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Debt Rattle October 11 2020

Oct 112020

October 11, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 8:54 am Finance Tagged with: Biden, Covid19, face masks, FBI, FISA, Gold Star Families, pollsters, Russiagate, superspreaders, Supreme Court, Trump 10 Responses »

Paul Wolff Frankfurt Opera House 1934

• It’s A 2-Point Race, Not 16 (WE)

• Biden Says Voters Don’t Deserve To Know If He Would Pack Supreme Court (JTN)

• Beltway Republicans Want Trump to Drop The “Russiagate” Issue (sundance)

• Biden Misquotes Trump on Gold Star Families (FactCheck.org)

• 50 Richest Americans Now Worth More Than Poorest 165 Million (ZH)

• Most Voters Believe FBI Should Be Prosecuted For Role In Russia Probe (JTN)

• EU Agrees Common ‘Traffic Light’ System For Coronavirus Travel (R.)

• New Italy Mandate Requires Face Masks At All Times When Outside (JTN)

• Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders (Oster)

The Plot Against the President

The Person Who Made This Movie’s (Amanda Milius) Father made a movie that you probably heard of

“RED DAWN”pic.twitter.com/DXmG8b4eHR

— Rich Higgins (@RichHiggins_DC) September 29, 2020

Pollsters, like much of the press, don’t care about their credibility. They’re political instruments.

• It’s A 2-Point Race, Not 16 (WE)

Add John Zogby to the growing number of Democratic pollsters questioning major media surveys showing a double-digit lead by Joe Biden over President Trump. “It’s closer than you think,” according to Zogby, who’s own John Zogby Strategies survey puts Biden’s lead at two points, 49%-47%. In his latest podcast with son and pollster Jeremy Zogby, John Zogby said that polls showing a bigger Biden lead are using a bad model, one that includes far too many Democrats. His model follows the partisan turnout in 2016 that was about 34% Republicans and about 38% Democrats. “We believe that is a more accurate reflection of the turnout model,” he said. But others showing a big Biden lead over-weigh Democrats. “Now some of the polls that have come out, I find troubling,” he said, citing CNN, Fox, and YouGov.

They give an average 15-point advantage to Democrats. CNN had it a 16-point lead. “I’m a Democrat,” he said, but “I just don’t don’t think the sampling is accurate.” While the elder Zogby didn’t cite a reason other pollsters are showing a bigger Biden lead, his son Jeremy did — Biden bias. “To me, it’s only two things. It’s deliberate, or it’s a projection of bias, and I would go with the latter,” he said in their weekly conversation, The Zogby Report. “If you live in an area, and you live in an echo chamber, and most of your friends think a certain way, a lot of times the echo chamber effect is that you tend to project, ‘How could people think such a certain way, clearly, for example, the president is out of mind, and he’s bad for this country, he’s bad for the world, so of course people are going to turn out in droves for Biden.’ I’m afraid that that’s what’s happening, a projection of bias in the data,” he said.

John McLaughlin, of McLaughlin & Associates, recently sent a memo to the president titled “Skewed media polls,” and said the media is trying to rig the election and suppress the GOP vote by making it look like a Biden runaway. In it, he wrote, “The latest skewed media polls must be intentional. It’s clear that NBC, ABC and CNN who have Democrat operatives like Chuck Todd, George Stephanopoulos and other Democrats in their news operations are consistently under-polling Republicans and therefore, reporting biased polls. They continue to poll adults or registered voters that skew away from likely voters. So instead of the 33% Republican turnout which actually happened in 2016, they are reporting polls on only 26%, 25% or even 24% Republicans.

“You’ll know my position on court-packing the day after the election..” What a curious thing to say. But who attacks him on it? He gets away with it.

“.. the moment he answers that question all headlines will be about his stance.” No, the same press who don’t ask it now will not write about it after.

• Biden Says Voters Don’t Deserve To Know If He Would Pack Supreme Court (JTN)

During a trip to Las Vegas, a reporter confronted Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on if he would pack the court, in which he replied that voters don’t deserve to know. A KTNV reporter told Biden the number one thing viewers have asked in the past couple days is if he would choose to pack the court. “Well you’ve been asked by the viewers who are probably Republicans who don’t want me continuing to talk about what they’re doing to the court right now,” Biden responded Friday. “Well, sir don’t the voters deserve to know…?” reporter Ross DiMattei asked.

“No they don’t…. I’m not gonna play his game, he’d love me to talk about, and I’ve already said something on court packing, he’d love that to be the discussion instead of what he’s doing now,” Biden said. Last year during the Democratic primary, Biden claimed to oppose packing the court, something some of the other candidates supported. “You’ll know my position on court-packing the day after the election,” Biden said in Phoenix on Thursday, explaining that the moment he answers that question all headlines will be about his stance.

Asked if voters deserve to know if he would pack the Supreme Court, Biden says “No, they don’t deserve” to. pic.twitter.com/uig5d14tsH

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) October 10, 2020

In whose interest is this?

• Beltway Republicans Want Trump to Drop The “Russiagate” Issue (sundance)

While it might seem frustrating to see republicans and conservatives demanding that President Trump stop talking about the greatest act of sedition and usurpation, within our Constitutional Republic in the history of our nation, this espousal by Andrew McCarthy is factually a very wide-spread opinion within the DC beltway:

Take the intents in their best possible light, and the basic premise is that no-one cares about the abuses of power that took place. National Review article by Rich Lowry is here. I have shared by own thoughts on this matter several times; and despite knowing this issue may not/will not drive the 2020 election; in my own contemplation I keep coming back to this central question: How can this be ignored? “… How does the office of a U.S. president; and more importantly the republic itself; survive a coordinated coup effort involving all three branches of government; while simultaneously those in charge of exposing the corruption fear the scale is too damaging for them to reveal?” What are your thoughts?

Did he say really crazy things? Factcheck says no.

• Biden Misquotes Trump on Gold Star Families (FactCheck.org)

Bartiromo, Oct: 8: And you said it was a blessing in disguise. Trump: A blessing in disguise. I’m — I’m glad because I’m the leader. And I can’t be like Biden where I hang out in a basement every day. Sure, he — if I wanted to hang out in a basement, I wouldn’t catch it, but I meet a lot of people and I have to. I’m the president of the country. I can’t hang around in a basement. So, I figured there would be a chance that I would catch it. Sometimes I’d be with — in groups of — for instance Gold Star families. I met with Gold Star families. I didn’t want to cancel that. But they all came in and they all talked about their son and daughter and father.

And, you know, they all came up to me and they tell me a story, Maria. It was really amazing actually, beautiful but sad. And they come up and they tell me a story about my son, sir, was in Iraq or he was in Afghanistan. And sir, he did this and he did that and then he charged in order to save his friends. And yes, sir, he was killed but he saved his friends. He’s so brave, sir. And they tell me these stories and I can’t say, “Back up, stand 10 feet.” I just can’t do it. And I went through like 35 people and everyone had a different story. I could also say don’t tell stories. They’re telling the story of their son who just died or daughter — Bartiromo: Right.

Trump: — or husband who just died in a war or recently died, you know, mostly over the last 10, 12 years but some very recent. And I can’t back up, Maria, and say, “Give me room, I want room. Give me 12 feet, stay 12 feet away when you talk.” They come, they come, within an inch of my face sometimes. They want to hug me and they want to kiss me. And they do. And frankly, I’m not telling them to back up. I’m not doing it. But I did say it’s like, you know — it’s obviously dangerous. It’s a dangerous thing I guess if you go by the COVID thing. But I’m thinking — Bartiromo: Yes. Trump: Look, I look at the numbers. I figured that you probably — that probably at some point I’d catch it and I’ll get better. That’s what happened. I’ve caught it.

Perversity.

• 50 Richest Americans Now Worth More Than Poorest 165 Million (ZH)

If readers want more evidence that the current economic system is rigged towards the working poor, well, look no further: New Federal Reserve data shows how these monetary wizards exacerbated the wealth gap during the virus pandemic via unprecedented quantitative easing programs. Never before has the Fed unleashed so much monetary stimulus in a given quarter (2Q20) to shield the economy from the virus-induced downturn. The result is a “K-shaped” recovery, disproportionately affecting low-wage service workers and households of color, while billionaires, cent millionaires, and millionaires added record wealth. The Fed’s monetary interventions resulted in surging stock and other asset prices, while those who owned no assets did not participate in the “V” recovery.

Earlier this week, Swiss bank UBS and accounting firm PwC published a new report that showed the wealth of the world’s 2,189 billionaires jumped to a new record high of $10.2 trillion in July, surpassing the $8.9 trillion record at the end of 2017. It was only when the world’s central banks aggressively expanded their balance sheets, beginning in March, that the rich got richer… Bloomberg notes that the Fed data shows the top 1% of Americans are worth $34.2 trillion, while the poorest 50%, around 165 million people, control about $2.08 trillion, or less than 2% of all household wealth. Meanwhile, the 50 wealthiest people in the country are worth almost $2 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, up $339 billion from the start of 2020. Tesla’s Elon Musk is a prime example of a billionaire who saw his wealth rapidly increase this year, up $75.6 billion year-to-date, to $103 billion.

Covid-19 has exacerbated the already worsening inequality issues in the U.S. If it’s monetary or fiscal, the transmission of stimulus has primarily flowed to society’s wealthiest. The rich got richer, and the working-poor got poorer. Tens of millions of working poor households were handed lousy $1,200 checks, with many folks still without jobs, depleted emergency savings, food insecurity issues, and millions at risk of eviction. The wealthiest 1% saw their wealth erupt earlier this year as they own about 50% of all stocks and mutual funds. The top 9% own about a third of stocks, which means the top 10% of Americans own about 88% of stocks.

The takeaway from this is how few people know they lied to a FISA court.

• Most Voters Believe FBI Should Be Prosecuted For Role In Russia Probe (JTN)

A near-majority of voters say FBI agents and leaders should be prosecuted for their role in the Russian collusion conspiracy theory, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen. Among the voters, 46% said FBI officials should be criminally charged over the scandal, while only half that number — 23% — said they shouldn’t. Thirty percent were unsure. The survey of 1,200 Registered Voters was conducted by Rasmussen using a mixed mode approach from October 1-3, 2020.

In a related Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen, just one-third of voters were aware that the FBI lied to a judge to obtain wiretaps against 2016 Trump campaign associates. When asked, 33% of voters said it was “true” that FBI agents lied to a judge to obtain warrants against Trump campaign affiliates. A fifth of all voters — 21% — found the allegation to be “false,” while 46% were unsure. The results indicate that relatively few voters are aware that former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith earlier this year admitted to falsifying an email used to obtain a wiretap against 2016 Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

As if that solves any problems.

• EU Agrees Common ‘Traffic Light’ System For Coronavirus Travel (R.)

European Union countries agreed on Friday to a common “traffic light” system to guide them on COVID-19 testing or quarantines on EU tourists and other non-essential travellers during the pandemic.It aims to end a confusing patchwork of restrictions across Europe and to bring back free movement of people, one of the key principles of the EU, within the 27-nation bloc when conditions allow. The system would lead to more “predictability and transparency” when travelling under COVID conditions in the EU, a spokesman for the German EU Council presidency said, calling it an important step forward.

The guidelines, which were backed by a majority of EU governments and will be formally adopted next week, advise that restrictions should be non-discriminatory, proportionate and limited to what is necessary. Under the plan, regions across the European Union will be designated green, orange or red, based on the degree to which the virus is under control, and grey if data is insufficient. The idea is that all countries will grant access to visitors from green zones. The European Centre of Disease Prevention and Control will provide weekly updates to assign the colours.

Based on its current assessment, with COVID-19 cases spiking across Europe, few areas would qualify as green – most of eastern Germany, parts of the Nordic and Baltic countries, Cyprus, certain regions of Bulgaria and Greece and one zone in Italy. While individual EU countries are free to determine their own measures, they will be encouraged to be consistent, for example setting the same measures for all red zones. A green status will apply to regions with fewer than 25 infections per 100,000 people in 14 days and where the percentage of positive tests is below 4%. Red means infection rates of 50 or more and positive tests of 4% or higher or infection rates of over 150 even with a low positive test rate.

“..masks and protective gear..” What other gear does he mean? Look, if people wear just anything on their faces nobody gets protected. That’s just signalling.

I just bought a whole bunch of KN95 masks for the people working at the social kitchen in Athens. They are at risk. And if I can do that, your government can also.

But this is just plain nonsense. The risk of getting infected outside is not zero, but still negligible.

• New Italy Mandate Requires Face Masks At All Times When Outside (JTN)

Protesters gathered in Rome on Saturday to show their anger over the country’s mask mandates among other continuous COVID-19 rules as infections across Italy and Europe are on the rise. Demonstrators expressed their frustration over harsh virus mandates that have not stopped since the beginning of the pandemic, including a new order that calls for all Italians to wear face masks while outside or else they could face a fine up to 1,000 euros ($1,200). “From now on, masks and protective gear have to be brought with us when we leave our house and worn. We have to wear them all the time unless we are in a situation of continuous isolation,” Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said.

There were two different anti-mask protests on Saturday in the city, according to AP News. The ‘march for freedom’ event rallied Italians together to show their government disapproval and concerns for the democracy and economy. There have been 350,000 confirmed cases of the virus in Italy and 36,140 deaths. Most of the recent cases in the country are asymptomatic, and are detected through increased testing.

Smart girl.

• Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders (Oster)

In early august, the first kids in America went back to school during the pandemic. Many of these openings happened in areas where cases were high or growing: in Georgia, Indiana, Florida. Parents, teachers, and scientists feared what might happen next. The New York Times reported that, in parts of Georgia, a school of 1,000 kids could expect to see 20 or 30 people arrive with COVID-19 during week one. Many assumed that school infections would balloon and spread outward to the broader community, triggering new waves. On social media, people shared pictures of high schools with crowded hallways and no masking as if to say I told you so.

Fear and bad press slowed down or canceled school reopenings elsewhere. Many large urban school districts chose not to open for in-person instruction, even in places with relatively low positivity rates. Chicago, L.A., Houston—all remote, at least so far. It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be a major spreader of COVID-19. Since early last month, I’ve been working with a group of data scientists at the technology company Qualtrics, as well as with school-principal and superintendent associations, to collect data on COVID-19 in schools.

Our data on almost 200,000 kids in 47 states from the last two weeks of September revealed an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. That’s about 1.3 infections over two weeks in a school of 1,000 kids, or 2.2 infections over two weeks in a group of 1,000 staff. Even in high-risk areas of the country, the student rates were well under half a percent. School-based data from other sources show similarly low rates. Texas reported 1,490 cases among students for the week ending on September 27, with 1,080,317 students estimated at school—a rate of about 0.14 percent. The staff rate was lower, about 0.10 percent. These numbers are not zero, which for some people means the numbers are not good enough.

But zero was never a realistic expectation. We know that children can get COVID-19, even if they do tend to have less serious cases. Even if there were no spread in schools, we’d see some cases, because students and teachers can contract the disease off campus. But the numbers are small—smaller than what many had forecasted. Predictions about school openings hurting the broader community seem to have been overblown as well. In places such as Florida, preliminary data haven’t shown big community spikes as a result of school openings. Rates in Georgia have continued to decline over the past month. And although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I’ve read many stories about outbreaks at universities, and vanishingly few about outbreaks at the K–12 level.

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Maps actual sizes

Here is a very chirpy animation explaining the distortions of #map projections. Source: https://t.co/l55EEH8wv1 pic.twitter.com/3qsfGRnHQq

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) June 5, 2018

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Debt Rattle September 24 2020

Sep 242020

September 24, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:05 am Finance Tagged with: Asperger, Assange, biochip implant, Covid19, digital dollars, Eric Trump, Hunter Biden, lockdowns, riots, Supreme Court, torture 20 Responses »

Ramón Casas A young decadent 1899

• Senate Report Slams Bidens For Conflicts Of Interest, Possible Criminal Activity (JTN)

• Ron Johnson Requests Documents From Biden, Archer’s Attorneys (JTN)

• Hunter Biden Received $3.5m Wire Transfer From Russian Billionaire (NYP)

• Judge Orders Eric Trump To Testify Before Election In New York AG Probe (CNBC)

• Swamp Thang (Kunstler)

• Trump Says Supreme Court Will Decide The Election, Needs A Ninth Justice (ZH)

• Fed Prepares To Deposit “Digital Dollars” Directly To “Each American” (ZH)

• 46% of Americans Struggle To Pay Rent, Bills (NPR)

• UK New Covid Restrictions Unscientific Mumbo Jumbo, Exercise In Futility (RT)

• Feared Coronavirus Outbreaks In Schools Yet To Arrive (WaPo)

• DARPA-Funded Biochip Implant to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Market by 2021 (MPN)

• Assange Could Crochet And Play Bingo In Supermax Prison, US Prosecutor (SMH)

• ‘Clear’ Julian Assange Is On Autistic Spectrum, Doctor Tells Court (PG)

• Doctor Diagnosed Julian Assange With Asperger’s Syndrome (Gosztola)

How bad are the riots and shootings in the US going to get?

The biggest problems right now are undoubtedly in Europe. The Netherlands is just one example. Mismanagement at its finest. They’ll just blame the people. None of these people have quit over their own failings.

Netherlands

The Netherlands needs action
A little more than a month in the Netherlands and unfortunately:
– Total cases: +38,945 (+61%)
– COVID-free municipalities: -91 (-86%)#go2zero #endcoronavirus #BreekDeTweedeGolf #Netherlands pic.twitter.com/Id68aIZ9NO

— EndCoronaVirus.org (@endCOVID19) September 24, 2020

Rand Paul and Fauci Long version

Rand Paul just confronted Dr. Fauci to his face on lockdowns:

"You have been a been fan of Cuomo and the shutdown in NY. You lauded NY for their policy. NY had the highest death rate in the world. How could we possibly be jumping up and down and saying Cuomo did a great job?" pic.twitter.com/VdXWVZ5TGM

— Kelb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 23, 2020

Rand Paul and Fauci Short version

If you want to see Dr. Fauci get really rattled… Check out this exchange of him trying to defend New York City and their awful #COvId19 record to ⁦@RandPaul⁩

Thank you Senator! pic.twitter.com/jkGm1BBwrO

— Justin Hart (@justin_hart) September 23, 2020

NYT headline: “Republican Inquiry Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by Biden” -The report delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.

Sorry, that not what I read.

• Senate Report Slams Bidens For Conflicts Of Interest, Possible Criminal Activity (JTN)

A year-long Senate investigation concluded Wednesday that Hunter Biden’s efforts to cash in on foreign business deals during his father’s vice presidency raised alarm among U.S. government officials, who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged concerns about possible criminal activity ranging from bribery to sex trafficking. The long-awaited joint report by the GOP-led Senate Homeland and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees delivered several blockbuster revelations less than two months before Election Day, suggesting Obama administration officials ignored clear warning signs about ethical conflicts and possible extortion risks involving Joe Biden’s family. Perhaps the most explosive revelation was that the U.S. Treasury Department flagged payments collected overseas by Hunter Biden and business partner Devon Archer for possible illicit activities.

The so-called Suspicious Activity Reports flagged millions of dollars in transactions from the Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, a Russian oligarch named Yelena Baturina, and Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing’s communist government, the report said. Senate investigators have yet to determine if the FBI or others investigated the concerns. “The Treasury records acquired by the Chairmen show potential criminal activity relating to transactions among and between Hunter Biden, his family, and his associates with Ukrainian, Russian, Kazakh and Chinese nationals,” the 87-page report disclosed, confirming an earlier report in Just the News. The report, citing U.S. government records, also raised concerns about possible ties to sex and human trafficking rings.

“Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring,” the report said. [..] Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson told Just the News Wednesday morning that the sheer volume of suspicious activity in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings left the Vice President vulnerable to illicit influence or extortion. “The report raises serious questions that former Vice President Biden needs to answer. There are simply too many potential conflict of interest, counterintelligence and extortion threats to ignore,” he said.

Biden Ukraine

This interview is a disaster for Joe Biden.pic.twitter.com/oxqfWVRLgM

— The First (@TheFirstonTV) September 23, 2020

Of course you want the info. How can you not?

• Ron Johnson Requests Documents From Biden, Archer’s Attorneys (JTN)

Senator Ron Johnson has requested information from the attorneys of Hunter Biden and Devon Archer after a bombshell Congressional report on Wednesday revealed that the duo had received millions in cash transfers from foreign nationals. A years-long investigation by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs and Senate Finance Committees revealed on Wednesday that, among other arrangements that raised red flags among government officials, Biden had received a $3.5 million wire transfer from a Moscow politician’s wife and Archer had received over $140,000 from a Kazakhstan businessman.

Johnson, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, told Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon on Wednesday that Senate officials had reached out to attorneys representing the pair for further information regarding the revelations in the Senate report. “We have sent an email to both Devon Archer and Hunter Biden’s attorneys requesting information,” Johnson said on the podcast John Solomon Reports. The senator said that officials have also extended the two men “an opportunity to come in for a transcribed interview.” “From my standpoint, I think it’s important for us to gather this information, you know, validate it, publish it,” Johnson continued.

Sidney Powell
https://twitter.com/i/status/1308833306889400321

Call him in, let him explain. Or do you want to give the Trump campaign free ammo? Or as Kunstler says: “If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?”

• Hunter Biden Received $3.5m Wire Transfer From Russian Billionaire (NYP)

Hunter Biden received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, the richest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow, Senate Republicans revealed in their report on the younger Biden’s work in Ukraine. Baturina is referenced in the 87-page report, which was released Wednesday, addressing her payment to Biden’s investment firm in early 2014. “Baturina became Russia’s only female billionaire when her plastics company, Inteko, received a series of Moscow municipal contracts while her husband was mayor,” it said in providing background on the businesswoman.

The report described her involvement with Biden as “a financial relationship,” but declined to delve deeper into why the wire transfer was made. The probe also found that Baturina sent 11 wires transfers between May and December 2015 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA, a tech startup that filed for bankruptcy in March 2019. Nine of those 11 wire transfers were first sent to Rosemont Seneca Partners, the investment firm founded by Biden and Chris Heinz, stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, before being transferred to BAK USA. All 11 transactions described the payments as “Loan Agreement” in the details section.

The report reads, “[B]etween May 6, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015, Baturina sent 11 wires in the amount of $391,968.21 to a bank account belonging to BAK USA LLC (BAK USA). Nine of the 11 transactions, totaling $241,797.14 were sent from Baturina’s accounts to a Rosemont Seneca Thornton bank account, which then transferred to the money to BAK USA. The 11 transactions all listed ‘Loan Agreement’ in the payment details section. “BAK USA was a startup technology company headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y., that produced tablet computers in cooperation with unnamed Chinese business partners. BAK USA filed for bankruptcy on March 29, 2019, with a reported loss of $39 million. These transactions were identified because of Baturina’s reported criminal activity,” it continues.

Paving the way for Hunter?!

• Judge Orders Eric Trump To Testify Before Election In New York AG Probe (CNBC)

Eric Trump must testify in response to a subpoena from the New York Attorney General’s office before the presidential election as part of an investigation into whether President Donald Trump’s company improperly valued real estate assets in official statements, a judge ordered Wednesday. Eric Trump, who is the president’s middle son and a top executive in the Trump Organization, must testify no later than Oct. 7, Judge Arthur Engoron ruled after a hearing in Manhattan Supreme Court, where Trump’s lawyers had asked to delay his deposition until after the election. Engoron noted that, “Mr. Trump cites no authority in support of his request, and at any event, neither petitioner nor this court is bound by timelines of the national election.”

Attorney General Letitia James’s office called the ruling a “major victory.” “The court’s order today makes clear that no one is above the law, not even an organization or an individual with the name Trump,” James said in a prepared statement. The attorney general is investigating whether the New York-based Trump Organization improperly inflated the values of several real estate assets on annual financial statements that were used to obtain loans, as well as to get economic and tax benefits related to those properties. James last month had filed an action with the court seeking Eric Trump’s compliance with the subpoena after she said that he had reneged on an agreement to testify this summer.

“If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject?”

• Swamp Thang (Kunstler)

The climate is changing, all right, but not in the way that some think it is. The political climate is changing, and what has been a pestilential subtropical sink on the Potomac is overdue for that cleansing we’ve heard about. Weeks from now, as the fetid water subsides, the protective miasma above will dissipate and the people from sea to shining sea will finally get a good look at the landscape revealed and the pitiful, wriggling, dying life-forms of the order Democratica stranded on it.

Case in point: Joe Biden. Many will wonder in the days to come whether the sole and otherwise inexplicable reason for his elevation to candidate-for-president was a ruse to avoid prosecution — his own and others. The matter was neatly laid out a year ago during the impeachment ploy: After the color revolution in Ukraine, 2014, Mr. Biden was designated not just “point man” overseeing American interests in that sad-sack country, but specifically as a watchdog against the notorious deep corruption of Ukraine’s entire political ecosystem — as if, you understand, the internal workings of Ukraine’s politics was any of our business in the first place.

The evidence aired publicly last year suggests that Mr. Biden jumped head-first and whole-heartedly into the hog-trough of loose money there, netting his son Hunter and cohorts millions of dollars for no-show jobs on the board of natgas company, Burisma. And then, of course, Mr. Biden stupidly bragged on a recorded panel session at the Council on Foreign Relations about threatening to withhold US aid money as a lever to induce Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko to fire a prosecutor looking into Burisma’s sketchy affairs. Naturally, the Democratic Party impeachment crew accused Mr. Trump of doing exactly what Mr. Biden accomplished a few years earlier.

The impeachment fizzled, but the charges and the odor of the Biden-Burisma scandal lingered without resolution — all the while that Mr. Biden posed as a presidential candidate in the primaries. This week, two Senate committees (Finance and Homeland) are expected to release a joint report detailing findings of their investigation into the Biden family’s exploits abroad. It is expected to not look good. Also implicated are the State Department officers in the Kiev embassy who pretended not to notice any of this, pointing also to their engagement in further shenanigans around the Trump-Clinton election of 2016 — a lot of that entwined in the Clinton-sponsored RussiaGate scheme. Will the committees be so bold as to issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department? If Mr. Biden actually shows up at next week’s debate, do you suppose that Mr. Trump will fail to bring up the subject? Does this finally force Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from what has been the most hollow, illusory, and dispirited campaign ever seen at this level in US political history?

4-4 really is dangerous.

• Trump Says Supreme Court Will Decide The Election, Needs A Ninth Justice (ZH)

Over the weekend, in the aftermath of Ruth Bader GInsburg’s death, we said that the “worst case scenario” for markets – a contested election – had become even more complicated as it now appeared that the US was heading into the most controversial election since Gore vs Bush with a SCOTUS that could end up deadlocked with a 4-4 vote should the election outcome escalate to the Supreme Court. It appears that the president agrees, because moments ago President Trump also predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the outcome of the November election and argued the Senate should confirm his nominee – who we already know will be a conservative woman – to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to break any tie. Trump said that “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important to have nine justices.”

Speaking before reporters at the White House, he continued, claiming that “this scam that the Democrats are pulling, it’s a scam, this scam will be before the United States Supreme Court,” Trump plans on Saturday to announce a nominee to replace Ginsburg, a liberal icon who died Friday at 87. Lawyers representing Trump’s campaign are challenging mail-in voting rules in a host of states, as a result of Trump’s claims that mail-in voting is more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting on Election Day. As reported yesterday, there is a growing probability that the first major test of the new post-RBG iteration of the Supreme Court, which will soon have a 6-3 conservative majority, the GOP is planning to ask SCOTUS to review a major PA state court decision that extended the due date for mail-in ballots in a critical battleground state.

They must have found a way to let bankers profit even from this.

• Fed Prepares To Deposit “Digital Dollars” Directly To “Each American” (ZH)

Over the past decade, the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability, was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system. The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation, prices as measured across the broader economy – using the flawed CPI metric and certainly stagnant worker wages – would remain subdued (as a reminder, the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can be eliminated and has so far failed to do so).

The Fed’s failure to reach its inflation target – which prompted the US central bank to radically overhaul its monetary dogma last month and unveil Flexible Average Inflation Targeting (or FAIT) whereby the Fed will allow inflation to run hot without hiking rates – has sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment, even though as we showed in June, deflation is now a direct function of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide, the lower the propensity to spend. In other words, the harder the Fed fights to stimulate inflation, the more deflation and more saving it spurs as a result.

In short, ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP, it has been making the situation it has been trying to “fix” even worse while blowing the biggest asset price bubble in history. And having recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy, the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated, specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “tricking down” all the way to the consumer level.

The Fed will have you covered.

• 46% of Americans Struggle To Pay Rent, Bills (NPR)

Jean was one of more than 3,000 people who took part in a new poll released Wednesday from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her story is an especially stark example of how pandemic financial stress is playing out. But the poll found many people reported problems with housing, health care and unsafe workplaces, and a high percentage of Americans — 46% — said they’re having “serious financial problems.” Nearly one out of three respondents had used up all or most of their savings. “Our surprise is how large the numbers are,” says Robert Blendon, a Harvard University public health professor who worked on the poll.

He notes that the poll was conducted during July, months after Congress approved an extra $600 a week in federal unemployment benefits that were still supposed to be flowing to people. Stimulus checks had gone out, too. And yet so many said they’re struggling. One in six households even reported missing or delaying paying major bills just so they could buy food. Blendon says it’s like the government sent 100 Federal Emergency Management Agency trucks into a disaster zone, but a lot of people never saw them or got help. “It’s just like interviewing people in a hurricane area and the people are telling you there’s no relief,” he says, when “it should be there.”

EU governments all committed the same mistakes. And brute force is not the answer.

• UK New Covid Restrictions Unscientific Mumbo Jumbo, Exercise In Futility (RT)

I accept my dissenting voice may not be heeded by the UK government, but when a former Supreme Court judge delivers a damning verdict that the rules are ‘pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary’, shouldn’t they be listening? The UK has announced a fresh suite of draconian Covid restrictions, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson warning they could be in place for six months. But, like all previous attempts, the new rules are worse than useless. You’ve all heard the new rules by now, so I won’t analyse the details of what the individual implications will be. Just as poring over a government white paper based on astrology would be pointless, tepid nit-picking within the nascent pseudoscience of ‘Covidology’ is an exercise in futility. It’s also an immediate acceptance of the quacks’ terms of the argument.

‘The rule of six’ could be ‘the rule of seven’, the pubs could close at midnight or 10pm, level 4, 5 or 75 could be enforced – none of this would make any difference. Nor is it acceptable. The fiddled numbers, the fake compromises, the newspeak – all of it is misdirection. In a nutshell, this doubling down means nothing less than the acceleration of an end to the free, decent life to which all human beings are born entitled. Only a total return to normality should be demanded, and it’s non-negotiable. Just ask former Supreme Court justice Lord Jonathan Sumption, who has been making waves this week with his scathing analysis of the government’s madcap plot. He’s dubbed Johnson’s ‘rule of six’ “pointless, arbitrary and unnecessary”.

It’s pointless, he says, because, without a Stasi-like secret army of citizen spies, it cannot be enforced. He is correct, of course (although I don’t consider the likelihood of an army of snitchers quite as unlikely as he seems to). It’s arbitrary because it’s far from universal – people mix in much larger numbers in schools and workplaces, on public transport and in the streets, all of which is essential. And it’s unnecessary because the increase in positive tests is being driven – as Health Secretary Matt Hancock is so fond of reminding us – by the young, to whom the disease poses relatively little threat.

Rapid test them 2x a week. What are you waiting for?

• Feared Coronavirus Outbreaks In Schools Yet To Arrive (WaPo)

Thousands of students and teachers have become sick with the coronavirus since schools began opening last month, but public health experts have found little evidence that the virus is spreading inside buildings, and the rates of infection are far below what is found in the surrounding communities. This early evidence, experts say, suggests that opening schools may not be as risky as many have feared and could guide administrators as they chart the rest of what is already an unprecedented school year. “Everyone had a fear there would be explosive outbreaks of transmission in the schools. In colleges, there have been. We have to say that, to date, we have not seen those in the younger kids, and that is a really important observation,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

This does not mean the risk of contracting the coronavirus is zero. Poor and inconsistent reporting in many parts of the country means that experts do not yet have a full view of the situation, and most schools have been open for only a few weeks. It’s also unclear how closely the incidence of the coronavirus in schools is tied to policies in schools such as mandatory mask-wearing. Most of the nation’s largest districts opened with fully remote teaching, so the data are largely from smaller communities. And the pandemic may grow worse as flu season and winter approaches. But the fact that large swaths of the country opened for in-person school while others did not offers the more cautious districts a chance to observe how things have gone elsewhere in charting their next steps.

On Wednesday, researchers at Brown University, working with school administrators, released their first set of data from a new National COVID-19 School Response Data Dashboard, created to track coronavirus cases. It found low levels of infection among students and teachers. Tracking infections over a two-week period beginning Aug. 31, it found that 0.23 percent of students had a confirmed or suspected case of the coronavirus. Among teachers, it was 0.49 percent. Looking only at confirmed cases, the rates were even lower: 0.078 percent for students and 0.15 percent for teachers.

I know a few people who will refuse any such implant.

• DARPA-Funded Biochip Implant to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Market by 2021 (MPN)

The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ BARDA. The revolutionary breakthrough came to a Canadian scientist named Derek Rossi in 2010 purely by accident. The now-retired Harvard professor claimed in an interview with the National Post that he found a way to “reprogram” the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.

These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As Rossi, himself, puts it: “The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.” [..] As early as 2006, DARPA was already researching how to identify viral, upper respiratory pathogens through its Predicting Health and Disease (PHD) program, which led to the creation of the agency’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO) [..]. In 2014, DARPA’s BTO launched its “In Vivo Nanoplatforms” (IVN) program, which researches implantable nanotechnologies, leading to the development of ‘hydrogel’.

Hydrogel is a nanotechnology whose inventor early on boasted that “If [it] pans out, with approval from FDA, then consumers could get the sensors implanted in their core to measure their levels of glucose, oxygen, and lactate.” This contact lens-like material requires a special injector to be introduced under the skin where it can transmit light-based digital signals through a wireless network like 5G. Once firmly implanted inside the body, human cells are at the mercy of any mRNA program delivered via this substrate, unleashing a nightmare of possibilities. It is, perhaps, the first true step towards full-on transhumanism; a “philosophy” that is in vogue with many powerful and influential people, such as Google’s Ray Kurzweil and Eric Schmidt and whose proponents see the fusion of technology and biology as an inevitable consequence of human progress.

It’s getting beyond depravity.

• Assange Could Crochet And Play Bingo In Supermax Prison, US Prosecutor (SMH)

The US government has suggested that Julian Assange would not be held in solitary confinement and would be able to crochet and play bingo if he is extradited and jailed on spying charges. The revelation emerged at Assange’s extradition hearing underway at London’s Old Bailey which has this week been focussed on Assange’s mental health. His defence team has called witnesses to testify that he has Autism Spectrum Disorder, Asperger’s, anxiety, hears voices, is depressed and would take his own life if he loses his legal battle. The court has heard that Assange has withheld telling doctors his true mental state while detained in Belmarsh Prison because he fears being placed in solitary confinement.

Assange remains in custody while he fights his extradition arguing that his human rights would be violated. Psychiatrist, Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at King’s College London, has previously told the court that if Assange is extradited there is a “very high” risk the father of four would take his own life rather than serve out any sentence in a US supermax prison. But Seena Fazel, a professor in forensic psychiatry at Oxford University, who interviewed Assange earlier this year said that he found the prisoner to be “moderately depressed,” an improvement on the severely depressed state he accepted Assange was in as recently as December last year.

Fazel appeared for the prosecution. He disagreed with a psychiatrist called by the defence on Tuesday about the likelihood of Assange committing suicide. He said the 49-year old had shown himself capable of managing his own suicide risk, by taking medication, undergoing counselling and accessing support from the Samaritans – a British mental health charity. On Tuesday the court was told that Assange has made preparations for death, including writing farewell letters, receiving absolution from a Catholic priest and preparing a will.

Imagine having your medical record laid out like this in public, for reasons that have nothing to do with what you are -falsely- accused of. That, too, is a form of torture.

• ‘Clear’ Julian Assange Is On Autistic Spectrum, Doctor Tells Court (PG)

A psychiatrist has told the extradition hearing of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange it is “clear” he is on the autistic spectrum. Dr Quinton Deeley, a consultant neuropsychiatrist, diagnosed Assange with Asperger’s syndrome after witnessing a two-hour autism assessment and conducting six hours of phone calls with the 49-year-old in Belmarsh prison. Assange is fighting extradition to the US, where he is facing an 18-count indictment alleging a plot to hack computers and conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. Giving evidence on Wednesday, Dr Deeley, who also spoke to Assange’s parents during his assessment, said: “To my mind, it’s clear Mr Assange presents as a person with an autistic spectrum condition. “He’s an intelligent person, he’s learnt to adapt to some of those characteristics.”

The Old Bailey heard Assange refused to complete two components of the autism test, including a task to act out brushing his teeth and answering questions about his daily “self-management” or “self-care” routine because he found them “demeaning”. James Lewis QC, for the US government, suggested: “It’s highly unusual for people to refuse these tests?” Dr Deeley, who said he has assessed hundreds of people to determine if they are autistic, replied: “Correct.” He described Assange as “an intelligent person” who shares the characteristics of “many high-functioning people on the autistic spectrum”, including engineers and computer scientists.

Dr Deeley said he has “difficulty discussing his own emotions”, with a “primary focus on his own thoughts and interests” and noted a “failure to initiate or sustain” conversations. Assange’s mother, Christine, told the doctor her son as a child “had a preference for solitary play” but made a small number of friendships in his teens with “geeky” boys who shared his interest in computers, the court heard. The court also heard Assange’s close friend Suelette Dreyfus referred to his “Edwardian style of speaking”, such as talking about Coca-Cola as mead, “like he’s been reading Jane Austen novels”.

There are two precedents that did not get extradited for this reason.

• Doctor Diagnosed Julian Assange With Asperger’s Syndrome (Gosztola)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, while detained in the Belmarsh high-security prison in London. This likely increases Assange’s risk of suicide if confined in restrictive prison conditions in the United States, according to a psychiatrist who testified at his extradition trial. Dr. Quinton Deeley, who works for the National Health Service (NHS), conducted an Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) test on Assange and produced a report. He interviewed Assange for six hours in July. Assange told Deeley he feared he would be held in isolation in a U.S. prison. He was afraid of the fresh indictment. He was also concerned about the fate of Joshua Schulte, who was held in harsh confinement conditions prior to his trial for allegedly disclosing the “Vault 7” materials to WikiLeaks. (Schulte’s case resulted in a mistrial in March.)

The U.S. Justice Department charged Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense. The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world. In the cases of Lauri Love and Gary McKinnon, the U.S. government was blocked from extraditing them because the United Kingdom High Court of Justice (Love) and the British Home Secretary (McKinnon) recognized their Asperger’s syndrome would result in degrading or inhuman treatment that violated human rights.

Love was accused of hacking into systems controlled by the Federal Reserve, U.S. Army, and a number of other government agencies. McKinnon was accused by the U.S. government of the “biggest military computer hack of all time.” Edward Fitzgerald represented Love, and he is part of Assange’s legal team, and the arguments against extradition that Fitizgerald put forward in Love’s case are nearly identical to the arguments in this case. Particularly: (1) The mere fact of extradition and detention in the United States would be likely to lead to a serious deterioration in the mental health of Mr. Love (2) To the extent that suicide was prevented by Mr. Love being placed on suicide watch, the conditions in which he would be held on suicide watch, or in segregation, would lead to a serious and permanent deterioration in his mental health, which was also related to his physical health.

James Lewis, the lead prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Authority, which represents the U.S. government in this case, went after Deeley and attempted to discredit his diagnosis. He said Assange has written books, given speeches, and hosted a “chat show” for RT. Plus, no other psychiatrist who saw Assange diagnosed him with Asperger’s syndrome. “It’s possible to both have a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome and to demonstrate expertise and be authoritative and knowledgeable when talking about certain topics,” Deeley replied.

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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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Why Trump Will Win

Sep 202020

September 20, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:23 pm Finance Tagged with: Alzheimer, Biden, dementia, drug test, Electoral College, energy, Orange Man Bad, Supreme Court, Trump 9 Responses »

René Magritte The song of the storm 1937

I was going to make this the shortest essay I’ve ever written. “Trump Will Win Because of Energy. Period.” But wouldn’t you know, things start popping up on exactly the topic it was going to be about… The difference in energy between Donald Trump and Joe Biden should be obvious to everyone, including Biden supporters, though they will try to ignore it, as well as the role energy plays in a campaign, as it does in life in general -not just human life either-.

People recognize energy, they feel it. it’s a primal thing, directly linked to survival. It doesn’t get recognized at a rational level, but somewhere much deeper. And it’s not even so much that Trump’s energy levels are above average, for a 74-year old (though they appear to be), but that Biden’s are so far below average – or perhaps exactly what you would expect for a 77-year old, which is why so few of them are running for president of the United States, a job that I think we would all agree requires a lot of energy.

When you take out of the equation which person you like or not, when you disregard their policy proposals, and you only look at energy levels, the difference is vast. And people will catch on to this. The first debate is in 9 days, September 29, and how do you prepare Biden for that? Trump last night suggested his handlers do it by applying ‘big, fat shots in the ass’, but even that wouldn’t do it.

Trump doesn’t need to hammer this point home too hard, it will be obvious no matter what. It may even be better for him to show compassion for Biden. One of the main instructions from his team will undoubtedly be to NOT go after Joe Biden so hard it will make him stutter. Because that would make Trump look like a bully, and give Biden points on compassion from the audience.

But I doubt Trump will be able to help himself. And perhaps, at least from his point of view, he should just be and remain who he is. Because that worked four years ago. Will these be the best-watched debates in history? Quite possibly. Meanwhile, as Trump yesterday worked all day -if we are to believe the reports- and then campaigned all night in Fayetteville NC, Biden was MIA.

That by now is a pattern. As is the mysterious lack of door-to-door campaigning by the Biden team. It may not be impossible to win that way, but it certainly would be a first. And it makes the team look like they have a similar energy level to Biden himself (In another mystery, we see people talk about finding it hard to get yard signs for the Biden campaign).

That leaves you with the impression that the Biden team really has just one message: Orange Man Bad. Not: vote *for* me, but vote *against* the other guy. the racist/rapist who killed 200,000 Americans and offends “our” troops”. That in turn appears to signal that what energy there is, is negative energy. Doesn’t look like a winning formula.

But if the media, including social media, keep on pumping out that same message 24/7, who knows how many people will buy into it? After all, Twitter and Facebook et al are even more important influencers today than they were in 2016. Then again, the Trump people seemed to be much stronger on social media back then, and why would they have squandered that advantage? But then again, again, they weren’t constantly censored and banned then.

Trump last night in Fayetteville:

‘Big, Fat Shots In The Ass’: Trump Again Suggests Biden Is On Energizing Drugs

Donald Trump has mercilessly taunted Joe Biden, telling supporters that his Democratic nemesis must be taking performance-enhancing substances and should undergo a drug test. Trump reiterated previous casual accusations that Biden is too senile to be a good fit for the US president’s office while talking to a crowd of supporters in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Using his nickname for his Democratic opponent, Trump said that “Sleepy Joe” is appearing conspicuously efficient during debates and public events.

“Don’t underestimate [him], he’s been doing this for 47 years. And I got a debate coming up with this guy,” Trump said as he grinned, before suggesting that performance-enhancing substances were behind Biden’s efficiency. “You never know, they gave him a big, fat shot in the ass and he comes out,” Trump claimed as his audience laughed. “And for two hours he’s better than ever before. The problem is, what happens after that,” the Republican president added. Adding insult to the injury, Trump said offering a drug test to Biden is an option.

Remarkably, this is not the first time the 74-year-old president has accused his 77-year-old rival of being on drugs. Over a week ago, he fanned the claim while speaking to Fox. “I think there’s probably, possibly, drugs involved,” Trump told host Jeanine Pirro. “I don’t know how you can go from being so bad where you can’t even get out a sentence…” he speculated without finishing the sentence.

Trump and Biden are expected to face each other during debates in Cleveland on September 29, in Miami on October 15, and in Nashville on October 22. Their vice-presidential nominees Mike Pence and Kamala Harris will have a one-on-one in Salt Lake City on October 7.

In that same vein, there was also this from Irishman Graham Dockery on August 27:

Trump Has Called On Biden To Take A Drug Test. Why Don’t Both Old Guys Take This Idea Seriously?

Trump is 74 years old and Biden 77. If elected, Biden would be the oldest president in history, and would assume office at the same age Ronald Reagan left the White House – himself exhibiting the telltale signs of Alzheimer’s disease. If Trump wins, he’ll beat Reagan’s record by one year. Ten percent of white Americans over the age of 65 suffer from Alzheimer’s and related dementias. After 65, the risk of dementia doubles every five years. Even if Biden was speaking coherently, he would have a one-third chance of developing dementia by the end of his first term. Likewise, while Trump may appear sharp, he’s twice as likely to be losing his marbles now than he was in 2016.

Modern drugs can mask the symptoms of cognitive decline fairly well. Donepezil, Galantamine, Memantine and Rivastigmine are all used to boost memory, attention and the ability to perform simple tasks – like using a phone. Aside from these prescription medications, a candidate looking for a quick pre-debate fix could swallow some Adderall, a legal amphetamine that boosts cognition, short term memory and attention span, not to mention whatever experimental cocktails these two might have access to.

I’m not suggesting that either candidate is a chattering speed-freak. Trump’s opponents have beaten that drum before, accusing the president of railing Adderall every time he sniffs in a speech. Biden, on the other hand, looks like a man who could use an infusion from Doctor Feelgood. But it would be nice to know for sure. Most Americans would likely balk at the idea of sending a medicated husk to negotiate with allies and outwit adversaries. Let the two men competing for this position lay their cards on the table, and let the American public use this information to inform their decision.

After all, this is the leader of the free world we’re talking about, the man who, with a flick of his finger, could doom the planet to nuclear holocaust. It’s probably best if this leader remembers where he left the tapioca pudding.

Note that by now Trump’s advantage on energy says little about how the 2020 election will eventually be decided. It’s no longer possible for the US to NOT to sink into a deep quagmire because of mail-in ballots and the many days it may take to count them, the hundreds of lawyers that will be involved in various stages of that process -including many lawsuits-, and the Supreme Court, which will be a major election issue before November 3, and a possible/probable deciding factor sometime after that date.

Add to this that having the most votes, or even the highest numbers in the Electoral College system, no longer guarantees you a victory -because: lawyers and because: states may try to tamper with that system- and you end up with the most godawful mess ever. You would think everyone in Washington has an interest in not letting the city devolve into a circus tent where the clowns end up fighting the lions and tigers, but apparently they all have “more important” things to consider.

And all the time I’m thinking, guys, take care of your country, at least someone take care of it, you’re going to have to live in it together next year and the year after that etc.

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Debt Rattle September 20 2020

Sep 202020

September 20, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:34 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, cold war, Covid19, lockdowns, masks, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen F. Cohen, Supreme Court, Trump, Tulsi Gabbard 26 Responses »

Robert Capa Capucine, French model and actress, in her hotel room, Rome 1951

• Ginsburg Death Opens Complex Partisan Chessboard (JTN)

• Picking RBG’s Successor: The Who, The When, & The Hypocrisy (ZH)

• Trump Says Supreme Court Pick Will ‘Most Likely’ Be A Woman (JTN)

• Tulsi Gabbard Introduces Bipartisan Bill To Deter Mail-in Ballot Fraud (RT)

• Bringing a Bazooka to a Knife Fight (Kunstler)

• COVID May Have Already Peaked In Many African Countries (G.)

• Masks Help Bring Down COVID19 Cases: Governors, State Health Officials (NBC)

• Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns If They Can Get Away With It (McKaken)

• How The Stock Market Got To Be So Out Of Touch With Reality (Stockman)

• Glenn Greenwald On Why Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Assange Trial (ZH)

• Stephen F. Cohen, Leading American Russia Expert, Dies At 81 (RT)

• Trump as New Cold War Heretic (Stephen F. Cohen)

Holland is the first place I’ve seen that anounces fast testing. Second was France?!. In November… They have their experts look at 5 different options. Better late than never, but I do wonder if they do it only because their PCR testing is so screwed up. And still I doubt they will allow people to fast-test themselves at home. Which they should.

Assange Clinton ISIS

Julian Assange: “Clinton and ISIS are funded by the same money.”

In a sane world, Hillary Clinton would be the one locked up for war crimes, and Julian Assange free and celebrated as a hero. pic.twitter.com/Usya4ZKKxZ

— Sarah Abdallah (@sahouraxo) September 18, 2020

If Trump nominates a black woman, wouldn’t that seal the deal right there and then?

You watch and read through all the statements everyone’s making, and you know they can all easily convince themselves the other side is 100% wrong.

• Ginsburg Death Opens Complex Partisan Chessboard (JTN)

The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg opens a complex partisan chessboard, with competing political calculations affecting the timeline of decision points by President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). A key decision is whether Trump and McConnell should push to get a nominee approved by the Senate prior to the Nov. 3 presidential election, a move that could serve as a polarizing catalyst to motivate both Democratic and Republican party bases. Polls show Trump has long maintained a strong edge over rival candidate Joe Biden in party enthusiasm, with thousands of Trump supporters lining up to attend lively rallies at airports, while Biden gatherings are far smaller and more subdued.

Another compelling possibility is whether balloting delays and disputes due to COVID-19 could result in an unclear presidential victor, kicking the outcome to the Supreme Court, just as in the nail-biter 2000 high court ruling in favor of Republican George W. Bush. “You had to know 2020 was going to end with an election that could be decided by a Supreme Court capable of a split 4-4 decision,” Catholic University professor C.C. Pecknold said on Twitter Friday night. The possibility of the Supreme Court stepping in to decide the election creates an added sense of urgency for Trump and McConnell to seat the nominee as quickly as possible. “She was an amazing woman,” President Trump said Friday night after learning about Ginsburg’s death just moments after stepping off the stage at a campaign event in Minnesota.

“Whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I’m saddened to hear that.” President Trump on Wednesday announced an updated list of Supreme Court nominees ahead of the 2020 election, adding nearly two dozen more possible justices to his list from 2016. Amy Coney Barrett, a U.S. Circuit Judge for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, is considered a leading candidate to replace Ginsburg. Axios political journalist Jonathan Swan noted that he reported in 2019 that during his deliberations over the Kennedy vacancy, Trump told confidants he was “saving her [Coney Barrett] for Ginsburg.”

Obama SCOTUS

Just dug up this clip of Obama in 2016:

"When there is a vacancy on the SCOTUS, the President is to nominate someone, the Senate is to consider that nomination… There's no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off-years. That's not in the Constitution text." pic.twitter.com/vrOi3DrkJN

— Kelb Hull (@CalebJHull) September 19, 2020

“A total of 61 SCOTUS justices have been nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court since the turn of the last century (1900) 70% of these (43 Justices) were confirmed in *under 46 days*..”

• Picking RBG’s Successor: The Who, The When, & The Hypocrisy (ZH)

The political battles over who will succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg as Supreme Court Justice have already begun with some demanding delays, some pushing urgency, others urging more radicalism, and all of this being super-amplified by every mainstream and social media feed, happy to use any old piece of fake news to make their point ever louder, and fearmonger the consequences of “the other side” getting to make their choice. First things first is the Hypocrisy – Obama/Biden Can’t Make Up Their Minds. Former president Obama has called for a delay in the decision until after the election (which presumably he believes Harris – and Biden – will win). All of which is very awkward since it’s 100% the opposite of what he himself said in 2016…

“”When there is a vacancy on the SCOTUS, the President is to nominate someone, the Senate is to consider that nomination… There’s no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off-years. That’s not in the Constitution text.” Obama in 2016: “I’m going to do my job. I’m going to nominate somebody… It’s not as if the Senate calendar is so full that we do not have time to get this done.” JoeBiden in 2016: “I would go forward with a confirmation process as chairman, even a few months before a presidential election, if the nominee were chosen with the advice, and not merely the consent, of the Senate, just as the Constitution requires.” So, Obama calls for a delay (in 2020); Biden says that would be unconstitutional (in 2016)! And President Trump agrees with Biden:

“We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices. We have this obligation, without delay!” [..] Second, there is the When – Rush Job… or Business As Usual? The mainstream media is already claiming that any nomination process would be a rush now… “The Senate would need to move faster than usual to confirm a nominee before the election 45 days from now. The average time from nomination to Senate vote – after vetting and hearings – is 69.6 days, or about 2.3 months, according to a 2018 report from the Congressional Research Service.”

However, there appears to be something wrong with their math as Undercover Huber (@JohnWHuber) detailed in a tweet-thread: “A total of 61 SCOTUS justices have been nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court since the turn of the last century (1900) 70% of these (43 Justices) were confirmed in *under 46 days* (the amount of time remaining until the Nov 3 Presidential election)”

But Amy Coney Barrett ain’t black!

• Trump Says Supreme Court Pick Will ‘Most Likely’ Be A Woman (JTN)

President Trump indicated Saturday that he likely select a female nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Ruth Ginsburg. “I could see most likely it would be a woman,” he told reporters at the White House on Saturday. The president earlier in the day made clear his intention to get a Supreme Court nominee confirmed to the high court to replace Ginsburg, arguing he and fellow Republicans “have this obligation, without delay!” Ginsburg died Friday from complications from cancer. She was 87. Her death immediately created a high-stakes partisan standoff about whether Trump should get to replace Ginsburg, with just 45 days before Election Day, or allow the winner of his presidential race with Democrat Joe Biden to nominate a replacement. Biden himself has pledged to nominate a black woman to the court during his term.

“We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices. We have this obligation, without delay!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. Republicans now control the Senate, in which a nominee is confirmed. However, the GOP is in jeopardy of losing its Senate majority with several races considered a tossup. The GOP has 53 member in the Senate and Democrats have 47 including including two independents.

AOC Ginsburg

It’s the Supreme Court, not the Make-A-Wish Foundation. If Ginsburg wanted a left-wing Democrat to pick her replacement, she could have resigned while Obama was president and Democrats controlled the Senate. She chose not to. Tough luck. https://t.co/mbvmXCpa2l

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) September 20, 2020

They’re going to throw her out.

• Tulsi Gabbard Introduces Bipartisan Bill To Deter Mail-in Ballot Fraud (RT)

Former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, branded a “Russian asset” by Hillary Clinton for her anti-war views, is again refusing to blindly follow her party’s talking points – this time over fears of election fraud. “Whether in the midst of a pandemic, as we are now, where mail-in voting is likely to drastically increase, or even in a normal election, no one should get in between a voter and the ballot box,” the Hawaii congresswoman said Friday on Twitter. Gabbard joined Thursday with Illinois Republican Congressman Rodney Davis to introduce a bill that would block federal funding to states that allow ballot harvesting – letting paid activists canvass neighborhoods to gather mail-ballots and turn them in on behalf of voters. There have been documented abuses with ballot harvesting, including a North Carolina case that led to an election being nullified and redone.

But Gabbard is running afoul of the Democratic Party’s position on election fraud. The Democrat-controlled House has blocked all efforts to ban ballot harvesting, while party leaders and their mainstream media allies have argued repeatedly that major voter fraud is a myth and that President Donald Trump’s attacks on the susceptibility of mail-in voting to foul play are unfounded. Gabbard directly contradicted that message in her tweet, saying ballot harvesting is “ripe for fraud and poses a serious threat to the integrity of our elections.” She added that abuse “is something we’ve actually seen happen in recent elections.” The stakes are high since a huge increase in absentee and mail-in voting is expected to occur this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Gabbard has a history of offending Democrats with unauthorized positions, such as when she embarrassed a party favorite, Senator Kamala Harris, in a presidential primary debate last year, by reminding voters of her record as prosecutor. Last December, the congresswoman voted ‘present’ on both articles of impeachment against Trump. She was out of step again earlier this month, joining conservatives in blasting Netflix for streaming the controversial movie ‘Cuties’, which she called “child porn.” That indiscretion led to her being smeared as a QAnon conspiracy theorist by activist Melissa Ryan. And as in the case of Gabbard’s attack on Netflix, she’s again winning praise from Republicans, this time for her position on ballot harvesting. Conservative author Helena Morrissey called Gabbard “a talented and nuanced politician stopped in her tracks because she doesn’t follow the narrative.” Commentator Blaire White said Gabbard was “the only Dem candidate that mattered.”

“..that is, if it is actually racist as its leadership claims it to be…”

• Bringing a Bazooka to a Knife Fight (Kunstler)

You heard it here first: Joe Biden will call in “sick” to the presidential candidates’ debate on Tuesday, September 29, and within days the Democratic Party will be obliged to replace him. Enough said for now. Wait for it…. Onto the election issue du jour: putting out ideological fires set by political arsonists: namely, the “systemic racism” hustle cooked up by “progressive” anarcho-terrorists to provoke hatred and division in a nation sore beset by propaganda, psy-ops, and seditious subterfuge — not to mention Covid-19 and economic collapse, as if those were not enough. This week, President Trump released an executive order halting all federal agency in-service training programs purporting to address “critical race theory,” “white privilege,” “unconscious bias,” and other hobgoblins of Wokesterism, a scam that has become a multimillion-dollar consulting racket funded by taxpayers.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a memo to executive branch agency heads directing them to identify all contracts or other agency spending related to any “propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil.” When the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attempted to defy the order and go forward with training to “examine the mechanisms of “systemic racism, white supremacist ideology, and systems of structured inequality,” Mr. Vought had to remind the agency to cancel it. So it goes with “the Resistance.”

One consulting outfit, CAST (the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking) has received $16-million from the Department of Education. At its August 2020 conference, attendees (including DOE staff) were told the United States has a “racial contract” that “says it’s okay for white people to kill blacks with immunity [sic]” (Did they mean impunity?). They also advocated abolishing prisons. The DOE press secretary says it’s investigating. God knows what kind of swamp creatures lie embedded in the lower mudbanks of that agency, but at the top, at least, the department is cleaning up its act. DOE Secretary Betsy DeVos took aggressive action days ago after Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber sent out an open letter to “the Princeton community” stating that “racism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”

Okay, it being the case that Princeton officially claims to be a “racist” institution, the DOE has opened an investigation into Title VI violations under US Civil Rights law so as to recover the $75-million in federal funding Princeton has received since Mr. Eisgruber became president of the institution in 2013. Seems fair, dontcha think? The DOE has required Princeton to produce electronic records of every conceivable type — memoranda, emails, calendars, text messages, telephone logs, you name it — in order to determine whether Princeton has made false representation of its compliance with civil rights law — that is, if it is actually racist as its leadership claims it to be.

More mystery.

• COVID May Have Already Peaked In Many African Countries (G.)

The coronavirus pandemic has peaked earlier than expected in many African countries, confounding early predictions, experts have told MPs. Scientists do not yet know why, but one hypothesis is the possibility of people having pre-existing immunity to Covid-19, caused by exposure to other infections. Prof Francesco Checchi, a specialist in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told MPs it was “broadly” true that coronavirus had not behaved in expected ways in African countries, including Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan and Somalia. “We are certainly observing a pattern that confounds us a little,” he told the UK’s international development committee’s inquiry into the impact of Covid on humanitarian crises. “In a few important case studies – Kenya, for example – what seems to be happening is the epidemic may be peaking earlier than our naive models predicted.”

He said a similar pattern has emerged in Yemen, which is in the middle of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. “Yemen is one of the few countries where to my knowledge there is almost no prevention of Covid transmission,” Checchi said. “The anecdotal reports we’re getting inside Yemen are pretty consistent that the epidemic has, quote unquote, passed. “There was a peak in May, June across Yemen, where hospitalisation facilities were being overwhelmed. That is no longer the case.” It was possible that the population had accrued some sort of “herd immunity” at least temporarily, he said. While that was “very good news”, Checchi said he was unable to say whether it had been less lethal or less severe on a per capita basis. In many developing countries, where testing is poor and deaths are not notified to the authorities, the rate of reported deaths is very low.

A study published on Tuesday from Imperial College London estimated that in Damascus, Syria, reported deaths from coronavirus were as low as 1.25% of the true figure. Checchi and his team are examining satellite images of graveyards in Aden, in the south of Yemen, and early results point to “considerable mortality with a peak in May in that city”. He said there could be up to a million cases in Yemen, based on one data modelling run. He and colleagues are now looking at explanations for the earlier than predicted peak in some low-income countries. “These range from the effect of age, to some sort of role for pre-existing immunity to pre-exposure to other infections, to other hypotheses. It isn’t a simple analysis.”

On Tuesday, a special envoy to the World Health Organization warned that the world was still at the “beginning” of the pandemic. Prof Azra Ghani, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, told MPs: “We know deaths are being underreported. We are starting to look at other sources of data, for instance media reports of funerals, to try to get a better handle on it.” The percentage of reported deaths varies from country to country, she said, and determining how the epidemic behaves was vital to answer questions about how countries can recover. “If infections have swept through and if there is a degree of immunity, then it would be possible for those economies to open up a little, but more safely, than if populations were quite naive to infections.”

Don’t know if it’s shoddy reporting or shoddy regulations, but “mask orders” or “mask mandates” are not terms anyone should use. After 9 months, it’s all turned into oppression.

• Masks Help Bring Down COVID19 Cases: Governors, State Health Officials (NBC)

There are still many Americans who resist, protest against and rant about wearing face masks. But state and county health officials across the country say the stark drop in Covid-19 case counts in their communities before and after mask orders were imposed clearly show how effective they can be in reducing the spread of the coronavirus. In Alabama, Gov. Kay Ivey announced a statewide mandatory mask order on July 16. Since then, the state saw a significant drop in daily Covid-19 cases, with numbers peaking above 2,000 toward the end of July and hovering over a 1,000 a month later. And now, cases have plummeted to 574 a day.

“The mask absolutely played a very important role and we really have had no other significant limitations or interventions other than the mask,” Dr. Scott Harris, state health officer at the Alabama Department of Public Health, told NBC News this week. Indiana currently has one of the lowest coronavirus transmission rates in the U.S., a significant result of the statewide mask orders, Gov. Eric Holcomb said Wednesday. “I don’t want that lost on anyone that what we’re doing is working,” Holcomb said during a briefing. “Masks work. Physical distancing works. And the number don’t lie.” With no federal mandate, 34 governors have ordered statewide mask mandates. Others have left the decision to county officials.

This week, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds described wearing a mask a “feel-good” act. But Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called them “the most powerful public health tool” against the coronavirus. “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine,” Redfield said at a Senate hearing Wednesday. South Carolina has no statewide mask requirements, leaving 11 jurisdictions with mask mandates and 61 without. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control’s latest findings, from mid-August, report that communities with mask mandates saw a drop of 34 cases per 100,000 people for the four weeks after the requirements were implemented, compared to before the orders took effect. In the same period, jurisdictions without mask requirements saw a rise of 24 cases per 100,000 people.

Governments and “Experts” have run out of options. Because rapid testing, HCQ, zinq, vitamin D and N95 masks were all ignored. But they won’t “get away with it”, those days are gone.

• Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns If They Can Get Away With It (McKaken)

Although they’re slowly backing off on full lockdowns for now, governments have been very careful to maintain that they retain the power to reimpose them—including full-on strict and ruthless lockdown—at any time. In some areas, this has already been done, such as in southern Australia and in New Zealand. In the state of Victoria in Australia, for instance, residents in recent weeks have been subject to strict curfews and even road closures preventing them from traveling more than a few miles form their homes. Those who dissent—such as a pregnant mother who was arrested for merely discussing an upcoming protest—are brutalized. Meanwhile, military personnel enforce martial law, dragging people from their cars and demanding they show their “papers.”

China continues to impose regional and partial lockdowns. Belgium, meanwhile, insists it may yet still impose “total lockdown.” Back in July, the UK’s Boris Johnson told the nation’s residents to follow the social distancing rules now or face harsher lockdowns in the future. Last week Johnson’s government announced strict new social distancing rules, prohibiting any gatherings of more than six people in most cases. Nor have American politicians abandoned these newfound powers. In Utah, which did not impose a lockdown in March or April, the authorities are still threatening a possible future “complete shutdown.” Governors in states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, and Michigan have all threatened new lockdowns if the residents don’t do as they’re told.

(Only two governors, to my knowledge, have said they will not impose future lockdowns. Earlier this month, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida vowed “we will never do any of these lockdowns again,” and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota, which has never imposed a lockdown at all, has also said lockdowns are not on the table.) In many cases politicians have substituted face masks and targeted lockdowns (of bars and nightclubs, etc.) in lieu of full stay-at-home orders. This limits public dissent by limiting the number of businesses and industries where people are thrown out of work and business owners are effectively robbed of their property. Fewer destitute or jobless voters likely translates into less active dissent.

This permanent embrace of emergency power is to be expected. Governments have long used crises as an excuse to expand government power, often with the glowing approval of the electorate. After the end of World War II, for example, the party platform of the British Labour Party explicitly sought to extend wartime economic planning indefinitely. The idea was that central planning had won the war and now it would “win the peace.” This meant a host of boards and commissions that would control everything from farming to housing. But that’s just one example. As Robert Higgs has shown in his book Crisis and Leviathan, using wars and other crises to permanently expand state power is just standard operating procedure for countless regimes. It’s what governments do.

Fed.

• How The Stock Market Got To Be So Out Of Touch With Reality (Stockman)

Both ends of the Acela Corridor have lost their marbles. This year, Uncle Sam borrowed $4 trillion in six months, the Fed printed $3 trillion in three months, and Wall Street drove the S&P 500 to 52X reported LTM earnings in the context of a deeper economic plunge than occurred in the worst quarter of the 1930s. Therefore, Washington has become disconnected from any semblance of fidelity to sound money and fiscal rectitude, while Wall Street has turned into an outright casino, valuing stocks based on endless Fed liquidity injections and the delusion that momentum chasing is an investment strategy. With respect to the rampant folly in the Imperial City, Treasury Secretary Stevie Mnuchin has always reminded us of Alfred E. Neuman of “Me Worry?” fame at Mad Magazine.

Recently, he more than earned that moniker when, in the context of the current monetary and fiscal lunacy, he proclaimed that, “Now is not the time to worry about shrinking the deficit or shrinking the Fed balance sheet.” That was the so-called Conservative Party speaking, and it is a shrill reminder that the Trumpified GOP has gone utterly AWOL when it comes to its true job in American democracy, namely, resisting the Government Party (Dems) and its affinity for feeding the Leviathan on the Potomac. That is to say, according to even the Keynesian deficit apologists at the CBO, Uncle Sam will spend $6.6 trillion during the current fiscal year (FY 2020) while collecting only $3.3 trillion in revenue. That’s Banana Republic stuff—borrowing 50% of every dollar spent.

Yet the advisory ranks of the potentially incoming Kamala Harris regency are even worse. They are loaded with “deficits don’t matter” ideologues and MMT crackpots who noisily argue that massive monetization of the public debt is not just a virtue, but utterly imperative. Needless to say, this bipartisan commitment to all-in stimulus is financial catnip to the Wall Street gamblers because they are actually capitalizing into today’s nosebleed stock prices, not the present drastically impaired economy on Main Street but a pro forma simulacrum of future prosperity based on the delusional presumption that massive debt and money-pumping actually create economic growth and wealth.

Both left and right saw themselves exposed by Assange.

• Glenn Greenwald On Why Mainstream Media Is Ignoring Assange Trial (ZH)

Well-known journalist Glenn Greenwald has once again sparked intense debate on the Left by refusing to conform to any level of group-think. On Friday he mused about the ongoing Julian Assange extradition trial in London, offering an explanation as to why mainstream US media has seemingly dropped Assange from its radar, despite during the early years of the most bombshell WikiLeaks revelations working closely with Assange in terms of corroborating coverage.

If you start from the premise that Trump is a fascist dictator who has brought Nazi tyranny to the US, then it isn't that irrational to believe that anyone who helped empower Trump (which is how they see Assange) deserves to be imprisoned, hence the lack of concern about it.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 18, 2020

Greenwald started with a tweet acknowledging that Assange’s plight, which includes the possibility of being extradited to the United States where he faces certain life in prison, has received “little media attention” ultimately because it doesn’t have an easy partisan angle. “But another is that many liberals believe their political adversaries deserve to be in prison,” Greenwald stated, going on the offensive. And that’s where the most famous founding journalist at The Intercept began going off on liberals’ exaggeration of what Trump represents and how he came to power: “If you start from the premise that Trump is a fascist dictator who has brought Nazi tyranny to the US, then it isn’t that irrational to believe that anyone who helped empower Trump (which is how they see Assange) deserves to be imprisoned, hence the lack of concern about it,” Greenwald said.

Earlier this month President Trump shocked many national security state insiders by suggesting be might be open to pardoning Edward Snowden. While the Assange case would no doubt be a much higher hurdle for Trump in terms of the ‘deep state’ fierce pushback that would be sure to follow any similar consideration, it remains a possibility, especially were Trump to take the White House again after November.

I quoted Cohen too often to remember. It’s a bad thing that America has lost its no. 1 Russia expert. Then again, he was marginalized for it already anyway.

• Stephen F. Cohen, Leading American Russia Expert, Dies At 81 (RT)

Stephen F. Cohen, the leading American Russia expert of his generation and a celebrated historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, who became a vocal critic of Washington’s “new Cold War” with Moscow, has died at the age of 81. Cohen succumbed to lung cancer at his home in Manhattan, on Friday, according to his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel, who is also the part-owner and publisher of The Nation magazine, where he worked as a contributing editor. A native of Kentucky, he was a prolific and prominent scholar in his field, serving as a professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. As a frequent visitor to Russia, Cohen became well-connected among leading Soviet dissidents, politicians and thinkers in the 1980s, even befriending Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev.

Cohen also advised former US President George Bush, senior, in the late 1980s, and assisted Anna Larina, the widow of Nikolai Bukharin, to rehabilitate her husband’s name during the Soviet era. He had earlier written a biography of the journalist and politician, which argued that had Bukharin succeeded Vladimir Lenin as Bolshevik leader, rather than Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union would have enjoyed greater openness, and perhaps even democracy. Breaking with many American academics and political commentators, Cohen was highly critical of Washington’s approach to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union. He warned of the dangers of NATO expansion and argued that much of the economic devastation seen in Russia during the 1990s could be traced to bad-faith policies and advice from the United States.

His principled, and patriotic stand, led to smears from members of the think tank racket and both liberal and neoconservative interventionists, keen to stoke tensions with Moscow. Cohen was labelled a Putin apologist. He responded by saying that he saw him as being “in the Russian tradition of leadership, getting Russia back on its feet.” After the election of Donald Trump, Cohen found himself in the crosshairs of the mainstream media for challenging the now-debunked Russiagate narrative, which he said was being used to sabotage bilateral relations and trigger a “new Cold War” with Moscow.

The unsubstantiated claim that Trump’s presidential campaign “colluded” with the Kremlin would likely make a US-Russia detente “impossible” and could even help fuel an actual war between the two nations, Cohen argued. He lamented that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the conspiracy theory, which found no evidence of collusion, would do little to tone down the fiery rhetoric and anonymously sourced media hysteria concerning Russia and its alleged influence over the US political system.

Stephen Cohen on July 18 2018.

• Trump as New Cold War Heretic (Stephen F. Cohen)

As has every American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943, President Trump held a summit meeting with the Kremlin’s leader—Russian President Putin, in Helsinki on July 16. As with every president since Eisenhower, the underlying and overriding purpose was to reduce the chances of war between the two nuclear superpowers. With the new US-Russian Cold War fraught with possibilities of hot war on several fronts, from Ukraine and the Baltic and Black Sea regions to Syria, Trump had a vital national-security duty to meet in the most august way with Putin.

As with previous summits, details will come later, but the two leaders reached several important agreements: to revive the necessary US-Russian diplomatic process tattered by recent events; to restore decades-long negotiations intended to reduce and regulate nuclear weapons and thus avert a new nuclear arms race; to jointly try to prevent Iran, Russia’s Middle East partner, from threatening “Israeli security,” as Putin formulated it, on that nation’s borders; to jointly relieve the “humanitarian” crisis in Syria, whose suffering was caused substantially by the aid rendered by Washington and its allies to anti-Assad “freedom fighters” and then, as collateral damage, by Moscow’s intervention in the Syrian war, in September 2015, in order to destroy the murderous Islamic State, which was threatening to take Damascus; and to promote American-Russian “business ties,” a nebulous aspiration, considering US and European economic sanctions on Russia. (This was possibly a signal by Trump that he would not object, as President Obama had, if the European Union diminished or terminated its sanctions, as several of its members wish to do and as would be wise.)

Historically, in what were once “normal” Cold War times, these summit achievements would have been widely supported, even applauded, across the American political spectrum, as they were, for example, even under President Nixon. But not Trump’s, which elicited an unprecedented torrent of denunciation by the US mainstream bipartisan (primarily Democratic but far from only) political-media establishment. Idioms varied, from The Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, but the once-stately New York Times, as is now its nearly daily practice, set the tone. Its front-page headline on July 17 blared: “Trump, At Putin’s Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election.” Another headline below explained, “Disdain for U.S. Institutions, and Praise for an Adversary.” The “reporting” itself was fulsomely prosecutorial, scarcely mentioning what Trump and Putin had agreed to.

Times columnists competed to indict the American president. An early entry, on July 16, before anything was actually known about the summit results, came from Charles M. Blow, whose headline thundered: “Trump, Treasonous Traitor.” The title of the entry by Michelle Goldberg, on July 17, was less alliterative: “Trump Shows the World He’s Putin’s Lackey.” Much as I predicted in the weeks prior to the summit, the same toxic message bellowed through the realm of mainstream print and cable “news”: Trump had betrayed and shamed America before the entire world. As has been the case for years regarding “the Russia threat”—created mainly by US policy itself—no dissenting voices were included in the “discussions,” apart perhaps from unqualified Trump spokespeople.

The media coverage, not Trump himself at the summit, was shameful. But media were reporting “news,” of the kind they wanted, amplifying leading political figures, also across the spectrum. As usual on this subject, Senator John McCain led the vigilante posse: “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.” He added for personal emphasis: “One of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.” Most unusual, given the traditional non-political public role of intel chiefs, however, was former CIA director John Brennan, who quickly appeared as Trump’s prosecutor and judge, declaring that his behavior in Helsinki “exceeds the threshold” for impeachment and indeed “was nothing short of treasonous.”

RIP Stephen Cohen, a friend and guide who spent the last four years of his life standing against a tidal wave of hysterical Cold War hostility with elegance and erudition.

His intellectual courage was anchored in experience and scholarship his antagonists could never match. pic.twitter.com/LaJhl1KDBD

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 20, 2020

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Debt Rattle September 19 2020

Sep 192020

September 19, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:01 am Finance Tagged with: Assange, Burisma, CIA, Covid19, Dalio, FBI, Hunter Biden, Sidney Powell, Smedley Butler, Supreme Court, torture 18 Responses »

Robert Capa Capucine, French model and actress, on a balcony, Rome 1951

• RBG Death At 87 Opens Supreme Court Seat Weeks Before Election (JTN)

• From Smedley Butler to “7 Days in May”…to Trump Today? (Ehret)

• Flynn Lawyer Powell Eyed to Replace Wray at FBI (NM)

• Senate Ukraine Report On Biden, Burisma Expected ‘In Days’ (SAC)

• Dalio: The World Is Going To Change In Shocking Ways In Next 5 Years (MW)

• COVID: Can A ‘Circuit Break’ Halt The Second Wave? (BBC)

• US MSM Reporters Silent About Being Spied On By Apparent CIA Contractor (GZ)

• Tortured El Masri Stands Up To CIA, Supports Assange During Trial (Gosztola)

• Trump ‘Approved’ of Pardon for Assange in Exchange for Source of DNC Leaks (Sp.)

So many things today about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and about how both left and right are adamant to defend their 180º diffferent positions on whether her seat should be filled before November 3. It’s just politics. But tons of people tweet “burn it all down” if the GOP even tries.

I find the argument interesting that if the Supreme Court is called into action past-election, with a 4-4 vote, that could lead to absolute mayhem and chaos, because no decision could be made either way.

Starbuck on RBG

Don’t let Democrats gaslight about the 'Biden rule'. The rule is that there will be no confirmations in an election year when different parties control the Senate and the White House. That’s it. That’s the rule. Republicans control both and are entitled to make the pick. Period.

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) September 19, 2020

https://twitter.com/i/status/1307174280510275586

Daily cases just short of the Sep 11 record.

Don’t miss this! Why PCR tests are so bad. Replace them with rapid testing!

Awesome update pic.twitter.com/0Q8nXftPti

— CovidSenseBloke (@CovidSenseBloke) September 17, 2020

“Mitch McConnell said in a statement Friday night that now, unlike in 2016, the White House and Senate are both in the hands of the same party.”

• RBG Death At 87 Opens Supreme Court Seat Weeks Before Election (JTN)

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday. She was 87. Ginsburg, a feminist and liberal icon, had been diagnosed with cancer four times and had numerous health scares, including several recent hospitalizations. She died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said. In July, Ginsburg announced that she was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for lesions on her liver, the latest of her several battles with cancer. “Our Nation has lost a jurist of historic stature,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in a statement to the Associated Press. “We at the Supreme Court have lost a cherished colleague. Today we mourn, but with confidence that future generations will remember Ruth Bader Ginsburg as we knew her – a tireless and resolute champion of justice.

President Trump hailed Ginsburg from the campaign trail in Minnesota as “an amazing woman.” Ginsburg’s death opens up an unexpected opportunity for him to nominate a replacement for the seat – less than 50 days before the election. A Trump nomination will almost certainly set off a heated battle over whether he should nominate, and the Republican-led Senate should confirm, Ginsburg’s replacement, or if the seat should remain vacant until after the outcome of Trump’s presidential race against Democrat Joe Biden is decided. The debate and will also energize the close race in its homestretch. Biden said that the person elected should choose Ginburg’s replacement. “There is no doubt, let me be clear, that the voters should pick the president and the president should pick the justice for the Senate to consider,” Biden told reporters.

When Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, also an election year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to act on Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to fill the opening. The seat remained vacant until after Trump’s surprising presidential victory. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement Friday night that now, unlike in 2016, the White House and Senate are both in the hands of the same party. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell said.

Trump on RBG

President Donald Trump reacts to news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. "She led an amazing life." pic.twitter.com/ZUj9CNJVGh

— NBCWashington (@nbcwashington) September 19, 2020

Good history of attempted coups in the US.

• From Smedley Butler to “7 Days in May”…to Trump Today? (Ehret)

Even though the financial elite of Wall Street had pulled the plug on the system four years earlier, the population had still not been broken sufficiently to accept fascism as the solution which Time magazine told them it was. Instead, the people voted for one of the few anti-fascist presidential candidates available in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected under the theme of taking the money lenders out of power and restoring the constitution. In his March 4, 1933 inaugural address FDR stated:

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

During FDR’s famous 100 Days, an all-out war was declared on the “economic royalists” that had taken over the nation. Audits and investigations were conducted on the banks in the form of the Pecora Commission, and the biggest financial houses which had spent billions on fascist parties of Europe were broken up while speculation was reined in under Glass-Steagall. Meanwhile a new form of banking was unveiled more in alignment with America’s constitutional traditions in the form of productive credit and long term public works which created real jobs and increased the national productive powers of labor. Many people remain totally ignorant that even before his March 4, 1933 inauguration, Franklin Roosevelt narrowly avoided an assassination attempt in Florida which saw 5 people struck by bullets and the mayor of Chicago dying of his wounds 3 weeks later.

Within days of the mayor’s death, the assassin Giuseppe Zingara was speedily labelled a “lone gunman” and executed without any serious investigation into his freemasonic connections. This however was just a pre-cursor for an even greater battle which Wall Street financiers would launch in order to overthrow the presidency later that year. This effort would only be stopped by the courageous intervention of a patriotic marine named Smedley Darlington Butler.

But if Trump loses, wouldn’t she be replaced again within days?

• Flynn Lawyer Powell Eyed to Replace Wray at FBI (NM)

Sidney Powell, the lawyer for Gen. Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, is on the White House shortlist of candidates to replace FBI Director Christopher Wray, reports Newsmax TV’s Emerald Robinson. During a Friday update on Newsmax TV’s “John Bachman Now,” Robinson said she was exclusively told that the White House “is formulating a list of replacements right now” for Wray. She said the list has been in the works for over a month, but a change won’t be made until after the election. Robinson shared Powell’s name as one being floated for the job. Minutes later, Powell made an already scheduled appearance on the show. She told host John Bachman that she has not been contacted about serving in the position, but said she has “seen comments like that on Twitter.”

“I am honored to be considered for it,” she said of Robinson’s announcement that her name could be on the shortlist, adding “I can only imagine the number of people in Washington, and elsewhere, that would need laundry service upon that announcement.” Powell, a former federal prosecutor, has been critical of Wray, especially when it comes to his handling of the Flynn case. Back in May, she retweeted a post that called for Wray’s firing, according to Axios. During her Friday appearance on Newsmax TV, she said she has “never been favorably impressed” by Wray. According to Robinson, Trump’s advisers are urging him to keep Wray in his role until after the election in order to avoid any fallout similar to what happened after the president fired James Comey from the position.

Can anyone please ask Hunter?

• Senate Ukraine Report On Biden, Burisma Expected ‘In Days’ (SAC)

An explosive detailed report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee, is expected to be released on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukraine gas company Burisma ‘within days,’ Sen. Ron Johnson told this reporter Friday. Moreover, Johnson’s Senate committee voted on Wednesday to authorize more than three dozen subpoenas and depositions of former senior Obama administration officials’ involved, or who had knowledge of the FBI’s probe into President Donald Trump. The issue, however, says Johnson, is that FBI Director Christopher Wray has refused to cooperate with his panel for information and documents that would aid in questioning witnesses.

The damning report is expected to detail Joe and Hunter Biden’s business connections to the Ukrainian gas giant Burisma, in which Hunter Biden was a paid board member. According to reports Hunter Biden was paid roughly $50,000 plus per month by the energy giant. His position on the gas company’s board has been questioned by both members of the GOP and some Democrats, who have noted that the former Vice President’s son has no experience in energy companies and does not speak Russian. Moreover, as previously reported by SaraACarter.com, Johnson’s committee has been investigating Hunter Biden’s employment to Burisma because it came at the same time his father was heading the Ukraine policy for former President Obama during his tenure.

“My game plan is to get this Ukraine report out as quickly as possible,” said Johnson, who chairs the Senate committee, and wants Americans to understand that there are numerous questions regarding Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden that have not have been answered or investigated. “I’m hopeful our report will turn some heads because my goal is to get the truth out to the American people,” he said. “The truth is a simple and important concept, don’t you think?” [..] the former official added that the connections between the former Vice President, his son and the Ukrainian gas giant are substantial and “shouldn’t be ignored. The real issue is what the Democrats aren’t discussing – if they try to blame Trump without any evidence of compromise with Russia, how can they ignore Biden and his very real connections with a foreign company connected to Ukraine, Russia.”

As for Johnson, he said he is also pushing FBI Director Christopher Wray to produce a slew of documentation that his committee has been requesting throughout the year so that the panel can appropriately question witnesses that are being subpoenaed. The chairman, whose committee has subpoenaed a number of former senior Obama officials, stressed that the FBI has done everything to keep the documents they’ve requested from the lawmakers and from being revealed to the public. Wray has put up roadblocks at every turn and used Attorney General William Barr’s appointed Connecticut Prosecutor John “Durham’s investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Trump Russia probe as an excuse,” said Johnson.

The history of empires rhymes.

• Dalio: The World Is Going To Change In Shocking Ways In Next 5 Years (MW)

There are three problems that are coming together, so it’s important to understand them individually and how they collectively make a bigger problem. There is a money and credit cycle problem, a wealth and values gap problem, and an emerging great power challenging the existing dominant power problem. What’s going on is an economic downturn together with a large wealth gap and the rising power of China challenging the existing power of the United States. It’s a fact that there has been a weakening of the competitive advantages of the United States over the last couple of decades. For example, the United States lost a lot of the education advantage relative to other countries, our share of world GDP is reduced, the wealth gap has increased which has contributed to our political and social polarization.

But we haven’t lost all of our competitive advantages. For example in innovation and technology, the United States is still the strongest, but China is coming on very strong and at existing rates will surpass the United States. Militarily, the U.S. is stronger but China also has come on very strong and is probably stronger in the waters close to China that include Taiwan and other disputed areas. Finances for both countries are challenging, but for the U.S. more so. The U.S. is in the late stages of a debt cycle and money cycle in which we’re producing a lot of debt and printing a lot of money. That’s a problem. As a reserve currency status, the U.S. dollar DXY, +0.03% is still dominant though its being threatened by its central bank printing of money and increasing the debt production problem.

[..] If you look at the history — for example, the Dutch Empire, the British Empire — both experienced the creation of debt and the printing of money, less educational advantages, greater internal wealth conflict, greater challenges from rival countries. Every country has stress tests. If you look at British history, the development of rival countries led them to lose their competitive advantages. Their finances were bad because they had accumulated a lot of debt. So, after World War II those trends went against them. Then they had the Suez Canal incident and they were no longer a world power and the British pound is no longer a reserve currency. These diseases almost always play out the same way. The United States’ relative position in the world, which was dominant in almost all these categories at the beginning of this world order in 1945, has declined and is exhibiting real signs that should raise worries.

There’s a lot of baggage. The U.S. has a lot of debt, which is adding to the hurdles that typically drag an economy down, so in order to succeed, you have to do a pretty big debt restructuring. History shows what kind of a challenge that is. I just want to present understanding and facts. There’s a life cycle. You’re born and you die. As you get older you can see certain things that are symptoms of being later on in life. To know the life cycle and to know that these symptoms are emerging is what I’m trying to convey. The United States is a 75-year-old empire and it is exhibiting signs of decline. If you want to extend your life, there are clear things you can do, but it means doing things that you don’t want to do.

No. Stop it. We’ve seen an enormous amount of incompetence, but Britain sure is high on the list. How do all these people hold on to power? What’s the mechanism for that?

Many countries still don’t have enough tests, or facemasks. How is that possible? After 9 months?

• COVID: Can A ‘Circuit Break’ Halt The Second Wave? (BBC)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the UK is “now seeing a second wave” of Covid-19. Expanding “local” restrictions mean more than 13 million people (one-fifth of the UK population) have extra curbs on their lives. And the surge in cases is not contained to just the hotspots, but is widespread across the UK. Local restrictions do not suppress a virus that is spreading outside of those areas. It is against this backdrop the government is deciding what to do next. One idea is a “circuit-break” – a short, sharp period of tightened restrictions for everyone to curb the spread of coronavirus. So why might a circuit break be needed and what could it achieve? Let’s do some rough maths.

Take 6,000 cases a day, double them every week – as the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) suggests is happening – and by mid-October you have more than 100,000 infections a day as we did at the peak. That is not sophisticated disease modelling, it is not written in stone and measures such as the “rule of six” should slow the spread. But that simple sum gives a sense of how quickly a small problem can be become a huge one. A circuit break is all about trying to change that trajectory. “The evidence is hospitalisations are increasing, it is a worry and the concern is what happens if we don’t do something,” Dr Mike Tildesley, from the University of Warwick, told me.

He is part of the government’s disease modelling group of scientists, called SPI-M, which has been discussing circuit-breakers this week. Dr Tildesley added: “To be perfectly frank, none of us want this, but we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. “However, with a managed short-term lockdown you buy yourself some time.” A bout of tighter restrictions should result in cases falling instead of rising, but how far they drop is uncertain and will depend on how severe the restrictions are. It is suggested schools and workplaces would remain open, but the hospitality sector (think bars and restaurants) would be hit. This is not Lockdown 2.0.

The US no longer has a press.

• US MSM Reporters Silent About Being Spied On By Apparent CIA Contractor (GZ)

A Spanish security firm apparently contracted by US intelligence to carry out a campaign of black operations against Julian Assange and his associates spied on several US reporters including Ellen Nakashima, the top national security reporter of the Washington Post, and Lowell Bergman, a New York Times and PBS veteran. To date, Nakashima and her employers at the Washington Post have said nothing about the flagrant assault on their constitutional rights by UC Global, the security company in charge of Ecuadorian embassy in London, which seemingly operated under the watch of the CIA’s then-director, Mike Pompeo. PBS, the New York Times, and other mainstream US outlets have also remained silent about the US government intrusion into reporters’ personal devices and private records.

The Grayzone has learned that several correspondents from a major US newspaper rebuffed appeals by Wikileaks to report on the illegal spying campaign by UC Global, privately justifying the contractor’s actions on national security grounds. US Global spied on numerous journalists were with the aim of sending their information to US intelligence through an FTP server placed at the company headquarters and through hand-delivered hard drives. Nearly all of those reporters have so far ignored or refused invitations to join a criminal complaint to be filed in Spanish court by Stefania Maurizi, an Italian journalist whose devices were invaded and compromised during a visit to Assange.

Proof of UC Global’s illegal spying campaign and the firm’s relationship with the CIA emerged following the September 2019 arrest of the company’s CEO, David Morales. Spanish police had enacted a secret operation called “Operation Tabanco” under a criminal case managed by the same National Court that orchestrated the arrest of former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet years before. Morales was charged in October 2019 by the Spanish court with violating the privacy of Assange and abusing his attorney-client privileges, as well as money laundering and bribery. A mercenary former Spanish special forces officer, Morales also stood accused of illegal weapons possession after two guns with the serial numbers filed off were found during a search of his property.

The documents and testimony revealed in court have exposed shocking details of UC Global’s campaign against Assange, his lawyers, friends, and reporters. Evidence of crimes ranging from spying to robberies to kidnapping and even a proposed plot to eliminate Assange by poisoning has emerged from the ongoing trial. [..] For the past four years, the Washington press corps has howled about Trump’s angry browbeating of the White House press pool, treating his resentful outbursts as a grave threat to press freedom. At the same time, it has reacted with a collective shrug to revelations that a firm that was, by all indications, contracted by the Trump administration’s CIA to destroy Assange had spied on prominent American national security reporters.

For revealing this, Assange must hang. What a world.

• Tortured El Masri Stands Up To CIA, Supports Assange During Trial (Gosztola)

Khaled El Masri, a survivor of CIA kidnapping, torture, rendition, and detention, submitted testimony in support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during his extradition trial. The Central Criminal Court in London was prepared for El Masri to testify. An interpreter was lined up for the ninth day of proceedings. However, technical problems prevented him from addressing the court beyond his written statement. Prosecutors also objected to El Masri giving live testimony. According to Court News UK reporter Charlie Jones, that prompted Assange to stand up and declare, “I will not accept you censoring a torture victim’s statement to this court.”

El Masri’s testimony directly relates to the defense argument that Assange published classified information from the United States in order to reveal abuses and misconduct, such as torture and war crimes. In the United Kingdom, Assange’s legal team has been allowed to enter this evidence into the public record. However, during a potential trial in the United States, it will likely be excluded as irrelevant because the Espionage Act does not allow a public interest defense. Assange is accused of 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense.

The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the United States government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world. El Masri declared, “I record here my belief that without dedicated and brave exposure of the state secrets in question what happened to me would never have been acknowledged and understood.” He added threats and intimidation are “not diminishing but expanding for all concerned.” “I nevertheless believe that the exposure of what happened was necessary not just for myself but for law and justice worldwide. My story is not yet concluded.”

As El Masri noted, he submited testimony because “WikiLeaks publications were relied on by the [European Court of Human Rights] in obtaining the redress” he received. While reading parts of El Masri’s statement for the court, defense attorney Mark Summers said that, as a result of cables, it is known that the German government bowed to pressure from the U.S. to not seek the extradition of the CIA rendition team. El Masri also mentioned the WikiLeaks cables similarly showed that the U.S. government interfered in a judicial investigation in Germany and in Spain. (The rendition flight in question traveled from Palma airport in Spain.)

Assange stands up

US lawyer: We see no utility whatsoever in having Mr el-Masri in court. None whatsoever.

Julian Assange stands up: Madam I will not accept you sensoring a torture victim’s statement to this court.

Judge: you are represented.

Assange: I have tried to convey those instructions. https://t.co/o3sTFwJEjO

— Charlie Jones (@CharlieDanJones) September 18, 2020

Pilger changed mood

Today, at the #Assange trial, I was struck by a changed mood. Julian's defence is winning hands down, aided by the US prosecution's abuse of witnesses and idiotic attempt to prove journalism is espionage. Even Judge Reaper has gone quiet. Trashing British justice has its dangers.

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) September 18, 2020

Assange could and would never identify a source. Not one potential future source could ever trust him again. Rohrabacher appears to deny what Robinson said she heard him say.

• Trump ‘Approved’ of Pardon for Assange in Exchange for Source of DNC Leaks (Sp.)

It has been alleged by members of the Democratic Party and elements of the press that the source of the DNC Leaks published by WikiLeaks is linked to the Russian state, a position that has been consistently denied by both Julian Assange and the Russian state. US President Donald Trump was “aware of and had approved of” US Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and Mr Charles Johnson meeting with Julian Assange in order to secure the source of the DNC Leaks, in exchange for some form of “pardon, assurance or agreement” which would “both benefit President Trump politically” and prevent a US indictment against and extradition of Mr Assange, the Old Bailey heard on Friday.

The assertions were read into open court on behalf of barrister Jennifer Robinson, who was present at the meeting in the Ecuadorian Embassy on 15 August 2015. This was before any indictment was issued against the WikiLeaks publisher, The US government’s representative told the court that they do not dispute the offer was made during the meeting but do appear that they will contest the truthfulness of the offer itself. Ms Robinson’s statement notes that Mr Rohrabacher and Mr Johnson told Ms Robinson and Mr Assange that they “wanted to resolve the ongoing speculation of Russian involvement in the Democratic National Convention” and that it was “damaging to US Russia relations and reviving old Cold War politics”.

Ms Robinson has represented Mr Assange on numerous matters since 2010, both as a solicitor and a barrister. Ms Robinson states that the Congressman made clear that “the source of the DNC leaks would be of interest value and interest” to the President. Mr Rohrabacher apparently described what would be a “win/win solution” for Mr Assange to leave the embassy and “get on with his life”. Ms Robinson’s notes that Mr Rohrabacher said he would “then return” and see what “would be done” to prevent Mr Assange’s indictment and extradition. Mr Assange did not provide the identity of any source”, the statement said.

Charles Johnson, who accompanied former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, denies that the pair offered Julian Assange a pardon from Trump, but asked Assange to share what he knew about his sources with the US govt.

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 18, 2020

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Debt Rattle April 11 2020

Apr 112020

April 11, 2020 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 10:55 am Finance Tagged with: Andrew Cuomo, Assange, coronavirus, Covid19, Fauci, hydroxychloroquine, nursing homes, Pelosi, Remdesivir, Supreme Court, WHO 32 Responses »

Dorothea Lange Six tenant farmers without farms, Hardeman County, Texas 1937

• 115-Year-Old Supreme Court Opinion Could Determine Rights In A Pandemic (CNN)

• Fauci: Immunity Cards Option For US, Antibody Tests To Come Next Week (Hill)

• Fauci: World Health Organization Boss ‘Really An Outstanding Person’ (JTN)

• New York Gov. Cuomo Tells Giuliani Coronavirus Modeling ‘100% Wrong’ (JTN)

• Democrats Want To Drop Joe Biden For Andrew Cuomo – Poll (NYP)

• New York Gov. Cuomo Joins International Criticism Of WHO (JTN)

• Progressive Caucus Demands Pelosi Unveil Bold Coronavirus Package (CD)

• 68% Of COVID-19 Patients Improve After Gilead Drug Remdesivir: NEJM (R.)

• New Jersey Loosens Restrictions On Hydroxychloroquine In Nursing Homes (NJ.com)

• Less Than 1% Of Austrians ‘Acutely’ Infected With Coronavirus (G.)

• French Coronavirus Toll Over 13,000 As Nursing Home Deaths Jump (R.)

• Deaths Soar At Britain’s Care Homes As COVID-19 Stalks Elderly (R.)

• 2,000 Extra Deaths: Dutch Coronavirus Toll May Be Far Higher Than Known (RT)

• Refusing To Share Debt Across The Eurozone Threatens EU’s Future (Varoufakis)

• Risings and Fallings (Kunstler)

• What if Ignored COVID19 Warnings Had Been Leaked to WikiLeaks? (Ray McGovern)

• The US becomes the first country to record more than 2,000 #coronavirus deaths in one day, with 2,108 fatalities in the past 24 hours, according to the Johns Hopkins University tally

• The US has now recorded 18,586 deaths, closing in on the toll of 18,849 dead in Italy which has seen the most fatalities so far,

• US records more than 500,000 coronavirus cases: Johns Hopkins as of 0030 GMT Saturday, up 35,098 in the past 24 hours

• U.S. Bureau of Prisons reports that 318 federal inmates and 163 employees have tested positive for coronavirus.

• Top 10 States – Positive Tests 4/10/20
1) NY/ 170,512;
2) NJ/ 54,588;
3/ MI/ 22,783;
4) MA/ 20,974;
5) CA/ 20,917;
6) PA/ 20,251;
7) LA/ 19,253;
8) FL/ 17,968;
9) IL/ 17,887;
10)TX 11,671.

• Cases 1,710,152 (+ 95,103 from yesterday’s 1,615,049)

• Deaths 103,506 (+ 6,715 from yesterday’s 96,791) (of 6,715 new deaths, over 2,000 were in the US)

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

From Worldometer – NOTE: mortality rate for closed cases is at 21% !–

From SCMP:

From COVID2019Info.live:

The legal game is definitely on.

• 115-Year-Old Supreme Court Opinion Could Determine Rights In A Pandemic (CNN)

When a US appeals court ruled this week that Texas could prevent physicians from performing abortions because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the judges leaned heavily on a 1905 Supreme Court decision against a Massachusetts man who had refused vaccination during a smallpox outbreak. That case could be invoked more in the months ahead. It is the high court’s touchstone for state power during public health crises. But it is a decision with limits. The 1905 court warned against “arbitrary” or “oppressive” regulation and expressly connected mandatory vaccination to ending the spread of smallpox. Today, the question is how bluntly the case, known as Jacobson v. Massachusetts, might be wielded to justify curbing individual liberties without caveat.

In the first decision of its kind during the coronavirus crisis, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals relied wholly on the 1905 case to permit Texas to include abortion clinics in its ban on non-essential medical services and surgeries. The panel, ruling by a 2-1 vote, rejected arguments regarding the right to abortion ingrained by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade and subsequent rulings. “Jacobson instructs that all constitutional rights may be reasonably restricted to combat a public health emergency,” wrote Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan for the majority. The 5th Circuit has a record of decisions against abortion access, including in a Louisiana dispute over physician regulations, begun long before the current pandemic and now pending at the US Supreme Court.

Dissenting in the new case, Judge James Dennis argued that the majority had taken the Jacobson precedent too far. Unlike in the early 1900s, Dennis wrote, when vaccination would stop the smallpox outbreak, “the thread connecting (the Texas measure) to combatting COVID-19 is more attenuated—premised not on the idea that abortion providers are spreading the virus, but that their continuing operation requires the use of resources that should be conserved and made available to healthcare workers fighting the outbreak.”

Something tells me a few gun-toting Americans will not like those cards.

• Fauci: Immunity Cards Option For US, Antibody Tests To Come Next Week (Hill)

Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said it’s possible that in the future Americans may carry documents to prove they are immune or not infected with the coronavirus. Fauci, who is one of the public health officials on the administration’s coronavirus task force, said such a system is one of several options they are discussing. “That’s possible,” he said on CNN’s “New Day.” “It’s one of those things that we talk about when we want to make sure who the vulnerable people are and not,” Fauci added. “This is something that’s being discussed, I think it might actually have some merit.”

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases also said that within a period of “a week or so” there will be a large number of new antibody tests, which allow users to discover whether they possess a unique immune response to the virus. “As soon as they get validated, they’ll be out there for people to use,” Fauci said. “It’s very likely that there are a large number of people out there that have been infected, have been asymptomatic and did not know.”

Coney Island 1940

This is just nonsense. Ask Fauci why the WHO declared a pandemic only on March 11.

• Fauci: World Health Organization Boss ‘Really An Outstanding Person’ (JTN)

The World Health Organization has landed in President Trump’s crosshairs for its handling of the coronavirus, yet Dr. Tony Fauci, a senior adviser on the White House’s coronavirus task force, has recently praised the group’s top leader. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has come under fire for allegedly failing to warn the world about the speedy, lethal nature of the coronavirus originating in China. Multiple U.S. lawmakers, as well as Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, have called for Ghebreyesus’s removal. A Change.org petition has garnered nearly 780K petition signers urging Tedros’ ouster. “Tedros is really an outstanding person,” Fauci said during the March 25 coronavirus task force briefing. “I’ve known him from the time that he was the minister of Health of Ethiopia.

“I mean, obviously, over the years, anyone who says that the WHO has not had problems has not been watching the WHO. But I think, under his leadership, they’ve done very well.” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), praised Ghebreyesus’ handling of the coronavirus epidemic. “He has been all over this,” Fauci said. “I was on the phone with him a few hours ago leading a WHO call.” “The W.H.O. really blew it,” Trump recently tweeted. “For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?”

Cuomo called for a lot of ventilators that turn out to be not needed.

• New York Gov. Cuomo Tells Giuliani Coronavirus Modeling ‘100% Wrong’ (JTN)

New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been the stoic face of the state’s battle against the deadly coronavirus, but he recently acknowledged that his efforts to save residents’ lives and keep the regional economy afloat have been hampered by “100 percent wrong” projections. “All of the projections, by the way, and the statisticians have been 100 percent wrong at this point,” Cuomo on Thursday told former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on his radio show.

The roughly 9-minute interview on WABC-AM was all pleasantries between the longtime New York pols, as the state, now the epicenter of the virus, appears to be near the height of infection cases and related deaths. “Thank you for asking about Chris, Mr. Mayor,” said Cuomo, who now gives daily TV briefings, when Giuliani inquired about his brother, Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor recovering from the virus. Giuliani started the interview by telling his audience that his guest is Gov. Cuomo “who, I think, is known to every American as a person who has supplied great, great leadership for his state and for his country.” Giuliani also added: “You’re doing a great job.”

After 2 weeks of not going out, the animals came to check if everything is ok. pic.twitter.com/SuzcWQjFvd

— You Have One Job, Stay Indoors (@_youhadonejob1) April 10, 2020

I have a question. Cuomo is governor of a state where the virus has run way out of hand. But nobody even tries to hold him accountable, it’s as if everything happened beyond his view, or power. It’s everybody’s fault but his. Why is that?

• Democrats Want To Drop Joe Biden For Andrew Cuomo – Poll (NYP)

A majority of Democrats want to nominate New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for president instead of Joe Biden, according to poll results shared exclusively with The Post. The national poll found 56 percent of Democrats prefer Cuomo, with 44 percent wanting to stick with presumptive nominee Biden — a 12-point margin well outside the 4.8 percent margin of error for the Democratic sample. Hispanic voters, young people, women and self-identified liberals are most likely to favor dumping the former vice president for Cuomo. The poll, conducted April 3-6, was commissioned by the conservative pro-market Club for Growth, which generally supports Republican candidates.

Cuomo denied last month that he wanted to run for president, but some Democrats still are clamoring for an alternative to Biden, who faded from public view during the coronavirus outbreak, which elevated Cuomo in daily press conferences. Club for Growth vice president of communications Joe Kildea told The Post that the results highlight Biden’s weakness as a candidate. “With every major news event, Democrats realize more and more how bad of a candidate Joe Biden is, and Democrats now preferring Cuomo is just another example,” Kildea said.

Here Cuomo is blaming yet another party. Not himself.

• New York Gov. Cuomo Joins International Criticism Of WHO (JTN)

New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Friday joined the bipartisan – and international – criticism of the World Health Organization’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “Where were the warning signs?” Cuomo asked at his daily briefing. “Who should have blown the whistle?” President Trump has been among the most vocal of world leaders on the issue of the WHO’s response, which they argue was slow and less than exact in its reporting and guidance. But the backlash against China appears global. Taiwan officials have suggested the WHO excluding it from membership has hurt the country’s response to the pandemic. Trump has vowed to withhold U.S. support for the group and said Friday that he’ll make a decision on the matter next week.

Cuomo pointed out Friday that headlines appeared in December and January about a new virus emerging in China, while the WHO failed to issue formal warnings. “Did we really need to be in this situation where the United States winds up having a higher number of cases than the places that came before?” he asked. Also in the U.S., congressional bills are being proposed by a number of GOP legislators, including Sens. Tom Cotton (Arkansas) and Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), and Rep. Mike Gallagher (Wisconsin), to encourage U.S. companies to source ingredients and goods outside of Chinese markets.

This is as close as you can get to UBI without naming it that.

• Progressive Caucus Demands Pelosi Unveil Bold Coronavirus Package (CD)

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is calling on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to meet the coronavirus crisis with the urgency it deserves by advancing another sweeping stimulus package that—unlike the previous business-friendly legislation—guarantees economic security for all, protects public health, and ensures election safety. “Our actions now can lay the foundation for a just and resilient recovery, but only if we recognize the scale of this unprecedented crisis and fashion a response that meets that scale,” the two dozen members of the CPC Executive Board wrote in a letter sent to Pelosi on Thursday. With the U.S. economy rapidly deteriorating as the coronavirus continues to spread—nearly 17 million Americans filed jobless claims between March 15 and April 4—the CPC urged Pelosi to quickly assemble a relief package that provides robust assistance to workers and the unemployed until the coronavirus pandemic completely subsides.

To ensure that Americans will not have to wait for further congressional action if the economic and public health crisis deepens, the CPC called for a legislative package that contains automatic triggers so that “assistance continues based on economic conditions throughout the duration of the pandemic.” CPC’s list of specific demands includes: • Monthly direct cash payments of at least $2,000 to every adult in the U.S., and an additional $1,000 for every child for up to a year; • A nationwide moratorium on all evictions and foreclosures; • At least $30,000 in student debt relief; • Suspending collection of all consumer debt, including medical debt; • Opening Medicare to all people who are unemployed and uninsured; • Ensuring that no one in the U.S. faces out-of-pocket costs for COVID-19 treatment; • Increasing federal nutrition assistance benefits; • Creating a “federal Paycheck Guarantee program” to stop mass layoffs; and • Guaranteeing nationwide vote-by-mail to make sure elections don’t contribute to the spread of COVID-19.

Top right: the Rest Of Us

I’d go for hydroxychloroquine. 68% is hardly spectacular.

• 68% Of COVID-19 Patients Improve After Gilead Drug Remdesivir: NEJM (R.)

More than two-thirds of severely ill COVID-19 patients saw their condition improve after treatment with remdesivir, an experimental drug being developed by Gilead Sciences, according to new data based on patient observation. The analysis, published on Friday by the New England Journal of Medicine, does not detail what other treatments the 61 hospitalized patients were given and data on eight of them were not included — in one case because of a dosing error. The paper’s author called the findings “hopeful,” but cautioned that it is difficult to interpret the results since they do not include comparison to a control group, as would be the case in a randomized clinical trial.

In addition, the patient numbers were small, the details being disclosed are limited, and the follow-up time was relatively short. There are currently no approved treatments or preventive vaccines for COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus that has killed more than 100,000 people worldwide. Gilead last month sharply limited its compassionate use program for remdesivir and is conducting its own clinical trials of the antiviral drug, with results expected in coming weeks. Researchers in China as well as the U.S. National Institutes of Health are also testing the drug in COVID-19 patients. The new analysis includes patients in the United States, Europe, Canada and Japan who received a 10-day course of intravenous remdesivir.

Before the treatment, 30 patients were on mechanical ventilators, and four were on a machine that pumps blood from the patient’s body through an artificial oxygenator. After a median follow-up of 18 days, 36 patients, or 68%, had an improvement in oxygen-support class, including more than half of the 30 patients receiving mechanical ventilation who had their breathing tubes removed. A total of 25 patients, or 47%, were discharged from the hospital. Seven patients, 13% of the total, died. Twelve patients, 23%, had serious side effects including multiple-organ-dysfunction syndrome, septic shock and acute kidney injury.

If people use it anyway, might as well.

• New Jersey Loosens Restrictions On Hydroxychloroquine In Nursing Homes (NJ.com)

The state on Friday loosened restrictions on using a controversial malaria drug for COVID-19 patients, making it more readily available for people in nursing homes and other facilities. The decision comes amid reports of nursing home residents dying from complications of the disease and after some doctors, politicians and pharmacists had called for a change in the state’s rules. Until Friday’s order, doctors had been barred from prescribing hydroxychloroquine and some other drugs to treat COVID-19 outside of hospitals unless patients tested positive for the virus. Officials have reported that 262 of 375 of the state’s long-term care facilities have had at least one case of coronavirus, with reports of multiple deaths at some homes.

On Thursday, the National Guard arrived at the New Jersey Veterans Home in Paramus to help its staff cope with an outbreak of the virus that has infected 40 veterans and killed 10. The same home has had nearly 30 other deaths over the last two weeks, but a lack of testing for Covid-19 means they might not be attributed to the disease. The new regulations list a number of settings outside of hospitals “where the prescribing limitations” of the old order “do not apply,” according to a statement released Friday evening by the Division of Consumer Affairs. Doctors already had been prescribing hydroxychloroquine to patients in hospitals, where a positive test was not required by the state. The new regulations add post-acute care facilities, assisted living facilities, nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, field hospitals and “other locations designated as emergency health care centers by the Commissioner of Health.”

The Guardian left the word ‘Acutely’ out of the headline, That makes all the difference. The article also mentions a “World Health Organization report in February suggesting truly asymptomatic cases were relatively rare”. We now know they could be 50%.

• Less Than 1% Of Austrians ‘Acutely’ Infected With Coronavirus (G.)

Less than 1% of the Austrian population is “acutely infected” with coronavirus, new research based on testing a representative sample of more than 1,500 people suggests. The government-commissioned study, reportedly the first of its kind in continental Europe, was led by the polling company Sora, which is known for projecting election results, in cooperation with the Red Cross, the Medical University of Vienna, and other institutions. The study made it possible to estimate the prevalence of acute coronavirus infections in Austria among those not in hospital at the beginning of April, and was designed to provide a clearer picture of the total number of infections, given gaps in testing.

The research, if replicated and confirmed elsewhere, would appear to scotch hopes of countries being remotely close to relying on “herd immunity” – where enough of the population is exposed to the virus to build up a combined immunity – as a viable policy option. The study stands in contrast to controversial modelling by researchers at Oxford University who, in one scenario they examined, suggested most people in the UK might already have been infected with Covid-19. The co-founder of Sora, Christoph Hofinger, told a news conference: “Based on this study, we believe that 0.33% of the population in Austria was acutely infected in early April.” Given the margin of error, the figure was 95% likely to be between 0.12% and 0.76%. The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who saw initial findings a few days ago, said on Monday that the rate of infection was around 1%.

This disproved the idea of herd immunity, which requires widespread infection, as a viable policy option, he said. However, researchers, speaking at a press conference to release the results, said the study provided only a “snapshot” and did not account for asymptomatic infections, or people who were immune. “We did not find out how many people are immune, but only how many people in Austria are currently acutely infected,” said Günther Ogris, from Sora. The issue of the proportion of asymptomatic infections in the population remains highly contested, with a World Health Organization report in February suggesting truly asymptomatic cases were relatively rare. However, another small Chinese study, reported in the British Medical Journal earlier this month, posited that up to four-fifths of all infections could be without symptoms

Nursing homes, care homes, whatever you call them, they’re petri dishes.

• French Coronavirus Toll Over 13,000 As Nursing Home Deaths Jump (R.)

The number of people who have died from coronavirus infection in France jumped by nearly 987 or 8% to 13,197 as nursing home deaths swelled but fewer people were in intensive care as the effect of nationwide confinement started to show. The total number of confirmed and probable coronavirus infections in the country rose by 7,120 to 124,869, although the ministry does not provide a total, splitting the number instead between cases in hospitals and cases in nursing homes. That total number is set to increase as just under 5,000 out of 7,400 homes so far have reported coronavirus cases to the government, a ministry official told Reuters.

The health ministry said on Friday that 7,004 people were in intensive care, a fall of 62 or 0.9% following a 1% fall on Thursday. “We seem to be reaching a plateau, albeit a high level,” health ministry director Jerome Salomon told a daily press briefing by video. But the death toll picked up again, with the number of people dying in hospitals up by 554 or 7% to 8,598 on Friday, after increasing 5% on Thursday. The number of people who died in nursing homes – according to incomplete data that cover several days and do not include all nursing homes – went up by 433 or 10% to 4,599 and now make up more than a third of the total toll.

They should really publish case numbers among their staff as well.

• Deaths Soar At Britain’s Care Homes As COVID-19 Stalks Elderly (R.)

Thousands of care homes across Britain were locked down last month to stop COVID-19 from spreading among their frail and elderly residents. For Jamshad Ali, 87, it came anyway. Ali and six other residents at Hawthorn Green Care Home in east London died with “symptoms consistent with COVID-19,” with 21 others also possibly infected, said a spokesman for the home. With growing reports of COVID-19 deaths and cases at other homes, experts fear the disease, caused by the new coronavirus, which has already ripped through the care sector in the United States and the rest of Europe is now doing the same in Britain. Care workers and advocacy groups are calling for more equipment to keep themselves and their residents safe, and for testing to get self-isolating staff back to workplaces already understaffed when the pandemic struck.

They’re also calling for more support for a sector whose workers are, like Britain’s National Health Service, fighting the coronavirus up close, but with less pay, training and recognition. Jamshad Ali’s daughter, Luthfa Hood, is heartbroken but also angry that care homes are considered such a low priority. “Young people, if they get the virus, they can fight it,” she said. “But (with) older people, it just seems like we’re saying, ‘We don’t care about you – you’re too old.’” Reporting delays and lack of testing make the death toll in care homes hard to pinpoint. Over 9% of them had reported cases and the number would continue to rise, said England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty on Tuesday.

“If you have a virus this infectious in a setting with lots of vulnerable older people, then it’s very bad news,” said Caroline Abrahams, Charity Director of Age UK, which supports older people. “The mortality rate is likely to be very high.” On Monday, France announced there had been more than 2,400 deaths in its care homes. About 433,000 people live in Britain’s 11,000 care homes, which have over 450,000 beds – three times more than the National Health Service.

2,000 extra people died last week. 881 were COVID19. That leaves 1,119 “undeclared” deaths. Every country should look at these numbers in their own jurisdiction.

• 2,000 Extra Deaths: Dutch Coronavirus Toll May Be Far Higher Than Known (RT)

The Netherlands suffered 2,000 more deaths than usual during the first week of April, the country’s statistics office has said. The spike suggests the Covid-19 toll might be significantly higher than officially registered. Figures released by Statistics Netherlands (CBS) on Friday show that around 5,100 deaths were registered across the country in the week ending April 5. The number is abnormally large and exceeded expectations, which were based on an average taken of the past several years, by some 2,000 people. Over the same period, the country’s National Institute for Public Health (RIVM) registered 881 coronavirus deaths – and the extra deaths overall in early April may also be due to the dreaded disease.

“The rising mortality rate coincides with the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis in the Netherlands,” the organization said. A more complete picture emerges by looking at the total weekly number of deaths as based on the data received by CBS, regardless of the cause of death. In some municipalities, the weekly death toll exceeded the average twofold and even fourfold, the CBS said. The abnormally large figures alone, however, cannot conclusively show that Covid-19 is to blame, and the spike may be “coincidental and not necessarily related to the coronavirus crisis,” the statistics body noted.

The complaints about the EU become a broken record. What are the odds it will ever change?

• Refusing To Share Debt Across The Eurozone Threatens EU’s Future (Varoufakis)

Most of continental Europe using the euro is in lockdown. The economic shockwaves caused by a lockdown do not care what currency we use. Just as in the United Kingdom, the United States or Japan, the precipitous falls in private incomes must be counterbalanced by substantial increases in public expenditure. If governments fail in this, the sum of private and public expenditure (which equals aggregate income) will crash even faster, bankruptcies will burgeon and government tax revenues will collapse further in the medium turn. The challenge facing the 19 countries of the eurozone is unique. The massive boost in public debt that is now so necessary is hampered by the quaint arrangement of sharing a central bank that, on the one hand, has no common treasury to lean against and, on the other, is banned from backing directly the 19 treasuries that must borrow in euros to fight the crisis.

The euro crisis that began in 2010 stretched this monetary architecture to its limits. The coronavirus recession is now pushing it beyond them. With the countries worst hit by Covid-19, such as Italy, being the most indebted and thus the least able to shoulder the necessary new debt, an impossible conundrum emerges: the new debt needed to revive the private sector will push the state into default, so destroying the banks whose capital is mostly government debt and, in short order, the rest of the private sector. The only way out of this trap is for the new debt not to fall on the weak shoulders of the most indebted eurozone countries but to be shared across the eurozone. Except that this debt-sharing is banned by the treaties that created the eurozone, at the insistence of the northern european countries running a trade surplus with the rest.

[..] The message today to Italians, Spaniards and Greeks is: your government can borrow large amounts from Europe’s bailout fund. No conditions. You will also receive help to pay for unemployment benefits from countries where employment holds up better. But, within a year or two, as your economies are recovering, huge new austerity measures will be demanded to bring your government’s finances back into line, including the repayment of the monies spent on your unemployment benefits.

“..readers are twanging on me to declare the whole Covid-19 story “a hoax,” which I’m not ready to do.”

• Risings and Fallings (Kunstler)

In the corkscrewing anguish of the social sequester, with careers, savings, futures, and dreams whirling down the drain, voices rise above the din of conflicting statistics to ask: what is going on here? To some, it looks like a deliberate attempt to demolish what’s left of the economy for political advantage. Clouds of suspicion gather over the two medical superstars of the Daily Briefing show, Doctors Fauci and Birx, as they somewhat sheepishly revise their numbers for contagion and death downward and attempt to “balance” the formula of modeled projections versus mitigation efforts. Was the stay-at-home panic necessary, after all? Will it save the day or kill off modern life as we knew it? Well, everyplace else in the world was shutting down, weren’t they? Did they all go off their rockers, too?

At least a hundred doctors died in Italy heroically tending the stricken, so they say. South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore opted for flat-out medical Gestapo action. Britain, Spain, France, and Germany about the same, but minus testing at the grand scale and tracing of contacts. Honestly, how is it possible the whole planet punked itself? I certainly don’t know the answer to all this, though readers are twanging on me to declare the whole Covid-19 story “a hoax,” which I’m not ready to do. I do know this: America has become utterly intolerant of uncertainty. And in the absence of certainty, that age-old human cognitive skill called pattern recognition, which has made us such a successful species, kicks into high gear scanning the field-of-view for answers. Any string-of-dots that affords even the slimmest plausibility goes on the table for review, including a lot of stories tagged as “conspiracy theories.”

[..] And meanwhile, the American public sequesters and festers, waiting for those $1,200 checks that will fix… everything! Let’s face it: this is a twilight zone between stupor and fury. Nobody is paying anything to anyone. All obligations are suspended: salaries, rents, mortgages, bills, loans, bets, and vigs, all up in the air somewhere, but definitely not moving to their assigned destinations. The velocity of money is zero and all the various new term facilities and structured vehicles conjured by the Federal Reserve and Congress amount to a mere shadow of money moving – even though they are represented by trillions of brand-new alleged dollars.

It’s Free Assange Day today.

• What if Ignored COVID19 Warnings Had Been Leaked to WikiLeaks? (Ray McGovern)

As I think of my good friend Julian, what comes to mind are the desperate words of Willy Loman’s wife Linda in “Death of a Salesman”: “He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” (On the chance you are wondering, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — as well as National Public Radio — have paid zero attention to the extradition hearing in recent weeks — much less to Judge Baraitser’s Queen of Hearts-style, “off-with-his-head” behavior.)

The pitiable Baraitser, of course, is simply a cog in the imperial machinery, a self-impressed, self-interested, rigid functionary aping the role of Caiaphas, the high priest beholden to an earlier Empire. “It’s better that one man die,” he is said to have explained, when another nonviolent truth-teller dared to expose the cruelties of Empire to the downtrodden of his day — including the despicable accessory role played by the high priests. Here is how theologian Eugene Peterson’s renders Caiaphas’s words in John 11: “Can’t you see that it’s to our advantage that one man die … rather than the whole nation be destroyed.” (“Nation” in that context meant the system of privilege enjoyed by collaborators with Rome — like the high priests and the lawyers of the time.)

The lesson meant to be taken away from Assange’s punishment are as clear — if less bloody — as the crucifixion that followed quickly after Caiaphas explained the rationale. The behavior of today’s empire pretends to be more “civilized” as it manufactures stories of rape, leans on ratty satraps in Sweden, England, and Ecuador, and ostentatiously thumbs its nose at official UN condemnations of “arbitrary detention.” And, if that were not enough, it also practices leave-no-marks torture.

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Debt Rattle October 7 2018

Oct 072018

October 7, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:10 am Finance Tagged with: China, cold war, Interpol, IPCC, Italy, Kavanaugh, Labour, May, murder, RRR, Supreme Court, Turkey 6 Responses »

Vincent van Gogh Autumn landscape 1885

• Turkish Police Suspect Saudi Journalist Khashoggi Was Killed At Consulate (MME)

• Interpol Asks China For Information On Its Missing President (CBS/AP)

• Brett Kavanaugh Sworn In As 114th Supreme Court Justice (ZH)

• Hot Jobs Market, Trade Tensions May Be Lethal Combo – Stephen Roach (CNBC)

• Former Fed Governor Warns Of “Several Decade Cold War” With China (ZH)

• China Pumps $109bn Into Economy As Trade War Bites (G.)

• Theresa May Bids For Centre Ground With Appeal To Labour Voters (O.)

• Italy Debt Crisis Flares Up, Banks Get Hit, Showdown with EU Intensifies (DQ)

• Migrants Fight To Save Italian Mayor Who Gave Them A New Home (G.)

• Major Climate Report Will Slam The Door On Wishful Thinking (Vox)

Tureky will issue statement(s) later. If this is true, it should lead to very strong condemnation of Saudi.

“Khashoggi had been “brutally tortured, killed and cut into pieces. Everything was videotaped to prove the mission had been accomplished and the tape was taken out of the country”.

• Turkish Police Suspect Saudi Journalist Khashoggi Was Killed At Consulate (MME)

Turkish authorities suspect that missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared four days ago after entering Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, was killed inside the consulate, two Turkish sources told Reuters on Saturday. “The initial assessment of the Turkish police is that Mr Khashoggi has been killed at the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. We believe that the murder was premeditated and the body was subsequently moved out of the consulate,” one of the sources, a Turkish official, said. A senior Turkish police source told MEE that Khashoggi had been “brutally tortured, killed and cut into pieces. Everything was videotaped to prove the mission had been accomplished and the tape was taken out of the country”.

Khashoggi’s disappearance is likely to further deepen divisions between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Reuters said. Relations were already strained after Turkey sent troops to the Gulf state of Qatar last year in a show of support after its Gulf neighbours, including Saudi Arabia, imposed an embargo on Doha. Police said about 15 Saudis, including officials, came to Istanbul on two private flights on Tuesday and were at the consulate at the same time as the journalist. They left again the same day, according to AFP. Their diplomatic bags could not be opened, a security ource told MEE, but Turkish intelligence was sure that Khashoggi’s remains were not in them.

“The newspaper said that upon landing last week Meng was “taken away” for questioning by what it said were “discipline authorities.”

• Interpol Asks China For Information On Its Missing President (CBS/AP)

Interpol has made a formal request to China for information about its missing Chinese president who seemingly vanished on a trip home. The agency said in a statement it “looks forward to an official response from China’s authorities to address concerns over the president’s well-being.” Interpol said it used law enforcement channels to submit its request about the status of Meng Hongwei. Meng’s wife says she hasn’t heard from him since he left Lyon at the end of September. French authorities say he boarded a plane and arrived in China, but the 64-year-old’s subsequent whereabouts are unknown. France has launched its own investigation.

“France is puzzled about the situation of Interpol’s president and concerned about the threats made to his wife,” its foreign ministry said, without providing any details. Meng is also a vice minister for public security in China, which has yet to comment. Previously, Interpol had said that reports about Meng’s disappearance were “a matter for the relevant authorities in both France and China.” The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, has suggested that Meng may have been the latest target of an ongoing campaign against corruption in China.

The newspaper said that upon landing last week Meng was “taken away” for questioning by what it said were “discipline authorities.” The term usually describes investigators in the ruling Communist Party who probe graft and political disloyalty. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the party’s secretive internal investigation agency, had no announcements on its website about Meng and couldn’t be reached for comment. Meng is the first from his country to serve as Interpol’s president, a post that is largely symbolic but powerful in status. Because Interpol’s secretary general is responsible for the day-to-day running of the agency’s operations, Meng’s absence may have little operational effect.

Need a new way to select Supreme Court judges. The Court must be perceived as neutral, or it loses credibility.

• Brett Kavanaugh Sworn In As 114th Supreme Court Justice (ZH)

The drama of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court finally ended on Saturday afternoon, when without any last-minute surprises, the US Senate voted Kavanaugh to become the 114th Justice to the US Supreme Court in a major victory for both the Republican party and President Trump. Kavanaugh was confirmed as expected in a 50-48 vote, the narrowest margin for any justice since the 19th century. In a rare move, Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican senator to oppose Kavanaugh on Saturday, but she formally voted “present” to offset the absence of GOP Sen. Steve Daines who left Washington, D.C., on Friday to fly to Montana for his daughter’s wedding.

West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who is up for reelection in a state Trump won by more than 40 points in 2016, was the only Democratic senator to support Kavanaugh’s nomination. As The Hill reports, republicans used Manchin’s support to tout Kavanaugh’s nomination as “bipartisan,” but the razor-thin vote margin marks the closest successful Supreme Court vote since Stanley Matthews was confirmed in a 24-23 vote in 1881. In the ends, it doesn’t matter how they got there: Kavanaugh’s confirmation will be a crowning victory for Trump and McConnell, fulfilling a top campaign promise for the president and a critical priority for the Kentucky Republican. Kavanaugh’s ascension to the high court will ensure a conservative majority for decades to come, an outcome that McConnell especially has focused on during his long tenure as the top Senate Republican.

Roach knows China. He doesn’t think they’ll give in.

• Hot Jobs Market, Trade Tensions May Be Lethal Combo – Stephen Roach (CNBC)

There’s a growing risk that trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies may converge with other factors to disrupt the global economy — and knock the historic U.S. stock market rally off its stride, according to one of the world’s leading authorities on Asia. Yale University senior fellow Stephen Roach is worried the US-China trade war is putting sand in the gears of global supply chains, which has been playing a vital force in keeping price pressures in check. Roach referred to the threat as one of the “more destructive” layers of the trade war for stocks.

“You’ve got potentially a lethal combination between a hot labor market in an unwinding of the supply chain effects on the global front which could give you a surprising surge in inflation that the Fed is not positioned to really address with its still very, very low federal funds rate,” he warned Friday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation.” He added: “For every point of slack in advanced economies, the value chains hold down overall inflation by about 9/10s of a point.”

Roach, who served as Morgan Stanley Asia chairman for five years, believes Wall Street and policy makers are largely underestimating the impact of the trade tensions. Despite the new deal to replace the North America Free Trade Agreement, Roach isn’t optimistic the U.S. is any closer to a resolution with China. “The whole hope from the Trump administration is that China will be quickly beaten into submission as they did with supposedly Mexico and Canada,” said Roach. “The odds of a long disruption are high.”

Economic cold war.

• Former Fed Governor Warns Of “Several Decade Cold War” With China (ZH)

Former Fed governor Kevin Warsh warned on Thursday that the US-China relationship is “probably as poor as” it has ever been since former President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger developed strategic relations between both countries in the early 1970s. “We’re at the risk of a real cold war” between the world’s two largest economies, said Warsh who had been on President Trump’s list for Fed chairman before Jerome Powell was chosen. “The last 30 years we’ve been living and breathing globalization as if it’s an inevitable force,” but now, it seems the six-decade-long bubble has finally popped.

Bank of Americas says trade wars and deteriorating relations with China have been some of the reasons for the decline in globalism. Especially, US tariff duties collected, % of total imports have surged under the Trump administration. “Protectionism has cross-party support in the US, and nationalist parties continue to gain in Europe. Further action on China ($200bn), autos ($350bn), NAFTA ($690bn) could raise US tariff revenue as % total imports to levels not seen since 1946,” said BofA. During the CNBC interview, Wash used the term “cold war” to describe the economic standoff, not the decades-long “mutually assured destruction” nuclear stalemate with Russia. “We are probably on the precipice of a brand new relationship with the Chinese,” Warsh told CNBC. He asked: “Could we be at the beginning of a 10- or 20-year cold war?” If so, an economic cold war between the countries could have major implications for the global economy like causing a global growth scare and repricing risk assets.

Fourth reserve requirement ratio cut this year. That’s not a game they can play forever.

• China Pumps $109bn Into Economy As Trade War Bites (G.)

China has slashed the amount of cash some of its banks must hold in reserve as Beijing’s leadership seeks to bolster a flagging economy. As higher US interest rates and fears of a trade war piles pressure on economies around the world, China’s central bank said on Sunday that it was cutting the reserve requirement ratios (RRRs) by 1% from 15 October to lower financing costs and spur growth in the world’s second-biggest economy. The reserve cut, the fourth by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) this year, came after Beijing pledged to speed up plans to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure projects as the economy shows signs of cooling further.

Investment growth has slowed to a record low and net exports have been a drag on growth in the first half of ther year. China releases a snapshot of its services sector on Monday, which will be closely watched for signs of slower growth. The injection of cash into the economy, which will be 750bn yuan ($109.2 billion), will also boost hopes that the negative impact of higher US tariffs on Chinese exports can be eased. The cut, which was announced on the last day of China’s week-long national day holiday, showed the central bank was probably worried about the impact of “external shocks” to markets such as a speech last week by US vice president Mike Pence criticising Beijing, said Zhang Yi, chief economist at Zhonghai Shengrong Capital Management.

This will get ugly. Trying to split Labour. Anti-semitism accusations have been prepared.

• Theresa May Bids For Centre Ground With Appeal To Labour Voters (O.)

Theresa May today delivers an extraordinary appeal to wavering Labour supporters to switch to the Conservatives as she attempts to portray her party as the only option for moderate and patriotic voters. Writing exclusively in today’s Observer the prime minister says that if people who have previously backed Labour look again at her government’s programme, including pledges to increase house building and manage markets where necessary, they will find that it is not driven by ideology, but by beliefs and values that the vast majority could support. Seeking to reclaim the One Nation mantle for the Tories, May writes: “I want voters who may previously have thought of themselves as Labour supporters to look at my government afresh. They will find a decent, moderate and patriotic programme that is worthy of their support.”

She argues that in an era in which traditional political allegiances count for less, the Tories now have a responsibility “on our shoulders” to offer a home to millions of former Labour voters who are unhappy with the party’s move left under Jeremy Corbyn. May’s pitch for the centre ground will enrage many Labour supporters who see her as a supporter of eight years of Tory austerity and the architect of the hostile environment for immigrants. It comes amid rumours in Westminster that disgruntled groups of Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat MPs could try to form a new party on the centre ground to appeal to voters who regard the Tories as too pro-Brexit and right wing, and dislike the leftwing agenda of Corbyn.

[..] Reacting to her initial pitch for centre ground voters in her conference speech last Wednesday, former Labour home secretary David Blunkett said May was clearly laying a trap for his party. “This is a well tried tactic, attempting to achieve two things at the same time,” Blunkett said. “The first is to appear to move sufficiently on to Labour territory to seem reasonable and moderate while at the same time trying to push Labour further from the mainstream. We must avoid this trap, because it is a trap. “We need to be much more sure-footed in demonstrating where the Conservatives have stolen our clothes. And we need to reassure people that we won’t allow these blatant Conservative tactics to push Labour into adopting policies even more extreme and outside the mainstream.”

The ECB buys Italian bonds like crazy. What will they do?

• Italy Debt Crisis Flares Up, Banks Get Hit, Showdown with EU Intensifies (DQ)

As tensions between Rome and Brussels escalate, and uncertainty grows about Italy’s economic future, investors are dumping Italian debt, causing bond values to fall and yields to rise. That, in turn, is hitting banks’ funding costs and their capital cushions. On average, banks are estimated to already have lost 40 basis points of their core capital in the second quarter and another 8 bps in the third.As their capital base shrinks, banks are less able to write down bad loans — of which there are still frighteningly many — or issue new loans. According to analysts at Morgan Stanley, Banco BPM SpA, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS) SpA and UBI Banca SpA are the most vulnerable of Italy’s largest lenders due to the size of their holdings of government debt.

It is this outsized exposure of Italian banks to Italian debt that makes any sudden deterioration in the value of Italian bonds so dangerous. The banking sector hold around 18% of all of the nation’s public debt. It’s the reason why, as investors abandon Italian bonds en masse, the shares of Italy’s banks are also nose-diving, with the stock of recently rescued Monte dei Paschi di Siena leading the way down having lost more than half its value year-to-date. The chart below shows how the FTSE Italy Banks Index has plunged 29% since early May (black line), while the Italian government 10-year yield (red line) has nearly doubled from 1.8% to 3.4%, practically in tandem:

Always put people first, no matter what your politics.

• Migrants Fight To Save Italian Mayor Who Gave Them A New Home (G.)

In 2009, shortly after his re-election as mayor and several years after he embarked on a policy of welcoming migrants as a means of reversing depopulation in his town, Domenico Lucano was shot at through the window of a restaurant where he was eating with friends. As if to ram home their opposition to his plans, the local mafia also poisoned two of his dogs. Unperturbed, Lucano responded by installing a billboard at the entrance of the town, saying: “Riace – a town of hospitality.” The sign remains today, as does one on the main square that lists the 20 countries people have come from – Eritrea, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan, to name a few. Riace, a tiny hilltop town in Italy’s southern Calabria region, has become famous for its much-lauded model of integration, which began in the late 1990s and continues to this day.

But last week, Lucano, the man credited with changing the lives of Italians and foreigners through an initiative that breathed new life into a dying economy, was put under house arrest for allegedly abetting illegal immigration. On Saturday, lending their support to a man dismissed by far-right politician Matteo Salvini as worth “zero”, hundreds of people turned out in support of the mayor and his leadership. Invariably described as altruistic and honest, they struggle to comprehend how Lucano, 60, can have his liberty stripped from him while people belonging to the mafia, a scourge of Italy’s south, roam free. “Mafiosi kill, yet a mayor who does good is arrested? It doesn’t make any sense,” said Elisabetta, who asked for her surname not to be used.

The worst wishful thinking is that we will replace fossil fuels with some other form of energy and go on growing the way we have. Fewer emissions is useful, fewer expectations is essential.

• Major Climate Report Will Slam The Door On Wishful Thinking (Vox)

The leading international body of climate change researchers is preparing to release a major report Sunday night on the impacts of global warming and what it would take to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels, a goal that looks increasingly unlikely. The report is from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international consortium of hundreds of climate researchers convened by the United Nations. Authors are meeting this week in Incheon, South Korea, to finalize their findings, but Climate Home News obtained an early leaked draft.

Why examine the prospects for limiting global warming to 1.5°C? Because under the Paris agreement, countries agreed that the goal should be to limit warming to below 2°C by 2100, with a nice-to-have target of capping warming at 1.5°C. According to the drafts, the report finds that it would take a massive global effort, far more aggressive than any we’ve seen to date, to keep warming in line with 1.5°C — in part because we are already en route to 3°C of warming. And even if we hit the 1.5°C goal, the planet will still face massive, devastating changes. So it’s pretty grim. But this is also a thunderous call to action, laying out what tools we have at our disposal (we have plenty) to mitigate global warming and to accelerate the turn toward cleaner energy. Let’s walk through the basics.

Debt Rattle July 12 2018

Jul 122018

July 12, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:09 am Finance Tagged with: Brexit, China, EU, Greece, junk bonds, NATO, recycling, Silk Road, Supreme Court, trade war, trash, Trump, wage rises 5 Responses »

Blu Mural in Rome, Italy 2015 Click to enlarge See also here

• Trade War Risk On (Hedgeye)

• Corporate Bonds Are Getting Junkier (DDMB)

• It’s Not Wage Rises That Are A Problem – It’s The Lack Of Them (Frank)

• Britain Facing ‘State Of Emergency’ If No Deal Reached – Grieve (Ind.)

• Trump Tells NATO Allies To Spend 4% of GDP On Defence (G.)

• Germans Want Trump To Pull US Troops Out Of Germany (Ind.)

• China’s Silky Charming of Arabia (Escobar)

• The Supreme Court Is Much Too Powerful (Mises.org)

• New Zealand Hospitals In Chaos As 30,000 Nurses Strike (G.)

• EU Approves ‘Enhanced Surveillance’ for Post-Bailout Greece (GR)

• Trash Piles Up In US As China Closes Door To Recycling (AFP)

Great cartoon.

• Trade War Risk On (Hedgeye)

– Global equities are retreating materially today on fears of a commensurate escalation in the burgeoning trade war between the U.S. and China. Specifically, the Trump administration released a list of goods that it may target w/ sanctions totaling some $200 billion, while China’s Commerce Ministry described the move as “totally unacceptable bullying”, and promised to lodge complaints at the WTO without detailing what its retaliatory steps would be. Are trade wars bad for growth? Of course they are. Does anyone really possess a reliable framework for quantifying the ultimate impact ex ante? Probably not.

This we do know, however: prior to the last Friday’s tit-for-tat escalation targeting $34 billion in Chinese goods and a list of [mostly] U.S. agricultural products, Export growth was trending lower in 70% of the near-50 economies we maintain detailed predictive tracking algorithms for, while 77% of Manufacturing PMI series were trending lower. This figures reflect data through MAY and JUN, respectively, and are supportive of our view that trade tensions aren’t the driving force behind Global #Divergences; they are merely adding fuel to the fire. Global equities peaked in late-JAN for a reason.

Anyone remember AAA?

• Corporate Bonds Are Getting Junkier (DDMB)

Life insurers invest heavily in high-grade corporate bonds to fund annuities, life insurance policies and other products. Here’s a look at the possibility that the issues might be affected by credit rating grade inflation… Much has been made of the degradation of the $7.5 trillion U.S. corporate debt market. High yield offers too little, well, yield. And “high grade” now requires air quotes to account for the growing dominance of bonds rated BBB, which is the lowest rung on the investment-grade ladder before dropping into “junk” status. And then there’s the massive market for leveraged loans, where covenants protecting investors have all but disappeared.

How does that break down? Corporate bonds rated BBB now total $2.56 trillion, having surpassed in size the sum of higher-rated debentures, which total $2.55 trillion, according to Morgan Stanley. Put another way, BBB bonds outstanding exceed by 50% the size of the entire investment grade market at the peak of the last credit boom, in 2007. But aren’t they still investment grade? At little to no risk of default? In 2000, when BBB bonds were a mere third of the market, net leverage (total debt minus cash and short term investments divided by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was 1.7 times. By the end of last year, the ratio had ballooned to 2.9 times.

Given the marked deterioration in fundamentals, bond powerhouse PIMCO worries that “This suggests a greater tolerance from the credit rating agencies for higher leverage, which in turn warrants extra caution when investing in lower-rated IG names, especially in sectors where earnings are more closely tied to the business cycle.” [..] why not treat the BBB portion of the bond market for what it is: a high-risk slice of the corporate debt pie. Keeping count of “fallen angels,” or those investment-grade bonds that are downgraded into junk territory, will become a spectator sport.

“Except in the very tightest labour markets, workers simply don’t have the power to demand their fair share.”

• It’s Not Wage Rises That Are A Problem – It’s The Lack Of Them (Frank)

If you study the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers on wages for nonsupervisory workers over the past few decades, you will notice that wage growth has been strangely slow to pick up. Hot economies usually drive wages up pretty promptly; this recovery has been running since 2009 and it has barely moved the needle. It’s even more perverse on the other side of the Atlantic. According to a 2017 story in the Financial Times, Britain was “the only big, advanced economy in which wages contracted while the economy expanded” – an amazing achievement if you think about it. And UK thinktank the Resolution Foundation has said this decade is “set to be the worst for pay growth since the Napoleonic wars”.

How could such a thing happen in this modern and enlightened age? Well, for starters, think of all that whining we’re hearing from the US’s management, who will apparently blame anyone and do anything to avoid paying workers more. Every labour-management innovation seems to have been designed with this amazing goal in mind. Every great bipartisan political initiative, from free trade to welfare reform, points the same way. When Republicans are in charge, it’s open season on working-class organisations. And you can forget about increases in the minimum wage, regardless of who’s in the White House.

Of course it’s happening the same way in the UK; be it Thatcher’s war on unions or New Labour’s “third way”, Britain has followed the US model closely. Political decisions within both countries have had highly predictable results, and we are now fated to live with them. Good times aren’t really all that good for ordinary people any more, only for the people on top – the owners of companies, of real estate, of stocks. Except in the very tightest labour markets, workers simply don’t have the power to demand their fair share. If you ask me, this is the thing to panic about: not the possibility that workers might prosper, but that they’re not prospering yet.

“..ordinary life will grind to a halt. That is the extent to which our lives are intermeshed with the lives of our European partners..”

• Britain Facing ‘State Of Emergency’ If No Deal Reached – Grieve (Ind.)

Britain will face a “state of emergency” if no Brexit deal is reached by February, Dominic Grieve has warned at an exclusive event for Independent subscribers. Appearing on a stage with other key Brexit figures, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Gina Miller, the leading Tory rebel said “ordinary life will grind to a halt” if the talks are still deadlocked as D-Day nears. The warning came as Mr Rees-Mogg launched his most outspoken attack yet on big businesses opposing a hard Brexit, claiming they have “got everything wrong in the whole of their history”. Andrea Leadsom, the Commons leader, suggested she would not accept any further “compromises” beyond the deal struck at Chequers by Theresa May – preferring a no-deal outcome. [..]

Last month, Mr Grieve, a former attorney general, led an aborted revolt to guarantee MPs a “meaningful vote” to prevent Britain crashing out of the EU without an agreement. In his most dramatic language yet, to underline the high stakes, Mr Grieve told the audience: “If by the end of February or early March it is clear that there is no deal on anything, there will be a declaration of a state of emergency in this country. “Actually, ordinary life will grind to a halt. That is the extent to which our lives are intermeshed with the lives of our European partners, and that is what will happen if there is no deal on anything.” Mr Grieve said hardline anti-Brexit MPs had “abdicated” their responsibilities to the public by boasting that they will do “absolutely nothing while we skated off the edge of the cliff into this major national crisis”. “That is the madness that has crept into some of the discourse in parliament,” he added.

They won’t.

• Trump Tells NATO Allies To Spend 4% of GDP On Defence (G.)

Donald Trump left the opening day of the Nato summit in Brussels in disarray on Wednesday after making a surprise demand for members to raise their defence spending to 4% of GDP, and clashing with German chancellor Angela Merkel over a proposed pipeline deal with Russia. Trump left the assembled presidents and prime ministers floundering, unsure whether he was serious about the 4% target, double the existing Nato target of 2%, which many do not meet, or whether it was just a ploy. After making the announcement, Trump walked out.

The White House press secretary, Sarah Sanders, confirmed the 4% figure. “During the president’s remarks today at the Nato summit he suggested that countries not only meet their commitment of 2% of their GDP on defence spending, but that they increase it to 4%,” she said. Sanders added: “President Trump wants to see our allies share more of the burden and, at a very minimum, meet their already stated obligations.”

So there. WHy on earth would you need so many US bases?

• Germans Want Trump To Pull US Troops Out Of Germany (Ind.)

Germans would actually welcome the withdrawal of American troops stationed in their country, a new poll has found – as Donald Trump threatens to pull the plug on military support. The finding comes on the first day of a Nato summit in which the US president is urging Europe to spend more on defence if it wants to continue to receive American military protection. But far from being seen as a threat, a YouGov poll for the dpa news agency found that more Germans would welcome the departure of the 35,000-strong American force than would oppose it.

42% said they supported withdrawal while just 37% wanted the soldiers to stay, with 21% undecided. Last month the US media reported that the US government was in the process of assessing the cost of keeping troops in Germany ahead of a possible withdrawal, citing Pentagon sources. But the policy of actually pulling out of the country has not actually reached the negotiating table in his week’s Brussels summit and is not expected to be discussed as a possibility – for now.

At some point the Chinese will run into Americans there.

• China’s Silky Charming of Arabia (Escobar)

Under the radar, away from World Cup frenzy and the merger and acquisition of Cristiano Ronaldo Inc. and Fiat, the eighth ministerial meeting of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum (CASCF), established in 2004, sailed on in Beijing, hosted by President Xi Jinping. Amid the torrential pledge of loans and aid, China committed to invest right across the Arab world in transportation infrastructure, oil and gas, finance, digital economy and artificial intelligence (AI). Significantly, Beijing will offer $15 million in aid for Palestinian economic development, as well as $91 million distributed among Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

A China-Arab bank consortium will be set up, with a dedicated fund of $3 billion tied up with the financial aid and loan package. Beijing also foresees importing a whopping $8 trillion from Arab states up to 2025. Predictably, once again Xi fully connected the whole Arab world with the expansion of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And careful to navigate the geopolitical minefield, he urged “relevant sides” to respect the international consensus in the Israel-Palestine confrontation, calling for justice. That may indicate a gradual, but sure departure from trademark Chinese passive or reactive policy across the Arab world, focused exclusively on energy and political non-interference.

Xi is now openly tying up Chinese financial aid and deals with nations across the Global South to an overall economic development drive; the only roadmap to solve intractable political and religious conflict. And that includes full respect of international deals. As much as the Arab world, Iran is in Southwest Asia. A day before the China-Arab forum, Premier Li Keqiang, in Berlin, was warning of “unforeseeable consequences” if the Iran nuclear deal, known as JCPOA, were to be discarded, as the Trump administration wants.

Stating the obvious.

• The Supreme Court Is Much Too Powerful (Mises.org)

The current frenzy over the vacancy on the Supreme Court in the wake of Justice Kennedy’s retirement highlights just how much power has been centralized in the hands of a small number of people in Washington, DC. The left has grown positively hysterical over the thought of yet another Trump-appointed judge being installed, who could potentially serve on the court for decades. Right-wingers who claim the left is overreacting, however, are unconvincing. One can only imagine the right’s reaction were Hillary Clinton president. She would have already had the opportunity to appoint Scalia’s replacement, and we might now be talking about her nominee to replace Justice Ginsberg.

The right-wing media would be filled with article after article about how the new court would be a disaster for health-care freedom, private gun ownership, and, of course, the unborn. But, as it is, we live in a country where five people on a court decide what the law is for 320 million people. And for some reason, many people think this is entirely normal. It’s our own American version of the Soviet politburo, but few are even bothering to ask whether it’s a good idea. After all, if it makes sense for a small handful of people to decide law for the entire country, why even bother with a House of Representatives? Even the Senate — composed primarily of multimillionaires living full-time in Washington, DC, is [by comparison] extravagantly “democratic.”

“be fair to those who care”

• New Zealand Hospitals In Chaos As 30,000 Nurses Strike (G.)

Hospitals in New Zealand have cancelled elective surgeries and discharged patients early after 30,000 nurses walked off the job in the first such nationwide strike in 30 years. The 24-hour strike began on Thursday, and comes after months of negotiations between the government and nurses broke down on Wednesday, leaving hospitals to battle winter illnesses without crucial staff. Long delays at hospital emergency departments are expected around the country. Striking nurses held rallies in major cities, chanting “be fair to those who care” in the largest public demonstrations by the health sector ever seen on the country’s streets. Nurses said they were overworked and underpaid, with unsafe working conditions leading to burnout and exhaustion.

Patient care and staff wellbeing were routinely compromised, they said. Acting prime minister Winston Peters said the government was “very, very disappointed” that its latest offer of a 12.5% increase had been rejected, and that it would take time to address nine years of neglect under the previous National government. Although the May budget delivered a surplus, Peters said the extra funds were needed to handle unforeseen spending, such as managing the spread of mycoplasma bovis, a cow disease. “We are saying give us some time … it’s not that we’re not willing to, we haven’t got the money,” said Peters. “We’ve gone as far as we can go as a government. We got hold of a negotiated arrangement which we inherited – the nurses have had a raw nine years.”

Straight jacket.

• EU Approves ‘Enhanced Surveillance’ for Post-Bailout Greece (GR)

The European Commission on Wednesday said Greece will remain under an “enhanced surveillance framework” to ensure that it meets ambitious budget targets through 2022. The country will still be subject to quarterly inspections from creditors after the bailout program ends in late August. “Greece is now able to stand on its own two feet but that doesn’t mean it has to stand alone … The reform era has not ended,” EU Financial Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said. “Enhanced surveillance is not a fourth program: it involves no new commitments or conditions. It is a framework to support the completion and delivery of ongoing reforms,” he added.

Despite returning to growth after a massive recession, Greece leaves the program still facing major difficulties. Banks are struggling to deal with a high rate of bad loans. At over 20%, Greece has the highest unemployment rate in the euro currency union. Government bonds remain below investment grade even though their yields have fallen to manageable rates. And to help reduce its debt, Greece has committed to punishingly high primary budget surpluses — that is, the budget excluding the cost of debt servicing — of above 3.5% through 2022. “Enhanced surveillance is there to help Greece build confidence with markets, investors and companies,” Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said. “They all want stability and predictability.”

They’ll find a new dump.

• Trash Piles Up In US As China Closes Door To Recycling (AFP)

For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China. Beijing is no longer buying, claiming the recycled materials are “contaminated.” For sure, the 900 tons of trash dumped at all hours of the day and night, five days a week, on the conveyor belts at the plant in Elkridge, Maryland – an hour’s drive from the US capital – are not clean. Amid the nerve-shattering din and clouds of brown dust, dozens of workers in gloves and masks – most of them women – nimbly pluck a diverse array of objects from the piles that could count as “contaminants.”

That could be anything from clothes to cables to tree branches to the bane of all recyclers: plastic bags, which are not supposed to go in recycling bins because they snarl up the machinery. “We’ve had to slow our machinery, and hire more people” to clean up the waste, says Michael Taylor, the head of recycling operations for Waste Management, the company that runs the plant. At the end of the sorting line is the end product — huge bales of compacted waste containing paper, cardboard or plastics. These have been bought up for decades by businesses, most of them based in China, which clean them up, crush them and transform them into raw materials for industrial plants.

Last year, China bought up more than half of the scrap materials exported by the United States. Globally, since 1992, 72% of plastic waste has ended up in China and Hong Kong, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. But since January, China has closed its borders to most paper and plastic waste in line with a new environmental policy pushed by Beijing, which no longer wants to be the world’s trash can, or even its recycle bin. For other waste products such as cardboard and metal, China has set a contamination level of 0.5% — a threshold too low for most current US technology to handle. US waste handlers say they expect China will close its doors to all recycled materials by 2020 — an impossibly short deadline.

Debt Rattle July 2 2018

Jul 022018

July 2, 2018 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:07 am Finance Tagged with: AMLO, bag rage, Brexit, customs, Merkel, Mexico, plastics, seabirds, Seehofer, Supreme Court, tariffs, Trump, WTO 9 Responses »

Roy Lichtenstein Woman in Bath 1963

• When Politics Trumps Economics (Roach)

• Update on Deflating Property Bubbles in Sydney & Melbourne (WS)

• EU Warns US Of $294 Billion Hit If Car Tariffs Imposed (R.)

• Key Merkel Ally Seehofer ‘Announces Intention To Resign’ Over Migration (G.)

• Competing Visions Of Europe Are Threatening To Tear The Union Apart (G.)

• Leftist ‘AMLO’ Sweeps To Mexican Presidency (AFP)

• Axios Leaks Trump Bill To Blow Up World Trade Organization (ZH)

• UK To Announce Third Post-Brexit Customs Model (BBC)

• The Supreme Court Has Already Reshaped America (G.)

• Australian Plastic Bag Ban Sparks Abuse, Violence From Angry Shoppers (Ind.)

• New Zealand Most Perilous Place For Seabirds Due To Plastic Pollution (G.)

All economics is politics.

• When Politics Trumps Economics (Roach)

With each passing day, it becomes increasingly evident that US President Donald Trump’s administration cares less about economics and more about the aggressive exercise of political power. This is obviously a source of enormous frustration for those of us who practice the art and science of economics. But by now, the verdict is self-evident: Trump and his team continue to flaunt virtually every principle of conventional economics. Trade policy is an obvious and essential case in point. Showing no appreciation of the time-honored linkage between trade deficits and macroeconomic saving-investment imbalances, the president continues to fixate on bilateral solutions to a multilateral problem – in effect, blaming China for America’s merchandise trade deficits with 102 countries.

Similarly, his refusal to sign the recent G7 communiqué was couched in the claim that the US is like a “piggy bank that everybody is robbing” through unfair trading practices. But piggy banks are for saving, and in the first quarter of this year, America’s net domestic saving rate was just 1.5% of national income. Not much to rob there! The same can be said of fiscal policy. Trump’s deficit-busting tax cuts and increases in government spending make no sense for an economy nearing a business-cycle peak and with an unemployment rate of 3.8%. Moreover, the feedback loop through the saving channel only exacerbates the very trade problems that Trump claims to be solving.

With the Congressional Budget Office projecting that federal budget deficits will average 4.2% of GDP from now until 2023, domestic saving will come under further pressure, fueling increased demand for surplus saving from abroad and even bigger trade deficits in order to fill the void. Yet Trump now ups the ante on tariffs – in effect, biting the very hand that feeds the US economy.

A real threat to the entire Aussie economy.

• Update on Deflating Property Bubbles in Sydney & Melbourne (WS)

In Sydney, Australia’s largest property market and Petri dish for one of the world’s biggest housing bubbles, home prices fell 4.6% in June compared to a year ago, with house prices down 6.2%, and prices of condos (“units” as they’re called) down 0.7%, according to CoreLogic. The most expensive sector got hit the hardest: in the top quartile of home sales, prices fell 7.3%. In the nine months since the peak in September, the overall Daily Home Value Index has fallen 5.0%. But it had been one heck of a boom in Sydney, where home prices had jumped over 80% from the end of 2009 through the peak in September last year. Even during the big-bad Global Financial Crisis, they’d only dipped 4.6%.

So the market is changing, and the denying has stopped. Australian banks are getting put through the wringer by the Royal Commission with ongoing revelations of an ever longer list of misdeeds, particularly in the mortgage sector. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (ARPA), which is supposed to regulate the financial services industry, put in place some macroprodential measures to tamp down on the housing bubble, and they’re finally having an impact. Banks are suddenly focusing on borrowers’ debt-to-income ratios and other specifics, rather than just the assurance that home prices will always rise. They’re under investigation, and they’re tightening credit. And investors – a huge force in the market – have suddenly lost their appetite for property speculation, and banks have lost their appetite for funding them.

Just make all tariffs the same.

• EU Warns US Of $294 Billion Hit If Car Tariffs Imposed (R.)

The European Union has warned the United States that imposing import tariffs on cars and car parts would harm its own automotive industry and likely lead to counter-measures by its trading partners on $294 billion of U.S. exports. In a 10-page submission to the United States Commerce Department sent last Friday, the European Union said tariffs on cars and car parts were unjustifiable and did not make economic sense. he Commerce Department launched its investigation, on grounds of national security, on May 23 under instruction from President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticised the EU over its trade surplus with the United States and for having higher import duties on cars. The EU has a 10% levy, compared to 2.5% for cars entering the United States.

Trump said last week that the government was completing its study and suggested the United States would take action soon, having earlier threatened to impose a 20% tariff on all EU-assembled cars. The bloc exported 37.4 billion euros (33.10 billion pounds) of cars to the United States in 2017, while 6.2 billion euros worth of cars went the other way. The European Union says that for some goods, such as trucks, U.S. import duties are higher. In its submission, the EU said that EU companies make close to 2.9 million cars in the United States, supporting 120,000 jobs – or 420,000 if cars dealerships and car parts retailers are included. [..] Assuming counter-measures along the lines of those taken in response to existing U.S. import tariffs on steel and aluminium, up to $294 billion of U.S. exports – 19% of overall U.S. exports – could be affected, the submission said.

One last chance for Merkel.

• Key Merkel Ally Seehofer ‘Announces Intention To Resign’ Over Migration (G.)

The future of Germany’s coalition government is hanging in the balance after the country’s interior minister reportedly announced his intention to resign over a migration showdown with Angela Merkel. Horst Seehofer, who is also leader of the Christian Social Union, on Sunday night offered to step down from his ministerial role and party leadership in a closed-door meeting in which he and fellow CSU leaders had debated the merits of the migration deal Merkel hammered out with fellow European Union leaders in Brussels. But with CSU hardliners believed to have tried to talk the combative interior minister into staying, a press conference was postponed until Monday, with Seehofer seeking to go back to Merkel in search of a final compromise.

At a 2am media conference, Seehofer said he had agreed to meet again with Merkel’s party before he made his decision final. “We’ll have more talks today with the CDU in Berlin with the hope that we can come to an agreement,” Seehofer said. “After that, then we will see.” In the short term, Seehofer’s resignation would appear to be a let-up for a beleaguered Merkel, removing a politician who has become the chancellor’s biggest nemesis inside her own government since taking up his post at the interior ministry in March. But if Seehofer were to resign and his replacement continue an adversarial approach, it would threaten to bring an end to the historic alliance between Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, and the Bavarian CSU, pushing the chancellor’s coalition government to the brink of collapse.

Germany has dictated policies far too long.

• Competing Visions Of Europe Are Threatening To Tear The Union Apart (G.)

[..] three competing visions have emerged. The first is Merkel’s idea of a “competitive” Europe. Under her “leadership” since the euro crisis began in 2010, the EU has increasingly become a vehicle for imposing market discipline on member states. It is in the name of this idea of a competitive Europe that, led by Germany, austerity has been imposed on debtor countries in the eurozone. In other words, although it is expressed in pro-European terms and involves further integration, it is essentially a neoliberal vision.

The second vision is the French president Emmanuel Macron’s idea of a “Europe qui protège”, a Europe that protects. Macron envisages an EU in which there would be greater solidarity between citizens and between member states. In practice, this means more redistribution and risk-sharing in the eurozone – the “transfer union” that Germany and other creditor countries fear. This is a centre-left vision of Europe – although in France, because Macron has implemented structural reforms in an attempt to gain credibility in Berlin, he is himself increasingly perceived as neoliberal.

The third vision is the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s idea of a “Christian” Europe of sovereign states. His vision first emerged in response to the attempt, led by Germany, to force EU member states to accept mandatory quotas of refugees in 2015, but it has developed into a broader critique of the European project. Orbán defines himself as an “illiberal democrat” in opposition to what he sees as the undemocratic liberalism of the EU. His vision is shared not just by the Law and Justice party government in Poland but also by far-right parties in other EU member states.

Good luck. Mexico is such a mess. But they might beat Brazil today in the World Cup.

• Leftist ‘AMLO’ Sweeps To Mexican Presidency (AFP)

Anti-establishment leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador swept to victory in Mexico’s presidential election Sunday, in a political sea change driven by voters’ anger over endemic corruption and brutal violence. The sharp-tongued, silver-haired politician known as “AMLO” won 53% of the vote, according to an official projection of the results. It is the first time in Mexico’s modern history a candidate has won more than half the vote in a competitive election, and a resounding rejection of the two parties that have governed the country for nearly a century. “This is a historic day, and it will be a memorable night,” Lopez Obrador said in a victory speech in Mexico City’s Alameda park, as thousands of ecstatic supporters flooded the capital’s central district, chanting “Yes we did!” and partying to mariachi music.

Lopez Obrador, 64, sought to downplay fears of radicalism, after critics branded him a “tropical Messiah” who would install Venezuela-style policies that could wreck Latin America’s second-largest economy. “Our new national project seeks an authentic democracy. We are not looking to construct a dictatorship, either open or hidden,” he told cheering supporters, promising to safeguard freedoms, respect the private sector and work to reconcile a divided nation. He also vowed to pursue a relationship of “friendship and cooperation” with the United States, Mexico’s key trading partner – a change in tone from some comments during the campaign, when he said he would put US President Donald Trump “in his place.”

Better to reorganize it?!

• Axios Leaks Trump Bill To Blow Up World Trade Organization (ZH)

Following the close of a second quarter that will be best remembered by President Trump’s vacillations on trade, Axios has dropped a Sunday night bombshell that may spook markets hoping for a respite from the daily escalating trade war rhetoric as the second half of the year begins: White House reporter Jonathan Swan has obtained a copy of a draft bill, purportedly ordered by Trump himself, that would allow the US to “walk away” from its commitments to the World Trade Organization. If passed, the bill (entitled the “United States Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act”) would effectively blow up the WTO, an organization that the US helped create back in the 90s, by allowing Trump to unilaterally ignore the two most important principles:

The “Most Favored Nation” (MFN) principle that countries can’t set different tariff rates for different countries outside of free trade agreements; “Bound tariff rates” — the tariff ceilings that each WTO country has already agreed to in previous negotiations. “It would be the equivalent of walking away from the WTO and our commitments there without us actually notifying our withdrawal,” one anonymous source reportedly told Axios. The bill asks Congress to hand over to Trump unilateral power to ignore WTO rules and negotiate unilateral trade agreements. The leak of the draft bill follows another WTO-related scoop from Axios, published last week, where Swan reported that Trump has repeatedly badgered his aides about pulling the US out of the WTO, which the president has famously criticized as a “disaster”.

The bill’s chances of making it through Congress are extremely low. However, if Trump has taught us anything about his trade agenda, it’s never say never. “The good news is Congress would never give this authority to the president,” the source added, describing the bill as “insane.” “It’s not implementable at the border,” given it would create potentially tens of thousands of new tariff rates on products. “And it would completely remove us from the set of global trade rules.”

Another nonstarter.

• UK To Announce Third Post-Brexit Customs Model (BBC)

Downing Street has produced a third model for handling customs after the UK leaves the EU, the BBC understands. Details of the new plan have not been revealed publicly but senior ministers will discuss it at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat, on Friday. Ministers have been involved in heated discussions recently as they tried to choose between two earlier models. Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg says the PM risks a revolt if the type of Brexit she promised is not delivered. Theresa May hopes to resolve cabinet splits on the shape of Brexit at this week’s cabinet meeting. The prime minister has said the UK will then publish a White Paper setting out “in more detail what strong partnership the United Kingdom wants to see with the European Union in the future”.

It follows last week’s summit in Brussels where European Council president Donald Tusk issued a “last call” for the UK to agree its position on Brexit, saying the “most difficult” issues were unresolved and “quick progress” was needed if agreement was to be reached by the next meeting in October. BBC political correspondent Chris Mason says Downing Street hopes it has now found its way out of a bind on customs, the issue central to the practicalities of the UK’s future trading relationship with the EU, and a significant part of finding a solution to maintaining an open border with the Republic of Ireland.

Highest courts in every nation MUST be independent.

• The Supreme Court Has Already Reshaped America (G.)

“It’s not just that justice Kennedy’s successor is likely going to move the court to the right,” Vladeck said. “It’s that knowing that there are five conservative justices surely emboldens states and conservative interest groups to bring to the supreme court legal theories that they might have been reluctant to leave in justice Kennedy’s hands.” If that picture of the country’s jurisprudential future has left liberals distraught, it has also raised questions about the court’s increasingly politicized nature, its power to shape society and the erosion of its independence as one branch of government meant to balance the other two – Congress and the presidency – and to be checked in turn itself.

While past courts have had liberal or conservative bents, since the Bush v Gore decision that decided the 2000 election, the court has taken on a more explicitly political feel. “People say the founders would roll over in their graves – I think the founders would hang themselves”, said Mickey Edwards, vice-president of the Aspen Institute think-tank and formerly a congressman for 16 years. “The whole idea of the court being a separate and independent branch has totally disappeared. It is now a third branch of the policymaking process.” Extreme partisanship in Congress has led the legislature to relinquish its power to the presidency and the court, Edwards said.

“We now have become so accustomed to thinking of things – whether it’s foreign policy or trade policy or other things that the Congress has constitutional authority over – we now look at them all as presidential powers,” Edwards said. “So the presidency has grown much stronger. “I would also say that the supreme court has grown stronger and it’s become more partisan, which is very disturbing.”

Portrait of a nation.

• Australian Plastic Bag Ban Sparks Abuse, Violence From Angry Shoppers (Ind.)

Supermarket staff in Australia have faced abuse and violence from shoppers angry at the removal of plastic bags as a ban comes into force. Customers rebelling against the end of free single-use bags have taken out their frustration on staff, prompting warnings to them to be considerate. In Western Australia, a shopper put his hands around the throat of an employee at Woolworths, which had stopped giving out free plastic bags days before the ban came into force. It was one of dozens of cases of shop staff being abused as Australia moves to reduce the amount of non-decomposing synthetic materials going into rivers and seas.

In a survey of supermarket workers this week, out of 132 who responded, 57 (43 per cent) said they had suffered abuse because of the plastic bag ban. “I work at Woolies and have already been abused countless times; it’s not our fault,” staff member Lauren McGowan told News.com.au. There have also been reports of customers stealing handfuls of bags before the ban. As of today, major retailers in Western Australia and Queensland face fines if they supply single-use plastic bags – which are already banned in Tasmania, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory.

Because there are so many birds.

• New Zealand Most Perilous Place For Seabirds Due To Plastic Pollution (G.)

Seabirds are more at risk of dying due to plastic in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world, new research presented to parliament has shown. New Zealand is considered “the seabird capital of the world”, according to the country’s Department of Conservation, with the northern royal albatross raising their chicks on the Otago Peninsula, unique species of oystercatchers on the Chatham Islands and more penguin species than any country in the world. There are 36 seabird species that breed only in New Zealand. Mexico is a distant second with just five. More than a third of all seabird species are known to spend time in New Zealand’s waters.

Karen Baird from conservation group Forest & Bird, which produced the report, said: “Rubbish that ends up in our seas has a far worse effect on seabird species than anywhere else in the world.” “Even though we don’t have the most plastic pollution, we are unique in the world in having so many seabirds species. We also have the most threatened seabird species, many of which are found nowhere else.” Seabirds are particularly vulnerable to eating plastic because they are surface feeders, spotting food from the air and swooping down on it, scooping it up and swallowing it before the mistake is realised. Seabird chicks and adults face starvation when their stomachs fill up with plastic rather than food.

Forest & Bird called on the government to ban single-use plastic bags and commit to further research into how marine life is affected by plastic in New Zealand waters. One in three turtles that are found sick or dead in the country are caused by the animals eating plastic, Forest & Bird found, with marine mammals such as seals and sea lions also at risk. In neighbouring Australia, nine out of 10 fledglings in some shearwater colonies surveyed had eaten significant quantities of plastic, Baird said. New Zealand’s 10 shearwater species could be in for the same fate if plastic pollution wasn’t urgently addressed, Baird said.

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