Tag: finance

Is Bitcoin A Store Of Value? Experts Weigh In On ‘Digital Gold’

Authored by Max Yakubowski via CoinTelegraph.com,

It’s hard to tell who was the first to coin – pun intended – Bitcoin as “digital gold,” underlining the idea that Bitcoin is a good store of value. To understand the community leaders’ thoughts about digital gold nowadays, we asked Binance’s  Changpeng Zhao, award-winning technology leader Jonathan Reichental, the  United Nations’ Susan Oh, Singularity University’s David Obran and other outstanding experts. 

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

The phrase “digital gold” possibly came into more widespread use after The New York Times journalist Nathaniel Popper’s book, “Digital Gold,” was published in 2015. Google searches for the term “Bitcoin digital gold” peaked in December 2017, when the leading cryptocurrency’s price hit record highs around $20,000 per coin.

Well before Bitcoin was born, computer scientist Nick Szabo wrote a proposal for “bit gold,” laying out a concept for secure digital money that is often referred to as Bitcoin’s predecessor.

After 10 years of existence, the question of whether or not Bitcoin can in fact be considered “digital gold” continues to be debated in the industry. Yes, Bitcoin is designed to be scarce, but when discussing it as a potential store of value, many point to Bitcoin’s historical volatility as an argument against doing so. 

To see where we’re at with the debate today, we asked a variety of crypto and blockchain experts to revisit the question.

Is Bitcoin a good store of value? Can it be considered “digital gold”?

“Maybe it’s too simple of an answer, but it just continues to be too unstable. Gold fluctuates, but it doesn’t double its value over a short period of time. 

“I don’t know if this is fake or not, but diamonds are abundant. And so, they really not of any value. But if you go to a store and you buy a diamond, it’s expensive, right? And the way in which it retains value is scarce. It’s supposed to be scarce. It looks beautiful, it’s a particular shape, whatever. And one particular big diamond company, I believe, gathered up a lot of diamonds and dumped them in the sea to keep the price high, because if beautiful diamonds are available to everybody, then they drop in price very quickly and it’s no longer a billion dollar market. I have no way to prove it, but I’ve read it on reliable sources.

“The big question in crypto is: Can we enter a phase where it’s stable? We have standards. It probably can’t exist in the complete absence of regulation. That’s kind of a nasty word to the cyber crypto marketplace. But, there probably — for some level of protection — needs to be some agreed regulations in national countries, but also globally.

“So, until such a time when it is stable over a long period of time and is recognized by the largest amount of organizations and governments, I think it won’t be able to be any gold or a stable asset class.”

— Jonathan Reichental, CEO of Human Future, professor at UC Berkeley, Former chief information officer for the city of Palo Alto

“Bitcoin is not gold. Gold is heavy, hard to carry around. Bitcoin is better.“

— Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance

“Bitcoin might be the greatest store of value in the history of the world. Yes, it’s volatile — as it’s only been useful for about seven years — but its ‘unconfiscatability’ property is unmatched. That is its true store of value, as gold is confiscatable and all other assets even easier.”

— Tone Vays, Trader and crypto analyst

“When I asked my friend Dan Sokol if he owned any Bitcoin in 2016, he said: ‘F— no, child. My heart couldn’t take it.’ Dan is an old time Silicon Valley dude of some 40 years, now retired. Among the world’s first hackers, Dan was a semiconductor engineer/serial inventor manager who took a copy of BASIC and gave out copies of it to hacker nerds, and said, ‘F— with it, break it, and once you figure out how to fix it, tell the rest of us how you did it.’ It was one of the first events of open-source in Silicon Valley. 

“Even he told me he didn’t want to risk owning Bitcoin. Until we stop valuing the short-term gain of trading on the volatility, it is a poor store of value, and not a currency. It’s an excellent technology that provides a trustless system without a single point of failure. It is a technology with a philosophy — of transparency, decentralization, and a democratization of value. Ideally.”

— Susan Oh, CEO of MKR AI and co-chair of Blockchain for Impact at the United Nations General Assembly

“The definition of a store of value is a bit circular: Something is a store of value if everybody believes it will still be valuable for a long time.

“Gold is considered the ultimate store of value because it has been considered valuable for most of human history in most places (there are some exceptions), so there is a strong widespread belief that gold will remain valuable in the future no matter how politics might feasibly change.

“With Bitcoin, the case that it is a store of value is much less clear. It’s certainly conceivable that five-10 years from now, Bitcoin could have almost no value.

“This is the economic definition, not the legal definition, which I’m not sure about.”

— Joseph Bonneau, Lecturer at New York University (course on crypto), Co-author of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies”

“I’ve always maintained that Satoshi originally intended Bitcoin to be used for payments, not store of value. That said, he left Bitcoin, so the community is now in control — for better or worse. 

“Since its creation in 2008, Bitcoin has been in the process of becoming a digital commodity. By definition, a store of value can be a commodity that’s not perishable or subject to depreciation over time versus main reference assets, like national currencies or currency baskets. 

“There is typically a base level of demand in which a store of value’s price is not expected to drop below a certain level, with the possible exception of structural changes to the local or global economy. Essentially, stores of value are items in which the value does not decay over time, but can in fact also increase. 

“For Bitcoin to be a reliable medium of exchange, or ‘a currency,’ it needs to be stable, and have low volatility. In other words, people need to accept and hold Bitcoins because they are trusted and will not fluctuate in value. Ultimately, to become a currency, it’s about network effect and the demand for a commodity that is mathematically limited to a supply of 21 million units.”

— Vinny Lingham, CEO of Civic

“Over the course of the past 10 years, the number of people knowing about Bitcoin and owning some amount has gone from zero to several million. Is this number going to grow to hundreds of millions or billions of people over the course of the next 10 years? I believe that it will. 

“And, even discounting the eventual further appreciation of BTC against various national fiat currencies, its features will make it attractive as a store of value to an increasing amount of people.

“Borderless, permissionless, portable — it is actually superior to gold. The current examples of people from countries like Venezuela will, over the years, be substituted by new ones. What will the citizens of the U.S. decide to do once the “petro-dollar” will cease to exist and a new geopolitical order emerge? Will they decide to trust Bitcoin in large numbers?”

— David Orban, Advisor to Singularity University, Founder of Network Society Ventures

“I am skeptical that a ‘good store of value’ can be defined in the abstract. Whether Bitcoin meets the standard depends on what you’re actually trying to accomplish through buying or hodling. What are your object-level goals, what properties are required to satisfy those goals, and does BTC have those properties? What are your other options, and how do the affordances of those options compare to BTC with respect to accomplishing your goals? In other words, what are your store-of-value priorities and which tradeoffs are you willing to make? Therein lies the answer.

“Of course, it is possible to generalize about Bitcoin’s suitability as a store of value. I’ve certainly seen people do it intelligently (for example, the back-and-forth in this Twitter thread). However, in my opinion, storing value is such a broad use case, pursued with so many different motivations and objectives, in so many different situations with idiosyncratically constrained local optima, that it’s impossible to establish BTC as a ‘good store of value’ in any universal or definitive sense.

“All of that said, Bitcoin is deflationary by nature, due to the capped 21 million supply and the clever incentive structure that has reliably safeguarded its inviolability. The emergent order governing Bitcoin, as both a software product and a phenomenon, is undeniably path-dependent, attributable in large part to Satoshi Nakamoto’s design decisions. There is no guarantee that BTC will increase in value, but past trends and the underlying supply-demand dynamics suggest that it’s a reasonable long-term prediction.

“Anyway. Thoughts on ‘digital gold’… There are sufficient similarities between gold and Bitcoin, with respect to production economics and censorship-resistance, that ‘digital gold’ is a useful term — albeit primarily as a shortcut that conveys the gist of how BTC works and what it does. ‘Digital gold’ is quick and convenient in the same way that describing a startup as ‘Uber for whatever’ is quick and convenient. Is the comparison 100% accurate in a strictly literal sense? No, but we don’t typically hold analogies to that standard.

“A more precise question: ‘Does BTC share the properties of gold that have made gold attractive as a store of value?’ Here, again, the answer depends on a specific context.

“Personally, I think that Bitcoin’s lack of privacy and related lack of fungibility are serious drawbacks that undermine its censorship-resistance as well as users’ other practical security needs. Teams like zkSNARKs have made significant and commendable progress in providing BTC users with more private options; I would like to see that continue. However, there is no substitute for future-proofed Layer 1 privacy, due to the probabilistic attacks to which decoy-based systems are vulnerable, and the rewards for successful high-stakes deanonymization.”

— Sonya Mann, Head of communications at the Zcash Foundation, Tech journalist

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Missile Launcher Found In Baltimore Airport Suitcase

Baltimore-Washington International (BWI) Airport security officials were alerted by computers on Monday morning when a Texas man’s checked luggage contained an unloaded missile launcher, reported the Capital Gazette.

The man, a resident of Jacksonville, Texas, told Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers he was active duty with the military traveling home from the Middle East and wanted to keep the launcher as a reminder of his service.

TSA spokesperson Lisa Farbstein said the launcher wasn’t loaded nor a “live device,” but the man was detained for questioning.

She added that military weapons are strictly prohibited in checked or carry-on bags, but also not illegal.

TSA officials questioned the man before releasing him so that he could catch a connecting flight. Government officials confiscated the missile launcher and sent it to the state fire marshal for disposal.

As far as we can see, not yet confirmed by officials, the missile launcher appears to be an AGM-176 Griffin, a lightweight, precision-guided munition developed by Raytheon.

The Griffin confiscated at BWI could be the tail-end of the launcher, as shown in the infographic below:

Another graphic shows the Griffin can be used to guard military bases.

The missile fired out of the launcher is a relatively small warhead and was designed for precision warfare.

Here’s a picture of the missile.

TSA uses their social media accounts to inform travelers that military weapons are prohibited at airports, could result in a fine or jail time.

In March, we reported that TSA confiscated a “rocket-propelled grenade launcher” at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley International Airport.

Farbstein told the Capital Gazette that this is the first time someone tried to sneak a missile launcher through BWI security, though TSA officials regularly confiscate weapons of all sorts.

TSA officials said twenty people had been caught so far this year (as of July 22) for having loaded firearms in their bags at BWI.

“Passengers are permitted to travel with firearms in checked baggage if they are properly packaged and declared,” the TSA said in a release.

“Firearms must be unloaded, packed in a hard-sided case, locked, and packed separately from ammunition. Firearm possession laws vary by state and locality.”

TSA’s Instagram account showcases several posts of some very unusual finds:

 

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Could Nuclear Fusion Be A Reality By 2025?

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

In order to keep globally rising temperatures from increasing more than 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, the international community will have to cut carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and down to zero by the middle of the century. Meanwhile emissions continue to increase every year, and the increase is accelerating, rising by 1.6 percent in 2017 and about 2.7 percent in 2018 to reach an all-time high. Making matters even more dire, global energy demand is projected to grow by approximately 27 percent by 2040, or 3,743 million tons oil equivalent (mtoe). What if there was one energy solution that could solve all of these pressing problems?

While it sounds fantastical, there is a comprehensive solution. And it’s right around the corner. 

One of the most powerful forms of power we use today is nuclear energy. While modern nuclear is extremely efficient and creates zero carbon emissions, it has a lot of drawbacks, and they’re big ones: potential nuclear meltdowns and radioactive waste that remains hazardous for thousands of years (costing taxpayers a bundle in the process). But there is a better way. Our current nuclear reactors are all powered using nuclear fission, the process of splitting atoms to generate energy. For years, scientists have wondered how we can harness nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun by fusing atoms together, for use on earth. Fusion is ultra-powerful, several times more potent than fission, and generates zero nuclear waste, since its fuel is not uranium or plutonium, but hydrogen. 

“Achieving controlled fusion reactions that net more power than they take to generate, and at commercial scale, is seen as a potential answer to climate change,” writes Nathanial Gronewold for Scientific American.

“Fusion energy would eliminate the need for fossil fuels and solve the intermittency and reliability concerns inherent with renewable energy sources. The energy would be generated without the dangerous amounts of radiation that raises concerns about fission nuclear energy.”

The dream of nuclear fusion has long been out-of-reach, but now, with companies like the Jeff Bezos-backed General Fusion and a huge pool of fusion startups heating up the competition, fusion is quickly becoming a reality. Just this week, the “world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment” has made a major breakthrough. 

Officials from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a multinational project based in Southern France, have announced that they are now just 6.5 years away from “First Plasma,” in a historic milestone. ITER’s project, supported by a consortium of 35 nations, is now 65 percent complete according to this week’s press release. “The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core,” reports Scientific American.

The project is the world’s very first commercial-scale fusion reactor project, and all eyes are on ITER’s tokamak to set the bar, as well as the timeline, for the commercialized nuclear fusion race. While the project is scheduled to launch at the end of 2025, it will take another decade (at least) to bring the facility to full power.

“The date for First Plasma is set; we will push the button in December 2025,” spokeswoman Sabina Griffith told SA.

“It will take another 10 years until we reach full deuterium-tritium operations.”

Nuclear fusion is so difficult to achieve because of the extreme conditions–like those in the core of the sun– needed to be reproduced here on Earth. As explained by the United States Department of Energy, “fusion reactions are being studied by scientists, but are difficult to sustain for long periods of time because of the tremendous amount of pressure and temperature needed to join the nuclei together.”

While nuclear fusion holds an incredible amount of promise for solving some of the modern world’s toughest issues, the clock is ticking, and many experts say that even with fusion right around the corner, time is not on our side. While it is hopeful that ITER’s tokamak will be up and running by 2025 and fully operational by around 2035, that could be too late. Climate experts are now saying that the 12-year deadline the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave the world to turn climate change around may need to be shortened–to 18 months. Potsdam Climate Institute’s Hans Joachim Schellnhuber puts it simply: “The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020.”

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As Protests Intensify, Activist Leader Urges U.S. To Stop Selling Riot Gear To Hong Kong Police

A student activist who rose to fame during Hong Kong’s Umbrella movement 5 years ago says that the U.S. government should suspend its sales of riot gear to the city to prevent human rights abuses. Joshua Wong made the comments in a Tweet on Monday, as weeks long protests in Hong Kong intensify, according to Bloomberg. 

He attached photos to his Tweet on Monday showing riot police shooting at protesters and close ups of a tear gas canister that was manufactured in Homer City, Pennsylvania by NonLethal Technologies, Inc. He also tweeted out photos of rubber-bullet shells made by ALS, which is a subsidiary of Pacem Defense Co., based in Florida. 

“HK Riot Police fired bullet & tear gas directly at persons and indoor that made in US. I am calling US Gov for the suspension of crowd control equipment exports to HK, prevent human rights abuses,” he wrote. 

Later in the day he also tweeted out gruesome injuries sustained by protesters, allegedly from “tear gas made in U.S. unleashed by HK riot police”. 

He said in an interview that he tweeted the photos not specifically to target the two companies, but because it appeared that they were being used in Hong Kong for the first time last weekend. 

Wong said: “One year ago, who would have imagined the police in Hong Kong would attack ordinary citizens with such extreme force? Governments and companies should not allow the police to use their equipment to harm ordinary citizens and peaceful protesters.”

The attention from the prominent activist could put pressure on the U.S. businesses as the protests move into their ninth straight weekend. Injuries have been reported among demonstrators and police. Other companies, like Cartier-owner Richemont and Television Broadcasts Ltd. have also been subject to fallout from the unrest in Hong Kong, which has cause some store closures and put companies under the microscope for criticism on social media. 

Wong’s tweet also included a link to a petition he created directed at the White House for the same purpose. As of writing, the petition had over 75,000 signatures of the 100,000 necessary to get a response from the White House. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/319cVUp Tyler Durden

Cui Bono? RussiaGate As Organized Distraction

Authored by Oliver Boyd-Barrett via ConsortiumNews.com,

For over two years RussiaGate has accounted for a substantial proportion of all mainstream U.S. media political journalism and, because U.S. media have significant agenda-setting propulsion, of global media coverage as well. The timing has been catastrophic. The Trump administration has shredded environmental protections,jettisoned nuclear agreements, exacerbated tensions with U.S. rivals and pandered to the rich.

In place of sustained media attention to the end of the human species from global warming, its even more imminent demise in nuclear warfare, or the further evisceration of democratic discourse in a society riven by historically unprecedented wealth inequalities and unbridled capitalistic greed, corporate media suffocate their publics with a puerile narrative of alleged collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia.

MSNBC news host Rachel Maddow schooling viewers.

The RussiaGate discourse is profoundly mendacious and hypocritical. It presumes that the U.S. electoral system enjoys a high degree of public trust and security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The U.S. democratic system is deeply entrenched in a dystopian two-party system dominated  by the rich and largely answerable to corporate oligopolies; it is ideologically beholden to the values of extreme capitalism and imperialist domination. Problems with the U.S. electoral system and media are extensive and well documented.

U.S. electoral procedures are profoundly compromised by an Electoral College that detaches votes counted from votes that count. The composition of electoral districts has been gerrymandered to minimize the possibility of electoral surprises. Voting is dependent on easily hackable corporate-manufactured electronic voting systems. Right-wing administrations reach into a tool-box of voter-suppression tactics that run the gamut from minimizing available voting centers and voting machines through to excessive voter identification requirements and the elimination of swathes of the voting lists (e.g. groups such as people who have committed felonies or people whose names are similar to those of felons, or people who have not voted in previous elections). Even the results of campaigns are corrupted when outgoing regimes abuse their remaining weeks in power to push through regulations or legislation that will scuttle the efforts of their successors. Democratic theory presupposes the formal equivalence of voice in the battlefield of ideas. Nothing could be further from the reality of the U.S. “democratic” system in which a small number of powerful interests enjoy ear-splitting megaphonic advantage on the basis of often anonymous “dark” money donations filtered through SuperPacs and their ilk, operating outside the confines of (the somewhat more transparently monitored) electoral campaigns.

Free and Open Exchange of Ideas

Regarding media, democratic theory presupposes a public communications infrastructure that facilitates the free and open exchange of ideas. No such infrastructure exists.  Mainstream media are owned and controlled by a small number of large, multi-media and multi-industrial conglomerates that lie at the very heart of U.S. oligopoly capitalism and much of whose advertising revenue and content is furnished from other conglomerates.

The inability of mainstream media to sustain an information environment that can encompass histories, perspectives and vocabularies that are free of the shackles of U.S. plutocratic self-regard is also well documented. Recent U.S. media coverage of the U.S.-gestated crisis in Venezuela is a case in point.

(Book Catalog/Flickr)

The much-celebrated revolutionary potential of social media is illusory. The principal suppliers of social media architecture are even more corporatized than their legacy predecessors. They depend not just on corporate advertising but on the sale of big data that they pilfer from users and sell to corporate and political propagandists often for non-transparent AI-assisted micro-targeting during “persuasion” campaigns. Like their legacy counterparts, social media are imbricated within, collaborate with, and are vulnerable to the machinations of the military-industry-surveillance establishment. So-called election meddling across the world has been an outstanding feature of the exploitation of social and legacy media by companies linked to political, defense and intelligence such as – but by no means limited to – the former Cambridge Analytica and its British parent SCL.

Against this backdrop of electoral and media failures, it makes little sense to elevate discussion of and attention to the alleged social media activities of, say, Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Russian Contacts Deplored

Trump and Putin at a working lunch, July 16, 2018 (White House/ Shealah Craighead)

Attention is being directed away from substantial, and substantiated, problems and onto trivial, and unsubstantiated, problems. Moreover, in a climate of manufactured McCarthyite hysteria, RussiaGate further presupposes that any communication between a presidential campaign and Russia is in itself deplorable. Even if one were to confine this conversation only to communication between ruling oligarchs of both the U.S. and Russia, however, the opposite would surely be the case. This is not simply because of the benefits that accrue from a broader understanding of the world, identification of shared interests and opportunities, and their promise for peaceful relations. A real politick analysis might advise the insertion of wedges between China and Russia so as to head off the perceived threat to the USA of a hybrid big-power control over a region of the world that has long been considered indispensable for truly global hegemony.

Even if we address RussiaGate as a problem worthy of our attention, the evidentiary basis for the major claims is weak. 

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments and investigations implicated several individuals for activities that in some cases have no connection whatsoever to the 2016 presidential campaign.  In some other instances they appear to have been more about lies and obstructions to his investigation rather than material illegal acts, or amount to charges that are unlikely ever to be contested in a court of law.

Robert Mueller at July 24, 2019, congressional hearing.

The investigation itself is traceable back to two significant but extremely problematic reports made public in January 2017.

One was the “Steele dossier” by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. This is principally of interest for its largely unsupported allegations that in some sense or another Trump was in cahoots with Russia. Steele’s company, Orbis, was commissioned to write the report by Fusion GPS which in turn was contracted by attorneys working for the Democratic National Campaign. Passage of earlier drafts of the Steele report through sources close to British intelligence, and accounts by Trump adviser George Papadopoulos concerning conversations he had concerning possible Russian possession of Clinton emails with a character who may as likely have been a British as a Russian spy, were instrumental in stimulating FBI interest in and spying on the Trump campaign.

There are indirect links between Steele, another former MI6 agent, Pablo Miller (who also worked for Orbis) and Sergei Skripal, a Russian agent who had been recruited as informer to MI6 by Miller and who was the target of an attempted assassination in 2018. This event has occasioned controversial, not to say highly implausible and mischievous British government claims and accusations against Russia.

The  most significant matter raised by a second report, issued by the Intelligence Community Assessment and representing the conclusions of a small team picked from the Director of Intelligence office, CIA, FBI and NSA, was its claim that Russian intelligence was responsible for the hacking of the computer systems of the DNC and its chairman John Podesta in summer 2016 and that the hacked documents had been passed to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. No evidence for this was supplied.

Although the hacking allegations have become largely uncontested articles of faith in the RussiaGate discourse they are significantly reliant on the problematic findings of a small private company hired by the DNC. There is also robust evidence that the documents may have been leaked rather than hacked and by U.S.-based sources. The fact that the documents revealed that the DNC, a supposedly neutral agent in the primary campaign, had in fact been biased in favor of the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, and that Clinton’s private statements to industry were not in keeping with her public positions, has long been obscured in media memory in favor a preferred narrative of Russian villainy.

Who Benefits?

Why then does the RussiaGate discourse have so much traction? Who benefits?

RussiaGate serves the interest of a (No. 1) corrupted Democratic Party, whose biased and arguably incompetent campaign management lost it the 2016 election, in alliance (No. 2) with powerful factions of the U.S. industrial-military-surveillance establishment that for the past 19 years, through NATO and other malleable international agencies, has sought to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s leadership, dismember Russia and the Russian Federation (undoubtedly for the benefit of Western capital) and, more latterly, further contain China in a perpetual and titanic struggle for the heart of EurAsia.

In so far as Trump had indicated (for whatever reasons) in the course of his campaign that he disagreed with at least some aspects of this long-term strategy, he came to be viewed as unreliable by the U.S. security state.

While serving the immediate purpose of containing Trump, U.S. accusations of Russian meddling in U.S. elections were farcical in the context of a well-chronicled history of U.S. “meddling” in the elections and politics of nations for over 100 years. This meddling across all hemispheres has included the staging of coups, invasions and occupations on false pretext in addition to numerous instances of “color revolution” strategies involving the financing of opposition parties and provoking uprisings, frequently coupled with economic warfare (sanctions).

A further beneficiary (No.3) is the sum of all those interests that favor a narrowing of public expression to a framework supportive of neoliberal imperialism. Paradoxically exploiting the moral panic associated with both Trump’s plaintive wailing about “fake news” whenever mainstream media coverage is critical of him, and social media embarrassment over exposure of their big-data sales to powerful corporate customers, these interests have called for more regulation of, as well as self-censorship by, social media.

Social media responses increasingly involve more restrictive algorithms and what are often partisan “fact-checkers” (illustrated by Facebook financial support for and dependence on the pro-NATO “think tank,” the Atlantic Council). The net impact has been devastating for many information organizations in the arena of social media whose only “sin” is analysis and opinion that runs counter to elite neoliberal propaganda.

The standard justification of such attacks on free expression is to insinuate ties to Russia and/or to terrorism. Given these heavy handed and censorious responses by powerful actors, it would appear perhaps that the RussiaGate narrative is increasingly implausible to many and the only hope now for its proponents is to stifle questioning. These are dark days indeed for democracy.

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Capital One Admits Massive Data Breach: 100 Million Americans Affected, Seattle Woman Arrested

Just a few short days after the Equifax data breach settlement – which affected 147 million Americans – Capital One Financial has just issued a statement confirming that on July 19th 2019, there was unauthorized access by an outside individual who obtained certain types of personal information relating to people who had applied for its credit card products and to Capital One credit card customers.

Based on their analysis, this event affected approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and approximately 6 million in Canada.

“While I am grateful that the perpetrator has been caught, I am deeply sorry for what has happened,” said Richard D. Fairbank, Chairman and CEO.

“I sincerely apologize for the understandable worry this incident must be causing those affected and I am committed to making it right.”

As The Washington Post reports, The FBI has arrested Paige A. Thompson, a Seattle area woman, on a charge of computer fraud and abuse, court records say. Thompson, who authorities say used the name “erratic” in online conversations, is suspected of “exfiltrating and stealing information, including credit card applications and other documents, from Capital One,” according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court. She was ordered to remain in jail pending a detention hearing scheduled for Thursday, according to court records.

It is unusual in a major hacking case for a suspect to be apprehended so quickly, and in this case, that was apparently due to boasts made online. In one online posting, “erratic” wrote:

“I’ve basically strapped myself with a bomb vest, [expletive] dropping capitol ones dox and admitting it,” according to the complaint.

The Capital One press release concludes:

We will notify affected individuals through a variety of channels. We will make free credit monitoring and identity protection available to everyone affected.

Safeguarding our customers’ information is essential to our mission and our role as a financial institution. We have invested heavily in cybersecurity and will continue to do so. We will incorporate the learnings from this incident to further strengthen our cyber defenses.

We are very thankful to the FBI’s Seattle Field Office and Special Agent Joel Martini, to U.S. Attorney Brian T. Moran, and to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Steven Masada and Andrew Friedman of the Western District of Washington for the speed with which they responded to this incident and apprehended the responsible party.

For more information about this incident and what Capital One is doing to respond, visit www.capitalone.com/facts2019. In Canada, information can be found at www.capitalone.ca/facts2019 and www.capitalone.ca/facts2019/fr. The investigation is ongoing and analysis is subject to change. As we learn more, we will update these websites to provide additional information.

Bloomberg reports that in court on Monday, Thompson broke down and laid her head down on the defense table during the hearing. She is charged with a single count of computer fraud and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

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After Rand Paul Offers To Buy Ticket To Somalia, Ilhan Omar Supports Violent Attack

Days after Sen. Rand Paul offered to buy “ungrateful” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) a ticket to Somalia to gain some perspective, the far-left Congresswoman appeared to advocate violence against the Kentucky Republican. 

On Monday, Omar retweeted Tom Arnold – who sympathized with Paul’s neighbor, who broke six of the Senator’s ribs in a violent 2017 attack over a longstanding landscaping dispute. The neighbor, Rene Boucher of Bowling Green, KY, spent 30 days in jail and was ordered to pay Paul $580,000.

“Imagine being Rand Paul’s next door neighbor and having to deal with @RandPaul lying cowardly circular whiney bullcrap about lawn clippings,” tweeted Arnold, adding. “No wonder he ripped his toupee off.” 

Rep. Omar – the subject of a recent ethics complaint alleging immigration, tax and student loan fraud – retweeted Arnold. 

In an interview with Breitbart published last Wednesday, Paul responded to a series July 14 tweets by President Trump slamming Omar and other “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen for being anti-American. 

“I’ve met people who have come here from behind the Iron Curtain,”Paul said. “They got away from communism, they’re some of the best Americans we have, because they really appreciate how great our country is, and then I hear Representative Omar say America is a terrible place,” said Paul. “Well, she came here and we fed her, we clothed her, she got welfare, she got [schooling], she got healthcare, and then, lo and behold, she has the honor of actually winning a seat in Congress, and she says we’re a terrible country? I think that’s about as ungrateful as you can get.” 

“And so — I’m willing to contribute to buy her a ticket to go visit Somalia,” Paul continued, adding “and I think she can look and maybe learn a little bit about the disaster that is Somalia — that has no capitalism, has no God-given rights guaranteed in a constitution, and has about seven different tribes that have been fighting each other for the last 40 years.”

“And then maybe after she’s visited Somalia for a while, she might come back and appreciate America more.”

Or, she might support a violent attack on a political enemy. 

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If I Were A Corporate Shill…

Authored by Bradley Thomas via The Mises Institute,

If I were a corporate shill, there are many policies I would favor.

For starters, I would strongly advocate for a highly interventionist government. Most government regulations and restrictions work to limit competition and create higher barriers to entry for potential entrants. If I were being paid to lobby for big corporations, mountains of bureaucratic red tape would be a surefire way to gain an advantage over the smaller or upstart competitors.

Large, established firms can typically better absorb the additional compliance costs, as they are more likely to have existing legal departments. Smaller firms would struggle to afford these additional costs, while potential startups would be strongly discouraged by the heavy burden.

Take, for instance, the Dodd-Frank bill enacted after the financial collapse of 2008. The bill was sold as imposing restrictions on Wall Street, but the end result was a chilling effect on smaller community banks. Leading up to the crisis, about 100 new banks were chartered every year. But after Dodd-Frank, only three opened from 2010 to 2015.

A big, regulatory state often means that big business wins.

If I were a corporate shill, I would support government subsidies to business. One of the most significant federal subsidies goes to agriculture, with the biggest recipients not being the family farm, but large agribusiness firms.

Moreover, when you combine a highly interventionist government along with a program of corporate subsidies, the environment is suitable for cronyism. With politicians indicating they favor a system of political privileges and handouts, the conditions are ripe for patronage. The firms with the best lobbyists will leverage their clout for favoritism, gaining competitive advantages over their less-influential rivals.

If I were a corporate shill, I would support rather than oppose the US military’s never-ending wars. The military industrial complex is real, and profits handsomely from every overseas venture sold as “protecting our freedoms,” or “fighting terrorism.”

I would also support international trade restrictions, such as heavy tariffs. The one caveat, however, to this position would be that my support would be targeted to those protectionist measures that benefited the industry I am shilling for. Behind every protective tariff is a well-paid corporate lobbyist who successfully convinced enough politicians to protect their industry at the expense of many others.

Unfettered free international trade would definitely not be on the wish list for a corporate shill.

If I were a corporate shill, I would support minimum wage legislation and the “Fight for 15.”

Surprised?

Just imagine how incumbent corporations could benefit from a law mandating wages that most of their competitors can’t afford to pay for a significant part of its work force. As a corporate shill, my paymasters would be able to afford the higher wages, they may even already pay all their workers more than $15 an hour.

And for those jobs that don’t warrant paying workers $15 an hour, my corporate allies would be able to afford to mechanize the necessary tasks. Smaller, less profitable firms would be crushed by this burden, enabling the incumbent corporate firms to seize a greater slice of the market share. And potential startups would have to re-evaluate their potential profit projections with the higher labor expenses, causing many startup plans to be canceled. All the better to insulate the reigning corporations from competition.

If I were a corporate shill, I’d support massive government light rail projects. Typical light rail projects mean billions in construction contracts — often times to politically connected firms. Government contracts don’t come with the same pressure as production for market consumers, if costs run over projections, who cares? There’s no profit and loss test for government projects.

Corporate developers also love light rail projects because they can make a killing on projects along the line, as the presence of the line significantly increases the value of that suddenly prime real estate.

In sum, if I were a corporate shill, the last thing I would advocate for would be a laissez-faire, free market economy.

Free market libertarians regularly get accused by political opponents of wanting to empower corporations. But statist interventions are what empower corporations via cronyism and political privileges and protections from competition, interventions that Libertarians consistently oppose.

Accusing free-market advocates of being corporate shills is as absurd as it is lazy.

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Venezuela Ready For War Against Likely US Invasion, Warns Socialist Party No. 2

Venezuelan Socialist Party Vice President Diosdado Cabello on Saturday said US Marines would “likely” invade the country, Reuters reported.

“We are few, a small country, we are very humble, and here it is likely that the US Marines enter. It is likely that they enter,” Cabello told the 25th Sao Paulo Forum in Caracas.

“Their problem will be getting out of Venezuela,” he warned.

Cabello’s prediction of war came after a US spy plane violated the country’s airspace, the third violation in July, which the Maduro regime called a “clear offensive” against the South American country.

“Once more US spy planes are unduly entering the Flight Information Region (FIR) under our country’s jurisdiction, violating aviation security and international treaties,” a note from National Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela read.

Cabello told lawmakers at the forum that “we are ready these days, and we say that without arrogance, but if they want it, they can have it – a total war of all our people in defense of our country and our peace.”

He said, “it is probable that US marines” will invade Venezuela, noting that if American troops should invade, “their problem will be to leave.”

Cabello described parallels between an inevitable US invasion of Venezuela and the War of Independence that liberated the South American country from Spain 200 years ago. He said, “Here, 200 years ago, we got rid of the most powerful empire of that time, and we weren’t nearly as prepared or as united.”

US-Venezuela tensions have risen in 2019 thanks to Juan Guaido, leader of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, became interim president in January, claiming President Nicolas Maduro’s 2018 re-election was unconstitutional.

Washington and most Western democracies have acknowledged Guaido as President. The interventionist Trump administration has said it will continue sanctioning President Maduro until he leaves office. President Trump hasn’t ruled out war with the country.

President Maduro said in March, “American imperialists want to kill me. We just exposed the plan that the devil’s puppet [Juan Guaido] personally directed to kill me,” adding that “Assassins and paramilitaries have been recruited using large amounts of money so that they can be sent to Colombia to receive training.”

In February, President Maduro told journalist Jordi Évole in a television interview, that President Trump is making “mistakes that will leave his hands covered in blood and will leave his presidency stained with blood.” He said: “Why would you want a repeat of Vietnam?”

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Johnstone: What Progressives Hopefully Learned From Russiagate

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

The Robert Mueller hearing on Tuesday was widely regarded as a humiliating disaster, not just by critics of the establishment Russia narrative, but by mainstream Democratic pundits. We haven’t seen a US official look so befuddled and disorganized during a congressional hearing since that time John McCain started babbling gibberish at James Comey, and he had a tumor eating his brain.

“A frail old man, unable to remember things, stumbling, refusing to answer basic questions,” tweeted liberal documentary filmmaker Michael Moore after the circus had ended. “I said it in 2017 and Mueller confirmed it today — All you pundits and moderates and lame Dems who told the public to put their faith in the esteemed Robert Mueller — just STFU from now on.”

“Much as I hate to say it, this morning’s hearing was a disaster,” tweetedvirulent Russiagater Laurence Tribe. “Far from breathing life into his damning report, the tired Robert Mueller sucked the life out of it. The effort to save democracy and the rule of law from this lawless president has been set back, not advanced.”

“On the optics, this was a disaster,” summarized NBC’s Chuck Todd.

As you’d expect, this widespread sentiment is shared by Trump himself, who told reporters after the hearing that “We had a very good day today.”

It is entirely possible that the Democrats and their allied media outlets handed Trump a re-election in 2020 with their nonstop fixation on a fact-free conspiracy theory that was doomed to failure, and many progressives have been pointing this out.

“This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up,” former MSNBC host Kristal Ball said after the hearing. “Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don’t know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about? Healthcare, wages, the teachers’ movement, whether we’re going to war with Iran?”

“It’s a self-soothing fantasy that makes people like Hillary Clinton and her allies feel better, but in reality all of this stood to help Trump, which is why from the very beginning I thought that this was such a disaster,” journalist Aaron Maté told CGTN America’s The Heat regarding the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

“It’s great to see more leftists & liberals recognizing that channelling the anti-Trump Resistance into a stupid conspiracy theory was a massive mistake, but for next time: let’s try harder to voice that when it’s actually happening for 2+ years, not after it finally collapses,” tweeted Maté, whose unparalleled reporting on the gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative won him an Izzy Award earlier this year.

Maté can reasonably be described as today’s leading authority on the Russiagate narrative and the arguments for and against it, and he is right not to only single out liberals in his criticism. It is true that there have been plenty of leftists and progressives who’ve continuously opposed Russiagate right from the get go, at least in part for the reasons Maté offers, but it is also true that it wasn’t just liberals who got lost in the conspiratorial haze of Trump-Russia hysteria.

I always get people on the left arguing with me about this, but it’s true. Being involved in progressive circles in 2017 was like watching a zombie apocalypse, with more and more leftists and Berners contracting the mind virus with every shrieking “bombshell” mass media Russiagate report. Maybe in your own small circle you didn’t see anyone succumb to the zombie outbreak, but everyone who interacted with a large and diverse cross-section of America’s true left in early-to-mid 2017 knows exactly what I’m talking about. Not everyone hopped on the Russiagate bandwagon, but many did, likely due in no small part to the fact that Bernie Sanders himself was continuously and forcefully pushing the collusion narrative on American progressives.

But it wasn’t even that they all necessarily bought into the propaganda. When Russiagate first started I pushed back against it hard on social media, especially on Facebook, and during that time I had a few Bernie people (who comprised a majority of my audience back then) admit to me that they knew the Russia stuff was probably fake, but they were helping to push it in the hope that it could hurt Trump. They didn’t honestly believe he’d get removed from office for Russian collusion, but they hoped that pushing for an investigation would help turn up impeachable evidence of corruption, or at least cause him political damage.

What do such people have to show for that strategy now? A new cold war reignited by a president who has been able to escalate world-threatening tensions against Russia with no resistance from his ostensible opposition whatsoever, and a 2020 election that now looks orders of magnitude harder to win than it ever should have been.

There are a couple of lessons that I hope progressives have learned from all this.

Firstly, I hope progressives have learned that we’re never going to manipulate our way into progressive reform. Truth is the one and only weapon we have. Trying to use a deceitful narrative to manipulate toward a desired end is something establishment loyalists do, but if progressives try it it will bite us in the ass every single time. If we try to manipulate the establishment away, we’re pitting our fledgling manipulation skills against manipulators who have generations of mastery in that field under their belt. You’re never, ever going to manipulate desired ends out of an establishment that is teeming with master manipulators. Truth is the only way.

Secondly, I hope that progressives are beginning to see that you can’t collaborate with the establishment to defeat the establishment. The oligarchic empire isn’t going to cooperate in its own destruction. Believing that you were going to be able to use an empire lackey like Robert “Iraq has WMDs” Mueller to bring the Executive Branch of the US empire to its knees was very foolish. If there’s any strength left in what remains of America’s progressive movement to effect real change, that change will come solely from grassroots populism, and it will be met with extremely forceful opposition from the Democratic establishment. If what you’re doing isn’t giving Nancy Pelosi literal night terrors, it’s worthless.

The establishment narrative managers are not done trying to herd America’s political left back into the establishment fold. New attempts to manipulate the mind of the American progressive are being workshopped currently, and they will likely be more subtle and devious than Russiagate was. Here’s hoping progressives learn their lesson and grow from it enough to prevent the next manipulation from succeeding.

*  *  *

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