- US Intelligence Warning: China Escalating Influence Operations
US Intelligence Warning: China Escalating Influence Operations
Authored by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,
China is doubling down on its efforts to influence state and local government leaders in the United States by exploiting the existing web of regional and local US-China relations, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) warned in July.
“Some of the goals of PRC [People’s Republic of China] influence operations in the United States are to expand support for PRC interests among state and local leaders and to use these relationships to pressure Washington for policies friendlier to Beijing. The PRC understands U.S. state and local leaders enjoy a degree of independence from Washington and may seek to use them as proxies to advocate for national U.S. policies Beijing desires, including improved U.S. economic cooperation with China, and reduced U.S. criticism of China’s policies towards Taiwan, Tibetans, Uyghurs, pro-democracy activists, and others.
“The PRC and CCP [Chinese Communist Party] continue to seek to influence Washington directly… Yet the PRC has also stepped up its efforts to cultivate U.S. state and local leaders in a strategy some have described as ‘using the local to surround the central.’ For the PRC and CCP, targeting state and local entities can be an effective way to pursue agendas that might be more challenging at the national level.”
The US intelligence officials warned US state and local leaders that Chinese influence operations “can be deceptive and coercive, with seemingly benign business opportunities or people-to-people exchanges sometimes masking PRC political agendas.”
The NCSC document also stated:
“Financial incentives may be used to hook U.S. state and local leaders, given their focus on local economic issues. In some cases, the PRC or its proxies may press state and local leaders to take actions that align with their local needs, but also advance PRC agendas, sometimes over national U.S. interests.”
There is nothing inherently new in the National Counterintelligence and Security Center’s July warning; PRC operatives have been working in this way for years, if not decades. One of the organizations that the US intelligence memo explicitly warns against is the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), which describes itself as a “national people’s organization engaged in people-to-people diplomacy of the People’s Republic of China.”
In reality, the organization is actually a front for the foreign influence efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It has been operating successfully in the US for decades, especially by forging numerous sister-city relationships with US cities to influence local US political, business, media and educational leaders. There are more than 200 sister city pairs and 50 sister state/province partnerships between the US and China, and such partnerships, according to US intelligence, can also include business, technical, cultural and educational exchanges between US and Chinese communities.
According to “China’s Influence & American Interests,” a 2018 report by the Working Group on Chinese Influence Activities in the United States, published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York:
“After forty years of engagement, the US-China focused foundations, educational and exchange programs, research institutes, and arts and entertainment initiatives throughout the country are too many and various to be cataloged…
“While American local governments value such ‘exchanges’ for financial and cultural reasons, ‘exchange’ (交流) has always been viewed as a practical political tool by Beijing, and all of China’s ‘exchange’ organizations have been assigned political missions.”
CPAFFC has been instrumental in sponsoring conferences connecting Chinese officials and others with US governors, mayors, and state and local legislators, according to US intelligence. Since 2011, for instance, CPAFFC was a sponsor of the China-U.S. Governors Forum. In 2019, this forum, which took place in Kentucky, was “billed as an ‘exclusive deal making opportunity’ for investors, industry, and government leaders of both nations.”
It was also a place where China’s ambassador to the United States sought to influence the assembled governors, mayors and other local leaders to follow China’s policies. According to the NCSC document:
“In 2019, the PRC’s U.S. Ambassador expressed concerns over Washington’s trade policies towards China at the CPAFFC-sponsored China-US. Governors Forum and urged U.S. Governors “to pay serious attention to this, and not let some ill-informed, ill-intentioned people incite a ‘new Cold War’ at the expense of the people’s interests.”
In 2020, however, the Trump administration withdrew the US from the China-U.S. Governors Forum. The administration said that since the US had signed the agreement, the CPAFFC had “sought to directly and malignly influence” US state and local leaders to promote China’s global agenda and thereby “undermined the Governors Forum’s original well-intentioned purpose.”
The NCSC document continues:
“Individual U.S. localities may be unaware that their partnerships with cities and states in China are centrally coordinated and managed in China by CPAFFC [the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries] which… is closely tied to the CCP’s political influence bureaucracy. The PRC’s centralized control over such partnerships underscores the need for U.S. state and local officials to understand the roles and intentions of all those participating on the Chinese side.”
US intelligence is also worried that China could create dependencies to gain influence:
“The PRC or its proxies may use financial rewards and punishments, such as promising or withdrawing access to Chinese markets, to cultivate and leverage business and government leaders at the U.S. state and local level.
“Rewards may take the form of investments in U.S. communities or business deals that promise ‘win-win’ or ‘mutually beneficial’ development. Paid trips to China for U.S. state and local leaders or PRC delegation visits to U.S. localities may also serve as enticements.”
Furthermore, US intelligence warned, Chinese “rewards” always come at a price, for instance by requiring the support of policies that would benefit China. “In 2019, a U.S. Governor received a letter from a PRC Consulate threatening to cancel a Chinese investment in the Governor’s state if the Governor chose to travel to Taiwan,” the NCSC wrote.
Additionally, China uses the same tactics when it comes to US business leaders:
“In 2021, the PRC Embassy in Washington sent letters to select U.S. business leaders urging them to lobby the U.S. Congress to reject bills the PRC opposed, including bills designed to increase U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China: ‘[W]e sincerely hope you will play a positive role in urging members of the Congress to abandon the zero-sum mindset and ideological prejudice, stop touting negative China-related bills, delete negative provisions, as to create favorable conditions for bilateral economic and trade cooperation, before it’s too late…’
“In 2021, a senior PRC official instructed U.S. business leaders with interests in China to ‘speak up and speak out, and push the US government to pursue a rational and pragmatic policy towards China, stop conducting wars in trade, industry, and technology…’ The PRC official added, ‘[T]he business community cannot make a fortune in silence.'”
While it is commendable that a US intelligence agency sets out to warn US local and state leaders against the CCP’s malign influence, the warning, arriving as it does after so many decades of Chinese influence operations in the US, comes across, unfortunately, as too little, too late. The U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center appears a little too hopeful when it assumes that Americans involved in all those exchanges are suddenly going to change their minds and begin to divest from the different Chinese ventures that they are involved in, especially as so much might be gained from staying ignorant.
According to Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, in their recently book, Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World:
“Local politicians typically know little about China and have no responsibility for national security, and because their Chinese interlocutors present themselves as offering people-to-people exchanges and ‘opportunities for local business’, these politicians have a strong incentive to remain uninformed…
“The focus is typically on economic and cultural ties and it’s easy to pretend that there is no political element… however, these local ties are in fact highly political, and where necessary they can be leveraged to pressure national governments. This is the tactic of ‘use the countryside to surround the city'”.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 23:40 - Is Democracy In Decline?
Is Democracy In Decline?
While it’s true that globally, the citizens of the world enjoy more democratic freedoms than in the past, Statista’s Anna Fleck notes that several indicators seem to suggest that this progress is now under threat. So: is the world becoming less democratic?
One way to approach this question is to look at the evolution of both democratic societies and autocratic regimes around the world.
In Statista’s chart below, they have drawn from the classification and evaluation of political regimes shown by Our World in Data (Lührmann et al. (2018), V-Dem). Here, democracies have been subdivided into two categories, “electoral” and “liberal”. Liberal democracies hold not only free elections but also have equitable laws and processes.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Using this data, we can see that democracy has indeed been on the decline in recent years. After an all-time high in 2016, when there were 97 democracies worldwide (both in terms of liberal and electoral), this figure fell to 89 in 2021.
The number of people living in democracies has plummeted from 3.9 billion in 2017 to 2.3 billion in 2021. Today, it is estimated that around 70 percent of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 23:20 - Chris Hedges: 'The Greatest Evil Is War'
Chris Hedges: ‘The Greatest Evil Is War’
Authored by Chris Hedges via ConsortiumNews.com,
Tomas was crippled for a war that should never have been fought. He was crippled for the lies of politicians. He was crippled for war profiteers. He was crippled for the careers of generals.
Excerpts from the author’s new book, The Greatest Evil is War.
I flew to Kansas City [in 2013] to see Tomas Young. Tomas was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He was receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary Body of War. He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.
“I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless,” he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intended to die.
“I couldn’t dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration.…”
He stopped abruptly and called his wife. “Claudia, can I get some water?” She opened a bottle of water, took a swig so it would not spill when he sipped, and handed it to him.
“I felt at the end of my rope,” the 33-year-old Army veteran went on. “I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away. This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes. I felt this was a fairer way to treat people than to just go out with a note. After the anoxic brain injury in 2008 I lost a lot of dexterity and strength in my upper body. So, I wouldn’t be able to shoot myself or even open the pill bottle to give myself an overdose. The only way I could think of doing it was to have Claudia open the pill bottle for me, but I didn’t want her implicated.”
Tomas Young visits Ground Zero. (Ellen Spiro / Mobilus Media, Wikimedia Commons)
“After you made that decision, how did you feel?” I asked.
“I felt relieved,” he answered. “I finally saw an end to this four-and-a-half-year fight. If I were in the same condition I was in during the filming of Body of War, in a manual chair, able to feed and dress myself and transfer from my bed to the wheelchair, you and I would not be having this discussion. I can’t even watch the movie anymore because it makes me sad to see how I was, compared to how I am.…Viewing the deterioration, I decided it was best to go out now rather than regress more.”
Tomas was crippled for a war that should never have been fought. He was crippled for the lies of politicians. He was crippled for war profiteers. He was crippled for the careers of generals. He bore all this upon his body. And there are hundreds of thousands of other broken bodies like his in Baghdad, Kandahar, Peshawar, the Walter Reed medical center, and hospitals in Russia and Ukraine. Mangled bodies and corpses, broken dreams, unending grief, betrayal, corporate profit, these are the true products of war. Tomas Young was the face of war they do not want you to see.
Sgt. John Hoxie, watches 82nd Airborne Division’s All American Week celebration May 18, 2009. Hoxie returned to Fort Bragg for the first time since he was injured during a 2007 deployment to Iraq. (The U.S. Army/Flickr)
On April 4, 2004, Tomas was crammed into the back of a two-and-a-half-ton Army truck with 20 other soldiers in Sadr City, Iraq. Insurgents opened fire on the truck from above. “It was like shooting ducks in a barrel,” he said. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spinal column. A second bullet shattered his knee. At first, he did not know he had been shot. He felt woozy. He tried to pick up his M16. He couldn’t lift his rifle from the truck bed. That was when he knew something was terribly wrong.
“I tried to say, ‘I’m going to be paralyzed, someone shoot me right now,’ but there was only a hoarse whisper that came out because my lungs had collapsed,” he said. “I knew the damage. I wanted to be taken out of my misery.”
His squad leader, Staff Sgt. Robert Miltenberger, bent over and told him he would be all right. A few years later Young would see a clip of Miltenberger weeping as he recounted the story of how he had lied to Young.
“I tried to contact him,” said Tomas, whose long red hair and flowing beard make him look like a biblical prophet. “I can’t find him. I want to tell him it is OK.”
Tomas had been in Iraq five days. It was his first deployment. After being wounded, he was sent to an Army hospital in Kuwait, and although his legs, now useless, lay straight in front of him he felt as if he was still sitting cross-legged on the floor of the truck. That sensation lasted for about three weeks. It was an odd and painful initiation into his life as a paraplegic. His body, from then on, would play tricks on him. He was transferred from Kuwait to the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, and then to Walter Reed in Washington, D.C.
He asked if he could meet Ralph Nader. Nader visited him in the hospital with Phil Donahue. Donahue, who had been fired by MSNBC a year earlier for speaking out against the war, would go on, with Ellen Spiro, to make the 2007 film Body of War, an account of Tomas’s daily struggle with his physical and emotional scars.
Ellen Spiro, co-director and co-producer of Body of War, in 2016. (Jessica Jin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
In the documentary, he suffers dizzy spells that force him to lower his head into his hands. He wears frozen gel inserts in a cooling jacket because he cannot control his body temperature. He struggles to find a solution to his erectile dysfunction. He downs fistfuls of medications — carbamazepine, for nerve pain; coumadin, a blood thinner; tizanidine, an anti-spasm medication; gabapentin, another nerve pain medication; bupropion, an antidepressant; omeprazole, for morning nausea; and morphine. His mother must insert a catheter into his penis. He joins Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, to protest with Iraq Veterans Against the War. His first wife leaves him.
“You know, you see a guy who’s paralyzed, and in a wheelchair, and you think he’s just in a wheelchair,” he says in Body of War. “You don’t think about the, you know, the stuff inside that’s paralyzed. I can’t cough because my stomach muscles are paralyzed, so I can’t work up the full coughing energy. I’m more susceptible to urinary tract infections, and there’s a great big erection sidebar to this whole story.”
Phil Donahue introducing the documentary Body of War at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2007. (jbach, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
In early March 2008 a blood clot in his right arm — the arm that bears a color tattoo of a character from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are — caused his arm to swell. He was taken to the Kansas City Veterans Affairs hospital, where he was given the blood thinner coumadin before being released. One month later, the VA took him off coumadin, and soon afterward the clot migrated to one of his lungs. He suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and fell into a coma. When he awoke from the coma in the hospital he could barely speak. He had lost most of his upper-body mobility and short-term memory, and his speech was slurred.
It was then that he began to experience debilitating pain in his abdomen. The hospital would not give him narcotics because the drugs would slow digestion, making it harder for the bowels to function. Tomas could digest only soup and Jell-O. In November, in a desperate bid to halt the pain, he had his colon removed. He was fitted with a colostomy bag. The pain disappeared for a few days and then came roaring back. He could not hold down food, even pureed food, because his stomach opening had shrunk. The doctors dilated his stomach. He could eat only soup and oatmeal. Three weeks earlier his stomach stretched. That was enough.
“I will go off the feeding tube,” he said, “after me and my wife’s anniversary,” April 20, the date on which he married Claudia in 2012. “I was married once before. It didn’t end well. It was a non-amicable divorce. At first, I thought I would wait for my brother and his wife, my niece, and my grandparents to visit me, but the one thing I will miss most in my life is my wife. I want to spend a little more time with her. I want to spend a full year with someone without the problems that plagued my previous marriage. I don’t know how long it will take when I stop eating. If it takes too long, I may take steps to quicken my departure. I have saved a bottle of liquid morphine. I can down that at one time with all my sleeping medication.”
Tomas’s room was painted a midnight blue and had a large cutout of Batman on one wall. He loved the superhero as a child, because “he was a regular person who had a horrible thing happen to him and wanted to save society.”
Tomas joined the Army immediately after 9/11 to go to Afghanistan and hunt down the people behind the attacks. He did not oppose the Afghanistan war. “In fact, if I had been injured in Afghanistan, there would be no Body of War movie to begin with,” he said. But he never understood the call to invade Iraq. “When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we didn’t invade China just because they looked the same,” he said.
He became increasingly depressed about his impending deployment to Iraq when he was in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. He asked the battalion doctor for antidepressants. The doctor said he had to meet first with the unit’s chaplain, who told him, “I think you will be happier when you get over to Iraq and start killing Iraqis.”
“I was dumbstruck by his response,” Tomas said.
U.S. Army recruits undergoing basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia., May 4, 2012. (DoD Photo by Glenn Fawcett)
He had not decided what would be done with his ashes. He flirted with the idea of having them plowed into ground where marijuana would be planted but then wondered if anyone would want to smoke the crop. He knows there will be no clergy at the memorial service held after his death. “It will just be people reminiscing over my life,” he said.
“I spend a lot of time sitting here in my bedroom, watching TV or sleeping,” he said. “I have found — I don’t know if it is the result of my decision or not — it is equally hard to be alone or to be around people. This includes my wife. I am rarely happy. Maybe it is because when I am alone all I have with me are my thoughts, and my mind is a very hazardous place to go. When I am around people I feel as if I have to put on a façade of being the happy little soldier.”
He listened, when he was well enough, to audiobooks with Claudia. Among them have been Al Franken’s satirical book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and Michael Moore’s The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader. He was a voracious reader but can no longer turn the pages of a book. He found some solace in the French film The Untouchables, about a paraplegic and his caregiver, and The Sessions, a film based on an essay by the paralyzed poet Mark O’Brien.
Tomas, when he was in a wheelchair, found that many people behaved as if he was mentally disabled, or not even there. When he was being fitted for a tuxedo for a friend’s wedding the salesman turned to his mother and asked her in front of him whether he could wear the company’s shoes.
“I look at the TV through the lens of his eyes and can see he is invisible,” said Claudia, standing in the living room as her husband rested in the bedroom. An array of books on death, the afterlife, and dying is spread out around her. “No one is sick on television. No one is disabled. No one faces death. Dying in America is a very lonely business.”
“If I had known then what I know now,” Tomas said, “I would not have gone into the military. But I was twenty-two, working various menial jobs, waiting tables, working in the copy department of an OfficeMax. My life was going nowhere. September 11 happened. I saw us being attacked. I wanted to respond. I signed up two days later. I wanted to be a combat journalist. I thought the military would help me out of my financial rut. I thought I could use the GI Bill to go to school.”
Tomas was not the first young man to be lured into war and then callously discarded. His story has been told many times. It is the story of Hector in The Iliad. It is the story of Joe Bonham, the protagonist in Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun, whose arms, legs, and face are blown away by an artillery shell, leaving him trapped in the inert remains of his body.
Bonham ruminates in the novel:
“He was the future he was a perfect picture of the future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight. So they were masking the future they were keeping the future a soft quiet deadly secret. They knew that if all the little people all the little guys saw the future they would begin to ask questions. They would ask questions and they would find answers and they would say to the guys who wanted them to fight they would say you lying thieving sons-of-bitches we won’t fight we won’t be dead we will live we are the world we are the future and we will not let you butcher us no matter what you say no matter what speeches you make no matter what slogans you write.”
For Tomas, the war, the wound, the paralysis, the wheelchair, the anti-war demonstrations, the wife who left him and the one who didn’t, the embolism, the loss of motor control, the slurred speech, the colostomy, the IV line for narcotics implanted in his chest, the open bedsores that expose his bones, the despair — the crushing despair — the decision to die, came down to a girl. Aleksus, his only niece. She would not remember her uncle. But he lay in his dimly lit room, painkillers flowing into his broken body, and thought of her. He did not know exactly when he would die. But it had to be before her second birthday, in June. He did not want to mar that day with his death.
He asked me to help him write a last letter to George W. Bush and the politicians and generals who sent him to war. It was March 2013, on the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He could not hold a pen. I took dictation. He planned to kill himself by cutting off his feeding tube. After issuing the letter, which was widely circulated and translated into several languages, Tomas changed his mind about committing suicide. He decided he wanted more time with his wife, Claudia. But he and Claudia knew he did not have long. The couple moved from Kansas City to Portland, Oregon, and then to Seattle, where Tomas died on November 10, 2014, at the age of thirty-four.
Tomas Young and brother. (Ellen Spiro, Wikimedia Commons)
Over the last eight months of Tomas’s life, Veterans Affairs reduced his pain medication, charging he had become an addict. It was a decision that thrust him into a wilderness of agony. Tomas’s existence became a constant battle with the VA. He suffered excruciating “breakthrough pain.” The VA was indifferent. It cut his thirty-day supply of pain medication to seven days. Tomas, when the pills did not arrive on time, might as well have been nailed to a cross. Claudia, in an exchange of several emails with me since Thomas’s death, remembered hearing her husband on the phone one day pleading with a VA doctor and finally saying: “So you mean to tell me it is better for me to live in pain than die on pain medicine in this disabled state?” At night, she said, he would moan and cry out.
“It was a battle of wills,” Claudia told me in an email. “We were losing. Our whole time in Portland was spent dealing with trying to get what we needed to be at home and comfortable and pain free. THAT’S ALL WE WANTED, TO BE HOME AND PAIN FREE, to enjoy whatever time we had left.”
They left Portland for Seattle to be closer to a good spinal cord injury unit. Also, Washington was one of the states that had legalized marijuana, which Tomas used extensively.
“Last week I called because his breakthrough pain started happening throughout the day,” Claudia wrote in an email. “I was using more and more of the morphine and Lorazepam. I was running out of pills. He had a high tolerance for pain, but it was getting bad. I called to report to the doctor that it was getting bad fast. I would not have enough pills to bridge him to the appointment on the 24th. The doctor was unsympathetic. He gave me a condescending lecture about strict narcotics regulations. I said, ‘but my husband is in pain what do I do?’”
Tomas tried to take enough sleeping pills to sleep away the pain. But he was able to rest for a prolonged period only every few days. The pain and exhaustion began to tear apart his frail body. He was dispirited. He was visibly weaker. He felt humiliated.
“Maybe he got so exhausted by the enduring of it all that he took a last sleep and never came back,” Claudia wrote.
“My conclusion is that he died in pain from the exhaustion of having to endure it. Early morning Monday, when I thought he was sleeping, I heard a silence I had never heard before. I couldn’t hear him breathing. I was scared, but I knew. The first thing I did was liberate him from all the tubes and bags on his body. I cut off the feeding tube. I took off the Ostomy Bags. I removed the Foley Catheter. I cleaned his body. I played music. We smoked a last joint together. I smoked for him. I started making calls.”
“The funeral home instructed me to call the police,” she wrote. “They arrived and concluded that there were no issues, but because of his young age they had to refer this to the Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner came. He made the determination that due to his age that they would have to perform an autopsy. I said, ‘Hey look at his body don’t you think he has been mutilated enough? Are you going to desecrate his body even further?’ So, he was cut open some more.”
The VA called her to ask for the autopsy report.
Tomas’s final days, Claudia said, were often “hopeless and humiliating.”
President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, Dec. 27, 2001. (U.S. National Archives)
This is his “Last Letter” to Bush and Cheney:
“I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care. I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured, and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—-my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege, and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation, but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of- mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq, I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads, and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military, and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”
You can order The Greatest Evil is War here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 23:00 - How Americans Rate Federal Agencies
How Americans Rate Federal Agencies
Gallup conducts a annual poll to find out which high-profile federal agencies and departments have the highest favorability scores with the U.S. public.
As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, in the latest installment, only four out of the agencies included were rated positively by at least 50 percent of respondents.
After being named the top-rated agency in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2021, the U.S. Postal Service once more came in at the top of the list as the most popular federal agency in 2022. Its rating rose to 60 percent from 57 percent in 2021, but came down from 74 percent in 2019. 13 percent rated the Postal Service as poor. No survey was carried out in 2020.
The top four is rounded off by NASA, the CIA and the FBI. The latter two were among the few agencies whose ratings could improve significantly from 2021, up 11 percentage points and six percentage points, respectively. As with the Postal Service, the ratings are lower than they were in 2019, however.
You will find more infographics at Statista
With 42 percent of people saying the agency was doing a good or excellent job, the Department of Homeland Security came fifth in 2022, ahead of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, whose rating dropped remarkably during the coronavirus pandemic – from 64 percent in 2019 to 41 percent in 2022. Yet, the CDC is not as loathed as some agencies Americans have long despised.
Of the ones published by Gallup, tax collector the Internal Revenue Service comes last at 34 percent approval, below the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency at 36 percent each.
The Department of Justice comes in at 35 percent, but no comparable 2021 figure exists.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 22:40 - The Renewable Energy 'Paradox': A More Costly Way Forward
The Renewable Energy ‘Paradox’: A More Costly Way Forward
Authored by Nina Nguyen via The Epoch Times,
A California-based leading eco-modernist has disputed the widespread claim that renewables are a cheap and clean energy source, arguing that it’s the opposite.
Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, said one of the “most misleading ways that renewable salespeople sell their technology” is they claim the electricity produced by wind and solar is cheaper.
However, the paradox about renewable energy is when deployed at scale, they actually make electricity production more expensive, Shellenberger told CPAC Australia in Sydney on Oct. 1.
“There are basically two reasons,” he said, “It requires more machines, more backup power generators, more transmission systems, and more people to manage the chaos of an electrical grid with a large amount of unreliable weather-dependent energy.”
Shellenberger pointed to a prediction by German economist Leon Hirth that the economic value of wind and solar declines significantly as they take up a larger proportion of the electricity grid.
In a paper for Energy Policy in 2013, Hirth estimated that when wind turbine power generation comprises 30 percent of the grid, its value declines by 40 percent; while solar power’s value declines by 50 percent when it reaches 15 percent.
“The reason is easy to understand,” Shellenberger noted, “Solar and wind produce too much energy when you don’t need them and not enough energy when you do, and both of those impose costs on the electrical grid.”
Steam rises from cooling towers of the Neurath coal-fired power plant as wind turbines spin over a field of rapeseed on May 05, 2022 near Bedburg, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)
He said the ideal situation was for the electricity supply to keep up with demand at “all times.”
“Every time you take electricity off the grid and put it back on, you’re paying energy penalties, which increase the cost of that energy somewhere between 20 to 40 percent.”
Shellenberger said this was the case whether it was using electricity to pump water uphill to operate hydroelectric dams or siphoning excess electricity supply into lithium batteries. He noted that it would cost the United States three-quarters of a trillion dollars to create enough storage to back up the entire country’s electricity grid for just four hours.
“We don’t need to backup the grid for four hours, we need to back it up if you’re relying on solar and wind for weeks or months because there are periods of time where there’s no sunlight, no wind, including often at night,” he said.
What About the Waste?
The comments from the environmentalist come as Western countries ramp up their efforts to decarbonise to move towards net zero by 2050, with renewables believed to be the solution as they produce neither greenhouse gases nor polluting emissions.
But Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” and “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” argued that renewables were more environmentally damaging than fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
A woman walks through the solar pannels of a photovoltaic power plant installed by Generale du Soleil (GDS) and operated by Energ’iV SEML in a former landfill of waste, on December 8, 2020 in Guignen, western France. (Photo by Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images)
Renewables produce 300 times more waste than nuclear plants do, while every solar panel removed from a rooftop was categorised as hazardous waste, the environmentalist noted.
“The problem is that renewables actually degrade the natural environment,” he said.
Shellenberger also said the push for more renewable power sources like wind and solar would result in Western countries moving “in the opposite direction towards a ‘higher material intensity’ society than we have under fossil fuels and nuclear.”
According to a report from the International Energy Agency, natural gas and coal only require a small fraction of mining to support their operations compared to what is needed for offshore wind and solar.
“We use about 10 percent of the materials in the world today for energy production, if we move towards 100 percent renewables that would rise to between 40 and 50 percent, and that’s going to be inflationary.”
He further said that “as a result of the war on natural gas, and this obsession with renewables, the world’s actually going to burn more coal in 2022 than it ever has before.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 22:20 - Boston Dynamics Pledges Not To Weaponize Robots While China Arms Robo-War Dogs With Machine Guns
Boston Dynamics Pledges Not To Weaponize Robots While China Arms Robo-War Dogs With Machine Guns
While several robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics, are pledging not to weaponize their robots and asked others in the industry to do the same, Chinese firms couldn’t care less and have created the most ridiculous drone that carries a robot war dog equipped with a machine gun.
Let’s start with an open letter obtained by Axios penned by Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics, and Unitree Robotics. Here’s an important section of the letter:
“We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues.”
Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter told Axios in an email that he’s “concerned about recent increases in makeshift efforts by individuals attempting to weaponize commercially available robots.”
He added: “For this technology to be broadly accepted throughout society, the public needs to know they can trust it. And that means we need a policy that prohibits bad actors from misusing it.”
But here’s the issue, America’s adversaries (read: “Dystopian Robot Dogs Now Sporting Guns And Russian Insignia”) don’t care about the open letter’s plea as they weaponize robots ahead of what could be a major conflict between world powers if a spillover in Ukraine materializes.
Footage of a Chinese drone carrying a ‘robo-dog’ equipped with a high-powered machine gun is something straight out of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game. An online video shows the drone flying the war dog onto the top of a building. The robot then maneuvers through the building, searching for the mock enemy with a machine gun strapped to its back.
Blood-Wing, a Chinese defense contractor, demonstrates drone-deploying an armed robodog.
The Future is Now. pic.twitter.com/tRKnKa8xvp
— Lia Wong (@LiaWongOSINT) October 4, 2022
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If America’s enemies are weaponizing drones for the modern battlefield, perhaps US robotics firms working with Pentagon/DARPA should be doing the same. The proliferation of drones on the modern battlefield in Ukraine provides a hint of the future of warfighting via automation. And these will be the tools of war in the next great conflict (whenever that is).
The one big issue we see is if these war dogs are transferred to law enforcement agencies and used against Americans. Let’s hope these war robots stay on the battlefield.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 22:00 - CIA, US Special Forces Presence Now "Far More Extensive" In Ukraine: Report
CIA, US Special Forces Presence Now “Far More Extensive” In Ukraine: Report
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
US special operations forces are on the ground in Ukraine as part of a broad covert operation that includes CIA personnel, The Intercept reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed US intelligence and military officials.
The report said that the US withdrew its CIA and special operations assets from Ukraine shortly before Russia’s invasion, although one US official said the CIA “never completely left.”
Illustrative file image: US Army The CIA initially predicted that Kyiv would fall quickly to Russia, but after it became clear that wouldn’t happen, the Biden administration sent its covert assets back into Ukraine.
The report said that US clandestine operations inside Ukraine “are now far more extensive than they were early in the war, when US intelligence officials were fearful that Russia would steamroll over the Ukrainian army.”
Several current and former intelligence officials said that there “is a much larger presence of both CIA and US special operations personnel and resources in Ukraine than there were at the time of the Russian invasion in February.”
Back in June, The New York Times reported that there was a CIA presence in Ukraine, but it made no mention of US special operations forces. The Times report did say that several US allies have special operations troops in Ukraine, including Britain, France, Canada, and Lithuania.
The Intercept report said the covert operations inside Ukraine are being conducted under a covert presidential finding that indicates President Biden has quietly notified Congress of a “broad program of clandestine operations inside the country.”
The Intercept buried this story’s actual scoop: that “clandestine American operations inside Ukraine are now far more extensive than they were early in the war,” with “a much larger presence of both CIA and U.S. special operations personnel” now than in February. https://t.co/eQcsc7cu5o
— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 6, 2022
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The report said that the finding President Biden is using is an altered version of a finding originally during the Obama administration:
“One former special forces officer said that Biden amended a preexisting finding, originally approved during the Obama administration, that was designed to counter malign foreign influence activities. A former CIA officer told The Intercept that Biden’s use of the preexisting finding has frustrated some intelligence officials, who believe that U.S. involvement in the Ukraine conflict differs so much from the spirit of the finding that it should merit a new one.”
It’s not clear what the US personnel are doing inside Ukraine or where exactly they are operating, but the presence risks provoking Russia. The covert operations contradict President Biden’s pledge not to send troops into Ukraine, which he said before Russia’s invasion could spark a “world war.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 21:40 - Kinzinger Points Finger At Elon Musk As Ukrainian Forces Claim "Catastrophic" Starlink Outages
Kinzinger Points Finger At Elon Musk As Ukrainian Forces Claim “Catastrophic” Starlink Outages
Elon Musk when sparring earlier this week with detractors on Twitter over his Russia-Ukraine peace poll said that he personally lost more than $80 million helping connect Ukrainians to the internet after donating Starlinks to the country amid the Russian invasion. The systems are also used by Ukraine’s military in front line positions.
Now there’s fresh scrutiny being placed on the billionaire entrepreneur after reports surfaced Friday that there have been “catastrophic” outages, based on the claims of Ukrainian officials. “Ukrainian troops have reported outages of their Starlink communication devices on the frontline, hindering efforts to liberate territory from Russian forces, according to Ukrainian officials and soldiers,” FT is reporting.
“Thousands of Starlink terminals, made by Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, were purchased by the US government and crowdfunded by donors to help Ukrainian troops operate drones, receive vital intelligence updates and communicate with each other in areas where there are no other secure networks,” FT reviews. Importantly the outages reportedly occurred in regions crucial to the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in places like Karkhiv, Donets, Luhansk, as well as near Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
But then there’s also the reality to consider of a cutting edge satellite web system being utilized in the middle of a war-torn country amid active invasion by a superpower, inevitably suffering bouts of short term glitches. It’s also as yet unclear the effectiveness of Russian signal-jamming tools, including the possibility of electromagnetic warfare.
Well-known Republican hawk Adam Kinzinger immediately upon the claims of faulty Starlinks emerging from Ukrainian sources demanded an investigation into Musk, calling it “a national security issue”.
The accusatory tweet strongly suggests the Illinois Congressman thinks there’s some level of intentional malfeasance related to the Strarlink systems on the part of the SpaceX and Tesla CEO.
Evidently the Starlink system is down over the front lines of Ukraine. @elonmusk should make a statement about this, or, this should be investigated. This is a national security issue
— Adam Kinzinger🇺🇦🇺🇸✌️ (@AdamKinzinger) October 7, 2022
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The timing couldn’t be more curious given the FT report underscores the Starlinks had suffered failures starting “weeks” ago – and yet insinuations against Musk are suddenly popping up alongside these new reports. “Another Kyiv official said the connection failures were widespread and prompted panicked calls from soldiers to helplines,” FT detailed. “Both Ukrainian officials said the problems occurred when soldiers liberated territory from Russia and moved past the frontline.”
And as it so happens, as we detailed days ago, Musk has been getting slammed for expressing ‘wrongthink’ on the Ukraine war. Musk’s peace poll from Monday, for which he was told to “f**k off” by Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk, even led to him being mocked and denounced by President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Very quickly, a mainstream media narrative solidified of “hero” Zelensky vs. “pro-Putin” Elon Musk. This despite Musk emphasizing that he is interested in seeking peace at all costs because “a possible, albeit unlikely, outcome from this conflict is nuclear war.”
Starlink “crucial as a secure form of communication on the battlefield, a soldier says … Ignore [Musk’s] tweets, he argues: “Starlink is our oxygen … If we tell Musk [to] piss off and take his Starlinks with him, our army would collapse into chaos.” https://t.co/80NazM5FoT
— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) October 7, 2022
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And yet throughout this week blue-check mark gatekeepers, journalists, bots, pundits and even government officials have pounced, seeking to paint Musk as a pro-Kremlin stooge (and thus a “traitor” – as Rep. Kinzinger’s tweet also insinuates). Now to end the week, we suddenly have demands that Musk be investigated over a “national security issue”… very, very curious timing indeed.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 21:20 - How To Settle The Great Chess Cheating Scandal
How To Settle The Great Chess Cheating Scandal
Authored by Kenneth Rogoff via Project Syndicate,
In early September, the 19-year-old American upstart Hans Niemann crushed world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, prompting the latter to level accusations of computer-assisted cheating. In the absence of any hard evidence to resolve the matter, the two should settle it on the chess board.
The chess world is reeling from an accusation of cheating that has generated headlines around the world, even drawing a response from Elon Musk. With the situation remaining unsettled and unresolved, the World Chess Federation (FIDE) has launched an investigation that one hopes will lead to better rules. But that is unlikely to prove decisive in the controversy at hand, so I want to suggest another way forward.
The basic facts of the case are as follows. In early September, the 19-year-old American upstart Hans Niemann, playing the black pieces, crushed world champion Magnus Carlsen of Norway. The match was shocking not only because Carlsen lost (which does happen, if only rarely), but because it is exceedingly rare for the world’s top player to be defeated in such a smooth, one-sided fashion.
The story could have ended there, but Carlsen withdrew from the tournament, insinuating that Niemann had been aided by a computer, possibly with the help of an accomplice. He then leveled that accusation openly in writing. His statement, remarks by other players, and all the other details are now available everywhere. But no one, ultimately, has any definitive answers.
To be more precise, it is pretty clear that Niemann has cheated in the past in online tournaments that are not considered official games for ranking purposes. He has admitted as much. What is shocking the chess world is Carlsen’s insinuation that Niemann might be cheating in major face-to-face matches, even where he is being recorded from all angles.
Carlsen has a very long record as a consummate sportsman, having played tens of thousands of games against all kinds of players. His credibility is unquestioned, and it is hard not to take him seriously. If he felt that Niemann behaved strangely during the game (his open letter alleges that his opponent never seemed to be concentrating or taking the game seriously), one must respect that.
Then again, weird behavior is not a crime. Concrete substantiation would have to be in the form of, say, proof that Niemann was carrying a device that allowed him to receive signals – possibly in Morse code – from an accomplice following the game and using a computer to come up with moves. How might tournament organizers prevent this? Airport scanners are fine if the concern is that players are carrying guns, but they most likely would not catch a tiny receiving chip planted somewhere on a player’s body.
What makes the case so difficult is that it is relatively easy to check retroactively if someone has been relying heavily on help from a computer, which is why all the big tournaments routinely screen the games to see if the play looks too “computer-like.” But if a player throws in some random, mediocre (but not losing) moves to throw off the scent, that is much harder to detect. Moreover, a strong enough player would not need a hint on every move. Just an occasional “stay awake here” would confer a staggering advantage.
Amateur sleuths think they have found many striking examples of Niemann playing games that are so blindingly brilliant, and so computer-like, that he must be cheating at least some of the time. Hikaru Nakamura, long one of the world’s very top players, has concluded that Niemann is either the greatest talent who has ever walked the earth, or he is cheating. Another top player, Fabiano Caruana (who tied Carlsen in their 2018 world championship match but lost in a rapid playoff) is more circumspect than Nakamura, but still finds some of Niemann’s moves to be brilliant beyond his own human understanding.
That said, it is equally important to note that the respected anti-cheating expert Ken Regan, a computer scientist at the University at Buffalo, has conducted his own statistical analysis and concluded that Niemann’s gameplay shows nothing glaringly suspicious.
The situation is vexing. On one hand, I am very uncomfortable with seeing Niemann’s budding career destroyed. What if he really is the second coming of Bobby Fischer? Is he to be canceled for his genius?
On the other hand, I would like to see Niemann prove that he is for real. A simple approach would be for him to agree that during any major tournament, the organizers can ask him to give a long interview immediately after one or two of the games to discuss his thinking in concrete detail (avoiding a discussion of the early moves, which usually come from computer-aided preparation anyway). As compensation for his time, they could pay him a large bonus. And, of course, such interviews would draw worldwide attention.
So far, some of Niemann’s explanations of critical move choices have indeed been quite superficial, adding to the suspicion. Normally, a truly great player who discusses a game’s moves in its immediate aftermath offers a mélange of brilliant variations that he considered. He does not just randomly land on amazing computer-like ideas that magically work.
Moreover, instead of refusing to play Niemann, Carlsen should agree to an informal match where they first play 20 blitz games, the fast pace of which makes cheating extremely difficult, followed by eight regular games. The arbiters can use whatever high-tech equipment and procedures that they deem necessary to preclude cheating (including not livestreaming the broadcast).
If Niemann does well (winning, say, 12 blitz games and 4.5-3.5 full-length games), Carlsen would agree to apologize in writing and retract previous remarks and insinuations, and Niemann would get a very big pot of money. But if Niemann is crushed, he will be outed. He would agree not to sue Carlsen for defamation, and he would voluntarily take a one-year hiatus from chess.
Plenty of people would be willing to sponsor such a match (here’s looking at you, Elon). So let us settle it on the chess board.
* * *
Subscribe to Project Syndicate Digital
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 21:00 - CDC: Record Number Of Children Hospitalized With Weakened Immune Systems
CDC: Record Number Of Children Hospitalized With Weakened Immune Systems
Official data suggests that more children and young adults than ever have been hospitalized with colds and respiratory issues, according to the Daily Mail, which notes that “experts have repeatedly warned lockdowns and measures used to contain Covid like face masks also suppressed the spread of germs which are crucial for building a strong immune system in children.”
According to a retrospective report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), levels of common cold viruses hit their highest level among non-adults in August 2021 – when levels had been much lower in previous years during the same month.
According to the data which sampled nearly 700 children, nearly 55% tested positive for RSV in August 2021. Of that, 450 were moved to emergency departments where nearly 35% had RSV – which is comparable to the winter months when over 30% of patients regularly have the virus, according to the report.
The CDC samples random pediatric hospitals across the US and makes national estimates to gauge how prevalent viruses are.
There were nearly 700 children in hospital sick with a respiratory virus across the seven wards studied in August last year, of which just over half had tested positive for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) – which is normally benign.
This was the highest levels ever recorded in summer, and came off the back of a year and a half of brutal pandemic restrictions forcing many to stay indoors.
The record all-time high is in December, when 60 per cent of children on wards with respiratory illnesses were infected with RSV. –Daily Mail
What’s more, separate data from the CDC indicates that hospital visits for those under four years old may be getting worse. For the week ending Sept. 18 of this year, 4.7% of ER visits in the US for toddlers were for breathing difficulties.
Yale medical director Dr. Scott Roberts told the Mail that lockdowns robbed children of the ability to build up immunity to common illnesses.
“There are two implications to this,” he said. “First, the gap gives time for the viruses to mutate even further to cause more severe disease. And second, whatever immunity was built up to those viruses’ it will have waned making the immune response now much less potent.”
Roberts added that his son, who just turned two-years-old, was coming down with repeated infections after starting daycare.
“We were pretty sheltered during the pandemic,” he said, adding “But now my son has just started daycare and he is getting constant infections.”
The rise in hospitalizations among children was noted in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), after scientists monitored seven hospitals in seven states for the number of children admitted for respiratory issues. Each child was then tested to determine what disease they had – which doesn’t necessarily mean that was the reason for hospitalization.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 20:40 - World Careening Toward "Dangerous New Normal", IMF Chief Warns
World Careening Toward “Dangerous New Normal”, IMF Chief Warns
Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,
The world is facing the risk of a recession, with the global economy experiencing a “fundamental shift,” warned Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In just three years, the world has lived through “shock, after shock, after shock,” Georgieva said during a speech at Georgetown University in Washington on Oct. 6. The world had to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and “climate disasters on all continents,” she claimed, saying such shocks have caused “immeasurable harm” to people’s lives.
The combined effect has been a surge in the prices of goods, especially energy and foods, creating a cost-of-living crisis, she said.
The world is seeing a “fundamental shift” in the global economy, moving away from a world of relative predictability— which had a rules-based framework for international economic cooperation, low inflation, and low interest rates—to a world of more fragility, greater uncertainty, geopolitical confrontations, higher economic volatility, and more frequent devastating natural disasters, she said.
To prevent this period of heightened fragility from becoming a “dangerous new normal,” the world must focus on stabilizing the global economy, revitalizing cooperation, and transforming the economy to build resilience against any future shocks, Georgieva said.
Uncertainty remains “extremely high” in the context of the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. Georgieva raised the possibility of “even more” economic shocks, pointing out that financial stability risks are rising.
The IMF head wants policymakers to focus on bringing down inflation and put in place a responsible fiscal policy that protects the financially vulnerable.
“The deeper causes of the world’s fragility can only be addressed by countries working together,” she said.
Growth Downgrade, Recession in US
In her speech, Georgieva pointed out that the IMF had projected a strong recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic, with the agency’s economists thinking that inflation would quickly subside.
“But this is not what happened. Multiple shocks, among them a senseless war, changed the economic picture completely. Far from being transitory, inflation has become more persistent,” she said.
“We have downgraded our growth projections already three times, to only 3.2 percent for 2022 and 2.9 percent for 2023. And as you will see in our updated World Economic Outlook next week, we will downgrade growth for next year.”
All of the world’s major economies are “slowing down,” including the United States, China, and the eurozone, she said. This ends up affecting developing and emerging nations as well, since they will be faced with reduced export demand as well as high energy and food prices.
The IMF believes the risks of recession are rising, with nations accounting for a third of the world economy projected to see “at least” two consecutive quarters of economic declines in 2022 or 2023. The United States has already had two consecutive negative quarters in 2022.
Even if there is positive growth, it will “feel like a recession” due to rising prices and shrinking incomes, Georgieva said. The IMF projects roughly $4 trillion in global output loss between now and 2026.
Billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller had recently warned that the potential economic downturn in the United States could be worse than an “average garden variety” recession.
At an investor summit in late September, Druckenmiller said it will be impossible for the U.S. economy to experience a “soft landing.” Instead, he is expecting the economy to do a “hard landing” by the end of 2023 due to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate hikes in response to rising inflation.
“We are in deep trouble,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 20:20 - NYC Rent-Wage Gap Widest Since 2008
NYC Rent-Wage Gap Widest Since 2008
While President Biden’s social media team is busy tweeting photo ops in gas-guzzling Corvettes to brag about how great the economy is doing, Americans not living ivory towers are roasting in the flames of inflation, while stagnant wages fail to keep up.
To wit, the gap between rent and wage growth in New York City is the widest since the 2008 recession.
After adjusting for inflation, real wages were down by 9.1% year-over-year, while rents jumped 13.4% during the same period in August – a difference of 23%, according to StreetEasy, which notes that less than half – 48.2% – of NYC’s 4-million-person workforce earned enough to afford 10% of the apartments listed over the summer, unless they spent more than half their income on rent, the NY Post reports.
If there’s any good news, StreetEasy adds that asking rents are still continuing their rise, but at a slower rate. Over the last year-plus, rents have plummeted to record lows and gradually rose to record — and bank-busting — highs. The impacts of those changes have included tenants getting sweet COVID deals who later faced massive rent hikes upon renewal — and house hunters finding themselves in bidding wars to lock in a deal.
Among the city professionals hit hardest during this time: healthcare support workers, such as nurses’ aides and home health aides. Typical annual incomes in this field are just shy of $39,000, which StreetEasy says is hardly enough to afford a mere 2% of this summer’s inventory without having half of the earnings solely go toward the rent. -NY Post
In the third quarter, the median asking rent for studios and one-bedroom apartments was $3,000 according to the report – while 2 and 3 bedroom units are going for $3,800. StreetEasy suggests finding roomates – which could save over $13,000 per year.
That said, the tide may be turning. The report also notes that a greater share of rental listings (8.6% vs. 6.6% in July) are extending concessions – such as a free month of rent on a 12-month lease.
In June we reported that a shocking 23% of New Yorkers can afford median rent amid an “incredibly tight market,” after Bloomberg cited a New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development report that found only 23% of full-time workers in the city can afford median rent.
The city’s report used the median asking rent of $2.75k for vacant and available units in 2021, and 2020 salary data showed that only 23% of full-time workers in New York made over $100k.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 20:00 - Kanye Accuses Kushner Of Sabotaging Trump
Kanye Accuses Kushner Of Sabotaging Trump
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
During his interview with Tucker Carlson last night, Kanye West savaged the Kushner family, accusing former White House advisor Jared Kushner of sabotaging Trump.
“After talking to them, and really sitting with Jared and sitting with Josh and finding out other pieces of information, I was like wow, these guys might have really been holding Trump back,” said Kanye.
Kanye also claimed that Jared Kushner and his brother Josh only arranged the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab countries to “make money.”
During the interview, West appeared to be somewhat nervous about the subject, at one point asking Carlson, “All these things with Israel … I just think it was to make money. Is that too heavy-handed to put in this platform?”
“I just think that that’s what they’re about, making money, I don’t think they have the ability to make anything on their own, I think they were born into money,” West said.
“For me as a maverick and a talent and a person that has been beaten, kicked, lost everything, said to have lost my mind… It’s a weird thing. A person who has built something from nothing when I sit across the table from Josh Kushner and he feels so entitled to that idea and this person has never brought anything of value other than being a good venture capitalist, I have a major issue with that. It makes me feel like they weren’t serving my boy Trump the way we could have.”
Kanye West on the Kushner family: “They are all about making money, I don’t think they have the ability to make anything on their own, they were born into money” pic.twitter.com/Va3BgzJhkw
— A Very Serious Place (@SeriousPIace) October 7, 2022
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As Chris Menahan notes, “Though West didn’t know the minutia of Kushner’s dealings, his suspicions were entirely correct. Kushner sought $100 million in kickbacks from Israel after securing them $38 billion in foreign aid from the US.”
“The Abraham Accords consisted of bribing Arab kings to normalize relations with Israel by offering them billions of US taxpayer dollars and high-tech weaponry to oppress their own populations.”
The rapper also separately attacked Kushner’s brother, Josh Kushner, for investing in Kim Kardashian’s underwear line without his knowledge.
“FUCK JOSH KUSHNER,” wrote Kanye in an Instagram post.
“WHAT IF I HAD 10% OF KARLIE KLOSS UNDERWEAR LINE WITHOUT YOU KNOWING,” West wrote, adding, “AND YOU ONLY HAD 5%.”
In the same post, Kanye also said, “JARED WAS HOLDING TRUMP BACK.”
The latter message is a sentiment held by many Trump supporters, namely that Jared Kushner was a globalist plant within the administration.
As we previously highlighted, Jared Kushner recently criticized Ron DeSantis over the Florida Governor’s migrant flights to to Martha’s Vineyard, claiming he was ‘troubled’ by the situation.
“I personally watch what’s happening, and it’s very hard to see at the southern border, I also—we have to remember that these are human beings, they’re people, so seeing them being used as political pawns one way or the other is very troubling to me,” said Kushner.
However, he didn’t have much criticism for Joe Biden for using migrants as political pawns to flood America, 4.9 million of whom have crossed the border since he came to power, paving the way for demographic changes that will permanently alter the country.
Jared Kushner criticizes Desantis’s flight of migrants to MV: “We have to remember that these are human beings, they’re people, so seeing them being used as political pawns is very troubling to me.” pic.twitter.com/zVCWxMUeES
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) September 22, 2022
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Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 19:40 - Biden Pardons Thousands Of Pot Convicts, Orders Review Of Schedule I Status
Biden Pardons Thousands Of Pot Convicts, Orders Review Of Schedule I Status
President Biden on Thursday announced he’ll pardon thousands of people with federal marijuana possession convictions, and ordered a review of the plant’s classification as a “Schedule I” drug.
The moves stand in sharp contrast to Biden’s career in the Senate, where he helped create a regime for the mass incarceration of people convicted under drug laws.
“Sending people to prison for possessing marijuana has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit,” said Biden in a statement.
His pardons will apply to nearly everyone convicted of simple possession of marijuana under federal law, but not to those convicted of selling or distributing it. It has no effect on the far greater population of people with state convictions.
While no firm tally has been released, officials say some 6,500 people were convicted of simple possession under federal law between 1992 and 2021 alone. The pardons will also clear thousands more convicted under the laws of the District of Columbia.
The move won’t free anyone from federal prison: Officials say there’s nobody behind federal bars today for possession alone. However, cleaner records will help eliminate barriers to finding jobs, leasing homes, receiving an education or receiving certain federal benefits.
“I am urging all governors to do the same with regard to state offenses,” said Biden. “Just as no one should be in a federal prison solely due to the possession of marijuana, no one should be in a local jail or state prison for that reason, either.”
Despite his administration’s welcoming posture toward illegal immigrants, Biden is not pardoning non-citizens who were in the country illegally at the time they were arrested.
In addition to the pardons, Biden did something else that has more far-reaching potential to bring a dose of rationality to federal regulation of intoxicants: He ordered Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Bacerra to “expeditiously” review how marijuana is scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act.
Under that law, drugs are classified into five “schedules.” In positively hallucinogenic fashion, marijuana is included in the most extreme Schedule I, reserved for drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Other Schedule I drugs include heroin, LSD, and ecstasy.
Marijuana’s Schedule I status has made it far harder for researchers to study the plant’s medical promise — which has in turn helped the drug warriors’ justify keeping it in Schedule I.
On the other hand, fentanyl — which killed tens of thousands of people in 2021 — is in the less severe Schedule II. “It makes no sense,” said Biden in a welcome moment of lucidity.
Cannabis stocks surged on the news: Tilray Brands spiked 31% and then another 11% in after-hours trading. Canopy Growth — which, like Tilray primarily operates in Canada — rose 20% and then another 5% after the close.
“De-scheduling would allow a Nasdaq-listed company like High Tide to begin selling cannabis in legal states,” said High Tide Chief Executive Raj Grover, who called Biden’s move a “game-changer.”
While Biden’s moves are a step in the right direction, they leave most of the counterproductive, unconstitutional and authoritarian federal marijuana regime fully intact. They also introduce a new thread of irrationality into the scheme, writes Jacob Sullom at Reason:
“The moral logic of Biden’s distinction between simple possession and other marijuana offenses is hard to follow. He says using marijuana should not be treated as a crime. If so, how can helping people use marijuana justify sending anyone to prison?”
Meanwhile, despite her own dismal record as an eager drug warrior, Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t help chiming in on Twitter, declaring, “This is a step forward in correcting the historical injustices of failed drug policies.”
Dis you? https://t.co/d4B0W1wg8O pic.twitter.com/tMLwdxsaiK
— 🐮 Dad (BASEBALL IS BACK!) (@yankees_28th) October 6, 2022
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In a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate, then-Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard memorably eviscerated Harris over her past pursuit of marijuana convictions, putting a dagger in her presidential aspirations:
Tulsi Gabbard bodying Kamala Harris, just tearing off mask:
“I’m concerned about this record of Senator Harris. She put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.”
1/2#DemocraticDebate2020 pic.twitter.com/bPRoREygeY
— Django✯ (@SleepyDjango) August 1, 2019
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 19:20 - Victor Davis Hanson: An Epidemic Of Cognitive Impairment?
Victor Davis Hanson: An Epidemic Of Cognitive Impairment?
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,
President Joe Biden, the nominal head of the Democratic Party, is 79. But he increasingly acts and sounds 89.
Recently, Biden has pivoted repeatedly on stage with his arm outstretched to shake the hand — of someone not there.
On one recent occasion Biden called out for Representative Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., who passed away in a car crash in early August. He was insistent, shouting to the crowd, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I think she wasn’t going to be here — to help make this a reality.”
Biden’s fantasy was the reality that Walorski is no longer with us.
Biden slurs his words. He truncates sentences. He speaks in a muddled voice that often makes comprehension impossible. When questioned, he grows irate, growls, and stutters.
Biden’s messaging is even more confusing than his medium. On any given day, Biden may impetuously announce that U.S. soldiers will defend the soil of Taiwan, or that the “killer” Russian President Vladimir Putin, unhinged head of nuclear Russia, must be removed from office promptly.
If Biden doesn’t like a question, he may deride the reporter as a “stupid son of a bitch.” He habitually lies about everything from COVID-19 vaccinations being unavailable until his presidency to the nature of his son’s military service.
Biden confuses Iran with Ukraine. He calls a senior African American assistant “my boy.”
For much of the Trump presidency, leftist opponents sought to remove him by the 25th Amendment. A Yale psychiatrist diagnosed Trump in absentia and declared him deserving of a straitjacket forced intervention. Partisan charges grew so intense that Trump voluntarily took — and aced — the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.
Strangely, the same Left arm-chair psychiatrists offer no such worries about Biden’s clear mental decline.
One reason Biden enjoys immunity from removal is that his 57-year-old vice president, Kamala Harris, is seen to be even more incoherent and ill-informed.
Harris cannot plead age as the cause of her mental confusion. Yet, the more the public sees and hears Harris’ mixed-up word salads, and bizarre cackling spells, the more it is convinced that she is either ignorant or intellectually lazy — or both.
Recently while at the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, she read from a prepared speech that the United States honors its “very important,” “strong,” and “enduring,” “alliance” — with the communist, genocidal “Republic of North Korea.”
For those other than the vice president, North Korea is the sworn enemy of the United States, and officially known as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
Millions of Floridians remain currently displaced by Hurricane Ian. In response, Harris recently reassured them that impending federal assistance would be predicated not on need or individual disasters, but on the basis of skin color.
Translated that would mean that millions of the homeless, white middle-class should wait in line for relief, given Harris’s promises to “fight for equity, understanding not everyone starts out at the same place.”
Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi is 82. At times she too seems trapped in her own world disconnected from reality. Pelosi apparently recently mixed up Taiwan with mainland Communist China, and thus exclaimed “China is one of the freest societies in the world.”
She stood up and weirdly rubbed her clenched fists together when Biden in his state of the union address and darkly mentioned the dangers of soldiers inhaling toxic fumes from burn pits.
Of course, after one of Trump’s SOTU addresses, Pelosi proceeded indignantly to tear up her copy of the speech on national television.
More recently, Pelosi defended open borders and the vast influxes of illegal aliens by crassly claiming “We need migrants to pick crops.”
Pelosi’s startling revelation of progressive condescension was reminiscent of NBC retweeting the liberal commentator who said of the movement of immigrants, “It’s like me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there.”
The Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania John Fetterman is running for senator in his home state. His handlers try to keep him from questioners. They duck debates. And they count on the media to edit videos of his increasingly rare and bizarre appearances.
Why?
Fetterman recently suffered a severe life-threatening stroke, the details and prognoses of which he has yet to fully disclose.
Like Biden, Fetterman is now severely cognitively impaired. He cannot finish a coherent sentence while campaigning.
Almost daily Fetterman suffers long bouts of incoherence. He even becomes confused over where exactly he and his crowd are: “Send us back to New Jersey and send me to DC.”
The Democratic Party’s top hierarchy is run by octogenarians and septuagenarians. In the case of Biden and Pelosi, their powerful positions and age-related cognitive disabilities startle both Americans and allies abroad.
Why is the supposed party of youth dominated by such frail and forgetful elderly?
Maybe because the alternative of the next generation of would-be leaders waiting in the wings — like a Kamala Harris or John Fetterman — is more frightening still.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 19:00 - Used Car Prices Record First Annual Drop In Two Years; Luxury Car Prices Take Beating
Used Car Prices Record First Annual Drop In Two Years; Luxury Car Prices Take Beating
Used car prices appear to moderate as the latest report from auction giant Manheim found that wholesale used-vehicle prices recorded the first annual drop in more than two years.
Manheim’s wholesale used-vehicle prices fell 3% in September versus the prior month. The index declined to 204.5 and is down .1% from a year ago, the first annual drop since May 2020.
Prices are still elevated but down about 13.5% from the all-time high of 236 in January.
In April, we asked the question: “Are Used Car Prices About To Peak For Real This Time?” Followed by a note one month later titled “Used Car Prices Are Crashing At A Near Record Pace.” And by August, we found that “Used-Car Market Cools As Prices Plunge To One Year Low.”
Unpacking today’s report, compact cars had the most significant yearly increase last month at 5.9%, followed by vans and pickups, both of which increased by 0.8%. Increasing demand for smaller, more fuel-efficient cars could be due to consumer shifts away from gas-guzzling SUVs. Meanwhile, midsize car prices were marginally lower, but what caught our eye was the significant decline in luxury vehicles, down 4.8%.
The data suggests that the used car market is cooling and could be headed for a very turbulent time as a confluence of factors, such as soaring interest rates and elevated gas prices, curbs demand.
“Certainly, they’re [interest rate hikes] going to have an impact on the new- and used-vehicle markets,” Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive, recently said.
However, higher interest rates could push more buyers with lower incomes and below-average credit scores to the used car market:
“New vehicles are becoming more of a … luxury product,” Chesbrough said. “Even having the ability to buy a new vehicle and afford one certainly puts you on the upper end of American household incomes.”
The good news is that Manheim’s data shows some normalization in the used car market, indicating that prices should move lower in the months ahead. The insanity during the pandemic could be over.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 18:40 - "Shoot Him So He Looks Like Grated Cheese": Florida Sheriff Offers Anti-Looter Advice
“Shoot Him So He Looks Like Grated Cheese”: Florida Sheriff Offers Anti-Looter Advice
Outspoken Polk County, Florida Sheriff Grady Judd recommends that residents who encounter a looter in their home in the wake of Hurricane Ian should “shoot him so he looks like grated cheese.”
Watch:
Sheriff Grady Judd: if a looter breaks into your home, take your gun and shoot him. Shoot him so he looks like grated cheese pic.twitter.com/uXxmJFZUnV
— Brendon Leslie (@BrendonLeslie) October 7, 2022
Judd last made headlines in June, when he responded to the Uvalde shooting by saying that active shooters should be taken out between zero and five minutes.
“Once an active shooter, always an active shooter. Push in, save lives, neutralize the threat. We train for that; we expect that. I want them to shoot them, shoot them so much that you can read the local newspaper through them. Neutralize the threat,” he said.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 18:25 - China Is Expanding Its Energy Footprint In The Middle East
China Is Expanding Its Energy Footprint In The Middle East
Authored by Simon Watkins via OilPrice.com,
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The top of China’s agenda in energy terms remains the Middle East.
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The recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit saw China enhance its influence with several of the world’s leading players in the oil and gas sector.
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China is looking to forge a “deeper strategic cooperation in a region where U.S. dominance is showing signs of retreat”.
The recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit saw China enhance its influence with several of the world’s leading players in the oil and gas sector. These included not just the stalwart full SCO members of Russia, Kazakhstan, and India (which was handed the presidency of the organisation for the coming year) but also new full member, Iran, whose new status in the group was announced at the end of the summit. Additionally, and crucial to China’s long-term plans for the SCO that run alongside its multi-generational ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) power-grab project, memoranda of understanding (MoUs) were signed granting Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Egypt, among others, the status of SCO dialogue partners. Agreement was also reached on admitting, among others, Bahrain, the UAE, and Kuwait as upcoming SCO dialogue partners. Lest there be any misunderstanding about the true intention of all these manoeuvres by China, January saw foreign ministers from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), arrive in Beijing for a five-day visit to push ahead on negotiations over the China-GCC Free Trade Agreement (FTA). At these meetings, the principal topics of conversation were to finally seal the China-GCC FTA and a “deeper strategic cooperation in a region where U.S. dominance is showing signs of retreat,” according to local news reports.
One element of the SCO that is particularly useful to China in its use of soft power, alongside its use of several hard power mechanisms, to co-opt countries into its sphere of influence is that the SCO is often overlooked by Western media. This lack of coverage, though, belies the SCO’s enormous scale and scope, which broadly is the China-led equivalent of the European Union (EU), the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) all rolled into one. Founded in 2001, although pre-dated by the Shanghai Five group established in 1996 (comprising China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), the SCO is the world’s biggest regional organisation both in terms of geographic scope and of population. It covers 60 percent of the Eurasian continent (the biggest single landmass on Earth), 40 percent of the world’s population, and more than 20 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). The operational scope of the SCO ranges from collective security and military cooperation (in the mould of NATO) to economic and trade union (in the manner of the EU and the USMCA).
The top of China’s agenda in energy terms remains the Middle East, with its immediate goal being to secure for itself the largest possible pools of oil and gas with which it can continue to fuel its economic growth. China’s goal economically is to surpass the U.S. in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) within the next 10 years to become the world’s leading economic power and, as a corollary of that, the world’s leading superpower. Therefore, it is not just enough for China to secure the largest possible pools of oil and gas that it can in the Middle East, which remains the world’s largest collective reservoir of such products, but also to secure these at the expense of the U.S., making it a zero-sum game for both countries. This model of exponential economic growth fuelled by Middle Eastern oil is the one that the U.S. itself used for many decades and it makes sense for China to do the same, taking advantage as well of the previous dithering in the West over the climate change impact of carbon emissions. The reluctance of the West to press ahead with oil and gas investment, whilst at the same time not building the infrastructure bridge required to move seamlessly into green energy as a substitute for these high carbon emissions products – notably the failure to invest in nuclear power – has allowed China’s sphere of influence to exploit two huge advantages. First, China itself has continued to use whatever fuel it wants to power its growth, usually at a much cheaper cost than the West’s green alternatives, and secondly the lack of building the transitional infrastructure bridge to green energy in the West has made core strategic parts of it – notably, the European Union – beholden to China’s great partner in this scheme, Russia.
At the very top of China’s power structure, Xi Jinping is a man who, aside from entirely understanding how the U.S. forged its growth over the last 100 years or so (buying in oil cheaply from the Middle East being a key component), also understands how the UK did it in the 100 years or so prior to that. “Xi is a great admirer of the [British] East India Company, and his knowledge of how it operated commercially, and effectively as a spearhead of British state interests, is extensive,” a senior energy security source from the European Union exclusively told OilPrice.com. Indeed, one lesson learned by Xi, it transpires, is the value of offering investment into countries initially and then leveraging this out into extensive political power, as the East India Company successfully did across India, southeast Asia, and east Asia as well, including in Hong Kong and China.
Top of China’s list in this regard is not Iran, although it is a useful country to have in its figurative back pocket, given both its huge and relatively under-developed oil and gas riches and its ability to cause chaos in the region and to U.S. interests there and elsewhere. The country that China is really after in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia and by signing an MoU with it, via the SCO, for it to become a full dialogue partner for the organisation, China is adding a layer of official organisational credence to what it has been busy doing with Saudi Arabia for years. Beijing’s efforts in this regard have been most effective since it stepped in to save Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) from domestic and international humiliation in his proposed initial public offering of Saudi Aramco, as analysed in depth in my latest book on the global oil markets. From this point onwards, MbS has been in China’s debt – as were the leaders of countries targeted and similarly helped by the East India Company – and Saudi Arabia’s positivity towards China increasing its influence there has followed.
Not only is Saudi Arabia now a prime mover in advancing the China-GCC Free Trade Agreement (FTA) – a key aim of which is to forge a “deeper strategic cooperation in a region where U.S. dominance is showing signs of retreat” – but also the Kingdom is now a prime advocate for switching away from the hegemony of U.S. dollars in the pricing of global oil and gas. Just after China made the offer to MbS to privately buy the entire 5 percent stake in Saudi Aramco that he originally wanted to float, the then-Saudi Vice Minister of Economy and Planning, Mohammed al-Tuwaijri, told a Saudi-China conference in Jeddah that: “We will be very willing to consider funding in renminbi and other Chinese products.” He added: “China is by far one of the top markets’ to diversify the funding…[and] we will also access other technical markets in terms of unique funding opportunities, private placements, panda bonds and others.”
These comments came at around the same time as the visit of high-ranking politicians and financiers from China to Saudi Arabia, which featured a meeting between King Salman and Chinese Vice Premier, Zhang Gaoli, in Jeddah. At these meetings, according to comments at the time from then-Saudi Energy Minister, Khalid al-Falih, it was also decided that Saudi Arabia and China would establish a US$20 billion investment fund on a 50:50 basis that would invest in sectors such as infrastructure, energy, mining, and materials, among other areas. The Jeddah meetings in August 2017 followed a landmark visit to China by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman in March of that year during which around US$65 billion of business deals were signed in sectors including oil refining, petrochemicals, light manufacturing, and electronics.
Since then, there have been a slew of deals done between the two countries, the most recent being the signing in August of a multi-pronged memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Saudi Aramco and the China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec). As the president of Sinopec, Yu Baocai, himself put it: “The signing of the MoU introduces a new chapter of our partnership in the Kingdom…The two companies will join hands in renewing the vitality and scoring new progress of the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI] and [Saudi Arabia’s] Vision 2030.” China also played a key role in engineering the five rounds of secret talks between Saudi Arabia and its historical nemesis, Iran, as reported by OilPrice.com.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 18:20 -
- California Begins Fighting Inflation With Stimulus Checks This Week
California Begins Fighting Inflation With Stimulus Checks This Week
Fighting fire with fire…
In true “government exercises every wrong solution before finally begrudgingly arriving at the correct one” fashion, this is the week that California residents can finally expect to get their “Middle Class Tax Refund” – the name the state has given to its stimulus checks it is distributing to residents in order to help fight inflation.
23 million taxpaying California residents are eligible to receive the payments, ABC reported this week. The payments are slated to start going out Thursday and Friday and are technically “tax refunds”.
The checks, which can be as much as $1,050 and are the brain child of Governor Gavin Newsom – will be distributed in amounts determined by people’s annual income, mixed with the amount of dependents they have. The California Globe broke down the details this week:
…those making up to $75,000 a year, or joint filers who make up to $150,000, will get $350 each. Those who make up to $125,000 a year, or joint filers making up to $250,000, will get $250 each. Those who make up to $250,000 a year, or $500,000 filing jointly, get $200 each. One dependent may also be added at each tier for the same amount as each filer, meaning Californians could see as much $1,050, $750, or $600 coming in per household depending on tier level.
The checks were debated over the course of the spring and summer and first started under the guise of gas relief checks. But California legislators weren’t happy with that idea and instead pushed for the idea of a flat rebate program for all residents making under a certain income level.
Sounds a lot like universal basic income, doesn’t it?
People who filed their taxes online will receive a relief check direct deposit, the report says, while those who filed a paper tax return in 2020 will get their funds on a debit card. 90% of direct deposits are expected to hit accounts in October, the report says. Debit cards will be mailed between now and mid-December, the same report says. Some will receive their cards by mid-January 2023.
Some have speculated that the timing of the stimulus conveniently lines up with mid-term elections, approaching next month. Former lobbyist Harry Schultz commented: “It’s not nearly as drastic this year since he has such a commanding lead, but this does help Newsom right before the election. Free money going out before an election, right during the beginning of a recession with consumer prices still being high? Yeah, that buys goodwill.”
He continued: “Honestly, it’s a good bet hedger. Just in case something catastrophic comes out that hurts Newsom, he still has some cards to play, and this is one of them. It has been odd timing both times to say the least, and if I were [Newsom Gubernatorial opponent Senator Brian] Dahle, I’d bring this up during the debate, even just a passing mention of it being ‘coincidental.’”
Meanwhile, as Insider notes, 73% of respondents said government spending was a “major cause” of higher prices when polled by a right-leaning advocacy group earlier this year.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/07/2022 – 18:00
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