- Russia Says NATO To Supply Ukraine With Advanced Weapons Under Guise Of Black Sea Drills
Russia Says NATO To Supply Ukraine With Advanced Weapons Under Guise Of Black Sea Drills
Russia’s Defense Ministry has lobbed an explosive accusation at a moment tensions with the West are soaring in the wake of the Belarus Ryanair incident on May 23rd. Spokesman for the ministry, Major General Igor Konashenkov on Wednesday said that NATO is preparing to use upcoming summer Black Sea sea exercises to smuggle tons of weaponry to Ukraine and “extremist” paramilitaries allied with Kiev.
Referencing the annual US-NATO Sea Breeze exercise in the Black Sea region, expected from June 28 through July 10 and including some 4,000 troops, Gen. Konashenkov claimed, “Advanced armaments, munitions and materiel are planned to be delivered precisely to that region for Ukrainian troops under the guise of holding the drills.”
“Eventually, as was the case in previous years, all this weaponry will be delivered to the Ukrainian troops and nationalist formations stationed close to the areas in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions uncontrolled by Kiev,” he added.
Russia is essentially the only major state bordering the Black Sea that will not take part or cooperate in some way with the exercises which further will involve at least 40 warships and other vessels, along with 30 aircraft – all with the involvement of 29 NATO member and ‘partner’ countries.
Leading the way will be United States, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Latvia and perhaps most notably other non-member allied or partner countries like Ukraine.
Russia’s defense ministry spokesman made the explosive charge in a Wednesday statement…
#Russia‘s General Exposes True Goal Of Sea Breeze 2021 Exercises In #Ukraine
Its main participants are Ukraine, #USA, #Canada, #GreatBritain, #Netherlands, #Romania, #Bulgaria, #Greece, #Turkey, #Latvia and partner countries.
#SeaBreeze⚡️🔥💥NATO Playing with Fire? 💥🔥⚡️ pic.twitter.com/kvMAaQcq4Z
— It@8848 Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil. (@Orpheus_111) June 3, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The Kremlin is more or less casting this year’s NATO drills as a dress rehearsal for future invasion of territory the West sees as “occupied” by pro-Russian forces, most notably Donbas and Crimea. And adding context to this suspicion is the fact that Sea Breeze war games prior to 2014 had been often conducted from Crimea.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/04/2021 – 02:45 - China's Belt And Road Being Built With Forced Labor
China’s Belt And Road Being Built With Forced Labor
Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,
“The entire Belt and Road initiative is based on forced labor,” according to Li Qiang, director of China Labor Watch.
“Chinese authorities want the Belt and Road projects for political gain and need to use these workers.”
A new report, “Silent Victims of Labor Trafficking: China’s Belt and Road workers stranded overseas amid Covid-19 pandemic” by China Labor Watch, published on April 30, details the conditions of some of those overseas Chinese workers, who are building China’s Belt and Road infrastructure projects across the world. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) forms a crucial part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) foreign policy and is a key tool in China’s ambition to become a global superpower.
China Labor Watch spoke to approximately 100 Chinese BRI workers in Indonesia, Algeria, Singapore, Jordan, Pakistan and Serbia. Many shared similar stories. According to the report:
“They were promised a job with good pay to support their families back in China. Upon arriving in the host countries, however, Chinese employers confiscated their passports, and told them that if they wanted to leave early, they had to pay a penalty for breach of contract, which is often equivalent to several months’ worth of their salary.”
China Labor Watch found that most of the indicators of forced labor in the definition used by the International Labour Organization (ILO) were present concerning the Chinese workers they interviewed.
Almost all the workers had been deceptively recruited with promises of certain wages and legal work visas. Instead, their passports were confiscated right after they disembarked the plane, leaving them unable to leave unless they paid a heavy fine to the Chinese employer. They received no legal work permits, making them illegal workers. They were locked up in poor living and working conditions on the work premises, which were guarded by security guards. If they wanted to leave the premises, they needed permission from the guards. They suffered excessive work hours of up to 12 hours a day, 7 days a week with no holiday allowance and insufficient labor protection and safety equipment. Many workers were injured during work with no access to medical treatment, leading some to permanent disability. After a worker from a Chinese mining company in Indonesia was diagnosed positive for Covid-19 in November 2020, he was put in isolation in an empty dormitory room for more than 20 days without any medical treatment. Later other workers found his dead body. According to the report:
“We have found that in some Chinese steel and mining companies, workers are frequently detained and beaten by the company’s security guards due to disobedience, attempting to strike, or other disputes with management. In a WeChat group of Chinese steel workers in Indonesia, someone posted a video of a worker being repeatedly reprimanded and slapped until the uniform was covered with blood from his nose. Then other members of the group commented that a factory’s translator was the one who beat them.
“Intimidation and threats are common for controlling Chinese workers in forced labor at some BRI projects. The most commonly used threats include deportation, reprisal after returning home, high fines and penalties. It is also common to force workers to sign a waiver of rights to sue the employer and to force workers to delete evidence of labor rights violations on their phones.”
Most workers received “late payments… and unexplained deductions.”
“A worker who went to Jordan worked in the desert for five months but only received his salary for the first six days. In Algeria, when an installation project of a subcontracting company was close to completion in 2019 two workers were left behind for maintenance and installation. They could not refuse the arrangement because their employer threatened them with six months of salary that had not yet been paid.”
There was no place where the workers could complain.
“Several workers said they tried to call the Chinese Embassy to report that their passports were detained by their employing company. The embassy’s reply was that it had no right to intervene and the workers were told to file a report at the local police station. However, these workers, cannot even get out of the gate of the work site, and they also face language barriers. It is quite unrealistic for them to call the local police. Moreover, workers are afraid that they will be punished or fined if the police find out that they do not have legal work status.”
The Chinese embassy also seems to have actively worked to suppress their complaints.
“Two volunteers we interviewed who are concerned about stranded overseas Chinese workers told us that what they published on their personal accounts about overseas migrant workers were often deleted by WeChat [a Chinese messaging and social media app] admins within a few hours. Once, after publishing an article mentioning a specific company name, an author received a call from the Chinese Embassy and company executives, telling him to delete the article and not to continue to focus on these workers.”
That the Belt and Road Initiative may be based on forced labor, as alleged by the report, is not surprising. Forced labor exists in two distinct forms in China. One form is modern slavery, not directly sanctioned by the state, as exemplified by the BRI workers mentioned above. According to the 2018 Global Slavery Index:
“[O]n any given day in 2016 there were over 3.8 million people living in conditions of modern slavery in China, a prevalence of 2.8 victims for every thousand people in the country. This estimate does not include figures on organ trafficking.”
The other form of forced labor is systematic and legal under China’s penal system. Communist China has used forced labor and labor camps, citing “reeducation”, since the 1950s. In 2013, the CCP claimed that it was abolishing the practice, only to reinstate it again some years later to “reeducate” Uyghurs. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), the Chinese government has built nearly 400 detention camps in Xinjiang. “By most estimates, about 10% of Uighurs and other Muslim nationalities in Xinjiang have found themselves arbitrarily detained in these camps,” according to Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the ASPI.
“Tens of thousands of former detainees are likely to have been transferred into forced labour programmes… Xinjiang’s continuing detention camps …underpin a vast network of labour programmes where consent is impossible. They contaminate the supply chains of hundreds of multinational companies with forced labour, and they implicate not only Chinese authorities, but much of the rest of the world in a concerted campaign of ethnic replacement that credible reports suggest may well amount to genocide”.
While the forced labor of Uyghurs has received much international attention in recent years, a much less known fact is that China also subjects Tibetans to forced labor on a large and organized scale. In the first seven months of 2020, China drove more than half a million Tibetans into forced labor, according to a 2020 report, “Xinjiang’s System of Militarized Vocational Training Comes to Tibet,” by Adrian Zenz for the Jamestown Foundation. According to the report, the CCP has been “reeducating” Tibetans in Tibet in ways that are similar to the forced-labor to which it subjects Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The report states:
“In 2019 and 2020, the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) introduced new policies to promote the systematic, centralized, and large-scale training and transfer of ‘rural surplus laborers’ to other parts of the TAR, as well as to other provinces of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the first 7 months of 2020, the region had trained over half a million rural surplus laborers through this policy…The labor transfer policy mandates that… farmers are to be subjected to centralized ‘military-style’… vocational training, which aims to reform ‘backward thinking’ and includes training in ‘work discipline,’ law, and the Chinese language…”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 06/04/2021 – 02:00 - Make Way For The Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch Of Government
Make Way For The Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch Of Government
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”
– Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype
We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.
This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.
Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.
Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.
Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.
It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes refers to them as “(data) pipelines to our intimate bodily processes”)—the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints and iris scans—are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
For instance, imagine what the government could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals.”
We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look like child’s play.
Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach and its power.
The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or undesirable behavior.
Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.
This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.
Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like.
The question of how to deal with government agencies and programs that operate outside of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution forces us to contend with a deeply unsatisfactory and dubious political “solution” to a problem that operates beyond the reach of voters and politicians: how do you hold accountable a government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing?
Certainly, the history and growth of the NSA tracks with the government’s insatiable hunger for ever-great powers.
Since its official start in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency—nicknamed “No Such Agency”—has operated covertly, unaccountable to Congress all the while using taxpayer dollars to fund its secret operations. It was only when the agency ballooned to 90,000 employees in 1969, making it the largest intelligence agency in the world with a significant footprint outside Washington, DC, that it became more difficult to deny its existence.
In the aftermath of Watergate in 1975, the Senate held meetings under the Church Committee in order to determine exactly what sorts of illicit activities the American intelligence apparatus was engaged in under the direction of President Nixon, and how future violations of the law could be stopped. It was the first time the NSA was exposed to public scrutiny since its creation.
The investigation revealed a sophisticated operation whose surveillance programs paid little heed to such things as the Constitution. For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Post reports, “Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.”
Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
The result was the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated. The law requires that the NSA get clearance from the FISA Court, a secret surveillance court, before it can carry out surveillance on American citizens. Fast forward to the present day, and the so-called solution to the problem of government entities engaging in unjustified and illegal surveillance—the FISA Court—has unwittingly become the enabler of such activities, rubberstamping almost every warrant request submitted to it.
The 9/11 attacks served as a watershed moment in our nation’s history, ushering in an era in which immoral and/or illegal government activities such as surveillance, torture, strip searches, SWAT team raids are sanctioned as part of the quest to keep us “safe.”
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans’ phone calls and emails. That wireless wiretap program was reportedly ended in 2007 after the New York Times reported on it, to mass indignation.
Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the violations worsened, with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments.
It was only after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had been betrayed once again.
Even so, nothing really changed.
Since then, presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone, but none of them have done much to put an end to the government’s “technotyranny.”
At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.”
Yet the surveillance sector is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under close watch and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.
Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor citizens online.
This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.
In this way, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance efforts.
Cue the dawning of what The Nation refers to as “the rise of a new class in America: the cyberintelligence ruling class. These are the people—often referred to as ‘intelligence professionals’—who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last [20] years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.”
The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.
As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.”
This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, technologically-wired age.
Marcus continues:
“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era — specifically when it comes to software designed for remote work and Covid-tracing… Contact tracing apps … have started to be adapted for other uses, including criminal probes by the Singaporean government. If that seems distinctly worrying, it might be useful to remember that the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are dealing with today is not just a beast that has outgrown its chains but a beast that will not be restrained.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 23:40 - New Details Emerge Of "Highly Modified Drone" Snooping On Critical Infrastructure
New Details Emerge Of “Highly Modified Drone” Snooping On Critical Infrastructure
The War Zone has released more information about a mysterious drone encounter in controlled airspace in Tucson, Arizona, on the night of Feb. 9.
The Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, and the Tucson Police Department’s Air Support Unit tracked an unidentified drone that evaded both agencies’ helicopters. The FBI released a statement indicating it was a “highly modified drone.”
A source with direct knowledge of the incident told The War Zone the drone was “highly unlikely to be battery-powered based on the altitude, distance, and speed at which it flew.” The source said the drone was equipped with high-tech sensors, such as an infrared camera, to operate at night. They added it’s “only logical that it was looking towards DM’s [Davis Monthan AFB] flight line” based on its location.
The source said the drone penetrated Class C airspace surrounding the US Air Force’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, 5 miles south-southeast of downtown Tucson, Arizona, and was hovering near a complex of fuel tanks west of Runway 12.
“The description of the drone’s initial observed location would appear to match the location of a terminal owned by Kinder Morgan, an energy company that operates fuel pipelines and other energy infrastructure,” The War Zone said. About 40% of all natural gas flows through Kinder Morgan’s pipes.
A user of JetCareers.com wrote on the online airline community, dated Feb. 10, about the drone’s initial observed location:
Last night, there was one just east of KTUS at about 1200′ AGL cruising eastbound. It passed about 30′ away co-altitude with a police helicopter flying the opposite direction. Helo made a 180 turn to give chase. The quad copter was described as approximately 5 feet long by about 3 feet wide, with a single green flashing LED light. It continued east into KDMAs airspace and began orbiting the base over the parallel taxiway near the fighter jet ramp. TUS and DMA towers were unaware of it, as was U90 [an FAA approach tower] controllers. The operator apparently realized by this time that the drone was being followed, because it then proceeded northwest at high speed and climbing, with the helo and another LE helo in trail. The copter began to climb and flew out of the TUS area about 50 miles to the northwest of town into the middle of nowhere desert out by the mine west of KAVQ. It was last seen climbing through 14,000′ and into the undercast, where it disappeared. The helos remained in VMC [Visual Meteorological Conditions] obviously, and one hung around for about an hour, to see if it would reappear descending, or if there was any vehicles driving through the middle of nowhere as either the operator or someone to potentially recover it. Neither appeared. U90 informed their FAA chain of command about it, but that’s as far as I’ve heard so far.
Interesting in both the range and the altitude, both control-wise in terms of line of sight, as well as battery life as it comes to the endurance of the thing. The concerns with it being around air traffic and a near mid-air, as well as it being over an Air Force base with security-sensitive aircraft, are all concerning. Definitely not something commercial off-the-shelf that one would buy at the local store.
Sources confirmed the radar track of the Tucson Police Department helicopter that pursued the drone, a Bell 206B JetRanger II, was the helicopter that supported CBP’s.
Whatever the drone was, it had enough power to evade two helicopters, each capable of 150-180 mph.
Considering all the supply chain disruptions happening in the country, we wonder if an adversary state operating within the US or in Mexico was planning an attack on the Kinder Morgan terminal or surveilling Davis Monthan AFB.
Similar incidents have been reported over America’s largest nuclear power and near other sensitive structures.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 23:20 - Liberating Yourself From Faucism
Liberating Yourself From Faucism
Authored by Barry Brownstein via The American Institute for Economic Research,
The deification of Anthony Fauci is unraveling; it is time to learn a meta lesson. The issue isn’t Anthony Fauci’s failings. The problem is Faucism, the fantastical belief that wise and beneficent experts should rule.
Fauci will fall because of the one blunder that the public will never accept: Evidence is mounting that gain of function research in China, possibly funded by Fauci as head of NIAID, may have led to the pandemic. Worse for Fauci, he is on record as arguing the “benefits of such [gain of function] experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks” including the risk of pandemics.
In coming months few will continue to deify Fauci. Fauci’s veneer of charm and brilliance will chip away and the political flip-flopper will be revealed. Increasingly the public will become aware that Fauci and his apostle politicians used the shield of false science to lie about such issues as herd immunity, the dire need for school closings, and other destructive policies.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in the National Review, offers two explanations for Fauci’s role. Either he “purposely manipulated viral narratives and circumstances in order to assert his own authority” or Fauci is “just a big-mouth wannabe out over his skis.”
Blame and rejection may come Fauci’s way, but few will learn the real lesson of why it is wrong to give one person so much power.
If Faucism is to die, the beliefs that give life to Faucism must be exposed and rejected.
We need to understand why a concentration of power creates errors. All “experts” given the power to control others are over-their-head big-mouth wannabes.
The Nature of Knowledge, Risk, and Science
Most Faucists have never read Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” They do not know why the idea of allowing one man to determine policy is absurd:
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
“Our ignorance is sobering and boundless,” observed philosopher Karl Popper. Faucists don’t believe that about their beloved leader. Who else should decide, they proclaim, but our most learned expert?
Popper continued with what could be a credo for individuals willing to humbly explore their beliefs and admit the limits of individual knowledge: “With each step forward, with each problem which we solve, we not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we also discover that where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux.”
If the world is full of challenging problems and individuals with boundless ignorance, it is not surprising that Popper believed, “There are no ultimate sources of knowledge.” We can only “hope to detect and eliminate error” by allowing criticism of the theories of others and our own.
To put it more succinctly, physicist Richard Feynman wrote, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Of course, in today’s world Faucists are busy censoring views that dissent from their beloved leader and his apostles
University of Pennsylvania professor Philip Tetlock has been a skeptic of the ability of expert forecasters, who are “often mistaken but never in doubt.” Despite the poor track record of forecasters, they never lack followers. Tetlock writes, “We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need.”
Psychologist Paul Slovic is a leading authority on risk. He explains, “[T]here is no such thing as ‘real risk’ or ‘objective risk.’” Like the rest of us, experts suffer cognitive biases. Thus, Slovic concludes that the public’s view of risk should not be trumped by experts with greater political power.
Dougherty observed that, “The public-health consensus around COVID-19 and the proper or necessary interventions to take against it shifts all the time.” Once we understand the nature of knowledge and the subjective nature of risk, how can it be any other way? The problem is that this consensus is filtered and defined by few people, such as Fauci, and then translated into rigid rules. Alternative views are then suppressed. Dougherty continues,
“This consensus shapes public policy and leaks out into respectable mainstream news outlets; most insidiously, it becomes encoded as a quasi-official public line that every individual on social media is obliged to repeat and share or else be subject to demonetization, warnings, censorship, and accusations of spreading disinformation. The polarization of our politics and of public-health elites has left us with two categories of thought on COVID: the Science, and dangerous (sometimes racist) conspiracy theories. Half the time, the conspiracy theories become the Science. Belief in the efficacy of masks or in the lab-leak theory made these transitions. But these shifts don’t happen upon the publication of credible new scientific studies. There is almost no public jousting and argument among scientists and researchers. There is just a sliding from one position to another when it becomes safe. Long after these shifts take place, CDC guidance often comes to incorporate them.”
Dougherty illuminated what was paramount in Fauci’s mind in the early days of the crisis. In March 2020, during a briefing by economic advisors to President Trump, Vice President Pence, and the coronavirus task force, the severity of the impact of lockdowns on the economy “stunned everyone into silence” except for Fauci. Fauci “immediately turned to Vice President Pence and asked… ‘I’m still in charge, right?’”
In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, journalist James Surowiecki, echoing Hayek on knowledge, explains “[T]here’s no real evidence that one can become expert in something as broad as ‘decision making’ or ‘policy.’”
For those who believe in decision making by elite experts, Surowiecki has counterintuitive conclusions: “If you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you’re better off entrusting it with major decisions rather than leaving them in the hands of one or two people, no matter how smart these people are.”
Medical Hierarchies
Dr. Peter Pronovost is a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. In his book Safe Patients, Smart Hospitals, Pronovost reveals a common mindset among physicians and medical professionals and explores why this mindset increases medical errors and compromises patient safety.
Pronovost relates, “[Doctors] are taught to ignore the crowd and trust their own training and education.” Referring to Surowiecki’s book, Pronovost explains that doctors have no use for the wisdom of crowds—nurses, physicians from other specialties, and others. As you read, notice how Pronovost’s mindset is Hayekian:
“Each of the members of a patient’s team, including a parent if the patient is a child, sees problems through a different set of lenses that is shaped by personal experiences and training. Each of those lenses provides valuable information, information that helps us make wise decisions. Nurses see things differently than doctors, junior doctors see things differently than senior doctors; patients see things differently than clinicians; and family members have their own lenses.”
Understanding that knowledge is dispersed leads to humility, not a desire to make your view supreme. Pronovost continues,
“No lens is more accurate than the other; they are just different. Each has a partially incomplete view of a complex puzzle. The fewer the lenses the more distorted the view, the worse the decision, and the greater the risk for preventable harm. A team approach does not detract from the physician’s talent, authority, or power. It only enhances them by ensuring that he or she makes the best possible decisions.”
Contrast the team approach Pronovost describes with the tenet of Faucism whereby the authority of the leader makes the leader’s view supreme. Pronovost relates many tales of white-coat supremacy resulting in harm, but who could have imagined a doctor with the power to harm millions?
Tacit knowledge is knowledge gained from experience and wisdom that can be difficult to express. Pronovost explains how guidelines from central authorities, such as the CDC, suppress tacit knowledge. He writes, “One of the greatest sources of knowledge in medicine comes from what physicians and nurses learn on the job. This tacit knowledge develops and spreads into a ‘tribal knowledge’ of techniques at work and these techniques are soon practiced by a number of physicians and nurses.”
Pronovost explains that much of “this [tacit] wisdom is not from the published literature, and some of it may not be very effective, but it is one of the ways physicians learn.” Pronovost adds “there is no existing system for capturing this knowledge and sharing it with the medical world.” Today, notice how tacit knowledge is stamped out as physicians developing effective treatments for Covid are ridiculed and censored.
Pronovost’s work has helped to flatten medical hierarchies and deflate the egos of doctors resulting in improved medical practices, notably reducing central line infections in intensive care units resulting in many saved lives.
Live Not by Lies
Pronovost has faced challenges as he exposed white-coat supremacy, but he never had to contend with vested interests trying to defame him.
During the pandemic, brave doctors such Scott Atlas, Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya have been vilified. These doctors have not been willing to, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would say, live by lies.
In 1974 when Solzhenitsyn was arrested, and exiled to the West, the text of his short essay “Live Not by Lies” was released. Solzhenitsyn railed against those who complained about the destructive policies of the ruling “they” while pretending they themselves were “helpless:”
“We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: ‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’”
Solzhenitsyn describes the mindset of helplessness, “We have internalized well the lessons drummed into us by the state; we are forever content and comfortable with its premise: we cannot escape the environment, the social conditions; they shape us, ‘being determines consciousness.’ What have we to do with this? We can do nothing.”
Helplessness is a common state of mind today. One may say, If vaccine passports become mandatory, what can I do? I must keep my job. Another may say, I am a family physician with reservations about administering the experimental vaccine to those at low risk for Covid. Yet, I must keep my mouth shut or risk censure by the administration of my hospital-owned practice.
Solzhenitsyn writes, “But we can do—everything!—even if we comfort and lie to ourselves that this is not so. It is not ‘they’ who are guilty of everything, but we ourselves, only we!”
Solzhenitsyn shows us the way; he provides a list of ways we can stop passively lying. Even if we are unwilling to risk our jobs, we can understand that authoritarians and totalitarians rule by lies. Through that understanding, we find “the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!”
Solzhenitsyn adds,
“For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.
We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!”
Our job is infinitely easier than was Solzhenitsyn’s. The big lie of Faucism is that rule by benign experts is possible when it is never possible. We must admit the limits of individual knowledge. Authoritarians and totalitarians rule by lies; their ignorance is as sobering and boundless as ours. Is it too much to ask of Americans that they learn why Faucism is a bankrupt philosophy? Is it too much to ask that they refuse to cooperate anymore in the censorship and canceling of others?
In place of helplessness, we can choose not to participate in lies. “Let their rule hold not through me!” is the key to our liberation. We can be open and eager for public jousting and arguments from diverse points of view. If this is too much to ask, we will lose our remaining freedoms.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 23:00 - May Payrolls Preview: A 1 Million "Whisper"
May Payrolls Preview: A 1 Million “Whisper”
Up until this morning, the big risk heading into tomorrow’s payrolls report was for yet another subpar print (as a reminder last month’s jobs report showed a paltry 266K jobs were added, a huge miss to expectations), but then today’s blockbuster ADP report, which showed 978K private jobs far above the highest forecast, changed everything (even if the ADP report has a reputation of being chronically incorrect, with zero predictive power).
Still, as Newsquawk notes, labor market indicators have generally been encouraging in May (if maybe not to the same degree as April and we know how that ended): ADP’s gauge of payroll growth surprised to the upside, initial jobless claims declined to a fresh pandemic low in the corresponding survey week, while continuing claims fell near to the post-pandemic low (both continued to make progress in the subsequent reports too). Business surveys like the ISM reports as well as the Fed’s own Beige Book allude to tight labor market conditions where firms are struggling to fill vacancies, and are having to offer financial incentives like signing-on fees and higher wages to attract staff. However, the Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence was more mixed: although consumers’ view of the labour market improved, their views on wage growth are not quite as bullish as business surveys are signalling.
Traders have suggested that the May jobs data is more important than other recent reports, since it will be influential in the market’s perceptions about the timing of the Fed’s taper of asset purchases; for what it is worth, even if the report comes in on the strong side, officials will likely highlight the great deal of slack that remains, while there are still multiple-millions that remain out of work vs pre-pandemic levels. Furthermore, to catch up to the pre-covid trendline by mid/late-2022, the economy will need to add roughly 1 million jobs every month (which isn’t very likely).
In his preview of tomorrow’s jobs number, JPM Chief Economist Mike Feroli has a sub-consensus forecast of +550k jobs while Economist Jesse Edgerton’s alternative data suggests +476k jobs. Both numbers are below the current consensus of +656k. If either Mike or Jesse is correct this would be a disappointment, which would fail to push yields higher. A weak jobs print combined with higher commodity prices likely pushes real yields more negative. This would be positive for both gold and Tech stocks.
Goldman’s economists are more optimistic, and estimate that nonfarm payrolls rose by an above consensus 750k in May. Following the surprisingly weak April report, Goldman believes the further easing of business restrictions more than offset a moderate drag from labor supply factors and seasonality. While Big Data measures were mixed between the April and May survey weeks, the signals Goldman tracks generally indicate sharply higher employment levels relative to March. Goldman’s optimistic goalseek narrative aside, the bank sees uncertainty ahead of tomorrow’s report to be higher than usual, and Goldman notes the possibility that the establishment survey undercounts job gains from reopening establishments, which other things equal would result in a relatively stronger household survey.
These two banks aside, here is what consensus expects:
- JOB GROWTH: Non-farm Payrolls (exp. 650k, prev. 266k); Private Payrolls (prev. 600k, prev. 218k); Government Payrolls (prev. 48k); Manufacturing Payrolls (exp. 24k, prev. -18k).
- JOBLESSNESS: Unemployment Rate (exp. 5.9%, prev. 6.1%); Participation Rate (prev. 61.7%, vs 63.3% in Feb 2020); U6 Underemployment (prev. 10.4%, vs 7.0% in Feb 2020); Employment-Population Ratio (prev. 57.9%, vs 61.1% in Feb 2020).
- WAGES: Average Earnings M/M (exp. +0.2%, prev. +0.7%); Average Earnings Y/Y (exp. +1.6%, prev. +0.3%); Average Workweek Hours (exp. 35.0hrs, prev. 35.0hrs)
Job Gains
- Initial jobless claims data that coincides with the BLS employment situation report survey period showed weekly claims falling to a post-pandemic low at 444k, and the data series continued to show progress the next week too; continuing claims also declined in the corresponding survey window to 3.64mln, although that was not a fresh pandemic low.
- The ADP measure of nonfarm payrolls surprised to the upside, seeing 978k private payrolls added to the economy in May, above the forecast range, where the most optimistic forecast saw gains of 900k. ADP’s chief economist said that private payrolls had shown a marked improvement from recent months, and the strongest monthly gain since the early days of the recovery; “While goods producers grew at a steady pace, it is service providers that accounted for the lion’s share of the gains, far outpacing the monthly average in the last six months,” she added, “companies of all sizes experienced an uptick in job growth, reflecting the improving nature of the pandemic and economy.”
- ISM’s manufacturing PMI saw the employment sub-component fall by 4.2ppts to 50.9, still in expansion for the sixth straight month, but with momentum cooling (a manufacturing employment index above 50.6, over time, is generally consistent with an increase in the BLS data on manufacturing employment). ISM said that continued strong new-order levels, low customer inventories and expanding backlogs continue to indicate employment strength, but panellists are struggling to meet labor-management plans, and the commentary indicates that an overwhelming majority of companies are hiring or attempting to hire, though more than 50% of manufacturing firms have expressed difficulty in doing so. Similarly, the employment sub-component within the Services ISM declined too, by 3.5 points to 55.3; respondents said that “competition for labor continues to intensify due to lack of available talent pool” and “working to fill vacant positions; difficulty in finding qualified candidates.”
Slack
- The Conference Board’s gauge of consumer confidence was mixed regarding the labour market; consumers’ assessment of current labour market conditions improved – with the number saying jobs are plentiful rising while those claiming that jobs are hard to get declining, which in aggregate bodes well for the May jobs report. However, optimism in the short-term outlook waned, CB said, with the number expecting business conditions to improve over the next six months falling, while the number expecting business conditions to worsen rose. CB also said that consumers were less upbeat about the job market ahead, with the proportion expecting more jobs in the months ahead falling, while those anticipating fewer jobs rose.
- But even if the data surprises to the upside (range is 400k to 1mln), some desks expect Fed commentary to remain cautious, and continue to note that there remain a significant number of Americans out of work. Indeed, the aggregate nonfarm payroll additions since March last year still leaves a deficit of 8.2mln who remain out of work vs pre-pandemic levels, if you judge the amount purely based on the totals of the nonfarm payrolls figures, and potentially even more when accounting for underemployment.
- Fed officials are looking beyond the headline unemployment rate to try and gauge the levels of slack that remains; accordingly, the U6 Underemployment metric, Participation Rate, as well as the Employment-toPopulation ratio have gained in importance; last month, U6 stood at 10.4% (vs 7.0% in February 2020), Participation was at 61.7% (vs 63.3% in February 2020), and the Employment-Population Ratio was at 57.9% (vs 61.1% in February 2020), all three of these indicating that there is still some way to go, and reclaiming this lost ground is not going to happen in the immediate short-term.
Wages
- Data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed monthly job cut announcements picking up a touch in May, to 24.6k from around 22.9k in April, but the trend remains solid, and announced job cuts were still some 93.8% lower vs May 2020 levels. “Many employers, especially those hit hard during the pandemic, such as Retailers and Hospitality and Leisure companies, are having a difficult time finding workers, and many are offering signing bonuses or higher wages to attract workers,” Challenger said, adding that “as the labour market tightens, workers may find employers offering more attractive perks and benefits, including higher starting wages, as they look for positions.”
- However, according to Conference Board data, the number of consumers expecting incomes to rise over the next six-months pared back a touch in May (to +14.5% from +17.4%), though the number of Americans expecting incomes to decline in the next six-months also dropped back. Anecdotes leaning towards this were also noted in the Fed’s recent Beige Book (which was conducted before 25th May), which stated that while overall wage growth was moderate, a growing number of firms were offering signing bonuses and had increased starting wages to attract and retain workers.
Arguing for a better-than-expected report:
- Reopening. Sharply lower infection rates and a further easing in the severity of business restrictions likely supported job growth in virus-sensitive industries between the April and May survey period. For example, restaurant seatings on OpenTable rebounded to -17% during the May survey week, compared to -35% in that of April.
- Big Data. High-frequency data on the labor market were mixed between the April and May survey weeks, with outright declines in three of the seven measures Goldman tracks (gray bars in Exhibit 2). However, most measures nonetheless indicate sharply higher employment levels relative to March. Taking into account last month’s divergence with nonfarm payrolls, the majority of the signals would argue for an above-consensus reading, on our estimates (blue bars below). We find that Homebase (75% directionally correct vs. consensus since May 2020), Dallas Fed(75%), the USC Understanding America Survey (67%), and the Census Small Business Pulse have been among the most reliable predictors of the jobs report over the last year. Given the diverging messages from these indicators, we believe uncertainty ahead of tomorrow’s report is higher than usual.
- ADP. Private sector employment in the ADP report increased by 978k in May, well above consensus expectations for a 650k gain. We continue to believe the ADP panel methodology undercounted workers returning to their previous employers,and this would argue for a larger gain in tomorrow’s report.
- Job availability. The Conference Board labor differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get—surged to +34.6 in May (from +21.6 in April) and is now at pre-pandemic levels.Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas fell by 30%nin May after declining by 23% in April (mom, SA by GS). Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas fell by 30% in May after declining by 23% in April(mom, SA by GS). Layoffs were at the lowest level since 1989.e at the lowest level since 1989. Employer surveys.
Arguing for a weaker-than-expected report:
- Labor supply constraints. Labor supply appears to be tighter than the unemployment rate suggests, likely reflecting the impact of unusually generous unemployment benefits and lingering virus-related impediments to working. We also believe that the survey period of tomorrow’s report is too early to reflect state-level changes to UI benefit availability and generosity, as benefits will be curtailed in onehalf of US states starting in June.
Neutral/mixed factors:
- Seasonality. In April, reopening effects likely overlapped with normal seasonal hiringn patterns, resulting in less-impressive job gains on a seasonally-adjusted basis. In normal times, many service industries ramp up operations in the spring ahead of peak-season demand. This year, however, firms in heavily-impacted industries may simply have been more focused on bringing back their pre-crisis permanent workforces than on expanding their businesses and adding temporary seasonal labor. If so, seasonality should weigh on the May report as well, as the May BLS adjustment factors generally anticipate at least 300k of net hiring (vs. over 800k in April).
- Employer surveys. The employment component of our manufacturing survey tracker decreased (-1.4pt to 58.5), while the employment component of our services survey tracker increased (+0.6pt to 56.6), but both remain around 2018 levels.
- Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims declined during the May payroll month, averaging 505k per week vs. 656k in April. Across all employee programs including emergency benefits, continuing claims remained roughly unchanged between the payroll survey weeks.
How will the market respond?
The yield curve has failed to move materially over the last month as we received a disappointing NFP print but Fed Mins that show the FOMC is talking about talking about tapering. According to JPM, it may be the case that the bond market needs to see multiple NFP prints that approach the 700k – 1mm jobs range and/or actual tapering talk, before we see a sustained move higher, especially since the latest JPM Treasury survey found the most shorts since 2017. In other words, there is nobody left to short rates.
Meanwhile, as Bloomberg notes, stronger data, including ADP and ISM services, sent real yields and the dollar higher. The risk of the payroll Friday is skewed favorably to the dollar. There’s a wide range of estimates for the payroll, making a clean read more difficult. The average forecast was 667k jobs. But with standard deviation of 147k, anything between 500k and 800k would be considered more or less in line with expectations.
But, as BBG’s Ye Xie notes, we know from various surveys that demand for labor isn’t an issue. It’s labor supply that is holding back job growth, because of the pandemic, child care and unemployment benefits. So, a low reading would be taken with a grain of salt. Any knee-jerk fall in yields or the dollar could be reversed soon after.
But a higher figure, say close to 1 million, would put the tapering discussion on the table more urgently.
Finally, it is worth noting that after several months of disappointment, the US economy is certainly in need of a strong jobs report and that may explain why moments ago we learned that the president, who already knows the number, is set to discuss it shortly after it is released:
- BIDEN TO GIVE REMARKS ON THE MAY JOBS REPORT AT 10:15AM ET.
That alone was enough to push the whisper number to 1 million.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 22:40 - Escobar: Mapping The Post-Unilateral World Order
Escobar: Mapping The Post-Unilateral World Order
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
As Sino-Russo-Iranophobia dissolves in sanctions and hysteria, mapmakers carve the post-unilateral order…
It’s the Nikolai Patrushev-Yang Jiechi show – all over again. These are the two players running an up and coming geopolitical entente, on behalf of their bosses Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
Last week, Yang Jiechi – the director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee – visited Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev in Moscow. That was part of the 16thround of China-Russia strategic security consultations.
What’s intriguing is that Yang-Patrushev happened between the Blinken-Lavrov meeting on the sidelines of the Arctic Council summit in Reykjavik, and the upcoming and highest-ranking Putin-Biden in Geneva on June 16 (possibly at the Intercontinental Hotel, where Reagan and Gorbachev met in 1985).
The Western spin before Putin-Biden is that it might herald some sort of reset back to “predictability” and “stability” in currently extra-turbulent US-Russia relations.
That’s wishful thinking. Putin, Patrushev and Lavrov harbor no illusions. Especially when in the G7 in London, in early May, the Western focus was on Russia’s “malign activities” as well as China’s “coercive economic policies.”
Russian and Chinese analysts, in informal conversations, tend to agree that Geneva will be yet another instance of good old Kissingerian divide and rule, complete with a few seducing tactics to lure Moscow away from Beijing, an attempt to bide some time and probing openings for laying out geopolitical traps. Old foxes such as Yang and Patrushev are more than aware of the game in play.
What’s particularly relevant is that Yang-Patrushev laid the groundwork for an upcoming Putin visit to Xi in Beijing not long after Putin-Biden in Geneva – to further coordinate geopolitically, once again, the “comprehensive strategic partnership”, in their mutually recognized terminology.
The visit might take place on July 1, the hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party – or on July 16, the 20thanniversary of the China-Russia Treaty of Friendship.
So Putin-Biden is the starter; Putin-Xi is the main course.
That Putin-Luka tea for two
Beyond the Russian president’s “outburst of emotions” comment defending his Belarusian counterpart’s action, the Putin-Lukashenko tea for two in Sochi yielded an extra piece of the puzzle concerning the RyanAir emergency landing in Minsk– starring a blogger from Belarus who is alleged to have lent his services to the ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi-ridden Azov battalion, which fought against the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Ukrainian Donbass in 2014.
Lukashenko told Putin he had “brought along some documents so you can understand what is going on.” Nothing has been leaked regarding the contents of these documents, but it’s possible they may be incandescent – related to the fact that sanctions were imposed by the EU against Belavia Airlines even though the carrier had nothing to do with the RyanAir saga – and potentially capable of being brought up in the context of Putin-Biden in Geneva.
The Big Picture is always Eurasia versus the Atlanticist West. As much as Washington will keep pushing Europe – and Japan – to decouple from both China and Russia, Cold War 2.0 on two simultaneous fronts has very few takers.
Rational players see that the 21st century combined scientific, economic and military power of a Russia-China strategic partnership would be a whole new ball game in terms of global reach compared with the former USSR/Iron Curtain era.
And when it comes to appealing to the Global South, and the new iterations of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), emphasis on an international order upholding the UN Charter and the rule of international law is definitely sexier than a much-vaunted “rules-based international order” where only the hegemon sets the rules.
In parallel to Moscow’s lack of illusions about the new Washington dispensation, the same applies to Beijing – especially after the latest outburst by Kurt Campbell, the former Obama-Biden 1.0 assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific who is now back as the head of Indo-Pacific Affairs on the National Security Council under Obama-Biden 3.0.
Campbell is the actual father of the ‘pivot to Asia’ concept when he was at the State Department in the early 2010s – although as I pointed out during the 2016 US presidential campaign, it was Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State who claimed Mothership of the pivot to Asia in an October 2011 essay.
At a gig promoted by Stanford University last week, Campbell said, “The period that was broadly described as engagement [with China] has come to an end.” After all, the “pivot to Asia” never really died, as there has been a clear Trump-Biden continuum.
Campbell obfuscated by talking about a “new set of strategic parameters” and the need to confront China by working with “allies, partners and friends”. Nonsense: this is all about the militarization of the Indo-Pacific.
That’s what Biden himself reiterated during his first address to a joint session of the US Congress, when he boasted about telling Xi that the US will “maintain a strong military presence in the Indo-Pacific” just as it does with NATO in Europe.
The Iranian factor
On a different but parallel track with Yang-Patrushev, Iran may be on the cusp of a momentous directional change. We may see it as part of a progressive strengthening of the Arc of Resistance – which links Iran, the People’s Mobilization Units in Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and now a more unified Palestine.
The proxy war on Syria was a tragic, massive fail on every aspect. It did not deliver secular Syria to a bunch of takfiris (aka “moderate rebels”). It did not prevent the expansion of Iran’s sphere of influence. It did not derail the Southwest Asia branch of the New Silk Roads. It did not destroy Hezbollah.
“Assad must go”? Dream on; he was reelected with 95% of Syrian votes, with a 78% turnout.
As for the upcoming Iranian presidential election on June 18 – only two days after Putin-Biden – it takes place when arguably the nuclear deal revival drama being enacted in Vienna will have reached an endgame. Tehran has repeatedly stressed that the deadline for a deal expires today, May 31.
The impasse is clear. In Vienna, through its EU interlocutors, Washington has agreed to lift sanctions on Iranian oil, petrochemicals and the central bank, but refuses to remove them on individuals such as members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
At the same time, in Tehran, something very intriguing happened with Ali Larijani, former Parliament speaker, an ambitious member of a quite prominent family but discarded by the Guardian Council when it chose candidates to run for President. Larijani immediately accepted the ruling. As I was told by Tehran insiders, that happened with no friction because he received a detailed explanation of something much bigger: the new game in town.
As it stands, the one positioned as the nearly inevitable winner on June 18 seems to be Ebrahim Raeisi, up to now the chief justice – and close to the Revolutionary Guards. There’s a very strong possibility that he will ask the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to leave Iran – and that means the end of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as we knew it, with unforeseen consequences. (From the Revolutionary Guards’ point of view, the JCPOA is already dead).
An extra factor is that Iran is currently suffering from severe drought – when summer has not even arrived. The power grid will be under tremendous pressure. The dams are empty – so it’s impossible to rely on hydroelectric power. There’s serious popular discontent regarding the fact that Team Rouhani for eight years prevented Iran from obtaining nuclear power. One of Raeisi’s first acts may be to command the immediate construction of a nuclear power plant.
We don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowin’ when it comes to the top three “existential threats” to the declining hegemon – Russia, China and Iran. What’s clear is that none of the good old methods deployed to maintain the subjugation of the vassals is working – at least when confronted by real sovereign powers.
As Sino-Russo-Iranophobia dissolves in a fog of sanctions and hysteria, mapmakers like Yang Jiechi and Nikolai Patrushev relentlessly carve the post-unilateral order.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 22:20 - DoD Invests In "Rocket Cargo" To Deliver Weapons Anywhere On Earth In 1 Hour
DoD Invests In “Rocket Cargo” To Deliver Weapons Anywhere On Earth In 1 Hour
Ars Technica points out that deep within the Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Budget Estimates, a 462-page book, there is a section about the Air Force leveraging rocket technology to deliver massive amounts of advanced weaponry and military cargo to anywhere in the world within a short notice.
“The Department of the Air Force seeks to leverage the current multi-billion dollar commercial investment to develop the largest rockets ever, and with full reusability to develop and test the capability to leverage a commercial rocket to deliver AF cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity,” the document states.
The section, titled “Rocket Cargo,” does not directly refer to Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship by name, but it’s the only vehicle at the moment with the capability described by the service.
Ars Technica says the Air Force plans to invest $47.9 million into the “Rocket Cargo” project in the coming fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.
“The Air Force is not investing in the commercial rocket development, but rather investing in the Science & Technology needed to interface the capability with DoD logistics needs, and extend the commercial capability to DoD-unique missions. Provides a new, faster and cheaper solution to the existing TRANSCOM Strategic Airlift mission. Enables AFSOC to perform current Rapid-Response Missions at lower cost, and meet a one-hour response requirement.
“Rocket Cargo uses modeling, simulation, and analysis to conduct operational analysis, verify military utility, performance, and operational cost. S&T will include novel “loadmaster” designs to quickly load/unload a rocket, rapid launch capabilities from unusual sites, characterization of potential landing surfaces and approaches to rapidly improve those surfaces, adversary detectability, new novel trajectories, and an S&T investigation of the potential ability to airdrop,” the document concludes.
Even though SpaceX was not directly mentioned in the budget documents, we noted in October 2020 that the US military and Musk’s company were in talks about developing a 7,500 mph rocket to deliver weapons worldwide.
From a logistical perspective, if this can be pulled off, the US may have the upper hand in deploying gear for quick reaction forces in hot zones.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 22:00 - As Tapering Nears, Beijing Drains Dollar Liquidity
As Tapering Nears, Beijing Drains Dollar Liquidity
By Ye Xie, Bloomberg reporter and Markets Live commentator
Good economic news is bad news for markets now.
A better-than-expected ADP jobs report sent the dollar and bond yields higher and stocks lower Thursday. A strong payroll report Friday would give more ammunition for folks calling for earlier QE tapering. In a sense, policy normalization has already started after the Fed announced plans to wind down its emergency corporate-credit facility. From that perspective, the peak of liquidity is near.
In China, the authorities are already mopping up the dollar liquidity awash in its domestic market. On Thursday, two Chinese policy banks, China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China, announced selling of dollar notes in the onshore market, the first such sales in years. It followed a move Monday when the PBOC required lenders to hold more foreign currencies in reserve.
Both aim to reduce the dollar supply and ease pressure for yuan appreciation. As a result, one-year yuan swap points dropped to the lowest since January, reflecting higher dollar funding costs. The yuan rally has also stalled.
Neither of these moves was large in size. It’s the signaling effect that matters. Beijing doesn’t want a currency overshoot so that when the Fed takes away the punch bowl, it will be less volatile and painful for Chinese markets.
In other news, President Biden amended a ban on U.S. investment in Chinese companies, naming 59 companies with ties to China’s military or in the surveillance industry. Since many of the companies were already on the Trump administration’s list, the market impact was largely a shrug.
It’s worth noting that the trade and economic dialog seem to be back on track after Vice Premier Liu He held “candid and constructive” talks with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Trade Representative Katherine Tai. The two moves — sanctions and dialog — are carried on separate tracks, as was during the trade war in the Trump era. In other words, sanctioning Chinese companies may not necessarily spoil trade talks.
As far as the markets are concerned, the latter is more important.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 21:40 - "We Cannot Postpone Again" – Olympics Chief Declares Games Won't Be Canceled As Public Opposition Grows
“We Cannot Postpone Again” – Olympics Chief Declares Games Won’t Be Canceled As Public Opposition Grows
Despite objections from government scientists and prominent businessmen, Japan is planning to move ahead with the postponed 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo next month. In an interview with the Japanese press, the president of the 2020 Games, Seiko Hashimoto, declared that the games would move ahead as planned, with the Japanese government taking certain precautions to prevent an outbreak of mutant COVID.
“We cannot postpone again,” Hashimoto told the Nikkan Sports newspaper via Reuters.
Hashimoto, who competed in seven summer and winter Olympics as a cyclist and skater, also told the BBC that while Japanese were understandably worried, they should be reassured that a “bubble situation” was being carefully constructed.
“I believe that the possibility of these Games going on is 100% that we will do this,” she added. “One thing the organising committee commits and promises to all the athletes out there is that we will defend and protect their health.”
Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is betting it all on pulling off the Games as he plans a critical snap election after the Games are over.
Meanwhile, Shigeru Omi, the head of a panel of government experts that has been advising Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, issued his strongest warning yet about the potential risks of holding the games.
“It’s not normal to have the Olympics in a situation like this,” Omi told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday, adding that organizers of the Games should have an explanation for a skeptical public.
Public opinion polls show most Japanese people do not want Tokyo 2020 to be held this year. Medical journals have questioned the wisdom of allowing 90K athletes, media, sponsors, officials and support staff to enter the country in July. Health officials worry this infusion of foreigners will place additional strain on Japan’s health-care system at a particularly vulnerable time.
10K of the 80K volunteers who initially signed up to help with the Games have quit, according to Japanese Broadcaster NHK. But organizers say they won’t need as many volunteers as they once suspected
Japan’s vaccine rollout has picked up over the last week, but it’s still way behind the US and Europe in terms of percentage of adults who have received at least one dose.
Already postponed from last year at the cost of $3.5 billion, a stripped-down Olympics with no foreign spectators allowed is slated to begin July 23.
Most of the capital city’s city council, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly, are in agreement that the Games should be cancelled.
But just last week, the Japanese government approved extending a state of emergency in Tokyo and eight other prefectures that’s slated to end roughly one month before the Games begin.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 21:20 - Shenzhen's Busiest Commercial Street Closed Due To COVID-19 Outbreak
Shenzhen’s Busiest Commercial Street Closed Due To COVID-19 Outbreak
Authored by Alex Wu via The Epoch Times,
The COVID-19 epidemic in Guangdong province continues to worsen. The Epoch Times has learned that one of the busiest commercial streets in the mega city of Shenzhen has just been closed due to infection. Meanwhile, in the provincial capital of Guangzhou city, food and medicine shortages have been reported in locked down areas.
Shenzhen’s busiest commercial street – the East Gate Pedestrian Mall and the Baima Clothing Wholesale City in Luohu District are closed due to COVID-19 outbreak. June 2, 2021. (Screenshot of online video)
On June 2, posts about a COVID-19 case in the Baima clothing wholesale market in Luohu District, Shenzhen, were circulating on Chinese social media. They said that the customer was a visitor from Guangzhou. It has caused a major commercial street—the East Gate Pedestrian Mall where the clothing market is located—to be closed down.
A shop owner in the East Gate Pedestrian Mall told The Epoch Times that the commercial street has a large number of visitors, and now all shops on the street have been required to close, with all customers told they have to get tested for COVID-19.
The Epoch Times obtained a video showing the commercial street in locked down.
On June 2, Shenzhen reported two more locally infected cases taking the official case reports to 15, while 16 more local cases were reported in Guangzhou taking the official case reports to 58.
The actual number of infected people and the true scale of the pandemic in China still remain unclear. The large-scale lockdowns and testing have caused many residents to suspect the officially reported infection numbers given the Chinese communist regime’s history of downplaying or covering up crises.
A netizen posted on Twitter that his friends in Guangzhou had told him that many cases were not being officially reported but that locals could tell that the situation was more severe that authorities were admitting from the semi-locked down state of the city and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central authorities sending a special epidemic team to visit Guangdong on May 30.
On June 2, 38 areas in Guangzhou were put under lockdown, with outbound travel restricted.
A child is tested for COVID-19 in Guangzhou in China’s southern Guangdong province on May 30, 2021. (AFP via Getty Images)
Some are also doubting the effectiveness of Chinese-made COVID-19 vaccines against variants reported in the outbreak cases.
According to Chinese state-run media, as of May 31, 10.11 million people in the city of 15.3 million have received their first vaccine, and another 3.25 million are fully vaccinated with two doses.
A staff member from the Shenzhen Municipal Health Commission told The Epoch Times on May 25 that Shenzhen residents were receiving the China-made CoronaVac and Sinopharm vaccines. They said that, like the non-Chinese vaccines, vaccination doesn’t guarantee full protection from COVID-19. They declined to comment on the efficacy of Chinese vaccines against COVID-19 variants.
The director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Gao Fu, also said of the recent outbreak that the vaccines are not used for preventing infection but to prevent severe symptoms and death. He said earlier that a third dose of the Chinese-made vaccines might needed to boost its efficacy. He also suggested mixing vaccines of different technologies, such as inactivated virus vaccines and mRNA ones.
Food and Medicine Shortage
On June 2, a number of posts were circulating on social media about the chaos and difficulties facing citizens in locked down areas of Guangzhou.
Residents in Jushu Village in Liwan District told The Epoch Times on June 2 that there was no notice before the sudden lockdown of their village on May 28. People went to work in the morning and found out that they could not leave the village. It’s been six days, and food, medicine, and formula milk for babies are severely lacking.
Zhao Li (alias) said that all stores in the village are out of stock, and things can’t be shipped in. People can only buy over-priced rationed food packages provided by the CCP’s village committee.
A Jushu villager posted on social media, “So far, 90 percent of us have not received the so-called free food and supplies provided by the authorities. Now, the village committee has started to drive up prices for the rationed food, and many people trapped here cannot afford the high-priced vegetables. The boxed lunches that cost 15 yuan ($ 2.3) before are now selling for 60 yuan ($ 9.2).”
Over-priced rationed food provided by the CCP’s Hainan village committee in Liwan District of Guangzhou on June 2, 2021. (Supplied to The Epoch Times)
Wang Hua (alias), another villager in Jushu, told The Epoch Times that up to now, the CCP’s village officials have not effectively arranged food supplies for the community. She said, “They just lock us in here, and don’t care if we are alive or dead. Many tenants who don’t usually cook have no preparations, and now they only have porridge and snacks to stay alive.”
She added, “I thought that after a whole year of fighting the epidemic, the state would not let me come to the situation that I have no food to eat, so I didn’t stock up much. However, I’ve found out that the supermarkets and food markets have all been closed. And nobody has ever told me where I can buy food and how can I get basic supplies. I can only depend on myself.”
Wang revealed to The Epoch Times that the shortage of medicine is another serious problem facing lockdown areas. She said that her friend’s husband’s feet were ulcerated, bloody, and in need of urgent medical assistance. They had called emergency services, hospitals, pharmacies, and all other official channels but have received no help. When they tried to buy medicine online, their order got cancelled, as no deliveries are being allowed in the lockdown areas. Later, they posted to a group chat on social media asking for help. Someone in the group had a similar symptom and shared his medicine with them.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 21:00 - "It Pushed Me Over The Edge" – Vaccine Lotteries Credited With Enticing Millions To Accept Jabs
“It Pushed Me Over The Edge” – Vaccine Lotteries Credited With Enticing Millions To Accept Jabs
In the US, the first winners of the “vaccination lotteries” being adopted by a growing number of states – including West Virginia (which is offering guns, trucks & “piles of cash), California and a handful of others – are taking home life-changing money, all because they decided to get vaccinated.
And according to WSJ, the incentives that these programs create are already having a positive impact on the vaccination rate, which has finally eclipsed 50% of American adults. The program is also having some success in Hong Kong.
But while it’s impossible to determine exactly how many people are getting vaccinated because of the potential monetary rewards created by the vaccination lotteries, the anecdotal evidence is clear, as the Toledo Blade showed in a recent story about one of Ohio’s “Vax-a-Million” winners who happened to be a Toledo resident.
“I kept hemming and hawing about it, and I work all the time, and when the Vax-a-Million thing started I immediately went down there and got it. It pushed me over the edge,” he said.
Mr. Carlyle said after he hung up with the governor, he then called his girlfriend to let his family know he had won.
“It’s overwhelming. I don’t know what to do. I’m still dreaming,” he said.
In Ohio alone, 3.2MM people entered the drawing – all of whom hadn’t been previously vaccinated despite being eligible for weeks or months. And Ohio’s Gov. ike DeWine credited the lottery enticements for a recent spike in vaccinations in the Buckeye State.
More than 3.2 million Ohioans entered the drawing to win the $1 million prize, and nearly 133,000 Ohioans ages 12 to 17 entered the college scholarship drawing, according to the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Lottery. The entry period for the next Ohio Vax-a-Million drawing ends June 6, 2021 at 11:59:59 p.m.
Governor DeWine credited the lottery enticement for a spike in new vaccinations after his initial announcement, but the numbers show the rate has again leveled off.
WSJ’s Mike Bird added that the efficacy shown so far is evidence that vaccination lotteries create benefits that far outweigh their costs.
It’s difficult to overstate just how small the lottery payouts are relative to the economies they cover. In Hong Kong’s case, a real-estate developer is offering an apartment valued at roughly $1.39 million. That prize, though highly valuable to the winner, is equivalent to 0.0004% of the city’s already-reduced 2020 GDP.
Faster vaccinations enable more rapid economic normalization, especially in places that still have significant international travel restrictions in place. That normalization is worth far more than any plausible prizes. One percentage point of GDP growth for Hong Kong would be equivalent to around 2,500 such apartments. The same is true for Ohio’s million-dollar payouts, in an economy with output in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
What’s more, there’s evidence from a study in Singapore showing financial incentives are effective at boosting vaccination rates.
But there is evidence that financial incentives work. Vouchers worth just 10-30 Singapore dollars ($7.56 to $22.69) could boost take-up of influenza vaccines by 4.5% to 9.2% in one study, with the strongest effect among elderly recipients. A review of the literature by the U.S. Community Preventive Services Task Force showed vaccination rates rising by a median of 8 percentage points in the studies assessed.
At the very least, using financial incentives is certainly more humane than coercing people by allowing employers to effectively require all new hires to be vaccinated, which risks excluding people who object to vaccination for religious or other reasons from the workforce.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 20:40 - Chinese Wind Farm Project In Texas A Threat To National Security: Kyle Bass
Chinese Wind Farm Project In Texas A Threat To National Security: Kyle Bass
Authored by Cathy He and Jen Jekielek via The Epoch Times,
A proposed Chinese wind farm in Texas poses national security concerns, warned China-watcher and hedge fund manager Kyle Bass.
The Blue Hills Wind development in southwest Texas’s Val Verde County has attracted heightened scrutiny in recent months, with lawmakers and experts signaling concern that the Chinese project could be used as a cover for espionage and to disrupt the state’s power grid.
The proposed wind farm site is about 30 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border and near the Laughlin Air Force Base, the U.S. Air Force’s largest pilot training facility.
The land for the wind farm is owned by a Chinese company called GH America Investments Group, which has since 2015 bought 130,000 acres of land—an area the size of Tulsa, Oklahoma—in Val Verde County. The man behind the firm is Sun Guangxin, a businessman from the northwestern Xinjiang region in China, who has strong ties to the communist regime.
Sun, a former military officer, is currently the richest person in Xinjiang—where the regime is committing genocide against ethnic Muslim minorities. He has a net worth of $1.9 billion, according to Forbes, and was also the vice chairman of the Xinjiang Provincial Youth Federation.
“My view is that is the reason that he bought the wind farm and wants to put up 700-foot turbines, is he plugs directly into our electric grid. Well, plugging directly into our electric grid is something that should never happen,” Bass, founder and chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management, told Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
Spurred by these security concerns, the Texas Legislature recently unanimously passed legislation that would ban individuals or companies connected with China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia from entering into contracts relating to the state’s critical infrastructure. The bill has been sent to the governor for signature. If it is signed, it will take effect immediately.
The country’s critical infrastructure has been the target of several cyberattacks in recent months. An annual threat assessment (pdf) by the U.S. Intelligence Community said the Chinese regime’s cyber-capabilities “at a minimum, can cause localized, temporary disruptions to critical infrastructure within the United States.”
Bass said the land was a curious site for a wind farm given that the area is not known to produce high levels of wind. The proposed height of the wind turbines are 700 feet—the height of the Washington Monument—meaning that they could be used to spy on activities at the Air Force base and border security operations at the U.S.-Mexico Border, he added.
Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell, sponsor of the bill, has likened the project to a “Trojan horse.”
“Why do they want to put this in Val Verde County, where the wind doesn’t really blow? Why is this area, where the turbine farm was going to be, 65 miles from our Laughlin Air Force Base, a strategic pilot training base?” Campbell said on the Senate floor in April.
GH America is now reviewing its options in light of the passage of the legislation, News 4 San Antonio reported.
Stephen Lindsey, a vice president of the company, told News 4 that the proposed wind farm was not a threat to the state’s security, and added that he didn’t know if Sun has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 20:20 - Ackman's SPAC Nears Deal To Take World's Largest Music Business Public
Ackman’s SPAC Nears Deal To Take World’s Largest Music Business Public
Bill Ackman’s massive SPAC is reportedly nearing a transaction to take public Universal Music Group, the world’s largest music business, at a valuation of about $40 billion, the WSJ reported citing sources.
Back in July, Ackman’s special purpose acquisition company, called Pershing Square Tontine Holdings Ltd., raised $4 billion in an initial public offering – a record amount for a SPAC to this day, as Ackman said that his firm was on the hunt for a “mature unicorn”:
“We’re in a unicorn mating dance and we want to marry a very attractive unicorn on the other side that meets our characteristics,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview at the time. “And we’ve designed ourselves to be a very attractive partner.”
Ackman has now found his target. While it is unclear if Universal is a “mature unicorn”, the company has benefited from a jump in revenue from music streaming on services such as Spotify Technology SA. Universal had about €7.4 billion in revenue last year, accounting for nearly half of Vivendi’s total.
The deal, which was hinted at last month when Vivendi said it was considering selling 10% of Universal’s shares to a U.S. investor without naming one, would have a €33 billion ($40 billion) equity value and a €35 billion enterprise value, which also accounts for net debt. A $40 billion deal for Universal Music would be the largest SPAC transaction on record, exceeding the $35 billion that Singaporean ride-hailing company Grab Holdings was valued at in a similar deal recently. It would have a so-called enterprise value, taking into consideration Universal’s debt, of about $42 billion.
Universal, which is a subsidiary of French media conglomerate Vivendi SE, is the record label behind artists including Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and the Weeknd. Its stable also includes classic acts such as Queen and the Beatles, and last year it bought Bob Dylan’s entire publishing catalog. China’s Tencent owns about 20% of Universal after the Chinese internet conglomerate doubled its stake last year in a deal that valued the business at about €30 billion.
A merger with Ackman’s SPAC would mean that Vivendi current plans to monetize its sub would be scrapped. In February the French media conglomerate planned to spin off the business and list it in the Netherlands later this year, with 60% of Universal’s shares distributed to the French company’s investors. As the WSJ notes, it isn’t clear how the Pershing Square transaction affects that plan, and other details couldn’t be learned.
Going public also could give UMG more financial clout to compete with rivals Warner Music Group Corp. and Sony Music Entertainment. Vivendi had originally planned a 2023 IPO for UMG, but said earlier this year that it was now aiming for the business to go public by the end of 2021.
While SPACs, or empty shells that raise money with the sole purpose of looking for a target to merge with and bring public, exploded in popularity in the second half of 2020 and early 2021 as companies sought alternatives to a traditional IPO, in recent months they hit a brick wall with deal flow slowing to a trickle amid a regulatory crackdown on vehicles that have come under fire for appearing to enrich sponsors at the expense of other shareholders. While so far in 2021, at least 330 SPACs have raised $104 billion, blowing through last year’s record of more than $80 billion, most of this activity took place in the first quarter with virtually no new SPACs in recent weeks. They typically have two years to find a target.
As the WSJ notes, Ackman made a splash in July when he raised his SPAC and said he was on the hunt for a large private company to take public. Since then, one of the biggest guessing games on Wall Street has been predicting which company might strike a deal with him. He initially told investors a deal could be made public by the end of March, before recently telling The Wall Street Journal that he had been working on one transaction since November, but needed more time.It isn’t guaranteed Universal and the SPAC will reach a deal. If they do, it could be completed in the next few weeks and isn’t subject to any additional due diligence.
While the deal may still be in doubt, Ackman’s expertise in the sector isn’t: the hedge fund billionaire is a veteran at using blank-check companies to do deals. He previously co-founded Justice Holdings which raised $1.44 billion in a 2011 listing in London. It merged with Burger King Worldwide Inc. in 2012.
When discussing potential targets for his current SPAC last year, Ackman said he wanted “a simple, predictable” cash-flow-generating company. “We’re looking for the super durable great growth business that we can own for the next decade,” he said.
That said, the news appears to have disappointed the market as the stock price of PSTH – Tontine’s publicly traded stolck – tumbled as much as 10% after hours as the unveil of Tontine’s “unicorn” was seen as less than exciting.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 19:59 - Greenwald: The FBI's Strange Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light On COVID Lab-Leak Theory And Fauci's Emails
Greenwald: The FBI’s Strange Anthrax Investigation Sheds Light On COVID Lab-Leak Theory And Fauci’s Emails
Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,
One of the most significant events of the last two decades has been largely memory-holed: the October, 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S. Beginning just one week after 9/11 and extending for another three weeks, a highly weaponized and sophisticated strain of anthrax had been sent around the country through the U.S. Postal Service addressed to some of the country’s most prominent political and media figures. As Americans were still reeling from the devastation of 9/11, the anthrax killed five Americans and sickened another seventeen.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing May 26, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images) As part of the extensive reporting I did on the subsequent FBI investigation to find the perpetrator(s), I documented how significant these attacks were in the public consciousness. ABC News, led by investigative reporter Brian Ross, spent a full week claiming that unnamed government sources told them that government tests demonstrated a high likelihood that the anthrax came from Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program. The Washington Post, in November, 2001, also raised “the possibility that [this weaponized strain of anthrax] may have slipped through an informal network of scientists to Iraq.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) appeared on The David Letterman Show on October 18, 2001, and said: “There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.” Three days later, McCain appeared on Meet the Press with Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and said of the anthrax perpetrators: “perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America,” while Lieberman said the anthrax was so finely weaponized that “there’s either a significant amount of money behind this, or this is state-sponsored, or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program” (Lieberman added: “Dr. Fauci can tell you more detail on that”).
In many ways, the prospect of a lethal, engineered biological agent randomly showing up in one’s mailbox or contaminating local communities was more terrifying than the extraordinary 9/11 attack itself. All sorts of oddities shrouded the anthrax mailings, including this bizarre admission in 2008 by long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen: “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.” At the very least, those anthrax attacks played a vital role in heightening fear levels and a foundational sense of uncertainty that shaped U.S. discourse and politics for years to come. It meant that not just Americans living near key power centers such as Manhattan and Washington were endangered, but all Americans everywhere were: even from their own mailboxes.
Letter sent to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, along with weaponized anthrax, in September, 2001 The FBI first falsely cast suspicion on a former government scientist, Dr. Steven Hatfill, who had conducted research on mailing deadly anthrax strains. Following the FBI’s accusations, media outlets began dutifully implying that Hatfill was the culprit. A January, 2002, New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof began by declaring: “I think I know who sent out the anthrax last fall,” then, without naming him, proceeded to perfectly describe Hatfill in a way that made him easily identifiable to everyone in that research community. Hatfill sued the U.S. Government, which eventually ended up paying him close to $6 million in damages before officially and explicitly exonerating him and apologizing. His lawsuit against the NYT and Kristof was dismissed since he was never named by the paper, but the columnist also apologized to him six years later.
A full seven years after the attack, the FBI once again claimed that it had found the perpetrator: this time, it was the microbiologist Bruce Ivins, a long-time “biodefense” researcher at the U.S. Army’s infectious disease research lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Yet before he could be indicted, Ivins died, apparently by suicide, to avoid prosecution. As a result, the FBI was never required to prove its case in court. The agency insisted, however, that there was no doubt that Ivins was the anthrax killer, citing genetic analysis of the anthrax strain that they said conclusively matched the anthrax found in Ivins’ U.S. Army lab, along with circumstantial evidence pointing to him.
But virtually every mainstream institution other than the FBI harbored doubts. The New York Times quoted Ivins’ co-workers as calling into question the FBI’s claims (“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody”), and the paper also cited “vocal skepticism from key members of Congress.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), one of the targets of the anthrax letters, said explicitly he did not believe Ivins could have carried out the attacks alone. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and then-Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a physicist, said the same to me in interviews. The nation’s three largest newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal — all editorially called for independent investigations on the grounds that the FBI’s evidence was inconclusive if not outright unconvincing. One of the country’s most prestigious science journals, Nature, published an editorial under the headline “Case Not Closed,” arguing, about the FBI’s key claims, that “the jury is still out on those questions.”
When an independent investigation was finally conducted in 2011 into the FBI’s scientific claims against Ivins, much of that doubt converted into full-blown skepticism. As The New York Times put it — in a 2011 article headlined “Expert Panel Is Critical of F.B.I. Work in Investigating Anthrax Letters” — the review “concludes that the bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the mailed anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce E. Ivins.” A Washington Post article — headlined: “Anthrax report casts doubt on scientific evidence in FBI case against Bruce Ivins” — announced that “the report reignited a debate that has simmered among some scientists and others who have questioned the strength of the FBI’s evidence against Ivins.”
An in-depth joint investigation by ProPublica, PBS and McClatchy — published under the headline “New Evidence Adds Doubt to FBI’s Case Against Anthrax Suspect” — concluded that “newly available documents and the accounts of Ivins’ former colleagues shed fresh light on the evidence and, while they don’t exonerate Ivins, are at odds with some of the science and circumstantial evidence that the government said would have convicted him of capital crimes.” It added: “even some of the government’s science consultants wonder whether the real killer is still at large.” The report itself, issued by the National Research Council, concluded that while the components of the anthrax in Ivins’ lab were “consistent” with the weaponized anthrax that had been sent, “the scientific link between the letter material and flask number RMR-1029 [found in Ivins’ lab] is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ Investigative Summary.”
In short, these were serious and widespread mainstream doubts about the FBI’s case against Ivins, and those have never been resolved. U.S. institutions seemingly agreed to simply move on without ever addressing lingering scientific and other evidentiary questions regarding whether Ivins was really involved in the anthrax attacks and, if so, how it was possible that he could have carried out this sophisticated attack within a top-secret U.S. Army lab acting alone. So whitewashed is this history that doubts about whether the FBI found the real perpetrator are now mocked by smug Smart People as a fringe conspiracy theory rather than what they had been: the consensus of mainstream institutions.
But what we do know for certain from this anthrax investigation is quite serious. And because it is quite relevant to the current debates over the origins of COVID-19, it is well-worth reviewing. A trove of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci — who was the government’s top infectious disease specialist during the AIDS pandemic, the anthrax attacks, and the COVID pandemic — was published on Monday by BuzzFeed after they were produced pursuant to a FOIA request. Among other things, they reveal that in February and March of last year — at the time that Fauci and others were dismissing any real possibility that the coronavirus inadvertently escaped from a lab, to the point that the Silicon Valley monopolies Facebook and Google banned any discussion of that theory — Fauci and his associates and colleagues were privately discussing the possibility that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly as part of a U.S.-funded joint program with the scientists at that lab.
Last week, BBC reported that “in recent weeks the controversial claim that the pandemic might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory — once dismissed by many as a fringe conspiracy theory — has been gaining traction.” President Biden ordered an investigation into this lab-leak possibility. And with Democrats now open to this possibility, “Facebook reversed course Thursday and said that it would no longer remove posts that claim the virus is man-made,” reported The Washington Post. Nobody can rationally claim to know the origins of COVID, and that is exactly why — as I explained in an interview on the Rising program this morning — it should be so disturbing that Silicon Valley monopolies and the WHO/Fauci-led scientific community spent a full year pretending to have certainty about that “debunked” theory that they plainly did not possess, to the point where discussions of it were prohibited on social media.
What we know — but have largely forgotten — from the anthrax case is now vital to recall. What made the anthrax attacks of 2001 particularly frightening was how sophisticated and deadly the strain was. It was not naturally occurring anthrax. Scientists quickly identified it as the notorious Ames strain, which researchers at the U.S. Army lab in Fort Detrick had essentially invented. As PBS’ Frontline program put it in 2011: “in October 2001, Northern Arizona University microbiologist Dr. Paul Keim identified that the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain, a development he described as ‘chilling’ because that particular strain was developed in U.S. government laboratories.” As Dr. Keim recalled in that Frontline interview about his 2001 analysis of the anthrax strain:
We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.
Why was the U.S. government creating exotic and extraordinarily deadly infectious bacterial strains and viruses that, even in small quantities, could kill large numbers of people? The official position of the U.S. Government is that it does not engage in offensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to create weaponized viruses as weapons of war. The U.S. has signed treaties barring such research. But in the wake of the anthrax attacks — especially once the FBI’s own theory was that the anthrax was sent by a U.S. Army scientist from his stash at Fort Detrick — U.S. officials were forced to acknowledge that they do engage in defensive bioweapons research: meaning research designed to allow the development of vaccines and other defenses in the event that another country unleashes a biological attack.
But ultimately, that distinction barely matters. For both offensive and defensive bioweapons research, scientists must create, cultivate, manipulate and store non-natural viruses or infectious bacteria in their labs, whether to study them for weaponization or for vaccines. A fascinating-in-retrospect New Yorker article from March, 2002, featured the suspicions of molecular biologist Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who had “strongly implied that the F.B.I. was moving much more slowly in its anthrax investigation than it had any reason to.” Like The New York Times, the magazine (without naming him) detailed her speculation that Dr. Hatfill was the perpetrator (though her theory about his motive — that he wanted to scare people about anthrax in order to increase funding for research — was virtually identical to the FBI’s ultimate accusations about Dr. Ivins’ motives).
But the key point that is particularly relevant now is what all of this said about the kind of very dangerous research the U.S. Government, along with other large governments, conducts in bioweapons research labs. Namely, they manufacture and store extremely lethal biological agents that, if they escape from the lab either deliberately or inadvertently, can jeopardize the human species. As the article put it:
The United States officially forswore biological-weapons development in 1969, and signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, along with many other nations. But Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won’t allow itself to be monitored, may not be in strict compliance with the convention. If the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks is who she thinks it is, that would put the American program in a bad light, and it would prove that she was right to demand that the program be monitored.
If the government is saying that the perpetrator was probably an American, it’s hard to imagine how it couldn’t have been an American who worked in a government-supported bioweapons lab. Think back to the panicky month of October [2001]: would knowing that have made you less nervous, or more?
Having extensively reported on the FBI’s investigation into the anthrax case and ultimate claim to have solved it, I continue to share all the doubts that were so widely expressed at the time about whether any of that was true. But what we know for certain is that the U.S. government and other governments do conduct research which requires the manufacture of deadly viruses and infectious bacterial strains. Dr. Fauci has acknowledged that the U.S. government indirectly funded research by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into coronaviruses, though he denies that this was for so-called “gain of function” research, whereby naturally occurring viruses are manipulated to make them more transmissible and/or more harmful to humans.
We do not know for sure if the COVID-19 virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, another lab, or jumped from animals to humans. But what we do know for certain — from the anthrax investigation — is that governments most definitely conduct the sort of research that could produce novel coronaviruses. Dr. Rosenberg, the subject of the 2002 New Yorker article, was suggesting that the F.B.I. was purposely impeding its own investigation because they knew that the anthrax actually came from the U.S. government’s own lab and wanted to prevent exposure of the real bio-research that is done there. We should again ponder why the pervasive mainstream doubts about the F.B.I.’s case against Ivins have been memory-holed. We should also reflect on what we learned about government research into highly lethal viruses and bacterial strains from that still-strange episode.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 19:40 - Iran's Zarif Gleefully Wishes Netanyahu Farewell "Into The Dustbin Of History"
Iran’s Zarif Gleefully Wishes Netanyahu Farewell “Into The Dustbin Of History”
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu engaged in desperate 11th hour scrambling to try and pick off enough lawmakers on the right-wing to deny a power-sharing government under an unlikely coalition formed by Yamina leader Naftali Bennett, Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid and Ra’am (United Arab List) chairman Mansour Abbas – Iran has taken a moment to mock Israel’s longest serving prime minister as he’s on his way out.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in a Thursday tweet said farewell to Netanyahu and his “disgraceful” political journey which has taken he and his allies “into the dustbin of history”. He wrote provocatively that “Netanyahu has joined the disgraceful journey of his anti-Iran co-conspirators—Bolton, Trump and Pompeo—into the dustbin of history.”
He continued in the social media message: “Iran continues to stand tall. This destiny has been repeated over several millennia for all those wishing Iranians harm. Time to change course.” The “changing course” could be a reference to positive momentum in Vienna as Tehran looks to be on the verge of striking a restored nuclear deal with world powers, which Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have sought to thwart at all costs.
Indeed during Trump and Netanyahu’s tenures and close intelligence coordination, Iran very nearly saw itself in a full-blown war with the US and its allies, especially following the Trump-approved assassination of IRGC Quds Force chief Qassem Soleimani on January 3rd, 2020.
Zarif and Netanyahu throughout the years of the Trump administration often engaged in bellicose indirect verbal attacks via statements, also as it became clear Israel was behind a string of assassinations, including the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in November 2020.
Netanyahu has joined the disgraceful journey of his anti-Iran co-conspirators—Bolton, Trump and Pompeo—into the dustbin of history.
Iran continues to stand tall.
This destiny has been repeated over several millennia for all those wishing Iranians harm.
Time to change course.
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) June 3, 2021
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
On Thursday Netanyahu again accused his one-time close ally Naftali Bennet of being a traitor and “selling out” – saying that “All right-wing Knesset members must oppose this dangerous left-wing government.” He also called the newly proposed government the “fraud of the century” which will endanger citizens’ lives.
The new so-called “change coalition” is moving fast seeking Knesset approval, with The Hill noting that “Picking off right-wing coalition members is likely the only way to undermine the group before the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, holds a confidence vote in the coming days to confirm the coalition’s status as the ruling government.”
If confirmed then Netanyahu would finally be out and is expected to become the opposition head, but is further expected to face criminal charges while no longer enjoying the immunity afforded by the PM’s office. Bennet would serve the first two years and prime minister, with Lapid serving the latter two of the four-year term.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 19:20 - Victor Davis Hanson: Never Let A Plague Go To Waste
Victor Davis Hanson: Never Let A Plague Go To Waste
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via PJMedia.com,
During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.
They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.
Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.
Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy left bragged that it was true.
After the 2008 financial meltdown, Barack Obama spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the country.
Now he’s back, weighing in on the panic-driven, multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion.
“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama said in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times.
“Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering — maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”
He apparently means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better approach to economics.
Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted about leveraging California’s statewide quarantine.
“There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism,” Newsom said. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”
Hillary Clinton said something similar early in the pandemic:
“… This would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes. We’ve learned a lot about what our absolute frailties are in our country when it comes to health justice and economic justice …”
The “old saying” she cited was actually a recycled quote from Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama’s chief of staff. His exact quote was: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
Later, Emanuel clarified that crises allow radical changes that had never been considered or were considered impossible. Without catastrophe, no one in his right mind would vote for far-left agendas.
Manipulating COVID-19 is not just a left-wing effort. The Davos crowd responsible for the World Economic Forum has talked of using the global crisis to push “the Great Reset.” These self-appointed guardians wish to create global rules governing the world’s economy, energy, transportation, education, climate, wealth distribution and media. In other words, a few elites will seek to override local laws.
What do all these efforts have in common?
One, they are all top-down agendas. Polls show that average Americans are worried about massive borrowing. They fear the government gaining new powers under the pretext of a pandemic.
Two, our elites are anti-democratic. They talk of forcing change down the throats of citizens through edicts, executive orders, court decisions or bureaucratic directives. Obama, Newsom, Clinton and the Great Resetters don’t want to put up their agendas for discussion before the people and their elected representatives.
Three, behind fancy slogans about not wasting crises, teachable moments and resets is the panic-porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they defy common sense. If Americans tried Obama’s economics with their family budgets, they would go broke or go to jail after piling up unpaid debts. Only elites, with their private security guards and the money and influence to remain safe, talk of defunding the police. Few of the woke elites who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class.
Four, our rich revolutionaries have no record of policy success. Massive borrowing, increasing government powers, restrictions on personal freedoms, higher taxes and more regulations don’t appeal to most Americans. Brexit and pushbacks against the European Union suggest that the same is true abroad.
Many members of the left-wing elite became wealthy by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking. A cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until they first got filthy rich — allowing them not to live like, think like or listen to the rest of us.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 19:00 - Starting Lawyer Bonuses Soar To Record $164,000 Amid Unprecedented Comp Surge
Starting Lawyer Bonuses Soar To Record $164,000 Amid Unprecedented Comp Surge
Think wage wars are only taking place among minimum wage workers, who (until September at least) are getting paid more from Uncle Sam to stay home and do nothing? Think again.
Amid numerous anecdotes of sticky wages at the high-end of the jobs spectrum, one stands out: as Bloomberg reports today, in September 2020, the Palo Alto-based Cooley law firm announced it was handing out $2,500 to $7,500 in one-time payments to associates. The bonuses came as the firm – along with many others in the legal industry – realized it was both flush with cash and facing worker burnout during the pandemic.
And as frequently happens amid the top-paid jobs where competition for talent is furious, Cooley’s move was quickly matched by others, including Davis Polk & Wardwell and Willkie Farr & Gallagher. Meanwhile, even though most attorneys at larger firms expect to receive one annual bonus, one payout was becoming two and now potentially three in a single year.
The result: bonuses soared to as much as $140,000 last year for a senior associate, and they’ve kept coming in 2021, with a potential windfall of $164,000 on top of salary by year end. Alongside the added cash, firms promised more time off and extended work-from-home arrangements, all part of an effort to retain and attract talent for what are often grueling 100-hour work weeks.
With every firm rushing to match everyone else’s bonuses, an arms race has broken within in the industry, which has long had a tepid, coordinated, lockstep approach to salaries.
Lawyers for the largest U.S. firms traditionally earn based on the “Cravath scale,” a historical practice of following the wages set each year by Cravath Swaine & Moore.
According to Bloomberg, first-year associates joining a major firm in 2021 will be paid $190,000 in salary, an amount that hasn’t changed since 2018, according to Biglaw Investor, which tracks compensation. An associate entering her or his eighth year with a major firm should expect to be paid $340,000.
While the industry has not nearly suffered as much from the labor shortage that has hammered much of corporate America (there are more than enough lawyers out there), the bonus windfall has been due largely to the feverish rush of corporate work that hit in the latter half of 2020, most notably a rash of restructuring filings, as well as new efforts to raise capital and the blank-check merger frenzy, the same drivers behind a frenzy of hiring for entry level bankers.
To be sure, the US legal industry, which reported 2.3% unemployment in March, is far from the only one boosting pay and offering better working conditions to hold onto or attract workers. Wall Street firms including Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are also facing strong demand for investment bankers and offering junior workers more money, vacations and even forced Saturdays off. And while there are plenty of senior-level lawyers, the same is not true at the entry level: as a result, holding onto young lawyers is critical as the market for associates heats up, especially for those practicing corporate law.
“We’re not seeing firms ask us for one or two associates. Some are coming to us saying we need 10,” said Summer Eberhard, West Coast-based managing director in the associate practice group at legal recruiter Major Lindsey & Africa.
Paradoxically, the boom in legal services (and bonuses) comes after law firms had prepared for the worst last summer, in the wake of the coronavirus. Many firms cut salaries for lawyers and staff, while some furloughed their employees to get through what they thought would be a massive economic downturn.
Instead, 2020 turned into a windfall year for the industry’s top 100 law firms by revenue, which brought in almost $111 billion in revenue, up 6.6% from 2019 and the biggest increase since 2018, according to data from the American Lawyer. Here are the details, courtesy of Bloomberg:
- The highest-grossing law firm, Kirkland & Ellis brought in $4.8 billion in revenue last year, while the runner up, Latham & Watkins LLP, brought in $4.3 billion.
- Across the industry, the average equity partner — a senior lawyer who shares in the firm’s profits — took home $2.23 million, an increase of 13% from the prior year.
- Top performing associates at big U.S. law firms can earn potential payouts in excess of $500,000, based on seniority.
What is unique about this cycle is that the ripple effects are unusually being felt beyond just New York City and Silicon Valley, as smaller firms and international firms now also find themselves in a battle to keep pace with Big Law’s richest to keep their younger talent. Remote work options have complicated local salaries.
“The bonuses are more impacting the industry beyond the walls of what it typically has,” Eberhard said. “This has broken that barrier.” At the same time, Big Law firms are paying in top of the market in regions where it would have previously been completely unheard of, like Atlanta, Milwaukee, and Seattle, she said.
And, as observed across the rest of the economy, the spending spree by big firms “has forced the hands of a lot of smaller markets to increase their compensation because in order to compete with talent, they have to compete with the big firms’ compensation because the firms are so much more willing to have people sit in other markets,” Eberhard said.
Bloomberg then notes that this bonus bonanza has also made its way to international markets: U.S.-based firms including Milbank, Paul Hastings and others extended bonuses to their London associates. Some of the elite U.K.-based firms in the so-called “Magic Circle” have followed suit — handing out one-time payments amounting to 5% of salary.
A newly qualified lawyer at one of London’s top firms can earn as much as 100,000 pounds ($142,000) a year. That mark is still well below what some U.S. firms pay in London. Houston-based Vinson & Elkins LLP, for example, offers their junior lawyers in London 147,500 pounds a year.
Canada’s top firms, known colloquially as the “Seven Sisters,” as well as other national and international firms have instituted a pair of bonuses for their associates, each equaling 10% of their base salary as well as signing bonuses, said Dal Bhathal, legal recruiter and managing partner of the Canada-based Counsel Network. “Associates are very busy, and these bonuses help compensate them for the additional work that they’re doing coupled with trying to do it in a pandemic,” she said.
Then there are the signing bonuses.
Many top U.S. law firms are also handing out “exorbitant” signing bonuses, ranging from $20,000 up to $100,000 for corporate practice attorneys, Eberhard said. Business Insider reported that mergers and acquisitions associates at Kirkland & Ellis are getting signing bonuses as high as $250,000.
“Firms are being much more willing to pay what they need to pay in order to get really quality associates in the door,” Eberhard said.
But wait there’s even more, because after signing bonuses come the retention bonuses.
Once they have the lawyers, some firms have turned to retention bonuses to entice associates to stay — splitting payments so that workers get one in the spring and another in the fall, or even in 2022. “It’s just about keeping associates at the firm,” said Joshua Holt, a former Goodwin Procter associate and founder of Biglaw Investor. “I think it has a huge impact on retention,” Holt said.
And it’s not just money being used to keep workers happy. DLA Piper, a global law firm with offices in more than 40 countries, offered its lawyers a “one-week thank you,” allowing them to choose between one week’s extra pay or a further week of holiday.
“Throughout the pandemic our people have been exceptional,” said Simon Levine, DLA Piper’s global co-CEO. “The extra week’s pay or holiday is just one small way of us saying thank you to them for everything they have achieved in such a challenging year.”
Finally, let’s not forget vacations.
Hard-working associates need some period of recovery because that’s where performance improvement happens, said Mitch Zuklie, chairman and chief executive officer of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, an international law firm founded in San Francisco. In order to avoid burnout, Orrick implemented recently implemented its “Unplug Time” policy, which gives its attorneys and staff 40 hours of additional vacation per year. So far, Zuklie said 15% of associates have used the program.
“It is a big problem when very talented people are saying I won’t do this for all the tea in China,” said Zuklie. “You have to listen and think about it and take that seriously.”
Other Big Law firms have begun experimenting with solutions to help their associates outside of just pure cash. Dentons and Baker McKenzie have both experimented with no meetings days, while Davis Polk is offering its associates luxury gifts as a reward for their work.
“It’s about sustaining top performance,” Zuklie said. “I think if we don’t get that right Big Law could really face an existential crisis and we could lose the talent that we’re working so hard to identify and attract, to train and to advance.”
One attorney who left a position doing securities work for a big law firm last year and went to a smaller firm was able to do that while matching compensation — not including bonus — while working more manageable hours doing more varied work.
The associate resigned after billing 13- and 14-hour days, multiple days in a row. “At that point I just did not care about the prestige anymore. I was having such bad days and nights where I just felt like I wasn’t being treated as a human,” said the associate, who asked not to be named to preserve relationships.
“We all know what we signed up for, but you can’t work 7 days a week, nonstop.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 18:40 - Can Australia Satisfy Tesla's Appetite For Battery Metals?
Can Australia Satisfy Tesla’s Appetite For Battery Metals?
Electric cars giant Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) said it expects to soon begin buying more than $1 billion a year of Australian lithium, nickel and other critical minerals for its batteries and engines. Chairman Robyn Denholm said the country has taken important steps towards cleaning its image of polluting commodities exporter and it is poised to become a globally significant supplier of climate change solutions.
“Australia has the minerals to power the renewable energy age throughout the world in the coming years,” Denholm, an Australian, said in a speech during a Minerals Council of Australia event.
“We expect our spend on Australian minerals to increase to more than $1 billion per annum for the next few years,” she said.
Denholm’s remarks come as Australia’s minerals sector released its first progress report on climate action, which shows the industry has cut emissions and is on track to reach a 30% annual reduction.
Source: MCA Climate Action Report Progress 2021. The document highlights 12 case studies on how the industry is taking practical climate action, including the rollout of renewables, carbon capture and storage development and investment in autonomous vehicles from major players such as BHP, Rio Tinto, Newcrest, Newmont, and Anglo American.
Tesla already sources three-quarters of the lithium it uses from Australia and over a third of its nickel, Denham said, without specifying a dollar figure.
$310 billion market by 2030
Tesla chairman also noted that the country has the advantage of having resources in all three critical battery metals as well as other components at the heart of the clean energy transition.
“To put it a simpler way: electric vehicles account for less than 1% of vehicles globally at the moment. To reach net zero emissions, that needs to be much closer to 100% within 30 years. So that’s at least a 100-fold increase ahead, just for vehicles,” she said.
Denholm said that shift would, by 2030, generate a global lithium-ion battery market of A$400 billion ($310bn).
“That’s eight times the revenue generated by Australia’s coal exports in 2020,” she said.
Government figures forecast exports of spodumene to hit A$1 billion ($773m) this year while its nickel exports are expected to be valued at A$4 billion ($3bn).
Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/03/2021 – 18:20
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