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Submitted by South Front,

On September 3, an explosion of an improvised explosive device (IED) targeted a convoy with equipment of the US-led coalition in the southern Iraqi province of Dhi Qar.

Iraqi troops that were escorting the convoy suffered no casualties. According to local sources, no significant damage was caused to the equipment. Following the incident, security forces detained 2 suspects near the explosion site. The investigation is ongoing.

However, it is no secret that the attack was likely conducted by one of multiple pro-Iranian Shiite groups that surfaced in the country following the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani and several prominent Iraqi commanders by a US strike in Baghdad in January.

Earlier, the Guardians of Blood (also known as Islamic Resistance in Iraq) released a video showing an IED attack on another convoy with US equipment. The attack took place near Camp Taji, north of Baghdad on August 23. During the last few months, such attacks became a regular occurrence across Iraq.

Pro-Iranian forces not only created a wide network of active cells that carry out these operations, but also successfully track movements of US forces and their equipment. According to local sources, a large number of Iraqi security personnel involved in the guarding of US forces and facilities in fact support the Iranian-backed campaign against the United States as well as the public demand of the full US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Despite loud statements and the handing over of several US bases to the Iraqi military, Washington is not reducing its military presence in the country. Rather it’s regrouping its forces and strengthening the security of the remaining facilities. Tensions are on the rise not only in Iraq.

On September 3, Israel’s ImageSat International released satellite images showcasing the impact of the recent Israeli strikes on Iranian-linked targets near the Syrian capital of Damascus, and in the province of Homs. The report claimed that the strike on the Damascus International Airport destroyed a headquarters and a warehouse used by Iranian forces. The same area was the target of an Israeli attack in February. The strike on the T4 airport in Homs damaged the main runway and an apron. As a result, the air base was temporary placed out of service.

A few days earlier, the Israeli Defense Forces claimed that they had hit approximately 100 Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in August. This supposedly included 35 hits on Hamas weapons manufacturing sites, along with 30 underground sites, 20 observation posts and 10 sites linked to the group’s aerial capabilities such as drones. According to the Israeli side, these strikes were a response to rocket and other attacks from the Gaza Strip. Palestinian groups claim that they just retaliate to permanent pressure and acts of aggression from the Israeli side.

Taking into account the war in Yemen, a large part of the Middle East has been turned into a battleground of the conflict between the Israeli-US bloc and the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance.

Social media has seeped into virtually all aspects of modern life. The vast social media universe collectively now holds 3.8 billion users, representing roughly 50% of the global population.

With an additional billion internet users projected to come online in the coming years, Visual Capitalist’s Aran Ali notes that it’s possible that the social media universe could expand even further.

How the Networks Stack Up

To begin, let’s take a look at how social networks compare in terms of monthly active users (MAUs)—an industry metric widely used to gauge the success of these platforms.

Here’s a closer look at individual social platforms, and their trials and tribulations:

Facebook

To put it mildly, Facebook has had its hands full. A flurry of companies are boycotting Facebook’s ads, while the platform struggles to fend off the spread of misinformation.

Yet, its stock price continues to advance to new highs while the traditional economy faces less than rosy forecasts. Facebook still possesses the largest cohort of users, inching closer to the 3 billion MAU mark—a breakthrough yet to be achieved by any company.

Snapchat

Snapchat and founder Evan Spiegel have had a bumpy road since their IPO in 2017. The stock price reached its nadir near $4 in 2018, reflecting investor concerns tied to the introduction of Instagram Stories. In recent times, the stock has advanced past the $20 mark, although there is still long-term unclarity around monetization and profitability.

YouTube

YouTube competes head on against traditional television and streaming programs for eyeballs. The platform raked in revenues of $15.1 billion in 2019, nearly double their figures in 2017.

Parent company Alphabet has invested in YouTube with new rollouts like YouTube Music (merged with what was once Google Music) and YouTube Premium—a bundled subscription-based platform providing music, ad-free content, and YouTube Originals. By the looks of it, the future of YouTube will be much more than just videos.

WeChat

The biggest social platform in China, WeChat has flourished, now holding a whopping 1.2 billion MAUs. As part of the Tencent Holdings conglomerate, they belong to the BATX group that is seen to lock horns with America’s Big Tech.

Reddit

There have been whispers of a Reddit IPO on Wall Street for some time now. While such an event has not yet materialized, Reddit’s success certainly has. With 430 million MAUs relative to 330 million in 2018, the company continues to attract a larger audience. The notion of community has taken on a different meaning in the digital age, and Reddit represents this transition with their ever-growing network of users.

Instagram

Instagram has been vital to Facebook’s success, since its $1 billion acquisition in 2012. The platform attracts a younger audience compared to Facebook and it has demonstrated an ability to remain versatile, specifically by implementing Instagram Stories and Reels.

Twitter

Busy schedules don’t seem to faze Jack Dorsey who has not one, but two CEO jobs in Twitter and Square. Twitter has been able to achieve profitability in the last two years, reporting net income figures of $1.2 and $1.5 billion in 2018 and 2019 respectively. They no doubt have their work cut out for them as they continue to combat fake news and similar controversies on their platform.

TikTok

If any publicity is good publicity, then 2020 has been TikTok’s year. Headlines include privacy breaches with alleged ties to the Chinese Communist Party, a banning of the app by India Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and now, talks of a partial U.S. acquisition. Potential acquirers include leaders Microsoft, Twitter, and Oracle.

Social Media Under Trial?

Despite the list of headwinds social media has faced, about half of the world is now on it—and there seems to be no end in sight for future growth.

How have companies with exposure to the social media universe fared in 2020 so far?

Widespread participation in social media comes with its fair set of problems. Some companies such as Facebook have found themselves in the crosshairs on both sides of the political spectrum. As concerns grow around privacy and data, social media will be front and center in shaping the future of government, business, and politics.

Only time will tell just how high user counts will reach. The long-term trajectory suggests there’s more room left in the engine. There are still parts of the world that are just beginning to possess the technological infrastructure for social media to be a possibility. It’s plausible future growth will come from that avenue.

If stock prices of companies linked to social media are of relevance, their performance this year paired with the fact that they are trading near all-time highs supports such a growth thesis.

Authored by Pat Buchanan, op-ed via Townhall.com,

When U.S. cities erupted after the death of George Floyd, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was in the vanguard of the protests, renaming a section of downtown Black Lives Matter Plaza, and painting the name in letters on the street so huge they could be seen from space.

Thursday, however, Bowser awoke to those same BLM protesters yelling outside her home, denouncing a “D.C. police murder of a Black Man,” and demanding the mayor fire Police Chief Peter Newsham.

18-year-old Deon Kay had been shot and killed Wednesday afternoon in an encounter with cops. While this was the fifth shooting by D.C. cops this year, it was the first fatality.

There have been 130 other homicides in D.C. in 2020, mostly of Black folks that involved other Black folks, and not the cops.

“We believe the suspect had a gun at the time,” Newsham told reporters.

Witnesses challenged the chief’s claim.

But this is only the latest problem bedeviling Bowser.

While she has been blaming “outside agitators” for the mayhem in the city, the Washington Times reports that 82 percent of the 541 people arrested for riot-related crimes were residents of D.C., Maryland or Virginia.

On Tuesday, the mayor’s office made national news by releasing a list of monuments and memorials in Washington that should be “removed, replaced or contextualized.”

Among them are the Washington Monument, the Jefferson Memorial and Columbus’ statue at Union Station.

The name of Alexander Graham Bell should be erased from Bell Multicultural High School, Bowser’s working group said. Like Winston Churchill and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the inventor of the telephone believed in eugenics.

Presidents James Madison, author of the Constitution, John Tyler, who annexed Texas, and Zachary Taylor, who led the U.S. army to victory in the Mexican-American War, are also candidates for having their memorials and monuments “replaced, removed or contextualized.”

Woodrow Wilson’s name should be removed from Wilson high, and the names of Founding Father Ben Franklin and author of the national anthem Francis Scott Key should be erased from buildings named in their honor.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the D.C. nonvoting representative in Congress, explained that the working group formed by Bowers to look into monuments and memorials did not mean the statues were to be pulled down but that plaques should be added informing visitors that these sites are dedicated to men who had a perverted view of human rights.

Norton wants the Emancipation Proclamation statue featuring Abe Lincoln and an unshackled slave, unveiled at an 1876 ceremony attended by President Grant, at which Frederick Douglass spoke, removed. She also wants the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square removed.

Yet, it was General Jackson who saved the Union from being torn apart at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, while the defenders of Washington and the White House fled from the attacking British, letting the nation’s capital be burned in August of 1814.

D.C. officials are today running away from the plans of the mayor’s working group, but those plans testify powerfully to what an act of folly and a capitulation to political correctness it would be for the Congress to vote statehood for D.C., as Nancy Pelosi’s House did this year.

D.C. is unrepresentative of America and undeserving in any way to be raised to statehood.

Since given the franchise 60 years ago, it has never voted Republican for president. Its three electoral votes have gone to the Democrats in every election since LBJ in ’64. Republican nominee Donald Trump got 4 percent of the D.C. vote. Hillary Clinton got 90 percent, a margin of 22-1.

Moreover, D.C. has a smaller population than 19 other American cities and is smaller in geographic size than 150 other U.S. cities. Rhode Island, our smallest state, is geographically 20 times the size of D.C.

The D.C. government has been in the headlines countless times for personal scandals and financial crises. One four-term mayor, Marion Barry, was sent to prison and returned to be reelected to office.

As for D.C. public schools, the problem is not that they are named for presidents but that they produce some of the lowest test scores in the nation.

More significant, as the protests, attended by riots since May, have shown, the D.C. government, a hostile province when a Republican is in the White House, is the domicile of a permanent regime of leftist and radical media, tens of thousands of federal and city bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists, all yoked to big government.

As the “peaceful protests” of June and July showed, with Georgetown sacked and statues demolished, D.C.’s government is an incompetent custodian of the nation’s historic monuments and memorials, and incapable of protecting the White House.

What does Joe Biden, who approved of the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers, generals and statesmen, think of D.C.’s scheme to “remove, replace or contextualize” the statues of so many men who held the office he now seeks?

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a new report warning about a “potential” electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the U.S. 

DHS’s warning published Thur. (Sept. 2), or about 60 days until the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 3, indicates there are “evolving threats against the American homeland, most recently highlighting efforts to combat an Electromagnetic Pulse attack which could disrupt the electrical grid and potentially damage electronics.” 

The department released an EMP status report via the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that said the “key actions to address known EMP-related vulnerabilities to critical infrastructure.” 

CISA said an EMP attack could “disrupt, degrade, and damage technology” embedded in critical infrastructure systems. Widespread blackouts could be seen if an EMP was to damage the nation’s electrical grid, resulting in additional flare-ups of socio-economic turmoil. 

“EMP attacks are part of the emerging threats against our nation and demand a response,” said Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli.

“That is why DHS is taking these contingencies very seriously, working diligently to mitigate our risks and equipping our state and local partners with the resources they need to do the same. We’ve made significant progress and look forward to work ahead,” Cuccinelli said. 

CISA Director Chris Krebs said top priorities of the agency is to mitigate threats associated with EMPs: 

“Over the past year, we have worked with interagency and industry partners to identify the footprint and effects of EMP threats across our National Critical Functions, and are developing sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation’s resilience to EMPs,” Krebs said.

To combat these emerging threats, President Trump signed an executive order in March 2019, delegating power to the White House for EMP preparedness. 

We recently quoted Peter Vincent Pry, ex-chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, who wrote an op-ed that said the virus pandemic from China has “exposed dangerous weaknesses in U.S. planning and preparation for civil defense protection and recovery, and those weaknesses surely have been noticed by our potential enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and international terrorists.”

Pry warned that “China has been planning to defeat the U.S. with an EMP and cyber “Pearl Harbor” attack for a quarter-century.” 

DHS nor CISA gave any more information on ‘evolving EMP threats’ on the American homeland. There was not mention of whether the threat could be from a solar storm or EMP weapons. However, the EMP status report did mention DHS is currently running EMP pilot tests to assess EMP vulnerability on infrastructure: 

“Finally, DHS is partnering with other federal departments and agencies, state, local, tribal, and territorial entities and the private sector to field test a more resilient critical infrastructure. There are a number of field demonstration (or pilot) projects planned and underway by both DHS and DOE to assess EMP vulnerability and then deploy, evaluate, and validate EMP mitigation and protection technologies.

“One such pilot is the San Antonio Electromagnetic Defense Initiative, designed to show how an entire region can become resilient against an EMP. These pilots are multisector, multifunction efforts, seeking to ensure key capabilities continue to function in a post EMP environment and that by maintaining those key functions we can expedite a full recovery. Working with federal interagency partners, DHS will play a major role in ensuring communications systems remain operational and, by ensuring key systems which are protected against EMP, are also protected against other threats such as cyber-attacks.” – EMP status report

One EMP-expert and friend-of-the-site summed up the report perfectly:

“We recognize the threat and we’re working on it and you don’t need to know any more than that, thank you for asking…”

The warning comes just two months before the U.S. presidential election…

Authored by Tom Luongo via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The Black Revolution is in full swing in the U.S. Over the next sixty days we will be treated to the greatest political show on Earth as the Democrats and their handlers in The Davos Crowd pursue the biggest lie since Climate Change.

The events of 2020 are lining up for a climax to this story that ends with only one outcome, a contested election which fuels a coup attempt after the election results come in on November 3rd.

And because of this now obvious plan, setting up a false flag around the election is the most likely means to produce election results close enough to support this course of action.

I’m not the only one thinking in these terms at this point. Joaquin Flores, writing for Fort Russ, mused similarly last week.

As the polls shift towards Donald Trump and the Democrats run around concocting fairy tales after allowing Joe Biden out of his gimp cellar long enough for people to see how far he has fallen mentally, I’m nearly convinced this is likely.

Color revolutions unfold in predictable stages. The first stage is destroying the local economy. Usually this means the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury pull back on available dollars through tight monetary policy and sanctions to create mass unemployment in the target nation.

Then foment violence from the youth who are disproportionately affected by the economic destruction after NGO’s lay the ideological foundation for revolution. Use the most convenient pretext. In the U.S. it means stoking racism and hatred of ‘the rich.’

Pick a color under which to unite them, in this case black and blame the leader for every single bad thing that happens, which is usually the work of agent provocateurs who amplify the organic frustration into targeted attacks which are then amped up by the media into a news story.

If the leader is stupid he acts like any garden-variety paranoid dictator by clamping down on the violence making him easy prey for the media to brand him a dictator.

Then bringing a mob to the capital is easy, because now there are too many people to be effectively policed and the potential for violence to boil the whole thing into a coup is very real.

All of this works if the oligarchs who run the political system of the target country are on board with this. In the U.S., it’s obvious from the response from all major corporations they approve this message. Note how it failed in Belarus recently for lack of this corporate sponsorship.

Looking at the way the Democrats have positioned themselves for this election it is clear that they are preparing the field for this outcome after election day.

They used the lockdowns to create an army of ready-made protestors with nothing else to do and little hope for the future.

They structured all aid to the middle class the run out during the height of the election campaign while blocking any further assistance even though the Treasury Dept. raised nearly $2 trillion to deploy as support and stimulus.

The media endlessly stoked fear over COVID-19 to push as many voters to consider mailing their votes in (or create the illusion that is what will happen) to delay certification of the election on election night.

But to his credit, President Trump hasn’t acted the way he was supposed to. He has governed this chaos exactly the way a majority of Americans want him to, as a Federalist. Even though he has the authority to do so, he’s refrained from sending Federal troops into rioting cities, laying bare just how much local authorities are aiding the violence.

He didn’t institute national lockdowns and draconian restrictions due to COVID-19, instead offering aid and allowing the data to eventually vindicate him to the point where even the CDC is now backtracking on how dangerous the virus actually is.

And his opponents in New York, for example, now look like out-of-touch, lying grandma murderers.

Eventually crisis fatigue sets in, people adjust to the new circumstances and the worst parts of their fear abates. And even if they don’t look at the new data, they realize enough costs have been born and it’s time to move on with our lives.

That’s what is now showing up in the polling data, even though it is still highly suspect. And this puts Trump in the driver’s seat for the election on November 3rd. As of today, the election looks like it is his to lose.

And yet the Democrats insist that the election will not be resolved on election day. In fact, it’s obvious they are prepping the narrative that Trump will only appear to win on election night but, in fact, the torrent of mail-in ballots will change the outcome of the election over the next few days.

Of course, this would fly in the face of decades of electoral statistics where the outcome of the election is almost certainly decided by the time 25% of the votes have been counted and a run-rate to completion can be calculated.

A report from Axios outlines what we can expect.

A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.

Why this matters: Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night….

… By the numbers: Under one of the group’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted.

And that’s what concerns me most. Because if all of this prep work has failed and Trump clearly wins an electoral college victory, but they are planning to harvest votes for days afterwards, how do they shift the dynamic back in Biden’s favor between now and then to keep the election close enough for them to steal?

More violence is how.

We are two weeks away from White House Siege beginning on September 17th. Organized by Adbusters, which is a front for George Soros’ partner in crime, David Brock and Media Matters For America, White House Siege is a planned 50-day protest in Lafayette Square in Washington D.C., ostensibly to protest President Trump ‘stealing the election.’

This is a ready-made recipe for a Maidan-like orgy of violence in the nation’s capital to create a false flag event which reflects badly on Trump. Think snipers on rooftops shooting both protestors and cops similar to what happened on the Maidan square in Kiev in 2014.

D.C. is not a state. It’s not governed by the same rules as the states, where the Governors are in charge.

Trump can, and in my mind should, as a matter of strategy, take control over D.C. to keep to possibility of violence to a minimum. D.C. mayor Muriel Bowser is trying to walk back her support of the protests after the violence after the Republican National Convention by urging U.S. Attorneys in D.C. to charge the people the police arrest.

This is Bowser trying to publicly keep Trump from doing exactly what I just said he should do. Because with cities looted and burned, with Democrat politicians losing the respect of their constituencies they have no political legs left to stand on.

Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York said in a press conference Trump better bring an army if he plans to set foot in his state. This is tantamount to sedition, for which a case can be made by nearly every major Democrat for statements made in the past six months.

“He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” the Democrat said, all but threatening the commander-in-chief.

Meanwhile Cuomo is now the target of a Dept. of Justice investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 crisis while Trump withholds Federal funds from the state, which prompted Cuomo’s bravado.

Between this and Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling Republicans “domestic enemies of the state” is the kind of language you don’t come back from. The Democrats and the U.S. Deep Stat are all in on removing Trump from office by any means necessary.

I don’t think the worst of the violence is behind us after Kenosha. I think the worst is still in front of us.

The great reset could be underway as a “social-bomb” explodes across American cities due to the virus pandemic, depressionary unemployment, and social unrest. Much of the destabilization is happening in Democratically controlled metropolitan areas as residents flee for suburbia and or rural communities.

About five months into the exodus, city dwellers are continuing to leave big cities. We’ve noted this trend could be red hot for a couple of years. 

As the outbound migration from cities gains momentum, people are now leaving in groups, pooling capital together, buying land, and building towns of their own. This is precisely what’s happening in Georgia. 

Georgia-based realtor Ashley Scott started The Freedom Georgia Initiative with her investor friend, Renee Walters, calling the movement to purchase land an opportunity to build a safe town for black people to thrive.

In total, 19 black families pooled together funds and bought nearly 100 acres in Toomsboro, Georgia, with plans to create a “new black Wall Street” and a community where black people aren’t murdered by police.

“We figured we could try to fix a broken system, or we could start fresh,” Scott wrote in a post on the about section of the initiative’s Facebook page. 

“Start a city that could be a shining example of being the change you want to see. We wanted to be more involved in creating the lives we really want for our Black families, and maybe, just maybe, create some generational wealth for ourselves by investing in the land. Investing in creating a community that is built around our core values and beliefs,” she continued. 

Scott encouraged black families to ‘build the town for ourselves’, but while doing, tap into the US municipal bond market and “go get all the money” the US has to offer.

“Now is the time to organize ourselves on the local scale and build new cities. Now is the time to vote locally and nationally. Now is the time of the new Black Independent Party. Now is the time for you and your Black families and friends to go build independent private assets, residuals, trusts and yields.

“Amass land, develop affordable housing for yourself, build your own food systems, build manufacturing and supply chains, build your own home school communities, build your own banks and credit unions, build your own cities, build your own police departments, tax yourselves and vote in a mayor and a city council you can trust. Build it from scratch! Then go get all the money the United States of America has available for government entities and get them bonds. This is how we build our new Black Wall Streets. We can do this. We can have Wakanda! We just have to build it for ourselves!” – The Freedom Georgia Initiative

The initiative shared a Facebook post on Monday afternoon updating the status on their new land. 

The group wrote in a post:

“This is how one family out of 19 decided to enjoy their Sunday on the unincorporated land of what’s soon to be known as Freedom Georgia.” 

Is the great reset where people flee major cities and construct micro-communities of their own? 

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

Since the pandemic lockdowns were first implemented in the US I have been more concerned with the government and central bank response than the virus itself. As I have noted in past articles, the pandemic restrictions and subsequent economic and social crisis events they help to create will cause far more deaths than Covid-19 ever will. Not only that, but the actions of the Federal Reserve continue to con the American public into believing that there is some kind of “plan” to stop the crash that THEY engineered.

The only agenda of the Fed is to increase the pain in the long term; they have no intention of actually preventing any disaster.

This is evidenced in comments by voting members of the Fed, including Neel Kashkari who recently argued for the enforcement of hard lockdowns for at least six weeks in the US, all because the US savings rate was going up. Meaning, because Americans are saving more in order to protect themselves from economic fallout, Kashkari thinks we should be punished with an economic shutdown that would force us to spend whatever we have been able to save.

Do you see how that works?

Fed members and government officials demand hard lockdowns, depleting public savings and destroying small businesses. Then, the public has to beg the Fed and the government for more and more stimulus measures so that they can survive. The people and the system become dependent on a single point of support – fiat money creation and welfare. Yet, the evidence suggests that this strategy is failing to do much of anything except stall the inevitable for a very short time.

If the goal was really to reduce the pain of the pandemic as much as possible, then the strategy should be to keep the economy as open as possible and let the virus run its course.  By initiating lockdowns, all we are doing is extending the economic damage over the span of years instead of months.  We can deal with the comparatively minimal deaths associated with the virus; we cannot handle the disaster that is about to befall the financial system.

The small business sector appears to be the most fragile element of the economy right now. The PPP loans that were supposed to shore up small businesses failed miserably, with data showing only 13% to 19% of applicants getting a loan of any kind. Over 64% of small businesses that received a loan are also worried about being approved for loan forgiveness. In other words, of the few small business owners that got a PPP loan more than half do not have the ability to pay the loan back if they end up not qualifying for exemption.

This problem does not seem to be affecting the corporate sector, however. International companies are enjoying incredible cash infusions from the Fed through overnight loans as well as Fed stimulus propping up stock markets (at least for now). Tech companies in particular are enjoying a rush of investment as the assumption in the daytrading world is that the central bank will not allow these companies to fail.

Maybe they are right, but stock markets today DO NOT reflect the health of our system in any way. Stock tickers are a placebo, a Pavlovian trigger for the public, a tool to make people believe that the situation is improving merely because share values are going up. This is not the case.

Small businesses in the US account for around 50% of all employment and job creation. They are a vital part of the economy. Yet, government and central bank measures seem to have left them out in the cold to die.

To be sure, the $600 weekly unemployment enhancement created through the CARES Act passed in March did boost consumer spending, primarily on durable goods such as computers, TVs, cellphones, etc. Spending on services declined though, which is where the majority of small businesses make their money. And, considering the fact that most durable goods are manufactured overseas, this means that the majority of stimulus dollars that went to consumers did not go into the US economy, but foreign exporters like China.

Now, the unemployment enhancement has ended and its return is in question. It will be interesting to see if the boost to purchases of goods will continue without that extra $600 weekly stimulus. Consumer spending rose in July by 1.9%, but this was already a weak print compared to the increases during the previous two months.

Unemployment numbers have declined due to soft reopenings in numerous states, and at the very least some part time jobs appear to be returning, but nowhere near the level needed to erase the millions of jobs lost since February after the initial lockdowns began. If you count U-6 measurements and unemployed people who have been removed from the rolls for being jobless for too long, the REAL unemployment rate is closer to 30% of working age Americans. This is essentially Great Depression levels of joblessness.

US GDP has continued to decline by 32% according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (despite statistical rigging by the Fed and government agencies), and while it’s possible that stimulus slowed the effects of GDP loss, there is no indication what the trillions of dollars created by the Fed have actually bought other than a few months of time and a massive bubble in the stock market.

The economy cannot survive extreme lockdown conditions for any length of time, let alone almost two more months. And, if you want to know what it means when elites in government and central banking call for a “hard lockdowns”, just look at Level 4 restrictions in places like Australia and New Zealand, where only one person can leave home at any given time, can only travel 3 miles from home and only for food and supplies, and anyone caught not wearing a mask is subject to arrest or a $10,000 fine.

This mother in Melbourne, Australia was arrested because of a Facebook post calling for protests over the lockdown restrictions.  She later had to take the post down and offered an apology, saying she did not know it was illegal to post such statements on social media:

Yeah, this kind of Orwellian response will do wonders for any economic recovery, and this is what Kashkari is calling for in the US.  It’s almost as if the Fed and certain politicians WANT a financial collapse in America…

The REAL solution is to stop the lockdown restrictions altogether. If the goal is truly to protect as many American lives as possible for the “greater good”, then the pandemic response must stop. Luckily, it seems that more and more people are beginning to see through the facade and are rejecting the restrictions. Even in Europe and Australia there have been some signs of protest and rebellion. The problem is that, at least in terms of the economy, it may be too late.

We have to consider the fact that once a large portion of the business sector (like small businesses) takes a massive hit like the one they have suffered over the past several months, many such businesses and jobs will simply not come back. There are many reasons for this, but primarily it’s a matter of debt. The average small business owner carries almost $200,000 in debt for 3-5 years before he reaches profitability or breaks even. This is assuming that there are no major economic catastrophes in that time.

With the pandemic, the riots, the restrictions, etc., businesses will have to take on much more debt with little guarantee of recovery in the next few years let alone the next few months.  Chapter 11 business bankruptcies in the US rose over 26% in the first half of 2020 alone.

Even if lockdown restrictions were completely eradicated tomorrow, a large number of businesses would go bankrupt anyway.  The “Retail Apocalypse” has been growing over the past decade, LONG before the coronavirus was on issue.  Thousands of businesses shut down last year and tens of thousands more are slated to close this year.   The virus and lockdowns simply accelerated the existing decline.

This is why large banks are cutting off loans to business owners and consumers right now; they know exactly where all this is headed.

Banks act as middlemen for the PPP loans financed by the Fed, yet those loans are not getting to most businesses. Banks have also cut credit card lending in the past few months, and general lending has crashed. All of this despite low interest rates for banks receiving stimulus injections from the Fed. Where is all of the money going? They are keeping it for themselves, buying up hard assets as well as propping up the stock market. As noted above, the elites have NO INTENTION of saving the economy, only themselves.

If the stimulus is not getting to the main-street economy then the only purpose it serves is to give the public a false sense of comfort.  The people who gain the most from the ongoing pandemic chaos are establishment elites that want severe restrictions on personal liberty.  Not to mention, the virus and lockdowns offer a convenient scapegoat for the financial crisis that was already brewing due to central bank mismanagement of stimulus, inflation and interest rates. The bottom line is, the banks do not want the crisis to end.  Why would they?  The longer the panic continues, the more they benefit.

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A helicopter drone flew a 3D-printed part to an offshore gas platform in the Troll gas field off the west coast of Norway. The operation was the world’s first logistics operation using a drone to an offshore installation, read a press release from oil and gas company Equinor. 

“Development is rapid, and we see the huge potential within drone technology that could transform the way we operate, both under and above the sea surface. Equinor aims to lead the way in utilizing new technology on the Norwegian continental shelf,” said Equinor’s executive vice president for Development and Production Arne Sigve.

“Drones could reinforce safety, boost production efficiency and contribute to lower CO2 emissions from Norwegian oil and gas. Drones will also play a role as we shape new energy solutions on the Norwegian shelf,” Nylund continued.

The helicopter drone traveled about 50 miles to the platform in the Troll field, at an altitude of 5,000 feet. The delivery of a 3D printer part was the first of its kind, where a freight operation was conducted with a helio-drone. 

The operator of the Schiebel Camcopter S-100 was the Sandnes-based company Nordic Unmanned. Equinor worked with the drone operator and with the Civil Aviation Authority, Avinor Air Navigation Services, and the Norwegian Communications Authority to conduct the trial flight.

“Over the longer term, we expect to see the new infrastructure for logistics and support operations, which can reinforce what we already have within vessels and helicopters,” said Alena Korbova Pedersen, who leads supply chain development for Equinor.

“If we are to develop the logistics solutions of the future on the Norwegian shelf, where drones could play an important role, we must cooperate across all of the industry’s players; operating companies, suppliers, the authorities, and the trade union and safety interests,” Pedersen continued.

Over the long-term, the adoption of drones for logistical flight missions will cut down operation costs for all sorts of companies, not just oil and gas ones. The caveat to this is the decline in pilot demand for helicopters, though a boom for drone pilots (read: “Airline Pilots Learn To Fly Drones Amid Mass Carrier Layoffs”). 

Authored by Brendan Brown via The Mises Institute,

The Fed Emperor’s New Clothes Show is a continuous comedy without laughter. The latest act, the virtual Jackson Hole conference (August 27), was dreadful.

The show’s audiences are accustomed to the Fed chair and his board delivering solemn pronouncements about their aims—low inflation, high employment, and financial stability. These officials play their parts according to script. They never explain how they will fulfill their promise—it is all boast and no substance. The assembled courtiers, including the financial media representatives who form part of the Fed’s propaganda machine, never ask difficult questions. Those inclined toward skepticism fear exposing their own lack of knowledge or losing their jobs.

In the just finished Jackson Hole episode, Chief Powell revealed that the Fed is now to target an average 2 percent inflation over the medium and long run, meaning that it will “steer” inflation above that level as needed to compensate for periods when it has languished below. Yet in the contemporary monetary system without anchor, there is no high-powered money aggregate whose growth firmly sets boundaries to the long-run path of goods and services prices. Instead, the Fed seeks to achieve its target by employing the blunt and highly imprecise instruments of interest rate manipulation, while counting on inertia of inflation and inflation expectations. That is always a recipe for huge economic and financial instability.

The essence of the policy framework review, just unveiled by Chief Powell, is that the Fed will be slower than in recent cycles to adapt that blunt instrument to any incipient buildup of monetary inflation symptoms in goods and services markets. Accordingly, the danger of an inflation breakout at some point in the future has increased. An extended deep recession through the present pandemic and beyond would delay that point.

Speculation on this Fed policy adjustment has been rife for many months. Similar shifts are occurring abroad, notably in Europe and Japan. The reality, though, is that the army of PhD economists at the Fed has not made a discovery in econometric science which would now reliably link the path of manipulated interest rates to the price level over time.

In fact, Chief Powell announced that his economics staff have discarded at last one notorious component of their craft, the notorious Phillips curve (purporting to relate the level of unemployment to inflation) while putting nothing in its place. And the chief has joked about the r stars and u stars (neutral interest rate and natural unemployment rate estimates) which once featured so heavily in Fed econometrics, notably in the application of the notorious “Taylor rule.”

Many of us already are so disenchanted with the central bankers led by the Fed hegemon that we just ignore the daily, weekly, or monthly theatricals – unless we are trying to profit from the asset price fluctuations which these give rise to in the short run. We should not, though, in our nonattendance of these shows overlook the degradations that monetary decisions announced there are inflicting on ourselves, whether in terms of our personal freedoms or of our reasonable hopes of enjoying economic prosperity.

As regards liberty, this Jackson Hole policy review blasts another wide gap in the constitutional guardrails which are meant to guarantee the right of US citizens to enjoy sound money. Of course, those guardrails were damaged severely almost a century ago when the Supreme Court ultimately approved the Roosevelt administration’s monetary radicalism. But now we have the Federal Reserve expanding and enforcing its 2 percent inflation standard without any challenge in prospect, whether from Congress, to which the Fed is “answerable,” or from the courts.

As regards the threat to economic prosperity, consider the present unique historical situation of Fed-created asset and credit market frenzy in the midst of a vast supply shock induced by pandemic. The sequel could yet be steep further recession, notwithstanding some recent rebound in economic aggregates as governments lift lockdowns.

The combination of pandemic with the interest income famine created by Fed policy has proved remarkably fertile ground for two speculative narratives.

• The first is that “determined action” by the Fed (and foreign central banks), including huge asset market purchase programs financed by money-printing, has removed solvency risk; hence the vast demand for high-yield (risky) credit during this pandemic.

• The second relates to monopoly profits from accelerated digitalization. According to this narrative, these present or potential mega-profits will far outlive the pandemic.

All this speculative froth has added to the appearance of giant monetary stimulus.

The froth, however, could dissipate suddenly—well before the arrival of any postpandemic boom economy. The mother of all monetary stimuli could turn out to be worse than a dud—a catalyst to a slide into further recession just as the supply shock of pandemic recedes. The Fed’s efforts to avoid financial crisis during the height of the pandemic could yet precipitate a still bigger crisis

No one can predict (in honesty) the dynamics of massive momentum trading into “pandemic stocks” and high-yield credit driven by highly dubious narratives of thirty years of high monopoly rents ahead or the Fed having extinguished insolvency risks. That depends on knowing when a round of investors deciding to take profits in these quasi Ponzi schemes finds there is no new layer of investors to sell to and the other potential buyers—shorts closing their position—have long since exited the field, in most cases terrified by losses to date.

We do know, however, that the collateral against huge amounts of credit is tied in value to expanses of malinvestment, whether in emerging markets, global supply chains, or the brick-and-mortar economy, including commercial real estate, travel, energy extraction. Feared and actual destruction of collateral value is what drives the dynamics of recession and depression and this will likely transcend the journey of the pandemic.

The economic damage of pandemic as witnessed to date does not spare us from further revelation of huge misallocation and waste in consequence of the great asset inflation from 2013–20. The supply shock has highlighted some areas of malinvestment (especially aircraft, travel, shopping centers) while camouflaging others (for example excessive digitalization). Banks and credit institutions, especially in Europe, are critically vulnerable to collapse in collateral values. Neither fantasy about big tech monopoly rents nor vaccines and drug therapies can wipe away accumulated malinvestment and related credit losses.

The emperor in the show, whether we take this as Chief Powell or ultimately the president in the White House who appointed him, is now promising the audience a return to the “prosperity of the pre-pandemic economy.” 

Whether this would have endured ostensibly much longer without the interruption of pandemic is dubious. But the prosperity which the big monopolists are now promising us, based on accelerated digitalization driven by the exigences of the pandemic, is surely a mirage.

Meanwhile Chief Powell blatantly fails to reveal that the biggest beneficiary of his reformed inflation target will be big government, for whom his institution is now a mammoth tax collector, with emphasis at first on monetary repression tax, and later on inflation tax.

80 people have been charged by the FBI in a “massive conspiracy” to defraud millions of dollars from businesses, the elderly and vulnerable women, according to Oxygen. Most of those charged were Nigerian nationals, according to the report.

Those charged were accused of using various online scams to deceive targets and convince them to hand over “at least $6 million”. The group “attempted to steal another $40 million” after that.

The suspects were said to have used both “romance scams” and “business schemes” that allowed them to hack into company escrow accounts. U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna said: “We believe this is one of the largest cases of its kind in US history.”

One scheme uncovered was a Japanese woman who thought she had been conversing with a U.S. Army captain stationed in Syria.

The two were pen pals before the relationship turned romantic and the man – we swear we are not making this up – “claimed he had discovered a bag of diamonds in Syria.” He sought the woman’s help and asked her to send money. The woman borrowed from family, friends and even her ex-husband, before sending over $200,000 to the man over the course of 10 months. 

Authorities later revealed the scheme was being run by “two Nigerian men based in Los Angeles” who relied on associates in Nigeria and other countries to assist them. The woman was “extremely depressed and angry about these losses,” the federal complaint against the men stated.

About a week ago, the United State’s Attorney’s Office Central District of California unsealed a 252-count federal grand jury indictment charging 80 people in the “massive conspiracy.” The two ringleaders of the group, Valentine Iro, 31, and Chukwudi Chrisogunus Igbokwe, 38, oversaw an “extensive money laundering network,” the complaint says. 

They are among 17 who have been arrested by authorities. Many other suspects live in other countries and Federal authorities are seeking to work to extradite those charged. They face conspiracy to commit fraud, conspiracy to launder money, and aggravated identity theft charges. 

Hanna concluded: “This case is part of our ongoing efforts to protect Americans from fraudulent online schemes and to bring to justice those who prey upon American citizens and businesses. Today, we have taken a major step to disrupt criminal networks that use BEC schemes, romance scams and other frauds to fleece victims. This indictment sends a message that we will identify perpetrators – no matter where they reside – and we will cut off the flow of ill-gotten gains.”