- Paul Craig Roberts: The United States Has Been Destroyed By Its Ruling Elites
Paul Craig Roberts: The United States Has Been Destroyed By Its Ruling Elites
Via PaulCraigRoberts.org, (emphasis ours)
Against the backdrop of the United States’ recognition of the investigation against Donald Trump as politically motivated, structural and ideological controversies, and concerns that the American economy will enter a recession, the GEOFOR editorial board asked Paul Craig Roberts, Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy (USA), a PhD in Economics and US Undersecretary of Treasury in the Reagan administration, to share his views on America’s future.
GEOFOR: Special Counsel John Durham “acquitted” Donald Trump on the so-called “Russiagate”, writing in his report that the FBI investigation was politically motivated. How will this news affect the Democrats’ fight against Trump?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Special Counsel’s vindication of Donald Trump and denunciation of the FBI for conducting a politically motivated investigation devoid of any evidence should collapse the equally fraudulent Biden regime investigation of Trump on fake documents charges and the New York state prosecution of Trump on alleged expense misreporting charges. It has been clear for a long time that the list of fake charges against Trump, supported by the media, are propaganda to prevent Trump again running for President and to teach all future potential presidential candidates that they will be destroyed if they attempt to represent the people instead of the unelected ruling oligarchy.
However, the Democrat Party and the presstitutes that service them have no respect whatsoever for truth. Facts simply do not matter to them. This is true also of American Universities, law associations, medical associations, the CIA, FBI, NSA, the State Department, the regulatory agencies such as NIH, CDC, FDA, the large corporations, and many establishment Republican members of the House and Senate who serve the economic interests that pay them, not truth. It is also the case with a high percentage of Democrat voters who have been conditioned by propaganda to hate Trump. To Democrats what matters is not facts, but getting Trump. Truth is not permitted to prevent the destruction of Trump.
Consequently, the US is moving toward a fatal split in the society from which recovery is impossible. Trump represents ordinary Americans who prefer peace to the neoconservatives’ wars, who want their jobs back that the greed-driven capitalist global corporations sent to China and Asia, who want their children properly educated instead of indoctrinated with sexual perversion, Satanism, and told that they are racists. In contrast, the Democrats are increasingly Woke–people who believe that truth is an oppressive tool of white supremacy, that Christian morality is tyrannical and discriminatory against pedophiles and other sexual perverts, and that, as “President” Biden himself has said, white people are the greatest threat to America. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/15/us-navy-enlists-drag-queen-for-digital-ambassador-role-to-attract-more-recruits-2/
Now that official investigations by the House Republicans have brought the utter corruption of Biden and his son to light (see: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2023/05/16/bank-records-show-biden-family-received-10-million-in-payments-from-china-foreign-interests-house-oversight/ ), the Democrats, the dangerous and corrupt military/security complex, and the complicit whore American media, are desperate. They all stand as being exposed. So, rather than apologize for their mistreatment of Trump and his supporters–1,000 of whom the Democrats have illegally imprisoned–they will likely strike out while they still control the Executive Branch, the US Senate, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and federal agencies such as the IRS that have been armed and militarized.
Alternatively, the corrupt and threatened Democrats might cause war between the US and Russia, or Iran, or China in the hopes that a war will unify even Trump supporters, especially the super-patriots among them, around the “President” against “foreign enemies.”
GEOFOR: Recently there were reports that former Vice President Mike Pence seriously intends to compete with Donald Trump in the presidential race of 2024. How do you assess his chances and why did he decide to take such a step?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Mike Pence has no chance whatsoever of prevailing over Donald Trump. Pence is running as a service to the ruling establishment. Spence is a pretend Christian Evangelical. Evangelicals don’t oppose Armageddon, because they believe they will be wafted up to Heaven, while those still on earth get consumed in fire. The Ruling American Oligarchy hopes that Spence will draw off the Christian Evangelicals from the Trump vote, thus reducing Trump’s margin of victory so that the Democrats can again steal the presidential election. As evangelicals are not very astute, the Democrats might succeed in derailing Trump and the American people. Pence, of course, would not become president.
GEOFOR: We can’t help but ask about the migration problem. After the abolition of Section 42, analysts predict a new influx of refugees from Mexico and Latin America. What will such problems lead to and will they affect the election of the head of the White House next year?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The Biden regime is spending billions of dollars “to defend Ukraine’s borders,” but won’t spend one penny to defend America’s borders. The Democrats want the Hispanic and Black immigrants, who they will give the vote, because the immigrant-invaders water down the white majority population and destroy the ethnic basis of the US. Instead of a unified nation, there is a Tower of Babel.
As the Democrats control the major cities in most states and thereby the election rules and vote counting, It doesn’t matter how people vote. As Stalin said, the only thing that matters is who counts the vote. Only a total fool would expect Democrats to count votes that gave victory to Republicans.
GEOFOR: Passions around the American public debt, inflation, jobs and the possible new collapses of American banks are only growing. Tell us, please, what awaits the American economy in the foreseeable future? After all, the recession in the United States will have an impact on the whole world one way or another…
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: The United States, despite my best efforts and the efforts of others for decades, has been destroyed by its ruling elites for the sake of short-term profits and short-term growth in power over the people. By offshoring its manufacturing jobs, the global corporations destroyed the American middle class and the ladders to upward mobility that had made America the “opportunity society.” Today many former American manufacturing and industrial cities look like the remains of bombed cities.
As US corporations produce the goods abroad that they market to Americans, the goods enter the US as imports. Thus, offshoring production for the home market worsens the trade deficit.
The trade deficit has to be financed. This is no problem for the US as long as the dollar is in demand as the reserve currency by all countries in order to pay for their international transactions, and countries with trade surpluses keep their monetary surpluses in US Treasury bonds, thus financing both the US trade and budget deficits. Washington in an act of incredible stupidity has driven a dagger through the heart of the US dollar as world reserve currency, thus ending Washington’s ability to pay its bills by printing money. The dagger was the Biden regime’s Russian and other sanctions and the seizure of Russia’s central bank deposits. This finally convinced the rest of the world that holding dollar balances exposed a country to the risk of expropriation or control by Washington.
The consequence is that the world is moving away from the use of the dollar, instead settling their trade balances in their own or other currencies. Therefore, the demand for dollars is declining, but the supply is rising because of the US trade and budget deficits.
Sooner or later the US dollar’s exchange value will fall, setting off high inflation in the US that is outside the control of the central bank. American living standards will fall, and the US will begin to look like India in 1900.The hatred of white people that Democrats have taught to blacks and immigrant-invaders will result in internal war. The only question is whether white Americans will have been so indoctrinated with their guilt that they are unable to defend themselves.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 23:30 - Where The Most Death Penalties Are Carried Out
Where The Most Death Penalties Are Carried Out
At least 883 people are known to have been put to death last year, according to Amnesty International’s annual review of the death penalty. However, as Statista’s Anna Fleck reports, the true number is likely far higher, as several countries do not publish accurate figures – including North Korea, Vietnam and Belarus.
In China, where numbers remain a state secret, thousands of people are believed to be executed and sentenced to death each year.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As Statista’s chart shows, Iran comes second only after China with at least 576 people known to have been executed in 2022, up 55 percent from the year.
The crimes behind these executions are mostly related to drugs and murder, while 18 were for moharebeh (enmity against God), which can be connected to the protests surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini.
Amnesty International notes that Saudi Arabia also saw a significant increase in death sentences since 2020, rising from 27 to a record high of 196 deaths, 83 of whom were executed for terrorism-related crimes. In total, 55 countries still have the death penalty, 20 of which recorded executions in 2022.
In the U.S., 18 executions were recorded in 2022 across six jurisdictions. These were Alabama (2), Arizona (3), Mississippi (1), Missouri (2), Oklahoma (5), and Texas (5). Meanwhile, there were 21 new death sentences recorded across 12 states. These included: Alabama (3), Arizona (1), California (2), Florida (5), Georgia (1), Louisiana (1), Mississippi (1), Missouri (1), North Carolina (2), Oklahoma (1), Pennsylvania (1) and Texas (2).
It is worth noting that while 2021 saw a 20 percent increase from the year before, both years represented the lowest number of executions since Amnesty International’s records began back in 2010. This lull, likely due to executions being put on hold because of the pandemic, seems to over, with the figures reaching their highest point since 2017.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 23:00 - Gun Industry Writes To Congress As Imminent Ban Threatens 40 Million Firearms
Gun Industry Writes To Congress As Imminent Ban Threatens 40 Million Firearms
Submitted by Gun Owners of America,
On June 1st, the Biden Pistol Ban is set to go into effect. This rule, concocted by the bureaucrats at ATF, criminalizes ownership of an estimated 40 million firearms currently in possession by law-abiding citizens.
According to the final rule, gun owners who possess braced firearms will have to destroy, reconfigure, register, and turn in their firearms to ATF, or face NFA violations which include $250,000 in fines and a hefty prison sentence.
This rule will have some of the most wide-reaching impacts nationwide compared to other ATF administrative rulemaking actions. In comparison, ATF’s bump stock rule was estimated to have affected 520,000 Americans, whereas this pistol brace ruling affects 80 times more law-abiding citizens.
In response, the No Compromise Alliance sent a letter signed by notable firearms industry companies to Congress.
Among the undersigned are notable firearms industry companies such as Rifle Dynamics, Kahr Arms Group, KCI USA, Tippmann Arms, and more.
Additionally, two other letters were sent to Congress, with notable people of influence throughout the firearms community – representing more than 30 million viewers – and local ranges & shops that are bound to be affected by ATF’s overreach.
While these letters certainly make a statement, Gun Owners of America is working on all fronts to defeat the ATF’s pistol brace rule before it goes into effect.
GOA has a lawsuit in the 5th Circuit with Texas AG Ken Paxton. This circuit is the same that recently overturned the ATF’s bump stock rule in January of 2023.
In addition, GOA has backed legislation targeting the root of the issue with the SHORT Act. The act itself would remove Short Barreled Rifles (SBR), Short Barreled Shotguns (SBS), and ATF’s favorite, “Any Other Weapons” (AOWs) from the unconstitutional regulation of the National Firearms Act.
The NFA is the law that ATF derives its regulatory authority from on the brace issue, so the SHORT Act aims to stop the ATF by removing its power over such items in the first place.
Lastly, GOA has fought hard with our allies in Congress to bring the ATF’s pistol brace rule under scrutiny via the Congressional Review Act.
For those unfamiliar, the Congressional Review Act allows Congress to file a joint resolution of disapproval, which would overturn agency rulemaking.
This is where we need your help.
With our legal fight against Biden and his ATF coming down to the wire, please call your Senators and Representatives and let them know to support the Joint Resolution for Congressional disapproval of the ATF’s rulemaking.
🚨ALERT🚨
The below GOP representatives have STILL NOT cosponsored H.J. Res. 44 to stop Biden from banning 40,000,000 pistols on June 1st, 2023.
We have 13 days. Call them NOW and ask them to support H.J. Res. 44. ☎️ 202-224-3121@SpeakerMcCarthy@SteveScalise@GOPMajorityWhip…
— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) May 18, 2023
You can call your elected officials at (202) 224-3121
Let them know to support S.J. RES. 20 if they’re in the Senate & H.J. RES. 20 if they’re in the House of Representatives.
* * *
We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 22:30 - Where 'Conversion Therapy' Is Still Legal
Where ‘Conversion Therapy’ Is Still Legal
Conversion therapy has been banned in several countries around the world, including Canada, Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, Germany, France, Malta and New Zealand, according to data aggregated by the Global Equality Caucus and The International Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA).
Conversion therapy is the process of trying to stop someone from being gay or trying to stop someone who wants to change their gender identity.
Methods include spoken therapy and prayer, or even more extreme tactics such as exorcism, physical violence, or food deprivation, as reported by the BBC. The British Psychological Society and Royal College of Psychiatrists in the UK declared that all kinds of conversion therapy are “unethical and potentially harmful”.
As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, in much of the world the practice of conversion therapy is still legal.
You will find more infographics at Statista
In multiple other countries though, although no explicit legislative ban exists, limited bans or bans through indirect prohibition have been introduced.
For example, several countries have introduced a ban on health practitioners to carry out conversion therapy. These include Albania, Switzerland and Taiwan (the latter banning health care professionals from carrying out conversion therapies on minors). In India, Tamil Nadu became the first Indian state to ban conversion therapy after a court order issued by a justice of the Madras High Court in 2021.
Meanwhile, several countries, such as Australia, Mexico and the United States, have seen gains with implementing bans on a regional or more basis.
The trend to enforce legislation banning conversion is slowly picking up pace, with national governments and parliaments in Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Portugal all in various states of pending legislation. At the same time, according to the Global Equality Caucus, Austria, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom have all expressed an intention to legislate bans.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 22:00 - FBI Improperly Used Surveillance Program To Spy On Jan. 6 Suspects
FBI Improperly Used Surveillance Program To Spy On Jan. 6 Suspects
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The FBI abused its surveillance powers while spying on suspects in the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol and Black Lives Matter protesters, a federal court said in a newly unsealed ruling.
FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks during a press conference at the Justice Department in Washington, on Jan. 26, 2023. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images) FBI agents flaunted standards the agency developed for the Section 702 program, which enables spying on Americans and others, more than 278,000 times, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said in the 2022 ruling, which was made public for the first time on May 19.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act enables agencies like the FBI to collect information like emails without warrants from foreigners, even if they’re in the United States, and bars intentionally targeting Americans.
The FBI developed its own standard for Section 702 searches, stating that queries “must be reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information, as defined by FISA, or evidence of a crime, unless otherwise specifically excepted.”
But FBI agents have been violating the standard, the court has found, with the newest ruling disclosing hundreds of thousands of abusive searches in addition to those already known.
The abusive searches include multiple improper queries targeting suspected or confirmed Jan. 6 suspects.
In one instance, an analyst searched for information on 13 people suspected of being involved in the Capitol breach. The analyst “said she ran the queries to determine whether these individuals had foreign ties,” but the Department of Justice’s National Security Division (NSD) “concluded the queries were not reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime,” the newly unsealed ruling states.
In another case, widespread searches that in total consisted of more than 23,000 separate queries looked for information on presumed Americans to see whether the people were “being used by a group” involved in the breach.
“The queries were run against unminimized Section 702 information to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence related to the query terms used,” the court said. “NSD assessed there was no specific factual basis to believe the queries were reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime from Section 702 information.”
Other Improper Searches
The new ruling, released by the Office of Director of National Intelligence, also revealed that FBI personnel improperly surveilled a congressional campaign.
An analyst conducted a so-called batch query, or a widespread query, for over 19,000 donors to the campaign. The analyst claimed the campaign was “a target of foreign influence,” but NSD officials found sufficient evidence for queries for just eight of the people who were queried.
In another instance, a batch query was conducted on 133 people who were arrested “in connection with civil unrest and protests between approximately May 30, and June 18, 2020,” the time period during which people, primarily Black Lives Matter members and supporters, were protesting and rioting over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“The query was run to determine whether the FBI had ‘any counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees,’ but without ‘any specific potential connections to terrorist related activity’ known to those who conducted the queries,’” the court found. NSD said the queries violated the FBI standards, but the FBI disagreed, claiming there was a “reasonable basis to believe these queries ‘would return foreign intelligence” due to citations that were redacted.
Additional 2020 violations included queries using variations of “political activist groups involved in organized protests;” 697 queries using identifiers on scheduled visits to a place or person that were redacted in the ruling; searches for at least 790 defense contractors that the FBI was considering requesting cooperation from; and at least 330 queries conducted using identifiers of employees of a company whose name was redacted, with the FBI claiming it might recruit the employees as sources.
Multiple queries were run without obtaining an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, another violation of the law.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 21:30 - Visualizing The American Workforce As 100 People
Visualizing The American Workforce As 100 People
n 2022, the U.S. population stood at 333 million. Of that, roughly 60% were employed in various jobs, positions, and sectors in the U.S. economy.
But where did all these people work? What jobs did they do and what positions did they hold? Where do most Americans do their nine-to-five?
Using data from the National Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates (2022) put out by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao reimagines the employed American workforce as only 100 people, to find out answers.
Interestingly, the data contains a mix of information demarcations. Some are job-specific (type of work), some are based on position (like Management), and some are broken down by industry (Transport and Health).
The Most Common Jobs In the U.S.
By far, most of the American workforce (13 out of 100) are employed in Office & Administrative work. This includes a mind-boggling variety of jobs: receptionists, payroll clerks, secretaries, proof-readers, administrative assistants, and customer service representatives to name a few.
Notably, any sort of management role is absent from this, as well as any other job categories, since the BLS categorizes managers in their own class.
The industry which employs the second largest group of people is Health, accounting for 11 people from the 100. This category is a combination of two sectors listed in the original dataset (healthcare practitioners and healthcare support) and covers the entire industry: from physicians, surgeons, veterinarians, nurses, and therapists to technicians, assistants, orderlies, and home and personal care aides.
Here’s a quick look at all the major sectors most of America’s workforce actually works in.
Rank Jobs People Examples 1. Office & Admin 13 Receptionists, Clerks, Customer service, Secretaries. 2. Health 11 Doctors, Nurses, Paramedics, Vets, Orderlies, Personal care aides. 3. Transport 9 Warehouse workers, Packagers, Pilots, Ambulance, Bus, Truck, Taxi drivers, Ship captains. 4. Sales 9 Sales representatives, Counter clerks. 5. Food 8 Food preparers & servers, Bartenders, Dishwashers, Hosts. 6. Management 6 Legislators, Chief executives, Directors, General & Operations managers. 7. Business & Finance 6 Accountants, Auditors, Financial analysts, Logisticians. 8. Manufacturing 6 Factory workers, Gas fitters, Machine operators, Cobblers, Tailors, Barbers. 9. Education 6 Teachers (all fields, all levels). 10. Construction & Extraction 4 Stone / brick / block / cement masons. Construction laborers. Roofers, Plumbers, Electricians, Mining workers. 11. Mechanics & Installation 4 Auto mechanic, Farm equipment mechanic, Home appliance mechanic, Locksmiths. 12. Data & Tech 3 Information analyst, Database architect, Software & Web
developers, Data scientists, Mathematicians, Computer support.13. Custodial 3 Cleaning, Groundskeeping, Landscaping, Housekeeping. 14. Protection 2 Cops, Firefighters, Security guards, Lifeguards, Correctional officers. 15. Hospitality 2 Animal trainers / caretakers. Ushers / attendants. Makeup artists. Concierge. Exercise trainers. 16. Architecture & Engineering 2 All engineers and architects (excluding the information industry). 17. Community & Social Service 2 Social workers, Therapists (counsellors) & Religious work. 18. Arts, Media, & Sport 1 Fine artists, Designers, Actors, Athletes, Journalists, Writers, Authors, Musicians. 19. Science 1 All scientists (not engineers). 20. Legal 1 Lawyers, Judges, Paralegals, Mediators. 21. Farming, Fishing, & Forestry 1 Farmers, logging workers. Total 100 The third most common job is actually a tie between Transport—cargo moving workers, pilots, truck drivers—and Sales—retail and industry sales agents, counter clerks—with both sectors employing nine of the 100 people. In the Sales category, two of the nine people are cashiers.
Ranked fifth is Food, with eight people, ranging from private chefs to serving staff at fast food restaurants.
Another six all belong in some kind of Management role (across industry, and including legislators) with two of those six being “top level executives” like a CEO, a general manager, a mayor, or university president. Management shares its spot with Business & Finance, Manufacturing, and Education, all at six each.
The following jobs or industries also employ the same number of people:
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Construction & Extraction along with Mechanics & Installation, at four each.
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Data & Tech, with Custodial jobs, with three each.
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Protection, Hospitality, Architecture & Engineering, and Social work, all at two each.
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Artists & Athletes, Scientists, Legal, and Farming, Fishing & Forestry are all one each.
Quirks of the Job Data
From the numbers, some fascinating nuances of the American workforce are revealed. For example, there are more cashiers (2) in the economy than artists, writers, designers & athletes (1). There are the same number of customer service representatives as the entire Scientific and Legal fields put together (2).
But perhaps the most interesting quirk comes from how few people are employed in the Farming, Fishing & Forestry industry, a critical primary sector. In raw data, the BLS estimates only slightly more than 450,000 farm, fish & forestry workers.
Importantly, it’s worth noting the BLS only collects data from “nonfarm” establishments, explaining the low estimate for their category, which is almost one-sixth of what the USDA estimates. Please see the data note at the end of this article for a full explanation.
Which Jobs Have the Highest Wages in the U.S.?
Meanwhile, the top 20 highest paid jobs (by annual average wages) all belong to doctors (usually specialists or surgeons), with two exceptions: CEOs and athletes.
The lowest-paid jobs are a mix of entertainers, and service and retail staff.
As a broader category, however, Management makes the most money, followed by Legal and then Tech. Workers in Food, Health Support, and Custodial jobs have the lowest wages.
Rank Jobs Annual Average Wages 1. Management $131,200 2. Legal $124,540 3. Data & Tech $108,130 4. Health (Practitioners) $96,770 5. Architecture & Engineering $94,670 6. Business & Finance $86,080 7. Scientists $83,640 8. Arts, Media, Sports $76,500 9. Education $63,240 10. Construction & Extraction $58,400 11. Community & Social Service $55,760 12. Mechanics & Installation $55,680 13. Protection $54,010 14. Sales $50,370 15. Office & Admin $45,550 16. Manufacturing $45,370 17. Transport $43,930 18. Farming, Fishing, & Forestry $37,870 20. Hospitality $36,210 19. Custodial $35,900 21. Health (Support) $35,560 22. Food $32,130 Analyzing the data throws up a few correlations between number of employees and wages. The top three sectors with the most jobs (Admin, Transport, and Sales) are in the bottom 10 categories when it comes to pay.
On the other hand, three sectors in the bottom 10 of employment numbers, (Data & Tech, Architecture & Engineering, and Legal) are in the top five highest paid sectors.
The Health sector sees a big divide in pay between practitioners (doctors, nurses, therapists) ranked 5th and support staff (assistants, aides, & orderlies), ranked 21st, or second-to-last.
How is the American Workforce Changing?
Over the last five years, the American workforce has not stayed static. Of the listed 22 groups, 13 saw growth in employment numbers, nine saw a decrease, and one stayed flat since 2018.
The top gainer by far is Health Support (medical assistants, care aides, orderlies, etc.) which grew by 65%. Looking at the timeline of growth does not paint a steady picture: employment jumped between 2018 and 2019, briefly fell in 2020, and has since risen again in 2021-2022.
Another top gainer is Transport, rising from the 4th to 3rd biggest employer, beating out Sales in 2022. Business & Finance and Management have also seen steady increases since 2018.
On the other hand Hospitality saw a staggering 48% drop in numbers, not all together surprising given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the rise of tech companies like Airbnb.
Meanwhile, Office & Admin work saw a 15% loss in employees, even though this category is still the biggest employer in the country by a significant margin. Although jobs in this group saw steady declines from 2018-2021, it registered a slight uptick in workers between 2021 and 2022.
Here’s a full list of top-level sectors and how they changed.
Jobs 2018 2022 % Change (2018-2022) Health Support 4,117,450 6,792,310 +65% Transport 10,244,260 13,560,460 +32% Management 7,616,650 9,860,740 +29% Business & Finance 7,721,300 9,677,720 +25% Data & Tech 4,384,300 5,003,910 +14% Sciences 1,171,910 1,314,360 +12% Legal 1,127,900 1,216,600 +7% Community & Social Service 2,171,820 2,313,620 +7% Arts, Media, & Sports 1,951,170 2,063,380 +6% Health Practioners 8,646,730 9,043,070 +5% Mechanics and Installataion 5,628,880 5,823,400 +3% Construction & Extraction 5,962,640 6,075,520 +2% Protection 3,437,410 3,437,610 0% Custodial 4,421,980 4,316,350 -2% Architecture & Engineering 2,556,220 2,481,170 -3% Education 8,779,780 8,496,780 -3% Farming, Fishing, & Forestry 480,130 461,750 -4% Manufacturing 9,115,530 8,738,980 -4% Food 13,374,620 12,514,620 -6% Sales and Related 14,542,290 13,183,250 -9% Office & Admin 21,828,990 18,674,770 -15% Hospitality 5,451,330 2,835,650 -48% Looking ahead, questions about the future of the American workforce loom large, especially in the wake of the AI revolution that has swept imaginations, and quite possibly, soon the economy. People who hold administrative jobs—the largest category—are most vulnerable since many office tasks can be automated with increasingly sophisticated AI tools.
Will AI be as dominating a factor as the Industrial Revolution on the global economy? Will it cause as big a shift as the offshoring of manufacturing from the U.S.?
Or will AI blend seamlessly into the current make-up of the American workforce, merely enhancing productivity and profit?
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 21:00 -
- "It's Criminal": Central Wisconsin Communities Unite To Stave Off Looming Wind Turbine Industry
“It’s Criminal”: Central Wisconsin Communities Unite To Stave Off Looming Wind Turbine Industry
Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times,
Central Wisconsin communities are coordinating efforts to shine a light into the flickering shadow cast by a looming wind turbine industry.
“There is a revolt happening here,” attorney Marti Machtan told The Epoch Times. “I’ve never seen our communities engage like this in my life.”
Machtan is a member of Farmland First, an organization that aims to facilitate discussion among community members concerned about reported coercive, predatory tactics used by industrial wind companies to manipulate landowners into signing their property rights away in the name of green energy.
“These companies are sneaky about it,” Tom Wilcox— also a member of Farmland First and chairman of the Town of Green Grove in Owen, Wisconsin—told The Epoch Times. “They don’t want to come right out and say how this will work. In fact, part of the reason why people don’t know this is happening is farmers have to agree to keep their mouth shut on the details of the contract.”
Wilcox is also on the Clark County Board of Supervisors and chairman of the Clark County Planning and Zoning.
Marti Machtan and Tom Wilcox at a farm free of wind turbines in Wisconsin in 2023. (Courtesy of Tom Wilcox)
This month, at least 13 central Wisconsin towns have passed health and safety ordinances setting the ground rules for companies seeking to build wind turbines up to 600 feet tall as close as 1,250 feet from their homes.
The resolutions are written to mitigate the harm wind turbines have been reported to cause to people, their land, and their natural environment, including wildlife.
Word spread after some community members openly discussed rejecting alluring offers with payoffs of over $1 million over 30 years to have a wind turbine built on their farm.
However, Machtan argued that because turbine companies can exit the contract for any reason, the possibility of actually getting that amount wouldn’t be a safe bet.
For Wilcox, there are too many unanswered questions, like how it works and what it does to property values.
Initially, Wilcox said he held the attitude that people can do whatever they want with their farm.
“But as I got further into this, I realized that these wind turbines aren’t at all good for the farming community,” Wilcox said. “As I got deeper, I realized just what kind of a sham this really is.”
‘Imbalanced, Unfair, One-Sided’
Machtan has reviewed, negotiated, and drafted over a billion dollars worth of contracts with companies of various sizes.
His assessment of the contracts between farmers and wind turbine companies like RWE Clean Energy, which has advanced into central Wisconsin, is as bad as he’s ever read.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that was more imbalanced, unfair, or one-sided to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the farmer,” Machtan said.
Many provisions in these contracts give more power to the wind company over the land than the property owner.
The wind company can get out of the contract at any time for any reason, while the farmer must commit to a decade’s worth of encumbrances, Machtan said.
“There are liability shifting provisions for the big multi-billion-dollar multinational companies that shift risks onto these farmers,” he said.
There are also inadequate decommissioning standards, he added.
“One of the things people are worried about is, because this type of energy production really doesn’t make sense over the long term, there’s the risk that farmers are going to be left holding the bag,” Machtan said.
There’s no mutual sharing of opportunity and risk, Machtan said, leaving him to conclude that these aren’t green-energy projects.
“This is financial engineering designed to shift risk on the farmers and our communities while providing large stable returns to private equity,” Machtan said. “What’s actually driving them is pension funds and other investors trying to get a stable return for their shareholders with as little risk as possible with the support of our federal and state government.”
Cows stand in a field with wind turbines near Eldorado, Texas, on April 16, 2021. (Sergio Flores/AFP via Getty Images)
The ESG Framework
Electricity derived from wind is advertised as a clean departure from dependence on fossil fuels, the burning of which is argued to be the source of what some believe to be global warming.
In 2021, President Joe Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, both of which incentivize federal and corporate investment in creating a renewable energy industry, a component of the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) framework.
Despite Biden’s proclamation that green energy companies would be domestically sourced, foreign shareholders and big banks are set to profit the most from these companies headquartered in the United States.
The largest shareholder of RWE Clean Energy—a subsidiary of the German parent company RWE—is Qatar Holding LLC, headquartered in Qatar.
“The maddening thing is that politicians can say, ‘American companies are investing in clean energy,’ and technically be telling the truth, but the parent companies or major investors or both are foreign,” Machtan said.
A Health Hazard
Just three years after wind turbines were installed in northeast Wisconsin in Brown County, they were declared a human health hazard by the county board of health in a unanimous vote in 2014, according to the Brown County Citizens for Responsible Wind Energy (BCCRWE).
To date, the declaration hasn’t been rescinded.
In 2015, former Brown County Health Director Chua Xiong ruled that there was insufficient evidence to link wind turbines to the illnesses reported by people who lived near the Shirley Wind Power, owned by Duke Energy.
BCCRWE called for her resignation, alleging she based her conclusion on a “very flawed process by which submitted evidence was selectively reviewed and inconsistently weighed, or ignored altogether.”
“The document demonstrates that Xiong’s evidence-review process was fraught with a multitude of failures of due diligence and that her resulting conclusion is without merit,” BCCRWE said.
She resigned three months after her decision, according to a 2016 news report, to take another job.
In a documentary produced by BCCRWE, Kevin Aschenbrenner, a former farmer, discussed how the wind turbines affected his livestock.
Aschenbrenner lost all his cattle, he said, to injury and eventually death. Before that, they ceased producing milk.
“It just got to the point where we just couldn’t survive anymore on the cattle, and we didn’t want to put the cattle through all of the effects they were getting off the turbines,” Aschenbrenner said.
William Acker, an energy engineer, said in the documentary that those effects are caused by the pressure pulsations in the infrasound range, “which is basically inaudible noise.”
“Infrasound is a very low hertz level noise—you can probably hear it in kids’ car stereos nowadays with a very loud booming noise that’s in the infrasound range,” he said. “Infrasound can be audible if the noise level is very high, but what we’re recording from the wind turbines is showing it to be, for the most part, in the inaudible range.”
Families reported sleep disturbances, ear pain, headaches, dizziness, and chest pain.
“There’s just a litany of symptoms that are universal; for example, they’re not just here in Shirley Wind, they’re all over the world,” said Jay Tibbetts, a now-deceased medical physician.
BCCRWE spokesperson Steve Deslauriers told The Epoch Times that landowners—in being distracted by the money—miss the details of the contract that essentially robs them of their property rights and their community’s health.
“Once you sign up your property, you lose control, not only of the exact placement of the turbines, but you also lose your ability to build, plant trees, and make decisions about the land you still own, but no longer control,” Deslauriers said.
The companies feed on ignorance and greed, he said, using deceitful tactics.
“Every time they go into a new community, they walk up to homes and say, ‘Hey, look, your neighbors are already signed up, and since you’re going to get the impacts anyway, you might as well sign up and get paid for it, too,” Deslauriers said. “They use that same playbook ever since they started in Wisconsin, signing up town officials and running over the townspeople.”
What Deslauriers has seen in the past is companies offering proactive payments in which farmers could sign up their whole property, giving them monthly payments.
“When the turbines are built, they get X number of dollars per turbine,” Deslauriers said.
Now, at least from what he’s seen, landowners are being offered payment per megawatt.
“To put it in perspective, the eight turbines at Duke Energy’s Shirley Wind Power are two-and-a-half megawatt turbines,” he said. “At the time, they were the largest turbines in the country in close proximity to homes. This led to three families being forced from their homes due to conditions in and around their homes. Now the payments look more attractive to landowners but have no doubt; this will lead to even more home abandonment in densely populated communities like ours.”
The companies suggest that there’s such a good community presence that they’ve decided to minimize the risks and maximize the payments to landowners by putting up five- to six-megawatt turbines on their property, Deslauriers explained.
“If you do the math on the money, what they throw at these farmers is just peanuts compared to what the companies make,” Deslauriers said. “No Invenergy executives live around a turbine. They sacrifice our families’ health for their wealth. These are the most horribly one-sided contracts you’ve ever seen.”
In response to The Epoch Times’ request for comment, a spokesperson for Duke Energy said there’s no evidence that Shirly Wind Power is negligent about causing harm to its neighbors.
“To the contrary of these allegations, court decisions over the past few years continue to support Duke Energy’s position on this issue,” the spokesperson said. “Duke Energy continues to be an important part of Brown County and Town of Glenmore communities endeavoring to work cooperatively as a contributor in a major way to support the residents in their furtherance of various community initiatives and acting consistently and responsibly as we progress towards our clean energy efforts.”
Cows grazing near a wind turbine in Livermore, California, on May 16, 2007. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
The Starbucks Rule
In these rural areas where the wind turbines are targeted to be constructed, Machtan and others have pointed out that farmers lack adequate legal representation and understanding of the deceptive nature of the contracts.
Farmers can be even more clouded by the money if they are struggling to stay afloat.
In a “Tucker Carlson Originals” documentary, Kevon Martis, a Michigan-based zoning administrator who advocates against the building of wind turbines, explained “The Starbucks Rule.”
“Never try and site a wind project within 30 miles of a Starbucks coffee shop,” Martis explained. “The demographic that’s willing to pay a premium price for quality coffee is the same demographic that typically has the education and financial wherewithal to organize and resist irresponsible wind projects.”
Companies see these rural areas like Wilcox’s township as an easy target because they are low-income, which translates to them as people desperate for revenue.
Wilcox said he discovered northeastern Clark County was labeled as an economically depressed area when looking for federal grants for broadband.
“There are extra subsidies involved if companies build these projects in those regions,” Wilcox said.
However, when wind turbine projects are proposed in wealthy areas such as Nantucket Sound, politicians with homes in that area quickly shut the project down.
“People who look at some of these wind proposals figure out quickly that one of the reasons their community is being targeted is it’s poor, and they’re perceived as being desperate for revenue,” Martis said in the documentary. “They just think we’re a bunch of rubes and hicks out here.”
‘It Only Gets Worse’
Different people have different objections to what potentially might take place if the turbines are built in Wilcox’s township, he said.
For many with whom he’s spoken, the destruction of the endangered bald eagle and other birdlife concerns them, he said.
Clean energy companies like RWE have been granted what’s called an incidental take permit, which is used under the U.S. Endangered Species Act to protect these companies from liability when endangered wildlife is harmed.
“They have an incidental take permit that basically says, ‘When an eagle flies into the turbine and gets killed, we’re sorry, but we’re not liable,’” Wilcox said. “It always interests me that some people latch on to this portion of it.”
Though there aren’t a lot of eagles in the area, Wilcox said they’d like to keep the ones they have.
“But to have an industrial wind complex come in and kill more eagles than I’ve seen in a year, that’s really troubling for us,” he said.
An eagle’s nest found in a Central Wisconsin township in 2023. (Courtesy of Tom Wilcox)
For others, it’s about the aesthetics, he said.
“We have beautiful sunsets here in central Wisconsin, and occasionally you can see the northern lights,” Wilcox said. “But if you have a spinning wind turbine with that flashing red light, it’s going to detract from that aspect of life.”
Others latch onto the complaint about decreased property values caused by the turbines, he said.
If given a choice between a farm with a turbine and a farm without, buyers prefer going without, he said.
People look at the cost benefits—how much the company is potentially going to make compared to how much the landowner will make.
Then there is the shadow flicker, the movement of the shadow from the turbine passing through people’s homes in a steady but dizzying rhythm.
“People say you can pull the blinds, but why should you pull the blinds in your home for something you didn’t even want in the first place and aren’t getting any benefit from?” Wilcox asked. “And, of course, when you go outside, it only gets worse.”
A sunset over a central Wisconsin township in 2023. (Courtesy of Tom Wilcox)
‘It’s Criminal’
According to Deslauriers, because of state legislation lobbied for by the turbine companies, municipalities have been stripped of the power to prohibit the construction of wind turbines in their townships through zoning regulations.
“The legislature took the power away, and the state of Wisconsin promulgated rules that said towns could not make rules any stricter,” he said. “Now, if you’re a village or city, you can exercise home rule and say no, but rural towns cannot.”
That authority is with the state through the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC), Deslauriers said, which writes the rules allowing turbine companies to ignore property rights and the health of families.
“This leaves communities to focus their fight on the devastating health and safety impacts,” Deslauriers said.
Townships pay a heavy price just to fight the projects, Deslauriers said.
“The money that we went through locally to stop it last time was an incredible expense for blue-collar families,” Deslauriers said.
Still, they keep fighting, with little sign of relief from lawmakers on either side of the aisle.
“The rules that have been put in place are the worst statewide rules in the country,” he said. “It’s the small individual communities that are bearing the massive cost to fight these international wind companies.”
Lawmakers—both Republican and Democrat—refuse to return the power to regulate wind development to the communities where impacts are felt, he said.
“These communities have been left to use their very limited resources to fight these guys with all their might, and it’s bankrupting people,” Deslauriers said. “Wind developers leave families split, neighbors fighting, and communities broken. It’s criminal.”
The Epoch Times contacted RWE Clean Energy, Invenergy, and PSC of Wisconsin for comment.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 20:30 - Is Self-Defense Becoming Illegal?
Is Self-Defense Becoming Illegal?
Authored by Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times,
If someone you love were threatened, or physically attacked, do you have the right to defend them? And even more so, when police are being defunded and when criminals are being released on the streets, do you have a right to protect yourself?
Do you have to just let things happen?
Must you just watch while innocent people are victimized by criminals?
Well, that’s the question currently on trial in New York.
That’s the case of Jordan Neely.
Now, if you read most news outlets on the left, you’ll hear the 30-year-old black man was a street performer and Michael Jackson impersonator.
You’ll also hear that his friends said he was a sweet kid, and that he later suffered from mental disabilities and became homeless.
If you read news outlets on the right, you’ll hear that he was arrested 42 times between 2013 and 2021.
In 2015, he was convicted of trying to kidnap a 7-year-old girl in Inwood, Queens, and was sentenced to four months in jail. Then, in 2021, he was arrested for punching a 67-year-old woman in the face as she exited a subway train in New York’s East Village, breaking her nose and fracturing her orbital bone.
He pleaded guilty, and while facing 15 months in an alternative-to-incarceration program, he skipped his court date, and had a warrant out for his arrest since February.
Both sides of Neely’s story are true. He was a talented dancer who suffered from mental problems, and had become a criminal menace. The New York justice system repeatedly let him off the hook. Even outside of his arrests, people were posting online about personal experiences of being threatened or attacked by Neely.
And then, on May 1, Neely was allegedly threatening passengers on a New York subway car until a former U.S. Marine intervened; he restrained Neely with a chokehold while two other men helped subdue him. After Neely lost consciousness, the men placed Neely in a recovery position, and yet, Neely died.
Nobody was initially charged. Video of the incident, which was limited to when Neely had already been restrained, was quickly picked up by political actors to play into the country’s race narratives.
Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of New York wrote on Twitter a couple days later that “Jordan Neely was murdered.” She claimed he was “houseless and crying for food in a time when the city is raising rents and stripping services to militarize itself while many in power demonize the poor.”
She said it was “disgusting” that the man who allegedly killed Neely wasn’t charged.
Others on the far left came forward also to criticize the case as being about race, and to suggest that justice was needed, although, even among Democrats, not everyone was in agreement.
The political attacks sounded like a dog whistle to radical groups in New York. There were no major protests like those that were common with the Black Lives Matter summer riots a few years back, although a few dozen protesters went viral when they jumped on the subway tracks and forced a Q train to slam on its brakes.
It also turned out the protesters weren’t grassroots protesters. They were with an organization called Voices of Community Activists and Leaders, which has funding from billionaires including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg through the FWD.us Education Fund, and radical left billionaire George Soros through his Open Society Foundations.
It also turned out that the radical organization that staged the subway protest had previously teamed up in other protests with the Young Communist League of the Communist Party USA.
The outright communist group also was involved in the Neely protests, and stated in a tweet, “Thank you to all our comrades who answered the call today! We’re just getting started!”
The communist connection to the staged protests brings the whole incident full circle, right back to Ocasio-Cortez being the frontrunner in calling for charges in the case. Justine Medina, a former AOC aide, is a member of the executive committee of the New York State Communist Party, and is co-chair of the New York Young Communist League. That’s the same group that staged the subway protest.
The People’s World website notes, “Justine Medina is a co-chair of the New York Young Communist League. She’s also been involved in Democratic Socialists of America and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaigns for Congress.”
So let’s dig into this…
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Soros finances the campaigns of radical district attorneys who let criminals off the hook.
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A criminal is killed by people defending themselves when the city’s justice system fails.
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A radical Congress member, whose political campaign was notably assisted by a media network with funding from Soros, comes out and calls for arrests.
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Then, a radical group funded by Soros stages a protest, while being backed by a communist group tied to that same politician, also calling for arrests.
Seems to be a lot of overlap here.
Regardless of the Soros “above and below” strategy at play, former U.S. Marine Daniel Penny was arrested in Neely’s death. He’s now facing a felony charge of second-degree manslaughter, although he holds that he acted in self-defense.
So is this really about crime, then? Is it really about justice? Or is it about something else? Well, it’s not clear. But what we can say is that the narratives aren’t lining up. Many politicians who called for Penny’s arrest were simultaneously criticizing the use of justice. They were noting that young men are being sent to prison, when, in reality, many just need help. Yet, they did this while also calling for Penny to be sent to prison.
Others were more direct. Others suggested this may not be about manslaughter, or about justice, or even about mental health. Instead, they’re saying this is about race.
New York Mayor Eric Adams flip-flopped on that point. He first criticized AOC for claiming that Penny murdered Neely. Then, Adams brought race-based narratives to the case.
For conservatives, it’s not about race. Instead, it’s about whether you’re allowed to defend yourself. The case has become a symbol of what’s wrong with defunding the police, and about whether people are being selectively prosecuted, based not on crime, but on the color of their skin.
When people such as Adams make it about race, other people start wondering if the case would be treated differently if race wasn’t an issue.
That’s partly why people like musician Kid Rock donated $5,000 to Penny’s defense fund, criticized New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and declared that Penny is a hero. It’s why even politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are getting on board to fundraise for Penny.
And it’s also why people are now bringing up the idea of self-defense. Al Sharpton, for example, was stating that if Penny wasn’t charged, it would encourage others to become vigilantes.
This is the point where many cities in the United States find themselves. The common view, at least among conservatives, is this: Police have been made unable to do their jobs, the courts appear to have a swinging door, and violent individuals such as Neely are allowed to attack, harass, and generally menace people.
So, if nobody will protect you, what are your options? Even if you see others being attacked or harassed, should you do anything to help them? Should you allow them to be attacked? Or do you want to risk going to prison simply for stepping up to help?
In 2021, we watched in shock at what took place in the Philadelphia area, when a woman was raped on a train. Passengers did nothing to help her. They listened to her cries, and they allowed it to happen. It raised the question of what we become as a society if people don’t stand up against evil, what happens when good people don’t come forward? And even more so, what will we become when good people aren’t allowed to intervene?
In the natural world, self-defense is written into the DNA of life. Even bugs have the means to defend themselves. Nearly every creature on earth has been given by God a means to defend itself, whether claws, or teeth, or stingers, or other means.
Humans create tools, like swords and guns, to defend ourselves. And this has held true throughout all human history. The right to self-defense is the right to life. And the right to guard life is one the main pillars of law.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 19:30 -
- Exxon Crushes Progressive Dreams That "Net Zero" Has Any Chance By 2050: It Would Mean Collapse In "Global Standard Of Living"
Exxon Crushes Progressive Dreams That “Net Zero” Has Any Chance By 2050: It Would Mean Collapse In “Global Standard Of Living”
In a world of suffocating snowflakery, ESG hypocrisy and, well… Tranheuser Busch, a corporation telling the truth without fear of reprisals from the Open Society-funded virtue signaling cabal is rarer than an mRNA-injected, genetically engineered hen’s teeth. And yet that’s what the company hated by every progressive, Exxon Mobil, did this week when it became the first corporation to denounce the insidious and laughable claims that “net zero” is even a remote possibility by 2050.
The US supermajor pushed back against investors pressing the company to report on the risks to its business from restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and potential environmental disasters when in a reply to proxy advisor Glass Lewis, Exxon said the prospect of the world achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is remote and should not be further evaluated in its financial statements.
A shareholder proposal seeking a report on the cost of having to abandon projects faces a shareholder vote on May 31. Glass Lewis backed the initiative, concluding Exxon could face material financial risks from the net-zero scenario.
Exxon disagreed, and said the world is not on a path to achieve net-zero emissions in 2050 as limiting energy production to levels below consumption demand would lead to a spike in energy prices, as observed in Europe following oil sanctions against Russia over Ukraine.
Exxon, is of course, correct however that won’t stop the green fanatics from beating the drum that somehow the world can transition to “green” energy (at a cost of some $150 trillion mind you) in the next 27 years without an energy cataclysm.
At the heart of the issue is the 2050 net-zero emissions (NZE) scenario of the International Energy Agency (IEA) which envisions a path to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. For the NZE scenario to be met, the IEA had hilariously said new oil exploration would have to have stopped in 2021 and nations would have to switch to renewable energy from fossil fuels (good luck with that). Exxon is among the companies heavily investing in new exploration to generate oil and gas for decades to come, and in retrospect, one can thank their deity of choice for Exxon’s decision to do so as opposed to sending the world back into the dark ages, an outcome which so many from the World Economic Forum seems to aspire to.
“It is clear that the IEA NZE does not, by the scenario authors’ own assessment, meet the level of likelihood required to be considered in our financial statements,” Exxon said in a response filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.
“It is highly unlikely that society would accept the degradation in global standard of living required to permanently achieve a scenario like the IEA NZE,” Exxon said in dismissing the proposal.
Source: Exxon Exxon also rebutted the woke proxy firm’s recommendation that it evaluate the impacts of a worst-case oil spill at its offshore Guyanese oil platforms. Exxon leads a consortium responsible for all of Guyana’s offshore oil production and its board has recommended against the proposal.
“The requested report clearly would not provide new, decision-useful information,” Exxon said, adding the shareholder request “ignore(s) the time, additional cost, and resources every report takes for the company to prepare.”
As for the IEA, instead of targeting those companies – which despite every effort by the senile US president to drain the US SPR and make the country once again dependent on outside energy sources – are doing everything in their power to retain US energy independence, perhaps it should bring its message to downtown Beijing. We are confident that China will listen to their pimply teenager-inspired “proposals” in a cool, calm and collected manner.
Source: Our world in data Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 19:00 - G-7 Leaders Respond To China’s Economic Bullying At Hiroshima Summit, Warn Of 'Consequences'
G-7 Leaders Respond To China’s Economic Bullying At Hiroshima Summit, Warn Of ‘Consequences’
Authored by Emel Akan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Economic security was a major focus on the second day of the Group of Seven (G-7) summit in Hiroshima, with leaders outlining actions to counter Beijing’s “economic coercion” and non-market practices.
The G-7 countries—the United States, the UK, Japan, Canada, Germany, France, and Italy—announced on May 20 their plan to address the “disturbing rise in incidents of economic coercion.”
“We will work together to ensure that attempts to weaponize economic dependencies by forcing G7 members and our partners, including small economies to comply and conform will fail and face consequences,” the G-7 leaders’ statement on economic security read.
“We express serious concern over economic coercion and call on all countries to refrain from its use.”
(L-R) Italy’s Primer Minister Giorgia Meloni, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen participate in a family photo with G7 leaders before their working lunch meeting on economic security at the Grand Prince Hotel in Hiroshima on May 20, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst/POOL/AFP via Getty Images) National security advisor Jake Sullivan, who briefed reporters on May 20 on the sidelines of the G-7 Summit, said the leaders agreed to deploy “a common set of tools” to confront China’s economic coercion.
“These economic security tools will include steps to build resilience in our supply chains. They will also include steps to protect sensitive technology, like export controls and outbound investment measures,” Sullivan said.
However, the leaders are emphasizing that their goal is to de-risk, not decouple from China.
“Our policy approaches are not designed to harm China nor do we seek to thwart China’s economic progress and development,” according to the G-7 Summit communique released on May 20.
“A growing China that plays by international rules would be of global interest. We are not decoupling or turning inwards. At the same time, we recognize that economic resilience requires de-risking and diversifying.”
Leveraging Economic Power
In recent years, China has increased its efforts to leverage its economic might to force political change around the world.
For example, after Australia called for an independent investigation into the origins of COVID-19 in April 2020, the communist regime announced trade sanctions on select Australian products.
An employee works as Australian-made wine (on display shelves on the right) at a store in Beijing on Aug. 18, 2020, the same day that the Chinese regime ramped up tensions with Australia after it launched a probe into wine imports from the country, the latest salvo in a bitter row after the Australian government called for a probe into the origins of COVID-19. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images) The Chinese regime’s economic coercion of Australia has served as a “wake-up call” to other countries, Liz Truss, the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time, warned.
There have been other instances of Chinese coercion in the past, including with Japan, which saw Chinese shipments of rare earth metals blocked due to a territorial dispute in 2010. South Korea faced business boycotts from China in 2017 after installing a U.S. missile defense system. And recently, Beijing retaliated against Lithuania after it attempted to strengthen ties with Taiwan.
China has recently pressured U.S. companies as well. For example, in reaction to the United States placing export bans on advanced semiconductors, Beijing launched a probe into memory chip company Micron. Furthermore, in March, Chinese police stormed the Beijing office of Mintz Group, an American due diligence firm, and detained five Chinese citizens working for the company. Later, Chinese police questioned employees at the Shanghai branch of Bain & Co., an American consulting firm.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak warned about China’s growing economic coercion.
“We should be clear-eyed about the growing challenge we face. China is engaged in a concerted and strategic economic contest,” Sunak said in his remarks before the meeting on May 20.
To address these issues, the G-7 leaders have announced the formation of a new “G7 Coordination Platform on Economic Coercion.”
The new platform “will address the growing and pernicious use of coercive economic measures to interfere in the sovereign affairs of other states,” Sunak said.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 18:30 - Lawmakers Scrutinize Executive Bonuses At Collapsed Banks
Lawmakers Scrutinize Executive Bonuses At Collapsed Banks
After several years during the pandemic in which bonuses exploded higher, reality is once again bearing down on the Wall Street gravy train, as regulators target banker paydays in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s blowup and the ensuing regional banking chaos that followed.
Democratic lawmakers are scrutinizing executives at Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank and the pay and bonuses they earned in the time leading up to each banks’ respective implosion, Bloomberg wrote in a wrap up this week.
Bloomberg notes that during a Senate Banking Committee hearing on Thursday, lawmakers including Martin Gruenberg, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Michael Barr, vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve, and Michael Hsu, acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency targeted adopting new incentive-based compensation rules.
The rules were originally products of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act with the purpose of discouraging risk-taking in the banking sector.
Such risk taking led to a tsunami of withdrawals from Silicon Valley Bank, which now infamously saw more than $40 billion in deposits pulled from the bank in just a matter of hours. The pace of withdrawals “took regulators by surprise”, Bloomberg wrote, leading to the banks being taken over by the government.
Meanwhile, former executives from the banks have retained bonuses they “earned” in their time leading up to the collapse. They have attested that they didn’t mismanage risk, but rather that (1) the Fed put the banks in an “unprecedented” position, as SVB’s CEO testified in front of congress this week and that (2) contagion from other collapses were to blame.
In other words, it’s everybody’s fault but the banking executives who put their banks in such precarious positions to begin with.
Democratic Senator Christopher Van Hollen said this week: “The bank executives manipulated profits in a way to increase their risks and made no changes to the compensation structure to account for that risk.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 18:00 - Biden Administration's New Mortgage Policy: Unjust And Dangerous
Biden Administration’s New Mortgage Policy: Unjust And Dangerous
Authored by Andy Matthews via RealClear Wire,
One of the essential lessons most of us are taught early in life is the importance of developing a sense of financial responsibility.
Work hard to earn a good paycheck. Don’t spend more than you can afford. Save for the future.
Eventually, following these steps will land you in a position where you can afford some of the nicer things life has to offer. Behaving in a financially responsible way isn’t always fun in the moment – but it’s well worth it when you get to reap the rewards of your good decisions later on, as you’re able to enjoy more and more of the things you want and need.
It’s one of the most fundamental principles of our society, and it’s also rooted in one of the basic realities of human nature: Incentivize good behavior, and you’ll get more of it.
But what happens when the incentive structure becomes inverted? We’re about to find out, because that’s what’s going to occur thanks to a new Biden administration policy that took effect on May 1.
The new Federal Housing Finance Agency policy will force those with good credit scores to pay more for their mortgages each month, with those extra payments used to subsidize the loans of higher-risk borrowers. Experts say that homebuyers with credit scores of 680 or higher will now pay roughly $40 per month more on a home loan of $400,000, with those who make down payments of 15 to 20% hit with the highest fees. It amounts to a tax increase on the middle class, and it’s atrocious in every way imaginable.
For starters, it is fundamentally unjust and absurd to impose a policy that punishes those who have acted responsibly, sacrificed, and worked hard toward a secure financial future for themselves and their families. That’s why I was honored to join a coalition of 34 state financial officers from around the country, led by Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity, in signing a letter to the Biden administration voicing opposition.
But this new policy is more than simply unfair. It’s also deeply reckless. The 2008 financial crisis and mortgage meltdown offered a painful lesson in what happens when government intervenes to push those who cannot afford a home loan to take one and to undermine the critical role that credit scores play in assessing a prospective borrower’s risk level. My home state of Nevada was hit the hardest by that crisis, suffering under the highest rates of foreclosures and unemployment in the entire nation. And Nevadans will once again be put in a position of exceptional vulnerability under the Biden administration’s new policy.
For its part, the administration defends its policy on the grounds that it’s simply trying to close a gap in house ownership between higher- and lower-income Americans. The administration also anticipates some political gain through what is merely the latest of its many wealth redistribution schemes.
But while increasing opportunities for home ownership is a laudable goal, the right way to accomplish this is by taking steps to eliminate unnecessary regulations, reduce inflation, and bring down energy costs – not to subvert basic market principles to political considerations.
If political advantage is what the Biden administration is indeed expecting here, they may be in for a harsh surprise. The more Americans learn about this new policy, the more they are rightly outraged and insulted that the administration would adopt a plan that perversely punishes responsible behavior and removes Americans’ incentives to manage their finances wisely and prudently.
The administration should reverse course immediately.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 17:30 - "Deep Level Of Corruption": Gen. Flynn Condemns FBI Following Durham Report
“Deep Level Of Corruption”: Gen. Flynn Condemns FBI Following Durham Report
Retired US Army Gen. Michael Flynn says that the United States needs to address the corruption revealed in the Durham report released on Monday.
“What people need to really stay focused on is this deep, deep level of corruption in our federal government, particularly starting in the White House,” Flynn told NTD News‘ “Capitol Report” host Steve Lance.
Durham’s report detailed corruption at the highest levels of the FBI to use a Clinton Campaign-funded propaganda dossier they knew was a hoax, in order to take down – and then smear, Donald Trump and his campaign.
The report concluded that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. The report also notes that on Aug. 3, 2016, a White House meeting between former President Obama, then-VP Joe Biden, former AG Loretta Lynch, then-CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey – where Brennan briefed those in the room about Clinton’s plan to undermine Trump by tying him to Russian election interference efforts.
In response to the Durham report, the FBI said that it had taken corrective action to address the issued raised.
Flynn says it’s BS.
“They weren’t missteps, those were criminal acts by the highest levels of people in our FBI and other elements and other people inside of the Department of Justice,” he told NTD News. “And today that problem is not fixed. Look at what we’re learning from the whistleblowers.”
Flynn then pointed to the FBI’s plan to infiltrate Catholic churches and other organizations in order to root out “radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology, after a document was leaked from the FBI’s Richmond Field Office describing the endeavor. The agency has since disavowed the record, saying that it “does not meet the exacting standards” of the bureau.
“This assault on Catholics, as an example—that’s just one example, the assault on Catholics and on the Latin Mass. I mean, that little thing alone that’s out of the Richmond office of the FBI, by the special agent in charge there,” said Flynn. “These are not things that are minor things. These are big, big deals. That’s just one example, you know, in addition to the politicization and the weaponization of the FBI that’s being additionally brought out by these whistleblowers, and it’s still ongoing.”
Flynn thinks both FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland are unfit to serve.
“And I think that impeachment proceedings need to start at the highest levels of our government, and I think it needs to start right behind the Roosevelt desk in the Oval Office,” Flynn said, referring to Biden.
The retired three-star general also weighed in over an alleged accounting error of up to $3 billion in Ukraine aid.
“The Pentagon, always, always overestimates everything. I don’t care whether it’s food, ammunition, people, battlefield operations, battlefield casualties, they always, always overestimate,” said Flynn. “In this case, because of the scrutiny that we have, by the American people right now on everything going on from this government, particularly everything going on over in the Ukraine, they needed to, they should have done a far better job before they actually put the data together.”
While he sees this accounting issue as part of a larger trend, Flynn said this particular accounting error has caught people’s attention because of how much money U.S. taxpayers have already given to Ukraine. -NTD
“If it was $3 million, maybe even $30 million, nobody would—we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but $3 billion, you know, that kind of money, when you break it down to the American people—the American people are just, they’re livid about $170 billion going over to Ukraine, and God knows where it’s going, and it doesn’t look like things are going well in the war over there,” said Flynn. “So a $3 billion oversight. So now it’s like, ‘Well, where is it?’ So is there going to be investigation? Well I’m sure there will be, and then we’ll never hear anything else about it, and come to find out—it’ll be one of those dollar amounts that somebody basically walked away with.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 17:00 - Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Shreds Lockdown Authoritarianism
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch Shreds Lockdown Authoritarianism
In a statement made today on a case concerning Title 42, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch breaks the painful silence on the topic of lockdowns and mandates, and presents the truth with startling clarity.
Importantly, this statement from the Supreme Court comes as so many other agencies, intellectuals, and journalists are in flat-out denial of what happened to the country.
[T]he history of this case illustrates the disruption we have experienced over the last three years in how our laws are made and our freedoms observed.
Since March 2020, we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country. Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale. Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes.
They shuttered businesses and schools public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too.
They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.
Federal executive officials entered the act too. Not just with emergency immigration decrees. They deployed a public-health agency to regulate landlord-tenant relations nationwide.They used a workplace-safety agency to issue a vaccination mandate for most working Americans.
They threatened to fire noncompliant employees, and warned that service members who refused to vaccinate might face dishonorable discharge and confinement. Along the way, it seems federal officials may have pressured social-media companies to suppress information about pandemic policies with which they disagreed.
While executive officials issued new emergency decrees at a furious pace, state legislatures and Congress—the bodies normally responsible for adopting our laws—too often fell silent. Courts bound to protect our liberties addressed a few—but hardly all—of the intrusions upon them. In some cases, like this one, courts even allowed themselves to be used to perpetuate emergency public-health decrees for collateral purposes, itself a form of emergency-lawmaking-by-litigation.
Doubtless, many lessons can be learned from this chapter in our history, and hopefully serious efforts will be made to study it. One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat.
A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes.
We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.
But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.
Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate. Decisions announced on the fly are rarely as wise as those that come after careful deliberation. Decisions made by a few often yield unintended consequences that may be avoided when more are consulted. Autocracies have always suffered these defects. Maybe, hopefully, we have relearned these lessons too.
In the 1970s, Congress studied the use of emergency decrees. It observed that they can allow executive authorities to tap into extraordinary powers. Congress also observed that emergency decrees have a habit of long outliving the crises that generate them; some federal emergency proclamations, Congress noted, had remained in effect for years or decades after the emergency in question had passed.
At the same time, Congress recognized that quick unilateral executive action is sometimes necessary and permitted in our constitutional order. In an effort to balance these considerations and ensure a more normal operation of our laws and a firmer protection of our liberties, Congress adopted a number of new guardrails in the National Emergencies Act.
Despite that law, the number of declared emergencies has only grown in the ensuing years. And it is hard not to wonder whether, after nearly a half-century and in light of our Nation’s recent experience, another look is warranted. It is hard not to wonder, too, whether state legislatures might profitably reexamine the proper scope of emergency executive powers at the state level.
At the very least, one can hope that the Judiciary will not soon again allow itself to be part of the problem by permitting litigants to manipulate our docket to perpetuate a decree designed for one emergency to address another. Make no mistake—decisive executive action is sometimes necessary and appropriate. But if emergency decrees promise to solve some problems, they threaten to generate others. And rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.
Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Arizona v. Mayorkas marks the culmination of his three-year effort to oppose the Covid regime’s eradication of civil liberties, unequal application of law, and political favoritism. From the outset, Gorsuch remained vigilant as public officials used the pretext of Covid to augment their power and strip the citizenry of its rights in defiance of long standing constitutional principles.
While other justices (even some purported constitutionalists) absconded their responsibility to uphold the Bill of Rights, Gorsuch diligently defended the Constitution. This became most apparent in the Supreme Court’s cases involving religious liberty in the Covid era.
Beginning in May 2020, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging Covid restrictions on religious attendance across the country. The Court was divided along familiar political lines: the liberal bloc of Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan voted to uphold deprivations of liberty as a valid exercise of states’ police power; Justice Gorsuch led conservatives Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas in challenging the irrationality of the edicts; Chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, justifying his decision by deferring to public health experts.
“Unelected judiciary lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people,” Roberts wrote in South Bay v. Newsom, the first Covid case to reach the Court.
And so the Court repeatedly upheld executive orders attacking religious liberty. In South Bay, the Court denied a California church’s request to block state restrictions on church attendance in a five to four decision. Roberts sided with the liberal bloc, urging deference to the public health apparatus as constitutional freedoms disappeared from American life.
In July 2020, the Court again split 5-4 and denied a church’s emergency motion for injunctive relief against Nevada’s Covid restrictions. Governor Steve Sisolak capped religious gatherings at 50 people, regardless of the precautions taken or the size of the establishment. The same order allowed for other groups, including casinos, to hold up to 500 people. The Court, with Chief Justice Roberts joining the liberal justices again, denied the motion in an unsigned motion without explanation.
Justice Gorsuch issued a one paragraph dissent that exposed the hypocrisy and irrationality of the Covid regime. “Under the Governor’s edict, a 10-screen ‘multiplex’ may host 500 moviegoers at any time. A casino, too, may cater to hundreds at once, with perhaps six people huddled at each craps table here and a similar number gathered around every roulette wheel there,” he wrote. But the Governor’s lockdown order imposed a 50-worshiper limit for religious gatherings, no matter the buildings’ capacities.
“The First Amendment prohibits such obvious discrimination against the exercise of religion,” Gorsuch wrote. “But there is no world in which the Constitution permits Nevada to favor Caesars Palace over Calvary Chapel.”
Gorsuch understood the threat to Americans’ liberties, but he was powerless with Chief Justice Roberts cowing to the interests of the public health bureaucracy. That changed when Justice Ginsburg died in September 2020.
The following month, Justice Barrett joined the Court and reversed the Court’s 5-4 split on religious freedom in the Covid era. The following month, the Court granted an emergency injunction to block Governor Cuomo’s executive order that limited attendance at religious services to 10 to 25 people.
Gorsuch was now in the majority, protecting Americans from the tyranny of unconstitutional edicts. In a concurring opinion in the New York case, he again compared restrictions on secular activities and religious gatherings; “according to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians… Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”
In February 2021, California religious organizations appealed for an emergency injunction against Governor Newsom’s Covid restriction. At the time, Newsom prohibited indoor worship in certain areas and banned singing. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Kavanaugh and Barrett, upheld the ban on singing but overturned the capacity limits.
Gorsuch wrote a separate opinion, joined by Thomas and Alito, that continued his critique of the authoritarian and irrational deprivations of America’s liberty as Covid entered its second year. He wrote, “Government actors have been moving the goalposts on pandemic-related sacrifices for months, adopting new benchmarks that always seem to put restoration of liberty just around the corner.”
Like his opinions in New York and Nevada, he focused on the disparate treatment and political favoritism behind the edicts; “if Hollywood may host a studio audience or film a singing competition while not a single soul may enter California’s churches, synagogues, and mosques, something has gone seriously awry.”
Thursday’s opinion allowed Gorsuch to review the devastating loss of liberty Americans suffered over the 1,141 days it took to flatten the curve.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 16:30 - Musk Demands AP Back Claims Or Retract Article Over 'Unchecked' Stolen Election Tweets
Musk Demands AP Back Claims Or Retract Article Over ‘Unchecked’ Stolen Election Tweets
Elon Musk has told AP to put up or shut up – after the outlet published an article alleging that “false claims of a stolen election thrive unchecked on Twitter,” refuting Musk’s claims during a CNBC interview that such claims would be fact checked on the platform.
“Either back up your claims @AP with actual source data or retract your story,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
Either back up your claims @AP with actual source data or retract your story
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 19, 2023
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The May 18 article written by Ali Swenson, who previously worked at a Magneto-funded fact checking nonprofit, the Center for Public Integrity, cites the CNBC interview in which Musk said that claims of stolen election on Twitter “will be corrected, 100 percent.”
Musk was responding to host David Faber, who asked about Twitter users claiming that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen” and whether such tweets would be tagged with a community note or face other actions.
“To be clear, I don’t think it was a stolen election,” Musk replied, with the caveat that he believes there was some election fraud.
“By the same token, if somebody is going to say that there is never any election fraud anywhere, this is obviously false. If 100 million people vote, the probability that the fraud is zero—is zero,” he added, before noting that it’s important to strike a balance in discussions regarding election integrity.
🚨BREAKING: Elon Musk Does NOT Believe 2020 Election Was Stolen
In an interview with David Faber, Elon Musk, made a significant statement by expressing his belief that the 2020 election was not stolen.
This statement goes against the claims made by some who allege fraud in the… pic.twitter.com/SwN4uen115
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 16, 2023
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Regardless, people in America are allowed to question the outcome of elections – like Democrats did in 2016 when Hillary Clinton kicked off her self-pity tour – so CNBC and AP and the rest of them can pound sand with that little purity test.
According to the Associated Press article, since former President Donald Trump held a CNN town hall in which he reiterated his claims that the 2020 election was stolen, such claims have spread on Twitter.
“Yet many such claims have thrived on Twitter in the week since former President Donald Trump spent much of a CNN town hall digging in on his lie that the 2020 election was ‘rigged’ against him,” reads Swenson’s article, which provides no evidence. “Twitter posts that amplified those false claims have thousands of shares with no visible enforcement, a review of posts on the platform shows.”
The article cites media intelligence from firm Zignal Labs, which claims without evidence to have identified the 10 most widely shared tweets promoting a “rigged election” narrative following the town hall.
“While Twitter has a system in place for users to add context to misleading tweets, the 10 posts, which collectively amassed more than 43,000 retweets, had no such notes attached,” AP claimed – again without evidence.
More via the Epoch Times,
In his town hall appearance on CNN, Trump reiterated his view that the 2020 election was stolen.
The former president said that he performed “fantastically” in 2020, doing “far better” than in 2016 with 12 million more votes.
“When you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens,” Trump said before adding that he believes the election was “rigged.”
“That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. It’s very bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw,” Trump said.
Donald Trump reaffirms his position on the 2020 election being stolen 🗳️ pic.twitter.com/DF0Ne0j3KR
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 11, 2023
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He pointed to the Twitter Files disclosures as an indication of apparent collusion between the FBI and Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the election, which Trump said, “made a big difference.”
The seventh installment of the Musk-endorsed Twitter Files claimed that there was an “organized effort” on the part of federal law enforcement to target social media companies that reported on the explosive Hunter Biden laptop story, which was first published by the New York Post.
Hunter Biden Laptop Story
In the run-up to the 2020 election, the New York Post published a story about a laptop abandoned at a computer repair shop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden and contained emails suggesting that then-candidate Joe Biden had knowledge of, and was allegedly involved in, his son’s foreign business dealings.
The New York Post’s story titled “Smoking-gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad” was published on Oct. 14, 2020.
Twitter first prevented sharing of the story for 24 hours before reversing the decision. However, the story did not circulate on the platform for weeks because of a policy requiring the original poster to delete and repost the original tweet.
Polling has indicated that if the public had been aware of the suppressed story ahead of the election, it may have cost then presidential candidate Joe Biden several percentage points of voters—possibly enough to thwart his bid for the White House.
“In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published,” wrote author Michael Shellenberger, who released screenshots on Dec. 19, 2022, that appeared to show message exchanges between top Twitter officials and the FBI in October 2020.
The FBI told The Epoch Times in an earlier emailed statement that it had only offered general warnings to Twitter about foreign election interference and never pushed for the platform to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Former Twitter executives have conceded that they made a mistake by blocking the Hunter Biden laptop story but denied that they were pressured to suppress the story by law enforcement.
However, documents filed with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) show that the FBI warned Twitter explicitly of a “hack-and-leak operation involving Hunter Biden” ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter’s former head of site integrity Yoel Roth made the remarks in a signed declaration (pdf) attached to a Dec. 21, 2020 letter to the FEC’s Office of Complaints Examination and Legal Administration on behalf of Twitter.
Roth said in the attached declaration that he was told by the FBI at a series of meetings ahead of the 2020 election that the agency warned of the threat of hacked materials being distributed on social media platforms.
“I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter,” Roth stated in the declaration.
“I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden,” Roth added.
Roth said that Twitter’s Site Integrity Team determined that the New York Post’s articles about the laptop violated the platform’s policies on hacked materials and Twitter took action to suppress the distribution of posts sharing the articles.
He later acknowledged that it was a mistake for Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 16:00 - Counter-Disinformation: The New Snake Oil
Counter-Disinformation: The New Snake Oil
Authored by Tom Wyatt via Racket News,
The San Diego Convention Center was packed with the defense industry elite. Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and a myriad of other arms industry salesmen, hungry to peddle their wares. WEST Conference 2023 is billed as the “premier naval conference and exposition on the West Coast.” A collective of military leaders and titans of the defense industry, intermingled in incestuous harmony.
The WEST 2023 conference in San Diego. It was a world with which I was well acquainted. After all, I had spent the past fifteen years in the Navy as a Special Warfare Boat Operator, using tools and weapons built by these very defense companies. My call to service came unexpectedly at the tail end of my high school senior year. I left for bootcamp on Valentine’s Day, 2007, and immediately entered the world of Naval Special Warfare upon completion. While the rest of my graduating class received tutelage at universities around the country, mine came by way of the military elite. Over a decade and a half, I received an education in Special Reconnaissance, Unconventional Warfare and tradecraft.
Many of the friends and former colleagues I met along the way now worked for these defense contractors, and perhaps, in another life, I’d be a participant in this conference. As it turned out, I was there as a spectator only.
I watched as a sea of suits and lanyards moved in waves throughout the lobby outside the convention floor. Thousands of exhibitors and participants waited in line to get their credentials, exchanging cards and networking as they sized up the competition. As I surveyed the crowd, I noticed something familiar in the attendees’ faces. There was a look of out-of-place discomfort. Tattoos peeking out of cuffs and collars of the business attire their bodies seemed to be rejecting. It was the look of the defense industry’s freshman class, those who had just made the leap from serving in the armed forces to being arms proliferators.
The conference embodied the idea of the military industrial complex’s self-licking ice cream cone structure. There was no discernible line between merchandiser and consumer, just a single organism supporting itself.
In 2021, the Revolving Door Project released a report titled “The Military-Industrial-Think Tank Complex: Conflict of Interest at the Center for a New American Security,” that trained a troubling spotlight on one of the most prominent defense-minded think tanks.
According to its website, the Center for a New American Society (CNAS) “is an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit organization that develops strong, pragmatic, and principled national security and defense policies.” The defense industry-funded group claims to “elevate the national security debate” by providing innovative research to policymakers and experts in the field. But given the whiff of defense industry influence around the organization, its high-level engagement with Washington’s most powerful figures raises numerous red flags.
A major point of concern presented by the Revolving Door Project, was, ironically CNAS’ own revolving door. According to the report, there are “16 CNAS alumni who have been selected for foreign policy and national security policy-making positions in the Biden administration.” Among them: Avril Haines, a former CNAS Board of Directors member who became Biden’s Director of National Intelligence in 2021, and Colin Kahl, the current Undersecretary of Defense Policy, a former CNAS Senior Fellow.
The report also includes instances of the think tank pushing agendas that directly benefit its membership, such as the collusion between CNAS and the United Arab Emirates to promote relaxed restrictions for exporting US drones. Not surprisingly, CNAS board member Neal Blue’s company, General Atomic, had an existing contract worth nearly $200 million with the UAE for drone production. The report reads:
CNAS receives large contributions directly from defense contractors, foreign governments, and the US government; publishes research and press material that frequently supports the interests of its sponsors without proper disclosure; and even gives its financial sponsors an official oversight role in helping to shape the organization’s research.
WEST 2023 offered yet another venue for private companies to seek out such connections, pushing an agenda that “supports the interests” of the defense industry–a kind of speed dating for the military industrial complex. And while the familiar mechanisms of war, like drones and submarines, were on display, the spotlight was on weapons of the information space.
Panel after panel featured cybersecurity and electronic warfare experts giving discussions on information operations, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. The conference seemed to embody the new horizon for the defense industry: Information Warfare.
Counter-Terrorism to Great Power Competition
“In hindsight, we should’ve never taken our eye off the Great Power Competition,” the counter-disinformation expert said, referring to the historical focus on traditional preparation for conflict against countries like China and Russia. Her mastery of the subject was honed over a decade through the study of forensic psychology and counter-extremism strategies. She had worked across the public and private sectors, countering the dangerous narratives of violent extremists.
At the end of World War II, the power that had previously been distributed across multiple nations was now consolidated by the US and Soviet Union. American foreign policy entered the era of Great Power Competition (GPC), a contest for global dominance and influence pitting the two former allies in a Highlander-style deathmatch to see who prevailed as the one true superpower. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US focused on maintaining this strategic edge, until a decade later when the towers fell.
After 9/11, the US reoriented its foreign policy around a new acronym: GWOT (Global War on Terror). The Spy vs. Spy tactics of the Cold War were obsolete now that the deadly effects of adversarial narratives had been demonstrated. While propaganda used by the Soviet Union (and the US, for that matter) was aimed at deceiving, disrupting and undermining the adversary, terrorist organizations focused their messaging campaigns on radicalization, targeting at-risk Muslim communities into armies of holy warriors.
The seemingly archaic, global network of radical Islamists tapped into the far-reaching technology of the world wide web to spread their message and indoctrinate would-be jihadists. To combat this ideological plague, the US began crafting counter-messaging tools and methodologies, giving birth to what would become an updated version of a counter-disinformation industry that had existed as far back as 1942, when Voice of America began broadcasting counter-narratives into Nazi Germany. These efforts ranged from a “whac-a-mole” style process of detecting and eliminating terrorist propaganda to enlisting moderate Muslim leaders to push a counter-message.
A 1947 Voice of America broadcast It’s no revelation that you can’t carpet bomb an ideology, so while the concept of fighting extremist narratives online to tamp down on global terrorism seems logical on its face, according to the industry expert I interviewed, “In practice, it’s not very effective.”
This sentiment was affirmed by another expert in countering extremist narratives, Caroline Moreno, who formerly ran the counter-terrorism training program at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA. “Counter messaging, when it comes from the US government, loses its credibility,” said Moreno.
It is understandable, in an unfamiliar world of ideology-based violence and radicalization, that some trial and error would occur along the path to understanding such a complex adversary. Tactics, of course, are developed over time and situationally based. Before 9/11, the military was focused on the most logical adversary, a conventional state actor, but had to adapt to the irregular warfare landscape of counter-terrorism operations.
The operators and ground-pounders on the frontlines get a real-world education in the necessary fluidity of such tactics, but the military monolith is often slow to adopt lessons gleaned from battle. To further complicate the matter, there are always plenty of defense industry opportunists promoting their tactics as dogma, such as the failed “hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency, further setting back any notion of catching up with the current threat, and the shift from the war on terror to the GPC has only exacerbated this strategic buffering.
The shift from counter-terrorism to GPC occurred long before the official end of the GWOT. Although some within the defense and intelligence communities saw the writing on the wall for some time, the declared pivot came in 2018 with the new National Defense Strategy, issued by then Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis “Long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia,” the guidance reads,” are the principal priorities for the Department [of Defense].”
The Pentagon, in other words, was announcing plans to take us back to a Cold War mindset. In a space-race type fashion, we would need to outfox the competition in arms, technology and influence in order to maintain our world power monopoly. Unfortunately, our drawdown in the Middle East and the swan song of the war on terror would mean a natural decrease in the defense budget, hampering any lofty dreams of competition.
Unless, of course, the new threat required a level of spending generally associated with kinetic warfare. A little thing like the absence of active armed conflict shouldn’t stop the growth of the defense industry. And in that spirit, the Pentagon’s budget reached its highest level last year, a whopping $816 billion.
A Brief PRIMER on Information Operations
During my final six years of service, in a move that seemed to parallel the national defense strategy, I shifted from Counter-Terrorism focused special boat operations to conducting sensitive intelligence activities aimed at the Great Power Competition. Our task was to clandestinely prepare the battlespace, establishing an operational environment that would give us an advantage in the event of a hot war, but more importantly, shaping the environment so that our adversary couldn’t do the same. Our best tool in this endeavor was Information Operations.
A Joint Chiefs of Staff publication on Information Operations, Joint Publication 3-13, reads:
Information Operations (IO) are described as the integrated employment of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC), in concert with specific supporting and related capabilities, to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making while protecting our own.
I’d left this world behind when I found myself at WEST 2023. Now a mere observer of the military industrial complex, I picked up a copy of Signal to orient myself to the occasion. Signal is the official magazine of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, or AFCEA, one of WEST 2023’s many sponsors. In fact, the conference had so many sponsors that it developed a funder caste system, segregating the donors into categories such as Premier, Platinum, Gold and Silver.
Amongst defense heavyweights Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, was a lesser-known company down in the silver category named Primer. Primer is one of the many artificial intelligence and machine learning-focused companies orbiting the defense industry. Aside from AT&T, the silver sponsors blended together in an indistinguishable list of obscure defense contractors, and perhaps Primer would’ve remained obscure, too, had the company not acquired Yonder, an Austin, Texas-based “information integrity” company.
Primer had already entered the disinformation space, in 2020, when it won a Small Business Innovation Research, or SBIR, contract with the Air Force and Special Operation Command, SOCOM, to develop the first machine learning platform to automatically identify and assess suspected disinformation. This evolution into the disinformation world was fully realized with its 2022 acquisition of Yonder, an “information integrity” company focused on detecting and disrupting disinformation campaigns online.
Yonder, originally New Knowledge, rose to prominence when they co-authored a report to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian influence campaigns leading up to the 2016 Presidential election. Ironically, New Knowledge’s own foray into election meddling would make them a household name. During the 2017 Alabama Senate race, New Knowledge’s CEO, Jonathon Morgan, created a fake Facebook page and Twitter “botnet” with the intent of persuading votes for the Democratic candidate.
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” said an internal document from Morgan’s project.
In another bit of controversy, New Knowledge, in the wake of the alleged Russian election meddling of 2016, helped develop a disinformation dashboard with the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, or ASD. The dashboard, named Hamilton 68, acted as a repository for supposed Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operatives, with access limited to a select few. This was ASD’s golden tablet, and only journalists and academics could wield the seer stone.
Unfortunately for all involved, including the media who treated the information as gospel, the dashboard proved most successful at identifying overzealous conservatives from middle America. This legacy, and all its implications, came part and parcel with Yonder’s acquisition.
In Primer’s catalog of machine learning products, Yonder is billed as a tool capable of identifying bad actors and narrative manipulation — Primer’s very own weapon against Information Operations.
Disinformation, propaganda, active measures — whatever you call it, the name of the game is Information Operations, or IO. In a war where battles are left of boom–where the strategy is to manipulate the information landscape to gain a competitive advantage over your adversary–a cat-and-mouse-like game develops. But with the advent of the internet, and its compounding stores of information, the task of determining what is real and what is fake is too much to ask of us mere mortals. Thus the need for a Yonder-style solution.
“I’m not a fan of the term disinformation,” the counter-disinformation expert said.
The statement came as a bit of throat clearing for the industry expert, as she digressed into a brief indictment of the trade she very much believes in.
“It’s been politicized. Even though disinformation has a distinct definition, it’s now being used as a label for any unwelcome information that someone doesn’t like, even when that information is true.”
A new industry has developed out of the great disinformation scare. A mishmash of government, academic and private industry experts, come together to identify what is true, and what isn’t. Or at least their idea of what they would like to be true and not true.
Most, if not all, countries dabble in information manipulation, not to mention non-state tricksters and deception artists, so it makes sense that you would need a cross-functional team of experts for such an undertaking. And given the implications of an information governing body, a kind of truth authority, you would damn well expect that all parties involved would be aboveboard.
But…
“Any industry has hucksters,” the expert said.
The term huckster, perhaps because of its old world feel, brought to mind a scene from the Clint Eastwood film The Outlaw Josey Wales:
The camera pans across a dusty frontier town as a carpetbagging salesman in a white suit holds the attention of a crowd, proselytizing about his magic elixir.
“What’s in it?” a man from the crowd asks.
“Ehh…I don’t know, various things. I’m only the salesman,” the man in the white suit replies.
He looks the salesman up and down.
“You drink it,” the man says as he walks off.
The man in white looks shaken by the question. He recomposes himself before returning to the crowd.
“Well, what can you expect from a non-believer?”
Enter the New Snake Oil Salesman
“You can charge more if you call it information operations,” said one veteran, working in commercial Information Operations. He asked that I not reveal the company he works for but needless to say, it is one of the many government contracted companies peddling AI driven counter-disinformation products.
His voice was flat with a dry, matter of fact delivery. There was no surprise in this revelation, not for him at least.
“And the higher the clearance level [of the project], the more money.”
The second part was less surprising. Anyone familiar with government contracts will share my lack of shock. It has been my experience that government contracts are reliably unreliable. The only thing you can count on is a cronyistic leveraging of relationships within the Department of Defense (DOD).
One former Primer employee referred to this as the “kabuki theater”: A vague request from the government, limited by over-classification and reluctance to “give too much away,” followed by a lavish set of promises from the contract winner, despite not having the specificity to deliver a quality product. These hollow requests make it impossible for the company to even know if they can deliver their empty promises.
“We need a machine learning tool, capable of dissecting media posts to identify and catalog state sponsored disinformation,” a DOD contracting officer might say to a Primer account executive.
“What systems will this work on?” the account executive asks.
“Classified ones.”
“Can we have access to them? It will help us.”
“Nope, classified.”
“Can we at least…”
“Nope. Here’s $10 million, good luck!”
The end result is just what you’d expect: an overly expensive useless doodad. Any oversight from the requesting agency is unlikely to catch this before it’s too late, given they rarely have the technical expertise to know what they are asking for in the first place.
“I don’t even use my company’s products,” the IO expert said, “I don’t find any of it useful.”
Even though his work is in information operations, he says it is more akin to public relations than traditional IO, just layered in secrecy for effect. This was not the first time I’d heard the comparison to the PR/ marketing world. As a matter of fact, the counter-disinformation expert suggested that many of the tools marketed to counter disinformation are simply recycled marketing products. Companies use social listening software, designed to analyze consumer wants by monitoring their online behavior, and marketing tools to construct the perfect narrative to sell their product. So to detect “bad” narratives, one only has to reverse engineer the process.
“Marketers use these types of social listening tools to understand who their target audience is, how to best reach them, and how best to craft a viral message. Analysts can use them to understand how state-sponsored messages traverse across the internet, hopping from platform to platform, and if they’re resonating with target audiences,” the counter-disinformation expert said.
So what? Many popular products were originally meant for some other use. Viagra was supposed to lower blood pressure, now it just redirects it. What’s the problem in finding a secondary use for a product that already exists? Nothing, provided you don’t make outlandish claims about the “new” product.
“With Yonder, you can slice through streams of social media to gain contextual intelligence on narratives – including their authenticity and likely trajectory of amplification…Understanding the intent, affiliations, and influence of adversarial networks provides you with critical insight into emerging topics and events before they go viral.”
Other companies in the counter-disinformation industry, like Graphika, Two Six Technologies and PeakMetrics, make similar claims using comparable marketing terminology for their AI driven products. It turns out, however, that regardless of the efficacy of these tools, the Defense Department is not equipped to handle them.
“The tech solutions aren’t all that great,” the IO expert said. “The DOD isn’t advanced enough, doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep up with the contracted solutions”. The bureaucracy of DOD acquisitions leaves the military in a perpetual state of obsolescence, always behind the powercurve of technology and innovation of their defense industry counterparts.
“The US is doing a shit job at [countering] disinformation,” the IO expert said, in another bit of optimistic revelation.
One problem is the lack of organization in the effort. While government agencies like the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) claim to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation,” the reality is a scattered series of efforts across the government and private entities. This resulting chaos is exacerbated by the fact that the GEC is largely staffed by Foreign Service Officers and contractors, who typically don’t have a background or deep understanding of IO or disinformation.
There are, of course, actual IO professionals in the space, both on the government and private side of things. These subject matter experts are a hot commodity in the task saturated world of the counter-disinformation industry, but that doesn’t mean that any IO hack can make the grade. To ensure they get the very elite, the industry has stringent requirements: X number of years as an IO expert, an active Top Secret security clearance, SCIF (sensitive compartmentalized information facility) access, and, of course, the ever-important connections to the right people. What you end up with is a small pool of the same industry experts, playing a game of musical chairs from place to place, ensuring the same entrenched mindset manifests across all aspects of the industry.
A Collective Paranoia
The military is a paranoid organization. If you need proof, look no further than the posters plastered all over military installations.
“Loose lips…might sink ships,” reads one poster.
“He’s Watching You,” reads another.
The paranoia, however, is justifiable in many instances. Being the most powerful military inspires competition, and competition can be ugly. Espionage, sabotage and propaganda are always on the menu of adversary tactics to deceive and compromise.
The modern disinformation scare has, no doubt, exacerbated this paranoia. Healthy suspicion, the kind that keeps the evildoers at bay, sometimes turns toxic, resulting in operational paralysis and rampant mistrust, setting off a chain of reactionary measures run amuck. Since the military is reactive by nature, only really employed when there is a tangible threat, our tactics to disrupt the flow of disinformation are inherently reactive as well.
It is due to this failed strategy that the counter-disinformation expert recommends a more proactive approach to countering, or more appropriately, preventing the fallout from potential disinformation campaigns. Her recommendations: media literacy and civic engagement.
A more critical media consumer, although hard to imagine at the moment, isn’t a bridge too far, yet the civic engagement angle seems to be. As skeptical as people are of the media, it pales in comparison to the distrust many Americans have for the government. But rather than entertain ideas of how to rebuild that trust, and possibly embolden local leaders and everyday citizens to take ownership of their relationship with the information they ingest and propagate, Washington seems content with deflecting the blame onto a third party. But for any of it to work, the two recommendations would need to be approached in tandem.
“The majority of actions in the ‘proactive’ realm revolve around making people aware of the potential for misleading/manipulated information and encouraging them to engage critically with the content they consume,” the expert explains.
To support her claim, she directs attention to Taiwan, who reportedly receives more fake news than any other country. Rather than succumb to the overwhelming disinformation campaign, or use artificial intelligence to detect and dismantle it, Taiwan employs the counter-disinformation experts’ proactive strategy.
To achieve this, Taiwan partners with Non-Government Organizations, or NGOs, to promote early age media literacy, which the Ministry of Education has incorporated into its teaching guidelines, along with creating fact checking tools for messaging apps and social media. It is hard to know whether these tools are any more successful than the myriad of ones offered by the burgeoning counter-disinformation industry, but Taiwan’s proactive measures signal a move in a better direction.
Former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs, an architect of modern DHS anti-disinformation policies. Perhaps initiatives like this, employed in the US and globally, can put an end to the counter-disinformation industry. It is, after all, beginning to show cracks. The recent dismantling of the Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation subcommittee, the murky remnants of the Department of Homeland Security’s failed Disinformation Governance Board, indicates a possible sea change. No doubt a more malevolent entity will take its place, but maybe, just maybe, this represents a retreat from the manic steps towards an Orwellian nightmare.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 15:30 - 2023: Echoes Of 1973
2023: Echoes Of 1973
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
So what’s changed? Everything, but mostly beneath the surface churn of circus and theater.
2023 is echoing 1973 in potentially consequential ways.. It’s not just one year, of course; the entire era from 2019 echoes the era that started in 1969, when the second-order effects of postwar policies finally started kicking in.
Consider these similarities / echoes:
1. Major shifts in global capital and trade flows that attracted little notice start to matter in terms of currency valuations, inflation, monetary and fiscal policy and geopolitics: check.
2. After decades of modest inflation, inflation not only rises but is sticky rather than transitory: check.
3. Major shifts in the power structure of global oil markets: check.
4. Cultural and social shifts become divisive, reaching destructive extremes: check.
5. A global superpower is ensnared in a hot war in which the other side is supplied by a superpower rival: check.
6. Political scandals upend the cozy arrangements of political elites: check.
7. A new wave of geopolitical rivalries arise between allies and rivals alike: check.
8. Stock and bond markets keep rallying like nothing’s changed, but since things have changed, each rally fails: check.
Let’s focus on #8: market participants continue assuming that the past 15 years are an accurate guide to the next 15 years, unable or unwilling to face the enormity of the changes that have already occurred in the fundamental structures of state and private-sector finance and the economy. (I discuss these in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal.)
These shifts guarantee the next 15 years will not follow the low-risk scripts of the past 15 years. I’ve explained here many times that systems have their own dynamics, and so they don’t respond to our desires or opinions or our policy tweaks. No matter how many policy tweaks you throw at diminishing returns, for example, returns still diminish–though you can mask this reality temporarily behind extremes of stimulus and other financial sleight of hand.
Tightly bound systems, i.e. highly centralized systems, unravel far more abruptly than loosely bound systems, no matter how many fiscal or monetary policy tweaks you throw at the system.
Path dependency and dependency chains direct what happens next and constrain policy options no matter how many policy tweaks you throw at the system.
Emergent systems exhibit characteristics that are different from those exhibited by each of the component systems. This means that we can combine financial “innovations” that generate X and economic policies that generate Y and end up with Z (for example, the whole shebang collapses in a heap.) What If the Whole Shebang Unravels?
Emergent systems exhibit characteristics that are different from those exhibited by each of the component systems.no matter how many policy tweaks you throw at the system because policy tweaks don’t actually add any meaningful feedback loops or change the tightly bound centralized system. All the tweaks can do is modify a parameter here or there–meaningless to the fundamental dynamics of the system as a whole.
What’s different now is our ability to make realistic assessments has effectively collapsed. As a society and economy, we only seem capable of careening between two states:
1. Complacency / denial
2. Panic
Neither are useful in problem-solving. Rather, both are toxic to problem-solving. Not only do we face an inter-connected tangle of emergent problems, we’ve frittered away our institutional and cultural ability to make realistic assessments, solve the problems in practical, pragmatic ways and agree to share the necessary sacrifices to get the train back on the tracks.
The loss of our collective ability to solve problems means every problem is now unresolvable. The systems dynamics that will play out in the next 15 years are beyond our feeble control, our feeble understanding and our hubristic blindness to our own incapacity to actually solve difficult real-world problems that demand steep costs and long-term sacrifices.
Note that stocks topped out in April 1973 and then crashed for a couple of years. It’s May 2023, but given the 50-year time span, that maps almost perfectly.
The world has changed, but punters and speculators are still chasing the same old sectors, plays and strategies. They will continue to do so, very like for a decade or so, as in the 1970s, until they’ve exhausted their capital or have given up and exited the casino with whatever they still own.
Governments, meanwhile, will do whatever it takes to protect their powers and elites, so the rules will change overnight and what was sacrosanct yesterday is today illegal. Those who exited the previous era with fortunes will find targets have been drawn on their backs (just ask Jack Ma how this works).
Niceties such as “ownership”–such a slippery term, actually–will be jettisoned as essential resources are expropriated, along with the wealth parked by foreigners, and any other tempting stashes of concentrated capital.
So what’s changed? Everything, but mostly beneath the surface churn of circus and theater. There is no ideal historical script that tracks the present exactly, but in rough outline, the 1970s might prove remarkable useful as a guide.
* * *
My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Read the first chapter for free (PDF)
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 15:30 - Russia Issues List Of 500 Americans Under Sanctions, Including Obama & Stephen Colbert
Russia Issues List Of 500 Americans Under Sanctions, Including Obama & Stephen Colbert
Russia has hit back at the International Criminal Court (ICC) after in March it issued a warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which quickly resulted in a handful of European countries saying they would willingly enforce it if Putin ever landed in their territory.
Moscow has now issued its own arrest warrant for top prosecutor at the Hague-based court Karim Khan. Russia’s Interior Ministry even officially added his photograph and file to its “wanted list” in the ministry’s database on Friday. This came also amid travel sanctions announced against a massive list of Americans and top officials.
Khan is a citizen of the United Kingdom, and Russia previously warned he was being investigated for “criminal prosecution of a person known to be innocent” – a reference to Putin and the ICC’s arrest warrant.
However, the new wanted notice didn’t specify Khan’s offense. These tit-for-tat warrants are of course largely symbolic, but could possibly make international travel plans a matter of extra planning and caution, given Khan is now effectively banned from ever entering (or perhaps flying over) Russian territory, where he would be arrested.
The ICC warrant against Putin, at the same time, makes the possibility of diplomacy and dialogue ever more distant.
Russia has also just announced a massive and growing list of Americans barred from ever entering the country, as The Washington Times details:
Former President Barack Obama, late-night television hosts, lawmakers and journalists, including from The Washington Times, are among “500 Americans” that Russia has banned from entering the country.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the move was made “in a response to the regularly anti-Russian sanctions imposed by the Joe Biden administration.”
The Foreign Ministry said the list – which includes 45 members of the U.S. House, Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Katie Britt of Alabama and Eric Schmit of Missouri – was composed of people who spread Russophobia, and supplied Ukraine with arms.
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, a columnist and commentary section editor at The Washington Times, was among the blackballed members of the media. Nick Paton Walsh, a CNN reporter and British citizen, was on the list.
Late-night comedians Jimmy Kimmell, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers are also on the list, along with former US Ambassador Jon Huntsman.
Barack Obama among 500 US nationals banned from entering Russia https://t.co/nBu2aZ7gS2 pic.twitter.com/QvfuVnrAVl
— Citizen TV Kenya (@citizentvkenya) May 20, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Currently, President Biden and other world leaders are meeting in Hiroshima, Japan for the G7 summit, where Ukraine’s President Zelensky is present as well. High on the agenda is freshly expanded Russian sanctions, and discussions underway over how to further punish Moscow for the Ukraine war.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 15:00 - Energy Commissioner Warns Of 'Major Threats' To Power Grid
Energy Commissioner Warns Of ‘Major Threats’ To Power Grid
Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Hope is a powerful energy, but it won’t keep the air conditioner on when summer temperatures soar and demand for electricity skyrockets, causing an overburdened electrical grid to grind to a stop.
With a hotter than usual summer projected, federal agencies are warning utilities of an “elevated risk” of power outages across two-thirds of North America between June and September. (Carlos Giusti/AP Photo) Yet that seems to be the Biden administration’s plan in addressing warnings that nine North American regional electrical grids face an “elevated risk” of power outages this summer, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie maintains.
“I take it as, ‘We hope we can through the summer. We think we have a chance if the weather is normal,’” he said during a May 18 FERC meeting. “We hope we get all good news this summer.”
Christie was critiquing the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Policy & Innovation and Office of Electric Reliability responses to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC)’s annual summer reliability assessment that forecasts brown-outs and black-outs across two-thirds of North America between June and September if there are “wide-area” heat waves, drought, and wildfires.
NERC, a not-for-profit public-private entity staffed with industry representatives, provides the DOE and state regulators with reliability assessments of the electrical grid from Canada to northern Mexico.
The commission is a subsidiary of FERC, which regulates transmission, pipelines, and interstate wholesale prices of electricity and natural gas.
The FERC board consists of five appointed members with one seat currently vacant. There are two Democrats, including Chair Willie Phillips, and two Republicans, including Christie, who was appointed to the commission by President Donald Trump in 2018.
California Independent System Operator announced a statewide electricity Flex Alert urging conservation to avoid blackouts in El Segundo, California on Aug. 31, 2022. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images) Non-Synchronous Problem is the Solution
In its assessment, NERC cites the “changing resource mix” driven by Biden’s goal to “decarbonize” the U.S. electrical grid by 2035 as spurring a disjointed transition from coal, oil, and natural gas to renewable energies, such as wind, solar, and nuclear.
With electricity demand increasing—it is projected to increase by at least 50 percent by 2050—fossil fuel plants are being retired more quickly than they are being replaced by plants generating electricity from “renewable” green sources, fostering fears of shortages that could see electricity prices soar.
“You’ve heard me say, and you’ve heard me say often, reliability is job one, and that is our focus of many of the orders we have today” including the NERC assessment, Phillips said.
The NERC assessment and other FERC programs address “the rapidly changing resource mix,” but added he is concerned about the “projected addition over the next decade of an unprecedented proportion of non-synchronous resources.”
Those resources include solar, wind, and hydropower, which are “non-synchronous” because they produce different amounts of electricity depending on conditions. Too much reliance on non-synchronous renewable energy generation can decrease overall grid stability, NERC maintains.
Nevertheless, the DOE agencies’ plan to remedy summer storm and heat wave shortfalls is adding more “non-synchronous” energy to the resource mix.
Energy Industry Analyst James Burchill of the Office of Energy Policy & Innovation told the commission that a “warmer than average summer [is] expected this year” with the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Agency forecasting a “50- to 70-percent chance of higher than normal temperatures this summer in most parts of the country.”
Burchill said aggregate net power generation this summer is expected to increase to 1,167 gigawatts (GW) from 1,138 GWs last summer “primarily from solar and wind generation that has been added or will begin service.”
An additional 4 GWs of energy storage capacity has been added nationwide for the second year in a row, “making battery storage the fourth-largest type of capacity addition to the grid by the end of summer 2023,” he said.
“Resource additions outpaced retirements, with rapid growth in storage capacity,” which should suffice in supplementing base grid generation, Burchill said. NERC maintains this should be adequate under normal operating conditions.
“Tracking recent trends,” he said, “much of the added capacity this summer will likely come from wind, solar, natural gas-fired (plants), and battery storage projects while retirements will most be coal-fired.”
Giant wind turbines near Interstate 10 are powered by strong prevailing winds near Palm Springs, California. (David McNew/Getty Images) ‘Good News’ Fueled By Wind, Sun, Hope
NERC Director of Reliability John Moura was less rosy, telling the commission the assessment “found that new resource additions will meet that [normal] demand, but the loss in capacity from retirements is increasing the risk of electricity shortages during wide-area heat waves and other extreme weather conditions.”
To be clear, he said, “All areas meet reliability criteria and have adequate resources for normal demand. However, we also found more areas are likely to have energy risks during the more extreme scenarios that we assess.”
Wind energy, in particular, is a concern, Moura said. “When low-wind factors are factored in” generation in peak demand is “not sufficient.”
“New wind and solar are not one-for-one replacements of retiring fossil plants,” Commissioner Allison Clements said. “They are not intended to create a reliable grid in isolation.”
She said that “properly accrediting the ability of all resource types during shortages is critical to reliability,” which is what the NERC assessment recommends and what is happening.
“It is important that we avoid jumping to conclusions, though, before we collectively kick the tires on the assumptions in this report,” Clements said, highlighting upcoming industry forums in Portland, Maine, and Austin, Texas, as opportunities for experts to find solutions, such as “grid-enhancing technologies.”
Fossil fuel plant retirements “are one important piece of a larger reliability puzzle and solving that puzzle starts with an analysis of all the pieces,” she said.
Phillips, who was heckled by climate change activists in his opening remarks and as the meeting concluded, said that despite concerns over summer outages, “I think there is some good news here. We’re seeing things trending in the right direction over the last year.”
That’s not what Christie said he’s seeing.
“The long-term trends, I don’t think are good news,” he said. “I think we have some major, major threats facing the reliability of the grid. The long-term trend is we are losing dispatchable generation at a rate that is unsustainable and it is going to have negative consequences in the future.”
But there’s the wind, the sun, and the hope that it all works out, Christie said.
“If wind doesn’t show up, there is insufficient dispatchable generating capacity,” he said. “So, we hope it does.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 05/20/2023 – 14:30
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