Jun 23

Today’s News 23rd June 2021

  • Glencore CEO Says Commodity Prices Will Stay Elevated For Longer
    Glencore CEO Says Commodity Prices Will Stay Elevated For Longer

    Some commodities have taken a beating over the last week after the Federal Reserve signaled for interest-rate increases, a rising dollar, and China’s efforts to slow inflation. The question readers should ask is what happens next? 

    Well, either Ark’s Cathie Wood, who has predicted a ‘serious correction’ in commodities and a return to deflation will be correct, or Ivan Glasenberg, the CEO of commodities trading giant Glencore, who told Bloomberg Tuesday on the second day of the Qatar Economic Forum 2021 that the overall rally in commodities will continue. 

    Only one person can be right. 

    Focusing on Glasenberg’s latest comments, he believes massive infrastructure spending in China, various commodities tangled in disruption due to COVID, which tighten up supplies, along with other infrastructure spending projects worldwide, including the prospects of one in the US, will continue to elevate commodity prices. 

    He said the Chinese have been trying to push commodity prices lower but believes that “is a short-term game because the underlying fundamentals of supply and demand will keep prices higher.” 

    Glasenberg said the Chinese are taking commodities from their strategic stockpile and flooding the market to push prices lower, but that can only happen for so long until they need to restock. 

    He was hesitant to call the post-COVID move in commodities a “supercycle,” adding that “commodity prices will stay strong for a long while longer.” 

    The next catalyst that moves commodity prices higher is the once-in-a-generation investment in America’s infrastructure via the Biden administration. Glasenberg said once the infrastructure package is passed, it’ll take the shovel-ready projects about 18 months to get going, adding to further demand for commodities. 

    Important to note a bullish yearly hammer was confirmed in 2020 on the Bloomberg Commodity Index. 

    He then said, “both parts of the world,” including China and the US, will be pushing infrastructure projects simultaneously. 

    Glasenberg questions how long will it take for new mining projects to come online to meet this new demand, warning that new mines may take longer than previous cycles. 

    He added that the mining industry would struggle to keep pace with the new “demand” coming from the green new economy. 

    One person can only be correct. It’s either Wood with her suggestion of commodity price slump or Glencore’s Glasenberg that elevated commodity prices will continue. 

    For Glencore’s Glasenberg full interview, fast forward to the one-hour eleven minute mark. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/23/2021 – 02:45

  • Ukraine And UK To Build Warships, Establish Naval Bases Together
    Ukraine And UK To Build Warships, Establish Naval Bases Together

    Via SouthFront.org,

    Ukraine and Great Britain have agreed on the joint construction of warships and bases for the domestic Navy, the press service of the Defense Ministry of Ukraine announced.

    On June 21 in Odesa aboard the HMS DEFENDER missile destroyer of the Royal Navy, Defence Procurement Minister of Great Britain Jeremy Quin and Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Oleksandr Myroniuk signed “a memorandum on maritime partnership projects between the UK industry consortium and the Ukrainian Navy,” the ministry said.

    In particular, the memorandum provides for the joint design and construction of warships in Ukraine and Great Britain, the reconstruction of Ukrainian shipbuilding enterprises and the construction of two bases of the Ukrainian Naval Forces.

    The signing ceremony took place aboard one of the most modern ships of the Royal Navy, HMS Defender, and was witnessed by the Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov, the First Sea Lord Admiral Tony Radakin and the British Ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons.

    They also observed joint training activity of Ukrainian, UK and US Special forces.

    HMS Defender arrived in Odesa on Friday. This magnificent warship is the second Royal Navy ship to visit Odesa in the last couple of weeks after HMS TRENT.

    Joint naval projects and regular warships visits are important examples of the close ties between the UK and Ukraine, as partners and friendly nations.

    The HMS DEFENDER destroyer arrived in Odesa last Friday, June 18. This is the second Royal Navy warship to visit Odesa in the last few weeks, after HMS TRENT.

    “This is another step in the development of bilateral cooperation between Ukraine and the UK, which is aimed at strengthening the Ukrainian fleet as it continues to face danger in the Black and Azov seas,” the Ukrainian defense ministry said.

    The UK will help Ukraine revive its shipbuilding industry, the Ukrainian defense ministry said. The two countries will design and build warships in Ukraine and in the UK and set up two bases for the Ukrainian navy.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/23/2021 – 02:00

  • Who Is A "Terrorist" In Biden's America?
    Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America?

    Authored by Whitney Webb via TheLastAmericanVagabond.com,

    Far from being a war against “white supremacy,” the Biden administration’s new “domestic terror” strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.

    In the latest sign that the US government’s War on Domestic Terror is growing in scope and scale, the White House on Tuesday revealed the nation’s first ever government-wide strategy for confronting domestic terrorism. While cloaked in language about stemming racially motivated violence, the strategy places those deemed “anti-government” or “anti-authority” on a par with racist extremists and charts out policies that could easily be abused to silence or even criminalize online criticism of the government.

    Even more disturbing is the call to essentially fuse intelligence agencies, law enforcement, Silicon Valley, and “community” and “faith-based” organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, as well as unspecified foreign governments, as partners in this “war,” which the strategy makes clear will rely heavily on a pre-crime orientation focused largely on what is said on social media and encrypted platforms. Though the strategy claims that the government will “shield free speech and civil liberties” in implementing this policy, its contents reveal that it is poised to gut both.

    Indeed, while framed publicly as chiefly targeting “right-wing white supremacists,” the strategy itself makes it clear that the government does not plan to focus on the Right but instead will pursue “domestic terrorists” in “an ideologically neutral, threat-driven manner,” as the law “makes no distinction based on political view—left, right or center.” It also states that a key goal of this strategic framework is to ensure “that there is simply no governmental tolerance . . . of violence as an acceptable mode of seeking political or social change,” regardless of a perpetrator’s political affiliation. 

    Considering that the main cheerleaders for the War on Domestic Terror exist mainly in establishment left circles, such individuals should rethink their support for this new policy given that the above statements could easily come to encompass Black Lives Matter–related protests, such as those that transpired last summer, depending on which political party is in power. 

    Once the new infrastructure is in place, it will remain there and will be open to the same abuses perpetrated by both political parties in the US during the lengthy War on Terror following September 11, 2001. The history of this new “domestic terror” policy, including its origins in the Trump administration, makes this clear.

    It’s Never Been Easier to Be a “Terrorist”

    In introducing the strategy, the Biden administration cites “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as a key reason for the new policy and a main justification for the War on Domestic Terror in general. This was most recently demonstrated Tuesday in Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statement announcing this new strategy. However, the document itself puts “anti-government” or “anti-authority” “extremists” in the same category as violent white supremacists in terms of being a threat to the homeland. The strategy’s characterization of such individuals is unsettling.

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    For instance, those who “violently oppose” “all forms of capitalism” or “corporate globalization” are listed under this less-discussed category of “domestic terrorist.” This highlights how people on the left, many of whom have called for capitalism to be dismantled or replaced in the US in recent years, could easily be targeted in this new “war” that many self-proclaimed leftists are currently supporting. Similarly, “environmentally-motivated extremists,” a category in which groups such as Extinction Rebellion could easily fall, are also included. 

    In addition, the phrasing indicates that it could easily include as “terrorists” those who oppose the World Economic Forum’s vision for global “stakeholder capitalism,” as that form of “capitalism” involves corporations and their main “stakeholders” creating a new global economic and governance system. The WEF’s stakeholder capitalism thus involves both “capitalism” and “corporate globalization.” 

    The strategy also includes those who “take steps to violently resist government authority . . . based on perceived overreach.” This, of course, creates a dangerous situation in which the government could, purposely or otherwise, implement a policy that is an obvious overreach and/or blatantly unconstitutional and then label those who resist it “domestic terrorists” and deal with them as such—well before the overreach can be challenged in court.

    Another telling addition to this group of potential “terrorists” is “any other individual or group who engages in violence—or incites imminent violence—in opposition to legislative, regulatory or other actions taken by the government.” Thus, if the government implements a policy that a large swath of the population finds abhorrent, such as launching a new, unpopular war abroad, those deemed to be “inciting” resistance to the action online could be considered domestic terrorists. 

    Such scenarios are not unrealistic, given the loose way in which the government and the media have defined things like “incitement” and even “violence” (e. g., “hate speech” is a form of violence) in the recent past. The situation is ripe for manipulation and abuse. To think the federal government (including the Biden administration and subsequent administrations) would not abuse such power reflects an ignorance of US political history, particularly when the main forces behind most terrorist incidents in the nation are actually US government institutions like the FBI (more FBI examples here, here, here, and here).

    Furthermore, the original plans for the detention of American dissidents in the event of a national emergency, drawn up during the Reagan era as part of its “continuity of government” contingency, cited popular nonviolent opposition to US intervention in Latin America as a potential “emergency” that could trigger the activation of those plans. Many of those “continuity of government” protocols remain on the books today and can be triggered, depending on the whims of those in power. It is unlikely that this new domestic terror framework will be any different regarding nonviolent protest and demonstrations.

    Yet another passage in this section of the strategy states that “domestic terrorists” can, “in some instances, connect and intersect with conspiracy theories and other forms of disinformation and misinformation.” It adds that the proliferation of such “dangerous” information “on Internet-based communications platforms such as social media, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, all of these elements can combine and amplify threats to public safety.” 

    Thus, the presence of “conspiracy theories” and information deemed by the government to be “misinformation” online is itself framed as threatening public safety, a claim made more than once in this policy document. Given that a major “pillar” of the strategy involves eliminating online material that promotes “domestic terrorist” ideologies, it seems inevitable that such efforts will also “connect and intersect” with the censorship of “conspiracy theories” and narratives that the establishment finds inconvenient or threatening for any reason. 

    Pillars of Tyranny

    The strategy notes in several places that this new domestic-terror policy will involve a variety of public-private partnerships in order to “build a community to address domestic terrorism that extends not only across the Federal Government but also to critical partners.” It adds, “That includes state, local, tribal and territorial governments, as well as foreign allies and partners, civil society, the technology sector, academic, and more.” 

    The mention of foreign allies and partners is important as it suggests a multinational approach to what is supposedly a US “domestic” issue and is yet another step toward a transnational security-state apparatus. A similar multinational approach was used to devastating effect during the CIA-developed Operation Condor, which was used to target and “disappear” domestic dissidents in South America in the 1970s and 1980s. The foreign allies mentioned in the Biden administration’s strategy are left unspecified, but it seems likely that such allies would include the rest of the Five Eyes alliance (the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) and Israel, all of which already have well-established information-sharing agreements with the US for signals intelligence.

    The new domestic-terror strategy has four main “pillars,” which can be summarized as (1) understanding and sharing domestic terrorism-related information, including with foreign governments and private tech companies; (2) preventing domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilization to violence; (3) disrupting and deterring domestic terrorism activity; and (4) confronting long-term contributors to domestic terrorism.

    The first pillar involves the mass accumulation of data through new information-sharing partnerships and the deepening of existing ones. Much of this information sharing will involve increased data mining and analysis of statements made openly on the internet, particularly on social media, something already done by US intelligence contractors such as Palantir. While the gathering of such information has been ongoing for years, this policy allows even more to be shared and legally used to make cases against individuals deemed to have made threats or expressed “dangerous” opinions online. 

    Included in the first pillar is the need to increase engagement with financial institutions concerning the financing of “domestic terrorists.” US banks, such as Bank of America, have already gone quite far in this regard, leading to accusations that it has begun acting like an intelligence agency. Such claims were made after it was revealed that the BofA had passed to the government the private banking information of over two hundred people that the bank deemed as pointing to involvement in the events of January 6, 2021. It seems likely, given this passage in the strategy, that such behavior by banks will soon become the norm, rather than an outlier, in the United States. 

    The second pillar is ostensibly focused on preventing the online recruitment of domestic terrorists and online content that leads to the “mobilization of violence.” The strategy notes that this pillar “means reducing both supply and demand of recruitment materials by limiting widespread availability online and bolstering resilience to it by those who nonetheless encounter it.“ The strategy states that such government efforts in the past have a “mixed record,” but it goes on to claim that trampling on civil liberties will be avoided because the government is “consulting extensively” with unspecified “stakeholders” nationwide.

    Regarding recruitment, the strategy states that “these activities are increasingly happening on Internet-based communications platforms, including social media, online gaming platforms, file-upload sites and end-to-end encrypted platforms, even as those products and services frequently offer other important benefits.” It adds that “the widespread availability of domestic terrorist recruitment material online is a national security threat whose front lines are overwhelmingly private-sector online platforms.” 

    The US government plans to provide “information to assist online platforms with their own initiatives to enforce their own terms of service that prohibits the use of their platforms for domestic terrorist activities” as well as to “facilitate more robust efforts outside the government to counter terrorists’ abuse of Internet-based communications platforms.” 

    Given the wider definition of “domestic terrorist” that now includes those who oppose capitalism and corporate globalization as well as those who resist government overreach, online content discussing these and other “anti-government” and “anti-authority” ideas could soon be treated in the same way as online Al Qaeda or ISIS propaganda. Efforts, however, are unlikely to remain focused on these topics. As Unlimited Hangout reported last November, both UK intelligence and the US national-security state were developing plans to treat critical reporting on the COVID-19 vaccines as “extremist” propaganda.

    Another key part of this pillar is the need to “increase digital literacy” among the American public, while censoring “harmful content” disseminated by “terrorists” as well as by “hostile foreign powers seeking to undermine American democracy.” The latter is a clear reference to the claim that critical reporting of US government policy, particularly its military and intelligence activities abroad, was the product of “Russian disinformation,” a now discredited claim that was used to heavily censor independent media. This new government strategy appears to promise more of this sort of thing. 

    It also notes that “digital literacy” education for a domestic audience is being developed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Such a policy would have previously violated US law until the Obama administration worked with Congress to repeal the Smith-Mundt Act, thus lifting the ban on the government directing propaganda at domestic audiences. 

    The third pillar of the strategy seeks to increase the number of federal prosecutors investigating and trying domestic-terror cases. Their numbers are likely to jump as the definition of “domestic terrorist” is expanded. It also seeks to explore whether “legislative reforms could meaningfully and materially increase our ability to protect Americans from acts of domestic terrorism while simultaneously guarding against potential abuse of overreach.” In contrast to past public statements on police reform by those in the Biden administration, the strategy calls to “empower” state and local law enforcement to tackle domestic terrorism, including with increased access to “intelligence” on citizens deemed dangerous or subversive for any number of reasons.

    To that effect, the strategy states the following (p. 24):

    “The Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security, with support from the National Counterterrorism Center [part of the intelligence community], are incorporating an increased focus on domestic terrorism into current intelligence products and leveraging current mechanisms of information and intelligence sharing to improve the sharing of domestic terrorism-related content and indicators with non-Federal partners. These agencies are also improving the usability of their existing information-sharing platforms, including through the development of mobile applications designed to provide a broader reach to non-Federal law enforcement partners, while simultaneously refining that support based on partner feedback.”

    Such an intelligence tool could easily be, for example, Palantir, which is already used by the intelligence agencies, the DHS, and several US police departments for “predictive policing,” that is, pre-crime actions. Notably, Palantir has long included a “subversive” label for individuals included on government and law enforcement databases, a parallel with the controversial and highly secretive Main Core database of US dissidents. 

    DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas made the “pre-crime” element of the new domestic terror strategy explicit on Tuesday when he said in a statement that DHS would continue “developing key partnerships with local stakeholders through the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) to identify potential threats and prevent terrorism.” CP3, which replaced DHS’ Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention this past May, officially “supports communities across the United States to prevent individuals from radicalizing to violence and intervene when individuals have already radicalized to violence.” 

    The fourth pillar of the strategy is by far the most opaque and cryptic, while also the most far-reaching. It aims to address the sources that cause “terrorists” to mobilize “towards violence.” This requires “tackling racism in America,” a lofty goal for an administration headed by the man who controversially eulogized Congress’ most ardent segregationist and who was a key architect of the 1994 crime bill. As well, it provides for “early intervention and appropriate care for those who pose a danger to themselves or others.”

    In regard to the latter proposal, the Trump administration, in a bid to “stop mass shootings before they occur,” considered a proposal to create a “health DARPA” or “HARPA” that would monitor the online communications of everyday Americans for “neuropsychiatric” warning signs that someone might be “mobilizing towards violence.” While the Trump administration did not create HARPA or adopt this policy, the Biden administration has recently announced plans to do so.

    Finally, the strategy indicates that this fourth pillar is part of a “broader priority”: “enhancing faith in government and addressing the extreme polarization, fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation often channeled through social media platforms, which can tear Americans apart and lead some to violence.” In other words, fostering trust in government while simultaneously censoring “polarizing” voices who distrust or criticize the government is a key policy goal behind the Biden administration’s new domestic-terror strategy. 

    Calling Their Shots?

    While this is a new strategy, its origins lie in the Trump administration. In October 2019, Trump’s attorney general William Barr formally announced in a memorandum that a new “national disruption and early engagement program” aimed at detecting those “mobilizing towards violence” before they commit any crime would launch in the coming months. That program, known as DEEP (Disruption and Early Engagement Program), is now active and has involved the Department of Justice, the FBI, and “private sector partners” since its creation.

    Barr’s announcement of DEEP followed his unsettling “prediction” in July 2019 that “a major incident may occur at any time that will galvanize public opinion on these issues.” Not long after that speech, a spate of mass shootings occurred, including the El Paso Walmart shooting, which killed twenty-three and about which many questions remain unanswered regarding the FBI’s apparent foreknowledge of the event. After these events took place in 2019, Trump called for the creation of a government backdoor into encryption and the very pre-crime system that Barr announced shortly thereafter in October 2019. The Biden administration, in publishing this strategy, is merely finishing what Barr started.

    Indeed, a “prediction” like Barr’s in 2019 was offered by the DHS’ Elizabeth Neumann during a Congressional hearing in late February 2020. That hearing was largely ignored by the media as it coincided with an international rise of concern regarding COVID-19. At the hearing, Neumann, who previously coordinated the development of the government’s post-9/11 terrorism information sharing strategies and policies and worked closely with the intelligence community, gave the following warning about an imminent “domestic terror” event in the United States:

    “And every counterterrorism professional I speak to in the federal government and overseas feels like we are at the doorstep of another 9/11, maybe not something that catastrophic in terms of the visual or the numbers, but that we can see it building and we don’t quite know how to stop it.”

    This “another 9/11” emerged on January 6, 2021, as the events of that day in the Capitol were quickly labeled as such by both the media and prominent politicians, while also inspiring calls from the White House and the Democrats for a “9/11-style commission” to investigate the incident. This event, of course, figures prominently in the justification for the new domestic-terror strategy, despite the considerable video and other evidence that shows that Capitol law enforcement, and potentially the FBI, were directly involved in facilitating the breach of the Capitol. In addition, when one considers that the QAnon movement, which had a clear role in the events of January 6, was itself likely a government-orchestrated psyop, the government hand in creating this situation seems clear. 

    It goes without saying that the official reasons offered for these militaristic “domestic terror” policies, which the US has already implemented abroad—causing much more terror than it has prevented—does not justify the creation of a massive new national-security infrastructure that aims to criminalize and censor online speech. Yet the admission that this new strategy, as part of a broader effort to “enhance faith in government,” combines domestic propaganda campaigns with the censorship and pursuit of those who distrust government heralds the end of even the illusion of democracy in the United States.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/23/2021 – 00:05

  • China Seizes "Large Cache Of Drugs" Hidden In Soy Ship From Brazil
    China Seizes “Large Cache Of Drugs” Hidden In Soy Ship From Brazil

    China’s Brazilian soybean imports have skyrocketed in May after previously delayed cargo arrived. In one of the shipments, Chinese customs agents found hundreds of pounds of cocaine. 

    Qingdao Customs in east China’s Shandong Province seized 474 pounds of cocaine, the largest bust this year by the customs office. 

    According to state-run media Xinhua, “authorities swung into action after receiving a tip-off that a foreign ship with a large cache of drugs was heading for Qingdao Port.” The ship originated from Brazil, hauling 67,000 tons of soybeans, and had 21 crew on board. 

    Upon arriving at Qingdao, customs agents searched the vessel and found nine suspicious packages in seven cargo holds filled with soybean. Further laboratory tests confirmed the suspicious packages have a total of 474 pounds of cocaine. 

    The last major cocaine shipment seized at Qingdao was 794 pounds in 2017. 

    Brazil is the largest supplier of soybeans, and China has been on a buying spree. So there’s no telling how many cocaine shipments hidden within soy cargos have slipped through Qingdao. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 23:45

  • Fact-Checker Poynter Demands Local News Reduce Crime Story Coverage Because It Fuels "Systemic Racism"
    Fact-Checker Poynter Demands Local News Reduce Crime Story Coverage Because It Fuels “Systemic Racism”

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Fact-checking institute Poynter is demanding that local news stations reduce coverage of stories that connect “Black and brown communities” to violent crime because it is fueling “systemic racism.”

    Yes, really.

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    The institute, which oversees the International Fact-Checking Network which operates Politifact, put out a statement urging journalists to “break the cycle of crime reporting.”

    Arrests for misdemeanors disproportionately affect people of color. Systemic racism compounds the injustice as reviews have shown that prosecutors are more likely to exclude Black jurors from trials.

    The crime and courts beat exists because it’s constantly churning out stories. Much of that content is directly related to public safety. Journalists can be smarter about who we cover and the follow-up stories we provide. Kelly McBride, who chairs the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at Poynter, said, “Local news reporters have amplified narratives that connect Black and brown communities to crime. As a result, we have fostered systemic racism through our crime coverage.”

    It’s within our power as journalists to break that cycle. We don’t need to publicize the crime blotter simply because it fills airtime or generates clicks.

    The announcement was made at the same time that Politifact asserted that a claim the Austin-American Statesman deliberately omitted a mass shooting suspect’s description because he was black is “false.”

    However, the original report stated the reason for not including a description of the suspect was because it “could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes,” meaning that Politifact is outright lying.

    With the addition of Politifact’s “false” rating (which itself is false), the story will now receive less circulation on social media networks.

    “Poynter president Neil Brown hates the fact people can still see what’s really happening in our streets despite their massive censorship regime and their blacklists,” writes Chris Menahan.

    Indeed, it appears as though Poynter thinks that by obfuscating the true perpetrators of violent crime, then it will cease to exist.

    The victims may have a different opinion.

    This also once again underscores how ‘fact-checking’ organizations exist to censor information and hide narratives that are inconvenient for the establishment.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 23:25

  • Another Starlink Issue? Redditor Reports Lightning-Strike Blows Apart Dish 
    Another Starlink Issue? Redditor Reports Lightning-Strike Blows Apart Dish 

    During last week’s massive heat wave that scorched much of the US, some “r/Starlink” Redditors complained their satellite internet dishes were knocked offline because of overheating issues. A different week, a new problem for beta users of SpaceX’s broadband service called Starlink as it appears no match for lighting strikes. 

    On Monday, Redditor “Coryhero” posted a picture of what seems to be the remaining bits of a Starlink system after a lightning strike on Sunday blew it to pieces. He wrote in the post, “House was struck by lightning last night. RIP Starlink.”

    In a continuation post, Coryhero said the entire Starlink system “exploded,” and it also took out his “DSL internet modem” and “gaming desktop.” 

    He said, “we’re completely without internet right now.” 

    Coryhero contacted Starlink support, who said he would have to fork over “$375 for a replacement refurbished dish,” adding, “not quite what I was hoping for, with all of the other costs I’m going to have to deal with. I might have to just go back to DSL for now, unfortunately.” 

    Last week, in a completely separate issue, dishes were overheating in the hot weather, producing an error message that read, “Offline Thermal Shutdown.” The dish “overheated” and “Starlink will reconnect after cooling down,” the error message continued. 

    Some Redditors have found a workaround to operate the satellite internet dish in the summer: build a tent.

    The list of issues continues to pile up for Starlink as Redditors report the dish is no match for Mother Nature. 

    Since Starlink is in “initial beta service,” hopefully, engineers can resolve these problems. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 23:05

  • So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly
    So Much Of What The CIA Used To Do Covertly It Now Does Overtly

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    In the later years of an abusive relationship I was in, my abuser had become so confident in how mentally caged he had me that he’d start overtly telling me what he is and what he was doing. He flat-out told me he was a sociopath and a manipulator, trusting that I was so submitted to his will by that point that I’d gaslight myself into reframing those statements in a sympathetic light. Toward the end one time he told me “I am going to rape you,” and then he did, and then he talked about it to some friends trusting that I’d run perception management on it for him.

    The better he got at psychologically twisting me up in knots and the more submitted I became, the more open he’d be about it. He seemed to enjoy doing this, taking a kind of exhibitionistic delight in showing off his accomplishments at crushing me as a person, both to others and to me. Like it was his art, and he wanted it to have an audience to appreciate it.

    I was reminded of this while watching a recent Fox News appearance by Glenn Greenwald where he made an observation we’ve discussed here previously about the way the CIA used to have to infiltrate the media, but now just openly has US intelligence veterans in mainstream media punditry positions managing public perception.

    “If you go and Google, and I hope your viewers do, Operation Mockingbird, what you will find is that during the Cold War these agencies used to plot how to clandestinely manipulate the news media to disseminate propaganda to the American population,” Greenwald said.

    “They used to try to do it secretly. They don’t even do it secretly anymore. They don’t need Operation Mockingbird. They literally put John Brennan who works for NBC and James Clapper who works for CNN and tons of FBI agents right on the payroll of these news organizations. They now shape the news openly to manipulate and to deceive the American population.”

    In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird. It was a major scandal, and rightly so. The news media are meant to report truthfully about what happens in the world, not manipulate public perception to suit the agendas of spooks and warmongers.

    Nowadays the CIA collaboration happens right out in the open, and the public is too brainwashed and gaslit to even recognize this as scandalous. Immensely influential outlets like The New York Times uncritically pass on CIA disinfo which is then spun as fact by cable news pundits. The sole owner of The Washington Post is a CIA contractor, and WaPo has never once disclosed this conflict of interest when reporting on US intelligence agencies per standard journalistic protocol. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona, as are known CIA assets like NBC’s Ken Dilanian, as are CIA interns like Anderson Cooper and CIA applicants like Tucker Carlson.

    They’re just rubbing it in our faces now. Like they’re showing off.

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    And that’s just the media. We also see this flaunting behavior exhibited in the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a propaganda operation geared at sabotaging foreign governments not aligned with the US which according to its own founding officials was set up to do overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The late author and commentator William Blum makes this clear:

    [I]n 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental” — part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (Non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

    “We should not have to do this kind of work covertly,” said Carl Gershman in 1986, while he was president of the Endowment. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.”

    And Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, declared in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

    In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

    We see NED’s fingerprints all over pretty much any situation where the western power alliance needs to manage public perception about a CIA-targeted government, from Russia to Hong Kong to Xinjiang to the imperial propaganda operation known as Bellingcat.

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    Hell, intelligence insiders are just openly running for office now. In an article titled “The CIA Democrats in the 2020 elections”, World Socialist Website documented the many veterans of the US intelligence cartel who ran in elections across America in 2018 and 2020:

    “In the course of the 2018 elections, a large group of former military-intelligence operatives entered capitalist politics as candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in 50 congressional seats — nearly half the seats where the Democrats were targeting Republican incumbents or open seats created by Republican retirements. Some 30 of these candidates won primary contests and became the Democratic candidates in the November 2018 election, and 11 of them won the general election, more than one quarter of the 40 previously Republican-held seats captured by the Democrats as they took control of the House of Representatives. In 2020, the intervention of the CIA Democrats continues on what is arguably an equally significant scale.”

    So they’re just getting more and more brazen the more confident they feel about how propaganda-addled and submissive the population has become. They’re laying more and more of their cards on the table. Soon the CIA will just be openly selling narcotics door to door like Girl Scout cookies.

    Or maybe not. I said my ex got more and more overt about his abuses in the later years of our relationship because those were the later years. I did eventually expand my own consciousness of my own inner workings enough to clear the fears and unexamined beliefs I had that he was using as hooks to manipulate me. Maybe, as humanity’s consciousness continues to expand, the same will happen for the people and their abusive relationship with the CIA.

    *  *  *

    The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 22:45

  • "It's A Sovereignty Issue" – Bermuda Pushes Back Against G-7 Minimum Corporate Tax Proposal
    “It’s A Sovereignty Issue” – Bermuda Pushes Back Against G-7 Minimum Corporate Tax Proposal

    Members of the G-7 may have agreed to a minimum global corporate tax framework that would set the minimum rate at 15%, which is higher than reputed “tax havens” like Ireland and Singapore. But the deal that President Biden has tasked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen with striking is still facing opposition from a coterie of low-tax countries that have taken umbrage at what they see as Washington’s attempt to meddle in their domestic affairs.

    As dozens of OECD members hold meetings to work on a framework that would be more palatable for all the NGO’s members, the FT sat down for an interview with the financial minister of Bermuda, the island nation best known as a low-tax haven for financial institutions like insurers and reinsurers.

    The former banker, Curtis Dickinson, said he was loath to impose a minimum corporate tax on the island of 64K people, arguing that the small nation’s popilation was still struggling to recover from both the pandemic and the 2008 financial crisis. It all feels like a violation of Bermuda’s “sovereignty”.

    “Bermuda has a right to determine for itself what it thinks is an appropriate tax system for its jurisdiction,” he said. “We have a system in place for 200 years. It’s not perfect. It does require some adjustment. But we would like to do that on our own and not have someone tell us to change our system to fit some global initiative…I would say it’s a sovereignty issue.”

    Dickinson added that taxing corporate profits would make Bermuda more bureaucratic and create complexity for businesss, Dickinson said, threatening the country’s role as a global hub for reinsurance. Bermuda collects revenue via taxes on payrolls and property, customs duties and fees charged to international businesses.

    Working class Bermudians struggle with the high cost of the island’s mostly imported goods, which are also heavily taxed. A bartender who spoke to the FT reporter quipped that Bermuda’s reputation as a “tax haven” is a misnomer: “It’s not a tax haven, it’s a tax hidden.”

    Still, the island’s “consumption-based” system makes life easier for corporations and businesses.

    “Bermuda’s current tax system…is consumption based – it is a function of seeking to be simple to administer, simple to file,” he said. “That is the system we have had in place…It has not been changed to encourage people to move here. It has been what it has been. The system works for us.”

    “Bermuda has already been weighing whether to change up its tax regime. A review carried out by the island’s government in 2018 determined that the tax code wasn’t neither “fair nor equitable.”

    To be sure, while other island tax havens known for having more corporate P.O. boxes than people (think the Caymans), Bermuda’s system of taxation has helped transform the island into a legitimate financial center, complete with the armies of actuaries who populate much of the island.

    Dickinson’s argument is that it is unfair to group Bermuda with tax havens that have more corporate mailboxes than people. He said it was an “anomaly” when Google last decade shifted tens of billions of dollars through its Dutch holding company to Bermuda under an intellectual property licensing scheme called the “double Irish Dutch sandwich.” Google has scrapped the arrangement, which enabled it to delay paying US taxes.

    Thanks to its tax system and streamlined regulatory regime, Dickinson said, Bermuda has become a proper financial centre. The big buildings of the leading insurers – AIG, Chubb and BF&M, among them – loom over the capital. More recent arrivals include Conduit Re, which raised $1.1bn last year through a London Stock Exchange listing, and Vantage, a reinsurer launched in 2020 with $1bn in equity capital from Carlyle, Hellman & Friedman and its management.

    […]

    “We want companies here that have boots on the ground,” Dickinson said.

    As of now, financial services companies (mostly insurance) generate more than half of Bermuda’s GDP.

    That’s not to say the island’s leadership is completely opposed to reform. In 2018, Bermuda’s own Tax Reform Commission highlighted the need for change after meeting with more than 50 stakeholder groups including local and international businesses.

    A recurring theme was that Bermuda’s tax structure was “neither fair nor equitable,” the report said. “There was a consensus…that Bermuda’s tax structure placed a disproportionate burden of tax on those least able to pay,” Dickinson said.

    But that doesn’t mean that re-jiggering the island’s tax policy to better suit Washington’s needs will make much of a difference.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 22:25

  • "Educate Yourself" – Seattle Human Rights Commission Dismisses Complaints About 'Whites & Accomplices' Paying "Reparations Fee" For Black Pride Parade
    “Educate Yourself” – Seattle Human Rights Commission Dismisses Complaints About ‘Whites & Accomplices’ Paying “Reparations Fee” For Black Pride Parade

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    There is a controversy in Seattle over plans for a pride event to charge people more based on their race. The Seattle Human Rights Commission is under fire this week after sending a letter dismissing a complaint over the announcement that the Taking B(l)ack Pride on June 26th would charge White entrants a “reparations” fee. The Commission told Charlette LeFevre and Philip Lipson of Capitol Hill Pride that they needed to “educate” themselves and consider the harm that they would cause by being participants in the event.

    Promotional material for Taking B(l)ack Pride was posted on Facebook as a “BLACK AND BROWN QUEER TRANS CENTERED, PRIORITIZED, VALUED, EVENT.” The Facebook page adds: “White allies and accomplices are welcome to attend but will be charged a $10 to $50 reparations fee that will be used to keep this event free of cost for BLACK AND BROWN Trans and Queer COMMUNITY.”

    Capitol Hill Pride organizers Philip Lipson and Charlette LeFevre  took offense and wrote to the Commission that “We consider this reverse discrimination in its worse (sic) form and we feel we are being attacked for not supporting due to disparaging and hostile e-mails. Please review this event’s stated admission policy as we feel this event is violating Seattle, King County, State and Federal equality laws.”

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    It would seem a fair complaint since the event was engaging in open racial discrimination.

    After all, the Seattle Human Rights Commission advises the city “in order to educate them on methods to prevent and eliminate discrimination city-wide.” 

    Lipson and LeFevre however received a letter that shamed them for even raising a racially discriminatory practice.

    The Commission not only shamed them but posted the response so others could read. 

    The Commission advised them if possible, to “educate yourself on the harm it may cause Seattle’s BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) in your pursuit of a free ticket to an event that is not expressly meant for you and your entertainment.”

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    The Commission stressed that charging people more based on race “does not in fact violate any of your human rights as stated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights.” The Commission justified the discriminatory policy on the basis of past discrimination against these groups:

    “They often face shame not only from the cis-heteronormative community, but within the queer community at large as well. In making the event free for the Black Queer Community, the organizers of this event are extending a courtesy so rarely extended; by providing a free and safe space to express joy, share story, and be in community.

    …Furthermore, we would urge you to examine the very real social dynamics and ramifications of this issue.”

    We recently discussed how the Biden Administration has been held to be discriminating in different programs giving preferences based on race and gender. What is interesting is that the Commission only considers itself as operating under the United Nations Declaration and makes no reference to the United States Constitution which prohibits such discrimination. Indeed, racist organizations once justified excluding minorities from lunch counters and events based on the claim that such spaces are not set aside for such individual or their entertainment.

    Nevertheless, such “justice pricing” is in vogue. Groups are now increasing asserting that they should be allowed to engage in raw discrimination as victims of past discrimination.

    This is a private group but it appears to be selling tickets and may require a city permit. The city anti-discrimination laws cover all public accommodations and prohibit discrimination based on race.  The Seattle Office for Civil Rights enforces Seattle’s civil rights laws which include protections against discrimination in employment, public places, housing, and contracting.

    Notably, this sensitive subject has led to some sharp words even on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in 2007 that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  In 2014, the Court ruled 6-2 in Schuette v. Bamn, that Michigan’s constitutional amendment banning affirmative action was constitutional.  Justice Sotomayor chided Roberts with a reframing of his famous line by saying: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” She went on to write in dissent:

    “Race matters. Race matters in part because of the long history of racial minorities being denied access to the political process. … Race also matters because of persistent racial inequality in society — inequality that cannot be ignored and that has produced stark socioeconomic disparities.

    And race matters for reasons that really are only skin deep, that cannot be discussed any other way, and that cannot be wished away…Race matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’”

    Roberts responded by rebutting the implied criticism for raising discriminatory practices even in the name of fighting discrimination:

    “The dissent states that ‘[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race.’ And it urges that ‘[r]ace matters because of the slights, the snickers, the silent judgments that reinforce that most crippling of thoughts: ‘I do not belong here.’

    But it is not ‘out of touch with reality’ to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect of reinforcing precisely that doubt, and — if so — that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to ‘wish away, rather than confront’ racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

    What is disconcerting is not just the dismissive attitude of the Commission but how it views discriminatory policies as secondary or irrelevant to human rights if it favors particular groups.  It does not matter that people are treated differently solely on the basis of their race. Indeed, it does not even warrant a consideration of countervailing constitutional and legal authorities. It is done in the name of equity and thus it is treated as not just correct but beyond question. Indeed, an objection to the policy is treated as a lack of understanding and sensitivity, requiring further education.

    The question is now what the City of Seattle will do and whether a court will give this matter more thought than the Seattle Human Rights Commission.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 22:05

  • Amazon Is Getting Into The Autonomous Trucking Business
    Amazon Is Getting Into The Autonomous Trucking Business

    While Jeff Bezos may be out at Amazon, his plans for conquering every single industry on Earth while maintaining Amazon’s unholy dominance in e-commerce seem to be firmly in tact. 

    Along those lines, Amazon announced this week that it had placed an order for 1,000 autonomous driving systems from self-driving truck technology startup Plus – and that it had also acquired an option to as much as a 20% stake in the company, according to Bloomberg. 

    Amazon will now have “the right to buy preferred shares of Plus via a warrant at a price of $0.46647 per share”, equating to about a 20% stake based on Plus’s pre-SPAC-merger share count, the report notes.

    The move could have obvious implications for both the autonomous vehicle industry, where other key players like Tesla and Workhorse will take note of Amazon’s entrance into the area – and in logistics, where Amazon is pushing the envelope forward for all e-commerce companies to consider how they handle their own logistics internally. 

    Plus is headquartered in Cupertino, California and backed by Sequoia Capital China. It is developing autonomous technology for long-haul trucking, the report says. It currently is set to have a valuation of $3.3 billion and it raised $150 million in a recent PIPE deal with names like BlackRock and D.E. Shaw. 

    Among its other investors are Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., GSR Ventures Management and a Chinese long-haul company known in English as Full Truck Alliance.

    Plus has also worked with Chinese delivery company SF Holding Co., which uses Plus-enabled trucks that can cover about 932 miles per day. State owned entity China FAW Group Co. has plans of “mass production” for jointly developed trucks with Plus beginning as soon as this quarter, Bloomberg noted.

    The potential investment from Amazon isn’t all that surprising, as Plus recently hired Chuck Joseph, formerly of Amazon, to help the company scale up production and promote its technology. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 21:45

  • Georgia Conducting Secret 2020 Election Review Over Suspicious Mail-In Ballots
    Georgia Conducting Secret 2020 Election Review Over Suspicious Mail-In Ballots

    Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations.com,

    After several Fulton County, Ga., poll monitors testified last year that boxes of mail-in ballots for Joe Biden looked liked they’d been run through a photocopy machine, state investigators quietly broke the seal on one suspicious box and inspected the hundreds of votes it contained for signs of fraud, RealClearInvestigations has learned exclusively.

    At the same time, a key whistleblower told RCI that state investigators pressured her to recant her story about what she and other poll monitors had observed — what they called unusually “pristine” mail-in ballots while sorting through them during last November’s hand recount.

    “I felt I was under investigation,” said Suzi Voyles, a longtime Fulton County poll manager whose sworn affidavits have been used by election watchdogs to sue the county for access to the ballots in question.

    Although the ballots are at the center of disputes about the Georgia presidential race, which Joe Biden won by just 12,000 votes, the state never disclosed its probe to the public or to election watchdogs suing to inspect the ballots.

    State officials also neglected to inform the judge hearing the lawsuit that they were conducting such an inspection, even though the judge had issued a protective order over the ballots in January. In a nine-page amicus brief recently filed in the case, attorneys for the office of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urged Superior Court Judge Brian Amero to deny petitioners’ requests to inspect the ballots, calling them a “fishing expedition.”

    Frances Watson, chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office, confirmed in a statement to RCI that she sent investigators to Fulton County earlier this year to inspect the batches of sealed ballots. Poll monitors involved in last November’s hand recount had described the mail-in ballots in sworn affidavits as devoid of creases and folds and featuring identically bubbled-in marks for Biden. But the state said it could not find any ballots matching that description.

    “Our investigators looked into it and didn’t find anything,” she said, while adding the investigation is “still ongoing.”

    The watchdogs question why state officials did not disclose their activities to the court and fear they may have “tampered” with the sealed ballots, which are at the center of their lawsuit seeking access to all 147,000 absentee ballots cast during the 2020 election in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.

    Led by longtime Georgia poll watcher Garland Favorito, founder of VoterGA.org, the court petitioners say the state has failed to inform the judge overseeing their case that they broke the chain of custody over the pallets of shrink-wrapped absentee ballots warehoused in a locked county facility in Atlanta.

    “If the secretary of state’s office did that, they tampered with the ballots and violated Georgia state law,” which restricts the handling of ballots to authorized elections officials involved in the tabulation and care of the ballots, Favorito said.

    He also noted that Judge Amero had placed the ballots under a protective order in January. “They would have had to ask for a court order to unseal and inspect those ballots and they never did that.”

    Raffensperger’s office seemed to acknowledge the ballots were still under seal when it urged Amero to prevent the watchdogs from inspecting the ballots.

    “The security and confidentiality of ballots is to be strictly maintained,” attorneys for Raffensperger argued in the brief they filed with Amero in April, “and the court should be cautious in granting petitioners’ access to ballots that Georgia law requires to remain under seal, which makes it a felony as soon as petitioners were to lay hands on them.”

    Raffensperger’s office did not respond to questions about why it did not inform the court about its probe, although it acknowledged that this is the first time its inspection of the ballots – which began in early January – has been publicly disclosed. Judge Amero did not respond to requests for comment.

    Biden narrowly won Georgia thanks to a late-night tally of absentee ballots in Fulton and other Democratic strongholds. The revelation that state authorities have already unsealed and investigated the ballots in question is a new twist in a case that has seen the firing of poll managers who blew the whistle on the suspicious ballots; a recent breach of security at the warehouse that Fulton County officials were supposed to be guarding around the clock; and an 11th-hour attempt by county officials to dismiss the court-ordered inspection of those ballots – many of which came from Atlanta area drop boxes whose chain of custody documentation has mysteriously turned up missing.

    Last month Amero ordered Fulton County to unseal its 147,000 absentee ballots and allow the petitioners to inspect them under certain restrictions, but the county filed a motion to dismiss the case. Amero is expected to rule on the motion later this month.

    The issue is further muddied by Suzi Voyles’ allegation, never previously reported, that she was pressured to recant her testimony about the pristine ballots. In sworn affidavits last November, Suzi Voyles said she observed that a large batch of mail-in ballots for Biden did not appear to have been folded or handled like she would have expected from her two decades of working elections in the county. She also said that the marks for Biden were identical, as though they had been filled in by a copying machine rather than a pen or pencil.

    In a Jan. 7 interview, which took place at a secretary of state’s office in Atlanta, Voyles told RCI that an investigator identifying himself as Paul Braun “grilled me for over two hours” about her testimony. She said he was joined by another official whom she said was from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. She added that the investigators did not have a copy of her affidavit and did not know the box number and batch numbers of the ballots in question.

    “I smelled a rat when they didn’t know the batch numbers when they were clearly denoted in my affidavit,” Voyles said.

    She added the investigators “gave no indication” they had gone to the warehouse to find the suspicious ballots or were conducting any kind of forensic investigation. Voyles said the investigators kept trying to convince her she might have been mistaken about her observations.

    “I did not recant,” she asserted.

    The ballots that I saw had been pre-printed. It’s a very serious thing in my opinion. That’s what I swore to under penalty of perjury. Recanting would be perjuring myself.”

    Watson told RCI that Voyles “stated that she may have been mistaken about the batch number and provided a different batch number.”

    “I never said that,” Voyles insisted.

    “The second batch number provided by Ms. Voyles did not exist,” Watson added.

    Voyles contended she never provided any other batch numbers. Watson also revealed that “investigators went to Fulton County and reviewed the batches identified by Ms. Voyles, but found no ballots that looked as Ms. Voyles described.” Favorito said his group’s attorney plans to file a motion to depose Watson and Braun to understand exactly what investigators have done regarding the boxes of absentee ballots in question.

    Favorito said he does not doubt Voyles’ testimony and said the ballot images his group has reviewed support her account of anomalies.

    “At no time has Susan Voyles claimed she was mistaken,” Favorito said.

    “She has consistently stood by her affidavit since she submitted it almost seven months ago.”

    Asked if Voyles is under criminal investigation, Georgia Secretary of State Communications Director Ari Schaffer said, “I have no reason to believe she’s under investigation for perjury.” Last December, Raffensperger “condemned” the unexplained firing of Voyles by Fulton County elections officials and called on them to rehire her.

    As RCI previously reported, Voyles is one of four Fulton County poll monitors who signed affidavits swearing they observed the same pattern of irregularities in stacks of mail-in ballots for Biden. All of them suggested the ballots had been photocopied.

    Favorito, who did not vote for Trump, said the state has also tried to interview one other witness – poll monitor Robin Hall – and said he himself is under investigation. He suggested state investigators are trying to intimidate witnesses into backing off their testimony, and are more interested in investigating whistleblowers than finding evidence of ballot fraud.

    Schaffer said he was unsure whether the other affiants have been interviewed. “I’ll have to check on the other three” witnesses, he said.

    Favorito added that the discovery of hard evidence of fraud in Georgia’s largest county would be embarrassing for Raffensperger, who is running for reelection with little support from the Georgia GOP, which recently censured him for creating “opportunities for fraud” by agreeing to the relaxation of voting rules during the 2020 election.

    “He is worried that we will uncover serious wrongdoing on the part of the secretary of state, not just Fulton County,” Favorito said.

    Voyles pointed out that Raffensperger has been too quick to declare the 2020 Georgia election free of fraud. Most recently, he was blindsided by revelations that Fulton County election officials had “misplaced” the required chain-of-custody forms documenting the collection of almost 20,000 mail-in ballots from 36 largely unsupervised drop-off boxes Raffensperger agreed to let Democrat-controlled Fulton County distribute across the Atlanta area ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election.

    “New revelations that Fulton County is unable to produce all ballot drop-box transfer documents will be investigated thoroughly,” Raffensperger tweeted June 14, adding that Fulton officials failed to follow state rules regarding the boxes.

    “This cannot continue.”

    Voyles said Raffensperger’s office is increasingly concerned about its pre-election decision to mollify demands by Democratic voter-rights group to make it easier to vote by absentee ballot.

    “They are investigating us to divert attention from their consent agreement with [Democratic activist] Stacey Abrams,” she said.

    “We never should have had any drop boxes. We wouldn’t have had chain-of-custody problems and the other problems with absentee ballots if they hadn’t put in those drop boxes,” Voyles added. “It was negligence.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 21:25

  • At Least Three Fed Members Don't Think Inflation Is Just "Transitory"
    At Least Three Fed Members Don’t Think Inflation Is Just “Transitory”

    Even though Fed Chair Powell was quick to disabuse the Congressional kangaroo court today that the current bout of runaway inflation is anything but permanent, at least three FOMC members disagree, as Curvature’s repo guru Scott Skyrm observes today.

    Writing in his daily repo market commentary, Skyrm notes that two Fed governors saw the fed funds peak at 3.00% and one at 2.75% in the “dot plot” of the FOMC statement in the next tightening cycle.

    Conceding that he may be reading the “tea leaves” too much, Skyrm the notes that “that’s 50 basis points above the peak of 2.25% to 2.50% during the last cycle.” And while everyone knows that the “dot plot” is historically inaccurate and it’s a better indication of what the Fed governors are thinking at the time, Skyrm said that a peak fed funds rate at 3.00% does not corresponds with the current surge in inflation as being “temporary”… or corresponds with keeping rates are zero right now.

    The repo experts concludes that “if some Fed governors believe there will be more tightening than that last cycle, it either means they expect more inflation in the near future or there’s too much stimulus in the economy right now.”

    Translation: a mutiny is building within Powell’s “Transitory Inflation” Fed, and while just three uber-hawks have emerged so far, there is plenty of time until 2023 for Powell to experience a real insurrection, not the straight-to-CNN January 6 special produced by the FBI in and around the Capitol building.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 21:05

  • Watch: US Patrol In Syria Blocked By Line Of Russian Commandos
    Watch: US Patrol In Syria Blocked By Line Of Russian Commandos

    Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

    Over the weekend, a US military patrol in northeastern Syria was blocked by the Russian military and forced to turn back to where they came from. The US reportedly violated existing security deals with Russia.

    Video of the brief encounter published by the Russian side shows the tense moment that Russian troops physically blocked the road while clutching their rifles:

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    The US and Russia both have troops in reasonably close proximity in Syria, and the US tends to hype confrontations heavily. To try to reduce the number of issues, they’ve made several deals to coordinate their patrols and avoid running into one another.

    That works well, as far as it goes, but in this case the US didn’t inform Russia ahead of time, so when the Russian forces ran into them, they complained about the US ignoring protocol on prior notice.

    The US has not commented on why they ignored the protocol, but it’s not clear why they bother to patrol anyhow, since the US presence is very limited, a hold-over from President Trump’s plan to take Syria’s oil.

    Patrolling into adjoining Kurdish areas means the US retains some ties to the Kurds, but with Russia and Turkey also in the area, it’s a potentially complicated matter, especially if the US considers previous deals to be optional.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 20:45

  • Russian Warships Practice Sinking Aircraft Carrier 35 Miles Off Hawaii Coast As US Places F22s On Standby
    Russian Warships Practice Sinking Aircraft Carrier 35 Miles Off Hawaii Coast As US Places F22s On Standby

    For weeks Russia has mustered a large fleet and aerial assets in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii in what’s been widely recognized as Russia’s largest Pacific military drills since the end of the Cold War. The Pentagon has closely monitored the somewhat unprecedented exercises which have seen at least 20 warships, submarines, fighter jets, and long-range bombers operating a mere 300 miles off Hawaii’s coast.

    But in a new alarming statement the US Navy is confirming that at one point Russian vessels and aircraft came a mere 35 miles off Hawaii’s coast as the massive war games were underway. While stressing that the foreign military assets stayed within international waters, spokesman for US Indo-Pacific Command Navy Capt. Mike Kafka, said, “At the closest point, some ships operated approximately 20 to 30 nautical miles (23 to 34 statute miles) off the coast of Hawaii,” he said. “We closely tracked all vessels.”

    New details of Russian maneuvers during the course of the exercises suggest there were multiple “close calls” – also as days ago the Pentagon scrambled F-22 stealth fighters, which remain on standby.

    The Russian side is now divulging that its military undertook mock attacks on a simulated aircraft carrier strike group.

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    First, as the Honolulu Star Advertiser has detailed, armed US fighters twice responded to the area amid a heightened state of alert over the Russian war games:

    The deployment of Russian “Bear” bombers as part of the exercise twice resulted in missile-armed Hawaii Air National Guard F-22 fighters scrambling to possibly intercept the turboprop planes — which headed in the direction of Hawaii but never came close, officials said.

    The report continues: “The Hawaii Air Guard stealth jets launched June 13 and again on Friday, but no intercepts were conducted with the Russian planes likely turning away from the path toward the state, according to an account of the launch.”

    Russian military, Varyag cruiser

    And the hugely provocative details of the simulated carrier sinking put out by Russia’s defense ministry were detailed in The Drive as follows:

    The Russian Ministry of Defense today published an account about the Pacific Fleet maneuvers, which are described as having practiced “the tasks of destroying an aircraft carrier strike group of a mock enemy.” 

    A simulated cruise missile strike was carried out by the Pacific Fleet flagship, the Slava class cruiser Varyag (pictured above), as well as the Udaloy class destroyer Marshal Shaposhnikov, and the Steregushchiy class corvettes Hero of the Russian Federation Aldar Tsydenzhapov, Gromky, and Sovershenniy.

    Russia’s defense ministry has lately issued multiple short official videos of its large force in action near Hawaii…

    Again, since the formal end of the exercises it’s emerging based on independent satellite image analysis that some of the Russian military assets were engaged in operations much closer to the United States’ sovereign territory than previously thought. 

    “Russia says that they are 300 miles off the coast of Hawaii, yet unconfirmed satellite images from June 19 appear to show them much closer – within 35 miles of the U.S. state,” The Daily Mail observes. The newest US Pacific-Command statement has since confirmed this proximity of at least some of the Russian assets.

    Russian MoD

    A number of Western pundits underscored that the large-scale Russian games were meant as a serious muscle-flexing “message” to President Biden just as he met with Vladimir Putin in Geneva last Wednesday. 

    Despite the US fighters being scrambled off Hawaii’s coast and remaining on stanby, Biden never publicly addressed the threat, though it’s unknown if he broached the issue with Putin directly in the closed-door talks.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    What’s more is that a Russian spy ship has remained in the regional waters near the US islands, according to Hawaiian news sources which detailed its presence Monday. 

    No doubt, US Pacific-Command forces are still on a high state of alert, monitoring for any remaining Russian military maneuvers in the area.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 20:45

  • China-Backed Media Highly Critical Of Texas' New Permitless Carry Law
    China-Backed Media Highly Critical Of Texas’ New Permitless Carry Law

    Nearly a week after Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1927 that eliminates the requirement for Texas residents to obtain a license to carry a handgun, the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda news outlet, Xinhua, published a highly critical piece on how the permitless carry law (beginning on Sept.1) could return the Lone Star State to its “Wild West past, or even worse.”  

    The U.S. state of Texas may return to its Wild West past, or even worse, predicts an advocate for responsible gun ownership and opponent of the so-called permitless carry law signed by Governor Greg Abbott on Wednesday, which allows Texans to carry handguns without a license or training starting Sept. 1.

    “There weren’t automatic weapons or 100-round magazine capacities in the guns 100 years ago,” said Gyl Switzer, director of Texas Gun Sense, a nonprofit group of more than 7,000 mostly gun owners who lobby for improved methods of gun control.

    The permitless carry law isn’t within Switzer’s ideas of ensuring responsible firearm safety, as indicated by Texas Gun Sense’s press release Wednesday within an hour of Abbott’s fulfillment of his promise to sign the Republican-backed legislation.

    “We are very concerned and disgusted that Governor Abbott has signed HB (House Bill) 1927 today while Texans are still fighting for their lives in Austin area hospitals from the most recent of Texas mass shootings,” the release stated. “(The bill) allows the permitless carry of handguns in public by people with no background check, no training in laws and safety and no demonstrated proficiency in shooting.” –Xinhua

    The Chinese government’s propaganda machine lashing out against the permitless carry law and siding with anti-gun Democrats is worrisome. 

    Xinhua didn’t even take the time to balance the article with what pro-gun groups had to say. The Chinese government and the communist party fear armed citizens. 

    Luckily, who cares what the Chinese government has to say because none of it matters as mainstream media fails to report the gun sanctuary moment is erupting across the country. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 20:25

  • Late Stage Globalism: When Anything That Is Not Censored Is A Lie
    Late Stage Globalism: When Anything That Is Not Censored Is A Lie

    Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

    Late Stage Globalism Is A Tale of Narratives vs Networks

    Over the past few weeks in my weekly #AxisOfEasy newsletter I’ve been covering how Big Tech and the corporate media tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on the Wuhan Lab origin narrative. At one point I half-joked “I’ll shut up about this when it’s safe to talk about Ivermectin”. This week, I did end up writing a piece about Ivermectin, namely how doctors can’t even mention it in their videos or podcast appearances without being penalized by social media platforms.

    Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who has studied bats (from which COVID-19 purportedly originated) was recently on Triggernometry, the UK based podcast that my company, easyDNS, has been sponsoring since mid-2020. It turns out that neither Weinstein nor Triggernometry can say the word “Ivermectin” in their shows. If they do they’ll get an automatic takedown by YouTube and a strike on Facebook for violating community standards.

    Matt Taibbi recently posed the question “Why has ‘Ivermectin’ become a dirty word?” He cites Dr. Pierre Kory in his testimony to a US Senate Committee hearing on medical responses to COVID-19 in December 2020. Kory was referring to an existing medicine that was already FDA approved that he was describing as a “wonder drug” in treating COVID-19, that drug was Ivermectin.

    This Senate testimony was televised and viewed by approximately 8 million people. YouTube removed the video of this exchange. They later suspended the account of the United States senator who invited Dr. Kory to speak. (Kory also appeared on Brett Weinstein’s show and they took down that as well).

    Associated Press for their part “fact checked” the senate testimony, and because, in their words “there is no evidence that Ivermectin is a ‘miracle drug’ against COVID”, they labeled it as false:

    CLAIM: The antiparasitic drug ivermectin “has a miraculous effectiveness that obliterates” the transmission of COVID-19 and will prevent people from getting sick.

    AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.

    First, I find it a little presumptuous for a wire service to be fact checking senate testimony. Isn’t the job of the committee holding the hearing largely that of fact-finding? Isn’t that the entire point? The ostensible role of the press should have been to simply report on what happened. What we got instead was an editorial wrapped in a logical fallacy (appeal to ignorance) that was passed off as some sort of objective truth.

    The coronavirus has accelerated the timelines on a lot of tectonic shifts that were already in motion. It’s pulled forward effects that would otherwise would have taken years or possibly even decades to play out. One of those dynamics is that the mainstream corporate press has self-immolated their own credibility in the eyes of their rapidly dwindling audience.

    Until now the masses seemed to be inculcated with the slow burn of endless propaganda and sermonizing from as far back as the days of Edward Bernays (who coined the word “propaganda”). Now with the pandemic and all this talk about a Great Reset and the New Normal because of a virus that was made more infectious in a Chinese lab funded by US technocrats, this is all beginning to look (in the immortal words of The New York Dolls) like “too much, too soon”.

    It may turn out that there is a saturation level of manufactured narrative that the public can be led to believe or tolerate and beyond that point it all begins to look like hyperreality. Not only do fewer people believe it anymore, more of them are done with even pretending to believe it.

    With too many things that were presented to us as truthful information over the last year turning out to be wrong, or a lie and almost everything that was dismissed as “already debunked conspiracy theory” turning out to have more substance, we may be crossing that point now.

    Mainstream media audiences are in secular decline.

    The biggest audiences to be found aren’t on CNN or MSNBC anymore, but most of the people still watching TV are watching FOX, mainly because Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are calling b/s on nearly every establishment talking point.

    Via The Hill

    But I’m looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, self-publishing via their Substack. That’s mainly email.

    Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve Bannon, btw. The few times I’ve been on his Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he’s doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be tuning into Bannon are telling me “I saw you on Warroom”. (It’s mind-blowing).

    Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any of the other bluecheck day camps for aspiring establishment shills.

    It’s because of independent, renegade journalists and people writing outside of major outlets that these stories are starting go mainstream despite the best efforts of Big Tech, enforcing whatever canon the corporate press deems to be truth, or the establishment anointed “fact checkers” who try to step in whenever something looks to gain traction:

    The Wuhan lab origin was suspected for over a year (and the Fauci emails prove it). Zerohedge was on it almost immediately and got deplatformed for their troubles. It was finally pushed over the line in a Medium post by Nicholas Wade over a year later.

    Ivermectin may be next round and it looks like if it gets anywhere it will be thanks to people like Matt Taibbi and Bret Weinstein.

    What is the common thread here? It’s the power of decentralized networks and open source protocols vs narrative control that is promulgated from global governments, amplified by the corporate media, and enforced by technocratic platforms.

    This is why crypto currencies won’t die. This is why things like Signal, Telegram, Mastodon, Keybase are spreading like wildfire. This is why the best way to build an audience in this day and age is still email. Everything I wrote in my book on defending from cancel-culture and deplatform attacks is even more relevant today than when I released it last year (I made it available for free a few months later).

    It may seem like the censorship is absolute and that the narrative and the spin is overwhelming. But take solace that it only appears that way because the facade is breaking.

    As more people realize that the centralized technocratic system is failing, those who’s privilege and position are premised on it have to double down, triple down. They have to burn the boats.

    They’re fully committed now and because they have no other choice they have to overstep and overreach. Too much, too soon. Too late.

    *  *  *

    To receive future posts in your mailbox join the free Bombthrower mailing list, follow me on Twitter, or use the current weakness in cryptos to take advantage of my Crypto Capitalist Portfolio trial offer.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 20:05

  • Here Are America's Top Ten Vacation Home Counties
    Here Are America’s Top Ten Vacation Home Counties

    A new report from the National Association of Realtors said the housing market is “hot in vacation home counties than nonvacation home counties.” 

    NAR’s 2021Vacation Home Counties Report examined more than 1,000 counties across the US using Multiple Listing Service data and found the top % vacation home counties in 2020. These counties are scattered across 16 states and met the criteria for being in the top 1%, including higher price, higher sales growth, and faster days on the market. 

    “North Carolina had four vacation counties (Swain, Alleghany, Macon, Watauga); there were three each in New York (Greene, Sullivan, Hamilton), Vermont (Windham, Bennington, Windsor), Massachusetts (Dukes, Barnstable, Nantucket), and Michigan (Oscoda, Alcona, Clare); there were two each in Florida (Lee, Collier), Missouri (Hickory, Camden), Maryland (Garrett, Worcester). Oklahoma, Maine, Arizona, New Jersey, Georgia, New Mexico, Delaware, and Minnesota each had one vacation home county that landed in the top 1% list,” NAR said. 

    “Vacation homes are a hot commodity at the moment,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “With many businesses and employers still extending an option to work remotely to workers, vacation housing and second homes will remain a popular choice among buyers.”

    Much of the boom has been fueled by the pandemic, as city-dwellers panic left cities for rural areas with scenic views or natural wonders. Also, mortgage rates at record lows unleashed a flurry of buyers while these homes were in short supply. 

    However, the monetary wizards at the Federal Reserve suggested last week that interest rate rises and tapering their massive balance sheet could occur sometime next year. This could derail not just the vacation home boom but the overall housing market.  

    Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Robert Kaplan played bad cop Monday morning as he suggested: “whether the housing market really needs the Fed’s support of $40 billion a month.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 19:45

  • Trump Organization Sues New York City for Cancelling Golf Course Contract
    Trump Organization Sues New York City for Cancelling Golf Course Contract

    Authored by Ivan Pentchoukov via The Epoch Times,

    The Trump Organization filed a lawsuit against New York City on June 21, alleging that its contract to run a Bronx golf course was cancelled for political reasons.

    The lawsuit, filed in state court, argues that the contract between the city and the organization did not give New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio grounds to terminate it due to the actions of some of the president’s supporters during the Jan. 6 riot earlier this year.

    The lawsuit asks the court to let the Trump organization continue operating the course or pay millions to exit the deal.

    “Mayor de Blasio’s actions are purely politically motivated, have no legal merit, and are yet another example of the mayor’s efforts to advance his own partisan agenda and interfere with free enterprise,” the Trump Organization said in a statement.

    New York City said the company breached the terms of the contract and that it will “vigorously defend” its decision to terminate the deal.

    De Blasio announced the contract’s termination in January in the wake of the Capitol riot. He accused Trump of the “criminal action” of inciting the rioters. The U.S. Senate exonerated Trump of a similar charge during its second impeachment trial for the president.

    A number of banks and other businesses have refused to do future business with the Trump organization after the unrest on Jan. 6.

    New York has also pointed to a decision by the PGA of America to cancel a tournament that had been scheduled to be held at a Trump golf course in New Jersey.

    The city said that Trump could no longer argue that he can attract prestigious tournaments to Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in the Bronx as is required in the contract.

    The Trump Organization argued in the lawsuit that the contract doesn’t require it to attract tournaments, only obliging it maintain a course that is “first-class, tournament quality.”

    It attached letters from course designers, golf organizations, and famous golfers, including top-ranked players Dustin Johnson and U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau, saying that the course met that standard.

    The city has previously argued that the Trump Organization was being “overly restrictive” in its interpretation of the phrase “first-class, tournament quality,” saying it need only show that Trump is incapable of attracting tournaments for whatever reason.

    Under the contract terms, New York City can terminate its deal with the Trump Organization at any time without cause but would be obligated to compensate the company for the money it invested in building a clubhouse on the course.

    Trump’s son Eric, who lashed out at the city decision as a part of “cancel culture” earlier this year, has said the city and rate payers would be obligated to pay more than $30 million if the city withdraws, a figure cited again in the lawsuit.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 19:25

  • US Losing 1.2 Million Workers To Early Retirement
    US Losing 1.2 Million Workers To Early Retirement

    According to a brand new analysis from Goldman’s economists, the US is on pace to experience a permanent loss of about 1.2 million workers from early retirement and reduced immigration. That’s the bad news; the good news – according to Goldman – is that younger workers who have been reluctant to return to the workforce are still likely to do so once temporary disincentives to work disappear (most later this year).  As a result, Goldman is looking for the labor force participation rate to rise by 100bps over the next year-plus to 62.6% (if still 0.8% below the 63.4% pre-pandemic rate).

    Why does this matter? Because while the labor market currently is a total shitshow due to Democrat policies that pay potential workers more to do nothing than to work, leading to a record 9.3 million job openings…

    … and as a result there is a historic labor shortage, this is expected to change in September when extended unemployment benefits run out. That’s why, consensus generally expects that the recovery in labor force participation will accelerate in the coming months as generous unemployment insurance benefits expire and other pandemic-related labor supply disincentives like school closures and health risk exposure fade away.

    But looking beyond the near term – 6 or so months from now – should we expect a full recovery in the labor supply? That’s what Goldman tries to answer in its latest economic note.

    The vampire squid starts off by reminding us that in December, it warned about a surge in early retirements that was likely to be a lingering drag on the labor force participation rate (LFPR). Since then, the number of excess retirees – defined as the difference between the actual number of retirees and the number of retirees implied by the age-specific retirement rates observed in 2019 – has soared to 1.2 million, a 0.5% hit to the labor force participation rate in addition to the roughly 0.2% structural drag from population aging since the pandemic began.

    Because most early retirements reflect permanent labor force exits, the labor force drag from early retirements will persist until it unwinds through fewer new retirements.

    Some more details:

    First, of the 2.7 million non-retiring workers who have left the labor force since the start of the pandemic (reflecting a 1.0% drag on the LFPR), 1.4 million say they don’t want a job now. However, many of these workers are aged 55+ (600k; a 0.2% drag) and are likely not working due to health concerns. In contrast, the share of prime-age and younger people who say they don’t want a job (a 0.3% drag) has increased only modestly and currently stands at mid-2019 levels (bottom chart, left).

    Second, among those workers who have left the labor force but still want a job (1.2 million; a 0.5% drag), most haven’t searched recently (over 900k; a 0.4pp drag), suggesting that they are postponing their job search until UI benefits expire and pandemic-related disincentives fall away (right chart, below). This, just in case there are still idiots who think that Biden’s generous claims aren’t behind the collapse in labor supply. The good news – for now – is that very few fall into the discouraged worker category that might indicate more persistent scarring and pose a threat to a full labor market recovery. This is of course intuitive: it is hard to imagine large numbers of workers dropping out in despair over a lack of job opportunities, as happened after the financial crisis, in an environment in which jobs are so abundant. Then again, this unstable equilibrium will flip soon enough once benefits run out and there is surge in labor supply and a sharp drop in wages.

    Looking beyond pandemic-driven changes in the labor force, Goldman sees scope for two tax policy changes to affect the labor supply of parents.

    • First, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) increased the Child Tax Credit (CTC), made it fully refundable, and removed its earned income-requirements for 2021 (chart below, left), and the upcoming fiscal package is expected to extend these changes through 2025. Prior academic research finds that the earned-income requirements of the CTC have had a significant impact on maternal labor supply, so removing these incentives could put downward pressure on female labor force participation. Although this effect will partially be offset by increased work incentives from the increased Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), earned income incentives will likely be reduced on net.
    • Second, the ARP also made the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) much more generous by allowing households to claim 50% of child care expenses up to $8k for one child and $16k for two or more children as a refundable tax credit (chart below, right). These changes could have large positive effects on maternal labor supply if they are extended beyond 2021.

    Here, Goldman says that its best guess is that the labor supply incentives from the CTC and CDCTC roughly offset each other, with some potential for a rotation in female labor supply from lower-income households (who should be most affected by the changes to the CTC) to middle-income households (who should benefit most from the changes to the CDCTC). However, there are some risks in both directions, depending on the details and permanence of each potential tax change.

    Overall, Goldman economists expect the Labor force participation rate to eventually rise from 61.6% now to a peak of 62.6% by the end of 2022, which however will still be 0.8% below the 63.4% pre-pandemic trend, with the gap in participation primarily reflecting early retirements and demographic shifts and other negative consequences resulting from Biden’s fiscal policies. It may also explain why there has been a concerted push to cut the work week from 5 to 4 days.

    In an amusing twist, Goldman “goes there” and writes that although immigration has only a small effect on the labor force participation rate (since it affects both the labor force and population), the bank expects the collapse in visa issuance during the pandemic (Exhibit 4) will reduce the labor force for the next few years. Quantified, GS economists expect that the drop in temporary worker visas currently is creating an effective labor force drag of 450k workers, although this hit will unwind through fewer expiring visas going forward. They also estimate that the drop in immigration visas has reduced the labor force by 300k through May, and since the loss in immigration in 2020 won’t be offset by higher immigration going forward, most of this drag will persist

    Finally, the next chart shows Goldman’s labor force forecast relative to the US demographic trend: here, Goldman continues to expect that most of the pandemic-driven exits will reverse in the coming months as pandemic- and policy-related obstacles to participation fade but that drags from early retirements and slower migration will keep the labor force over 1.2 million workers below trend by the end of 2022.

    How and when that transitions to a full-blown socialist state – which is the aim of most progressive democrats – where the government pays tens of millions not to work with the funding coming courtesy of the intellectual fraud that is MMT (Magic Money Tree), remains unclear although it will likely require an even bigger shock than the covid pandemic. War with China may just suffice.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/22/2021 – 19:05

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