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Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

India versus China, Egypt versus Ethiopia, Israel versus the Palestinians – the Water Wars are already here in the US also, yet American and European policymakers remain disastrously blind to them.

This is certain to have catastrophic consequences for the wealthy, arrogant and ludicrously complacent elites of the West.

The problem is particularly acute in the United States: Indeed, it has been growing for half a century but has reached such enormous dimensions in the 21st century that neocon imperialist Republican, neoliberal imperialist Democratic and Green policymakers are all oblivious to it.

How can this be? It is because all three sets of ideologues and opinion-shapers overwhelmingly live on the East and West Coasts of the United States. In both areas, water has always been plentiful and climate mild.

These regional prejudices go back a very long way: They explain why Theodore Roosevelt practiced arrogant elitist imperialism against not only the unfortunate peoples of Central America and Northeast Asia during his fateful presidency but also against the inhabitants of his own country’s Heartland. For it was Roosevelt who initiated the bizarre practice of cutting off vast quantities of prime land across the nation from human usage and declaring it National Parks, worshipped blindly by all liberals as well Greens to this day.

Theodore Roosevelt’s policies were followed by later presidents, most notably Ronald Reagan.

So today, an amazing 95 percent of the population of the United States remains concentrated on only seven percent of its land area in truly tiny concentrated suburban bubbles around a handful of great cities. Yet more than twice that area is cut off from any productive use by the American population because it is designated as National Parks.

However, these empty places are also extremely dangerous ones. They swarm with predators, human as well as animal: Thousands of people, especially young campers disappear in them every year. It is virtually impossible to get reliable statistics on this from the federal government which has a vested interest in hiding its own criminal incompetence and failure to portect its own people.

At the very least, usually unarmed, romantic suburbanites who dream about the nurturing joys of Nature are at a complete loss on how to survive in the wild when they get lost and wander even a few hundred yards away from major roads.

Yet the Republican hegemony across the Heartland United States has been based on the hatred of scores of millions of people cut off from key resources by these romantic and arrogant imperialist policies.

This conflict indeed decided the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It explains why all the Heartland states including many with generations-long “blue” Democratic traditions unexpectedly swung “red” behind Donald Trump. The ineffably and reliably stupid Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton made the conflict far worse with her “war” on coal as a fuel. (U.S. policymakers have a childish and disgusting habit of calling all non violent conflicts “war” making them uniquely inept at the real thing).

Because the population of the United States is so urban and concentrated, the Heartland outside major urban areas is now less densely populated, incredibly than it was 200 years ago when land hungry settlers were spreading across it like human locusts.

This means that the great populations concentrated in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and Miami have no idea of the true environmental realities that exist behind their romantic Green policy dreams. They have no sense of how much fresh water they consume or how limited its supply always was, even before Global Climate Change started to dramatically shrink the water tables.

This development is long term very good news for Russia and Canada since it is already freeing up enormous areas of land and resources undreamed of in their national histories. But it means that American neo-imperialist dreamers waste their military resources on crazy misadventures from Afghanistan to Ukraine when they should really be deploying them to safeguard the water resources of New York City in the Appalachian Mountains or those of Los Angeles from the water-hungry Western states.

It also means water conflicts around the world are not fashionable enough for the self-imagined geniuses of the Washington think tanks and media platforms to pay any serious attention to. They would far rather lecture Russia (which handles its water resources extremely well) or China (which faces enormous challenges from the changing climate, and whose leaders now fully recognize the problem) then face the problems in their own backyard.

So when it comes to mediating the conflicts between India and China over the rapidly shrinking glaciers and fresh water reserves of the Himalaya watershed, or the remorseless escalating conflict between Ethiopia (not to be underestimated) and Egypt (which has had zero success over the past 200 years in projecting its own military power that far south up the Nile River), Washington policymakers do not have a clue.

The wars of water are already with U.S.: And they are likely to erupt with the most unexpected virulence in the United States first.

The now likely victory of Democrat Joe Biden in this November’s U.S. presidential election will rip civic bonds apart over this and related issues, though as usual Russia and China will be scapegoated for the inept failures of Washington policymakers to anticipate or deal with the crisis.

Fresh water is the ultimate essential resource for the aquatic mammal known as the human race: Loss of it will be fatal for hundreds of millions. For the American people, those Inconvenient Facts are about to impact – hard.

It has been several weeks since Elon Musk blatantly taunted the Securities and Exchange Commission by telling them to “s*** his c***”. As a result, what has happened since then?

A) A just application of the law has held Musk accountable for his previous actions.

B) A stern warning was issued to Tesla’s Board of Directors to get Musk under control. 

C) A co-director of the agency’s enforcement division picks up and leaves the agency days after Jay Clayton kisses Musk’s ass live on CNBC by saying he has “no comment” about Musk’s remarks. 

If you guessed option “C”, you’re right! 

It was announced yesterday that co-director of enforcement at the SEC, Steven Peikin, is leaving the agency in relatively abrupt fashion on August 14. He is leaving after more than 3 years in his role, which co-director Stephanie Avakian will now absolve, according to an SEC statement. 

Peikin said: “Serving as Co-Director of the Division of Enforcement has been an incredible honor, and I am immensely grateful to Chairman Clayton for his confidence in me, for giving me the opportunity to again serve the public, and for his unwavering support of vigorous enforcement of the federal securities laws.”

He continued: “I am tremendously proud of the accomplishments of the women and men of the Division of Enforcement, whose knowledge, expertise, and dedication to protecting investors and preserving market integrity inspired and impressed me every day.  It has been a privilege to serve among them.”

During his tenure, the agency says over $13.5 billion in disgorgement and penalties was obtained by the agency. Peikin was formerly a managing partner at Sullivan & Cromwell.

SEC Chairman Jay Clayton praised Peikin in a press release: “Their investor-first efforts have resulted in thousands of actions that have righted wrongs and, more importantly, both returned illicit gains to harmed investors and eliminated improper fees, providing lasting savings for years to come.”

We took a stab at writing a more accurate statement, which might sound something like: “Our team has allowed frauds to operate unfettered until such time as either the fraud implodes or it is completely obvious to the public, at which point we try to save our reputation by collecting perfunctory and menial fees to keep our agency’s lights on while expensive lawyers, paid for with money obtained through fraud, impose their will on us for immaterial settlements with their clients.” 

The SEC didn’t comment on Peikin’s future plans, nor did Peikin comment beyond his official statement to the SEC. We wonder if he knows there’s a General Counsel position available at Tesla…

Authored by Julia Conley via CommonDreams.org,

New legislation put forward by Sens. Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders on Tuesday would curb the use of facial recognition software by corporations and help to slow the spread of “abusive” surveillance, according to leading privacy advocates.

Similar to Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, which has been in place since 2008, the Merkley-Sanders legislation would bar corporations from using facial recognition without the knowledge and explicit affirmative consent of customers. 

“Do we really want to live under constant surveillance by unaccountable corporations? I don’t. We cannot allow Orwellian facial recognition technology to continue to violate the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Sanders told Business Insider Tuesday.

The Illinois law has resulted in $650 million in fines for Facebook over its use of facial recognition-enabled tagging in the state, and was cited by the ACLU in May when the group sued Clearview AI over its collection and storing of the data of residents without their knowledge of consent.

The digital rights group Fight for the Future, which launched its nationwide campaign demanding a federal ban on all facial recognition technology last year, expressed support for the National Biometric Information Privacy Act even though it falls short of an outright ban.

“We believe most private and corporate uses of facial recognition should be banned entirely, but this new legislation will play an important role in slowing down the unfettered creep of this technology into our daily lives, giving us time to have a meaningful debate about whether artificial intelligence powered surveillance systems should be used at all all in a free and open society,” Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement. 

How Rite Aid deployed facial recognition technology in 200 stores across the U.S., with some in the heart of New York and Los Angeles, in largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods. For a year, it used a China-linked company to do it https://t.co/ZNwEG9U3u9 pic.twitter.com/6AlnHTD2Az

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 28, 2020

Merkley and Sanders introduced the legislation days after Reuters reported that the Rite-Aid drugstore chain has spied on customers in about 200 stores across the U.S. using facial recognition over the past eight years. Many of the stores equipped with the technology, without the knowledge of consumers, are in low-income, largely-minority neighborhoods. 

Facial recognition has been shown to disproportionately misidentify people of color, according to a landmark federal study published last year. 

“Right now in most states in the U.S., it would be totally legal for a big box store to set up surveillance cameras, scan the faces of everyone entering the store and compare them to a public mugshot database,” said Greer. “That would be enormously invasive, and exacerbate existing forms of discrimination. If this legislation passes, that sort of creepy corporate surveillance would be impossible, because the store would have to obtain the affirmative consent of every customer before scanning their face.”

Under Merkley and Sanders’ legislation, companies would need consent to gather biometric data including retina or iris scans, voiceprints, faceprints including those derived from a photograph, fingerprints or palm prints, and any “uniquely identifying information based on the characteristics of an individual’s gait or other immutable characteristic of an individual.”

“We can’t let companies scoop up or profit from people’s faces and fingerprints without their consent,” Merkley told Recode. “We have to fight against a ‘big brother’ surveillance state that eradicates our privacy and our control of our own information, be it a threat from the government or from private companies.” 

Fight for the Future, which has also fought the use of facial recognition by law enforcement and other government agencies, warned that Americans should be just as concerned about the use of the technology by private companies. 

“From targeting people with creepy and discriminatory advertisements based on their face to harvesting and selling our sensitive biometric data, there are so many ways corporations can abuse our rights with facial recognition,” said Greer.

“Unless we organize to stop it, the surveillance dystopia of our nightmares may be offered up by corporations in the name of convenience, rather than imposed by an authoritarian government.”

The Drive has published the first-ever picture of a fully intact stealthy Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopter. It sheds new light on what the US military might have used, or at least a variant of it, during the 2011 Osama Bin Laden raid. 

Readers may recall the special operations teams used previously unseen stealth helicopters to raid the safehouse of Osama Bin Laden. During the operation, one of the helicopters crash-landed in the compound. The tail of the top-secret helicopter survived, giving the world the first partial glimpse of the new helicopter.

“Now, what appears to be a previously unpublished picture has come to our attention that shows a heavily modified EH-60 electronic warfare and signals intelligence variant of the Black Hawk,” The Drive said.

It is our understanding that the picture in question seen at the top of this story and again below in a slightly enhanced manner, has a relation to Fort Eustis in Virginia. In addition to being home to 128th Aviation Brigade, previously known as the U.S. Army Aviation Logistics School, Fort Eustis’ Felker Army Airfield it also hosts a unit commonly known as the Flight Concepts Division (FCD), that is now called the Aviation Technology Office (ATO). This is the unit understood to be responsible for leading the development of the stealth Black Hawks used during the Bin Laden raid and many of the U.S. Army’s most advanced and secretive rotary-wing capabilities.

The picture is undated and we have no immediate information about any program or programs the helicopter might have been associated with. The location where it was taken is also unknown, but is a desert locale that could indicate it was shot somewhere in the American southwest, which is home to a number of aviation test facilities, including top-secret air bases, such as Area 51 and the Tonopah Test Range Airport. The stealthy Black Hawks used in the Bin Laden raid were housed at the former, according to reports. -The Drive 

It appears helicopters can be stealthy – and after a decade since the raid, perhaps the first fully intact image of the top-secret helicopters was just leaked, or maybe a variant of it. 

The Trump Administration’s campaign of non-stop foreign policy agitation – from sending Alex Azar to Taiwan, to holding more military exercises in the South China Sea, to Trump threatening to ban TikTok, and imposing sanctions on firms and individuals tied to the Chinese security apparatus in Xinjiang – continues apace Thursday night.

WSJ reports that a new proposal from the Trump Administration calls for all Chinese-domiciled companies with shares listed on American stock exchanges will need to comply with American auditing rules, or de-list by 2022.

It’s not exactly a surprise. The Senate back in May passed a bill entitled the “Holding Foreign Companies Accountable” Act that called for Chinese companies to confirm to American accounting standards, or de-list. The bill was passed in the wake of the Luckin Coffee fraud. 

It has been on the back-burner since.

If it were signed into law, the bill would required Chinese companies to comply with American auditing rules (they’re currently exempt) or face being delisted, which would put $1.3 trillion of US-listed Chinese firms, including behemoths like Alibaba Group and Tencent, at risk of being pushed out of American markets.

In an amusing coincidence, since President Trump is threatening to ‘cut Democrats out’ of an extension of federal unemployment enhancement money and other emergency measures as the negotiations over an extension drag on, this new “proposal” from the Trump Administration would simply bypass Congress to use the SEC and Treasury to enact new regulations that would have the same effect in practice as the pending legislation.

Which begs the question: Why hasn’t Pelosi brought the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act up for a vote already?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Senior editor Ash Bennington speaks to David Bahnsen, founder and managing partner of The Bahnsen Group, about the economics of re-opening and the state of the U.S. equity markets. Bahnsen weighs the risks and rewards of reopening the U.S. economy during the ongoing pandemic, using the Swedish “no-lockdown” model as an example. Bahnsen and Bennington also discuss the methodology of calculating GDP change as well as the widening chasm between the S&P 500 and the drastic economy contraction. Bahnsen explains this bifurcation by noting that the GDP looks backward while the stock market looks forward. In the intro, Jack Farley reviews the latest initial claims data and gives a strategic overview of the dramatic price action in the Turkish Lira.