Jan 132025
 


Pablo Picasso Self portrait 1906

 

Trump Blew The Overton Window So Wide Open, Anything Seems Possible (Peters)
Trump’s Plan For Greenland ‘Not A Crazy Idea’ – Former Top NATO Commander (RT)
Greenland ‘Most Welcome’ To Join US – Musk (RT)
Trump Energizes Greenland Independence Movement (Mish)
Trump: California Fires ‘One Of The Worst Catastrophes’ In US History (JTN)
Ukraine Must Acknowledge Territorial ‘Reality’ – Trump Adviser Waltz (RT)
Biden Laying Russia Sanctions Trap For Trump – WaPo (RT)
Anti-Russian Sanctions Killing German Companies – Wagenknecht (RT)
Poles Tired Of Ukrainians – Defense Minister (RT)
The Walls Close in on Zelensky (Jim Rickards)
In the Western World You Become Respectable by Selling Out the People (PCR)
Weaponizing Law Enforcement Against Americans (Spivak)
Tulsi Gabbard Now Supports FISA-702 to Get Confirmed as Head of DNI (CTH)
Biden Eyes Preemptive Pardons Amid Trump’s Return (RT)
Vance Says Trump Won’t Issue Pardons for Violent Jan. 6 Defendants (ET)
Biden Calls Meta Decision to End Fact-Checking Program ‘Really Shameful’ (ET)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1878102416429883684

Cali Fire

How Trump was made a felon. Listen well.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1878395613018026473

JD
https://twitter.com/i/status/1878456747850956958

Tucker Newsom

 

 

 

 

 

 

“..the feasibility of a policy idea depends not on its inherent merits but on whether it falls within the range of public acceptance..”

Trump Blew The Overton Window So Wide Open, Anything Seems Possible (Peters)

“Wayne, would you like to be governor of Canada?” asked Trump, speaking with his buddy Gretzky, tugging at the Overton Window with all his might. “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN,” the President-Elect tweeted on Truth Social, sending his oldest son north with a box of red hats. He wouldn’t rule out taking the Panama Canal by force. And with each such suggestion, the window widened further. The Overton Window is a concept in political science and sociology that refers to the range of policies or ideas considered acceptable in public discourse at a given time. Like most things in life, I learned about it rather late. “We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory, the Gulf of America. What a beautiful name,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago, prying the window open so wide that nearly anything seems possible, plausible, probable.

Say such things enough times, amplify the words using our AI-enabled social media machines, and presto, nothing’s shocking. But not only that, AI will soon converge with quantum computing. “The Willow processor performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse,” wrote Google, presenting its latest breakthrough, cracking our perception of reality. As the window widens fully, not only is nothing impossible, but almost anything can seem reasonable. The right and left tails of every distribution lengthen and fatten. And we are left unanchored, adrift, in an endless sea of wild possibility, volatility. “I’m going to give you a report on drones about one day into the administration, because I think it’s ridiculous that they’re not telling you about what’s going on with the drones,” pledged the President-Elect.

Windows. John Overton posited that ideas travel through stages, moving from being seen as extreme or unthinkable to becoming widely accepted and adopted as policy. Democracy was once considered unthinkable. Universal suffrage too. Emancipation. Most things that matter have traveled this path.

Here are Overton’s six stages:
• Unthinkable – outside of acceptable thought.
• Radical – at the edge of discussion.
• Acceptable – starting to gain traction.
• Sensible – reasonable and widely discussed.
• Popular – widely supported.
• Policy – acted upon and implemented.

Overton introduced this framework to describe how the feasibility of a policy idea depends not on its inherent merits but on whether it falls within the range of public acceptance. He argued that public policy is constrained by this “window” of acceptable ideas and politicians tend to stay within the window to maintain public support. But what was yesterday’s unthinkable can become tomorrow’s policy as the window widens, shifts left, or right. And what moves the window is naturally tied into one of life’s great mysteries, the superorganism we call humanity. Overton’s framework helps us make sense of society, markets too, risks, opportunities. I try to look at emerging investment themes through this lens. With each move of the window, power structures shift, capital flows adjust, new winners emerge, incumbents struggle or fail. The nimble survive, thrive.

With such stakes, those with influence are desperate to guide the process. Politicians, propagandists, business leaders, religious leaders, union bosses, authors, artists, athletes, advocacy groups, lobbyists, social media influencers, and now AI. There was a time, not so long ago when it was radical or even unthinkable to call network news fake. No longer. And now we openly joke about Canada becoming our 51st state. Where that leads is anyone’s guess, but the window has widened. Greenland’s Prime Minister announced today that he’s ready to speak with Trump. I started trading in 1989 and never in that time has the Overton Window shifted this rapidly across so many dimensions. There’s no precedent for it in modern history. And this dynamic is becoming a new market fundamental.

But it’s not just Trump. Javier Millei has thrown open an anti-statist libertarian window that had been nailed shut for as long as I’ve been alive. Argentina had the best performing stock market in the world last year. This is breathtaking change. And in roughly two short years, we went from the FTX apocalypse to serious talk of strategic sovereign Bitcoin reserves. That window is wide open. Intertwined with both Millei and Bitcoin is radical talk of sovereign insolvency throughout the western world. Before it’s over, make no mistake, we’ll be talking about massive entitlement cuts. But for today, that idea is stuck in the unthinkable stage.

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The best idea for Greenland?!

Trump’s Plan For Greenland ‘Not A Crazy Idea’ – Former Top NATO Commander (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to acquire Greenland from Denmark is not a “crazy idea,” former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, James Stavridis, has said. He, however, dismissed the possibility of military intervention, instead advocating for economic engagement as a means to strengthen ties with the region. Speaking at ‘The Cats Roundtable’ with John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 radio on Sunday, the retired admiral described Greenland as a “strategic goldmine for the United States,” highlighting its geopolitical position and abundant natural resources. “It sits at the very top of the North Atlantic. It protects approaches to our own country – the Atlantic Ocean – so it is geographically very important,” Stavridis said. He added that the region is rich in rare minerals and likely has vast oil and gas deposits.

“And it’s huge, a huge land mass. It’s three times the size of Texas,” he said, agreeing with the host that Greenland is “almost a better deal than Alaska.” “And here’s my point. We already almost bought Greenland,” Stavridis said. “We almost bought it at the same time when we bought Alaska, back in the 1860s. So it’s not a crazy idea.” The former NATO commander ruled out using “military force to attack Greenland or Denmark,” arguing that the US should focus on economic engagement to counter Russian and Chinese influence in the region. “We could do an awful lot in terms of business, investment, box out the Russians, box out the Chinese, and work very closely with Greenland,” he said. He added that Greenland “doesn’t have to become the 51st state, but it could certainly be an economic objective for us.”

Trump first floated the idea of purchasing Greenland in 2019, a proposal that was swiftly rejected by Danish and Greenlandic officials. He revived the idea last month, describing the ownership of the Arctic island as an absolute necessity” for US security. Greenlandic pro-independence prime minister, Mute Egede, ruled out selling the island but said on Friday that he was “ready to talk” with Trump. “We have a desire to be the master of our own house,” he said. Although Denmark rejected Trump’s proposal, Copenhagen has reportedly floated to Trump the possibility of boosting US military presence on Greenland, which already hosts an American base. A self-governing Danish territory since 1979, Greenland has gradually been pursuing greater sovereignty. The island currently has its own government, but Denmark retains control over foreign affairs and defense.

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US needs an arctic base.

Greenland ‘Most Welcome’ To Join US – Musk (RT)

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has expressed support for Greenland potentially becoming part of the United States, after incoming President Donald Trump renewed interest in acquiring the Danish self-governed island. Musk made the remarks on Sunday, writing on X: “If the people of Greenland want to be part of America, which I hope they do, they would be most welcome!” In doing so, he was responding to a recent poll by the University of Copenhagen indicating that the majority of Greenlanders favor independence. Musk’s comments came after Trump voiced support for the acquisition of the island, describing it as an “absolute necessity” and a “national security” matter. The president-elect first suggested purchasing Greenland during his first term in 2019, but the idea went nowhere at the time due to opposition both from Greenland and Denmark.

Greenlandic Prime Minister Mute Egede has rejected the possibility of selling the island to the US, but said on Friday that “we are ready to talk” with Trump. He noted that “we have a desire for independence, a desire to be the master of our own house… This is something everyone should respect.” On Saturday, Axios reported, citing sources, that Denmark, Washington’s NATO ally, had sent “private messages” to Trump signaling that it is open to discussing boosting US military presence in Greenland. The island of about 60,000 people is already home to a US military base and plays a key role in NATO’s defense because of its strategic location, which allows it to control vital Arctic shipping lanes that are gradually becoming more navigable due to global warming.

An autonomous territory of Denmark since 1979, Greenland has been gradually seeking more sovereignty. The island currently has its own government, but Denmark retains control over foreign affairs and defense. A 2019 poll indicated that 67.8% of Greenlanders favor independence from Denmark within the next two decades.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1878454609720606735

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They’ll always depend on someone. Just got to choose who.

Trump Energizes Greenland Independence Movement (Mish)

The Wall Street Journal reports “Trump’s Talk of Buying Greenland Energizes Island’s Independence Movement”. “Greenland is a self-ruling part of the Kingdom of Denmark. The Danish government says it is willing to grant Greenland full independence if there is local support, and recent Greenlandic elections and polls indicate there is. Trump’s recent threat of a trade war with Denmark is changing the negotiating dynamic, says Ulrik Pram Gad, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. The Danish government now might be more open to agreeing a divorce deal that includes some continued payments to ease Greenland’s path to independence, he says. “My prognosis is that the Danish government will accept it in the next few years,” he says.

“An independent Greenland would then be free to forge its own security or economic ties with the U.S., Denmark or anyone else. In April, Greenland goes to the polls in a vote that could fire the starter gun on independence for the territory of 57,000 people. The last time elections were held, pro-independence parties got 80% of the vote. The prime minister of Greenland made a New Year’s address to the nation saying that a draft constitution for the country has been prepared and that the independence process should be triggered. “It is now time to take the next step for our country,” Múte Egede said. “Like other countries in the world, we must work to remove the obstacles to cooperation—which we can describe as the shackles of the colonial era—and move on.”

“A 2009 Danish law lays out how Greenland can take the first step in the process: It must notify the Danish government, the two must negotiate a divorce agreement and the deal must then be ratified by a referendum in Greenland. The Greenlandic government has commissioned legal experts to work out the details of how step one would work with a two- year deadline. Pro-independence campaigners in Greenland would like to adopt a “free association” model, similar to the relationship between the Marshall Islands and the U.S. or the Cook Islands and New Zealand. Some of Trump’s advisers have privately acknowledged a sale of Greenland is unlikely, but an expansion of U.S. military and financial presence on the island is a possibility. A poll in 2021 showed that 69% of Greenlanders favored more cooperation with the U.S., compared with 39% who favored tighter cooperation with China.”

Trump’s Offer to Buy Greenland. Some people thought I was crazy when I posted Trump’s Offer to Buy Greenland Is Not as Preposterous as it Sounds. A free association model may be more likely, but don’t rule out an outright purchase. There are only about 59,000 Greenland citizens. I proposed an offer of $2 million each. That would only be $118 billion. Greenland would be cheap at double the price if I am correct about the mineral deposits.

Critical Materials Risk Assessment. Our Department of Energy has placed some of the rare earth minerals we need for weapons systems, wind turbines, batteries, semiconductors, cell phones, and aircraft on a critical materials list. Nearly all of them are mined or refined in China. If Trump increases tariffs on China by 60 percent, China could easily shut down rare earth exports. I have been warning about this for years China controls more than 80% of the world’s supply of tungsten and about 90% of global magnesium production China has an effective monopoly over processing major heavy rare earths – Dysprosium (Dy) and Terbium (Tb), and Light Rare Earths – Neodymium (Nd) and Praseodymium (Pr).

On December 3, I commented China Halts Rare Exports Used by US Technology Companies and the Military. This is China’s advance salvo at Trump tariffs. It comes one day after the Biden administration expanded curbs on the sale of advanced American technology to China. The US gets rare earths from allies who get them from China. But don’t rule out the possibility that China shuts off all access.

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“There is death all over the place.”

Trump: California Fires ‘One Of The Worst Catastrophes’ In US History (JTN)

President-elect Donald Trump blasted California and Los Angeles officials for their handling of the wildfires that have been raging for nearly a week. “The fires are still raging in L.A.,” Trump wrote on Truth Social early Sunday morning. “The incompetent pols have no idea how to put them out. Thousands of magnificent houses are gone, and many more will soon be lost. There is death all over the place.” He said that this is turning out to be “one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country.” “They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?” he continued, according to The Hill. Last week Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California.”

“NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!” Trump posted later that day. Newsom pushed back on X regarding Trump’s claim about the water restoration declaration. Newsweek, among others, fact-checked the claim about the water restoration declaration and concluded, “The notion that Newsom therefore turned down a ‘declaration,’ referring to federal action that Trump introduced anyway, is not accurate. However, it is clear that the governor has opposed Trump’s actions on water policy, drawing a sharp response from Trump in turn.”

The death toll has climbed to 16 as of Saturday evening. LA County has declared a local health emergency as over 40,000 acres have burned, according to Cal Fire. While this is clearly a combination of natural and environmental phenomenon, arson, and government failure and mismanagement, this catastrophe will be analyzed and characterized for decades to come, often through a political lens as the region and the country come to grips with the realities and implications on the ground.

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They take it step by step.

Ukraine Must Acknowledge Territorial ‘Reality’ – Trump Adviser Waltz (RT)

It is not possible to “expel every Russian from every inch” of soil claimed by Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula, incoming US National Security Adviser Michael Waltz has admitted. Acknowledging “that reality” has become a major step toward resolving the conflict between Moscow and Kiev, Waltz told ABC News in an interview on Sunday, adding that this idea is now in the process of being accepted by Ukraine’s backers. “Everybody knows that this [conflict] has to end somehow diplomatically. I just don’t think it’s realistic to say we’re going to expel every Russian from every inch of Ukrainian soil. Even Crimea – President[-elect Donald] Trump has acknowledged that reality, and I think it has been a huge step forward that the entire world is acknowledging that reality,” Waltz stated.

Waltz suggested that accepting the fact that returning to Ukraine’s original post-Soviet borders is unrealistic now opens the way to addressing the question of “how do we no longer perpetuate this conflict and how… we no longer allow it to escalate in a way that drags in the entire world.” The remarks appeared to be reminiscent of statements previously made by other close Trump allies, including his vice president, J.D. Vance. Shortly ahead of the November election, Vance suggested Kiev could end up in a situation where it decides to cede some lands to Russia.

The stance signaled by the incoming US administration sharply contrasts with the goal repeatedly proclaimed by Kiev of regaining the entirety of its post-Soviet territory. This has been accompanied by an explicit refusal by Ukraine to engage in any meaningful negotiations with Russia. Moscow, however, regards the five formerly Ukrainian regions, including Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Crimea, as integral parts of its territory. Crimea broke away from Ukraine in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan coup in Kiev, joining Russia via a referendum shortly thereafter. The four other regions were incorporated into Russia in late 2022 after the local population overwhelmingly backed such a move during separate referendums. Last year, Moscow demanded that Kiev pull its troops out of the areas it still controls in its former regions in order to begin the long-stalled negotiation process.

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“Key obstacles include the legal framework under which the sanctions are authorized and the likelihood of strong congressional resistance..”

Biden Laying Russia Sanctions Trap For Trump – WaPo (RT)

The administration of US President Joe Biden has set a sanctions trap for President-elect Donald Trump, making it politically and legally challenging to roll back sweeping measures targeting Russia’s energy sector, according to a report by the Washington Post. The newspaper claims that Biden’s actions could create significant hurdles for Trump if he seeks to lift the restrictions. Key obstacles include the legal framework under which the sanctions are authorized and the likelihood of strong congressional resistance. Republican lawmakers have previously pushed for tougher penalties, potentially complicating Trump’s efforts to reverse course. “It’s entirely up to [the next administration] to determine whether, when, and on what terms they might lift any sanctions we put in place,” a senior Biden official is quoted as saying. However, current sanctions laws give Congress the power to block any move to ease restrictions.

This framework leaves Trump with limited options, potentially forcing him to maintain the pressure on Moscow despite his calls for a quick settlement in Ukraine. Michael Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has argued for leveraging the sanctions to encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin into peace talks. In an article for The Economist before the election, Waltz wrote: “If [Putin] refuses to talk, Washington can… provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions. Faced with this pressure, Mr. Putin will probably take the opportunity to wind the conflict down.” Targeting oil giants Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas, as well as 183 oil tankers, the latest US measures are designed to strike at Russia’s energy industry, which helps fund its budget. They also tighten the US Treasury Department’s license, restricting Moscow’s ability to be paid in dollars for energy exports.

The timing – just days before Trump’s inauguration – has drawn accusations from Moscow of deliberate sabotage. “Of course, we are aware that the administration will try to leave the most difficult legacy possible in bilateral relations to Trump and his associates,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said ahead of the sanctions announcement. Biden officials have framed the sanctions as a long-term strategy. “We believe our actions are leaving a solid foundation upon which the next administration can build,” one official said, predicting the measures would cost Russia billions in monthly revenue and force “hard decisions” between sustaining its economy. With the sanctions tied to bipartisan legislation, any rollback is expected to face resistance in Congress, leaving Trump constrained as he takes office, the Washington Post added.

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“The sanctions have nothing to do with morality, they have nothing to do with human rights, they have nothing to do with the love of peace, they are simply a stimulus program for the US economy…”

Anti-Russian Sanctions Killing German Companies – Wagenknecht (RT)

Western sanctions imposed on Russia are “killing” German companies and enriching the American economy, Sahra Wagenknecht, the leader of Germany’s left-wing BSW party, said during an election conference on Sunday. The delegates of the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance – Reason and Justice (BSW) gathered in the city of Bonn to adopt the platform for the Bundestag election that will take place next month. During her speech, Wagenknecht refused to blame Russia for the ongoing Ukraine conflict. “The sanctions have nothing to do with morality, they have nothing to do with human rights, they have nothing to do with the love of peace, they are simply a stimulus program for the US economy and a killer program for German and European companies,” Wagenknecht said.

She called for the restoration of the gas imports from Russia. “We simply have to tie our energy imports with the criteria of the lowest price and not any kind of double standards or ideology,” she stated. The left-wing politician condemned Washington’s foreign policy, alerting the audience about “the blood trail of US proxy wars” around the globe. She stressed that the German chancellor must not be “a vassal” of the US. BSW co-leader Amira Mohamed Ali said that the party stands for “a strong, fair and sovereign Germany.” The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party held its conference in Riesa, Saxony on Saturday. The delegates rejected a motion condemning Russia and called for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. The snap election was called after Germany’s ruling three-party coalition collapsed last month due to disagreements over the budget.

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“..especially when people here see young Ukrainian men driving the latest cars or staying in five-star hotels.”

Poles Tired Of Ukrainians – Defense Minister (RT)

Poles are “fatigued” of Ukrainian migrants in their country, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Defense Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz has stated. The official partially attributed this sentiment to the sight of young men leading an ostentatious lifestyle in the EU nation instead of defending their homeland. Nearly a million Ukrainians currently reside in Poland, according to UN estimates. While Poland opened its doors to those fleeing the neighboring country following the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022, attitudes towards Ukrainians among Poles have somewhat soured since then. In an interview to the Financial Times published on Sunday, Kosiniak-Kamysz said: “Of course there is fatigue in Polish society, and it is understandable especially when people here see young Ukrainian men driving the latest cars or staying in five-star hotels.”

In October, the official voiced identical criticisms, arguing that young Ukrainian men flaunting their wealth were an affront to Polish taxpayers, who contribute to Warsaw’s military and financial aid to Kiev. Around the same time, the Center for Public Opinion Research published a poll indicating that some 67% of Polish citizens were in favor of deporting male Ukrainian migrants back home. Referring to a recent spat over the delivery of the remaining Polish MiG-29 fighter jets, the defense chief on Sunday also suggested that the Ukrainian leadership would do well to “remember that when others were only sending helmets, we sent tanks.”

In November 2024, Kosiniak-Kamysz similarly suggested that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky had a “short memory.” A month prior, Kiev slammed its NATO backers, and Poland in particular, over their failure to provide previously promised Soviet-era warplanes. Warsaw clarified that it needed the remaining MiG-29 fighter jets to ensure its own security before the F-35s that it has ordered arrive. In his interview to the FT, Kosiniak-Kamysz also ruled out deploying Polish peacekeepers to Ukraine once Kiev and Moscow seal a truce, calling for “greater burden sharing and diversification within NATO” instead.

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“Trump has his work cut out for him. But he is the only person in the world today who stands a chance at ending this war.”

The Walls Close in on Zelensky (Jim Rickards)

The walls are closing in on Ukraine’s President Zelensky. In a meeting with allies in Germany this week, the embattled leader requested NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine. “Our goal is to find as many instruments as possible to force Russia into peace. I believe that such deployment of partners’ contingents is one of the best instruments. Let’s be more practical in making it possible.” Nothing about this proposal is “practical”. Even if Zelensky is speaking about peacekeeping troops as part of a settlement, which isn’t clear, it’s still a fundamentally crazy idea. Simply put, it would bring us to the brink of nuclear war. Of course, this isn’t the first time Zelensky has suggested that NATO should send troops to fight and die in this war. But this latest instance is noteworthy because it comes just ahead of President Trump’s inauguration. Given the circumstances, the move signals desperation.

President Trump has stood his ground on this issue thus far. Just this week he acknowledged that NATO’s courtship of Ukraine was a major cause of the war, noting that if Ukraine were to join the Western military alliance, “then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep, and I could understand their feelings about that.” Trump correctly blames Biden for promising Ukraine NATO membership and escalating the war. In early December, Trump’s team conveyed the message that Ukraine would need to make major concessions to end the war. Those concessions will probably involve giving up land already captured by Russia, agreeing to a form of disarmament, and pledging to never join NATO. This was an important shift, as it became clear even to the biggest hawks that Ukraine wasn’t going to recapture much, if any lost territory. And forget about Crimea.

Trump’s views on Ukraine are certainly unique in Washington D.C., But his base is ready for the war to end, and this issue was one of the keys to his landslide victory. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether Zelensky and the Ukrainian deep state would agree to such concessions. It’s also unclear whether they truly have a say in the matter, unless they’re prepared to go it alone against Russia. But it’s also not clear if Russia would agree to such a deal. Putin could insist upon an end to sanctions on Russia, and a return of their frozen assets.There’s also a chance that Russia won’t want to give Ukraine a break to re-arm itself. NATO has already pulled a fast one on Russia once, during the Minsk accords from 2014-2021. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has admitted this peace deal was in actuality a stall tactic to give Ukraine more time to build its military capabilities.

So President Putin may want to press the attack, eliminate Ukraine’s military capabilities, and gain more territory. Russia is advancing along almost the entire frontline. Its use of hypersonic missiles, artillery, drones, and guided glide bombs has devastated Ukrainian strongholds. Ukrainian forces have been forced to fall back into far less favorable defensive positions, and this does not bode well for their outlook. The waste of life in this conflict is exponentially larger than the public has been told. In December of 2024, President Zelensky claimed that only 43,000 of his nation’s troops had been killed in the war so far. In truth, upwards of 600,000 Ukrainian soldiers have likely died. On paper, the Ukrainian army is over one million strong. But across the line, foxholes are empty. Where are all the soldiers?

Russia has likely lost at least 100,000 soldiers KIA as well, though they haven’t released any specific numbers. When the truth about this war comes out, it will shock anyone who is still paying attention at that point. Make no mistake. Trump has his work cut out for him. But he is the only person in the world today who stands a chance at ending this war. I believe he’ll get it done. But the cost in terms of geopolitical capital may be high.

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Paul Craig Roberts: “I keep waiting [for] the day that every member of the French Legion of Honor is arrested for being a patriot..”

In the Western World You Become Respectable by Selling Out the People (PCR)

Two themes to which I return are the difficulty of effecting change and the disappearance of ethnic nations in the West. What is going on right now in France is a story of both together. Marine Le Pen’s political party, National Rally (formerly National Front), is the largest French party, but it is kept from office by all other parties combining against it. Le Pen’s party has stood for French ethnicity as opposed to a diverse Tower of Babel. In Europe an ethnic-based national state has become associated with Hitler’s Third Reich. Consequently, the French establishment has branded the National Rally racist and even Nazi. By branding the National Rally in this way, the French establishment endeavors to make Le Pen’s party, not immigrant-invaders, the main threat to France. The French establishment and French left-wing have equated hating Le Pen with resisting fascism.

But it is not working. Native French are awakening to the fact that their civilization and their culture are being transformed by waves of immigrant-invaders and that France is ceasing to be French. So the French establishment has focused on Marine Le Pen herself with the lawfare made famous in America with the false indictments of Donald Trump. Le Pen faces the prospect of a devastating prison sentence plus five years of political ineligibility on the charge that she used European Parliament funds where she is represented to pay for National Front employees. All parties do the same thing, but the investigation was limited to Marine Le Pen. We are witnessing the French establishment’s selective use of law to eliminate a perceived threat.

On January 7 Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the founder of the party, passed away. The French left-wing, or perhaps it was the Establishment, celebrated his death with fireworks on the Place de la Republique. French Establishment commitment to diversity, the EU, and globalism requires the death of a French patriot to be celebrated. I keep waiting [for] the day that every member of the French Legion of Honor is arrested for being a patriot. One would think that the insult to Jean-Marie and the sentencing of Marine would strengthen Le Pen’s party as France’s only representative. But according to an article by Pierre Levy the National Rally’s new leader, Jordan Bardella, craves respectability. He has succumbed to the temptation of gaining office by making the National Front acceptable to the establishment.

The question in my mind is: Will Trump also choose to become respectable? When change is desperately required, dictatorships are more easily overthrown than democracies. In democracies the system permits well-financed interest groups to dominate the countries political, legal, media, entertainment, and educational institutions. A ruling establishment becomes institutionalized in the countries’ institutions. Attempts to bring governance back to service to the people from service to the establishment requires the equivalent of a religious revival or the blood of a Leninist revolution, the consequences of which can be worst than what was overthrown. Over the course of my lifetime I have witnessed the dissolution of the belief system that is Western civilization. The voices that have attempted to defend civilization have been weak. The very definition of civilization has changed. Are Western peoples sufficiently aware and educated to face this challenge?

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“Above all, the administration must not redirect targeting—it must eradicate these stains on the American soul.”

Weaponizing Law Enforcement Against Americans (Spivak)

Reports released by two House committees in December shine a harsh light on the deceptions and oppressive tactics utilized by numerous federal agencies, the Intelligence Community, and leaders of the Democratic Party. During the last year of the first Trump Administration, agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), State Department, and Justice Department (DOJ) initiated improper contacts with media in an effort to censor conservative views. These agencies also took steps to interfere in the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden. The Biden-Harris Administration supercharged the weaponization of the federal government against the American people. With the active participation of the media, the administration followed a whole-of-government effort to collude with, and coerce, the media to suppress and censor conservatives and others who opposed progressive goals.

It threatened parents with terrorist “threat tagging” and visits from the FBI for speaking their minds, stretched statutory authority beyond recognition to prosecute Donald Trump and his supporters, harassed and penalized whistleblowers, invaded bank privacy, sent heavily armed federal agents into private homes, and brought an unprecedented barrage of litigation against states to force them into compliance with the administration’s unconstitutional goals. On December 17, 2024, the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight (Administration Subcommittee) released its report on the events surrounding January 6, 2021 and the politicization of the Select Committee (January 6 Committee) established by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to investigate those events. Three days later, the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (Justice Subcommittee) released a 17,000-page final report detailing the administrative state’s and the Biden-Harris Administration’s repressive censorship enterprise and other abuses.

Based on the evidence described in these reports, there are two inescapable conclusions: (1) regardless of the administration in office, the Deep State in DHS, DoD, DOJ, IRS, the Intelligence Community, and other agencies have arrogated to themselves unconstitutional and unlawful powers to infringe individual liberties, expand rules, and use force to suppress conservatives’ goals, religion, and free speech; and (2) the Biden-Harris Administration, Pelosi, and leading Democrats endorsed, supported, facilitated, and led the expansion of these efforts. These reports are products of extensive investigations and include copious evidence. Though the Administration Subcommittee’s report can be faulted for its angry tone, a vainglorious pandering to its chairman, Barry Loudermilk, and sometimes hyperbolic conclusions, it provides compelling evidence of wrongdoing.

Broader in scope and more thoroughly researched, the Justice Subcommittee’s report is the product of a detailed inquiry into a broad betrayal of trust. Justice Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan is to be commended for uncovering problems and taking steps that have already ameliorated some of these practices. The findings in these reports show why the Trump Administration must clean house. That is why Trump has nominated sometimes controversial individuals such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, John Ratcliffe, Russell Vought, and Rick Grenell. It explains Trump’s impulsive, properly withdrawn nomination of Matt Gaetz and the creation of DOGE as an advisor outside of government. It is why so many of Trump’s appointees have expressed concern about the agencies they have been selected to lead. Above all, the administration must not redirect targeting—it must eradicate these stains on the American soul.

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Feels like the Matrix.

Tulsi Gabbard Now Supports FISA-702 to Get Confirmed as Head of DNI (CTH)

As the story is told, and it aligns with every scintilla of researched data on the darkest and deepest elements of the Deep State, DNI nominee Tulsi Gabbard has reversed her position and will now support FISA-702, the warrantless searches of American communication and electronic metadata. Apparently the FISA process and the 702 aspect (specific to American citizens) is the line in the sand the Senate Select Intelligence Committee has drawn. If Tulsi Gabbard does not support it, her confirmation is in doubt. As a result, she has reportedly reversed her position and now supports it. This is absolutely par for the course.

It should be remembered, in the last reauthorization of FISA-702 congress exempted themselves from the warrantless search and surveillance system used by the U.S. Intelligence Apparatus. Congress forbids the FBI or any entity with access to the NSA database, from being allowed to use the process to search themselves or their staff. However, every other American does not enjoy this same protection. After spending years asking every representative of consequence why they support the FISA-702 process, I can tell you every one of them says they believe it is needed because the IC tells them there are just too many domestic terror threats that need to be monitored. It is impossible to find a person in DC who will forcefully try to stop FISA-702 reauthorization.

If you ask me why in hindsight, I now take the position that FISA-702 is the gateway to the massive surveillance system currently being put into place using Real ID and the AI facial recognition software provided by Palantir (CIA exploit). In essence, the gateway that allows the full-scale surveillance state, is opened by the prior authorization of FISA-702 that negates any 4th amendment protection. Why? Because all of the surveillance mechanisms within the network being updated and enhanced by AI search and capture, comes from the IC being allowed to exploit the NSA database. That same database access allowance is the targeting mechanism for FISA-702. If warrantless searches of the NSA database were stopped, the Palantir/IC and Tech Bro collaboration could hit a brick wall. Against this backdrop, the SSCI telling Tulsi Gabbard that her nomination approval is contingent upon her support for FISA-702, simply makes sense.

WASHINGTON DC – […] Multiple senators from both parties who met with the former Hawaii lawmaker in recent days told us they emerged from those sessions unsure about Gabbard’s position on the 702 program. During these meetings, senators have pressed Gabbard on her previous public statements on the issue, as well as her votes against 702 reauthorization throughout her eight years in Congress. GOP national security hawks in particular viewed this as problematic, we’re told, fueling renewed doubts about her confirmation prospects. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, suggested on a WSJ podcast Wednesday that Gabbard should disavow her previous opposition to the 702 program.

“Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) also sent us a statement Thursday night supporting Gabbard’s 702 stance — a key indicator of how the GOP leadership is thinking about her nomination. “Tulsi Gabbard has assured me in our conversations that she supports Section 702 as recently amended and that she will follow the law and support its reauthorization as DNI,” Cotton said. That last part is important because, if confirmed as DNI, Gabbard would need to certify the statute annually in order for intelligence collection to continue under the 702 program. This is also a big part of the reason why the DC Deep State will easily confirm Kash Patel to be Donald Trump’s FBI Director. Kash Patel is a big believer in the value of FISA-702.”

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“Asked if he would pardon himself, Biden dismissed the idea, saying, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

What does that say about those he did hand a pardon?

Biden Eyes Preemptive Pardons Amid Trump’s Return (RT)

US President Joe Biden is considering issuing preemptive pardons for individuals who may be targeted by the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump. Trump, who defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, is set to return to the White House on January 20. “There’s still consideration… but no decision,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Friday, in response to a question regarding potential preemptive pardons. “It depends on some of the language and expectations that Trump broadcasts in the last couple days here as to what he’s going to do.” Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race in July after concerns arose within the Democratic Party following a June debate performance against Trump which raised doubts about his viability as a candidate. He ultimately endorsed Harris, who lost the general election to the Republican candidate, Trump.

The president-elect has expressed intentions to prosecute perceived “enemies,” including Harris and “the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” Trump also criticized Biden for pardoning his son Hunter in December. In a reversal of his pledge to not do so, Biden pardoned Hunter, who was convicted of tax evasion and gun charges and was set to be sentenced in December. Trump called the decision a “miscarriage of justice,” while referencing the people who were jailed for the January 6 Capitol riots. “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. The president-elect also called for investigations into former President Barack Obama and Liz Cheney, a high-profile Republican critic of Trump.

Ahead of the November 2024 election, Trump threatened unprecedented prosecution for individuals he accused of potential election cheating. “Please beware this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials,” Trump posted on Truth Social. He previously claimed widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump also stated last year that he would fire Jack Smith, the Justice Department’s special counsel overseeing criminal investigations into the Republican president-elect. Smith resigned on Friday. Biden described Trump’s intentions to prosecute political opponents as “outrageous.” Asked if he would pardon himself, Biden dismissed the idea, saying, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

The president likely possesses the constitutional authority to issue broad preemptive pardons for federal offenses committed in the past, even if charges have not yet been filed. However, this authority does not apply to state crimes or future offenses. The types of pardons Biden might consider would generally fall within his executive power.

Read more …

More pardons. But these ones are not pre-emptive.

Vance Says Trump Won’t Issue Pardons for Violent Jan. 6 Defendants (ET)

Vice President-elect JD Vance said on Jan. 12 that individuals who were violent during the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021, “obviously” should not be pardoned. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to use his clemency power for people who have been charged in connection with the incident over the past four years. Those who “protested peacefully” on Jan. 6 should receive a pardon, Vance told Fox News. He added that there is also a “little bit of a gray area” in some of those cases. “I think it’s very simple,” Vance said. “If you protested peacefully on Jan. 6 and you’ve had [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice treat you like a gang member, you should be pardoned. If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.”

More than 1,500 people have been charged with federal crimes in connection with the Capitol breach, according to Department of Justice records. A number of people were charged with misdemeanor offenses for entering the Capitol in an unauthorized manner, and some were charged with felonies. Leaders of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys groups were convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as plots to use violence to stop the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to then-President-elect Joe Biden. Vance said on Jan. 12 that he believes that “a lot of people” have been “prosecuted unfairly” over the past several years. “We need to rectify that,” Vance said. “We’re very much committed to seeing the equal administration of law.”

Also on the morning of Jan. 12, Vance responded to critics on social media who said that his comments to Fox News didn’t go far enough, with some saying that all Jan. 6 defendants should be pardoned. “I’ve been defending these guys for years,” Vance wrote on social media platform X. “The president saying he’ll look at each case (and me saying the same) is not some walkback … I assure you, we care about people unjustly locked up. Yes, that includes people provoked and it includes people who got a garbage trial.” That comment came in response to a prominent conservative social media account’s statement on Jan. 12 that new footage has shown “cops shooting innocent J6 protesters and [Vance] goes on Fox News and tells the world that only non violent protesters should get pardoned … better rethink what you just said JD.” Vance noted that he donated to a Jan. 6 “political prisoner fund” and was criticized over it during his run for Ohio’s Senate seat.

In a wide-ranging news conference last week at his Florida Mar-a-Lago residence, Trump suggested that he would initiate “major pardons” for individuals arrested in the aftermath of Jan. 6. A reporter asked him, “You said on your first day of office you were going to pardon Jan. 6 defendants. Are you planning to pardon those who were charged with violent offenses?” “Well, we’re looking at it, and we have other people in there,” Trump said. “People that didn’t even walk into the building are in jail right now. “We’ll be looking at the whole thing. But I’ll be making major pardons, yes.” The president-elect has said on multiple occasions that he would carry out the pardons quickly after he is sworn into office on Jan. 20.

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Fake anger.

Biden Calls Meta Decision to End Fact-Checking Program ‘Really Shameful’ (ET)

President Joe Biden has shared his disapproval at Meta’s decision to do away with its current social media fact-checking program. This week Meta, which owns the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms, announced it would stop using its third-party fact-checking program for U.S.-based content review purposes. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he made the decision because the existing fact-checking program has become “too politically biased,” resulting in censorship and a loss of trust. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” he said in a Jan. 7 video statement. Asked for his opinion on the move at a Jan. 10 press conference, Biden said, “It’s just completely contrary to everything America is about.”

Up until this week, Meta had partnered with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) to run its third-party fact-checking service. The IFCN is administered by the Poynter Institute, which also operates the PolitiFact fact-checking publication. “The idea that, you know, a billionaire can buy something and say ‘by the way from this point on, we’re not going to fact-check anything’ and you know when you have millions of people reading, going online reading this stuff it’s—anyway, I think it’s really shameful,” Biden said. Meta is not doing away with fact-checking outright. Rather, Zuckerberg said Meta’s platforms will move toward a “more comprehensive community notes” style system, similar to the one employed by social media platform X. He will start the new model in the United States.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1878485939091025933

Rather than relying on a fact-checking organization such as the IFCN to review content, X’s community notes feature allows users to weigh in directly. X users may suggest a fact-checking note on controversial posts on the platform, and then provide feedback on whether a suggested fact-checking note is itself accurate, and necessary for the particular post. Posts that have been flagged with sufficient community input display an attached fact-checking note explaining why the particular post is inaccurate or may be missing important context. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta’s content moderation team will be moved out of California to Texas “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.” Zuckerberg and other Meta officers have defended the move as needed to restore free speech and expression to their platforms.

In a Jan. 7 blog post, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said as well-intentioned as their prior fact-checking efforts had been, “they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users, and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.” “Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail,’ and we are often too slow to respond when they do,” Kaplan said. Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation decisions had been a point of contention during the 2020 presidential election cycle.

In October 2020, the Meta platforms reduced the reach of posts linking to articles by The New York Post concerning a laptop that then-candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had reportedly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop. The New York Post’s articles detailed the contents of the laptop, including documents indicating the elder Biden had some level of interaction with his son’s foreign business partners. In a Jan. 10 interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg alleged that officials in the Biden administration routinely contacted Meta, with demands that they remove or suppress certain content, including memes and satirical posts. “Basically these people from the Biden administration would call up our team and like scream at them and curse,” Zuckerberg said.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Starlink
https://twitter.com/i/status/1878673305588359296

 

 

Tumbling
https://twitter.com/i/status/1878690946340270500

 

 

little men
https://twitter.com/i/status/1878695718132813987

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Dec 042024
 


Johannes Vermeer The geographer 1668-69

 

FBI Agents Back Kash Patel As Next Director: ‘He’s the right fix’ (JTN)
The Government Gangsters (Glenn Beck)
Tucker Carlson Claims US Embassy Has Muted Zelensky (RT)
Trump Offers Canada Chance To Join US (RT)
Joe Biden Cloaks His Legacy in Infamy With the Hunter Biden Pardon (Turley)
In Pardoning His Own Son, Biden Argues That US Justice Sucks (Marsden)
“Trump-Proofing” California Could Be a Costly Option for Californians (Turley)
Ukraine Will Reject Any Alternative To NATO Membership – Foreign Ministry (RT)
Kiev Should ‘Disregard Everything And Everyone’, Become Nuclear Power – MP (RT)
Georgia: A Second Front for Putin (Paul Craig Roberts)
The Second Front Has Been Activated In Syria (Sonja van den Ende)
EU Reports Dramatic Fall In Birth Rate (RT)
EU Has Weakened ‘A Lot’ Amid Ukraine Conflict – Hungarian FM (RT)
The End Of Fake News? MSNBC Hits New Low In Ratings (ZH)
Ryanair CEO O’Leary: Germany Is Run By ‘Idiots’ (RMX)
Fani Full Release Ordered After Fulton DA Sat On RICO Records (ZH)
House Oversight Report Supports Lab-Leak Theory for COVID-19 Origin (ET)
The Skripals Are As Good As Dead – The Judge Has Buried Them (Helmer)

 

 

 

 

YMCA

Article III

In a blanket pardon, you lose the 5th

Georgia
https://twitter.com/i/status/1863938810196955257

Gaetz

Benz


https://twitter.com/i/status/1864152269153063050

Biden AI

 

 

 

 

“..an influential retired bureau supervisor says a large number of agents support Kash Patel for the job..”

FBI Agents Back Kash Patel As Next Director: ‘He’s the right fix’ (JTN)

As Democrats try to stymie President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for FBI Director, an influential retired bureau supervisor says a large number of agents support Kash Patel for the job because of his national security experience and his vision to replace the law enforcement agency’s leadership who allowed politics to usurp crime fighting. “This guy is completely and 100% qualified to run that organization. He’s what’s needed today. He’s the right fix,” retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Danik told Just the News in a wide-ranging interview Monday. While Democrats and news media critics have suggested that Patel was selected to be a loyalist seeking revenge on Trump foes, Danik noted Patel’s extensive career experience, which includes stints as a federal public defender, federal prosecutor, counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, senior counsel to the House Intelligence Committee and chief of staff to both the Defense Secretary and the Director of National Intelligence.

“He has the correct balance, in my view, having been there for almost 30 years,” Danik said of Patel. “He has the correct balance of prosecutor, which is what we do. We feed the prosecution tube. Defense attorney, so the other side of that coin. Intelligence, the intelligence agencies, which is a key element to the FBI’s either success or failure. “And then also, I think this is personal, that he’s been a victim himself of the system,” Danik said. “And the combination of those things uniquely qualifies him beyond his, you know, substantial accomplishments.” Those accomplishments, Just the News confirmed, include two major government awards for Patel’s work on national security during the Obama administration.

The recognitions included a 2017 Assistant Attorney General’s award of excellence for Patel’s prosecution of 12 Al-Shabab terrorists who killed 72 and injured dozens more with suicide bombings targeting sports fans watching a 2010 FIFA World Cup soccer match at two locations in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. They also include a Central Intelligence Agency Award for Human Intelligence Gathering for his work combating terrorism in East Africa. Patel mentioned both awards in a lawsuit he filed against a news media organization back in 2019 and they were confirmed by government officials who spoke to Just the News.Danik’s full-throated endorsement of Patel is significant, since he is a popular figure in the FBI retiree community as an accomplished bureau supervisor in the Miami area known to help and counsel agents currently on the job.

“I talk to agents all the time. I’m constantly involved with helping them, counseling them through tough times, or helping on the job or just after retirement,” Danik said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “And there’s a large group that are highly, highly supportive of him, of the President-elect, and are willing to help with whatever jobs or tasks are involved in getting behind the scenes.” “When somebody new comes into into an organization, even if they’re somewhat familiar with it, there’s a lot of complexity involved with these federal bureaucracies. They have really established lots of different little machine gunner nests that need to be known about before you go in,” he added. Danik was explicitly supportive of Patel’s oft-stated strategy of “cleaning house” in the upper echelons of the FBI, saying that is where cases involving Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and others have been politicized to the detriment of the nation.

Read more …

X thread.

The Government Gangsters (Glenn Beck)

Trumps FBI Director Kash Patel knew the Deep State’s plan to remove Joe Biden and pardon Hunter to hide their crimes. Garland and Wray should have been impeached. Fauci, the CIA and the Media lied about the origins of Covid. Wray has the Epstein files. He says the FBI can be fixed by shutting down the Hoover building immediately and opening it up the next day as a Museum of the Deep State letting everyone walk the halls for free and leaving it open 365 days a year. He says twenty people can run the FBI, the other seven thousand agents that are sitting in that building should be chasing criminals around America, not distorting statistics about January 6th so Christopher Wray can go to Congress and lie and say domestic violent terrorism is on the rise.

He encourages the arrest and prosecution of Hunter Biden over the crime of prostitution for calling a Hooker, which is prosecutable in almost every jurisdiction in America and he also says Joe Biden can be prosecuted for receiving money overseas, ill gotten gains, which is illegal. There are bigger crimes involving Ukraine and other matters, but these are simple and fast crimes to prosecute. The investigation into the Hunter Biden Laptop was shutdown by the FBI and the Department of Justice with the help of the media, proving this was a coordinated Deep State effort. He says the Obama-Clinton Administration has been running the White House for years, not Joe Biden. The Deep State is evil, vindictive and very smart.

He names the Top Five Deep State Operatives in America which are General Mark Milley of the U.S. Department of Defense, Mark T. Esper former Secretary of Defense, William Barr former U.S. Attorney General of the Department of Justice, Christopher Wray current FBI Director and Merrick Garland the current Attorney General of the Department of Justice. He says the Deep State will be shattered under the second Trump Administration, but it will be a monster fight. He read the entire secret JFK files and the secret seven pages of the 9/11 report, he says he has seen it all and will recommend to President Trump to release all the files to the American people including the Epstein files. He refers to the Deep State Operatives as Government Gangsters that will be brought to justice.

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“..Carlson published a video on X in which he previewed the upcoming release of an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov..”

Tucker Carlson Claims US Embassy Has Muted Zelensky (RT)

American journalist Tucker Carlson has said the US government has been blocking his attempts to organize an interview with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for more than a year. On Wednesday, Carlson published a video on X in which he previewed the upcoming release of an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The journalist said the conversation with Russia’s top diplomat was aimed at providing a perspective on how close Washington and Moscow could be to a direct clash, after the administration of outgoing US President Joe Biden granted Ukraine permission to fire American-made long-range weapons deep into Russian territory.

In the same clip, filmed on Manezhnaya Square in the heart of Moscow, the former Fox News host revealed that “we have also tried for over a year to get an interview with Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.” According to Carlson, his team “have attacked that from a bunch of different angles. We have spoken to a lot of different people around him, had dinner with them. We have been in talks continuously.” “And those efforts have been thwarted by the US government. The American Embassy in Kiev, which our tax dollars pay for, told the Zelensky government: No, you may not do the interview. You can talk to CNN. You cannot talk to us,” Carlson said.

In June, the journalist said he had agreed an interview with the Ukrainian leader. However, Zelensky’s press-secretary, Sergey Nikiforov, swiftly rejected the claim, saying that “Tucker Carlson should check his sources in the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) more carefully.” Zelensky “has a completely different schedule, and Tucker Carlson is not on it,” Nikiforov stressed. Carlson’s latest trip to Moscow is his second since the escalation between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022. In February, he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the recording of their two-hour conversation getting 14 million views on YouTube and 185 million views on X in the first three days after its release.

Read more …

Western Canada would be interested. But not the east. Though Québec…

Trump Offers Canada Chance To Join US (RT)

US President-elect Donald Trump has suggested that Canada should become the 51st US state unless it manages to halt the flow of illegal migrants and drugs across its border with the US, Fox News reported on Monday, citing sources. According to the report, the incoming US leader made the remarks last Friday during a dinner with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Earlier last week, Trump threatened to place 25% tariffs on goods coming from both Canada and Mexico upon inauguration in retaliation for illegal immigration, as well as the “crime and drugs,” coming to the US across the borders with the two countries. Trudeau called Trump shortly thereafter to attempt to dissuade the incoming US president from going ahead with the proposed hike, and on Friday arrived at Trump’s estate at Mar-a-Lago to continue discussions.

According to people reportedly present at Friday’s dinner who heard Trump’s discussion with Trudeau, the US president-elect repeated his earlier claim that Canada had failed its neighbor by allowing drugs and illegal immigrants from over 70 different countries to enter the US. He also reportedly chided Canada for the US trade deficit with it, which he estimated at around $100 billion. Trudeau reportedly told Trump that such punishing tariffs would destroy the Canadian economy. Trump was said to have replied with a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Canada could avoid this by becoming the 51st US state, with Trudeau as governor. He later expounded on the idea, saying that Canada could even be divided into two states, one conservative and one liberal. The remark was reportedly received with nervous laughter from Trudeau and other dinner attendants, while Trump once again emphasized that he plans to carry out his threat as soon as he returns to the White House on January 20.

After the dinner, Trudeau told reporters he had “an excellent conversation” with Trump, without revealing its details. Trump later called his meeting with Trudeau “productive” and noted that the Canadian prime minister had “made a commitment” to work with the new US administration on Trump’s key points of concern. He did not mention his previous tariff hike threat again. Many US imports from both Canada and Mexico are currently exempted from tariffs because of the USMCA trade agreement that Trump enacted during his first term. Experts have warned that it is not clear how Trump could implement the proposed tariff hikes without violating that deal. Many economists have also warned that tariff hikes could backfire on the US economy by causing a spike in domestic prices, and also lead to retaliatory actions by targeted countries that could spark a trade war.

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“Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office.”

Joe Biden Cloaks His Legacy in Infamy With the Hunter Biden Pardon (Turley)

President Joe Biden’s decision to use his presidential powers to pardon his own son will be a decision that lives in infamy in presidential politics. It is not just that the President used his constitutional powers to benefit his family. It is because the action culminates years of lying to the public about his knowledge and intentions in the influence-peddling scandal surrounding his family. Even among past scandals in the abuse of the pardon power, Biden has done lasting damage not just to his legacy but his office. Despite its noble origins and purpose, the pardon power historically has not been a pristine power used by past presidents. As I have previously written, it was used to benefit the political cronies of past presidents. President Warren Harding was even accused of selling pardons, including to mob enforcer Ignacio Lupo, known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Former president William Clinton waited for the final days of his presidency to pardon his own brother as well as a major democratic donor.

In 2023, I wrote that Biden might follow this same pattern and pardon his son as a lame-duck president. The column suggested that Biden might withdraw as a candidate for office and then take the action as a father: “The pardon-and-apology approach might appeal to Biden not only as an effort to convert vice into virtue but to justify his withdrawal from the election as a selfless act.” In the 2020 election and throughout his presidential term, Biden repeatedly lied to the American public with an ease and impunity that shocked even many political veterans in Washington. He was repeatedly asked if he knew about Hunter’s foreign dealings, including millions in alleged deals with Russians, Ukrainians, Chinese, and other clients. President Biden lied and denied such knowledge. As I detailed in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, he had repeated discussions of these dealings. He is even on tape discussing news stories on the dealings.

President Biden was also repeatedly asked if he met any of his son’s clients. He repeatedly lied. We have pictures and records of dinners and meetings with these clients. Hunter Biden was expressly thanked for his arranging such access to his father. Few reporters pressed Biden on the corruption scandal, but they were often met not only with denials but angry retorts from the president. When Fox reporter Peter Doocy raised it, the President steamed “Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man — you’re a one-horse pony, I tell you.” When CBS’s Bo Erickson broke ranks and raised the scandal and drew a rebuke from Biden “I know you’d ask it. I have no response, it’s another smear campaign, right up your alley, those are the questions you always ask.” The President continued to lie throughout the election, the presidential debates, and his term. Then, the press repeatedly asked him whether he would pardon his son. The President was now running for reelection and again lied.

He and the White House said over and over again that no such pardon would occur and was not being contemplated. That was also a lie. NBC is reporting that, while issuing these denials last June, there were discussions about the pardon. The pardon power was written in absolute terms, and a president can even, in my view, pardon himself. However, what is constitutional is not necessarily ethical or right. This is one of the most disgraceful pardons even in the checkered history of presidential pardons. President Biden has lied to cover up a corruption scandal that reportedly brought his family millions in raw influence peddling. His portrayal of his son as a victim stands in sharp contrast to the sense of immunity and power conveyed by Hunter in his dealings. There were diamonds as gifts, lavish expense accounts, and a sports car, in addition to massive payments that Hunter claimed were “loans.”

There are messages where Hunter belies the President’s portrayal of a political witch hunt, including messages like the one to a Chinese businessman openly threatening the displeasure of Joe Biden if money is not sent to them immediately. In the WhatsApp message, Hunter stated: “I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the Chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.” The President has now pardoned Hunter for his convicted felonies and any crimes he may have committed from “Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 1, 2024.” It is all now being buried under a sweeping immunity deal and a pack of presidential lies.

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“Too bad that time’s up for you to actually do anything about this kind of systemic selective prosecutorial bullying, beyond serving your own family’s interests.”

In Pardoning His Own Son, Biden Argues That US Justice Sucks (Marsden)

One of the big bonuses of being US president is that you can pardon any federal crimes you want on the way out the door. It’s a chance to help out family, friends, donors, or curry favor with potential future business associates in your post-White House career. US President Joe Biden just handed one out to his own son, Hunter Biden, who was facing up to 25 years prison in a firearms case and 17 years for a tax case. That length of sentence would make it seem that Hunter was accused of waving a gun around or firing it off in the vicinity of someone, but that’s hardly even the case. Instead, he was convicted of lying on his paperwork when applying for one. One of the questions asks whether you’ve smoked pot or done any other drugs “unlawfully.” No way, Hunter said. But unfortunately for him, a quick Google image search reveals spades of images of him with a crack pipe hanging from his mouth. Whoops.

In the tax case, he was convicted of three felony offenses and six misdemeanor offenses, according to his dad’s Justice Department statement, having “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.” And when he was finally made to pay up, having blanked out on paying for four tax years, he indulged in some creative accounting in inventing some business deductions. Enter Joe in the role of the parent who shows up at the school principal’s office to explain why his kid is such a screwup and can’t get his homework done on time for the tax man. “Those who were late paying their taxes because of serious addictions, but paid them back subsequently with interest and penalties, are typically given non-criminal resolutions. It is clear that Hunter was treated differently,” Biden wrote in a statement. Sounds like Hunter’s serious addiction in this case was not paying taxes, just like every other American facing similar charges.

Everyone’s addicted to something. Maybe some other Americans were too busy double-fisting Ding Dongs or Twinkies to cater to the tax man? Or working on their gains at the gym? Or on a Netflix bender? Where’s their pardon? I’m sure Americans will be thrilled to learn that the president figures that indulging in some nose candy constitutes a free pass from any serious consequences of messing up your taxes – or just ignoring their existence altogether. Tax man knocking at the door? Just answer while smoking a giant blunt and tell him to bugger off. What about the gun stuff, though? Joe has an answer for that, too. “Without aggravating factors like use in a crime, multiple purchases, or buying a weapon as a straw purchaser, people are almost never brought to trial on felony charges solely for how they filled out a gun form,” he wrote.

Yeah okay, and most drivers who speed aren’t hauled up on speeding charges. Not because they aren’t doing it, but because there isn’t a cop sitting in the back of each one of their cars waiting for them to go over the limit and give them a ticket. Biden is literally saying that Hunter has been “treated differently” simply because he’s Biden’s son. Is he seriously blowing the whistle on his own Justice Department, and American justice, in general, with accusations of political prosecutions? Sure sounds like it. Too bad that, as president, he wasn’t actually in any position to actually do anything about it, huh? How about the tax man targeting Donald Trump’s returns? Is that not political, too, Joe? What about all the other felony charges that seemed designed to derail his return to the presidency? “For the first time in American history a former president that is a convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden said earlier his year. “But as disturbing as that is, more damaging is the all-out assault Donald Trump is making on the American system of justice.”

Are we talking about the same system of justice that sucks so much that you had to correct its errors so your kid could avoid becoming someone’s Alcatraz amigo? “It says a lot about the United States that we work relentlessly to free Americans who are unjustly held around the world,” Biden said amid a prisoner swap with Russia this summer. How much work has Biden done – beyond his own kid’s case – to ensure that people who mess up on government paperwork in the US aren’t facing prison terms that rival those of genocide perpetrators? “The charges in his cases came about only after several of my political opponents in Congress instigated them to attack me and oppose my election,” Biden said. Sounds like a real problem. Too bad that time’s up for you to actually do anything about this kind of systemic selective prosecutorial bullying, beyond serving your own family’s interests.

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“Californian voters surprised many Democrats this election with almost 40% voting for President-elect Trump over California’s own Vice President Kamala Harris..”

“Trump-Proofing” California Could Be a Costly Option for Californians (Turley)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is widely known to be angling to be the next Democratic presidential nominee after the implosion of Vice President Kamala Harris. This week, Newsom positioned not just his campaign but also his state as part of the “resistance” for the next four years against the Trump Administration. Newsom pushed a special session to secure a $25 million war chest to take the Trump Administration to court, even before the inauguration and release of policies by the incoming administration. I wrote earlier about how the loss of both houses, as well as the White House, will mean that lawfare and obstructive efforts will shift to the states. Newsom is moving to out-position governors (and potential primary opponents) like Govs. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker moved first in a chest-pounding press conference that he would stop the incoming administration from trying to remove undocumented persons, declaring, “You come for my people, you come through me.” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) added that he will “fight to the death” against Trump’s agenda. Newsom has upped the ante by demanding millions to pre-fund litigation against the new administration. With a massive budget debt burden, Newsom has continued to pile on new debt for politically popular initiatives. I cannot recall any state pre-positioning funds for the sole purpose of litigating against any incoming administration. The most obvious area of disagreement is the effort to ramp up the enforcement of immigration laws and to carry out deportations.

While polls show that the public overwhelmingly supports such enforcement, including deportations, California is seeking to take the lead in court actions designed to slow or frustrate such efforts. It could prove costly, not just in litigation expenditures. The Trump Administration could seek to withhold federal funding from states and cities obstructing enforcement efforts. In the meantime, sanctuary cities are continuing to face rising costs associated with rising populations of undocumented migrants. For example, as we previously discussed, Denver Mayor Mike Johnson (D) declared that he was preparing the Mile-High City for its “Tiananmen Square moment” to fight the federal government in any attempt to deport unlawful migrants. Johnson warned that he would have not only Denver police “stationed at the county line to keep [ICE] out” but also “50,000 Denverites.” He later walked back the comments while repeating that the city is positioning itself to be part of the resistance.

Now the Common Sense Institute (CSI), a non-partisan research organization estimated that eight percent of the city’s 2025 budget of $4.4 billion is now dedicated to housing and services for undocumented persons. If true, that amounts to $356 million or $7,900 per migrant. California has led other states in offering a wide array of benefits to undocumented persons. Notably, Californian voters surprised many Democrats this election with almost 40% voting for President-elect Trump over California’s own Vice President Kamala Harris.

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“Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Kiev’s NATO ambitions were the key reason behind the current conflict.”

Ukraine Will Reject Any Alternative To NATO Membership – Foreign Ministry (RT)

Ukraine will not accept any kind of security guarantees as a substitute for NATO membership, according to a Foreign Ministry statement published on Tuesday. In the document issued ahead of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels this week, Kiev blasted the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal for security guarantees from Russia and the West. The Foreign Ministry called the pact a “monument to short-sightedness in strategic security decision-making,” and urged its Western backers to issue it an invitation to the US-led military bloc during the meeting in Brussels. “Having the bitter experience of the Budapest Memorandum behind us, we will not settle for any alternatives, surrogates, or substitutes for Ukraine’s full membership in NATO,” the ministry said in a statement, marking this week’s 30th anniversary of the memorandum’s signing.

The criticism comes amid recent Russian advances and the upcoming return of US President-elect Donald Trump to the White House in January, which has raised uncertainty over US support as Kiev fears it could be forced to the negotiating table. “We are convinced that the only real security guarantee for Ukraine, as well as a deterrent factor for further Russian aggression against Ukraine and other states, is only Ukraine’s full membership in NATO,” the statement said. Ukraine was left with around 1,700 nuclear warheads after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While this stockpile technically made Ukraine the world’s third-largest nuclear power, the weapons themselves remained under the operational control of Russia, and were surrendered under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. This agreement involved the US, UK, and Russia providing security assurances to Kiev in return for the removal of the weapons.

While Ukraine has never controlled nuclear weapons, in 2022, Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky expressed regret about his country agreeing to relinquish them, suggesting that Kiev has “every right” to reverse the decision. Earlier this year, Zelensky said Ukraine could protect itself by becoming either a nuclear state or a member of NATO. He later backtracked, saying Kiev does not have any alternative “except NATO.” NATO, however, is “highly unlikely” to heed Kiev’s call for a membership invitation during this week’s meeting, Reuters reported, citing diplomats, saying it would take weeks or even months to reach a consensus from the bloc’s 32 members for the decision. Ukraine made NATO membership a strategic goal in 2019. This was a red line for Moscow, which has for years expressed concerns about the bloc’s creeping expansion towards its borders. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Kiev’s NATO ambitions were the key reason behind the current conflict.

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Forget it. Think Oreshnik.

Kiev Should ‘Disregard Everything And Everyone’, Become Nuclear Power – MP (RT)

Ukraine must become a nuclear power to protect itself no matter the consequences, an opposition MP said on Tuesday. Becoming a member of NATO, which the current government hopes will happen, is not enough, Aleksey Goncharenko has argued. This week marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Budapest Memorandum, which comprises three nearly-identical multilateral agreements with former parts of the USSR that had nuclear weapons stationed on their territories at the time the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine agreed to denuclearize in exchange for security assurances by Russia, the US, and UK. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Tuesday to complain that the document has not applied to Kiev since the US-backed armed coup of 2014.

The anniversary, it said, is a good time to extend to Ukraine a formal invitation to NATO, it claimed. ”NATO is a good thing. But NATO will not defend us. Nuclear weapons would,” Goncharenko wrote in response on social media. “So we should disregard everything and everyone and make the bomb. Then we’ll figure things out.” The MP also rebuked Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for missing the opportunity to get a “normal peace treaty” with Russia and NATO membership before the 2023 ‘counteroffensive’. He belongs to the party of former President Pyotr Poroshenko, who lost to Zelensky in the 2019 presidential election. The Budapest Memorandum with Ukraine should serve as a reminder to Western leaders that the “development of European security architecture at the expense of Ukrainian interests rather than in alignment with them is doomed to fail,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in the statement.

The country “will not accept any alternative, imitation, or substitute for a NATO membership with full rights,” it added. In recent statements, Zelensky has been sending mixed messages on NATO membership, suggesting that Kiev would be willing to accept accession of only the territories currently under its control, or accession of all claimed territories without protection under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Kiev claims that Ukraine was the third-largest nuclear power after Russia and the US, before agreeing to give up the weapons. The Ukrainian government has denied having a secret nuclearization plan, after German media claimed last month that it does.

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The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas took the side of the 34%, whom she declared to be the “Georgian people,” not the 54% who won the election.”

Georgia: A Second Front for Putin (Paul Craig Roberts)

President Putin faces the possibility of a second Ukraine, a second war front that could result from Washington’s success in staging a coup d’etat in Georgia with a color revolution. Riots ongoing since the “Russian party” defeated the “Western party” by 54% to 34% have convinced the Prime Minister of Georgia that the West is in the process of launching a color revolution to overthrow, as was done in Ukraine, the democratically elected government. Putin is silent and consequently could find himself fighting on two fronts. Then the West will open a third front. This is what Putin can expect from consistently presenting himself as a non-interventionist unless Russia is attacked. Russia, certainly the most powerful military entity on earth, carries no weight in Western councils. Georgia, the country, became a part of Russia in early 1800. In 1917 Georgia became one of the provinces of the Soviet Union.

The country became independent in 1991 when the collapse of the Soviet Union gave Washington the opportunity to break up the Soviet Union. Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Central Asian provinces were turned into independent countries. In 2003 Washington engineered the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia, which put a pro-Western government in office. In 2008 Washington sent its US trained and equipped Georgian army into South Ossetia, a disputed province that did not agree to leave Russia with Georgia. As Russian peacekeepers were killed in the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, Putin sent in the Russian Army which quickly destroyed the American trained Georgian Army and conquered Georgia in five days, which is what should have happened in Ukraine. Failing to realize that Washington would continue to try to turn Georgia into a front against Russia, Putin turned Georgia loose and took his army home.

Putin, a true believer in non-interference even when it is at Russia’s expense, left Georgia to be subverted by Washington. Putin did not require that Georgia shut down Washington’s NGOs operating in the country or that Georgia subordinate itself in any way to Russia. Consequently, Washington got a French-born woman installed as president of Georgia, and Washington’s propaganda and NGOs have convinced 34% of Georgians to prefer alignment with the West than with Russia. It is part of Washington’s intent to surround Russia with missile bases. Washington’s EU puppet has threatened to impose sanctions on the democratically elected Georgian government for failure to void the election and put in office a pro-West government. The EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas took the side of the 34%, whom she declared to be the “Georgian people,” not the 54% who won the election.

She promised that the EU would punish those who won and that sanctions against Georgia was one of the options for dealing with the Georgian people’s refusal to comply with EU rule. Last Saturday the US State Department spokesman announced Washington’s suspension of its strategic partnership with Georgia, thus setting up Georgia for overthrow. The Georgian President supports Washington’s NGO protesters and said the parliamentary elections are illegitimate. There is no indication that the Russian government realizes that the overthrow of the pro-Russian government means trouble for Russia. Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, writes nonsensically about the attempt at “color revolution” as if it is merely an internal affair for Georgia.

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“..Uyghur jihadists in Syria pose an overlooked yet significant regional and international security problem..”

The Second Front Has Been Activated In Syria (Sonja van den Ende)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will go down in history as the most corrupt leader of the most extreme radical settler regime ever seen in the “promised land” called Israel, has negotiated a supposed ceasefire with Hezbollah, which will last for 60 days. Shortly after the ceasefire in Lebanon came into effect, and after Israeli Netanyahu warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that he was “playing with fire”, a new front was opened from Idlib to Aleppo. The terrorist group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched an attack on Aleppo from their last enclave in Idlib. HTS and other factions called the al-Fatah al-Mubin group, just another small terrorist organization affiliated with HTS, advanced in the western countryside of Aleppo and took control of strategic points in the villages of Qubtan al-Jabal and Sheikh Aqil.

According to sources and Syrian media, around 50 people were killed, including terrorists, Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers and an SAA soldier who was taken back to Idlib as booty. Who is HTS? If you believe Western sources, they are a Sunni Islamist political and armed organization involved in the Syrian civil war. It was formed on January 28, 2017, as a merger between Jaysh al-Ahrar, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, Ansar al-Din Front, Jaysh al-Sunna, Liwa al-Haq and Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. Syrian and Iraqi people call the organization Daesh, which means “the one who crushes”. The West sometimes gave it another name, ISIS or Islamic State. Also, the so-called Syrian civil war is a proxy war of the West to get the oil and gas out of Syria (and Iraq). This is well known among Syrians, who see their oil being stolen by the U.S., initially by their proxies Daesh, but now more directly with the help of the U.S. military.

The main goal of the U.S. is to replace Russian allies with those of the U.S., usurping Assad’s power with radical jihadists, aligned in the past mainly with Saudi Arabia and Qatar, so that the U.S. could build a pipeline through Syria to Europe. The evidence is clear that U.S. President Barack Obama, against advice and warnings from his top military officers, pursued a policy to protect the fundamentalist Sunni organization Al Qaeda in Syria. Proof that the U.S. (and its Western client states) under the Obama administration sponsored terrorists in Syria and Iraq is in the form of the last mentioned group, the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement. Obama had to admit before the entire Western press that Nour al-Din al-Zenki, who beheaded an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy in cold blood in front of rolling cameras, was indeed a terrorist group.

But so were all the others who the U.S. kept on sponsoring with weapons and money (as did Europe and the entire West). Later, they all merged with Daesh (ISIS). In 2016, during the liberation of Aleppo by the Syrian Arab Army, fighters from other terrorist groups (all fighting under the banner of Daesh but fighting among themselves) captured and killed members of the Zenki movement. Many of those who survived were later granted asylum in Europe (particularly Germany) along with other terrorists. But to this day, Europe is in denial and calls them rebels, while the evidence of gang violence happening in the cities of Europe is clear. Some say because of President Assad’s humane offer, they chose to be exiled to the enclave of Idlib, where a concentration of jihadists (after 2016) is now located.

The biggest Daesh group there has become HTS, and almost all groups are affiliated with them. Also, there are remaining Uyghurs, many of whom are in Idlib. This group is extremely violent, and they know they can’t go back to China. According to one report, Uyghur jihadist fighters in Syria have served as a force multiplier for insurgents there. Uyghur fighters gained ground in Idlib, the only Syrian province that still has a large local and foreign jihadist presence. Uyghur jihadists in Syria pose an overlooked yet significant regional and international security problem. They are likely to become a greater threat if fighting in Idlib winds down and the province is not decisively captured by a strong state or non-state actor hostile to jihadist groups.”

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Here’s the plan: “The negative natural change (more deaths than births) was outnumbered by the positive net migration..”

EU Reports Dramatic Fall In Birth Rate (RT)

The number of babies born in the EU fell to a record low last year, according to the latest data from the bloc’s statistical office (Eurostat). Despite this, the total population has been on the rise due to mass immigration. Births across the EU’s 27 member states stood at 3,665,000 in 2023 – a decline of 5.5% year-on-year, as per Eurostat’s figures. Birth rates have been falling steadily across the EU since 2008. The number of births last year was the lowest in the EU countries since comparable data was first collected in 1961, and the annual decline is the largest on record, the Financial Times (FT) reports. The sharpest drops in births over the past decade have been recorded in Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states.

Demographic experts polled by the FT believe the longstanding trend of Europeans having fewer babies may have been exacerbated by concerns over economic and political tensions on the international level, the worst surge in inflation in a generation, climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic. According to a recent report, the Total Fertility Rate has halved from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to 1.5 in 2022 in the 38 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which include 22 EU member states plus Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and others. According to Eurostat, all EU regions have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 live births per woman.

Nevertheless, the population of the EU has been on the rise over the past decade, with the exception of the pandemic year of 2021. The most notable jump was recorded in 2023, according to Eurostat figures. “The negative natural change (more deaths than births) was outnumbered by the positive net migration,” the agency said in a release in July. Eurostat attributed the population growth to increased migration after the pandemic and the influx of immigrants from Ukraine who received temporary protection status in the EU.

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“When I sit on the meetings of the Foreign Affairs Council with other foreign ministers and listen to some, I’m so sad, that such kind of extreme pro-war positions are present..”

EU Has Weakened ‘A Lot’ Amid Ukraine Conflict – Hungarian FM (RT)

The EU approach to the Ukraine conflict has ultimately weakened the bloc “a lot,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has said, branding the decision to blindly follow Washington’s polices a “big mistake.” The top diplomat made the remarks while speaking exclusively to RT’s Saskia Taylor in an interview on Monday. Comparisons between EU and US aid to Ukraine by the bloc’s leaders are a “very bad and harmful approach from the European perspective,” Szijjarto said. While the US is hardly affected by the enduring hostility between Moscow and Kiev, the conflict has taken a heavy toll on the EU, according to the minister. “There is destruction taking place in Europe, and the European economy is faced with the impacts and the consequences of this war. So therefore, following the US policies without any kind of criticism, that’s a big mistake and I do believe that the strategy the European Union has been following in the recent 1000 days is a failed one,” Szijjarto said.

The EU has “weakened a lot” during the conflict, and the approach taken by the bloc has proven to be a wrong one, the diplomat stated. I do believe that instead of globalizing the conflict, the right strategy would have been to localize it and to do everything in order to resolve it, to make peace, instead of pouring oil on the fire, which has been the case. “There are many extremely pro-war politicians in Europe. When I sit on the meetings of the Foreign Affairs Council with other foreign ministers and listen to some, I’m so sad, that such kind of extreme pro-war positions are present,” Szijjarto stated. Hungary itself has taken a different approach, remaining “the only country in Europe or European Union which has not delivered weapons to Ukraine,” he noted. “We are the only country in NATO, almost the only one, which speaks openly about the red lines which must be kept seriously. And we are the ones who speak openly about our assessment that NATO is a defense alliance and not an attack,” Szijjarto added.

The foreign minister also touched upon the situation in Georgia, which has been gripped by unrest over the past few days after Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that he would freeze accession talks with the EU until 2028. The protests have been openly backed by the EU, with the stance taken by the bloc’s leadership hardly surprising given that Hungary has been “under attack for the last 15 years,” Szijjarto suggested. “My problem is that this is very [common] in Europe. In the case, if it is not the liberals to win an election, the democratic nature of the whole country and the whole political system is being questioned immediately. If it is liberals to win, everything’s fine. If it’s patriots to win, if it is conservatives to win, if it is right-wing to win, the nature of democracy is immediately questioned. And this is totally unacceptable,” he said.

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“During the week of Nov. 6, MSNBC averaged just 38,000 viewers among adults 25-54..

The End Of Fake News? MSNBC Hits New Low In Ratings (ZH)

The leftist “news” channel MSNBC is facing a ratings crisis, with some of its advertiser-coveted viewership dropping to a two-decade low, according to Nielsen data reviewed by Fox News. During the week of Nov. 6, MSNBC averaged just 38,000 viewers among adults 25-54, its lowest-rated non-holiday weekday since July 19, 2004. As reported by Fox News, this demographic is widely prized by advertisers and is crucial for network revenue. Low viewership impacted shows like The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle and Jose Diaz Balart Reports, both of which saw their smallest audiences ever. Other shows—including Chris Jansing Reports, Deadline: White House and Katy Tur Reports—saw their worst days ever among the demos. Several shows lost over 50% of their 25-54 audience.

Among those shows are The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, All In with Chris Hayes, Chris Jansing Reports, Inside with Jen Psaki, The Rachel Maddow Show and Joy Reid’s ReidOut. This slump couldn’t have come at a worse time, as MSNBC’s parent company, Comcast, announced cuts to cable channels, excluding NBC News and Bravo TV. CNN reports that MSNBC will be moved into “SpinCo,” a publicly traded cable programming company. Tech mogul Elon Musk has hinted at purchasing MSNBC, while journalist Jack Posobiec says he’s recruiting investors to take control of the left-wing network.

Podcast host Joe Rogan joked about replacing Rachel Maddow if Musk buys MSNBC: “I will wear the same outfit and glasses, and I will tell the same lies.”Along with viewership and Comcast scandals, MSNBC is under the scrutiny of its viewers after Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with Donald Trump, despite having previously compared him to dictators. Al Sharpton faces ethical scrutiny after his nonprofit quietly took a $500,000 donation from the Harris campaign ahead of his interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. MSNBC conceded that Sharpton blindsided them with the donation. “MSNBC was unaware of the donations made to the National Action Network,” an MSNBC spokesperson told the Washington Free Beacon.

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“Hamburg will see its flights cut by 60 percent, BER by 20 percent and Cologne/Bonn by 10 percent.”

Ryanair CEO O’Leary: Germany Is Run By ‘Idiots’ (RMX)

In an interview for the industry magazine “Airliners,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary attacked German politicians, calling them “a government of idiots,” criticizing in particular the Greens, whom he accused of “stupid solutions,” reports DoRceczy. He was also skeptical about the future government of the Federal Republic of Germany. “I don’t think the next government of Germany will be any better,” he said. Ryanair’s boss described the German aviation market as one of the worst in Europe, calling Berlin’s BER airport “dysfunctional,” adding that the airport could only function as “a regional airport at best.”

According to him, high fees of over €50 per passenger are a key reason why the German aviation industry is only slowly recovering from the coronavirus pandemic. This is why Ryanair has already reduced its German capacity from 16 million to 13.5 million seats. The fleet of 300 aircraft will be moved to more attractive markets, with the location “determined strictly on the basis of expected profits,” he said. Ryanair will be withdrawing completely from Dortmund, Dresden, and Halle/Leipzig airports by March 2025, while Hamburg will see its flights cut by 60 percent, BER by 20 percent and Cologne/Bonn by 10 percent. “Further cuts could come next year with the summer flight schedule, as Ryanair increasingly favors lower-cost destinations outside Germany,” DW reports.

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“Defendant is ORDERED to provide Plaintiff with copies of all responsive records that are not legally exempted or excepted from disclosure..”

Fani Full Release Ordered After Fulton DA Sat On RICO Records (ZH)

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been ordered by a local judge to release all communications between her office, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office, and the January 6th Committee regarding her RICO case against President Donald Trump and his allies, after she was found to have violated federal law by withholding them. “The Court also hereby ORDERS Defendant to conduct a diligent search of her records for responsive materials within five business days of the entry of this Order. Within that same five day period, Defendant is ORDERED to provide Plaintiff with copies of all responsive records that are not legally exempted or excepted from disclosure,” reads a Tuesday order. If Willis can’t find them, she is mandated to follow court-ordered procedures to “provide an explanation why such correspondence does not exist.”

Willis, who had been served on March 11, 2024 in the suite involving conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, failed to respond by an April 10 deadline. After later claiming she ‘misunderstood’ the court’s directive, she then said that the document release would jeopardize her RICO case. [..] As the Epoch Times notes further… “In mid-2023, Willis told a local radio station that she was not coordinating in any way with Smith’s office in investigations and cases brought against former President Donald Trump. Smith had charged Trump, now the president-elect, with both classified documents-related and 2020 election-related charges in two different jurisdictions, while Willis brought charges against him and more than a dozen others for alleged election-related crimes in Fulton County.

“I don’t know what Jack Smith is doing and Jack Smith doesn’t know what I’m doing,” Willis said in July of that year. “In all honesty, if Jack Smith was standing next to me, I’m not sure I would know who he was. My guess is he probably can’t pronounce my name correctly.” Since then, however, she has made no comments about Smith’s investigation. Smith, meanwhile, has never commented on Willis’s case against Trump. Smith in November filed court papers confirming he would be dropping his election case against Trump and would stop the appeals process in his classified documents case. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said he would terminate Smith as special counsel upon taking office.

A letter sent by Willis’s office on Dec. 17, 2021, to the House Jan. 6 committee had “requested access to any Select Committee records relevant to her investigation into President Trump’s actions to challenge the 2020 presidential election, including ‘recordings and transcripts of witness interviews and depositions, electronic and print records of communications, and records of travel,’” House Judiciary Republicans said in a report released last year relating to an investigation they launched into Willis. Willis has been critical of House Republicans’ investigation into her office and the Trump case, accusing House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) of trying to interfere in the case at one point. “Jim Jordan has, time after time after time, attacked my office with no legitimate purpose,” she told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in May. “Anyone who knows Jim Jordan’s history knows that he only has the purpose of trying to interfere in a criminal investigation.”

In a letter issued to Republicans in 2023, Willis said Republicans are trying to “obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous partisan misrepresentations.” Her case against Trump has stalled in recent months after one of the president-elect’s co-defendants submitted a court filing earlier this year claiming Willis and then-special prosecutor Nathan Wade were engaged in a romantic relationship. The pair confirmed they were in a relationship but denied any wrongdoing. A judge overseeing the case issued an order in March allowing Willis to remain on the case if Wade resigned, which he did hours later. Trump and several of his co-defendants appealed the decision to the Georgia Court of Appeals earlier this year, where the case is still pending.”

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“By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced..”

House Oversight Report Supports Lab-Leak Theory for COVID-19 Origin (ET)

A Republican-led oversight subcommittee has concluded that the COVID-19 virus likely originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, following a two-year investigation into the pandemic. The House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report on Dec. 2, detailing the findings of the subcommittee’s investigation. The report found that the U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and that EcoHealth Alliance Inc. used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate this research at the lab. It also found that the Chinese communist regime, agencies within the U.S. government, and some members of the international scientific community sought to cover up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic.

The committee said that COVID-19 possesses biological characteristics not found in nature and that data indicates that all COVID-19 cases stemmed from a single introduction into humans, unlike previous pandemics, where there were more spillover events. “By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced,” the oversight subcommittee said in a statement. The report said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has a history of conducting “gain-of-function” research under low biosafety precautions. Several researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick with a COVID-like virus months before the first case of the outbreak was allegedly detected at a wet market, according to the report.

The report said that in January 2021, the U.S. State Department published an unclassified fact sheet that stated: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.” Citing the fact sheet, the report stated that the Wuhan Institute of Virology “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.” The report said the June 2023 ODNI assessment supported this conclusion and went further, stating, “Scientists at the WIV have created chimeras, or combinations of SARS-like coronaviruses through genetic engineering, attempted to clone other unrelated viruses, and used reverse genetic cloning techniques on SARS-like coronaviruses.”

The June 2023 ODNI Assessment said that some of the “WIV’s genetic engineering projects on coronaviruses involved techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes.” Among those interviewed during the panel’s investigation was Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), who stepped down from his role in December 2022. The report stated that Fauci had “prompted” a research study titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”—which dismissed the idea that the virus was laboratory constructed—to “disprove” the lab leak theory. Fauci testified at a June hearing that he did not suppress the lab leak theory and did not view it as inherently a conspiracy theory but said that “some distortions on that particular subject are,” according to the report.

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“Hughes’s expression of his gratitude to everyone associated with the Novichok narrative except for the Skripals means he is burying them..”

The Skripals Are As Good As Dead – The Judge Has Buried Them (Helmer)

After Yulia Skripal has testified through her doctor that she was attacked with a poison spray in a restaurant minutes before she and her father, Sergei Skripal, collapsed on March 4, 2018, the British Government hearings on what happened have attempted to suppress her evidence. Yesterday, December 2, the hearings ended with a statement by Jack Holborn, a lawyer paid by the Home Office to say he represents the Skripals, and to claim they agree to the suppression of their own evidence. “Sergei and Yulia Skripal are grateful to this Inquiry for its work,” Holborn said. “Thank you.” Page 158 The retired judge who has directed the hearings, Anthony Hughes (titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley), let slip in his closing statement that he understands the Skripals are dead or incommunicado in prison because he omitted to thank them for their participation. “

I am grateful,” Hughes said, “to all the Core Participants and chiefly, of course, to those most closely connected to the events, namely Dawn Sturgess’ family, who have coped, if I may say so, admirably with what must have been at times extremely difficult evidence to listen to.” Only the Skripals were closer to the events than the Sturgess family or the ambulance crews, police, intelligence agents, doctors, and government officials who have been called to testify on their oaths. But Hughes ruled on September 23 that the Skripals were not allowed to testify either in the open hearing room, behind closed doors, or by remote internet link. Hughes’s expression of his gratitude to everyone associated with the Novichok narrative except for the Skripals means he is burying them.

Holborn has been seconding Andrew Deakin KC, a lawyer also paid by the Home Office to represent the Skripals. Neither of them has asked questions of any witness nor made submissions throughout the eight weeks of the Dawn Sturgess Inquiry hearings. Deakin’s opening statement on October 14 lasted 88 seconds. “Both Sergei and Yulia Skripal,” Deakin said, “would like to express their sorrow at the death of Dawn Sturgess and to offer their deepest sympathies to her family and loved ones. Sergei and Yulia Skripal also express their sympathy to those who were injured in the course of this incident. Finally, Sergei and Yulia would like to express their profound gratitude to the emergency workers, police and hospital staff who risked their lives to help them. Sergei and Yulia keenly await the outcome of this Inquiry. They look forward to better understanding the circumstances of the Salisbury attack, to considering the Inquiry’s conclusions as to who was responsible for that attack and to being able to move on with their lives.” Page 156-57. Deakin did not appear again.

In open testimony at the Inquiry it has been revealed that Yulia Skripal’s doctor at the Salisbury District Hospital, Stephen Cockroft, discovered she had recovered consciousness on March 8, four days after the attack. The police evidence to the Inquiry is that Skripal then communicated by eye signals to Cockroft that she remembered being sprayed, not at home but at Zizzi’s Restaurant where she and her father had been lunching just before they collapsed. The senior police source for this evidence was Keith Asman; he is the chief of forensics for the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTPSE) group which in the investigation of the Novichok affair has combined the Metropolitan and regional police forces with the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5). In his witness statement, Asman repeated what another police officer, code-named VN104, had recorded from Dr Cockroft. The evidence of Detective Inspector (DI) VN104, identified as the deputy head of the Metropolitan Police investigating Novichok, was not called into open or closed testimony by Hughes.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Frens
https://twitter.com/i/status/1863534908569981204

 

 

Slide
https://twitter.com/i/status/1863660969118822457

 

 

Bonedigger

 

 

Kestrel

 

 

Seal

 

 

Dunkin

 

 

Chihuahua
https://twitter.com/i/status/1863677018270994682

 

 

Save the bees

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 252021
 


Amedeo Modigliani Jeanne Hebuterne 1919

 

Israel: 60% Drop In Hospitalizations For Age 60+ 3 Weeks After 1st Shot (ToI)
Nevada District To Partially Reopen Schools As Student Suicides Surge (Hill)
California Refuses To Disclose COVID19 Data Used To Drive Lockdowns (ZH)
Covid-19 Variant In California May Explain Sharp Rise In Cases (F.)
Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Targets Almost Half The Country (NR)
Biden 2020 Run Backed By $145 Million In ‘Dark Money’ (ZH)
Rubio: Trump Impeachment Trial Is ‘Stupid’ (Hill)
Impeachment Trial To Keep National Guard Troops At Capitol (Pol.)
UN Agency: China Surpassed US In Foreign Direct Investments In 2020 (Hill)
Boeing 737 Max Cleared To Fly Again ‘Too Early’ (BBC)
Australia Says ‘Inevitable’ That Facebook & Google Will Pay For Content (RT)
Facebook Feeds Private Messages of Its Users Directly to the FBI (TFTP)
Toxic Chemicals Threaten Humanity’s Ability To Reproduce (IC)

 

 

 

 

Build Back Better
https://twitter.com/i/status/1351507371386949639

 

 

Could be good news. But I’m a bit reluctant to attach too much meaning to 6 vs 18 infections among 50,777 people. Once you apply normal procedures like margin of error to this, then what are you left with? What would a bookmaker make of it?

Israel: 60% Drop In Hospitalizations For Age 60+ 3 Weeks After 1st Shot (ToI)

Vaccines are quickly averting serious cases of COVID-19 among the most vulnerable members of society, an Israeli healthcare provider has indicated. The full effects of Pfizer’s vaccine are only slated to kick in around a month after the first shot, but data from Israel, home to the world’s fastest vaccination drive, has already shown that there is a stark drop in infections even before this point. Attracting widespread international interest by sharing early data, Maccabi Healthcare Services reported earlier this month that it has seen a 60 percent reduction in coronavirus infections three weeks after the first shot is administered. But it wasn’t clear if the benefits were being felt equally by those who have a propensity to mild infection and those who would be likely to take COVID-19 badly.

Now, Maccabi is starting to answer the question that hospitals and health ministers around the world are anxiously asking, amid fears of health service meltdowns: How quickly will COVID-19 wards start to see the benefits of vaccination? The decrease in hospital admissions is swift after vaccination, Maccabi suggests in its latest data, finding that hospitalizations start to fall sharply from Day 18 after people receive the first shot. Galia Rahav, head of infectious diseases at Israel’s largest hospital, Sheba Medical Center, described the data as “very important.” By Day 23, which is 2 days after the second shot, there is a 60% drop in hospitalizations among vaccinated people aged 60-plus, Maccabi revealed after monitoring 50,777 patients. It compared their hospitalization rate at that point with their hospitalization rate soon after receiving the vaccine, using 7-day moving averages.

“This is very important data,” Rahav, who is unconnected to the study, told The Times of Israel. “It has an impact because amid high infection rates and the spread of variants it’s hard to see from general figures how vaccination is influencing things. “By giving an insight into hospitalizations among just those elderly people who were vaccinated, this data is valuable.” However, she cautioned that some of the drop may be due to a tendency of newly vaccinated people to adhere to lockdown rules, which causes a drop in infection and hospitalization.The new data also supports Maccabi’s earlier claim of a 60% infection rate drop after three weeks, reporting that it saw the same drop with a new sample comprising only the 60-plus age group. Maccabi’s graph gives a real picture of infection in Israel, showing that until Day 13, vaccinated over-60s had similar infection rates as the overall 60-plus population. Then, a gap opens, and by Day 23, there were 18 daily infections among the 50,777 overall, but just six among the vaccinated.

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One dimension is not enough.

Nevada District To Partially Reopen Schools As Student Suicides Surge (Hill)

The Clark County School District in Nevada is moving to partially reopen schools in response to a surge of student suicides, The New York Times reports. Eighteen students in the county took their own lives in the final nine months of 2020, the Times reports, leading the Clark County school board to approve returning some elementary school grades and struggling classes back to in-person learning despite the continuing spread of the coronavirus. “When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the COVID numbers we need to look at anymore,” said Clark County superintendent Jesus Jara. “We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.”

According to Jara, the 18 suicides in the nine months that schools have been closed is double the number of suicides recorded in the school district in the entire previous year. The youngest student to kill themselves was nine years old. The pandemic has had a devastating effect on students’ mental health, grades and attendance around the world and health and education experts have struggled with the best way to protect students – and the faculty, staff and family members who may be more vulnerable – while tending to their mental health and education. In Virginia’s largest school district, the number of F’s nearly doubled among middle school and high school students.

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, has called for schools to remain open if at all possible, saying there is a way for them to do so safely. The Times reports that Clark County, which includes the city of Las Vegas, invested in the GoGuardian Beacon alert system following the sixth student suicide. The system monitors student writing on iPads provided by the school district, looking for suicide risks. More than 31,000 alerts were made between the months of June and October.

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“..they won’t answer why indoor religious services are strictly forbidden while other venues where people gather are just fine..”

California Refuses To Disclose COVID19 Data Used To Drive Lockdowns (ZH)

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) promised months ago that the state’s COVID-19 policy decisions would be driven by transparent data that would be shared with the public. Now, his administration is refusing to disclose key information used to determine when lockdown orders are implemented or rescinded – and has denied a public records request filed with the California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Agency on May 28 by the Center for American Liberty (CAL) seeking both the data and science behind the state’s lockdown decisions, according to Fox News. State health officials now say they rely on a ‘very complex set of measurements that would confuse and potentially mislead the public,’ AP reports.

In short, California says you’re too stupid to understand their rationale for mandating thousands of businesses into financial ruin through what appear to be arbitrary and unscientific decisions. To wit, at least two California judges have struck down the state’s draconian mandates over lack of scientific evidence to support lockdowns and restaurant restrictions. Not only that, according to SFGATE, there’s growing speculation that California’s ban on outdoor dining may have contributed to the state’s COVID-19 surge. Not the best of optics as as a GOP effort to recall Newsom continues to gain momentum. According to CAL executive director Mark Trammel, the Golden State won’t answer why, for example, they won’t answer why indoor religious services are strictly forbidden while other venues where people gather are just fine.

“If it’s safe enough to go to a marijuana dispensary or Macy’s or Costco that same standard should apply to parishioners in our congregation they should be able to sep in pews and wear a mask,” Trammel told Fox News in a recent interview. Dr. Lee Riley, chairman of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health infectious disease division thinks the state’s lack of transparency is troubling. “There is more uncertainty created by NOT releasing the data that only the state has access to,” he told the Associated Press in an email.

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Get your own variant!

Covid-19 Variant In California May Explain Sharp Rise In Cases (F.)

The post-Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s surge of Covid-19 cases has been felt in nearly all 50 states, but perhaps none more so than California. More specifically, Southern California, and even more specifically, Los Angeles County, have been experiencing daily case counts never before seen in the past 11 months. Hospitals have been in surge mode since the week before Christmas, with ICU capacity down to 0% in many facilities. Reminiscent of New York City back in April 2020, refrigerated trucks for deceased bodies of those who succumbed to complications due to Covid-19 infections were seen outside of many hospitals, where morgues became full in recent weeks. Some hospitals have been using tents, hallways, and even hospital gift shops as patient care areas. Some hospitals were operating at 200% capacity.

Most have canceled non-emergency surgeries, procedures, and admissions. Death rates of hospitalized patients have risen, in part due to stresses on personnel and equipment availability, and in part due to the fact that only the very sickest patients would be provided an inpatient hospital bed. Initial thoughts that the relatively cooler weather, even for Southern California, combined with pandemic fatigue and complacency, all in the midst of holiday gatherings and travel, would explain the remarkable uptick in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. By early January 2021, test positivity in Los Angeles County was in the 20% range, and one Angeleno was dying from Covid every six to eight minutes. But just as the U.K. has identified a more transmissible variant, termed B.1.1.7, South Africa has identified another highly transmissible variant, and a third variant has arisen in Japan and Brazil, California has found one of its own.

The California strain, known as Cal.20C, has been identified in 35-50% of recently diagnosed cases in Los Angeles. And as has been the case for the other variants across the world, all of which have crossed oceans and borders, the Cal.20C variant is more infectious than the prior forms of coronavirus, or SARS-CoV2. In addition, this and the previously identified variants are not necessarily more deadly, nor do they necessarily cause more significant illnesses. The variant, although named for the western-most state, has also been found in other states in the Southwest as well as the Northeast.

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“You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house..”

Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Targets Almost Half The Country (NR)

Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii, on Friday expressed concern that a proposed measure to combat domestic terrorism could be used to undermine civil liberties. Gabbard’s comments came during an appearance on Fox News Primetime when host Brian Kilmeade asked her if she was “surprised they’re pushing forward with this extra surveillance on would-be domestic terror.” “It’s so dangerous as you guys have been talking about, this is an issue that all Democrats, Republicans, independents, Libertarians should be extremely concerned about, especially because we don’t have to guess about where this goes or how this ends,” Gabbard said. She continued:

“When you have people like former CIA Director John Brennan openly talking about how he’s spoken with or heard from appointees and nominees in the Biden administration who are already starting to look across our country for these types of movements similar to the insurgencies they’ve seen overseas, that in his words, he says make up this unholy alliance of religious extremists, racists, bigots, he lists a few others and at the end, even libertarians.” She said her concern lies in how officials will define the characteristics they are searching for in potential threats.

“What characteristics are we looking for as we are building this profile of a potential extremist, what are we talking about? Religious extremists, are we talking about Christians, evangelical Christians, what is a religious extremist? Is it somebody who is pro-life? Where do you take this?” Gabbard said. She said the proposed legislation could create “a very dangerous undermining of our civil liberties, our freedoms in our Constitution, and a targeting of almost half of the country.” “You start looking at obviously, have to be a white person, obviously likely male, libertarians, anyone who loves freedom, liberty, maybe has an American flag outside their house, or people who, you know, attended a Trump rally,” Gabbard said.

Tulsi Liberty
https://twitter.com/i/status/1353403241820635136

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We’ll never know how much. Would it be an idea to just stop this? So a billionaire gets one vote, just like a plumber?

Biden 2020 Run Backed By $145 Million In ‘Dark Money’ (ZH)

President Biden’s campaign received a record-breaking amount of anonymous donations to outside groups backing him, which means the public “will never have a full accounting of who helped him win the White House,” according to Bloomberg. In total, $145 million in so-called dark money donations, “a type of fundraising Democrats have decried for years,” backed the Biden campaign – and combined with his $1.5 billion record-breaking haul. Of note, Biden’s campaign called for banning certain types of nonprofits from spending money to influence elections, and that any organization spending over $10,000 to benefit a candidate register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and disclose its donors. They didn’t specifically call on their own supporters to do so, however.

“That amount of dark money dwarfs the $28.4 million spent on behalf of his rival, former President Donald Trump. And it tops the previous record of $113 million in anonymous donations backing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012. Democrats have said they want to ban dark money as uniquely corrupting, since it allows supporters to quietly back a candidate without scrutiny. Yet in their effort to defeat Trump in 2020, they embraced it.” -Bloomberg. One such dark money recipient, Priorities USA Action Fund designated by Biden as his preferred vehicle for outside spending, backed Biden with $26 million originally (and anonymously) donated to its nonprofit arm, Priorities USA.

Priorities USA Chairman Guy Cecil deflected when asked about the funds, saying in a statement “We weren’t going to unilaterally disarm against Trump and the right- wing forces that enabled him.” Another entity funneling dark money to benefit Biden was the Future Forward PAC, which spent $104 million backing Biden. While they received tens of millions from known sources, such as $46.9 million from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, $3 million from Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, and $2.6 million from Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt – they received $61 million from Future Forward USA Action – none of which requires disclosure of sources.

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“I don’t own the Senate seat, it doesn’t belong to me,” he added. “If I want to be back in the U.S Senate, I have to earn that every six years.”

Rubio: Trump Impeachment Trial Is ‘Stupid’ (Hill)

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said Sunday that he would vote to dismiss the article of impeachment against former President Trump at the earliest opportunity, calling the upcoming Senate trial detrimental to national unity. “I think the trial is stupid,” Rubio said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We already have a flaming fire in this country,” he added, saying the trial would be “a bunch of gasoline.” “The first chance I get to vote to end this trial I’ll do it,” the Florida senator told Fox News’s Chris Wallace. Rubio went on to say that then-President Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon after his resignation was “in hindsight important” for “moving the country forward” despite widespread consensus that Nixon had committed criminal offenses. “I think [Trump is] entitled to due process,” Rubio added.


“The House doesn’t have much of a record of witnesses because they rammed it through very quickly … I think this is going to be very bad for the country.” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) earlier in the show pushed back on claims that convicting a former president was unconstitutional, saying the “preponderance of opinion” allowed for such a conviction. Romney was the only Republican to vote for conviction in the president’s early 2020 impeachment trial. Wallace went on to ask Rubio, who is up for reelection in 2022, about rumors that former White House adviser Ivanka Trump is considering a primary challenge for the Senate seat. “I don’t really get into the parlor games of Washington,” Rubio said. “I don’t own the Senate seat, it doesn’t belong to me,” he added. “If I want to be back in the U.S Senate, I have to earn that every six years.”

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“Morale is low among the troops, who described having to stand guard for hours at a time in full gear with limited access to food and water..”

Impeachment Trial To Keep National Guard Troops At Capitol (Pol.)

Former President Donald Trump’s upcoming Senate impeachment trial poses a security concern that federal law enforcement officials told lawmakers last week requires as many as 5,000 National Guard troops to remain in Washington through mid-March, according to four people familiar with the matter. The contingency force will help protect the Capitol from what was described as “impeachment security concerns,” including the possibility of mass demonstrations coinciding with the Senate’s trial, which is slated to begin the week of Feb. 8. Despite the threat, the citizen soldiers on the ground say they have been given little information about the extension and wonder why they are being forced to endure combat-like conditions in the nation’s capital without a clear mission.

“Quite frankly this is not a ‘combat zone,’ so combat conditions shouldn’t apply,” said one Guard member on the ground in D.C. who has deployed twice to Afghanistan. Several National Guard units have seen their deployments extended involuntarily, though a majority of Guardsmen remaining in Washington will do so on a volunteer basis. Around 7,000 troops will continue to provide riot security through the beginning of February, with that number decreasing slightly to 5,000 by the time Trump’s impeachment trial begins. “We are not going to allow any surprises again,” said one Guard member, referring to the widespread lack of preparedness for the insurrection on Jan. 6. There is also some concern over potential unrest surrounding March 4, the date some QAnon conspiracy theorists believe Trump will be inaugurated for the second time.

[..] Now, thousands of Guard members will remain in Washington far longer than they initially expected when they packed their suitcases for what they believed to be a short-term mission on Jan. 6. The rank-and-file have so far been given no official justifications, threat reports or any explanation for the extended mission, said two Guard members — nor have they seen any violence thus far. “There is no defined situation, or mission statement. … This is very unusual for any military mission,” said one member, who has deployed twice to Afghanistan. “We are usually given a situation, with defined mission perimeters, and at least a tentative plan on how to execute those objectives.”

[..] Morale is low among the troops, who described having to stand guard for hours at a time in full gear with limited access to food and water, waiting for hours to be transported to and from their hotels, and very little sleep. Many are washing socks and cold-weather undergarments in hotel bathroom sinks because they do not have access to laundry facilities. Some have been forced to purchase their own food out of pocket to supplement the sparse meals they have been provided, which do not provide enough calories to sustain the long days. Even meals ready to eat are hard to come by due to logistical and transportation issues. “Even if they do arrive all on time, the calories are just not there for the amount of work we put in and time we’re spending on our feet, in the cold, in full gear,” one Guard member said.

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Western stimulus money being transferred out of originating countries because their interest rates are too low.

UN Agency: China Surpassed US In Foreign Direct Investments In 2020 (Hill)

A United Nations trade agency reported that China surpassed the U.S. as the largest recipient of foreign direct investments (FDI) in 2020. The UN Conference on Trade and Developments (UNCTAD) concluded that China became the largest FDI receiver last year over the U.S., with flows increasing by 4 percent to $163 billion, Bloomberg News reported. Most countries saw decreases due to the coronavirus pandemic, including the U.S., which saw its flow drop by 49 percent to $134 billion, according to UNCTAD’s Investment Trends Monitor. The U.S.’s decrease was seen in wholesale trade, financial services and manufacturing. China’s return to positive GDP growth and targeted investment facilitation program assisted in the country’s FDI levels, the agency noted in a release.


Globally, flows fell by 42 percent to $859 billion due to the coronavirus pandemic, compared to $1.5 trillion in 2019. The global foreign direct investment reached its lowest level since the 1990s, including 30 percent lower than investments after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. North American flows dropped by 46 percent to $166 billion, but Europe saw declines of about 66 percent to negative $4 billion. The decreases were found to be concentrated in developed countries, where flows dropped 69 percent. Meanwhile, developing countries accounted for 72 percent of the global FDI, the highest percentage recorded.

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And there’s Sully.

Boeing 737 Max Cleared To Fly Again ‘Too Early’ (BBC)

A former senior manager at Boeing’s 737 plant in Seattle has raised new concerns over the safety of the company’s 737 Max. The aircraft, which was grounded after two accidents in which 346 people died, has already been cleared to resume flights in North America and Brazil, and is expected to gain approval in Europe this week. But in a new report, Ed Pierson claims that further investigation of electrical issues and production quality problems at the 737 factory is badly needed. Regulators in the US and Europe insist their reviews have been thorough, and that the 737 Max aircraft is now safe. In his report, Mr Pierson claims that regulators and investigators have largely ignored factors, which he believes, may have played a direct role in the accidents. He explicitly links them to conditions at the company’s factory in Renton, near Seattle at the time. Boeing says this is unfounded.

Lion Air flight JT610 crashed into the sea off Indonesia in October 2018. Five months later, Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 came down minutes after take-off from the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa. Investigators believe both accidents were triggered by the failure of a single sensor. It sent inaccurate data to a piece of flight control software, called MCAS. This automated system then repeatedly forced the nose of the aircraft downwards, when the pilots were trying to gain height. Ultimately each aircraft was pushed into an unrecoverable dive. Efforts to make the 737 Max safe have focused on redesigning the MCAS software, and ensuring it can no longer be triggered by a single sensor failure.

For Ed Pierson, this does not go nearly far enough. A US Navy veteran, who had a senior role on the 737 production line from 2015-2018, he was a star witness during congressional hearings into the disasters involving the Max. He told lawmakers he had become so concerned about conditions at the factory, he had told his bosses that he was hesitant about taking his own family on a Boeing plane. [..] Mr Pierson’s concerns are supported by the celebrated aviation safety campaigner Captain Chesley Sullenberger. Best known as “Sully”, one of the pilots who safely ditched a crippled and engineless Airbus plane in the Hudson river off Manhattan in 2009, he too believes that modifications to the Max do not go far enough. He believes changes are needed to warning systems aboard the plane, which were carried over from a previous version of the 737 and are “not up to modern standards”.

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One member of the Five Eyes defies the others.

Australia Says ‘Inevitable’ That Facebook & Google Will Pay For Content (RT)

Australia’s treasurer has advised the tech giants to accept that their platforms will have to start paying for content, amid threats from Facebook and Google to limit services in the country if such a policy is enacted. Canberra is finalizing legislation that would require the internet behemoths to obtain licenses to use content created by Australian news outlets. Both companies have warned that they would retaliate over the revenue-sharing scheme, with Google saying last week that it would remove its search engine from Australia, and Facebook declaring that it would strip news from the feeds of all Australian users. On Sunday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg pushed back on the ultimatums, signaling that the Australian government wouldn’t reverse course.

“My view is that it is inevitable that the digital giants will be paying for original content,” he said, suggesting that Australia was leading the way in what would soon become a worldwide norm. He also admonished Facebook and Google for their hostility towards the proposed regulation, describing their threats to pull out of Australia as a “big disservice.” Google has been particularly unreceptive to the proposed legislation. Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Silicon Valley giant has been experimenting with blacklisting some Australian news sites from its search results, apparently as a future strategy to avoid having to pay for hosting the content. The move shocked Australian media outlets, which accused Google of carrying out a flagrant show of force to stop the revenue-sharing code from becoming law.

A spokesman for Nine, the corporate owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, described the tech behemoth’s “experiment” as a “chilling illustration of their extraordinary market power.” The proposed law was drafted last July following an inquiry by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The commission concluded that a large proportion of the country’s media are reliant on referrals from Google and Facebook, despite the fact that news outlets have little or no influence over the powerhouse corporations.

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They’re US intelligence pure and simple.

Facebook Feeds Private Messages of Its Users Directly to the FBI (TFTP)

Deferring all responsibility for the planning of the raid on the capitol, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg had stated shortly after the incident that the protests were largely organized off Facebook. However, she was not telling the truth, and likely knew that large portions of the pro-Trump protests were talked about and organized on Facebook. But was Facebook wiped off the internet like Parler? No, no it was not. Here’s why. This week, Facebook began furnishing the Federal Bureau of Investigation with data on Trump supporters who discussed the events at the capitol on their platform — up to and including their private messages. Through this action the social media giant is acting as a de facto intelligence collecting arm of the US government.

In contrast, when Syed Farook, otherwise known as the San Bernardino mass shooter, wouldn’t unlock his iPhone for the feds, Apple refused to create a backdoor for them to access it acting as an actual private company supporting the privacy rights of its customers. But Facebook is more than willing to open up its data mining services for their friends in the federal government — because, as we have stated numerous times, Facebook is not private. As TFTP reported in 2018, Facebook announced that it partnered with the arm of the government-funded Atlantic Council, known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab that was brought on to help the social media behemoth with “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

The Atlantic Council is the group that NATO uses to whitewash wars and foster hatred toward Russia, which in turn allows them to continue to justify themselves. It’s funded by arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. It is also funded by billionaire oligarchs like the Ukraine’s Victor Pinchuk and Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri. The list goes on. The highly unethical HSBC group — who has been caught numerous times laundering money for cartels and terrorists — is listed as one of their top donors. They are also funded by the pharmaceutical industry, Google, Goldman Sachs and others. However, the funding that comes from the United States, the US Army, and the Airforce directly negates the “private” aspect of the partnership. The “think tank” Facebook partnered with to make decisions on who they censor is directly funded by multiple state actors — including the United States — which voids any and all claims that Facebook is a wholly “private actor.”

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It’s scary stuff, and it makes you wonder how it links to all the talk of erasing gender-specific words etc.

Toxic Chemicals Threaten Humanity’s Ability To Reproduce (IC)

Shanna Swan is the senior author of a 2017 study that documented a dramatic drop in sperm counts in Western countries over the past half-century. That meta-analysis of 185 studies involving 42,935 men found that total sperm count fell 59 percent between 1973 and 2011. Swan, a reproductive epidemiologist, pointed to the role of environmental chemicals in that trend. Now she has written “Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race,” a book that ties industrial chemicals in everyday products to a wide range of changes taking place in recent years, including increasing numbers of babies being born with smaller penises; higher rates of erectile dysfunction; declining fertility; eroding sex differences in some animal species; and potentially even behaviors that are thought of as gender-typical.

Your study showed that baby boys who had been exposed to four different phthalates at the end of the first trimester in the womb had a shorter anogenital distance, or AGD. Can you explain what AGD is and why it’s important? Nobody is going to like that term, so you could use taint or gooch instead. But basically it’s the distance between the anus and the beginning of the genitals. And scientists have recognized its importance for a long time. I have a paper from 1912 that looks at AGD and showed that they were nearly 100 percent longer in males than in females. Our work has shown that chemicals, including the diethylhexyl phthalate, shorten the AGD in males.

You’ve also linked phthalate exposure to a lack of interest in sex. Yes, we found a relationship between women’s phthalate levels and their sexual satisfaction. And researchers in China found that workers with higher levels of bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, in their blood were more likely to have sexual problems, including decreased desire. Of course, phthalates, which are added to plastics, food, cosmetics, and other products, aren’t the only problem. You write about lots of chemicals that interfere with the hormonal system and reproduction, including the pesticide atrazine, which you’ve linked to lower sperm quality, and glyphosate, which you’ve recently shown decreases AGD in rats and perhaps also in humans.

It’s worth pointing out that all of these chemicals we’re talking about are still in use in the U.S., while some other countries have banned them. Anyway, tell me about the relationship between endocrine disrupting chemicals and how children play? Sexually dimorphic play is controversial. Some people say it’s all socially determined. And it undoubtedly does have social determinants, but it also has physiological determinants. And we showed that in two studies. We asked mothers of young children to tell us how their children play. It’s pretty simple: How often do they play with guns? Play with dolls? Play dress-up? Play with tea sets, etc. And it turns out that when boys are exposed to the same chemicals that affect AGD, they play in a less male-typical manner.

Read more …

 

 

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Jun 102020
 


Banksy June 2020

 

WHO Walks Back Claim On Asymptomatic Transmission Of Coronavirus (RT)
Coronavirus Patients Most Infectious When They First Feel Unwell: WHO (R.)
WHO Urges Pakistan To Return To Lockdown As Hospitals Struggle (GH.)
California, Southwest Face New Coronavirus Woes As US Economy Reopens (R.)
Mexico’s Coronavirus Peak Still Weeks Off, 600 New Deaths In One Day (R.)
Widespread Mask-Wearing Could Prevent COVID19 Second Waves (R.)
DC National Guard Members Test Positive After Protests Response (McC)
Chicago Professor Removes Post That Appeared To Call For A Military Coup (Turley)
Tory Minister Says Eating Chlorinated Chicken Should Be Up To Consumer (Ind.)
World Faces Worst Food Crisis For At Least 50 Years – UN (G.)
ECB Prepares ‘Bad Bank’ Plan For Wave Of Coronavirus Toxic Debt (R.)
The Illusion of a Rapid US Recovery (Galbraith)
Misfortune vs. Carelessness (Ben Hunt)
Banksy Reveals Plan For Bristol’s Toppled Colston Statue (CB)

 

 

Worldometer has global new cases for June 8 (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 121,751.

My count from about 6 am EDT to 6 am EDT is about + 125,033 cases.

The decrease we saw for a few days did not last. New deaths also rose from 2,599 yesterday back up to 5,032.

 

 

 

 

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 19,056
• Brazil + 30,197
• Russia + 8,595
• India + 9,548
• Pakistan + 5,385

 

 

Cases 7,344,220 (+ 125,033 from yesterday’s 7,219,187)

Deaths 414,140 (+ 5,032 from yesterday’s 409,108)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-:

 

 

From Worldometer:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The WHO keeps on piling on “mistakes”. If it isn’t China, it’s HCQ, and if not that, it’s asymptomatic patients.

WHO Walks Back Claim On Asymptomatic Transmission Of Coronavirus (RT)

The World Health Organization has qualified its bombshell claim that asymptomatic people rarely infect others with Covid-19, scrambling to explain how its earlier statement was misinterpreted and based on a “misunderstanding.” WHO coronavirus lead Maria Van Kerkhove attempted on Tuesday to clear up controversy around her previous claim that asymptomatic transmission was “very rare,” insisting she had been speaking based on the results of just “two or three” studies. To claim asymptomatic transmission is rare globally would be a “misunderstanding,” she explained.

“I was just responding to a question, I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that,” she backpedaled, explaining that asymptomatic transmission estimates come from dubiously-accurate models. “That’s a big open question, and that remains an open question.” Some 16 percent of infected people may be asymptomatic, she said, citing studies – while some scientific models claim as much as 40 percent of global transmission may come from asymptomatic individuals. Given that sloppy disease modeling has been responsible for some of the most disastrous overreactions to the pandemic, Van Kerkhove’s reluctance to include these supposedly scientific speculations in the previous day’s briefing could be forgiven, but WHO emergency director Mike Ryan acknowledged his colleague’s words were likely “misinterpreted.”

[..] Harvard Global Health Institute had flat-out refused to accept Van Kerkhove’s claim, declaring “all of the best evidence suggests that people without symptoms can and do readily spread SARS-CoV-2” in a statement on Tuesday. The institute warned that “communicating preliminary data…without much context can have tremendous negative impact” on public and government responses to the pandemic, and indeed, Van Kerkhove’s comments had touched off a chain-reaction of second-guessing, pearl-clutching, and general existential crises among lockdown proponents as the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases continues to climb.

Read more …

A.k.a. the exact moment they should start taking hydroxychloroquine.

Coronavirus Patients Most Infectious When They First Feel Unwell: WHO (R.)

Studies show people with the coronavirus are most infectious just at the point when they first begin to feel unwell, World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Tuesday. This feature has made it so hard to control spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 disease, but it can be done through rigorous testing and social distancing, they said. “It appears from very limited information we have right now that people have more virus in their body at or around the time that they develop symptoms, so very early on,” Maria van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist and technical lead on the pandemic, told a live session on social media. Preliminary studies from Germany and the United States suggest that people with mild symptoms can be infectious for up to 8-9 days, and “it can be a lot longer for people who are more severely ill”, she said.

Earlier, some disease experts questioned her statement on Monday that transmission of COVID-19 by people with no symptoms is “very rare”, saying this guidance could pose problems for governments as they seek to lift lockdowns. Van Kerkhove, citing disease-modelling studies, clarified on Tuesday that some people do not develop symptoms, but can still infect others. “Some estimates of around 40 percent of transmission may be due to asymptomatic (cases), but those are from models. So I didn’t include that in my answer yesterday but wanted to make sure that I made that clear,” she said.

Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s top emergencies expert, said that the novel coronavirus lodges in the upper respiratory tract, making it easier to transmit by droplets than related viruses such as SARS or MERS, which are in the lower tract. “Now as we look at COVID-19, we have an infectious pathogen that is present in the upper airway for which the viral loads are peaking at the time you are just beginning to get sick,” he said. “That means you could be in the restaurant feeling perfectly well and start to get a fever, you are feeling ok, you didn’t think to stay home, but that’s the moment at which your viral load could be actually quite high,” he said.

Read more …

You try getting 212 million people on a second lockdown.

WHO Urges Pakistan To Return To Lockdown As Hospitals Struggle (GH.)

The World Health Organization has taken the unusual step of urging Pakistan to return to lockdown, suggesting the country implement restrictions in a cycle of two weeks on, two weeks off. While Pakistan has relatively low testing rates, one in four people who are tested return a positive result, the WHO said in a letter to Punjab’s provincial health minister, Yasmin Rashid. Prime Minister Imran Khan has resisted a national lockdown, arguing the country cannot afford it, and provinces have instead introduced patchwork lockdowns. Last week Khan said these would be lifted. But, with 108,317 known cases and 2,172 confirmed deaths, hospitals across the south Asian country say they are at or near capacity, with some turning Covid-19 patients away. Globally, the WHO confirmed the biggest ever one-day rise in confirmed cases this week, with 136,000 cases in 24 hours, according to director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Most were from south Asia and the Americas.


[..] Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, warned on Tuesday the pandemic was “far from over,” and that he was surprised at how “rapidly it just took over the planet”. Speaking in a videotaped discussion at a Biotechnology Innovation Organization conference, Fauci said: “I mean, Ebola was scary. But Ebola would never be easily transmitted in a global way.” He added: “HIV, as important as it is, was drawn out over an extended period of time.” He warned that the world was still at the start of seeing the coronavirus pandemic’s effects. “Oh my goodness,” Fauci said. “Where is it going to end? We’re still at the beginning of it.” On Tuesday, 21 US states reported weekly increases in new cases. Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posted rises of 40% or higher for the week ending Sunday, compared with the prior seven days, according to a Reuters analysis.

Read more …

“21 U.S. states reported weekly increases [..] Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posted rises of 40% or higher for the week..”

California, Southwest Face New Coronavirus Woes As US Economy Reopens (R.)

Coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are spiking in parts of California and the U.S. Southwest, prompting Arizona to reactivate its emergency plan for medical facilities and California to place counties where half its population lives on a watch list. The uptick in cases, which could lead authorities to reimpose or tighten public health restrictions aimed at slowing the virus’ spread, complicates efforts to reopen the U.S. economy, which has been devastated by shelter-at-home rules. New Jersey, one of the states hit hardest by the pandemic, with over 12,000 deaths, lifted its stay-at-home order on Tuesday. More than 18 million of California’s 39 million residents live in counties now on the watch list, which includes Los Angeles, Santa Clara and Fresno, a Reuters analysis showed.


“Many of the cases that are showing up in hospitals are linked to gatherings that are taking place in homes – birthday parties and funerals,” said Olivia Kasirye, public health director of Sacramento County, one of the nine counties on the state watch list that may eventually require them to roll back reopening efforts. Arizona was among the first states to reopen in mid-May and its cases have increased 115% since then, leading a former state health chief to warn that a new stay-at-home order or field hospitals may be needed. According to a Reuters tally, there were 1,983,825 coronavirus cases in the United States and 111,747 deaths as of Tuesday. On Tuesday, 21 U.S. states reported weekly increases in new cases of COVID-19.

[..] Arizona, Utah and New Mexico all posted rises of 40% or higher for the week ended Sunday, compared with the prior seven days, according to a Reuters analysis. Some of the new cases are linked to better testing. But many stem from loosened public health restrictions that have allowed people to gather in groups and go inside stores to shop, said public health officers in two California counties. Health officials believe other cases have been passed along by people not following social-distancing recommendations. It is too soon to see whether cases will also spike after protests swept the country [..]

Read more …

“The government previously predicted the pandemic would peak in early May, and under U.S. pressure, has begun reopening its carmaking industry..”

Mexico’s Coronavirus Peak Still Weeks Off, 600 New Deaths In One Day (R.)

New coronavirus cases in Mexico are expected to keep rising, a top health official said on Tuesday, even as the government pushes a gradual reopening of the economy launched at the beginning of this month. “We still haven’t reached the maximum point,” Deputy Health Minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell told a morning news conference. “For several more weeks, we will keep announcing there are more cases today than yesterday.” His assessment was largely echoed by officials from the World Health Organization and its Pan American Health Organization during a webcast news conference later in the day. While Mexico has yet to reach peak infections, they said, officials should boost testing before any wide-scale economic reopening and stick to safety measures, including social distancing.


Government figures released on Tuesday night showed nearly 600 deaths added to the official count as total infections rose to 124,301. Overall, reported deaths stood at 14,649. In recent weeks, Latin America has emerged as the epicenter of the pandemic, with a spike in cases even as the tide of infection recedes elsewhere. Mexican officials have gradually raised the projections of total fatalities and now forecast up to 35,000 deaths through October. A study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington last week forecast up to 75,516 deaths by August. The government previously predicted the pandemic would peak in early May, and under U.S. pressure, has begun reopening its carmaking industry, which has since been deemed essential. But plans to further relax social-distancing measures were put on hold as infection rates continued to rise.

Read more …

That this is studied at all tells you how insane the west is. Asians don’t waste money on that, they just wear them.

Widespread Mask-Wearing Could Prevent COVID19 Second Waves (R.)

Population-wide facemask use could push COVID-19 transmission down to controllable levels for national epidemics and could prevent further waves of the pandemic disease when combined with lockdowns, according to a UK study published Wednesday. The research, led by scientists at the Britain’s Cambridge and Greenwich Universities, suggests lockdowns alone will not stop the resurgence of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but that even homemade masks can dramatically reduce transmission rates if enough people wear them in public. “Our analyses support the immediate and universal adoption of facemasks by the public,” said Richard Stutt, who co-led the study at Cambridge.

He said the findings showed that if widespread mask use were combined with social distancing and some lockdown measures, this could be “an acceptable way of managing the pandemic and re-opening economic activity” long before the development and public availability of an effective vaccine against COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus. The study’s findings were published in the “Proceedings of the Royal Society A” scientific journal. The World Health Organization updated its guidance on Friday to recommend that governments ask everyone to wear fabric face masks in public areas where there is a risk to reduce the spread of the disease.

In this study, researchers linked the dynamics of spread between people with population-level models to assess the effect on the disease’s reproduction rate, or R value, of different scenarios of mask adoption combined with periods of lockdown. The R value measures the average number of people that one infected person will pass the disease on to. An R value above 1 can lead to exponential growth. The study found that if people wear masks whenever they are in public it is twice as effective at reducing the R value than if masks are only worn after symptoms appear. In all scenarios the study looked at, routine facemask use by 50% or more of the population reduced COVID-19 spread to an R of less than 1.0, flattening future disease waves and allowing for less stringent lockdowns.

Read more …

But the Dems like the protests! Stopping them would be interfering with the election!

DC National Guard Members Test Positive After Protests Response (McC)

Members of the D.C. National Guard who were responding to protests in the nation’s capital over the death of George Floyd have tested positive for COVID-19, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday. The service members were part of the 1,300 D.C. National Guard members called up to help law enforcement respond initially to rioting on May 31, that was followed by days of peaceful protests. A Guard spokeswoman did not identify how many positive tests the unit has recorded. “We can confirm that we have had COVID-19 positive tests with the DCNG,” said D.C. National Guard spokeswoman Air Force Lt. Col. Brooke Davis. “The safety and security of our personnel is always a concern, especially in light of the COVID-19 era.”


The news follows reports that two members of the Nebraska National Guard who were activated in response to protests in Lincoln, Neb., have also tested positive. The D.C. National Guard was supported by approximately 3,900 additional Guardsmen from Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah to protect national monuments and ensure peaceful demonstrations as tens of thousands of protesters took to district streets last week. In the largest protest Saturday, participants squeezed past each other, some with masks, some not, as they chanted and sang near the White House.

Read more …

“Trump is Hitler” died about 3 years ago. The MSM have brought it back.

Chicago Professor Removes Post That Appeared To Call For A Military Coup (Turley)

Figures from Glenn Greenwald to Tucker Carlson have raised the recent posting by University of Chicago Professor Brian Leiter saying that military leaders should “depose” President Donald Trump and jail him. The posting was either a poor attempt at a coup or comedy. The real problem is that in today’s environment it was unclear and, worse yet, unremarkable. On Reddit, readers were directed to “Brian Leiter (UoC professor) calls for a military coup: “Trump should be deposed and jailed” Leiter removed the statement and blamed the lack of a sense of humor on those who objected. He was not calling for a coup d’état, just musing about the possibility of a coup d’état.

On his site, Leiter discussed the criticism of Trump by General Mattis and stated that Mattis now “needs to encourage his military colleagues who share his respect for American democracy and the rule of law to do what he should have done while in office: Trump should be deposed and jailed.” Leiter later removed the statement with an addendum reading: “I’ve removed my little joke about a military coup in favor of VP Pence. I have, it appears, more faith in the U.S. military, and its commitment to the rule of law, than most readers.” The incident however raises a more concerning problem. Many could not tell. It is now routine for academics to make sweeping and irresponsible statements about how to deal with Trump and his Administration.

This is not a reference to the distortion of the criminal code to declare a host of criminal acts that are unsupportable under controlling case law. It is superheated rhetoric of professors denouncing the Trump Administration as a fascist regime and even endorsing violent protests as a form of speech. Harvard Professor Lawrence Tribe retweeted a comparison of Trump to Hitler engaging in similar gestures and calling it “horrifying,” He later took done the tweet and said “I’m not saying Trump is becoming Hitler, so don’t bother tweeting the distinctions.” Many are still making the comparison. Indeed, I have had other professors make the same comparison in conversations.

A professor who said that he teaches a course on fascism insisted that the comparison to fascism is apt and that violence is warranted, including the attack on journalist Andy Ngo: “I don’t have a problem with it. There are children dying of lack of medication in concentration camps in the U.S. If one fascist gets a milkshake thrown at him… And beaten up. I don’t have a problem with it.” This is why people do not get the joke because many academics are not joking. Indeed, we have discussed cases where faculty have been physically attacked and intimidated.

Read more …

Let them eat shit.

Tory Minister Says Eating Chlorinated Chicken Should Be Up To Consumer (Ind.)

A minister has stoked fears that low-welfare American meat could soon be on its way to British supermarkets and cafeterias after suggesting that the government would “trust the consumer” on whether to buy it or not. In the latest exchange in parliament on the issue, Cabinet Office minister Penny Mordaunt refused to say a ban would remain on chlorinated chicken, hormone-fed beef and other US imports after an upcoming trade deal with Donald Trump. The minister said she believed “we should be trusting the consumer” on the issue and suggested some people did not want to “put their faith in government” regulations. Despite the talk of consumer choice, in reality many meat products, such as in restaurants, hospitals, and school cafeterias, do not have a country of origin label, making it impossible for consumers to differentiate.

Where such labelling does currently exist, the US also regards it as an illegitimate barrier to its exports and pushes to have the practice banned as part of trade agreements it signs with other countries. US negotiators have made clear that opening the door to American agricultural exports, which are produced to much lower welfare standards than their European counterparts, is their primary demand in talks with the UK. While the government’s own best-case scenario shows an agreement with the US would lead to a tiny boost to the UK economy of just 0.16 per cent of GDP, failing to sign such a deal would be highly politically embarrassing for Boris Johnson, who has presented such an arrangement as part of the alternative to EU membership.

[..] As recently as January, Theresa Villiers, then environment secretary, reiterated that “we will not be importing chlorinated chicken” – but since then US trade chiefs have put pressure on the UK to change its position, leading the government to change tack. American meat factories use chlorine to wash chickens so that they can operate a less sanitary production environment otherwise, an approach which saves money and allows them to undercut other producers. [..] If US food exports do make it to the UK, British consumers may be denied information about which products are American to help them get a foothold in the market. The US government’s “Foreign Trade Barriers” document for 2019 catalogues policies in countries around the world the US wants ended.

Read more …

We now blame the virus for everything. Next up: corona causes climate change.

World Faces Worst Food Crisis For At Least 50 Years – UN (G.)

The world stands on the brink of a food crisis worse than any seen for at least 50 years, the UN has warned as it urged governments to act swiftly to avoid disaster. Better social protections for poor people are urgently needed as the looming recession following the coronavirus pandemic may put basic nutrition beyond their reach, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Tuesday. “Unless immediate action is taken, it is increasingly clear that there is an impending global food emergency that could have long-term impacts on hundreds of millions of children and adults,” he said. “We need to act now to avoid the worst impacts of our efforts to control the pandemic.”

Although harvests of staple crops are holding up, and the export bans and protectionism that experts feared have so far been largely avoided, the worst of the impacts of the pandemic and ensuing recession are yet to be felt. Guterres warned: “Even in countries with abundant food, we see risks of disruption in the food supply chain.” About 50 million people risk falling into extreme poverty this year owing to the pandemic, but the long-term effects will be even worse, as poor nutrition in childhood causes lifelong suffering. Already, one in five children around the world are stunted in their growth by the age of five, and millions more are likely to suffer the same fate if poverty rates soar.

Guterres laid out a three-point plan to repair the world’s ailing food systems and prevent further harm. These are: to focus aid on the worst-stricken regions to stave off immediate disaster, and for governments to prioritise food supply chains; to strengthen social protections so that young children, pregnant and breastfeeding women and other at-risk groups – including children who are not receiving school meals in lockdown – receive adequate nutrition; and to invest in the future, by building a global recovery from the pandemic that prioritises healthy and environmentally sustainable food systems.

Read more …

The ECB is there ONLY for the banks, not at all for anyone else. The bad bank issues bonds with bad loans as collateral, banks buy those, and hand them to the ECB as … collateral. Circle jerk.

“The bad bank would then issue bonds which commercial banks would buy in exchange for portfolios of unpaid loans, neutralising the virus shock for Europe’s lenders. The banks could then lodge those bonds with the ECB as collateral for central bank funding.. “

ECB Prepares ‘Bad Bank’ Plan For Wave Of Coronavirus Toxic Debt (R.)

European Central Bank officials are drawing up a scheme to cope with potentially hundreds of billions of euros of unpaid loans in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The project, which comes as Europe mobilises trillions of euros to bolster the region’s economy, is aimed at shielding commercial banks from any second fallout from the crisis, if rising unemployment chokes off the income needed to repay loans. One of the people familiar with the plan said the ECB had set up a task force to look at the idea of a “bad bank” to warehouse unpaid euro debt and that work on the scheme had accelerated in recent weeks. The amount of debt in the euro zone that is considered unlikely to ever be fully repaid already stands at more than half a trillion euros, including credit cards, car loans and mortgages, according to official statistics.

That is set to rise as the COVID-19 outbreak squeezes borrowers and could even double to one trillion euros, weighing on already fragile banks and hindering new lending, the people familiar with the ECB plans said. While the idea for a euro zone bad bank was discussed and shelved over two years ago, the ECB, under its new President Christine Lagarde, has consulted banks and EU officials about a scheme in recent weeks, one of the people said. As the euro zone’s most powerful institution, ECB backing for the project is critical but it would also require the blessing of Germany, the bloc’s biggest economy. Berlin has long opposed schemes that accept shared responsibility for debts in other countries although it recently had an unexpected change of heart, agreeing to pool EU borrowing for a coronavirus recovery fund.

One blueprint under discussion would involve the European Stability Mechanism, an EU institution which can provide financial assistance to euro zone countries or lenders, standing in as guarantor for the bad bank, the people said. The bad bank would then issue bonds which commercial banks would buy in exchange for portfolios of unpaid loans, neutralising the virus shock for Europe’s lenders. The banks could then lodge those bonds with the ECB as collateral for central bank funding, one of the people said. Major European commercial banks could be called on to join forces to underpin the scheme, the second person said.

Read more …

There are calls for Jay Powell to stop supporting the stock markets, because he’s helping Trump.

The Illusion of a Rapid US Recovery (Galbraith)

Furman, Krugman, and the CBO share a mental model. They regard the pandemic as an economic shock, like an earthquake or the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is a disruption to a solid structure, a deviation from normal growth. To get America moving again, what is mainly needed is confidence, perhaps aided by stimulus. If consumers channel their pent-up demand into new spending, this “shock-stimulus” model dictates, then businesses will revive investment, and soon enough, all will be well once again.This is how mainstream center-left economists and policymakers have thought about recessions and recoveries since at least the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, pushed through tax cuts. But it ignores three major changes in the US economy since then: globalization, the rise of services in consumption and employment, and the impact of personal and corporate debts.

In the 1960s, the US had a balanced economy that produced goods for both businesses and households, at all levels of technology, with a fairly small (and tightly regulated) financial sector. It produced largely for itself, importing mainly commodities. Today, the US produces for the world, mainly advanced investment goods and services, in sectors such as aerospace, information technology, arms, oilfield services, and finance. And it imports far more consumer goods, such as clothing, electronics, cars, and car parts, than it did a half-century ago. And whereas cars, televisions, and household appliances drove US consumer demand in the 1960s, a much larger share of domestic spending today goes (or went) to restaurants, bars, hotels, resorts, gyms, salons, coffee shops, and tattoo parlors, as well as college tuition and doctor’s visits.

Tens of millions of Americans work in these sectors.Finally, American household spending in the 1960s was powered by rising wages and growing home equity. But wages have been largely stagnant since at least 2000, and spending increases since 2010 were powered by rising personal and corporate debts. House values are now stagnant at best, and will likely fall in the months ahead. Mainstream economics pays little attention to such structural questions. Instead, it assumes that business investment responds mostly to the consumer, whose spending is dictated equally by income and desire. The distinction between “essential” and “superfluous” does not exist. Debt burdens are largely ignored.

But demand for many US-made capital goods now depends on global conditions. Orders for new aircraft will not recover while half of all existing planes are grounded. At current prices, the global oil industry is not drilling new wells. Even at home, though existing construction projects may be completed, plans for new office towers or retail outlets won’t be launched soon. And as people commute less, cars will last longer, so demand for them (and gasoline) will suffer.Faced with radical uncertainty, US consumers will save more and spend less. Even if the government replaces their lost incomes for a time, people know that stimulus is short term. What they do not know is when the next job offer – or layoff – will come along.

Read more …

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
-Oscar Wilde, “The Importance of Being Earnest”

Misfortune vs. Carelessness (Ben Hunt)

Back in 2013 – in some of my very first Epsilon Theory notes – I wrote about how unemployment data was chronically misreported during Barack Obama’s first term, with an outrageous bias towards making the employment news flow in the United States look much better in narrative than it was in fact. [..] the skinny is this: for a period of some years in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, initial unemployment claims were systematically undercounted. Amazingly enough, this systematic misreporting in unemployment data stopped after Obama was re-elected for a second term.

Was this an intentional act of malfeasance and corruption by the Obama-era Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), who at the time weren’t even responsible for collecting the weekly initial unemployment claims data? Nope. Did the Obama-era BLS recognize the systematic error and direction of bias in the initial unemployment claims data? Absolutely. Could the Obama-era BLS have fixed the systematic error and direction of bias in the initial unemployment claims data if they had wanted to? In a heartbeat.

It’s exactly the same thing with the Trump-era Bureau of Labor Statistics and the reporting of weekly and monthly employment data. The measurement error we’ve seen in the monthly jobs report – and keep in mind that it is exactly the SAME ERROR being made for the past THREE MONTHS – is not an intentional mistake. But the failure to correct these errors – the conscious effort required to allow known and obvious errors to persist and create a market-moving and election-moving cartoon – well, I think that IS intentional.

Accidents happen. Misfortune occurs. Mistakes are made. But when the same accident happens over and over again, in exactly the same way and with exactly the same bias … What’s happening with the Bureau of Labor Statistics – and of course it’s not only the Bureau of Labor Statistics – is an intentional carelessness. It is an intentional, political carelessness that supports status quo cartoons of control, regardless of which political party happens to be championing the status quo today. It’s not a Democrat thing and it’s not a Republican thing. It’s a power thing.

Read more …

I see a global industry emerging.

Banksy Reveals Plan For Bristol’s Toppled Colston Statue (CB)

Protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have been taking place across the world over the last few weeks, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. In one of the most symbolic images from this weekend’s protests, the statue of 18th century slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol, and pushed into the harbour. As debate rages over whether the statue should be reinstated, left in the harbour, or pulled out and put in the city’s museum, the mysterious Bristol-based street artist Banksy has proposed a solution (below) to keep “everyone happy”. He suggests putting the statue back on its plinth, but with the addition of other life-size statues of the protestors pulling it down.

“What should we do with the empty plinth in the middle of Bristol? Here’s an idea that caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t. We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size bronze statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down. Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated.”

Read more …

 

 

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May 142020
 


Byron Street haberdashery, New York 1900

 

95,000 Entered UK By Air In 25 Days During Lockdown (G.)
Australia Saw Overseas Visitors Fall 99% In April (R.)
Why California Is Struggling To Control Coronavirus (LAT)
Real UK Care Home Death Toll Double Official Figure (G.)
Pensioners 34 Times More Likely To Die Of COVID19 Than Working Age Brits (G.)
Only 4.4% of French Population Infected By Coronavirus (R.)
Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s Stay-at-Home Order (NBC)
72 People In Wisconsin Test Positive After Attending ‘Large Gathering’ (DM)
36.6% of COVID19 Patients In NY Study Develop Acute Kidney Injury (R.)
Ontario Redeploys Educators Into Nursing Homes, As One Records 56 Deaths (R.)
Why Are So Many People Getting Sick And Dying In Montreal From Covid-19? (G.)
COVID-19 Bailout Gave Wall Street a No-Lose Casino (Taibbi)
FBI Accidentally Reveals Name Of Saudi Embassy Official Suspected In 9/11 (Y!)
US Judge Asks If Michael Flynn Should Be Held In Contempt (R.)
Flynn Case Requires Letting The Sun Shine On Comey And Mueller (McLaughlin)

 

 

• US New cases 21,449

• New deaths 1,896 (yesterday 1,894, Monday: 830, Sunday: 776)

• Russia breaks its chain of 10 consecutive days of more than 10,000 new cases with 9,974

 

 

 

Cases 4,451,226 (+ 93,006 from yesterday’s 4,358,220)

Deaths 298,520 (+ 5,284 from yesterday’s 293,236)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-

 

 

From Worldometer

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID19Info.live:

 

 

 

 

The UK never had an actual lockdown, they just pretended they did.

18.1 million arrivals to the UK by air, land and sea from 1 January to 23 March, pre-“lockdown”. Another 95,000 just by air between 1 April and 26 April, during the lockdown. With tons of stories of very few if any checked out.

The government stopped issuing guidance at the border to arrivals from specific countries – including from Italy and China – to self-isolate on 13 March, 10 days before the lockdown was imposed.

95,000 Entered UK By Air In 25 Days During Lockdown (G.)

At least 95,000 people have entered the UK from overseas since the coronavirus lockdown was imposed, one of the government’s chief scientific advisers has revealed, while repeatedly failing to provide an estimate of how many of these people had Covid-19. Appearing before MPs on the science and technology committee, Prof John Aston, the chief scientific adviser at the Home Office, admitted that had tougher restrictions been introduced at the border, the peak of the virus may have been delayed – but he did not say by how long, or if this would have saved lives. Aston, who attends meetings of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which is advising the government during the crisis, was asked repeatedly for the estimated proportion or number of people arriving in the UK with Covid-19.

He insisted instead that a more “robust” assessment was the ratio of imported cases to domestic cases. This model, formulated by Sage, estimates 0.5% of all cases on any given day are imported from overseas. The government stopped issuing guidance at the border to arrivals from specific countries – including from Italy and China – to self-isolate on 13 March, 10 days before the lockdown was imposed. Since then, there has been little intervention other than advice provided on leaflets and posters. Arrivals will have been subjected to the same lockdown restrictions imposed on the wider population since 23 March. [..] Yvette Cooper, the chair of the home affairs select committee, [..] asked Aston if ministers had a central estimate of the number of people arriving each week who might have Covid-19 when the decision to stop asking any arrivals to self-isolate was made.

[..] Cooper [..] said: “Previously people were asked to self-isolate at the border for 14 days. Inexplicably when other countries were increasing their restrictions or their requirements to self-isolate, the UK lifted them all. It was before the peak in Spain, it was still around the peak in Italy, it was several weeks before the peak in UK.” Aston’s evidence comes as the government prepares to enforce a 14-day quarantine for arrivals by air at the UK border – a policy that some have suggested would have been more appropriate prior to the UK lockdown on 23 March. There were 18.1 million arrivals to the UK in the period from 1 January to 23 March across air, land and sea, of whom 273 air passengers were formally quarantined. Aston told the committee that between 1 April and 26 April there were 95,000 arrivals into the UK by air, of whom about 53,000 were UK citizens.

Read more …

This looks more like a lockdown. Just 6,500 non-Australians arrived in April.

Australia Saw Overseas Visitors Fall 99% In April (R.)

Australia saw overseas arrivals collapse to almost nothing in April as it closed its borders to fight the coronavirus pandemic, in a massive blow for the tourist industry. Preliminary data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics released on Wednesday showed arrivals of 21,600 in April, down 98.7% from a year earlier. Returning Australian citizens accounted for 15,100 of them. The biggest decline was in arrivals from New Zealand, which dived by 161,950 to just 1,180. Arrivals from China, where closures had already badly curbed tourism in March, dropped 132,040 to only 320. Departures from Australia likewise plunged 96.5% to 63,500, mostly foreigners returning home.

Read more …

50% of people still leave their homes every day. Not a lockdown.

Why California Is Struggling To Control Coronavirus (LAT)

The Times asked UC San Francisco epidemiologist and infectious disease expert Dr. George Rutherford, a former epidemic intelligence service officer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about why the plateau persists. “As long as it’s going up, it has not ended. It’s got to come down for it to end,” he said. Rutherford offered two reasons why the disease is persisting: a certain percentage of people still must go out to work, and others are getting fed up with staying at home. A significant part of the population has chosen not to say home or has been unable to do so because they’re essential workers manning supermarkets, meat processing plants, prisons and nursing homes.

A CDC study estimated that around April 1, about two weeks into a regional stay-at-home order, nearly 50% of residents in five Bay Area counties were still leaving home, down from 80% in late February. “That’s still 50%,” Rutherford said, adding that people can still get infected even if they limit their trips outside the home to buy a loaf of bread at the supermarket. Essential workers who must leave home — people working in the food industry, making deliveries and staffing medical facilities — are among those contracting the coronavirus. A UC San Francisco study of thousands of residents and workers in the city’s Mission District found that 57% of those tested must leave their homes for work, and those who had to leave home to work accounted for 90% of the positive cases.

Nearly 89% of those who tested positive earn less than $50,000 a year, and most live in households with three or more people. While Latinos made up 44% of those tested, they accounted for more than 99% of the positive COVID-19 cases. Many residents and workers in the Mission District are employed in essential services such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing, restaurants, grocery stores and janitorial and domestic services, the university said. Staying home, the researchers said, clearly seemed to make a difference.

Read more …

Ambrose Evans Pritchard quotes a “London cardiologist friendly to Boris”:

“We discharged known, suspected and unknown cases into care homes which were unprepared with no formal warning that the patients were infected, no testing available, and no PPE to prevent transmission.”

Real UK Care Home Death Toll Double Official Figure (G.)

More than 22,000 care home residents in England and Wales may have died as a direct or indirect result of Covid-19, academics have calculated – more than double the number stated as passing away from the disease in official figures. Academics at the London School of Economics found that data on deaths in care homes directly attributed to the virus published by the Office for National Statistics significantly underestimated the impact of the pandemic on care home residents and accounted for only about four out of 10 of the excess deaths in care settings recorded in recent weeks in England and Wales. ONS statisticians said on Tuesday that 8,314 people had died from confirmed or suspected Covid-19 in English care homes up to 8 May.

The figures suggest the impact of the virus in care homes is finally reducing. They are based on reports filed directly from care home operators to the regulator, the Care Quality Commission. Care Inspectorate Wales has said Covid was confirmed or suspected in a further 504 cases in homes up to the 8 May in Wales. But academics at the care policy and evaluation centre at the LSE found that when excess deaths of other care residents and the deaths of care home residents from Covid-19 in hospitals are taken into account, the toll that can be directly and indirectly linked to the virus pandemic is likely to be more than double the current official count.

[..] Care homes have been running at 10% to 20% staff absence rates and many homes have been trying to isolate residents in their rooms to reduce infection spread, but this can also make their normal care more difficult and residents’ needs less visible.

Read more …

Well, if you put them all together and insert known patients, no wonder. Do the same with younger people and you get the same result.

Pensioners 34 Times More Likely To Die Of COVID19 Than Working Age Brits (G.)

As Britain edges back to work and employees consider the risks of moving beyond lockdown, official figures underscore that working-age Britons are 34 times less likely to die of coronavirus than over-65s. About 12% of all deaths relating to Covid-19 have occurred among those under 65 – a total of 4,066 deaths. Most victims have been in the over-65 category, accounting for 30,978 fatalities. There have been 8.4 deaths per 100,000 people among the under-65 category, which rises to 286 deaths per 100,000 in the over-65 group, meaning pensioners are 34 times more likely to die of the illness. The contrast is even starker in data concerning those under 45. According to the Office for National Statistics figure, there have been just 401 deaths in this age group – one death for every 100,000 people, or around 1% of the overall death toll.

However, age is just one of the factors that will affect a person’s vulnerability to the virus. Research has shown that ethnicity, deprivation, pre-existing health conditions and occupation also contribute to an individual’s risk of dying. The death rate among the working population differs by gender. The death rate for men is 9.9 per 100,000 people and 5.2 per 100,000 women. This may also be driven by the death rate in particular occupations, as some workers appear to be more vulnerable depending on exposure to the virus.

Death rates among some minority ethnic groups are also disproportionately high, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It found the death rate among British black Africans and British Pakistanis from coronavirus in English hospitals was more than 2.5 times that of the white population. Guardian reporting also found that areas with high BAME populations tended to have higher death rates.

New data released by the ONS on Monday showed for the first time that people in low-paid manual jobs were at much greater risk of dying from Covid-19. Men in low-paid jobs were almost four times more likely to die from coronavirus than professionals, with 21.4 deaths per 100,000 people, compared with 5.6 among white-collar male workers, according to the analysis. Jobs which were found to have high death rates included security guards, care workers, construction workers, plant operatives, cleaners, taxi drivers, bus drivers, chefs and retail workers. Commenting on the findings, Professor Neil Pearce, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “The observations are almost certainly due to … exposure to people….”

Read more …

Probably a lowball, but very far from herd immunity.

Only 4.4% of French Population Infected By Coronavirus (R.)

A study led by the Pasteur Institute says a mere 4.4% of the French population – or 2.8 million people – have been infected by the novel coronavirus, much higher than the official count of cases but way too low to achieve so-called “herd immunity”. In a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science, researchers say the infection rate in the worst-hit parts of France – the eastern part of the country and the Paris region – is between 9 and 10 percent on average. “Around 65% of the population should be immune if we want to control the pandemic by the sole means of immunity”, the study says. Herd immunity refers to a situation where enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to be able to effectively stop that disease from spreading. The rate of infection was measured by the Pasteur Institute as of May 11, the day when France started to unwind its almost two-month-long national lockdown.


“As of a consequence, our results show that, without a vaccine, the herd immunity alone will not be enough to avoid a second wave at the end of the lockdown. Efficient control measures must thus be upheld after May 11”, researchers say. France’s overall death toll from the virus rose to 27,074 on Wednesday, the fifth-highest in the world, and total number of cases officially stood at 177,700, the seventh-highest total. The Pasteur Institute also said the lockdown put in place on March 17 in France led to a drastic decline of the coronavirus’ reproduction rate, going from 2.9 to 0.67 over the 55-day virtual standstill of the country. A Spanish study also published on Wednesday showed similar results, saying about 5% of the country’s population had contracted the disease and that there was no herd immunity in Spain, also emerging progressively for long lockdown.


Large sero-survey in Spain with 60,000 participants shows ~5% of population tested positive for #coronavirus antibodies, 11% in region with highest incidence (Madrid)
1) Infection fatality rate ~1.2%
2) Herd immunity is not an option

Read more …

Why then have a law that says you can’t drive through city center at 200 mph? Same difference. “I will not give up my freedom for your safety”.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Strikes Down State’s Stay-at-Home Order (NBC)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the state’s stay-at-home order during the coronavirus pandemic as “unlawful, invalid, and unenforceable” after finding that the state’s health secretary exceeded her authority. In a 4-3 ruling, the court called Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm’s directive, known as Emergency Order 28, a “vast seizure of power.” The order directed all people in the state to stay at home or at their places of residence, subject only to exceptions allowed by Palm, the ruling says. The order, which had been set to run until May 26, also restricted travel and business, along with threatening jail time or fines for those who don’t comply.


The ruling says the judges weren’t challenging Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ emergency powers, but the decision effectively undercuts his administration and forces him to work out a compromise with the Republican-controlled Legislature. One of the dissenting justices, Rebecca Dallet, said her conservative colleagues in the majority were the ones who were exceeding their authority, and she noted precedent for Palm’s directives — a monthslong stay-at-home order during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. “This decision will undoubtedly go down as one of the most blatant examples of judicial activism in this court’s history,” she said. “And it will be Wisconsinites who pay the price.” [..] During oral arguments, Justice Rebecca Bradley suggested that the order amounted to “tyranny,” and at another point, she referred to Japanese Americans’ internment during World War II.

Read more …

A protest meeting.

72 People In Wisconsin Test Positive After Attending ‘Large Gathering’ (DM)

More than 70 people in Wisconsin have tested positive for coronavirus after admitting they attended a ‘large gathering’ in the state – around the same time that thousands of protesters were pictured ignoring social distancing and shunning face masks at a mass anti-lockdown rally. The state’s Department of Health Services (DHS) confirmed that 72 individuals who were diagnosed with the deadly virus on or after April 26 had all attended a large gathering not long before their diagnosis. ‘We were able to pull some limited data – out of 1,986 cases with onset/diagnosis on or after 4/26, there were seventy-two cases who reported attending a large gathering,’ DHS spokesperson Jennifer Miller told The Progressive.


Two days earlier on April 24, thousands of protesters gathered outside Wisconsin’s capitol building in Madison demanding Democratic Governor Tony Evers reopen the state for business. It marked one of the largest anti-lockdown rallies to take place across the country. At the time there were 5,356 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Wisconsin and 262 people had died. As of Wednesday, cases have almost doubled to 10,611 and the death toll has reached 418. [..] ‘Possible exposures during protests haven’t been specifically added to the database because we already ask about large gatherings,’ Miller told The Progressive. ‘Contact tracers do ask if patients attended mass gatherings, but not specifically about protests, so there’s really no data on who may have contracted COVID-19 at a protest.’ Miller added: ‘No, it doesn’t specifically state that the 72 were at a rally, but this is the data we have.’

Read more …

Right before they go on the ventilator.

36.6% of COVID19 Patients In NY Study Develop Acute Kidney Injury (R.)

Over a third of patients treated for COVID-19 in a large New York medical system developed acute kidney injury, and nearly 15% required dialysis, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday. The study was conducted by a team at Northwell Health, the largest health provider in New York state. “We found in the first 5,449 patients admitted, 36.6% developed acute kidney injury,” said study co-author Dr. Kenar Jhaveri, associated chief of nephrology at Hofstra/Northwell in Great Neck, New York, whose findings were published in the journal Kidney International. Acute kidney injury occurs when the kidneys fail and become unable to filter out waste. Of those patients with kidney failure, 14.3% required dialysis, Jhaveri said in a phone interview.


The study is the largest to date to look at kidney injury in COVID-19 patients. It may be helpful, Jhaveri said, as other hospitals face new waves of patients with the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that has infected more than 4.3 million people and killed over 295,000 globally. Several groups have noted increased rates of kidney failure among patients with COVID-19. Jhaveri and colleagues set out to quantify it by combing through medical records of 5,449 COVID-19 patients hospitalized between March 1 and April 5. They found that kidney failure occurred early on, with 37.3% of patients arriving at the hospital with failing kidneys, or developing the condition within the first 24 hours of being admitted. In many cases, the kidney failure occurred around the time severely ill patients needed to be placed on a ventilator, Jhaveri said.

Read more …

Canada’s not doing well.

Ontario Redeploys Educators Into Nursing Homes, As One Records 56 Deaths (R.)

The Canadian province of Ontario is allowing its education staff, including teachers and custodians, to voluntarily redeploy into the province’s long-term care homes, the provincial government said on Wednesday, as the coronavirus outbreak at just one Toronto-area home alone has killed dozens. Coronavirus deaths in long-term care nursing homes account for 815 of 1,765 total deaths in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, according to provincial data released on Wednesday. Camilla Care Community recorded 56 deaths, according to the home’s owner, Sienna Senior Living, on Wednesday. The regional health authority reported 179 residents and 39 staff have tested positive at the facility.


In March, Ontario closed schools in an effort to stop the spread of the virus, requiring many educators and other staff to leave their jobs. This latest redeployment focuses on training and moving any employees who volunteer into nursing homes. Ontario has previously moved workers from hospitals into long-term care homes, and Wednesday’s announcement expands the province’s support for the facilities, which have been hit hard by the virus. The province also issued an emergency order on Wednesday morning, allowing the provincial government to issue mandatory management orders to any long-term care home struggling to deal with an outbreak.

Read more …

Not just care homes, poor parts of town as well.

Why Are So Many People Getting Sick And Dying In Montreal From Covid-19? (G.)

Springtime in Montreal is normally a cause for celebration. After the city’s long, arduous winters, people emerge from the confines of their apartments at the first inkling of warmth to lounge in parks and on patios – or terrasses – and enjoy a meal, beverage and the company of friends. Not this year. Montreal, a city touted by tourist guides as “North America’s Europe” for its rich culture and joie de vivre, is Canada’s centre for Covid-19. Of the entire country’s 70,000 cases and 5,000 deaths, the city of 2 million people has 20,000 cases and more than 2,000 deaths, or about 64% of the entire province’s death toll. Those numbers have catapulted Quebec into an unfavourable position: it is now the seventh deadliest place in the world for daily coronavirus deaths, according to Quebec newspaper La Presse.


[..] Earlier this month, the province admitted that its effort to manage staffing shortages by moving workers around the long-term care network could be spreading the virus. Montreal North feels the consequences of that. One in five Montrealers infected with Covid-19 are healthcare workers – none of whom are receiving danger pay. In Montreal North, 23% are infected, said community organizer Will Prosper. “It’s these people who are still taking care of us, when not too long ago they were the people who we wanted to kick out,” said Prosper.

Read more …

Just a bigger casino.

COVID-19 Bailout Gave Wall Street a No-Lose Casino (Taibbi)

The $2.3 trillion CARES Act, the Donald Trump-led rescue package signed into law on March 27th, is a radical rethink of American capitalism. It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain. This is a fresh take on a long-developing dynamic. Dating to the late Eighties, when then-Fed-chief Alan Greenspan slashed interest rates after the 1987 stock-market crash, there’s been an understanding that the government would be there to help Wall Street back on its feet in hard times.

[..] What’s happening in the COVID-19 crisis is the next step: a financial bubble where the Fed isn’t the cleanup mechanism, but the source of the mania itself. While the real economy is seeing record disruptions, Wall Street has seen prolonged rallies of “rational exuberance” over the Fed’s decision to usher in “QE infinity” and essentially ban losing in finance capitalism. Though this is a Trump bill — El Pompadour is so determined that the CARES Act be remembered as his work, he fought to get his signature on relief checks — it passed unanimously, by voice vote in the House, and 96-0 in the Senate. Talk to Democrats on the Hill and they will tell you this is a bailout to be cheered and supported, nothing like the 2008 rescue. This time is different, the argument goes: Three-quarters of the money goes to real people.

[..] Technically, “only” about $500 billion of the congressionally passed rescue package goes to “big business.” Moreover, the big-business aid ostensibly comes with a range of draconian-sounding conditions barring greedy hijinks, meaning no layoffs, no stock buybacks, no big bonuses, etc., if companies want the handout. The loophole comes via $454 billion created as part of that big-business package. This “emergency fund” will be dumped into a “special-purpose vehicle” used to backstop further lending by the Federal Reserve. That $454 billion is designed to grow by a factor of 10 or more. “We can lever up to $4 trillion,” said Steve Mnuchin, playing the “free-spending Goldman Sachs-trained Treasury secretary” role that apparently is a prerequisite for financial-disaster narratives in modern America.

Read more …

Lovely.

FBI Accidentally Reveals Name Of Saudi Embassy Official Suspected In 9/11 (Y!)

The FBI inadvertently revealed one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive secrets about the Sept. 11 terror attacks: the identity of a mysterious Saudi Embassy official in Washington who agents suspected had directed crucial support to two of the al-Qaida hijackers. The disclosure came in a new declaration filed in federal court by a senior FBI official in response to a lawsuit brought by families of 9/11 victims that accuses the Saudi government of complicity in the terrorist attacks. The declaration was filed last month but unsealed late last week. According to a spokesman for the 9/11 victims’ families, it represents a major breakthrough in the long-running case, providing for the first time an apparent confirmation that FBI agents investigating the attacks believed they had uncovered a link between the hijackers and the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

It’s unclear just how strong the evidence is against the former Saudi Embassy official — it’s been a subject of sharp dispute within the FBI for years. But the disclosure, which a senior U.S. government official confirmed was made in error, seems likely to revive questions about potential Saudi links to the 9/11 plot. It also shines a light on the extraordinary efforts by top Trump administration officials in recent months to prevent internal documents about the issue from ever becoming public. “This shows there is a complete government cover-up of the Saudi involvement,” said Brett Eagleson, a spokesman for the 9/11 families whose father was killed in the attacks. “It demonstrates there was a hierarchy of command that’s coming from the Saudi Embassy to the Ministry of Islamic Affairs [in Los Angeles] to the hijackers.”

Still, Eagleson acknowledged he was flabbergasted by the bureau’s slip-up in identifying the Saudi Embassy official in a public filing. Although Justice Department lawyers had last September notified lawyers for the 9/11 families of the official’s identity, they had done so under a protective order that forbade the family members from publicly disclosing it. Now, the bureau itself has named the Saudi official. “This is a giant screwup,” Eagleson said.

Read more …

Or should the FBI be held in contempt?

US Judge Asks If Michael Flynn Should Be Held In Contempt (R.)

A U.S. judge on Wednesday signaled reluctance to allow the Justice Department to drop its criminal prosecution of Michael Flynn, tasking a retired judge with advising on whether the former Trump administration official should face an additional criminal contempt charge for perjury. In a short written order, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington asked John Gleeson, a former federal judge in New York, to present arguments in the case as an amicus curiae, or friend of the court. Sullivan said he was seeking Gleeson’s recommendation on whether Flynn should face a criminal contempt charge for perjury because he testified under oath that he was guilty of lying to the FBI but then reversed course and said he had never lied. Sullivan also said he wanted Gleeson to make the case for why a motion to dismiss the Flynn case filed by the Justice Department last week should be rejected.


The Justice Department’s bombshell May 7 decision to drop its case against Flynn came on the heels of growing pressure from Trump and Trump’s political allies who repeatedly accused the FBI of improprieties in how it handled the investigation. Up until that point, the Justice Department had staunchly defended the FBI’s actions in the case. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as an adviser to Trump during the 2016 campaign, pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia’s U.S. ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks before Trump took office. However, later in the case he switched lawyers and tactics, accusing the FBI of tricking him and seeking to have his guilty plea withdrawn.

Read more …

Appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Patrick M. McLaughlin served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio from 1984-1988 and as an assistant U.S. attorney from 1978 to 1984.

Flynn Case Requires Letting The Sun Shine On Comey And Mueller (McLaughlin)

For most Americans, it must be absolute confusion trying to decipher truth from non-truth as charges and countercharges are leveled by the Democrats and Republicans, and the media weigh in on the Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn case. My suggestion is to ignore the talking heads and read the DOJ’s 20-page motion to dismiss the criminal information against Flynn, and all the exhibits attached to that motion. Then, you will have the facts necessary to come to an informed opinion. I have done that, so let me give a primer. The DOJ determined that “continued prosecution of this case would not serve the interests of justice” because the interview of Flynn by the FBI was unjustified by the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Flynn, since that investigation “had yielded an ‘absence of any derogatory information.’”

The DOJ is unpersuaded that Flynn’s interview “was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis” and does not believe that Flynn’s statements “were material even if untrue.” In addition, in consideration of all the evidence “including newly discovered and disclosed information,” the government doubts that it can prove “either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.” The motion, plus 86 pages of exhibits, provides evidence, at best, of the dereliction of duty by the FBI under James Comey and, at worst, possible criminal misconduct. Only a full disclosure of all relevant information, documents, and testimony under oath by participants will satisfy the right of Americans to have the evidence we deserve in order to form our opinions unfiltered by the talking heads. Let the real facts fall where they may.

[..] When you review the DOJ’s filing, put yourself in Flynn’s shoes and consider how you would feel if the government treated you in the same manner and, to top it off, hid material exculpatory information from your defense team and the court. Overlay on that: How would you handle it if legal fees had wiped you out financially and the agents and prosecutors were threatening to indict a member of your family to pressure you to cave? The conduct of Comey’s FBI, of the Special Counsel, and of some at Main Justice should be placed under the microscope of a truth-seeking, nonpartisan inquiry with the interests of the nation in mind. Find out what happened and why — then fix it.

Read more …

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Feb 072017
 
 February 7, 2017  Posted by at 11:08 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Russell Lee Sharecropper mother teaching children in home, Transylvania, LA. 1939

Trump To Be Barred From UK Parliament Over ‘Racism and Sexism’ (BBG)
Trump’s Wall Street Deregulation ‘The Last Thing We Need’ – Draghi (Ind.)
Meet The Men Who Could Topple Donald Trump (G.)
California Is Not ‘Out Of Control,’ Leaders Tell Trump (R.)
Our Part In The Darkness (Alameddine)
The New York Times Just Doesn’t Understand This Economics Stuff (Worstall)
The Fed’s Mortage-Bond Whale (BBG)
When The Money Supply Dries Up (IM)
Army Corps Of Engineers May Decide On DAPL By Week’s End (BBG)
New Bill Would Block EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases
Too Late For Couples Therapy? (DiEM25)
Varoufakis: Tsipras Should Prepare To Break Deal With Greece’s Creditors (FR)
Rare Split On IMF Board Puts Greek Bailout At Risk (MW)
Greece Won’t Meet Fiscal Surplus Targets Set By Europe, IMF Says (BBG)
Third Quake Over 5-Richter Magnitude Rattles Lesbos (K.)

 

 

Really dumb stuff. If only because Trump loves it.

Trump To Be Barred From UK Parliament Over ‘Racism and Sexism’ (BBG)

U.S. President Donald Trump must not be allowed to address the U.K. Parliament during a state visit to Britain, House of Commons Speaker John Bercow said. Prime Minister Theresa May invited Trump to visit the U.K., but there have been calls by lawmakers not to give the president the honor of addressing both houses of Parliament after he introduced a ban on people from some majority-Muslim countries traveling to the U.S. “Before the imposition of the migrant ban I would myself have been strongly opposed to an address by President Trump in Westminster Hall; after the imposition of the migrant ban by President Trump I’m even more strongly opposed,” Bercow told lawmakers on Monday.

He added, “I feel very strongly our opposition to racism and to sexism and our support for equality before the law and an independent judiciary are hugely important considerations in the House of Commons.” Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, and world leaders including Nelson Mandela, Angela Merkel and Pope Benedict XVI have all been invited to speak to members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. [..] The announcement was greeted with cheers and – a rare event in the House of Commons – applause from the opposition benches. A motion arguing that Trump shouldn’t be invited to speak has been signed by 163 out of Parliament’s 650 members.

Bercow said he has a veto over a speech in Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Houses of Parliament, and would block one. It would also be a breach with tradition if Trump spoke in the Royal Gallery behind the Lords without his name on the invitation, he said. “An address by a foreign leader to both houses of Parliament is not an automatic right, it is an earned honor,” Bercow said. “There are many precedents for state visits to take place to our country that do not include an address to both houses of Parliament.”

Read more …

Meet Mario the kettle.

Trump’s Wall Street Deregulation ‘The Last Thing We Need’ – Draghi (Ind.)

Donald Trump’s roll-back of Wall Street regulation is “very worrisome” and “the last thing we need” the President of the ECB, Mario Draghi, has warned. Giving evidence to the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs on Monday, Mr Draghi was asked about the American President’s assault on the US post-crisis Dodd-Frank legislation, which had curbed the risk-taking of US banks, raised their capital requirements and introduced more safeguards for consumers. “The last thing we need is a relaxation of regulation,” Mr Draghi said. “The fact that we are not seeing….significant financial stability risk is the reward of the action of supervisors…. Nowadays financial intermediaries are strong. The idea of repeating the conditions of before the crisis is very worrisome.”

Mr Draghi added: “If we were to look at historical experience and ask what are the main reasons for the financial crisis starting in 2007 onwards, well, one can disagree [over] whether it was too expansive monetary policy or the dismantling of financial regulation in previous years – but surely we can agree it was a combination”. Last week President Trump signed an executive order to relax Dodd-Frank, prompting warnings that he is preparing the ground for another financial crisis. Phil Angelides, who served as chair of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, branded President Trump’s decision “insane”. “In the wake of the financial crisis, millions of families lost their homes. Millions of people lost their jobs. The economy was wrecked and communities across the country were devastated. Big Wall Street banks admitted wrongdoing and paid tens of billions of dollars in fines. And now, with bankers at his side, President Trump begins to rip apart protections put in place to protect America’s families and our economy,” he said.

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As I said a few dats ago: “More interesting right now is how strongly this is dividing the White House team. Kelly refused to enact some of Bannon’s demands. Tillerson and Mattis are not sitting comfortable either.”

Meet The Men Who Could Topple Donald Trump (G.)

When Trump began putting together his cabinet, liberals and some in the media expressed concern over the number of retired generals he was appointing to top positions. “Trump hires third general, raising concerns about heavy military influence,” blared a headline in the Washington Post during the presidential transition. “I am concerned that so many of the president-elect’s nominees thus far come from the ranks of recently retired military officers,” the Democratic representative Steny Hoyer told the Washington Examiner in December. The fretting over Trump’s generals was always misplaced, not least because the number of retired generals Trump has appointed to top positions in his administration is hardly unprecedented.

Trump nominated the retired Marine generals James Mattis and John Kelly to lead the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, respectively, and tapped the retired army general Mike Flynn to be his national security adviser. When entering office after winning the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama also appointed three retired generals to top positions and few batted an eyelid. But those concerned about Trump’s presidency should be thankful that the generals are there, particularly Mattis and Kelly. By all accounts, they are men of great honor and courage with strong backbones. Kelly led men into battle and lost a son fighting in Afghanistan. Mattis may be the most distinguished and respected Marine officer of his generation, revered for his dedication to his troops and his intellect. I had the honor of spending an hour with him one-on-one last May when he was a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Our conversation was off the record, but make no mistake, this is not a man to be trifled with.

Trump may have actually boxed himself in by picking highly respected generals such as Kelly and Mattis to helm top posts in his administration. Even conservatives who publicly stand by the president latch on to the appointments of Mattis and Kelly as their best evidence that Trump’s presidency will not be as problematic as his temperament and actions sometimes suggest, or some of his more troubling White House advisers portend. But if Mattis or Kelly were to resign in protest, that might change everything. There have already been reports that Mattis and Kelly are less than happy with some of what has gone on in the White House. During the transition, Mattis reportedly clashed with the Trump transition team over key appointments to the defense department. Tensions boiled over when Mattis and Kelly weren’t given sufficient consultation over the recent immigration executive order.

The Democratic representative Seth Moulton, a retired Marine who served under Mattis during the Iraq war, says insiders have informed him that after the executive order fiasco, some top appointments like Mattis began thinking about what would make them leave the administration. “What I’ve heard from behind the scenes,’’ Moulton told the Boston Globe: “What will make you resign? What’s your red line?”

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This is the kind of confrontation the country badly needs. Where everyone has to argue and define their viewpoints.

California Is Not ‘Out Of Control,’ Leaders Tell Trump (R.)

California leaders pushed back on Monday against President Donald Trump’s claim that the state is “out of control,” pointing to its balanced budget and high jobs numbers in the latest dustup between the populist Republican and the progressive state. The state’s top Democrats called Trump cruel and his proposals unconstitutional after the businessman-turned-politician threatened to withhold federal funding from the most populous U.S. state if lawmakers passed a so-called sanctuary bill aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants. “President Trump’s threat to weaponize federal funding is not only unconstitutional but emblematic of the cruelty he seeks to impose on our most vulnerable communities,” state Senate Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said in a statement on Monday.

State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, an L.A.-area Democrat, said the state has the most manufacturing jobs in the nation, and produces a quarter of the country’s food. “If this is what Donald Trump thinks is ‘out of control,’ I’d suggest other states should be more like us,” Rendon said. The latest war of words between Trump and Democratic leaders in California, where voters chose his opponent, Hillary Clinton, two-to-one in November’s election, began Sunday, in an interview between Trump and Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. During the interview, O’Reilly asked Trump about a bill in the state legislature, authored by de Leon, to ban law enforcement agencies in the state from cooperating with immigration officials in most circumstances. Cities who have enacted similar bans are known as sanctuary cities, and de Leon’s bill, if passed and signed into law by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown, would effectively extend such rules to the entire state.

Trump disparaged the bill as ridiculous, saying that sanctuary cities “breed crime.” “We’ll have to, well, de-fund,” Trump said. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California.” Trump went on to say he viewed funding as a weapon. “California in many ways is out of control,” Trump said to O’Reilly. “Obviously the voters agree or otherwise they wouldn’t have voted for me.” Last week, Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from the University of California at Berkeley, where violent protests led to the cancellation of a speech by an editor for the right-wing Breitbart News. But experts said it would be difficult for the President to withhold funds from either the university or the state. Court rulings have limited the power of the president to punish states by withholding funds, and most appropriations come from the Congress and not the executive branch.

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Really excellent. Don’t miss.

Our Part In The Darkness (Alameddine)

Right after the election, my Twitter feed exploded with shock and moans. It seemed that everyone’s favorite phrase was “We are better than this.” I considered the statement so obviously wrong. I understood the convoluted logic of it, the jolt and hurt that would lead someone to type this, but it was not true. We are not better than this. We are this. The man was elected President. Ipso facto, America is this, we are this. I say this not to suggest that we must be blamed, or that someone who did not vote for Donald Trump is just as culpable as one who did. What I keep trying to point out, to friends, to anyone who will listen, is that too few of us are willing to acknowledge responsibility—not necessarily to accept blame, but to stand up and say, “This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.”

I remember when the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib came to light. The response was similar. This is not us. Those soldiers were rotten. It began at the top, with George W. Bush, and it filtered down. But we would never do such a thing. Of course, we did do those things, and we kept on doing them over and over, and doing worse. Some objected, but most of us simply moved on, chose to forget. “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” the Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec once wrote. Trump bans Muslims and we claim that this is un-American, that we are not this. I don’t have to talk up “ancient” history to show that we are. I won’t bring up settler colonialism, genocide, and land theft, or harp on slavery, or internment camps for Japanese-Americans.

I won’t refer to the Page Act banning those deemed “undesirable,” the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, or the Emergency Quota Act. I don’t have to mention the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans deported in the nineteen-thirties, or the thousands of Jews escaping Nazi violence who were turned away. It was F.D.R., not Trump, who claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security. I won’t mention any of this, because this happened so long ago. We can always delude ourselves by saying that America was this but now we are better. Let me just say that in 2010 and 2011, state legislatures passed a hundred and sixty-four anti-immigration laws.

Many were upset when Trump campaigned on a Muslim registry, but I was surprised to find out how few knew that we’d already had one: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or nseers, implemented on September 11, 2002. From the Atlantic: “It consisted of two ‘special registration’ programs: one that required foreign nationals from certain countries to check in with the government before entering and leaving the country, and another that obliged some foreigners living in the United States to report regularly to immigration officials.” Obama did not suspend the program until 2011. He dismantled it right before he left office.

[..] I was in Lesbos a year ago, helping Syrian refugees. At Moria, the biggest camp on the island, thousands of refugees were being processed every day. The crisis had been ongoing for more than six months. I’d heard that every big N.G.O. had taken a turn at leading the camp, but each one failed because of mismanagement, backstabbing, interagency bickering, governmental interference, what have you. But, as horrid as the situation was in the camp, I thought that it was being well managed, as well as it could be with so many people in and out. I met this unassuming man, a retired Mormon from Utah, who had been volunteering at the camp since the first boats arrived. He spoke no Arabic or Farsi, had no medical training of any kind, none of the identifiable skills, yet both volunteers and refugees sought him out with every conceivable question about what to do. It seems that he had arrived to offer whatever help he could. He slowly began to fill in wherever he was needed. As the N.G.O.s began to wash their hands of the camp, he was needed more and more. When I was there, he was running the damn place. We are this. We can be better.

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“That is just a howling error, to talk about the number of jobs and wages as if they are different things.”

The New York Times Just Doesn’t Understand This Economics Stuff (Worstall)

The Editorial Board of the New York Times tells us all that repealing parts of or all of Dodd Frank will damage the economic recovery. It’s possible to see the glimmerings of a point there, no one does think that if half the banks fall over again then all will be toodle dandy. However, they do manage to betray a terrible ignorance of the basics of economics and wages in the same editorial. Really, this is such a basic point that even Karl Marx was able to understand it: Mr. Trump may believe that ending Dodd-Frank will lead to more jobs by making it easier for businesses to get loans. But even if looser credit would help hiring — a very big if — the main problem in the job market today is not too few jobs, but wages that have been too low for too long. A rollback of Dodd Frank will not help that, and will hurt by forfeiting the stability that has helped the economy come this far.

That is just a howling error, to talk about the number of jobs and wages as if they are different things. They are the same thing–it is full employment which lifts the workers’ wages, nothing more and nothing less. As I say this is such a fundamental concept that even Karl Marx was able to get it right. If we have unemployment, that reserve army of the unemployed, then a capitalist can increase his labour force just by hiring some more of those unemployed. He doesn’t have to tempt anyone in with higher wages, he doesn’t need to pay his own workforce more as profits rise. For anyone gets bolshie he can just hire more of those unemployed people. However, the moment that reserve army is exhausted, the moment that there are no unemployed to hire it all changes. Suddenly, to gain access to more labour temptation must be employed.

It is necessary to tempt labour away from the jobs they are already doing. The capitalists, therefore, are in competition with each other for the profits that can be made by employment. At which point of course wages have to rise. To tempt labour into factory B away from factory A then B must pay more than A (in some form, could be shorter hours, better scheduling, more pay, whatever).And factory B had better raise its own wages for the extant workforce to stop A tempting it away. This is how wages rise over time. The capitalists compete for the profits that can be made by employing labour. And in the absence of unemployment they can only do this by raising wages as productivity rises. This process has been going on some 200 years by now, ever since productivity rises became a general feature of the economy.

And there’s no reason to think that it has stopped nor that it will. That is, contrary to the editorial board f the New York Times, it’s not that wages and jobs are different issues. It’s that wages haven’t risen because there haven’t been enough jobs. And seriously, if your understanding of capitalist and market economics is behind even that of Karl Marx are we sure that you should be writing newspaper articles on the subject of economics?

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If you create an artificial recovery, there will be a price to be eventually.

The Fed’s Mortage-Bond Whale (BBG)

Almost a decade after it all began, the Federal Reserve is finally talking about unwinding its grand experiment in monetary policy. And when it happens, the knock-on effects in the bond market could pose a threat to the U.S. housing recovery. Just how big is hard to quantify. But over the past month, a number of Fed officials have openly discussed the need for the central bank to reduce its bond holdings, which it amassed as part of its unprecedented quantitative easing during and after the financial crisis. The talk has prompted some on Wall Street to suggest the Fed will start its drawdown as soon as this year, which has refocused attention on its $1.75 trillion stash of mortgage-backed securities.

While the Fed also owns Treasuries as part of its $4.45 trillion of assets, its MBS holdings have long been a contentious issue, with some lawmakers criticizing the investments as beyond what’s needed to achieve the central bank’s mandate. Yet because the Fed is now the biggest source of demand for U.S. government-backed mortgage debt and owns a third of the market, any move is likely to boost costs for home buyers. In the past year alone, the Fed bought $387 billion of mortgage bonds just to maintain its holdings. Getting out of the bond-buying business as the economy strengthens could help lift 30-year mortgage rates past 6% within three years, according to Moody’s. Unwinding QE “will be a massive and long-lasting hit” for the mortgage market, said Michael Cloherty at RBC Capital Markets. He expects the Fed to start paring its investments in the fourth quarter and ultimately dispose of all its MBS holdings.

Unlike Treasuries, the Fed rarely owned mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis. Over the years, its purchases have been key in getting the housing market back on its feet. Along with near-zero interest rates, the demand from the Fed reduced the cost of mortgage debt relative to Treasuries and encouraged banks to extend more loans to consumers. In a roughly two-year span that ended in 2014, the Fed increased its MBS holdings by about $1 trillion, which it has maintained by reinvesting its maturing debt. Since then, 30-year bonds composed of Fannie Mae-backed mortgages have only been about a percentage point higher than the average yield for five- and 10-year Treasuries, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That’s less than the spread during housing boom in 2005 and 2006.

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Don’t know if it’s money supply drying up or debts becoming overwhelming. Not the same thing. But the last paragraphs of the piece are interesting:

When The Money Supply Dries Up (IM)

Whenever the ability to enforce draconian legislation goes into decline, the people of a nation suddenly realise that they’ve been living in fear of a paper tiger. It doesn’t take long before some people choose to defy the system. When they’re seen to succeed, others follow in droves. So, what does this say of the US and its power? Well, as Doug Casey has been known to say, “Countries fall from grace with remarkable speed.” Quite so. On an international level, this means that international leaders will be watching the economic decline of the US closely. Countries such as China and Russia have been loading up on precious metals in preparation for a collapse in fiat currency. In addition, they’ve created their own version of the World Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and have been hard at work inking deals with other nations for international settlement in currencies other than the dollar.

Most people in the world today cannot remember a time before Bretton Woods, yet they may soon witness the Bretton Woods agreement becoming a dead duck. But, if we extend this premise, we also should be questioning the other constructs of the postwar period that have become dinosaurs. What of the United Nations? This organisation was once meant to be a body for arbitration and world planning, but has in latter decades become a quagmire of bickering and gainsaying—with its decisions rarely being adopted by the nations in question. And yet the US alone pays some $8 billion annually to keep the UN afloat. Surely, when the world at large ceases its willingness to carry further US debt, the US government will jettison the expense for the UN before it cuts either its military spending or its entitlement programmes.

Similarly, NATO, which requires $2.8 billion annually (with only five of its 28 members currently meeting the recommended payments) would experience a similar fate. With the above entities heading south, the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which has since 1992 been the basis of US aggression policy, would become unachievable. In addition to the decline or cessation of the above international adventurism, enforcement of revenue pursuit in the guise of FATCA and OECD schemes would equally suffer from a loss of funding. It would not be a question of whether the empire still wished to squeeze the lemon more than ever before—it would. But once the funds to do so dried up, the US and EU would find themselves in the situation that we currently observe in Venezuela: The money to pay for the enforcement is simply not there anymore.

The decline would begin with bounced cheques, followed by massive layoffs in the enforcement departments, followed by a decline in receipts, necessitating further layoffs, and continuing in a downward spiral. At present, countless people live in fear of the present empires and their ever-increasing efforts at usurpation. However, as history shows, once debt has reached its nadir and begins its rapid fall, so does the empire’s ability to enforce draconian confiscations.

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Army vs veterans?!

Army Corps Of Engineers May Decide On DAPL By Week’s End (BBG)

The U.S. Army may decide by week’s end whether to approve construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline across North Dakota’s Lake Oahe and lands claimed sacred by Sioux Indian tribes. Justice Department lawyer Matthew Marinelli outlined the planned timeline for the Army’s decision to a federal judge in Washington hearing a three-way dispute over the planned path of the Energy Transfer Partners LP-led project. Marinelli didn’t say which way the decision might go. President Donald Trump last month issued a memorandum urging the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite its review of the conduit’s path after the federal agency put the brakes on ETP’s nearly complete $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile conduit for shunting crude from northwestern North Dakota to a Patoka, Illinois, distribution center last year amid protests raised by environmental groups and the Sioux.

[..] While U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, and then a federal appeals court, declined to grant the tribes’ request for an order halting the project, the corps stopped construction anyway, stating it was reconsidering whether to issue easements required for tunneling under the lake bed. Jan Hasselman, lead lawyer for the suing Sioux tribes, told the judge that because the Army Corps had already committed to an environmental impact review of the lake crossing, any easement granted before that analysis is complete “would be unlawful.” The Corps turned the decision to the U.S. Army. The tribes will likely file a second bid to halt the project, citing environmental impact concerns, if the pipeline project gets a U.S. government go-ahead, Hasselman said.

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Now use that to get a deal that actually achieves something.

New Bill Would Block EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases (EW)

Republican lawmakers have proposed a bill to curtail the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to address climate change. The “Stopping EPA Overreach Act of 2017” (HR637) would amend the Clean Air Act so that: “The term ‘air pollutant’ does not include carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, or sulfur hexafluoride.” The bill was introduced by Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) and has already racked up 114 Republican co-sponsors. Palmer is a climate denier who once said that temperature data used to measure global climate change have been “falsified” and manipulated.

Palmer’s latest proposal would nullify the EPA’s regulation of carbon pollution, stating that “no federal agency has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under current law” and “no attempt to regulate greenhouse gases should be undertaken without further Congressional action.” Liz Perera, climate policy director at the Sierra Club, told Huffington Post that the resolution would make it nearly impossible for the federal government to fight climate change. “This is the legislative equivalent of trying to ban fire trucks while your house is burning,” she said, adding its sponsors “should be embarrassed for so blatantly ignoring reality and ashamed of themselves for so recklessly endangering our communities.”

[..] Fortunately, the bill does not seem to have any legs. David Doniger, a senior attorney for Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate and clean air program told The Guardian that HR637 does not have much of a chance breaking through a Senate filibuster as Democrats would have near-universal opposition to it and even some moderate Republican Senators would vote against it as well.

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Yes. Annul the wedding. Before someone gets hurt.

Too Late For Couples Therapy? (DiEM25)

For the past seven years, Greece has been stuck in an abusive marriage with its European partners. Of course, she has not been the perfect partner, but who has? No one deserves violence. No one deserves abuse. Everyone deserves hope, and not the delusional “you will be done by 2060, if you can maintain the hilariously unsustainable 3.5% primary budget surplus” kind of hope offered by Mr Schäuble. The hypocrisy and pseudo-morality of European lenders and the IMF is painful. Germany’s “no debt-reduction” stance is particularly exasperating, when that very same country has experienced both the economic, social and political disaster that vindictive, self-righteous hardheadedness can lead to after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, as well as the miraculous quality of debt-reduction when its own debt was cut by half (!) at the London Debt Agreement of 1953.

The more years pass, the closer Greece and the rest of Europe edge from a post-modern 1919 to a post-modern 1933. And now, with news of Greece’s three-week window to resolve its next instalment before economically imploding – a piece of news which some media outlets appeared surprised about, bless them – many of us cannot help but wonder: when will we get serious about resolving this? The obvious answer is: when there is political will for a resolution. The only place where this seems to be the case is the nation-patient itself. Two summers ago, under remarkable socio-economic pressure, amid capital-controls and an overwhelmingly pro-EU media landscape, 62% of Greeks came out and refused the terms of a third bailout. Anyone with half-an-understanding of economics and finance seems to agree that the current approach to Greek debt is unsustainable economically, socially and politically: all in all, a disaster.

Even the master chef of the entire travesty, the IMF, has come out and admitted that neo-liberalism and austerity simply do not work. So what are we waiting for? Why are millions of Europeans still suffering under utterly misguided political and economic dogmas? Quite simply because to admit defeat at this point would mark the end of a number of powerful careers. Having poisoned European voters against the lazy PIIGS, it would be nothing short of political suicide to turn around and give in to Greek demands. When would be the next electoral victory in Europe for austerity’s architects if it was revealed that the years of financial and social suffering was a pointless self-inflicted wound with only negative economic results?

So it is becoming increasingly obvious that Greece has to work its own way out of this mess. At this stage, that means an immediate halt of repayments to lenders; a stance that will either force its partners to a vital debt-reduction, or will lead the country to an exit from the Euro. With Germany (in clear breach of EU rules) stubbornly maintaining its 9% budget surplus and refusing to increase imports, Europe is at an impasse, and no one is hurt more by this than Greece. Although the former outcome would be preferred – avoiding to rock the European boat at a time of major global instability is a major plus – the latter is still preferable to the status quo.

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Translation of Greek article by Varoufakis I posted about earlier.

Varoufakis: Tsipras Should Prepare To Break Deal With Greece’s Creditors (FR)

Through a recent article at the Efimerida ton Syntakton (Newspaper of Editors), the former Minister of Finance of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, referred to Tsipras retreat against Greece’s creditors and called him to prepare seriously this time, to break the destructive continuous agreements. As Varoufakis wrote among other things: The night of the Greek referendum, I tried hard to explain to the Greek PM that the submission of Greece to the third memorandum was Schäuble’s real plan (not Grexit). In reality, there was no hope that the 3rd toxic “program” for Greece would be rationalized progressively through the support of the European Commission to Athens. Meaning, there was no hope that IMF’s austerity and anti-social measures could be softened.

The fact that Moscovici, Juncker, Sapin and others made such promises, is no excuse because the Greek government knew since May 2015 that these people know how to tell lies, or, they are unable to keep their promises when they don’t lie. Suddenly, the Schäuble-IMF-ECB attacked on Greece, demanding exhausting measures, while Merkel-Hollande-Commission didn’t do anything. Tsipras then retreated for one more time in order to “save” Greece. This was Schäuble’s plan. With his stance, Tsipras sank Podemos, made an approach with the collapsing (ethically and politically) Social Democracy, disappointed the progressive Europeans. And all these happened at the same time where nationalism triumphs everywhere.

Tsipras promises, one more time, that he will not retreat (this time!) by legislating new austerity even after 2018. If he means it, I remind him what we had agreed that is necessary and which – even today – is the only thing that may prevent the worst things to come. Prepare for unilateral restructuring of Greek bonds held by the ECB, which must be repaid in July (and after). Prepare the electronic system of transactions through Taxisnet which I had designed, I had started building it and even announced it to the new Minister of Finance, Euclid Tsakalotos, when I delivered the Ministry. Therefore, if indeed the Greek PM means it this time that he will not retreat, he should prepare for breaking the deal with the creditors, so that to prevent it. The design of a parallel system for payments is ready since 2014, as he knows.

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Make it stop!

Rare Split On IMF Board Puts Greek Bailout At Risk (MW)

Some members of the IMF are growing concerned with the terms of Greece’s bailout program, fueling fears the fund might pull out of the much-needed rescue plan for the country. The IMF’s annual review of the Greek economy published on Tuesday revealed a rare split among its board members, showing they are in disagreement over the austerity measures imposed on Athens and over the country’s huge debt burden. The report said that “most” of the 24 IMF executive directors agreed Greece is on track to reach a fiscal surplus of 1.5% of GDP. It said Athens does “not require further fiscal consolidation at this time, given the impressive adjustment to date.” However, some of the board members argued that Greece still needs to bring the surplus up to 3.5%, as agreed in the last bailout in 2015.

“Most Executive Directors agreed with the thrust of the staff appraisal, while some Directors had different views on the fiscal path and debt sustainability,” the IMF said in the assessment. The IMF usually keeps its deliberations confidential, so any differences on the board are rarely exposed to the public. The yield on 10-year Greek government debt surged 26 basis points after the report on Tuesday to 7.925%, according to electronic trading platform Tradeweb. Economists consider borrowing costs above 7% unsustainable in the long term.

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This is getting sadistic.

Greece Won’t Meet Fiscal Surplus Targets Set By Europe, IMF Says (BBG)

Greece is on track to fall short of budget-surplus targets set under a bailout by the nation’s euro-zone creditors, the IMF said. Greece’s primary budget surplus will rise to 1.5% over the long run from about 1% last year, amid a modest recovery, the IMF said Monday after executive directors met to discuss the fund’s annual assessment of the nation’s economy. Still, the projected surplus falls short of the 3.1% forecast by the country’s European creditors. The fund reiterated its view that Greece’s debt is unsustainable. Most of the executive directors don’t believe the economy needs more fiscal consolidation, the IMF said. The IMF has said it would consider giving Greece a new loan to supplement the 86 billion euros ($92 billion) it’s receiving from euro-area countries, but only if the nation’s debt-reduction plans are credible.

Greece’s European creditors also want the IMF to sign off before disbursing the next tranche of the euro-zone bailout. Greece’s government debt will reach 275% of its gross domestic product by 2060, when its financing needs will represent 62% of GDP, the IMF said in a draft staff report obtained by Bloomberg last month. Public debt will reach 181% of GDP this year, the IMF projected Monday. Greece’s economy is expected to grow 2.7% this year, up from 0.4% in 2016, the fund said. However, long-run growth is expected to slip to about 1%, the IMF predicts. The IMF’s assumptions aren’t based in reality and don’t take into account the reform of Greece’s public finances, according to a European Union official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are sensitive.

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Yeah, sure, add some more crap. For some reason this makes me think of George Clinton: “Do Fries Come With That Shake?”

Third Quake Over 5-Richter Magnitude Rattles Lesbos (K.)

Seismologists in Greece are keeping a close eye on activity in the eastern Aegean, as a third quake in 24 hours measuring above 5 Richter rattled the area in the early hours of Tuesday. The tremor hit at 4.24 a.m. and measured 5.3 on the Richter scale, according to the Geodynamic Institute in Athens, with the epicenter located 15 kilometers north of Lesvos. With a depth of just 10 kilometers, the quake was felt quite strongly on the Greek islands of Lesvos and Chios. Seismologist Efthimios Lekkas on Monday said two tremors – with a magnitude of 5.1 and 5.3 respectively – were not linked to the North Anatolian Fault Line, the source of powerful quakes in the past.

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Apr 022015
 
 April 2, 2015  Posted by at 9:39 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Marion Post Wolcott Negro woman carrying laundry between Durham and Mebane, NC 1939

The Committee To Destroy The World (Michael Lewitt)
Our Current Illusion Of Prosperity (Mises Inst.)
Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think (Scientific American)
Burning Down The House: Land, Water & Food (Eastwood)
The Warren Effect: Here Is A Bluff That Needs To Be Called (Esquire)
Companies Go All-In Before Rate Hike, Issue Record Debt In Q1 (Zero Hedge)
Shanghai Traders Make Trillion-Yuan Stock Bet With Borrowed Cash (Bloomberg)
Greek Defiance Mounts As Alexis Tsipras Turns To Russia And China (AEP)
Greece Threatens Default As Fresh Reform Bid Falters (Telegraph)
China’s Fuel Demand to Peak Sooner Than Oil Giants Expect (Bloomberg)
The Saudis Are Losing Their Lock on Asian Oil Sales (Bloomberg)
Reckoning Arrives for Cash-Strapped Oil Firms Amid Bank Squeeze (Bloomberg)
Appalachia Miners Wiped Out by Coal Glut That They Can’t Reverse (Bloomberg)
World Dairy Prices Slide 10.8% On Supply Concerns (NZ Herald)
CFTC Charges Kraft, Mondelez With Manipulating Wheat Futures (MarketWatch)
Brazil’s Richest Man May Reap $5.6 Billion in Kraft-Heinz Merger
The Cuban Money Crisis (Bloomberg)
California Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Of 25% Amid Record Drought (WSJ)

Absolute must read. And then a second time.

The Committee To Destroy The World (Michael Lewitt)

Last month, the world mourned the death of beloved actor Leonard Nimoy. Mr. Nimoy, of course, was renowned for his portrayal of the iconic character Mr. Spock on the 1960s television series Star Trek. One of the most memorable Star Trek inventions was the transporter that allowed human beings to be beamed through space and time like light and energy. Investors expecting central bankers to solve the world’s economic problems might as well believe that Janet Yellen is capable of beaming them straight into the Marriner S. Eccles Building in Washington, D.C. Their failure to acknowledge that the Fed is failing to generate sustainable economic growth while contributing to income inequality and crushing debt burdens is inexplicable.

Central banks that purport to be promoting financial stability are actually undermining it – with the able assistance of regulators who have drained liquidity from the world’s most important markets. Negative interest rates on $3 trillion of European debt are an obvious sign of policy failure, yet the policy elite stands mute. Actually that’s not correct – the cognoscenti is cheering on Mario Draghi as he destroys the European bond markets just as they celebrated Janet Yellen’s demolition of the Treasury market. Negative interest rates are not some curiosity; they represent a symptom of policy failure and a violation of the very tenets of capitalist economics. The same is true of persistent near-zero interest rates in the United States and Japan.

Zero gravity renders it impossible for fiduciaries to generate positive returns for their clients, insurance companies to issue policies, and savers to entrust their money to banks. They are a byproduct of failed economic policies, not some clever device to defeat deflation and stimulate economic growth. They are mathematically doomed to fail regardless of what economists, who are merely failed monetary philosophers practicing a soft social science, purport to tell us. The fact that European and American central banks are following the path of Japan with virtually no objection represents one of the most profound intellectual failures in the history of economic policy history.[..]

Christopher Whalen, one of the best bank analysts on Wall Street, argued that global banks face trillions of bad off-balance sheet debts that must eventually be resolved (i.e. written off) and are dragging on economic growth. These debts include everything from loans by German banks to Greece to home equity loans in the U.S. for homes that are underwater on their first mortgage. Banks and governments refuse to restructure (i.e. write off) these bad debts because doing so would trigger capital losses for banks and governments. As Mr. Whalen explains, “the Fed and ECB have decided to address the issue of debt by slowly confiscating value from investors via negative rates, this because the fiscal authorities in the respective industrial nations cannot or will not address the problem directly.”

But in addition to avoiding the bad debt problem, these policies are causing further economic damage by depressing growth and starving savers. Per Mr. Whalen: “ZIRP and QE as practiced by the Fed and ECB are not boosting, but instead depressing, private sector economic activity. By using bank reserves to acquire government and agency securities, the FOMC has actually been retarding private economic growth, even while pushing up the prices of financial assets around the world.”

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“Massive layoffs in the energy sector are now a certainty. Few realize that most of the gains in employment in the US since 2008 have been in shale states. Yet the carnage is not over.”

Our Current Illusion Of Prosperity (Mises Inst.)

President Obama and Fed Chair Janet Yellen have been crowing about improving economic conditions in the US. Unemployment is down to 5.5% and growth in 2014 hit 2.2%. Journalists and economists point to this improvement as proof that quantitative easing was effective. Unfortunately, this latest boom is artificial and has been built by adding debt on top of debt. Total household debt increased 2.5% in 2014 — the highest level since 2010. Mortgage loans increased 1.5%, student loans 6.6% while auto loans increased a hefty 9.6%. The improving auto sales are built mostly on a bubble of sub-prime borrowers. Auto sales have been brisk because of a surge in loans to individuals with credit scores below 620. Since 2010, such loans have increased over 100% and have gone from 20% of originations in 2009 to 27% in 2013.

Yet, auto loans to individuals with strong credit scores, above 760, have barely budged over the last year. Subprime consumer borrowing climbed $189 billion in the first eleven months of 2014. Excluding home mortgages, this accounted for 41% of total consumer lending. This is exactly the kind of lending that got us into trouble less than a decade ago, and for many consumers, this will only end in tears. But we need to ask ourselves: is the current boom built on sound foundations? In other words, do we have sharp increases in productivity or real wage growth? Productivity increased less than 1% on average in the last three years and real wages have flat lined or declined for decades. From mid-2007 to mid-2014, real wages declined 4.9% for workers with a high school degree, dropped 2.5% for workers with a college degree and rose just 0.2% for workers with an advanced degree.

Is the boom being built on broad base investment in plant and equipment? The current average age of working plants and equipment in the US is one of the oldest on record. Meanwhile, it is now clear that the shale boom was an illusion of prosperity. Oil prices have dipped below $50 with some analysts calling for $20 oil by the end of the year. This is a drop from over $100 from last year. Many shale outfits need oil above $65 just to break even. Massive layoffs in the energy sector are now a certainty. Few realize that most of the gains in employment in the US since 2008 have been in shale states. Yet the carnage is not over. Induced by low interest, investment banks loaned over $1 trillion to the energy industry. The impact on the financial sector is still to be felt.

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Do read.

Economic Inequality: It’s Far Worse Than You Think (Scientific American)

In a candid conversation with Frank Rich last fall, Chris Rock said, “Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” The findings of three studies, published over the last several years in Perspectives on Psychological Science, suggest that Rock is right. We have no idea how unequal our society has become. In their 2011 paper, Michael Norton and Dan Ariely analyzed beliefs about wealth inequality. They asked more than 5,000 Americans to guess the%age of wealth (i.e., savings, property, stocks, etc., minus debts) owned by each fifth of the population. Next, they asked people to construct their ideal distributions. Imagine a pizza of all the wealth in the United States. What%age of that pizza belongs to the top 20% of Americans?

How big of a slice does the bottom 40% have? In an ideal world, how much should they have? The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined. We don’t want to live like this. In our ideal distribution, the top quintile owns 32% and the bottom two quintiles own 25%. As the journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.” Norton and Ariely found a surprising level of consensus: everyone — even Republicans and the wealthy—wants a more equal distribution of wealth than the status quo.

This all might ring a bell. An infographic video of the study went viral and has been watched more than 16 million times. In a study published last year, Norton and Sorapop Kiatpongsan used a similar approach to assess perceptions of income inequality. They asked about 55,000 people from 40 countries to estimate how much corporate CEOs and unskilled workers earned. Then they asked people how much CEOs and workers should earn. The median American estimated that the CEO-to-worker pay-ratio was 30-to-1, and that ideally, it’d be 7-to-1. The reality? 354-to-1. Fifty years ago, it was 20-to-1. Again, the patterns were the same for all subgroups, regardless of age, education, political affiliation, or opinion on inequality and pay. “In sum,” the researchers concluded, “respondents underestimate actual pay gaps, and their ideal pay gaps are even further from reality than those underestimates.”

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Can man stop himself?

Burning Down The House: Land, Water & Food (Eastwood)

I’m sure when Talking Heads wrote “Burning Down The House” that they didn’t exactly have financial collapse and environmental degradation in mind. Although with a verse like “Hold tight wait till the party’s over. Hold tight we’re in for nasty weather. There has got to be a way. Burning down the house” it’s hard not to see that song as strangely prophetic. What we are now doing to the planet and to human society is exactly that – burning down the house while we are still living in it. Everyone needs fuel, especially during a bitter winter, but only a mad man starts deconstructing the house in order to burn bits of it in the stove or fireplace. Almost as mad as that is stealing bits of other people’s houses to burn, but that at least is not soiling your own doorstep – well not at first.

In a world of limited resources and limited space we’ve now reached the point where raiding our neighbours’ houses is the same thing as raiding our own house, because the net effect is the same – disaster on an unprecedented level. Of course it’s easier to live in denial and keep on cannibalising the world’s vital resources at an ever-increasing rate and pretend that it’s business as usual, but in reality it is anything but that. The alarm bells from commentators from all sectors: science, economics, religion etc. are getting louder and more frequent, better argued and with the raw data to back it up, but we are still not listening. Of course, the alarm bell was being rung fifty or more years ago by people such as Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1957, the now retiring Lester Brown and the late Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring).

Nobody really listened that well back then, although governments paid lip-service to these troublesome do-gooders. Now we know that what they said was entirely true, that we are headed for disaster and yet will still only get the tired old lip-service, as before or Koch Brother inspired denial. The evidence is clearly there that we are depleting all of our resources far too quickly, especially the land we use to produce food and draw raw materials from. In part a consequence of this, the fresh water supplies that are even more vital are also being depleted way too fast. Devastation of the land, especially deforestation exacerbates water loss and soil erosion. Couple this with increased damming of rivers, pollutant run-off into rivers, fracking and mining and you’ve a recipe for a water crisis, which will, in turn, lead to a food crisis.

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Amen.

The Warren Effect: Here Is A Bluff That Needs To Be Called (Esquire)

Let us be quite definite about this. Any Democratic politician who thinks this is a bad situation – or, worse, will not stand by a Democratic colleague in this situation – is not worth the hankie to blow Joe Lieberman’s nose.

Representatives from Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street, sources familiar with the discussions said this week. Bank officials said the idea of withholding donations was not discussed at a meeting of the four banks in Washington but it has been raised in one-on-one conversations between representatives of some of them. However, there was no agreement on coordinating any action, and each bank is making its own decision, they said.

My god, what a prodigious bluff. Also, my god, what towering arrogance? These guys own half the world and have enough money to buy the other half, and they’re threatening the party still most likely to control the White House because they don’t like the Senator Professor’s tone? Her tone? Sherrod Brown’s tone? These are guys who should be worried about the tone of the guard who’s calling them down to breakfast at Danbury and they’re concerned about the tenderness of their Savile Row’d fee-fees? Honkies, please.

The tensions are a sign that the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis – the bank bailouts and the fights over financial reforms to rein in Wall Street – are still a factor in the 2016 elections. Citigroup has decided to withhold donations for now to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee over concerns that Senate Democrats could give Warren and lawmakers who share her views more power, sources inside the bank told Reuters.

Tensions? These are the guys who should have spent the last six years going door to door apologizing to every American for blowing up the world economy and then buying up the splinters. That is, they should have been going door-to-door to apologize to all those Americans who still have doors they can call their own. Call this. Do it now. Tell them their money is no good here any more. Give these brigands the 86 the way any respectable saloonkeeper gives the heave to a chronic deadbeat who’s run up an unpayable tab. Show the country in simple (and not necessarily civil) words what these people really are.

Demonstrate, speech by speech, that they have no loyalty to the political entity that is the United States of America, that they are stateless gombeen bastards who would sell this country’s democracy off like a subprime mortgage to put another ten bucks into their pockets. They are threatening the people whom they still should be thanking for saving them from themselves. And Senator Professor Warren is only their most conspicuous target. Don’t kid yourselves, this is a message they’re sending to every politician, up and down the line, national and local. Don’t cross us. We own you. There is only one response for a democratic people to make to this ongoing gross obscenity. Bring it, motherfkers. Bring your lunch. And your lawyers.

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What could possibly go wrong?

Companies Go All-In Before Rate Hike, Issue Record Debt In Q1 (Zero Hedge)

It should come as no surprise that Q1 was a banner quarter for corporate debt issuance as struggling oil producers tapped HY markets to stay afloat, companies scrambled to max out the stock-buyback-via-balance-sheet re-leveraging play before a certain “diminutive” superwoman in the Eccles Building decides to do the unthinkable and actually hike rates, and there was M&A. As we discussed last week, rising stock prices have tipped investors’ asset allocation towards equities even as money continues to flow into bonds, meaning that yet more money must be funneled into fixed income for rebalancing purposes, which ironically drives demand for the very same debt that US corporates are using to fund the very same buy backs that are driving equity outperformance in the first place. Put more simply: the bubble machine is in hyperdrive. Not only did Q1 mark a record quarter for issuance, March supply also hit a record at $143 billion, tying the total put up in May of 2008. Here’s more from BofAML:

1Q set records for both supply and trading volumes in high grade, as new issue supply volumes reached $348bn, up from the previous record of $310bn in 1Q- 2014, whereas trading volumes averaged 15.6bn per day, up from the previous record of $14.3bn during the same quarter last year… Issuance in March totaled $143bn and it tied with May 2008 and September of 2013 for the highest monthly supply on record going back to at least 1998. September of 2013 was the month when the record $49bn VZ deal was priced… Supply in March was supported by low interest rates (encouraging opportunistic issuance on the supply side and supporting investor demand by diminishing interest rate risk concerns) and a busy M&A-related calendar. Some of these trends will continue in April, although investors are becoming more concerned about the Fed hiking cycle…

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The China casino.

Shanghai Traders Make Trillion-Yuan Stock Bet With Borrowed Cash (Bloomberg)

Shanghai traders now have more than 1 trillion yuan ($161 billion) of borrowed cash riding on the world’s highest-flying stock market. The outstanding balance of margin debt on the Shanghai Stock Exchange surpassed the trillion-yuan mark for the first time on Wednesday, a nearly fourfold jump from just 12 months ago. The city’s benchmark index has surged 86% during that time, more than any of the world’s major stock gauges. While the extra buying power that comes from leverage has fueled the Shanghai Composite Index’s rally, it’s also sending equity volatility to five-year highs and may accelerate losses if a market reversal forces traders to sell.

Margin debt has increased even after regulators suspended three of the nation’s biggest brokers from adding new accounts in January and said securities firms shouldn’t lend to investors with less than 500,000 yuan. “It’s like a two-edged sword,” said Wu Kan, a money manager at Dragon Life Insurance Co. in Shanghai, which oversees about $3.3 billion. “When the market starts a correction or falls, it will increase the magnitude of declines.” In a margin trade, investors use their own money for just a portion of their stock purchase, borrowing the rest from a brokerage. The loans are backed by the investors’ equity holdings, meaning that they may be compelled to sell when prices fall to repay their debt.

Chinese investors have been piling into the stock market after the central bank cut interest rates twice since November and authorities from the China Securities Regulatory Commission to central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan endorsed the flow of funds into equities. Traders have opened 2.8 million new stock accounts in just the past two weeks, almost on par with Chicago’s entire population. The outstanding balance of the margin debt on China’s smaller exchange in Shenzhen was 493.8 billion yuan on March 31. That puts the combined figure for China’s two main bourses at the equivalent of about $241 billion. In the U.S., which has a stock market almost four times the size of China’s, margin debt on the New York Stock Exchange was about $465 billion at the end of February.

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Strong effort by Ambrose. He manages to look behind the obvious veil: “When Warren Buffett suggests that Europe might emerge stronger after a salutary purge of its weak link in Greece, he confirms his own rule that you should never dabble in matters beyond your ken.”

Greek Defiance Mounts As Alexis Tsipras Turns To Russia And China (AEP)

Two months of EU bluster and reproof have failed to cow Greece. It is becoming clear that Europe’s creditor powers have misjudged the nature of the Greek crisis and can no longer avoid facing the Morton’s Fork in front of them. Any deal that goes far enough to assuage Greece’s justly-aggrieved people must automatically blow apart the austerity settlement already fraying in the rest of southern Europe. The necessary concessions would embolden populist defiance in Spain, Portugal and Italy, and bring German euroscepticism to the boil. Emotional consent for monetary union is ebbing dangerously in Bavaria and most of eastern Germany, even if formulaic surveys do not fully catch the strength of the undercurrents. This week’s resignation of Bavarian MP Peter Gauweiler over Greece’s bail-out extension can, of course, be over-played. He has long been a foe of EMU.

But his protest is unquestionably a warning shot for Angela Merkel’s political family. Mr Gauweiler was made vice-chairman of Bavaria’s Social Christians (CSU) in 2013 for the express purpose of shoring up the party’s eurosceptic wing and heading off threats from the anti-euro Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). Yet if the EMU powers persist mechanically with their stale demands – even reverting to terms that the previous pro-EMU government in Athens rejected in December – they risk setting off a political chain-reaction that can only eviscerate the EU Project as a motivating ideology in Europe. Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission’s chief, understands the risk perfectly, warning anybody who will listen that Grexit would lead to an “irreparable loss of global prestige for the whole EU” and crystallize Europe’s final fall from grace.

When Warren Buffett suggests that Europe might emerge stronger after a salutary purge of its weak link in Greece, he confirms his own rule that you should never dabble in matters beyond your ken. Alexis Tsipras leads the first radical-Leftist government elected in Europe since the Second World War. His Syriza movement is, in a sense, totemic for the European Left, even if sympathisers despair over its chaotic twists and turns. As such, it is a litmus test of whether progressives can pursue anything resembling an autonomous economic policy within EMU. There are faint echoes of what happened to the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, a litmus test for the Latin American Left in its day. His experiment in land reform was famously snuffed out by a CIA coup in 1954, with lasting consequences. It was the moment of epiphany for Che Guevara, then working as a volunteer doctor in the country.

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Believe it or not, this thing will have to reach a conclusion soon.

Greece Threatens Default As Fresh Reform Bid Falters (Telegraph)

The Greek government has threatened to default on its loans to the International Monetary Fund, as Athens continued its battle to convince creditors for a fresh injection of bail-out cash. Greece’s interior minister told Germany’s Spiegel magazine, his country would not respect a looming €450m loan repayment to the fund on April 9, without a release of much-needed bail-out funds. “If no money is flowing on April 9, we will first determine the salaries and pensions paid here in Greece and then ask our partners abroad to achieve consensus that we will not pay €450 million to the IMF on time,” said Nikos Voutzis. The cash-strapped government has struggled to keep up with its wage and pensions obligations having agreed a bail-out extension on February 20.

Athens insists it has enough money to last it until the middle of April, but a final agreement on any deal is unlikely to be secured before the end of the month. A Greek government spokesperson later denied the reports of a deliberate default, saying the country still hoped for a “positive outcome” to its debt negotiations. The comments came as the eurozone’s working group discussed a new 26-page plan of reforms from Athens on Wednesday. Aiming to generate an estimated €6bn in 2015, Athens has pledged a range of revenue-raising measures including cracking down on tax evasion, carrying out an audit on overseas bank transfers, and introducing a “luxury tax”. The document also warned brinkmanship on the part of the eurozone meant the “viability” of the currency union was now “in question.”

“It is necessary now, without further delay to turn a corner on the mistakes of the past and to forge a new relationship between member states, a relationship based on solidarity, resolve, mutual respect,” said the proposal. The Leftist government has continually fallen short of creditor demands, who hold the purse strings on €7.2bn in bail-out cash the government requires over the next three months. However, the latest blueprint is unlikely to satisfy lenders as it lacks details on labour market liberalisation or pensions reforms. Previous privatisations of the country’s assets were also described as a “spectacular” failure, generating far less in revenues for the state than first envisaged..

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Wrong on purpose?

China’s Fuel Demand to Peak Sooner Than Oil Giants Expect (Bloomberg)

China’s biggest oil refiner is signaling the nation is headed to its peak in diesel and gasoline consumption far sooner than most Western energy companies and analysts are forecasting. If correct, the projections by China Petroleum & Chemical, or Sinopec, a state-controlled enterprise with public shareholders in Hong Kong, pose a big challenge to the world’s largest oil companies. They’re counting on demand from China and other developing countries to keep their businesses growing as energy consumption falls in more advanced economies. “Plenty of people are talking about the peak in Chinese coal, but not many are talking about the peak in Chinese diesel demand, or Chinese oil generally,” said Mark C. Lewis at Kepler Cheuvreux. “It is shocking.”

Sinopec has offered a view of the country that should serve as a reality check to any oil bull. For diesel, the fuel that most closely tracks economic growth, the peak in China’s demand is just two years away, in 2017, according to Sinopec Chairman Fu Chengyu, who gave his outlook on a little reported March 23 conference call. The high point in gasoline sales is likely to come in about a decade, he said, and the company is already preparing for the day when selling fuel is what he called a “non-core” activity. That forecast, from a company whose 30,000 gas stations and 23,000 convenience stores arguably give it a better view on the market than anyone else, runs counter to the narrative heard regularly from oil drillers from the U.S. and Europe that Chinese demand for their product will increase for decades to come.

“From 2010 to 2040, transportation energy needs in OECD32 countries are projected to fall about 10% while in the rest of the world these needs are expected to double,” Exxon Mobil said in a December report on its view of the future. “China and India will together account for about half of the global increase.” Exxon expects most of that growth to be driven by commercial transportation for heavy-duty vehicles, specifically ships, trucks, planes and trains that run on diesel and similar fuels. BP’s latest public projection for China, released in February, sounds a similar note. “Energy consumed in transport grows by 98%. Oil remains the dominant fuel but loses market share, dropping from 90% to 83% in 2035.”

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“Asian-Pacific refiners are forecast to add 5.4 million barrels a day of capacity in the next five years..”

The Saudis Are Losing Their Lock on Asian Oil Sales (Bloomberg)

Ships carrying oil from Mexico docked in South Korea this year for the first time in more than two decades as the global fight for market share intensifies. Latin American producers are providing increasing amounts of heavy crude to bargain-hungry Asian refiners in a challenge to Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter and the region’s dominant supplier. “By diversifying, more Asian refiners will be able to reduce the clout that Saudi Arabia has on the market,” said Suresh Sivanandam, a refining and chemical analyst with Wood Mackenzie Ltd. in Singapore. “They will be getting more bargaining power for sure.”

The U.S., enjoying a surge of light oil from shale formations, has raised imports of heavy grades from Canada, displacing crude from nations such as Mexico and Venezuela. That’s boosting South American deliveries to Asia even after Saudi Arabia cut prices for March oil sales to the region, its largest market, to the lowest in at least 14 years. The shale boom also has transformed the flow of oil to Asia. South Korea received its first shipment of Alaskan crude in at least eight years as output from Texas and North Dakota displaces oil that fed U.S. refineries for years. The country was one of the first to receive a cargo of the ultralight U.S. crude known as condensate after export rules were eased.

Petrobras and partner operators are also shipping to Asia and were scheduled to load nine tankers bound for the region in March, according to Energy Aspects, as Latin American oil’s discount to Middle East benchmark Dubai widens to almost double the average of the past year. Asian-Pacific refiners are forecast to add 5.4 million barrels a day of capacity in the next five years, according to Gaffney, Cline & Associates, a petroleum consultant.

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“April is a crucial month for the industry because it’s when lenders are due to recalculate the value of properties that energy companies staked as loan collateral.” Calculations until now are stil based on $90 oil.

Reckoning Arrives for Cash-Strapped Oil Firms Amid Bank Squeeze (Bloomberg)

Lenders are preparing to cut the credit lines to a group of junk-rated shale oil companies by as much as 30% in the coming days, dealing another blow as they struggle with a slump in crude prices, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sabine Oil & Gas became one of the first companies to warn investors that it faces a cash shortage from a reduced credit line, saying Tuesday that it raises “substantial doubt” about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern. About 10 firms are having trouble finding backup financing, said the people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because the information hasn’t been announced. April is a crucial month for the industry because it’s when lenders are due to recalculate the value of properties that energy companies staked as loan collateral.

With those assets in decline along with oil prices, banks are preparing to cut the amount they’re willing to lend. And that will only squeeze companies’ ability to produce more oil. “If they can’t drill, they can’t make money,” said Kristen Campana at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP’s finance and financial restructuring groups. “It’s a downward spiral.” Sabine, the Houston-based exploration and production company that merged with Forest Oil Corp. last year, told investors Tuesday that it’s at risk of defaulting on $2 billion of loans and other debt if its banks don’t grant a waiver. Publicly traded firms are required to disclose such news to investors within four business days, under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules.

Some of the companies facing liquidity shortfalls will also disclose that they have fully drawn down their revolving credit lines like Sabine, according to one of the people. The credit discussions are ongoing and a number of banks may opt to be more lenient, giving companies more time to prepare for bigger cuts later in the year, the people said. Credit lines for some of the companies may be reduced by as little as 10%, they said. The companies are among speculative-grade energy producers that were able to load up on cheap debt as crude prices climbed above $100 a barrel. The borrowing limits are tied to reserves, the amount of oil and gas a company has in the ground that can profitably be extracted based on its land holdings. With oil prices plunging below $50 from last year’s peak of $107 in June, some are now fighting to survive.

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Commodities have been overvalued for a long time, due to crazy expectations for China growth.

Appalachia Miners Wiped Out by Coal Glut That They Can’t Reverse (Bloomberg)

Douglas Blackburn has been crawling in and out of the coal mines of Central Appalachia since he was a boy accompanying his father and grandfather some 50 years ago. The only time that Blackburn, now a coal industry consultant, remembers things being this bad was in the 1990s. Back then, he estimates, almost 40% of the region’s mines went bankrupt. “It’s a similar situation,” said Blackburn, who owns Blackacre, a Richmond, Va consulting firm. Now, like then, the principal problem is sinking coal prices. They’ve dropped 33% over the past four years to levels that have made most mining companies across the Appalachia mountain region unprofitable. To make matters worse, there’s little chance of a quick rebound in prices. That’s because idling a mine to cut output and stem losses isn’t an option for many companies.

The cost of doing so – even on a temporary basis – has become so prohibitive that it can put a miner out of business fast, Blackburn and other industry analysts say. So companies keep pulling coal out of the ground, opting to take a small, steady loss rather than one big writedown, in the hope that prices will bounce back. That, of course, is only adding to the supply glut in the U.S., the world’s second-biggest producer, and driving prices down further. It’s become, in essence, a trap for miners. “You have this really perverse situation where they keep producing,” James Stevenson at IHS said in a telephone interview. “You’re just shoveling coal into this market that’s oversupplied.” Companies will dig up at least 17 million tons more coal than power plants need this year, Morgan Stanley estimates. Coal is burned at the plants to generate electricity. That’s creating the latest fossil fuel glut in the U.S., joining oil and natural gas.

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I was just sent this. Don’t know enough about it, I must admit. The article suggests that prices are still 11% higher than 3 months ago. That would seem to mean they rose 20% or so in 2015. It doesn’t make much sense to me right now.

World Dairy Prices Slide 10.8% On Supply Concerns (NZ Herald)

International dairy prices continued to reverse gains made early this year at this morning’s GlobalDairyTrade (GDT) auction, putting downward pressure on Fonterra’s $4.70 a kg farmgate milk price forecast and raising concerns about next season’s likely payout. The GDT price index fell by 10.8% compared with the last sale a fortnight ago, when prices dropped by 8.8%. Big falls were recorded for the key products of wholemilk powder – down 13.3% to US$2,538 a tonne, skim milk powder – down 9.9% to US$2,467/tonne. Wholemilk prices are now just 11% higher than than they were by the end of 2014. ANZ rural economist Con Williams said that with milk powder making up the bulk of New Zealand’s product mix, the GDT result suggested a payout of $4.50-4.70 a kg this year.

The largest price falls at the auction were generally seen in the longer-dated contracts, up to 6 months out – into the new season. “While these prices remain higher than those for the end of this season, the curve has flattened, suggesting less price recovery is now anticipated – not boding well for next year’s payout,” Williams said. The fall comes as the New Zealand season enters its final phase, with about 80% of production now out of the way. Most of the price weakness was put down to better-than-expected supply, with the effects of this year’s drought being offset by rain in many parts of the country.

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Warren!

CFTC Charges Kraft, Mondelez With Manipulating Wheat Futures (MarketWatch)

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Wednesday charged Kraft Foods and Mondelez Global with manipulating wheat futures and cash wheat prices. The CFTC says that, in response to high cash wheat prices in summer 2011, the two companies developed and executed in early December 2011 a strategy to buy $90 million of wheat futures they didn’t intend on receiving. The companies expected the market would react to their “enormous” long position in futures by lowering cash prices, the CFTC said. They later earned more than $5.4 million in profits, according to the CFTC’s complaint. The agency says litigation is continuing against the companies and it is seeking disgorgement and civil monetary penalties.

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“3G, co-founded by Lemann, eliminated more than 7,000 Heinz jobs in 20 months..”

Brazil’s Richest Man May Reap $5.6 Billion in Kraft-Heinz Merger

Brazil’s richest man Jorge Paulo Lemann may add more than $5 billion to his personal fortune after ketchup maker H.J. Heinz merges with Kraft Foods. Heinz, controlled by Lemann’s 3G Capital and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, agreed last week to buy the macaroni-and-cheese maker Kraft in a cash-and-stock deal. Heinz’s 51% of the combined company will be worth about $45 billion, valuing Lemann’s stake at about $9.6 billion, said Kevin Dreyer, a portfolio manager at Gabelli Equity. Lemann has invested about $4 billion through 3G Capital, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“A combination of synergies from the deal and the sprinkling of the magic 3G dust is giving Kraft a higher valuation than it would otherwise have,” Dreyer said in a phone interview from New York. “3G has a track record of drastically expanding margins. There’s an expectation they’ll achieve the number they put in and then some.” 3G, co-founded by Lemann, eliminated more than 7,000 Heinz jobs in 20 months after taking the company over with Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett defended the job reductions his partners at 3G have taken when they buy businesses during a March 31 interview on CNBC.

The share price of Kraft, which surged 36% the day of the deal, can be used to estimate the future value of closely held Heinz, Dreyer said. His calculation takes into account the ketchup maker’s special dividend payment and assumes a market capitalization of about $87 billion for the new company. 3G owns 48% of Heinz, co-founder Alex Behring told reporters March 25. The buyout firm contributed $4.25 billion to Heinz in 2013 and another $4.8 billion in the Kraft deal. Lemann hasn’t disclosed his personal stake in Heinz. His investments in publicly traded companies show he tends to have a larger stake than Brazilian 3G partners Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira..

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Multiple currencies. Looks inevitable for Greece too.

The Cuban Money Crisis (Bloomberg)

The currency crisis starts about 75 feet into Cuba. I land in the late afternoon and, after clearing customs, step into the busy arrivals hall of Havana’s airport looking for help. I ask a woman in a gray, military-like uniform where I can change money. Follow me, she says. But she doesn’t turn left, toward the airport’s exchange kiosk. Called cadecas, these government-run currency shops are the only legal way, along with banks, to swap your foreign money for Cuba s tourist tender, the CUC. Instead, my guide turns right and only comes clean when we reach a quiet area at the top of an escalator. The official rate is 87 for a hundred, she whispers, meaning CUCs to dollars. I’m giving you 90. So it’s a good deal for you.

I want to convert $500, and she doesn’t blink an eye. Go in the men’s room and count your money out, she instructs. I’ll do the same in the ladies room. The bathroom is crowded, with not one but two staff and the usual traffic of an airport in the evening. There s no toilet paper. In an unlit stall I try counting to 25 while laying $20 bills on my knees. There’s an urgent knock, and under the door I see high heels. I’m still counting, I say. She’s back two minutes later and pushes her way into my stall. We trade stacks, count, and the tryst is over. For my $500, I get 450 CUCs, the currency that’s been required for the purchase of almost anything important in Cuba since 1994. CUCs aren’t paid to Cubans; islanders receive their wages in a different currency, the grubby national peso that features Che Guevara’s face, among others, but is worth just 1/25th as much as a CUC.

Issued in shades of citrus and berry, the CUC dollarized, tourist-friendly money has for 21 years been the key to a better life in Cuba, as well as a stinging reminder of the difference between the haves and the have-nots. But that’s about to change: Cuba is going to kill the CUC. Described as a matter of fairness by President Raul Castro, the end of the two-currency system is also the key to overhauling the uniquely incompetent and centrally planned chaos machine that is the Cuban economy.

Even in Cuba there are markets, and the effects of Castro’s October announcement of a five-step plan for phasing out the CUC are already rippling out to every wallet in the country. The government has issued notifications and price conversion charts, and introduced new, larger bills to supplement the low-value national peso. Over the next year, the CUC will be invalidated what Cuban economists call Day Zero and then, in steps four and five, the regular Cuban peso will become exchangeable and be floated against a basket of five currencies: the yuan, the euro, the U.S. dollar, and two others to be named later.

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But still in complete denial: “..the governor’s action won’t mean mandatory rationing for households.”

California Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Of 25% Amid Record Drought (WSJ)

California Gov. Jerry Brown ordered unprecedented mandatory water cuts across the Golden State after the latest measurements show the state’s mountain snowpack – which accounts for roughly a third of California’s water supply – has shrunk to a record low of 5% of normal for this time of year. The Democratic governor took the action on Wednesday after accompanying state surveyors into the Sierra Nevada mountains to manually verify electronic readings that show an average snow water equivalent of 1.4 inches, the lowest ever recorded on April 1. “Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” the governor said. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action.”

Gov. Brown directed the State Water Resources Control Board to implement mandatory water reductions of 25%. Details on how the cuts would be implemented weren’t immediately released, although the governor said in his order that reductions would fall hardest in water districts that haven’t adequately followed his voluntary calls for conservation last year. According to monthly surveys of water use, conservation levels have varied widely around the state. In general, reductions have been lower in Southern California than the rest of the state, in part because of the region’s concentration of estate-sized lots homes and golf courses. A spokesman for the state water control board, which has already ordered limits in outdoor lawn watering, said the governor’s action won’t mean mandatory rationing for households.

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Mar 142015
 
 March 14, 2015  Posted by at 7:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Wyland Stanley General Motors exhibit, San Francisco 1939

Why The Dollar Is Rising As The Global Monetary Bubble Craters (David Stockman)
American Mystery Story: Consumers Don’t Spend Even In Booming Job Market (BBG)
Surprise: US Economic Data Have Been the World’s Most Disappointing (Bloomberg)
Why We’re At Risk Of A QE Trap: Richard Koo (CNBC)
Roubini Greek Doom Scenario Is So Bad It May Keep the Euro Intact (Bloomberg)
Merkel’s Office Denies ‘Private Feud’ Between Greece And Germany (Guardian)
Power Struggle in Brussels and Berlin over Fate of Greece (Spiegel)
Tsipras Reaches Out to Euro Region Amid Spat With Germany (Bloomberg)
Schism Between Germany And Greece Grows Wider By The Day (Guardian)
US Seeks Billions From Global Banks For Currency Manipulation (Bloomberg)
The Fed Gives A Giant F##k You to Working Class Americans (Beversdorf)
Oil Plunges On Bloated US Supply (CNBC)
Shale Producer Whiting Draws Exxon, Others as Suitors (Bloomberg)
The Coming Chinese Crackup (WSJ)
Japan’s Orwellian Politics About Ukraine (Eric Zuesse)
Hillary’s Email Mess Gets Messier (Pam Martens)
For David Brooks, The Rich Are People, the Poor Are Numbers (Matt Taibbi)
California Has About One Year Of Water Left. Will You Ration Now? (NASA)

“Won’t you make money shorting the doomed dollar? Heavens no! At least not any time soon.”

Why The Dollar Is Rising As The Global Monetary Bubble Craters (David Stockman)

Contra Corner is not about investment advice, but its unstinting critique of the current malignant monetary regime does not merely imply that the Wall Street casino is a dangerous place for your money. No, it screams get out of harms’ way. Now! Yet I am constantly braced with questions about the US dollar and its impending demise. The reasoning seems to be that if America is a debt addicted dystopia—-and it surely is—- won’t the US dollar sooner or later go down in flames as the day of reckoning materializes? Won’t you make money shorting the doomed dollar? Heavens no! At least not any time soon. The reason is simply that the other three big economies of the world—Japan, China and Europe—are in even more disastrous condition.

Worse still, their governments and central banks are actually more clueless than Washington, and are conducting policies that are flat out lunatic—–meaning that their faltering economies will be facing even more destructive punishment from policies makers in the days ahead. Indeed, Draghi, Kuroda and the commissars of red capitalism in Beijing make Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer (Fed Vice-Chairman) appear to be slightly sober. So as trite as it sounds, the US dollar is the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry. And on a relative basis, its is going to look even cleaner as two decades of monetary madness around the world finally hit the shoals. You have to start with a stark assessment of the other three major economies.

To hear the Wall Street analysts and economists tell it, Japan, China and Europe are just variants of the US economy with different mixes of pluses and minuses, experiencing somewhat different stages of the economic cycle and obviously shaped by their own diverse brands of domestic politics and economic governance. Yet despite these surface difference, the non-US big three economies are held to be just part of a global economic convoy heading for continued economic growth, rising living standards and higher stock market prices. Actually, not so. Japan is a bankrupt old age colony. China is the most monumental credit and construction Ponzi in human history. Europe is a terminal victim of socialist welfare and statist dirigisme. All three are attempting to defer the day of reckoning via a resort to a final spasm of money printing and central bank manipulation that is so desperate and crazy that it can only end in disaster.

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See: The American Story Is A Mystery Only to Economists

American Mystery Story: Consumers Don’t Spend Even In Booming Job Market (BBG)

It’s an American mystery story: More people have jobs and extra pocket money from lower gas prices, but they aren’t buying as much as economists expected. The government’s count of how much people shelled out at retailers fell in February for a third consecutive month. Payrolls are up 863,000 over the same period. The chart below shows retail sales and payrolls generally move in the same direction, until now. The divergence could portend lower levels of economic growth if Americans’ usually reliable penchant to spend is less than what it once was.


YoY growth in U.S. retail and food services sales (red) against YoY change in non-farm payrolls (blue).
Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics

“The expenditures that add up to gross domestic product are coming in a lot softer than employment,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research LLC. “Why would retailers be hiring if sales are falling? Why would they be boosting hours if sales are falling and why would they be paying more?” Also, take a look at the household saving rate. It’s gone up as gas prices fell:

Ben Herzon, a senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, isn’t that worried yet. As usual, the data is quirky. First, he notes, “it was crazy cold in February.” Aside from stocking up on milk in the snowstorm, staying indoors was probably a more attractive option for most shoppers. Purchases at online retailers in February showed a 2.2% increase, the largest since March 2014. In the region from the Mississippi River to the East Coast, Americans in 23 states lived through a “top-10-coldest February” in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data back to the start of 1895. Herzon notes that lower gas prices also depressed the count in prior months. The government is adding up dollars spent, so fewer dollars to fill a gas tank results in lower sales.

That even bleeds into narrower measures of retail sales because grocery stores such as Safeway, Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club also sell gasoline. Herzon is counting on a March rebound. There won’t be the weather to blame anymore, and gas prices have rebounded off their lows of late January and early February. The average price of a gallon of unleaded gas $2.45 Wednesday compared with $2.06 Feb. 1, according to AAA. “Payroll employment has been great, and it is generating a lot of labor income that you think would be spent,” Herzon said. “March should be a rebound. Our story would be wrong if it doesn’t happen.”

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How wrong Bloomberg usually is.

Surprise: US Economic Data Have Been the World’s Most Disappointing (Bloomberg)

It’s not only the just-released University of Michigan consumer confidence report and February retail sales on Thursday that surprised economists and investors with another dose of underwhelming news. Overall, U.S. economic data have been falling short of prognosticators’ expectations by the most in six years. The Bloomberg ECO U.S. Surprise Index, which measures whether data beat or miss forecasts, fell to the lowest since 2009, when the nation was in the deepest recession since the Great Depression. There’s been one notable exception to the gloom, and it’s a big one: payrolls. The economy added 295,000 jobs in February and 1.3 million over four months, a reflection of a healthier labor market in which the unemployment rate has fallen to the lowest in almost seven years.

Most everything else? Blah. This month alone, personal income and spending, manufacturing as measured by the Institute for Supply Management, auto sales, factory orders, and retail sales have all come in a bit weak. Citigroup keeps economic surprise indexes for the world, and its scoreboard shows the U.S. is most disappointing relative to consensus forecasts, with Latin America and Canada next, as of March 12. Emerging markets were supposed to be hurt by falling oil prices but are now delivering positive surprises. U.S. policymakers frequently talk about weakness in Europe and China, though both are exceeding expectations. And there’s one rub. The surprise shortfall in the U.S. doesn’t necessarily mean the world’s largest economy is in dire straights. It’s just falling short of some perhaps overly elevated expectations.

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“When no one is borrowing money, monetary policy is largely useless..”

Why We’re At Risk Of A QE Trap: Richard Koo (CNBC)

The problem with central banks’ massive bond-buying programs is that if consumers and businesses fail to borrow money to stimulate economic growth, the policy is rendered mostly “useless,” one Nomura economist said Friday. The U.S. and U.K. embarked on asset-purchase, or QE programs, following the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Japan joined the QE club in 2013 and the ECB began its 1 trillion euro ($1.06 trillion) bond-buying stimulus this week. “Both the U.S. and Europe are facing the same problem– which is that we are in a situation where the private sector in any of these economies is not borrowing money at zero interest rates or repairing balance sheets following what happened in the crisis,” Richard Koo, Chief Economist at Nomura, told CNBC on the side lines of the Ambrosetti Spring Workshop in Italy.

“When no one is borrowing money, monetary policy is largely useless,” he added. In the run-up to the launch of QE in the euro zone, loans to the private sector, which are a gauge of economic health, contracted. Data published late last month showed that the volume of loans to private firms and households fell by 0.1% on year in January, compared with a 0.5% drop in December. According to Koo, major central banks are holding reserves far in excess of levels they need because of the monetary stimulus. This has not led to a rise in private sector spending because big economies are struggling with a balance sheet recession – a situation where companies are focused on paying down debt rather than spending or investing – increasing the risk of QE trap.

“In a national economy if someone is saving money, you need someone to borrow money and this is the part that is missing. They [central banks] are pumping money but no one is borrowing, so you get negative interest rates and all sorts of distortions,” Koo said. He added that instead of looking to raise interest rates, the U.S. Federal Reserve should first focus on reducing its balance sheet which stands at over $4 trillion. The Fed, which meets next week, is widely expected to raise rates this year against a backdrop of improving economic data. “They [Fed policy makers] should not rush into a rate rise; they should reduce the balance sheet when people are not worried about inflation,” Koo said.

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Roubini’s scenario? Anyone could have told you this.

Roubini Greek Doom Scenario Is So Bad It May Keep the Euro Intact (Bloomberg)

Nouriel Roubini isn’t called “Dr. Doom” for nothing. He tends to be a glass half-empty kind of guy who worries a lot about looming crises. But in an interesting twist, when it comes to Greece, the economic professor’s not that concerned. Here’s why: the doomsday scenario he envisions if the country exited the euro zone is so bleak for the whole region that policy makers both in Athens and across Europe will never let it happen. It’s true other analysts are speculating that officials in Germany and other EU countries are more willing now to entertain the idea of a Greek exit, but that’s not how Roubini sees it.

Borrowing costs would soar for nations such as Italy and Spain and Europeans would race to withdraw cash from their bank accounts, according to Roubini, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. Even Germany – Greece’s main nemesis as it negotiates a new financial aid package from European leaders — recognizes this risk, he said in a Bloomberg Television interview Friday. “It doesn’t make sense to have a Greek exit,” he said. “There would be massive contagion.” While bond buyers are selling Greek bonds, they seem complacent about the risk to the rest of the euro region and have been pouring money into debt of Italy, Spain and Portugal, sending yields on those nations’ debt to record lows.

Spanish and Italian 10-year bonds are yielding just 1.2%. Greek debt, meanwhile, has been falling. Yields on Greece’s 10-year bonds rose to 10.7% Friday from 8.6% on Feb. 24. Rates on its 3-year notes have climbed to 19% from 12.4%. So, maybe investors are right to dismiss concerns that a Greek exit would infect all of Europe, even as the nation with one-quarter of its working-age population unemployed faces very real deadlines for making debt payments. While Greece made a €350 million loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund Friday, it faces another financial hurdle on March 20, when the government has to pay the IMF another €346 million and refinance €1.6 billion of treasury bills.

Tensions have risen between Greece and Germany since the election of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Jan. 25. Tsipras won on a platform of ending the austerity his Syriza party blames Chancellor Angela Merkel for pushing. Roubini says that, even though Germany has been vocal about its displeasure with Greece’s antics, everyone understands the potential consequences of failing to keep the region intact – which is why it won’t unravel. Dr. Doom almost sounds a little optimistic.

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“If one country leaves this union, the markets will immediately ask which country is next. And that could be the beginning of the end.”

Merkel’s Office Denies ‘Private Feud’ Between Greece And Germany (Guardian)

The spokesman of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has denied a “private feud” has broken out between Berlin and Athens, as the radical Syriza government battles to avoid leaving the single currency – a risk euro-watchers have dubbed “Grexident”. As Athens rushes to implement economic reforms and convince its creditors to extend emergency funding, Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s official spokesman, insisted Greece’s economic future should not be reduced to a face off between the two nations. “I neither see a private feud nor do I view the whole issue of Greece and how it solves its problems as a bilateral German-Greek topic”, he said, reiterating that Merkel wants Greece to stay inside the single currency.

Tensions between Greece and Germany have been running high, after Syriza rekindled a row over war reparations to the Greek people earlier this week. On Friday, France’s economics minister, Pierre Moscovici, said in a German magazine interview that a Greek exit from the euro would be a “catastrophe”, despite some analysts having sought to play down the consequences. “All of us in Europe probably agree that a Grexit would be a catastrophe – for the Greek economy, but also for the euro zone as a whole,” he told Der Spiegel. “If one country leaves this union, the markets will immediately ask which country is next. And that could be the beginning of the end.”

Greece has been granted a four-month window to implement economic reforms after striking a last-minute deal with its creditors to extend its €240bn bailout. Yanis Varoufakis, Syriza’s controversial finance minister, insisted his party would be able to satisfy the 20 February agreement – even if that means delaying some of its election promises. “We have a commitment, all of us, to reach an agreement by 20 April,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Italy. “If this means that, for the next few months that we have negotiations, we suspend or we delay the implementation of our [election] promises, we should do precisely that in the context to build trust with our partners,” he said. However, he is likely to face pressure from within his own party to live up to the anti-austerity rhetoric of the election campaign.

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Must read from Der Spiegel. Watch Juncker. I’ve said it before, he will play a role.

Power Struggle in Brussels and Berlin over Fate of Greece (Spiegel)

Many in the ECB are aware that they are operating at the very fringes of legality. French Executive Board member Benoît Coeuré issued a public warning a few days ago that the ECB is not allowed to finance the Greek government. Doing so, he said, is illegal. Draghi, said an official in Berlin, “could cut Greece off at any moment.” But, the official added, he doesn’t dare. Which means it is up to the politicians to find the way forward. And finding that path has become dependent on the ongoing conflict between Juncker and the EU member states, led by the chancellor. It has long been apparent that the Commission president wants to prevent a Grexit at all costs, at least since he received the Greek prime minister in Brussels five weeks ago as though welcoming a long lost friend.

Two weeks after that, Economic and Financial Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici presented a plan that looked more like a package for growth than like strict requirements for Greece. Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis had nothing but praise for the paper. The other Euro Group finance ministers weren’t nearly as enthusiastic. In the end, the Moscovici paper proved largely irrelevant, but it had, from Juncker’s perspective, had its effect. It was a demonstration of power; he had simply wanted to send a message to Merkel. The conflict between Brussels and Berlin is a fundamental one. Juncker is taking the position that Christian Democrats have supported for decades.

The European Union, in his view, is the answer to the horrors of the wars that destroyed Europe in the first half of the 20th century – and the Continent’s salvation, he believes, lies in further deepening the ties that bind the European Union together. It is no accident that he presented former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s book last fall. The book is called “Out of Concern for Europe,” and many have interpreted it as indirect criticism of Merkel’s approach to the EU. Though Merkel is a Christian Democrat herself, she has broken with the Kohl line. For her, Europe is not a matter of war and peace, but of euros and cents. Merkel has used the euro crisis to reduce the European Commission’s power and to return some of it to member-state capitals. From this perspective, she could be seen as a 21st century de Gaulle.

Juncker would like to get in her way and the Greece crisis is the instrument that has presented itself. “We have to keep the shop together,” Juncker has said repeatedly in background sessions with journalists in recent weeks. This Friday, Juncker received Tsipras in Brussels yet again, with the Greek prime minister also holding talks with European Parliament President Martin Schulz. Juncker entered office wanting to make the Commission, the European Union’s executive body, more powerful and more political — and thus far, he has been successful. He defanged the European Stability Pact, that German invention that was to prevent euro-zone member states from taking on too much debt. And he has ensured that France’s Socialist government receive an additional two years to reduce its budget deficit.

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Syriza is becoming a comedy act. Hard to predict.

Tsipras Reaches Out to Euro Region Amid Spat With Germany (Bloomberg)

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reached out to Greece’s creditors, saying he’ll iron out the kinks in relations with the rest of the euro area days after his government lodged a complaint about the German finance minister. Tsipras, speaking as his country met a loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund of about €350 million, said that Greece has already starting delivering the action required to release more bailout funding and that he expects the euro region to do its part. “We will solve all these misunderstandings,” Tsipras told reporters in Brussels on Friday before meeting with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. The Greek people need to hear a “hope message,” he said.

Tsipras and his finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, are negotiating with the euro region to release more funds from the country’s €240 billion bailout amid concern that his government could run out of cash at any moment. The Greece Public Debt Management Agency issued a payment order to be transferred to the IMF and the money will be deposited today, government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis said by telephone. Greek bonds fell, with the 10-year government bond yield gaining 29 basis points to 10.71% at 1:17 p.m in Athens. The Athens Stock Exchange dropped 1.1% to 785.53. The next financial hurdle comes on March 20, when the government has to pay the IMF another €346 millions and refinance €1.6 billion of treasury bills. That’s at the same time as EU leaders including Tsipras and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be meeting for a two-day summit in Brussels.

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“Ya boo to that, says Jens Weidmann [..] See if I care, says Varoufakis.”

Schism Between Germany And Greece Grows Wider By The Day (Guardian)

It is the politics of the playground. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is accused of calling his Greek counterpart Yanis Varoufakis “foolishly naive” in his dealings with the media. Athens lodges a formal complaint with Berlin, saying a minister of a country that is a “friend and ally” cannot go around insulting a colleague. Ya boo to that, says Jens Weidmann, the president of Germany’s Bundesbank. Greece is losing the trust of its partners and it is only right that the ECB should think very hard about whether it wants to extend its exposure to the crisis-ridden country. See if I care, says Varoufakis. I have never had the trust of the German government. What matters is that I have the trust of the Greek people at a time when the ECB is “asphyxiating” the country.

This outbreak of undiplomatic language might sound funny, but it isn’t. The schism between Germany and Greece is growing wider by the day. Unless Berlin and Athens can come to an amicable agreement, something that looks increasingly less likely, there are only two possible outcomes: Greece capitulates or Greece leaves the euro. Schäuble clearly believes that Greece has no intention of going back to the drachma. Varoufakis has said as much, as has the new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras. However, if Greece wants to remain inside the single currency, it is going to need the cooperation and financial support of the other members of the club, including Germany. Greece is going to have to do what it is told by the troika of the ECB, the EU and the IMF at some point, so it makes no sense for Athens to start dredging up memories of German occupation in the second world war.

Varoufakis is making it even more likely that the rest of the eurozone will play hardball with Greece. It is not clear if Schäuble really said the words “foolishly naive” – but that would be a fair judgment if the end result is abject capitulation to whatever the troika demands. But as the Labour peer Meghnad Desai points out in an OMFIF blog, there is a way out for the Syriza-led coalition. That is to call a referendum on the basis of who governs Greece. As Desai notes, Tsipras and Varoufakis could say they had underestimated how difficult it would be to end austerity and it was up to the Greek people whether they wanted year after year of externally-imposed pain or exit from the eurozone.

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Peanuts.

US Seeks Billions From Global Banks For Currency Manipulation (Bloomberg)

The U.S. Justice Department is seeking about $1 billion each from global banks being investigated for manipulation of currency markets, according to two people familiar with the talks. The figure is a starting point in settlement discussions, with some banks being asked for more and some less than $1 billion. One bank that has cooperated from the beginning is expected to pay far less, one of the people said. Penalties of about $4 billion are on the table, according to one of the people, though the number could change markedly. Banks are pushing back harder than in some previous negotiations, including those for mortgage-backed securities, and the final penalties could be lower, people close to the talks said.

The discussions, which have begun in earnest in recent weeks, could lead to settlements that would resolve U.S. accusations of criminal activity in the currency markets against Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan, RBS and UBS. The government has also said it is preparing cases against individuals. Prosecutors are also pressing Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan and the Royal Bank of Scotland to plead guilty, people familiar with the matter have said. In the worldwide investigation into currency-rigging, six banks have already agreed to pay regulators about $4.3 billion. The Justice Department’s move signals that investigations are giving way to wrangling over issues such as whether the banks plead guilty to antitrust or fraud charges, what behaviors the banks will admit to in settlement documents and how much they will pay.

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Hats off to Beversdorf.

The Fed Gives A Giant F##k You to Working Class Americans (Beversdorf)

I was shocked today by the absolute gaul of the Fed releasing a statement about Net Worth in America reaching record levels. Now I get that they are under extreme pressure to sell the story that everything is rainbows and butterflies. But surely they understand that working class Americans are going along with the story because they really don’t have any say in our nation’s policies anymore. That doesn’t mean they want it thrown in their faces that the Fed has spent 6 years now inflating the wealth of the top 10% so much that it actually lifts the total wealth of the nation’s citizens to record highs. The ugly reality is that the bottom 80% of Americans experienced none of that gain. That’s right a big ole goose egg.

And so when the Fed via its ass pamper boy, Steve Liesman, start banging on about the fact that some sliver of society is being handed extraordinary wealth while the working class has lost 40% of their net worth since 2007, well a big fuck you right back at ya bub! The Fed is very aware that the bottom 80% of Americans own less than 5% of US equity markets. And so the Fed is very aware that its manipulation of stock prices such that it creates immense unearned wealth to those in the markets doesn’t reach the bottom 80%. So why celebrate the results of the stock market price manipulation?? It is embarrassing that our policymakers are either that inconsiderate or that stupid to celebrate such a brutal dislocation between the haves and have nots.

I don’t know what one can even say about the Fed making a celebratory statement like that today. It is somewhat beyond words. And really paints the picture as to how little thought goes into the lives and well being of the bottom 80%. Just to give you something to compare and contrast the situation of the bottom 80% here in the US to counter the Fed’s celebration today. I want you to think about how lucky we are not being in one of the PIIGS nations of Europe. These are the nations that are essentially bankrupt and just hanging on by the kindness of the Troika.

So there it is. While the average net worth of Americans is 4th in the world pulled up by the top 10%, the median net worth of Americans comes in the 19th spot. Yep, behind Spain, Italy and Ireland so 3 of the 5 PIIGS nations. Meaning the bottom 80% in these broke ass barely hanging on nations have more wealth than the bottom 80% of us here in America. So I’d like to ask the Fed, is it that you just hate the working class here in America and thus like to torment them or are you truly that stuck up your own asses that you just cannot see the light? Celebrating the fact you did today is downright nasty you lowlife scoundrel pieces of shit. It’s akin to a family showing off and celebrating a new born baby at the funeral of another family’s child. It is just a very ugly thing to do. Even if it wasn’t meant to be malicious it looks very much like a giant FU.

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“The industry has been watching oil supplies surge to 80-year highs..”

Oil Plunges On Bloated US Supply (CNBC)

Oil prices plunged on the double whammy of a surging dollar and a new report that raised worries about a U.S. oil glut that could send crude dramatically lower. The drop in oil also slammed the stock market, reeling too from the stronger dollar. The Dow tumbled more than 145 points to 17,749, while the S&P 500 lost 12 points to 2053. West Texas Intermediate futures for April fell 4.7% to settle at $44.84 per barrel, and Brent, the international benchmark, was trading below $55 per barrel. For WTI, the closing low of the year was $44.45 per barrel on Jan. 28, though it touched an intraday low of $43.58 per barrel on Jan. 29.

Oil analysts have expected the market to challenge those lows on strong U.S. supply, and a report Friday from the International Energy Agency fed those fears. The IEA said U.S. production increased by 115,000 barrels a day in February and the growing inventories threaten to drive prices lower. Oil was also hurt by gains in the dollar. The dollar index rose to a 52-week high, crossing above 100. “This has been a building situation—the massive inventory increases of the past several weeks and the production level showing no sign of relenting despite the decline in the rig count,” said John Kilduff analyst and founder at Again Capital. “What’s setting us up for another selloff is that we’re hitting a slack demand period in between the winter heating fuel season and the summer driving season.”

The industry has been watching oil supplies surge to 80-year highs, and inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub for WTI futures contracts continue to balloon. “There’s speculation the tanks in Cushing could get full or reach capacity,” said Kilduff. “If no further oil could get into that delivery point, it would send a ripple effect into the futures market and beyond. It could create a break.” He also said it could send cash prices lower across the U.S. and possibly globally. While some analysts expect to see $40 as a floor, other say it could be much lower if buyers don’t step up and the spiral is rapid. “If we test that low, going back to the $30s could be in the cards,” said Kilduff.

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Can’t be a good isgn that the largest Bakken producer must sell itself.

Shale Producer Whiting Draws Exxon, Others as Suitors (Bloomberg)

Whiting Petroleum, the North Dakota oil explorer, has attracted interest from Exxon Mobil and Continental Resources Inc. as it explores a sale of the entire company, people with knowledge of the situation said. Hess and Statoil are also looking at Denver-based Whiting. Whiting has set up a data room for potential buyers to evaluate the company’s financial information and asked them to submit bids next week, the people said. The discussions are ongoing and there’s no guarantee a deal will be reached. A potential deal for Whiting, the largest producer in North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation, may be the first in an anticipated pickup of merger activity for U.S. energy producers as they grapple with heavy debt and an oil selloff.

Continental, Exxon, Hess and Statoil are already among the 10 largest holders of acreage in the Bakken, a giant slab of oil-soaked rock that lies beneath Montana, North Dakota and parts of Canada, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Consolidation is likely to pick up in the oil patch this year as larger U.S. and international buyers seek to “snatch up” valuable shale producers, according to a statement from Paulson & Co., which owns 8.1% of Whiting. Whiting is probably exploring a sale along with other strategic alternatives, including selling assets, raising debt and selling shares in order to address “investor liquidity concerns,” Phillip Jungwirth, an analyst with Bank of Montreal, wrote in a research note last week.

Bloomberg News reported in February that Whiting was exploring selling up to $700 million of oil and natural gas processing assets. “While some reports implied Whiting was a distressed seller, we don’t view this as the case,” Jungwirth wrote. “We’d expect interest in Whiting to come from larger Bakken peers that are looking to expand their footprint.” Buying a shale producer such as Whiting is cheaper than it has been at any time in recent years as companies used new technology to unlock a boom in North American supplies, flooding world markets and depressing prices. The value of reserves held by about 75 drillers based on their reserves fell by a median of 25% by the end of 2014 compared to the previous year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

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Tyler Durden ran this week-old piece, which I had also missed. Don’t miss.

The Coming Chinese Crackup (WSJ)

Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated, China-watchers have been on high alert for telltale signs of regime decay and decline ever since the regime’s near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Since then, several seasoned Sinologists have risked their professional reputations by asserting that the collapse of CCP rule was inevitable. Others were more cautious—myself included. But times change in China, and so must our analyses. The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think. We don’t know what the pathway from now until the end will look like, of course. It will probably be highly unstable and unsettled. But until the system begins to unravel in some obvious way, those inside of it will play along—thus contributing to the facade of stability.

Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly. A single event is unlikely to trigger a peaceful implosion of the regime. Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état. With his aggressive anticorruption campaign—a focus of this week’s National People’s Congress—he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies. The Chinese have a proverb, waiying, neiruan—hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Mr. Xi is a genuinely tough ruler. He exudes conviction and personal confidence. But this hard personality belies a party and political system that is extremely fragile on the inside.

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How much longer for Abe?

Japan’s Orwellian Politics About Ukraine (Eric Zuesse)

Yukio Hatayama, who during 2009 and 2010 had been the first and only non-LDP, or non-one-party-state, Prime Minister of Japan (and he was then quickly ousted by the LDP), said in Crimea on Tuesday, March 10th, that Japan should not be so totally controlled by the U.S. Government, and that, “It’s shameful that information from Japanese and Western media is one-sided.” Hatayama also praised “the happy, peaceful life in Crimea,” as opposed to the war-torn and economically collapsing Ukraine, which the IMF, EU and especially the U.S., keep lending money to pay Ukraine to bomb the residents in Ukraine’s strongly anti-fascist eastern area. Japan’s LDP Foreign Minister, Fumio Kishida, promptly dismissed the Hatayama statement by saying that it came from a “gaffe-prone” man. Telling the truth is a ‘gaffe.’

Mitsuhiro Kimura, leader of another small anti-U.S.-control-of-Japan party, travelled with Hatayama, and supported this initiative for increasing trade and cultural exchanges with Crimea and with Russia generally. He said that this visit was “historic,” and that “Maybe it will give us a chance to influence Japan’s foreign policies and change them.” The Agence France Presse report on this event referred to Kimura’s party as “the right-wing political group Issuikai,” implicitly suggesting thereby that opposition to U.S. control of Japan is “right-wing.” This propaganda effort aimed to insinuate that since the U.S. had defeated the fascist Government of Japan in 1945, the LDP, which the U.S. installed in Japan post-War, can only be the opposite of fascist.

On 17 May 2007, Britain’s conservative Economist had headlined “Japan’s Ultra-Nationalists: Old Habits Die Hard,” and it reported that Kimura was rabble-rousing, and that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Kimura and other “ultra-nationalist” politicians in Japan constituted a “threat to democracy.” The Economist also noted, however, ironically, that: “It was Mr Abe’s own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who as prime minister cemented ties between the government, the uyoku dantai and the mob back in 1960, when he enlisted yakuza help against left-wing opponents of Japan’s alliance with America.“ Abe is considered, by the U.S. and its allies, to be “conservative,” instead of “far-right.”

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“The Department of State acknowledged receipt of the request but the AP has received nothing under that request after more than five years.”

Hillary’s Email Mess Gets Messier (Pam Martens)

There’s an old adage that goes: “never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” It’s generally interpreted to mean don’t go to war with the press. That would surely include syndicated reporters working for the Associated Press, which says in a lawsuit filed yesterday that it has “one billion readers, listeners and viewers.” Despite the sage advice, Hillary Clinton is now in a full blown war with the press over how she became the Decider in Chief over which government emails would be preserved from her time as Secretary of State versus the tens of thousands that she elected to erase, ruling them to be about personal matters.

AP has filed its lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State because the Federal agency has defied the Freedom of Information Act and stonewalled AP reporters for as long as five years over requests for records pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State. The lawsuit suggests a Department of State flagrantly ignoring Federal FOIA laws. One section reads: “In early March 2015, Secretary Clinton confirmed reports that she used a personal email account, rather than a government account, for government business during her tenure at State. Although AP’s FOIA requests have been pending for years, State first asked Secretary Clinton to turn over emails from that personal account only last summer.

Secretary Clinton reportedly provided about 50,000 pages of printed emails to State late last year, and has said she wants those emails to be released to the public. State’s failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s governmental emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP’s requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires.” Not only have Clinton’s emails been denied to AP reporters, but her daily calendar of appointments, record of phone calls and meetings have also been withheld for the past five years. All of this opacity is raising curiosity in the press as to just what might be hiding in these troves of unreleased documents.

The earliest request filed by the AP was by reporter Robert Burns on March 9, 2010, according to the lawsuit. Burns requested “a copy of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s daily calendar of appointments, phone calls, and meetings, from the first day of the Obama Administration to the present,” i.e., “from 1/20/2009 to [March 9, 2010].” The Department of State acknowledged receipt of the request but the AP has received nothing under that request after more than five years.

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Vintage Taibbi.

For David Brooks, The Rich Are People, the Poor Are Numbers (Matt Taibbi)

Everybody gets on famed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s case for quoting cab drivers, but say this about Friedman: At least he talks to somebody outside his own house. The same can’t be said for his colleague on the Times editorial page, David Brooks, who with this week’s “The Cost of Relativism” column has written roughly his 10 thousandth odious article about how rich people are better parents than the poor, each one apparently written without the benefit of actually talking to any poor people. The column is a review of a new book by the academic Robert Putnam called Our Kids, about a widening gap in the way the children of different classes are raised in America.

Putnam begins his book by telling a story about his childhood in the Fifties in Port Clinton, Ohio, when both rich and poor children grew up in two-parent households where the fathers had steady jobs. Since, then, Putnam argues, deindustrialization has led to increasingly segregated communities for the wealthy on the one hand, and a sharp decline in stability for poor children on the other. Here’s Brooks describing the findings: Roughly 10% of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70% of children born to high school grads do… High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

Brooks then goes on to relate some of the horrific case studies from the book – more on those in a moment – before coming to his inevitable conclusion, which is that poor people need to get off the couch, stop giving in to every self-indulgent whim, and discipline their wild offspring before they end up leaving their own illegitimate babies on our lawns: Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Brooks has devoted an extraordinary amount of his literary efforts over the years to this subject, focusing particularly on declining marriage rates among the poor. He wrote a piece last winter that ludicrously pooh-poohed the issue of income inequality, citing certain “behaviors” among the poor that “damage their long-term income prospects” and cause a “fraying” of the social fabric, single motherhood being an example.

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Dry.

California Has About One Year Of Water Left. Will You Ration Now? (NASA)

Given the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California’s winter was as well. As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too. Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins – that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined – was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014.

That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir. Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.

As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century. Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.

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