Month: June 2021

Authored by Winnie Han via The Epoch Times,

China’s hawkish state-run media Global Times said Beijing should increase its build-up of nuclear weapons after recent Sino-U.S. trade talks.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He held an online meeting on May 26, the first trade talks for both countries since U.S. President Joe Biden took office in January.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai testifies during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies hearing on the proposed budget for fiscal year 2022 for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative on Capitol Hill, in Washington, on April 28, 2021. (Sarah Silbiger/Pool via AP)

Both sides described the talks as “candid” and stated that they looked forward to future discussions, according to separate press releases from the two countries. The U.S. trade office also stated that Tai raised “issues of concern” without providing more details. However, China’s Ministry of Commerce did not say that the U.S. side had raised any concerns.

While the two sides failed to disclose any concrete details about the talks, Tai told Reuters before the online meeting that the United States faces “very large challenges” in its trade and economic ties with Beijing and that the Biden administration needs to pay attention across the board.

Several hours after Tai and Liu concluded their meeting, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of  the Global Times took to his WeChat account to say that China should be ready militarily in the face of “increasing strategic containment” by the United States.

Hu urged Beijing to “rapidly increase its number of nuclear warheads and long-distance, highly-viable strategic ballistic missiles DF-41.”

He said these weapons would serve as the “cornerstone” for China’s “strategic resistance” against the United States.

The ultimate goal, Hu explained, was for China to have enough nuclear ballistic missiles so that U.S. policymakers would “tremble” whenever they thought of having a “military confrontation with China.”

The Federation of American Scientists, a U.S.-based policy think tank, estimated in September 2020 that China had about 320 nuclear warheads. In comparison, the United States had 3,800 nuclear warheads with another 2,000 waiting to be dismantled.

Former President Donald Trump, in an effort to tackle China’s unfair trade practices, imposed tariffs on a long list of Chinese imports, leading to a U.S.-China trade war.

The two sides signed a phase one trade deal in January 2020, requiring China to buy an additional $200 billion in U.S. goods and services during 2020 and 2021, compared to the 2017 level.

However, China bought just 58 percent of what it promised under the deal in 2020, according to a report from Washington-based think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics. For the first four months of this year, China purchased $47.1 billion U.S. products, falling short of the $64.5 billion target under the deal.

U.S.-based current affairs commentator Li Yanming, in an interview with the Chinese-language Epoch Times, said that he did not expect Beijing and Washington to hold any future discussions to end the trade war anytime soon.

As for Hu’s online remark, Li explained that it was nothing more than an empty threat because the United States possesses a lopsided military advantage over China.

In two separate congressional hearings in May, Tai expressed the importance of confronting China on trade issues.

“If China cannot or will not adapt to international rules and norms, we must be bold and creative in taking steps to level the playing field and enhance our own capabilities and partnerships,” Tai said on May 12.

A day later, Tai called for new U.S. “trade tools”  to confront Beijing’s anti-competitive threats, pointing to the example of how existing U.S. trade laws have failed to safeguard the U.S. steel industry in the face of China’s competition.

As we approach the second half of 2021, many countries around the world are beginning to relax their COVID-19 restrictions.

And while this signals a return to normalcy for much of the global economy, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu notes that there’s one subject that’s likely to remain controversial: government debt.

To see how each country is faring in the aftermath of an unprecedented global borrowing spree, this graphic from HowMuch.net visualizes debt-to-GDP ratios using April 2021 data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Ranking the Top 10 in Government Debt

Government debt is often analyzed through the debt-to-GDP metric because it contextualizes an otherwise massive number.

Take for example the U.S. national debt, which currently sits at over $27 trillion. In isolation this figure sounds daunting, but when expressed as a % of U.S. GDP, it works out to a more relatable 133%. This format also allows us to make a better comparison between countries, especially when their economies differ in size.

With that being said, here are the top 10 countries in terms of debt-to-GDP. For further context, we’ve included their 2019 and 2020 values as well.

Japan tops the list with a ratio of 257%, though this isn’t really a surprise—the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio first surpassed 100% in the 1990s, and in 2010, it became the first advanced economy to reach 200%.

Such significant debt burdens are the result of non-traditional monetary policies, many of which were first implemented by Japan, then adopted by others. In the late 1990s, for instance, the Bank of Japan (BoJ) set interest rates at 0% to counter deflation and promote economic growth.

This low cost of borrowing enables businesses and governments to accumulate debt much more freely, and has seen widespread use among other developed nations post-2008.

What are the Risks?

Given that a majority of countries in this visual are red (meaning their debt-to-GDP ratios are over 50%), it’s safe to say that government borrowing is common practice.

But are large government debts a cause for concern?

Some believe that excessive borrowing will lead to higher interest costs in the long run, which could detract from economic growth and public sector investment. This theory is unlikely to become a reality anytime soon, however.

A recent report by RBC Wealth Management reported that the cost of servicing U.S. federal debt actually decreased in 2020, thanks to the low borrowing costs mentioned previously.

Perhaps a more prescient question would be: how long can the world’s central banks keep interest rates at near-zero levels?

Authored by John Lott Jr via RealClearInvestigations.com,

Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections – warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story – of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned. 

A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they’ve experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe — a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy — all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections. Moreover, Boris Johnson’s government recently introduced legislation to have the rest of the country follow suit. 

Criticisms of the British leader’s voter ID push are similar to those heard in the U.S. The Scottish National Party claims his voter ID push targets “lower income, ethnic minority and younger people” who are less likely to vote for Johnson’s conservatives and therefore represents “Trump-like voter suppression.” 

Yet despite such pushback, Britain looks set to follow countries in Europe and elsewhere with stricter voting regimes, few of which temporarily relaxed any of their voting rules during the pandemic.

In the map here, the blue isn’t for America’s Democratic Party. Rather, it’s for European countries that require voter photo IDs, which Democrats oppose in the U.S. The exception is Britain (green), which plans to require IDs for all elections, while Denmark (light blue) requires them on request.

Seventy-four percent of European countries entirely ban absentee voting for citizens who reside domestically.

Another 6% limit it to those hospitalized or in the military, and they require third-party verification and a photo voter ID. Another 15% require a photo ID for absentee voting.

Similarly, government-issued photo IDs are required to vote by 33 nations in the 37-member Organistion for Economic Co-operation and Development (which has considerable European overlap). Only the UK, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia currently do not require IDs. Of those outliers: 

• Japan provides each voter with tickets that bear unique bar codes. If the voter loses the ticket or accidentally brings the ticket for another family member, polling staff verifies the voter’s name and address using a computer with access to the city’s database. The voter may have to present government-issued photo identification. 

• New Zealand technically requires an ID with a unique code, but while it will take longer to look up identifying information, it is still possible to vote without the ID.

• Australia has by far the loosest rules, and while a photo ID is required to register to vote, once at a polling station, voters need simply report their names, addresses, and whether they have voted in a previous election.

There were a few exceptions to developed countries’ general avoidance of emergency voting measures during the pandemic. Poland allowed mail-in ballots for everyone last year as a one-time measure, as did two cities in Russia, but Poland’s rushed plan played out so poorly it dissuaded other countries from following suit. France made more limited exceptions, temporarily allowing sick or at-risk individuals to vote absentee.

In some countries, even driver’s licenses aren’t considered authoritative enough forms of voter identity verification.

The Czech Republic and Russia require passports or military-issued IDs and others use national identity cards. Others go even further: Colombia and Mexico each require a biometric ID to cast a ballot.

Many countries in Europe and beyond have learned the hard way that fraud can result from looser voting regimes — and they have instituted stricter voting measures in direct response to it.

In Northern Ireland, where a bitter sectarian conflict extends to hardball electoral machinations, voter fraud has been described as “widespread and systemic” on all sides. Both Conservative and Labour governments instituted reforms to quell it. In 1985, the U.K. started requiring identification before ballots could be issued. This proved insufficient. A 1998 Select Committee on Northern Ireland report found that medical cards used as IDs after the 1985 law could be “easily forged or applied for fraudulently,” thus allowing non-existent people to vote. By 2002, the Labour government made voter identification cards much more difficult to forge, and used the more secure ID and other rules to prevent people from registering to vote multiple times. These anti-fraud provisions led to an immediate 11% reduction in total registrations — a suggestion to Labour of the extent of earlier fraud.

One study of vote fraud in Northern Ireland before the 2002 reforms interviewed Brendan Hughes, the former IRA Belfast commander. Hughes explained that he had a fleet of taxis to ferry fraudulent voters from one polling station to another and that they “dressed up volunteers with wigs, clothes, and glasses, and said this practice continued for decades.” Young women were usually “used for voter impersonation because they were more likely to be let off if there was any doubt.” 

A 2002 survey of Northern Ireland by the U.K. Electoral Commission, conducted after the rules passed but before they went into effect, found that by a 64% to 10% margin, voters thought that vote “fraud in some areas is enough to change the election results.”

Elsewhere in Britain, there have been notable fraud cases involving absentee ballots. In 2004, before recent photo ID requirements, six Labour Party councilors in Birmingham won office in what a judge later described as a “massive, systematic and organized” postal voting fraud campaign. The fraud was apparently carried out with the full knowledge and cooperation of the local Labour party, and involved “widespread theft” of absentee ballots (possibly around 40,000) in areas with large Muslim populations. The fraud reflected some Labour members’ worries that the areas’ Muslims could no longer be trusted to vote for the party because of unhappiness over the Iraq War.

On the mainland, France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in the island region of Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and others were cast in the names of dead people.

In Hungary, which has the most lenient mail-in voting regulations in Europe, including no ID requirement, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, criticized for authoritarian tendencies, won 96% of the mail votes in the 2018 election, thus giving itself a supermajority in parliament by a very slim margin. Concerns are that fraud is possible because “there is little scope for verification of identities, or to check that people are still alive.”

When there are no tamper-resistant photo IDs, fraud is difficult to prove. If hundreds or thousands of people vote at a polling place, how do you verify if someone voted by pretending to be someone else? Criminal convictions tend to occur only when people try voting in the same polling station multiple times instead of visiting multiple stations. But, with poll workers often working different shifts, even the same polling station can be compromised.

Take a case from the U.K. in 2016. As the Electoral Commission describes it: “Later in the day the same voter attended again and sought to vote again, this time in his own name. Due to certain physical characteristics of the voter (he was very tall and wore distinctive clothing) and the vigilance of the presiding officer he was suspected of having already voted earlier and formally challenged.”

In another case in the U.K. from 2017, police caught a person voting multiple times only because he openly bragged about it on Twitter. By far the most common consequence for those caught voting multiple times is a “caution” notice from the police.

American progressives might take heed of a Mexican election stolen from voters on the left in part due to lax voting requirements facilitating fraud. The 1988 loss of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the leading leftist presidential candidate, to Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party has long been considered a result of electoral fraud, later even acknowledged by the then-incumbent president, Miguel de la Madrid.

And as a result of that fraud, Mexico in 1991 mandated voter photo IDs with biometric information, banned absentee ballots, and required in-person voter registration. Despite making registration much more difficult and banning absentee ballots, voter participation rates rose after Mexico implemented the new rules. In the three presidential elections following the 1991 reforms, an average of 68% of the eligible citizens voted, compared with only 59% in the three elections prior to the rule changes. Seemingly, as people gained faith in the electoral process, they became more likely to vote. Ultimately, in 2006 Mexico would revert to permitting absentee voting, but limited it to those living abroad who requested a ballot at least six months in advance. Claims of voting irregularities have occasionally arisen in later years, but they focus on vote buying, not impersonating others, or having non-existent people voting.

Despite the record of Europe and the vast majority of the rest of the developed world, congressional Democrats are pushing to remove identification requirements for voting. The House recently passed the For the People Act of 2021, which replaces state voter ID rules with a signed statement from the voter, and makes permanent the pandemic’s mail-in ballot voting. The mailing out of blank absentee ballots en masse would become a fixture of American elections. The Senate Committee on Rules and Administration marked up the bill, but failed to pass it with a 9-to-9 pure party-line tie vote. However, Democrats have recently changed Senate rules, so they can still bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote.

Meanwhile, efforts in Republican states to require voter IDs for in-person voting and absentee ballots have triggered boycotts from Major League Baseball and other corporations. Georgia’s new absentee provisions raised a ruckus despite being much less restrictive than much of the rest of the world. Anyone who wants an absentee ballot can obtain one. A reason need not be given, such as being out of town, but one must have an ID to get an absentee ballot. The pattern is similar for developed countries around the world.

The case of Mexico undermines the idea that stricter voting rules lead to vote suppression, and so does some of the evidence from America. A number of states have in recent years instituted photo and non-photo ID measures, and found no statistically significant change in voter participation rates. Other evidence suggests that black and minority voter registration rates increased faster than whites after states implemented voter ID requirements for registration.

RCI contacted both the Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU, two organizations that have been at the forefront of the ballot access/voting integrity debate, to ask them what they made of the more restrictive voting rules implemented elsewhere. The ACLU did not respond, and a Brennan Center spokesman said: “As a rule, we don’t comment on other countries’ voting systems because that’s not our area of expertise.”

Australians are threatening to boycott the candy bar “Snickers,” after a viral TikTok video revealed the chocolate is now made in China.

Jeremy Toh, who goes by the handle “@thatjeremytoh” on TikTok, uploaded the video over the weekend and found while shopping at Woolworths Supermarkets, a Snickers candy bar is no longer made in Australia but instead China. 

“Did you know your Snickers are no longer made in Australia?” a voice-over feature on the popular social media app said.

The video shows Toh zooming in on the candy bar, revealing its origins are Chinese. 

“All Your Snickers Belong To Me Now,” a bolded headline overtop Chinese President Xi Jinping read. 

Here’s the video. 

Australians have gone bonkers about their favorite candy bar now produced in China. Here’s one comment from Snickers Australia’s Facebook page: 

“I bought some yesterday and they are made in China. I will never buy another Snickers again. I’m sure many people feel this way,” one person wrote.

Comments on the video were even more brutal: 

“No more snickers for me now…” a TikToker said. 

“Time to reduce my chocolate intake…” another said. 

“If they’re mixing plastic with rice & selling it. I wonder what they put in snickers,” someone else said. 

The Daily Mail quoted a spokesperson from Mars Wrigley – which manufactures the bar – said the company had to shift domestic production to China while its facility at Ballarat, in regional Victoria, underwent upgrades. 

The spokesperson went on to say that the production of Australian Snicker bars will be made available in 2022. 

“No jobs have been impacted as we carry out these upgrades, and we are working hard to return SNICKERS production to Australia early next year,” they said.

The takeaway here is that Australian nationalism is growing as tensions between China-Australia ramp up.

Last month, China “indefinitely” suspended activity under a China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue in the latest setback between both countries. 

Mars Wrigley could be subjected to a nationwide boycott if the TikTok video continues to gain popularity. 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via RealClearMarkets.com,

An axiom everyone picks up in college – and in nearly the whole of media culture too – is that people who favor a market economy disregard everyone but the privileged rich (itself a euphemism). It’s a great rhetorical trick because the presumption keeps backers of freedom on the hot seat, permanently. 

You know the ropes. Trickle down is a myth, so why are we shilling for the rich? What’s this fetish for big business? Why do we disregard the poor, the workers, the marginalized, the vulnerable? Why is our thinking so solipsistically exclusionary of people unlike ourselves?

If the experience of 2020 doesn’t change this fake narrative, nothing will. The reality is that with few exceptions, the people who identify as “left of center” became the champions of lockdowns, as if this were a normal policy any civilized country would deploy in the event of a new pathogen.

I never would have believed it, and some of my friends on the left are shocked by it all. They are in the minority among their tribe. Still there it was, a clear ideological bias for lockdowns that strongly tilted left. 

Let us begin with the great slogan of Spring 2020: “Stay home and stay safe.” Twitter even invented a little house icon that appeared when you typed it. It became a kind of mantra that the way to control this disease is not to leave your house. Have your meals delivered. Watch your church services on your computer. Meet with friends only through Zoom. Get out on the roads only if you have to, and do not travel no matter what. 

You know what’s amazing about this? Only about one third of workers could comply with this dictate. In bigger cities, it was closer to 40% but much lower in more rural areas. The newspapers and television reporters, to say nothing of social media, were speaking to what’s come to be known as the Zoom class, the people who work in digital media, finance, insurance, banking, and other such high-end areas. 

ETrade

ETrade

What about the rest? Who precisely is going to deliver these groceries? Who is going to work in the hospitals? What precisely happens to all the workers in the restaurants, hotels, airports, theaters, and churches? Who will cut hair, trim lawns, build houses, drive trucks? Who will be operating the lockdown economy and keep us all from starving?

It was like no one really cared, certainly not most of those elites who identify as left of center. 

What emerged in the lockdown culture of 2020 was a new feudalism, or, worse, a new totalitarianism. Society became almost immediately split down the middle, essential and nonessential workers. Some of the essentials could work on laptops and some could not, but in any case, their paychecks kept arriving. The nonessentials were declared to be dispensable. Hardly any of TV’s talking heads gave a flying fig. 

And it’s true, the nonessentials are not the blue checkmark people on Twitter. You never see them being interviewed by CNN or MSNBC. They do not have Wikipedia pages. They do not write academic articles. They aren’t judges or public-health bureaucrats. They don’t have the resources to run for public office. They don’t read the New York Times. They can’t even afford access to attorneys, so it’s not as easy as somehow suing the system that exploited them. 

We are talking about the silent two thirds, people who might be in the majority but because of their economic and professional position were not granted access to protest, much less change the system. They became the fodder in other people’s plots and plans to enact a grand new social/political experiment in disease mitigation. 

Whatever happened to concern for the working class, the poor, the marginalized, the minorities, such as women with children who left the workforce in droves to care for children who were shut out of schools for a year? In other words, what of the tropes about social concern that have animated the left for the better part of a century? 

And so much for the rights of women, especially women of color! 

“Four times as many women over the age of 20 dropped out of the labor force in September (2020) compared to men,” reports the Washington Examiner.

“When school started up last fall, roughly 865,000 women had dropped out of the labor force in September, compared to 216,000 men.”

What about the sick? Diagnosis for 6 cancers dropped 46%. For breast cancer in particular, diagnosis collapsed by 50% due to lack of screenings. Visits to the emergency room fell by half. There was a collapse in diagnosis of appendicitis, heart attack, and stroke. As many as 40% of Americans reported last year to be struggling with substance abuse and mental health disorders. You would never believe this one: health care spending during a pandemic actually fell by 6%, mainly because people were locked out of their doctor’s offices and hospitals. 

This is some serious collateral damage and it massively and disproportionately affected the working poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized. Where was the concern? Where was the sympathy? The very people who have paraded their social virtues for many decades fell silent. It was especially egregious to observe the lack of concern for schoolchildren, who lost their connection to their communities and got lost. Reports of child abuse fell by 18% during lockdowns. It’s not as if actual abuse and neglect fell by that much. It just became invisible. 

We could go on with this for an entire book but let’s look briefly at small business. Nearly half of restaurants closed or are expected to do so, with their workers unemployed. A quarter of small businesses already closed, and nearly half had to lay off workers. Remember that the next time some supporter of lockdowns preaches fealty to the cause of helping small business. Forget subsidies; how about the basic right to operate a business?

I’ve puzzled about this strange disconnect for the better part of a year. My conclusion is that left-wing ideology has evolved to become a highly selfish ruling class vision that only purports to love the poor and so on in the abstract. In real life, the people who preach socialist principles have very little if any connection to the real stuff of life, exactly as we’ve seen over the last year, and in fact care very little about those who win from freedom and lose from the despotism they imagine to be better. 

In 1949, F.A. Hayek worried that as we become ever more prosperous the ranks of the “intellectual class” would grow and become injurious to the common good. “The class does not consist of only journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction,” he wrote. “The class also includes many professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors, who through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of their expert knowledge of their own subjects, are listened with respect on most others.”

“It is the intellectuals,” Hayek continued, “in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.”

If that was true in 1949, how much more so today, now the growth of the intellectual class, real and imagined, has grown to become a sizeable swath of the workforce? As for everyone else, they felt browbeat, bullied, intimidated, and ultimately crushed in a year in which the intellectual class experimented with the unthinkable, even as the virus itself ignored all the political machinations and did its damage anyway.

Hayek ended his essay with the hope that we won’t have to experience the worst of totalitarian ideology before we come to appreciate the glorious virtues of a free society. Reading it (and I encourage you to do so) is a chilling experience. He provides a perfect picture of how the scientific-industrial ruling class elite accomplished its goals in the last 14 months: by taking over the commanding heights of opinion. 

The question now is: what happens next? Will we imagine a new liberty or acquiesce to the new serfdom under which we live today? Lockdowns came to us like a meteor that few even knew existed. If that doesn’t shake your worldview, and your sense of who will stand up for basic rights and liberties, nothing will. 

We’ve documented (read here & here) this spring of a “megadrought” sweeping through the western half of the country and could be one of the worst in decades. This is troubling news because major water reservoirs have already dropped to dangerously low levels, cutting off access to farmers. 

The latest US Drought Monitor map shows nearly the entire western half of the nation is experiencing some level of drought at this moment. Parts of the Southwest could be undergoing their second Dust Bowl as conditions continue to deteriorate. 

According to Reuters, for farmers like Joe Del Bosque, located in Firebaugh, California, a third of his 2,000-acre farm is unseeded this spring due to extreme drought and the inability to source water. 

About 40% of California’s 24.6 million acres of farmland is irrigated. State and federal agencies that regulate reservoirs and canals across the state do not have enough water to allocate to farmers. Many of them are leaving their fields unplanted as a result of the water shortage. 

We’ve explained before, La Nina conditions are turbocharging droughts in North and South America. 

Agriculture in the state counts for 2% of its GDP and employs hundreds of thousands of workers. The state is a top producer of berries, dairy products, nuts and vegetables.

 Del Bosque told Reuters he’s “taking a big risk in planting crops and hoping the water gets here in time.” 

Others are reducing crop acreage as there is simply no water to go around:

“I’m going to be reducing some of our almond acreages. I may be increasing some of our row crops, like tomatoes,” said Stuart Woolf, who operates 30,000 acres in Western Fresno County.

Woolf said about 30% or 9,000 acres would be fallow this growing season because of water shortages. 

Del Bosque said he’s estimated to lose half a million dollars in income this year and lay off many of his 700 workers. 

Ernest Conant, regional director of the Bureau of Reclamation, California-Great Basin region, the federal agency that manages dams, canals, and water allocations in the Western US, said, “we simply don’t have enough water to supply our agricultural users. We’re hopeful some water can be moved sooner than October, but there are no guarantees.” 

Water shortages across Southwest are increasing as average crop development growth in these areas will likely be impacted this growing season. Hot air, gusty winds, and low humidity will accelerate drying conditions. 

To call this a “plague” would be a significant understatement. 

If arid conditions continue in the Southwest, there will be epic crop failures by the end of this year’s growing season. This suggests US food production could be impacted, fueling inflation at supermarkets. 

Now Dust Bowl conditions are returning, and farmers, ranchers and local authorities can’t do anything about it. 

Authored by Jamie Joseph via The Epoch Times,

Los Angeles is set ablaze up to 24 times a day. The cause? Thousands of homeless encampments…

This year, fires started in homeless encampments have accounted for 54 percent of the blazes battled by the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD), according to officials—a sharp uptick compared to 2020.

As the county grapples with more than 66,000 people living on its streets, critics are pointing to the growing number of fires caused by the homeless as another indication that officials are mishandling the crisis. And in parts of the city where the homeless are concentrated, residents and business owners say their concerns are not being heard.

LAFD Capt. Erik Scott told The Epoch Times that potential hazards in encampments come from warming and cooking fires, particularly on cold nights.

“One of our concerns is fires in tents where people experiencing homelessness are sleeping—where they could be injured or even die—and fires that start against a building and spread into the structure,” Scott said.

“Flames from those fires can spread into the brush in wildland areas, or to nearby buildings in urban areas or inside vacant buildings.”

He said potential fire hazards increase significantly on windy days, when the flames can spread rapidly.

“Using open flame to cook in any enclosed spaces, especially tight quarters like tents, can easily catch the tent or belongings inside on fire,” said Scott. In addition, toxic smoke gases can asphyxiate the tent’s occupants, knocking them out or killing them.

LAFD Fire Chief Ralph M. Terrazas recently walked through the Skid Row area in downtown L.A. with representatives from nearby business districts to discuss their concerns about encampments.

“The LAFD now has our Downtown-based Fast Response Vehicle on duty six days per week to service the Skid Row area,” Scott said.

He described the vehicle as a quad-cab pickup truck equipped with a 300-gallon fire-suppression tank that “can quickly extinguish fires while small.”

But not all fires caused by the homeless are small: In the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades, a homeless person was charged May 18 with committing arson attacks that ignited a 1,158-acre brush fire. The suspect allegedly ignited the blaze repeatedly, according to witnesses in an LAFD helicopter.

Burned items are found along the 91 Freeway near the area where a homeless man died after starting a fire, in Anaheim, Calif., on April 21, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

The issue is citywide, Scott said. Multiple agencies and departments have separate roles regarding the homeless, based upon their agency’s jurisdiction. The LAFD is now working closely with both city and county partners to address the encampment fires.

After the Pacific Palisades suspect was arrested, L.A. Councilmember Mike Bonin responded on Twitter.

“Arson is a crime committed by a person, and not by their housing status,” Bonin wrote.

“Suggesting the suspect’s housing status is a contributing factor to the crime is irresponsible, and implies other people experiencing homelessness are inherently more dangerous or more likely to commit arson than housed people.”

A man on an electric scooter drives past the site of a building that was torched by homeless individuals, in Venice Beach, Calif., on Jan. 27, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Venice Beach

One L.A. neighborhood in particular experiences these fires too often: Venice Beach. The world-renowned tourist destination—with an estimated 30,000 visitors per day—is now crippled with crime, drugs, fires, and homeless tents piled on top of each other.

Many of the tents have propane tanks and camping stoves inside, used by the homeless for cooking or warmth. Needles, feces, and other discarded hazardous items are regularly found on the nearby sand.

The deterioration of the neighborhood has impacted local businesses. People from around the world are canceling their hotel reservations in the area, according to Venice Chamber of Commerce President George Francisco, who said he’s received firsthand accounts from local hotel owners.

“People see the news stories, and they just cancel,” Francisco told The Epoch Times.

“Or when you’re looking for hotel rooms and you see the coverage … how could any of these places stay in business?”

Francisco said city officials haven’t offered any solutions to protect businesses and residents. He used to stay in touch with Bonin, he said, but the councilman hasn’t responded to him in four years—despite multiple letters sent to officials sounding the alarm on the homelessness issue affecting businesses on the boardwalk.

“No one is trying to solve this problem [because it would] cripple the largest financial business in Venice, which is social services,” Francisco said, pointing to Bonin’s policies that address homelessness by creating more emergency shelters, which then contract nonprofits to operate them.

Bonin, who did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment, championed the neighborhood’s first bridge housing facility. Residents have told The Epoch Times previously that the facility doesn’t work, and only serves to attract more transients and trash.

The Wild Wild West

Videos are shared daily on social media by a local neighborhood watchdog group that show the disorder on the Venice boardwalk. In early May, the group posted a video that showed an encampment erupting in flames. Another video, shared later in the month, shows two homeless people physically assaulting one another while a dog gets caught in the middle.

“Sadly, animal abuse and neglect are common in the boardwalk encampments,” according to the caption.

Another video, posted to Twitter on May 20, shows two individuals in a fistfight in front of the Venice Beach Bar. “Who needs MMA [mixed martial arts] when we have the Venice Boardwalk?” the posting states. The caption concludes by thanking Councilmember Bonin, whose district includes Venice.

Luis Perez, the bar’s general manager, told The Epoch Times the incident was what locals call “street justice.” The fight started because one of the men, who lives in a nearby encampment, was allegedly abusing his girlfriend, he said.

Perez said similar incidents take place weekly—and the bar is suffering because of them. They’re “definitely feeling a loss of business, because you know, tourists don’t want to be here,” he said. “If they do come here, they pass right through,” and go to Santa Monica or Marina Del Rey instead.

The regulars who hang around the area have started to call it “the Wild Wild West,” he said, where “there’s no control.”

An LAFD paramedic responds to an emergency on the Venice Boardwalk, in Venice Beach, Calif., on Jan. 27, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Perez said he has seen around 10 fires in encampments located on the boardwalk only two blocks from the bar.

“There was a woman—I haven’t seen her in a long time—she was definitely suffering from mental illness issues. I came into the bar one morning … and the fire trucks were out, and apparently she had said she was playing with something, and she hit a fire off,” he said.

He said the situation gets worse when the weather gets colder and people try to keep warm within the encampments.

“It’s very unsanitary, very violent,” he said.

“We try to tell our councilman … all of us, all the restaurant owners down here. There’s a group of us that are constantly sending videos and asking for help, and we have no police presence because the police department [has] been defunded.”

Before the pandemic, the boardwalk would see police presence every 10 to 15 minutes, Perez said. Now, a whole day will go by without seeing any officers patrolling the boardwalk.

“These are troubled times for us down here in the business district,” he said.

“It’s really sad, and we’re all struggling to try to keep up, keep people wanting to come back, and come in and feel safe.”

Perez said there had always been unhoused people in the area, ever since the bar opened in 2016. The difference between then and now, he said, is that he knew them all by name. They were transients who played music, created art on the boardwalk, and sold other goods. There were no tents allowed, per the city code.

But during the pandemic, Bonin declared the boardwalk a sanctuary zone—and Perez said he saw homeless people being bussed in from other cities.

“All the people who actually were here for years went away, because I haven’t seen anyone who used to be around here,” he said, adding that it wasn’t long before he didn’t recognize anyone.

“I do realize that as a situation we got to find a place to help these people out, but I personally just don’t believe that a beautiful state park in a business district is the right place to allow for that to be a sanctuary area,” he said.

A homeless man sleeps on a bench in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles on Jan. 27, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Putting Out Fires

The fires in Venice Beach have become such a threat that the LAFD has allocated one special fire vehicle to patrol the area four days a week.

The vehicle is a unique, fully equipped paramedic unit with a 150-gallon water tank, according to Scott. “Since it is a smaller size vehicle, that allows us to get around quicker than a traditional larger engine,” he said.

But for some residents, it’s too little, too late.

In April, a woman’s home burned down, and the fire killed her dog. The suspect, accused of throwing something onto the roof, was a homeless person living in one of the encampments.

On Ocean Front Walk, where visitors stroll the boardwalk, an empty space has been fenced off between two businesses. The lot was once the site of a commercial building—until January, when homeless encampments next to it caught fire. The building burnt to the ground in the early hours of the morning.

The destruction caused by homeless fires has resulted in millions of dollars in damages, according to the L.A. Times.

Francisco suggested small business owners on Venice Beach forced to put up with the problems caused by the homeless should be taken into consideration.

“You have basically 70 percent of all visitors coming to Venice, going to Ocean Front Walk and the boardwalk, which is predominantly populated by shops … but they are small, four to 12 person operations––and there is something that should be cherished about that,” Francisco said.

“There’s never been city abetted, you know, small business aid in this council district. There’s plenty of operations that are given money to, quote unquote, help solve the homeless problem. There seems to be no lack of effort for that.”

According to the Venice Chamber of Commerce, Venice is the second largest tourist attraction in Southern California, behind only Disneyland, with 62 percent of visitors having an average income over $50,000.

The businesses they visit, mainly T-Shirt and other pop-up shops, have been under “constant siege” due to COVID-19 restrictions and other financial challenges, Francisco said––and that was before the threat of homeless encampments and fires.

Teetering on the Brink

Klaus Moeller is a small business owner on the boardwalk. His Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream shop opened in 2018, but he arrived in Venice 11 years earlier.

“Loved the grungy feel of Venice, and of course the 14 million or so tourists that came each year,” Moeller told The Epoch Times.

“It was such a fun place for us to spread happiness and love—plus employ 20 local kids—pretty much all of them minorities.”

But after struggling through the pandemic and its restrictions, his business is now on the brink of closing. Though his landlords have reduced the rent to help the shop survive, Moeller said it’s losing money every month.

The homeless encampments right outside the shop deterred customers even before the pandemic, he said. But when the stay-at-home orders began last year, Bonin allowed encampments to congregate on the boardwalk.

“In order to house maybe 200 people, of whom I think maybe 30 are actual Venice homeless, the #2 tourist attraction in SoCal has been ruined. How is that fair to local tax paying business operators and residents?” Moeller asked in an email.

“We have fires, shootings, stabbings and robberies. It is insanity. A hotel on the boardwalk has been turned into a homeless shelter. That means less tourists can stay here and support the shops and restaurants.”

Moeller said the area has been overrun by two competing gangs that are selling drugs to transients. According to news reports, gang activity in the area has been relatively common in recent years, and one woman was murdered last December in a gang-related shooting near Moeller’s business.

“The amount of crime is so out of hand that it is literally not possible for the police to deal with,” he said.

“Take care of the root of the problem, and stop inviting transients from all over the world to move here. Charity begins at home. Take care of the Venice residents.”

U.S. troops tasked with guarding nuclear bombs in Europe accidentally leaked highly sensitive information about these weapons on popular educational websites, according to Bellingcat.

Military personnel used popular learning websites such as Quizlet, Chegg Prep, and Cram to remember complex security protocols, exact locations, and other top-secret information. 

So how did Bellingcat’s Foeke Postma uncover the leaked documents? Well, a simple search on the study websites revealed various sets of flashcards. 

“By simply searching online for terms publicly known to be associated with nuclear weapons, Bellingcat was able to discover cards used by military personnel serving at all six European military bases reported to store nuclear devices,” Postma wrote. 

A deck of 70 study cards on Chegg, titled “Study!,” disclosed exact facilities housing live and non-live nuclear bombs at the Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands.

“How many WS3 [Weapons Storage and Security Systems] vaults are there on Volkel ab,” asked one of the virtual flashcards. 

The answer: “Eleven (11).” 

The flashcard indicated five of the eleven holding facilities on the base had “hot” nuclear bombs and 6 “cold” ones. 

A deck of 80 virtual cards on website Cram revealed the hot and cold vaults at Aviano Air Base in Italy. The information is so sensitive that a few cards detailed how soldiers should respond while activating the weapons. 

Other study cards revealed nuclear secrets at bases in Belgium, Germany, and Turkey. Some detailed locations of CCTV security systems and additional information would be beneficial for Russia or China. 

Bellingcat found some of the flashcards dated back to 2013 and more recent ones from April 2021. 

Postma said the cards it viewed had been scrubbed after contacting NATO and the U.S. military for comment about the leaks. 

There is no word if the soldiers using the educational websites will be reprimanded for leaking highly sensitive information. 

This sort of embarrassment is similar to when soldiers wore interactive online fitness tracking devices that revealed secret military bases and CIA “black” sites worldwide. 

Authored by Lawrence Kadish via The Gatestone Institute,

One suspects that historians and economists will consistently agree on one irrefutable fact: nations that allow their economies to bathe in red ink are destined to fail. This failure takes many roads and differs in timing, but massive, uncontrolled national deficits eventually reduce a nation state to being a pauper, a pariah — and pathetic.

Enter Joe Biden’s “American Jobs Plan,” a $2.3 trillion spending scheme that takes some Americans’ most fevered fantasies and wraps them inside an “infrastructure” label in an effort to convince Capitol Hill that the spending is all about roads and bridges. An analysis by the Wharton School places plenty of caution flags on this initiative.

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possible sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

Even the White House acknowledges that their spending debt would take 15 years to pay off, providing that Biden’s proposed corporate tax hikes generate the projected revenue – itself highly questionable. What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant. Sadly, the bill suggests a clumsy political strategy to prevent open debate and an honest review of the Biden agenda.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge. Biden’s spending spree is far beyond Washington’s traditional pork. It is creating a level of unsustainable debt in pursuit of a social agenda that could literally sink everyone, drowning all, regardless of which political party they claim.

As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.