Even With a Biden Win, Portland’s Protesters Vow to Keep Smashing Stuff

Portland Protests

“WHOEVER THEY VOTE FOR, WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE,” reads one of the flyers for the event taking place the day after the presidential election, organized in part by the PNW Youth Liberation Front. The idea that activists in Portland, at least the kind we see breaking windows and spitting in cops’ faces, are in the bag for the Democrats is a product of binary thinking. Sure, they hate the president, but anyone willing to be disabused of the notion that they prefer liberalism can check out their tweet at 11:30 p.m. on election night—”Fuck Trump, Fuck Biden, death to America! We want something better than this trash, and we’re going to take it.”

The first step to “taking it” begins in Portland’s North Park Blocks at 2 p.m., though at start time it’s not more than people in street clothes carrying stockpots of soup and cases of water out of minivans and setting up folding tables featuring flyers like, “Are You An Anarchist? (the answer may surprise you!).” 

By 3:30, a guy on the mic is talking about best practices when you are arrested, especially the importance of filming every encounter with the police.

“What you’re doing is you’re creating a clear record that you invoked your right to remain silent and asked to see a lawyer,” he says. “You’re reminding the good cops to be good cops—and I say good cops carefully. That’s not to say that the good cops won’t try to ruin your life and your friend’s life and your family’s life and your children’s lives, because they will, that’s their job…they will follow the law when they’re in the process of trying to ruin your life.” 

The maybe 150 people in attendance react with ennui; it’s likely they’ve heard it before. Many of them have been in the streets at least since May 27 and while there have been more than 1,000 arrests, very few—owing to new rules by the district attorney—have stuck. That there is little fear of consequence, maybe, adds to the general lassitude.

If the crowd grows more animated when a young man named Truth explains why he voted for Biden—”With this election, I chose who I wanted to fight…I would much rather to fight a feeble-minded neoliberal than a narcissistic racist neo-fascist.”—it’s pretty clear politics bores them, too, but that what animates them is the fight, the release that comes with screaming in people’s faces and breaking whatever is at hand.

Still, anarchy needs fuel; where to get it? From the uniform, evidently—the head-to-toe black covering that today strikes me as unfathomably sad, a squandering of youth and beauty they will never get back. The repetition of engagement is likewise depressing, the same mission night after night, the same sloganeering, the same objects of hatred: Mayor Ted Wheeler and the Portland police. If the protesters show remarkable tolerance for repetition, for the endless spray painting of FUCK TED and the chanting of, “All Cops Are Bastards—ACAB!”, there is less willingness to try anything new, or not more new than infusing the same actions with more violence.

The anticipation of which you can feel as the clock ticks toward 5 p.m., as the music in the back of a pickup bumps up, and a murder of crows, just visible above the tall oaks, circles and caws in a way that might, if one is feeling poetic, seem eerie or ominous. 

But there’s no poetry—it’s the same marching; the same slogans; the same shining of high-beam flashlights into people’s apartments; the same marching down Burnside, turning up Broadway; the same motorcycle riders clearing anyone up ahead; the same pickup trucks protecting the now maybe 400 protesters as they pass the venerable strip club Mary’s Club and the luxury Benson Hotel, which claims to have hosted “every U.S. president since William H. Taft.” Then they turn east, passing the Apple Store, which months ago tried to proactively protect its tall glass windows with plywood painted with pro-Black Lives Matter imagery. No luck: The protesters just threw the rocks higher.

“Check it out,” my friend says, as a guy playing a banjo and his friend pass. They are each carrying rifles, not the usual M.O. of the antifa/BLM crew. Maybe I am wrong about their being unwilling to try anything new. Later, these two will tell me that they are here to protect people; that the other side—meaning, in their telling, the Proud Boys, though there do not appear to be any Proud Boys around tonight—have guns and they need to, too.

“We’ve started carrying in Portland and overall, we’ve gotten a great reception,” says banjo player, who hands his rifle to another friend so he can strum a few chords. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, also, not everyone should do it. As long as you’re cool-headed and know what you’re doing.”

Two minutes from the Apple Store, past an uncounted number of street tents and several piles of fresh vomit, the protesters intersect with a second protest, people holding “EVERY VOTE COUNTS” signs and a drumline and hundreds marching south, to where a bandstand of sorts is set up, with a deejay and messages of unity beamed onto the wall overlooking the Willamette River. This second event, put on by the Defend Democracy Coalition, kicks off with a heavyset man on the mic.

“Stop standing separately and get the fuck over here!” shouts the man in the direction of the antifa/BLM crew, who’ve parked themselves on the sidewalk across the street and do not, despite the man’s entreaty that, “What we need to do is unify right now. Stop the fucking drama,” show any sign of moving. 

The speakers—a rabbi, a member of a local native tribe, a longtime black activist—all talk of better understanding, of the work they have done for decades, of pulling together with resilience. By the time the native woman has counseled us to “keep respect in your heart for other people and more than anything, give the love,” the crew across the street is on the move, marching west, greeted, as they pass Voodoo Donuts, by a canned message from a cop car up the block.

“This is the unified command of the Oregon State Police and Multnomah County Sheriff’s office…”

“Go fuck yourself!”

“Fuck you!”

“We support your right to freedom of speech but please do not engage in criminal activity. If you engage in criminal activity, you will be subject to citation or arrest.”

And then, quicker than I’ve seen before, the protesters and the cops are gone, with the exception of one almost child-size black bloc member, who films us from behind and then scoots around a corner.

“They’re over by the Benson,” says my friend, who’s got a tracker of sorts on her phone. 

“It’s such a shame,” says a uniformed employee of the hotel, scrubbing freshly sprayed “ACAB” and “BLM” graffiti off the outside wall. “I asked the guy to stop, and he’s just such a jerk. ‘Oh, you guys are in business, you can afford it, it’s no problem.’ Yeah, right.”

But for an antifa medic truck—a pickup with its front bumper falling off—there is no sign of the protesters, but we can hear them, can hear shouts and sirens. One more corner turn and there are dozens of police and sheriff vehicles with their lights blazing, parked alongside a strip of stores whose plate glass windows have just now been smashed in, including Wildfang, an apparel store whose tagline is “f*cking with gender stereotypes since 2013,” and in whose window, or what remains of its window, hangs the message, “HATE CANNOT DRIVE OUT HATE. ONLY LOVE CAN DO THAT—MLK.”

“When I heard [them] coming this way, I kind of just sat across the street and kind of watched it happen, because there was no way I could stop it,” says Ryan, who works at Wildfang and who now stands in a pile of broken glass and waits for the plywood people to arrive. “So hammers and rocks and anything they can use to just [break] our windows as they ran by,” he adds. “And there was nothing the police can do because they’re running.”

Ryan estimates there were more than a hundred of them, some of whom are currently around the corner, slipping on piles of broken glass as the police press in on them.

“PUT YOUR MASKS ON, YOU MURDERERS!” a protester shouts from inside the melee.

A guy looking at Wildfang’s broken windows says to his friend, “Who would do anything like this?” 

The haw-haw-haw in his voice is unmistakable. I go up to the guy and point out Ryan, tell him that he works at Wildfang, that he might have a family—

“Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of my face,” says the guy, who wears a mask with the words, I CAN’T BREATHE, which, to be honest, is pretty clever, even if his level of discourse is not—a not unexceptional occurrence when trying to talk with the antifa/BLM crew: You ask questions, they tell you to go fuck yourself. Which tells me they either have no interest in engaging or are incapable of doing so, in which case, I have only their actions to show me their intentions. So far, what they’ve mastered seems little more than what the toddler knows, how to smash and how to scream.

I turn from the guy telling me to go fuck myself to find three young people filming me with their phones, asking me questions, making accusations, telling me variously that they know who I am and that they’ve never heard of me, all in a kind of snotty tone. I can understand how someone would find this intimidating. I find it boring, as is—no disrespect intended—what happens as soon as the police move out, the burning of an American flag. Every night it’s the same show, making one wonder when they will get some new ideas, when they might tilt toward joy, when they will become capable of building as avidly as they destroy.

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China Outraged After Pompeo Removes Terrorist Label From Group Dubbed ‘Chinese ISIS’

China Outraged After Pompeo Removes Terrorist Label From Group Dubbed ‘Chinese ISIS’

Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/06/2020 – 15:00

China expressed outrage and frustration Friday after the US officially delisted the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as an official terror organization

The group is a hardline Islamist group rooted in Muslim Uighur-dominant Xinjiang province that has sent foreign fighters to Syria, where it’s been observed cooperating with Syrian al-Qaeda and ISIS over the past years to try and oust Assad. It’s also believed the ETIM still has a presence in Idlib. Its ultimate goal is to erect an Islamic state in Western China and Central Asia.

Via MEMRI/The Sun: The Chinese ISIS fighters have long been documented in Syria and have vowed to return home and conquer China

In 2017 China’s Foreign Ministry estimated that 5,000 or more Uighur jihadists had gone to wage jihad in Syria, a problem which may have only grown. This brought Beijing into quiet security and defense cooperation with Assad, given China has long been worried about the return of the battle-hardened Islamic fighters.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo late last month had ordered the East Turkestan Islamic Movement’s delisting, but which was only revealed in Thursday’s release of the Federal Register. They had been listed since 2002, which was a moment that Washington sought closer Chinese assistance in fighting the post-9/11 war on terror. 

A number of Syria observers and Mideast analysts blasted the move as essentially delisting a radical group whose ideology is not far removed to that of ISIS. Throughout the war in Syria the foreign group was at times dubbed in Western press reports as “Chinese ISIS”.

The ETIM seeks an independent state based in Xinjiang govern by Sharia law instead of what it sees as “godless atheistic communism” and has over the past years conducted dozens of terror attacks in Chinese cities like Shanghai and Yunnan.

In Friday statements the Chinese foreign ministry slammed Washington’s “double standards” in the fight of global terrorism, underscoring the ETIM is among the world’s most brutal Islamic jihadist movements. Spokesman Wang Wenbin told a media briefing that “China deplores and rejects US decision”.

“The ETIM is a UN Security Council listed terrorist organization and is recognized as such by the international community,” he said referring also a UN designation. He described “violent terrorist activities, causing massive casualties and property damage” as a key reason the group is rightfully on the list.

“Fighting ETIM is an international consensus and an important part of the international counter-terrorism fight. The US was a co-sponsor of the listing of the ETIM in the UN in 1267 committee and now it is flip-flopping on its position,” he said.

ETIM has also been listed as a terrorist group in the UK since 2016:

“This once again shows those in power at Washington has double standards on counter-terrorism and has ugly two-faced approach to terrorism,” Wang added.

He further slammed the US ‘whitewashing terrorism’ whenever it suits America’s geopolitical aims. In this case it appears geared toward keeping continued pressure on Beijing regarding the ethnic Uighur issue. The US has accused China of widescale oppression of the Muslim minority in the country, including establishing a network of communist reeducation camps, which has been subject of widespread media scrutiny and reporting over at least the past year.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3k3DumT Tyler Durden

Newt Gingrich: The ‘Corrupt’ Believe The American People Are “Spineless… Cowards”

Newt Gingrich: The ‘Corrupt’ Believe The American People Are “Spineless… Cowards”

Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/06/2020 – 14:40

Authored by Sara Carter via SaraACarter.com,

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tells Fox News host Sean Hannity Thursday (Nov.5,2020) that the presidential election has been mired in corruption and must be investigated.

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a long time top political analyst and best selling author, told Fox News host Sean Hannity Thursday that the presidential election has been mired in corruption and must be investigated if America is to survive.

Gingrich is right and his warning should be headed. He referenced his decades long career since 1958, saying “I’m the angriest I have been in that entire six decades.”

He reiterated that a “group of corrupt people who have absolute contempt for the American people who believe we are so spineless, so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for ourselves that they can steal the presidency.”

The corrupt bureaucrats that targeted President Donald Trump since the start of his presidency believe we – the American people – will do nothing but “wring our hands,” he said.

The “hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans, who understand exactly what’s going on – the Philadelphia machine is corrupt, the Atlanta machine is corrupt, the machine in Detroit is corrupt – and they are trying to steal the presidency and we should not allow them to do that,” Gingrich went on to say.

My thoughts:

I’m grateful I’m not the only one feeling this way. This is not about being a soar loser this is about election corruption and suppression of the will of the American people. We’ve been watching this same routine of targeting President Trump since he was elected in 2016 and our nation’s foundation is eroding. Soon there won’t be the America of our fore-fathers but something far different than we could have ever imagined. A nation cannot survive this type of systemic corruption.

*  *  *

Gingrich’s comments from Fox News show Hannity Thursday night:

First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law. To stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you are doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.

I am sick and tired of corrupt left-wing democrats who believe that we are too timid and too easy to intimidate, and therefore let us just go out and steal it. That’s exactly — no one should have any doubt.

You are watching an effort to steal the presidency of the United States. And this is not about Donald Trump. This is about the American people. the American people have the right in an honest election with honest legitimate ballots to pick their leader or are we now just sheep to be dominated by these high-tech businesses, the news media, and the various political machines? And are we are supposed to surrender? I think this is one of the great, this is a crisis in the American system comparable to Washington on Christmas Eve or comparable to Lincoln and Gettysburg. This is a genuine deep crisis of our survival.

NEWT GINGRICH

*  *  *

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Even With a Biden Win, Portland’s Protesters Vow to Keep Smashing Stuff

Portland Protests

“WHOEVER THEY VOTE FOR, WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE,” reads one of the flyers for the event taking place the day after the presidential election, organized in part by the PNW Youth Liberation Front. The idea that activists in Portland, at least the kind we see breaking windows and spitting in cops’ faces, are in the bag for the Democrats is a product of binary thinking. Sure, they hate the president, but anyone willing to be disabused of the notion that they prefer liberalism can check out their tweet at 11:30 p.m. on election night—”Fuck Trump, Fuck Biden, death to America! We want something better than this trash, and we’re going to take it.”

The first step to “taking it” begins in Portland’s North Park Blocks at 2 p.m., though at start time it’s not more than people in street clothes carrying stockpots of soup and cases of water out of minivans and setting up folding tables featuring flyers like, “Are You An Anarchist? (the answer may surprise you!).” 

By 3:30, a guy on the mic is talking about best practices when you are arrested, especially the importance of filming every encounter with the police.

“What you’re doing is you’re creating a clear record that you invoked your right to remain silent and asked to see a lawyer,” he says. “You’re reminding the good cops to be good cops—and I say good cops carefully. That’s not to say that the good cops won’t try to ruin your life and your friend’s life and your family’s life and your children’s lives, because they will, that’s their job…they will follow the law when they’re in the process of trying to ruin your life.” 

The maybe 150 people in attendance react with ennui; it’s likely they’ve heard it before. Many of them have been in the streets at least since May 27 and while there have been more than 1,000 arrests, very few—owing to new rules by the district attorney—have stuck. That there is little fear of consequence, maybe, adds to the general lassitude.

If the crowd grows more animated when a young man named Truth explains why he voted for Biden—”With this election, I chose who I wanted to fight…I would much rather to fight a feeble-minded neoliberal than a narcissistic racist neo-fascist.”—it’s pretty clear politics bores them, too, but that what animates them is the fight, the release that comes with screaming in people’s faces and breaking whatever is at hand.

Still, anarchy needs fuel; where to get it? From the uniform, evidently—the head-to-toe black covering that today strikes me as unfathomably sad, a squandering of youth and beauty they will never get back. The repetition of engagement is likewise depressing, the same mission night after night, the same sloganeering, the same objects of hatred: Mayor Ted Wheeler and the Portland police. If the protesters show remarkable tolerance for repetition, for the endless spray painting of FUCK TED and the chanting of, “All Cops Are Bastards—ACAB!”, there is less willingness to try anything new, or not more new than infusing the same actions with more violence.

The anticipation of which you can feel as the clock ticks toward 5 p.m., as the music in the back of a pickup bumps up, and a murder of crows, just visible above the tall oaks, circles and caws in a way that might, if one is feeling poetic, seem eerie or ominous. 

But there’s no poetry—it’s the same marching; the same slogans; the same shining of high-beam flashlights into people’s apartments; the same marching down Burnside, turning up Broadway; the same motorcycle riders clearing anyone up ahead; the same pickup trucks protecting the now maybe 400 protesters as they pass the venerable strip club Mary’s Club and the luxury Benson Hotel, which claims to have hosted “every U.S. president since William H. Taft.” Then they turn east, passing the Apple Store, which months ago tried to proactively protect its tall glass windows with plywood painted with pro-Black Lives Matter imagery. No luck: The protesters just threw the rocks higher.

“Check it out,” my friend says, as a guy playing a banjo and his friend pass. They are each carrying rifles, not the usual M.O. of the antifa/BLM crew. Maybe I am wrong about their being unwilling to try anything new. Later, these two will tell me that they are here to protect people; that the other side—meaning, in their telling, the Proud Boys, though there do not appear to be any Proud Boys around tonight—have guns and they need to, too.

“We’ve started carrying in Portland and overall, we’ve gotten a great reception,” says banjo player, who hands his rifle to another friend so he can strum a few chords. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, also, not everyone should do it. As long as you’re cool-headed and know what you’re doing.”

Two minutes from the Apple Store, past an uncounted number of street tents and several piles of fresh vomit, the protesters intersect with a second protest, people holding “EVERY VOTE COUNTS” signs and a drumline and hundreds marching south, to where a bandstand of sorts is set up, with a deejay and messages of unity beamed onto the wall overlooking the Willamette River. This second event, put on by the Defend Democracy Coalition, kicks off with a heavyset man on the mic.

“Stop standing separately and get the fuck over here!” shouts the man in the direction of the antifa/BLM crew, who’ve parked themselves on the sidewalk across the street and do not, despite the man’s entreaty that, “What we need to do is unify right now. Stop the fucking drama,” show any sign of moving. 

The speakers—a rabbi, a member of a local native tribe, a longtime black activist—all talk of better understanding, of the work they have done for decades, of pulling together with resilience. By the time the native woman has counseled us to “keep respect in your heart for other people and more than anything, give the love,” the crew across the street is on the move, marching west, greeted, as they pass Voodoo Donuts, by a canned message from a cop car up the block.

“This is the unified command of the Oregon State Police and Multnomah County Sheriff’s office…”

“Go fuck yourself!”

“Fuck you!”

“We support your right to freedom of speech but please do not engage in criminal activity. If you engage in criminal activity, you will be subject to citation or arrest.”

And then, quicker than I’ve seen before, the protesters and the cops are gone, with the exception of one almost child-size black bloc member, who films us from behind and then scoots around a corner.

“They’re over by the Benson,” says my friend, who’s got a tracker of sorts on her phone. 

“It’s such a shame,” says a uniformed employee of the hotel, scrubbing freshly sprayed “ACAB” and “BLM” graffiti off the outside wall. “I asked the guy to stop, and he’s just such a jerk. ‘Oh, you guys are in business, you can afford it, it’s no problem.’ Yeah, right.”

But for an antifa medic truck—a pickup with its front bumper falling off—there is no sign of the protesters, but we can hear them, can hear shouts and sirens. One more corner turn and there are dozens of police and sheriff vehicles with their lights blazing, parked alongside a strip of stores whose plate glass windows have just now been smashed in, including Wildfang, an apparel store whose tagline is “f*cking with gender stereotypes since 2013,” and in whose window, or what remains of its window, hangs the message, “HATE CANNOT DRIVE OUT HATE. ONLY LOVE CAN DO THAT—MLK.”

“When I heard [them] coming this way, I kind of just sat across the street and kind of watched it happen, because there was no way I could stop it,” says Ryan, who works at Wildfang and who now stands in a pile of broken glass and waits for the plywood people to arrive. “So hammers and rocks and anything they can use to just [break] our windows as they ran by,” he adds. “And there was nothing the police can do because they’re running.”

Ryan estimates there were more than a hundred of them, some of whom are currently around the corner, slipping on piles of broken glass as the police press in on them.

“PUT YOUR MASKS ON, YOU MURDERERS!” a protester shouts from inside the melee.

A guy looking at Wildfang’s broken windows says to his friend, “Who would do anything like this?” 

The haw-haw-haw in his voice is unmistakable. I go up to the guy and point out Ryan, tell him that he works at Wildfang, that he might have a family—

“Who the fuck are you? Get the fuck out of my face,” says the guy, who wears a mask with the words, I CAN’T BREATHE, which, to be honest, is pretty clever, even if his level of discourse is not—a not unexceptional occurrence when trying to talk with the antifa/BLM crew: You ask questions, they tell you to go fuck yourself. Which tells me they either have no interest in engaging or are incapable of doing so, in which case, I have only their actions to show me their intentions. So far, what they’ve mastered seems little more than what the toddler knows, how to smash and how to scream.

I turn from the guy telling me to go fuck myself to find three young people filming me with their phones, asking me questions, making accusations, telling me variously that they know who I am and that they’ve never heard of me, all in a kind of snotty tone. I can understand how someone would find this intimidating. I find it boring, as is—no disrespect intended—what happens as soon as the police move out, the burning of an American flag. Every night it’s the same show, making one wonder when they will get some new ideas, when they might tilt toward joy, when they will become capable of building as avidly as they destroy.

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The 2020 Election Results Look Like a Massive Rebuke of Socialism

rtrleleven842272

Summarizing the key lessons that Democrats should take away from election results that were much less favorable than expected, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D–Va.) reportedly told fellow members of her caucus during a conference call on Thursday that they shouldn’t say the word socialism “ever again.”

This would be good policy advice, whether or not it’s good political advice. But as it turns out, socialism is looking like a major political loser this election cycle, with the specter of it likely costing former Vice President Joe Biden his chance at winning Florida. Indeed, this could be a rough couple of years for progressives: A Biden presidency coupled with a Republican-controlled Senate—an outcome that is far from certain, but gaining some degree of likelihood—would make it almost impossible for Democrats to push through the structural changes (such as D.C. statehood or an expansion of the Supreme Court) that could allow the left to take power.

This is something of a reversal of fortunes. For democratic socialists, the 2020 election cycle began with great promise; the hard left had not one but two ardently progressive primary candidates in Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the latter of whom had shown auspicious resilience against Hillary Clinton in 2016. There had also been small, encouraging signs in the years between then and now: the surprise election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) in 2018, the success of socialist magazines and podcasts, the increasing salience of issues like economic inequality and Medicare for All, the formation of “the Squad.

But neither Warren nor Sanders could overcome Biden, the candidate who had worked hardest to put serious distance between himself and the term socialist. If anything, Biden needed to work even harder at this, since President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign was able to tie Democrats to Latin American socialism in the minds of some Florida voters, leading to a surprisingly good showing for Trump among Latino—and particularly Cuban—voters.

Progressives often operate under the assumption that their failure to win elections is a result of malfeasance: More democracy, more activism, and more turnout will produce the broad mandate they need to enact change. They also assume that an increasingly racially diverse electorate will override the white voters who don’t support fundamental, revolutionary changes to the economy. But the 2020 results are casting doubt on both of these beliefs: Trump is on track to have the GOP’s best showing among minorities in decades, and while he will indeed lose the popular vote to Biden, the unusually high turnout did not lend itself to any sort of blue wave.

Not all of the results are in yet, and it’s possible that subsequent election-related developments could change the outlook for progressives. But a GOP-controlled Senate will kill any chances of big, lofty, leftist legislation. The Senate could vote down Biden’s judicial picks, and they could thwart liberal Cabinet nominees. Warren’s bid for Treasury Secretary will be dead in the water.

“The Biden presidency will be doomed to failure before it starts,” writes New York magazine’s Eric Levitz, who correctly notes that progressives are on the brink of catastrophe.

Democrats are clearly unhappy with this result, and many blame the excesses of the left for putting them in such a position.

“Democrats’ messaging is terrible; it doesn’t resonate,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D–Ore.), a moderate Blue Dog Democrat, told The Washington Post. “When [voters] see the far left that gets all the news media attention, they get scared. They’re very afraid that this will become a supernanny state, and their ability to do things on their own is going to be taken away.”

Former Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, now a commentator for MSNBC, told viewers on Wednesday she was worried that far-left positions on issues were scaring potential voters away. Her remarks drew a rebuke from Ocasio-Cortez, who said McCaskill’s loss in 2016 means she’s no expert on winning elections. (McCaskill might have responded that AOC’s own victory in an inner-city House district hardly confers a great deal of political expertise.)

Even some progressives think it’s in the party’s best interest to at the very least stop using the word socialism. 

“I think Republicans did get some traction trying to scare people on this ‘socialist narrative,'” Rep. Jared Huffman (D–Calif.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Washington Post. “What’s the point of embracing a phrase like that?”

If a large number of Democrats actually absorbed this message, it would be icing on the cake. Right now, it appears that some of the worst impulses of both parties have been checked, and the next administration will take office with neither a mandate nor an ability to enact transformational economic policy changes.

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SocGen Calculates The S&P Would Be At 1,800 Lower Without QE

SocGen Calculates The S&P Would Be At 1,800 Lower Without QE

Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/06/2020 – 14:20

One of the most challenging questions traders have faced over the past 11 years, ever since the Fed’s first QE, has been what is the fair value of stocks without the Fed’s chronic intervention in capital markets via trillions in spontaneously appearing liquidity used to prop up risk assets.

Today, in an attempt to answer this $64 trillion question, SocGen strategists Sophie Huynh and Charles de Boissezon calculate that nearly half of the U.S. benchmark’s current level is due to quantitative easing, while claiming that the impact of QE on the Nasdaq was even higher at 57%, with small cap less affected.

First, some background.

As part of their analysis, the socgen strategists find that the acceleration of the secular trend for bond yields since 2009 has triggered a shift in the causality between equity and bonds.

Specifically, before QE, US equities were more often the driver of US bonds, as investors would add either more or fewer bonds to their portfolios in response to the risk-on/off signals provided by the equity complex. However, this causality has totally changed since QE: US equities have been increasingly driven by US bond yields.

With that in mind, we move on the core of the analysis, namely what is the impact of QE on different equity indices.

SocGen find that for all US equity indices – from large, mid and small caps to the more tech-focused Nasdaq 100 – the US bond yield has played an increasing role in equity returns. Since 2009 until today, bonds have driven the S&P 500 32% of the time (on daily data), S&P 400 Midcaps 38% of the time, the Russell 2000 36% of the time and the Nasdaq 100 25% of the time. “All in all, the causality relationship of bonds driving equities was approximately two times more frequent than in the pre-2009 period”, according to SocGen.

While frequency is one aspect which gives perspective on how the low interest rate environment pushed investors into the equity complex by default, given the more attractive combined yield – dividend and buyback yield – to US government bonds ever-declining coupons, what about the scale of the impact? SocGen tries to quantify the impact of QE on the different US equity indices through the discount rate.

To do that, the bank uses its proprietary Equity Risk Premium framework, applying a dividend discount model to the equity market, and considering the whole market as a company paying a dividend each year. Therefore, the present value of the equity market (as reflected by the index price) is equal to the discounted value of future dividend flows. The first step would be to quantify the impact of QE on the UST 10y bond yield – which we use as the risk-free rate in our framework.

1. Quantifying the impact of QE on UST 10y bond yield

SocGen uses a simple regression to estimate the impact of QE. Since 2009, the cumulative impact of the different waves of QE on UST 10y bond yield was approximately 180bp. In other words, without QE, 10Y Yields would have been around 2.8%, a number which many would claim is unthinkable in the current environment.

2. Quantifying the impact of QE on the different US equity indices

Using the bank’s equity risk premium framework and work on the impact of QE on UST 10y allows it to understand how the different US equity indices have been impacted since 2009: there is a huge dispersion among the equity indices under review: the Nasdaq 100 has been the most impacted – and even more so this year – versus the S&P 600 Small Caps, which has been the least impacted. As of Oct-2020, the Nasdaq 100 price level was 57% explained by QE.

Here are the stunning findings: without QE the Nasdaq 100 should be closer to 5,000 than 11,000, while the S&P 500 should be closer to 1,800 rather than 3,300.

Clearly, large caps have benefited the most from the ever-lower interest rate environment resulting from QE. The sensitivity to bond yield can also be explained by the low payout and higher price-to-book ratios of Nasdaq 100 companies versus peers. Growth companies are overall less focused on dividends, but rather more on share buybacks as a way of neutralizing the impact of  restricted share units. Small and mid caps, on a relative basis, given their higher payout and lower price-to-book value ratios, are less sensitive to swings in bond yields.

* * *

Having quantified the past, SocGen next looks at the future, and says that it expects 10-year Treasury yield to reach 1% by year-end and 1.2% by mid-2021 on less Fed intervention, increasing the need for earnings to deliver to justify valuations. For S&P 500 to “weather” a 10-year yield of 1%, expected EPS growth in 2021 would need to be at least 38% vs current expectation of 24%; more ominously, for the Nasdaq 100, a doubling of the 2021 EPS growth would not be sufficient to absorb a UST 10y yield of 1%. In the case of mid and small caps, it would be considerably less. Needless to say, this suggests that if yields do indeed rise even modestly, there will be lots of pain for growth/tech/momentum names.

In conclusion, SocGen warns that the focus on the feedback loop between equities and bonds has already started in the US:

With the UST 10y breaching the 50-80bp range in October and with the US election newsflow, the underperformance of Nasdaq 100 has been quite noticeable.

Meanwhile, the rotation into cyclical sectors, which have lagged the more defensive and growth sectors since the start of the bear market rally combined with a preference for value versus growth, were a reflection of the bond sell-off. The undecided outcome of the US election has triggered an unwinding of these positions for now.

Going forward, SocGen believes that currently causality order will hold and US Treasuries should continue to drive US equities, which is bad news for those who believe a continued rise in yields will not impact stocks: according to SocGen the impact will be very pronounced unless companies succeed in boosting their EPS well beyond current consensus estimates.

This is why, as SocGen ominously warns, “there will be a breaking point where a bond sell-off will impact the highly leveraged corporates which typically benefit from a higher yield environment as being of a shorter duration.” All in all, the bank’s suggestion is to go long S&P 400 MidCaps versus the Nasdaq 100 “as this could offer good leverage on the higher US yield environment, while taking into account the leverage dimension.”

Finally, and aside from SocGen’s analysis which may be off by a few percentage points but is directionally accurate, the fact that Fed, through, QE now holds trillions in equity value hostage is also who Powell and his successors will never again dare to tighten financial conditions as the resulting asset price crash would have catastrophic consequences for both capital markets and US household net worth, which is roughly 70% in the form of stocks, bonds, financial assets, and other non-tangibles.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32keh1n Tyler Durden

The 2020 Election Results Look Like a Massive Rebuke of Socialism

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Summarizing the key lessons that Democrats should take away from election results that were much less favorable than expected, Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D–Va.) reportedly told fellow members of her caucus during a conference call on Thursday that they shouldn’t say the word socialism “ever again.”

This would be good policy advice, whether or not it’s good political advice. But as it turns out, socialism is looking like a major political loser this election cycle, with the specter of it likely costing former Vice President Joe Biden his chance at winning Florida. Indeed, this could be a rough couple of years for progressives: A Biden presidency coupled with a Republican-controlled Senate—an outcome that is far from certain, but gaining some degree of likelihood—would make it almost impossible for Democrats to push through the structural changes (such as D.C. statehood or an expansion of the Supreme Court) that could allow the left to take power.

This is something of a reversal of fortunes. For democratic socialists, the 2020 election cycle began with great promise; the hard left had not one but two ardently progressive primary candidates in Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the latter of whom had shown auspicious resilience against Hillary Clinton in 2016. There had also been small, encouraging signs in the years between then and now: the surprise election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) in 2018, the success of socialist magazines and podcasts, the increasing salience of issues like economic inequality and Medicare for All, the formation of “the Squad.

But neither Warren nor Sanders could overcome Biden, the candidate who had worked hardest to put serious distance between himself and the term socialist. If anything, Biden needed to work even harder at this, since President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign was able to tie Democrats to Latin American socialism in the minds of some Florida voters, leading to a surprisingly good showing for Trump among Latino—and particularly Cuban—voters.

Progressives often operate under the assumption that their failure to win elections is a result of malfeasance: More democracy, more activism, and more turnout will produce the broad mandate they need to enact change. They also assume that an increasingly racially diverse electorate will override the white voters who don’t support fundamental, revolutionary changes to the economy. But the 2020 results are casting doubt on both of these beliefs: Trump is on track to have the GOP’s best showing among minorities in decades, and while he will indeed lose the popular vote to Biden, the unusually high turnout did not lend itself to any sort of blue wave.

Not all of the results are in yet, and it’s possible that subsequent election-related developments could change the outlook for progressives. But a GOP-controlled Senate will kill any chances of big, lofty, leftist legislation. The Senate could vote down Biden’s judicial picks, and they could thwart liberal Cabinet nominees. Warren’s bid for Treasury Secretary will be dead in the water.

“The Biden presidency will be doomed to failure before it starts,” writes New York magazine’s Eric Levitz, who correctly notes that progressives are on the brink of catastrophe.

Democrats are clearly unhappy with this result, and many blame the excesses of the left for putting them in such a position.

“Democrats’ messaging is terrible; it doesn’t resonate,” Rep. Kurt Schrader (D–Ore.), a moderate Blue Dog Democrat, told The Washington Post. “When [voters] see the far left that gets all the news media attention, they get scared. They’re very afraid that this will become a supernanny state, and their ability to do things on their own is going to be taken away.”

Former Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, now a commentator for MSNBC, told viewers on Wednesday she was worried that far-left positions on issues were scaring potential voters away. Her remarks drew a rebuke from Ocasio-Cortez, who said McCaskill’s loss in 2016 means she’s no expert on winning elections. (McCaskill might have responded that AOC’s own victory in an inner-city House district hardly confers a great deal of political expertise.)

Even some progressives think it’s in the party’s best interest to at the very least stop using the word socialism. 

“I think Republicans did get some traction trying to scare people on this ‘socialist narrative,'” Rep. Jared Huffman (D–Calif.), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Washington Post. “What’s the point of embracing a phrase like that?”

If a large number of Democrats actually absorbed this message, it would be icing on the cake. Right now, it appears that some of the worst impulses of both parties have been checked, and the next administration will take office with neither a mandate nor an ability to enact transformational economic policy changes.

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Consolidation Is Killing Jobs In The US Shale Industry

Consolidation Is Killing Jobs In The US Shale Industry

Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/06/2020 – 14:00

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

The long-awaited consolidation in the U.S. shale patch is well underway, with several high-profile multi-billion-dollar deals announced in the span of just a few weeks.  

Analysts say that the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) frenzy was inevitable; smaller oil firms with manageable debts are trying to survive the pandemic-driven industry downturn, and bigger players are looking to add top-quality assets to their portfolios.

What is also inevitable during this consolidation drive in the U.S. shale patch is the loss of U.S. oil industry jobs as companies combine to reduce fixed cost and administrative expenses and benefit from synergies.

Granted, the oil industry had already started shedding jobs at a fast pace as early as in March, when oil prices crashed in the pandemic, and the brief but very ill-timed Saudi-Russia spat over OPEC+ policies further crushed the market. The U.S. industry has already lost thousands of jobs in the upstream and oilfield services sectors because companies curtailed production at oil prices lower than break-evens and slashed capital spending for this year and next.

While signs have emerged that the worst for employment and rig counts could be over, the M&A mania is leading to another wave of job losses in the U.S. oil sector. However, many of those layoffs could take place in corporate functions and support services. As firms announce deals, they are also announcing layoffs at the new entities. Those redundancies add to an already high number of jobs lost due to the pandemic-inflicted crisis.

Analysts and the market welcomed the latest U.S. oil deals as win-win transactions and perfect fits for the pairs involved. But there is a loser in those mergers and acquisitions—the oil industry jobs.

Job losses have been hefty even without the consolidation, but the merger mania is accelerating layoffs.

Consolidation Continues

M&A activity picked up pace in recent weeks after U.S. companies shook off the initial shock from the fastest slump in oil prices in recent memory.

Chevron acquired Noble Energy in the first major post-COVID deal. Devon Energy and WPX Energy announced their merger in September.

ConocoPhillips recently announced that it was buying Permian-focused Concho Resources in an all-stock deal valued at US$9.7 billion. A day later, Pioneer Natural Resources said it would buy Parsley Energy in an all-stock transaction valued at US$7.6 billion, including Parsley’s debt.

Analysts see those deals as natural fits, expecting the resulting larger companies to fill the gaps in the portfolios of the stand-alone firms.

The ConocoPhillips-Concho deal is “remarkable,” said Robert Clarke, vice president, Lower 48 upstream, at Wood Mackenzie.

“Just in scale, ConocoPhillips is adding enough Permian production to nip at the heels of ExxonMobil’s massive programme,” Clarke commented on the deal.

Pioneer and Parsley are also “a perfect fit,” Benjamin Shattuck, Research Director, Americas Upstream Oil & Gas at WoodMac, said, adding that “the combined company will produce more regionally than ConocoPhillips and Concho, more than ExxonMobil, and more than Occidental and Anadarko.”

The M&A wave is about scale, in terms of both gaining access to top assets and cutting costs. Reducing costs, however, means reducing staffing numbers.  

“The tendency is that consolidation causes job loss,” Karr Ingham, a petroleum economist with the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, told the Houston Chronicle last month.

So it does.

Jobs Lost To M&A Wave

After the merger with Devon Energy, some employees at Tulsa-based WPX Energy will move to Oklahoma City, but others will lose their jobs.

“We recognize that synergies and redundancies between the two companies will impact jobs, but we’re going to be very thoughtful and respectful of people as we move through that process,” WPX Energy chairman and CEO Richard Muncrief said on the Q3 earnings call last week.

Chevron, which has already announced job cuts of up to 15 percent of its workforce, will also lay off around 25 percent of Noble Energy’s staff—equal to around 570 positions—who join the U.S. supermajor in the merger, Chevron said in an email to Reuters last week.

Yet, layoffs are by no means limited to companies involved in mergers.

U.S. Oil Industry Loses Jobs Even Without Consolidation  

Everyone is cutting workforce numbers, from the oilfield services providers to the biggest oil corporations.

ExxonMobil, for example, announced last week around 14,000 job cuts, or 15 percent of its workforce, including some 1,900 jobs in the United States.

In the U.S. oilfield services sector, 106,218 jobs have been lost since the pandemic began, according to the Petroleum Equipment & Services Association (PESA). Texas has been hit the hardest, with nearly 60,000 jobs lost. The industry is estimated to have added 1,400 jobs in September, but compared to September 2019, oilfield services employment is down by 15.7 percent, PESA said last month. 

The upstream sector in Texas may have already seen the worst of the downturn and could be headed to recovery, the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers said this week, citing a slim gain in jobs in September.

Even if the industry has left the worst of the crisis behind, as much as 70 percent of the more than 100,000 jobs lost in the U.S. oil, gas, and chemicals industries due to the pandemic may not return by the end of 2021, Deloitte said in an analysis last month. Since the previous oil price crash of 2014, employment in the oil and gas sectors has become much more sensitive to changes in crude oil prices due to the short-cycle investment and production in the U.S. shale patch, Deloitte noted.        

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32kGsxv Tyler Durden

McConnell Hints Next Stimulus Will Be Much Smaller

McConnell Hints Next Stimulus Will Be Much Smaller

Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/06/2020 – 13:45

While the media is focused on the outcome of the presidential election, where Joe Biden has taken the lead in states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, while adding to his lead in Nevada even as Trump appears to be gaining in Arizona, a bigger question for the broader population is what is the fate of the next fiscal stimulus, especially since Republicans will likely hold on to a slim majority in the Senate, barring some major reversals in two possible runoff elections in Georgia in January.

And unfortunately, the “gridlock” scenario that was highlighted by Bank of America and which markets have so far blissfully ignored…

… is starting to read its ugly head because the previous Republican bid of approximately $1.9 trillion no longer appears to be on the table.

Speaking after today’s stronger than expected payrolls report, Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the administration now opposes a $2 trillion fiscal stimulus in the wake of stronger-than-expected economic numbers, even as Speaker Nancy Pelosi – who may be facing an internal party revolt in the coming weeks – again rejected a scaled back pandemic relief package.

The comments Friday suggested a continuing impasse despite promises from both sides to renew negotiations after Tuesday’s election.

“We’re not interested in you know two or three trillion,” Kudlow told reporters. House Democrats had pressed for a $2.4 trillion package before the election. “It would still be a targeted package to specific areas” that the administration wants, Kudlow said, even after the administration last month proposed a deal around $1.9 trillion, which unless Trump wins, is clearly off the table.

Echoing Kudlow’s view, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who refused to budge and meet Democrat stimulus demands ahead of the election, called for a scaled-back relief bill, highlighting that Democrats failed to make significant gains in congressional elections and that the latest jobs numbers showed a bigger-than-expected drop in the U.S. unemployment rate.

Justifying his calls for a far smaller stimulus than what the Democrats have tabled, McConnell points to the 6.9% unemployment rate, saying “that clearly ought to affect the size of any additional stimulus package we do,” As a reminder, Senate Republicans have proposed a $500 billion relief plan.”

And in an amusing reminder of what Bank of America said a month ago when it quipped that “political parties historically have used obstructionist tactics when out of power to thwart key legislation, most often through the ‘rediscovery’ of commitments to fiscal discipline, Republican Senate Lindsay Graham confirmed just that, saying that “If we keep the Senate which I think we will and I become Budget chairman. I’d like to create a dialogue about how can we finally begin to address the debt.

Needless to say, it is ironic that the GOP has rediscovered its fiscal conservatism after allowing total debt to grow by over $7 trillion in the past 4 years.

Perhaps sensing that her political career is at stake if she is unable to pass another massive stimulus bill, the House speaker argued that Biden will have a bigger mandate than John F. Kennedy had following his narrow win of the popular vote in 1960. That means major “legislation on everything from infrastructure to prescription drugs, she said, though Kennedy had significant Democratic majorities in the House and Senate at the time.”

“The public wants a big jobs bill,” Pelosi said, although whether or not the public gets that will depend on whether Democrats can clinch both seats in the Georgia runoff election in January. As of this moment, it does not look likely.

One final point: without more stimulus the US economy will likely suffer a historic double-dip hit. As Albert Edwards wrote in his latest note, “the likely fiscal impasse in the US from a divided government is important. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, massive fiscal expansion had sustained the US economy and during the recession it financed a huge rise in the private (household) sector savings ratio (as it usually does in recessions). That largesse is now under threat – and the bond market knows it.”

 

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The Economy, Racial Inequality, and COVID-19 Topped Voter Minds

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Despite years of verbal fireworks, charges of foreign election interference, and political warfare culminating in an impeachment trial, it’s quite likely that the inconclusive outcome of the 2020 election comes down to the events of the last eight months. Pundits and political junkies may fret over Russia, immigration policy, personal temperament, and the like, but average voters say they care most about racial inequality, the economy, and the pandemic. But—after rivers of vitriol and billions of dollars spent to sway votes—it seems Americans are most concerned about what they’ve experienced since March of this year.

First, a caveat: pollsters across the country are currently curled in the fetal position, nuzzling booze bottles as they contemplate the failings of their industry in predicting election outcomes. But exit polls ask people about what they’ve done rather than what they plan to do. And if we take the precise numbers with a grain of salt, we can at least get a read for what is on American minds.

When asked by Edison Research exit pollsters which one policy was the most important in deciding their vote for president, the three top picks were the economy (picked by 35 percent), racial inequality (picked by 20 percent), and the coronavirus pandemic (picked by 17 percent).

Of those naming the economy as their top concern, 82 percent say they voted for Donald Trump and 17 percent say they voted for Joe Biden. Of those naming racial inequality, 91 percent voted for Biden and 8 percent for Trump. Pandemic voters broke 82 percent for Biden and 14 percent for Trump. That is, Americans are as divided as everybody thinks, just not in exactly the way political junkies are.

These three issues featured prominently in people’s lives and in headlines since early this year and are thoroughly intertwined. The U.S. entered 2020 with a strong economy that had seen continuous growth for over 10 years. That trend came to a grinding halt with the spread of COVID-19 around the world, people isolating themselves, and governments imposing business closures and lockdowns that brought much of normal life to a halt.

“A peak in monthly economic activity occurred in the U.S. economy in February 2020,” the National Bureau of Economic Research announced in June. “The peak marks the end of the expansion that began in June 2009 and the beginning of a recession. The expansion lasted 128 months, the longest in the history of U.S. business cycles dating back to 1854.”

The shifting economy “was affected by special circumstances associated with the pandemic of early 2020,” the NBER acknowledged.

The stresses of the pandemic and of unemployment and economic uncertainty added to preexisting tensions—many of them having to do with conflict between minority communities and the police.

“The pandemic has put the U.S. into a recession, and it’s likely to worsen,” wrote Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation in August. “Millions are unemployed; soon, many of them could be destitute. COVID-19 and the economic distress it’s causing could change how people behave in a (seemingly) more hostile world, how they view the legitimacy of government authority and how they value life itself.”

“Adding to the radicalizing ferment of this pandemic are the widespread anguish and anger over systemic racism and police brutality unleashed by the killing of George Floyd,” Jenkins added.

In response to Floyd’s shooting and similar incidents, Americans across the country took to the streets against police brutality in protests that sometimes turned into riots. It was an issue of deep importance to many people.

This is the world in which those who voted on November 3 lived in the months before Election Day. For many, it’s been a fraught experience of health risks, economic collapse and recovery, and uncorked outrage over historic wrongs. It makes sense that these issues would be prominent in people’s minds as they decided how to cast their votes—generally along much-discussed tribal lines, but not motivated by the ongoing concerns emphasized by the chattering class.

That puts into interesting perspective the essentially never-ending campaign that the major political parties and their leaders waged from 2016 until the present day, with the rehashing of the first presidential contest blending into preparations for the second without relief. The degree to which the events of 2020 matter to voters also casts doubt on all the time, energy, and money put into allegations of corruption, sexual hijinks, and foreign meddling.

Speaking of money, an estimated $8 billion went into political advertising this election cycle, with Democrats outspending Republicans by $2 billion, according to Advertising Analytics. That’s a lot of cash and TV and radio time purchased by politicians who often seem to be focused on issues that matter to them and aren’t necessarily of the greatest importance to the people they’re trying to reach.

Media types—yeah, I’m part of that—haven’t done much better in getting a handle on what drives people to vote. They hammer at the idea that Trump voters must be motivated by racism and then goggle as his support increases among blacks and Latinos.

“When Donald Trump pulled off a stunning upset and won the presidency in 2016, few people were more shocked than the professional take-havers in the mainstream media,” Reason‘s Robby Soave pointed out the day after the election. “Four years later—in the midst of a nail-bitingly close election—the predictions of the pundit class have proven to be no more accurate than they were in 2016.”

As it turns out, it appears that most people largely ignored years of huffing, puffing, and internecine political warfare that entertain those of use with an unhealthy obsession with politics. They saved their attention for the approach of the election itself and the state of the world in which they live. Americans didn’t all come to the same conclusions by any means; it’s still a deeply divided country, after all. But, by all appearances, it’s the world of the present, not the controversies of the past, that motivated voters.

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