Month: July 2023

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The second Russia-Africa summit, this week in St. Petersburg, should be seen as a milestone in terms of Global South integration and the concerted drive by the Global Majority towards a more equal and fair multipolar order.

The summit welcomes no less than 49 African delegations. President Putin previously announced that a comprehensive declaration and a Russia-Africa Partnership Forum Action Plan all the way to 2026 will be adopted.

Madaraka Nyerere, the son of Tanzania’s legendary anti-colonial activist and first President, Julius Nyerere, set the context, telling RT that the only “realistic” way for Africa to develop is to unite and stop being an agent for foreign exploitative powers.

And the path towards cooperation goes through BRICS – starting with the crucial upcoming summit in South Africa, and the incorporation of more African nations into BRICS+.

Nyerere’s father was a very important force behind the Organization of African Unity, which later became the African Union.

South Africa’s Julius Malema succinctly expanded the geoeconomic concept of a united Africa: “They [neocolonial powers] thrive on the division of the African continent. Can you imagine the minerals of the DRC combined with the minerals of South Africa, and with a new currency based on the minerals? What can we do to the dollar? If we become a United States of Africa, with our minerals alone, we can defeat the dollar.”

No humanitarian nature, no deal

The Russian-African Conference of the Valdai Club functioned like a sort of final expert watch synchronization in the run-up to St. Petersburg. The first session was particularly relevant.

That came after the publication of a comprehensive analysis by President Putin of Russia-Africa relations, with a special emphasis on the recently collapsed grain deal involving the UN, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine.

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the Russian Federation Council, has stressed how “Ukraine, Washington and NATO were interested in the grain corridor for sabotage”.

In his Op-Ed, Putin explained how, “for almost a year, a total of 32.8 million tons of cargo were exported from Ukraine under the ‘deal’, of which more than 70% went to high-and above-middle-income countries, including the European Union, while countries such as Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia, as well as Yemen and Afghanistan accounted for less than 3% of the total volume – less than one million tons.”

So that was one of the key reasons for Russia to leave the grain deal. Moscow published a list of requirements which would need to be fulfilled for Russia to reinstate it.

Among them: a real, practical end to sanctions on Russian grain and fertilizers shipped to world markets; no more obstacles for banks and financial institutions; no more restrictions on charter of ships and insurance – that means clean logistics for all food supplies; restoration of the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline.

And a particularly crucial item: the restoration of “the original humanitarian nature of the grain deal.”

There’s no way the collective West subjected to the Straussian neocon psychos who control US foreign policy will fulfill all or even some of these conditions.

So Russia, by itself, will offer grain and fertilizers free of charge for the poorest nations and contracts for grain supply at normal commercial terms for the others. Supply is guaranteed: Moscow had the biggest grain harvest ever during this season.

This is all about solidarity. At the Valdai session, a key discussion was around the importance of solidarity in the struggle against neo-colonialism and for global equality and justice.

Oleg Ozerov, Ambassador-at-Large of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and Head of the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum, stressed how European “former” partners persist on the one-way track of shifting blame to Russia as Africa is “acquiring agency” and “denying neo-colonialism.”

Ozerov mentioned how “France-Afrique is collapsing – and Russia is not behind it. Russia is ensuring that Africa acts as one of the powers of the multipolar world”, as “a member of the G20 and present in the UN Security Council.” Moreover, Moscow is interested to expand Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) free trade deals towards Africa.

Welcome to Global South “multi-vector” cooperation

This all spells out a common theme in the Russia-Africa summit: “multi-vector cooperation”. The South African perspective, especially in the light of the raging controversy over Putin’s non-physical presence in the BRICS summit, is that “Africans are not taking sides. They want peace.”

What matters is what Africa brings to BRICS: “Markets, and a young, educated population.”

On the Russian bridge to Africa, what is needed, for instance, is “railways along coastlines”: connectivity, which can be developed with Russian assistance, much as China has been investing widely across Africa under BRI projects. Russia, after all, “trained many professionals across Africa.”

There’s a wide consensus, to be reflected in the summit, that Africa is becoming an economic growth pole in the Global South – and African experts know it. State institutions are becoming more stable. The abysmal crisis in Russia-Western relations ended up boosting interest in Africa. No wonder that’s now a national priority for Russia.

So what can Russia offer? Essentially an investment portfolio, and crucially the idea of sovereignty – without requesting anything in return.

Mali is a fascinating case. It goes back to investments by the USSR training the workforce; at least 10,000 Malians, who were offered first-class education, including 80% of their professors.

That intersects with the terrorism threat of the Salafi-jihadi variety, “encouraged” by the usual suspects even before 9/11. Mali holds at least 350,000 refugees, all of them unemployed. France’s “initiatives” have been deemed “totally inefficient”.

Mali needs “broader measures” – including the launch of a new trading system. Russia after all taught how to set up infrastructure to create new jobs; time to fully profit from the knowledge of those trained in the USSR. Moreover, in 2023 over 100 students from Mali are coming to Russia on state-sponsored scholarships.

As Russia makes inroads in French-speaking Africa, former “partners”, predictably, demonize Mali’s cooperation with Russia. With no avail. Mali has just dropped French as its official language (that has been the case since 1960).

Under the new constitution, passed overwhelmingly with 96.9% in a June 15 referendum, French will be only a working language, while 13 national languages will also receive official language status.

Essentially, this is about sovereignty. Coupled with the fact that the West, as recognized from Mali to Ethiopia – the only African nation never colonized by Europeans – is losing moral authority across Africa at astonishing speed.

Multitudes in Africa now understand that Russia actively encourages freedom from neocolonialism. When it comes to geopolitical capital, Moscow now seems to enjoy all it takes to build a fruitful, Global Majority-centered strategic partnership.

California likes to pretend it leads the nation in decarbonizing its power grid but has been out ‘greened’ by an unlikely state: Texas. 

Texas is the reddest state in the country (for now). It leads California and all other states in terms of total electricity generation from renewable sources. 

The latest U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows Texas versus California’s power generation mix. And the clear winner in decarbonizing the grid so far is… 

Since 2018, Texas has surpassed California and the national average in integrating renewable energy sources like solar and wind, thus becoming a frontrunner in the efforts to decarbonize the grid. This contradicts the popular narrative that California, with its progressive leadership, is the champion in this field.

Bloomberg explained why Texas is now the “king of clean energy”: 

In Texas, solar permitting is uncomplicated. Connecting projects to the electric grid is straightforward. Then there’s cheap labor, homegrown energy expertise, plenty of sunshine and an anything-goes ethos. “There’s no ‘Mother, may I?’ here,” says Doug Lewin, who worked in the Texas Legislature on energy policy and now advises power companies. “In Texas, it’s just easier to get things done.”

Texas’ leadership in adding renewables to its power generation mix is at odds with its status as the top-producing state of crude oil, natural gas, refined products, and petrochemicals. 

But in terms of decarbonizing power grids, Texas trumps virtue signaling California. After all, America’s largest EV carmaker, Tesla, is now based in Austin, Texas. 

Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

Last summer, weak Republicans teamed up with Anti-Gun Democrats to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.  

Part of that law included funding for ‘red flag laws’ nationwide. The reason for this is that the Anti-Gun lobby knows that a national red flag law is totally unconstitutional and would immediately be struck down by federal courts. So instead, they chose to bribe states with federal funds into passing their own ‘red flag’ laws at the state level, where challenges to the laws could get stuck in court proceedings for years to come.  

According to the letter penned by Senator Roger Marshall of Kentucky and Representative Alex Mooney from West Virginia, the Biden Department of Justice has weaponized Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to Illegally bribe states into passing red flag laws. 

In the letter, the lawmakers state that the Justice Department gave Federal funding to States that did not meet the criteria for due process.  

“The Department of Justice appears to have weaponized the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to illegally fund ineligible red flag laws and bribe pro-gun states into passing gun confiscation laws.”  

Interestingly, Minnesota passed a red flag law within 100 days of receiving $3.7 Million from this program.  

These Federal grants were supposed to only be given to states whose ‘red flag’ laws met “due process requirements,” a term specifically set by one of the bill’s Republican authors, Senator John Cornyn of Texas.  

When Gun Owners of America pointed out that this provision would be abused and ignored by the government, Republicans who supported the legislation accused GOA of lying. 

But now it seems that states that don’t have red flag laws at all, — such as West Virginia, Alaska, Kansas, and Arkansas – got millions of dollars towards implementing these sorts of laws in their respective states.  

This letter, — along with Representative Lauren Boebert’s Shall Not Be Infringed Act, which would repeal all the gun control passed by the 117th Congress — are just a few of the battles that GOA is fighting for your 2A rights every day on Capitol Hill. 

Read the letter here: 

So, pick up the phone and call your Senators and Representative and demand to know what they’re doing to hold the Biden administration accountable for this misuse of federal funds. 

*   *   *

We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now. 

The battle in the minds of people in the U.S. between prioritizing the environment (even at the risk of curbing economic growth) or the economy (even if the environment suffers), has been a bit of a rollercoaster over the last few decades.

As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, while Gallup survey data shows that back in the 80’s and 90’s, the environment was the clear winner in this moral dilemma when looked at nationally; things have started to change as the new millennium commenced.

You will find more infographics at Statista

As Statista’s infographic illustrates, the struggle in the U.S. between the two really came to a head as the effects of the 2008 financial crisis started to bite.

In March 2009, the economy had shifted to the forefront of most people’s minds, with a majority (51 percent) choosing the economy as a priority, compared to 42 percent favoring the environment.

Mother Earth did eventually start to gain control over American hearts and minds again between 2015 and 2019, but the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020 onward narrowed the gap between the slight majority thinking conservation is paramount and those who feel that economic development should be given priority over conservation efforts.

Authored by Jessie Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The latest report on adverse reactions to vaccines in Western Australia has revealed that COVID-19 vaccinations have 24 times the rate of adverse reactions in the state compared to all other vaccines.

According to the state’s vaccine safety surveillance report (pdf), COVID-19 vaccines showed that for every 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines administered, 264 adverse events following immunisations (AEFIs) were recorded.

For all other vaccinations, 11.1 AEFIs were recorded, making the COVID-19 vaccines 23.8 times more likely than non-COVID-19 vaccines to result in adverse events.

The rate of adverse events varied among different types of COVID-19 vaccines.

The Spikevax (Moderna) vaccine recorded 281.4 AEFIs per 100,000 doses, Comirnaty (Pfizer) recorded 244.8, and the Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca) vaccine, which was removed from the vaccine program after reports emerged of blood clotting in younger people, recorded 306.

Adverse events following vaccination can range from mild, such as a sore arm, to serious conditions, such as anaphylaxis, thrombosis with thrombocytopaenia syndrome (TTS), Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), myocarditis, and pericarditis.

Collaboration Continues With 3-in-1 Super Jab

Meanwhile, despite these concerns, the Australian government’s partnership with Moderna to produce vaccines using experimental messenger RNA technology to prepare for the next pandemic means these vaccines are here to stay.

The company has been forming a trifecta jab to address the main respiratory viruses—influenza, COVID-19, and RSV to maintain its market share amid the falling revenue of vaccine companies as the health crisis subsides.

Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine sales of US$18.4 billion in 2022 are expected to dive to $5 billion this year.

Recently, it was granted expedited approval by Australia’s authority for medicines for its mRNA-1345 (RSV vaccine), meaning that the company will be able to launch the vaccines in Australia before any other country in the world.

A spokesperson from Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration told the Epoch Times that Moderna was granted an accelerated approval process on March 30 after satisfying all of the following criteria:

• the medicine is new
• the medicine is for the treatment, prevention, or diagnosis of a life-threatening condition
• no other medicines that are intended to treat, prevent or diagnose the condition are included in the Australian drug register or there is substantial evidence that this medicine provides a significant improvement in efficacy or safety of the treatment, prevention or diagnosis of the condition compared to those goods already included in the register
• there is substantial evidence that the medicine provides a major therapeutic advance.

However, phase 3 clinical trials for Moderna’s mRNA version of the seasonal influenza vaccine have been underwhelming, showing a high rate of side effects.

Although the vaccine generates a strong immune response against the A strains of the flu, its efficacy against B strains is not better than existing approved vaccines.

Additionally, 70 percent of trial participants who received the shot reported adverse reactions such as headaches, swelling, and fatigue compared to 48 percent for the conventional flu vaccine.

The former head of Israel’s Mossad says the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is filled with “extreme lunatics” that are “a lot worse” than the Ku Klux Klan.  

In a Thursday interview, Tamir Pardo, who led the Israeli intelligence agency from 2011 to 2016, said national security minister Itavar Ben Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich represent “horrible racist parties” — respectively, Jewish Power and Religious Zionism — that make the Klan pale in comparison. 

However, Pardo said suggestions that Netanyahu is being coerced by extremists amounds to “urban legend,” telling Kan radio, “The leader has lost his mind. Nothing that has happened would have happened if the prime minister didn’t lead this process.”

Substantiating the comparison, Pardo pointed to Smotrich’s call for the wholesale destruction of an entire Palestinian village. In the wake of the killing of two Israeli brothers, Smotrich liked a tweet in which a West Bank Israeli mayor called for the government to “wipe out the village of Huwara today.” 

When asked why he “liked” it, Smotrich said, “Because I think the village of Huwara needs to be wiped out. I think the State of Israel should do it,” adding that “God forbid” private Israelis take matters into their own hands. 

Israeli settlers are rampaging through the Turmus Aya village.

Fires can be seen from miles. People are locked inside their homes. Multiple vehicles & farms burned down…

All with total impunity & ZERO consequences!

Yesterday settlers burned & damaged 134 cars & wounded 34! pic.twitter.com/tNNBIT3sJw

— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) June 21, 2023

Previously, Smotrich called for Palestinian mothers to be separated from Jews in the country’s maternity wards, saying, “[My wife] would not want to sleep next to someone who just gave birth to a baby who might want to murder her baby in twenty years,”

Meanwhile, security minister Ben-Gvir decorated his home with a poster of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 killed 28 Muslim worshippers and wounded 125 in the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. 

Exposing the hypocrisy of the Israeli government, Pardo said that if a different country adopted laws against Jews akin to the anti-Palestinian laws being passed by the Knesset, it would be considered anti-semitic. For example, this week saw the passage of a law empowering about half of Israeli’s small towns to bar Palestinians from moving in. 

Within hours of the Israeli president meeting with President Biden and addressing Congress, the Israeli occupation government bulldozed the farming plot of a Palestinian community, in the occupied West Bankpic.twitter.com/qQdZhUI7KP

— Rachael Swindon (@Rachael_Swindon) July 21, 2023

Pardo has been outspoken against the Netanyahu government’s drive to reform Israel’s judiciary system. Middle East Eye notes that in a speech against that effort, Pardo said that if a law was passed to remove the Supreme Court’s ability to apply a “reasonableness” standard, Israel would “be similar to Iran and Hungary – ostensibly a democracy, in practice a dictatorship.”

That law was passed Monday, following months of enormous protests across the country. Pardo pins the division on Netanyahu: “A nation has been torn in two and the prime minister does not blink and shows happiness on his face.”  

Authored by Mike Fredenburg via The Epoch Times,

That the F-35 Lightning II has been prohibited from flying anywhere near lightning is ironic. That the F-35 has been under development since 1994 and that the Pentagon “doesn’t have a path forward” to fix the F-35 is unforgivable.

That a plane that’s supposed to be the foundation of American air supremacy has an Achilles heel so easily exploitable is a glaring example of how our military procurement system wastes taxpayer dollars while failing to provide the weapon systems needed to meet our national security needs.

Yes, the F-35, the aging “wunder plane” that the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin have been assuring us for decades is just that one fix away from being ready for full-rate production, isn’t allowed to fly within 25 miles of a thunderstorm.

So far, the indefinite restriction has been publicly announced as applying “only” to the Air Force’s F-35A. But given the F-35 Joint Program Office’s history of hiding and “managing” bad news, it would not be at all surprising to find out that the same restrictions are in place for the Marines’ F-35B and the Navy’s F-35C, but have not yet been made public. That having this unpublicized policy in place could make sense was demonstrated in July 2021 when two F-35Bs flying out of their airbase in Japan were forced to execute emergency landings after they both suffered millions of dollars worth of lightning damage in the same storm.

This restriction is even more crippling than the F35’s restrictions on supersonic flight, as not being able to fly within 25 miles of potential lightning activity will allow an enemy to use lightning proximity as cover for air, ground, and sea operations knowing that the F-35s will not be flying overwatch or be able to be scrambled to areas where lightning threatens them. That this is the plane that’s slated to be the replacement for F-16s, A-10s, AV-8B Harriers, F/A-18E Hornets, and F/A-18F Super Hornets is a decision that needs to be re-evaluated.

On the face of it, it seems as if it shouldn’t be that hard to design a plane to do what planes have been doing for many decades. Each year commercial aircraft worldwide are struck tens of thousands of times by lightning. And every commercial plane is struck about once or twice a year on average. As is the case with commercial aircraft, military aircraft, while instructed to avoid thunderstorms if possible, are expected to be able to fly through them as necessary. And they’re expected to be able to take lightning strikes and complete their missions with no problem. For example, a single 1950s-era jet fighter, an F-106B Delta Dart, was struck over 700 times by lightning while flying test flights for NASA and maintained flight worthiness. Of course, that’s an extreme example, but it does demonstrate that lightning strikes need not cripple or destroy a fighter.

So, why was the most expensive airplane/weapons system development program in the history of the world unable to come up with a plane able to do what pretty much any other plane can do? We don’t really know, because the F-35 Joint Program Office won’t reveal the problem specifics due to “operational security reasons.” But by looking at the F-35’s design history and the basics of lightning protection for aircraft, we can come up with a couple of possibilities.

Possibility one comes out of the fact that planes with composite skins, such as that of the F-35, rely much more heavily on their on-board inert gas generating system (OBIGGS) to keep their fuel tanks from blowing up than do planes with metal skins.

The OBIGGS pumps nitrogen into a plane’s fuel tanks as they empty to ensure that the oxygen content in the tanks never reaches a level that will support combustion (about 9 percent). That way, even if lightning does arc through the fuel tanks, the fuel vapor will not have enough oxygen to combust, and the plane doesn’t blow up.

So, if the F-35 OBIGGS can’t generate enough nitrogen and or evenly distribute that nitrogen through all the F-35 tanks, the F-35 would be vulnerable to a lightning strike. Still, one would think that properly sizing an OBIGGS unit would be a no-brainer for F-35 designers. However, the F-35 isn’t your typical airplane, and since the beginning of its development, it has been dealing with severe weight problems, and in 2004 it went through what many would describe as a draconic weight-cutting exercise.

Did the F-35 design team, in their eagerness to drop weight, perhaps cut it too close in estimating just how much oxygen the OBIGGS system would have to deal with for a plane with truly massive fuel tanks and a super big fuel fraction? And did they take into account just how much dissolved oxygen would be forced out of the fuel when it heated up as it provided cooling for electronics, avionics, and radar equipment—far more cooling than for which it was initially specificationed? This could be the case, but the other possibility that has yet to be mentioned publicly is even more insidious.

The other possibility is that the F-35 is so stuffed full of sensitive electronics gear that the foil/mesh embedded in its composite skin isn’t thick enough to effectively conduct lightning strikes around the exterior of the plane. Hence a lightning strike could damage the sensitive electronics housed in the interior.

This vulnerability may also have stemmed from a design process in which every ounce mattered, and that the weight of metal embedded in the F-35 skin necessary to conduct the lightning ended up being inadequate for the task of protecting more electronics than was ever before crammed into a single-engine fighter, or any fighter for that matter.

That this could be the issue jibes with the previously cited incident in which F-35Bs damaged by lightning didn’t blow up but did suffer severe enough damage to require landing immediately. Of course, the exact nature of the damage was never revealed, but if it was the electronics that were damaged, that would be very bad news as a fix would almost certainly be prohibitively expensive.

Either both, or one of the above, or maybe even none of the above, could be why the F-35 has to avoid lightning. As the Pentagon is keeping the specifics secret, we don’t know for sure. Regardless, having our main source of future airpower unable to fly in rough weather is flat-out unacceptable, and unless this critical problem can be remedied, continuing to move forward with the F-35 is actually damaging, not enhancing our national security.

“The Kansas Highway Patrol has waged war on motorists — especially out-of-state residents traveling between Colorado and Missouri on federal highway I-70,” a federal judge declared on Friday in a scathing condemnation of tyrannical practices embedded in police training.  

Among those practices is something cops call the “Kansas Two-Step.” After pulling you over for a traffic violation and dispensing either a warning or a ticket, a cop starts walking away, but then turns back and asks, “Hey, can I ask you something?” 

What feels like a friendly conversational question is actually intended to trick you. As Reason’s Jacob Sullum explains: 

“Police are not supposed to continue detaining you after the ostensible purpose of the stop has been accomplished unless they reasonably suspect you are involved in criminal activity.

The two-step is designed to extend the encounter by making it notionally voluntary, giving the officer a chance to elicit incriminating information, ask for permission to search your car, and/or walk a drug-sniffing dog around the vehicle.”

Troopers are taught the technique in their training, but US District Judge Kathryn Vratil said, “the theory that a driver who remains on the scene gives knowing and voluntary consent to further questioning is nothing but a convenient fiction.”

“Troopers occupy a position of power and authority during a traffic stop,” wrote Vratil, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, “and when a trooper quickly re-approaches a driver after a traffic stop and continues to ask questions, the authority that a trooper wields—combined with the fact that most motorists do not know that they are free to leave and KHP troopers deliberately decline to tell them that they are free to leave—communicates a strong message that the driver is not free to leave.”

The Kansas Two-Step is just one piece of a policing regime that Vratil rightly found objectionable. In her decision, Vratil also criticized pretextual traffic stops, in which police contrive some reason to pull people over merely on the hope that they’ll discover something they can arrest you for. 

“As wars go, this one is relatively easy; it’s simple and cheap, and for motorists, it’s not a fair fight,” wrote Vratil. “The war is basically a question of numbers: stop enough cars and you’re bound to discover drugs. And what’s the harm if a few constitutional rights are trampled along the way?” 

The thicket of traffic and vehicle equipment regulations, including the ability for cops to pull you over for actions subjectively deemed “imprudent,” means anyone can be pulled over on a whim. 

“Even the most cautious driver would find it virtually impossible to drive for even a short distance without violating some traffic law,” writes University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris, whom Vratil cited in her ruling. “A police officer willing to follow any driver for a few blocks would therefore always have probable cause to make a stop.”

Kansas state troopers disproportionately preyed on those with out-of-state license plates. “KHP troopers stopped 70 per cent more out-of-state drivers than would be expected if KHP troopers stopped in-state and out-of state drivers at the same rate…represent[ing] roughly 50,000 traffic stops,” wrote Vratil.

She found the KHP has been violating tenets set down by the 2016 case of Vasquez v Lewis, which rejected searches based on flimsy pretexts such as “status as a resident of Colorado.” Vratil said troopers applied “an absurd and tenuous combination of factors” to conclude that individuals were suspicious, such as: 

• Having a car with out-of-state plates
• “Seeming nervous while interacting with law enforcement”
• “Having fingerprints on the trunk lid”
• “Going on a trip with one’s nephew”
• “Having a bag in the passenger seat”

Many fruitless vehicle searches were initiated by the use police dogs, whose purported alerts are determined solely by their dog handlers. That’s problematic enough, but even genuine alerts are triggered by mere odors, not drugs per se. That means a dog could very well alert simply because someone who smoked pot — maybe a car mechanic returning from lunch or the previous user of your rental car — touched your door handle.  

In the coming weeks, Judge Vratil, who was arrested in 2019 on suspicion of driving under the influence, will impose an injunction. Her ruling includes a draft with provisions that would, among many other things, require troopers to:

• Communicate to drivers when they’ve reached the point where the traffic stop has concluded and they are free to go 
• Inform drivers of their right to refuse or revoke search consent
• Obtain supervisory approval before commencing purportedly consensual searches
• Maintain better traffic-stop documentation and electronic records

Plaintiffs in the the case, Shaw v Jones, are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, on rare occasion, the ACLU — which increasingly throws its principles to the wind to please leftist donors — still manages to occasionally do some good.   

Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Fed Chair Powell knows he has a problem… and he all but admitted it this week.

He told journalists that “if financial conditions get looser we [may] need to do more”, but said he was confident interest rates were affecting economic activity and inflation.

“What tends to happen is financial conditions get in and out of alignment with what we’re doing [but] ultimately over time we get where we need to go.”

The problem – of course – is that he is full of gaslighting crap.

Soaring stock prices and falling bond yields have made it so much easier for US companies to raise funds than would be expected given The Fed’s inflation-fighting efforts so far.

In fact, as The FT reports, much of the impact of the Fed’s interest rate rises has been neutralised.

Goldman’s Financial Conditions Index is at its ‘easiest’ since The Fed started on its 50bps rate-hikes in May 2022, and while they have continued to hike rates for the last 9 months, financial conditions have done nothing but ease as traders ‘fight The Fed’.

Source: Bloomberg

Remember, looser financial conditions run counter to the Fed’s goal of slowing the economy to bring inflation under control, and make it more likely the Fed will have to keep interest rates higher for longer.

“The reality is that financial conditions have loosened — we have [effectively] unwound roughly 450 basis points of rate hikes. Financial conditions are enough to take us back to March of last year,” said Sonal Desai, chief investment officer for Franklin Templeton Fixed Income.

“As the market comes around to the belief that we are not going to have a recession, that implies that demand will remain strong, [and] that implies that we will not have any need to cut interest rates.”

The looser conditions reflect a view among investors that the Fed has effectively finished raising interest rates since its main focus is bringing down inflation – which has fallen sharply in recent months.

“I would say that conditions right now are loosening, probably to the chagrin of the Fed,” said Andy Brenner, head of international fixed income at Natalliance Securities.

“But as long as the Fed gets better inflation numbers, they’re going to care less and less.”

However, what few seem to believe is that inflation could re-emerge from these ‘easy’ financial conditions.

Mike Chang, a high-yield portfolio manager at Vanguard, said financial conditions had not loosened across the board.

“The market is still discriminating between stronger and weaker issuers and many weaker issuers still don’t have access to capital markets.”

“Higher interest rates generally take time to work [their] way through the economy and through corporate balance sheets”, Chang added.

“Given how much refinancing activity has occurred over the past several years in the high-yield market, it will take more time for maturities and refinancing to become a larger issue.”

Finally, markets will closely scrutinize next Monday’s Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices (SLOOS) – after the last quarterly report by the Fed found that banks expected to tighten lending standards over the rest of 2023 – for signs of worsening credit conditions (or worse still for The Fed, improving conditions).

The message – be careful what you wish for: the ‘easier’ financial conditions get, the more likely a new bubble emerges, asset prices re-inflate, and The Fed is forced to stay higher-er for longer-er…