NYT Archives - Page 2 of 4 - The Automatic Earth

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden have both agreed in “principle” to hold a meeting to halt escalation of conflict in Ukraine, the Elysee Palace said in a statement on Sunday night. Emmanuel Macron “proposed a summit to be held between President Biden and President Putin and then with relevant stakeholders to discuss security and strategic stability in Europe,” according to the statement. “Presidents Biden and Putin have both accepted the principle of such a summit,” it added. However, such a meeting “can only be held at the condition that Russia does not invade Ukraine,” the Elysee palace added. The “substance” of the summit, should it take place, will be prepared by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken during their meeting expected on Thursday, February 24.

While the Kremlin has yet to issue a comment, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that President Biden “accepted in principle a meeting with President Putin following [Blinken-Lavrov] engagement, again, if an invasion hasn’t happened.” French President briefed his US counterpart on Sunday evening on his talks with Vladimir Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, in a call that reportedly lasted only 15 minutes on Sunday evening. In a call with Putin earlier on Sunday, Macron offered to mediate talks in the so-called Normandy Format “in the next few hours” to secure a ceasefire along the line of contact in the disputed region of Donbass in eastern Ukraine. The Kremlin confirmed that “the two leaders agreed to maintain contact at various levels,” but did not provide any specific details on such plans.

“..they must take the manufactured crisis to the brink of thermonuclear war, so that Joe Biden can save the world and be seen as this legendary diplomat.”

• Biden-Putin Peace Summit Certain to Bring Nobel Peace Nomination (CTH)

To understand why there has been so much escalating rhetoric about Russia going to invade Ukraine at any moment, you must realize the intent. The motives of the crisis narrative are crystal clear. Everything about the Russia invasion of Ukraine has to be increasingly imminent, horrible and loomingly catastrophic for the planet, so that when it doesn’t happen the glorious victory for Dear Leader Biden can be proclaimed and amplified from the mountaintops. Russia has absolutely no plan to invade Ukraine and doesn’t even have a role in this theatrical production from the White House. The way the game is played; and believe me, everything about this is a game; they must take the manufactured crisis to the brink of thermonuclear war, so that Joe Biden can save the world and be seen as this legendary diplomat.

In the annals of U.S. historym there has never been such an important summit. The nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Ron Klain wants in this mid-term election year, is dependent on magnanimous and strategic Biden overcoming all geopolitical odds to save the world. Everything is carefully planned and scripted with a ‘this’, then ‘that‘ approach toward sequencing. Earlier today, the Sunday news talk shows were filled with pending invasion rhetoric. Putin was mere moments away from a massive army entering Ukraine. The smells of heavy diesel loomed in the valleys as the thundering sound of tank tracks approached ever closer. Dark men with black weapons were beating drums and carrying the flag of Mother Russia, as millions were seen marching by U.S. spy satellites in the region.

The birds all fled as the sounds of the battle groups began converging on the Ukraine border. “The Russians are coming; The Russians are coming” one lad shouted to the CNN crew as he whizzed by on his bicycle, trying to peddle fast while carrying a bag of sausages for his sullen and sickly grandparents in eastern Ukraine. CBS David Martin and Margaret Brennan reported {link} the Russian generals were informing their troop commanders of the invasion plans. CNN then broke into the news cycle quoting three sources {link} “saying that the US has intelligence indicating that orders have been sent to Russian commanders to proceed with an attack on Ukraine.” Things looked really bad just before noon…

Everything within the game needs to be looming on the precipice of crisis in order for it to have maximum impact when it doesn’t happen. However, it was always never going to happen, because it is pretend. It is all a big performance, a ruse, built on a completely manufactured scenario they know will never happen… because the White House is making it up.

“Ukraine’s own assessment is clearly far afield of America’s.”

• Ukraine DM: Low Probability of Major Escalation With Russia (Antiwar)

Ukraine DM Oleksii Reznikov told parliament on Friday that there is a low probability of any major escalation with Russia. He added that Ukraine intelligence sees every move made in the area. Tensions at the Russia-Ukraine border have been ongoing, with several Western nations repeatedly predicting a huge war. Ukraine has chided those nations for causing a panic. Predictions of such a conflict go back years, and while previous Ukraine officials had similar pessimism about it, more recently officials see a lot more chance for diplomacy. President Biden again predicted a Russian invasion Friday, noting a Russian offer to talk later this month and suggesting there’d be no point if invasion happens first. Ukraine’s own assessment is clearly far afield of America’s.

Gazprom has honored all contracts.

• Europe Has Next To No Gas Left – Gazprom (RT)

Underground gas storage facilities (UGS) in Europe were 95.3% empty as of February 17, Russia’s state energy giant and major gas exporter Gazprom said on Saturday, citing data from Gas Infrastructure Europe. This means that Europe now has only 4.7% of its gas reserves left for the remainder of the winter season. The volume of active gas in storage facilities is 21% or 8.3 billion cubic meters less compared to the same time last year. In total, 44.8 billion cubic meters have already been withdrawn from Europe’s UGS this winter. According to Gazprom, gas reserves in underground storage facilities in Ukraine are also at a minimum, having dropped to 10.6 billion cubic meters, which is 45% less than last year. Also, earlier this week, authorities in Germany, which has one of the largest underground storage capacities in Europe, reported a plunge in storage volumes to historically low levels compared to previous years.

The European Union, however, this week claimed that its supplies were sufficient to last several more weeks in the event that Russia stops its gas flow to the bloc amid tensions over Ukraine. Russian gas supplies to European countries had already started to fall in mid-2021, and the decline accelerated at the beginning of 2022. Gazprom, however, repeatedly insisted that it is still supplying Europe with gas in strict accordance with existing contracts. Despite this, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, on Saturday called Gazprom’s supply policy intentionally harmful. “Gazprom is consciously trying to store and deliver as little as possible while prices and demand are skyrocketing,” she said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, as quoted by Anadolu news agency.

“The financial system has come to an end.”

• New World Order Desperate as Plan Falls Apart – Martin Armstrong (USAW)

Legendary financial and geopolitical cycle analyst Martin Armstrong thinks the New World Order’s so-called “Great Reset” plan for humanity is falling apart, and the globalists are becoming increasingly “desperate.” Armstrong explains, “They are basically desperate at this stage. I don’t think they anticipate the amount of resistance that they are getting. It’s not just with the truckers in Canada, but this is starting everywhere. There has been an awful lot of resistance consistently that the press does not cover in virtually every city throughout Europe. . . . . They never step out and talk to the people because we are too stupid to actually have an opinion. They know better. This is what Klause Schwab does. He is far more sophisticated than people realize.

He has methodically gone out and created his young global leaders. He is basically sticking people in government positions that are loyal to him. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau is one of them. . . . They think communism is a step up, and the last time this was attempted, it led to the death of 200 million people. This is absurd. . . . You are not allowed to think freely. That’s what communism really is. . . . You don’t realize this whole thing we are going through right now is the same thing. This is cancel culture. Someone said something I don’t like, and that was 20 years ago, so cancel them. This is exactly what took place in communism. You are destroying the right to speak freely.” The so-called “Great Reset” is all about control and tyranny. Armstrong says, “Just look at Canada. Trudeau is one of Klaus Schwab’s young global leaders. The worst countries have leaders that have graduated from his school. Make everybody comply, and if they don’t, crush them to the ground.”

The only good news is, according to Armstrong and his “Socrates” computer analysis, this is “not going to work out well for the globalists pushing communism.” Armstrong says, “With Karl Marx, at the time, people owned nothing. Schwab is saying, ‘You will own nothing and you will be happy.’ This is absurd because what you are doing is creating a fake image. Schwab is saying I am going to relieve you of all your debt. . . . That is a front because the government has gone to the point of no return. What you have to understand here is it is really the government that has to default. What I have said is, look, governments are going to have to default because this is no longer sustainable.” Armstrong predicted last year, “The financial system has come to an end.”

A WEF overview. Can you still get elected anywhere without being a member?

• The Next Step for the World Economic Forum (Koops)

If I give you the names of the following people – Biden, Trudeau, Ardern, Merkel, Macron, Draghi, Morrison, Xi Jinping – what do you think that they have in common? Yes, they are all pampered and stumble over themselves, but that is also not the connection. One can see very quickly that these names certainly connect to lockdown countries and individuals who have ignored their own laws and/or tried in some way to usurp them. But, there is more to it than that and I will give a hint by providing a link with each name. Joseph Biden, President, United States Boris Johnson, PM of United Kingdom Jacinda Ardern, PM of New Zealand Angela Merkel, Former PM of Germany Emmanuel Macron, President of France Justin Trudeau, PM of Canada Xi Jinping, CCP Leader, China Mario Draghi, PM of Italy Scott Morrison, PM of Australia

They are all associated with the World Economic Forum (WEF), a “nonprofit” private organization started (in 1971) and headed by Klaus “You will own nothing and be happy” Schwab and his family. This is a private organization that has no official bearing with any world governance body, despite the implication of the name. It could just as well have been called the “Church of Schwabies.” The WEF was the origin of the “Great Reset” and I would guess that it was the origin of “Build Back Better” (since most of the above names have used that term recently). If you think that the WEF membership ends with just leaders of countries, here are a few more names: Gavin Newsom, Governor of California Jay Inslee, Governor of Washington State Anthony Fauci, Director NIAID Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House .

Allow me to introduce more of the WEF by giving a list of names for the Board of Trustees. Al Gore, Former VP of the US Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action T. Shanmugaratnam, Seminar Minister Singapore Christine Lagarde, President, European Central Bank Ngozi Okonja-Iweala, Director General, WTO Kristalian Georggieva, Managing Director, IMF Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Minister of Canada Laurence Fink, CEO, BlackRock

You can see a cross section of political and economic leaders on the board. The leader of the organization, that is the leader of the Board, is still Klaus Schwab. He has built an impressive array of followers. If you want to really see the extent of influence, go to the website and pick out the corporate name of your choice; there are many to choose from: Abbott Laboratories, Astra-Zeneca, Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer, Serum Institute of India, BASF, Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, Blackrock, CISCO, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Zoom, Yahoo, Amazon, Airbus, Boeing, Honda, Rakuten, Walmart, UPS, Coca-Cola, UBER, Bank of China. Bank of America. Deutsche Bank, State Bank of India, Royal Bank of Canada, Lloyds Banking, JP Morgan-Chase, Equifax, Goldman-Sachs, Hong Kong Exchanges, Bloomberg, VISA, New York Times, Ontario (Canada) Teacher’s Pension Plan

“That’s what the State is folks, violence. Always has been. This is why Klaus Schwab and his minions like Trudeau, Arden and others will fail.”

• The Great Reset Becomes The Great Awakening (Luongo)

The reality is that Arden and Trudeau are both hanging on by a thread because public opinion already turned against them. The only thing propping Trudeau up at this point is the shock at the speed he has escalated events. That shock will wear off very soon. If parliament doesn’t act to limit/censure or simply get rid of this guy, Canadians will have a much bigger problem on their hands. Too many Canadians are still asking, “Is this Canada?” When they should be stating, “This is not Canada.” Stop asking for permission to feel outraged and feel the outrage.

In New Zealand, the veil of authority for Arden is thinner thanks to Trudeau’s mistakes in Ottawa. No doubt they are seeing the same things we are and want no part of it. The knives will come out for Arden quickly if she doesn’t back down. I say all the time, spooks start civil wars, militaries end them. In Canada, the civil war there is just beginning. What we’ve not seen in New Zealand means it’s likely over before anyone even realized they were in one. The Great Reset rests on tyrants like Justin Trudeau to win through fear, intimidation and the banal corruption of weak people to support them. With each image of peaceful people being trampled under the bootheel of Canadian stormtroopers, more people awaken from the slumber of the comfortable lie the government protects us from chaos.

That’s what the State is folks, violence. Always has been. This is why Klaus Schwab and his minions like Trudeau, Arden and others will fail. There is no law these people recognize. There is no restraint on their behavior they feel is justified for their holy cause. The sooner we accept that, like many of the truckers who organized this protest, the sooner we can all begin bridging the divide.

Schwab
https://twitter.com/i/status/1487922335864741890

“The problems we have go a lot deeper than the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates.”

• Why People Believe Wrong Things: A Response to Reader Critiques (Eugyp)

People on the establishment side of the debate mainly argue that Corona is an unprecedented and unusual virus, and that the scientific response has been totally reasonable and justified. People on our side of the discussion tend to see Corona as nothing special, but the scientific and political response as something new and unusual. I suggest that it helps to see the virus, despite its laboratory origins, as a biological threat of the kind we’ve lived with for millennia; and that it likewise helps to see our unbalanced reaction to this virus as an expression of our own declining society and institutions. That’s a big reason why fixing this has proven to be so hard.

The problems we have go a lot deeper than the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates. In many ways, those guys are just the surface manifestations of this much deeper rot. I know a lot of you conceive of what happened in 2020 as a kind of mass hysteria or hypnosis, or compare our current policies to National Socialism in the 1930s. I think there can be polemical value in both points, but I also think the most important thing, is to recognise that containment is a characteristic policy not of Nazi Germany, but of western liberal democracies. These regimes have enthusiastically embraced lockdowns, compulsory vaccination, and widespread restrictions. For two years, our governments pursued containment as their highest and most central political goal; it became a kind of ideological system unto itself, and persists as one. These are western, liberal, democratic policies by definition, and they show that something is terribly wrong with our political order.

I think it is important to come to terms with these simple facts, because these dangerous crazy lunatics are still running everything. The pandemicists have come out of the past two years more entrenched and powerful than ever before. Our public health bureaucracies have learned what they can do now, and with what little pretence. SARS-2 research will receive tidal waves of funding for decades to come; even people who study elephants or soil fungi will now find incentives to make their work at least a little bit about Corona. The SARS-related virus research will also continue, there will be more lab leaks, and the vaccinators will show up every fall with their mRNA snake oil. It would be better, if all of this nonsense were directed, or the result of some unusual passing madness. It’s not; it is the way things are. This is the nature of the political and social institutions that govern us.

What’s more striking, that the NYT goes after the CDC, or that they do it only now?

• The CDC Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects (NYT)

For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public. When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected. The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.

Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said. Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.

Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots. Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.” Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

[..] Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status. But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years. Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists. “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021. A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”

CDC doesn’t publish, and scientists don’t research.

• Scientists Reluctant to Study Vaccine Side Effects, Notes Top Journal (DS)

While current evidence suggests that serious side effects are rare, the same is true of Covid itself when we’re talking about healthy, young people or those with a prior infection. Hence it’s by no means clear that vaccination actually makes sense for these people – especially if you factor in the possibility of unknown, long-term effects. So far, there’s evidence of an increased risk of blood clots following the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, and an increased risk of heart inflammation following the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. While the absolute risks are still low, any side effects – however rare – have to be taken seriously. What’s more, there’s evidence that side effects are more common in young people and those who’ve already had Covid – two groups that face very little risk from the disease itself.

However, we still don’t know exactly what the risk of side effects is for specific subgroups, such as ‘people aged 18–30 with a prior infection’. In addition, some conditions that have been linked to the vaccines (including one that resembles long Covid) are not yet well-understood. Shouldn’t scientists be rushing to answer these and other unanswered questions about vaccine side effects? You’d certainly think so. But unfortunately, that isn’t the way science works in our current, politicised era. As this surprisingly candid report in the journal Science notes, scientists have other things to consider aside from how pressing certain questions might be:

“Probing possible side effects presents a dilemma to researchers: They risk fomenting rejection of vaccines that are generally safe, effective, and crucial to saving lives. “You have to be very careful” before tying COVID-19 vaccines to complications, Nath cautions. “You can make the wrong conclusion. … The implications are huge.” [Avindra Nath is clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke]” Researchers are reluctant to work on vaccine side effects for fear of causing, or being accused of causing, ‘vaccine hesitancy’. The Science report goes on: “Other researchers note the scientific community is uneasy about studying such effects. “Everyone is tiptoeing around it,” Pretorius says. “I’ve talked to a lot of clinicians and researchers at various universities, and they don’t want to touch it.” [Resia Pretorius is a physiologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa]”

Needless to say, this does not bode well for science. Nor does it bode well for vaccine uptake in the long term. After all, people will only take vaccines – whether for Covid or anything else – if they trust the medical establishment. And ignoring side effects, even rare ones, isn’t the way to build trust.

Wednesday.

• American Truckers Are Launching The People’s Convoy (Malone)

American truckers are launching The People’s Convoy, a peaceful and unified transcontinental movement, on Wednesday, February 23, 2022, from the Adelanto Stadium in Southern California. Starting at 10:00 a.m., hundreds of truckers will hear words of encouragement and blessings from a group of speakers including FLCCC President Dr. Pierre Kory and Godspeak Church Pastor Rob McCoy. The truckers and blue-collar workers of the United States will be joined by freedom-loving supporters from all walks of life – frontline doctors, lawyers, first- responders, former military servicemen and women, students, retirees, mothers, fathers and children – on this peaceful and law-abiding transcontinental journey toward the east coast. The truckers encourage one and all to come out to the stadium in the heart of Adelanto, California to wish them well, see them off and join in the journey.

This convoy is about freedom and unity: the truckers are riding unified across party and state lines and with people of all colors and creeds – Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Mormons, Agnostics, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, Republican, Democrats. All individuals are welcome to participate by either attending the launch gathering – at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday February 23, at Adelanto Stadium – or by getting in their own vehicles and following the big rigs from Adelanto toward the east coast! The message of The People’s Convoy is simple. The last 23 months of the COVID-19 pandemic have been a rough road for all Americans to travel: spiritually, emotionally, physically, and – not least – financially.

With the advent of the vaccine and workable therapeutic agents, along with the hard work of so many sectors that contributed to declining COVID-19 cases and severity of illness, it is now time to re-open the country. The average American worker needs to be able to end-run the economic hardships of the last two years, and get back to the business of making bread – so they can pay their rents and mortgages and help jumpstart this economy. To that end, it’s time for elected officials to work with the blue collar and white-collar workers of America and restore accountability and liberty – by lifting all mandates and ending the state of emergency – as COVID is well-in-hand now, and Americans need to get back to work in a free and unrestricted manner.

“Watson said that officers had “done a remarkable job,” and were “very measured in their response.“

• Ottawa Mayor Wants To Sell Confiscated Freedom Convoy Trucks (RT)

Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson has praised the police crackdown on anti-mandate Freedom Convoy protesters in the Canadian capital. With the demonstrations cleared, he told state media that trucks, campers, and vehicles seized from the protesters should be sold off, claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s controversial emergency powers allow him to do so. Speaking to CBC on Saturday, Watson commended police officers for clearing protesters from downtown Ottawa, where they had been camped for three weeks protesting vaccine mandates. The demonstrations were broken by city and federal police officers between Friday and Saturday after Trudeau invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act on Monday.

Despite video footage showing shocking scenes of police brutality, Watson said that officers had “done a remarkable job,” and were “very measured in their response.” At least 170 protesters have been arrested, more than 50 vehicles have been seized, and the government has frozen the bank accounts of at least 76 protest participants and supporters. “Under the Emergencies Act I’ve asked our solicitor and our city manager, ‘how can we keep the tow trucks and the campers and the vans and everything else that we’ve confiscated, and sell those pieces of equipment to help recoup some of the costs that our taxpayers are absorbing?’” Watson told CBC.

[..] It is unclear whether Watson’s plan will go ahead, and whether the Emergencies Act actually allows the city to auction off seized vehicles. Ottawa Police have previously stated that seized vehicles will be held for seven days, after which time they can be retrieved. Likewise the Emergencies Act is currently being enforced despite not being debated in Parliament, and could end up amended significantly. While some of Canada’s provincial premiers have relaxed their rules on masking and vaccination since the protest began, Trudeau’s nationwide vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers and a rule requiring Canadians be vaccinated to leave the country remain in effect.

Ha! Yeah, that’ll work…

• US Congresswoman Proposes Asylum For Canadian Protesters (RT)

A US congresswoman has promised to introduce legislation to grant asylum to Canadian truckers facing persecution from their government for being involved in the recent ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests against Covid-19 restrictions. Republican New Mexico Congresswoman Yvette Herrell announced her campaign to provide refuge to dissident Canadians on Saturday, comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “heavy-handed crackdown against peaceful protesters” to that of “an authoritarian regime like Venezuela.”

Arguing that Canada’s treatment of protesters “is not the action of a Western Democracy,” Herrell said the US should provide asylum for protesters “who have been subjected to violence, had their property confiscated, and their bank accounts frozen by a government that is quickly becoming the embarrassment of the free world.” “I am introducing legislation that would temporarily grant asylum to innocent Canadian protesters who are being persecuted by their own government,” she said. “We cannot be silent as our neighbors to the north are treated so badly “

“When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them?”

• A Social Credit System Arrives in Canada (Sacks)

On Monday, the rhetoric turned to action when Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act. This heretofore-unused 1988 law gives the government virtually unlimited power for 30 days to deal with a crisis. Invoking the law under the present circumstance would require the threat or use of “serious violence,” yet the vast majority of protesters have been entirely peaceful—playing “We Are the World” and waving Maple Leaf flags. Indeed, the government has made little attempt to justify the need for emergency powers beyond Trudeau’s frequent bemoaning of the truckers’ alleged “hateful rhetoric.” His public safety minister Marco Mendocino stated that such extraordinary measures were necessary due to “intimidation, harassment, and expressions of hate.” Perhaps he doesn’t realize that none of these are listed in the law as valid reasons to invoke it.

Trudeau escalated things further on Tuesday night, when he issued a new directive called the Emergency Economic Measures Order. Invoking a War on Terror law called the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, the order requires financial institutions—including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets—to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”). This has resulted, according to the CBC, in “frozen accounts, stranded money and canceled credit cards.” Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person.” A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites.

In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy. Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked—and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised—many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest. Already, a low-level government official in Ontario was fired after her $100 donation came to light. A gelato shop was forced to close when it received threats after its owner was revealed to have donated to the protest. On Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti went on Canadian television to say the quiet part aloud, namely that anyone contributing to “a pro-Trump movement” should be “worried” about their bank accounts and other financial assets being frozen.

When these protestors or those that supported them end up in financial hardship because they lose their job, business, or bank account, what will happen to those who try to help them? Will Canadian financial institutions be forced to play Six Degrees of Deplorables? The fear of being ensnared in the dragnet will surely have a chilling effect on the commercial prospects of those suspected of “unacceptable views,” creating a caste of untouchables whom no one will dare to transact with or help. B.J. Dichter, one of the protest organizers who has had all of his bank accounts and credit cards frozen, expressed the sense of desperation: “It feels like being banished from the medieval village left to die.”

Make sure you have cash.

• Trudeau to Make Surveillance Powers over Financial Transactions Permanent (NR)

As all eyes were trained on the aggressive police sweep of the Ottawa trucker convoy this week, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s administration was quietly moving to implement a sweeping expansion of surveillance power at the federal level. The Trudeau government’s financial war against the truckers has been covered at length. But one underreported aspect of this broader assault on Canadian civil liberties is the effort to bring crowdfunding and payment service providers — two of the most prominent routes for financial transactions on the Internet — under the permanent control of a centralized government authority.

In a February 14 news conference, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland said that the government was using the Emergencies Act to broaden “the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist financing rules so that they cover crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use.” That broadened power requires all forms of digital transactions, including cryptocurrencies, to be reported to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Canada. (I.e., “Fintrac”). “As of today, all crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with Fintrac, and they must report large and suspicious transactions to Fintrac,” Freeland said. She justified the move as a way to “mitigate the risk” of “illicit funds” and “increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by Fintrac and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement.” Trudeau, standing behind Freeland at the press conference, nodded his head in agreement.

Freeland said the trucker convoy, which had assembled to protest coronavirus restrictions, had “highlighted the fact” that digital assets and funding mechanisms “weren’t captured” by the Canadian government’s pre-existing surveillance powers. As a result, she said, “the government will also bring forward legislation to provide these authorities to FinTrac on a permanent basis.” Freeland reiterated that point in a subsequent press conference this past Friday. “We reviewed very, very carefully the tools at the disposal of the federal government, and we used all the tools that we had prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and we determined that we needed some additional tools,” she said. “Now some of those tools, we will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place. The authorities of FinTrac, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and their payment providers.”

New York can’t pick a decent mayor, can it?

• Eric Adams Admits That Vax Mandates Don’t Work, But Won’t Change Them (NYP)

Mayor Eric Adams admitted Wednesday that vaccine mandates don’t work — yet he’s still going ahead with firing city workers who refuse to show proof they got their shots. “The rule was put in place; to start changing it now would send mixed messages,” he said while lamenting the fact that un-jabbed Brooklyn Nets point guard Kyrie Irving can’t play at his home arena even though unvaxxed out-of-towners can. Mixed messages? We’ve heard time and again that vax mandates are a life-and-death question of public health, fending off some new COVID surge. That’s plainly no longer true, if it ever was. So what’s the point now? New York City’s positivity rate is below 2%, down from an Omicron peak of near 23%. It’s clearly time to rethink draconian COVID approaches

The disconnect between policy and reality here is so glaring that the best Adams can offer in defense is a lukewarm worry that changing it might scramble political messaging. But at least he’s finally, albeit inadvertently, come clean about mandates: They’ve become pure hygiene theater. As we’ve said before: The vaccines are safe and effective and almost everybody should get them. But the data reveal that mandates have near-zero effect on COVID outcomes. Look at Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis actively restricted vaccine mandates. Per Mayo Clinic data, the Sunshine State saw about 347 average daily cases per 100,000 people at its Omicron peak. New York, with vastly stricter policies, saw 366. Florida’s fatality rate at the peak was 1.2% vs. New York’s 1.4%. And those outcomes were this similar even before Delta hit.

But even if you don’t want to “follow the science,” what about basic logic? You are allowed to play ball at Barclays Center or the Garden if you’re not vaccinated; you just can’t play for a New York team. Guess we missed that epidemiological principle: Away players are never disease vectors. A rule so self-contradictory has nothing to do with health. It’s pure power politics. Kyrie Irving is lucky. He earns many multiples of what average Americans will see in a lifetime even with his haircut for missed home games. But what of the hundreds of teachers, cops, firefighters and so on Adams just axed for refusing a vaccine? If the mandate’s main purpose is now literally rhetorical, it’s indefensible.

Police in Paris have joined the march against Covid mandates.

For the 32nd Saturday in a row, Paris protests to end COVID law today. pic.twitter.com/4aWM5ZFXJn

— Aaron Ginn (@aginnt) February 20, 2022

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Debt Rattle December 30 2020

Dec 302020

December 30, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:17 am Finance Tagged with: Bernie, Covid19, Hunter Biden, McConnell, mental health, NYT, Ukraine, vaccine, vaccine passport 44 Responses »

Juan Gris Guitar on a chair 1913

• Travelers May Need A COVID Vaccine Passport To Travel In 2021 (JTN)

• ER Nurse Tests Positive For COVID19 Eight Days After He Was Vaccinated (DM)

• Covid Poses ‘Greatest Threat To Mental Health Since Second World War’ (G.)

• Majority Of New COVID Cases In UK Are New Variant (Sky)

• McConnell Blocks Vote On $2,000 Checks, Signals New Package (Hill)

• Bernie Sanders Fights for a $2,000 Check for You on the Senate Floor (Jac.)

• 10 Stats About The $2,000 Checks (DP)

• Ukraine Press Conference Explicitly Ties Hunter & Joe Biden To Corruption (ZH)

• Why Senators Must Reject Avril Haines for Intelligence (MPN)

• UK House Prices Rise By Most In Six Years (R.)

• Five Times this Year the New York Times Accidentally Told the Truth (AIER)

Carlin immune system

George Carlin talking about 2020 all the way back in 1996. He called it. pic.twitter.com/LAJd4UC247

— FightOracle ™ (@fightoracle) December 28, 2020

I’m afraid I lost the plot line along the way. If the chief WHO scientist says there’s no evidence the vaccine protects you from being infected, or even from infecting others, what is the purpose of a vaccine passport?

• Travelers May Need A COVID Vaccine Passport To Travel In 2021 (JTN)

Travelers may need to show proof that they have taken the COVID-19 vaccine in order to travel in 2021. “Several companies and technology groups have begun developing smartphone apps or systems for individuals to upload details of their COVID-19 tests and vaccinations, creating digital credentials that could be shown in order to enter concert venues, stadiums, movie theaters, offices, or even countries,” CBS-Miami reported. “The Common Trust Network, an initiative by Geneva-based nonprofit The Commons Project and the World Economic Forum, has partnered with several airlines including Cathay Pacific, JetBlue, Lufthansa, Swiss Airlines, United Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, as well as hundreds of health systems across the United States and the government of Aruba,” the station reported.

Thomas Crampton, chief marketing and communications officer for The Commons Project, told CNN Business that a simple and easily transferable set of credentials, or a “digital yellow card,” could be the answer. Last week, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said “immunity passports” for Americans to prove they have taken the COVID-19 vaccine might help the country get “back to a new normal.” Dr. Thomas Frieden told CBS that “done right, immunity passports could be one of a series of things that could help us get to a new normal as soon as possible.” “We don’t know if this is going to happen, but fundamentally we’re seeing companies and countries giving people a certificate of vaccination,” he said. “The risk of this is it will make inequality even worse. If people have both susceptibility to the virus and less access to the vaccine, they’ll have even more problems.”

Frieden, who served as director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, said for the passports to work, there would need to be “absolute privacy,” adding that the vaccine should be “absolutely opt in.” “Fundamentally, we’re facing a very difficult few weeks and few months. There’s not enough vaccine yet and we’re seeing the highest levels of cases, hospitalizations and deaths the U.S. has since the start of this pandemic,” he said. In an op-ed published this week in The Washington Post, Frieden and co-author Aaron Schwid, a human rights lawyer, wrote: “As more and more people are vaccinated, it’s time to carefully design a system of ‘immunity passports.'” “These passports would serve as a form of proof of immunity, allowing people who have immunity to engage in some activities others cannot. That could make it possible to ratchet down protective measures, such as stay-at-home orders and business closures, without increasing health risks,” they wrote.

We’ll have to see a lot more of these stories before someone admits there may be a problem.

• ER Nurse Tests Positive For COVID19 Eight Days After He Was Vaccinated (DM)

A California nurse has tested positive for COVID-19 just eight days after receiving the vaccination. ER nurse Matthew W., received the Pfizer vaccine on December 18, according to a post from Instagram. ‘Got my Covid vaccine! The 15 minutes afterward sitting around with a bunch of others while health care workers asked us how we felt made me think of an opium den. I’ll report back if I start to grow a third arm,’ Matthew wrote. But on Christmas Eve, Matthew, who works at two different hospitals in San Diego, began feeling sick after working a shift in the COVID-19 unit. He told ABC 10 News, that he first got the chills before coming down with muscle aches and fatigue. On December 26, he went to a hospital to get tested for the virus and tested positive.

And while it is surprising, it’s not unexpected, according to health experts who weighed in on the case. Dr Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist with Family Health Centers of San Diego, told the station: ‘It’s not unexpected at all. If you work through the numbers, this is exactly what we’d expect to happen if someone was exposed.’ And while it is surprising, it’s not unexpected, according to health experts who weighed in on the case. ‘That first dose we think gives you somewhere around 50%, and you need that second dose to get up to 95%,’ Ramers added. Matthew says he is feeling better since his symptoms appeared last week.

“..the number of people in contact with mental health services has never been higher, and some hospital trusts report that their mental health wards are at capacity.”

• Covid Poses ‘Greatest Threat To Mental Health Since Second World War’ (G.)

The coronavirus crisis poses the greatest threat to mental health since the second world war, with the impact to be felt for years after the virus has been brought under control, the country’s leading psychiatrist has said. Dr Adrian James, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said a combination of the disease, its social consequences and the economic fallout were having a profound effect on mental health that would continue long after the epidemic is reined in. As many as 10 million people, including 1.5 million children, are thought to need new or additional mental health support as a direct result of the crisis. The prediction comes as the virus surges in the UK, and highlights the need for a plan that ensures those who develop mental illness or see existing conditions worsen have swift access to effective support in the years ahead.

“This is going to have a profound effect on mental health,” James said. “It is probably the biggest hit to mental health since the second world war. It doesn’t stop when the virus is under control and there are few people in hospital. You’ve got to fund the long-term consequences.” Demand for mental health services dropped at the start of the pandemic as people stayed away from GP surgeries and hospitals, or thought treatment was unavailable. But the dip was followed by a surge in people seeking help that shows no sign of abating. Data from NHS Digital reveals that the number of people in contact with mental health services has never been higher, and some hospital trusts report that their mental health wards are at capacity. “The whole system is clearly under pressure,” James said.

Modelling by the Centre for Mental Health forecasts that as many as 10 million people will need new or additional mental health support as a direct result of the coronavirus epidemic. About 1.3 million people who have not had mental health problems before are expected to need treatment for moderate to severe anxiety, and 1.8 million treatment for moderate to severe depression, it found. The overall figure includes 1.5 million children at risk of anxiety and depression brought about or aggravated by social isolation, quarantine or the hospitalisation or death of family members. The numbers may rise as the full impact becomes clear on Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, care homes and people with disabilities.

The UK is moving into danger territory. If only they had not cut their medical facilities in half.

• Majority Of New COVID Cases In UK Are New Variant (Sky)

The new, faster-spreading coronavirus variant makes up the majority of new cases in the UK, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has told Sky News. A recent surge of COVID-19 cases is largely due to the variant which may be up to 70% more infectious than the original one, Mr Hancock said. “The ‘suppress the virus’ bit has got a whole lot harder since the new variant really got going over December,” he said. “Now the majority of the new cases in the UK are the new variant. It is much, much easier to transmit from one person to another.”

The faster transmission had put extreme pressure on the NHS, Mr Hancock added. “It is absolutely critical that people follow the rules and do everything they can to stop the spread, particularly of the new variant of this virus that transmits so much faster.” “So, the challenge of suppressing the virus has got harder, but thankfully, the cavalry has arrived in terms of not one, but two vaccines – and we’ve got to get them into people’s arms at the speed at which they can be manufactured”.

“..the GOP leader later filed a bill that would increase the amount of the stimulus checks, repeal a legal shield for tech companies known as Section 230 and create an election commission that would study the November elections.”

• McConnell Blocks Vote On $2,000 Checks, Signals New Package (Hill)

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday blocked an attempt by Democrats to set up a stand-alone vote on increasing the amount of recently passed stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000. Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) both tried to get consent for the Senate to bring up legislation that passed the House in a 273-134 vote on Monday. The GOP leader did not directly address why he objected, but under the Senate’s rules any one senator can block efforts to set up votes or pass bills. McConnell signaled separately that he could package the increase in direct stimulus checks, with a repeal of a tech shield that has emerged as a top target for Trump and election-related investigations.

Trump, in his statement on signing the $2.3 trillion package, said the Senate would “start the process for a vote” that tackles the three issues. “During this process, the president highlighted three additional issues of national significance he would like to see Congress tackle together,” McConnell said. “Those are the three important subjects the president has linked together. This week the Senate will begin a process to bring these three priorities into focus,” he added. McConnell did not provide additional details during his floor speech about how he might bring the measures up. But the GOP leader later filed a bill that would increase the amount of the stimulus checks, repeal a legal shield for tech companies known as Section 230 and create an election commission that would study the November elections.

“Sanders has the procedural means at his disposal to keep the Senate in session all the way to New Year’s Day..”

• Bernie Sanders Fights for a $2,000 Check for You on the Senate Floor (Jac.)

For most of the last few decades, budget standoffs in Washington tended to follow the same script: Republicans threatened to block some domestic spending bill or fully shut down the government unless Democrats agreed to let the GOP own the libs with something bad like a JPMorgan giveaway, a tax break for the rich, or a draconian cut to a social program. When Democrats controlled Congress, they never mustered the courage to respond with their own version of the same shrewd tactics. Even toward the end of the Bush era when the Iraq War was deeply unpopular, they never made a serious attempt to hold up a bloated GOP-written Pentagon bill in order to try to get their way on a progressive initiative. But at the end of one of the worst years in recent history, it seems things are changing.

In a long overdue script-flipping move, Sen. Bernie Sanders is now moving to halt a major defense bill until and unless Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell allows a full vote on legislation to give millions of starving Americans $2,000 in emergency aid. That legislation passed the House yesterday over opposition from a majority of House Republicans, who tried their best to deny their own constituents much-needed aid. Now the bill is in McConnell’s hands, and Sanders is pulling a McConnell on McConnell. He is imperiling the GOP boss’s top priority — the defense bill that authorizes pay increases for soldiers, military training, new weapons systems, while also complicating attempts to draw down troops deployed in Afghanistan. That McConnell-backed legislation could be stalled unless he agrees to Sanders’ demands and stops obstructing a progressive priority.

The Vermont independent appears ready to play hardball: He is doing his best impression of Marc Maron’s cameo in Almost Famous, effectively screaming “lock the gates!” and threatening to force Senate Republicans to remain in Washington, rather than flee while the country withers. The American Prospect reports: “Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), with the backing of the Senate Democratic caucus, is prepared to make life miserable for Senate Republicans if they do not put a clean vote on the floor to increase one-time emergency payments to most Americans approved in the recent COVID relief package from $600 to $2,000. Sanders has the procedural means at his disposal to keep the Senate in session all the way to New Year’s Day, inconveniencing Senators of both parties, particularly the incumbent Republicans from Georgia, who are in their final full week of campaigning for runoff elections on January 5….

The Senate operates on the principle of unanimous consent. It’s not impossible to get things done if one Senator objects, but it’s quite a bit slower. The majority needs to hold votes and waste time to muscle past an objecting Senator. For this reason, Sanders can prevent quick passage of the defense bill override, the only thing McConnell really wants to accomplish in the last week of the Senate session. This ramps up pressure on McConnell to just hold a vote on the $2,000 checks. Senators don’t want to be stuck in Washington on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day if they can prevent it.“

“3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).”

• 10 Stats About The $2,000 Checks (DP)

1. The total cost of $2,000 checks ($465 billion) is less than half the amount that American billionaires have made during the pandemic ($1 trillion). The total cost of the checks is less than the amount that just 16 American billionaires increased their net worth by during the pandemic ($471 billion).

2. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk gained more wealth during the pandemic ($158 billion) than Congress just authorized for additional unemployment benefits for millions of Americans ($120 billion).

3. Jeff Bezos’s personal wealth increased more every second of 2020 ($2,800) than Congress is considering giving Americans who are facing eviction, starvation and bankruptcy ($2,000).

4. Congressional lawmakers are being paid $3,300 of government money every week to come up with ways to block $2,000 checks to millions of Americans.

5. It took Congress less than a month to pass legislation giving a $700 billion bailout to bank executives during the financial crisis. It has taken Congress more than 8 months to even seriously consider a far less expensive bill to give $2,000 checks to millions of Americans during this economic crisis.

6. A $2,000 survival check would give the average soldier more money than the proposed 3 percent military pay increase that is included in defense legislation that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ed Markey are filibustering in order to force a vote on the survival checks.

7. The richest 5 percent of Americans received more in Trump tax cuts in 2020 ($145 billion) than Congress is spending on increased unemployment benefits for millions of Americans during the economic crisis ($120 billion).

8. In 2016, “children, elderly, disabled people, and students made up around 70 percent of the poor,” according to the People’s Policy Project. Unlike unemployment benefits, $2,000 checks would help them.

9. About 60 percent of Georgia households make less than $75,000, meaning Georgia Republican senators allowing $2,000 checks to be blocked would deny aid to roughly 2 million of their state’s households as they run for reelection.

10. As Republicans try to block the $2,000 check legislation, a new national survey found that 78 percent of Americans support it, even as some pundits insist that the proposal is “divisive.”

Can we bury this story too?

• Ukraine Press Conference Explicitly Ties Hunter & Joe Biden To Corruption (ZH)

From the introduction: “At one of the first press conferences about a year ago, we showed bank transactions for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the family of former US Vice President Joe Biden, namely to his son Robert Hunter Biden. The latter was a member of the board of directors of the infamous gas production company Burisma. Burisma belongs to the fugitive Yanukovych-era minister Mykola Zlochevsky. The inclusion of Biden in the Burisma leadership and payment for his services is nothing more than a political cover that protected Zlochevsky from the Ukrainian law, namely from the criminal code.”

Two foreign witnesses whose identities are protected – Witness 1 and Witness 2 – came forward to testify about the facts of the case. Konstantyn Kulyk, the Head of the Group of Prosecutors of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, explained what the witnesses offered: “One quote from a statement by a Witness: “All the described financial transactions were fictitious. And a lot of money was paid in Ukraine so that the state authorities turned a blind eye to it.” [snip] In the period from November 2014 to October 2015, the Witnesses noticed strange recurring payments that, at the direction of Oleh Nelin (Zlochevsky’s assistant in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine), were sent from the account of BURISMA HOLDINGS LTD, which was opened for the personal needs of Mykola Zlochevsky, in the Latvian PrivatBank AS to the account of the American company ROSEMONT SENECA BONAI LLC.”

“The witnesses drew attention to these payments since about 20 times the same uneven amount was recurring – $83,333.33 as payment for consulting services. [snip] In the period from November 2014 to October 2015, the money stolen from Ukrainians, located on account of BURISMA HOLDINGS LTD with the Latvian PrivatBank AS, was transferred to the account of ROSEMONT SENECA BONAI LLC in the American bank MORGAN STANLEY in payments in total amounting to $3.4 million for consulting services. [snip] This is a payment for the political “cover” that Biden provided to Zlochevsky.” The video offers a graphic image showing the flow of money and favors:

Andrii Derkach picked up the narrative. He focused on Joe Biden’s conversations with Former President Poroshenko when Viktor Shokin, a prosecutor, started looking into Zlochevsky’s graft. As we all know, Biden openly boasted about holding up money from the U.S. unless Poroshenko fired Shokin. The press conference included audio from a November 16, 2016 conversation between Biden and Poroshenko. Biden was wheeling and dealing for influence and money – and conducting foreign policy behind Trump’s back. The men spoke again in February 2017, at which time Biden smothered Poroshenko with fulsome compliments. Ukraine’s government is gunning for Joe Biden. The Ukrainians know Biden helped prop up a corrupt government in their country and that he profited mightily from doing so. No wonder this video has gone viral.

“She is the affable assassin..”

• Why Senators Must Reject Avril Haines for Intelligence (MPN)

Even before President-elect Joe Biden sets foot in the White House, the Senate Intelligence Committee may start hearings on his nomination of Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence. Barack Obama’s top lawyer on the National Security Council from 2010 to 2013 followed by CIA Deputy Director from 2013 to 2015, Haines is the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. She is the affable assassin who, according to Newsweek, would be summoned in the middle of the night to decide if a citizen of any country, including our own, should be incinerated in a U.S. drone strike in a distant land in the greater Middle East. Haines also played a key role in covering up the U.S. torture program, known euphemistically as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which included repeated waterboarding, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, dousing naked prisoners with ice-cold water, and rectal rehydration.

For these reasons, among others, the activist groups CODEPINK, Progressive Democrats of America, World Beyond War, and Roots Action have launched a campaign calling on the Senate to reject her confirmation. These same groups ran successful campaigns to dissuade Biden from choosing two other warmongering candidates for critical foreign policy positions: China-hawk Michele Flournoy for Secretary of Defense and torture apologist Mike Morell for CIA Director. By hosting calling parties to Senators, launching petitions and publishing Open Letters from DNC delegates, feminists—including Alice Walker, Jane Fonda, and Gloria Steinem—and Guantanamo torture survivors, activists helped derail candidates who were once considered shoo-ins for Biden’s cabinet. Now activists are challenging Avril Haines.

In 2015, when Haines was CIA Deputy Director, CIA agents illegally hacked the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to thwart the Committee’s investigation into the spy agency’s detention and interrogation program. Haines overruled the CIA’s own Inspector General in failing to discipline the CIA agents who violated the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers. According to former CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, she not only shielded the hackers from accountability but even awarded them the Career Intelligence Medal. And there’s more. When the exhaustive 6,000-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture was finally complete, after five years of investigation and research, Haines took charge of redacting it to deny the public’s right to know its full details, reducing the document to a 500-page, black-ink-smeared summary.

By no means just in the UK. As the economy shrinks bigtime.

• UK House Prices Rise By Most In Six Years (R.)

British house prices rose faster than expected in December to record their biggest annual increase in six years, as tax incentives and COVID-driven appetite for larger homes continued to boost demand, mortgage lender Nationwide said. House prices rose by 0.8% in December alone, barely slowing from the 0.9% recorded in November, and were 7.3% higher than a year earlier, well above forecasts in a Reuters poll for a 6.7% rise. After a collapse in house purchases during the first months of lockdown, there has been a surge in demand to move house, driven in part by a temporary exemption of property purchase taxes which will expire at the end of March.

Nationwide said the strength of the housing market contrasted with weakness in some other parts of the economy – especially those exposed to renewed COVID-19 restrictions – and said the outlook for prices in 2021 was highly uncertain. “Housing market activity is likely to slow in the coming quarters, perhaps sharply, if the labour market weakens as most analysts expect, especially once the stamp duty holiday expires at the end of March,” Nationwide economist Robert Gardner said. So far furlough payments and similar support for the self-employed had limited the impact of a historic 26% fall in economic output on the housing market, against most economists’ earlier expectations, he added.

Propaganda.

• Five Times this Year the New York Times Accidentally Told the Truth (AIER)

The paper of record in 2020 shifted dramatically to the most illiberal stance possible on the virus, pushing for full lockdowns, and ignoring or burying any information that might contradict the case for this unprecedented experiment in social and economic control. This article highlights the exceptions. The first shocking sign of the placing of a persistent bias was a podcast with reporter Donald McNeil on February 27. This was the beginning. It was grossly irresponsible. He asserted that half the American public would get this disease and that it would have a case fatality rate of 2.5%, or 25 times as deadly as flu, hence 4.8 million dead people. No consideration of demographic gradients in risk and no knowledge of viral basics such as the tradeoff between severity and prevalence.

Even if you leave aside the fog of fatality misclassification, he exaggerated the risk by 12 times but still spoke with a sense of certainty designed to create panic. Host Michael Barbaro himself seemed shocked: “I thought you were here to bring calm, Donald.” “I’m trying to bring a sense that if things don’t change, a lot of us might die,” he said. “If you have 300 relatively close friends and acquaintances, six of them would die.” The primal fear of disease is thus thrown into massive overdrive, following 100 years in which public health tried to bring rationality to the topic. That podcast was followed by an op-ed by the same journalist/pundit: “To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.”

It seemed incredible that such a responsible outlet would advocate the overthrow of a century of public-health wisdom and even immunological basics, but that’s what they did. At this point, the New York Times was fully committed to the narrative that we must dismantle society to save it. And there it has been for nearly a year of unbearably biased coverage. Even within the blatant and aggressive pro-lockdown bias, and consistent with the way the New York Times does its work, the paper has not been entirely barren of truth about Covid and lockdowns. Below I list five times that the news section of the paper, however inadvertently and however buried deep within the paper, actually told the truth.

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Debt Rattle December 21 2020

Dec 212020

December 21, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:12 am Finance Tagged with: bipartisan, Brexit, Congress, COVID Variant, Covid19, Flynn, mutation, NYT, Russiagate, SCOTUS, stimulus bill, Swalwell 26 Responses »

Edward Hopper House tops 1921

• $600 Is Not Enough, And It Won’t Get Easier (Sirota)

• Hospital CEOs Have Gotten Rich Cutting Staff And Supplies (IC)

• Coronavirus New Variant (Conv.)

• Covid Chaos Disrupts Kent Ports As France Bans UK Freight (G.)

• Saudi Arabia Shuts Down Int’l Air, See & Land Travel Over New Covid Strain

• US Deep State Preempts Reset in Relations With Russia (SCF)

• ‘No Question’ Russia Behind Latest Hacking Scare – Adam Schiff (RT)

• Trump Campaign Take Election Battle To SCOTUS Over Pennsylvania Rulings (RT)

• Flynn: Foreign Intelligence Agencies Were Monitoring US Election (ET)

• Japan Record $1 Trillion Budget Highlights COVID Challenge To Growth, Debt (R.)

• For NY Times, No News Is Fit To Print About Rep. Swalwell And A Spy (Hill)

A bipartisan effort. Meanwhile, none of this ever made it:

“Back in March, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton proposed giving low- and middle-income Americans between $1,000 and $4,000 of aid per month. More recently, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley joined with Sen. Bernie Sanders to push for $1,200 checks. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump reportedly told allies he wanted at least $1,200 and up to $2,000..”

• $600 Is Not Enough, And It Won’t Get Easier (Sirota)

Congressional leaders announced an agreement on a new $900 billion stimulus bill that will deliver a boost in unemployment benefits and provide $600 checks to some families. Democratic leaders are depicting this as a big win and are promising that these kinds of emergency spending bills will become “much easier” in a new Congress under Joe Biden. Both of those arguments are ridiculous. Here’s the truth: Democrats had a rare opportunity to win on a wildly popular proposal for much bigger survival checks, but they chose to lose. Here’s some more truth: one-time means-tested checks of $600 is not a big victory, and not even the bare minimum that should be considered acceptable during an economic meltdown that has been punctuated by mass starvation and intensifying poverty.

Though the legislative language of the final package has not yet been released, it appears the meager checks come in a bill that will give new tax benefits to corporate executives to write off their meals and provide other tax breaks to businesses that used the Paycheck Protection Program — which will be a windfall for the wealthy. Will the bill change the law to similarly exempt emergency unemployment benefits from tax levies? We don’t yet know, but there’s no indication it will. According to a bill summary circulating on Capitol Hill, the legislation provides a mere $286 billion for the survival checks and unemployment benefits, and an additional $51 billion for food aid and rental assistance. That’s not nothing, but it’s obviously inadequate. For comparison, only three years ago, Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that enriched the wealthiest one percent of households.

Much of the blame for this debacle certainly goes to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who seems absolutely determined to starve the country. But much of it also goes to Democratic leaders who had one of the easiest political opportunities to forge a bipartisan coalition or a much bigger lifeline to Americans — and then decided to squander it. Let’s remember: Back in March, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton proposed giving low- and middle-income Americans between $1,000 and $4,000 of aid per month. More recently, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley joined with Sen. Bernie Sanders to push for $1,200 checks. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump reportedly told allies he wanted at least $1,200 and up to $2,000 — and he made a general demand for more money public in a Fox News interview last week.

“Right now, I want to see checks – for more money than they’re talking about – going to people,” he said. “I’m pushing it very hard, and to be honest with you, if the Democrats really wanted to do the deal, they’d do the deal.” He tweeted on Sunday that Congress should give people “more money in direct payments.” You can try to argue that the words of a handful of maverick Republicans and Trump cannot be fully trusted — maybe that’s true, but it’s moot. The point here is that there was a huge opportunity for Democrats to triangulate a group of Republican senators and a Republican president against McConnell — and Democrats refused to do it.

Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer followed Sen. Joe Manchin, Mark Warner and other Democratic corporatists into budget negotiations that kept producing smaller and smaller stimulus proposals, and now they are trying to portray a meager $600 one-time payment as some sort of enormous victory.

When you read about overwhelmed health care systems in US, UK, etc, don’t forget this part.

• Hospital CEOs Have Gotten Rich Cutting Staff And Supplies (IC)

In 2006, Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx had healthier patients, just enough nursing staff to take care of them, and a CEO who was earning $2 million a year, a senior nurse and union leader told The Intercept. Fifteen years later, its patients are sicker than ever before, its staffing levels are inadequate, and, as of 2018, its new CEO is earning $13 million per year. The nonprofit hospital, like hundreds of others across the nation, has been cutting costs, progressively going leaner on staffing and supplies over the years. This accelerated approach has meant that the pandemic has hit the hospital, especially health care workers, doubly hard. The nurse, Karine Raymond, has provided care at the facility for 27 years. In the second wave of Covid-19, as in the first, she and her colleagues are taking care of double the patients that they typically do.

“It’s untenable and unmanageable and left us feeling very concerned that perhaps we might have done better if circumstances were different,” said Raymond. “[Our CEO] makes $13 million. How many nurses would his salary pay for? I do have a problem with seeing the suffering of the community I’m supposed to serve while others are collecting funds that have been provided by state and federal governments just because they can.” Nurses were overworked before, but since March, many nurses have left the industry entirely, retiring early or seeking other work. While personal protective equipment supplies are more abundant now than in the spring, nurses are more burnt out than ever — just as hospitals are getting ready for another wave of Covid-19 patients.

The executives who typically make the decisions at the United States’s hospitals, whether for-profit or ostensibly nonprofit, are uniquely unprepared for the coming deluge, experts say. A decadeslong failure to recruit and retain health care workers like nurses, technicians, and nurse’s aides has made U.S. hospitals less able to manage the scope of a pandemic, and makes it much more likely that hospitals will break down, as they did in the spring in Wuhan, Italy, and New York City.

“Even before the pandemic hit us so hard hospitals were using a policy called ‘Lean,’ which is just-in-time staffing and supplies,” said Linda Aiken, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania who has long studied the relationship between nurse staffing and patient care. The concept of lean hospitals was developed by management consultant Mark Graban in 2009, but business practices imported from manufacturing based on lean staffing began to be introduced in health care starting in the early ’90s. “All of our research shows those policies were a failure well before Covid and now they are a disaster during this national emergency,” said Aiken.

“..there was no evidence to date that this variant alters disease severity, either in terms of mortality or the seriousness of the cases of COVID-19 for those infected.”

• Coronavirus New Variant (Conv.)

The new UK variant, known as VUI–202012/01 or lineage B.1.1.7, was first identified in the county of Kent on September 20. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, first announced the existence of the variant on December 14; it was subsequently confirmed by Public Health England and the UK’s COVID-19 sequencing consortium. The variant carries 14 defining mutations including seven in the spike protein, the protein that mediates entry of the virus into human cells. This is a relatively large number of changes compared to the many variants we have in circulation globally. To date, genetic profiles – or genomes – of this variant have been largely sequenced and shared from the UK but include some in Denmark and two cases in Australia.

There have also been reports of a case in the Netherlands. These countries all have very large genome sequencing efforts and it is very possible that these observations do not reflect the true distribution of this variant of the virus, which could exist undetected elsewhere. We will know more as more genomes are generated and shared. Thanks to the efforts of data sharing, genomic surveillance and COVID-19 test results in the UK, it seems that this variant is now starting to dominate over existing versions of the virus and that it may be responsible for an increasing proportion of cases in parts of the country, particular in regions where we also have rapidly expanding case numbers.

It is always very difficult to disentangle cause and effect in these cases. For example increases in the appearance of certain mutations can be due to viral lineages carrying them rising in frequency just because they happen to be the ones present in an area where transmission is high, for example due to human activities or choice of interventions. Though this is still a possibility, there are clearly enough concerning observations so far for this variant to warrant very careful characterisation, surveillance and interventions to curb transmission. Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, stated clearly that there was no evidence to date that this variant alters disease severity, either in terms of mortality or the seriousness of the cases of COVID-19 for those infected. Work is underway to confirm this.

Where did the variant come from? Right now, we don’t know. To date, scientists have not identified any closely related viruses to support the theory that the variant had been introduced from abroad. The patterns of mutations observed are more supportive of an extended period of adaptive evolution most likely in the UK based on current data. Similar patterns of mutation to these have been observed in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in chronically infected patients with weaker immune systems. The current hypothesis is that such a scenario of chronic infection, in a single patient, may have played a role in the origin of this variant. This will continue to be investigated.

Anaphylaxis

THREAD (please see the entire thread)

URGENT MESSAGE ABOUT CV-19 V*CC*NE
**********************************************

Dr. Vernon Coleman reads shocking data about anaphylaxis following m-RNA CV-19 V*cc*ne receipt

PLEASE SHARE WIDELY
************************* pic.twitter.com/xxP8Kw3k63

— Ian Lyne (@lyne_ian) December 20, 2020

10 days before Brexit. Perfect timing.

• Covid Chaos Disrupts Kent Ports As France Bans UK Freight (G.)

Miles of lorry queues and travel chaos were expected across Kent on Monday morning after France announced a 48-hour ban on passengers and freight entering from the UK. The prime minister, Boris Johnson, is to chair a Cobra meeting on Monday that will address “the steady flow of freight into and out of the UK”, a number 10 spokesperson said, amid expected significant disruption at ports in the south-east. The European Union is to hold a similar crisis meeting today to coordinate its response to concerns about a fast-spreading new strain of Covid-19 after countries across the continent banned UK flight arrivals.

The UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, warned of “significant disruption” following the snap travel ban that came into force on Sunday night. As a result of the announcement from Paris, Kent police implemented Operation Stack, where lorries will queue between junctions eight and 11 of the M20, southbound, to avoid gridlock on the county’s roads. A No 10 spokesman said: “The prime minister will chair a Cobra meeting tomorrow to discuss the situation regarding international travel, in particular the steady flow of freight into and out of the UK.”

The Department for Transport (DfT) said Manston Airport in Kent was being prepared to accommodate up to 4,000 lorries as another measure to ease the congestion. However due to the expected level of disruption, DfT also advised hauliers to avoid travel to Kent ports until further notice. “Following the French government’s announcement it will not accept any passengers arriving from the UK for the next 48hrs, we’re asking the public & particularly hauliers not to travel to Kent ports or other routes to France,” Shapps tweeted. “My department is urgently working with Highways England and Kent Council on contingency measures to minimise traffic disruption in the area.”

Just as you thought the world couldn’t get any smaller.

• Saudi Arabia Shuts Down Int’l Air, See & Land Travel Over New Covid Strain

Riyadh has sealed its borders for all passenger travel for at least a week, suspending international flights as well as entry to sea and land ports over a mutant Covid-19 variant that was first discovered in the UK. With a growing number of European countries locking out travel from the UK, Saudi Arabia has pulled all the stops in its effort to curb the spread of the new strain of the coronavirus, imposing a sweeping ban on all commercial travel, Saudi Press Agency reported on Sunday, citing an ”official source” with the country’s Interior Ministry.

The ban will see all international flights, save for “exceptional cases,” be suspended for a period of one week, that may be extended for yet another week. Land and sea ports will be closed for international arrivals as well. The measures were taken in “precaution” and until the nature of the strain, which is said to be highly contagious, “becomes clear,” the agency reported. A rapidly growing list of countries that have banned travel from the UK, citing concerns about the new virus, after British PM Boris Johnson announced strict Tier-4 lockdowns for parts of the country, including London, the Southeast and, Peterborough in the east of the UK.

A bipartisan effort that happens every four years.

• US Deep State Preempts Reset in Relations With Russia (SCF)

The flurry of U.S. media claims this week about alleged Russian cyber-attacks on government departments came just as Joe Biden was officially declared President-elect. As usual, there is no evidence to back up the sensational claims, but the objective seems to be to ensure that the incoming Biden administration maintains, or adopts a more, hostile policy towards Russia. The timing of all this is hardly coincidence. On Monday this week, the Electoral College in the United States cast its votes to confirm Biden’s election to the White House. The Democrat contender had already won the popular vote by a decisive margin against incumbent Republican President Donald Trump. Almost six weeks of controversy since the November 3 election day – due to Trump’s tenuous claims of voter fraud – were laid to rest this week when the Electoral College confirmed Biden as president-elect.

He is due to be inaugurated as the 46th occupant of the White House on January 20. Out of respect for the American electoral process being consummated, Russian President Vladimir Putin had waited until this week to make any comment. However, after the Electoral College executed its duties, Putin promptly telegrammed congratulations to Biden on his victory. The Russian leader expressed the hope that Russia and the United States would begin to normalize relations for the sake of global security. Ominously, the auspicious occasion was immediately marred by a U.S. media frenzy alleging a massive cyber-assault on the heart of American government and industries. Russia was predictably blamed as the offender.

The Kremlin dismissed the claims as yet another anti-Russia fabrication. For the past four years, the U.S. media have regularly peddled sensational claims of Russian malfeasance, from alleged interference in elections, to alleged assassination programs against U.S. troops in Afghanistan, among many other such tall stories. Never has any verifiable evidence been presented to back up these lurid allegations. The cyber domain is a particular favorite for such anti-Russia claims, most likely because these stories are handily told without any real evidence. All that is required is for anonymous cyber security agents to be quoted. The abstract and arcane cyber world also lends itself to mystery for most people. In short, it is amenable to false claims because of its elusive technical nature.

Now, it is feasible that some kind of malign cyber event did indeed happen in the U.S. government departments, agencies, infrastructure and private sector as reported this week. Though, what is very much in doubt is the question of who actually carried it out. The U.S. media and anonymous officials are fingering Russia. But where is the proof of Russia’s culpability? The FBI and Department of Homeland Security briefed members of Congress about the cyber-attacks. Senators emerged from the briefings fulminating against Russia. The second-highest ranking Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, told media that “it was virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States”.= What is going on here is a classic case of “gas-lighting” whereby people are being manipulated to believe in something utterly false; for an ulterior agenda.

No question and no evidence.

• ‘No Question’ Russia Behind Latest Hacking Scare – Adam Schiff (RT)

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has joined Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in blaming Russia for a recent massive cyber attack. He also slammed President Donald Trump for the inconvenient suggestion China could have been the culprit. “Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think there’s any question that it was Russia,” Schiff, who is the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC on Sunday, commenting on the hack. The hacking operation in question targeted the SolarWinds Orion Platform, a network monitoring tool used by US government agencies and numerous corporations. There has been no evidence presented that Russia was behind the hack, but Pompeo alleged otherwise in a recent interview.

The president broke with his secretary of state on Saturday and called out “fake news media” for their anonymous reports pinning the hack on Russia. He also suggested China may have been behind the hack, tying it to his ongoing allegations of voter fraud in key swing states during November’s election. Schiff, one of the president’s most vocal critics in the House and a supporter of evidence-free claims Russia colluded to influence the 2016 presidential election, called Trump’s tweets “uniformly destructive and deceitful and injurious” to the country’s “national security.” In a previous tweet, Schiff called the president’s China accusation “another scandalous betrayal of our national security.”

[..] When Trump assumed his post in January 2017, the stage had already been set for the worsening of relations with Moscow, which included dozens of Russian diplomats getting expelled by the Obama administration over the allegations of meddling in US affairs and over “hacking” of the election. As Trump’s term progressed, overshadowed by the failed ‘Russiagate’ investigation, initial hopes of a detente with Moscow have all but faded.

Rinse and repeat.

• Trump Campaign Take Election Battle To SCOTUS Over Pennsylvania Rulings (RT)

President Donald Trump’s legal team filed an appeal to the US Supreme Court on Sunday, requesting multiple rulings out of Pennsylvania be overturned in their latest attempt to overturn election results over alleged voter fraud. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani announced the last ditch effort in a public statement, claiming a trio of Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases “illegally changed Pennsylvania’s mail balloting law immediately before and after the 2020 presidential election.” The appeal follows numerous legal battles in key swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia. Trump and his team have alleged massive voter fraud in these and other states led to Joe Biden’s victory, which was certified by the Electoral College earlier this month.

Pennsylvania’s changing of the law, Giuliani claims, was “in violation of Article II of the U.S. Constitution.” These decisions “eviscerated the Pennsylvania’s Legislature’s protection against mail ballot fraud,” the release continues. The actual rulings include “prohibiting election officials” from checking signatures on mail-in ballots “during canvassing on Election Day” and “eliminating the right of campaign’s to challenge mail ballots during canvassing for forged signatures and other irregularities.” The legal team also claims the “right of campaigns to observe the canvassing of mail ballots” only meant observers were allowed to be “in the room,” but could not properly verify information because they were too far away.

“Statutory requirements that voters properly sign, address, and date mail ballots” were also not enforced thanks to the state’s Supreme Court, they contend. Trump’s legal team is seeking for electors committed to Joe Biden be “vacated” and the Pennsylvania General Assembly be allowed to select replacements. With Congress set to meet on January 6 to certify the votes of the Electoral College, the campaign is seeking an “expedited” process and a response from the Supreme Court within days.

Let’s see the goodies.

• Flynn: Foreign Intelligence Agencies Were Monitoring US Election (ET)

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn said he was provided information that foreign intelligence agencies were monitoring the U.S. election on Nov. 3 and are willing to provide evidence to President Donald Trump. “We have evidence now of foreign countries … were watching the attacks on our election system, our election process, on the 3rd of November,” Flynn told Fox Business on Friday. “So we now have that evidence and we received that today,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on what foreign intelligence agencies were involved, how he obtained that information, or the nature of the alleged attacks on the election system.

But the foreign governments “are willing to provide that directly to the president,” Flynn remarked. “There are foreign partners and allies that are willing to help us,” he said. [..] Flynn had been making reference to the SolarWinds cyberattack that impacted a considerable portion of federal government agencies. It is not clear if Flynn’s previous remarks about foreign countries monitoring the Nov. 3 election was linked to the SolarWinds hack. “I would say is SolarWinds is an entry point into the rest of our entire U.S. critical infrastructure,” Flynn added. “So everything that touches the United States government, if you enter through this SolarWinds attack that we perceive you basically have keys to the vault.”

Earlier in the week, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) cybersecurity agency warned that the hack presents a risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities” as well as the private sector.” These hackers compromised agencies, critical infrastructure programs, and private sector organizations starting in March 2020 or possibly before that, according to the agency. “You’re able to rummage around and do [expletive] near anything. So it’s a very, very serious attack … We’ve known about it for about six months as I understand it,” Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, added to Fox’s Lou Dobbs. “So when we talk about our election security, Lou, I think this is all part of it because there’s a relationship between these SolarWinds attacks which has basically penetrated our entire infrastructure as well as our election securities.”

Growth?

• Japan Record $1 Trillion Budget Highlights COVID Challenge To Growth, Debt (R.)

Japan’s cabinet approved on Monday a record $1.03 trillion budget draft for the next fiscal year starting in April 2021, the Ministry of Finance said, as the coronavirus and stimulus spending puts pressure on already dire public finances. The 106.6 trillion yen ($1.03 trillion) annual budget also got a boost from record military and welfare outlays. It marked a 4% rise from this year’s initial level, rising for nine years in a row, with new debt making up more than a third of revenue. From Europe to America, policymakers globally have unleashed a torrent of monetary and fiscal stimulus to prevent a deep and prolonged recession as the pandemic shut international borders and sent many out of work.

In Japan, fiscal reform has been shelved as Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga prioritized efforts to contain the pandemic and boost growth, despite public debt at more than twice the size of Japan’s $5 trillion economy. “How to balance the coronavirus response with fiscal reform has hardly been debated in Japan,” said Izuru Kato, chief economist at Totan Research. “Ultralow interest rates under the Bank of Japan’s prolonged monetary easing may have caused fiscal discipline to be paralyzed.” The spending plan, which was in line with a Reuters report out last week, must be approved by parliament early next year.

It will be rolled out along with a third extra budget for this fiscal year as a combined 15-month budget aimed for seamless spending to ease the virus pain and back Suga’s goal of achieving carbon neutrality and digital transformation. “We had to strike a right balance between the needs to prevent the spread of infections, revive the economy and achieve fiscal reform,” Finance Minister Taro Aso told reporters after a cabinet meeting. “That was the most difficult task in compiling this budget.”

I guess there are still people who read the New York Times. Why?

• For NY Times, No News Is Fit To Print About Rep. Swalwell And A Spy (Hill)

If you’re a New York Times subscriber who also watches the broadcast network evening news and considers that your news diet, there’s a very good chance you haven’t heard about Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and his ties to an accused Chinese spy a few years ago. To review why this is absolutely worthy of coverage, Swalwell’s interaction with the alleged spy known as Fang Fang included, according to Axios, Fang placing an intern in Swalwell’s office and helping to fundraise for his 2014 reelection campaign. In 2015, the FBI provided Swalwell a “defensive briefing” to warn him of the threat she appeared to pose. So, the first obvious question is this: Given how easily Swalwell was duped, why did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) shortly thereafter place him on the House Intelligence Committee, which oversees the CIA and therefore has access to the highest level of sensitive, classified information?

The New York Times doesn’t seem to care about getting an answer to that question. Of the biases we see in major media, the sin of omission is one that seems to occur only when the protagonist of a major story has a (D) next to his or her name. So, when the New York Times, which has a whopping 7 million subscribers and is considered the country’s most influential publication, doesn’t see the Swalwell story as a story at all, it tells you just as much about its moral compass as it does its editorial decisions. Swalwell isn’t just a random lawmaker. He’s arguably the most ubiquitous D.C. figure on cable news – and particularly CNN and MSNBC – this side of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) in conducting hundreds of interviews over the past four years, primarily to charge without evidence that President Trump is an agent of Russia.

The 40-year-old also somehow sits on the House Intelligence Committee, meaning he has access to the nation’s top classified information. The Swalwell/Chinese spy story was broken 10 days ago by Axios, which isn’t exactly a bastion of right-wing sentiment. No matter: Swalwell decided to allege that Axios had colluded with Trump in terms of how the story came to light. “I’ve been a critic of the president. I’ve spoken out against him. I was on both committees that worked to impeach him. The timing feels like that should be looked at,” Swalwell claimed on Dec. 9. Yep — Eric Swalwell, who ran for president for about five minutes in 2019, is such a threat to an outgoing president that a decision was made to work with Axios (which worked on the story for more than a year) to run with a Trump leak.

This is the same lawmaker who told MSNBC that Trump “is working on behalf of the Russians” and used his position on the Intel Committee to imply that he had evidence to back up such information. That evidence has yet to be presented, because it doesn’t exist. So, an obvious question is whether Swalwell should remain on the Intelligence Committee given the Chinese connection and the reckless statements about a sitting president working with a hostile nation. More than a dozen GOP House members are urging Speaker Pelosi to oust Swalwell from the committee; Pelosi has responded by saying she doesn’t have “any concerns” about the congressman.

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Debt Rattle November 21 2020

Nov 212020

November 21, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:22 am Finance Tagged with: Covid19, Dominion, Medicare, NYT, PBS, Pentagon, Pfizer, Sidney Powell, Trump, Tucker, vaccine 15 Responses »

Salaì Penitent Magdalene 1515 to 1520

Don’t miss the update on our support for the Monastiraki social kitchen in Athens.. And please consider donating to our efforts for this Christmas season.

• Sanford Health CEO on COVID19 Hospitalizations: ‘There’s Not A Crisis.’ (AL)

• More People Are Getting COVID19 Twice (AAAS)

• How Pfizer Plans To Keep Its Vaccine At Deep-Frozen During Transport (CBS)

• Trump Targets Medicare Drug Prices With Cost-cutting Measures (Fox)

• 61% Think Trump Should Concede to Biden (Rasmussen)

• PBS Does A Deep Dive On Georgia’s Use Of Dominion Voting Systems Machines (GP)

• Dominion Voting ‘Lawyers Up’, Abruptly Backs Out Of PA Hearing (Heine)

• The Many Layers of Travail (Jim Kunstler)

• Sidney Powell: Tucker Carlson Was ‘Insulting, Demanding, And Rude’ (WE)

• The Pentagon and the CIA Are in Charge of Foreign Policy (FFF)

• How ‘Western’ Media Select Their Foreign Correspondents (MoA)

BlackRock Bitcoin replacing gold
https://twitter.com/i/status/1329774212018475010

“For me to wear a mask defies the efficacy and purpose of a mask and sends an untruthful message that I’m susceptible to infection or could transmit it.”

• Sanford Health CEO on COVID19 Hospitalizations: ‘There’s Not A Crisis.’ (AL)

Sanford Health’s chief executive says South Dakota doesn’t need a mask-mandate, and the worst of the pandemic is days away from being in the rear-view mirror. Kelby Krabbenhoft, president and CEO of Sanford Health, told the Argus Leader in an interview Thursday his healthcare system is positioned well to handle the amount of COVID-19 patients coming through the door. Krabbenhoft, 62, said as of Thursday, Sanford Health’s network of hospitals in the region were caring for a 1,400 patients, 390 of which are hospitalized with COVID-19. And while that has put a large burden on front-line workers, he said Sanford has capacity to handle even more patients should hospitalizations continue to go up before mass vaccination begins in January. “At this point, we feel we’ve got this under control,” Krabbenhoft said. “There’s not a crisis.”

And though state health officials have previously stated vaccine doses would begin arriving in South Dakota sometime in December, Krabbenhoft said new information provided to him Thursday indicates Sanford’s first vaccine shipment could come even sooner than that. “I feel like with a vaccine — I’m told we’re about 10 days away from receiving it — it feels like the cavalry is coming,” he said. Krabbenhoft was reiterating comments he made the day prior in an email sent to all Sanford Health staff, in which he disclosed that he dealt with a COVID-19 diagnosis of his own earlier this year. In the Argus Leader interview, he said he contracted the virus while watching a football game on an outdoor patio with a friend who was asymptotic at the time.

He likened his case to that of a severe cold or the flu, having worsening symptoms for about a week before beginning to improve. Now that he’s had the virus, he presumes he’s immune to the virus for at least a few months and can’t spread it. That’s why Krabbenhoft told his employees in the email that he doesn’t always wear a mask when he’s in public settings. “The information, science, truth, advice and growing evidence is that I am immune for at least seven months and perhaps for years to come, similar to that of chicken pox, measles, etc,” he wrote in the email. “For me to wear a mask defies the efficacy and purpose of a mask and sends an untruthful message that I’m susceptible to infection or could transmit it.”

“The bar is very high,” Moss says. “In many cases, the genetic material just isn’t there.”

• More People Are Getting COVID19 Twice (AAAS)

In late June, Sanne de Jong developed nausea, shortness of breath, sore muscles, and a runny nose. At first, she thought it might be lingering effects from her COVID-19 infection in the spring. De Jong, 22, had tested positive on 17 April and suffered mild symptoms for about 2 weeks. She tested negative on 2 May—just in time to say farewell to her dying grandmother—and returned to work as a nursing intern in a hospital in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. But when her symptoms re-emerged, her doctor suggested she get tested again. “A reinfection this soon would be peculiar, but not impossible,” she told De Jong, who by then had again lost her sense of smell and had abdominal pains and diarrhea. The call from her municipal health service came on 3 July. De Jong had tested positive again. “You’re kidding me!” she recalls saying.

Scientists are keenly interested in cases like hers, which are still rare but on the rise. Reinfections hint that immunity against COVID-19 may be fragile and wane relatively quickly, with implications not just for the risks facing recovered patients, but also for how long future vaccines might protect people. “The question everybody wants to answer is: Is that second one going to be less severe most of the time or not?” says Derek Cummings, who studies infectious disease dynamics at the University of Florida. “And what do reinfections teach us about SARS-CoV-2 immunity in general?” South Korean scientists reported the first suspected reinfections in April, but it took until 24 August before a case was officially confirmed: a 33-year-old man who was treated at a Hong Kong hospital for a mild case in March and who tested positive again at the Hong Kong airport on 15 August after returning from a trip to Spain.

Since then, at least 24 other reinfections have been officially confirmed—but scientists say that is definitely an underestimate. To count as a case of reinfection, a patient must have had a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test twice with at least one symptom-free month in between. But virologist Chantal Reusken of the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) explains that a second test can also be positive because the patient has a residue of nonreplicating viral RNA from their original infection in their respiratory tract, because of an infection with two viruses at the same time or because they had suppressed but never fully cleared the virus. So most journals want to see two full virus sequences, from the first and second illnesses, that are sufficiently different, says Paul Moss, a hematologist at the University of Birmingham.

“The bar is very high,” Moss says. “In many cases, the genetic material just isn’t there.” Even if it is, many labs don’t have the time or money to clinch the case. As a result, the number of genetically proven reinfections is orders of magnitude lower than that of suspected reinfections. The Netherlands alone has 50 such cases, Brazil 95, Sweden 150, Mexico 285, and Qatar at least 243.

Why bother if other vaccines don’t require this?

• How Pfizer Plans To Keep Its Vaccine At Deep-Frozen During Transport (CBS)

Pfizer is now the first company to apply for emergency authorization of its coronavirus vaccine, setting off a sprint by scientists at the Food and Drug Administration to approve it. About 25 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine may become available in December, 30 million in January and 35 million more in February and March, according to information presented to the National Academy of Medicine this week. Recipients will need two doses, three weeks apart. CBS News got an inside look at the logistical challenges of getting Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine to the public, including a required storage temperature you would find in the coldest places on Earth.

Colder than Antarctica in winter, dry ice – made from carbon dioxide – is crucial for moving and storing these vaccines. Pfizer’s vaccine needs to be kept at 94 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Dry ice helps maintain the subarctic temperature during shipping. Pfizer developed a thermal shipper, which they call a “cool box,” for the trip. It’s about the size of a carry-on suitcase. “There’s dry ice that goes around it, and then it has actually a device within it that has a continuous GPS and temperature monitor,” said Tanya Alcorn, vice president of Pfizer’s BioPharma Global Supply Chain. Each “cool box” contains a minimum of about 1,000 vaccine doses, which poses a challenge for rural communities with no place to store them.

Tim Size, executive director of the Rural Wisconsin Health Cooperative, which represents 43 rural hospitals across the state, said, “I don’t think anybody wants to give a message that rural Wisconsin or rural America is second class.” “If you can ship 1,000, you can ship 200,” he added. “It’s more expensive. It’s more cumbersome, but it allows rural to be getting vaccinated at the same time urban’s getting vaccinated.”

“..end rebates paid to the so-called middlemen in Medicare..”

• Trump Targets Medicare Drug Prices With Cost-cutting Measures (Fox)

The Trump administration on Friday announced three measures designed to cut prescription drug prices – with a particular focus on seniors – pursuant to executive orders signed earlier this year. “Together, these reforms will save Americans patients many, many billions of dollars every single year,” Trump said during a press conference at the White House. The first would end rebates paid to the so-called middlemen in Medicare, who are supposed to pass them on to commercial plans – though there is doubt over whether that happens. Instead, the discounts are expected to be offered to consumers directly at the pharmacy counter. There has been a concern that this policy could result in higher Part D premiums for beneficiaries.

The second action announced on Friday aims to make U.S. drug prices more competitive by linking prices paid for prescriptions under Medicare to prices charged for the same drugs in other countries. Trump said that Medicare will look at prices paid by other developed nations and instead of paying “the highest price on the list,” the program “will pay the lowest price.” Additionally, the administration said it would end the Unapproved Drug Initiative, which was designed to prevent the use of unapproved drugs, but instead has allowed drugmakers to exploit older drugs that have received renewed approval and exclusivity by hiking prices. One study found that prices were increased by as much as 1,644% after approval.

30% of Democrats Believe Election Stolen from Trump

• 61% Think Trump Should Concede to Biden (Rasmussen)

Most voters now believe President Trump should admit that he lost the election, although they’re less certain their friends and neighbors would agree. They’re more closely divided, however, over whether the Democrats stole the election as Trump contends.The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 61% of Likely U.S. Voters think Trump should concede the presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden. Just 33% disagree. (To see survey question wording, click here.) 84% of Democrats, 37% of Republicans and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party believe Trump should concede. 57% of Republicans disagree.

Among all voters, though, only 51% think their friends and neighbors believe Trump should concede. 30% suspect they would disagree, but 18% are not sure. 47% say it’s likely that Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Biden would win, but 50% disagree. This includes 36% who say it’s Very Likely and 41% who consider it Not At All Likely. The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted November 17-18, 2020 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Looking back at the presidential election, Trump voters overwhelmingly say they voted for the president, while a sizable number of Biden supporters admit they were voting against Trump rather than for the former vice president. The older the voter, the less supportive they are of Trump conceding the election to Biden. Whites oppose concession more strongly than blacks and other minority voters do. Even among those who Strongly Approve of Trump’s job performance, nearly one-in-four (23%) believe he should admit he lost. Of course, that compares to 93% of those who Strongly Disapprove of the job he’s been doing. 61% of Republicans say it’s Very Likely the Democrats stole the election, but just as many Democrats (61%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Among unaffiliateds, 29% feel it’s a stolen election; 45% do not.

80% of voters who do not believe Trump should concede yet think it’s Very Likely Democrats stole votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure that Biden would win. Fifteen percent (15%) of those who want Trump to concede agree. Trump’s job performance was the most important issue for Biden voters, closely followed by the coronavirus. For Trump voters, the economy came first and then how the president did his job. Just two weeks before this year’s Election Day, 94% said their vote would be correctly recorded and counted, with 73% who said it was Very Likely. Following the election, those findings fell to 71%and 47% respectively.

PBS Went to Georgia One Week Before the Election

• PBS Does A Deep Dive On Georgia’s Use Of Dominion Voting Systems Machines (GP)

One week before the 2020 election PBS went to Georgia to do a deep dive of their Dominion Voting Systems. One of their experts, Harry Hursti from Nordic Innovation Labs, told PBS the Georgia system does not seem to have any safeguards. Georgia’s vote tabulating system was a complex system of laptops, ipads, magnetic cards, touch screens, printers and scanners. Investigators found several troubling issues before the election. One expert said it would be easy to dublicate the ballot codes and make up new ballots.

PBS does a deep dive on Georgia’s use of Dominion Voting Systems machines.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1327329411805421570

Not a great look.

• Dominion Voting ‘Lawyers Up’, Abruptly Backs Out Of PA Hearing (Heine)

Dominion Voting Systems Thursday night abruptly backed out of attending a fact-finding hearing that was set for Friday morning with the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee. At a press conference Friday morning, State Govt Committee Chair Seth Grove said the 1.3. million Pennsylvanians who used Dominion’s voting machines have been “hung out to dry and slapped in their faces.” Pennsylvania lawmakers had scheduled the hearing with the voting machine manufacturer “to help identify and correct any irregularities in the election process,” according to the House Republican Caucus. “It is vitally important voters have faith in the machines they use to cast their ballots.

On the heels of Gov. Tom Wolf unilaterally decertifying every voting machine in the Commonwealth, we need to know whether these new machines met expectations, whether they are reliable and whether they are not subject to interference,” said Rep. Grove (R-York). Dominion had initially agreed to attend the hearing, before it “abruptly canceled,” Grove said. “I was impressed at what appeared to be the willingness that Dominion Voting Systems to address accusations and it would have put 1.3. million Pennsylvanians who used their machines at ease—including myself, thinking that Dominion was willing to publicly back up their product which PA taxpayers invested millions to purchase” he noted during the presser. “Unfortunately, last evening, Dominion Voting Systems lawyered up, and backed out of their commitment to the people of Pennsylvania to provide their input in a public format.”

Grove blasted the company for “retreating into the darkness,” rather than appearing at the hearing with “honesty and integrity.” The committee chair said he wanted to know why a company with nothing to hide would back out. “Why would a vender of public goods fear discussing their product sold to the public for the public good? If Dominion’s products were successful and operated as they were supposed to, why wouldn’t Dominion take the opportunity to publicly review its success?” Grove demanded. “How hard is it to say, ‘our ballot machines worked exactly as promised and they’re 100 percent accurate’?” “After weeks of accusations, why has Dominion Voting Systems not released any analysis of the success of its voting machines to the public in order to stop their accusers in their tracks? If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding from us?” he asked.

John Oliver

John Oliver slammed the use of electronic voting machines, admitted Trump was completely right https://t.co/K50SUaBabK

— President-Elect of Jesusland Poso (@JackPosobiec) November 21, 2020

“..we’ll have to stand by like grownups and see how it all plays out in the courts.”

“(If I were her, I’d be deep into the George Dickel No. 12 Sour Mash by eight o’clock that night, Tucker Time.)”

• The Many Layers of Travail (Jim Kunstler)

One thing you could say about the three Trump campaign lawyers’ joint press conference at high noon, Thursday: it sure wasn’t slick. But then, are we now such a nation of lobotomized chumps that our chief criteria for any public acting-out of an acute national melodrama is slickness of presentation? I guess we like our crises fluffed, like a Caitlin Jenner spot on The View. This one, though, is raw and savage.

And so there stood Rudy Giuliani in that cramped briefing room, with dark rivulets running down both temples as if he were sweating blood (more likely, hair dye), cracking jokes at times, and laying out some rather harsh predicates for pending election fraud lawsuits. Next up, the usually demure Sidney Powell appeared boiling over with grief and rage at the hijacking of American democracy, and the Deep State’s long-running connivance with all that, yielding nearly to tears at moments as she sketched out the sinister history and associations of the Dominion and Smartmatic vote systems — and the utter failure of public officialdom to monitor any of it for many years. Then Jenna Ellis, much in command of herself, emphasized perhaps half a dozen times, and quite sternly for the obdurately seditious news media, that the actual evidence would be revealed in court and that the day’s presentation was a mere overview. Got that? In court.

The news media didn’t get the message — on purpose, as usual — and so the stories flew all over the Internet’s gaslit echo chambers that the three lawyers failed to make a case. Later that night, Tucker Carlson piled on Sidney Powell for not sharing what she intends to present in a court of law. Apparently, she hung up the phone on him. Let’s face it, the lady has had a hard month, and a hard year, having to battle the malevolent and depraved Judge Emmet Sullivan over the dismissal of the case against General Flynn (as ordered by the DOJ), and now this colossal hairball of a momentous and historic election fraud case. (If I were her, I’d be deep into the George Dickel No. 12 Sour Mash by eight o’clock that night, Tucker Time.)

All right then, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have set the table for this epic political food-fight with just a few weeks to file and proceed, and we’ll have to stand by like grownups and see how it all plays out in the courts. There may be other sideshows and shenanigans in the various state legislatures over electoral college slates and such, along the way, but meanwhile I want to remind you that there are many other layers in this burgeoning mega-crisis worth being mindful of.

“..As soon as he saw multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here.”

• Sidney Powell: Tucker Carlson Was ‘Insulting, Demanding, And Rude’ (WE)

Sidney Powell, an attorney on President Trump’s election legal team, shot back at Fox News host Tucker Carlson the morning after he said she “got angry” and refused to provide evidence on his show for her claims of voting software flipping votes. “No, I didn’t get angry with the request to provide evidence,” the former federal prosecutor said Friday morning during an interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo. “In fact, I sent an affidavit to Tucker that I had not even attached to a pleading yet to help him understand the situation, and I offered him another witness who could explain the mathematics and the statistical evidence far better than I can. I’m not really a numbers person,” she added. “But he was very insulting, demanding, and rude, and I told him not to contact me again, in those terms,” Powell concluded.

Powell did not state whether it was Carlson or a member of his team she spoke to about appearing on his show. [..]On his show Friday night, Carlson said that he had made “a lot of requests” for Powell to provide evidence for the Trump campaign’s allegations of widespread voter fraud but was given “not a page.” “We took Sidney Powell seriously. We had no intention of fighting with her. We’ve always respected her work. We simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them? So, we invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would’ve given her the whole hour. We would’ve given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time at rapt attention. That’s a big story. But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests — polite requests. Not a page,” Carlson said.

After Powell told Carlson to stop contacting her, he said that his team “checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority,” who said that “Powell had never given them any evidence either.” Carlson’s show followed a wild press conference featuring Powell and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in which they laid out their claim of a “massive” vote-rigging scheme, laying much of the blame on Dominion Voting Systems. “We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works,” Powell said. “His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood and the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. … As soon as he saw multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here.”

Dinesh D’Souza

The dispute between Tucker Carlson and Sidney Powell points to a larger failure—the failure of the media to do anything resembling investigative journalism on this or any other story pic.twitter.com/LV4Lb9GG8o

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) November 20, 2020

Not the President.

• The Pentagon and the CIA Are in Charge of Foreign Policy (FFF)

President Trump has announced that he is ordering a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq during the waning days of his administration. Why only partial? And why now in the waning days of his presidency? After all, when Trump campaigned in 2016. his expressed aim was to bring all the troops home from those two countries. He repeatedly vowed to bring an end to America’s “forever wars.” There is a simple explanation for Trump’s failure, one that unfortunately so many Americans are loathe to consider: It’s not the president who is in charge of foreign policy. Instead it is the Pentagon and the CIA that are in charge. Trump had four years to bring home those troops. Clearly he wanted to. The reason he didn’t – the reason he still can’t – is because the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA won’t let him.

Longtime readers of my blog know that I have periodically referenced a book titled National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon, who is a professor of law at Tufts University and served as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He knows what he is talking about. I highly recommend his book.Glennon’s thesis is a simple one: The real power of the federal government lies with the national-security establishment – namely the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. They permit the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court to maintain the veneer of power. That veneer is unimportant to the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. What’s important to them is who holds the power, not who appears to hold the power.

Trump’s inability to bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq provides confirmation of Glennon’s thesis. Trump wanted to bring them home. He vowed to bring them home. He had four years to bring them home. He was unable to do so. The Pentagon and the CIA simply would not permit it. In his Farewell Address in 1961, President Eisenhower warned about the danger to America’s democratic processes from what he called the “military-industrial complex.” That was almost 60 years ago. As we have seen with President Trump, the national-security state has grown ever more powerful since then.

What the NYT has become.

• How ‘Western’ Media Select Their Foreign Correspondents (MoA)

Did you ever wonder why ‘western’ mainstream media get stories about Russia and other foreign countries so wrong? It is simple. They hire the most brainwashed, biased and cynic writers they can get for the job. Those who are corrupt enough to tell any lie required to support the world view of their editors and media owners. They are quite upfront about it. Here is evidence in form of a New York Times job description for a foreign correspondent position in Moscow:

To be allowed to write for the Times one must see the Russian Federation as a country that is ruled by just one man. One must be a fervent believer in MI6 produced Novichok hogwash. One must also believe in Russiagate and in the multiple idiocies it produced even after all of them have been debunked. One must know that vote counts in Russia are always wrong while U.S. vote counting is the most reliable ever. Russian private military contractors (which one must know to be evil men) are ‘secretly deployed’ to wherever the editors claim them to be. Russia’s hospitals are of cause always much worse than ours. Even when it is easy to check that Vladimir Putin (the most evil man ever) is at work in the Kremlin the job will require one to claim that he is hiding in a villa.

Most people writing for the Times will actually not believe the above nonsense. But the description is not for a position that requires one to weight and report the facts. It is for a job that requires one to lie. That the Times lists all the recent nonsense about Russia right at the top of the job description makes it clear that only people who support those past lies will be considered adequate to tell future lies about Russia. No honest unbiased person will want such a job. But as it comes with social prestige, a good paycheck and a probably nice flat in Moscow the New York Times will surely find a number of people who are willing to sell their souls to take it.

Interestingly the job advertisement does not list Russian language capabilities as a requirement. It only says that ‘Fluency in Russian is preferred’. ‘Western’ mainstream media are filled with such biased, cynic and self-censoring correspondents who have little if any knowledge of the country they are reporting from. It is therefore not astonishing that ‘western’ populations as well as their politicians have often no knowledge of what is really happening in the world.

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Neil DeGrasse Tyson Galileo

Between now and Dec 21 Saturn & Jupiter approach each other on the sky until a mere tenth of a degree separates them. Last time this happened Galileo was alive.

The solar system: A Cosmic Ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity.

Joe Rao tells all:https://t.co/lDiyD1LaVL pic.twitter.com/uYszbbnh5R

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) November 20, 2020

Apple

Apple a day keeps the doctor away! #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/v9Yd8e9Qso

— RT (@RT_com) November 21, 2020

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Debt Rattle October 29 2020

Oct 292020

October 29, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: ACB, Bellingcat, Bobulinski, CNN, Covid19, Fed, inflation, Jack Dorsey, NYT, OPCW, Tucker, Zuckerberg 20 Responses »

Gustav Klimt Pine forest II 1901

• Senate Committee: All Bobulinski Materials Reviewed To Date Legitimate (DC)

• Tucker Carlson: Bobulinski Documents Intercepted and Removed (sundance)

• Zuckerberg: ‘I Would Guess That Our Employee Base Skews Left-Leaning’ (JTN)

• Gundlach: Trump Will Win Next Week, “Some Sort Of Revolution” By 2027 (ZH)

• Professor Deliberately Catches COVID19 To Test His Immune Response (ST)

• Cable News October Ratings Explode As Fox News Hits Historic Highs (Hill)

• CNN Won’t Run Trump Ad Warning Biden Will Raise Taxes On Middle Class (Hill)

• ‘Anonymous’ Anti-Trump Official Revealed As CNN Pundit Miles Taylor (Fox)

• ALICE Doesn’t Work Here Anymore (CHS)

• The Fed MUST Have Inflation (Rickards)

• Ornstein: Impeach Amy Coney Barrett (Turley)

• Bellingcat Smears OPCW Whistleblower, Journalists With False Letter (Maté)

• Greece Has Protected Its Jobs Better Than The Rest Of The EU (K.)

• Jack Dorsey Hires Homeless Man To Fill In For Him At Senate Hearings (BBee)

“If you can’t expose crime in the government you don’t really have a government. You have a dictatorship that is dressed up like a government.”

– Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan Greenwald

'It speaks to the lack of trust that we have in #MainstreamMedia today because if you can't expose crime in the government you don't really have a government. You have a dictatorship.' @joerogan with @ggreenwald #FreeAssange #FreePress #MediaFreedom https://t.co/prRoJ7Iqb1 pic.twitter.com/aVkS9xzGcN

— Don't Extradite Assange (@DEAcampaign) October 28, 2020

“I appreciate that the FBI has a job to do, and I am glad they are finally taking an interest in these concerning financial matters that our Committees have been investigating for months..”

• Senate Committee: All Bobulinski Materials Reviewed To Date Legitimate (DC)

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has been successful in verifying all materials reviewed so far from Hunter Biden’s ex-business partner Tony Bobulinski, the Daily Caller has learned. Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson will not call Bobulinski to testify before the November 3 elections, as the committee is working to review all the information provided to the committee by Bobulinski. The information has to be verified, as it is subject to the same false information to Congress laws that verbal or written testimony does. However, a Johnson spokesperson told the Caller that all the material provided by Bobulinski that has been reviewed so far has turned out to be legitimate. The committee has “also” not come across any “signs” or evidence to suggest the content is false, the spokesperson added.

Bobulinski, who said Tuesday he believes “Joe Biden and the Biden family are compromised” in an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, has turned over evidence to the FBI alleging he met twice in the past with the former vice president in regards to business with his son Hunter. The Biden family has not yet disputed this information. [..] Johnson had the chance to interview Bobulinski on Friday and released a statement shortly after saying: “I appreciate that the FBI has a job to do, and I am glad they are finally taking an interest in these concerning financial matters that our Committees have been investigating for months,” Sen. Johnson said. “I expect that Mr. Bobulinski will speak with our committee as soon as possible and fully share his insights into the Biden family’s business dealings.”

Strange story. He has copies.

• Tucker Carlson: Bobulinski Documents Intercepted and Removed (sundance)

Tucker Carlson revealed this evening that someone intercepted an envelope containing documents of evidence supporting the claims by Tony Bobulinski. The documents were mailed by a “well known overnight transport” company and mysteriously were removed in transit from New York to LA. I have a hunch what happened…. but first, WATCH:

Tucker missing documents

Damning Hunter Biden documents suddenly vanish pic.twitter.com/B2qsajZlID

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) October 29, 2020

I review this story from a position that I cannot fully explain. However, I have personal experience -recent experience- with a similar and rather unusual situation that cannot be explained by any method other than DHS surveillance. So here’s what I think took place. The package, likely a Fed-X delivery, was intercepted by FBI agents using mechanisms for tracking and surveillance that open targeting through portals connected to DHS. As an outcome of the U.S. Patriot Act, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security has an agreement in place with mail shipping companies, public/private services, that essentially allows them a portal to track all in-state and interstate mail deliveries.

The FBI has access to this data network in the same way the FBI has access to federal transportation records. Just like when you book a flight and DHS portals are open that allow FBI to track your movements domestically. This type of portal is also accessed in private company transportation like Uber, Lyft etc. DHS, and as a consequence the FBI, can easily track your whereabouts. Without much hesitation I will bet the FBI was monitoring the communication of Bobulinski, and by extension the entire Tucker Carlson production network. Once the shipment was known to be taking place, the DHS portals are opened; the package is tracked; and the FBI moves in to intercept the delivery.

The transport company doesn’t need to be participating because they are essentially unneeded. Their system network is connected to the FBI. That’s the likely scenario. Wanna bet?

Every time these people come in for questioning, nothing happens.

• Zuckerberg: ‘I Would Guess That Our Employee Base Skews Left-Leaning’ (JTN)

Under questioning from Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday that the employees at his company “skew left-leaning.” “Would you say that the political ideology of the employees at your company is, let’s say, 50:50, conservative versus liberal progressive or do you think it’s closer to 90% liberal and 10% conservative?” Johnson asked during a hearing with the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “I don’t know the makeup of our employees because it’s not something we ask or focus on,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey responded. “It’s not something I look for.”

In response to the same question, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said more than 50% of Google’s 100,000 employees are from outside of California. “It does tend to be proportionate to the areas that we are in,” he said. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “I don’t know the exact number but I would guess that our employee base skews left-leaning.” According to OpenSecrets.org, the employees of Facebook, Google and Twitter favored Democrats over Republicans with political contributions in this election cycle. Johnson also asked Dorsey and Zuckerberg if they had “any evidence” that the New York Post’s recent reporting on content from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden was based on Russian disinformation.

“We don’t,” Dorsey said. Later in the hearing, GOP Sen. Roger Wicker, the committee chairman, asked Zuckerberg if he has evidence that Russia was the source of the information in the New York Post’s reporting. “I would rely on the FBI to make that assessment,” Zuckerberg said but added that he personally does not have that evidence. “I do not, myself.”

@tedcruz and @jack

Here is the full back and forth between @tedcruz and @jack.

Ted Cruz absolutely BODIED him. pic.twitter.com/GLqV3fSoRZ

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) October 28, 2020

“Some people will hedge their bets and split their vote towards retaining the Republican Senate because they view Biden as risky..”

• Gundlach: Trump Will Win Next Week, “Some Sort Of Revolution” By 2027 (ZH)

Back at the start of 2016, when nobody else would even consider such an outcome, DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeff Gundlach shocked the economic, financial and political establishments when during the January Barron’s roundtable of that year, he predicted that Donald Trump would become the next US president. He was right. Fast forward to today when one week before the elections, and in an environment when most polls predict that Biden will crush Trump and where Nate Silver gives Trump just as 13% chance of defeating Trump, Jeffrey Gundlach is predicting another victory for President Donald Trump.

As Financial Advisor magazine reported, during a Tuesday webcast as part of Schwab’s 2020 IMPACT conference, Gundlach said that despite polls, analysis and betting odds that suggest otherwise, Trump is likely to outpace former Democratic vice president Joe Biden in the contest. “The polls right now say he isn’t going to win, but they said that four years ago,” said Gundlach referring to the following chart. “Mind you, my conviction is way lower than it was four years ago. But back in [that period], when Trump was little more than an asterisk in the betting odds, I predicted he was going to win. This one is much more murky, but in my eyes, it favors a Trump win.”

Addressing the elephant in the room, Gundlach said that public political polls are often “designed to create impressions” rather than illustrate reality, said Gundlach, and shouldn’t be trusted. He also argued that many Trump voters are unwilling to engage with pollsters and the media because they fear retribution for their political beliefs, also known as the “shy voter” phenomenon according to which “Over 10% Of Trump Voters Won’t Admit Preferences To Pollsters.” Biden also faces an enthusiasm problem, said Gundlach. Gundlach then went on to crush hopes of a Blue Wave, arguing that Republicans will likely keep the Senate regardless of who wins – mainly because of uncertainty around Biden.

“Some people will hedge their bets and split their vote towards retaining the Republican Senate because they view Biden as risky,” said Gundlach, who noted that Trump is often portrayed as riskier than Biden. And yet, in the four years of his presidency, there have been no international conflicts, despite some outrageous and bellicose language. “You might dislike Trump or some of his policies, but risk is not what you’re getting with him, particularly compared to turning the presidency over to another party, and particularly when that party’s candidate isn’t saying what some of his policy positions are.”

“His conclusion is that there will be no collective immunity to coronavirus despite earlier hopes. The virus is here to stay for a long while, and while vaccines may give immunity this is likely to be temporary.”

• Professor Deliberately Catches COVID19 To Test His Immune Response (ST)

Alexander Chepurnov had already recovered once when he re-infected himself in an experiment. The virologist experimented with his own health to check how long the body’s immune response lasted after his first bout of COVID-19. A former researcher at the Vector Centre of Virology and Biotechnology who currently works at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Chepurnov was first infected at the end of February 2020. ‘I was on my way to a skiing holiday from Siberia to France with a stopover in Moscow,’ he said. ‘After getting to the mountains I felt unwell with a high fever and sharp chest pain. My sense of smell has gone, too.’ It was impossible back then to do a COVID-19 test in Europe, he told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in Novosibirsk.

He cut the holiday short, returned home to Novosibirsk, and was promptly diagnosed with double pneumonia. A month later in March he did a test which showed antibodies to Covid, confirming that he had been infected with the new virus. ‘I was the first in my team who had COVID-19,’ he said. ‘We started to follow the way antibodies ‘behaved’, how strong they were, and how long they stayed in the body. ‘The observation showed that they were fast to decrease. By the end of the third month from the moment I felt sick the antibodies were no longer detected.’ The scientist, 68 when he was first hit by COVID-19, said that he wanted to study the probability of getting re-infected.

To test the strength of his own immune response, Chepurnov deliberately exposed himself to COVID-19-positive patients wearing no protection. ‘My body’s defence fell exactly six months after I got the first infection. The first sign was a sore throat. The nasopharyngeal PCR smear immediately showed a positive reaction to COVID-19 on the 27th cycle, and two days later already on the 17th cycle, which corresponds to a high viral titre’, Chepurnov said of the second bout. The second illness was more acute, with Chepurnov needing hospitalisation after his saturation fell below 93. ‘For five days, my body temperature remained above 39C,’ he said. ‘I lost the sense of smell, my taste perception changed.

‘On the sixth day of the illness, the CT scan of the lungs was clear, and three days after the scan the X-ray showed double pneumonia. ‘The virus went away rather quickly – after two weeks it was no longer detected in the nasopharyngeal or in other samples.’ His conclusion is that there will be no collective immunity to coronavirus despite earlier hopes. The virus is here to stay for a long while, and while vaccines may give immunity this is likely to be temporary. ‘We need a vaccine that can be used multiple times, a recombinant vaccine will not suit,’ he said. ‘Once injected with the adenoviral vector-based vaccine we won’t be able to repeat it because the immunity against the adenoviral carrier will keep interfering.’

I’d be more interested in seeing these numbers for social media.

• Cable News October Ratings Explode As Fox News Hits Historic Highs (Hill)

Cable news ratings exploded in October across Fox News, CNN and MSNBC as all three networks saw record numbers for the month, with Fox News having the highest-rated month in cable news history, according to Nielsen Media Research. The month included a positive coronavirus test for the president, who was briefly hospitalized, and a fever pitch on the presidential campaign trail. The month also included a presidential debate, a vice presidential debate and multiple town hall events. Fox News led the way with a whopping 4.9 million total viewers in prime time, the highest number in the history of cable news dating back 40 years. MSNBC was second with 2.7 million viewers, followed by CNN with 2.4 million.

The top five shows for the month included Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with an average of 5.3 million viewers, followed by “Hannity” with 5.2 million and “The Five” with 4.1 million despite airing before prime time in the 5 p.m. EDT slot. “The Ingraham Angle” delivered an average of just over 4 million total viewers, finishing fourth overall, with MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show” rounding out the top five with 3.7 million. All three of the major cable news networks also saw substantial growth when compared to the same month last year. Fox News was up 83 percent year-over-year in total viewers and 139 percent in the key 25-54 demographic that advertisers covet most in prime time. CNN saw a 98 percent increase in total viewers when compared to October 2019, and a 116 percent jump in the demographic, while MSNBC is up 38 percent in total viewers and 45 percent in the younger category.

“..the ad has been approved to run on ABC, AMC, Cooking, CBS, Comcast, DIY, Discovery, ESPN, Food Network, Fox, HGTV, History, Lifetime and The Weather Channel.”

• CNN Won’t Run Trump Ad Warning Biden Will Raise Taxes On Middle Class (Hill)

CNN has informed the largest outside group supporting President Trump’s reelection that it will not run one of its new ads, saying the ad is false because it warns Democratic nominee Joe Biden will raise taxes on the middle class and implies that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supports socialist policies. The ad, from America First Action (AFA), says Biden “sided with socialists,” while showing pictures of Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The narrator of the ad also warns that Biden will “raise taxes on the middle class” and that “his liberal agenda will cost millions of jobs.” America First Action says the ad has been approved to run on ABC, AMC, Cooking, CBS, Comcast, DIY, Discovery, ESPN, Food Network, Fox, HGTV, History, Lifetime and The Weather Channel.

But in an email, an account executive at Warner Media said the clearance team rejected it. “WarnerMedia Commercial Clearance has not accepted America First Action’s advertisement ‘We Are America’ for its networks as the ad does not meet its commercial clearance standards,” the email states. “Specifically, the ad asserts that Biden will raise taxes on the middle class. That claim is not adequately substantiated and has been judged false by independent fact-checkers. The advertisement also mischaracterizes Nancy Pelosi as a socialist.” [..] In a letter to lawyers at Warner Media, an attorney representing AFA accused the media company of censoring normal political speech that is “at the very least a matter worthy of debate.”

“While AFA’s opponents are, of course, permitted to purchase air time to try to rebut AFA’s claims, it is not the job of your network to censor a statement that is factually supported and relates to an important issue in the upcoming election,” wrote Stephen Kenny of Jones Day. “Indeed, every other cable network is currently airing AFA’s ad. If you continue to decline to air the ad, please let us know why the factual support outlined above is insufficient.”

The New York Times offers anonymous editorial space to complete nobodies these days. Sweet Jesus. Anything to smear Trump.

• ‘Anonymous’ Anti-Trump Official Revealed As CNN Pundit Miles Taylor (Fox)

The anonymous senior Trump administration official who authored the infamous New York Times op-ed in 2018 declaring to be part of the “resistance” revealed himself on Wednesday to be former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor. Taylor, who previously came forward as a critic of President Trump and a supporter of Joe Biden in August, explained that he wrote his 2019 book “A Warning” as Anonymous as a “caution to voters that it wasn’t as bad as it looked inside the Trump administration – it was worse.” “While I claim sole authorship of the work, the sentiments expressed within it were widely held among officials at the highest levels of the federal government,” Taylor wrote in a statement published on Medium. “In other words, Trump’s own lieutenants were alarmed by his instability.”

Taylor was hired by CNN as a contributor in September. However, it is now known that he lied to the network by denying authorship of the op-ed during an Aug. 21 interview with his now-colleague Anderson Cooper. “There was an op-ed, there was a book by someone calling themselves ‘Anonymous.’ Are you aware of who that is?” Cooper asked. “I’m not,” Taylor responded. “Look, that was a parlor game that happened in Washington D.C. of a lot of folks trying to think of who that might be. I’ve got my own thoughts about who that might be, but-” “You’re not Anonymous,” Cooper interjected. “I wear a mask for two things, Anderson: Halloweens and pandemics. So, no,” Taylor answered.

[..] According to CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who broke the news on his network on Wednesday afternoon, “We did not know this until today. [..] White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany released a statement knocking Taylor as a “low-level, disgruntled former staffer,” as well as “a liar and a coward who chose anonymity over action and leaking over leading. “He was ineffective and incompetent during his time as DHS Chief of Staff which is why he was promptly fired after only serving in this role for a matter of weeks,” McEnany added. “It is appalling a low-ranking official would be granted anonymity and it is clear the New York Times is doing the bidding of Never-Trumpers and Democrats.”

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also piled on the former Trump official. You have got to be kidding me. Miles Taylor? That’s who the New York Times granted an anonymous editorial article? I’ve seen more exciting reveals in Scooby-Doo episodes. What a monumental embarrassment,” Meadows tweeted.

“ALICE will never go back to her insecure, low-wage job, ever.”

• ALICE Doesn’t Work Here Anymore (CHS)

Meet ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, at least she was employed until the pandemic presented impossible choices between taking care of her children and their education, and her aging parents, and keeping her demanding, low-wage job. Though it doesn’t fit in with the cute mythology of “capitalism” that apologists love to promote, ALICE wasn’t working to get ahead–she was working to barely survive in an economy where wages have stagnated for decades and recently lost ground at an alarming rate as costs for everything from rent to childcare to utilities have soared while her hours have been cut.

This is the neofeudalism I’ve often described here: the modern-day equivalent of the landless (i.e. owns no capital) serf is a landless (i.e. owns no capital) debt-serf with student loans, an auto loan and credit card debt and income that is constrained by globalization, financialization and the scarcity of high-paying work that isn’t reserved for insiders and the privileged few who chose their wealthy, well-educated, socially connected parents wisely. Lacking capital and any realistic means of acquiring any, the debt-serf has only labor to sell, and in a globalized world in which everyone selling their labor is competing globally for work producing tradable goods and services, ordinary labor has lost purchasing power for the past 45 years (see charts below).

The dominance of Big Tech monopoly platforms has created new fields for the exploitation of ordinary labor in the low-paid gig economy and fulfillment centers. The traditional neofeudal fiefdoms (retail outlets, hospitality and restaurants) have been hit by the pandemic pullback in consumer spending, and the other low-wage fiefdoms (fast food and domestic service) have been in structural decline for years. Meanwhile, the owners of the Financial Nobility’s fiefdoms and Big Tech monopolies have enjoyed unprecedented gains in income and wealth (see charts below) as wages’ share of the economy has declined for decades, in effect transferring trillions from labor to the Financial Nobility.

This neofeudal arrangement is about to change as Universal Basic Income (UBI) or its equivalent becomes the accepted status quo solution to neofeudalism’s soaring inequality. Since there’s no limit to how much currency can be created by the Federal Reserve, then why not distribute enough “free money” to the serfs to tamp down the brewing revolt? What the political class and the Financial Nobility don’t yet grasp (due to their complete disconnect from neofeudal daily life) is that ALICE will never go back to her insecure, low-wage job, ever. No matter how meager the UBI, permanent unemployment, stimulus or whatever the political class calls the distribution of “Fed free money,” ALICE will find a way to escape the bonds of neofeudal serfdom.

But can’t create it, or print it. I’m not a fan of using all sorts of different kids of inflation, but in this case the point remains the same.

• The Fed MUST Have Inflation (Rickards)

The Fed says that “price stability” is part of their dual mandate and they are committed to maintaining the purchasing power of the dollar. But the Fed has a funny definition of price stability. Common sense says price stability should be zero inflation and zero deflation. A dollar five years from now should have the same purchasing power as a dollar today. Of course, this purchasing power would be “on average,” since some items are always going up or down in price for reasons that have nothing to do with the Fed. And how you construct the price index matters also. It’s an inexact science, but zero inflation seems like the right target. But the Fed target is 2%, not zero. If that sounds low, it’s not. Inflation of 2% cuts the purchasing power of a dollar in half in 35 years and in half again in another 35 years.

That means in an average lifetime of 70 years, 2% will cause the dollar to 75% of its purchasing power! Just 3% inflation will cut the purchasing power of a dollar by almost 90% in the same average lifetime. But for the Fed, there’s a problem: They can’t produce 2% inflation. Inflation depends on consumer psychology. We have not had much consumer price inflation, but we have had huge asset price inflation. The “inflation” is not in consumer prices; it’s in asset prices. The printed money has to go somewhere. Instead of chasing goods, investors have been chasing yield. Inflation would help diminish the real value of the debt, but central banks have obviously proved impotent at generating inflation. Now central banks face the new depression and more deflation with few policy options to fight it.

” There is not a single case in history where such a recusal of the justice has occurred under this type of flimsy claim.”

• Ornstein: Impeach Amy Coney Barrett (Turley)

My column this morning in the Hill discussed a call by columnist and professor Norm Ornstein to impeach Amy Coney Barrett if she does not yield to a demand to recuse herself from any election challenge before the Court. A demand for such recusal was filed yesterday in the Supreme Court. Ornstein’s call for impeachment is the latest unhinged response to Barrett nomination and further decouples our national debate from any sense rationality and restraint. Ornstein declared on Twitter: “If Amy Coney Barrett goes on the Court and immediately votes for PA voter suppression, she should quickly be impeached. Trump asked her openly to act to tilt the scales of the election.”

I have already addressed the recusal calls as entirely baseless. Recusal under these circumstances would create a dangerous precedent for future nominees who are pressured to recuse solely to influence the outcome of pending or expected cases. There is not a single case in history where such a recusal of the justice has occurred under this type of flimsy claim. Barrett has no personal, professional, or financial interest in pending election cases. We have had only one justice ever impeached in our history. That was Samuel Chase in 1804 and he was acquitted by the Senate in 1805.

The Chase case is a telling point of comparison. Like today, the politics of the time were lethal and hysterical. Chase was a highly partisan Federalist who was tainted by the use of the Alien and Sedition Acts to attack political critics during the Administration of John Adams. The impeachment, supported by Thomas Jefferson, was based on Chase’s presiding on controversial trials for figures like James Callender. Despite the Federalist being in the minority in the Senate, the senators overwhelmingly rejected the case against Chase. It remains to be seen if we have a bipartisan majority of senators equally committed to the integrity of the Court and the Constitution today.

Bellingcat is a dangerous arm of US, UK intelligence. We will see that soon again in the MH17 mess.

• Bellingcat Smears OPCW Whistleblower, Journalists With False Letter (Maté)

Bellingcat, the NATO member state-funded website that has participated in a propaganda effort to accuse Syria of a chemical weapons attack in April 2018 and justify the US-led bombing that followed, has published a new falsehood-ridden attack on an OPCW whistleblower whose suppressed findings exposed the pro-war deception. According to Bellingcat, a leak that it has obtained not only “proves that a chemical attack did occur,” in the Syrian city of Douma in April 2018, but also, “shows that any notion of a cover-up at the OPCW is false.” Contrary to Bellingcat’s account, the website has only added a new chapter to the OPCW cover-up scandal by publishing an article beset with multiple demonstrable falsehoods and outlandish or unsupported claims.

It also features a malicious effort to dox and discredit a veteran, highly-regarded OPCW inspector who challenged the censorship of his team’s investigation. The anonymously authored Bellingcat article’s problems begin with its very premise, which turns out to be a blatant falsehood. The article is based on excerpts of a leaked draft letter that, Bellingcat claims, was sent in June 2019 by OPCW Director General Fernando Arias to Brendan Whelan, a member of the OPCW’s Douma team. However, The Grayzone can reveal that the text that Bellingcat published was never actually sent to Whelan. Indeed, the text of the letter featured by Bellingcat was actually an unsent draft that Whelan never received. This fact dismantles the heart of the NATO state-backed website’s argument.

Dr. Whelan, a 16-year OPCW veteran, first challenged the censorship of his team’s investigation in June 2018, weeks after the OPCW team returned from Syria. A series of leaks show that Whelan and the other OPCW inspectors who deployed to Syria found evidence that undermined allegations of a chemical attack in Douma. Yet their data was suppressed, and, when the censorship was challenged, the inspectors were removed from their own investigation. The cover-up coincided with pressure on the OPCW from the U.S. government, which had bombed Syria, along with the UK and France, in April 2018 based on the pretext that the Syrian government was culpable. The OPCW’s final report in March 2019 omitted the suppressed findings and strongly implied Syrian government guilt.

Well, it’s something.

• Greece Has Protected Its Jobs Better Than The Rest Of The EU (K.)

The Greek government’s measures to protect workers from the effects of the pandemic have served as a shield against unemployment, according to the course of the jobless rate in Greece and the rest of the European Union as revealed by Eurostat figures. In the second quarter of the year, when most of the bloc was in lockdown, the share of workers in Greece who lost their job was below 2% of those employed, against over 6.5% in Spain and between 3.5% and 5% in Italy. Across most EU countries, that rate ranged between 2% and 3.5%, according to an experimental study by the bloc’s statistical service.

Greece achieved that thanks to the introduction of contract suspensions and the subsidy of 534 euros per month to each worker furloughed, which is continuing for more than 160,000 recipients. This puts this country among the member-states that proved best at protecting jobs in the April-June period. On Thursday 116,860 workers will receive the special-purpose compensation for September, adding up to €58 million, and another 41,504 will collect a total of €10.6 million through the Syn-Ergasia labor subsidy program.

“Don’t harsh my mellow, man. I’m doing this for a couple bags of blow and a $20, man. You suck!”

• Jack Dorsey Hires Homeless Man To Fill In For Him At Senate Hearings (BBee)

Jack Dorsey was summoned to the Senate’s hearing on Big Tech today, but he was tripping on acid with the spider-monkeys off the southern coast of St. Bart’s, so he quickly called up his office and had his people hire a homeless man hanging out in front of Twitter’s headquarters to fill in for him. The hobo was holding up a sign reading “Will Go to Senate Hearing for Crack,” and Dorsey’s assistants quickly hired him for the hearing. “Yeah, uh, censorship, I like that. That’s good stuff,” said the hobo to the confused panel. “The apocalypse is coming, man. The signs are all around us!”

“Sorry, Mr., uh, Dorsey, we were expecting a professional-looking CEO, but you’re clearly just a hobo off the streets of San Francisco,” said Senator Mike Lee. “Couldn’t you at least have taken a shower before talking to the United States Senate?” “Hey, bro, chill out,” the hobo responded. “Don’t harsh my mellow, man. I’m doing this for a couple bags of blow and a $20, man. You suck!” For his part, Mark Zuckerberg programmed a lookalike android to testify.

Ron Johnson @jack

Here's the most incredible answer from today's hearing.

When @jack is asked if @Twitter has the ability to influence elections, he says NO.

Yet they all believe Russia has the power to influence through social media platforms. Does that make sense? pic.twitter.com/HydgAAcCZU

— Senator Ron Johnson (@SenRonJohnson) October 29, 2020

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Click at the top of the sidebars for Paypal and Patreon donations. Thank you for your support.

Joe Rogan Greenwald Clapper

The new reality:

The government knows everything about us and we only know what the government wants us to know.

Real democracy:

We know everything the government does because they work for us and the government has to respect our right to privacy.pic.twitter.com/AIyHL6FoNW

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) October 29, 2020

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Debt Rattle September 23 2020

Sep 232020

September 23, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, depression, Deutsche, felons, Guardian, Joe Rogan, microfibers, NYT, Putin, RBG, second wave, stranded whales, Supreme Court, torture 19 Responses »

SalvadorDali Girl at a window 1925

• The US Is Using The Guardian To Justify Jailing Assange For Life (Cook)

• Prosecutor Claims Assange May Be Faking His Depression (RT)

• The War on Assange is a War on Truth (Ron Paul)

• Edward Snowden To Give Up More Than $5 Million From Book And Speeches (CNN)

• US Suspects Deutsche Bank Laundered $1.3 Trillion In 20 Years (RT)

• Amy Coney Barrett Would Be The Ultimate Insult To RBG (NBC)

• Amy Coney Barrett Is Hands-Down Best Pick To Replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg (NYP)

• Michael Bloomberg Pays Fines For 32,000 Florida Felons So They Can Vote (NYP)

• New York Times Wrongly Cuts Election Year Nominations By Almost Half (Turley)

• Spotify Employees Demand Editorial Oversight Over Joe Rogan Podcasts (DMN)

• Putin Offers UN Staff Free Dose Of Russia’s Sputnik V Vaccine (RT)

• Putin: Global Economy Won’t Recover From Pandemic ‘For A Long Time’ (RT)

• How Rescuing Drowning Migrants Became A Crime (G.)

• Washed Clothing’s Synthetic Mountain of ‘Fluff’ (BBC)

• 380 Whales Dead In Worst Mass Stranding In Australia’s History (G.)

• NBA Players Wear Special Lace Collars To Honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg (BBee)

“Quiet” numbers. But not in Western Europe. Governments are talking about new lockdowns. People will not obey.

Western Europe second wave.

Stella Moris

The next three days will be very difficult for us. The court will hear medical evidence of Julian's physical and mental condition and his likelihood of survival if he is extradited to face 175 years in a US prison.

Please treat Julian with dignity and humanity. #MentalHealth

— Stella Moris (@StellaMoris1) September 22, 2020

Excellent by Jonathan Cook. There are quite a few people at the Guardian who should be on trial instead of Assange..

• The US Is Using The Guardian To Justify Jailing Assange For Life (Cook)

[..] The corporate media had two possible responses to the promised Wikileaks revolution. One was to get behind it. But that was not straightforward. As we have noted, Wikileaks’ goal of transparency was fundamentally at odds both with the corporate media’s need for access to members of the power elite and with its embedded role, representing one side in the “competition” between rival power centres. The corporate media’s other possible response was to get behind the political elite’s efforts to destroy Wikileaks. Once Wikileaks and Assange were disabled, there could be a return to media business as usual.

Outlets would once again chase tidbits of information from the corridors of power, getting “exclusives” from the power centres they were allied with. Put in simple terms, Fox News would continue to get self-serving exclusives against the Democratic party, and MSNBC would get self-serving exclusives against Trump and the Republican Party. That way, everyone would get a slice of editorial action and advertising revenue – and nothing significant would change. The power elite in its two flavours, Democrat and Republican, would continue to run the show unchallenged, switching chairs occasionally as elections required.

[..] The Guardian may be largely ignoring the hearings, but the Old Bailey is far from ignoring the Guardian. The paper’s name has been cited over and over again in court by lawyers for the US. They have regularly quoted from a 2011 book on Assange by two Guardian reporters, David Leigh and Luke Harding, to bolster the Trump administration’s increasingly frantic arguments for extraditing Assange. When Leigh worked with Assange, back in 2010, he was the Guardian’s investigations editor and, it should be noted, the brother-in-law of the then-editor, Alan Rusbridger. Harding, meanwhile, is a long-time reporter whose main talent appears to be churning out Guardian books at high speed that closely track the main concerns of the UK and US security services.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I had underwhelming experiences dealing with both of them during my years working at the Guardian. Normally a newspaper would not hesitate to put on its front page reports of the most momentous trial of recent times, and especially one on which the future of journalism depends. That imperative would be all the stronger were its own reporters’ testimony likely to be critical in determining the outcome of the trial. For the Guardian, detailed and prominent reporting of, and commentary on, the Assange extradition hearings should be a double priority.

So how to explain the Guardian’s silence? The book by Leigh and Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, made a lot of money for the Guardian and its authors by hurriedly cashing in on the early notoriety around Assange and Wikileaks. But the problem today is that the Guardian has precisely no interest in drawing attention to the book outside the confines of a repressive courtroom. Indeed, were the book to be subjected to any serious scrutiny, it might now look like an embarrassing, journalistic fraud. The two authors used the book not only to vent their personal animosity towards Assange – in part because he refused to let them write his official biography – but also to divulge a complex password with which he had entrusted Leigh to an online cache of encrypted documents.

That egregious mistake by the Guardian opened the door for every security service in the world to break into the file, as well as other files by cracking Assange’s sophisticated formula for devising passwords. Much of the furore about Assange’s supposed failure to protect names in the leaked documents Assange published stems from Leigh’s much-obscured role in sabotaging Wikileaks’ work. Assange was forced into a damage limitation operation because of Leigh’s incompetence, forcing him to hurriedly publish files so that anyone worried they had been named in the documents could know before hostile security services identified them.

The Guardian has sought for nearly a decade to obscure David Leigh's deeply irresponsible antics in publishing that critically important Wikileaks password.

It's another reason why the Guardian has barely covered the Assange hearings. It goes way beyond 'conflict of interest'

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) September 22, 2020

All is fair in war.

• Prosecutor Claims Assange May Be Faking His Depression (RT)

A prosecutor representing the US at Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has argued that the WikiLeaks founder could be feigning depression after a psychiatrist said he might commit sucide if he is sent to the US to be tried. James Lewis, the lawyer representing Washington at Assange’s hearings in London, sought to poke holes in the testimony of renowned professor of neuropsychiatry, Michael Kopelman, who said on Tuesday that the WikiLeaks founder is suffering from “severe depression” after being confined to the maximum security Belmarsh Prison for over 16 months. Kopelman, who has visited Assange more than 20 times in prison, opined that if the court rules in favor of extradition to the US, it might drive Assange to take his own life.

He pointed out that the Australian’s years-long isolation at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and the history of depression running in his family make the scenario even more plausible. It’s the imminence of extradition and/or an actual extradition that will trigger the [suicide] attempt, in my opinion Lewis argued that the symptoms of depression Kopelman saw in Assange are no more than pretense, suggesting that Assange has learned how to imitate the condition by reading the British Medical Journal in his cell and might have lied about having hallucinations, reported Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola, who attended the hearing. Lewis also blasted the expert for not identifying Assange’s partner, Stella Morris, by name in his first report, which Kopelman said was omitted for the sake of her privacy. Lewis then argued that the fact that Assange had a wife and two small children was “a protective factor against suicide” – a notion which Kopelman rejected, saying that suicide is not a sole prerogative of single people.

“President Trump should end the US government’s war on Assange…and on all whistleblowers and their publishers.”

• The War on Assange is a War on Truth (Ron Paul)

It is dangerous to reveal the truth about the illegal and immoral things our government does with our money and in our name, and the war on journalists who dare reveal such truths is very much a bipartisan affair. Just ask Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who was relentlessly pursued first by the Obama Administration and now by the Trump Administration for the “crime” of reporting on the crimes perpetrated by the United States government. Assange is now literally fighting for his life, as he tries to avoid being extradited to the United States where he faces 175 years in prison for violating the “Espionage Act.” While it makes no sense to be prosecuted as a traitor to a country of which you are not a citizen, the idea that journalists who do their job and expose criminality in high places are treated like traitors is deeply dangerous in a free society.

To get around the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press, Assange’s tormentors simply claim that he is not a journalist. Then-CIA director Mike Pompeo declared that Wikileaks was a “hostile intelligence service” aided by Russia. Ironically, that’s pretty much what the Democrats say about Assange. Earlier this month, a US Federal appeals court judge ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records was illegal. That bulk collection program, born out of the anti-American PATRIOT Act, was first revealed to us by whistleblower Edward Snowden just over seven years ago. That is why whistleblowers and those who publish their information are so important. Were it not for Snowden and Assange, we would never know about this government criminality.

And if we never know about government malfeasance it can never be found to be criminal in the first place. That is convenient for governments, but it is also a recipe for tyranny. While we might expect the US media to aggressively come to the aid of a fellow journalist being persecuted by the government for doing his job, the opposite is happening. As journalist Glen Greenwald wrote last week, the US mainstream media is completely ignoring the Assange extradition trial. Why would they do such a thing? Partisan politics. Journalists – with a few important exceptions like Greenwald himself – are no longer interested in digging and reporting the truth. These days they believe they have a “higher calling.”

[..] We cannot have a self-governing society as was intended for our Republic if the government, with the complicity of the mainstream media, decides that there are things we are not allowed to know about it. President Trump should end the US government’s war on Assange…and on all whistleblowers and their publishers.

I’m sure we all feel a lot more comfortable once CNN starts showing a human-interest interest in Edward Snowden, right?

CNN badly misreported this.

A) This is not a settlement; I didn't agree to it.

B) The judgement from this censorship case is not enforceable while I am in exile, but I've never had that much money anyway.

Better headline: "US could gain up to $5m by pardoning Edward Snowden." https://t.co/8jp6IZnOKC

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 22, 2020

• Edward Snowden To Give Up More Than $5 Million From Book And Speeches (CNN)

Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who leaked intelligence secrets in 2013, has agreed to forfeit more than $5 million he earned from his book and speaking fees to the US government, according to court records. Snowden published his book “Permanent Record” last year without government approval, in violation of contracts he signed with the CIA and the National Security Agency. A federal judge had sided with the Justice Department in its lawsuit to claw back Snowden’s proceeds, and was considering how much he would need to pay. The agreement Snowden’s legal team reached may not be the end of the dispute of his book proceeds, however. The judge has not yet approved the forfeiture plan.

And Snowden, in the agreement, said he still wants the ability to appeal the judge’s earlier decision against him. He tweeted his reaction to CNN’s reporting on Tuesday. “A) This is not a settlement; I didn’t agree to it. B) The judgement from this censorship case is not enforceable while I am in exile, but I’ve never had that much money anyway,” he wrote on Twitter, highlighting how he may still contest his case in court or be able to block handing over his proceeds. “Better headline: ‘US could gain up to $5m by pardoning Edward Snowden,'” he added. Snowden’s pardon suggestion on Twitter downplayed the current reality of his situation — if the court proceedings stand, Snowden would still be liable for the $5 million his lawyers said he’s gained and agreed to give up, and potentially more.

[..] The case represents one of the few ways the US government has found to hold former employees accountable for unauthorized leaks. John Bolton, the former national security adviser who published a damaging book about President Donald Trump earlier this year, faces a similar attempt by the Justice Department to claw back proceeds for publishing. That case is still ongoing, with a hearing set for this week. Bolton disputes the government’s accusations. Snowden, who lives in Russia, had earned $4.2 million from his book sales, royalties and related rights as of this month. He gave 56 paid speeches that included disclosures that breached his government secrecy agreement, according to the court filing from his lawyers in the US and the Justice Department. In all, Snowden made about $1.03 million from the speeches, with an average speaking fee of $18,000. The money will be put in a trust, according to the plan to which Snowden and the Trump administration agreed.

Meanwhile, where the real criminals hang out…

• US Suspects Deutsche Bank Laundered $1.3 Trillion In 20 Years (RT)

Germany’s largest lender, Deutsche Bank, is reportedly suspected by the US of facilitating more than half of the $2 trillion of suspicious transactions that were flagged by the US government between 1999 and 2017. According to broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), some $1.3 trillion of $2 trillion in leaked transactions that occurred between 1999 and 2017 and were flagged as suspicious passed through Deutsche Bank. DW cited documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The documents revealed that five major banks (Bank of New York Mellon, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan and Standard Chartered) processed trillions of dollars of transactions identified as suspicious.

The activity reports that banks and other financial institutions filed with the US Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, showed that the megabanks continued to profit from powerful and dangerous players even after US authorities fined the financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money. Deutsche Bank said in a statement that the incidents in the leaked documents “have already been investigated and led to regulatory resolutions in which the bank’s cooperation and remediation was publicly recognized. Where necessary and appropriate, consequence management was applied.” Deutsche added that it has “devoted significant resources to strengthening our controls” and is “very focused on meeting our responsibilities and obligations.”

I confess, I like to f*ck with your mind. Two articles with 180º different views of Barrett, who may well not even be nominated. Gotta stay ahead of the game, right?

I still don’t get why people keep talking up RBG’s “dying wish”, if she ever had one. She would have been the first to acknowledge it was never her call. Don’t you dishonor her by suggesting it was?

• Amy Coney Barrett Would Be The Ultimate Insult To RBG (NBC)

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School in 1956, she was one of just nine women in a class of about 500 men. She transferred to Columbia and graduated at the top of her class, but many judges wouldn’t hire a woman as a clerk. When she began to teach law, there were fewer than two dozen female law professors. Sixteen years after Ginsburg started at Harvard Law, Barrett was born. The same year, 1972, Notre Dame Law School — which would become Barrett’s alma mater — began admitting female students, thanks to people like Ginsburg who pushed through doors long closed. Barrett wasn’t even 1 year old in 1973, when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion nationwide; just a few years before that, the court had decided Griswold v. Connecticut, which established a right to sexual and intimate privacy and legalized contraception.

With those two decisions, women had unprecedented power to control their reproductive lives, which in turn gave them greater control over their educations, their finances and their futures. In Roe and Griswold’s wake, women flooded into college, law school and the workplace. Barrett was one of them. But instead of doing what Ginsburg did — pushing doors open, reaching out to help others through — Barrett tried to slam them shut. She went on to be a conservative lawyer, professor and judge, and if she is appointed to the Supreme Court, she will likely be key in undermining much of what has allowed American women to make the progress they have: abortion rights, contraception access and prohibitions on many forms of gender discrimination.

This certainly puts Barrett at odds with most of America’s most venerated female lawyers and jurists and with female lawyers more generally. Feminism creates something like a virtuous cycle: As women gain greater opportunity, they become more invested in preserving and expanding what they’ve gained. But making the initial gains, and moving them forward, has always been difficult. Constraints on women’s rights in the United States have historically been couched in the language of benevolence and protection, of women being too moral and too delicate to play in the same arena as men. Gender discrimination was justified as chivalrous, as an effort to protect women and treat them as ladies. This, Ginsburg noted, “helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.”

Clarence Thomas

They tried to destroy Thomas in 1991, they tried to destroy Kavanaugh in 2018. They’ll try to destroy the next nominee.
Listen to every word of this powerful response from Thomas & watch out for shot of Biden squirming.
pic.twitter.com/kJrJ1SMJog

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) September 21, 2020

“Picture a female jurist who has consistently defied social expectations imposed on women and whose legal thinking is closely bound up with her faith.”

• Amy Coney Barrett Is Hands-Down Best Pick To Replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg (NYP)

Picture a female jurist who has consistently defied social expectations imposed on women and whose legal thinking is closely bound up with her faith. No, I’m not talking about Amy Coney Barrett, reported to top President Trump’s list of candidates to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. I’m talking about Ginsburg herself. Ginsburg believed fervently that conventional expectations shouldn’t hinder women as they seek their full, fair share of public life. Nor was she shy about how her Jewish faith shaped her judicial mind. In an essay for the American Jewish Committee published in 1993, she wrote: “Laws as protectors of the oppressed, the poor, the loner, is evident in the work of my Jewish predecessors .. The biblical command ‘Justice, justice shalt thou pursue’ is a strand that ties them together.”

By those criteria, Barrett would make a most worthy successor to RBG. In nominating the 48-year-old Louisianan, the president would present the nation with an inspiring vision of what it means to be an American woman in 2020 — one that could by turns surprise and captivate the suburban women Trump is keen to court while also delivering for the GOP base. “Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree. Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman -a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of impeaching the president- hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998. “She was one of the two best lawyers” of the 40 clerks “and arguably the single best.” Feldman concluded: “She was legally prepared enough to go on the court 20 years ago.” When Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, every single one of those 40 fellow clerks endorsed her as a “first-rate” thinker including such vehemently anti-Trump figures as Neal Katyal, solicitor general under Team Obama. The entire Notre Dame law faculty likewise endorsed her, “and that includes people who identify as liberal,” as Snead was quick to note.

“774,000 Floridians who have already served their time in jail or prison are not eligible to vote..”

That is nuts. But isn’t this too close for comfort to buying votes? It would be funny if they all vote Trump.

• Michael Bloomberg Pays Fines For 32,000 Florida Felons So They Can Vote (NYP)

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has helped pay the outstanding fines and fees of 32,000 convicted felons in Florida so they could regain their right to vote ahead of the November election, according to a report. The billionaire and former presidential candidate raised over $16 million for, and donated $5 million to, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, according to Axios. Bloomberg’s push would benefit ex-cons as part of a 2018 state constitutional amendment allowing felons who have served their time to regain their right to vote. Before they can regain that right, however, they need to pay any fines, fees or restitution.

In a statement to the news outlet, a representative for Bloomberg said, “The right to vote is fundamental to our democracy and no American should be denied that right. Working together with the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, we are determined to end disenfranchisement and the discrimination that has always driven it.” On Monday, the FRRC shared a New York Times op-ed titled, “This Is How Bloomberg Can Help Biden Win Florida.” The piece praised his decision to spend $100 million in the Sunshine State to boost Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as he fights a neck-and-neck race against President Trump.

“An even more politically effective, and charitable, use of those dollars might be to help pay off the debts of Floridians who have financial obligations related to a felony conviction — as LeBron James and the group behind More Than a Vote did this summer. “Because of an 11th Circuit appeals court ruling on Sept. 11, an estimated 774,000 Floridians who have already served their time in jail or prison are not eligible to vote in the 2020 election until they pay the fines and fees associated with their sentences,” read the op-ed, authored by computer scientist Dr. Robert Montoye.

Hey, it fits their MO!

NYT, Guardian, rest of MSM in 2020 know only one side of the population reads and watches them, and that they don’t read the other side. That frees them up to paint a very one-sided picture.

• New York Times Wrongly Cuts Election Year Nominations By Almost Half (Turley)

The New York Times ran a story declaring that there were only “there have been 16 Supreme Court vacancies that occurred before Election Day.” [..] I decided to do another rough count and, if anything, it would seem that the 29 nomination figure is arguably too low and that there appears almost twice the number cited by the New York Times. [..]

There has been considerable push back on the “precedent” for an election-year nomination. NBC Meet the Press Host Chuck Todd exclaimed “What precedent?!” when John Barrasso (R-WY) even used the word precedent in his interview. In reality, such nominations have occurred regularly in history. Indeed, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself said in 2016 that the Senate had to do its “job” and vote on such nominations because “there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” (While Todd correctly considered it newsworthy to note that Ginsburg wanted to leave her seat for the next president to fill, he did not consider it relevant to also note that Ginsburg previously insisted that the Senate was supposed to fill such seats in an election year).

Justice Sonia Sotomayor also stated that it was wrong to leave the Court with only eight justices. That debate will continue to rage, but we should be able to reach a consensus on the historical record, even in this time of rage. Here is my effort (taken at my own peril). I may be missing something obvious but I count 30 nominations in the year before a presidential election. The current vacancy could produce 31. There are a couple that could be excluded by a day or so (Johnson, Rutledge, Jay, and Crittenden). There is a recess appointment (Brennan). There were also a couple on the last day of the election period (King and Walworth). Moreover, a couple nominees were nominated and then renominated.

Some are repeaters. For example, President John Tyler nominated Reuben Walworth three times in 1844, but Tyler was unpopular with the Democrats and the Whigs in Congress (leading to a series of stalled efforts on nominations and legislation). Spencer and King were also repeaters but represented separate nominations. However, even with such eliminations, it comes to roughly 30 not 16 from what I can see.

There is nothing in Joe Rogan’s $100 million contract to protect his freedom? If so, what lawyer negotiated that?

• Spotify Employees Demand Editorial Oversight Over Joe Rogan Podcasts (DMN)

A group of Spotify staffers are now reportedly pushing to introduce direct editing oversight over The Joe Rogan Experience — before the episodes go live. That includes content flags, trigger warnings, references to fact-checked information, or simply refusing to publish an episode at all. The demands follow a string of controversial comments by Joe Rogan, who was lured to Spotify in a massive, $100 million deal. Rogan’s appeal to millions of listeners is his unfiltered and irreverent approach, though that style isn’t sitting well with an activist group of Spotify staffers who say he needs to be reined in.

Earlier this month, Digital Music News first reported that multiple podcast episodes were missing following a migration to Spotify’s platform. That included controversial interviews with the likes of Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gavin McInnes. Also missing are episodes featuring right-wing figures like Owen Benjamin, Stefan Molyneux, and Charles C. Johnson. But despite the glaring omissions, Spotify staffers are now stepping up their demands to control more of Rogan’s content. Vice first reported that Spotify employees have conducted more than ten meetings to discuss possible changes. Those discussions included proposals for the outright removal of additional podcast episodes.

Of particular focus in an earlier conversation featuring author Abigail Shrier, who wrote Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Shrier’s opinions on the matter drew howls of protest from certain Spotify staffers, who demanded its removal — though the episode is still available on the Spotify platform. Now, Digital Music News has learned that the protesting employee group is stepping up its demands to control Rogan’s work.
Part of the rationale is that Spotify already exerts control over content like playlists, even those created by outside curators. So why not extend that oversight to podcasts as well?

I’ll take some.

• Putin Offers UN Staff Free Dose Of Russia’s Sputnik V Vaccine (RT)

Speaking at the UN General Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin has called for a top-level conference on joint global development of a Covid-19 vaccine. He also offered UN staff a dose of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine for free. The UN General Assembly, held in a coronavirus-appropriate virtual format, kicked off on Tuesday. Putin delivered a speech during its morning session, largely focusing on the ongoing pandemic. “We’ve all faced a fundamentally new challenge – the coronavirus pandemic. The disease directly affected millions of people, [and] claimed the most precious thing – hundreds of thousands of human lives. Quarantines, the closure of borders, creation of numerous problems for citizens of almost all countries – all these things are the reality today,” Putin said.

All world leaders interested in cooperation on the development of a Covid-19 vaccine should meet and discuss fending off the deadly disease and making the jab freely accessible to everyone, he said, calling it the top priority for the whole of humankind. Russia was the first in the world to register a vaccine – Sputnik V, which has proven to be “reliable, safe and effective” – and is ready to provide all the assistance needed, Putin stressed. “We are absolutely open and committed to partnership. In this regard, we are coming with an initiative to hold a high-level online conference in the nearest future with states interested in cooperation in the development of vaccines against coronavirus.”

Noting that the disease has already affected UN staff, Putin then offered the organization help in battling the virus. He said that Moscow is ready to provide free Sputnik V shots to any UN staffers willing to be vaccinated, adding that Russia has already received some requests from their UN colleagues. The Sputnik V vaccine is currently undergoing large-scale final trials. Tens of thousands of Russians and foreigners have volunteered to take part in the pilot immunization program.

Cut out all sanctions.

• Putin: Global Economy Won’t Recover From Pandemic ‘For A Long Time’ (RT)

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin told the 75th session of the UN General Assembly that global trade needs to be released from illegitimate sanctions. He also decried a “lack of humanity” in international affairs in the Covid era. Addressing the assembly on Tuesday, Putin added that it will take a long time to resuscitate the global economy from the damage wrought by coronavirus. In his opinion, it will be necessary to make radical choices. The Russian president added that the UN Security Council should “take into fuller account the interests of all countries.” “I would like to once again draw attention to the Russian proposal on the introduction of so-called ‘green corridors,’ [which would be] free from trade wars and sanctions, primarily for essential goods, food, medicines, and personal protective equipment, which are in demand specifically to combat the pandemic,” he said.

“In general, releasing and freeing world trade from barriers, bans, restrictions, [and] illegitimate sanctions could help to restore global growth and reduce unemployment.” Putin also urged the UN itself to adapt to the present global situation. “[It] should reflect in its development the dynamics of the 21st century, and consistently adapt to the realities of the modern world, which is indeed becoming more complex, multipolar, multidimensional,” he explained. Sounding a downbeat note on the global economy, the Russian leader noted that “experts have yet to fully assess the scale of the socio-

Direct result of our criminal actions in their home counntries.

• How Rescuing Drowning Migrants Became A Crime (G.)

In the summer of 2017, two years on from the peak of Europe’s refugee crisis, smugglers in Libya were still sending hundreds of people a day to sea in unsafe rubber boats, and the Iuventa’s crew wanted to be where the action was. In a patch of sea just off the coast of north Africa, about a dozen NGO ships were searching for boats in distress – a direct challenge, as many of them saw it, to European governments that had scaled back state-run rescue efforts. Yet the Iuventa had been following instructions that drew it further away from the rescue zone and closer to Italian territorial waters. According to the ship’s records, the Italian coastguard first told the crew to rendezvous with an Italian navy ship to collect two men found adrift at sea, and deliver them to another. The second ship never turned up.

Then they were told to look for a blue and white fishing boat with 50 people on board, apparently foundering in the sea close to Lampedusa. As night fell on 1 August, after a day spent searching the waves in vain, a message came through: call off your search and proceed into port. It was the third time in a few months that the ship had been ordered into the harbour at Lampedusa. In just over a year, the Iuventa – crewed by a group of young, motivated people “who could not stand to see the situation in the Mediterranean any longer”, as one put it to me – rescued more than 14,000 people. Most of these rescues were coordinated by the Italian coastguard, but the relationship was increasingly strained.

The Iuventa’s revolving crew of volunteers were outspoken critics of Europe’s border policies, and the small, agile ship took more risks than some of the larger NGO vessels, sailing as close as possible to Libyan waters in order to be able to rescue people from unsafe boats sooner. As one Italian media outlet put it, the ship was “like a sort of Berliner squat out in the middle of the sea – very well organised, radical and antagonistic”. As the Iuventa entered the harbour of Lampedusa, the crew expected to be questioned briefly by police, as they had been on previous occasions, then allowed to get back to work. They were wrong. Within a few hours, their ship would be seized, marking the beginning of a long and still unresolved criminal investigation that leaves 10 humanitarian volunteers facing up to 20 years in prison.

You are what you wear. Literally: the article doesn’t mention it, but those microfibers pile up inside our bodies too.

• Washed Clothing’s Synthetic Mountain of ‘Fluff’ (BBC)

When you add it up, the total amount of synthetic microfibres going into the wider environment as we wash our clothes is an astonishing number. US scientists estimate it to be 5.6 million tonnes since we first started wearing those polyester and nylon garments in a big way in the 1950s. Just over half this mass – 2.9 million tonnes – has likely ended up in our rivers and seas. That’s the equivalent of seven billion fleece jackets, the researchers say. But while we fret about water pollution, and rightly so, increasingly this synthetic “fluff” issue is one that affects the land. The University of California, Santa Barbara, team which did the calculations found that emission to the terrestrial environment has now overtaken that to water bodies – some 176,500 tonnes a year versus 167,000 tonnes.

The reason? Wastewater treatment works have become very good at catching the fibres lost from washing machines. What’s happening is those captured fibres, along with biosolid sludge, are then being applied to cropland or simply buried in landfills. “I hear people say that the synthetic microfibre problem from apparel washing will take care of itself as wastewater treatment works become more widespread around the world and more efficient. But really what we’re doing is just moving the problem from one environmental compartment to another,” Roland Geyer, from UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, told BBC News. The industrial ecologist, working with a range of other experts, has previously totted up the total amount of virgin plastics ever produced (8.3 billion tonnes); and the annual flow of plastics into the oceans (roughly eight million tonnes a year).

These types of calculations are fiendishly complicated, involve models and necessarily resort to quite a few assumptions to plug real-world data gaps. They can’t be absolute in their descriptions of the issues, but at the very least they provide some ball-park figures on which to base serious conversations around mitigation. [..] When the UCSB team ran its flow analysis on all these variables, the number that emerged for the total mass of synthetic microfibres emitted from apparel washing between 1950 and 2016 was 5.6 million tonnes. Half of this amount, however, was released in just the last decade. This is in part a consequence of course of our ballooning collections of clothes. In 1990, say the researchers, the global average stock of garments per capita was 8kg. By 2016 it was 26kg per head.

Mysteries can make one sad too.

• 380 Whales Dead In Worst Mass Stranding In Australia’s History (G.)

Rescuers fighting to save a pod of 270 whales stranded in Tasmania’s west have discovered a further 200 whales about 10km away in the same harbour, which all appear to be dead. The stranding is likely one of the largest on record globally and the worst in Australia’s history. The sighting was made by helicopter over Macquarie Harbour on Wednesday morning and brings the total number of dead long-finned pilot whales in the stranding to about 290. The number of dead could rise further today as data from infrared helicopter surveillance is analysed, said Nic Deka, the coordinator of the rescue from Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service regional manager.

Dr Kris Carlyon, a marine conservation program wildlife biologist, said on Wednesday that the addition of 200 whales made this current stranding the largest in Tasmania’s history. Records show some 294 whales, also long-finned pilots, stranded at Stanley on Tasmania’s north-west in 1935.

Manas Sharma/Reuters

Babylon Bee Brilliance.

• NBA Players Wear Special Lace Collars To Honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg (BBee)

NBA players are honoring the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg this week by wearing pretty lace collars just like Notorious RBG used to wear. In a touching show of respect for the late Justice Ginsburg, and in solidarity with her progressive cause, Lebron James and the LA Lakers took to the court yesterday wearing a stunning variety of delicate white collars inspired by RBG’s wardrobe. According to several commentators on ESPN, the virtual teleconference crowd fell silent in reverent awe as the players all knelt down and chanted “RBG! RBG! RBG!” “Yeah, RBG was an amazing person,” said LeBron James after the game. “I have her biography right here and I totally read it right before the game. She was a judge. That’s cool, I respect that. Judges judge things and not everyone can do that. She believed in Black Lives Matter and being on the right side of history and stuff.”

Power forward Anthony Davis also expressed his happiness with the collars. “It’s good to honor her today with these lacey things. Commissioner Adam Silver and President Xi Jinping told us to wear them so we did. I just took this little doily thing from under a table lamp at my mom’s house and cut a hole in the middle. Easy.” NBA players are vowing to wear the collars until Trump is removed from office, or until angry rioters burn their basketball arenas down, whichever comes first.

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Debt Rattle July 19 2020

Jul 192020

July 19, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:36 am Finance Tagged with: Catalunya, coronavirus, Covid19, HCQ, heart damage, Huawei, Iran, Lovelock, NYT, Steele, Strzok, troop withdrawal, Trump 24 Responses »

Marion Post Wolcott Coal miner waiting for lift home, Capels, West Virginia 1938

• More Than Half Of All COVID19 Patients Found To Have Damaged Hearts (ND)

• Coronavirus Spike Continues Amid New Catalonia Restrictions (BBC)

• CDC Acknowledges Mixing Up Coronavirus Testing Data (Hill)

• US Defense-Readiness A Concern As Troop COVID-19 Cases Surpass 20,000 (ZH)

• Hydroxychloroquine Should Be Available Over The Counter (TH)

• Rouhani Estimates 25 Million Infected In Iran (JTN)

• Icelandair Sacks All Cabin Crew, Says Spare Pilots Must Take Over (Ind.)

• Pressure From Trump Led To 5G Ban, Britain Tells Huawei (G.)

• Trump Wants “Full & Speedy Withdrawal” From Afghanistan (ZH)

• NYT Russiagate Propaganda Shredded By Strzok Comments (ZH)

• The Biosphere and I Are Both In The Last 1% Of Our Lives – James Lovelock (O.)

No, you can’t just look at mortality numbers and say everything’s okay. We hardly know a thing, but we do know that. Try morbidity: “More Than Half Of All COVID19 Patients Found To Have Damaged Hearts”.

I’ve seen reports this morning of new record numbers, but Worldometer doesn’t reflect that. A surge in US deaths was also reported.

Hussman

Though R0 of #SARSCoV2 (#COVID19) wasn’t quite as high as first estimated, I have to say that the Jan 24 “Holy Mother of God” thread from @DrEricDing ranks among the best public-service Twitter posts ever. It’s just a shame the clear risks were dismissed.https://t.co/oha6cbv5MI

— John P. Hussman (@hussmanjp) July 19, 2020

“55 per cent of patients had an abnormality. One in seven patients were found to have severe abnormalities..”

• More Than Half Of All COVID19 Patients Found To Have Damaged Hearts (ND)

An international survey of heart scans in people treated for COVID-19 found that 55 per cent of patients had an abnormality. One in seven patients were found to have severe abnormalities. The study adds further evidence to the emerging picture of COVID-19 as a disease of the vascular system in a significant number of cases, and not always primarily a respiratory disease. It also suggests that a significant of COVID-19 patients will need to be monitored and assessed for permanent damage to the heart. And it raises questions about the extent to which COVID-19 is a disease you may not fully recover from. The research is from a team at the Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Edinburgh, UK. They studied echocardiograms from 1216 patients, aged 52 to 71, 70 per cent of them male.

The patients came from 69 countries across six continents. They were all presumed or confirmed cases of COVID-19 when the echocardiograms were taken (between April 3 and April 20, 2020). An echocardiogram uses ultrasound to show how your heart muscle and valves are working. About three-quarters of the patients (901 of them) had no pre-existing cardiac disease. But 46 per cent of their echocardiograms were abnormal, and 13 per cent were found with severe disease. According to the study: Left and right ventricular abnormalities were reported in 479 (39 per cent) and 397 (33 per cent) patients, respectively. There was evidence of new myocardial infarction in 36 (three per cent), myocarditis in 35 (three per cent), and takotsubo cardiomyopathy in 19 (two per cent). Sixty percent of the scans were performed in an ICU unit or emergency room. About 54 percent of the patients had severe COVID-19. Abnormalities were often “unheralded or severe, and imaging changed management in one-third of patients.”

Study co-author Marc Dweck, consultant cardiologist at the University of Edinburgh, U.K., said in a statement: “COVID-19 is a complex, multi-system disease which can have profound effects on many parts of the body, including the heart. “Many doctors have been hesitant to order echocardiograms for patients with COVID-19 because it’s an added procedure which involves close contact with patients. “Our work shows that these scans are important—they improved the treatment for a third of patients who received them.” Dr Dweck continued: “Damage to the heart is known to occur in severe flu, but we were surprised to see so many patients with damage to their heart with COVID-19, and so many patients with severe dysfunction.”

These local surges can and will occur in many places.

• Coronavirus Spike Continues Amid New Catalonia Restrictions (BBC)

Spain’s north-eastern Catalonia region has again recorded a daily Covid-19 infection figure of more than 1,000, as residents endure new restrictions. Health authorities are trying to halt this week’s surge, which has led to four million people around Barcelona being asked to stay home for 15 days. Catalonia’s is the worst of 150 Spanish outbreaks and neighbouring France says closing borders should be discussed. Spain has recorded 260,000 cases and there have been 28,400 deaths. The latest 24-hour figures from the region’s department of health on Saturday record another 1,226 cases, 894 of them in the Barcelona metropolitan area, adding to a surge over the past week. The surge led to tough new measures being announced on Friday.

Although they did not amount to a full lockdown, they have caused considerable concern in a region that was hoping to see an easing of restrictions. The measures, for an initial period of 15 days, include:
• No meetings of more than 10 people in public or private • No visits to nursing homes • Only leave the house for essential activities • Closure of nightclubs and gyms, restrictions on bars and restaurants, suspension of cultural activities and recreational sport
Barcelona bar owner Maria Quintana told AFP: “We’d just started to see things coming back to life with the arrival of a few foreign tourists, so this is a step backwards.”

How to just about literally mix up apples and oranges. And end up with something entirely useless.

• CDC Acknowledges Mixing Up Coronavirus Testing Data (Hill)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledged Thursday that it is combining the results from viral and antibody COVID-19 tests when reporting the country’s testing totals, despite marked differences between the tests. First reported by NPR’s WLRN station in Miaimi, the practice has drawn ire from U.S. health experts who say combining the tests inhibits the agency’s ability to discern the country’s actual testing capacity. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told The Atlantic. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”

Viral tests — commonly referred to as PCR tests as most of them use a process known as polymerase chain reaction — are used by health professionals to determine whether or not a person is currently infected with the disease. During the pandemic, viral tests have been the most effective way of being able to diagnose a positive case of COVID-19. They are what state governments have been counting to track the number of confirmed cases of the virus they have. Antibody, or serology, tests serve a different purpose. Unlike viral tests that are taken by nose swab or saliva sample, antibody tests examine a person’s blood to see if their immune system has created antibodies to combat COVID-19. These tests allow doctors to see if someone has previously been exposed to the virus.

As the push for widespread testing in the U.S. has strengthened, antibody tests have been widely produced, many experts have balked at saying that antibodies equate to immunity from COVID-19. Serology tests are also less accurate than PCR tests, increasing the chances for a false negative. Moreover, a negative test means different things for either test. A negative PCR test indicates to physicians that the patient isn’t currently ill with the disease. But, a negative serology test means that the patient has most likely not been exposed to or infected with COVID-19. “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” Jha told The Atlantic. [..] According to reports, several states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and Florida, have also been combining the results of the two tests.

“I wouldn’t want any mixed messages going out there to any adversaries that they can take advantage of an opportunity, if you will, at a time of crisis,”

Ha ha! You don’t think they know?

• US Defense-Readiness A Concern As Troop COVID-19 Cases Surpass 20,000 (ZH)

Months ago the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier disaster which saw over 1,000 crew members infected with COVID-19, cutting short its mission in the western pacific also amid public controversy and division within the Navy’s ranks over the handling of the crisis, made it clear that the Pentagon is keenly aware that US national security could be deeply impacted by the pandemic. During that prior saga China even boasted that its own warships in the region were coronavirus-free, prompting US generals to issue their own statements of continued full military readiness. But new infected case numbers put out by Military Times reveals the Department of Defense (DoD) is continuing to fight an uphill battle on this front: “Coronavirus cases are up more than 20 percent in service members this week, to 20,212, as the military’s battle against the pandemic continues to mirror the challenges civilian leaders are facing across the country.”

Military officials have downplayed this grim milestone of over 20,000 US military cases, including three deaths and 425 hospitalizations, as reflective of the rest of the general population. Like the civilian population, military cases have more than doubled since April. “From the first soldier diagnosed in South Korea at the end of February, it took until early June for the military to see 10,000 cases. The next 10,000 cases took six weeks,” Military Times writes. It’s likely that similar to what was observed in USS Roosevelt cases, most military personnel with coronavirus are asymptomatic, but the DoD has struggled to break this down and provide public data. One likely explanation for the rise in military cases is that most major installations are located in states like Texas, which has seen spiking numbers across the population.

[..] In April, when tensions with China in the East and South China Seas were growing, also after the Roosevelt supercarrier was temporarily taken out of commission by outbreak among the crew, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley issued a stern warning to enemies. “We’re still capable and we’re still ready no matter what the threat,” Milley said at the time. “I wouldn’t want any mixed messages going out there to any adversaries that they can take advantage of an opportunity, if you will, at a time of crisis,” he added. “That would be a terrible and tragic mistake if they thought that.”

Hmmm. I would tend to agree, but HCQ is not harmless in large doses. Not sure dragging in Pearl Harbor and party politics helps much either.

• Hydroxychloroquine Should Be Available Over The Counter (TH)

It is time to take the bull by the horns to conquer the Wuhan virus. Drastic action is necessary, like on December 8, 1941 after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. President Trump should order immediate public access to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) by making the medication available over-the-counter (OTC). Liberals have interfered with public access to this medication for COVID-19 through the old-fashioned route of requiring a prescription and then having a pharmacist fill or reject the prescription. Millions of Americans do not visit physicians, and cannot obtain a prescription for HCQ if they did. Even if you have been exposed to COVID-19, you cannot obtain a prescription for HCQ in most states because regulators prohibit dispensing it without a positive test result, which typically cannot be obtained until late in the progression of the disease.

No one credibly doubts that HCQ is safe, and safer than many medications currently available OTC. No one credibly doubts the dozens of studies showing that early use of HCQ, pre-exposure and immediately after exposure to COVID, has helped many overcome this dreaded disease. Americans do not need a prescription to obtain hundreds of medications which once required a prescription. Nexium, Prevacid, Prilosec, Claritin, Flonase, and Primatene Mist are medications that have been shifted from Rx to OTC in recent years, not because the medical establishment pushed for the change, but because of public demand for it. No demand is higher at this time than for a medication which helps prevent against COVID. Yet Americans are not being allowed to access the medication which they want and need, and instead are being told by FDA and state officials that they cannot have it.

Last month the Oregon pharmacy board, for example, blocked HCQ access as follows: “Prescription orders for chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 infection may only be dispensed if written for a patient enrolled in a clinical trial by an authorized investigator.” They based their ban on an improper statement issued by FDA, which is controlled by opponents of Trump’s reelection. Of course, many government officials in Oregon are against Trump, too. Every state board of pharmacy or medicine is controlled by left-leaning government workers who, by and large, despise President Trump and hope he loses in November. They are accomplishing their dream by choking off public access to HCQ.

Current official number is 271,000. Why is he saying this now?

• Rouhani Estimates 25 Million Infected In Iran (JTN)

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Saturday belatedly acknowledged the toll coronavirus has taken on his country, reporting 25 million Iranians may have been infected and 14,000 have died. The staggering number means the estimated COVID-19 cases in Iran are nearly double the rest of the world’s infections and represent about 30 percent of Iran’s population. Rouhani also suggested the worst is not over, warning as many as 35 million more citizens could be infected before the pandemic ends. Tehran began new restrictions on Sunday, with many public places closed and religious gatherings canceled. “Our estimate is that so far 25 million Iranians have been infected with this virus and about 14,000 have lost their lives,” Rouhani said. Rouhani’s office said the number of infections was based on an “estimated scenario” from the health ministry.

There’s no law there against firing an entire group of people just because they organized?

• Icelandair Sacks All Cabin Crew, Says Spare Pilots Must Take Over (Ind.)

From Monday, every crew member on every Icelandair flight will be a pilot. The Icelandic national airline been negotiating with the Icelandic Cabin Crew Association (Flugfreyjufelag Islands/FFI) for months over new contracts in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In June, the two sides signed a five-year agreement that, according to Icelandair, involved “increasing productivity and flexibility”. The carrier has made similar deals with the pilots’ and engineers’ unions. But 10 days ago, cabin crew voted against the proposals by a majority of 73:27. Icelandair now says negotiations have broken down: “It has now become evident that a mutually agreed conclusion will not be reached.”

As a result, it has decided to “permanently terminate the employment of its current cabin crew members and permanently discontinue the employment relationship between the parties”. The airline says it has been “exploring other options regarding safety and service onboard its aircraft”. From 20 July pilots who are currently not required for flying duties will be assigned “responsibility for safety on board”. Passengers are warned: “Services will continue to be at a minimum, as it has since the impact of Covid-19 started.” Icelandair is now seeking new cabin crew, and is reported to be in talks with staff who lost their jobs when Wow Air collapsed in 2018. The cabin crew union said a strike would begin at once.

Key: “Huawei was told that geopolitics had played a part, and was given the impression that it was possible the decision could be revisited in future, perhaps if Trump failed to win a second term..”

• Pressure From Trump Led To 5G Ban, Britain Tells Huawei (G.)

The British government privately told the Chinese technology giant Huawei that it was being banned from Britain’s 5G telecoms network partly for “geopolitical” reasons following huge pressure from President Donald Trump, the Observer has learned. In the days leading up to the controversial announcement on Tuesday last week, intensive discussions were held and confidential communications exchanged between the government and Whitehall officials on one side and Huawei executives on the other. As part of the high-level behind-the-scenes contacts, Huawei was told that geopolitics had played a part, and was given the impression that it was possible the decision could be revisited in future, perhaps if Trump failed to win a second term and the anti-China stance in Washington eased.

Senior Huawei executives have gone public since Tuesday’s decision saying that they hope the British government will rethink, apparently encouraged by the results of back-channel contacts. The government’s private admissions are out of kilter with public statements last week by ministers, who said Huawei had been banned because of new security concerns raised by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ. In the Commons, Oliver Dowden, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said new sanctions forbidding the sale of US-produced components to Huawei – meaning the Chinese company will have to source them from elsewhere – had changed the balance of security risk.

Not if the Democrats can help it.

• Trump Wants “Full & Speedy Withdrawal” From Afghanistan (ZH)

Amid a substantial US pullout from Afghanistan, the administration still doesn’t have a proper US Ambassador for that country. Reports, however, are that the short list includes a long-time war critic, Will Ruger. Though not nominated yet, Ruger is undergoing vetting, and has been meeting with officials. The Vice President for Research and policy at the Charles Koch Institute, Ruger has frequently advocated ending the Afghanistan War. Though the US is heading toward ending that war anyhow, with so many officials taking a wait and see approach, having a proper ambassador who is known to want a pullout would be a clear signal the administration intends to complete the process.

According to Politico: Ruger, a Naval Reserve officer who served a year in Afghanistan a decade ago, is aligned with the president’s thinking about the U.S. footprint in the Middle East and the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, and has been especially vocal about getting out of Afghanistan. “President Trump has correctly concluded that a full and speedy withdrawal of our troops is imperative,” he wrote in the American Interest in late May. “Our national interest isn’t served by continuing to wage a futile battle but by exiting it.” The US is well ahead of its pullout schedule, down to about 8,500 troops in Afghanistan. Officials sayt hey want 4,000 by the election, and some are saying a complete pullout is possible by then.

This is what the Trump campaign is going to push. Way before Robert Mueller became Special Counsel, it was abundantly clear there was no there there. It was clear in early January 2017 at the latest. And look what happened after. There’s no way to keep this out of the elections anymore.

Also: “Christopher Steele’s “Primary Sub-Source” Was His Own Employee” (Not some Russian Kremlin insider). And that employee greatly disagreed with how Steele used his comments. It was all made up.

• NYT Russiagate Propaganda Shredded By Strzok Comments (ZH)

Statement and documents from Sen. Lindsey Graham’s office: WASHINGTON – Today, as part of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ongoing investigation into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation and related FISA abuses, Chairman Lindsey Graham (R- South Carolina) released two recently declassified documents that significantly undercut the reliability of the Steele dossier and the accuracy and reliability of many of the factual assertions in the Carter Page FISA applications. “I’m very pleased the investigation in the Senate Judiciary Committee has been able to secure the declassification of these important documents,” said Chairman Graham. “I want to thank Attorney General Barr for releasing these documents and allowing the American People to judge for themselves.

“What have we learned from the release of these two documents by the Department of Justice? Number one, it is clear to me that the memo regarding the FBI interview of the primary sub-source in January 2017 should have required the system to stop and reevaluate the case against Mr. Page. “Most importantly after this interview of the sub-source and the subsequent memo detailing the contents of the interview, it was a miscarriage of justice for the FBI and the Department of Justice to continue to seek a FISA warrant against Carter Page in April and June of 2017. “The dossier was a critical document to justify a FISA warrant against Mr. Page and this DOJ memo clearly indicates that the reliability of the dossier was completely destroyed after the interview with the primary sub-source in January 2017.

Those who knew or should have known of this development and continued to pursue a FISA warrant against Mr. Page anyway are in deep legal jeopardy in my view. “Secondly, the comments of Peter Strzok regarding the February 14 New York Times article are devastating in that they are an admission that there was no reliable evidence that anyone from the Trump Campaign was working with Russian Intelligence Agencies in any form. “The statements by Mr. Strzok question the entire premise of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump Campaign and make it even more outrageous that the Mueller team continued this investigation for almost two and a half years. Moreover, the statements by Strzok raise troubling questions as to whether the FBI was impermissibly unmasking and analyzing intelligence gathered on U.S. persons.

Whitney Webb Biden Strom Thurmond’

“There’s not enough troops in the army, to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the n—er race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.” – Strom Thurmond, Joe Biden’s “good friend”

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) July 19, 2020

Say and think what you will, but here’s a formidable man. Born in July 1919. He was 6 days short of turning 50 when the first man walked on the moon.

“I think people will discover all sorts of things they can do that they didn’t do before. Maybe they’ll realise it is not such a good idea to get fat; that much of the suffering they get in middle age and later life is caused by just eating too much of the wrong sort of food.”

• The Biosphere and I Are Both In The Last 1% Of Our Lives – James Lovelock (O.)

Is the virus part of the self-regulation of Gaia? Definitely, it’s a matter of sources and sinks. The source is the multiplication of the virus and the sink is anything we can do to get rid of it, which is not at the moment very effective. This is all part of evolution as Darwin saw it. You are not going to get a new species flourishing unless it has a food supply. In a sense that is what we are becoming. We are the food. I could easily make you a model and demonstrate that as the human population on the planet grew larger and larger, the probability of a virus evolving that would cut back the population is quite marked. We’re not exactly a desirable animal to let loose in unlimited numbers on the planet. Malthus was about right. In his day, when the human population was much smaller and distributed less densely across the planet, I don’t think Covid would have had a chance.

How will lockdown affect this prognosis? After this virus, I suspect quite a hefty change will be discernible. I think people will discover all sorts of things they can do that they didn’t do before. Maybe they’ll realise it is not such a good idea to get fat; that much of the suffering they get in middle age and later life is caused by just eating too much of the wrong sort of food. I always find it fascinating how the statistics illustrate that the health of the nation was enormously better at the end of the second world war than it was at the beginning.

Early in your career, you did some research in this field… The first work I did after university was with the Medical Research Council in the department run by the discoverer of the influenza virus, Sir Christopher Andrewes. My job was to measure the number of droplets caused by coughing and sneezing in underground shelters during the second world war. There had been a deadly influenza virus at the end of the first world war and they were mortally afraid of that starting again because the tube was crammed with people.

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, your support is now an integral part of the process.

Thank you.

A subtle hint:

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime.

Debt Rattle July 18 2020

Jul 182020

July 18, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:09 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, austerity, Biden, bonuses, CNN, coronavirus, Covid19, EU, Fed, HCQ, NYT, plagiarism, Strzok, White Helmets, zinc 19 Responses »

John Vachon Paramount Theater and dairy truck, 44th Street, NYC 1943

• Zelenko Study Suggests HCQ, Zinc Effective as Early Corona Treament (PRN)

• Oxford Vaccine Could Provide ‘Double Protection’ (Sky)

• Coronavirus Symptoms Fall Into Six Different Groupings (G.)

• The Fed Is Setting The Stage For A Major Policy Change (BBG)

• EU Leaders Deadlocked Over COVID Recovery Plan (R.)

• As EU Leaders Squabble, The Elephant In The Room Goes Unnoticed (Varoufakis)

• On Eve Of Bankruptcy, US Firms Shower Execs With Bonuses (R.)

• A Tale of Two CNNs: A Network Struggling With Objectivity (Turley)

• St. Louis Prosecutor Targeting McCloskeys Gets $78,000 From Soros Group (JTN)

• White Helmets Co-Founder Stole Aid Money Destined For Syria (RT)

• Docs Show Peter Strzok Tore Apart NYT Report On Trump-Russia Contacts (DC)

• Joe Biden’s Plagiarism Is a Danger to America (Epshteyn)

• A Bigger Picture (Jim Kunstler)

Maté NYT

Do they stand by this story that Strzok refuted privately, Comey refuted publicly, & Mueller found no evidence of like they stand by their Russia bounty story, which their own reporting contradicted? https://t.co/lqcE3bPQ5B

That’s not standing by reporting, it’s denying reality.

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) July 18, 2020

“Hydroxychloroquine’s main function within this treatment approach is to allow zinc to enter the cell. Zinc is the virus killer..”

• Zelenko Study Suggests HCQ, Zinc Effective as Early Corona Treament (PRN)

Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a New York based primary care physician, announced that a retrospective analysis based on his patient data is available to read online at www.thezelenkoprotocol.com. The study, which has been submitted for peer review, found that early intervention and treatment of risk stratified COVID-19 patients in the outpatient setting resulted in five times less hospitalizations and deaths. The medications used in the treatment approach were zinc, low dose hydroxychloroquine, and azithromycin. Prior studies of COVID-19 treatments have been largely based on severely ill patients in the hospital. This study examines outcomes of patients treated after their first visit to the doctor’s office.

Using simple risk stratification criteria, Dr. Zelenko identified which patients required prescriptions for the triple drug therapy, and prescribed these medications for five days. To produce the study, Zelenko collaborated with Dr. Roland Derwand, a German medical doctor and life science industry expert, and Professor Martin Scholz, an independent consultant and adjunct professor for experimental medicine at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany. Derwand and Scholz performed the data analysis while Zelenko handled all in-person treatments. The main results show that of 141 patients who were treated with the triple therapy, only 2.8% (4/141) were hospitalized compared to 15.4% of an untreated control group (58/377) (odds ratio 0.16, 95% CI 0.06-0.5; p<0.001).

Only 0.71% (1/141) patients died in the treatment group, versus 3.5% (13/377) in the untreated group (odds ratio 0.2, 95% CI 0.03-1.5; p=0.16). “These three medications are affordable, available in pill form, and work in synergy against COVID-19,” said Zelenko. “Hydroxychloroquine’s main function within this treatment approach is to allow zinc to enter the cell. Zinc is the virus killer, and azithromycin prevents secondary bacterial infection in the lungs and reduces the risk of pulmonary complications.” “The world seems to have forgotten common medical knowledge: that we want to treat any patient with an infectious disease as soon as possible,” said Derwand. “What differentiates this study is that patients were prescribed these medications early, in the outpatient setting. Dr. Zelenko treated his risk stratified patients immediately and didn’t wait for the disease to intensify.”

“The well-tolerated 5-day triple therapy resulted in a significantly lower hospitalization rate and less fatalities with no reported cardiac side effects compared with relevant public reference data of untreated patients,” said Sholz. “The magnitude of the results can substantially elevate the relevance of early use, low dose hydroxychloroquine, especially in combination with zinc. This data can be used to inform ongoing pandemic response policies as well as future clinical trials.” “It’s unfortunate much of the news coverage surrounding hydroxychloroquine has been negative,” Zelenko added. “This study suggests that when taken early and together with zinc and azithromycin, this cost-effective drug can be part of the solution to the pandemic.”

Shame they don’t explain what that double thing might be. Reads like an ad.

• Oxford Vaccine Could Provide ‘Double Protection’ (Sky)

Researchers at the University of Oxford believe they have made a breakthrough in the development of a coronavirus vaccine. Human trials are reported to have shown promising results after the team discovered the jab could provide “double protection” against the virus. Blood samples taken from volunteers in phase one trials have shown the vaccine stimulated the body to produce antibodies and T-cells, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph. T-cells play a central part in the body’s immune response. A source told the newspaper that the combination “will hopefully keep people safe”. The vaccine is one of more than 100 in development as the coronavirus continues to spread – infecting more than 13 million people and killing at least 582,000.

David Carpenter, chairman of the Berkshire Research Ethics Committee, which approved the Oxford trial, said the vaccine team was “absolutely on track”. He added: “Nobody can put final dates… things might go wrong but the reality is that by working with a big pharma company, that vaccine could be fairly widely available around September and that is the sort of target they are working on.” The vaccine development is being supported by the UK government and AstraZeneca. The pharmaceutical company’s chief executive said last month that phase one trials were due to finish and a phase three trial had begun which will see the vaccine given to thousands of people so it can be tested for efficacy and safety.

The firm has reached agreements to supply around two billion doses worldwide, despite acknowledging that it is not yet certain the vaccine will work. The vaccine is based on a weakened version of the common cold that causes infections in chimpanzees. It also contains the genetic material of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 – the strain of coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 illness. The UK government has also given £41m to the development of another coronavirus vaccine being developed by London’s Imperial College.

If you let an algoritm do your work for you, it had better be a very good one. This feels shaky.

• Coronavirus Symptoms Fall Into Six Different Groupings (G.)

Symptoms of Covid-19 appear to fall into six different groupings, researchers have revealed, in work they say could help to predict whether a patient will end up needing a ventilator or other breathing support. The team say the findings could give healthcare providers several days advanced warning of demand for hospital care and respiratory support. But it could also help flag patients at risk of becoming seriously ill, meaning home support, such as an oxygen meter or nurse visits, could be provided so that any deterioration is spotted quickly and hospital attendance is prompt. At present, the team added, the average time to get to hospital with Covid-19 is 13 days.

[..] The researchers drew on data from 1,653 users who tested positive for Covid-19, reported persistent symptoms and regularly logged updates on their health and situation. Overall, 383 of these users made at least one trip to hospital, and 107 required either extra oxygen or ventilation. [..] The team then used machine learning algorithms – a type of artificial intelligence – to explore whether some symptoms, among the 14 monitored, cluster together. The results suggest six different groupings based on the type of symptoms, when they occurred, and their duration within the first 14 days of participants’ sickness.

And there was more. “We saw that there was a very clear gradient between these clusters and outcomes in terms of [participants’ need for] respiratory support,” said Dr Claire Steves, clinical senior author on the paper from King’s College London, adding other factors such as older age or certain pre-existing medical conditions were more common in some groups.

The six groupings, or “clusters”, are:
Cluster 1: Mainly upper respiratory tract symptoms, such as a persistent cough, with muscle pain also present. About 1.5% of patients in this group required respiratory support, with 16% making one or more trips to hospital. This was the most common cluster of symptoms, affecting 462 participants.
Cluster 2: Mainly upper respiratory tract symptoms, but also a greater frequency of skipped meals and fever. Of patients in this group 4.4% required respiratory support, with 17.5% making one or more trips to hospital.
Cluster 3: Gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhoea, but few other symptoms. While only 3.7% of patients in this group later needed respiratory support, almost 24% made at least one visit to hospital.
Cluster 4: Early signs of severe fatigue, continuous chest pain and cough. Of patients in this group 8.6% required respiratory support, with 23.6% making one or more trips to hospital.
Cluster 5: Confusion, skipped meals and severe fatigue. Of patients in this group 9.9% required respiratory support, with 24.6% making one or more trips to hospital.
Cluster 6: Marked respiratory distress including early onset of breathlessness and chest pain, as well as confusion, fatigue and gastrointestinal symptoms. Almost 20% of this group needed respiratory support and 45.5% made one or more visits to hospital. But this was the least common symptom cluster, affecting 167 participants.

The theories they base their decisions on are either outdated, plain wrong or made up on the spot. They have one thing in common: they benefit banks, not people. As long as the Fed remains in place, the US will never have a healthy economy.

• The Fed Is Setting The Stage For A Major Policy Change (BBG)

For the Federal Reserve, this time really is different. Having learned a hard lesson in the last recovery – don’t tighten monetary policy too early – the central bank is leaning in the opposite direction. In practice, that means the Fed will not just emphasize actual inflation over forecasted inflation, but will also attempt to push the inflate rate above its 2 per cent target. It’s a whole new ballgame. The Fed’s traditional Phillips curve approach to forecasting inflation, which relies on the theory that inflation accelerates as unemployment falls, was widely criticized during the most recent economic recovery. Inflation remained quiescent in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis even as the unemployment rate fell to 3.5 per cent, well below the 2012 high estimate of the natural rate, or 5.6 per cent.

The Fed’s commitment to Phillips curve-based inflation forecasts induced it to raise interest rates too early in the cycle and continue to boost rates into late 2018 even as faltering markets signaled the hikes had gone too far. The Fed was eventually forced to lower rates 75 basis points in 2019 to put a floor under the economy. Inflation remained stubbornly below the Fed’s 2 per cent target throughout that period. Faced now with the prospect of another prolonged period of low inflation, Fed officials are signaling they will place less emphasis on Phillips curve estimates when setting policy. Fed Governor Lael Brainard said this week that “with inflation exhibiting low sensitivity to labor market tightness, policy should not preemptively withdraw support based on a historically steeper Phillips curve that is not currently in evidence.”

No longer are estimates of longer-run unemployment taken as almost certainly indicating the economy is at full employment. Instead, Brainard said the Fed should focus on achieving “employment outcomes with the kind of breadth and depth that were only achieved late in the previous recovery.” The Fed is going to try to run the economy hot to push down unemployment. By de-emphasizing the Philips curve, the Fed loses its primary inflation forecasting tool. Instead of an inflation forecast, the Fed will rely on actual inflation outcomes to determine the appropriate time to change policy. Brainard pointed out that “research suggests that refraining from liftoff until inflation reaches 2 per cent could lead to some modest temporary overshooting, which would help offset the previous underperformance.”

The sheer quantity of the economic losses may well tear the EU apart. The rich countries have rich citizens to answer to, the poor have different problems.

• EU Leaders Deadlocked Over COVID Recovery Plan (R.)

EU leaders failed on Friday to make headway in negotiations over a massive stimulus plan to breathe life into economies ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, returning to their Brussels hotels shortly before midnight to rest and try again in the morning. Many of the 27 heads declared on arrival for their first face-to-face summit for five months that a deal was crucial to rescue economies in free fall and shore up faith in the European Union, which has lurched for years from crisis to crisis. But officials said a thrifty camp of wealthy northern states led by the Netherlands stood its ground on access to the recovery fund, in the face of opposition from Germany, France, southern nations Italy and Spain, and eastern European states.

The proposed sums under discussion include the EU’s 2021-27 budget of more than 1 trillion euros and the recovery fund worth 750 billion euros that will be funneled mostly to Mediterranean coast countries worst affected by the pandemic. Diplomats said the 27 remained at odds over the overall size of the package, the split between grants and repayable loans in the recovery fund and rule-of-law strings attached to it. But the main stumbling block was over vetting procedures to access aid, an EU official said, with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte demanding that one country could block payouts from the fund if member states backslide on economic reform. “If they want loans and even grants then I think it’s only logical that I can explain to people in the Netherlands … that in return those reforms have taken place,” Rutte said, estimating the chances for a deal at fifty-fifty.

Polish premier Mateusz Morawiecki was even more gloomy. As the leaders broke up for the day, he tweeted that they were divided by a bundle of issues and said it was “highly probable” that they would fail to reach a deal on Saturday or even on Sunday if the summit drags past its scheduled two days. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who celebrated her 66th birthday around the negotiating table in Brussels, was also cautious on chances for an agreement, envisaging “very, very difficult negotiations”.

Recovery plan: 1%. Austerity: 4%.

• As EU Leaders Squabble, The Elephant In The Room Goes Unnoticed (Varoufakis)

While the media are reporting the news of the deadlocked EU Summit negotiations over the so-called ‘Recovery Fund’, an eerie silence prevails regarding the Elephant in the Room: The huge wave of austerity the Eurozone is sleepwalking towards. Let’s look at the facts. Even if the Dutch Prime Minister, Mr Rutte, and the rest of the ‘frugal four’, were to remove their objections to the Recovery Fund’s terms and conditions, the net fiscal effect across the Eurozone will be no more than 1% annually for three years. Now, let us turn to the Elephant in the Room: the dreaded return of the obligation to balance government budgets, the infamous Fiscal Compact.

According to the optimistic scenario of the European Commission, the Eurozone’s mean government budget in 2020 will be -8% of total Eurozone GDP . Of this, next year, the nascent steady-state recovery will remove, at best 4%, leaving the Eurozone, on average, with a -4% 2021 budget deficit. Moreover, as this is a mean, some countries (e.g. Italy and Greece) are facing, in 2021, a steady state budget deficit in excess of -8% (down from -15% in 2020). Which means that, to get back to balanced budgets, on average, the Eurozone will impose upon itself fiscal austerity of approximately 4% of its aggregate GDP, with countries like Italy and Greece facing an austerity nightmare in excess of 8% of their crushed GDP.

If this were to be allowed to happen, the Recover Fund’s 1% annual fiscal boost will be countered by a 4% fiscal austerity wave. As Europe begins to recover from the pandemic’s disastrous effects, Brussels will be hitting our economies over the head with a sledgehammer. And yet, ultimate proof that the EU’s establishment resembles the Bourbons (in that they forget nothing and learn nothing!), our great and good leaders refuse to discuss this ominous Elephant in the Room, choosing instead to invest hours in endless negotiations over the 1% fiscal boost and whether it should be reduced or how it will be managed.

This is America.

• On Eve Of Bankruptcy, US Firms Shower Execs With Bonuses (R.)

Nearly a third of more than 40 large companies seeking U.S. bankruptcy protection during the coronavirus pandemic awarded bonuses to executives within a month of filing their cases, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings and court records. Under a 2005 bankruptcy law, companies are banned, with few exceptions, from paying executives retention bonuses while in bankruptcy. But the firms seized on a loophole by granting payouts before filing. Six of the 14 companies that approved bonuses within a month of their filings cited business challenges executives faced during the pandemic in justifying the compensation.Even more firms paid bonuses in the half-year period before their bankruptcies.

Thirty-two of the 45 companies Reuters examined approved or paid bonuses within six months of filing. Nearly half authorized payouts within two months. Eight companies, including J.C. Penney and Hertz, approved bonuses as few as five days before seeking bankruptcy protection. Hi-Crush Inc, a supplier of sand for oil-and-gas fracking, paid executive bonuses two days before its July 12 filing. J.C. Penney – forced to temporarily close its 846 department stores and furlough about 78,000 of its 85,000 employees as the pandemic spread – approved nearly $10 million in payouts just before its May 15 filing. On Wednesday, the company said it would permanently close 152 stores and lay off 1,000 employees.

[..] Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group in March temporarily closed all of its 67 stores and in April furloughed more than 11,000 employees. The company paid $4 million in bonuses to Chairman and Chief Executive Geoffroy van Raemdonck in February and more than $4 million to other executives in the weeks before its May 7 bankruptcy filing, court records show. Neiman Marcus drew scrutiny this week on a plan it proposed after filing for bankruptcy to pay additional bonuses to executives. Hertz – which recently terminated more than 14,000 workers – paid senior executives bonuses of $1.5 million days before its May 22 bankruptcy, in part to recognize the uncertainty they faced from the pandemic’s impact on travel, the company said in a filing.

Turley is overly diplomatic. CNN left objectivity behind a long time ago. CNN only still exists because Trump exists and they can dump on him 24/7.

• A Tale of Two CNNs: A Network Struggling With Objectivity (Turley)

There was a telling moment of dissonance on CNN this week, a network that is now unrelenting in its negative and highly partisan coverage of the Administration. CNN’s White House reporter Jim Acosta has been repeatedly called out for such bias and sent out a clearly misleading tweet bashing White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Meanwhile, CNN host Jake Tapper set the record straight in fairness to McEnany. While I have occasionally criticized Tapper, I have more often praised him for his professionalism and intellect. This is why. This is what CNN was once and, with the help of figures like Tapper, it could be again: an honest and objective news organization.

In Thursday’s briefing, McEnany repeated President Trump’s call for children to go back to school in the fall. “The science should not stand in the way of this, but as Dr. Scott Atlas said — I thought this was a good quote, ‘Of course, we can do it. Everyone else in the Western world, our peer nations are doing it. We are the outlier here.’ The science is very clear on this. For example, you look at the JAMA pediatric study of 46 pediatric hospitals in North America that said the risk of critical illness from COVID is far less for children than the seasonal flu. The science is on our side here. We encourage localities and states to just simply follow the science. Open our schools.”

She is clearly citing the science as supporting the position of the Administration. However, Acosta clipped the statement to make it sound like McEnany was dismissing the relevance of science: “The White House Press Secretary on Trump’s push to reopen schools: ‘The science should not stand in the way of this.’” That was clearly and absolutely false. However, Acosta knew that it would play well in the eco-journalistic model adopted by CNN. He quickly racked up 30,000 retweets. He then later added that McEnany actually meant the opposite. That received less than 700 retweets. It is the ultimate example of the demand of many viewers to only hear news that supports their own bias and adds to a type of journalistic comfort zone.

That was clearly and absolutely false. However, Acosta knew that it would play well in the eco-journalistic model adopted by CNN. He quickly racked up 30,000 retweets. He then later added that McEnany actually meant the opposite. That received less than 700 retweets. It is the ultimate example of the demand of many viewers to only hear news that supports their own bias and adds to a type of journalistic comfort zone. To Acosta’s credit, he sent out the second tweet, but saying “McEnany went on to say ‘the science is on our side here’” does not quite capture the scene. The quote was McEnany referring to a scientific study and, right after the line quoted, McEnany said “The science is very clear on this.” She then two lines later added “The science is on our side here.” The entire quote was McEnany raising a scientific study that supports their position.

It is akin to a McEnany saying “National security is not relevant because the Defense Department report supports this policy” only to have Acosta tweet “The White House Press Secretary: “National Security is not relevant” in White House policy. Over at CNN headquarters however Tapper stepped out of that comfort zone and corrected CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta after he repeated the same false narrative that McEnany was having an “alternative facts kind of moment.” Tapper responded: “If I could just say, Sanjay,. I think she was just trying to say that the science shouldn’t stand in the way because the science is on our side. I don’t know that all of the science is on their side- and certainly, this White House, their respect for science knows bounds, let’s put it that way, but I think that’s what she was getting at.”

Where the real battle is.

• St. Louis Prosecutor Targeting McCloskeys Gets $78,000 From Soros Group (JTN)

The Missouri Justice Public Safety PAC, which is linked to George Soros, has donated nearly $78,000 in contributions to St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s 2020 campaign, according to her July 15, 2020 financial report, obtained by Just the News. Missouri Justice & Public Safety PAC, which donated the amount through in-kind contributions, was contacted for this story but has yet to respond with comment. The Washington, D.C.-based political action committee is listed at the same street address as one that contributed to Gardner’s 2016 campaign. The Safety and Justice PAC that contributed to the 2016 campaign has the same 13th Street NW address of the Missouri Justice & Public Safety PAC. Both have financial links to Soros.

“Yes, it’s no secret we contribute to Safety and Justice PACs,” Soros spokesman Michael Vachon, told Just the News. “We are for criminal justice reform.” The Gardner campaign filed its financial report on Thursday, the same day Missouri GOP Sen. Josh Hawley sent a letter to Attorney William Barr calling for a federal civil rights investigation into Gardner. Gardner, St. Louis’ top prosecutor, remains under criminal investigation for her handling of the criminal investigation into former Republican Gov. Eric Greitens. More recently, Gardner has targeted Mark and Patricia McCloskey for defending their home June 28 when they brandished their guns as hundreds of Black Lives Matters protestors trespassed onto their property as they headed to the St. Louis mayor’s home.

The protesters barged through the McCloskeys’ privately closed gate and onto their private road. President Trump and Missouri Governor Michael Parson have even weighed in with concern for how Gardner is handling the situation. Hawley, who is the former Missouri attorney general, argues that Gardner has abused her office after seizing McCloskey’s guns while pursuing a possible indictment of the married couple.

I’m so surprised I can’t tell you. These wankers receive over $30 million a year from governments?! To do what? Plants chemical canisters twice a year?

• White Helmets Co-Founder Stole Aid Money Destined For Syria (RT)

As Western governments opened their checkbooks for the White Helmets – a controversial ‘rescue organization’ in Syria – their co-founder used the cash to top up his wage and even finance his wedding, according to a Dutch report. Days before he plunged from a window in Istanbul to his death last year, White Helmets co-founder and British mercenary James Le Mesurier admitted to defrauding Mayday Rescue, an organization that fundraised for the anti-government rescue group in Syria. According to documents seen by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, Le Mesurier told an accountant sent to audit the charity’s books that he forged receipts for $50,000, pretending that it was sent to finance an evacuation operation in Syria.

Instead, the money was paid to Le Mesurier himself. In addition to paying himself a salary of €24,000 ($27,414) per month, Le Mesurier dipped into company cash to finance a lavish wedding in Istanbul in 2018, and to issue loans to his new wife, former diplomat Emma Winberg, the report claims. The accountant sent to investigate Mayday found that “tens of thousands of dollars in cash” were withdrawn to pay for the “fairytale wedding.” Meanwhile, governments across the Western world were lining up to support Mayday, and channel money to the White Helmets. According to a 2018 report by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the organization took in $127 million between 2014 and 2018, with only $19 million of this haul coming from non-state donors.

The government of the Netherlands paid out almost $11.5 million in this period, while similar donations flowed in from Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Qatar, and others. Despite being hailed as fearless rescue workers, the White Helmets have been accused of partnering with Al-Qaeda. Operating exclusively in rebel-held territory, the group’s members have been photographed posing with jihadists and have been accused of staging chemical weapons attacks to draw in Western forces against Syrian President Bashar Assad. Le Mesurier’s death was deemed a suicide by Turkish authorities. Shortly afterwards, a number of countries that had donated to Mayday demanded an accountant have another look over the organization’s books. According to De Volkskrant, this probe found that most of Mayday’s financial records are “missing.” Donations were not just handed to the organization in Amsterdam and forwarded to Syria, but distributed through a network of commercial organizations in Turkey and Dubai.

Less than four months until the election.

• Docs Show Peter Strzok Tore Apart NYT Report On Trump-Russia Contacts (DC)

An FBI document released Friday details at least 14 inaccuracies in a New York Times report from early 2017 that leveled shocking allegations of Trump associates’ contacts with Russian intelligence officers. The document shows then-FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok’s comments on a Feb. 14, 2017 article entitled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence.” Written by journalists Michael Schmidt, Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, the story cited four current and former American officials who said that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies had intercepted call records showing that Trump associates had contacts with Russian intelligence in the year prior to the election. Strzok, who was the lead investigator on the Trump investigation, spotted 14 errors in the article.

The Senate Judiciary Committee released the document on Friday along with a memo of the FBI’s interviews with a key source of information for dossier author Christopher Steele. “This statement is inaccurate and misleading as written,” Strzok wrote in reference to the lead of the Times story, which said that officials had intercepted calls and obtained phone records of contacts between Russian intelligence officials and individuals associated with Trump. “We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Intelligence Officers],” Strzok’s note said. The Times reported that sources said former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was one of the individuals picked up in intercepted calls with Russian intelligence officers.

The story also said that the FBI was sifting through a vast trove of call logs and intercepted communications as part of the investigation into any links between Trump associates and Russia. Strzok discounted those allegations, writing that “we are unaware of any call with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party.” He also wrote that the FBI had “very few” call logs in its possession. Strzok reiterated in another section of the document that the FBI had no evidence that any Trump advisers had contact with Russian intelligence officials. “Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials,” he wrote.

The Times also inaccurately reported that the FBI was at the time investigation Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant. “We have not investigated Roger Stone,” Strzok wrote in reference to a section that said the FBI had “closely examined” the political operative along with several Trump campaign aides. [..] Sen. Lindsey Graham, who released the FBI documents on Friday, said in a press release that Strzok’s annotations on the Times article “are devastating in that they are an admission that there was no reliable evidence that anyone from the Trump Campaign was working with Russian Intelligence Agencies in any form.”

And he’s not even doing the plagiarizing. His puppeteers to do it for him.

• Joe Biden’s Plagiarism Is a Danger to America (Epshteyn)

Presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden has a serious problem: His compulsive plagiarism has gotten out of control. As is clearly evident from his new policy platform, the former vice president just can’t stop stealing original ideas from other politicians—a rather worrying sign for someone whose mental fitness for the pressures of the presidency has already come under serious scrutiny. Biden’s “Made in America” doctrine—which calls for increased government purchases from U.S. producers—is strikingly similar to President Trump’s own America First economic platform. In fact, it’s almost identical to the executive order the president signed a full year ago prioritizing the purchasing of American-made products and the hiring of American workers by government agencies.

“Biden starts with a pretty basic idea—when we spend taxpayer money, we should buy American products and support American jobs,” the document reads, echoing Donald Trump’s repeated calls to “buy American” products and “hire American” workers (the very ideas the president has already put into practice using his executive authority). “He plagiarized from me, but he could never pull it off,” President Trump said recently, pointing out that Biden’s policies would not have nearly the same rejuvenating effect on the U.S. economy as Trump’s own decisive actions. “He likes plagiarizing. …But he said the right things because he’s copying what I’ve done, but the difference is he can’t do it.”

Of course, this sort of thing is nothing new for Biden. The “unity platform” he just released—a 110-page list of policy recommendations for the Democratic Party—shamelessly appropriated entire chunks of Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) “democratic-socialist” political agenda, in many cases word-for-word. Indeed, Biden even invited members of Bernie’s policy team to help craft the proposals. Last year, the Biden presidential campaign was also called out for pilfering language from various far-left special interest groups while crafting the candidate’s climate and education policies. Biden’s track record of plagiarism, in fact, can be traced all the way back to his days in law school. When confronted with his academic fraud, Biden airily blew off the accusations by claiming that his cheating was not “malevolent.”

The ugly tendency came back to haunt him during his 1988 presidential campaign, when he shamelessly stole turns of phrase from former Attorney General Bobby Kennedy and former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and even appropriated the life story of British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock. Biden’s extensive history of plagiarism shows that neither he nor his political team have a clear, independent vision for the country. While the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has never liked being called an empty vessel or a Trojan horse, that is precisely what his candidacy this election cycle has now become.

Jim back to basics.

• A Bigger Picture (Jim Kunstler)

In 1918, the country was lashed by a far deadlier pandemic disease at the same time it was fighting a world war, and daily life barely missed a step. The economy then was emphatically one of production, not the mere consumption of things made elsewhere in the world (exchanged for US IOUs), nor of tanning parlors, nail salons, streaming services, and Pilates studios. The economy was a mix of large, medium, and small enterprises, not just floundering giants, especially in the retail commerce of goods.

We lived distributed in towns, cities not-yet-overgrown, and a distinctly rural landscape devoted to rural activities — not the vast demolition derby of entropic suburbia that has no future as a human habitat. Banking was only 5% of the economy, not the bloated matrix of rackets now swollen to more than 40% of so-called GDP. Government at the federal and state levels was miniscule compared to the suffocating, parasitic leviathan it is now. What happened? Like Hemingway’s old quip about a man going broke slowly and then all-at-once, we allowed everything in American life to creep into hapless giantism too cumbersome to adapt to new conditions, and suddenly conditions have changed.

And now it’s all coming apart: the dying chain stores, the giant zombie companies that can only exist by borrowing money to buy back their own stocks, the auto-makers who have run out of lending schemes for non-creditworthy customers, the shale oil fracking companies that could never make a red cent, the agri-biz farmers grown morbidly obese on a diet of credit and government subsidies (just like their end-customers grew obese on engineered snack-foods), the Wall Street lords of financialization hypothecating fortunes by leveraging the stripped assets of everything not nailed down from sea to shining sea, the swelling underclass conditioned to helplessness, addiction, and vice, the inescapable ambient tyranny of media hype, propaganda, and disinformation, and, of course, the catastrophe that government has become.

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Debt Rattle June 21 2020

Jun 212020

June 21, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 12:59 pm Finance Tagged with: Athens, Biden, Bill Barr, CNN, coronavirus, Covid19, mortgages, MSM, NYT, Parthenon Marbles, security, Tiktok, travel industry, Trump, Tulsa 52 Responses »

Lewis Wickes Hine 12-year-old newsie, Hyman Alpert, been selling 3 years, New Haven CT 1909

• Trump Makes Triumphant Return To Campaign Rallies (JTN)

• Trump’s Tulsa Rally Was Just Another Sad Farce (G.)

• Over A Third Of Americans Think Civil War Is Likely (ZH)

• Judge Says Bolton ‘Gambling With National Security’ But Won’t Block Book (JTN)

• Lawyer Says Bolton ‘Utterly Powerless’ To Stop Book’s Circulation (JTN)

• Manhattan Prosecutor Steps Down, Ending Stand-Off With AG Barr (R.)

• US Travel Industry Revenues To Plummet By Half a Trillion In 2020 (F.)

• Nearly Half Of Americans Consider Selling Home As COVID Crushes Finances (ZH)

• Greece Urges UK To Return Parthenon Marbles (G.)

I’m a bit later than usual today, I couldn’t resist taking a walk in the almost deserted city of Athina. It’s terrible for a lot of people I know who work in hospitality, but the quiet is appealing at the same time. Here’s a photo I took just around the corner:

I brought up a possible civil war in the US yesterday, and just about everything I read appears to rhyme with that idea. Trump held his first meeting last night in Tulsa, and all too predictably the MSM says it was awful and nobody showed up, while the right wing press calls it a “triumphant return”. Nobody cares about news anymore, everything has turned into opinion.

It’s been well over 4 years since I started noticing -and writing about- that the NYT, WaPo et al began to publish 10+ anti-Trump stories every single day, and that got me labeled as a Trump supporter. No use saying that I’m not, and never have been, even Nicole, bless her heart, said: yes you are!

Like I am too stupid to know what I support, or maybe I’m a closet Trumpian. It’s that whole idea of if you don’t comply with the narrative and parrot CNN etc., you must be against them. And it’s true that I dislike CNN very much, for adopting a 24/7 anti-Trump business model, but that is not the same as supporting Trump. A news channel should provide us with news, not a political opinion.

I would almost hope Joe Biden wins (not going to happen) because that would mean the end of CNN. I often think Trump and Jerry Zucker have a secret deal that requires Trump to say 100 crazy things per day and CNN to “report” on all of them and invent 100 more as they go along.

But, you know, only half the country now reads the NYT and WaPo, the so-called liberal half. There once was a time when both halves did, but that is no longer an option. There is more money in one-sided and overblown opinion. The country’s best newspapers have sold their souls to Dr. Faust.

The headlines at Britain’s Guardian this morning pretty much sum up the entire story:

• Donald Trump: President sows division and promises ‘greatness’ at Tulsa rally flop

• US president’s much hyped return turned to humiliation when he failed to fill arena in Republican stronghold of Oklahoma

• Don’t call it a comeback: rally was just another sad farce

• ‘Kung flu’ President uses racist term to describe Covid-19

• ‘Saving our country’: An event for Trump’s true believers

And people who read things like the Guardian, NYT, WaPo, keep on eating it up. They buy these papers, they take out subscriptions, just to get their daily fill of anti-Trump “news”. I personally think that is extremely sad, and dangerous to boot. But if and when I say that, I will be labeled a Trump supporter again.

Because that is the easy way out for the Orange Man Bad crowd. Just as it will be, mind you, for all those out there who are going to take a bite out of Joe Biden’s dementia. We should all be able to do better. We should all be able to see that this is not about two old white guys, and that they have much more in common with each other than they have with you or me.

But in the present environment, try saying you’re not partisan and you’ll be labeled “partisan” for saying it. That’s why I brought up the civil war thing yesterday. The liberal press absolutely loves the fact that some grandma on TikTok made kids in Korea order 1000s of tickets for Tulsa and then not show up. The same press that wouldn’t know TikTok from a hole in the ground.

Meanwhile, has anyone at all pondered what the outcome will be for a Joe Biden rally? Oh my Lord, the excitement! Be still my heart. Bring an extra set of underwear.

If the TikTok fake tickets thing happened to a Joe Biden “event”, you know who would be blamed? Russia.

Worldometer reports new cases for June 20 (midnight to midnight GMT+0) at + 181,005 .

My count 6AM EDT to 6AM EDT (a bit more today) based on Worldometer numbers is 159,182.

New cases past 24 hours in:

• US + 33,388
• Brazil + 31,571
• Russia + 7,889
• India + 15,545

• Cases 8,945,774 (+ 159,182 from yesterday’s 8,786,592)

• Deaths 467,306 (+ 4,150 from yesterday’s 463,156)

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

From Worldometer:

From COVID19Info.live:

It is one thing to have young leaderless protesters spreading viruses locally. But here the chief executive of the US is organizing the mother of all REDISTRIBUTION of germs across the country…

And then they complain about the "economic costs" of "fighting" the pandemic. https://t.co/YitfNyvpcR

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 21, 2020

Here's why this matters:

Schiff told us in 2017 that he had seen "more than circumstantial" evidence of collusion. He lied.

Mueller report & Stone trial underscored that Stone had no actual Wikileaks inside info.

Now, Schiff keeps lying. No wonder he does that: he's a liar. https://t.co/zAtREkmyOI

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) June 20, 2020

Just the News is John Solomon’s new outlet.

• Trump Makes Triumphant Return To Campaign Rallies (JTN)

After months of coronavirus, racial strife and economic calamity, President Trump returned Saturday night to the campaign trail with a extravagant stadium event in Tulsa, Okla., vowing to win re-election on behalf of a “silent majority” of Americans drowned out by polls, media pundits and protesters. n”You are warriors,” a smiling Trump declared as he waved and gave fist pumps to an audience of thousands who braved fears about contagion, a lawsuit that failed to stop the events and protests outside the arena.

“I stand before you today to declare the silent majority is stronger than ever before,” Trump said to cheers. “Five months from now we’re going to defeat sleepy Joe Biden. … We are going to stop the radical left, and we’re going to build a future of safety and opportunity for Americans of every race color, religion and creed.” Seeking to address the recent rioting and protests caused by police killings, Trump portrayed himself and the GOP as best suited to bring racial healing and quell the violence. “Republicans are the party of liberty, equality and justice for all. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, and we are the party of law and order,” he told the crowd.

“You got punked by several hundred thousand TikTok users, organized by a grandmother in Fort Dodge, Iowa. Mary Jo Laupp was apparently so upset by the original date and place of Trump’s rally – the city where one of America’s worst racist massacres took place, in 1921 – that she asked people to sign up for the rally and not show up. Laupp only joined TikTok earlier this year, but her call connected with thousands of K-Pop fans who are what Trump might call a silent majority.”

• Trump’s Tulsa Rally Was Just Another Sad Farce (G.)

There have been so many reasons to feel embarrassed about Donald Trump. There was the time he paid off a porn star. There was the time he lied about the size of his inauguration crowd. The time he talked about the big water around Puerto Rico. The time he thought you could kill the coronavirus by injecting yourself with bleach. But nothing truly comes close to the embarrassment of his so-called comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday. It was so toe-curlingly cringeworthy, such a crushing humiliation. There are 80s pop bands who have enjoyed greater comebacks than Donald Trump. To understand how much of his insides will always melt at the thought of that Tulsa rally, it’s worth quoting Trump’s fine words just before he boarded Marine One at the White House.

“The event in Oklahoma is unbelievable,” he boasted. “The crowds are unbelievable. They haven’t seen anything like it. And we will go there now. We’ll give a, hopefully, good speech. We’re going to see a lot of great people, a lot of great friends. And pretty much, that’s it. OK?” We really haven’t seen anything like that. For a man who loves peddling superlatives, this was the worst measure of his oh-so-sad popularity. The lowest point in electoral incompetence. The saddest campaign fiasco. The event in Oklahoma was literally unbelievable if you believe that the Trump campaign is competent, and that Trump himself is actually popular. That’s the weird thing about our populist president: his approval ratings have never cracked 50% and are now stuck firmly in the low 40s. Perhaps that’s why he’s trailing Joe Biden by double-digits in recent polls.

Think perhaps I shouldn’t have raised the spectre of civil war yesterday?

• Over A Third Of Americans Think Civil War Is Likely (ZH)

No one would have ever fathomed, that America – the greatest country in the world – with “the greatest economy ever” – could even be on the cusp of a civil war. Except for Peter Turchin, who predicted a decade ago in the scholarly journal Nature that America would “suffer a period of major social upheaval” starting around the year 2020. As race-driven/anti-police protests flourish nationwide – one-in-three Americans are warming up to the idea the country is on the brink of another civil war, according to Rasmussen Reports. The latest findings found 34% of respondents said the country would experience a second civil war within five years, and that includes 9% of those who said it’s very likely. Rasmussen noted, “This compares to 31 percent and 11 percent respectively two years ago.”

When examining between party lines, 40% of Republicans said civil war was “on the horizon,” while 28% of Democrats concurred. Around 38% of Independent voters said a civil war is possible in the next five years. The survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters was conducted on June 11 and 14 by Rasmussen Reports, also asked respondents about local governments and protesters removing Confederate monuments. Rasmussen said: “39 percent) of all voters believe the removal of Confederate symbols, names, and monuments throughout the country honoring those who fought in the first civil war will help race relations. Twenty-seven percent (27 percent) disagree and think it will hurt race relations instead.”

“These numbers are reversed from August 2017 when 28% said the removal of the symbols would help race relations, while 39% thought it would hurt instead. Little changed is the 28% who think the removal of public traces of the Confederacy will have no impact,” it noted. Rasmussen continued, “Women and those under 40 are more supportive of the current anti-police protests and the anti-Confederacy drive than men and older voters.” “Younger voters worry most about another civil war… Just 29 percent of blacks believe the current protests will lead to long-term, meaningful racial change in America, compared to 35 percent of whites and 48 percent of other minority voters,” it said.

Chaos in America’s inner cities have been brewing for some time – and was due to erupt, according to Turchin. He looked at “declining wages, wealth inequality and exploding national debt” as social pressures that affected national stability. His model showed that the U.S. would reach a “boiling point” in 2020 — none of this should come as a surprise to Zero Hedge readers. So does civil war become a self-fulfilling prophecy with a third of Americans believing severe domestic turmoil is ahead?

How about a $1 billion fine for Simon and Schuster? For sending out 10,000 copies while the case was pending?

• Judge Says Bolton ‘Gambling With National Security’ But Won’t Block Book (JTN)

A federal judge on Saturday declined to block the publication of former national security adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about the Trump White House, dealing a blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to halt what they claimed was a book full of classified information. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in a decision issued Saturday declared that the government “failed to establish that an injunction will prevent irreparable harm,” noting that the book was already in widespread circulation even prior to formal publication. But Lamberth also slammed Bolton for “gambl[ing] with the national security of the United States” and “expos[ing] his country to harm” by ordering the publication of the book “without written authorization and without notice to the government.”

Bolton’s lawyers had argued yesterday that their client was “powerless” to stop the book’s dissemination throughout media and society. Copies of the manuscript have already been delivered to journalists, book reviewers and other media outlets around the country. Lamberth in his ruling agreed, writing that “by the looks of it, the horse is not just out of the barn—it is out of the country.”

He couldn’t even stop himself from writing, it, I tells ya. It was divine intervention.

• Lawyer Says Bolton ‘Utterly Powerless’ To Stop Book’s Circulation (JTN)

A lawyer for former national security adviser John Bolton on Friday argued before a district judge that his client is “utterly powerless” to stop the widespread circulation of his tell-all book, urging the court to dismiss the Trump administration’s attempt to halt publication of the book. The administration has sued to block the release of the book, arguing it contains classified information that necessitates the use of prior restraint, a high bar for governments to clear under First Amendment jurisprudence. In addition to arguing that the book’s material is suitable for publication, attorney Charles Cooper told Judge Royce Lamberth of the D.C. District Court that “the horse is out of the barn” on the matter of the book’s becoming part of the public record. Numerous journalists and media outlets around the country have already received advance copies of the account.

“This isn’t really a judicial proceeding,” Cooper told Lamberth. “It doesn’t actually have as its purpose convincing you to order John Bolton to do something that he is utterly powerless to do, and that you are utterly powerless to force him to do,” namely pull the book from general circulation. Justice Department lawyer David Morrell urged Lamberth to direct Bolton to halt publication “and further dissemination” of the book prior to further review. Morrell said Bolton committed a “flagrant breach” of proper protocol in seeking to publish the alleged classified material. Bolton’s attorneys in an earlier filing had urged Lamberth to toss the suit, claiming that the memoir – which reveals alleged incidents witnessed by Bolton during his tenure at the White House from April 2018 to September 2019 – is protected speech under the First Amendment.

Again: the left’s new hero is a Trump campaign contributor.

• Manhattan Prosecutor Steps Down, Ending Stand-Off With AG Barr (R.)

A stand-off over the independence of one of the country’s most important prosecutor’s offices ended on Saturday when Geoffrey Berman agreed to step down as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the office that had been investigating President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani. Berman’s confirmation of his departure came after Attorney General William Barr told him he had been fired by Trump at Barr’s request, and that Berman’s hand-picked No. 2, Deputy U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss, would become Acting U.S. Attorney until a permanent replacement is installed. Under Strauss’ leadership, Berman said the office could continue its “tradition of integrity and independence.”

Berman’s office, which is known for prosecuting the most high profile terrorism cases, Wall Street financial crimes and government corruption, has not shied from taking on figures in Trump’s orbit. It oversaw the prosecution of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, indicted two Giuliani associates and launched a probe into Giuliani in connection with his efforts to dig up dirt on Trump’s political adversaries in Ukraine. Giuliani has not formally been accused of any wrongdoing. The standoff with Berman follows the latest in a series of moves by Barr that critics say are meant to benefit Trump politically and undermine the independence of the Justice Department. It also comes as Trump has sought to purge officials perceived as not fully supporting him. In recent weeks he has fired a series of agency watchdogs, including one who played a key role in Trump’s impeachment earlier this year.

Stay at Herm.

• US Travel Industry Revenues To Plummet By Half a Trillion In 2020 (F.)

Travel spending in the United States will fall by more than a half-trillion dollars this year and likely won’t recover to 2019 levels until 2024. That’s according to a new economic analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and government steps to constrict personal and business interactions in an effort to fight the disease’s spread. The dire forecast was prepared for the U.S. Travel Association, a Washington lobby group, by Tourism Economics. Both the USTA and the Air Line Pilots Association on Thursday went public with new requests for federal assistance. The analysis projects that companies providing travel related services – airlines, hotels, restaurants, attractions and more – will take in $505 billion less in revenue by the end of this year than they did in 2019.

Last year U.S. travel spending topped $1.1 trillion, an all-time high. This year the same group is forecast to take in 45 percent less revenue, or around $622 billion. Furthermore, the forecast for 2020 shows that while travel spending in the U.S. on travel in 2021 should rise 37.5 percent over this year’s total spending to around $855 billion, that still would leave the U.S. travel industry 24 percent smaller in terms of revenues in 2021 than it was in 2019. The recovery in travel spending is then forecast to continue in 2022 and 2023, but at a slower pace. The forecast 14.2 percent growth in travel spending in 2022 would take total spending to just shy of a trillion dollars: 976 billion.

Would it be really stupid if I ask who’s going to buy them?

• Nearly Half Of Americans Consider Selling Home As COVID Crushes Finances (ZH)

As the virus pandemic has metastasized into an economic downturn, tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs and are struggling to service mortgage payments. New research offers a glimpse into struggling households, discovers out of the 2,000 American homeowners polled, over half (52%) of respondents say they’re routinely worried about making future mortgage payments and nearly half (47%) considered selling their home because of the inability to service mortgage payments. The study, conducted by OnePoll and the National Association of Realtors, determined 81% of respondents had experienced unexpected financial stress due to the virus-induced recession. Over half (56%) reduced spending so they could service mortgage payments.

Since mid-March, or about the time when the lockdowns began, nearly half (47%) of homeowners have explored alternative ways of making money. About two-thirds of respondents (64%) started side projects, while 53% sold valuables to supplement income. “The swift and unprecedented impact of COVID-19 left many people in a financial emergency, and we want to make sure struggling homeowners know they have relief options, especially during Homeownership Month,” said the National Association of Realtors President Vince Malta. “Realtors and lenders can identify programs and aid designed to help meet loan obligations. Acting quickly may help homeowners stay in their homes and keep the money they have already invested into it,” Malta said.

From clothing (71%) and take-out (66%) to streaming TV services (46%) and groceries (45%), respondents said their spending habits had been significantly reduced so they could service mortgage payments. In a separate report, more than 4 million homeowners are in mortgage forbearance plan – representing 7.54% of all mortgages, delinquencies are set to surpass the great recession, which peaked at 10%.

Broken record. Give them back, you twits.

• Greece Urges UK To Return Parthenon Marbles (G.)

The New Acropolis Museum was purpose-built to host the one thing every Greek government will always agree on: the Parthenon marbles being returned from London. On Saturday, as the four-storey edifice marked its 11th anniversary, Athens reinvigorated the cultural row calling the British Museum’s retention of the antiquities illegal and “contrary to any moral principle”. “Since September 2003 when construction work for the Acropolis Museum began, Greece has systematically demanded the return of the sculptures on display in the British Museum because they are the product of theft,” the country’s culture minister Lina Mendoni told the Greek newspaper Ta Nea.

“The current Greek government – like any Greek government – is not going to stop claiming the stolen sculptures which the British Museum, contrary to any moral principle, continues to hold illegally.” For years, she said, the museum had argued that Athens had nowhere decent enough to display Phidias’ masterpieces, insisting that its stance was “in stark contrast” to the view of the UK public. In repeated polls, Britons have voiced support for the repatriation of the carvings, controversially removed from the Parthenon in 1802 at the behest of Lord Elgin, London’s ambassador to the Sublime Porte. “It is sad that one of the world’s largest and most important museums is still governed by outdated, colonialist views.” Greece’s centre-right administration has vowed to step up the campaign to win back artworks that adorned the frieze of the Periclean showpiece ahead of the country’s bicentennial independence celebrations next year.

Within weeks of his election, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister, told the Observer Athens was prepared to allow treasures that had never travelled abroad to be exhibited in London in exchange for the marbles being reunited with “a monument of global cultural heritage”. Well-placed government officials have not excluded the EU pressing for the return of the antiquities as part of an overarching Brexit deal. The row was injected with renewed rancour when the British Museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, described their removal from Greece as “a creative act”. Half of the 160-metre frieze is in London, with 50 metres in Athens and other pieces displayed in a total of eight other museums across Europe.

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Imagine being John Bolton and sincerely believing that this description of an extremely portentous moment in the Trump presidency makes Trump look irrational and Bolton look sane. pic.twitter.com/MJGqJYSO1o

— Will Schryver (@imetatronink) June 21, 2020

Cinema Quarantino presents Das KONVERSAZION ( part 1). STEPHEN FRY stars in this 2 part (think The Godfather series) Lockdown Meisterstück. Stephen and Sam SEEM fine , but perhaps all is not quite that straightforward … ⁦@stephenfry⁩ pic.twitter.com/3Nb5sw1bVg

— Sam Neill (@TwoPaddocks) June 20, 2020

https://twitter.com/CarpeDonktum/status/1274537090261430275

My man. My Main man.

Robert Allen Zimmerman is 79 years old.

But his brain has just been born.

Three miles north of purgatory –
one step from the great beyond
I prayed to the cross, and I kissed the girls,
and I crossed the Rubicon.

Bob Dylan

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Debt Rattle April 23 2020

Apr 232020

April 23, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 11:00 am Finance Tagged with: Azar, Bloomberg, Chinagate, Democrats, Georgia, labradoodle, narcotics, NYT, pathetic, PPE, small business, Taleb, tracing, Trump, Turkey, UK 44 Responses »

Jack Delano Union Station, Chicago, Illinois 1943

• Not a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System – Taleb (NYer)

• Coronavirus Started Spreading In US Much Earlier Than Thought (CoD)

• Coronavirus Study Points To Vast Number Of Cases Under Radar In China (SCMP)

• How Does Coronavirus Kill? (ScienceMag)

• Many Small Businesses Say Loans Won’t Get Them To Rehire (AP)

• Congressional Democrats Do Little To Improve ‘Pathetic’ Coronavirus Deal (IC)

• Trump Disagrees ‘Strongly’ With Georgia Reopening Shops (JTN)

• HHS Secretary Alex Azar Waited For Weeks To Brief Trump (WSJ)

• Azar Tapped Former Labradoodle Breeder To Lead US Pandemic Task Force (R.)

• Cuomo Taps Bloomberg To Lead COVID-19 Contact “Tracing Army” (Gothamist)

• Turkey PPE Supplier Doesn’t Have Enough Stock To Meet UK Order (Sky)

• Coronavirus Upends Global Narcotics Trade (R.)

• The Analogy Trap in Economic Policy (Eichengreen)

• New York Times Revives its Role in Chinagate (Lauria)

• The US had +2,341 new deaths from coronavirus today, down from its record high yesterday, bringing the total US death toll to 47,659.

• New York had +661 new deaths, while New Jersey had +310, Massachusetts had +221, and three other states (CA, MI, CT) had over 100 new deaths. Only five states did not have a coronavirus death today.

• The US had nearly +30k new confirmed cases today, bringing the total to over 848k, with over 717k active cases.

• US total cases currently at 848,735, with death totals at 47,663.
• Globally, total cases have hit 2,637,414, with death totals at 184,204.

• US yesterday new 25,985, today now 27,948.
• IL, CT today exceed 2,000

• Spain yesterday 3,968, today 4,211. Fluctuating. No daily testing data

• 4/22/20 – Top 12 State Cases
New York: 257,216
New Jersey: 95,865
Massachusetts: 42,944
California: 35,396
Illinois: 35,108
Pennsylvania: 35,045
Michigan: 33,966
Florida: 28,309
Louisiana: 25,258
Connecticut: 22,469
Texas: 21,069
Georgia: 20,740

#Coronavirus: Global #Covid19 Deaths By Week
01/22: 17
01/29: 133
02/05: 564
02/12: 1,118
02/19: 2,122
02/26: 2,770
03/04: 3,254
03/11: 4,615
03/18: 8,733
03/25: 21,181
04/01: 46,809
04/08: 88,338
04/15: 134,177
04/22: 183,027

• Cases 2,656,391 (+ 82,920 from yesterday’s 2,573,471)

• Deaths 185,156 (+ 6,598 from yesterday’s 178,558)

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

From Worldometer – NOTE: among Active Cases, Serious or Critical fell to 3%. Among Closed Cases, Deaths have fallen to 20%

From SCMP:

From COVID19Info.live: Note: Turkey, Russia, UK are the biggest risers

“The state,” he told me, “should not smooth out your life, like a Lebanese mother, but should be there for intervention in negative times, like a rich Lebanese uncle.”

• Not a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System – Taleb (NYer)

COVID19 has initiated ordinary citizens into the esoteric “mayhem” that Taleb’s writings portend. Who knows what will change for countries when the pandemic ends? What we do know, Taleb says, is what cannot remain the same. He is “too much a cosmopolitan” to want global networks undone, even if they could be. But he does want the institutional equivalent of “circuit breakers, fail-safe protocols, and backup systems,” many of which he summarizes in his fourth, and favorite, book, “Antifragile,” published in 2012. For countries, he envisions political and economic principles that amount to an analogue of his investment strategy: government officials and corporate executives accepting what may seem like too-small gains from their investment dollars, while protecting themselves from catastrophic loss.

For Taleb, an antifragile country would encourage the distribution of power among smaller, more local, experimental, and self-sufficient entities—in short, build a system that could survive random stresses, rather than break under any particular one. (His word for this beneficial distribution is “fractal.”) We should discourage the concentration of power in big corporations, “including a severe restriction of lobbying,” Taleb told me. “When one per cent of the people have fifty per cent of the income, that is a fat tail.” Companies shouldn’t be able to make money from monopoly power, “from rent-seeking”—using that power not to build something but to extract an ever-larger part of the surplus.

There should be an expansion of the powers of state and even county governments, where there is “bottom-up” control and accountability. This could incubate new businesses and foster new education methods that emphasize “action learning and apprenticeship” over purely academic certification. He thinks that “we should have a national Entrepreneurship Day.” But Taleb doesn’t believe that the government should abandon citizens buffeted by events they can’t possibly anticipate or control. (He dedicated his book “Skin in the Game,” published in 2018, to Ron Paul and Ralph Nader.) “The state,” he told me, “should not smooth out your life, like a Lebanese mother, but should be there for intervention in negative times, like a rich Lebanese uncle.”

Right now, for example, the government should, indeed, be sending out checks to unemployed and gig workers. (“You don’t bail out companies, you bail out individuals.”) He would also consider a guaranteed basic income, much as Andrew Yang, whom he admires, has advocated. Crucially, the government should be an insurer of health care, though Taleb prefers not a centrally run Medicare-for-all system but one such as Canada’s, which is controlled by the provinces. And, like responsible supply-chain managers, the federal government should create buffers against public-health disasters: “If it can spend trillions stockpiling nuclear weapons, it ought to spend tens of billions stockpiling ventilators and testing kits.”

This was a given.

• Coronavirus Started Spreading In US Much Earlier Than Thought (CoD)

Experts have released new information about just how long the coronavirus (COVID-19) might have been silently spreading in the United States. Health officials in California said the first U.S. coronavirus deaths actually occurred weeks before they previously believed. This comes as no surprise to doctors. Many doctors had patients earlier on that they now believe were COVID-19 cases. But they didn’t qualify for testing at the time because they either didn’t have a history of travel to China or the didn’t have the initially reported symptoms of fever, cough and shortness of breath. But now there’s concrete proof that the timeline of cases started much earlier.

The first confirmed case of the coronavirus in the U.S. came Jan. 21 in a man from Washington state who developed symptoms after returning from a trip to Wuhan, China. But the first confirmed death was thought to be more than a month later, on Feb. 29, in Kirkland, Washington. Health officials there later found two deaths on Feb. 26 were due to the virus, pushing the timeline back three days. But coroners across the country are now looking back at other deaths. The medial examiner in Santa Clara County, California, sent tissue samples collected during autopsies performed in February to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing.

Samples taken from patients who died at home on Feb. 6 and Feb. 17 both tested positive for the coronavirus. That pushes the fatality timeline back 20 days. Health officials believe the patients were infected in the community. Neither is known to have a travel history. Given that deaths tend to lag infections by about two weeks, the first patient could have been infected in mid-January. It’s likely the coronavirus was already spreading in the U.S. far earlier than initially reported — hidden in a bad flu season and undetected by rigid testing rules.

So people will say: see, infection rate is much lower! Well, not if the death rate is also much higher. Which certainly in China is possible.

• Coronavirus Study Points To Vast Number Of Cases Under Radar In China (SCMP)

China’s official tally of coronavirus cases could have quadrupled in mid-February if one broader system for classifying confirmed patients had been used from the outset of the pandemic, according to researchers at the University of Hong Kong. In a study published in the medical journal The Lancet on Tuesday, the researchers said China might have had 232,000 confirmed cases – rather than the official total of about 55,000 – by February 20 if a revised definition adopted earlier in the month had been applied throughout. “We estimated that there were at least 232,000 infections in the first epidemic wave of Covid-19 in mainland China,” they said, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus.

“The true number of infections could still be higher than that currently estimated considering the possibility of under-detection of some infections, particularly those that were mild and asymptomatic, even under the broadest case definitions.” The researchers – led by Peng Wu from the University of Hong Kong’s school of public health – looked at the various classification systems used by the government after the epidemic erupted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late December. China has published seven editions of diagnosis and treatment guidelines, changing the classification system as understanding of the disease developed. The Hong Kong team found that different definitions made a big difference to the number of cases.

“We estimated that when the case definitions were changed from version 1 to 2, version 2 to 4, and version 4 to 5, the proportion of infections being identified as Covid-19 cases was increased by 7.1 times from version 1 to 2, 2.8 times from version 2 to 4, and 4.2 times from version 4 to 5,” the paper, co-authored by Peng’s HKU colleagues epidemiologist Benjamin Cowling and medical faculty dean Gabriel Leung, said.

Thorough report on how and why. But even then a lack of understanding of what the virus is, remains.

• How Does Coronavirus Kill? (ScienceMag)

When an infected person expels virus-laden droplets and someone else inhales them, the novel coronavirus, called SARS-CoV-2, enters the nose and throat. It finds a welcome home in the lining of the nose, according to a preprint from scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and elsewhere. They found that cells there are rich in a cell-surface receptor called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). Throughout the body, the presence of ACE2, which normally helps regulate blood pressure, marks tissues vulnerable to infection, because the virus requires that receptor to enter a cell. Once inside, the virus hijacks the cell’s machinery, making myriad copies of itself and invading new cells.

As the virus multiplies, an infected person may shed copious amounts of it, especially during the first week or so. Symptoms may be absent at this point. Or the virus’ new victim may develop a fever, dry cough, sore throat, loss of smell and taste, or head and body aches. If the immune system doesn’t beat back SARS-CoV-2 during this initial phase, the virus then marches down the windpipe to attack the lungs, where it can turn deadly. The thinner, distant branches of the lung’s respiratory tree end in tiny air sacs called alveoli, each lined by a single layer of cells that are also rich in ACE2 receptors.

Normally, oxygen crosses the alveoli into the capillaries, tiny blood vessels that lie beside the air sacs; the oxygen is then carried to the rest of the body. But as the immune system wars with the invader, the battle itself disrupts this healthy oxygen transfer. Front-line white blood cells release inflammatory molecules called chemokines, which in turn summon more immune cells that target and kill virus-infected cells, leaving a stew of fluid and dead cells—pus—behind. This is the underlying pathology of pneumonia, with its corresponding symptoms: coughing; fever; and rapid, shallow respiration. Some COVID-19 patients recover, sometimes with no more support than oxygen breathed in through nasal prongs.

But others deteriorate, often quite suddenly, developing a condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Oxygen levels in their blood plummet and they struggle ever harder to breathe. On x-rays and computed tomography scans, their lungs are riddled with white opacities where black space—air—should be. Commonly, these patients end up on ventilators. Many die. Autopsies show their alveoli became stuffed with fluid, white blood cells, mucus, and the detritus of destroyed lung cells.

All the big money’s already been handed out.

• Many Small Businesses Say Loans Won’t Get Them To Rehire (AP)

Some small businesses that obtained a highly-coveted government loan say they won’t be able to use it to bring all their laid-off workers back, even though that is what the program was designed to do. The Paycheck Protection Program promises a business owner loan forgiveness if they retain or rehire all the workers they had in late February. But owners say the equation isn’t so simple, in part because of current economic conditions and partly due to the terms of the loans. As a result, the lending may not reduce unemployment as much as the Trump administration and Congress hope. The government’s $2 trillion relief package included $349 billion for the small business loan program, which was besieged with applications and ran out of money Thursday.

Congress and the White House reached a deal Tuesday that would provide another $310 billion. To get the loans forgiven, companies need to spend 75% on payroll within eight weeks of receiving the money. The other 25% can be spent on rent, utilities, and mortgage payments. Otherwise, the loan has generous terms: Only a 1% interest rate and six months before any principal is due. Many of the small companies that were able to obtain a loan are having second thoughts about rehiring all their workers and a few plan to return the money. Others will use what they can on rent and utilities, and will use some to rehire a portion of their laid-off staff. But most are unsure they will be able to reopen eight weeks from now.

They see little point in rehiring all their workers, paying them to do little or nothing, and then potentially laying them off again if business remains weak two months from now. “You’re turning the business into a pass through for the federal government,” said Joe Walsh, who owns Clean Green Maine, a cleaning service in Portland, Maine with 35 employees. “You’re doing very little to actually help the business.” [..] Also, the generous unemployment aid that was also included in the government’s relief package has made it more difficult to rehire. Many workers are making more with unemployment checks, which now include a $600 weekly benefit from the federal government.

Walsh, who received a $280,000 loan from the SBA, said that he is reluctant to push his employees to return to work because, under unemployment benefit rules, they could lose their weekly checks if they turn down potential jobs. “That’s just putting me as the employer in a really difficult position,” Walsh said. He pays at least $17 an hour, with benefits, but his former employees are getting the equivalent of roughly $25 an hour from unemployment.

They all have the same campaign contributors. And they’re not small businesses.

• Congressional Democrats Do Little To Improve ‘Pathetic’ Coronavirus Deal (IC)

PROGRESSIVE GROUPS are outraged with the nearly $500 billion interim coronavirus rescue package the Senate passed on Tuesday, urging House Democrats to oppose the “pathetic” deal they say doesn’t come close to providing the relief vulnerable people need while giving away all Democratic leverage for future legislation. The “Phase 3.5” bill, which is expected to sail through the House this week, left out almost everything Democratic leaders were advocating for. There’s no additional funding for state and local governments, no expanded food stamp benefits, no hazard pay for front-line workers, nor money for the U.S. Postal Service, which had all been basic Democratic priorities.

The lack of progressive opposition in Congress has been especially noteworthy, after members of the progressive caucus promised to help make future legislation more comprehensive following the hastily passed Phase 3 bill. While some progressive advocates argue that Democrats didn’t have much leverage on the package to begin with, others note that Democrats control the House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have led the party to pass its own bill. “Just as importantly as the inadequate policy provisions, this bill gives away all Democratic leverage,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, said in an emailed statement.

“We fought so hard to win back the House in 2018 — to make sure that we had a voice in negotiations like this. So far we’ve heard silence from the House. This bill may be our last chance to get the things we need. [Republican Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell has already said he doesn’t want to push through another bill, and if he does, it won’t be for weeks.” [..] The interim package, which would replenish funds for an emergency small business lending program, also includes an additional $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for coronavirus testing — two necessities that have been framed as GOP concessions. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the legislation is everything they were expecting. “When you look at the package that is going to be passed, it’s almost exactly like the one we asked for two weeks ago, or 12 days ago,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

It takes 2 weeks for new infections to occur. By then, most of the US will have reopened.

• Trump Disagrees ‘Strongly’ With Georgia Reopening Shops (JTN)

President Trump said he disagreed with Georgia’s decision to allow some shops to re-open as early as Friday after shuttering due to the coronavirus pandemic. “I told the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the Phase 1 guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia,” Trump said Wednesday during a press conference of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “But at the same time, he must do what he thinks is right. I want him to do what he thinks is right. But I disagree with him on what he’s doing.” Trump said he wanted to give governors discretion, although he would step in if he sees something “totally egregious, totally out of line.”

Trump’s administration last week released a 3-phase set of guidelines to re-open following the worst of the pandemic. Trump said that these Georgia shops shouldn’t be re-opening during the federal phase 1 guidelines and should instead wait for phase 2. “We’re going to have phase 2 very soon,” Trump said. “It’s just too soon. I think it’s too soon. And I love the people. I love those people that use all of those things, the spas, and the beauty parlors, barber shops, tattoo parlors. I love ’em. But they can wait a little bit longer, just a little bit. Not much. Because safety has to predominate. We have to have that. So I told the governor very simply that I disagree with his decision, but he has to do what he thinks is right.”

[..] 46% of registered U.S. voters want decisions about re-opening the country after the coronavirus to be made by state and local officials. Only 15% think it should be a federal decision, according to the Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen. Trump praised Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) for his re-opening strategy. “Some of the governors have done a fantastic job working with us,” Trump said.

Sidelined a little too late perhaps?

• HHS Secretary Alex Azar Waited For Weeks To Brief Trump (WSJ)

On Jan. 29, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told President Trump the coronavirus epidemic was under control. The U.S. government had never mounted a better interagency response to a crisis, Mr. Azar told the president in a meeting held eight days after the U.S. announced its first case, according to administration officials. At the time, the administration’s focus was on containing the virus. When other officials asked about diagnostic testing, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, began to answer. Mr. Azar cut him off, telling the president it was “the fastest we’ve ever created a test,” the officials recalled, and that more than one million tests would be available within weeks.

That didn’t happen. The CDC began shipping tests the following week, only to discover a flaw that forced it to recall the test from state public-health laboratories. When White House advisers later in February criticized Mr. Azar for the delays caused by the recall, he lashed out at Dr. Redfield, accusing the CDC director of misleading him on the timing of a fix. “Did you lie to me?” one of the officials recalled him yelling. Six weeks after that Jan. 29 meeting, the federal government declared a national emergency and issued guidelines that effectively closed down the country. Mr. Azar, who had been at the center of the decision-making from the outset, was eventually sidelined.

Many factors muddled the administration’s early response to the coronavirus as officials debated the severity of the threat, including comments from Mr. Trump that minimized the risk. But interviews with more than two dozen administration officials and others involved in the government’s coronavirus effort show that Mr. Azar waited for weeks to brief the president on the threat, oversold his agency’s progress in the early days and didn’t coordinate effectively across the health-care divisions under his purview.

[..] White House officials say there is no plan to replace Mr. Azar during a pandemic. Still, the president last week installed a former campaign aide, Michael Caputo, to serve as assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS. The White House also appointed policy adviser Emily Newman as a liaison to HHS who will oversee the agency’s political hires. Mr. Azar has largely been sidelined over the past several weeks from discussions with the president and with the White House task force, administration officials said. He hasn’t attended the daily briefing since April 3.

The headline is just too good.

• Azar Tapped Former Labradoodle Breeder To Lead US Pandemic Task Force (R.)

On January 21, the day the first U.S. case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared. “We developed a diagnostic test at the CDC, so we can confirm if somebody has this,” Azar said. “We will be spreading that diagnostic around the country so that we are able to do rapid testing on site.” While coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was “potentially serious,” Azar assured viewers in America, it “was one for which we have a playbook.”

Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness. As is now widely known, two agencies Azar oversaw as HHS secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, wouldn’t come up with viable tests for five and half weeks, even as other countries and the World Health Organization had already prepared their own. Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19.

The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.” Azar’s optimistic public pronouncement and choice of an inexperienced manager are emblematic of his agency’s oft-troubled response to the crisis. His HHS is a behemoth department, overseeing almost every federal public health agency in the country, with a $1.3 trillion budget that exceeds the GDP of most countries. [..[ Azar and his top deputies oversaw health agencies that were slow to alert the public to the magnitude of the crisis, to produce a test to tell patients if they were sick, and to provide protective masks to hospitals even as physicians pleaded for them.

The first test created by the CDC, meant to be used by other labs, was plagued by a glitch that rendered it useless and wasn’t fixed for weeks. It wasn’t until March that tests by other labs went into production. The lack of tests “limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff,” the HHS Inspector General said in a report this month. The equipment shortage “put staff and patients at risk.” A promised virus surveillance program failed to take root, despite assurances Azar gave to Congress. Rather than share information, three current and three former government officials told Reuters, Azar and top staff sidelined key agencies that could have played a higher-profile role in addressing the pandemic. “It was a mess,” said a White House official who worked with HHS.

Little Mike mighty actually pull it off. But he doesn’t care too much about privacy.

• Cuomo Taps Bloomberg To Lead COVID-19 Contact “Tracing Army” (Gothamist)

Michael Bloomberg has been charged with amassing and leading a “tracing army” to track the spread of COVID-19 in the Tri-State area, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo. The goal will be to aggressively test and isolate contacts of all those who tested positive for the virus — a major undertaking that experts say is necessary before officials can consider relaxing social distancing measures. After previewing this push in recent weeks, Cuomo revealed during a press conference on Wednesday that Bloomberg will “coordinate the entire effort,” including developing the program and designing the training for thousands of newly-hired tracers.

The multibillionaire former mayor, who does not have a public health background, has also agreed to contribute $10 million to the initiative. By comparison, he spent $1 billion on his failed presidential bid. The announcement came hours after Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled his own plans for a citywide contact tracing apparatus. The mayor was not informed by the Governor’s Office that Bloomberg, his predecessor and political rival, would be heading up the statewide effort until Wednesday morning, as de Blasio was announcing his own initiative, mayoral spokesperson Freddi Goldstein told Gothamist. While the city will still be responsible for hiring some of the field workers, Cuomo stressed that the initiative had to be regionally focused.

“You cannot trace someone within the boundaries of New York City,” he said. The state will also partner with Johns Hopkins University and the non-profit Vital Strategies to roll out the program. Some of the roughly 35,000 CUNY and SUNY students in medical fields will also be tapped for the effort, Cuomo said. The federal government has made available $1.3 billion for New York to begin contact tracing. Cuomo did not immediately have an estimate for how much it would cost. “You don’t have months to get this up and running,” he added. “You have weeks.”

Turkey is one of the exploding countries. Is it a good ide to export their supplies?

• Turkey PPE Supplier Doesn’t Have Enough Stock To Meet UK Order (Sky)

A commercial supplier in Turkey did not have enough stock to fulfil an order for 84 tonnes of protective equipment supposed to be bound for the UK, Turkish officials have said. British sources said the UK government was working with the company and the Turkish authorities to secure the shipment “as soon as possible” – though no time frame was given. It comes as a flight carrying PPE – urgently needed by front line health workers as they treat COVID-19 patients in the UK – arrived from Turkey, following days of delays. The Royal Air Force plane arrived at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire from Istanbul just after 3am.

The total consignment of 84 tonnes includes 400,000 clinical gowns, but it is not clear how much of this is on today’s flight. An initial batch of just 2,500 gowns was sent to the airport in Istanbul for quality control checks on Tuesday. Turkish officials said Britain’s attempt to buy the protective equipment from a Turkish firm ran into trouble because the supplier did not have enough stock. Turkey’s ambassador to the UK, Umit Yalcin, told Sky News: “As far as I understand there have been problems with the private supplier company. “Now Turkey is cooperating with the UK authorities to find a quick solution for the UK’s urgent needs.

Support your local dealer.

• Coronavirus Upends Global Narcotics Trade (R.)

Countries around the world have spent billions of dollars bailing out businesses affected by the coronavirus outbreak. Peru’s coca farmers, who grow the bushy plant used to make cocaine, say they want help, too. Prices for coca leaves sold to drug gangs have slumped 70% since Peru went on lockdown last month, according to Julián Pérez Mallqui, the head of a local growers’ organization. He said his members cater to Peru’s tightly regulated legal coca market, but acknowledged some growers sell on the black market. Peruvian officials say more than 90% of the country’s coca crop goes to traffickers who are now struggling to move product. With the sector in turmoil, Pérez’s group is crafting a plan to ask the government to buy up excess coca inventory.

Peru “has to design clear intervention strategies for coca,” Pérez said. “We’re screwed, just like everyone else in the world.” A spokesman for Peru’s anti-drugs agency said it may funnel more development aid to hard-hit areas. The coronavirus outbreak has upended industries across the globe. The international narcotics trade has not been spared. From the cartel badlands along the U.S.-Mexico border and verdant coca fields of the Andes, to street dealers in London and Paris, traffickers are grappling with many of the same woes as legitimate businesses, Reuters has found. On three continents, Reuters spoke with more than two dozen law enforcement officials, narcotics experts, diplomats and people involved in the illicit trade.

They described a business experiencing busted supply chains, delivery delays, disgruntled workers and millions of customers on lockdown. They also gave a window into the innovation – and opportunism – that are hallmarks of the underworld. [..] coronavirus has managed to do what authorities worldwide have not: slow the global narcotics juggernaut almost overnight and inflict a measure of pain on all who participate. In Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel has faced many threats over the years, including the jailing of former leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. But never one like the coronavirus pandemic.

“The task for now is income maintenance — targeting public support at the unemployed so that parents can feed their children.”

• The Analogy Trap in Economic Policy (Eichengreen)

Where comparisons with past crises have value is precisely in highlighting how this crisis is different, and therefore how the policy response should vary. First, this crisis did not originate in the financial system, in contrast to 1929 and 2008. Flooding financial markets with liquidity, as central banks have done, may prevent problems on the real side of the economy from destabilising financial institutions and markets. But doing so will not mend the economy or even halt its downward spiral. Achieving this requires first containing the pandemic. Second, in contrast to these earlier episodes, major fiscal stimulus packages are not the right policy focus. Unlike in the past, we have also experienced an unprecedented supply shock.

It makes no sense to try to sustain demand at earlier levels at a time when production can’t keep up, since it is not yet safe — and won’t be safe for some time — for people to return to work. The time for demand stimulus is later. The task for now is income maintenance — targeting public support at the unemployed so that parents can feed their children. Third, this crisis will be most acute in low-income countries. These countries have weak health systems. They are being hit by weak commodity prices, falling remittances, capital flight, a shortage of trade credit and collapsing currencies all at once. They were not the focus in 1929 or 2008 because those crises centred on the global financial system, and because low-income countries had only rudimentary financial systems and were not integrated financially.

This time, low-income countries are at risk of a crisis that will dwarf anything in the advanced-country world. Addressing their plight should be priority number one on humanitarian grounds, but also because what happens there will spill back onto the rest of the world through both economic and epidemiological channels. With the IMF and World Bank meetings coming up next week, one wonders whether advanced countries will look beyond their domestic concerns. One worries that their preoccupation with the questions ‘is this downturn more serious than the Global Financial Crisis?’ and ‘could unemployment rise as high as in the Great Depression?’ will cause them to lose sight of what is about to become the most serious crisis of all.

Yeah, before you know it you’re trapped with the NYT in your corner.

• New York Times Revives its Role in Chinagate (Lauria)

During the saga of Russiagate The New York Times was the main vehicle for unnamed U.S. intelligence officials to filter uncorroborated allegations about Russia, presenting them as proven fact. Just as the Democratic Party attempted to shift the blame from its disastrous 2016 loss to Donald Trump onto Russia, the Trump administration is now trying to shift the blame from Trump’s disastrous handling of the Coronavirus crisis onto China. And The New York Times is once again the vehicle. In a front-page story on Wednesday, the Times reports as flat fact that “Chinese agents helped spread messages to millions of Americans about a fake lockdown last month, sowing virus panic in the U.S., officials said.” One of the messages said Trump would lock down the entire nation. “They will announce this as soon as they have troops in place to help prevent looters and rioters.”

But as in the Times‘ sordid history of numerous Russiagate stories, you have to read deep into the piece, in this case to paragraph seven, before you are told: “The origin of the messages remains murky. American officials declined to reveal details of the intelligence linking Chinese agents to the dissemination of the disinformation, citing the need to protect their sources and methods for monitoring Beijing’s activities.” Any reputable journalism school will teach its students that you hold off publishing until you see the evidence underlying an assertion. This is especially true when quoting anonymous sources. And it is doubly true when these sources are intelligence agents, who have a long history of deception. It is part of their job description.

Reporters should by now be wary and demand proof after they had allowed intelligence officials to misuse them in misleading the public about the reasons to invade Iraq, and indeed about the later proven lies about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Times story on Wednesday rather shamelessly revives and links China’s alleged misdeeds to Russiagate. “American officials said China, borrowing from Russia’s strategies, has been trying to widen political divisions in the United States. As public dissent simmers over lockdown policies in several states, officials worry it will be easy for China and Russia to amplify the partisan disagreements.”

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This is my life now pic.twitter.com/qo3mTxe2LM

— Life on Earth (@planetpng) April 22, 2020

Over 20 million people are jobless bc of this virus and our government is doing almost nothing to help them. If we don’t push our leaders to step up, the anti-lockdown protesters are going to tap into that legit rage & redirect it to the right. pic.twitter.com/ofjsUevMj3

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) April 23, 2020

https://twitter.com/i/status/1252733979544993794

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