Tag: finance

Authored by Michael Walsh via The Epoch Times,

“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

That’s the famous phrase that instantly entered the American lexicon, courtesy of Paddy Chayefsky, the writer of the 1976 Oscar-winning movie, “Network.”

The film, which starred Faye Dunaway, William Holden, and the late Peter Finch as the enraged newscaster, Howard Beale, won four Oscars, including a best actor prize for Finch, whose Beale character was the forerunner of every fuming cable TV pundit from Bill O’Reilly to Keith Olbermann to Glenn Beck to Rachel Maddow to, latterly, Tucker Carlson, expatiating on behalf of the American public.

Here’s the speech, which might have been written yesterday by a conservative, but 44 years ago was the authentic voice of a Hollywood liberal:

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. There’s no end to it.

“We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms…

“Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being. God dammit, my life has value.’

“I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’”

Fantasy World

Welcome to 2020, the year in which what was once fanciful is now practically reality.

In the movie, things end badly for Beale, the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” who has become a quasi-religious leader hosting a segment called “Vox Populi” – he is assassinated on camera at the cynical direction of the network executives by members of Ecumenical Liberation Army, as a kickoff to their new show, “The Mao Tse-Tung Hour” of revolutionary chic.

It’s a win-win all around for the network, which has experienced a ratings bonanza with Beale, but with his usefulness at an end, needed a way to literally kill off his character to make way for something even more outrageous—even if it sends the exact opposite political message.

If the media was driving America crazy in 1976, in the direct aftermath of the Arab oil embargo, Watergate, and the surprising accession of an unelected vice president to the Oval Office in the hapless Gerald Ford, how much nuttier are we now?

We are currently living in a fantasy world in which Howard Beale really is the voice of sanity.

Consider what we are being asked to believe:

• Some lives matter more than other lives, despite our common shared humanity.

• The mainstream media is an impartial, objective reporter of facts, unaligned with party or ideology.

• Men can be women, and women can be men, at will.

• Speech equals violence, but silence equals violence as well.

• Infection by the CCP virus equals death – even though the death toll in the United States at this writing is about .04 percent of the total population. It is also race-selective in its lethality.

• The United States was built on a foundation of sub-Saharan African slavery in 1619, and is therefore illegitimate.

• A “national conversation” means agreeing with the Left in every particular no matter what the subject.

• The office of the Executive – Article II of the Constitution – is subject to the Supreme Court – Article III – thanks to an 1803 Court decision, Marbury v. Madison.

• The United States has benefited from outsourcing its crucial bio-medical infrastructure to the Chinese Communist Party, along with a substantial portion of its manufacturing capability, because lower prices are what Adam Smith would have wanted.

• There is an epidemic of white policemen shooting black street criminals.

• The Leftist/Fascist gang of street paramilitary thugs called “Antifa” are the equivalent of the American boys who landed at Omaha Beach in 1944, when in fact their “flag” is simply the inversion of the Antifaschiste Aktion of the Weimar Republic Communists.

• Western civilization, which includes Homer, Cicero, Charlemagne, Mozart, Dickens, Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and Mount Rushmore equals “white supremacy.”

• The highest form of “patriotism” is not simply “dissent” anymore, it’s overt treason.

Time to Rise Up

So perhaps now it’s time for real, patriotic Americans to assert themselves – for if not now, when?

The goal of the Herbert Marcuse-Saul Alinsky–Howard Zinn left has always been the destruction of the country-as-founded and its replacement by a (temporary) nation-state that acknowledges the illegitimacy of its founding – Marcuse’s doctrine of “Repressive Tolerance,” which posits tolerance for Leftist ideas until the Left seizes power, after which “tolerance” is no longer a virtue. (See also Alinsky’s “Rule No. 4,” which posits: “‘Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules’… You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.”)

In the old Soviet Union, in which I spent many unhappy hours between the years 1986-1991, the United States was always referred to as the “principal enemy.” To today’s Communists, whether Chinese or home-grown, this remains true. As I like to say on Twitter—from which I have been temporarily “suspended” for who-knows-what imagined transgression of the “Twitter safety” rules—“they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.”

Nevertheless, it’s time for all patriotic Americans to rise up and say, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” As Beale says in his final speech, just before his assassination:

“At the bottom of all of our terrified souls, we know, that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept, riling in its final pain. I don’t mean that the United States is finished as a world power. The United States is the richest, the most powerful, the most advanced country in the world, light years ahead of any other country… What is finished… is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it.”

Was he right? Or is it up to us to prove him wrong? The choice in November is ours.

Perhaps drug smugglers are adjusting to President Trump’s new border wall and increased patrols via US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. So far, about 200 miles of the latest high-tech fence has been erected, and stricter border enforcement overall has led to a decline in crossings this year. 

Traversing the international border has become more challenging for drug smugglers and could be the reason why some have resorted to using ultralight aircraft flying at low altitudes.

KXAN-TV in Austin, Texas, reports Monday CBP spotted an ultralight aircraft in US airspace moments before finding a duffle bag filled with meth. 

CBP agents in the El Centro Sector’s Calexico Station followed the aircraft late Saturday night about three and a half miles north of the US-Mexico border. 

When agents responded to the dropoff zone – they found a 145.5-pound bag of methamphetamine in 26 clear plastic containers. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) determined the drugs were meth and said it has a street value of $327,375. 

Several images via CBP: 

Meth plane’s cargo 

Here’s an example of drug cartels using an ultralight aircraft to fly meth across the international border (note this is not the aircraft from Saturday’s incident). 

Here’s an instance where the border wall is ineffective against ultralight aircraft flying at low altitudes. Is it time to install MIM-104 Patriots along the border?

Authored by Anya Parampil via TheGrayZone.com,

The Grayzone has confirmed that former US ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson traveled to Venezuela on Monday, July 13, following conversations with the families of former Green Beret soldiers Luke Denman and Airan Berry. Venezuelan authorities detained Berry and Denman on May 4, after they participated in a failed mercenary invasion of Venezuela with the stated goal of kidnapping the country’s elected president, Nicolas Maduro. 

Mark Denman, the younger brother of the detained mercenary Luke Denman, told The Grayzone that Richardson had agreed to help his family after the US Department of State failed to offer assistance. Denman said the FBI had contacted his family, but only to advance its apparent criminal investigation into the ringleader of the botched mercenary invasion, Silvercorp CEO Jordan Goudreau.

“Richardson is not a government official, he’s a private individual right now and so I’m glad he agreed to help us out,” Mark Denman told The Grayzone.

According to Denman, Luke’s girlfriend “reached out to [The Richardson Center] and got them involved and they agreed to help. We formally asked them to help out and they said that they would love to.”

It is unclear whether the families of other US citizens charged with crimes in Venezuela, such as the Citgo 6, have also reached out to Richardson.

Denman said his older brother’s girlfriend had learned about The Richardson Center after reading about Governor Richardson’s successful effort to free a US Navy Veteran held in Iran this past June. Richardson has previously led successful missions to free US prisoners in North Korea and Iran, including in the high-profile cases of college student Otto Warmbier and journalist Laura Ling. His efforts earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.

“I was glad to see this tweet today, everyone was sending it to me, to see that they are traveling and all,” Denman said, referring to The Richardson Center’s announcement of its latest mission on Twitter. Richardson’s effort came as the US government has failed to offer any official support to the Denman and Berry families.

Governor Richardson, at the request of several American prisoners’ families, is traveling to Caracas on a private humanitarian mission to meet with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to discuss the status of the American prisoners and other COVID-19 humanitarian issues.

— Richardson Center (@RichardsonCNTR) July 13, 2020

“As of yet we have not had any contact with the State Department,” Denman explained to The Grayzone. He described a frustrating “Catch-22” situation in dealing with US diplomats.

“We’ve spoken with employees at the US embassy in Bogotá, who have asked us to get Luke to fill out a ‘privacy release form’ so that they can speak to us more about his situation. And I asked them how they propose I do that since technically I don’t even know where these guys [Luke and Airan] are,” Denman said.

“The employee then advised we hire an attorney in Venezuela, and I asked how they propose I do that since as far as I know there are massive efforts to shut off any method of sending money to Venezuela and attorneys want to get paid,” he stated, referencing the impact of unilateral US economic sanctions which have restricted the ability of US citizens to transfer funds to Venezuela.

“I don’t know what information they’d be able to get out anyway since they’re in Colombia and we don’t have any diplomatic ties with Venezuela right now,” Denman added.

Beyond those conversations with US officials in Bogotá, Denman said the only contact his family has had with the US government arrived through the FBI as part of what “sounded like” a criminal investigation into Jordan Goudreau, the former US Green-Beret who directed the bungled invasion of Venezuela, dubbed “Operation Gideon.”

“We’ve been talked to by the FBI a little bit. The questions they asked are revolving around Jordan and any contact we’ve had with him,” Denman said. “They’ve been very basic questions like, ‘Did we know Jordan before this? When have we talked to him? What numbers do we have for him? And if we have record of any communication between Luke and Jordan.’”

Denman told The Grayzone he was “happy to cooperate with the FBI” because “based on my communication with Luke from the beginning, what it looks like is that Luke genuinely believed this to be a US-backed operation and was acting [based] on that… I think any investigation is going to show that whatever Jordan actually knew and had actually going on, or whether the US was actually involved or not, Luke and Airan certainly believed that was the case.”

Denman explained that Luke and Airan trusted Goodreau because he was a “guy they had been in a lot of combat with, [who had] superior rank and all that stuff, so they did this thing they thought was meaningful.”

Denman expressed caution in dealing with US politicians, or either Presidential candidate, to assist his family in bringing Luke and Airan home, saying he would rather leave the task to “private individuals and members of society who actually honor soldier services as opposed to politicians who [are only concerned with] their own re-elections.”

“I’d like them involved if they’re helpful but if they’re not helpful I’d rather they just stay out of it,” he added, suggesting President Donald Trump or Democratic Nominee Joe Biden would only involved “if some campaign advisors advised them [putting together] a photo-op with these guys would be good, but it’s a little unpredictable.”

When asked what he would like the US and Venezuelan public to know about his brother and his friend Airan Berry, Denman remarked, “they believed the Venezuelan people to be suffering and they thought they were working in their government’s interest and with the backing of their government.” 

“People work with limited information,” he added.

After a new case of the bubonic plague rattled the part of Mongolia near the Russian border, it appears the infamous plague strain responsible for killing between 50 million and 100 million Europeans during the 14th Century has now been discovered in Colorado, where a squirrel recently tested positive, according to local news reports.

The squirrel was discovered in the Town of Morrison in Colorado, according to Jefferson County Public Health officials, who made the announcement in a statement released over the weekend. The squirrel, discovered on Saturday, is the first case of plague in Jefferson County in modern history.

Tests were run after a concerned townsperson saw at least 15 dead squirrels lying around town. When one of the bodies was tested, it came back positive for plague.

Officials expect the other dozen or so dead squirrels were also infected.

Though it can now be treated with antibiotics, the plague can spread among pets. Cats and dogs who play outside are particularly susceptible.

Cats are highly susceptible to the plague and can catch it from flea bites or a rodent scratch or bite, or by ingesting a rodent. Cats may also die if not properly treated with antibiotics, officials said.

For those who aren’t familiar with the history of the Black Death, here’s some background courtesy of NatGeo:

“Arguably the most infamous plague outbreak was the so-called Black Death, a multi-century pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe,” according to National Geographic. “It was believed to start in China in 1334, spreading along trade routes and reaching Europe via Sicilian ports in the late 1340s. The plague killed an estimated 25 million people, almost a third of the continent’s population. The Black Death lingered on for centuries, particularly in cities. Outbreaks included the Great Plague of London (1665-66), in which 70,000 residents died.”

Though of course that doesn’t answer the most important question: How did it get to Colorado?

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

On July 22, 1988, after the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, the party nominee, Gov. Michael Dukakis, enjoyed a 17-point lead over Vice President George W. Bush.

Five weeks later, on Labor Day, Dukakis was down eight points, the same margin by which he would lose the election. He had lost 25 points in one month.

What had happened?

During August, Republican attack groups elevated and relentlessly pounded what might be called Dukakis’ Bay State radical liberalism.

He had proudly called himself a card-carrying member of the ACLU. He had vetoed a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in Massachusetts’ schools. He was against imposing the death penalty. He had issued weekend passes to convicted killers such as the infamous Willie Horton, who had used his get-out-of-jail-free card to go to Maryland and rape and murder.

Vice President Bush ended up winning 40 states.

Is this possible today?

Because a turnaround of that magnitude appears to be needed by Donald J. Trump.

Over the weekend, the bad news on the virus front turned awful, for the country and Trump.

The U.S. dead from the coronavirus hit 135,000. COVID-19 deaths, whose weekly average had been falling since April, began to rise again.

New cases of the infection began appearing in previously unseen numbers across the Sun Belt. Florida set a U.S. record with more than 15,000 new cases in one day.

This surge in infections is occurring as the nation debates whether to send its young back to schools. Children, teachers and students could arrive in classrooms in the millions in late summer only to be sent home in a new shutdown as a second wave of COVID-19 hits this fall.

Were that not enough to concentrate the mind, an economy that was as strong as any in modern history last winter now looks to be in a depression. The good news of the May-June revival could be canceled out by shutdowns mandated by the new infections.

Beyond this, America’s racial divide has reopened. The attacks on cops and their demonization in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, has led to demoralization, resignations and retirements, and, from there, to an explosion of shootings and killings in major cities.

And we have witnessed the outbreak of a cultural revolution, which holds that as America has, from birth, been a slave-owning society whose policies toward the native-born amounted to cultural and ethnic genocide, the statues of those generations of men who produced such a history should all be pulled down and smashed.

A medical crisis, an economic crisis, and a cultural and social crisis, have hit us all at once, raising some fundamental questions.

Does America retain the unity, strength and sense of purpose to lead the world? Is American democracy still the model for mankind?

Trump is not responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. And the shutdowns that induced today’s depression were as much the decisions of governors and mayors as of the president. Yet, he is the one whose fate is tied to the state of the economy in November 2020.

And, politically, Trump is the one paying the price.

Several national polls have Joe Biden up by 10 points or more, and polls in swing states, as well as must-carry states for Trump such as Florida, have Biden leading. In the money primary, Biden and the Democrats turned May and June into winning months. Their Senate candidates are awash in cash in states where they had been seen as sacrificial lambs.

The pundits, following the polls, are giddily predicting a Biden win, a recapture of the Senate and the retention of Democratic control of the House.

What can Trump do? What should Trump do?

In 1948, Harry Truman looked like a certain loser to Gov. Tom Dewey. So he sent a raft of liberal legislation to the Hill and challenged the Republican Congress to enact it. When Congress airily dismissed his proposals, Truman barnstormed the country, calling on America to help him rid the nation of this “no-good, do-nothing 80th Congress.”

Which the country proceeded to do, as it elected Truman and threw out the first Republican Congress to sit since before the Depression.

What the Trump folks must do now is to zero in on Biden’s vulnerabilities, personal and political.

• First among these is Biden’s transparently diminished verbal and mental capacity. He is no longer the man who bested Paul Ryan in the vice presidential debate of 2012. Even during controlled appearances where he reads from a teleprompter, Biden emits a sense of unease that he will lose control of his ghostwritten script.

• Second, the Biden campaign has embraced an agenda that is, in part, Bernie Sanders-AOC-Black Lives Matter.

The Trump folks need to force Biden to come out of his basement and either embrace or renounce the radical elements of his agenda. They need to do for Biden what Lee Atwater & Co. did for Dukakis.

The self-titled “King of Instagram”, Dan Bilzerian, now also appears to be the “King of Lighting Cash On Fire”.

That’s because Bilzerian’s new pot company, Ignite International, looks like it’s about to go up in smoke. The company torched $50 million in cash last year after raising $19.9 million in convertible debt and $23.7 million from a short term promissory note. 

If the company winds up surviving, it may have to enter a toxic financing spiral that could decimate the company’s shareholders further than they already have been. 

The company sells all types of weed-related products and has been promoted heavily on Bilzerian’s Instagram account, where he has over 31 million followers and frequently posts photos of himself with models in exotic locations.

Of the $50 million burned last year, $43 million was for expenses related to marketing and promotion, according to the NY Post. Much of that shareholder cash was spent throwing booze fueled parties at various global destinations with barely-dressed women.  

Nearly all of Bilzerian’s photographs on his Instagram portray a playboy-like lifestyle for the CEO. In fact, the company’s annual marketing budget was more than double its annual sales revenue. 

The company’s shareholders appear to be footing the bill for Bilzerian’s personal lifestyle – not only paying for his lavish parties but also paying him a salary in the process. 

Bilzerian was also said to have lost out on a book deal last month because he was “too busy partying” to deliver the manuscript that was required by his publisher, Simon & Schuster. 

His company, meanwhile, sells everything from vodka to THC vape pens to CBD oils. It began trading publicly in Canada in January 2019 and trades under BLIZF on the US OTC markets.

Its stock is down more than 70% over the last year and trades at just $0.66 in the US. Its 52-week high was $4. 

It’s a shame no one ever told Bilzerian that if you run an unprofitable company, some fancy A/R accounting and short dated out of the money call options can work wonders. Maybe he could turn his loss generating machine into the largest company in the world.

But until he learns those “secrets” of being a public company, he’ll have to continue sticking it to his shareholders the old fashioned way: siphoning money out of the company while diluting retail bagholders whose “due diligence” is poring through Bilzerian’s Instagram photos. 

Authored by A. Gary Shilling, originally published in Bloomberg Opinion

The Social Security Trust Fund has done quite well in recent years, due to the postwar babies’ surge into the labor force in the last decades of the 20th century while retirees from the low-birth rate Great Depression years were drawing relatively few benefits. The combination of these two forces pushed the Social Security Trust Fund balance from about zero in 1980 to $2.9 trillion today. But now, the coronavirus pandemic threatens to undo all those gains, and without swift action by the government a new crisis may be at hand.

The fund’s Trustees noted in an April report that net inflows into the Trust Fund will turn negative next year, commencing a demise that will see the Trust Fund go broke in 2035. Then, payroll taxes will cover only 79% of promised retiree benefits. Here’s the troubling part: “The projections and analyses in this year’s report do not reflect the potential effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Social Security program,” the Trustees stated in the annual report. Clearly, benefits will increase as more workers retire early or claim disability while payroll taxes swoon with the drop in employment.

Social Security is not like a cash-value life insurance policy in which an individual’s premiums and interest earned on them are eventually paid out to the insured or in death benefits. Instead, Social Security transfers the payroll taxes of employees and employers to retirees, plus interest.

The huge net inflows of recent years masked the vast expansion of Social Security payouts since World War II that were not actuarially matched by offsetting payroll taxes. That removed any semblance of a savings plan and shifted Social Security to a family welfare scheme. Payments are made to many who aren’t paying payroll taxes, including non-working spouses, widows and children. Also, originally, annual retiree benefits were 17.5% of earnings in the last five years of work but have reached 33% of retiree incomes, on average.

Now, 10,000 postwar babies are reaching 65 every day and retiring to draw Social Security benefits. This year, 65 million Americans, or 20% of the population, are receiving over $1 trillion in benefits, including 90% of those over 65. And many currently employed are in the relative sparse baby bust generation that followed the postwar babies, the last of whom were born in 1964.

Social Security’s plight has been obvious for decades and the longer Washington procrastinates, the more difficult the solutions. The Trust Fund Trustees state that ensuring solvency over the next 75 years would require a 3.1- percentage point rise in the 12.4% current payroll tax that is split between employees and employers. Even less politically attractive would be an immediate 19% across-the-board cut in benefits. Waiting for the Trust Fund money to run out in 2035 would require a 4.1-percentage-point rise in the combined payroll tax or a 25% cut in benefits, the Trustees calculate.

The increased woes from the pandemic may finally force Washington to act, as costs will probably balloon to the point that the fiction of a self-funding Trust Fund is abandoned and Social Security benefits are paid directly by the Treasury. That would eliminate any protections Social Security has from politics, but concerns about the resulting jump in the federal budget deficit would mount. Payroll taxes on higher incomes and perhaps capital gains as well would be used to redistribute income downward.

If self-funded Social Security benefits are an entitlement that is no longer affordable, so too are state pension fund benefits. Decades of lush retiree benefits, overly-optimistic investment return assumptions, insufficiency pension fund contributions and lengthening retiree life spans have resulted in the liabilities of public pension funds exceeding assets by $1.2 trillion in 2018, according to the latest data and Pew Charitable Trusts. The pandemic will surely worsen the mismatch.

As with Social Security, options to restore to health these pension plans, which are only 79% funded on average, are unattractive. State governments are already strained by falling revenue from declining sales and income taxes, and are unlikely to help. Cutting benefits is politically difficult. To boost investment returns, pension funds can continue to shift to hedge funds, private equity, commodities and other volatile investments, but risk-adjusted returns may not improve, as was seen in the first quarter.

Some states have introduced cost-sharing policies that distribute unexpected gains and losses among employers, employees and retirees. Others are shifting from more expensive and burdensome defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans for new employees or introducing hybrid plans that contain elements of both.

As with Social Security, the coronavirus crisis may force action on these entitlements.

Senior editor Ash Bennington joins managing editor Ed Harrison to discuss Q2 earnings for banks such as JPMorgan and Wells Fargo and use it as a barometer to talk about market cycles. Ash and Ed consider how the abysmal results in financials can cloud our understanding of where markets are at in the cycle. They also break down the sector weightings in the S&P 500, examining how severely underrepresented certain industries are and how that is distorting equity market performance. They also ponder the ways in which the system is currently “rigged,” the sorts of inequities that arise out of it, and how the pandemic is exposing it all. In the intro, Peter Cooper discusses the Q2 earnings for JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo, and analyzes how effective the Payroll Protection Program has been in supporting small businesses in the US.

Last summer Iran began claiming to have busted a network of CIA spies within the country. Statements at the time described that Iranians embedded at key military and defense technology sites were in contact with CIA officers based in Arab Gulf countries.

While little detail has been given as to their identities, at least a dozen have faced capital offense cases for ‘treason’ and other charges.

Iran’s judiciary on Tuesday announced that it executed a defense ministry employee who was convicted for spying on behalf of the CIA. 

It marks the second recent such announced execution of an alleged asset said to be working for the Americans, the AP notes. Typically names and details only emerge after such death penalty cases.

The AP identifies the following based on Iranian state media: 

The report said Reza Asgari was executed last week. Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Esmaili said Asgari had worked in the airspace department of the ministry and retired in 2016.

“In the last years of his service, he joined the CIA, he sold information about our missiles… to the CIA and took money from them,” Esmaili said. “He was identified, tried and sentenced to death.”

In some recent examples, Iranian officials have claimed some among the spies have “confessed” to working with the CIA or other Western intelligence agencies. 

In other instances there are still Western travelers who ended up in Iranian political prisons on what seem to many like trumped up charges of spying and sabotage related activities.

For example in 2019 three Australian nationals were imprisoned – with one given a steep ten year prison sentence. 

Often the charges are ambiguous with no evidence publicly issued.

In recent years such controversial detentions appear more for the sake of gaining leverage with Washington – in recent cases for example to conduct prisoner exchanges with the US. Both the US and UK have been in quiet back-channel negotiations with Tehran to get their citizens back, who most often are dual nationals holding US or UK and Iranian citizenship.

Authored by Ethan Yang via The American Institute for Economic Research,

As the school year approaches, there is much consideration over whether or not to close the K-12 system in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. These concerns come from a wide variety of constituencies, from parents to public officials to teachers. However, much like the overall discussion regarding COVID-19, this proposal is ill-informed and will likely lead to unintended consequences that will be far more severe than the problem it seeks to address.

School Closures Are a Time-Sensitive Policy

One of the first points to consider when approaching the question of closing schools is timing. Yale University sociologist Nicholas Christakis, a proponent of school closure, warns that although the policy could be beneficial it must be done very early. Furthermore, although Dr. Christakis certainly supports school closure if done at the correct time, he acknowledges that now

“It’s sort of closing the barn door after the cow is gone.”

This maneuver, even for those that support it, will be incredibly difficult to do effectively and the appropriate time to even consider this policy may well have been in January, not July. 

It also seems that proponents of school closure seem to misunderstand the purpose of their proposal. Italian epidemiologist Marco Ajelli tells NPR

“Closing schools can buy time and delay the peak of an epidemic.”

Unfortunately, that time has passed as well. Much like anything concerning COVID-19 and epidemiology, we cannot be certain that closing schools will actually delay the peak of an epidemic. Even if it is an effective policy measure, school closures are not intended for simply reducing cases amongst children; they are a way to buy time to prepare for the climax of an outbreak. 

As outlined by Dr. Christakis’s sentiments, the time for this conversation should have been months ago. It may have been an effective policy to buy time for hospitals to retool and prepare for the outbreak but that has since been accomplished, although rather sloppily. The peak of the pandemic has passed, COVID-related deaths have dramatically decreased, and hospitals are far more prepared than they were months ago. 

Closing Schools May Hurt Children More Than It Protects Them From COVID-19

When it comes to protecting the health of children, sending them to school could possibly be the safest option. Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore Public Schools tells NPR that 

“For a large number of our students, the safest place for them to be is actually in school.”

Schools provide a number of things that would be advantageous to the well-being of a child. Being at school places children in a controlled environment which in some neighborhoods could be better for more problems besides infection control. 

Children are the least vulnerable to COVID-19. Professor Peter Collignon, an Australian microbiologist and infectious disease physician, writes in the Guardian 

“The data from a range of countries shows that children rarely, and in many countries never, have died from this infection. Children appear to get infected at a much lower rate than those who are older… there is no evidence that children are important in transmitting the disease.”

Furthermore, a paper published by medical experts at Colorado State University and Yale University says that 

“What we know about social distancing policies is based largely on models of influenza, where children are a vulnerable group. However, preliminary data on COVID-19 suggests that children are a small fraction of cases and may be less vulnerable than older adults.”

The Atlantic offers some additional insight on why children seem to be at a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 as they report 

“Everything an infant sees, or a young child sees, is new,” says Donna Farber, an immunologist at Columbia University. Thus, their immune system is primed to fight new pathogens in a number of ways… This is why adults are able to mount a rapid immune response to previously encountered pathogens, but also why they might have trouble fighting a new one. Diseases such as rubella and chicken pox are also, for various reasons, more severe in adults than in children.”

The CDC echos this assertion that children are at a lower risk of COVID-19 not only in the mortality rate which is extremely rare but also in the infection rate. Furthermore, online teaching in its current state would not deliver the same results as an in-person experience. If schools intend to stay closed for any substantial amount of time that could be incredibly detrimental for young students.

Professor Collignon writes

“Many will likely miss out on over six months of teaching. While online learning might be available it is unlikely to be as effective as face-to-face teaching and those with less resources will disproportionately be disadvantaged. Minimal or no mixing with their friends and other children for over six months will also have deleterious effects.”

Many teachers will have little to no aptitude for effectively running online classes. Disadvantaged students such as those with troubled families or low socioeconomic status will be most harmed by school closure. In particular, many parents will need to take time off from work to care for their children. For many, this would be impossible. 

Childcare Obligations Will Decrease the Effectiveness of the Healthcare Sector And Potentially Increase Deaths

When considering the childcare needs of healthcare workers, closing schools may actually lead to an increase in mortality rates not just for COVID patients but sick individuals more broadly. Congruent with AIER’s observation that the conversation surrounding COVID-19 seems to be utterly blind to the tradeoffs of lockdown measures, Jude Bayham and Eli Fenichel write

“School closures come with many tradeoffs. Setting aside economic costs, school closures implemented to reduce COVID-19 spread create unintended childcare obligations, which are particularly large in healthcare occupations.”

According to their raw data about 15% of registered nurses, 19.14% of Diagnostic- related technicians and technologists, as well as 14.45% of EMT and paramedics will be unable to meet their childcare obligations with the help of a nonworking adult or sibling just to name a few. Much like all models and calculations, the true percentage of total healthcare professionals that will be forced to take time off from work is not certain. However, what we can be certain about is that closing schools will impose childcare obligations on healthcare workers that will lead to a reduction in the overall medical staff.

The drawbacks of such a decision, the most important being an increase in mortality rates due to lack of medical professionals, can only be estimated with models. These models, much like those used by epidemiologists to predict COVID-19 deaths and spread, must rely on assumed values and equations that seek to imitate reality. As a result, we cannot be certain whether the result will be more or less severe. 

We can be certain that closing schools will result in a reduction of medical staff. We can also be certain that this reduction of staff will increase the risk of mortality not just for COVID-19 which is a comparatively mild disease but also for those suffering from even more serious ailments. Whether it will be a slight increase that can be justified by an overall reduction in infections, as some would say, or send catastrophic shockwaves of unintended consequences, much like closing the economy, cannot be reliably predicted at this time. 

A paper on epidemiology written by British Healthcare Professionals caution concludes that 

“Other implications of school closure (e.g., ethical and economic considerations) and viral properties such as virulence must also be considered in policy decisions.”

It is worth noting that the authors of the paper conclude that school closures would be effective in combating influenza. In the case of COVID-19, in which children are at a lesser risk, it is unclear whether or not school closures would be as helpful in slowing infections. What we can be sure of is that there will be a host of unintended consequences. These include everything from a drop in healthcare staffing to an additional economic disturbance on top of the current financial calamity generated by the lockdowns. 

Closing Schools Will Exacerbate Existing Economic Calamity 

A report published by the Brookings Institution states that 

“We find that closing all schools in the U.S. for four weeks could cost between $10 and $47 billion dollars (sic) (0.1-0.3% of GDP) and lead to a reduction of 6% to 19% in key health care personnel. These should be considered conservative (i.e., low) economic estimates in that earnings rather than total compensation are used to calculate costs.” 

This is only assuming schools will be closed for four weeks, not until 2021 which many either advocate or have already done. Much like shutting down the economy and labeling some businesses “nonessential” has unleashed a wide range of predicted as well as unpredicted consequences, we can be sure closing schools will do the same. 

Sending children to school has been a basic component of American socioeconomic life for generations. A sudden cessation leaves millions of kids at home in an economic system which is virtually built on the assumption that their parents don’t have to take care of them during the day. We can only imagine how disruptive that would be. 

Perhaps one of the most overlooked consequences of closing schools and lockdowns more generally because of its difficulty in measuring is hope. Although we can measure decreases in the healthcare workforce and economic retraction, we can’t easily measure optimism. Right now optimism is critical. A working paper from the University of Chicago estimates that 60% of the current economic downturn is due to consumer sentiments; that is, being afraid of living their lives due to COVID-19. 

There will surely be further economic retraction due not only from physically closing schools but a reduction of hope and increased anxiety. The effects will be impossible to measure until they happen. The same goes for increases in suicide rates, domestic violence, substance abuse, and so on. These are further unintended consequences and tradeoffs that have resulted from the lockdowns. It is not absurd to think they will only worsen by closing schools.

Are the Tradeoffs Worth It??

As the 2020-2021 academic year approaches, closing K-12 education and switching to remote learning is on the minds of many. Those who advocate for this decision must come to terms with a number of important tradeoffs that come with it. Some of those tradeoffs are more apparent than others. 

Closing schools will certainly be detrimental to the education and social needs of a generation of children. 

For some, school might actually be the safest place to be and for countless working parents they need their kids to be there. More importantly, the healthcare sector needs all hands on deck not only to handle the pandemic but to serve patients with ailments far deadlier than COVID-19. 

Forcing healthcare professionals to stay home to take care of their children will likely result in a higher mortality rate. Closing schools will inevitably worsen the economic downturn caused by the existing lockdown in ways that we can only begin to imagine. 

Medical experts who support school closures more generally clarify that they are a tool to be considered at the beginning of a pandemic, not seven months in. Lastly, COVID-19 poses a far lesser risk to children for both death and infection. Closing schools will probably spare some schoolchildren from infection. Whether it will be enough to justify what we may have to sacrifice is another question entirely.