- 2020: A Retrospective From 2025
2020: A Retrospective From 2025
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 23:40Authored by Tom Trenchard via AmericanMind.org,
Donald Trump and the Altogether True and Amazing Origin of the United American Counties.
2020 marked an epoch in American history, standing alongside 1865, 1787, and 1776. First there was the COVID-19 pandemic, then there were the racial protests and riots throughout the summer, and then there was the disputed presidential election. Finally and most cataclysmically, though, 2020 witnessed the initial formation of the United American Counties (UACo) within the former United States of America. Five years later, it is only now becoming possible to assess the most important causes and consequences of this momentous development for American political society.
As with most politically revolutionary events, the Declaration of UACo Independence was almost entirely unforeseen before it occurred, but almost inevitable in hindsight. By the early 2010s two things were clear:
(1) Americans had become increasingly polarized in their worldviews and political beliefs; and
(2) These polarized halves of the U.S. were increasingly sorting themselves into either urban or suburban/rural areas.
Trump’s election in 2016 put a spotlight on these political realities; as Trump frequently boasted, the 2016 electoral map looked like a sea of red surrounding islands of blue. In 2020, that situation was essentially unchanged.
97% of land area in the U.S. constituted rural counties. Trump’s support within these counties was high and enthusiastic both in 2016 and 2020. Within the remaining 3% of the geographical U.S. – the big cities – anti-Trump sentiment was equally high and enthusiastic.
The 2020 election was the perfect storm for a confrontation between these two factions. It looked like Trump was winning on election day, and then the mail-in ballots handed an apparent victory to Biden. Although widespread electoral fraud wasn’t uncovered by the protracted legal investigation that followed, the die had been cast. Trump and his supporters thought the election had been stolen, and that Trump was the legitimate president of the U.S.
If it had only been the election dispute, tensions may have dissipated over time. Trump supporters may have learned to live with a Biden presidency, especially given GOP victories at the state level and in Congress. The problem was that the election dispute coincided with a deep polarization of worldviews and American historical narratives that had been building for decades. This polarization had proceeded to the extent of annihilating any possible common ground, rendering attempts at compromise or a “live and let live” approach impossible. We had become two Americas; and, as Lincoln had said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
In 1861, the outcome of this intractable situation was state secession. The division at this time was between slave states and free states. In 2020, the division was not so much between states as between rural and urban counties within states. In 1861, Lincoln was able to marshal the political will, the moral justification, and the economic and military resources necessary to maintain the original constitutional union by force. In 2020, none of these factors was present: Biden proved to be no Lincoln, and the country was too exhausted from the events of 2020 to muster an extended effort to compel union through force.
An America Altogether New
The rapid dissemination of the Declaration of UACo Independence in December 2020 provided the motivation and justification for the formation of a new political society within the former U.S.
Its “List of Principles” effectively encapsulated the worldview of American political conservatives and echoed the Declaration of 1776: it endorsed “the equal natural rights bestowed by God on all human beings,” “limited and local self-government,” “the traditional family begun in marriage between one man and one woman,” and “the free market economy.”
And its “List of Grievances” against the progressive liberal orthodoxy entrenched in corrupt urban areas supplied the relevant context for separation: chief among the complaints were “the suppression of freedom of speech” through cancel culture and thought policing, “the eclipse of local self-government by distant ruling elites,” “the replacement of equality under the law with identity politics,” “the rejection of the American political tradition,” and “the introduction of policies destructive of economic freedom.”
As the Declaration was supplying the inspiration, Trump’s team supplied the necessary perspiration by working quickly and tirelessly to rally support and official endorsement from the hundreds of counties that had supported his election to office weeks before. The rapidity with which this was accomplished was crucial to its ultimate success, and almost unbelievable in hindsight. They were aided by the establishment of efficient systems of communication running throughout the hundreds of rural and suburban counties sympathetic to the movement—the so-called “Town Crier Committees.” This system, working in conjunction with self-dubbed “Minutemen” vigilante groups, provided the coordinated resistance necessary to enforce the county endorsements of Trump’s leadership.
The preexistence of county government and law enforcement structures aided the transition as well. Early efforts by state governors to use state police and National Guard troops to compel adherence to state laws across vast UACo areas met with such resistance, both externally and internally, that they were quickly deemed impracticable. With the adoption of the provisional Constitution for the United American Counties in January 2021 by more than 500 counties—a number that would grow to nearly 2,000 by May of that same year—the stage was set for a decision by the newly-inaugurated Biden and the areas remaining under his jurisdiction. Would he go to war with Trump’s counties and attempt to compel union as Lincoln had?
A Separate Peace
Many factors weighed against this decision. There was, first, the lack of the kind of moral momentum that the abolition movement had supplied in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As Lincoln had long insisted, the controversy that brought on the Civil War was the question of whether slavery was right or wrong. The seceding states took a stand for its rightness, and the Union states took a stand for its wrongness. In 2020, there was no moral controversy that would come close to this kind of stark alternative; no higher ideal that would plausibly justify shedding the blood of fellow Americans.
Secondly, although Biden technically assumed control of the powerful U.S. military, he and his advisors were justifiably wary of issuing an immediate order to mobilize this force—a majority of whom had voted for Trump in the election—against such a widespread movement involving innumerable family connections and divided loyalties for military service members. There was the problem of supply chains for manufacturing and transportation; since these relied upon and ran directly through large swaths of UACo-controlled territory, they could be easily disrupted either by the withholding of necessary support or through sabotage.
There was also the immense practical difficulty of fighting a war against guerilla-type forces dispersed across more than 75% of the land area of the U.S. As the British had come to realize in the American Revolutionary War, such a conflict may well have been unwinnable, despite a large disparity in raw military and economic might.
In the face of these obstacles to compelling union through force, Biden had no choice but to negotiate with Trump. The American Friendship Accords, finalized on the anniversary of election day the year before (November 3, 2021), officially established two sovereign nations (the United American Counties and the United American Cities), averted large-scale violent conflict, and established the economic and military agreements necessary to maintain cooperation between the two new political entities at a level similar to what had existed before.
In 2025, just five short years after the tumultuous period of 2020-21, we seem to have entered a new era of American peace and prosperity. Relieved from the incessant tension of trying to reconcile fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews under a common government, polarized American society has achieved a kind of equilibrium. Common moral and political principles are once again able to provide the foundation for productive debate and coherent public policy within both the UACo and the UACi. The freedom of economic exchange and personal movement between the two has facilitated the growth of new ties of continental friendship where before there was polarization and enmity.
It may still be too early to pronounce judgment on the new political situation in the former U.S. But so far, looking back on 2020 seems to confirm the old proverb: It’s always darkest just before the dawn.
- Chaos & Suspicion: The Killing Of Iran's Nuclear Scientists
Chaos & Suspicion: The Killing Of Iran's Nuclear Scientists
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 23:20New details are emerging about an attack that killed Iran’s most senior nuclear scientist last Friday. Initially, it was thought that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh’s car was attacked by undentified gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosives. However, a Fars news agency report on Sunday evening states that Fakhrizadeh was actually killed by a remote-controlled weapon mounted in a vehicle that subsequently exploded. Iran has blamed Israel and an opposition group in exile called Mujahedeen-e-Khalq for the attack. A senior Iranian security official has described it as “highly complex”, adding that it was carried out with “electronic devices”.
While Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is the most senior nuclear scientist to be killed in mysterious circumstances in Iran, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that he is by no means the first with Tehran holding Israel accountable for at least five assassinations.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The first high-profile killing happened in early 2010 when Masoud Ali Mohammadi died after a bomb was detonated on a motorcycle when he left his home. The pattern of targeting nuclear scientists during their commute repeated itself in subsequent incidents and Majid Shahriar died when a motorcyclist attached a bomb to his car in November 2010. It remains unclear whether Darioush Rezaeineja was connected to the nuclear program but he was shot dead regardless by two gunmen on a motorcycle in July 2011. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was killed a year later when assailants on a motorcycle attached magnetic bombs to his car while he was on his way to work.
Alongside the assassinations, a chain of mysterious blasts and fires at various facilities associated with the nuclear program have added to the chaos and suspicion. These have been happening for years with reports of major incidents emerging in 2011. That year, an explosion was heard at a nuclear facility in Isfahan and a blast occurred at a steel mill linked to the nuclear program in Yasd, killing seven people. They have become more frequent in 2020 with a major explosion rocking a missile-production complex in Khojir in June, followed by a blast that destroyed a building developing advanced centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility in July.
The fact that a presidential transition is imminent in Washington D.C. has added to the tension, particularly as Joe Biden has pledged to resurrect the 2015 nuclear deal. It is unclear whether Tehran will be receptive given recent events, however, and it has already promised to push on with its nuclear program in addition to vowing to retaliate for Fakhrizadeh’s killing. Friday’s incident is also almost certainly going to fan the flames of Iran’s regional conflict with Israel which has been going on for years, particularly in Syria. Israel has carried out airstrikes against Iranian proxies in Syria as well as against Iran’s military directly. The latest killing of a nuclear scientist may lead to a dangerous escalation in that (relatively) covert conflict.
- NDAA Seeks To Halt Trump's Troop Withdrawals From Afghanistan & Germany
NDAA Seeks To Halt Trump's Troop Withdrawals From Afghanistan & Germany
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 23:00Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
The version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) agreed to by the House and Senate, known as the compromise version, includes provisions to block President Trump’s planned troop withdrawals in both Afghanistan and Germany.
For Afghanistan, there is language in the bill that would block funding to reduce troop numbers in the country before the Pentagon, State Department, and the director of national intelligence assess how the drawdown would affect US security. The assessment would be required before troop numbers could drop lower than they are when the NDAA becomes law, and again if they drop below 2,000.
Via Zuma Press/Xinhua President Trump’s current plan is to bring troop numbers in Afghanistan down to 2,500 by January 15th. The US-Taliban peace deal signed in February paved the way for all US and other foreign forces to be out of the country by Spring 2021.
Another troop drawdown President Trump’s Pentagon is planning is a reduction of forces in Germany from about 36,000 troops to 24,000. Congressional aides told The Hill that the compromise version of the NDAA includes language that would block the drawdown.
“There is language that prevents reduction in the number of US forces stationed in Germany below 34,500 until 120 days after the secretary of Defense submits an assessment and planning regarding the implications for allies, costs, military families, deterrence and other key issues,” one of the aides said.
The provisions to block Trump’s withdrawals could add to the controversy that is already surrounding the NDAA. On Tuesday, President Trump said he would veto the spending bill if it did not include an amendment to repeal Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.
Section 230 gives tech platforms immunity from liability for content published by third parties. Trump doubled down on his call to include the provision in a tweet on Thursday after some Republican senators voiced their objection to the idea.
- Black Google Researcher Claims She Was Fired Because She Discovered AI Is Racist
Black Google Researcher Claims She Was Fired Because She Discovered AI Is Racist
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 22:40A well-known artificial intelligence researcher at Google tweeted Wednesday that she was fired over an email expressing dismay with management over the censorship of new research.
Timnit Gebru, a technical co-lead of Google’s Ethical A.I. team, who researches algorithmic bias and data mining, has been an outspoken advocate for diversity in technology, claimed, in a series of tweets, she was fired for refusing to retract a research paper that outlines how A.I. discriminates against minorities and also due to a complaint in an email to colleagues.
Expressing her frustrations in an email to an internal company group named Google Brain Women and Allies – Gebru criticized Google’s hiring of minorities and not doing enough to promote “responsible A.I.”
The email was shared by Platformer’s Casey Newton:
Hi friends,
I had stopped writing here as you may know, after all the micro and macro aggressions and harassments I received after posting my stories here (and then of course it started being moderated).
Recently however, I was contributing to a document that Katherine and Daphne were writing where they were dismayed by the fact that after all this talk, this org seems to have hired 14% or so women this year. Samy has hired 39% from what I understand but he has zero incentive to do this.
What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. Because there is zero accountability. There is no incentive to hire 39% women: your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to give you good ratings during calibration. There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.
Have you ever heard of someone getting “feedback” on a paper through a privileged and confidential document to H.R.? Does that sound like a standard procedure to you or does it just happen to people like me who are constantly dehumanized?
Imagine this: You’ve sent a paper for feedback to 30+ researchers, you’re awaiting feedback from P.R. & Policy who you gave a heads up before you even wrote the work saying “we’re thinking of doing this”, working on a revision plan figuring out how to address different feedback from people, haven’t heard from P.R. & Policy besides them asking you for updates (in 2 months). A week before you go out on vacation, you see a meeting pop up at 4:30pm PST on your calendar (this popped up at around 2pm). No one would tell you what the meeting was about in advance. Then in that meeting your manager’s manager tells you “it has been decided” that you need to retract this paper by next week, Nov. 27, the week when almost everyone would be out (and a date which has nothing to do with the conference process). You are not worth having any conversations about this, since you are not someone whose humanity (let alone expertise recognized by journalists, governments, scientists, civic organizations such as the electronic frontiers foundation etc) is acknowledged or valued in this company.
Then, you ask for more information. What specific feedback exists? Who is it coming from? Why now? Why not before? Can you go back and forth with anyone? Can you understand what exactly is problematic and what can be changed?
And you are told after a while, that your manager can read you a privileged and confidential document and you’re not supposed to even know who contributed to this document, who wrote this feedback, what process was followed or anything. You write a detailed document discussing whatever pieces of feedback you can find, asking for questions and clarifications, and it is completely ignored. And you’re met with, once again, an order to retract the paper with no engagement whatsoever.
Then you try to engage in a conversation about how this is not acceptable and people start doing the opposite of any sort of self reflection—trying to find scapegoats to blame.
Silencing marginalized voices like this is the opposite of the NAUWU principles which we discussed. And doing this in the context of “responsible A.I.” adds so much salt to the wounds. I understand that the only things that mean anything at Google are levels, I’ve seen how my expertise has been completely dismissed. But now there’s an additional layer saying any privileged person can decide that they don’t want your paper out with zero conversation. So you’re blocked from adding your voice to the research community—your work which you do on top of the other marginalization you face here.
I’m always amazed at how people can continue to do thing after thing like this and then turn around and ask me for some sort of extra DEI work or input. This happened to me last year. I was in the middle of a potential lawsuit for which Kat Herller and I hired feminist lawyers who threatened to sue Google (which is when they backed off–before that Google lawyers were prepared to throw us under the bus and our leaders were following as instructed) and the next day I get some random “impact award.” Pure gaslighting.
So if you would like to change things, I suggest focusing on leadership accountability and thinking through what types of pressures can also be applied from the outside. For instance, I believe that the Congressional Black Caucus is the entity that started forcing tech companies to report their diversity numbers. Writing more documents and saying things over and over again will tire you out but no one will listen.
Timnit
Gebru was apparently in talks with management over a possible resignation if certain conditions regarding her research paper were not met. She said those conditions, which by the way, were not stated in the public domain, were not met. The company did not give her a chance to respond with immediate termination.
“Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me 🙂 that’s the lawyer-speak,” she tweeted.
Apparently my manager’s manager sent an email my direct reports saying she accepted my resignation. I hadn’t resigned—I had asked for simple conditions first and said I would respond when I’m back from vacation. But I guess she decided for me 🙂 that’s the lawyer speak.
— Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) December 3, 2020
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She continued: “I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.”
I said here are the conditions. If you can meet them great I’ll take my name off this paper, if not then I can work on a last date. Then she sent an email to my direct reports saying she has accepted my resignation. So that is google for you folks. You saw it happen right here.
— Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) December 3, 2020
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Here’s a quoted email response from Gebru’s manager about her termination:
“Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation.
“However, we believe the end of your employment should happen faster than your email reflects because certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.
“As a result, we are accepting your resignation immediately, effective today. We will send your final paycheck to your address in Workday. When you return from your vacation, PeopleOps will reach out to you to coordinate the return of Google devices and assets.”
In another tweet, Gebru called out Google’s A.I. chief, Jeff Dean. She said Dean is likely the one who signed off on her firing. “He didn’t like my email to a mailing list for women & allies at brain,” she added.
I would post my email here but my corp account has been cutoff. I feel bad for my teammates but for me its better to know the beast than to pretend. @negar_rz didn’t even have any idea things had escalated this quickly.
— Timnit Gebru (@timnitGebru) December 3, 2020
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Gebru’s tweets about her termination came after the U.S. National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Google, accusing the company of violating labor laws.
The company was allegedly “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of their rights guaranteed in Section 7 of the Act,” according to the complaint filed Tuesday.
Since Gebru’s termination, Google employees are standing in solidarity with the fired researcher due to “unprecedented research censorship,” read the website Google Walkout For Real Change.
“We call on Google Research to strengthen its commitment to research integrity and to unequivocally commit to supporting research that honors the commitments made in Google’s A.I. Principles,” the website said.
This is just the latest incident showing Google is getting too powerful.
- Chief Medical Officer Says Canadians Who Refuse Vaccine Won't Have "Freedom To Move Around"
Chief Medical Officer Says Canadians Who Refuse Vaccine Won't Have "Freedom To Move Around"
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 22:20Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer says that those who refuse to take the COVID vaccine won’t have “freedom to move around” and will have to continue to wear masks.
Dr. David Williams was asked if he “would make some sort of mandatory vaccination recommendation.”
Williams acknowledged that “we can’t force someone to take a vaccine,” but when on to explain how people who didn’t take it would have their freedom of mobility severely restricted.
“What we can do is to say sometimes for access or ease of getting into certain settings, if you don’t have vaccination then you’re not allowed into that setting without other protection materials,” said Williams.
“What may be mandatory, is proof of vaccination, in order to have latitude and freedom to move around without wearing personal protective equipment.” – Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Williams pic.twitter.com/gHupcMxbcm
— CrasHTalk (@CrasTalk) December 3, 2020
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“What may be mandatory is proof of…vaccination in order to have latitude and freedom to move around…without wearing other types of personal protective equipment,” he added.
Williams also suggested that people would be prevented from entering certain settings without having been vaccinated if there was a “risk.”
As we previously highlighted, governments do not have to make the vaccine mandatory, they can simply make life unlivable for people who refuse to take the vaccine.
If bars, restaurants, cinemas, sports venues, airlines, employers and others all make the vaccination a mandatory condition of service, anyone who refuses to take it will be reduced to a personal form of de facto lockdown with their social lives and mobility completely stunted.
* * *
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- Citi's Corbat Concerned Working-From-Home Could Harm 'Long-Term Productivity' As Bankers Pull 7-Day Weeks
Citi's Corbat Concerned Working-From-Home Could Harm 'Long-Term Productivity' As Bankers Pull 7-Day Weeks
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 22:00As Wall Street deal flow continues to rage and top JPM executives inform M&A analysts that they won’t be getting much of a Christmas break, outgoing Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat has just become the second top banker to express doubts about the shift to working from home vs. the office – at least, as far as Wall Street is concerned.
As bankers wonder what the future might hold as far as when they’ll be returning to the office for good (if they haven’t already), Bloomberg has published a wide-ranging interview with Corbat on Friday as he prepares to hand over the reins to Jane Fraser, set to become the first woman to ever lead an American megabank.
During the interview, Corbat addressed reports that WFH has – counterintuitively – led to a surge in productivity as the bank’s workers pull long hours and 7-day weeks. He added that productivity like this could come with serious long-term drawbacks.
“People talk about the productivity that comes with working remotely,” Corbat said in a televised interview for a Bloomberg Invest Talks event that aired Friday. “Well, if I worked seven days a week, 15 to 16 hours a day and I don’t take any holidays, at least for a period of time I’m going to be more productive.”
Although he’s concerned about the “hollowing out” of workers’ skill sets, Corbat says Citi should take its time to assess how WFH impacts productivity over the long term, arguing that a final decision about WFH policies shouldn’t be made in hast.
“I don’t want to wake up as an industry and have hollowed out our skill sets,” Corbat said. “We’ll absolutely continue to accelerate the move toward digital and, where appropriate, more remote. But I certainly wouldn’t want to see us move too quickly.”
While Citi “absolutely” prefers its workers in the office, Corbat insisted the bank wouldn’t ask workers to come in if there safety might be in jeopardy.
“We absolutely like to have our people in when we can have them in, but we’re not going to put them at risk,” Corbat said. “We’ve got to stay flexible and obviously we’re going through a bit of resurgence in parts of the world right now. We’ve been in the phase of tapering back.”
But if Corbat’s comments about the long hours Citi’s bankers are pulling at home, then that would suggest that the bank has stumbled on what could be a major productivity breakthrough: how to get all of its bankers to work 1st year analyst hours.
“if I worked seven days a week, 15 to 16 hours a day and I don’t take any holidays, at least for a period of time I’m going to be more productive.” – Citi CEO Corbat
Wall Street finally figured out how to make everyone work 1st year analyst hours
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 4, 2020
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If what Corbat says is true, maybe JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon should rethink his rejection of Work From Home. In actuality, it might afford his bank even more opportunities to cut costs – not only space, but head count – wringing out even greater profits.
- "Texas Has A Lot Going For It" – Bay Area Residents Agree
"Texas Has A Lot Going For It" – Bay Area Residents Agree
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 21:40Submitted by Market Crumbs,
While California’s Silicon Valley is the epicenter of all things technology, companies based out of Texas played an important role in the rise of the personal computer as well.
Christopher Cantwell was even inspired to create the hit television series Halt and Catch Fire following his childhood in North Texas’s Silicon Prairie, where his father was employed as a software salesman in the 1980’s.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced on Monday in its fourth quarter earnings release that it will be moving its headquarters from San Jose, California to Houston, Texas.
“HPE’s largest U.S. employment hub, Houston is an attractive market to recruit and retain future diverse talent, and is where the company is currently constructing a state-of-the-art new campus,” HPE said. “The Bay Area will continue to be a strategic hub for HPE innovation, and the company will consolidate a number of sites in the Bay Area to its San Jose campus. No layoffs are associated with this move.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott thanked HPE for relocating to Houston while explaining why more than 10% of Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in the state.
“Hewlett Packard Enterprise joins more than 50 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the Lone Star State, including 22 in the Houston area alone,” Abbott said. “That is because Texas offers the best business climate in the nation. Our low taxes, high quality of life, top-notch workforce, and tier one universities create an environment where innovative companies like HPE can flourish.”
HPE’s announcement comes as a number of technology founders and executives make the same move from California to Texas. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale are just a few of the high profile names reportedly set to make Austin their new permanent home.
“Texas is a lot like going to California 40 to 50 years ago,” Lonsdale said. “It’s very welcoming, it’s a dynamic economy, it’s affordable. Texas has a lot going for it.”
Even Elon Musk, who reportedly changed his driver’s license to a Texas license, has floated the idea of moving Tesla’s headquarters from Palo Alto to Texas. Tesla’s headquarters remains in California but the company announced in July it will build its next Gigafactory near Austin.
“I guess a lot of people from California, if you ask them what’s the one place you would move outside of California, it’s Austin…,” Musk said. “I went to our team and said, ‘Where do you want to spend time? And where would you potentially move?’ And they were like, ‘Well, Austin is just the No. 1 choice.'”
Data from moving company moveBuddha.com shows Texas is by far the most popular destination for those leaving the San Francisco Bay area. So far this year, 16% of outbound Bay Area residents moved to the state. That’s more than the combined total going to next two most popular states—Washington and New York, which accounted for 7.9% and 6.5% of the outbound total, respectively.
Austin is attracting the bulk of the new Texas residents as 7% of outbound Bay Area residents are moving to the city. Two additional Texas cities made the list of the top 15 most popular destinations as Dallas and Houston ranked 8th and 12th, respectively.
Their report shows Austin’s median value of owner occupied housing is $312,300 compared to $746,211 for all Bay Area counties. Their report shows Dallas’ and Houston’s median values stand at $169,400 and $161,300, respectively.
Texas is cementing itself as the go-to destination for companies and individuals who want to escape the Bay Area for a lower cost of living and friendlier business climate.
- Around The World In Two Hours? Chinese Scientists Test "Revolutionary" Hypersonic Engine
Around The World In Two Hours? Chinese Scientists Test "Revolutionary" Hypersonic Engine
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 21:20Chinese scientists have built what they claim is a “revolutionary” hypersonic engine that could one day propel an airframe as fast as Mach 16, or about 12,300 mph, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), citing a new paper published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics.
The flight test of the hypersonic engine was conducted in a wind tunnel in Beijing suggested unprecedented thrust, fuel efficiency, and operational stability. Scientists believe the engine could operate at Mach 16, propelling an airframe across the world in just two hours.
The Chinese paper, titled “The criteria for airbreathing hypersonic propulsion and its experimental verification,” says the sodramjet (short for “standing oblique detonation ramjet engine”) is an “airbreathing propulsion” system “for future aerospace flight.” It has no moving parts and uses the plane’s speed to ram air into the engine, then blended with hydrogen fuel and detonated, discharging out of the back of the engine as thrust.
“The Sodramjet engine model is developed with several flow control techniques and tested successfully with the hypersonic flight-duplicated shock tunnel. The experimental data show that the Sodramjet engine model works steadily, and an oblique detonation can be made stationary in the engine combustor and is controllable. This research demonstrates the Sodramjet engine is a promising concept and can be operated stably with high thermal efficiency at hypersonic flow conditions,” the scientist wrote.
Sodramjet uses the sonic boom as combustion:
“Turning the shock wave from their enemy to their friend helped them sustain and stabilize combustion at hypersonic speed,” SCMP said. “The faster the engine flew, the more efficiently the hydrogen fuel burned. The new engine was also much smaller and lighter than previous models.”
Researchers noted, “the US government shifted the bulk of hypersonic research from Nasa to private companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and Morrison’s idea was largely if not completely forgotten by the American defense industry. The contractors put all their resources into scramjet design and continued to suffer setbacks that eventually caused them to trail other countries.”
All commercial aircraft today have turbofans or turboprops. The introduction of hypersonic engines for commercial aircraft might not be seen until after 2030.
“With reusable trans-atmospheric planes, we can take off horizontally from an airport runway, accelerate into orbit around the Earth, then reenter into the atmosphere, and finally land at an airport,” the scientist wrote. “In this way, space access will become reliable, routine, and affordable.”
A couple of years ago, China released a rendition of a hypersonic plane that could fly from Beijing to New York in 2 hours.
Could the sodramjet technology be used in this future plane?
- San Francisco Bans Smoking Inside Apartments Unless It's Weed
San Francisco Bans Smoking Inside Apartments Unless It's Weed
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 21:00Authored by John Vibes via TheMindUnleashed.com,
San Francisco city officials have banned all tobacco smoking inside apartments, due to concerns about secondhand smoke, but cannabis smoke will be permitted under the new guidelines.
The proposal was originally drafted to include a ban on smoking cannabis as well, but the cannabis ban was later removed from the law after pushback from activists who pointed out that the only place they are legally permitted to smoke is in the privacy of their own homes, considering that it is illegal to smoke cannabis in public. If this law passed with the cannabis provision, it would have effectively made the substance illegal in the state all over again.
“Unlike tobacco smokers who could still leave their apartments to step out to the curb or smoke in other permitted outdoor smoking areas, cannabis users would have no such legal alternatives,” Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who wrote the amendment to exempt cannabis said, according to the Associated Press.
On Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors for San Francisco voted 10-1 to approve the ordinance for the ban on smoking tobacco products inside of apartments. There are now 63 cities in the state of California with a ban on smoking inside apartments.
Under the new law, the city’s Department of Public Health will first help to provide resources to help violators quit smoking, but repeat offenders could be fined up to $1,000 a day. Technically, the law does not allow tenants to be evicted for smoking violations, but a $1,000 fine would be enough to disrupt a poor person’s rent, which could get them legally evicted.
SMOKING BAN: San Francisco to join 63 California cities and counties that bans smoking tobacco inside apartments.https://t.co/QCE1ZQdE9C
— KRON4 News (@kron4news) December 2, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The mayor is expected to sign off on the ordinance next week, and the new law will go into effect 30 days after it is approved.
The fact that tobacco products would be banned while cannabis would be allowed seems strange for many of us who grew up in an era where cigarettes were ubiquitous and cannabis was perceived as a dangerous and illegal drug that was thought to only be consumed by criminals, addicts and perhaps sometimes musicians. We now know that cannabis is actually far less dangerous than tobacco, and in the context of smoke in a shared living space, it also dissipates much quicker than cigarette smoke as well.
Smoking is one of the leading causes of illness and death in the world. Carcinogenic, poisonous chemicals and toxic metals can all be found in modern tobacco products. These chemicals are present for many reasons ranging from taste and preservation to being purposely addictive.
There are over 4000 of these chemicals in cigarettes and all of them are actually not even revealed to the public, they are protected under law as “trade secrets”. This means they can be putting anything they want in there without our knowledge.
The global tobacco business is valued at over $849 billion and the World Health Organization estimates that cigarettes could kill 1 billion people in the 21st century if the current trend continues.
- 'A Slap In My Face': LA Bar Owner Livid In After City Lets Hollywood Studio Set Up Dining Tents
'A Slap In My Face': LA Bar Owner Livid In After City Lets Hollywood Studio Set Up Dining Tents
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 20:46A viral video is making the rounds which perfectly captures the anger, frustration and contempt people have for our elected officials, who flagrantly break their own COVID-19 rules when it suits them – and, as you’ll see, grant well-connected ‘elites’ privileges as regular Americans continue to be devastated by what seems like a two-tiered set of lockdown restrictions.
In this latest example, the owner of the Pineapple Hill Grill & Saloon in Sherman Oaks, Angela M, offers heartbreaking commentary as she walks through her parking lot – revealing that while her own outdoor dining has been shut down due to heightened pandemic restrictions, a movie studio was granted permission to set up outdoor dining tents for a production.
“I walk into my parking lot, and obviously Mayor Garcetti has approved – this being set up for a movie company,” says Angela – who came to work to gather materials for a lockdown protest she’s organizing.
“I’m losing everything,” she adds. “Everything I own is being taken away from me. And they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio.“
People wonder why I am protesting and I have had enough. They have not given us money and they’ve shut us down. We cannot survive. The staff cannot survive. Look at this,” she says – gesturing to her patio. “Tell me that this is dangerous, but right next to me is a slap in my face.”
“This is dangerous… We need your help. We need someone to do something about this,” she says in closing.
Watch:
Bar owner in Los Angeles CA is livid to see that mayor Garcetti has approved an outdoor dining area for a movie company directly across from her outdoor dining area (which was shut down) pic.twitter.com/jkUP2CWg35
— Jake Coco 💙🇺🇸🎶🐻 (@jakecoco) December 4, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsThe restaurant is sponsoring a Saturday protest in front of LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s house in Santa Monica.
From the owners page pic.twitter.com/gp4hGijVry
— Jake Coco 💙🇺🇸🎶🐻 (@jakecoco) December 5, 2020
- "Beyond Repair" – Sino-US Relations Badly Damaged, Warns China State Media
"Beyond Repair" – Sino-US Relations Badly Damaged, Warns China State Media
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 20:40What caught our attention earlier this week was a tweet from Santiago Capital’s Brent Johnson, who described markets were reflating as if “globalization” was back on the menu, further “saying it’s not.” Johnson went on to say the world is moving “towards two supply chains, not one.”
Johnson’s view of a fractured global economy that is deeply bruised at the moment was reiterated by Chinese state media Thursday, who said some damage from President Trump’s trade war is “beyond repair.”
Reuters, quoting an editorial via the government-backed China Daily, said it viewed “worrisome signs” Washington’s decision to limit visitor visas for members of the Chinese Communist Party and their families.
“Even if the incoming administration has any intention of easing the tensions that have been sown, and continue being sown, some damage is simply beyond repair, as the sitting U.S. president intends,” the paper added.
Relations between the two countries are being shifted to “a dangerous path,” the editorial warned.
Taking a look at the gross Sino-US trade flows, notice how the trade war resulted in a rapid drop in trade between both countries starting around 2H18.
Earlier this year, UN Secretary‑General Antonio Guterres, speaking to the General Assembly in September, said the world must do everything to prevent a new Cold War.
“We are headed in a very dangerous direction,” he said.
The question that should be asked is that if China is transforming from a trade partner to an enemy of the US.
It’s still unclear whether a Biden presidency would bring a dramatic shift in trade policy between both countries. This week, Biden said he would not remove existing Chinese tariffs set by the Trump administration.
- Why I Mask
Why I Mask
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 20:20Authored by Sam Younnokis via AmericanThinker.com,
Masks are useless as well as uncomfortable. I believe they actually increase the odds of the wearer coming down with a case of COVID infection. They make it hard to have intelligible conversations and hide what few smiles people may still be having. Yet I do mask.
Maybe I’m just a coward, afraid to stand against the overbearing government. As noble and even important as such a stand would be, I value more my ability to be self-reliant. In a modern world, in an urban environment such as the one in which I live, this is at best an illusion. I’m not growing my own food or hauling water and firewood. Maybe that’s practical and even essential if you have raw land that you’re homesteading. It’s pretty much impossible for most city-dwellers. There just isn’t enough land to support us, and there are many rules about what you can do with whatever space you have.
Don’t suggest everybody move to the countryside. That would just destroy the countryside.
I live in an apartment. I pay rent, buy food at stores, work in an office. My self-reliance consists of paying the bills myself and doing the chores myself. I know I’m no “mountain man.” The local health department has required stores to demand that customers wear masks while shopping. I don’t know how zealously the stores enforce the rules. Perhaps their business licenses depend on a high level of compliance. I wear the mask and try to limit myself to buying essentials only — no impulse purchases. It doesn’t fight the edicts, but it limits the time I spend in the mask.
My office also has rules requiring masks to be worn. Without income, I don’t have even a semblance of self-reliance. Would I starve to death before I’d shop in a mask? Obviously not. If you would, perhaps you will forgive me for not sharing your dedication. Infringements on liberty start small and grow over time. While this is not the hill I choose to die on, I acknowledge your right to make your own choice.
Heroism is often associated with high risk of imminent death — charging into a burning building, for example, or standing in front of a tank that you know is not going to swerve. There are “everyday heroes” (AKA people) who get up every morning and try to get through another day without a disaster. There are so-called “heroes” (AKA “delivery drivers”) who bring things to our homes so we can remain in social as well as physical quarantine. I don’t claim to be any sort of hero.
I wear a mask because it’s required in order to maintain an acceptable level of life. I expect that this is what residents of communist countries tell themselves as they submit to every new rule. Thoreau said we have the worst government we are willing to endure, and he was right. Many opinionators rail against the way government is behaving, but no one calls for violence. Too soon? Too late? Or is it all just opinionators making money off claiming that the world is headed for communism? Maybe it’s a problem they don’t really want solved, since then they would need to find a “real job.”
My country is being destroyed, and I don’t see how to save it, but I still feel as though I should do something. Perhaps in the end, the real reason I wear a mask is shame.
- "There Will Absolutely Be A Black Market" For COVID Vaccines, Bioethicists Warn
"There Will Absolutely Be A Black Market" For COVID Vaccines, Bioethicists Warn
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 20:00The American media has already established that the initial wave of COVID-19 vaccines will almost immediately lead to massive inequalities between wealthy and poor nations, as well as among the wealthy and the poor within each individual society.
Given that Pfizer’s vaccine is not only in limited supply, but comparatively costly due to its stringent temperature requirements for shipment and storage, some have warned that it risks becoming a “vaccine for the rich”.
Now, bioethicists are saying that the likelihood that a ‘black market’ for the rich and famous emerging is a virtual guarantee. Because just like black-market human organs, the COVID-19 vaccines has “life-saving properties”.
The worst attempts to nefariously procure a vaccine may come a few months into distribution, once vaccines are available that don’t require ultra-cold storage and local pharmacies and physician practices get allotments. “There absolutely will be a black market,” said bioethicist Arthur Caplan of New York University. “Anything that’s seen as lifesaving, life-preserving, and that’s in short supply creates black markets.”
Concierge services for wealthy clients are already being inundated with questions about when COVID vaccines will be available (even though opinion polls show many have reservations about whether the approval process has been “rushed”).
At WorldClinic, which charges members $10,000 to $250,000 a year for 24/7 care, no patients have asked for special treatment and the clinic would not undermine its integrity by trying to secure vaccines unethically, said Lang, who was a White House physician during both the Bush and Clinton administrations. “The optics of trying to jump the line would be so bad, they don’t want to do that.” But within the broader system, he added, some people will inevitably cut in line.
In addition to ensuring that nurses and doctors get the vaccines, members of the ACIP, a federal panel responsible for writing the rules surrounding how to distribute the vaccines has pledged to ensure that only the real “essential” workers will be prioritized to ensure that “people of color, who are often the hardest hit by the virus, get early access.”
Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the federal panel recommending how to distribute the vaccines, want to prioritize essential workers to help ensure people of color, who are often the hardest hit by the virus, get early access. But the predominantly white workers in the financial services industry are also considered essential, according to guidance from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was referenced by ACIP, as well as executive orders from several states including New York, Illinois, Colorado, and California. Public-facing bank tellers face contagion risks in their work, but aren’t the only financial services employees included. “It was left a little bit nebulous but basically covered people who oil the movement of money, so exchanges, trading floors, trading operations, and people who keep money moving at the retail [banking] level,” said Lang. “They’re defined very broadly in New York and Illinois, because that’s where so many of our financial services industries are based.”
Whether that will happen remains to be seen. As STAT’s sources argue, it’s a difficult problem fraught with complications.
Bioethicists warned that as soon as vaccines start getting doled out, there will be a rush of industries trying to claim that their workers are “essential” and deserve priority – much like we saw with the lockdowns.
Already, financial services employees – a broadly defined category that includes everything from bank tellers to investment banking analysts – are raising eyebrows and hackles from some who feel they’ve been unfairly classified as “essential”.
The potential of industry lobbyists “redefining what an essential worker is is a very strong possibility,” said Glenn Ellis, a visiting scholar at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health care at Tuskegee University and a narrative bioethics fellow at Harvard Medical School.
Prioritizing essential workers is intended to give early vaccine access to those who provide a critical societal function and cannot socially distance easily, the Colorado health department said in a statement that acknowledged it can be difficult to write airtight rules. “Given the thousands of different job descriptions in the state, it is impossible to come up with a complete list for every occupation for a specific vaccine phase. Vaccine providers will need to use their best judgment about which patients may qualify for vaccination during this phase.” The California health department confirmed financial services employees, including those needed to “maintain orderly market operations,” will have early access to the vaccine as essential workers, as will people in the news media, such as reporters. State health departments in New York and Illinois did not respond to requests for comment about whether those in financial services would receive a vaccine early.
On the flip side, it’s nice to see the medical establishment finally acknowledge the fact that, yes, the definition of what constitutes an “essential” worker is vague, fluid and hardly an inflexible concept. Beyond nurses, doctors, other medical workers, and grocery-store clerks, there’s a wide world of functions that are critical to keeping the economy humming without causing serious shortages of food or other resources (like, for example, toilet paper).
Adding some balance to the piece, STAT adds that making the early ‘essential’ phases of vaccine distribution completely airtight comes with its own risks. Because if government agencies get too involved checking and double-checking everything, the bureaucracy would likely slow down the process.
At a certain point, though, vigilance brings its own risks. “If you add too many inefficiencies of checking and double-checking everyone, then you put so much bureaucracy into the program, you slow things down,” he added.
Plus, with the college admissions scandal still fresh in everyone’s mind, people in positions of power are presently hyper-aware of the risks of being caught and called out, and what it could mean for their livelihoods. That, one bioethicist said, will probably act as an effective check on abuse – at least to a degree.
The public shame of being caught should act as a deterrent, especially if the backlash is akin to what several Hollywood celebrities and wealthy parents faced following the 2019 college admissions bribing and cheating scandal, said Bateman-House. “I can promise you, no CEO wants to be on the front page of the newspaper for giving preferential access to his college roommate,” she said. “I think a few public naming and shamings would probably tamp down some activity.”
The piece ends with STAT’s sources claiming that the decision to supply experimental treatments to President Trump and other politicians (Ben Carson, Chris Christie) could hurt public faith in the process by creating the impression that insiders are cutting the line.
While bioethicists are at it, we would love to hear their take on the ethics of governments issuing COVID-19 ‘vaccine passports’ or vaccine ID cards.
In the end, to create a truly effective deterrent, the public must send a message to the rich and powerful that special treatment simply won’t be tolerated.
Following the vaccine rollout, the response to the wealthy and powerful cutting the line needs to be different and fierce, he said. “Everybody has to condemn them: the media, your neighbor, your boss, everybody.”
But what if all those people are the same ones who are cutting the line?
- These Are The Hypocritical Government Officials Who Demand You Stay Home While They Party
These Are The Hypocritical Government Officials Who Demand You Stay Home While They Party
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 19:40Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,
Little is more annoying than seeing a wealthy government official solemnly telling you to stay home, forgo time with your family, and stop working while losing tons of money in missed wages.
Well, except for one thing. It’s more annoying when that government official is telling you to hunker down while they’re out partying in one luxurious location or another. I’d say that is far more annoying to watch those people tell us, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
It reminds me of The Hunger Games, in which people at the Capitol enjoy frivolous pastimes while the peons in the other Districts must spend their days doing menial jobs to provide for the wealthy, lest they be beaten or killed by “Peacekeepers.”
Here are some particularly egregious examples of hypocritical government officials who want you to sacrifice while they celebrate. The list is by no means comprehensive.
California Governor Gavin Newsom
Probably the most prominent example of a “leader” abandoning any pretense of following his rules is California Governor Gavin Newsom, who was spotted dining at a fancy restaurant – like $325 per person fancy – at a birthday party for a lobbyist.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) was photographed attending a dinner party at the French Laundry, one of the nation’s priciest restaurants, with a group of prominent lobbyists, including several who represent the California Medical Association. The photos show no one in the large party wearing a mask.
Newsom apologized a few days later.
“I want to apologize to you because I need to preach and practice, not just preach and not practice, and I’ve done my best to do that,” Newsom said. (source)
Oh and also, his kids can go to school in person at their fancy private school, while everyone else’s kids are stuck with “distance learning.”
Newsom is self-quarantining after a student at one of his children’s schools tested positive for the coronavirus — another sore spot for critics who are frustrated that most California students are not learning in person.
“His kids can learn in person. But yours can’t. He can celebrate birthday parties. But you can’t,” San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer (R), a potential Newsom rival in 2022, wrote on Twitter. (source)
San Francisco Mayor London Breed
Incidentally, the following night after Newsom got busted at French Laundry, San Francisco Mayor London Breed was caught at a birthday dinner there with 7 other people – right before she closed down dining in every restaurant in San Francisco.
“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that everyone act responsibly to reduce the spread of the virus,” Breed said in a statement Nov. 10. “Every San Franciscan needs to do their part so that we can start moving in the right direction again.”(source)
Austin Mayor Steve Adler
Steve Adler, the mayor of Austin, Texas, has been busted twice flouting his own restrictions. First, he hosted 20 people at a wedding and reception for his daughter at a downtown Austin hotel. The very next day, he took 7 other people in a private jet to his timeshare in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. The thing that makes this so richly ironic is that he addressed the people of Austin from Cabo on a Facebook video in which he said:
We need to stay home if you can. This is not the time to relax. We are going to be looking really closely. … We may have to close things down if we are not careful.” (source)
Adler maintains that neither the wedding nor the vacay broke his orders or those of the state’s governor.
However, the city recommended that people not gather in groups larger than 10 people, and also Adler himself asked people not to travel for Thanksgiving, saying,
“Everyday since March, I repeat that being home is the safest place for people to be,” Adler said in a statement Wednesday. “Only at our most trying moments, like around Thanksgiving, have I asked people not to travel as part of extra precautions. It is safest to stay home. However, we aren’t asking people to never venture out. We ask everyone to be as safe as possible when they do.” (source)
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York was forced to change his plans after he announced on the radio, for Pete’s sake, that he was having his adult daughters and his 89-year-old mother visit his home in Albany for Thanksgiving. Cuomo:
…went on WAMC radio and told of his own Thanksgiving plans, for all to hear, as CNN noted: “My mom is going to come up and two of my girls, is the current plan. But the plans change. I have a lot of work to do between now and Thanksgiving.”
And then in this same interview, Cuomo scolded New Yorkers again to stay home and to stay in groups of fewer than 10. (source)
Meanwhile, he was telling other New Yorkers to skip Thanksgiving.
“My personal advice is, you don’t have family gatherings – even for Thanksgiving,” the governor said as he listed off a number of smaller gatherings that have led to recent outbreaks across the state.
“My personal advice is the best way to say ‘I love you,’ this Thanksgiving, the best way to say ‘I’m thankful for you,’ is to say, ‘I love you so much, I’m so thankful for you, that I don’t want to endanger you, and I don’t want to endanger our family and I don’t want to endanger our friends. So we’ll celebrate virtually,’” he added. (source)
New Yorkers got the Emmy Award-winning governor’s mixed message loud and clear.
Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser of Washington, DC ignored travel restrictions to go to Joe Biden’s victory party in Delaware, and then changed the rules for a mandatory 14-day quarantine established for peons upon her return. The Washington Post reports:
The trip, which comes as the mayor attempts to discourage interstate travel because of the pandemic, prompted questions from reporters and derision on social media from some residents and Bowser critics.
Bowser (D) said that she was “very proud” to attend the celebration in Wilmington and that the trip “absolutely” qualified as “essential travel” — which is exempted from the mayor’s quarantine order — because she was conducting government business on the road.
“I do a lot of things to advance the interests of the District of Columbia. Some of them are formal and some of them are informal, but all of them are necessary,” she said…
…Until last week, Bowser’s mayoral order on interstate travel would have required anyone who visited Delaware (and other states with more than 10 new daily coronavirus cases on average per 100,000 residents) to quarantine at home for two weeks upon returning to the District, except those whose travel was for essential purposes.
Last week, however, Bowser replaced that order with a new one that went into effect Monday, after her trip. The new order got rid of the two-week, post-vacation quarantine that she had instituted in July. In its place, she ordered that people who wish to visit the District from high-risk states get a negative coronavirus test first (though the city will not check or enforce that requirement); residents who travel should quarantine at home — except for essential activities — until they get a negative test, generally at least three days after their trip. (source)
It’s certainly convenient to be able to rewrite the rules at your own convenience.
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock
Mayor Michael Hancock of Denver, Colorado tweeted a reminder for people to “Pass the potatoes, not COVID… Stay home as much as you can, especially if you’re sick… Host virtual gatherings instead of in-person dinners. Avoid travel, if you can.”
He tweeted that minutes before boarding a plane to spend Thanksgiving with his own family members.
Hancock then flew off to Houston, with a connecting flight to Meridian, Mississippi. His wife, Mary Louise Lee, was already there and they would be joining their 22-year-old daughter, Janae Hancock, for Thanksgiving…
…Apart from the outrageous timing, Hancock’s hypocrisy becomes particularly egregious when you consider a Nov. 20 letter his office received from a Colorado county public health official warning that Denver International Airport (DIA) constitutes a serious COVID-19 hazard…
…Despite the warning, Hancock headed for the airport on Thursday and passed through the Thanksgiving crowds, tweeting a warning about COVID-19. He told his constituents to stay home and then boarded a plane, undermining critical warnings while placing others at risk, by example and directly in person. He also stood a chance of passing along COVID with the potatoes to his wife and daughter. (source)
It’s notable that in early November, Mayor Hancock humble-bragged that he wouldn’t be hosting his usual Thanksgiving dinner for 60 people at his home. Instead, he opted to fly across the country during a pandemic while telling everyone else to cancel their plans.
Members of the California Legislature
Several members of the California legislature enjoyed a trip to Hawaii to attend a conference.
Those attending include Republican Assembly members Heath Flora of Ripon and Jordan Cunningham of Paso Robles, Republican Sen. Andreas Borgeas of Modesto, Democratic Sen. Bill Dodd of Napa, Democratic Assembly members Blanca Rubio of Baldwin Park, Mike Gipson of Carson, Jose Medina of Riverside and Wendy Carrillo of Los Angeles, as well as Chad Mayes of Rancho Mirage, who won reelection this month as unaffiliated with any political party. (source)
They rubbed elbows with lobbyists and special interest groups while in Hawaii. The Los Angeles Times reports:
More than half a dozen California lawmakers are among the 50 people attending a policy conference sponsored by the Independent Voter Project, a nonprofit group, at the Fairmont Kea Lani Hotel in Wailea, with some legislators’ travel expenses picked up by the hosts. The four-day conference, at which panel participants discuss various issues including how to reopen states safely amid COVID-19, began Monday.
The annual gathering, which has seen up to 25 California lawmakers in attendance in past years, has faced criticism because it is partly financed and attended by special interests, including businesses and labor groups, that lobby legislators. (source)
Ironically, the conference began on the same day California reinstituted its strict “purple level” restrictions for citizens of the state that aren’t legislators or governors.
And that’s not all.
These are but a sprinkling of the hypocritical actions of those who claim to be leaders but are showing themselves to be more along the lines of pampered despots.
Don’t forget about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s infamous haircut, Chris Cuomo wandering around without a mask, Senator Diane Feinstein wandering around without a mask at both the Capitol building and Dulles International Airport, the mayor of San Jose dining with members of five other households, Dr. Fauci attending a baseball game with 2 guests and his mask pulled down in an otherwise empty stadium, and the “fact” that it’s okay to “protest” but not to go to church.
It’s certainly no way to get people on board with dystopian restrictions. The fact that these so-called leaders throw caution to the wind when it comes to the rules the rest of us are expected to follow certainly lends credence to those questioning whether the government is overstepping when it’s unnecessary.
- GOP Raises 400% More Than Democrats For Georgia Runoff
GOP Raises 400% More Than Democrats For Georgia Runoff
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 19:20Despite calls by Trump supporters for Republicans to withhold votes for Georgia GOP candidates in January’s runoff election, GOP donors have been showing up big for the candidates, despite their refusal to back the president’s claims of widespread election fraud.
According to Bloomberg, GOP donors contributed $95 million to their party’s Senate super-pac and party election committee between election day and Nov. 23 – over four times the $18 million Democrats contributed to similar groups over the same period. Granted, that time frame excludes much of the fervor over election fraud, or the fact that Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are essentially never-Trump Republicans.
Their Democratic opponents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock have a much higher volume of donations – albeit in far smaller amounts contributed mostly online.
Thanks to the massive contributions, the Georgia GOP has been able to ramp up expensive advertising – with the GOP candidates having booked $161.6 million in airtime vs. $118.3 million for Democrats, which came primarily from out of state.
Both parties are laser focused on the Georgia runoffs because the outcome will determine who controls the upper chamber. If Democrats manage to unseat both incumbents, the Senate would be split 50-50. Democrats will be able to set the agenda because Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be able to break any ties.
And big money Republicans are stepping up for the fight. The Senate Leadership Fund, a super-PAC that has ties to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, raised $104.2 million between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23, with $71.1 million of that amount donated after the Nov. 3 general election. -Bloomberg
GOP donors include Blackstone Groujp co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who gave $15 million on Nov. 12, as well as Citadel co-founder Kenneth Griffin, who put $10 million towards the race the same day. Adding to the list of megadonors who contributed after election day are investor Timothy Mellon, Steve Wynn – who each gave $5 million. In the $1 million club are Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, and real estate developer Geoffrey Palmer.
Meanwhile, the National GOP Senatorial Committee has raised $23.9 million since Nov. 3, which include contributions from Senate Republicans’ own campaigns. A super-PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell raised $104.2 million between Oct. 15 and Nov. 12 – of which $71.1 million was contributed after the election.
WinRed’s data suggests that online donations to the two Republicans lag behind the Democrats. Using the platform, Republican donors contributed $28.6 million to Perdue and $27 million to Loeffler. Loeffler had largely self-financed her campaign before Oct. 15, loaning it $23 million while raising just $5 million.
The national interest in the races is reflected in the grassroots giving. Of nearly $114 million raised by the two Democrats through ActBlue, 96% comes from donors outside of Georgia. For the Republican candidates, 92% of their $56 million through WinRed is from out-of-state contributions. -Bloomberg
On the Democratic side, their Senate Majority PAC has raised $89.9 million between Oct. 15 and Nov. 12, however just $10.2 million of that came after Election Day. Big donors who contributed before the election include Renaissance Technologies founder James Simons, Eric Mindich of Eton Park Capital Management, and Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein – while Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Carlyle Group co-founder co-founder William Conway donated $250,000.
- "It Was No Longer Safe For Me To Live In China": Former Chinese Communist Party Insider Breaks With Beijing
"It Was No Longer Safe For Me To Live In China": Former Chinese Communist Party Insider Breaks With Beijing
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 19:00By Cai Xia, a Professor at the Central Party School of the Chinese Communist Party from 1998 to 2012. This essay was translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher (Read in Chinese here).
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, I was full of hope for China. As a professor at the prestigious school that educates top leaders in the Chinese Communist Party, I knew enough about history to conclude that it was past time for China to open up its political system. After a decade of stagnation, the CCP needed reform more than ever, and Xi, who had hinted at his proclivity for change, seemed like the man to lead it.
By then, I was midway through a decades-long process of grappling with China’s official ideology, even as I was responsible for indoctrinating officials in it. Once a fervent Marxist, I had parted ways with Marxism and increasingly looked to Western thought for answers to China’s problems. Once a proud defender of official policy, I had begun to make the case for liberalization. Once a loyal member of the CCP, I was secretly harboring doubts about the sincerity of its beliefs and its concern for the Chinese people.
So I should not have been surprised when it turned out that Xi was no reformer. Over the course of his tenure, the regime has degenerated further into a political oligarchy bent on holding on to power through brutality and ruthlessness. It has grown even more repressive and dictatorial. A personality cult now surrounds Xi, who has tightened the party’s grip on ideology and eliminated what little space there was for political speech and civil society. People who haven’t lived in mainland China for the past eight years can hardly understand how brutal the regime has become, how many quiet tragedies it has authored. After speaking out against the system, I learned it was no longer safe for me to live in China.
THE EDUCATION OF A COMMUNIST
I was born into a Communist military family. In 1928, at the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, my maternal grandfather joined a peasant uprising led by Mao Zedong. When the Communists and the Nationalists put hostilities on hold during World War II, my parents and much of my mother’s family fought against the Japanese invaders in armies led by the CCP.
After the Communists’ victory, in 1949, life was good for a revolutionary family such as ours. My father commanded a People’s Liberation Army unit near Nanjing, and my mother ran an office in that city’s government. My parents forbade my two sisters and me from taking advantage of the privileges of their offices, lest we become “spoiled bourgeois ladies.” We could not ride in our father’s official car, and his security guards never ran family errands. Still, I benefited from my parents’ status and never suffered the privations that so many Chinese did in the Mao years. I knew nothing of the tens of millions of people who starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.
All I could see was socialism’s bright future. My family’s bookshelves were stocked with Marxist titles such as The Selected Works of Stalin and Required Reading for Cadres. As a teenager, I turned to these books for extracurricular reading. Whenever I opened them, I was filled with reverence. Even though I could not grasp the complexity of their arguments, my mission was clear: I must love the motherland, inherit my parents’ revolutionary legacy, and build a communist society free of exploitation. I was a true believer.
I gained a more sophisticated understanding of communist thought after joining the People’s Liberation Army in 1969, at age 17. With the Cultural Revolution in full swing, Mao required everyone to read six works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, including The Communist Manifesto. One utopian passage from that book left a lasting impression on me: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Although I didn’t really understand the concept of freedom at that point, those words stuck in my head.
The People’s Liberation Army assigned me to a military medical school. My job was to manage its library, which happened to carry Chinese translations of “reactionary” works, mostly Western literature and political philosophy. Distinguished by their gray covers, these books were restricted to regime insiders for the purpose of familiarizing themselves with China’s ideological opponents, but in secret, I read them, too. I was most impressed by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by the American journalist William Shirer, and a collection of Soviet fiction. There was a world of ideas outside of the Marxist classics, I realized. But I still believed that Marxism was the only truth.
I left the military in 1978 and got a job in the party-run trade union of a state-owned fertilizer factory on the outskirts of the city of Suzhou. By then, Mao was dead and the Cultural Revolution was over. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, was ushering in a period of reform and opening, and as part of this effort, he was recruiting a new generation of reform-minded cadres who could run the party in the future. Each local party organization had to choose a few members to serve in this group, and the Suzhou party organization picked me. I was sent to a two-year program at the Suzhou Municipal Party School, where my fellow students and I studied Marxist theory and the history of the CCP. We also received some training in the Chinese classics, a subject we had missed on account of the disruption of education during the Cultural Revolution.
I plowed through Das Kapital twice and learned the ins and outs of Marxist theory. What appealed to me most were Marx’s ideas about labor and value—namely, that capitalists accrue wealth by taking advantage of workers. I was also impressed by Marx’s philosophical approach, dialectical materialism, which allowed him to see capitalism’s political, legal, cultural, and moral systems as built on a foundation of economic exploitation.
When I graduated, in 1986, I was invited to stay on as a faculty member at the school, which was short-staffed at the time. I accepted, which disappointed some of the city’s leaders, who thought I had a promising future as a party apparatchik. Instead, my new job launched my career as an academic in the CCP’s system of ideological indoctrination.
THE STUDENT BECOMES THE MASTER
At the top of that system sits the Central Party School in Beijing. Since 1933, it has trained generations of top-ranking CCP cadres, who run the Chinese bureaucracy at the municipal level and above. The school has close ties to the party elite and is always headed by a member of the Politburo. (Its president from 2007 to 2012 was none other than Xi.)
In June 1989, the government cracked down on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds. Privately, I was appalled that the People’s Liberation Army had fired on college students, which ran contrary to the indoctrination I had received since my childhood that the army protected the people; only Japanese “devils” and Nationalist reactionaries killed them. Alarmed by the protests, plus the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the CCP’s top leadership decided it had to counteract ideological laxity. It ordered local party schools to send some of their teachers to the Central Party School to brush up on the party’s thinking. My school in Suzhou chose me. My brief stay at the Central Party School made me want to study there for much longer. After spending a year preparing for the entrance examinations, I was admitted to the master’s program in the school’s theory department. So devoted was I to the CCP’s line that behind my back, my classmates called me “Old Mrs. Marx.” In 1998, I received my Ph.D. and joined the school’s faculty.
Some of my students were regular graduate students, who were taught a conventional curriculum in Marxist political theory and CCP history. But others were mid- and high-level party officials, including leading provincial and municipal administrators and cabinet-level ministers. Some of my students were members of the CCP’s Central Committee, the body of a few hundred delegates that sits atop the party hierarchy and ratifies major decisions.
Teaching at the Central Party School was not easy. Video cameras in the classrooms recorded our lectures, which were then reviewed by our supervisors. We had to make the subject come alive for the high-level and experienced students in the class, without interpreting the doctrine too flexibly or drawing attention to its weak spots. Often, we had to come up with smart answers to tough questions asked by the officials in our classes.
Most of their questions revolved around puzzling contradictions within the official ideology, which had been crafted to justify the real-world policies implemented by the CCP. Amendments added in 2004 to China’s constitution said that the government protects human rights and private property. But what about Marx’s view that a communist system should abolish private property? Deng wanted to “let a part of the population get rich first” to motivate people and stimulate productivity. How did that square with Marx’s promise that communism would provide to each according to his needs?
I remained loyal to the CCP, yet I was constantly questioning my own beliefs. In the 1980s, Chinese academic circles had engaged in a lively discussion of “Marxist humanism,” a strain of Marxist thinking that emphasized the full development of the human personality. A few academics continued that discussion into the 1990s, even as the scope of acceptable discourse narrowed. I studied Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which said that the purpose of socialism was to liberate the individual. I identified with the Marxist philosophers who stressed freedom—above all, Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse.
Already in my master’s thesis, I had criticized the idea that people should always sacrifice their individual interests in order to serve the party. In my Ph.D. dissertation, I had challenged the ancient Chinese slogan “rich country, strong army” by contending that China would be strong only if the party allowed its citizens to prosper. Now, I took this argument a step further. In papers and talks, I suggested that state enterprises were still too dominant in the Chinese economy and that further reform was needed to allow private companies to compete. Corruption, I stressed, should be seen not as a moral failing of individual cadres but as a systemic problem resulting from the government’s grip on the economy.
THEORY AND PRACTICE
My thinking happened to align in part with that of Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin. Determined to develop China’s economy, Jiang sought to stimulate private enterprise and bring China into the World Trade Organization. But these policies contradicted the CCP’s long-held theories prizing the planned economy and national self-sufficiency. Since the ideology of neither Marx nor Mao nor Deng could resolve these contradictions, Jiang felt compelled to come up with something new. He called it “the Three Represents.”
I first heard of this new theory when everyone else did. On the evening of February 25, 2000, I watched as China Central Television (CCTV) broadcast a report on the Three Represents. The party, Jiang said, had to represent three aspects of China: “the development requirements of advanced productive forces,” cultural progress, and the interests of the majority. As a professor at the Central Party School, I immediately understood that this theory presaged a significant shift in CCP ideology. In particular, the first of the Three Represents implied that Jiang was abandoning the core Marxist belief that capitalists were an exploitative social group. Instead, Jiang was opening the party to their ranks—a decision I welcomed.
The Central Propaganda Department, the body in charge of the CCP’s ideological work, was responsible for promoting Jiang’s new theory, but they had a problem: the Three Represents had come under attack from the extreme left, which thought Jiang was going too far in wooing entrepreneurs. Hoping to skirt this dispute, the Propaganda Department chose to water down the theory. The People’s Daily published a full-page article demonstrating the correctness of the Three Represents with cross-references to texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Deng.
I found this unconvincing. What was the purpose of the Three Represents if it merely restated existing ideology? I was disgusted by the superficial methods of the party’s publicity apparatus. I grew determined to reveal the true meaning of the Three Represents, a theory that in fact marked a bold departure for China. This, it turned out, would bring me into conflict with the entrenched bureaucracy of the CCP.
THE UNLEARNED ELITES
My opportunity to promote a proper understanding of the Three Represents arrived in early 2001, when CCTV, hearing from a colleague that I was especially interested in Jiang’s new theory, invited me to write a television program on it. I spent six months researching and writing the documentary and discussing it at length with producers at the network. My script emphasized the need for innovative new policies to meet the challenges of a new era. I stressed the same things Jiang did: that the government was now going to reduce its intervention in the economy and that the role of the party was no longer to make violent revolution against the exploitative capitalists—instead, it was to encourage the creation of wealth and balance the interests of different groups in society.
On the afternoon of June 16, four CCTV senior vice presidents gathered in a studio in the network’s headquarters to review the three 30-minute episodes. As they watched it, their faces darkened. “Let’s stop here,” one of them said when the first episode ended.
“Professor Cai, do you know why you were invited to produce a program on the Three Represents?” he asked.
“The party has put forward a new ideological theory,” I replied, “and we need to publicize it.”
The official was unmoved. “Your research and innovation can be presented at the Central Party School, but only the safest things can be shown on TV,” he said. At that point, nobody was quite sure what the Three Represents would ultimately be interpreted to mean, and he worried that my script might be out of step with the Propaganda Department’s views. “If there’s any discrepancy, the impact would be too great.”
Another station administrator chimed in. “This year is the 80th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party!” he exclaimed. Such an anniversary demanded not a discussion of challenges facing the party but a heroic celebration of its triumphs. At that moment, I understood. The CCTV people weren’t interested in the real implications of ideology. They just wanted to make the party look good and flatter their superiors.
The Central Party School in Beijing, June 2019; Ben Blanchard / Reuters Over the next ten days, we scrambled to remake the documentary. We edited out potentially offensive words and phrases, working day and night as my script went through several political reviews by teams from across the party bureaucracy. Finally, a dozen officials arrived for one last review, during which I learned even more about the party’s hypocrisy. At one point, a high-level member of the vetting committee spoke up. In the program’s second episode, I had quoted two of Deng’s famous sayings, which are often strung together: “Poverty is not socialism; development is the hard truth.”
“Poverty isn’t socialism?” the official asked dubiously. “So what is socialism?” His critique went on, growing louder. “And development is the hard truth? How are those two sentences related? Tell me!”
I was dumbfounded. These were Deng’s exact words, and this senior official—the head of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, the powerful agency overseeing all broadcast media—didn’t know it? I thought immediately of Mao’s criticism of bureaucrats during the Cultural Revolution: “They don’t read books, and they don’t read newspapers.”
AN EMPTY IDEOLOGY
Over the course of 2001, as part of its efforts to promote Jiang’s signature theory, the Propaganda Department began work on a study outline for the Three Represents, a summary that would be issued as a Central Committee document for the entire party to read and implement. Perhaps because I had worked on the CCTV program and had given a speech on the Three Represents at an academic conference, I was asked to help.
Along with another scholar and 18 propaganda officials, I was sent to the Propaganda Department’s training center near the foothills west of Beijing. The department had settled on a general framework for the outline, and now it was asking us to fill the framework with content. My task was to write the section on building the party.
Drafting documents for the Central Committee is a highly confidential process. My colleagues and I were forbidden from leaving the premises or receiving guests. When the Propaganda Department convened a meeting, those who weren’t invited weren’t allowed to ask about it. We writers could eat and take walks together, but we were prohibited from discussing our work. I was the only woman in the group. At dinner, the men gossiped and cracked jokes. I found the off-color, alcohol-fueled conversation vulgar and would always slink out after a few bites of food. Finally, another participant took me aside. Talk of official business would only get us in trouble, he explained; it was safer and more enjoyable to confine the conversation to sex.
Helping with the study outline was the most important writing assignment of my life, but it was also the most ridiculous. My job was to read through a stack of documents cataloging Jiang’s thoughts, including confidential speeches and articles intended for the party’s internal consumption. I would then extract relevant quotations and place them under various topic subheadings, annotating the source. I couldn’t add or subtract text, but I could change a period to a comma and connect one quote to another. I was amazed that the formal explanation of one of the party’s most important ideological campaigns in the post-Mao era would be little more than a cut-and-paste job.
Because the task was so easy, I spent a lot of time waiting in boredom for my work to be vetted. One day, I sounded out another participant, a professor from Renmin University of China. “Aren’t we just creating another version of Quotations From Chairman Mao?” I asked, referring to the Little Red Book, a pocket volume of out-of-context aphorisms that circulated during the Cultural Revolution. He looked around and smiled wryly. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “We’re in a lovely scenic location with good food and pleasant walks. Where else could we convalesce so comfortably? Just go fetch a book to read. All that matters is that you’re here when they call you for a meeting.”
In June 2003, a high-profile press conference was held at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, to unveil the study outline, and all of us who had helped write it were told to attend. Liu Yunshan, a Politburo member and the head of the Propaganda Department, presented the report. As he and other officials took to the stage, I felt a sinking feeling. My understanding of the Three Represents as an important pivot in the ruling party’s ideology had been completely squeezed out of the document and replaced with pablum. Remembering the lewd chatter around the dinner table every night, I felt for the first time that the system I had long considered sacred was in fact unbearably absurd.
IDEAS FOR SALE
My experience with the study outline taught me that the ideas the party sanctimoniously promoted were in fact self-serving tools used to deceive the Chinese people. I soon learned that they were also a way of making money. An official I came to know at the General Administration of Press and Publication, which controls the right to publish books and magazines, told me of a disturbing episode involving a turf war over publishing revenues within the CCP.
For many years, Red Flag Press had been one of three organizations responsible for publishing the party’s educational books. In 2005, the press was in the process of publishing a routine book of readings when an official from the Central Organization Department, the powerful agency in charge of the CCP’s personnel decisions, stepped in to insist that only his department had the authority to publish such a book. He tried to get the General Administration of Press and Publication to prevent the book from being published. But Red Flag Press’s main job was precisely to publish works on ideology. To get out of this fix, the agency vetted the book in the hopes of finding problems that would justify banning it—but awkwardly, it came up empty.
Why was the Organization Department so territorial about publishing? It all came down to money. Many departments have slush funds, which are used for the lavish enjoyment of senior officials and divided among personnel as “welfare subsidies.” The easiest way to replenish those funds is to publish books. At that time, the CCP had more than 3.6 million grassroots organizations, each of which was expected to buy a copy of a new publication. If the book was priced at ten yuan per copy, that meant a minimum of 36 million yuan in sales revenue—equivalent to more than $5 million today. Since that money was coming from the budgets of the party branches, the scheme was essentially an exercise in forcing one public entity to transfer money to another. No wonder the Organization Department promoted a new political education topic every year. And no wonder almost every institution within the CCP had a publishing arm. With nearly every unit inventing new ways to make money, venality has permeated the regime.
Despite my growing disillusionment, I didn’t completely reject the party. Along with many other scholars inside it, I still hoped that the CCP could embrace reform and move in the direction of some form of democracy. In the later years of the Jiang era, the party started tolerating a relatively relaxed discussion of sensitive issues within the party, as long as the discussions never went public. At the Central Party School, my fellow professors and I felt free to raise deep-seated problems with China’s political system among ourselves. We talked about reducing the role of party officials in deciding administrative issues that were best handled by government officials. We discussed the idea of judicial independence, which had been written into the constitution but never really practiced.
To our delight, the party was in fact experimenting with democracy, both within its own operations and in society at the grassroots level. I saw all of this as hopeful signs of progress. But subsequent events would only cement my disillusionment.
ANOTHER WAY
A key turning point came in 2008, when I took a brief but fateful trip to Spain. Visiting the country as part of an academic exchange, I learned how Spain had transitioned from autocracy to democracy after the death of its dictator, Francisco Franco, in 1975. I could not help but compare Spain’s experience to China’s. Mao died just ten months after Franco, and both countries underwent tremendous changes in the ensuing three decades. But whereas Spain quickly and peacefully made the leap to democracy and achieved social stability and economic prosperity, China accomplished only a partial transition, moving from a planned economy to a mixed economy without liberalizing its politics. What could Spain teach China?
I came to the pessimistic conclusion that the CCP was unlikely to reform politically. For one thing, Spain’s transition was initiated by reformist forces within the post-Franco regime, such as King Juan Carlos I, who placed national interests above their personal interests. The CCP, having come to power in 1949 through violence, was deeply wedded to the idea that it had earned a permanent monopoly on political power. The party’s record, particularly its crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests, demonstrated that it would not give up that monopoly peacefully. And none of the post-Deng leaders had the courage to push for political reform; they simply wanted to pass the buck to future leaders.
China’s Politburo Standing Committee members in Beijing, November 2012; Carlos Barria / Reuters I also learned that after Franco’s death, Spain quickly created a favorable environment for reform, consolidating judicial independence and expanding freedom of the press. It even incorporated opposition forces into the transition process. The CCP, by contrast, has treated demands for social and economic justice as threats to its power, suppressing civil society and restricting people’s liberties. The regime and the people have been locked in confrontation for decades, making reconciliation unthinkable.
My newly acquired understanding of the democratic transition in Spain, along with what I already knew about those in the former Soviet bloc, led me to fundamentally reject the Marxist ideology in which I once had unshakable faith. I came to realize that the theories Marx advanced in the nineteenth century were limited by his own intellect and the historical circumstances of his time. Moreover, I saw that the highly centralized, oppressive version of Marxism promoted by the CCP owed more to Stalin than to Marx himself. I increasingly recognized it as an ideology formed to serve a self-interested dictatorship. Marxism, I began to hint in publications and lectures, should not be worshiped as an absolute truth, and China had to start the journey to democracy. In 2010, when some liberal scholars published an edited volume called Toward Constitutionalism, I contributed an article that discussed the Spanish experience.
My vision—shared with other liberal scholars—was that China would start by implementing democracy within the party, which, over the long run, would lead to a constitutional democracy. China would have a parliament, even a real opposition party. In my heart, I worried that the CCP might violently resist such a transition, but I kept that thought to myself. Instead, when speaking with colleagues and students, I argued that such a transition would be good for China and even for the party itself, which could consolidate its legitimacy by making itself more accountable to the people. Many of the officials I taught acknowledged that the party faced problems, but they could not say so themselves. Instead, they cautiously urged me to persuade their superiors.
THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF XI
The problem was that at that very time, Jiang’s successor, Hu Jintao, was moving in the opposite direction. In 2003, while in the process of taking over the reins of power, Hu had put forward “the Scientific Outlook on Development,” his substitute for Jiang’s Three Represents. The concept was another attempt to justify China’s mixed development model with a thin cover of Marxist-sounding ideology, and it avoided the big questions facing China. China’s breakneck development was producing social conflict as farmers’ land was seized for development and factories squeezed workers for more profits. The number of petitioners seeking redress from the government increased dramatically, and nationwide, demonstrations eventually exceeded 100,000 per year. To me, the discontent showed that it was becoming harder for China to develop its economy without liberalizing its politics.
Hu thought otherwise. “Don’t muck up things,” he said in 2008, at a ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the policy of reform and opening. I understood this to mean that the economic, political, and ideological reforms the party had made so far should be maintained but not pushed forward. Hu was defending himself against accusations from both sides: from conservatives who thought that reform had gone too far and from liberals who thought it hadn’t gone far enough. So China, under his watch, entered a period of political stagnation, a decline similar to what the Soviet Union experienced under Leonid Brezhnev.
Thus it was with optimism that I looked to Xi when it became clear that he was going to take power. The easy reforms had all been made 30 years ago; now it was time for the hard ones. Given the reputation of Xi’s father, a former CCP leader with liberal inclinations, and the flexible style that Xi himself had displayed in previous posts, I and other advocates of reform hoped that our new leader would have the courage to enact bold changes to China’s political system. But not everyone had such confidence in Xi. The skeptics I knew fell into two categories. Both proved prescient.
The first group consisted of princelings—descendants of the party’s founders. Xi was a princeling, as was Bo Xilai, the dynamic party chief of Chongqing. Xi and Bo rose to senior provincial and ministerial positions at almost the same time, and both were expected to join the highest body in the CCP, the Politburo Standing Committee, and were considered top contenders to lead China. But Bo fell out of the leadership competition early in 2012, when he was implicated in his wife’s murder of a British businessman, and the party’s senior statesmen backed the safe and steady Xi. The princelings I knew, familiar with Xi’s ruthlessness, predicted that the rivalry would not end there. Indeed, after Xi took power, Bo was convicted of corruption, stripped of all his assets, and sentenced to life in prison.
The other group of skeptics consisted of establishment scholars. More than a month before the 18th Party Congress of November 2012, when Xi would be formally unveiled as the CCP’s new general secretary, I was chatting with a veteran reporter from a major Chinese magazine and a leading professor at my school who had observed Xi’s career for a long time. The two had just wrapped up an interview, and before leaving, the reporter tossed out a question: “I hear that Xi Jinping lived in the Central Party School compound for a period of time. Now he’s about to become the party’s general secretary. What do you think of him?” The professor’s lip twitched, and he said with disdain that Xi suffered from “inadequate knowledge.” The reporter and I were stunned at this blunt pronouncement.
In spite of these negative views, I willingly suspended disbelief and put my hopes in Xi. But shortly after Xi’s ascension, I started to have my doubts. A December 2012 speech he gave suggested a reformist and progressive mentality, but other statements hinted at a throwback to the pre-reform era. Was Xi headed left or right? I had just retired from the Central Party School, but I still kept in touch with my former colleagues. Once when I was talking to some of them about Xi’s plans, one of them said, “It’s not a question of whether Xi is going left or right but rather that he lacks basic judgment and speaks illogically.” Everyone fell silent. A chill ran down my spine. With deficiencies like these, how could we expect him to lead a struggle for political reform?
I soon concluded that we probably could not. After Xi released his comprehensive reform plan in late 2013, business and academic circles excitedly predicted that he would push ahead with major reforms. My feeling was just the opposite. The plan avoided all the key issues of political reform. China’s long-standing problems of corruption, excessive debt, and unprofitable state enterprises are rooted in party officials’ power to meddle in economic decisions without public supervision. Trying to liberalize the economy while tightening political control was a contradiction. Yet Xi was launching the biggest ideological campaign since Mao’s death to revive Maoist rule. His plan called for intensified societal surveillance and a clampdown on free expression. A ban on any discussion of constitutional democracy and universal values was shamelessly promoted under the banner of “governance, management, service, and law.”
This trend continued with a package of legal reforms passed in 2014, which further exposed the party’s intent to use the law as a tool for maintaining totalitarian rule. At this point, Xi’s perverse tendencies and the CCP’s political regression were clear. If I once had a vague hope for Xi and the party, my illusions were now shattered. Subsequent events would only confirm that when it came to reform, Xi was taking China from stagnation to regression. In 2015, the party rounded up hundreds of defense lawyers. The next year, it launched a Cultural Revolution–style campaign against an outspoken real estate tycoon. It was my reaction to that episode that landed me in hot water.
THE LAST STRAW
The tycoon, Ren Zhiqiang, had increasingly come into conflict with Xi, whom he criticized for censoring Chinese media. In February 2016, a CCP website labeled Ren as “anti-party.” I didn’t know Ren personally, but his case struck me as especially disturbing because I had long relied on the principle that within the CCP, we were allowed—even encouraged—to speak freely in order to help the party correct its own mistakes. Here was a longtime party member who had been demonized for doing just that. Having lived through the Cultural Revolution, I knew that people branded with the label “anti-party” were deprived of their rights and subjected to harsh persecution. Since a defense of Ren could never be published in censored media outlets, I wrote one up and sent it to a WeChat group, hoping my friends would share it with their contacts. My article went viral.
Although most of my article simply quoted the party’s constitution and code of conduct, the Central Party School’s disciplinary committee accused me of serious errors. I faced a series of intimidating interviews in which my interrogators applied psychological pressure and laid word traps in an effort to induce a false confession of wrongdoing. It was uncomfortable, but I recognized the process as a psychological contest. If I didn’t show fear, I realized, they would lose half the battle. And so a stalemate ensued: I kept publishing, and the authorities kept calling me in for questioning. Soon, I concluded that security agencies were tapping my phone, reading my digital correspondence, and following me to see where I went and with whom I met. Retired professors from the Central Party School usually need permission only from the school to travel to Hong Kong or abroad, but now the school hinted that I had to clear such trips with the Ministry of State Security in the future.
In April 2016, the text of a speech I had given a few months earlier at Tsinghua University—in which I argued that if ideology violates common sense, it deteriorates into lies—was published on an influential website in Hong Kong. The timing was bad: Xi had just announced that some of the free inquiry taking place at the Central Party School had gone too far and urged greater supervision of its professors. As a result, in early May, I was called in again by the school’s disciplinary committee and accused of opposing Xi. From then on, the CCP blocked me from all media in China—print, online, television. Even my name could not be published. Then, one night in July, I was summoned again to a meeting at the Central Party School, where a member of the disciplinary committee placed a foot-tall pile of documents on the table in front of me. “There’s already this much material on you,” he said. “Think it over.” It was clear that I was being warned to keep silent and that if I so much as tweeted a word, I would be subjected to disciplinary action, including reduced retirement benefits. I was indignant at my treatment, even though I understood that others had been dealt with even more harshly.
In all my years as a member of the CCP, I had never violated a single rule, nor had I ever been called in for a reprimand. But now, I was regularly interrogated by party officials. The school’s disciplinary committee repeatedly threatened the humiliating prospect of holding a large public meeting and announcing a formal punishment. At the end of each conversation, my interrogators demanded I keep it a secret. It was all part of an underworld that couldn’t be exposed to the light of day.
Then came a cover-up of police brutality that triggered my final break with Xi and the party. Earlier, in May 2016, Lei Yang, an environmental scientist, was on his way to the airport to pick up his mother-in-law when, in circumstances that remain murky, he died in the custody of the Beijing police. In order to evade responsibility for the crime, the police framed Lei, alleging that he had been soliciting a prostitute. His classmates from his university days, outraged at this attempt at defamation, banded together to help his family seek justice, starting a campaign that reverberated throughout China. To quell the fury, the CCP’s top leaders ordered an investigation. The prosecution agreed to an independent autopsy, and a trial was scheduled to argue the matter.
A strange thing happened next: Lei’s parents, wife, and children were put under house arrest, and the local government offered them massive compensation, about $1 million, to give up their pursuit of the truth. When Lei’s family refused, the payment was increased to $3 million. Even after a $3 million house was thrown in, Lei’s wife insisted on clearing her late husband’s name. The government then pressured Lei’s parents, who knelt before their daughter-in-law and begged her to abandon the case. In December, prosecutors announced that they would not charge anyone for Lei’s death, and his family’s lawyer revealed that he had been forced to stand down.
When I learned of this outcome, I sat at my desk all night, overcome with grief and anger. Lei’s death was a clear-cut case of wrongdoing, and instead of punishing the police officers responsible, their superiors had tried to use the people’s hard-earned tax money to settle the matter out of court. Officials were closing ranks rather than serving the people. I asked myself, If the CCP’s officials are capable of such despicable actions, how can the party be trusted? Most of all, I wondered how I could remain part of this system.
After 20 years of hesitation, confusion, and misery, I made the decision to emerge from the darkness and make a complete break with the party. Xi’s great leap backward soon left me with no other choice. In 2018, Xi abolished presidential term limits, raising the prospect that I would have to live indefinitely under neo-Stalinist rule. The next summer, I was able to travel to the United States on a tourist visa. While there, I received a message from a friend telling me that the Chinese authorities, accusing me of “anti-China” activities, would arrest me if I returned. I decided to prolong my visit until things calmed down. Then the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, and flights to China were canceled, so I had to wait a little longer. At the same time, I was disgusted by Xi’s mishandling of the outbreak and signed a petition supporting Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been harassed by police for warning his friends about the new disease and eventually died of it. I received urgent phone calls from the authorities at the Central Party School demanding that I come home.
But the atmosphere in China was growing darker. Ren, the dissident real estate tycoon, disappeared in March and was soon expelled from the party and sentenced to 18 years in prison. Meanwhile, my problems with the authorities were compounded by the unauthorized release of a private talk I had given online to a small circle of friends in which I had called the CCP “a political zombie” and said that Xi should step down. When I sent friends a short article I had written denouncing Xi’s repressive new national security law in Hong Kong, someone leaked that, too.
I knew I was in trouble. Soon, I was expelled from the party. The school stripped me of my retirement benefits. My bank account was frozen. I asked the authorities at the Central Party School for a guarantee of my personal safety if I returned. Officials there avoided answering the question and instead made vague threats against my daughter in China and her young son. It was at this point that I accepted the truth: there was no going back.
- "A Keynesian Beauty Contest — But With No Beauty"
"A Keynesian Beauty Contest — But With No Beauty"
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 18:55Real Vision senior editor Ash Bennington (“Cash Pennington”) hosts managing editor Ed Harrison to break down today’s dismal data on the state of the U.S. labor market. Ed and Ash put in context the non-farm payroll figures, released today, and contrast this dreadful print with the rally in U.S. equities. After reflecting on what these job numbers means for the yield curve and interest rate margins, Ed and Ash conduct an even-handed analysis of the worsening data on COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations. In the intro, editor Jack Farley explores why the investors seem convinced that the adverse jobs data is actually good news for the stock market. - Uranium Stocks Soar: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze
Uranium Stocks Soar: Is This The Beginning Of The Next ESG Craze
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 18:40Uranium stocks soared on Friday after House and Senate lawmakers revealed a compromise version of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. According to S&P Global, the bill effectively provides for the military to continue a policy under President-elect Joe Biden that classifies the domestic supplies of certain minerals such as uranium, graphite and lithium as vital to national security.
Uranium companies such as Cameco rose 9.7%, Uranium Energy +10%, Energy Fuels +17%, North Short GLobal Uranium Mining +6%.
Even ahead of today’s NDAA announcement, the URA Uranium ETF was breaking out of an elongated bear market and downtrending channel to the upside as Larry McDonald’s latest Bear Traps report showed.
Even ahead of today’s announcement, Bear Traps noted that “CCJ and uranium have been fading sideways since June while the rest of the commodity space has rallied” and added that it expects uranium names “to play catch-up in the months ahead.”
Reminding readers that uranium has historically been a high-flying sector, the report predicts that “if the mad-mob trading FCEL and other ESG names gets ahold of uranium… Watch out.“
As McDonald concludes “we find it more than bizarre that every commodity is ripping and uranium miners are dead in the water. Seasonally and politically, upside CCJ vol looks extremely cheap.”
So besides a convenient way to profit from the wave of virtue-signaling sweeping passive investors (and, potentially, World War III), here is why if uranium is indeed stirring to the upside it has a long way to go:
Finally, for those unconvinced, below we repost McDonald’s Uranium bull case:
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When are people going to figure out how GREEN Cameco CCJ equity is?!
CCJ Seasonal Returns
Notice how when energy commodities were still rising (2011-2014) CCJ’s December and January returns were very strong. Meanwhile, every commodity stock is the metal space is up 40% in the past month, futures are ripping too yet CCJ and UXA1 are at April levels. CCJ calls are cheap, seasonality looks good, and with all these hot stocks jumping around (FCEL traded 1/2 of its market cap today) I think its only a matter of time before the mad mob finds Uranium equities… Buy the March $11 calls, put them in the drawer.
PM on CCJ Cameco Corp
Agree with your thesis. The space is so small and it makes so much sense. However, it would really be nice to see the spot U price catch a sustainable bid here. I am looking for a turn of the year trade in U, if not sooner. We need to see some utility to ink a relatively good sized contract to get things moving. That would be big. I am also looking for financial players to get more serious about throwing weight around in this sector. A group with decent capital at a multi-strat HF or a medium sized fund could allocate a few hundred mill and create their own reality in this sector, IMO. The order of operations would be to buy up positions in call option like U miners, then buy the U trusts trading at discounts and then hit the spot market hard. I think you would make money on all legs of that if you committed a few hundred mill to it.
Looking at moves in some U stocks recently I wonder if this operation could be starting…
It seemed like the whole U mining sector in Australia was up 13% on Tuesday (several names up that much). We are seeing stuff like UUUU today. And even LEU (+9.6%) which is a name I need to understand better and could have a very interesting role to play in a resurgent US nuclear sector.
I am very excited about the potential here. With NXE and PDN.au my bit positions I am definitely liking the action, but I know we have to see U move eventually. And CCJ probably has to move too as the only “investable” name in the space if you exclude KAP.li
It seems to me CCJ could be $12 in a hurry if it just catches a bid like many in the sector have.
But it’s hard to argue that the better trade isn’t Uranium Participation Corp for people that can make do with the liquidity. The 17% discount to NAV is just a big deal, especially if you believe, as I do that it will be at a premium during this cycle. Risk reward is just excellent there. You are buying a discount to NAV based on a spot discount to forward, at a commodity price which is unsustainably low, at a time when the whole commodity deck has been priced higher, when even Elon Musk is flagging the need for nuclear power.
A commodity that hasn’t moved right as the world wakes up to inflation with an actual clean energy angle to it. This could well be THE trade for 2021, IMO. I know it’s been slow to develop, but it just looks better than ever.
Industry Expert on the Uranium Fundamentals – BULLISH CCJ Equity
The consensus seems to be that Biden will be far more bullish for uranium than Trump has ever been in his 4 years. Biden’s $2T Infrastructure plan embraces the current nuclear reactor industry and creates a new ARPA Agency for Climate that has put the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors as a priority, seeking to build them cheaper and faster through technical innovation. Biden’s push for clean energy will also serve to reduce competition from coal powered plants that will be phased out sooner, and carbon-emitting gas plants as well given power grids will become more carbon sensitive, rewarding carbon-free nuclear and hydro for their climate change mitigation. Today the bipartisan US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works approved the American Nuclear Infrastructure Act designed to boost the US nuclear industry, establish a strategic Uranium Reserve, support enhancing the US nuclear fuel cycle and encourage US reactor exports worldwide. All signs are pointing towards a US nuclear renaissance if Biden Administration is to achieve its Net Zero emissions goals, as all evidence shows that intermittent renewables, solar and wind, are not able to provide the continuous 24/7 baseload carbon-free electricity needed by industry and the transition to electric transportation from cars to buses to truck transport. California has been the poster child for the failure of renewables to deliver on their early promise. The outlook for US nuclear has never been better in the past few decades as Democrats now flip to be nuclear advocates, and with pro-nuclear Kerry nominated as Biden’s Climate Envoy, that renaissance could spread throughout the west as US rejoins Paris Climate Accord.
Both US and Russia are also now looking to leverage their nuclear power generation capacity to produce clean hydrogen fuel, adding more value to reactors in the clean energy transition while creating a new revenue stream that will support maintaining the US fleet where already a number of utilities have applied to extend reactor operating lives to 80 years from the previous limit of 60.
On the supply side, 2020 has seen a record uranium supply deficit due to previous mine shutdowns, flexing down by Kazakhstan, and 5-month mining suspensions at Cameco’s Cigar Lake and all of Kazakhstan’s ISR uranium mines. Total mined supply this year will come in under 120M lbs, a level not seen since 2008. The 5-month cessation of ISR wellfield development, during what is usually Kazakhstan’s peak seasonal period for drilling and expanding wells to maintain production levels, is only now beginning to impact uranium production, and there is a high expectation that 2021 will see that supply destruction continue into Q2. For the first time ever both Cameco and Kazatomprom have depleted their held inventory, forcing both to be active buyers in the Spot market in order to fulfill their contract delivery commitments. With COVID-19 case numbers continuing to spike higher in Northern Saskatchewan, chances of another temporary shutdown of Cigar Lake are increasing daily. Spot U3O8 price has responded, jumping above $34/lb in March/April then backing off to level off near $30/lb at present to create a new floor at 25% above its March low.
Further fueling the bullish outlook for uranium was the decision by BHP to scrap its Olympic Dam mine expansion plan. Uranium is an 8M lbs/yr by-product of that mine, which BHP simply sells primarily to traders in the Spot market. The expansion plan was expected to add another 7-8M lbs/yr supply to Spot market. ERA’s Ranger Mine in Australia closes permanently next month, and Orano’s COMINAK mine in Niger, West Africa, will close permanently in March of next year. Together they will reduce 2021 supply by somewhere around 7M lbs/yr. The only major new mine actively trying to get into production is Berkeley Energia’s Salamanca mine in Spain. It had received all but 1 of the dozens of permits needed to begin construction before being potentially shelved due to a policy change in government. Brazil has just begun building a small new open pit mine which is expected to produce just over 500,000 lbs per year starting in 2022. All other mine projects remain on hold, as are all mine restarts as operators wait for uranium prices to move significantly higher into the $40-$50/lb range.
On the nuclear demand side, nuclear utilities have seen almost all of the political and trade overhangs removed that have been keeping them on the sidelines since the Section 232 Uranium Petition was served in January 2018. They withdrew their RFP’s nearly 3 years ago, preferring to delay contracting until a long list of uncertainties were dealt with. The Section 232 morphed into the Nuclear Fuel Working Group but many of the recommendations were not actioned. Uncertainty over the Iran nuclear waivers became a major issue but that too has been resolved. The most significant uranium trade issue this year was negotiating an extension to the Russian Suspension Agreement, which Commerce and Rosatom eventually concluded successfully. The RSA was extended to at least 2040 with limits on Russian uranium imports being reduced from 20% to 15% of US nuclear fuel requirements by 2040. The last remaining political overhang is the US election outcome, as nuclear utilities do not want to enter into long term contracts until certain that they will get the support they need to keep them running under a new administration.
While COVID-19 has had a severe impact on uranium supply, it has had an opposite effect on demand. Continuous baseload power has been in high demand throughout the pandemic, and many nations are targeting COVID recovery infrastructure funds to rebuild their power grids with carbon-free energy to achieve their net zero emissions goals. In just the past few months there has been a strong shift to expand nuclear power generating capacity in China, India, and most recently in Britain where PM Boris Johnson is pushing for construction of a new 3200MW Sizewell-C power plant, and the 16 x 440MW UKSMR advanced reactors that the Rolls-Royce consortium is planning to build across the UK, hoping to expand into the global market. Advanced reactor projects have found new legs in Canada and the US. In all there are now 72 new advanced reactor designs under development in 18 countries. Many had thought that COVID-19 would hurt the nuclear industry by reducing demand, but the outlook now seems to be that it has instead fueled a new global nuclear renaissance, just as global uranium supply is in a record deficit. Demand this year is in the order of 187M lbs (vs 120M lbs of primary mined supply) and TradeTech expects demand to rise to 220M lbs over the next 10 years. Where the supply will come from to bring the market back into balance is the big unknown. All the major new mines are many years away from construction, and those looking to restart, like Paladin’s Langer Heinrich and Cameco’s McArthur River, are also 2 years or more away. Kazatomprom has extended their production flex-down through to the end of 2022. In the 11 years I’ve been following the uranium sector, never have the fundamentals been so strong for a major uranium price recovery like what was seen in 2004-2007. “If” is no longer the question… only “When” remains open.
COVID-19 has been sidelining nuclear fuel buyers as well, given the folks who have been engaged in a record number of reactor refuelings in 2020, under the added pressure of operating through a pandemic, are the same folks tasked with negotiating for new long term contracts with producers. Term contracting has been very slow as utilities choose to draw down inventories, buying small quantities on Spot, deferring contracting into next year. With Cameco, Kazatomprom and some utilities buying pounds in a depleted Spot market, the Spot price has found its floor near $30. Once COVID begins to wane we are expecting to see a strong re-stocking cycle where utilities will over-buy to replace their cushions and acquire the new fuel needed in 2-3 years’ time. As the waiting game continues we are seeing new interest emerging in the uranium space, with some significant gains in quite a few developers and explorers over the past few weeks. I expect that to continue in what is usually a strong seasonal period from now until April/May.
That’s a synopsis of where things stand today with respect to the Uranium bull case. A major move in uranium and related equities seems closer than ever… things move slowly in this sector… until they don’t.
- The Plot Against Small Businesses
The Plot Against Small Businesses
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/04/2020 – 18:20Authored by Ash Staub via HumanEvents.,com,
If one were to consider the upward transfer of wealth and market share to Big Business since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, one would think such economic changes were intended. After all, it’s no secret that the interests of politicians and the corporate elite align more often than not.
As we near a year of lockdowns and sheltering in place, the long-term effects of pandemic policy on the economy are becoming clearer. Almost every piece of legislation ostensibly designed to curb the spread of the coronavirus and protect workers has wreaked devastation on small businesses—while benefiting the largest corporations. Roughly 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed due to COVID-19, while big-box retailers, tech giants, and pharmaceutical manufacturers have seen record profits.
America’s small businesses currently face an attack on all fronts.
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First, there are the more visible policies (e.g., lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing requirements) that strongly discourage people from patronizing brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurants. These policies impact small businesses more than large chains and corporations. Small retailers, for example, may not have the space to effectively implement social distancing policies, and often lack an online infrastructure to support curbside pickups of retail goods.
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Second, the cost of complying with health and safety guidelines, and the corresponding fines if businesses don’t comply, have forced businesses to incur additional expenses while their revenue declines. According to the Small Business Administration, the cost of compliance disproportionately impacts small businesses, who lack the funds and infrastructure of large corporations to adapt to new regulation. Overhauling a business to accommodate remote work, for example, requires a flexibility and an investment of resources that many small businesses simply do not have. For dine-in restaurants, the vast majority of which are small businesses, switching to outdoor dining is often not even possible given the business’s location.
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Lastly, there are ever-evolving COVID-19 employment regulations that disproportionately expose small businesses to lawsuits and the subsequent legal expenses and damages that may result. The conspicuous absence of liability protection also disadvantages small businesses, as the largest corporations can spare the capital required to fight lawsuits and painlessly pay out any damages. For example, Publix, a large supermarket chain, has so far managed to avoid paying damages to the family of an employee who died of COVID-19 due to the fact that he wasn’t allowed to wear a mask at work.
Despite the fact that these policies are explicitly harmful to small businesses, they can be justified on the basis of “public health” and thereby shielded from criticism. Practically unlimited regulation (that always seems to benefit the corporate elite) can be defended, because such policies are said to be designed to ensure the health and safety of the public. Opposition to these onerous restrictions can therefore be conveniently characterized as “anti-science,” or worse, reckless and/or malicious endangerment of one’s community. As a consequence, policies that explicitly disadvantage small businesses, such as the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), can be passed under the guise of public health and worker protection without raising any alarm bells.
When considering the cumulative effects of pandemic policy, a clear pattern begins to emerge. Every substantial piece of COVID-19 legislation enacted at the federal level has harmed small businesses while benefiting large corporations. This indicates, at the very least, a willful indifference on the part of lawmakers to the plight of small businesses, but more likely, a conscious effort to disadvantage small businesses for the advantage of Big Business.
THE EFFECTS OF COVID-19 LEGISLATION
The FFCRA, passed in March of this year, requires businesses to provide two weeks of paid sick leave for quarantined employees and/or employees experiencing COVID-19 related symptoms. It also requires two weeks of paid sick leave at two-thirds the regular rate of pay for employees who need to care for quarantined individuals, such as elderly relatives or spouses. Furthermore, employers must also provide ten weeks of extended leave, also at two-thirds the regular rate of pay, for employees caring for their children due to school closures.
The FFCRA only applies to employers with fewer than 500 employees.
It sounds absurd, but it’s correct; the businesses most capable of providing these benefits are under no legal obligation to do so, while those most affected by the pandemic are expected to incur the FFCRA’s additional expenses. While the actual cost of paid leave is reimbursed through tax credits, there is no reimbursement for lost labor and productivity, and the subsequent disadvantage compared to large, FFCRA-exempt competitors. This is not to say that businesses should or should not provide these benefits—only to point out how the policy singles out and targets small businesses.
And as small businesses shut down in droves, it’s difficult to justify this competitive disadvantage. 58% of small business owners say they’re worried about closing, while 100,000 small businesses have already closed. The smallest businesses are the hardest hit: 48% of businesses with 1-4 employees claim to have been severely impacted by the new COVID-era regulations.
Furthermore, the financial burden of the FFCRA extends beyond the simple cost of compliance. As a result of the FFCRA, small businesses have been sued over violations of employment regulations at a substantially higher rate than big businesses. Despite employing 52% of the nation’s workforce, private employers with less than 500 employees (those forced to comply with the FFCRA) were the defendants in 65% of COVID-19 related employment lawsuits; employers with less than 50 employees were the defendants in 38% of lawsuits. That means the businesses least capable of contesting an employment lawsuit, much less incurring the financial burden of liability damages and legal fees, are the businesses most often sued.
Thus, the FFCRA has imposed financial obligations on small businesses while exempting big businesses. Small businesses are forced to pay the cost of complying with the FFCRA, while big businesses are not. Small businesses are at risk of FFCRA-related lawsuits; big businesses are not. The FFCRA clearly disadvantages small businesses, and expecting small businesses to incur the cost of the FFCRA while their revenue plummets, and their corporate competition profits, is a recipe for widespread small business bankruptcy.
And that is exactly what’s happening.
This is a feature, not a bug, and calls into question the true purpose of the FFCRA. There is no good-faith reason for big businesses to be exempt from the FFCRA that would also not apply to small businesses. Furthermore, if the FFCRA really was designed to protect workers, why only cover half the workforce? Why exempt the largest employers? Are Walmart employees privy to some germ-repelling magic elixir, thereby absolving Walmart of the same responsibilities demanded of small businesses? The fact of the matter is that the FFCRA is more interested in transferring the market share of small businesses to giant corporations than protecting workers.
Federal relief, or lack thereof, reinforces this claim. The CARES Act, the 2.2 trillion dollar federal stimulus bill passed in March, offers a lifeline to small businesses in the form of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a loan issued at a 1% interest rate. Yet the loan only covers roughly ten weeks of payroll expenses, and applications closed in early August. It is now early December, and further financial aid to small businesses has yet to be legislated. Moreover, while the CARES Act offers $349 billion in aid to small businesses, it provides upwards of $500 billion to large businesses, in effect rewarding the businesses already profiting off the pandemic, to the detriment of the small businesses suffering the most.
Relief in the form of liability protection is also not forthcoming. The HEALS Act, a stimulus bill which would include COVID-19 liability shields for all employers, has been tied up in the Senate since July, with much of its delay attributable to opposition to its liability protections. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is among the more vocal opponents of liability shields, arguing that businesses would be “off the hook” if an employee or customer were to contract COVID-19 at a business establishment, thereby permitting businesses to neglect health precautions. “Without any ability to hold an employer [liable],” Gillibrand argues, “then you’re putting a lot of workers and a lot of Americans across the country at grave risk.”
Even though big businesses are actively lobbying for and would benefit from liability shields, it’s clear that withholding liability protections disproportionately impacts small businesses while favoring corporations with the most capital and access to quality legal representation. A retail giant such as Target, which has unsurprisingly profited off the pandemic, can easily afford to pay out any liability damages. Moreover, Target has the resources to contest the claim in court. But a family-owned consignment store? A single lawsuit may well bankrupt the business. And as small businesses are the defendants in a significantly larger portion of COVID-19 related lawsuits, the absence of liability shields contributes to their demise.
Though the lack of liability protection legislation can partly be attributed to garden-variety legislative sclerosis and inefficiency, its absence disproportionately affects small businesses. The degree to which this is intentional is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Congress is well aware of the difficulties facing small businesses given the fact that small business stimulus legislation has been discussed since July, and that the lack of liability protection exacerbates these difficulties, but it has done nothing. This continued inaction as small business bankruptcies and lawsuits pile up is at the very least tantamount to indifference, and therefore tacit approval.
Unless our policymakers are woefully incompetent, the intent of policy cannot be divorced from its effect. And the effect of COVID-19 policy on small businesses has been devastating. Relief is nonexistent, as is the case with liability shields, or inadequate, in the case of the PPP. Public health and worker/customer protection legislation is explicitly harmful to America’s small businesses in the cases of the FFCRA, lockdowns, and onerous restrictions.
If one were extremely charitable, the lack of liability protections can be attributed to callous indifference, and the inadequacy of the PPP can be chalked up to sclerosis and bad policy. Lockdowns and health and safety obligations have public health justifications. But the FFCRA’s targeting of small businesses is indefensible. There is no reasonable explanation for the FFCRA to not apply to Big Business other than to disadvantage small businesses.
When considered together, these policies have demonstrably harmed small businesses while favoring big businesses. The systematic transfer of wealth and market space from small businesses to large corporations is entirely the result of government policy. Again, intent cannot be separated from effect, and the lack of persuasive arguments justifying the targeting of small businesses by policymakers can be explained in simple terms: pandemic policy was an intentional effort by policymakers to facilitate an upward transfer of wealth to Big Business at the expense of small business.
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