- French Officials Considering "Absurd" New Tax On Vehicles Based On Weight
French Officials Considering “Absurd” New Tax On Vehicles Based On Weight
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/25/2020 – 02:45Pretty soon, there’s going to be no cars left to drive. Between California looking to phase out internal combustion engines by 2035 and France apparently now considering another tax on vehicles based on how much they weigh, it seems like the world is hell bent on assuring a future that’s replete with Ubers and public transit.
But regardless, the press to “save the planet” much push on. That’s why at the Convention Citoyenne sur le Climat (the Citizens’ Climate Convention) in June 2020, the idea of taxing vehicles by how much they weigh was raised. It is currently being considered by the French government, according to The Connexion.
Meanwhile – as is usual with government – the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. In May 2020, just one month earlier, the government was doling out an aid package of 8 billion Euros for the French car industry trying to boost production. The taxes by weight would have just the opposite effect.
The future of French automobiles Luc Chatel, president of automobile association la Plateforme de la Filière Automobile (PFA) pointed out that the two policies obviously contradict each other and has asked for “stability” in decisions being made by government. Good luck with that.
He stated on French TV last week: “We cannot, three months after [the government announced its support plan], put in place a tax that will go against what we’ve been told.”
Taxe sur le poids des véhicules: “On ne peut pas mettre en place une taxe qui va à l’encontre de ce qui s’est dit il y a 3 mois” selon le président de la plateforme automobile
🎙@chrisjaku, Sandra Gandoin, @LucChatel pic.twitter.com/62E26LumtF
— BFM Business (@bfmbusiness) September 18, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
He called the tax “absurd” and continued: “The cars will benefit from a bonus for reduced CO2 emissions and a penalty [for their weight] at the same time. It’s ridiculous.”
Chatel predicts that 70% of vehicles in France will be affected by the tax.
And for France, it looks like the environmentalist agenda doesn’t stop with vehicles. “As well as taxing vehicles according to their weight,” the Connexion article says, “the 150 measures proposed by the citizens’ Climate Convention include changing the French constitution to highlight the importance of environmental protection, and introducing a new environmental crime called ‘ecocide’.”
- Will A Second COVID-19 Lockdown Coincide With A "No Deal" Brexit?
Will A Second COVID-19 Lockdown Coincide With A “No Deal” Brexit?
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/25/2020 – 02:00When I last posted an article about Brexit in May I discussed how the convergence of a possible world trade organisation scenario with the EU and the Covid-19 lockdown measures would serve to exacerbate the economic strain that the UK is currently being subjected to. I argued that as the devastation brought about by the self imposed lockdown became more profound, not only would a WTO Brexit compound matters but it would also put further downward pressure on sterling and prove a harbinger for a significant spike in inflation over the coming years.
Four months on and a number of developments have since occurred. As I predicted, the transition period was not extended, meaning it will come to an end on the 31st December 2020. Shortly afterwards a cabinet office document of ‘worst case scenarios‘ was revealed that detailed what may happen should a no deal Brexit coincide with a ‘second wave‘ of Covid-19. One possibility raised was how the government could decide to deploy the military on the streets of Britain in the event of public disorder.
Earlier this month, with trade negotiations floundering, Boris Johnson announced that if a deal cannot be agreed by October 15th the UK will walk away and revert to WTO tariffs. Following on from this was his latest intervention came just days ago when he unveiled renewed Covid-19 restrictions on the population after a rise in those testing positive for the virus, just as the final rounds of Brexit negotiations are due to begin.
One aspect to pick up on here is how when addressing the nation this week, Johnson made clear that he would be prepared to authorise using the military to ‘backfill when necessary‘ should the police require more support to enforce restrictions. Johnson also told the House of Commons that he had the option to ‘draw on military support where required to free up the police.’
Johnson’s official spokesman had this to say on the matter:
This would involve the military backfilling certain duties, such as office roles and guarding protected sites, so police officers can be out enforcing the virus response.
This is not about providing any additional powers to the military, or them replacing the police in enforcement roles, and they will not be handing out fines. It is about freeing up more police officers.
So here we have both Brexit and Covid-19 being talked about as potentially escalating to the stage where the military could be called upon under the guise of helping to maintain social order.
From my perspective here’s why I think this should be taken seriously:
Before the original lockdown was implemented on March 24th, I saw first hand in my role as a supermarket worker how the usual lucid nature of shoppers rapidly gave way to palpable fear and hysteria. After weeks of wall to wall coverage on Covid-19 in the media, the threat of a national lockdown began to enter the narrative. People responded by rushing to buy up food and medical supplies. As a consequence supply chains were severely impacted with shelves lying empty for weeks on end.
This demonstrated to me one inescapable fact. As much as people claim to distrust the mainstream media, what it actually showed was just how many continue to rely on outlets like Sky, the BBC and daily newspapers in guiding their perceptions. Their relentless messaging was undoubtedly a driving influence over the behaviour of people leading into the lockdown.
What I witnessed was how the threat of being deprived of essentials triggered within people a survival instinct. After weeks of preparatory propaganda, they knew what was coming and were inspired to act. The UK’s ceremonial exit from the EU on January 31st was now no longer part of the news agenda. Months of discord over Brexit was consigned to history.
But here’s the problem – the UK did not leave the European Union in any meaningful way on January 31st. Nothing materially changed in terms of the relationship. When those in support of Brexit declared on the morning of February 1st 2020 that the sky had not fallen in, they were at best being disingenuous. This is primarily because the country remains a member of the single market and the customs union. The real point of exit, when the UK is due to vacate the institutions that make up the EU, is not set to happen until the end of 2020 when the transition period expires.
The arrival of Covid-19 rendered Brexit an afterthought. But with the end of the transition period less than 100 days away, this is no longer the case. People are beginning to think about Brexit again.
My worry is that the public response to a likely no deal scenario will be met in a similar manner to how fears over a national lockdown were met. Boris Johnson’s deadline of October 15th for a trade deal, which coincides with a European Council meeting, is quickly approaching, as is the threat of a second lockdown.
If Johnson keeps to his word and the 15th passes without agreement, the UK will declare their intention to move onto WTO tariffs come January 1st 2021. That would leave exactly eleven weeks before this became a reality. Plenty of time for the media to begin a campaign of fear based propaganda – centred around stories of food and medicine shortages – and for the government to promote a nationwide communications programme urging people to prepare for potential disruption.
In truth it has already started. This week the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Michael Gove, warned that in a no deal scenario up to 7,000 port bound trucks looking to cross the channel could be delayed if hauliers do not have the requisite paperwork:
Irrespective of the outcome of negotiations between the UK and EU, traders will face new customs controls and processes. Simply put, if traders, both in the UK and EU, have not completed the right paperwork, their goods will be stopped when entering the EU and disruption will occur. It is essential that traders act now and get ready for new formalities.
With Christmas approaching, I suspect that warnings such as this will once again trigger within people the same fear that they felt back in March. There are already some signs, albeit isolated, of people starting to stockpile.
But unlike six months ago, the British public now have more than Covid-19 to consider. On the one hand you have people observing social distancing rules, which were not a requirement during the first bout of panic buying. On the other are increasing concerns that supermarkets may soon see an upsurge in customer demand off the back of a potential second lockdown, supply chain disruption following a no deal Brexit and the yearly onslaught of Christmas shopping.
It seems obvious to me that the media would portray a ‘second wave‘ of Covid-19 and a disorderly Brexit as a two pronged threat to the public.
You can probably tell where I am going with this. If a second lockdown is implemented, I suspect it would occur in the weeks leading up to Christmas. As fears would mount over access to supplies and people began to pile into supermarkets to stock up, warnings would be abound that because of the uptake in custom people are failing to social distance resulting in the spread of the virus, which in turn would create a rationale within the media for a second lockdown. A economically ruinous lockdown that would largely be blamed on Brexit. And, of course, running beneath Brexit is the narrative of a rise in nationalism and protectionism, which global planners have cited as dangers to the post World War Two ‘rules based global order.’
If you put aside any ideological bias you may have over Brexit, you begin to see how a chaotic separation from the EU is beneficial to global planners. This is something I have discussed in numerous articles over the past couple of years. Central bankers speak of the ‘post Brexit architecture‘ in terms of the the future make-up of the global economic system. Most recently the World Economic Forum launched their ‘Great Reset‘ initiative, which includes plans for a global economic reset that would likely encompass the recomposition of currencies, the introduction of central bank digital currency and a desire to replace ‘failed institutions, processes and rules with new ones that are better suited to current and future needs‘.
One of those institutions just happens to be the World Trade Organisation, which was earmarked for reform back in 2018. The WTO would play the leading role in a no deal Brexit outcome, and if it is shown as being not up to the job then this strengthens the hand of global planners to either remodel or replace it entirely.
As I have long argued, the most vulnerable aspect to Brexit is pound sterling, both in terms of its value and its role as a global reserve currency. Brexit can and I think will play a part in global planners attempting to reconstruct the economic system in their own image. In that sense it is why I believe they want Brexit to happen and in as disorderly a way as possible. Chaos is often advantageous to globalists, not detrimental. Especially when they have already laid out their solutions through Sustainable Development and the Great Reset. All they need is a sufficient number of crises in order to position themselves as the benefactors.
- Justice Sleeps And "We, The People" Suffer: No, The US Supreme Court Will Not Save Us
Justice Sleeps And “We, The People” Suffer: No, The US Supreme Court Will Not Save Us
Tyler Durden
Fri, 09/25/2020 – 00:00Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people.”
– Justice William O. Douglas
The U.S. Supreme Court will not save us.
It doesn’t matter which party gets to pick the replacement to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The battle that is gearing up right now is yet more distraction and spin to keep us oblivious to the steady encroachment on our rights by the architects of the American Police State.
Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice.
Although the courts were established to serve as Courts of Justice, what we have been saddled with, instead, are Courts of Order. This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government interests than with upholding the rights of the people enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
As a result, the police and other government agents have been generally empowered to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts.
Rarely do the concerns of the populace prevail.
When presented with an opportunity to loosen the government’s noose that keeps getting cinched tighter and tighter around the necks of the American people, what does our current Supreme Court usually do?
It ducks. Prevaricates. Remains silent. Speaks to the narrowest possible concern.
More often than not, it gives the government and its corporate sponsors the benefit of the doubt, which leaves “we the people” hanging by a thread.
Rarely do the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court— preoccupied with their personal politics, cocooned in a world of privilege, partial to those with power, money and influence, and narrowly focused on a shrinking docket (the court accepts on average 80 cases out of 8,000 each year)—venture beyond their rarefied comfort zones.
Every so often, the justices toss a bone to those who fear they have abdicated their allegiance to the Constitution. Too often, however, the Supreme Court tends to march in lockstep with the police state.
In recent years, for example, the Court has ruled that police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits; police officers can stop cars based only on “anonymous” tips; Secret Service agents are not accountable for their actions, as long as they’re done in the name of “security”; citizens only have a right to remain silent if they assert it; police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes,” justifying any and all police searches of vehicles stopped on the roadside; police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime; police can stop, search, question and profile citizens and non-citizens alike; police can subject Americans to virtual strip searches, no matter the “offense”; police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home; and it’s a crime to not identify yourself when a policeman asks your name.
The cases the Supreme Court refuses to hear, allowing lower court judgments to stand, are almost as critical as the ones they rule on. Some of these cases have delivered devastating blows to the lives and rights enshrined in the Constitution. By remaining silent, the Court has affirmed that: legally owning a firearm is enough to justify a no-knock raid by police; the military can arrest and detain American citizens; students can be subjected to random lockdowns and mass searches at school; and police officers who don’t know their actions violate the law aren’t guilty of breaking the law.
You think you’ve got rights? Think again.
All of those freedoms we cherish—the ones enshrined in the Constitution, the ones that affirm our right to free speech and assembly, due process, privacy, bodily integrity, the right to not have police seize our property without a warrant, or search and detain us without probable cause—amount to nothing when the government and its agents are allowed to disregard those prohibitions on government overreach at will.
This is the grim reality of life in the American police state.
In fact, our so-called rights have been reduced to technicalities in the face of the government’s ongoing power grabs.
In the police state being erected around us, the police can probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts.
This is what one would call a slow death by a thousand cuts, only it’s the Fourth Amendment being inexorably bled to death by the very institution that is supposed to be protecting it (and us) from government abuse.
Remember, it was a unanimous Supreme Court which determined that police officers may use drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops. That same Court gave police the green light to taser defenseless motorists, strip search non-violent suspects arrested for minor incidents, and break down people’s front doors without evidence that they have done anything wrong.
Make no mistake about it: this is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.
These are the hallmarks of the emerging American police state, where police officers, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.
Whether it’s police officers breaking through people’s front doors and shooting them dead in their homes or strip searching motorists on the side of the road, in a police state such as ours, these instances of abuse are not condemned by the government. Rather, they are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution.
The system is rigged.
Because the system is rigged and the U.S. Supreme Court—the so-called “people’s court”—has exchanged its appointed role as a gatekeeper of justice for its new role as maintainer of the status quo, the police state will keep winning and “we the people” will keep losing.
By refusing to accept any of the eight or so qualified immunity cases before it this past term that strove to hold police accountable for official misconduct, the Supreme Court delivered a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”
This is how qualified immunity keeps the police state in power.
Lawyers tend to offer a lot of complicated, convoluted explanations for the doctrine of qualified immunity, which was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to rig the system, ensuring that abusive agents of the government almost always win and the victims of government abuse almost always lose.
How else do you explain a doctrine that requires victims of police violence to prove that their abusers knew their behavior was illegal because it had been deemed so in a nearly identical case at some prior time?
It’s a setup for failure.
A review of critical court rulings over the past several decades, including rulings affirming qualified immunity protections for government agents by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order, protecting the ruling class, and insulating government agents from charges of wrongdoing than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
Indeed, as Reuters reports, qualified immunity “has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”
Worse, as Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police.”
For those in need of a reminder of all the ways in which the Supreme Court has made us sitting ducks at the mercy of the American police state, let me offer the following.
As a result of court rulings in recent years, police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless searches. Police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless arrests based on mere suspicion. Police can claim qualified immunity for using excessive force against protesters. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a mentally impaired person. Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits. Police can stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Police officers can stop cars based on “anonymous” tips or for “suspicious” behavior such as having a reclined car seat or driving too carefully. Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime. Police can use the “fear for my life” rationale as an excuse for shooting unarmed individuals. Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes.” Not only are police largely protected by qualified immunity, but police dogs are also off the hook for wrongdoing.
Police can subject Americans to strip searches, no matter the “offense.” Police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home. Police can use knock-and-talk tactics as a means of sidestepping the Fourth Amendment. Police can carry out no-knock raids if they believe announcing themselves would be dangerous. Police can recklessly open fire on anyone that might be “armed.” Police can destroy a home during a SWAT raid, even if the owner gives their consent to enter and search it. Police can suffocate someone, deliberately or inadvertently, in the process of subduing them.
To sum it up, we are dealing with a nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat. In this way, the justices of the United States Supreme Court—through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency—have become the architects of the American police state.
So where does that leave us?
For those deluded enough to believe that they’re living the American dream—where the government represents the people, where the people are equal in the eyes of the law, where the courts are arbiters of justice, where the police are keepers of the peace, and where the law is applied equally as a means of protecting the rights of the people—it’s time to wake up.
We no longer have a representative government, a rule of law, or justice.
Liberty has fallen to legalism. Freedom has fallen to fascism.
Justice has become jaded, jaundiced and just plain unjust.
And for too many, the American dream of freedom and opportunity has turned into a living nightmare.
Given the turbulence of our age, with its police overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, profit-driven prisons, and corporate corruption, the need for a guardian of the people’s rights has never been greater.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, neither the president, nor the legislatures, nor the courts will save us from the police state that holds us in its clutches.
So we can waste our strength over the next few weeks and months raging over the makeup of the Supreme Court or we can stand united against the tyrant in our midst.
After all, the president, the legislatures, and the courts are all on the government’s payroll.
They are the police state.
- The $88 Trillion World Economy In One Chart
The $88 Trillion World Economy In One Chart
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:40The global economy can seem like an abstract concept, yet, as Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh notes, it influences our everyday lives in both obvious and subtle ways. Nowhere is this clearer than in the current economic state amid the throes of the pandemic.
This voronoi-style visualization from HowMuch relies on gross domestic product (GDP) data from the World Bank to paint a picture of the global economy – which crested $87.8 trillion in 2019.
Editor’s note: Annual data on economic output is a lagging indicator, and is released the following year by organizations such as the World Bank. The figures in this diagram provide a snapshot of the global economy in 2019, but do not necessarily represent the impact of recent developments such as COVID-19.
Top 10 Countries by GDP (2019)
In the one-year period since the last release of official data in 2018, the global economy grew approximately $2 trillion in size—or about 2.3%.
The United States continues to have the top GDP, accounting for nearly one-quarter of the world economy. China also continued to grow its share of global GDP, going from 15.9% to 16.3%.
In recent years, the Indian economy has continued to have an upward trajectory—now pulling ahead of both the UK and France—to become one of the world’s top five economies.
In aggregate, these top 10 countries combine for over two-thirds of total global GDP.
2020 Economic Contractions
So far this year, multiple countries have experienced temporary economic contractions, including many of the top 10 countries listed above.
The following interactive chart from Our World in Data helps to give us some perspective on this turbulence, comparing Q2 economic figures against those from the same quarter last year.
One of the hardest hit economies has been Peru. The Latin American country, which is about the 50th largest in terms of GDP globally, saw its economy contract by 30.2% in Q2 despite efforts to curb the virus early.
Spain and the UK are also feeling the impact, posting quarterly GDP numbers that are 22.1% and 21.7% smaller respectively.
Meanwhile, Taiwan and South Korea are two countries that may have done the best at weathering the COVID-19 storm. Both saw minuscule contractions in a quarter where the global economy seemed to grind to a halt.
Projections Going Forward
According to the World Bank, the global economy could ultimately shrink 5.2% in 2020 – the deepest cut since WWII.
See below for World Bank projections on GDP in 2020 for when the dust settles, as well as the subsequent potential for recovery in 2021.
Source: World Bank Global Economic Prospects, released June 2020
- Secret Report Exposes CIA's Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary
Secret Report Exposes CIA’s Brennan Overruled Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:20Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations.com,
Former CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and assigned a political ally to take a lead role in writing it after career analysts disputed Brennan’s take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White House, according to two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials detailing Brennan’s role in drafting the document.
John Brennan, left, with Robert Mueller in 2013: The CIA director’s explosive conclusion in the ICA helped justify continuing Trump-Russia “collusion” investigations, notably Mueller’s probe as special counsel. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
The explosive conclusion Brennan inserted into the report was used to help justify continuing the Trump-Russia “collusion” investigation, which had been launched by the FBI in 2016. It was picked up after the election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who in the end found no proof that Trump or his campaign conspired with Moscow.
The Obama administration publicly released a declassified version of the report — known as the “Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent Elections (ICA)” — just two weeks before Trump took office, casting a cloud of suspicion over his presidency. Democrats and national media have cited the report to suggest Russia influenced the 2016 outcome and warn that Putin is likely meddling again to reelect Trump.
The ICA is a key focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.
RealClearInvestigations has learned that one of the CIA operatives who helped Brennan draft the ICA, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, financially supported Hillary Clinton during the campaign and is a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RCI as the Democratic national security “whistleblower” whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment, ending in Senate acquittal in January.
John Durham: He is said to be using the long-hidden report on the drafting of the ICA as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence. Department of Justice via AP
The two officials said Brennan, who openly supported Clinton during the campaign, excluded conflicting evidence about Putin’s motives from the report, despite objections from some intelligence analysts who argued Putin counted on Clinton winning the election and viewed Trump as a “wild card.”
The dissenting analysts found that Moscow preferred Clinton because it judged she would work with its leaders, whereas it worried Trump would be too unpredictable. As secretary of state, Clinton tried to “reset” relations with Moscow to move them to a more positive and cooperative stage, while Trump campaigned on expanding the U.S. military, which Moscow perceived as a threat.
These same analysts argued the Kremlin was generally trying to sow discord and disrupt the American democratic process during the 2016 election cycle. They also noted that Russia tried to interfere in the 2008 and 2012 races, many years before Trump threw his hat in the ring.
“They complained Brennan took a thesis [that Putin supported Trump] and decided he was going to ignore dissenting data and exaggerate the importance of that conclusion, even though they said it didn’t have any real substance behind it,” said a senior U.S intelligence official who participated in a 2018 review of the spycraft behind the assessment, which President Obama ordered after the 2016 election.
He elaborated that the analysts said they also came under political pressure to back Brennan’s judgment that Putin personally ordered “active measures” against the Clinton campaign to throw the election to Trump, even though the underlying intelligence was “weak.”
Adam Schiff: Soon after the Democrat took control of the House Intelligence Committee, its review of the drafting of the intelligence community assessment was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe. AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The review, conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, culminated in a lengthy report that was classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the committee in January 2019.
The official said the committee spent more than 1,200 hours reviewing the ICA and interviewing analysts involved in crafting it, including the chief of Brennan’s so-called “fusion cell,” which was the interagency analytical group Obama’s top spook stood up to look into Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.
Durham is said to be using the long-hidden report, which runs 50-plus pages, as a road map in his investigation of whether the Obama administration politicized intelligence while targeting the Trump campaign and presidential transition in an unprecedented investigation involving wiretapping and other secret surveillance.
The special prosecutor recently interviewed Brennan for several hours at CIA headquarters after obtaining his emails, call logs and other documents from the agency. Durham has also quizzed analysts and supervisors who worked on the ICA.
A spokesman for Brennan said that, according to Durham, he is not the target of a criminal investigation and “only a witness to events that are under review.” Durham’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said former senior CIA political analyst Kendall-Taylor was a key member of the team that worked on the ICA. A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, federal records show. In June, she gave $250 to the Biden Victory Fund.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor: A Brennan protégé, she donated hundreds of dollars to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and recently defended the ICA in a “60 Minutes” interview. “60 Minutes”/YouTube
Kendall-Taylor and Ciaramella entered the CIA as junior analysts around the same time and worked the Russia beat together at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From 2015 to 2018, Kendall-Taylor was detailed to the National Intelligence Council, where she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. Ciaramella succeeded her in that position at NIC, a unit of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that oversees the CIA and the other intelligence agencies.
It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. He was working in the White House as a CIA detailee at the time. The CIA declined comment.
Kendall-Taylor did not respond to requests for comment, but she recently defended the ICA as a national security expert in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Russia’s election activities, arguing it was a slam-dunk case “based on a large body of evidence that demonstrated not only what Russia was doing, but also its intent. And it’s based on a number of different sources, collected human intelligence, technical intelligence.”
But the secret congressional review details how the ICA, which was hastily put together over 30 days at the direction of Obama intelligence czar James Clapper, did not follow longstanding rules for crafting such assessments. It was not farmed out to other key intelligence agencies for their input, and did not include an annex for dissent, among other extraordinary departures from past tradecraft.
Eric Ciaramella: The Democratic national security “whistleblower,” whose complaint led to President Trump’s impeachment, was a close colleague of Kendall-Taylor. It’s not clear if Ciaramella also played a role in the drafting of the January 2017 assessment. whitehouse.gov
It did, however, include a two-page annex summarizing allegations from a dossier compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. His claim that Putin had personally ordered cyberattacks on the Clinton campaign to help Trump win happened to echo the key finding of the ICA that Brennan supported. Brennan had briefed Democratic senators about allegations from the dossier on Capitol Hill.
“Some of the FBI source’s [Steele’s] reporting is consistent with the judgment in the assessment,” stated the appended summary, which the two intelligence sources say was written by Brennan loyalists.
“The FBI source claimed, for example, that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Secretary Clinton, whom Putin ‘feared and hated.’ “
Steele’s reporting has since been discredited by the Justice Department’s inspector general as rumor-based opposition research on Trump paid for by the Clinton campaign. Several allegations have been debunked, even by Steele’s own primary source, who confessed to the FBI that he ginned the rumors up with some of his Russian drinking buddies to earn money from Steele.
Former FBI Director James Comey told the Justice Department’s watchdog that the Steele material, which he referred to as the “Crown material,” was incorporated with the ICA because it was “corroborative of the central thesis of the assessment “The IC analysts found it credible on its face,” Comey said.
Christopher Steele: His dossier allegations were summarized in a two-page annex to the ICA, but dissenting views about the Kremlin’s favoring Hillary Clinton over Trump were excluded. Victoria Jones/PA via AP
The officials who have read the secret congressional report on the ICA dispute that. They say a number of analysts objected to including the dossier, arguing it was political innuendo and not sound intelligence.
“The staff report makes it fairly clear the assessment was politicized and skewed to discredit Trump’s election,” said the second U.S. intelligence source, who also requested anonymity.
Kendall-Taylor denied any political bias factored into the intelligence.
“To suggest that there was political interference in that process is ridiculous,” she recently told NBC News.
Her boss during the ICA’s drafting was CIA officer Julia Gurganus. Clapper tasked Gurganus, then detailed to NIC as its national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, with coordinating the production of the ICA with Kendall-Taylor.
They, in turn, worked closely with NIC’s cybersecurity expert Vinh Nguyen, who had been consulting with Democratic National Committee cybersecurity contractor CrowdStrike to gather intelligence on the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer system. (CrowdStrike’s president has testified he couldn’t say for sure Russian intelligence stole DNC emails, according to recently declassified transcripts.)
Durham’s investigators have focused on people who worked at NIC during the drafting of the ICA, according to recent published reports.
No Input From CIA’s ‘Russia House’
The senior official who identified Kendall-Taylor said Brennan did not seek input from experts from CIA’s so-called Russia House, a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe and Eurasia, before arriving at the conclusion that Putin meddled in the election to benefit Trump.
“It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia House,” the official said. “It was just a small group of people selected and driven by Brennan himself … and Brennan did the editing.”
The official noted that National Security Agency analysts also dissented from the conclusion that Putin personally sought to tilt the scale for Trump. One of only three agencies from the 17-agency intelligence community invited to participate in the ICA, the NSA had a lower level of confidence than the CIA and FBI, specifically on that bombshell conclusion.
The official said the NSA’s departure was significant because the agency monitors the communications of Russian officials overseas. Yet it could not corroborate Brennan’s preferred conclusion through its signals intelligence. Former NSA Director Michael Rogers, who has testified that the conclusion about Putin and Trump “didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources,” reportedly has been cooperating with Durham’s probe.
The second senior intelligence official, who has read a draft of the still-classified House Intelligence Committee review, confirmed that career intelligence analysts complained that the ICA was tightly controlled and manipulated by Brennan, who previously worked in the Obama White House.
“It wasn’t 17 agencies and it wasn’t even a dozen analysts from the three agencies who wrote the assessment,” as has been widely reported in the media, he said.
“It was just five officers of the CIA who wrote it, and Brennan hand-picked all five. And the lead writer was a good friend of Brennan’s.”
Brennan’s tight control over the process of drafting the ICA belies public claims the assessment reflected the “consensus of the entire intelligence community.” His unilateral role also raises doubts about the objectivity of the intelligence.
In his defense, Brennan has pointed to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report that found “no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”
“The ICA correctly found the Russians interfered in our 2016 election to hurt Secretary Clinton and help the candidacy of Donald Trump,” argued committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va.
“Our review of the highly classified ICA and underlying intelligence found that this and other conclusions were well-supported,” Warner added.
“There is certainly no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020, and we must not be caught unprepared.”
Brennan, ex-Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco and ex-national intelligence director James Clapper, interviewed by Nicolle Wallace of MSNBC, right, at a 2018 Aspen Instutute event. Aspen Institute
However, the report completely blacks out a review of the underlying evidence to support the Brennan-inserted conclusion, including an entire section labeled “Putin Ordered Campaign to Influence U.S. Election.” Still, it suggests elsewhere that conclusions are supported by intelligence with “varying substantiation” and with “differing confidence levels.” It also notes “concerns about the use of specific sources.”
Adding to doubts, the committee relied heavily on the closed-door testimony of former Obama homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco, a close Brennan ally who met with Brennan and his “fusion team” at the White House before and after the election. The extent of Monaco’s role in the ICA is unclear.
Brennan last week pledged he would cooperate with two other Senate committees investigating the origins of the Russia “collusion” investigation. The Senate judiciary and governmental affairs panels recently gained authority to subpoena Brennan and other witnesses to testify.
Several Republican lawmakers and former Trump officials are clamoring for the declassification and release of the secret House staff report on the ICA.
“It’s dynamite,” said former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who reviewed the staff report while serving as chief of staff to then-National Security Adviser John Bolton.
“There are things in there that people don’t know,” he told RCI.
“It will change the dynamic of our understanding of Russian meddling in the election.”
However, according to the intelligence official who worked on the ICA review, Brennan ensured that it would be next to impossible to declassify his sourcing for the key judgment on Putin. He said Brennan hid all sources and references to the underlying intelligence behind a highly sensitive and compartmented wall of classification.
He explained that he and Clapper created two classified versions of the ICA – a highly restricted Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information version that reveals the sourcing, and a more accessible Top Secret version that omits details about the sourcing.
Unless the classification of compartmented findings can be downgraded, access to Brennan’s questionable sourcing will remain highly restricted, leaving the underlying evidence conveniently opaque, the official said.
- "Let Me Explain What Happens Next…" – A Reader Sums It All Up Very Ominously
“Let Me Explain What Happens Next…” – A Reader Sums It All Up Very Ominously
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:00Authored by ‘Austrian Peter’ via The Burning Platform,
A reader recently wrote me a long letter on how he feels about all this ‘Plandemic’ stuff. I thought it would be good to share it as there is so much in it which rings bells of truth for me…
[emphasis ours]
I’ve just woken up after reading ZeroHedge late into the night. I awoke with the conviction that Covid is being used to roll out a police state:
They know it’s not deadly, it’s no longer spreading and Lockdown is killing off the few small businesses which remain viable. Yet Boris now insists upon banning the assembly of more than 6 people. He has recalled some petty bureaucrats to act as street enforcers and requested people become snitches who report on their neighbours for any breaches of these guidelines. This automatically means we must now all fear our neighbours, or strangers who take our car number. How better to destroy the mutual trust upon which society is built?
Just think if one were to refuse to bend the knee. In Australia and Spain the police have been caught using excessive force against those not wearing masks. Intimidating isn’t it? I’m thinking I may have to start using one. Yet the science is clear – masks offer no protection.
So we know these new restrictions are not being driven by the authority’s concern for our health. And what is the difference between where we are now and making it normal for the police to come to your door and arrest you for a breach of their protocols? What is the difference between where we are now and an oppressive police state?
There is only one difference between now and full-on state oppression: A change in the Zeitgeist.
They need an event that will change the mood of the people – an event or a series of events that make us afraid of ‘them’. A psychological shock that will give the police the conviction that things are so bad ‘a little force is necessary’ to ensure things don’t get out of control. And then, magically, the current ‘temporary restrictions’ become state oppression. What could that game changer be?
Imagine this November: The US has 100 cities descending into what looks like the start of civil war as patriots turn out to stop Antifa burning down Middle America. Kamala Harris is calling for the army to ‘evict’ Trump because he refuses to leave the White House on the grounds that he won the popular vote while the mail-in ballots were fraudulent.
For the Brits, Brexit has caused problems at the ports – among other things some foodstuffs are not getting through. Germany’s economy has cratered after the EU stopped them exporting cars to the UK (Trumps already tariffed them), and the EU’s bank has insisted Germany let the 500 non-viable, medium sized biz (currently kept alive with emergency funding) go bankrupt.
Deutsche Bank collapses and this initiates a global banking crisis. Europe has no way of saving its banks as all the European economies are so damaged and 20% of workers have already been laid off. It’s a Greek style banking crisis on steroids. People are pulling out cash in the expectation of daily cash limits. Physical gold will have already disappeared from the market place. So any biz with money in the bank is frantically buying bitcoin in an attempt to avoid their working capital being ‘bailed in’.
The banks will have already pulled the plug on their most vulnerable customers – the airlines – so virtually no planes are flying. Dover is jammed up with lorries lining the approach roads. So no one can leave Blighty. And if you did, the emergency measures intended to pre-empt Covid’s Second Wave require you to be kept in quarantine at your destination. Locked down in a hotel, under military guard (as in NZ), for 4 weeks at your own expense and with frequent testing to ensure you are not a carrier. With full bio-metric data being collected and filed on an EU wide register. In practice this means that travel becomes so fraught that escape from your homeland is just about impossible.
You get the gist? November could be the end of world as we know it’ (TEOTWAWKI). But my point is this: Why are we looking at such a catastrophe if their goal is not a police state? No one destroys the globe’s economy and creates the conditions for a 10 year Greater Depression by accident. This has to be a planned, intentional destruction of much of global civilization.
The evidence is overwhelming. This civilization has been purposefully destroyed. Right now we’re in an unreal time (like the beautiful summer just before WW1’s carnage). It’s like Wiley E Coyote who has gone over the cliff, is still running but not yet started to fall. But when we fall, how will people react as they realize that they will never work again, never pay off the mortgage, never collect their pensions? If we have state oppression and economic chaos by Christmas then what will be the next stage of their takeover?
The world’s economy is already doomed. The already broken supply chains ensure it can only get worse. Once the derivative market goes, and banks can no longer fund the credit lines crucial for importers and exporters, then trade will collapse and thus food supplies cease.
It would seem to be inevitable that America is going to see more conflict as the Dems & Soros show no signs of wishing to abort their colour revolution. Maybe in 2021, maybe a year or two later, but there will come a time when a credit shortage leads to deflation. So the banks will print more and then rain down helicopter money which will lead to inflation. And then the currencies will start collapsing. Many people understand that this is inevitable. But what happens when people come to accept that money isn’t go to be worth the paper it’s printed on? And thus keeping a job may not be worth the danger of leaving your house or of leaving safety.
I summarise one of last night’s articles:
“the beasts of burden don’t rebel, they just no longer show up. Not showing up can take a number of forms: early retirement, sick leave, a demand to work halftime, a workers’ compensation stress leave, and of course, resignation and quitting as in: “take this job and shove it”. They slip noiselessly into the cracks and crevasses and once they’re gone, there’s nobody left to replace them.”
“As the Vital Few 4% realize the system no longer works for them and opt out, this will have an out-sized effect on the 64%, most likely urban dwellers, highly dependent on increasingly brittle, fragile services that depend on the Vital Few for their functionality. Think of London’s tube train drivers phoning in sick – ideology won’t matter.
Those dropping out may be Conservative or Progressive or they may have lost interest entirely in politics and all the other circuses that serve to distract the populace from the crises dissolving the glue that held the system together. “So I won’t get rich, that dream died a long time ago.” What I’m interested in now is getting my life back and getting the heck out of Dodge as things fall apart.”
The rich will escape to their holiday cottages. The poor will riot – but what then? As the social facade cracks, and the economic system breaks, there is neither a society nor an economy to fall back on. By Christmas it will be obvious that normality has gone for ever.
So what will ‘they’ do with millions of unemployed, frightened people? If ‘they’ leave the internet on then the people will start to organize – first politically – but when that doesn’t work, riots and then finally revolution. Turn it off and they will riot without being organized. Turn off phones and all hell will break out. Don’t turn them off and the kids will organize against the state – trash cars or burn down the local police station. Have you noticed how some police stations look like forts?
My point is that it’s very hard not to see ‘events’ hitting the fan this November. And once they do it’s very hard to see life ever going back to stability, let alone ‘normality’. Rather, there will be an overwhelming need to control {oppress} the population before they take over the state. But what do you do with millions of unemployed in a failed economy who are doomed to losing their currency, long term poverty and probably food shortages. There is only one thing ‘they’ can do. Kill them.
Ideally, for the elite, Covid’s Second Wave will have a higher morbidity rate. Enough to steadily reduce the population but not so fast they can’t be buried in plague pits. It would have to be bad enough to justify a harsh Lockdown but it’s difficult to see that being feasible without giving the people electricity, internet & food and the money to pay for it. And even then it’s only a temporary fix as Lockdown can’t last for ever. Permanent Lockdown would soon destroy the currency which will mean no electricity or food.
Maybe Covid-19 v1.0 was supposed to kill off more people but it failed. Or maybe it worked as intended – they didn’t want to risk killing off too many in case the Lockdown failed and we revolted. But I don’t see they have much choice now. ‘The Fourth Turning’ will be turbulent until 2025 and things won’t really be resolved until 2030. How are they going to manage us for another 10 years? How will they control us? Feed us?
They can start a war but no one is going to turn up. Fight a war for the elite? Use a gun to kill people you don’t know? That’s not going to happen. And they need to preserve the professional soldiers to ‘maintain the peace’ in the cities. So what options do they have but to release a more potent bio-weapon – nuclear war perhaps?
One of the scary things about working through ‘their’ options is that they don’t have many. Things have gone too far – they’ve destroyed the world’s economy. The system is stuffed. What are ‘they’ going to do with 2bn unemployed people. Even if there is enough food but the US has a developing dust bowl, Africa’s suffered huge locust devastation, and China’s preparing for food shortages. How do unemployed people pay for it? Who can give them money without destroying the currency or if the currency is already destroyed?
A simple thing like the current fall in the number of sunspots is indicating an immediate future of colder weather and lower crop yields. Add into that, fuel shortages for agricultural machinery, lack of fertilizer – Nitrogen is made by burning lots of oil, lack of supply lines, and loss of credit lines. With people in Lockdown ‘they’ would be relying on a planned economy (not a free market) which is going to be inefficient. A planned economy is completely incapable of ensuring a stable food supply when there are shortages and the world is chaotic.
It’s not even feeding our cities that will be prime problem. It will be feeding the cities in Mexico and North Africa. They can’t cope with food price inflation. But they won’t starve – they’ll flood into the USA or cross the Mediterranean – lucky us! And what will Erdogan in Turkey do to feed his people – nothing good! If there are real food shortages then note that there are huge Muslim populations in France & Sweden, Turks and refugees in Germany, Pakistani ghettos in UK and plenty more where they all came from.
I’m feeling concerned. The problem is I can’t see Brexit solving our problems. Sure, it may not exacerbate them as much as I fear. November’s events may not trigger us into a state of oppression. But do you see my point? Things have got so bad, they can only get worse. November is bound to see some changes and they may well trigger a change in the Zeitgeist, though how significant depends on ‘events, dear boy, events’.
But whatever happens I think it’s virtually guaranteed that both the economy and society will keep on deteriorating.
Do you think I’m right?
Will November be the tipping point?
Is there any way back?
Will there be anything to go ‘back’ to?
Or else, is it a case of: “we’re doomed, I tell ya, doomed”. And what happens when more people work out that the elites have created a situation where their only option is to rapidly reduce the population! Famine will lead to uncontrollable social conflict, perhaps with Muslims massacring whites in general or the local Jewish populations in particular. I think that much conflict could see ‘them‘ lose control.
Thus it’s hard to see any other viable method than a bio-weapon. Agenda 21 could be implemented on schedule. And if not, the solution will need to be applied within a few years, certainly before 2025. Timing may depend on vaccine production as there will have to be at least enough vaccine for essential workers, the police, the military and the management class if the elite are to retain control.
- US School Districts Abandon Online-Curriculum Provider Over 'Racially Insensitive & Inaccurate' Content
US School Districts Abandon Online-Curriculum Provider Over ‘Racially Insensitive & Inaccurate’ Content
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 23:00As children prepare for online learning to continue being part of their life for at least another 6 months to a year (ultimately, it will depend on when a vaccine can be distributed), embarrassing stories of incompetence by the companies who are running these programs have whipped up a firestorm of controversy in the media.
Complaints about the Acellus Learning Accelerator, the program picked by the Alameda School District in California, and many others around the country, have piled up in local press reports.
Earlier this month, the controversy was sparked by “racist” or “sexist” questions, including one that asked young students what’s the proper definition of a “family”, before showing several options, including a black single mother, and a traditional white family with a mom and a father.
The answer was ‘the white family’. California’s liberals were apoplectic, and Alameda’s school district immediately severed its relationship with the program’s owner. One couple who said they paid the massively inflated home prices in Alameda in part for the schools. The fact that the district is spending money on programs with such obvious flaws is “frankly depressing”.
“We bought a home here so our kids could enroll in these schools and to have them roll out something like that,” Eckman said. “It’s very disappointing.”
Now, WSJ is reporting on more examples of the Acellus software’s egregious mistakes, including this error: ‘that Rosa Parks was arrested because she didn’t sit in the Blacks only section on a bus, instead of the correct answer, which is ‘she refused to give up her seat to a white ma’.
Teachers have at times rebelled, telling supervisors that the content simply “isn’t suitable” and ceasing to use it in their classes.
Over the past few weeks, Hawaii has emerged as a locus of complaints about the software, as thousands of parents signed a petition condemning the company’s content as racist, sexist and low quality. This fall, Acellus, which had previously only been used by some home schooled students in the state, had become the primary remote learning tool for 80k students across the state.
While school districts in Hawaii confessed that they didn’t thoroughly vet the product, one school district in Ohio rejected the software after finding several examples of “racially insensitive” content. The Delaware City School District in Ohio told parents it reviewed Acellus in greater depth after receiving complaints, and that the “racially and culturally insensitive material” had been evident.
In one particularly startling example, a history lesson the southern plantations said that slavery was “important” to keep them going.
As it turns out, while Acellus’s founders tout the software as “magical” and unlike anything else on the market, WSJ has discovered that three of the “PhDs” in charge of the company got their degrees from non-accredited institutions.
Later on in the story, Acellus’s biggest backers admitted that the software’s main competitive advantage was its price: It cost just $100 per student for the school year, compared with $300 or $400 for competing products. Previously, districts mostly used it sparingly for kids who needed to catch up on course credits. The WSJ story also hinted at strange “religious” ties in the founder’s “background”.
It’s almost hard to believe that America’s schools would make the mistake of contracting an “education” company run by three pseudo-“PhDs” who got their credentials from what’s effectively a diploma mill. But with the fiscal pinch and general chaos of the pandemic, school districts are finding it difficult to adapt.
- "He Who Cheats Best, Wins?" – Bloomberg Backs Lawbreakers-For-Biden In Florida
“He Who Cheats Best, Wins?” – Bloomberg Backs Lawbreakers-For-Biden In Florida
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 22:40Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
In 2016 I told the few people who were listening to me then that I thought Trump would win Florida by around seven points depending on the level of cheating in Broward and Dade counties by now deposed and disgraced Broward Supervisor of Election, Brenda Snipes.
He wound up winning by three, so to me that says there was likely a fair amount of it going on. Argue with me all you want but I operate, normally, under the principle that U.S. elections of any import are determined by the maxim:
He who cheats best, wins.
Call it the Luongo Rule of Electoral Politics if you will.
This year we know that the cheating will be systemic and of a kind that we’ve not experienced before.
There is no more decorum about it. Only those truly naive or in the media will tell you otherwise.
In this election the ideologues have been radicalized on all sides to view the threat of the other side winning as existential to their future. And, far be it from me to tell them they’re wrong, because when I’m being honest with myself, they aren’t.
So that gives them not only motive, means and opportunity to cheat but also the fervent belief that they have to in order to save society itself. Well, at least, that’s what they are telling themselves as they go about doing it.
What’s also very clear is that the oligarch class which animates the establishment wing of the Republican party is working with the whole of the Democratic party and the media to remove Trump from power by any and all means necessary.
And while they are certainly signaling that they will use any and all means necessary to achieve this end, they would prefer for their actions to have the veneer of respectability, through some form of electoral mandate, even if that mandate is patent fiction.
Now any political neophyte knows Florida is the most important state in the union today from an electoral college perspective. Without Florida both Trump and Biden have a very difficult path to victory.
Those 29 (soon to be 31) electoral votes represent the pivot on which the entire election rests. I spent an hour recently with Joe Cotto of the Cotto/Gottfried Show talking about this from a uniquely Florida perspective which I think should give anyone pause who thinks Florida is actually up for grabs, because it isn’t.
Caption: They even got mah Trump Face… must love YouTube!
Looking back on the whole Coronapocalypse a tremendous amount of attention and pressure was placed on Governor Ron DeSantis to destroy the state economy.
It seemed every five days or so I’d log into Twitter to see some version of #DeSantisMustDie trending. After six months of it it’s a little tiring.
Then again, after a four-year temper tantrum electoral politics is pretty much tiresome.
For most of this year the polls have all told us that Joe Biden was winning in Florida. And that may have been the case six months ago, you know, when no one gave a crap about the presidential election except people who make their living covering it.
Guilty as charged.
But in the wake of almost surreal violence and scenes of looting and, frankly, animal-like behavior all that was ever going to do was push the moderate voter in a state like Florida towards Donald Trump, not away from him.
And now the polls, as flawed and dishonest as most of them are, have begun to reflect this basic truth. At no time in 2016 did Trump lead the polls in Florida. On election night I watched the faces of shitlibs from across the socio-economic spectrum of Alachua county go into paroxysms of despair as the results came in.
I almost, for a minute, felt bad for them.
So, this years, in my analysis, it doesn’t help that even the die-hard Democrat midwits I’ve known for most of my life are holding their nose to vote for Biden, not because he’s any good but because their own sense of self would be tarnished forever by voting Republican.
That level of disgust is a not a motivator to vote, it’s a motivator to stay home and drink heavily. And it will not play well for Biden here, nor will it help him win Democratic strongholds by the same majorities Democrats usually win by in places like Broward, Leon (Tallahassee), Alachua (Gainesville) and even Miami-Dade.
The fear that Florida will go big for Trump is so acute now Mini Mike Bloomberg and LeBron James are spending millions to pay off debts of black and Hispanic felons to restore their voting rights before the election hoping that translates into enough votes to push Biden to victory.
Honestly, they should worry more about pushing him to the teleprompter lucid at this point.
Now, don’t get me wrong, felons who have paid their way back to make restitution to their victims should be allowed to decide who rules over them. I think they should have their right to self-defense restored as well, especially non-violent felons.
But what’s happening here is blatant electioneering and an in-kind contribution to the Biden campaign. It’s indicative of what happens when you invest too much power in the political process, the power corrupts everyone and incentivizes them to skirt the rules.
Given that the entire political, legal and monetary system is designed to roll wealth up to oligarchs like Bloomberg it seriously distorts their power to alter the course of elections at a fundamental level.
All libertarian critiques of why handing these people money, guns and laws is a truly terrible idea apply here.
The problem with money in politics is that there is money in politics.
And that won’t change until the systems themselves are decentralized and stripped of their power.
That’s what is so seductively dangerous about the whole “Defund the Police” movement, it is highlighting a real inequity in our society. Police and prosecutors have too much power and too much immunity from the consequences of their actions and the use of their power.
And I’m happy to have a real conversation about how to alter the path we’re on – End the Drug War, get rid of income taxes, tort reform, strengthen home rule of states, etc. But that’s not what Antifa and BLM are offering. It isn’t what the Democrats’ silent assent for their subhuman behavior will offer us if they return to power.
And as far as I can tell very few people here in the state of Florida disagree with me on this.
So, the last stand of American Marxists is on full display and they’ve brought not only their dirty money, like most of the money Bloomberg has made in his life, but now their racial Struggle Sessions to the streets of St. Petersburg.
Woke liberal absurdity has taken over St. Petersburg, FL & the mayor Rick Kriseman is to blame. His city defunded the police in July. @ GovRonDeSantis should suspend him immediately and restore the police department. BLM thugs harassing pic.twitter.com/Ixb5RGWvGz@rockpsychologst
— Watchman 🇺🇸 (@JohnD91394640) September 24, 2020
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And if anyone in that video had two operating brain cells to rub together to make a spark they’d realize this isn’t going to win them an election. And then the Soros/Brock bucks will vanish and they’ll just be more grist for the mill of oligarchs like Mini Mike.
They have gone all-in on this strategy. Men like George Soros have spent billions in support of this push for the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. They aren’t going to allow such a little thing like the passing of a supreme court justice at the wrong time deter them from their goal.
You don’t need to have a dog’s keen nose to smell the fear and desperation that clings to these people, however. It is palpable in their behavior, their rhetoric and their over-reaction to everything Trump does or might do.
And their act is tiresome.
The American people have fear porn fatigue. It’s showing up in the polls and its showing up in their hysterics.
Regardless of how the election turns out, there will be no rest from the violence unleashed and the violence yet to come when millions of Americans come to the uncomfortable conclusion that they will never hold power again in their lifetimes.
No matter how they try to buy our obedience in Florida. Because this is the Florida I know.
This Florida Sheriff is an Alpha Boss.
Give this Sheriff an award @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/BfMHXLwUqv
— Derek Utley (@realDerekUtley) September 23, 2020
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- Hedge Funds Flock To Florida As Wealthy Americans Seek Lower Taxes
Hedge Funds Flock To Florida As Wealthy Americans Seek Lower Taxes
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 22:20Carl Ichan isn’t the only mogul moving to Florida for tax reasons.
According to Bloomberg, a flood of hedge funds are planning to expand their presence in the Sunshine State, as wealthy residents from northern states contend with the threat of higher taxes.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. is reportedly considering opening a Florida office, as is Chicago-based Balyasny Asset Management, which has approximately $8 billion in AUM and plans to open an outpost in MIami, according to people familiar with the matter.
Adding to the list of firms which have already made the move is Bluecrest Capital Management, which just opened a Miami office for approximately 10 portfolio managers. Notably, Miami is offering companies up to $50,000 if they relocate downtown and employ at least 10 high-wage workers as part of their “Follow the Sun” campaign.
The moves to Florida, which has no state income tax, come as locales with the highest number of hedge funds weigh tax increases on the rich. Last week, New Jersey adopted a millionaires tax, and a ballot measure in Illinois calls for raising taxes on the wealthy. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has said such a tax could be possible if the U.S. government fails to step in with aid, and Connecticut’s legislature also has discussed a tax hike.
“Every firm like Elliott is in the process of evaluating choices in how and where they work, including working from home and opening additional offices, but Elliott has not made any decisions,” said Stephen Spruiell, a spokesman for the New York-based firm. –Bloomberg
According to Palm Beach Hedge Fund Association head David Goodboy, two or three hedge funds per week are asking him about making the move, vs. one or two per month during the normal times. 90% of them are from Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut – with popular destinations including Miami, Palm Beach and Boca Raton – the latter of which Verition Fund Management set up shop two years ago for a couple of portfolio managers.
In 2015, David Tepper moved from New Jersey to Miami, relocating Appaloosa Management there the following year.
As Bloomberg also notes, wealthy individuals have been drawn to Florida’s favorable tax laws for years – with the GOP-backed 2017 law capping deductions for state and local taxes on federal returns undoubtedly contributing to newcomers. Meanwhile, real estate in Miami and Palm Beach has been on fire – with sellers deluged by offers.
- Is Insurance More Expensive In Black Neighborhoods?
Is Insurance More Expensive In Black Neighborhoods?
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 22:00This post is from Goodcover, a Priceonomics Data Studio customer.
Amid the recent Black Lives Matter protests, much of society has been re-examining explicit and implicit sources of discrimination against Black people in America. What are the conscious and unconscious ways our society and economy harm Black citizens?
Housing and its associated cost has historically played a critical role in institutionalizing racism and segregation. Even insurance companies have historically discriminated against Black people through processes like redlining where they refused to write policies in certain neighborhoods, thus making housing more expensive or challenging to acquire.
As an insurance provider ourselves, we wanted to examine data to see how race impacts the price of insurance. We asked: is renters insurance more expensive if you live in a predominantly Black neighborhood than if you live in a predominantly white one?
We analyzed public data from the California Department of Insurance on how much companies charge for renters insurance in cities across the state. We also analyzed our own pricing for those locations.
We found the higher the percentage of Black people living in a zip code or city, the higher the price of insurance on average. Across the industry renters insurance annual premiums were about 20% higher in predominantly Black neighborhoods than predominantly white ones. While we did not find such a correlation in our own prices, we recognize there is a lot of work left to do.
The data and methodology
Before diving into the results, it’s worth spending a moment on methodology. The California Department of Insurance requires all insurance companies operating in the state to publicly file the rates they would charge for a set coverage level in a given area. We analyzed this public data using defined coverage limits ($100k liability, $30k personal property, $500 deductible) for the top 10 most popular companies in the state and analyzed how much they charged in different zip codes and cities for renters insurance. Using US census data, we’re able to calculate the percentage of the population in those areas that is Black, and see how that correlates with prices.
This analysis is focused on showing the difference in insurance prices for the same kind of housing that’s in a mostly Black neighborhood versus a mostly white one. Housing discrimination spans all races and ethnicities across our country, however for this research our primary focus is on Black communities in the state of California.
In this analysis we haven’t identified any causal factors; It’s meant more as a jumping off point for further analysis examining potential causal factors which can range from discriminatory practices based on the racial composition of a neighborhood (i.e. redlining), to other factors that impact pricing like proximity to a fire station.
This is a first analysis, meant to start a conversation about how racial inequities in finance and insurance. First, we must answer the question, is renters insurance more expensive if you live in a predominantly Black neighborhood?
Cost of renters insurance in California
To begin, let’s look at the average price of renters insurance in California and how much it varies according to the percentage of the population in a zip code that is Black. For context, in California 5.9% of the population is Black, and across the state the average renters insurance policy costs $183 per year.
Chart via Goodcover
As shown above, companies charge more for renters insurance in zip codes where there’s a higher percentage of Black residents. If your zip code has more than 20% Black population, the expected annual price for renters insurance would be $210, which is around 20% more expensive than in zip codes where less than one percent of the population is Black.
Next, let’s turn our attention to the average price of renters insurance across various cities in California and how it varies by the percentage of residents who are Black. The chart below ranks cities in California from most to least expensive annual policies and also shows the percentage of Black residents in that city. (One column represents the average price for the top 10 insurance providers, and next column are average Goodcover prices for those cities. Only cities with over 100k residents where the CA Department of Insurance publishes rates are included.)
Chart via Goodcover
Across California, renters insurance is most expensive in Berkeley, followed by Oakland and Los Angeles. Each of the top five cities with most expensive renters insurance policies in California have a substantially higher percentage of Black residents than the state average of 5.9%.
Is there any correlation between the percentage of Black residents in a city and companies charging more for renters insurance?
Let’s see, the following chart plots renters insurance prices versus percent of population that is Black from the same list of cities as above.
Chart via Goodcover
The above chart shows a 30%, statistically significant (p < 0.0001) correlation between higher prices for renters insurance and the percentage of Black residents living in the city. Virtually every city with a higher percentage of Black residents have insurance policies that cost more than the state average. And crucially, not just the average but also the minimum price among top California insurers is noticeably higher in every city with a higher than average percentage of Black residents.
Examining our own rates
Looking at the industry at a whole, we see a troubling correlation. Is Goodcover also more expensive in Black neighborhoods? To find out we looked at how Goodcover would rate for the same policy and location compared to the top 10 insurance companies in the state using the government pricing data. We found a far lower, statistically insignificant (p = 0.079) correlation as shown below.
Chart via Goodcover
Furthermore, doing the same population segment analysis as earlier, our average annual pricing was $91, $91, $94, $92, for zip codes with percentage of Black population of <1%, 1-5%, 5-20%, and 20%+ respectively – a different trend than the increase of price seen for the top 10 companies which resulted in a 20% higher price for areas with the largest Black population.
Chart via Goodcover
The data shows that the insurance industry charges renters in California more if they live in Black neighborhoods, but Goodcover doesn’t.
We don’t have a good explanation for why this is happening. To be clear, we don’t believe the insurance industry is intentionally raising prices on Black neighborhoods because they have a higher percentage of Black residents. There are many potential causal factors, which is one reason why racial discrimination in housing is such a systemic problem.
Our own pricing is based on statistical analysis that controls for factors that influence risks like fire, theft, water damage, liability (which together account for 85% of our price). This analysis shows that there should not be any real correlation between price and the percentage of Black residents in a neighborhood.
A partial explanation for the discrepancy could be that our rates were computed and filed with the State of California in 2019, so we were able to evaluate risk as we see it now, rather than inheriting old rating structures and any potential biases.
Continuing the conversation
In this analysis, we have shown that there’s a wide variation in how much renters insurance costs across California and that prices tend to be significantly higher in predominantly Black neighborhoods.
However we’ve also shown that from our own analysis of risk, which resulted in Goodcover’s rating, there is no readily evident reason why this correlation exists. Further study is warranted to understand why this is so.
At Goodcover, we believe it is our responsibility both as a company and as an industry to understand and address our systemic biases. This begins internally – Goodcover is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion in our hiring practices, service and pricing. And then there’s more to be done in our industry – we must further examine rating for bias, increase use of digital servicing to remove biases such as linguistic profiling, reduce or eliminate installment fees that penalize policyholders living paycheck to paycheck, and simply lower the cost of renters insurance to make it more accessible for the 56% of Californians who still don’t have it.
Eliminating pricing disparities because of the composition of a community is attainable, and the right thing to do. Our industry needs to keep vigilant in re-examining our processes so we banish discrimination from the ways we serve our policyholders and the public.
- Walmart Raises Pay – Only To Slash Hours, Bonuses
Walmart Raises Pay – Only To Slash Hours, Bonuses
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 21:40Walmart last year said it was overhauling its stores to make them operate smoother and create more opportunities for employees to “do meaningful work.” The “Great Workplace” initiative, described by the nation’s largest private employer, said it would be “the key to winning the future of retail.”
Walmart’s new initiative, which includes restructuring the leadership roles at its Supercenters and raising pay for some of its salaried and hourly employees, also eliminated their quarterly bonuses, and now appearing to reduce workers’ hours while increasing workloads despite promises of greater opportunity.
The Guardian spoke with employees who were promised “greater opportunity for associates to lead and take more ownership in the business,” but, they said, none of that came to pass. Instead, some saw their hours reduced, making it more difficult impossible to pay bills and feed their families.
Some staff said the retailer is accelerating internal restructuring plans as some workers have seen their hours “cut horrendously – making it very difficult” to survive on minimum wage.
Noted above, the plan, called the Great Workplace program, was rolled out in 2019 and promoted increased wages for those accepted into new management positions. About 11% of workers, or about 165,000 out of 1.5 million employees, are expected to receive pay increases. As for low-level employees, working on the floor, if that is restocking shelves, directing customers, or unloading delivery trucks, their minimum wage starts around $11 an hour and will remain unchanged.
The Guardian spoke with several former and current employees who confirmed “significant cuts to workers’ hours, pay cuts, and increased workloads.”
Kimberly Patrick Gray, a Walmart associate for four years in Tupelo, Mississippi, said her store saw a consolidation of “three departments into one and then expected all the associates from those areas to fight for hours.”
Gray said her schedule was reduced from around 35 hours a week on average to less than 20 hours this year, forcing her to quit because the reduction in hours made it “very difficult to pay bills.”
A department manager at a store in Arizona, who wanted to remain anonymous, said Walmart’s new restructuring plan slashed pay by at least $2.05 an hour if they were not chosen for a leadership position.
“Those that are not offered a lead position or turn down a team lead over will have till 29 January to find another position,” they said. “Only those department managers that get team lead positions will receive a pay raise. The rest of us will be cut in pay. If I’m lucky I will only lose $2.05 an hour. It is possible that I could lose much more.”
In Oklahoma, a customer service manager with three years at Walmart, said they would have to reapply for a different position if they’re rejected from a team lead position.
“My coworkers and I feel like we are being put against each other with this whole process because we feel like we have to fight for these positions,” they said.
A cashier at a store in California said the restructuring has resulted in extra workloads, including restocking and front end inventory, which would have been done by a manager.
“It’s more work for the same, or less money, unless you are one of the ones who roll into the new positions,” they said. “We are on a skeleton crew and there is zero time when there aren’t sales to ring.”
Former part-time employee Eric Anderson, who worked at a Walmart supercenter in Mulberry, Florida, quit in Oct. 2019 due to restructuring changes:
“The first inklings of trouble came when my produce manager, who had 20 years with Walmart, said he was going to have to reapply for his job. Same with several more longtime employees,” Anderson said.
He said departments were consolidated during the restructuring with no new hires, resulting in existing workers taking on more tasks.
“They all jumped through the hoops to reapply and none of them got to keep their jobs. Most were eligible for a severance for their years of service. At that point Walmart would not tell them when their last day would be, so they couldn’t apply for other jobs because they didn’t know when they could start,” he said. “When I saw how this company treated loyal long time employees, I decided I was done.”
Gary Stevens, a former maintenance supervisor at Walmart in Ticonderoga, New York, for nearly eight years, quit earlier this year as the Great Workplace program reduced his staff by 50%.
“Workloads increased and the management was pushing us to get more done than if I had a full staff. Not one of them knew how to do my job in stripping and waxing floors, but they would tell me how long it should take and yell at me and my crew if we ran behind the time they gave us,” Stevens said.
Walmart also announced the closure of 63 Sam’s Club locations in 2018, resulting in 10,000 layoffs. In 2019, the retailer fired greeter positions at about 1,000 of its retail locations. Corporate jobs have also been axed; last year, it closed a corporate center in Charlotte, North Carolina, laying off 570 workers and outsourcing it to a firm in Arkansas.
While virtue-signaling Walmart promised the world to its low-skill workers, and in some cases, greatly underdelivered, the company’s executives have spent billions of dollars in stock buybacks enriching themselves, shareholders, and fat cats on Wall Street.
- Iranian Drones Buzz US Aircraft Carrier; Helicopter With 'Russian PMCs' Crashes In Libya
Iranian Drones Buzz US Aircraft Carrier; Helicopter With ‘Russian PMCs’ Crashes In Libya
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 21:20Submitted by SouthFront,
A Libyan National Army (LNA) military helicopter that was transporting Russian private military contractors has crashed near al-Jufra Air Base in central Libya, Brig. Gen. Abdul Hadi Dara, a spokesman for the Sirte-Jufra Operations Room of the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA), claimed on September 23.
The helicopter, which was also carrying weapons, allegedly crashed near the town of Sawknah, to the southwest of al-Jufra. Several explosions were heard in the region. The GNA spokesman told Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency that at least four Russian PMCs lost their lives in the crash.
These claims were dismissed by the Libyan National Army (LNA), which reported that the helicopter touched the ground with the main rotor during an emergency landing. The aircraft caught fire and burned as a result of the incident. However, there were no casualties.
While a limited presence of Russia-linked PMCs in Libya is no secret, pro-GNA and pro-Turkish sources like to claim that almost every incident, crash or explosion involves the mysterious Russians and led to casualties among them. Likely, this approach is an attempt to compensate for the inability of the Turkish Armed Forces, GNA units and almost 10,000 Turkish-backed Syrian militants deployed in Libya to capture the port city of Sirte from the Libyan National Army. In fact, the mighty Turkish advance on LNA positions virtually ground to a halt after Turkish-led forces secured the countryside of Tripoli. The main reason for this being the red line drawn by Egypt, the main LNA backer along with the UAE, which warned that it will respond with direct military action if Sirte is attacked. At the same time, Russian participation in the ongoing standoff is mostly focused on distant diplomatic support to the UAE-Egypt block and diplomatic work with Turkey. Russian PMCs deployed in the conflict zone represent the interests of various Russian business groups rather than those of the state.
According to the US, there are 3,000 Russia-linked PMCs. Later, AFRICOM even claimed that Russia deployed 14 warplanes in Libya. These warplanes, the US military says, are based out of Al Jufra and Al Khadim airfields. They are allegedly operated by Russian contractors and have engaged in “combat activities”. Nonetheless, the Pentagon provided no evidence to support these claims.
On September 11, Rear Admiral Heidi Berg, AFRICOM’s director of intelligence, said that two Russia-deployed Mig-29 jets had already crashed: one on June 28, another on September 7. The statement came just a few days after an evacuation training video released by a Russian military blog was used by Turkish propaganda and MSM to claim that a Russian warplane had crashed in Libya. So, it looks as if the US military simply once again used sensational, unfounded reports to maintain an artificially created frightening image of Russia.
On September 23, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released several close-up photos of the US Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Nimitz and its escort ships in the Persian Gulf. The photos were taken by an IRGC military drone that buzzed the US carrier strike group recently. The USS Nimitz passed through the Strait of Hormuz into the Persian Gulf last week.
On the same day, 188 new naval drones and helicopters were officially added to the IRGC Navy’s fleet of aircraft. During the ceremony, three types of vertical take-off and landing drones, dubbed Sepehr, Shahab-2 and Hodhod-4, were unveiled for the first time. According to an IRGC Navy commander, all three drones can take off from ships. The batch of delivered equipment also included a number of Mohajer-6 combat drones. The Mohajer-6 has a range of 200 km and can be armed with up to four guided missiles.
Iran insists that it has a full spectrum of means and measures that it can employ against US naval forces and bases in the Persian Gulf region in the event of an open military confrontation. In their turn, the United States regularly deploys aircraft carriers in the gulf as a part of its own power projection policy. In April 2020, US President Donald Trump even stated that he had passed an order to “destroy any and all Iranian gunboats” if they harass US ships at sea. Taking into account that Iran sees the Persian Gulf as a vital area of national interest and cannot leave US strike groups there without close monitoring, the sides are balancing right on the brink of a new open confrontation.
- 20 Inmates And Accomplices Charged In COVID-19 Unemployment Fraud
20 Inmates And Accomplices Charged In COVID-19 Unemployment Fraud
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 21:00Pennsylvania officials charged 20 inmates and outside accomplices in a scheme to fraudulently bilk some $300,000 in COVID-19 unemployment benefits, according to ABC News.
The fraud ring operated across three state prisons, where inmates allegedly collected the personal information of other inmates and distributed them to their accomplices on the outside, who would then apply for pandemic relief funds in their names.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the arrests are linked to at least two existing rings of inmates who were busted in similar COVID-19 related fraud cases.
“After announcing our first round of arrests in these COVID unemployment scams, I promised that there were more to come,” said Shapiro. “Today, 20 more individuals have been charged with illegally taking benefits away from hardworking Pennsylvanians who are struggling during this crisis.”
The investigation will continue, according to Shapiro. “These arrests are not the end of our investigation, and I’ll continue working with my colleagues at the federal level to track down those heading these schemes, along with those who are willfully participating and breaking the law.”
The arrests were part of a broader operation, which included a roundup of arrests at state correctional facilities in Centre County, Correctional Institution Benner, and in Schuylkill County at the Mahanoy State Correctional Institution.
The Benner ring included two ringleaders — inmate James Neff Zonge and his girlfriend Adele Moore — as well as and eight additional inmates.
Moore, a resident of State College, Pennsylvania, and Zonge were accused of helping start the ring. Officials said Moore successfully applied for COVID-19 unemployment benefits on Zonge’s behalf and began doing the same for others. Zonge allegedly received about $3,000 from the inmates for his help in filing the claims.
Moore allegedly kept the majority of the money for her own personal use. She also received about $7,000 from inmates for filing the applications and from two of the inmate debit cards that she received for the inmates at her residence. Zonge, meanwhile, netted about $3,000 from inmates for his part in the scheme. –ABC News
The ringleader of the State Correctional Institution Mahanoy scheme was allegedly Wendy Danfora of York, PA, and her inmate boyfriend Markal Munford – who is accused of applying for COVID-19 unemployment benefits, also using inmate names. While Danfora gave a portion of the fraudulently obtained funds to the inmates whose names she used, she kept the majority of the $109,900 in benefits to herself.
- How Saudi Arabia Put OPEC's Future At Stake
How Saudi Arabia Put OPEC’s Future At Stake
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 20:40Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,
OPEC’s 60th birthday should have been reason for celebration, but its largest producer Saudi Arabia is increasingly putting its own interests before the cartel’s objectives and has put the very existence of OPEC at stake on a number of occasions.
Founded 60 years ago this month by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) originated from a solid base of sensible values centred upon providing a collective voice for oil producers that were being exploited by the ‘Seven Sisters’ group of international oil companies. Its stated mission was to:
“Co-ordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its member countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets, in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers, and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry.”
For nearly 55 years it was broadly able to achieve these aims, buoyed by its members accounting for around 40 per cent of the world’s crude oil output and about 60 per cent of the total petroleum traded internationally. In 2014, though, OPEC’s de facto leader, Saudi Arabia placed its own interests above those of its fellow OPEC members, since which time the Kingdom has betrayed the group on two more notable occasions and jeopardised its very existence.
Prior to 2014, OPEC had managed to turn the tables on the Seven Sisters group of major oil companies, comprising the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP) and Royal Dutch Shell (RDS), plus three iterations of Standard Oil (Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Standard Oil Company of New York), plus Gulf Oil, and Texaco. At one point, these seven companies controlled at least 85 per cent of the world’s petroleum reserves, having often paid the host countries a minimal percentage of the resulting sales profits in return.
This compensation model dated from the first major oil discovery (the Masjed Soleiman field) made by a modern foreign oil company (the Anglo-Persian Oil Company) operating in the Middle East (modern-day Iran). Iran’s 16 per cent share of the profits from its oil before 1951 (when the Iranian parliament voted to nationalise the British company due to its paltry payout) looked positively generous when compared to Standard Oil’s payment of US$275,000 in April 1933 (equivalent to around US$6 million in 2020) to Saudi Arabia to secure the exclusive rights to drill across the entire country. As a portent of the geopolitics of the global oil market to come, the then-Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was removed in 1953 by a military coup – ‘Operation Ajax’ – organised jointly between the U.K.’s Secret Intelligence Service and the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency after he had nationalised the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s local infrastructure assets, and renamed it the National Iranian Oil Company. After the formation of OPEC, though, the influence of the Seven Sisters began to markedly decline.
The real turning point for OPEC as an international commercial and geopolitical force came in October 1973 when OPEC members plus Egypt, Syria and Tunisia began an embargo on oil exports to the U.S., the U.K., Japan, Canada and the Netherlands in response to the U.S.’s ongoing supply of arms to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The spike in oil prices was exacerbated by incremental cuts to oil production by OPEC members over the period and, taken together, by the end of the embargo in March 1974, the price of oil had risen from around USD3 per barrel to nearly USD11 per barrel and then it trended higher again. This in turn stoked the fire of a global economic slowdown, especially felt in the West. In the process, the balance of power between the big developed market-consumers of oil and the big emerging market-producers of oil had shifted, as highlighted by the Saudi Minister of Oil and Mineral Reserves at the time, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani.
In 2014, though, at a series of high-profile meetings with bankers and fund managers in New York and London, various senior Saudi officials made it clear that, regardless of the economic and financial consequences to its fellow OPEC members, the Kingdom would instruct them to massively overproduce crude oil in order to crash oil prices in order to destroy the then-nascent U.S. shale oil sector. For the U.S., the instigation of this oil price war by the Saudis was an unforgivable betrayal of the trust in Saudi Arabia that had been implicit in the deal agreed in 1945 between the then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Saudi King at the time, Abdulaziz. This deal had been that the U.S. would guarantee the security both of the ruling House of Saud and, by extension, Saudi Arabia, in exchange for which the U.S. would receive all of the oil supplies it needed for as long as Saudi had oil in place. After some initial success – the U.S. oil rig count in January/February 2015 saw its biggest period-on-period fall since 1991 – the Saudis found by 2016 that all that they had done was help to shape a much more cost-efficient U.S. shale oil sector that could survive above US$35 per barrel of WTI, compared to pre-2014 estimates of a US$75+ per barrel. In the process, according to the IEA, OPEC member states had collectively lost at least US$450 billion in revenues.
By the time that the next oil price war rolled around earlier this year, instigated again by the Saudis with exactly the same strategy as the war of 2014-2016 (crude oil overproduction to crash oil prices) and exactly the same objective (to destroy or disable the U.S. shale oil sector) the U.S. was in no mood to – as one senior source close to the Presidential Administration told OilPrice.com at the time – “put up with any more crap from the Saudis.” In the run-up to the March 2020 oil price war, U.S. President Donald Trump had already repeatedly warned the Saudis that the U.S. would not accept any actions that would undermine either its economy or the continued development of its shale oil sector. At a 2018 speech before the U.N. General Assembly, he stated:
“OPEC and OPEC nations are, as usual, ripping off the rest of the world, and I don’t like it. Nobody should like it,” he said, and shortly afterwards he underlined at a rally in Southaven, Mississippi, in October 2018:
“I said, ‘King we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us.’”
Finally, on 2 April, after the Saudis had further destroyed the finances of its fellow OPEC members, Trump telephoned Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and directly told him that unless OPEC started cutting oil production he would be powerless to stop lawmakers from passing legislation to withdraw U.S. troops from the Kingdom.
Worse, though, is on the horizon for Saudi Arabia and OPEC. The U.S. has been so enraged by the Saudis trying to destroy its geopolitically and economically crucial shale oil sector yet again that any further moves by Saudi and OPEC to either push prices up over the US$80 per barrel of Brent level (regarded as economically harmful to the U.S.) or to below US$40 per barrel of Brent (seen as damaging for the U.S. shale oil sector) is highly likely to result in the passing of the ‘No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Bill’ (NOPEC). A version of the NOPEC bill managed to pass both houses of Congress in 2007 before it was shelved after President George W. Bush said he would veto the legislation. However, in February 2019, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee passed the NOPEC Act, which cleared the way for a vote on the Bill before the full House of Representatives. On the same day, Democrats Patrick Leahy and Amy Klobuchar and – most remarkably – two Republicans, Chuck Grassley and Mike Lee, introduced the NOPEC Bill to the Senate. It was only the intervention of Trump at that time that stopped the Bill being voted into law.
This Bill makes it illegal to artificially cap oil (and gas) production or to set prices, which is a corollary function of OPEC, and it removes the sovereign immunity that presently exists in U.S. courts for OPEC as a group and for its individual member states. This would leave Saudi Arabia open to being sued under existing U.S. anti-trust legislation, with its total liability being its estimated US$1 trillion of investments in the U.S. alone, and to all other OPEC member facing the same legal action. It would also mean the end of OPEC in any meaningful form.
- Seoul Outraged After North Korean Soldiers Shoot & Burn Body Of "Defector" At Sea
Seoul Outraged After North Korean Soldiers Shoot & Burn Body Of “Defector” At Sea
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 20:20In a bizarre and alarming deadly incident in waters off Korea, a South Korean fisheries official was shot and killed by North Korean soldiers after the official was apprehended at sea.
South Korea’s defense ministry has confirmed the killing while condemning the “outrageous act” despite the belief that the South Korean man was trying to defect to the north.
The official had reportedly disappeared from a boat close to the the western border island of Yeonpyeong, Yonhap news agency reports. He was reportedly set upon by a North Korean patrol vessel while wearing a life jacket. Seoul defense sources told AFP that “circumstances tell us that there was an intent to defect.”
North Korean boat patrol police file image, via Reuters. However, it’s clear the north considered the act deeply suspicious and likely considered he was a spy or attempting to infiltrate the border for nefarious purposes.
Shockingly, after his summary execution at sea his body was burned:
“North Korean soldiers shot dead a suspected South Korean defector after interrogating him at sea, then poured oil over his body and burned it over coronavirus fears, Seoul military officials said Thursday,” AFP reports.
“He was shot dead in the water,” a military official told AFP. “North Korean soldiers poured oil over his body and burnt it in the water.”
The report describes that the man was questioned by North Korean soldiers while he was still in the water, after which they opened fire. The burning of the body is believed related to strict anti-coronavirus measures enforced by North Korea’s military.
“We assess it was carried out under the North’s anti-coronavirus measure,” a military official in Seoul told AFP. And Yonhap said the presumed defector’s killing took place upon orders from higher-ups in Pyongyang.
“Atrocious act”: Lt. Gen. Ahn Young-ho of the South Korean military, via Yonhap/NY Times The north currently has “shoot to kill” orders in place in cases of illegal border breaches as part of its coronavirus lockdown.
The South’s defense ministry “confirmed from the analysis of various intelligence that the North shot our citizen found in its waters and cremated his body,” according to a statement.
Map locating Yeonpyeong Island near where a South Korean fisheries official was shot dead by North Korean forces in Pyongyang’s waters, according to Seoul’s defence ministry @AFPgraphics pic.twitter.com/yk2lMk57Ud
— AFP news agency (@AFP) September 24, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
South Korea’s defense ministry said the killing is a huge and unnecessary provocation. “We sternly warn North Korea that all responsibilities for this incident lie with it,” it said.
The episode underscores that the two sides are still in an active state of war, and that even “defectors” from either side run the risk of being killed on the spot upon breaching the militarized border.
- Civilization Requires Collective Common Sense
Civilization Requires Collective Common Sense
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 20:00Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via PJMedia.com,
Without common sense in government, civilization cannot continue…
After the summer protests and rioting in many large cities, activists demanded a defunding, or at least radical pullbacks, of the police. So-called crime experts often concurred. So some city governments ignored public warnings and diminished their police presence despite a sharp rise in crime in many cities. Looting and arson were often ignored.
If you call 911 in a large American city, there is no guarantee that anyone will answer promptly and send out police to aid the endangered. So gun sales have soared. Some people who never before owned weapons, or even opposed the use of firearms, are now terrified to remain unarmed. Self-protection often outweighs abstract ideology.
According to a recent Gallup poll, most Black Americans favor maintaining or increasing police presence. Often, city officials who support cutting back on law enforcement still expect their own homes and property to be constantly policed. The same is often true of activist elites who live far from the inner city.
Large swaths of the American West are now charred by out-of-control wildfires. Some governors and many federal bureaucrats blame the conflagrations on climate change. But those who actually live within forests, or on mountains and foothills, that are historically vulnerable to wildfires know that the epic droughts of 2013-2015 killed or dried out millions of acres of trees and vegetation.
Yet most of these decaying trees were never removed by authorities. They now predictably provide the fuel for the current wildfire Armageddon.
A few veteran forest managers have been proverbial voices in the wilderness in recent years. They warned that ignoring dead trees, limiting the sort of domestic animal grazing that reduces dead brush and dry foliage, forbidding timber companies from harvesting decaying timber, and preventing periodic controlled burns were collectively a prescription for the very disasters that now cloud Western skies with fires, smoke, and air pollution.
In other words, pragmatic people once understood that tens of millions of dead trees were not to be left alone as mulch for premodern ecosystems. In the present, the dried-up vegetation has served as veritable napalm, causing traditional fall wildfires to blow up into biblical conflagrations that consume homes, property, and people.
The public trust in science depends on its consistency, its transparency, and its divorce from politics and ideology. There can be no left or right, liberal or conservative, blue-state or red-state slant if scientific expertise is to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the very opposite has sometimes occurred.
The World Health Organization initially swore that the virus was not transmissible by humans, did not warrant travel bans or mask-wearing, and was not a significant global threat. The organization’s Chinese patrons had given WHO an unscientific party line. And its director then branded the propaganda with superficial scientific authority.
American experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health agencies were often inconsistent on travel bans, testing, masks, quarantines, and medical therapies, and intolerant of dissident medical research. Authorities rarely could consistently explain to the public how the virus was spread; why children, who were rarely stricken, were kept from attending school; and whether quarantines were aimed at flattening the curve of infection, eliminating it altogether or just waiting out the virus.
The elderly were rightly deemed the most vulnerable. But then, inexplicably, they were often exposed to newly arriving infected patients in their long-term care facilities.
When millions of people hit the streets to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, many health care professionals ignored the supposedly dangerous mass meetings that they had earlier insisted were major public health threats.
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More than 1,000 health professionals, sympathetic to protests, even signed an open letter declaring that social activism was, for the moment, more important than social distancing.
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When supporters of President Donald Trump then went to open-air rallies, many medical experts suddenly called these assemblies dangerous to public health.
In truth, either both or neither types of public outings are dangerous.
For six months, experts have given the American public contradictory and weaponized election-year directives on masks, social distancing, lockdowns, school closures, and workplace policies.
All of these matters of public health reveal the disasters that follow when common sense is ignored and ideology reigns.
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Most Americans know that only the police can protect the vulnerable in times of social chaos.
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Most people instinctively sense that when vast swaths of dead trees are not removed from dense forests, they will eventually serve as kindling for raging firestorms.
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And when scientific expertise offers ever-changing, inconsistent, and occasionally absurd public health advice, then people turn to their own instincts and innate common sense to protect themselves and their livelihoods.
Experts, not common-sense citizens, have been failing America.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.
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- Iranian Tanker Loads Venezuelan Crude For Sale Abroad As US Threatens Seizure
Iranian Tanker Loads Venezuelan Crude For Sale Abroad As US Threatens Seizure
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 19:40Last month US authorities seized the Iranian fuel aboard four tankers en route to Venezuela and diverted them to Houston over alleged sanctions-busting operations between the two countries.
Despite this incident and further threats by Washington to disrupt the growing bilateral trade between the “rogue states” – in US parlance anyway, Reuters has cited an internal company source and documents to allege state-run PDVSA is preparing a sale of 2 million barrels of heavy Venezuelan crude to Iran. Likely it will be sold somewhere in Asia.
Iran tanker file The sale is said to have been agreed to by the Venezuela’s PDVSA and the state-owned Iranian National Oil Company.
Reuters reports that “The Iranian-flagged very large crude carrier (VLCC) arrived in Venezuela’s main oil port of Jose this month carrying 2.1 million barrels of Iranian condensate to be used as diluent for Venezuela’s extra heavy oil production, according to company documents.” And it plans to now ship the Venezuelan product abroad in defiance of US sanctions.
The Iranian tanker is allegedly trying to conceal its operations:
The tanker, owned and managed by National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), made the whole trip from the Middle East to PDVSA’s port with its transponder off and has remained offline while in Venezuelan waters, according to Refinitiv Eikon’s tracking data.
It’s as yet unknown when it plans to sail, but the US has threatened to conduct further oil and fuel seizure operations on the high seas, like what happened previously in August.
No doubt the Iranian tanker is “going dark” under threat from US authorities or its allies. What’s more is that another few tankers are currently inbound with badly needed gasoline for Maduro’s Venezuela.
Reuters records that “Three Iranian tankers – the Fortune, Faxon and Forest – are also crossing the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Venezuela, according to the Eikon data, carrying gasoline to help ease an acute scarcity that has kept Venezuelans lining up in front of gas stations waiting for fuel.”
- "Confirmed" Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting
“Confirmed” Has Become A Meaningless Word In Mainstream News Reporting
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 19:20Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
Last week Politico published a major exclusive report that the “Iranian government is weighing an assassination attempt against the American ambassador to South Africa” in retaliation for the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani earlier this year, citing (you guessed it) anonymous government officials.
The claim was nonsensical on its face; the idea that Iran would see the assassination of some random ambassador to an irrelevant country as a proportionate response to the killing of its wildly beloved top military commander would only make sense to someone with a very US-centric worldview who knows nothing about Iran. On top of that, the South African government published a statement that “the information provided is not sufficient to sustain the allegation that there is a credible threat against the United States Ambassador to South Africa”.
The flimsy nature of this allegation was of course not enough to prevent bombastic Twitter threats from America’s manchild-in-chief that this nonexistent assassination plot “will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!” if carried out.
…caused over so many years. Any attack by Iran, in any form, against the United States will be met with an attack on Iran that will be 1,000 times greater in magnitude!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2020
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It also wasn’t enough to prevent the Politico article’s co-author, Natasha Bertrand, from falsely claiming that The New York Times had “confirmed” her reporting.
“The NYT has confirmed Nahal Toosi and my reporting about Iran,” Bertrand tweeted today with a link to a new Times article, quoting the excerpt “Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack…Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.”
The New York Times has in fact not confirmed Bertrand and Toosi’s reporting, and Bertrand omits a very significant portion of text from her excerpt. Here is the quote in full, bold mine:
Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Mr. Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack, according to national security officials. But some briefed on the intelligence said Iran has not decided to directly target any American official, and other current and former officials accused the Trump administration of overstating the threat. Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.
Awful lot of important information hiding in that ellipsis of yours, Ms Bertrand.
The NYT has confirmed @nahaltoosi and my reporting about Iran.
“Lana Marks, the American ambassador to South Africa and a political supporter of Trump, was a potential target of an Iranian attack…Politico earlier reported that Ms. Marks was a target.” https://t.co/VMqqgOpypr
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) September 20, 2020
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So NYT had in fact merely spoken to unnamed officials (probably some of the same ones) and found there to be misgivings about the claim Bertrand had promoted, and then Bertrand deceptively omitted text which contradicted the claim she was making that her report had been “confirmed”.
It should surprise no one that Bertrand would abuse the trust of her followers in such a phenomenally sleazy way. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explained after the Politico report was discredited by the South African government, Bertrand “built her career on hyping the Steele Dossier, a now-discredited document that made unverified claims about the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016.”
But Bertrand’s slimy manipulation is also to be expected because she knows she can get away with it. The word “confirmed” has been misused and abused to such a spectacular extent in mainstream news reporting of late that it doesn’t actually mean anything anymore when they say it.
When a news reporter announces that they have independently confirmed another outlet’s reporting, the reader imagines that they have done actual investigative journalism, traveled to the places about which the claims are being made, done deep digging and looked at the evidence with their own two eyes and found that the claim is true. In practice, all it often means is that they spoke to the same sources the other reporter spoke to and are in fact just confirming that the source did indeed make a given assertion. The reader assumes they’re confirming the source’s claim is true, but all they’re actually confirming is that the first reporter didn’t just make up the claim they’re uncritically parroting.
Take when the anonymously sourced story about Russia paying bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for killing occupying coalition forces was first reported by The New York Times. We now know this story was completely baseless, but when it first broke there were a bunch of mass media reporters buzzing around claiming to have “confirmed” one another’s stories on the matter.
The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting.https://t.co/PUeCrLKoQPhttps://t.co/1pYjztUkfo
— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) June 27, 2020
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“The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” the NYT story’s co-author Charlie Savage tweeted after the story broke.
“We have confirmed the New York Times’ scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” tweeted The Washington Post‘s John Hudson.
“We matched The New York Times’ great reporting on how US intel has assessed that Russians paid Taliban to target US, coalition forces in Afg which is a pretty stunning development,” tweeted Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold.
All three of these men were lying.
John Hudson’s claim that the Washington Post article he co-authored “confirmed the New York Times’ scoop” twice used the words “if confirmed” with regard to his central claim, saying “Russian involvement in operations targeting Americans, if confirmed,” and “The attempt to stoke violence against Americans, if confirmed“. This is of course an acknowledgement that these things had not, in fact, been confirmed.
The Wall Street Journal article co-authored by Gordon Lubold cited only anonymous “people”, who we have no reason to believe are different people than NYT’s sources, repeating the same unsubstantiated assertions about an intelligence report. The article cited no evidence that Lubold’s “stunning development” actually occurred beyond “people familiar with the report said” and “a person familiar with it said“.
The fact that both Hudson and Lubold were lying about having confirmed the New York Times‘ reporting means that Savage was also lying when he said they did. When they said the report has been “confirmed”, what they really meant was that it had been agreed upon. All the three of them actually did was use their profoundly influential outlets to uncritically parrot something nameless spooks wanted the public to believe, which is the same as just publishing a CIA press release free of charge. It is unprincipled stenography for opaque and unaccountable intelligence agencies, and it is odious.
Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using “Confirmed” to Mean its Oppositehttps://t.co/e0u0NE6fNG
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 5, 2020
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Earlier this month The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald published an article titled “Journalism’s New Propaganda Tool: Using ‘Confirmed’ to Mean Its Opposite”, about an anonymously sourced claim by The Atlantic that Trump had said disparaging things about US troops. An excerpt:
Other media outlets — including Associated Press and Fox News — now claim that they did exactly that: “confirmed” the Atlantic story. But if one looks at what they actually did, at what this “confirmation” consists of, it is the opposite of what that word would mean, or should mean, in any minimally responsible sense. AP, for instance, merely claims that “a senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press,” while Fox merely said “a former senior Trump administration official who was in France traveling with the president in November 2018 did confirm other details surrounding that trip.”
Greenwald also documents how in 2017 CNN falsely reported that Donald Trump Jr had received an encryption key to WikiLeaks which let him preview the 2016 DNC leaks ten days before they were published, which we shortly thereafter learned was actually due to nobody involved in the story bothering to read the date on the email correctly. The whole entire story, in reality, was that Trump had merely received an email about an already published WikiLeaks drop.
Greenwald writes the following:
Very shortly after CNN unveiled its false story, MSNBC’s intelligence community spokesman Ken Dilanian went on air and breathlessly announced that he had obtained independent confirmation that the CNN story was true. In a video segment I cannot recommend highly enough, Dilanian was introduced by an incredibly excited Hallie Jackson — who urged Dilanian to “tell us what we’ve just now learned,” adding, “I know you and some of our colleagues have confirmed some of this information: What’s up?” Dilanian then proceeded to explain what he had learned:
“That’s right, Hallie. Two sources with direct knowledge of this are telling us that congressional investigators have obtained an email from a man named ‘Mike Erickson’ — obviously they don’t know if that’s his real name — offering Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr. access to WikiLeaks documents. … It goes to the heart of the collusion question. … One of the big questions is: Did [Trump Jr.] call the FBI?”
How could that happen? How could MSNBC purport to confirm a false story from CNN? Shortly after, CBS News also purported to have “confirmed” the same false story: that Trump Jr. received advanced access to the WikiLeaks documents. It’s one thing for a news outlet to make a mistake in reporting by, for instance, misreporting the date of an email and thus getting the story completely wrong. But how is it possible that multiple other outlets could “confirm” the same false report?
That’s three mainstream outlets — CNN, MSNBC, and CBS, all claiming to have independently “confirmed” a story that would have been recognized as false if even one person in any of those outlets had done the tiniest bare minimum of independent investigation into the claim that its source was making, namely looking with their eyeballs at the actual information they were being presented with.
They didn’t, because that’s the state of the mass media today. That is its culture. That, in answer to Greenwald’s question above, is how this could happen: the western mass media are nothing but a bunch of lackeys mindlessly regurgitating incendiary narratives by those in power in their rapacious search for ratings.
.@natashabertrand claims NYT has “confirmed” her “reporting” on an Iranian plot by distorting what NYT actually says.
She omits “national security officials”, who are just repeating to NYT what they told her. And she omits rest of graf, in which other officials doubt the story! pic.twitter.com/ys89nW9AMh
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) September 20, 2020
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Natasha Bertrand is acutely aware of this, which is why she feels comfortable falsely telling the world that her absurd reporting has been “confirmed”.
So now you know. Whenever you see the mass media saying an important claim has been “confirmed”, just ignore them. They have no respect for that word, and it has lost all meaning among their ranks. The western media class does not exist to tell you the truth about the world, it exists to distort your understanding of the world for the advantage of the powerful.
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- "I Was Never An 'Evil Monster' Until You Decided That I Was…"
“I Was Never An ‘Evil Monster’ Until You Decided That I Was…”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/24/2020 – 19:00“I was never an evil monster until you decided that I was…
I never cared if you were ‘gay‘ until you started shoving it in my face, and the faces of my children.
I never cared what color you were, until you started blaming my race for your problems.
I never cared about your political affiliation until you started to condemn me for mine.
I never cared where you were born until you wanted to erase my history and blame my ancestors for your current problems.
I never cared if you were well-off or poor, until you said you were discriminated against, when I was promoted because I worked harder.
I never cared if your beliefs were different from mine, until you said my beliefs were wrong.
NOW I CARE!
My patience and tolerance are gone.
I’m not alone in feeling this way, there are millions of us who do and we have had enough!”
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