- Evil Walks Among Us: Child Trafficking Has Become Big Business In America
Evil Walks Among Us: Child Trafficking Has Become Big Business In America
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”
– John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
It takes a special kind of evil to prostitute and traffick a child for sex, and yet this evil walks among us every minute of every day.
Consider this: every two minutes, a child is bought and sold for sex.
Hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex, as many as 20 times per day.
Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States alone.
In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.
On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.
It is estimated that at least 100,000 to 500,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.
Child rape has become Big Business in America.
This is not a problem found only in big cities.
It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.
As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”
Like so many of the evils in our midst, sex trafficking (and the sexualization of young people) is a cultural disease that is rooted in the American police state’s heart of darkness. It speaks to a sordid, far-reaching corruption that stretches from the highest seats of power (governmental and corporate) down to the most hidden corners and relies on our silence and our complicity to turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
It is estimated that the number of children who are at risk of being trafficked or have already been sold into the sex trade would fill 1300 school buses.
The internet has become the primary means of sexual predators targeting and selling young children for sex. “One in five kids online are sexually propositioned through gaming platforms and other social media. And those, non-contact oriented forums of sexual exploitation are increasing,” said researcher Brian Ulicny.
It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable, either.
According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”
Every year, the ages of the girls and boys being bought and sold get younger and younger.
The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.”
“They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking.
“They’re little girls.”
This is America’s dirty little secret.
But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? Who buys a child for sex?
Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.
According to criminal investigator Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers”—the so-called “ordinary” men who drive the demand for sex with children—represent a cross-section of American society: every age, every race, every socio-economic background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, etc.
America’s police forces—riddled with corruption, brutality, sexual misconduct and drug abuse—represent another facet of the problem: police have become both predators and pimps. As the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “Hundreds of police officers across the country have turned from protectors to predators, using the power of their badge to extort sex.”
Young girls are particularly vulnerable to these predators in blue.
Former police officer Phil Stinson estimates that half of the victims of police sex crimes are minors under the age of eighteen. According to The Washington Post, a national study found that 40 percent of reported cases of police sexual misconduct involved teens.
For example, in California, a police sergeant—a 16-year veteran of the police force—was arrested for raping a 16-year-old girl who was being held captive and sold for sex in a home in an upscale neighborhood.
A Pennsylvania police chief and his friend were arrested for allegedly raping a young girl hundreds of times—orally, vaginally, and anally several times a week—over the course of seven years, starting when she was 4 years old.
Two NYPD cops were accused of arresting a teenager, handcuffing her, and driving her in an unmarked van to a nearby parking lot, where they raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on them, then dropped her off on a nearby street corner.
The New York Times reports that “a sheriff’s deputy in San Antonio was charged with sexually assaulting the 4-year-old daughter of an undocumented Guatemalan woman and threatening to have her deported if she reported the abuse.”
And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Whether or not the Super Bowl is a “windfall” for sex traffickers as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to rape young children.
Finally, as I documented in an earlier column, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.
Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.
Rarely do these children enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).
For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.
Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.
A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men.
As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”
One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.
This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.
Unfortunately, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the government’s war on sex trafficking, much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime, has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public while doing little to actually protect our children from sex predators.
That so many children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 23:40 - Yuma Arizona 'On The Brink Of Collapse' Due To 'Unprecedented' Migrant Surge
Yuma Arizona ‘On The Brink Of Collapse’ Due To ‘Unprecedented’ Migrant Surge
The border city of Yuma, Arizona is on the ‘brink of collapse’ as a flood of migrants have overloaded hospitals and food banks.
According to officials, some 5 million migrants have crossed into the US since President Biden took office in January 2021.
As a result, Yuma County’s Border Patrol has seen a rise in migrant crossings of 171%. According to County Supervisor Jonathan Lines, the county will ‘crumble’ if it can’t support the flow of migrants. Lines says that the situation will only get worse, according to the Fox News.
Yuma County Supervisor Jonathan Lines (pictured at the county’s border) slammed the Biden administration for its handing of the border crisis In a statement to Fox News, Lines said that “Policies need to be changed when you see an unprecedented amount of people coming across the border that even supersedes what we saw under any of the other presidents for the past 30 years,” adding that the surge in crossings is “ridiculous.”
“They’re coming because they said that Biden told them to come, that we have an open border.”
Graphic via the Daily Mail According to fifth-generation Yuma resident and farmer, Hank Auza, “The problem that we’re foreseeing right now is there’s a couple of big waves coming,” adding “Yuma can’t support that. It will overwhelm the system here.“
El Paso, Texas, another border town, declared a state of emergency as thousands of migrants camped in the streets during below-freezing temperatures in December. Many migrant shelters were over capacity, leading the city to use the local airport for temporary refuge.
Lines, Auza and another Yuma farmer, Alex Muller, had shared concerns, starting with the fear around food security, since agricultural production makes up a large part of the town’s economy.
“Our fields are monitored and audited and tested for different pathogens,” Muller, said. “You can’t have people walking through the field.”
Auza said Yuma’s fields, which produce 93% of the nation’s leafy greens in the winter months, have faced a fair amount of migrant traffic, risking damage to their crops due to foodborne illness concerns. He also said many residents can’t get into the city’s only hospital. -Fox News
“People have had a hard time getting into the hospital because the hospital has been so full of” migrants, said Auza.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 23:20 - How Equifax Became A Private IRS
How Equifax Became A Private IRS
Authored by Matt Stoller via BIG (emphasis ours),
The movie The Big Short is about the housing crisis and its collapse, along with all the fraudulent activity up and down the financial system that abetted it. It is as much a cultural story as it is one about finance, a film about what banking corruption does to human beings and the law itself. In it, there’s a famous scene where fund investors betting on a housing collapse are trying to learn about the Florida housing market, and are interviewing some frat-boy type Florida real estate agents. The agents keep discussing their self-serving and illegal behavior, like falsifying paperwork or selling to people who knowingly can’t pay back loans. At a certain point, the main character asks his colleagues, ‘why are they confessing?’ to which the others respond, “they’re not confessing, they’re bragging.”
The point of this scene is to show that people in the industry during the housing bubble weren’t just breaking the law, but saw the law itself as irrelevant. Enforcement was so weak that those in finance and real estate would just openly brag about all the crime they were doing.
It was a true story. And it continues to be a true story in most white collar areas.
Late last year, the CEO of Equifax Mark Begor presented at a Goldman Sachs conference for investors, and openly told the investors how much market power his firm has in the business of selling income verification services to creditors. “We have meaningful pricing power,” he said, because “only Equifax has that income and employment data.” Equifax aggressively raises prices on the Work Number product line annually, and has, according to Begor, “already got our January 1, 2023 price increases in the market.” Long term, he says, “we have an ability to grow price well in excess of GDP.” This is fairly shocking stuff from a CEO, who should know better than to confess to monopolization. Only, it seems as if Begor wasn’t confessing, he was bragging.
Here’s the audio.
Still, why wouldn’t Begor brag to investors? Equifax’s controversial behavior is near-legendary. The firm is an important credit bureau, and credit data is exactly what we wouldn’t want to fall into the hands of hackers, who could then easily use it to engage in identity theft, en masse. But in 2017, Equifax had a massive scandal, one of the biggest data breaches in history, when it accidentally exposed the personal data of 147 million people. The Federal Trade Commission fined the company more than $575 million, and the CEO, CIO, and chief security officer were all forced out.
Yet the firm didn’t suffer any long-term reputation damage. And in all the hoopla around the scandal, there really wasn’t a lot of discussion about why that is, and how Equifax actually makes money. So looking at Begor’s braggadocio around the firm’s market power is useful. The product Begor told investors about at the Goldman Sachs confab is called The Work Number, which is a business line that bundles data about the incomes of hundreds of millions of people and sells it to interested parties, like lenders, landlords, employers, and government agencies. Payroll and data is by some estimates a $10 billion market, and now brings in a majority of the firm’s domestic revenue.
Equifax used to be a firm, which, along with Experian and TransUnion, focused on keeps tabs on all of us and whether we pay our debts. But over the last four years, it has transformed itself into a sort of tax information agency, which sells information about our salary and income to third parties. It’s a better business than just credit data, because while three firms have information about whether you pay back your credit card company, only Equifax has complete information about where you work. And a monopoly, as Begor bragged, is better than an oligopoly.
The Work Number
First let’s start with why this business exists. Sharing information about where you work and what you make is something we all need to do on occasion. If a bank or auto dealer wants to lend someone money to buy a home or car, they need a verification that the person works where he says he works and makes the income he says he makes. Sometimes a potential employer or landlord needs to check work history, or a public agency needs to ensure someone qualifies for government assistance, or they have to update immigration status.
How do third parties verify this information? Employers don’t like it when their HR departments are getting constant requests from lenders about their employees and what they make. And getting this information from the IRS is illegal (or least has been since progressives in the 1920s temporarily had tax returns made public.) So for decades, employers have been sending data on this to brokers, who sell the records to interested parties. Today, the biggest and in some ways only meaningful broker in this space is Equifax. If you are trying to find out someone’s work history and income, it’s pretty likely Equifax has it, and it’s unlikely anyone else does. (Experian is the second player in the market, but they just started their product line in 2021, and as I’ll explain, they are far behind.) And we’re not just talking about the data the IRS has, we’re talking about data on pay for every payroll cycle, your overtime amount, the start and end date for your job, your title, your health care provider, whether you have dental insurance, and if you’ve ever filed an unemployment claim.
There are network effects in this business; the more data Equifax gets from employers, the more likely it is to be the place lenders and government agencies seek to do income verification. In addition, having lots of data about workers also allows Equifax to build services for firms, such as managing unemployment compensation. When a firm lays off a worker, that worker is supposed to have rights to unemployment compensation, which the firm has to pay for. But if that employee was fired for cause, or quit, then that worker isn’t entitled to unemployment payments, and the firm is off the hook. There are lots of grey areas here, it’s a quasi-legal setup between the state, the business, and the employee. Managing this process, along with appeals, is also something Equifax does, as it’s a natural extension of its data business.
Because of this extensive warehouse of data and set of services, firms and agencies then integrate themselves into the Work Number. So one could argue this business has natural barriers to entry. But the story here isn’t just one of scale efficiencies. The Work Number is a legacy business, started decades ago. With the internet, however, there’s no technical reason for a centralized repository of employment and verification data, or at least not the way it’s set up today. It’s quite possible to set up a system allowing any verifier to ask the individual for his or her records. But that would cut against Equifax’s business model, which involves not only taking your data without you knowing about it and selling it, but also, crucially, preventing any other third party from innovating to build a more privacy-safe version of the same service.
Indeed, the story here is monopolization. Fifteen years ago, Equifax had already run into the Federal Trade commission, not for privacy violations, but for antitrust violations. Only, because its income verification business was a sideshow to its main credit reporting revenue line, people didn’t really notice. Today, however, Equifax is now a monopoly income verifier with a side credit information business.
The original Work Number product came from a company called TALX Corporation, which was founded in the 1970s and that Equifax bought in 2007. From 2002-2005, TALX had bought up seven rivals, consolidating the verification of income and employment business. Immediately after this acquisition spree, TALX raised prices and forced customers to move from buying annually to signing long-term multi-year contracts. Additionally, TALX had non-competes and non-solicitation agreements with its employees, which further locked up the market.
In 2008, the Bush administration FTC sued Equifax over acquisitions and unfair methods of competition. It was a creative complaint, with the Chair of the commission – Bill Kovacic – looking skeptically at a series of small acquisitions, instead of one big one. But the FTC didn’t seek to undo any of the mergers. Instead, it signed a consent decree forcing TALX, now Equifax, to let customers out of long-term contracts and employees out of non-compete agreements. These consent decree obligations ended in 2017. Ultimately, this FTC action, because it didn’t require a break-up, didn’t restore competition in the market, allowing Equifax to fortify its monopoly. Equifax’s TALX subsidiary was even caught for violating of the Fair Credit Reporting Act just two years later. And the company is still a merger machine, purchasing small and large firms nearly every year. For instance, just in 2021, it made $3 billion in acquisitions, buying HIREtech and i2Verify.
After the consent decree ended, the exclusive arrangements came back. ADP, Intuit, Paycor, PrismHR, Rippling, and many other providers of outsourced payroll services have deals with Equifax to turn over or sell records. So do large companies. In 2017, Joel Winston at Fast Company reported that “75% of the Fortune 500 companies, 85% of the federal government workforce, entire state governments and agencies, courts, colleges, and thousands of small businesses nationwide” handed over data. Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Google, Wal-Mart, Twitter, AT&T, Harvard Law School, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania do too. The number of entities handing over this data has only gone up since then.
And Equifax pays many of these entities for their employee data, turning human resources into a revenue generator. Of course, the employees don’t know their own data is being sold by their employer, and even small businesses who use payroll services like ADP don’t realize their data is being sold. (Small businesses can opt-out, but they have to tell their payroll provider.)
The net effect of these arrangements is that smaller players in the market, such as ExperianVerify, Truework, Thomas & Company, and Certree, simply cannot get the data that Equifax has. They are boxed out. If you are doing income verification, and you put someone’s Social Security number into Equifax, you have a 50-70% chance of getting a successful conversion. For other brokers, it’s much lower. There isn’t so much a market for employer/income verification information, there’s a market for information about each specific person. To a lender, it doesn’t matter if a rival to Equifax has information on 30% of the country, it matters if that rival has information on the individual to whom they are considering loaning money. If they don’t, you have to use Equifax.
On the other side, Equifax has also erected barriers to entry. If you are a frequent buyer of income and employment data, Equifax sometimes offers a loyalty discount if you move all your business to the Work Number. One background check provider, SwiftCheck, explained Equifax offered that “if our organization performs The Work Number Verification on every employment verification, a discount is offered.” This is a classic loyalty discount, what looks like an unlawful mechanism to exclude competitors.
So that’s how Equifax establishes its market power, by blocking rivals from getting data and by locking in customers of that data. And we can see this market power at work in the pricing, as their CEO noted in December. Equifax has been raising prices substantially for years. How much? Well like an airline or any firm with market power, Equifax doesn’t just have one price. It can engage in price discrimination depending on the willingness to pay. But the price hikes that are public, are extreme. In 2017, the price for a record was $20, in 2020 it was $41.95. Today, it lists its price as $54.95 for a record of where you currently work, and potentially up to $200 for records with more historical information. And it’ll keep going up.
The Real Cost: Equifax as Private Government
Consumers pay for this cost in ways they don’t see. When you get a loan or rent an apartment, the lender or landlord has to pay Equifax’s toll, and will include that extra cost in the price of your loan or rent. But more than just higher prices, Equifax’s database is powerful. The Work Number can, according to the government, help determine “an applicant’s social service eligibility” or “inform child support collections and enforcement.”
There are often errors, and getting your own data from Equifax can be difficult if not maddening. Just read this thread of frustrated consumers trying to do so, and often encountering mistakes in the process. And as we know, Equifax is prone to hacking. People don’t know that their employment data is being sold to Equifax, and they tend to be upset when they find out. Google workers were outraged about it, which is ironic. It’s also prone to abuse; Apple told the Work Number that every worker who left was automatically given the title “associate,” regardless of whether they were a top engineer. According to one former Apple worker, this error “delayed the hiring process at a prospective employer by nearly a week, during which time the company rescinded the offer.” I don’t tend to focus on privacy, but though Equifax claims there are controls on who can buy this information, security researcher Brian Krebs noted in 2017, that it’s easy for pretty much anyone to learn your salary. These flaws are all quality harms, standard for any monopolist who isn’t subject to competition.
The Work Number is so important that Equifax is engaged in the work that should be reserved to a government. Generally speaking, people would get really upset if the IRS shared our tax information for a fee. Effectively, Equifax is doing that, because for most people, employment and income is our tax information. But since it’s a private monopoly, the anti-government types don’t notice or care. At the height of the Great Recession in 2010, Equifax’s TALX division was processing 30% of the unemployment claims in the country. Though originally intended to automate the process, what Equifax ended up doing was automating the refusal to pay out unemployment claims. It systemically denied applications regardless of merit so its clients – employers – would have to pay less in unemployment taxes. And this goal is on the firm’s investment documents, which uses the anodyne wording of “reduce the cost of unemployment claims through effective claims representation” to describe the service it provides to employers who give it data.
It’s perhaps no exaggeration to note that Equifax is a quasi-governmental agency, a monopoly provider of evidence that you work, where you work, and what you make. If there’s an error, or if someone lies about you, too bad. If Equifax itself is paid to harm you, too bad. If a government agency gets the wrong data and denies you assistance or screws up your immigration status, that’s on you, well, you have limited to no rights in this situation. In some ways, you might have more to fear from Equifax than the IRS.
It Need Not Be This Way
As is always the case, most things created by people can be unmade by people. And so too with Equifax. I learned about the Work Number from a contact on Wall Street who pays attention to monopolies. He told me the Work Number is one of the purest examples of market power he’s seen, which of course, the CEO of Equifax helpfully confirmed in public. I’ve also talked to a number of people in the industry trying to compete in the payroll data space. Two firms – Certree and Argyle – recently sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission asking for an investigation into this market, pointing at the abuse of consumers by Equifax (and to a lesser extent Experian).
The strategies for each small rival are different, but both give the consumer control over who can access their data, instead of building a giant centralized repository controlled by a monopolist. Certree gives each employee a ‘personal vault’ where his or her data resides. While they verify that the data came from an employer, only the employee can give permission for a third party to look at what’s inside – even Certree can’t see it. Certree is paid when a lender or third party successfully verifies an employment or income record.
Argyle has a totally different model. It isn’t even a data broker, but a ‘data transfer agent.’ It lets third parties ask consumers about their income and employment information by sending them a link, and then gets consumers to give them their passwords for their employment information. Argyle doesn’t keep any data on hand, but is controversial because it engages in screen-scraping of your employer’s website, which can be a security risk. And yet it is weird to think it’s problematic for employees to take their own data from their employer, but fine for employers to sell that data to Equifax.
Both Certree and Argyle charge much less than Equifax for their service.
Regardless, the overall point is that having a centralized data broker that has a quasi-monopoly over income and verification data, and sits largely unregulated, is ridiculous. Breaking up Equifax’s monopoly wouldn’t be that hard, at least conceptually. Many of the practices that it engages in today are things the FTC banned in its old consent decree with the firm. And it’s obvious that Equifax is immune to competitive forces. Despite the price hikes and devastating and routine news stories about hacks, errors and problems, as well as public polling showing increasing concerns over privacy, Equifax marches on, unbothered and unchastened. That’s the classic monopoly position, a recognition that there is no alternative.
Beyond the monopoly problem, however, why not have a system where individuals control their own data? Prior to the internet this would have been impossible, but today it’s quite doable. Giving individual control over their data would probably require both antitrust law and an aggressive reading of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s authority over Credit Reporting Agencies, or a new Congressional statute for ownership and control of employment data.
Regardless, I’d like to thank Equifax CEO Mark Begor for bragging last month about his firm’s market power. Without that, I never would have taken the time to learn why Equifax can act as a private IRS, put out a middle finger to each one of us, and collect our money regardless.
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Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. And consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 23:00 - White House Roils Housing Industry Over New Tenant Protections
White House Roils Housing Industry Over New Tenant Protections
The housing industry is up in arms over new tenant protections that the Biden administration administration is preparing to roll out as soon as this month, Politico reports.
The protections, which come as rents around the country are falling, could include promoting grace periods for late rents, as well as giving renters who are facing eviction the right to legal counsel, according to advocates.
According to Jerry Howard, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, the industry is bracing for “some pretty intense regulation.”
“They need to be very cautious about what they’re doing,” he added, having attended a November White House meeting on tenant protections. “There’s a real chance of creating a problem that doesn’t exist.”
With a possible recession looming, the Biden administration will be looking for ways to provide relief to cash-strapped Americans suffering from a higher cost of living. Since the U.S. House is now under Republican control, the kind of sweeping economic legislation enacted during the last two years is off the table.
Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), are leaning on the administration to go big by curbing rent increases at millions of units in properties with government-backed mortgages – a long-shot move the White House is not seriously weighing, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. -Politico
The National Apartment Association and 10 other industry groups are lobbying the White House to resist pressure to enact new federal requirements on top of existing laws – insisting in a December letter that doing so would “further exacerbate affordability challenges.”
“People can’t afford to live,” said Rep Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). “We want to push the president as far as possible to lighten the burden of rent on everyday people.”
Democrats are pushing the Biden administration to enact restrictions on rent hikes and punish landlords who they say are price gouging.
“[N]ot just principles, not just guidelines, but what can the president do through executive action to lighten the burden on people and put more money in their pockets,” Bowman told Politico in an interview.
The White House, meanwhile, appears to be in agreement – though it has yet to comment on specifics.
“We are exploring a broad set of administrative actions that further our commitment to ensuring a fair and affordable market for renters across the nation,” according to spokesperson Robyn Patterson. “We look forward to continuing to work with lawmakers to strengthen tenant protections and improve rental affordability.”
While rent is still driving up overall inflation — thanks in part to a data lag in the official inflation gauge — the national median rent has fallen for four straight months, according to the latest data from Apartment List. New lease demand plummeted in the second half of 2022, when the net demand for apartments fell into negative territory for the first time since 2009, according to an analysis by RealPage Market Analytics. -Politrico
“Complicating this process isn’t good at any time in the market cycle,” said Greg Brown, senior VP of government affairs at the National Apartment Association. “But we’re in the fourth straight month of rent declines. I think things are adjusting again, so it does raise the question, are they responding to a situation of three to four months ago, not what is currently happening or will be happening in the near future?“
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 22:40 - What Will Save Rural Healthcare?
What Will Save Rural Healthcare?
By Mariah Muhammad and Laura Dyrda of Becker’s Hospital Review
Rural hospitals and healthcare facilities face amplified financial challenges amid persisting workforce shortages, rising costs and leveling reimbursement. Reserves are dwindling and without urgent action, hundreds of facilities face closure.
But it’s not too late. Mobile health, partnerships, new payment methods and government support can make a big difference to rural hospitals across the U.S. Becker’s asked 33 healthcare executives to share their best ideas to save rural healthcare, and here they are. The executives featured in this article are all speaking at the Becker’s Healthcare CEO+CFO Roundtable on Nov. 13-16, 2023 in Chicago.
Question: What is your best idea to save rural healthcare?
President and CEO
Johnese Spisso. President of UCLA Health, CEO of UCLA Hospital System and Associate Vice Chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences: While some progress has been made in improving access to primary care in rural areas, access to specialty care remains a challenge. One of the opportunities to increase access is through the use of telemedicine and video visits with highly trained specialists who are available at academic medical centers and other large health systems. One of the ways we have expanded access at UCLA Health is through telemedicine. Additionally, through operating an interfacility transfer center, we serve as a resource to rural hospitals in our region, which rely on us to accept transfers of complex patients that have needs that exceed the level of care that can be provided in the rural facilities.
David Lubarsky, MD. CEO and Vice Chancellor of Human Health Sciences at UC Davis Health (Sacramento, Calif.): Around one in five Americans live in rural areas, but only 5 percent of physicians practice in these same areas. UC Davis has made it a priority to help close this gap in rural healthcare by incentivizing medical school graduates to practice in rural communities. We have built a number of clinical and education partnerships to both increase providers in these communities and bring in, via virtual technologies, advanced and specialty practices from regional academic medical centers.
We need new models of place-based medical provider recruitment, education and training to include far greater numbers of individuals from rural communities, as they are much more likely to ultimately practice in these communities. Our COMPADRE program is an example of a cross-state effort funded by American Medical Association, UC Davis and Oregon Health & Science University to partner with dozens of graduate medical education programs and tribal communities in Southern Oregon and Northern California to address this crisis.
Bill Gassen. President and CEO of Sanford Health (Sioux Falls, S.D.): Protecting rural health care starts with reimagining how we deliver care for the 1.5 million patients we have the privilege of serving at Sanford Health, two-thirds of whom live in rural communities. Sanford’s landmark $350 million virtual care initiative aims to expand access to convenient, high-quality care regardless of zip code, improve the patient experience, advance innovation through new research and attract and train a new generation of clinicians.
The past few years have tested our nation’s health systems as never before. Sanford Health is committed to seeking new ways to provide more affordable, accessible and equitable care, which is why we’re excited about our proposed merger with Fairview Health Services. Together, we will strengthen care for our patients, offer expanded career growth opportunities for our employees and serve as a destination for top clinical talent. By combining our respective strengths and expertise in rural and urban health care, we will expand access to high-quality care for more people across our region, drive innovative care solutions, invest in the well-being and quality of life of our communities and ensure we can continue to deliver world-class care for all those who place their trust in us long into the future
Donna Lynne. CEO of Denver Health (Colo.): My best ideas for rural healthcare are partnering with urban hospitals, particularly safety nets, and using telehealth with those hospitals that are truly partners. Lastly, another good idea is to use some form of “gainsharing” when patients are transferred.
Brian Peters. CEO of Michigan Health Hospital Association (Okemos): I am a big believer in technology as a game-changer for the future of healthcare delivery. In particular, it can serve as a force multiplier in the realm of healthcare staffing. When combined with the significant traction gained by telehealth since the start of the pandemic, this means that technology — if thoughtfully deployed — can help to stabilize the rural health infrastructure. One imperative: we need regulatory and reimbursement policies that incentivize and support this concept.
Jeff Thompson, MD. CEO Emeritus at Gundersen Health System (La Crosse, Wis.): Although more rapidly changing the payment system away from fee-for-service will help, the best hope and most progress is to change the behavior of the large systems and universities to view rural areas not as referral pipelines but as citizens and providers that need real population healthcare partners.
Not closing, but re-focusing the work of rural providers and rural hospitals that have already been shifting to outpatient work [will help]. Systems can connect the EHR , provide quality and HR systems improvements, focus on cancer screening and mental health services as well as those other needed procedures that can be done well locally like cataracts, mammograms, and colonoscopies. Those systems that are truly partners will most likely improve referrals, but the connection is built on the value of improving health.
Robert Corona. CEO of SUNY Upstate Medical University (Syracuse, N.Y.): It will be solved by technological and process innovations. We serve one-third of the geography of New York State, so rural healthcare is key for us. We have a rural medicine training program for physicians and they need special tools. Rural healthcare is best served through use of advanced computing and communications technology, autonomous machines like drones and robots for supply logistics and other operations.
We now have established an autonomous machines division and a mobile medical unit. We have a hospital at home program and an influenza-like illness program that both use body-worn sensors on remotely located patients for vital signs and other parameters. This is all part of the distribution of healthcare services beyond bricks and mortar healthcare facilities.
Mark McPherson. President and CEO of Trinity Health At Home (Livonia, Mich.): Enact legislation to pay for telehealth in a home health nursing environment. During the pandemic, telehealth was shown to be highly effective as a way to provide care. It’s reimbursable for physicians, but not for nursing care. Reimbursing telehealth in-home care would allow home care agencies to leverage already scarce nursing resources across an unlimited geography, mitigating many of the logistical issues of providing home care in a rural environment.
Charles A. Powell, MD. CEO of Mount Sinai-National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute; Medical Director of Mount Sinai Hospital Respiratory Care Services (New York City): In the respiratory disease space, a key point of emphasis on providing access to specialty services in remote or rural regions. We are able to address potential gaps in access by leveraging technology to connect rural clinics and to connect with patients at home. For example, multidisciplinary tumor boards and multidisciplinary interstitial lung disease management programs can provide access to clinicians in practice locations that are distant from the tertiary facility hosting the discussion. We have deployed remote patient monitoring solutions to patients and home sleep study patients by direct shipping that allow us to connect with COPD patients across the continuum of care and to diagnose patients with symptoms of obstructive sleep apnea.
Helen Johnson. CEO of Sparrow Eaton Hospital (Charlotte, Mich.): The expansion of broadband internet services has helped level the playing field for rural communities. While not yet complete, in those areas where access to high-speed internet is available, those communities are leveraging this basic utility for healthcare, education and economic development.
Donald Lloyd, II. President and CEO of St. Claire Healthcare (Morehead, Ky.): In my view, we cannot perpetuate a stable rural health infrastructure until we address three significant issues critical to achieve rural health sustainability. First, we must develop and attract a rural-centric pipeline of talent to meet our clinical and workforce needs. Second, we must realize that it is not economically possible to sustain a full service acute care hospital in every rural community. Such a realization takes great political courage but also clinical creativity to meet the community’s needs. Third, CMS and state Medicaid agencies must establish payment methodologies that sustain institutions in low volume and safety-net environments
Mark Gridley. President and CEO of FHN Memorial Hospital (Freeport, Ill.): My thought is a deep focus by federal and state legislators that are truly seeking to understand the barriers to healthcare in rural communities. Many of these barriers are driven by inadequate reimbursement methodologies for noncritical access providers, which creates difficulty in staffing and, ultimately, in providing access to care that is sustainable, consistent and close to small communities. This would include innovative technological program funding in addition to stabilizing declining reimbursement amidst increasing costs.
Michael Canady, MD. CEO of Holzer Health System (Gallipolis, Ohio): The solution to saving rural healthcare lies in solving the payer mix issue. Rural HCOs have such a high percentage of Medicare/Medicaid/self-pay that it is becoming a challenging revenue issue. Closely related to this is the 20 percent initial denial rate across the board. Fix these two problems and rural healthcare can survive.
Thomas Siemers. CEO of Wilbarger General Hospital (Vernon, Texas): Collaboration and diversification are the key strategies for future success. We should look for ways we can collaborate with other organizations and providers to expand and diversify our services. Rural hospitals will have to try new strategies, start new services, adapt to the changing needs of patients. The key is to keep our patients local so they don’t have to travel for care. Rural hospitals will have to share revenue and/or pay for the services provided by other organizations/providers. But it’s worth it. We’ve got to grow.
Jeremiah Hodshire. President and CEO of Hillsdale (Mich.) Hospital Administration: Ultimately, rural healthcare suffers from the reality that we are often paid less than what it costs us to provide patient care. No other business or industry would be expected to survive under those conditions, and rural hospitals shouldn’t have to scramble to find other revenue sources like grants, cash-only services, etc., in order to be financially sustainable. Achieving health equity for rural Americans requires us to sustain rural hospitals so we can continue innovating, investing in technology, pioneering access to care initiatives and more. Payment reform is not just the best way to save rural healthcare long-term — it is the ONLY way.
Kenneth Rose. President and CEO of Texas Health Hospital Mansfield: The plight of rural healthcare in our country is one that will not be solved by hospitals and healthcare systems alone. Rural communities would be benefited by the collaboration of community services offered by other not-for-profit organizations along with hospitals. The issues in rural communities many times are more than just acute care related and have other social/societal components, which calls for more than the expertise of community hospitals. An issue as large as this brings the old saying to mind: many hands make light work.
Christopher Bjornberg, CEO of Mayers Memorial Healthcare District (Fall River Mills, Calif.): The best way to save rural healthcare is to treat it as rural healthcare. Urban health is not the same as rural health but it is mostly treated the same way. Currently, Medicare is the only payer that has a program specific for rural health that takes a critical access hospital designation while Medicaid and commercial payers like Blue Cross, UnitedHealthcare and the like generally do not. Coupled with the poor reimbursement rates, are the rising administrative costs for providing healthcare. According to an article from CNN in February 2022, “Administrative costs alone make up more than a quarter of U.S. healthcare spending.” If we want to save rural healthcare we have to change the reimbursement across all payers not just one and then ease the administrative burdens that go along with that. Just like it shouldn’t be difficult for people to obtain good quality healthcare, it should not be difficult to get paid to provide good quality healthcare.
CFO and Strategic Leaders
Marty Hutson. CFO of St. Mary’s Health Care System (Bayside, N.Y.): The first step to ‘save’ rural healthcare is to accept that the one-size-fits-none model of Medicare does not work. Rural hospitals face more difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff. Given your location, access to goods and services is also more expensive. CAH based on bed size is not effective when some facilities are too big to be considered critical access but remain just as remote and important as those with that designation.
Nate Shinagawa. COO of UCI Health (Orange County, Calif.): One of America’s strengths, compared to anywhere in the world, is our recognition that immigrants add value to the culture and success of our country. Nowhere is this more evident than in healthcare, where 25 percent of all physicians are international medical graduates. Many of these physicians came to America through the H1-B visa program, a critical pathway that’s provided talented physicians to underserved areas, including much of rural America.
For example, in places like North Dakota, H1-B applicants represent almost 5 percent of all physicians. We can turn around the healthcare access problem in rural America with progressive immigration policies. Expand H1-B visas, fast-track the green card process for physicians and nurses, expand the J-1 visa waiver program and make it easier to attain state licensures. In a year, we’d see the impact of these changes to the great benefit of rural America.
Cristen Page, MD. Executive Dean of the UNC School of Medicine (Chapel Hill, N.C.): We should address this issue with humility. Our neighbors living in rural areas need to be listened to and supported as they know best what is needed in their communities. I have dedicated much of my career to rural workforce development and creating sustainable programs that introduce future providers to the impacts that they can make and the joys that they can find in rural service. We need more providers in rural service – not just physicians, but nurses, APPs, and others. We need to support the expansion of rural residency and other training programs and to continue building strong networks so that success stories and knowledge can be shared. And we need to leverage technology to support our rural providers as well as new models of care to better serve our rural patients.
Arianne Dowdell, JD. Vice President and Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer of Houston Methodist (Texas): Equitable access to healthcare may not just mean a brick-and-mortar location but also working closely with community partners to support people with chronic health conditions through prevention, education and access. Looking at data to learn more about the communities we serve or those we have the potential to serve and knowing more about incidence rates of certain diseases is helpful when meeting the healthcare needs of patients, particularly those in rural communities.
At Houston Methodist, we often talk about meeting people where they are and that includes supporting people with varying education levels, limited knowledge about their own healthcare, or those who have little to no access to technology. We learned a lot during the pandemic about how we can support people who may fall into these areas of their healthcare journey, and we’re continuing to use those lessons learned to create quality healthcare experiences for people despite where they live.
Nick Stefanizzi. CEO of Northwell Direct (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): ‘Saving’ rural healthcare will be predicated on solving for the unique challenges experienced by these populations – primarily, addressing access and social determinants of health, which in the context of rural health, are synergistic strategies.
To start, given that the National Rural Health Association has described that of the more than 7,200 federally designated health professional shortage areas, 3 out of 5 are in rural regions, access is a clear structural barrier. The fix here can’t just be brick and mortar facilities and providers. Rather, solving for this will require a combination of in-person and virtual treatment modalities to expand the pool of providers available for critical services. It will also require an investment in digital tools and resources that enable individuals to better engage and manage their own health. All must be highly integrated and easy to navigate if we expect widespread adoption and utilization.
Further, a population health approach to addressing the social determinants of health and the underlying factors that can adversely influence the health of populations living in rural communities will similarly help to address root causes. An individual’s zip code often has more impact on health than any other factor, and in order to raise the health of rural populations, the focus needs to expand beyond traditional medical care. Through innovative and proactive interventions, we can enable health professionals and individuals to better engage and manage chronic and other conditions that exacerbate the challenges associated with the lack of access to local care providers.
Taken together, addressing access and social determinants will go a long way in solving the rural healthcare crisis.
Kerry Mackey. Vice President of Hospital Operations, Women and Children’s Services at NYU Langone Health (New York City): Telemedicine/telehealth services can be utilized to expand access to care in rural areas. We learned this from COVID-19 when we had to extend healthcare outside the hospital’s doors/walls. Also, implementing a home hospital service can complement telehealth/telemedicine by bringing that day-to-day nursing care to the applicable patient’s home. In addition, utilizing data and outcomes to negotiate reimbursement rates for Medicare services is how we can overcome the challenge around service or provider restrictions.
Scott Polenz, CPA, MBA, FACHE. Vice President of Physician and Advanced Practice Clinician Relations of Marshfield Clinic Health System (Wis.): Saving rural healthcare is about as ambitious an undertaking as you can aspire to because of the complex, interwoven challenges that must be addressed. Fixing rural health care requires fixing our national health care system and a societal-level shift with regard to how we view health and health care. On a national level, we have to commit to the systemic changes required to truly move to a value-based system. On a more rural-specific level, we need massive investments to upgrade our overall public health infrastructure. Rural communities lag behind metropolitan counterparts in areas like access to transportation, availability of internet, distance from sites of care, access to healthy food and many other community-based resources. This basic infrastructure is fundamental to accessing quality health care, and it is going to take systemic, sustained investment to equip rural health care with the tools we need.
Chad Dilley. COO of IU Health Saxony (Fishers, Ind.): IU Health is proud to serve many rural Indiana communities in places like Tipton, Bedford and Frankfort. There are really two inherent challenges: the geography of small populations spread over large areas, and provider recruitment to live and work away from urban centers and the specialty and subspecialty support that affords. We are continuing to lean into virtual care, virtual consults and telehealth to make care more accessible for patients close to home (or at home), and support our teams with the expertise and collaboration they need to provide excellent care in rural settings.
Kira Carter-Robertson. Senior Vice President of Regional Hospitals at Sparrow Health System (Lansing, Mich.): I would love to say there is a magic bullet to save rural healthcare, but I don’t think the answer is one-size-fits-all. While rural hospitals may face similar pressures, rural communities are not all the same. In the short-term, rural healthcare providers will have to continue blocking, tackling, and juggling service needs with volume, managing staffing and provider challenges, assessing the right operation models, and exploring partnerships and mergers. Finances are the key driver behind closures and financial challenges for rural hospitals, so the long-term answer is a drastic payment overhaul. In the meantime, the secret sauce for rural healthcare is more complex and several levers will need to be pulled both regulatory and operationally to sustain the future of rural healthcare.
Rashid Syed. Managing Partner of North Houston Surgical Hospitals: In my opinion, the best approach towards improving rural healthcare is to segregate the patient care services from one large hospital system to nimbler healthcare facilities, making it more approachable and personable for both, the patients and the providers, by creating urgent care centers, surgery centers, specialty microhospitals for mild to moderate complexity elective and nonelective treatments and keeping larger hospitals for higher complexity, longer complicated treatments. It’s about taking healthcare to the patients rather than patients in need seeking healthcare.
Clinical Leaders
Andy Anderson, MD. Chief Medical and Quality Officer of RWJBarnabas Health (West Orange, N.J.): Rural healthcare is essential to address the health and healthcare needs of patients and families who live in rural communities. My best idea to save rural healthcare is to provide robust virtual access (through telemedicine and remote patient monitoring devices) to triage and address acute care needs, to better manage chronic conditions, and to provide access to the best specialists to diagnose and treat complex medical conditions.
William Morice, MD, PhD. President of Mayo Clinic Laboratories and Chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.): From my perspective, to save rural healthcare, one must tackle one of the greatest challenges facing rural hospitals and healthcare providers, which is maintaining sufficient patient volumes in their facilities while also developing next-generation tools and capabilities. These tools and capabilities, such as at-home testing and digital diagnostics, will allow them to reach their patients in their homes spread across large areas. So, my idea is to invest in rural healthcare’s ability to interact with patients remotely while also designing practice and social service models that bring them into facilities for care when needed. Done correctly, this will enable rural healthcare to sustain and grow their services while also increasing their reach and convenience for patients.
Phil Schaefer. Senior Vice President, Ambulatory Services and Chief Care Network Development Officer of Southern Illinois Healthcare (Carbondale): For rural hospitals to survive, the economics of reimbursement must change along with the hospitals’ approach to their cost structures. With almost all major payers having record profits last year and with declining utilization and reimbursement, the current model of paying hospitals is not sustainable. Given this, it’s imperative for rural hospitals to reevaluate their service portfolio and bend their cost curve downward.
Steve Lipshultz, MD. Goodyear Professor and Chair, Department of Pediatrics of University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (Buffalo, N.Y.); Pediatric Chief-of-Service of Kaleida Health (Buffalo, N.Y.); President of UBMD Pediatrics (Buffalo, N.Y.): Improving rural healthcare finances is one of several key elements to sustaining rural healthcare and coming closer to a single standard of US healthcare. Below I list 14 areas where opportunities exist and are needed. Utilizing technology such as:
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Telehealth;
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EMRs;
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3. ub-and-spoke health system networking and infrastructures to allow most care in the local community but having the backup;
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Ongoing physician and other healthcare provider and staff training;
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Recruitment;
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Retention, addressing;
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Workforce shortages with pipeline programs and others;
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QA/QI oversight and feedback as drivers of decisions based on the quality of care in rural places;
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Enhanced rural public health;
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Focused patient management on unique needs in rural settings;
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Other necessary infrastructures to increase both revenues from payments and reimbursements and other efficiencies and outcomes are key;
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The transition to value-based care will be very sensitive for rural healthcare with reduced reserves and with unique needs and solutions.;
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Having a national agenda to reduce disparities by states for funders of rural healthcare around the U.S. will help level the playing field. The differences in reimbursements and uncompensated care for the same services around the U.S. widely vary based on local rules and regulations and (both state and federal) often cause essential services in rural communities to no longer be sustained.; and
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Adequate payments and better payment systems are needed with a level playing field.
Anuj Vohra, DO. Chairman and Medical Director of the Department of Emergency Medicine of Charlotte Hungerford Hospital (Torrington, Conn.): My best idea to save rural healthcare is advancing access to care by means of telemedicine, home visits and increasing preventative care.
Charles Emerman, MD. Chair, Emergency Medicine and Medical Director, Service Line of MetroHealth Medical Center (Cleveland, Ohio): Smaller rural hospitals would do well to form more robust clinical programs that leverage the resources of the larger urban hospitals. For example, we have trauma surgeons who take calls at two smaller rural hospitals. The local surgeons are happy not to take overnight ED calls. The trauma surgeons operate locally when appropriate and then transfer the more complex patients. It works out well for the patients, the local medical staff, and both systems.
Andy Anderson, MD. Chief Medical and Quality Officer of RWJBarnabas Health Medical Group (West Orange, N.J.): Rural healthcare is essential to address the health and healthcare needs of patients and families who live in rural communities. My best idea to save rural healthcare is to provide robust virtual access (through telemedicine and remote patient monitoring devices) to triage and address acute care needs, manage chronic conditions better, and provide access to the best specialists to diagnose and treat complex medical conditions.
Nisha Mehta, MD. Founder of Physician Side Gigs: Maintaining the quality of care in rural areas will become increasingly challenging as healthcare personnel shortages continue to amplify. Employers will need to place a real focus on retention and recruitment of clinicians, and systemically, threats to compensation by CMS and other payers need to be addressed. Medicare cuts are short sighted and will only exacerbate existing issues with access to care.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 22:20 -
- That's Science? Congress Must Probe The Rationale For COVID Mask Mandates
That’s Science? Congress Must Probe The Rationale For COVID Mask Mandates
Authored by Robert E. Moffit via RealClear Wire,
The Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives recently authorized formation of a new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Peering into the murky Chinese origins of COVID-19, especially any connection to U.S. government funding, will be a top priority. And that’s as it should be.
Dr. Anthony Fauci will no doubt be a star witness. The former director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases at the NIH says he would welcome an invitation to testify on his role during the pandemic. Lawmakers should note, however, that in his recent deposition in the continuing case of The State of Missouri, et al. v Joseph Biden et al in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Fauci responded to questions by saying that he could not recall… 174 times. New congressional inquiries might refresh his memory.
However, the subcommittee must concentrate more on “The Science” than on Dr. Fauci. Throughout the pandemic, federal officials who claim to represent “The Science” gave mixed messages. This left citizens eager to follow “The Science” frightened and confused.
Take, for instance, the issue of masking and mask mandates. The mixed messages had a tremendous effect on all Americans, especially schoolchildren.
On this topic, Dr. Fauci’s recent deposition was revealing. In a February 2020 email, Sylvia Burwell, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asked Fauci whether she should wear a mask at the airport in her travels. He replied:
Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected, rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep [sic] out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you. I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you’re going to a low-risk location.
So, Fauci expressed privately to a former colleague a strong conviction that cloth masks were ineffective. That view was broadly shared by other senior federal public health officials, including both Dr. Nancy Messonnier, Fauci’s colleague at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and former Surgeon General of the United States Jerome Adams. Indeed, in a March 2020 social media message to the public Dr. Adams warned: “Seriously, people, STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing the general public from catching Coronavirus.”
Fauci’s initial response to Burwell’s question was in accord with previous scientific research. Furthermore, in the following months, peer-reviewed literature on masking and viral infection confirmed Fauci’s initial advice. For example, a May 2020 review of the professional literature on the subject for the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, concluded “In pooled analysis, we found no significant reduction in influenza transmission with the use of face masks.” Also in May 2020, researchers writing in The New England Journal of Medicine observed: “We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.” In March 2022, a British Medical Journal study on the masking of Spanish school-aged children found that cloth face masks “…were not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 incidence or transmission, suggesting that this intervention was not effective.”
Yet, in April 2020, the federal government’s masking advice took a 180-degree turn. The CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks, and CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield went as far as to declare in a congressional hearing that face masks would be even more effective than a (yet unavailable) Covid-19 vaccine.
The CDC recommendations were quickly translated into state and local mask mandates (sometimes, as in New York City, with stiff fines) throughout the nation. In January 2021, CDC imposed a mask mandate on persons taking public transportation, which was subsequently struck down in federal court because CDC had no statutory authority to impose such a mandate.
Here’s the mystery. Why exactly did CDC masking policy change so dramatically in that brief period between February and April 2020? Did CDC conduct its own randomized controlled trial to determine the efficacy of either masking or the kinds of masks that would be most efficacious? The agency should have, of course, but it did not.
Did federal officials come into possession of some groundbreaking scientific research refuting previous peer-reviewed studies that had cast doubt on the efficacy of masking?
That question came during the Nov. 23, 2022, deposition:
Attorney: “How many studies were done between February of 2020, when you emailed Ms. Burwell and told her that ‘the typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out the virus, which is small enough to pass through the material” between when you said that and April 3rd of 2020, what studies were done of the efficacy of masks… in preventing the spread of- of- Covid-19?”
Dr. Fauci: “I could find those—and get them for you, but I don’t have them in my fingertips right now.”
Later during the deposition, Fauci said that he changed his mind about masking because by April of 2020 there was no feared shortage of masks for health care workers, and the public could get them without depriving these workers the much-needed protection that masks would provide.
Dr. Fauci also said that it had become clear that the virus spread from persons who did not have symptoms, and that masking would help stop asymptomatic transmission. Finally, he asserted, “Evidence began accumulating that masks actually work in preventing acquisition and transmission.”
Under further questioning, Dr. Fauci repeated that his view on masking changed due to “new” scientific evidence., Missouri’s attorney again, therefore, pressed the question about the science behind the masking policy.
Attorney: “Were there placebo-based, randomized, double-blind studies of the efficacy of masking that were done between February and April of 2020?”
Dr. Fauci: “I don’t recall. I’d have to go back and take a close look at the literature. I don’t recall.”
Attorney: “Have you seen any studies that contradict the efficacy of masking?”
Dr. Fauci: “There were some studies early on—I don’t know the dates of them—that made the statement that masks were not effective. When those studies were subject to statistical scrutinization, they were felt to be not definitive. Subsequent to that time, there have been studies to indicate that in situations where mask wearing was compared to not mask wearing, that masks clearly have an effect.”
While lawmakers may want to trust Dr. Fauci on this point, they must verify it.
Maybe Dr. Fauci can produce those studies he did not have “at his fingertips.” Perhaps at some point between February and April of 2020 there were novel studies on the effectiveness of masks, including the advantages of the mandatory masking of schoolchildren. Conceivably, new evidence was “accumulating” that, contrary to previous studies, masking was broadly effective in preventing viral infection and transmission. Perhaps the “statistical scrutinization” of previous studies on masking did indeed reveal flaws.
Lawmakers can resolve these questions by securing the more recent scholarship that Dr. Fauci alludes to as refuting previous masking studies. It would also be edifying to know who, in fact, did the “statistical scrutinization” and if—and where—it was published.
What matters is the science, not Dr. Fauci’s memory.
For lawmakers, Fauci’s role during the pandemic is just one item on the congressional oversight agenda. As outlined in a Heritage Foundation Special Report, a dozen other areas are ripe for congressional inquiry, ranging from the debacle of diagnostic testing and flawed vaccine policies to the impact of lockdowns and school closures. The federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic is, unfortunately, a target rich environment. Understandably, many members of Congress, like millions of their constituents, are angry.
But a word of caution. A scattershot, highly inflammatory process of congressional investigation will not serve the American people well. Lawmakers should not allow themselves to transform these necessary probes into tiresome “gotcha” political theater—a powerful temptation in our polarized political environment. Rather, House and Senate investigators need to target the specific rationale for each of the major federal policy recommendations over the past three years, with a view toward forging positive legislative changes that would enable the federal government to perform better when the next pandemic hits America’s shores.
Robert E. Moffit, PhD, is a Senior Fellow in Health and Welfare Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 21:40 - Tesla 'Weaponizes' Price-Cuts To Crush EV Competition
Tesla ‘Weaponizes’ Price-Cuts To Crush EV Competition
Tesla, Inc. plans to report fourth-quarter results after the market close on Wednesday. Investors seek updates on the 2023 demand outlook after the EV company slashed prices on its cars worldwide.
The automaker realized it’s not only EV game in the ‘carbon-free’ town, as US, Europe, and Japanese car companies are ramping up EV production. Tesla slashed Model 3 and Model Y prices by up 20% in hopes of stoking demand as the entire EV market becomes saturated but also slows.
WSJ spoke with Stanly Tran, a 32yo California psychotherapist, who was on the waiting list to purchase a Ford Mustang Mach-E electric SUV but quickly canceled his reservation and bought a Model Y after hearing about the price cut.
“‘There’s no way,'” Tran said when he heard about the price cut, adding the Model Y offered more range and a competitive price to the Mach-E.
Tesla’s move to squeeze competitors by sacrificing some of its strong operating-profit margins is a desperate attempt to increase sales but also roiled the secondary market for used Teslas.
Meanwhile, dealers who sell Teslas from their used-car inventory say valuations on some models fell by several thousand dollars following this month’s price cut. In the first 17 days of January, prices of 2020 model year or newer used Teslas were down about 25% from their peak in June of last year, about double the rate of the industrywide drop during that same period, according to Edmunds. –WSJ
One example of the price cut was the Model Y, now priced at $53,000, down from about $66,000. And if buyers qualify for the federal tax credit, they can loop off another $7,500.
Bank of America analyst John Murphy said, unlike Tesla, traditional automakers have very thin profit margins or lose money on their EV lineups. He said such a move to reduce prices could spark a price war.
“These price cuts are likely to make the business even more difficult, just as they are attempting to ramp production of EV offerings,” Murphy said.
The lingering question is if the Elon Musk-led carmaker stoked demand. WSJ has some data on that:
The number of car shoppers researching Tesla surged following the early January price cut, research site Edmunds said. The Model Y was the second-most-researched vehicle on Edmunds’ website for the week ended Jan. 15, up from 70th the week prior. The Model 3 moved up 36 spots.
Soon after the price cut, applications for financing of Tesla vehicles tripled at Tenet, a New York startup firm that provides financing to EV buyers. The influx of customers has remained elevated, Tenet Chief Executive Alex Liegl said.
One consequence of the price cut is that it might spark an EV price war with Detroit. Then there’s the issue of angry car dealers and owners who saw their Teslas drop in price overnight. Such a move is a sign of desperation by Tesla.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 21:20 - CDC Officials Who Spread Misinformation Apologized To Source Of False Data But Not To Public: Emails
CDC Officials Who Spread Misinformation Apologized To Source Of False Data But Not To Public: Emails
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
U.S. health officials who spread inflated COVID-19 child death data in public meetings apologized to the source of the false data but not to the public, newly obtained emails show.
The Emergency Operations Center at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga., on March 19, 2021. (Eric Baradat/AFP via Getty Images) Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver, with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered the false data in 2022 while U.S. officials weighed granting emergency authorization to COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months.
The study they cited for the data was published ahead of peer review by a group comprised primarily of British authors. The study was corrected after the public meetings.
Emails obtained by The Epoch Times showed that Fleming-Dutra and Oliver were alerted that they had spread misinformation. Neither the officials nor the CDC have informed the public of the false information. Newly obtained emails showed the officials apologized to Seth Flaxman, one of the study’s authors, and even offered to see whether the study could be published in the CDC’s quasi-journal.
“I feel … that we owe you an apology,” Oliver wrote to Flaxman on June 27, about 10 days after she and Fleming-Dutra falsely said there had been at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 in America among those 19 and younger. “We draw the attention of a variety of individuals with the ACIP meetings, and apologize that you got caught in it this time.”
“I am also sorry that you got pulled into the attention around the VRBPAC and ACIP meetings,” Fleming-Dutra added. She had presented the data to the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which advises the CDC.
Fleming-Dutra, Oliver, and Flaxman did not respond to requests for comment.
Inflated Death Toll
Using data from the CDC, Flaxman and his co-authors claimed that there were at least 1,433 deaths primarily attributed to COVID-19 among those aged 0 to 19 in the United States. The actual number was 1,088, the authors acknowledged in the corrected version of the study.
Fleming-Dutra presented the false data as rankings to VRBPAC on June 14, 2022 and ACIP three days later. It’s not clear why the CDC didn’t examine its own database rather than relying on a preprint study.
Oliver also cited the study while speaking during the ACIP meeting.
The data had an impact. It showed “that this is not a minor illness in children,” Dr. Katherine Poehling, one of the ACIP members, said at the time.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, later appeared to cite the inflated death toll and ACIP still cites the preprint, though it was later updated with the correct data.
Flaxman updated the study after receiving an email from Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has become a fact-checker of suspect COVID-19-related claims.
Krohnert’s concerns also made their way to Fleming-Dutra and Oliver, but the CDC officials have never publicly acknowledged promoting misinformation.
‘We Had an Error’
Flaxman acknowledged in emails to Krohnert, and in a June 27 message to Fleming-Dutra and Oliver, that he did not fully understand how the CDC’s death database works.
“Thanks for your work, and your great presentations to VRBPAC and ACIP. You cited our preprint. We’ve just updated it (see attached; it should appear on medrxiv in the next day). While none of the substantive conclusions change, we had an error which you may have seen was picked up very prominently by a blogger,” Flaxman wrote. “I am writing first to say sorry–I really regret that this happened. It was my mistake in misunderstanding the [death certificate] data, and not realizing about CDC Wonder’s provisional database.”
Flaxman also asked for feedback on the updated study and whether the officials could help with submitting the paper to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a quasi-journal the CDC publishes that only includes articles (pdf) vetted and shaped by top CDC officials to align with the agency’s policies.
“We’ve never tried to publish there, so I don’t know the process or how often they consider manuscripts from non-CDC authors,” Flaxman said. “If you do think this would be a possible route, perhaps one or both of you would want to help us revise the manuscript and join as an author?”
Oliver wrote back first, saying that she wanted to apologize to Flaxman and that “we will absolutely review and provide feedback,” as well as context.
“We are more than happy to do that without formally being co-authors. That way you can avoid formal CDC clearance,” Oliver wrote.
Fleming-Dutra then chimed in with her apology, adding, “I am glad to hear that you and your team are continuing to do this important work.” She recommended Flaxman and his team review studies published in the MMWR to get a sense of the format of the digest. A large portion of her email was redacted under an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act for “inter-agency or intra-agency records.” The Epoch Times has appealed that and other redactions.
Flaxman then notified the CDC officials that the corrected study had been made public. Fleming-Dutra replied, but the email was redacted.
“Thanks, very useful feedback. Small update: we’re hoping to submit to JAMA Pediatrics in the next week or so, and [redacted],” Flaxman answered. He indicated that the CDC had provided feedback and questioned on how to cite it in the submission.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 21:00 - Study Finds US Would Run Out Of Long-Range Munitions In 1 Week In China Hot War
Study Finds US Would Run Out Of Long-Range Munitions In 1 Week In China Hot War
A new study released this week by the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has concluded that America’s defense industry is “not adequately prepared” for “a protracted conventional war” with an enemy with a large military like China.
The findings were the result of a war games simulation which also relied heavily on observations and statistics being gained from the Ukraine-Russia war, and Washington’s ongoing military support role to Kiev.
Information from the Ukraine war led CSIS to find that the US would rapidly deplete its munitions, particularly long-range, precision-guided ones – in merely less than a week of a hot war with China in the Taiwan Strait.
Chinese PLA naval soldiers on the march in a file photo. Image: Asia Times/Facebook “The main problem is that the U.S. defense industrial base — including the munitions industrial base — is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war,” the study emphasized.
“The bottom line is the defense industrial base, in my judgment, is not prepared for the security environment that now exists,” CSIS’s Seth Jones concluded in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
As the study’s main author, Jones posed the question: “How do you effectively deter if you don’t have sufficient stockpiles of the kinds of munitions you’re going to need for a China-Taiwan Strait kind of scenario?” According to more from the study:
“As the war in Ukraine illustrates, a war between major powers is likely to be a protracted, industrial-style conflict that needs a robust defense industry able to produce enough munitions and other weapons systems for a protracted war if deterrence fails…”
“Given the lead time for industrial production, it would likely be too late for the defense industry to ramp up production if a war were to occur without major changes.”
The report additionally pointed out that the slow-moving nature of US bureaucracy and oversight is also a fundamental aspect to the problem:
The study also said that the U.S.’s foreign military sales (FMS) take too long because they need to be initiated by the Department of State and then executed by the Department of Defense and ultimately approved by Congress. Foreign sales have benefits, including supporting the U.S. defense industry, strengthening ally relations and preventing the sale of adversary systems to other countries, the study said.
“The U.S. FMS system is not optimal for today’s competitive environment — an environment where such countries as China are building significant military capabilities and increasingly looking to sell them overseas,” the study stated.
It does seem the Pentagon is taking note, and is aware that events in Ukraine have exposed US defense shortcomings, as the Biden administration chooses to get more and more involved. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the US plans to boost production of artillery ammunition by 500% over the next two years.
Whereas the US Army previously produced 14,400 155mm shells a month, the new plans could see those numbers hit over 90,000 each month.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 20:40 - Police Injured By 'Friendly Fire' On January 6
Police Injured By ‘Friendly Fire’ On January 6
Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com,
A New Jersey man will be sentenced on Friday for his participation in the events of January 6, 2021. Julian Khater, 33, faces up to eight years in prison for allegedly using pepper spray against three police officers, including the late Brian Sicknick, that afternoon.
Khater and his friend, George Tanios, were arrested in March 2021 in connection with the alleged assault. After spending more than 18 months in a fetid D.C. jail under pretrial detention orders – Judge Thomas Hogan repeatedly denied attempts by his family to post bail – Khater pleaded guilty to assaulting police officers with a dangerous weapon.
(Tanios rejected numerous plea offers on the same charges; prosecutors finally dropped the assault counts, and he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors.)
The Justice Department’s case was flimsy from the start, which I explained shortly after the pair’s arrest. Khater and Tanios are nothing more than human props to sustain arguably the biggest falsehood related to January 6—that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed in the line of duty. Even though a coroner concluded Sicknick died of two strokes caused by a blood clot near his brain, his death is still shamefully exploited by everyone from Joe Biden to congressional Democrats and even Sicknick’s own loved ones.
Capitol police announced Sicknick’s passing on January 7, 2021, with claims he was “injured while physically engaging with protesters.” Donald Trump and his supporters were immediately branded as cop killers.
The story, however, kept changing. First, the New York Times reported Sicknick had been bludgeoned to death by a fire extinguisher. After the paper retracted that story in February 2021, the media, no doubt prompted by the Justice Department, suggested Sicknick died of an allergic reaction to chemical spray.
In an attempt to salvage the credibility of its first bogus account, the Times published another lengthy report in March 2021 with cherry-picked clips and screenshots designed to reenact the assault.
“New videos obtained by The New York Times show publicly for the first time how the U.S. Capitol Police officer who died after facing off with rioters on Jan. 6 was attacked with chemical spray.”
But body camera footage from a D.C. Metropolitan police officer on duty that day raises serious doubts about the government’s claims and the Times’ face-saving story about what happened to Sicknick.
In fact, the video shows how police, not protesters, gassed their fellow officers with chemical spray. Stricken officers, including Sicknick, appear to seek aid and shelter from the toxic gas, causing the collapse of a security line on the west side of the building.
This six-minute clip from Officer Daniel Thau’s body camera shows the accidental discharge of a 40-millimeter canister of a chemical irritant around 2:25 p.m. on January 6. Thau ordered Officer Richard Khoury to aim a launcher with the canister at protesters assembled on scaffolding erected for Biden’s inauguration.
“Fire it up in the air,” Thau instructed Khoury. “Just fucking shoot.”
But Khoury misfired. “What the fuck?” he asked.
A large cloud of chemical powder fell short of the scaffolding and instead enveloped a crowd of officers standing on the northern end of the west side of the Capitol. Officers coughed and gasped for air; some were bent over in pain.
The gas cloud quickly traveled southward to where Sicknick was stationed, propelled by a brisk 18-mile-per-hour wind out of the north in Washington on January 6.
Prosecutors claim Khater sprayed Sicknick at around 2:23 p.m., but the evidence, just like everything in the January 6 saga, is dubious at best. Darren Beattie at Revolver News carefully disassembled both the Times’ reporting and the government’s evidence.
“[From] the moment Khater raises a spray canister onward, there is not a single moment in which Khater appears in the same video frame as Officer Sicknick,” Beattie wrote in March 2021.
That’s because, according to a separate choppy video released by the government in April 2021, Sicknick left that area and headed north—presumably walking straight into the drifting chemical cloud produced by Khoury’s launcher.
Sicknick is then photographed bent over near inaugural scaffolding, the same area where officers quickly advanced up a set of stairs to seek fresh air on the upper west terrace after Khoury’s misfire.
It just happened to be the exact location where Sicknick is also seen on surveillance video recovering from the effects of chemical spray and rinsing his eyes with bottled water about two minutes after Khoury’s misfire.
The Times’ March 2021 also suggested Khater’s “attack” on law enforcement caused many officers to abandon the secure perimeter.
“The attack on Officer Sicknick and his colleagues comes at a key moment. Within five minutes, the police line collapses, officers retreat into the Capitol and rioters gain control over the west side of the building.”
Except that’s not accurate.
Testimony by a top Capitol Police official this month confirmed it was the misfire by Officer Khoury that led to the collapse of the police line, which at the time was successfully keeping the crowd away from the building:
Defense Attorney Bradford Geyer: As we play this, if you can try to pay attention to the smoke, whether it’s just smoke or whether it’s [tear] gas, and the reactions of the officers. Okay?
Mendoza: OK.
(Video played.)
Geyer: Does it seem to you there’s some kind of retreat by the officers along the line in this video?
Mendoza: Yes.
Geyer: So could this be a reason why right around this time you had to confront protestors coming into the crypt and coming into that first floor, because there was a strategic retreat, the lines gave way, and the crowd just walked forward with provocateurs.
Mendoza: I can’t say why that specific crowd was where they were at the time they were there.
Mendoza also confirmed that police used “a lot of munitions that day.” Thau’s full video shows his arrival at the west side of the Capitol shortly after 1:00 p.m., more than an hour before the building was breached on the other side. Officers are seen coughing and rubbing their eyes after being hit with tear gas deployed by law enforcement.
At around 1:50 p.m., Thau ordered another officer to “drop one in there” against the nonviolent crowd.
He then warned his colleagues to protect themselves.
“Wind, wind!” he shouted, referring to high wind conditions.
As Thau tended to the injured, one officer screamed at him: “Stop doing the goddamn pepper spray!”
Even giving the government the benefit of the doubt—that Khater attacked Sicknick a minute or so before Khoury’s misfire—it’s clear the individuals responsible for discharging copious amounts of dangerous chemicals into the air on January 6 were police officers. (Khater is seen on open source video at 2:14 p.m. complaining that “they just sprayed me,” referring to police. And body camera footage from the D.C. Metro police officers who recorded the alleged attack remains under protective seal.)
The notion that a palm-sized container of pepper spray could disable three officers standing several feet away is simply not believable. Officer Caroline Edwards, one of the three officers Khater is accused of attacking, told the January 6 select committee that the spray she encountered was much stronger than what she endured during training. “I remember it hurting a lot more, which is saying something because the academy’s—our pepper spray is—well, it’s actually Sabre Red. It’s no joke. It literally feels like someone punched—just punched like two holes in your eye sockets. This felt like—it was just pain unimaginable.”
That wasn’t produced by anything allegedly sprayed by Trump supporters. Potent gas that caused dozens of officers to struggle to breathe, see, or stand—some reportedly vomited—was used needlessly by law enforcement itself against a crowd obeying police commands and respecting barriers at the time.
How many of the 140 or so officers reportedly injured on January 6 were hurt by the actions of their own colleagues?
Of course, these facts have surfaced too late to save Julian Khater, who will face the vengeful wrath of federal prosecutors and an octogenarian judge, all of whom consider January 6 an act of domestic terror. The New York Times will again escape accountability for publishing another flawed story about what happened to Brian Sicknick.
And the false narrative about Sicknick’s death will remain intact and leveraged for political purposes, evidence be damned—a recurring theme when it comes to anything about the events of January 6.
* * *
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 20:20 - 20 Red States Sue Biden Admin Over Migrant Parole Program
20 Red States Sue Biden Admin Over Migrant Parole Program
Two weeks after the state of Texas filed a lawsuit to stop the Biden administration from ignoring a federal immigration law that prevents illegal immigrants from residing in the US if they’re likely to rely on taxpayer-funded programs, a group of 20 Republican-led states, spearheaded once again by Texas AG Ken Paxton – have sued the administration again.
This time, the 20 states and America First Legal, have claimed in the suit that the Department of Homeland Security effectively created a visa program without congressional approval by “announcing that it will permit up to 360,000 aliens annually from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to be ‘paroled’ into the United States for two years or longer and with eligibility for employment authorization.”
The lawsuit claims that DHS exceeded congressional limits on parole authority – and that the agency can only issue parole on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, the agency did not have the authority to authorize the program, and ignored the mandatory notice-and-comment rulemaking requirement detailed in the Administrative Procedure Act, Just the News reports.
Since President Joe Biden took office, more than 4 million illegal migrants have entered the United States, with a record 2.4 million doing so in fiscal year 2022 alone. The crisis shows no sign of abating, with roughly 216,000 migrants crossing the border in December 2022, an 11% increase over the November totals.
That surge was largely driven by an influx of Cuban and Nicaraguan migrants, which the Biden administration took to indicate that its parole program for Venezuelans was succeeding, given the decline of migrants from that country. Migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua and Haiti would benefit from the expanded parole process. -JTN
When the program was originally announced, President Biden claimed that the aim was to limit the number of uninvited arrivals on the southern border because migrants would be encouraged to obtain pre-approval for entry while still in their home country.
“We anticipate this action is going to substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross our southwest border without going through a legal process,” said Biden.
Read the complaint below:
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 20:00 - New Gun Regulation Handicaps The Disabled
New Gun Regulation Handicaps The Disabled
Authored by John R. Lott Jr. via RealClear Wire,
The Biden administration’s newly released regulations regarding “pistol-stabilizing braces” will instantly turn tens of thousands of law-abiding Americans into felons and create a national rifle registry. But the Biden administration and the media exaggerate the costs and ignore the benefits these braces produce.
Few seem to realize that stabilizing braces for pistols were originally designed to allow wounded and disabled veterans who may have lost the use of part of their hand to hold handguns. They are essentially a strap attached to the gun. Disabled individuals are often viewed as easy targets by criminals, and stabilizers make it easier to defend themselves. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) originally approved pistol braces during the Obama administration.
There are plenty of statements from disabled veterans, such as Rick Cicero, who lost his right arm in an explosion in Afghanistan and can still use a gun today because of the pistol-stabilizing brace. But outside of a brief mention in a Fox News story, news articles on the new regulations never mention that these braces help the disabled and make it possible for them to defend themselves.
Obama was hardly a friend of gun ownership, but now the Biden administration has changed the Obama administration’s decision. The ATF now concludes that any foreign-made pistols with stabilizing braces violate the law and are retroactively considered rifles and violate the size requirement for rifles. As such, registration or removal of the brace won’t bring it into compliance. The ATF leaves only two options: the destruction of the guns or their surrender to ATF. This includes imported pistols that never had a brace added to them.
Putting aside that the ATF isn’t Congress and can’t make up new laws to redefine what a rifle is, their logic is baffling. Take two otherwise identical guns, one with a pistol brace and one that never had a pistol brace: Even if the pistol brace is removed from the gun to which it was attached, it is still banned. Meanwhile, the gun that never had the brace attached could have one added, just as easily as the gun that previously had the pistol brace could have it reattached – but only the gun that once had a pistol brace attached to it is banned.
Of course, how the ATF is supposed to know whether you used to have the pistol brace attached to the gun is a mystery. Nor is it obvious why functionally identical foreign-made pistols should be treated differently than domestically manufactured ones.
All this started after President Biden cited a crime in 2021 in Colorado – where a shooter used a pistol stabilizing brace when attacking shoppers in a grocery store – to justify calling for classifying such brace-affixed pistols as machine guns. Ahmed Al Alwi murdered 10 people at close range in a Boulder, Colo. grocery store. A previous shooting in 2019 by Connor Betts, in Dayton, Ohio, also involved a pistol brace. These are the only two cases of their kind and, more importantly, neither of them had any difficulty holding their guns and all their shots were fired at a short distance. There is no evidence that the brace made any difference in their ability to carry out the attacks. And there has been no surge in crime by the disabled or others using these braces.
These new regulations aren’t surprising after Steven Dettelbach, a controversial gun control advocate, was confirmed as director of the ATF. He was narrowly confirmed only with the unanimous support of all voting Democrats, including the support of Democrats who claim to support the Second Amendment, such as Montana’s Jon Tester and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.
With no evidence that these two attacks were any more lethal with stabilizing braces – and with no attempt to make that case – gun control advocates haven’t seriously tried to justify the new regulation. The cost will be to the disabled Americans who will now have a harder time being able to defend themselves and their families.
John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 19:40 - Arctic Air Intrusions Coming To Lower 48 Next Week
Arctic Air Intrusions Coming To Lower 48 Next Week
Progressive Farmer Meteorologist John Baranick penned a note this week, making a case for the return of winter for a large swath of the Lower 48 — something we’ve pointed out in recent weeks — recall, Siberia Records Minus-80 Degrees As Talk Of Polar Vortex Grows.
The year started with above-average temperatures for much of the Lower 48. Now Baranick forecasts a major shift in the weather for the Canadian Prairies, Northern and Central Plains, and Upper Midwest.
“These areas will have the longest duration of low temperatures from the upcoming event that is forecast to last about two weeks, or into mid-February,” he said.
Other parts of the country will see varying temperatures with the West, Southern Plains, rest of the Midwest, and Northeast more likely to see cold than warm, and the Southeast to see more warm than cold during the same time frame.
Temperatures in the northwestern Corn Belt and Canadian Prairies will be 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit below normal on average during that two-week period while some bursts of arctic air will make those even colder. Warmth in the Southeast will resist the deeper penetration of the arctic air.
Baranick noted:
The setup of very low temperatures in the northwest and warm conditions in the Southeast will fuel an active storm period. The initial front itself will be setup by a clipper system moving through southern Canada Jan. 26-28.
That front will be continually pushed southward by a couple of storm systems forming along that front, with the colder air reaching down to Texas and the Ohio River by Jan. 29. Another push should bring that cold air deeper early to middle of next week, but the far Southeast, near the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts, are likely to be spared the colder temperatures until late next week.
Baranick’s forecast aligns with the Climate Prediction Center’s latest 8-14 day outlook for Feb. 1-7.
The latest run of the Global Ensemble Forecast System model shows arctic air should begin pouring into the Midwest this weekend.
“The incoming cold will send energy demand up, and how often that reaches the more populated areas of the country in the east and south will determine how much demand increases. Natural gas prices have taken a dive recently due to a very warm January. But they are likely to go up,” Baranick explained.
However, NatGas futures dropped to a 19-month low on Wednesday despite long-term weather models forecasting colder weather for the Lower 48.
Baranick asked this question:
When does the cold recede? Models disagree on timing, but a building ridge of high pressure in the Southeast may be able to push back the cold more to the western portions of the U.S. and Canada to bring some relief around mid-February.
And he added: “So, buckle up, the reign of winter is back upon us and will have some staying power.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 19:20 - Biden 'Dietary Expert' Claims Willpower Doesn't Exist And Obesity Is A 'Brain Disease'
Biden ‘Dietary Expert’ Claims Willpower Doesn’t Exist And Obesity Is A ‘Brain Disease’
Authored by Ben Bartee via PJMedia.com,
Dr. Fatima Stanford, who sits on Biden’s 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, appeared on corporate media to share her lived experiences as a fat propagandist.
Here are the highlights of Stanford’s remarkably detached-from-reality obesity religion masquerading as science:
-
“[Obesity] is a brain disease.”
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“Throw [willpower] out the window.”
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“The number one cause of obesity is genetics. That means if you were born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50-85% likelihood of having the disease yourself even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management, so when people see families that have obesity, the assumption is, ‘Ugh. What are they feeding those kids? They’re doing something wrong.’”
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“Doctors do not understand obesity.”
To summarize the tenets of the faith, fat children (who are getting fatter by the year) of fat parents are fat because of genetics, not because the whole family eats the same GMO-processed slop.
Doctors have biases against obese people, and they also don’t understand obesity.
Loving and liberal tolerance is not about tolerance but about enabling destructive behaviors that weaken society and, as a result, any potential resistance to the power structure.
Fat people are probably too depressed and downtrodden and wheezy to put up a fight.
Plus, if they can keep you in the “sweet spot” of barely alive, the medical industry can extract all of the fats’ wealth with their products and services while they slowly expire.
They want you right in the middle pic.twitter.com/RWaZ8NgGz1
— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) January 24, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
You’ll be scandalized and flabbergasted to learn that the good doctor is actually a paid pharmaceutical shill — or, as the New York Times more delicately puts it, “Dr. Stanford has served as an adviser for a number of pharmaceutical companies, a common practice for experts in the field.”
That’s just the way it is.
Bein’ real don’t appeal to the brother in you (Yeah)
You gotta operate the easy way
“I made a G today,” but you made it in a sleazy way
Sellin’ crack to the kids (Oh-oh), “I gotta get paid” (Oh)
Well hey, well that’s the way it is.
—Tupac, ‘Changes’Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 19:00 -
- Arizona Lawmakers Push Bill To Make Bitcoin Legal Tender
Arizona Lawmakers Push Bill To Make Bitcoin Legal Tender
A bill introduced by Sen. Wendy Rogers reflects growing interest in bitcoin from U.S. states…
State Sen. Wendy Rogers (R-AZ) has introduced a set of bills aimed at making bitcoin legal tender in Arizona and allowing state agencies to accept bitcoin.
As Bitcoin Magazine’s ‘BTCCasey’ reports, the proposed legislation aims to recognize bitcoin as a legal form of currency in Arizona, allowing it to be used to pay for debts, taxes and other financial obligations.
This would mean that all transactions that are currently done in U.S. dollars could potentially be done with bitcoin, and individuals and businesses would have the option to use bitcoin as they see fit.
Specifically mentioning bitcoin alone, the legal tender bill defines bitcoin as, “the decentralized, peer-to-peer digital currency in which a record of transactions is maintained on the Bitcoin blockchain and new units of currency are generated by the computational solution of mathematical problems and that operates independently of a central bank.”
The acceptance bill is more broad, saying that, “A state agency may enter into an agreement with a cryptocurrency issuer to provide a method to accept cryptocurrency as a payment method of fines, civil penalties or other penalties, rent, rates, taxes, fees, charges, revenue, financial obligations and special assessments to pay any amount due to that agency or this state.”
Additionally, as CoinTelegraph reports, in legislation introduced in the first session of the Arizona State Senate in 2023, Senators Rogers, Borrelli, and Wadsack proposed having Arizona residents decide on amending the state’s constitution in regard to crypto and property taxes.
Should the measure pass the legislature, voters could choose in November 2024 to make virtual currency — specifically tokens that are not “a representation of the United States dollar or a foreign currency” – tax-exempt.
Under Arizona’s constitution, all federal, state, county and municipal property are tax exempt, as are public debts, many household goods, and certain “stocks of raw or finished materials, unassembled parts, works in process or finished products”.
Data from the Arizona Secretary of State indicates that there were more than 4 million registered voters in the November 2022 general election, with the state leaning slightly Republican.
This is the second time that Sen. Rogers has introduced a bill aimed at making bitcoin legal tender in her state. She introduced the same amendment in January 2022, which died by the second reading.
Although it may appear there are slim chances of the bill passing this time, El Salvador’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender has proven to be a boon for growth and investment in the country.
Recent actions in states like Texas, New Hampshire, Missouri and Mississippi all indicate increasing U.S. state interest in bitcoin and its benefits.
As bitcoin adoption strengthens, the likelihood of such bills passing will only increase.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 18:40 - "I Believe He Was Murdered": Ghislane Maxwell On Jeffrey Epstein's Death
“I Believe He Was Murdered”: Ghislane Maxwell On Jeffrey Epstein’s Death
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Former socialite and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell told Britain’s Talk TV in a jailhouse interview that she believes her former associate and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.
Audrey Strauss, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, points to a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, during a news conference in New York on July 2, 2020. (John Minchillo/AP Photo) Epstein, who was facing multiple charges of sex trafficking of minors, was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City in August 2019.
His death was officially ruled as a suicide by hanging, but there has been widespread speculation about the cause. For instance, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother said multiple fractures found in his neck were “very unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with strangulation.
Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence in a Florida prison for helping Epstein sexually abuse girls, told Talk TV that she believes Epstein’s death was no suicide.
“I believe that he was murdered,” Maxwell said in the Talk TV interview. “I was shocked. Then I wondered how it had happened because as far as I was concerned, he was going to … I was sure he was going to appeal.”
Many people have united in skepticism that Epstein could have taken his own life a mere month after being arrested on sex trafficking charges.
In particular, a number of people have pointed to Epstein’s connections to powerful individuals, some of whom may have been implicated in illicit activities with him and would have wanted to keep him quiet.
Maxwell said earlier that one of her fellow inmates was offered money to murder her and schemed to “strangle her in her sleep,” according to court papers filed last year by her lawyers ahead of her sentencing.
“This incident reflects the brutal reality that there are numerous prison inmates who would not hesitate to kill Ms. Maxwell—whether for money, fame, or simple ‘street cred,’” the lawyers wrote in the filing, suggesting someone may have wanted Maxwell dead badly enough to pay for it.
Maxwell was sentenced on June 28, 2022, to 20 years in prison for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.
She is serving time at Florida’s low-security FCI Tallahassee prison.
(L): Ghislaine Maxwell attends a symposium in New York City in a 2013 file photograph. (Laura Cavanaugh/Getty Images); (R): Jeffrey Epstein in a 2013 mugshot in Florida. (Florida Department of Law Enforcement via Getty Images) Questions Unanswered
Questions have swirled about the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death since he was found dead on Aug. 10, 2019, in his cell with a bedsheet around his neck.
Epstein’s death sparked outrage that such a high-profile prisoner could have gone unmonitored at a facility where such infamous inmates like Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff came and went without incident.
Epstein had been placed on suicide watch about a month before his death after he was found on his cell floor on July 23 with bruises on his neck. He was later taken off suicide watch and placed in a high-security housing unit where he was less closely monitored but still supposed to be checked on every half hour.
Two jail guards who were supposed to monitor Epstein were accused by prosecutors of falling asleep and surfing the internet that night rather than checking on him every 30 minutes.
The pair, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, would later admit they “willfully and knowingly” falsified records to make it seem they were following the correct check-in protocols with regard to Epstein.
In January 2022, the criminal case against Noel and Thomas was dropped after they complied with the six-month deferred prosecution agreements they agreed to earlier, which included 100 hours of community service and cooperating with a Justice Department (DOJ) probe into Epstein’s death.
Medical Examiner: ‘The Cause Is Hanging’
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson ruled Epstein’s death a suicide by hanging. She said she made the determination “after careful review of all investigative information, including complete autopsy findings.”
Not long after Sampson ruled Epstein’s death a suicide, Epstein’s brother hired forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who was in the room for Epstein’s autopsy, to review the evidence.
Baden, who was New York City’s chief medical examiner in the 1970s, said at the time that the evidence suggested Epstein may have been murdered. He said that Epstein’s injuries were more consistent with those found in homicide victims and that he hadn’t seen the type of neck bone injuries that Epstein had in any suicides that he had investigated. Baden added, however, that his observations were not conclusive.
Some experts have said that, while uncommon, injuries to the hyoid bone that Epstein had do sometimes occur in suicidal hangings, more so in older people. Epstein was 66 at the time of his death.
After Baden issued his opinion, Sampson responded by saying that no conclusions should be drawn from a single piece of evidence or unusual injury.
“I stand firmly behind our determination of the cause and manner of death for Mr. Epstein,” she said in October 2019. “The cause is hanging, the manner is suicide.”
‘Serious Irregularities’
Then-Attorney General William Barr said at the time that there were “serious irregularities” at the Manhattan jail where Epstein died, vowing that the DOJ’s inspector general would “get to the bottom of what happened” and that there “will be accountability.” That investigation continues and no report has been released yet.
Following Barr’s remarks, then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and then-ranking member Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) sent a letter to the Bureau of Prisons asking 23 questions about Epstein’s death. In the letter, they cited deficiencies in inmate protocol and requested information about the Bureau of Prisons’ suicide prevention policies, resources, and staffing.
A subsequent report (pdf) prepared by the Bureau of Prisons National Suicide Prevention Coordinator, Psychology Services Branch, Central Office, put forward a timeline of events and circumstances leading up to Epstein’s death.
The report stated that a facilities assistant described Epstein as “distraught, sad, and a little confused” when he arrived at the correctional facility on July 6, 2019.
The assistant was cited in the report as saying that, even though Epstein said he felt fine, she wasn’t convinced and wrote that he seemed “dazed and withdrawn” and advised in an email that someone from Psychology should talk to him to “just be on the safe side and prevent any suicidal thoughts.”
Following a court proceeding on July 8, Epstein denied having any suicidal thoughts but due to risk factors was put on psychological observation, a protocol that is less restrictive than suicide watch. The report says he was taken off psychological observation several days later.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 18:20 - Kremlin Reacts To Doomsday Clock Moving Closer To Midnight
Kremlin Reacts To Doomsday Clock Moving Closer To Midnight
The Kremlin has weighed in on The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moving the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight. As we reported earlier, the body of scientists and intellectuals which have maintained the clock since 1947 on Tuesday moved it to 90 seconds till midnight, which is the closest it’s been in history. It seeks to gauge how close the world stands to nuclear war and total annihilation.
The Bulletin explained that the clock moving closer is mostly due to escalation among world powers in Ukraine. The Russian government on Wednesday called it “really alarming” – with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirming that de-escalation does not at all seem to be on the horizon, and that the question of ceasefire talks is a thing of the past.
File image via EuroNews/Canva “On the whole, the situation is really alarming,” Peskov said, explaining that at this point nations must be “particularly attentive, vigilant and responsive” – and willing to take appropriate measures to reduce risk of nuclear war.
The Tuesday change put the clock closer by 10 seconds compared to the year before. As The Hill reviews: “The previous record of 100 seconds to midnight was set in 2020. In the clock’s history, midnight has been as far as 17 minutes away, which happened in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.”
“Midnight has typically been close to 10 or more minutes away throughout much of the clock’s history, even during the Cold War, but it has been no more than a few minutes away in modern times.”
The bipartisan DC consensus in favor of Biden’s war escalation in Ukraine blissfully marches on, as usual, despite graver warnings of escalation. The more escalation there is, the less debate.
The key question remains: how are the lives of Americans improved from this war?👇 https://t.co/Ll27tIsogh
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 25, 2023
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With the US and Germany on Wednesday confirming that they are sending heavy battle tanks in a fresh major escalation which a mere months ago had not been a realistic consideration, journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that we are in a situation of “more escalation” and “less debate”.
He poses the question of the US public broadly – “The key question remains: how are the lives of Americans improved from this war?”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 18:00 - House Committee Chair Calls For Probe Into '$60 Billion' In Fake COVID-19 Unemployment Claims
House Committee Chair Calls For Probe Into ‘$60 Billion’ In Fake COVID-19 Unemployment Claims
Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) is calling for an investigation into the “historic theft of taxpayer dollars from COVID-era unemployment programs” after a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that as much as $60 billion may have been spent on fraudulent claims for unemployment insurance during the pandemic.
People line up outside Kentucky Career Center prior to its opening to find assistance with their unemployment claims in Frankfort, Kentucky, on June 18, 2020. (Bryan Woolston/Reuters) The report, released on Jan. 23, said that the Department of Labor (DOL) stated that about $878 billion in total unemployment benefits were paid from April 2020 through September 2022.
GAO said that at least $4.3 billion in unemployment insurance (UI) fraud has been formally confirmed by state workforce agencies, while at least $45 billion in payments have been flagged for potential fraud by the DOL’s Office of Inspector General.
The federal government started an unemployment aid program in March 2020. GAO added that it’s difficult to know for sure the extent of fraud in unemployment insurance programs across the system during the pandemic.
For example, it noted that the Labor Department, based on states’ reviews of samples of claims, estimates that as much as $8.5 billion was spent on fraudulent UI claims in 2021.
According to GAO, if that level were to be extrapolated to total spending across all UI programs during the wider pandemic period, it would suggest more than $60 billion in fraudulent payments were made.
People who lost their jobs wait in line to file for unemployment at an Arkansas Workforce Center in Fayetteville, Ark., on April 6, 2020. (Nick Oxford/Reuters) ‘Hard-Earned Tax Dollars Lost to Criminal Activity, Fraud’
The report notes, however, that the figure is an estimate, subject to limitations regarding its validity and accuracy, and should be “interpreted with caution” while the actual amount is unclear.
In a statement on Monday, Smith said that the GAO report “only scratches the surface of what is publicly known about the unprecedented scope, size, and severity of the fraud.”
“This report proves what Republicans have already been saying. American families, whose wages have eroded under President [Joe] Biden’s inflation crisis, have watched as hundreds of billions of their hard-earned tax dollars were lost to criminal activity and fraud because Democrats refused to acknowledge the problem and repeatedly rejected Republican efforts to put basic safeguards in place to protect against this activity,” Smith said.
“Congressional Democrats walked away from their oversight responsibilities of getting to the bottom of how this happened, what they could do to prevent it, and even how much has fully been lost, leaving criminals to profit off the backs of taxpayers. Republicans are committed to investigating fraud and conducting rigorous oversight on behalf of working families,” he added.
The Missouri lawmaker also pointed to testimony (pdf) by DOL Inspector General Larry D. Turner in March last year stating that at least $163 billion in pandemic UI benefits could have been “paid improperly, with a significant portion attributable to fraud.”
According to The Washington Post, the government has so far recovered just over $4 billion of that, which amounts to just 2.4 percent of the wrongful payments.
In this photo illustration, a person files an application for unemployment benefits in Arlington, Va., on April 16, 2020. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images) Actual Unemployment Fraud Figure Could Be Much Higher
Smith also pointed to estimates by experts including Blake Hall, CEO of ID.me, who told Axios in 2021 that as much as $400 billion went on fraudulent unemployment claims. Half of all unemployment spending may have been stolen, Hall told the publication.
A statement issued in September 2022 by the DOL inspector general said that more than 190,000 investigations relating to UI fraud have been opened since the start of the pandemic, but so far just over 1,000 individuals have been charged.
While GAO noted in its report that the DOL has taken steps to address fraudulent jobless benefits, such as issuing guidance, providing funding to states, and deploying teams to recommend improvements to state unemployment insurance programs, the watchdog noted that as of December 2022, the department has “not yet developed an antifraud strategy based on leading practices in GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework.”
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 17:40 - Facebook Reinstates Trump After Two Years With "New Guardrails In Place"
Facebook Reinstates Trump After Two Years With “New Guardrails In Place”
A little more than a week after the Trump campaign urged Facebook parent Meta to lift the ban on the former president, the social media giant has agreed to reinstate him on both Facebook and Instagram after a two-year ban, according to Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs.
“We’ve always believed that Americans should be able to hear from the people who want to lead the country,” Clegg said.
“We don’t want to stand in the way of that.”
As Meta wrote in a lengthy blog post:
“Social media is rooted in the belief that open debate and the free flow of ideas are important values, especially at a time when they are under threat in many places around the world. As a general rule, we don’t want to get in the way of open, public and democratic debate on Meta’s platforms — especially in the context of elections in democratic societies like the United States.
The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box. But that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of real world harm — a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse — we act.
…
We know that any decision we make on this issue will be fiercely criticized. Reasonable people will disagree over whether it is the right decision. But a decision had to be made, so we have tried to make it as best we can in a way that is consistent with our values and the process we established in response to the Oversight Board’s guidance.”
Interestingly, Meta’s Oversight Board wrote its own blog post distancing itself from the decision:
Today’s decision by Meta is a pivotal moment in the debate over the best way to handle harmful content posted by politicians on social media.
Today’s decision to reinstate Mr. Trump on Meta’s platforms sat with Meta alone — the Board did not have a role in the decision.
As Nick Clegg noted, “I am the the ultimate decision maker on these kinds of issues in the company.”
Cue the outrage mob explaining how this will end democracy as we know it…
Trump incited an insurrection. And tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
He’s shown no remorse. No contrition.
Giving him back access to a social media platform to spread his lies and demagoguery is dangerous.@facebook caved, giving him a platform to do more harm.
— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 25, 2023
Despite all the fearmongering, Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, says “this is the right call”…
“…not because the former president has any right to be on the platform but because the public has an interest in hearing directly from candidates for political office. There are narrow circumstances in which social media platforms really have no choice but to take down political leaders’ posts – which is why we endorsed Meta’s decision to suspend Trump’s account when he used it to encourage violence. In most circumstances, though, it’s better if the major social media platforms err on the side of leaving speech up, even if the speech is offensive or false, so that it can be addressed by other users and other institutions.”
Additionally, Katie Fallow, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, points out that “big tech platforms already exercise a huge amount of power over public discourse online. In general, we don’t want them also deciding which political leaders we hear from and which ones we don’t.”
Former President Trump has responded in his usual under-stated manner:
Trump was banned from the platform shortly after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
The reinstatement of Trump’s accounts will allow him to run ads via his Facebook and Instagram pages, which have 34 million and 23 million followers, respectively.
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Trump relied heavily on Facebook ads in previous election cycles for fundraising and list-building.
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Under Elon Musk, Twitter has also reinstated Trump’s account, but he has not posted yet, continuing to rely on his account at Truth Social instead. -Axios
That said, Clegg warned that “We just do not want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election, much as he sought to discredit the 2020 election.”
Trump’s accounts will not be reinstated immediately, as Meta engineers will need time to build in nanny capabilities to restrict certain posts or ad capabilities in the future, if needed.
The former president will be subject to new policies governing accounts by public figures during periods of civil unrest – under which Meta can restrict the account for between one month and two years.
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More serious violations will merit either a six or 12-month restriction from creating content or a full account restriction for two years, if severe.
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Trump will also be subject to a crisis policy protocol, introduced by Meta in August, that will consider both on and off-platform risks of imminent harm to evaluating whether the actions or speech of any public figures requires sanctioning.
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“If he now posts further violating content, that content will be removed, of course, and he could be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,” Clegg said. -Axios
Interestingly, Trump has an exclusivity deal with his social media company, Truth Social – which requires him to “first channel any and all social media communications” to Truth for at least six hours before cross-posting the content to other platforms, according to SEC filings. That agreement expires in June, according to Rolling Stone, which notes that it would be right around when Republican primary season begins to heat up.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/25/2023 – 17:21 -
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