Twitter has written “shadow banning” aka, censorship, into their new terms. The platform will now intentionally “limit the visibility” of some users. Expect those who dissent from the official narrative to be the ones censored.
Critics have accused Twitter of censorship for quite some time now. But this time, it’s official. The company has admitted they will attempt to silence those critical of the ruling class. According to RT, the news terms will be taking effect in January of 2020. While the new terms don’t look like much to write home about, some tweaks to the language could have larger repercussions for users, limiting their reach behind the scenes without their knowledge.
Last year, when I spoke to Twitter reps, they lied and gaslight us about their targeted manipulation of people’s tweets. Now it’s in their new TOS. https://t.co/dti7FSd1v6 nu, @RubinReport, we’re waiting for an alternative pic.twitter.com/W2LBYma3lU
“We may also remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services, limit distribution or visibilityof any Content on the service, suspend or terminate users, and reclaim usernames without liability to you,” the new terms state.
The social media giant is telling users that it reserves the right shadow ban or “throttle” or censor certain accounts. And it is not clear on what basis will it make those decisions, although we guess (based on their past which is rife with censorship) that accounts that aren’t parroting the government’s official narrative will be on the list.
While Twitter has previously insisted point-blank “we do not shadow ban,”in the pre-2020 terms the company split hairs between shadow banning and “ranking” posts to determine their prominence on the site, and acknowledged deliberately down-ranking “bad-faith actors” to limit their visibility.
In January 2018, conservative media watchdog group Project Veritas published footage showing Abhinov Vadrevu, a former Twitter software engineer, discussing shadow banning as a “strategy” the company was at least considering, if not already using. “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned because they keep posting and no one sees their content,” Vadrevu said. “So they just think that no one is engaging with their content when in reality, no one is seeing it.”
The new terms will make shadow bans an official policy, all but guaranteeing continued cries of bias and censorship from the platform’s many critics will be silenced.
Russia Ready To Extend New START Arms Pact “Without Preconditions” By Year-End: Putin
Since the recent collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, the world has witnessed a hardening of positions on the part of the US, Moscow, and some European powers, also as the ‘Open Skies’ treaty is on the White House chopping block. And it goes without saying that these treaties are designed to prevent the kind of Cold War arms race which nearly took the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, thus many analysts fear once removed there’s no putting the lid of a major arms race back on. New START, which is the landmark nuclear arms reduction treaty signed by the two superpowers in 1991 and took effect in 1994, isset to expire in February 2021, which would be a mere weeks after the next presidential inauguration.
A little over a month ago the Russian Foreign Ministry declared of the potentially soon to be expired pact: “The ball is now in the Americans’ court”; however, on Thursday Putin made a significant overture and is apparently holding out an open hand, lest this final major arms reduction treaty joints the dust bin of history like the INF.
“Russia is ready to immediately, as soon as possible, before the end of the year, extend the New START treaty without any preconditions, so that there would be no double, triple interpretation of our position later. I’m saying this officially,” the Russian president pointed declared according to Interfax.
Image source: DPA/DW.com
Addressing a Russian defense meeting, he explained further that he hopes to avoid a new arms race with the United States, and vowed to in good faith refrain from deploying intermediate and shorter range missiles there where there are none.
“Russia is not interested in triggering an arms race or deploying missiles where there are none,” Putin said. He also invited the US and European countries to join a Russian proposed moratorium on such new deployments and weapons. So far only France has greeted the proposal positively. Indicating the offer is conditional, he warned, “No reaction from other partners followed. This forces us to take measures to resist the aforesaid threats.”
He also took Washington to task for prematurely quitting the INF while attempting to falsely place blame on Russia for being in violation for years. “There is nothing to support this stance. Nevertheless, such attempts are being made,” he concluded, in statements reported by TASS.
Some analysts in the West agree with him. As The American Conservative’s Daniel Larison recently observed, “Refusing to renew the treaty is the same as killing it, and the US will be to blame for the collapse of the last limits on the biggest nuclear arsenals on earth.”
It’s becoming more and more apparent that the United States will not be going back to “business as usual” after Donald Trump leaves office, and it is easy to imagine that the anti-Trump parties will use their return to power as an opportunity to settle scores against the hated rubes and “deplorables” who dared attempt to oppose their betters in Washington, DC, California, and New York.
Certainly, this ongoing conflict will manifest itself in the culture war through further attacks on people who take religious faith seriously, and on those who hold any social views unpopular among degreed people from major urban centers. The First Amendment will be imperiled like never before with both religious freedom and freedom of speech denounced as vehicles of “hate.” Certainly, the Second Amendment will hang by a thread.
But even more dangerous will be the deep state’s return to a vaunted position of nearly untrammeled power and obeisance from elected officials in the civilian government. The FBI and CIA will go to even greater lengths to ensure the voters are never again “allowed” to elect anyone who doesn’t receive the explicit imprimatur of the American intelligence “community.” The Fourth Amendment will be banished forever so that the NSA and its friends can spy on every American with impunity. The FBI and CIA will more freely combine the use of surveillance and media leaks to destroy adversaries.
Anyone who objects to the deep state’s wars on either Americans or on foreigners will be denounced as stooges of foreign powers.
These scenarios may seem overly dramatic, but the extremity of the situation is suggested by the fact that Trump — who is only a very mild opponent of the status quo — has received such hysterical opposition. After all, Trump has not dismantled the welfare state. He has not slashed — or even failed to increase — the military budget. His fights with the deep state are largely based on minor issues.
His sins lie merely in his lack of enthusiasm for the center-left’s current drive toward ever more vicious identity politics. And, of course, he has been insufficiently gung ho about starting more wars, expanding NATO, and generally pushing the Russians toward World War III.
For even these minor deviations, we are told, he must be destroyed.
So, we can venture a guess as to what the agenda will look like once Trump is out of the way. It looks to be neither mild nor measured.
If the effort at preventing any future Trumps succeeds, it will signal essentially the final victory over so-called “Red State” America.
And then what?
In that situation, half the country may regard itself as conquered, powerless, and unheard.
That’s a recipe for civil war.
The Need for Separation
So long as most Americans labor under the authoritarian notion that the United States is “one nation, indivisible” there will be no answer to the problem of one powerful region (or party) wielding unchallenged power over a hapless minority.
Many conservatives naïvely claim that the Constitution and the “rule of law” will protect minorities in this situation. But their theories only hold water if the people making and interpreting the laws subscribe to an ideology which respects local autonomy and freedom for worldviews in conflict with the ruling class. That is increasingly not the ideology of the majority, let alone the majority of powerful judges and politicians.
Thus, for those who can manage to leave behind the flag-waving propaganda of their youths, it is increasingly evident that the only way to avoid a violent conflict over control of the national government is breaking the United States up into smaller pieces. Or at least decentralizing power sufficiently to allow for meaningful autonomy beyond the reach of federal power.
As I’ve noted in the past, this notion has long been gaining steam in Europe, where referendums on greater local autonomy are growing more frequent.
And conservatives are increasingly seeing the writing on the wall. Among the more insightful of these has been Angelo Codevilla. In 2017, Codevilla, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, laid out a blueprint for local opposition to federal power and noted:
Texas passed a law that, in effect, closes down most of its abortion clinics. The U.S. Supreme Court struck it down. What if Texas closed them nonetheless? Send the Army to point guns at Texas rangers to open them? What would the federal government do if North Dakota declared itself a “Sanctuary for the Unborn” and simply banned abortion? For that matter, what is the federal government doing about the fact that, for practical purposes, its laws concerning marijuana are being ignored in Colorado and California? Utah objects to the boundaries of national monuments created by decree within its borders. What if the state ignored those boundaries? Prayer in schools? What could bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., do if any number of states decided that what the federal courts have to say about such things is bad?
Now that identity politics have replaced the politics of persuasion and blended into the art of war, statesmen should try to preserve what peace remains through mutual forbearance toward jurisdictions that ignore or act contrary to federal laws, regulations, or court orders. Blue states and red states deal differently with some matters of health, education, welfare, and police. It does no good to insist that all do all things uniformly.
And by 2019, the need for separation was becoming more urgent. Last week Codevilla continued in this line of thinking:
[A]fter the 2020 elections ordinary Americans will have to deal with the same dreadful question we faced in 2016: How do we secure and perhaps restore our fast-diminishing freedom to live as Americans? And while we may wish for help from Trump, we have to look to ourselves and to other leaders for how we may counter the ruling class’s manifold assaults now, and especially in the long term…
The logical recourse is to conserve what can be conserved, and for it to be done by, of, and for those who wish to conserve it. However much force of what kind may be required to accomplish that, the objective has to be conservation of the people and ways that wish to be conserved.
That means some kind of separation.
… [T]he natural, least stressful course of events is for all sides to tolerate the others going their own ways. The ruling class has not been shy about using the powers of the state and local governments it controls to do things at variance with national policy, effectively nullifying national laws. And they get away with it.
For example, the Trump Administration has not sent federal troops to enforce national marijuana laws in Colorado and California, nor has it punished persons and governments who have defied national laws on immigration. There is no reason why the conservative states, counties, and localities should not enforce their own view of the good.
Not even President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would order troops to shoot to re-open abortion clinics were Missouri or North Dakota, or any city, to shut them down. As Francis Buckley argues in American Secession: The Looming Breakup of the United States, some kind of separation is inevitable, and the options regarding it are many.
It is notable that Codevilla’s strategy is not marked by grandiose gestures of independence or a yearning to re-create the glorious military victories of the days of yore. Such were the mistakes of the Confederates in the mid-nineteenth century.
Interestingly, Codevilla’s more sensible approach shares quite a bit in common with the strategies recommended by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his essay “What Must Be Done.” The idea is to assert local control and refuse cooperation with federal policymakers. But with restraint. Hoppe writes:
It would appear to be prudent … to avoid a direct confrontation with the central government and not openly denounce its authority or even abjure the realm. Rather, it seems advisable to engage in a policy of passive resistance and non-cooperation. One simply stops to help in the enforcement in each and every federal law. One assumes the following attitude: “Such are your rules, and you enforce them. I cannot hinder you, but I will not help you either, as my only obligation is to my local constituents.”
Consistently applied, no cooperation, no assistance whatsoever on any level, the central government’s power would be severely diminished or even evaporate. And in light of the general public opinion, it would appear highly unlikely that the federal government would dare to occupy a territory whose inhabitants did nothing else than trying to mind their own business. Waco, a teeny group of freaks, is one thing. But to occupy, or to wipe out a significantly large group of normal, accomplished, upstanding citizens is quite another, and quite a more difficult thing.
Some will be unable to break out of the mindset that the United States must forever be governed by a singular national policy. They will insist any attempt at decentralization of this sort must necessarily result in violence.
Writing at The American Conservative, Michael Vlahos, for example, appears unconvinced that violence can be avoided. But even he concedes the violence is unlikely to take the form of mass bloodshed as seen in the 1860s:
Our antique civil wars were not bound to formal rules, yet somehow they held to well-etched bounds of expectation. American society today has very different norms and expectations for civil conflict, which certainly will constrain how we fight the next battle.
Today’s America no longer embraces a national landscape of an industrial-lockstep battlefield (think Gettysburg, D-Day). Our next civil war — as social media so eloquently reminds us — will enact its violence on a battle campus of equal pain, if less blood.
Many devotees of perpetual federal supremacy, of course, won’t admit even this. Any attempt at decentralization, nullification, or secession is said to be invalid because “that was decided by the Civil War.” There is no doubt, of course, that the Civil War settled the matter for a generation or two. But to claim any war “settled things” forever, is clearly nonsense.
It is true, however, that if the idea of a legally, culturally, and politically unified United States wins the day, Americans may be looking toward a future of ever greater political repression marked by increasingly common episodes of bloodshed. This is simply the logical outcome of any system where it is assumed the ruling party has a right and a duty to force the ways of the one group upon another. That is the endgame of a unified America.
Algorithms are at the heart of the Big Data/machine learning/AI changes that are propelling computerized decision-making. In their book, The Ethical Algorithm, Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, two Computer Science professors at Penn, flag some of the social and ethical choices these changes are forcing upon us. My interview with them touches on many of the hot-button issues surrounding algorithmic decision-making.
I have long suspected that much of the fuss over bias in machine learning is a way of smuggling racial and gender quotas and other academic social values into the algorithmic outputs. Michael and Aaron may not agree with that formulation, but the conversation provides a framework for testing it – and leaves me more skeptical about claims that “AI bias” is the problem it’s been portrayed.
Less controversial, but equally fun, is our dive into the ways in which Big Data and algorithms defeat old-school anonymization – and the ways in which that problem can be solved. The cheating husbands of Philadelphia help me understand the value and technique of differential privacy.
And if you wondered why, say, much of the social science and nutrition research of the last 50 years doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, blame Big Data and algorithms that reliably generate a significant correlation once in every 20 tries.
Michael and Aaron also take us into the unexpected social costs of algorithmic optimization. It turns out that a recommendation engine that produces exactly what we want, even when we didn’t know we wanted it, is great for the user, at least in the moment, but maybe not so great for society. In this regard, it’s a little like creating markets in areas once governed by social norms. The switch to market pricing instead of societal mores often optimizes individual choice but at considerable social cost. It turns out that algorithms can do the same – optimize individual gratification in the moment while roiling our social and political order in unpredictable ways. We would react badly to a proposal that dating choices be turned into more efficient microeconomic transactions (otherwise known as prostitution) but we don’t feel the same way about reducing them to algorithms.
As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the speakers’ families, friends, a growing number of former friends, clients, or institutions. Or spouses. I’ve been instructed to specifically mention spouses.
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Algorithms are at the heart of the Big Data/machine learning/AI changes that are propelling computerized decision-making. In their book, The Ethical Algorithm, Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, two Computer Science professors at Penn, flag some of the social and ethical choices these changes are forcing upon us. My interview with them touches on many of the hot-button issues surrounding algorithmic decision-making.
I have long suspected that much of the fuss over bias in machine learning is a way of smuggling racial and gender quotas and other academic social values into the algorithmic outputs. Michael and Aaron may not agree with that formulation, but the conversation provides a framework for testing it – and leaves me more skeptical about claims that “AI bias” is the problem it’s been portrayed.
Less controversial, but equally fun, is our dive into the ways in which Big Data and algorithms defeat old-school anonymization – and the ways in which that problem can be solved. The cheating husbands of Philadelphia help me understand the value and technique of differential privacy.
And if you wondered why, say, much of the social science and nutrition research of the last 50 years doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, blame Big Data and algorithms that reliably generate a significant correlation once in every 20 tries.
Michael and Aaron also take us into the unexpected social costs of algorithmic optimization. It turns out that a recommendation engine that produces exactly what we want, even when we didn’t know we wanted it, is great for the user, at least in the moment, but maybe not so great for society. In this regard, it’s a little like creating markets in areas once governed by social norms. The switch to market pricing instead of societal mores often optimizes individual choice but at considerable social cost. It turns out that algorithms can do the same – optimize individual gratification in the moment while roiling our social and political order in unpredictable ways. We would react badly to a proposal that dating choices be turned into more efficient microeconomic transactions (otherwise known as prostitution) but we don’t feel the same way about reducing them to algorithms.
As always, The Cyberlaw Podcast is open to feedback. Be sure to engage with @stewartbaker on Twitter. Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for topics or interviewees to CyberlawPodcast@steptoe.com. Remember: If your suggested guest appears on the show, we will send you a highly coveted Cyberlaw Podcast mug!
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the speakers’ families, friends, a growing number of former friends, clients, or institutions. Or spouses. I’ve been instructed to specifically mention spouses.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33ZuZBu
via IFTTT
Venture capitalists have poured billions of dollars into fintech unicorns, otherwise known as digital bank startups over the last decade. The biggest question everyone is asking is whether the fintech bubble has already burst.
Taking a look at the fintech mania, Ian Green, principal consultant for data and technology at The Disruption House, has provided the Financial Times with a chart of benchmarking and data analytics of the sector.
The chart above shows a massive increase in the number of fintech startups founded between 2004 and 2014, but as soon as 2015 rolled around, the number of new startups developed collapsed from 390 in 2015 to just 71 in 2018.
Green said the data series is incomplete for 2019 but will likely show the continuation of the trend lower. He said the number of fintech startups founded this year was only 12 versus 390 in 2015.
Green wrote a piece on Risk.net titled The end of the fintech gold rush?, in which he described why so many fintech startups have recently failed:
“The post-crisis boom years were a period of punctuated equilibrium in the evolution of software. In a rapidly changing environment, a large number of experimental forms emerged with exceptional speed. Most of these died out quickly as the pace of change in the banking landscape reverted to stasis. The mechanism causing most of the new firms to fail, and eventually checking the creation of further startups, could theoretically be the occupation of every new niche by the most successful of the new firms. But it doesn’t feel like that – or, at least, not just that. Rather, the environment in which the plethora of startups hoped to thrive proved intrinsically hostile to new life forms.
There is another hurdle beyond the sales cycle for fintechs that target banks as clients: the difficulty that banks have in integrating anyone else’s software. As Access Fintech’s Saadon observes, “fintechs see the $100,000 of value they can bring to a bank, but not the bank’s $1 million cost of change”. The exceptional riskiness and high cost of adoption is partly due to the massive accumulation of interconnected software that comprises a bank’s in-house stack. As far as IT goes, banks are enmeshed in their own history.”
FT makes an intriguing point that the “problem for fintechs is that anything they can do; traditional banks can copy, and can throw more resources at.”
And with that being said, it seems that another bubble has imploded, and barely anyone has noticed.
Though when it comes to Silicon Valley unicorns heading to the public markets this year, it has been an absolute disaster as the tide has gone out for companies who don’t make money ahead of the next recession.
The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability’s special pension report released this week shows yet again how strong markets and ever-more taxpayer funds can’t fix the flaws in the state’s politician-run pension system.
Illinois’ pension shortfall grew to a record $137 billion in 2019, up from $134 billion the year before. That increase continues a near unabated increase in pension liabilities since 2000, when the state’s shortfall was just $16 billion. Given Illinois politicians have shown no appetite to amend the constitution to reform pensions, the shortfall is likely to continue its upward trend.
A lack of reform has taken a real toll on taxpayers and the ability of the state to meet its obligations to teachers, state workers, university employees, judges and lawmakers. The state’s accrued liabilities – the sum of the state’s yet-to-be-paid obligations to pensioners and active workers – has grown so quickly that they have overwhelmed the state’s finances.
In 1987, obligations to members of the five state-run pension funds was $18 billion, or 1.6 times more than the state’s then-general fund budget of $11 billion.
Today, the state’s obligations total $229 billion, or 5.7 times the state’s budget of $40 billion.
That growth in pension obligations has dwarfed the ability of state taxpayers to fund them.
The lack of reform has also forced Illinoisans to contribute a record $10.1 billion in 2019 to pay for state pensions and the debt service on pension obligation bonds. Retirement costs now consume more than a quarter of the budget. No other state in the nation spends that much of their budget on pensions.
In contrast, Illinois taxpayers in 2009 paid just $3.2 billion toward pensions, or 10 percent of the budget.
Taxpayer contributions to pay for pensions have grown by about 13 percent annually since 2009, more than four times the rate of inflation.
What’s most damning about the current pension system is that the nation’s longest-ever bull market (along with billions in additional state contributions) has done nothing to improve the nation’s worst pension crisis. The funded ratio for the state’s five plans has stayed virtually flat – at 40 percent – since 2009, even though markets are now almost four times higher compared to their lows of the Great Recession.
Illinois has the nation’s third-worst funded rate for pensions in the nation, according to Pew Charitable Trusts.
Contributing to this year’s failure was the pension systems inability to meet their investment goals in 2019. The Teachers Retirement Fund’s investments performed the worst, achieving a return of 5 percent compared to the fund’s assumed 7 percent return. And the State Universities’ Retirement System only managed a 6.1 percent return versus a target of 6.75 percent.
It’s worse than what they say
The state’s unfunded liabilities are now at a record $137 billion, nearly three times higher than when the Great Recession started in 2007. But the official numbers are far lower than what Moody’s Investors Service says Illinois’ true shortfall is.
Using more realistic investment assumptions, Moody’s calculates the shortfall for the five state-run funds at $241 billion. That’s the biggest pension shortfall in the nation.
What Moody’s says matters since it currently rates Illinois’ credit risk at just one notch above junk. Illinois has the worst credit rating of any state in the country, according to the agency. On top of that, Moody Analytics, a sister company, also recently found Illinois to be the nation’s second-least prepared state for a recession.
That’s particularly troublesome considering Illinois has another $121 billion in local retirement shortfalls, according to Moody’s, and $73 billion in retiree health debts, too.
Stark warning
Collectively, Illinois’ five pension systems have just 40.2 percent of the funds they need today to be able to meet their obligations in the future, up slightly from 39.8 percent the year before. The university employee fund, SURS, is the best funded of the five, at 42.3 percent, but its funded ratio fell by nearly 2 percentage points this year.
Most notable is the funding ratio for the state lawmaker pensions. Embarrassingly, it’s just 15.9 percent funded.
Wirepoints has remarked several times in the past about the stark warning the state’s pension trend shows: if retirement shortfalls in Illinois continue to grow during a period of remarkable stock market returns, imagine how those funds will fare when the next recession inevitably hits.
Politicians can continue to ignore the crisis, but ordinary residents are seeing their tax bills go up to pay for pensions – both at the state and local level. Just this week, Howmuch.net released a report highlighting the fact that Illinoisans now pay the nation’s highest combined state and local taxes.
Illinois lawmakers must reform pensions, cut retirement debts and roll back collective bargaining laws, or Illinoisans will continue to flee from the taxes imposed to “fix” the crisis.
Read more about Illinois’ worst-in-nation pension crisis:
Tesla Owners Wait In Half-Mile-Long Line To Charge Their Cars On Black Friday
Dozens of tree-hugging Californians who have convinced themselves that they are single-handedly saving the planet wound up spending a good portion of their Black Friday waiting on an extensive line to have their cars charged.
The Kettleman City Supercharger station, which boasts 40 charging stalls, was “overrun” on Black Friday, according to video and photos posted by the Daily Mail.
Shanon Stellini was traveling through the area on November 30 and found a backlog of “around 50” Teslas waiting to charge at the station which is off Interstate 5.
The scene has become more common at Superchargers around the U.S. as the cash-strapped company, which feels like it is in a perpetual state of slashing its capex, fails to keep up its infrastructure to handle the number of cars they have been selling.
“Bet they wish they had gas,” Stellini’s partner says in the video.
The icing on the cake is the fact that when more cars are trying to recharge at once, it slows down the process of recharging for everybody else.
It was unclear exactly how long drivers were forced to wait to have their cars fully charged, but one person Tweeted that they had been waiting on line for 40 minutes and was only “halfway” to the charger.
@Tesla I think you can do better with charging situation. This is at Kettleman location. Been sitting here in line for 40 mins and looks like half way there. pic.twitter.com/vb6V5FA872
There are now around 400,000 Teslas on the roads of the U.S. and the company’s commitment to hoarding its cash by any means necessary, including not paying bills and not investing in its Supercharger network, could finally be coming back to bite its owners in pronounced fashion.
The day before Black Friday, another video was posted online showing 15 Teslas waiting at a Supercharger station in San Luis Obispo at about 4:45pm on the Thanksgiving holiday. Owners can reach a 100% charge in 75 minutes according to the article.
The video shows a line of cars wrapped around the Madonna Inn, with many owners waiting outside their vehicles, waiting for their chance to charge their cars.
“Supercharger stations are conveniently located near desirable amenities like restaurants, shops and WiFi hotspots. Each station contains multiple Superchargers to get you back on the road quickly,” Tesla says.
Tesla says its Superchargers are the “world’s fastest charging network”, but we’re not sure that counts the hours you have to sit and wait in line first, before even getting to a charger.
In the second week of October, after the “partial” U.S.-China trade deal was announced to much fanfare, I made this prediction:
“US and Chinese officials rarely waste an opportunity to use trade talk headlines to head-fake markets with false hope. Rumors of a “partial” or tentative trade deal are circulating today, with MORE trade talks in a month or two. In other words, “more trade talks” means there is no deal of any substance and there’s plenty of time for the whole thing to fall apart once again. I give it less than a month. In the meantime, there will be plenty of other distractions for the general public, including the impeachment circus, tariffs against Europe, tensions in Syria, the Brexit mess, etc, etc.”
My estimate was incorrect; it took a little OVER one month for the whole thing to fall apart. That said, I think the primary point remains the same. The trade war is not going to end anytime soon and there is a very good reason why this is the case: It serves the globalist agenda as a perfect distraction for the collapse of the “Everything Bubble” and the launch of the global economic reset into a what the elites call a “new world order”.
But let’s go back for a moment to understand what just happened. A month ago, the trade deal was treated as essentially done. China had partially folded on most of Trump’s demands and Trump was going to pull off a major economic victory just in time for the 2020 election season. The Dow was going to rocket past 30,000 and Trump’s second term was now assured. This was the narrative in the majority of the alternative media, and I have to say, it is sad to see so many otherwise intelligent analysts make such a huge blunder.
I have lost track of how many times the trade war was put on hold in light of an optimistic “new deal”, and how many times people bought into the farce. For many, though, this event seemed different. The rhetoric on both sides was more conciliatory and they even had a tentative date set for a “phase one” deal signing. The problem is that after every deal announcement, the establishment has always left at least a few separate “linchpins” in place that would allow them to explode trade deal exuberance down the road.
A year ago, the linchpin was the arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou in the middle of a 90-day truce. This time, it was the U.S. passage of a bill supporting Hong Kong protesters only weeks before the trade deal was to be signed and before new U.S. tariffs were to be implemented against China.
The Hong Kong issue is an interesting one. I won’t get too involved in the domestic politics of Hong Kong vs. China because I think this is peripheral to the bigger discussion. I will say that if I was living in Hong Kong, I would not want to concede further control to the totalitarian aspirations of mainland China. But U.S. involvement doesn’t help the protesters. In fact, it hurts them.
Mass protests against government dominance require grassroots momentum to be successful. They require the public and the rest of the world to view their efforts as a legitimate fight for freedom against the oversteps of the political elites. Such activist efforts are derailed when they are sullied by associations with foreign powers. Meaning, when a protest or rebellion is accused of being a puppet movement of a foreign government seeking war by proxy, the rebellion loses support in the eyes of the rest of the public and thus loses momentum.
Americans should be intimately familiar with this problem. Conservative activist groups have been accused for years of being puppets of the Russian government, and this is clearly designed to undermine their image as true Americans fighting for a freer society. In Hong Kong, the U.S. is being presented as the foreign power whose tentacles are spreading through every facet of the protests. And even if the Hong Kong rebellion started on honest terms as a real domestic response to Chinese Big Brother collectivism, it doesn’t matter now. The U.S. government has sabotaged those efforts by injecting itself into the situation.
U.S. legislation in support of Hong Kong also wrecks any future possibility of a trade deal, because it directly attaches the Trump Administration and the trade talks to the violent tides in Hong Kong. Trump cannot sign a trade deal with China while China brutalizes protesters, and China cannot sign a deal while Trump encourages what they consider domestic terrorism. Even if one side or the other wanted to capitulate, now it is impossible.
Of course, it is my belief that neither side ever had any intention of signing a trade deal in the first place. It is also my belief that the next escalation of the trade war will be used by the establishment as a scapegoat for the ongoing collapse in economic fundamentals and eventually a crash in stock markets.
Currently, it appears that the December phase one deal signing is off. Donald Trump has stated that he “likes the idea” of delaying a trade deal until after the 2020 election. The Chinese state-controlled media has accused the U.S. of “backpedaling” on recent agreements. And, rumors are that the Trump Administration is poised to assert new and higher tariffs on China by December 15th. I think the people betting on a Santa rally in markets this holiday season are about to get the same shock they got during the 2018 holiday season.
In the meantime, precious metals, which saw a pull-back in recent weeks due to economic optimism fueled by a potential trade deal, will soon return to their previous rally as the trade deal falls apart yet again. There is a reason why countries like Russia and China have been stocking gold like mad the past few years. They know what is about to happen.
But why reignite the trade war now? As I noted at the end of October:
“Trump has no intention of “winning” the trade war, and China has no intention of giving any real concessions to the US. In the meantime, the banking elites are conditioning the public to associate the trade war with the success or failure of stock markets, and separating themselves from any blame for the ongoing crash in fundamentals. When the trade deal finally and fully falls apart and markets crash, the public will assume the two things are directly related, and the banking elites hope that everyone will forget that it was they that created the Everything Bubble in the first place…”
The Federal Reserve’s overnight and month-long repo purchases conveniently coincided with October and November’s trade deal optimism. Stock markets rocketed upwards despite almost all economic data showing a severe decline in every sector from housing to manufacturing to retail sales and store closures to auto sales, all on top of historic levels of corporate and consumer debt not seen since the crash of 2008. Now the Fed’s repo-loans are coming due and companies are going to have to buy back the collateral they initially gave the Fed in exchange for quick cash, conveniently at the same time as the trade war is being accelerated.
You will notice that in almost every instance that there is a policy shift by the Fed, something extreme seems to happen in the trade war. The central bankers are acclimating the public to the idea that every time good things happen in markets, it’s because of trade deal optimism. And, every time something bad happens in markets, it’s because the trade war is getting worse.
The masses are being conditioned to forget all about the epic financial bubble the elites engineered over the past decade through stimulus measures and QE, not to mention the fact that the Fed popped that bubble over a year ago through interest rate hikes and balance sheet cuts into economic weakness.
Another rather advantageous aspect of the trade war is that it provides cover for the destruction of the current monetary order and makes way for what the establishment elites call the “global economic reset”. As “de-dollarization” continues in Russia, China, the EU and other nations, eventually the American public is going to discover that their currency is being replaced as the world reserve with a basket system that includes a cashless digital alternative. This system is already being created by the IMF, and many nations including China and Russia have proclaimed their support for it.
The U.S. will see considerable inflation or stagflation as the reset evolves. The elites hope that Americans will blame China and perhaps Russia for the pain of the dollar crash. The trade war creates a false paradigm of East vs. West, while the global banks and their political allies escape all blame. At least, that is the plan.
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Representative Matt Gaetz was widely mocked yesterday for suggesting during the impeachment hearing that “maybe it’s a different president we should be impeaching,” by which he meant the one who left office in January 2017. He soon clarified via Twitter that he did indeed mean to say the House can impeach former presidents.
This is not an easy case, and there is not a scholarly consensus on this point, but it is plausible that it is within the authority of the House to impeach former federal officers.
Rather awkwardly, the framers separated the impeachment power into several different clauses sprinkled across the Constitution. Notably, the Constitution grants to the House of Representatives the “sole power of impeachment.” It separately specifies that the president, vice president and other civil officers shall be removed if convicted upon an impeachment, and limits the Senate to doing no more than removing from office and disqualifying from future office when rendering a judgment in an impeachment trial.
In practice, disqualification from future office has rarely been an issue in federal impeachments. The House has rarely requested it. Only three officers, all judges, have been disqualified from future office by the Senate. Removing a problematic officer has often been treated as the sole purpose of the impeachment power, but I think that is a mistake. The impeachment power can and has served other purposes than just removing a sitting officer. If removal is the only purpose an impeachment can serve, then there would never be any point in the House voting to impeach when it knew the Senate would not convict. But sometimes it makes sense to impeach even when removal is not an available option.
When the framers entrusted the House with the power of impeachment, what did they think that power encompassed? They did not say very much about that. But the English parliamentary practice from which they were borrowing did not restrict impeachments to current officeholders. When the impeachment power was transplanted to American shores, it was explicitly shorn of some British features. Americans did not impeach private citizens. American legislatures were prohibited from imposing punishments other than removal and disqualification on those who had been convicted in impeachment trials. American legislatures were restricted to impeaching only for a limited type of offense.
But some state constitutions explicitly authorized their legislatures to impeach former officers, sometimes while imposing a time limit on how long the former officer was at risk of impeachment, and none prohibited it. The federal constitutional framers did not clearly rule it out, though they were aware that such applications were understood to be within the scope of a legislative power of impeachment.
If impeachments are a “grand inquest” into the conduct of public officials, then there is no necessary reason why that inquest should be cut off by an officer’s departure from office. If impeachments are to deter public officers from gross misconduct, then leaving the door open to a legislature scrutinizing the conduct of former officers is potentially useful. If impeachments are to protect the republic from dangerous officeholders, then the ability to disqualify a former officer who has been demonstrated to have committed grave abuses of office in the past might be valuable.
One can imagine situations in which such a use of the impeachment power would be justifiable. In 1862, the Senate for the first time disqualified someone from future federal office when it convicted Judge West Humphreys on articles of impeachment that included the charge that he “did unlawfully act as judge of an illegally constituted tribunal within said State, called the district court of the Confederate States of America.” If Humphreys had bothered to send in his resignation rather than simply neglecting his duties as a federal judge under the U.S. Constitution, the House might not have taken the time to impeach him. But it would have been understandable if Congress had determined that even if he had resigned that the secessionist Humphreys still needed to be barred from any future federal office of honor, trust, or profit.
In 1876, Secretary of War William Belknap resigned as the House was considering impeaching him for a newly revealed corruption scandal. The House impeached him anyway, and the Senate rejected a motion to dismiss the case for want of jurisdiction over a former federal officer. Belknap was not convicted, in part because some senators doubted their authority to do so. Condemning Belknap’s actions and disqualifying him from future office seemed a sufficient reason to proceed for many in the House and Senate.
If Congress in 1974 had imagined the possibility of President Richard Nixon rehabilitating his reputation sufficiently to have a chance at holding a future office, it is not hard to imagine a bipartisan House and Senate steaming ahead with an impeachment and trial in order to bar that possibility through a judgment of disqualification. Worried that an infamous former officeholder might eventually live down his infamy, Congress might seek to make that recovery more difficult through the impeachment process.
The House practice manual accepts that the impeachment power extends to former officers, though it admits that since removal is generally the “primary objective” of an impeachment the proceedings have usually been brought to an end if the officer resigns. Brian Kalt has provided the most comprehensive analysis of “late impeachments,” and I find him persuasive.
But this is also a good opportunity to reemphasize the importance of distinguishing what a government official or institution can do from what it should do. It is possible to abuse your discretionary authority. An act can be wrong and contrary to the health of the constitutional regime even if it is within a government official’s lawful authority. An officer can be impeached for such an act. Members of Congress cannot be impeached, but they can certainly be condemned for such actions.
The House may have the constitutional authority to impeach a former president, but such acts are highly disfavored within our constitutional practice and the House would have an extraordinary argumentative burden to bear to justify such an action. It might be the case that the House should impeach a former officer so as to fortify constitutional norms and send a clear message to other officers that the behavior in question is unacceptable. But we should not want to go down the road of simply using the impeachment power to settle scores with the leaders of the other political party. It would quickly squander the solemnity and weight of the impeachment power while heightening partisan tensions and fostering greater animosity and distrust.
Representative Gaetz is probably right that the House could impeach a former president, but that does not mean the House should.
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