China’s top economic adviser has issued guidelines over how to introduce incentives that can boost a person’s social credit score, according to ECNS.
Issued by the National Development and Reform Commission, the new guidelines include 15 preferential policies to evaluate if a person should be considered a ‘role model’ in terms of creditworthiness.
Outstanding individuals in the system can freely acquire personal credit reports a number of times in a year, and freely search information in the national credit information online platform, according to the regulation.
They will also enjoy fast-tracked services when applying for administrative approval, qualification reviews, credit cards or personal loans, patents or copyright registration, and quick refunds from financial institutions or platform companies. –ECNS
The guidelines also state that role models will have priority access to public elderly care services as well as preferential treatment when applying for civil service positions.
Cities are encouraged to reward outstanding individuals with benefits in education, housing, employment, medicare and and administrative approvals.
“Keeping trust is glorious and breaking trust is disgraceful,” is the guiding ideology of Beijing’s attempt to crack down on rampant corruption, financial scams, corporate scandals and petty crimes.
In the eastern city of Hangzhou, “pro-social” activity includes donating blood and volunteer work, while violating traffic laws lowers an individual’s credit score. In Zhoushan, an island near Shanghai, no-nos include smoking or driving while using a mobile phone, vandalism, walking a dog without a leash and playing loud music in public. Too much time playing video games and circulating fake news can also count against individuals. According to U.S. magazine Foreign Policy, residents of the northeastern city of Rongcheng adapted the system to include penalties for online defamation and spreading religion illegally. –Washington Post
“Untrustworthy conduct” by both business and individuals includes failure to repay loans, illegal fund collection, false and misleading advertising, swindling customers, and – for individuals, acts such as taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.
According to a February report by SCMP, around 17.46 million people who are “discredited” were prevented from buying plane tickets, while 5.47 million were disallowed from purchasing tickets to China’s high-speed train system.
Legal experts have expressed concern that the accelerated use of the creditworthiness system trample on what little privacy rights they have in China.
“Many people cannot pay their debt because they are too poor but will be subject to this kind of surveillance and this kind of public shaming,” said one attorney quoted by SCMP, who added “It violates the rights of human beings.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KqujyM Tyler Durden
The unusual shaking on the west coast continues to intensify. As you can see from this map, over 240 earthquakes have struck the states of California and Nevada over the last 24 hours. Yes, the west coast gets hit by quakes every day, but this is definitely an unusually high number. Fortunately, most of the earthquakes have been very small, but a couple of them were greater than magnitude 3.0.
A magnitude 3.3 earthquake was felt in parts of Southern California on Sunday afternoon, one in a series of quakes to hit the Riverside County area.
The latest quake occurred at 4:36 p.m. and was centered on Glen Avon, south of Fontana. The seismic activity continued into Monday morning with dozens of new small quakes.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quakes were felt across swaths of the Inland Empire, a region that has had hundreds of small quakes over the weekend, including one that registered a magnitude of 3.1.
Hopefully it will not happen immediately, but at some point there will be a history-altering earthquake along the southern California coastline that will cause death and destruction on a scale that most of us don’t even want to think about right now.
With Chinese macro continuing its serial disappointment (absent the record liquidity-injection rebound in April), expectations were for Caixin PMI Services data to slow in May (after its exuberant rebound) echoing the demise seen in Chinese manufacturing.
China’s official manufacturing PMI tumbled into contraction (and Caixin was flat just above contraction) in May.
China’s official services PMI was flat from April but Caixin data plunged from 54.5 to 52.7 (well below the 54.0 drop expected).
Comment Commenting on the China General Services PMI™ data, Dr. Zhengsheng Zhong, Director of Macroeconomic Analysis at CEBM Group said: “The Caixin China General Services Business Activity Index fell to 52.7 in May from the recent high of 54.5 in April, although it remained firmly within expansionary territory.”
Among the gauges included in the survey:
1) The gauge for new business fell from the past month’s recent high but remained in expansionary territory, reflecting slowing growth in demand across the services sector.
2) The measure for employment fell from the past month’s recent high while remaining within expansionary territory, suggesting jobs growth is slowing.
3) Gauges for input costs and prices charged by services providers both fell slightly while remaining in expansionary territory. Growth in input costs outpaced that of prices charged, indicating that services companies remained under significant pressure.
4) The measure for business expectations continued to fall, despite staying in positive territory, reflecting services providers’ weakening confidence in their future prospects.
The Caixin China Composite Output Index fell to 51.5 in May from 52.7 the month before, mainly due to slower growth in the service sector.
1) The gauge for new orders edged down while remaining in expansionary territory, while the measure for new export orders returned to growth, pointing to weakening demand at home but improved demand abroad. The negative effects of China-U.S. tensions on exports have yet to emerge, perhaps due to exporters front-loading shipments of products that are in the remaining $300 billion of goods not subject to punitive tariffs.
2) The employment gauge continued to fall, entering contractionary territory. This suggested the labor market is under pressure. In a move that is likely related, the State Council recently set up a new leading group on employment.
3) Both gauges for input costs and output charges edged down while remaining in expansionary territory. Growth in input costs outpaced that of output charges, indicating companies continued to be squeezed.
4) The measure for future output fell markedly, to the lowest reading since the series began in 2012, although it remained in positive territory. This indicates business confidence is in urgent need of a boost.
“Overall, China’s economic growth showed some signs of slowing in May. Employment and business confidence in particular merit policymakers’ attention.”
There was one big potential shift in May that could have affected the Services data – the yuan plunged…
The homeownership rate among these young adults (under 35 years old) is currently at 1994 levels. Back then, a 30-year loan yielded over 9%. Today it’s a little under 4%.
Mother Jones examined mortgage rates and looked at monthly payments as a percentage of income, indicating average monthly home payments nationally for young adults has relatively stayed the same over the last several decades.
The average monthly home payment for Los Angeles, New York City, and Atlanta have been stable since 1994:
But with the “greatest economy ever,” why hasn’t the millennial homeownership rate risen?
Financial stress among this heavily indebted generation is showing up in record debt delinquencies of student loans.
Student loans “have completely broken with the business cycle,” NY Fed researchers wrote in a report earlier this month that showed student loan growth continued to increase even as other forms of debt growth slowed.
While the student loan bubble is set to implode in the next downturn, young people might not be able to buy homes until the mid-2020s, this is primarily due to their credit reports would be so devastated in a recession that lenders would have to deny young applicants on tighter lending standards.
Even though average monthly mortgage payments have been relatively the same cost from two decades ago, young adults today are financially challenged with insurmountable debts that inhibit them from purchasing a home, another clue that the American Dream has died for the millennial generation who will be a majority of the workforce in the next five years.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/3187iqd Tyler Durden
It cannot be emphasized too often: Russiagate — allegations that the American president has been compromised by the Kremlin, which may even have helped to put him in the White House — is the worst and (considering the lack of actual evidence) most fraudulent political scandal in American history. We have yet to calculate the damage Russiagate has inflicted on America’s democratic institutions, including the presidency and the electoral process, and on domestic and foreign perceptions of American democracy, or on US-Russian relations at a critical moment when both sides, having “modernized” their nuclear weapons, are embarking on a new, more dangerous, and largely unreported arms race.
Rational (if politically innocent) observers may have thought that when the Mueller report found no “collusion” or other conspiracy between Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, only possible “obstruction” by Trump — nothing Mueller said in his May 29 press statement altered that conclusion — Russiagate would fade away. If so, they were badly mistaken. Evidently infuriated that Mueller did not liberate the White House from Trump, Russiagate promoters — liberal Democrats and progressives foremost among them — have only redoubled their unverified collusion allegations, even in once-respectable media outlets. Whether out of political ambition or impassioned faith, the damage wrought by these Russiagaters continues to mount, with no end in sight.
One way to end Russiagate might be to discover how it actually began. Considering what we have learned, or been told, since the allegations became public nearly three years ago, in mid-2016, there seem to be at least three hypothetical possibilities:
1. One is the orthodox Russiagate explanation: Early on, sharp-eyed top officials of President Obama’s intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI, detected truly suspicious “contacts” between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russians “linked to the Kremlin” (whatever that may mean, considering that the presidential administration employs hundreds of people), and this discovery legitimately led to the full-scale “counterintelligence investigation” initiated in July 2016. Indeed, Mueller documented various foreigners who contacted, or who sought to contact, the Trump campaign. The problem here is that Mueller does not tell us, and we do not know, if the number of them was unusual.
Many foreigners seek “contacts” with US presidential campaigns and have done so for decades. In this case, we do not know, for the sake of comparison, how many such foreigners had or sought contacts with the rival Clinton campaign, directly or through the Clinton Foundation, in 2016. (Certainly, there were quite a few contacts with anti-Trump Ukrainians, for example.) If the number was roughly comparable, why didn’t US intelligence initiate a counterintelligence investigation of the Clinton campaign?
If readers think the answer is because the foreigners around the Trump campaign included Russians, consider this: In 1988, when Senator Gary Hart was the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he went to Russia — still Communist Soviet Russia — to make contacts in preparation for his anticipated presidency, including meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. US media coverage of Hart’s visit was generally favorable. (I accompanied Senator Hart and do not recall much, if any, adverse US media reaction.)
2. The second explanation – currently, and oddly, favored by non-comprehending pro-Trump commentators at Fox News and elsewhere – is that “Putin’s Kremlin” pumped anti-Trump “disinformation” into the American media, primarily through what became known as the Steele Dossier.As I pointed out nearly a year and a half ago, this makes no sense factually or logically. Nothing in the dossier suggests that any of its contents necessarily came from high-level Kremlin sources, as Steele claimed. Moreover, if Kremlin leader Putin so favored Trump, as a Russiagate premise insists, is it really plausible that underlings in the Kremlin would have risked Putin’s ire by furnishing Steele with anti-Trump “information”? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that “researchers” in the United States (some, like Christopher Steele, paid by the Clinton campaign) were supplying him with the fruits of their research.
3. The third possible explanation—one I have termed “Intelgate,” and that I explore in my recent book War With Russia?: From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate — is that US intelligence agencies undertook an operation to damage, if not destroy, first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. More evidence of “Intelgate” has since appeared. For example, the intelligence community has said it began its investigation in April 2016 because of a few innocuous remarks by a young, lowly Trump foreign-policy adviser, George Papadopoulos. The relatively obscure Papadopoulos suddenly found himself befriended by apparently influential people he had not previously known, among them Stefan Halper, Joseph Mifsud, Alexander Downer, and a woman calling herself Azra Turk. What we now know—and what Papadopoulos did not know at the time—is that all of them had ties to US and/or UK and Western European intelligence agencies.
US Attorney General William Barr now proposes to investigate the origins of Russiagate. He has appointed yet another special prosecutor, John Durham, to do so, but the power to decide the range and focus of the investigation will remain with Barr. The important news is Barr’s expressed intention to investigate the role of other US intelligence agencies, not just the FBI, which obviously means the CIA when it was headed by John Brennan and Brennan’s partner at the time, James Clapper, then director of national intelligence. As I argued in The Nation, Brennan, not Obama’s hapless FBI Director James Comey, was the godfather of Russiagate, a thesis for which more evidencehas since appeared. We should hope that Barr intends to exclude nothing, including the two foundational texts of the deceitful Russiagate narrative: the Steele Dossier and, directly related, the contrived but equally ramifying Intelligence Community Assessment of January 2017. (Not coincidentally, they were made public at virtually the same time, inflating Russiagate into an obsessive national scandal.)
Thus far, Barr has been cautious in his public statements. He has acknowledged there was “spying,” or surveillance, on the Trump campaign, which can be legal, but he surely knows that in the case of Papadopoulos (and possibly of General Michael Flynn), what happened was more akin to entrapment, which is never legal. Barr no doubt also recalls, and will likely keep in mind, the astonishing warning Senator Charles Schumer issued to President-elect Trump in January 2017: “Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” (Indeed, Barr might ask Schumer what he meant and why he felt the need to be the menacing messenger of intel agencies, wittingly or not.)
But Barr’s thorniest problem may be understanding the woeful role of mainstream media in Russiagate. As Lee Smith, who contributed important investigative reporting, has written: “The press is part of the operation, the indispensable part. None of it would have been possible…had the media not linked arms with spies, cops, and lawyers to relay a story first spun by Clinton operatives.” How does Barr explore this “indispensable” complicity of the media in originating and perpetuating the Russiagate fraud without impermissibly infringing on the freedom of the press?
Ideally, mainstream media — print and broadcast — would now themselves report on how and why they permitted intelligence officials, through leaks and anonymous sources, and as “opinion” commentators, to use their pages and programming to promote Russiagate for so long, and why they so excluded well-informed, nonpartisan alternative opinions. Instead, they have almost unanimously reported and broadcast negatively, even antagonistically, about Barr’s investigation, and indeed about Barr personally. (The Washington Post even found a way to print this: “William Barr looks like a toad…”) Such is the seeming panic of the Russiagate media over Barr’s investigation, which promises to declassify related documents, that The New York Times again trotted out its easily debunked fiction that public disclosures will endanger a purported US informant, a Kremlin mole, at Putin’s side.
Finally, but most crucially, what was the real reason US intelligence agencies launched a discrediting operation against Trump? Was it because, as seems likely, they intensely disliked his campaign talk of “cooperation with Russia,” which seemed to mean the prospect of a new US-Russian détente? Even fervent political and media opponents of Trump should want to know who is making foreign policy in Washington. The next intel target might be their preferred candidate or president, or a foreign policy they favor.
Nor, it seems clear, did the CIA stop. In March 2018, the current director, Gina Haspel, flatly lied to President Trump about an incident in the UK in order to persuade him to escalate measures against Moscow, which he then reluctantly did. Several non–mainstreammedia outlets have reported the true story. Typically, The New York Times, on April 17 of this year, reported it without correcting Haspel’s falsehood.
We are left, then, with this paradox, formulated in a tweet on May 24 by the British journalist John O’Sullivan: “Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ESnEtJ Tyler Durden
The first rule of stopping gun violence in Baltimore, is you don’t talk about gun violence.
Following a deadly weekend in Baltimore (with 11 injured and 2 dead), city officials are discussing a very different tactic from the usual gun-confiscation talking points as a solution.
As WBAL reports, Mayor Jack Young said he’s considering having people solve their issues in public boxing matches.
“Gun violence has been plaguing this city for the last 10 years. The murder rate in this city and non-fatal shootings have increased. I’m not happy with it and neither should the citizens of Baltimore,” Young said.
He went on to say:
“If they want to really settle them, we can have them down at the civic center, put a boxing ring up and let them go and box it out. Those kinds of things, you know, and the best man wins and the beef should be over. Those are some of the things I’m thinking about.”
Young, along with City States Attorney Marilyn Mosby, attended a National Gun Violence Awareness Day event, connecting youth with resources, such as jobs, in an attempt to encourage them not to pick up a gun.
“Frederick Douglas said it best. It’s easier to build strong children than it is to repair broken men, and so we have to focus on our babies before it’s too late,” Mosby said.
So Baltimore is set to shift to a Mad Max “two men enter, one man leaves” society? We are sure nothing will go wrong there.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KscT4T Tyler Durden
Hillary Clinton has a lot to answer for, particularly if the new standard for investigating a presidential candidate is “it looked suspicious.”
To that end, The Hill‘s John Solomon wants to revisit the Clinton apparatus; from “overt appearance” of ‘pay-to-play’ plaguing the Clinton Foundation (which saw donations crater by 90% after she lost the 2016 election), to Clinton’s ability to “sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee,” while simultaneously bankrolling a “foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research document” which was used to both spy on the Trump campaign and harm Donald Trump politically.
And while there are many other “suspicious” Clinton matters one could investigate spanning decades, Solomon focuses on the two most significant and recent examples that probably wouldn’t take an honest Special Counsel too long to flush out.
In closing, Solomon has 10 essential questionsfor Clinton.
Hillary Clinton’s Russia Collusion IOU: The Answers She Owes America
During the combined two decades she served as a U.S. senator and secretary of State, Hillary Clinton’s patrons regularly donated to her family charity when they had official business pending before America’s most powerful political woman.
The pattern of political IOUs paid to the Clinton Foundation was so pernicious that the State Department even tried to execute a special agreement with the charity to avoid the overt appearance of “pay-to-play” policy.
Still, the money continued to flow by the millions of dollars, from foreigners and Americans alike who were perceived to be indebted to the Clinton machine or in need of its help.
It’s time for the American public to call in their own IOU on political transparency.
The reason? Never before — until 2016 — had the apparatus of a U.S. presidential candidate managed to sic the weight of the FBI and U.S. intelligence community on a rival nominee during an election, and by using a foreign-fed, uncorroborated political opposition research document.
But Clinton’s campaign, in concert with the Democratic Party and through their shared law firm, funded Christopher Steele’s unverified dossier which, it turns out, falsely portrayed Republican Donald Trump as a treasonous asset colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin to hijack the U.S. election.
Steele went to the FBI to get an investigation started and then leaked the existence of the investigation, with the hope of sinking Trump’s presidential aspirations.
On its face, it is arguably the most devious political dirty trick in American history and one of the most overt intrusions of a foreigner into a U.S. election.
It appears the Clinton machine knew that what it was doing was controversial. That’s why it did backflips to disguise the operation from Congress and the public, and in its Federal Election Commission (FEC) spending reports.
Clinton and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) used the law firm of Perkins Coie to hire Glenn Simpson’s research firm, Fusion GPS, which then hired Steele — several layers that obfuscated transparency, kept the operation off the campaign’s public FEC reports and gave the Clintons plausible deniability.
But Steele’s first overture on July 5, 2016, failed to capture the FBI’s imagination. So the Clinton machine escalated. Steele, a British national, went to senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr — whose wife, Nellie, also worked for Fusion — to push his Trump dirt to the top of the FBI.
Nellie Ohr likewise sent some of her own anti-Trump research augmenting Steele’s dossier to the FBI through her husband. Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann used his connection to former FBI general counsel James Baker to dump Trump dirt at the FBI, too.
In short, the Clinton machine flooded the FBI with pressure — and bad intel — until an investigation of Trump was started. The bureau and its hapless sheriff at the time, James Comey, eventually acquiesced with the help of such Clinton fans as then-FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
To finish the mission, Simpson and Steele leaked the existence of the FBI investigation to the news media to ensure it would hurt Trump politically. Simpson even called the leaks a “hail Mary” that failed.
Trump won, however. And now, thanks to special counsel Robert Mueller, we know the Russia-collusion allegations relentlessly peddled by Team Clinton were bogus. But not before the FBI used the Clinton-funded, foreign-created research to get a total of four warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, transition and presidency from October 2016 through the following autumn.
The Clinton team’s dirty trick was as diabolical as it was brilliant. It literally used house money and a large part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus to carry out its political hit job on Trump.
After two years of American discomfort, and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars spent, it’s time for the house to call in its IOU.
Hillary Clinton owes us answers — lots of them. So far, she has ducked them, even while doing many high-profile media interviews.
I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Longtime Clinton adviser Douglas Schoen said Friday night on Fox News that it’s time for Clinton to answer what she knew and when she knew it.
Here are 10 essential questions:
In January 2018, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a formal investigative request for documents and written answers from your campaign. Do you plan to comply?
Please identify each person in your campaign who was involved with, or aware of, hiring Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Christopher Steele.
Please identify each person in your campaign, including Perkins Coie lawyers, who were aware that Steele provided information to the FBI or State Department, and when they learned it.
Describe any information you and your campaign staff received, or were briefed on, before Election Day that was derived from the work of Simpson, Steele, Fusion GPS, Nellie Ohr or Perkins Coie and that tried to connect Trump, his campaign or his business empire with Russia.
Please describe all contacts your campaign had before Election Day with or about the following individuals: Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, former foreign policy scholar Stefan Halper and Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud.
Did you or any senior members of your campaign, including lawyers such as Michael Sussmann, have any contact with the CIA, its former Director John Brennan, current Director Gina Haspel, James Baker, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page or former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe?
Describe all contacts your campaign had with Cody Shearer and Sidney Blumenthal concerning Trump, Russia and Ukraine.
Describe all contacts you and your campaign had with DNC contractorAlexander Chalupa, the Ukraine government, the Ukraine Embassy in the United States or the U.S. Embassy in Kiev concerning Trump, Russia or former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Why did your campaign and the Democratic Party make a concerted effort to portray Trump as a Russian asset?
Given that investigations by a House committee, a Senate committee and a special prosecutor all have concluded there isn’t evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, do you regret the actions by your campaign and by Steele, Simpson and Sussmann to inject these unfounded allegations into the FBI, the U.S. intelligence community and the news media?
Hillary Clinton owes us answers to each of these questions. She should skip the lawyer-speak and answer them with the candor worthy of an elder American stateswoman.
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists’ misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @jsolomonReports.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2QL3CGd Tyler Durden
San Francisco authorities are expected to consider a Tuesday proposal that would force mentally ill drug addicts into treatment centers against their will, according to ABC News.
Known as conservatorship, the program has the endorsement of Mayor London Breed and others, who say it’s a necessary step to deal with often-homeless addicts who may be a danger to themselves or others. The program would allow a court to appoint a public conservator for those who have been involuntarily detained for psychiatric hospitalization at least eight times in a year under section 5150 of California’s welfare and institutions code. According to the report, treatment could last for up to a year. So far, San Francisco’s public health department has identified 55 individuals who would qualify for the program, and 48 more who have been detained six or seven times.
Incomes are generally high in San Francisco, where the median price of a home is $1.4 million and median monthly rent for a one-bedroom unit is $3,700. But the city struggles with a growing number of homeless people — some with disturbing street behavior fueled by drugs, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
They shuffle from the streets to jail and psychiatric care, unaware they need steady treatment, sometimes dashing into traffic or screaming at strangers. –ABC News
“Anyone who’s been to San Francisco recently, either in our downtown or in the neighborhoods I represent, has seen an alarming number of people who seem to be mentally ill, or in some kind of psychosis, and they seem to be not getting the care that they need,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who co-sponsored the measure along with state Sen. Scott Wiener (D).
The proposal faces a challenge in the 11-member SF Board of Supervisors, which has been divided on the issue. Not everyone is on board with the idea. Critics say that the measure is a violation of civil rights that runs counter to the liberal city’s principles, and that San Francisco lacks the resources to accommodate the sheer number of mentally ill addicts.
The health department has nearly $400 million budgeted for mental health and substance abuse services – providing help to some 25,000 people in 2018.
Last year, voters approved a tax on some of the city’s wealthiest companies to raise money for homeless and mental health services. And this year, several supervisors are proposing a November ballot measure to guarantee mental health services for everyone.
Jen Flory, a policy advocate with the Western Center on Law and Policy, which lobbies on behalf of poor people, said it’s no accident that the most expensive cities in California are seeing more people with serious problems on the streets.
Her organization opposes the San Francisco measure, saying there are insufficient services available to make it work. She hopes people are offered outpatient services with fewer restrictions.
“These are very difficult people to house, but what works is to continually try to work with somebody until something works,” she said. “We don’t know of forced models that work.” –ABC News
Watching homeless people mentally deteriorate is heartbreaking, according to Mandelman, who said that the city’s merchants “see them going from ‘kind of not great’ to being in absolute and complete distress.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/31b521i Tyler Durden
With Beijing making louder noise by the day about using rare earth metals as a “nuclear” retaliation option in trade war with the US, Washington is not sitting on its thumbs waiting for the day China pulls the plug, and as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said today, the U.S. will take steps to ensure it doesn’t get cut off from the supply of rare earths.
As reported previously both in the Chinese and US press, Beijing has prepared a plan to restrict exports of rare earths to the U.S. if the trade war between the two nations deepens, and on Tuesday the Commerce Department released a report requested by President Donald Trump in December 2017, when he asked officials to look into U.S. access to so-called rare earths, a group of 17 elements including lanthanum and terbium, which are used in everything from the production of computer screens to missile systems and mobile phones.
“These critical minerals are often overlooked but modern life without them would be impossible,” Ross said in a statement. “Through the recommendations detailed in this report, the federal government will take unprecedented action to ensure that the United States will not be cut off from these vital materials.”
While some have minimized the consequences of a potential rare earth boycott of the US by China, the report acknowledged the potential danger to the U.S. of being shut out of foreign supplies of rare earths.
“The United States is heavily dependent on critical mineral imports,” according to the report. “If China or Russia were to stop exports to the United States and its allies for a prolonged period — similar to China’s rare earths embargo in 2010 — an extended supply disruption could cause significant shocks throughout U.S. and foreign critical mineral supply chains.”
China accounts for more than 70% of global output of rare earths. Ironically, the U.S. was the leading global producer of rare earths from the 1960s to the 80s, when production began shifting off shore.
According to Bloomberg, the Commerce Dept report recommended a number of steps, including improving the government’s understanding of domestic sources of rare earths and expediting approvals of mining permits.
And here another irony emerges: the U.S. has 1.4 million metric tons in rare earth mine reserves, 93 times the nation’s output last year, according to data from the U.S. Geological Service website; it should be relatively simple to restart mothballed facilities. And yet, it isn’t: the only US producer, MP Materials, has been shipping all its output from the Mountain Pass mine in California to China because there is currently no refining capacity available to handle its output anywhere else in the world, its biggest shareholder said.
“As with our energy security, the Trump administration is dedicated to ensuring that we are never held hostage to foreign powers for the natural resources critical to our national security and economic growth,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a separate statement. “The department will work expeditiously to implement the president’s strategy from streamlining the permitting process to locating domestic supplies of minerals.”
Of course, whether or not the US finds alternative supply chains is of secondary importance: what matters is for China to believe the US is no longer a hostage to weaponized Chinese rare earth metals. That in itself should be enough to eliminate the leverage. Then again, the only way China can ascertain this is by testing out US supply chains. Which is why the moment Beijing does pull the plug on these exports, is the moment trade war between the two superpowers will have crossed the rubicon, and no amount of dovish jawboning by Powell will be able to offset the coming risk rout.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KtJuHA Tyler Durden
The FBI cops to the fact that its database of mugshots, called the Interstate Photo System, has about 36 million entries. The feds use facial recognition technology, among other techniques, to sift through photos during its investigations.
But that’s the tip of the iceberg. A director at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Gretta Goodwin, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today that the FBI can scan about 640 million pictures, including not just mugshots but driver’s licenses and passport photos. From the AP’s account:
…taking into account the bureau contracts providing access to driver’s licenses in 21 states, and its use of photos and other databases, the FBI has access to about 640 million photographs, Goodwin told lawmakers at the House oversight committee hearing.
But don’t worry, because they FBI has “strict policies” governing the use of such technology, said a spokesman for an agency that is exceedingly well-known for what the ACLU calls an “unchecked abuse of authority” that is exceptionally well-documented in Tim Weiner’s 2012 book Enemies: A History of the FBI. While J. Edgar Hoover’s legendary contempt for the rule of law and darkly comic episodes such as a failed attempt to discern the lyrics of the 1963 pop song “Louie, Louie” are widely known, the FBI continues to be a dumpster fire when it comes to accountability. A 2018 Time cover story, for instance, was titled “The FBI Is in Crisis. It’s Worse Than You Think,” and wrote about internal investigations that, among other things,
showed that the ousted deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, had lied to the bureau’s internal investigations branch to cover up a leak he orchestrated about Clinton’s family foundation less than two weeks before the election…. Another IG report in March found that FBI retaliation against internal whistle-blowers was continuing despite years of bureau pledges to fix the problem. Last fall, [Justice Department Inspector General Michael] Horowitz found that the FBI wasn’t adequately investigating “high-risk” employees who failed polygraph tests.
Back to today’s congressional testimony about the FBI’s access to photos and its rules about using facial recognition technology:
Kimberly Del Greco, a deputy assistant director at the FBI, said the bureau has strict policies for using facial recognition. She said it is used only when there is an active FBI investigation or an assessment, which can precede a formal investigation. When using the state databases, the FBI submits a so-called “probe photo” and then states conduct a search to yield a list of potential candidates to be reviewed by trained federal agents.
“Facial recognition is a tool that, if used properly, can greatly enhance law enforcement capabilities and protect public safety,” she said.
In May, Reason‘s Ronald Bailey hailed a decision by San Francisco’s board of supervisors to ban law enforcement use of facial recognition technology. Here’s part of his reasoning:
We know that government agencies have and still do rifle largely unhindered through private communications databases at will. Perhaps federal espionage and law enforcement agencies will be more punctilious about observing our constitutional right to privacy with respect to this emerging surveillance technology, but I wouldn’t count on it….
A bipartisan group of congressional representatives have apparently just agreed to draft legislation—possibly including a moratorium—to regulate law enforcement use of facial recognition. Given Congress’s ongoing refusal to rein in domestic spying programs, legislative action on this issue deserves close monitoring….
[I]t doesn’t seem too panicky to observe the principles of federalism such that states and localities can explore ways to prevent law enforcement abuse of this emerging surveillance technology.
