Tag: news

Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.org,

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In George Orwell’s day — the 1930s — that’s what supporters of violent, Marxist revolution often said in justification.

Orwell, the stunningly prescient author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, had a simple response: “Where’s the omelet?”

An honest look at the omelet offered by Black Lives Matter is long overdue, particularly for BLM Chicago.

What do they want? Do its supporters and apologists know?

Where’s their omelet?

BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullers

In an interview about Black Lives Matter, its national co-founder Patrisse Cullors said, “We actually do have an ideological frame. “Myself and Alicia [Alicia Garza, another co-founder] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”

Chicago BLMers are likewise trained.

Watch the video meeting they hosted last week titled, “Black Abolitionist Huddle: On How We Win Police Abolition.” You will see that many of them are very fluent with Marxist rhetoric, particularly the modern version focused on toppling “late stage capitalism.”

On Twitter, BLM Chicago said this, which you could imagine coming from a reincarnated, woke, twenty-something Vladimir Lenin:

Stay in the streets! The system is throwing every diversionary and de-mobilizing tactic at us. We are fighting to end policing and prisons as a system which necessitates fighting white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchial imperialism. Vet your comrades and stay focused.

That BLM Chicago video and its other statements should also put to bed lingering spin that its demand to defund police actually means just reimagining how policing works and partial redirection of resources.

They mean abolish the police. That’s their word for it.

Abolish prisons, too. Here’s their separate post on that.

Don’t stop there. The entire Department of Corrections must end. On Twitter, BLM Chicago said,

We say #DefundThePolice and #DefundDepOfCorrections because they work in tandem. The rise of mass incarceration occurred alongside the rise of militarized and mass policing. They must be abolished as a system.

What they don’t say is perhaps more important than what they say. There’s no condemnation of violence. With BLM graffiti covering so much of Chicago, there’s no doubt many members and supporters participated in the vandalism.

BLM’s evolution with Marxism was described nicely by The Federalist in 2016, which showed how parts of BLM’s platform read like they were lifted straight from the pages of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto. BLM faded in popularity around then and politicians began to shy away from mentioning it, mostly because of its controversial positions like that.

BLM nevertheless became mainstream just in the past couple months. It’s easy to find BLM yard signs and seemingly reasonable people who have marched with BLMers or carried its signs.

I know some of the apologists and supporters, and you may, too. Some marched. Some are friends. They are peaceful and principled just like most protesters were, genuinely fed up with racial inequality and police misconduct.

But they, too, must answer Orwell’s question. Where’s the omelet?

More precisely, what is the omelet they think BLM hopes to serve up? Why the indifference to support for a violent, Marxist revolution and the anarchy of abolishing police and prisons?

The least charitable explanations are that they are just foolish or uninformed – unaware of what BLM is about.

Others understand fully and approve. Those explanations do account for some of BLM’s support.

A more charitable explanation probably covers most who embrace BLM, which is that they seek only to make a statement about police misconduct and racial justice, and they might point to some of BLM’s other deeds, like food banks.

“Black Lives Matter” is also just a phrase, they might say might say; never mind the organization. And the organization has many chapters that aren’t all singing the same tune. They might point to BLM’s own Facebook page that says, “This group is one of many iterations of #BlackLivesMatter: a movement, a rebellion, an affirmation, an intervention… and so much more.”

But that murkiness about phrasing, organization and diffused power is precisely what makes BLM dangerous. It allows peaceful protesters to be used as pawns who carry their signs and draw law enforcement away from rioters. It sucks in the well-intentioned but gullible, especially the young. Most importantly, its disbursed leadership and the vague distinction from an ambiguous phrase are the perfect cocktail for intoxicating society into the stupor essential for violent revolutions to succeed: chaos.

Let’s put that more bluntly: Well-intentioned BLM supporters are getting had. The majority of those either using the BLM phrase or supporting the organization are being used on behalf of a violent, chaotic insurrection.

They are also supporting, deliberately or not, the nonviolent but vicious mob now running unchallenged across America.

Though twice as many Americans and a majority of black Americans prefer the All Lives Matter phrase over Black Lives Matter, saying so can get you fired. Grant Napear,  a 32-year veteran TV voice of the Sacramento Kings, lost his job simply for saying, “All Lives Matter, every single one.”

Similar stories now fill the news.

The poll therefore only highlights the size of the potential purge by the mob.

Toppled statue of George Washington

Tear down a statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and spray it with BLM? No problem. The police stand aside. But questioning BLM will put your career and reputation at risk.

Don’t expect BLM supporters to answer Orwell’s question about the omelet they think they’ll get from breaking some eggs because they see questions, too, as racist.

If you want Orwell’s answer, here it is, from Nineteen Eighty-Four:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.

One thing BLM says should be universally accepted, though for different reasons. “Silence is violence,” they say.

Indeed it is.

If the two-thirds of Americans who believe all lives matter continue to remain silent, expect more violence from many causes.

• Racism will surge thanks to passions deliberately inflamed by identity politics.

• Poverty will soar as businesses flee Chicago and other big cities.

• Shrunken budgets and emptied prisons will overload police departments.

• The Ferguson effect will embolden thugs, initially, but bad apples in the police will later respond with a vengeance.

• And trained Marxists will pursue their dream of violent insurrection.

There’s your omelet.

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. announced Tuesday morning that it has decided to extend the suspension of most sailings through September 15. The announcement said Chinese sails are suspended through the end of July, and sailings on its Bermuda line won’t reopen until October 31. 

This comes days after Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) said most cruise lines would voluntarily extend the suspension of operations from US ports until September 15. 

With the risks of a second coronavirus wave emerging in the US, Royal Caribbean appears to be delaying the Bermuda line about 45 days after CLIA’s September 15 extension. If a full-blown virus pandemic is seen by fall, it would suggest the Bermuda segment could be offline for the remainder of the year. 

Royal Caribbean shares have jumped nearly 300% since the low (19.25) on March 18 to a high of 75.48 on June 8. Price has since slid  33% to the 52 handle on Tuesday – as it becomes evident, investors got way ahead of fundamentals. 

Since Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, the biggest cruise line bull on social media, told his 1.5 followers “cruise ships are poised for take-off again” – share price in Royal Caribbean initially popped on his tweet but has subsided to pre-tweet levels. 

Royal Caribbean has been a top favorite stock among Robinhood traders – account holders went from 4,000 at the start of March to nearly 240,000 on June 22. 

With no vaccine and the emergence of confirmed virus cases, the cruise industry will remain dead this year – any more extensions for the industry could be devastating, especially for equity holders, and likely result in a reverse of share price for many cruise ship stocks, which would leave a generation of millennial traders as bagholders. 

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Today’s the day.

Across the Land of the Free, and much of the world, local governments are finally starting to allow businesses to re-open and employees to come back to the office.

Offices in New York City opened this morning for the first time in months, after Comrade Mayor Bill de Blasio’s politburo finally approved the policy.

The Republic of CHAZ, formerly known as Seattle, was approved for ‘Phase II reopening’ on Friday, both by state health authorities as well as local warlords.

Other major cities and anarcho-communist enclaves around the world have been slowly re-opening over the past few weeks. And so far one key trend is obvious:

A lot of people aren’t showing up.

New York City’s major Wall Street banks, for example, are still keeping most people at home.

Goldman Sachs only expects 10% of its workforce back in the office, and those are all ‘volunteers’. Morgan Stanley has less than 10% of its workforce nationwide at the office.

Citigroup expects 5% of its workforce back in the office over the next few weeks, and JP Morgan isn’t requiring anyone to return to work right now.

Companies in a variety of other industries have taken a similar approach.

Microsoft, Disney, Twitter, Mastercard, Facebook, Nationwide Insurance, Google, Amazon, Square, CNN, Slack, Sales Force, PayPal, Shopify, and Apple are among countless others who have told employees they can keep working from home.

And many of those changes are permanent; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, for example, has said that potentially half of his company’s work force could end up working remotely forever.

Twitter and Square have told employees they can work from home “indefinitely”. Nationwide Insurance announced a permanent transition to working from home.

The CEO of banking giant Barclays called crowded offices with thousands of workers “a thing of the past”. Morgan Stanley’s CEO expects his bank to need “a lot less real estate” in the future. Disney’s chairman said his company will reopen “with less office space.”

This is a pretty obvious trend– there will continue to be a LOT of people working from home.

And if you can work from home, you can work just about anywhere within reason.

We talked about this briefly last week– I told you that I expect a massive trend in migration from high tax, high cost urban places to lower tax, lower cost suburban and rural places.

And the reasons are obvious.

Plenty of people have been miserably cooped up in shoebox-sized apartments for the past three months due to local lockdown restrictions. And now they’re finally realizing– ‘if I don’t need to go to the office anymore, I don’t need to be in this city anymore…’

Plus they’re wisely thinking about the future.

Sure, maybe medical researchers find the miracle drug to treat Covid-19. Or they develop a vaccine that Bill Gates will personally inject into each and every one of us at gunpoint.

But then what happens if Covid-20 hits? Or an antibiotic resistant superbug is unleashed upon the world?

Or people simply decide they don’t want to raise their children in a place where arson, vandalism, and looting are considered acts of heroism?

This is not a passing trend. It’s a way of life.

It’s unlikely that cities will become ghost towns… but people who understand what’s happening are really starting to consider new places to live.

The arithmetic is quite simple. Someone can trade a $5,000/month hamster cage in Manhattan for a 4,000+ square foot home with water views and a spacious yard in sunny Florida, and still have plenty of extra money left over… with the added benefit that Florida has no state income tax.

This logic makes five places very interesting for prospective migrants.

Texas, Florida, Nevada, and Tennessee are four states with warm weather, plenty of wide-open spaces, cheap living costs, access to big city amenities, and no state income tax.

We’ll talk about this a lot more in future letters because there’s a LOT to digest– from the decline of office property (WeWork has already started skipping some rent payments) to the ridiculously low mortgage rates available to investors.

But before we get to that, there’s a fifth place worth mentioning– and that’s right here in Puerto Rico.

Lately there’s been a surge of prospective residents who have arrived here over the past few weeks looking at property.

I live in a fairly high end, luxury resort, and most of the residents are investors and entrepreneurs. One of my neighbors, for example, is a prominent hedge fund manager, another is an acclaimed tech entrepreneur, and another is a former pro-athlete who built a highly successful sports business.

I’m fairly close with the executives in my development, and they told me there’s been a flood of people from the mainland (mostly from New York) who are trying to get out of Manhattan as quickly as possible.

And they’re looking very hard at Puerto Rico.

That’s because, in addition to the great weather and time zone (Puerto Rico is currently in the same time zone as New York), the tax incentives are unbeatable.

New Yorkers who move to Florida no longer have to pay city or state income tax. And that can easily save 10%.

But as we’ve discussed many times in the past, bona fide residents of Puerto Rico who meet certain conditions are exempt from US federal income tax as well.

Puerto Rico’s tax incentives can reduce your business profits tax to just 4%, and individual tax to ZERO… plus you can live on the beach and never be cold again.

*  *  *

On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.

In a dramatic opening nobody expected, President Trump told Axios in an Oval Office interview last Friday that he would “maybe think about” a face-to-face meeting with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro to discuss to future of the embattled Latin American country.

“I would maybe think about that… Maduro would like to meet. And I’m never opposed to meetings — you know, rarely opposed to meetings,” Trump said when pressed on the matter. “I always say, you lose very little with meetings. But at this moment, I’ve turned them down,” he added. 

Maduro responded Monday, saying he’s “prepared” to talk to Trump. “When the time comes I’m prepared to speak respectfully with President Donald Trump,” Maduro told state media.

This set off a political firestorm, with the Biden campaign seizing to moment to portray Trump as “weak” on Venezuela, targeting the Miami area with political ads to that effect. 

“News of President Donald Trump’s willingness to meet some day with embattled Venezuelan ruler Nicolás Maduro is coming to the AM radio dial in Miami. And to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube,” Miami Herald reports Tuesday. 

“We’ve known for some time that Donald Trump is no friend to the Venezuelan people fighting for human rights and democracy in their country, and now there can be no doubt,” the Biden campaign announced in a statement. “This is deeply personal to all those in South Florida who have fled to the United States from the brutal Maduro regime, and this November, Floridians are going to hold Trump accountable for his behavior toward the Venezuelan people and elect Joe Biden.”

Perhaps backtracking on the Axios interview, or at least sensing he needed to clarify based on the growing Biden campaign pressure in Florida, Trump tweeted Monday in follow-up: “My Admin has always stood on the side of FREEDOM and LIBERTY and against the oppressive Maduro regime! I would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power!“

Unlike the radical left, I will ALWAYS stand against socialism and with the people of Venezuela. My Admin has always stood on the side of FREEDOM and LIBERTY and against the oppressive Maduro regime! I would only meet with Maduro to discuss one thing: a peaceful exit from power!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2020

Of course, the admin does indeed have a record of covert coup attempts targeting the socialist country, not to mention bestowing official recognition on opposition leader Juan Guaido as ‘Interim President’.

Trump has also long discussed a naval blockade on the country to ensure no sanctions busting, however, his admirals and generals have reportedly balked, citing the practical difficulty of such an effort, not to mention the potential of getting dragged into a new war in America’s ‘backyard’ with little in the way of defined end goals.

But given the controversy over the possibility of a Trump-Maduro meeting, a remote scenario at this point, nothing is likely to materialize ahead of November, given the political sensitivity especially in the key battleground state of Florida.

As part of an escalating probe into anti-competitive and antitrust practices by Google, Reuters reports that DOJ officials and some state attorneys general are set to meet on Friday to discuss next steps. The federal government and nearly all state attorneys general have opened investigations into allegations that the company which once upon a time said its motto was “don’t be evil” has broken antitrust laws.

The federal probe focuses on search bias, advertising and management of Google’s Android operating system, according to the report.

Separately, in a letter sent Sunday to U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn on Tuesday said that Google and parent company, Alphabet, pose a “threat to a free and fair press in America.”

Addressing the Attorney General, Blackburn urges him “to thoroughly scrutinize how the company’s anticompetitive practices could lead to the crippling of journalistic freedom. I also ask that your probe examine abuses in both the online advertising and online search markets, and to take enforcement action swiftly before further economic harm results.“

The rest of the story is well known to everyone on this site:

Google leverages the power of its ad platform GoogleAds to harm consumers and competitors alike. Last week, Google took actions towards demonetizing two conservative news media organizations based on the sites’ third-party user comments. A NBC article incorrectly reported that The Federalist and ZeroHedge were being banned from the GoogleAds platform for publishing racist articles, and a Google representative claimed that the punishment was for the publication of “derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race.”1 In reality, the takedown pretext was based on user comments and not on news content. While The Federalist was allowed to remain on GoogleAds after suspending the user comment function, ZeroHedge’s entire site was blocked. Google knows it holds clients’ livelihoods in the palm of its hands, as publishers have no meaningful choice to generate ad revenue. Google has no qualms falsely labeling news publishers as racist as a convenient way to turn off their sites and scare writers from debating controversial ideas

Blackburn praised the DOJ for issuing a proposal last week to “roll back liability shields” for Google and other online platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. These reforms alone, however, won’t stop “Google’s encroachment on competitors and grip on public discourse,” Blackburn warned.

Google’s behavior could lead to the crippling of our free press.

Today I asked AG Barr @TheJusticeDept to examine abuses of online advertising & search markets, and to take action before further economic harm results. pic.twitter.com/TRJy9ZeaNT

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) June 22, 2020

“Google must be held accountable for such anticompetitive conduct. Both the American free market and the openness of our democracy are presently at stake,” she concluded her letter. “As the Department decides which actions to pursue, I urge mounting a full investigation that examines the company’s control over vast sectors of the Internet economy, from online advertising to online search.”

Her full letter is below (pdf link):

Authored by Matt Stoller,

There are five Senate-confirmed members of the Federal Reserve. It won’t surprise you to know that all five of them are millionaires. Here’s a list, with links to their financial disclosure forms. (If you have some time to poke around and find anything interesting, let me know or put it in the comments.)

• The Chair, Jay Powell, 67, is worth between $20 million and $55 million, the richest Fed Chair in history.

• Randal Quarles, 62, is worth between $24.7 million and $125 million.

• Richard H. Clarida, 63, is worth between $9 million and $39 million.

• Michelle Bowman, 49, is worth between $2 million and $11 million.

• Lael Brainaird, 58, is worth between $3 million and $11 million.

I’ve gone over the financial disclosure forms of all five of these members, and they are all invested in various forms of indexes. Some are invested in private equity funds, Blackrock iShares, or various other assets referencing financial corporations. These strike me as a violation of Section 10, part 5 of the Federal Reserve Act, which says:

No member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System shall be an officer or director of any bank, banking institution, trust company, or Federal Reserve bank or hold stock in any bank, banking institution, or trust company;

It’s been decades since anyone took conflicts of interest seriously, and I suspect that the Fed has lawyers who can weasel their way into ensuring that Fed board members get to invest in the financial services industry without violating this law. But the statute is there for a reason, which is that the Fed was created in 1913 to take power from Wall Street banks, not to place them on a publicly sanctioned monetary throne. (The original House passed version of the Federal Reserve Act had the Secretary of Agriculture as a Fed Governor, because farmers were the main labor force and borrowing group in the economy back then.)

There’s a more fundamental problem with the arrangement of having an all-millionaire Fed board, aside from any pecuniary gain that might result from all members of the Fed having public positions in which their policy decisions affect their portfolios in similar ways. The Fed is supposed to manage lending and borrowing conditions, but the only people represented among decision-makers are lenders, as opposed to a balance of lenders and borrowers.

America is full of people with credit card debt, student debt, auto debt and medical debt, people who have had trouble getting jobs, or people with bad credit, or entrepreneurs who can’t get loans to build their businesses. Young people. Old people. Middle-aged people, of different races. Yet the Fed board is composed of those with graduate degrees and high net worths, most of whom are in their late 50s or early 60s in terms of age.

In other words, based on their asset ownership and educational credentials alone, no one on the Fed is in touch with the world in which most Americans live. My analysis actually understates the problem, because there are members of the key policy committee at the Fed, known as the Federal Open Markets Committee, that aren’t even appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, but are hired by regional bankers to run Fed branches. (I’m not kidding. It was actually a brief flashpoint during the debate over post-financial crisis legislation, whether bankers could continue to hire their own regulators. Barney Frank’s compromise was that they could.)

This lack of representation has serious consequences. In 2017, I reported on how key Fed policymakers mocked unemployed Americans behind closed doors, laughing at and making jokes about them as lazy drug addicts. People didn’t want jobs, according to several officials, one of whom based his commentary on what his wife had told him about her charity work.

These rigid members had to debate Fed board member Sarah Bloom Raskin, who had gone, undercover, to a job fair, to see how employment conditions were on the ground. She was shocked at the poor quality of job offerings, despite what appeared to be a solid economy. Raskin’s undercover attendance at a job fair caused a bit of a stir, because it was a violation of decorum; Fed members simply don’t do such things. Her view, unsurprisingly, was that the Fed should see unemployment as a function of the bad economy, not poor work ethic. I don’t know if anyone on the FOMC has gone to a job fair since Raskin did. But the stack of old millionaires on the board suggests there’s a serious imbalance in terms of representation; there are more private equity barons on the Fed board than people with student debt.

One of the main policy problems in America is that political elites seem to over-prioritize the stock market. It’s not just an inequality problem, but even broader than that. For instance, no one in power really took the Coronavirus seriously until the market started tanking in March. One of the main reasons for this is that policymaking increasingly flows through the Federal Reserve, and the people who run the place have social networks and portfolios that are dependent on how Wall Street is doing, not how the rest of America is.

Anyway, one of my dream pieces of legislation would be a law that reserves half of the slots on the Federal Reserve board for non-millionaires. I know such a law seems gimmicky, but representation really does matter. At least one person on the Fed board should know what it’s like to be harassed by a debt collector, instead of owning financial assets whose value depends on the people doing the harassing.

China, on Tuesday, successfully launched the final satellite in its BeiDou-3 navigation system, further cementing its ability to ditch the use of the US government-owned Global Positioning System (GPS). 

State broadcaster CCTV tweeted a video of the launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, in southwestern Sichuan province, showed a Long March-3B carrier rocket in the distance blasting off from a pad with a payload ontop. 

China announced that the launch of the last #satellite of #BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has succeeded after the Long March-3B carrier rocket sent it to its designated orbit.https://t.co/uzyBnnNA95 https://t.co/FN5fH2OCmW pic.twitter.com/A5AB0U6iMD

— CCTV+ (@CCTV_Plus) June 23, 2020

The launch of the Beidou-3GEO3 satellite is a $10 billion project comprised of 35 satellites and provides a geolocation system designed to rival GPS. China began construction of its global navigation system in the early 1990s for transportation, marine, and military vehicles. 

“I think the Beidou-3 system being operational is a big event,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told AFP.

“This is a big investment from China and makes China independent of US and European systems,” McDowell said.

Tens of millions of smartphones to drones to guided farm equipment to vessels to automated cars to even missiles can now use the new location service.  

Chinese state media said 120 countries, including many along the Belt and Road Initiative, are using Beidou’s location service. 

The launch of the final satellite, along with the completion of the geolocation system to revival GPS, comes at a time when tensions between Beijing and Washington are increasing over the pandemic, trade, and Hong Kong.