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To justify Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss to Donald Trump, leading Democrats and their key media allies for years competed with one another to depict what they called “Russia’s interference in our elections” in the most apocalyptic terms possible. They fanatically rejected the view of the Russian Federation repeatedly expressed by President Obama — that it is a weak regional power with an economy smaller than Italy’s capable of only threatening its neighbors but not the U.S. — and instead cast Moscow as a grave, even existential, threat to U.S. democracy, with its actions tantamount to the worst security breaches in U.S. history.

This post-2016 mania culminated with prominent liberal politicians and journalists (as well as John McCain) declaring Russia’s activities surrounding the 2016 to be an “act of war” which, many of them insisted, was comparable to Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attack — the two most traumatic attacks in modern U.S. history which both spawned years of savage and destructive war, among other things.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) repeatedly demanded that Russia’s 2016 “interference” be treated as “an act of war.” Hillary Clinton described Russian hacking as “a cyber 9/11.” And here is Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on MSNBC in early February, 2018, pronouncing Russia “a hostile foreign power” whose 2016 meddling was the “equivalent” of Pearl Harbor, “very much on par” with the “seriousness” of the 1941 attack in Hawaii that helped prompt four years of U.S. involvement in a world war.

With the Democrats, under Joe Biden, just weeks away from assuming control of the White House and the U.S. military and foreign policy that goes along with it, the discourse from them and their media allies about Russia is becoming even more unhinged and dangerous. Moscow’s alleged responsibility for the recently revealed, multi-pronged hack of U.S. Government agencies and various corporate servers is asserted — despite not a shred of evidence, literally, having yet been presented — as not merely proven fact, but as so obviously true that it is off-limits from doubt or questioning.

Any questioning of this claim will be instantly vilified by the Democrats’ extremely militaristic media spokespeople as virtual treason. “Now the president is not just silent on Russia and the hack. He is deliberately running defense for the Kremlin by contradicting his own Secretary of State on Russian responsibility,” pronounced CNN’s national security reporter Jim Sciutto, who last week depicted Trump’s attempted troop withdrawal from Syria and Germany as “ceding territory” and furnishing “gifts” to Putin. More alarmingly, both the rhetoric to describe the hack and the retaliation being threatened are rapidly spiraling out of control.

Democrats (along with some Republicans long obsessed with The Russian Threat, such as Mitt Romney) are casting the latest alleged hack by Moscow in the most melodramatic terms possible, ensuring that Biden will enter the White House with tensions sky-high with Russia and facing heavy pressure to retaliate aggressively. Biden’s top national security advisers and now Biden himself have, with no evidence shown to the public, repeatedly threatened aggressive retaliation against the country with the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile.

Congressman Jason Crow (D-CO) — one of the pro-war Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee who earlier this year joined with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to block Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan — announced: “this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,” adding: “Our nation is under assault.” The second-ranking Senate Democrat, Dick Durbin (D-IL), pronounced: “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who has for years been casting Russia as a grave threat to the U.S. while Democrats mocked him as a relic of the Cold War (before they copied and then surpassed him), described the latest hack as “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.” The GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee also blasted Trump for his failure to be “aggressively speaking out and protesting and taking punitive action,” though — like virtually every prominent figure demanding tough “retaliation” — Romney failed to specify what he had in mind that would be sufficient retaliation for “the equivalent of Russian bombers flying undetected over the entire country.”

For those keeping track at home: that’s two separate “Pearl Harbors” in less than four years from Moscow (or, if you prefer, one Pearl Harbor and one 9/11). If Democrats actually believe that, it stands to reason that they will be eager to embrace a policy of belligerence and aggression toward Russia. Many of them are demanding this outright, mocking Trump for failing to attack Russia — despite no evidence that they were responsible — while their well-trained liberal flock is suggesting that the non-response constitutes some form of “high treason.”

Indeed, the Biden team has been signalling that they intend to quickly fulfill demands for aggressive retaliation. The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Biden “accused President Trump [] of ‘irrational downplaying’” of the hack while “warning Russia that he would not allow the intrusion to ‘go unanswered’ after he takes office.” Biden emphasized that once the intelligence assessment is complete, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.”

Threats and retaliation between the U.S. and Russia are always dangerous, but particularly so now. One of the key nuclear arms agreements between the two nuclear-armed nations, the New START treaty, will expire in February unless Putin and Biden can successfully negotiate a renewal: sixteen days after Biden is scheduled to take office. “That will force Mr. Biden to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another,” observed the Times.

This escalating rhetoric from Washington about Russia, and the resulting climate of heightened tensions, are dangerous in the extreme. They are also based in numerous myths, deceits and falsehoods:

First, absolutely no evidence of any kind has been presented to suggest, let alone prove, that Russia is responsible for these hacks. It goes without saying that it is perfectly plausible that Russia could have done this: it’s the sort of thing that every large power from China and Iran to the U.S. and Russia have the capability to do and wield against virtually every other country including one another.

But if we learned nothing else over the last several decades, we should know that accepting claims that emanate from the U.S. intelligence community about adversaries without a shred of evidence is madness of the highest order. We just had a glaring reminder of the importance of this rule: just weeks before the election, countless mainstream media outlets laundered and endorsed the utterly false claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation,” only for officials to acknowledge once the harm was done that there was no evidence — zero — of Russian involvement.

Yet that is exactly what the overwhelming bulk of media outlets are doing again: asserting that Russia is behind these hacks despite having no evidence of its truth. The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro, host of the paper’s popular The Daily podcast, asked his colleague, national security reporter David Sanger, what evidence exists to assert that Russia did this. As Barbaro put it, even Sanger is “allowing that early conclusions could all be wrong, but that it’s doubtful.” Indeed, Sanger acknowledged to Barbaro that they have no proof, asserting instead that the basis on which he is relying is that Russia possesses the sophistication to carry out such a hack (as do several other nation-states), along with claiming that the hack has what he calls the “markings” of Russian hackers.

But this tactic was exactly the same one used by former intelligence officials, echoed by these same media outlets, to circulate the false pre-election claim that the documents from Hunter Biden’s laptop were “Russian disinformation”: namely, they pronounced in lockstep, the material from Hunter’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information.” This was also exactly the same tactic used by the U.S. intelligence community in 2001 to falsely blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks, claiming that their chemical analysis revealed a substance that was “a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program.”

These media outlets will, if pressed, acknowledge their lack of proof that Russia did this. Despite this admitted lack of proof, media outlets are repeatedly stating Russian responsibility as proven fact.

“Scope of Russian Hacking Becomes Clear: Multiple U.S. Agencies Were Hit,” one New York Times headline proclaimed, and the first line of that article, co-written by Sanger, stated definitively: “The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday.” The Washington Post deluged the public with identically certain headlines:

Nobody in the government has been as definitive in asserting Russian responsibility as corporate media outlets. Even Trump’s hawkish Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, crafted his accusation against Moscow with caveats and uncertainty: “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”

If actual evidence ultimately emerges demonstrating Russian responsibility, it would not alter how dangerous it is that — less than twenty years after the Iraq WMD debacle and less than a couple of years after media endorsement of endless Russiagate falsehoods — the most influential media outlets continue to mindlessly peddle as Truth whatever the intelligence community feeds them, without the need to see any evidence that what they’re claiming is actually true. Even more alarmingly, large sectors of the public that venerate these outlets continue to believe that what they hear from them must be true, no matter how many times they betray that trust. The ease with which the CIA can disseminate whatever messaging it wants through friendly media outlets is stunning.

Second, the very idea that this hack could be compared to rogue and wildly aberrational events such as Pearl Harbor or the 9/11 attack is utterly laughable on its face. One has to be drowning in endless amounts of jingoistic self-delusion to believe that this hack — or, for that matter, the 2016 “election interference” — is a radical departure from international norms as opposed to a perfect reflection of them.

Just as was true of 2016 fake Facebook pages and Twitter bots, it is not an exaggeration to say that the U.S. Government engages in hacking attacks of this sort, and ones far more invasive, against virtually every country on the planet, including Russia, on a weekly basis. That does not mean that this kind of hacking is either justified or unjustified. It does mean, however, that depicting it as some particularly dastardly and incomparably immoral act that requires massive retaliation requires a degree of irrationality and gullibility that is bewildering to behold.

The NSA reporting enabled by Edward Snowden by itself proved that the NSA spies on virtually anyone it can. Indeed, after reviewing the archive back in 2013, I made the decision that I would not report on U.S. hacks of large adversary countries such as China and Russia because it was so commonplace for all of these countries to hack one another as aggressively and intrusively as they could that it was hardly newsworthy to report on this (the only exception was when there was a substantial reason to view such spying as independently newsworthy, such as Sweden’s partnering with NSA to spy on Russia in direct violation of the denials Swedish officials voiced to their public).

Other news outlets who had access to Snowden documents, particularly The New York Times, were not nearly as circumspect in exposing U.S. spying on large nation-state adversaries. As a result, there is ample proof published by those outlets (sometimes provoking Snowden’s strong objections) that the U.S. does exactly what Russia is alleged to have done here — and far worse.

“Even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from [China’s] Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks,” reported The New York Times’ David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in 2013, adding that “the agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart.”

In 2013, the Guardian revealed “an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow,” and added: “foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts.” Meanwhile, “Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday,” noted Reuters, citing what one NSA document described as “a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics.”

Other reports revealed that the U.S. had hacked into the Brazilian telecommunications system to collect data on the whole population, and was spying on Brazil’s key leaders (including then-President Dilma Rousseff) as well as its most important companies such as its oil giant Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy. The Washington Post reported: “The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.” And on and on.

Read the rest of the report here.

While the U.S. continues to print money as though there will be zero consequences and while a China-borne virus (or, rather, the response to the virus) continues to ravage economies globally, China is planning on shoring up and “normalizing” both its fiscal and monetary policy heading into 2021.

A new note from SocGen to clients on Monday of this week says that the Chinese government at the annual Economic Work Conference telegraphed that it is “poised to scale down both monetary and fiscal policy impulses from here, and that the focus have been shifted back toward controlling risks, including local governments’ implicit debt, banks’ capital adequacy, housing stability and too-big-to-fail companies.”

Regarding fiscal policy, SocGen predicts that China will be “still proactive but less accommodative.”

The stance was described as “proactive”, focusing on “effectiveness” and “sustainability”. The wording signals a less accommodative stance signalled up until 3Q, when it was stated that “proactive fiscal policy has to be even more proactive”. While the government should support important tasks such as promoting technological development, accelerating structural adjustment and improving income allocation, it also needs to further mitigate the risk of implicit local government debt.

“This echoes comments from policymakers that expressed concerns over local government debt sustainability,” SocGen said. “We expect the government to announce a smaller fiscal deficit target of 3% of GDP (versus above 3.6% this year), the quota of special LGB issuance to decline considerably from RMB3.75tn this year to around RMB3tn next year, and no special CGB issuance.”

But the bigger shock to the global financial system could be the result of “normalization” continuing for China’s monetary policy. At the CEWC, China said it would stick to “prudent” monetary
policy that aims to be “flexible”, “targeted” and “reasonably appropriate”. Which, naturally, contrasts with the rest of the world – especially the U.S. – whose monetary policy has become “print money and buy anything that isn’t bolted to the floor”. 

SocGen said that China’s statements regarding “maintaining M2 and TSF growth” and “keeping the macro leverage ratio largely stable” is likely a “clear reconfirmation that monetary policy intends to continue to normalise back toward a status of stable leverage, after credit growth significantly outpacing economic growth throughout 2020.”

The bank predicts that “TSF growth will slow from 13.5% currently to around 10% by end-2021.”

Among other initiatives, take on housing problems in big cities and promote green development. The note also says China’s focus will turn to expanding domestic demand in 2021. SocGen wrote:

The CEWC acknowledged that the key to expanding consumption is to increase employment, enhance the social security system and improve income allocation. It pledged to remove administrative measures that obstruct purchases in order to unleash the potential of rural consumption; to improve the occupational training and education system in order to support quality employment; and to increase public spending on education, healthcare and pensions in order to lower savings. Regarding investments, like this year, the government will focus on new infrastructure, manufacturing upgrades, old town renovation and logistics infrastructure upgrades. Mindful of debt sustainability concerns, it also stressed that over-investment in emerging industries needs to be avoided.

Assuming China’s idea of monetary normalization is different from Jerome Powell’s (to hike interest rates once before capitulating horrifically and, only months later, implementing infinite QE while embarrassingly explaining on national television that “we print it digitally”), the country could wind up taking the lead on leading the global economy onto a drastically different path in 2021.

What would be even more interesting would be if part of China’s “de-risking” includes the country deciding it no longer wants the “risk on” position of owning too many U.S. Treasuries. 

Maybe there’s a reason China has been hoarding all that gold after all…

Tune in for this special edition of the Daily Briefing to hear from Ed and Ash live at 4:30 PM ET. They will answer audience questions, provide an update on what they’re seeing in markets this holiday season, and look ahead to the opportunities and macro risks for 2021.

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

In response to COVID-19, Cornell University requires that students returning to campus must receive a flu shot.

That’s not a typo: they want you to have a flu shot… to battle Covid.

Obviously the flu shot doesn’t protect you from COVID-19. But hey, this isn’t the first COVID response that makes absolutely no sense.

But it does indicate that Cornell, and other universities, might require students to receive a COVID vaccine when they become widely available.

In fact, in its “Behavioral Compact” which Cornell forced students to agree to before returning to campus, the very first line states,

“Until there is an effective vaccine for COVID-19, we live in a world of significantly enhanced community and personal health risks.”

The compact goes on to explain how everyone has a responsibility to adhere to the safety requirements, not just for themselves, but to keep the entire community safe, especially those most at risk.

And this, apparently, means requiring that everyone have a flu shot.

Well, not quite everyone:

The university will be happy to exempt Black, Ingenious, and People of Color (BIPOC) from the flu shot mandate.

Cornell’s website states that “due to longstanding systemic racism and health inequities in this country,” the university understands that these “requirements may feel suspect or even exploitative” to BIPOC people.

For example, “Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) have been mistreated, and used by people in power, sometimes for profit or medical gain.”

And to be clear, Cornell’s claim is 100% true.

The Tuskegee syphilis experiments come to mind, in which the United States Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control pretended to treat black subjects for syphilis from 1932-1972.

In reality the government was studying the progression of untreated syphilis, allowing the black subjects to be killed slowly and painfully, while spreading the disease.

The whole experiment was a disgusting lie that turned its subjects into unwitting lab rats.

The website continues:

“At the same time, we know that long-standing social inequalities and health disparities have resulted in COVID-19 disproportionately affecting BIPOC individuals. Higher percentages of individuals from these communities become infected with COVID, and the health outcomes related to infection are often more serious.”

So, to summarize:

– Cornell mandated the flu shot to keep the most vulnerable people safe from COVID.

– BIPOC people are among the most vulnerable.

– Therefore Cornell exempted BIPOC people from the flu shot.

MAKES PERFECT SENSE!

You’d think that if the flu shot truly were necessary to keep people safe, then Cornell would demand that EVERYONE take the shot.

You can’t have it both ways. Either the flu shot is critical and necessary to protect the most vulnerable, or it’s not.

And if it is critical, then why would Cornell allow the most vulnerable to slip through the cracks?

And if the university does not believe the flu shot is critical, then why subject anyone to the requirements?

Also– why are BIPOC people the only ones who are allowed to not trust the medical establishment?

I seem to remember a certain Dr. Fauci admitting that he lied at the beginning of the pandemic, when he told people that masks would not help slow the spread of COVID-19. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the lies and coverup from the World Health Organization.

So haven’t we all been lied to, at least by certain key figures in the medical establishment, about COVID?

But if you’re not BIPOC, you’re apparently not allowed to have a different opinion, express skepticism, or raise any concerns at all.

The irony here is that Cornell is supposed to be a UNIVERSITY after all.

So if they really feel that a flu shot is critical and necessary to protect vulnerable people in their community, perhaps they might try EDUCATING their students about why they believe this is an appropriate public health policy, as opposed to coercing certain ethnic groups, while exempting others.

Don’t worry, Cornell addresses that too:

“we understand that someone may know the science and still feel distrusting of health care and may have addition (sic) questions.” [note the grammatical error from one of the nation’s top universities.]

You have to understand that the Social Justice Warrior is a walking contradiction.

They care so much about inequality in health outcomes for people of color, that they will hand them an excuse on a silver platter to allow that inequality to continue.

They recognize that BIPOC people have reasons not to trust the establishment, but everyone else is a science denier for simply asking questions, and wanting more information.

They say that vaccines are not just to keep the individual safe, but the community as well. But it’s acceptable for BIPOC people to ignore this.

Sort of like how opening your business causes COVID-19 to spread, but “peaceful protests” are so righteous that they can’t spread disease among their tightly packed crowds.

*  *  *

On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

New Jersey has joined a legal battle to stop New York and other neighboring states from taxing residents who are telecommuting from home.

The suit, filed in October by New Hampshire, originally sought to bar Massachusetts from taxing people who stopped commuting to the state due to the pandemic. Since then, a dozen other states have filed a amicus curiae (‘friend-of-the-court’) briefs in an effort to convince the US Supreme Court to take up New Hampshire’s challenge, according to Bloomberg‘s Stacie Sherman.

On Dec. 22, New Jersey, Hawaii and Iowa filed their own briefs.

At stake for New Jersey is as much as $1.2 billion credited to its residents for income taxes paid to New York. Before the pandemic, more than 400,000 residents of New Jersey commuted to jobs in New York City. With many of these people now working remotely, their taxes are “more fairly attributed to New Jersey,” state Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio said in a statement.

Seven states currently tax people where their office is, even if they work remotely. According to New York’s taxation website, any nonresident whose primary office is in the state but is telecommuting is still considered to be working in the state. Many states, including New Jersey, provide a tax credit to eliminate “double taxation” of a person’s income. –Bloomberg

“The resolution of this case thus has far-reaching implications as to which states will collect billions in revenue during the pandemic,” reads New Jersey’s brief.

With millions of Americans now working from home, the tax issue has taken central focus. According to a Gartner survey of company leaders, 80% plan to allow employees to work remotely at least part time after the pandemic, while 47% will allow employees to work from home full-time.

Another survey by PwC citing 669 CEOs, 78% say that remote work is here to stay for the long-term.

And now, states are fighting over taxes.