- Escobar: The Valdai Meeting – Where West Asia Meets Multipolarity
Escobar: The Valdai Meeting – Where West Asia Meets Multipolarity
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,
At Russia’s Valdai Club meeting – the east’s answer to Davos – intellectuals and influencers gathered to frame West Asia’s current and future developments…
The 12th “Middle East Conference” at the Valdai Club in Moscow offered a more than welcome cornucopia of views on interconnected troubles and tribulations affecting the region.
But first, an important word on terminology – as only one of Valdai’s guests took the trouble to stress. This is not the “Middle East” – a reductionist, Orientalist notion devised by old colonials: at The Cradle we emphasize the region must be correctly described as West Asia.
Some of the region’s trials and tribulations have been mapped by the official Valdai report, The Middle East and The Future of Polycentric World. But the intellectual and political clout of those in attendance can provide valuable anecdotal insights too. Here are a few of the major strands participants highlighted on regional developments, current and future:
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov set the stage by stressing that Kremlin policy encourages the formation of an “inclusive regional security system.” That’s exactly what the Americans refused to discuss with the Russians in December 2021, then applied to Europe and the post-Soviet space. The result was a proxy war.
Kayhan Barzegar of Islamic Azad University in Iran qualified the two major strategic developments affecting West Asia: a possible US retreat and a message to regional allies: “You cannot count on our security guarantees.”
Every vector – from rivalry in the South Caucasus to the Israeli normalization with the Persian Gulf – is subordinated to this logic, notes Barzegar, with quite a few Arab actors finally understanding that there now exists a margin of maneuver to choose between the western or the non-western bloc.
Barzegar does not identify Iran-Russia ties as a strategic alliance, but rather a geopolitical, economic bloc based on technology and regional supply chains – a “new algorithm in politics” – ranging from weapons deals to nuclear and energy cooperation, driven by Moscow’s revived southern and eastward orientations. And as far as Iran-western relations go, Barzegar still believes the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, is not dead. A least not yet.
‘Nobody knows what these rules are’
Egyptian Ramzy Ramzy, until 2019 the UN Deputy Special Envoy for Syria, considers the reactivation of relations between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE with Syria as the most important realignment underway in the region. Not to mention prospects for a Damascus-Ankara reconciliation. “Why is this happening? Because of the regional security system’s dissatisfaction with the present,” Ramzy explains.
Yet even if the US may be drifting away, “neither Russia nor China are willing to take up a leadership role,” he says. At the same time, Syria “cannot be allowed to fall prey to outside interventions. The earthquake at least accelerated these rapprochements.”
Bouthaina Shaaban, a special advisor to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, is a remarkable woman, fiery and candid. Her presence at Valdai was nothing short of electric. She stressed how “since the US war in Vietnam, we lost what we witnessed as free media. The free press has died.” At the same time “the colonial west changed its methods,” subcontracting wars and relying on local fifth columnists.
Shaaban volunteered the best short definition anywhere of the “rules-based international order”: “Nobody knows what these rules are, and what this order is.”
She re-emphasized that in this post-globalization period that is ushering in regional blocs, the usual western meddlers prefer to use non-state actors – as in Syria and Iran – “mandating locals to do what the US would like to do.”
A crucial example is the US al-Tanf military base that occupies sovereign Syrian territory on two critical borders. Shaaban calls the establishment of this base as “strategic, for the US to prevent regional cooperation, at the Iraq, Jordan, and Syria crossroads.” Washington knows full well what it is doing: unhampered trade and transportation at the Syria-Iraq border is a major lifeline for the Syrian economy.
Reminding everyone once again that “all political issues are connected to Palestine,” Shaaban also offered a healthy dose of gloomy realism: “The eastern bloc has not been able to match the western narrative.”
A ‘double-layered proxy war’
Cagri Erhan, rector of Altinbas University in Turkey, offered a quite handy definition of a Hegemon: the one who controls the lingua franca, the currency, the legal setting, and the trade routes.
Erhan qualifies the current western hegemonic state of play as “double-layered proxy war” against, of course, Russia and China. The Russians have been defined by the US as an “open enemy” – a major threat. And when it comes to West Asia, proxy war still rules: “So the US is not retreating,” says Erhan. Washington will always consider using the area “strategically against emerging powers.”
Then what about the foreign policy priorities of key West Asian and North African actors?
Algerian political journalist Akram Kharief, editor of the online MenaDefense, insists Russia should get closer to Algeria, “which is still in the French sphere of influence,” and be wary of how the Americans are trying to portray Moscow as “a new imperial threat to Africa.”
Professor Hasan Unal of Maltepe University in Turkiye made it quite clear how Ankara finally “got rid of its Middle East [West Asian] entanglements,” when it was previously “turning against everybody.”
Mid-sized powers such as Turkiye, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are now stepping to the forefront of the region’s political stage. Unal notes how “Turkiye and the US don’t see eye to eye on any issue important to Ankara.” Which certainly explains the strengthening of Turkish-Russian ties – and their mutual interest in introducing “multi-faceted solutions” to the region’s problems.
For one, Russia is actively mediating Turkiye-Syria rapprochement. Unal confirmed that the Syrian and Turkish foreign ministers will soon meet in person – in Moscow – which will represent the highest-ranking direct engagement between the two nations since the onset of the Syrian war. And that will pave the way for a tripartite summit between Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Note that the big regional reconciliations are being held – once again – either in, or with the participation of Moscow, which can rightfully be described as the capital of the 21st century multipolar world.
When it comes to Cyprus, Unal notes how “Russia would not be interested in a unified state that would be EU and NATO territory.” So it’s time for “creative ideas: as Turkey is changing its Syria policy, Russia should change its Cyprus policy.”
Dr. Gong Jiong, from the Israeli campus of China’s University of International Business and Economics, came up with a catchy neologism: the “coalition of the unwilling” – describing how “almost the whole Global South is not supporting sanctions on Russia,” and certainly none of the players in West Asia.
Gong noted that as much as China-Russia trade is rising fast – partly as a direct consequence of western sanctions – the Americans would have to think twice about China-hit sanctions. Russia-China trade stands at $200 billion a year, after all, while US-China trade is a whopping $700 billion per annum.
The pressure on the “neutrality camp” won’t relent anyway. What is needed by the world’s “silent majority,” as Gong defines it, is “an alliance.” He describes the 12-point Chinese peace plan for Ukraine as “a set of principles” – Beijing’s base for serious negotiations: “This is the first step.”
There will be no new Yalta
What the Valdai debates made crystal clear, once again, is how Russia is the only actor capable of approaching every player across West Asia, and be listened to carefully and respectfully.
It was left to Anwar Abdul-Hadi, director of the political department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the latter’s official envoy to Damascus, to arguably sum up what led to the current global geopolitical predicament: “A new Yalta or a new world war? They [the west] chose war.”
And still, as new geopolitical and geoeconomic fault lines keep emerging, it is as though West Asia is anticipating something “big” coming ahead. That feeling was palpable in the air at Valdai.
To paraphrase Yeats, and updating him to the young, turbulent 21st century, “what rough beast, its hour come out at last, slouches towards the cradle [of civilization] to be born?
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 23:40 - Is The Greater Idaho Movement A Model For National Divorce From The Political Left?
Is The Greater Idaho Movement A Model For National Divorce From The Political Left?
They said it was an absurd waste of time, but now, the progressive coastal regions of Oregon and Democrats in Idaho are getting a little worried about the “Greater Idaho Movement,” with at least 11 eastern Oregon counties officially voting to leave the state and join their more conservative neighbors in Idaho. Democrats were saying that the move was impossible, but with momentum growing they are now suggesting that the break-up is “bad for the country.”
Why is it bad for the country if a handful of conservative counties decide to freely walk away from the state of Oregon and join with Idaho? Leftists do not explain the assertion, but one can deduce from their behavior a number of probable conclusions.
Common arguments Democrats in Oregon and Idaho make against the move are usually an attempt to dissuade Idaho citizens from wanting to pursue secession measures. The core claim is that the state of Idaho would have to subsidize the new counties, with Dems suggesting that rural areas are a drain on high revenue centers like Portland.
This stems from the leftist argument that red counties and states “cannot survive” economically when detached from blue regions.
It’s simply not true.
Firstly, if rural counties are a financial sinkhole for progressive states, then why are they so opposed to rural counties leaving? Would this not enrich blue counties beyond belief? While at least one study shows that Idaho would incur expenses such as Medicaid costs, it also shows that the state actually stands to gain an extra $170 million in net revenue with the new counties in place, along with an even greater conservative majority population, all without people being forced to relocate.
Secondly, if we are talking about economic usefulness, it’s important to remember that the majority of people that grow food, produce goods, repair goods and keep the supply chain running are conservative leaning. Leftists produce very little other than complaints and misery.
The big question Democrats are not asking is why so many Oregon counties want to leave the state at all? They don’t ask because they don’t care. Diplomacy and reconciliation with the conservative population has never crossed their minds. Only now with the secession movement gaining traction are they suddenly interested.
Let’s use the mega-leftist sanctum of Portland as an example of why conservative regions want to break away from progressive controlled regions:
In 2021 alone, Portland witnessed a 38% spike in violent crime including homicides and rapes. Property crime rose by 17%. The city also set an all time record for number of homicides in 2021. In 2022, the city breezed past the homicide record once again. Portland was once listed among the safest cities in America – Not anymore.
Crime rates skyrocketed almost immediately after Portland embraced the far-left BLM and Antifa calls to “defund the police.” The city had to reverse course on this stance 18 months later as the program proved to be a dismal failure.
On the indoctrination end of things, the Oregon Board of Education has advised schools to “keep student gender identities hidden from families.” This is on top of the already expansive agenda to inject gender identity politics into classrooms in Oregon. So, what they are saying essentially is that “we are going to brainwash your children with woke ideology, and we are going to lie to you about our curriculum to keep you in the dark.”
Public school policies in Oregon revolve around dictates drafted in progressive controlled counties. Rural counties can fight back by putting pressure on their local school boards, but it will be a constant battle with losing prospects unless they break from leftist influence completely.
Another big factor in making conservatives want to leave Oregon was the recent draconian covid lockdowns and mandates enforced by the Democrat controlled state government. Many conservative county officials fought back against these mandates while enduring threats of legal retribution and even arrest. The leftists revealed their true authoritarian natures during the pandemic event and a number of people ranging from conservative to independent suddenly realized how bad the situation can really get if they remain under the governmental oversight of Democrats.
It makes perfect sense for red counties to want to break away from blue states after the kinds of chaos leftists have created within our nation in the past few years alone. When Dems say this would be “bad for the country” what they really mean is that it will be bad for them. The Greater Idaho Movement may have a very slim chance of success in the long run, but it puts the issue of national divorce front and center in the public consciousness, and they don’t like that.
Democrat representatives like Ned Burns in Idaho asserts that the political system works best “When there’s a balance of different viewpoints,” arguing that efforts “to build a one-party state lead to extremism and that can be very dangerous.”
Idaho Democrat Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow echoed this sentiment:
“While there are vast political differences in our region, Greater Idaho is not the proper remedy for those differences,” said Wintrow. “Our democratic republic depends on level heads coming together to find solutions to the issues that impact our citizens. Dividing state borders to create enclaves of politically like-minded people is the opposite of a healthy America.”
But we already have extremist regions of the country in the form of blue states, we saw that clear as day during the covid mandates. Not only that, cooperation within the status quo only seems to be the Democrat rally cry when progressives are in power. Only five years ago leftists in states like California widely called for secession from the US over the election of Donald Trump. Today, they rail against a few counties seceding, not from the country, but merely from Oregon.
The political left views everything through the lens of collectivism. They see people as property of their model of society, which they consider the only model for society. If Americans are allowed to walk away, then this might reflect badly on progressive society as a whole. If people are allowed to build their own systems elsewhere they might prove that the leftist system is frail, oppressive and unstable. If people have the ability to choose and take their county and their land with them, why would they stay under the governance of a leftist dominated place?
The ability to walk away would completely destroy the leftist socialist dynamic. They can only survive if they are able to force people to participate in their model while requiring those same prisoners to adopt woke beliefs. They see conservative congregation and secession as a threat to their aims to absorb the entire nation; not just half of US states, but all of America. The rest of the US would do well to take the Greater Idaho Movement seriously as it represents a feeling that is growing across the country – We are at an impasse.
There are two completely separate cultures in America today and they cannot coexist.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 23:20 - Top Military Enlisted Say Housing And Pay Issues Hurt Recruitment, Retention
Top Military Enlisted Say Housing And Pay Issues Hurt Recruitment, Retention
Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The military’s top enlisted members say poor housing, health care, childcare, and pay problems are deleterious to recruiting and retention.
Homes that were constructed by Balfour Beatty are seen in a neighborhood at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., on May 1, 2019. (Nick Oxford/Reuters) Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) claimed that a plan promoted by Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to freeze discretionary spending at FY 2022 levels would only make things worse.
“We can’t take a giant leap backward,” Wasserman Schultz said.
The highest-ranking enlisted people for each service testified in an oversight hearing of the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies on Feb. 28. They said the Department of Defense (DOD) must address quality of life issues.
Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael Grinston told the subcommittee that the problem extends beyond just soldiers’ morale. It could impact national security.
“This is an American problem,” he said.
Grinston said the Army had dedicated approximately $1.5 billion to family housing, soldiers’ barracks, and childcare facilities on Army posts worldwide. He said these problems are aggravating matters stemming from pay issues and increased demands on enlisted personnel.
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy James Honea agreed. He said that Navy hospitals in the Pacific Northwest had been recently downsized, forcing Navy personnel to drive farther from their bases for medical care. This only adds to the pressure already felt by many in the enlisted ranks.
“We will begin losing employees that are mission critical,” Honea said.
The housing issue began around the mid-1990s as military budgets were cut after the Cold War.
Approximately 180,000 housing units needed renovation or replacement at that time, according to the Military Housing Association (MHA).
In 1996, Congress authorized the Military Housing Privatization Initiative (MHPI). Under the MHPI, each branch contracted with private property managers to handle military housing. The MHA was formed to represent those property managers.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) had issued several reports documenting complaints about mold, pests, lack of maintenance, rundown housing units, and rude and indifferent responses from property managers when they requested help.
According to the most recent GAO report, DOD is increasing its oversight of the MHPI. However, it is hampered by the fact that it deals with civilian property managers.
Dealing With Civilians Complicates Things
“Nevertheless, oversight of the privatized family housing problem will likely continue to face challenges.
In part, because DOD cannot unilaterally make changes to projects without the concurrence of the private companies,” the March 2022 GAO report reads.
For example, the report mentions a Tenant Bill of Rights, which the DOD ordered by Congress to implement in February 2020. By March 2022, the managers of properties at five military installations had not agreed to the Bill of Rights.
Pay issues were further aggravating the problems, the military members said.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at least 20,000 military families, 213,000 National Guard and Reserve members, and 1.1 million veterans qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Grinston said the issue is “a math problem.”
He said that across-the-board pay increases don’t address the realities that enlisted troops face. While their pay increases, it doesn’t increase comparable to that of commissioned officers. As a result, enlisted pay often fails to keep pace with inflation, the cost of living where the troops live, and other factors.
“Inflation is real, the supply chain is real, these basic needs compete with one another,” said Sgt. Major of the Marine Corps Troy Black.
Grinston said all military branches are doing more to teach enlisted members money management skills. Ultimately DOD will have to develop a better formula for adjusting military pay, according to Grinston. He said that leaving this issue unaddressed would reflect poorly on the military.
“We really wouldn’t want our service members to be eligible for that benefit,” Grinston said.
Wasserman Schultz asked how a cut in the defense budget would impact the issues they had discussed.
She referenced a promise to hold discretionary spending to FY 2022 levels that the Republican “Freedom Caucus” got from McCarthy in his bid to become Speaker.
The plan does not exempt DOD. Wasserman Schultz said this could cost the military $4 billion in lost funding.
Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force JoAnne Bass said such a cut would force all the military services to decide which programs to cut.
“Any cut to those (housing, childcare, health care) would put your services in a position where they have to make those very tough decisions.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 23:00 - Retail Investors Buy Record Amounts Of Six-Month Bills In Monday's Auction
Retail Investors Buy Record Amounts Of Six-Month Bills In Monday’s Auction
Several months ago, a Goldman trader penned the phrase JOMO (or the Joy Of Missing Out from the daily chaos in stocks) to describe the growing infatuation – across both institutional and retail investors – with generously-yielding fixed income instruments, at the expense of equities which not that long were the only game in town (a time when FOMO dominated). And nowhere was this more obvious than in today’s 6-Month bill auction.
As Bloomberg notes, retail investors took the most six-month Treasury bills at an auction in nearly 30 years as high interest rates trumped concerns over Federal Reserve tightening.
Noncompetitive bidders, a group of bond buyers which tend to be smaller investors that want to passively accept the auction yield without the risk of submitting a competitive bid, took $2.84 billion of six-month bills at Monday’s auction.
That, as shown in the chart below, was a near-record bid by retail, second only to the $2.88 billion awarded on June 27, 1994, Treasury Department data show. At this rate, expect a new record retail print as soon as next week’s 6M Bill auction.
Today’s $48 billion auction stood out in yet another way: the stop-out yield of 4.97% was the highest for a six-month offering since January 2007.
“Generally, intermediate bills have struggled to generate investor demand due to risks associated with the prospects of a more hawkish Fed, and uncertainty about the debt ceiling,” Jefferies economists Thomas Simons and Aneta Markowska say in a note. “However, with the small cut in supply for 3s, and the high outright yield levels offered, the auctions did a bit better today”
As a reminder, the yield on six-month bills initially rose above 5% on Feb. 14, making it the first US government obligation to reach that threshold in 16 years. That yield is slightly higher than those on 4-month and one-year bills, which according to BBG reflect reflecting concerns over the trajectory of Fed rate hikes and the risk that Congress will fail to raise the debt ceiling before Treasury exhausts its cash reserves. According to various forecasts, the D-Day will realistically hit some time in September or October, which roughly coincides with the maturity of the current 6Month. Of course, in case of a default, repayment on said Bill will be in limbo indefinitely.
While we doubt that the US will default (there will be the usual last minute fireworks but in the end holdout republicans will fold, although we may need a modest scare in stocks to get there), what is more interesting is that so many retail investors are shifting their portfolios to debt securities, whether floating or fixed rate, that continued tightening by the Fed – which ends up pushing yields even higher – will soon have the effect of easing financial conditions as it boosts how much disposable income savers end up getting in the form of interest income. As for those who never saved anything and live month to month on their credit card, better luck next time.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 22:40 - China's Modest Growth Target Isn't Stalling Reopening Trade
China’s Modest Growth Target Isn’t Stalling Reopening Trade
By George Lei, Bloomberg Markets Live strategist and reporter
China’s 5% growth target may appear underwhelming to some, though it is very much in-line with shifting market expectations since last week’s blowout PMI. The modest objective leaves room for upside growth surprises and bodes well for Chinese equities overall, though Hong Kong stocks are likely to keep outperforming their onshore peers.
The 5% goal was below the 5.3% consensus in a Bloomberg survey, as well as the 5.5% objective for 2022 and also targets set by most provinces. Conservative as it is, the number won’t necessarily lead to a weak outcome, according to Citigroup, which noted that as recently as 2021 China managed to grow 8.1% versus a 6% target.
The ongoing Congress in Beijing leaves one thing perfectly clear, though: There will be no major stimulus on either fiscal or monetary fronts. The strength of China’s reopening exceeded the expectations of top leaders, who will be more restrained in rolling out new stimulus, Bloomberg reported last week. Now that the 5% target is in place, Citigroup believes any positive data surprises may “limit the extent of downward move” in market interest rates.
What does that mean for equities? As my colleague Sofia Horta e Costa noted, Hong Kong has so far been home to the reopening trade for investors who believe the post-Covid economy is already doing well. Onshore equities, on the contrary, are the stimulus play for those who expect Beijing to deliver more fiscal spending or PBOC liquidity.
The reopening trade has beaten stimulus bets handily since the end of October when chatter of exiting Covid Zero began to pick up steam. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng China Enterprise Index has rallied more than 40% over the period, while the onshore benchmark CSI 300 advanced less than half of that. The gap will probably persist, or even widen, in the foreseeable future.
China’s reopening is likely to be more V-shaped than consensus expectations, with substantial excess savings likely to support consumption, according to a March 6 research report from Morgan Stanley, which expects equities in North Asia ex-Japan to continually outperform as is “typical in the early phases of a bull market.”
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 22:26 - Hedges: Lynching The Deplorables
Hedges: Lynching The Deplorables
Authored by Chris Hedges via The Chris Hedges Report,
There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. Their vision for America, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories leaves a very wide chasm between their beliefs and mine. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.
Image: Executing the Law – by Mr. Fish
The U.S. legal system has a very sordid history. It was used to enforce segregation and legitimize the reign of terror against Black people. It was the hammer that broke the back of militant union movements. It persecuted radicals and reformers in the name of anti-communism. After 9/11, it relentlessly went after Muslim leaders and activists with Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs, established by the Clinton administration, originally only applied to people who ordered murders from prison or were convicted of mass murder, but are now used to isolate all manner of detainees before and during trial. They severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world; prohibiting calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. The solitary confinement like conditions associated with SAMs undermine any meaningful right to a fair trial according to analysis by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and can amount to torture according to the United Nations. Julian Assange faces SAMs or similar conditions should he be extradited to the U.S. The Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, also allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from defendants. The courts, throughout American history, have abjectly served the interests of big business and the billionaire class. The current Supreme Court is one of the most retrograde in decades, rolling back legal protections for vulnerable groups and denying workers protection from predatory corporate abuse.
At least 1,003 people have been arrested and charged so far for participation in events on Jan. 6, with 476 pleading guilty, in what has been the largest single criminal investigation in U.S. history, according to analysis by Business Insider. The charges and sentences vary, with many receiving misdemeanor sentences such as fines, probation, a few months in prison or a combination of the three. Of the 394 federal defendants who have had their cases adjudicated and sentenced as of Feb. 6, approximately 220 “have been sentenced to periods of incarceration” with a further 100 defendants “sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 15 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. There are six convictions and four guilty pleas on charges of “seditious conspiracy.” This offense is so widely defined that it includes conspiring to levy war against the government on the one hand and delaying the execution of any law on the other. Those charged and convicted of “seditious conspiracy” were accused of collaborating to oppose “the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” by preventing or delaying the Certification of the Electoral College vote. While a few of the organizers of the Jan. 6 protest such as Stewart Rhodes, who founded Oath Keepers, may conceivably be guilty of sedition, and even this is in doubt, the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results.
Joseph D. McBride went to law school because his brother was serving a 15-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. He provided free legal advice as a law school student to those encamped in Zuccotti Park in New York City during the Occupy movement. Following law school, he worked as a public defender and in the Legal Aid Society. He represents several of those charged in the Jan. 6 incursion, including Richard Barnett. Barnett was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office with his leg propped up on her desk. Barnett was convicted by a federal jury, which deliberated for two hours, on eight counts, including disorderly conduct in the Capitol building. He faces up to 47 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 3.
“The post 9/11 model is being applied to American citizens,” McBride told me when I reached him by phone. “That model is the 19 hijackers. Everyone who is a religious Muslim is a suspect for the next 20 years. They should be waterboarded. They should be put in fucking jail and left in Guantanamo Bay. Lock them up. Throw away the key. Because they are psychopath extremists who believe in Allah and we don’t have time for that. They’re a threat based on who they are, what they look like, what they believe in. When the truth is, the vast majority of these guys don’t do drugs, don’t drink alcohol, they have five kids and they live pretty good lives. But because of the label of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Osama Bin Laden’ and ‘al-Qaeda’, everybody who is a Muslim is now a target. If we get on a plane next to one of these people, we get nervous about it because that’s how much it’s ingrained in us. The same thing is happening, except it’s being applied to a new group of people, primarily white Christians, Trump supporters, for now.”
“Power is going to change hands,” he warned. “The Democrats are not going to be in power forever. When power changes hands, that precedent is going to travel with it. If somebody else from the other side gets in and starts to target the people who are in power now, their families, their businesses, their lives, their freedom, then it’s over. America goes from being a free democracy to a tribalist partisan state. Maybe there’s not ethnic-cleansing in the streets, but people are cleansing each other from the workplace, from social media, from the banking system and they’re putting people in jail. That’s where we’re headed. I don’t know why people can’t see what’s on the horizon.”
The Jan. 6 protestors were not the first to occupy Congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s office. Young environmental activists from the Sunrise Movement, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even congressional staffers have engaged in numerous occupations of congressional offices and interrupted congressional hearings. What will happen to groups such as Code Pink if they occupy congressional offices with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pretrial detention? Will they be given lengthy prison terms based on dubious interpretations of the law? Will they be considered domestic terrorists? Will protests and civil disobedience become impossible?
McBride said those who walked to the Capitol were not aware that the Department of Justice had created arbitrary markers, what McBride called an “imaginary red line that they draw around the Capitol grounds.” Anyone who crossed that invisible line was charged with violating Capitol grounds.
He railed against the negative portrayal of the protestors in the media, the White House and Democratic Party leadership, as well as a tainted jury pool in Washington composed of people who have close links to the federal government. He said Change of Venue motions filed by the defense lawyers have been denied.
“The D.C. jury pool is poisoned beyond repair,” McBride said. “When you just look at what the January 6 Committee did alone, never mind President Biden’s speeches about ‘insurrectionists,’ ‘MAGA Republican extremists’ and all this stuff, and if you just consider the fact that D.C. is very small, that people who work in the Federal Government are all by definition, kind of victims of January 6 and what happened that day, their institutions and colleagues were ‘under attack.’ How can anybody from that town serve on a jury pool? They can’t. The bias is astounding.”
Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon shaman” who was adorned on Jan. 6 in red, white and blue face paint, carried an American flag on a spear-tipped pole and wore a coyote-fur and horned headdress, pleaded guilty to obstruction. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison. Chansley, who says he is a practitioner of ahimsa, an ancient Indian principle of non-violence toward all living beings, was not accused of assaulting anyone. He was diagnosed in prison with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.
Guy Wesley Reffitt, who did not enter the Capitol building, nevertheless was sentenced after three hours of deliberations to seven years and three months in prison on five charges, including “two counts of civil disorder, and one count each of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a firearm, and obstruction of justice.” His obstruction of justice charge came from “threatening” his two teenage children to prevent them from reporting him to law enforcement.
Daniel Ray Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran, who sprayed a chemical irritant at a group of police officers outside the Capitol and entered through the Senate Wing doors where he remained inside for approximately two minutes, was sentenced to more than five years in prison. He spent, like many who have been charged, nearly two years in pretrial detention.
Even the charges against Rhodes, who faces 20 years in prison, and other militia leaders of groups such as the Proud Boys are problematic. The New York Times reported that, “despite the vast amount of evidence the government collected in the case — including more than 500,000 encrypted text messages — investigators never found a smoking gun that conclusively showed the Proud Boys plotted to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.” The government has relied on the testimony of a former Proud Boy, Jeremy Bertino, who is cooperating with prosecutors to build an “inferential case” against Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, the five defendants in the current Proud Boy case. Bertino, on cross-examination, admitted that in previous interviews with the government, he repeatedly told investigators that the Proud Boys did not have an explicit plan to halt the election certification and that he did not anticipate acts of violence on Jan. 6. The FBI had as many as eight informants in the Proud Boys that included its leader, Enrique Tarrio, during the storming of the Capitol, raising the very real possibility of entrapment.
“They’re changing the laws,” McBride said. “Look at the 1512 charge, the obstruction charge. That was used for document shredding in Enron. It has no applicability to Jan. 6 whatsoever. They took it. They repurposed it. They weaponised it against these people and made it impossible for them to defend themselves. When you look at the civil disorder charge, they are saying that if January 6 was one big civil disorder, and if you had any type of interaction with a police officer that day that may or may not have caused the police officer to step away from his duties for a moment, you can go down with civil disorder and get five years in jail.”
Ryan Nichols, a Marine Corps veteran, is living under house arrest in Texas after nearly two years in pretrial detention, much of it in solitary confinement, in Washington, D.C and Virginia jails. He faces five felony and three misdemeanor charges. Prosecutors say Nichols assaulted officers and obstructed an official proceeding. He has been ordered to “stay away from Washington, D.C.” except for business related to his case, according to court documents. He has had to submit to “location monitoring technology” and is denied access to the internet and his phone except to perform functions related to his case. He cannot have contact with anyone involved in the Jan. 6 events, including co-defendants. Nichols must remain in his home 24 hours a day except for medical and court appointments. He is permitted to attend Sunday church services at Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview, Texas. He is facing 20 years in prison. He is scheduled to go to trial on March 27.
I spoke with Bonnie Nichols, Ryan’s wife, by phone from their home in Longview, Texas.
Ryan was arrested on Jan. 18, 2020. The FBI surrounded their house at 5:30 am in armored vehicles. They unscrewed the bulbs from flood lights and cut the wires to the couple’s security cameras before kicking in the front door. The couple and their two children, then aged 4 and 6, were at Bonnie’s parents house during the raid. The FBI confiscated their weapons, electronics and documents, including Social Security cards.
“We wanted to cooperate,” she said. “We didn’t know anything was wrong. They asked Ryan to come in for questioning. Ryan went and turned himself in. They arrested him and I didn’t see him again for over a year and a half.”
Ryan, who had no criminal record, ran a nonprofit called Rescue the Universe where he carried out search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters. He was denied bail. He was sent to a holding facility in Grady County Oklahoma for two months before being flown to Washington, D.C. where he was met by some two dozen U.S. Marshals. His feet were shackled. His arms were shackled to a chain around his waist. He was placed in long term solitary confinement and denied video calls or visitation from his family, including his children. He was denied access to his trial documents for nearly a year and prohibited from attending religious services in the jail.
Ryan, whose most serious offense appears to be incendiary rhetoric calling for a “second American revolution,” spent nearly 22 months in solitary confinement. Depressed, struggling to cope with the physical and psychological strain of prolonged isolation, he was eventually placed on suicide watch. He was strapped to a bench in a room where a light was never turned off. Guards would periodically shout through a window “Do you feel like killing yourself?” Those on suicide watch who said “yes” remained strapped to the bench. Those who said “no” were sent back to their cells. Ryan was often prohibited from having nail clippers — the guards told him he could chew his toenails down — or getting a haircut unless he agreed to be vaccinated for COVID-19. When Ryan appeared before Judge Thomas Hogan, who finally released him on Nov. 23, 2022, he told Ryan, with his long unkempt hair and fingernails, that he looked like Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away.
Every night, for the two years Ryan was held in solitary confinement, Bonnie and her two small boys would say prayers that Ryan would one day come home. She said she and her family have received numerous death threats.
“Ryan deals with insomnia,” Bonnie said of her husband. “He deals with extreme anxiety, depression and paranoia. He will not even go outside of his backyard because he’s scared that if he goes outside, that they’re going to take him back to jail. He has liver issues from the food that he ate because they fed him baloney sandwiches and trash while he was in D.C. He’s having a lot of medical issues. He also has lower testosterone than a 60-year-old man because he wasn’t able to have any sunlight. His vitamin D levels are low. The list goes on and on. This man does not sleep at night. He has nightmares. He whimpers at night in his sleep because he has dreams that he’s back in D.C. I mean, he’s a mess. This is the result of what has happened to him. He has vision loss. He doesn’t see as good as he used to.”
Ryan’s family, like many families of those charged, are struggling financially. Bonnie said their savings are gone. She and Ryan are heavily in debt. She has set up a fundraising page here.
“We are God-loving patriots,” she said. “Who’s going to be next? It’s not about Republican or Democrat or white or Black, Christian, or Muslim. We are all children of God. We are all U.S. American citizens. We are all entitled to our constitutional rights and freedom of speech. We can all come together and agree on that, right?”
The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right. We are turning those being hounded to prison into political prisoners and martyrs. We are moving ever closer towards tyranny.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 22:20 - Meteorologists Warn Of Big Snow And Rain Storm For Late Week
Meteorologists Warn Of Big Snow And Rain Storm For Late Week
AccuWeather meteorologists warn of a late-week storm that could bring wintry and severe weather to large swaths of the central US.
“There is the potential for some states in the northern Plains to be hit with two snowstorms within a week,” said AccuWeather Meteorologist Joseph Bauer.
Bauer said forecasts point to a winter event, with snow expected to begin late Wednesday in the Rockies and to spread into the Upper Midwest through Friday. He said accumulating snow is expected for cities from Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver to Madison, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis.
The exact snowfall and tracking of the storm have yet to be determined. The storm will take aim at the Plains and might strengthen as it moves eastward.
In the South, warm weather will lead to an all-rain event from Texas to Tennessee.
“Repeated rounds of rain from mid-to-late week could bring several inches of rain, especially from the Texas-Oklahoma border to Tennessee and Kentucky,” said Bauer.
Meteorologists have yet to determine East Coast impacts from the storm. Though average temperatures across the Lower 48 will trend below 30-year seasonal averages through mid-March.
Punxsutawney Phil was right one month ago when he saw his shadow in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which translated into a forecast of six more weeks of winter. The good news is that seasonal averages are trending higher as spring is just weeks away.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 22:00 - Judge Rules USA Powerlifting Must Allow Biological Male To Compete Against Women
Judge Rules USA Powerlifting Must Allow Biological Male To Compete Against Women
Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A Minnesota judge has ruled that biological men who identify as women can compete against natural-born women in USA Powerlifting (USAPL) following a discrimination case against the organization.
An athlete in a powerlifting competition in Tokyo on Aug. 26, 2021. (Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images) In his ruling (pdf), District Judge Patrick Diamond said that the national powerlifting organization must “cease and desist from all unfair discriminatory practices” after finding that it had engaged in unfair discriminatory practices by denying transgender weightlifter JayCee Cooper “the full and equal enjoyment of public accommodation because of sexual orientation.”
Cooper, who was born a male, filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights in 2019 alleging that the organization had violated the state’s Human Rights Act after Cooper was banned from competing in the women’s division.
Cooper then filed a lawsuit against USA Powerlifting in state court in 2021 alleging claims of sex and sexual orientation discrimination under the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) against USAPL and Powerlifting Minnesota.
The lawsuit, which was filed through the Minnesota-based advocacy group Gender Justice, also alleged that Powerlifting Minnesota had aided and abetted sex and sexual orientation discrimination under the MHRA.
Cooper Was ‘Separated, Segregated’
Lawyers for the weightlifter said in the lawsuit (pdf) that Cooper began powerlifting in 2018 and “fell in love with the sport.”
“Ms. Cooper sees powerlifting as a way to find strength within herself and has found a home in the community of strong supportive women who come together around a shared love of sport,” the lawyers wrote.
It goes on to note that Cooper had been training to compete in the USAPL Minnesota State Bench Press Championship and the Minnesota Women’s State Championship in January and February 2019, respectively, but in December 2018, USAPL sent an email to the weightlifter, stating that Cooper could not compete because of Cooper’s transgender identity.
“USAPL then revoked her competition card, which means that she was not eligible to compete in future USAPL events,” the lawsuit states, referring to Cooper. “USAPL MN then went on to hold both championship events, at which all transgender women athletes were prohibited from competing.”
Diamond ultimately agreed with Cooper’s attorneys.
“By denying Cooper the right to participate in the female category, the category consistent with her self-identification, USAPL denied her the full and equal enjoyment of the services, support, and facilities USAPL offered its members,” Diamond wrote in his ruling. “It separated Cooper and segregated her and, in doing so, failed to fully perform the contractual obligations it agreed to when it accepted Cooper’s money and issued Cooper a membership card.”
The judge also noted in his 46-page ruling that “the harm is in making a person pretend to be something different, the implicit message being that who they are is less than.”
“That is the very essence of separation and segregation, and it is what the MHRA prohibits,” the judge wrote. He also cited the “increased risk of depression and suicide, lack of access to coaching and practice facilities, or other performance suppression common to transgender persons,” as competitive disadvantages for transgender competitors.
USA Powerlifting Must Revise Policy
USAPL had argued that allowing male-to-female transgender athletes to compete against women was against company policy and that Cooper would have a competitive advantage over natural-born women.
In 2021, USAPL established an MX category, which is open to cisgender men and women as well as transgender men and women.
Judge Diamond ordered that USAPL submit a revised policy to remedy three specific areas of discrimination within 14 days and to comply with the revised policy thereafter.
A trial on possible damages has been set for May 1.
In a statement to Minneapolis NBC affiliate KARE-TV after the ruling, Cooper called the decision a “win.”
“After years of experiencing discrimination from USA Powerlifting, and the backlash that has occurred due to that, of course I have complex feelings about the sport,” Cooper said. “But I think that this win – [it] is a representation of where we can move forward.”
‘We Respectfully Disagree’
Separately, USA Powerlifting President Larry Maile told the KARE-TV it is considering appealing the decision.
“Our position has been aimed at balancing the needs of cis- and transgender women, whose capacities differ significantly in purely strength sports,” Maile said. “We have received a summary judgment decision from the Court finding us liable for discrimination. We respectfully disagree with the Court’s conclusions. We are considering all of our options, including appeal.”
The Epoch Times has contacted USA Powerlifting for comment.
The latest ruling comes shortly after 22 Republican senators, including Sens. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and Mike Lee (R-Utah), reintroduced a bill aimed at protecting female athletes and ensuring fairness and safety in women’s sports at educational institutions across the United States.
Known as the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act,” the bill would preserve Title IX protections for female athletes, which ban discrimination on the basis of sex in sports programs and require all educational institutions in the country to reward male and female athletes equally.
That bill would counteract the Biden administration’s expected plans to finalize rules in May that would force institutions to allow biological males to share women-only spaces and compete in women’s sports.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 21:40 - Man Stranded In Oregon Wilderness Uses Drone To Call For Help
Man Stranded In Oregon Wilderness Uses Drone To Call For Help
A sheriff’s office in Oregon reported a man was stranded in Willamette National Forest due to heavy snowfall. He was stuck on a stretch of roadway with no cellphone service and decided to use his drone to call for help.
In a Facebook post, the Lane County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue detailed the man attached his smartphone to a drone. He typed out a message to a friend. When he hit send, he launched the drone hundreds of feet into the air. After several tries, the phone connected to a nearby cell tower, and the message was sent.
“The increased elevation allowed his phone to connect to a tower and send the message, which resulted in our teams being deployed and assisting him out of his situation,” the search and rescue team wrote.
Here’s more on the out-of-the-box, or rather over-the-box, thinking that saved this man’s life.
Recently Lane County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue responded to an all-too-familiar mission, but with a unique twist.
A motorist had attempted to traverse a remote road in the U.S. Forest Service – Willamette National Forest that is not maintained for winter travel. His vehicle became stuck in the snow and he did not have cell service to call for help (cell reception is very limited in many forested areas of Lane County). Making his situation worse, his family was out of the country and nobody knew where he had gone or to call for help if he didn’t make it home.
Regardless of the circumstances leading to his situation, once stranded this person made several smart decisions. First, he stayed with his vehicle. Rarely does anyone in Oregon die from exposure waiting in their vehicle to be found and rescued, but we have unfortunately seen many poor outcomes from those who chose to walk away. Second, he used some ingenuity to find a way to call for help. The man had a drone with him and attached his cell phone to the drone. He then typed a text message to a trusted person describing his situation and exact location, hit send, and launched the drone several hundred feet into the air. The increased elevation allowed his phone to connect to a tower and send the message, which resulted in our teams being deployed and assisting him out of his situation.
While our teams were rescuing this person, another motorist who had also been stranded nearby in the snow for multiple days was located and rescued.
We are happy with the outcome of this call for service, and impressed with the creatively displayed to call for help, but we would like to take this opportunity to ask everyone to help us spread some important winter travel safety messages:
1) Forest Roads are not maintained for winter travel. Any attempt to travel on unmaintained snow or ice covered roads (no matter how much or little) should only be made with a group of well-equipped vehicles. If one vehicle becomes stuck, the other vehicles can attempt to free the stuck vehicle or can turn around and be used to drive everyone back to safety.
2) Always tell a responsible person EXACTLY where you are going, and when you expect to be back. Do not deviate from this plan. If a road becomes unpassable, turn around and go back the way you came, do not attempt a detour without first updating your plan with your emergency contact.
3) Of the dozens of missions we have had this winter involving a vehicle stuck in the snow, nearly all of them were 4×4 vehicles and almost all of the drivers told us “I didn’t think I would get stuck.” Instead of asking yourself whether you think you can get through a section of road, ask yourself “What will happen if I do get stuck?” If you (and the group of other vehicles you are traveling with) are not prepared to deal with any of the possible outcomes from an attempt, turn around and go back the way you came.
Full story here.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 21:20 - Prepared For The Worst, Survival Shelter Companies Waiting For Collapse Of Society
Prepared For The Worst, Survival Shelter Companies Waiting For Collapse Of Society
Authored by Allen Stein via The Epoch Times,
Set against a rocky slope, Fortitude Ranch resembles almost any other desert grange scattered along the barren highway in northwestern Nevada, far from any city or town.
On this 174-acre privately owned spread are free-roaming cattle, pens for raising sheep and chickens, a main house, and other living quarters under construction.
The ranch has good soil for growing crops, fruit-bearing trees, natural springs for gardening and livestock, and austere, rolling mountains on either side of the highway for cover.
Here, the resemblance ends.
The new Viking Lodge survival shelter is a work in progress at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Fortitude Ranch is anything but your typical farmstead. Its founder, Drew Miller, said its purpose is to ensure the safety of its inhabitants during a societal disintegration.
“Our design is to survive any collapse,” Miller said.
“We define a collapse as no functioning economy and widespread loss of law and order.”
It could take any form: a bird flu pandemic with heavy casualties, an economic depression, a world war, or global famine resulting in civil unrest and death.
A Question of Survival
During such a scenario, Miller said, “some people will just stay at home and starve to death.”
Others won’t go quietly into the twilight of civilization.
“A lot of people will say, ‘You know what? I will go out and steal food from my neighbor and do what I can to keep my family alive.”
A view of the desert scape from the windows of survival housing under construction at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Miller said this group poses a significant risk to the prepared.
Today, only some people feel the urgency to stock up against these terrifying scenarios or even think about them, said Miller, who started building survival ranches in 2012 as the need became more apparent.
Back then, the notion of preparing for a collapse of civil society still carried the stigma of tin foil hats and conspiracy theories.
The television series “Doomsday Preppers” further tarnished the image of “preppers” for years.
Miller, a former U.S. Air Force colonel, said a decade ago, people either smirked or turned away whenever he mentioned prepping.
That was then.
After the COVID-19 lockdowns and urban riots of 2020, the power substation attacks of 2022, the possibility of looming war with Russia—and China—and toxic chemical spills in 2023, hardly anyone is smirking now.
“People get it now. There’s much more recognition that you need to prepare for the fragile electric grid. For the avian flu contagion—and bad people,” Miller said.
Jason, a carpenter at Fortitude Ranch Nevada, works on a section of a new section of survival shelters on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“We tell our members there’s a chance a collapse could be something they haven’t even considered.”
The company lists 50 known triggers for a societal collapse on its website, taking each one seriously as its likelihood increases with each passing year.
Miller said the probability of an unexpected “black swan” event occurring this year is anywhere from 1 and 21 percent based on current trends and models.
Network of Like-Minded Survivors
The purpose of Fortitude Ranch is to meet the challenge through a network of survival communities with close to 500 members across the United States.
Miller sees it as a work in progress with five discreet corporate locations and a sixth survival ranch franchise.
He envisions as many as 100 nationwide franchises to keep pace with the demand.
From a survival standpoint, Fortitude Ranch is less costly than going alone, Miller said, because “you’ve got a survival community to share the cost.”
“We’ve got the staff. We’ve got the facilities. When our members show up in a collapse, all they have to do is follow directions.”
However, Fortitude Ranch is not geared toward the well-to-do. Its target membership is the middle class.
Ranch manager Brandon M stands in front of the new survival shelter lodge at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
While yearly dues are low (about $1,000 per person), amenities are substantial and guaranteed to ride out the collapse in comfort and safety, Miller said.
“We are affordable because of large numbers of members and economies of scale. Fortitude Ranch is attractive to join because it is a recreation/vacation facility as well,” according to the company’s website.
Each ranch setup has a basic fortified shelter design that varies by location.
There are log-cabin-style living quarters and below-ground configurations made with corrugated steel, including shared spaces, quarantine buildings, recreational areas, and guard posts.
The simplicity of each location’s design is the key to its efficiency, Miller said.
“That’s why we formed Fortitude Ranch. Our system is for the middle class. We have plywood bunk beds in some of the rooms. It’s not fancy. We’ve got some nice digs, but many of our rooms are called Spartan rooms.”
“We don’t give out our locations because it upsets our members,” Miller told The Epoch Times, but “if you’re alive in a collapse, they will find you. You cannot hide. You’ve got to be able to protect yourself.”
Buckets of long-term survival food are stacked against the basement wall at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
The rule is safety in numbers and armed security around the clock. When it’s time to “bug out,” members will arrive with extra food, guns, and ammunition.
“Hopefully before the collapse occurs—if the collapse occurs—we tell them don’t wait for a warning,” Miller said. “If you can’t contact us—that’s a good clue.”
At Fortitude Ranch in Nevada, Brandon M said the facility has everything an individual or family would need to survive following a general collapse.
“We’ve got over a year’s worth of food for more members than we have,” Brandon said. “That gives us time to have our agriculture and crops in place. We’ve also got our livestock.”
The ranch, built in 2020, is operational with solar and gas-powered generators for off-grid living. Brandon is the full-time manager, and Heather is his new assistant. Jason is a carpenter, helping construct the new Viking Lodge overlooking the ranch.
“I’ve been to some of the ranches. [Fortitude Ranch Nevada] is probably my favorite from a strategic standpoint,” Brandon said. “You have a lot of high points, but you don’t have a lot of trees, which can be a disadvantage as far as not having wood. The advantage is to see who’s coming at you.”
Ranch manager Brandon M stands in the middle of a new room under construction at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Brandon, now retired from the military, said the political climate in America has become more unstable and divided.
“I was looking to find a place with like-minded [people]. I realized I couldn’t do it alone,” he said.
After a decade serving in the Air Force, Heather said she found Fortitude Ranch online and applied for a job. She’s been out here for about three weeks and has enjoyed her experience.
“I like this because it’s more realistic. I don’t know if you even think about luxuries—water, food, and shelter. Those are the priorities. I think everybody should be concerned [about a societal collapse]. Not like fear—just aware,” Heather said.
The new Viking Lodge features a pair of log cabins joined with a corrugated steel enclosure to provide even more living space when complete. The ranch also has a small medical clinic, a workshop, and a practice firing range.
“We’re still building. We’re always building as we keep adding members,” Brandon told The Epoch Times. “Once we finish the Viking Lodge, we could easily have 200 [people].”
“Like right now, I’m working on rooms for paid members. It was just me out here for a long time, so it was slow. I don’t mind it; I like the isolation. You can’t just run to the store and grab some cough medicine.”
Fortitude Ranch Nevada manager Brandon M demonstrates a ham radio on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Brandon said Fortitude Ranch offers good protection against thieves and roaming bands of marauders. Given its remote location, finding the ranch wouldn’t be easy for the hungry and desperate following a collapse in the city.
“Being this far out here, nobody will want to waste calories walking and not even knowing what you’ll find,” Brandon said. “North of us, there isn’t anything for 30 miles.”
The ranch currently has more than 50 members, and everyone will have a job to do when they arrive, as determined by their skill set.
Brandon said two members are medical professionals. There are engineers and teachers as well.
One member is a culinary chef. The oldest member is 90.
“We’ve got big families, small families, individuals—all kinds of political backgrounds. Right and left. You’d think it would be all right [leaning]. We do have some [left-leaning] people. We’re getting more and more,” Brandon said.
“It’s like any other community. When civilization started, people had to come together in some way. It comes down to this: are the things that unite you stronger than those that divide you?
The medical clinic is fully stocked at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
The medical clinic at Fortitude Ranch Nevada includes a single bed on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
The nearest town is about a half-hour drive south. Brandon said some people suspected a nearby survival community whenever he shops for supplies. They’ll spot him at the supermarket, loading 20 bags of beans and 20 bags of rice into a cart.
Sometimes, they’ll ask him questions.
“I’ll make a joke. I don’t talk about what we are or where we are. They think you’re from a restaurant,” Brandon said.
Rebuilding Society
In the main house at Fortitude Ranch are furnished rooms with beds, fresh linen, and other amenities. The ranch guarantees a daily minimum of 2,000 calories for one year for each member.
However, some members prefer to stock their own food for long-term storage.
Brandon said members are serious about their preparations as national and global tensions worsen.
“A lot of them will come out here and store stuff. They’re constantly asking me how we are doing, where are we at.”
Fortitude Ranch Nevada manager Brandon M enters the work shed where gardening supplies are kept on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Members receive a monthly online newsletter to stay informed. So when the critical moment arrives, they will know what to do.
“It’s just about bringing communities back to what they once were,” Jason told The Epoch Times. “We’re trying to get people to work together in an environment to sustain themselves from anything.
“The template was there back in the day. It’s a winning model that works for everybody.”
Believing “history repeats itself” and collapse is inevitable, Jason said the sooner members work as a community, the sooner they can help to rebuild society.
“We’ve seen this before, and we’ll see it again. The probability of biological attacks is the norm right now,” Jason said.
Brandon said the collapse of society would look different than what people expect or imagine.
“You saw the rioting with [Hurricane] Katrina. This time will be on a much bigger scale.”
A barren lake bed stretches for miles on the way to Fortitude Ranch Nevada. Below, manager Brandon M walks along the dirt road to the main ranch house on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“It’s going to suck,” Brandon said, as people long to go back to life before the collapse.
“When we get knocked back into the Stone Age, you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people,” he said.
Jason added, “People will get caught where they don’t want to be. That’s the beauty of being a member [of Fortitude Ranch].”
Living Large Post-Apocalypse
Located in central Kansas, Survival Condos is a former missile silo turned into a luxury survival shelter on the higher end of the affordability spectrum.
Developer Larry Hall considers the project life-affirming in a world gone further off the deep end.
“For me, I took an intercontinental ballistic missile site that used to have a weapon of mass destruction designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people. I turned it into the complete opposite,” Hall said.
“It’s now a green facility, state-of-art technology that protects families.”
Fortitude Ranch Nevada is located in a remote northwestern part of the state, far from any city or town on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
He admits the condos are expensive. A 3,600-square-foot Penthouse unit starts at $4.5 million. A full-floor unit measuring 1,840 square feet costs $3 million, and a half-floor condo runs about $1.5 million.
“People buy what they can afford and what they perceive they need protection from,” Hall told The Epoch Times.
“I decided there was a missing niche market in the luxury high-end bunker where people didn’t know how long they’d need a bunker.”
Hall said before COVID-19, people used to scoff at survival shelters as a fringe market demographic.
The question was always, “What are the chances of society collapsing?”
Then came the lockdowns, the urban riots, and the general chaos in 2020.
Hall said the events of the past three years have only vindicated the preparedness mindset. Survival Condo is now considered the “Gold Standard” for survival shelters.
Raising sheep is one of the main activities at Fortitude Ranch Nevada on March 2, 2023. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“I never get asked that question [will society collapse] anymore,” Hall said. “You’ve pretty much become mainstream. People realize the value of having a hardened property to go to and that extra degree of safety.”
He said Survival Condo’s purpose is to make sure that clients will survive the collapse and thrive in the process.
To that end, Survival Condo hired a psychologist to aid in the project design for extended off-grid living. The psychologist looked at basic human physical and emotional needs—from the need for optimum lighting and color schemes to foster a positive mood, better food quality to improve personal satisfaction, and recreational activities to keep tenants happy and fit.
“The single thing you need to have to keep people from going stir crazy—what people call cabin fever—is to have a good quality of food,” Hall said.
The original complex held 72 silos. Hall bought two silos with options to purchase another four, built out the first silo, and is working on completing the second.
An aerial view of the dome as it is built over the existing missile silo at Survival Condo in central Kansas. (Courtesy of Survival Condo)
The finished silo is 15 stories tall and built with a military-grade redundant air filtration system to handle nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks. The facility has redundant power sources and more than 20,000 square feet of floor space under the dome.
Each fully furnished condo unit has a biometric key entry. Other high-end amenities include a custom theater, bar and lounge, a library, indoor swimming pool and spa, workout facility, command and control center, hydroponic gardens, a medical first-aid clinic, a digital weather station, and homeschooling classrooms.
Hall said there’s a long waiting list for units when they become available.
“Ours is way up at the top for a reason—military-grade everything with high engineering,” Hall said. “The book has done everything with very tough standards.”
“We’re constantly keeping the place in a state of readiness. We could scale it up if we needed to be here for an extended time.”
The interior floor plan for Survival Condo, a former intercontinental ballistic missile silo turned condominium in central Kansas. (Courtesy of Survival Condo)
That time now appears close as the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists stands 90 seconds away from midnight.
Whether a natural or man-made disaster is on the horizon—”pick a poison,” Hall said. “All result in one common denominator, and that’s civil unrest.
“People are afraid and trying to get by and survive. So, ultimately, you need something where you can sleep with both eyes closed and don’t have to worry about a gang of MS-13 guys kicking in your door.”
“The whole thing is you have a place designed to protect families,” Hall said. “We’ve got a facility that can do that. We’re not out to muck with anybody. We want to be out of sight and mind, do our best to survive, not burden society, and take care of ourselves.”
Miller, at Fortitude Ranch, said the demand for survival ranch franchises has been growing exponentially.
“We’re going like mad now through franchising. We’ll double our number of locations this year. It could take off even more,” Miller said.
A furnished condominium at Survival Condo in central Kansas. (Courtesy of Survival Condo)
But even with 100 new franchise locations, “that’s still a tiny percentage of the population,” he said. “We’re not even close to handling 1 percent of the population.”
Miller said people owe it to themselves and the future to survive the coming collapse as the opportunities to rebuild will be “phenomenal.”
“I hope the United States will recover and follow the Constitution. We don’t follow it today,” Miller said.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 21:00 - Ferrari Named Top Car Pick Over Tesla At Morgan Stanley
Ferrari Named Top Car Pick Over Tesla At Morgan Stanley
Could the automobile love affair at Morgan Stanley be shifting?
Analyst Adam Jonas, long known for his affection of Tesla and Elon Musk, has penned a note to start this week introducing Ferrari as a top pick by the firm, which has raised its price target on the company to $310 from $280.
Jonas has an overweight rating on the name and called the company “the most defensive name in his coverage” that avoids much of the “EV hype and EV risk”, according to a Monday morning Bloomberg wrap-up.
“We believe RACE is the best positioned company in our coverage in a highly uncertain macroeconomic and geopolitical tape. In addition to its strong fundamentals, we believe RACE has levers to pull for both growth or downside protection, within a wide dispersion of macro outcomes,” Jonas and peers wrote in their note.
“Ferrari has built its moat on scarcity, desirability, and brand values around performance (“driving thrills”) and luxury which is the key driver for continued demand. These factors make it hard for a competitor to replicate the Ferrari model overnight. In our view, buying a Ferrari today is not so much about ‘the sound of the engine’ or the ‘performance’ in and of itself,” it continues.
“Rather, we think it is a totality of factors that drive customers to want the elements that a Ferrari possesses: scarcity, desirability, connotations of luxury and performance (stemming from Formula 1 racing pedigree),and exquisite Italian design and engineering. The brand and scarcity drive unprecedented demand for the vehicles, which Ferrari is able to leverage with tight supply control.”
Jonas also likes that Ferrari has the longest order backlog, greatest earnings visibility and highest pricing power of any of the companies he covers, the Bloomberg note also said.
Long-term opportunities, a predictable business model and a “near unmatched brand and market moat” were cited as additional factors for the believe in Ferrari.
Jonas wrote: “We believe investors over-estimate the risk of EVs to Ferrari and misprice the inherent opportunity in EVs coupled with continuing the ICE business on an exclusive basis with price points for ICE approaching $1mn/unit.”
“The key concern we field from investors on RACE is the shift to EVs. Although the shift away from the ICE engine which has been at the heart of RACE’s brand since inception presents a profound shift in Ferrari’s powertrain technology, it need not threaten the company’s DNA. We believe the engine is only part of the reason why Ferrari has been able to create one the strongest brands in the world,” it reads.
The firm also didn’t seem to see risks of Ferrari shifting their model to EV from traditional ICE, concluding that Ferrari “can offer an EV that will be just as high in demand as what investors are used to from ICE.”
Broadly, however, Jonas is getting more cautious about the sector in general, citing the “rebound in equity prices and continuing signs of unaffordability and auto credit pressure”.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 20:40 - SPLC Attorney Among 23 ANTIFA Rioters Arrested On Domestic Terrorism Charges
SPLC Attorney Among 23 ANTIFA Rioters Arrested On Domestic Terrorism Charges
Submitted by Blue Apples
Since late January when a fatal shooting between Atlanta-area police and ANTIFA-affiliated broke out, Georgia’s capital has become ground zero of the continually fomenting hostilities from the radical leftist group. The tenuous situation saw that violence continue at the site of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Under the pretense of a “mostly peaceful protest,” rioters unleashed their fury by destroying construction equipment at the site of where Georgia State Patrol Troopers had exchanged gunfire with protesters occupying the site in late January. The latest ANTIFA insurgency resulted in the arrest of 23 people on domestic terrorism charges.
One arrest in particular sticks out. Thomas Webb Jurgens was one of the 23 arrested on Sunday according to DeKalb County arrest records. Jurgens arrest is notable because he is a staff attorney at the Decatur, Georgia office of the Southern Povery Law Center. Ironically, the SPLC have cultivated a partnership with state and federal law enforcement across the United States to designate and investigate extremists groups like those engaged in domestic terrorism across the country. Now, they are in a position where it’s difficult to unequivocally deny the criticism levied against them that their own members qualify to be designated among those ranks.
One of the Antifa members arrested on domestic terrorism charges in Atlanta last night is a staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The FBI has historically used the SPLC as a source for who should be considered domestic terrorists. pic.twitter.com/y5isk5AHaq
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 6, 2023
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According to Jurgens’ LinkedIn page, he joined the SPLC in September 2021 as a new hire to its Economic Justice Project. He presently is admitted to both the Georgia and Florida state bar associations. Jurgens had graduated with his Juris Doctor from the University of Georgia School of Law, the campus of which is located in Athens, Georgia. The campus is just 60 miles from Atlanta where he was arrested.
The Atlanta Police department detailed how the events leading to Jurgens arrest unfolded. Those arrested initially convened under the cover of gathering for a protest before events turned violent. “They changed into black clothing and entered the construction area and began to throw large rocks, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and fireworks at police officers.” according to Atlanta police who responded to the scene of the crimes. Footage released by the police department shows approximately 150 masked rioters breaking into the construction site. 35 were detained in total, with 23 already being charged and the potential charges looming for the remaining 12.
CONSTRUCTION SITE BURNS: Huge plumes of smoke and massive police response after @defendATLforest / #StopCopCity protesters face off with police at the site of Atlanta’s future Public Safety Training Facility. I’m told Molotov cocktails were thrown. Construction equipment is on… https://t.co/6dIyrPff6T pic.twitter.com/0F9qj8dgFn
— Billy Heath III (@BillyHeathFOX5) March 5, 2023
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Fortunately, unlike the police engagement in January, the events from Sunday evening went without any serious injuries or fatalities. No indication that any of the arrested ANTIFA supporters were armed with a firearm has arisen yet either. Despite that outcomes, Atlanta police aren’t viewing that good fortune as an auspice of what lies ahead. Officials cataloged Sunday night’s arrests as a catalyst for reactionary violence in the coming days. Police department officials forewarned “with protests planned for the coming days, the Atlanta Police Department, in collaboration with law enforcement partners, have a multi-layered strategy that includes reaction and arrest.”
Following violence during the “Night of Rage” ANTIFA organized in response to January’s shooting, Georgia Governor Brian P. Kemp issued a response indicating that state prosecutors would execute a new strategy to prosecuted rioters under domestic terrorism charges. Kemp’s Attorney General, Chris Carr announced his office’s intention to continue to pursue sweeping indictments against ANTIFA members for domestic terrorism continuing to riot. Carr also took the media to task for categorizing ANTIFA members as protesters. The arrest of 23 more ANTIFA rioters, including the SPLC’s Thomas Jurgens, conveys the commitment to a concerted effort between Georgia’s law enforcement and attorney general’s office to prosecute rioters to the furthest extent of the law.
The SPLC could not be reached for comment and has released no official statement regarding Jurgens’ arrest. In addition to domestic terrorism charges, Jurgens faces potential discipline from the bar associations he is admitted to in Georgia and Florida which could result in the loss of his license to practice law. The revelation of his arrest should also be cause for law enforcement officials around the country to reassess their working relationship with the SPLC. If Jurgens’ arrest says anything about the non-profit, it’s that their offices are a place where hate groups are apparently being cultivated instead of persecuted.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 20:20 - Russia Successfully Dodging Sanctions To Secure Semiconductors For Military Tech
Russia Successfully Dodging Sanctions To Secure Semiconductors For Military Tech
One astute geopolitical blog has issued a report exploring the many ways which sanctions on Russia have come back to bite their issuers. The same author had also clearly one year ago predicted precisely the scenario unfolding now.
Over the weekend, Bloomberg explored another key area where President Putin has been given a lifeline via third party countries such as Turkey, China the UAE, Kazakhstan and Serbia when it comes to semiconductors which are vital to military tech and other industries.
Source: Bloomberg Bloomberg writes that “Russia looks to be successfully working around European Union and Group of Seven sanctions to secure crucial semiconductors and other technologies for its war in Ukraine, according to a senior European diplomat.”
Citing the source, the report continues: “Russian imports in general have largely returned to their pre-war 2020 levels and analysis of trade data suggests that advanced chips and integrated circuits made in the EU and other allied nations are being shipped to Russia through third countries such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan, the diplomat said, pointing to those private assessments.”
This despite sweeping EU sanctions and restrictions impacting hundreds of items, including crucial technologies, meant to cripple the Russian economy and its the defense sector in particular.
Russia’s sources of imported chips before the war and before sanctions (2017-July 2021)…
As for China, Bloomberg observes:
Shipments from China to Russia have also surged as Beijing plays an increasingly important role in supplying Moscow, the diplomat added, asking not to be named discussing sensitive information. Those countries outside the EU haven’t sanctioned Russia themselves, but most have repeatedly denied they are helping the Kremlin.
Russian does actually produce domestic semiconductors; however, it’s long been known that government agencies and large private companies often refuse to use them due to their low quality and the manufacturer’s inability to keep pace with technological demands.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 20:00 - Victor Davis Hanson: Life Among The Ruins
Victor Davis Hanson: Life Among The Ruins
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,
American society is facing three existential crises not unlike those that overcame the late Roman, and a millennium later, terminal Byzantine, empires.
Premodern Barbarism
We are suffering an epidemic of premodern barbarism. The signs unfortunately appear everywhere. Over half a million homeless people crowd our big-city downtowns.
Most know the result of such Medieval street living is unhealthy, violent, and lethal for all concerned. Yet no one knows—or even seems to worry about—how to stop it.
So public defecation, urination, fornication, and injection continue unabated. Progressive urban pedestrians pass by holding their noses, averting their gazes, and accelerating the pace of their walking. The greenest generation in history allows its sidewalks to become pre-civilizational sewers. In a very brief time, we all but have destroyed the downtowns of our major cities—which will increasingly become vacant in a manner like the 6th-century A.D. Roman forum.
All accept that defunding the police, no-cash bail, Soros-funded district attorneys, and radical changes in jurisprudence have destroyed deterrence. The only dividend is the unleashing of a criminal class to smash-and-grab, carjack, steal, burglarize, execute, and assault—with de facto immunity. Instead we are sometimes lectured that looting is not a crime, but lengthy incarceration is criminally immoral.
We have redefined felonies as misdemeanors warranting no punishment. Misdemeanors are now infractions that are not criminal. Infractions we treat as lifestyle choices. Normality, not criminality, is deemed criminal. We all know this will not work, but still wonder why it continues.
Many among the middle classes of our cities who can flee or move, do so—like 5th-century equestrians who left Rome for rural fortified farms before the onslaught of the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. For most of our lives we were lectured that the old southern states—Florida, Tennessee, Texas—were backward and uninviting. Now even liberals often flee to them, leaving behind supposedly cosmopolitan Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. The more people leave the blue states, the more those states praise themselves as utopian.
The less well-off, without the means to leave, hope that their environs have hit bottom so things can only improve. The elite who caused this premodern catastrophe assumes they will always have the money and wherewithal to ensure that themselves and their own can navigate around or even profit from the barbarism they unleashed. For them the critic, not the target of criticism, is the greater threat.
The hard urban work of the 1990s and early 2000s—cleaner, safer subways, secure nightlife downtown, clean sidewalks, low vacancy rates, little vagrancy, and litter-free streets—so often has been undone, deliberately so. We are descending to the late 1960s and 1970s wild streets—if we are lucky the mayhem does not devolve even further.
A mere 10 years ago, if an American learned that a man was arrested for clubbing, robbing, or shooting innocents, and yet would be released from custody that day of his crime, he would have thought it an obscenity. Now he fears that often the criminal will not even be arrested.
A once secure border no longer exists. Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas simply demolished it and allowed 6-7 million foreign nationals to cross illegally into the United States without audits—to the delight of their apparent constituent, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
What would shame a Biden or Mayorkas? What would change their minds? Billions of dollars spent on social services for the lawbreaking at the expense of the American poor?
Would 100,000 annual lethal overdoses—12 times more than those who died over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined—from drugs that flow across the open border sway them? Or would it take 200,000, or 300,000 deaths before Joe Biden relented and ceased his chuckling?
What does a people do when its highest officials simply renounce their oaths of office and refuse to enforce laws they don’t like? Everyone knows the border will eventually have to become secure, but none have any idea whether it will take another 20, 30, or 50 million illegal entrants and 1 million more fentanyl deaths to close it.
Polls show race relations have hit historic lows. Much of the ecumenicalism of the post-Civil Rights movement seems squandered—almost deliberately so.
The Left now rarely mentions Martin Luther King, Jr. or even the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Perhaps it knows it has violated the spirit and legacy of both.
Today, our identity politics leaders believe that the color of our skin, not the content of our character, certainly matters more. The practitioners of the new tribalism in some sense fear outlawing segregation and discrimination by race. They know to do so would end racially restricted houses and safe spaces, racially exclusive graduations, and race-based admissions, hiring, and promotion on campus.
Read Professor Ibram X. Kendi and his message is implicit. For him, the problem with a Jim Crow-like system was not segregation or racial chauvinism per se, but merely who was doing the victimizing and who were the victims: so the original racism was bad; but racism in reverse is good.
We abhor violence, racism, and misogyny—in the abstract. Yet the entire hip-hop industry would find no audience—or so we are told by its appeasers—if rappers refrained from “ho” misogyny, brags of violence against law enforcement, and self-described proprietary use of the N-word.
Most know that young black males under 30 commit violent crimes at well over 10 times their 3-4 percent demographic of the population—so often victimizing the nonwhite. All know that reality must remain unmentionable even as its causes need to be debated and discussed if lives are to be saved. Yet the greater crime seems not the crime itself, but even mentioning crime.
Postmodern Abyss
Postmodernism in our age is deadlier even than premodernism. Sexually explicit drag shows that allow the attendance of children 20 years ago would have been outlawed—by liberals worried over the trauma of the young watching performance-art simulated sex.
Now the children come last and the performers first—as ratified by the same liberals. But to fathom the new transitioning, simply learn from ancient transitioning and gender dysphoria, an unhappy classical theme from Catullus’ Attis poem (stimulatus ibi furenti rabie, vagus/ devolsit ili acuto sibi pondera silice/ itaque ut relicta sensit sibi membra sine viro) to Giton in Petronius’ Satyricon.
Current “science” is now synonymous with ideology, religion, or superstition. Lockdowns, mRNA vaccinations, masking, transgenderism, “climate change,” and green power brook no dissent. They are declared scientifically correct in the manner that the sun used to revolve around the earth, and any dissenting Galileo or Copernicus is cancel-cultured, doxxed, and deplatformed.
It is now verboten to cite the causes of the current upswing. We must remain silent about the classical exegeses that cults, pornography, and constructed sexual identities, when not biological, were the manifestations of a bored culture’s affluence (luxus), leisure (otium), and decadence (licentia/dissolutio).
The classical analyses of an elite collapse focus on a falling birth rate, a scarce labor force, ubiquitous abortion, an undermanned military, and a shrinking population. We suffer all that and perhaps more still.
Millions of young men are detached and ensconced in solitude, their indebted 20s too often consumed with video-gaming, internet surfing, or consumption of porn. Many suffer from prolonged adolescence. Many assume that they are immune from criticism, given that the alternative of getting married, having children, finding a full-time job, and buying a house is society’s new abnormal.
Rarely has an elite society become so Victorian and yet so raunchy. A slip with an anachronistic “Gal” or “Honey” can get one fired. Meanwhile, grabbing one’s genitals while pregnant on stage before 120 million viewers is considered a successful Super Bowl extravaganza.
Our army is short of its annual recruitment by 25 percent. We all suspect but do not say out loud the cause. The stereotyping of poor and middle-class white males as both raging and biased, and yet expected yet to fight and die in misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, has finally convinced the parents of these 18-year-olds to say, “no more.”
Need we say anything about the lack of efficacy or morality of the Department of Justice, FBI, or CIA?
Or rather is there anything the FBI will not do?
Doctor court evidence? Hire Twitter to suppress the news? Monitor parents at school board meetings? Allow directors to lie under oath or “misremember” before Congress?
Swiping clean subpoenaed phones? Hiring fakers to compile dirt on a presidential candidate—and then using that known smear to hoodwink a judge to allow spying on Americans?
Suppressing evidence on a laptop to warp an election? Raiding an ex-president’s home with a SWAT-like team? Spying on Catholics in mass? Storming a home full of children of a man accused of a politically incorrect misdemeanor?
The more the military has been stalemated in Iraq, humiliated in Afghanistan, and dreading what China will soon do or what Iran will even sooner let off, the more it insists our priorities should be diversity, equity, and inclusion. Will that escapism ensure more lethal pilots, tank commanders, and Marine company commanders?
The mindsets of too many of our new generations of command are twofold: first to be promoted by virtue signaling woke policies that they must know eventually will hamper combat readiness, and then in the future to rotate at retirement into multimillionaire status by leveraging past expertise for defense contractors. Keep that in mind and almost every publicly uttered nonsense from our highest in the Pentagon makes perfect sense.
Them
There is a third challenge. Our enemies—illiberal, deadly, and vengeful—have concluded we are more effective critics of ourselves than are they. They enjoy our divided nation, torn apart by racial incivility, dysfunctional cities, and woke madness. (Notice how even the communists long ago dropped deadly Maoist wokeism, or how the Russians viewed the Soviet commissariat as antithetical to their military and economic agendas.)
Iran believes that this present generation of Americans would likely allow it to nuke Israel rather than stop its proliferation. China assumes that Taiwan is theirs and the only rub is how to destroy or absorb it without losing too many global markets and income. Russia conjectures that the more we trumpet its impending defeat, the more it will destroy Eastern Ukraine and call such a desert peace.
Our “friends” can be as dangerous as our enemies.
A visitor from another world might conclude Mexico has done more damage to America than North Korea, Iran, and Russia combined. It has, by intent, flooded our border with 20 million illegal aliens. It has allowed cartels with Chinese help to conduct multibillion-dollar profiteering by killing 100,000 Americans per year (did the Kremlin ever match that tally in a half century of the Cold War?).
Mexico drains $60 billion from its expatriates on the expectation that American subsidies will free up their cash to be sent home. The more the cartels run wild, the more money trickles down—while their top drug enforcement official Genaro García Luna was found guilty in a New York courtroom for collusion with the cartels.
How did all of this so quickly erode our great country? Our crisis was not the next generation of foreign Hitlers and Stalins. It was not earthquakes, floods, or even pandemics. It was not endemic poverty and want. It was not a meager inheritance from past generations of incompetents. Nor was it a dearth of natural resources or bounty.
Instead our catastrophe arose from our most highly educated, the wealthiest and most privileged in American history with the greatest sense of self-esteem and sanctimoniousness. Sometime around the millennium, they felt their genius could change human nature and bring an end to history—if only they had enough power to force hoi polloi to follow their abstract and bankrupt theories that they had no intention of abiding by themselves.
And then the few sowed the wind, and so the many now reap their whirlwind.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 19:40 - Pentagon Sees Chinese 'Spy Cranes' At US Ports As "Trojan Horse"
Pentagon Sees Chinese ‘Spy Cranes’ At US Ports As “Trojan Horse”
US officials have voiced concerns that Chinese-manufactured cranes operating at major US ports and various military bases may serve as a “Trojan horse” for Beijing’s intelligence-gathering program, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to national security and Pentagon officials, the ship-to-shore cranes, produced by China’s ZPMC, are equipped with advanced sensors capable of detecting and monitoring shipping containers, raising alarms that Beijing could gather intelligence about the materials being transported to or from the US ports or military bases.
“Cranes can be the new Huawei,” Bill Evanina, a former top US counterintelligence official, told WSJ. US officials have banned Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies from US communication networks on fears of spying. And he said the extent of the spying goes beyond Huawei into other forms, such as cranes.
“It’s the perfect combination of legitimate business that can also masquerade as clandestine intelligence collection,” Evanina said.
A spokesperson from the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the new panic around cranes is “paranoia-driven” and an attempt to obstruct trade and economic cooperation with China. The person added:
“Playing the ‘China card’ and floating the ‘China threat’ theory is irresponsible and will harm the interests of the US itself.”
The concerns about the alleged ‘spy’ cranes come after a recent dispute between the US and China regarding high-altitude balloons. In response to a recent spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, the Biden administration deployed a stealth fighter that successfully shot down the balloon with a Sidewinder missile.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 19:20 - Illinois Torched Business And Common Sense With Its Biometric Privacy Law
Illinois Torched Business And Common Sense With Its Biometric Privacy Law
By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints
How sadly ironic that White Castle became the latest victim of the Illinois General Assembly’s malfeasance. Its stores are modeled after the Chicago Water Tower, which survived the Chicago Fire and stands as a monument to the spirit of tenacity and resilience that once prevailed to rebuild the city.
Today, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow is the state’s own government. It set off what the law firm Mayer Brown rightly calls a “six-alarm fire for businesses with customers or employees in Illinois.”
BIPA, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, arises from a legitimate concern, as most laws do. In this case, it’s privacy of personal biometric information such as fingerprints, DNA and distinctive elements of things like face and retina features. Some of that data is used widely in the business world for things like time management, security, wellness programs and worker safety. The law requires informed consent prior to collecting the data, mandates protection and retention guidelines and bans profiting from selling the data.
That’s fine, but the problem is that the law imposes penalties wildly out of proportion to the seriousness of noncompliance or amount of harm done by a violation.
It can be a death penalty for violators. And the law allows anybody affected to sue for those fines.
That’s a firebomb recipe for personal injury lawyers. Nearly 2,000 lawsuits alleging violations of BIPA have been filed since 2017, “yielding a series of massive settlements and judgments,” as Reuters reported. Defendants have included Facebook, which paid $650 million to settle a BIPA class action and BNSF Railway Co, which a jury ordered to pay $228 million to truck drivers. Anybody thinking about suing enjoys a very generous five-year statute of limitations.
Then came last week’s decision on White Castle from the Illinois Supreme Court, pouring accelerant on the fire.
Separate BIPA violations occurred every time an employee used White Castle’s system that required its employees to scan their fingerprints to access their pay stubs and computers, the court ruled. And BIPA authorizes statutory damages of $1,000 for “each violation” of the statute, or $5,000 if the violation is intentional or reckless.
The top court’s decision therefore could mean a $17 billion liability for White Castle since some 9,500 current and past employees had used the system for years, as a dissenting opinion says, citing White Castle’s estimate. The court’s decision “could easily lead to annihilative liability for businesses,” says the dissent.
That’s what makes the decision terrifying for many other businesses that use biometrics. Every instance of use could mean a penalty of $1,000 or $5,000.
The decision “leaves the plaintiffs’ bar with an all-you-can-eat biometric café,” wrote the law firm Winston & Strawn in its newsletter.
A liability that big would destroy White Castle many times over. It’s not that big a company compared to many publicly owned food chains and is privately owned.
Sorry, said the majority of the court said in their opinion, the plain language of the statute required that result. If this needs to be fixed it’s up to the General Assembly. “Ultimately,” the majority opinion says, “we continue to believe that policy-based concerns about potentially excessive damage awards under the Act are best addressed by the legislature.”
That’s the real takeaway – the General Assembly should have fixed this long ago. The liabilities being imposed under BIPA have been burning out of control for several years, and the ruling making each instance subject to a penalty has long been feared, having percolated up through the courts for several years. Bills to fix it have languished.
The dissent argued that only one violation should be recognized for any employee for the first time fingerprints are collected, and that the law must have been intended that way.
Right or wrong, that’s now water under the bridge. The top court has ruled. Only the General Assembly can fix the statute.
One next potential victim of BIPA may be the cannabis industry, an increasingly important revenue force for the state, according to lawyers at Dentons U.S. “BIPA damages could be a death knell to cannabis operators,” they wrote, explaining,
The cannabis industry has placed a strong emphasis on security for grow facilities and dispensaries. These enhanced security measures are a must to protect employees handling largely cash transactions and customers purchasing a heavily regulated product. But, in taking these reasonable security measures, the cannabis industry has opened itself up to litigation surrounding BIPA’s stringent requirements.
The majority opinion in White Castle’s case says, “We respectfully suggest that the legislature review these policy concerns and make clear its intent regarding the assessment of damages under the Act.”
That’s being too nice. Nobody should be “respectfully suggesting” anything to legislature about this. They should have fixed BIPA long ago. Fix it now.
In the meantime, any business touching Illinoisans in any way that uses biometrics should follow the advice of many lawyers: At least mitigate your exposure by immediately reviewing policies and practices related to biometric information to ensure BIPA compliance, including biometric use for employee timekeeping.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 19:00 - Luongo: The War For The Dollar Is Already Over, Part I
Luongo: The War For The Dollar Is Already Over, Part I
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
And the Fed has won. In the words of Ambassador Kosh from the classic television series Babylon 5, “The avalanche has started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.”
For nearly the past two years I’ve been a nearly lone voice in the wilderness questioning the financial orthodoxy over the behavior of the Federal Reserve. It started with an innocent, if not openly naïve question back in June of 2021, “Could the Fed actually be getting off the globalist train?”
When I asked that question it was just days after musing to my Patrons on the eve of the June 16th, 2021 FOMC meeting that the Fed would have to step in and defend the US dollar. The dollar’s weakness during the Trump presidency couldn’t last forever. Even then I didn’t have a good answer as to how they would do it.
I just knew, intuitively, that they had to.
Back then there was no indication that the Fed was ready to begin raising rates. But by raising the Reverse Repo payout rate 0.05% above the Fed Funds Rate the Fed started the avalanche of US dollar strength that has persisted through to today.
And the pebbles screaming, “Pivot!” have been consistently overrun by the reversal of flow of US dollars from overseas back home, now getting extinguished at an unprecedented rate.
It was that extreme response by the market to the RRP rate that led to my asking that question. Nothing more, nothing less.
The implications of that question were far reaching. It led to a whole series of questions as to the knock-on effects. I wrote about some of these in the days after the Geneva summit where President “Biden” and Vladimir Putin hashed out a ceasefire over Ukraine. In that article I didn’t get everything right, but the main point, that the Fed was no longer willing to go along with the destruction of the private formation of capital, has more than held true.
Here’s the most important point:
The Fed is now ready, I think, to go to war with Davos over the future of money and they aren’t ready to hand over the keys to the candy store to a bunch of European commies, at least while also cutting Wall St. out completely of the New World Order…
…The plan {Davos’} is pretty obvious at this point: hand over the keys to capital formation to the central banks and destroy all risk assessment. Commercial banks aren’t needed. Only socially acceptable projects going forward will get funded. This is what Christine Lagarde wants with her new all-European Green Stock Exchange she introduced at Ankara last week.
But what’s clear to me now is that Davos went for the boob too fast on Prom Night at the Eschaton. It’s too much, too soon and the acceleration is exposing its flanks. Why would China and the U.S. go to war over COVID-19 and trade issues when they are being manipulated into it by a bunch of feckless Eurocrats with delusions of adequacy?
It was the possibility that the Fed, who ultimately answers to US commercial banking interests, is pursuing its own agenda that I explored in a recent podcast with Danielle Dimartino Booth, hoping to get her perspective on this widened lens of Fed policy rather than just focusing on inflation. In my opinion, Danielle more than delivered.
One of the biggest complaints about the Fed’s policies since the 2008 financial crisis has been that it has acted as the Central Bank of the World, rather than the Central Bank of the US. What I find hilarious, honestly, if not a little pathetic, is that the moment the Fed starts acting like a domestic central bank, the wailing and gnashing of teeth comes from all corners.
I expect that from globalists and vultures who love taking the Fed’s zero-cost dollars and levering them up to feather their own nests to build their own private empires in the shadow banking system. I didn’t expect that from the alternative economics space, however.
It’s like the Fed had just become everyone’s punching bag and that was that.
Ok, rant off. Back to the avalanche at hand.
Think back to 2021, or even the beginning of 2022, and remember that no one could even conceive of where we’d be today – the Fed Funds Rate at 4.75%, likely going to 5% in less than two weeks, and the term structure of dollar futures markets reluctantly admitting to a terminal rate between 5.50% and 5.75%.
I argued strenuously that in order for FOMC Chair Jerome Powell to make this new sovereign US monetary policy stick, he would have to ‘pull a Volcker’ and raise rates aggressively. This would expose the lies of the “Biden” administration about deflation and the need for trillions more in COVID-19 relief funds — the Build Back Better bill.
It would uncover who on Capitol Hill was aligned with the Fed and the New York Banks it represents, or, at least, who had their backing — Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D_WV) — and who was actively working against them. — Joe Biden, Federal Reserve Vice-Chair Lael Brainard, the Democratic Party and most of the Republican Party and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Even as I was making these arguments I never thought Powell would actually do it.
Then he did it.
And here we are today (well, March 3rd’s closing).
When I say markets reluctantly acceded to the Fed’s program I mean that just one month ago these curves were all signaling a Fed “Pivot” at 5% and that it would happen in June. Now the Fed Funds Futures is essentially flat at 5.45% until December.
But these curves are highlighting for me exactly what I’ve been preaching for the past two years. The Fed, through aggressive rate hikes and fundamental changes to its transmission of monetary policy, has placed the biggest burden on on US dollar markets overseas, not domestically.
Moreover, every major shift in policy, the statements coming from Powell, and the upcoming changes to US dollar markets themselves have supported this idea.
All of this was taking place against a gradual change in the foundation of US dollar markets phased in over a five-year period; the shift from LIBOR as the debt-indexing rate in US dollars globally to SOFR.
As of today there are three major futures markets to coordinate the supply of US dollars through time, the Eurodollar, the Fed Funds, and now SOFR.
But all of these ultimately were subservient to LIBOR because that’s where the overnight money markets took their cues directly from. The futures markets reacted to the LIBOR call out.
Remember in January 2022, the penultimate phase of SOFR’s replacement for LIBOR took place. That was when all new US debt had to reference SOFR as the baseline rate, rather than LIBOR. LIBOR was ending in June 30th, 2023.
Keep that date in mind. Because it looms large over everything currently happening.
Go back to what I’ve been saying for over a year, the Fed is not raising rates to combat inflation.
The Fed is raising rates to drain offshore dollar markets and force the offshore dollar trade to take its cues from the domestic cost of dollars as priced by SOFR, not LIBOR.
If you still haven’t been convinced of this argument, fair cop, but then why is the Eurodollar futures curve, at the first sign of bond markets finally believing the Fed is serious about not “pivoting,” trading significantly above both the Fed Funds and the SOFR futures markets? (see graph of yield curves above).
The spread being positive (26 basis points positive!) means the demand for US dollars overseas is far greater than the demand for them domestically. That spread is the pain threshold not for the Fed but for, primarily, the ECB and the Bank of England.
As much as we would like to blame the Fed for everything happening, creating scapegoats are simply a coping mechanism for being unable or unwilling to reconcile what is happening versus what we would like to see happen.
They are a reflection of our anxiety about that which we can’t control. And you can argue that I’ve done that with my incessant invoking the Davos bogeyman lurking behind the scenes, and, again, fair enough.
But that’s why we go deeper and ask the questions necessary to map out where everyone’s incentives are and how they would react to specific pressures changes in policy or personnel.
Bye Bye Eurodollars, Hello SOFR
Two years ago the idea that SOFR would successfully replace Eurodollars as the global market yield curve for US dollars was laughable. When SOFR was introduced in 2017 it was phased in with a five-year rollout plan, culminating in January 2022’s mandate. SOFR was the indexing rate of the US and that was that.
In December of 2021 SOFR futures traded around 290,000 contracts per day. By this report by IFR going from numbers from the CME, volume surged to 964,000 contracts.
Average daily volumes in SOFR futures reached 964,000 contracts in the two weeks ending February 4, according to derivatives exchange CME Group, up from about 290,000 in December and more than five times higher than their September level.
That was last year, less than a month before Powell began squeezing the Eurodollar markets to death.
Oh, but wait there’s more from Feb 2022:
But SOFR futures have also closed the gap this year to Eurodollar futures, the Libor-linked contracts that have long been a mainstay of rates trading markets and that SOFR futures are set to supplant altogether from the middle of 2023. SOFR futures volumes as a share of Eurodollar contracts have reached as high as 37% this month, compared with an average of 10% in the final quarter of 2021.
“There’s been a significant change in behaviour over the last few months and we’re now seeing exponential growth in SOFR futures activity. Records are being broken almost daily,” said Mark Rogerson, head of interest rate products for EMEA at CME Group.
“We thought there’d be an acceleration moving into 2022 when the regulatory guidance provided a catalyst. We’re now at a point where we’ve achieved critical mass in SOFR futures: liquidity is more than sufficient for almost all customers’ needs.”
Still not convinced? Why would you be, a year ago SOFR was doing 37% of the mighty Eurodollar’s business. Then let’s flash forward to February of this year with a press release from the CME itself.
CME Group, the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, today announced new milestones in the growth of its SOFR derivatives contracts, with a single-day record of 7,558,467 SOFR futures and options traded and record open interest (OI) of 35,698,298 contracts on January 12…
…In the first two weeks of January 2023, the average daily volume (ADV) of SOFR futures and options traded reached 4,674,007 contracts. Month-to-date January 2023 SOFR futures ADV is equivalent to 572% of Eurodollar futures ADV and SOFR options ADV is equivalent to 1,334% of Eurodollar options ADV.
Ooops.
If this was a prize fight they would have called it on a technical knockout two rounds ago.
Oh, but wait, they already did. You see, this is why I sandbagged you for this entire article. One, because I’m an asshole and two, because so are the guys running the CME.
The CME announced back in October that it was suspending trading in its former champion Eurodollar Futures and Options on Futures contracts dated after (wait for it) June 30th, 2023. The last day of trading will be April 14th. For a little more fun you can check out the CME’s daily SOFR Futures report.
I think that avalanche is now so loud it could be heard from space. Poor pebbles.
SOFR knocked out the Eurodollar because that was the Fed’s and New York’s ultimate goal; to replace the global rate for dollars with a domestic one where the capital would have to trade here.
The globe takes its cues, not from what Europe or Hong Kong wants, but what America needs.
This stabilizes our banking system, taking back power the Fed had ceded under Greenspan, Bernanke and Yellen and reminding everyone else just who runs Bartertown.
Most importantly, it pulls liquidity from around the world back into US markets, providing a foundation for a future where Davos doesn’t control DC. There are further implications of this but I’ll leave that for Part II.
The question I leave you with is the following, “Is there another, bigger avalanche further up the mountain?”
* * *
Join my Patreon if you don’t want to be a pebble.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 18:20 - Ex-CNN President Jeff Zucker Ordered Staff To Ignore Lab-Leak Theory
Ex-CNN President Jeff Zucker Ordered Staff To Ignore Lab-Leak Theory
Former CNN president Jeff Zucker ordered network employees not to investigate the Covid-19 lab leak theory because he considered it a “Trump talking point,” a “well-placed” CNN insider told Fox News Digital on Monday.
The ‘theory’ was recently bolstered by a Department of Energy finding that a lab-leak was the most likely origin for the virus, while FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed last week that his agency believes the same.
“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”
Throughout Zucker’s tenure as CNN’s chief, he pulled what was once widely seen as a straight-news organization to an anti-Trump operation. CNN bent over backwards to knock down what former President Trump and members of his administration said lending credibility to the lab-leak theory, as the White House was deemed a nemesis by the network. -Fox News
Fox News notes that on March 28, 2020, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy published a story with the headline:”Here’s how to debunk coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories from friends and family.”
Add this near the top of the mountains of media scandals. On a vital question of this generation – how did COVID originate? – they claimed a certainty they lacked, and banished a theory that was fully viable, because they prioritized their partisan allegiances above reporting.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 6, 2023
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“While the coronavirus pandemic has isolated family and friends inside their homes, it has in many cases increased online or over-the-phone communication with loved ones,” Darcy wrote. “But, in some cases, relatives and friends share poor information – whether it is bad science related to how to prevent the virus, debunked rumors about cities being put on lockdown, or conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19. While any strain of misinformation is not ideal, misinformation related to a public health crisis has an especially dangerous element to it,” he continued.
CNN host Fareed Zakaria notably said that “the far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory” while discussing the lab-leak theory.
And on Feb. 18, 2020, CNN insisted that it was “possible, yet unlikely, that the lab was connected to the start of the outbreak.”
Meanwhile, during an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci – who we recently learned ordered the fabrication of the ‘Proximal Origins’ paper ruling out the lab-leak – CNN‘s John Vause called the lab-leak theory “misinformation.”
Fauci responded that “theories that are not based on evidence and facts often can really mislead people.”
A CNN headline from April 2020 reading “Nearly 30% in the US believe a coronavirus theory that’s almost certainly not true” was based on a Pew Research poll taken at the time.
“Its origin is up for debate, but it wasn’t made in a lab,” CNN reported. “There’s still much we don’t know about the coronavirus pandemic, but virus experts agree on one piece of its origin story: The virus likely originated in a bat, not in a Chinese lab.” -Fox News
CNN directly politicized the issue once again on May 5, 2020, when now-fired Chris Cillizza, wrote the headline “Anthony Fauci just crushed Donald Trump’s theory on the origins of the coronavirus,” in which he noted that Trump “has been making the case that the coronavirus originated not in nature but in a lab in Wuhan, China,” but that Fauci’s natural origins claim was more accurate.
“Now, before we play the game of ‘he said, he said’ remember this: Only one of these two people is a world-renowned infectious disease expert. And it’s not Donald Trump,” wrote Cillizza. “In short, Fauci’s view on the origins of the disease matters a whole lot more than Trump’s opinion about where it came from.”
“Especially because, outside of Trump and his immediate inner circle, most people in a position to know are very, very skeptical of the Trump narrative that the virus came out of a lab – whether accidentally or on purpose.”
And of course, it was more than just CNN…
Probably the most incredible media fact — one so shameful the NYT has to ignore it — is that their lead COVID reporter maligned the lab leak theory as **racist**, only for key parts of the USG itself to now admit it’s a likely explanation.
Fauci gave the orders; they obeyed. pic.twitter.com/p3sOcKBW0C
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 6, 2023
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 18:11 - 'The Government Is Trying To Kill Us Now': Low-Income Americans Fume In Mile-Long Food Lines After Pandemic Benefits End
‘The Government Is Trying To Kill Us Now’: Low-Income Americans Fume In Mile-Long Food Lines After Pandemic Benefits End
Over the past year, 18 US states have officially ended pandemic-era states of emergency – including the covid food benefit, while a December mandate from Congress will end aid in March for the other 32 states, along with the District of Columbia, the US Virgin Islands and Guam.
The collective return to pre-pandemic policies includes enhanced unemployment benefits and child tax credits, as well as a rollback adjustment to Medicaid that boosted enrollment.
Now, people are waiting up to nine hours in mile-long lines for free food – some of whom say they can only afford to eat once per day, while others say they limit expensive food items such as meat for specific family members, such as growing teenage boys.
“I thought, ‘Wow, the government is trying to kill us now,” said 63-year-old Danny Blair of Kentucky. Blair, who lives in a mobile home with his wife, survives on his Social Security disability check, the Washington Post reports.
“They are going to starve us out,” Blair continued, apparently unaware that government assistance provided during the pandemic wasn’t permanent.
Blair and his wife hop into their truck twice a month at 4 a.m. to ensure they get a few staples at the Hazel Green Food Project’s giveaway. On a recent Friday, they waited nine hours until local prisoners on work duty started loading bags of meat and vegetables, potato chips and cookies into vehicles in one of the nation’s most impoverished communities.
From the front to the back of the line, the sea of despair and hardship along this desolate Kentucky highway foreshadowed what may be in store for millions of Americans as the federal government ended the remaining pandemic increase in monthly food stamp benefits this week. -WaPo
As the Post frames it, the pullback of pandemic-related aid could pose a setback to the Biden administration’s efforts to ‘slash poverty’ while building a ‘healthier and more sustainable middle class’ – none of which were the stated goals of the temporary aid.
“We saw positive benefits from this and less hardship, including for families with children,” said Dottie Rosenbaum, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who points out that all the free money helped reduce childhood poverty rates in 2021. “We can expect that to reverse now.”
Following the reduction in benefits, the average SNAP recipient’s benefits are expected to drop by around $90 per month, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That said, an even greater reduction is in store for seniors and the working poor who receive assistance from other government programs, and will likely qualify for less.
In Kentucky, many seniors on food stamps saw their monthly benefit drop from $281 to $22 last year after the state ended the pandemic emergency in May, according to local food bank network, Feeding Kentucky.
Other states are preparing for the same
“We are bracing, and our agencies, member food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens are not prepared for what is about to hit them,” Said Ohio Association of Foodbanks executive director, Lisa Hamler-Fugitt. “This reduction, and end of the public health emergency, could not be coming at a worse time.”
Even before the benefits retired this month in Ohio, Hamler-Fugitt said demand at food banks soared last year as retail food prices rose by 11.4 percent nationwide, more than five times the historical annual average. She said Ohio charities and foodbanks served 3.1 million people in the last quarter of 2022, which she called a record and about 600,000 more than were served during the same period in 2021.
Now, Hamler-Fugitt expects many of the state’s 1.5 million recipients will also be scrambling to find food assistance, adding she projects the benefit reductions will remove $120 million from Ohio’s retail economy each month. -WaPo
“We estimate we would have to increase our distribution by 15 times to even begin to address this, and we don’t have the resources to do that,” said Hamler-Fugitt. “So hunger rates are going to increase among our seniors, and families, and our children are going to fall behind academically because they are not going to be able to concentrate on empty stomachs.”
Is this practical?
In Kentucky, GOP lawmaker Sen. Donald Douglas said during debates that it wasn’t practical to live “under a constant state of emergency.”
“Let’s ask yourself, should SNAP benefits be a way of life?” he asked. “Now we know it is for some. Should it be a way of life for adults?“
Tyler Durden
Mon, 03/06/2023 – 18:00
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