Former first lady and 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said Joe Biden shouldn’t concede the election because the final results of the election will likely drag out due to mail-in ballots.
“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually, I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton said in an interview on Tuesday.
“I think that [Republicans] have a couple of scenarios that they are looking toward. One is messing up absentee balloting. They believe that helps them so that they then get maybe a narrow advantage in the Electoral College on Election Day,” she claimed.
“So we’ve got to have a massive legal operation, and I know the Biden campaign is working on that.”
She went on:
“We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places,” Clinton said, urging people to become poll workers in November.
Hillary Clinton has some advice for Joe Biden: Don’t concede in a close race.
And even if you do concede, always blame the Russians?
President Donald Trump said Monday that mail-in voting access is a politically motivated plan hatched by Democrats.
“What they’re doing is using COVID to steal an election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention. “They’re using COVID to defraud the American people, all of our people, of a fair and free election. We can’t do that.”
“Eighty million mail-in ballots they’re working on, sending them out to people that didn’t ask for them,” Trump added. “And it’s not fair and it’s not right, and it’s not going to be possible to tabulate, in my opinion.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden accepts the Democratic presidential nomination during a speech delivered for the largely virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention from the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., on Aug. 20, 2020. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Some political observers have said that a winner of the presidential contest might not be declared on Election Day due to mail-in voting delays. The mail-in voting push is designed to curb the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.
Trump, in recent months, has criticized mail-in voting efforts, accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) earlier this week asserted in an interview that Trump is trying “to scare people from voting, to intimidate them by saying he’s going to have law enforcement people at the polls.”
“But ignore him,” she said, “because his purpose is to diminish the vote, to suppress the vote.”
Meanwhile, congressional lawmakers questioned Postmaster General Louis DeJoy about whether recent reforms at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) were political in nature.
“I am not engaged in sabotaging the election,” DeJoy told lawmakers. Last week, he announced that he would suspend some operational and organizational changes that he made, saying that he does not want to create the appearance of a conflict of interest.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YxPDsv Tyler Durden
Columbia Journalism Review Explains How The Gates Foundation Manipulates The Media Narrative Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2020 – 21:05
Most of the feature stories published by the Columbia Journalism Review, a mostly-digital biannual “magazine” published and edited by the Columbia School of Journalism and its staff, is sanctimonious media naval-gazing filtered through a lens of cryptomarxist propaganda, written by a seemingly endless procession of washed-up magazine writers.
But every once in a while, just like the NYT, Washington Post and CNN, even CJR gets it (mostly) right. And fortunately for us, one of those days arrived earlier this month, when the website published this insightful piece outlining the influence of the Gates Foundation on the media that covers it.
Most readers probably didn’t realize how much money the Gates Foundation spends backing even for-profit media companies like the New York Times and the Financial Times, some of the most financially successful legacy media products, thanks to their dedicated readerships. For most media companies, which don’t have the financial wherewithal of the two named above, the financial links go even deeper. Schwab opens with his strongest example: NPR.
LAST AUGUST, NPR PROFILED A HARVARD-LED EXPERIMENT to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to “break the cycle of poverty.” According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes—a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.
If you squint as you read the story, you’ll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll also see the editor’s note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.
NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.
And that speaks to a larger trend—and ethical issue—with billionaire philanthropists’ bankrolling the news. The Broad Foundation, whose philanthropic agenda includes promoting charter schools, at one point funded part of the LA Times’ reporting on education. Charles Koch has made charitable donations to journalistic institutions such as the Poynter Institute, as well as to news outlets such as the Daily Caller, that support his conservative politics. And the Rockefeller Foundation funds Vox’s Future Perfect, a reporting project that examines the world “through the lens of effective altruism”—often looking at philanthropy.
As philanthropists increasingly fill in the funding gaps at news organizations—a role that is almost certain to expand in the media downturn following the coronavirus pandemic—an underexamined worry is how this will affect the ways newsrooms report on their benefactors. Nowhere does this concern loom larger than with the Gates Foundation, a leading donor to newsrooms and a frequent subject of favorable news coverage.
It’s just the latest reminder that all of NPR’s reporting on the coronavirus and China is suspect due to its links to Gates and, by extension, the WHO. Back in April, we noted this piece for being an egregious example of a reporter failing to make all of the sources links to China explicitly clear. Though a few clues were included.
Of course, even CJR left out certain salient examples of the media’s penchant for protecting Gates. He was reportedly a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s, even reportedly maintaining ties after the deceased pedophile’s first stint in prison.
That photo never gets old.
Of course, the Gates Foundation is unusual in the level of heft it exerts, but it’s not alone. The Clinton Foundation has benefited from equally light-touch treatment from the mainstream press, if not more so. Little unflattering reporting was done on the Clinton Foundation until Steve Bannon helped Peter Schweizer produce “Clinton Cash”.
Read some more of the CJR piece below:
I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.
The foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders. A top-level finding: “There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review.” Notably, the study’s underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.
Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity. Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works.
During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.
In the same way that the news media has given Gates an outsize voice in the pandemic, the foundation has long used its charitable giving to shape the public discourse on everything from global health to education to agriculture—a level of influence that has landed Bill Gates on Forbes’s list of the most powerful people in the world. The Gates Foundation can point to important charitable accomplishments over the past two decades—like helping drive down polio and putting new funds into fighting malaria—but even these efforts have drawn expert detractors who say that Gates may actually be introducing harm, or distracting us from more important, lifesaving public health projects.
From virtually any of Gates’s good deeds, reporters can also find problems with the foundation’s outsize power, if they choose to look. But readers don’t hear these critical voices in the news as often or as loudly as Bill and Melinda’s. News about Gates these days is often filtered through the perspectives of the many academics, nonprofits, and think tanks that Gates funds. Sometimes it is delivered to readers by newsrooms with financial ties to the foundation.
The Gates Foundation declined multiple interview requests for this story and would not provide its own accounting of how much money it has put toward journalism.
In response to questions sent via email, a spokesperson for the foundation said that a “guiding principle” of its journalism funding is “ensuring creative and editorial independence.” The spokesperson also noted that, because of financial pressures in journalism, many of the issues the foundation works on “do not get the in-depth, consistent media coverage they once did.… When well-respected media outlets have an opportunity to produce coverage of under-researched and under-reported issues, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies in both the public and private sectors.”
As CJR was finalizing its fact check of this article, the Gates Foundation offered a more pointed response: “Recipients of foundation journalism grants have been and continue to be some of the most respected journalism outlets in the world.… The line of questioning for this story implies that these organizations have compromised their integrity and independence by reporting on global health, development, and education with foundation funding. We strongly dispute this notion.”
The foundation’s response also volunteered other ties it has to the news media, including “participating in dozens of conferences, such as the Perugia Journalism Festival, the Global Editors Network, or the World Conference of Science Journalism,” as well as “help[ing] build capacity through the likes of the Innovation in Development Reporting fund.”
The full scope of Gates’s giving to the news media remains unknown because the foundation only publicly discloses money awarded through charitable grants, not through contracts. In response to questions, Gates only disclosed one contract—Vox’s—but did describe how some of this contract money is spent: producing sponsored content, and occasionally funding “non-media nonprofit entities to support efforts such as journalist trainings, media convenings, and attendance at events.”
Over the years, reporters have investigated the apparent blind spots in how the news media covers the Gates Foundation, though such reflective reporting has waned in recent years. In 2015, Vox ran an article examining the widespread uncritical journalistic coverage surrounding the foundation—coverage that comes even as many experts and scholars raise red flags. Vox didn’t cite Gates’s charitable giving to newsrooms as a contributing factor, nor did it address Bill Gates’s month-long stint as guest editor for The Verge, a Vox subsidiary, earlier that year. Still, the news outlet did raise critical questions about journalists’ tendency to cover the Gates Foundation as a dispassionate charity instead of a structure of power.
Five years earlier, in 2010, CJR published a two-part series that examined, in part, the millions of dollars going toward PBS NewsHour, which it found to reliably avoid critical reporting on Gates.
In 2011, the Seattle Times detailed concerns over the ways in which Gates Foundation funding might hamper independent reporting…
Part of the “new normal” in America seems to be battle zones erupting across the nation. I’m not just talking about protests, but full-on sieges that may last for days, weeks, or even months. Some of these began due to acts of police brutality, while others have taken on lives of their own with wholesale looting and violence.
The United States of America we see today is incredibly different from the one we saw at the beginning of the year. We’ve been wracked by a pandemic, a subsequent economic catastrophe, and massive, widespread civil unrest.
Let’s take a look at these pockets of violent behavior. (WARNING: This article contains videos with violent content.)
Kenosha, Wisconsin
Yesterday, police officers shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, in the back as he tried to enter the vehicle where his children were. Blake is in stable condition and expected to live, but the shocking video has spread virally across social media. You can see the cell phone footage below. (Violence Warning)
Kenosha, a city in Wisconsin of about one hundred thousand people, quickly erupted in protest of the shooting. (Never think these things only happen in large cities – here is an inside look at the Ferguson riots of 2014.)
Protests, riots, and looting are expected to continue in Kenosha.
Denver, Colorado
Not only is Colorado currently beset by wildfires, but it’s also plagued with violent civil unrest. Over the weekend, rioters set out to destroy property in downtown Denver.
One Twitter user reported that a group of protesters had gathered in front of a police department in Denver, and that a van pulled up to hand out shields.
A protest in front of Denver Police headquarters is small but has escalated quickly. About 50 protesters are here right now, many with shields and helmets. A van pulled up and passed out shields to protesters. Protesters are at a standoff with a SWAT team now #9Newspic.twitter.com/XlzmcenfG9
The Denver “protesters” called for the abolition of police.
A group of about 40 people protested outside the Denver Police Department headquarters Saturday night and marched through streets in the area, blocking traffic. Some clashed with officers, set fires and broke windows…
…Chemical agents were deployed to control the crowd and eight people were taken into custody…
…Copter4 was over 13th and Delaware when people in the group were breaking windows.
People in the group set two small fires, which were quickly extinguished. (source)
Portland, Oregon
Riots have been ongoing in Portland for months, and this weekend, several notable events occurred.
On Saturday, rioters fought one another in the streets.
Protesters at Portland rallies to show support for police and President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign engaged in physical combat repeatedly with counterprotesters Saturday without police intervention. Members of the chaotic crowd used an array of weapons, including baseball bats and firearms to beat and threaten those they opposed…
…Pro-Trump demonstrators, people carrying shields with references to the QAnon conspiracy theory and members of the Proud Boys — a self-described chauvinist group that regularly engages in violence — all gathered around noon, some carrying rifles…
…Counterprotesters from anti-fascist groups like Popular Mobilization PDX also gathered Saturday, and the two groups quickly began shouting at each other and engaging in tense, face-to-face confrontations in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center.
Within an hour of meeting, protesters began to push each other and throw objects. Some demonstrators on the pro-police side fired paintball guns and deployed pepper spray on counterdemonstrators. Other protesters used baseball bats. Many people wore helmets and body armor as they punched, kicked and tore at each other. (source)
This isn’t just a few people yelling and chanting. This is outright fighting – physical violence.
Conservative rioters left the area in the afternoon, but the remaining rioters continued to become increasingly violent into the night until teargas was released to disperse crowds.
The police did not declare an event because they “didn’t have the resources to handle one.”
In a press release distributed Saturday afternoon, Portland police said its officers did not intervene to stop the fighting because those involved “willingly” engaged, its forces were stretched too thin from policing 80+ nights of protests, and the bureau didn’t feel the clashes would last that long.
“Each skirmish appeared to involve willing participants and the events were not enduring in time, so officers were not deployed to intervene,” the release states. (source)
On Sunday night, the NY Post reported that rioters set fire to a police precinct.
Black Lives Matter militants set fire to a police station in Portland Sunday night during yet another night of violence in the Oregon city.
The march on the Portland Police Bureau’s north precinct had already been declared an unlawful assembly as police say they were pelted with “rocks and bottles” and had “powerful green lasers” pointed at them.
But a mob of at least 300 continued to advance despite repeated warnings by police — and lit an awning on the precinct ablaze… (source)
The fire was extinguished without injuries.
A week ago, a man was seriously injured when he was pulled from his vehicle and brutally attacked during an “otherwise peaceful demonstration.”
A crowd gathered around him and repeatedly punched and kicked him in the head until he was bloody.
Witnesses told police the man had been helping a transgender female who had an item of hers stolen, and he was dragged out of the car and beat by nine or 10 people. When police arrived the man was unconscious.
Portland police said their response to the assault was “complicated by a hostile group.” (source)
It’s important to note that Portland’s new district attorney, Mike Schmidt, has refused to prosecute protesters that commit criminal acts. The New York Times reports that since he took office on August 1 of this year, he has dismissed charges against half of the more than 600 people who have been arrested for crimes like interfering with the police, disorderly conduct and trespassing. Charges that involve assaulting officers will “require closer scrutiny, with prosecutors taking into account in filing charges whether the police fired tear gas into crowds.”
Unsurprisingly, local law enforcement believes that Schmidt’s policies are making matters worse.
Mr. Schmidt said Portland police leaders told him that they were concerned the directive would lead to more police injuries, though he said nothing prevented officers from making lawful arrests they deemed necessary. (The Portland police chief, Chuck Lovell, said the force “will continue to do the job the community expects of us.”)
The sheriff, Mike Reese, warned Mr. Schmidt in an email that some protesters were bent on “starting fires, damaging property and assaulting police, community members,” adding, “They may feel even more emboldened if there is a public statement that appears to minimize their activities.” In response to one of the sheriff’s concerns, Mr. Schmidt said he revised the policy to greenlight prosecutions for rioting in cases where a defendant was accused of serious offenses.
The Oregon State Police also took a parting shot at Mr. Schmidt as troopers pulled back after a two-week deployment at the protests this month, saying they preferred to put resources in “counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority.” (source)
The violence in Portland shows no sign of relenting.
Seattle, Washington
Seattle has been the site of some of the most destructive and violent riots in the country – and considering everything I’ve just written about – that’s saying a lot. Riots began back in
A group of protestors took over a six-block area near the Capitol in Seattle, initially naming it the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) and then changing the name of the area to CHOP (Capitol Hill Occupy Protest) – a move that some have considered extremely meaningful. Riots have taken place on a regular basis and the hands of responders have been tied by the local government.
Initially, the local government in Seattle agreed to slash the police budget by 50% in response to the riots protests, but interestingly, most of the politicians have walked back their initial statements.
In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, and widespread police brutality and anti-racist protests, a veto-proof majority of council members voiced their support for defunding the police, slashing 50% of the department’s budget.
But since then, they’ve faced a series of logistical roadblocks and clashed with other city leaders, and ultimately all but one of them have walked back their statements.
The council instead voted for a much smaller round of cuts, including reducing the salaries of Carmen Best, who is Seattle’s chief of police, and members of her command staff as well as trimming about 100 of the department’s 1,400 police officers. (source)
That march prompted the mayor to ask the City Council to investigate Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who took part in the June demonstration. Because Durkan’s address hasn’t been publicly disclosed due to her background as a former U.S. attorney, she said the march was organized with a “reckless disregard of the safety of (her) family and children.” (source)
At the time of publication, protests and riots have been ongoing in Seattle for 87 days.
Chicago, Illinois
Chicago has long been the site of carnage and gang violence, but things have escalated to an entirely different level. On August 10th, an upscale shopping district was pillaged after this shooting occurred.
Hundreds of people swept through the Magnificent Mile and other parts of downtown Chicago early Monday, smashing windows, looting stores and confronting police after officers shot a suspect in Englewood hours earlier.
The mayhem marked the second time since late May that the city’s upscale shopping district has been targeted by looters amid unrest, reigniting the debate over policing as city leaders continued to point fingers and downtown again was shut down overnight heading to Tuesday. (source)
The response sounds positively medieval – Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot locked down the city by raising drawbridges to prevent looters from accessing the area. The move has been deeply criticized.
Over the last week, for the second time in three months, Mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered most of the bridges up at night to limit access to the Loop, Gold Coast and surrounding areas after an outbreak of property destruction and unrest.
The move was among a number of measures the mayor announced to protect businesses and reassure residents. But it was the image of the bridges being raised that offered the clearest symbol of Chicago’s divisions.
In a time of crisis, in one of the most racially and economically segregated places in the country, the bridges connecting north and south and linking east and west — sides of town that serve as proxies for wealth versus disinvestment — were made uncrossable, like drawbridges over a castle moat.
Longtime Chicagoans say they can’t remember any other time the bridges were raised in the name of crime prevention or public safety. “You’re basically saying you’re protecting one part of the city from another part,” veteran political strategist Delmarie Cobb said. (source)
The most enlightening thing about the loot-fest in Chicago, however, is the justification. According to a Black Lives Matter activist and organizer, Ariel Atkins, it was just “reparations.” Atkins believes that anything the looters wish to damage or steal is owed to them. She made the radical statement at a solidarity rally in front of a Chicago police station, where people were gathered to support those who had been arrested.
“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci’s or a Macy’s or a Nike because that makes sure that that person eats. That makes sure that that person has clothes,” Ariel Atkins said at a rally outside the South Loop police station Monday, local outlets reported.
“That’s a reparation,” Atkins said. “Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance.” (source)
At a time when more people than ever in the United States were willing to get on board and protest police brutality and racial violence, entitled statements like the one made by Atkins have served to return us to a place of absolute division.
New York, New York
New York City has been labeled a “warzone” as violence escalates rapidly. The violence in the Big Apple isn’t directly tied to protests or riots, but instead, appears to be a deadly new way of life.
This brings NYC to more than 1,000 total shooting incidents across the city year to date, already double all of last year, and the summer is not even over — a summer which ironically has witnessed a supposed heightened consciousness and awareness of police shootings of black Americans given the ongoing George Floyd and Black Lives Matters protests.
But in the case of New York City’s explosion of gun violence, people are being killed with the police far away from the scene, though in one instance over a week ago, it was a black police officer shot in Queenswhile looking for a parking spot merely a mile from his home.
Citywide, there were at least 25 shootings that injured 31 people on Friday and Saturday, police said. Officers responded to 16 shootings on Saturday and nine on Sunday.
At least three of those shootings happened within just blocks of each other in Coney Island, according to police.
Among these, there were seven deaths between Friday and Sunday morning, according the NYPD, including a 25-year-old mother of three children.
Priscilla Vasquez was described in local reports as shot in the back of the head by an unknown gunman in the early morning hours of Saturday while standing on a sidewalk in front of a public school, just around the corner from her Bronx home.
Underscoring the senseless and often random nature of much of the violence, her friends and family don’t think she was the intended targeted, also given the gunman appeared to fire wildly and haphazardly. (source)
Police released the following footage of a shooting in Brooklyn.
If you aren’t already prepared for civil unrest in your own backyard, it’s high time you began to do so. To learn more about surviving riots and civil unrest, check out Selco’s course.
It is not an exaggeration to say that any act of violence by police officers, whether justified or not, is the potential spark for an explosion of unrest. While I certainly agree that the police should be held to very high standards of behavior, it’s unfortunate now that the first thought of most people isn’t, “Why did this shooting occur?” It’s now, “Oh, crap, how close am I to this looming riot?”
I don’t foresee this situation calming down any time soon. In fact, as we draw closer to the election, I expect we’re going to see this type of violence and wholesale destruction reaching smaller and smaller population zones. There have been many rumors about protesters being bussed to smaller towns. It begs the question, are they just testing the waters to see what kind of response will occur when they’re out of urban population centers?
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3guo8Gi Tyler Durden
Watch Live: RNC Day 2 “Land Of Opportunity” – Pompeo, Paul, Sandmann, & Melania Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2020 – 20:25
After last night was mass-media-reprted as having a “darker tone”, the RNC begins night 2 with the theme “Land of Opportunity.”
Living the American Dream
This week, the world witnesses President Trump’s historic pledge to continue putting America first for four more years as he accepts his re-nomination for President of the United States. Part of that pledge is his fight to keep the American Dream alive for future generations. And, I know the importance of the American Dream. I know because I have lived it.
As a first-generation Korean American, my life reflects that the American dream is built on opportunity. I grew up with strong conservative values and have lived them every day as I have worked for a life only the United States of America can offer. I have lived on both coasts, worked for the then-Mayor of New York City and the President of the United States and now have had the opportunity – as the first Asian American to serve as President and CEO of either the RNC or DNC convention – to lead this historic, and unconventional convention. I know the value of hard work, but I also know the worth of opportunity. We have President Trump to thank for championing opportunity and paving the way for the American Dream to continue.
We remember life before this pandemic and the incredible, record-breaking jobs numbers, historic unemployment lows and our booming economy. It was President Trump who led us into that incredible era, and he is doing it again. As he works to revitalize our economy, fight for American businesses and usher in new opportunities for the American worker in these unparalleled times, we know the American Dream is alive and well.
Because of President Trump’s leadership, this country remains the land of opportunity. It’s the land of opportunity for the single mom working to provide for her family and for grandparents who are finally able to plan for their retirement. America is the land of opportunity for the veteran who is jumping back into the workforce and for every American working to build a better future for their children and grandchildren. This land of opportunity has welcomed countless immigrants, like my parents, who sought to follow the law and create a new life for themselves and their families here in the greatest nation in the world. In the United States of America, we know and have lived the American Dream because of the opportunity uniquely found in a nation of people that never stops dreaming.
This land, our land, truly is the land of opportunity. During this historic week, we celebrate all that means for us and for every American still to come.
Tonight’s highlights include Rand Paul, Nick Sandmann, Eric Trump, Mike Pompeo, and Melania Trump:
In order of appearance
Norma Urrabazo, pastor and executive at the National Latina/Latino Commission
Myron Lizer, Navajo Nation vice president
Richard Beasley, former FBI agent
Jon Ponder, founder and CEO of HOPE for Prisoners, Inc.
Senator Rand Paul
Jason Joyce, Maine lobsterman
Cris Peterson, Minnesota dairy farmer
Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council
John Peterson, CEO of Schuette Metals
Cissie Graham Lynch, granddaughter of Billy Graham
Robert Vlaisavljevich, mayor of Eveleth, Minnesota
Abby Johnson, anti-abortion rights activist
Mary Ann Mendoza, mother whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant
Nicholas Sandmann, student who sued news outlets after confrontation with Native American activist
Pam Bondi, former Florida attorney general
Tiffany Trump, daughter of Mr. Trump
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds
Ryan Holets, police officer known for adopting opioid-addicted baby
Florida Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez
Eric Trump, son of Mr. Trump
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
First lady Melania Trump
Watch live here:
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YzpARL Tyler Durden
It’s nothing short of amazing watching the usual “fake news media” suspects still flogging the long-dead Russiagate Hoax when U.S. Attorney John Durham has begun rolling out indictments from it.
Anybody who thinks this stops with the conviction of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith hasn’t followed SpyGate at all for the past three years like I have.
Think about what the Clinesmith indictment reveals: It reveals that Durham and his investigators are going right to the very heart of the fraud perpetrated on the FISA Court.
This very first indictment shows the FBI Crossfire Hurricane team and the Mueller Special Counsel team were well aware by June 2017 of the compelling necessity of hiding from the FISA Court Carter Page’s longstanding relationship with the CIA.
Why did they need to hide that relationship from the court?
Because their “evidence” for the warrant alleging Page was a Russian agent came from a political propagandist named Christopher Steele who was
1) being paid by the Clinton campaign, and
2) misrepresenting the key source providing the Page allegations (who turned out to be a low-level research assistant at the Brookings Institute named Igor Danchenko).
What if the FBI admits to the FISA Court all the relevant facts that
1) Steele is a paid employee of the Clinton campaign,
2) who is using a Brookings research assistant disguised as a top Russian intelligence official as his source,
3) but that the CIA itself says Page is not a Russian agent but is instead a CIA intelligence asset reporting all his Russian contacts to their agency?
FBI Knew Steele’s Fake Evidence Would Not Withstand Real Examination
The moment the FISA Court was alerted to the fact the CIA claimed Page as one of their own, the judge would have had to take a closer look at the Steele information. If that happened, the entire carefully managed fraud would begin unraveling.
How could Page be a Russian agent if he’s been keeping the CIA up to date about his contacts with top Russian officials, the very same contacts the FBI is attempting to use in this warrant in order to claim he is working for the Russians?
If that happened, Steele’s hearsay allegations against Page would be exposed and the FBI was very likely not going to get the warrant approved.
So not only did the FBI end up hiding at least three key relevant facts from the FISA Court to get the original warrant, they kept the fraud going all through the three subsequent renewals of the warrant.
Durham Will Prove Most Involved in the Fraudulent Warrants Knew the Truth About Carter Page and the CIA
Clinesmith altered the key email that stated Page was a CIA source so that it read he wasn’t a source. Clinesmith’s motivation for doing that is readily apparent: Admitting Page was a CIA good guy destroys the entire basis for the surveillance warrant.
Clinesmith altered the one copy of the CIA email that was being sent up to the FISA Court for the fourth renewal in June 2017 while he was also sending other FBI/Mueller team members accurate copies of the same email.
Guess what that’s going to allow Durham to prove?
It’s going to allow Durham to prove with documentary evidence that, just like Clinesmith, other FBI/Mueller team members knew the truth about Carter Page, and yet they still hid this from the court as they continued to obtain warrants through what can only be described as acts of deliberate fraud.
It’s right there in the Department of Justice IG Michael Horowitz’s FISA abuse report from last December that FBI Special Supervisory Agent (SSA) Stephen Somma deliberately hid several things from the FISA Court to get the Page warrant—including Page’s relationship with the CIA.
According to the Daily Caller:
“The report identifies six areas where the agent withheld information that contradicted the FBI’s working theory that Page was an agent of Russia. According to the report, Case Agent 1 withheld exculpatory statements that Page and another Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, made to [Stefan] Halper. The agent also withheld information from Justice Department attorneys about Page’s longstanding relationship with the CIA.”
There’s a section in that report that details six separate issues where Somma deliberately withheld evidence to ensure the original warrant and its three renewals were granted.
It’s Not Possible to Limit the Russiagate Hoax to Only Clinesmith
It simply isn’t possible to say that prosecutions for deliberately withholding evidence to fool the FISA Court into granting a warrant based on acts of deliberate fraud can be limited only to Clinesmith. There’s far too much evidence that’s already gone public that clearly shows this goes far beyond and above just him.
Durham is starting his prosecutions by demonstrating that many of the officials involved in this Russiagate Hoax knew from the beginning the basis for claiming Page was a traitor to his country was based on fraud, and they knew they were deliberately framing a CIA source as a Russian agent.
You’re about to see over the next several months the DNC Media propagandists disguised as journalists suffer from cognitive dissonance as they keep trying to claim the Russiagate Hoax is still alive and well even as U.S. Attorney Durham is rolling out indictments of the people that perpetrated it.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3jcxzvM Tyler Durden
“Stand Down!” – How One Navy Seal Killed A Multi-Billion Hedge Fund Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2020 – 19:45
It has now been revealed that the fall of Dan Kamensky’s Marble Ridge Capital was at the hands of a former Navy SEAL, turned trader.
Joe Femenia, the head of distressed-debt trading at Jefferies Financial Group, is the man who was outlined in court filings as having taped conversations that brought the hedge fund down, according to Bloomberg. The fund fell after Kamensky urged Femenia to not submit a bid for part of bankrupt retailer Neiman Marcus.
Jefferies and Marble Ridge had been involved in a standoff regarding Neiman Marcus, as they both sought to bid for a portion of the company’s online business, MyTheresa.
Femenia sounded the alarm on the dubious tactic and raised the issue with a U.S. trustee. Highlighting the issue forced Kamensky to acknowledge he had committed a “grave mistake” and forced him to ultimately shut down his fund.
Legal filings show Kamensky telling Femenia to “Stand DOWN”. Probably not a bright thing to say to a Navy SEAL…
Photo: Bloomberg
They continued with Kamensky telling Femenia: “DO NOT SEND IN A BID.” This was followed by a “confrontational” phone call between the two, according to court filings.
Femenia took the altercation to Jefferies’ general counsel, who then disclosed it to an official creditor committee that was supervising the sale. Kamensky then urged Femenia, on a second phone call, to “treat the conversation off the books”. He also urged Femenia to “change his recollection” of how their first call went but, by then, Femenia was recording the call.
Kamensky pleaded: “[I]f you’re going to continue to tell them what you just told me, I’m going to jail, OK? Because they’re going to say that I abused my position as a fiduciary, which I probably did, right? Maybe I should go to jail. But I’m asking you not to put me in jail.”
Veteran trader Eric Rosen said: “I have known Joe and always found him to be an honest, upstanding guy and a straight shooter. He risked his life for our country and he seems to have done the honorable thing here.”
Femenia’s track record includes graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy before being a SEAL and spending “much of his 20s” fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. He previously worked at the elite trading group at Goldman Sachs before moving to Jefferies in 2016, where he worked as the head of
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lf80vU Tyler Durden
As I type, Hurricane Laura is headed towards the Louisiana/Texas border. It is still not exactly clear where Laura will land, and how strong it will be. (I encourage everyone to check out SpaceCityWeather.com for objective, non-hyped weather forecasts). My College has announced that the building will close on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m., and will remain closed on Thursday. (Friday is TBD). But, classes will continue virtually for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. One key advantage of Zoom University is that the entire campus can seamlessly transition to online classes during inclement weather.
In 2018, classes were cancelled for nearly two weeks because of Hurricane Harvey. Rescheduling classes became nearly impossible. All nights and weekends some became clogged with makeup class requests. Now, we are fully equipped to go online, immediately.
Unfortunately, many of our students will be affected by Hurricane Laura, and will be unable to watch the classes live. Some of our students are under mandatory evacuation orders. Thankfully, Zoom University will allow these students to watch the makeup classes when it is safe to do so.
I hope everyone in our region stays safe and dry.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2YAOAI5
via IFTTT
As I type, Hurricane Laura is headed towards the Louisiana/Texas border. It is still not exactly clear where Laura will land, and how strong it will be. (I encourage everyone to check out SpaceCityWeather.com for objective, non-hyped weather forecasts). My College has announced that the building will close on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m., and will remain closed on Thursday. (Friday is TBD). But, classes will continue virtually for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. One key advantage of Zoom University is that the entire campus can seamlessly transition to online classes during inclement weather.
In 2018, classes were cancelled for nearly two weeks because of Hurricane Harvey. Rescheduling classes became nearly impossible. All nights and weekends some became clogged with makeup class requests. Now, we are fully equipped to go online, immediately.
Unfortunately, many of our students will be affected by Hurricane Laura, and will be unable to watch the classes live. Some of our students are under mandatory evacuation orders. Thankfully, Zoom University will allow these students to watch the makeup classes when it is safe to do so.
I hope everyone in our region stays safe and dry.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2YAOAI5
via IFTTT
In a move which has gone entirely unnoticed in the precious metals markets, but which signals gold and silver bar delivery constraints for the COMEX gold and silver futures contracts, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group (CME), operator of the New York based COMEX, has quietly and under the radar, hugely expanded its lists of eligible refinery gold and silver bar brands that can be delivered against the massively traded flagship GC 100 (100 oz gold) and SI (5000 oz silver) contracts.
These changes, which were implemented on 27 July and which are detailed below, also look to be serving an even bigger agenda of preparing for a radical change in the delivery procedures of these two famous contracts so as to facilitate gold and silver stored in London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) vaults in London, England, to be used in settlement against the GC 100 oz and the SI 5000 oz COMEX contracts. Note that the COMEX 100 oz gold futures contract is currently deliverable as either one 100 troy ounce gold bar, or three 1 kilo gold bars, while the COMEX 5000 oz silver futures contract is currently deliverable as five 1,000 troy ounce cast silver bars (with a weight tolerance of 10% either higher or lower).
To reiterate, these changes are to the gold and silver refiner brand lists of the big boy contracts GC 100 and SI. You may recall something similar happening for a new 4GC contract when it was rushed out in late March, but that was just a trial run. This is the main event.
From New York to London
As a reminder and as some background, CME (COMEX) and the LBMA began explicitly colluding on 24 March this year in an attempt to try to reign in the global precious metals markets following an Exchange for Physical (EFP) gold delivery failure in London which caused both a blow out between gold futures and gold spot spreads, as well as a bid-ask spread blowout in London spot gold, and which prompted the LBMA in a public statement to say that it had:
“offered its support to CME Group to facilitate physical delivery in New York”
On the same day, 24 March, Reuters, the embedded LBMA mouthpiece, reported that:
“The LBMA and executives at major gold-trading banks asked CME to allow 400-ounce bars to be used to settle Comex contracts, said the two sources, both of whom were involved in the discussions.”
Again, on the same day, 24 March, the CME Group hurriedly launched a new gold futures contract called the “Gold (Enhanced Delivery) futures contract” (ticker 4GC), a contract which is structured to allow delivery via 100 oz gold bars, or kilo gold bars, or 400 oz gold bars.
Notably, in the 4GC contract, a 400 oz gold bar can be delivered via “Accumulated Certificates of Exchange” (ACEs), a fractional paper construct created by the CME to, in its words, “facilitate the conversion of 400 oz bars in fractional units which can be used for delivery” where “the Clearing House will issue four ACEs. Each ACE will represent an equal share of ownership of the larger bar.”
Cutting the Desk with Sleight of Hand – COMEX ACEs. Source: CME website
Importantly, in late March, CME created an entirely new and huge list of eligible gold refiner brands whose bars would be acceptable for delivery against this new ‘Enhanced Delivery’ 4GC futures contract, a list which comprised every gold refiner brand on both the current and former LBMA Good Delivery lists of gold refiners, and every gold refiner brand already on the GC 100 contract eligible gold refiner list at that time.
Whatever it Takes – Add the whole Goddam List
As the CME said in its 24 March press release for the 4GC contract:
“The approved brand list for this product will have complete convergence with the approved brand list for CME Group’s existing gold futures and the LBMA gold good delivery list.”
While this 400 oz 4GC contract launched in late March has hardly traded since then, its primary purpose now looks to have been a trial run to test out linking COMEX precious metals contracts to the London vaults and to the LBMA Good Delivery refiners lists, and to test implement the construction technique for the expanded eligible gold and silver bar brand lists of the GC 100 gold and SI (5000) silver contracts.
As the CME and the LBMA said in another joint statement on 1 April, they “will continue to coordinate efforts as market circumstances evolve”. And continue to coordinate they have.
For those who might not be familiar, the COMEX approved brand list for gold and the LBMA Good Delivery lists for gold were (up until recently) two entirely unrelated lists and concepts. The same was true of the COMEX approved brand list for silver and the LBMA Good Delivery lists for silver – they were two entirely unrelated lists and concepts.
The COMEX approved gold refiner brand list (up until 27 July) was a list of refiners which produced either 100 oz gold bars or 1 kilo gold bars which COMEX judged to be of a sufficient standard to be physically deliverable against the GC 100 gold contract. On the other hand, the LBMA Good Delivery List for gold lists those gold refineries around the world which produce the far larger 400 oz gold bars (central bank gold bars) and whose gold bars are deemed by the LBMA Good Delivery referees to be of a high enough quality for inclusion.
Likewise, the COMEX approved silver refiner brand list (up until 27 July) was a list of silver refiners which produced 1000 oz silver bars, bars which COMEX deemed worthy to be deliverable against the SI silver contract. In contrast, the LBMA Good Delivery List for silver is a far larger list of silver refineries which produce 1000 oz silver bars, including many CHinese refineries, that have been accredited by the LBMA Good Delivery referees.
When at the end of March, CME rushed to create a new gold bar refiner list for the 4GC (400 oz) gold contract, there were 68 gold bar brands listed on the existing GC 100 approved gold bar brand, and this list had not changed in any material way for a long time save for a few additions and deletions of refineries along the way.
In late March for the new 4GC contract, CME took this existing COMEX GC 100 refiner list and merged it with the LBMA Good Delivery List for gold, adding in all the gold refinery brands that were on the LBMA Good Delivery list that had not already been on the GC 100 list. This was a whopping 51 bar brands on the LBMA Good Delivery gold list that were not on the GC 100 refiner list. When these two lists were added together and merged, it resulted in a combined list of 119 approved bar brands, an exact 75% increase over the 68 refineries which were on the GC 100 COMEX gold bar brand list.
4GC Test Run
Next, and this too is very important, the CME also added to the 4GC list all of the gold refineries that are listed on the former LBMA Good Delivery List for gold. For those who don’t know, the LBMA maintains two refiner bar brand lists for gold as well as another two refiner bar brand lists for silver. The current LBMA Good Delivery List for gold lists gold refiners which currently produce 400 oz gold bars which have been accredited by the LBMA.
The former LBMA Good Delivery List for gold lists gold refiners which at some point in the past produced 400 oz gold bars which had been accredited by the London Gold Market referees, such as the Royal Mint’s refinery and Johnson Matthey, which previously administered the London Good Delivery list. This former list is a list of refineries, including historic and long gone refiners, which don’t currently make Good Delivery gold bars (400 oz gold bars) but whose gold bars, before they stopped making them or were taken off the list, are still accepted as London Good Delivery. Note that the history of the Good Delivery list stretches back all the way to 1750. The LBMA has only been in existence since 1987.
There are, wait for it, 111 additional refiners on the former LBMA Good Delivery List for gold that are not on the current LBMA Good Delivery list for gold. This means, in total, when the COMEX 4GC contract went live in early April this year, its approved refiner list of gold bar brands contained the names of a massive 230 refiner bar brands, 68 + 51 + 111 = 230. That’s a 238% increase in the number of refineries compared to the 68 refiners which were on the pre-April GC 100 approved refiner gold list. Ironically, the new 4GC contract has never traded, but was it ever meant to, or was it a red herring to set up the 400 oz London deliverable infrastructure for the GC 100 contract?
GC 100 and SI 5000 – A Live Exercise, Conjob-27
Now fast forward to 27 July, and what do we find? Well on 27 July, the CME (COMEX) in a very low key way and without any media announcements or press releases, quietly slipped in a market regulation filing (MKR) on its website titled “Regularity Approvals for Gold and Silver Brands”, with a short statement as follows:
“From Registrar’s Office
# MKR07-27-20
Notice Date 27 July 2020
Effective Date 27 July 2020
The Commodity Exchange, Inc. (“COMEX” or “Exchange”) has approved certain London Bullion Market Association (“LBMA”) good delivery brands for delivery against the Exchange’s Gold Futures (GC) and Silver Futures (SI) contracts. The list of brands are located in the “Gold (GC) Brands” and “Silver (SI) Brands” tabs in the service providers table at the end of Chapter 7 of the COMEX Rulebook.
These approvals will increase the brands of available material that can be used to satisfy delivery requirements of the Gold Futures (GC) and Silver Futures (SI) contractsand will afford market participants expanded delivery options.
These approvals are effective immediately.”
When one consults the said “Gold (GC) Brands” and “Silver (SI) Brands” tabs of the latest CME service providers table (which is published as a spreadsheet in XLS format here), one sees the following.
On the Gold (GC) Brands worksheet for the flagship GC 100 oz contract, we now find that:
51 LBMA approved gold refineries have been added to the eligible brand list for the COMEX 100 (GC 100) gold futures contract. These 51 additional refinery brands are listed directly under the existing refiner list with a subheading of “(Added as of 27 July, 2020)” There were 69 brands on this list prior to 27 July. There are now 120 current brands on the GC 100 gold list. 69 + 51 = 120
Of the 51 refiner brands, the top three countries represented are 12 refineries are from China, 10 from Japan, and 7 from Russia.
An additional 111 gold bars brands from the LBMA ‘former’ Good Delivery List for gold have been added to the Gold (GC) brands tab as a separate list beside and to the right of the first list. In total 162 LBMA approved gold bar brands have been added to the COMEX approved gold bar brand list.
Overall, there are now 231 brands on the COMEX approved gold bar brand list. That’s a 235% increase in the number of gold bar brands that are now on the GC 100 list compared to the 69 that were listed before the 27 July change.
Note that the current LBMA Good Delivery List for gold lists 71 refiner gold bar brands. The former LBMA Good Delivery List lists 115 refiner bar brands.
Silver Panic – Under the Radar
An even bigger bombshell arguably is that the CME and LBMA’s actions are now signaling panic about future physical silver delivery. Turning to the Silver Futures (SI) Brands worksheet, we find that on 27 July, the COMEX SI eligible silver refiner brand list, which up until then had listed 75 silver bar refiner brands, has also been hugely expanded.
On the Silver (SI) Brands worksheet tab of the same service providers XLS, we now find that:
65 LBMA approved silver refineries have been added to the eligible brand list for the COMEX SI (5000 oz) silver futures contract. These 65 additional refinery brands are listed directly under the existing refiner list with a subheading of “(Added as of 27 July, 2020)”
There were 75 brands on this list prior to 27 July. There are now 140 current brands on the current SI silver refiner list. 75 + 65 = 140
Of the 65 silver refiner brands added, the top three countries represented are 26 silver refineries from China, 11 from Japan, and 5 from Russia.
An additional 40 silver bars brands from the LBMA ‘former’ Good Delivery List for silver have also been added to the Silver (SI) Brands tab as a separate list beside and to the right of the first list.
In total, 105 LBMA silver bar brands were added by COMEX on 27 July, taking the COMEX SI silver list to a total of 180 eligible silver bar brands. That’s a 140% increase in the number of silver bar brands compared to prior to 27 July, or in other words, 2.4 times more brands on the SI silver brand list than there had been prior to 27 July.
Note that the current LBMA Good Delivery List for Silver lists 84 refiner silver bar brands. The former LBMA Good Delivery List lists 82 refiner bar brands.
In summary, on 27 July, across the GC 100 contract and SI contract refiner lists, COMEX stealthily added 267 LBMA gold and silver refiner brands to the COMEX approved refiner lists using one small paragraph in an obscure hidden filing on its website. Critically, these changes were approved and ‘effective immediately’ on 27 July, the same day that they were announced. How’s that for covert behind the scenes dealings? With COMEX and LBMA hoping no one would notice.
267 gold and silver brands added to the COMEX GC and SI contracts – Nothing to See!
The Old Normal
Previously, CME always announced each addition or removal of an approved gold or silver refiner brand separately in a distinct filing, for example, when the ABC Refinery (Australia) brand was added to the GC 100 gold approved refiner list on 5 June this year, or when, CME removed the approval of the gold bar brand of the North Korean central bank from the 4GC approved brand list on July 23 July (the Pyongyang gold bar brand had slipped through the cracks in COMEX’s rush to blanket list all former LBMA brands, this obviously did not go down well in New York, or perhaps in Washington DC).
In contrast to all of these individual additions and deletions, now COMEX has added 267 gold and silver bar brands to its approved in one fell swoop. Nothing like this has ever happened before. So why now?
New Normal – We’re Going to Need A Bigger List
Traditionally, the COMEX futures markets in New York has been known around the world as a venue which trades gargantuan volumes of futures contracts (GC 100 oz gold and SI 5000 silver) that while deliverable, were rarely delivered. This therefore gave the COMEX the reputation of being a relative backwater for physical gold and silver activity. But with contract holders now demanding physical delivery of both gold and silver, that is increasingly less the case.
Huge increase in COMEX GC 100 gold contracts delivered in 2020. Source: www.GoldChartsRUs.com
Since late March 2020, a net 879 tonnes of gold has arrived into COMEX approved New York vaults, with total gold stocks more than quadrupling from 271 tonnes to 1151 tonnes. Of these net additions, 461 tonnes have ended up as registered gold inventories, the eligible gold inventories have swelled by other 418 tonnes.
Since April inclusive, a massive 155,430 GC 100 gold contracts have been delivered (warrants changing hands), predominantly across the April, June and August contracts, representing 483 tonnes of gold.
Silver net inflows into COMEX vaults since 23 March have been more subdued, both in terms of size and a percentage of existing stocks, with the net additions totaling about 16.8 million ozs of silver, which has raised total COMEX silver holdings from 323.4 million ozs to the current 340.3 million ozs. But within that, there has been a marked increase in registered silver stocks from less than 3000 tonnes to currently over 4000 tonnes.
Silver SI 5000 oz contracts moving to delivery have also increased massively in the last few months, with vault warrants 9,044 contracts changing hands in May and 17,294 contracts in July. Between April and August to date, 28989 SI contracts, each for 5000 oz of silver have gone to warrant delivery, that’s 144.95 million ozs of silver, or 4500 tonnes. The next active delivery month in SI silver is September, followed by December. Both months currently have huge Open Interest, 59,000 contracts and 120,000 contracts respectively, far larger than available COMEX silver stocks.
Kilo Bars Do Not Explain the Changes
The billion dollar question now is why, on 27 July, did CME blanketly and surreptitiously add 162 LBMA gold bar brands to the COMEX GC 100 eligible gold refiner list and 105 LBMA silver bar brands to the COMEX SI 5000 eligible silver refiner list?
For the GC 100 gold futures contract, the deliverable unit of the 100 oz gold bar is not only not common, it is not usually a gold bar size produced by gold refineries around the world. While the 1 kilobar unit is popular, many of the gold refinery brands added to the GC 100 approved list on 27 July, not to mention those on the former gold LBMA Good Delivery gold list, don’t and never did produce kilo gold bars, let alone 100 oz gold bars.
For example, there is a gold kilobar Good Delivery List maintained by the Singapore Bullion Market Association (SBMA) which only lists 15 refinery brands of gold kilobar. The Dubai Good Delivery Standard (DGD), a 1 kilogram bar standard operated by Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) in Dubai only lists 13 refiner gold brands on its active DGD list, and another 18 on a former list.
So why were 162 LBMA Good Delivery refiner bar brands added to the COMEX list? The large Swiss gold refineries of PAMP, Valcambi, Metalor and Argor-Heraeus were already on the GC 100 gold brand refiner list. As were the Perth Mint, Royal Canadian Mint, Rand Refinery, and Johnson Matthey. Adding a large list of refiners could give a bit of juice in terms of extra kilobar gold brands that could be delivered against GC 100. But not hugely. Besides, looking at the daily COMEX gold inventory reports shows that no gold moved from the 4GC Enhanced Delivery category to the normal reporting category in any of the COMEX vaults after the mass approval of all the extra bar brands, which means there were no previously GC 100 contract ineligible bar brands of 1 kilo or 100 oz units sitting in the vaults waiting to be reclassified.
Plug in London
The more likely and logical explanation is that the COMEX, in conjunction with the LBMA, is planning to change the GC 100 delivery procedure to allow delivery of 400 oz gold bars in London, and the associated paper fractional scheme of Accumulated Certificates of Exchange (ACEs). That’s what they originally wanted and that is the holy grail for the bullion banks.
A telling sign it that CME specifically added 111 gold bar brands on the former LBMA Good Delivery List for gold when many of these refineries are no longer in existence and never ever produced 1 gold kilo bars or 100 oz gold bars. Are the COMEX and LBMA bullion banks that desperate that they are now scraping the proverbial bottom of the London gold vaults, planning to deliver the GC 100 contract into long forgotten 400 oz gold bars in deep storage under the Bank of England?
As noted by Bloomberg in an article in early July:
“CME, which owns Comex where the main gold futures contract is listed, said in March it would offer a new futures contract with expanded delivery options that included 400-ounce bars, which is the size that’s accepted in the larger spot market in London.
On Tuesday [30 June], it announced that traders will also be able to deliver gold in London vaults against the new contract, saying the move would “provide market participants greater opportunity to make and take delivery.”
However, the move falls short of what some market participants had been hoping. The main “GC” gold contract is still only deliverable in the US using 100-ounce bars or kilobars.”
Huge increase in COMEX SI 5000 silver contracts delivered in 2020. Source: www.GoldChartsRUs.com
Why too has COMEX added 65 LBMA silver bar brands to the approved silver bar brand list for the SI contract? This entire change in the deliverable brand list for the SI silver contract has completely come in under the market’s radar. Does COMEX plan to push through silver delivery in the London vaults for its SI contract too? It would appear so.
The same question can be asked about why CME (COMEX) has added 40 former silver refineries to its SI approved silver brand list. Is there such an upcoming shortage of physical silver that the COMEX needs to approve every silver refinery on the planet, both current and former, so as to have a large enough universe of silver bars to tap including long forgotten silver bar brands?
The LBMA – CME spin from March to May was that coronavirus lockdowns caused gold delivery logistical delays which were responsible for the price spread blowout between COMEX gold futures and London spot gold. This was also, said the duo, the reason why they needed to launch the 4GC (400 oz) contract, to give market participants ‘enhanced’ delivery options in London from an extended refiner brand list.
Then why has this 4GC contract never been used? And why has COMEX now railroaded through the exact same refiner list changes to the GC 100 contract, as were implemented for the 4GC contract. The only logical explanation is that as the GC 100 refiner list expansion has now occurred so too soon will the additional of London gold vaults as a GC 100 delivery option.
If it wasn’t for those Pesky Rules
As to why COMEX created the 4GC contract in March and didn’t change the GC 100 contract specs to allow 400 oz gold bar delivery, the official line from was that CME cannot change contract that have Open Interest. As CME said in its 4GC FAQ:
“There are significant legal and regulatory concerns with making changes to any existing contract with significant open interest, and we always work to preserve the integrity of each contract for all open interest holders – short and long”
According to the Stone X daily gold market commentary on 1 July, changes to permit gold bar delivery in London against the 4GC contract also require a contract that has no Open Interest:
“The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has announced that it will permit delivery against its new 4GC contract into London vaults. This will be effective as of the September contract, which is the earliest contract in which there is no current open interest (or beyond). Contracts are not allowed to be modified where there is open interest.”
COMEX has already added in the reference to London depositories (vaults) for the 4GC into chapter 7 of its “Delivery Facilities and Procedures”, where the relevant section now reads as follows, with the sentence in bold having been inserted:
“The depository for gold deliverable against the Gold futures (GC) contract must qualify and be designated a weighmaster and must be located within a 150-mile radius of the City of New York. The depository for gold deliverable against the Gold (Enhanced Delivery) futures (4GC) contract must qualify and be designated a weighmaster and must be located within a 150-mile radius of the City of New York or in London, UK.”
A previous version of this Chapter 7 text, from 23 April, had no mention of London, nor of the Gold (Enhanced Delivery) 4GC contract.
It will be interesting to see how COMEX, the LBMA and the bullion banks will get around the “significant legal and regulatory concerns with making changes” to GC and SI contracts that have significant open interest, but with the expanded approved refiner lists now done and dusted, the next step will be to get the CME lawyers, in league with an as always compliant CFTC, to change the GC and SI contract specs. As they used a stealthy and covert approach when implementing the refiner list changes, expect similar such attempts with the contract specs.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink Plans To Unveil “Real Time Neuron Demonstration” This Week Tyler Durden
Tue, 08/25/2020 – 19:05
All we can say is if this Neuralink “reveal” is anywhere as realistic as Tesla’s solar roof tiles – or anywhere as disruptive as putting a Tesla on skates and pushing it through a tunnel under goofy neon lights – we’re glad we’re not signed up as test subjects.
But regardless, Neuralink presses on. The brain-machine interface company that Musk has claimed will be able to cure everything from Alzheimers to compulsive shopping has scheduled an event for later this week to “update the public on its progress” since last year’s presentation.
“Will show neurons firing in real-time on August 28th. The matrix in the matrix,” Musk had tweeted at the end of July.
“Wait until you see the next version vs what was presented last year. It’s *awesome*,” Musk wrote in February. “The profound impact of high bandwidth, high precision neural interfaces is underappreciated. Neuralink may have this in a human as soon as this year. Just needs to be unequivocally better than Utah Array, which is already in some humans & has severe drawbacks.”
Uh, right. Smells like a capital raise could be close, if you ask us.
Neuralink plans on using its own surgical robot for inserting electrodes into the brain to make the leap. So far, the design has been tested on 19 different animals with “around an 87% success rate”. That doesn’t seem too promising, if you ask us – but we’re not brain surgeons.
Come to think of it, neither is Musk.
Regardless, the company’s long term goal is “obtaining human symbiosis with artificial intelligence (AI)”, according to Teslarati. To do that, the company needs to connect electrodes throughout the brain. From there, data is collected from brain signals and analyzed by Neuralink’s software.
Musk has said in the past that installation of Neuralink chips could “restore limb function, improve human movement, resolve issues with eyesight and hearing, and help with diseases like Parkinson’s.”
Human trials could be on the schedule for 2020, according to the company. And yet, we still don’t have full self driving.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34xFyiX Tyler Durden
