bots Archives - The Automatic Earth

President Trump cracks up a crowd of farmers in Wisconsin by telling them that Elon Musk is 80% brilliant and 20% “bad moments.”

TRUMP: “And you know, look, Elon, he had a bad moment. But now he’s a friend of mine again.”

“He had a very bad moment.”

“He’s 80% brilliant and… pic.twitter.com/tdBJ5CKOzB
— Overton (@overton_news) June 5, 2026

NVIDIA CEO JENSEN HUANG DELIVERED A PRO-TRUMP MESSAGE THAT FEW TECH LEADERS WOULD DARE TO SAY PUBLICLY.

HE LOOKED STRAIGHT AT JOE ROGAN AND SAID:

“PRESIDENT TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT. HE IS OUR PRESIDENT.”

“JUST BECAUSE IT’S PRESIDENT TRUMP, MANY PEOPLE WANT HIM TO BE WRONG.”

“I… pic.twitter.com/1iyZIfQRZF
— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) June 5, 2026

MASS LAYOFFS AT SPY AGENCIES?

Two real pieces here.

On June 3, an order moved about 8,000 senior federal workers to at-will status with no appeal rights, and OPM says it could reach 50,000.

WSJ today points toward Trump urging @pulte to cut the bloat.

Interesting timing. https://t.co/GMUJI0CXnp pic.twitter.com/Ys7ACMuljS
— Official Layoff (@LayoffAI) June 5, 2026

Hussein Obama is the only President to stay in DC after his term ended. Now we know why. pic.twitter.com/AvrOhyUBzZ
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) June 6, 2026

Surprisingly little war news today, but all the more -racial- discrimination.

About this article: 100 vessels a month is quite a lot. 3 per day, and not small vessels. An oil tanker carries two million barrels.

• US Led Over 100 Vessels via Strait of Hormuz in May — NYT (TASS)

Last month, the US military helped coordinate the passage of more than 100 commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times (NYT) wrote citing sources. According to the report, passage through this waterway remains dangerous for ships against the backdrop of stalled US-Iranian reconciliation talks. Earlier, The New York Times said the US Central Command (CENTCOM) assisted the passage of 70 ships via the strait. The majority of them switched off their transponders.

The United States and Israel launched a military operation against Iran on February 28. Major Iranian cities, including Tehran, were struck. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced a retaliatory operation, targeting sites in Israel. US military bases in Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were also hit. Tehran decided to close the Strait of Hormuz to ships associated with the United States, Israel and countries that backed the aggression against Iran.

“The US president could have ended the Ukraine conflict by following through on his own proposals, the Russian foreign minister has told RT..”

• ‘Biden’s War’ Has Become Trump’s – Lavrov (RT)

America’s position on the Ukraine conflict has become almost indistinguishable from that of the EU, making US President Donald Trump’s stated ambition to mediate an end to the fighting hollow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told RT. Trump repeatedly blamed the conflict between Russia and Ukraine on his predecessor, Joe Biden, and claimed that he could bring it to a swift conclusion while campaigning in 2024. However, recent statements by members of his administration suggest a different course, Lavrov said on Thursday in an interview on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

“Biden’s war has become Trump’s war,” the Russian foreign minister said. Speaking to Congress this week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said efforts to facilitate Russia-Ukraine talks were complicated “because, frankly, we’re not an impartial mediator.” He cited the continuation of the sanctions on Russia and sales of US weapons to Ukraine. “After we agreed to the United States proposal in Anchorage [in August 2025], Washington began to shift its position. Instead of advancing those same proposals in its dealings with Ukrainians, it is now pretending that the parties should sort things out themselves. This is not a very consistent position,” Lavrov said.
“It is the West that cannot be trusted to keep its agreements. Its approach is: ‘I’ll promise something now, then stall for time.’ If the US had truly advanced its own initiative, I think… the fighting would already have stopped.” According to Lavrov, the only major difference between Trump’s policy and that of Biden and the EU is that his administration resumed direct talks with Russia. Dialogue is important, he said, but it must be matched by action on commitments already made.

“.. both Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed on the problem. The difference between them was the solution.”

• Promethean Action PAC Discovers MAGAnomics (CTH)

In 2015, even before President Trump came down the golden escalator, CTH was outlining a ‘new era and dimension’ in American economics that could be possible if a presidential candidate focused on specific Main Street policy. Throughout the next four years we watched carefully how Donald Trump was organizing that Main Street revival and what specifically was creating the economic growth. One of the points emphasized in 2016 about Trump’s unique MAGAnomic policy, was how both Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed on the problem. The difference between them was the solution.

Think of it like economic football.
Both Trump and Sanders identify the rigged game. Bernie Sanders wanted to change the referees so that government controls the game. Donald Trump’s approach was different. Trump wanted to change the rules of the game, not step in and try to play referee to a rigged game where the rules were flawed. One of the examples of economic “rule changing” is trade tariffs. You don’t need govt to regulate the corporations directly (ie. raise corporate income taxes). Instead, you can change trade policy to make the better corporate decision a return of production back to the USA (a fundamental rules change).
Both approaches involve a different govt policy, but Trump’s approach changes behavior. That’s MAGAnomics. One of the reasons Trump’s approaches are much more effective, is that his rule changes extend beyond the American corporate game. Trump’s approach changes the behavior of foreign governments and foreign corporations, a win/win/win.An example is the Japanese government investing in America to offset reciprocity tariffs; while Toyota, a corporation, invests in specific auto manufacturing expansion to avoid baseline tariffs.
You don’t get that kind of result through Bernie’s approach changing the American referee in an all-American game and raising corporate income taxes. And don’t forget, the corporation can just move offshore and avoid income taxes entirely. Apple used to have their company incorporated in Ireland. Trump’s rule changes brought them back.The Promethean Action PAC is now highlighting the fundamentals of Trump’s MAGAnomics and how the policy is distinctly different from all U.S. economic policy before it.

“The bad news? His executive order is voluntary and does almost nothing to protect Americans,“ Sanders wrote. “Congress MUST act.”

• Trump Says US Weighing Taking Stakes In AI Companies (ET)

President Donald Trump told reporters on June 5 that his administration is exploring the possibility of the United States acquiring a public stake in artificial intelligence (AI) companies. Trump made the comment in response to a question about a recent News of the United States report, which suggested that unnamed senior U.S. officials had discussed with major AI firms the possibility of the federal government holding some shares in their companies. “There’s so much money that is so big that there are concepts where pieces could be given to the American public, where the American public essentially becomes a partner with the companies,” Trump said aboard Air Force One.

“I have spoken to all of [the AI companies]. There’s something very interesting about it, where it almost becomes a partnership with the American public, and we’ll look into that,” he said. Trump said he and his team have a meeting scheduled in the “very near future” with major AI firms to discuss this possible venture. “We’re talking about it, where the American people can benefit from the success of AI, and by doing that, they can like it better,” Trump explained.nSen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) penned an op-ed in The New York Times on Monday titled “A.I. Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It,” where he announced he would soon introduce congressional legislation to give the American public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in the United States.
“It would create a sovereign wealth fund through a one-time 50 percent tax—not on the profits of OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and other companies, but paid with something far more valuable than that: the stock,” Sanders wrote in the piece. He said the legislation, which he plans to call the American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, would give the American public a direct role in determining the future of AI while also guaranteeing that the trillions generated by the industry are “used to improve the lives of all of us—not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.”
When asked on Friday if he found it odd that he and Sanders were seemingly on the same page about the proposal, Trump said that the two “have certain things that aren’t that far apart” regarding economic policy. “People are surprised, but if you’ll take a look, many of the people who voted for Bernie Sanders … they went to me,” Trump said, referring to some of the voters who backed him in the 2016 presidential election after previously supporting Sanders in the Democratic primary that year.
Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday asking AI companies to voluntarily submit their frontier models for government review 30 days before a full public release. In a post on X hours after the order was announced, Sanders said it was “good news” that Trump had “finally acknowledged AI poses a real threat” after the president had previously criticized efforts to tighten regulation of the AI industry. “The bad news? His executive order is voluntary and does almost nothing to protect Americans,“ Sanders wrote. “Congress MUST act.”

Expect nothing. You may be pleasantly surprised.

• California and the Politics of Low Expectations (Turley)

This week, the nation watched as California grappled again with the ordinarily straightforward task of counting votes in an election. While large states such as Florida declare election winners within 24 hours, California may take up to two weeks to count all the votes. Even Los Angeles cannot count its votes in the time of large states despite giving the Clerk an annual budget of $336 million and a $448,179 a year salary with the help of 1,100 budgeted positions. In most states, voters would be outraged by the incompetence, waste, and inefficiency.

However, in the Golden State, voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance. Call it the Politics of Low Expectations and California is the model for the nation. For years, my students have asked me what the secret is to a successful marriage approaching four decades (For full disclosure, there is an ongoing contractual dispute over my counting eight years of monogamous dating — leading to two dates on our anniversary cakes). The answer is simple. I reduced her expectations so low that I have exceeded them on a daily basis.
That began with our eloping on New Year’s Eve. We were married after an actual shotgun wedding where the clearly expectant teenage bride’s family was screaming profanities at the teenage groom. After paying $50 and using my high school ring for a wedding ring, we stepped out on the street of Old Town Alexandria as a drunk was retching in the gutter. That left only room for improvement. On any given day, my wife is simply grateful that I have not traded the house and car for a handful of magic beans. California Democrats seem to have applied my approach to matrimony to politics, creating a politician’s dream voter with few expectations.
That is most evident with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s infamous high-speed train to nowhere. In 2008, voters were promised a 500-mile High-Speed train running from San Francisco to Los Angeles for $33 billion. It is now projected to cost somewhere between $126 billion and $231 billion. After roughly two decades, no track has been laid, and the current plan is to focus on building a track between Bakersfield and Merced. Without any track to display, Newsom recently stood before a freight train on an existing track to insist that his train is moving speedily along.
One would think that citizens would be coming for their leaders with torches and pitchforks. Instead, there is a collective shrug as if it is perfectly normal to spend more than the entire budget of Amtrak on a non-existent train. The same leaders have burned billions in other boondoggles, including a massive solar power farm that produced energy at a higher cost and incinerated thousands of birds a year. California is facing a growing crisis of rising homelessness, dismal education scores, and an exodus of business and wealthy taxpayers. It has also imposed taxes that make gas the most expensive in the nation while suppressing its own energy industry.
Now, after many voters took the unprecedented step of voting for Republican candidates for governor and L.A. mayor, citizens will wait for weeks to learn the results of an election that would have been called days ago by third-world countries. The same politics of low expectations are evident in other states. In New York City, voters just shrug when told that they have a budget rivaling that of the entire state of Florida, resulting in awful educational, infrastructure, and other conditions. Voters have watched as wealthy taxpayers have taken their money and jobs to other states.
In return, figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani promise state-run grocery stores, which will cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate at a loss. In Minnesota, elected officials allowed billions to be stolen in fraud while businesses fled a state rife with rioting and homelessness.
Baltimore, a student failed all but three of his classes and was ranked in the top half of his graduating class. Yet, voters reelected the same leaders who have denied generations any real opportunity for advancement. While other countries maintain superior school systems at a fraction of the cost, urban voters cast their ballots like lemmings for the same party and politicians.
In states like California, politics has long been run on Henry Ford’s pitch that you can have any color Model T so long as it is black. This election seemed to offer voters something they had not seen in many years: a real choice between a Republican governor and an L.A. mayor. As California slowly counts its votes, the odds still heavily favor the continuation of California as a one-party state. Poor services, rising crime, rampant homelessness, hundreds of billions in waste and other failures are treated as virtually inevitable. The result is an electorate that only a politician would love: passive voters who expect little from their government and receive even less.

“Politicians promise immigration control while the economic and demographic forces driving migration remain firmly in place..”

In other words: Europe is simply too far gone.

• The EU’s ‘Strictest-Ever Migration Law’ Won’t Change Anything (von Hoffmeister)

The European Union’s new migration rules, agreed upon in principle by lawmakers and state representatives, will allow EU countries to transfer rejected asylum seekers to third countries if they cannot be returned to their countries of origin. They also introduce stricter rules for dealing with illegal migrants, especially those considered a security risk.

The media has called it “historic,” “hardline,” and the “strictest-ever migration law” as politicians behind their lecterns spoke of control and the defense of borders. Yet in truth, the EU has once again promised to become tougher while preserving the structures that produced the migration crisis in the first place. New procedures, databases, and regulations have appeared, but the underlying incentives have remained largely intact. The result resembles many political spectacles of recent years: a performance designed to reassure anxious voters while preserving the economic and ideological foundations of the existing system. The gap between rhetoric and reality has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary Western politics.
The same pattern can be observed across the Atlantic. Donald Trump returned to office promising the strongest immigration enforcement campaign in American history. His supporters anticipated deportation operations on a scale never previously attempted. Yet the reality has proved considerably more modest. Immigration enforcement agencies continue to conduct highly publicized arrests that generate dramatic footage for television and social media. A worker removed from a restaurant kitchen, a raid on a warehouse or construction site – all good for cameras and for political supporters to receive confirmation that action is taking place.
Yet the larger economic machinery that attracts millions of migrants continues operating. Businesses that employ illegal labor rarely face penalties severe enough to transform their calculations. The availability of employment remains the primary magnet drawing people across borders. A government genuinely committed to ending illegal immigration would focus relentlessly on employers, labor contractors, and industries dependent on cheap foreign labor. However, such measures would provoke opposition from powerful economic interests. Consequently, symbolic enforcement often proves more attractive than structural reform.
Politicians frequently present immigration as a humanitarian question, a cultural question, or a question of border security. The economic dimension often receives less scrutiny. Modern capitalism and mass immigration have become deeply intertwined. Employers gain access to larger labor pools, which increases competition among workers and places downward pressure on wages in many sectors. Agricultural businesses, logistics firms, construction companies, restaurants, delivery services, and countless other industries derive substantial advantages from a continuous supply of foreign labor. The benefits remain concentrated while many of the costs become dispersed throughout society. Housing demand rises, infrastructure faces greater pressure, schools require expansion, healthcare systems absorb additional burdens.
Welfare programs support those who struggle to establish themselves economically. These expenses rarely appear on corporate balance sheets – instead, they get distributed across the broader population through taxation and public expenditure. This contradiction led the French thinker Alain de Benoist to formulate one of the most incisive observations in the entire debate: “One who criticizes capitalism while approving of immigration, of which the working class is its first victim, would do better to remain silent. One who criticizes immigration while remaining silent regarding capitalism should do the same.” The statement captures a reality that many ideological camps prefer to avoid. Immigration and capitalism frequently function as partners within the same economic system, and any serious analysis of one eventually encounters the other.
Back in Western Europe, governments routinely announce crackdowns on illegal immigration while simultaneously preserving the economic and demographic model that depends on continuous inflows of foreign labor. Public discussion frequently centers on boats crossing the Mediterranean or migrants entering through other irregular routes – images that dominate news coverage because they are visually dramatic. Yet illegal immigration represents only one component of a much larger phenomenon. The overwhelming transformation of Western Europe has occurred through legal channels. Work permits, family reunification programs, student visas, humanitarian admissions, labor recruitment schemes, and various residency pathways have altered the demographic composition of entire societies. A politician can reduce small boat arrivals while expanding legal immigration quotas. Statistical reports may then suggest success even as overall migration continues at historic levels.
Italy provides an instructive example. Giorgia Meloni rose to power promising a fundamental break with previous migration policies. Her electoral success depended heavily on public dissatisfaction with mass immigration. Yet her government subsequently approved hundreds of thousands of additional work permits for non-European migrants in response to labor shortages. Nearly half a million new non-EU work visas were authorized over a multi-year period even while the government continued presenting itself as a champion of immigration control. Supporters emphasized efforts against illegal arrivals, while employers welcomed access to additional labor, and the demographic trajectory remained largely unchanged.
This recurring pattern has created a phenomenon increasingly described by critics as the “Melonization effect,” where leaders campaign as insurgents against mass immigration and then govern as managers of the existing system. Similar tendencies have appeared across numerous Western countries.

Marine Le Pen.

• Paris Riots Fuel The Right (RMX)

:With French national elections approaching in 2027, the mass riots seen in Paris following the PSG victory in the Champions League are leading to an even sharper electoral shift towards the right-leaning National Rally’s Jordan Bardella. Verian’s June barometer, published by Le Figaro Magazine, places Jordan Bardella at the top of political figures, with 47 percent of those questioned wanting to see him occupy an important place in public life. This rating, up six points in one month, reveals a record result for the National Rally.

Marine Le Pen comes in second position and is also progressing. Several other personalities located on the right are also rising in the ranking, including Marion Maréchal, Éric Ciotti and Robert Ménard. The riots in Paris left stores and cars burned out and resulted in 890 arrests, 180 officers injured, and two deaths. The apocalyptic videos from the riots also sent shockwaves through the French public. While these polls cannot predict the election, they underline data showing that Bardella or Le Pen are well positioned to win the presidency in 2027 elections.
https://twitter.com/RMXnews/status/2061886947467919775?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2061886947467919775%7Ctwgr%5Ed4eaf6b6844c32a7acab68214b84076630ca3930%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Frmx.news%2Farticle%2Fparis-riots-fuel-the-right-jordan-bardella-would-trounce-all-opponents-in-2027-national-election%2F
Other recent polls also show that Bardella would win a runoff against a range of candidates. A poll from a week ago from Odoxa showed Bardella beating former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe 52 to 48 percent. Other potential candidates, such as the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, were also beaten by wide margins, with polling showing Bardella nearly 50 points ahead of him, at 74 percent to 26 percent, illustrating the France’s distate for Mélenchon’s politics.
Brussels’ nightmare scenario
Politico ran a piece three days ago entitled “Brussels’ nightmare scenario,” which predicted that a Bardella-Mélenchon matchup is a real possibility and would be viewed as catastrophic by the EU elite, as both candidates have a highly skeptical view of the European Union.
“That prospect of stopping Bardella has hit a major potential hurdle, however, as momentum builds behind the campaign of the firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed party. The latest polls suggest he now has a strong chance of qualifying for the second-round showdown — depriving the race of a centrist who could rally voters against the far right in the EU’s No. 2 economy.” The paper also quoted, Gérald Darmanin, the justice minister under President Emmanuel Macron. He said he now believes Mélenchon will be the main challenger to the “far right.” “You have … to be wearing blinkers not to see it,” he said.

A brown skinned lady who swears that Britain “is not a racist country,” Now you know what you got there is a politician.

• Tory Leader Warns Of ‘Civil War’ In UK (RT)

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has slammed UK politicians over what she described as attempts to score points on existing racial divisions, warning that it risked pushing the country towards a “civil war.”nSpeaking in an interview with the BBC aired on Friday, Badenoch reacted to the murder of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old Polish-British university student, who was stabbed five times by Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh. The incident took place in Southampton in December 2025, but gained a national spotlight only recently.

When police arrived, Digwa falsely claimed he had been the victim of a racist assault, with police initially believing his account. Body-cam footage released after sentencing showed officers handcuffing the dying student as he repeatedly told them he had been stabbed and could not breathe. While Digwa was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years, the fall-out triggered widespread uproar, protests, and accusations of “two-tier policing” and “anti-white prejudice” in Britain. The incident also drew outcry from the US – a traditional UK ally – with the State Department warning that “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline.”
Badenoch insisted that Britain “is not a racist country,” but acknowledged that “we are now seeing more and more hostility to people of every ethnicity, whether they’re English or not English.” However, she insisted that the real driver of tension was politicians using racial divisions to harvest votes and importing these conflicts into communities that had previously been spared from them. “Parties which do that, politicians who do that, they may get to benefit in the short term, but in the long term, that’s how you end up with civil war,” Badenoch warned.
While Badenoch did not name specific politicians, one of those who seized on the controversy was Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, widely known for his anti-immigration agenda. Farage called for “pure cold rage” in response to the incident. Reform UK is currently polling at around 27%, with Labour and the Conservatives tied at roughly 18% each. Meanwhile, Badenoch herself became the Tory leader after former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s landslide defeat in the general election in 2024, which was in large part caused by the party’s identitarian and cultural policies as well as a failure to deliver on immigration promises.
The culture war has long plagued British politics, with one of the most notable instances coming in August 2025 when “Operation Raise the Colours” saw activists tying Union Jacks and St. George’s Cross flags to lampposts across England. While the protest was framed as an expression of patriotism, some Labour-run councils disagreed, ordering the flags to be removed over concerns that they were sowing division – a move that drew furious condemnation from Reform UK.

“I’m the look-around candidate. All you have to do to understand why I’m surging in the polls is just look around. . . .” — Spencer Pratt

• Questions and Answers (James Howard Kunstler)

Just watch in wonder and nausea as California’s mail-in ballots dribble in, providing a real-time demonstration of the “Our Democracy” party spitting in the country’s face again, since everybody knows exactly what’s going on. Meanwhile, the Senate voted down the SAVE Act again this week by 52 to 48 for. . . reasons. But, hey, cheer up, it’s Pride Month. At the same time that California was queering its own “jungle primary,” a troupe of drag queens swanned and capered around New York’s City Council Chamber in what was called a “Pride Ball” (actually more of a show than a ball).

And what it really showed is that the party running New York City has no shame. How, exactly, does mental illness intersect with the public interest, you might ask? Historians of the future, roasting armadillos-on-the-half-shell over their campfires, will probably figure it out. For now, you must pretend that no such question even exists. Don’t bother asking. Just go along with the gag.
Here’s a scene you might like to see: As you know by now, the president has nominated Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to be the Senate-confirmed full-on, bona fide AG. But Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) says he would require Mr. Blanche to declare that the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol riot was “an insurrection.” Wouldn’t it be fun to hear Mr. Blanche reply by saying, “Can’t do that, sir, because the DOJ has an ongoing case that involves dozens of federal officers from several agencies instigating the events of that day in collusion with members of Congress and the US military, and, well, I can say no more about that at this time. . . .”
Similarly, election fraud. Just days ago, Mr. Trump told Miranda Divine of The New York Post, “We had a rigged election [2020], we can’t have rigged elections. We know who rigged the election. We know everything now. . . we have information that nobody thought was possible. . . . Let’s see what happens.”
Hmmmm. . .. Wouldn’t that prompt you to suspect that the DOJ has a case, or multiple cases, involving 2020 election fraud cooking on its stove? Recall that not long ago the FBI seized 700 boxes of evidence from the Fulton County Election Hub in Union City, GA. And another truckload out of Maricopa County, AZ. Do you think they’ll discover some, er, irregularities in all that? Perhaps eye-wateringly blatant?
Would it not then be urgent to seek indictments of actual persons, if any are deserved, well before November, so that measures could be taken to preclude more fraud and cheating in the midterm election — measures like . . . passing the SAVE Act! How might Majority Leader John Thune explain his intransigence on the matter in the face of all that? Or, like New York’s City Council, does he have no shame?
In another momentous development this week, the new management at CBS-News cashiered 60-Minutes star Scott Pelley for apparent insubordinate behavior in a confab with the show’s newly-hired Executive Producer Nick Bilton and Mr. Bilton’s boss, Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss. They had already sacked the querulous Sharyn Alfonsi a week earlier. Of course, 60-Minutes, with its giant audience following NFL games, was one of the main units in the Deep State’s gaslighting apparatus, and Mr. Pelley burned brightest there for years, flaring out one lying-ass narrative after another from the Russia Collusion hoax to 2020 election fraud to the Jan 6 fake “insurrection,” with the same burnished arrogance he showed his new bosses. Gone now. . . buh-bye. Next up, Lesley Stahl (“Sir!!! Sir !!!”), and the self-important prick Bill Whitaker. Fire them all!
If you seek to understand why the American public is so deeply bamboozled, it is largely the utter failure of the news business. You can trace that to a couple of signal changes of policy. One was the 1987 repeal of the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine,” which required TV stations holding federal licenses to cover controversial public issues in a “fair and balanced manner.” The other was the 2013 “modernization” (under Barack Obama) of the Smith-Mundt Act (1948), which had prohibited the US government from “propagandizing” its own citizens — and after “modernization” turned squishy on that.
The 1975–1976 (Sen. Frank) Church Committee — the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — documented that the CIA had long-term secret relationships with dozens of U.S. journalists. This is casually referred to as “Operation Mockingbird.” Since the Church Committee, it has only gotten much worse as the Deep State struggles to cover-up layer upon layer of crimes it keeps committing. The nightly news shows now are just anchors and “panelists” shooting their mouths off. The news itself goes mostly unreported. A big reason is that broadcast news now employs nearly zero correspondents in-the-field. Nobody is out there reporting on events. They don’t want to spend the money. So, the news just spins and spins, mostly in the service of manufactured lies.
Also last week, famous New York Times columnist and fake Nobel economics prize-winner Paul Krugman put out a video calling for the “purging” of MAGA and everything MAGA-adjacent from American life — when his team (the party of “Our Democracy”) comes back to power, as it must. He didn’t detail whether this process would entail internment camps and crematoriums, but you could infer as much from his tone. Kinda gives you a clue of where their heads are at.

Paul Craig Roberts.

• The White Countries Have Become Rabidly Racist Against White People (PCR)

As I was writing this article several thousand British citizens were outside a police station in Southhampton, England, demanding accountability for the murder of a young white British student, Henry Nowak, by a black immigrant-invader and the white British police.

The black immigrant-invader murdered Nowak by stabbing him five times. The white British police murdered Nowak by ignoring his testimony that he had been stabbed and what turned out to be Novak’s last words: “I can’t breathe.” The British police, trained as they successfully have been to see the white person as the aggressor, instead of arresting the black immigrant-invader who attacked Nowak, fatally as it turned out, the white British police arrested the dying Nowak, who died in police handcuffs. The “racially sensitive trained” white British police believed the black immigrant-invader’s lie that Nowak had used a racial epithet. They did not believe Nowak that he had been stabbed. The “racially sensitive police” did not even look to see if Nowak had been stabbed. Instead, they handcuffed a dying man and did not call for medical help.
You would think that this would be a scandal–and it was–but not for the right reason. The rabidly anti-white white British prime minister Starmer characterized the several thousand white protesters, a small number in view of the enormity of the injustice, as “far-right rioters and racist thugs.” In other words, the Prime Minister of England sees racism not in the unprovoked deadly attack on the white Nowak by the black immigrant-invader, not in the British police’s ignoring of Nowak’s dying plea for help. The white British Prime Minister Starmer sees racism in the British citizens’ protest about what has happened. Is there any lower form of pure political excrement than Starmer ? How does a piece of political excrement such as Starmer survive as Prime Minister of Great Britain?
Now, let us ask ourselves how a white ethnic British Prime Minister from the Labour Party, which in former times prior to the despicable Tony Blair, represented the ethnic British working class, became indoctrinated and brainwashed to such an extreme extent that the racists in society are the white people who suffer from theft, rape, and murder by immigrant-invaders.? Confront this fact: The excrement that serves as Prime Minister of Great Britain, formerly a great and reasonably moral country, has defined protest about a racist murder of a white British citizen to be “white racism.” This is the position of white people today. In NO Western country do white ethnic citizens have the protection of law. Their own government is against them.
The UK, once an ethnic nation, now a Tower of Babel, has a “commitment to racial equality.” What does it mean? To quote the official answer, “it does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘color blind,’” it means limiting racism to white people. No one but white people can be racists. This is the official position of the Starmer UK government. It was the official position of the Biden regime and the official position of all Western European governments. Trump prefers to hand over to Israel the power otherwise handed over to immigrant-invaders. This is why the police automatically saw the murderer of Nowak as the victim and Nowak as the racist.

“This death connects directly to George Floyd — not superficially, not controversially, but logically. In both cases, nobody asked what happened. They asked who did it — then let that answer bury every other question alive.”

• When Race is the Only Possible Verdict (Eric Florack)

Vodkapundit put it best earlier this week: “By now you must know the story of Henry Nowak all too well. The 18-year-old student was stabbed five times on a Southampton street following an altercation with a British Sikh man. As he lay bleeding out, trying to tell the police he’d been stabbed, killer Vickrum Digwa told police that Nowak was a racist. So police cuffed the dying victim. Digwa and his brother knew exactly what to do even before the cops arrived. “We’ve just been attacked by…” Gurpreet Digwa told police dispatchers with a pause, “someone racially.”

Vickrum was just convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum term of 21 years, but the Southampton police have yet to face any consequences for their behavior. In today’s Britain, it’s basically impossible. Almost 250 years after Americans codified British notions of liberty, Britons returned the favor, so to speak, by institutionalizing the American left’s liberty-destroying racial grievance spoils system. “To understand how we got here,” Konstantin Kisin wrote for The Free Press this week, “you have to understand what the post-[George] Floyd ‘reckoning’ actually did to British institutions—especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional, nor was it just symbolic. It was ideological, and it was systematic.”
I have a lot of respect for Kisin. His statement here does nothing to diminish that respect. Kisin is right. This death connects directly to George Floyd — not superficially, not controversially, but logically. In both cases, nobody asked what happened. They asked who did it — then let that answer bury every other question alive. More succinctly, ethnicity didn’t influence the verdict. Ethnicity was the verdict, delivered before Nowak’s body finished cooling. But sure, call it justice. The left certainly does. News flash: That’s not a justice system. That’s an ideology with a gavel. On Derek Chauvin, I’ll be equally direct: overturn the conviction. George Floyd killed George Floyd. The fentanyl he swallowed in order to hide it from the cops did the paperwork.
I’ll grant the cops in the case of Nowak this much: they followed orders and training. How reassuringly Nuremberg of them. I mean, they were certainly caught in the middle here. That truth doesn’t exonerate them, but it does redirect the crosshairs. The politicians who enshrined race over logic in that department’s doctrine? They built this outcome, brick by brick. The brass who designed training that systematically lobotomizes human judgment deserve the lion’s share of the blame for Nowak’s death. You don’t get to manufacture robots, point them at people, and then act surprised when someone ends up dead.
Bill Glahn over at Powerline addresses this with appropriate sarcasm: It has been decreed by official Britain: the unprovoked, brutal murder of Henry Nowak shall not be “politicized,” lest the wishes of Henry’s surviving family be dishonored. In practice, to avoid politicization, one must refrain from any criticizing or questioning any errors or omissions by anyone in government. How dare you. The only prominent political figure to not go along with the Omerta is Reform leader Nigel Farage. For this incivility he was defamed on the BBC. Now that the official police watchdog has officially cleared the police response from any hint of wrongdoing, and now that Nowak’s murderer has been sentenced to the shortest possible prison term (21 years) for a murder conviction, we must speak of this incident no more.

“We are to blame for a great many of these problems ourselves, former Austrian Foreign Minister said “

• Europe No Longer Attractive Global Hub, Only Itself To Blame – Kneissl (TASS)

Europe has ceased to be a center of attraction in terms of economy, innovation, and demographics, and it has only itself to blame for it, former Austrian Foreign Minister and head of the G.O.R.K.I. Center at St. Petersburg State University Karin Kneissl said in an interview with TASS on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). She noted that in recent years, a lot of Arabic and Spanish could be heard at SPIEF.

“That’s simply a reflection of the times. It’s interesting that American companies were here again this year. The world has changed, and overall I have much more confidence in the South and the East. And I have been saying this for a long time, even before this whole situation with the war in Ukraine began. Because for me, Europe is no longer the focus of attention. And it hasn’t been for a long time,” Kneissl said. “From a demographic standpoint, we have been left behind. We are not particularly strong in innovation either,” she continued. “We are to blame for the economic crises we are experiencing in Germany and other countries. There is too much bureaucracy, too much ideology in the energy sector, and the selection of personnel is too poor.”
According to her, there are even bigger problems on top of that. “And now, in just about every corporation, everyone has their own director of geopolitical affairs who explains where the Strait of Hormuz is. We are to blame for a great many of these problems ourselves. And some people are still trying to point the finger at Russia and say: this is ‘Putin’s inflation’ or this is ‘the Russian recession.’ You still hear this in Germany and especially in Austria,” the analyst noted. At the same time, she believes that there are forces in some countries that hold a different view. “There are also those who have realized that they created their own problems and that they must solve them on their own,” Kneissl stressed.
SPIEF
The 29th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF-2026) is taking place on June 3-6. This year, the event is held under the theme “Pragmatic Dialogue: The Path to a Stable Future.” Saudi Arabia is the guest country at SPIEF. The forum program is dedicated to shaping a new model of global development amid the ongoing transformation of the world economy.

“According to former Austrian Foreign Minister, European embassies “just need to do their job”..” These days, she’s “head of the G.O.R.K.I. Center at St. Petersburg State University”..

• EU Embassies In Moscow Should Establish Dialogue With Russia — Kneissl (TASS)

EU embassies should take the lead in restoring dialogue with Moscow, former Austrian Foreign Minister and head of the G.O.R.K.I. Center at St. Petersburg State University Karin Kneissl said in an interview with TASS on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). “Every EU country has an embassy. They really need to start doing their job and maintain normal relations with Russia. I’ll say it again: there is no need for a mediator here. There are 27 EU embassies in Moscow, and their job is to maintain daily working contacts with the Russian authorities. That is their responsibility,” she said.
According to Kneissl, European embassies “just need to do their job.” “I do not see much point in having a separate coordinator. Theoretically, the EU high representative could perform this task. Who is that now? Kaja Kallas. We know her very personal stance toward Russia,” the expert noted. The former Austrian foreign minister added that if Javier Solana, the EU’s first High Representative, were hypothetically in Kallas’s position today, “he might have been a better fit.”

“Of course, a lot depends on the individual. But regardless of who holds this position, in my view, this task should be carried out by each individual EU embassy. French companies have one approach to the Russian market, German companies another, and Italian companies their own view of Russia. Ultimately, each country has its own foreign trade interests when it comes to Russia,” she emphasized.
According to Kneissl, “the high representative will never be able to take all these interests into account, especially since there is another position in the European Commission responsible for that — the commissioner for trade and economic security.” “Perhaps I am being too pragmatic. But I will say it again: the core tasks of diplomacy have hardly changed over the centuries. What should a diplomat do? First, represent their country. Second, keep their capital informed about what is happening in Russia. And third, conduct negotiations. They need to negotiate agreements in areas such as culture and sports. These are their responsibilities. And they must do their job,” Kneissl concluded.
SPIEF
The 29th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF-2026) is taking place on June 3-6. This year, the event is held under the theme “Pragmatic Dialogue: The Path to a Stable Future.” Saudi Arabia is the guest country at SPIEF. The forum program is dedicated to shaping a new model of global development amid the ongoing transformation of the world economy. The Roscongress Foundation is the organizer of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. TASS is its official general information partner.

How much crazier are the British than everybody else?

• UK Government Plots Digital ID Lockdown On Every Phone (MN)

The Labour government in Britain is accelerating its assault on digital privacy under the well-worn banner of child protection. Fresh plans leaked to the press reveal ministers intend to compel Apple, Google and other tech firms to restrict smartphones so thoroughly that a digital ID will be needed to use them with unfettered access. The mechanism comes in the form of expanded age verification that effectively demands digital identification for device setup and use. What is sold as safeguarding the young is shaping up as a backdoor mandate for every adult in Britain to submit ID just to operate a phone or go online.

This development lands alongside Google’s confirmation that it will soon bring digital IDs to Android devices in the UK via Google Wallet. Users will record a short video selfie and scan a government-issued ID to add a digital version of their passport or other documents.

Google is bringing Digital IDs to the UK 'soon' to bolster age checks on Android phones https://t.co/H9wSASduQe
— GB News (@GBNEWS) June 4, 2026

The feature, already rolling out in select EU countries this summer, is explicitly tied to the UK’s Online Safety Act requirements for age checks on content involving self-harm, eating disorders, bullying and pornography. Google is exploring certification under the government’s digital identity trust framework, which could extend its use to everyday purchases such as alcohol. Apple has already implemented similar restrictions on iOS devices in Britain, forcing age confirmation or locking users into limited “child mode.”
ig Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo has been blunt about where this leads. “Protecting children online is vital, but these are outrageous plans that will fail to address the underlying causes of online harm. This will only result in population-wide ID checks for all of us to use our phones, tablets and laptops.” She continued: “Put simply, the Labour Government is introducing ID checks for the internet. No one in a democracy should need to show their passport just to get online.”

Protecting children online is vital, but these are outrageous plans that will fail to address the underlying causes of online harm.

This will only result in population-wide ID checks for all of us to use our phones, tablets and laptops.
— Silkie Carlo (@silkiecarlo) June 5, 2026

Carlo warned that the proposals replace genuine parental responsibility and meaningful tech design with “performative, authoritarian government control that children can easily circumvent by accessing adult-registered devices.” For the UK’s fifty million adult internet users, the outcome is stark: “this backdoor digital ID requirement would invoke the death of anonymity and internet privacy.” The mechanics are chilling. Without submitting to intrusive ID checks during device setup, users face a “chokehold on your software and internet access leaving you with a child-locked device.” Restrictions on messaging, streaming and browsing open the door to client-side scanning – government spyware sitting in every pocket. Carlo noted this has long been a GCHQ ambition and “will be exploited for other purposes before long.”
The bigger picture involving “The Government mandating that all phones/devices in Britain require ID and surveillance software is a crossing of the Rubicon that would make the UK one of the most authoritarian internet regimes in the world.” “I don’t know anywhere else in the world that has done this,” Carlo warned. The story broke via a leak to The Times rather than any parliamentary process. Carlo called it a travesty: “This extreme technological censorship requires rigorous public and parliamentary scrutiny that is totally missing.” Big Brother Watch has pledged to fight the measures. These phone-level controls do not exist in isolation. They slot directly into the UK’s wider digital ID infrastructure, already exposed as a dystopian experiment in mass surveillance.
The government’s One Login platform and planned GOV.UK Wallet create a centralized system for identity verification across public services, with biometric data, audit trails logging every use, and a permissions framework that can deny access to everything from jobs to age-restricted purchases. What begins as convenient “right-to-work” checks or alcohol verification quickly becomes a comprehensive record of daily life, open to expansion and abuse. nThe ambition reaches even further back – to the cradle. Labour ministers have privately discussed assigning digital IDs to newborn babies alongside their health records, modeled on Estonia’s system.
Framed initially as a tool to tackle illegal immigration through right-to-work verification, the scheme has ballooned into a cradle-to-grave tracking apparatus. Critics across the spectrum have labeled it a sinister overreach with nothing to do with stopping the boats and everything to do with building a permanent digital file on every citizen from birth.

“The rise of AI agents has pushed automated requests past human activity, according to the internet infrastructure firm..”

• Bots Now Generate More Web Traffic Than Humans – Cloudflare (RT)

Bots and AI agents now generate more web traffic than humans, according to data from internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. CEO Matthew Prince has described the development as a major turning point in the history of the web. Recent Cloudflare Radar data shows that automated bot requests account for roughly 57% of traffic to ordinary webpages across a selection of websites using the company’s services, compared with about 43% generated by humans.

“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote on X on Wednesday. He stated that he had expected automated traffic to overtake human activity only in 2027, but that “agentic traffic” has grown rapidly enough for bots to pass humans “for the first time in the Internet’s history.” The shift is primarily being driven by AI agents – automated systems that browse, retrieve, and process web content on behalf of users. While a human might visit a handful of websites before making a purchase or researching a topic, an AI agent can scan thousands of pages in order to produce an answer or complete a task.
Cloudflare’s figures suggest that much of today’s web activity is no longer ordinary browsing by people clicking through pages, but machine-to-machine traffic with automated systems requesting data from websites, apps, services and databases. The data covers web traffic only and does not include activities such as streaming, messaging, gaming, or app usage. The trend has revived debate over the “dead internet theory,” the idea that much of online activity is increasingly generated by bots, automated accounts, and AI systems interacting with other machine-made content.
The rise of bot traffic has also threatened the internet’s advertising-based business model. Since bots do not click on ads, concerns have been raised about whether websites may eventually charge AI agents for access to content. Meanwhile, researchers have also noted that large parts of the older web have been disappearing. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later, fueling concerns that the open web is being transformed from a space built around human browsing into one increasingly dominated by automated systems.

SpaceX’s compute business is already becoming massive

Anthropic: $1.25B per month
Google: $920M per month

That is $2.17B in monthly compute revenue at full run-rate

Annualized, that is more than $26B per year…..just from SpaceX’s AI compute business

And this is only the… pic.twitter.com/JS7GWtGGHX
— X Freeze (@XFreeze) June 5, 2026

The car that used to be in my garage is currently in an Earth-Mars elliptical orbit and will be there for at least 10 million years https://t.co/SlBthuU5hp
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 6, 2026

Starlink https://t.co/t1jLcpFUz0
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2026

Figure just announced it scaled humanoid robot production from one per day to one per hour in 120 days, a 24x increase in output in 4 months.

Each robot goes through intensive physical testing before leaving the line: repeated squats, jogging, stair climbing, complex terrain… https://t.co/czHVMcROvy
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) June 5, 2026

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Debt Rattle April 10 2018

Apr 102018

April 10, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:51 am Finance Tagged with: bitcoin, bots, Cohen, debt, deficit, Facebook, FBI, Germany, sanctions, Skripal, Syria, Trump, Twitter, Xi 16 Responses »

Acme Storm over Manhattan 1950

• Trump Blasts “Disgraceful” FBI Raid Of Lawyer’s Office (ZH)

• Xi Vows To Further Open China Economy As US Trade Spat Simmers (AFP)

• Global Debt Jumped to Record $237 Trillion Last Year

• US Deficit to Surpass $1 Trillion Two Years Ahead of Estimates – CBO (BBG)

• Global Trade Is Broken, And Trump Is Sparking The Crisis Needed (Morici)

• Russian Firms And Rouble Hit Heavily By Trump Sanctions (G.)

• Bitcoin, the Biggest Bubble in History, Is Popping – BofA (BBG)

• Bots, Good Or Bad, Dominate Twitter Conversation (AFP)

• Black Lives Matter Facebook Page With 700,000 Followers Exposed As Fake (G.)

• 10 New Zealanders Download App On Facebook, Expose 63,714 Friends (G.)

• Your Facebook Data Is Only Worth $5.20 On The Dark Web (MW)

• Jerome Is The New Janet: Same Old Keynesian Jabberwocky (Stockman)

• Yulia Skripal Discharged From Hospital (G.)

• No Trace Of Chemical Weapons In Douma, Photos Are Fake – Russia (RT)

• “Weapons Of Mass Destruction,” And All (Kunstler)

• In 2020, German Society Will Start Collapsing (GEFIRA)

• Fishing Boat Caught With Illegal 18-Mile-Long Nets (Ind.)

“..the fact that the FBI likely seized privileged material between the president and his lawyer is certainly troubling.”

Or is it just a promotion campaign for Comey’s book tour?

• Trump Blasts “Disgraceful” FBI Raid Of Lawyer’s Office (ZH)

Update II: As many probably suspected, Trump attorney Michael Cohen is under investigation for possible fraud and campaign finance violations, the Washington Post reported. The FBI has seized documents – including emails, tax documents and other records – related to Cohen’s $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Meanwhile, President Trump has stepped up to defend his longtime personal attorney, calling the raid “a whole new level of unfairness” and going as far to say it was an “attack on our country, on what we stand for before heading into a meeting with top military leaders.” He also described the special counsel’s team as “the most conflicted group of people I’ve ever met” and said the raid was “a disgraceful situation.”

Trump added that the raid happened after Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein – who is supervising the Mueller probe – approved a referral that Mueller brought to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Jeff Sessions also came under fire as the president bashed him once again for recusing himself from the Mueller probe. Trump also exclaimed that “no one is looking at the other side” referring to Clinton’s 30,000 missing emails. “I have this witch hunt constantly going on,” he said. Of course, Trump has every reason to defend Cohen. As Trump’s longtime lawyer, Cohen knows where the bodies are buried. And the fact that the FBI likely seized privileged material between the president and his lawyer is certainly troubling.
–
Update: Michael Cohen’s lawyer says the FBI seized privileged communications between Cohen and his clients – a group that notably includes President Trump. And thus, we have what could quite possibly be an ulterior motive for the search. While initial reports suggested the raid on Cohen’s home wasn’t related to the Mueller probe, CBS is reporting that it’s unclear whether the raid was in relation to Stormy Daniels, the Mueller probe or something else. The Wall Street Journal reported that Cohen’s office in Rockefeller Center was searched along with his home and hotel room. The search was executed by the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office which is carrying out an independent investigation in coordination with Mueller. Cohen has of course already turned over his emails to the special counsel.

For now it’s just words. But his tone could have been different.

• Xi Vows To Further Open China Economy As US Trade Spat Simmers (AFP)

Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged on Tuesday to lower car tariffs this year and take other steps to further open the world’s number two economy, indirectly addressing major complaints by the United States in a simmering trade row. Promising a “new phase of opening up”, Xi told an economic forum on the southern island of Hainan that Beijing “does not seek a trade surplus” and hopes to increase imports. He said China will take measures to liberalise automobile investment, significantly reduce tariffs on cars this year and protect intellectual property – all areas that have been high on the list of demands by Washington. “Economic globalisation is an irreversible trend of the time,” Xi told the Boao Forum for Asia.

“The door of China’s opening up will not close, it will only open wider and wider.” Xi pushed measures in areas that have been high on the list of US President Donald Trump’s ire at China. “When a car is sent to the United States from China, there is a Tariff to be paid of 2.5%. When a car is sent to China from the United States, there is a Tariff to be paid of 25%,” Trump tweeted on Monday. “Does that sound like free or fair trade. No, it sounds like STUPID TRADE – going on for years!” Without directly responding to Trump, Xi promised China would lower import tariffs for vehicles and other products, but he gave no details or an exact date for taking the measures.

[..] Xi also pledged specific measures to address IP protection. “This year, we will reorganise the State Intellectual Property Office to strengthen law enforcement,” he told the forum, an Asian version of the World Economic Forum, which draws global leaders to its annual meeting in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. “We encourage Chinese and foreign companies to carry out normal technical exchanges and cooperation to protect the legitimate intellectual property rights of foreign-funded enterprises in China,” he said.

This will be important: “Ireland and Italy are the only major countries where household debt as a percentage of GDP is below 50%.”

• Global Debt Jumped to Record $237 Trillion Last Year

Global debt rose to a record $237 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2017, more than $70 trillion higher from a decade earlier, according to an analysis by the Institute of International Finance. Among mature markets, household debt as a percentage of GDP hit all-time highs in Belgium, Canada, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. That’s a worrying signal, with interest rates beginning to rise globally. Ireland and Italy are the only major countries where household debt as a percentage of GDP is below 50%. Still, the ratio of global debt-to-GDP fell for the fifth consecutive quarter as the world’s economic growth accelerated. The ratio is now around 317.8% of GDP, or 4 percentage points below the high in the third quarter of 2016, according to the IIF. Among emerging markets, household debt to GDP is approaching parity in South Korea at 94.6%.

And the Fed wants to raise rates?!

• US Deficit to Surpass $1 Trillion Two Years Ahead of Estimates – CBO (BBG)

The U.S. budget deficit will surpass $1 trillion by 2020, two years sooner than previously estimated, as tax cuts and spending increases signed by President Donald Trump do little to boost long-term economic growth, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Spending will exceed revenue by $804 billion in the fiscal year through September, jumping from a projected $563 billion shortfall forecast in June, the non-partisan arm of Congress said in a report Monday. In fiscal 2019, the deficit will reach $981 billion, compared with an earlier projection of $689 billion. The nation’s budget gap was only set to surpass the trillion-dollar level in fiscal 2022 under CBO’s report last June.

Deficits are growing as the Trump administration enacted a tax overhaul this year that will lower federal revenue and Congress approved a roughly $300 billion spending increase. The fresh CBO estimates could heighten investor worries as they weigh the potential impact that tariff threats between the U.S. and China may have on the world economy. The report includes new projections for the effects of the tax legislation – saying it will increase the deficit by almost $1.9 trillion over the next 11 years, when accounting for its macroeconomic effects and increased debt-service costs. In December, Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation had said the tax package would reduce federal revenue by almost $1.1 trillion over a 10-year period.

The WTO and democracy.

• Global Trade Is Broken, And Trump Is Sparking The Crisis Needed (Morici)

[..] It may be time to recognize that China is not a market economy — and is not likely to become one anytime soon. Over time, the WTO membership encompassed increasingly diverse nations. For example, Saudi Arabia joined in 2005, is not a democracy and hardly has a market economy. It’s a monarchy and dependent on oil, its government seeks to rig petroleum markets through OPEC. Nondemocratic, nonmarket economies were admitted on the premise that participation in the system would encourage reforms but as Saudi Arabia demonstrates — similar to Mexico in the 1980s — political and economic progress mostly happens when autocratic regimes are threatened by financial crisis.

For the oil kingdom, it took the U.S. shale boom and prospects of oil permanently depressed at about $65 a barrel to inspire House of Saud to select a progressive crown prince. China joined the WTO in 2002 but has hardly liberalized. Beijing is perfecting Orwellian mechanisms to monitor its citizens’ activities and squash political dissent. President Xi Jinping is enhancing the role of state-owned enterprises, extending state influence over private firms and foreign subsidiaries, and compelling the latter to form joint ventures with Chinese firms and embrace Beijing’s propaganda strategies.

China’s state capitalism clearly creates unfair advantages, imposes trade deficits and job losses on other nations, and has been the target of many unfair trade complaints in the WTO, but Beijing has invested in top flight U.S. lawyers — for example, Steptoe & Johnson. And the activities of its complex mix of state-owned and state-supported private enterprise have proven difficult to discipline under WTO rules, which were written to constrain governments operating in a market context.

From 2011 to 2017, the United States was frustrated in many dispute settlement processes covering nearly 50 industries. In 2016, the administration aides cited a long list of complaints in an effort to block the reappointment of a South Korean judge to the appellate body. Since then, Mr. Trump has been criticized — as he seems to be for every principled action — for continuing this policy by blocking the appointment of other judges to compel reform. It may be time to recognize that China is not a market economy — and is not likely to become one anytime soon. And it is not likely possible to rewrite the WTO rules just to suit its peculiar system.

Talk is better.

• Russian Firms And Rouble Hit Heavily By Trump Sanctions (G.)

The Trump administration’s new sanctions on Russian oligarchs and top government officials began to bite on Monday as the rouble suffered its biggest daily fall in more than three years, the main Russian stock index slumped and investors dumped shares in businesses controlled by Oleg Deripaska. Russia’s currency briefly dipped more than 4% before recovering slightly to trade at 60.42 to the dollar on Monday evening, down 3.8%, its biggest daily percentage fall since January 2015. The value of Deripaska’s aluminium producer Rusal halved in Hong Kong and more than 40% was wiped off the value of his London-listed EN+ as investors took fright at the potential impact.

Shares in Rusal and EN+ had already fallen sharply on Friday in response to the sanctions, which were announced towards the end of trading in London. The Russian stock market also fell heavily. The main RTS index dropped 11%, affecting companies not caught by the sanctions. The price of aluminium jumped as traders worried Rusal would be excluded from supplying the market. The firm, which produces almost 6% of the world’s aluminium, said the sanctions could cause technical defaults on bank loans and some credit obligations. Both Rusal and EN+, Deripaska’s holding company, said the sanctions could be “materially adverse to the business and prospects” of the companies.

Rusal and seven other companies linked to Deripaska were the main targets when the US imposed sanctions designed to punish Vladimir Putin’s inner circle for “malign activity”, including support for Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria and interfering with the US election in 2016. Rusal sells more than 10% of its aluminium to the US.

Not my words. But nice graph.

• Bitcoin, the Biggest Bubble in History, Is Popping – BofA (BBG)

The greatest bubble in history is popping, according to Bank of America. The cryptocurrency is tracking the downfalls of the other massive asset-price bubbles in history less than one year out from its record, analysts lead by Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett wrote in a note Sunday. The cryptocurrency has fallen more than 65% since peaking in December at $19,511. Bitcoin rose 2.2% to $6,750 on Monday.

“..accounting for two-thirds of tweets linking to popular websites..”

• Bots, Good Or Bad, Dominate Twitter Conversation (AFP)

Automated accounts or “bots” play a big role in disseminating information on Twitter, accounting for two-thirds of tweets linking to popular websites, a study showed Monday. The Pew Research Center report found bots were a major source for diffusing information on news, sports, entertainment and other topics. The researchers found that of all tweeted links to popular websites, 66% were shared by accounts that appeared to be automated rather than human users. While bots have gained attention due to concerns over Russian-sponsored manipulation of social media during the 2016 political campaign and for other hot-button topics, the researchers said they made no effort to distinguish between “good” or “bad” bots.

“The study does not find evidence that automated accounts currently have a liberal or conservative ‘political bias’ in their overall link-sharing behavior,” the researchers wrote. Twitter’s policy on automated accounts, last updated in November, allows bots to operate but with limitations. The policy allows for bots to “automatically broadcast helpful information” or “run creative campaigns that auto-reply to users.” But Twitter’s rules forbid automatic posts about trending topics or using automation “to attempt to influence or manipulate trending topics.” It also bans the use of multiple accounts to generate more activity.

“These findings illustrate the extent to which bots play a prominent and pervasive role in the social media environment,” says Pew researcher Aaron Smith. “Automated accounts are far from a niche phenomenon: They share a significant portion of tweeted links to even the most prominent and mainstream publications and online outlets. Since these accounts can impact the information people see on social media, it is important to have a sense their overall prevalence on social media.”

“.. upwards of $100,000 in donations, at least some of which was directed to bank accounts registered in Australia.”

One thing: Facebook could have known this.

• Black Lives Matter Facebook Page With 700,000 Followers Exposed As Fake (G.)

A high-ranking Australian union official has been suspended amid reports he ran a fake Black Lives Matter Facebook page that solicited donations from the movement’s supporters. CNN reports that Ian MacKay – an official with the National Union of Workers – helped set up and run a Facebook page called Black Lives Matter as well as other domain names linked to black rights. The page, which was removed by Facebook after CNN’s queries, had almost 700,000 followers – more than double the official Black Lives Matter page. MacKay – who is white – did not respond to calls or emails but denied running the page when contacted by CNN. A statement given to the Guardian by the NUW’s national secretary, Tim Kennedy, said the union had launched an investigation into the claims made in the CNN report.

He said the union had suspended “the relevant officials pending the outcome of an investigation”. “The NUW is not involved in and has not authorised any activities with reference to claims made in CNN’s story,” he said. The Guardian understands MacKay and one other NUW official has been suspended. In 2015 Mackay was appointed vice president of the NUW’s general branch and the union’s public office records state that he still holds the position. The investigation quoted sources who said the page may have garnered upwards of $100,000 in donations, at least some of which was directed to bank accounts registered in Australia.

This happened 4 years ago! And only now Facebook is “..in the process of alerting New Zealanders..”?!

• 10 New Zealanders Download App On Facebook, Expose 63,714 Friends (G.)

Ten New Zealanders who downloaded an app on Facebook could have exposed up to 63,714 of their compatriots to the data mining tactics of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has told the country’s privacy commissioner that it is in the process of alerting New Zealanders who were affected by the breach, which occurred when ten users downloaded a personality quiz app. “For New Zealand, we estimate a total of 63,724 people may have been impacted – 10 are estimated to have downloaded the quiz app with 63,714 friends possibly impacted,” said Antonia Sanda, head of communications for Facebook in Australia and New Zealand.

New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, John Edwards, said he was urgently seeking further information from Facebook on how New Zealanders data was used by Cambridge Analytica, and is working closely with his counterparts in the US, UK Australia and Canada to establish the severity and ramifications of the privacy beach. “I think we have some real information deficits that I hope my colleagues in the UK and the US will uncover … I am not sure New Zealanders were ‘targeted’ but I think there is a level of complacency [in New Zealand]. And when you say we’re so far away, we’re only one click away really,” Edwards said.

Edwards deleted his own Facebook account shortly after the revelations regarding Cambridge Analytica broke, and said New Zealanders should seriously consider doing the same and then resetting their profile. “I am actually quite concerned about the drip-feed of information [from Facebook]. These events occurred four years ago. There was knowledge about Cambridge Analytica targeting tactics a good two years ago, yet we are really only seeing Facebook confront this issue now,” Edwards said.

This, too, is Facebook. Supply and demand.

• Your Facebook Data Is Only Worth $5.20 On The Dark Web (MW)

Were you impacted by Cambridge Analytica’s misuse of Facebook data? An estimated 87 million Facebook users will find out Monday whether the group improperly used their data, the social-media company said. All 2.2 billion Facebook users will get see a message on Facebook called “Protecting Your Information,” that lays out which third-party apps have access to your individual Facebook profile. Whether or not you were impacted by the Cambridge Analytica incident, there’s a depressing aspect of many recent privacy violations: The most important parts of your identity can be sold online for just a few dollars.

Consumers have to spend hours of their time — and, sometimes, their own money — when they find out their driver’s license, Facebook “likes” or Social Security number have been exposed to hackers. But those who sell them are making only petty cash. That’s according to a new report from the content marketing agency Fractl, which analyzed all the fraud-related listings on three large “dark web” marketplaces — Dream, Point and Wall Street Market — over several days last month. The “dark web” is part of the internet that people can only access by using special software. To create this report, Fractl accessed the dark web through the browser Tor.

People buy other risky or illegal substances on the dark web, including drugs, pirated content like movies or music and materials that help with scams, including credit-card “skimmers.” Facebook logins can be sold for $5.20 each because they allow criminals to have access to personal data that could potentially let them hack into more of an individual’s accounts. The credentials to a PayPal account with a relatively high balance can be sold on the dark web for $247 on average, the report found. One’s entire online identity, including personal identification numbers and hacked financial accounts, can be sold for only about $1,200 on the dark web, Fractl found. That’s because so much personal information may already available to hackers, after repeated data breaches across a range of industries.

“..fiscally incontinent government..” Great line.

• Jerome Is The New Janet: Same Old Keynesian Jabberwocky (Stockman)

The election of 2016 was supposed to be the most disruptive break with the status quo in modern history, if ever. On the single most important decision of his tenure, however, the Donald has lined-up check-by-jowl with Barry and Dubya, too. That is to say, Trump’s new Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, amounts to Janet Yellen in trousers and tie. In fact, you can make it a three-part composite by adding Bernanke with a full head of hair and Greenspan sans the mumble. The overarching point here is that the great problems plaguing American society – scarcity of good jobs, punk GDP growth, faltering productivity, raging wealth mal-distribution, massive indebtedness, egregious speculative bubbles, fiscally incontinent government – are overwhelmingly caused by our rogue central bank.

They are the fetid fruits of massive and sustained financial repression and falsification of the most import prices in all of capitalism – the prices of money, debt, equities and other financial assets. Moreover, the worst of it is that the Fed is overwhelmingly the province of an unelected politburo that rules by the lights of its own Keynesian groupthink and by the hypnotic power of its Big Lie. So powerful is the latter that American democracy has meekly seconded vast, open-ended power to dominate the financial markets, and therefore the warp and woof of the nation’s $19 trillion economy, to a tiny priesthood possessing neither of the usual instruments of rule.

That is to say, never before in history has a people so completely and abjectly surrendered to an occupying power – even though its ostensibly democratic government already possessed all the votes and all the guns. So it is no exaggeration to say, therefore, that the Fed is an alien state unto itself. That was powerfully symbolized most recently by the appointment of John Williams, a lifetime apparatchik at the San Francisco Fed, to the job of head satrap at the central bank’s Liberty Street outpost in the heart of Wall Street. In the scheme of things, the President of the New York Fed is #2 in the whole central banking apparatus, and as such is immensely more powerful than any Senate Committee Chairman or House Speaker. But Williams’ appointment was not reviewed or passed upon by a single elected official accountable to any voter anywhere in the US of A.

Hard to tell what the next steps are.

• Yulia Skripal Discharged From Hospital (G.)

Yulia Skripal, the daughter of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, has been discharged from hospital, according to reports. Just over one month after she and her father were found in Salisbury in Wiltshire after being poisoned with a nerve agent, the BBC reported that Skripal had left Salisbury district hospital. Skripal, 33, flew to the UK on 3 March, the day before she and her father are believed to have been poisoned by a novichok nerve agent. She released a statement on Friday to say her strength was “growing daily”. The BBC reported on Tuesday morning that Skripal had been taken to a secure location, though a hospital spokesman declined to comment on the reports. Christine Blanshard, the hospital’s deputy chief executive, and Lorna Wilkinson, the director of nursing, are to make a statement later on Tuesday morning.

It’s the White Helmets again.

• No Trace Of Chemical Weapons In Douma, Photos Are Fake – Russia (RT)

The Russian military has found no trace of chemical weapons use after searching parts of Syria’s Douma allegedly targeted by an “attack.” Photos of victims posted by the White Helmets are fake, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. Experts in radiological, chemical and biological warfare, as well as medics, on Monday inspected the parts of the Eastern Ghouta city of Douma, where an alleged chemical attack supposedly took place on Saturday, the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria said in a statement. The specialists “found no traces of the use of chemical agents” after searching the sites, the statement said. The center’s medical specialists also visited a local hospital but found no patients that showed signs of chemical weapons poisoning.

“All these facts show… that no chemical weapons were used in the town of Douma, as it was claimed by the White Helmets,” the statement said, referring to the controversial “civil defense” group that was among the first to report about the alleged attack. “All the accusations brought by the White Helmets, as well as their photos… allegedly showing the victims of the chemical attack, are nothing more than a yet another piece of fake news and an attempt to disrupt the ceasefire,” the Reconciliation Center said. On Saturday, some rebel-linked groups, including the White Helmets, accused the Syrian government of carrying out a chemical attack that, allegedly, affected dozens of civilians in the Eastern Ghouta town of Douma.

The reports have already provoked a wave of outrage in the West, as the US and the EU rushed to put the blame for the incident on Damascus and Moscow. US President Donald Trum hastily denounced the perceived attack as a “mindless” atrocity and a “humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever,” warning of a “big price” to be paid. Syria and Russia have dismissed the accusations and called the reports fake news, aimed at helping the extremists and at justifying potential strikes against Syrian forces. In the very early hours of Monday, Israeli fighter jets targeted Syria’s T-4 airbase in Homs province, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Israel has not commented on the strike. Earlier, a number of Israeli officials had called on the US to strike Syria as a response to the reported chemical attack.

Like is the case with Russia, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has declared Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal destroyed.

• “Weapons Of Mass Destruction,” And All (Kunstler)

[..] a joint mission of the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was called in to supervise the destruction of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons, and certified it as accomplished in late 2014. Yet, poison gas incidents continued – most notoriously in 2017 when President Donald Trump responded to one with a sortie of cruise missiles against a vacant Syrian government airfield. And now another incident in the Damascus suburb of Douma has provoked Mr. Trump to tweetstormed threats of retaliatory violence, just days after he proposed a swift withdrawal from that vexing corner of the world.

Surely by now the American public has developed some immunity to claims of nefarious doings in foreign lands (“weapons of mass destruction,” and all). The operative sentence in that New York Times report is “…Syrian forces hit a suburb of Damascus with bombs that rescue workers said unleashed toxic gas.” Yeah, well, how clear is it that the toxic gas was contained in the bombs, or rather that the bombs dropped by the Syrian military blew up a chemical weapon depot controlled by anti-government Jihadis? Does that hodgepodge of maniacs show any respect for the UN, or the Geneva Convention, or any other agency of international law?

As in many previous such incidents, we don’t know who was responsible — though there is plenty of reason to believe that parties within the US establishment are against Mr. Trump’s idea of getting the hell out of that place, and might cook up a convenient reason to prevent it. Lastly, how is it in Bashar al-Assad’s interests to provoke a fresh international uproar against him and his regime? I’d say it is not the least in his interest, since he is on the verge of putting an end to the awful conflict. He may not be a model of rectitude by Western standards, but he’s not a mental defective. And he has very able Russian support advising him in what has been so far a long and difficult effort to prevent his state from failing — or being failed for him.

Germany, Japan, China.

• In 2020, German Society Will Start Collapsing (GEFIRA)

The next crisis is just a couple of years away, and Germany will be its largest victim. Economies grow, driven by capital and labour. The ECB monetary policy is currently providing the German economy with enough funds, but the country is experiencing a catastrophic lack of youth, and its ageing labour force is not being replaced as a result of which workforce is already in short supply. Since the German population is declining at a staggering pace, before the end of the century there will only be 22 million indigenous Germans left. Currently the working population has already begun to shrink. This drop is still moderate compared to what will come after 2020.

The disappearing of the nation that has just begun will have catastrophic consequences. The German government recorded a large budget surplus last year, a sign that the authorities are not willing or able to invest in their own country. Germany lacks health care professionals, road construction workers and teachers, but allocating more tax money to this sector makes no sense because there are simply no people available. For that reason road construction sites have come to a standstill and road maintenance is postponed. In order to find consumers and labourers, the German industry is investing in new factories abroad.

In the past, the German economy was able to attract employees from Southern, Eastern and Central Europe, but at present the demographic situation in states such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Poland – which have long provided Germany with workforce – has worsened, so for all practical purposes these sources of labour have all but dried out. Poland for instance has lost a large number of young people to the West European labour market and the loss has not been made good because of extremely low fertility.The financial sector depends on a growing economy, but – apart from periods of temporary increase – there is no significant growth, and banks have to unwind their positions by selling their assets and returning cash to their clients. When the ageing population tries to sell its investments – stocks, obligations or companies – after 2020 they will find a declining working age population that is willing and able to buy these assets. It is already difficult for German business owners to find successors.

Tragic species, mankind.

• Fishing Boat Caught With Illegal 18-Mile-Long Nets (Ind.)

A fishing ship carrying 600 illegal nets stretching up to 18 miles has been seized after it escaped Chinese authorities, while using the flags of eight different countries to evade capture. The vessel, STS-50, had targeted a cod species called Antarctic toothfish that plays an important role in the Southern Ocean ecosystem, according to Indonesia‘s fisheries ministry. Its hundreds of gillnets had walls of fine mesh and could expand to a distance of 18 miles. Gillnetting has been banned in Antarctic waters since 2006 and is described by Australia as posing a “huge risk to almost all marine life, including marine mammals due to [its] indiscriminate nature”.

The use of the nets also harm seabirds including endangered albatrosses, the country’s environment department said on its website in 2011. Indonesia was acting on a request from Interpol when it seized the officially stateless craft. It had eluded authorities by flying eight different flags at different times, including those of Sierra Leone, Togo, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, Micronesia and Namibia, the ministry said in a statement. Interpol contacted Indonesia last week with a request to investigate the vessel, fisheries minister Susi Pudjiastuti said in the statement. “Navy ship Simeuleu conducted a ‘stop, investigate and detain’ operation on Friday and successfully seized the vessel,” she said.

The STS-50 had previously been detained by China, but escaped and was caught in the port of Maputo in Mozambique before fleeing again, Ms Pudjiastuti said. Prior to its capture off the Indonesian island of Weh in the northwestern province of Aceh, the vessel had also operated under several other names including Sea Breeze, Andrey Dolgov, STD No. 2 and Aida, the statement said. Shipping data in Thomson Reuters Eikon shows the 54m-long, 452-tonne vessel was built in 1985.