Month: January 2021

Authored by Aaron Maté via TheGrayZone.com,

For the first time, OPCW chief Fernando Arias was asked a series of direct questions at the United Nations about the cover-up of a Syria chemical weapons probe. He answered none of them.

Russia’s UN ambassador asked Arias about several damning leaks, some revealed by The Grayzone, as well as ongoing deceptive attacks on the veteran scientists who challenged the censorship of their investigation. Arias refused to answer in public session, and gave vague, non-substantive answers in private.

Aaron Maté recaps the unanswered questions to Arias, as well as recent attacks on the OPCW whistleblowers via Western state-funded outlets Bellingcat and the BBC.

Read more:

Draft debacle: Bellingcat smears OPCW whistleblower, journalists with false letter, farcical claims

Questions for BBC on new White Helmets podcast series attacking OPCW whistleblowers

OPCW executives praised whistleblower and criticized Syria cover-up, leaks reveal

Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

Read Part I: Reduced Expectations And Bio-Techno-Feudalism here…

Read Part II: Corporate Socialism here…

The title of this essay represents a play on the Chinese Communist Party’s description of its economy. Several decades ago, when China’s growing reliance on the for-profit sectors of its economy could no longer be credibly denied by the CCP, its leadership approved the slogan “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to describe the Chinese economic system. Formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the phrase became an essential component the CCP’s attempt to rationalize Chinese capitalist development under a socialist-communist political system.

According to the party, the growing privatization of the Chinese economy was to be a temporary phase—lasting as long as a hundred years according to some party leaders—on the way to a classless society of full socialism-communism. The party leaders claimed, and still maintain, that socialism with Chinese characteristics was necessary in China’s case because China was a “backward” agrarian country when communism was introduced—too early, it was suggested. China needed a cap­italist booster shot.

With the slogan, the party was able to argue that China had been an exception to the orthodox Marxist position that social­ism arrives only after the development of capitalism—although Marx himself deviated from his own formula late in life. At the same time, the slogan allowed the CCP to confirm the ortho­dox Marxist position. China’s communist revolution had come before developed industrial capitalism—an exception to orthodox Marxism. Capitalism was thus introduced into China’s economic system later—a confirmation of orthodox Marxism.

Stripped of its socialist ideological pretensions, socialism with Chinese characteristics, or the Chinese system itself, amounts to a socialist-communist state increasingly funded by capitalist economic development. The difference between the former Soviet Union and contemporary China is that when it became obvious that a socialist-communist economy had failed, the former gave up its socialist-communist economic pretenses, while the latter did not.

Whether the CCP leaders believe their own rhetoric or not, the ideological gymnastics on display are nevertheless spectacu­lar. On its face, the slogan embeds and glosses over a seemingly obvious contradiction in an attempt to sanctify or “recommu­nize” Chinese capitalist development as a precondition of full socialism-communism.

However, the Chinese slogan does capture an essential truth about communism, one that is either unrecognized or unac­knowledged by the CCP and denied by Western Marxists. Con­trary to the assertions of communist leaders and followers, and even contrary to the claims of many who oppose it, socialism-com­munism is not essentially an economic but rather a political system.

Once in power, socialist-communist leaders recognize that given their control over resources, they have effectively become the new owners of the means of production (whereas, as Lud­wig von Mises suggested, consumers effectively hold the power of economic disposal in free markets). In attempting to implement a socialist-communist economy, they recognize that, in the absence of prices, large-scale industrial production requires supervisory decision-making. Likewise, decision-making is not democratic in the sense promised by socialist-communist ideologues. Decision-making must be centralized, or at least bureaucratized, to a great extent. Democratic decision-making is precluded by state-owned and controlled production and distri­bution.

Socialism-communism is a political system in which resource allocation is commanded by the state and thus effectively controlled by the state leaders, the real ruling class. The latter retain control through ideology and force.

As opposed to a fully implemented economic system, socialism-communism is always only a political arrange­ment. This is why socialism-communism can be combined with “capitalism” under such forms as “state capitalism” or corporate socialism. Its economic pretensions will be jettisoned as capitalist development is introduced and cleverly rationalized, as in Chi­na. If such pretentions are maintained for long, they will wreck society, as in the former Soviet Union. In either case, the social­ist-communist leadership will learn that wealth production re­quires the accumulation of privately held capital—whether they understand why or not.

Enter Corporate Socialism

A socialist-communist sequel is coming to a theater near you. Some of the same old characters are reappearing, while new ones have joined the cast. While the ideology and rhetoric sound nearly the same, they are being put to slightly different ends. This time around, the old bromides and promises are in play, and a similar but not identical bait and switch is being dangled. Socialism promises the protection of the beleaguered from the economically and politically “evil,” the promotion of the economic interests of the underclass, a benign banning of “dangerous” persons from public forums and civic life, and a primary or exclusive concern for “the common good.” China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative may hang the takers in Africa and other underdeveloped regions as if from an infrastructural noose. A different variety is on the docket in the developed world, including in the US.

The contemporary variant is corporate socialism, or a two-tiered system of “actually existing socialism” on the ground, coupled with a parallel set of corporate monopolies or would-be monopolies on top. The difference between state socialism and corporate socialism is merely that a different constituency effectively controls the means of production. But both depend on monopoly—one the state and the other the corporate monopolization of the economy. And both depend on socialist-communist ideology of democratic socialism, or, in a recent variant, “social justice” or “woke” ideology. Corporate socialism is the desired end, while democratic socialism and woke capitalism are among the means.

China is the model for the economic and political system being promoted in the West, and the Great Reset is the most forthright articulation of that system – although its articulation is anything but perfectly forthright.

The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism” later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and said, “yes, we want it.”

This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise system as we understand it.

The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and control.

In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.

The US Navy could be a couple of years away from deploying the largest unmanned undersea vehicle called “Snakehead” to scout underwater areas and gather intelligence on enemy forces. 

Called the Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (LDUUV), the Snakehead program will be an important electronic warfare platform for the service. 

Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) published a final request for proposals (RFP) for Snakehead’s Phase 2 last week. While the actual RFP is only available to defense firms bidding on the build, the Navy could select a company to begin the build as early as Sept. 30. 

“Snakehead is a long-endurance, multi-mission unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), deployed from submarine large open interfaces, with the capability to deploy reconfigurable payloads,” NAVSEA said in a press release while referring to the RFP. “It is the largest UUV intended for hosting and deployment from submarines.”

Snakehead can be launched and recovered by littoral combat ships and nuclear-powered submarines. It will play a critical role for the Navy in conducting intelligence, surveillance, and countermeasure mine missions.

To do this, the drone will have a variety of sensors, including side-scan sonars and bathymetric sensors, to generate maps of the seabed for search and destroy missions. 

Snakehead is not the first submarine the Navy is planning to launch. The service is secretly developing armed robot submarines controlled by onboard artificial intelligence that could kill the enemy without human control. 

Upon completion of the build, the Navy will likely deploy these underwater drones somewhere in the Pacific as geopolitical tensions with China continue to rise. Courtesy of BofA is a map of US military bases and presence in the Pacific Ocean and, specifically, in proximity to China.

Besides the US, China and Russia are also developing or deploying underwater drones as it appears fully autonomous weapons will soon be prowling underneath the world’s oceans. 

Authored by Peter van Buren via TheAmericanConservative.com,

The Bidens, and even the Clintons, are small-time players. The real corruption is much bigger, much higher, and entirely unpunished.

I learned the facts of life from a drunk uncle. He was not an American, and worked in international construction in Asia. His main job was to bribe people. Over the course of many tiny glasses of some awful, clear Asian liquor I learned every yard of concrete poured required money to gangsters who controlled unions and to politicians who controlled permits. A fact of life, he said. You get used to it. He even had a joke—my hands are dirtier than the guys who dig the foundations.

You come to realize someone is pulling the strings behind everything and it usually isn’t you, he said. The odd official just doing his job for his salary is a rube. You feel embarrassed for him, saying no for moral reasons. You learn, uncle slurred, to trust nothing. That politician on TV? The company just dropped off a nice check to his “charity.” Play by the rules? Those were the rules.

The first bribe I ever paid was to an Indonesian immigration officer, who noticed some small defect on my passport. Of course, he said, it could be resolved. Between us. With a fine (so many euphemisms). Off to the side. In cash. It was all of $20 to save a vacation but I felt filthy, cheated, a chump. But I learned the rules.

In New York we use the euphemism “tip,” and it is as required as oxygen to get through the day. A restaurant table pre-COVID. A last minute anything. A friendlier handling by a doorman. Timely attention to fix-it requests. My, um, friend, used to pay a lot of money for better hotel rooms until he learned $20 at check in with a friendly “anything you can do” often got him upgraded to the same thing at a fraction of the price. What, you still paying retail, bro?

I used to think it was all small stuff, maybe with the odd mafia king bribing a judge with real money or something else Netflix-worthy.

In America we were ultimately… fair, right? But things started to add up. We have our petty corruption like anywhere, but our souls are filthy on a much larger scale. America goes big or it goes home.

Things like the Clinton Foundation accepting donations from the Saudis to help with women’s empowerment, an issue of course dear to the heart of the Kingdom. When it looked like his wife was going to be president, Bill made six-figure speeches to businesses seeking influence within the U.S. government, earning $50 million during his wife’s term as secretary of pay-for-play state. The Foundation, now mostly out of business, was at its peak a two-billion-dollar financial dangle. It spent in 2013 the same on travel expenses for Hillary and her family as it did on charitable grants. The media, forever big Clinton fans, told us we should be used to it. Hey, Nixon was so much worse.

Trump refused to be very specific about who his charity donated to. We know its offshoot, the Eric Trump charity, donated to a wine industry association, a plastic surgeon supposedly gifting nose jobs to kids, and an artist who painted a portrait of Donald. Trump-owned resorts received $880,000 for hosting Trump-sponsored charity events. Trump donated money from his foundation to conservative influencers ahead of his presidential bid.

With Joe as vice president, the Bidens made $396,000 in 2016. But in just the four years since leaving the Obama White House, Joe and Jill made more than $15 million. In fact, as his prospects for election improved, Joe and his wife made nearly twice as much in one year as they did in the previous 19 years combined. Joe scored $10 million alone for a book no one read. Jill was paid more than $3 million for her book in 2018. Joe has a tax-dodge S Corporation that donated money back to his own political PAC. Then of course there was Hunter, who scored millions in Chinese and Ukrainian money for doing nothing but being Joe’s son.

About half the nation got very twisted over Trump’s corruption and actively avoided noticing the Clintons and Bidens, and vice-versa, to the point of covering their ears NYANYANAYNYA. Yeah, politicians are corrupt, but does anyone think the donors in all three cases didn’t know what they were buying? What, you still voting retail, bro?

But even all those millions, measured in Epsteins (a unit of influence buying I just made up) are petty cash. Real corruption scales. Pre-COVID America’s 614 billionaires were worth $2.95 trillion. As the Dow hit record highs this month, there are now 650 billionaires and their combined wealth is $4 trillion. The 400 richest Americans own 64 percent of the country’s wealth.

Where’d all their money come from? You.

Dan Gilbert, chair of Quicken Loans, worth $7 billion in March, is now at $43 billion (thanks for paying on time each month.) Who benefited more from COVID and everyone buying from home then Amazon and Jeff Bezos? It takes a lot of poor people to sustain that amount of wealth at the top.

Money is always good. But it is wrong to think just in dollars. That’s how small-time grifters like waiters and the Bidens think. The real rich understand wealth as power. The power to shape society and government to ensure they make more money for more power until someday they Have. It. All. You hope one day for an upgrade to business class; they own the jet.

To talk about conspiracy theories is to imply something “different” happened, that the system does not work as intended; for example, instead of an election the president was assassinated to change leaders. So let’s not call what happened this autumn to elect Joe Biden a conspiracy.

But here is what happened.

Corporate media owned by the wealthiest Americans spent four years attacking Trump. Working as a single organism fused to the Democratic party as its host, they tried to bundle Trump into a SuperMax as a literal Russian agent. When that failed they ginned up an impeachment with more holes in it than a bad joke about Stormy Daniels. The same media then pivoted to defense when it mattered most, sending information about Hunter Biden that would have changed the election down the memory hole, and policing social media to Joe’s advantage.

Corporate pharma, also owned by the same people, held back announcement of COVID vaccines until just after the election. The intel community, tightly bound with Big Tech and its super-wealthy owners, did its part leaking and concealing information as needed. They too worked to discredit the Hunter Biden story by calling it Russian disinfo. Money that actually controls information is gold.

Earlier in the contest something happened, again, in Democratic primaries which began with some of the most progressive candidates in the running since Henry Wallace. Instead a politician known as the Senator from Mastercard was pushed into the White House. It was just a coincidence two promising candidates, Buttigieg and Klobuchar, dropped out nearly simultaneously just ahead of the South Carolina vote Biden desperately needed to end Bernie, again. How many people in America are powerful enough to have made those phone calls to Pete and Amy?

Biden promptly returned the favor, filling his Cabinet with the same old thinkers corporate America liked from the Obama years. A highlight is Janet Yellen (net worth $13 million) at Treasury, who helped swizzle the corporate bailout that created the .01 percent out of the one percent after the Great Recession. Notice how crises for most of us like the Recession and COVID end up benefiting the wealthy? Biden was wrong when he told donors “nothing would fundamentally change” for the wealthy when he’s in charge—actually, things’ll get better.

A tiny percentage of Americans own, control, and benefit from most everything; some call them the one percent but a large number of even those people are just slugs and remoras (hedge fund managers, corporate lawyers) who feed off the crumbs left by the really powerful. You know a handful of the names—Bezos, Gates, Buffet—because they own public-facing companies. Most of the others prefer less public lives while they control the public.

And silly you, you worried that it was the Russians who stole the election. What, you aren’t down with using Prime points to vote in the next election, bro?

A new report in Newsmax argues that “When it comes to the next phase of space exploration, China has its eyes on domination, placing the U.S. in danger of losing its superiority in technology, economics, and world power.”

Multiple foreign policy thinkers and China watchers say “The dramatic new space race includes China’s plans to establish a military base on the moon within 10 years,” according to the report. Though during the historic space race of the 20th century China was far behind the US and Soviet Union, Brandon Weichert, author of the book “Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower,” maintains that currently “China wants to have a lunar colony by 2028 and a military base on the moon by 2030.”

The report concludes further that “NASA does have a plan to return to the moon via its Artemis program, but it is open to other nations. Experts also worry it won’t be a priority under a Joe Biden administration.”

Weichert along with other apparent China hawks cited in the report claim that Beijing is intent on militarizing space while US plans to counter this are much less defined and behind in preparation, also as US satellites could come under threat, considering further that anti-satellite weaponry is already advancing by US rivals Russia and China.

Weichert put forth the following alarming scenario:

“The biggest issue we are going to need to contend with is averting a space Pearl Harbor,” Weichert said, pointing out that the U.S. relies on satellites more than any other country in the world and has done little to defend them from a possible attack. “China and Russia have been developing counterspace strategies that are meant to deny America access to satellites.”

Adding to this, the report cites China commentator Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, to lay out further:

In the near term, he said China or Russia could use space as a “first strike area” by knocking out satellites as a prelude to attacking the U.S. or its allies on the ground. If the U.S. is deprived of its technology and loses communication with its allies, he said the Russians could easily carry out an invasion of the Baltics or the Chinese an attack on Taiwan in a “nightmare scenario.”

“We have an economy and military dependent on satellites,” Chang said. “We could lose the next war within the first 10 minutes of a conflict if they take down our space assets.”

They are arguing that the US urgently get back into establishing a firm presence on the moon in order to safeguard its resources and prevent something like a Chinese military colonization scenario. 

Of course, it remains that the alarmism is based mostly on heavy speculation as to China’s near and long-term intent. The reality remains that when it comes to space, all others are far behind America’s proven capabilities, meaning generally that if US defense leadership senses others are closing the gap it can more easily act at any point.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin ramps up his aggressive campaign to stamp out COVID-19 once and for all (as Russia races to vaccinate its most vulnerable citizens while striking deals to supply “Sputnik V” to developing markets the world), the embattled president has just raised the possibility of distributing ‘immunity passports’, an idea that has gained traction around the world since the dawn of the pandemic.

According ton an RT report, the Russian government is considering the development and distribution of documents verifying whether individuals have been vaccinated. China has already road-tested technology transmitting people’s COVID status via smartphone apps, and it’s widely suspected that Beijing will impose some version of immunity passports, if they haven’t already.

Russian PM Mikhail Mishustin has been tasked with carrying out the policy.

In a series of instructions to officials, published at the end of 2020, President Vladimir Putin ordered policymakers “to consider issuing certificates to people who have been vaccinated against Covid-19 infections using Russian vaccines…or the purpose of enabling citizens to travel across the borders of the Russian Federation and those of other countries.”

Russia’s Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, has been charged with implementing the recommendations, and is set to report back on January 20.

For once, Putin and American billionaire Bill Gates will be seeing eye to eye, as support for “immunity passports” grows not just among governments (even in “liberal democracies” like Canada), but the private sector as well. As RT reminds us, the IATA has voiced support for “immunity passports” as a strategy for hastening the revival of air travel.

The International Air Transport Association, which represents 290 airlines across the world, has supported the idea of vaccine passports, and is developing its own digital system to track who has been immunized against the virus. Passengers may be expected to present equivalent documents before being allowed to board planes in the future. Immunizations with the Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine, the first to be registered for the prevention of Covid-19 anywhere in the world, have been taking place in growing numbers in the capital and across the country. More than 70 centers in Moscow are now offering jabs, and at least 800,000 people have received their first dose.

Remember, once they arrived, people might soon find “Immunity Passports” will become a permanent facet of their lives: even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends, they could be used to offer evidence that a traveler has been vaccinated – not just for COVID-19, but for any other diseases, or even perhaps mutated forms of COVID-19.

Critically, as we noted previously, if we are going to live in a world where vaccines are mandatory for travel, who is to say that every nation on Earth is going to acknowledge the validity of every other vaccine. The Mainstream Media makes it seem as though just getting any vaccine with some sort of paperwork to back it up should be good enough, but this is unlikely to be true

If push comes to shove and this concept of travel papers based on vaccination (immunization passports) comes to pass then it is very likely that non-Western versions will “not count” at border crossings. Although with enough time and money one can probably get any type of vaccine anywhere, for the overwhelming majority this could create a new invisible Iron Curtain – the Western Vaccines on one side with the Russian one (with other possible outlier versions) on the other.

Map: The “geopolitical vaccination space” of Russia’s Sputnik V. Dark green has ordered millions, light green is considering.

This may sound like a stretch of the imagination but the madness of Russophobic conspiracy theories seems to have no bounds. And most importantly governmental reactions to the Covid-19 Pandemic have been harsh, dubious in effect, and very short sighted. There is a real chance that in 2021 we will see the rise of the geopolitics of vaccination.

In a shocking turn of events, NYSE has decided to reverse its previous decision (from last Thursday) to follow President Trump’s Executive Order to delist three Chinese Telecom giants (China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom Hong Kong) identified as “affiliated with the Chinese military”.

The investment ban will take effect on Jan. 11, just days before President-elect Joe Biden is due to be inaugurated, and according to NYSE on Thursday, trading in the three companies was to be suspended possibly as soon as Jan. 7 or as late as Jan. 11.

Maybe not so “strong” after all…

But now, in a statement on parent ICE’s website, NYSE reversed its previous stance:

In light of further consultation with relevant regulatory authorities in connection with Office of Foreign Assets Control FAQ 857, available here, the New York Stock Exchange LLC (“NYSE”) announced today that NYSE Regulation no longer intends to move forward with the delisting action in relation to the three issuers enumerated below (the “Issuers”) which was announced on December 31, 2020.

At this time, the Issuers will continue to be listed and traded on the NYSE. NYSE Regulation will continue to evaluate the applicability of Executive Order 13959 to these Issuers and their continued listing status.

The NYSE’s decision follows threats from Beijing:

The ministry of commerce said in a statement that China will “take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises,” according to the state-run Global Times.

The commerce ministry said that the U.S. was “abusing national security and using state power to crack down on Chinese enterprises” and said the move was “not in line with market rules and logic, which harms not only the legitimate rights of Chinese enterprises, but also the interests of investors in other countries, including the US.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry also accused the U.S. of “viciously slandering” its military-civilian integration policies and vowed to protect the country’s companies. Chinese officials have also threatened to respond to previous Trump administration actions with their own blacklist of U.S. companies, but have so far failed to do so.

So, the question is simple – did Xi yank Biden’s leash over incriminating Hunter malarkey… and Biden promised NYSE he’ll undo Trump’s EO in three weeks anyway?

Conspiracy theory? Or is the NYSE now in the habit of simply refusing to acknowledge a presidential executive order that warns of funding firms associated with the Chinese military? Seems like a strong stance for a stock exchange to take in the middle of such a tense geopolitical situation.

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News

A year ago this week, I sat in a left corner seat in a school auditorium, watching as presidential candidate Andrew Yang yukked it up with teens at Concord High in New Hampshire.

Yang was a hit. He said he wanted to give sixteen-year-olds a thousand bucks a month, the vote, and legalized weed. He also told them a generation of political leaders had left a sociopolitical “disaster” they would imminently be forced to address. “You could even call it a shit show,” he said (I noted a ripple of teacher applause).

Afterward, I asked about what at the time seemed like a small controversy. The Democratic Party was scheduled to hold a primary debate in Des Moines a few weeks later — on January 14th, 2020, to be exact — and it was beginning to look like Yang, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, and a host of other viable-ish candidates would be excluded.

The Democratic National Committee had been regularly changing qualification procedures for TV debates. At one point they allowed candidates polling as low as 1%. Now they were insisting on four “qualifying” polls showing 5% support or higher, or two polls showing 7% or more in the early battleground states of Iowa or New Hampshire. Which was fair enough, except there hadn’t been a “qualifying” poll in over a month, since November 17, 2019, in fact.

Yang’s campaign had been a success. His innovative P.R. strategy, led by a core of online #YangGang volunteers, caused the heretofore little-known business figure to become the fifth-largest fundraiser in the fourth quarter of 2019, pulling in $16.5 million. For context, this was just $6.2 million less than eventual nominee Joe Biden ($22.7 million). The late surge prompted Buzzfeed to write, “Andrew Yang Could Win This Thing.”

The Party didn’t agree. When Yang joined Booker and billionaire Tom Steyer in offering to fund new polls, they told him to suck it. It wasn’t the DNC’s problem. It was, they said, just bad luck that the 16 “qualified” polling organizations, like the New York Times, hadn’t done a survey in a while. “They should do more independent polling,” the Party suggested, in amusing deadpan.

When I asked Yang if he was disappointed, he laughed. “We’re operating on the assumption the debate doesn’t exist… Besides, all of this stuff ahead of time historically hasn’t made the determination,” he said. “You know what has? Voters.”

I liked Yang personally — he’s a rare genuinely funny politician — but was mostly agnostic about his campaign, ironically apart from his attitude about things like this. Unlike many politicians, whose aides constantly whisper off the record about the various wrongs done to their candidate, Yang embraced the long odds of his campaign, seeming to take it for granted that the institutional deck would be stacked against him.

He figured just having a fair shot with voters was reason enough to be optimistic, and why not? At that moment in time a year ago, the persuasive authority of institutional America seemed at its nadir.

An impeachment drama cooked up by the Party and relentlessly propagandized by mainstream news would prove a massive dud, both politically and from a ratings perspective. Legacy press outlets resorted to writing explainer pieces about why the public wasn’t as mesmerized as it should be, with the L.A. Times noting that “sobriety and clarity” were “a hard sell in an ecosystem where escapism and mirrored reality are the currency.” New York explained that Nielsen ratings didn’t account for people “checking in periodically on a C-SPAN stream.” There were many similar stories written to explain the impeachment drama’s lack of impact on Donald Trump’s poll numbers.

Worse, it was looking like the nominees for the general election would be two oft-denounced op-ed targets in Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. A string of efforts by a panicking political elite to restore order failed, from the silly debate scam, to scare tales about Vladimir Putin scheming for Bernie (as well as Trump), to a half-baked smear campaign about Sanders allegedly telling Elizabeth Warren “a woman can’t win” — a story reported as fact by all the usual media suspects that the public roundly disbelieved — to a far more serious effort to buy the Democratic nomination outright through the bluntly obnoxious campaign of Mike Bloomberg.

The year 2020, in other words, looked destined to be the climax of a long-developing story about the collapse of public faith in the pronouncements of America’s most powerful institutions: the news media, the two political parties, the medical and pharmaceutical establishments, the intelligence services, Wall Street, etc.

I was skeptical that anything would change much, but it did seem the public’s snowballing alienation was moving to a new phase. Genuinely interesting ways to re-think society might now be embraced. Yang was symbolic of this. Though I didn’t necessarily buy his guaranteed income scheme, it was fascinating to hear how many people in places like New Hampshire were open to the concept. As was made clear in 2016, huge numbers of people were and are increasingly open to anything. Like Ice Cube, a lot of Americans were broke, their feet hurt, and they were “Down For Whatever”:

The clear subtext of the last half-decade of political upheaval has been rising impatience with how difficult it has become to enjoy things once considered the basics of life. Young people leave school saddled in debt, consider themselves lucky if they get health insurance, and are usually so far from being able to imagine owning their own homes or having real professional security that marriage or children seem like absurd, unattainable luxuries.

For older people further along in life, the logistical challenges of mere living have become so outrageous that many have committed to Dickensian work regimes, only to discover that in America, even working overtime costs money. You take a second job to pay for the child care necessitated by the first, and the little ancillary costs that seemed not so serious once — from DMV fees to getting a stove repaired to parking — now trigger a pucker factor just to consider. That’s without even taking into account all the various near-automatically bankrupting endgames built into the American experience that most people try as much as possible not to think about: serious illness, an elderly relative forced into care, divorce, surprise legal problems, etc.

The fact that a year ago, anyone thought it made sense to tell the millions of people forced daily to navigate all this stupidity that they needed to focus on a labyrinthine political controversy in Ukraine — and to blast them for deficits of “sobriety and clarity” when they didn’t — told you everything you needed to know about the cluelessness of the people who run this country.

Then the pandemic happened.

No conspiracy theories are necessary to point out that all of the institutions Americans were in the process of rejecting just a year ago have since increased their power and influence. Be it opportunism or coincidence, the international emergency has written a dramatic heel turn into our history.

A sweeping Fed-based rescue program resulted in enormous booms in asset values, allowing America’s wealthiest to increase their net worth by nearly a trillion dollars since the start of the pandemic (in mid-summer, American billionaires were collectively earning $42 billion per week). The disease pummeled people who actually had to travel to work, while empowering conglomerates like Amazon, which tripled its profits in the third quarter alone. Most of our lives are online now, an ironic reward to intelligence services that went unpunished after illegal surveillance programs were disclosed in the Obama years.

After all that upheaval, the White House is about to be re-occupied by a political fossil from the eighties, surrounded by a zombie cabinet of Iraq War supporters, drone assassination proponents, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and neoliberal economists, coming from places like Amazon, DuPont, and Raytheon (the Pentagon appointment of the current Henry Kissinger Chair from the Center from Strategic and International Studies was a nice homage to the unchangingly vile character of America’s royal court). How bad any of this is in comparison with the chaotic presidency of Donald Trump is arguable, but it surely represents the triumph of Sameness, a powerful reminder that in America, you ultimately can’t beat City Hall. Or can you?

The news in recent years often reads like accounts of America before the Sixties upheavals. That was also a time when long-held myths were rapidly losing force and people were beginning to question the palate of life choices celebrated in places like the Book of the Month Club and Life magazine. Men wondered why they were being sent around the world to kill poor people, only to come home to what Paul Goodman described as a “style of life dictated by Personnel… to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator.”

Women had it worse, consigned to tend house and give themselves nightly as a reward for men who’d completed their “covenant of murder” in places like Vietnam. Spirituality in much of Jim Crow America was a superficial weekly injunction to conformity at archaic churches and temples, while our real religion, consumerism, became a constant devotional exercise, bolstered by a thousand dazzling commercials for products that people began to realize fulfilled every conceivable need, but the most important.

We’re in such a similar place, and though America’s political leaders learned a great deal from those times — the list of absurd Woke Headlines run here a few days ago chronicles the extremely clever effort to commoditize and sell the desire for political action that had no permissible outlet in the sixties — the reality is, if you keep giving people nothing but crappy choices, they’ll eventually write their own story, even if they can’t do it through voting.

Americans are tired. The rancorous politics they’ve been sold as bread-and-circus diversions are tiring, not laughing is tiring, having too much work and too little money is tiring, being stuck inside now is tiring, even being sexually frustrated is tiring (look at the stats on that one sometime, if you want insight into why so many Americans seemed a tad touchy in recent years). The most exhausting part is the mandate to take it all seriously. Unfortunately for America’s leaders, that’s the easiest part to change, which is why 2021 feels like such a good candidate to be the year things finally begin turning in a happier direction.

Distortions on CNN or in the New York Times drive people crazy, but that’s only because they remember trusting those sources. They’ll forget soon and learn to walk right past mass media blather as if it were just amusingly terrible wallpaper, the way Soviets eventually did with Pravda and Izvestia. Student debt is crushing and college is an overpriced scam, but a reckoning of sorts is coming when people stop being ashamed of vocational school. Facebook and Instagram turbocharged the impact of fear-based “ring around the collar”-style marketing, but what happens when the pandemic recedes and going offline is possible again? Throwing off worries about likes and rediscovering real-life interaction feels destined to become a fashionable dissident statement, in the same way tuning in, turning on, and “dropping out” was an obvious response to the stultifying conformity of the fifties.

Watching billionaires get richer and all the discredited vultures of the War on Terror and financial crisis eras sweep back into power is a bummer, but the tighter those people grip the reins, the more inevitable a counterculture feels. Who knows what that will look like, but it’ll probably be based on friends, family, and other things you can’t buy, and surely kinder and less maddening than the stress-packed world we’ve been asked to live in. My New Year’s resolution is to start living that other life sooner rather than later, after I check Twitter one last time, of course…

In TK recently:

The Wokest News Stories of 2020. A review of the year in radical political ideas, as evangelized with surprising enthusiasm by the national corporate press. Out from behind a paywall for New Year’s week.

Meet the Censored: Mark Crispin Miller. An NYU professor is denounced by colleagues for recommending reading skeptical of mask use.

Neoliberal Champion Larry Summers Opens Mouth, Inserts Both Feet. The testudine former Harvard President articulates the view from the bubble about the desirability of bailing out the lumpenvolk.

Poll: Choice for a Book Review. Will be using TK as a forum for subscribers to read and discuss a book each month. I checked the poll mid-stream and ordered The Culture of Narcissism and The Deficit Myth, which both earned a lot of votes from subscribers, so I’ll be reading and reviewing whichever of those arrives first (will advise ASAP). I may try a review-as-I-read method using the discussion tool.

More coming this week. Hope you all had a good holiday.

Virtu Financial has become the latest in a long line of companies leaving New York for Florida. 

It’s a trend that started early this year when we first reported that Citadel had set up a makeshift trading floor at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach. Back then, the thought process was to get out of crowded areas due to unknowns about the pandemic. 

As the year has progressed, companies and executives have continued to leave places like California and New York (and their liberal political leaders) in favor of lower taxes and less regulation in places like Texas and Florida. Companies like Elliot Management and Goldman Sachs have also moved some offices to Florida. 

Virtu is the latest to follow suit, according to Bloomberg. It’ll be moving about 30 people to Palm Beach Gardens and is closing in on signing a 10 year lease. By the end of this year the firm expects total employees in Florida to rise to 50 people, about 10% of their workforce. The Palm Beach location is set to become a “full-fledged base” for the company, the report says. Employees who transfer will effectively get an 11% bump in pay due to Florida having no income tax. 

Chief Executive Officer Doug Cifu commented: “We are dramatically oversubscribed for people who want to relocate from the tri-state area. We surveyed our employees, and the No. 1 concern that people had was quality of life — but also taking mass transit to New York City any time in the foreseeable future.”

“I was always a non-work-from-home, people-gotta-be-in-the-office, trading-room kind of guy. But I don’t think it’s practical given the modern world and where people want to live their lives and where people are happiest,” he continued.

The regulatory environment will likely help bolster what has already been a record year for the company, which doubled its net trading income to $1.82 billion through the third quarter. 

The company will shrink its footprint in Manhattan by 75% and will sublet its offices while looking for a “smaller, cheaper” location. Cifu says the changes were spurred by working from home, but again – the regulatory environment – and New York’s consistent promise of higher taxes – likely played into the decision making, as well. It also helps that Cifu owns part of the Florida Panthers hockey team.

He says he is fed up driving from New Jersey to Manhattan and spending 12 to 14 hours away from home each day. He says in Florida, his commute will be much shorter: “I would probably leave my house at 7:30 and I would be in the office by 7:36. On a good day, I’d probably leave at 4:30 — see the markets close. In the spring and the fall, for sure I’ll get 18 holes in.”

“Why am I forcing 400-odd people to schlep to lower Manhattan? I hate it, and I’m the CEO — I don’t have a boss, I don’t have to be there on time. Can you imagine the other 399 people? They must hate it much worse than I do,” Cifu concluded. “Doing business in Florida is more inviting and more welcoming. There are parts of the political class in New York and New Jersey that just don’t value the jobs and the industry.”