Month: June 2023

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

It’s common now to speak of the before times in contrast to the after times. The turning point was of course March 16, 2020, the day of 15 Days to Flatten the Curve, though authoritarian trends predate that. Rights were suddenly broadly throttled, even religious rights. We were told to conduct every aspect of our lives in accordance with the priorities of the bio-medical security state. 

Very few people anticipated such a shocking development. It was the onset of a new state-conducted war and the enemy was something we could not see and hence could be anywhere. No one has ever doubted the omnipresence of potentially dangerous pathogens but now we were being told that life itself depended entirely on avoidance of them and the only guide going forward would be public-health authorities. 

Everything changed. Nothing is the same. The trauma is real and lasting. The claim of “15 Days” was revealed to be a ruse. The emergency lasted three years and then some. The people and machinery that did this are still in power. The pick to head the CDC has a long track record of enabling and cheering the lockdowns and all that followed. 

It’s a helpful exercise to summarize the new things we’ve all discovered in these years. Together they account for why the world seems different and why we all feel and think differently now than we did just a few years ago. 

Twenty terrible realities unearthed by lockdowns

1. Surveillance and censorship by Big Tech. The resistance eventually found each other but it took months and years. A censorship regime descended on all major social platforms, technologies designed with the intention of keeping us more connected and expanding the range of opinion we could experience. We did not know it was happening, but we eventually learned of the crackdown, which is why so much of us felt so alone. Others could not hear us and we could not hear them. The regime faces a bold court challenge on many fronts but it still goes on today, with all but Twitter constantly policing their networks in ways that are unpredictably authoritarian. We have ironclad evidence now that they are all captured. 

2. Power and influence of Big Pharma. It was April 2020 when someone asked me if the goal of the vaccine produced by the pharmaceutical cartel was really behind the lockdowns. The idea would be to terrify us and ruin our lives until we were begging for shots. I thought the whole idea was insane and that the corruption could not possibly reach this deep. I was wrong. Pharma had been at work on a vaccine since January of that year and called in every form of purchased influence to eventually make them mandatory. Now we know that the major regulators are wholly owned and controlled, to the point that necessity, safety, and efficacy don’t really matter. 

3. Government propaganda by Big Media. It was relentless from day one: the major media proved hardcore partisans of Anthony Fauci. The powers that be could tap the New York Times, National Public Radio, Washington Post, and all the rest, whenever and however they wanted. Later the media was deployed to demonize those who violated lockdowns, refused masks, and resisted the shots. Gone was the idea that “democracy dies in darkness” and the “paper of record” replaced by darkness itself and constant propaganda. They showed no real curiosity of the other side. The Great Barrington Declaration itself began as an effort to educate journalists but only a few dared even show up. Now we get it: the mainstream media too is wholly owned and completely compromised. They already knew what to report and how to report it. Nothing else mattered. 

4. Corruption of public health. Who in their right minds would have predicted that the CDC and NIH, not to mention the World Health Organization, would be deployed as frontline workers in the imposition of totalitarian control? Some observers perhaps predicted this but implausibly so. But in fact it was these agencies which were responsible for all the absurd protocols from closing hospitals to non-Covid cases, putting up Plexiglas everywhere, keeping schools closed, demonizing repurpose therapeutics, masking toddlers, and forcing shots. They knew no limits to their power. They revealed themselves to be faithful agents of the hegemon. 

5. Consolidation of industry. Free enterprise is supposed to be free but when workers, industries, and brands were divided between essential and nonessential, where were the howls from Big Business? They weren’t there. They proved willing to put profit ahead of the system of competition. So long as they benefited from the system of consolidation, cartelization, and centralization, they were fine with it. The big-box stores got to wipe out the competition and gain a leg up in industrial standing. Same with remote learning platforms and digital technology. The biggest businesses proved to be the worst enemies of real capitalism and the biggest friends of corporatism. As for arts and music: we know now that the elites consider them dispensable. 

6. Influence and power of administrative state. The Constitution established three branches of government but lockdowns were not managed by any of them. Instead it was a fourth branch that has grown up over the decades, the permanent class of bureaucrats that no one elected and no one from the public controls. These permanent “experts” were completely unleashed and unhinged with no check on their power, and they cranked out protocols by the hour and enforced them as legislatures, judges, and even presidents and governors stood by powerless and in awe. We know now that there was a coup d’etat on March 13, 2020 that transferred all power to the national security state but we certainly did not know it then. The edict was classified. The administrative state still rules the day. 

7. Cowardice of intellectuals. The intellectuals are the most free to speak their minds of any group. Indeed that is their job. Instead, they stayed quiet for the most part. This was true of right and left. The pundits and scholars just went along with the most egregious attacks on human rights in this generation if not in all living memory. We employ these people to be independent but they proved themselves to be anything but that. We stood by in shock as even famed civil libertarians looked out at the suffering and said “This is fine.” A whole generation among them is today completely discredited. And by the way, the few who did stand up were called horrible names and often lost their jobs. Others took note of this reality and decided instead to behave by staying quiet or echoing the ruling-class line. 

8. Pusillanimity of universities. The origin of modern academia is with the sanctuaries from war and pestilence so that great ideas could survive even the worst of times. Most universities – only a handful excepted – completely went along with the regime. They closed their doors. They locked students in their dormitories. They denied paying customers in-person education. Then came the shots. Millions were jabbed unnecessarily and could only refuse on pain of being kicked out of degree programs. They showed a complete lack of principle. Alumni should take note and so should parents who are considering where to send their high school seniors next year. 

9. Spinelessness of think tanks. The job of these huge nonprofits is to test the boundaries of acceptable opinion and drive the policy and intellectual world in the direction of progress for everyone. They are also supposed to be independent. They don’t depend on tuition or political favor. They can be bold and principled. So where were they? Almost without exception they clammed up or became craven apologists for the lockdown regime. They waited and waited until the coast was clear and then eked out little opinions that had little impact. Were they just being shy? Not likely. The financials tell a different story. They are supported by the very industries that stood to benefit from the egregious policies. Donors who believe in freedom should take note! 

10. Madness of crowds. We’ve all read the classic book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds but we thought it was a chronicle of the past and probably impossible now. But within an instant, mobs of people fell into medieval-style panics, hunting down non-compliers and hiding from the invisible miasma. They had a mission. They were ferreting out dissidents and ratting out the non-compliers. None of this would have happened otherwise. Just like in the Cultural Revolution of China, these would-be members of the Red Guard became foot soldiers for the state. Mathias Desmet’s book on Mass Formation now stands as a classic explanation of how a population devoid of meaningful lives can turn these sorts of political frenzies into deluded crusades. Most of our friends and neighbors went along. 

11. Lack of ideological conviction of both right and left. Both right and left betrayed their ideals. The right abandoned its affections for limited government, free enterprise, and the rule of law. And the left turned against its traditional stand for civil liberties, equal freedoms, and free speech. They all became compromised, and they all made up fake rationales for this pathetic situation. Had this all began under a Democrat, the Republicans would have been screaming. Instead they went quiet. Then the Covid regime passed to a Democrat and so they stayed quiet while the Republicans, embarrassed at their previous silence, stayed silent for far too long. Both sides proved ineffective and toothless throughout. 

12. Sadism of the ruling class. The kids were denied a year or two of school in some locations. People missed medical diagnostics. Weddings and funerals were on Zoom. The aged were forced into desperate loneliness. The poor suffered. People turned to substance abuse and put on added pounds. The working classes were exploited. Small businesses were wrecked. Millions were forced to move and millions more were displaced from their jobs. The ruling class that advertised its wonderful altruism and public spiritedness became callous and completely disregarded all this suffering. Even when the data poured in about suicide ideation and mental illness from loneliness, it made no difference. They could not muster any concern. They changed nothing. The schools stayed closed and the travel restrictions stayed in place. Those who pointed this out were called terrible names. It was a form of grotesque sadism of which we did not know they were capable. 

13. The real-life problem of massive class inequality. Would any of this have happened 20 years ago when a third of the workforce was not privileged enough to take their work home and pretend to produce from laptops? Doubtful. But by 2020, there had developed an overclass that was completely disconnected from the lives of those who work with their hands for a living. But the overclass didn’t care that they had to face the virus bravely and first. These workers and peasants did not have privileges and apparently they didn’t matter much. When it came time for the shots, the overclass wanted their health care workers, pilots, and delivery people to get them too, all in the interest of purifying society of germs. Huge wealth inequalities turn out to make a big difference in political outcomes, especially when one class is forced to serve the other in lockdowns. 

14. The cravenness and corruption of public education. A universal education was the proudest achievement of progressives one hundred years ago. We all assumed it was the one thing that would be protected above all else. The kids would never be sacrificed. But then for no good reason, the schools were all closed. The labor unions representing the teachers rather liked their extended paid holiday and tried to make it last as long as possible, as the students got ever further behind in their studies. These are schools for which people paid for with their taxes for many years but no one promised a rebate or any compensation. Homeschooling went from existing under a legal cloud to being suddenly mandatory. And when they opened back up, the kids faced mass silencing with masks. 

15. Enabling power of central banking to fund it all. From March 12, 2020, and onward, the Federal Reserve deployed every power to serve as a Congressional printing press. It slammed rates back to zero. It eliminated (eliminated!) reserve requirements for banks. It flooded the economy with fresh money, eventually reaching a peak of 26 percent expansion or $6.2 trillion in total. This of course later translated into price inflation that quickly ate away the actual purchasing power of all that free stimulus dispensed by government, thus harming on net both producers and consumers. It was a great head fake, all made possible by the central bank and its powers. Further damage came to the structure of production by a prolongation of low interest rates. 

16. The shallowness of the faith communities. Where were the churches and synagogues? They closed their doors and kept out the people they had sworn to defend. They canceled holy days and holiday celebrations. They utterly and completely failed to protest. And why? Because they went along with the propaganda that ceasing their ministries was consistent with public health priorities. They went along with the state and media claim that their religions were deeply dangerous to the public. What this means is that they don’t really believe in what they claim to believe. When the opening finally came, they discovered that their congregations had dramatically shrunk. It’s no wonder. And who among them did not go along? It was the supposed crazy and odd ones: the Amish, the estranged Mormons, and the Orthodox Jews. How non-mainstream they are. How marginal! But apparently they were among the only ones whose faith was strong enough to resist the demands of princes. 

17. The limitations on travel. We didn’t know the government had the power to limit our travel but they did it anyway. First it was internationally. But then it became domestic. For a few months there, it was hard to cross state lines because of the demands that everyone who did so had to quarantine for a fortnight. It was strange because we didn’t know what was and what was not legal nor did we know the enforcement mechanism. It turned out to be a training exercise for what we know now they really want, which is 15-minute cities. Apparently a people on the move are harder to control and corral. We were being acculturated toward a more medieval and tribal existence, staying put so that our masters can keep tabs on us. 

18. The tolerance for segregation. Vaccine uptake was certainly disproportionate by race and income. Richer and whiter populations went along but some 40 percent of the non-white and poorer communities didn’t trust the jab and refused. That did not stop 5 major cities from imposing vaccine segregation and enforcing it with police power. For a time, major cities were segregated with disparate impact by race. I don’t recall a single article in a major newspaper that pointed this out, much less decried it. So much for public accommodations and so much for enlightenment! Segregation turns out to be just fine so long as it fits with government priorities – same now as it was in the bad old days.  

19. The goal of a social credit system. It is not paranoia to speculate that all this segregation was really about the creation of a vaccine passport system running off a national base, the one they want very much to implement. And part of this is the real and long-term goal of creating a China-style social credit system that would make your participation in economic and social life contingent on political compliance. The CCP has mastered the art and imposed totalitarian control. We know for sure now that major aspects of the pandemic response were scripted in Beijing and imposed through the influence of China’s ruling class. It is completely reasonable to assume that this is the real goal of vaccine passports and even Central Bank Digital Currency. 

20. Corporatism as the system under which we live, giving lie to existing ideological systems. For many generations, the great debate has been between capitalism and socialism. All the while, the real goal has passed us by: the institutionalization of an interwar-style corporatist state. This is where property is nominally private and concentrated in only top industries in major sectors but publicly controlled with an eye to political priorities. This is not traditional socialism and it certainly isn’t competitive capitalism. It is a social, economic, and political system designed by the ruling class to serve its interests above all else. Here is the main threat and the existing reality but it is not well understood by either right or left. Not even libertarians seem to get this: they are so attached to the public/private binary that they have blinded themselves to the merger of the two and the ways in which major corporate players are actually driving the advance of statism in their own interests. 

If you haven’t changed your thinking over the last three years, you are a prophet, indifferent, or asleep. Much has been revealed and much has changed. To meet these challenges, we must do so with our eyes wide open. The greatest threats to human liberty today are not the ones of the past and they elude easy ideological categorization. Further, we have to admit that in many ways the plain human desire to live a fulfilling life in freedom has been subverted. If we want our freedoms back, we need to have a full understanding of the frightening challenges before us. 

Brownstone’s work and influence in this regard is far beyond any that we’ve told publicly. You would be astonished at the extent of it. The times demand circumspection in overt institutional aggrandizement. 

We are grateful to our donors for having faith in the power of ideas. We are daily amazed at the ability of passionate and scrupulous writers and intellectuals to make a real difference for the cause of freedom. Please, if you can, join our donor community to keep the momentum going, for the hill is perhaps the steepest we’ve climbed in our lives. We have no “development department” and no corporate or government benefactors: you can make a difference.

If everyone lived like the inhabitants of the countries highlighted on our map, one Earth would suffice to meet the needs of humanity.

You will find more infographics at Statista

But, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, as for the lifestyles of the 140 or so remaining countries, the ecological footprint exceeds the planet’s biocapacity, i.e. all the natural resources the Earth can regenerate (and the waste it can absorb) in the space of a year.

An observation that highlights the pressure exerted by human activities on ecosystems.

According to calculations by the NGO Global Footprint Network, as of August 2, 2023, humanity will have already consumed all the resources the planet can replenish in one year. Earth Overshoot Day arriving earlier and earlier, moving from as late as December 30 in 1970.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Humanity is thus living “on credit”, and it would take 1.75 Earths to meet the needs of the world’s population in 2022. Compared to this global average, the inhabitants of a country like France or Germany have an ecological footprint almost twice as high.

The concept of Earth Overshoot Day was first conceived by Andrew Simms of the UK think tank New Economics Foundation, which partnered with Global Footprint Network in 2006 to launch the first global Earth Overshoot Day campaign. WWF, the world’s largest conservation organization, has participated in Earth Overshoot Day since 2007.To find out more about the calculations behind Earth Overshoot Day, please click here.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A former Target executive claimed that there was one item that sparked widespread boycott calls against the big box chain.

Former Target Vice Chairman Gerald Storch said in a Sunday interview with Fox News that a number of retailers, including Target, have sold pro-LGBT merchandise over the past several years and claimed that “everybody carries that stuff.”

But he noted that Target appeared to go a step further this year by carrying a “tuck swimsuit” that targets transgender people. In mid-May, conservative commentators made note of the swimsuit and claimed that it was being marketed for children, but Target officials pushed back and said that the item was only sold for adults.

“I’ve never seen a case where one item, that tuck swimsuit, that’s really what made the difference versus the competitors. That’s where the big mistake [was] made,” Storch told the outlet.

Some pointed out that Target’s website sells a range of LGBT and pro-transgender merchandise, including “pride” clothing targeting infants and small children. Target is also selling children’s books that instruct them on how to use transgender pronouns.

“I cannot state enough how important is for people to choose not to shop at Target. There has never been a company that has been more pro-transgenderism than Target,” Daily Wire commentator Candace Owens wrote last month.

Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, meanwhile, criticized the chain for selling the “tuck” swimwear. Target, she said, “decided to willingly partner with this clothing manufacturer to make Pride month gear that includes bathing suits that are quote ‘tuck-friendly’ that have extra material … which no woman needs.”

In the midst of the backlash, the company last month confirmed that it pulled some items from shelves and moved displays.

“Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and well-being while at work,” the firm said, without elaborating on the specific threats. “Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior,” it also said.

Since the boycott against the Minneapolis retailer was launched in mid-May, the company’s stock has declined from nearly $161 per share to about $133.22 per share as of June 2.

“Target stock has certainly been performing poorly, off 11 percent year to date. So that’s not good, and certainly, this boycott of the whole issue here isn’t helping. It’s very distracting to have that going on in the business. But there are more fundamental concerns with that, with the environment, with the consumer, and with the business here,” Storch noted.

“The consumer is feeling very stressed, very stressed by the environment, by inflation, and Target is known as the upscale discounter. So it’s not good to be the upscale discounter at a time when the consumer doesn’t have a lot of money to spend. So they’re migrating more to Wal-Mart, and that’s a huge problem,” Storch added.

The former executive then claimed that the “boycott is part of the problem” but claimed that investors are likely “more concerned with the fundamental business issues” at play. But he noted that Target’s executives “certainly didn’t handle this well, either going in or trying to deal with it on the way out. But I think over time, this is not going to be a big issue for them,” he said.

Read more here…

Authored by Frank Miele via RealClear Wire,

Some years ago Kenneth Anger wrote a book called “Hollywood Babylon” to expose the dark secrets of the nation’s debauched film capital. It’s about time for an ambitious insider with a strong stomach for deceit and hypocrisy to write a tome called “D.C. Babylon.” One whole chapter could be dedicated to the modern FBI and its labyrinth of corruption and calumny.

Or perhaps it will take more than one chapter considering the record of the FBI under the direction of James Comey and Christopher Wray. Both men oversaw blatant exercises in election interference on behalf of Democrats, and then either lied about it or pretended it never happened. It’s almost as though they consider themselves to be above the law.

The refusal of FBI Director Wray last week to honor a congressional subpoena and turn over an unclassified document to the House Oversight Committee should therefore come as no surprise to anyone, even more so since the document in question could potentially end the presidency of Joe Biden.

The FD-1023 form submitted by a confidential informant contains allegations that Biden, while vice president, accepted bribes from a foreign national in exchange for favorable policy decisions. You would think that the FBI, which spent years chasing down imaginary pee tapes involving President Trump, would have a few minutes to confer with Congress about allegations that the sitting president had engaged in potentially treasonous behavior.

But no.

Since that 1023 form would redound significantly against the incumbent Democrat president’s re-election chances, it would be entirely out of character for the FBI to cooperate with the Republican-led investigation. Remember, this is the same FBI that sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for nearly an entire year prior to the 2020 election, knowing full well that it contained evidence of wrongdoing. Just as the FBI under Wray protected Joe Biden’s son then, it now is working diligently to protect Joe Biden himself as we enter the 2024 election cycle.

No surprise. After all, as Special Counsel John Durham’s report documented, the FBI under the direction of Comey used its police powers to damage the candidacy of Donald Trump in 2016, and then worked to cripple his presidency by giving weight to Democrat lies and leaking stories damaging to Trump and his family and friends.

In other words, the modern FBI, under the direction of first Comey and now Wray, is a political weapon aimed at Republicans in the service of Democrats.

Hopefully, that is becoming plainly apparent to the majority of Americans. Maybe it is. A Rasmussen Reports poll last month showed that 69% of U.S. voters consider the influence-peddling scandal a serious problem for Biden, and more than 50% consider it “very serious.”

This latest standoff between Wray and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer exposes just how wide the gap is between the views of the American people and the Washington, D.C. elites. In D.C. Babylon, a corrupt FBI is merely business as usual, while for the rest of us, it is the poster child for a two-tiered system of justice. No one can honestly claim that Democrats receive the same level of scrutiny as Republicans by either the Department of Justice or the FBI.

On the issue of double standards, a couple of points have not been adequately raised about the significance of Wray’s refusal to honor the congressional subpoena.

First of all, we need to ask why Wray is not being vilified by the mainstream media in the same way that former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were when they refused to honor subpoenas from the sham House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.

In those cases, both men have faced not just contempt of Congress citations, but criminal prosecution. Bannon, the architect of Trump’s 2016 victory, has already been convicted of criminal contempt and faces four months in prison pending his appeal. Navarro has not yet been tried, but you can bet that the same heavily Democratic jury base in Washington, D.C. will be happy to send Navarro to prison until they can get their hands on their main target, Donald Trump.

So what is the difference between Bannon and Chris Wray? They both refused to cooperate with a congressional subpoena, but even if Wray is held in contempt by the House, there is no chance he will be prosecuted by the Biden Justice Department, any more than Attorney General Eric Holder was by the Obama Justice Department. Two tiers. Double standard. Call it what you want.

Secondly, we also should weigh Wray’s authoritarian rejection of congressional subpoena power against the current case being put together against Trump by special prosecutor Jack Smith in the Mar-a-Lago documents scandal. If Clark proceeds with an obstruction case against Trump because he didn’t act quickly enough in responding to the federal subpoena for classified documents, we have every right to ask why Wray gets to explicitly reject his subpoena, but Trump’s home was raided by the FBI while his lawyers were still in the process of negotiating with the Department of Justice.

But there’s no need to ask when everyone already knows the answer. Election interference, anyone?

By Benjamin Picton, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank

And Now For Something Completely Different

The debt ceiling fracas is mercifully behind us (at least until 2025), so today we turn our focus away from the USA’s dwindling treasury and towards the more immediate issue of its dwindling dominance of the Western Pacific. Over the weekend US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urged China to re-engage with the United States to “help avoid misunderstandings or miscalculations that may lead to crisis or conflict.” The plea was timely, because there have been a few near-misses in recent days that might have caused more concern in markets in years gone by. The first was the interception of a US surveillance plane by a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea in late May. The Chinese jet crossed in front of the US plane, thereby forcing it to fly through the unstable jet wash (just like Maverick and Goose). A further incident occurred on Saturday when a Chinese warship cut directly in front of a US destroyer, passing within 140 meters of colliding with the US ship.

Watch the moment a Chinese warship nearly hits US destroyer in Taiwan Strait 👇 pic.twitter.com/WBJkHUZaJG
— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 5, 2023

If you’re sensing a theme here, you’re not alone. Western leaders have been promising a “de-risking”, rather than a “de-coupling” of the China relationship in recent months, but the geopolitical risks seem to be increasing, rather than diminishing. When Christine Lagarde warned in April that “we are witnessing the fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs” she was effectively articulating our long-held house view, which my colleague Michael Every has written about many times.

So, when Western leaders talk about “de-risking”, what they mean is that they want to ensure that unfriendly powers don’t have them over an economic barrel in the same way that Vladimir Putin did with Europe in early 2022. The goal is to restructure trade and production so that it cannot be used as a weapon in this new era of Great Power competition. This is easier said than done. Especially when we are accustomed to a world where one bloc does most of the producing and another does most of the consuming.

If the world really does split into competing blocs in the way that Lagarde has warned, we are going to have to see further economic restructuring to make it work. In the meantime, there will be a process of muddling-through, as we continue to sell and buy what we can, while doing our best to re-shore, on-shore and friend-shore, since we are un-sure about the reliability of supply for certain goods and commodities in the years ahead.

Such a restructuring probably means inflation in the West (that is certainly our view) and deflation in the East. If the West is going to be making more of its own stuff, it is off to a slow start. The ISM manufacturing index last week showed further contraction, continuing a trend that started in November last year. New orders were down, inventories were down, prices paid were WELL down, but the employment index grew strongly. That’s an interesting result given the continued strength in non-farm payrolls, which again surprised to the upside on Friday by reporting that employment rose by 339,000 in May against a forecast of just 195,000. This coincided with a 3-tick increase in the unemployment rate to 3.7%, which meant that there was something for everyone in the numbers. Consequently, the stock market rallied, as did the Dollar, as did 10-year Treasury yields  (up 10 bps on the day), and the front end underperformed as the market awaits new issuance and a clearer signal on the path of the Fed Funds Rate.

Despite a poor recent run for both the USA and Germany, it would be unfair of me to characterize the malaise in manufacturing as a purely Western phenomenon. China has had its troubles this year, too. Last week’s PMI data presented a mixed picture on this front, with the Federation of Logistics and Purchasing numbers showing a further contraction in May, while the Caixin manufacturing PMI showed an unexpected lift back into expansion. By contrast, the Caixin services index continues to show remarkable strength. The May data was released earlier today and showed a rise in the index to 57.1, which seems to imply that there is still some steam left in the China re-opening trade. There has been speculation for some weeks now that the Chinese government would soon step in to provide broad stimulus to the economy, but these latest Caixin numbers may cool those expectations for the time being.

Signs of a pickup in China is always welcome in Australia, where the wealth of the nation is largely generated by digging things up to sell to Chinese steel mills before being redeployed into the local housing market. The sustainability of how that national wealth is shared was called into question on Friday when the Fair Work Commission delivered a 5.75% increase in award wages and an 8.6% bump in the national minimum wage. Industry awards cover somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the Aussie labor market, so the FWC decision has a large bearing on aggregate wage outcomes. This is important, because RBA Governor Lowe had earlier in the week warned politicians that unit labor costs are rising too fast and that expected levels of wages growth were not consistent with meeting the inflation mandate unless sagging productivity growth picked up. Naturally, the implied path of the RBA cash rate is higher post-decision as traders intuited this to mean more inflation pressures and therefore a higher path for the policy rate, just for something completely different!

Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Students at the University of Texas at Austin were found to be responsible for a censorship project that targeted conservative news outlets.

The Global Disinformation Index’s (GDI) report, which called for the blacklisting of conservative news organizations, was written up by students under the direction of academics working at the University of Texas at Austin’s Global Disinformation Lab (GDIL), The Federalist reported.

In the disinformation index, the group labeled several conservative media companies as the riskiest.

The academics in charge of the lab allegedly held an anti-conservative bias in readings of internal communications, along with several other accusations found in the over 1,000 pages of documents reviewed by The Federalist.

Publicly Funded Organization Involved in News Blacklist

The Washington Examiner investigative reporter, Gabe Kaminsky, published a Feb. 9 exclusive multi-part series: “Disinformation Inc.”

Kaminsky revealed that “self-styled ‘disinformation’ tracking organizations,” such as the GDI’s review of the top ten “riskiest American news organizations, were heavily biased against conservative outlets.

Conservative news outlets such as American Spectator, Newsmax, The Federalist, American Conservative, One America News, The Blaze, Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post, generally had the lowest ratings.

In contrast, left-leaning news publications like The New York Times and CNN were among the top 10 “least risky” in their rating system.

GDI sold its lists to marketing organizations, which led to companies pulling advertisements from blacklisted outlets and thus starving them of funding.

For example, Microsoft’s Xandr used GDI’s blacklist to limit advertising dollars, but has since reportedly dropped its use of the blacklist after the series was published, reported the Washington Examiner.

The government-funded National Endowment for Democracy was also caught granting GDI over $500,000 between 2020 and 2021, while the State Department’s Global Engagement Center similarly awarded the GDI $100,000 in taxpayer funds in 2021, wrote Kaminsky.

University of Texas Caught in Media Censorship Controversy

Meanwhile, GDI released a report with help from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin on Dec. 16, 2022, called “Disinformation Risk Assessment: The Online News Market in the United States.”

After the report admitting the targeting conservative outlets was published, The Federalist filed a public records request at UT Austin in February, demanding all communications related to GDIL’s work with the GDI on the news media review.

Despite actions by UT Austin to withhold some of the details of its methodology and research over concerns regarding “confidentiality of trade secrets” and “certain commercial or financial information,” the internal documents that were released revealed many concerning details.

The files showed that the GDI paid the university to have student researchers, with little training, apply the organization’s screening methodology to rate the various media outlets for its final report, which gave conservative news outlets low ratings.

GDI sold the university project to GDIL with the goal of influencing the 2022 midterms, The Federalist reported.

Student researchers were recruited by being informed that their work would be “immediately valuable” since GDI would release it early “to make waves ahead of the midterms” and affect reportage of the 2022 election.

After the team was finished, UT Austin retained any surplus funds that GDI received for the work, leading critics to question how a state-funded university could profit from such a politically biased program.

Biden Administration Continues to Fund Censorship Operations

Additional documents from GDIL further revealed that GDI had an even larger role in censorship activities than had been previously known, according to The Federalist.

It was revealed by these internal files that GDI and GDIL were also working with the Biden State Department and other prominent public and private organizations to censor conservatives.

A top lab manager on the project at UT Austin wrote in an internal email communication that GDI worked “with governments, policymakers, social media platforms, and adtech companies to defund disinformation.”

“They are instrumental in providing data to a bunch of people that I am not sure if I am allowed to talk about,” the lab manager continued, adding GDI had formal and informal relationships with “trust and safety teams at various big platforms, the most recently announced partnership is with Twitch.”

In addition, an email GDIL received from the Global Engagement Center’s “Academic and Think-Tank Liaison” showed that the State Department had developed a close relationship with a growing number of universities and publicly funded think tanks to promote the censorship of anti-progressive views, according to The Federalist.

The State Department was exposed for its dealings with the Centre for Information Resilience, whose vice president happens to be former Department of Homeland Security disinformation czar, Nina Jankowicz.

Jankowicz was pushed out of DHS by the Biden administration last year after a massive backlash caused the termination of the much-criticized censorship program.

The Epoch Times reached out to the University of Texas at Austin GSIL, GDI, and the State Department for comment.

Over the weekend Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit that any potential future conflict between the United States and China would bring “unbearable disaster for the world”.

But he said both rival powerful countries should be able to grow together and to avoid confrontation. His words came as the US condemned what it called unsafe and aggressive maneuvers by a Chinese PLA Navy warship in the Taiwan Strait as the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon conducted a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit on Saturday.

“It is undeniable that a severe conflict or confrontation between China and the US would be an unbearable disaster for the world,” Li said. 

While at the conference the top Chinese defense leader refused a sit-down bilateral meeting with his US counterpart Lloyd Austin, but there was at least a cordial handshake.  

Li, who took up his posts in March, additionally said China “believes that a big power should behave like one, instead of provoking bloc confrontation for self-interest.”

He urged that Washington “take concrete action” to find common ground with China and to reverse the trend of spiraling ties, which has been on display and intensified ever since the US Chinese ‘spy balloon’ shootdown in early February.

While not naming the US, Li also said at the defense summit over the weekend that “some country” practices “exceptionalism and double standards and only serves the interests and follows the rules of a small number of countries.”

He stressed that China remains “strongly opposed to imposing one’s own will on others, placing one’s own interests above those of others and pursuing one’s own security at the expense of others.”

Currently Washington and Beijing are trading harsh words over the aforementioned Saturday ‘close-call’ between the US and Chinese warships off Taiwan. 

Gen. Li upon taking his post in March told his country and military that “we must prevent attempts that try to use those freedom of navigation (patrols), that innocent passage, to exercise hegemony of navigation.”

He remains under US sanctions – something which has served to thwart talks with US defense officials and the Biden administration. China has demanded that the White House first drop the sanctions on him before direct military dialogue can be restored.

Authored by Enrico Trigoso via The Epooch Times (emphasis ours),

American Airlines, a leading carrier based in Fort Worth, is currently grappling with a significant challenge. The airline is unable to operate approximately 150 of its regional aircraft due to a persistent shortage of pilots, as revealed by CEO Robert Isom.

Speaking at the Bernstein 39th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, Isom stated, “We would deploy properly to markets that aren’t being served. We would do that today. It’s just we don’t have the pilots.”

This issue arises at a time when the airline industry is witnessing a record demand for travel, particularly during the summer season. However, the capacity to meet this demand is constrained by the lack of pilots, leading to grounded planes and missed opportunities to capitalize on high ticket prices. Isom noted that the situation is more severe than the previous year when the pilot shortage began to significantly affect regional airlines as demand rebounded following the downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Looking ahead, Isom shared that American Airlines expects to acquire more pilots for its regional network over the next 18 to 24 months. Once these pilots are onboard, the grounded aircraft will be reintroduced into service in a manner that is expected to generate favorable unit revenues. He stated, “American anticipates getting more pilots over the next 18 to 24 months for the regional network, and those aircraft would be put back into service in a fashion that is going to produce unit revenues that are very favorable.”

However, the challenge of pilot shortage is not unique to American Airlines. The airline industry as a whole is projected to face a deficit of nearly 80,000 pilots by 2032, as per a report by Oliver Wyman.

The report said the supply of pilots is being affected by a wave of early retirements that occurred during the pandemic, a mandatory age of retirement of 65, compounded by an older workforce, a “shrinking pool of potential pilots from the military, and a tough value proposition for perspective [sic] candidates outside the military.”

In an effort to address this issue, American Airlines has recently reached a tentative agreement with its pilots union, the Allied Pilots Association, which represents over 15,000 pilots. The agreement includes a proposed pay raise of about 21 percent for this year, in addition to back-dated raises dating back to 2020. Isom believes that the airline has been efficient in its operations and has seen a significant number of pilots expressing interest in becoming first officers.

Read more here…