Month: January 2021

Authored by Binoy Kampmark via Off-Guardian.org,

The odds are stacked against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher who faces the grimmest of prospects come January 4.

On that day, the unsympathetic judicial head of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser will reveal her decision on the Old Bailey proceedings that took place between September and October this year.

Despite Assange’s team being able to marshal an impressive, even astonishing array of sources and witnesses demolishing the prosecution’s case for extradition to the United States, power can be blindly vengeful.

Such blindness is much in evidence in a co-authored contribution to The Daily Signal from this month. The authors are insipidly predictable: national security and technology types with comic strip names (Charles “Cully” Stimson; Klon Kitchen) and rule of law advocates who seemingly campaign against their own brief (John G. Malcolm).

Having not bothered to read the evidence submitted at the extradition trial, the authors are obedient to a fictitious record. This includes allegations that WikiLeaks harmed US diplomatic relations; the stubborn libel that Assange’s actions, far from exposing US atrocities, led to a loss of life; and the disruption of essential “intelligence sources and methods”. (Accountability can be expensive.)

The authors fail to appreciate the dangers of the Assange case to the First Amendment, free speech and the publication of national security information. They merely claim to be free speech defenders, only to neatly hive Assange’s activities off from its protections. Free speech is a fine thing as long as it is innocuous and inconsequential.

Suppression of speech, in a free society, is wrong. But Assange is not a free-speech hero.”

By internationalising the reach of the Espionage Act, the indictment against Assange threatens the global documentation and reporting of classified information in the public interest. To put it in elementary terms for the legions of ignorant security hacks, granting the request will legitimise the targeting of US citizens.

Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, summarises the implications:

If the UK grants the request to deliver Assange, UK prosecutors could make similar arguments in an effort to extradite a journalist in the US for violations of its Official Secrets Act, which explicitly criminalizes the publication of leaked military or intelligence information.”

Of central importance in the Assange pardon drive is the cultivation of vanity and, it follows, the appeal to posterity.

“We write to request that you put a defining stamp to your presidential legacy by pardoning Julian Assange or stopping his tradition,” urge the signatories of yet another letter to Trump on the subject.

The heavy artillery is impressive, including five Nobel Prize laureates: Northern Irish peace activist Mairead Maguire, human rights activist Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Iranian political activist and lawyer Shirin Ebadi, feminist campaigner Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Austrian novelist Peter Handke.

Appropriately, the signatories impress upon Trump that the case “threatens the constitutional protections that Americans hold dear” and suggest that history will be kind should he show sound judgment in the case. 

“By offering a pardon, to put a stop to the prosecution of Assange, your presidency will be remembered for having saved First Amendment protections for all Americans.”

The approach taken by the UN Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is more expansive and detailed.

In his appeal to Trump on December 22, Nils Melzer outlines the high price Assange has paid “for the courage to publish true information about government misconduct throughout the world.” The deteriorating health condition of the publisher is noted, including the risks posed to him by the COVID-19 pandemic at Belmarsh prison in London.

The relevant pointers are there: that Assange is not an enemy of the American people; his work and that of WikiLeaks “fights secrecy and corruption throughout the world and, therefore, acts in the public interest of the American people and of humanity as a whole.” He had not hacked or pilfered the information he published, having “obtained it from authentic documents and sources in the same way as any other serious and independent investigative journalists conduct their work.”

Melzer then seeks to appeal to Trump the man, pleading for Assange’s release as the president had:

vowed … to pursue an agenda of fighting government corruption and misconduct; and because allowing the prosecution of Mr Assange to continue would mean that, under your legacy, telling the truth about such corruption and misconduct has become a crime.”

Finally, the personal touch is being fashioned for the president, spearheaded by Assange’s fiancée Stella Moris. Her appearance on Fox News with host Tucker Carlson was primed for Trump’s hearty consumption, laden with hooks of catchy lingo. This made perfectly good sense; there is still some time to go before the world’s first Fox News president vacates the White House.

“Once he [Assange] gets to the US,” feared Moris, “he will be in the hands of the Deep State. That’s why I pleaded with the President to show the mercy the Deep State will not show Julian if he is extradited.”

Carlson was certainly convinced, taking a position at odds with various national security wonks that pullulate the US airwaves:

Whatever you think of Julian Assange and what he did, he is effectively a journalist. He took information and he put it in a place the public could read it.”

The Australian was spending time in prison for releasing documents “he did not steal,” merely providing a platform for their dissemination, showing that “the US government was illegally spying on me, and everybody else in this country.”

The seeds for a stinging provocation against the US imperium have been sown. Whether they take firm root and grow in the self-absorbed mind of the commander-in-chief is another matter.

Remember the “initial coin offering”? It seemed like every day at one point over the last couple of years, another one was taking place. In fact, at one point, investors were putting $20 billion in ICOs as a way to try and stake investments in new digital tokens. 

This week, Financial Times tried to answer an interesting question: what the hell happened to all that money? And all those projects?

Many of them have “sunk without a trace,” FT notes, but some projects like storage network Filecoin – which was set up to build digital infrastructure – have made it to their launch point. Filecoin is an “open-source, public, cryptocurrency and digital payment system intended to be a blockchain-based cooperative digital storage and data retrieval method”.

Filecoin’s tokens are up about 14x from the average price they were offered at their ICO. Filecoin owns 300m of those tokens itself, currently valued at about $7 billion.

Its founder, Juan Benet, said that people who want to earn its tokens have committed 1.3 exabytes of storage capacity to the system. In fact, its ICO and the ensuing notoriety helped it achieve storage capacity that was “ten times ahead of expectations”. Demand from customers looking to buy capacity is still short of expectations, however. 

Benet said: “These projects have built pretty significant things. I think the total capital organised [by ICOs] in the last three years is not — if you look at the rest of technology — out of the ordinary.”

Another ICO beneficiary, Polkadot, a “a platform others can use to create their own blockchains” is nearing its launch. ICO fueled companies like Cosmos and Tezos have also reached their launch points. 

Their founders admit that the ICO “speculation” helped fuel their growth. Gavin Wood, a founder of Polkadot, said: “Ultimately I think a lot of people viewed this as a sort of accumulator bet. They won a lot of money on Ethereum and they wanted to see if they could carry on rolling.”

While some blockchain networks are live, they are still awaiting development of their associated applications. For example, the Tezos blockchain was made to create a digital economy anywhere – even in video games – but it has yet to be adopted. 

Decentralized finance applications have also diverted some attention to blockchain platforms, including ones created at Polkadot, but major adoption has yet to take place. 

Certainly, Bitcoin’s recent move has once again shed some light to the ICO bubble. Many ICOs accepted Bitcoin and Ethereum in exchange for tokens, meaning that investments for ICOs have likely doubled or tripled, while the value of many tokens issued may have crashed. Such was the case with Tezos:

Tezos Foundation took in $232m through its 2017 ICO — an amount that had risen to $652m by July this year. With more than 60 per cent of its reserves held in Bitcoin, it is now likely to be worth well over $1bn.

Ultimately, FT likens the ICO craze to the dotcom period – an apt comparison that we don’t disagree with. “The dotcom period also produced a small number of big winners, including Amazon and Yahoo,” the report says, before injecting a little reality disclaimer: “The survivors from the ICO bubble still have a long way to go to prove they have anything like the staying power.”

Authored by Bruce Wilds via Advancing Time blog,

The EU is taking the path of strengthening its ties to China in the hope it will spark an economic renaissance. The Euro-Zone was already in deep trouble before CoVid-19 hit. Argue as you may but the bout of economic weakness that started in 2017 never ended. The latest scheme cooked up by Brussels seems more of its policy to extend and pretend all is well. The EU abandoned all structural reforms in 2014 when the ECB started its quantitative easing program (QE) and expanded the balance sheet to record-levels. Playing into Europe’s problems is that in 2019, almost 22% of the Euro Zone GDP gross added value came from Travel & Leisure, a sector that will unlikely come back anytime soon. 

To avoid the union coming apart at the seams the European Commission last year unveiled an unprecedented  €750BN CoVid-19 recovery plan. It consisted of €500 billion in grants to member states and €250 billion in loans. This means those in Brussels are seeking a major extension of their power to where they can borrow money under the premise it will aid in ending the worst recession in European history and at the same time shore up Italy. This would result in transforming the EU’s governing body in Brussels by allowing it to raise unprecedented sums on the capital markets to shore up hard-pressed EU countries. 

Roughly 80% of the Euro-Zone’s real economy is financed by a banking sector that carries more than 600 billion euro in non-performing loans. Unemployment is also a problem, almost 30% of the Euro Zone labor force is expected to be under some form of unemployment scheme for years. France, Spain, and Italy, with important rules and tax burdens on job creation, may suffer large unemployment for even longer. As of 2017, not a single European company ranked among the top fifteen technology companies in the world and only four of the top 50 global technology companies are European. This is why skeptics are concern that if the politically directed “Green New Deal” agenda doesn’t boost growth or reduce debt the Euro-Zone will remain economically stagnate.

The elephant in the room is that the Euro-zone region simply isn’t competitive. The EU lacks technological and intellectual property and is falling further behind the U.S. and China. Germany, the regions manufacturing powerhouse continues to skirt along narrowly escaping recession while France, Spain, and Italy face years of large unemployment levels. It was clear that the EU was struggling in the spring of 2020 when the European Commission sharply revised lower its economic growth forecast for the area due to Covid-19. So far, the European Commission’s expectations its economy would rapidly rebound have been dashed by a second wave of the pandemic. 

To generate the impression of hope the EU’s leaders in Brussels are trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat by strengthening ties with China. The Guardian recently reported that China and the EU now appear to have resolved their differences over protecting labor rights in China and are set to sign a long-delayed investment agreement. This would strengthen ties between them and make the economies of the two blocs more interdependent. The investment talks address opening up Chinese markets for European investment, as well as addressing Chinese practices opposed by the EU concerning industrial subsidies, state control of enterprises, and forced technology transfers. 

A sticking point for the talks launched in 2013, has been the treatment of Uighur Muslims, and the systematic suppression of free speech in Hong Kong. At the heart of these talks has been the EU’s concern about these issues and how to enforce and arbitrate other parts of the agreement. It must be noted the same members of the European parliament have in the recent past passed resolutions condemning the use of forced labor in China must ratify the agreement. Also, America and the incoming Biden administration are far from happy about the EU-China comprehensive investment agreement which signifies a significant shift in EU policy towards Asia.

The proposed deal dovetails with Beijing’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative and follows the signing of an agreement made with Italy which is viewed by many as bankrupt. Last year, in what might be considered a bold move the Italian Prime Minister signed a historic memorandum of understanding with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Rome. The agreement made Italy the first founding EU  member, and the first G-7 nation, to officially sign on to OBOR in hopes it would shore up its weak prospects. The ramifications flowing from Italy’s deal with China may, in the end, prove to be a deal with the devil. 

The key motivation behind China working to reach a deal with poor, weak, but lovable Italy was its desire to exploit Italy and use it as a backdoor into the broader Euro-Zone market. The deal China and Italy inked contained development deals covering everything from port management, science and technology, e-commerce, and even soccer. The reality is that China is eager for control of entry points into the European Union that can be lawfully expanded upon. This does not bode well for the region.

While in the past, Europe has enjoyed a trade surplus with America year after year this has not been the case when it comes to China. According to data from Eurostat, the EU had a 153 billion euro ($180.3 billion) surplus with the U.S. (meaning it exported more to the U.S. than it imported) in 2019. The European Union is China’s second-largest trading partner but imports far more from China than it imports. These sort of numbers are not outliers but certification of a trend that has been growing for years. Simply put America has been carrying Europe on its back and the money and wealth that flows from America to Europe quickly finds its way to Asia. 

Below are the import and export figures with China from 2018 in billions of US dollars.

•  United States,  Total trade 583.3  Exports 429.7  Imports   153.9  Trade Deficit  275.8

•  European Union,  Total Trade  573.08  Exports  375.1   Imports  197.9  Trade Deficit 177.1

It could be argued Brussels is leading the EU into an ambush, Europe cannot hold its own against China. In the past, both the United States and the European Union have complained that China wants free trade without playing fair. To think China is a tiger that has suddenly changed its stripes borders on insanity. This treaty will not correct the market imbalance or give Europe the same level of market access or non-discriminatory environment investors seek. They will find this is not the first time that China signs such an agreement without respecting it. Europe which has seen its manufacturing sector debased by cheap knockoffs from China and other low-wage countries will find little comfort in bringing more of these goods into their market.

It could be argued the Chinese system is geared to exploit. China’s state-run economy is based on a predatory business model that is geared to expand by crushing the competition. China is determined to move into high-tech products and its plan centers around both state-owned and private firms investing in and acquiring foreign companies to steal their technological innovations. Subsidizing those companies working within its system in a multitude of ways helps China achieve this goal. This is not going to change, China exports goods at slightly below cost in order to draw manufacturing jobs from other countries. Those of us with such a view of China contend the move towards closer ties with China may hasten the demise of Europe.

Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute,

The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)

In his book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab writes that the covid-19 crisis should be regarded as an “opportunity [that can be] seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on the path toward a fairer, greener future.” Although Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset for years, the covid crisis has provided a pretext for finally enacting it. According to Schwab, we should not expect the postcovid world system to return to its previous modes of operation. Rather, alternating between description and prescription, Schwab suggests that changes will be, or should be, enacted across interlocking, interdependent domains to produce a new normal.

So, just what is the Great Reset and what is the new normal it would establish?

The Great Reset means reduced incomes and carbon use. But Schwab and the WEF also define the Great Reset in terms of the convergence of economic, monetary, technological, medical, genomic, environmental, military, and governance systems. The Great Reset would involve vast transformations in each of these domains, changes which, according to Schwab, will not only alter our world but also lead us to “question what it means to be human.”

In terms of economics and monetary policy, the Great Reset would involve a consolidation of wealth, on the one hand, and the likely issuance of universal basic income (UBI) on the other. It might include a shift to a digital currency, including a consolidated centralization of banking and bank accounts, immediate real-time taxation, negative interest rates, and centralized surveillance and control over spending and debt.

While every aspect of the Great Reset involves technology, the Great Reset specifically entails “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” or transhumanism, which includes the expansion of genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics and their penetration into human bodies and brains. Of course, the fourth Industrial Revolution involves the redundancy of human labor in increasing sectors, to be replaced by automation. But moreover, Schwab hails the use of nanotechnology and brain scans to predict and preempt human behavior.

The Great Reset means the issuance of medical passports, soon to be digitized, as well as the transparency of medical records inclusive of medical history, genetic makeup, and disease states. But it could include the implanting of microchips that would read and report on genetic makeup and brain states such that “[e]ven crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”

On the genomic front, the Great Reset includes advances in genetic engineering and the fusion of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

In military terms, the Great Reset entails the creation of new battle spaces including cyberspaces and the human brain as a battle space.

In terms of governance, the Great Reset means increasingly centralized, coordinated, and expanded government and “governmentalities,” the convergence of corporations and states, and the digitalization of governmental functions, including, with the use of 5G and predictive algorithms, real-time tracking and surveillance of bodies in space or the “anticipatory governance” of human and systems behavior.

That being said, “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as the New York Times has suggested, the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking” of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders” and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.

In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared destiny,” among other euphemisms. Together, such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).

I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in their thrall. The mass of humanity, the planners would have it, will live under an economic stasis of reduced expectations, with individual autonomy greatly curtailed if not utterly obliterated. As Mises suggested, such planners are authoritarians who mean to supplant the plans of individual actors with their own, centralized plans.

If enacted, such plans would fail, but their adoption would nevertheless exact a price.

The American population is a unique mosaic of cultures – and almost 40% of people identify as racial or ethnic minorities today.

In this treemap, Visual Capitalist’s Iman Ghosh uses data for 2019 from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which bases its analysis on the latest American Community Survey (ACS) data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Then we break down the same data on a state-by-state basis.

Growing Diversity in America

As of 2019, here is the current distribution of the U.S. population by race:

• White: 60.1%

• Hispanic: 18.5%

• Black: 12.2%

• Asian: 5.6%

• Multiple Races: 2.8%

• American Indian/Alaska Native: 0.7%

• Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: 0.2%

*Note that the U.S. totals do not include Puerto Rico.

However, these race and ethnicity projections are expected to change over the coming years. By the year 2060, it’s expected that the distribution of Whites as a percentage of total population will fall from 60.1% to 44.3% of Americans.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. *Other includes American Indian/Alaska Native (0.7%) and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (0.2%). Both proportions remain unchanged in these projections.

Interestingly, the proportion of those from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds will more than double, from 2.3% to 4.9% alongside rising patterns of interracial marriage.

Over time, the U.S. Census has been vastly expanded to reflect the true diversity that the country holds. In fact, it was only from 1960 onwards that people could select their own race—and only from 2020 can those who chose White or Black provide further information on their roots.

A State-by-State Breakdown

Of course, racial diversity in the United States differs widely from region to region.

In the Northeast—particularly the states Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire—the White population accounts for 90% or more of the total. In contrast, Black populations are highest in the District of Columbia (45%) and several Southern states.

Note: A dash (-) indicates estimates with relative standard errors greater than 30%, which were not included in the data

Of all the 50 states, Hawaii is home to the largest share of Asian populations at 39%. It also has one of the most diverse racial breakdowns in the nation overall, including the highest proportion of mixed race individuals.

Looking to another island, an overwhelming majority (98%) of Puerto Ricans are of Hispanic origins. While it’s not a state, its inhabitants are all considered U.S. citizens.

Charting the U.S. population by race is crucial for a number of reasons. This information can be used to better understand existing income and wealth gaps, track public health outcomes, and to aid in policy decision-making at higher levels.

“We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.”

– Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the U.S.

Authored by Alexander Mercouris via ConsortiumNews.com,

In accordance with a British magistrate court’s usual procedure, Julian Assange’s Judgment has almost certainly already been written and sent in draft form to the respective teams of lawyers, probably early on Friday evening.

The lawyers therefore already know what the decision is, as well as the British government and at least the Department of Justice in Washington.

Under established procedure, Assange’s lawyers are not supposed to tell Assange himself what the decision is so he and his family are probably the only people who are directly involved in his case who don’t yet know its outcome.

The purpose in sending the Judgment in draft form to the lawyers in advance of the Court hearing is to give them an opportunity to check it for factual mistakes.

The public will not know the outcome until Magistrate Vanessa Baraitser reads out the Judgment in its finalized form, with any factual mistakes corrected, when Court convenes on Monday at 10 am London time. The Judgment should then be published online by the Court Service directly after she has finished.

In addition to the Judgment – and obviously to the decision whether or not to extradite, which will be set out in the Judgment – the public may learn immediately afterward whether either of the two sets of lawyers intend to appeal. Either side has seven days to appeal the judgment.

While the intent of allowing both sides to see the Judgment in advance is not to help facilitate an appeal, having the judgement before it is read to the court affords attorneys to a chance to consider whether or not to launch one.

If It’s a Split Decision

One possibility that must be considered is that Baraitser may decide to extradite on one indictment and not on the other, for instance, if she rules against extradition on the Espionage Act charges, but decides in favor of extradition on the conspiracy to commit computer intrusion charge (which carries a maximum five year sentence as opposed to 170 on espionage.)

I think what would happen in that case is that the British authorities would accept Baraitser’s decision and would try to reach an agreement with the DoJ whereby, in return for Assange’s extradition, the U.S. would commit itself to try Assange only on the computer intrusion charges, and not on the Espionage Act charges.

‘Assange’s liberty represents that of all journalists and publishers whose job is to expose government and corporate criminality without fear of prosecution’https://t.co/xVlFx2FMbB

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) January 2, 2021

The British over the course of the negotiations would tell the U.S. that if the U.S. were not willing to give that commitment then the British would not be able to extradite Assange to the U.S.

Of course the British (if Assange were extradited to the U.S. on such a basis) would be in no position to compel the U.S. to abide by such a commitment if the U..S were to go back on it once Assange was on U.S. soil.

Since that has to be a very likely possibility, one would think it would be a point which Assange’s lawyers would make in the appeal they would be bound to make to the High Court against Baraitser’s decision.

In fact in such a scenario it’s not impossible that both sides would appeal to the High Court:

1. the U.S. against Baraitser’s decision to refuse to extradite on the basis of the Espionage Act;
2. Assange’s lawyers against Baraitser’s decision to extradite on the computer intrusion charges.

It would be a fascinating battle and it would be fascinating to see how it would play out. Logically, the balance ought to tip in Assange’s favor since Baraitser would presumably have rejected extradition on the Espionage Act charges because they were not properly made out and because they were overtly political.

In light of that, would the High Court be prepared to allow Assange’s extradition on computer intrusion charges to a country which had tried unsuccessfully to bring overtly political charges against him which the lower Court had rejected?

Nothing is predictable in this case.

Appeal Scenarios

In the event that Baraitser decides the case in Assange’s favor, and the U.S. government decides to appeal, there is also the question of whether or not Assange will be released pending the outcome of the appeal, or whether he will continue to be kept in detention in Belmarsh.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald in his latest article assumes that Assange will remain in detention throughout the appeal process, but that is not certain.

Since there would be a Court Judgment saying that extradition had been refused, and since Assange is not being held because of any crime committed in the United Kingdom, and as there is no outstanding prison sentence imposed on him by any British Court, one would think that Baraitser in her Judgment would order his immediate release.

British authorities might take steps to rearrest him (perhaps on still more, new U.S. charges) immediately as the order for his release is made. But it seems certain that Assange’s lawyers would make an prompt application, either to Baraitser or to a High Court judge for Assange’s immediate release, which given a hypothetical decision in his favor,  Baraitser or the High Court judge would probably grant.

Given Baraitser’s demeanour in court during Assange’s hearing, and given several of the decisions she made, the greater likelihood is that she will rule in favor of U.S. extradition on both indictmments, in which case Assange would almost certainly remain in Belmarsh prison while his legal team appeals.  If she should pursue a split decision there would be a stronger likelihood that Assange would continue in detention until the appeal were decided because the Court would have decided to allow his extradition to the U.S.

However even in that case Assange’s lawyers would still be in a position to apply for bail on the grounds that the most serious and important part of the case made by the U.S. for his extradition (the Espionage Act charges) had been refused, and that his appeal against the remaining part (the computer intrusion charges) was likely to be successful.  

The public and Assange himself will know in less than 48 hours.