- Why Should American Soldiers Die For Taiwan?
Why Should American Soldiers Die For Taiwan?
Authored by Daniel Davis via 19fortyfive.com,
Calls by U.S. leaders to extend security guarantees to Taiwan against an aggressive China are on the rise. American pundits have likewise been eager and disturbingly casual about offering up U.S. service members to go and die for Taipei. Before taking another step down this dangerous path, however, these leaders need to consider just how willing Taiwanese are to die for their own country.
Until we have more concrete evidence that the Taiwanese are doing all they can for their own defense, all talk of America risking war with China for their benefit needs to come to a halt. There is no justification for sending American men and women to die on the seas and in the air around Taiwan when the citizens of Taiwan are themselves cool to the idea of dying for their own country.
First is the classic “show me your checkbook and I’ll show you your priorities.” The United States places great value on protecting its citizens and global interests, as evidenced by the fact that we spend more on national defense than any nation on the planet, upwards of 3.5% GDP annually.
As recently as 2016, Taiwan was spending an anemic 1.6% GDP on defense, and next year is expected to be only slightly better, at 2.1%. Evidence suggests that constant boasts by U.S. opinion leaders that the United States should give security guarantees to Taiwan leads the island’s leaders to conclude they don’t have to spend money on their own defense because they believe we will provide it for them.
Second is the extent to which the citizens are willing to serve in the armed forces and risk their lives in defense of their country. In the United States, our all-volunteer force constantly produces sufficient numbers of service personnel to fully man the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard. We don’t always meet the recruiting goals but we always have sufficient numbers of personnel.
In Taiwan, by contrast, the armed services are significantly understaffed. So few Taiwanese are willing to sign up for military service, in fact, that earlier this year frontline combat units in the Taiwan military were assessed as being manned at a shockingly low 60%.
The Taipei Times newspaper conducted research a few years ago into the attitudes of the recruitment-age youth in Taiwan, finding that large numbers were “(a)pathetic toward the military and averse to service.”
One former Taiwanese Marine seemed to capture the reason for the apathy well:
“I think it’s unlikely that we will go to war. If there’s no real enemy to fight against, I don’t know why military training is necessary.”
Reuters reported in 2018 that 1,000 reservists over the previous three years had been charged for “dodging mandatory training.”
It is clear that considerable numbers of Taiwanese people either do not believe the threat from China is real, don’t believe their country could defeat China if it did attack, or just don’t want to “waste time” serving. Such a dynamic harkens back to the recent situation in Afghanistan where large numbers of Afghan troops would rather make deals with their enemy than to fight to the death in a fight they don’t think they could win. It therefore made no difference to the outcome that American troops did fight for them over a 20 year period.
Similarly, when the Russians annexed the Crimea in 2014, they did so without firing a shot because, like the Taliban did earlier this year, the Russians made deals with the defenders of The Crimea and likewise told them it would be pointless and futile to die fighting – when they could instead come to work for the victorious Russians. There is little reason to think some version of the same dynamic would not also exist in Taiwan if the Chinese were to attack.
If the government of Taiwan is not willing to adequately fund its military, if the Taiwanese men and women whose lives would be on the line in a war with China aren’t willing to fight for their country, it would frankly be immoral to force American men and women to die in their place for Taiwan’s defense. It is time U.S. opinion leaders and government officials stopped being so eager to offer up American troops to go into harm’s way for the benefit of another country and start being concerned for the welfare of our troops’ lives.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 23:40 - "How Dare You?" – These Countries Are The Most Committed To Coal
“How Dare You?” – These Countries Are The Most Committed To Coal
The already ambitious global carbon emission reduction goals were dealt a significant blow this month as China, having recently pledged to end all future foreign coal power projects, announced that they would be further committing to domestic coal expansion – likely pushing back the year the country expects to reach peak emissions (currently 2030), referencing a new “phased timetable and roadmap for peaking carbon emissions”
Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports that, in a statement after a meeting of Beijing’s National Energy Commission, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang said:
“Given the predominant place of coal in the country’s energy and resource endowment, it is important to optimise the layout for the coal production capacity, build advanced coal-fired power plants as appropriate in line with development needs, and continue to phase out outdated coal plants in an orderly fashion. Domestic oil and gas exploration will be intensified.”
As data from Global Energy Monitor shows, planned and under construction coal plants in China already totaled 238 projects in July 2021, equating to an expected 260,017 megawatts of capacity.
You will find more infographics at Statista
This new output accounts for over half of all the world’s currently under construction coal energy capacity and puts China firmly ahead of all other countries still investing in the fossil fuel.
We know at least on person is going to be furious…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 23:20 - Israel Resumes Practicing Military Attacks On Iran After 2-Year Pause
Israel Resumes Practicing Military Attacks On Iran After 2-Year Pause
Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,
The Israeli Air Force has resumed, after a two-year pause, what is being described as “intense” drills to practice attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, a move that likely would start a major war.
This comes just days after a report that the Israeli government approved a $1.5 billion budget increase for the military explicitly to pay for preparations to attack Iran. Defense Minister Benny Gantz defended the spending, saying it is necessary to prepare for the planned attack on Iran. This is expected to include acquiring new planes to participate in the attack.
An Israeli Air Force Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker and F-16 fighter jets, via AFP Underpinning Israel’s on-again, off-again planning to attack are decades of efforts to get the United States to attack Iran instead. Usually Israel’s scaling up its own unilateral options is theater to try to pressure the US.
This time, it comes not long after Israeli officials were crowing about Secretary of State Antony Blinken giving lip service to a US military option. This was reported to be exactly what Israel wanted, but now Israel is back to spending on its own war option.
In the grand scheme of things, the Israeli war narrative fuels itself more than anything, trying to feed US policy with alarmist claims and false statements about the months until Iran has a bomb they aren’t even working on.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is in Moscow discussing Syria and Iran with President Putin…
PM @naftalibennett said Friday he and #Russian President Vladimir #Putin discussed Israel’s fears over #Iran’s strengthening in Syria, the campaign against the #Iranian #nuclear program and Russia’s fears over uncoordinated Israeli attacks in Syriahttps://t.co/1m0Oc5suNZ
— CJP Israel 🇮🇱 (@CJPIsrael) October 22, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Though decades of this has made US decision-makers at least a little resistant, Israel’s own politicians, more than a few of whom have made a career on targeting Iran, may blunder themselves into an ugly war by falsely presenting themselves with no alternative.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 23:00 - Chicago Pizzeria Forced To Close Due To Labor Shortage
Chicago Pizzeria Forced To Close Due To Labor Shortage
The country’s labor shortage is hitting home a little bit more for one Chicago-based pizzeria.
This past weekend, the restaurant couldn’t open because it didn’t have enough staff, according to a new report from Insider. It cost the owner about $5,000 in revenue, the report says.
Dave Bonomi, the owner of Coalfire Pizza in West Town, wrote on Twitter this past Sunday: “We are closed today. I simply do not have enough people to open.”
“In nearly 15 years of selling pizza, this has never happened,” he continued.
In addition to not having enough staff, Bonomi said that applicants for jobs weren’t showing up to scheduled interviews. He attributes the no-shows to restaurants having a toxic reputation as places to work due to harassment from customers and low pay.
Some of Coalfire’s staff had already left for higher paying jobs at larger restaurant chains. Coalfire increased its starting salary for cooks to $18 per hour from $15 per hour in response.
Coalfire had already been “running on fumes” with a skeleton staff, Bonomi said. These problems got worse during the pandemic, he said, noting that the pandemic and the ensuing shortage was like “nothing I’ve ever seen”.
Coalfire is a microcosm of a shortage taking place all over the country, where independent businesses find themselves shorthanded and unable to staff themselves. Restaurants and businesses that were just getting back to operating “normally” after the pandemic have still had to close their doors and shutter operations as a result.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 22:40 - The Frightened Class
The Frightened Class
Authored by Thomas Harrington via The Browstone Institute,
They’re all around us, especially those of us who live in relatively prosperous metropolitan neighborhoods in the US or Western Europe. Despite being—at least in material terms—among the most fortunate people who have ever walked the earth, they are very scared. And they want you to be very frightened too.
Indeed, many of them see your refusal to be as frightened as they are about life’s inevitable risks as a grave problem which entitles them and their often powerful and influential fellow travelers to recur to all manner of authoritarian practices to insure that you adhere to their increasingly neurotic view of reality.
This tendency has been in full bloom lately as the people who have sat safely behind their laptops during the last 20 months have harangued and threatened those who have been out on job sites and meatpacking plants mixing freely with others and the virus, to internalize their own obsessions.
And when these supposedly ignorant others—whose storehouse of empirical evidence about the dangers of the virus easily outstrips that of the laptoppers—refuse to buckle to the demand to be scared, they are met with all sorts of opprobrium.
Viewed in historical terms, it’s an odd phenomenon.
For most of recorded time prosperity and education have been the gateway to a life of relative freedom from worry. But now, the people who most enjoy these benefits are, it seems, wracked with anxiety and, in the not infrequent way of many people suffering that plague, and hellbent on sharing their misery with others.
The point here is not to belittle the very real costs of anxiety in the lives of many people, nor to dismiss it as a real public health concern. Rather, it is to ask how and why it is proliferating so rapidly among those who, at least on the surface, have less reason than the vast majority of their fellow human beings to suffer from it.
There are, I think, a number of possible explanations.
One way of explaining the phenomenon is in the context of income inequality and its devastating effects on the shape and size of the upper middle class, and those who still believe they have a realistic chance of joining its ranks. Those who have “made it” into that sub-group are deeply cognizant of the unstable nature of their status in a world of corporate buyouts and rampant layoffs. And they worry that they may not be able to provide their children with the ability to retain what they see, rightly or wrongly, as the only real version of the good life.
Thus, when the people way up on top made the decision following September 11th to make the inducement of fear the cornerstone of political mobilization in an increasingly post-political and post-communal society, they found a ready reserve of support in this anxious if also relatively prosperous cohort of the population.
And after two decades of having their already anxious inner selves massaged daily by an a steady drumbeat of fear (and a diet of Trump as Hitler for dessert) both they and their children fell like ripe fruit into the hands of those that wanted to sell them on the “unprecedented” threat posed by a disease that leaves 99.75% of its victims wonderfully alive.
Adding another layer to this general phenomenon is the increasing isolation of our educated classes from “physicality” in both their work and communal lives.
Until the 1990s it was virtually impossible for anyone other than the richest of the rich not to have any active or passive acquaintance with the world of physical work. Indeed, for the first three or four decades after World War II many of those who could financially afford to relieve their children of this acquaintance with physical work often did not do so, as they believed that knowing what it meant to sweat, ache, be crushingly bored and, not infrequently, humiliated during the course of the day was essential to gaining a more rounded and empathetic understanding of the human condition.
All that ended when the financialization of the economy and the rise of the internet made what Christopher Lasch presciently termed the “rebellion of the elites a much more palpable possibility.”
For example, very few of my students have ever worked during their summers in anything other than office jobs, often procured through family connections. They thus have little understanding, and hence little empathy, of just how brutal and demeaning daily work can be for so many people.
This alienation from the physical can also be seen in family life. The predominant and seldom challenged edict of “go where the money is”—a virtual religion for those seeking upward advancement in US culture—has meant that large numbers of children now grow up far away from their extended families. However, we seldom talk about the built-in costs of subscribing to this ethos.
To talk with and listen to grandparents, uncles and aunts on a regular basis and in person is very different from seeing these people in occasional choreographed holiday rituals, or from time-to-time on Zoom. In the first instance, the child is inserted into a milieu that, for better or worse, structures his understanding of how the world works and forces him to recognize his relationship to both the past, other people and their individual stories.
Might they decide later, for very good reasons, to break for this particular network of narratives? Of course. But when they do so they will at least carry within the idea of a stable and rooted identity as a life goal, something that my discussions with students over the last decade have led me to believe many of them no longer see as a possibility, or even a need.
The increasing distance between those working within the antiseptic confines of the information economy and those still earning their keep with their bodies has, moreover, led many of the former group into a state of enormous confusion regarding the distinction between words and deeds.
To work in academia, as I have for the last three decades, is to be surrounded by people who truly believe that the words one exchanges with others are as existentially weighty and consequential as physical assaults upon the body. This not only shows how few of them have ever been in a real brawl, but how blind they are to the fundamental role that physical violence and/or the looming threat of its use has always played in the game of coercing the many to bend to the will of the few.
And this is why so many of them, parroting the moralizing, if factually tenuous, talking points supplied to them by a deeply corrupt media establishment, are so nonplussed about the physical assaults upon people’s bodies now taking place in the name of “fighting Covid.” It is also why a disturbing number of those whom they teach truly believe that hearing someone utter a critique against an ideological construct that another person told them was good and correct is much more problematic than forcing someone to be injected with an experimental drug under the threat of losing their livelihood.
But perhaps the most significant reason for the rise of the Frightened Class is modern consumer culture’s assault upon the millenary practice of providing the young with what Joseph Campbell called “adequate mythic instruction.” For Campbell myths are, above all, a means of inoculating the young against the angst of knowing we are all destined for decrepitude and death, as well as much inflicted cruelty during that march toward oblivion.
These stories, he suggests, show the young how others have confronted their fears in the past and have learned to find meaning and coherence in the apparent absurdity of their situations. They drive home the message that there is nothing approaching vital plenitude and significant psychological growth without the repeated assumption of risk and a constant engagement with fear. In short, they instill in the young the idea that they are by no means alone in their existential dilemmas.
From the point of view of consumer culture, however, a mythically-anchored person; that is, someone able to place their present struggles in a broad, coherent and historically-informed perspective, is a very troubling thing.
Why?
Because such people are much less amenable to the mostly fear-based pitches that drive the production and consumption of the often nonessential goods upon which the system depends for its continued growth and expansion. If an adolescent has heard stories that underscore the ubiquity of awkward feelings among people of his age, and how so many before them passed through these difficulties and became stronger and wiser, then he is much less likely to pine for the purchase of the “solution” to the problem proffered to him by commercial entities.
It has been said that, over time, we tend to “become what we do.” It seems that after orchestrating campaign after campaign of fear on behalf of the truly powerful, the “literate” comfortable classes have come to believe their own schtick to the point where they have trouble understanding, or even tolerating, those who have always consumed their mercenarily-produced fear porn with a large helping of salt.
Worse yet, these self-frightened elites seem to think they can now remedy their lack of credibility with those living outside their grim prison of angst by simply amping up the volume on the scare machine. I suspect they might be in for a bigger and much more “physical” set of responses than they ever imagined could come their way.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 22:20 - CFTC Awards Almost $200 Million To Deutsche Bank Whistleblower
CFTC Awards Almost $200 Million To Deutsche Bank Whistleblower
In a release out Thursday, the CFTC said it had issued a monstrous $200 million whistleblower award to someone whose “specific, credible, and timely original information significantly contributed to an already open investigation and led to a successful enforcement action, as well as to the success of two related actions, by a U.S. federal regulator and a foreign regulator.”
It marks the largest payout ever by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Information provided by the whistleblower “led the CFTC to important, direct evidence of wrongdoing,” the release stated. It continued:
In order to qualify for an award, a whistleblower who significantly contributed to the success of an enforcement action must demonstrate that there is a “meaningful nexus” between the information provided and the CFTC’s ability to successfully complete its investigation, and to either obtain a settlement or prevail in a litigated proceeding. The Commission determined here that the whistleblower met this standard.
The whistleblower’s claim in connection with a third related action by a state regulator was denied because the whistleblower’s information was never shared with the state regulator.
While the CFTC’s release didn’t name the whistleblower or the case the award was related to, follow on reporting by the Wall Street Journal identified the whistleblower as someone who helped regulators investigate manipulation of global interest-rate benchmarks by Deutsche Bank.
David Kovel, a managing partner at law firm Kirby McInerney LLP who represents the whistleblower, said: “We’re very happy that the CFTC was able to reverse an earlier decision and turn around their thinking. It says a lot about the people there that they don’t feel forced to stick with the wrong decision given the amount that’s at stake.”
The whistleblower had offered information that helped lead to $2.5 billion in settlements with Deutsche Bank in 2015.
“The kind of information he provided was of the sort that was very hard to get if you don’t know where to look in a big financial organization,” Kovel added.
Dawn Stump, a Republican commissioner on the CFTC, was against tailoring the award to fines levied by foreign regulators. “I believe we need to take an especially close look at cases where a whistleblower asks the commission to tap its limited Customer Protection Fund for an award relating to an action by a foreign futures authority to address harm outside the United States,” she told the Journal.
Mary Inman, an attorney representing whistleblowers at law firm Constantine Cannon LLP, concluded: “It’s showing that the CFTC program, like the SEC program, over the past 10 years, has really reached its maturity.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 22:00 - Taibbi: Cancel Culture Takes A Big "L"
Taibbi: Cancel Culture Takes A Big “L”
Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,
First, there were the numbers. Over the course of the last week, news commentators predicted a huge demonstration of Netflix employees in protest of comedian Dave Chappelle’s The Closer special, with Yahoo! typifying coverage. “Reports say that one thousand Netflix employees — nearly 10% of the company’s workforce,” they wrote, “are planning an October 20 walkout to protest the Chappelle special.”
The Hollywood Reporter did say “at least one thousand” were planning on participating in a “virtual walkout,” whatever that is, but noted the story first came out in The Verge, which talked about a “company-wide” demonstration. Others followed, mostly without any hint that any of the reporters involved talked to anyone at Netflix but the demonstration’s organizers.
Nobody checked, because everyone liked the narrative as was. As a result, “at least one thousand” became gospel, via headlines like Gizmodo’s “1,000 Netflix Employees Are Reportedly Planning Walkout to Protest New Chappelle Special,” or The Independent inviting us to “watch live” as “more than one thousand Netflix employees are set to walk out of their jobs on Wednesday.”
By this Wednesday, October 20th, the day of the planned walkout, the story became “hundreds of Netflix employees and supporters are expected” to show up (CNN). Then, as the event started, it became “hundreds of protesters stood in solidarity with” Netflix’s employees, per The Daily Beast, for instance. Then NBC told us “Hundreds rally outside Netflix,” where protesting employees who lined up outside were “met with roaring applause.”
How many employees walked out? Not one news organization put the real number in a headline, and only a few had the guts to even tweet that the actual protest was reduced in the end to the famed Arrested Development meme:
Even the op-ed wrapups couldn’t avoid sounding like parodies, with the Washington Post talking about the “crowd of dozens” gathered outside the company’s West Hollywood offices being evidence that the popularity of a comedian whose show already gained over 10 million views was colliding with a “growing movement to protect the rights of transgender people” (how a comedy set could be a violation of “the rights of transgender people” was not explained, of course).
Coverage across the board was ridiculously one-sided, with story after story quoting nothing but activists and woke Twitter personalities denouncing Chappelle’s “alleged jokes.” Journalists not only felt no responsibility to accurately gauge how many protesters might turn up, or balance out the outraged tweets with any of the millions of commenters who felt differently (or indifferently, as it were), they routinely mischaracterized the show’s content. For instance, Chappelle was regularly accused of having “defended” the rapper DaBaby in the special, an example being New York Times guest columnist Roxane Gay writing:
One of the strangest but most telling moments in ‘The Closer’ is when Mr. Chappelle defends DaBaby, a rapper in the news for making pretty egregious homophobic remarks.
You have to be high, or having a psychotic episode, to hear “defending DaBaby” in The Closer. For those who don’t know the story — I didn’t — DaBaby, described by Chappelle as “the number one streaming artist until about a couple of weeks ago,” went onstage in a concert in Florida in July and went on a half-coherent rant. He told “fellas” in the crowd: “If you ain’t sucking dick in the parking lot, put your cell phones up!” Some in the crowd went along.
“Now you know, I go hard in the paint, but even I saw that shit and was like, ‘God damn, DaBaby,’ was Chappelle’s first comment. Then he went on:
Can’t do that. Can’t do that. But I do believe and I’ll make this point later that the kid made a very egregious mistake. I will acknowledge that. But, you know a lot of the LBGTQ community doesn’t know DaBaby’s history, he’s a wild guy. He once shot a n*gga… and killed him, in Walmart. Oh, this is true, Google it. DaBaby shot and killed a n*gga in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career.
Do you see where I am going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a n*gga, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings.
You can definitely infer from that bit that Dave Chappelle does, in fact, think it’s worse to shoot and kill a person than to make homophobic remarks. That regularly came out translated in op-ed pages as “defending DaBaby.” Such blithely insane, proudly dishonest mischaracterizations have become a regular feature of national media commentary, and Chappelle mocks the habit repeatedly in The Closer (to the delight of audiences around the world, it might behoove press people to notice). However, that’s not where he was going with the DaBaby bit.
White audiences couldn’t get enough of laughing at institutional racism as described in Chappelle’s Show, but The Closer is something different. Here we’re not talking about meathead cops who shoot your dog, or fat-cat white collar lawyers, congressmen, and federal investigators who kiss the asses of corporate thieves, i.e. the type of character he roasted in bits like “Tron Carter’s Law and Order.” Everyone hates those people, so you can beat on them all you want. They long ago stopped being taboo targets. The Closer goes after racism we’re not yet allowed to discuss.
Fifteen-plus years ago, when Chappelle’s Show was taking the entertainment world by storm, we didn’t yet live in a world where upper-class white people had completed their Apollo 11 mission to enlightenment and planted a flag in racism and discrimination as their exclusive properties.
This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 21:40 - Mutated Strain Of Delta Variant Causing Panic In UK Has Been Found In US
Mutated Strain Of Delta Variant Causing Panic In UK Has Been Found In US
A mutated version of the delta variant that has caused panic in the UK has been detected in several states in the US, the CDC revealed this week.
AY.4.2, a subtype of the highly transmissible delta variant which has become informally known as “delta plus”, accounted for 6% of all sequenced samples of the virus. Its emergence has coincided with a rebound in COVID cases in the UK.
To be sure, right now, the strain is still rare in the US and accounts for “well below 0.05%” of cases sequenced, the CDC says. So there’s no reason to panic.
“At this time, there is no evidence that the sublineage AY.4.2 impacts the effectiveness of our current vaccines or therapeutics,” the CDC said. “Vaccination remains the best public health measure to slow the spread of the virus and reduce the likelihood of new variants to emerge.”
Around 16,830 AY.4.2 cases have been detected around the world across at least 28 countries, according to data from Outbreak.Info.
Jeffrey Barrett, director of the COVID-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K., told Newsweek on Thursday that it’s still unclear whether the subtype is helping drive rising case numbers in the UK.
“We are one of the groups that has observed a [roughy] 10 percent growth advantage compared to other Delta.”
“I’d say we can’t say for sure yet that that is a true biological advantage, as opposed to a bit of epidemiological ‘luck’ for this lineage, but the data are now accumulating week-by-week in favor of a small growth advantage.”
While the sub-lineage is spreading in the U.K., experts have said AY.4.2 is not necessarily going to outcompete the original Delta variant.
Although AY.4.2 is being monitored in the UK, it hasn’t yet been classified as a “variant under investigation” or a “variant of concern” by the WHO.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 21:20 - Why Authoritarianism Must Prevail
Why Authoritarianism Must Prevail
Authored by Robert Wright via The American Institute for Economic Research,
Freedom anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere. That is why authoritarians must destroy all freedom and why liberty lovers, and even the merely “lib-curious” (liberty curious), must not just resist blatant authoritarianism, but reject it in all its guises. The fate of the nation, and the world, again hangs in the balance.
To the extent that any freedom persists, authoritarian diktat can be subverted, albeit at a cost. History is rife with examples of bizarre entities, like nonbank banks (I kid you not!), rent-a-banks (ditto!), and gold caches, designed to work around branching restrictions, usury laws (maximum interest rates), the criminalization of holding gold, and sundry other attempts to limit financial freedom. (See my Financial Exclusion for details.)
To squelch “undesirable” activity, like increasing bank competition, voluntarily lending/borrowing small amounts of money at rates commensurate with the attendant costs and risks, or trying to protect one’s family against fiat money inflation, government must outlaw the workarounds too. To get their way, statists must suppress all unapproved activities, which ultimately means forcing would-be innovators to obtain permission before they can lawfully engage in any new activities.
Consider, for example, recent calls to allow the IRS to monitor essentially all bank accounts in the country. Maybe Americans will accept it, if, as claimed, the power is only used to enforce current tax laws. But if tax rates rise appreciably, as it seems they will, given the current administration’s policy goals, or if the transaction information is used for partisan political purposes, or to shame or coerce people into buying this, or not buying that, Americans will begin to search for workarounds. To the extent that the workarounds prove successful, government will be forced to outlaw the workarounds too.
For instance, if workers ask their employers to pay them in Federal Reserve Notes or Bitcoin because they believe that the transaction costs of making payments in those media will be less burdensome than giving some party hack access to the most intimate details of their lives, the government may well force employers to pay workers only in USD and only via bank transfer. It might even ban cryptocurrencies entirely, or at least try to.
Workers might then make one payment per month, to a “bill paying service” that for a fee will pay their bills for them, out of its one, giant bank account. Oh, but that sounds like an unregulated bank taking uninsured deposits so those services will have to be suppressed as well, or perhaps replaced by the central bank.
People may then begin paying everything by credit card, and even direct their employers to repay their credit card issuers directly. Next thing you know Uncle Sam will want to see your credit card statements too. Ditto PayPal, Venmo, and any other fintech apps used to make or receive payments. Thus a seemingly innocuous request to see bank accounts for tax purposes becomes the excuse for full-blown financial repression. This will, as always, hurt the poor the most.
Employers might work around those laws, along with the tax code and vaccine mandates by converting their employees into volunteers and donating payroll to a nonprofit charity with the singular mission of ensuring that the “volunteers” receive “donations” that happen to match the value of their former compensation. Imagine the chaos if every employer simultaneously did that! Government would have to respond by tightly regulating, if not outright outlawing, charities and volunteer work. Our liberty would be truly lost at that point, and again the poor would suffer most.
Corporations shouldn’t be taxed, but they are. Many of the largest have engaged in (international) tax arbitrage by adroitly shifting headquarters, production facilities, and charters between different states, provinces, and countries. Governments are now fighting back by establishing a global minimum corporation tax. How long before some entity begins to offer oceanic or orbital (then moon, then Martian) charters as tax havens? Soon after, though, private space flight and oceanic colonization will likely be banned or heavily restricted.
Everyone should be aware that if an international gold ETF issuing bearer shares, Honeypot.xxx (a sex worker-owned substitute for OnlyFans), a parallel university system, or anything else of import that runs against the woke or statist grain begins to gain commercial traction, regulatory hammers will swiftly bludgeon the innovators into compliance, or out of existence.
Were that all! When statist solutions to perceived “problems” create real problems, the call inevitably goes out for yet more government. When pressed about how to pay for UBI (various universal basic income) schemes, for example, schemes that are purportedly needed to solve a nearly nonexistent income disparity “problem,” proponents will sometimes argue for the establishment of a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF, or a giant investment fund owned by a government), the dividends and realized capital gains of which can be divided equally among the citizenry.
UBI proponents are not sure where the money to fund the SWF will come from, or if it is a good idea to concentrate all that economic and political power in one decision maker’s hands, but if you want to see their true colors, ask them why individuals cannot simply invest their own money for themselves. Turns out that elites believe that most Americans don’t know how to invest properly, in the “right” (which is to say Left) companies. So look for a push to outlaw individual investment in favor of a SWF-funded UBI, or at least a narrowing of choice to SEC-approved ESG funds. You may still own something in 2030, but it seems increasingly unlikely you will be happy.
America and the rest of the West have been sliding down the slippery slope of statism for so long that they are now rapidly approaching the precipice that ends in rock bottom. Will liberty be crushed and a new dark age commence? Or will the masses then finally see governments as the problem, rather than as the solution?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 21:00 - Parts Shortages Hit Auto Repair Shops, Taking Weeks To Fix Vehicles
Parts Shortages Hit Auto Repair Shops, Taking Weeks To Fix Vehicles
A global semiconductor shortage has reduced new car production and boosted used car demand. The average used car age on U.S. highways hit 12.1 this year, a record high, and has unleashed a repair boom. But with snarled supply chains, auto repair shops have had difficulty sourcing parts and told customers their cars could take weeks to fix, according to Bloomberg.
Paul McCarthy, chief executive of the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association, said that auto parts and repair industry is getting slammed like everyone else – delays stretching from weeks due to port congestion have produced hefty backlogs.
“This is the most difficult supply-chain environment that I have ever seen,” AutoZone Inc. CEO William Rhodes said in a September earnings call. AutoZone is operating at “the lowest level of in-stock that I can ever remember,” he said.
For repair shops, breaking the news to customers that their broken cars might not be fixed for weeks because of a part of backorder has been difficult.
Bryan Kelley, the owner of Valley Automotive Repair and Electric, had to wait months for parts in the Seattle suburbs. He said a crankshaft position sensor took between 60-90 days to arrive, adding that the sensors used to take less than a day in pre-COVID times.
Kelley said one customer was about to give up on fixing his Dodge Ram 1500 because of the sensor backlog.
“He went as far as to say, ‘I’m going to tow it and buy another truck,'” said Kelley, who’s also chairman of the Automotive Service Association Northwest trade group. “It got compounded when he found he couldn’t just go down and buy one.”
Another instance is in the Philadelphia suburbs, where Matlock’s Nissan Sentra flooded during Hurricane Ida in early September. The storm left her car’s interior moist. She took her car to Colket Technical Services in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, for new carpets, but mechanics told her no carpet sets were available. The workaround the mechanics advised her to do was rip up the old carpet and have it professionally cleaned, then reinstalled.
In Bethesda, Maryland, River Road Auto Service manager Danny Tomasian said even “oil filters are becoming harder to get, so when I buy them, I buy them in as big of quantities I can get.”
Compounding a repair boom with port congestion across China and U.S. adds to domestic shortages of parts and increased prices.
McCarthy of the suppliers association warned the shortage of aftermarket parts could get worse into next year.
Colket, the Philadelphia-area garage owner, called the shortage of parts and persistent delays: “We lovingly refer to it as an intergalactic backorder.”… and it’s not just sensors and oil filters that are becoming harder to find. Some tires have been in short supply that takes well over a month to receive.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 20:40 - Feeding The Liberal Flock: Glenn Greenwald Exposes The Real Reasons For The Congressional 1/6 Committee
Feeding The Liberal Flock: Glenn Greenwald Exposes The Real Reasons For The Congressional 1/6 Committee
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via Substack,
The Biden DOJ has not charged one 1/6 defendant with insurrection, sedition or plotting to kidnap or kill. Democrats need Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney to satiate liberal anger...
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) arrive for the House Select Committee hearing investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on July 27, 2021 at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
What follows is the last section of my article earlier this week, documenting why Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate 1/6 is both unconstitutional and an assault on civil liberties.
Underlying so much of the anger and resentment surrounding 1/6 is the complete dissonance between the narrative fed to the citizenry by Democrats and their media allies on the one hand, and the legal realities on the other. It must be infuriating and baffling to a large sector of the population to have been convinced that what happened on January 6 was an unprecedentedly dangerous insurrection perpetrated by an organized group of seditious traitors who had plotted to kidnap and murder elected officials, only for the Biden DOJ to have charged exactly nobody with any criminal charges remotely suggesting any of those melodramatic claims.
This was the same frustration and confusion that beset a large portion of liberal America when they were led to believe for years that Robert Mueller was coming to arrest all of their political enemies for treason and criminal conspiracy with Russia, only for the FBI Superman to close his investigation without charging a single American with criminal conspiracy with Russia and then issuing a report admitting that he could not find evidence to establish any such crime. How to keep the flock loyal when the doomsday prophecies continue to be unfulfilled, as the World-Ending Date comes and goes without so much as a bang, let alone an explosion?
Adam Schiff’s new book — which essentially claims that Mueller is senile and was suffering from pitiful dementia — is obviously intended to provide some solace or at least a framework of understanding for disappointed liberals to keep the faith, but deep down, they know what they were expecting. The endorphin-producing fantasies on which they fed for years — of Trump and Trump, Jr. and Jared and Bannon and Ivanka being frog-marched out of the White House by armed, strapping FBI agents — were way too viscerally arousing for them to simply forget that none of it happened.
A repeat of this disorientation and disillusionment when it comes to 1/6 could be quite dangerous for Democrats. It could be devastating to the media outlets which survive on serving the Democrats’ messaging and feeding dramatic conspiracy theories to the beleaguered liberal flock. In the days and weeks following 1/6, liberals really thought that dozens of members of Congress — from Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene — would be not just expelled from Congress but summarily imprisoned as traitors by a newly righteous Justice Department. They were led to believe that, with Bill Barr out of the way, Trump and his mafia family would finally pay for their crimes.
Instead, they have been served a tepid, cautious, and compartmentally conservative Merrick Garland who seems barely able to send the Evil Insurrectionists — many of whom are just hapless and impoverished lost souls — to prison for more than a few months. The harsh reality is yet again destroying their cravings for promised vengeance and retribution, and something must be done, lest the cult loyalty be lost forever.
That is, at bottom, what the 1/6 Committee is really for. The House Democrats have smart lawyers who are fully aware of all the above-discussed case law and other limitations on congressional power. That is why they purposely structured their third-party subpoenas to ensure nobody can challenge them in court: they know those subpoenas vastly exceed the limits of their authority and cannot withstand judicial scrutiny.
This congressional committee is designed to be cathartic theater for liberals, and a political drama for the rest of the country. They know Republicans will object to their deliberately unconstitutional inquisitions, and they intend to exploit those objections to darkly insinuate to the country that Republicans are driven by a desire to protect the violent traitors so that they can deploy them as an insurrectionary army for future coups. They have staffed the committee with their most flamboyant and dishonest drama queens, knowing that Adam Schiff will spend most of his days on CNN with Chris Cuomo comparing 1/6 to Pearl Harbor and the Holocaust; Liz Cheney will equate Republicans with Al Qaeda and the Capitol riot to the destruction of the World Trade Center; and Adam Kinzinger will cry on cue as he reminds everyone over and over that he served in the U.S. military only to find himself distraught and traumatized that the real terrorists are not those he was sent to fight overseas but those at home, in his own party.
But the manipulative political design of this spectacle should not obscure how threatening it nonetheless is to core civil liberties. Democrats in politics and media have whipped themselves into such a manic frenzy ever since 1/6 — indeed, they have been doing little else ever since Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 — that they have become the worst kinds of fanatics: the ones who really believe their own lies. Many genuinely believe that they are on the front lines of an epic historical battle against the New Hitler (Trump) and his band of deplorable fascist followers bent on a coup against the democratic order. In their cable-and-Twitter-stimulated imaginations, shortly following this right-wing coup will be the installation of every crypto-fascist bell and whistle from concentration camps for racial and ethnic minorities to death or prison for courageous #Resistance dissidents. At some point, the line between actually believing this and being paid to pretend to believe it, or feeling coerced by cultural and friendship circles to feign belief in it, erodes, fostering actual collective conviction and mania.
And when fanatics convince themselves that their cause is not only indisputably just but an imperative for survival, then any doubts or questions about methods and weapons can no longer be acknowledged. The war they are fighting is of such overarching importance and righteousness that there is no such thing as unjust or excessive means to achieve it. Just a cursory examination of liberal discourse is enough to see that they have long ago arrived at and flew past this point of sectarian zealotry. And that is what explains their overwhelming support for state and corporate censorship of the internet, increasing reverence for security state agencies such as the CIA and FBI, love for and trust in corporate media, and a belief that no punishment or level of suffering is excessive when it comes to retaliation against their political enemies, including but not only those who participated in any way in the 1/6 protests.
This is, after all, a movement that has long opposed the death penalty and whose more left-wing factions spent 2020 rioting in cities to protest police violence and chanting “Defund the Police!,” yet their only lament about Ashli Babbitt seems to be that she was the only pro-Trump “fascist” shot and killed by noble police officers on that day. They have pranced around for decades as criminal justice reformists, denouncing harsh prosecutorial strategies and judicial punishments, yet are indignant that people who put their feet on Nancy Pelosi’s sacred desk or vandalized the sacred halls of American power with their dirty and deplorable presence are not spending decades in a cage. They spent 2020 depicting police officers as racist savages, only to valorize the Capitol Police as benevolent public servants whom only barbarians would want to harm, then gave them an additional $2 billion to intensify their surveillance capabilities and augment their stockpile of weapons. Their fury that Trump officials did not end up spending decades in cages due to vague associations with Russians is exceeded only by their rage that pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol are being sentenced to months rather than years or decades in prison.
A political movement that operates from the premise that its cause is too important to be constrained is one that inevitably becomes authoritarian. That such authoritarianism is the defining feature of American liberalism has been evident for several years. And an investigative congressional committee that they control, aimed squarely at their political enemies, accompanied by demands that anyone resisting it be imprisoned, can only lead to very dark and dangerous destinations.
* * *
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 20:20 - All The Metals Mined In One Visualization
All The Metals Mined In One Visualization
Metals are all around us, from our phones and cars to our homes and office buildings. While we often overlook the presence of these raw materials, they are an essential part of the modern economy. But, as Visual Capitalist’s Govind Bhutada details below, obtaining these materials can be a complex process that involves mining, refining, and then converting them into usable forms.
So, how much metal gets mined in a year?
Metals vs Ores
Before digging into the numbers, it’s important that we distinguish between ores and metals.
Ores are naturally occurring rocks that contain metals and metal compounds. Metals are the valuable parts of ores that can be extracted by separating and removing the waste rock. As a result, ore production is typically much higher than the actual metal content of the ore. For example, miners produced 347 million tonnes of bauxite ore in 2019, but the actual aluminum metal content extracted from that was only 62.9 million tonnes.
Here are all the metals and metal ores mined in 2019, according to the British Geological Survey:
Miners produced roughly three billion tonnes of iron ore in 2019, representing close to 94% of all mined metals. The primary use of all this iron is to make steel. In fact, 98% of iron ore goes into steelmaking, with the rest fulfilling various other applications.
Industrial and technology metals made up the other 6% of all mined metals in 2019. How do they break down?
Industrial Metals
From construction and agriculture to manufacturing and transportation, virtually every industry harnesses the properties of metals in different ways.
Here are the industrial metals we mined in 2019.
It’s no surprise that aluminum is the most-produced industrial metal. The lightweight metal is one of the most commonly used materials in the world, with uses ranging from making foils and beer kegs to buildings and aircraft parts.
Manganese and chromium rank second and third respectively in terms of metal mined, and are important ingredients in steelmaking. Manganese helps convert iron ore into steel, and chromium hardens and toughens steel. Furthermore, manganese is a critical ingredient of lithium-manganese-cobalt-oxide (NMC) batteries for electric vehicles.
Although copper production is around one-third that of aluminum, copper has a key role in making modern life possible. The red metal is found in virtually every wire, motor, and electrical appliance in our homes and offices. It’s also critical for various renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles.
Technology and Precious Metals
Technology is only as good as the materials that make it.
Technology metals can be classified as relatively rare metals commonly used in technology and devices. While miners produce some tech and precious metals in large quantities, others are relatively scarce.
Tin was the most-mined tech metal in 2019, and according to the International Tin Association, nearly half of it went into soldering.
It’s also interesting to see the prevalence of battery and energy metals. Lithium, cobalt, vanadium, and molybdenum are all critical for various energy technologies, including lithium-ion batteries, wind farms, and energy storage technologies. Additionally, miners also extracted 220,000 tonnes of rare earth elements, of which 60% came from China.
Given their rarity, it’s not surprising that gold, silver, and platinum group metals (PGMs) were the least-mined materials in this category. Collectively, these metals represent just 2.3% of the tech and precious metals mined in 2019.
A Material World
Although humans mine and use massive quantities of metals every year, it’s important to put these figures into perspective.
According to Circle Economy, the world consumes 100.6 billion tonnes of materials annually. Of this total, 3.2 billion tonnes of metals produced in 2019 would account for just 3% of our overall material consumption. In fact, the world’s annual production of cement alone is around 4.1 billion tonnes, dwarfing total metal production.
The world’s appetite for materials is growing with its population. As resource-intensive megatrends such as urbanization and electrification pick up the pace, our material pie will only get larger.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 20:00 - Some Questions About America's "Wealth"
Some Questions About America’s “Wealth”
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via DailyReckoning.com,
It is a supremely tragic irony that while the corporate media ceaselessly tout America’s soaring financial “wealth,” the nation’s true wealth — its social order — is fast unraveling.
While we’re encouraged to cheer billionaires blowing a tiny sliver of their wealth on space tourism and $500 million yachts as evidence of “prosperity,” our media and leadership (ahem) seem to be mystified by the unmistakable signs of unraveling.
In my analysis, the social order is comprised of all the intangible social elements that serve to bind a nation’s people beyond their legal rights. The social order includes, but is not limited to, social (upward) mobility — the ladder to advancing one’s agency (control of one’s life) and opportunities for improved security and well-being.
The social order also includes civic virtue, the willingness to share the sacrifices of one’s fellow citizens for the common good in proportion to one’s wealth and power and equal treatment before the law, not just as an abstraction but in the real world of the judicial system.
The social order also includes the moral legitimacy of the governance system: Does the state (government) serve the citizenry, or is it the other way around?
Lastly, the social order manifests social cohesion, which is the capacity for shared values and purpose and common ground, all of which generate a concern for the well-being of other citizens and a willingness to focus on shared interests.
The Rot Starts at the Top
America has lost all of these elements, as self-interest is the only value, purpose and goal that guides behavior, starting at the top: How do politicians acquire fortunes in excess of $100 million (cough, Pelosi, cough)? Through public service? (Don’t bust a gut laughing…) How do billionaires gain additional wealth so effortlessly (cough, Federal Reserve, cough)?
The rot starts at the top and then seeps down into every fiber of the nation’s economic, social and political orders. America is now a moral cesspool, and “democracy” is merely the public-relations cover for a neofeudal autocracy.
Behind every PR narrative lies the corruption of self-interest. How is it that day traders now rabidly follow Pelosi’s stock portfolio and super-wealthy Federal Reserve “leaders” front-run the Fed’s policies to further enrich themselves while claiming the mantle of “public service”?
How does a child molester like Jeffrey Epstein end up entertaining Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, the Harvard elite and a veritable who’s who of America’s wealthy and powerful players?
The evidence of irreversible social decay is everywhere: Violent behavior is now ubiquitous in aircraft and other social settings, common ground has vanished and the willingness or even the capacity to identify common interests has vanished.
“Reform”
“Reform” is another insider joke. Real reform might impinge on the wealth and power of our self-interested elites, so what we have instead is a simulacra of reform, which only adds additional friction to a system choking on bureaucratic sand in the gears.
Homeless encampments are now just another accepted reflection of “soaring wealth and prosperity” in America, along with the declining prospects and wealth of the bottom 80%. If you fail to repeat the party line with sufficient enthusiasm, Big Tech will send you to the Digital Gulag.
The more that politicians, Fed governors, insiders and billionaires bleat that they really, really care about commoners, the greater the gulf between the reality of their self-interest and their laughably transparent PR.
As the apologists, toadies, lackeys, factotums and apparatchiks frantically spew rah-rah PR about the “recovery” (you mean we’re all addicts and are now “recovering”?), the workforce is finally awakening to the emptiness of the PR and the decay of America’s social order:
The rewards of the economy have flowed to two classes, the Financial Aristocracy, the top 0.1% who now own more wealth than the bottom 80% of American households, and speculators, from the front-running scammers on Wall Street to the day traders gambling their Pelosi portfolios.
So by all means, focus on the inexorable rise of stocks, cryptos and housing as “proof” of America’s soaring “wealth” while the social order unravels beneath our feet.
Maybe it’s time to reconsider what we mean by “wealth”…
What Is Wealth Anyway?
The conventional definition of wealth is solely financial: ownership of money and assets. The assumption is that money can buy anything the owner desires: power, access, land, shelter, energy, transport and if not love, then a facsimile of caring.
The flaw in this reductionist definition is obvious: Not everything of value can be purchased at any price —for example, health, once lost, cannot be purchased for $1 million, $10 million or even $100 million.
A facsimile of friendship can be purchased (i.e., companions willing to trade fake friendliness for money), but true friendship cannot be bought at any price: Its very nature renders friendship a noncommodity.
This explains the abundance of wealthy people who are miserable, lonely and phony to the core. Only commoditized goods and services can be bought with money or assets.
Given the limits of the conventional model of wealth, the question naturally arises: What if we defined wealth more by what cannot be bought rather than by what can be bought?
Another way of making the distinction is to ask: What has been commoditized/globalized such that any person with money anywhere on the planet can buy it? What cannot be commoditized because it is intrinsically inaccessible to commodification?
Six Questions to Ask
We can start our inquiry with a series of questions:
1. What would be the impact on an individual’s health if modern medicine/pharmaceuticals were no longer available? Put another way: How dependent is one’s “good health” on commoditized interventions? How independent is an individual’s health/vitality from commoditized medicine?
Health that is sufficiently vibrant that it has no need for commoditized medicine cannot be bought, and therefore it is a form of intrinsic (noncommodity) wealth.
2. Can a shipwrecked individual swim two miles through open ocean from a doomed ship to safety?
Money has no value if there is no help that can be bought; the individual’s only wealth in this situation (assuming they know how to swim) is their core physical strength and endurance — forms of wealth that cannot be substituted with money.
3. If Cicero was correct and “the man who has a garden and a library has everything,” then let’s ask not how extensive one’s library might be in terms of the number of volumes, but ask how many of the books (or e-books) have been read, absorbed and enjoyed by the owner?
In other words, it’s not the ownership of a library that creates noncommoditized wealth but the joy, knowledge and pleasure derived from the reading of the books that defines wealth.
4. The same analysis can also be applied to a garden/orchard: What if we ask not how large the garden/orchard is in terms of square meters, but how expansive is the owner’s participation in the care of the garden/orchard, how much pleasure is created by the toil and harvest and how much of the bounty is shared with others?
5. How many friendships does an individual have that began in high school or earlier and are still vibrant? How many friends does one have who can be entrusted with the deepest personal crises? How many friends’ homes are open to you, rain or shine?
What if we defined the person with no true friends as impoverished, regardless of their ownership of assets and cash? Many people seem to have professional acquaintances they call “friends” to mask their bottomless poverty of real friends and friendships.
6. What if wealth were measured in personal integrity, i.e., honesty, trustworthiness, compassion and the ability to remain accountable even as things fall apart?
This is of course just a start: We could continue our redefinition of wealth to include kindness, empathy, the skills needed to organize volunteer community work parties and so on.
As we explore what actually cannot be bought or commoditized, it raises this question:
What if our commoditized, financialized definition of wealth reflects a staggering poverty of culture, spirit, wisdom, integrity, warmth, kindness, friendship, practicality and common sense?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 19:40 - Dems Launch Federal Unionization Drive To Win Back Blue-Collar Workers Lost To Trump
Dems Launch Federal Unionization Drive To Win Back Blue-Collar Workers Lost To Trump
The fact that President Trump managed to win over white, working-class workers – many of them union workers, or the children of longtime union workers who saw their jobs shipped overseas when the factories closed – during Trump’s 2016 electoral triumph has stuck in the Democrat’s craw for years.
In the ensuing years, the Dems have been quietly formulating a plan to win those workers back. And as the latest labor-relations battle brews in upstate New York, where a handful of company-owned Starbucks’ are seeing workers push for unionization, and workers at John Deere flex their power with a strike, Dems are quietly moving to try and signal their support for millennials’ and Gen Z’s supposed “fondness” for unionizing. But they’re doing it slowly, and quietly – and in a way that won’t infuriate any of their big corporate backers before next year’s midterm election.
According to Axios, VP Kamala Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh are announcing new guidelines “to encourage federal workers to join unions.”
Why is this important? Well, per Axios, the Biden Admin wants to bolster the collective bargaining power of workers across the country. So, they’ve decided the best course of action is to start “at home” with changes in the federal workforce.
Why? Because there’s plenty of room for growth. With more than 2.1MM non-postal employees, the federal government is America’s largest employer. And right now, only 20% of federal employees belong to a union.
That means there’s plenty of room for the Dems to kick-start their new labor-organizing push. But here’s the key: as Axios reports, the ultimate goal of this effort is to transform more workers – especially women and men of color – into dedicated labor organizers, who can then spread out across the economy and help their private-sector comrades demand their fair share from Starbucks and Amazon (companies that are already offering massive pay increases and benefits as the worker shortage reaches what just might be its most acute phase).
Harris and Walsh are starting with two new requirements for federal workers.
- For new hires, the government will be required to educate applicants about unions during the hiring and onboarding process. Unions will also be given a chance to participate in new employee training sessions.
- For current workers, employers will need to communicate more clearly throughout the year about their collective bargaining rights and how to contact their unions.
Union participation has been declining for 40 years, although it ticked up slightly in 2020, increasing to 10.8% of the workforce from 10.3% in 2019. The shift toward labor organizing appears to be happening no matter what at this point. The Dems just need to pretend like they’re the ones leading the charge.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 19:20 - "Makes No Sense": Southwest Airlines Says It Won't Fire Workers Who Don't Get COVID Vaccine
“Makes No Sense”: Southwest Airlines Says It Won’t Fire Workers Who Don’t Get COVID Vaccine
By Jack Phillips of Epoch Times,
Southwest Airlines’ CEO said the company will not fire employees who do not get the COVID-19 vaccine by Dec. 9 following a Biden administration mandate that was announced last month for federal contractors.
In a statement to news outlets Friday, the Dallas-based carrier confirmed to Fox News it does not want to “lose any employee” over President Joe Biden’s mandate, adding that firing a worker over the vaccine “makes no sense.” It came a day after Southwest CEO Gary Kelly made a similar announcement during an earnings call.
“This is an evolving process working with the government in terms of what they expect, and very clearly, we wanted our employees to know that nobody is going to lose their job on December the 9th if we’re not perfectly in compliance,” Kelly said, according to news reports. The Epoch Times has contacted Southwest for comment.
“It is a work in progress, and we’re going to continue working in good faith to meet the requirements of the executive order. But I’ve already said, and I’m sure you’ve heard, we’re not going to fire anybody who doesn’t get vaccinated,” he continued.
Biden’s mandate will start on Dec. 8, requiring federal contractors to make sure their workers are vaccinated. Employees can be granted a medical or religious exemption.
But Kelly’s and Southwest’s announcements this week mark a reversal in the carrier’s vaccination stance. Earlier this month, Southwest stated that workers would have to be fully vaccinated or receive an exemption to “continue employment with the airline” after it conducted a “thorough review of President Biden’s COVID Action Plan and determined that the carrier’s contracts with the U.S. government require full compliance with the federal vaccination directive.”
Also on Thursday, Southwest said in its quarterly results that it lost some $75 million after thousands of flights were canceled and delayed earlier this month. The firm blamed the weather and unspecified staffing issues, although there was widespread speculation that pilots and other employees walked out over the vaccine requirement.
“I’m not going to fire anybody,” Kelly told CNBC Thursday after the quarterly results were released.
Hundreds of workers and others also demonstrated outside Southwest’s Dallas headquarters on Monday, demanding an end to the vaccination requirement.
Earlier in October, Southwest’s pilot’s union filed a lawsuit against the company, arguing that the COVID-19 shot could trigger potential career-ending side-effects for pilots. In court filings over the weekend, Southwest asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit and said an injunction against its vaccine mandate could potentially harm its business.
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker said this week that unvaccinated workers also will not be fired by the Dec. 9 mandate, saying the company will “work with” those who haven’t got the shot.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 19:00 - Largest Candy Corn Producer Hit With Ransomware Attack Before Halloween
Largest Candy Corn Producer Hit With Ransomware Attack Before Halloween
Candy corn lovers, beware. Candy manufacturer Ferrara Candy was hit with a ransomware attack earlier this month. The company is responsible for 85% of all candy corn production in the US.
Gizmodo first reported the ransomware attack to have occurred on Oct. 9. Ferrara told the online tech publication that the attack “encrypted some of our systems,” and they were working with law enforcement:
“Upon discovery, we immediately responded to secure all systems and commence an investigation into the nature and scope of this incident. Ferrara is cooperating with law enforcement and our technical team is working closely with third-party specialists to fully restore impacted systems as expeditiously and as safely as possible.”
The Chicago-based confectionery manufacturer is currently operating at limited capacity but is hoping to fill all orders.
“We have resumed production in select manufacturing facilities, and we are shipping from all of our distribution centers across the country, near to capacity. We are also now working to process all orders in our queue,” Ferrara said. “We want to assure consumers that Ferrara’s Halloween products are on shelves at retailers across the country ahead of the holiday.”
Ransomware attacks are surging this year, and many companies and even municipalities are paying the price to unlock their networks by meeting hackers’ demands. The most significant hack was the Colonial Pipeline by DarkSide, which led to fuel shortages across the Southern US. The ransomware attack was eventually resolved but came at a devastating cost to the company and the broader economy.
With ten days until Halloween, Ferrara better increase its candy corn output, or there could be shortages of the pentagonal pyramid-shaped candy that tastes like honey, sugar, butter, and vanilla.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 18:40 - White House Wants Easier Path For "Climate Migrants"
White House Wants Easier Path For “Climate Migrants”
Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times,
With the United Nations’ Glasgow climate conference just weeks away, on Oct. 21 several federal agencies simultaneously released four new analyses on the national security implications of climate change—including a report from the White House on climate change and migration stating that individuals citing climate change “may, in limited instances, have valid claims for refugee status” in the United States.
That White House report goes on to state that nationals from a foreign state can be granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) on the basis of “climate-related factors,” later recommending that Congress consider relaxing TPS requirements and making it easier for TPS recipients to apply for permanent status.
That report also recommends Congress evaluate the possibility of additional protection “for individuals who can establish that they are fleeing serious, credible threats to their life or physical integrity as a result of climate change.”
In addition, it recommends that the United States scale up its investments related to climate migration through funding to USAID and the UN, among other entities.
The report comes as the National Security Council creates a new interagency working group focused on the connection between climate change and migration.
“Given that climate-induced weather extremes will grow in severity in unexpected ways, this working group will provide a venue for developing long-term strategies consistent with the evolving scientific understanding of climate impacts, such as those communicated through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. National Climate Assessment,” writes the White House in its Fact Sheet on the new reports.
The White House report was released concurrently with three other reports, which follow up on President Biden’s executive orders on climate change, including E.O. 14013, “Executive Order on Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration.”
One comes from the Office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, which released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Climate Change.
Representing the consensus position of the DNI and seventeen other intelligence agencies, the report claims that climate change will result in many outcomes that threaten U.S. national security interests, including by heightening water-related conflict, driving cross-border migration, and spurring competition for critical minerals with China.
“China and India will play critical roles in determining the trajectory of temperature rise,” the report states.
It also outlines several events that would alter its assessment, including large-scale geoengineering to “dim the planet” and induce global cooling, breakthroughs in nuclear fusion, and military incursions by China or other countries in the thawing Arctic.
Another report comes from the Department of Defense, which released an unclassified version of its Climate Risk Analysis.
That report omitted region-level analyses of climate-related hazards relevant to DoD’s global operations, which it stated were “Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).”
Finally, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its Strategic Framework for Addressing Climate Change.
“An influx of climate-related migration through the U.S.-Mexico border and climate-induced existential threats to Arctic communities and Alaska Native culture will accelerate and require our proactive actions to manage future border crises and potential relocation of internally-displaced populations,” states that report.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 18:20 - "No Jab, No Job" – Aussie Supermarkets Demands 300K Workers Must Get Vaccinated Or Find Work Elsewhere
“No Jab, No Job” – Aussie Supermarkets Demands 300K Workers Must Get Vaccinated Or Find Work Elsewhere
As Australia continues to ease COVID restrictions, three major supermarket chains in the country are preparing to adopt a vaccine mandate that will effectively force 300K workers from across Australia to either get vaccinated, or quit, in accordance with the “no jab, no job” doctrine.
According to the Financial Review, Australia’s most widely read financial journal, Woolworth’s is leading the charge to impose vaccination mandates on workers across Australia’s supermarket sector. So far, rivals Cole’s and Aldi have already joined in with their own commitments.
However, even as the mandate is imposed on workers, unvaccinated customers will, of course, still be welcome in all of these stores, since the management and Aussie government have apparently drawn the line at threatening starvation to try and coerce people to accept the jab.
Woolworths’ mandate will apply to all staff at its 1,200 retail outlets across its supermarkets and its Big W discount department stores, as well as those working in the group’s large warehousing and distribution centers, and its offices. Cole’s and Aldi have issued similar mandates. Woolworth’s added that it intends to make Jan. 31 the deadline for full vaccination requirement in NSW, Victoria, ACT, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania will have a deadline of March 31.
Despite all of Australia’s efforts to stamp out COVID, including closing its borders and locking down half the country for most of the winter (summer in the northern hemisphere) – cases have continued to climb, forcing the Australian government to finally relent as the lockdown measures took a massive toll on the country’s economy. Technically, Melbourne’s lockdown measures have been in place in some form for 245 days, making the lockdown in Australia’s second-largest city the longest-lasting lockdown anywhere in the world.
Interestingly, other Aussie grocery chains have decided on a different tack.
Wesfarmers, owner of Kmart, Target and the Bunnings hardware chain, is requiring all new employees to be vaccinated, but unlike its competitors, the company won’t make it mandatory for existing employees because. Why? Because, as the company’s managing director told the FR, the take-up rate was so high anyway through information sessions, on-site hubs and vaccination-leave arrangements, that coercing its own workers to get the jab simply doesn’t make sense.
“I expect we will have a fully vaccinated workforce in the new year,” he said.
Enough of them have already gotten, or plan to get, the jab voluntarily. At this point, the leading scientists have finally admitted that the concept of “herd immunity” is now a myth. COVID will most likely be endemic in the human population from here on out.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 18:00 - Edward Snowden: "If You Weaken Encryption, People Will Die"
Edward Snowden: “If You Weaken Encryption, People Will Die”
Authored by Thomas Macaulay via TheNextWeb.com,
Our online privacy faces growing threats. Governments around the world are calling for encryption backdoors that would enable access to personal information.
They argue that encryption protects criminals. But it also protects activists, dissidents, persecuted groups, and ordinary citizens.
Edward Snowden is among the most prominent beneficiaries. The whistleblower’s first messages to journalists were made with encryption. They resulted in revelations that millions of Americans had been under illegal mass surveillance.
“If you weaken encryption, people will die,” said Snowden in a statement.
“This year alone, after the fall of the government of Afghanistan, we saw how crucial encryption is in keeping ordinary people safe.”
Snowden has joined the Global Encryption Coalition to launch a campaign to protect encryption. The group of civil society organizations and tech firms warns that undermining encryption will leave people more vulnerable to crime and surveillance.
“I have seen first-hand how governments can abuse the power they have to access the personal data of innocent people in the name of national security,” said Snowden.
“Weakening encryption would be a colossal mistake that could put thousands of lives at risk.”
End-to-end encryption would make it harder to implement spy programs like the one Snowden exposed — which may be one reason why governments want to circumvent it. It would not be the first time that lawmakers have undermined our privacy in the name of fighting terrorism.
Politicians assert — with justification — that criminal gangs and paedophiles use encryption. But so do racial justice protestors to avoid police surveillance, LBTQ+ people in countries where their sexual orientation is criminalized, and even some of the politicians who have called for Snowden to be put in jail.
Reporters also rely on encryption to protect their sources.
“Now more than ever, journalists are facing digital threats to their work and safety,” said Lisa Dittmer, advocacy officer for Internet Freedom, Reporters Without Borders.
“Encryption plays a critical role in protecting journalists and their sources, enabling them to share information even in the most dangerous environments.
Yet as the need for encryption grows, so do the efforts to weaken it. Governments from India to Australia are calling for tech companies to build backdoors into their end-to-end encrypted systems. In the UK, new regulation could make service providers criminally liable for the acts of users if law enforcement can’t access their encrypted data.
Their proposals, however, could actually make people more vulnerable. Any encryption backdoor may be a target for criminals. The information they access could threaten both national security and individual privacy.
“Encryption makes us all safer,” said Snowden.
“From families protecting photographs of their kids, to personal healthcare information, encryption keeps our private information private.”
We all have private conversations that we don’t want overhead. Encryption backdoors would give malicious actors another way to access them.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/22/2021 – 17:40
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