Month: April 2022

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it…

The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands. And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country. 

For understandable reasons, socialists and leftists are usually kept out of the inner circles of the Democratic Party, and especially kept away from control of the country. A now resuscitated Bernie Sanders for most of his political career was an inert outlier. The brief flirtations with old-style hardcore liberals such as George McGovern in 1972 and Mike Dukakis in 1988 imploded the Democratic Party. Their crash-and-burn campaigns were followed by corrective nominees who actually won the presidency: Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. 

Such was the nation’s innate distrust of the Left, and in particular the East Coast elite liberal. For nearly half a century between the elections of John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama, it was assumed that no Democratic presidential candidate could win the popular vote unless he had a reassuring Southern accent. 

How did the extreme Left manage its rare takeover of the country between 2018 and 2020? Certainly, Obama’s election helped accelerate the woke movement and energized identity politics. One could also argue over the political opportunities in 2020 following the devastation of COVID-19. 

In the long term, the medicine of lockdowns and quarantines probably proved more calamitous than the disease, and this crisis mode made doable what had once been unimaginable.

State governors such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo did not let the pandemic crisis go to waste. It was a rare occasion to leverage agendas that otherwise had no public support in ordinary times.

In the chaos of 2020, both laws and customs were altered or scrapped—changing the very way we vote.

Over 102 million ballots were either mailed in or cast during so-called “early voting”—strangely resulting in far lower rejection rates in most states than in past “normal” years of predominantly in-person voting on Election Day. Indeed, in just one year, Election Day went from an American institution to an afterthought.

The hatred of Donald Trump prompted an influx of hundreds of millions of dark dollars from Silicon Valley to supplant the responsibilities of registrars in key precincts with armies of paid activists.

A non compos mentis, basement-bound Joe Biden was cynically given an “Ol’ Joe from Scranton” moderate veneer to pursue a calibrated hard-Left agenda. 

So Americans ended up with a neo-socialist government.

It is proving as disastrous as it is bitterly instructive—reminding this generation of Americans what the Left does when it grasps power. As all restraints came off, the hard and now unbridled Left went to work to turn America into something like a looney, one-party California. A wide-open border followed. We may see 3 million illegal aliens cross at the southern border during the first 18 months of the Biden Administration. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allotted to reward those illegally entering America, who can expect free legal support from the U.S. government to ensure they are not subject to the laws of the United States. 

In a sane world, Biden would have been impeached for deliberately destroying the very federal laws he swore to uphold. On the prompt of his hard Left controllers, he was eager to alter the electoral demography of the nation rather than ensure immigrants came in reasonable numbers, legally, with audit and background checks, and safely in a time of a pandemic. The former illegal arrivals were seen as needed constituents, the latter legal immigrants too politically unpredictable.

The Left in about a year has negated American gas and oil independence. Biden, who promised to end America’s use of fossil fuels on his watch, cast adrift millions of his fellow citizens to choose between driving and eating. Much of what the Left had traditionally demonized and wanted gone from American life—from gasoline to beefsteak to new pickup trucks—became so inflated in price as to be nearly unattainable. 

The electrician now pays five times more for his wire, the carpenter eight times more for his plywood, the plumber six times more for his pipe—as all three have to pay off-the-books cash for rare workers who prefer to get checks from the Biden Administration. The Biden printing press has destroyed both the idea that all citizens will work if there are just good-paying jobs, and that affordable necessities for life—food, fuel, and shelter—form the basis for a middle-class life.

If the Left did all that in 14 months, imagine what it can still do before losing the Congress in 2022.

The Biden Administration’s profligate multitrillion-dollar budget, inflation of the currency, de facto zero interest rates, destructive subsidies that undermined labor participation, and incompetence at addressing the supply-chain and clogged port crises will all by midyear likely achieve a 10 percent annualized inflation rate. Carter-era stagflation is on the near horizon. 

When an American president predicts a food shortage in what used to be the breadbasket of the world, then we see the wages of socialism in all their unapologetic cruelty. When the Left can scarcely hide its glee that diesel fuel hit $7 a gallon in California, the public is finally seeing that the Bidens, Newsoms, and AOCs of the world care nothing for the real-life consequences of their elite utopian green fantasies. How did America ever stoop to begging communist Venezuela, theocratic Iran, and dictatorial Russia to pump oil for us that we have in abundance but will not produce? Which insane person thought up the idea of using Vladimir Putin’s Russia as our mediator to restart the Iran Deal?

The now unfettered woke revolution seeks to Trotskyize American history and its heroes. A disastrous foreign policy of appeasement has ended U.S. deterrence. After the worst military humiliation in 50 years in Afghanistan, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea all seek to capitalize on a rare American Phaethon moment. The world’s superpower has turned over the reins of its deterrence chariot to a ninny and his gurus. And before crashing the country, they aimlessly rebound from one self-created crisis to the next self-induced disaster. 

The Clerks Come Out

Aside from the dismal left-wing political record, the public has also witnessed an unapologetically leftwing federal bureaucracy now completely unbound. Our top echelon of the administrative state is defiant in its weaponized assumption of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. 

We are learning that the likes of Anthony Fauci have all but destroyed the reputation of once time-honored federal health agencies. In their contradictions, about-faces, and deceit, they focused mostly on controlling their multibillion-dollar public fiefdoms, hounding critics, rewarding sycophants, politicizing “science,” hiding culpability about routing money to lunatic gain-of-function research in China, and marginalizing outspoken voices of audit.

The military apparat after Afghanistan – defined as woke Pentagon functionaries, revolving door and politically weaponized corporate generals, and outspoken politicos – managed the impossible: a once revered military now cannot even win a 50 percent vote of confidence from the American public. 

The intelligence agencies are worse. Former kingpins such as John Brennan and James Clapper, both pundits for hire on leftwing cable networks, lied under oath before Congress without consequences. When 50 retired intelligence officials during the Biden 2020 campaign claimed publicly that Hunter’s laptop was likely a Russian plot, what then is left of any semblance of nonpartisan professionalism and integrity? 

James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Christopher Wray have all eroded the reputation of the FBI by fueling the Russian collusion hoax, the Alfa Bank hoax, and the Hunter laptop disinformation hoax. Since when does the FBI go after journalists in their underwear or moms and dads at school board meetings, as if it is now an extension of the teacher union or DNC?

Along with Robert Mueller—who claimed no knowledge of either the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS—the Washington FBI hierarchy did to the agency what Lois Lerner infamously did to the IRS. Just as Lerner became an extension of the Obama 2012 reelection effort and corrupted tax law, so the FBI descended into becoming the wayward Biden family’s retrieval service—eager to keep quiet Hunter’s incriminating laptop and to rescue Ashley Biden’s lurid diary.

When the evidence becomes overwhelming that the collusionary media lied about the laptop or the origins of COVID-19, there is never a retraction, only a Soviet-style silence about past untruth. And then it is on to the next false narrative. 

Add in the conduct of FBI luminaries such as the forger Kevin Clinesmith, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok, who preferred to investigate conservatives rather than enemies of the nation. What characterizes, then, our once revered intelligence agencies is not just institutionalized mediocracy. Rather it is a dangerous zeal to enact by fiat politicized agendas that cannot otherwise be ratified by a legislative vote—all with the expectation that these sanctified agents of political change are above the law and will be rewarded accordingly.

Our Ill Institutions

Americans had tuned out many of our major institutions that are now openly hostile to American exceptionalism.

In their nihilism, leftists seek to destroy the very organizations they absorbed. 

Professional sports?

Multimillionaire basketball players are more likely to refuse to salute their own flag than to say a word of dissent to their autocratic and often ethnocentric Chinese paymasters.

Higher education?

A Yale law school dean contextualizes the loud disruption of free speech by leftist law students at a conference. Only that way can she ensure that rules about open expression remain theoretical, and not real for the woke. 

Entertainment?

Hiring, promotions, and awards are now based as much on race, gender, and sexual identity as on merit. 

Forty years ago, face slapper Will Smith would likely have been removed from the Oscar ceremonies for rudely shouting and interrupting the worldwide show. Twenty years ago, he might still have been rebuked for profanity and yelling the F-word in a live televised event. Now he is neither arrested nor even removed for physically assaulting comedian Chris Rock. His belated contrition is belied by his refusal to leave the ceremony and to go dancing and partying into the post-assault wee hours. Will there be open brawling on stage next year?

The Left got what it wanted and now controls academia, the media, the internet, K-12 education, corporate boardrooms, the Pentagon, Wall Street, and Hollywood. And they more or less have turned each of these into versions of Pravda.

The sermons, arrogance, and narcissism of these woke cultural imperialists now explain why they are disliked as much abroad as they are at home. 

In sum, we are watching a rare laboratory experiment in which the traditional American fringe is now in control of the government. In pursuit of its utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it. The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democratic Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States.

CCP bureaucrats in charge of China’s largest city, Shanghai, extended COVID-19 lockdowns for all 26 million residents, according to Reuters. The city began a multi-stage lockdown on March 28, initially covering Shanghai’s eastern districts, and has since expanded citywide. New drone footage shows the extent of the lockdowns, transforming it into a post-apocalyptic ghost town. 

Shanghai has failed to suppress the omicron-driven outbreak. CCP officials favored the zero-COVID policy by locking down the entire city, upending daily life, and shuttering business operations in the financial hub. The military and thousands of healthcare workers have been called in for mass testing. 

Drone footage captures the latest round of quarantining, one of the largest efforts since the outbreak in Wuhan more than two years ago. Video shows what are usually bustling city streets completely empty. 

Drone shot from today. A bit of Suzhou River and Jing’an Temple. Deserted except a few delivery worker. #Shanghai #Covid_19 pic.twitter.com/R5CKAKRjxq

— Thomas Yau (@Tominmedill) April 1, 2022

Another video provides an eerie sight of the downtown district. There are no people nor cars in the streets — the local economy has come to a screeching halt. 

In Shanghai, China, an empty streets were filmed from a drone due to the current quarantine associated with another outbreak of coronavirus. Citizens were forbidden to go outside their apartments. pic.twitter.com/w8gMQSwPua

— Be Curious Ⓜ️ (@BeCuriousarabi) April 4, 2022

The final drone video shows empty streets and highways and an outdoor COVID testing center. 

WATCH VIDEO：DRONE- #Shanghai starts testing all its 25 million residents for #COVID curb pic.twitter.com/Pa10ywlYVP

— ShanghaiEye🚀official (@ShanghaiEye) April 4, 2022

The interconnectedness of Shanghai and the global economy is a deep one that may suggest more supply chain turmoil is ahead and could exacerbate the risk of stagflation for Western economies. 

Authored by Peter Dahlin via The Epoch Times,

On the eve of Jan. 11, former lawyer and human rights defender Xie Yang was on a video call with Lyndon Li, a Chinese law student in England, when police suddenly appeared at his home, and the call ended abruptly.

The news leaked out within a few days that Chinese authorities had taken Xie away—this was not the first time.

Xie shot to fame after spending six months inside China’s system for secret jails or Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). He described in detail to his lawyers the prolonged, severe physical and psychological torture he had experienced inside the system.

As Xie’s testimony made headlines worldwide, China’s RSDL was not widely known until that point. Many other lawyers, alongside Xie, who were also placed into the RSDL system around the same time, have helped to slowly expose it as more victims came forth willing to speak about the reality behind those four letters.

The Dual Rise of Xi Jinping and RSDL

The RSDL system was put into place as Xi Jinping took power, and it has expanded in scope and size alongside the leader’s growing control over Chinese society.

RSDL allows the police to take any target(s) off the street, place them inside solitary confinement at secret locations, hold them incommunicado, and deny their family or anyone else knowledge of their whereabouts. It is essentially legalized kidnapping, and the United Nations has stated as much, if in more diplomatic language.

Around the time of the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year, court data (some of which are available online in a database hosted by China’s Supreme Court) revealed that RSDL remains extensively used. During the pandemic, against all odds, its use increased even more. The RSDL may now have claimed as many as 100,000 victims, the equivalent of 150 Guantanamo Bays.

The first known victim, Zhu Chengzhi, was put in the RSDL on Jan. 4, 2013, within the first three days the system was first put into use. Zhu happens to be from the same province as Mao Zedong, a man to whom Xi is often compared. Zhu would later claim another distinction; in mid-2018, he became the first known victim to be placed into the system a second time.

It wasn’t always like that. In the same year that Zhu became RSDL’s first victim, there were close to 1,000 victims nationwide. At the time, RSDL was primarily used in exceptional circumstances; for example, when an individual couldn’t be arrested due to illness or detention made it challenging to carry out an investigation. But gradually, the lack of oversight allowed the Chinese police to abuse the RSDL system.

By the time the “709” crackdown started in 2015, a nationwide campaign that targeted human rights lawyers, the use of RSDL had grown significantly. A year or two later, sources showed that local police started using the system indiscriminately against those charged with minor and regular crimes.

With RSDL, the Chinese police have expanded their power significantly and in a way that undermines more or less every basic rights one has come to expect. Those placed into RSDL cannot be held in detention centers, police stations, or anything deemed a “case-handling area.” Instead, police can use either custom-built facilities, for example, secret jails and renovated rooms in controlled facilities such as guest houses, training centers, etc.

Once taken into RSDL, one simply disappears.

To make matters worse, a victim can be held under the system for six months. Once inside the RSDL, the law states that individuals must be kept in solitary confinement and in facilities designed to protect them from self-harm. In short, suicide-padded, solitary confinement cells.

This absolute power that RSDL affords police over its victims has not been lost on local police forces, who have taken up the use of RSDL with enthusiasm, which would explain its rapidly expanding deployment in recent years.

How One Man’s Testimony Exposed the Realities of RSDL

Xie’s testimony was the first detailed account of what goes on inside RSDL and revealed why it had become the preferred tool of the Chinese authorities. Why detain (bound by supervision and regulation) an individual when they can instead disappear (and act with impunity)?

For Xie, it began like many other days. One morning, he had left to travel out of town to represent a group of farmers over a land dispute.

“There was nothing different about this time. Like before, he left for work,” his wife, Chen Guiqiu, told this author.

Two days later, while he stayed at a hotel out of town, he was awoken before daybreak by a large group of both plain-clothed and uniformed officers who took him away. Within 24 hours, Xie was officially placed under RSDL, and authorities told him: “Your only right is to obey,” according to author Michael Caster.

In reality, the police can do anything under RSDL, short of killing a person, as they have six months of total control over their victim.

A doctor attending to those who disappeared under RSDL put it plainly once: “Don’t let them die. A dead person would create big problems. Someone who is only injured doesn’t matter,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

Six months of torture would follow. Through it all, interrogations, which often occurred while the victim was shackled to a tiger chair, would happen frequently. At some point, Xie thought some 40 different people had interrogated him. He was deprived of sleep and spent up to 20 hours a day on the “dangling stool.” It is a small, narrow, high stool where the victim’s legs cannot reach the floor. Slowly, over hours, blood gets cut off from the legs, causing intense, crippling pain. This would be alternated with being kicked, kneed, punched, or hung from the ceiling and beaten unconscious.

Death threats were common. According to Caster, one person, a middle-class, white-collar IT engineer, was threatened before even arriving at the custom-built RSDL facility in southern Beijing. He was told: “We are crossing the mountains. If you want to come back alive, you should think well about what you tell us.”

Of course, not everyone suffers the same abuses. A young man from northeastern Dongbei—China’s rust belt—said he was stripped naked in his cold cell, with extra guards brought into the room, and then told to stand on one leg and sing the Chinese national anthem.

Xie might have avoided the same fate as Zhu, who was taken into RSDL a second time, but that is precisely what happened to fellow lawyer Chang Weiping not long before the police took Xie away.

Chang spent nearly half a year inside RSDL before being arrested; he is now awaiting trial. So far, no one knows what Chang has had to go through.

Raising Awareness of RSDL

Many lawyers, journalists, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, and others who work in sensitive fields and are often targeted by authorities were oblivious to the system for quite some time. Those who heard about RSDL often thought it was a mild form of detention, something less severe.

When co-workers of Wang Quanzhang, another well-known rights lawyer, learned that he had been placed into RSDL instead of being arrested, they felt relief and thought it was a good sign. I was one of those colleagues with that very same thought.

For better or worse, those days are long gone within China’s rights defense community. RSDL has become as feared a tool as they come. As what goes on inside leaks out, the community has been given a wake-up call. The worse the stories that leak out, the more RSDL terrifies the larger community. It has, in effect, become a tool of political terror.

Wang Yu, a lawyer, didn’t know much about RSDL until she was held in a secret jail for six months. Her husband, Bao, a local activist, went through the same ordeal. But torture wasn’t enough to break them.

Police went further and threatened to arrest the couple’s then-teenage son, Bao Mengmeng. He made headlines worldwide when he was captured by Chinese police inside Burma (commonly known as Myanmar), alongside two activists trying to smuggle him out of China after his parents had been disappeared. Those two activists were taken back to China and likely placed into RSDL, while Mengmeng spent about two years under police custody until 2018.

The True Scope of China’s Use of Disappearances via RSDL

In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned China’s RSDL system and called for its complete abolishment. However, until early 2020, there had been no attempts to figure out the extent to which the system was used. That changed with a small report, a data analysis from the NGO Safeguard Defenders, which showed how it is possible to track the use of the system—by using China’s public database on verdicts.

Now, some two years later and after a new round of research from the database China Judgments Online, more information on the scope and scale of the system can be presented—and it is grim reading. As with any statistics in China, the data is flawed at best. In addition, thousands of verdicts mentioning RSDL use have been removed from the database, and more are disappearing almost every day as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tries to hide such information.

Despite that, and using knowledge derived from detailed studies on how RSDL cases are published, or not published, even such studies carried out by pro-CCP legal scholars in China, one can get a strong idea of how the RSDL system has developed.

As clearly indicated by the U.N. in its condemnation of the RSDL system, its use often constitutes enforced disappearances, as the location of the victim is kept secret. Torture is rampant, and in addition, using solitary confinement for prolonged periods for interrogation purposes is in itself an act of torture.

This qualifies China’s use of RSDL as a crime against humanity on at least two points, if proven to be systematic or widespread, according to the aforementioned author Michael Caster, who is also an international law analyst and co-founder of Safeguard Defenders.

Furthermore, the consistent year-by-year data available on RSDL use, Safeguard Defenders spokesperson Laura Harth says, shows beyond doubt that it is both systematic and widespread.

For 2020, the last year for which more complete data exists, the RSDL system reached new heights, with some 15,000 new victims that year alone. For 2021, the figure remains high, at over 10,000, yet it may be too early to properly assess the data. By now, the system is likely to have seen anywhere from 85,000 to 115,000 victims.

The real problem with the aforementioned data is that they only scratch the surface. Many of those named in this article did not go on trial and were released often “under bail.” Such cases simply won’t show up in the database or anywhere else. It is impossible to know how much of the iceberg we are seeing in the data above, but most likely a big part is underwater.

RSDL Is Here to Stay, May Expand Beyond China’s Borders

The growing awareness of the CCP’s use of “hostage diplomacy” has centered on RSDL. Just like families are denied knowledge of victims’ whereabouts, so are foreign governments when their citizens are placed into the system. Whether it is British Lee Bo who was kidnapped in Hong Kong, Swede Gui Minhai who was kidnapped in Thailand, Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, or American basketball player Jeff Harper, among others, they were all quickly placed into the RSDL system.

With a more aggressive communist China—more willing to detain foreign citizens to get what it wants—every indicator points toward foreigners becoming a more common target for RSDL.

Worse yet, according to Harth, is “the deafening silence from Western governments about the system and its rapid expansion. … The complete lack of any political cost imposed on the Chinese Communist Party for engaging in what is clearly yet another crime against humanity sends a clear-cut message to other authoritarian governments, especially in Southeast and Central Asia” and “who study China’s methods to silence dissent,” that may adopt similar “legalized” forms of disappearances.

Even though disappearances never went away, since its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become an anomaly and was used mostly on an ad-hoc basis, as it had become a crime, like torture, considered so heinous that even the worst dictatorships at least pretended to not engage in it.

With China’s “legalization” of disappearances and normalizing it by expanding its use to mass scale, the international human rights system stands before yet another challenge: how to fight back against such normalization.

“How many other countries can adopt similar systems until the norm is broken?” said Caster. “Will we see it spreading to other parts of the world, moving from authoritarian to authoritarian-leaning or ‘illiberal democracies’”?

There is far more at stake here than “merely” the abusive treatment of Chinese human rights activists.

With stronger pressure from the central government to maintain stability, lawyer Wang Quanzhang believes local governments are encouraged to use any means necessary, and RSDL is an easy, yet very powerful tool for just that purpose. It took a long time and ever-mounting criticism to get the CCP to abolish the reeducation through labor system. But it may take a lot more to get the CCP to abolish the RSDL system.

Until then, RSDL will continue to expand. It will be used to destroy Chinese civil society and, sooner or later, start spreading beyond China’s own borders.

*  *  *

Peter Dahlin is the founder of the NGO Safeguard Defenders and the co-founder of the Beijing-based Chinese NGO China Action (2007–2016). He is the author of “Trial By Media,” and contributor to “The People’s Republic of the Disappeared.” He lived in Beijing from 2007, until detained and placed in a secret jail in 2016, subsequently deported and banned.

Stop us if you’ve heard this story before: a Tesla spontaneously combusts and causes tons of collateral damage in destroying surrounding property. While we don’t know about you, the story sure sounds familiar to us – it feels like we’ve written it dozens of times over the last few years.

The latest example comes from Australia, where a home was “partially destroyed” and a “family cat left dead” after it caught fire. The incident took place in Sydney and the blaze “could have been started by a charging Tesla”, according to News.au.

The fire first started in the attached garage to a house in Southwest Sydney, police said. 

A firefighter at the scene told News.au: “The fire destroyed the garage and two vehicles inside. The fire has travelled through to the house and destroyed the kitchen.”

Forensic examination of the premises is set to begin this week. 

“Early reports” are suggesting that a charging Tesla may have started the blaze, News.au wrote. “A family cat has been killed and a home destroyed,” they wrote.

We’ll monitor developments in this story this week…

By Simon White, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and analyst

The minutes from the Fed’s meeting in March, released on Wednesday, is likely to be the most tradeable event in a week fairly light on data. More FOMC members are advocating for 50bps hikes, with Mary Daly, President of the San Francisco Fed, in an interview on Sunday recommending a 50bps hike in May. The minutes will give further information on the likelihood this happens, and also more colour on the projected path for balance-sheet contraction. There is currently ~80% chance the Fed does lift rates by 50bps in May, and there are now over eight 25bps hikes priced in over the remaining six meetings of 2022.

It seems, though, that the Fed is just gearing up its tightening as the economy is about to slow. Friday saw the release of the ISM manufacturing survey. The ratio of the new orders and inventory subcomponents of the survey slipped lower, closer to the critical value of one. This ratio gives a good lead on U.S. industrial production and indicates growth in the U.S. is set to slow quite sharply through the rest of the year. Unemployment will follow suit and begin rising, posing a problem for the Fed later in year. Suffice to say their zeal for tightening may fade somewhat when growth is looking shaky, and political pressure on dealing with inflation eases after the mid-terms in November.

In Europe, we also get the minutes from the ECB’s March meeting. The ECB is in a bigger quandary than the Fed where the economy and inflation are more sensitive to energy prices. Last week saw another big rise in Europe’s inflation rate, to 7.5% y/y, driven by a huge 12.5% m/m rise in energy prices. Growth in Europe is set to slow faster than in the U.S., especially as China struggles to get on top of its Covid situation. The weakening of the yen will also be an unwelcome development, and may prompt a more significant easing from China.

The Fed and the ECB are likely to underdeliver on rate-hike expectations as growth concerns resurface and inflation begins to slow. However, that will only fan the flames for a resurgence in inflation, possibly larger than the current spike. Then, they will have no choice but to deliver the sort of rate hikes that make the pips squeeze. No-one would envy being a central banker in the coming months and years.

The White House won’t rule out granting pardons to Hunter Biden or James Biden, the son and brother of President Joe Biden, as investigations over their international dealings heat up.

“That’s not a hypothetical I’m going to entertain,” White House communications director Kate Bedingfield told reporters last week when asked during the daily press briefing. “I don’t have anything to add from this podium.”

Bedingfield was reluctant to address any aspect of the Hunter Biden story, after CNN, The Washington Post, and the New York Times recently published stories about the federal tax probe into Hunter Biden and his foreign business deals.

When asked additional questions about Hunter Biden and the president’s brother James Biden, Bedingfield would only reply, “I don’t have anything further to add from this podium.” –Breitbart

A reporter asks Kate Bedingfield if Biden “might use his pardon or commutation power” for Hunter Biden:

“That’s not a hypothetical I’m going to entertain.” pic.twitter.com/cS9vMe53he

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) March 31, 2022

Two weeks ago, the New York Times confirmed Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop exists, and is legit – and confirmed several previously reported aspects of the story, including correspondence between Hunter and his business partner Devon Archer, both of whom served on the board Ukrainian energy giant Burisma.

Contained on the laptop were a trove of emails, text messages, photographs and financial documents.

Last week, the Washington Post and CNN piled on – with the post reporting on Hunter’s “multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company,” and CNN running a blistering segment and reporting that the federal investigation into Hunter is ‘heating up.’

After the bell on Monday, Exxon told investors in a filing that its first quarter profits could wind up exceeding $9 billion, mainly helped along by the rising price of oil. 

The company said that between $1.9 billion and $2.3 billion in fourth quarter profit was due to the change in the price of crude. It also estimated about $400 million in additional profit as a result of gas-price changes. 

The company said its filing was to offer “perspective” about market and other “planned factors” about its upcoming quarterly report, expected toward the end of the month. It warned that these figures were not an estimate, MarketWatch pointed out. 

The company noted that Q1 results could have been as much as $2 billion higher than Q4 2021, when the company posted earnings of $8.8 billion. 

But the company’s massive earnings don’t come without potential risks, as Bloomberg noted Monday. Those risks include Democrats in the House who are looking for oil companies to “immediately halt dividends and share buybacks until the war’s conclusion” in Ukraine. 

Politicians have been scolding oil and gas companies for a number of things that the industry had no hand in, including prices rising due to the war, prices rising due to the U.S.’s constrained supply of oil and alleged “profit gouging” that is simply margin expansion as a result of higher output pricing. 

The same politicians that fail to understand the basic economics behind the industry are also in the midst of trying to figure out a way to bring oil prices lower. President Biden warned last week of “of punishing financial penalties for companies slow-walking projects involving federally owned oil prospects,” Bloomberg wrote. 

Democrats took out their ire on Exxon and three other explorers for spending $44 billion on buybacks and dividends last year. We guess politicians won’t be happy until the companies go back to running at massive losses, like they did after the government shut down the economy at the onset of Covid. 

House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ro Khanna are leading the charge against the oil industry. 

We couldn’t help but notice that Ford Motor’s sales of gas-guzzling vehicles plunged in the first quarter compared with last year. This could be the start of demand destruction as consumers gravitate to more fuel-efficient cars or sit on the sidelines. Low inventory from semiconductor shortages, soaring fuel costs, and higher interest rates could be creating the perfect storm of a ‘buyer’s strike.’ 

Ford Motor’s first-quarter sales of new US vehicles tumbled 17.1% from a year ago to 432,132 vehicles. Auto website Edmunds.com said sales were in line with expectations. In March, the Detroit-based auto manufacturer sold 159,328 vehicles across all brands, a 26% plunge from a year ago, which coincided with record-high gas and diesel prices at the pump following the invasion of Ukraine. 

Compared with industry peers, Ford’s quarterly sales were worse on a percentage basis than Stellantis and Toyota but not as bad as General Motors. 

Ford continued to blame semiconductor chip shortages on the sales woes for the quarter. 

“I think the global semiconductor chip shortage continues to create some challenges for Ford and the industry. But keep in mind the industry wasn’t experiencing quite the same chip challenges last year as it’s having this year,” Erich Merkle, head of US sales analysis.

By model, sales of SUVs, trucks, cargo vans, and sports cars in the quarter took a hit. 

• F-Series down 31% to 140,701
• Ranger down 27% to 17,639
• Transit down 37.3% to 17,211
• Ford Mustang down 19% to 13,986
• Explorer down 34.5% to 42,736
• Expedition down 56.3% to 9,718

The Bronco Sport, Ford Edge, and all-electric Mustang Mach-E recorded growth. 

• Bronco Sport saw a 24.5% growth to 29,089 vehicles
• Ford Edge saw 19.2% growth to 26,412 vehicles
• All-electric Mustang Mach-E saw 1.8% growth to 6,734 vehicles

Record high fuel prices at the pump could be swaying consumer behavior on future car purchases. Remember when fuel prices spiked ahead of the 2008 crash, and people gravitated away from their Suburbans and H2 Hummers to more economical hybrid electric vehicles, such as the Toyota Prius. 

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas points out what could be the emergence of a “buyer’s strike” in autos. He said the US car market is “not a car market at all. It’s a truck market.”  

Jonas penned a note Friday that, per his conversation with auto dealers, initial signs of demand destruction could materialize in lower-income customers buying “gas-guzzling vehicles.” He said rising fuel prices and low inventory at dealerships might sideline consumers. 

Jonas also believes that inflation and rising gas prices would help spur a buyer’s strike. 

So is this the point where consumers give up on purchasing trucks and SUVs because they can’t afford to pay for record-high fuel? If so, what do people buy? Well, for one thing, they can’t afford Teslas because they’re too expensive, and prices are being consistently hiked due to rising industrial metal prices for batteries. 

Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The lead investigator for the House Intelligence Committee’s 2018 probe into the FBI’s investigation of alleged Trump–Russia collusion, Kash Patel, said the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign is paying a penalty to Federal Election Commission (FEC) is an admittance of guilt.

Clinton and DNC are doing so to bury the narrative and prevent more media coverage of these illegal activities, said Patel.

“I think the public sees what that is. It’s their way of burying the narrative, because if they contested what happens, more media coverage, more people start looking into these things,” Patel said.

“So the Hillary Clinton campaign is not contesting it, they’re paying the fine. It’s basically admitting that they did this and they’re out is: ‘we just don’t want a protracted legal deal, as if the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC ever shied away from taking something or someone to court,” Patel added.

Clinton’s campaign and the DNC agreed to pay a combined $113,000 to the FEC, according to documents made public on March 30, after the commission found probable cause that the entities violated federal law by describing payments that ultimately went to the Fusion GPS research group as going toward legal services and consulting.

“It shows them how wrong they were to violate the law and spend political campaign dollars on hit job, opposition research pieces for then-candidate Trump, all of which, [to] remind the audience, was then used intentionally by the FBI—even though they knew it was false—to go to a federal secret court and surveil a presidential candidate and later a president of the United States.”

The FEC, which is responsible for overseeing federal elections, including the presidential election, found that the Hillary Clinton campaign broke FEC rules about how donations can be used.

“What we knew when we ran the Russiagate investigation, Chairman Nunes and I, we exposed that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier, an opposition research hit job. We had proven that some years ago,” said Patel.

“What the Coolidge Reagan Foundation did … based on our investigation, said ‘wait a second FEC, you as a political campaign cannot spend political dollars launching opposition research, false or otherwise,’” said Patel.

Dan Backer, an attorney who lodged the complaint with the election commission against the Clinton campaign and the DNC, told The Epoch Times that it’s the first time Clinton “has actually been held accountable for misconduct,” calling the fines “a great step for accountability.”

“So they fined them, that’s the FEC’s job. And the Hillary Clinton campaign could have said: ‘We disagree with your finding. We’re going to go to court.’ What did the Hillary Clinton campaign do? … They agreed to the finding of probable cause by the FEC, which means they’re basically agreeing that it happened. … Like we’ve always said, ‘follow the money.’”

Patel said while the FEC fine is an important step toward holding the Clinton campaign and other key players involved in the Russia disinformation campaign accountable, the true victory, he hopes, will be indictments made by U.S. special counsel John Durham.

In October 2020, Durham was appointed by the Dept. of Justice as special counsel to investigate the FBI’s handling of Russiagate. His recent filings revealed that internet traffic at Trump Tower and the White House was accessed to fabricate ties between Trump and Russia.

The filing, which was submitted late on Feb. 11 in connection with the indictment of Michael Sussmann, a former attorney to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, reveals that Rodney Joffe, a tech executive who was working with Sussmann, had exploited access to domain name system (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) as well as Trump Tower and Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building.

“This FEC fine is another step towards accountability. But [for] me as a former federal prosecutor, maybe I’m biased, but the ultimate step of accountability which the American public is waiting for,comes in the form of indictments, especially to those people who violated their oath of office,” Patel said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Clinton campaign for comment.

One week ago, RH (the stock-buyback/short-squeeze mogul formerly known as Restoration Hardware) reported dismal earnings which sent its stock plunging, but it was the company’s earnings call that shocked Wall Street: in a nutshell, the company disclosed that it had seen a sharp deceleration in customer activity over just the last several days, prompting CEO Gary Friedman to give an ominous assessment of the overall macro situation.

While first quarter sales and margin strand to remain healthy due to the ongoing relief of our backlog, we have experienced softening demand in the first quarter that coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February and the market volatility that followed. We believe it is prudent to remain conservative until demand trends return to normal and — we are providing the following outlook for the first quarter of 2022.”

What was remarkable about Friedman’s admission is that whereas until now, management commentary had mostly lamented soaring commodity prices and supply-chain weakness, which management had then successfully passed on to consumers, this was a direct admission of tangible weakness in consumer end-demand. What was more ominous is that, unlike the Biden admin, Friedman did not blame the soaring inflation and the sudden bout of economic weakness on Putin. In fact, as the following excerpt from his earnings call commentary revealed, the CEO saw broad-based weakness in virtually every aspect of the economy.

… It’s probably one of the most difficult guides since 2008 and ’09, because we — we’re right in the middle of this disruption from Ukraine and Russia, which I think — I don’t think it’s all Ukraine and Russia. I think it’s triggered a greater awareness. It’s like someone rang the bell, and everybody paid attention, and then all of a sudden, everybody started talking. All of a sudden, the Fed’s off to the races and that creates concern. You’ve got housing prices at all-time highs. I mean, is it sustainable? I don’t know for how long; doesn’t make sense on what’s happening in the housing sector and other places. And you’ve got inflation like I’ve never seen.

Now I was telling people, when Yellen said, we’re going back to 2%, we were just signing our new freight contracts, ocean freight contracts. I just wonder if the Fed has picked up the phone and called a business person and said, hi, what do you think is happening with inflation? How is ocean rates? How is this? How is that?

I mean I don’t think anybody really understands what’s coming from an inflation point of view, because either businesses are going to make a lot less money or they’re going to raise their prices. And I don’t think anybody really understands how high prices are going to go everywhere. In restaurants, in cars and everything. And I think it’s going to outrun the consumer. And I think we’re going to be in some tricky space. So everything is kind of happening at once. And I think you got to prepare for war. I mean if you’re going into a very difficult, unpredictable time, you just got to be super flexible, you’ve got to be able to improvise, adapt, overcome and kind of be ready for anything.

And I don’t mean that by playing defense. I mean it’s by playing offense, but it’s — I wouldn’t call it happy days right now. I’d call it pensive days. Be ready. And when we play like that, we usually have our best outcome. When we get overly optimistic, we have a higher likelihood to wind up in the ditch and get ahead of ourselves. So — but if everything, if the war in Ukraine ends and inflation slows down some miraculous way, I don’t know, everybody can sign new freight contracts because, I mean, most of the world all signed new freight contracts. Two years ago, price of the container for us went from 2,400 to 4,800? I’m not going to tell you what it just went to. But just let’s say that looked like a nice increase.

So either people are going to do stupid things like take quality down to make their goods look like it’s better value or they’re going to have to take prices up and where they won’t take prices up and they’ll hurt — their margin profile is going to change. But it’s not just us, it’s everybody I know in every industry. And I just don’t think it’s like — again, I don’t want to scare everybody. But I talk about them, like there’s the scene in The Big Short, where everybody is in that ballroom and the guy from Bear Stearns or someone is up there, and he’s saying how they are going to buy back $1 billion of their stock, and then one guy on his BlackBerry, goes, can I ask the question, sir? In the 20 minutes that you’ve been talking, your stock is down like 55%. And everybody ran out of the room.

The call, which took place after the close on Wednesday, sent RH stock crashing and unleashed a pall over the broader retail sector. However, the recession blues quickly spread just 48 hours later when Craig Fuller, the CEO of Freight Waves, a supply-chain logistics expert and hardly the hyperbolic type, warned that a “freight recession is imminent“, commentary which sent the transports index plummeting on Friday and which continued to depress the space on Monday as well. 

… I wish the answers were different. I would prefer to say the U.S. trucking market was robust and the expansion will continue throughout 2022. But I can’t. Since I wrote the piece about the bloodbath, FreightWaves SONAR’s tender data continues to reinforce the perspective of a declining freight market.  

Tender rejections are the best indicator into real-time supply/demand in the truckload sector. The data comes from actual electronic load requests – “tenders” in the truckload contract market.

A high rejection rate means that trucking companies have more options to choose from. A low rejection rate means carriers have fewer options in freight to pick from. Since this measures actual load activity and not load board posts or searches, it tells us what the market is actually doing.

And since it measures the willingness of carriers that are contracted to accept or to reject a load they have a contracted rate for, if the rejection rate declines, it suggests capacity is loosening.

And so, the yield curve inverts and we immediately get management chatter about recession hitting retail and freight (i.e., transports), two of the most critical sectors propping up the US economy. Well, we can now add the beating heart of the tech sector – semiconductors – to the list too.

Last week, the chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor said that consumer electronics demand is showing signs of slowing amid geopolitical uncertainties and COVID-related lockdowns in China,  The slowdown is emerging in areas “such as smartphones, PCs, and TVs, especially in China, the biggest consumer market,” TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said.

Liu also warned that the cost of components and materials are rising sharply, pushing up production costs for tech and chip companies.

“Such pressure could eventually be passed on to consumers,” Liu said on the sidelines of an industry event where he was speaking in his capacity as chair of the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association.

When TSMC speaks, or worse warns, everyone pays attention: a key Apple supplier, TSMC is the world’s biggest contract chipmaker and a barometer of global electronics demand. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is the world’s second-largest chip economy by revenue, behind only the U.S.

“Everyone in the industry is worried about rising costs across the overall supply chain… The semiconductor industry already and directly experienced that cost increase,” Liu said, adding that the industry is also concerned about macroeconomic uncertainties this year.

And yet, despite the dire warning of slowing end-demand, TSMC – like so many of its peers – refused to accept what the new reality means for its top line, and instead has chosen to assume that the chip fab giant can just keep passing on all the soaring costs to a consumer that has already been tapped out: Liu said that TSMC is not likely to change its growth target and capital expenditure this year.

“Despite the slowdown in some areas, we still see robust demand in automotive applications and high-performance computing as well as internet of things-related devices,” he said. “We still cannot meet our customers’ demand with our current capacity. We will reorganize and prioritize orders for those areas that still see healthy demand.” At least until those areas fall into the pre-recessionary void too.

Why does all of this matter? Because with stocks still just shy of all time highs – following the recent torrid rally – we get retail, freight and semis all issuing very loud, and very troubling warnings that what is dead ahead is something, in the parlance of the RH CEO, straight our of The Big Short, a movie which we are confident he picked for obvious reasons. More importantly, it all happens within hours of the 2s10s yield curve inverting…

… which is also why Wall Street has spent so much in the past few days trying to convince anyone who still bothers to listen that a recession is not imminent… why would be lovely, if the companies themselves weren’t telling us otherwise.