Month: August 2022

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.”

– H. L. Mencken

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

Think about it.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the citizenry—purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure—has come about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian powers.

Who is the biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons (weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

Who is the largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which country has a history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Which country has conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.

What country has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.

We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.

It’s a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the population, no matter what one’s political leanings.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, “The government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat.”

This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.

For instance, the FBI has been secretly carrying out an entrapment scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted 27 million messages over the course of 18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any criminal activity whatsoever.

Even reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today / Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that sidestep the rule of law: “we the people” become suspects and potential criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces they seek to vanquish.  

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become thieves.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

This certainly isn’t a constitutional republic, however.

Some days, it feels like the government is running its own crime syndicate complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI—the government’s law enforcement agency—also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that government agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of Justice after learning that FBI agents created a fake AP news story and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, “The FBI may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However, the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks, distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially a piece of government disinformation.”

Then again, to those familiar with COINTELPRO, an FBI program created to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.”

Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread violations.

The FBI’s surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security Agency, boast a nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls. 

In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.”

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to expand its invasive hacking powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and hacking tools that can “steal financial account passwords, turn an iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a nuclear facility.”

In fact, the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the “WannaCry” or “Wanna Decryptor” malware worm which—as a result of hackers accessing the government’s arsenal—hijacked more than 57,000 computers and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and government entities in more than 70 countries.

Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

That’s exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded—and was given—immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to fight the very danger it had created.

This has become the shadow government’s modus operandi regardless of which party controls the White House: the government creates a menace—knowing full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public—then without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don’t really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it’s the American people who pay the price for the government’s insatiable greed and quest for power.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the United States is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance.

Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given way to kleptocracy, and representative government has been rejected in favor of rule by career politicians, corporations and thieves—individuals and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

The Pentagon has confirmed that a previously widely reported deal for Russia to acquire Iranian drones has now gone through, given US officials say a first shipment of Iranian-made Mohajer-6 and Shahed-series have been delivered to Moscow.

A Pentagon spokesperson has told Politico that an initial round of what is eventually expected to be “hundreds” of armed unmanned aerial vehicles has arrived in Russia. They are capable of conducting strikes and assisting ground forces with targeting, as well as electronic warfare – and are expected to be deployed in Ukraine amid depleting Russian munitions. 

“Russia deepening their alliance with Iran is something that the whole world — and especially those in the region — should watch and see as a profound threat,” the DOD official, Todd Breasseale, was quoted as saying. “We will vigorously enforce all U.S. sanctions on both the Russian and Iranian arms trade and we will stand with our allies and partners throughout the region against the Iranian threat.”

“This demonstrates that as Russia endures costs on the battlefield in Ukraine, it is experiencing difficulties in sustaining its own weapons, as it looks to countries like Iran for capabilities to sustain its forces,” Breasseale explained. “It also makes the case for U.S. engagement in the region so we don’t leave a vacuum for China or Russia.”

The Islamic Republic and Russia have been drifting into slow, deepening cooperation for years – but the Ukraine invasion appears to have hastened Moscow’s willingness to proceed with military deals with Tehran. 

Starting over a month ago, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan cited US intelligence to warn that Iran is “preparing to provide Russia with several hundred UAVs, including weapons capable UAVs” for use in Ukraine. The story was initially met with some degree of skepticism, given its unprecedented nature and the fact that many military technology observers considered Russia’s own drone program to be advancing. 

Politico underscores further that as part of the deal Russian personnel have already been in Iran to receive training on the new systems: 

Russian operators have been undergoing training in Iran for weeks as part of the agreement for UAV transfers, according to a spokesperson for the National Security Council, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss a sensitive matter.

Beyond the drone transfers, the U.S. has seen recent reports that Russia launched a satellite with “significant spying capabilities” on Iran’s behalf, the spokesperson said.

The timing is interesting, given it could negatively impact a restored Iran nuclear deal, at a moment the world awaits final word from Tehran and Washington on whether the ‘final text’ presented by the EU is acceptable to both of them. So far, it’s not looking like a restored JCPOA will be announced anytime soon, and this drone deal without doubt complicates matters further.

If the JCPOA is revived and European firms consider doing business with #Iran, some added business risk: they would be investing in Tehran which is providing lethal drones to #Russia for use against EU candidate country #Ukraine.https://t.co/54LLPqL35S

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) August 30, 2022

As for the initial delivery, the AP has these details: “Russian cargo planes picked up the first batch of drones from an airfield in Iran earlier this month, leaving with two types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the Washington Post reported Monday.”

“According to intelligence gathered by US and other spy agencies, the delivery has been marred by serious technical failures in early tests and the Russians are displeased with the performance of the drone systems,” the unconfirmed report said.

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg markets live analyst and reporter.

China is reportedly setting up a national bailout fund to finance stalled real-estate projects. The move, if confirmed, will reduce some systemic risk in the sector. Unfortunately, it’s neither a cure-all designed to save troubled developers, nor a game changer to turn around the market.

We have a date! Beijing set Oct. 16 as the start of the Communist Party’s twice-a-decade leadership congress, where President Xi Jinping is widely expected to retain his power for an unprecedented third term. Optimists might take the news as a positive, hoping that Beijing will improve its economic and Covid policies once the uncertainties about leadership are removed. The CSI 300 did rise in the three months following the two previous leadership changes at the party congresses — in 2002 and 2012.

One area in desperate need of improvement is the housing market. Despite various supportive measures from Beijing, including lowering mortgage rates, the sector shows few signs of a meaningful recovery. New home sales in 30 cities fell about 22% from a year earlier in the month through Aug. 27, only slightly better than the 33% contraction in July, according to Nomura.

The government is doing more. Caixin magazine reported Monday that Beijing has set up a 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) fund  — financed by two policy banks – to help stalled property projects. It’s in-line with earlier reports from other media outlets, including Bloomberg, but contains more details.

• Local governments will borrow these special-purpose loans and complete the unfinished projects, according to Caixin. The loans will carry low interest rates of 2.8% in the first two years, but rates will jump to 6.4% if they cannot be repaid within three years. In other words, it’s not a blank check.
• Crucially, regulators have made it clear that the fund will only be used to finish stalled projects. It will not be used to stimulate the housing market or rescue developers.
• Leaving aside the question of whether it’s enough money, the plan won’t hand cash to the developers. It’s unlikely to completely break the vicious feedback loop between delayed projects, mortgage boycotts and slumping home sales.

As long as home sales are depressed, more credit problems are likely. Goldman Sachs’s analyst Kenneth Ho expects the default ratio of high-yield dollar bonds by Chinese developers to rise this year to 45%, from the current 30%.

This may not topple China’s credit system as offshore bonds only account for 4% of the total debt of Chinese developers, according to Ho. By the same token, it shows why Beijing can afford to stand tough against developers.

The reported rescue plan makes it clear that President Xi is only willing to save the little guys on Main Street, not greedy and reckless tycoons.

The California Senate on Monday voted to create a “Fast Food Council” that would have the authority to set minimum wages and issue safety, health and anti-discrimination regulations.  

The 10-member council, which would include four worker representatives, four employer representatives and two state officials, would have the authority to increase California’s fast-food minimum wage to as much as $22 in 2023.

California’s minimum wage is $15 today, and is scheduled to rise to $15.50 on Jan. 1. The board — 40% of which would be worker reps — would thus be empowered to institute a 42% minimum-wage hike. Thereafter, the cap would rise by the smaller of the consumer price index or 3.5%. 

Any California store that’s part of a chain with at least 100 outlets nationwide would be subject to the Fast Food Council’s edicts. There are over a half-million fast food workers in the state. 

If enacted, it would be the first law of its kind in the United States. Putting workers’ representatives on a wage-setting government board could begin reshaping the way compensation is negotiated in America. 

“The bill could herald an important step toward sectoral bargaining, in which workers and employers negotiate compensation and working conditions on an industrywide basis, as opposed to enterprise bargaining, in which workers negotiate with individual companies at individual locations,” writes Noam Scheiber at The New York Times.  

The council’s wage power would have ripple effects throughout California’s economy, as employers in other low-skill industries would be forced to compete with compulsory rates paid by fast-food companies. 

Of course, further minimum wage hikes will also encourage fast food outlets to replace workers with machines, and higher wages will mean higher fast food costs for Californians — including many of those at the lower end of the economic ladder.     

Leftists were exuberant. “We made history today,” Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry told the Associated Press. “This legislation is a great leap huge step forward for workers in California and all across the country.” 

It’s “one of the most significant pieces of employment legislation passed in a generation,” gushed similarly enthusiastic Columbia Law School professor Kate Andrias, who called it “a great leap huge step forward for some of the most vulnerable workers in the country, giving them a collective voice in their working conditions.”

Each of the California Senate’s nine Republicans voted against the measure, known as the Fast Act, as did three Democrats. Speaking against the bill, Republican Senator Brian Dahle — who is also the nominee for governor — said, “There are no slaves that work for California businesses, period. You can quit any day you want and you can go get a job someplace else if you don’t like your employer.”

The state assembly is expected to pass the bill by Wednesday, but governor and likely presidential candidate Gavin Newsom hasn’t made his position on the final bill known. Earlier, his administration expressed concern that the general concept would create “a fragmented regulatory and legal environment.”

His administration opposed an earlier version that would have given the proposed Fast Food Council even more power. It would also have treated restaurant chains as joint employers of franchisee’s employees, leaving them vulnerable to liability for labor law violations.  

The fast food industry worked hard to get those measures stripped from the bill. “This is the biggest lobbying fight that the franchise sector has ever been in,” Matthew Haller, president of the International Franchise Association, told The Wall Street Journal. 

That’s not to say they’re at all happy with the final product. “We are pulling the fire alarm in all states to wake our members up about what’s going on in California,” Haller separately told The New York Times. 

By Tsvetana Paraskova of Oilprice.com

Tokyo Gas, the largest city gas supplier in Japan, has signed a long-term LNG agreement with the new Russian operator of the Sakhalin-2 project to keep supply volumes from the project, a spokesperson for the Japanese company told Reuters on Tuesday in a second such deal between a firm from Japan and the new operator. 

Last week, the largest power generation firm in Japan, JERA, told Reuters it had signed a long-term LNG deal to maintain its supply from the Sakhalin-2 project.   

Western majors hastened to announce they are abandoning joint projects in Russia after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Some international companies have managed to exit their participation, such as Norway’s Equinor, which said at the end of May that “The exit from all Joint Ventures has been completed in accordance with Norwegian and EU sanctions legislation related to Russia.”

A decree from Putin stipulated in early July that a newly set up state Russian company take over the rights and obligations of Sakhalin Energy Investment Co., the joint venture running the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project. Shell and Japan’s Mitsui and Mitsubishi were minority shareholders in Sakhalin Energy Investment Co. Shell already said a few months ago it would leave the project and has since then been looking for buyers for its stake in Sakhalin-2. 

Shell has already completed the sale of its retail and lubricants businesses in Russia to Lukoil, but hasn’t exited the Sakhalin-2 LNG project yet.

In early August, the Russian government gave Sakhalin-2 minority foreign investors – Shell, and Japan’s Mitsui & Co and Mitsubishi – one month to claim their stakes in a new entity that will replace the existing project. Shell has confirmed it is looking at ways to exit the project. The Japanese companies are expected to keep their stakes, Japan’s Industry Minister Koichi Hagiuda has said, as carried by Reuters.  

Record monsoons in Pakistan have forced “a third of the country” underwater, according to Sherry Rehman, the country’s country’s climate change minister.

Rehman said of her country, which is about 340,000 square miles: “It’s all one big ocean, there’s no dry land to pump the water out.”

The country is the 33rd largest by area, bigger than countries like Turkey and France, according to RT. It is inhabited by nearly 242 million people and is the fifth most populated nation in the world, the report says. 

Rehman said the occurrence was “very far from a normal monsoon” and called it “climate dystopia at our doorstep.” The crisis that has been created as a result of the flooding has been of “unimaginable proportions”, she continued. 

She called the flooding a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions.”

“We’ve had to deploy the navy for the first time to operate in Indo-Pakistan,” she said, due to the water. “Frankly, no one has seen this kind of downpour & flooding before, and no one country can cope alone with the multiple, cascading effects of extreme weather, climate events.”

As of Monday, the death toll from the rains was over 1,000 people. More than 3,000 roads have been destroyed, RT reports. 130 bridges and 495,000 homes have also been damaged or affected by flash floods. 

33 million people in the country were estimated to have been affected. 

ABC reported that in the last 24 hours alone, 75 people had died and 59 had been injured. 

“Padidan, in Pakistan’s Sindh Province, received an “unheard of” nearly 70 inches of rain in one day,” the report said. 

By John Kingston of FreightWaves

The injunction that kept California’s independent contractor law, AB5, out of the state’s trucking sector is officially dead.

In a hearing Monday, according to a statement released by trucking-focused law firm Scopelitis, Garvin, Light, Hanson & Feary, Federal District Court Judge Robert Benitez formally lifted the injunction that had been in effect since New Year’s Eve 2019. A filing by the court of its ruling was not available online at publication time. 

The lifting of the injunction, which was expected, puts into effect an April 2021 U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that overturned the original injunction handed down by Benitez. The appellate court ruling reversing the Benitez injunction nonetheless allowed the injunction to stay in place while the California Trucking Association, which filed the original lawsuit in the case, pursued its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

When the high court chose not to review the case, California Trucking Association v. Bonta, that put it back into the hands of the appellate court. That court in turn handed down a mandate to the district court ordering the reversal of the injunction. The action Monday formalized that step.

But the case is not over. The legal arguments put forth by the CTA — that AB5 as applied to trucking in California violates parts of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act — was only argued through motions on the injunction, rather than a full court procedure. The CTA will now pursue the case from the beginning and has asked for a new injunction. None was forthcoming Monday.

According to the Scopelitis memo, an earlier Benitez ruling that denied a CTA argument regarding AB5 and the Dormant Commerce Clause, which impacts interstate commerce, was vacated by Benitez, per the request of the CTA. The issue of whether the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) can intervene in the case remains to be decided.

Next steps are the filing of briefs in the case, which can take place into December, according to an earlier court filing. 

AB5 requires workers be judged against the provisions of the so-called ABC test to settle the question of whether they are independent contractors or employee. In particular for trucking, the so-called B prong is troublesome, as it says an independent contractor must be involved in “work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.” A trucking company hiring an outside truck driver runs the risk of being ruled in violation of the B prong.

The ruling did bring a quick media outreach from a public relations firm offering up commentary from the union side of the ledger.

“Today, drivers across California can rest easy knowing that trucking companies that have gotten away with misclassifying workers can no longer exploit their workers or the people of California to further their bottom line,” the email from Teamsters PR agency Berlin Rosen said. “These companies are going to be held accountable, and drivers’ rights will be protected under the law.”