- Zuesse: Americans Are Only Now Beginning To Learn They Live In A Dictatorship
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The first time when it became clear to me that I live in a dictatorship was in 2014 when reading, prior to its publication, the landmark (and still the only) scientific empirical study to address the question as to whether or not the United States federal Government is, authentically, a democracy — or, whether, alternatively, it's instead more of a dictatorship, than a democracy.
This study documented conclusively that America's Government is the latter.
So, on 14 April 2014, I headlined “US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy, Says Scientific Study”. Subsequently, my editor linked it to the published article at the Journal where the study was published, Perspectives on Politics, from the American Political Science Association, and the full study can be read there.
On 30 April 2014, was posted at youtube the video that remains, to this day, the best and clearest ordinary-language summary of what that badly-written academic study proved. See its explanation here:
That summary’s title is also better than the title of my article was; this excellent video headlines “Corruption is Legal in America”, which is another accurate conclusion from that study. Every American citizen should know what this 6-minute video says and shows from the academic study, because it explains how the super-rich, as a class, steal from everyone else (everyone who isn’t super-rich): They do it through corruption.
Then, that same person who created the video did another presentation of it, but this time with text accompanying the video, and this article was titled "One graph shows how the rich control American politics”, and it indeed showed how. The super-rich carry out their control via corruption, which is legal in America and which can be done vastly more by rich people than by poor people — poor people simply can’t buy the Government, and any who would even attempt to do so would be using only the illegal means, which the US Supreme Court says constitutes the only illegal means, and that's blatant bribery, which is lower-class corruption, not the far more lucrative type of corruption that super-wealthy individuals have access to. Only the forms of corruption which are available only to the super-rich are legal in America. That’s the reason why the super-rich keep getting still-richer, while the rest of the population are lucky if they don’t become poorer.
On 28 July 2015, former US President Jimmy Carter was frank about this situation; as a caller at a progressive radio show, he said this about America’s soaring top-level corruption:
It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it's just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and US Senators and congress members. So, now we've just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. …
At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell."
Three days later, Huffington Post published my article about that statement, which was headlined “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the US Is No Longer a Democracy,” and it had over 60,000 likes on Facebook (here the article is shown a bit earlier, when it had 56,000) but HuffPo reduced that number down to its currently shown number, 18,000; and this article turned out to have been the last submission of the 100+ that they accepted from me. They've rejected all of my submissions after it. No explanation was ever given, and I never heard anything from them again.
The scientific article about America’s Government had reviewed 1,779 pieces of proposed legislation during the period from 1981 to 2002, and it found that only what the super-rich wanted to become law did become law: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” they said. That’s certainly not a democracy.
There has been speculation as to how far back historically America’s government-by-the-aristocracy (or, simply, America’s being an aristocracy — a rule over the public by the few super-rich, an “oligarchy”) has been in effect. Prior to Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, going back to the time when FDR died in office in 1945 as the President, the distribution of income and of wealth was much more equal in America than it started to become as soon as Reagan entered the White House and began the subsequent dominance of supply-side economics, which is based upon the supply-push belief that wealth trickles down from the few rich, instead of (as FDR believed) in a demand-pull way, that it percolates up from the many poor. FDR believed that what drives an economy is needs, not the products and services to fill needs. Reagan believed in the opposite, Say’s law, which says that whatever is produced will fill needs (or at least desires) — that production is what drives an economy, and that needs (and desires) just take care of themselves. So, FDR focused on “the common man” and especially the poor, but Reagan focused on “entrepreneurs” or the owners of businesses. (The middle class isn’t an issue here, but is simply the richer portion of the poor. Historically that has been the case. For example, America’s middle class has declined while the poor have mushroomed, but the top 5% are getting all of the gains; and most of that is going to the top 1% or even less. So: “poor” here includes the middle-class; and, to refer to “middle-class America” is now like referring to a dying breed — but it’s a breed of poor, not of rich.)
However, the extreme corruption at the top in this country is showing up more sharply than ever in recently declassified US Government documents about the JFK assassination — showing up as having begun much earlier than had generally been suspected, begun at least by the time when President Kennedy came into office on 20 January 1961. Kennedy found himself surrounded by the military-industrial complex that his predecessor, Eisenhower, had cultivated while he was in the White House and that “Ike” hypocritically warned the American public against, on his way out of office, only on 17 January 1961 — three days before Kennedy’s inauguration. Some of these corrupt people were ones whom Kennedy himself had brought in. Not all of them were Ike’s holdovers. But Kennedy was apparently shocked, nonetheless.
The beginnings of this profound corruption might be traced still farther back to moles in the Government (such as the Dulles brothers, Averell Harriman and Prescott Bush) who had built their careers after World War I by means of plying and mastering the revolving door between the Government’s foreign-policy Establishment and Wall Street.
Starting at the very end of WW II, in 1945, agents of these moles ended FDR’s Office of Strategic Services and started Truman’s CIA. Right from the get-go, the CIA was deeply corrupt, as the following 2.5-hour BBC documentary from 1992 makes clear:
Operation Gladio – Full 1992 documentary BBC
It documents from testimony of former CIA operatives in Europe, that the CIA had been hiring European aristocrats and committed fascists and even ‘former’ Nazis, to set up terrorist incidents in Europe rigged so as to be blamed by the public against communists and against any entities that were favorable in any way toward the Soviet Union. Numberless Europeans were injured and killed in terrorist incidents that were set up by the CIA to be, basically, anti-communist propaganda. This CIA operation was called “Gladio,” and it continues to this day, even though communism itself is gone.
Subsequently, a video was done that’s far briefer, 50 minutes, and which starts with interviews of some of the survivors of these CIA-NATO operations, so that it’s far more from the victims’ perspective than was the BBC’s lengthier documentary:
NATO’s Secret Armies (2009)
When Kennedy became President, he found himself surrounded by advisors who were urging him such as, on 22 March 1962, John Kennedy’s own brother and US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy did, when RFK held a meeting to discuss “the possibility of US manufacture or acquisition of Soviet aircraft” because:
“There is a possibility that such aircraft could be used in a deception operation designed to confuse enemy planes in the air, to launch a surprise attack against enemy installations or in a provocation operation in which Soviet aircraft would appear to attack US or friendly installations in order to provide an excuse for US intervention. If the planes were to be used in such covert operations, it would seem preferable to manufacture them in the United States.”
And, also like this (on 12 April 1962, from a Major General and CIA officer — see it on page 16):
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of a Cuban agent and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.”
Even JFK’s own brother RFK, and Secretary of ‘Defense’ Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk — plus lots of holdovers from the Eisenhower Administration — thought that this sort of thing would be worth the President of the United States considering. Fortunately, JFK didn’t.
Michael Ellison had gotten to see a bit of the 12 April 1962 document decades earlier and he reported it on 2 May 2001 in Britain’s Guardian under the headline “Memos disclose US cold-war plot to frame Castro”. Ellison wrote that “The idea was an element in a wider scheme that ‘may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government’, asserts James Bamford.” Since Bamford is perhaps the world’s leading journalist and historian who has written about the NSA (books such as his 1983 The Puzzle Palace), for even him to have expressed surprise in 2001 that the US Government, at its top level, was predominantly staffed by people who were racking their brains to figure out ways to fake Soviet terrorism and attacks so as for the US and NATO to have a pretext to invade the Soviet Union, indicates how much more cynical we all have become after George W. Bush’s lies about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ as pretexts for the US and its collaborators to invade and destroy Iraq in 2003. Not only was John Kennedy surprised to discover it in 1962, but James Bamford was surprised to discover it even as late as 2001. Bamford in 2001 might not have said what he said there if he had seen that 1992 BBC documentary, which showed that the top level of the CIA had been like this from the time when the CIA started in 1947. But with so much history behind us now and which had still been classified information, and thus non-public, until 2001 when Bamford said that the 12 April 1962 document described “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US Government,” we today are hardly surprised at all to discover it.
The corruption at the top of the US Government has long since overflowed its banks, out into the public’s consciousness. Not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can put the myth of US Government decency together again.
- Can The US Survive An EMP Attack?
While there’s no question that a nuclear strike on the Continental US would be utterly devastating, it’s not the only way a rogue state like North Korea could kill millions of American civilians in one fell swoop.
Another possibility that is being studied by lawmakers and Pentagon officials is – like North Korea itself – a vestige of the Cold War. We’re of course referring to an electromagnetic pulse. By detonating a hydrogen bomb in just the right spot miles above the Earth’s surface, the North could permanently damage the US power grid – maybe even take it offline completely. By robbing entire swaths of the US of electricity, the North could precipitate thousands – if not millions – of deaths.
The North first threatened an EMP attack over the summer, and North Korean media and its people have mentioned it several times since.
Given the success of the North’s missile tests, Congress increased funding for the Commission to Assess the Threat to the US from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack as part of the National Defense Authorization Act back in September.
Last month, federal agencies and utility executives held GridEx IV, a biennial event where officials responsible for hundreds of local utilities game out scenarios in which North America’s power grid could fail. Unsurprisingly, with the North Korean threat looming, these discussions took on a whole new level of urgency, as Bloomberg explains.
This year, the event took on an added urgency given growing concern with a weapon straight out of the Cold War: an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, emanating from a nuclear blast – specifically, one delivered by a North Korean missile or satellite detonated miles above the Earth. Though GridEx IV didn’t pose this exact scenario, industry experts concede there’s no clear plan to deal with it.
An EMP could damage electronic circuits over large areas, depending on the configuration of the weapon and how high it was detonated, though there’s disagreement over how effective such a tactic would be. Scientists also emphasize that a nuclear bomb that hits a ground target is much more worrisome. Nevertheless, with North Korea’s increasingly successful missile and warhead tests in mind, Congress moved to renew funding for the Commission to Assess the Threat to the US from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
In September, the commission’s top officials warned lawmakers that the threat of an EMP attack from a rogue nation “becomes one of the few ways that such a country could inflict devastating damage to the U.S."
GridEx IV participants said the use of an EMP, however improbable, has been very much on their radar. Lisa Barton, executive vice president of Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Co.’s transmission unit, said the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry research arm, was analyzing the risk. An EPRI report published this week emphasized that widespread damage was indeed possible from such an attack.
The consensus was hardly reassuring. How damaging would an EMP attack be? Well, nobody can say for sure. But according to a report from the Electric Power Research Institute, an EMP could easily trigger a “mass casualty event” – even if its impact was limited to a specific region, as one of their simulations suggested…
Still, the EPRI report paints a picture that’s hard to ignore. Simulations showed that detonating a nuclear weapon about 250 miles above the Earth using a 1.4 megaton bomb, almost 100 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima, would likely collapse voltage regionally, affecting several states but not the entire eastern or western networks. “None of the scenarios that were evaluated resulted in a nationwide grid collapse,” the report stated. Recovery time from a high-altitude EMP would depend on equipment damage, something the EPRI said it plans to study next year and “develop cost-effective options for mitigating."
Fortunately, the operators of America’s power grids have some experience developing emergency response scenarios for an EMP. As it turns out, an EMP would essentially mimic the effects of an extremely powerful solar flare. Power grid operators are constantly on the lookout for flares, and have theorized what improvements might be needed to make power grids totally resistant.
PJM Interconnection LLC, operator of the power grid serving one-fifth of America's population, has a lot of experience protecting systems against solar activity. PJM has also been working with transmission owners to protect against other threats, many of which have two specific characteristics: low probability and high potential for catastrophe, said Mike Bryson, vice president of operations for the Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based operator. An EMP is one of them.
Power companies have made a few moves to protect against electromagnetic interference. Some grid operators and transmission infrastructure owners are putting in place so-called Faraday enclosures, shields of conductive material used to protect electronic equipment and facilities. Utilities have also started stockpiling spare parts to replace any that are damaged by an EMP event, storms or other disasters.
“I don’t think we have an illusion we will prevent it,” Bryson said in an interview. “That’s really the government’s job."
Expensive fortifications known as Faraday cages could help diffuse the energy pulse, possibly stopping it from overwhelming a power grid. Another option would be installing automated control systems that would regulate the grid’s response to an EMP, potentially allowing it to recover more quickly.
Duke Energy Corp., one of the country’s largest utility owners, has been working with EPRI to study its threat to civilian infrastructure. Lee Mazzocchi, Duke’s senior vice president of grid solutions, said “we really want to use science and research to validate if and how much an EMP threat there could be."
Jon Rogers, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, has been studying the threat since the 1990s. The lab has been looking at how automated control systems could help systems recover. Rogers noted that the grid already has lightning surge arrestors to protect against strikes, which could potentially be useful in case of an EMP. “There are open questions,” he said.
“Back in the Cold War, we worried about massive exchanges at the time with the Soviet bloc,” Rogers said. “There seems to be reduced concern about that and increased concern about a single or smaller surges and what that could mean.” Targeted attacks on specific elements of infrastructure are seen as more likely, including “using an EMP without going nuclear,” added Jeff Engle, vice president of government and legal affairs for United Data Technologies, a security services firm.
“EMP technology itself has been advancing with devices becoming smaller, more effective,” said Engle, who declined to give specific examples. Along these lines, the industry’s stance has been to prepare for less-intense EMPs from irregular lightning strikes, solar flares—and possibly localized attacks.
Researchers at the Edison Electric Institute believe an EMP would be tremendously damaging to a wide range of critical infrastructure…
For EMPs resulting from nuclear blasts, the Edison Electric Institute, an industry group, said the possible effects aren’t fully understood and proposed fixes remain unproven and impractical.
“Other sectors of the economy likely will be affected by a nuclear EMP attack, including other critical infrastructure sectors upon which the electric sector depends,” the group said in a 2015 paper titled Electromagnetic Pulses (EMPs):
Myths vs. Facts. “It makes little sense to protect the electric grid while ignoring these other critical infrastructure sectors."
…But the costs of fending off such an attack would be astronomical – as one scientist put it. Making the entire US power grid immune to an EMP would cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
Richard Mroz, president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, warned the cost of preventing widespread failures from an EMP would “be astronomical.” Placing transformers or a substations in shielded cages would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, he said, while protecting critical assets on a distribution system like New Jersey’s could reach into the billions of dollars.
“Managing that kind of threat right now—no one really has the resources to do that,” Mroz said.
As we pointed out back in October, one expert told Congress that an EMP could kill off 90% of the US population. People who lived through the New York City blackout in 1977 will remember how lootings and crime exploded while the lights were out. A similar phenomenon would likely play out following an EMP, as law enforcement would be hobbled and powerless to contain criminal behavior.
Think about how Hurricanes Irma and Maria devastated Puerto Rico by knocking out all communication and electricity infrastructure. Three months later, it has yet to be fully restored. Meanwhile, the death toll from the storms is on track to eclipse the thousands who died during Hurricane Katrina.
…Now imagine that scenario playing out across the entire Atlantic seaboard…
- If Libs Were Smart They Would Push For Mueller Firing Himself Now
The desperation of U.S. liberals to find some truth in the claims that Donald Trump’s campaign staff colluded with Russian state actors is approaching infinity.
FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s testimony to the House Intelligence Committee all but confirms that the only ‘proof’ the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller have of collusion is the discredited “Trump Dossier.”
This dossier was compiled by Christopher Steele and sold to the Clinton Campaign as opposition research by Fusion GPS. McCabe stonewalled the HIC on this matter but couldn’t point to anything in the dossier that the FBI verified to be true other than publicly-known knowledge of Carter Page visiting Moscow in 2016.
And the last time I checked (as least for now) visiting Moscow is not a crime.
Neither is what Michael Flynn did a crime either, but let’s not bring facts in to dash the hope of the terminally insane.
McCabe has to stonewall on this issue otherwise he and the rest of the FBI are guilty of acting on behalf of Hillary Clinton to assist in spying on her political opponent. Because that’s where all of this leads if people would take their ideological blinders off for five seconds and look at what we actually know as opposed to what we ‘just know to be true.’
Everyone involved in this sordid affair should be tried for espionage and treason.
Those prominent liberals running around protesting the mere thought of Donald Trump shutting down the Mueller investigation to ‘protect the sanctity of our elections’ are a bunch of simpering morons.
And I’m sick to death of the blatant and rank hypocrisy when it comes to election fraud in this country.
For this reason alone, the Mueller investigation should be shut down.
The Stupid Show
Look, anyone taking the rumor seriously that Donald Trump was close to shutting Mueller’s investigation down should have their head examined. This was a blatant plant by the Washington Post (and the CIA, let’s get real) to create exactly the kind of response from the Wil Wheatons of our world.
These people are simply ab-reacting noradrenaline junkies living in their amygdalas 24/7 while the world moves on without them.
Oh, important thing that I forgot: There are hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans who are prepared to take to the streets when Trump tries to fire Mueller, DAG Rosenstein, or otherwise shut down the investigation. We’re organizing here: https://t.co/0NjevMQ4oN (13/12)
— Wil ‘Kick the Nazis off the tweeters’ Wheaton (@wilw) December 19, 2017
I don’t know if we can stop it from happening, or if there are even enough Republicans in government who are capable of putting our country ahead of their party. But read up and know your history, just in case: https://t.co/79YhjPcKq9 (12/12)
— Wil ‘Kick the Nazis off the tweeters’ Wheaton (@wilw) December 19, 2017
If this isn’t the picture of someone in serious need of psychotherapy then …
In the same week we also get this little ditty by Newsweek. You don’t think these things aren’t coordinated to evoke this kind of response in ‘soy-boy’ Wheaton?
Painter, who worked under former president George W. Bush, appeared on MSNBC to discuss the widely criticized Fox News segment that suggested the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign could be considered a coup.
“The commander in chief is Donald Trump,” Painter said. “There is a risk of him using that power to destroy our democracy, whether you call it a coup or anything else. It’s not from the critics of Donald Trump that the danger is posed, it’s the fact that the man who is commander in chief of our military is engaged in obstruction of justice.”
The salient point here is why would Trump shut down Mueller?
Mueller has nothing on him. The longer this goes on the worse it looks for everyone involved and Trump comes out looking like the victim of a political witch-hunt.
Trump knows and has known from the beginning that there was nothing to investigate.
The only question has been whether Mueller could invent something through nigh-onto-illegal pressuring of people like Flynn, caught in the usual FBI web of procedural dishonesty, to turn on Trump and perjure themselves to avoid a prison sentence.
Trump v. Mueller
In fact, the more I think about the sequence of events, the more I think the meeting between Trump and Mueller the evening before Mueller was appointed as Special Counsel involved Trump telling Mueller, “Good luck finding anything, Bob, I’ll hang you by your own rope when this is all over.”
If I were in Trump’s position I would have done exactly that. I would have goaded Mueller into this, knowing full well that Uranium One was out there. This would have lit a fire under Mueller to cast a wide net, turn over every rock looking for any kind of dirt. Doing so would expose the whole rotten mess and Mueller looks like a guy running around investigating himself in the end.
Remember, Trump is the one that brought up Uranium One in the first place on the campaign trail.
In response, Hillary, as she always does, then accused Trump of that which she was actually guilty of – colluding with the Russians and using her position for personal gain.
The people who want to believe in Russia-Gate are missing this in their zeal to rid the world of Trump to validate their own failing world-view.
The longer this investigation goes on the more it will uncover the truth about what happened. In my mind, all the Mueller is doing now is compiling the actual case to exonerate himself over Uranium One and throw the rest of the FBI under the bus.
Given what we already know, I’d say Bob’s done a good job of this and it’s time for him to step aside and let this play out.
- Silicon Valley Obscenity – 1 In 4 People Are "Food Insecure"
In the years since the first dot-com bubble burst, Silicon Valley has become emblematic of the intensifying wealth inequality that’s making life increasingly unaffordable for millions of working- and middle-class Americans.
And while the unprecedented wealth creation in the region has helped enrich hundreds of thousands of tech workers and entrepreneurs, virtually everybody else in the region – from college students to the cafeteria workers and janitors who service the headquarters of storied tech firms like Google and Facebook – has suffered from rising rents and a cost of living that’s far outstripped wage inflation.
Now, a study has found that more than one in four Silicon Valley residents is food insecure – meaning they go without at least one meal or rely on food pantries due to lack of financial resources, according to researchers at the Second Harvest food bank.
Using hundreds of community interviews and data modeling, a new study suggests that 26.8% of the population – almost 720,000 people – meet this ignominious designation. Furthermore, nearly a quarter are families with children.
“We call it the Silicon Valley paradox,” says Steve Brennan, the food bank’s marketing director. “As the economy gets better we seem to be serving more people.” Since the recession, Second Harvest has seen demand spike by 46%.
The Guardian interviewed local residents who qualify as food insecure for a story about the worsening wealth gap in one of the wealthiest regions in the US.
Karla Peralta is surrounded by food. As a line cook in Facebook’s cafeteria, she spends her days preparing free meals for the tech firm’s staff. She’s worked in kitchens for most of her 30 years in the US, building a life in Silicon Valley as a single mother raising two daughters.
But at home, food is a different story. The region’s soaring rents and high cost-of-living means that even with a full-time job, putting food on the table hasn’t been simple. Over the years she has struggled to afford groceries – at one point feeding her family of three with food stamps that amounted to $75 a week, about half what the government describes as a “thrifty” food budget. “I was thinking, when am I going to get through this?” she said.
In a region famed for its foodie culture, where the well-heeled can dine on gold-flecked steaks, $500 tasting menus and $29 loaves of bread, hunger is alarmingly widespread, according to a new study shared exclusively with the Guardian.
According to the Guardian, the food bank is literally at the center of the Silicon Valley boom – both literally and figuratively. It sits just half a mile from Cisco’s headquarters and counts Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg among its major donors. But the need it serves is exacerbated by this industry’s wealth; as high-paying tech firms move in, the cost of living rises for everyone else.
As we’ve pointed out, faced with some of the most expensive rental housing in the nation, some Bay Area residents are feeling priced out and are seeking low-cost alternatives like living in their cars, or commuting nearly two hours to work each way.
All of this is happening as the Nasdaq – which includes many of the tech behemoths like Facebook, Google and Apple that are based in the region – reached an all-time high above 7,000 on Monday.
Food insecurity often accompanies other poverty indicators, such as homelessness. San Jose, Silicon Valley’s largest city, had a homeless population of more than 4,000 people during a recent count.
For workers like Karla Peralta – the Facebook cafeteria worker who shared the story of her daily struggles with the Guardian – there’s a stark division between well-heeled salaried tech workers at Facebook, and others like herself who work under contract.
What’s worse, many workers like Peralta are finding themselves mired in an uncomfortable gray area: they make too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to get by.
These days Peralta earns too much to qualify for food stamps, but not enough not to worry. She pays $2,000 a month – or three-quarters of her paycheck – to rent the small apartment she shares with her youngest daughter. “Even just the two of us, it’s still a struggle.” So once a month, she picks up supplies at the food bank to supplement what she buys at the store.
She isn’t one to complain, but acknowledges the vast gulf between the needs of Facebook employees and contract workers such as herself. “The first thing they do [for Facebook employees] is buy you an iPhone and an Apple computer, and all these other benefits,” she laughs. “It’s like, wow."
Second Harvest is the only food bank serving Silicon Valley. It’s also one of the largest in the country. In any given month, it provides meals for 257,000 people. It served 66 million pounds of food last year. When the Guardian visited its cavernous, 75,000 square foot main warehouse space, boxes of produce stretched to the ceiling. Strip lights illuminated crates of cucumbers and pallets of sweet potatoes with a chilly glow. Volunteers in PayPal T-shirts packed cabbages and apples that arrived in boxes as big as paddling pools, while in the walk-in freezer turkeys waited to defrost.
To Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech workers, the struggles of the hundreds of thousands of working poor in the region are often invisible.
“Often we think of somebody visibly hungry, the traditional homeless person,” Brennan said. “But this study is putting light on the non-traditional homeless: people living in their car or a garage, working people who have to choose between rent and food, people without access to a kitchen."
He added, “you’re not thinking when you pick up your shirts from dry cleaning, or getting your landscaping done, or going to a restaurant, or getting your child cared for, ‘is that person hungry?’ It’s very easy to assume they are fine."
The cost of housing is one of the biggest contributor to inequality – and the main reason many workers in the region are forced to go hungry. In Santa Clara County, the median price of a family home has reached a new high of $1.125 million, while the supply of homes continues to shrink. A family of four earning less than $85,000 is now considered low income. Meanwhile, the median income in the US is less than $60,000.
These realities mean food insecurity cuts across lines of race, age and employment status.
Minority communities in the Bay Area have been hit the hardest.
The Latino community is “passing through a hard time”, says Vicky Avila-Medrano, a food connection specialist. She runs a program that sends current and former food bank users out into the community, which has been disproportionately affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
“Here in Silicon Valley, we have a big problem. This is a beautiful place to live for people in the tech industry, but we are not working in that industry."
Of course, the problems posed by rising rents aren’t unique to the San Francisco Bay Area. As we noted back in October, rental costs growing faster than disposable income for 22 consecutive months. In September, rent ate up more disposable income than at any prior time in history.
All of this underscores the hypocrisy of the ultra-liberal Bay Area. While well-heeled tech workers spurn anybody who disagrees with their narrow-minded worldview in the name of progress, many of these same workers drift through their daily routines largely ignorant of the dire circumstances of the people who handle their dry cleaning and prepare their food.
Google famously fired former engineer James Damore for publishing an open letter pointing out flaws in the company’s diversity hiring program.
Meanwhile, the more than 10,000 employees who work at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. are some of the biggest contributors to wealth inequality in the region.
While we're sure the Bay Area's insistence on social equality in the workplace is well intentioned, progress won't feed the working poor.
- Mexico Suffers Deadliest Year Ever: Violence Hits Cabo, Tourist Havens
Local authorities near the beautiful tourist town of Los Cabos on the Baja California peninsula found six bodies suspended from three different bridges this week.
Authorities did not want to comment on the details surrounding how the men got onto the bridges, but Reuters suspects “drug gangs”, who often hang the bodies of their murdered rivals in public for intimidation purposes.
According to official data in November, there were more murders in October in Mexico than any other month over the past 20-years.
Mexico is on track to have the deadliest year ever since modern records began. In the first 10-months of 2017, there were more than 20,878 murders nationwide, as many in the war-torn country have blamed President Enrique Pena Nieto’s failure to tackle drug violence.
One local prosecutor said in a statement to Reuters,
Two bodies were found on a bridge in Las Veredas, near Los Cabos International Airport, and two on a different bridge on the highway between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, local prosecutors said in a statement.
In a separate statement, the prosecutors said two further bodies were found on a third bridge near the airport.
The latest spree of violent crime has surged in Baja California, especially around the multi-national resorts of Los Cabos, with yearly visits attracting more than one million foreigners. To make matters worse, Los Cabos police chief Juan Manuel Mayorga was assassinated last week, as the once calm resort town descends into chaos.
Hotel Prices in Los Cabos (as of 12-21-17) have collapsed amid the violence spiraling out of control in the area.
In August, a hail of automatic gunfire killed three and wounded two others at a popular Mexican beach resort in Los Cabos.
Earlier this week, authorities in the northern state of Chihuahua reported a massacre of 12 killed in armed clashes between two rival drug gangs.
Carlos Mendoza Davis, the governor state of Baja California, said the authorities are investigating the recent surge in violence around the Los Cabos area.
Reuters further elaborates on Baja California and Los Cabos’s deadly year.
Homicides have more than doubled in Baja California Sur this year, with 409 people killed through October, from 192 in all of 2016. In June authorities said they had found a mass grave with the bodies of 11 men and three women near Los Cabos.
Assuming that Mexico descends further into chaos, broke Americans who are looking for an all inclusive vacation might want to checkout Los Cabos. Hotels rooms are being heavily discounted as drug violence penetrates the popular resort town. As for Mexico as a whole, it’s a complete mess, and this is the reason why President Trump wants to build the wall.
- Hedge Fund Behind Mystery "Bitcoin To $50,000" Bet Revealed
The crypto space was thrown into chaos today as the price of bitcoin and its peers plunged overnight, cementing the pioneering digital currency's worst week since December 2013, only to rebound dramatically into the close, wiping out virtually all losses. Also today, just as the rout was nearing its trough, we shared a story from the Wall Street Journal about a mystery trader who placed a $1 million bet that bitcoin will climb above $50,000 by December 28, 2018.
That trade was a call option purchased on the LedgerX platform, which received permission from the CFTC over the summer to launch the first swap execution facility for the clearing of bitcoin-linked derivatives, and began trading in the fall, before CME and CBOE launched their own bitcoin futures. As the WSJ detailed previously, if bitcoin is below $50,000 on Dec. 28, 2018, the options will expire worthless, and the $1 million will be lost. But if bitcoin rises above that level, the options give the owner the right to buy 275 bitcoins for $50,000 apiece—a transaction that would cost $13.8 million.
Some more details on the trade mechanics from Privateer's Aaron Brown:
… one or more people delivered 275 bitcoin (valued at $4.5 million at the time) to the LedgerX clearinghouse, and wrote one-year calls at a strike of $50,000 ($13.75 million in total) against them for a premium of $3,600 per coin ($990,000 total); that is, the buyer paid the seller $990,000 today, and has the right but not the obligation to buy 275 bitcoin for $13.75 million any time before December 28, 2018. These 275 bitcoin are held by the LedgerX clearinghouse and will be released on Dec. 28, 2018 to either the buyer (if the buyer exercises the option by paying $13.75 million) or the seller (if the buyer does not exercise).
These are real bitcoin, and there is no need for any sort of settlement auction, the call option buyer can exercise and receive the physical bitcoin.
Naturally, it was unclear who the buyer of the call was, just as it was unclear if the call was a standalone trade or part of a broader, multi-leg option strategy. And perhaps more importantly, the identity of the seller was also a secret.
On Friday afternoon, one part of the the mystery was solved, when the buyer of the $50,000 call was revealed as Blocktower Capital, a prominent crypto hedge fund, Business Insider reported.
BlockTower Capital is among the best known crypto hedge funds in a booming space that now includes over 175 such firms, according to fintech analytics firm Autonomous NEXT. BlockTower was founded by Ari Paul, formerly of trading firm Susquehanna, and Matthew Goetz, a former VP at Goldman Sachs.
Paul tweeted about the WSJ story on Thursday:
I wonder who bought these? ???? https://t.co/gIXFW0d0hm
— Ari Paul (@AriDavidPaul) December 21, 2017
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Paul followed up that tweet by saying: "One thing to understand with options: a deep out of the money call is not a bet that something *will* happen, it's a bet that something *might* happen. Risk a little to win a lot."
Still, just days after the trade was executed, Blocktower is nursing a not insiginificant amount of bruises, because as a result of today's sharp repricing lower in cryptos and the acute impact of gamma and vega on what is already the world's most volatilte instrument (excluding electricity) the MTM value of the call option declined substantially (although in all fairness should today's sharp rebound continue for a few more days, all the losses will be offset by the renewed upward momentum). Indeed, some like Dan Novaes, CEO of blockchain company Current Media said, "The holidays are a notorious time for crypto prices to drop — that has been the case over the past several years. After the holidays, I expect the prices to rebound."
Perhaps Novaes is right: many have suggested that today's drop was nothing more than some tax loss selling which quickly snowballed on Thursday night into a major momentum-reversal drop in the illiquid pre-Christmas market. And perhaps bitcoin will indeed trade well above $50,000 before December 28, 2018, resulting in a substantial payday for Blocktower Capital.
And while we know who the buyer was, what is more interesting here is the identity of the seller, as that may have been one of the original bitcoin "whale" billionaires, who – as Aaron Brown speculated yesterday – has found a way to cash out partially of their massive positions without moving the market.
Keep in mind that the only cash that exchanged hands when the trade was done was $1 million, or rather $990,000, between the buyer of the call, and the seller. Here is Brown's explanation why this particular option trade could be far more important not for directional bet on the underlying, but to allow the mega holders of bitcoin to cash out.
I spoke to some large bitcoin holders, most of whom have held for years and never sold, and all expressed at least some interest in doing similar trades. It is a natural one, the "bitcoin billionaires" — the approximately 1,000 people who hold an estimated 40 percent of all bitcoin, or an average of around $350 million each — reducing their exposure in return for some cash today. In turn, financial investors get a secure, levered exposure to bitcoin that is not hostage to an unproven price-setting and without the expense of setting up a system to hold physical bitcoin. Bitcoin miners need cash for equipment and electricity bills (China this year cut off lending on bitcoin collateral) and early bitcoin adopters could stand to diversify their portfolios.
In addition to allowing whales to cash out in dribs and drabs, such selling of calls (or puts) could also have a dramatically stabilizing effect on the market:
One trade doesn't make a market, but if, say, 1 percent of all bitcoin were taken off the market and held as option collateral, and financial investors put up cash in one-year derivatives, that could do a lot to stabilize the market. That means both reducing price volatility and giving confidence that market prices represent true trading prices for institutional quantities of bitcoin. This, in turn, could make Cboe and CME cash-settled futures more attractive, and thereby represent a solid base for bitcoin ETFs.
Finally, this increased visibility in the bitcoin pipeline and clearance would boost institutional confidence and lead to increased holdings:
And once that happens, institutions are likely to accept custodianed ownership of physical bitcoin, broadening and deepening the ownership base. There are few entities with institutional access to bitcoin derivatives trading and expertise with trading and holding physical bitcoin. That has to change for bitcoin to join the global financial system.
The last point is spot on because the inverse is also true: if bitcoin billionaires stay out of the market, institutional investment in bitcoin will remain problematic. Individuals will be able to trade small amounts in a fragmented market of loosely regulated exchanges, but futures and ETFs will not be securely backed by physical bitcoin — their prices will be pushed around by betting sentiment of people who own no bitcoin.
Then again, as Brown concedes "that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, bitcoin was invented as an alternative to financial markets, and it functioned quite nicely for years with no connection to Wall Street. That's one possible path for cryptocurrencies, a parallel financial system. But many people have set their hearts on linking the two systems, and we may have just seen the first trade to validate their dreams."
Needless to say, for Blocktower Capital's bullish bet to be successful, a linkage which enables institutional investors to offload some of the "whale" holdings while stabilizing the market, would be the far better, not to mention profitable outcome, one which could indeed result in Bitcoin rising to $50,000, and above, in 12 months time.
Incidentally, Ari Paul is not worried by today's selloff. In fact, as he tweeted earlier, "a major sell-off with prolonged consolidation at a lower level would be the healthiest thing for crypto. <50 million people own any at all today. I'd love to see broader ownership."
- Bombshell Report Reveals Up To 30% Of Federal Inmates Are Illegal Immigrants
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released its findings on the immigration status of federal prison inmates, as mandated in a controversial Executive Order signed during the President Trump’s first week in the White House. The report reveals that of the 37,557 confirmed immigrants in the federal prison system, 35,334 (94%) of them are in the United States illegally – which means out of a total of 185,507, federally incarcerated individuals, over 19% are confirmed illegal immigrants – which, in 2014, cost U.S. taxpayers $1.87 billion to house.
It should be noted that the 19% figure is based on known illegals in federal prison – while 58,766 individuals are “known or suspected” to be illegal. If we apply the 94% confirmed illegal rate to the “known or suspected” population, it brings the total number of potential incarcerated illegal immigrants to 55,240 – or 30% of federal incarcerations.
(DHS Alien Incarceration Report , Q4 2017)
The report also points out that the federal prison population is roughly 10%, with state and local facilities containing the vast majority of incarcerated individuals in the U.S.
“The American people deserve a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interest,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions, adding “But at the border and in communities across America, our citizens are being victimized by illegal aliens who commit crimes. Nearly 95 percent of confirmed aliens in our federal prisons are here illegally. We know based on sentencing data that non-citizens commit a substantially disproportionate number of drug-related offenses, which contributes to our national drug abuse crisis. The simple fact is that any offense committed by a criminal alien is ultimately preventable.”
Immigrant rights groups predictably had a major problem with the report, claiming racism and manipulated data.
“The report proves one thing only: The administration will take any opportunity possible to twist facts to demonize immigrants,” said Tom Jawetz, VP for immigration policy at the very liberal Center for American Progress, adding “The vast majority of immigrants in federal prison are there for crimes that only immigrants can be charged with – illegal entry and illegal entry after removal. When you cook the books you shouldn’t pretend to be surprised by the results.”
The January 25th Executive Order, 13768; “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” was designed to use all available resources to deport incarcerated illegals and enforce existing immigration laws. The order states “We cannot faithfully execute the immigration laws of the United States if we exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement. The purpose of this order is to direct executive departments and agencies (agencies) to employ all lawful means to enforce the immigration laws of the United States.”The order calls for the hire of 10,000 additional immigration officers, allows for issuing fines and penalties to unlawful aliens, allows State and local law enforcement agencies to act as immigration officers, and yanks Federal grant money from sanctuary cities – which was later reversed nationwide by a Chicago judge and ruled unconstitutional by Santa Clara County, CA judge William Orrick III.
What wasn’t killed by activist judges, however, was the Executive Order’s mandate to provide quarterly reports on incarcerated immigrants. The EO reads:
To promote the transparency and situational awareness of criminal aliens in the United States, the Secretary and the Attorney General are hereby directed to collect relevant data and provide quarterly reports on the following:
(a) the immigration status of all aliens incarcerated under the supervision of the Federal Bureau of Prisons;
(b) the immigration status of all aliens incarcerated as Federal pretrial detainees under the supervision of the United States Marshals Service; and
(c) the immigration status of all convicted aliens incarcerated in State prisons and local detention centers throughout the United States.
The Order also sets out enforcement actions, which “shall prioritize for removal those aliens described by the Congress… …removable aliens who:
(a) Have been convicted of any criminal offense;
(b) Have been charged with any criminal offense, where such charge has not been resolved;
(c) Have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense;
(d) Have engaged in fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency;
(e) Have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits;
(f) Are subject to a final order of removal, but who have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the United States; or
(g) In the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.
One oustanding question now is what will a seemingly sleepwalking Jeff Sessions do about it?
In May, Sessions announced the expansion and modernization of the Justice Department’s Institutional Hearing Program, which is responsible for deportation hearings of incarcerated individuals. The measures are intended to fast-track the deportation of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes, which according to Sessions, will speed up the process by removing the criminal immigrant as soon as their sentence is complete – as opposed to sending them to another facility to await deportation.
“We owe it to the American people to ensure that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes and are serving time in our federal prisons are expeditiously removed from our country as the law requires,” Sessions said in a statement.
Sessions’ May proposal established 14 federal prisons and six contract facilities for deportation proceedings, which the Attorney General says is a top priority going forward.
- Facebook Handing Over More Info To US Government: "This Is What Facebook Was Designed To Do"
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Every year, Facebook gets tens of thousands of requests for data from governments worldwide, including search warrants, subpoenas, or calls to restrict certain kinds of content. And, according to a new report, those requests are increasing at an alarming rate.
According to QZ.com, in the United States, the requests rose by 26% from the last six months of 2016 to the first six months of 2017, while globally, requests increased by about 21%. Since 2013, when the company first started providing data on government requests, the US number has been steadily rising – it has roughly tripled in a period of four years.
This is alarming many and causing a concern about privacy. Joe Joseph, from the Daily Sheeple, isn’t sugarcoating the reality of Facebook either. “Duh. This is exactly what Facebook was designed to do,” says Joseph.
“You have to remember that Zuckerberg had “seed money” and that seed money came from CIA front companies that put a lot of resources into this and…basically think about it as like, sowing seeds; if you will. They knew that Facebook was gonna bear fruit.
I don’t think they realized just how big it would become. But I can tell you that they get so much information and intel from social media: I don’t think that it would go away even if we wanted it to.”
The government keeps requesting the information, and Facebook continues to comply with the government’s demands.
In the first six months of 2013, it granted the government – which includes the police – 79% of requests (“some data was produced” in these cases, the company says); in the first six months of 2017, that share rose to 85%. “We continue to carefully scrutinize each request we receive for account data — whether from an authority in the U.S., Europe, or elsewhere — to make sure it is legally sufficient,” Chris Sonderby, the company’s general counsel, wrote in a post. “If a request appears to be deficient or overly broad, we push back, and will fight in court, if necessary.”
But Joseph thinks Facebook is just trying to pacify the easily manipulated sheeple of society.
“This is pretty troubling when you think about what you put out there, what they collect, and Facebook only being one of the many avenues that they have,” Joseph says.
“The United States is collecting your data. Whether you like it or not. They are scooping up everything. And they’re taking it and they’re storing it in their facility at Bluffdale, Utah which has the capacity at this time to store every communication on the face of this earth for the next one hundred years.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Joseph continues. “This is stuff that is unacceptable to me, but I’m sure, to a lot of you. And these companies have really gone too far…they can reconstruct your life and make anyone they want a patsy.”
- WORLD SILVER PRODUCTION: 3 Charts You Won’t See Anywhere Else
By the SRSrocco Report,
The rate at which global silver production increased over the past century is quite astonishing. When Columbus arrived in America (1492), the world was only producing 7 million oz of silver a year. Today, the world’s largest primary silver mine, Fresnillo’s Sauicto Mine, produced three times that amount in just one year (22 million oz, 2016). Yes, we have come along way in 500 years.
Just think about that for a minute. One silver mine last year produced three times the global amount in 1493. According to the U.S. Bureau of Mines 1930 Report on Summarized Data of Silver Production, the average annual silver production in the world from 1493 to 1600 was 6.9 million oz (Moz). If we look at the following chart, we can see how world silver production increased over the past 500+ years:
As we can see, average annual world silver production increased from 6.9 Moz during 1493-1600, to 13 Moz from 1600-1700, 18 Moz from 1700-1800, 51 Moz from 1800-1900, 274 Moz from 1900-2000 and a stunning 722 Moz from 2000-2017. Again, these figures represent the average annual silver production for each time period.
In the current period, 2000-2017, the world has produced 103 times more silver per year than from 1493-1600. However, the next chart shows the total silver production for each period. From 1493-1600, the world produced a total of 747 Moz of silver, compared to 13,000 Moz (13 billion oz) in just 18 years from 2000-2017:
Now, the reason the last silver bar on the right of the chart is lower than the previous one has to do with comparing 18 years worth of silver production (2000-2017) versus 50 years (1950-2000). It took 50 years to produce 17,061 Moz during 1950-2000 versus 13,000 Moz in the 18 years from 2000-2017.
If we compare world silver production from the different periods, here is the result:
Percentage Of World Silver Production (1493-2017)
2000-2017 = 26.4%
1950-2017 = 61%
1900-2017 = 82%
While a little more than a quarter of all world silver production (1493-2017) was produced in the past 18 years, 82% were produced since 1900. That is a lot of silver. It turns out that 40.4 billion oz was produced from 1900-2017 out of the total 49.3 billion oz produced since 1493. Interestingly, more than half of that silver was consumed in industrial silver applications. I will be writing more about that in future articles.
The last chart I find quite interesting. If we go back a little more than a century, the United States was the largest silver producer in the world. In 1915, the U.S. produced 75 Moz of silver out of the total 189 Moz mined in the world that year:
Thus, in 1915, the U.S. produced 40% of all world silver production. Mexico came in second in 1915 by producing 39.3 Moz. However, U.S. silver production in 2017 will only be 34 Moz versus the estimated 870 Moz globally. Thus, U.S. silver production only accounts for 4% of world mine supply versus 40% back in 1915. What a change in 100 years.
Lastly, the U.S. imports approximately 22% of world mine production each year. That is 193 Moz of the total 870 Moz in 2017. While domestic mine supply is only 34 Moz, the United States has to import more than a fifth of global mine production to meet its silver market demand.
If you haven’t checked out our new PRECIOUS METALS INVESTING section or our new LOWEST COST PRECIOUS METALS STORAGE page, I highly recommend you do.
Check back for new articles and updates at the SRSrocco Report.
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