If the Nobel committee’s handing over of the Nobel peace prize to newly elected President Obama seemed like the nadir of the prize’s prestige, there’s now another thing coming.
The Black Lives Matter movement has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel peace prize for the way its call for systemic change has spread around the world.
In his nomination papers, the Norwegian MP Petter Eide said the movement had forced countries outside the US to grapple with racism within their own societies.
“I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality,” Eide said.
“Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice.
“They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness about racial injustice.”
That’s right, a group led by self-described “trained Marxists” who literally spent time with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and then triggered night after night of violent looting riots at a cost of at least 25 lives and a record $2 billion in insured property claims, (probably much more in uninsured property), and grotesque Red Guard-style repudiation scenes such as forcing restaurant diners to wave their fists in solidarity or face overturned tables and assault, is somehow … is worthy of the world’s top award for peace.
Back in 1964, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the same prize for calls to judge people on the content of their character over color, along with non-violent resistence, there was a recognizable standard for peace. Now, such approaches don’t cut it anymore for this Norwegian bunch. And to place BLM in the same league as MLK, Jr., is kind of obscene.
The Norwegian pol who put the nomination out cited BLM’s capacity to mobilize as his criteria. But that seems to be pretty shaky grounds, given that so many leftists out there really just wanted to Get Trump. BLM has since morphed into what appears to be a corporate shakedown racket and managed to get its Marxist identity politics party line into every corporate boardroom in America. But the capacity to use muscling community organizer tactics is no evidence of morality, or more pointedly, peace. BLM is never going to be satisfied no matter how much kowtowing is done, each victory it wins brings a bigger demand to its marks, without ceasing, until its will to absolute power is achieved. Sound like peace? Only of the grave.
What it highlights is how low the Nobel peace prize has fallen. Sure, this Norwegian socialist clown doing the nominating likely has no idea what’s going on in the states, given that he lives in isolated Norway, takes in meetings with activists, and only reads the leftist press. The idiocy of his proposal tops that of the Norwegians handing out a Nobel prize to Barack Obama just for getting elected president for being black without doing anything else.
In both instances, the Nobel committee nominators seem to relish anyone with the ability to exert leftist power, equating that kind of power-mongering with ‘peace.’ It’s a sorry act they’ve come to, to worship power over any semblance of authentic peace. If this is peace, what a sorry state of affairs we have, mau-mauing’s triumph over actual creating of peace. Will all Nobel peace prize recipients have to show proof of starting riots to qualify now? How, exactly, is riot-making ‘peace’? One likes to suppose that this nomination will go nowhere, but with the current nonsense going on, don’t bet on it.
While high-fives and smily-faces abound on the interwebs over the destruction wrought on numerous hedge funds amid the short- and gamma-squeezes in GME and the rest of the heavily-shorted names, some are at least taking a moment to pause and reflect on other possibilities about how this all ends…
Via ‘The_Law_of_Pizza’:
I don’t work on the trading Floor, but I’m an attorney who services a variety of financial institutions, including broker/dealers.
This isn’t the exciting, hilarious answer you want, but a lot of people had no idea it was even happening until the past 48 hours, and even now, it’s mostly just a funny news article about some internet trolls making a bubble.
This is a big deal to the shorting community, but to the other 99% of the financial world, nobody gives a shit.
As much as young people on the internet like to imagine this as an epic, David vs Goliath, Wall Street vs Main Street showdown for the history books; from a bird’s eye view its actually just a brief dumpster fire where a couple hedge funds lost their shirts betting on one little small cap stock. It has happened before, and it will happen again.
In 6 months, nobody will remember or care, except that (maybe) it will become more difficult for retail investors to trade options.
And not because the greedy hedge fund oligarchs forced the SEC to crack down on retail investors.
But rather because, when this is all said and done, there is going to be a black hole where most of these retail investors’ brokerage accounts used to be, and the SEC and brokerage community will be lambasted for failing to protect unsophisticated investors from a bubble.
I have been monitoring the WSB threads, and while the WSB veterans know that they’re making a suicide charge for the memes, they have brought thousands of naive, new investors with them – who predominantly think that they’re going to somehow come out on top, not realizing that they’re cannon fodder for the more savvy WSB users to exit with gains.
Redditors never seem to stop and think about why the WSB guys know so much about derivatives trading.
Or how they seem to know how to access and read from a Bloomberg Terminal.
Or why there are so many users there that can seemingly drop tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on complicated meme plays.
How do you think that WSB knew that GME was open to a short squeeze and a gamma squeeze play?
WSB’s power users are younger finance bros. It’s 30-something investment bankers and portfolio managers memeing with each other a. cosplaying as “autists.”
If you didn’t know what a gamma squeeze was 48 hours ago, you are their exit strategy and the down payment on their next Porsche.
The Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force would stop using the GangNet database that catalogs thousands of gang members and gang-affiliated persons in the DC Metropolitan area over complaints that the database includes a ‘disproportionate number of minorities’.
According to the Washington Post, it will be the first law enforcement entity in the area that would stop using GangNet.
The database is widely used by more than 120 law enforcement agencies in the greater Washington, DC area that includes densely populated counties in both Maryland and Virginia. GangNet had been in use for about 10 years and has about 7,800 gang members in its database.
The database is used for intelligence purposes and can’t be used for the basis of probable cause to arrest someone.
Nonetheless, collecting the data about any crimes that may involve the ‘disproportional number of minorities’ appeared to be too much for the new neo-liberal era in the US.
It may soon appear that the entire concept of the ‘ethnic crime’ can appear to be banned in the US because it is not enough tolerant.
Jessica Alba’s “Honest Company” Files Confidentially For IPO
At times of peak ESG mania, what’s one more dubious company to add to the IPO mix? Will anybody notice? Will anybody care?
Perhaps Jessica Alba is hoping that people won’t. Because Alba’s Honest Company – the same one that was exposed years ago for having harmful chemicals it railed against in its detergent – is apparently lining up for an IPO. The company’s schtick is claiming to offer products without the harmful chemicals of normal consumer products – a perfect nonsense story for the snowflakes setting the tone of today’s ESG fueled market.
“The Los Angeles-based company backed by L Catterton is preparing to file confidentially for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as soon as Friday, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public,” Bloomberg BNN reported on Friday.
The company is reportedly seeking a $2 billion valuation at IPO. The company was previously looking to sell itself for a valuation of about $1 billion, the report notes. Recall, back in September of 2016, Alba was reportedly laughing off $1 billion offers for her company. It seems that, since then, its valuation hasn’t expanded much, if at all.
About six or seven years ago, we wrote about how Alba’s “Honest” company may not have been so honest after all. We noted a 2014 Wall Street Journal article that alleged that the company hadn’t really been honest in disclosing which chemicals were used to make their “non-toxic” diapers and detergents.
We noted: “One of the primary ingredients Honest tells consumers to avoid is a cleaning agent called sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS, which can be found in everyday household items from Colgate toothpaste to Tide detergent and Honest says can irritate skin. The company lists SLS first in the ‘Honestly free of’ label of verboten ingredients it puts on bottles of its laundry detergent, one of Honest’s first and most popular products.”
And then, of course, two independent lab tests determined that Honest’s liquid laundry detergent did in fact contain SLS:
“Our findings support that there is a significant amount of sodium lauryl sulfate” in Honest’s detergent, said Barbara Pavan, a chemist at one of the labs, Impact Analytical. Another lab, Chemir, a division of EAG Inc., said its test for SLS found about the same concentration as Tide, which is made by P&G. “It was not a trace amount,” said Matthew Hynes, a chemist at Chemir who conducted the test.
In Alba’s 2013 book, “The Honest Life” she lists SLS as a “toxin” that consumers should avoid. She started Santa Monica, Calif.-based Honest in 2011 after she said she had an allergic reaction to a popular brand of laundry detergent.
The unfortunate truth is that this is the exact type of “honesty” that Wall Street loves, and the IPO will probably become a resounding success despite Alba’s checkered track record.
In a blowout comedy for the ages, finance pirates take it up the clacker
In the fall of 2008, America’s wealthiest companies were in a pickle. Short-selling hedge funds, smelling blood as the global economy cratered, loaded up with bets against finance stocks, pouring downward pressure on teetering, hyper-leveraged firms like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. The free-market purists at the banks begged the government to stop the music, and when the S.E.C. complied with a ban on financial short sales, conventional wisdom let out a cheer.
“This will absolutely make a difference,” economist Peter Cardillo told CNN. “Now, if there is any good news, shorts will have to cover.”
At the time, poor beleaguered banks were victims, while hedge funds betting them down as the economy circled the drain were seen as antisocial monsters. “They are like looters after a hurricane,” seethed Andrew Cuomo, then-Attorney General of New York State, who “promised to intensify investigations into short selling abuses.” Senator John McCain, in the home stretch of his eventual landslide loss to Barack Obama, added that S.E.C. chairman Christopher Cox had “betrayed the public’s trust” by allowing “speculators and hedge funds” to “turn our markets into a casino.”
Fast forward thirteen years. The day-trading followers of a two-million-subscriber Reddit forum called “wallstreetbets” somewhat randomly decide to keep short-sellers from laying waste to a brick-and-mortar retail video game company called GameStop, betting it up in defiance of the Street. Worth just $6 four months ago, the stock went from $18.36 on the afternoon of the Capitol riot, to $43.03 on the 21st two weeks later, to $147.98 this past Tuesday the 26th, to an incredible $347.51 at the close of the next day, January 27th.
The rally sent crushing losses at short-selling hedge funds like Melvin Capital, which was forced to close out its position at a cost of nearly $3 billion. Just like 2008, down-bettors got smashed, only this time, there were no quotes from economists celebrating the “good news” that shorts had to cover. Instead, polite society was united in its horror at the spectacle of amateur gamblers doing to hotshot finance professionals what those market pros routinely do to everyone else. If you’ve ever seen Animal House, you understand the sentiment:
The press conveyed panic and moral disgust. “I didn’t realize it was this cultlike,” said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, without irony denouncing the campaign against firms like his as “just a get rich quick scheme.” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said the Redditor campaign had “no basis in reality,” while Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge funder whose bets against subprime mortgages were lionized in “The Big Short,” called the amateur squeeze “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”
The episode prompted calls to regulate Reddit and, finally, halt action on the disputed stocks. As I write this, word has come out that platforms like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are curbing trading in GameStop and several other companies, including Nokia and AMC Entertainment holdings.
Meaning: just like 2008, trading was shut down to save the hides of erstwhile high priests of “creative destruction.” Also just like 2008, there are calls for the government to investigate the people deemed responsible for unapproved market losses.
The acting head of the SEC said the agency was “monitoring” the situation, while the former head of its office of Internet enforcement, John Stark, said, “I can’t imagine there isn’t an open investigation and probably a formal order to find out who’s on these message boards.” Georgetown finance professor James Angel lamented, “it’s going to be hard for the SEC to find blatant manipulation,” but they “owe it to look.” The Washington Post elaborated:
To establish manipulation that runs afoul of securities laws, Angel said regulators would need to prove traders engaged in “an intentional act to push a price away from its fundamental value to seek a profit.” In market parlance, this is typically known as a pump-and-dump scheme…
Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked about “manipulation” and “what’s going on on Wall Street right now,” said “we’ll all be reviewing it,” as if it were the business of congress to worry about a bunch of day traders cashing in for once.
The only thing “dangerous” about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a “pump and dump scheme” to push prices away from their “fundamental value” is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?
America’s banks just had maybe their best year ever, raking in $125 billion in underwriting fees at a time when the rest of the country is dealing with record unemployment, thanks entirely to massive Federal Reserve intervention that turned a crash into a boom. Who thinks the “fundamental value” of most stocks would be this high, absent the Fed’s Atlas-like support in the last year?
For context, Goldman, Sachs posted revenues of $44.56 billion in 2020, its best year since 2009, a.k.a. the last year Wall Street cashed in on a bailout. Back then, the shortcut back to giganto-bonuses was underwriting fees for financial companies raising money to purge themselves of TARP debt. This time it’s underwriting fees for bond issues and IPOs. The subtext of both bailouts was that anyone who owned or underwrote financial assets got richer, while everyone else got the proverbial high hat. It’s no accident that income inequality dramatically accelerated after the last bailouts, and that the only people to see net gains in wealth since 2008 have been the richest 20% of Americans, a pattern almost certain to continue.
The constant in the bailout years has been a battery of artificial stimulants sent through the financial sector, from the TARP to years of zero-interest-rate policies (ZIRP) to outright interventions like the multiple trillion-dollar rounds of Quantitative Easing. All that froth allowed finance companies to suck out hundreds of billions in fees, encouraged lunatic risk-taking in every direction and rampages of private equity takeovers, and kept a vast stable of functionally dead companies alive on cheap credit.
Those so-called “zombie companies” make up roughly 30% of all corporations in America now, and they racked up over a trillion dollars in new debt since the pandemic alone. While policymakers may have stabilized the economy with the bailouts, they may also “inadvertently be directing the flow of capital to unproductive firms,” as Bloomberg euphemistically put it back in November.
In other words, it was all well and good for investment banks and executives of phoney-baloney companies to gorge themselves on funhouse profits on a funhouse economy, but when amateurs decided to funnel just a bit of this clown show into their own pockets, finance pros wailed like the grave of Adam Smith had been danced upon. The worst was Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, who issued a somber warning that those behind the recent market frenzy are “in for a very rude awakening,” adding, “I don’t know if it is going to happen tomorrow, next week or in a month, but it will happen.”
This is the same James Gorman whose company just saw its 2020 fourth-quarter profits go up 51% versus the year before, with total revenues up 16% to $48.2 billion, matching almost exactly the 16% rise in the stock market last year. If you’re going to rake in $33 million as Gorman did last year captaining a firm that just siphoned off billions in essentially risk-free profits underwriting a never-ending bailout, should you really be worrying about someone else getting a “rude awakening”? There are 19 million people collecting unemployment who might be reading those profit numbers. Does this man know how to spell “pitchfork”?
GameStop has prompted more pearl-clutching than any news story in recent memory. Expert after grave-faced expert has marched on TV to tell Reddit traders that markets are complicated, this isn’t a game, and they wouldn’t be doing this, if they really understood how things work.
“I’m not sure everybody fully understands what’s happening here,” was the melancholy comment on CNBC of Wall Street’s famed fluffer-in-chief, Andrew Ross Sorkin. The author of Too Big to Fail added in pedagogic tones that while this “stick it to the man moment” might feel good, betting up the value of GameStop above Delta Airlines just isn’t right, because “there are no fundamentals here”:
Furthermore, everybody “understands” what happened with GameStop. Unlike some other Wall Street stories, this one isn’t complicated. The entire tale, in a nutshell, goes like this. One group of gamblers announced, “Fuck you!” Another group announced back: “No, fuck YOU!”
That’s it. Or, as one market analyst put it to me this morning, “A bunch of guys made a bet, got killed, then doubled and tripled down and got killed even more.”
Regarding improprieties, leaving aside that the Redditors were doing exactly what billion-dollar hedge funds do every day — colluding to move a stock for fun and profit — the notion that this should be the subject of a federal investigation is preposterous.
Is it completely outside the realm of possibility that the GME fiasco isn’t just day traders giving the finger to Wall Street, that “major players” are behind the stock’s movement, in an illegal manipulation scheme? No. Probably it’s not that, but it could be, just as some of the usual suspects may have piled on the long side once the frenzy started. But if there’s anything to investigate here, the obvious place to start is with the hedge funds and their brokers.
While it isn’t a complicated story, some of the awesome humor of GameStop is in the mechanics.
Unlike betting on a stock to go up (i.e. betting “long”), where you can only lose as much as you invest, the losses in shorting can be infinite. This adds a potential extra layer of Schadenfreude to the plight of the happy hedge fund pirate who might have borrowed gazillions of GameStop shares at five or ten hoping to tank the firm, only to go in pucker mode as Internet hordes drive the cost of the trade to ten, twenty, fifty times their original investment.
Short-sellers bet by borrowing shares from so-called prime brokers (Goldman, Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are among the biggest), selling them, and waiting for the price to drop, at which point they buy them back on the open market at the lower price and return them. The commonly understood rub is that prime brokers don’t always really procure those original borrowed shares, and often give out more “locates” than they should, putting more shares in circulation than actually exist (as in this case). GameStop is exposing this systematic plundering of firms using phantom shares and locates, by groups of actors who now have the gall to complain that they’re the victims of a “get rich quick” scheme.
Short-sellers are not inherently antisocial. They can be beneficial to society, instrumental in rooting out corruption and waste in whole sectors like the subprime industry, or in single companies like Enron. Moreover, the wiping out of such funds isn’t necessarily to be cheered. Sorkin correctly notes that many hedge funds invest on behalf of entities like pension funds, though maybe they shouldn’t, given their high cost and relatively mediocre performance, as I’ve noted before.
However, that’s the point. The degree to which even the beneficial functions of short-sellers are cheered or not is dependent upon whose corruption they’re uncovering. Let the record show that when the S.E.C. imposed a ban on shorts of financial stocks in 2008, they routed short-sellers who were dead right about the insolubility of America’s banking sector. The state prevented their correct judgment about companies like Wachovia and Washington Mutual, whose stocks kept plunging even after the ban and went bust soon after.
The shorts were right about all the other banks, too. The Inspector General of the TARP, Neil Barofsky, eventually told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that 12 of the 13 biggest banks were on the brink of failure when they got saved — by the short ban, by emergency overnight grants of commercial bank licenses to companies that weren’t commercial banks, by the bailouts, by the subsequent avalanche of underwriting fees, and most of all, by the lies about all of the above.
The home of James “rude awakening” Gorman, Morgan Stanley, got its bank holding company license (and the lifesaving Fed credit lines that came with it) late on a Sunday night in September, 2008, because the firm couldn’t have opened its doors without it the next Monday morning. They’d have been blown to bits, by “fundamentals.” Instead, they got rescued, given a forever pass to keep feeding at the neck of society while claiming, falsely, to be not-failures and not-welfare recipients, better somehow than the “dumb money” they think should be theirs alone to manage.
The rank selectivity of this makes any moral argument against the GameStop revolt moot. There’s no legitimate cause here, just an assertion of exclusive rights to plunder, which will doubtless be exercised now in the form of bans, investigations, and increased barriers to market entry. Probably also, in the political spirit of our times, there will some form of speech crackdown on platforms like Reddit, to protect us from the mob.
About that: there are many making hay of a description found on a Subreddit, to the effect that wallstreetbets is “like 4Chan found a Bloomberg terminal.” A columnist at the Guardian, settling into the rhetorical line sure to find acceptance among the wine-and-MSNBC crowd, admitted to finding the rampaging-id dynamic on 4chan funny as a young person, but strange now to “witness a brief and regretful adolescent occupation re-emerge as a prominent cultural force.” The author wanted to admit to laughing at this “intentionally senseless” behavior, but ultimately decried the “transgressive attitudes” of the Redditors.
This is where society will ultimately come down, of course, uniting to denounce $GME as financial Trumpism, even though it actually comes closer to being an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street. It’s likely not any evil manipulation scheme, but ordinary people acting — out of self-interest, but also out of sheer enthusiasm for one of the best reasons to do just about anything, because you can — on a few simple, powerful observations.
They’ve seen first that our markets are basically fake, set up to artificially accelerate the wealth divide, and not in their favor. Secondly they see that the stock market, like the ballot box, remains one of the only places where sheer numbers still matter more than capital or connections. And they’re piling on, and it’s delicious, not so much because they’re right, but because the people running for cover are so wrong, and still can’t admit it.
Buy the ticket, take the ride, nitwits. If you earned anything, it’s this.
Bill Gates Aghast Over ‘Crazy And Evil Conspiracy Theories’ About He And Fauci, Hints At Social Media Censorship
Bill Gates is apparently shocked over ‘crazy and evil conspiracy theories’ which claim that he and Dr. Anthony Fauci are participating in a nefarious scheme to push vaccines, profit from the pandemic, and reduce the population.
In Wednesday comments to Reuters, Gates said that there are “millions of messages out there” targeting he and Fauci, and suggested that “social media companies” might be able to censor discussion on the topic.
“Nobody would have predicted that I and Dr. Fauci would be so prominent in really kind of evil theories about – did we create the pandemic, are we trying to profit from it? – and on and on,” said Gates, adding “We’re going to have to get educated about this over the next year and understand, how does it change people’s behavior?”
“How should we have minimized this, either working with the social media companies or explaining what we were up to in a better way?“
Gates’ motives have come under fire over his foundation’s 2019 participation in “Event 201“ – a collaboration between the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which simulated a global pandemic after a fictional coronavirus broke out among pigs in Brazil, before spreading to farmers. In the simulation, the virus infected the globe within six months, and killed 65 million people, triggering a global financial crisis. All of this took place just months before COVID-19 emerged.
In an April 2020 interview, Gates told the BBC: “Now here we are. We didn’t simulate this, we didn’t practice, so both the health policies and economic policies, we find ourselves in uncharted territory.”
In April 2018, Gates told the Massachusetts Medical Society that “millions could die” if the United States doesn’t prepare for a coming pandemic. Specifically, Gates said the U.S. government is falling short in preparing the nation and the world for the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.”
In 2017, Gates told the Munich Security Conference that world leaders should “imagine that somewhere in the world a new weapon exists or could emerge that is capable of killing millions of people, bringing economies to a standstill, and casting nations into chaos. If it were a military weapon, the response would be to do everything possible to develop countermeasures,” adding that a “sense of urgency is lacking” over biological threats.
And according to Robert F. Kennedy, Gates was involved in a Polio immunization program in India which paralyzed 490,000 children.
Promising his share of $450 million of $1.2 billion to eradicate Polio, Gates took control of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) which mandated up to 50 doses (Table 1) of polio vaccines through overlapping immunization programs to children before the age of five. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children beyond expected rates between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and asked Gates and his vaccine policies to leave India. NPAFP rates dropped precipitously.
India barred the Gates Foundation from funding part of its immunization program, citing concerns over ‘non-governmental organizations’ asserting control over decision making in key policy areas.
Gates has also opined on the need to control population growth – for which a plethora of theories exist involving vaccines. In 2012, Gates said: “The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. (…) And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.“
So, in case Gates is wondering just why people are skeptical over his push to vaccinate the world and take a key outside role in advising the Biden administration’s COVID-19 response, the above evidence may offer some clues.
What do these orders, or any of his other moves, tell us about the future plans of the recently “elected” administration? Nothing good, unfortunately.
1. VACCINATION PASSPORTS
I still remember people claiming the introduction of vaccination passports (or immunity passes or the like) was just a “conspiracy theory”, the paranoid fantasy of fringe “covidiots”. All the way back in December, when they were getting fact-checked by tabloid journalists who can’t do basic maths.
International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of the TSA), in coordination with any relevant international organizations, shall assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.
2. CABINET APPOINTMENTS
Biden’s cabinet is praised as the “most diverse” in history, but will hiring a few non-white people really change the decades-old policies of US Imperialism? It certainly doesn’t look like it.
His pick for Under Secretary of State is Victoria Nuland, a neocon warmonger and one of the masterminds of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. She is married to Robert Kagan, another neocon warmonger, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and one of the masterminds behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The incoming Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is also an inveterate US Imperialist, arguing for every US military intervention since the 1990s, and criticised Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria.
Biden’s pick for Defence Secretary is the first African-American ever appointed to this role, but former General Lloyd Austin is hardly going be some kind of “progressive” voice int his cabinet. He’s a career soldier who retired from the military in 2016 to join the board of Raytheon Technologies, an arms manufacturer and military contractor.
As “diverse” as this cabinet may be in skin colour or gender…there is most certainly no “diversity” of opinion or policy. There are very few new faces and no new thoughts.
So, it looks like we can expect more of the same in terms of foreign policy. A fact that’s already been displayed in…
3. IRAQ…
Despite heavy resistance from the military and Deep State, Donald Trump wanted to end the war in Iraq and pledged to pull American troops out of the country. This was one of Trump’s more popular policies, and during the campaign Biden made no mention of intending to reverse that decision.
The Iraqi parliament has made it clear it wants the US to take its military off their soil, so any American forces on Iraqi land are technically there illegally in contravention of international law. But that never bothered them before.
4. …AFGHANISTAN…
Turns out the US can’t withdraw from Afghanistan either. Last February Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that all US personnel would leave Afghanistan by May 2021.
Joe Biden has already committed to “reviewing” this deal. Sec. Blinken was quoted as saying that Biden’s admin wanted:
to end this so-called forever war [but also] retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place”.
As a great man once said, nothing someone says before the word “but” really counts. The US will not be withdrawing from Afghanistan, and if there is any public pressure to do so, the government will simply claim the Taliban broke their side of the deal first, or stage a few terrorist attacks.
5. …AND SYRIA
Far from simply continuing the on-going wars, there are already signs Biden’s “diverse” team will look to escalate, or even start, other conflicts.
Syria was another theatre of war from which Donald Trump wanted to extricate the United States, unilaterally ordering all US troops from the country in late 2019.
We now know the Pentagon ignored those orders. They lied to the President, telling Trump they had followed his orders…but not withdrawing a single man. This organized mutiny against the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces was played for a joke in the media when it was finally revealed.
There will be no need for any such duplicity now Biden is in the Oval Office, he was a vocal critic of the decision to withdraw, claiming it gave ISIS a “new lease of life”. Indeed, within two days of his being sworn in a column of American military vehicles was seen entering Syria from Iraq.
6. DOMESTIC TERRORISM
We called this before the inauguration. They made it just too obvious. Before the dirty footprints had been cleaned from Nancy Pelosi’s desk it was clear where it was all going.
Direct the Justice Department, FBI and National Security Council to execute a top-down approach prioritizing domestic terrorism; pass new domestic terrorism legislation; or do a bit of both as Democrats propose a crack down on social media giants like Facebook for algorithms that promote conspiracy laden posts.
That last part is key. The “crack down on social media” part, because the anti-Domestic Terrorism legislation will likely be very focused on communication and so-called “misinformation”.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has publicly called for a congressional panel to “rein in” the media:
We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,”
And who will be the target of these crack downs and new legislations? Well, according John Brennan (ex-head of the CIA and accomplished war criminal), practically anybody:
.@JohnBrennan: Biden intel community “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” pic.twitter.com/SjVXWhPhR8
They’re casting a wide net. Expect “extremist”, “bigot” and “racist” to be just a few of the words which have their meanings totally revised in the next few months. “Conspiracy theorist” will be used a lot, too.
Further, they are moving closer and closer toward the “anyone who disagrees with us is literally insane” model. With many articles actually talking about “de-programming” Trump voters. The Atlantic suggests “mental hygiene” would cure the MAGA problem.
Again AOC is on point here, clearly auditioning for the role of High Inquisitor, claiming that the new Biden government needs to fund programs that “de-radicalise” “conspiracy theorists” who are on the “spectrum of radicalisation”.
* * *
As I said at the beginning, it’s been a busy week for Joe Biden, but you can sum up his biggest policy plans in one short sentence: More violence overseas, less tolerance of dissent and strict clampdowns on “misinformation”.
Earlier this week, I blogged about California’s decision to lift the regional orders shutting down indoor worship. Now both South Bay and Harvest Rock churches are back to the Supreme Court. Both cases are fully briefed. I had anticipated that California would argue that the dispute were moot, in the never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. I was wrong. California concedes that the restrictions are still in effect.
The very end of California’s opposition brief is something of a proffer to the Court–if you rule against us, please leave the percentage restrictions in place.
Should this Court disagree, however, it would be critical for it to tailor any injunction and preserve some latitude for state public health officials to limit the number of people attending large and communal gatherings indoors, in order to mitigate the virus’s spread. Cf. Roman Catholic Diocese, 141 S.Ct. at 68 (“[W]e should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area.”). The court of appeals has already enjoined the numerical capacity limitations in Tiers 2 and 3, South Bay App. A 47-49, and this Court has recognized that, even with those caps, the limitations in Tiers 2 through 4 are “far” less restrictive than the New York restrictions that were enjoined in Roman Catholic Diocese, 141 S.Ct. at 67 & n.2.57 While the State firmly believes that the Tier 1 restrictions are constitutional and critical to preventing excessive spread of the virus, if the Court were to enjoin those restrictions, it should leave the percentage capacity restrictions in Tiers 2 through 4 in effect, and specify that the State may impose the Tier 2 percentage capacity limitations on counties in Tier 1. Cf. Roman Catholic Diocese, 141 S.Ct. at 68 (leaving in place proportional capacity limitation). It would also be critical to allow the State to continue imposing requirements such as “social distancing, wearing masks, leaving doors and windows open, forgoing singing, and disinfecting spaces between services.” Id. at. 69 (Gorsuch, J., concurring).
Given this posture, Chief Justice Roberts will have an opportunity to rule on a case that is not moot. Justice Breyer will be in a tough spot, as he was sympathetic to the arguments presented in Diocese of Brooklyn. Where will Justice Kagan go?
I also commend the Becket Fund for flagging Governor Newsom’s “bait-and-switch”:
California officials told reporters by at least the morning of January 22— well before the Ninth Circuit panel issued its decision—that it had ICU data it was not sharing with the public, again because it would “mislead.” Don Thompson, “It’s a secret: California keeps key virus data from public,” ABC News (Jan. 22, 2021), available at https://ift.tt/3j3y0tw. After receiving sharp criticism from academic epidemiologists—including from Dr. George Rutherford, one of California’s own declarants in the Harvest Rock case—California officials decided over the weekend to release the data. Ibid. As it happened, that data showed a massive improvement in California’s ICU capacity, including in Southern California. Yet for some reason, California did not share this information with the South Bay panel, which had been led to believe that the ICU capacity metric was far worse than it actually was. By Monday, California wasn’t even taking ICU capacity into account in determining what activities would or would not be allowed. See State of California, Blueprint for a Safer Economy, https://ift.tt/3crXYpg (“Every county in California is assigned to a tier based on its test positivity and adjusted case rate.”). In situations of information asymmetry, courts can be tempted to defer completely to the assertions of government officials. But where core First Amendment rights are at stake—and where no other state in a similar situation has imposed the “draconian” measures California has—courts must be willing to look behind the curtain. Harvest Rock Church, 2021 WL 235640 at *1, *3 (O’Scannlain, J., concurring). Cf. Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of U.S., Inc., 466 U.S. 485, 500–501 (1984) (appellate courts have duty of independent review in First Amendment cases). California’s deliberate withholding of information is another reason it cannot meet its burdens of proof and persuasion on strict scrutiny.
We should get a ruling in the next week or two.
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What do these orders, or any of his other moves, tell us about the future plans of the recently “elected” administration? Nothing good, unfortunately.
1. VACCINATION PASSPORTS
I still remember people claiming the introduction of vaccination passports (or immunity passes or the like) was just a “conspiracy theory”, the paranoid fantasy of fringe “covidiots”. All the way back in December, when they were getting fact-checked by tabloid journalists who can’t do basic maths.
International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of the TSA), in coordination with any relevant international organizations, shall assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.
2. CABINET APPOINTMENTS
Biden’s cabinet is praised as the “most diverse” in history, but will hiring a few non-white people really change the decades-old policies of US Imperialism? It certainly doesn’t look like it.
His pick for Under Secretary of State is Victoria Nuland, a neocon warmonger and one of the masterminds of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. She is married to Robert Kagan, another neocon warmonger, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and one of the masterminds behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The incoming Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is also an inveterate US Imperialist, arguing for every US military intervention since the 1990s, and criticised Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria.
Biden’s pick for Defence Secretary is the first African-American ever appointed to this role, but former General Lloyd Austin is hardly going be some kind of “progressive” voice int his cabinet. He’s a career soldier who retired from the military in 2016 to join the board of Raytheon Technologies, an arms manufacturer and military contractor.
As “diverse” as this cabinet may be in skin colour or gender…there is most certainly no “diversity” of opinion or policy. There are very few new faces and no new thoughts.
So, it looks like we can expect more of the same in terms of foreign policy. A fact that’s already been displayed in…
3. IRAQ…
Despite heavy resistance from the military and Deep State, Donald Trump wanted to end the war in Iraq and pledged to pull American troops out of the country. This was one of Trump’s more popular policies, and during the campaign Biden made no mention of intending to reverse that decision.
The Iraqi parliament has made it clear it wants the US to take its military off their soil, so any American forces on Iraqi land are technically there illegally in contravention of international law. But that never bothered them before.
4. …AFGHANISTAN…
Turns out the US can’t withdraw from Afghanistan either. Last February Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that all US personnel would leave Afghanistan by May 2021.
Joe Biden has already committed to “reviewing” this deal. Sec. Blinken was quoted as saying that Biden’s admin wanted:
to end this so-called forever war [but also] retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place”.
As a great man once said, nothing someone says before the word “but” really counts. The US will not be withdrawing from Afghanistan, and if there is any public pressure to do so, the government will simply claim the Taliban broke their side of the deal first, or stage a few terrorist attacks.
5. …AND SYRIA
Far from simply continuing the on-going wars, there are already signs Biden’s “diverse” team will look to escalate, or even start, other conflicts.
Syria was another theatre of war from which Donald Trump wanted to extricate the United States, unilaterally ordering all US troops from the country in late 2019.
We now know the Pentagon ignored those orders. They lied to the President, telling Trump they had followed his orders…but not withdrawing a single man. This organized mutiny against the Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces was played for a joke in the media when it was finally revealed.
There will be no need for any such duplicity now Biden is in the Oval Office, he was a vocal critic of the decision to withdraw, claiming it gave ISIS a “new lease of life”. Indeed, within two days of his being sworn in a column of American military vehicles was seen entering Syria from Iraq.
6. DOMESTIC TERRORISM
We called this before the inauguration. They made it just too obvious. Before the dirty footprints had been cleaned from Nancy Pelosi’s desk it was clear where it was all going.
Direct the Justice Department, FBI and National Security Council to execute a top-down approach prioritizing domestic terrorism; pass new domestic terrorism legislation; or do a bit of both as Democrats propose a crack down on social media giants like Facebook for algorithms that promote conspiracy laden posts.
That last part is key. The “crack down on social media” part, because the anti-Domestic Terrorism legislation will likely be very focused on communication and so-called “misinformation”.
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has publicly called for a congressional panel to “rein in” the media:
We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,”
And who will be the target of these crack downs and new legislations? Well, according John Brennan (ex-head of the CIA and accomplished war criminal), practically anybody:
.@JohnBrennan: Biden intel community “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” pic.twitter.com/SjVXWhPhR8
They’re casting a wide net. Expect “extremist”, “bigot” and “racist” to be just a few of the words which have their meanings totally revised in the next few months. “Conspiracy theorist” will be used a lot, too.
Further, they are moving closer and closer toward the “anyone who disagrees with us is literally insane” model. With many articles actually talking about “de-programming” Trump voters. The Atlantic suggests “mental hygiene” would cure the MAGA problem.
Again AOC is on point here, clearly auditioning for the role of High Inquisitor, claiming that the new Biden government needs to fund programs that “de-radicalise” “conspiracy theorists” who are on the “spectrum of radicalisation”.
* * *
As I said at the beginning, it’s been a busy week for Joe Biden, but you can sum up his biggest policy plans in one short sentence: More violence overseas, less tolerance of dissent and strict clampdowns on “misinformation”.
Earlier this week, I blogged about California’s decision to lift the regional orders shutting down indoor worship. Now both South Bay and Harvest Rock churches are back to the Supreme Court. Both cases are fully briefed. I had anticipated that California would argue that the dispute were moot, in the never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. I was wrong. California concedes that the restrictions are still in effect.
The very end of California’s opposition brief is something of a proffer to the Court–if you rule against us, please leave the percentage restrictions in place.
Should this Court disagree, however, it would be critical for it to tailor any injunction and preserve some latitude for state public health officials to limit the number of people attending large and communal gatherings indoors, in order to mitigate the virus’s spread. Cf. Roman Catholic Diocese, 141 S.Ct. at 68 (“[W]e should respect the judgment of those with special expertise and responsibility in this area.”). The court of appeals has already enjoined the numerical capacity limitations in Tiers 2 and 3, South Bay App. A 47-49, and this Court has recognized that, even with those caps, the limitations in Tiers 2 through 4 are “far” less restrictive than the New York restrictions that were enjoined in Roman Catholic Diocese, 141 S.Ct. at 67 & n.2.57 While the State firmly believes that the Tier 1 restrictions are constitutional and critical to preventing excessive spread of the virus, if the Court were to enjoin those restrictions, it should leave the percentage capacity restrictions in Tiers 2 through 4 in effect, and specify that the State may impose the Tier 2 percentage capacity limitations on counties in Tier 1. Cf. Roman Catholic Diocese, 141 S.Ct. at 68 (leaving in place proportional capacity limitation). It would also be critical to allow the State to continue imposing requirements such as “social distancing, wearing masks, leaving doors and windows open, forgoing singing, and disinfecting spaces between services.” Id. at. 69 (Gorsuch, J., concurring).
Given this posture, Chief Justice Roberts will have an opportunity to rule on a case that is not moot. Justice Breyer will be in a tough spot, as he was sympathetic to the arguments presented in Diocese of Brooklyn. Where will Justice Kagan go?
I also commend the Becket Fund for flagging Governor Newsom’s “bait-and-switch”:
California officials told reporters by at least the morning of January 22— well before the Ninth Circuit panel issued its decision—that it had ICU data it was not sharing with the public, again because it would “mislead.” Don Thompson, “It’s a secret: California keeps key virus data from public,” ABC News (Jan. 22, 2021), available at https://ift.tt/3j3y0tw. After receiving sharp criticism from academic epidemiologists—including from Dr. George Rutherford, one of California’s own declarants in the Harvest Rock case—California officials decided over the weekend to release the data. Ibid. As it happened, that data showed a massive improvement in California’s ICU capacity, including in Southern California. Yet for some reason, California did not share this information with the South Bay panel, which had been led to believe that the ICU capacity metric was far worse than it actually was. By Monday, California wasn’t even taking ICU capacity into account in determining what activities would or would not be allowed. See State of California, Blueprint for a Safer Economy, https://ift.tt/3crXYpg (“Every county in California is assigned to a tier based on its test positivity and adjusted case rate.”). In situations of information asymmetry, courts can be tempted to defer completely to the assertions of government officials. But where core First Amendment rights are at stake—and where no other state in a similar situation has imposed the “draconian” measures California has—courts must be willing to look behind the curtain. Harvest Rock Church, 2021 WL 235640 at *1, *3 (O’Scannlain, J., concurring). Cf. Bose Corp. v. Consumers Union of U.S., Inc., 466 U.S. 485, 500–501 (1984) (appellate courts have duty of independent review in First Amendment cases). California’s deliberate withholding of information is another reason it cannot meet its burdens of proof and persuasion on strict scrutiny.
We should get a ruling in the next week or two.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3ai5eBs
via IFTTT
