What happens if you toss $97.9B in liquidity at an extended market and it sells off anyways? Maybe nothing, but maybe everything.
The unholy alliance surely has succeeded in elevating asset prices in recent weeks, indeed prices have exceeded the level I suggested as a potential key target in April in Combustion, 3102 on $ES:
Today $ES hit 3157 or 1.7% above that level I outlined then.
Back then I discussed an apex of trend lines possibly converging in October 2019. October came and went and the Fed went full repo and QE and markets kept ascending relentlessly. Until today.
And guess what. Despite all the rallying $ES still hasn’t managed to recapture its broken 2009 trend line. It still hasn’t overcome its 2007 trend line. And it still hasn’t overcome its broken 2019 trend.
No Sir. What this rally has done to run relentlessly toward a trifecta apex of trend lines. When? This morning. In pre-market:
Got within 20-25 handles of that apex peak point and on a negative monthly divergence again.
Now there’s nothing that says we can’t get above it with all this liquidity, but I note $ES got near the apex and suddenly rejected even with $97.9B in liquidity thrown at it.
This convergence of trend lines ends this month. It may simply mean nothing by the end of the month or it may mean everything. It’s simply too early to tell. If it means everything then it may be game over for this bull run.
If it’s a meaningful level then even a basic .236 fib level retrace risks a move ultimately toward 2584. A proper technical move toward the .382 fib would target 2,218. Again, way too early to tell, I’m just outlining the potential technical ramifications.
So December will be critical to get a better sense of the validity of this chart.
Perhaps of note the rejection today came at key trend line resistance points in the form of throw overs. The throw overs occurred last week during the shortened low volume holiday week.
The broad all market ETF $VTI:
The rejection today then leaves its megaphone structure technically still intact.
On the short time frame $SPX has formed a new channel in recent months and it rejected today as well:
Note $SPX hit its highest RSI readings in 2019 on the recent rally hence it became very much overbought. As long as this channel remains intact the game can continue and there are plenty support levels below on a proper technical retrace, think the 50MA, thing the July highs, think the lower trend line. All of these could offer support for coming rallies.
All we can say for certain now is that $ES reached a massively important confluence area and so has the larger market.
Tops are only known in hindsight and we are far from confirming anything here, but at least we know where we are relatively to several key trends. And for today at least all of these trends have asserted themselves in form of resistance and if they prove meaningful it may be game over for this liquidity soaked bull run.
* * *
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This Week in the Great Decoupling: The Commerce Department has rolled out proposed telecom and supply chain security rules that are aimed at but never once mention China. Acually, what the Department rolled out was more a sketch of its preliminary thinking about proposed rules. Brian Egan and I tackle the substance and history of the proposal and conclude that policymakers are still fighting each other about the meaning of a policy they’ve already announced.
And to show that decoupling can go both ways, a US-based chip-tech group is moving to Switzerland to reassure its Chinese participants. Nick Weaver and I conclude that there’s a little less here than Reuters seems to think.
Mark MacCarthy tells us that reports of UChicago weather turning sunny and warm for hipster antitrust are probably overdone. Even so, Silicon Valley should be at least a little nervous that Chicago School enforcers are taking a hard look at personal data and free services as sources of anti-competitive conduct.
Mark highlights my favorite story of the week, in which the Right to be Forgotten discredits itself in, where else, Germany. Turns out that you can kill two people and wound a third on a yacht in the Atlantic, get convicted, serve 20 years, and then demand that everybody just forget it happened. The doctrine hasn’t just jumped the shark. It’s doubled back and put a couple of bullets in the poor shark for good measure.
Nick explains why NSA is so worried about TLS inspection. And delivers a rant on the bad cybersecurity software that makes NSA’s worries so plausible.
It’s been a bad week for TikTok, which was caught blocking an American Muslim teen who posted about Uighurs in China and offered an explanation that was believable only because US social media companies have offered explanations for their content moderation that were even less credible. I suggest that all the criticism will just lead to social media dreaming up more and sneakier ways to downgrade disfavored content without getting caught. Brian tells us how the flap might affect TikTok’s pending CFIUS negotiation.
Senate Democrats have introduced the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act, an online privacy bill with an unfortunate acronym (think fossilized dinosaur poop). Mark and I conclude that the bill is a sign that Washington isn’t going to do privacy before 2021.
Join Steptoe for a complimentary webinar on Tuesday, December 10. We’ll be talking about the impacts on retailers of the newly implemented California Consumer Privacy Act and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. This is a fast-moving area of the law; we can keep you up to date. You can find out more and register here.
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, former friends, clients, or institutions. Or spouses. I’ve been instructed to specifically mention spouses.
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Pompeo: We’ll Help ‘Legitimate’ Latin America Govts Prevent Protests From “Morphing Into Riots”
For Washington it’s never too late to dust off the ole Monroe Doctrine, apparently. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday issued a bombshell declaration concerning US Latin America policy, vowing Washington’s support to countries facing mass protests and unrest which Pompeo says could be hijacked by Cuba and Venezuela (and thus by extension allies in Moscow and Beijing).
Citing recent popular political unrest in Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia, the US top diplomat said“We in the Trump administration will continue to support countries trying to prevent Cuba and Venezuela from hijacking those protests and we’ll work with legitimate (governments) to prevent protests from morphing into riots and violence that don’t reflect the democratic will of the people.” He was addressing an audience at the University of Louisville, in Kentucky.
Most interesting and sure to raise eyebrows is his distinguishing ‘legitimate governments’ as worthy of support.
No doubt this means, according to the Chomskyesque forumula, those compliant regimes willing to do America’s bidding should be able to suppress and crackdown on ‘rioters’ while governments dubbed official enemies ought to be swept aside by ‘democratic protesters’ and freedom movements.
Touting the Trump administration’s “moral and strategic clarity” on Latin America, he again singled out Nicolás Maduro as enemy #1 in the region, and Caracas along with Havana as seeking to hijack unrest in neighboring countries.
Pompeo cited recent political protests in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador and said that Colombia had closed its border to Venezuela out of concern that protesters from the neighboring country would enter.
He said that the United States “cannot tolerate” regimes deemed unsatisfactory, while perhaps ironically, framing White House policy in terms of “realism” and “restraint”.
Last Spring in a brief coup attempt, some Venezuelan military officers defected and pledged support to US-backed Juan Guaido.
However, only those protests which reflect the “character of legitimate democratic governments and democratic expression” should be respected and supported.
As for the presumed ‘delegitimate’ in the region: “The end will come for Maduro as well. We just don’t know what day,” Pompeo vowed ominously.
The results of plastic bag bans and restrictions are frequently disappointing, and occasionally counter-productive. Take the United Kingdom, where a country-wide bag fee is encouraging consumers to switch from single-use bags to thicker, reusable bags that use more plastic.
Last Thursday, Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a non-profit, released a report on the plastic consumption of British grocery stores that found they were actually using more plastic even as customers switch from using thin, disposable plastic bags to thicker reusable “bags for life.”
The report found that use of these “bags for life” increased from 960 million in 2018 to 1.5 billion in 2019. That’s a big single-year increase and well above the 439 million reusable plastic “bags for life” dispensed by the seven largest British grocery stores in 2014, according to a Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP) study.
The U.K. imposed a mandatory 5-pence fee in 2015 on all plastic bags given out by retailers in the country in hopes of reducing plastic use.
“It is clear from this data that many people are simply swapping ‘single-use’ plastic bags for these plastic bags for ‘life’,” reads the Greenpeace/EIA report. “The impact of this simple substitution is a major concern, given the significantly higher plastic content of bags for life.”
Plastic bag regulations have produced this unintended consequence before. A University of Sydney study of local bag bans in California found that while they got rid of single-use plastic bags, they encouraged customers to buy thicker garbage bags as substitutes.
Plastic consumption still fell in California, but not by as much as bag banners anticipated.
That appears to be true in the U.K. as well. According to the Greenpeace study, all bags used by the grocery stores surveyed (including both single-use and reusable bags) equaled 48,000 tons in 2019. According to the WRAP study, the seven largest grocery stores used 68,000 tons of reusable and single-use plastic bags in 2014, the year before the country’s bag fee went into effect.
To be clear, these studies are not apples-to-apples comparisons. The per-bag weights used by WRAP (6.8 grams for single-use bags, 40 grams for reusable ones) are higher than those used by the Greenpeace study (4.2 grams for single-use bags, 30 grams for reusable ones). If WRAP’s average weights are correct, then Greenpeace well might be undercounting the decline in plastic weight consumed by supermarkets. On the other hand, the Greenpeace study includes bag use figures from more grocery stores, which would have the effect of increasing the number of bags counted.
Regardless, consumers’ dastardly habit of changing their behavior in response to the country’s bag fee is still undercutting the goal of environmentalists.
To that end, the Greenpeace/EIA study recommends either hiking fees on “bags for life” to 70 pence (about $1), or banning them entirely, in order to get people to finally remember to bring their own bags to the grocery store.
“When we go shopping, we should remember our bags like we remember our phones,” Fiona Nicholls, one of the report’s authors, said to The New York Times.
An alternative would be to stop trying to micromanage people’s behavior. While the world’s oceans do indeed contain an alarming amount of plastic waste, little of that comes from the U.K. or other developed nations that have effective waste management systems. According to one study, the U.K. was responsible for about one-tenth of one percent of marine plastic waste entering the world’s oceans in 2010. The vast bulk of plastic waste in the developed world is deposited in landfills or (occasionally) recycled.
That’s in contrast to countries in Africa and especially East Asia, where growing plastic consumption has not been matched by better waste collection, leading to an explosion in the amount of plastic waste coming from these countries.
Even if environmentalists in the U.K., or rich countries more broadly, eliminate plastic use completely, it will have little effect on the overall problem of global plastic pollution. Successfully banning plastic bags, either the disposable kind or the “for life” kind, won’t save the oceans, but they will punish shoppers.
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And if the cloud bursts thunder in your ear
You shout and no one seems to hear
And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon
Brain Damage, Pink Floyd
And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon
Brain Damage, Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd’s 1973 Dark Side of the Moon album is considered one of the greatest albums of all-time. It stayed on the Billboard 200 charts for 937 weeks. Roger Waters concept was for an album that dealt with things that “make people mad”. The Dark Side of the Moon’s themes include war, conflict, greed, the passage of time, death, and insanity, the latter inspired in part by former band member Syd Barrett’s worsening mental state.
The five tracks on each side reflect various stages of human life, beginning and ending with a heartbeat, exploring the nature of the human experience, and empathy. The themes of this album are timeless and are as germane today as they were forty-six years ago, if not more relevant. The country and world are awash in conflict, driven by the greed of evil men. Decent, law abiding, hard-working, critical thinking Americans see the world going insane as the passage of time leads towards the death of an American empire.
Waters and Gilmour lyrics have always captured the falsity of the world, whether it be the music industry, the ruling elite, educational system, politicians, the military, or our own delusions that keep us from accepting the truth. Their cynicism about our world appeals to my natural inclination towards skepticism about mankind and those constituting the invisible government, controlling the levers of our society.
Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall capture the injustice, depravity, and degradation of our society into a toxic mix of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, with an all- encompassing surveillance state, a populace amused to death by their electronic gadgets and oligarchs implementing every propaganda technique ever conceived in the warped mind of Edward Bernays.
I’ve found Pink Floyd lyrics to be inspirational in previous articles I’ve written over the years, including: Mother Should I Trust the Government, Comfortably Numb, and Hey You. I’ve selected the lyrics from a few songs on the Dark Side of the Moon album as a reflection of what I’m seeing in our world today.
Money
Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you’re O.K.
Money, it’s a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team
No one can deny money is the primary driver of American society and a culture of greed and avarice has been promoted by those in power. The wanton materialism of the masses has been driven by the oligarchs, the financial industrial complex, and the media whores incessantly promoting products, services, and “unnecessary” necessities. The people of this country were far less materialistic in the early 70’s when this song was written.
The credit card was in its infancy. People paid cash for their purchases. Nixon closing the gold window and the proliferation of credit by the financial industry marked a terrible turning point for the country. Politicians were unrestrained from making promises on the backs of unborn generations. The national debt was $458 billion in 1973, after 184 years as an independent country. We create that much debt in about 5 months today. From $458 billion to $23.1 trillion in 46 years. Debt to GDP ratio up from 32% to 110%, all thanks to the Federal Reserve, their Wall Street owners, and the captured politicians in Washington.
It’s not money that makes the world go around, it’s debt. The concept of saving money until you have enough to make a desired purchase is inconceivable to today’s generations. Deferred gratification is an antiquated notion in our instant satisfaction society. Generations have been socially engineered in government schools and propagandized through the techniques of Edward Bernays by the corporate fascists to believe buying baubles, trinkets, gadgets and luxury automobiles on credit makes them wealthier, when it only makes them debt serfs.
Keeping up with the Joneses has been ingrained in their psyches through the conscious and intelligent manipulation of their minds by the unseen forces operating behind the curtain. Whether you call them the Deep State or the invisible government, they represent the true ruling power of the country.
Money, it’s a crime
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away
Money and who controls it is the major storyline of our time. It truly is the root of all evil today, yesterday and tomorrow. Human nature never changes, so greed and material desires have always and will always drive the actions of some people. The most dangerous of these sociopaths are those with the highest IQs. The competing narratives about wealth inequality, the causes and the solutions are, hot and heavy as the presidential campaign heats up.
Both sides tell half-truths, which turn out to be great lies. The truth is true free market capitalism is the best method for wealth creation with the majority of a population willing to work. But the fact is we don’t have anything resembling free market capitalism. Instead we have a corporate fascist oligarchy, where a relatively small number of mega-corporations control all the major markets, exerting their near monopolistic control by bribing politicians and regulators to maintain their control, power and riches.
The socialist/communist Democrat presidential candidates and their intellectually challenged minions believe the solution to wealth inequality is to drastically increase taxes on the rich, which always results in higher taxes on the not so rich. Having 535 power hungry, low intellect, low morals, highly corrupt apparatchiks decide how to redistribute the wealth of the country has proven to be a disaster. The $23 trillion of debt and $200 trillion of unfunded welfare liabilities is a testament to their worthlessness and sleaze.
The military industrial complex, sick care complex, Silicon Valley tech complex, propaganda corporate media complex, and Wall Street cabal wield immense power and control over this country, funneling money from the taxpayers to the .1% at the top of the pyramid. These corporations destroy smaller competitors through regulatory capture and buying off political candidates. This unholy alliance between corporations and government is the definition of corporate fascism.
I’m all for lower taxes. Keeping more of the money I have earned is my preference. Government halfwits extracting money from my pocket to waste on wars in foreign lands, welfare programs as payoffs for votes, inefficient corrupt infrastructure projects, and tax breaks for mega-corporations so they can buy back their stock and enrich their executives, is not free market capitalism.
Reveling in stock market records on Wall Street enriching the .1%, while average Americans on Main Street struggle to pay for rent and basic healthcare, exposes the warped nature of our society. Those with critical thinking skills comprehend the Ponzi nature of our entire economic system, built upon a crumbling foundation of ever-expanding debt.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall set in motion a disastrous sequence of events which is still playing out today. Allowing Wall Street banks to combine traditional lending with the high-risk betting of investment banking, while also allowing six Too Big To Trust mega-banks to capture the majority of deposits, mortgage lending, credit card business, and auto loans, has created a heads they win tails we lose economic system.
These Wall Street shysters use their political power to control Congress and their ownership power to bully the spineless academics at the Federal Reserve into doing whatever they demand. They blew up the world in 2008 with their massive mortgage fraud scheme, demanded $700 billion of TARP through their Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary, forced Congress – against the will of the people – to pass it, had their puppets at the Federal Reserve buy their toxic debt and provide unlimited free financing, and faced zero criminal consequences through their control of the regulatory agencies.
What was once illegal – a corporation buying back its own stock – has become the latest fraudulent scheme used to mislead the masses and enrich the oligarchs. The Wall Street banks lend hundreds of billions to mega-corporations at near zero rates. The executives of these mega-corporations then use the debt to buy back billions of their stock, therefore artificially inflating their EPS, driving the stock price higher as Wall Street banks provide positive propaganda spin, and the executives reward themselves with stock options and sell along the way, becoming filthy rich in the process.
Meanwhile, actual corporate profits are no higher today than they were in 2014, while the market is up 70%, propelled by easy money provided by the Fed. While the Wall Street banks borrow at near zero rates from the Fed, they charge the average American 17% on their credit card balance. The money piles up in bank accounts of the oligarchy, while the debt piles up on the backs of American taxpayers.
Us and Them
Us and them
And after all we’re only ordinary men
Me and you God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do
“Forward!” he cried From the rear And the front rank died And the general sat And the lines on the map Moved from side to side
The Us versus Them theme has never been more obvious than today. The song uses war as the basis for examining the futility and stupidity of human conflict. But human nature lends itself to tribalism and war like behavior, as seen through the ages. When you witness the U.S. continuing to wage an eighteen-year war in Afghanistan, while fomenting civil war in Syria, Yemen, Libya, Ukraine and Venezuela, you have to wonder what threats to our safety and security these wars are protecting us from. The truth is these wars of choice aren’t protecting Americans from invasion or attack.
The never-ending war on terrorism was necessary to keep the military industrial complex satiated and enriched. The end of the Cold War threatened their immense profits. As Smedley Butler noted eighty-four years ago, war is a racket. Old men order young men to die on behalf of mega-corporations for oil and riches. The amoral arms industry sells to everyone, with their propaganda mouthpieces stirring up discontent throughout the world, so their killing wares are used up and replaced, with obscene profits generated by the deaths of innocents.
The Waters/Wright lyrics capture the unequivocal truth we are just ordinary people, with no desire to kill each other. I don’t hate Russians, Chinese, Syrians, or other Americans. The average person in this world is just trying to live their life, earn a living, support their family, and try to achieve some semblance of happiness during their short stay on this planet.
It is through the dumbing down of the populace via government school indoctrination and incessant fear propaganda pumped into their pliable brains by Deep State controlled media, creating phantom enemies and fake threats, that feeds the war machine with close to $1 trillion per year. War is good business. And young poor men are the cannon fodder, publicized as heroes, but actually nothing more than instruments of wealth extraction for the oil industry and arms dealers. Old rich men sentencing young poor men to death to keep the profits flowing.
Black and blue
And who knows which is which and who is who?
Up and down And in the end it’s only round and round and round
“Haven’t you heard It’s a battle of words?” The poster bearer cried.
There is a plethora of Us and Them scenarios currently in play. The song was geared towards traditional war where the leaders, safe in their luxury office buildings, sent young men to kill other young men, even though the young men had no particular issue with those they were killing. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984 where the enemy changed whenever Big Brother found it convenient:
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
The black and blue are now the red and blue, with Republicans and Democrats sworn enemies, with no chance of compromise on their positions. The country is divided as deeply as it was in 1860. The chatter about civil war grows louder. The upcoming presidential election results will likely not be honored by the losers. Civil chaos is likely to ensue. We have been witnessing the prologue to civil war for the last three years, as the Democrats refuse to accept the 2016 result.
Democrats will not accept Trump as president and have used every opportunity to thwart his every move. At first the resistance seemed genuine, as their beloved Hillary managed to lose an unlosable election due to her hubris and arrogant loathing for the deplorables in flyover country. Trump voters proved to be the silent majority. The Russians had nothing to do with his victory. Hatred of the establishment of both parties by a majority is why Trump is president. His victory has further revealed the true Us and Them.
The current impeachment farce, the defunct Russiagate sham, the Mueller travesty, and the never-ending stream of fake news from the left-wing media has exposed the truth about a Deep State. Only conspiracy nuts like myself talked about the Deep State five years ago. Not only does it exist, but it is openly flaunting its power by attempting a three-year coup against a sitting president.
These surveillance state manipulators of public opinion are THEM. They are the personification of evil. They want nothing less than complete control over all levers of government, industry, finance and media. These rogue traitors to the Constitution boldly flaunt their lawlessness on prime-time propaganda news networks, blatantly lying to America about their true intentions.
This truly is the battle of this century. Will a small cadre of unelected, unregulated, unaccountable thugs be allowed to use the massive power of the state to rule over the plebs, enriching themselves and their acolytes? Or will the people – US – regain control over the destiny of our country, through whatever means necessary? It is becoming quite clear to me, these evil men will not relinquish their wealth, power and control without a fight requiring a violent response by the deplorables.
The second half of the ongoing Fourth Turning is destined to be bloody, as this Federal Reserve created Himalayan mountain of debt collapses for the simple reason it can never be serviced or repaid. History has proven Ponzi schemes always end in disaster. Always.
In part 2 of this article I will tackle the themes of how our time on this earth can mean something if we choose to make a difference. See you on the dark side of the moon.
* * *
The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from the site, please keep it running with a donation. [Jim Quinn – PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal.
The results of plastic bag bans and restrictions are frequently disappointing, and occasionally counter-productive. Take the United Kingdom, where a country-wide bag fee is encouraging consumers to switch from single-use bags to thicker, reusable bags that use more plastic.
Last Thursday, Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a non-profit, released a report on the plastic consumption of British grocery stores that found they were actually using more plastic even as customers switch from using thin, disposable plastic bags to thicker reusable “bags for life.”
The report found that use of these “bags for life” increased from 960 million in 2018 to 1.5 billion in 2019. That’s a big single-year increase and well above the 439 million reusable plastic “bags for life” dispensed by the seven largest British grocery stores in 2014, according to a Waste and Resources Action Program (WRAP) study.
The U.K. imposed a mandatory 5-pence fee in 2015 on all plastic bags given out by retailers in the country in hopes of reducing plastic use.
“It is clear from this data that many people are simply swapping ‘single-use’ plastic bags for these plastic bags for ‘life’,” reads the Greenpeace/EIA report. “The impact of this simple substitution is a major concern, given the significantly higher plastic content of bags for life.”
Plastic bag regulations have produced this unintended consequence before. A University of Sydney study of local bag bans in California found that while they got rid of single-use plastic bags, they encouraged customers to buy thicker garbage bags as substitutes.
Plastic consumption still fell in California, but not by as much as bag banners anticipated.
That appears to be true in the U.K. as well. According to the Greenpeace study, all bags used by the grocery stores surveyed (including both single-use and reusable bags) equaled 48,000 tons in 2019. According to the WRAP study, the seven largest grocery stores used 68,000 tons of reusable and single-use plastic bags in 2014, the year before the country’s bag fee went into effect.
To be clear, these studies are not apples-to-apples comparisons. The per-bag weights used by WRAP (6.8 grams for single-use bags, 40 grams for reusable ones) are higher than those used by the Greenpeace study (4.2 grams for single-use bags, 30 grams for reusable ones). If WRAP’s average weights are correct, then Greenpeace well might be undercounting the decline in plastic weight consumed by supermarkets. On the other hand, the Greenpeace study includes bag use figures from more grocery stores, which would have the effect of increasing the number of bags counted.
Regardless, consumers’ dastardly habit of changing their behavior in response to the country’s bag fee is still undercutting the goal of environmentalists.
To that end, the Greenpeace/EIA study recommends either hiking fees on “bags for life” to 70 pence (about $1), or banning them entirely, in order to get people to finally remember to bring their own bags to the grocery store.
“When we go shopping, we should remember our bags like we remember our phones,” Fiona Nicholls, one of the report’s authors, said to The New York Times.
An alternative would be to stop trying to micromanage people’s behavior. While the world’s oceans do indeed contain an alarming amount of plastic waste, little of that comes from the U.K. or other developed nations that have effective waste management systems. According to one study, the U.K. was responsible for about one-tenth of one percent of marine plastic waste entering the world’s oceans in 2010. The vast bulk of plastic waste in the developed world is deposited in landfills or (occasionally) recycled.
That’s in contrast to countries in Africa and especially East Asia, where growing plastic consumption has not been matched by better waste collection, leading to an explosion in the amount of plastic waste coming from these countries.
Even if environmentalists in the U.K., or rich countries more broadly, eliminate plastic use completely, it will have little effect on the overall problem of global plastic pollution. Successfully banning plastic bags, either the disposable kind or the “for life” kind, won’t save the oceans, but they will punish shoppers.
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Trump Committed “No Quid Pro Quo, Bribery, Extortion, Or Abuse Of Power,” House Republicans Find
Expanding on the staff memo issued before the farce of the public impeachment hearings, Axios reports that Republicans on the House committees investigating the Ukraine controversy have concluded, in a 100-plus-page prebuttal report, that President Trump committed “no quid pro quo, bribery, extortion, or abuse of power,” but rather that the president made “entirely prudent” decisions driven by a “reasonable skepticism” about corruption in the country.
The report – to be released to Congress as soon as this evening – will reportedly provide the basis for Republicans’ rejection of Democrats’ anticipated articles of impeachment against the president for the remainder of the House proceedings.
The Hill reports that a draft of the document echos the president’s arguments in his own defense, with Republicans refusing to admit any wrongdoing:
“Understood in this proper context, the President’s initial hesitation to meet with President Zelensky or to provide U.S. taxpayer-funded security assistance to Ukraine without thoughtful review is entirely prudent,” the draft impeachment report reads.
Additionally, Republicans attack the impeachment inquiry led by Democrats as a partisan campaign to shake up the political system.
“The Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is not the organic outgrowth of serious misconduct; it is an orchestrated campaign to upend our political system,” the draft reads.
“Democrats in the House of Representatives have been working to impeach President Trump since his election.”
Axios notes that, according to officials, The White House had no level of involvement in the drafting of the document.
“They gave us no direction or input,” one of the officials said.
Finally, we note that Democrats have drafted their own report, and all members of the House Intelligence Committee can review a draft in classified spaces tonight (the committee will meet behind closed doors tomorrow evening to adopt the report and add Republicans’ views).
For some idea of what the GOP talking points will be in the latest prebuttal report, here is the full staff memo from early November is below…
Addressed on today’s edition: President Donald Trump’s latest tariff lunacies vis-à-vis Brazil and Argentina, and what they tell us about the current and previous administrations, as well as the broader currents in global opinion about trade, immigration, and multilateral institutions. As is the custom, the co-hosts have…different opinions. Other questions discussed: Which Democratic presidential candidate will drop out next? Is Ted Cruz’s beard hot or not? How many four-letter words can one fit in a negative review of The Irishman?
Addressed on today’s edition: President Donald Trump’s latest tariff lunacies vis-à-vis Brazil and Argentina, and what they tell us about the current and previous administrations, as well as the broader currents in global opinion about trade, immigration, and multilateral institutions. As is the custom, the co-hosts have…different opinions. Other questions discussed: Which Democratic presidential candidate will drop out next? Is Ted Cruz’s beard hot or not? How many four-letter words can one fit in a negative review of The Irishman?
A nation that’s no longer capable of naming names and reporting what actually happened richly deserves an economic and political collapse to match its moral collapse.
You’ve probably heard of the Truth Commissions held in disastrously corrupt and oppressive regimes after the sociopath/kleptocrat Oligarchs are deposed. The goal is not revenge, as well-deserved as that might be; the goal is national reconciliation via the only possible path to healing: name names and tell the plain, unadorned truth, stripped of self-serving artifice, spin, propaganda and PR.
Is such a stripped-of-spin truthful account of names and events even possible in the U.S.? Sadly, there is precious little evidence that a Truth Commission in the U.S. would be anything more than a travesty of a mockery of a sham, a parade of half-truths, misdirections, falsehoods and fabrications, all aimed at one goal: protecting the powerful from the consequences of their decisions and actions.
Sadly, we’ve lost the capacity to simply tell the truth: everything, and I mean everything, is crafted to protect the guilty, polish the putrid decay of legalized looting, defraud the unwary, ease the most venal, power-mad sociopaths into positions of unparalleled power, sell low-quality goods and services nobody needs or would even want if the marketing weren’t so Orwellian, persuade debt-serfs to borrow more and bamboozle voters into further enriching the few at the expense of the many.
The truth is no match for greed is good and don’t be evil, unless it’s incredibly profitable, in which case, go for it but cover your tracks (here’s looking at you, Big Tech). Outrage is reserved for whistleblowers who name names and reveal the sordid truths that the status quo has expended the nation’s treasure to protect from the light of day.
This is the pathetic state of America: our outrage is reserved for those telling the truth, not for the legions who lie, cheat, steal and prevaricate to conceal the truth at all costs.
The so-called gatekeepers are all corrupt and self-serving, minions of the Intelligence Community, corporate overlords, billionaires or the interest groups that fund their studies, departments, think tanks and “research” (the conclusions are established first and the “research” follows accordingly).
Who has earned our trust by refusing to toe the line of an approved narrative? Who’s left who isn’t blinded by hatred, bought off by billionaires or fearful of retribution from America’s disastrously corrupt and oppressive regime, rightfully fearing being fired, demoted, marginalized, demonetized, disappeared from public view via being de-platformed or permanently disappeared via “accident” or “suicide”?
We’ve been so jaded by all the lies, all the legal looting, all the rigged statisics, and yes, all the convenient “accidents” that we no longer trust anyone to simply report the names and events. We now assume that everyone has an axe to grind and is likely being handsomely rewarded to sharpen the axe without appearing to do so too blatantly.
A nation that’s no longer capable of naming names and reporting what actually happened richly deserves an economic and political collapse to match its moral collapse. A nation whose only reliable purpose and goal is to protect the powerful from consequences, no matter what the consequences of that corruption might be, is nothing but a hollow shell begging for one good kick to send it tumbling into the abyss.
