President Joe Biden faces an avalanche of problems when he returns to the White House in the new year.
For starters, Covid – the virus he vowed to ‘shut down’ the moment he entered office – is out of control. Just weeks ago, he warned the unvaccinated that they face a “winter of severe illness and death.”
Now, the CDC has pivoted to a ‘pox party’ strategy by essentially encouraging people to spread the mildly symptomatic Omicron variant with a shortened quarantine period (5 days vs. 10), followed by ‘get back to work with a mask’ for five more days. The agency also dropped end-of-infection PCR testing guidelines because ‘they can remain positive for up to 12 weeks.’
This means that for the past 21 months, people sat home for extra days and weeks because their test came back with an irrelevant positive. We didn’t know this 6, 12, 18 months ago? Really?
Oh, and Biden now insists there’s no federal solution to Covid. Loyal Church of Covid adherents are undoubtedly crestfallen ahead of midterms.
“At the end of the day, his fortunes are intertwined with COVID,” Democratic strategist Joel Payne tells The Hill. “Joe Biden is president because of COVID, but Dems are struggling right now because of COVID. And until they can find someone to figure this out, people are going to be mad about COVID.”
Bill Galston, a senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution who also served as a White House policy adviser to former President Clinton, said it is important for Biden to strike a balanced tone and avoid overpromising given the unpredictability of the virus.
“They’re in possession of all the facts and the most experienced scientists and public policy experts in the business, and I think that they’re going to do everything that can be done. I see the decline in the president’s ratings on COVID since midsummer in part as a consequence of what I regard as unwise overpromising that occurred at the beginning of July,” Galston said. “He came perilously close to hanging out a ‘mission accomplished’ banner at the door of the White House.” -The Hill
Next, Biden and Congressional Democrats will attempt to revive the corpse of their $2 trillion Build Back Better agenda – while still facing opposition from moderate Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Without their buy-in, the best Biden and crew can hope for is to salvage components of it into smaller chunks that the two moderates may or may not agree to.
“To face this many genuine political fires, from a pandemic raging again to major legislation that might be finished, is the worst way to start a new year,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.” Just to add to the challenge, the midterm season will get fully underway, and it will be harder to persuade any politician to do something that poses electoral risk.“
The White House will also grapple with supply chain issues and inflation in 2022, after repeatedly insisting it was ‘transitory’ throughout the second half of 2021.
“In addition to COVID, this is where Biden and his team fumbled the ball,” according to one Democratic strategist. “They denied there was a problem, and then they looked silly when they had to backpedal. They can’t do that kind of thing again. It looks bad.”
And with inflation expected to persist into the new year, the White House will once again need to tweak its messaging instead of its go-to that Congress needs to pass BBB in order to tame the ongoing price hikes.
“Time is not the friend here,” said Jim Manley, a former aide to ex-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). “The last thing that we as Democrats can afford is to go through a prolonged period of negotiating as we head towards the midterms.”
Next up, the Democrat exodus, as at least 23 Democratic members of Congress have announced that they won’t seek reelection this year – setting Republicans up for a potential red wave that would dash Democrats’ plan for wanton spending.
Finally, Biden will have to deal with Donald Trump.
“He remains the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and I think President Biden in 2020 ran offering himself as the alternative to the status quo, and President Trump may have the opportunity to flip that script on him,” said GOP strategist Colin Reed, who suggested that 2024 will likely include ‘strong Republican contenders other than Trump.’
“There’s just a lot of holes to poke in the Biden record, and a Republican candidate, be it Donald Trump or anyone else, is going to have a lot of material to work with.“
Shanghai Electric Power Co. Ltd. plans to terminate a project that was supposed to provide “green” energy in China’s Xinjiang region but instead discharges polluted wastewater.
In a Dec. 28 filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the company said that owing to the malfunction of an exhaust gas purification system, the operation of its Hami Xuanli Gas Power project had improperly discharged a considerable amount of wastewater containing phenol, or carbolic acid.
The state-owned utility said it had decided to shut the project and dispose of related equipment.
Hami Xuanli was started for the purpose of “utilizing the exhaust gas emitted by coal tar in an Industrial Cluster Park, and through combined gas and steam turbines to generate electricity,” according to a 2014 official introduction to the project.
The utility said that after on-site inspections in 2021, a team of external experts concluded that the purification facilities needed large-scale renovation to meet environmental requirements. However, they concluded that “it is costly, and the effect remains uncertain.”
The project’s losses will cost Shanghai Electric Power $91 million in impairment provisions, said the exchange filing, adding that apart from the $47 million impairment for Hami Xuanli Gas Power Generation Co. Ltd., there is also a $44 million impairment for another subsidiary, Luojing Gas Turbine Power Plant.
Luojing Power Plant leased facilities linked to the project. Its facilities will be dismantled since they are non-standard and cannot be used in domestic power plants of the same type.
The Shanghai-listed company’s stock declined sharply on Dec. 29, the last trading day of 2021.
The project was approved in 2014 by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, also known as XPCC or Bingtuan (“The Corps”).
“The major goal of the project is to make maximum use of the exhaust gas produced by the industries in the park, while also purifying the gas to fulfill environmental protection regulations,” project manager Xu Jihui said in May 2020, according to bingtuan.com.
In the report, the state-run outlet covered a groundbreaking ceremony held by XPCC for Hami Xuanli’s second gas station, adding that the project is to “further relieve the industrial park’s pollution condition, and move forward with high-quality development while preserving the park’s efficient and green environment.”
China is the world’s largest carbon emitter. The Chinese regime said that its country’s carbon emissions will peak in 2030, and then begin to fall, with the objective of reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. The regime has argued that China is still a developing economy and should not be held to the same standards as developed countries in terms of cutting carbon emissions.
XPCC is a unique state-owned economic and paramilitary entity in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that is subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the entity in 2020 for human rights violations.
On Dec. 23, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law legislation that bans all imports from the Xinjiang region over concerns of forced labor.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is part of the United States’ response to Beijing’s treatment of China’s Uyghur minority, which Washington has called genocide.
In 2020, Shanghai Electric Power Co. settled $66 million in asset impairment for the Hami Xuanli project because of pollution, according to local outlet Time-Weekly.com.
Biden Extends Space Station Operations Through 2030 Despite Structural Fatigue Issues
The aging International Space Station (ISS) had its operational timespan extended through 2030, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said.
On Dec. 31, Nelson announced in a NASA blog that the Biden administration extended ISS’ operations through 2030. The administration also said they’re committed to working with their international partners on the station, including Europe (ESA, European Space Agency), Japan (JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Canada (CSA, Canadian Space Agency), and Russia (State Space Corporation Roscosmos).
“The International Space Station is a beacon of peaceful international scientific collaboration and for more than 20 years has returned enormous scientific, educational, and technological developments to benefit humanity. I’m pleased that the Biden-Harris Administration has committed to continuing station operations through 2030,” Nelson said.
“The United States’ continued participation on the ISS will enhance innovation and competitiveness, as well as advance the research and technology necessary to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program and pave the way for sending the first humans to Mars. As more and more nations are active in space, it’s more important than ever that the United States continues to lead the world in growing international alliances and modeling rules and norms for the peaceful and responsible use of space,” he explained.
Meanwhile, new space stations are coming online. China recently launched a next-generation space station into orbit and has already conducted an array of missions. Russia is set to construct a space station within five years, and private companies, such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, have unveiled plans for a commercial space station.
CNN Story Perfectly Captures The Mass Covid Neuroticism Of 2021
The below CNN story appropriately ran on December 31st, marking the end of a tumultuous 2021 dubbed by many headlines to be “the year of the coronavirus vaccine”. It was also a year of general Covid lunacy as people’s faith in the public “science and health experts” began to wane, but also as true believers in the dogma of “trust the science” refused to allow an inkling of doubt, even as highly vaxxed populations saw numbers of cases soar.
“Chicago woman quarantined in airplane bathroom for 3 hours after testing positive for Covid-19 mid-flight” – the CNN headline reads. She locked herself in the bathroom while en route from Chicago to Reykjavik, Iceland (she planned to go on to visit family in Switzerland) – after panicking upon discovering that a sore throat was the onset of coronavirus. CNN seems to actually hail her as some kind of hero of public conscientiousness. The start of the story perfectly encapsulates the kind of neurosis and failed precautions and anxiety-inducing “health rituals” which have taken hold over vast segments of the population. The woman took no less than seven Covid testsjust before the flight:
Before the flight, Fotieo told CNN she took two PCR tests and about five rapid tests, all of which came back negative. But about an hour and a half into the flight, Fotieo started to feel a sore throat.
“The wheels started turning in my brain and I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to just go take a test.’ It was going to make me feel better,” Fotieo told CNN. “Immediately, it came back positive.”
This story should be in The Onion. This woman, triple vaxxed, wears masks and shields, tests obsessively. Tested positive while mid-air (she’s hoarding tests) and locks herself in an airplane bathroom for hours fearing she’s killing everyone and herself. https://t.co/AeaaUEO9nq
And here’s the kicker: the woman who gave herself seven Covid tests but learned on the 8th that she had the virus was fully vaccinated and had received the booster.
But CNN still reminds the reader that it’s the “unvaccinated population” that we have to worry about here:
When she got her results in the airplane bathroom, over the Atlantic Ocean, she said she started to panic.
“The first flight attendant I ran into was Rocky. I was hysterical, I was crying,” Fotieo said. “I was nervous for my family who I just had dinner with. I was nervous for the other people on the plane. I was nervous for myself.”
Upon leaving the bathroom and the airplane when the flight touched down in Iceland, she was administered two more Covid tests, which both came back positive. So within a short span, that makes ten total Covid tests.
And let’s not forget the at least three vaccine doses she said she had which were supposed to “prevent” getting Covid-19 in the first place (preventing infection is the longstanding definition of what a vaccine is supposed to do, the recent CDC change to the literal definition notwithstanding).
A woman tested positive mid-air so she quarantined in the plane’s bathroom for the remaining 5 hours of the flight pic.twitter.com/ADNc0KKEM7
Her ten-day quarantine in a Red Cross hotel in Reykjavik appears to have gone smooth, with no mention of serious or severe symptoms.
After all this, she told CNN, “Honestly it has been an easy experience.” It appears that for now her “faith” in the just “trust the science” narrative remains unshaken. But for the rest of us, the saga is a perfectly absurd demonstration of all that’s been “learned” from the Covid lunacy of 2021.
* * *
Meanwhile, such stores are leading a handful of mainstream pundits to begin to ask…
Thoughts? This a solid description of how these conditions develop. Question: are we in such a state? https://t.co/vhcKE1Bub9
The global recovery has slowed down significantly since the peak of the re-opening effect in June 2021. What many expected would be a multi-year cycle of above-trend growth is proving to be a more modest bounce. Furthermore, according to Bloomberg Economics, the global economy will likely grow in the next ten years at a slower pace than in the decade prior to the pandemic.
The causes of the slowdown are clear. On one hand, China’s real estate bubble is a larger problem than anticipated, and there is no way in which the Chinese authorities can engineer higher growth from other sectors to offset real estate, which accounts for almost 30% of the country’s GDP and was growing at double-digit rates in the past years. Additionally, Inflation is rising all over the world due to a combination of excessive monetary policy and supply chain challenges brought by the lockdowns. Global food prices reached a new record-high, making it more difficult for the poor to navigate the crisis. Finally, large stimulus plans have delivered no significant multiplier effect.
Why would 2022 be the year of the hangover? Because the signs of overheating of the global economy are multiplying.
2021 was a year of massive demand-side policies. To the effect of the re-opening, policy makers added enormous deficit-spending plans, infrastructure and current spending boosts, and a massive monetary stimulus. The triple effect of the largest monetary stimulus in years, the re-opening and enormous government spending programs have overheated the economy. It is evident in inflationary pressures, housing, indebtedness, and twin deficit imbalances in most large economies. And those effects will not be there, or at least be present in the same proportion, in 2022.
2021 was the year of binge spending. 2022 is likely to be a hangover.
The combination of those enormous demand-side effects did not deliver the expected growth in 2021 but opened the door to a ghost of crises past: Inflation. In January 2021, all policymakers said there was no risk of inflation, rather the opposite. In March they told us it was due to the base effect. In June, they said it was temporary. Now they see it as “persistent,” according to Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve.
Inflation has been a heavy burden on families and businesses. Real wages are falling, disposable income is weakening, and small business margins are suffering. If inflationary pressures persist, the impact on consumption and investment will likely be larger in 2022.
Many believe that the slowdown is going to contain the inflationary spike. It may, but we should never forget that inflation accumulates. Those who see inflation in the United States moderating to 3% in 2022 should remember that this means more than 9% in two years.
The hangover effect is likely because the large deficit approved for the United States budget and the Biden infrastructure plan are pushing inflationary pressures in energy intensive activities and current spending.
Governments and central banks are incentivising demand where there is no need to do so, as it was mostly a case of re-opening the economy, not a liquidity or spending problem, and pushing global money supply and new credit to areas that have excess capacity. Meanwhile, underinvestment in commodities remains a key issue.
More government spending and more debt are causing a weaker recovery and slower job creation. At the same time, excessive monetary stimulus is eroding real wages.
The United States may pass this difficult year because global demand for US dollars is rising as other world currencies weaken, but the eurozone, that did not even see a strong recovery in 2021, is in an exceedingly difficult position. The US and European economy would have recovered faster and created more jobs with lower government intervention in the middle of the re-opening. Now, the negative effect of excessive spending and debt is likely to be larger. After over-heating the economy with unnecessary spending, it is difficult for policymakers to stop or admit the mistake. Central banks and governments will interpret the “hangover” slowdown as a need for more stimuli. And they will be wrong again
In writing my article on pseudonymous litigation, I’ve noticed that some pseudonyms aren’t mainstays such as Doe or Roe, or deliberately common names such as John Smith, but instead are either puns or references to famous (and perhaps topically connected) works. Three in particular come to mind:
Hester Prynne v. Settle, 848 F. App’x 93 (9th Cir. 2021), where plaintiff was challenging sex offender registry laws (hence the allusion to The Scarlet Letter).
Carol, Marie & Joseph Danvers v. Loudoun County School Bd., No. 1:21-cv-01028-RDA-JFA4 (E.D. Va. Sept. 13, 2021), a sexual assault case in which the high school student plaintiff’s pseudonym is the name of Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel (and the parents’ pseudonyms match Ms. Marvel’s parents).
Femedeer v. Haun, 227 F.3d 1244, 1246 (10th Cir. 2000), where plaintiff was challenging a sex offender notification law. My guess is that Femedeer is a pun on Doe (a deer, a feme deer).
Are there other examples that belong on the list? (I appreciate that the facts of #2 are fairly grim, and I was surprised to see a seemingly frivolous pseudonym in that case, but I assume that this was something that the plaintiff saw as meaningful and positive.)
In writing my article on pseudonymous litigation, I’ve noticed that some pseudonyms aren’t mainstays such as Doe or Roe, or deliberately common names such as John Smith, but instead are either puns or references to famous (and perhaps topically connected) works. Three in particular come to mind:
Hester Prynne v. Settle, 848 F. App’x 93 (9th Cir. 2021), where plaintiff was challenging sex offender registry laws (hence the allusion to The Scarlet Letter).
Carol, Marie & Joseph Danvers v. Loudoun County School Bd., No. 1:21-cv-01028-RDA-JFA4 (E.D. Va. Sept. 13, 2021), a sexual assault case in which the high school student plaintiff’s pseudonym is the name of Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel (and the parents’ pseudonyms match Ms. Marvel’s parents).
Femedeer v. Haun, 227 F.3d 1244, 1246 (10th Cir. 2000), where plaintiff was challenging a sex offender notification law. My guess is that Femedeer is a pun on Doe (a deer, a feme deer).
Are there other examples that belong on the list? (I appreciate that the facts of #2 are fairly grim, and I was surprised to see a seemingly frivolous pseudonym in that case, but I assume that this was something that the plaintiff saw as meaningful and positive.)
“Just In Case Fiat Money Goes To Hell”: Billionaires Are Finally Flooding Into Cryptos
It was back in September 2015, when we first predicted that bitcoin would surge exponentially (back then it traded at $250 and we said it would “soar past $500, past $1,000 and rise as high as $10,000 or more”… in retrospect it was “or much more”) as millions realized that cryptocurrencies are the logical alternative to failing monetary systems. Fast forward almost seven years later and several thousand percent higher, and only now is the “real” money (not to mention the really dumb money… you know who you are), finally throwing in the towel and starting to load up on crypto.
Note, we said “real” money not smart money, because institutional investors entered crypto at the start of 2021 (just as we predicted at the start of last January), around the time Elon Musk discovered his infatuation with cryptos. And now that all the early – and easy – gains have been made, the slow, dumb money, read billionaires, are finally rushing in. Take Thomas Peterffy, the Hungarian-born billionaire founder of Interactive Brokers. It was just a few years ago, back in 2017, when he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal warning of the dangers that bitcoin futures posed to capital markets. Well, it looks like those dangers are not as dire as he first predicted. These days Peterffy, worth $25 billion, said it’s prudent to have 2% to 3% of one’s personal wealth in cryptocurrencies, just in case fiat currency goes to “hell.”
A couple points here: fiat currency is going to hell, as even central banks admit with their relentless push to launch CBDCs (although if China is anything to go by, the rollout will be catastrophic), it’s just a matter of time. As for what 2-3% of personal wealth being allocated to crypto means, consider that just since the covid pandemic, household net worth has risen by $34 trillion, and was $145 trillion at last check (of course, most of that belongs to the 1%).
So in a banana republic where the top 1% of Americans own more wealth than the entire middle class (i.e., those in the 20% to 80% range, as shown in the chart below) for the first time since the Great Depression …
… what would happen if 3% of just US wealth was converted into cryptos? Well, 3% of $145 is $4.35 trillion, or about double the market cap of all cryptocurrencies in circulation today. So Bitcoin at $100,000, Ethereum at $10k and so on…
Of course, if one held much more of their net worth in cryptos over the past decade they would be, to loosely paraphrase Hans Gruber, sitting on a beach, not caring if they earn 20 percent.
To be sure, Peterffy is one such billionaire who has made the full conversion from skeptic to believer, and even endorser – as Bloomberg reports, he owns some himself, while his firm Interactive Brokers recently offered customers the ability to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, after detecting “urgency” from its clients to get in on the action. Peterffy said Interactive Brokers will offer the ability to trade another five to 10 coins or so starting this month.
It’s possible that cryptocurrencies could reap extraordinary returns — even if the opposite is also true, Peterffy said.
“I think it can go to zero, and I think it can go to a million dollars,” he said in an interview. “I have no idea.”
Well, unlike Peterffy, we had an idea back in 2015 and so far that idea has returned over 200x in 4 years.
But what is more important, is that the Hungarian’s tentative approach highlights the shifting attitude toward crypto by investors who once scorned or were wary of digital tokens but realized, especially in 2021, that they can’t bear to miss out on the potential for massive gains that have made millions of ordinary forward thinkers extremely rich.
One such example of slow money adoption is Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio, whoe recently revealed he was holding at least some Bitcoin and Ethereum in his portfolio only months after questioning crypto’s utility as a store of wealth. The Bridgewater Associates founder views the investments as an alternative money in a world where “cash is trash’’ and inflation erodes buying power. Paul Tudor Jones disclosed he’s invested as a hedge against inflation, and almost half the family offices Goldman Sachs Group does business with were interested in adding digital currencies to their portfolios.
What is remarkable, is that for once the world’s richest are far behind the adoption curve, with even retail investors way ahead of them. Consider that while the SEC has yet to approve a token-based ETF, tens of millions of Americans are already investing and trading crypto, a process which made Coinbase founder, Brian Armstrong, worth some $10 billion. Elsewhere, an NFT from Beeple sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s. Tom Brady released NFTs tied to his legendary career, while Katy Perry, Grimes and the agency behind K-Pop sensation BTS all sought to profit from the burgeoning industry. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele even made Bitcoin legal tender in his country.
And, as Bloomberg notes, the crypto marketing juggernaut will keep going in 2022 — Staples Center in Los Angeles is now Crypto.com Arena, while FTX and Singapore’s Crypto.com are running ads during the Super Bowl — even if prices don’t necessarily climb to the moon.
Still, that doesn’t mean that prices will continue their stratospheric ascent. Billionaire Michael Novogratz, who runs Galaxy Digital, said last month that prices could go “sideways to down” in the near-term. There was a lot of “froth” in the markets in 2021, Novogratz told Bloomberg, as retail investors piled into NFTs and pursued unusual crypto investments. The New York-based digital evangelist also predicted Bitcoin won’t fall below a floor of about $42,000. It closed the year at about $46,300.
“So much money is pouring into this space it would make no sense if crypto prices would go much below that,” Novogratz stated.
Even if prices did drop, they would promptly find buyers – after all if only 21 million people bought (and held) just one bitcoin, there would be no more freely floating. Jesse Powell, chief executive officer of crypto exchange Kraken, acknowledges prices could fall, but said on Bloomberg TV on Dec. 14 that any move below $40,000 is a “buying opportunity.” Then again, one should take his forecasts with a ton of salt: in August, he predicted prices would reach $100,000 a coin in 2021; they peaked just below $70K. Ark Investment Management’s Cathie Wood, meanwhile, still expects Bitcoin to reach $500,000, and said last month that it isn’t necessarily due for a correction.
That said, not every billionaire is a believer. Citadel’s Ken Griffin recently described the rush to embrace cryptocurrencies as a “jihadist call” against the U.S. dollar. But Griffin said his own firm would trade crypto if there were more regulation. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin “worthless” in October, but that came even as the New York-based banking giant was bulking up hiring to help its clients trade digital currencies. Of course, anyone who listened to Dimon who threatened to fire any JPM employees caught trading bitcoin, would have lost on the best investment opportunity of the 21st century… similarly to anyone who still pays for a Financial Times subscription. With its non-stop negative coverage of bitcoin over the past decade, the British (or is that Japanese) newspaper has singlehandedly been responsible for the greatest personal finance value destruction in modern history.
Two of the television outlets on which American liberals rely most for their news — NBC News and CNN — have spent the last six years hiring a virtual army of former CIA operatives, FBI officials, NSA spies, Pentagon chiefs, and DOJ prosecutors to work in their newsrooms. The multiple ways in which journalism is fundamentally corrupted by this spectacle are all vividly illustrated by a new article from NBC Newsthat urges the prosecution and extradition of Julian Assange, claiming that the WikiLeaks founder, once on U.S. soil, will finally provide the long-elusive proof that Trump criminally conspired with Russia.
The NBC article is written by former FBI Assistant Director and current NBC News employee Frank Figliuzzi, who played a central role during the Obama years in the FBI’s attempt to investigate and criminalize Assange: a rather relevant fact concealed by NBC when publishing this. But this is how U.S. security state agents now directly control corporate news outlets.
During the Cold War and then in the decades following it, the U.S. security state constantly used clandestine measures to infiltrate U.S. corporate media outlets and shape U.S. media coverage in order to propagandize the domestic population. Indeed, intelligence agencies have a long, documented record of violating their charter by interfering in domestic politics through formal programs to manipulate U.S. media coverage.
In 1974, The New York Times’ Seymour Hersh exposed that “the [CIA], directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation” which included “assembling domestic intelligence dossiers” and “recruiting informants to infiltrate some of the more militant dissident groups.” The Senate’s Church Committee report in 1976 concluded that “intelligence excesses, at home and abroad, were not the ‘product of any single party, administration, or man,”; rather, “Intelligence agencies have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.” A 1977 Rolling Stone exposé by Carl Bernstein — entitled “The CIA and the Media” — revealed “more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the CIA” — including the most influential news executives in the country: William Paley of CBS, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times. Bernstein laid out how sweeping the CIA’s commandeering of mainstream media outlets was:
Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services — from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country.
Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested it the derring-do of the spy business as in filing articles, and, the smallest category, full-time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements America’s leading news organizations. The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception. . . . By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS, and Time Inc.
In 1996, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a lengthy report entitled “CIA’s Use of Journalists and Clergy in Intelligence Operations” after “the House of Representatives [took] a vote on the subject as to the prohibition of use of journalists and others by the CIA.” In 2008, The New York Times’ David Barstow won a Pulitzer for exposing the Pentagon’s secret plot to disseminate Defense Department talking points by placing former officials as “analysts” at each news network who, in secret, coordinated their claims. In 2014, The Interceptobtained the CIA’s communications with journalists through a FOIA request and discovered that national security reporter Ken Dilanian routinely submitted his drafts about the CIA to agency officials before publication; his newspaper at the time, The Los AngelesTimes, pronounced itself “disappointed” and said he may have violated the paper’s rules, but he was promptly hired by the Associated Press and now covers the intelligence community for . . . NBC News.
Revealingly, none of those multiple Congressional and media exposés deterred the CIA and related agencies from contaminating domestic media coverage. Over the last six years, the opposite happened: this tactic has accelerated greatly. U.S. security state services now not only shape but often control news coverage — not by clandestine tactics but right out in the open.
Many of the top security state officials over the last two decades have been hired to deliver “news” for these two major corporate networks: former CIA Director John Brennan (NBC), former Homeland Security Secretary James Clapper (CNN), former Assistant FBI Director Frank Figliuzzi (NBC), former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend (CNN), disgraced former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe (CNN), former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden (CNN), and countlessothers.
This career path from the Deep State to NBC/CNN is now so common that those who are fired in disgrace or resign immediately show up on their payroll. As but one illustrative example: on February 2, 2018, FBI official Josh Campbell wrote a self-serving op-ed in The New York Times flamboyantly announcing his resignation over alleged interference by Trump officials; two days later, CNN announced it had hired Campbell as a “law enforcement analyst,” where he continues to “report the news.” In 2018, the DOJ’s Inspector General concluded that McCabe, while serving as former FBI Deputy Director, had lied to the Bureau about his role in the leaks; CNN then hired him.
The reasons this is so dangerous are self-evident. Allowing the U.S. security state to shape the news converts media outlets into a form of state TV. As Politico‘s Jack Shafer wrote in 2018 under the headline “The Spies Who Came Into the TV Studio”:
Standard journalistic contributors—reporters, anchors, editors, producers—pursue the news wherever it goes without fear or favor, as the famous motto puts it. But almost to a one, the TV spooks still identify with their former employers at the CIA, FBI, DEA, DHS, or other security agencies and remain protective of their institutions. This makes nearly every word that comes out of their mouths suspect.
These security state agencies were created to lie and spread disinformation; allowing them to place their top operatives at news outlets obliterates even the pretense that there is any separation between them and corporate journalism. Worse, it requires these media outlets to pretend they are adversarially reporting on agencies which their own colleagues recently helped run. And, worst of all, it creates a massive conflict of interest whereby news “analysts” are commenting on stories in which they played central roles in their prior, often-very-recent life as a security state operative — as happened repeatedly during Russiagate when people like John Brennan were “analyzing” investigations for NBC News which they helped launch or of which they are targets.
To call all of this a conflict of interest is to gravely understate the case. It is an all-but-explicit merger between the security state and the corporate media.
This latest NBC News article on Assange by former FBI Assistant Director Figliuzzi features all of these corrupt dynamics. MSNBC has been repeatedly promoting it. That is remarkable on its own: a so-called “news outlet” is cheering — indeed, salivating over — the Biden administration’s attempt to criminalize Assange under “espionage” laws for the sin of reporting genuine documents showing all sorts of improper conduct by the agencies whose former operatives now staff that network. Given that press freedom groups in the West have uniformly condemned the prosecution of Assange as a grave threat to a free press, it is stunning to watch a corporation that claims to be in the news business cheering rather than denouncing it.
But for the U.S. media, that is just ordinary corruption and subservience to the CIA: it is hardly rare to find “journalists” giddy over the prospect of Assange’s ongoing imprisonment. What makes this new article particularly notable is that the FBI — when Figliuzzi was a senior official there — was directly involved in the attempt to investigate, frame and prosecute Assange. Yet the article, while identifying its analyst as “the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and directed all espionage investigations across the government,” makes no mention of his direct personal interest in the Assange prosecution.
The primary claim of this article is an unhinged conspiracy theory. Figliuzzi asserts that extraditing Assange onto U.S. soil could endanger Donald Trump. The former FBI official barely conceals his glee over the prospect that Assange could somehow offer up dirt on Trump in exchange for a promise of leniency from prosecutors:
If the Department of Justice plays its cards right, it can make the case precisely about those Russian government hacks and WikiLeaks’ dissemination of the content of those hacks by offering a deal to Assange in return for what he knows.
That’s what should worry Trump and his allies. . . . Assange may be able to close the gap between collusion and criminal conspiracy. Assange got the Democratic National Committee data dump from an entity long suspected to be a front for the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service. . . Assange may be able to help the U.S. government in exchange for more lenient charges or a plea deal. Prosecutions can make for strange bedfellows. A trade that offers a deal to a thief who steals data, in return for him flipping on someone who tried to steal democracy sounds like a deal worth doing.
So, DOJ, if you’re listening…
That Assange “stole data” is an absolute lie — not even the U.S. Government claims this — but NBC News has previously shown that it has no qualms about disseminating that particular lie. As for Figliuzzi’s belief that Assange possesses secret information about Trump’s collusion with Russia over the 2016 election: that is nothing short of madness. Robert Mueller did not even attempt to interview Assange, precisely because the Special Counsel (Figliuzzi’s former boss) obviously recognized that Assange had no information that would assist Mueller’s investigation to determine whether Trump or his associates criminally conspired with Russia. If Assange really has information showing Trump criminally worked with the Kremlin, how can Figliuzzi justify that Mueller, during eighteen months of investigating that question, never even sought to speak to Assange?
Moreover, if — as Figliuzzi fantasizes — Assange were in possession of some sort of smoking gun that Mueller never found but which would finally prove Trump’s guilt on various crimes, why did Trump not pardon Assange? After all, if this twisted fantasy that NBC News is promoting had any validity — namely, Trump will be in big trouble once the U.S. succeeds in extraditing Assange to the U.S. to stand trial — why was it the Trump administration that brought these charges against Assange in the first place, and why would Trump not have pardoned Assange in order to prevent such a deal from taking place? None of what Figliuzzi is claiming has any evidence to support it or even makes any minimal sense.
But as usual, that is no bar to NBC News and MSNBC publishing and aggressively promoting it. As I will never tire of pointing out, it is the corporate media outlets that most vocally denounce disinformation which are the ones guilty of spreading it most frequently and destructively.
What makes this NBC article by Figliuzzi worse than standard media disinformation is that the former FBI official is writing about events in which he had direct personal involvement, without any disclosure of this fact. In 2011, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, Ogmundur Jonasson, discovered that FBI agents had been deployed to his country under false pretenses. The FBI’s counterintelligence unit, led by Figliuzzi, had claimed they were there because they wanted to help the Icelandic government stop an “imminent attack” by hackers into Iceland’s government databases.
That was a lie. As The New York Timesreported two years later, the FBI went to Iceland in order to dig up dirt on Assange and WikiLeaks that would enable their prosecution. At the time, Assange was spending significant time in Iceland; he concluded that the country’s broad press freedom and privacy protections, as well as support from several politicians, enabled him to work there safely.
The FBI unit under Figliuzzi focused its counterintelligence efforts in Iceland on recruiting a very young WikiLeaks insider with a history of criminality and mental illness, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, in order to provide incriminating information about Assange. When Jonasson, the Interior Minister, discovered the truth, he expelled the FBI from his country, as The Times recounted:
But when “eight or nine” F.B.I. agents arrived in August, Mr. Jonasson said, he found that they were not investigating an imminent attack, but gathering material on WikiLeaks, the activist group that has been responsible for publishing millions of confidential documents over the past three years, and that has many operatives in Iceland. . . .
The F.B.I.’s activities in Iceland provide perhaps the clearest view of the government’s interest in Mr. Assange. A young online activist, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson (known as Siggi), told a closed session of Iceland’s Parliament this year that he had been cooperating with United States agents investigating WikiLeaks at the time of the F.B.I.’s visit in 2011. . . The F.B.I. efforts left WikiLeaks supporters in Iceland shaken. “The paranoia,” [Parliament member Birgitta] Jonsdottir said, “is going to kill us all.”
The FBI’s counterintelligence efforts under Figliuzzi in Iceland succeeded. Thordarson became a key witness for the FBI in its efforts to prosecute Assange. Indeed, the pending indictment against the WikiLeaks founder — which is the basis for the Biden DOJ’s demand that he be extradited from the U.K. — heavily relies on accusations from Thordarson (the indictment refers to him as “Teenager” and to Iceland as “NATO Country-1”). Even a cursory review of the indictment shows how central to the case against Assange are the allegations which the FBI induced Thordarson to make: “In September 2010, ASSANGE directed Teenager to hack into the computer of an individual formerly associated with WikiLeaks and delete chat logs containing statements of ASSANGE.”
But in June of this year, Thordarson recanted his allegations against Assange. Speaking to the Icelandic newspaper Stundin, Thordarson confessed how he had been caught stealing money from WikiLeaks by forging an email in Assange’s name and directing WikiLeaks’ funds to be sent to his personal account. He “saw a way out” of the pending criminal problem by helping the FBI in its hunt against Assange. Thus, “on August 23d, [Thordarson] sent an email to the US Embassy in Iceland offering information in relation to a criminal investigation,” and he then became the FBI’s star witness.
Providing the FBI with false allegations against Assange helped the FBI but did not help Thordarson much: he was shortly thereafter convicted on charges of “massive fraud, forgeries and theft on the one hand and for sexual violations against underage boys he had tricked or forced into sexual acts on the other.” Yet “Thordarson was sentenced in 2013 and 2014 and received relatively lenient sentences” as the judge reviewed his cooperation activities as well as his formal psychiatric diagnosis that he is a sociopath.
Even after that lenient punishment, Thordarson continued to commit crimes, piling up numerous other criminal charges. That was when the FBI, eager to indict Assange, again saw an opportunity in Thordarson:
In May 2019 Thordarson was offered an immunity deal, signed by [U.S. Deputy Attorney General Kellen S.] Dwyer, that granted him immunity from prosecution based on any information on wrongdoing they had on him. The deal, seen in writing by Stundin, also guarantees that the DOJ would not share any such information to other prosecutorial or law enforcement agencies. That would include Icelandic ones, meaning that the Americans will not share information on crimes he might have committed threatening Icelandic security interests – and the Americans apparently had plenty of those but had over the years failed to share them with their Icelandic counterparts.
With Assange now behind bars based on the indictment he helped the FBI secure, Thordarson decided to come clean. He had lied to the FBI and fed them false incriminating information against Assange because he knew that would help shield him from accountability for his own crimes. In other words, at the heart of the FBI’s case against Assange — one compiled by the FBI’s counterintelligence operations under Figliuzzi before he went to NBC News — is a chronic criminal with a history of fraud, sexual assault against minors, and serious psychiatric illness. And he has now recanted his claims.
If NBC News were a legitimate news operation, it would obviously bar Figliuzzi from “reporting on” or “analyzing” a major press freedom case in which the FBI was so intricately involved, and implicated, during his tenure there. But the opposite is true. Figliuzzi is obsessed with Assange’s prosecution and extradition, talking about it often both on his social media account and on NBC and MSNBC platforms.
Beyond the issue of journalistic ethics — which nobody should expect of NBC and MSNBC at this point — something more sinister is going on here. The Biden administration’s aggressive pursuit of Assange’s extradition, along with its demand that he be kept imprisoned while the judicial process is pending, has been denounced with increasing fervor by press freedom and civil liberties groups that are usually allies of the Democrats. That even includes the ACLU. Leaders from around the world, including on the left, have been strongly condemning the Biden administration. Other countries are now frequently holding up Biden’s assault on press freedom, along with the British government, as a reason why those two countries lack credibility to sermonize about press freedom.
This new argument pushed by NBC News and its former FBI operative Frank Figliuzzi — liberals should cheer Assange’s prosecution because we can squeeze him once he is here to turn on and implicate Trump — seems like a barely disguised political ploy to protect the Biden White House from criticism. NBC News knows that liberals crave Trump’s prosecution above all, so trying to convince them that Assange’s extradition could advance that — as false as that obviously is — would likely benefit the White House which NBC serves, by fortifying support among Trump-obsessed liberals or at least diluting opposition.
But taken on its own terms, the argument now being promoted by NBC to justify Assange’s extradition is deeply disturbing. What they are essentially arguing is that the entire prosecution is a pretext. Though justified based on Assange’s alleged lawbreaking in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, the real benefit, according to NBC, is the opportunity to pressure Assange to turn on Trump in connection with the 2016 election.
In other words, they are keeping Assange imprisoned for years, and working to bring him to the U.S., because they believe they can force him with promises of leniency to offer up information they can use against Trump — just as the FBI manipulated the young, mentally unwell Icelandic teenager to offer false accusations against Assange. And that would also create the added incentive to treat Assange as abusively as possible to turn the pressure as high up as possible for him to implicate Trump. Indeed, on the day Assange was arrested in London, a smiling Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) all but proclaimed this to be the real purpose of the extradition (“he’ll be our property and we can get the truth and the facts from him”):
That the U.S.’s corporate newsrooms are now filled with former agents of the U.S. security state on their payrolls is one of the most significant and disturbing media developments in recent years. It means that dirty, scheming operatives like Frank Figliuzzi can now do their dirty work not in the shadows or in agencies known to be guilty for decades of this sort of treachery and lies, but under the cover of “respectable” media outlets.
When Figliuzzi speaks — or when John Brennan or James Clapper or Andrew McCabe do — the lips of these media outlets are moving but the CIA and the FBI and the DOJ are the ones actually speaking. That has been true for decades, but at least they had the decency to maintain the pretense. That security state agencies have now dispensed with the formalities and control these news outlets so directly reveals the utter impunity with which they now operate, particularly in establishment liberal circles. That an FBI official who played a key role in concocting false accusations against Assange now “reports” or “analyzes” that very same case under the logo of NBC News says more about the institutional corruption of these news outlets than thousands of articles could ever get close to.
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