Nov 132021
 
 November 13, 2021  Posted by at 9:57 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , ,  68 Responses »


Mestre da Família Artés The Last Judgment and the Mass of Saint Gregory 1500-1520

 

US Appeals Court Again Rejects Biden’s Vaccine Mandate (RT)
Will Biden’s Vaccine-Mandate “Work-Around” Work with the Supreme Court? (Turley)
Why Covid Vaccine Mandates Are Completely Nonsensical (Kirsch)
Over 65: Health Pass Deactivated 6 Months And 5 Weeks After 2nd Dose (BFM)
CDC Crushes Rights of Naturally Immune Without Proof They Transmit Virus (Siri)
Latvia Bans Unvaccinated Lawmakers From Voting, Docks Pay (R.)
Austria To Declare Nationwide Lockdown For Unvaccinated People (BNO)
The Fight to Allow Doctors to “Doctor” Heads to a Virginia Court (FLCCC)
The Recognition (Kunstler)
When Science Speaks in Tongues: How Glossolalia can lead to Collapse (Bardi)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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https://twitter.com/i/status/1459187939116785664

 

 

 

 

“staggeringly overbroad” and an abuse of “extraordinary power.”

“critical to note that the (Biden Admin) makes no serious attempt to explain why OSHA and the President himself were against vaccine mandates before they were for one here.”

US Appeals Court Again Rejects Biden’s Vaccine Mandate (RT)

A US federal appeals court has again ruled against President Joe Biden’s national vaccine mandate for companies with 100 or more workers, shredding the policy as “staggeringly overbroad” and an abuse of “extraordinary power.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stark rebuke to Biden’s vaccine requirement for larger American companies in a ruling on Friday, stating that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) – the federal agency tapped to enforce the mandate – was not created to “make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.”

“The Mandate is staggeringly overbroad,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt said, noting that it does not take into account the diversity of workplaces across the country, nor the fact that Covid-19 “is more dangerous to some employees than to other employees.” As an example, he compared a hypothetical 28-year-old truck driver who works in isolation to a “62-year-old prison janitor” employed in more cramped conditions. The Biden administration initially announced the requirement in September, with OSHA following up earlier this month with an emergency order to enforce the mandate. The agency will require all workers at firms with more than 100 employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by early next year, or else test for the virus regularly and wear masks at all times while working.

The appeals court issued its first stay on November 6 after a litany of plaintiffs – including a number of companies and several US states – challenged the move, conducting an expedited judicial review. Friday’s ruling reaffirmed the pause, telling OSHA to “take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.” Despite the first stay, the White House has continued to urge businesses to follow the vaccine dictate and effectively ignore the ruling, potentially setting up a battle in the Supreme Court. While OSHA does have the power to issue what’s known as an “emergency temporary standard,” or ETS, the judge observed that only a single standard has survived legal scrutiny since the agency was founded in the 1970s. “The reason for the rarity of this form of emergency action is simple,” Engelhardt went on, adding that courts and OSHA itself have agreed “for generations” that such orders constitute “extraordinary power” which must be “delicately exercised, and only in those emergency situations which require it.”

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I can’t see the Supreme Court allowing the OSHA abuse.

Will Biden’s Vaccine-Mandate “Work-Around” Work with the Supreme Court? (Turley)

OSHA regulations are designed for dangers inherent in a given workplace or industry. In the case of hard hats, things fall, and workers need to protect their heads. Likewise, if workers are being exposed to a toxic chemical in a given industry, that industry can face an ETS. The idea is to stop businesses from creating dangerous conditions once people enter workplaces. But this national vaccine mandate is different. The administration arguably is using the workplace to make society at large safer. White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre seemed to make that point on Monday when she insisted that OSHA clearly has this authority because “more than 750,000 people have died of COVID. You have approximately 1,300 people a day, who continue to die a day, as I said, from COVID. If that’s not a grave danger, I don’t know what else is.”

However, those are people dying in society at large, not in workplaces. While some may have contracted the virus in the workplace, courts may demand a closer nexus to a “grave danger” inherent in the workplace. The White House has expressly admitted that it is seeking to “reduce the number of unvaccinated Americans by using regulatory powers and … these requirements will become dominant in the workplace.” It is not even clear that the rule is necessary. Courts have uniformly upheld the right of employers to impose mandatory vaccination or testing requirements as a condition for employment; states have enhanced authority over such public health measures, too.

This is, admittedly, a novel issue, and there are good arguments on both sides. But it also is a generally-worded statute that can be interpreted broadly, and I expect a split in court decisions — and that only increases the likelihood of a Supreme Court review. Once there, the Biden administration could be giving some justices an opportunity to review not mandates but OSHA’s discretion over such mandate orders. A majority of the court has shown an interest in rolling back the so-called Chevron Doctrine, which affords agencies great deference in the interpretation and enforcement of federal law. After long debating whether it even has this authority, OSHA has suddenly found it, and then has issued one of the most comprehensive health-based standards in its history — all without rule-making or debate. Ironically, the Supreme Court warned against such sudden agency “finds” of regulatory authority.

In 2014, the court ruled that “When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate a significant portion of the American economy, we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism. We expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decision of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Indeed, the Court recently rejected Biden’s effort to continue the eviction moratorium under the same type of sweeping interpretation by saying “[i]t strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the [agency] the sweeping authority that it asserts.”

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“..neither vaccine status nor the presence or absence of symptoms should influence the recommendation and implementation of good public health practices..”

Why Covid Vaccine Mandates Are Completely Nonsensical (Kirsch)

Let’s be clear.COVID vaccine mandates are necessary because the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that didn’t protect the protected. Get it? A study from UC Davis and UCSF authors published on October 5, 2021 show conclusively that the viral loads are exactly the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated. “No Significant Difference in Viral Load Between Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, Asymptomatic and Symptomatic Groups Infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant. The data gathered in this study during the surge of the Delta variant strongly support the notion that neither vaccine status nor the presence or absence of symptoms should influence the recommendation and implementation of good public health practices, including mask wearing, testing, social distancing, and other measures designed to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2.”

In other words, the latest data from UCSF shows that basing public health practices on vaccination status is nonsensical. A person who is unvaccinated is just as likely to have and spread COVID as someone who is vaccinated. They are no different. If they were different, we’d see it clearly in that study (which sampled people at random times). In short, we are not following the science at all with mandates. We are mandating something that makes no difference to the health of others. Mandates only infringe our liberties to do what we choose with our body. [..] ” The CDC admits that there isn’t a single known case of a person with “recovered immunity” infecting someone with COVID. So if you have had COVID, you should SURELY be exempt from both vaccine mandates and testing. Yet we treat such people the same as unvaccinated. There is absolutely no way to justify that. The data is unambiguous.

And to make matters worse, nobody in the medical community is raising any objections! They are all brain dead. This stuff couldn’t be more obvious. Is there a hidden benefit that the vaccinated are less likely to get infected? Well, the study only looked at infected people, so that’s possible. However, the way the vaccine works is to create antibodies and T-cell immunity that would fight off any infection that came in. So a working vaccine would always show a significantly lower level of infection for all vaccinated people at all times. We see no difference. So explain to me the mechanism of how you think the vaccine is preventing infection? A new magical process? Is there a hidden benefit that people who are vaccinated are less likely to be hospitalized like they say? No, there is nothing we’ve seen in any of the research that would lead to this. Everything we have measured shows the opposite: it basically suppresses your immune system in general, raises D-dimer, raises troponin, etc. All bad things. The only potentially good thing it does do is raise your antibody levels, but clearly these antibodies aren’t making much of a difference based on this study since the virus has mutated to avoid the vaccines.

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Macron is crazy. At least Napoleon was brilliant too.

Over 65: Health Pass Deactivated 6 Months And 5 Weeks After 2nd Dose (BFM)

To keep their health pass after December 15, people over the age of 65 already doubly vaccinated will have to receive a third injection before crossing the six-month and five-week date after their second dose. This Wednesday morning, Gabriel Attal clarified the announcements of Emmanuel Macron, in particular on the question of the third dose for those over 65 years old. “On December 15, the pass will be deactivated,” said the government spokesperson on France Info , for “over 65s, if you have had your second dose for more than 6 months and 5 weeks”, without to have made recall. “You will have alerts which will remind you that it is important to recall, there will also be Health Insurance”, added the government spokesperson. Nearly 100,000 appointments have been made for the booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine within an hour of the president’s speech on Tuesday evening.

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The definition of “naturally immune” to only mean those who have been infected makes no sense. Is it because what keeps most people from getting Covid is hard to measure? Across the world, max 10% of people ever even test positive. But they’re not “naturally immune”?

CDC Crushes Rights of Naturally Immune Without Proof They Transmit Virus (Siri)

You would assume that if the CDC was going to crush the civil and individual rights of those with natural immunity by having them expelled from school, fired from their jobs, separated from the military, and worse, the CDC would have proof of at least one instance of an unvaccinated, naturally immune individual transmitting the COVID-19 virus to another individual. If you thought this, you would be wrong. My firm, on behalf of ICAN, asked the CDC for precisely this proof. ICAN wanted to see proof of any instance in which someone who previously had COVID-19 became reinfected with and transmitted the virus to someone else. The CDC’s incredible response is that it does not have a single document reflecting that this has ever occurred. Not one. In contrast, there are endless documents reflecting cases of vaccinated individuals becoming infected with and transmitting the virus to others. It goes on and on…

But it gets worse. The CDC’s excuse for not having a shred of evidence of the naturally immune transmitting the virus is that “this information is not collected.” What?! No proof! But yet the CDC is actively crushing the rights of millions of naturally immune individuals in this country if they do not get the vaccine on the assumption they can transmit the virus. But despite clear proof the vaccinated spread the virus, the CDC lifts restrictions on the vaccinated?! That is dystopian. The facts about natural immunity are simple. Every single peer reviewed study has found that the naturally immune have far greater than 99% protection from having COVID-19, and this immunity does not wane. In contrast, the COVID-19 vaccine provides, at best, 95% protection and this immunity wanes rapidly.

I am no mathematician, but a constant 99% seems preferable to a 95% that quickly drops. And, while the vaccinated readily transmit the virus, not so for the naturally immune. The lesson yet again is not that health authorities should never make mistakes. They will. It happens. The lesson is that civil and individual rights should never be contingent upon a medical procedure. Everyone, the naturally immune or otherwise, who wants to get vaccinated and boosted should be free to do so. But nobody should be coerced by the government to partake in any medical procedure.

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Clueless.

Latvia Bans Unvaccinated Lawmakers From Voting, Docks Pay (R.)

Latvia’s parliament voted on Friday to ban lawmakers who refuse COVID-19 vaccine from voting on legislature and participating in discussions.Latvia, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in European Union, was the first in the bloc to reimpose a lockdown this autumn as a surge in COVID-19 cases threatens to overwhelm its health system. The restrictions on vaccine-rejecting lawmakers, which includes docking their pay, was supported by 62 of its 100 lawmakers, and will last from Monday until mid-2022. State television reported that nine MPs have rejected the vaccine.


The ban on unvaccinated MPs in parliament was necessary to promote public confidence in the government’s policies to control COVID-19 infections, the legislation’s sponsor, lawmaker Janis Rancans, was cited as saying by the parliamentary press service. Latvia, home to 1.9 million people, has reported 236,765 infections and 3,646 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.

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Once again: ..the viral loads are exactly the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated ..

Austria To Declare Nationwide Lockdown For Unvaccinated People (BNO)

Austria will impose a nationwide lockdown for people who have not been vaccinated against COVID-19, becoming the first country in the world to do so, Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced on Friday. Schallenberg, speaking at a press conference in Tyrol, said the nationwide lockdown is expected to be formally approved at a meeting on Sunday. Random checks will be carried out to ensure compliance with the new restrictions. “A lockdown for the unvaccinated means one cannot leave one’s home unless one is going to work, shopping (for essentials), stretching one’s legs – exactly what we all had to suffer through in 2020,” Schallenberg said earlier, according to Reuters.

The lockdown for the unvaccinated has already been formally approved in Upper Austria, where restrictions have also been announced for the entire population. This includes a legal requirement to wear an FFP2 mask in all indoor public places and a ban on events for 3 weeks. Daily coronavirus cases in Austria reached an all-time high this week, with 11,576 new cases on Wednesday alone. A further 11,040 new cases were reported on Friday, along with 40 deaths, which is the highest since April 13. About 60 percent of Austria’s population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, making it the lowest rate in Western Europe, with the exception of tiny Liechtenstein. This means the lockdown will affect roughly 40 percent of the population.

However, questions have been raised about the feasibility of a lockdown which applies to only a part of the population. “We don’t live in a police state and we can’t and don’t want to check every street corner,” Schallenberg said.

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The case heading to court is Dr. Paul Marik’s. This part of the text is Dr. Joseph Varon’s.

The Fight to Allow Doctors to “Doctor” Heads to a Virginia Court (FLCCC)

DR. VARON: My position at the hospitals where I have privileges has fortunately enabled me to employ any, and all effective treatments to cure COVID-19 and its effects at every stage of the disease but, most particularly, at the critical care stage when patients are admitted to hospital and/or the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). As a result of the remarkable success our hospitals have enjoyed with such patients over the past 18 months since March 19, 2020, we have exclusively applied the MATH+ protocol, with small variations as appropriate to every COVID patient entering our hospitals and ICUs.

Over the past 18 months of our hospitals’ use during the COVID pandemic, I can testify that the MATH+ protocol saves lives, and saves them in substantial numbers. I know this first, and foremost, from my own experience in our hospital, where we were able to lower our mortality for COVID-19 patients (both critically ill and those on regular wards) beginning in March 2020 (when we began utilizing the MATH+ protocol) to 4.4% as of August 2020– a dramatic improvement over the national average of 22% over the same time period.

Reported mortality averages across the globe have varied widely, but our hospitals’ results have successfully maintained far lower patient mortality rate—between 4.4% and 7%—to the present day. Multiple studies report much higher national mortality averages, including one such study that I participated in and published in June 2021 in the Journal of Community Medicine and Public Health Reports. That study, reviewing some 85 hospital studies worldwide, establishes an average 28-day hospital mortality rate among COVID-19 patients of 20% nationwide, and 21% globally. Moreover, as the study points out, because a large percentage of patients remain hospitalized after Day 28, the real average mortality rate is likely much higher. To this day—even with the advent of the “Delta variant” of COVID-19, our mortality rate has not risen above 7%. Bottom line: our hospitals’ use of the MATH+ protocol has reduced mortality of hospitalized COVID-19 patients by at least 50% below the national average.

Our experience of substantially lowering the mortality rate using MATH+ protocols is made all the more remarkable by the fact that our hospital now routinely admits severely ill patients referred by other hospitals and ICUs that for whatever reason are not administering the MATH+ protocol. These patients, in many cases, are those that the referring hospital/physician has determined will not likely survive. As our success has become increasingly known among treating physicians in the Houston area, and beyond, those referrals have risen to account for approximately 10-15% of our admitted COVID-19 patients. While we have been able to cure the vast majority of those patients using MATH+, in my opinion, the advanced stage of the disease we see in the referred patients likely accounts for some of the increase in our mortality rate for COVID patients. Nevertheless, we are currently experiencing a mortality rate in our hospitals of just 5%.

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“..the skulking managers behind the ectoplasmic “President Joe Biden” (and their handmaidens in Congress) — that Satanic host of coercion-meisters, inqusitionists, corporate despots, reputational executioners, moneygrubbers, political whores, and credentialed sadists trying to run your life — are headed for a fall.”

The Recognition (Kunstler)

The collapse of the global economy is underway and working itself out as it will, and the fear associated with that epic loss of resources, goods, comforts, and conveniences is driving Western Civ batshit crazy. Hence, the lunacies around the Covid-19 virus, another measure-and-control mania. Except that most of the official measurements about Covid-19 are untrue, gamed, fudged, juggled, misrepresented, and weaponized for political purposes. In fact, despite all the obsessive-compulsive statistical measuring, everything that the public health officialdom and the medical establishment did to control the disease after January 2020, only made the pandemic worse and prolonged it.

And so now all those authorities are bent on “vaccinating” every last human — which is absolutely the last thing you would rationally do in the midst of the pandemic event, since it only provokes new iterations of the virus that are immune to the “vaccines.” What’s more, the “vaccines” are so ineffective in the first place, and so toxic in the second place, that the damage they cause is arguably worse than the disease. But that quandary affords another opportunity for the self-designated “good” people (the vaxxed) to distinguish themselves from the “bad” people (the unvaxxed), and hence another way to persecute them. (Do you suppose it’s a mere coincidence that the people who refuse to get agitated by the climate change panic are often the very same people skeptical of the “vaccines.”)

Another interesting paradox in this panorama of mindfuckery is that the self-designated “good” people have behaved with uniform bad-faith and dishonesty throughout the long crisis — at least from RussiaGate through the current crusade to vax-up all the children — and that is what will change the game, probably soon. It happens that the leadership of the “good” people includes most of the figures in authority over the whole country: those public health officials like Dr. Fauci, the hospital directors who outlawed early treatment protocols, the pharma executives who buried their failed drug trials, the scientific journal publishers who killed reports that don’t support the “vaccine” narrative, the news-media editors and producers who can’t stop spinning lies, the Social Media totalitarian censors and cancellers, the tyrant mayors of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the “blue” state governors who destroyed small business with lockdowns and “passports,” the Woked-up state and federal bureaucrats ever preoccupied with covering their asses, the skulking managers behind the ectoplasmic “President Joe Biden” (and their handmaidens in Congress) — that Satanic host of coercion-meisters, inqusitionists, corporate despots, reputational executioners, moneygrubbers, political whores, and credentialed sadists trying to run your life — are headed for a fall.

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Yeah, sure. But this is not what’s happening with Covid papers. They simply get banned and censored,

When Science Speaks in Tongues: How Glossolalia can lead to Collapse (Bardi)

You may have heard the recent news of 44 scientific papers being retracted from a scientific journal after they were discovered to be nothing but gibberish. The usual reaction in these cases is to speak of “a few bad apples.” But this fraud exposes a problem that goes deep, very deep, in science. Science suffers from “glossolalia” — a syndrome that makes people utter meaningless sounds as if they were speaking a real language. To start, “papers” are the main output of a scientist’s work. It is the harsh law of “publish or perish,” meaning that for a scientist publishing something — anything — in an academic journal is the first line of defense against being fired. Even if a scientist has no money, no grants, no instrumentation, no ideas, they have to show that they are doing something. Woe betide the scientist who does not publish at least one paper every year! Anathema! Abomination! Horror! May you be eaten by the h-index bugbear who punishes those who sin so hideously against the sacred rules of science!

But publishing papers has a problem. When scientists publish something, in a certain way they are showing their hand. Readers will be able to understand how good they are, how well they master their field, how much money they have to perform their research, and more. They may not want others to know that, especially if they have something to hide (almost everyone does, in this world). So, many scientists practice obfuscation in order to defend their turf. So, scientists want to publish papers, but they may not want others to read them. A way to do that is to use purposefully convoluted language, eliminating all elements that would make a text interesting, turning it into the most boring possible kind of prose. The use of the passive form is a typical example (“it has been found that”) instead of the simpler “we found that….”. But there is more: for instance, why do scientists often sign their papers only with the initials of their first and middle names? (“J. I. Smith” — does it mean “Jolly Idiot Smith,” or what?). The idea is the same: to remove all hints of human interest for the text.

By far the most effective strategy is to use obscure terms. Uncommon and archaic ones can do a good job of repelling readers. An example noted by Malcolm Kendrick in his “The Clot Thickens” (2021): why in the world would anyone write “pultaceous” instead of “pulpy” if not with the specific purpose of being obscure? But what makes a paper truly unreadable is the proliferation of acronyms. If you stumble on “GDAP,” you have to decide which one of the 9 known meanings it can take (here, it is “Growing Danger of Acronym Proliferation”).

So, you start understanding how the mechanism works. First of all, an obscure paper makes it difficult for the reviewers to wade through the text and, surely, they don’t want to appear ignorant by asking what a particular term or acronym, or whatever means. Then, the paper may be full of mistakes, inconsistencies, shortcomings, and plain lies but, if it is really, obscure there is a chance that neither the reviewers nor anybody else will read it through and notice its shortcomings. It may even be cited, thus providing some extra points for the authors, by those who just read the title. Of course, it won’t make the authors candidates for the Nobel prize, but it means some respite from the wrath of the scientific PTB (obscure acronym for the “powers that be”).

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Freezing soap bubble
https://twitter.com/i/status/1459216275922731012

 

 

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Nov 072021
 


Pablo Picasso Sleeping peasants 1919

 

US Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Federal Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate (NYP)
Federal Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s ‘Big-Company’ Vaxx-Mandate (ZH)
Pfizer “Vaccine”: Kill 200 To ‘Save’ One? (OffG)
How Long Does Vaccine Based Immunity Last? (SRMD)
Pfizer Board Member Gottlieb: Pandemic Could Be Over In US By January (CNBC)
Bootleggers, Baptists, and Vaccine Mandates (AIER)
Scientific Journals Censor Science: Removal of Myocarditis report in VAERS (TSN)
Feds Pay Zero Claims For COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries/Deaths (ZH)
When Pandemics Collide: The Interplay Of Obesity And Covid-19 (PMC)
Assange, Fiancee Sue Uk For ‘Preventing Them From Marrying In Prison’ (DM)

 

 

“Because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate, the Mandate is hereby STAYED pending further action by this court.”

 

 

 

 

“Something very dark is going on.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1457002810063609859
https://twitter.com/i/status/1457032388232597505

 

 

Big win. Key line:

“Because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate, the Mandate is hereby STAYED pending further action by this court.”

US Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s Federal Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate (NYP)

A federal appeals court in Louisiana has blocked the Biden administration’s latest COVID-19 vaccination mandate, giving the government until Monday afternoon to submit a response. An emergency stay, issued Saturday from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, prevents the White House from requiring all full and part-time workers at private-sector companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated or get tested weekly and wear face masks. In its decision, the court cited “grave statutory and constitutional” concerns about the government’s mandate, which is scheduled to take effect on January 4. The mandate — issued Thursday under a new rule by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — would apply to some 84 million Americans.

It has been challenged in court by more than two dozen states, including Texas, Missouri and Louisiana. Employers who don’t comply could face fines of up to $14,000 per infraction, according to the government’s guidelines. “We will have our day in court to strike down Biden’s unconstitutional abuse of authority,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted after news of the stay was announced Saturday afternoon. A petition filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and representing 10 other states, declared the vaccine mandate is “unconstitutional, unlawful and unwise.” It also challenges OSHA authority, claiming the agency does not have the jurisdiction to implement the regulations.

“Its unlawful mandate will cause injuries and hardship to working families, inflict economic disruption and staffing shortages on the states and private employers,” reads the petition. In September, the president promised to impose a flurry of vaccine mandates after the Delta variant led to a spike in COVID-19 infections, ending what Biden called the “summer of freedom” from the deadly virus. “A distinct minority of Americans supported by a distinct minority of elected officials are keeping us from turning the corner,” Biden said in a White House address. “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us.” The government has until Monday at 5 pm to challenge the stay.

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Will need to read a number of reports to get the relevant details. Note: there will be as many appeals as cases brought.

Federal Appeals Court Blocks Biden’s ‘Big-Company’ Vaxx-Mandate

A federal court has issued a temporary victory in a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine mandate issuing a stay on the controversial federal government regulation in Texas. “Yesterday, I sued the Biden Admin over its unlawful OSHA vax mandate,” Texas’ Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted Saturday. “WE WON. Just this morning, citing “grave statutory and constitutional issues,” the 5th Circuit stayed the mandate. The fight is not over and I will never stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!” As Fox News reports, earlier in the week, Paxton sued the Biden administration over the mandate and argued that the move to force workers at companies with over 100 employees to be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing is “flatly unconstitutional.”

“Biden’s new vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of power,” Paxton tweeted Friday. “OSHA has only limited power & specific responsibilities. This latest move goes way outside those bounds. This ‘standard’ is flatly unconstitutional. I’m asking the Court to strike it down.” The Wall Street Journal reports that the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit said it would quickly consider whether to issue an injunction against the vaccine and testing requirements, ordering the Biden administration to file initial legal papers by late Monday afternoon. A number of trade groups have issued warnings about the mandate, saying that it would exacerbate supply chain bottlenecks and staffing shortages nationwide. The White House remains confident the mandate will stand up to legal challenges.

“We are very confident that it can,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “As for the legal side of this, let me be crystal clear to avoid what appears to be possible misinformation or disinformation around the emergency temporary standard being a vaccine mandate. That would be on its face incorrect as has been explicit for months. It is a standard for safe workplace to either comply with weekly testing or to be vaccinated.”

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“It’s literally the worst NNTV in the history of vaccination.”

Pfizer “Vaccine”: Kill 200 To ‘Save’ One? (OffG)

This is the absolute risk reduction for Pfizer/BioNtech (each group had over 18,000 people):
Injection Group: 8/18,198 = 0.04%
Placebo Group: 162/18,325 = 0.88%
Absolute risk reduction = 0.84%

From the “absolute risk reduction”, you can then calculate the “number needed to vaccinate” (NNTV). This is the rough number of people you need to inject in order to definitely prevent one case/death. To continue the example above, if your vaccine reduces the odds of infection from 10% to 1% (an ARR of 9%), you need to vaccinate eleven people to prevent one infection, giving you an NNTV of 11. Again, the NNTV of the Covid vaccines are much, much, MUCH higher than 11. Estimates range from between 88 and 700 to prevent a single case, and anything up to 100,000 to prevent one solitary death. And remember, all this data was for adults. Children are at a far lower risk from Covid – both in terms of hospitalisation and death. In the US, children aged 5-11 have a 99.992% chance of surviving “Covid” – so it naturally follows the NNTV for this group will be far, far higher than for adults.

But, now that the FDA has approved Pfizer’s “vaccine” for emergency use on children aged 5-11, “far, far higher” is not good enough. We need to calculate an actual figure for the “number needed to vaccinate” in order to hypothetically protect one child from dying “with Covid”. Fortunately for us, someone else has already done it. Writing on his Substack, economist Toby Rogers PhD has collated the numbers from Pfizer’s own trials, the FDA and the CDC and done a very thorough write up. You can read the whole thing here, we’ll just present you with some of the highlights: As of October 30, 2021, the CDC stated that 170 children ages 5 to 11 have died of COVID-19-related illness since the start of the pandemic. (That represents less than 0.1% of all coronavirus-related deaths nationwide even though children that age make up 8.7% of the U.S. population).

The Pfizer mRNA shot only “works” for about 6 months (it increases risk in the first month, provides moderate protection in months 2 through 4 and then effectiveness begins to wane, which is why all of the FDA modeling only used a 6 month time-frame). So any modeling would have to be based on vaccine effectiveness in connection with the 57 (170/3) children who might otherwise have died of COVID-related illness during a 6-month period.At best, the Pfizer mRNA shot might be 80% effective against hospitalizations and death. That number comes directly from the FDA modeling. I am bending over backwards to give Pfizer the benefit of considerable doubt because again, the Pfizer clinical trial showed NO reduction in hospitalizations or death in this age group.

So injecting all 28,384,878 children ages 5 to 11 with two doses of Pfizer (which is what the Biden administration wants to do) would save, at most, 45 lives (0.8 effectiveness x 57 fatalities that otherwise would have occurred during that time period = 45). So then the NNTV to prevent a single fatality in this age group is 630,775 (28,384,878 / 45). But it’s a two dose regimen so if one wants to calculate the NNTV per injection the number doubles to 1,261,550. It’s literally the worst NNTV in the history of vaccination. 630,000 children injected with 1.2 million doses to save one life. That’s incredibly inefficient. However, it could be even worse than that. As we covered last week, according to statistics cited at the VRBPAC meeting, only 94 children from the 5-11 age group have died. If this lower figure is correct, the NNTV to prevent a single death jumps up to 915,641.

In other words, in order to hypothetically prevent a single child from dying over a six month period, you would have to inject nearly one million children with almost two million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

Read more …

We need solid research into this.

How Long Does Vaccine Based Immunity Last? (SRMD)

It’s unfortunate that the drug companies decided to end their trials early, by giving active covid vaccine to the members of the placebo group after just a few months. It means that there is no long term follow-up of the covid vaccines from randomized trials, and there never will be. This means that we are instead forced to rely entirely on observational data as we try to understand how safe and effective the vaccines are over the longer term. That is why a recent study out of Sweden is so very interesting. It is currenly available as a pre-print and can be found here. The purpose of the study was to determine how effective the vaccines are at protecting against covid over the longer term (i.e. after more than a few months). This was a registry based study, so it’s not surprising that it is coming out of Sweden. Sweden is generally acknowledged as being better than any other country at collecting and sorting large quantities of population data and using it to produce these types of studies.

The authors of the study began by identifying all people residing in Sweden who had been fully vaccinated against covid-19 by late May 2021. At that time, three different vaccines were being used in Sweden: Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca. The vaccinated people were then matched individually against people of the same age and gender, and living in the same municipality, who hadn’t been vaccinated. In total, 1,684,958 individuals were included in the study. They were followed until October to see if they developed covid-19. So, what did the study show? As would be expected, the vaccines were very effective at preventing symptomatic covid around two months out from vaccination. This is what the randomized trials showed, and it’s the reason the vaccines were approved for use. Overall, the reduction in relative risk at 31-60 days out from vaccination was 89%.

However, after those first two months, there was a rapid decline in efficacy. At four to six months, the vaccines were only reducing the relative risk of infection by 48%! This is pretty interesting when we consider that governments had initially set the bar for approving the vaccines at a 50% relative risk reduction. So, if the trials had been required to run for six months before presenting results instead of only running for two months, then the vaccines would have been considered too ineffective to be worth bothering with, an would never have been approved. Well, that’s not quite true. One vaccine did still provide a better than 50% relative risk reduction at six months – the Moderna vaccine. At four to six months, the relative risk reduction with the Moderna vaccine was 71%. Pfizer was at the same time point only offering a 47% reduction in risk, and AstraZeneca was at that point not doing anything whatsoever to lower risk.

It makes sense that the Moderna vaccine would offer better protection than the Pfizer vaccine. Although the vaccines are virtually identical, the dose in the Moderna vaccine is three times higher. This is likely the reason why Moderna has been associated with much higher rates of myocarditis, which is why it is no longer approved for use in people under the age of 30 here in Sweden.

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But only if you consume our products.

Pfizer Board Member Gottlieb: Pandemic Could Be Over In US By January (CNBC)

The Covid-19 pandemic could be over in the U.S. by the time President Joe Biden’s workplace vaccine mandates take effect in early January, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday. The vaccine requirements from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration begin on Jan. 4 for any company with at least 100 employees. Some 84 million private sector workers must get either their second Moderna or Pfizer shot or one dose from Johnson & Johnson by that date or face regular testing for the virus. “These mandates that are going to be put in place by Jan. 4 really are coming on the tail end of this pandemic,” said Gottlieb, who’s also a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

“By Jan. 4, this pandemic may well be over, at least as it relates to the United States after we get through this delta wave of infection. And we’ll be in a more endemic phase of this virus.” All companies complying with OSHA’s new rules must also start enforcing indoor mask mandates for unvaccinated employees starting Dec. 5. Those personnel must also begin submitting weekly negative Covid tests after Jan. 4 to enter the workplace, and anyone who tests positive should quarantine. The federal mandate contains exemptions for religious and medical reasons. Employees who work exclusively outdoors, at home or in settings where others aren’t present are also exempt from the rules.

OSHA’s guidance doesn’t mandate that businesses pay for their employees’ Covid tests or masks, but any company caught dodging the rules could face fines of anywhere between $13,653 to $136,532 for intentional noncompliance. Gottlieb’s comments came in the wake of data from Pfizer that indicated its Covid antiviral pill, when paired with an HIV medication, slashed the potential for hospitalization or death by 89% in adults at risk for severe complications. Combining the pill with an HIV medication slowed the metabolism, allowing the Covid antiviral to work longer in the body. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in an interview Friday morning with “Squawk Box” before Gottlieb spoke that the company will submit data on the therapeutic to the FDA before Thanksgiving.

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“The Bootleggers supported the ban, too, but only because they would enjoy a thriving black market on those days and profit from illegal alcohol sales.”

Bootleggers, Baptists, and Vaccine Mandates (AIER)

In 1983, economist Bruce Yandle developed the Bootleggers and Baptists framework to explain his belief that durable government action tends to come about with the support of two types of interest groups: those with moral interests and those with financial interests. Yandle appeals to early twentieth-century blue laws, which prohibited the sale of alcohol on Sundays. Baptists, the moralists, were motivated by their beliefs that Sundays should be respected as a day of prayer and rest, not drinking. The Bootleggers supported the ban, too, but only because they would enjoy a thriving black market on those days and profit from illegal alcohol sales. Durable government action, according to Yandle, tends to emerge with the support of coalitions that share a common goal even if they don’t share common motivations.

In a global pandemic, it has not been difficult to find a plethora of public health pieties. Nor has it been hard to find profiteers, especially pharma. I doubt that Anthony Fauci has any financial interests in the Moderna/NIAID vaccine — though investigators should look. He’s in it for the glory. Still, the Moderna/NIAID partnership puts the Bootleggers and Baptists on the same team. Fauci, President Biden, and all the MSM sentinels are the moralists in this equation, that is, if Prof. Yandle will permit a not-so-bright line between moralism and savior complex. They want to be known as the ones who beat the pandemic. One might even say Fauci has been planning for this his whole career. Now he graces us with his presence daily on SAHM programs such as The View, basking in the lamps, reminding us to wear our masks and get our vaccines.

The decrepit Biden, though he needs help getting up on that high horse, once bestride it, holds his mighty executive pen aloft and commands the multitudes to get the jab or else. Waiting in the wings are shadowy corporate figures, such as Moderna’s Bancel, prepared to execute these technocratic plans using billions of dollars inked in red. Though howls against Big Pharma were once prominent in the Progressive Playbook, those have mysteriously been redacted like Anthony Fauci’s FOIA’d emails. When one stops to think that these billions will have to be repaid by the very children who won’t have a choice but to get these vaccines, much less likely Covid, she might find the idea nauseous. A considerably more disturbing thought, though, is that Fauci probably suspected all along that NIH funding led to the creation and (accidental) release of a virus that has killed 5 million people as of this writing.

Anthony Fauci is a monopsony on funding for infectious disease research. He clearly does not want to be known as the guy in charge of funding the pandemic, even inadvertently. His defensiveness, his untruths before Congress, and his moth like draw to camera lights — all seem to reveal a man who, in his moralism, refuses to acknowledge that his agency had any hand in the damage Covid dealt. He wants to be America’s doctor, and his grand plan has always been to vaccinate the world. In his favored scenario, he would not be viewed not as a negligent bureaucrat but a savior. And he wants to keep it that way. The researchers? The intermediaries? The pharma execs? They’re in it for the money upon which their careers depend.

My hypothesis, therefore, tentative but bold, is that economist Bruce Yandle must have seen this coming a mile away. The vaccine mandates of 2020-2021 is a story of Bootleggers colluding with Baptists. The only question that remains, then, is whether we’re going to let them get away with it.

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Cancelling McCullough.

Scientific Journals Censor Science: Removal of Myocarditis report in VAERS (TSN)

Dr Peter McCullough, MD, one of the most cited physicians in the world, an eminent practitioner of internal medicine, a cardiologist and epidemiologist, co-wrote a report with Dr Jessica Rose, Ph.D., a virologist and epidemiologist in Canada, called ‘A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products.’

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Paying means acknowledging damage. Look at the restrictions…

Feds Pay Zero Claims For COVID-19 Vaccine Injuries/Deaths (ZH)

In fiscal year 2021, the U.S. government paid $246.9 million in claims for vaccine-related injuries and deaths. Not a single payout was related to Covid-19 vaccines. Each person with a “provable” injury from a Covid vaccine could claim up to $379,000 from a special Covid vaccine fund set up by the federal government. The payout for death could be as high as $370,376. However, according to an OpenTheBooks.com investigation, the federal government didn’t pay a penny for Covid-vaccine claims. The special fund for these claims is called the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP). There were only 1,357 claims filed that alleged “injuries/deaths from the Covid vaccines,” and 53 were listed as deaths, according to recent reporting by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

By contrast, the self-reporting Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS) lists 16,310 deaths related to Covid vaccines. Of these, “5,326 of the deaths occurred on Day 0, 1,or 2 following vaccination[.]” The low number of applicants to the CICP fund for injuries or death from the Covid vaccine suggests that people don’t know the special fund exists. The “normal” vaccine fund, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), has existed since 1988 and provides compensation for injuries or deaths associated with most vaccines routinely administered in the United States (such as pediatric and seasonal influenza vaccines), according to the Congressional Research Service. Last year, this fund paid out $246.9 million in vaccine-related injuries and deaths. Payouts include $250,000 for a vaccine-caused death and $250,000 “for pain and suffering and emotional distress.”

A special vaccine court handles these claims. However, in the case of Covid-19 vaccines developed and approved under Project Warp Speed, deaths resulting from a Covid vaccine would pay out through the CICP and would pay more money than a vaccine-related death in normal times. Since the benefit for a death caused by a Covid-19 vaccine is $370,376 for fiscal year 2021 and $50,000 per year for lost employment income (with a lifetime cap to be “generally $379,000”). So, the death benefit is $120,376 higher than for other vaccines ($250,000). However, there is no equivalent to the VICP’s $250,000 “for pain and suffering and emotional distress” under the current Covid-19 parameters. Here are some other differences between the two vaccine-injury funds:

• No attorney fees. The Covid fund is not authorized to provide reimbursement for attorneys’ fees. Therefore, lawyers have less incentive to represent claims.
• Injured children receive small payouts. A Covid vaccine-injured child would only be reimbursed for “reasonable medical expenses.” Since the child survived and isn’t employed, there’s no other compensation.
• Narrow window to file a claim. The Covid fund allows a one-year window to file a claim whereas the regular vaccine fund has a three-year window.
• And sure enough, the CICP fund hasn’t paid out a dime in Covid-vaccine claims. HHS bluntly states online, “As of October 1, 2021, the CICP has not compensated any Covid-19 countermeasures claims.”

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A good bit on inflammation, something I find sorely lacking in most reports. There’s no way chronic and systemic inflammation is not a huge factor in Covid.

When Pandemics Collide: The Interplay Of Obesity And Covid-19 (PMC)

Among 20,133 patients hospitalized with SARS-CoV-2 infection across 208 hospitals in the United Kingdom, obesity was identified in 10.5% [2]. Worse, obesity was a strong predictor of mortality (HR 1.33; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.19 to 1.49) after adjusting for other comorbidities. Between March 1 and April 8, 2020, 5279 patients at NYU Langone Health tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 [3]. Of these, 2741 (51.9%) required hospitalization, 990 (36.1%) developed critical illness requiring intensive care unit (ICU) services, and 665 (24.3%) died. In multi-variate analysis, obesity (especially a BMI>40 kg/m2) emerged as a risk factor for both hospital admission (OR 2.5; 95% CI:1.8 to 3.4) and critical illness requiring ICU services (OR 1.5; 1.0 to 2.2).


In another report from New York City, among 3615 individuals who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, 775 (21%) had a BMI of 30 34 kg/m2 and 595 (16%) had a BMI of 35 kg/m2 or higher [4]. Among patients under 60 years old, those with a BMI of 30 34 kg/m2 were 2.0 (1.6 2.6) times as likely to be admitted to the hospital and 1.8 (1.2 2.7) times as likely to be admitted to the ICU, as compared to those with normal range BMI. In a cohort from Mexico of 51,633 SARS-CoV-2 positive cases and 5332 related deaths (10.3%), the obese, as compared to non-obese, had a higher rate of mortality (13.5% versus 9.4%), critical illness (5.0% versus 3.3%), and ventilator support (5.2% versus 3.3%) [5]. Data from France found a higher rate of obesity in those SARS-CoV-2 patients who were critically ill and required mechanical ventilation (Odds ratio of 7.36 [1.63 33.14] comparing BMI e”35 vs. <25) [6″ ].

These data highlight the devastating impact of one pandemic (obesity) on another (COVID-19). Obese individuals may have a compounded risk for acquiring more severe COVID-19 disease. First, individuals who are obese undergo gross structural and cellular level changes which puts them at greater risk for ischemic heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and respiratory disease, which are themselves risk-factors for acquiring COVID-19 disease. Second, obesity-specific structural changes can make caring for obese patients who acquire COVID-19 disease logistically challenging. Finally, there may be a link between obesity and SARS-CoV-2 specific receptors found in adipose tissue, possibly rendering obese individuals more susceptible to acquiring more severe disease.

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“The wedding stand-off began in May when Stella approached the prison chaplain to ask about arranging a ceremony. After an initial response, no further help was forthcoming. On October 7, Assange formally asked the Governor’s office to agree to a Belmarsh wedding, but he has had no reply.”

Assange, Fiancee Sue Uk For ‘Preventing Them From Marrying In Prison’ (DM)

Julian Assange and his fiancee Stella Moris are bringing legal action against Justice Secretary Dominic Raab and the Governor of Belmarsh Prison, accusing them of preventing the couple from marrying behind bars. They fear the obstacles put in the way of their wedding by UK authorities are linked to a US-backed political war against the Wikileaks publisher and campaigner. In September it was revealed the CIA had drawn up plans to kidnap or kill Assange during his seven years exiled in the Embassy of Ecuador in London. The agency also spied on his family and friends and led a campaign of misinformation against him. Stella, 38, a lawyer, said: ‘Those catch-or-kill plans were not implemented but other hostile measures were and this is the sting in the tail.

‘It’s part of an enormous conspiracy against Julian which makes itself felt in all that we try to do. ‘A wedding would be a moment of happiness, a bit of normality in insane circumstances. Julian needs things to hold on to because daily life is a struggle for him in Belmarsh and there is so much uncertainty about his future. ‘Our love for each other is the one thing which has carried us through and being married would be another bulwark in our emotional defences. ‘There is no reason for political interference in what is a basic human right. The CIA revelations show the lengths some agencies are willing to go to in their persecution of Julian.’ Assange, 50, and his fiancee have been engaged for five years, have two children and are both practising Catholics. They have been asking since May for help to arrange their wedding in Belmarsh.

[..] Stella is adamant their wedding ceremony would have no legal impact on extradition since his right to a family life in the UK is determined by the fact that their sons Gabriel, four, and Max, two, are British citizens. She also has rights of residency, having lived in Britain for 20 years, although she was born in South Africa. On Friday, the couple opened legal action paving the way for a judicial review. The case is brought against the Justice Secretary and Belmarsh Governor Jenny Louis. The wedding stand-off began in May when Stella approached the prison chaplain to ask about arranging a ceremony. After an initial response, no further help was forthcoming. On October 7, Assange formally asked the Governor’s office to agree to a Belmarsh wedding, but he has had no reply.

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“Any system you contrive without us will be brought down.”
— Leonard Cohen
https://twitter.com/i/status/1401284243733594119

 

 

The sights I have to look at every day.

 

 

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Feb 102017
 
 February 10, 2017  Posted by at 10:05 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Al Capone’s free soup kitchen, Chicago, 1931

 

US Appeals Court Upholds Suspension Of Trump Travel Ban (AP)
The Crash Will Be Violent (David Stockman)
Foreign Governments Dump US Treasuries as Never Before; Who is Buying? (WS)
Impediments to Growth (Lacy Hunt)
A Game Of Chess (BP)
Biography of President Donald Trump, a.k.a. “Wayne Newton” (Jim Kunstler)
What Would it Cost a Country to Leave the Euro? (WS)
Varoufakis Accuses Creditors Of Going After Greece’s ‘Little People’ (Ind.)
Greece Hopeful Of Imminent EU Debt Deal Despite German Warning (G.)
Greek Crisis Descends Into Blame Game (Tel.)
China Bitcoin Exchanges Halt Withdrawals After PBOC Talks (BBG)
Where US Immigrants Have Come From Over Time (BI)
The World According to a Free-Range Short Seller (BBG)
Radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Reactor Is Now at ‘Unimaginable’ Levels (Fox)
Ground-Breaking Research Uncovers New Risks of GMOs, Glyphosate (NGR)
‘No One Accepts Responsibility’: Thirteen Refugees Dead In Greece (IRR)

 

 

It is crucial for the US political system to be tested this way. So far, it seems to work, but we’re in very early innings. Important to recognize that Trump and Bannon merely attempt to use the broader executive powers developed under Clinton, Bush and Obama. A major problem can be that the judiciary has alredy become very politicized, with presidents getting to pick judges.

US Appeals Court Upholds Suspension Of Trump Travel Ban (AP)

Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations, dealing another legal setback to the new administration’s immigration policy. In a unanimous decision, the panel of three judges from the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is possible. The court rejected the administration’s claim that it did not have the authority to review the president’s executive order. “There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy,” the court said. The judges noted that the states had raised serious allegations about religious discrimination.

Following news of the ruling, Trump tweeted, “See you in court, the security of our nation is at stake!” U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban last week after Washington state and Minnesota sued. The ban temporarily suspended the nation’s refugee program and immigration from countries that have raised terrorism concerns. Justice Department lawyers appealed to the 9th Circuit, arguing that the president has the constitutional power to restrict entry to the United States and that the courts cannot second-guess his determination that such a step was needed to prevent terrorism. The states said Trump’s travel ban harmed individuals, businesses and universities. Citing Trump’s campaign promise to stop Muslims from entering the U.S., they said the ban unconstitutionally blocked entry to people based on religion.

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“..the first half of the year will be consumed in nasty partisan battles over cabinet appointments, the Gorsuch nomination, interminable maneuvers over the travel ban and follow-on measures of extreme vetting and the Obamacare repeal/replace battle.”

The Crash Will Be Violent (David Stockman)

[..] What will be coming soon, however, is the mother of all debt ceiling crises — an eruption of beltway dysfunction that will finally demolish the notion that Trump is good for the economy and the stock market. The debt ceiling holiday ends on March 15, and it appears that the rudderless Treasury Department — Mnuchin has not yet been approved as Treasury Secretary and there are no Trump deputies, either — may be engaging in a bit of sabotage. That is, the cash balance has run down from a peak of about $450 billion to just $304 billion as of last Friday. Unless reversed soon, this means that the Treasury will run out of cash by perhaps July 4th rather than Labor Day. After that, all hell will break loose.

Washington has been obviously dysfunctional for years, but the virtue of the Great Disrupter is that his tweets, tangents, inconsistencies and unpredictabilities guarantee that the system will soon shut down entirely. Consequently, the first half of the year will be consumed in nasty partisan battles over cabinet appointments, the Gorsuch nomination, interminable maneuvers over the travel ban and follow-on measures of extreme vetting and the Obamacare repeal/replace battle. Then, the second half of 2017 will degenerate into a non-stop battle over raising the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions for fiscal year (FY) 2018 which begins October 1. That will mean, in turn, that there is no budget resolution embodying the Trump/GOP fiscal agenda, and therefore no basis for filibuster-proof “reconciliation instructions” on the tax cut.

This latter point, in fact, needs special emphasis. The frail GOP majorities now in place will be too battered and fractured by the interim battles to coalesce around a ten-year budget resolution that embodies the $10 trillion of incremental deficits already built into the CBO baseline — plus trillions more for defense, veterans, border control, the Mexican Wall, an infrastructure bonanza and big tax cuts, too. It will never happen. There is not remotely a GOP majority for such a resolution. But without an FY 2018 budget resolution, inertia and the K-Street lobbies will rule. Without a 51-vote majority rule in the Senate, a material, deficit-neutral cut in the corporate tax rate would be absolutely impossible to pass. Yet that’s exactly what the casino is currently pricing-in.

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Foreign investors.

Foreign Governments Dump US Treasuries as Never Before; Who is Buying? (WS)

It started with a whimper a couple of years ago and has turned into a roar: foreign governments are dumping US Treasuries. The signs are coming from all sides. The data from the US Treasury Department points at it. The People’s Bank of China points at it in its data releases on its foreign exchange reserves. Japan too has started selling Treasuries, as have other governments and central banks. Some, like China and Saudi Arabia, are unloading their foreign exchange reserves to counteract capital flight, prop up their own currencies, or defend a currency peg. Others might sell US Treasuries because QE is over and yields are rising as the Fed has embarked on ending its eight years of zero-interest-rate policy with what looks like years of wild flip-flopping, while some of the Fed heads are talking out loud about unwinding QE and shedding some of the Treasuries on its balance sheet.

Inflation has picked up too, and Treasury yields have begun to rise, and when yields rise, bond prices fall, and so unloading US Treasuries at what might be seen as the peak may just be an investment decision by some official institutions. The chart below from Goldman Sachs, via Christine Hughes at Otterwood Capital, shows the net transactions of US Treasury bonds and notes in billions of dollars by foreign official institutions (central banks, government funds, and the like) on a 12-month moving average. Note how it started with a whimper, bounced back a little, before turning into wholesale dumping, hitting record after record (red marks added):

The People’s Bank of China reported two days ago that foreign exchange reserves fell by another $12.3 billion in January, to $2.998 trillion, the seventh month in a row of declines, and the lowest in six years. They’re down 25%, or almost exactly $1 trillion, from their peak in June 2014 of nearly $4 trillion (via Trading Economics, red line added):

China’s foreign exchange reserves are composed of assets that are denominated in different currencies, but China does not provide details. So of the $1 trillion in reserves that it shed since 2014, not all were denominated in dollars. The US Treasury Department provides another partial view, based on data collected primarily from US-based custodians and broker-dealers that are holding these securities for China and other countries. But the US Treasury cannot determine which country owns the Treasuries held in custodial accounts overseas. Based on this limited data, China’s holdings of US Treasuries have plunged by $215.2 billion, or 17%, over the most recent 12 reporting months through November, to just above $1 trillion.

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From a Mish article quoting an unpublished report. I wonder when all these people will begin to understand my point that growth is gone. Only then will the pieces fall into place. Note: calling Weak Global Growth and Impediment to Growth sounds a bit silly.

Impediments to Growth (Lacy Hunt)

1. Unproductive Debt At the end of the third quarter, domestic nonfinancial debt and total debt reached $47.0 and $69.4 trillion, respectively. Neither of these figures includes a sizeable volume of vehicle and other leases that will come due in the next few years nor unfunded pension liabilities that will eventually be due. The total figure is much larger as it includes debt of financial institutions as well as foreign debt owed. The broader series points to the complexity of the debt overhang. Netting out the financial institutions and foreign debt is certainly appropriate for closed economies, but it is not appropriate for the current economy.

Total debt gained $3.1 trillion in the past four quarters, or $5.70 dollars for each $1.00 of GDP growth. From 1870 to 2015, $1.90 of total debt generated $1.00 dollar of GDP. We estimate that approximately $20 trillion of debt in the U.S. will reset within the next two years. Interest rates across the curve are up approximately 100 basis points from the lows of last year. Unless rates reverse, the annual interest costs will jump $200 billion within two years and move steadily higher thereafter as more debt obligations mature. This sum is equivalent to almost two-fifths of the $533 billion in nominal GDP in the past four quarters. This situation is the same problem that has constantly dogged highly indebted economies like the U.S., Japan and the Eurozone.

2. Record Global Debt The IMF calculated that the gross debt in the global non-financial sector was $217 trillion, or 325% of GDP, at the end of the third quarter of 2016. Total debt at the end of the third quarter 2016 was more than triple its level at the end of 1999. Debt in China surged by $3 trillion in just the first three quarters of 2016. Chinese debt at the end of the third quarter soared to 390% of GDP, an estimated 20% higher than U.S. debt-to-GDP. This debt surge explains the shortfall in the Chinese growth target for 2016, a major capital flight, a precipitous fall of the Yuan against the dollar and a large hike in their overnight lending rate. Such policies lose their effectiveness over time. [As stated by] Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek (1933):“To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about.”

3. Weak Global Growth Based on figures from the World Bank and the IMF through 2016, growth in a 60-country composite was just 1.1%, a fraction of the 7.2% average since 1961. Even with the small gain for 2016, the three-year average growth was -0.8%. As such, the last three years have provided more evidence that the benefits of a massive debt surge are elusive. World trade volume also confirms the fragile state of economic conditions. Trade peaked at 115.4 in February 2016, with September 2016 1.7% below that peak, according to the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis. Over the last 12 months, world trade volume fell 0.7%, compared to the 5.1% average growth since 1992.

4. Eroding Demographics World trade volume also confirms the fragile state of economic conditions. Trade peaked at 115.4 in February 2016, with September 2016 1.7% below that peak, according to the Netherlands Bureau of Economic Policy Analysis. Over the last 12 months, world trade volume fell 0.7%, compared to the 5.1% average growth since 1992.

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Absolutely delightful.

A Game Of Chess (BP)

Chess is a game where the number of possible positions rises at an astronomical rate. By the 2nd move of the game there are already 400 possible positions and after each person moves twice, that number rises to 8902. My coach explained to me that I was not trained enough to even begin to keep track of those things and that my only chance of ever winning was to take the initiative and never give it up. “You must know what your opponent will do next by playing his game for him.” was the advice I received. Now, I won’t bore you with the particulars but it boiled down to throwing punches each and every turn without exception. In other words, if my opponent must always waste his turn responding to what I am doing then he never gets an opportunity to come at me in the millions of possibilities that reside in the game. Again, if I throw the punch – even one that can be easily blocked, then I only have to worry about one combination and not millions.

My Russian chess coach next taught me that I should Proudly Announce what exactly I am doing and why I am doing it. He explained to me that bad chess players believe that they can hide their strategy even though all the pieces are right there in plain sight for anyone to see. A good chess player has no fear of this because they will choose positions that are unassailable so why not announce them? As a coach, I made all of my students tell each other why they were making the moves that they made as well as what they were planning next. It entirely removed luck from the game and quickly made them into superior players.

My Russian coach next stressed Time as something I should focus on to round out my game. He said that I shouldn’t move the same piece twice in a row and that my “wild punches” should focus on getting my pieces on to the board and into play as quickly as possible. So, if I do everything correctly, I have an opponent that will have a disorganized defense, no offense and few pieces even in play and this will work 9 out of 10 times. The only time it doesn’t work for me is when I go against players that have memorized hundreds of games and have memorized how to get out of these traps.

With all that said, let’s see if President Trump is playing chess. First, we can all agree that Trump, if nothing else, throws a lot of punches. We really saw this in the primaries where barely a day could go by without some scandal that would supposedly end his presidential bid. His opponents and the press erroneously thought that responding to each and every “outrage” was the correct thing to do without ever taking the time to think whether or not they had just walked into a trap. They would use their turn to block his Twitter attack but he wouldn’t move that piece again once that was in play but, instead, brought on the next outrage – just like my coach instructed me to do.

Second, Trump is very vocal in what he is going to do. Just like I had my students announced to each other their plans, Trump has been nothing but transparent about what he intends to do. After all, announcing your plans only works if your position is unassailable. It demoralizes your opponent. You rub their face in it. Another benefit to being vocal is that it encourages your opponent to bring out his favorite piece to deal with said announced plans. This is a big mistake as any good chess player will quickly recognize which piece his opponent favors and then go take them.

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“Fraid Jim lost it.

Biography of President Donald Trump, a.k.a. “Wayne Newton” (Jim Kunstler)

And so it happened years ago on the Trump family’s annual Christmas pilgrimage to Paraguay that Papa Fred and Mama Mary Anne fell in socially with the circle around Klaus Furtwänkler, Waffen-SS Gruppenführer (ret.) in the little resort village of Nueva Bavaria. The former commandant of the Flossenbürg work camp (granite quarries) introduced young Donald to the song “Danke Schoen” popularized by the vocalist Eva Braun at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Since earliest childhood, with his love for the “spotlight,” Donald had entertained the family with renditions of Disney’s beloved hits, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” “When I See an Elephant Fly,” and “Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (an Actor’s Life for Me).” The next evening, on Furtwänkler’s 3,000-hectare estancia, before an audience of fifty “special guests” at the Heiliger Abend buffet (Arapaima snapper with red cabbage and potato salad), Donald performed “Danke Schoen” to wild applause, propelling him into a career in show business. Not a few of the frauleins present fainted.


Young Donald or someone else?

To protect Papa’s real estate business interests in Queens, New York, Donald adopted the professional name “Wayne Newton” and was withdrawn from military school to perform on the county fair circuit across the states that would later self- identify by the color “red” — but which, given our adversarial relations with the USSR at the time, styled themselves red, white, and blue. Six month’s later, “Wayne” caught the eye of Las Vegas promoter Sal “Cukarach” Vaselino while playing the Refrigeration Engineers annual meet-up at the Sands Hotel, and then after a six-week smash engagement at the Golden Nugget in 1963, “Wayne” was inducted into the notorious Frank Sinatra / Dean Martin Rat-pack as its first underage member. (Rat-pack consigliere Peter Lawford introduced the talented lad to the concept of “sloppy seconds”).

[..] Back on the convention circuit with Jules the Singing Jackrabbit, Wayne played the 1983 National Realtors Association Pump-and-Dump Expo and was influenced to get his first real estate license. “Why pay for milk when you can own the cash cow,” keynote speaker Ivan Boesky advised “Wayne,” prompting him to return to his New York City “roots” and resume his identity as “The Donald,” son of “The Fred” Trump. A carefully orchestrated life of public appearances at Gotham charity events and a lavish wedding to model Ivana Zelníková reestablished Donald Trump as a fixture on the glittering Manhattan scene – meanwhile, a Greyhound Bus mechanic and aspiring country crooner named Bud Gorch, a “dead-ringer” look-alike for the erstwhile “Wayne Newton,” was recruited by the Trump Organization to impersonate the once-again in-demand Las Vegas star. Gorch-as-Wayne successfully premiered his new act at the National Colorectal Surgeons Association Chron’s and Colitis Congress and the “great switch” was achieved. The rest, as they say, is history!


Who actually was it onstage at the National Organ Transplant Association Convention, 1967?

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The door is ajar.

What Would it Cost a Country to Leave the Euro? (WS)

[Le Pen] is campaigning on taking France out of the euro (after holding a referendum) and re-denominating the entire €2.4 trillion pile of French government debt into new franc. Then the government can just print the money it wants to spend. There are some complications with her plan, including that the diverse and bickering French political class will unite into a slick monolithic bloc against her during the second round. And if she still wins, her government will face that bloc in parliament. But hey. And now people are seriously thinking about it. Greece was on the verge of leaving the euro, but then within a millimeter of actually taking the step, it blinked and inched back from the precipice in the hot summer of 2015. And so for now still no one knows what the cost would be to leave…

[..] Now ECB President Mario Draghi is stumbling into the fray. “The euro is irrevocable,” he told the European Parliament on Monday, to counter the populist rejection of the euro. “This is the treaty,” he said. Which evoked memories of the good ol’ days of the sovereign debt crisis, when, to put an end to it in July 2012, Draghi said that the euro was “irreversible” and that the ECB was “ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro.” At the time, the Spanish 10-year yield was above 7% and the Italian 10-year yield was above 6%. So now, same tune, different scenario. It’s not a debt crisis. It’s just a question of whether or not it’s possible to leave the euro, and if yes, how much it would cost. And that question has already been raised officially.

On January 18, Draghi had sent a letter to European Union lawmakers Marco Valli and Marco Zanni, telling them: “If a country were to leave the Eurosystem, its national central bank’s claims on or liabilities to the ECB would need to be settled in full.” That was the opening – the IF. “If a country were to leave…” It meant that a country could leave! It was the first official admission that this was actually possible. It was just a matter of cost. That’s how Zani saw Draghi’s response. Bloomberg: “I wanted to bring up the issue of exit from the euro and how it can happen,” he said in an interview before the testimony. “Draghi has now clearly admitted that such an exit is possible and now there is need to have more clarity about the cost. I’m sure that in case of Italy’s exit from the euro, benefits exceed costs.”

Alas, in his testimony before the European Parliament, Draghi refused to put a price tag on leaving the euro. Valli asked him whether the “liabilities” Draghi had referred to that would “need to be settled in full” were the so-called Target2 imbalances. These are a result of payment settlements within the European System of Central Banks. They’d soared during the debt crisis to hundreds of billions of euros, a sign of the underlying financial tensions between debtor and creditor countries. But Draghi dodged the question: “I cannot answer a question that is based on hypotheses, on assumptions which are not foreseen” by the European treaties, he said. “What I could do is send you a written answer which compares our Target2 system with the Federal Reserve-based system.” Which was very helpful.

But even though he refused to put a price tag on leaving the euro, the whole exchange confirmed that it’s possible to leave the euro, though there is nothing in the treaties that mentions leaving the euro.

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Yanis is spot on right. The Greeks are now being sacrificed on the altar of incumbents afraid to lose elections. The insane narrative that Germans and Dutch ‘give’ billions to Greece persists. That says a lot about the press in these countries.

Varoufakis Accuses Creditors Of Going After Greece’s ‘Little People’ (Ind.)

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has said that everyday life in Greece is unsustainable and that the country’s European creditors are going after the “little people” rather than “corrupt oligarchs”. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the 55-year old economist said that the country has been put on a fiscal path which makes everyday life “unsustainable” in Greece. “The German finance minister agrees that no Greek government, however reformist it might be, can sustain the current debt obligations of Greece,” he said. Earlier in the day, Wolfgang Schäuble told German broadcaster ARD that Greece must reform or quit the euro. “A country in desperate need of reform has been made unreformable by unsustainable macroeconomic policies,” Mr Varoufakis said.

He said that “instead of attacking the worst cases of corruption, for six years now the creditors have been after the little people, the small pharmacists, the very poor pensioners instead of going for the oligarchies”. Greece in 2010 was given a huge loan that Mr Varoufakis said was not designed to save the bankrupt country but to “cynically transfer huge banking losses from the books of the Franco German banks onto the shoulders of the weakest taxpayers in Europe”. Earlier this week, the IMF warned Greece’s debts are on an “explosive” path, despite years of economic reform. The IMF has insisted on additional debt relief and reduced fiscal targets before it participates financially in Greece’s current bailout program. Germany, which faces national elections, has resisted such moves. Statistics agency ELSTAT said on Thursday that Greece’s jobless rate came in at 23% in November, unchanged from the previous month. But although the jobless rate has come down from record highs, it remains more than double the euro zone’s average of 9.8% in November.

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Why try anymore?

Greece Hopeful Of Imminent EU Debt Deal Despite German Warning (G.)

The Greek government has expressed hope of an imminent deal with its EU creditors, despite a warning from the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, that the country could cut its debts only by leaving the single currency. Athens is in a familiar stand-off with the German finance ministry as it seeks easier repayment terms on its €330bn debt pile, which the IMF has described as unsustainable and explosive. The IMF has so far declined to get involved in the latest Greek rescue effort, a three-year EU bailout worth €86bn set to run until August 2018. The fund says it will only join if Greece gets significant debt relief, although its board is split. Germany and the Netherlands, which both face elections this year, think the IMF’s involvement is crucial for the bailout plan to continue.

Tensions – and Greek borrowing costs – have risen in recent weeks, ahead of a meeting of eurozone finance ministers on 20 February, which is widely seen as the last moment to reach agreement before the eurozone election cycle. The Dutch go to the polls in March; French presidential elections follow in April-May and German elections in the autumn. George Katrougalos, Greece’s Europe minister, voiced confidence that a deal was within reach: “I am optimistic that we can have such an agreement before the Eurogroup of 20 February.” He told journalists in Brussels that Europe was not the problem. “If we had just to deal with the Europeans we would have already completed this review in December. All the delay is due to the ambivalence of the IMF to participate or not to participate.”

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“Klaus Regling, the managing director of the European Stability Mechanism, argued that “Greece’s debt situation does not have to be cause for alarm”…

Greek Crisis Descends Into Blame Game (Tel.)

Greece is under mounting pressure to embark on a new wave of economic reforms, as its international creditors demand extra efforts to drag the country out of its latest crisis. At the same time Germany is facing fresh demands from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to write off some of the money it loaned to Greece in the most recent €86bn (£73bn) bailout. And the IMF has been forced to defend its dire predictions of permanent economic gloom as the Greek government rejects the IMF’s assessment of its reforms, public finances and economic performance. On top of that, the IMF itself is split, with a minority of directors pushing for extra spending cuts and tax hikes in Greece to try to improve its public finances. The IMF tried to address its internal splits, stressing that it wants debt relief for Greece combined with economic reforms, not austerity. It does still demand serious action, though – unless the economy picks up and debts are slashed, it has warned Greece’s debts are on an “explosive” path.

“Our strong preference is for a primary [Greek budget] surplus target of 1.5pc and that this should be accompanied by significant debt relief. We’ve referred to this as the ‘two legs’ of the programme that we think is required,” said Gerry RIce, the IMF’s spokesman. “We think this target, the 1.5, can be obtained by the policies envisaged by the current European Stability Mechanism programme – in short, the IMF is not asking for any more austerity for Greece.” That passes much of the pressure on to Germany and the other nations which have loaned Greece money, but are unwilling to write off the debt. Germany renewed the pressure on Greece to press ahead with more economic reforms. Its finance minister Wolfgang Schauble told a German TV station that the Lisbon Treaty prevents governments from writing off these debts.

Instead, he argued, Greece must continue reforming to make its economy more competitive. Meanwhile Klaus Regling, the managing director of the European Stability Mechanism, argued that “Greece’s debt situation does not have to be cause for alarm”. Writing in the Financial Times, he said that the IMF has failed to fully appreciate the amount of support on offer from other eurozone countries to Greece, largely in the form of very generous loans. “It is hard to overestimate the significance of this pledge, made by the finance ministers of the eurozone. Solidarity with Greece will continue,” he said. “We would not have lent this amount if we did not think we would get our money back,” he said, ruling out debt relief and backing more economic reforms.

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Beijing decides what bitcoin is.

China Bitcoin Exchanges Halt Withdrawals After PBOC Talks (BBG)

China’s three biggest bitcoin exchanges took steps to prevent withdrawals of the cryptocurrency amid pressure from the nation’s central bank to clamp down on capital outflows. BTC China subjected all bitcoin withdrawals to a 72-hour review, while Huobi and OKCoin suspended them completely, the three venues said in separate statements on Thursday. They all said the measures were in response to central bank requirements. Conversion to and from the yuan is not affected and the curbs will be dropped after updates to compliance systems, the exchanges said. The People’s Bank of China told nine bitcoin venues at a meeting in Beijing on Wednesday that it will close exchanges that violate rules on foreign exchange management, money laundering, and payment and settlement.

Chinese authorities are scrutinizing the cryptocurrency amid concerns it’s being used to spirit money out of the country, undermining official efforts to clamp down on capital outflows and prop up the yuan. Demand from investors in Asia’s largest economy, home to most of the world’s bitcoin trades, has fueled a 160% rally versus the dollar over the past year. Huobi and OKCoin said it will take about a month to upgrade systems in line with new PBOC guidelines. BTC China did not give a timing for when any upgrade would be completed. “The Chinese government is worried about capital flight,” said Arthur Hayes, a former market maker at Citigroup who now runs BitMEX, a bitcoin derivatives venue in Hong Kong. “Bitcoin is seen as another way to move money out of China, even though most people trade it for onshore capital appreciation and as another asset in their portfolio.”

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A long history of immgrant bans.

Where US Immigrants Have Come From Over Time (BI)

President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders on immigration may have reignited public debate, but Americans have long harbored anti-immigrant sentiments. One-third of Americans said in a 2016 Pew Research Center survey that immigrants are a “burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care,” and 38% say immigration should be decreased. On the flip side, 59% of Americans say immigrants “strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents” and either think immigration should stay at its present level or increase. Today, immigrants make up 13.5% of the US population — on par with the share in 1860, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The overall number of immigrants coming to the US peaked from 2000-05 at 5 million, and has been declining since then. Here are the major regions where immigrants entering the US have come from since 1820:

US immigrants were largely of European descent in the 1800s, and started coming from the Americas (largely Mexico) in the 1960s. The sharp decrease in the 1920s is due to Congress passing the Exclusion Act, which set limits on the number of immigrants who could enter the US, based on a quota system of the percentage of nationalities already in the country. Barely anyone from Asia could enter at all. Congress revised the law in 1952, and immigration started to tick up again.

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Wonderful story.

The World According to a Free-Range Short Seller (BBG)

Some of the most respected people in the investing industry say that, dating back to the 1980s, nobody has had a better nose for sniffing out fraud than the 56-year-old Cohodes. He’s exposed suspect accounting at a number of high-profile companies, including the Belgian speech-recognition software developer Lernout & Hauspie, which went bankrupt in 2001 after being valued at about $10 billion, and mortgage lender NovaStar Financial, where his efforts earned him a Harvard Business School case study published in 2013. “I would not want to be his adversary if I was still a criminal today,” says Sam Antar, who was sentenced to six months of house arrest and 1,200 hours of community service for cooking the books at New York consumer-electronics chain Crazy Eddie in one of the largest securities frauds unearthed in the 1980s. “A character like Marc”—the two crossed paths later in his life when both were focused on detecting fraud—“you stay away from.”

And that’s been relatively easy for at least part of the past eight years. In 2008 the hedge fund Cohodes worked at for more than two decades went out of business under controversial circumstances. He maintains that Goldman Sachs, its prime broker, closed it too hastily by making needless margin calls, a claim Goldman disputes. The fallout spurred a bout of what Cohodes likens to post-traumatic stress disorder. “What happened to me would put the average person under,” he says. He retreated to his farm, where he recuperated by spending his days delivering eggs to San Francisco, cheering on the Oakland Raiders, and traveling to see a friend’s rock band, Collective Soul. Besides, the vast majority of stocks were rising because of central bank stimulus, depriving him of ideal opportunities as a short seller.

Now Cohodes is back. His time among the horses and chickens—outside the money management industry—may even have helped him return to the top of his game. Slimmed down and fighting fit, he’s been winning big on a series of short bets against Canadian companies since he made his comeback. Cohodes says he’s been betting against embattled Valeant Pharmaceuticals International since the summer of 2015. Around the same time, he began shorting another debt-laden Canadian drugmaker, Concordia International, which he calls “the poor man’s Valeant.” Both stocks lost most of their value last year. Cohodes says he’s committed to exposing companies that he believes may be ripping off ordinary, unwary investors—“Joe Six-pack,” as he puts it. “Legitimate companies don’t know who the f— I am. And they don’t care,” Cohodes says. “The bad guys? They know. And they do care.”

And he’ll go to great lengths to chase them down: dumpster-diving to find clues of wrongdoing, lambasting enemies on Twitter (where his rambunctious character is on full display), and hotfooting it across Las Vegas to check whether new business offices reported by NovaStar were real. (They weren’t, according to Cohodes; one was a private home, another a massage parlor.) “I’m a pretty driven guy,” he says.

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Still trying to find a good report on this, it’s frustrating. One detail: radiation levels are measured at a certain distance from the source, having some suggest real levels at that source could be 5000 sievert.

Radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Reactor Is Now at ‘Unimaginable’ Levels (Fox)

The radiation levels at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant are now at “unimaginable” levels. Adam Housley, who reported from the area in 2011 following the catastrophic triple-meltdown, said this morning that new fuel leaks have been discovered. He said the radiation levels – as high as 530 sieverts per hour – are now the highest they’ve been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor. “To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people,” he explained.

He said that critics, including the U.S. military in 2011, have long questioned whether Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and officials have been providing accurate information on the severity of the radiation. TEPCO maintains that the radiation is confined to the site and not a risk to the public. It’s expected to take at least $300 billion and four decades to fix it. Housley said small levels of radiation are still being detected off the coasts of California and Oregon and scientists fear it could get worse. “The worry is with 300 tons of radioactive water going into the Pacific every day, what is that doing to the Pacific Ocean?” said Housley. He added that critics are now questioning whether the radiation has been this severe all along.

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Keep paying attention.

Ground-Breaking Research Uncovers New Risks of GMOs, Glyphosate (NGR)

Within just a few weeks, two studies were published in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports that cast new doubts on the safety of genetically modified foods and glyphosate herbicide. The first found that a genetically modified corn, NK 603, was not substantially equivalent to a non-GMO counterpart, which is contrary to claims of GMO proponents. The second study found that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, can cause a serious liver disease at doses thousands of times lower than that allowed by law. Dr. Michael Antoniou, Head of the Gene Expression and Therapy Group at King’s College London in the United Kingdom, led the ground-breaking research.

The main focus of research within Dr. Antoniou’s group is the study of the molecular mechanisms of the regulation of gene function. He has used these discoveries to develop efficient gene expression systems for efficacious and safe biotechnological applications, including gene therapy. More recently, Dr. Antoniou has expanded his research program to include using molecular profiling “omics” methods in evaluating the safety of foods derived from GMO crops, low dose exposure from their associated pesticides, and other chemical pollutants. Dr. Antoniou is also a co-author of GMO Myths and Truths, an evidence-based examination of the claims made for the safety of genetically modified crops and foods.

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Too many parties involved see misery as being a positive for their goals. Very few aim at actually solving the problems.

‘No One Accepts Responsibility’: Thirteen Refugees Dead In Greece (IRR)

The IRR has been trying to ascertain the circumstances in which thirteen refugees and migrants died since April 2016 in Greece, with six of these deaths occurring in hotspots. In only one of these cases are we in a position to provide the full name of the deceased; the only available identifier is nationality. At least six of the dead were refugees from Syria, including Syrian Kurds, three were from Afghanistan. Five of the dead were living at the hotspot at Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos where over 3,000 refugees are accommodated, well above stated capacity. Those who died here did so because the heaters and gas canisters they had obtained in order to keep warm or cook food were faulty, or used in dangerous situations. An Iraqi man died of a cardiac arrest at a hotspot in Samos (refugee population around 1,800 in a place designed for less than half that number).

Since the Idomeni makeshift migrant camp close to the Macedonian border was cleared by police in May 2016, sub-standard government refugee camps lacking basic amenities have been set up, with three of the dead living in such facilities around Thessaloniki. The oldest to die was a grandmother of 66, the youngest a two-month-old baby. There are three children amongst the dead. The remaining two deaths we have recorded were of men who died of hypothermia after having crossed from Turkey via the river Evros. It’s likely that they made the perilous crossing in order to avoid being detained in the hotspots on the Greek islands. Autopsy results are shrouded in secrecy. Nevertheless, the facts speak for themselves. Overcrowded, unprotected and dangerous conditions are all symptoms of institutional neglect. The simple truth is that the securitisation of asylum policy has come at the expense of refugee protection, as well as basic human rights.

[..] The deaths that have occurred over the winter have at least been reported in the media, partly because human rights defenders, wary of the positive communication strategy of the UNHCR and the EU, issued a number of press releases. Even so, officialdom does not appear over- anxious to investigate. What is particularly worrying is the secrecy shrouding autopsy results, which, if left unchallenged, will ensure that completely avoidable deaths such as these become the new normal. Philippa Kempson, of the Eftalou/ Molovos refugee support group on Lesbos, told IRR News of her fear that the ‘deaths could be subject to cover ups’, and her particular concern that ‘the “accidental” deaths in Moria still do not have a conclusive cause of death’. She also drew attention to the escalation in suicide attempts, particularly amongst unaccompanied minors, at Moria. ‘No one accepts responsibility for what is going on, just a circle of blame,’ she said.

In fact, evading accountability is hard-wired into the way refugee reception is organised in Greece, as there is no central authority responsible for the camps’ administration but a number of actors – a mixture of EU officials, the Greek army and other Greek institutions, the Red Cross and the UNHCR. This means that when anything goes wrong, the various actors end up blaming each other – something academics refer to as a process of distanciation, in which complex chains of responsibility make it difficult to connect cause (ie, government policies) with effect (ie, border-related deaths). Guardian journalist Patrick Kingsley made a similar point in his recent exposé of how a multi-million pound fund administered by the EU’s aid department ECHO, implemented in Greece by UNHCR and aimed at creating adequate facilities to protect refugees from the winter, has been mishandled. Kingsley points out that as ‘no single actor has overall control of all funding and management decisions in the camps, this has allowed most parties to distance themselves from blame’.

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Feb 052017
 
 February 5, 2017  Posted by at 8:59 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Hugo Simberg The Wounded Angel 1903

 

US Appeals Court Denies Request To Restore Trump’s Immigration Ban (R.)
DHS Suspends Actions On Travel Ban; ‘Standard Policy’ Now In Effect (R.)
Trump Tells O’Reilly He ‘Respects’ Putin in Super Bowl Interview (Fox)
As Trump Weighs Thaw With Putin, EU Set to Renew Its Blacklist (BBG)
Goldman Throws Cold Water On Trump Agenda (CNBC)
Economists Say Action On Carbon Is Vital, Or Say Nothing At All (Age)
Japan – It’s Finally Happening (Muir)
Le Pen Kicks Off Campaign With Promise Of French ‘Freedom’ (R.)
Theresa May Abandons ‘Home Owning Democracy’ of Thatcher and Tories (G.)
Attention Trade Warriors: Germany’s Surplus is on the Wane (BBG)
Dennis Kucinich Rages Against The Military-Industrial-Complex (FB)
NATO, Not Russia, Has Deployed Tanks To Poland & Baltic States – Galloway (RT)
Varoufakis Calls on PM Tspiras to Ditch Bailout Restructuring (GR)
Varoufakis Urges Tsipras To Ditch Negotiations, Adopt “Parallel System” (KTG)
UK: Refugees Heading To Europe To Be Sent To Asia And Latin America (Ind.)

 

 

It was always going to the Supreme Court. 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. And the legal team has gained in standing, a lot. Trump cannot afford too many of these snags, even if they love the attention and controversy coming from it. All in all, a good thing that the legal system gets tested, never a thing to fall asleep on.

US Appeals Court Denies Request To Restore Trump’s Immigration Ban (R.)

A U.S. appeal court late on Saturday denied an emergency appeal from the U.S. Department of Justice to restore an immigration order from President Donald Trump barring citizens from seven mainly Muslim countries and temporarily banning refugees. “Appellants’ request for an immediate administrative stay pending full consideration of the emergency motion for a stay pending appeal is denied,” the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said. It said a reply from the Department in support of the emergency appeal was due on Monday. The Department filed the appeal a day after a federal judge in Seattle ordered Trump’s travel ban to be lifted. The president’s Jan. 27 order had barred admission of citizens from the seven nations for 90 days.

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Law.

DHS Suspends Actions On Travel Ban; ‘Standard Policy’ Now In Effect (R.)

A Seattle federal judge on Friday put a nationwide block on U.S. President Donald Trump’s week-old executive order that had temporarily barred refugees and nationals from seven countries from entering the United States. The judge’s temporary restraining order represents a major setback for Trump’s action, though the White House said late Friday that it believed the ban to be “lawful and appropriate” and that the U.S. Department of Justice would file an emergency appeal. As a result of the ruling, the Department of Homeland Security suspended its enforcement of the ban, announcing on Saturday that “standard policy and procedures” were now in effect. “In accordance with the judge’s ruling, DHS has suspended any and all actions implementing the affected sections of the Executive Order entitled, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States,” DHS said in a statement.

“DHS personnel will resume inspection of travelers in accordance with standard policy and procedure,” it stated, adding that the Justice Department would file an emergency stay to “defend the president’s executive order, which is lawful and appropriate.” The move came on the heels of the State Department announcing it was reversing the revocation of visas that left countless travelers stranded at airports last weekend. The move all but ensures a protracted public and legal battle over one of Trump’s most controversial policies, barely two weeks after he was inaugurated. Early Saturday morning, Trump criticised the ruling as “ridiculous” and warned of big trouble if a country could not control its borders.

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Quite right. Putin bashing is a losing strategy.

Trump Tells O’Reilly He ‘Respects’ Putin in Super Bowl Interview (Fox)

On Sunday, Bill O’Reilly will hold a special Super Bowl pre-game interview with President Trump at 4 p.m. ET on your local FOX broadcast station. In a special preview, Trump revealed his plans for dealing with Russian President Vladimir Putin. O’Reilly asked Trump whether he “respects” the former KGB agent: “I do respect him, but I respect a lot of people,” Trump said, “That doesn’t mean I’m going to get along with him.” Trump said he would appreciate any assistance from Russia in the fight against ISIS terrorists, adding that he would rather get along with the former Cold War-era foe than otherwise. “But, [Putin] is a killer,” O’Reilly said. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump responded, “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

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For the EU, like NATO, Putin bashing is the only thing left that provides a reason to be. That’s just dangerous.

As Trump Weighs Thaw With Putin, EU Set to Renew Its Blacklist (BBG)

The European Union plans to renew asset freezes and travel bans against key allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin who are accused of destabilizing Ukraine, at a time when Donald Trump is weighing warmer ties with Moscow. Four EU officials said member governments intend by mid-March to prolong the sanctions for another six months on more than 100 Ukrainians and Russians. Among them: Arkady Rotenberg, co-owner of SMP Bank and InvestCapitalBank, and Yury Kovalchuk, the biggest shareholder in Bank Rossiya, the Brussels-based officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are confidential. Trump, who had a phone call with Putin on Jan. 28, has left open the possibility of easing the U.S.’s sanctions against Russia.

Former President Barack Obama drew up the American penalties in coordination with the 28-nation EU after Putin annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea in 2014 and lent support to separatist rebels. “The Europeans are waiting to see what hand grenade Trump throws into the Russia-Ukraine pond,” Michael Emerson, a foreign-policy expert at the CEPS think tank in Brussels, said by phone. With the asset freezes and travel bans due to expire on March 15, “European politicians and diplomats will be cautious and stick to the status quo,” he said. The planned renewal of the blacklist highlights the EU’s political commitment to a policy that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande guided in step with Obama. The European sanctions against Russia resemble the U.S. penalties and include a separate set of curbs – prolonged for another six months just before Trump took office on Jan. 20 – on Russia’s financial, energy and defense industries.

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Volatility.

Goldman Throws Cold Water On Trump Agenda (CNBC)

The policy halo effect that provided ballast to the stock market and fueled investor optimism is already being dimmed by political realities, according to Goldman Sachs, which may have negative implications for economic growth. In a note to clients on Friday, the investment bank noted President Donald Trump’s agenda was already running into bipartisan political resistance, with doubts growing about potential tax reform and a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, among other marquee Trump administration initiatives. Just two weeks into his tenure, “risks are less positively tilted than they appeared shortly after the election ,” Goldman wrote. Growing resistance to Trump’s executive orders on immigration and financial reform has galvanized opposition while dividing members of the president’s own Republican Party.

It has also curbed the enthusiasm of investors, who sent stocks on a roller-coaster ride this week as they struggled to reconcile the new restrictions on immigration with Trump’s professed pro-business bent. “While bipartisan cooperation looked possible on some issues following the election, the political environment appears to be as polarized as ever, suggesting that issues that require bipartisan support may be difficult to address,” the bank added. The balance of risks “are less positively tilted than they appeared shortly after the election,” Goldman said, which may blunt the force of future growth. Amid reports that top GOP members are reportedly becoming nervous about the impact of a full-fleged repeal of health care, that political pushback “does not bode well for reaching a quick agreement on tax reform or infrastructure funding, and reinforces our view that a fiscal boost, if it happens, is mostly a 2018 story.”

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Steve on Twitter: “Coulnd’t resist it: sanctimonious carbon price pap, & belief market can solve an ecological problem just baug me. So my satirical gene fired.”

Economists Say Action On Carbon Is Vital, Or Say Nothing At All (Age)

There is no consensus. Economists either believe it is vital that Australia becomes a low-carbon intensity economy, or that the issue is so unimportant – or perhaps that it is so politically divisive – that they choose not to volunteer an opinion. Asked about the importance of reducing the country’s carbon footprint and how best to do it, more than half of 27 economists from industry, consultancy, academia and finance questioned for the annual BusinessDay Scope survey agreed it was a must. Another 10 left the question blank. Whether this indicates a lack of interest or the contentious nature of climate change policy is unclear. But none of those who did answer made the case that cleaning up the economy did not matter. They overwhelmingly said action should be swift and include a market-based carbon pricing scheme.

[..] Steve Keen, of London’s Kingston University, made what – we think – was a similar point about the importance of climate action, albeit less conventionally. “Nah mate! Wassa matta, dontcha own a pair of budgie smugglers?” he wrote. “It’s all a conspiracy by Marxists anyway to undermine the Ostralyan way of life – you know, burning stuff and damn well enjoying it rather than whingeing. “A bit a coal never hurt anyone, matter of fact it tastes even better than a raw onion!”

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“I am shorting JGBs with both fists.”

Japan – It’s Finally Happening (Muir)

I still shake my head at the stupidity. One of the most overindebted countries in the history of modern finance trading with a 0% thirty year bond. Professor Malkiel – stick that in your pipe and smoke it. But into that panic a crazy thing happened. Worried its bonds would trade at negative yields and pressure the financial system, the Bank of Japan pegged its 10 year yield at 0%. In doing so, the Bank of Japan moved from a set rate of balance sheet expansion to one that varies based on whether that peg is either too high, or too low. If the equilibrium level of 10 year rates was in fact below 0%, the Bank of Japan would be forced to sell bonds to keep rates stuck at 0%. If there was demand for credit and 10 year rates moved higher, then the BoJ would be forced to buy bonds to keep them from declining.

The BoJ program was a little more nuanced, and there were some caveats, but at its heart, the BoJ was giving up control of its balance sheet so it could peg a specific part of the yield curve. Of course Central Banks do this all the time. The difference is they usually operate at the front part of the curve, and when there is too much demand or supply, they change the rate. When the Bank of Japan took this unprecedented step, I walked away from my short JGB position. I figured there were better fixed income markets to short. Yet I highlighted that by pegging the 10 year rate, the Bank of Japan had not eliminated volatility, but merely postponed it. Eventually the Bank of Japan’s massive balance sheet expansion would kick in. At that point, inflation would pick up, credit would be demanded and the Bank of Japan would be forced to defend the 0% peg.

Yet this defending would be expansionary as they would be forced to buy bonds and expand the amount of base money, which if not offset with a decline in the velocity of money, would create more inflation, etc… All of this would be occurring with an already highly supercharged Japanese Central Bank balance sheet. I have been sitting and waiting for this expansionary feedback loop to kickstart. Until recently, the Bank of Japan had not been forced to buy any bonds to keep the rate pegged at 0%. When 10 year rates drifted far enough above 0%, the Bank of Japan made a bid to buy an unlimited number of bonds at a level below the market, which scared the market back to the pegged level. But this week the market decided to test the BoJ’s resolve.

The JGB 10 Year bond spiked through the previous high yield on news the Bank of Japan would not be expanding their balance sheet quite as aggressively as expected in their regular QE program. As yields popped through the previous 0.10% yield ceiling, the Bank of Japan came charging into the market. The BoJ bid 3-4 basis points through the market with unlimited size to push yields back down to the 0.10% level. What does this mean? The market is finally saying the demand for credit is enough to force the Bank of Japan to buy bonds to keep rates down. And that was the signal I was waiting for. I am shorting JGBs with both fists. It probably won’t happen tomorrow, nor the next day. Heck it probably won’t even happen next month, but we have reached the point where I need to be short JGBs.

The pressure will continue to build and when it finally bursts, the torrent will be overwhelming and quick. Although many traders think they will be able to climb on board, it will most likely be extremely difficult – like jumping on a raft bouncing down a raging river, it always seems way easier than it is. I hate German bunds, but I now have a fixed income instrument I hate even more. I expect bund yields to double or even triple in the coming quarters, but JGBs will eventually trade significantly though bunds. It would be just like the Market Gods to finally usher in the JGBs collapse once all the hedge fund guys had given up on it…

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Count her out at your own peril.

Le Pen Kicks Off Campaign With Promise Of French ‘Freedom’ (R.)

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen kicked off her presidential campaign on Saturday with a promise to shield voters from globalization and make their country “free”, hoping to profit from political turmoil to score a Donald Trump-style upset. Opinion polls see the 48-year old daughter of National Front (FN) founder Jean-Marie Le Pen topping the first round on April 23 but then losing the May 7 run-off to a mainstream candidate. But in the most unpredictable election race France has known in decades, the FN hopes the scandal hitting conservative candidate Francois Fillon and the rise of populism across the West will help convince voters to back Le Pen. “We were told Donald Trump would never win in the United States against the media, against the establishment, but he won… We were told Marine Le Pen would not win the presidential election, but on May 7 she will win!” Jean-Lin Lacapelle, a top FN official, told several hundred party officials and members.

In 144 “commitments” published at the start of a two-day rally in Lyon, Le Pen proposes leaving the euro zone, holding a referendum on EU membership, slapping taxes on imports and on the job contracts of foreigners, lowering the retirement age and increasing several welfare benefits while lowering income tax. The manifesto also foresees reserving certain rights now available to all residents, including free education, to French citizens only, hiring 15,000 police, curbing migration and leaving NATO’s integrated command. “The aim of this program is first of all to give France its freedom back and give the people a voice,” Le Pen said in the introduction to the manifesto.

[..] “This presidential election puts two opposite proposals,” Le Pen said in her manifesto. “The ‘globalist’ choice backed by all my opponents … and the ‘patriotic’ choice which I personify.” If elected, Le Pen says she would immediately seek an overhaul of the European Union that would reduce it to a very loose cooperative of nations with no single currency and no border-free area. If, as is likely, France’s EU partners refuse to agree to this, she would call a referendum to leave the bloc.

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Horse barn.

Theresa May Abandons ‘Home Owning Democracy’ of Thatcher and Tories (G.)

A major shift in Tory housing policy in favour of people who rent will be announced by ministers this week as Theresa May’s government admits that home ownership is now out of reach for millions of families. In a departure from her predecessor David Cameron, who focused on advancing Margaret Thatcher’s ambition for a “home-owning democracy”, a white paper will aim to deliver more affordable and secure rental deals, and threaten tougher action against rogue landlords, for the millions of families unable to buy because of sky-high property prices. Ministers will say they want to change planning and other rules to ensure developers provide a proportion of new homes for “affordable rent” instead of just insisting that they provide a quota of “affordable homes for sale”.

They will also announce incentives to encourage landlords to offer “family-friendly” guaranteed three-year tenancies, new action to ban unscrupulous landlords who offer sub-standard properties, and a further consultation on banning many of the fees that are charged by letting agents. A senior Whitehall source said: “We want to help renters get more choice, a better deal and more secure tenancies.” They added that the government did not want to scare people off from renting out homes, but offer incentives to encourage best practice and isolate the worst landlords. By emphasising the rights of renters, as well as trying to boost house building, the white paper will mark a turning point for a party that since the 1980s, and the first council house sales, has promoted home ownership as a badge of success, while neglecting the interests of renters.

The Tory manifesto for the 2015 general election spelt out plans for 200,000 new “starter homes” that could be bought by first-time buyers at 20% discounts, but said little about promoting the interests and improving the lot of so-called “generation rent”. Cameron also pushed the idea of getting people on the housing ladder through shared ownership schemes, an idea that is no longer such a priority. The white paper will be seen as part of May’s deliberate break with Cameron, and her drive to create a country “that works for everyone, not just the privileged few”.

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Makes no difference anymore to Greece and Italy.

Attention Trade Warriors: Germany’s Surplus is on the Wane (BBG)

The Trump administration appears intent on escalating the long-standing U.S. practice of attacking Germany’s current-account surplus. Good news for those on the receiving end: It has probably peaked. As officials like National Trade Council director Peter Navarro rail against the trade imbalance that dominates the balance of payments between the two countries, pensioners, home-buyers and immigrants are quietly working to bring that $297 billion current-account surplus down. According to research by Deutsche Bank, demographics and a housing boom are two factors that will drive the current account balance – the difference between what a country earns from abroad and what it spends – to its lowest level in seven years by 2020.

That may offer little consolation to the German delegation when it hosts a Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers in March, as they’ll likely face intensified criticism for allowing such an imbalance to continue. Germany has long faced flak, both within the euro area and outside it, for failing to encourage greater domestic spending and imports to balance out its external excess. Still, while the weaker euro will continue to make German exports attractive in the U.S. – think expensive sedans, high-tech machinery – there are countervailing factors at play on the other side of the equation. “In the medium term we expect the demographic development and the solid domestic economy, driven by a sustained positive development on the property market, to push the surplus down to 7 percent of GDP,” Deutsche Bank economist Heiko Peters said by phone.

A rising share of pensioners in the German population, who normally have less money to save than people in jobs, will crimp household savings rates, while an increasing number of immigrants such as refugees will contribute to boosting German imports, Peters wrote in a study first published last year. And with housing valuations outpacing income and rent growth since 2009, home owners feel richer, save less toward retirement and borrow against their property. That leads to rising imports of building materials to fuel the property boom and increased demand for foreign consumer goods on the back of the wealth effect. 7% of GDP is still a mighty big number for an economy as large as Germany’s. “That’s still a relatively high level until 2020,” Peters says. “But an even greater demographic effect is then expected for 2020-2025, and the surplus should then decline clearly further.”

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Another ‘curious’ WaPo feat.

Dennis Kucinich Rages Against The Military-Industrial-Complex (FB)

I have dedicated my life to peace. As a member of Congress I led efforts to avert conflict and end wars in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Iran. And yet those of us who work for peace are put under false scrutiny to protect Washington’s war machine. Those who undermine our national security by promoting military attacks and destroying other nations are held up as national leaders to admire. Recently Rep. Tulsi Gabbard and I took a Congressional Ethics-approved fact finding trip to Lebanon and Syria, where we visited Aleppo and refugee camps, and met with religious leaders, governmental leaders and people from all sides of the conflict, including political opposition to the Syrian government.

Since that time we have been under constant attack on false grounds. The media and the war establishment are desperate to keep hold of their false narrative for world-wide war, interventionism and regime change, which is a profitable business for Washington insiders and which impoverishes our own country. Today, Rep. Gabbard came under attack yet again by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin who has been on a tear trying to ruin the reputations of the people and the organization who sponsored our humanitarian, fact-finding mission of peace to the Middle East. Rogin just claimed in a tweet that as community organization I have been associated with for twenty years does not exist. The organization is in my neighborhood. Here’s photos I took yesterday of AACCESS-Ohio’s marquee.

It clearly exists, despite the base, condescending assertions of Mr. Rogin. Enough of this dangerous pettiness. Let’s dig in to what is really going on, inside Syria, in the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon. In the words of President Eisenhower, let’s beware (and scrutinize) the military-industrial-complex. It is time to be vigilant for our democracy.


These leaders of the Christian faith in Aleppo begged for the US to stop funding terrorists in #Syria. They expressed that before international interventions (covert and overt) Syrians lived in peace without concern as to whether they were Christian, Muslim or Jew.

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Line of the day: “Why are we spending £160bn on renewing Trident when we now know its missiles are more likely to hit Australia if they were aimed at Russia?..”

NATO, Not Russia, Has Deployed Tanks To Poland & Baltic States – Galloway (RT)

British Defense Secretary speech on “Russian threat” is a desperate attempt to “save jobs and budgets” for the Cold War crowd, which is worried the new US leader will not consider Russia an enemy, broadcaster and former British MP George Galloway told RT. Addressing a group of university students, the UK’s defense secretary Michael Fallon warned of a resurgent Russia and said that it is becoming aggressive. RT: What did you make of Michael Fallon’s speech? George Galloway: Well, Michael Fallon puts the ‘squeak’ in the word ‘pipsqueak.’ He is of course the defense minister of a small and semi-detached European power with not much military prowess and which wants to feel big about itself.

And these people, and he’s not alone – the military industrial complex in the United States is up to the same game – they are desperately thrashing around to save their jobs, to save their budgets, to save their roles as muscle-men in the world. And Fallon got used to, as did other European powers, going around the world, threatening people with America’s army. Now America’s army is not quite so reliable, because America has a President who might not want to use the army in the way that these people want him to, at least one hopes not. And so they desperately seek to continually exacerbate the existing tensions with Russia to defend their own relevance. The people are asking, “What’s NATO for?”

The people are asking, “Why are we spending £160bn on renewing Trident when we now know its missiles are more likely to hit Australia if they were aimed at Russia? And in any case Russia has thousands of nuclear weapons, and we only a handful.” So it’s all pretty pitiful, actually. Right down to the audience of university students, hoping that none of them would challenge him. I’d like him to debate these matters with me, he knows me well, he comes from the same town in Scotland as me. I’d really love to get my metaphorical hands on him to have some of these matters out. The truth is that the European Union is having to come to terms with the fact that the US now has a President that doesn’t want war with Russia and they – who have built their entire 50-60 years of history on the possibility of war with Russia – are all at sea, except we don’t have that many battleships left either.

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Greece turning into an impoverished prison camp is a feature not a bug.

Varoufakis Calls on PM Tspiras to Ditch Bailout Restructuring (GR)

Yanis Varoufakis wrote in an op-ed in Efimerida ton Syntakton on Saturday. The former finance minister called on Prime Minister Alexis Tspiras to adopt a plan originally proposed by Varoufakis while he was still in office. The plan would unilaterally restructure the loans the ECB holds. In addition according to BitCoin Magazine and reiterated in the former FM’s op-ed a payment system that could operate in euros but which could be changed into drachmas “overnight” if necessary would be implemented along with a parallel payment system. “This two-pronged preparation is the only way to prevent another excruciating retreat by the prime minister in the short-term and [German Finance Minister Wolfgang] Schaeuble’s plan in the long-term,” Varoufakis wrote. Varoufakis has been a vocal protester to Greek bailout plans and restructuring as it stands now, hence his resignation. He firmly believes that the current plan could lead to Greece leaving the Eurozone of their own accord.

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More on that. “In reality there was never a basis for hope that the toxic 3rd bailout would be gradually rationalized, in terms that the European Commission would support Athens so that the austerity and anti-social IMF measures would relax..”

Varoufakis Urges Tsipras To Ditch Negotiations, Adopt “Parallel System” (KTG)

Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis strikes back and urges Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to turn his back on Greece’s lenders, adopt a parallel payment system and to unilaterally restructure the loans held by the ECB. In an op-ed in Efimerida ton Syntakton, Varoufakis, Varoufakis calls on Tispras to prepare for rupture with creditors in order to avoid rupture. “This two-pronged preparation is the only way to prevent another excruciating retreat by the prime minister in the short term and [German Finance Minister Wolfgang] Schaeuble’s plan in the long term,” Varoufakis wrote. In his article, Varoufakis suggested that Schaeuble’s strategy is to lead Greeks to the point of exhaustion so they ask to leave the euro themselves.

Noting that the “parallel payment system was already designed in 2014”, Varoufakis stresses that Tsipras had “two delusions” that led the government to the current impasse: A) that on the night of the referendum, the dilemma was between Schaeuble’s Grexit Plan and the 3rd bailout, and B) that the obedience to the 3rd bailout could be politically manageable through a parallel, society-friendly program. Both of these “working assumptions” were based only on autosuggestion, the ex finance minister stresses adding that he tried to explained this to the Prime Minister on the night of the referendum

“In reality there was never a basis for hope that the toxic 3rd bailout would be gradually rationalized, in terms that the European Commission would support Athens so that the austerity and anti-social IMF measures would relax, the IMF would force Berlin to accept debt restructuring and lower primary surpluses, the ECB would include Greece in the bond purchase program (QE),” Varoufakis wrote. He accused leading European negotiators of lying. “That Moscovici [EU Monetary Affairs Commissioner], Coerer [ECB] and Sapen [French finance minister] might have given such promises was not an excuse. Since May 2015 we were fully aware that these gentlemen know how to lie and fail to deliver on their promises when they do not lie.”

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Completely devoid of any comprehension or compassion. Moral Bankruptcy. Throw money at it, that should work… And then keep bombing, British involvement in that makes a lot of profit.

UK: Refugees Heading To Europe To Be Sent To Asia And Latin America (Ind.)

Refugees heading to Europe will be urged to settle in Asia and Latin America instead, under a new £30m British aid package. Theresa May announced the scheme at an EU summit in Malta, arguing it showed the Government is “stepping up its support for the most vulnerable refugees”. The package will see Britain provide lifesaving supplies for people facing freezing conditions across Eastern Europe and Greece, including warm clothing, shelter and medical care. However, it will also pay for better infrastructure in far-flung countries willing to take refugees who had hoped to settle in Europe. The move builds on an existing scheme run by The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), but it is the first time Britain’s aid budget has been used to bolster it. It risks adding to criticism that the Prime Minister is unwilling for the UK to accept a reasonable share of the refugees and migrants fleeing Syria and other war zones.

Only a few thousand Syrian refugees have been resettled in Britain – and the Government has refused to take part in an EU-wide programme to co-ordinate the continent’s response to the crisis. Government sources stressed that people would only be diverted to countries in Asia and Latin America if they were willing to be resettled there. The Department for International Development is expected to release a list of interested countries later. In Malta the Prime Minister insisted the focus of the £30m programme was “helping migrants return home rather than risk their lives continuing perilous journeys to Europe”. It would provide assistance to refugees and migrants across Greece, the Balkans, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Sudan. Priti Patel, the International Development Secretary, said: “Conflict, drought and political upheaval have fuelled protracted crises and driven mass migration. We cannot ignore these challenges.

The package will be delivered by UNHCR, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and NGO collective Start Network. Its aim is to:

* provide 22,400 life-saving relief items including tents, blankets, winter clothes such as hats and gloves and hygiene kits including mother and baby products

* help more than 60,000 people with emergency medical care, legal support and frontline workers to identify those at risk of violence and trafficking

* allow up to 22,000 people to reunite with family members they have become separated from

* help countries in Asia and Latin America that “might be able to resettle refugees put the infrastructure and systems in place to do so”

* provide more than 1,500 refugees in Egypt, including those fleeing Syria and other conflicts, with urgent health assistance and educational grants for students to go back to school

* provide a migrant centre in Sudan to enable “voluntary returns home when safe”, replicating a successful scheme in Niger.

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