Category: zerohedge

There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and Argentina defaults.

And while we have seen a lot of the first in the past year, Biden is making sure we will see much more of the second in coming years, it was Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner who said on Wednesday that we are about to have one more of the third.

Speaking at an event in Buenos Aires, CFK said that Argentina is unable to repay its $45 billion debt with the International Monetary Fund – the same fund that came to Argentina’s rescue in 2018 to fund the country’s latest default – under current negotiating conditions for one simple reason: “we can’t pay because we don’t have the money to pay,” she said adding that the IMF’s conditions are “unacceptable” diminishing the possibility of an agreement with the country’s largest creditor.

In the speech, CFK was flanked by Axel Kicillof, the governor of Buenos Aires Province and her son Maximo. She called on the opposition to help seek better terms from the fund since they are responsible for taking on the debt under former President Mauricio Macri.

“We are not saying to not pay the debt,” Fernandez de Kirchner said, when in reality that’s precisely what she was saying. “Our political group was the only one that paid the debts of all the other governments. We should make an effort, the ruling party and the opposition, to give us a longer term and a different interest rate on a debt that others have contracted.”

CFK’s comment, first reported by Bloomberg, came come after discussions between Economy Minister Martin Guzman and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in Washington on Tuesday that what was described by both sides as a “very good meeting” although in retrospect, they were not so good.

The hardline stance from Fernandez de Kirchner, who battled with creditors during her eight years in office from 2007 to 2015, may help bury the already diminished prospects for a deal to get done before key midterm elections in October. President Alberto Fernandez leads a broad Peronist coalition, and Fernandez de Kirchner comes from a more radical but important left-wing group.

“Key players in the government’s coalition would prefer to be perpetually at war with the Fund,” said Benjamin Gedan, director of the Argentina Project at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank. “That attitude is not productive and complicates the economy minister’s efforts to negotiate a new program.”

Meanwhile, the IMF remains completely toothless in protecting its capital, much of which comes from US taxpayers. While IMF negotiators prefer to hash out a deal with Argentina as soon as possible to put the country back on a path to growth, the Fund knows it can’t force the nation’s hand, Bloomberg sources said.

There is another reason why Argentina is preparing for another default: the alternative is the political suicide known as austerity. CFK is already facing a narrowing political path as the Oct. 24 vote approaches. Announcing an agreement with the Fund, which would include further fiscal austerity pledges, would hurt the ruling coalition’s standing in a country where the IMF is usually blamed for its recurrent economic crisis.

Meanwhile, as Bloomberg notes, Argentina faces an economic minefield… and all the downside of MMT, i.e., helicopter money. 

The country is just emerging from three years of recession, inflation is projected to hit nearly 50% this year and unemployment is in the double digits. The government’s $65 billion debt restructuring with private creditors last year didn’t boost its credibility, and the bonds are now in junk territory again. The country has no access to foreign credit, forcing it to print money.

Now seeking its 22nd IMF program since 1956, Argentina’s fraught history with the lender includes its 2001 financial crisis, when painful budget cuts urged by the Fund failed to avert an economic collapse and debt default. The record agreement in 2018, which failed to lift the economy, also translated into more austerity that led Argentines to vote out a pro-business government and elect Fernandez.

“It’s not totally unexpected, this is an electoral year and she is delivering the message to their voting base, and we should expect more of the same from her,” said BBVA strategist William Snead in an interview from New York.

Argentine dollar bonds maturing in 2030 fell 0.9 cents on the dollar to 34.15 cents on Wednesday. The bonds edged lower after Fernandez de Kirchner’s comments. Argentina restructured its debt with bondholders last year and is still trying to reschedule payments with the Washington-based lender. Argentina’s CDS jumped to the highest level since the country emerged from default last year, rising 1 percentage point to an upfront cost of 39 percentage points, indicating that a near-term default is virtually assured.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Twenty twenty was an unpleasant year for so many reasons. It was a year of riots, unemployment, and the trend in overall rising mortality continued unabated.

Homicides also increased.

In fact, in preliminary homicide data, it looks like homicides increased a lot in 2020.

According to the FBI’s Preliminary Uniform Crime Report for the first half of 2020, “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter offenses increased 14.8%, and aggravated assault offenses were up 4.6%.”

If the second half of 2020 proves to be about the same as the first half, then the nationwide homicide rate for 2020 will have risen from 5 per 100,000 in 2019 to 5.8 per 100,000 in 2020. That’s a big increase, and puts 2020’s total at the highest rate recorded in fifteen years, matching 2006’s rate of 5.8 per 100,000.

Some other data, however, suggests the year-end numbers for 2020 will be even worse than that. Homicides look to be up more than 20 percent during the fall of 2020 compared to the previous year. Thus, the increase from 2019 to 2020 may prove to be one of the largest increases in homicide in more than fifty years.

Source: FBI, “Crime in the US” report, 2020 preliminary report.

Meanwhile, homicides in certain cities increased by far worse rates. Year-over-year increases of 30 percent or more were common in 2020, and this wasn’t limited to only large cities.

In data posted by researcher Jeff Asher, total year-over-year homicides through September 2020 were up in a wide range of locations: up 55 percent in Chicago, up 54 percent in Boston, up 38 percent in Denver, and up 105 percent in Omaha.

What Caused the Surge?

It’s much easier to count homicides than to determine the events and phenomena driving trends in homicides. It’s never a good idea to attribute changes in homicide totals to any single cause.

Nonetheless, we can hazard some guesses.

If we’re going to ask ourselves what might have caused such an unusually large rise in homicide, we ought to look for unusual events.

Most obvious among these, of course, are the stay-at-home orders, business closures, and lockdowns that have occurred since March of last year. These are pretty unusual things.

Although it is considered somewhat heretical to point out that lockdowns can produce significant negative societal side effects, the connection to violent behavior is so undeniable that this is now openly admitted.

For example, in a recent interview with The Atlantic, sociologist Patrick Sharkey discusses some of the likely causes of 2020’s surge in violence, stating:

Last year, everyday patterns of life broke down. Schools shut down. Young people were on their own. There was a widespread sense of a crisis and a surge in gun ownership. People stopped making their way to institutions that they know and where they spend their time. That type of destabilization is what creates the conditions for violence to emerge.

When asked if “idle time” caused by lockdowns was somehow connected to rising homicides, Sharkey continued:

It’s not just idle time but disconnection. That might be the better way to talk about it. People lost connections to institutions of community life, which include school, summer jobs programs, pools, and libraries. Those are the institutions that create connections between members of communities, especially for young people. When individuals are not connected to those institutions, then they’re out in public spaces, often without adults present. And while that dynamic doesn’t always lead to a rise in violence, it can.

The connection between a lack of community institutions and social dysfunction is well known by sociologists.

Last year, when looking at the role the stay-at-home orders might have had on the summer’s riots, I wrote:

As much as lockdown advocates may wish that human beings could be reduced to creatures that do nothing more than work all day and watch television all night, the fact is that no society can long endure such conditions.

Human beings need what are known as “third places.” …

As described by a Brookings Institution report, these third places include churches, parks, recreation centers, hairdressers’ shops, gyms, and even fast-food restaurants.

Yet, the lockdown advocates, in a matter of a few days, cut people off from their third places and insisted, in many cases, that this would be the “new normal” for a year or more.

These third places cannot simply be shut down—and the public told to just forget about them indefinitely—without creating the potential for violence and other antisocial behavior.

Few of these places exist for the explicit purpose of reducing violence, although they tend to have this effect. But during the government-mandated lockdowns, some organizations specifically devoted to violence prevention were shut down and, as noted by law professor Tracey Meares, the pandemic has prevented many antiviolence programs from operating. These programs, however, require “a great deal of a face-to-face contact, typically, among service providers and the folks who are most likely to both commit these offenses and be the victims of them,” Meares says. “And it’s a lot harder to do that when people can’t meet in person.”

Of course, it’s not that these people just can’t meet in person, as if it were physically impossible to do so. It’s that in many places they are legally prohibited from doing so. This means even the most urgent cases were neglected and put on the back burner because policymakers made a decision to ignore the realities of violent crime in order to obsess over covid risks.

And this is a point that must be made repeatedly. “The pandemic” isn’t what caused the widespread destruction of social institutions that are key in increasing social cohesion and preventing violence. Government edicts did this. Certainly, given fears over covid infection, it stands to reason that many people would have elected to stay home, and that important social institutions would have functioned at reduced capacity even without government mandates.

However, what government mandates did was prevent people from even using their own discretion, which means even the most at-risk, isolated, and emotionally volatile people—the people who need these institutions the most—were cut off from important resources.

Also important in understanding homicides is the fact covid lockdowns have increased domestic violence; as Sharkey notes, “Intimate-partner violence increased in 2020.” Again, advocates for stay-at-home orders have used their bizarrely extreme preoccupation with covid deaths as an excuse to insist it is “worth it” to keep women and children locked up with their abusers. Homicides have increased as a result in many cases. 

The Role of Police in Lockdown Enforcement

The lockdowns aren’t the only factors behind rising crime, of course. Another factor in the rising homicide rate is likely the decline of the public’s trust in police institutions.

The reputations of police and police organizations appear to have gone into significant decline in recent years as police encounters are increasingly being recorded and made public—thus exposing police abuse and what at least appears to be police abuse.

These events have been connected to rising rates of violent crime. As noted by both Sharkey and by crime historian Randolph Roth, the public’s trust in government institutions—which certainly includes police—can impact a community’s willingness to turn to violence in personal interactions.

In other words, antipolice sentiment is regarded as a likely indirect cause of growing homicide rates. This declining trust manifested itself in last summer’s riots, but the origins of the riots predate both the riots and the George Floyd case.

But even when we look to the role of police agencies’ status within communities, we find that the stay-at-home orders and lockdowns again play a role.

It is the police, after all, who have been responsible for enforcing government orders to wear masks, close businesses, and avoid gatherings. Throughout 2020, police have been a central in harassing churchgoers, beating up nonviolent citizens for not “social distancing,” and arresting women for not wearing masks. Police have also arrested business owners and shut down their businesses. And then there was the case of a six-year-old girl who was taken from her mother because the mother wasn’t wearing a mask when she dropped her daughter off at school. Who will be providing the regime’s muscle when it comes to separating this child from her mother? Naturally, it will be the police.

Although the police have continued to enjoy uncritical support from the “Back the Blue” movement, more reasonable people can only tolerate so much when it comes to police who willingly attack and arrest people for the noncrimes of using their own private property or not wearing a mask on a public sidewalk.

Reversing the Damage Done in 2020

It’s unclear at this point if reversing policies that caused a year of community destruction can quickly undo the damage. In any case, however, the responsible thing to do is end any and all policies that keep churches, community centers, and meeting spaces closed. The police must be out of the business of roughing people up in the name of social distancing. The politicians’ obsession with isolating people must end.

A Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II sustained millions of dollars in damage last month while flying a routine training mission over U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground in Yuma, Arizona, when it accidentally shot itself. 

Military.com reports the F-35B was on a training mission at Yuma during a night operation when an externally mounted GAU-22 firing 25mm x 137 PGU-32/U SAPHEI-T (semi-armor piercing, high explosive incendiary-tracer rounds) discharged and “exploded after leaving the fighter’s cannon,” Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Andrew Wood confirmed to Military.com on Tuesday.

The aircraft landed safely after the round caused at least $2.5 million in damages. 

“It was not immediately clear if the round was fired deliberately. Citing the ongoing investigation, Wood did not provide further details,” said Military.com.

The F-35B is the most advanced fifth-generation fighter jet in the world. This model is particularly designed for the Marines, is capable of short takeoff and vertical landings. 

The F-35 program has been plagued with hundreds of issues. For instance, the 25mm gun on the stealth jet has had an accuracy problem hitting ground targets. 

Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s independent weapons tester, told Bloomberg in January that the F-35 has 871 software and hardware flaws that could affect combat operations. 

Here are other unresolved glitches of the F-35 program (the partial list via Defense News):

• When the F-35B vertically lands on very hot days, older engines may be unable to produce the required thrust to keep the jet airborne, resulting in a hard landing.
• After doing certain maneuvers, F-35B and F-35C pilots are not always able to completely control the aircraft’s pitch, roll and yaw.
• Supersonic flight in excess of Mach 1.2 can cause structural damage and blistering to the stealth coating of the F-35B and F-35C.
• Cabin pressure spikes in the cockpit of the F-35 have been known to cause barotrauma, the word given to extreme ear and sinus pain.
• The spare parts inventory shown by the F-35’s logistics system does not always reflect reality, causing occasional mission cancellations.
• If the F-35A and F-35B blows a tire upon landing, the impact could also take out both hydraulic lines and pose a loss-of-aircraft risk.
• Possible maneuvering issues when the aircraft is operating above a 20-degree angle of attack.
• The F-35’s logistics system currently has no way for foreign F-35 operators to keep their secret data from being sent to the United States.

It could take billions of dollars more over the next few years for upgrades, research and development, aircraft procurement, operations, and maintenance to resolve these issues. 

The F-35 is America’s most expensive jet fighter program, expected to cost taxpayers $1 trillion over the years. The latest snafu is more evidence that the world’s most advanced stealth fighter is plagued with flaws – suggesting it may not be combat-ready. 

Authored by Julianne Geiger via OilPrice.com,

Former Glencore oil trader Emilio Jose Heredia Collado has pleaded guilty to conspiring to manipulate an oil-price benchmark to influence global oil prices. 

Heredia now faces up to five years in prison. 

According to prosecutors, the 49-year-old trader attempted to manipulate prices through an S&P Global Platts-managed process between 2012 and 2016, the WSJ reported. 

More specifically, prosecutors alleged that Heredia directed buy and sell orders that would manipulate fuel oil prices and allow the companies he worked for to generate profits off the price swings.  

Co-conspirators were directed by Heredia to submit bids and offers through oil benchmark price publisher S&P Global Platts to change price assessments that would allow the company he was working for to scoop up fuel oil from another company at a lower price.  

While the charges contained several examples, in one specific instance, prosecutors said Heredia ordered traders to submit bids and offers that resulted in a massive reduction–over $40 per metric ton–in the benchmark price for bunker fuel, which generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in illicit profits for Heredia’s company in 2016.

Glencore is cooperating with the authorities in this case, but also notes that Heredia was a former employee, and not exclusively of Glencore. In a Tuesday statement, Glencore said: “We note that one of Chemoil’s—and later Glencore Ltd.’s—former employees in the US has been charged with conspiracy to manipulate the price of fuel oil in the LA market between 2012 and 2016.” 

Heredia entered his guilty plea via video conference Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, and the case is being highlighted as an invigorated crackdown on energy market manipulation. It follows another trading scandal that climaxed late last year. 

In December, energy and commodities trading giant Vitol Inc agreed to pay $164 million to US and Brazilian authorities to settle attempted market manipulation and fraud charges, including bribes to officials in Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador for business with state oil companies between 2015 and 2020. 

Taiwan’s military has made an extremely rare admission that could hasten China’s efforts to bring the democratic island to heel. A top official acknowledged on Thursday that Taiwan has initiated mass production of long-range missiles capable of striking mainland China. 

In addition to one missile type now in production, the military said three others are currently in development. The information which is sure to raise alarm bells in Beijing came during testimony by Taiwan’s Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng in front of parliament.

While taking lawmakers’ questions he indicated that putting in place a long-range attack capability is seen as “a priority” by the nation’s armed forces amid a broader modernization and overhaul of its defenses – efforts backed by the United States.

The key part of the exchange was captured by Reuters as follows:

“We hope it is long-range, accurate, and mobile,” he said, adding research on such weapons by the state-owned National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology had “never stopped.”

Standing next to Chiu, the institute’s deputy director Leng Chin-hsu said one long-range, land-based missile had already entered production, with three other long-range missiles in development.

Leng said it was “not convenient” for him to provide details on how far the missile could fly.

The region is already on edge given what are now weekly and almost daily incursions by Chinese aerial patrols. In the past months this has sometimes included a half-dozen Chinese H-6K strategic bombers or more making aggressive maneuvers in breach of Taiwan’s defense zones. 

The United States as the main supplier of arms to the island has also been condemned by Beijing for violating the ‘One China’ status quo, particularly because of the series of major weapons sales approvals during the last six months of the Trump administration. 

While Biden said Thursday during his first presidential press conference that he “doesn’t want confrontation” with China he’s done little in terms of rolling pack ‘confrontational’ Trump policies – but quite the opposition – he’s arguably actually increased the pressure. 

One of the main lessons from the deadly Texas polar blast disaster last month which left millions of homes without power for days, is that it provides a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to offer (and implement) fixes. Not surprisingly, power pioneer Elon Musk did just that earlier this month when a Tesla subsidiary – Gambit Energy Storage LLC – was revealed to be secretively building a more than 100 megawatt energy storage project in Angleton, Texas, a town roughly 40 miles south of Houston (a battery that size could power about 20,000 homes on a hot summer day).

Now it’s Warren Buffett’s turn.

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has proposed an multi-billion plan to help Texas avoid a repeat of February’s blackouts: according to the proposal, the company to be known as Texas Emergency Power Reserve, would invest $8.3 billion to build many new gas-powered plants along with gas storage. That would add about 10,000 megawatts of reliability plants to ERCOT, the grid that sends electricity to about 90% of Texans.

According to the Dallas Morning News and Bloomberg, the conglomerate put together a presentation asking state lawmakers to approve a plan for a new company that would add about 10 gigawatts of gas plants and emergency gas storage.

“We really want to make sure that this never happens again. So we’re really wanting to partner with the state,” Chris Brown, chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Energy Infrastructure Group, said in an interview, although what he really wanted is something else entirely as readers will find out shortly. “The proposal is simple: state residents should have a reliable source of backup power” he said, echoing Elon Musk’s own vision of how to “fix” the dilapidated Texas power grid.

Ironically, if Berkshire is successful in its lobbying campaign, Texas would be adding a massive amount of new gas-fired capacity at a time when President Joe Biden is trying to shift the country away from fossil fuels, and in a state that’s invested heavily in wind and solar power (although was remind readers that it was precisely Texas’ outsized reliance on wind power which prompted the collapse, as the cascading failures started once windmills failed due to the freezing temperatures).

And while superficially the proposal makes sense, with Berkshire proposing that the Texas grid operator retain control the plants and tap them to prevent blackouts like the one that left more than 4 million homes and businesses in the dark, there is one catch… or rather a few catches.

While Buffett would make a one time investment of $8.3BN, Berkshire would earn a whopping 9.3% risk free rate of return – unheard of in a day and age when there are $14 trillion in bonds trading with negative yields – which would be paid by consumers after approval from the Public Utility Commission. The Buffett proposal would also stick Texas power customers with paying the fee to cover the costs of the plants.

Additionally, the plan includes a major change to Texas’ deregulated power market, including guaranteed payments for the extra capacity.

In other words, Buffett is generously “offering” Texas taxpayers a deal where he makes a one-time payment and collects a return that is 6 times higher than 10Y Treasurys despite having roughly the same level of risk. In fact, under Buffett’s proposal he would make his entire investment back in about 10 years. And while billionaire is laughing all the way to the bank, it is Texas taxpayers who end up footing the bill for any future costs which as February demonstrated, will be substantial.

A spokesman for Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan confirmed to Bloomberg that the office had received the slides and had met with Berkshire regarding the plan. However, as CreditSights utility analyst Andy DeVries writes, “we see little to no chance of Texas approving that Buffett proposal,” for one simple reason: “If they were going to spend that amount of money – which is a big if – they would do it with Texas companies.”

Berkshire, however, is undaunted, and believes it could have its plan operational by the winter of 2023, according to the slides. The proposal would cost less than winterizing the state’s power generators or creating a so-called capacity market where generation units are paid to provide supplies in future years, according to Berkshire.

The additional capacity created by Berkshire would ensure that no customer would be without power for more than three hours, the company said. The Texas Reliability Corp. would offer a $4 billion performance guaranty provided by an investment graded counterparty.

The other catch: Buffett’s proposal flies against the very principles that makes the Texas energy market unique. The proposal will face loud opposition, especially from heavy industrial users of electricity who want to pay for power they use, not power pledged for emergencies, which is precisely what Berkshire – which has perfected the insurance model – is hoping to implement. Texas generators also would want to get in on the action, and one observer called the Berkshire proposal “a one-company capacity market.”

It’s why Height Securities analyst Josh Price said he was “skeptical” that the idea would have traction with lawmakers.

“The key question will be whether policymakers are willing to forego market-based principles if a non-competitive approach would be more cost-effective,” he said in an email.

Non-competitive being the key word here, and applies perfectly to Buffett, 90, who is hoping to extend his folksy crony capitalist ways to yet another state. We can only hope that Texans are smart enough to read between the lines.

But the biggest reason why the Berkshire proposal won’t work is that competitors would love to be part of the proposed solution, too. And while generators have proposed a capacity market for Texas in recent years, lawmakers have passed on those bills. They will do the same again, unless somehow their palms end up being well-greased just before the decision is made.

As Goldman Sachs presses its employees around the world to return to the office as soon as possible, the bank has apparently learned from past mistakes that pushing too hard can be counterproductive.

In a move that could foreshadow more complications in New York and elsewhere as Goldman moves employees back to offices around the world, Goldman Sachs told all but critical staff at its operation in the Indian IT capital of Bengaluru to return to working from home on Wednesday, Reuters reports. The decision marks a reversal of a move to get staff back to one of GS’s biggest global offices. The move comes as daily new COVID cases in India have rebounded to their highest level in five months. The surge prompted the Indian government to halt exports of vaccines manufactured at the Indian Serum Institute.

Source: mSightly

Cities including Bengaluru, the Indian city where Goldman’s office is based, have been advised to be on notice as they have seen the bulk of the spread. Some states have reimposed tighter restrictions as scientists have identified a “double mutant” strain of the virus.

Goldman reportedly scheduled a call with local workers on Thursday to offer more details and information about when they can expect to return. In March so far, nearly 14K new COVID cases have been reported in Bengaluru, more than twice the number recorded in February. The Bengaluru office seats about 7K employees, the bulk of GS’s Indian workforce, who are involved in a variety of functions including technology, finance and human resources. Workers in Bengaluru also provide back-end support for business lines such as trading and the consumer banking business, Marcus.

“This hasn’t come as a surprise given how coronavirus cases have been rising in the city, specifically in the area where the office is located,” one employee said, asking not to be named. “There’s no word on how long the work-from-home will continue but my guess is that we won’t be returning to office for the next three to four months.”

Asked about the reversal, a spokesman for the bank told Reuters: “We continue to work on plans to return our people to office safely, and those plans will vary division by division, country by country, city by city.”

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

2021 is quickly shaping up to the be the Year of the Censor. 

Already this year we’ve seen the best of our journalists driven out of high-profile positions and going independent. 

From Glenn Greenwald being forced out at the company he helped found, The Intercept, to Matt Taibbi leaving Rolling Stone, the days of the independent voice in media is being driven underground.

Even with them gone to newcomer Substack, that hasn’t satisfied the gatekeepers of political correctness, who want them unable to even make a living. 

If they can silence voices that large, then it has chilling implications for smaller voices.

For a creator like me there is real risk tying my livelihood to a platform like Patreon whose history with hosting controversial material is spotty to say the least. 

Patreon has been walking this path for a couple of years now but with its recent spate of bans it is quickly morphing into a company without a future, a company with a permanently damaged brand.

And, for the record, I consider this a real shame. 

What began as a platform for creators to bypass the publishing gatekeepers that guys like Taibbi and Greenwald fought the good fight against for years has, sadly, morphed into a platform more interested in sanitizing the creative drive of budding artists rather than nurturing it.

I say this as a person who saw Patreon as my best option when I went independent back in early 2017.  Even then there were signs that “Cancel Culture” would reach deeper and deeper into alternative media.

What started with the de-platforming of ‘alt-right Nazis’ during the 2016 presidential campaign, quickly escalated into the war on disinformation from gadflies and performance artists like Milo Yiannopolous and Alex Jones.

Jones was targeted because of his coverage of the Sandy Hook tragedy.  He was a test case to gauge the level of public pushback against removing a dissident voice from the public forum. 

The story of Twitter alternative, Gab, whose only crime is strictly adhering to the First Amendment and the Supreme Court’s limits on it, is even worse than Jones’ story.

Patreon lost major revenue streams from people like Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin over Patreon’s treatment of Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin.  Rubin would go on to build a Patreon alternative, Locals, in response.

By the end of the Trump Administration Big Tech censorship kicked into high gear, further extending the argument about protecting public safety from ‘bad information’ into the public health narrative surrounding COVID-19.

And this is what got major investigative journalists like Whitney Webb, John Corbett, Venessa Beeley and others removed from Patreon recently, their coverage of COVID-19, the vaccines and political impulses behind them.

But that is the current line in the sand for the Big Tech firms.  Cross it and get de-platformed.  I’m not saying it’s right.  It’s not.  But that’s the state of play.

The lesson for all purveyors of any counter-narrative at this point is they must be aware of the ever-shifting line if they want to continue having a voice.

And this brings me to the crux of the problem.  What do we do about it as consumers and producers?  Patreon is supposed to be a middleman, I get that they only want to host certain kinds of content as is their right as a business.

Crowdfunding is a powerful tool.  I saw it validated first-hand when the legendary rock band (and personal favorite) Marillion’s fans accidentally created it funding their 1997 tour of the U.S. and then the band itself by asking for the production costs of their 2001 album Anoraknophobia up front.

This was the first instance of a fanbase and a creator openly working together without the middleman taking all the profit.  I jumped at the chance to back their next project, the incredible album Marbles, and every crowdfunded project thereafter to support their assault on the rapacious record industry. 

Their goal was simple, use the funds to become their own recording and distribution company, freeing themselves from the wants of a label.  It not only worked, but it was also the proof of concept that spawned an entire industry.

It turned the entire business model for artists on its head.  Now an artist could keep most of the revenue their work generated versus the other way around.  Now unit sales in the thousands or even hundreds, priced properly, could sustain an artist rather than needing to reach the millions the big distribution houses supposedly had access to.

The board game industry is going through a boom like never before because of Kickstarter.  Boutique games with insane production values can make it to the market turning a labor of love into a shared reality.

When your art, however, is journalism or political commentary, in a world becoming increasingly polarized politically and when those in power are paranoid about losing control over the public narrative, unfortunately all bets are off.

Now, those people, like me, are faced with the very real threat of crossing the line and losing our lives.

Because stifling dissent is the last resort of a tyrant and a scoundrel.  And there is pressure on companies like Patreon and banks to cancel those out of political favor. 

In this kind of environment is is nearly impossible to tell the difference between a company helping the censorship willingly or going along under threat of extinction themselves.

As a libertarian I believe strongly that companies, like people, have the right to deny someone being its customer.  Freedom of association implies freedom from association.

But I also understand the reality that the playing field is tilted towards those that control access to not only the internet bandwidth but also the banking system.  And when those people are also the same ones who control the government and the media there is no ‘safe space’ for anyone who speaks their mind openly.

It’s one thing for Apple to deny Parler or Gab an app on their app store.  I don’t agree with it, but I get it.  It’s quite another for a bank to deny them service because of the threat of retribution from government, which is what is happening here.

As a creator tied to Patreon today I want to continue validating not only my own business model but Patreon’s.  As I thrive, they thrive. 

I see them not just as a service provider but as a partner in my business.  I want them to make decisions which support the rights of all creators to have a voice in the marketplace of ideas, including those they disagree with or even despise.

That’s what the first amendment is supposed to protect.

If those ideas are terrible then let them not flourish.  And if the information is untrue let them bear the consequences of that as well in court. 

I’ve been inundated with notices from current and potential Patrons that they won’t do business with Patreon because of their latest abrogation of the public trust.  They want to support people they respect.  They want fairness brought back to the playing field and let the best ideas win. 

After four years of consistent attacks by the undeserved self-righteousness of the woke mob and the tyrants who support them, they want to exercise the only power they feel they have left in the Culture War.

And I fully respect that position.  I canceled my subscription to Netflix for this reason. 

But no solution today is a perfect one.  There’s always some part of the business that is offensive to someone else.  Locals, as Dave Rubin pointed out during the assault on Parler, uses Amazon Web Services for its data hosting. 

It’s a vulnerability.  If you hate Amazon for what they did to Parler, will you boycott Locals because of it? 

The hallmark of the free market is that it coordinates the labor and time of millions of people, most of whom wouldn’t like each other if they ever met.  Murray Rothbard is famous for saying to never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And Patreon, to this point, has been very good to me.  And to my customers even though they are far from perfect. 

Something many of you may not realize, with the freedom to publish comes the responsibility of management.  Independent producers aren’t just journalists, cartoonists and writers, they are also marketers, accountants, managers and editors. 

There’s a time cost associated with the choice to walk away from Patreon or any other censorious platform.  That time cost is exactly what the tyrants want us to pay.  They want us distracted with their harassment and not producing content which challenges them.

That’s why I felt this article needed to be written, to remind us all what our goals are and the true face of the battle we are fighting. 

There’s a certain irony in continuing to use the very tools they think they are oppressing us with to point out their hypocrisy.

Most importantly, with the proliferation of competition and the rapid adoption of cryptocurrencies as a payment layer and the blockchain as a bulwark against censorship, the days of this kind of pressure are numbered anyway.

As always, the market will provide a solution.

Patreon, in my opinion, is committing brand suicide with its decisions today that they will not likely recover from.  For now, I choose to take the high road and treat Patreon the way they have treated me. There is no profit for anyone in borrowing trouble that may never come. 

Because that may be the biggest self-inflicted wound of all.

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Join My Patreon even if you hate them.

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Manhattan’s luxury condo frenzy cooled in the last few years. Owners are taking realized losses as they offload properties at steep losses. We’ve spent the last 19 or so months writing about the borough’s deteriorating residential market conditions. Now it appears a floor has been put in as buyers rush in and purchase luxury homes at deep discounts. 

The latest market report from Olshan Realty shows 41 contracts were signed last week at $4 million and above. Last week was the seventh consecutive week of 30 deals or more in the borough, the best streak since 2006. 

Year to date, there have been a total of 343, a 60% jump from 215 contracts for the same period in 2020. 

We first noted Olshan Realty’s report from early last month explaining how the luxury real estate market is beginning to attract buyers. 

This is “the comeback year,” Donna Olshan, president of the brokerage, told Bloomberg. “These are people who live in New York or are from New York, and they’re betting on the home team.”

Last week’s largest contract was a townhome at 19 West 12th Street, listed at $22.5 million, reduced $12.45 million from its 2016 listing of $34.95 million. The seller took a 36% haircut. 

Earlier this month, Olshan said wealthy sellers in the market have no interest in sticking around in “New York if they’re not using the asset or if the asset isn’t giving a return.” 

With Mayor Bill De Blasio doing everything he possibly can to drive both businesses (like Goldman Sachs) and individual citizens out of the city, the effects of his colossal mismanagement and general cluelessness have been at the expense of the ultra-rich who are panic unloading their luxury condos or townhomes for more space and comfort in rural communities. 

Last week, Goldman Sachs executive Michael Daffey purchased convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion for $51 million, listed initially in July 2020 at $88 million. Epstein’s estate executors slashed the price of the home by more than 42%. 

According to Olshan, condos accounted for 68% of last week’s signed contracts priced at $4 million or more, while co-ops made up 20% and townhouses 12%. The average asking price was $7.4 million, and discounts averaged around 11% off original asking prices.

Luxury Manhattan homes are only back in vogue because prices are deeply discounted as smart money leaves the metro area. The question remains who is catching the falling knife? 

Authored by Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Good for Governor Ron DeSantis.

In sharp contrast with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who recently imposed “vaccine passport” requirements for people in New York to attend certain events, DeSantis is standing up for freedom and against the imposing of vaccine passports in Florida.

In a Thursday press conference, DeSantis stated his firm opposition to vaccine passports, as well as to requiring people to demonstrate they have tested negative for coronavirus. A WCJB-TV report quotes DeSantis’ comments on the matter from the press conference:

“I just want to make very clear in Florida, we are not doing any vaccine passports,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during his news conference on Thursday afternoon.

“I think it’s a bad idea. And so that will not happen. And so folks should get vaccinated if they want to obviously provide that. But under no circumstances will the state be asking you to show proof of vaccination.”

“And I don’t think private companies should be doing that either,” added DeSantis.

“So we’re going to look into see what we need to do to be able to make sure we’re protecting Floridians. But I do think it would be a big problem to start going down the road of vaccine passports.”

…

“You have some of these states saying to go to a sporting event, you have to show either a negative test or a vaccine proof. I think you just got to make decisions. If you want to go to an event go to an event if you don’t don’t, but to be requiring people to provide all this proof,” said DeSantis.

“That’s not how you get society back to normal. So we’re rejecting any vaccine passports here in the state of Florida.”

Back in September, when most governors were extending and even adding to their states’ coronavirus crackdowns because of “the science,” DeSantis was terminating restrictions in Florida and giving a platform to scientists opposed to the multitude of draconian government actions taken in the name of countering coronavirus.