- Is World War III About To Start? Part II: Are The Military-Industrial Complex & Deep State Driving Us To War?
Is World War III About To Start? Part II: Are The Military-Industrial Complex & Deep State Driving Us To War?
Authored by Richard C Cook via ScheerPost.com,
Read Part 1 of this series here.
Why is the U.S. refusing to call a halt to the Ukraine madness? Why can’t an era of “Peaceful Coexistence” in Europe and the world be declared or at least sought? How about détente with Russia? With Russia and China? What is wrong with that?
We’ll start peeling the onion by looking at the U.S. military-industrial complex.
Of course, President Eisenhower warned us against the MIC over 60 years ago in his “Farewell Address” of January 20, 1961. Among other remarks he said:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.
The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov.
Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce.
We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.
Added to the above are members of Congress who vote on military budgets and make the laws that protect the MIC from accountability, lobbyists who pressure those members to cast votes favorable to their MIC clients, private sector financial service employees who handle the retirement accounts of the MIC multitude, foreigners who are employed at overseas bases, and various scoundrels and hangers-on. I would include in the latter category the multitude of MIC cheerleaders from Hollywood who produce trashy spectacles like Top Gun.
On top of everything else, there are millions of retirees drawing annuities in excess of what most working-class Americans earn, many of these retirees double- or triple-dipping with lucrative jobs in business or government.
Each of the above individuals supports multiple family members, workers, and vendors within the civilian economy who, with the ripple effect and velocity of money, keep entire towns, cities, states, regions, and industries afloat. An example is building the F-35 that has workers assembling it in 350 congressional districts. It is probably no exaggeration to say that given the vast exiting of civilian U.S. factories and jobs over the last half-century to cheap-labor countries abroad, the MIC is probably the principal economic engine of the U.S. as a whole.
So are we going to tell what adds up to tens of millions of people, sorry, your services are no longer needed? Good luck with that. And isn’t it obvious that all these people, especially the higher echelons, are going to do everything within their power to persuade us that their jobs are so essential that without them we will shortly be overwhelmed and eaten alive by every “enemy” on the planet?
If you doubt what I am saying, ask any retired colonel or general who has hired himself out as a talking head to CNN or MSNBC. It’s also why DoD has formally declared Russia and China our two “adversaries,” because, after all, you have to point the finger at someone and blame them for your own dysfunctional society.
But as I witnessed personally in my NASA days, many MIC personnel never do a lick of honest work, or are mainly occupied with paper shuffling or other busywork, especially with work-at-home now the vogue, with many spending their days surfing the internet, or worse, while drawing a level of pay that puts most civilian workers in the shade.
Not to mention stay-at-home mothers, teachers and caregivers, first responders, law enforcement personnel, food service employees, or the unemployed, underemployed, or homeless. Yet many of these people, while working hard for low pay, if any, have a sense of fulfillment and self-worth that surpasses the swarms of MIC bureaucrats who can’t help but feel degraded in their superfluous and often pointless vocational stagnation.
Is all this enough to create an imperative for World War III? You tell me. It certainly has to be a contributing factor. Plus it saps the nation’s natural strength. We could even say that the U.S. war machine is a cancerous tumor that has metastasized throughout the entirety of American society, polluting and corrupting every aspect of life, including the body politic, the environment, the entertainment industry, the mass media, education, scientific research, etc.
It was the military, for example, that supported planning for the U.S. lockdowns during the COVID so-called pandemic, as documented by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in his monumental indictment of Big Pharma/MIC collusion in his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.
A subset of the question whether the MIC could drive us to war for its own selfish reasons is whether a president, a political party, or the Deep State itself could use the MIC to generate a war to save their own sorry asses at a time of scandal or possible election loss, along the lines of the movie Wag the Dog?
We’ll leave that an open question for now. At least Tucker Carlson seems to think so in his forecast that the Biden administration will spark a hot war with Russia before the 2024 election. Of course, we can’t know what they are really planning, because they hide behind billions of classified documents and imprison those who dare to lift the veil of secrecy. We are vaguely aware that the top dogs have their own “continuity of government” plans with hidden bunkers, an “underground Pentagon,” caches of MREs that can last decades, etc. Just don’t ask to see any of this.
Every war the U.S. has fought since Korea, including the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, has been an MIC bonanza. Then there’s the simple fact that if you are an individual possessing a weapon of any kind, whether a military pistol or an ICBM, despite the protocols that govern their use, you still fantasize about using that weapon on somebody. This alone creates a societal imperative towards war. Plus I have had the wife of an MIC worker tell me straight up that she favored war because otherwise how would their family eat?
Another way to look at it is that we have a deeply entrenched system of military socialism. I happen to think it’s very corrupt, very inefficient, and very dangerous.
IS BRICS+ VS. THE WEST DECIDING THE PARAMETERS OF THE CONFLICT?
This brings us to the subject of economics. The national level of expenditure on the MIC and its role as the central tent pole of the U.S. economy certainly point to economic motives in any stampede to war. But wealth depends on resources and their exploitation. In fact, the seizure of the world’s resources had become a finely-honed specialty of the European powers, with the U.S. joining in the later stages, during the entire era of colonization. Even today, the populations of former Western colonies continue to work the farms, plantations, mines, and transport facilities of Western owners.
Of course, the Europeans and Americans have been justifying their expropriation of the resources of other countries for centuries by virtue of ideologies like “right of conquest,” “survival of the fittest,” “white man’s burden, etc.,” always proclaiming shock at native resistance. During the 19th century, such resistance was decisively subdued by the invention of the Maxim machine gun.
The U.S. gained early experience in grabbing the land and its bounty through dispossession of Native Americans and the massive growth of slave-worked plantation agriculture. Westward expansion brought the taking of land for gold and silver prospecting. By the time the U.S. began to gain colonies, the rich soil of Hawaii offered wealth to pineapple growers. A prime motive of the Spanish-American War was confiscation of Cuban sugar plantations. In Central America it was bananas and coffee. In Chile it was copper.
At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. bankers lent money to the British to aid them in fighting the Boers in order to secure the incredible deposits of diamonds and gold beneath the surface in South Africa. We also know that U.S. bankers saw a great business opportunity in the chance to lend money to Britain and France in order for them to prosecute World War I against Germany. After that war, the Rockefeller oil empire began its expansion into the Middle East. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is suspected to have baited Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor because there was nothing better than a good war to boost employment after failing to create a full-employment economy during the Great Depression. When the “War on Terror” commenced, the chief topic on the agenda at President George W. Bush’s staff meetings was the takeover of Iraq’s oil fields.
Today, the MIC has one overriding mission: protect the overseas interests of big U.S. banks, investment and hedge funds, and multinational corporations. The biggest U.S. defense firm is Lockheed, which itself is largely owned by three giant hedge funds: State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock. The CIA is there to control foreign governments, overthrow them as needed, and keep foreign leaders and journalists on the payroll while quaking with fear for their careers or even lives. The paradigm is most egregious in Europe, which the Anglo-Americans view as vassals, with the E.U. a policeman. NATO is an enforcement mechanism for U.S./U.K. control, not to defend against Russia, which today has no discernible interest in political control over Europe, even if it were capable of making such a move, which it isn’t.
Rather than defend against a non-existent Russian threat, the West would love to get its hands on Russian oil, gas, and mineral resources, as it began to do in the 1990s before Putin took over and fostered a nationalistic revival. The U.S. had long been targeting the Caspian Basin and Central Asia, which now seemed vulnerable with the separation from Russia of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. These countries are still in play for the West, as are the microstates of the Caucasus.
The 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup in Ukraine was partly for acquisition of Ukrainian land and resources, including the fertile farmland of the steppes. Big players are Cargill, ADM, and BlackRock, along with numerous E.U. companies. Despite global warming and professions of getting rid of fossil fuels, trying to get hold of hydrocarbons worldwide remains a matter of Western urgency.
But with the current situation, another dimension is “dollar hegemony.” This brings us to BRICS. Perhaps the biggest threat to Western economic imperialism is the formation of the economic compact consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. As the Ukraine conflict deepens, BRICS expansion has become of particular importance to Russia, as it is obviously a means of outflanking the West and beating it at its own geopolitical game.
At the South African BRICS summit of August 22-24, 2023, six new nations were added: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina, leading to BRICS+. Added to the earlier rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the effects of BRICS and its expansion are seismic. Additional nations that have expressed an interest in BRICS are Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and at least a dozen others.
The potential of BRICS is the inclusion of half or more of the world’s population. BRICS economies had overtaken G-7 economies by 2012, and the gap between BRICS and G-7 economies is widening irreversibly.
GDP is not a viable measure of economic performance for “reserve currency” nations like the U.S. that can print money “out of thin air.” But there is a linear relationship between real goods production and energy. Thus a much more reliable economic performance evaluation can be inferred from electricity generation, as the following chart illustrates:
The following can be noted:
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The BRICS economies overtook G-7 economies in 2012, with the gap increasing steadily since.
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G-7 economies have not witnessed any growth since the 2008-2009 “Great Financial Crisis.”
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G-7 economies have shrunk by 6 percent since their peak in 2007.
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BRICS economies were 50 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.
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BRICS+ economies (BRICS plus six candidate countries) were 60 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.
The graph also explains why the BRICS nations are not pursuing aggressive policies, despite Western propaganda, as they view time as being on their side. Naturally they refuse the “reserve currency” prerogative which allows G-7 countries to siphon hard earned wealth from the rest of the world. The most worrying aspect for the U.S. is the obvious intention of BRICS to foster trade exchanges in local currencies, bypassing the primacy of the dollar, and secondarily the Euro.
According to Stephen Jen, CEO of Eurizon SLJ Capital Ltd. and former IMF/Morgan Stanley economist, “The dollar share in foreign reserves has lost about 11 percent since 2016. The decisive event has been Western sanctions and the freezing of Russia’s dollar reserves.” He adds: “Taking purchasing power into account the BRICS nations currently account for 32 percent of global economic output, compared to 30 percent covered by the G7 countries.” This differential is bound to worsen as new nations are added to BRICS.
As BRICS, ASEAN and other countries increasingly trade in national currencies in lieu of Western reserve currencies, this results in weakening of those Western currencies, as evidenced by the drop in their purchasing power, aka inflation. Over time, the standards of living commensurate with the production of tradable goods will result in growing poverty in the U.S. and the EU that will result in social instability. But the damage will fall largely to the lower income echelons, resulting in growth in an already unsustainable wealth disparity, with the GINI factor for wealth distribution in the U.S. reaching 0.85 in 2020.
This explains several observations:
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Why BRICS do not find it necessary to issue a new currency: Trade in national currencies will bring an end to the wealth siphoning mechanism of U.S. dollar hegemony.
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Why Russia and China are trying to maintain non-confrontational policies despite provocations: As trade away from the U.S., UK, and EU increases with growing use of national currencies, political instability, particularly in the most de-industrialized Western nations, will result. Social discontent and political instability can already be witnessed throughout the West. This will only increase as impoverishment spreads due to depreciating currencies, leading to eventual implosion of the neoliberal political system. Thus Russia, China, and other sovereign nations have adopted a policy of “wait it out” rather than risk a kinetic war which would result in the deaths of millions. Nevertheless, these countries are embarking on an accelerated program of military development, along with strengthened alliances, in case war is inevitable.
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Why the West is embarking on highly aggressive policies: The neoliberal cabals in control of the West realize that the changes occurring in the world, particularly as regards the monetary and financial global architecture, spell their doom, and hence are increasingly acting hysterically, fomenting conflict and chaos wherever they can.
It is dollar hegemony, dating back to the World War II-era Bretton Woods Agreements and the Nixonian removal of the international currency gold peg, that has allowed the U.S. to attempt overcoming its massive trade deficit and its public debt at $33.1 trillion and growing. Only by selling trillions of dollars of Treasury bonds to foreign countries, especially China, Japan, and Korea, has the U.S. been able to straddle the globe with the hundreds of military bases and other facilities it relies on to secure a world order friendly to its interests. For decades, foreign countries have needed dollars to trade in petroleum and other commodities. But with BRICS, that imperative may end sooner rather than later. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen has said this will never happen, but other policy makers are seeing the writing on the wall.
Are the prospects of BRICS so serious that the U.S. could launch World War III against its main powers, Russia, China, and now Iran, as a last-ditch act of desperation as its entire world order veers toward collapse?
It hardly bodes well that these three nations, along with North Korea, have been identified by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee as the new “axis of evil.” She speaks for much of the U.S. political class.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/28/2023 – 02:00 -
- The New Abnormal: Authoritarian Control Freaks Want To Micromanage Our Lives
The New Abnormal: Authoritarian Control Freaks Want To Micromanage Our Lives
Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Authoritarian control freaks out to micromanage our lives have become the new normal or, to be more accurate, the new abnormal when it comes to how the government relates to the citizenry.
This overbearing despotism, which pre-dates the COVID-19 hysteria, is the very definition of a Nanny State, where government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.
Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.
This tug-of-war for control and sovereignty over our selves impacts almost every aspect of our lives, whether you’re talking about decisions relating to our health, our homes, how we raise our children, what we consume, what we drive, what we wear, how we spend our money, how we protect ourselves and our loved ones, and even who we associate with and what we think.
As Liz Wolfe writes for Reason, “Little things that make people’s lives better, tastier, and less tedious are being cracked down on by big government types in federal and state governments.”
You can’t even buy a stove, a dishwasher, a showerhead, a leaf blower, or a lightbulb anymore without running afoul of the Nanny State.
In this way, under the guise of pseudo-benevolence, the government has meted out this bureaucratic tyranny in such a way as to nullify the inalienable rights of the individual and limit our choices to those few that the government deems safe enough.
Yet limited choice is no choice at all. Likewise, regulated freedom is no freedom at all.
Indeed, as a study by the Cato Institute concludes, for the average American, freedom has declined generally over the past 20 years. As researchers William Ruger and Jason Sorens explain, “We ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”
The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.
When the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the individual rights of the citizenry, we’re in trouble, folks.
Federal and state governments have used the law as a bludgeon to litigate, legislate and micromanage our lives through overregulation and overcriminalization.
This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.
Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal, and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.
You don’t have to look far to find abundant examples of Nanny State laws that infantilize individuals and strip them of their ability to decide things for themselves. Back in 2012, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg infamously proposed a ban on the sale of sodas and large sugary drinks in order to guard against obesity. Other localities enacted bans on texting while jaywalking, wearing saggy pants, having too much mud on your car, smoking outdoors, storing trash in your car, improperly sorting your trash, cursing within earshot of others, or screeching your tires.
Yet while there are endless ways for the Nanny State to micromanage our lives, things become truly ominous when the government adopts mechanisms enabling it to monitor us for violations in order to enforce its many laws.
Nanny State, meet the all-seeing, all-knowing Surveillance State and its sidekick, the muscle-flexing Police State.
You see, in an age of overcriminalization—when the law is wielded like a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates whatever they might be—you don’t have to do anything “wrong” to be fined, arrested or subjected to raids and seizures and surveillance.
You just have to refuse to march in lockstep with the government.
As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.
“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”
This is the police state’s superpower: empowered by the Nanny State, it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.
Indeed, if you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in by the Nanny State working in tandem with the Police State.
The government’s response to COVID-19 saddled us with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.
The groundwork laid with COVID-19 is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.
Consider how many more ways the government could “protect us” from ourselves under the guise of public health and safety.
For instance, under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
When combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, these preemptive mental health programs could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”
This is how it begins.
On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
Having conditioned the population to the idea that being part of society is a privilege and not a right, such access could easily be predicated on social credit scores, the worthiness of one’s political views, or the extent to which one is willing to comply with the government’s dictates, no matter what they might be.
COVID-19 with its talk of mass testing, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, and snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities was a preview of what’s to come.
We should all be leery and afraid.
At a time when the government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state, it won’t take much for any of us to be considered outlaws or terrorists.
After all, the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. The Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
At some point, being an individualist will be considered as dangerous as being a terrorist.
When anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism, “we the people” have little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
In an age of overcriminalization, you’re already a criminal.
All the government needs is proof of your law-breaking. They’ll get it, too.
Whether it’s through the use of surveillance software such as ShadowDragon that allows police to watch people’s social media activity, or technology that uses a home’s WiFi router and smart appliances to allow those on the outside to “see” throughout your home, it’s just a matter of time.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying one of its numerous mandates but when.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 09/28/2023 – 00:00 - US Admits Israel Into Visa Waiver Program In Major Upgrade To Ties
US Admits Israel Into Visa Waiver Program In Major Upgrade To Ties
The Netanyahu government has just pulled off a major diplomatic victory, reaching a longtime goal toward upgrading US-Israel relations.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has agreed to Israel’s entry into the US Visa Waiver Program, which means that for the first time Israeli citizens will be able to travel to the United States visa-free. It will take effect Nov. 30, according to US officials.
Image: Flash90 “The designation of Israel into the Visa Waiver Program is an important recognition of our shared security interests and the close cooperation between our two countries,” Mayorkas said in Wednesday statement confirming Israel’s upgraded status.
And Secretary of State Antony Blinken hailed the designation as “a critical step forward” in the US strategic partnership with Israel “that will further strengthen long-standing people-to-people engagement, economic cooperation, and security coordination between our two countries” – as quoted in Axios.
“This important achievement will enhance freedom of movement for U.S. citizens, including those living in the Palestinian Territories or traveling to and from them,” he added, in reference to reciprocity. Israel will now allow US passport holders visa-free travel in return, including theoretically Palestinian-Americans.
However, Arab groups and Palestinian activists have charged that Israel has failed to change its entry policies in practice, and that it will still discriminate against Palestinians, even if they are US citizens. According to Al Jazeera:
On Tuesday, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) said it had filed a lawsuit against Israel’s VWP designation. “Credible reports and ADC’s own investigations have shown that Israel failed to meet all of the legal requirements for admission,” the group said.
Abed Ayoub, the ADC’s executive director, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that by letting Israel into the programme, the Biden administration “has endorsed and embraced Israeli discrimination and apartheid”.
“With this decision, the US government will be sending a message that not all American passport holders are equal,” Ayoub said.
This significant step in US-Israel relations comes after last week President Biden and PM Netanyahu met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Relations have been on the rocks, given the controversial judicial reform initiative in Israel, and the fact that Netanyahu was never invited to the White House after being sworn in again as prime minister. Netanyahu took it as a personal affront, but this Visa Waiver Program upgrade is being seen as a breakthrough.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 23:40 - Canada Launches UN Declaration Targeting Online 'Disinformation'
Canada Launches UN Declaration Targeting Online ‘Disinformation’
Authored by Amanda Brown via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has launched a United Nations declaration that calls for action to protect what it calls “information integrity” and to tackle “disinformation.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly speaks with reporters in the foyer of the House of Commons in Ottawa on April 27, 2023. (The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld) Ms. Joly launched the Global Declaration on Information Integrity Online jointly with Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Hanke Bruins Slot during the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 20.
“Information integrity is essential to help ensure the strength of democratic processes and to protect fundamental rights,” says a joint statement by Canada and the Netherlands.
“The erosion of information integrity, including the propagation of disinformation, weakens the strength of democratic engagement.”
In a speech on Sept. 20, Ms. Joly said the declaration is a “concrete step toward establishing global norms on disinformation, misinformation, and information integrity,” the National Post reported.
Speaking to the U.N. on the same day, Ms. Bruins Slot said the emerging online environment makes it difficult to determine what is and what is not truthful.
“Every day, the world is flooded with disinformation and misinformation. Rapid advances in technology—particularly generative AI—make it more and more difficult to tell fact from fiction,” she said.
Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Japan, and South Korea are among the 30 countries that have signed the declaration.
The declaration promotes concepts such as respect for “the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information.”
It says signatories need to “take active steps to address misinformation and disinformation targeted at women, LGBTIQ+ persons, persons with disabilities and Indigenous Peoples.”
It also calls on signatories to “refrain from unduly restricting human rights online, especially the freedom of opinion and expression, under the guise of countering disinformation,” and to “promote and respect pluralistic media and journalism, and protect access to media content as one measure to counter disinformation.”
Multiple Strategies
In recent years, the federal government has initiated a number of projects to counter “misinformation,” “disinformation” and what it considers extremist ideologies.
Some initiatives are the result of international collaborative efforts to shape the flow of information, and others have been conceived closer to home.
Canada’s participation in the Rapid Response Mechanism, established by G7 leaders at the 2018 G7 Summit in Charlevoix, Quebec, monitors the digital information environment. Its goal is to encourage cooperation among member countries to provide a coordinated response to “foreign state-sponsored disinformation” and the “evolving foreign threats to democracy.”
The Liberal government has enacted legislation to shape the information space, with bills C-18 and C-11 being passed in recent months.
The Online News Act, Bill C-18, which passed in June, has been framed as an attempt to defend democracy by bolstering the coffers of flailing legacy media with money from Big Tech.
In reaction to the new legislation, Meta has restricted Canadians’ access to news content in their feeds, to avoid sharing revenue with media outlets. Google has threatened to take action but hasn’t yet.
The Liberal government also passed Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, in order to boost Canadian content and to regulate some aspects of online streaming and social media.
A new bill to address “online harms” is also in the works, but it does not appear to be a legislative priority for the government at this time.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 23:20 - Costa Rica Declares State Of Emergency As Migrant Crisis Rocks Americas
Costa Rica Declares State Of Emergency As Migrant Crisis Rocks Americas
Costa Rica’s President Rodrigo Chaves declared a state of emergency on Tuesday as the number of migrants passing through the Central American country on the way toward the US surges, Reuters reported.
“I have instructed the security ministry to take a firm stance with anyone who takes Costa Rica’s kindness for weakness,” Chavez older reporters, referring to recent riots caused by migrants crossing the country.
Chavez explained the tsunami of migrants is coming from Ecuador, Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti, Yemen, Bangladesh, and even China. He noted, “We all know that throughout the Americas there is a migration crisis.”
Since the beginning of the year, nearly 400,000 migrants have crossed the border from Panama into Costa Rica.
The migrant crisis is only going to escalate moving forward. Biden’s complete lack of action has signaled to millions that American’s borders are completely open and the blue states’ decisions to subsidize them with free housing, jobs and care might as well be a red carpet… https://t.co/wKdiAFEvWG
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 27, 2023
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Costa Rica’s migrant chaos comes as President Biden’s disastrous open southern border crisis has sparked a record-breaking month for August. According to the US Customs and Border Protection, 232,972 migrants were encountered at the US-Mexico border in August.
Biden greenlighted migrants worldwide in a June 20 statement marking World Refugee Day: “Welcoming refugees is part of who we are as Americans – our nation was founded by those fleeing religious persecution. When we take action to help refugees around the world, and include them, we honor this past and are stronger for it.”
In recent weeks, all hell has broken out at Eagle Pass, Texas, and other border crossings as migrants flood the southern border via an easy commute through Mexico by freight train.
Holy sh*t.
New video shows a massive train loaded with illegal migrants headed for the US border.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 17, 2023
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NEW – Drone footage reveals hundreds of migrants on trains headed for Eagle Pass, Texas, and the U.S. southern border.pic.twitter.com/avYTTWx0he
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 26, 2023
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Waves of undocumented migrants have disembarked from the trains in Mexico and are hiking the final 20 miles in to Eagle Pass, Texas. pic.twitter.com/4ZUUHBMnja
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 27, 2023
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Law-abiding taxpayers need to ask why the Biden administration is pushing disastrous open border policies to flood illegals into metro areas ahead of the presidential election. These devastating policies are against the will of the majority and only supported by a fringe minority of political elites and progressive billionaires.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 23:00 - US Rebukes Close Ally Egypt For Using Child Soldiers
US Rebukes Close Ally Egypt For Using Child Soldiers
A report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday says that the US has added Egypt to its list of countries believed to be using child soldiers.
According to the report, the designation by the State Department comes after a number of independent investigations, which found that Egypt’s military has been conducting joint operations with allied militia groups in northern Sinai that recruit children.
File image of military forces in North Sinai, Egypt, via Reuters These operations often included combat against groups such as the Islamic State-affiliated Wilayat Sinai. Some of those recruited to fight were as young as 16, and were used for various tasks, including logistics and combat operations.
Previous reports and investigations have revealed that the child soldiers were wounded or killed in the fighting. HRW also cited a number of videos shared on social media platforms, such as Facebook and TikTok, which have depicted child soldiers engaging in military operations.
Last month, the UK-based Sinai Foundation for Human Rights (SFHR) said that between 2013 and 2022, children as young as 12 were enlisted, with some under 18 directly participating in hostilities.
Others were tasked with spying, delivering food to military checkpoints and disassembling explosives, the group found. HRW’s findings, released on Tuesday, come after a months-long investigation by SFHR, partly based on testimonies from the children’s relatives, pro-government militia members and a child allegedly enlisted by armed forces.
Under international law, governments are prohibited from recruiting children under the age of 15 for any purpose. Such recruitment by either a government or armed groups is listed as a war crime in the International Criminal Court statutes.
SFHR said it was calling on the Egyptian government to “immediately halt the recruitment, enlistment and use of children under 18 as combatants or in military support roles that expose them to danger”.
Before the Ukraine war, Egypt consistently ranked second in the world among highest US foreign aid recipients…
Summary executions
The IS faction Wilayat Sinai has been directly responsible for the deaths of some of the child soldiers, including through executions.
In one instance, a 17-year-old was beheaded in front of his father with a scalpel, and his head was then left by a railway crossing in his village as a warning to others alleged to have worked with the Egyptian authorities.
Other children were seriously wounded during their work, including several injured while trying to defuse explosives, SFHR said. Since 2015, local tribes in the area have formed a pro-government militia.
The conflict has caused military and civilian casualties, although it is difficult to gauge the full picture as journalists have often been barred from the area.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 22:40 - Culinary And Bartenders Unions Authorize Vegas-Wide Strike Across 22 Casinos And Resorts
Culinary And Bartenders Unions Authorize Vegas-Wide Strike Across 22 Casinos And Resorts
Tis the season to strike.
Following President Biden’s unprecedented visit to the picket lines of United Auto Workers in Michigan on Tuesday afternoon, by night, tens of thousands of members of the Culinary and Bartenders Unions in Las Vegas voted by 95% to authorize a strike against some of Sin City’s largest casinos and resorts.
“Now, Culinary and Bartenders Unions negotiating committee is authorized to call for a strike at 22 casino resorts properties on the Las Vegas Strip between the largest employers MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment Corporation, and Wynn/Encore Resorts. The Culinary Union, which is now authorized to call for a strike at any date or time, has not yet set a strike deadline and continues negotiating in good faith with all gaming companies,” Culinary Workers Union Local 226 wrote in a press release.
BREAKING: Culinary Union announces 95% have voted yes to authorize a Citywide Strike.
Negotiations continue with @MGMResortsIntl), @CaesarsEnt, & @WynnLasVegas next week.
Culinary Union is now authorized to call for a strike any day.#OneJobShouldBeEnough pic.twitter.com/j0IzmCkyNN
— Culinary Union (@Culinary226) September 27, 2023
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Both unions represent 60,000 hospitality workers across Nevada, of which 53,000 are based on the Vegas Strip. In Vegas alone, 40,000 workers are employed at the 22 casino resorts, with many of them working for MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn/Encore Resorts. They noted that “negotiations with casino/hotel employers for a new 5-year contract” are underway.
“Today, Culinary and Bartenders Union members have sent the strongest message possible to the casino industry to settle a fair contract as soon as possible. We have negotiations scheduled next week with MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, and Wynn/Encore Resorts and it’s up the three largest employers in Las Vegas to step up and do the right thing,” said Ted Pappageorge, Secretary-Treasurer for the Culinary Union.
Pappageorge continued, “If these gaming companies don’t come to an agreement, the workers have spoken and we will be ready to do whatever it takes – up to and including a strike. Workers brought every single one of these companies through the pandemic and into a great recovery, and workers deserve a fair share. Companies are doing extremely well and we are demanding that workers aren’t left behind.”
The unions are asking for better wages, benefits, job security protections, and reduced workload, among other things.
If the unions strike, it raises the question of whether President Biden will stand on picket lines along the Vegas Strip with kitchen staff and bartenders.
And any new labor contract that meets the unions’ demands will only force casinos and resorts to raise drink and food prices: inflation.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 22:20 - If China Is So Weak, Why Are Commodities So Strong?
If China Is So Weak, Why Are Commodities So Strong?
By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live reporter and strategist
The decline in China’s home construction has been remarkable, almost rivaling the US housing crisis of 2008.
It raises the question: Why are commodity prices so resilient if one of the biggest buyers is in malaise?
It turns out China’s demand for raw materials is more robust than the overall economy. In other words, there’s some decoupling between China’s housing activity and commodities.
US rates and crude oil remain the two most-important variables driving asset prices globally now. WTI crude rose to a one-year high near $94 a barrel. Ten-year yields jumped to 4.6%, pushing the dollar stronger along the way.
The strength in oil, and more broadly the resilience of raw materials, seems at odds with a sluggish Chinese economy, considering the commodity-heavy housing sector remains in trouble. The floor space of newly started housing averaged about 87 million square meters over the past 12 months, marking a 60% decline from a peak in 2021. That isn’t far from the slump in the US housing market during the financial crisis.
Yet, China’s import volume of commodities from oil and coal to iron ore remains in-line with the trend growth, as shown in this chart from UBS. What gives?
For oil, it’s easier to understand. The US consumes 20% of global oil, compared with China’s 15%. So part of the oil price increase reflects a strong US economy, plus OPEC+ output cut. And in China, while the economy struggles, measures of transportation such as domestic flights and trucking have already risen above the pre-pandemic level, underpinning the demand for fuel.
UBS’s strategists including Manik Narain noted two other supportive factors: strength in infrastructure and manufacturing investments, as well as export demand for commodity-sensitive products (steel) and inventory rebuilding (coal). Bloomberg also reported that railway construction has been robust.
Source: UBS In a report published Wednesday, Goldman Sachs’s strategists Nicholas Snowdon and Aditi Rai also pointed out that the demand for copper and aluminum is supported by growth in renewable energy, the power grid and property completions. For example, China’s solar installations this year have surged.
So the demand for commodities at idiosyncratic, micro levels is outperforming China’s macro economy. Is this a structural change? That remains to be seen. But for anyone who is bearish on China, shorting commodities hasn’t been a great trade so far.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 22:00 - 100s Of Pages Of Newly Released Memos Spark Fresh Corruption Charges Ahead Of 1st Biden Impeachment Inquiry Hearing
100s Of Pages Of Newly Released Memos Spark Fresh Corruption Charges Ahead Of 1st Biden Impeachment Inquiry Hearing
Mountains of evidence released by House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee today point to a decade and more of influence peddling and financial fraud involving President Joe Biden, his son Hunter, and brother, James, and multiple business associates.
These documents will be reviewed on Thursday in the first special impeachment inquiry hearing of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
Newly revealed materials confirm that Hunter Biden was traveling the world to sell influence and access to the Biden “brand,” meaning his father, Joe Biden.
Hunter has even referred to access to his father as “the keys” to “my family’s only asset.”
In just the last day, we have discovered:
A $250K wire for Hunter Biden in 2019 from China with Joe Biden’s address as the beneficiary.
The wires were from Wang Xin and Jonathan Li, the latter of whom ran a Chinese private equity fund (BHR) which Hunter was listed as being on the board of directors. Hunter also arranged for a meeting between Li and Joe Biden while Joe was VP, while Joe allegedly gave Li’s son a letter of recommendation.
One document confirmed rumors that at one point the FBI and IRS investigated Hunter Biden for possible violations of the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), a federal law requiring disclosure of any lobbying activities on behalf of foreign powers. “Please focus on FARA evidence only,” Delaware Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf emailed agents in August 2020 concerning a possible search warrant application.
Test message showing that James Biden suggested it was normal for Joe Biden to be involved in his son’s business.
In an affidavit to the committee, Ziegler suggested agents believed there was evidence in a series of WhatsApp encrypted text messages that Joe Biden was involved in the CEFC business deal and others before it, but the FBI’s interview with James Biden was constructed to avoid asking those questions.
To back up the claim, Ziegler attached a summary of one text messages between James Biden and Hunter Biden from 2018. “This can work, you need a safe harbor. I can work with you father alone !! We as usual just need several months of his help for this to work. Let’s talk about it. It makes perfect sense to me. This is difficult to fully vet without talking,” the uncle wrote Hunter Biden.
Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings received Joe Biden’s planned talking points ahead of his December 2015 trip to Ukraine, according to a newly released memo from lobbying firm Blue Star Strategies.
Blue Star Strategies sent the memo to Burisma on Dec. 2, 2015, after an apparent call with “senior administration officials” and detailed then-Vice President Joe Biden’s messaging strategy for his trip to Ukraine, the memo shows.
And finally, and perhaps most damningly, as Kyle Becker highlighted, Hunter Biden signed off on a Burisma memo to the Ukrainian prosecutor who replaced Viktor Shokin that warned not to continue further investigations.
“Moreover it is imperative that allegations of criminal activity made to the media about Burisma and/or Nikolay Zlochevsky come to an end.”
Is that enough “evidence” for the “there is no evidence” misinformation-spreaders to fold?
We highly doubt it… but tomorrow’s hearing will give us a glimpse at the Democrats’ plan…
Democrats are staring at a mountain of emails, text messages, bank records, AF2 logs, White House visitor logs, FBI docs, whistleblower statements & witness testimony and insist there’s no “smoking gun.”
This is the same shameless party that impeached Trump. TWICE.
Not only…
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) September 27, 2023
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While the proceedings will initially convene in that committee’s hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building, the inquiry – authorized Sept. 12 by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) – is being led by oversight panel chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.).
As Mark Tapscott detailed earlier via The Epoch Times, Republicans have portrayed the initial hearing as merely a summary or review of the evidence obtained to date, but Mr. Comer announced Sept. 26 that his panel received in response to subpoenas two previously unknown wire transfers to Hunter Biden from Chinese businessmen with numerous links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“On July 26, 2019, Hunter Biden received a $10,000 wire from Wang Xin. On August 2, 2019, Hunter Biden received a $250,000 wire from Jonathan Li and Tan Ling. Both wires originated in Beijing and Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home is listed as the beneficiary address for both wires,” Mr. Comer said in a statement. The transfers directly contradict claims by the President and Hunter Biden’s lawyer that no funds were received from China.
In addition, Mr. Comer pointed out that “evidence shows Joe Biden developed a familiar relationship with Jonathan Li during his vice presidency and prior to these payments to Hunter Biden. Devon Archer, a Biden business associate, described [to the oversight committee in closed-door testimony] how Joe Biden met with Jonathan Li in Beijing, China, had a phone call with him, and later wrote college recommendation letters for his children.”
Then on Sept. 27, Mr. Smith’s panel made public 700 pages of additional evidence provided by two IRS whistleblowers who were deeply involved in the government’s long-running investigation of Hunter Biden’s failure to pay taxes on income he received in 2014 and 2015.
The Ways and Means panel made the new evidence public following a closed-door executive session in which all 18 Democrats opposed the release.
The new materials made public by Mr. Smith indicated the Biden family received at least $19 million in income from entities in at least 23 countries around the world which was channeled through 20 shell companies.
The income was ultimately received directly or indirectly by multiple members of the Biden family, including the president while he was vice president.
The materials also included numerous references in emails and telephone messages to the senior Biden playing an active role in what Mr. Smith described to reporters during a Capitol Hill news conference following the executive session as “a complex and lucrative enterprise operated by the Biden family to enrich themselves to the tune of at least $20 million, with much of Hunter Biden’s share going unreported for taxes.”
Mr. Smith further claimed the new evidence makes clear that “then Vice President Joe Biden’s political power and influence was ‘the brand’ that Hunter Biden was selling all over the world. Even more alarming, the Biden family foreign influence peddling operation suggests an effort to sway U.S. policy decisions.”
The tranche of materials includes an August 2020 email from Lesley Wolf, a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney helping to oversee the investigation of Mr. Biden, telling investigators to redraft a search warrant to remove mention of “political figure 1.”
That was a reference to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, according to Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the panel.
“It’s about a two-tiered system of justice. If Joe Biden’s name had been Smith or Jones or Johnson, he would not have been excluded from this search warrant. But he was. And we wouldn’t know that if the whistleblowers had not come forward,” Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.), a former U.S. attorney and member of the committee, told reporters.
The backgrounds of the witnesses for the hearing suggest the impeachment inquiry’s summary of evidence will focus on three major areas.
Witness Bruce Dubinski is a Florida-based forensic accountant who specializes in cases involving white-collar crime and financial fraud.
He has testified as an expert witness in multiple federal and state bench and jury trials.
Republican leaders of the impeachment inquiry have repeatedly described their efforts as “following the money,” and they have pointed to more than 170 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) from financial institutions to the Department of Treasury concerning the movement of funds among the 20 Biden shell companies as evidence of money laundering in an attempt to conceal the sources of income to the family.
Mr. Dubinski is expected to shed additional light on the significance of the SARs and how the funds flowed from foreign sources to the shell companies and then to members of the Biden family, including several grandchildren.
Former Assistant Attorney General Eileen O’Connor will be the second witness providing testimony to the impeachment inquiry. She oversaw the Tax Division of the Department of Justice during the presidency of George W. Bush from 2001 to 2007.
Ms. O’Connor has since specialized in civil and criminal tax disputes, from the administrative investigative phases through trial litigation and appellate processes. Committee members will likely quiz her closely on issues and evidence related to the government’s investigation of Hunter Biden’s failure to report income and pay taxes on it.
She will also be questioned about the significance of the failed plea deal rejected in July by a federal judge that would have enabled the president’s son to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and a felony gun charge, and which would have granted him immunity from all future prosecutions.
Professor Jonathan Turley of the George Washington University Law School will be the third witness. Mr. Turley is a constitutional law authority who frequently testifies before committees of both chambers in Congress, including during the first impeachment hearings of the 117th Congress against President Donald Trump.
A Fox News Contributor, Mr. Turley is a frequent commenter on controversial legal and political developments in the nation’s capital, and he has also served as a legal analyst for CBS News and NBC News on high-profile controversies. Committee members will likely seek his insights on constitutional issues related to impeachable activities and federal ethics laws and regulations.
Democrats condemn the impeachment inquiry as a waste of time, especially coming with only hours until the federal government could be forced to shut down if Congress has not adopted a 2024 budget by midnight Saturday, the end of the current fiscal year.
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the Ranking Member of the Ways and Means Committee, issued a statement following the closed executive session in which he labeled the hearing “a distraction from my colleagues’ inability to govern and from their inability to fund the government. Amid their chaos, they’ve failed to convince their own colleagues of the necessity of their political stunt, let alone the American people.”
The Massachusetts Democrat, who preceded Mr. Smith as Chairman, added that “millions of women and children are at risk of losing their food assistance because of my colleagues’ disinterest in governing. How are we supposed to tell our constituents that Fox News hits were more important than their next meal? Or what are we supposed to say to the 2.2 million American workers who may go without a paycheck when Republicans shut down the government? For this Republican majority, regardless of evidence, all roads lead to impeachment. It’s a sad day for the Congress and for the American people.”
Finally, The Daily Caller reports that an email obtained by a CNN producer showed Hunter Biden expected all of the “stuff” regarding his criminal wrongdoings to disappear once his father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, became president, according to documents the House Ways and Means Committee released.
Justin T. Cole, the Office of Communications Director for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), notified the agency’s chief and deputy chief a CNN producer reached out about their investigation into Hunter’s tax and gun crimes, according to an email the Ways and Means committee released. Cole apparently said the CNN producer possessed an email from Hunter saying he believed he would be off the hook once his father became president and that he was unwilling to accept a plea deal.
“Producer has an email from Hunter saying he expected all of this “stuff” to go away when his dad becomes President,” Cole wrote.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 21:45 - The Great Demoralization
The Great Demoralization
Commentary by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
On March 6, 2020, the mayor of Austin, Texas, canceled the biggest tech and arts trade show in the world, South-by-Southwest, only a week before hundreds of thousands were to gather in the city.
In an instant, with the stroke of a pen, it was all gone: hotel reservations, flight plans, performances, exhibitors, and all the hopes and dreams of thousands of merchants in the town. Economic impact: a loss $335 million in revenue at least. And that was just to the city alone, to say nothing of the broader impact.
(imtmphoto/Shutterstock) It was the beginning of U.S. lockdowns. It wasn’t entirely clear at the time—my own sense was that this was a calamity that would lead to decades of successful lawsuits against the Austin mayor—but it turned out that Austin was the test case and template for the entire nation and then the world.
The reason was of course COVID but the pathogen wasn’t even there. The idea was to keep it out of the city, an incredible and sudden fallback to a medieval practice that has nothing to do with modern public health understanding of how a respiratory virus should be handled.
“In six months,” I wrote at the time, “if we are in a recession, unemployment is up, financial markets are wrecked, and people are locked in their homes, we’ll wonder why the heck governments chose disease ‘containment’ over disease mitigation. Then the conspiracy theorists get to work.”
I was right about the conspiracy theorists but I had not anticipated that they would turn out to be right about nearly everything. We were being groomed for extended national and global lockdowns.
At this point in the trajectory, we already knew the gradient of risk. It was not medically significant for healthy working-age adults (which still to this day the CDCs does not admit). So the shutdown likely protected very few if anyone.
The extraordinary edict—worthy of a tin-pot dictator of a dark age—completely overrode the wishes of millions, all on the decision of one man, whose name is Steven Adler.
“Was the consideration between maintaining that money, effectively rolling the dice, and doing what you did?” asked Texas Monthly of the mayor.
His answer: “No.”
Clarifying: “We made a decision based on what was in the best health interest for the city. And that is not an easy choice.”
After the shocking cancellation, which overrode property rights and free will, the mayor urged all residents to go out and eat at restaurants and gather and spend money to support the local economy. In this later interview, he explained that he had no problem keeping the city open. He just didn’t want people from hither and yon—the dirty people, so to speak—to bring a virus with them.
He was here playing the role of Prince Prospero in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” He was turning the capital city of Texas into a castle in which the elite could hide from the virus, an action that also became a foreshadowing of what was to come: the division of the entire country into clean and dirty populations.
The mayor further added a strange comment: “I think the spread of the disease here is inevitable. I don’t think that closing down South Bay was intended to stop the disease from getting here because it is coming. The assessment of our public health professionals was that we were risking it coming here more quickly, or in a greater way with a greater impact. And the longer we could put that off, the better this city is.”
And there we have the “flatten the curve” thinking at work. Kick the can down the road. Postpone. Delay herd immunity as long as possible. Yes, everyone will get the bug but it is always better that it happens later rather than sooner. But why? We were never told. Flatten the curve was really just prolong the pain, keep our overlords in charge as long as possible, put normal life on hold, and stay safe as long as you can.
Prolonging the pain might also have served another surreptitious agenda: let the working classes—the dirty people—get the bug and bear the burden of herd immunity so that the elites can stay clean and hopefully it will die out before it gets to the highest echelons. There was indeed a hierarchy of infection.
In all these months, no one ever explained to the American public why prolonging the period of non-exposure was always better than meeting the virus sooner, gaining immunity, and getting over it. The hospitals around the country were not strained. Indeed, with the inexplicable shutdown of medical services for diagnostics and elective surgeries, hospitals in Texas were empty for months. Health care spending collapsed.
This was the onset of the great demoralization. The message was: your property is not your own. Your events are not yours. Your decisions are subject to our will. We know better than you. You cannot take risks with your own free will. Our judgment is always better than yours. We will override anything about your bodily autonomy and choices that are inconsistent with our perceptions of the common good. There is no restraint on us and every restraint on you.
This messaging and this practice is inconsistent with a flourishing human life, which requires the freedom of choice above all else. It also requires the security of property and contracts. It presumes that if we make plans, those plans cannot be arbitrarily canceled by force by a power outside of our control. Those are bare minimum presumptions of a civilized society. Anything else leads to barbarism and that is exactly where the Austin decision took us.
We still don’t know precisely who was involved in this rash judgment or on what basis they made it. There was a growing sense in the country at the time that something was going to happen. There had been sporadic use of lockdown powers in the past. Think of the closure of Boston after the bombing in 2013. A year later, the state of Connecticut quarantined two travelers who might have been exposed to Ebola in Africa. These were the precedents.
“The coronavirus is driving Americans into unexplored territory, in this case understanding and accepting the loss of freedom associated with a quarantine,” wrote the New York Times on March 19, 2020, three days after the Trump press conference that announced two weeks to flatten the curve.
The experience on a nationwide basis fundamentally undermined the civil liberties and rights that Americans had long taken for granted. It was a shock to everyone but to young people still in school, it was utter trauma and a moment of mental reprogramming. They learned all the wrong lessons: they are not in charge of their lives; someone else is. The only way to be is to figure out the system and play along.
We now see epic learning loss, psychological shock, population-wide obesity and substance abuse, a fall in investor confidence, a shrinkage of savings reflecting less interest in the future, and a dramatic decline in public participation in what used to be normal life events: church, theater, museums, libraries, fairs, symphonies, ballets, theme parks, and so on. Attendance in general is down by half and this is starving these venues of money. Most of the big institutions in large cities like New York, such as Broadway and the Met, are on life support. The symphony halls have a third empty seats despite lowering prices.
It seems remarkable that this three-and-a-half year-long war against basic liberty for nearly everyone has come to this. And yet it should not be a surprise. All ideology aside, you simply cannot maintain much less cultivate a civilized life when governments, in combination with the commanding heights of media and large corporations, treat their citizens like lab rats in a science experiment. You only end in sucking away the essence and vibrancy of the human spirit, as well as the will to build a good life.
In the name of public health, they sapped the will to health. And if you object, they shut you up. This is still going on daily.
The ruling class that did this to the country has yet to speak honestly about what transpired. It was their actions that created the current cultural, economic, and social crisis. Their experiment left the country and our lives in shambles. We’ve yet to hear apologies or even basic honesty about any of it. Instead, all we get is more misleading propaganda about how we need yet another shot that doesn’t work.
History provides many cases of a beaten down, demoralized, and increasingly poor and censored majority population being ruled over by an imperious, inhumane, sadistic, privileged, and yet tiny ruling class. We just never believed we would become one of those cases. The truth of this is so grim and glaring, and the likely explanation of what happened so shocking, that the entire subject is regarded as something of a taboo in public life.
There will be no fixing this, no crawling out from under the rubble, until we get something from our rulers other than public preening about a job well done, in ads sponsored by Pfizer and Moderna.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 21:40 - What's Behind The Record Divergence Between GDP and GDI, And Why Tomorrow The US Economy Will Be Revised Sharply Lower
What’s Behind The Record Divergence Between GDP and GDI, And Why Tomorrow The US Economy Will Be Revised Sharply Lower
Tomorrow morning years of politically-motivated upward drift in US economic “data” will get their come to Jesus moment of gravitational reacquaintance: at 8:30am ET on Thursday, alongside the final Q2 GDP print (expected unchanged at 2.2%) the BEA will also publish its once-every-five-years revision of GDP from Q1 2005 to Q1 2023, which according to Morgan Stanley will lead to a sharp downward revision, of as much as 80bps from Q2 GDP, and could potentially even indicate economic contraction in the first half of 2023.
There are several reasons why GDP may be revised right off the proverbial cliff, but chief among them is the previously discussed record divergence between GDP and GDI, two series which – in theory – should be identical.
Besides GDP, Gross domestic income (GDI) and select income components will also be revised from Q1 1979 through Q1 2023, but as Morgan Stanley explained previously, the likely drift in revisions will be toward a lower GDP and higher GDI. This is how the bank’s chief US economist Ellen Zentner explained it previously:
GDP will likely be revised down toward GDI. Not only does the GDI/GDP gap tend to close in absolute terms, but we also find evidence that GDP usually converges toward GDI in YoY% rates. Exhibit 4 shows the relationship between the percentage point difference between GDI and GDP before the revision (latest quarter available before revision, YoY%) and the change in GDP growth rate after the revision (pp difference after vs before). There is a positive link between the two variables suggesting that a negative GDI/GDP difference like the one we have now might result in a downward revision to GDP. In Exhibit 4 we show two linear fits, one using the 20-year sample and the other only focusing on the revisions where the GDI/GDP gap closed, with a stronger link between the variables. Using the predictions from these simple models, we would expect to see a downward revision to 2Q 23 YoY% GDP of as much as -50bp to -80bp
And while we discussed all this and more previously, a key question some may ask is what is the reason behind the massive divergence between GDP and GDI?
For the answer we go to a recent note from JPM chief economist Michael Feroli who correctly notes that one dark cloud hanging over the US economic outlook all year has been the very weak performance of real gross domestic income (GDI), which has contracted 0.5% over the past four quarters.
As noted before, GDI should equate with GDP, and past research has indicated that averaging GDI with GDP (also called GDO, or gross domestic output) provides a better measure of the underlying growth of economic activity than either measure viewed in isolation. Obviously, incorporating GDI clearly sends a more downbeat message about the economy’s recent performance, and suggests that the surge in the US Dollar and 10Y yields are just huge headfakes, and once the revised data is released we could see a brutal mean reversion in both the greenback and US Treasuries.
But going back to the key question – what is behind the record difference between GDP and GDI – Feroli answers that this is the result of previously omitted net interest payments by the Federal Reserve, which will be corrected by tomorrow’s data revision, thereby boosting GDI. By itself this revision would close about half of the gap between these two broadest measures of the size of the economy.
As Feroli explains next, “consistent with their legal status, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) consider the Federal Reserve banks to be financial corporate businesses.” Their contribution to GDI has so far been in corporate profits, which track closely to the net income of the Federal Reserve system. Recently, the profits of the Federal Reserve banks have rapidly deteriorated, contributing to the weakness in GDI.
This deterioration has been the result of ballooning interest payments on the Fed’s liabilities as short-term interest rates have increased (this would also explain the confusion experienced by Albert Edwards recently when he looked at a variation of this chart to conclude that it was “The Maddest Macro Chart I Have Seen In Many Years“).
So to address the unprecedented collapse in Fed profits as a result of soaring interest rates…
… In June, the BEA discussed how in the upcoming annual revision of the NIPAs they will begin recording interest paid by the Federal Reserve banks. Like corporate profits, net interest payments are an element of corporate operating surplus, which is an element of GDI. This methodological revision updates the NIPAs to keep them more consistent across accounts considering the Fed’s relatively newfound ability to pay interest.
What does this mean for the record statistical discrepancy using between GDP and GDP? The answer comes from data pulled from the Fed’s balance sheet and administered interest rates. (Although the BEA documentation is ambiguous, JPM assumes that all paid liabilities will be recorded, including those for the overnight reverse repo facility).
This inclusion would cut in half the statistical discrepancy in 2Q23, bringing it down from 1.8% of GDP to 0.9%.
In other words, this revision would still leave real GDI growth negative in 4Q22 and 1Q23 – suggesting that GDP would also be revised negative for two quarters, potentially springing an unexpected recession on the US – but would raise the annualized growth in those quarters by about 1%-pt.
The inclusion of Fed interest payments in GDI isn’t the only component that will be revised later this month. The inclusion of more complete data could push estimates of GDP and GDI either up or down. That said, JPM agrees with Morgan Stanley that there is a tendency for GDP and GDI to be revised toward each other. This fact, suggests that while GDI may not look so worrisome in another three weeks, GDP will also see some very substantive haircuts which may effectively eliminate much if not all purported “growth” in 2023.
Finally, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid agrees, and in a recent note he writes that while tomorrow’s revisions could make GDI look more healthy (interest payments add income to parts of the economy) they could “also make interest costs in the economy look more realistic and hurt fundamental models of interest cover for those indebted.” As such, “the revisions are potentially an important event and could make us think differently about the US economy in the recent past and therefore the future” especially if it is revealed that due to faulty data, the Fed kept hiking in the first half of 2023 even though true GDP was flat if not outright negative.
And if the sharp historical revision to GDP wasn’t enough, the coming plunge in Q4 GDP on the back of…
- The resumption of student loan payments, which will subtract (at least) 0.5% (and likely much more) from quarterly annualized GDP growth
- The government shutdown which will reduce quarterly annualized growth by 0.2% for each week it lasts
- The ongoing UAW auto strike which reduces quarterly annualized growth by 0.05-0.10% for each week it lasts.
…which will almost certainly push the economy into contraction, should be sufficient to put a sharp stop to any further surge in either the dollar or US interest rates.
More in the GDI/GDP reports from JPM, DB and Morgan Stanley
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 21:20 - More Politicians Are Leaving The Democratic Party
More Politicians Are Leaving The Democratic Party
Authored by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
When Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson announced his switch from Democrat to Republican in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he wrote he had “no intention of changing my approach to my job” but that American cities needed the fiscal conservatism and law enforcement that Republicans push for.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson in a file photo. (Carolyn Caster/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) And he’s not alone. This year has already seen five state lawmakers switch affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Last year, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) switched from Democrat to Independent. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has said he’s giving serious consideration to leaving the Democratic Party, and is reportedly aiming for a third party bid in 2024 for the Oval Office. In 2022, it was reported that 1 million voters had switched to the Republican Party, compared to 630,000 who became Democrats.
While switching parties is not unique, doing so while holding a partisan elected office is much more rare. According to Ballotpedia, 173 legislators have done so while in office since 1994, mostly in favor of the Republican Party.
Mr. Johnson’s office is not a partisan one, which he noted in his op-ed.
“I was never a favorite of the Democratic caucus, and the feeling was mutual. By the time I was elected mayor—a nonpartisan office—in 2019, I was relieved to be free from hyperpartisanship and ready to focus on solving problems,” he wrote.
Local Issues
The state lawmakers’ reasons for switching are not “grandiose” statements about the nation, according to Georgia state representative Mesha Mainor, speaking for herself. In most cases, the reasons for the change in party affiliation were local, and even personal.
A former healthcare provider, Ms. Mainor spent 20 years working with people of all backgrounds trying to find them solutions, and said she joined the state assembly expecting to do the same. But she quickly learned that her party was not open to working across the aisle, and several times insisted she vote down Republican bills, not because it was bad policy, but because Democrats wanted to send a message.
“I think America is saying that we’re tired of hyper-partisanship,” Ms. Mainor told The Epoch Times, sharing that her many constituents texted and called after she announced in July she was switching party affiliations to show their support. They told her they didn’t care which party she belonged to, so long as she continued to represent them.
Georgia state Rep. Mesha Mainor speaks in the House Chamber at the Georgia Capitol, in Atlanta, on March 6, 2023. Mainor announced on July 11, 2023 that she was switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, saying Democrats had driven her out for refusing to follow party orthodoxy. (Alex Slitz/AP Photo) “I champion issues that are brought to me,” said Ms. Mainor, who was elected twice on a platform to fix whatever issues constituents brought her.
For instance, when someone who is under investigation is killed, the state holds onto the death certificate, and families have requested Ms. Mainor’s help to obtain the death certificates so they can access the insurance money for the deceased’s children. Another big issue is school choice, because in Ms. Mainor’s district, only about 3 percent of schools are meeting math and reading proficiency.
Ms. Mainor hadn’t changed parties because her issues changed; she did so in order to continue championing the issues she ran on.
“The Republican Party, I would say, have a bigger tent,” she said, adding that with her new party, she is not expected to vote the party line and has room for disagreement.
‘Toxicity’
The disagreement she experienced in the Democratic Party at times got hostile—when she voted against a colleague’s bill one time, fellow Democratic legislators blasted her on social media, one holding up a $1,000 check calling on someone else to run for Ms. Mainor’s seat.
These sort of strong-arming tactics were one reason North Carolina representative Tricia Cotham switched to the Republican Party.
Her move was heavily criticized, as it gave the Republicans a supermajority—and the power to override vetos—in the House.
Ms. Cotham, whose mother is a prominent Democrat in the state, is also a veteran lawmaker. She served from 2007 to 2016 and left when her oldest son was about to start kindegarten. While recovering from a severe case of COVID-19, she learned her district’s seat was open, and ran after a lot of thought and prayer.
In an interview with local media after her announcement, Ms. Cotham recounted the “toxicity” and “nastiness” of her colleagues’ behavior toward her, and how she was ostracized in caucus meetings. She criticized the Democrats’ emphasis on “shadowing” Republican committee chairs to do opposition research, rather than spending the time on creating good policies, and said the party had changed greatly since her time in office.
Rep. Tricia Cotham, 2023. (Courtesy of the North Carolina General Assembly) The former educator and education committee chair said she started really “praying on the issue,” before making her decision. “I’ve not changed overnight despite the terrible ads, the vicious, vile words used against me,” she said.
Ms. Cotham said multiple times that she had not changed as a person, but her votes on issues relating to abortion and “trans” policy changed after her party switch.
She has frequently avoided the media on the issues and did not respond to multiple requests from The Epoch Times.
In 2015, Ms. Cotham gave testimony against a bill that would require women to wait 72 hours before an abortion. She shared the story of her first pregnancy, an ectopic pregnancy that required an induced miscarriage that saved her life.
In May, she supported a 12-week abortion ban, which she said she thought struck a “reasonable balance” and “middle ground” between extremes, refuting claims of hypocricy.
In April, Ms. Cotham also voted for a bill that would ban biological males from girls’ sports, for which she received another wave of criticism from the left.
In an interview shortly after she announced the party switch, she told the local channel that she would always support “LGB” rights, leaving out the “T” for “trans.”
In 2016, she voted on a bathroom bill that would allow “trans” identifying students to use the bathroom they preferred instead of the one matching their sex. It was the year after Bruce Jenner “came out” as Caitlyn Jenner, garnering widespread awareness and understanding of what it meant to “transition.” The word “transgender” was only just replacing “transexual,” and the issue hadn’t yet zeroed in on children.
Critics of Ms. Cotham have demanded she be recalled from office, and Ms. Cotham has already refunded donors who supported her campaign on request.
‘Nothing Has Changed’
In Louisiana, two state legislators changed parties.
Francis Thompson had served as a Democrat for 50 years before he switched parties in March, giving Republicans a supermajority.
A longtime “conservative Democrat,” Mr. Thompson was known in his district for his ability to bring big spending projects to the area.
A local outlet’s profile of him described him as a legislator who always cultivated a close relationship with the governor. It described a press conference Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards held, celebrating a defeat of the Republican effort to override his veto of their bill which would prevent male athletes from competing in women’s sports.
Mr. Thompson had voted against the governor, yet he was present at the conference, clapping along with his colleagues—at least one of whom challenged him for attending, according to The Advocate.
“I’m here to honor my Democratic governor,” said the then-Democrat legislator, who had been elected by his constituents 11 times in a row, making him the longest serving Democrat lawmaker in the state before he switched parties.
Besides the sports bill, he had also voted outside party lines when he voted to repeal permit requirements to carry concealed handguns, and again to override the governor’s veto of a congressional redistricting bill.
When he announced his party switch, Mr. Thompson said that “nothing has changed” and he will continue to vote according to his principles.
He said the Democrat Party had increasingly embraced positions that did not “align with those values and principles that are part of my Christian life.”
“There are values and principles that I firmly hold onto that guide my decisions. My conservative voting record over the years I have served in the Legislature speaks for itself,” he said in his press conference.
Following the Votes?
Weeks later, Louisiana state lawmaker Jeremy LaCombe switched parties from Democrat to Republican as well, without announcing a reason. His reelection campaign website now touts him as an “independent voice” willing to work with both sides to get things done.
Local outlet The Advocate notes that in recent years, Louisiana has turned red; Mr. LaCombe lost badly to a Republican when he pursued a state Senate seat in 2022.
Neither Mr. LaCombe nor Mr. Thompson responded to multiple requests for comment from The Epoch Times.
West Virginia lawmaker Elliott Pritt switched parties in April, after winning his first term in 2022 as a Democrat.
His district lies in the southern coalfields of the state, which has become predominantly red in recent years.
He told Politico, “Even if I were to run again and win, I would look at another term of never getting another bill passed, never getting anything done.”
“For the time I’m going to be there I’m not going to sit there and be a lame duck and not get anything.”
The House has 89 Republicans and 11 Democrats, while the Senate has 31 Republicans and three Democrats, making it impossible not to work across the aisle for the minority party.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 21:00 - Watch Live: DeSantis' Last Stand In Second GOP Primary Debate (Ex-Trump)
Watch Live: DeSantis’ Last Stand In Second GOP Primary Debate (Ex-Trump)
Ding, Ding, Round Two!
But once again, there’s no real contender as former President Trump heads to Detroit, skipping the second Republican presidential nominee debate tonight at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
You can’t really blame him, given his position in the polls is still dominant, but one thing is for sure, tonight is make-or-break for any hopefuls…
Everyone from debate No. 1 qualified for debate No. 2 except former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
Those who tuned into the first debate may have noticed some major topics and questions were missing or minimized – everything from election integrity, a huge concern for many Republicans after the 2020 election, to the fate of Jeffrey Epstein, which Tucker Carlson tackled during an interview with former President Trump that ran at the same time as the debate.
Nathan Worcester, writing for The Epoch Times, lays out some more things to look out for at the showdown in Simi Valley.
Trump, Trump, and More Trump
A transcript of the first debate shows the word “Trump” was spoken more than 25 times.
President Trump will likely remain a significant focus of the conversation on Sept. 27. As he faces multiple indictments while campaigning for his previous office, the real estate developer turned politician is still the main character in American politics and certainly in the Republican Party.
“He has a huge lead. As the debates have gone on, his lead has only increased. While there were some standout performances in Milwaukee, nobody really made a dent in that,” Mr. Kall said.
“They can’t just attack each other and hope to do well. They really have to take the fight to Donald Trump,” he added.
“There’s definitely a split in the Republican Party—those who want to move into the populist direction and those who want to stay with the 2000s or even earlier type of Republicanism, like Nikki Haley or Mike Pence.
“That’s going to be something for Republican primary voters to decide at the ballots,” Ms. Krieger said.
Mr. Ramaswamy and Gov. DeSantis are closer to the populist camp. A strong attack on President Trump from either one would be noteworthy.
More Foreign Policy Clashes
During the first debate, some of the biggest arguments erupted over foreign policy.
That’s unsurprising. In a party reshaped by President Trump and, before him, the likes of Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, hawkishness has given ground to what some call non-interventionism and what others call isolationism.
As the closest equivalent to President Trump in Milwaukee, Mr. Ramaswamy sparred with Ms. Haley and Mr. Christie as well as former Vice President Pence.
Mr. Pence described Mr. Ramaswamy’s vision of ceding parts of Ukraine to Russia to sever it from Beijing as a “giveaway … to Putin.”
Ms. Haley, who served as the United States ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, argued with Mr. Ramaswamy over Russia, China, Taiwan, and Israel.
Count on foreign policy remaining a hot topic at the Reagan Library. After all, the president has considerable power over foreign policy, as outlined in Article II of the Constitution, and American foreign policy decisions resonate across the country and the planet.
The ‘Laptop from Hell’
Special counsel David Weiss’s investigation of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, didn’t come up as part of the moderators’ questions in Milwaukee.
Mr. Christie and Mr. DeSantis did mention his legal issues at the first debate.
Although Hunter Biden has been under investigation for years, no charges were filed until whistleblowers with the IRS testified that multiple U.S. attorneys declined to let Mr. Weiss bring charges.
Now, an FBI agent has come forward and confirmed their accounts during a closed-door interview with members of Congress.
“I remember learning at some point in the investigation that Mr. Weiss would have to go through his other processes because the U.S. Attorney’s Offices had, I guess, in that sense, using that terminology, wasn’t going to partner,” the agent said, as recorded in a transcript The Epoch Times has obtained and reviewed.
Hunter Biden is also suing former Trump aide Garrett Ziegler in connection with the laptop linked to him in the runup to the 2020 election, dubbed “the laptop from hell.”
As Newt Gingirch writes at The New York Sun, overall debate performance is not all that matters. In this kind of wide-open environment – with seven candidates maneuvering to become the Trump alternative – candidates have two simple goals.
First, do not get too eager and screw up. One big mistake could lead people to write you off as unable to beat Mr. Trump or lead the country.
Second, find no more than three breakthrough moments in which your ideas, language, delivery, intelligence, courage, and authenticity vividly come through. Networks will specifically hunt for these moments to highlight repeatedly. And they will go viral on social media.
Ambassador (and former Governor) Haley came close to breaking through after the first debate. Many polls showed that people felt she was the most effective and forceful debater. Her focus on Vice President Harris worked to her advantage.
Ms. Haley’s range of experience in foreign policy and national security was impressive.
Her toughness about balancing the budget and lessons she learned as a reform governor of South Carolina communicated an important authenticity. She may be the best positioned to break out.
Mr. Ramaswamy impressed in the first debate.
As a remarkably successful 38-year-old entrepreneur, he has a lot going for him. However, many people refuse to consider him because they don’t believe he has enough experience to be President. If he can perform well enough to overcome those concerns, he could take off and have an exciting run.
Mr. Desantis may be facing his last chance to prove he is a contender.
He has been an excellent governor of Florida. It has been perplexing to watch him decay under the dual assaults of the Trump team and the left-wing press. This may be his last opportunity to resurrect his candidacy and convince people — especially major donors — to give him a second look.
Gingrich closes by suggesting that “it will be an interesting and important debate. It is worth your time to watch and think about it.”
The two-hour event will be moderated by Fox News’ Dana Perino and Stuart Varney as well as Univision’s Ilia Calderon.
The debate is being hosted on Fox News and Fox Business, accessible online only via login. Click the image below to link to the live Rumble feed (not embeddable)…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 20:40 - Musk Says COVID Shot "Almost Sent Me To Hospital", Says He'd Go To Prison Before Firing Workers For Refusing Jab
Musk Says COVID Shot “Almost Sent Me To Hospital”, Says He’d Go To Prison Before Firing Workers For Refusing Jab
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Elon Musk on Tuesday revealed that he took multiple COVID-19 vaccines so that he could travel during the period of intense pandemic restrictions and that after taking his third shot, he nearly ended up hospitalized.
Elon Musk, founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in Washington on March 9, 2020. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) Mr. Musk made the remarks in a post on X that was part of a thread he started as a response to a warning by European Union (EU) officials that X has fallen squarely into the bloc’s censorship crosshairs for being found to be the top purveyor of so-called misinformation and disinformation.
“Have you heard dis information?” Mr. Musk captioned his original post, in a play on words that accompanied a video compilation of COVID-19 vaccine news headlines that began with bold initial claims early in the pandemic that the vaccines are “100 percent effective” before steadily dropping lower and lower.
My concern was more the outrageous demand that people *must* take the vaccine and multiple boosters to do anything at all. That was messed up.
Until the Supreme Court invalidated Biden’s exec order, SpaceX and many other companies would have been forced to fire anyone who…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was only 47% effective after 5 months?” reads one of the later headlines, followed by even more negative headlines like “Sweden, Denmark Halt Moderna’s Covid Shot for Younger People” and, finally, ones highlighting vaccine-maker profitability amid calls for seemingly endless boosters.
‘Messed Up’
Mr. Musk’s meme on waning vaccine efficacy drew a number of comments, including one by political journalist Ed Krassenstein, who raised objections.
“I think efficacy changes are a result of new strains and the vaccine immunity wearing off. It’s stupid anyone ever claimed it was 100% effective. No vaccine is 100% full-proof,” he wrote.
Mr. Musk replied by saying that he’s not against vaccines in principle, but that he opposes mandates forcing people to get the shot.
“My concern was more the outrageous demand that people *must* take the vaccine and multiple boosters to do anything at all. That was messed up,” Mr. Musk wrote.
He added that, until the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated President Joe Biden’s executive order imposing a vaccine-or-test mandate for large companies, his company SpaceX “and many other other companies would have been forced to fire anyone who refused to get vaccinated!”
“We would not have done so. I would rather go to prison than fire good people who didn’t want to be jabbed,” Mr. Musk continued.
Mr. Musk also revealed that he got COVID-19 and experienced “mild cold symptoms” but took vaccines repeatedly for travel.
“The third shot almost sent me to hospital,” Mr. Musk said.
“How many other people out there have symptoms that are actually from the vaccine or Covid treatment, rather than Covid itself?” he asked.
There’s a growing body of data suggesting that COVID-19 vaccine side effects are more serious than previously claimed.
Mr. Musk qualified his remarks by saying he’s not against vaccines as a matter of principle.
“It’s not like I don’t believe in vaccines—I do. However, the cure cannot be potentially worse than the disease,” he said.
“Public debate over efficacy should not be shut down,” Mr. Musk continued.
Mr. Musk added that he believes “there is also great potential for curing many diseases using synthetic mRNA, so let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.”
The X chief’s post garnered a series of reactions, including a humorous one by the Joe Biden Press Release (Parody) account, which features a photo of a smiling President Joe Biden saying: “I promise you’ll be safe after the 42nd booster.”
“Just be sure to triple mask, Elon,” the account added.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, EU officials took Mr. Musk and X into their censorship crosshairs.
‘We Will Be Watching’
A senior European Union official on Sept. 26 accused X of being the top purveyor of disinformation and issued a veiled threat, prompting Mr. Musk to push back by posting the meme highlighting waning vaccine effectiveness and sparking online debate.
At a press conference on Tuesday, the EU’s top commissar on disinformation—European Commission (EC) Vice President Vera Jourova—singled out X as being “the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts.”
Unlike competitors like Facebook and Google, Mr. Musk’s X has refused to participate in the European Union’s (EU) voluntary anti-disinformation effort called the 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation.
While the code is supposedly nonbinding, companies that take part can ease some of their compliance requirements under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which kicked in at the end of August and is mandatory for the biggest tech platforms with over 45 million users in the EU—including X.
After earlier reprimanding Mr. Musk and X for lacking the appetite to self-censor and not taking the EU’s fight against “disinformation” seriously, the EU ramped up its rhetoric on Sept. 26, the day that social media companies like Facebook and Google—but not X—published reports on compliance with the bloc’s new “disinformation” code.
“Mr. Musk knows that he is not off the hook by leaving the code of practice because now we have the Digital Services Act fully enforced,” Ms. Jourova said. “So my message for Twitter is you have to comply with the hard law and we will be watching what you are doing.”
While X quite the voluntary code in May, it counts as a “very large online platform” under the mandatory Digital Services Act (DSA) and so is subject to stricter content rules.
Ms. Jourova reminded Mr. Musk of the fact that the EU has enforcement tools to pressure the platform into compliance with its content laws.
She made the remarks while providing an update on the 27-nation EU’s 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation, which companies like Google, TikTok, and Facebook parent Meta signed up for—but which Mr. Musk’s X has snubbed.
Some examples from the reports include Google indicating that it prevented around $33 million in advertising dollars from going to “disinformation actors” and Meta slapped over 40 million pieces of content with factchecking labels.
The new Digital Services Act rules apply to 19 “very large” digital platforms (such as social media networks, websites, and online retailers) with at least 45 million active users in the EU.
The 19 platforms that fall under the umbrella of the new rules are: Alibaba AliExpress, Amazon Store, Apple AppStore, Bing, Booking.com, Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Google Shopping, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, X, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Zalando.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 20:20 - Mitsubishi Is Pulling Out Of China's Auto Market
Mitsubishi Is Pulling Out Of China’s Auto Market
We have been writing over the last few months about increased competition in China’s EV market and (most recently) about intense EU scrutiny over Chinese subsidies, which the EU claims is mucking up its electric vehicle market by driving prices lower.
Now, one Japanese automaker is backing out of China altogether. Mitsubishi “has started final withdrawal talks with China’s Guangzhou Automobile Group”, its joint venture partner in China, according to Nikkei. The company has been suffering from “sluggish sales”, the report says, noting that other Japanese automakers are also reassessing their viability in the Asian country.
GAC Mitsubishi Motors has shuttered its manufacturing operations in Hunan province indefinitely, marking the end of Mitsubishi’s sole factory in China. GAC, which holds a 50% share in the joint venture, plans to repurpose the Hunan facility for electric vehicle (EV) production while aiming to retain some level of its workforce, the report says.
Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Corp., owning 30% and 20% stakes respectively, will pull their investments, although GAC Mitsubishi will continue to exist as a business entity.
Nikkei notes that in 2022, Mitsubishi’s car sales in China plummeted by 60% to 38,550 vehicles. An attempt to revive sales with the launch of the hybrid Outlander SUV last autumn failed to meet expectations. Mitsubishi now plans to reallocate resources to Southeast Asia and Oceania, areas responsible for about one-third of the company’s consolidated sales.
Meanwhile, the electric vehicle market in China is booming, with a report from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers indicating an 80% surge in EV sales in 2022 to 5.36 million units. Mitsubishi has lagged in this segment, relying on GAC for EV supplies in China.
Competition from Chinese auto manufacturers is also intensifying. Data from research firm MarkLines shows that Chinese brands captured 50.7% of the passenger car market in 2022, an increase of 5.2 percentage points from the previous year. Japanese companies accounted for 18.3% of the market, a decline of 2.8 percentage points.
Nissan Motor’s president and CEO, Makoto Uchida, recently expressed concern over the challenging market conditions, citing unsustainable discounting practices and hinting at a potential reevaluation of Nissan’s joint ventures in China, according to the report.
Mitsubishi has had a long history in China, dating back to the 1970s when it began exporting commercial vehicles. It formed a joint venture with Soueast Motor that lasted from 2006 until 2021. GAC Mitsubishi Motors was established in 2012 and reached its zenith in 2018 with 140,000 vehicles sold.
It isn’t just Japanese automakers that the heat is getting turned up on in China. Recall yesterday we wrote that Tesla was part and parcel with the ongoing EU investigation into Chinese subsidies.
EU executive vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis said this week that there was “sufficient prima facie evidence” to support the probe, FT reported on Tuesday morning. We had previously written about the EU’s investigation and Beijing’s response via The Global Times.
In an interview this week, responding specifically to whether or not Tesla would be included in the investigation, Dombrovskis said: “Strictly speaking, it’s not limited only to Chinese brand electrical vehicles, it can be also other producers’ vehicles if they are receiving production-side subsidies.”
He said he was “constantly pressed by his Chinese counterparts about the probe” after a five day trip to China, FT wrote.
“The EU is now probably the largest market which is open for Chinese producers,” he commented, defending the investigation. He said that the EU was “open to competition” but that it “needs to be fair”.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 20:00 - DC Appeals Court Refuses To Release Pro-Life Campaigner During Appeal
DC Appeals Court Refuses To Release Pro-Life Campaigner During Appeal
Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A federal appeals court has denied pro-life campaigner Lauren Handy’s emergency motion to be released from custody pending her appeal.
Left-wing pro-life protester Lauren Handy, the director of activism with Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, protests outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 15, 2022.(Jackson Elliott/The Epoch Times) Lawyers for Ms. Handy, who was jailed over a Washington abortion clinic protest, previously filed an emergency appeal seeking her release, arguing that the trial judge was wrong to rule that the disruptive political protest in which she was involved was a “crime of violence.”
Ms. Handy’s appeal of her conviction itself remains pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is the same court that denied the emergency motion to release her on Sept. 22.
One of Ms. Handy’s lawyers, Stephen Crampton, senior counsel at the Thomas More Society, a public interest law firm, said, “We are disappointed but not deterred.”
“We will fight on, and we believe we will ultimately prevail,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Crampton explained what will happen next.
“We were denied an emergency motion. We have filed an expedited appeal, together with two of Lauren’s other defendants.” The brief for the expedited appeal is due by Oct. 2, he noted.
Ms. Handy, who was convicted by a jury on Aug. 29 of conspiring to obstruct access to an abortion clinic in the nation’s capital and of “conspiracy against rights,” was ordered incarcerated immediately after the conviction and pending sentencing by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The judge was appointed in 1997 by President Bill Clinton.
On Aug. 31, Judge Kollar-Kotelly rejected a post-trial emergency motion to release Ms. Handy and four of her co-defendants before sentencing. Unless a court orders otherwise, Ms. Handy and her four co-defendants will remain in custody until sentencing at least, which could be months away. Each defendant faces up to 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $350,000.
Ms. Handy and the cohort of co-defendants in her trial were convicted of conspiracy against rights and conspiracy under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (or FACE Act), which has been criticized by federal lawmakers. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has said the Biden administration enforces the law selectively against pro-life activists.
On Sept. 19, Mr. Roy introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal the FACE Act, which he described as “an unconstitutional federal takeover of state police powers … [that] must be repealed.”
“Free Americans should never live in fear of their government targeting them because of their beliefs. Yet, [President Joe] Biden’s Department of Justice has brazenly weaponized the FACE Act against normal, everyday Americans across the political spectrum, simply because they are pro-life,” the lawmaker said at the time.
Critics like Mr. Roy reject the conspiracy against rights charge because there is no constitutional right to an abortion, as the Supreme Court determined in June 2022. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the nation’s highest court reversed the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent and returned the regulation of abortion to the states.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that denied the emergency motion to release Ms. Handy stated in its order (pdf) that the court declined to exercise its authority under federal appellate rules because the appellant “has not shown that immediate relief before resolution of her expedited appeal is warranted.”
The court did not otherwise elaborate on its reasoning but panel member Judge Greg Katsas, whom President Donald Trump appointed in 2017, attached a brief explanation for his vote to the order.
In ruling on the motion, the court had no occasion to consider whether the FACE Act’s “element of ‘force’ sweeps more broadly than the ‘physical force’ required for a crime of violence.”
“That possibility arises because the common-law definition of ‘force’ encompasses even the ‘slightest offensive touching,’ whereas the crime-of-violence definition of ‘physical force’ requires ‘violent force—that is, force capable of causing physical pain or injury to another person,’” Judge Katsas wrote, citing Johnson v. United States, a 2010 Supreme Court ruling.
“So, if FACE Act ‘force’ tracks the broader common-law standard, then section 248(a)(1) is not a crime of violence. My vote to deny interim relief rests on Handy’s failure to develop this argument, rather than on any assessment of whether it is likely to succeed.”
The other two judges on the panel were Robert Wilkins, who was appointed in 2014 by President Barack Obama, and Justin Walker, who was appointed in 2020 by President Trump.
Earlier this month, Mr. Crampton anticipated Judge Katsas’s statement when he told The Epoch Times that force and violence are not necessarily the same thing legally.
“I can use force by running into the door. … But I don’t necessarily have to entail violence in that action because if nobody’s there, and I don’t run into anybody, there’s no violence that results,” he said.
“We believe the FACE Act contemplates just that sort of distinction—not all use of force is necessarily violent. And that’s really the heart of our argument to the appeals court right now.”
Ms. Handy is the director of activism for Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, which describes its mission as mobilizing “grassroots anti-abortion activists for direct action and [to] educate on the exploitative influence of the Abortion Industrial Complex through an anti-capitalist lens.”
After being sentenced to jail time on a separate charge in July 2022, Ms. Handy said, “As a Catholic and progressive myself, I am compelled by my deeply held beliefs (religious and political) to put my body between the oppressed and the oppressor.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice, which is handling the prosecution, for comment.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 19:40 - Trudeau Apologizes To Zelensky & Canadian Public For NaziGate, Quietly Tells MPs Don't Speak About It
Trudeau Apologizes To Zelensky & Canadian Public For NaziGate, Quietly Tells MPs Don’t Speak About It
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday issued formal apology to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over what’s coming to be known as the ‘NaziGate’ scandal. He indicated that this apology was sent through diplomatic channels.
Trudeau confirmed this in a press conference regarding the House of Commons’ honoring a veteran of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi forces as part of last week’s events centered on hosting Zelensky. “This was a mistake that has deeply embarrassed Parliament and Canada. All of us who were in this House on Friday regret deeply having stood and clapped even though we did so unaware of the context,” Trudeau told reporters.
TRUDEAU EMBARRASSES HIMSELF AGAIN OVER NAZI-GATE pic.twitter.com/BhQTdaazpn
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 27, 2023
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“It was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust,” he continued, in the statement which also appeared to put sole blame on now resigned Speaker Anthony Rota.
98-year old Waffen-SS Galicia Division veteran Yaroslav Hunka is now possibly being sought by Poland, and extradition proceedings are being mulled in Warsaw.
Trudeau now says “Canada is deeply sorry” for involving Zelensky, who along with all of Canadian parliament was seen enthusiastically applauding Hunka with a standing ovation. Trudeau further called the whole event “deeply, deeply painful” to Jewish people, Poles, Roma, and the so-called “2SLGTBQIA+” “community” (yes, it’s an official Canadian govt designation, absurd as it is).
He also sought to assert (or rather deflect) once again that this fiasco is playing into Russia’s hands, which is seeking to “politicize” it. Thus the prime minister is continuing to spin it as somehow really a story of ‘Russian disinformation’.
Wow! “Trudeau apologizes after a Ukrainian Nazi veteran was celebrated at Zelenskyy speech. Liberal caucus sources have told CBC News that Trudeau told MPs Wednesday they should avoid speaking to the press about Hunka’s invitation and the subsequent fallout, and that the media… pic.twitter.com/0SVZBaaP12
— Ivan Katchanovski (@I_Katchanovski) September 27, 2023
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But perhaps more interesting is what Trudeau and his staff are reportedly telling members of parliament in private. They are to stay “tight-lipped” in hopes that the scandal and international media coverage will just ‘go away’. According to Canada’s national broadcaster CBC:
Liberal caucus sources have told CBC News that Trudeau told MPs Wednesday they should avoid speaking to the press about Hunka’s invitation and the subsequent fallout, and that the media frenzy would die down if they stayed tight-lipped.
Trudeau’s remarks come after Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said inviting Hunka to attend Zelenskyy’s historic address to Parliament is the “biggest single diplomatic embarrassment” in the country’s history.
Poilievre is blaming Trudeau for the mishap, despite outgoing Speaker Anthony Rota’s assertion that he alone was responsible for inviting Hunka.
But as GrayZone journalist Max Blumenthal points out, this may actually be the tip of the iceberg for Canada’s NaziGate…
Canada’s @cafreeland perpetuates her Nazi grandfather’s legacy through Ukraine proxy war
After serving as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainian propagandists in occupied Poland, Michael Chomiak joined thousands of Nazi collaborators on the ratline to Canada during the 1950s.
Following… pic.twitter.com/u8m0mHogWO
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 27, 2023
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Below is Blumenthal’s full backgrounder on the disturbing associations and past activism of Trudeau’s Deputy Prime Minister & Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland [emphasis by ZH]…
* * *
After serving as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainian propagandists in occupied Poland, Michael Chomiak joined thousands of Nazi collaborators on the ratline to Canada during the 1950s. Following Chomiak’s death in 1984, his granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications.
Freeland was an early contributor to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which was edited by her grandfather’s former boss in Poland, the Nazi collaborator and ethnic cleansing advocate Volodymyr Kubijovyč. Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where Chomiak had served as editor.
A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division. During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.
“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.
Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”
In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates. She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.
When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.
Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.
The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.
Read my full report on Canada’s longstanding policy of training and protecting Ukrainian Nazis – including the grandfather of the country’s second most powerful official https://t.co/uXOsugSYka
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 27, 2023
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Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization. For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”
When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.” By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media.
On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”
“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted. After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.
Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 19:20 - What Happens To Social Security Payments If The Government Shuts Down?
What Happens To Social Security Payments If The Government Shuts Down?
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The looming government shutdown has some Americans worried about what would happen to their Social Security payments if the end-of-the-month deadline passes with no resolution to the gridlock in Washington and parts of the federal government start to grind to a halt.
A Social Security card sits alongside checks from the U.S. Treasury in Washington on Oct. 14, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) It appears increasingly likely that Congress will fail to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund various federal government agencies by the Sept. 30 deadline.
Failure to pass the bills would mean many government operations are halted and hundreds of thousands of federal employees are furloughed—including those at the Social Security Administration (SSA), which administers the Social Security system.
But while some Social Security operations might be affected by a shutdown, legal experts say Social Security recipients need not worry about one thing—their money.
“As a Metairie disability lawyer, every time a government shutdown is in the news, I get calls asking ‘Is Social Security affected by a government shutdown?'” Louisiana-based attorney Loyd J. Burgeois said in a note on his website.
Mr. Burgeois said that staffing would be limited at SSA offices as many employees would be furloughed.
Some operations might be affected by a government shutdown—such as halts to processing of new Social Security claims, as happened during the 2013 shutdown.
“During the Clinton-era shutdown, new Social Security claims were not being processed because the agency furloughed 61,415 employees,” Mr. Burgeois said. “As the shutdown wore on, the agency adjusted its plan and recalled workers to start processing new claims.”
However, while some SSA operations would be impacted, Mr. Burgeois said Social Security checks will continue to be sent out.
“Social Security benefits are considered mandatory spending and are paid from the program’s trust fund, and therefore, the agency has the funds to continue paying benefits,” he said.
A law passed by Congress in 1996 provides special protections for Social Security benefits and such benefits are considered mandatory spending—and aren’t affected by a government shutdown.
During the last two shutdowns, the SSA continued mailing checks throughout the shutdown.
“When the government shut down in 1995 and again in 2013, all social security payments continued to be sent out in time. This included social security disability,” the team at Gray, Sowle, Iacco, Richards, a Michigan-based law office, wrote in a blog post.
They expect that, “just like the previous government shutdowns that social security disability payments will continue.”
The team at Gray, Sowle, Iacco, Richards said that they also expect that hearing officers would most likely continue to hold Social Security disability and SSI hearings in the event of a shutdown.
While new hearings were not scheduled during the 2013 shutdown, the Office of Disability Adjudication and Review (ODAR) still held previously scheduled hearings, but staffing was limited.
Another federal agency that many Americans may be less enthused about continuing its operations in the event of a government shutdown is the IRS, which will likely keep running.
Americans Worry Social Security Will Run Dry
With the issue of Social Security benefits on the minds of retirees ahead of the looming government shutdown, a recent survey showed that the vast majority of Americans aged 50 and over are worried that Social Security will completely run out of money within their lifetime.
Ten years ago, 66 percent of U.S. adults above the age of 50 worried that Social Security would run dry within their lifetime, according to the Nationwide Retirement Institute, which has been polling Americans annually about their perceptions of and concerns about the Social Security system.
Today, that figure is significantly higher, with a whopping 75 percent saying they’re concerned that Social Security will run out of funds within their lifetime, according to the latest 2023 edition of the survey (pdf).
The increased worry about the state of the Social Security fund is eclipsed by the growth in the share of adults aged 50 and above who say they have no source of retirement income aside from Social Security.
Just over one in five (21 percent) said all they have to count on for retirement is Social Security, up sharply from 13 percent in 2014.
Ten years ago, 48 percent of Americans had a pension in addition to Social Security. In 2023, that number has dwindled to just 31 percent.
Social Security Fund In Danger
Social Security is facing future challenges due to various factors such as inflation and lower-than-expected tax revenue.
A recent projection by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimates that the Social Security trust fund, which consists of two smaller funds—the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund and the Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund will be insolvent in 2033.
“Upon insolvency, the law mandates that the OASI trust fund can only spend in amounts equal to incoming trust fund revenue, which means that all 70 million retirees, dependents, and survivors—regardless of age, income, or need—will see their benefits cut by 23 percent,” the analysis states.
This means that, in 2033, annual benefits for the average newly retired dual-income couple would be cut by over $17,000.
“For a typical dual-income couple retiring in 2033, we estimate this would represent an immediate $17,400 cut in current dollar annual benefits and an immediate $13,100 cut for a typical single-income couple,” the analysis states.
The CRFB analysis also says that any 2024 presidential candidate who promises not to touch Social Security is “implicitly endorsing a 23 percent across-the-board benefit cut” for some 70 million retirees when the fund runs out of money within 10 years.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 19:00 - CIA Building Own ChatGPT-style AI Bot In Shadow Of China's Advances
CIA Building Own ChatGPT-style AI Bot In Shadow Of China’s Advances
The US Central Intelligence Agency’s Open-Source Enterprise division will soon roll out with a ChatGPT-like large language model (LLM), which is to serve as a tool for federal and intelligence agencies to more easily and quickly access intel and information.
Director of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division, Randy Nixon, explained that source information can be sifted and returned to individual intel analysts faster than ever before. “We’ve gone from newspapers and radio, to newspapers and television, to newspapers and cable television, to basic internet, to big data, and it just keeps going,” Nixon told Bloomberg.
“We have to find the needles in the needle field,” he added. In addition to literally hundreds of thousands or millions of classified files, analysts often rely on gathering open-source information for their assessments as well. For example this could include culling public social media apps like Facebook or X.
“Then you can take it to the next level and start chatting and asking questions of the machines to give you answers, also sourced,” Nixon continued. “Our collection can just continue to grow and grow with no limitations other than how much things cost.”
He explained further that the AI platform will be available and used by Washington’s 18 different intelligence branches, including federal law enforcement, such as the FBI. It’s also expected that the US military will have access, though it remains that security protocols and preventing leaks will be a big question, given the vast amounts of classified materials which will be at the tool’s disposal.
There’s also the question of privacy, especially following the Edward Snowden revelations of a decade ago showing that the NSA had in prior years regularly swept up the data of innocent American citizens, violating their Fourth Amendment protections.
According to a prior Bloomberg report which questioned the NSA over the impact on privacy:
“The intelligence community needs to find a way to take benefit of these large models without violating privacy,” Gilbert Herrera, director of research at the National Security Agency, said in an interview. “If we want to realize the full power of artificial intelligence for other applications, then we’re probably going to have to rely on a partnership with industry.”
“It all has to be done in a manner that respects civil liberties and privacy,” Herrera claimed in that prior interview. “It’s a tough problem,” she added, further admitting that “The issue of the intelligence community’s use of publicly trained information is an issue we’re going to have to grapple with because otherwise there would be capabilities of AI that we would not be able to use.”
The future of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) is bright at #CIA. We’re always looking to build strong partnerships with the visionaries of today … and tomorrow.#CIASXSW #EmergingTech #FutureofIntelligence #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning
— CIA (@CIA) March 13, 2023
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But we highly doubt the US government’s top intelligence officials will be overly concerned with “limiting” AI’s power due to the Bill of Rights and concerns over individual privacy.
Another interesting aspect to the CIA working on its own version of ChatGPT is the question of competition with China’s significant advances in AI. The new Bloomberg report highlights the mounting pressure US intelligence faces in the wake of more advanced Chinese capabilities. Beijing is looking to become the global leader in the AI field by 2030, and is already considered by many to be a world leader in the technology:
In an ominous glimpse into the nation’s use of the programs, in 2021 China developed a ‘prosecutor’ that could identify and press charges with a reported 97 percent accuracy.
In contrast, America’s law enforcement sphere has also come under fire for struggling to utilize the power of AI in investigations, but Nixon said the new program will aid in condensing the unprecedented levels of information floating through the web.
But it remains that in the West there is a much more robust legal concept of individual rights, free expression, and autonomy – compared to communist China. On this front, concerning a CIA-built AI chatbot, what could possibly go wrong?
After all, the American public doesn’t want to find itself living in a society modeled on “Minority Report” merely for the sake of ‘keeping up’ technologically with rival superpowers (however, in some ways we are already there).
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/27/2023 – 18:40
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