- Suspending The Constitution: Police State Uses Crises To Expand Its Lockdown Powers
Suspending The Constitution: Police State Uses Crises To Expand Its Lockdown Powers
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
You can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured.
This coronavirus pandemic is no exception.
Not only are the federal and state governments unraveling the constitutional fabric of the nation with lockdown mandates that are sending the economy into a tailspin and wreaking havoc with our liberties, but they are also rendering the citizenry fully dependent on the government for financial handouts, medical intervention, protection and sustenance.
Unless we find some way to rein in the government’s power grabs, the fall-out will be epic.
Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has coalesced into this present moment.
The government’s shameless exploitation of past national emergencies for its own nefarious purposes pales in comparison to what is presently unfolding.
It’s downright Machiavellian.
Deploying the same strategy it used with 9/11 to acquire greater powers under the USA Patriot Act, the police state—a.k.a. the shadow government, a.k.a. the Deep State—has been anticipating this moment for years, quietly assembling a wish list of lockdown powers that could be trotted out and approved at a moment’s notice.
It should surprise no one, then, that the Trump Administration has asked Congress to allow it to suspend parts of the Constitution whenever it deems it necessary during this coronavirus pandemic and “other” emergencies.
It’s that “other” emergencies part that should particularly give you pause, if not spur you to immediate action (by action, I mean a loud and vocal, apolitical, nonpartisan outcry and sustained, apolitical, nonpartisan resistance).
In fact, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been quietly trotting out and testing a long laundry list of terrifying powers that override the Constitution.
We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, “stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,” reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die…
You’re getting the picture now, right?
These are powers the police state would desperately like to make permanent.
Specifically, the DOJ wants to be able to indefinitely detain American citizens without trial. The DOJ also wants to be able to pause court proceedings and suspend the statute of limitations on criminal and civil cases.
Both signify a clear violation of every right espoused in the Constitution, including habeas corpus.
Habeas corpus, a fundamental tenet of English common law that guards against arbitrary and lawless state action, does not appear anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Its importance was such that it was enshrined in the Constitution itself. And it is of such magnitude that all other rights, including those in the Bill of Rights, are dependent upon it. Without habeas corpus, the significance of all other rights crumbles.
The right of habeas corpus was important to the Framers of the Constitution because they knew from personal experience what it was like to be labeled enemy combatants, imprisoned indefinitely and not given the opportunity to appear before a neutral judge. Believing that such arbitrary imprisonment is “in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instrument of tyranny,” the Founders were all the more determined to protect Americans from such government abuses.
Translated as “you should have the body,” habeas corpus is a legal action, or writ, by which those imprisoned unlawfully can seek relief from their imprisonment. Derived from English common law, habeas corpus first appeared in the Magna Carta of 1215 and is the oldest human right in the history of English-speaking civilization. The doctrine of habeas corpus stems from the requirement that a government must either charge a person or let him go free.
While serving as President, Thomas Jefferson addressed the essential necessity of habeas corpus. In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1801, Jefferson said, “I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough.” But, said Jefferson, our nation was “the world’s best hope” and, because of our strong commitment to democracy, “the strongest government on earth.” Jefferson said that the sum of this basic belief was found in the “freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.”
Throughout the twentieth century, the importance of the right of habeas corpus has repeatedly been confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet 200-plus years after America’s founders risked their lives to secure their freedoms, we find ourselves right back where we started, with a government determined to strip us of every vestige of our freedoms.
The DOJ’s latest request to Congress is merely a signal that the police state is ready to step out of the shadows, with the current national emergency being a convenient cover for their dastardly deeds.
Bear in mind, however, that these powers the Trump Administration, acting on orders from the police state, are officially asking Congress to recognize and authorize barely scratch the surface of the far-reaching powers the government has already unilaterally claimed for itself.
Unofficially, the police state has been riding roughshod over the rule of law for years now without any pretense of being reined in or restricted in its power grabs by Congress, the courts or the citizenry.
As David C. Unger, observes in The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs:
“For seven decades we have been yielding our most basic liberties to a secretive, unaccountable emergency state – a vast but increasingly misdirected complex of national security institutions, reflexes, and beliefs that so define our present world that we forget that there was ever a different America. … Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”
This rise of an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security is all happening according to schedule.
The civil unrest, the national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters,” the government’s reliance on the armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems, the implicit declaration of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security: the powers-that-be have been planning and preparing for such a crisis for years now, not just with active shooter drills and lockdowns and checkpoints and heightened danger alerts, but with a sensory overload of militarized, battlefield images—in video games, in movies, on the news—that acclimate us to life in a police state.
Whether or not this particular crisis is of the government’s own making is not the point: to those for whom power and profit are everything, the end always justifies the means.
The seeds of this present madness were sown several decades ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency, which is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.“
Comprising the country’s Continuity of Government (COG) plan, these directives (National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20), which do not need congressional approval, provide a skeletal outline of the actions the president will take in the event of a “national emergency.”
Mind you, that national emergency can take any form, can be manipulated for any purpose and can be used to justify any end goal—all on the say so of the president.
Just what sort of actions the president will take once he declares a national emergency can barely be discerned from the barebones directives. However, one thing is clear: in the event of a national emergency, the president will become a dictator because while the COG directives ensure the continuity of executive branch functions, they do not provide for repopulating or reconvening Congress or the Supreme Court.
Thus, a debilitating attack would give unchecked executive, legislative and judicial power to the executive branch and its unelected minions. The country would then be subjected to martial law by default, and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights would be suspended.
Originally devised as a plan for quickly restoring constitutional government, the COG concept arose during the Cold War. The fear was that a nuclear strike would paralyze the federal government.
These concerns continued into the 1980s.
Under President Ronald Reagan, an elaborate plan was created in which three teams consisting of a cabinet member, an executive chief of staff and military and intelligence officials would practice evacuating and directing a counter nuclear strike against the Soviet Union from a variety of high-tech, mobile command vehicles. If the president and vice president were both killed, one of these teams would take control, with the ranking cabinet official serving as president.
Among those Reagan handpicked to advise an inexperienced and potentially incompetent successor in a time of crisis were Congressman Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, then a business executive with G. D. Searle & Co. At least once a year during the 1980s, Cheney and Rumsfeld vanished on top-secret training missions, where each of the teams practiced evacuating and directing a counter nuclear strike against Russia.
This all changed after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that the assumptions that drove COG planning during the Cold War no longer applied: there would be no warning against a so-called “terrorist” attack. Thus, instead of relying on part-time bureaucrats and evacuation schematics, the Bush administration permanently appointed executive officials, stationed outside the capital, to run a shadow government.
The U.S. military has reportedly already been given standby orders under COG for this present coronavirus pandemic.
The plans for the shadow government administered by those who run the Deep State are more elaborate than many realize. Massive underground bunkers the size of small cities are sprinkled throughout the country for the government elite to escape to in the event of a national emergency. Mount Weather, near Bluemont, Va., is one of a number of such facilities. Built into the side of a mountain, this bunker contains, among other things, a hospital, crematorium, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, reservoirs of drinking and cooling water, an emergency power plant and a radio/television studio.
There is also an Office of the Presidency at Mount Weather, which regularly receives top-secret national security information from all the federal departments and agencies. This facility was largely unknown to everyone, including Congress, until it came to light in the mid-1970s. Military personnel connected to the bunker have refused to reveal any information about it, even before congressional committees. In fact, Congress has no oversight, budgetary or otherwise, on Mount Weather, and the specifics of the facility remain top-secret.
What is the bottom line here?
We are, for all intents and purposes, one crisis away from having a full-fledged authoritarian state emerge from the shadows, at which time democratic government will be dissolved and the country will be ruled by an unelected bureaucracy.
This is exactly the kind of mischief that Thomas Jefferson warned against when he cautioned, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Thus far, we have at least pretended that the government abides by the Constitution.
Those who wrote our Constitution sought to ensure our freedoms by creating a document that protects our God-given rights at all times, even when we are engaged in war, whether that is a so-called war on terrorism, a so-called war on drugs, a so-called war on illegal immigration, or a so-called war on disease.
The attempts by each successive presidential administration to rule by fiat merely plays into the hands of those who would distort the government’s system of checks and balances and its constitutional separation of powers beyond all recognition.
Remember, these powers do not expire at the end of a president’s term. They remain on the books, just waiting to be used or abused by the next political demagogue.
So, too, every action taken by Trump and his predecessors to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the executive branch of government has made us that much more vulnerable to those who would abuse those powers in the future.
Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) have claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill.
The Trump Administration’s willingness to circumvent the Constitution by leaning heavily on the president’s so-called emergency powers constitutes a gross perversion of what limited power the Constitution affords the executive branch.
The powers amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whomever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability.
As law professor William P. Marshall explains, “every extraordinary use of power by one President expands the availability of executive branch power for use by future Presidents.” Moreover, it doesn’t even matter whether other presidents have chosen not to take advantage of any particular power, because “it is a President’s action in using power, rather than forsaking its use, that has the precedential significance.”
In other words, each successive president continues to add to his office’s list of extraordinary orders and directives, expanding the reach and power of the presidency and granting him- or herself near dictatorial powers.
This abuse of presidential powers has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.
We no longer have a system of checks and balances.
“The system of checks and balances that the Framers envisioned now lacks effective checks and is no longer in balance,” concludes Marshall.
“The implications of this are serious. The Framers designed a system of separation of powers to combat government excess and abuse and to curb incompetence. They also believed that, in the absence of an effective separation-of-powers structure, such ills would inevitably follow. Unfortunately, however, power once taken is not easily surrendered.”
All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush and now Trump—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects (including American citizens) indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to wage wars without congressional authorization, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to establish a standing army on American soil, to operate a shadow government, to declare national emergencies for any manipulated reason, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—have become a permanent part of the president’s toolbox of terror.
These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to operate above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.
Think on this: the presidential election is right around the corner.
Suddenly, the improbable possibility of any incumbent president attempting to extend the police state’s stranglehold on power by using current events to justify postponing or doing away with an election—forfeiting the people’s rights to govern altogether—and establishing a totalitarian regime seems less far-fetched than it did even a few years ago.
The emergency state is now out in the open for all to see. Unfortunately, “we the people” refuse to see what’s before us. Most Americans, fearful and easily controlled, would sooner rouse themselves to fight for that last roll of toilet paper than they would their own freedoms.
This is how freedom dies.
We erect our own prison walls, and as our rights dwindle away, we forge our own chains of servitude to the police state.
Be warned, however: once you surrender your freedoms to the government—no matter how compelling the reason might be for doing so—you can never get them back.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, no government willingly relinquishes power.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
The America metamorphosing before our eyes is almost unrecognizable from the country I grew up in, and that’s not just tragic—it’s downright terrifying.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 03/28/2020 – 00:05 - Social-Distancing Getting You Down? Sex-Robot Firm Launches "Antibacterial" Dolls
Social-Distancing Getting You Down? Sex-Robot Firm Launches "Antibacterial" Dolls
Coronavirus is already transforming society as we know it.
Days ago, we noted how one strip club in Las Vegas opened up a drive-thru window for patrons to watch dancers, all because of strict social distancing measures implemented by the federal and state government.
As Americans are in mass quarantine and ordered to avoid social gatherings and other people, the good old days of logging into Tinder, Bumble, and or Grindr could be over for now – due mostly because, having sex with strangers could result in a contraction of the virus.
This is why the rise of the sex doll industry could be imminent as millions have been forced by the government to practice social distancing to flatten the curve.
On Thursday, sex robot company RealDoll, also known as Abyss, assured people that its sex dolls are antibacterial and are safe for use during a pandemic, reported Daily Star.
“Self-isolating doesn’t have to be the worst!” the company’s Instagram account said. “All RealDolls are made from Platinum Grade Silicone and are naturally antibacterial and nonporous!”
RealDoll is preparing to unveil an entire line of futuristic AI-driven sex dolls onto the market this year. Last month it released a video of its AI-driven sex dolls conveying “human expression” and holding conversations. The dolls were heard saying: “We are AI-driven robotic dolls; We are here to become your perfect companion.”
The company’s launch of AI-driven sex dolls during a pandemic could be a hit with consumers, considering tens of millions of people are likely to change their sex life habits during this health crisis.
And while we assume these dolls are expensive, and if you cannot afford a robot sex doll of your own, there’s a sex doll brothel in Toronto that offers the “world’s most beautiful silicone ladies.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 23:45 - 13 Reasons To Fear The Coming COVID World Order
13 Reasons To Fear The Coming COVID World Order
Authored by Andrew Korybko via One World Press,
COVID-19 has fundamentally changed life as we know it, and it’s more than likely that our future will be a dystopian one given how various governments have already responded to this viral outbreak.
The skeptics among us are fearful that this whole pandemic is overblown and being exploited as a smokescreen for stealing our freedoms, and while their attitude towards this disease is questionable (and quite possibly dangerous), their suspicion about a government takeover of society is warranted.
Never before have governments had so much power over the people, though in these emergency conditions, that might not be an entirely bad thing for the time being seeing as how it could very well be necessary for our survival.
The problem, however, is that these newly assumed powers probably won’t be voluntarily surrendered after this epidemic ends, which is why many people are so concerned. They’re convinced that we’ve suddenly entered a period of global dictatorship, and it’s difficult to argue with them.
So much else is also changing as well, and it’s hard to keep up with the “COVID World Order” that’s been thrust upon us, but what follows is an attempt to briefly describe everything that’s already taken place and predict what will probably follow:
1. DE-FACTO MARTIAL LAW…
There’s no other way to describe both the “recommended” and mandatory quarantines that many in the world are experiencing than to call them what they are, a state of de-facto martial law, which isn’t being formally declared in order to not provoke any more panic than there already is.
2. …IS THE “NEW NORMAL”
Now that de-facto martial law of a seemingly indefinite period has been accepted by the people (whether willingly or begrudgingly), it’ll probably become the “new normal” and be implemented countless times in the future, be it as an “overabundance of caution” in the event of another outbreak or under any other pretext.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP WILL INTENSIFY
“Big Brother” is already here, but he’s going to become a bigger bully than ever before by intensifying his censorship of people’s social media posts on the basis that they’re “socially irresponsible” (e.g. questioning the seriousness of this disease), after which the “politically incorrect” net will widen to encompass other topics too.
4. TRAVEL WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN
Domestic and international travel will never be the same again, with internal restrictions on movement likely becoming commonplace and most foreign guests being required to self-quarantine for a period of time except in special circumstances, thus all but killing the global tourism industry.
5. BORDER CONTROL WILL BECOME MORE ROBUST
Gone are the days of so-called “open borders” where anyone can freely move between jurisdictions at will (whether legally or otherwise), with more stringent controls being put into place to protect the local population from outsiders (including their own compatriots from elsewhere in the country).
6. MANDATORY VACCINES ARE COMING
For whatever one thinks about vaccines, there’s probably no way to stop them from becoming mandatory after the COVID-19 pandemic, with it being predicted that people will have to prove that they’ve been vaccinated in order to do anything at all such as study, work, travel, and receive government benefits.
7. REMOTE LEARNING & WORKING WILL INCREASE
With so many people stuck at home and unable to leave except to purchase essential goods in most cases, it’s predictable that remote learning and working (the latter which will of course be for those whose jobs allow them to do so) will pick up in the coming future as society gets used to this way of doing things.
8. 5G IS INEVITABLE
The massive surge of online traffic from folks who are learning, working, or simply entertaining themselves online will necessitate the rapid roll-out of 5G technology despite what some people suspect are its serious health concerns.
9. SOCIETY DEPENDS ON JUST A FEW JOBS TO FUNCTION
The “new normal” of de-facto martial law has made many people realize that society really just depends on a few jobs in order to continue functioning at the bare minimum, with these being techies, grocery store and pharmacy employees, bank clerks, healthcare professionals, food service workers, farmers, and truckers.
10. NATIONALIZATION MIGHT BE IMMINENT
For better or for worse, governments across the world might go on a nationalization spree in order to take control of what they regard as “essential industries” (though whether some of them truly are or not is another story), which could lead to the informal imposition of either socialist or fascist economic models.
11. “UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME”
Given the scale and scope of the global economic collapse that was catalyzed by the world’s uncoordinated response to COVID-19, it’s foreseeable that governments will unveil what’s been described as a “universal basic income” in order to ensure that their people can continue to at least purchase basic goods and services.
12. MANDATORY MEDICAL TRAINING IN EXCHANGE FOR GOVERNMENT BENEFITS
Medical training is arguably more important than military service nowadays, so the state will probably make it mandatory in schools from here on out and for anyone who wants to receive government benefits, thereby enabling the government to draft them in the future whenever there’s a dearth of healthcare professionals.
13. SAY GOODBYE TO CASH
The cashless society is coming, whether justified by the (real, false, or exaggerated) fear that lethal viruses can be spread by paper currency or as the government’s preferred method of dispersing its “universal basic income”, meaning that the authorities can cut folks off from their funds at any time that they want to.
* * *
There’s no guarantee that everything that was described above will come to pass, but there’s certainly a high likelihood that at least some of it will transpire with time, though it’ll remain to be seen how sustainable these socio-economic and political changes are and whether or not they can ever be reversed.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 23:25 - Tokyo On Cusp Of Explosive COVID-19 Outbreak: Governor
Tokyo On Cusp Of Explosive COVID-19 Outbreak: Governor
Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike urged citizens to halt all non-essential outings as she warned that the city is at grave risk if it cannot prevent an explosive spread of COVID-19, according to NHK.
Koike suggested that people stop visiting the iconic cherry blossoms until next year, as the current pace of roughly 40 new infections for three straight days has reaffirmed that the nation’s capital is on the brink of a surge in cases.
Meanwhile, residents are already beginning to panic, as empty store shelves have begun to make an appearance.
The Governor has called on residents to share a sense of crisis and act responsibly – noting that Tokyo will work with neighboring prefectures to halt the spread of the disease, according to NHK.
The governor said “non-essential outings” refers to outings that can be delayed. They exclude hospital visits by people with chronic ailments and shopping at supermarkets or convenience stores to buy necessities.
She asked residents to make their own decisions on whether they must go out.
Many people gather at parks and other outdoor locations to enjoy cherry-blossom viewing around this time of year. –NHK
Japan has largely avoided the impact of COVID-19 felt by other nations, with just under 1,400 cases and 47 deaths as of this writing.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 23:05 - This Pandemic Is Exposing The Futility Of The National Security State
This Pandemic Is Exposing The Futility Of The National Security State
Authored by Andrew Bacevich via TomDispatch.com,
Americans are facing “A Spring Unlike Any Before.” So warned a front-page headline in the March 13th New York Times.
That headline, however hyperbolic, was all too apt. The coming of spring has always promised relief from the discomforts of winter. Yet, far too often, it also brings its own calamities and afflictions.
According to the poet T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruelest month.” Yet while April has certainly delivered its share of cataclysms, March and May haven’t lagged far behind. In fact, cruelty has seldom been a respecter of seasons. The infamous influenza epidemic of 1918, frequently cited as a possible analogue to our current crisis, began in the spring of that year, but lasted well into 1919.
That said, something about the coronavirus pandemic does seem to set this particular spring apart. At one level, that something is the collective panic now sweeping virtually the entire country. President Trump’s grotesque ineptitude and tone-deafness have only fed that panic. And in their eagerness to hold Trump himself responsible for the pandemic, as if he were the bat that first transmitted the disease to a human being, his critics magnify further a growing sense of events spinning out of control.
Yet to heap the blame for this crisis on Trump alone (though he certainly deserves plenty of blame) is to miss its deeper significance. Deferred for far too long, Judgment Day may at long last have arrived for the national security state.
ORIGINS OF A COLOSSUS
That state within a state’s origins date from the early days of the Cold War. Its ostensible purpose has been to keep Americans safe and so, by extension, to guarantee our freedoms. From the 1950s through the 1980s, keeping us safe provided a seemingly adequate justification for maintaining a sprawling military establishment along with a panoply of “intelligence” agencies—the CIA, the DIA, the NRO, the NSA—all engaged in secret activities hidden from public view. From time to time, the scope, prerogatives, and actions of that conglomeration of agencies attracted brief critical attention—the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Iran-Contra affair during the presidency of Ronald Reagan being prime examples. Yet at no time did such failures come anywhere close to jeopardizing its existence.
Indeed, even when the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War removed the original justification for its creation, the entire apparatus persisted. With the Soviet Empire gone, Russia in a state of disarray, and communism having lost its appeal as an alternative to democratic capitalism, the managers of the national security state wasted no time in identifying new threats and new missions.
The new threats included autocrats like Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, once deemed valuable American assets, but now, their usefulness gone, classified as dangers to be eliminated. Prominent among the new missions was a sudden urge to repair broken places like the Balkans, Haiti, and Somalia, with American power deployed under the aegis of “humanitarian intervention” and pursuant to a “responsibility to protect.” In this way, in the first decade of the post-Cold War era, the national security state kept itself busy. While the results achieved, to put it politely, were mixed at best, the costs incurred appeared tolerable. In sum, the entire apparatus remained impervious to serious scrutiny.
During that decade, however, both the organs of national security and the American public began taking increased notice of what was called “anti-American terrorism”—and not without reason. In 1993, Islamic fundamentalists detonated a bomb in a parking garage of New York’s World Trade Center. In 1996, terrorists obliterated an apartment building used to house US military personnel in Saudi Arabia. Two years later, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up and, in 2000, suicide bombers nearly sank the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer making a port call in Aden at the tip of the Arabian peninsula. To each of these increasingly brazen attacks, all occurring during the administration of President Bill Clinton, the national security state responded ineffectually.
Then, of course, came September 11, 2001. Orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and carried out by 19 suicidal al-Qaeda operatives, this act of mass murder inflicted incalculable harm on the United States. In its wake, it became common to say that “9/11 changed everything.”
In fact, however, remarkably little changed. Despite its 17 intelligence agencies, the national security state failed utterly to anticipate and thwart that devastating attack on the nation’s political and financial capitals. Yet apart from minor adjustments—primarily expanding surveillance efforts at home and abroad—those outfits mostly kept doing what they had been doing, even as their leaders evaded accountability. After Pearl Harbor, at least, one admiral and one general were fired. After 9/11, no one lost his or her job. At the upper echelons of the national security state, the wagons were circled and a consensus quickly formed: No one had screwed up.
Once President George W. Bush identified an “Axis of Evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea), three nations that had had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, as the primary target for his administration’s “Global War on Terrorism,” it became clear that no wholesale reevaluation of national security policy was going to occur. The Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, along with their sprawling support network of profit-minded contractors, could breathe easy. All of them would get ever more money. That went without saying. Meanwhile, the underlying premise of US policy since the immediate aftermath of World War II—that projecting hard power globally would keep Americans safe—remained sacrosanct.
Viewed from this perspective, the sequence of events that followed was probably overdetermined. In late 2001, US forces invaded Afghanistan, overthrew the Taliban regime, and set out to install a political order more agreeable to Washington. In early 2003, with the mission in Afghanistan still anything but complete, US forces set out to do the same in Iraq. Both of those undertakings have dragged on, in one fashion or another, without coming remotely close to success. Today, the military undertaking launched in 2001 continues, even if it no longer has a name or an agreed-upon purpose.
Nonetheless, at the upper echelons of the national security state, the consensus forged after 9/11 remains firmly in place: No one screws up. In Washington, the conviction that projecting hard power keeps Americans safe likewise remains sacrosanct.
In the nearly two decades since 9/11, willingness to challenge this paradigm has rarely extended beyond non-conforming publications like TomDispatch. Until Donald Trump came along, rare was the ambitious politician of either political party who dared say aloud what Trump himself has repeatedly said—that, as he calls them, the “ridiculous endless wars” launched in response to 9/11 represent the height of folly.
Astonishingly enough, within the political establishment that point has still not sunk in. So, in 2020, as in 2016, the likely Democratic nominee for president will be someone who vigorously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Imagine, if you will, Democrats in 1880 nominating not a former union general (as they did) but a former confederate who, 20 years before, had advocated secession. Back then, some sins were unforgivable. Today, politicians of both parties practice self-absolution and get away with it.
THE REAL THREAT
Note, however, the parallel narrative that has unfolded alongside those post-9/11 wars. Taken seriously, that narrative exposes the utter irrelevance of the national security state as currently constituted. The coronavirus pandemic will doubtless prove to be a significant learning experience. Here is one lesson that Americans cannot afford to overlook.
Presidents now routinely request and Congress routinely appropriates more than a trillion dollars annually to satisfy the national security state’s supposed needs. Even so, Americans today do not feel safe and, to a degree without precedent, they are being denied the exercise of basic everyday freedoms. Judged by this standard, the apparatus created to keep them safe and free has failed. In the face of a pandemic, nature’s version of an act of true terror, that failure, the consequences of which Americans will suffer through for months to come, should be seen as definitive.
But wait, some will object: Don’t we find ourselves in uncharted waters? Is this really the moment to rush to judgment? In fact, judgment is long overdue.
While the menace posed by the coronavirus may differ in scope, it does not differ substantively from the myriad other perils that Americans have endured since the national security state wandered off on its quixotic quest to pacify Afghanistan and Iraq and purge the planet of terrorists. Since 9/11, a partial roster of those perils would include: Hurricane Katrina (2005), Hurricane Sandy (2012), Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria (2017), and massive wildfires that have devastated vast stretches of the West Coast on virtually an annual basis. The cumulative cost of such events exceeds a half-trillion dollars. Together, they have taken the lives of several thousand more people than were lost in the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Earlier generations might have written all of these off as acts of God. Today, we know better. As with blaming Trump, blaming God won’t do. Human activities, ranging from the hubristic reengineering of rivers like the Mississippi to the effects of climate change stemming from the use of fossil fuels, have substantially exacerbated such “natural” catastrophes.
And unlike faraway autocrats or terrorist organizations, such phenomena, from extreme-weather events to pandemics, directly and immediately threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people. Don’t tell the Central Intelligence Agency or the Joint Chiefs of Staff but the principal threats to our collective wellbeing are right here where we live.
Apart from modest belated efforts at mitigation, the existing national security state is about as pertinent to addressing such threats as President Trump’s cheery expectations that the coronavirus will simply evaporate once warmer weather appears. Terror has indeed arrived on our shores and it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or ISIS or Iranian-backed militias. Americans are terrorized because it has now become apparent that our government, whether out of negligence or stupidity, has left them exposed to dangers that truly put life and liberty at risk. As it happens, all these years in which the national security state has been preoccupied with projecting hard power abroad have left us naked and vulnerable right here at home.
Protecting Americans where they live ought to be the national security priority of our time. The existing national security state is incapable of fulfilling that imperative, while its leaders, fixated on waging distant wars, have yet to even accept that they have a responsibility to do so.
Worst of all, even in this election year, no one on the national political scene appears to recognize the danger now fully at hand.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 22:45 - How Governments Are Deploying Big Data To Enforce COVID-19 Quarantines
How Governments Are Deploying Big Data To Enforce COVID-19 Quarantines
This week a technology startup called Unacast launched a new app called “Social Distancing Scoreboard,” which tracks the GPS location of smartphones and grades geographical regions, such as a town, county, and or even a state, on how well residents in those areas are abiding by the government-enforced social distancing rules. The app creates an index, ranked from A to F, for whether people are staying home or not.
Comparing the nation’s mass movements between February 28 to March 23 – virus cases started to rise and local governments across the country began to implement “shelter in place” public health orders, which by mid-month, changes in the average mobility for Americans started to slope downwards. As of March 23, the app ranked the US with a “C,” detailing how many people in the US are ignoring calls by the federal and state governments to stay home amid community spreading.
As of March 23, the top five states where citizens were practicing the best social distancing were District of Colombia, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, and Alaska. The bottom five states were Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
On a state and county level, Maryland earned a “B” with much of its counties surrounding Washington, DC, and central counties receiving good marks on Monday as many stayed home. However, in Western Maryland, it was life as usual as many seemingly did not care about the virus crisis.
Unacast is just another example of how technology is being deployed as mass surveillance tools to combat the virus.
Several other examples of companies and governments extracting data from citizens for surveillance purposes to support quarantines have been though monitoring social media posts and facial recognition databases.
Ghost Data, a big data analysis firm, collected half a million Instagram posts in March, mainly from hard-hit virus regions in Italy that are in lockdown. The company was able to run facial recognition software on all images to identify people who were violating the country’s quarantine orders.
Another technology company that has joined the effort to support big governments in their quest to enforce full lockdowns with high-tech tools is telecommunications firm Vodafone. The company is giving European governments heat maps of location data, to track mass gatherings.
The World Health Organization has widely supported the actions by governments to tap technology companies to unleash mass surveillance programs to fight the virus. Monitoring the populace through invasive technology tools will erode whatever freedoms people of the West have left and risk ushering in a more permeant dystopian surveillance system like China’s.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 22:25 - All The Craziest Things About America Are Being Highlighted By This Virus
All The Craziest Things About America Are Being Highlighted By This Virus
Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,
“Corona is a black light and America is a cum-stained hotel room,” comedian Megan Amram colorfully tweeted a couple of weeks ago. Her observation has only grown more accurate since.
The corporate cronyism of America’s political system has been highlighted with a massive kleptocratic multitrillion-dollar corporate bailout of which actual Americans are only receiving a tiny fraction. Instead of putting that money toward paying people a living wage to stay home during a global pandemic, the overwhelming majority of the money is going to corporations while actual human beings receive a paltry $1,200 (which they won’t even be getting until May at the earliest) at a time of record-smashing unemployment.
America’s capitalism worship has been highlighted with Wall Street Journal headline “Dow Soars More Than 11% In Biggest One-Day Jump Since 1933” running at the exact same time as “Record Rise in Unemployment Claims Halts Historic Run of Job Growth — More than 3 million workers file for jobless benefits as coronavirus hits the economy”. Stocks are booming, Amazon is surging, and mountains of wealth are being transferred to sprawling megacorporations, while actual human beings are terrified of what the future holds.
America’s joke of a healthcare system is being highlighted as uninsured COVID-19 patients are racking up $35,000 medical bills and even insured COVID-19 patients are looking at out-of-pocket expenses in excess of $1,300. Combine this with the millions of Americans getting thrown off of employer-provided health insurance and you’re looking at a huge number of people who will avoid getting tested and avoid treatment as much as possible. Both heads of America’s two-headed one-party system have spent decades forcefully creating this dynamic.
America’s income and wealth inequality is being highlighted in a nation suffering from all of the above problems while most Americans were already unable to afford a mere $1,000 emergency expense. A one-time $1,200 payment to a population already stretched that thin guarantees that millions will be plunged into crushing debt and destitution in a nation with a historically unprecedented billionaire class raking in even more unearned wealth.
The insanity of America’s war machine has been highlighted as awareness grows during a global health emergency that government military spending negatively impacts government healthcare spending and the US has the most bloated military budget on the planet. Now as journalist Max Blumenthal explains this war machine’s escalating hostility toward China is causing Americans to needlessly die of the virus.
America’s fake political system has been highlighted as the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee completely vanished for a week and then returned to deliver an embarrassing string of befuddled interviews upon his return, reminding the nation once again that the Democrats are running an actual, literal dementia patient for the most powerful elected office in the world. Biden will of course be running against an incoherent reality TV star who only last week decided that the virus is indeed a real problem which needs to be seriously addressed, and who now already wants to begin rolling back the inadequate measures his administration implemented far too late. The debates between two men who don’t understand what they’re doing and can’t string a sentence together between them will soon be broadcast around the world for all of civilization to behold.
America’s lying mass media are being highlighted with propagandistic lines that would make Kim Jong Un blush, like The New York Times claiming today that “the American medical system is unsurpassed and its public health system has a reputation as one of the finest in the world”. We can safely expect US media to get even more demented as they expands their hysteria-inducing new cold war propaganda campaign against Russia to China as well.
America’s murderous sanctions machine has been highlighted as the US continues ramping up its economic warfare against Iranian civilians, with thousands already dead and potentially millions to follow due to Tehran’s inability to access necessary equipment, medicine and resources during the pandemic. The Trump administration has not eased the sanctions during the outbreak, and has in fact added to them, because killing Iranian civilians has always been the goal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has gone on record to say that the objective is to make Iranian civilians so miserable and desperate that they overthrow their own government.
So basically everything crazy about America is being amplified to absurd caricatures of its own insanity and highlighted for everyone to see. There’s a lot of ugliness coming out into the light as a result of this virus, which may end up being one of its few perks for everyone. As they say of both viruses and governments, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 22:05 - There Is Now A Treasury Shortage
There Is Now A Treasury Shortage
Earlier this morning we showed something remarkable in the Fed’s ongoing attempt to inject a record amount of liquidity into the financial system: on Friday morning, the Fed held a $500 billion term repo operation and nobody showed up. There were zero submissions of either Treasury, Agency of MBS securities by Dealers who appear to have run out of securities, or are unwilling to pledge to the Fed.
Today’s “zero bid” auction was merely the logical endgame of a recent collapse in Treasury submissions into the Fed’s massive daily term and overnight repo operations, which climaxed two weeks ago, only to plunge as soon as the Fed announced the start of unlimited QE.
With dealers now able to sell unlimited amounts directly to the Fed, and at a premium to carrying values, most of them appear to have picked that option instead of holding on to paper that may be worthless especially with an avalanche of debt coming down the pipeline as the Treasury has to fund its $2 trillion corporate handout package.
“Why on Earth you would tie something up for three months in repo with the Fed buying,” said Ian Burdette, managing director at Academy Securities, who followed up with a very apt observation: “I think people are getting wise to the fact that an absolute tsunami of global sovereign debt issuance is on its way. Best to sell it all to the fed now probably.“
Another hint that the Fed may have overliquified the market, soaking up too much “safe, money-like collateral” such as Treasuries and MBS, and injecting too many reserves (i.e., cash) came from the Fed itself which 30 minutes before the close today announced it would taper “QE-unlimited” and cut the amount of TSY purchases starting April 1 from $75BN to $60BN, while also trimming its MBS QE from $50BN to $40BN.
But the clearest hint yet that there has been a sea change in the US financial system, which has gone from reserve scarce to collateral(Treasury) scarce was in today’s fixed-rate reverse repo operation. As the name suggests, this is the opposite of repo, where instead of borrowing cash from the Fed in exchange for Treasury collateral, while paying a modest borrowing fee, Dealers borrow Treasurys in exchange for cash collateral.
If the presence of a reverse repo is news to some, there’s a reason for that: for much of the past 3 years, when the Fed was draining reserves as part of QT and banks were cash strained, there was an abundance of Treasurys.
Until today, because today’s reverse repo operation exploded to a record $210BN from $138.4BN yesterday, after virtually no usages for years.
This means that after scrambling to park treasuries at the Fed in exchange for cash, Dealers are now doing the opposite, because as a result of the Fed’s historic QE spree in which the Fed has bought $1 trillion in TSYs and MBS in the past two weeks, there is now an unexpected Treasury shortage among the financial community. Either that, or simply nobody wants to park their Treasurys with the Fed if they can sell them.
But don’t worry: if there is indeed a Treasury shortage, it won’t last. With the US Treasury on deck to issue hundreds of billions in debt in the coming weeks, a scarcity of US paper is the last thing the world will have to worry about…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 21:40 - Whither COVID-19? When Will It End And What Will Happen Along The Way
Whither COVID-19? When Will It End And What Will Happen Along The Way
Authored by Phillip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The coronavirus story has generated a number of major subplots…
First is the origin of the virus. Did it occur naturally or was it created in a Chinese, American or Israeli weapons lab? If bioengineered, did it somehow escape or was it deliberately released? As the governments that might have been involved in the process have become very tight lipped and the mainstream media is reluctant to embrace conspiracy theories, we the public may never know the answer.
Second is the nature of the virus itself. There are inevitably skeptics who choose to compare the affliction to a common head cold or normal winter flu and are able to cherry pick so-called experts to support their case. Many Americans are unwilling to submit to a lockdown or isolation and are flaunting their willingness to go out in public and mix freely while others are claiming that the whole thing is a hoax designed to create a panic that will benefit certain constituencies. There are press reports of teenagers going to supermarkets and faking a sneeze or a cough in the produce section to show their indifference to the infection avoidance guidelines now being promoted by the media and government. Some critics have also commented regarding the deaths of hundreds of Italians daily, suggesting that in Italy’s health care system old people were deliberately being allowed to die.
The fact is that when critically ill people die in hospitals it is sometimes attributable to triage. Triage arises when there are only limited resources to treat the sick, as in the case recently in the Italian Lombard city of Bergamo where hospitals were overwhelmed. Doctors must make the decision to treat those who are ill who are likely to survive as a first priority, meaning that others will only receive limited treatment. Italy has roughly the same number of hospital beds as does the United States per capita and it has more ventilators capable of being used to treat the advanced stages of the virus. It also is receiving assistance from both China and Russia on testing supplies and additional ventilators and masks. Italy has conducted far more coronavirus tests than has the U.S. The northern Italian medical services system was up to European standards, better than what prevails in the U.S., but it has been broken by the virus. Spain is heading the same way and there are similar concerns about France.
In spite of all the ideologically driven background clutter, genuinely knowledgeable medical authorities come down overwhelmingly promoting the view that the virus is highly contagious and capable of spreading rapidly, making it a pandemic, and it can be exceptionally lethal to certain demographics, including the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. The way of combatting it also appears to be agreed upon by most genuine experts i.e. that testing must be widespread to determine who is infected and those individuals should be isolated from contact with others for at least two weeks to limit the spread of the contagion. For those whose conditions worsen, hospitalization and treatment for possible respiratory failure are warranted.
The third big issue is the apparently deliberate failure of the Trump Administration to respond proactively to limit the spread of the virus. Seeking to protect the stock market more than the American public, President Donald Trump initially downplayed the impact of the virus, even calling it a “hoax” during January and February when it first appeared on U.S. soil. It turned out that several institutes affiliated to the Center for Disease Control to deal with epidemics had been dismantled by the Administration and, in spite of the warning provided by what was occurring in Wuhan, the U.S. made no effort to increase its supply of testing kits, masks or ventilators. Meanwhile, congressmen were receiving dire warnings of what was coming from the intelligence community in private briefings, leading to a number of senators selling their stock in anticipation of a market collapse. That is something called insider trading and it is illegal. It is also a measure of the corruption of America’s ruling class.
The fourth major subplot relates to what will come out of the pandemic once it is over, if it is indeed defeated at all. Critics rightly observe that the government response both at federal and state levels might well be a major overreaction to a health crisis that could possibly be dealt with using a lighter hand. Donald Trump has now called himself a “wartime president,” a particularly odd conceit in that America’s chief executive officer dodged the Vietnam war draft. Trump is now providing daily rambling briefings emphasizing that his administration deserves a “10 out or 10” for its yeoman’s work against coronavirus. The real story is that the president personally inhibited initial efforts to respond to the disease and he is now attempting to regain lost ground by supporting draconian measures to include cash payments to all American residents, even to people who do not need the money. The money itself will have to be borrowed or printed, putting the United States even deeper in debt.
Based on his wartime status, the president and his cabinet are poised to exploit Civil War and Korean War legislation to assume powers over the economy and will likely arrange bailouts of some industries that will then acquire the government as a partner. The now declared “national emergency” will undoubtedly come to include some forms of martial law to enforce the isolation of targeted populations and it is also being reported that the Justice Department has asked Congress to allow judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during the “emergency.” As we have learned from the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act and the Authorization to Use Military Force, allegedly temporary powers acquired by the executive branch have frequently become permanent. Unrestrained power in the hands of a Trump or Biden should frighten anyone who is still interested in voting in November.
There is some speculation that Trump might well follow the example being set by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Israel has banned foreign visitors, is under 24 hours curfew and is effectively in lockdown. It is using cell phone intercepts provided by the intelligence services to track the comings and goings of Israeli residents. The monitoring is being justified as a mechanism to create a record of who is meeting whom and where to support isolation and lockdown efforts. A similar program is already active in the suburbs around Washington. The National Security Agency (NSA) already has the technical ability in place that would permit monitoring of the movements of much of the U.S. population. It would be an intelligence community dream and would fit quite nicely with Congress’s recent efforts to re-authorization certain Patriot Act aspects of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Fifth and finally, there is the politicization aspect of coronavirus. The virus is being “blamed” on China, a global competitor of the United States. As is often the case, Trump has gotten the ball rolling through his usual verbal toxicity, calling the virus the Chinese Virus or Wuhan Virus. Other Republicans have picked up on the theme, leading to the inevitably Democratic progressive wing complaints that such language was “racist.” The fact it, there is no evidence whatsoever that China in any deliberate way either created or unleashed the virus.
And, of course, there is Russia. It would almost seem an old joke that is no longer amusing to blame something new and menacing on Moscow and congress has so far largely refrained from doing so. But that does not mean that the Deep State establishment is holding the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin blameless. The U.S. intelligence community, through its preferred propaganda sheet the New York Times, is now reporting that Russia is taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to spread disinformation through Europe and also in the U.S. In particular, Putin has escalated a campaign-by-innuendo to reduce confidence in the outcome of the upcoming 2020 presidential election. In any event, the Russians are too late as the Democratic and Republican parties’ behavior has already convinced many Americans that voting in November will be a waste of time.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 21:25 - Airbnb To Offer Free Or Subsidized Housing For 100,000 COVID-19 First Responders
Airbnb To Offer Free Or Subsidized Housing For 100,000 COVID-19 First Responders
As global confirmed virus cases breach the 500,000 mark, with about 23,000 deaths, Airbnb has released a new statement that it wants to “provide free or subsidized housing” for 100,000 “healthcare professionals, relief workers, and first responders” who are combating COVID-19.
“Medical workers and first responders are providing lifesaving support during the coronavirus outbreak and we want to help,” says Airbnb’s Co-founder Joe Gebbia.
“We’ve heard from countless hosts around the world who want to provide a comforting home to heroic first responders. We are connecting our nonprofit partners, government agencies and others with our incredible host community to work together in these extraordinary times.”
Airbnb is working with businesses, government and emergency management agencies and nonprofits such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the statement read.
We are partnering with our hosts to provide healthcare providers, relief workers, and first responders on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic with places that are safe, clean, and allow them to be close to their patients. https://t.co/7ZVfNmvgQI
— Airbnb (@Airbnb) March 26, 2020
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Airbnb hosts can opt into the program to help first responders by opening their homes for free using Airbnb’s Open Homes platform. If the hosts are not able to offer their homes for free, “Airbnb will still waive all fees on the stay.”
The company said it has already piloted the program in Italy, with nearly 6,000 Airbnb hosts have already opened up their homes to first responders.
“I applaud Airbnb for working under conditions of such uncertainty to provide housing for first responders and medical staff working in this pandemic. We are working to provide clear communication and resources, based on rapidly evolving knowledge about this novel virus and best practices on sanitation, in order to help keep communities as safe as possible,” said Dr. Larry Brilliant.
And maybe Airbnb’s subsided program to help first responders is really a ploy to bail out its “superhosts” that are up to their eyeballs in mortgages, now face financial ruin as guests booking their properties have gone to zero amid the virus outbreak.
Watch the real estate market.
My neighbor is an @Airbnb super host.
She is on forums with other hosts.
Many of them have 10+ mortgages.
0 guests are booking their properties.
They are running out of cash.
— Spencer Noon (@spencernoon) March 24, 2020
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I have no sympathy whatsoever for the Airbnb “superhosts” with multiple properties that are now in financial ruin because their greedy lil scheme has gone up in flames.
— CROWD SHAMING SZN (@ashindestad) March 26, 2020
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 21:05 - Ed Snowden Warns: Surveillance Measures Will Outlast The Pandemic
Ed Snowden Warns: Surveillance Measures Will Outlast The Pandemic
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Edward Snowden has a warning for those who are giving up liberty for a false sense of security: the temporary mass surveillance measures put in place will be anything but temporary. Snowden says that these measures are not worth giving up even more liberty.
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program, and infamous whistleblower Edward Snowden is sounding the alarms about the Orwellian mass surveillance that will long outlast this coronavirus pandemic.
The former CIA contractor, whose leaks exposed the scale of spying programs in the United States, is warning that once this tech is taken out of the box, it will be hard to put it back.
“When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky,” Snowden said in an interview with the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.
The emergency tends to be expanded. Then the authorities become comfortable with some new power. They start to like it.
Power corrupts. It always has and always will. But people have become comfortable with government officials ruling over them, stealing their money, and telling them what to do. We’ve been transformed into the government’s slaves, and Snowden says it’s only going to get worse.
Security services will soon find new uses for the tech. And when the crisis passes, governments can impose new laws that make the emergency rules permanent and exploit them to crack down on dissent and political opposition.
Take the proposals to monitor the outbreak by tracking mobile phone location data.
This could prove a powerful method of tracing the spread of the virus and the movements of people who have it. But it will also be a tempting tool to track terrorists — or any other potential enemies of the states. -The Next Web
This virus has so far been an excuse by the ruling class to institute permanent tyranny. As I’ve stated before, I’m far less afraid of this virus than I am of the government’s response to it. Snowden is as well. He’s especially concerned about security services adding artificial intelligence to all the other surveillance tech they have. “They already know what you’re looking at on the internet,” he said. “They already know where your phone is moving. Now they know what your heart rate is, what your pulse is. What happens when they start to mix these and apply artificial intelligence to it?”
There is no disputing the severity of this pandemic, however, surrendering basic human rights and dignity to the government is essentially giving up and allowing yourself to be enslaved for the remainder of your life.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 20:45 - Large-Scale "Internet Rationing" Possible, Experts Warn
Large-Scale "Internet Rationing" Possible, Experts Warn
Netflix app downloads have exploded across Europe over the last several weeks as
“Netflix and chill”“Netflix and quarantine” has been all the rage during countrywide lockdowns in Italy, France, Spain, and the UK.netflix and self-quarantine?
— maura quint (@behindyourback) March 9, 2020
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We noted last Thursday that Netflix had to reduce traffic to its European networks by 25% for 30 days to preserve internet functionality as streaming traffic surged among tens of millions of people in quarantine.
Days after Netflix pledged to reduce streaming traffic, experts are saying that European countries could start rolling out large-scale “internet rationing” to prioritize critical apps and websites.
“If we end up in a situation where worldwide, 850m children start to receive lessons virtually for an extended period of time, then networks might want to start prioritizing video traffic over gaming traffic,” said Matthew Howett, principal analyst at Assembly, who spoke with The Telegraph.
British internet provider BT Group said their communication network could handle the extreme levels of data of millions surfing the internet while in quarantine. But they warned that video streaming services could start bogging down the system and leave critical networks, reserved for emergency services, exposed to slow speeds.
Besides Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube are other streaming services limiting ultra-high definition videos to European users to preserve the functionality of the internet.
The French and UK governments have reportedly asked Disney to suspend the launch of its new streaming service in both countries on March 24.
The risk of large-scale “internet rationings” by European governments could be on the horizon as more and more people across the continent are forced to shelter in their homes. This could lead to the throttling of internet speeds for citizens while internet traffic is preserved for European healthcare systems, education systems, and emergency systems.
Important phone conversation with @ReedHastings, CEO of @Netflix
To beat #COVID19, we #StayAtHome
Teleworking & streaming help a lot but infrastructures might be in strain.
To secure Internet access for all, let’s #SwitchToStandard definition when HD is not necessary.
— Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) March 18, 2020
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Kester Mann, an analyst at CCS Insight, said “drastic methods” could be nearing to throttle the internet if usage continues to increase exponentially:
“If you’re talking about education over other services, that could get a little bit controversial,” Mann said.
Andrew Ellis, a professor of optical communications at Aston University, called for mass throttling of the UK’s internet back in 2015 to avoid overloading networks.
Ellis said last week that the virus crisis has now spurred discussion that the UK’s internet infrastructure needs to be upgraded.
“If we carry on doubling what we do online every couple of years or so, eventually we’ll run out of energy or capacity and we’ll have to start making hard decisions,” he said.
Austria and Switzerland have already prioritized their internet traffic if networks become overloaded.
One reason why people aren’t rioting in the Western world and have accepted forced quarantines by governments is that they’re content with all the food they have just hoarded and can stream almost any movie on Netflix. Take the TV and food away, everyone would be in the streets.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 20:25 - Frightened Mobs In Peru Burn Hundreds Of Bats With Torches As COVID-19 Hysteria Grows
Frightened Mobs In Peru Burn Hundreds Of Bats With Torches As COVID-19 Hysteria Grows
Authored by Elias Marat via TheMindUnleashed.com,
As the coronavirus outbreak continues to grow, misinformation in the form of fake news, rumors, and gossip have continued to feed mass hysteria and panic over the deadly disease.
In Peru, this has resulted in locals attempting to fight CoViD-19 by attacking communities of bats despite the fact that the novel virus still hasn’t been decisively proven to have originated from the winged creature.
On Wednesday, the Peruvian government issued a statement warning residents to stop killing bats after authorities were forced to intervene when roughly half a thousand of the flying mammals came under attack by gangs of peasants hoping to exterminate what they believed were carriers of the disease, reports Peruvian network América Noticias.
Roughly 300 of the creatures were killed in the arson attacks that took place in the small village of Culden, which lies in the Cajamarca region, after mobs attacked the caves where the bat communities dwelled, Peru’s National Service of Wild Forests and Fauna (SERFOR) announced.
About 200 bats were saved from the torch-bearing gangs by members of the wildlife service and National Agrarian Health Service (SENASA) who later released the animals into a distant cave far from Culden.
[Cajamarca]Personal del @serforperu del @minagriperu, y municipalidad provincial liberan en una cueva alejada de la población a 200 murciélagos rescatados del ataque de la población en un caserío en Catache. ¡Los murciélagos son aliados en la conservación de nuestros bosques!🌱🦇 pic.twitter.com/yt4P5Ca39S
— Serfor Perú (@SerforPeru) March 25, 2020
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AFP reports that in a statement, SERFOR said:
“We must not distort the situation due to the pandemic. Bats are not our enemies.”
Continuing, the wildlife agency explained that the bats are actually quite beneficial to humans and are even helping to combat deadly viruses including dengue. Dengue fever outbreaks in Southeast Asia and the Americas have continued unabated while the world’s attention has been fixed on containing the CoViD-19 pandemic.
SERFOR said:
“70 percent of the [bat] species in the world feed off insects, many of which are harmful to agriculture and our health, like mosquitoes that spread dengue and other diseases”.
Jessica Galvez-Durand, head of wild fauna operations at SERFOR, also used the opportunity to remind Peruvians that they should abstain from eating wild animals or using their flesh for medicinal purposes.
Exotic species are famously seen as delicacies in some Asian and Pacific Island nations due to the often unproven medicinal benefits of eating the wild creatures or because the consumption of exotic and even live animals is seen as a symbol of social status.
However, the misconception that soup made from bat meat is some popular menu item throughout China—and that bat soup is “responsible” for the coronavirus outbreak originating in the Chinese city of Wuhan—has been thoroughly debunked as misinformation that spread through viral fake news stories and social media posts.
Some scientists do believe that the virus may have originated in bat microbes but transformed into deadly human pathogens through an intermediary animal, such as pangolins, whose meat is sometimes used in traditional medicine.
So far, there have been over 400 confirmed CoViD-19 infections and at least nine deaths from the novel virus in Peru.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 20:05 - "If Getting Us Into $6 Trillion More Debt Doesn’t Matter, Then Why Not $350 Trillion?"
"If Getting Us Into $6 Trillion More Debt Doesn’t Matter, Then Why Not $350 Trillion?"
Shortly after 4pm, president Trump signed into law the $2 trillion fiscal stimulus also known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which gives the Fed the ammunition to issue up to $4.5 trillion in additional debt, a “Multitrillion Dollar Helicopter Credit Drop” as Bloomberg called it, and officially launches not only helicopter money but the biggest wealth transfer in US history, as not only will the Fed balance sheet double on short notice but will unleash an unprecedented spending spree the likes of which not even Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez could have ever imagined would take place.
One person tried to if not stop it, then at least delay and ask the critical questions that everyone else in Congress should have been asking: why are US citizens, who are supposed to be the sole beneficiaries of this emergency bailout act, just a footnote in the gargantuan bill’s deluge of electronic ones and zeroes. That person was Republican Rep. from Kentucky, Thomas Massie, who tried to force a recorded vote on the legislation, i.e., a roll coll, prompting a scramble by House members to come back to Washington to form the required quorum of at least 216 members.
Of course, Massie failed, as the vote passed and was eventually signed into law. However, Massie did at least try to bring some much needed attention to what was contained in the bill, and pose some of the key questions that so many others should have asked.
Below are some of his key points:
This bill should have been voted on much sooner in both the Senate and House and it shouldn’t be stuffed full of Nancy Pelosi’s pork- including $25 million for the Kennedy Center, grants for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Arts, and millions more other measures that have no direct relation to the Coronavirus Pandemic. That $25 million, for example, should go directly to purchasing test kits. The number one priority of this bill should have been to expand testing availability and creation of tests so that every American, not just the wealthy and privileged, have access to testing. We have shut down the world’s economy without adequate data. Everyone, even those with no symptoms, needs immediate access to a test.
Of course, to quote none other than Nancy, “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it”, and we are confident that in just a few months, everyone will find out precisely why the bill was so rushed: because out of the $2 trillion, only $290 billion is meant for direct payments to families, which as a reminder was the whole point of the bill.
Massie also pointed out that among the bill’s key provisions was the even greater entrenchment of Fed secrecy, a Fed which in theory is there to serve the people yet which has successfully defended against an open audit for over a decade:
This bill creates even more secrecy around a Federal Reserve that still refuses to be audited. It allows the Federal Reserve to make decisions about who gets what, how much money we’ll print. With no transparency.
Massie was referring to the fact that the bill repeals the sunshine law for the Fed’s meetings until the end of the year, or until the President says the coronavirus threat is over, which may very well be never. That, as Wall Street on Parade notes, “could make any FOIA lawsuits to unleash details of what’s going on next to impossible since it has been codified in a federal law.” The bill states the following:
SEC. 4009. TEMPORARY GOVERNMENT IN THE SUNSHINE ACT RELIEF. (a) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in subsection 8 (b), notwithstanding any other provision of law, if the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System determines, in writing, that unusual and exigent circumstances exist, the Board may conduct meetings without regard to the requirements of section 552b of title 5, United States Code, during the period beginning on the date of enactment of this Act and ending on the earlier of— (1) the date on which the national emergency concerning the novel coronavirus disease (COVID–19) outbreak declared by the President on March 13, 2020 under the National Emergencies Act (50 20 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) terminates; or (2) December 31, 2020.
This would also mean that US taxpayer will never learn why they went into debt to the tune of $454 billion, which would then be levered 10x by the Fed to issue up to $4.5 trillion in loans to companies the Fed deems appropriate, if no records are being maintained.
However, Massie’s final point that was the punchline:
If getting us into $6 trillion more debt doesn’t matter, then why are we not getting $350 trillion more in debt so that we can give a check of $1 million to every person in the country?
Here the Kentucky Representative hit the bullseye, as this is precisely the endgame. However, since one can’t unleash the full $350 trillion overnight without classical economists admitting the truth about what the real nature of this bailout is, it will be done piecemeal with other crises, and other “unprecedented” emergencies emerging in the near future and unlocking the path to what is the real goal of this unprecedented reflationary bailout of the world’s most indebted nation. It also indirectly addresses Massie’s final point:
This stimulus should go straight to the people rather than being funneled through banks and corporations like this bill is doing. 2 trillion divided by 150 million workers is about $13,333.00 per person. That’s much more than the $1,200 per person check authorized by this bill.
Indeed, the math is simple, and the stimulus isn’t going directly to the people for one simple reason: that’s not its purpose. Instead, its purpose is to not only provide trillions in corporate welfare, but to greenlight self-reinforcing helicopter money whereby the Treasury will now have to issue trillions and trillions in debt and the Fed will have to monetize it or else interest rates will explode.
Of course, this arrangement may prompt other questions, like for example “why pay taxes if the Treasury can just print whatever debt it needs, and the Fed can just buy it“, something we have said for over a decade, but we will leave that particular train of thought to another enterprising politician to address… and be ridiculed.
And speaking of ridicule, how do we know that Massie struck a raw nerve? Because shortly after his protest he was mocked not only by the republican president but also by some of the most prominent democrat.
Breaking news: Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity. He’s given new meaning to the term #Masshole. (Finally, something the president and I can agree on!) https://t.co/N1CNLPsZjc
— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) March 27, 2020
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And in case anyone still hasn’t figured it out, the whole “republican, democrat” split of the population in two rival camps is nothing more than theater meant to distract while those in control loot not only the here and now, but also rob the future generations blind. Because the sad truth is that behind the fake veneer of either progressive ideals of conservative values, politicians on both sides have one simple directive: to perpetuate the broken status quo for as long as humanly possible, and get as rich as possible in the process.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 19:45 - Going Down With The Ship: After Raging At Moody's For Downgrade To Deep Junk, Masa Son Pledges 40% Of SoftBank Stake To Lenders
Going Down With The Ship: After Raging At Moody's For Downgrade To Deep Junk, Masa Son Pledges 40% Of SoftBank Stake To Lenders
Last October, in the aftermath of the WeWork and Uber fiasco, we asked if SoftBank, that chronic seed (and not so seed) investor in cash-incinerating
zerocornsstartups would be “The Bubble Era’s “Short Of The Century.” Subsequent events have only made our query more pressing: with the global economy frozen, with social distancing and self-quarantine now a mandatory part of life, the “sharing economy” that is the basis of so many of SoftBank’s investments has ground to a halt, making its already unsustainable cash burn explode to obscene levels.Not helping matters is that one month ago, activist investor icon Paul Singer officially engaged SoftBank, demanding a higher stock price and forcing Son to announce on Monday plans to liquidate a whopping $41 billion in viable assets ( including $14 billion of shares in Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba) in a bid to raise SoftBank’s price by announcing another massive stock buyback, something the company did first last February when it said it would repurchase 10.3% of its stock (apparently Masa Son has learned absolutely nothing from Boeing’s PR fiasco involving tens of billions in stock buybacks over the past decade, only to come crawling for a bailout in recent weeks not surprisingly finding a hostile rececption).
The good news: news of the massive buyback helped SoftBank stock surge 55% which last week fell to a four-year low as investors panicked over its hefty debt exposure.
The bad news: unfortunately for SoftBank and Masa Son, the rating agencies noticed the company’s latest attempt to boost its stock price now at the expense of jeopardizing the company’s long term viability (see Boeing), and on Wednesday Moody’s issued a two-notch downgrade of SoftBank that cut its debt deeper into junk status.
Moody’s cited SoftBank’s “aggressive financial policy” for its decision to cut its rating from Ba1 to Ba3, saying the value of the group’s portfolio would be reduced if it sold off its lucrative stakes in Chinese ecommerce group Alibaba and Sprint during the market volatility caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Asset sales will be challenging in the current financial market downturn, with valuations falling and a flight to safety,” said Motoki Yanase, Moody’s senior credit officer, in a statement.
Needless to say, Masa Son was furious that someone dared to point out that Japan’s hail mary M&A, rollup and venture capital emperor was, in fact, naked, and slammed Moody’s demanding that the rating agency remove all of its bond ratings on the Japanese conglomerate.
“[SoftBank Group] believes that Moody’s ratings action is based on excessively pessimistic assumptions regarding the market environment and misunderstanding that SBG will quickly liquidate assets without any thorough consideration.”
But the damage was already done, and the downgrade led to a sharp increase in the borrowing costs on SoftBank’ massive, $55bn debt load. Yields on SoftBank’s perpetual bonds, which have no maturity date, climbed above 11% after a sell off in Wednesday morning trading.
And just like that all the investor goodwill Masa Son hoped to buy with the record upcoming buyback has fizzled, just because – this time – the rating agencies refused to keep their mouth shut and called out the company on its desperate attempt to boost its stock price while stripping it of some of its most valuable assets (not surprisingly, the rating agency corruption in Japan continues, and while SoftBank’s debt relative to cash flow mean that western rating agencies class SoftBank as junk, the group has an investment-grade rating from the local Japanese rating agency, JCR. It is unclear how much in kickbacks it costs Masa Son to keep this sole investment grade rating).
But wait, there’s more.
With the noose tightening and as more questions about the viability of SoftBank emerge, on Friday Masa Son pledged an additional 10.1 million of his own SoftBank shares to lenders in the past two weeks, regulatory filings revealed.
The latest filing means Son has now committed a total of 227 million SoftBank shares as collateral, worth about $8 billion, or about 40% of his 27% stake in the publicly traded financial conglomerate.
Call it going down with the ship.
According to Bloomberg, the newly pledged shares were worth about $360 million at Friday’s close. Son’s net worth is $12 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which excludes the value of the pledged shares. It has fallen $3.6 billion so far this year, as Masa has increasingly tied his own fate with that of SoftBank: the Japanese billionaire has more than tripled the level of his pledging since 2013.
And if Masa is going down with the ship, so are his personal bankers, which according to Bloomberg include UBS and Nomura.
So what happens next?
Well, if the selloff continues, margin calls are next.
As Bloomberg notes, Son’s filing comes as some billionaires scramble to meet margin calls on their pledged shares. India’s Gautam Adani and his family put up an additional $1.4 billion of shares as collateral on existing debt this month, and banks like ultra high net worth caterers UBS (there it is again) and Credit Suisse have asked clients to post additional collateral, which leads to further forced selling, and perpetuates the liquidation spiral.
The worst case scenario however is not that Masa Son will be broke: we are confident he has billions stashed in an offshore bank somewhere. No, who will be hardest hit is – as usual – retail investors. Going back to SoftBank’s fabricated, and potentially criminal Investment Grade rating with JCR, the FT writes that SoftBank had repeatedly taken advantage of this higher domestic credit rating to raise debt from retail investors. Last year, the group became the biggest issuer of debt sold to “Mrs Watanabe”, i.e., Japan’s army of kamikaze retail investors, accounting for more than half of all outstanding retail bonds from companies and financial institutions in March last year.
Which means that when the bubble era “short of the century” finally collapses under the weight of its massive debt, it will once again be main street that is hardest hit. Because some things never change.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 19:45 - Why The World's Doing A Double-Take On China's No-New-Infections Claim
Why The World's Doing A Double-Take On China's No-New-Infections Claim
Authored by Richard Bernstein via RealClearInvestigations,
China’s announcement this month of nearly a week of no new infections in Wuhan, the hard-hit city where the coronavirus pandemic originated, was both hope-inspiring — and hard to believe.
Medical professionals said the draconian set of policies imposed by the Chinese government – including widespread testing, isolation of all infected people and anyone they came in contact with – are proven methods for limiting contagion. Other countries, South Korea and Taiwan, for example, have followed similar courses, and they have also reported steep declines in new infections, though neither says it has achieved no new local infections, as China claims.
A Taiwan network reported that one hospital was under pressure from the central government not to admit patients so it could report no new cases.
“What we don’t know is the degree to which they’re being transparent and the degree to which they’re following up on existing infections,” Don Goldmann, a professor of immunology, infectious diseases, and epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a phone interview.
Dr. Goldmann said Chinese scientists have been extremely transparent about what they’ve discovered about the coronavirus so far; they have shared information on the genetics and sequencing of the virus and details of autopsies, clinical care and outcomes, he said. They’ve also shared fatality rates among different age groups.
“So I’m not sure why they would make this up,” he said, “especially since risking another wave of this would not be in their interests or in the interests of their leadership.”
Still, skepticism about China’s no-new-local-infections claim is widespread, including, at least according to the anecdotal evidence, inside China. The doubt is fueled both by China’s Communist Party’s long history of propaganda and by the obvious benefits of changing the focus from the government’s initial efforts to suppress information about the coronavirus to its supposedly glorious victory over the disease crippling much of the world.
“A propaganda spokesman’s job is the turn messy facts into a clean narrative,” Andrew J. Nathan, professor of political science at Columbia University and a leading China expert, said in an email.
“China is trying to bury the embarrassment of the Covid-19 cover-up in a happy story of triumph over the virus.
“But it feels like overreaching to say that transmission has completely stopped,” Nathan continued.
“It seems that the message is political, not epidemiological.”
Some reports have chipped away at least at China’s most extreme claim of success. On the very days when the national health authority was announcing that there were no new local infections, social media accounts in China were circulating photographs of “urgent notices” put up in residential areas announcing new cases and warning people to stay home.
EBC News, a Taiwan cable news network, broadcast two such photographs dated March 20, which is two days after China reported there were no new local Wuhan infections. One of the notices, after announcing the new cases, read: “Do not go out, or gather, wash your hands, be careful, hold on, hold on, and hold on some more.”
EBC also broadcast video of a hospital in Wuhan that it says was taken on March 19 and provided by a local Wuhan journalist. The video shows a reception area crowded with people, some of them on gurneys with IV drips, and health care workers in full protective gear, white suits, face masks and goggles.
According to the Taiwan commentators, the reporter had accompanied a friend who was seeking care for his sick mother, but the hospital, while allowing patients to stay in the waiting area, was refusing to admit any of them. When the reporter asked the reason, a health worker at the hospital told him the hospital was under pressure from the central government to report no new cases.
There’s no question that since Beijing began implementing strict quarantine measures to fight the virus, the Chinese propaganda machine has been in full gear, praising the Communist Party and its paramount leader, Xi Jinping, for directing an effective response to the epidemic and presenting itself as a model for the rest of the world. The overall message is that, as always, when things get tough, the Communist Party and its leaders, and only they, can be counted on for national salvation.
“From the flood rescue effort in 1998 to the SARS epidemic in 2003 and the earthquake relief work in 2008,” the People’s Daily, the party’s official organ, said early in March, as China began reporting a drop in new coronavirus infections, “these great struggles one after the other have taught us that the Chinese Communist Party is the backbone of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.”
In recent days, the Chinese media have gone beyond praise of the country’s leaders to depicting a world grateful to China for its leadership in the fight against the disease. It has also been expressing fury at President Trump for calling the disease the “Chinese virus” and it has lent credence to the unfounded conspiracy theory that the virus actually originated not in a market in Wuhan, but in an American military germ warfare lab.
“China selflessly extends helping hand to countries around the world in global battle against Covid-19,” read one recent headline in the English-language People’s Daily Online. The article showed pictures of a group of Chinese health care workers at a hospital in Italy giving the thumbs up. Another recent headline: “Foreign Politicians Thank China for Support Amid Epidemic.”
The barrage of good news propaganda has, moreover, been accompanied by what the human rights group Reporters Without Borders is calling China’s relentless crackdown on all independent news outlets that might mar the official narrative. This repression originated early in January when Li Wenliang, the doctor who first reported the existence of the virus, was taken into custody by the local Public Security Bureau and only released when he signed a confession admitting to “spreading false rumors.”
Dr. Li soon died of the very disease whose existence was being denied by China’s authorities, and his martyrdom forced the authorities to admit that they had behaved incorrectly in his case.
But the effort at information control has continued nonetheless. At least three citizen journalists who put out videos and reports on the dismal, crowded conditions in Wuhan’s hospitals have disappeared. Among them was Fang Bin, a businessman in Wuhan who was able to video-record his own arrest by Chinese police, posing as medical workers at his apartment. Fang was released for a time, but he soon put out a video in which he clearly anticipated his ability to act as an independent source of information in Wuhan wouldn’t last long.
“I’m afraid,” he said.
“Before me there’s the virus. And behind me, the legal and administrative apparatus of the Chinese state.”
There have been other apparent arrests, or at least unexplained disappearances, including that of Ren Zhiqiang, a wealthy property developer who circulated an article in which he criticized Xi for his handling of the crisis. Earlier this month, according to Reporters Without Borders, an issue of the magazine Ren Wu was pulled from the newsstands after publishing an interview with a prominent Wuhan doctor criticizing the government for censoring doctors.
Now, with China’s recent expulsion of reporters from The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, the country’s effort to gain total control of the coronavirus narrative would seem to be almost complete.
China “is in the midst of its most intensive propaganda operation in living memory, in trying to project its success in dealing with the virus,” Peter Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the London University School of Oriental and African Studies, told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post.
“There is now an imperative for the statistics to be low, and now we have statistics that serve the political imperative.”
So, what is the true picture? That is not an easy question to answer, but the available evidence would seem to support the conclusion that, while the no-new-infections claim may be more propaganda than literal result, China has, as Dr. Goldmann said, almost certainly succeeded in substantially slowing down the spread of the virus.
Still, several things are missing from the official narrative that might be useful to other countries seeking to reduce the virus’s spread. These include whether the actions taken to track down infected people and force them into total quarantine could be duplicated in democratic countries. Taiwan’s EBC television network a couple of weeks ago broadcast video of a street brawl between local residents and police, the residents evidently furious they were unable even to obtain food and shouting, “We’ve been abandoned.” No images of that sort are likely to be shown on Chinese Central TV.
And then there’s the risk mentioned by Dr. Goldmann that a new flare up of the virus would harm the credibility of the authorities. But one commentator on Taiwan television speculated that, if there is a new surge of infections, the propaganda machine will put the blame on the United States and Europe, saying the new infections were the result of their failure to follow the Chinese example.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 19:25 - Baltimore Population Plunges To Lowest In Over A Century As Homicides Soar
Baltimore Population Plunges To Lowest In Over A Century As Homicides Soar
Baltimore City’s population dipped below the 600,000 level, not see in more than a century, as record homicides, an opioid crisis, and now an economic depression risks sending the city deeper into chaos.
The Baltimore Sun, citing new US Census data released on Thursday, estimates that the population in the city was 593,490 as of July 2019.
To give you some perspective on the collapsing population trend in Baltimore. In 1950, the city had 950,000 residents. Now it has 593,490, which is a loss of 356,510 people, or about 37.5% of the entire population in seven decades.
We’ve mentioned on several occasions how deindustrialization, “white flight” of the 1960/70s, the crack epidemic of the 1980/90s, and now the murder and opioid crisis has created another mass exodus, with many people fleeing for Baltimore County and other surrounding counties.
Michael Rendall, director of the Maryland Population Research Center and a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, said after the 2015 Baltimore Riots, no other counties surrounding the city saw a fall in population.
The city’s plunging population, Rendall said, “is not a phenomenon reflective of the overall metropolitan area.”
Over the previous year, Baltimore City lost 8,953 people, or 1.5% of its population.
Back in 2014, when Democratic Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake was in office, the city had more than 623,000 residents. Which means the city has lost nearly 5% of its population in five years.
Since the riots, Baltimore’s economic revival was halted, homicides surged, and opioids flooded low-income neighborhoods. Many people have packed their bags and exited the city, reflected in recent population trends.
With a depression expected to hit the US economy in the second quarter, the fear is that Baltimore could dive deeper into chaos. Most of the jobs in the city are service-based, completely wiped out by the virus-related shutdowns. Economic downturns have been known to stoke violence, drug use, and could risk another uprising in the city by angry folks who have not just lost their jobs but have been living in a hellhole for the last several decades.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 19:05 - Marvel Introduces Superheros "Snowflake" & "Safespace"
Marvel Introduces Superheros "Snowflake" & "Safespace"
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity… and on occasion, poetic justice.
* * *
Alcohol to go: Why wasn’t this always a thing?
You realize how absurdly micromanaged the economy is when the government starts lifting pointless restrictions.
For example, New York and Washington DC will now allow people to order takeout and to-go alcoholic beverages from bars and restaurants.
But these governments still can’t totally let go of control. The new rules in DC require restaurants and bars to obtain special permission from the government to sell drinks to-go.
And even then, in both DC and New York, customers can only order drinks if they also buy food.
See New York’s rules here, and Washington DC’s here.
* * *
Marvel introduces superheros “Snowflake” and “Safespace”
We had to check to make sure this one wasn’t fake news. It’s real.
Marvel, the group behind Captain America, Ironman, etc., has now introduced two new superheroes: Snowflake, and their brother Safespace.
(Snowflake is non-binary and uses pronouns they/them/their.)
Snowflake creates icy throwing stars, while Safespace has more defensive powers. Both use “violence to combat bullying,” according to the author.
They must also be antifa members if they respond to words and dissenting opinions with violence.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
DOJ wants the power to detain Americans indefinitely during crises
We see two forces at work during a crisis.
On the one hand, the government is eliminating unnecessary laws and burdensome regulations.
This is to make the response easier, and to placate people who are dealing with restrictions on their freedom to run a business or carry on with normal life.
On the other hand, you have the government grab at more “temporary” powers… that never seem to expire.
Using the Covid-19 epidemic as a convenient excuse, the Department of Justice has asked Congress for the power to “pause” court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.”
It might sound reasonable enough. Until you realize that anyone can be arrested and detained indefinitely without trial or without even a preliminary hearing in front of a judge.
The draft language of the draft bill applies this suspension to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures.”
Pre-arrest? Does that mean cops don’t even need a warrant from a judge anymore for arrests and homes raids?
As long as the emergency persists, all rights of the accused go out the window.
And the way things are looking right now, an “emergency situation” could last a long long time.
Sort of like the special war powers the government took almost twenty years ago… for a war that is still ongoing.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
Brazil’s president insists his people “never catch anything”
It seems these days that people everywhere think that their president or prime minister is the biggest buffoon in the world.
And to be fair there is no shortage of political leaders who routinely say the dumbest things imaginable.
But Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro may really win the award. In a press conference just yesterday, he told reporters that he was unconcerned about the Corona Virus and that Brazilians “never catch anything.”
When challenged, he doubled down on that assertion, stating that there’s some antibodies within Brazilians that should be studied, because his people simply do not get sick.
77 Brazilians are already dead as of Thursday, with nearly 3,000 confirmed cases.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 18:45 - Global Pandemic Response Handing Governments Sweeping Powers They May Never Relinquish
Global Pandemic Response Handing Governments Sweeping Powers They May Never Relinquish
While the response to the coronavirus pandemic have ranged from mocking the disease (such has Brazil’s Bolsonaro) to physically sealing people inside of apartment buildings in China, governments are deploying an array of legislative and technical measures to track and control citizens during the outbreak which has killed over 21,000 in roughly three months.
As the situation deteriorates, many fear that the current efforts to control the virus will have dire consequences for individual freedoms long after the danger of COVID-19 has passed, according to Bloomberg‘s Ian Marlow – who notes “In desperate times like these, leaders on all levels are going to extraordinary lengths to do whatever possible to contain the virus.”
Like the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., the coronavirus pandemic is a crisis of such magnitude that it threatens to change the world in which we live, with ramifications for how leaders govern. Governments are locking down cities with the help of the army, mapping population flows via smartphones and jailing or sequestering quarantine breakers using banks of CCTV and facial recognition cameras backed by artificial intelligence.
The restrictions are unprecedented in peacetime and made possible only by rapid advances in technology. And while citizens across the globe may be willing to sacrifice civil liberties temporarily, history shows that emergency powers can be hard to relinquish. –Bloomberg
“A primary concern is that if the public gives governments new surveillance powers to contain Covid-19, then governments will keep these powers after the public health crisis ends,” says Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco. “Nearly two decades after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government still uses many of the surveillance technologies it developed in the immediate wake.“
In China, authorities have leveraged their extensive monitoring network to trace people exposed to COVID’s epicenter in Hubei, and encouraged citizens to monitor their neighbors’ health and movements. And perhaps this has worked – as the country has lifted standing travel restrictions as the rest of the world goes into lockdown (reported resurgence aside).
“China was able to control the outbreak because government was tracking people closely,” said Shanghai worker Joy Huang. “I don’t want to get tracked, but meanwhile, I don’t want infected people not getting tracked. Freedom has a price.”
Outside of China, governments are enacting strict measures to combat the pandemic.
In Hungary, a bill has been introduced to allow Prime Minister Viktor Orban to rule by decree indefinitely. It includes up to five years in prison for anyone trying to “distort facts” which might weaken the government’s “defense measures.”
In Russia, police are using Moscow’s extensive CCTV network to arrest people violating quarantine after returning from high-risk countries – deploying one of the world’s most advanced facial-recognition systems to monitor over 13,000 people required to self-isolate.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron established a committee to address the pandemic which includes a potential “mobile identification strategy” to track anyone who has come into contact with infected people. Paris, meanwhile, has been using drones to enforce quarantines.
Singapore recently launched a voluntary phone app which uses Bluetooth technology to map close contacts in case an infected person can’t remember all of their social interactions.
Israel has granted the police the ability to monitor those suspected to be in isolation, while the internal security service, the Shin Bet, can track and infected person’s mobile phone data going back two weeks.
India just enacted an unprecedented three-week lockdown across the entire country, while officials are tracking mobile phones, cross-referencing reservation data from airlines and railways, and stamping the hands of those with suspected infections.
“Given the caseload, a 21-day nationwide lockdown, implemented at such short notice and likely without thinking through all the consequences, seems incomprehensible,” said former World Bank economic development expert, Salman Anees Soz – a member of India’s opposition Congress Party who compared the move to the prime minister’s controversial 2016 cash ban. “It is either that the government knows the disease has spread far beyond the official numbers or the government wants to be seen as doing something decisively. Either way, it reminds me of demonetization. In fact, this is going to be far bigger and poses extreme risks to India’s poor and vulnerable.”
The list goes on and on.
My phone, which is satellite-tracked by the Taiwan gov to enforce quarantine, ran out of battery at 7:30 AM. By 8:15, four different units called me. By 8:20, the police were knocking at my door.
— Milo Hsieh (@MiloHsieh) March 22, 2020
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According to the ACLU’s Jennifer Granick, the US doesn’t have the ability to enact a China-style quarantine, because people’s trackable information is ‘disaggregated and mostly in the hands of private companies, not the government.”
“We’re going to have to accept, as with any law in our society, a little bit of noncompliance,” she said.
Some see the need for greater control.
Australia’s government has received criticism from some health experts for not using enough surveillance and tracking measures to halt the spread of the virus. In Japan, where the outbreak seems to have been less severe than in many other countries, parliament passed a bill that would allow Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to declare an emergency, but he hasn’t yet done so.
Europe has its own sensibilities, with more importance placed on data protection. In Germany, a draft coronavirus law with provisions enabling tracking by smartphone of infected patients without any time limit was amended after the justice minister expressed her opposition. Israel’s state security measures have been opposed at the country’s supreme court. –Bloomberg
According to Nanjing University philosophy professor Gu Su, governments worldwide “should be allowed to concentrate and expand their power, to some extent, to handle the crisis more efficiently,” as long as it is “strictly limited.”
The problem is that governments have issues with limits, and will push boundaries until enough pitchforks come out. Then, everyone forgets – while big brother has a new suite of toys to track, control and oppress at will.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/27/2020 – 18:25
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