- Escobar: Maidan In Almaty? Oh Yeah, But It's Complicated
Escobar: Maidan In Almaty? Oh Yeah, But It’s Complicated
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,
Steppe on Fire: Kazakhstan’s Color Revolution
So is that much fear and loathing all about gas? Not really.
Kazakhstan was rocked into chaos virtually overnight, in principle, because of the doubling of prices for liquefied gas, which reached the (Russian) equivalent of 20 rubles per liter (compare it to an average of 30 rubles in Russia itself).
That was the spark for nationwide protests spanning every latitude from top business hub Almaty to the Caspian Sea ports of Aktau and Atyrau and even the capital Nur-Sultan, formerly Astana.
The central government was forced to roll back the gas price to the equivalent of 8 rubles a liter. Yet that only prompted the next stage of the protests, demanding lower food prices, an end of the vaccination campaign, a lower retirement age for mothers with many children and – last but not least – regime change, complete with its own slogan: Shal, ket! (“Down with the old man.”)
The “old man” is none other than national leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81, who even as he stepped down from the presidency after 29 years in power, in 2019, for all practical purposes remains the Kazakh gray eminence as head of the Security Council and the arbiter of domestic and foreign policy.
The prospect of yet another color revolution inevitably comes to mind: perhaps Turquoise-Yellow – reflecting the colors of the Kazakh national flag. Especially because right on cue, sharp observers found out that the usual suspects – the American embassy – was already “warning” about mass protests as early as in December 16, 2021.
Maidan in Almaty? Oh yeah. But it’s complicated.
Almaty in chaos
For the outside world, it’s hard to understand why a major energy exporting power such as Kazakhstan needs to increase gas prices for its own population.
The reason is – what else – unbridled neoliberalism and the proverbial free market shenanigans. Since 2019 liquefied gas is electronically traded in Kazakhstan. So keeping price caps – a decades-long custom – soon became impossible, as producers were constantly faced with selling their product below cost as consumption skyrocketed.
Everybody in Kazakhstan was expecting a price hike, as much as everybody in Kazakhstan uses liquefied gas, especially in their converted cars. And everybody in Kazakhstan has a car, as I was told, ruefully, during my last visit to Almaty, in late 2019, when I was trying in vain to find a taxi to head downtown.
It’s quite telling that the protests started in the city of Zhanaozen, smack into the oil/gas hub of Mangystau. And it’s also telling that Unrest Central immediately turned to car-addicted Almaty, the nation’s real business hub, and not the isolated, government infrastructure-heavy capital in the middle of the steppes.
At first President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev seemed to have been caught in a deer facing the headlights situation. He promised the return of price caps, installed a state of emergency/curfew both in Almaty and Mangystau (then nationwide) while accepting the current government’s resignation en masse and appointing a faceless Deputy Prime Minister, Alikhan Smailov, as interim PM until the formation of a new cabinet.
Yet that could not possibly contain the unrest. In lightning fast succession, we had the storming of the Almaty Akimat (mayor’s office); protesters shooting at the Army; a Nazarbayev monument demolished in Taldykorgan; his former residence in Almaty taken over; Kazakhtelecom disconnecting the whole country from the internet; several members of the National Guard – armored vehicles included – joining the protesters in Aktau; ATMs gone dead.
And then Almaty, plunged into complete chaos, was virtually seized by the protesters, including its international airport, which on Wednesday morning was under extra security, and in the evening had become occupied territory.
Kazakh airspace, meanwhile, had to contend with an extended traffic jam of private jets leaving to Moscow and Western Europe. Even though the Kremlin noted that Nur-Sultan had not asked for any Russian help, a “special delegation” was soon flying out of Moscow. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cautiously stressed, “we are convinced that our Kazakh friends can independently solve their internal problems”, adding, “it is important that no one interferes from the outside.”
Geostrategy talks
How could it all derail so fast?
Up to now, the succession game in Kazakhstan had been seen mostly as a hit across Northern Eurasia. Local honchos, oligarchs and the comprador elites all kept their fiefdoms and sources of income. And yet, off the record, I was told in Nur-Sultan in late 2019 there would be serious problems ahead when some regional clans would come to collect – as in confronting “the old man” Nazarbayev and the system he put in place.
Tokayev did issue the proverbial call “not to succumb to internal and external provocations” – which makes sense – yet also assured that the government “will not fall”. Well, it was already falling, even after an emergency meeting trying to address the tangled web of socioeconomic problems with a promise that all “legitimate demands” by the protesters will be met.
This did not play out as a classic regime change scenario – at least initially. The configuration was of a fluid, amorphous state of chaos, as the – fragile – Kazakh institutions of power were simply incapable of comprehending the wider social malaise. A competent political opposition is non-existent: there’s no political exchange. Civil society has no channels to express itself.
So yes: there’s a riot goin’ on – to quote American rhythm’n blues. And everyone is a loser. What is still not exactly clear is which conflicting clans are flaming the protests – and what is their agenda in case they’d have a shot at power. After all, no “spontaneous” protests can pop up simultaneously all over this vast nation virtually overnight.
Kazakhstan was the last republic to leave the collapsing USSR over three decades ago, in December 1991. Under Nazarbayev, it immediately engaged in a self-described “multi-vector” foreign policy. Up to now, Nur-Sultan was skillfully positioning itself as a prime diplomatic mediator – from discussions on the Iranian nuclear program as early as 2013 to the war in/on Syria from 2016. The target: to solidify itself as the quintessential bridge between Europe and Asia.
The Chinese-driven New Silk Roads, or BRI, were officially launched by Xi Jinping at Nazarbayev University in September 2013. That happened to swiftly dovetail with the Kazakh concept of Eurasian economic integration, crafted after Nazarbayev’s own government spending project, Nurly Zhol (“Bright Path”), designed to turbo-charge the economy after the 2008-9 financial crisis.
In September 2015, in Beijing, Nazarbayev aligned Nurly Zhol with BRI, de facto propelling Kazakhstan to the heart of the new Eurasian integration order. Geostrategically, the largest landlocked nation on the planet became the prime interplay territory of the Chinese and Russian visions, BRI and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
A diversionary tactic
For Russia, Kazakhstan is even more strategic than for China. Nur-Sultan signed the CSTO treaty in 2003. It’s a key member of the EAEU. Both nations have massive military-technical ties and conduct strategic space cooperation in Baikonur. Russian has the status of an official language, spoken by 51% of the republic’s citizens.
At least 3.5 million Russians live in Kazakhstan. It’s still early to speculate about a possible “revolution” tinged with national liberation colors were the old system to eventually collapse. And even if that happened, Moscow will never lose all of its considerable political influence.
So the immediate problem is to assure Kazakhstan’s stability. The protests must be dispersed. There will be plenty of economic concessions. Permanent destabilizing chaos simply cannot be tolerated – and Moscow knows it by heart. Another – rolling – Maidan is out of the question.
The Belarus equation has shown how a strong hand can operate miracles. Still, the CSTO agreements do not cover assistance in case of internal political crises – and Tokayev did not seem to be inclined to make such a request.
Until he did. He called for the CSTO to intervene to restore order. There will be a military enforced curfew. And Nur-Sultan may even confiscate the assets of US and UK companies which are allegedly sponsoring the protests.
This is how Nikol Pashinyan, chairman of the CSTO Collective Security Council and Prime Minister of Armenia, framed it: Tokayev invoked a “threat to national security” and the “sovereignty” of Kazakhstan, “caused, inter alia, by outside interference.” So the CSTO “decided to send peacekeeping forces” to normalize the situation, “for a limited period of time”.
The usual destabilizing suspects are well known. They may not have the reach, the political influence, and the necessary amount of Trojan horses to keep Kazakhstan on fire indefinitely.
At least the Trojan horses themselves are being very explicit. They want an immediate release of all political prisoners; regime change; a provisional government of “reputable” citizens; and – what else – “withdrawal of all alliances with Russia.”
And then it all gets down to the level of ridiculous farce, as the EU starts calling on Kazakh authorities to “respect the right to peaceful protests.” As in allowing total anarchy, robbery, looting, hundreds of vehicles destroyed, attacks with assault rifles, ATMs and even the Duty Free at Almaty airport completely plundered.
This analysis (in Russian) covers some key points, mentioning, “the internet is full of pre-arranged propaganda posters and memos to the rebels” and the fact that “the authorities are not cleaning up the mess, as Lukashenko did in Belarus.”
Slogans so far seem to originate from plenty of sources – extolling everything from a “western path” to Kazakhstan to polygamy and Sharia law: “There is no single goal yet, it has not been identified. The result will come later. It is usually the same. The elimination of sovereignty, external management and, finally, as a rule, the formation of an anti-Russian political party.”
Putin, Lukashenko and Tokayev spent a long time over the phone, at the initiative of Lukashenko. The leaders of all CSTO members are in close contact. A master game plan – as in a massive “anti-terrorist operation” – has already been hatched. Gen. Gerasimov will personally supervise it.
Now compare it to what I learned from two different, high-ranking intel sources.
The first source was explicit: the whole Kazakh adventure is being sponsored by MI6 to create a new Maidan right before the Russia/US-NATO talks in Geneva and Brussels next week, to prevent any kind of agreement.
Significantly, the “rebels” maintained their national coordination even after the internet was disconnected.
The second source is more nuanced: the usual suspects are trying to force Russia to back down against the collective West by creating a major distraction in their Eastern front, as part of a rolling strategy of chaos all along Russia’s borders.
That may be a clever diversionary tactic, but Russian military intel is watching. Closely. And for the sake of the usual suspects, this better may not be interpreted – ominously – as a war provocation.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 01/07/2022 – 02:00 - Expect A "Blue Wave Of Gun Control" In 2022
Expect A “Blue Wave Of Gun Control” In 2022
Submitted by The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).,
Governing By Executive Fiat.
It’s something that the Biden Administration knows quite well. Not even a week into the new year, Merrick Garland, Attorney General at the Department of Justice, announced a new “rule” for Federal Firearms Licensees, also known as FFLs.
The “Rule” is as follows: FFLs must have “safe storage” options for sale. The government is mandating that FFLs sell locks and safes. It also changes the definition of an antique firearm; you can read the change here.
While this might sound wholly bland and harmless, keep in mind that the DOJ can use the 1968 Gun Control Act to add new rules and regulations to gun ownership without passing any laws. This change means that unelected bureaucrats in executive branch positions can usurp federal power to make “law” as they see fit.
It is precisely this attitude that we’ve seen throughout 2021 from the Biden Administration, the Department of Justice, and the ATF. There’s no reason to expect that they would shift their plans for 2022.
Just because gun owners were able to make their voices heard and stop the disastrous nomination of David Chipman to head the ATF doesn’t mean that it’s all over. 2021 has been full of significant accomplishments; we’ve added more constitutional carry states and 2nd amendment sanctuaries. Support for gun control has hit its lowest point, and almost 8 million new gun owners have decided to exercise their constitutional rights. That being said, we’re headed into year number two of one of the most hostile administrations to gun rights in recent history.
We can make a few predictions about what the Biden admin may do (and to a lesser extent blue state governors as well) but let’s take a look at some recent actions first.
In 2020, the ATF raided a company called Diversified Machine. Diversified Machine sells Solvent Traps. The ATF now considers these devices to be Suppressors. Since they raided Diversified Machine, the ATF has a list of all of Diversified Machine’s customers.
A few days ago, the ATF sent customers of Diversified Machine letters saying that they were actually in possession of a suppressor and that those needed to be turned in immediately or those customers would face felony charges.
What separated Diversified Machine’s solvent traps from any other solvent trap on the market? Well, their solvent traps were dimpled on the end caps.
Prior to these letters, the ATF offered no guidance on what they did/did not consider to be a suppressor, or solvent trap, dimpled end caps or not. Solvent traps are popular with Form 1 Suppressor groups online, as they can be purchased, an ATF Form 1 can be filed, and then said solvent trap can be converted into a suppressor.
This behavior is par for the course with the ATF and should come as no surprise for long-time gun owners. In 2021 we saw them change rules on 80% kits, pistol braces, and the Rare Breed Forced-Reset-Trigger.
What’s interesting about this letter to Diversified Machine customers, though, is that the ATF states explicitly that the customer is in possession of a suppressor. Even though the words “readily convertible” are used in conjunction, we can only infer that the ATF is considering these solvent traps as sold to be actual suppressors, making the purchase of a solvent trap a violation of the 1968 GCA and the National Firearms Act, or NFA.
We should expect a forthcoming “rule” on solvent traps that will turn millions of Americans into felons overnight. What’s worse is the ATF hasn’t stopped at solvent traps; they’ve started investigating people who have bought fuel filters online. According to Ammoland, Federal Agents visited an unnamed Florida resident who had purchased fuel filters online. The Agents demanded that he hand over the filters, even though he did not own firearms. Another example of wackiness, a YouTuber named “Truck Master” was told to turn over the diesel truck filters he was using for his truck builds under suspicion that they were illegal suppressors.
The question we have to ask is, how far is too far? The ATF has decided on a whim that fuel filters and solvent traps fit their definition of a suppressor, even though both items have legitimate uses beyond being firearm suppressors.
In 2022, we should expect the ATF and DOJ to march forward with the idea that anything that is “readily convertible” to be a firearm, is in fact, a firearm in the eyes of the Feds. It’s looking grim for 80% kits like Polymer80. How long until it’s an NFA/GCA violation if you have a block of metal and CNC knowledge. There’s not much separating those two things.
We should also expect a “Blue Wave” of gun control legislation and proposals on the state and federal level, with politicians and governors doubling down on unpopular gun policy. Considering how low Biden is currently polling and the 2022 midterms fastly approaching, gun control is an easy issue for the President to pull out and energize his base. Doubling down on gun control will also keep his major donors like Bloomberg and Soros from the anti-gun lobby happy. Blue state governors will, of course, follow suit. We saw Gavin Newsom of CA recently propose gun control as a way to spit in the face of gun owners and one-up the Texas abortion law at the same time.
Expect the Biden Admin to try and move forward with already proposed rules regarding pistol braces as well. Currently, the DOJ has asked for delays on the final rule’s implementation as they try to figure out a way to get around all the impending lawsuits from the pro-gun lobby.
I also expect Biden to nominate a Gun Czar, as an appeasement to the Gun Control lobby, after being such a disappointment that the mainstream media have run headlines like this.
So, what can we do to stop this? Right now, because of the way that the ATF is using current law to add additional regulations, our best bet of stopping the ATF from continuing to be able to act in this manner is the bump stock case currently making its way to the supreme court. The case is Aposhian v. Garland, and it tackles why the ATF has been able to, on a whim, decide that items are illegal. That being a legal doctrine called the “Chevron Deference.” This is a legal test in which a court may not substitute its own interpretation for a reasonable interpretation made by an administrative agency.
The question isn’t if Aposhian v. Garland makes it to the supreme court; it’s when. A panel of 16 judges on the 6th circuit just had a tie vote (8-8) on the case, making it even more necessary for the Supreme Court to weigh in on this hotly debated issue.
We’ve seen a clear pathway that the anti-gun lobby is taking in our coverage of gun control issues. Using the NFA, 1968 GCA, FOPA, and other gun control laws on the books, they’ve managed to ban bump stocks and inch closer and closer to regulating semi-automatic firearms under the NFA or outright ban them. This Case, Aposhian v. Garland, would put a significant roadblock in front of the ATF by taking away their ability to regulate items without congressional approval.
With hotly contested midterms and Presidential approval ratings plummeting, The Biden Administration will be looking for any scapegoat to rally their base back to vote. Gun control will likely be that issue, and gun owners should be ready to get out and once again make their voices heard.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 23:40 - Elon Musk's "Death Trap" Underground Vegas Tunnel Hit With Traffic Jam
Elon Musk’s “Death Trap” Underground Vegas Tunnel Hit With Traffic Jam
A video has gone viral on Reddit of the Las Vegas Loop, an underground express transportation tunnel designed and built by Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to help alleviate traffic congestion on convention streets, showing everything the tunnel promised not to do: cause traffic jams.
The Boring Company’s Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) Loop system is a 1.7-mile tunnel under the Las Vegas Strip that stretches from the convention center with three stations, the South, the West, and the Central. It allegedly slashes the above-ground 45-minute walk to a two-minute drive.
Musk founded The Boring Co. in 2017 with the hopes of solving traffic problems in major cities by creating underground tunnels for Tesla vehicles. However, this is the first instance where Musk’s grand tunnel idea has hit a snag, or rather a traffic jam.
The viral video titled “Lol. Elon Musk’s Boring company has traffic jams. I was told it was impossible” was posted on Reddit on Thursday morning. It already has 21k upvotes and 3k comments.
Redditors were not that enthusiastic about the tunnel. Many voiced concerns about the safety of the tunnel, with one person calling it a “death trap.”
Another said, “I’m surprised it’s even legal. No lighting, no ventilation, no fire detection or suppression, not enough space between the cars and the wall to walk out… They are asking for trouble. If somehow a car catches fire, people will die.”
“Not any fire. A fucking battery fire burning brightly, extremely hot and producing poisonous gas,” someone else said.
One Redditor said, “Imagine having to go in reverse because the person in front of you had their car catch on fire. But then you just run into more people going in reverse… If you exit your car you’re going to inhale poisonous toxins… But it’s getting hotter in your car by the second.”
So Musk, maybe back to the drawing boards. The big idea to solve traffic congestion with underground tunnels appears not to be working. Also, people think it’s a death trap.
If you frequent Vegas, there are efficient monorails on the surface that do just fine.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 23:20 - Victor Davis Hanson: Who Are The Real Insurrectionists?
Victor Davis Hanson: Who Are The Real Insurrectionists?
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
Recently, Democrats have been despondent over President Joe Biden’s sinking poll numbers. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support.
As a result, the left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when they expect to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when they fear losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup.
A cynic might suggest that they praise democracy when they get elected, only to claim it is broken when they lose.
Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.
After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old, 50-state union?
Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?
The Constitution also clearly states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of former president Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?
Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?
The left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.
Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?
New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration potentially lifesaving new COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.”
The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?
In summer 2020, many local- and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity — if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.
Currently, the Biden administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law.
The administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border — in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.
The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated.
Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers.
At various times in our nation’s history — 1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63 — America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.
In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy.
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Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.”
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Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and herself claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.
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The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command.
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Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander-in-chief.
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Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.
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Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress, again, mostly with impunity.
All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Trump.
The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.
We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish one-day rioters on Jan. 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property — all under the banner of revolutionary justice.
Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 23:00 -
- Risk Parity ETF Suffers Biggest Drop Since Covid Crash
Risk Parity ETF Suffers Biggest Drop Since Covid Crash
Earlier today we joked that while many on Wall Street were lamenting their fate, it could be even worse: they could be running a risk-parity fund.
It could be worse, you could be running a risk-parity fund
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) January 6, 2022
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But for investors in one particular fund, however, this wasn’t a joke.
While secretive risk-parity hedge funds such as Bridgewater will reveal their losses from the recent market turmoil in due time, there is one investment vehicle which invests in portfolios of stocks and bonds and which reveals in real time just how much pain its has suffered as a result of the concurrent plunge in equities and Treasuries in recent days.
The $1.6 billion RPAR Risk Parity exchange-traded fund (ticker RPAR) – the biggest of its kind – has dropped 3.4% in the five trading days through Thursday, on course for the worst five-day streak since March 2020. Its systematic strategy, popularized by Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, allocates across asset classes based on risk and tends to suffer outsize losses when markets fall together.
According to Bloomberg, the cross-asset volatility is also bad timing for RPAR’s new sister fund launched this week, which seeks to amp up returns with extra leverage (yes, that’s leverage upon leverage). The RPAR Ultra Risk Parity ETF (UPAR) has fallen in each of its first three trading days, including a 1.5% slump on Wednesday — a drop that equals some of RPAR’s worst moves in the past year.
Both funds traded lower on Thursday in New York as the S&P 500 fluctuated and Treasuries extended their retreat.
While risk-parity indexes hit records in 2021 as reopening optimism fueled stocks and commodities while dovish central banks kept bond yields in check, runaway inflation and the Fed’s hiking intentions are disrupting the “everything rally” and making life for balanced portfolio investors mierable.
Worse, since risk parity funds target a level of risk by allocating across assets based on their volatility and then levering up, that means that during times of market turbulence they can be forced to unwind positions exacerbating price moves. That’s what happened during March 2020 when Treasury yields first exploded then crashed.
RPAR and its levered cousing, UPAR, are actively managed but seek to match the returns of an index across four major asset classes: global equities, commodities, Treasuries and Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 22:40 - Shift To Quality Intensifies Thanks To Hawkish Fed
Shift To Quality Intensifies Thanks To Hawkish Fed
By Ishika Mookerjee, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and analyst
Demand for quality stocks is strengthening in Asia as the Federal Reserve dials up its hawkish commentary, making riskier firms look more vulnerable with borrowing costs expected to rise.
The MSCI AC Asia ex-Japan Quality Index has climbed about 1% since the end of October as the Fed announced its plan to taper asset purchases, while the MSCI AC Asia ex Japan Index has slumped 4%. The gauge of stocks with a high return on equity, stable earnings growth and low leverage trounced the broader benchmark by about nine percentage points last year, a better relative performance than that seen in its global peer.
“Asian quality stocks tend to outperform during global slowdown, inflationary regime in Asia and in the following 12 months post China slowdown,” Sanford C. Bernstein analysts Rupal Agarwal and Anusha Madireddy wrote in a note on Wednesday. There’s also support from positive earnings revisions and a historical discount to low-quality stocks, they added.
Investors are dumping riskier companies, yet the outperformance of the quality gauge suggests they are still comfortable betting on the more mature tech companies in the region. The sector had the biggest weighting in the gauge as of November with software firms Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services as well as chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing among the largest constituents. Their shares are up 9%, 12% and 9% respectively since the end of October, despite pressure on the global tech sector
While the jury’s still out on China’s internet behemoths, semiconductor stocks are expected to fare better in Asia amid an ongoing chip shortage. The 12-month forward earnings estimates for Samsung Electronics and TSMC have risen more than 20% in the past year and over 50% for SK Hynix. That’s while the MSCI Asia Pacific Communication Services Index — which includes Tencent — saw a drop of 13% in its earnings estimates.
Given inflationary pressures, high-yielding quality stocks in Taiwan and China are preferred by Bernstein. “We are most bullish on staples, tech and energy while being most negative towards discretionary and industrials,” the analysts wrote.
The median forecast in Bloomberg’s survey of analysts anticipates the FOMC will raise its policy rate twice this year and three times next.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 22:21 - Unvaxxed Aussies Told They Won't Be Allowed To Exercise Or Go To Work
Unvaxxed Aussies Told They Won’t Be Allowed To Exercise Or Go To Work
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Unvaccinated Australians in the Northern Territory have been put under a new lockdown during which they won’t be allowed to go outside to exercise or travel to work.
Yes, really.
The onerous new measures were announced by NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner in response to the detection of 256 new cases of COVID-19, including 27 cases of community transmission.
“The fully vaccinated can continue as they were. For people who are not vaccinated, lockdown rules will apply to everyone aged 16 and above,” Mr Gunner said.
The unvaccinated will be banned from traveling further than 30km from their home unless they’re traveling to hospital.
Gunner said that unjabbed Aussies in the region will be forbidden from taking an hour of outdoor exercise and won’t be allowed to travel to their job.
“Unlike previous lockdown rules, unvaccinated people will not be able to leave home to go to work or for exercise,” he asserted.
NT 🇦🇺 The Insanity Continues 💥 So it begins…Aus gets the UNWAXXED lockdown. UNWAXXED have ONLY 3 reasons to leave home, Essential Shopping, Medical Treatment or Care Giving…No WORK, no EXERCISE nothing…Welcome to Full Bore Covid1984 people, it’s time to Rise🔥👇👊 pic.twitter.com/ACTEcrwz4z
— 𝙍𝙄𝙎𝙀𝙈𝙀𝙇𝘽𝙊𝙐𝙍𝙉𝙀 (@risemelbourne) January 6, 2022
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The rules are being introduced despite the fact that across the entire territory, only 23 people are in hospital with COVID-19 and just two are in the ICU.
Fully vaccinated people will not be subject to any further restrictions, despite the fact that they can still spread the virus.
Indeed, a new study out of Denmark found that the Omicron variant spreads faster within vaccinated people.
According to a summary of the study, “Omicron spreads faster than Delta among those who are fully vaccinated, and even higher between those who have received booster shots.”
Australia continues to pursue its disastrous ‘zero COVID’ policy at the expense of fundamental human rights.
The Northern Territory region has set up a network of COVID internment camps, including one at Howard Springs centre near Darwin, where people aren’t allowed to leave.
Last month, Australian police arrested three camp inmates who tried to escape in the middle of the night.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 22:20 - Russia May Sentence Pedophile Rapists To Life In Arctic Prison
Russia May Sentence Pedophile Rapists To Life In Arctic Prison
Repeat child sex offenders in Russia could be sent to hard labor penal colonies in the Arctic, where they would be forced to work in Siberian mines, according a plan floated by Parliamentary Speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin.
The new legislation was presented after the horrific murder of a five-year-old girl, who was abducted by a serial pedophile and his lover, before being raped and stabbed to death.
Veronika Nikolayeva had been playing near her mother’s workplace in Kostroma, and a video showed how she was snatched before being abused.
The helpless girl ‘struggled and fought back’ but passersby did not pay attention to her distress – and the men took her to their hostel.
Her corpse was later found in a duffle bag as the suspects, named Denis Gerasimov, 44, and Vadim Belyakov, 24, planned to dispose of her body.
…
As the girl’s body was removed from the suspects’ hostel, a mob of locals demanded to be allowed to lynch the suspects. The suspects are understood to have been in a long term relationship since the younger man was underage. The men told interrogators that the crime was ‘spontaneous’, it was reported. The younger one ‘suggested that his partner catch the girl and make fun of her’.
The video shows one suspect carrying the kidnapped girl down snowy streets, while the other walks alongside. When police raided the room shared by the suspects in a hostel, they found the girl’s body hidden in a duffle bag, say law enforcement sources. –Daily Mail
Volodin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, called the child’s abuse and death a “terrible tragedy,” which illustrated the need for tougher laws against pedophiles.
“One of the detained men turned out to be a formerly convicted paedophile,” he said, adding “Let’s do everything for the law on life sentences for paedophiles to be adopted in January.”
One of the suspects was named as Denis Gerasimov, 44 (left), earlier jailed for paedophile offences including producing child pornography. The other suspect Vadim Belyakov, 24 (right), reportedly has a conviction for theft (via the Daily Mail) “Those convicted for such crimes should serve life sentences in the harshest conditions – in the extreme north (of Russia) or in mines,” he continued, adding: “These bastards should undergo the hardest labour, so they remember the crimes they committed every day – and regret them.”
“They cannot be called human,” he said.
The idea was supported by influential MP, Alexander Khinstein, who said “‘It is necessary to adopt our bill on life punishment for paedophile-rapists as soon as possible,” adding that all sex attackers released from prison should be forced to wear electronic tags.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 22:00 - Seattle Police Officers Falsified Reports About Proud Boys Moving Toward 'CHOP': Watchdog
Seattle Police Officers Falsified Reports About Proud Boys Moving Toward ‘CHOP’: Watchdog
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours):
Seattle police officers falsified a report of armed Proud Boys members heading toward the autonomous zone in the city in 2020, a watchdog found.
The Seattle Police Department East Precinct at Seattle’s Capitol Hill in June 2020. (Echo Liu/The Epoch Times) The Seattle Police Department abandoned a precinct on June 8, 2020, and activists soon after established an armed protest zone in the area known by some as CHOP.
That same day, officers over the radio said armed members of the Proud Boys, a right-wing group that has clashed with members of the far-left Antifa network, were heading towards the area where the autonomous zone cropped up.
“We’re going to be the one taking my group down around city hall to monitor the group of the Proud Boys gathering right now,” one officer told a dispatcher.
“Small group, possible Proud Boys. It looks like a few of them might be open carry,” another said.
A third officer later said one of the group was carrying a gun and that the group “is very boisterous tonight.”
“Hearing from the Proud Boys group. They are not very happy with the response in the audience. They may be looking for somewhere else for confrontation,” the first officer said.
According to a journalist who was in the autonomous zone, the string of communications prompted many people to go grab firearms and the event transitioned from being peaceful to something entirely different. However, video footage from the scene showed at least some individuals already armed.
Interviewed by the Seattle Office Police Accountability, the officer credited with coming up with the effort said officers put forth “misinformation” because they knew they would be overheard.
“[There was] no intent to put any kind of false narrative out there, as far as like Proud Boys, or anything, that was not the guidance that I gave to those. I just wanted to see if that was something that would, that could actually work, but it was all more routine kind of movement, you know, we’re going to go here to there, let’s deliver food, let’s do that kind of stuff like that, just to kind of see what the reaction would be,” the officer, who was a captain at the time, told investigators (pdf).
The officer, who has since retired, said he did not believe the transmissions prompted people in the autonomous zone to grab weapons, adding that officers had already been injured by armed people there.
A second officer, who was already retired when interviewed, said the captain had asked him to “organize some folks that could broadcast anything that was mundane and kind of focus some attention on a location different than where the main police and protest interactions were happening.”
He said including the Proud Boys was part of making the ruse “seem realistic.” But the first officer claimed using the group went against the guidance he gave to his colleague.
Former Police Chief Carmen Best appeared to be unaware of the plot, investigators said. The assistant chief of patrol operations said he knew of the misinformation effort but did not know the Proud Boys were mentioned.
“Given the volatility situation, I think everyone is trying to do the best they could try to resolve a very complex situation, very dynamic circumstances, again, there’s no attempt to instill fear or create alarm, I think, really, the goal was to try and without using force, move the crowd or get the crowd somehow distracted away from the precinct so potentially we could take the action to reoccupy the space,” the assistant chief said.
The Seattle Office Police Accountability attributed responsibility for the ruse to the captain, who it said abused law enforcement discretion by not providing sufficient guidelines, not adequately supervising it, and did not document any part of the effort.
The second officer also bore responsibility, the watchdog said. The officers who carried out the fake broadcast did, too, but the watchdog removed the allegations against them, blaming their supervisors for what happened.
A Seattle police spokesman told The Epoch Times that the findings have not been reviewed by the chain of command or Police Chief Adrian Diaz. He declined further comment.
The autonomous zone was eventually ordered disbanded after multiple shootings took place. The city was sued by several people over allowing the zone to remain in place.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 21:40 - Chicago Thieves 'Boast' Of Ease Of Store Break-Ins By Dumping Loot On Democrat Governor's Lawn
Chicago Thieves ‘Boast’ Of Ease Of Store Break-Ins By Dumping Loot On Democrat Governor’s Lawn
Chicago police have confirmed that a high-end Burberry store on the city’s central Michigan Ave. was robbed no less than two times this week, with the second break-in coming early Thursday morning. The first instance was Tuesday morning, with the burglaries being especially brazen given they took place in daylight hours, or just before dawn. The Tuesday incident involved five men in a White SUV, but apparently with no other leads or identifiers. So naturally they hit the same site again, plus others.
But as CWB Chicago details of the second break-in, it appears the criminals are positively boasting about the ease of mass theft in a seemingly “lawless” windy city: “A group of armed burglars broke into two Lakeview convenience stores, dumped their stolen cash registers in front of Gov. JB Pritzker’s home, and then burglarized the Burberry store on Michigan Avenue early Thursday.”
Image: NBC Chicago It appears to be the same criminal gang, and what’s more is that police indicated it all happened in under 45 minutes. They’re believed to have escaped with an estimated $100,000 in merchandise from the Burberry store, with other loot from the separate stores as yet unknown.
According to further details for the spree, “Burglars broke into Apple Bite, a liquor store at 2919 North Broadway, around 4:10 a.m. and then burglarized Belmont Harbor Market, 401 West Belmont, around 4:35 a.m., according to separate police reports. They took cash, registers, liquor, and tobacco products.”
It’s hard to imagine the purpose of taking the chance of casually going by the governor’s Chicago residence to dump presumably empty cash registers in front of the home, other than to “boast” and in effect rub the Democrat governor’s face in it.
The bizarre antics come amid a spate of break-ins where thieves are breaching small Chicago stores with ease. Perhaps in a strange and hugely ironic way, the thieves themselves are seeking to demonstrate the fact directly to the governor.
Is this the equivalent of putting a Horse Head in Pritzker’s bed?https://t.co/7bU8IKIxR6
— Jim Bianco biancoresearch.eth (@biancoresearch) January 6, 2022
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“Late-night burglary sprees targeting small stores for liquor, cigarettes, and cash registers have been an ongoing problem across the North Side for several weeks, the Thursday CWB Chicago report highlights.
“Some stores, including Belmont Harbor Market, which was targeted this morning, have been hit twice” it underscored. And here’s the topper from ABC7 news: “No one is in custody for either incident.”
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 21:20 - The Vaccine Is A Dud, But That Won't Stop Push For Digital IDs
The Vaccine Is A Dud, But That Won’t Stop Push For Digital IDs
Authored by Jeffrey Barrett via American Thinker (emphasis ours),
As time goes on, we are learning more and more about Covid 19 and the Covid 19 vaccines. To date, the most important and surprising information about the vaccines is that they do not prevent the vaccinated from contracting or transmitting the virus. The irony is that the CDC, a government agency, readily admits this[i] but other sectors of the government are carrying on as if this vitally important new information did not exist at all.
Take for example Biden’s OSHA which, before it was temporarily halted by a Circuit Court ruling, ordered the unvaccinated but not the vaccinated employees of private companies to undergo inconvenient weekly Covid tests even though other parts of the government were admitting that the vaccinated transmit the virus as readily as the unvaccinated. The whole moral justification of forcing people to take the vaccine is to protect others even if the “hesitant” don’t want to risk taking the jab due to the escalating problem of vaccine-related deaths and serious injuries.[ii] But we now know that the vaccine is a dud. While it can reduce symptoms of Covid, it cannot prevent the vaccinated from catching and transmitting Covid. And yet the government is acting as if none of this matters and is continuing to push harsh mandates upon those who do not want to play vaccine roulette and take the risk of a vaccine injury.
Again as time goes on, it is becoming increasingly evident that the reason why the Biden administration is demonstrably not “following the science“[iii] is that the irrational and probably unconstitutional vaccine mandates are not about public health at all but more likely about the implementation of a universal digital identification program that governments are labeling “vaccine passports.”
To understand why the government seems determined to tag every citizen of every age with a digital ID, it is first necessary to understand the attitudinal evolution of political elites in Western countries. These elites appear to be losing their faith in the classical liberal emphasis on individual human freedom that was intellectually nurtured in the West by such thinkers as Kant, Voltaire, Locke, Bastiat, Mill, and Spencer and attained its clearest concrete political expression in the American Constitutional Republic. The essence of this revolution in political thought and practice is that it gave common people protection against the potential abuse of power of their ruling elites. Such protections included political theory that rooted individual rights in natural law and Divine Will as well as practical institutions such as the division of power between the states and central government, the further division of those powers between the legislature, executive, and judiciary, the rule of law, courts of law, the Bill of Rights, privacy rights, property rights, elections and so forth.
Despite considerable differences, Western elites used to broadly agree on the moral necessity of protecting the people against the potential abuse of power of those who controlled a society’s instruments of coercion such as the police and military. This appears to be no longer case. Western elites from the political, commercial, and media worlds regularly meet in events and “training schools”[iv] sponsored by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to discuss the need for a whole new kind of society where people own no personal property, have little or no personal privacy, are heavily dependent upon their governments for the goods and services they consume, the location of their homes and where and how often they can travel. All this illiberalism is couched in terms of a new kind of “sustainable,” “inclusive,” “equitable” quasi-utopian society[v] not unlike the vaporous visions that Marx used to conjure up in his early writings.
The reason for this abandonment of traditional Western ideals appears to be their belief that these ideals no longer work in the post-World War II era. At the beginning of that era, Western elites were still largely committed to civil liberties but their commitment to economic liberty and constrained government was considerably less than that of earlier generations of leaders. Then increasingly post-World War II elites began to strive to seek and sustain their power by claiming they could proactively provide their voters with a level of economic wealth, economic security, and an overall social “safety” environment never before seen in human history. The economic justification for these escalating promises was a form of neo- Keynesianism. The economist John Maynard Keynes did not trust the markets to correct themselves during recurring business cycles and so advocated that government go into debt to “stimulate” stagnant economies out of recessions and then pay off that debt during the subsequent booms and budgetary surpluses brought about by the proactive economic managers. Western politicians quickly forgot about the “paying off” part and gradually over the postwar decades increased the public debt to the stupendous levels we see today. Western central banks also suppressed interest rates thereby incentivizing private companies and consumers to heap unprecedented private debt onto the unprecedented public debt.
Today the European and Japanese bond markets are in such shambles that only their central banks will purchase their government debt. And as economists have been pointing out for years, governments cannot possibly pay for all the promises they have made to their voters for future benefits such as pensions, medical care, and other cradle-to-grave comforts. The American federal government alone has, by some measures, a 200 Trillion gap between future expected revenues and future promised benefits.[vi] Little wonder that today’s Western elites are giving up on traditional Western liberties because they know that once the hard times hit, the masses will use those liberties such as freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to protest, the courts, and elections as weapons to lash back at the “establishments” in power.
The establishments, of course, do not want to give up their wealth, status, and power, and so must find some way of depriving the masses of these dangerous liberties, exert more authority over them and turn them from free citizens into subjects.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 21:00 - Here's What The Fed's Quantitative Tightening Will Look Like
Here’s What The Fed’s Quantitative Tightening Will Look Like
As we noted last night, the December FOMC meeting minutes included a lengthy discussion of the timing and speed of Fed balance sheet shrinkage (quantitative tightening or “QT”), an unexpected twist which sent risk assets and Treasurys tumbling. The broad message appears to be that QT will start sooner than it did in the previous tightening cycle, and proceed at a faster pace although as the Fed’s Bullard (who is a voting member this year) observed, the runoff could be passive, i.e., not involve actual selling but merely be the result of maturing securities held by the Fed.
In any case, in a note from BofA economist Aditya Bhave, he argues that the Fed’s balance sheet policy will remain accommodative for the next several quarters for several reasons:
- The Fed has more than doubled its balance sheet during the pandemic.
- Therefore it will have to reinvest a larger quantity of maturing Treasuries even while it is shrinking its balance sheet.
- BofA expects QT to start in 4Q 2022, but the stance of Fed balance sheet policy will remain more accommodative than it was before the pandemic through end-2023.
With regard to point two, a frustrated Steve Liesman pointed out yesterday that what the Fed is doing is a “historic absurdity” and noted that “the fed is talking about aggressively reducing its balance sheet while at the same time adding assets to that balance sheet. I think that’s the monetary policy equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.”
I can’t let the historic absurdity of current monetary policy pass w/out remark: the fed is talking about aggressively reducing its balance sheet while at the same time adding assets to that balance sheet. I think that’s the monetary policy equivalent of a dog chasing its tail.
— Steve Liesman (@steveliesman) January 5, 2022
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Fed’s (now constant) absurdity aside, what markets want to know is what the Fed’s QT will look like, and for the answer we again turn to BofA, whose strategists think the Fed will allow $10BN of maturing coupon-paying Treasuries to run off its balance sheet in the first month of QT (which they expect will start in October 2022). This “redemption cap” – shown in yellow on the chart below – should rise to $40bn by January 2023 and then remain at that level. They also assume a $30bn redemption cap for Agency MBS.
In total, this would allow the Fed’s balance sheet to shrink by $1.2tn through end-2024. They think the balance sheet could be cut further in future years, all the way down to $4.7tn, i.e. about 15% larger than its pre-pandemic level (spoiler alert: there is no way the market will allow this type of balance sheet shrinkage without a historic tantrum first).
Here BofA takes a quick detour to note that there is considerable debate about the exact mechanism through which balance sheet policy affects markets, with three pathways generally viewed as important. Some investors think it is the size of the Fed’s balance sheet that matters. In that case Fed balance sheet policy is clearly easier than it was pre-Covid. Others – such as this website – think that flow matters, i.e., the change in the balance sheet, or said otherwise, the size of asset purchases net of maturities, is the key variable. Then balance sheet shrinkage – QT – would certainly imply a tighter policy stance than the flat balance sheet policy of early 2020.
A third view is that gross asset purchases are what matter. This is the view that BofA sympathizes with. In the “gross” world, the Fed replaces maturing assets via “add-ons” in Treasury auctions, or as Liesman put it, the Fed is adding to its balance sheet at the same time as it is shrinking it all the while it’s chasing its tail. For example, if the Fed plans to re-invest $10bn in an auction, the Treasury would reduce the size of its auction by this amount and then allocate $10bn worth of securities to the Fed at the market-clearing price. Markets price in this mechanism: the larger the add-on, the less is the supply that markets have to absorb, and the higher would be the market-clearing price.
Theory aside, let’s look at some numbers: since the Fed’s balance sheet has more than doubled during the pandemic, keeping it steady would require significantly more reinvestment than would have been the case before the pandemic. Specifically, to keep its balance sheet steady as a result if upcoming maturities, the Fed would have to purchase (i.e., reinvest) nearly $400bn worth of coupon-paying Treasuries in 2Q and 3Q 2022, of which 59% were bought during the pandemic. This, according to BofA and it is correct here, would buffer the impact of rate hikes. Recall that most banks are now forecasting three to four hikes this year, as the Fed responds to sticky high inflation.
What about QT?
The chart below compares BofA’s QT forecast to the maturity schedule of coupon-paying Treasuries on the Fed’s balance sheet. The light blue bars represent Treasuries that were purchased in pandemic-era QE and the dark blue bars show those that were on the balance sheet pre-Covid. Quantities below the QT redemption cap (the yellow line) would run off the balance sheet while those above the cap would be reinvested (i.e., re-purchased)
Notice that in all but three months through end-2023, the redemption cap is less than the amount of maturing coupon-paying Treasuries that were purchased during the pandemic. Therefore in 2022 and 2023, reinvestments will generally exceed the amount of maturing assets that the Fed owned before Covid.
In other words, the likely path of reinvestment under QT would have amounted to QE relative to the pre-pandemic Fed balance sheet.
The bottom line is despite impending QT, the stance of the Fed’s balance sheet policy for the next couple of years should be more accommodative that it was pre-pandemic (as it continues to buy tens of billions in Treasuries just to keep its balance sheet from shrinking too fast), and as a final note, the above analysis excludes the additional liquidity support of roughly $1.5 trillion currently parked in the Reverse Repo facility which will slowly be drained in the coming quarters to make the impact of QT easier.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 20:40 - Greenwald: The Histrionics & Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, But They Serve Several Key Purposes
Greenwald: The Histrionics & Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, But They Serve Several Key Purposes
As Kamala Harris compares 1/6 to 9/11 and Nancy Pelosi introduces the cast of Hamilton to sing about democracy, today’s inanity should not obscure its dangers…
A pro-Trump protester carries the lectern of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi through the Roturnda of the U.S. Capitol Building (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”
Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.
The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. The Huffington Post‘s senior politics reporter Igor Bobic unironically expressed gratitude for “the four legged emotional support professionals roaming the Capitol this week, helping officers, staffers, and reporters alike.” Yesterday, CNN’s Kaise Hunt announced: “Tomorrow is going to be a tough one for those of us who were there or had loved ones in the building. Thinking of all of you and finding strength knowing I’m not alone in this.” Unsurprisingly but still repellently: Kamala Harris today compared 1/6 to 9/11.
That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or “coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.
Putting the events of January 6 into their proper perspective is not to dismiss the fact that it was a lamentable event — any more than opposing the exploitation of 9/11 and exaggeration of the domestic threat of Muslim extremism, which I spent a full decade doing, meant that one was denying the heinousness of that attack. The day after the 1/6 riot, I wrote in this space that “the introduction of physical force into political protest is always lamentable, usually dangerous, and, except in the rarest of circumstances that are plainly inapplicable here, unjustifiable.” I still believe that to be the case. There was nothing virtuous about the 1/6 riot.
But it is typically the case that fear-mongering and deliberate exaggeration of threats has an element of truth to them. Al Qaeda and ISIS really did want to carry out mass-casualty events on U.S. soil. COVID is a fatal virus that can kill people and has done so around the world. There are right-wing extremists in the U.S. bent on using violence to advance their political agenda, just as there are left-wing extremists and anarchist insurrectionary movements and many other types eager to do the same (more destruction was caused by the latter than the former over the last two years, to say nothing of the dozens of journalists physically assaulted by individuals participating in Antifa protests).
Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.
The Democratic Party, eager to cling to their majoritarian control of the White House and both houses of Congress, knows it has no political program that is appealing and thus hopes that this concocted drama will help them win — just as they foolishly believed about Russiagate. With the threat of Al Qaeda and ISIS faded if not gone, and the attempt to scare Americans over Putin a failure, the U.S. security state, always in need of a scary enemy, has settled on the claim that right-wing “domestic extremists” are the greatest threat to U.S national security; though they claimed this before 1/6, casting 1/6 as an insurrection allows them to classify an entire domestic political movement as an insurrectionary criminal group and thus justify greater spying powers and budgetary authorities.
CNN proudly announced that the most-watched day in the history of their network was 1/6. The dirty little secret of the liberal wing of the corporate media is that nobody benefited more from the Trump campaign, his presidency and its aftermath than they, and they are desperate to rejuvenate it and re-discover that glory. Meanwhile, coddled journalists who have never broken meaningful stories have finally found a way to claim that they stared down dangerous and risky situations — as if they spent years in the middle of an active war zone or were persecuted and prosecuted by a corrupt and authoritarian state for their intrepid reporting — and have converted Brian Stelter’s CNN show into a virtual therapists’s couch where they all get to go and talk about how they are still coping with the deep trauma of spending a few hours in the Capitol last year.
The pettiness and absurdity of this Democrat/media narrative, laughable as it often is, does not mean it is free of danger. Asserting that the U.S. suffered an attempted coup by a still-vibrant armed faction of insurrectionists is a self-evidently inflammatory claim. It has been used to allocate billions more to the Capitol Police and to radically expand their powers; justify the increased domestic use of FBI tactics including monitoring and infiltration; and agitate for the mass imprisonment of political adversaries, including elected members of Congress. Hapless defendants who are not even accused of using violence have been held in harsh solitary confinement for close to a year, then sentenced to years in prison — while self-styled criminal justice reform advocates say nothing or, even worse, cheer. If one genuinely believes that the U.S. came close to a violent overthrow of American democracy and still faces the risk of an insurrection, then it is rational to sanction radical acts by the U.S. security state that, in more peaceful and normal times, would be unthinkable.
Where is this “insurrection”? What happened to it? Where did it go? The January 6 protest barely lasted four hours until it was easily subdued. Copying the Bush/Cheney model of keeping fear levels high by constantly issuing vague warnings of looming violence and doom, the Department of Homeland Security issued at least six separate “heightened threat” warnings last year, not a single one of which materialized. There were no violent protests in Washington, D.C. or in state capitols on Inauguration Day; no violent protests materialized the week after Biden’s inauguration; no violent protest erupted once COVID lockdowns were eased due to social media provocations; none happened on the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack; there was no right-wing violence perpetrated in connection with the commemoration of the 100th year anniversary of the Tulsa massacre. Each time such a warning was issued, cable outlets and liberal newspapers breathlessly reported them, ensuring fear levels remained high.
What is really going on here is as tawdry as it is obvious. Democrats have no governing program on which they can run and win. The complete collapse of the party was temporarily obscured by the once-in-a-generation talent in Barack Obama and the very narrow win in 2020 of a banal, empty septuagenarian, thanks to the incumbent-killing double crisis of a devastating pandemic and economic shutdown. But the edifice of this party collapsed under Obama — “the Whole Democratic Party is Now a Smoking Pile of Rubble,” warned supreme Democratic partisan Matt Yglesias at Vox in 2016 — and it is collapsing once again under Biden. Its only ideologies — neoliberalism, corporatism, militarism — are widely despised failures, but they are imprisoned by their donor base from offering anything else.
A party that does not believe it can win politically often tries to criminalize its adversaries. That is what Democrats did during the Trump years: focused not on defeating his legislative agenda but obsessing on the fantasy that FBI Superman Robert Mueller was going to come and round up Trump and his family members and associates and haul them off to prison. The Democrats’ beloved former CIA Director, NBC News star John Brennan, all but promised that was going to happen two weeks before Robert Mueller closed his investigation by announcing he found no evidence to establish the core crime of conspiring with Russia.
When that four-year-long prison fantasy collapsed, they quickly switched to a new one: Merrick Garland was going to come and round up Trump and his allies in Congress like Josh Hawley and Matt Gaetz and haul them off to prison as traitors and seditionists. After a full year of producing nothing but banal trespassing and assault charges — no sexy allegations of insurrection or sedition let alone the arrest of Trump and his relatives — Democrats, who spent four years pretending to revere an apolitical DOJ, are now intensifying their political pressure on Garland to deliver. In a press conference on Wednesday, the beleaguered Attorney General addressed those political attacks directly and urged Democrats to have patience, implying that people not present at the Capitol on 1/6 could and would be criminally charged. Fantasies of Trump in handcuffs once again danced in the heads of Adam Schiff, Laurence Tribe, and Eric Swalwell.
As demonstrated by the glee universally expressed by Democrats over Twitter’s banning this week of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (D-GA), it is not an exaggeration to say the top priority for Democrats is to turn their opponents into criminals who are silenced, censored, rounded up by prosecutors and then imprisoned. That is why they are so content to see Julian Assange (an actually persecuted and traumatized journalist) rotting in prison: to them, his real crime is that he helped elect Donald Trump and, for that, he deserves prison. That is why this Insurrection narrative surrounding 1/6 is so vital to Democrats: it ensures that they are not facing a different ideological camp but rather a band of criminals and domestic terrorists who deserve not a defeat at the ballot box but censorship by a union of state and corporate power, followed by a prison cell.
Democrats’ media allies — the axis of the The New York Times, NBC News, CNN, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the undifferentiated and rapidly disappearing mass of Brooklyn-based digital outlets (HuffPostGizmodoBuzzFeedDailyBeastIntercept MotherJonesViceVultureVox, who churn out the same content with just a few more curse words and radical poses) — now speak only to and for one another when they are not failing completely. Keeping Americans hooked on fear — of Putin’s takeover of the U.S., of COVID, of an imminent fascist coup — is their only hope for relevance, profit, and purpose. They can shower themselves with as many Pulitzers as they want for fake Russiagate stories and spend all day applauding one another on social media, but they know they are widely despised and distrusted. Posturing as the bulwark against Fascism and Defenders of Democracy — which in turn depends on the existence of an insurrectionary movement — is their only hope for finding meaning. But cowards and propagandists who weep and engage in public therapy when confronting the slightest discomfort do not make for convincing super heroes. Nobody is inspired, but merely irritated, by the Princess whining about the pea buried under her seventeenth mattress.
As usual, the prime beneficiaries of all of this, and the most dangerous one, is the U.S. security state. They need, above all else, an existential threat to justify their endless growth and unchecked power. All of the old villains are largely vanquished and stale (Communism, Al Qaeda, ISIS), while the proposed stand-ins never really panned out (Americans never woke up thinking about Putin). That is when they began claiming that the most serious threat was a domestic one: fellow American citizens who harbor “extremist” ideologies. Though they claim that it is right-wing extremists who pose the greatest threat — white supremacist extremists to be exact — the lists they disseminate of who falls under this rubric encompasses essentially anyone — left, right or in between — who sees the world differently than Wolf Blitzer, Joe Scarborough and Chris Hayes see it: meaning dissidents, those who distrust the decrees of authority and wish to subvert rather than submit to establishment power. Claiming that the U.S. is facing an Insurrection and barely survived a “coup” is a script that could not be better suited to their interests.
There are genuine unresolved questions surrounding the 1/6 riot that are genuinely important and merit scrutiny. It is proven that the FBI had at least two informants on the ground with whom it was communicating as the protest unfolded, but the full extent of the FBI’s role — whether it replicated what it repeatedly did during the first War on Terror and then again in engineering the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — remains unknown. That is because the only bodies capable of discovering the answers — the DOJ and the Congressional 1/6 Committee — have no interest in finding out. The contrary is true: they have a strong interest in suppressing those facts because it undermines rather than advances their fear narrative.
Fear is a powerful human drive — arguably the most powerful one. Humans need it to survive; without it, they would have died off thousands of years ago. It is embedded in our psyches. And any demagogue worth their salt knows how to stimulate it and manipulate it. Fear — as we have seen throughout the last two years of the COVID pandemic — breeds acquiescence, subservience and conformity. It fosters not just a willingness, but an eagerness to submit to any authority promising to keep you safe from the threat and to banish and silence anyone dissenting from their decrees, on the ground that dissent is not just wrong but dangerous.
What happened on January 6 was ugly and disturbing. But it was nowhere near an insurrection, a coup, or anything threatening in a fundamental or sustained way. That core truth — that it was a protest that turned into a three-hour riot killing nobody except four of the protesters — destroys its value. Only the false narrative that has been constructed over the last year and consecrated by today’s inane festivities can convert this banal episode into some world-historic event that at once makes heroes out of those who were there to oppose it and justifies everything and anything done in the name of preventing its repetition.
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Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 20:20 - December Payrolls Preview: Strong Enough For A March Rate Hike?
December Payrolls Preview: Strong Enough For A March Rate Hike?
We are officially in the “good news is bad news” quarter of the artificial business cycle, and as such a strong payrolls number on Friday (especially after last month’s major headline payrolls disappointment when only 210K jobs were added) will only raise expectations of an even stronger hawkish response by the Fed, and an appropriate market reaction. And, naturally, vice versa especially since it appears that the Fed is hiking into a major economic slowdown.
With that in mind, here is what Wall Street expects tomorrow, courtesy of Newsquawk:
- Analysts look for a 447k rise in December payrolls, up from 210K with a range in analyst forecasts between 150k and 1.1 million.
- Manufacturing payrolls are expected at 35k vs the prior 31k, while private payrolls are expected to rise 365k vs the prior 235k.
- The unemployment rate is expected to drop from 4.2% to 4.1%, with analyst forecasts ranging between 4.0% and 4.4%.
- Wages are seen rising 0.4% M/M, up from 0.3% in November, while the Y/Y metric is seen slowing to 4.2% from 4.8% growth.
- The average work week hours are expected to remain unchanged at 34.8hrs.
Significant upward revisions to prior-month payrolls are fairly likely, following large upward revisions over the previous seven reports and a view that the depressed November response rate may have weighed on reported job growth in the advance release.
In a late Thursday report, Goldman raised its nonfarm payrolls estimate from 450K to 500k, above the consensus of +447k, after the strong ADP print, with the bank noting that the pre-Omicron payroll trend was much firmer than the 210k pace reported for November – perhaps as high as +600k – and most of the virus-related slowdown in dining activity occurred after the December survey week. Big Data labor market indicators were generally solid in the month, and the number of year-end layoffs was well below normal. By industry, Goldman looks for a weather-related boost in the construction industry and a ~50k rebound in education employment (public and private) — the latter reflecting fewer janitors and support staff departing for the holidays. However, the bank also expects another modest decline in retail jobs due to labor supply constraints, and we are assuming only a modest pickup in leisure-sector job growth.
Slack measures will also be eyed, with the November report showing an improvement in the participation rate, employment-population ratio and U6 underemployment, although none have managed to return to pre-pandemic levels. While Powell has acknowledged the “rapid” progress the labor market is making, he has highlighted the pick-up in participation was subdued and disappointing, with Powell suggesting that it was now likely that higher participation will take longer than previously anticipated. Powell explained the subdued participation may be a result of people not wanting to go back into the labor force while COVID is still prevalent, a lack of availability of childcare, and higher savings. Other measures of slack also saw improvement in November, the employment to population ratio rose to 59.2%, compared to the 61.1% pre-pandemic print, while U6 underemployment fell to 7.8%, edging closer to the pre-pandemic level of 7.0%.
The December NFP report will be framed in context of Fed lift-off, especially after the latest minutes leaned hawkish with some policymakers suggesting a hike could come before maximum employment is met, but several said that this had already been achieved and most judged it could be achieved relatively soon if job growth continues at the current pace. Fed pricing moved hawkish following the minutes, to see an 80% chance of a March hike, therefore a strong report will be viewed as a tiebreaker whether March will see the first lift-off.
That said, employment gauges for December are mixed, the jobless claims week that coincided with the usual NFP survey period was in-line with expectations and unchanged from the prior week at 205k, while continued claims fell by more than expected. However, some analysts question the accuracy of the jobless claims data over the holiday period. The ADP report, although having a weak correlation with the official release, saw a very strong print which doubled analyst expectations, and led some banks to slightly revise higher their forecasts for the NFP print. The business surveys point to further growth in the manufacturing sector, while the services sector shows a slowdown, but still in expansionary territory. Job cuts however were disappointing, rising to 19k from 14.9k.
FED POLICY OUTLOOK: The Friday NFP report will help shape expectations for lift off from the Fed. The December meeting minutes on Wednesday revealed that participants generally noted it may become warranted to increase the FFR sooner or at a faster pace than was earlier anticipated, while some members of the FOMC said there could be circumstances whereby the Fed raises rates before maximum employment had been fully achieved. Meanwhile, several participants viewed labor market conditions as already largely consistent with maximum employment, while most judged it could be met relatively soon if the recent pace of the labor market continues. The prior jobs report (which the Fed saw going into the December meeting) disappointed on the headline, seeing 210k jobs created in November, although measures of slack (participation rate, employment to population ratio, and U6 underemployment) all improved from the prior, but remained beneath pre-pandemic levels. After the release of the hawkish December minutes, interest rate futures started to price in a c.80% chance of a Fed hike at the March meeting, something Governor Waller has previously alluded too. As the Fed is now in data-dependent mode, and given the remarks around the labor market from the Fed minutes, providing job growth continues at the current pace, the case for a March lift-off will strengthen, although doves on the FOMC, including Kashkari, suggested to wait before the April data has been seen – note, Kashkari is a non-voter this year. Given the Fed are looking for the current pace to continue, a beat or miss on the headline may not be too important, just providing the jobs market is still increasing at a decent pace, while the Fed will also be cognizant of the slack metrics.
JOBLESS CLAIMS: For the week coinciding with December’s NFP, initial jobless claims printed in-line with expectations at 205k, and unchanged from the prior week. Pantheon Macroeconomics note, “the apparent stalling in the downshift jobless claims in the past couple weeks is no big deal; the seasonals now are less friendly over the next few weeks than in October and November, and the data are always noisy over the holidays”. Moreover, PM added “the core story is unchanged; the trend in claims is very low and still falling, because rising demand is easing the pressure on businesses. Moreover, firms are reluctant to let staff go in such a tight labor market, unless they have no other choice”. The continued claims that coincide with the NFP survey week fell to 1.716mln from 1.856mln, better than the expected rise to 1.868mln.
ADP: The ADP report was strong, although the consistency with the official NFP report has not been strong. The ADP report added 807k jobs in December, seeing the largest increase since May 2021, rising from the prior 505k (revised lower from 534k) despite expectations for job growth to slow to 400k in December. Analysts at Pantheon Macroeconomics highlight the ADP data is slightly lower than the over 1mln rise in private payrolls signalled by the Homebase small business employment data, but although neither are consistently accurate in terms of the official NFP report, it is still consistent with their view that the NFP expectation of c. 400k is too low and thus are maintaining their 1mln forecast. Note, following the ADP report, analysts at Goldman Sachs boosted their NFP forecast for Friday to +500k from +450k. Pantheon points out that the rise in payrolls could be due to the fading of some of the forces holding back labor supply, such as enhanced unemployment benefits and school closures, combined with strong labor demand. However, the consultancy does note this could be interrupted by the rise in Omicron cases, although this may not be seen until the January data is released. Pantheon writes “it looks as though December survey week fell in something of a sweet spot, after the Delta wave faded, but before the Omicron surge began.”
BUSINESS SURVEYS: The December ISM Manufacturing PMI report saw an uptick in employment, suggesting faster growth than the prior month. The employment index rose 0.9pts to 54.2 from 53.3 to show the fourth consecutive month of expansion. The report also notes that “an Employment Index above 50.6 percent, over time, is generally consistent with an increase in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on manufacturing employment”. ISM note that the survey panelists’ companies are still struggling to meet labor-management plans, but there were modest signs of progress where 7% of comments noted greater hiring ease, the same as November. Meanwhile an overwhelming majority (85%) indicated their companies are hiring or attempting to hire, but 37% of those expressed difficulty in filling positions, but that is lower than the November report. The December services report was more downbeat, employment fell to 54.9 from 56.5 in December, albeit remained in expansionary territory. Commentary noted respondents are struggling to backfill positions in a timely manner noting “The Great Resignation” is hitting them. Respondents are having to relook at their policies and incentive programs as fast-food restaurants are offering higher pay for lower level jobs as well as sign-on bonuses.
ARGUING FOR A BETTER-THAN-EXPECTED REPORT:
- Education seasonality. Education weighed on job growth during the fall, likely because some janitors and support staff declined to return for the new school year. Many of these individuals typically stop working for the December survey period, implying a seasonally adjusted gain in education payrolls in tomorrow’s report.
- Big Data. High-frequency data on the labor market generally point to in-line or above-consensus job gains, as shown in Exhibit 1. That being said, the Google series continues to be biased upward by return-to-office (RTO) initiatives (office workers commuting instead of working from home)
- ADP. Private sector employment in the ADP report increased by 807k in December, nearly double consensus expectations and consistent with strong growth in the ADP panel.
- Jobless claims. Initial jobless claims fell during the December payroll month, averaging 204k per week vs. 277k in November. Continuing claims in regular state programs decreased 337k from survey week to survey week.
- End of federal enhanced unemployment benefits. The expiration of federal benefits in some states boosted job-finding rates over the summer, and all remaining such programs expired in early September. With 4.6mn fewer individuals receiving benefits versus in early September, the gradual return of these workers is expected to boost job growth in tomorrow’s report and beyond.
- Weather. Unseasonably warm weather during and leading up to the survey week argues for a solid rise in industries like construction. National temperatures averaged 40 degrees during the December survey week, compared to 35 degrees on average in those of the previous three years.
- Job availability. The Conference Board labor differential—the difference between the percent of respondents saying jobs are plentiful and those saying jobs are hard to get—decreased by 2.1pt to 42.6, but remained near record highs. JOLTS job openings decreased by 529k in November to 10.6mn but remained significantly higher than the pre-pandemic peak.
ARGUING FOR A WEAKER-THEN-EXPECTED REPORT:
- Public health. Covid infections rose sharply in late December, but the survey period ended on December 18th, and as shown below the decline in dining activity versus the November survey week—eventually to 20pp below pre-crisis levels—mostly occurred after the December survey period. Coupled with the 246krise in ADP’s estimate of leisure and hospitality jobs, we expect continued job gains in the leisure sector in tomorrow’s report (our estimates embed a rise of nearly+100k, compared to +23k in November).
- Supply constraints in retail. Labor supply constraints likely weighed on pre-holiday hiring in the retail industry in November (-20k mom sa). The BLS seasonal factors anticipate 100k net hires in December, and we do not expect all of these positions to be filled. If so, retail payroll could again fall on a seasonally adjusted basis.
- Vaccine mandates. The vaccine mandates announced by the Biden administration in September apply to roughly 25mn unvaccinated workers, and may have weighed on December job growth in healthcare and government. While the federal deadline for compliance is generally not until early January and faces an uncertain future in the court system, early adoption in some states may have reduced job growth at the margin in tomorrow’s report.
- Employer surveys. The employment components of business surveys generally decreased in December. Goldman’s services survey employment tracker decreased 2.3pts to 54.1 and the manufacturing survey employment tracker decreased 1.7pt to 57.9.The Goldman Sachs Analyst Index (GSAI) edged down by 0.3pt to 76.9 in December, but the employment component rose 6.8pt to a record-high of 82.4.
NEUTRAL FACTORS:
- Job cuts. Announced layoffs reported by Challenger, Gray & Christmas increased by 24% month-over-month in December after decreasing by 11% in November, but remain near their three-decade low.
As noted above, upward revisions to prior-month non farm payrolls are likely in tomorrow’s report, which reflects the trend of large upward revisions over the course of the year.
There are two potential explanations, both of which could produce upward revisions in tomorrow’s report as well. First, some reopening establishments may respond to the BLS survey with a lag (e.g. 1-2 months after reopening). This would result in positive revisions to the not-seasonally-adjusted data (dark blue bars above). Relatedly, the depressed response rate in last month’s report (lowest for November in 13 years) may have in part reflected this issue, with the busiest human resource managers least likely to respond to the survey during the Thanksgiving holiday.
A second possible explanation is that the seasonal factors may be overfitting to the advance releases, mistaking some of the strong job creation in 2021 as an evolution of seasonality (light blue bars). Given this and given consensus expectation of strong gains in the December panel, upward revisions are fairly likely.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 20:07 - Judge Rejects FDA's 75 Year Delay On Vax Data, Cuts To Just 8 Months
Judge Rejects FDA’s 75 Year Delay On Vax Data, Cuts To Just 8 Months
A federal judge has rejected a request by the FDA to produce just 500 pages per month of the data submitted by Pfizer to license its Covid-19 vaccine – and has ordered them to produce 55,000 pages per month. Assuming there are roughly 450,000 pages, that means it will take just over eight months for the world to see what’s under the hood.
Attorney Aaron Siri, who represents the plaintiff in the case, has provided this stunning update via his blog, Injecting Freedom:
On behalf of a client, my firm requested that the FDA produce all the data submitted by Pfizer to license its Covid-19 vaccine. The FDA asked the Court for permission to only be required to produce at a rate of 500 pages per month, which would have taken over 75 years to produce all the documents.
I am pleased to report that a federal judge soundly rejected the FDA’s request and ordered the FDA to produce all the data at a clip of 55,000 pages per month!
This is a great win for transparency and removes one of the strangleholds federal “health” authorities have had on the data needed for independent scientists to offer solutions and address serious issues with the current vaccine program – issues which include waning immunity, variants evading vaccine immunity, and, as the CDC has confirmed, that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.
No person should ever be coerced to engage in an unwanted medical procedure. And while it is bad enough the government violated this basic liberty right by mandating the Covid-19 vaccine, the government also wanted to hide the data by waiting to fully produce what it relied upon to license this product until almost every American alive today is dead. That form of governance is destructive to liberty and antithetical to the openness required in a democratic society.
In ordering the release of the documents in a timely manner, the Judge recognized that the release of this data is of paramount public importance and should be one of the FDA’s highest priorities. He then aptly quoted James Madison as saying a “popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy” and John F. Kennedy as explaining that a “nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
The following is the full text of the Judge’s order, a copy of which is also available here.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
PHMPT, Plaintiff v. FDA, Defendant, No. 4:21-cv-1058-P
ORDER
This case involves the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). Specifically, at issue is Plaintiff’s FOIA request seeking “[a]ll data and information for the Pfizer Vaccine enumerated in 21 C.F.R. § 601.51(e) with the exception of publicly available reports on the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System” from the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). See ECF No. 1. As has become standard, the Parties failed to agree to a mutually acceptable production schedule; instead, they submitted dueling production schedules for this Court’s consideration. Accordingly, the Court held a conference with the Parties to determine an appropriate production schedule.[1] See ECF Nos. 21, 34.
“Open government is fundamentally an American issue” – it is neither a Republican nor a Democrat issue.[2] As James Madison wrote, “[a] popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”[3] John F. Kennedy likewise recognized that “a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”[4] And, particularly appropriate in this case, John McCain (correctly) noted that “[e]xcessive administrative secrecy . . . feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public’s confidence in the government.”[5]
Echoing these sentiments, “[t]he basic purpose of FOIA is to ensure an informed citizenry, [which is] vital to the functioning of a democratic society.” NLRB v. Robbins Tire & Rubber Co., 437 U.S. 214, 242 (1977). “FOIA was [therefore] enacted to ‘pierce the veil of administrative secrecy and to open agency action to the light of public scrutiny.’” Batton v. Evers, 598 F.3d 169, 175 (5th Cir. 2010) (quoting Dep’t of the Air Force v. Rose, 425 U.S. 352, 361 (1976)). And “Congress has long recognized that ‘information is often useful only if it is timely’ and that, therefore ‘excessive delay by the agency in its response is often tantamount to denial.’” Open Soc’y Just. Initiative v. CIA, 399 F. Supp. 3d 161, 165 (S.D.N.Y. 2019) (quoting H.R. REP. NO. 93-876, at 6271 (1974)). When needed, a court “may use its equitable powers to require an agency to process documents according to a court-imposed timeline.” Clemente v. FBI, 71 F. Supp. 3d 262, 269 (D.D.C. 2014).
Here, the Court recognizes the “unduly burdensome” challenges that this FOIA request may present to the FDA. See generally ECF Nos. 23, 30, 34. But, as expressed at the scheduling conference, there may not be a “more important issue at the Food and Drug Administration . . . than the pandemic, the Pfizer vaccine, getting every American vaccinated, [and] making sure that the American public is assured that this was not [] rush[ed] on behalf of the United States . . . .” ECF No. 34 at 46. Accordingly, the Court concludes that this FOIA request is of paramount public importance.
“[S]tale information is of little value.” Payne Enters., Inc. v. United States, 837 F.2d 486, 494 (D.C. Cir. 1988). The Court, agreeing with this truism, therefore concludes that the expeditious completion of Plaintiff’s request is not only practicable, but necessary. See Bloomberg, L.P. v. FDA, 500 F. Supp. 2d 371, 378 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 15, 2007) (“[I]t is the compelling need for such public understanding that drives the urgency of the request.”). To that end, the Court further concludes that the production rate, as detailed below, appropriately balances the need for unprecedented urgency in processing this request with the FDA’s concerns regarding the burdens of production. See Halpern v. FBI, 181 F.3d 279, 284–85 (2nd Cir. 1991) (“[FOIA] emphasizes a preference for the fullest possible agency disclosure of such information consistent with a responsible balancing of competing concerns . . . .”).
Accordingly, having considered the Parties’ arguments, filings in support, and the applicable law, the Court ORDERS that:
1. The FDA shall produce the “more than 12,000 pages” articulated in its own proposal, see ECF No. 29 at 24, on or before January 31, 2022.
2. The FDA shall produce the remaining documents at a rate of 55,000 pages every 30 days, with the first production being due on or before March 1, 2022, until production is complete.
3. To the extent the FDA asserts any privilege, exemption, or exclusion as to any responsive record or portion thereof, FDA shall, concurrent with each production required by this Order, produce a redacted version of the record, redacting only those portions as to which privilege, exemption, or exclusion is asserted.
4. The Parties shall submit a Joint Status Report detailing the progress of the rolling production by April 1, 2022, and every 90 days thereafter.[6]
SO ORDERED on this 6th day of January, 2022.
[1] Surprisingly, the FDA did not send an agency representative to the scheduling conference.
[2] 151 CONG. REC. S1521 (daily ed. Feb. 16, 2005) (statement of Sen. John Cornyn).
[3] Letter from James Madison to W.T. Barry (August 4, 1822), in 9 WRITINGS OF JAMES MADISON 103 (S. Hunt ed., 1910).
[4] John F. Kennedy, Remarks on the 20th Anniversary of the Voice of America (Feb. 26, 1962).
[5] America After 9/11: Freedom Preserved or Freedom Lost?: Hearing Before the S. Comm. on the Judiciary, 108th Cong. 302 (2003).
[6] Although the Court does not decide whether the FDA correctly denied Plaintiff’s request for expedited processing, the issue is not moot. Should the Parties seek to file motions for summary judgment, the Court will take up the issue then.
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Boom! Very bad for a certain company. $PFE https://t.co/TmOJF6qeZI
— Ed ☯️Free Thinker & Oracle (@DowdEdward) January 6, 2022
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 19:40 - Outgoing Fed Vice Chair Quietly Covered Up Suspicious Trades Made During March 2020 Market Rout
Outgoing Fed Vice Chair Quietly Covered Up Suspicious Trades Made During March 2020 Market Rout
Several months have passed since FOMC members Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren and Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan abandoned their posts following a trading scandal that raised questions about senior Fed officials.
Now, Richard Clarida, who is already on his way out the door at the Fed to make room for Biden appointee Lael Brainard, has become the latest senior Fed official to find his way into the ethics officials’ rifle sights.
Because according to the NYT, Bloomberg and a handful of other reports, Clarida sold at least $1M of shares in a US-traded stock fund in February 2020 before buying a similar amount of the same fund a few days later, on the eve of a major Fed policy announcement that would trigger an 18-month-plus torrid rally in stocks, bonds and other securities.
Notably, while Clarida’s purchase was previously disclosed and reported by Bloomberg News back in October, the initial sale of the fund shares wasn’t disclosed until last month, when an amended financial-disclosure form was finally filed with the government. Notably, this amended form was filed several weeks after the backlash to Clarida’s colleagues’ trades had died down.
And apparently, no journalists had even bothered to notice the amended form for weeks, until the NYT reported on it Thursday.
For the record, the new form showed Clarida sold $1M to $5M of the iShares MSCI USA Min Vol Factor exchange-traded fund on Feb. 24, then invested a similar range in the fund on Feb. 27.
As Bloomberg explains, the disclosure may raise further questions about what the soon-to-depart vice chair knew about the impending Feb. 28 announcement from Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who declared the Fed would unveil massive new monetary stimulus measures in the days afterward, stimulus that is only now finally being unwound.
“In reviewing his materials, Vice Chair Clarida identified inadvertent errors requiring amendment,” a Federal Reserve spokesperson said.
“He reviewed those transactions with our ethics office and submitted amendments” to his disclosure forms for 2019 and 2020.
The amended form, dated Dec. 16, came out just one day after the close of the Fed’s Dec. 14-15 FOMC meeting. The minutes from that meeting were only just reported yesterday, and Clarida has already said he has no intentions of attending the next FOMC meeting later this month. Clarida is expected to step down at the end of the month to make room for Lael Brainard, who has served on the Fed board of governors since 2014, and who was nominated by President Biden to serve as the Fed’s new vice chair, assuming her nomination makes it through the Senate.
In the wake of the trading scandal that engulfed the Fed last fall, Chairman Jerome Powell has announced new investment guidelines in October, including banning purchases or sales during periods of market stress for all senior Fed bureaucrats. All of this begs the question, why is Clarida exposing all of this now? A probe of Fed trading is presently under way by the central bank’s inspector general, which declined to comment on whether Clarida is part of the investigation.
Read the updated filing below:
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 19:20 - China's Xi Orders Military To Create "Elite Force" To Win Wars
China’s Xi Orders Military To Create “Elite Force” To Win Wars
By Andrew Thornebrooke of Epoch Times,
Chinese leader Xi Jinping delivered this year’s mobilization orders to the regime’s military on Jan. 5, saying it must evolve into an elite force capable of winning any war.
“The armed forces must closely follow the evolution of technology, warfare, and rivals, redouble their efforts to better combine training with combat operations, and strengthen systematic training and the use of technologies to develop an elite force that is capable of fighting and winning wars,” the order said, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.
Xi, who is both the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the head of the Party’s military as chairman of the Central Military Commission, has issued mobilization orders annually since 2018. The orders signal the priorities of the armed forces and initiate military-wide training for the coming year.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping (L) speaks after reviewing the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy fleet in the South China Sea The orders come as the CCP takes an increasingly bellicose approach to international relations, coinciding with worsening relations between the regime and the greater international order.
Since coming to power in 2012, Xi has implemented sweeping reforms across the whole of Chinese society, including a massive restructuring of the military, which began in 2015.
That restructuring process continues to this day, and Xi has worked to significantly tighten his personal control over military leadership during the intervening period, promoting at least 58 generals loyal to him and sympathetic to his reforms.
The technology-focused mobilization order also follows the CCP’s signing of a joint statement earlier this week with the other members of the U.N. Security Council. In it, the regime leadership said it believed the further spread of nuclear weapons must be prevented.
Immediately after the statement was issued, however, a Chinese official said that the regime would continue to modernize its nuclear arsenal and wouldn’t make any reductions until the United States and Russia had fewer nuclear warheads than it did.
The United States has grown increasingly wary of China’s expanding military capabilities.
These include new bids on assault helicopters from Russia, an expanding navy, a record number of incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone by Chinese military aircraft, Taiwan invasion simulations, and the test of a hypersonic weapon in July.
In response, the Pentagon said its upcoming national security strategy would focus on developing global alliances and partnerships while contending with the Chinese regime as a “pacing challenge.”
As such, the United States is expanding its military footprint in the Indo-Pacific, increasing troop rotations to allied nations, and pursuing increased multilateral operations and diplomatic forums with allies and partners through channels such as AUKUS and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), which are considered vital to continued U.S. strength in the region.
In December, the U.S. military introduced new software to help predict how its actions might provoke anger from China’s communist leadership. Ultimately intended to help American leadership avoid the ire of the CCP, the software was pejoratively dubbed an “appeasement app” by some critics.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 19:00 - "It's Been Bad Since Christmas" – Subway Service Slows Dramatically As Worker Shortages Cause Mass Delays
“It’s Been Bad Since Christmas” – Subway Service Slows Dramatically As Worker Shortages Cause Mass Delays
One day after New York’s Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered her state of the state address – her first major address since taking over from her former boss Gov. Andrew Cuomo this past summer – the NYT and the rest of the media gallery praised her performance. But despite her alluring promises about ending “unproductive” rivalries between the elected leaders of NYC and the Empire State.
Unfortunately, she still has one major, economy-wrecking problem to solve, and it’s this: on any day this week, some 1,300 people out of a work force of 6.3K (roughly 1/5th) have been absent from work from the MTA due the ongoing crush of omicron case.
The soaring jump in absenteeism, which the transportation authority attributes to the virus, has meant a lack of workers to keep up with the regular train schedules, leading officials to suspend service this week on three of the system’s 22 subway lines and reduce schedules on many others, leading to longer wait times.
NYC’s shortage of workers has made it the most critically underserved public transit system in the country, the NYT reports.
“I feel like it’s been bad since Christmas,” Jennifer Hall, 41, said Wednesday morning as she waited with her son for a D train in the Bronx.
The news comes as New York State confirmed 85K new cases on Thursday, a new daily record for the Empire State.
Source: NYT
The surge in worker absences comes as the transportation authority has already been contending with a smaller work force after a rush of retirements and a pandemic-related hiring freeze was lifted last February.
Unlike other public workers, MTA employees are not restricted by the vaccine mandate (although if they aren’t vaccinated they must submit to a test every week).
The MTA’s troubles are hardly unique; they’re part of a wider issue of staffing shortages that has lead to thousands of flights being cancelled, along with train delays across the country.
In particular, sick calls have soared in recent weeks: “We have seen increased sick calls, more than we have seen in the past,” said Craig Cipriano, the interim president of the division of the transportation authority. The number swelled through the end of the year, with unplanned absences currently more than three times higher than their typical levels before the pandemic.
The number of subway riders in NYC has fluctuated dramatically, often following the COVID case numbers in an inverse pattern. Unsurprisingly, this has forced the MTA to make some exceptions to its virus-related worker absences.
Subway ridership this week stood at about 40 percent of prepandemic numbers, transit officials said. That is a drop from levels that climbed above 50 percent in November, but still represents millions of passengers.
For now, at least, the MTA’s leaders expect the worker shortages to get better, not worse.
Still, Mr. Cipriano said there was reason to believe that the suspensions and delays caused by virus-related worker absences would soon ease, though he would not specify when. Already this week, he said, the absentee numbers showed signs they may be reversing. Transit employees who test positive for the virus get up to two weeks of sick leave beyond their standard sick time, which is 12 days per year. In the transit authority’s guidance to employees, which mirrors recent guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it suggests that vaccinated workers who test positive for Covid-19 must isolate for at least five days and can return to work only if they have been without a fever for three days, have no runny nose and a “minimal cough.”
Unvaccinated workers who have tested positive or been exposed to the virus must isolate for 10 days before returning to work. Transit officials have said that about 80 percent of its roughly 67,000 employees were vaccinated, and that they were unlikely to impose a stricter vaccine requirement out of concern that it might further disrupt service at a time when the system can scarcely afford it.
Fortunately, Cipriano and the rest of the MTA leadership don’t expect to halt round-the-clock service any time soon. At the very least, they feel they would be able to run fewer trains per hour before they’re stuck with having to dial back service, forcing passengers who keep odd hours to pay for cab fare after leaving work late at night or early in the morning.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 18:40 - Destroying A Democracy To Save it: Democrats Call For The Disqualification Of Dozens Of Republican Members
Destroying A Democracy To Save it: Democrats Call For The Disqualification Of Dozens Of Republican Members
Below is my column in the Hill on the continued calls to disqualify Republican members of Congress to prevent them from running for reelection. What is maddening is that Democratic groups and commentators are seeking to remove as many as 120 Republicans from the ballots in the name of democracy.
It is like burning books in the name of literacy.
Yet, on this anniversary of the January 6th riot, members of Congress and Democratic groups want to block voters from reelecting their preferred representatives. Like villages in Vietnam, it appears that some members and activists believe that you have to destroy democracy to save it from itself.
Here is the column:
This year, the Biden administration joined many in the United States in criticizing the mass disqualification of 583 candidates in Iran by the Guardian Council. The Iranian elections (like elections in other countries like China and Venezuela) are democratic only in the most artificial sense: You can freely vote from a pre-selected list of candidates.
Electoral disqualification systems are generally anathema to democratic values, but some in the United States are now toying with the idea for the 2022 or 2024 elections. While more modest than the Iranian model, the Democratic calls for disqualification are just as dangerous. What is most maddening is that this anti-democratic effort is cloaked in democratic doublespeak.
This week, Democratic lawyer Marc Elias predicted that 2022 would bring a renewed interest in disqualifying Republican members from office based on an obscure Civil War-era provision. Elias — the former Hilary Clinton campaign general counsel — is a well-known figure in Washington who has been prominently featured in the ongoing investigation of Special Counsel John Durham. Elias has founded a self-described “pro-democracy” group that challenges Republican voting laws and pledges to “shape our elections and democratic institutions for years to come.”
In the age of rage, nothing says democracy like preventing people from running for office.
Elias and others are suggesting that — rather than defeat Republicans at the polls — Democrats in Congress could disqualify the Republicans for supporting or encouraging the Jan. 6 “insurrection.” Last year, Democratic members called for the disqualification of dozens of Republicans. One, Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) demanded the disqualification of the 120 House Republicans — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy(R-Calif.) — for simply signing a “Friend of the Court brief” (or amicus brief) in support of an election challenge from Texas.
These members and activists have latched upon the long-dormant provision in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the “disqualification clause” — which was written after the 39th Congress convened in December 1865 and many members were shocked to see Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, waiting to take a seat with an array of other former Confederate senators and military officers.
Justin Reade of the North Carolina Supreme Court later explained, “[t]he idea [was] that one who had taken an oath to support the Constitution and violated it, ought to be excluded from taking it again.” So, members drafted a provision that declared that “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
By declaring the Jan. 6th riot an “insurrection,” some Democratic members of Congress and liberal activists hope to bar incumbent Republicans from running. Even support for court filings is now being declared an act of rebellion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) helped fuel this movement — before Jan. 6 even occurred — by declaring that the Republicans supporting election challenges were “subverting the Constitution by their reckless and fruitless assault on our democracy which threatens to seriously erode public trust in our most sacred democratic institutions, and to set back our progress on the urgent challenges ahead.”
Jan. 6 was a national tragedy. I publicly condemned President Trump’s speech that day while it was being given — and I denounced the riot as a “constitutional desecration.” However, it has not been treated legally as an insurrection. Those charged for their role in the attack that day are largely facing trespass and other less serious charges — rather than insurrection or sedition. That’s because this was a riot that was allowed to get out of control by grossly negligent preparations by Capitol Police and congressional officials. While the FBI launched a massive national investigation, it did not find evidence of an insurrection.
With an ominous mid-term election approaching, much of the effort among Democrats on the Hill and in the media has been to keep the enmity alive from Jan. 6. In what seemed almost a hopeful plea, the New York Times recently declared “Every Day is Now Jan. 6.” It made this tragedy sound like the political equivalent of a year-round Christmas store: Every day should involve a renewed gift of reminiscence and rage.
The saddest aspect of this politicization of the Jan. 6 riot is that many of us wanted a full, transparent, and apolitical investigation. House Republicans rejected that idea, but there remain many questions to be answered — which has not happened. Instead, we have an effort to encode the notion of an actual insurrection through mantra-like repetition.
The Constitution fortunately demands more than proof by repetition. In this case, it requires an actual rebellion. The clause Democrats are citing was created in reference to a real Civil War in which over 750,000 people died in combat. The confederacy formed a government, an army, a currency, and carried out diplomatic missions.
Conversely, Jan. 6 was a protest that became a riot.
That is not meant to diminish the legitimate outrage over the day. It was reprehensible — but only a “rebellion” in the most rhetorical sense.
More importantly, even if you adopt a dangerously broad definition of “insurrection” or “rebellion,” members of Congress who supported challenging the electoral votes (as Democrats have done in prior years) were exercising constitutionally protected speech.
Moreover, the Democrats cannot simply use their razor-thin majority to disqualify opponents willy-nilly. Punishments like expulsions take two-thirds votes, and any disqualifications can be challenged in the court.
Indeed, not long after ratification in 1869, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase ruled in a circuit opinion that the clause was not self-executing. He suggested that allowing Congress to simply bar political opponents from office would be a form of punishment without due process and would likely violate the prohibition on bills of attainder.
As Democrats push to federalize elections and negate the laws in a couple dozen states, figures like Elias are now suggesting that Republicans could also be listed as “rebels” and barred from the ballot. Congress would then control not just how states conduct their elections but even who can appear on such ballots.
The renewed calls for disqualifications may be simply reckless rhetoric timed for the anniversary of the riot. After all, every day would not be Jan. 6 without the requisite rage. However, it is reason — not rage — that we need right now.
A recent poll showed that one in three Americans believes that violence against the government can be justified. It often seems like some want to trigger an actual rebellion by disenfranchising parts of our population. The fact is that there are people who traffic and profit in rage, and we are all the poorer for it.
Tyler Durden
Thu, 01/06/2022 – 18:20
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