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Debt Rattle May 4 2025

May 042025
 
 May 4, 2025  Posted by at 10:15 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  39 Responses »


Edouard Vuillard The window 1894

 

• Elon Musk : DOGE, Support For Trump ‘Essential’ For America (NYP)
• Zelensky Threatens World Leaders Visiting Moscow On Victory Day: Kremlin (ZH)
• Moscow Responds To Zelensky’s Victory Day Threats (RT)
• Ukrainian Troops To Take Part In Victory Day Parade In London (RT)
• Farage’s Party Making Big Gains In Local British Elections (RT)
• What Does Russia Want? (Ben Shapiro)
• From The Mongols to NATO: Here’s The Real Russian Doctrine (Bordachev)
• US Approves F-16 Support Package For Ukraine (RT)
• Trump’s First Tariff Trade Deal With India Could Be Game-Changing (JTN)
• De Minimis Loophole for Beijing Ends, Temu Halts Direct Shipping (CTH)
• An Unavoidable Trade War with Canada is Looming (CTH)
• Want To Know The Truth Behind Those Anti-Trump Polls? (Margolis)
• Trump’s WWII Claim Is ‘Pompous Nonsense’ – Medvedev (RT)
• Freedom in the EU? Only if You Can Afford It (Roos)
• Green Energy Fixation Sends Spain Dark (Gonzalez)
• DOGE Cuts Behind Nearly Half of All Layoffs This Year (JTN)
• CIA to Cut 1,200 (5%) Jobs -Ratcliffe Shifts Focus to “Human Intelligence” (CTH)
• Buffett To Step Down As Berkshire CEO At Year-End (ZH)

 

 

 

 

Pope
https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1918683034401812862

https://twitter.com/KTmBoyle/status/1918123156411187320

https://twitter.com/SilverlochMedia/status/1918482139072602406

Did you see Mike Waltz’s ‘disguise’?

Tulsi

RT Editor-in-Chief

Orban


https://twitter.com/PM_ViktorOrban/status/1918705744675012711

Romania has ‘elections’ today, without the leading candidate.
https://twitter.com/ricwe123/status/1918569944905633948

 

 

 

 

“That I was useful in the furtherance of civilization,.. “That I helped move civilization forward, added to the store of knowledge and capability — that I helped to understand the universe.”

• Elon Musk : DOGE, Support For Trump ‘Essential’ For America (NYP)

Tesla co-founder Elon Musk is beginning his exit from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as his time as a special government employee comes to a close. His tenure as the public face of DOGE has been marked by historic cuts and widespread outrage, but the tech titan does not regret his time with the Trump administration. Although once praised by the media and championed by the left, Musk’s decision to become a force in the public sphere has not been without backlash. From his purchase of Twitter, now X, to coming out in support of then-candidate Donald Trump, Musk’s year has been anything but “boring.” Fox News host Lara Trump asked Musk if he had any “regret” over his work at DOGE or his support of Trump, to which the SpaceX founder replied, “No.” “I think it was essential for President Trump to win to ensure that America remained great, and that we reach greater heights,” Musk said in an interview that aired Saturday on “My View with Lara Trump.”

In the run-up to the November 2024 election, Musk became a staunch supporter of Trump despite having been a former Obama donor, citing concerns over former President Joe Biden’s “most radical-left, crazy administration ever.” “Whoever controlled the auto pen and teleprompter during the Biden administration was the real president,” he said. Musk also told Lara Trump that he believed “if President Trump had not won, I think the Democrat campaign to import vast numbers of illegal voters would have succeeded,” adding that America would have risked becoming a “one-party state from which we could never escape.” “Some people out there may be somewhat skeptical. They may think, ‘Well, there isn’t some Democrat plan to subvert democracy and achieve a permanent one-party, deep blue socialist state.’ I assure you, the more you research it, the more that you will see it is true.”

With Trump winning in November, Musk was put to work on day one of the new administration, but his cost-cutting efforts have sparked nationwide opposition. “It’s not been boring, that’s for sure — an eventful year to say the least. At least I didn’t get shot, you know. Look on the bright side,” Musk said. “But we have had people shoot up Tesla stores and burn down Tesla cars. I wasn’t expecting that level of violence, really,” he continued. Musk even conceded the bad actors targeting him and his companies are “somewhat inevitable.” Part of the backlash has been a “relentless propaganda campaign” from opponents of the Trump administration, attempting to “destroy [his] public perception” and “doing character assassination,” he said.

Musk concluded the outrage shows DOGE’s work is “effective.” As President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office on Tuesday, DOGE said it has cut at least $160 billion in waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. With no plans of slowing down, DOGE has made a number of consequential and controversial cuts in recent months, including cuts to hundreds of millions in DEI contracts and efforts to slash federal spending by trimming the federal workforce. While DOGE made historic moves in the Trump administration’s first 100 days, Musk revealed what he most wants his legacy to be. “That I was useful in the furtherance of civilization,” he told Lara Trump. “That I helped move civilization forward, added to the store of knowledge and capability — that I helped to understand the universe.”

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• Zelensky Threatens World Leaders Visiting Moscow On Victory Day: Kremlin (ZH)

Ukraine’s President Zelensky has dismissed the Kremlin’s unilateral declaration of a three-day ceasefire for Russia’s World War II commemorations on May 9 as but a “game” and “theatrical performance”. “This is more of a theatrical performance on his part. Because in two or three days, it is impossible to develop a plan for the next steps to end the war,” Zelensky said, offering instead a fuller 30-day ceasefire. We reported earlier that Zelensky days ago went so far as to hint that a Ukrainian attack on Victory Day events could happen. Here’s what Zelensky warned several days ago: “Now they are worried that their parade is in question, and they are rightly worried. But they should be concerned that this war is still going on. They must end the war,” the Ukrainian president said.

Moscow officials certainly took this as a direct threat. Various world leaders, including President Xi Jinping of China, will be present for the V-Day parade through Red Square and other observances. This year’s will be particularly special given it’s the 80th anniversary since the end of WW2. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova issued a statement Saturday saying that Zelensky “unambiguously threatened world leaders.” “After every terrorist attack on Russia’s territory, the Kiev regime, its security services, and Zelensky personally boast that this is their doing, that this will continue. Therefore, the phrase that he ‘does not guarantee security on May 9 in Russia’ as it is not his area of responsibility is, of course, a direct threat,” the diplomat stated. She and Peskov further blasted Zelensky’s stance as having exposed “the neo-Nazi nature of the Kiev regime, which has become a terrorist cell,” according to TASS.

Lately there’s been assassination bombings targeting top Russian generals, as well as long-range drone attacks which have reached the outskirts of Moscow. Clearly, Ukrainian intelligence and/or its allied Western intel services have made inroads into Russia. Without doubt, Russian defense and security services will bulk up anti-air systems in an around Moscow for Victory Day events. Defense officials, heads of state, and foreign ministers from various countries and especially Russia-friendly nations are expected to be present. Earlier in the Ukraine war, drones were sent across the Russian border and made it all the way to the Moscow Kremlin complex, lightly damaging the top of a dome, in what was a major first at the time. Since then, Moscow area airports have more frequently halted operations during inbound drone attacks.

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You’d almost hope they aim a device at Xi Jinping. Without hitting anyone, of course.

“Zelensky’s remarks “once again prove the neo-Nazi nature of the Kiev regime, which has turned into a terrorist cell..”

• Moscow Responds To Zelensky’s Victory Day Threats (RT)

Vladimir Zelensky’s refusal to join Russia in observing a 72-hour ceasefire to mark the Victory Day celebrations exposes Kiev’s “neo-Nazi essence” and amounts to a threat by an “international-level terrorist,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday. Earlier in the day, Ukrainian leader reiterated his refusal to accept Moscow’s proposal for a three-day ceasefire starting May 8 and continuing through the World War II Victory Day celebrations, dismissing it as a “theatrical production.” Zelensky also appeared to threaten the world leaders expected to take part in the May 9 events in Moscow, stating that Kiev cannot guarantee their safety. Zelensky’s remarks “once again prove the neo-Nazi nature of the Kiev regime, which has turned into a terrorist cell,” Zakharova said in a statement.

“Today [Zelensky] hit a new low: now he is threatening the physical safety of veterans who will come to parades and ceremonial events on that sacred day,” she said. “After every terrorist attack on Russian territory, the Kiev regime, its security services, and Zelensky personally boast that it was their doing and that it will continue to be like this. Therefore, the phrase that he ‘does not guarantee security on May 9 on Russian territory,’ since this is not his area of responsibility, is, of course, a direct threat,” Zakharova stressed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov offered a similar take on Zelensky’s remarks, stating the proposed ceasefire is a “test” for Kiev, and the apparent refusal to join it “clearly shows that neo-Nazism is the ideological basis of the contemporary Kiev regime.”

The 72-hour ceasefire was announced unilaterally by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday. The president ordered the suspension of all military action against Ukraine’s forces from midnight on May 7 to midnight on May 10 and urged Kiev to join the truce. Zelensky and other top Ukrainian officials, however, dismissed the proposal as a “manipulation attempt,” demanding an immediate 30-day ceasefire instead. In March, Russia and Ukraine both agreed to a US-brokered 30-day partial ceasefire focused on halting strikes on energy infrastructure. Kiev, however, violated the truce on numerous occasions, according to the Russian military. The Victory Day truce follows a similar unilaterally announced pause during Easter weekend in April that ended up being only partially successful. While a certain lull in the hostilities was observed, Kiev violated the truce more than 3,900 times, according to estimates by the Russian Defense Ministry.

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Let’s hope they carry some Bandera flags, insignia. That country is lost

• Ukrainian Troops To Take Part In Victory Day Parade In London (RT)

Ukrainian troops will take part in the World War II Victory Day parade in London on May 8 at the invitation of the UK government, the British Ministry of Defense has announced. Moscow has condemned the move as “blasphemous” and “disrespectful” due to Kiev’s open glorification of Nazism. Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) is celebrated in the West on May 8 to commemorate Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945. In a post on X on Saturday, the UK MOD said Ukrainian troops will take part in a military procession commemorating the event alongside 1,000 British servicemen. The ministry claimed that Kiev’s participation in the event “reminds us that Ukraine is now at freedom’s front line.” UK Defense Secretary John Healey described it as “fitting” that Ukrainian troops will be present at the event.

Moscow has condemned London’s decision. “Inviting followers of neo-Nazi elements to Victory Day celebrations is not just disrespectful to those British veterans who gave their lives during World War II. It is blasphemy,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday. Commemorations of WWII-era nationalist figures linked to Nazi Germany have been common in Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists hold annual torchlight marches in Kiev, Lviv, and other cities in honor of Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with the Nazis and took part in the massacre of more than 100,000 Poles, Jews, Russians, and Soviet-aligned Ukrainians. Throughout the conflict with Russia, Ukrainian troops have on numerous occasions been filmed displaying Nazi symbols, including patches of SS units and swastikas. Italy’s Rai News 24 apologized last year after a journalist interviewed a Ukrainian fighter wearing a cap with the emblem of the ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’ SS division.

Germany previously expelled seven Ukrainian soldiers undergoing military training in the country because they were wearing Nazi symbols. Ukraine’s notorious Azov unit, a neo-Nazi formation established in 2014 and later integrated into the National Guard, has been accused of war crimes and was designated a terrorist organization by Russia in 2022. Although the original Azov Battalion was defeated in the 2022 Battle of Mariupol, co-founder Andrey Biletsky launched the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade under the Azov banner in 2023, which remains active. Russia has repeatedly warned of a Nazi revival in Ukraine and has accused Kiev of embracing neo-Nazi ideology while whitewashing WWII collaborators. President Vladimir Putin listed “denazification” among the goals of Russia’s military operation against the Kiev regime, along with demilitarization and neutrality.

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Farage will win bigly. It’s the same pattern all over Europe. Le Pen, AfD, Georgescu…

• Farage’s Party Making Big Gains In Local British Elections (RT)

The right-wing Reform UK party has won 677 out of more than 1,600 seats in England’s local elections, while the Labour and the Conservative parties suffered heavy defeats across the country. As results began to trickle in on Friday, the party led by firebrand and Brexit proponent Nigel Farage emerged as the strongest performer in contests held in 23 local authorities across England, winning control of ten councils. These included eight taken from the Conservatives – Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, North Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire and West Northamptonshire — along with Doncaster from Labour and Durham, where no party previously had a majority.

Reform also won hard-fought parliamentary by-elections in Runcorn and Helsby, snatching victory from Labour by just six votes after a recount. As a result, the party now controls five seats in the UK Parliament. According to a BBC projection, if a general election were held today, Reform UK would receive 30% of the vote, ahead of Labour at 20% and the Conservatives at 15%. However, the next general election is not due until May 2029. The last one was held last year and saw Labour secure a landslide victory, riding a wave of public dissatisfaction with the economic policies of the Tories. Commenting on his party’s strides, Farage remarked: “In post-war Britain, no one has ever beaten both Labour and the Tories in a local election before. These results are unprecedented… Reform can and will win the next general election.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that while he felt a “sharp edge of fury,” he said he understood the voters’ choice while promising to “go further and faster in pursuit of… national renewal.” Meanwhile, Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch bluntly acknowledged that the elections were a predictable “bloodbath,” stressing that the Tories must continue work to rebuild trust in the party. Reform UK’s rise has been driven by voter frustration over high levels of immigration, the rising cost of living, and what many see as years of mismanagement by both major parties. The party campaigned heavily on promises to cut migration – including by small boat crossings – lower taxes, and reduce council spending, positioning itself as the only alternative to what it calls “a failed political establishment.”

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Ben Shapiro displays a stunning lack of knowledge about the war.

“..cost Ukrainians at least 50,000 dead and the Russians as many as 200,000 dead..”

If Shapiro is right about anything at all, then people like Doug Macgregor and Scott Ritter have been terribly wrong for 3 years running now. They swear there’s not 4x as many Russian casualties, but 7-8x as many Ukrainian. Off by a factor of 30.

• What Does Russia Want? (Ben Shapiro)

Russia’s war to conquer Ukraine has been raging since February 2022. At first, the Russian offensive seemed fated for success: Russian troops came within a few kilometers of Kyiv, and Western powers offered President Volodymyr Zelenskyy exit from the country. Zelenskyy refused; Ukrainian forces proceeded to hold off and reverse the Russian offensive. Within a few weeks, the battle lines solidified, with Russia continuing to hold much of the territory in the East and Crimea they had held since 2014. The only potential solution was the obvious solution: an armistice essentially freezing the lines of conflict and security guarantees to Ukraine sufficient to deter another Russian attack. But no solution could be found. Russia demonstrated little interest, after mid-2022, in any negotiated end to the war.

President Donald Trump came into office pledging to end the war—a war that has cost Ukrainians at least 50,000 dead and the Russians as many as 200,000 dead. To that end, he pressured Zelenskyy to come to the table. Zelenskyy eventually did, offering an unconditional 30-day ceasefire. Russian President Vladimir Putin has thus far refused any such ceasefire—presumably because he hopes that the Trump administration will pull its support from Ukraine, thereby leaving the country vulnerable to a final Russian offensive. And herein lies the problem for Trump. He knows—as everyone knows—that the only off-ramp for the war lies in a Korean War-style armistice. But Russia still refuses to come to the table, no matter the pleading and cajoling of special envoy Steve Witkoff, whose negotiating style seems to be warmly embracing various anti-American dictators, speaking kindly about them in public, and then hoping they will give him what he seeks.

In order to reach an end to the war, therefore, the Trump administration ought to fully consider just what Russia wants at this point. And the answer happens to be surprisingly simple: Russia wants either Ukraine conquered or a puppet government in place or a clear pathway to conquering Ukraine in the future. We know this because Russia repeatedly says it. Alexander Dugin, a philosopher and geopolitics expert known colloquially as “Putin’s brain,” spelled all of this out in his magnum opus, “Foundations of Geopolitics” (1997)—a book that was apparently used as a textbook at the General Staff Academy. For Dugin, the Russian spirit can only be animated by imperial dreams; regional power alone would be “tantamount to suicide for the Russian nation.” The antithesis of the Russian spirit is “‘the West’ as a whole.”

And Ukraine—an independent country that should be suffused with that “Russian spirit” but that wants to orient towards the West—represents a stinging rebuke to the Russian identity as a whole. Thus, Dugin argues, Ukraine must rejoin Russia or forever be condemned to a “puppet existence and geopolitical service” to the West. Ukraine’s continued existence as a sovereign state, Dugin argues, “is tantamount to a monstrous blow to Russia’s geopolitical security, tantamount to an invasion of its territory.” Now, during the war, Dugin writes, “We must win the war in Ukraine, liberate the entire territory of this former country from the Nazi regime. Regardless of Trump’s victory or anything else, this imperative remains unchanged. Just as the ancient Roman consul Cato the Elder used to say, ‘Carthage must be destroyed,’ in our case, ‘Kiev must be taken’”

So, if the true Russian goal is the destruction or subjugation of Ukraine, how could Russia be brought to the table? Only through the “peace through strength” policy Trump pursued during his first term. Only a Russia that believes that the West will refuse to surrender Ukraine will be pressured into an armistice. Trump seems ready to consider that possibility; he’s now acknowledging publicly that Putin seems to be slow-playing him. But the answer won’t be more sanctions. It will be a recognition that Ukraine’s sovereignty can only be guaranteed by force of arms—and that an off-ramp can only be achieved by a guarantee of that sovereignty.

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Wonderful history lesson by Timofey Bordachev. It all goes back to the 13th century, the Mongol hordes.

• From The Mongols to NATO: Here’s The Real Russian Doctrine (Bordachev)

“Only crows fly straight,” goes an old saying from the Vladimir-Suzdal region, where the revival of the Russian state began after the devastation of the Mongol invasion in the 13th century. Within 250 years, a powerful state emerged in Eastern Europe, its independence and decision-making unquestioned by others. From its earliest days, Russia’s foreign policy culture has been shaped by a single goal: to preserve the nation’s ability to determine its own future. The methods have varied, but a few constants remain: no fixed strategies, no binding ideologies, and an ability to surprise opponents. Unlike European or Asian powers, Russia never needed rigid doctrines; its vast, unpredictable geography – and its instinct for unorthodox solutions – made that unnecessary. Yet this distinctive foreign policy culture did not develop overnight.

Before the mid-13th century, Russia’s trajectory looked much like the rest of Eastern Europe’s. Fragmented and inward-looking, its city-states had little reason to unify. Geography and climate kept them largely self-contained. It could have ended up like other Slavic nations, eventually dominated by German or Turkish powers. But then came what Nikolay Gogol called a “wonderful event”: the 1237 Mongol invasion. Russia’s strongest state centers were obliterated. This catastrophe, paradoxically, gave rise to two defining features of Russian statehood: a reason to unify and a deep-seated pragmatism. For 250 years, Russians paid tribute to the Golden Horde but were never its slaves. The relationship with the Horde was a constant struggle – clashes alternating with tactical cooperation. It was during this period that the “sharp sword of Moscow” was forged: a state that functioned as a military organization, always blending conflict and diplomacy. War and peace merged seamlessly, without the moral dilemmas that often paralyze others.

These centuries also forged another trait of Russian thinking: the strength of the adversary is irrelevant to the legitimacy of its demands. Unlike the Western Hobbesian notion that might makes right, Russians have historically viewed force as just one factor – not the determinant of truth. A 16th-century song about a Crimean Khan’s raid sums it up: he is called both a “tsar” for his military power and a “dog” for lacking justice. Similarly, after the Cold War, Russia recognized Western power – but not the righteousness of its actions. Demographics have always been a challenge, driven by climate and geography. Russia’s population did not match that of France until the late 18th century, despite covering an area many times larger than Western Europe. And crucially, Russia has never relied on external allies. Its foreign policy rests on the understanding that no one else will solve its problems – a lesson learned through bitter experience. Yet Russia has always been a reliable ally to others.

A pivotal moment came in the mid-15th century, when Grand Duke Vasily Vasilyevich settled Kazan princes on Russia’s eastern borders. This marked the beginning of Russia’s multi-ethnic statehood, where loyalty – not religion – was the key requirement. Unlike Western Europe, where the church dictated social order, Russia’s statehood grew as a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, all unified by a shared commitment to defense. This pragmatism – welcoming Christians, Muslims, and others alike – set Russia apart. Spain’s rulers completed the Reconquista by expelling or forcibly converting Jews and Muslims; Russia integrated its minorities, allowing them to serve and prosper without renouncing their identities.

Today, Russia’s foreign policy still draws on these deep traditions. Its core priority remains the same: defending sovereignty and retaining freedom of choice in a volatile world. And true to form, Russia resists doctrinaire strategies. Fixed doctrines require fixed ideologies – something historically alien to Russia. Russia also rejects the idea of “eternal enemies.” The Mongol Horde, once its deadliest foe, was absorbed within decades of its collapse. Its nobles merged with Russian aristocracy, its cities became Russian cities. No other country has fully absorbed such a formidable rival. Even Poland, a centuries-long adversary, was eventually diminished not by decisive battles but by sustained pressure. Victory for Russia has never been about glory – it’s about achieving objectives. Often, this means exhausting adversaries rather than crushing them outright. The Mongols were defeated in 1480 without a single major battle. Similarly, Poland was gradually reduced in stature over centuries of relentless pressure.

This mindset explains Russia’s readiness to negotiate at every stage: politics always outweighs military concerns. Foreign and domestic policy are inseparable, and every foreign venture is also a bid to strengthen internal cohesion, just as the medieval princes of Moscow used external threats to unite the Russian lands. Today’s geopolitical landscape is shifting again. The West – led by the United States – remains powerful, but no longer omnipotent. China is expanding its influence, though cautiously. Western Europe, historically Russia’s main threat, is losing its relevance, unable to define a vision for its own future. Russia, the US and China all possess that vision – and in the coming decades, their triangular relationship will shape global politics. India may join this elite circle in time, but for now, it still lags behind.

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Dumb but predictable: the US supports its weapons industry.

• US Approves F-16 Support Package For Ukraine (RT)

The US has approved a $310.5 million deal to sustain Ukrainian-operated F-16 fighter jets provided by Kiev’s European backers. The move comes after the US and Ukraine signed a deal in which Kiev grants Washington access to its natural resources in exchange for future assistance. The F-16 deliveries from European NATO members to Ukraine were approved by former US President Joe Biden in August 2023, but the first jets did not arrive in the country until a year later. While Ukrainian officials hailed the deliveries as a major coup, Western media warned that they would not be a “game changer” in the conflict. In March, the Ukrainian Air Force acknowledged that the F-16s operated by Kiev “cannot compete” with the latest Russian jets.

In a statement on Friday, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) said the State Department had signed off on a foreign military sale to Ukraine which includes training, spare parts, aircraft modifications, logistics assistance, and software support for F-16s. The agency added that the proposed sale “will support the foreign policy goals… of the United States by improving the security of a partner country that is a force for political stability” in Europe. More than 80 F-16s have been promised to Ukraine, with the bulk expected to come from Belgium and the Netherlands, while the US has never committed to providing the jets on its own. While the exact number of jets delivered is unknown, Moscow confirmed last month it had shot down one F-16. Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky said the aircraft’s pilot perished during a “combat mission.”

In 2024, Ukraine reported the loss of another F-16, saying it crashed while repelling a Russian air strike. The DSCA announcement comes after the Pentagon said it is sending “disused and completely non-operational F-16s to Ukraine for parts.” It also follows the signing of a US-Ukraine resource deal that is intended to allow Washington to recover the cost of future military support through shared proceeds from Ukrainian mineral resource licenses. Moscow has condemned the Western arms shipments to Ukraine, warning they will only prolong the conflict without changing the outcome. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Ukrainian-operated F-16s will “burn” just like other Western-supplied equipment.

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India would be big. “Apple announced on April 25 that it would be shifting production of most U.S.-bound iPhones to India from China..”

• Trump’s First Tariff Trade Deal With India Could Be Game-Changing (JTN)

Just a month into his tariff policy, President Donald Trump could unveil his first new trade deals with allies as early as this week as his negotiators press for handshakes and signatures that could further calm markets and empower a brighter future for American workers, officials tell Just the News. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hinted at an approaching announcement last week when he revealed he has a trade deal with an unspecified country, pending approval of its conditions. Administration officials said as many as two or three deals could be unveiled in the coming days.Speculation has swirled surrounding India being the first to forge a partnership after Vice President J.D. Vance last week met with India Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi to discuss a Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA).

The vice president’s office put out a statement following their meeting, which stated, “The BTA presents an opportunity to negotiate a new and modern trade agreement focused on promoting job creation and citizen well-being in both countries, with the goal of enhancing bilateral trade and supply-chain integration in a balanced and mutually beneficial manner.” Also last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent indicated that many trade partners had reached out to the White House since the tariffs were unveiled and had made ‘very good’ proposals. “I would guess that India would be one of the first trade deals we would sign,” Bessent told CNBC, and that the U.S. also held productive negotiations with Japan and other Asian nations.

Former Deputy National Security Advisor Victoria Coates said an early deal with India could be a game-changer, since it is a partner with the market size of China that could apply pressure on Beijing. “I’d love to have them be first out of the box,” she said, noting Prime Minister Modi’s relationship with Vance has already yielded dividends. Coates said deals with the European Union will take longer, but there are some other big early possibilities. “I would look at Japan. I think that that would be key,” she said. “I think the conversation with the Europeans is going to be a longer one, but again that really has to happen. We might be surprised by the UK.” Mere signs of trade deals on the horizon have already calmed markets after an early free fall prompted by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2.

The S&P 500 on Friday notched its longest streak of closing in the positive column in more than two decades, after it rose 1.47% at the close of business and marked its ninth consecutive day of gains. India has a few notable incentives to make it happen soon: India’s largest trading partner is the United States. The nation was hit with 26% reciprocal tariffs on April 2 before Trump suspended the larger tariffs on most countries for 90 days, but kept a universal 10% tariff in place. India is also placing a large emphasis on an agreement as part of its India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership, which Modi says “will be a defining partnership of the 21st Century for a better future of our people and the world.”

Adding sweetness to the deal: Apple announced on April 25 that it would be shifting production of most U.S.-bound iPhones to India from China, bringing billions in revenue and jobs to the populous, developing nation. India’s ambition to more than double trade between the U.S. and India, from the current $190 billion to $500 billion, was originally sent by Modi to Trump in February 2025. With headlines alluding to a Trump “misfire,” Democrats and legacy media have wasted no time prognosticating about why the trade deals are taking so long, and may never come. However, sources told Fox Business on Monday that the president is working on broader trade deals encompassing additional nations, not just nations involving tariffs. This, they report, is the reason there has been only speculation and no official announcements of trade deals.

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Where will Temu get its sales now?

“If you order a $20 shirt from China effective June 1st, you will pay $220. $20 for the shirt, and $200 minimum tariff. Yep, this is only the beginning.”

• De Minimis Loophole for Beijing Ends, Temu Halts Direct Shipping (CTH)

Think about it. We’ve already heard about the massive stoppages of April factory work in China, causing serious concern for Beijing and Chinese worker protests. American importers front loaded inventory in February and March with a 50% increase in orders. Now, in addition to those factories going quiet, the de minimis rule kicks in. (Via CNBC) – “Chinese bargain retailer Temu changed its business model in the U.S. as the Trump administration’s new rules on low-value shipments took effect Friday. In recent days, Temu has abruptly shifted its website and app to only display listings for products shipped from U.S.-based warehouses. Items shipped directly from China, which previously blanketed the site, are now labeled as out of stock. Temu made a name for itself in the U.S. as a destination for ultra-discounted items shipped direct from China, such as $5 sneakers and $1.50 garlic presses.

It’s been able to keep prices low because of the so-called de minimis rule, which has allowed items worth $800 or less to enter the country duty-free since 2016. The loophole expired Friday at 12:01 a.m. EDT as a result of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in April.” The de minimis loophole comes from back in the 1930s. The idea back then was, say you went on a vacation to Paris, you shouldn’t have to file customs paperwork or pay taxes if you decided to ship some little Eiffel Tower statues to your friends back home. Congress in 2015 then raised the de minimis threshold from $200 to $800. However, the e-commerce world exploded, and Chinese companies began using the de minimis loophole to ship cheap goods (ex. Temu and Shein) into the USA direct to consumers without paying any customs duty.

On April 2nd, as part of the global trade reset and tariff structure, President Trump revoked authorization for Chinese goods to transfer to the USA using the de minimis rule. The de minimis exemption was cancelled for all products coming out of China. The rule change only targeted China and Chinese shippers. No one else. As part of the modification to Executive Order #14257, President Trump has increased the baseline tariff for product mailed from China [de minimis tariff] from 30 90 percent to 120%. Mailed products from China now face a 120% tariff. Additionally, minimum tariff amounts increased from $75 to $100 effective May 1st, and from $150 to $200 effective June 1st. Example: If you order a $20 shirt from China effective June 1st, you will pay $220. $20 for the shirt, and $200 minimum tariff. Yep, this is only the beginning.

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“When Trudeau outlines the inability of Canada to agree to trade terms, simply because his country no longer has the capability of adhering to those trade terms, a frustrated President Trump says, “then become a state.”

• An Unavoidable Trade War with Canada is Looming (CTH)

Following the 2024 presidential election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Mar-a-Lago and said if President Trump was to make the Canadian government face reciprocal tariffs, open the USMCA trade agreements to force reciprocity, and/or balance economic relations on non-tariff issues, then Canada would collapse upon itself economically and cease to exist. In essence, in addition to the NATO defense shortfall, Canada cannot survive as a free and independent north American nation, without receiving all the one-way benefits from the U.S. economy. To wit, President Trump then said, if Canada cannot survive in a balanced rules environment, including putting together their own military and defenses and meeting their NATO obligations, then Canada should become the 51st U.S state. It was following this meeting that President Trump started emphasizing this point and shocking everyone in the process.

However, in the emotional reaction to Trump’s statements, no-one looked at the core issues outlined by Trudeau that framed President Trump’s opinion. Representing Canada, Justin Trudeau was not expressing an unwillingness to comply with fairness and reciprocity in trade with the USA, what Trudeau was expressing was an inability to comply. Quite simply, after decades of shifting priorities, Canada no longer has the internal economic capability to comply with a fair-trade agreement (FTA). Trudeau was not lying, and President Trump understood the argument; hence his 51st state remarks.This is where it becomes important to understand the core reason why Trump, Ross and Lighthizer (2017) did not structurally want to replace the NAFTA agreement with another trilateral trade deal. Mexico and Canada are completely different as it pertains to trade with the USA. President Trump would rather have two separate bilateral agreements; one for Mexico and one for Canada.

• Firstly, Canada is a NATO partner, Mexico is not. As President Trump affirmed to Justin Trudeau during the meeting, it would be unfair of President Trump to discuss NATO funding with the European Union, while Canada is one of the worst offenders. Trump is leveraging favorable trade terms and tariff relief with the EU member states, as a carrot to get them into compliance with the 2.0 to 2.5% spending requirement for their military. If the NATO member states contribute more to their own defense, the U.S. can pull back spending and save Americans money. However, Canada is currently 26th in NATO funding, spending only 1.37% of their GDP on defense (link). Canada would have to spend at least another $15 billion/yr on their defense programs in order to reach 2.0%. Justin Trudeau told President Trump that was an impossible goal given the nature of the Canadian political system, and the current size of their economy ($2.25 trillion).

• Secondly, over the last 40 years Canada has deindustrialized their economy, Mexico has not. As the progressive political ideology of their politicians took control of Canada policy, the ‘climate change’ agenda and ‘green’ economy became their focus. The dirty industrialized systems were not compliant with the goals of the Canadian policy makers. The dirty mining sector (coal, coking coal, ore) no longer exists at scale to support self-sufficient manufacturing. The dirty oil refineries do not exist to refine the crude oil they extract. Large industrial heavy industry no longer exists at a scale needed to be self-sufficient. Instead, Canada purchases forged and rolled steel component parts from overseas (mostly China). Making the issue more challenging, Canada doesn’t even have enough people skilled to do the dirty jobs within the heavy manufacturing; they would need a national apprenticeship program. Again, all points raised by Trudeau to explain why bilateral trade compliance was impossible.

• Thirdly, the trade between Canada/U. S and Mexico/U. S is entirely different. The main imports from Canada are energy, lumber and raw materials. The main imports from Mexico are agriculture, cars and finished industrial goods. Mexico refines its own oil; Canada ships their oil to the USA for refining. There are obviously some similar products from Mexico and Canada, but for the most part there is a big difference.

• Forth, USA banks are allowed to operate in Mexico, but USA banks are not allowed to operate in Canada. USA media organizations are allowed to broadcast in Mexico, but USA media organizations are regulated and not permitted to broadcast in Canada. The Canadian government has strong regulations and restrictions on information and Intellectual Property. All of these points of difference highlight why a trilateral trade agreement like NAFTA and the USMCA just don’t work out for the USA. Additionally, if President Trump levies a tariff on Chinese imports, it hits Canada much harder than Mexico because Canada has deindustrialized and now imports from China to assemble into finished goods destined to the USA. In a very direct way Canada is a passthrough for Chinese products. Canada is now more of an assembly economy, not a dirty job manufacturing economy.

When Trudeau outlines the inability of Canada to agree to trade terms, simply because his country no longer has the capability of adhering to those trade terms, a frustrated President Trump says, “then become a state.” There is no option to remain taking advantage of the USA on this level, and things are only getting worse. Thus, the point of irreconcilable conflict is identified.

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If 80% of those you poll are Democrats, it’s easy going.

• Want To Know The Truth Behind Those Anti-Trump Polls? (Margolis)

You’ve no doubt heard the media narrative about President Trump’s poll numbers according to most pollsters—you know, the ones who got the 2024 election so wrong, Make no mistake about it — the legacy media is at it again with their dishonest polling tactics against President Trump. But this time, their deceptive game has been called out by none other than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Appearing on Hannity Thursday night, Gingrich exposed how the media’s recent polling showing Trump’s approval dropping is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The reality? These polls are deliberately skewed to paint a false narrative about Trump’s standing with the American people. Let’s look at the facts. The same media outlets that got it wrong in 2024—ABC News, CBS News, and CNN—are now pushing polls that show Trump’s approval is declining from his February high of 53%.

But are they really? “I got a little preview about poll numbers that are coming out tomorrow, and from both Robert Cahaly and Matt Towery, who I respect a lot,” Hannity said. “And as I suspected, all of the polls that the media has been pushing on the American people about Donald Trump are false, and that’s what the early indications are.” He pointed out the absurdity of the numbers being hyped by the media, especially when far-left figures such as Chuck Schumer were polling in the teens. “All the pollsters that got the election in ‘24 wrong and got every election about Donald Trump wrong—all of those people—the ones saying, ‘Oh, he’s plummeting.’ But meanwhile, they’re ignoring Chuck is at 17% and the Democrats are in the 20s. I’m trying to understand that logic. Can you help me out?” Gingrich didn’t mince words.

“Well, I mean, first of all, they’re just plain lying,” Gingrich replied. “And I think we’ve got to be tougher and clearer about how dishonest these people are.” He cited conversations with veteran GOP pollsters, pointing to the way poll samples are rigged to undercount Republicans. “The fact is, and I talked to John McLaughlin and I talked to Matt Towery about this, they have some polls there that are like 27% Republican when Trump got 50% of the vote. So if you add the 23 points they didn’t test, suddenly he’s in great shape. This is deliberate. It is willful.” Gingrich then laid out what he sees as the last bastions of anti-Trump resistance in the establishment. “Look, there are three great centers of resistance: the propaganda media, which will lie all the time, the fake district judges, and the fake Congressional Budget Office. Those are the last three great centers of resistance, and they’re going to do anything they can to defeat Trump and the Republicans, including lying about virtually everything.”

“None of them, to be honest with you,” Towery said when asked which poll concerned him the most. “I have a group of pollsters I look at who are public pollsters who’ve been right in all three of Trump’s cycles. We happen to be one of those. None of us have had him down by any of these numbers we’ve seen before. The only one that might concern me at all is the Fox News one because Fox did well in the 24 cycle.” Towery also took aim at the methodology behind the polls. “They are absolutely, I don’t like to criticize polling, but how can you have a poll, as John McLaughlin, a good friend of mine pointed out, how could you have a poll that shows Donald Trump at 39%? But yet when you ask people who they voted for and they said they voted for Trump, like 95% said they would vote for him again.”

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“The capitulation took effect after midnight in Moscow. May 8 is observed as Victory in Europe Day, with Russia commemorating the occasion on May 9.”

• Trump’s WWII Claim Is ‘Pompous Nonsense’ – Medvedev (RT)

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has dismissed US President Donald Trump’s claim that America played the primary role in winning World War II as “pompous nonsense.”Medvedev made the comment on his VK page on Saturday, in response to Trump’s plan to designate May 8 as ‘American Victory Day’. “Trump recently announced that the US made the main contribution to the victory in World War II and that he would establish a holiday on May 8. A holiday is not bad. But the first conclusion is pompous nonsense,” Medvedev wrote. Earlier this week, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he “will create a new holiday called AMERICAN VICTORY DAY, to be celebrated on May 8.” He went on to say: “This date marks the formal surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied Forces in World War II, ending the war in Europe. AMERICAN VICTORY DAY will celebrate the heroes who helped vanquish tyranny and secure liberty for generations to come.”

Trump also said he wants to rename Veterans Day, a federal holiday celebrated on November 11, to “Victory Day for World War I,” adding that the US “won both wars.” In response, Medvedev, who currently serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, highlighted the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany, stressing that the Red Army bore heavy losses and “liberated ungrateful Europe.” “Our people gave 27 million lives of their sons and daughters for the sake of destroying damned fascism,” he wrote. “Victory Day is ours and it is on May 9. That’s how it was, is, and always will be!” Earlier this week, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia is grateful to the US for its support during WWII, but the USSR would have defeated Nazi Germany even without the assistance. “The famous Lend-Lease indeed helped us. We received vehicles, airplanes, ammunition, and tanks. And indeed, without this, it would have been very difficult.”

The Lend-Lease program was a US government initiative that provided allies with military supplies, equipment, food, and strategic raw materials. The Soviet Union received aid valued at around $200 billion in today’s terms, Peskov said. He noted, however, that the assistance was not free. Russia, as the USSR’s successor state, completed its financial obligations related to the Lend-Lease program in 2006. Nazi Germany officially surrendered to the Allied forces on May 8, 1945, following the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops. The capitulation took effect after midnight in Moscow. May 8 is observed as Victory in Europe Day, with Russia commemorating the occasion on May 9.

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“Starting in 2027, the European Union will expand its emissions trading system (ETS) into new territory with the launch of ETS2..”

“Margaret Thatcher: “Global warming provides a marvelous excuse for global socialism.”

• Freedom in the EU? Only if You Can Afford It (Roos)

Starting in 2027, the European Union will expand its emissions trading system (ETS) into new territory with the launch of ETS2. While the original ETS primarily targeted heavy industry and power plants, ETS2 directly impacts ordinary citizens — their homes, their cars, their daily lives. Under the guise of ’saving the climate,’ the EU will steadily make gasoline, diesel, and gas for heating more expensive. But let’s be honest: ETS2 has very little to do with protecting the environment. It is about economic control, wealth redistribution, and the consolidation of power among banks, large corporations, governments, and the European Commission. Formally, everything remains ‘voluntary.’ You may continue driving a gasoline car. You may continue heating your home with natural gas. But every choice that deviates from the state’s ‘sustainability goals’ will become economically unbearable.

This is not a direct expropriation of property, but it is economic subjugation through price pressure, regulation, and redistribution of the proceeds. Instead of free choices, citizens and companies are financially forced to adopt government-approved behavior. Who benefits? Banks, investment funds, multinational corporations, government treasuries, and the European Commission. Financial giants like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank are already making billions from trading CO2 certificates. Governments are raking in massive revenues from the auctioning of emission permits. Meanwhile, large corporations that receive free allowances or have surplus certificates can sell them for profit—all while greenwashing their public image.

And who bears the cost? Ordinary citizens, small businesses, the transport sector, and independent entrepreneurs. They will face hundreds of euros in additional costs every year just to heat their homes and drive to work. The most vulnerable are promised compensation through a ’Social Climate Fund’—a government handout that makes them ever more dependent on state aid. This brings us to the deeper question: What direction are we heading in? Is this communism, where the state owns the means of production? Or is it fascism, where the state controls production and merges with big business to dominate society? In truth, ETS2 signals a new hybrid system. Private ownership remains in name, but real control is exercised through regulations, price manipulation, and conditional subsidies.

The market is not abolished; it is repurposed around ideological objectives. Economic freedom exists only for those who can afford to comply. The Brussels technocratic pressure is sold as a ‘necessary transition,’ but in reality, it is dismantling the foundation of our economy, destroying the middle class, and eroding prosperity. Instead of fostering genuine innovation, ETS2 punishes those who lack the resources to “comply.” While banks and corporations speculate and profit, the hardworking EU citizen is soon faced with a grim choice: freeze in the winter or take on debt for a heat pump they neither asked for nor needed. The EU claims that prices will rise “gradually” and that safeguards are in place to prevent social unrest. But history teaches us that once new taxes and levies are introduced, they rarely disappear. Temporary exceptions inevitably become permanent rules.

After homes and cars, aviation, agriculture, and consumer goods will follow. Every sector deemed ‘unsustainable’ will face similar price manipulation. Personal freedom will continue to shrink, not through open political force, but through economic coercion masked as environmental stewardship. And for those still believing they will retain the freedom to choose: A choice that becomes financially impossible is no longer a real choice. It is coerced compliance. It is economic submission. Remember the words of Margaret Thatcher: “Global warming provides a marvelous excuse for global socialism.” Climate change must never be used as an excuse for economic servitude. Say no to green tyranny. Say yes to freedom, prosperity, and choice.

Read more …

Many will follow. It won’t be pretty. The systems are old but volatile.

• Green Energy Fixation Sends Spain Dark (Gonzalez)

VALENCIA, Spain—Two modern ills converged in Europe on Monday, literally one of the darkest days in decades. An ideological obsession with climate fanaticism left countries without power for hours, while censorship of “disinformation,” often information the powerful don’t like, plunged the population in an informational blackout in subsequent days. The electrical blackout brought planes, trains, and automobiles to a screeching halt throughout Spain, Portugal, and small parts of southern France. Electricity simply stopped flowing, and with it control towers, rail lines, and traffic lights. Cellphones became quadrangular black boxes that did nothing and lost their “smartness.” A political conference I was attending in this sunny Mediterranean port city suddenly became eerie when people started coming in and out and whispering to each other. One person in the seat in front finally turned and enlightened a friend and me: “The electricity is down. We’re cut off from the world.”

We then realized that, yes, sirens had been wailing outside, and it had been a while since we’d gotten emails or texts. A generator in the hotel kept our conference going, but nothing else worked; everyone had to take the stairs and use bathrooms in the dark—though water, too, stopped working. It wasn’t quite dystopic, but our modern dependence on electricity and its creature comforts suddenly was brought home to us. Many speculated that it was a cyberattack from Russia or China. Who else had the power to do this? Center-right politicians from across Europe were about to descend on Valencia the next day. Surely, an invitation for bad actors to do their thing. Well, not so fast. Neither Russia’s Vladimir Putin nor China’s Xi Jinping is above carrying out this type of attack, and cybersecurity is a serious matter. But, to quote Vice President JD Vance at a February conference in Munich, Germany, the threat to worry about the most in Europe “is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor.”

“What I worry about,” went on Vance, “is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its fundamental values.” Vance mentioned Europe’s need “to enjoy affordable energy,” and the fact that, as he put it, “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” European officials are still fuming about how “rude” that young Vance was, but it looks like he was on the money. It is increasingly clear that what caused the blackout was not a cyberattack. Reuters News agency reported that Spain’s grid operator Red Electrica on Tuesday ruled out external sabotage, and said instead that it had identified two “incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants,” in southwestern Spain. That, said the Reuters report, “caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its connection with France. The electrical system collapsed, affecting both the Spanish and Portuguese systems.”

“There was not enough inertia, or redundancy, in the system to keep it going,” my colleague Diana Furchott-Roth emailed from Washington when I was able to receive communications from the outside world. “The last coal-fired plant was closed on April 12.” Diana has been warning about this type of thing for decades, and Spain’s socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez is a poster boy for the things she has warned against. His government has not only closed coal-fired plants, but has been busily destroying nuclear plants as well. “Net zero,” or zero CO2 emissions, is the name of this new mad delusion, and Spain’s infantile leftists have been posting on social media gleeful workers destroying nuclear power plants. The goal has been 100% “renewable” generation.

Well, they happened to have gotten very close to their holy grail on Monday at 12:30. The Iberian Peninsula’s power grid was getting a disproportionate amount of energy from the renewables loved by the Left: 80% from solar photovoltaic, solar thermal and wind. Nuclear was at a measly 11%. In a mere five minutes, solar photovoltaic generation plunged by 50%, from 18 gigawatts to eight, according to Reuters. Iberia and adjacent parts of France, including the tiny Pyrenean principality of Andorra, all of which depended on this grid, then descended into darkness at 12:35, from which it was not to recover till late at night. The hapless Sanchez was still arguing late Tuesday that just because Red Electrica was discounting a cyberattack, it did not mean that one hadn’t happened. Governments finding themselves in a corner will lie, or at least equivocate, and it’s the job of the opposition to keep asking for answers.

“An energy policy that prioritizes the fight against climate change above the security of supply has provoked this general blackout,” said an analysis on the site of the think tank Disenso, which is linked to the opposition Vox Party (full disclosure, I sit on Disenso’s foreign advisory board). But it is also the job of the media. Yet Spain’s state television stations, and even private ones, were still keeping the truth about the failure of the Left’s renewable dream from getting any airtime as late as Wednesday morning, when I left for the airport. That was left to radio and to some newspapers on the right. An honest media would be not just informing voters about how a blackout that left at least five dead and stopped a modern economy in its tracks happened. It would also be debating whether such a modern society really does want to stop using comfort creatures and working toilets, all in the name of fighting climate change.

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Big Balls can take over. They have a strong team.

• DOGE Cuts Behind Nearly Half of All Layoffs This Year (JTN)

President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is responsible for nearly half of all job cuts announced this year, according to a new report. The report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas said DOGE-related actions lead all job cut reasons in 2025 with 283,172, 2,919 of which occurred in April. Another 6,945 cuts were attributed to “DOGE Downstream Impact” through April, primarily at nonprofits and education organizations. These combined (290,117) make up 48% of all job cuts announced so far in 2025, according to the report. “Though the Government cuts are front and center, we saw job cuts across sectors last month,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert for Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Generally, companies are citing the economy and new technology. Employers are slow to hire and limiting hiring plans as they wait and see what will happen with trade, supply chain, and consumer spending.”

The vast majority of the DOGE-related cuts were from March, according to the report. After DOGE, market and economic conditions were cited for 95,348 job cuts, as economic uncertainty, consumer spending, and trade challenges hit U.S. companies, according to the report. Tariffs were cited for 1,413 cuts so far this year, with 1,350 occurring in April. Restructuring accounted for 67,627, and 60,551 were due to store, unit or location closing. When Trump created DOGE, he said it would be the government cost-cutting equivalent of the “Manhattan Project.” Both Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised Americans would get a more efficient government after DOGE addressed government waste, reduced regulations, and reduced the federal workforce. Many of the DOGE-led cuts in government face legal challenges from unions and other groups. Many of those same cuts remain in limbo as pending court cases continue.

The Challenger report comes as Musk steps back from government work to focus more on Tesla. Musk initially said DOGE would aim to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, but he later cut that in half. At a Cabinet meeting in April, Musk said DOGE was on pace to cut $150 billion from the federal budget. The U.S. government employs about 2.4 million federal workers, excluding the military (about 1.3 million active-duty military personnel) and U.S. Postal Service (about 600,000 employees), according to 2024 Pew Research report. That report noted that the federal government employed 1.87% of the entire civilian workforce. That percentage includes postal employees, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

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“Musk met with Ratcliffe in late March for a discussion that included government efficiency measures, but no DOGE teams have been working at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, campus.”

• CIA to Cut 1,200 (5%) Jobs -Ratcliffe Shifts Focus to “Human Intelligence” (CTH)

The Washington Post (but of course, CIA outlet) is reporting on a downsizing effort within the CIA to eliminate approximately 1,200 jobs. The number represents approximately 5% of the workforce although the actual number of CIA employees is classified (national security, dontchaknow). Within the report, Director John Ratcliffe is noted as shifting the focus of America’s leading spy agency to use more “human intelligence.” That phrase, “human intelligence,” is IC silo code speak for shifting away from “analysts” (political operatives) and engaging in more factual intelligence information. According to the report, DNI Tulsi Gabbard has also reduced the employment level within the Director of National Intelligence office by approximately 25% (current payroll estimate of 2,000 employees). The general narrative within the WaPo reporting is that “national security” is being compromised by large downsizing of spy agency employment. Additionally, to bolster the positions of the current political operatives within the CIA, the WaPo waxes concerningly about China and other mysterious foreign adversaries recruiting the CIA employees who are now becoming increasingly concerned about their paychecks.

WASHINGTON POST – “The Trump administration is planning significant personnel cuts at the Central Intelligence Agency and other major U.S. spy units, downsizing the government’s most sensitive national security agencies, according to people familiar with the plans. The administration recently informed lawmakers on Capitol Hill that it intends to reduce the CIA’s workforce by about 1,200 personnel over several years and cut thousands more from other parts of the U.S. intelligence community, including at the National Security Agency, a highly secretive service that specializes in cryptology and global electronic espionage, a person familiar with the matter said. The person, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

[…] The staff reductions would take place over several years and would be accomplished in part through reduced hiring. No outright firings are envisioned. The goal of a roughly 1,200-person staff reduction includes several hundred individuals who already have opted for early retirement, the person familiar with the matter said. The downsizing is taking place separately from efforts by the U.S. DOGE Service, led by billionaire Elon Musk, to radically restructure the federal government. Musk met with Ratcliffe in late March for a discussion that included government efficiency measures, but no DOGE teams have been working at the agency’s Langley, Virginia, campus.

[Obviously, I can certainly appreciate the “human intelligence” shift noted by Director Ratcliffe for all the factual reasons that necessitate his concern. It is part of the reason why I ended up frustrated with “western reports” and determined the only way to really understand what is going on inside Russia during the sanctions was to travel there myself and review. It was quite an experience to sit in a renamed Starbucks coffee shop at the crowded Galleria Mall in downtown St Petersburg, Russia and read the Wall Street Journal reporting on the devastation to the Russian economy, while looking around at the packed stores and purchases being made on an ordinary weekday. Then to read the New York Times reports of shortages of steel in Russia, while driving past many miles of apartment and condominium construction. Everything cited in western corporate media, “according to sources familiar with the situation”, was/is the complete opposite of everything factually visible.]

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Did I see 44,000%?!

• Buffett To Step Down As Berkshire CEO At Year-End (ZH)

It’s the end of an era at America’s largest hedge fund/private equity/insurance float-cum-rollup conglomerate, whatever you want to call it: Warren Buffett just announced during the Berkshire annual pilgrimage to Omaha that he is stepping down as CEO of Berkshire at the end of the year, and that Greg Abel, the vice chairman for non-insurance operations who has been groomed over the past decade for just this moment, will take over the conglomerate. The news was greeted with a standing ovation by the thousands of Berkshire shareholders who were present at Omaha’s Convention Center.

Buffett – whose track record cemented him, along his long-time sidesick Charlie Munger, into a celebrity billionaire renowned for his investing acumen and witticisms – built Berkshire Hathaway into a business valued at more than $1.16 trillion, generating compounded annual returns to shareholders at double the rate of the S&P (19.9% vs 10.4%), since 1965, and a staggering 5,502,482% overall gain on BRK stocks since 1964, vs “only” 39,054% for the S&P. His investing success gave him the power to move stocks and helped him strike lucrative deals with Goldman Sachs and General Electric during times of crisis. The announcement stunned the board and even Abel, who, while long signaled as Buffett’s successor, was unaware that the news was coming as the annual meeting drew to a close. “That’s the news hook for the day,” Buffett said. “Thanks for coming.”

Berkshire grew aggressively over the decades with Buffett as chairman and CEO, as he chose acquisitions and stocks for the company portfolio alongside trusted adviser and vice chairman, Charlie Munger, who died in 2023 at 99. As Bloomberg notes, “the conglomerate acquired a bewildering assortment of businesses, which Buffett often said mirrored the US economy as a whole. A bet on Berkshire, he said, was a bet on America.” Buffett started managing money when he was young, a disciple of Benjamin Graham’s investing style. He moved more into the corporate world when his Buffett Partnership Ltd. bought shares of Berkshire. In 1965, he took control of the rest of the business.

Composed mostly of struggling textile operations that would eventually fade away, Berkshire became the foundation for Buffett’s modern-day giant. Piece by piece, he built and acquired operations into a varied set of industries, including insurance — which gave him cash, or “float” — to help his investing strategy. Now, Berkshire owns businesses ranging from railroad BNSF to auto insurer Geico, sprawling energy operations, and even retailers such as Dairy Queen and See’s Candies. Its collection of companies generated $47.4 billion of annual operating earnings in 2024. Buffett also built up the stock portfolio — populating it with giant bets on the likes of Apple Inc. and American Express — and offering Berkshire another way to participate in the gains of businesses that it didn’t fully own.

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FSD

AI

Fauci

Ocean
https://twitter.com/dom_lucre/status/1918406723351802248

Moose

Birds

Cows
https://twitter.com/InternetH0F/status/1918410455258718428

Kookaburra

lion pair

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle January 17 2023

Jan 172023
 
 January 17, 2023  Posted by at 10:11 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  61 Responses »


Hasui Kawase Mimhae Pavilion, Kyongju, Korea 1940

 

• How The Davos Elite Took Back Control (Fazi)
• Global Political Elite Skipping Davos (RT)
• All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front (Escobar)
• Kiev Coaching EU On Path To Ruin – Exiled Ukrainian Politician (RT)
• West Sees Ukraine As Spoils Of Cold War – Medvedchuk (RT)
• Croatian President Weighs In On ‘Proxy War’ Against Russia (RT)
• Biden Uses His Lawyers To Shield His Classified Docs From The FBI (Turley)
• More Documents Marked As Classified Found At Biden’s Home – White House (CBS)
• Adam Schiff Admits Biden May Have Endangered National Security (CB)
• Did The Deep State Turn on Biden? (Roach)
• Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election (Jacobin)
• ‘Twitter Files’ Expose Big Pharma Bullying (ZH)
• China Records First Population Decline In 60 Years (RT)
• The Black Album (Trish Wood)
• There Is Nothing Green About Green Energy (Pettimore)
• The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People (Ugo Bardi)

 

 

 

 

The Woke Mind Virus
https://twitter.com/i/status/1613830456243273730

 

 

Dowd sudden death epidemic
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615116979030966278

 

 

Forget about the housing market. It’s done.

 

 

BBC stickers

 

 

Pregnant women are not getting vaxxed.

 

 

Carpe
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615019200921182217

 

 

 

 

 

 

The business elite.

• How The Davos Elite Took Back Control (Fazi)

Founded in 1971 by Schwab himself, the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world through public-private cooperation”, also known as multistakeholder governance. The idea is that global decision-making should not be left to governments and nation-states — as in the post-war multilateralist framework enshrined in the United Nations — but should involve a whole range of non-government stakeholders: civil society bodies, academic experts, media personalities and, most important, multinational corporations. In its own words, the WEF’s project is “to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component”.

While this may sound fairly benign, it neatly encapsulates the basic philosophy of globalism: insulating policy from democracy by transferring the decision-making process from the national and international level, where citizens theoretically are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to the supranational level, by placing a self-selected group of unelected, unaccountable “stakeholders” — mainly corporations — in charge of global decisions concerning everything from energy and food production to the media and public health. The underlying undemocratic philosophy is the same one underpinning the philanthrocapitalist approach of people such Bill Gates, himself a long-time partner of the WEF: that non-governmental social and business organisations are best suited to solve the world’s problems than governments and multilateral institutions.

Even though the WEF has increasingly focused its agenda on fashionable topics such as environmental protection and social entrepreneurship, there is little doubt as to which interests Schwab’s brainchild is actually promoting and empowering: the WEF is itself mostly funded by around 1,000 member companies — typically global enterprises with multi-billion dollar turnovers, which include some of the world’s biggest corporations in oil (Saudi Aramco, Shell, Chevron, BP), food (Unilever, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé), technology (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) and pharmaceuticals (AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna). The composition of the WEF’s board is also very revealing, including Laurence D. Fink, CEO of Blackrock, David M. Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, and Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé. There’s no need to resort to conspiracy theories to posit that the WEF’s agenda is much more likely to be tailored to suit the interests of its funders and board members — the world’s ultra-wealthy and corporate elites — rather than to “improving the state of the world”, as the organisation claims.

Read more …

CEOs take over.

• Global Political Elite Skipping Davos (RT)

The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland has kicked off on Monday with a number of top-tier leaders absent. US President Joe Biden is skipping this year’s gathering, along with French President Emmanuel Macron, and new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also passing on the event, along with the entire Russian business elite, which has been forced off the guest list by Ukraine-related sanctions. Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Chinese businessmen will also miss the forum following the aftershocks of a recent spike in Covid-19 cases and troubles on the domestic stock market, which saw some $224 billion erased last year from the fortunes of China’s wealthiest people.


Of the Group of Seven (G7) leaders, only German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is set to attend Davos this year, along with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Despite the shrinking number of political leaders, this year’s attendance list is rich in top managers. Among 2,700 participants in the official WEF sessions, “we’re likely to surpass the old record from 2020 with 600 global CEOs – including 1,500 C-suite level overall,” according to WEF head of digital and marketing, George Schmitt. According to Bloomberg, a total of 116 billionaires are attending the WEF this year, a 40% rise from ten years ago. Representatives from the US will form the largest group with 33 delegates. Some 18 more billionaires are coming from Europe, and 13 from India, including industrialist Gautam Adani, the world’s fourth-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

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“Analyst Peter Koenig has developed a convincing thesis that the WEF, the WHO and NATO may be running some sort of sophisticated death cult.”

• All Quiet (Panic) on the Western Front (Escobar)

Cynics of all persuasions may be excused for lamenting Mr. Zircon – currently on oceanic patrol encompassing the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and of course “Mare Nostrum” Mediterranean – won’t be presenting his business card at Davos. Analyst Peter Koenig has developed a convincing thesis that the WEF, the WHO and NATO may be running some sort of sophisticated death cult. The Great Reset does mingle merrily with NATO’s agenda as agent provocateur, financer and weaponizer of the proxy Empire vs. Russia war in black hole Ukraine. NAKO – an acronym for North Atlantic Killing Organization – would be more appropriate in this case. As Koenig summarizes it, “NATO enters any territory where the ‘conventional’ media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough.”

In parallel, very few people are aware that on June 13, 2019 in New York, a secret deal was clinched between the UN, the WEF, an array of oligarch-weaponized NGOs – with the WHO in the front line – and last but not least, the world’s top corporations, which are all owned by an interlinked maze with Vanguard and BlackRock at the center. The practical result of the deal is the UN Agenda 2030. Virtually every government in the NATOstan area and the “Western Hemisphere” (US establishment definition) has been hijacked by Agenda 2030 – which translates, essentially, as hoarding, privatizing and financializing all the earth’s assets, under the pretext of “protecting” them. Translation: the marketization and monetization of the entire natural world.

Davos superstar shills such as insufferable bore Niall Ferguson are just well rewarded vassals: western intellectuals of the Harvard, Yale and Princeton mould that would never dare bite the hand that feeds them. Ferguson just wrote a column on Bloomberg titled “All is Not Quiet on the Eastern Front” – basically to peddle the risk of WWIII, on behalf of his masters, blaming of course “China as the arsenal of autocracy”. Among serial high-handed inanities, this one stands out. Ferguson writes, “There are two obvious problems with US strategy (…) The first is that if algorithmic weapons systems are the equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons, Putin may eventually be driven to using the latter, as he clearly lacks the former.” Cluelessness here is a euphemism. Ferguson clearly has no idea “algorithmic weapons” mean; if he’s referring to electronic warfare, the US may have been able to maintain superiority for a while in Ukraine, but that’s over.

[..] Nobody with an IQ over room temperature will expect Davos next week to discuss any aspect of the NATO vs. Eurasia existential war seriously – not to mention propose diplomacy. So I’ll leave you with yet another typical tawdry story about how the Empire – who rules over Davos – deals in practice with its vassals. While in Sicily earlier this year I learned that an ultra high-value Pentagon asset had landed in Rome, in haste, as part of an unscheduled visit. A few days later the reason for the visit was printed in La Repubblica, one of the papers of the toxic Agnelli clan. That was a Mafia scam: a face-to-face “suggestion” for the Meloni government to imperatively provide Kiev, as soon as possible, with the costly anti-Samp-T missile system, developed by an European consortium, Eurosam, uniting MBDA Italy, MBDA France and Thales.

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Medvedchuk is the voice of reason in Ukraine politics. So of course he’s in exile.

• Kiev Coaching EU On Path To Ruin – Exiled Ukrainian Politician (RT)

Kiev’s adopted policy of hatred and intransigence towards Russia is inevitably driving it into poverty, a former Ukrainian opposition-party leader, who was forced from his home nation, has concluded. Now Kiev is teaching Europe the same approach, leading to the same outcome and to possible nuclear war, he added. Viktor Medvedchuk’s political party had the biggest opposition faction in the current Ukrainian parliament. The government of President Vladimir Zelensky launched a crackdown on the group and on its leader personally. A proponent of reconciliation with Russia, he has written a keynote article published on Monday in Russian newspaper Izvestia, explaining the roots of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. Both Zelensky and his predecessor Pyotr Poroshenko had been elected after the 2014 coup in Kiev on a platform of peace, and each made a U-turn after getting into office, Medvedchuk pointed out.

He argued that this shows a pattern of betrayal of the Ukrainian people by its leadership and by what he termed a “party of war.” Being enemies with Russia is against Ukraine’s economic interest, Medvedchuk asserted. Not only is Russia a major market and source of raw materials from which Ukraine can benefit, the country’s industrial sector was mostly in the east and people there, who for historic reasons have emotional ties to Russia, were antagonized by Kiev. Economic ruination is an inevitable consequence of the conflict, the politician wrote. “It is no longer Europe that teaches Ukraine politics, but Ukraine that teaches Europe how to achieve economic decline and poverty with the help of a policy of hatred and intransigence. And if Europe continues to support this policy, it will be dragged into a war, possibly a nuclear one,” he warned.

He accused Western nations of giving the incumbent Ukrainian government “triumph after triumph, while no military breakthrough is observed,” referring to the parades that generals in Ancient Rome were given after major victories. Meanwhile, the “party of peace” gets no voice either at home or in Western nations, Medvedchuk lamented. “Those who stood for peace were slandered, intimidated and repressed on incitement from the West. The Ukrainian party of peace simply did not fit into Western democracy.” “This eloquently suggests that most US and European politicians do not want any peace for Ukraine. But this does not mean at all that Ukrainians do not want peace, and Zelensky’s military triumph is more important to them than their lives and destroyed homes.” he reasoned. Only when pro-peace politicians are allowed to make their case freely can there be hope to resolve the situation, Medvedchuk believes.

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“Western nations must recognize that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine. Otherwise, it will “grow further, spilling over to Europe and other countries..”

• West Sees Ukraine As Spoils Of Cold War – Medvedchuk (RT)

The West’s insistence that it won the Cold War and was entitled to the spoils at the expense of Russian interests is at the root of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the country’s exiled opposition leader has said. Viktor Medvedchuk was forced to leave his home nation under the threat of prosecution for alleged treason. His Opposition Bloc – For Life party had the biggest faction in the Ukrainian parliament and advocated reconciliation with Russia. However, the government of President Vladimir Zelensky cracked down on it and ultimately forced many of its members into exile or silence. In an article published by Russian newspaper Izvestia on Monday, Medvedchuk analyzed the causes of the current crisis, arguing that the origin of the conflict lies in the way that the end of the Cold War is perceived by Washington and Moscow.

“The West definitely considers itself as a winner and Russia as a defeated party,” he said. Consequently, it considers ex-Soviet territories as “legitimate prey for the US and NATO” under the “woe to the conquered” principle. From Moscow’s standpoint, it simply relinquished confrontation when it decided against pursuing communism. Since the 1990s, it had sought friendly relations with Western nations, as well as economic and political integration into the EU, Medvedchuk wrote. The US plan, as evidenced by the expansion of NATO in Europe despite the objections of Moscow, was at odds with opening the door to its Cold War opponent. Ultimately, it derailed EU-Russian engagement, he argued. Conflicts like the Balkan wars are further evidence that the West had moved to gobble up the former Eastern Bloc, he continued, since they helped to “make it easier for the winner to take it over.”

The West targeted Ukraine for absorption and saw the country as part of its rightful prize, but a lot of resistance had to be overcome in order to split it from Russia, considering Kiev’s historical ties with Moscow, and the economic interest in maintaining good relations, Medvedchuk explained. Kiev antagonized the eastern part of the country, which was both economically stronger and more pro-Russian than the nationalist lands in the east, he suggested. And even then, both Zelensky and his predecessor, Pyotr Poroshenko, had been elected on a peace platform only to become “war party” politicians after taking office. The current conflict can be resolved only if pro-peace politicians are allowed to make their case, and Western nations must recognize that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine. Otherwise, it will “grow further, spilling over to Europe and other countries,” and has the potential to escalate into a nuclear war, he warned.

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“They go from war to war. And what should I be? An American slave?”

The president and PM have very different views.

• Croatian President Weighs In On ‘Proxy War’ Against Russia (RT)

Croatian President Zoran Milanovic has claimed NATO, a military bloc of which Zagreb is a member, is waging a “proxy war” against Moscow in Ukraine. He also dismissed sanctions against Moscow as “nonsense,” adding that he does not want to be an “American slave.” Speaking to Croatian reporters in the city of Vukovar on Sunday, Milanovic said, among other things: “Washington and NATO are waging a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine,” as quoted by media outlet Istra24. He went on to argue that “The plan cannot be to remove Putin. The plan cannot be sanctions,” adding that such punitive measures are “nonsense and we will not achieve anything with them.” “They go from war to war. And what should I be? An American slave?” Croatia’s president asked rhetorically.

Milanovic voiced his frustration with the US-led military bloc’s policies in the same interview in which he tore into Croatia’s prime minister, Andrej Plenkovic, over his latest Ukraine-related remark. Speaking to news channel France 24 on Saturday, Plenkovic said the Balkan nation’s lawmakers, who in mid-December didn’t support the EU’s program to train Ukrainian military personnel in member states, have “failed to be on the right side of history.” Commenting on the remark, Milanovic, in turn, slammed the premier for bringing “disgrace” to his country “and to its democratic representatives in front of others.” The Croatian president argued that this kind of behavior reaches a low that is “the bottom of the bottom.”

As for the EU’s mission, the Croatian president warned that it effectively means that “for the first time in its history, the EU is participating in a war.” This, according to Milanovic, is “against the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU.” In December 2022, Milanovic argued that having Ukrainian service members train on Croatian soil would “bring war” to the Balkan nation. He also insisted at the time that “Ukraine is not an ally,” criticizing Brussels’ decision last June to grant Kiev candidate status as “cynical.”

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“Using private counsel allows Biden to raise attorney-client privilege. [..] While that attorney-client privilege can be overcome under a “crime/fraud exception,” it adds a level of initial protection.”

• Biden Uses His Lawyers To Shield His Classified Docs From The FBI (Turley)

The discovery of a fourth set of classified documents, at the Biden residence in Delaware, has further undermined the White House’s virtual mantra that the president “takes classified documents very seriously.” Putting aside the repeated movement of highly classified documents over six years, one curious element has emerged in this scandal: the use of private counsel. Not only did President Joe Biden enlist lawyers to clear out his private Washington office; he then used them — rather than security officers or the FBI — to search for additional classified documents. The initial use of lawyers is notable. While it seems a fairly pricey moving crew, Biden could argue a trove of documents might require a judgment on where they should be sent and whether they belong to Biden, the Penn Biden Center or the government.

But why was a legal team sent in six years after Biden took the documents on leaving as vice president? Were the lawyers specifically selected because they had clearances, an acknowledgment there might be classified material unlawfully housed in the office? After the fourth batch of documents was discovered this week (the third found in Delaware), Richard Sauber, referred to as the “special counsel to the president,” stressed that he has a clearance. Sauber admits the lawyers who found the first batch at the residence didn’t have clearances but says he found the later documents. It remains unclear which lawyers were involved in which discoveries, whether they had clearances and (if so) at what level. In fact, it seems to suggest Biden continued to use uncleared lawyers after his team found highly classified documents Nov. 2 in the Penn Biden office closet in Washington. That itself could be viewed as gross mishandling of classified information.

It’s strange Biden did not use security officers or the FBI to conduct further searches. The president has a host of people who regularly handle classified material. So why use the lawyers? The answer appears the same as in the case of Hillary Clinton’s emails: control. Using private counsel allows Biden to raise attorney-client privilege. Trump also used counsel, but eventually the FBI raided his home to search and remove not just classified material but documents found in boxes with that material. While that attorney-client privilege can be overcome under a “crime/fraud exception,” it adds a level of initial protection. It also allowed Biden to control the discovery and initial record of the discovery of classified information. The key to any investigation will be the chain of custody extending back to the documents’ removal in 2017 when Biden left office.

How these documents appeared in their discovered locations is known only to his lawyers. It’s a link in the chain of custody that Biden effectively controls. With Mar-a-Lago, the FBI was criticized for staging documents to be shown in the storage room. The photos were then leaked to an eager media. There will be no staged photos of documents alongside Time magazine covers for Biden. Nor were documents he housed with classified documents removed. Indeed, it’s not clear if the FBI will know what documents were stored in the same boxes. What was potentially lost is significant. Classified documents are generally supposed to be in folders with a thick, colored border and large printed classification warnings. Were some of those folders observable before they were moved? If so, anyone could tell a pile contained classified material, including the president and passersby.

Likewise, the initial discovery could show the context of surrounding material. The FBI at Mar-a-Lago carefully photographed that context and its search. Here, we’re relying on counsel to have kept such a record when most lawyers would be reluctant to do so given the risk to their client. The key is that unlike FBI agents, these lawyers are not acting on behalf of the public interest but for the president’s personal interests. If there are criminal charges, the key witnesses will be lawyers representing the president as an individual. They are more likely to minimize incriminating or embarrassing elements.

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Turley’s comment on this: “Biden counsel continues to make statements seemingly against their client’s interests. Sauber said that the lawyers who discovered the documents on Wednesday night did not have clearances…”

• More Documents Marked As Classified Found At Biden’s Home – White House (CBS)

Lawyers for President Biden found more documents marked as classified at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged in a statement Saturday. White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of documents marked as classified were found during a search of Mr. Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there. The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Mr. Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration are under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Department of Justice. “While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.” The Justice Department declined to comment to CBS News on the newly discovered documents. Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”

Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of records with classified markings. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial group of documents at the Biden office. On Thursday, asked whether Mr. Biden could guarantee that additional classified documents would not turn up in a further search, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “You should assume that it’s been completed, yes.” Sauber reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with Hur’s investigation. Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, said his legal team has “attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”

Marco Polo

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Shifty turns.

• Adam Schiff Admits Biden May Have Endangered National Security (CB)

In what is a stunning admission, California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff has admitted that President Joe Biden may have endangered national security by mishandling classified documents. He spoke to ABC “This Week” host Jonathan Karl on Sunday when the topic of the classified document scandal and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointing a special counsel was talked about. “Congressman Schiff, you were on this show just after Attorney General Garland appointed a special counsel in the case of the Trump documents. You said it was the right move. Do you feel the same way about this special counsel?” the host said. “I do think it’s the right move. The attorney general has to make sure that not only is justice evenly applied, but the appearances of justice are also satisfactory to the public.

And here, I don’t think he had any choice but to appoint a special counsel. And I think that special counsel will do the proper assessment,” the Congressman said. “I still would like to see Congress do its own assessment of — and receive an assessment from the intelligence community of whether there was an exposure to others of these documents, whether there was harm to national security, on the case of either set of documents with either president. But, yes, I think the special counsel was appropriately appointed,” he said. “Jonathan, if I could also, though, because my state is still trying to dig out from these terrible storms, I want to thank the president for making an emergency declaration and let Californians know that in the three most affected counties they can now apply for help in terms of rebuilding their homes and their businesses and that other counties need to report their damage as soon as possible so they can qualify for relief as well,” he said as the host brought the conversation back to the documents.

“You raise the possibility of those national security assessment. Is it possible that national security was jeopardized here as – as many, including you, raised that possibility with the Mar-a-Lago documents?” the host said. “I don’t think we can exclude the possibility without knowing more of the facts. We have asked for an assessment in the intelligence community of the Mar-a-Lago documents. I think we ought to get that same assessment of the documents found in the – in the think tank, as well as the home of President Biden. I’d like to know what these documents were. I’d like to know what the IC’s assessment is, whether there was any risk of exposure and what the harm would be and whether any mitigation needs to be done. I think that would be appropriate and consistent with what we requested in the case of Mar-a-Lago,” the Congressman said.

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Well, someone did.

• Did The Deep State Turn on Biden? (Roach)

In spite of his manifest unpopularity and refusal even to campaign, Biden was installed as president in 2020. Having rarely met an actual Biden supporter, Trump voters were skeptical and angry. The extended recounts, unceremonious dismissal of legal challenges, and videos of disappearing ballots, along with strident denunciations of “election deniers,” did not reassure anyone. Later revelations showed the coordinated way government officials, the media, NGOs, billionaires, and others conspired to “fortify” the 2020 election. Biden governed as he ran: mostly hidden from the public, beholden to donors and party elders, doing as little as possible. This seemed acceptable for a while, since it allowed the various constituent parts of the government to do what they wanted with little interference.

Everyone knows Biden’s never been that sharp and seems more decrepit than ever, that his vice president is even dumber than he is, and that he’s not really running anything. But this is all a feature, not a bug, for the cabal that brought him to office. For them, the more independence they have from oversight, the better. Lately, it seems there’s a disturbance in force. Biden and his allies have continued their vendetta against Trump, exposing his tax returns and raiding his home for possessing documents he supposedly owed the National Archives. This did not go over as well as Attorney General (and all-around hack) Merrick Garland anticipated, and it seems Garland and the January 6 Committee have each decided to scale back their demands. This is why the recent exposure of top secret documents in Biden’s old office, his garage, and a mysterious third location suggests something is afoot.

We went from a Monday disclosure to a special counsel being appointed on Thursday. Nothing like this happens this quickly unless it is by design. There are, of course, ways to deal with this situation that do not involve public exposure. Couldn’t Biden or his staff order some FBI agents or White House people to pick them up and take them to wherever they’re supposed to be stored? It’s in the news because somehow his lawyers found the documents and reported them before the story could go through White House channels. And, lawyers being lawyers, they followed the street-lawyer rule that if someone has to go to jail, make sure it’s your client and not you. Concerned about individual culpability for obstruction or mishandling documents, they made this hot potato someone else’s problem as fast as possible.

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The Jacobin is one of the Dems’ staunchest supporters. Until now.

• Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election (Jacobin)

Amid the generalized media crack-up that surrounded the 2016 presidential election, the bogeyman of “Russian bots” quickly became a load-bearing concept. A Russia-based social media campaign, or so it was said, had saturated sites like Twitter with fake accounts and, in doing so, helped to swing the election for Donald Trump. Becoming axiomatic in liberal circles, this story soon took on a life of its own. It’s since played a prominent role in mainstream media narratives of the 2016 election, been the subject of highly publicized congressional hearings, and also loomed large in the wider global discourse about “fake news.” That the Russian government preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton and that Russia-connected actors engaged in digital skulduggery related to the election are not really in dispute.

Much of the mainstream discussion around Russian bots, however, has been premised on unexamined assumptions about the scale and effectiveness of these efforts. Powerful states including the United States, after all, regularly engage in the likes of online propaganda and sock-puppeting campaigns. Whether they have a more than negligible impact on real world events, electoral and otherwise, is another question. It’s notable, then, that a new analysis published by the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University finds no evidence whatsoever that Russia-based Twitter disinformation had any meaningful impact on voter behavior in 2016. In place of the terrifying bot army menace that’s periodically been invoked, the researchers instead detail an enterprise with minimal reach or influence, and one overwhelmingly concentrated among partisan Republicans already inclined to vote for Trump.

They estimate that as many as thirty-two million US Twitter users may have been “exposed” to tweets from Russia-aligned accounts over the eight-month period preceding the 2016 election.” In numerical terms that may sound like a lot, but it actually isn’t when you factor in the sheer volume of posts and information encountered by social media users on a daily basis. As the report puts it: While, on average, respondents were exposed to roughly 4 posts from Russian foreign influence accounts per day in the last month of the election campaign, they were exposed to an average of 106 posts on average per day from national news media and 35 posts per day from US politicians. In other words, respondents were exposed to 25 times more posts from national news media and 9 times as many posts from politicians than those from Russian foreign influence accounts.

Sheer exposure, of course, doesn’t even necessarily amount to influence. Like advertising, politically motivated content can functionally be background noise if it fails to reach particular audiences or in turn doesn’t have an impact on those that it does. In both respects, the study is quite unequivocal: not only were Russian Twitter efforts dwarfed by posts from media and politicians, but actual exposure to them was highly concentrated within a subset of partisan conservatives: Results . . . show that the amount of exposure depends substantially on users’ self-identified partisanship: those who identify as “Strong Republicans” were exposed to roughly nine times as many posts from Russian foreign influence accounts than were those who identify as Democrats or Independents.

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Musk Says ZeroHedge Did “Nothing Warranting Suspension”

• ‘Twitter Files’ Expose Big Pharma Bullying (ZH)

Today’s Twitter Files drop contains several notable pieces of evidence. First, that lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry launched a ‘massive lobbying blitz to crush any effort to share patents/IP for new covid-related medicine,” according to The Intercept’s Lee Fang. As part of this effort, lobbying group BIO “wrote to the newly elected Biden admin, demanding the U.S. gov sanction any country attempting to violate patent rights and create generic low cost covid medicine or vaccines.” Of note, Pfizer and BioNTech raked in $37 billion in revenue in 2021 alone from the COVID-19 vaccine, while Moderna made $17.7 billion the same year (and has recently announced a plan to hike the price of the Covid-19 vaccine by approximately 400%). BioNTech, which developed the Pfizer vaccine, “reached out to Twitter to request that Twitter directly censor users tweeting at them to ask for generic low cost vaccines.”

According to Fang, “Twitter’s reps responded quickly to the pharma request,” while “A lobbyist in Europe asked the content moderation team to monitor the accounts of Pfizer, AstraZeneca & of activist hashtags like #peoplesvaccine.” Meanwhile, the “fake accounts” flagged by the pharmaceutical companies for action were real people – one of whom Fang spoke with on the phone. “For more than two years, a global movement has been speaking out against pharmaceutical greed and demanding that everyone, everywhere has the tools to combat pandemics,” said Maaza Seyoum, a campaigner for the People’s Vaccine Alliance. “Whatever nasty tricks companies and governments pull,” she continued, “we cannot and will not be silenced.” Second, ‘Pfizer & Moderna’s lobbying group, BIO, fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects (PGP), which worked w/Twitter to set content moderation rules around covid “misinformation.”‘ according to Fang.

BIO funded the PGP campaign, “Stronger,” to the tune of $1.275 million. Its focus? Helping Twitter ‘create content moderation bots,’ selecting which public health accounts would be verified, and helping to crowdsource content takedowns. Of note, the Moderna/Pfizer-funded campaign included regular emails to Twitter officals with takedown and verification requests. “Here’s an example of those types of emails that went straight to Twitter’s lobbyists and content moderators. Many focused on @zerohedge, which was suspended.” Fang includes a screencap of an email with two excel spreadsheets containing said requests.

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One child policy fallout. Like trying to turn an oil tanker around. Population to almost halve by 2100.

• China Records First Population Decline In 60 Years (RT)

The population declined in 2022 to 1.411 billion, down some 850,000 people from the previous year, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced during a Tuesday briefing on annual data. Analysts said the decline was the first since 1961 during the great famine triggered by former leader Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. “The population will likely trend down from here in coming years. This is very important, with implications for potential growth and domestic demand,” said Zhiwei Zhang, president and chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management. The birth rate also fell to a record low of 6.77 births per 1,000, down from 7.52 a year earlier and the lowest level since the founding of Communist China in 1949. Some 9.56 million babies were born, compared with 10.62 million in 2021 – despite a push from the government to encourage more married couples to have children.


The new data came alongside the announcement of one of China’s worst annual economic performances in nearly half a century, with the economy expanding by just 3% for the year, far below the government’s target, underscoring the steep economic challenges the country faces as its labor force shrinks and its retired demographic grows. The demographic crisis, which is expected to have an increasing impact on Chinese growth in the years to come, has been a key concern for policymakers. Beijing scrapped its decades-long and highly controversial “one child” policy in 2015, after realizing the restrictive policy had contributed to a rapidly aging population and shrinking workforce that could severely distress the country’s economic and social stability. To arrest the falling birth rate, the Chinese government announced in 2015 that it would allow married couples to have two children. But after a brief uptick in 2016, the national birth rate has continued to fall.

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“At least the Manson Murders were covered by corporate media. We all shared a similar experience.”

• The Black Album (Trish Wood)

Later I bought the book, Helter Skelter, written by the man who prosecuted Charlie. But as an adult and a true crime reporter it was a story I steered clear of, never once accepting a production role in any of the many retellings. Like Didion, I remained skittish about it. I couldn’t make sense of Sharon Tate’s astonishing beauty being annihilated and the peace and love ethos of rich Hollywood hippies reduced to feral human remains – for nothing. The True Detective-type photos from Cielo Drive are images that still haunt. So, why am I so gripped by the revelations that Big Tech, legacy media and for sure the government actually silenced the voices of experts honestly trying to stop the unfolding disaster of lockdowns? Why does this feel like a moment as significant as those era-ending murders in the pretty house on a quiet SoCal Drive?

A team of independent journos is uncovering irrefutable proof that our well being was not paramount in the minds of those who peddled a fake consensus to invoke lockdowns — in my view — the most ruinous public health mistake in modern history. Government, its public health officials, legacy media, and even the medical journals were more into narrative stitching than truth and actually saving lives. The stories of governmental and scientific fraud and perfidy are all over Substack and Twitter and Elon is being hailed as a hero — as he should be, despite what my friend CJ Hopkins said on the podcast last week. But corporate media are running their usual smear-games — abdicating their responsibility to their audience — in order to hide their own complicity in a policy scandal that dwarfs all others.

In the meantime, we are on our own, facing an ugly truth about the people who govern us and the agencies they exploit to stay in power. Everything we thought was true about this power dynamic is a lie. At least the Manson Murders were covered by corporate media. We all shared a similar experience.

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Trojan Horse.

Twitter thread.

• There Is Nothing Green About Green Energy (Pettimore)

As a miner for 40 years I have worked in various mines around the world. Gold, platinum, copper, coal, lead, zinc, oil and salt. I’m going to tell you something, and here it is. We will destroy the earth in the name of “Green Energy” Follow along and I will explain. MiningWatch Canada is estimating that “[Three] billion tons of mined metals and minerals will be needed to power the energy transition” – a “massive” increase especially for six critical minerals: lithium, graphite, copper, cobalt, nickel and rare earth minerals Over the next 30 years 7.5 billion of us, we will consume more minerals than the last 70,000 years or the past 500 generations, which is more than all of the 108 billion humans who have ever walked the Earth.

Mining requires the extraction of solid ores, often after removing vast amounts of overlying rock. Then the ore must be processed, creating an enormous quantity of waste – about 100 billion tonnes a year, more than any other human-made waste stream. Purifying a single tonne of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic meters of water, which then becomes polluted with acids and heavy metals. On top of that, imagine the destruction and energy required to obtain these essential metals:
18,740 pounds of purified rock to produce 2.2 pounds of vanadium
35,275 pounds of ore for 2.2 pounds of cerium
110,230 pounds of rock for 2.2 pounds of gallium
2,645,550 pounds of ore to get 2.2 pounds of lutecium

Also staggering amounts of ore are needed for other metals. By 2035, demand is expected to double for germanium; quadruple for tantalum; and quintuple for palladium. The scandium market could increase nine-fold, and the cobalt market by a factor of 24. (Marscheider-Wiedemann 2016 ‘raw materials for emerging technologies’. The potential demand for rare metals is exponential. We are already consuming over two billion tonnes of metals every year — the equivalent of more than 500 Eiffel Towers a day. There is nothing refined about mining. It involves crushing rock, and then using a concoction of chemical reagents such as sulphuric and nitric acid, a long and highly repetitive process using many different procedures to obtain a rare-earth concentrate close to 100% purity.

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“The problem is that we don’t have a discussion on population: we have a clash of absolutes.”

• The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People (Ugo Bardi)

With 8 billion people alive on Earth, it may be reasonable to believe that the planet is becoming a little crowded. Nevertheless, we should not neglect the opposite opinion: that we have resources and technologies sufficient to keep 8 billion people alive and reasonably happy, and perhaps even more. Neither position can be proven, nor disproven. The future will tell us who was right but, in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to propose that population growth should be slowed down by birth planning. The problem is that we don’t have a discussion on population: we have a clash of absolutes. The position that sees overpopulation as a problem has been thoroughly demonized over the past decades and, still today, you cannot even mention the subject without being immediately branded as a would-be exterminator.

It happened to Bill Gates, to the Club of Rome, and to many others who dared suggest that the world would be a better place if the human population were to stabilize at levels lower than the present one. The demonization trend is, of course, a knee-jerk reaction: the people who propose population planning would be simply horrified at being accused of supporting mass exterminations. But note also that demonization starts from a real problem. Exterminations DID happen in the recent past, and they were carried out largely on the basis of a wrong evaluation of the overpopulation problem. During the Nazi era in Germany, the idea that Europe was overpopulated was common and it was widely believed that the “Lebensraum, “living space” available was insufficient for the German people. The result was a series of exterminations correctly considered the most heinous crimes in human history.

How was that possible? The Germans of that time were the grandfathers of the Germans of today, who are horrified at thinking of what their grandparents did or at least did not oppose. But, for the Germans of those times, killing the Untermenschen, the inferior races, seemed to be the right thing to do, given the vision of the world that was proposed to them and that they had accepted. The Germans fell into a trap called “utilitarianism.” It is one of those principles that are so embedded in our way of thinking that we don’t even realize that it exists. But it does, and it causes enormous damage. In principle, utilitarianism wouldn’t seem to be such a bad idea. It is a rational calculation of the consequences of taking or not taking a certain action based on the principle of generating the maximum good for the maximum number of people. So defined, it looks both sensible and harmless. But that’s the theory. What we have is a good illustration of the age-old principle that “in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they are not.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Relativity
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614947859245240325

 

 

Huxley

 

 

This should make a few doctors think.

 

 

Hairdresser
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614661494947340289

 

 

 

 

Cleaner shrimps

 

 

Blue whale
https://twitter.com/i/status/1615041486331969584

 

 


A hummingbird lays back and “relaxes” after drinking flower nectar. Source: Rahul Singh

 

 

Skippy

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle March 6 2021

Mar 062021
 
 March 6, 2021  Posted by at 10:02 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Lane near Arles 1888

 

• The Trial of Winnie the Pooh (Jim Kunstler)
• 88% Of COVID Deaths Are In Countries With Over Half Of People Overweight (ZH)
• UK Scientist: Substantial Degree Of Covid Mortality Inevitable In Future (G.)
• Russia’s 3rd Vaccine Uses Classic ‘Dead Virus’ Technology (RT)
• Ivermectin Does Not Alleviate Mild Covid-19 Symptoms – Study (NYT)
• Europe Divided Over Covid Passports (Kern)
• The Political Economy of Covid-19 Vaccines (IF)
• Senate Clears Pathway To Passing COVID-19 Relief Bill (JTN)
• Lessons From Today’s Doomed Effort To Save The $15 Minimum Wage
• The Myths Of Green Energy (CHS)
• 100,000 Illegal Immigrants Arrested At US Mexico Border in February (ZH)
• Legislature Strips Cuomo Of Emergency Powers (ZH)
• US, Allies Drop 46 Bombs Per Day for 20 Years (MPN)
• ‘Shia Backed’, ‘Iran Backed’ Nonsense And Other Warmongering Journalism (MoA)
• Neoclassical Economics III: A Machine To Destroy The World (RWER)
• Love, politics, and Universal Basic Income (Meaden)

 

 

 

 

Jim gets his mojo back. Love it.

• The Trial of Winnie the Pooh (Jim Kunstler)

A solemn silence turned collective gasp in the District of Columbia Woke Circuit courtroom as two bailiffs entered the door beside the jury box with the small cream-colored bear suspended between them, his stumpy hind legs wheeling fruitlessly to seek purchase in the unavailing air. The Queen of Hearts, presiding, banged her gavel as the little bear was seated at the table for the defense beside another rather small, darkish, furtive figure. The Queen of Hearts peered over her half-glasses at the defendant and snarled, “State your full name and residence.” “Winnie-the-Pooh,” the defendant said. “From the Hundred Acre Wood.” “What is your personal pronoun?” The bear looked perplexed. “Oh, bother,” he said. “Nobody I know has such a thing?”

“Of course they do,” the Queen said. “Perhaps it’s ‘the’,” the bear said. “That is a definite article, not a pronoun!” the Queen barked. “Are you an imbecile?” “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s ‘dear’”— “That’s enough out of you!” the Queen said. “And let’s have no more impertinence! Do you have counsel?” “Why, yes,” the bear said. “Mr. Kafka, who is seated beside me.” “You are mistaken,” the Queen said. “That is a cockroach seated beside you, and the court is displeased to see it. Bailiff, please remove that disgusting cockroach from my court.” Mr. Kafka, gesticulating in protest with all six arms and legs, had to be dragged out. “First witness!” the Queen screeched. “Counsel for the prosecution….” “Calling Uncle Remus,” said the prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, famous for his exploits in the Enron case and with The Mueller Team in the old Russia collusion days.

An elderly gentleman-of-color with white beard and a kindly face limped forward and took the witness stand. “Do you know this bear?” Weissmann asked. “I knows a Brer B’ar,” Uncle Remus said. “But he a black b’ar. Dishyere one a white b’ar.” “Exactly!” Weissmann said. “Dismissed.” “Dat all?” Uncle Remus asked. “It’s plenty,” Weissmann retorted and smirked at the jury, composed of members from the United Federation of Teachers, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Antifa, who all nodded amongst themselves. “A white bear!” Weissmann repeated for emphasis, shaking his head. “And not a polar bear, either. A white bear. From England. Think about it…!” The jurors emitted growls of opprobrium. “Next witness,” the Queen cried. “Calling N-Word Jim,” Weissmann said.

A strapping middle-aged gentleman-of-color, dressed in ragged clothes, strode to the witness chair. “You reside in libraries all over the world, is that correct?” the attorney asked. “Yassuh, dat is so. But I’se originally fum Hannibal, Missouri.” “Are you acquainted with the defendant?” “I done seen him on many a shelf ‘round de worl’.” “How much shelf space does he occupy compared to you?” “Well, fur as I knows, ‘bout double.” “Does that seem fair to you?” “Way I sees it, he in mebbe twice as minny books as me and Huck.” “Huck! Who is this Huck?” “White boy I done made a journey down de ribber wif one time.” “What is your experience with white folks, Jim?” “Well, dey runs mos’ everything, I ‘spect. Leas’ as fur as I kin see.”

“Exactly!” Weissmann argued. “Is it not white privilege to — as you say — run everything?” he added, shaking his head gravely. “Hegemonizing and colonizing literature everywhere you look.” “Say, what…?” the witness rejoined and pulled his chin. “You can go back to your raft, Jim,” Weissmann said. “Dismissed. Calling Mr. Christopher Robin.”

Read more …

“..obesity is a “global pandemic in its own right.”

But we’ll keep promoting corn syrup.

• 88% Of COVID Deaths Are In Countries With Over Half Of People Overweight (ZH)

A new report by the World Obesity Federation found that 88% of deaths in the first year of the pandemic occurred in countries where over half of the population is classified as overweight – which is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) above 25. Of note, BMI values above 30 – considered obese – are associated with ‘particularly severe outcomes,’ according to the Washington Post. On the other hand, in countries where less than half of the adult population is considered overweight account, the risk of death from COVID-19 is around one-tenth of countries with the higher proportion of overweight adults. Higher BMIs are also associated with an increased risk of hospitalization, ICU admissions, and the need for mechanically assisted ventilation.


The ‘overweight’ countries in question include Britain, Italy and the United States – the latter of which has seen over 517,000 COVID deaths out of a total of 2.5 million globally. Hilariously, the Post also suggests that “correlations between coronavirus severity and weight are also tied to racial and ethnic inequality.” How, you might ask? Because “Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black adults have a higher prevalence of obesity and are more likely to suffer worse outcomes from COVID-19,” according to the CDC. In the UK, overweight COVID-19 patients were 67% more likely to require intensive care, while obese patients were three times more likely. The findings by the World Obesity Federation were “near-uniform across the globe,” according to the Post, which notes that the report found that increased body weight is the second greatest predictor of poor outcomes after old age. According to the United Nations, contrary to what the woke fashion industry tells us, obesity is a “global pandemic in its own right.”

Read more …

More measures, more vaccines, we’re truly stuck in one dimension.

• UK Scientist: Substantial Degree Of Covid Mortality Inevitable In Future (G.)

Prof Andrew Hayward, a member of the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), has said society will have to live with a degree of mortality that will be “substantial”, but added that we will “get back to normal”.He told Times Radio: “I think, you know, given the societal trade-offs, we are going to have to live with a degree of mortality that will be substantial … it will get less over time as more people get vaccinated and as more people get immune, and I do believe that we’ve been through the worst of this.” Hayward said he did not think new variants of Covid-19 would completely evade vaccine-related immunity. “The vaccines will still take the sting out of it, if you like, and reduce the case fatality rates,” he said.


“Of course, we have the technology to update the vaccines and I think that’s where we’re going really, a situation that will be much more like flu, the numbers of deaths will be much more like flu, the approach to surveillance of new strains and development of new vaccines and regular annual vaccinations will be like that. And we will get back to normal.” Looking back on the beginning of the pandemic, Hayward, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at UCL, said: “I think one of the reasons that we’ve had so many deaths is that we left things far too late, in terms of taking more restrictive measures. “We should have been taking social distancing measures – if not a full lockdown then other measures that were trying to separate people – much earlier. At that time, of course, we also didn’t really have the same mechanisms to measure how much disease there was in the community, so we were largely only really seeing the tip of the iceberg of cases.

Read more …

“The most important thing is that at this point we have a vaccine that definitely has no side effects..”

• Russia’s 3rd Vaccine Uses Classic ‘Dead Virus’ Technology (RT)

The third Covid-19 vaccine registered in Russia is based on a “perfectly conventional” platform, and those who have been injected experienced no side effects, the head of the Chumakov Scientific Center, which created it, told RT. The CoviVac vaccine received national approval in Russia on February 20. The first batch of doses is expected to be available to the public in mid-March, according to the government. The vaccine is based on the most traditional technology that has been around for a long time and is widely used throughout the world, Aidar Ishmukhametov, the director general of the Chumakov Scientific Center, told RT.

“Globally, almost 100% of vaccines contain either deactivated or live pathogens,” he said, adding that the one developed by his center contains an ‘inactivated’ (dead) coronavirus. This type of vaccine simulates a natural infection process, introducing the immune system to the virus and “teaching” the body to fight the pathogen without the risk of it spreading through the body and causing disease, he explained. “Two weeks after the first shot, we give a person another jab to reinforce the immune response. As a result, the body becomes fully capable of fighting off the virus on its own,” Ishmukhametov said, adding that this vaccine involves two shots, as is the case with all other currently existing Covid-19 vaccines.

It is based on a particular specimen of the coronavirus that was found to be more susceptible to inactivation and controlled reproduction in the center. Nevertheless, Ishmukhametov believes that the vaccine will be effective against all Covid-19 strains, including the South African variant, which reportedly proved to be resistant to the AstraZeneca vaccine. “Since we are talking about a whole-virion vaccine, the deviations in the genetic sequence – something one is calling different strains or different variants – are insignificant and amount to less than one percent. So… it would be weird to think that a whole-virion vaccine might fail to work against new strains, considering how small the differences are,” he said.

CoviVac received national approval in Russia while still in the second phase of clinical trials. It now has to go through the third phase so the developers can precisely assess its effectiveness, according to Ishmukhametov. However, the first trials have already shown that it has no side effects, he said. “The most important thing is that at this point we have a vaccine that definitely has no side effects,” he said, adding that, out of 300 volunteers, none reported any symptoms except for occasional soreness around the injection site. [..] “We have been doing this for 60 years, and we’ve defeated polio and yellow fever,” he said, adding that the Chumakov Center hosts the Collaborating Centre for Poliovirus and Enterovirus Surveillance and Research of the World Health Organization (WHO) and actively cooperates with the UN health watchdog.

Read more …

The propaganda machine speaks…

• Ivermectin Does Not Alleviate Mild Covid-19 Symptoms – Study (NYT)

Ivermectin, a controversial anti-parasitic drug that has been touted as a potential Covid-19 treatment, does not speed recovery in people with mild cases of the disease, according to a randomized controlled trial published on Thursday in the journal JAMA. Ivermectin is typically used to treat parasitic worms in both people and animals, but scientific evidence for its efficacy against the coronavirus is thin. Some studies have indicated that the drug can prevent several different viruses from replicating in cells. And last year, researchers in Australia found that high doses of ivermectin suppressed SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in cell cultures. Such findings had spurred use of the drug against Covid-19, especially in Latin America.


“Ivermectin is currently being used widely,” said Dr. Eduardo López-Medina, a doctor and researcher at the Center for Pediatric Infectious Diseases in Cali, Colombia, who led the new trial. “In many countries in the Americas and other parts of the world, it’s part of the national guidelines of treating Covid.” But the drug has also proved divisive. While some scientists see potential, others suspect that effectively inhibiting the coronavirus may require extremely high, potentially unsafe doses. Health officials have also worried that people desperate for coronavirus treatments might take versions of the drug that have been formulated for pets. (It is commonly used to prevent heartworm in dogs.) “There’s been a lot of conflicting views on this, sometimes extreme conflicting views,” said Dr. Carlos Chaccour, a researcher at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health who was not involved in the new study. “I think it has become another hydroxychloroquine.”

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What a lousy idea, executed even lousier. Ergo … a winner.

• Europe Divided Over Covid Passports (Kern)

Professor Christopher Dye, Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford and co-author of the Royal Society report, added: “An effective vaccine passport system that would allow the return to pre-Covid-19 activities, including travel, without compromising personal or public health, must meet a set of demanding criteria — but it is feasible. First there is the science of immunity, then the challenges of something working across the world that is durable, reliable and secure. There are the legal and ethical issues and if you can crack all that, you have to have the trust of the people. “Huge progress has been made in many of these areas, but we are not there yet. At the most basic level, we are still gathering data on exactly how effective each vaccine is in preventing infection and transmission and on how long the immunity will last.”

The Reuters News Agency reported that there are still many unanswered questions about immunity to Covid-19: “EU officials also point out there is no guidance yet from the WHO and EU agencies whether people who have received two shots of the Covid-19 vaccine can still carry the coronavirus and infect others, even if no longer vulnerable themselves. “It was also not clear if people could be infectious having already fought off the coronavirus themselves, for how long they remained immune and if they too should get certificates.” Professor Carsten Maple, a cyber security expert at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science, warned that criminals could exploit the demand from prospective travelers for vaccine passports:

“This really gives that kind of incentive. You’ll get people who’ve got these rights, especially if it’s mandatory. Other people will be excluded. People, where it is mandatory and really offers a significant difference, will be incentivized to create a market of forged documents. “We know that in Israel they’ve made statements about anybody who tries to forge will face criminal proceedings and possibly be imprisoned. So, they really think that this is a risk that could happen.”

Read more …

Mostly about “fair distribution” of as much mRNA as we can produce, but these details are interesting.

• The Political Economy of Covid-19 Vaccines (IF)

[..] for Covid-19 vaccines, many big pharma companies received massive subsidies from governments that have mostly and in some cases completely covered research and development costs. In the US alone, the six major vaccine companies received over $12 billion in public subsidies for developing Covid-19 vaccines (MSF 2021). Other rich country governments have provided similar subsidies. Private pharma companies also benefited from prior public research (Scientific American 2020) and reduced costs of clinical testing, because of more unpaid volunteers for trials. The ‘leader’ vaccines may have already received what could be considered as reasonable returns on their own investment, and more. For example, while Pfizer did not receive direct subsidies from the US government, I received pre-orders for 100 million doses for $1.95 billion (Industry Week 2020).

Moreover, it relied on technology from BioNTech, which had received $445 million from the German government for their research (Bloomberg 2020). Pfizer claims costs of $3.1 billion to develop this vaccine (BBC 2020), while estimated sales in 2021 will be worth $15 billion (Quartz, 2020). Developing the Moderna vaccine cost $2.5 billion, apparently entirely funded by the US federal government (USA Today, 2020). The recently approved Johnson and Johnson vaccine benefited from US government subsidies and a pre-order of 100 million doses likely to cover costs (Johnson and Johnson 2020). The original distribution model [for the Oxford vaccine] was for an open-licence platform, designed to make the vaccine freely available for any manufacturer.

The case of the AstraZeneca vaccine is particularly instructive, also because it is seen as viable for developing country use. (Significant quantities of this vaccine are being produced by the Serum Institute of India under a collaboration agreement.) The vaccine was entirely developed by a publicly funded lab at Oxford University. The original distribution model was for an open-licence platform, designed to make the vaccine freely available for any manufacturer. However, the Gates Foundation, which had clout because it had donated $750 million to Oxford for vaccine development, persuaded the university to change course completely and sign “an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices” (Jay Hancock 2020).

Read more …

Dysfunctionality like in the last days of Rome. Marie Antoinette.

• Senate Clears Pathway To Passing COVID-19 Relief Bill (JTN)

The Senate broke a logjam Friday night and reached agreement on an issue that had stopped debate for approximately nine hours, and which paves the way for a continuation of the “vote-a-rama” of amendments to the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. The agreement was to provide $300 a week in unemployment benefits through Sept. 6, plus $10,200 in tax relief for people who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic. Democrats had been fighting for $400 a week, instead of $300. The key figure in the negotiations was Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). He represented the 50th vote for Democrats, which is what they need to prevail, considering that Vice President Kamala Harris represents the 51st vote.


Manchin has indicated he will support the rest of the Democrats’ bill, making its passage in the Senate on Saturday a near certainty. Republicans have pointed out that approximately 90% of the bill, which passed the House along party lines, has nothing to do with COVID-19 relief. One of the largest components of the bill is $350 billion for states and cities, which Republicans have argued is a way to bail out poorly run and profligate states and cities at the expense of well run, mostly Republican states. Since there have been changes to the House bill that was originally introduced in the Senate, the Senate version will go back to the House where it is expected to easily pass, again along party lines. It would then go to President Biden for his signature, making it the law of the land.

Read more …

“Harris wasn’t even in the Senate chair today during the vote on Sanders’ amendment.”

• Lessons From Today’s Doomed Effort To Save The $15 Minimum Wage

There was another way Democrats could have moved forward with the $15 minimum wage in their COVID-19 relief bill: Vice President Harris, as presiding Chair of the Senate, could have ruled against the parliamentarian’s advice and kept the provision in the legislation. While the Senate could vote to overturn the ruling, it would take 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to do so. A confidential memo obtained by The Daily Poster that circulated on Capitol Hill last week detailed exactly how that scenario would play out: “What would probably happen is a senator would appeal the ruling of the chair and then the full Senate would vote on whether to sustain the appeal,” the memo stated. “The Chair’s ruling would be upheld as long as there are not 60 affirmative votes to sustain the appeal. So, if the majority could hold enough members together (less than 60 affirmative votes to sustain the appeal), the ruling that runs counter to the Parliamentarian’s advice would be upheld.”

In other words, if at least 41 Democrats refused to overturn Harris’ ruling, the minimum wage provision would have remained in the bill. Today, 42 Democrats voted in support of a $15 minimum wage. That is one more than would have been necessary for the alternative approach to work. It’s fair to wonder whether some of these Democrats would have wimped out in a situation where their votes weren’t simply a symbolic gesture, as they were today. Colorado freshman John Hickenlooper, for example, was a late, surprise yes vote on the minimum wage amendment on Friday.

But these 42 Senators voted in favor of considering a $15 minimum wage even after the Biden administration signaled again and again that passing such legislation was less of a priority than, say, trying to get Neera Tanden, a scandal-plagued, union-busting, rage-tweeting apparatchik, confirmed as the head of the White House budget office. Imagine if the Biden administration had fought for the $15 minimum wage as hard as it fought for Tanden’s doomed confirmation. Instead, Harris wasn’t even in the Senate chair today during the vote on Sanders’ amendment.

Read more …

Charles cites my friend Nate Hagens, but it’s unclear to me how much of this is from Nate.

• The Myths Of Green Energy (CHS)

Finance is often cloaked in arcane terminology and math, but the one dynamic that governs the future is actually very simple. Here it is: “All debt is borrowed against future supplies of affordable hydrocarbons (oil, coal and natural gas).” Since global economic activity is ultimately dependent on a continued abundance of affordable energy, it follows that all money borrowed against future income is actually being borrowed against future supplies of affordable energy. Many people believe that alternative “green” energy will soon replace most or all hydrocarbon energy sources, but this belief is not realistic. All the “renewable” energy sources are about 3% of all energy consumed, with hydropower providing another few percent. There are unavoidable headwinds to this appealing fantasy…

1. All “renewable” energy is actually “replaceable” energy, analyst Nate Hagens points out. Every 15-25 years (or less) much or all of the alt-energy systems and structures have to be replaced, and little of the necessary mining, manufacturing and transport can be performed with the “renewable” electricity these sources generate. Virtually all the heavy lifting of these processes require hydrocarbons and especially oil.

2. Wind and solar “renewable” energy is intermittent and therefore requires changes in behavior (no clothes dryers or electric ovens used after dark, etc.) or battery storage on a scale that isn’t practical in terms of the materials required.

3. Batteries are also “replaceable” and don’t last very long. The percentage of lithium-ion batteries being recycled globally is near-zero, so all batteries end up as costly, toxic landfill.

4. Battery technologies are limited by the physics of energy storage and materials. Moving whiz-bang exotic technologies from the lab to global scales of production is non-trivial.

5. The material and energy resources required to build alt-energy sources that replace hydrocarbon energy and replace all the alt-energy which has broken down or reached the end of its life exceeds the affordable reserves of materials and energy available on the planet.

6. Externalized costs of alt-energy are not being included in the cost. Nobody’s adding the immense cost of the environmental damage caused by lithium mines to the price of the lithium batteries. Once the full external costs are included, the cost is no longer as affordable as promoters claim.

7. None of the so-called “green” “replaceable” energy has actually replaced hydrocarbons; all the alt-energy has done is increase total energy consumption. This is what’s called Jevons Paradox: every increase in efficiency or energy production only increases consumption.

Read more …

“We are weeks, maybe even days, away from a crisis on the southern border. Inaction is simply not an option..”

More kids, more cages facilities.

• 100,000 Illegal Immigrants Arrested At US Mexico Border in February (ZH)

This may come as a shock to Joe Biden supporters. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose Congressional district lies near the U.S.-Mexico border, warned that more than 10,000 illegal immigrants have been apprehended in a single border sector in Texas in about a week, with Reuters adding that a stunning 100,000 migrants were detained at the border in February, the highest arrest total for the month of February since 2006. “We are weeks, maybe even days, away from a crisis on the southern border. Inaction is simply not an option,” the Texas Democrat said in a news release on Thursday. “Our country is currently unprepared to handle a surge in migrants in the middle of the pandemic.”

As The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips notes, in recent days, Cuellar has issued warnings about what appears to be a looming humanitarian crisis at the border, adding that it will spread COVID-19 in southern Texas and other border communities. But now, his office has released figures showing Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley arrested about 10,000 illegal immigrants in the past week alone, according to the release, while adding that some 2,500 illegal immigrants have been apprehended in the past two days since the press statement was released. According to Border Patrol data, agents also apprehended 5,700 unaccompanied child illegal immigrants in January. Illegal immigrants are “potentially exposing border communities to the coronavirus and putting us at risk,” Cuellar said, guaranteeing the triggering of progressives everywhere. “Right now, none of the migrants are being tested for COVID-19 by Border Patrol.”

“As a border representative, I will continue to fight in Washington for my community to ensure they have the necessary funding and resources to properly care for these migrants and to keep American families safe. I urge the Biden administration to listen and work with the communities on the southern border who are dealing with the surge of migrants,” he added. Cuellar isn’t the only Texas member of Congress who is sounding the alarm. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, another Democrat, did not mince words in how he described the current White House’s immigration policy and said a proposed bill is “catastrophic.” “I can assure you, it won’t be long before we have tens of thousands of people showing up to our border, and it’ll be catastrophic for our country, for my region, for my district,” he told CNN. “In the middle of a pandemic, in an area where we’ve lost over 3,000 people in my small congressional district … I think we need to have a better plan in place.”

Read more …

Drip drip.

• Legislature Strips Cuomo Of Emergency Powers (ZH)

In November, the TV Academy presented Cuomo with the International Emmy Founders Award “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of TV to inform and calm people around the world.” It sure wishes it could take that day back. Late on Friday, three days after NY legislators reached a deal to strip disgraced NY governor Andrew Cuomo – who now finds himself in a vortex of potentially criminal scandals involving both nursing home deaths and alleged sexual assaults – of his emergency powers, and two days after an “embarrassed” Cuomo told a disgusted TV audience (well everyone except for the virtue-signaling sycophants at CNN and MSNBC) that he was “very sorry” but was “not resigning” in the aftermath of his own sexual assault scandal, late on Friday, the New York legislature approved a bill to repeal the pandemic-era emergency powers afforded to the scandal-plagued Governor Cuomo.

The measure, which received final passage from the Assembly on Friday evening, revoked temporary powers given to Cuomo in March that effectively gave him dic(k)tator powers, allowing him to supersede the legislature, as well as local laws, to issue hundreds of sweeping emergency directives on everything from closing businesses and schools to mandating the use of masks. In retrospect, this was the worst – and deadliest – decision the legislature had made who may be just as culpable of crimes as Cuomo.

[..] As Bloomberg reports, the rebuke from lawmakers, where Democrats hold a supermajority in both chambers, follows public outcry over sexual-harassment claims by what are now three women against Cuomo and allegations that his administration deliberately covered up Covid-19 deaths of nursing-home residents. In the latest twist which emerged late in the week, Cuomo’s administration said Thursday that officials had altered a July report of data on the deaths to exclude those who had died outside the facilities. The administration was responding to a New York Times report that said these changes show that the state had a fuller accounting of the deaths at the time, despite resisting requests for that data.

[..] Earlier this week, Cuomo said he had brokered the emergency-power deal with lawmakers to focus just on curbing new directives. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a fellow Democrat, disputed Cuomo, saying lawmakers didn’t work with the governor to cut a deal. Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris said on the floor that the governor lied to the public and was not involved in negotiations. Asked if he was bothered by the lie, Gianaris said: “There is so much that this governor has done that I’m bothered by.” Asked if he trusts the governor, Gianaris said: “I haven’t trusted this governor in a long time.” Gianaris is a democrat. Imagine if he was republican. Currently, only the governor may declare and end a state of emergency. “For the first time ever, we are adding a power for the Legislature to nullify a state of emergency,” Gianaris said.

Read more …

Costs? Lives?

• US, Allies Drop 46 Bombs Per Day for 20 Years (MPN)

The United States and its allies have dropped at least 326,000 bombs and missiles on countries in the greater Middle East/ North Africa region since 2001. That is the conclusion of new research by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies of anti-war group CODEPINK. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen are the countries that have felt the worst of the violence, but Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine and Somalia have also been targeted. The total amounts to an average of 46 bombs dropped per day over the last 20 years. CODEPINK’s numbers are based primarily on official U.S. military releases, as well as data from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Yemen Data Project, and the New America Foundation.

As striking as the figure of 326,000 is, it is an underestimate, as the Trump administration ceased publishing figures of its bombing campaigns in 2020, meaning there is no data for Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan for either of the previous two years. Also not counted are bombs or missiles used in helicopter strikes, AC-130 gunship attacks, strafing runs from U.S. bombers, or any counterinsurgency or counter-terrorism operations in other parts of the world. Last week President Joe Biden gave the order to attack Iraqi militias in Syria, dropping 1.75 tons of bombs on a border village and killing 22 people — something that brought cheers from Washington insiders and corporate media pundits alike. The move was reportedly in response to strikes on U.S. military bases in Iraq — bases that, last year, the Iraqi parliament unanimously demanded be closed.

Yesterday, anonymous administration officials claimed that Biden called off a second Syria strike after being warned that women and children were in the area. Though no evidence was offered and the officials refused to go on record, corporate media diligently parroted the State Department line, allowing the new administration to simultaneously present itself as getting tough on its enemies and as a champion of human rights. The United States has been at war for nearly every year of its existence as an independent nation, fighting in 227 years of its 244-year history. While both Barack Obama and Donald Trump offered up anti-war rhetoric when they were on the campaign trail, both moved steadfastly away from that position once in office.

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The bombs were dropped in Iraq, not Syria. And they’re trying to hide that fact.

• ‘Shia Backed’, ‘Iran Backed’ Nonsense And Other Warmongering Journalism (MoA)

The recent U.S. airstrike at the Syrian-Iraqi border and the missile attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq were followed by many examples of bad journalism. U.S. media, as FAIR documents, have purged inconvenient facts from their coverage of Biden’s ‘first’ airstrike: “The less clear the US population is about the frequency and scale of murderous violence its government carries out, the easier it is for the US ruling class to go about its wars. Fortunately for the US state, corporate media help manufacture collective amnesia by expunging US aggression from the record…. Securing consent for running a lethal, worldwide empire requires unremitting propaganda: Redacting the historical record and playing the victim are two useful strategies.”

The dozens of examples in the FAIR piece are telling. FAIR gets one thing wrong though. The attack was not in Syria, as the U.S. claimed, but on the Iraqi side of the border. Elijah J. Magnier @ejmalrai – 6:01 UTC · Mar 3, 2021 “Analysts keep making this mistake: 1st Biden’s bombing was in #Iraq not #Syria. An Iraqi military delegation sent by @MAKadhimi verified & confirmed that the #US bombed Iraqi security forces on the Iraqi borders with #Syria and not on Syrian territory. Nearly all U.S. media use ‘Iran-backed militia’ when describing the groups that allegedly launched the missiles. The Pentagon now wants to change that. A press briefing with spokesman John F. Kirby had several exchanges about that:

“Q: Just going back to — to the rocket attack, could you describe roughly the distance that the rockets were coming from? And what does that say about the tactics — and how does that — of the — whoever fired those? And to what degree does this resemble previous attacks by the Iranian-backed militia? MR. KIRBY: I’m not qualified to do the forensics, Dan, on — on — on how this equates to previous attacks, other than obviously it’s a rocket attack and we have seen rocket attacks come from Shia-backed militia groups in the past. So in that way, it certainly — it certainly coincides with our past experience here.”

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“Unchecked growth has no place, outside of the microbial world. Unchecked growth is called a plague, an epidemic or a cancer..”

• Neoclassical Economics III: A Machine To Destroy The World (RWER)

Growth has a fundamental place in the biological world, of which we humans are a part. Unchecked growth has no place, outside of the microbial world. Unchecked growth is called a plague, an epidemic or a cancer. Growth, among mainstream economists, has become a reflexive, mindless goal, specifically growth of the Gross Domestic Product. Growth of the GDP is the dominant global criterion for allegedly successful management of an economy. GDP is an indiscriminate measure of what we spend money on: some things good, some useless, some bad and, increasingly, some attempting to repair damage from previous spending. GDP is not a useful measure of our quality of life, whose improvement should be the real goal, but it does correlate with resource use and resource waste, also known as pollution.

The claim that unchecked competitive markets are the most efficient way to increase material wealth has no basis, as I explained in Part II. Nor have free markets worked in practice. Australia’s economic performance post-1983 has never come close to that in the 1950s and 60s when it averaged over 5% annual GDP growth and 1.3% unemployment. However economists and the self-interested rich have promoted a system based on unrestrained markets that in turn promotes anything that yields short-term profit. Thus we have unsustainable extraction of natural resources, and for-profit aged care that consigns our grandparents to disgusting neglect. We also have potent and dangerous new technologies like face recognition, meta-data analysis, artificial ‘intelligence’ and various biotechnologies including, imminently, the suspension of biological ageing.

The planet really needs a plague of demanding, smart-aleck old farts. The surveillance state is a reality, and rapidly gaining in power and pervasiveness. I am only mentioning war making and killer robotics. Some older people occasionally wonder why the forecasts of our childhood have not come to pass. We were told that by the year 2000 no-one would work more than 15 hours a week. The reason is that we have been kept on the treadmill so as to keep the GDP increasing. A major motivator has been ‘labour market flexibility’, the notion that your labour is just a free-market disposable commodity that needs to be used to maximum efficiency and effect. One difficulty of course is that your labour comes with you attached. The primary effects have been to keep the employed insecure and to enrich the rich and empower the powerful.

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The Catholic church promotes UBI. What do catholics think though?

• Love, politics, and Universal Basic Income (Meaden)

London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey recently said that if people were given a Universal Basic Income (UBI) they would spend it on ‘lots of drugs’. This was widely reported. Less widely reported was the response of Dr Simon Duffy, speaking in the same meeting, where he helped to persuade the Economic Committee of the London Assembly to vote in favour a pilot of UBI in the capital. Dr Duffy said: “What the UK has become is an increasingly mean-spirited society. What we’ve seen is a decline in respect for people on low incomes, and a concomitant decline in the value of basic benefits. So now, the poorest 10 per cent of people in the UK receive, after tax, about £40 to £50 per person [per week]. There’s a reason why they get less and less – it’s to do with the political choices that we make, it’s to do with the way the political system has been able to stigmatise those people as somehow unworthy.

And that’s why we increasingly move away from cash and economic security and move to increased sanctions and conditionality, and even talk of vouchers. It’s all interconnected. And what we really need to do – and this is about politics, not economics – we need to move towards a universal approach that says every citizen is entitled to economic security, every citizen is worthy of respect. And that’s where the love is, Shaun.” The idea that an economic or political policy could be an expression of love, and a recognition of the innate dignity and worth of every human being may sound unusual to our ears, but it really shouldn’t. As the Archbishop of York said recently, “Loving your neighbour is a profoundly political statement.”

This connection, between truly loving our neighbour and its and implications for politics is explored in a profound way in Catholic Social Teaching, and there we find a single phrase which fundamentally challenges the way our society and our economy are organised. That phrase is “the universal destination of goods”. The universal destination of goods means, quite simply, that as the world was created for all of us, and as we are all equal in human dignity and worth, then we are all entitled to a share of what the world has to offer. And this right does not have to be earned – it is the automatic right of every human being, by virtue of being human.

The phrase first appeared in the foundational document of CST, Rerum Novarum, written by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. The principle has largely remained in the realm of the abstract, underpinning a belief in social justice, but with no specific policy application endorsed by the church. Recently however, Pope Francis has been quite vocal in his insistence that the time has come to put such beliefs into practice, in order to protect the planet and human dignity. [..] UBI is an idea which is the logical outcome of looking at the world through a lens of love and justice. To be implemented properly it will, as Dr Duffy acknowledges, involve some redistribution of wealth. This will no doubt meet resistance, particularly from those who have most, and therefore have most to lose.

But as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “The right to private property is secondary to the right of everyone, without exception, to their share in the goods of creation. The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind. The universal destination of goods remains primordial, even if the promotion of the common good requires respect for the right to private property and its exercise” (Catechism 2403).

Read more …

 

 

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Debt Rattle November 29 2015

Nov 292015
 
 November 29, 2015  Posted by at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Edwin Rosskam Provincetown, Massachusetts 1937

• US Black Friday Sales Fall 10% From Last Year (AP)
• China’s Shadow Banking Risk Shifts To Booming Bond Market (Reuters)
• Chinese Pull Back From US Property Investments (WSJ)
• Chinese Cash Floods US Real Estate Market (NY Times)
• Giant ‘Green Energy’ Boondoggle Flops in Spain (Tenebrarum)
• How Green Energy Really Works (Tenebrarum)
• Kremlin Says Putin ‘Fully Mobilized’ To Tackle Threat From Turkey (Reuters)
• Vladimir Putin Announces Russian Sanctions Against Turkey (Guardian)
• Iraqi Politician Claims Turkey Lets ISIL Sell Oil for $20 a Barrel (Sputnik)
• BAE Sets Its Sights on Tank and Ammo Exports (Bloomberg)
• Somali Victims Of US Drone Strike Take Legal Action Against Netherlands (VK)
• Pope Francis to Head to War Zone in Central African Republic (WSJ)
• Over 1 Million Children Need Urgent Aid In Central African Republic (Reuters)
• Dijsselbloem Warns Of Mini-Schengen Over Refugee Issue (Reuters)
• How A Secretive Elite Created The EU To Build A World Government (Sked)
• ‘Snowden Effect’: NSA Authority to Collect Bulk Phone Metadata Ends (Intercept)
• Paris Climate Activists Put Under House Arrest Using Emergency Laws (Guardian)
• FYROM/Greece Border Tension Peaks As Fence Erected (Kath.)
• Life In A Refugee Camp: ‘The Cold And Fear Get In Your Bones’ (Guardian)

For once they don’t blame the weather: it’s Halloween who dunnit!

• US Black Friday Sales Fall 10% From Last Year (AP)

Total sales in the US on Black Friday fell 10% to $10.4bn this year, down from $11.6bn in 2014, according to research firm ShopperTrak. The decline in sales on the traditional busiest shopping day of the year has been blamed on shops opening the day before. But this year, sales on Thanksgiving also dropped, and by the same percentage, to $1.8bn. A big reason for the decline is increased online shopping, as Americans hunt down deals on their smartphones, tablets and computers. Many retailers are also offering bargains long before Thanksgiving, limiting the impact of Black Friday specials. Online retailers have been bombarding customers with email discounts and bargains for weeks. Online sales jumped 14.3% on Friday compared with last year, according to Adobe, which tracked activity on 4,500 retail websites.

Email promotions drove 25% more sales compared with 2014, the company said. Brick-and-mortar retailers saw fewer customer visits on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, compared with last year, according to Kevin Kearns, ShopperTrak’s chief revenue officer. “Shoppers are researching products ahead of time, targeting their store visits, and arriving in store with the intention of making a purchase,” Kearns said. The drop in Thanksgiving Day visits may also reflect a “social backlash” against stores opening on that day, Kearns said. Chris Christopher, director of consumer economics at consulting firm IHS, said many retailers’ warehouses and store shelves were overstocked heading into the fall. That prompted many to offer deep discounts as early as the beginning of this month. “The price discounting has been creeping toward Halloween,” he said.

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Lovely. PIMCO’s getting their share of the China casino. WMP=Weapons of Mass Ponzi?!

• China’s Shadow Banking Risk Shifts To Booming Bond Market (Reuters)

A year after China’s financial regulators squared up to the systemic perils of “shadow banking”, the threat is shifting to a booming corporate bond market, and risky borrowers’ debt is finding its way into products aimed at retail investors. An opaque network of trust companies and non-bank lenders had grown their annual market to a hefty 2.9 trillion yuan ($450 billion) in loans before regulators stepped in, spooked by rising defaults on wealth-management products (WMPs) backed by such high-interest shadow lending. Now the high-risk borrowers who took those loans, such as unlisted real-estate firms struggling with a stagnant property market and financing companies backing shoddy local government investment, are finding a new avenue of funding after regulators began allowing unlisted companies to issue bonds on public exchanges.

New corporate bond issuance leaped to 914 billion yuan in the third quarter, accounting for 29% of all new credit, up from 381 billion yuan and just 8% in the first. And the profile of new borrowers looks strikingly like the patrons of the shadow banking set. Of the 57 firms posting bond listing announcements in Shanghai in October, 23 were local-government-owned project or infrastructure investment firms. Beijing engineered the freeing up of the bond markets as a transparent alternative funding route, and the credit crunch that followed its clampdown on shadow banking guaranteed a high take-up. But wealth managers are now turning these bonds into leveraged high-yielding products and selling them to investors desperate for returns after a real-estate slump and summer stock-market crash.

Data from CN Benefit, a research firm tracking wealth management sales, shows that 60% of new bank wealth-management products (WMPs) were linked to debt and money market instruments in September, up from less than half in the first quarter. Demand is hot for these products, and the higher the yield, the higher the risk, which is amplified if the fund’s assets are partly bought on credit, or leveraged. Colight Asset Management, a private fund offering bond-backed WMPs, raised more than 40 million yuan in just four days in November from an 8.7% yielding, 400% leveraged bond-based product, according to customer service staff member Chen Xun. Much bigger companies such as PIMCO and the Agricultural Bank of China also offer similar high-yielding leveraged products.

Investors, however, assume that products offered by big names are relatively safe. “The risk of default is very slim,” said a 45 year-old business manager in Shanghai surnamed Pan who invests in WMPs on an exchange backed by China’s second-largest insurer, Ping An Group. “I’m sure such a big company as Ping An will make sure investors can get their money back.”

Read more …

Nothing better than two main US media contradicting each other on the same day. Here’s the WSJ….

• Chinese Pull Back From US Property Investments (WSJ)

Karen Xu, a Shanghai resident looking to invest in U.S. real estate, decided this spring to seek a Miami one-bedroom condominium in the $500,000-to-$750,000 price range. China’s economic slowdown has since changed her mind. “I don’t think I’ll be investing in the U.S. right now,” said Ms. Xu, who works at an investment consulting firm. “Maybe I’ll wait another five years, or invest in China.” Capping a five-year real-estate binge, Chinese nationals surpassed Canadian snowbirds as the top foreign buyers of U.S. homes for the year that ended in March—the most recent annual data—scooping up everything from $500,000 condos in New Jersey to $3 million vacation homes in California to $13 million Manhattan condos.

But in recent weeks, some Chinese buyers have started to pull back, scared off by China’s stock-market selloff, slowing economic growth, currency devaluation and tightened restrictions on capital outflows. On Friday, China’s benchmark stock index fell by 5.5%, its biggest daily slide since August, as Beijing authorities stepped up a crackdown on the securities industry. “We are ready to embrace a winter for Chinese buyers in the next one year, two years,” said Daniel Chang, a New York City-based broker at Sotheby’s International Realty. Mr. Chang, who sells properties in the $2 million-to-$10 million range, said about half of the clients served by his team are Chinese.

Interest from Chinese buyers “went dark” for several weeks after stocks becan their sharp fall, said Tom Mitchell, president and chief operating officer of Tri Pointe Group, a home builder in Irvine, Calif. China’s main stock index, the Shanghai Composite Index, is down 38% since its June peak. Foreign Chinese buyers make up about 30% of customers in a handful of the company’s developments in Orange County and the San Francisco area. Price increases there, he said, have prompted clients to “pause and think.” Zhang Xin, chief executive of SOHO China, a real-estate developer, said last month she wouldn’t buy overseas real estate today because many cities abroad are too pricey.

Read more …

…..and next is the NY Times. Which more or less says the exact opposite.

• Chinese Cash Floods US Real Estate Market (NY Times)

In London, Chinese investors are purchasing high-end apartments in wealthy neighborhoods and big skyscrapers in the financial district. In Canada, they are paying $1 million for modest Vancouver bungalows. In Australia, a Chinese sovereign wealth fund bought nine office towers, one of the biggest real estate transactions in that nation’s history. In the United States, the home-buying spree began on the coasts, where Chinese buyers snapped up luxury condos in Manhattan and McMansions in Silicon Valley, pushing up home values in big cities. It is now spreading to the middle of the country, where prices are more modest and have room to run.

The homes here in Corinth will feature two master suites, one for the buyers, the other for aging parents. A concierge service will help new arrivals from overseas order Internet service and pay electric bills. Chauffeurs will ferry homeowners until they learn to navigate the loops and spurs of Texas freeways. “When Chairman Zhang saw the strength of the Texan economy, he decided it was time that the Asian community should be presented an opportunity to invest in the American Dream”, marketing materials for the development read. The great property rush is part of the tidal wave of Chinese money that is pouring into the global economy and reshaping financial markets. In residential and commercial real estate, the new flow of cash is upending the traditional dynamics of buying and selling.

This year, Chinese families represented for the first time the largest group of overseas home buyers in the United States. Big spenders on new homes are helping prop up local economies in the Midwest. But in dense areas like San Francisco and Manhattan, they are also affecting the affordability and availability of housing, as demand outpaces supply and bidding wars ensue.

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Abengoa’s bankruptcy may be a turning point in ‘green’ energy subsidies.

• Giant ‘Green Energy’ Boondoggle Flops in Spain (Tenebrarum)

[..] since Spain’s government and banking system are de facto insolvent and their temporary rescue has been tied to conditions, Spain can no longer subsidize many of the pet projects of social engineers and the vast hordes of cronies they have hitherto kept in bread by enlisting the involuntary help of taxpayers. In a way, it is a case of socialism running out of people to loot. Solar energy has surely come a long way in recent years, as technological progress has undoubtedly improved its economics. Evidently though, the improvement isn’t sufficient yet to make it actually viable. One would think that it makes sense to deploy it in places that are sunny most of the time (such as, well, Spain), but even there, it evidently depends on subsidies.

People often forget that it actually costs energy to produce solar panels. Whether they will in turn produce enough energy during their lifetime to make this investment viable remains questionable. It remains questionable precisely because so many companies in the sector depend both directly and indirectly on a vast variety of government subsidies (including the introduction of inane trade barriers to the detriment of consumers). With the subsidization scam in Spain reaching its limit, it turns out that not even sunny climes can keep solar boondoggles afloat. In the current case, a cool $29 billion (€27.3 bn.) in liabilities have just been exposed to intense vaporization danger, as “green energy” company Abengoa has finally filed for bankruptcy. It is the by far biggest bankruptcy in Spain’s history. 24,000 employees will have to look for a new job.

The sovereign wealth fund of oil junkie Norway holds 2.7% of the company’s shares, an investment it will now have to write off. More than 200 banks are creditors of Abengoa, with total exposure of €20.2 billion. Abengoa’s business activities are described as “renewable electricity generation, converting biomass into biofuel and desalination of seawater” – practically a what’s what list of businesses that cannot possibly survive without subsidies. Abengoa incidentally provides an excellent illustration of Austrian Business Cycle Theory, as more than 20 giant ongoing construction projects the company has initiated will remain incomplete. These empty shells are testament to the fact that there is a big difference between money and real capital. Banks and investors had no problem providing the company with money (much of it created from thin air), lending it huge sums. But the economy’s pool of real funding has proved unable to support the company’s investments.

[..] US taxpayers are on the hook as well in this “Spanish Solyndra”. According to the US media: “When the Free Beacon interviewed a pair of former Abengoa managers last year, one predicted that the company would go under. “This company eventually will go bankrupt. The question is at what expense to the United States people and government,” said Mike Alhalabi, formerly the senior lead mechanical engineer at Abener, a subsidiary of Abengoa. The cost to U.S. taxpayers could be enormous. Abengoa has received nearly $3 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy, as well as more than $100 million in federal grants.

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This goes a bit far for my taste, but the propaganda behind green energy certainly needs more scrutiny. To blame it on ‘leftists’ is weird, though. It’s about everyone with their hands in the public till.

• How Green Energy Really Works (Tenebrarum)

Businesses that cannot possibly survive without subsidies are ipso facto not economically viable. In spite of all the high-minded pronouncements about the “need to save the planet” and how this valiant effort can allegedly be “combined with economic growth”, their existence serves primarily one function: to distribute money looted from taxpayers and consumers to assorted cronies of the political class, who in turn provide the latter with kickbacks. That is all there is to it.

Surely no-one is so naïve as to believe that modern-day politicians, whose horizon and time preferences never stretch beyond the next election date, are really concerned about what might happen to the planet a century hence (not to mention that the entire “climate change” religion seems to be little more than an elaborate hoax). With Abengoa’s bankruptcy we are once again presented with a bill that serves as a stark reminder how much scarce capital has been wasted on such schemes.

Ultimately it is little more than a modern form of highway robbery, clad in highly effective propaganda. Many people feel guilty about “consumerism”, believing that it must be true that prosperity and progress are somehow sinful. In reality, environmentalism has long become the home of a great many authoritarian leftists after they lost their former sugar daddy in Moscow in 1990.

They are trying – very successfully it saddens us to admit – to undermine free market capitalism by appealing to people’s sense of guilt and their innate need to receive absolution for their sins. And they have of course found out that their new sugar daddy is much better than their old one, as there is far more wealth ready to be looted and everybody involved is quite happy to get a cut. Occasionally reality has a habit of interfering, but that won’t stop them, at least not yet.

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“The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat.”

• Kremlin Says Putin ‘Fully Mobilized’ To Tackle Threat From Turkey (Reuters)

President Vladimir Putin is fully mobilized to tackle what the Kremlin regards as an unprecedented threat from Turkey following the shooting down of one of its warplanes by a Turkish F-16, the Russian leader’s spokesman said on Saturday. In comments which underscore how angry the Kremlin still is over the incident, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, called the behavior of the Turkish air force “absolute madness” and said Ankara’s subsequent handling of the crisis had reminded him of the “theater of the absurd.” “Nobody has the right to traitorously shoot down a Russian plane from behind,” Peskov told Russia’s “News on Saturday” TV program, calling Turkish evidence purporting to show the Russian SU-24 jet had violated Turkish air space “cartoons”.

Peskov said the crisis had prompted Putin, whose ministers are preparing retaliatory economic measures against Turkey, to “mobilize” in the way an army does in tense times. “The president is mobilized, fully mobilized, mobilized to the extent that circumstances demand,” said Peskov. “The circumstances are unprecedented. The gauntlet thrown down to Russia is unprecedented. So naturally the reaction is in line with this threat.” Peskov said Putin was aware of a Turkish request for him to meet President Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of the Paris climate change conference next week but gave no indication of whether such a meeting would take place. Erdogan on Saturday said the Paris summit could be a chance to repair Ankara’s relations with Russia.

Peskov denied Turkish press reports which said Moscow and Ankara had struck a deal for their warplanes to stop flying along the Syrian-Turkish border, saying military ties between the two countries had been severed and a hot line meant to avoid misunderstandings among their pilots dismantled. Peskov, according to the TASS news agency, also spoke of how Erdogan’s son had a “certain interest” in the oil industry. Putin has said oil from Syrian territory controlled by Islamic State militants is finding its way to Turkey. Erdogan has spoken of slander and asked anyone making such accusations to back up their words with evidence. Peskov said he “noted” that Turkey’s newly-appointed energy minister, Berat Albayrak, was Erdogan’s son-in-law. Peskov said there could be up to 200,000 Turkish citizens on Russian soil. “What’s important is that everyone who is able to use their influence to guarantee at least some predictability in the pattern of Turkey’s behavior,” said Peskov. “Russian planes should never be shot down.”

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Read contradictory reports on whether Turkish workers now in Russia would be sent back.

• Vladimir Putin Announces Russian Sanctions Against Turkey (Guardian)

Russia has announced a package of economic sanctions against Turkey in retaliation for the shooting down of a Russian jet four days ago on the Syrian-Turkish border. President Vladimir Putin signed a decree outlining the curbs and the details were posted on the Kremlin’s website. Among the measures announced were restrictions on imports of some Turkish goods, a ban on charter flights between the two countries and an an end to Russian tour operators selling trips to Turkey. It also said Turkish companies operating in Russia and Turkish staff employed by Russian companies will face restrictions and ordered the government to prepare a list of goods, businesses and jobs that would be affected.

Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said there are close to 90,000 Turkish nationals working in Russia. Taking family members into account, that figure rises to 200,000. Russia is Turkey’s second largest trading partner and more than three million Russian tourists visited Turkey last year. The decree, which came into force immediately, was called: “On measures to ensure Russia’s national security and protect Russian citizens from criminal and other illegal activities, and the application of special economic measures against Turkey.” On Friday, Russia reinstated the need for visas to travel between the two countries.

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Erdogan gets more exposed by the day. Russia hasn’t even started yet. They know exactly what is going on.

• Iraqi Politician Claims Turkey Lets ISIL Sell Oil for $20 a Barrel (Sputnik)

Turkey allows the Islamic State terrorist group to sell Iraqi and Syrian oil for just $20 a barrel, Iraq’s former National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie wrote on Saturday. In a statement posted on his Facebook page al-Rubaie, who is also a leader of the Law-Governed State parliamentary coalition, outlined Ankara’s four-pronged support for the Islamic militants, with the illegal oil trade topping the list. “First and foremost, the Turks help the militants sell stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil for $20 a barrel, which is half the market price,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie wrote.

Turkey in general, and Istanbul in particular, is also a place where ISIL commanders recruit local migrants and take them to Mosul in Iraq or Raqqa in Syria, he noted. “Each month hundreds of radicals cross the Turkish border, while the local law enforcers pretend they just don’t see,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie wrote, adding that many wounded ISIL fighters were apparently undergoing treatment in Turkish hospitals. During a joint news conference with French President Francois Hollande in Moscow earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin mentioned the massive supplies of Syrian oil being sent to Turkey by the Islamic State terrorist group.

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Yesss! Let’s invest in killing ‘them’! The globe’s no. 1 growth industry. The only one, as a matter of fact.

• BAE Sets Its Sights on Tank and Ammo Exports (Bloomberg)

BAE Systems is merging its munitions and combat vehicles arms in the U.K. in an effort to sharpen its focus on export deals following Britain’s withdrawal from ground offensives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The move, to be completed by Jan. 1, will combine the units under a new Land U.K. sector led by former Combat Vehicles U.K. head Jennifer Osbaldestin, BAE confirmed to Bloomberg on Friday. A revised strategy will be outlined in the first quarter and include an export-market appraisal, it said. No jobs will go.
After a surge in Britain’s investment in military vehicles and ammunition at the height of Mideast desert wars, the balance of spending on BAE products has switched to air and maritime projects such as the Eurofighter Typhoon and Type 26 frigate.

New strike brigades announced by the government this week will use Scout armored vehicles ordered from General Dynamics Corp. “It makes good sense for us to have one interface with the Ministry of Defence, but also both businesses have export potential and when you are looking to secure a land deal you would at the same time be determining what you could offer in ammunition,” BAE spokeswoman Rachael Gordon said. The merged operation will remain within the London-based company’s Platforms & Services U.K. business unit. BAE said in its annual report published in March that it’s seeking a contract to upgrade Britain’s Challenger 2 battle tank, which Monday’s defense review confirmed as a cheaper option than purchasing new vehicles, reflecting limits on ground-equipment spending.

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if they succeed, the financial flood gates are open.

• Somali Victims Of US Drone Strike Take Legal Action Against Netherlands (VK)

Two Somali victims of a US drone strike take legal action against the Netherlands. In January 2014, both men were hit by an American missile and lost two young daughters. One nomad lost his leg and their livestock was mostly annihilated. The Somalis and their lawyers hold the Netherlands co-responsible for the attack by the Americans, they said to reporters of De Volkskrant. The 2014 American drone strike targeted a convoy of cars transporting members of the Somali terrorist organization Al Shabaab. According to CNN, the intended target of the attack was Ahmed Godane. He remained unharmed, but other Al Shabaab members were killed. The nomads and their children and cattle were in the area when the missiles struck. No civilian casualties were reported by Western media or the US government.

The nomads are represented by two Dutch lawyers, Göran Sluiter and Liesbeth Zegveld. This is the first time that victims of an American drone strike apply to a Dutch court. They claim that the Netherlands are co-responsible for the attack since the Dutch provide important intelligence about Somali communications to the US. Documents leaked by former NSA-contractor Edward Snowden have already shown that telecommunication intercepted by the Netherlands plays an important part in American covert operations in Somalia. The Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD has intercepted millions of telephone calls and text messages by Somalis over the past few years, using a satellite receiver in the small town of Burum in the Friesland province. This was done as part of the anti-piracy operation ‘Ocean Shield’, in which the Netherlands participate.

The communication’s ‘meta data’, such as which number called which other number and for how long, were shared with the Americans. As the Americans had little useful intelligence on Somalia, the NSA also provided Dutch military intelligence service MIVD with special interception technology for listening in on telephone traffic from ships off the coast of Somalia. Secret documents published on the website The Intercept reveal how in more than fifty percent of the cases the Americans choose targets in Yemen and Somalia on the basis of meta data. Telecommunication intercepted by foreign parties is crucial in this, as the documents reveal: signal intelligence ‘is often provided by foreign partners.’ ‘By providing these telecom data, the Netherlands are supporting these American strikes to a considerable extent,’ says Sluiter, one of the lawyers. ‘Even more so: without the Dutch support the US could never have realized their drone program in those areas.’

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“I want to go to Central Africa,” the pope told the pilot of his flight to Africa last Wednesday, according to the Vatican newspaper, “and if you’re not able to take me, give me a parachute.”

• Pope Francis to Head to War Zone in Central African Republic (WSJ)

Pope Francis will fly Sunday to the war-torn capital of the Central African Republic, making a trip that has been in doubt for security reasons until practically the last minute, the Vatican spokesman said Saturday evening. “We will the take the plane and fly to Bangui” according to schedule, Father Federico Lombardi said. The confirmation came at the end of a day in which the pope honored Christian martyrs in Uganda, met with young people there and greeted local clergy. The Central African Republic has been beset since 2013 by civil war that has taken on a religious profile, with armed groups divided between Muslims and Christians.

Bangui’s Muslim quarter has been especially hard hit, under siege from Christian militias and effectively off-limits to non-Muslims since September. The pope plans to visit a mosque in the Muslim neighborhood as part of his effort to promote reconciliation, which will also include a meeting with local Christian and Muslim dialogue partners. “I want to go to Central Africa,” the pope told the pilot of his flight to Africa last Wednesday, according to the Vatican newspaper, “and if you’re not able to take me, give me a parachute.”

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We screwed up that region too.

• Over 1 Million Children Need Urgent Aid In Central African Republic (Reuters)

More than a million children in the Central African Republic are in urgent need of humanitarian aid while almost half of those under five are malnourished, the United Nations said on Friday ahead of Pope Francis’ visit to the conflict-torn country. The majority Christian nation plunged into tumult when mostly Muslim Seleka rebels briefly seized power in a 2013 coup. Sectarian violence has plagued the country since and fresh fighting broke out in Bangui two months ago, the worst violence in the capital this year, when the murder of a Muslim man triggered reprisal attacks on a largely Christian neighborhood. Some two million children have been affected by violence which first broke out in December 2012, and 1.2 million now need urgent aid, said the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF.

“The violence that has plagued this country has had a devastating impact on the lives of children,” said Mohamed Fall, UNICEF representative in the Central African Republic. “The humanitarian needs are overwhelming, to meet them we need access and we need greater international support.” The conflict has uprooted 400,000 people within the country and forced half a million to seek refuge in neighboring countries, while recent insecurity and attacks on convoys have hindered aid deliveries and lifesaving activities, UNICEF said. Clashes between mainly Christian anti-balaka militias and mainly Muslim Seleka factions initially cast doubt on the pope’s visit, and risk derailing internationally-backed elections now due on Dec. 27 after being postponed in October due to violence.

Pope Francis is due to arrive in the country on Sunday, and Central Africans on both sides of the religious chasm, even the Seleka, have rallied behind the visit, reducing the risk that his presence could add fuel to the fire of communal tensions. “We are hopeful that … the Pope’s visit will promote reconciliation in a country that is in desperate need of peace,” Fall added.

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When did it get normal for a finance minister to comment on purely political issues?

• Dijsselbloem Warns Of Mini-Schengen Over Refugee Issue (Reuters)

Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem warned that countries which fail to adequately guard Europe’s borders and do not take in a fair share of refugees could find themselves outside the borders of a future “mini-Schengen” zone. In an interview in Belgian business dailies De Tijd and L’Echo on Friday, Dijsselbloem, who is also the Dutch finance minister, said the EU’s passport-free Schengen zone could not work if only a few countries gave shelter to refugees. “There are a few countries that are carrying the heaviest burden in the asylum crisis, taking in the most refugees,” he told the papers, naming Sweden, Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. “Some countries are now saying, ‘It’s not our problem. It’s yours. Good luck.’ That places our solidarity under huge pressure,” he said.

Many members of the 26-country Schengen zone, particularly poorer Eastern European ones, oppose a European Commission plan to distribute refugees who have arrived in Europe since the start of the year. Poland’s newly-elected government has said the risk of militant attacks in the wake of the Paris shootings makes it harder for it to shelter asylum seekers fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East. Dijsselbloem said his aim was to preserve the Schengen zone, but if countries did not shoulder their fair share, others would have to go it alone, since the migrant influx would otherwise endanger their generous welfare states. “To preserve them, you need to guard the external borders. (Otherwise) loads of people come and demand support and they blow the system up. That is what is happening now in the Netherlands,” he said.

He called for more joint investment in guarding the EU’s external borders and for more support for refugee camps in Turkey and Lebanon. “If we do not do it in the external borders of the EU’s 28 members, or in the Schengen zone, then maybe we will have to do it on the level of a mini-Schengen zone,” he said, adding he wanted to avoid that outcome. The Netherlands first floated the idea of a passport-free inner core earlier this month, though Germany, without which such a plan would be unworkable, immediately distanced itself from the proposals. On Wednesday, Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the EU’s executive, warned that the fate of the Schengen zone was bound up with that of the euro single currency: the one would not survive the failure of the other. Schengen consists of 22 countries in the European Union along with Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

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Alan Sked is the original founder of Ukip.

• How A Secretive Elite Created The EU To Build A World Government (Sked)

As the debate over the forthcoming EU referendum gears up, it would be wise perhaps to remember how Britain was led into membership in the first place. It seems to me that most people have little idea why one of the victors of the Second World War should have become almost desperate to join this “club”. That’s a shame, because answering that question is key to understanding why the EU has gone so wrong. Most students seem to think that Britain was in dire economic straits, and that the European Economic Community – as it was then called – provided an economic engine which could revitalise our economy. Others seem to believe that after the Second World War Britain needed to recast her geopolitical position away from empire, and towards a more realistic one at the heart of Europe.
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Neither of these arguments, however, makes any sense at all. The EEC in the 1960s and 1970s was in no position to regenerate anyone’s economy. It spent most of its meagre resources on agriculture and fisheries and had no means or policies to generate economic growth. When growth did happen, it did not come from the EU. From Ludwig Erhard’s supply-side reforms in West Germany in 1948 to Thatcher’s privatisation of nationalised industry in the Eighties, European growth came from reforms introduced by individual countries which were were copied elsewhere. EU policy has always been either irrelevant or positively detrimental (as was the case with the euro). Nor did British growth ever really lag behind Europe’s. Sometimes it surged ahead.

In the 1950s Western Europe had a growth rate of 3.5%; in the 1960s, it was 4.5%. But in 1959, when Harold Macmillan took office, the real annual growth rate of British GDP, according to the Office of National Statistics, was almost 6%. It was again almost 6% when de Gaulle vetoed our first application to join the EEC in 1963. In 1973, when we entered the EEC, our annual national growth rate in real terms was a record 7.4%. The present Chancellor would die for such figures. So the economic basket-case argument doesn’t work.

What about geopolitics? What argument in the cold light of hindsight could have been so compelling as to make us kick our Second-World-War Commonwealth allies in the teeth to join a combination of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany and Italy? Four of these countries held no international weight whatsoever. Germany was occupied and divided. France, meanwhile, had lost one colonial war in Vietnam and another in Algeria. De Gaulle had come to power to save the country from civil war. Most realists must surely have regarded these states as a bunch of losers. De Gaulle, himself a supreme realist, pointed out that Britain had democratic political institutions, world trade links, cheap food from the Commonwealth, and was a global power. Why would it want to enter the EEC?

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Think it’ll stop them?

• ‘Snowden Effect’: NSA Authority to Collect Bulk Phone Metadata Ends (Intercept)

The National Security Agency no longer has legal authority to collect phone metadata in bulk as of midnight, Saturday, November 28. The executive branch previously claimed the government possessed such authority under Section 215 of 2001’s USA PATRIOT Act, which gave the FBI power to demand “any tangible things” needed “for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information.” The FBI was thus able to obtain the phone records of millions of Americans from U.S. telecommunications companies and turn them over to the NSA. The USA FREEDOM Act, signed into law on June 2 earlier this year, gave the executive branch 180 days to wind down the bulk collection program.

According to the Tumblr of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government is “prohibited from collecting telephone metadata records in bulk” starting November 29. The executive branch will now be able to obtain phone metadata by asking the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order telecommunications companies to turn over specific records. The end of the bulk collection program is a modest but real victory for former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, who provided documents concerning the program to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, co-founding editors of The Intercept. The first article by Greenwald based on the documents leaked by Snowden, published on June 6, 2013, was about the bulk collection program.

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The future is one long state of emergency.

• Paris Climate Activists Put Under House Arrest Using Emergency Laws (Guardian)

At least 24 climate activists have been put under house arrest by French police, accused of flouting a ban on organising protests during next week’s Paris climate summit, the Guardian has learned. One legal adviser to the activists said many officers raided his Paris apartment and occupied three floors and a staircase in his block. French authorities did not respond to requests for comment but lawyers said that the warrants were issued under state of emergency laws, imposed after the terror attacks that killed 130 people earlier this month. The author and climate change campaigner, Naomi Klein, accused French authorities of “a gross abuse of power that risks turning the summit into a farce”.

“Climate summits are not photo opportunities to boost the popularity of politicians,” she told the Guardian. “Given the stakes of the climate crisis, they are by their nature highly contested. That is democracy, messy as it may be. The French government, under cover of anti-terrorism laws, seems to be trying to avoid this, shamefully banning peaceful demonstrations and using emergency powers to pre-emptively detain key activists.” Since Thursday, three people have been placed under house arrest in Rens, two in Paris, two in Rouen and one in Lyons, according to campaigners. They may now only leave their houses to sign a post office register verifying their whereabouts, three times a day.

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Stop Making Sense: “There is no doubt that many of the ‘fighters’ returning from Syria take the Balkan route,” he said. “Maybe one in every 100,000.”

• FYROM/Greece Border Tension Peaks As Fence Erected (Kath.)

Tensions peaked at Greece’s border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia over the weekend after the FYROM army started building a border fence to keep out would-be migrants. FYROM border guards were photographed by foreign news agencies as they erected a 2.5-meter-high fence along the Greek border on Saturday. A FYROM army source quoted by Agence France-Presse said the crossing from Greece to FYROM would remain open and that the fence was aimed at ensuring migrants did not try to slip across at other spots. FYROM authorities had indicated in recent weeks that they might build a fence to limit the number of migrants pouring into their country from Greece and border guards recently started filtering the migrants they allow through, granting entry only to people from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result, hundreds of migrants from other countries, including Iran and Pakistan, have gathered in and around the Greek border town of Idomeni, protesting and demanding passage. In a recent interview with Kathimerini and other Greek media, FYROM’s Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki said that the EU’s border monitoring agency Frontex should establish a presence at Greece’s border with FYROM. He suggested that jihadists were slipping through. “There is no doubt that many of the ‘fighters’ returning from Syria take the Balkan route,” he said. “Maybe one in every 100,000.” The tensions over the weekend coincided with yesterday’s EU leaders’ summit on the refugee crisis, which focused also on the role of Turkey, a key transit country for migrants heading toward Europe via Greece.

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And this is not the Balkans, it’s France and Britain.

• Life In A Refugee Camp: ‘The Cold And Fear Get In Your Bones’ (Guardian)

“I was not born to live here like this,” says Ali. “I have three languages but I really want to learn Japanese. I love Japanese movies.” Ali is from Iran. He says he is not alone, but he seems very alone. We are in a refugee camp at Grande–Synthe, a Dunkirk suburb, sitting under a tarpaulin while people wait to see a doctor. But to describe this as a camp is wrong. This is a swamp. There are no basic facilities. None. It’s a field of mud and tattered tents. I am surrounded by people waiting to see a doctor holding little tickets, eyeing each other with suspicion. This, at least, is better than where I have just been, where I found Afghans sleeping in a ditch. The people I am with are worried about the children, aged as young as 10 and 11, they have seen there; “unaccompanied minors” with scabies.

Ali babbles to me non-stop about how he is all right, really. But no one here is. In June, there were maybe 150 people camped out. Now there are more than 10 times as many, predominantly Kurds. Families are arriving all the time. The average refugee is a young man, it’s true, but there are more and more women and children. A boy of seven pulls out his prize possession to show us – a tiny fire truck. Women sit in tents frying potatoes. They smile and chat, but everyone is cold. Everything is wet. Everyone has a story of how they got here. Some show me on their phones images of them getting out of flimsy dinghies – their witnesses to trauma. As they have journeyed from Syria or Eritrea, fleeing Islamic State, torture, unimaginable darkness, the phones are their lifelines. They connect them back to where they have come from and to a world they are now locked out of.

This is limbo. Limbo comes from limbus meaning the edge, the border of hell, and this is as close as I have ever been. Thankfully I am here with Doctors of the World (part of the Médecins du Monde Network), one of the Guardian’s refugee appeal charities, which has provided medical help on the ground in Calais since 2003. The director of the charity, Leigh Daynes, is shocked by what he is seeing – and he is a veteran of Darfur and Haiti. Every day, the charity runs the gauntlet of racism and aggression to get the most basic of care into the camps. Political rhetoric has successfully dehumanised these people as someone else’s problem. We don’t want them, the French don’t want them. Money has been spent on building higher, flesh-ripping fences. So here they fester. Human detritus.

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