Month: February 2023

Alabama Set To Resume Executions. But Will They Stop Botching Them?


Alabama Governor Kay Ivey with a red background

After calling for a moratorium on executions in the state, Alabama’s governor has announced that executions will resume, following the completion of an investigation into the state’s execution procedures. However, critics have raised concerns with the quality of the investigation, citing a lack of transparency—and some troubling legal developments—that make it likely that Alabama will soon return to botching executions.

Last Friday, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (R) announced that the state would resume executions, following the results of an investigation into the state’s execution practices. The investigation was ordered in November, following a series of high-profile botched executions in the state. While Ivey praised the investigation, stating on February 24 that it would allow the state to “resume our duty of carrying out lawful death sentences,” critics took swift concern with the investigation—citing its lack of transparency.

“Far too many Alabama families have waited far too long—often for decades—to obtain justice for the loss of a loved one and to obtain closure for themselves,” wrote Gov. Ivey on Friday. “This brief pause on executions was necessary to make sure we can successfully deliver that justice and that closure.”

The investigation was carried out by officials in the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), rather than an independent agency. ADOC didn’t make the full results of its investigation public, instead simply releasing a two-page letter to the governor which loosely described the changes the agency plans to undertake.

In the letter, John Q. Hamm, the Department’s commissioner, makes a vague commitment to increase medical staff, writing that ADOC will “add to its pool of available medical personnel for executions,” though the letter doesn’t describe what qualifications new medical personnel will be required to have, and if more medical staff will be involved in the execution process. Hamm also noted that the state has carried out multiple “rehearsals” of the execution process “to ensure that our staff members are well-trained and prepared to perform their duties during the execution process.”

Most troublingly, though not surprisingly, Hamm praised a recent change to the state’s execution procedures granted by the state Supreme Court. Last month, it granted an amendment to the state’s execution rules, allowing the state to choose a “time frame” in which an inmate can be executed, rather than a set 24-hour period. This change appears to be motivated by the state’s failed attempts to execute inmates Kenneth Eugene Smith, and Alan Eugene Miller as staff was unable to place the IV necessary to begin the lethal injection process before midnight on this execution date.

Hamm describes how this change will make it easier to limit inmates’ ability to mount legal challenges to their executions, writing that “this change will make it harder for inmates to ‘run out the clock’ with last-minute appeals and requests for stays of execution.”

In fact, Hamm’s letter consistently used language that characterized legal appeals of death sentences as morally suspect, writing that “death row inmates will continue seeking to evade their lawfully imposed death sentences,” despite minor policy changes. Ivey also deployed this framing of inmates’ Constitutional rights to appeal their sentences, writing on Friday that “death-row inmates will continue doing everything in their power to evade justices.”

This framing—as well as the lack of transparency—has sparked concern among critics, who argue that, despite the pretense of an investigation, the state is doing little to meaningfully address its botched execution problem.

“No one buys this sham of a review,” wrote Josh Moon, a reporter at the Alabama Political Reporter. “And the reason we don’t buy it is because we all have functioning brains. And those functioning brains tell us that you can’t repeatedly botch executions—and botch them because you’re repeatedly failing to accomplish some of the simplest tasks related to that execution—and not have way bigger issues than needing to practice more.”

The post Alabama Set To Resume Executions. But Will They Stop Botching Them? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Ex-Lawmakers, Socialist City Councilmember Fight Putting New Housing on Shuttered Denver Golf Course


Denver golf course superimposed on the planned Park Hill development

As housing costs mount in cities across the country, an increasingly popular idea is converting urban golf courses into new homes. On paper, it seems like a great plan.

Golf courses often take up a tremendous amount of prime real estate for a sport only few people play. Meanwhile, developers and policy makers alike are keen to site new housing on land that doesn’t involve the expensive and often politically fraught prospect of tearing down existing homes or businesses.

But the idea of repurposing putting greens for people is easier said than done, as evidenced by a bitter, years-long battle over the redevelopment of a private golf course in Denver, Colorado.

In Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood, sits a shuttered 155-acre private 18-hole golf course that hasn’t had a game played on it since 2018. The owner of the site, real estate company Westside, would like to turn the disused course into a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood featuring thousands of new homes, businesses, and an 80-acre public park.

Doing so, they say, will help ease Denver’s ease mounting housing affordability pressures while also gifting the city what would be Denver’s fourth largest park. One 2022 report found that the Denver metro area had produced 69,000 fewer units than it needed.

“We have an actual plan with clarity around what we’re going to do and commitments in terms of community benefits and a financing mechanism to do that,” says Kenneth Ho, a principal at Westside.

It’s a plan that’s won the support of local YIMBY activists, affordable housing developers like Habitat for Humanity, and a majority of the Denver City Council.

“It’s an abandoned golf course right now,” says Tobin Stone, an activist with the housing advocacy YIMBY Denver. “The working class cannot afford to live in Denver right now. The best thing we can do is approve every big development that comes before us.”

But not everyone is so keen on big development.

Opposing Westside’s project is a motley crew of neighborhood activists, former Democratic lawmakers, and Denver’s one socialist city councilmember. All are fighting tooth and nail to stop new housing from popping up on the site. Instead, they’re demanding that all the golf course land, instead of a mere majority of it, remain as open space.

“The environmental impact of developing on green space instead of walking across the street and developing those hundreds of acres made no sense whatsoever,” Harry Doby, who resides near the Park Hill site and is an activist with the group Save Open Spaces (SOS) Denver.

Come April, city voters will decide in a referendum whether the Park Hill golf course will be redeveloped into homes and businesses, or if it remains a disused golf course.

Supporters and opponents are both hoping it will be the last word in a fight over the golf course’s future that’s been raging since 2019.

It was that year that Westside purchased the property. The plan had always been to transform the site into a mixed-use development in a rapidly growing area of Denver. Over the course of the next three years, it worked closely with the city government to hash out a detailed development plan for the site.

Their vision is to turn 55 acres of the 155-acre public golf course into 3,200 units of housing plus commercial and retail space. At least a quarter of the new homes, per Westside’s development agreement with the city, will have to be income-restricted units offered at below-market rates.

Westside is also agreeing to donate 80 acres of the site to the city for use as a public park. The remaining acreage, they say, will be kept as non-park open space.

The one major roadblock to Westside’s plans is a 25-year-old conservation easement. In 1997, Denver paid the former owner of the site, Clayton Trust, $2 million to agree to keep the land as a golf course.

Putting new housing on the Park Hill site requires the easement to be lifted.

Westside’s efforts to eliminate it have kicked up a storm of controversy from neighbors who’ve made a panoply of arguments against building on the old golf course.

Doby argues that developing the Park Hill site will be a huge loss for the environment. “In a climate crisis, in a heat island with a deficit of trees, you don’t cut them down and build on top of it. Not when you have alternatives that are equal and better,” he says, saying development would be more appropriate on nearby industrial properties.

These arguments have resonated with current and former elected officials and the city’s major daily newspaper.

Denver City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has also criticized Westside’s development in various venues for its alleged environmental harms and for spurring gentrification.

The Denver Post has also come out against the project in a recent editorial in which it argued the city’s plan to lift the easement amounted to a “sweetheart deal” for Westside. The added development potential would massively increase the value of the company’s land far in excess of the community benefits they’ve agreed to provide, argues the Post.

It’s an argument that ignores the communitywide benefits of adding housing to the city. By the Post‘s logic, the city also massively underpaid the former Park Hill owner to accept the conservation easement given how much development potential it cost them.

Nearly a dozen former Democratic state legislators and former city elected officials have come out against the project as well.

Those former officials have joined as plaintiffs in two separate lawsuits filed by SOS Denver. Both suits argue that a court order is required to dissolve the Park Hill conservation easement, and that city actions preparing for development on the site are therefore illegal.

The first such lawsuit was quickly dismissed in early 2022, with a Denver District Court judge ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing and a court order is not in fact required to lift the easement covering Park Hill.

SOS Denver’s second, very similar lawsuit, which is again joined by several former elected officials, was filed two weeks ago. The plaintiffs are being represented by Tierney Lawrence Stiles, LLC, a self-described “progressive” law firm that specializes in representing nonprofits.

While critics of the Park Hill development have so far failed in court and at city hall, they have had more luck at the ballot box.

In 2021, SOS Denver placed an initiative on the Denver ballot that would require the lifting of conservation easements to be put to a public vote. It passed with an overwhelming 64 percent of the vote. A Westside-backed ballot initiative that would have effectively exempted their property from this referendum requirement failed by a similarly wide margin.

In late January 2023, the Denver City Council considered whether to approve Westside’s Park Hill project and send the issue to voters. It became a heated clash of visions between supporters and critics of the development.

Opponents re-upped their arguments that the city would be losing irreplaceable open space by moving ahead with the development, all just to placate a wealthy developer.

“No one is talking about how potentially 10,000 new residents will impact traffic and quality of life,” said one opponent. Westside’s promise to keep half the site as open space “would be like living with half a lung,” said another.

“See if you see anyone tonight say ‘gosh I can’t wait for 12-story buildings across from my house’,” said one project opponent during the hearing. “I can’t wait for 12-story buildings to be honest,” Stone shot back during his time at the mic in a now-viral Twitter exchange.

Other project supporters argued that building housing for people should be the city’s priority, not preserving open space. “I hear people talking about birds. I love birds. But they’re not more important than putting roofs over people’s heads,” said one woman in attendance.

These arguments proved convincing enough for most of the city council. The three holdouts included councilmembers Amanda Sandoval, Paul Kashmann, and CdeBaca, the latter raising a long list of objections at the January hearing. Westside would build units too fast and exceed the infrastructure needed to support it, she argued. She also said Westside would build units too slowly, meaning that rapidly rising incomes would erode the affordability gains from the project’s income-restricted units (whose rents and sale prices are based on the area’s median income).

“This is absolutely not a rezoning I would support even if the affordably is real,” CdeBaca concluded.

Those complaints notwithstanding, the city council voted 10–3 to put the Park Hill development before voters.

Doby, who is also treasurer of the “no” campaign, says he expects voting residents will see the Westside project for the raw deal that it is and shoot it down.

“It’s a bad deal for Denver because we’re giving away what we now know is more like 100 and something million dollars of development rights,” he says. “We get no compensation for that other than ‘oh great you can rent an apartment on what used to be a golf course.'”

Ho counters that if their development plan is rejected, the land will just go back to being a closed golf course that benefits no one.

“If we go back to a golf course, no one would be able to access it without paying a fee and walking around hitting a white ball toward a hole,” he says.

The post Ex-Lawmakers, Socialist City Councilmember Fight Putting New Housing on Shuttered Denver Golf Course appeared first on Reason.com.

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Corporations Embracing ESG Must Lose Their Legal Protection

Corporations Embracing ESG Must Lose Their Legal Protection

Authored by Bruce Abramson via RealClear Wire,

ESG, an acronym for Environmental, Social, and Governance, is everywhere. If you work for, advise, invest in, regulate, study, or otherwise care about one or more corporations, you’ve likely encountered the term. Consultancies, banks, investment funds, managers, governments, and international organizations trip over themselves touting their ESG scores and credentials.

So what is ESG, and why should we care?

Though the term calls for incorporating concern with global warming (“E”), systemic racism (“S”), and other “woke” priorities into corporate governance (“G”), specifics can be elusive. The basic effect, however, is clear. ESG’s redefinition of “the corporation” threatens to undermine the stock market, the global economy, and large swathes of American law.

Its radicalism is hardly coincidental. ESG is an outgrowth of “stakeholder capitalism,” a theory first forwarded decades ago as an alternative to “shareholder capitalism.” Its earliest advocates thought that corporations whose sole purpose is to serve their owners—or shareholders—are cold and uncaring. Shouldn’t corporations also care about their employees, customers, neighbors, and all others whose lives they touch?

Under stakeholder capitalism, those people would gain a say over corporate decision-making. Under ESG, if all human activity affects problems like climate change and systemic racism, then all corporate decisions should incorporate such concerns. Corporations operating under this stakeholder model are thus a different species from the familiar shareholder corporation.

But corporations don’t exist in nature, and they don’t evolve. They’re legal constructs, subject to certain assumptions and constraints. Their legal and financial treatment is designed to make sense given the consequent model of corporate behavior. Alter the conceptual model of the corporation, and the bases of both corporate law and corporate finance collapse.

Shareholder corporations answer to a single moral imperative: maximize shareholder value. Whether you like the implicit morality or not, the behavior of entities following a single rule is predictable. Every existing element of both corporate law and corporate finance assumes that corporations are predictable profit-maximizers.

Stakeholder corporations undermine that assumption. Though stakeholder corporations can return value to shareholders, any corporation claiming proudly to consider multiple potentially conflicting tradeoffs cannot be assumed to work toward maximizing shareholder value. Stakeholder corporations are more complex entities than shareholder corporations—requiring corresponding complexity in their legal and financial treatment.

The World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, arguably the most influential and prominent advocate of the ESG movement, was an early champion of stakeholder capitalism. In his recent Great Reset and Great Narrative books, Schwab shows how the stakeholder model, filtered through ESG, will centralize decision-making authority among a small cadre of corporate leaders and government bureaucrats—who, unencumbered by annoying shareholders or voters, will be free to focus on the common good.

For those of us who wish to prevent ESG’s takeover of the corporate landscape, corporate law offers a promising avenue of counterattack. The predictability of shareholder corporations earned them a simplified legal treatment subject to many helpful presumptions. Proud of their “evolved” ethical codes, stakeholder corporations have announced that such presumptions are misplaced.

Fair enough. Let the law take them at their word. Litigation and legislation must sever the legal treatment of stakeholder corporations from that of shareholder corporations.

Perhaps the cleanest—and potentially the most consequential—place to start is the Business Judgment Rule. This legal presumption allows every corporate defendant to arrive in the courtroom asserting that its decisions—including those that prove disastrous for shareholders—were made in the service of maximizing shareholder value. Plaintiffs—whether employees, shareholders, or business partners—complaining about corporate actions that failed to deliver bear the burden of proving bad faith, rather than mere errors in judgment.

The Business Judgment Rule makes sense when applied to shareholder corporations—but not to stakeholder corporations. Any corporation with an ESG statement has explicitly proclaimed that it will subvert some shareholder interests in favor of pressing environmental or social concerns.

The campaign to restore shareholder capitalism would snowball from there. Stakeholder corporations shorn of such legal benefits would sue the lawyers and consultants who guided them away from the legally beneficial shareholder model towards ESG—assuming only that even the most woke American corporations still value their own corporate interests. The legal and consulting classes will get the message.

ESG will persist as long as corporate leaders view it as cheap virtue signaling, would-be overlords see it as a path to power, and lawyers and consultants can milk it for revenues. The best way to defeat ESG is to rely on the same self-interest driving its current embrace: if the costs of ESG become exorbitant and obvious, the entire edifice will fall.

Like all utopian schemes, ESG is an attack on global freedom and prosperity. If you’re really dedicated to improving the lives of all stakeholders, you should work for an end to ESG.

Bruce Abramson, PhD, JD, is the author of five books, most recently “The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America” (RealClear Publishing, 2021). He is president of the strategic consultancy Informationism, Inc. and a director of the American Center for Education and Knowledge.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 13:30

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Brazilian President And WEF Member Lula Da Silva Pressures Population Into Total COVID Vaccination

Brazilian President And WEF Member Lula Da Silva Pressures Population Into Total COVID Vaccination

After three years of covid disinformation from governments and globalist institutions, western countries are finally starting to realize that the pandemic event was not much of a pandemic and that the majority of restrictions and mandates involved in the response had nothing to do with public health or safety.  The establishment failed to implement vaccine mandates and passports in the west, but that does not mean they have given up on the agenda in other parts of the world.  The nation of Brazil has become a prime target for further medical authoritarianism despite the fading mandate efforts in the US and Europe.

While data disproving the majority of covid claims is becoming widespread in North America, there is a fight brewing in South America to dismiss or censor scientific evidence and enforce vaccine requirements anyway.  To recap, the “conspiracy theorists” were right about everything. 

The lockdown mandates were useless.  The mask mandates were useless.  The death rate of covid has been exposed as fraudulent, with up to 70% of covid fatalities misdiagnosed by hospitals.  The rumors of covid induced heart failure have been debunked.  The claims of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” have been debunked as the majority of covid deaths today are among the vaccinated.  Natural immunity has been shown to be far superior to the vaccines.  The US government is now essentially admitting that covid most likely came from the Level 4 virology lab in Wuhan, China – The same lab where Anthony Fauci and the NIH funded gain of function research on coronaviruses.

Don’t show any of this evidence to Lula Da Silva, the highly controversial convicted criminal president of Brazil – He says it’s all “denialism” designed to convince the Brazilian populace to remain unprotected from covid.  Silva has made forced vaccination a centerpiece of his presidency, and his latest efforts smell of globalist policy influence.

Silva has launched a new covid vaccination initiative in 2023, thee years after the covid outbreak and more than a year after most other nations gave up trying to pressure the citizenry to comply.  The oddity of it is rooted in Brazil’s existing vaccine rate – According to “official data” Brazil already has an 80% vaccinated population.  If this is true, why is Silva still trying to force the other 20% into compliance?  In pure public health terms, Brazil has already achieved herd immunity (if the vaccines were actually effective as claimed).  It would appear another motive is afoot.  

Lula is a long time favorite associate of the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab.  Lula has attended the WEF for at least 20 years, and the think-tank gave him a “Global Statesman Award” in 2010.  The WEF has stated on numerous occasions that “vaccinating the entire world” using mRNA covid products is their goal.  

The WEF member was convicted on corruption charges in 2018 and was supposed to serve a 12 year sentence.  However, magically, the Brazilian Supreme Court reversed the prison sentence less than two years later.  A coordinated corporate media campaign designed to clean up Silva’s image was then enacted so that he could run for president yet again.  Silva claimed victory in the 2022 elections, though at least half of Brazil argues that the elections were rigged.

Ever since, Silva has made it his mission to vaccinate the whole of Brazil, using such measures as restricting access to welfare benefits for anyone that does not stay up-to-date on their boosters and parents that refuse to vaccinate their children. 

Silva’s go-to narrative is to shame Brazilians into submitting to the vaccine by suggesting they are putting their children and relatives at risk.  He claims that the vaccine is the “only guarantee of life.”  All the scientific evidence says otherwise.  With covid’s official median Infection Fatality Rate at 0.23% (even less when taking false positive deaths into account) covid is a non-issue for 99.8% of the public.  But if the goal is to test how far the population can be pushed to accept globalist covid rules, then evidence will not mean much.  

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 13:10

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Buttigieg’s Derailment: NTSB Exposes East Palestine Claim As “Misinformation”

Buttigieg’s Derailment: NTSB Exposes East Palestine Claim As “Misinformation”

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been repeatedly criticized for transportation problems, including the holiday pile up at our ports that slowed delivery of goods in December. He was also criticized for his response to the recent airport shutdown. I have not joined in that criticism because I am not sure that he has direct responsibility for some of these problems. However, Buttigieg recently raised a legal claim to blame the Trump Administration for the train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. The claim was not only manifestly false but Buttigieg knew or should have known it was false.

The implications are deeply disturbing.

When confronted with a disaster, Buttigieg not only made a false claim but attempted to weaponize a tragedy against political opponents.

That is a serious problem for a public figure and worthy of condemnation.

Buttigieg was criticized for his delay in responding publicly to the Ohio disaster and his even longer delay in going to the site. Again, while a politically tone deaf, I was not one of those critics. It is possible to respond to a tragedy without being at the scene. However, the Administration (including the President) were clearly losing ground in its response with many noting the absence of both the President and Transportation Secretary in Ohio after the wreck.

When Buttigieg finally made it to the scene, significant time had passed and many of the details were known publicly on the cause. Buttigieg presumably had even earlier and better information, including the statements of the train crew on the cause.

The crew of the freight train received a warning about an overheating wheel bearing and tried to slow the train in response. According to the report of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the wheel bearing was heating up for several miles before reaching 253 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the air temperature. The train engineer employed the brakes and the automatic braking system also activated, but fifty of the train’s 149 cars derailed with 11 carrying toxic chemicals.

Given his delay in visiting the site, Buttigieg had more information on the cause of the derailment than just the initial accounts. However, he falsely claimed that “we’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation,” and cited “the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015.”

This false claim was picked up by various pundits and politicians, including figures like Joy Behar on the The View. That included Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) who went to the Senate floor and declared that, in 2017,

“the Trump administration repealed requirements for an electronic braking system because, according to them, the safety benefits were not worth the cost. I think the people of East Palestine now know that analysis was wrong and that they’re suffering the consequences of rail companies putting profits over people.”

Yet, politicians and pundits often weaponize tragedy.

A Secretary of Transportation is needed to establish the facts and assure the public that safety, not politics, is driving decisionmaking during a crisis. Buttigieg clearly failed that test in spectacular fashion.

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chair Jennifer Homendy took the opposite approach and stated the facts dispassionately and without a political spin. She stated that the rule raised by Buttigieg would have applied only to trains classified as high-hazard flammable trains:  “This means even if the rule had gone into effect, this train wouldn’t have had ECP brakes.”

Homendy sounded more like a cabinet member than Buttigieg when she declared “Enough with the politics on this. I don’t understand why this has gotten so political. This is a community that is suffering. This is not about politics.” Homendy added that anyone who says otherwise is “spreading misinformation.”

Given this Administration’s long use of disinformation and misinformation as rationales for censorship, the statement was particularly poignant. Would the Biden Administration demand that Buttigieg be censored by social media in making this claim as it has done with conservative speakers or posters? After all, this was a false claim made on a current public health emergency.

Of course, I would not censor Buttigieg. It is sufficient (as shown this week) that free speech allows for good speech to counter bad speech. However, it is another example of how subjective censorship can be when you go into the business of barring views deemed disinformation.

Even The Washington Post called out the claims of Buttigieg. In a Monday column, Glenn Kessler stated

“We decided to examine every possible regulatory change made under Trump that could be related to the accident and assess whether it could have made an impact. From our analysis, none of the regulatory changes made during the Trump administration at this point can be cited as contributing to the accident.”

At a time of tragedy, presidents ideally try to rally a nation to a common cause and shared suffering. They do not always succeed. However, cabinet members are expected to show complete detachment from politics in dealing with tragedies to assure the public that public safety is not being balanced against political expediencies. That is why this false claim is so serious. One of the first major statements made by Buttigieg at the scene was to attack the former president and the expected opponent to President Biden in 2024.

Buttigieg went off the tracks with this political spin. He should apologize.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 12:50

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Kremlin: West Pumping Weapons Into Ukraine Could Bring ‘Apocalypse’

Kremlin: West Pumping Weapons Into Ukraine Could Bring ‘Apocalypse’

Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has sounded off in a new Russian media op-ed, warning the west of the dire, worst-case scenario that awaits if it keeps escalating its support to Ukrainian forces. 

His words published at the start of this week said the Western policy of arming Ukraine could lead to “apocalypse.” The former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the security council has never been shy about these types of warnings, frequently saying that nuclear war could result. The printed words also coincided with Janet Yellen’s Monday trip to Ukraine where she discussed $10 billion in new budgetary aid for Kiev, and announced the first $1.2 billion tranche.

Via AP

He also stressed in the new piece that the West’s policy is bent on blocking the possibility of peace negotiations. “One could continue to pump weapons into the neo-fascist Kiev regime and block any opportunity to revive negotiations,” Medvedev wrote for the newspaper Izvestiya.

“Our enemies are doing just that, not wanting to understand that their goals obviously lead to a total fiasco. Lose for everyone. Collapse. Apocalypse,” he added.

“When the former life will have to be forgotten for centuries, until the smoky blockages cease to emit radiation.” Thus his words clearly have in mind a ‘nuclear apocalypse’. 

His ominous words came within a week of President Putin declaring that Moscow has formally suspended participation in the New START nuclear treaty with the US. It is the last end of Cold War era treaty seeking to reduce, limit, and monitor the rival superpowers’ nuclear stockpiles. 

Putin has also lately described the proxy war in Ukraine as constituting an existential threat to Russia, saying his people’s very survival is on the line, and stressing Moscow won’t back down until its military objectives are achieved. 

But Russia’s declaration on the treaty is widely seen as temporary, with the US State Department days ago saying it’s ready to begin dialogue at any time, and conditioned on Russia’s readiness to deescalate.

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 12:30

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Biden Admin Proposes To Block Half Of Current Gas Range Models

Biden Admin Proposes To Block Half Of Current Gas Range Models

Authored by Allen Zhong via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

An efficiency proposal by the Department of Energy (DOE) would block half of current gas cooking appliances from the U.S. market, an analysis by the federal agency shows.

The DOE proposed a maximum annual gas consumption of 1,204 thousand British thermal units (kBtu), also known as the EL 2 standard, for all gas cooking tops. If that rule is finalized, only half of those appliances that are currently on the market would be able to meet the new standard.

The department “estimates that nearly half of the total gas cooking top market currently achieves EL 2 and therefore would not be impacted by the proposed standard, if finalized,” DOE stated in an updated analysis (pdf).

The department issued the updated analysis mainly because it excluded certain types of gas cooking tops in the previous analysis that was published on Feb. 1 (pdf).

The governmental agency includes gas cooking tops with high input rate (HIR) burners in the new analysis.

The market share of qualified products expands substantially because all products with HIR can meet the new standard, according to the DOE.

The new rule would take effect three years after it’s adopted.

The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) stated that it’s “very concerned” about the direction of the DOE.

“They have released the most stringent proposal for gas ranges, which only a sliver of the market can meet,” Jill Notini, industry spokesperson for AHAM, told The Epoch Times. “It’s very concerning what they’re doing with gas products. We believe that there should be consumer choice and that consumers should be able to make a decision on whether they would like to purchase a gas or electric product.

“Clearly, the Department of Energy’s intentions are to eliminate gas products from the market. And they should just say that instead of releasing a deceptive and flawed analysis to justify their proposal.”

AHAM, a trade association that represents the manufacturers of household appliances sold in the United States, doesn’t trust the DOE’s analysis and is carrying out its own analysis.

The results of the proposed regulation could be much worse than the DOE stated, according to the AHAM.

“What we believe is that products right now in the market would need significant redesign in order to meet the proposed levels,” Notini said.

Read more here…

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 12:10

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How Many Zoom Jobs Were Actually Useless?

How Many Zoom Jobs Were Actually Useless?

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Twitter watchers were stunned yesterday when Elon Musk canned another 10 percent of the Twitter workforce. He has now fired 3 of 4 employees that worked there before he took over. Imagine a thriving business tossing out 75 percent of a staff of 7,500! That alone should indicate that something had gone very wrong in the hiring process.

Is the site and service suffering? Not so far as users can tell. It seems like it works better than ever. The manipulative throttles are largely gone, though some still exist by deference to European rules. As a service overall, it has never been better. And there are new features being continually rolled out.

One feature that fascinates me is “Twitter Spaces.” Truly you can spend most any evening of the week listening and engaging with people based on topics in what is a very agile radio call-in show that works in real time. It’s startling to encounter simply because it’s self-policing: complete free speech but with a culture of civility and intelligence.

It’s truly addictive. To be sure, ad revenue is still behind and the idea of paid check marks and benefits for upgrades didn’t plug all the holes in the boat. But one can sense that the platform is inching its way toward profitability. There has been more in the way of development since Elon took over than in the three years prior.

Crucial to getting there finally is to cut ridiculous labor costs. That’s what this is about.

Among the terminations was the high-profile executive Esther Crawford, who famously slept on the floor as she worked after the first round of cuts.

How do we know she slept on the floor? Because she Tweeted out the picture. “Hey, get a picture of me sleeping on the floor and I’ll tweet it” ~ that’s a pretty weird way to go about gaining job security.

A much better way would be to prove your value to the firm. Along with 200 others, she apparently hasn’t done this, at least not in a way that justifies what are surely very high salaries. I don’t know for sure but one suspects that she isn’t unlike many people in her position, better at performing work than actually doing it.

Everyone knows the type. It might be typical of most workers in these sectors. They specialize in appearances rather than value creation. They rely mainly on their resumes and educational credentials and extract huge salaries with an implicit blackmail to their bosses that unless they earn top dollar, they’ll go to the competition.

It worked for many years. But the game seems to be up. A whole generation of the haut bourgeois professional class is being introduced to the cold waters of the capitalistic work ethic.

They never learned about this in school and the workplace heretofore hasn’t taught them.

Elon isn’t a ruthless man. Nor is he cruel. He’s a person who’s dealing with economic realities. Twitter was blown up wildly out of proportion with labor costs. So too with many of these tech companies that thrived so much in lockdowns. Even before the lockdowns, thanks to zero-interest rate policies by the Fed, it seemed to many in these sectors that there was truly no limit to the boom. They made the decision to hire their friends and friends of friends, seemingly without limit.

It was this period in which we saw the invention of a slew of management theories that we had never seen in the history of capitalism. We were told that the point of a company isn’t to sell stuff, do excellent work, and serve its stockholders. The point was to bolster highly politicized ideals that went under fancy-sounding acronyms like ESG and DEI.

It was also in this period that every job came with an endless slew of benefits, like unlimited time off for mental health. The idea of a Human Resources department with vast powers and budget was also invented, as a kind of courtroom of the workplace to which everyone could carry their grievances.

Workers in these low-show jobs began to tout their devotion to “work/life balance.” In case you don’t know, that means that the person doesn’t like work.

Then, there was the claim that young people aren’t seeking high salaries as such but rather experiences, and so employers had better comply and give plenty of both.

When the lockdowns came, for them it was just more of the same. Instead of goofing off at work—always preserving that balance!—they could goof off at home. That went on for two years.

To be sure, the life of Riley didn’t actually lead to happiness. We saw a slew of books appearing about the misery of corporate life, about bad bosses, and the lawsuits against anyone and everyone began to pile up. The corporate workplace became a cesspool of discontent and anger.

Why might this be? Because there’s something about knowing you’re useless that eats away at the human spirit. Laziness and subterfuge are actually not good for us, mentally or morally. Idle hands do the devil’s work, as they say. Indeed, it’s true for vast numbers of the overpaid millions who lost self-respect, skills, and even basic regard for others during this period.

Now, these companies inhabit a new economic environment. The Fed started working to cool inflation. But there was and is a problem. It isn’t as if they could take rates from 5 percent to 10 percent and thereby soak up some of the trillions in excess money floating around. They had to start at near-0 percent and get rates ahead of the pace at which the dollar was depreciating.

This has required engaging in the fastest rate of change in the history of modern interest-rate policy. And we are still not where we need to be with the terminal rate. But consider what this change did to the trajectory of capital in a macroeconomic sense. It drained it from the bloated capital goods industries promising profits in the very long term and rekindled interest in actual profits on the left side of the yield curve.

Everyone in the tech sector is today looking for the way forward on cost-cutting.

The labor sector is nowhere near purged enough. Elon’s strategy of firing 3 in 4 overpaid and spoiled people on the payroll has the attention of the world.

The costs of the lockdown period are truly astronomical in terms of lost productivity and talent. They set us far back as a civilization. But something similar can be said of zero-interest rate policies that began in 2008. They massively distorted production structures and turned an entire generation of otherwise intelligent workers into lazy drones for whom kvetching became their only skill.

This isn’t easily fixed. It will be many years before the work ethic comes back as a norm, if it ever does.

Final advice for workers in these sectors: Don’t expect that posting performative pictures of dedication on social media platforms is going to give you job security. The best job security now and in the future might be via the old-fashioned way: actual hard work that creates value for the firm and its owners and customers.

Read more here…

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 11:35

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Z9cBR3b Tyler Durden

Amazon Employees Can Now Borrow Against Their Stock To Buy Homes

Amazon Employees Can Now Borrow Against Their Stock To Buy Homes

Amazon employees will soon be able to pledge company shares when purchasing a home, under a new deal with digital lender Better.com, according to WSJ. 

Better announced a new program for Amazon employees called “Equity Locker,” allowing them to use stock as collateral for a down payment without selling. Previously, Amazon employees had to sell their equity to purchase a home. 

“At Better, our mission is to make homeownership cheaper, faster and easier for all Americans.

“Today, we are very excited to announce that we have created Equity Unlocker to help Amazon employees unlock their equity, their homes and their futures,” Better CEO and founder Vishal Garg said in a statement. 

Equity Locker is open to current and former Amazon employees in Florida, New York, and Washington state.

Garg said the homeownership process is “opaque and stressful.” Homeownership is challenging for many people with student debt, maxed-out credit cards, and limited savings. He said many companies provide their employees with equity over cash, adding to this problem.

“The status quo is broken.

 “Even though equity is a valuable asset, it is considered ineligible by most banks and financial institutions when calculating the necessary down payment on a home,” Garg said.

Better said, Equity Unlocker is non-mark-to-market and non-recourse, meaning the loan terms aren’t impacted by stock market volatility.

To account for the risk of the Amazon stock price falling, Better is going to charge between 25 and 250 basis points over the market rate for mortgages, depending on how a person’s down payment is structured. 

Nick Taylor, head of real estate at Better, said: 

“What we then do is we look at that pledge and we value the equity at 50% of the current share price. We look at the date that an offer is made on the home and we calculate what the share price is for Amazon that day.” 

… and what does this remind us of? Well, the return of “creative financing.” 

Recall high-net-worth individuals leveraging their stocks for personal loans when interest rates were at the zero lower bound. And in some cases, that was a bad idea. 

Take, for example, John Foley, the co-founder and former CEO of Peloton, who pledged his stock as collateral for personal loans during the Covid stock mania. As soon as the Federal Reserve lifted rates last year, growth stocks crashed, and Foley was slapped with repeated margin calls by Goldman Sachs. 

Lenders accepting stock as collateral for purchasing a home isn’t exactly what the Fed wants to see while trying to cool the housing market. 

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 11:15

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/8SDczfL Tyler Durden

Rand Paul Calls For Declassification Of COVID Lab-Leak Documents

Rand Paul Calls For Declassification Of COVID Lab-Leak Documents

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

Senator Rand Paul has demanded that the Biden Administration declassify documents purporting to show that The Energy Department concluded that the likely cause of the coronavirus pandemic was a lab leak in Wuhan.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“Classified documents leaked (they should be declassified!) showing scientists at DOE believe COVID leaked from Wuhan Lab,” Paul, who is now the ranking member of Senate Homeland Security Committee, tweeted along with a link to the Wall Street Journal story on the documents.

The revelation came in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The Energy Department conclusion adds to the State Department, the National Intelligence Council, and the FBI’s apparent agreement that the bio lab in Wuhan was the likeliest source of the outbreak.

Senator Josh Hawley also said Sunday that he intends to introduce legislation to declassify intelligence findings about the likely origin of the outbreak.

“The American people deserve the full truth about #COVID origins. No more whitewash. I will again introduce legislation to make the U.S. government’s intelligence reports on COVID more open to the public,” Hawley tweeted.  

Other Republicans have also called for a renewed focus on the origins of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday refused to say if the Biden administration will release an “unclassified version” of the Chinese lab leak assessment:

NSC spokesman John Kirby also refused to give direct answers:

Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/28/2023 – 10:55

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/63Nx7uR Tyler Durden