This Week Showed Internet Censorship Is As Much A Threat To The Left As The Right

Authored by Danielle Ryan via RT.com,

The banning of right wing controversialist Alex Jones from multiple social media platforms last week was a cause of celebration for many liberals, but should those on the left really be so complacent about creeping censorship?

So far, the evidence suggest that there is indeed plenty for the left to worry about when it comes to corporations like Facebook and Twitter and their alliances with government censors.

1. Facebook censorship of Venezuelan news

In May, Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council in an effort to weed out “inauthentic content” on the platform. This organization is funded by various NATO governments and a slew of arms manufacturers like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Its board includes names like Henry Kissinger and former CIA director Michael Hayden — and it has consistently lobbied for regime change in Syria and, you guessed it, Venezuela, where it has funnelled large amounts of money into pro-opposition groups for years.

So, it’s no surprise that weeks after Facebook partnered up with this less-than-objective group, it deleted from its platform the page belonging to top English-language, left-leaning Latin American news outlet Telesur without any explanation at all. The page was restored two days later, with Facebook citing vague “instability on the platform” as the cause of the block.

Telesur just so happens to be one of the only major outlets reporting on events in Venezuela in a manner that goes against the US government position and US mainstream media perspective — so obviously, out with Alex Jones it must go.

It wasn’t just Telesur, though. Facebook deleted the pages belonging to independent grassroots Venezuela Analysis and Haiti Analysis, which are also leftist websites highly critical of US foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean region.

2. Facebook complying with Israeli deletion orders

Last year, journalist Glenn Greenwald reported that Facebook met with Israeli government officials to determine which Palestinian activists should have their accounts deleted. The Israeli government threatened to enact laws forcing Facebook to comply with its deletion orders if it did not do so voluntarily.

Of course, Facebook capitulated immediately and set about deleting accounts owned by Palestinian activists. Of some 158 requests submitted (over just four months) by Tel Aviv to Facebook asking for the removal of Palestinian content, 95 percent of them were granted. According to the same Intercept report,  Facebook hasn’t been overly concerned about what Israelis themselves are saying on Facebook and even calls for murder can be ignored by the social media giant.

3. Google and Facebook censorship of left/socialist websites

The World Socialist Web Site reported last year that changes to Google’s algorithms had seriously negatively impacted left-wing socialist and anti-war websites. An analysis by WSWS found that 13 such websites had seen their traffic plunge by a whopping 55 percent in the six months since Google had changed its algorithms. WSWS itself experienced a 74 percent drop in traffic between April and July last year. The changes also affected sites like Alternet, which saw its traffic plunge by 71 percent between April and September, Democracy Now (50 percent drop) and Truth-out.org (49 percent drop).

Similarly, Police the Police (a page dedicated to exposing US police brutality) and the Free Thought Project (which focuses on government transparency) also saw their Facebook page traffic tank in 2018 after Facebook made changes to its newsfeed and search algorithms in an effort to combat “fake news”. PTP traffic dropped from between 12-15 million people per week to about 4 million — and the website had to fire its writing staff as a result. “The left is cheering this on, when historically the left is usually the side cheering for free speech,” PTP founder Jason Bassler told Mic.

Amidst all of the celebration over the banning of Jones, some on the left cautioned that in fact, the left may indeed be the“real target” in all of this — and that those celebrating while people like Jones are banned are in fact being “conditioned”into accepting further censorship down the road.

4. Legitimate left-wing protests targeted?

A particularly strange example of Facebook’s commitment to banning “fake news” and promoting a nice, cozy atmosphere for everyone online is its decision to delete event pages for anti-racist and anti-fascist protests happening in Washington D.C.

The “No Unite the Right 2-DC” event (a counter-rally against a previous white nationalist event in the city) was taken down after Facebook decided it displayed some “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (the kind of random phrase that can no doubt be arbitrarily applied to anything without explanation).

The event organizer said in a statement: “This is a real protest in Washington, D.C. It is not George Soros. It is not Russia. It is just us.”

5. Twitter suspending and banning anti-war activists

Twitter has come under fire recently for “shadowbanning” conservative accounts, making them harder to find on the platform and having their tweets appear less prominently in people’s feeds in an effort to limit their audience. But again, it’s not just the right.

Twitter recently suspended the accounts of Daniel McAdams, the executive director of the libertarian and antiwar Ron Paul Institute and Scott Horton, the editor of the AntiWar.com website. Explaining what happened, McAdams said that he and Horton were suspended after defending former US diplomat Peter Van Buren who had just been banned permanently from Twitter after heated exchanges with journalist Jonathan M. Katz over what Van Buren said was his “unwillingness to challenge government lies”. In one of his tweets to Katz, Buren sarcastically commented: “I hope a MAGA guy eats your face”. Katz reported him for “promoting violence” and Twitter later caved and removed Buren’s account.

In explaining his suspension, Twitter told McAdams that he could not “promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease” — none of which he accepts that he did.

*  *  *

Perhaps the really amazing thing about all of this is that it is happening in front of our eyes and the powers that be are not even bothering to lie about it. Elected US officials are openly promoting this kind of censorship as a way to prevent the“sowing of discord” among populations. At a Senate Judiciary Committee last year about “Extremist Content and Russian Disinformation Online,” Democratic Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono called on social media platforms to prove their commitment to preventing “the fomenting of discord” online.

Working hand-in-glove with governments, corporations like Facebook have been handed enormous power to decide what constitutes free speech and which opinions are worthy of being heard. How long will it be before people realize banning Alex Jones wasn’t really a victory at all?

Danielle Ryan

via RSS https://ift.tt/2L2MR4J Tyler Durden

How The Hell Did A Teenager Hack Apple’s Secured Servers?

An Australian teenager whose name has been withheld is facing serious charges by authorities over a massive data breach of Apple’s secured network.

Apple said on Friday no customer information was compromised after Australian media reported a boy, 16, from the southern city of Melbourne, hacked into the world’s most valuable company from his parent’s basement many times over the last year, The Age newspaper reported, citing statements by the teenager’s lawyer in Children’s Court. He was summoned to a Melbourne court on Thursday.

Apple contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation which launched a major international investigation, The Age said, quoting statements made in court. The FBI then passed the case to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), where they later tracked down the teen and found software that had enabled the hacking.

The AFP raided the teen’s family home in Melbourne and seized two laptops, a mobile phone, and a hard drive. Court documents said the teenage hacker stored 90 gigabytes of Apple secured files and customer accounts in a folder titled “hacky hack hack,” the newspaper said. Authorities also said he readily spoke about his illegal activities on Facebook-owned instant messenger WhatsApp.

Here is what the court heard:

“Two Apple laptops were seized and the serial numbers matched the serial numbers of the devices which accessed the internal systems,” a prosecutor said.

“A mobile phone and hard drive were also seized and the IP address … matched the intrusions into the organization.

“The purpose was to connect remotely to the company’s internal systems.”

The teen’s lawyer told the courtroom his client had become so popular in the international hacking community that even mentioning the case in detail could expose him and his family to unwanted risk.

Crown Prosecutors also acknowledged that Apple was “very sensitive about publicity,” as it seems the story has not been widely reported.

An Apple spokesman said this in a statement to Guardian Australia:

“At Apple, we vigilantly protect our networks and have dedicated teams of information security professionals that work to detect and respond to threats,” said the spokesman.

“In this case, our teams discovered the unauthorized access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement. We regard the data security of our users as one of our greatest responsibilities and want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised.”

Dr. Suelette Dreyfus, a privacy expert from the University of Melbourne’s school of computing and information systems, urged against jailtime. “I have researched a number of teen hacker cases internationally,” Dreyfus told Guardian Australia.

“Almost all these teens grew out of the technology boundary-pushing of their youth, and then went on to live useful lives and contributing to society. Putting them in prison is often a waste of that potential. “Young people often make mistakes when they are exploring and rule-breaking especially online – including boasting about their exploits. It’s not right, but for tech teens, it can be a part of growing up … there’s usually a really worried teen and family at the end of this sort of court case.”

Both AFP and Melbourne court declined to comment on the matter when asked by Guardian Australia. Reports indicate the teenager would be sentenced next month on September 20.

So we ask a difficult question: How the hell did a teenager hack the world’s most valuable company and steal customer data? Apple has a lot of explaining to do…

via RSS https://ift.tt/2MzkHmD Tyler Durden

How US Sugar Subsidies Bring A ‘Red Tide’ Of Algae To Florida’s Shores

Authored by Mark Thornton via The Mises Institute,

ABC News reports that “Toxic red tide blooms are creeping up Florida’s west coast, killing marine life and irritating humans.” The red (or maroonish) tide is truly a nasty problem that I have experienced first-hand in the form of a ruined vacation.

It is a potentially toxic algae to wildlife when it occurs in high concentrations. The Karenia brevis algae can be a threat to fish, birds, and even manatee. At least 92 manatees have been killed so far and at least one whale shark! This creates conditions at the beach of discolored water, dead fish, and a horrible smell. Tourists are adversely affected as well as local businesses.

The algae are a natural phenomenon that has been known of for almost two centuries. However, the harmful “blooms” have occurred much more often and in more places in recent decades. More recently, it has been plaguing southwest Florida beaches since November 2017 and is now particularly bad over a larger area.

I was recently attacked on Facebook for explaining all the benefits we would receive if we reduced the number of regulators and their budgets, i.e., fewer unnecessary regulatory restrictions on businesses and resource owners, less spending and taxes, more resources in the productive economy, and more entrepreneurship to name the primary ones.

My “friend” wrote that if we reduced the number of regulators, who would protect him from all the various perceived evils, including the red tide at the Florida coast. I replied to him, in part, that we pay for over 100,000 regulators for financial markets and they did not protect us from the financial crisis, that BP’s deep-water oil rigs are extremely highly regulated (in fact they would not be drilling in deep water at all if not for regulations!), and in fact, EPA rules and regulators are there to protect the interests of polluters and to block citizens from protecting themselves in court. That was the end of the conversation.

Back to the story. Actually, this is an old story that I most recently I wrote about 4 ½ years ago. There is an easy answer to why this red tide problem is growing increasingly worse, as well as having an easy solution. There is no need to create a Red Tide Project to do declare a War on Red Tide.

The Red Tide starts as natural growth of the “bad algae” dozens of miles off shore near the continental shelf. That algae can then drift toward shore and enter brackish water inlets. The blooms are not stimulated in open circulating waters. However, they are stimulated to grow and get bigger in the presence of manmade nutrients, such as fertilizers that have run into water sources from agricultural production all over the Gulf of Mexico.

In contrast, if the water in the Gulf is circulating well, then it brings more natural nutrients to the coastline. These nutrients feed other types of green “good algae” which keeps the Red Tide in check. In other words, mother nature can keep the problem in check.

However, when water circulation is down and fertilizer runoff is in play, you have a problem. A multi-billion-dollar problem.

Though other factors play a role in the algae bloom crises, one of the most significant involves the sugar industry. A combination of federal sugar subsidies, federal regulations on pollution, and federal control of Lake Okeechobee (a giant lake in southern Florida) runoff guidelines has created a recipe for disaster.

The federal sugar subsidy prevents Americans from buying sugar from Cuba and other sources. This means that we have to produce our own sugar and that we pay the world’s highest price for sugar. It also means that we grow sugar and sugar substitutes in a high-cost fashion using a lot of fertilizer!

According to ABC News:

Once the red tide is inshore, the algae can grow even more using man-made nutrients, such as fertilizer.

“The increase in runoff may likely exacerbate an existing bloom,” Weisberg said.

Earlier this week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott called for the FWC and FDEP to “mobilize all available resources” to address the impacts of the red tide.

On Friday, Scott blamed the cause of the blooms on “the federal government releasing water from Lake Okeechobee.”

“For too long, Floridians have had to deal with harmful algal blooms caused by the federal government releasing water from Lake Okeechobee into our rivers and coastal estuaries,” Scott said in a press release.

So, there you have it. Federal rules, regulations, and regulators are the cause. The federal sugar subsidy has created a massive increase in fertilizer use in agriculture in southern Florida and in other states, such as Louisiana. The EPA protects farmers and others who dump chemicals into the water by setting protection “limits,” and then federal officials dump excessive pollutants into our water ways and we have no recourse against them.

I think the solutions are simple and straightforward. End the sugar subsidies and the EPA and its protection limits. Restore the right of the people to sue polluters that cause demonstrable harm.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2w9NIeH Tyler Durden

Not The Onion: Southwest To Allow Miniature Horses As ‘Emotional Support Animals’

Southwest Airlines has revamped their policy for travelers who need to fly with unconventional “emotional support animals,” following similar moves by JetBlue, United, American and Delta – which have all cracked down on those traveling with everything from motherfu*king therapy snakes, to supportive spiders, to peacocks trained to stow one’s emotional baggage. Cats and dogs are still allowed. 

One animal Southwest hasn’t restricted, however, is miniature horses. Because why not? 

Each passenger will be allowed one Emotional Support Animal (ESA) – which we imagine will be the ultimate Sophie’s Choice for those hoping to smuggle their emotional ant farms past security. Also, a note from a licensed medical doctor or mental health professional will be required on the day of departure. 

For everyone not bringing an emotional support cat, dog, or miniature horse – looks like you’re just going to have to go to your happy place – or take a road trip.

 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2MVLaaW Tyler Durden

Trade War May Push China To Russian Energy

Via Global Risk Insights,

Although China has backpedaled on proposed tariffs on U.S. crude imports, the move is indicative of its need to diversify sources and steps may now be taken to enable China to play the oil card in the future – including imports from Iran despite sanctions, and drawing closer to Russia.

A reshuffle of crude oil exports to Asia

Asian oil refiners have been rushing to secure crude supplies in anticipation of an escalating trade war between the United States and China. Last week, Dongming Petrochemical, an independent Chinese refiner, said it has halted crude purchases from the U.S. and turned to Iranian imports amid escalating trade tensions between Beijing and Washington. U.S. crude oil exports to China reached 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) at the beginning of this July, but Beijing has recently threatened a 25 percent duty on imports of U.S. crude as part of its retaliation for Trump’s latest round of tariffs on US$34 billion worth of Chinese goods. In addition, Iran’s foreign minister said on 3 August that China was “pivotal” to salvaging a multilateral nuclear agreement for the Middle Eastern country after the United States pulled out. A reshuffle of crude oil exports to Asia is possible, with China vacuuming up much of the Iranian oil that other nations won’t buy because of the threat of U.S. sanctions. 

China, India, Japan and South Korea together account for almost 65 percent of the 2.7 million barrels a day that Iran exported in May. The U.S. has been lobbying these countries and other multinational oil giants to cut crude purchases from Iran to zero by November, the deadline for re-imposition of the secondary sanctions. In view of the current trade disputes with the U.S., China has reacted defiantly to U.S. sanctions banning business ties with the Islamic republic. This could be the determining factor in helping Tehran withstand the sanctions on its vital energy industry.

With China turning to Iran, U.S. oil would start flowing in greater amounts to other leading importers in the region, such as Japan and South Korea. In Japan, the oil industry has yet to respond to this issue publicly. The Petroleum Association of Japan previously warned refiners that they will have to stop loading Iranian crude oil from October onward if Tokyo doesn’t win an exemption on U.S.-Iran sanctions. However, this past weekend, South Korea’s embassy in Iran rejected media reports that the country had suspended oil purchases from Iran under pressure from the U.S. Whether Japan and South Korea would seek more crude imports from the U.S. remains to be seen.

China may have Russia on its side

The sanctions imposed on Russia from the West, as well as the trade tensions between China and the U.S., may provide even more room for energy cooperation between China and Russia. Russia’s sour relationship with the West forces it to look for new trade and investment partners, which could include China and countries in the Middle East. Russia has already become Beijing’s single largest crude oil supplier, exporting crude oil worth US$23.7 billion to China in 2017. Now with Beijing possibly cutting imports from the U.S., Russia may seek to export even more crude oil to China.

On 19 July, China received the first ever liquefied LNG cargo from Russian natural gas producer Novatek via the Northern Sea Route (NSR) alongside the Arctic coast. The $27 billion Yamal project is the world’s largest Arctic LNG project and the first large-scale energy cooperation project to be implemented in Russia after the “Belt and Road” initiative. China’s National Energy Administration said China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC) will start lifting at least 3 million tonnes of LNG from Yamal starting in 2019. Therefore, it’s highly possible that China and Russia will deepen their cooperation in liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade despite U.S. sanctions.

In addition, according to an anonymous Russian government official, Russia is ready to invest US$50 billion in Iran’s oil and gas sector amid mounting pressure from the U.S. to economically and diplomatically isolate Tehran. Russia’s energy minister Alexander Novak said that Moscow was interested in developing an oil-for-goods program that would allow Iranian companies to buy Russian products in exchange for oil contracts to be sold to third world countries. This was evidence of Russia’s consistent strategy of using its strong oil and gas industry to meddle in Middle East issues. Under the current situation, even though China may somehow reach an agreement with the U.S. promising that it will cut oil imports if the U.S. is willing to reduce the trade tariffs, in the short-term China is still likely to get Russia on its side in defiance of the U.S. oil campaign.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2nPjiKF Tyler Durden

Average Pay Gap Between CEOs and Ordinary Workers Hits 312x

The pay gap between the CEOs of major corporations and their rank and file workers has continued to widen, maintaining a trend of inequitable wage growth that has been ongoing since the 1990s.  A new Economic Policy Institute report showed CEOs of America’s top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their rank and file workers.

Jeff Bezos eating an iguana

According to a report summary in The Guardian, CEOs of major corporations got an average pay rise of 17.6% over the last year while rank-and-file employee compensation rose just 0.3% over the same time. The latter saw their wages stall, for the most part, while CEOs took home an average of $18.9 million in compensation, according to the report.

Not surprisingly, this divergence in pay is the continuation of a trend that started back in the 90s:

The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20-to-one; that figure had risen to 58-to-one by in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker.

CEO pay dipped in the early 2000s and during the last recession but has been rising rapidly since 2009. Chief executives are even leaving the 0.1% in the dust. The bosses of large firms now earn 5.5 times as much as the average earner in the top 0.1%.

Recently there has been added visibility on this pay gap since companies have been forced to report it in their financials. This has highlighted some extraordinarily egregious pay gaps, such as at those at McDonald’s and Walmart:

The astronomical gap between the remuneration of workers and bosses has been brought into sharper focus by a new financial disclosure rule that forces companies to publish the ratio of CEO to worker pay. Last year McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101-to-one. The average Walmart worker earned $19,177 in 2017 while CEO Doug McMillon took home $22.8m – a ratio of 1,188-to-one.

It’s not just the pay difference with the rank and file that has exploded: the average pay gap between CEOs and other very high wage earners has also grown substantially, and CEOs in large companies making 5.5x more than the average earner in the top 0.1%

The self-fulfilling prophecy of rising CEO compensation, which is estimated to partly be a result of the stock market’s rise and “everybody thinking their CEO is better than the next one”, according to Lawrence Mishel, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, has now pushed the rising compensation rate to outgrow the rise in the stock market.

Between 1978 and 2017 CEO compensation has increased by 979%. Over the same period the S&P 500 Index of the US’s largest companies grew 637%.

At the same time, the Guardian article notes, while the S&P 500 index was up 637% from 1978 to 2017, the typical rank and file worker only saw their pay package rise just 11.2%.

The report fails to discuss the role monetary policy has had in creating this enormous pay gap; it also ignores the “virtuous circle” of stock buybacks and executive compensation, which is usually pegged to stock price milestones, incentivizing the C-suite to lever up the company just to achieve a faster cash out while burdening what’s left of the company with excess debt that could lead to an accelerated bankruptcy during a recession or when rates spike. By then, of course, the CEO – sporting an overflowing bank account – will be long gone.

Meanwhile, as the government selectively chooses to bail out those that are “too big to fail”, the average rank-and-file worker sees little to no benefits of such a policy. Under the selective bailout, crony-capitalist Keynesian system as it exists today, this data just continues to prove that it is easier for the rich to keep getting richer while ordinary workers remain stuck unable to reap any benefits.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2OLZl36 Tyler Durden

Nomi Prins: Your Should Fear The Emerging Market Debt Bubble

Authored by Nomi Prins via The Daily Reckoning,

Global debt has ballooned since the financial crisis as central banks have distorted markets and fueled debt bubbles in particular.

A lot of the increase in global debt has come from emerging market (EM) economies, especially China. In fact, a record amount of EM debt has accumulated during the past decade, mostly in dollars. A large portion of that debt is therefore denominated in U.S. dollars.

That’s why I’ve long argued that the first shoe to drop in the next crisis would likely be EM debt.

Borrowing is not a problem when dollars are cheap. Low interest rates mean the cost of servicing that debt is low.

The problem starts when the Fed raises rates or the dollar strengthens, even temporarily. The more the dollar rises, the more EM currencies and related markets fall. Dollar-denominated debt then becomes too expensive to repay or service as the dollar rises relative to EM currencies. Before long default becomes the only viable option.

This situation becomes more dangerous than even asset bubbles because debt is required to be repaid on a set schedule. If a country misses a debt payment, it could set off a chain reaction of defaults.

That’s why an EM crisis could quickly become a global crisis. In today’s world of financial globalization, any remote crisis can become an international problem in seconds. That’s the reality of today’s markets. Obviously, it could also have major ramifications for your own finances and investments.

How did we get here?

Because of the Fed’s rate hike cycle and quantitative tightening (QT) stance, the dollar has become much stronger. The dollar has risen 6.8% since late January alone. And that’s put emerging markets under considerable pressure.

Dollars are fleeing emerging market economies as investors are pouring into dollar assets and U.S. Treasuries.

As the Fed itself has warned about such a scenario, “If these risks materialized, there could be an increase in the demand for safe assets, particularly U.S. Treasuries.”

That starts a vicious cycle that only strengthens the dollar and weakens EM currencies further. In other words, emerging markets are being deprived of dollars at a time when they need them most.

Enter Turkey.

Panic spread throughout global markets last Friday as the Turkish lira plummeted after the Trump administration announced its plan to double tariffs on aluminum and steel imports. Already down substantially this year, the Turkish lira dropped as much as an additional 24% last Friday.

Even though it’s half a planet away from the U.S., the country could have a major impact. Like other emerging markets, Turkey borrowed a lot of money in U.S. dollars after the Federal Reserve initiated its zero interest rates in the wake of the financial crisis.

Turkey borrowed so much that its current foreign currency debt stands at more than 50%. Now, Turkey has a 15% inflation rate and a cratering currency.

As the Fed is raising rates, and the dollar is getting stronger, paying back that money is becoming much harder. The rise in the cost of debt payments means that defaults will become more likely.

Turkey’s central bank will need to raise rates to defend its currency, placing the government and economy in a difficult position.

The lira has been holding its own these past few days, but this dynamic could take a long time to play out. Do not assume the crisis is over, and it may be some time before Turkey recovers.

European banks with exposure to Turkey, along with U.S. banks connected to those European banks could encounter serious headwinds, as will emerging market funds. Weakness in one emerging market economy leads to a loss of investor confidence in others. We’ve seen that movie before.

But what’s happening in Turkey right now shouldn’t be terribly surprising, given Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s attitudes towards emerging markets.

Going back to last October, his words offer a glimpse of what was coming.

Powell was then just the number two guy at the Fed when he publicly articulated his outlook on tightening interest rates, the rising dollar and the impact of both on emerging markets.

He conceded that higher U.S. interest rates and weakening EM currencies “could cause capital to return to advanced economies.” But, unlike those that actually pay attention, Powell was not worried. He believed that the “most likely outcome” of that policy shift for emerging markets “will be manageable.”

Powell’s statement matters. He now commands the central bank with the largest influence on assets in the world. Powell seemed to deny that the Fed is, as Zero Hedge sums it up, the “major determinant of flows of capital into developing economies.”

Later on as Fed chairman, Powell reemphasized that position at an IMF and Swiss National Bank gathering in Zurich. According to Powell:

There is good reason to think that the normalization of monetary policy in advanced economies should continue to prove manageable for EMEs. Markets should not be surprised by our actions if the economy evolves in line with expectations.

But Powell’s argument misses a central point. What he left out was that it was the Fed’s low interest rate policy to begin with that enabled countries to borrow as much as they did.

If money is cheap around the world, higher rates absolutely matter. It appears he simply did not understand the inflows of cash, which explains why he wasn’t concerned about the outflows.

He believes that if the Fed raises rates (“normalizes monetary policy,” which it’s been doing) and causes money to flow away from the emerging-market countries, it’s not his fault.

Powell was not alone in his lackadaisical approach to emerging markets.

Though the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has expressed concerns for years about the impact of a rising dollar and rates on EM markets, it recently said that a reversal of rates would be “orderly and will not take a toll on emerging markets growth.”

Well, ask Turkey how orderly it’s been.

But capital flows won’t be the only negative for emerging markets if the Fed continues hiking rates. We could also see dollar-denominated interest on debt become squeezed if the dollar rises on the back of higher rates.

There’s also considerable reason to remain wary about not just emerging markets, but governments and corporations with too much dollar exposure.

How will the current situation affect Fed policy going forward?

Despite Powell’s previous comments, the current surge in the dollar gives reason to believe that the Fed won’t tighten as quickly as it’s said it would this year. A September rate hike, which seemed all but certain a short while ago, is now in doubt. Another rate hike right now and a stronger dollar would only throw more fuel on the fire.

Ultimately, central banks will intervene with additional easing if the crisis gets worse. That means more “dark money” will become available to prop up markets.

That also means stocks could technically continue soaring on the basis of cash or borrowed cash for an even longer period of time. Don’t be surprised if stocks move higher from here. That’s how dark money works to move markets.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2vUfqwC Tyler Durden

Were UFO Hunters Foiled Again After “Huge Spacecraft” Video Goes Viral?

A YouTube video posted earlier this year has gained international attention after it was picked up and reposted last week on UFO and British tabloid websites, said The Charlotte Observer.

The footage, recorded May 29 by “Jason Swing,” shows a long tubular object hovering for more than two minutes over North Carolina’s Lake Norman, north of Charlotte.

Swing called the object “a spacecraft” at the beginning of his video.

“It had been raining all morning. Rain finally stopped so we went (to) pick up a boat from Lake Norman,” Swing wrote in the about section of the video. “When (I) came around the corner I saw this thing sitting still very close.”

Swing’s extremely shaky cellphone video went unnoticed for weeks and even months on end but gained international attention after being featured in two British tabloids and Russia’s Sputnik News.

Comments on Swing’s video have ranged from mockery to support for the UFO theory.

According to a Goodyear tweet, the Goodyear blimp was reportedly circling the region on May 29, for NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 race.

Since the video went viral, social media trolls have not been kind to Swing, with many criticizing his amateurish video work. One user even said it looked like Swing was recording the object “while jumping on a Pogostick.”

“So annoying that people can’t film properly. I get that they are scared, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” user Tom Brown wrote.

“A line in the sky can’t be that scary. [It] wasn’t moving or flashing lights [and] there was no indication that it was alien and not some kind of craft made by humans. Who knows. Wish people would film things properly these days. It’s 2018 and we can’t even get a good UFO video. Ah well until we get true disclosure nothing will ever change.”

Here are some comments from the YouTube video (unedited):

  • “Yes, we have many of them here. Among other things we’ve seen here. There is more going on than you know.”

  • “How difficult it is to stand on an empty road and hold the freakin’ phone right?”

  • “Also known as the Goodyear blimp. Real common to that area — like most anytime there is a game or race at the speedway about thirty miles south of Lake Norman. I, myself, have spoken to blimp aliens. They are an impressive life form, but for some odd reason they refused to take me aboard their mother ship.”

  • “So irritating when someone is incapable of keeping their phone the least bit still. Wish I had the last two minutes of my life back.”

  • “I suspect hoax and a scam due to the SHORT nature of the video and the OVERLY SHAKY cam that can only be intentional.”

  • “It was terrifying. His shaking made me want to call 911 for him.”

  • “Just a passenger jet coming out of Charlotte Douglas Airport. Flying low (below the cloud deck) on northbound track from airport. See this all the time up there. Look at the tops of the trees and bushes each time the video shows the plane and you see that it is steadily moving left to right. Going to look like hovering and slow movement since it is about 4 miles away.”

via RSS https://ift.tt/2MYBmwW Tyler Durden

Twitter Bans Anti-War Activist Caitlin Johnstone For “Abusing” John McCain

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

UPDATE: It looks like the suspension was lifted just after I hit publish on this. A lot of my fans and even a few haters made a big noise in objection to Twitter’s actions, and it worked! As we discussed recently, the plutocratic manipulators work so hard to manufacture our consent because they need that consent, and they can’t act if we don’t give it to them. I’ve left the article as-is below for posterity, and so people can see my experience with #Resistance Twitter’s attempt to silence dissident speech. Never stop fighting.

*  *  *

I’ve received an email from Twitter which reads as follows:

Hello Caitlin Johnstone,

Your account, caitoz has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules.

Specifically, for:

Violating our rules against abusive behavior.

You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

Note that if you attempt to evade a permanent suspension by creating new accounts, we will suspend your new accounts. If you wish to appeal this suspension, please contact our support team.

They’re calling it a “suspension”, but nobody can view my page and I can’t perform any activities on it, and it appears to be permanent unless I succeed in going through the anonymous and unaccountable appeals process. Now when people try to access my account, they get a screen that looks something like this depending on what device they’re using:

I haven’t abused anybody, and I’ve been observing extreme caution with my language for the last few days ever since I made a political tweet about John McCain which drew the wrath of #Resistance Twitter. The offending tweet reads as follows:

“Friendly public service reminder that John McCain has devoted his entire political career to slaughtering as many human beings as possible at every opportunity, and the world will be improved when he finally dies.”

I posted this four days ago when John McCain was trending because Donald Trump didn’t pay him any respect when signing the bloated NDAA military spending bill that was (appropriately) named after him. My reason for doing so was simple: the establishment pundits responsible for manipulating the way Americans think and vote have been aggressively promulgating the narrative that McCain is a hero and a saint, and I think it’s very important to disrupt that narrative. If we allow them to canonize this warmongering psychopath, then they’ll have normalized and sanctified his extensive record of pushing for psychopathic acts of military violence throughout his entire political career. They’ll have helped manufacture support for war and the military-industrial complex war whores who facilitate it. Saying we’ll be glad when he’s gone is a loud and unequivocal way of rejecting that establishment-imposed narrative.

Interestingly, I’ve been saying this exact same thing repeatedly for over a year. An article I wrote about McCain in July of last year titled “Please Just Fucking Die Already” received a far more widespread backlash than this one, with articles published about it by outlets like CNN, USA Today and the Washington Post. Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar talked about me on The View. I was never once suspended or warned by any social media outlet or blogging platform at that time; it was treated as the political speech about a public figure that it clearly and undeniably is. The only thing that has changed since that time is the climate of internet censorship.

So anyway, I tweeted the thing about McCain, it was getting some angry backlash, and I received an email that a different tweet I’d made about McCain had been reported, reviewed and found not to be in violation.

Then a popular #Resist account condemned my post and was retweeted by Caroline Orr, a pundit with hundreds of thousands of followers who works with the David Brock propaganda firm Shareblue. Instantly, my Twitter notifications began filling up with comments like these:

I also got a bunch of notifications like these from bot accounts as soon as Orr shared the response to my tweet:

And I’ve received furious, vitriolic notifications from Clintonite Twitter accounts ever since, up until my account was shut down.

So it looks like anyone who voices a political opinion that is deemed sufficiently offensive to Centrist Twitter can be purged in this way now. If you can get enough people reporting the same thing over and over again for a few days, one of those reports will eventually land in the lap of an admin whose personal bias allows them to squint just right at political speech about a public figure and see a violation of Twitter policy.

I’ve been writing about the dangers of internet censorship so much lately because this is becoming a major problem. In a corporatist system of government, wherein government power and corporate power are not separated in any meaningful way, corporate censorship is state censorship.

The plutocratic class which effectively owns the US government also owns all the mass media, allowing that plutocratic class to efficiently manipulate the way Americans think and vote so as to manufacture public consent for the establishment status quo upon which those plutocratic empires are built.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The only cracks in plutocratic narrative control have come in the form of alternative media outlets and social media, the access to which is unfortunately guarded by plutocrats with well-documented ties to secretive and unaccountable government agencies. The plutocratic alliance has successfully funneled online audiences into platforms that can be easily regulated, and now they are censoring those platforms.

An ungoverned media landscape would cripple the consent-manufacturing propaganda machine of the ruling oligarchs, making us impossible to manipulate and control. This would give us our only real shot at ending the wars that the John McCains of the world have devoted their lives to facilitating, our only shot at creating true and authentic democracy, and our only shot at turning the world around from the omnicidal, ecocidal trajectory that these sociopathic oligarchs have us on.

They can’t allow that. Their rule depends upon it, and, historically, rulers do not give up power willingly.

The longer we wait to fight this, the more marginalized our voices become, and the smaller our window to escape the cage they are building around us shrinks. Make your voices heard and refuse to consent to allowing a few Silicon Valley plutocrats to manipulate public discourse in their own interest. The time to act is now.

*  *  *

Internet censorship is closing in, so the best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2vQW2k4 Tyler Durden

Crispin Odey: It Feels Like Tesla’s “Final Stage of Life”

Hedge fund manager and noted Tesla bear Crispin Odey, in the wake of Tesla’s nearly 10% crash on Friday, talked in his most recent investor letter about how difficult it was to be short the name. He also made the revelation that he believes that the company is “entering the final stages of its life”.

Odey, like many shorts, has ridden out the seemingly never-ending bullishness in Tesla stock as, despite failed promises and erratic behavior from CEO Elon Musk over the last couple of years, the equity has done very little but move higher since it has been a public company.

Odey also compared Musk’s behavior to Donald Crowhurst, “the amateur sailor who set off in the 1960s on a solo voyage around the world and never came back,” according to a Bloomberg article. 

Tesla shares were pummeled on Friday, dropping almost 10% after Thursday night’s New York Times piece, in which Musk tearfully broke down and admitted not only that no one had reviewed his going private Tweet before he put it out whilst driving, but also that he would voluntarily resign the position of CEO to somebody who could do it better.

“…if you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know,” he told the New York Times. “They can have the job. Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now.”

Also in Musk’s interview with the New York Times, published Thursday evening, he again couldn’t help himself and had to take a shot at short-sellers like Odey.

Musk said he was bracing for “at least a few months of extreme torture from the short-sellers, who are desperately pushing a narrative that will possibly result in Tesla’s destruction.”

Referring to  short-sellers, he added: 

“They’re not dumb guys, but they’re not supersmart. They’re O.K. They’re smartish.”

It’s not just short sellers that Musk thinks are “not supersmart” – he reserves that designation for virtually anyone, especially if they happen to disagree with him: in recent months, in addition to wrangling with short-sellers and sending David Einhorn “short shorts”, Musk has belittled analysts for asking “boring, bonehead” questions.

The Bloomberg article noted that Tesla is Odey European Inc’s second biggest equity short position.

“The path this fund has taken to reach this place was so painful, but now I would not swap this portfolio for anyone else’s,” Odey wrote in the letter. “It is a pity you daren’t give it a try.”

Perhaps over the coming weeks, we will truly see who is smart and who is “smartish”.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2PkTXFl Tyler Durden