking a question and you answering,” Clyde interjected, adding “I’m asking the question, sir, not you.”
“Right, and I’m answering the question,” Kumar replied, further stating “Somebody with a uterus may have the capability of becoming pregnant whether they’re a woman or a man, that doesn’t make a difference.”
“Ok, we’re done,” an exasperated Clyde responded adding “This isn’t complicated. Let me tell you: if a person has a uterus and is born female, they are a woman. That is not a man, and the vast majority of the world considers that to be a woman, because there are biological differences between men and women.”
“I Can’t believe it’s necessary to say this, but men cannot get pregnant and cannot give birth regardless of how they identify themselves,” Clyde asserted, adding “Why in the world would Democrats bring in a person whose title is director of trans care for an abortion hearing when only biological women can become pregnant?”
Clyde then re-read Kumar’s opening statement, in which the Planned Parenthood Director described abortion restrictions as “inherently racist, inherently classist and fundamentally part of the white supremacy agenda.”
Clyde then noted that the organization Kumar works for was founded by Margaret Sanger.
“Margaret Sanger’s entire focus was to decimate communities of color through abortion to eliminate their future generations,” Clyde urged.
“How many abortions have you performed in your lifetime?” the rep then asked Kumar, to which the doctor replied “Likely thousands.”
Clyde shot back, “So as doctor yourself, do you believe you have terminated enough babies to justify Margaret Sanger’s beliefs and your continuance of her legacy? This is unconscionable, this is inexcusable, I’m thankful this is now criminal and I look forward to the day when life is again respected across our entire nation.”
Watch:
Elsewhere during the hearing, Kumar suggested that natural disasters warrant unimpeded abortions:
Kumar did admit, however, that Abortion bans “do not outlaw care for ectopic pregnancies”.
Kumar made the comments while being questioned by Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who scoffed at Republicans who don’t believe men can get pregnant.
“The same folks who … told us that COVID’s just a flu, that climate change isn’t real, that January 6 was nothing but a tourist visit … are now trying to tell us that transgender people are not real,” AOC proclaimed.
“And I would say that their claim is probably just as legitimate as all their others, which is to say not very much at all,” she further stated.
Rep. @AOC (D-NY): “The same folks who tell us … that COVID’s just a flu, that climate change isn’t real, that January 6th was just nothing but a tourist visit, are now trying to tell us that transgender people aren’t real.” pic.twitter.com/NQbdK5ltGT
— The Recount (@therecount) September 29, 2022
Democrats keep presenting a rogues gallery of agitated and clearly mentally unstable people as ‘witnesses’ during these hearings, all of whom have claimed that men can give birth, a notion that almost one quarter of Democratic voters believe to be true, according to recent research.
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/30/2022 – 17:00
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