‘Mudpocalypse’ Hits Burning Man, 73,000 Trapped In ‘Toxic’ Lake Bed In Nevada Desert
Food and fuel are running low for the tens of thousands of attendees (and tech bros) trapped at the Burning Man festival located in one of the harshest environments on earth (high desert, on a dried-up alkaline lake bed) in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The situation deteriorated early Saturday when a rainstorm drenched the lake bed, transforming the area into a ‘mudpocalypse.’
Since early Saturday, all entry and exit points of the Burning Man festival remained closed due to the thick, alkaline mud. As of 0900 ET Sunday, event organizers said, “The gate and airport in and out of Black Rock City remain closed. Ingress and egress are halted until further notice. No driving is permitted except emergency vehicles.”
Organizers continued to advise the 73,000 attendees to “conserve food and water, and shelter in a warm space.”
The gate and airport in and out of Black Rock City remain closed. Ingress and egress are halted until further notice. No driving is permitted except emergency vehicles. If you are in BRC, conserve food and water, and shelter in a warm space. More updates to come. Stay safe!
The Independent confirmed local officials had reported at least one death but have not released details on the suspected cause of death. A major concern is that the toxic alkali dust that makes up the lake bed is now three inches of mud, and if attendees aren’t wearing socks and closed shoes, it can cause chemical burns called “Playa Foot.”
All fun & games until that alkaline rich mud sucks the moisture right out of the skin. Those porta johns are filthy and can’t be emptied. On a sunny day it takes 11hrs to commute into this remote barren lake.
Burning Man 2023 pic.twitter.com/qrwsSQMSH2
A challenging situation unfolds as the desert festival site turns into a sea of mud due to unexpected rain, leaving Burning Man attendees trapped. Stay safe, resilient, and support one another, Burners! 🌄🌧️ #BurningMan#RainyDesert… pic.twitter.com/QCVPCeFg3D
And who attends this drug-infested event? The rich tech bros.
… rich white tech bros.
Surely, these ‘informed’ folks who are now stuck in a swamped toxic lake bed understood it was an El Nino year…
Probably not. They were fixated on the corporate media headlines hyping a non-existent climate crisis (well, that’s according to these 1,600 scientists).
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) likely overstepped its authority when it told Americans to “stop” using ivermectin against COVID-19, a federal court ruled on Sept. 1.
“FDA can inform, but it has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers ‘stop’ taking medicine,” U.S. Circuit Judge Don Willett wrote in the ruling.
The FDA has authority under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to convey information to consumers.
The FDA during the COVID-19 pandemic has issued multiple statements discouraging people from taking ivermectin against COVID-19.
Accompanied by a picture of a horse and a link to an FDA webpage on ivermectin, the agency wrote in one social media post: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”
The page it linked to is titled, “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.”
Three doctors sued the FDA over its statements on ivermectin, arguing the agency cannot advise doctors on which drugs to prescribe.
Ivermectin is approved by the agency as an antiparasitic drug for both humans and animals.
Federal law gives the government immunity against legal actions, with some exceptions. One exception, known as ultra vires, is when an official acts outside their authority. Plaintiffs challenging the acts must show that the official was “acting ‘without any authority whatever,’ or without any ‘colorable basis for the exercise of authority,'” according to an earlier court ruling.
The FDA does have the authority to share data and facts, the parties agree. But they diverge on whether the FDA can issue recommendations on medical matters, such as treatments.
The FDA has claimed that the posts do not contain advice, stating in one brief that they were “informational statements” that “do not ‘direct’ consumers, or anyone else, to do or refrain from doing anything.” At the same time, the FDA acknowledged that the statements “provided recommendations” and “advise[d] consumers.”
“Despite these concessions, FDA never points to any authority that allows it to issue recommendations or give medical advice,” Judge Willett wrote.
“Rather, FDA argues that some posts included a hyperlink that leads to the update. The update, in turn, directs consumers to “[t]alk to your health care provider.” But not all of the social-media posts included such a link. And even for those posts that did include a link, the posts themselves offer advice, not mere information.”
The update itself is problematic because of its title, “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19,” the judge said. Even though it later says that people can take ivermectin if prescribed by a health care provider, “the trailing qualifier does not lessen the opening instruction’s imperative character,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown ruled against the doctors in 2022, finding that doctors had not proven an exception to sovereign immunity and that there was no indication the FDA acted outside of the authority conferred by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.
Judge Brown erred on the second point as well, according to the new ruling.
“Nothing in the Act’s plain text authorizes FDA to issue medical advice or recommendations,” Judge Willett said.
The judge, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, was joined by U.S. Circuit Judges Edith Brown Clement and Jennifer Walker Elrod.
Judges Willett and Brown were appointed under President Donald Trump. Judges Clement and Elrod were appointed under President George W. Bush.
The appeals court panel remanded the case back to Judge Brown to decide on whether the doctors have standing. The ruling followed oral arguments before the panel.
Dr. Robert Apter, one of the plaintiffs, called the ruling “a big win for doctors and for patients!”
The U.S. government has not yet reacted to the ruling.
Russian Drones Destroy Ukrainian Oil Depot On Romanian Border Amid Retaliation Campaign
Russia is retaliating against the recent frequent cross-border drone attacks on its territory, over the weekend bombing several key Ukraine infrastructure sites, chiefly through drones.
On Sunday Russia’s defense ministry announced its forces launched a successful UAV attack on an oil depot that’s near the Romanian border. It was reportedly destroyed, but was seen as vital to supplying Ukrainian forces deployed in the Odessa region.
“The Russian Aerospace Force made a group strike by unmanned aerial vehicles this night against fuel storages used for supplies to military vehicles of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the port of Reni, Odessa Region. The strike objective was achieved. All the designated targets were engaged,” the ministry said.
The statement continued: “Tactical and army aviation, rocket troops and artillery of battlegroups of the Russian Federation Armed Forces engaged manpower and materiel of the adversary in 119 areas.”
The main oil depot that was hit is located on the bank of the Danube River which lies opposite NATO-member Romania, raising tensions given Romania has been key to setting up an alternative grain export route for Kiev.
Additionally, more military and infrastructure facilities were hit particularly connected to Ukrainian ports.
RT reported separately that “MOD officials also said Russia had taken out two Ukrainian ammunition depots and a drone command center in southeastern Dnepropetrovsk Region and a Kiev-controlled part of Kherson Region, again using UAV strikes.
At this point amid the last several months of Kiev’s stepped-up campaign to attack Russian territory, there have been multiple dozens (if not possibly hundreds) of strikes on Russia and the Crimean peninsula – including as deep into Russia as Moscow and parts of the northwest.
The Kremlin has frequently said it would step up its retaliation on ‘decision-making centers’ in Ukraine, and that campaign appears to be in process.
While Western and international press reports have highlighted the occasions of brazen cross-border operations against Russian territory out of Ukraine, the major Russian strikes on Ukrainian sites have received less attentions in headlines of late, which has angered and frustrated Kiev officials.
These UAV assaults on Russia and Crimea have become almost daily, particularly drone assaults, but really nothing has changed on the battlefield in terms of the failing counteroffensive.
As millions of Americans struggle to recover from the latest hurricane, state government officials are issuing stern reminders that criminal penalties loom for anyone who engages in “price gouging.”
“Price gouging” is the pejorative label applied to the charging of substantially higher prices for goods and services that are in high demand and short supply in disaster-stricken areas. Anti-price gouging laws typically apply to things like food, fuel, lodging, medicine, building materials, construction tools and other necessities.
The idea of charging higher prices in the midst of a crisis goes against human impulses about fair play. However, a dispassionate examination of “price gouging” reveals that it actually benefits people in disaster areas — and confirms that, like other forms of price control, anti-price gouging laws make things worse for the people they’re supposed to benefit.
Before diving in, it’s essential to fully appreciate what prices are. They aren’t just numbers on cases of water, hotel signs or gas pumps. Embedded with information, prices transmit important signals to would-be buyers and sellers alike.
Sharply higher prices announce that the demand for a product is suddenly much higher than the supply. At the same time, the higher price performs two enormously beneficial functions:
Incentivizing consumers to more deeply consider if they truly need the product right now — and, if so, in what quantity.
Incentivizing sellers to go to great lengths to bring more of the product to the market as quickly as possible.
Let’s first consider the effect of crisis-driven price spikes on consumer behavior, using gas prices as an example. When gas prices in a disaster area are allowed to soar alongside surging demand and plummeting supply, consumers are pressured to buy only what they think they really need. If they’re on an evacuation route, they’ll be more inclined to buy only what’s needed to get them out of the disaster area and to a place where gas is in greater supply.
On the other hand, when laws compel gas stations to keep the same price as during normal conditions, customers are prone to top off like they always do. When a station runs out, it will have served fewer people’s needs and left more people with no opportunity to buy gas at any price.
Similarly, consider the market for hotel rooms. When prices spike, a family with two teenagers will be incentivized to share one room rather than indulging in two. Another family may choose to travel a little farther, where the supply of rooms is greater and the price lower. Others will pursue non-hotel substitutes, like staying at the home of a friend or relative.
In each case, the resulting consumer behavior sees price signals organically guiding the market toward a broader and more rational distribution of scarce products, with those products more likely to be obtained by people whose need for them is greatest.
At the same time they’re positively influencing consumers, crisis-driven price surges offer powerful enticements to businesses and entrepreneurs, pushing them to rush products into the disaster area so they can reap outsized rewards.
Sellers have a particular motivation to be among the first to introduce new inventory into the area, before the supply-demand imbalance is neutralized and prices collapse. In that way, larger profit margins foster an urgency among sellers that’s aligned with the urgency of disaster-area buyers.
Even those who can’t afford the higher prices initially asked by the “gougers” benefit from them, as those prices draw new supply into the market that will push prices down to more affordable levels.
“Poor people may not be able to afford the high prices at first, but having empty shelves wouldn’t help poor people either,” said Duke University Professor Michael Munger. “Anti-price-gouging laws keep the shelves empty longer. High prices are better than empty shelves, and high prices come down quickly if we’ll just let producers do their jobs.”
Price signals can even inspire those who aren’t normally in the business of selling a particular product to jump into the market in pursuit of attractive profits.
That’s no classroom hypothetical: After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and wiped out electricity for more than 2 million people in the region, Kentuckian John Shepperson bought 19 generators, rented a U-Haul truck and drove 600 miles to Mississippi, where he offered them at twice his purchase price.
If you’re flinching at Shepperson’s “price-gouging” markup, consider his time, his long trek that grew increasingly difficult as he proceeded deeper into the disaster zone, and the financial risk he took by buying the generators, renting a truck, and paying for fuel along the way —all with hope but not certainty of reaching buyers.
Shepperson wasn’t acting as a charity. However, his actions show how, in a free market, individuals pursuing their own separate interests are driven to act in a way that benefits other people at the same time it benefits themselves.
Sadly, in a particularly vivid illustration of Robert LeFevre’s observation that “government is a disease masquerading as its own cure,” Shepperson was arrested for violating Mississippi’s anti-price-gouging law and held in a jail for four days. His generators were confiscated and locked away in police storage where — rather than powering the homes of those who’d be happy to pay Shepperson’s asking price — they sat idle.
In more than 30 states, the law embraces that outcome — one where police intervene to prevent willing buyers from paying prices that a government official subjectively determines to be “excessive” or “unconscionable.” To borrow from Thomas Sowell, those who champion such laws — whether they’re legislators or the citizens who cheer them on — are “long on indignation and short on economics.”
The Price Gouging Hotline is activated for #Idalia.
None of this is to say that higher prices make everyone better off or result in a perfectly fair allocation of scarce resources in precise order of need. “But the question is whether alternative systems of rationing are usually better or worse,” wrote Sowell in his indispensable book, “Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy.”
Anti-price gouging laws impose a first-come, first-served rationing system, one that encourages hoarding and empties shelves faster, while doing nothing to prioritize the distribution of products by urgency of need, or to incentivize a rapid influx of new supply to ease the crisis.
At a superficial level, “price-gouging” may feel wrong. However, those who turn society’s impulsive indignation over the phenomenon into outright criminalization ultimately do a great disservice to their fellow citizens.
Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. Read more and subscribe at starkrealities.substack.com
“The Endgame Is Clear” – Gold’s Role Rises As Dollar Hegemony Falls
At the recent Rick Rule Precious Metals Symposium, experts Matthew Piepenburg, Rick Rule, and Jim Rickards sat down to discuss the future of the USD, the rising BRICS tide, and the Realpolitik of any realistic (i.e., immediate) gold-backed BRICS trade currency.
The conversation revolved around the idea that the dollar has not only been debased but also weaponized, which has led to decreasing trust in the currency as a global reserve.
Rickards noted, “It’s the weaponization of the dollar… you’re not just stealing our money with inflation, you’re actually telling us we can’t get it back,” emphasizing that while the BRICS countries might not fully trust each other, they are more likely to trust a “common trading currency backed by gold.”
Rule described the U.S. dollar’s previous “exorbitant privilege” advantage is coming to an end, thereby making things more expensive for Americans.
“The enemy of the U.S. dollar isn’t in Beijing or Moscow or Riyadh, it’s in Washington.”
For Piepenburg, the end-game is clear.
Debt drives policy and debt drives current market directions.
This debt will not and cannot be sustained by GDP growth or tax revenues,…
…which means ultimately money printers will continue to de-value that world reserve currency,…
…and hence devalue the once hegemonic respect for the US holder of that currency.
Piepenburg states, “America doesn’t seem to be the America that it was in 1944 or the America that it was under Kissinger in the early 70s,” indicating a significant shift in global economic dynamics.
While all experts seemed to agree that gold could play an increasingly important role, Piepenburg was skeptical that national leaders and central bankers would willingly give up their power to print money at will, dubbing this the “Nietzsche thesis,” questioning why leaders would want to “relinquish that ability to print at will.”
Overall, the panel agreed that the weaponization and debasement of the dollar have diminished its credibility, setting the stage for other forms of currency or assets like gold to gain importance in protecting investors from this increasingly beleaguered, self-destructive, debased and less popular US currency.
The EU’s Foreign Affairs Council usually calls for peace talks between the opposing parties in remote armed conflicts, but the opposite principle is applied toward the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, said Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó while he was in Slovenia on Tuesday.
“Anyone who advocates an immediate ceasefire and peace talks is immediately condemned and branded a Russian spy, a Kremlin propagandist, a friend of Putin,” the minister said.
He noted that with war raging on the continent, the position of peace is suddenly not the position of the EU bloc, despite the fact that it has been more than a year and a half since the war began and hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives while Europe’s economy has directly suffered.
Szijjártó said at a panel discussion at the Bled Strategic Forum that the EU is not in good shape today and has weakened a lot in recent years in the areas of security, the economy and energy security.
The Hungarian foreign minister said that this situation did come out of nowhere, but is the result of a series of decisions that were taken or not taken.
On the issue of security, he said that “the negative consequences of the war in Ukraine in the immediate neighborhood were particularly serious and that Hungarians were also dying in the fighting.”
In addition, Szijjártó said the European Union needs sensible reforms, enlargement of the bloc must be treated as a top priority, and the Western Balkan states must be admitted to the EU as soon as possible, as this would significantly strengthen the community.
Economic cooperation with China?
Szijjártó also stated that in 2010, the European Union’s share of world GDP was 22 percent, while China’s was 9 percent. However, today the situation has reversed, with China’s share at 18 percent and the EU’s at 17 percent.
He called the cutting of economic ties between Europe and China, the so-called “de-risking,” which some people wish to see, a mistake.
“I think the real risk is de-risking itself. It is not a risk to cooperate with a rapidly emerging economy, but to cut ourselves off from it,” he said.
Szijjártó added that strong economic cooperation with China could make a major contribution to the EU’s economic growth.
Ron Berman agonizes over how to tell this story, where even to start, because the short version doesn’t capture the full travesty and the long version is overwhelming. But here’s the crux of it: A group of federal prison guards raped his daughter and got away with it. Not only did they get away with it, but they got away with it even after they admitted they did it.
Berman’s daughter, Carleane, was one of at least a dozen women who were abused by corrupt correctional officers at FCC Coleman, a federal prison complex in Florida. In December, a Senate investigation revealed that those correctional officers had admitted in sworn interviews with internal affairs investigators that they had repeatedly raped women under their control.
Yet thanks to a little known Supreme Court precedent and a culture of corrupt self-protection inside the prison system, none of those guards were ever prosecuted—precisely because of the manner in which they confessed.
Most of the guards retired before they could be fired, meaning they walked with their retirement benefits intact. Over the last five years, Berman’s daughter and the rest of those women were failed by nearly everyone around them at every level of government.
Berman has been emailing and calling everyone he can think of—his congressional representatives, the FBI, federal prosecutors, local prosecutors, the county sheriff, reporters—trying to get justice for his daughter.
“It’s not the system that failed her,” he says. “It’s the people.”
‘Don’t Say Anything, Don’t Ask Questions’
Three years ago, Reason reported on a federal lawsuit filed by women abused at Coleman. The lawsuit claimed that prison leadership created a “sanctuary” for a cadre of serial rapists employed by the U.S. government.”
The sexual abuse at these female prisons is rampant but goes largely unchecked as a result of cultural tolerance, orchestrated cover-ups and organizational reprisals of inmates who dare to complain or report sexual abuse,” the suit said.
Berman’s daughter was one of the plaintiffs in that suit. Carleane Berman arrived at Coleman’s minimum security work camp for women in March 2017 to serve a 30-month sentence for her role in a Miami crime ring that imported huge amounts of the club drug molly, or MDMA, from China.
She had started using drugs as a teenager. Despite increasingly severe interventions from her parents, it just got worse. She ran away for days at a time, getting lost in Miami Beach’s all-night clubs. “I was caught up in the typical nightlife scene that fueled my addiction,” she would later tell the Miami Herald.
That was how she met Jorge Hernandez, a charismatic, tattooed military veteran who recruited several young women, including Berman, to wire money and pick up packages of molly. Everyone got busted after an irate girlfriend ratted out Hernandez’s business partner to the police.
Berman’s sentence didn’t look so bad on paper. As federal prison goes, two and a half years at a minimum security camp is about as good as it gets. You live in dormitory-style housing; you have access to jobs and programs; your movement isn’t as restricted; there’s plenty of fresh air.
At Coleman, Berman was on the landscaping crew, where she worked with Miranda Williams, who also arrived at Coleman that year. The two quickly became the sort of ride-or-die friends you only make when you’re thrown together in bad circumstances.
Williams says Berman was a fun, bubbly person, a bit wild, quick to help others without expecting anything in return. She used to take the four-wheelers they used for landscaping and run them through mud puddles when it was raining.
Before long, Williams and Berman started hearing rumors.”
Inmates would basically warn me that if I see anything, hear anything, something happens with me, then not to speak, don’t tell, don’t say anything, don’t ask questions, because I’m gonna end up in a worse situation than what I was already in,” Williams says. “And at the time I didn’t know what that meant, so I just kept my mouth closed.”
Williams says she was first raped by a correctional officer in mid-June 2017. It started with one officer, but then there was another, and then another.
“The harassment quickly evolved into sexual assault as Officers [Christopher] Palomares, [Keith] Vann and [Timothy] Phillips coerced, intimated and demanded that Ms. Berman engage in all types of sexual activities with each of them including oral sex, intercourse, and group sex with Ms. Flowers,” their eventual lawsuit said. (Williams’ last name was formerly Flowers.)
“It happened as frequently as they wanted it to,” Williams says.
As far as the Justice Department and federal law are concerned, there is no such thing as consensual sex between a correctional officer and an incarcerated person. It is sexual assault—always.
Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) in 2003. It was supposed to create zero-tolerance policies for sexual abuse in U.S. prisons and jails. PREA is mostly toothless, though—and in the federal prison system, festering corruption made it a bad joke. In December 2022, the former warden of a federal women’s prison in California was convicted of sexually abusing incarcerated women. He was also the prison’s PREA compliance officer.
“I was incarcerated for almost eight years, and I saw it at pretty much every single institution I was at,” Kara Guggino, a former Coleman inmate and a plaintiff in the eventual lawsuit, toldReason in 2019. “I was at maybe six different places, and this was going on everywhere. But it was by far the worst at Coleman.”
‘Multiple Admitted Sexual Abusers Were Not Criminally Prosecuted’
When Berman first reached out to Reason, the lawsuit was over and the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had stonewalled every attempt to uncover more information about how these guards had been allowed to run rampant for years.
The Miami Herald tried requesting personnel files on all of the named officers to see if they had a history of complaints and misconduct. “The Bureau of Prisons responded that absent an ‘overriding public interest,’ it would not provide such documents, calling the provision of such records ‘an unwarranted invasion of their personal privacy,'” the newspaper reported.
Berman filed a records request for internal affairs interviews with the correctional officers, but was likewise denied.
Reason filed a records request for the interviews, internal affairs memos, and emails between some of the correctional officers named in the lawsuit. The BOP rejected all those requests.
What really happened at Coleman might have been obscured forever, but there was one group the BOP couldn’t ignore: Congress.
Last December, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) released the results of a 10-month investigation into sexual abuse of incarcerated women in the federal prison system.
The report found that the Bureau of Prisons has failed to implement PREA and that long delays in investigating complaints created a backlog of more than 8,000 internal affairs cases. The report concluded that these failures “allowed serious, repeated sexual abuse in at least four facilities to go undetected,” including Coleman.
“BOP’s internal affairs practices have failed to hold employees accountable, and multiple admitted sexual abusers were not criminally prosecuted as a result,” the report said.
Overall, the investigation found that BOP employees sexually abused female inmates in at least two-thirds of federal women’s prisons over the last decade.
Senate investigators also obtained what Berman, the Miami Herald, and Reason could never get our hands on: “copies of non-public sworn, compelled statements from officers at FCC Coleman, wherein the officers admitted to sexual abuse of female detainees in graphic detail.”
‘Oh My God, This Piece of Shit Is Talking About Me’
Judi Aloe, a former Coleman inmate, was skimming the PSI report when she noticed a familiar name: Campbell.
In a portion of one of those sworn affidavits reprinted in the report, a former BOP correctional officer named Scott Campbell admitted to repeatedly assaulting a woman, whose name was redacted:
(Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations)
Aloe knew who the woman was, though.
“Oh my God,” she thought. “This piece of shit is talking about me.”
Aloe arrived at Coleman in 2016. She was intent on keeping her head down and getting through her four-year sentence for her role in an odometer tampering scheme as quietly as possible. She didn’t have visitors. She didn’t make phone calls. She was mostly invisible. She says she was assaulted not only by Campbell but also by Palomares, who snuck into her room and groped her.*
“I actually had my headphones on, and I don’t know if I was doing a word search or if I was drawing,” Aloe recalls. “All of a sudden [Palomares’] hand came over my mouth and the other hand was groping my breast. He took his hand off my breast and put it up to his mouth. Like, shhhh.”
The abuse escalated over the next several months until Campbell raped her in a supply closet. Aloe wants the officers prosecuted.
“Do the math,” she says. “If I was a victim of domestic violence, and I did four years in prison for odometer tampering, what do they get for being sex traffickers and serial rapists?”
Queen for a Day
How can a federal law enforcement officer admit to a crime in a sworn interview and not be prosecuted? That’s the question that rankles Berman, Aloe, and most everyone else who comes across this case. The answer involves bureaucratic dysfunction and a 50-year-old Supreme Court decision.
The Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) has what it calls “right of first refusal” to investigate misconduct in Justice Department components, such as the FBI and BOP. According to a 2021 letter the BOP sent to Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio in response to inquiries from Rubio’s office about the scandal, the BOP Office of Internal Affairs (OIA) referred allegations that guards raped Carleane Berman to the OIG three times—in September 2017, November 2017, and May 2019. Each time, the OIG deferred launching a criminal investigation, leaving Internal Affairs to handle it as an administrative matter.
Internal Affairs then forced the correctional officers to sit for sworn interviews. Once those officers confessed to sexual assault, the possibility of criminal prosecution evaporated. The Supreme Court ruled in a 1967 case, Garrity v. New Jersey, that when a government employee is compelled to answer questions under oath as a condition of employment, it would violate the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination for prosecutors to use those statements.
By compelling prison guards to admit to criminal conduct, BOP internal affairs investigators got enough dirt to kick them out of the agency but also shielded them from future criminal prosecution.
Although it would technically be possible for federal prosecutors to bring charges now, they would have to rely on other evidence and prove that nothing in their case was tainted by those interviews. Perversely, the more detailed and thorough the confession, the harder it is to prosecute—a feature that any BOP employee who screws up badly enough to get called in for a sworn interview understands.
“There is no world in which we can say this is a good outcome,” the Justice Department Inspector General testified before the PSI. “These individuals knew they have been compelled and could retire and resign and spill to [BOP] OIA and basically have immunity in some cases for engaging in sexual activity with multiple inmates. It is a terrible outcome.”
The PSI report refers to these sworn interviews as Garrity interviews, but that’s not what they were known as at Coleman.
Rob Farlow, a former correctional officer at Coleman, says they were called “queen for a day.” As in, “Did you hear that Smith got queen for a day?” The term is more commonly used in criminal law to refer to a proffer agreement between federal prosecutors and a potential defendant—basically, spill the beans in exchange for possible immunity—but it worked much the same way between BOP internal affairs investigators and correctional officers.
Garrity interviews also allowed the BOP to quietly remove problem officers without the media attention that criminal charges would bring. “It’s their way of covering up embarrassment for the Bureau,” Farlow says.
‘I Knew They Were Scumbags’
By the time Carleane Berman and Miranda Williams arrived at the Coleman women’s camp in 2018, the abuse had been going on for years, says Ann Ursiny, another former Coleman inmate. She had been at Coleman since 2012, serving a 10-year sentence, and was an old hand around the camp. She knew how things worked and when to keep her mouth shut.
Ursiny also knew there was at least one person at Coleman trying to do something about it: David DeCamilla, a BOP special investigative supervisor (SIS). An SIS acts like a detective inside a federal prison, investigating potential misconduct and criminal activity.
DeCamilla had been nagging Ursiny to talk to him about what was going on at the camp. He took his job seriously. But no one else took his job seriously—not the inmates like Ursiny, who refused to talk to him, and not the prison administration, which was content to let him spin his wheels while the problem officers had unfettered access to their victims.
“Oh my God, he chased me around that whole complex on my tractor for years,” Ursiny says. “And every time he talked to me I lied, because I had seen so many of my peers be whisked away to county and transferred. I was like, yeah, that’s not happening to me.”
To understand why it took the incarcerated women at Coleman so long to come forward, and why many even initially denied to investigators that any abuse had occurred, you have to understand how much leverage the correctional officers had over them.
There are innumerable small ways a correctional officer can make life difficult for an inmate. At the pettiest level, getting on the wrong side of an officer could lead to losing a desirable work assignment. Maybe your stuff starts getting tossed during “random” searches, or your requests to see a nurse get ignored. You get write-ups for ticky-tacky disciplinary infractions.
The Coleman women also all say it was well-known that if you reported a correctional officer for misconduct, you would be transferred to another federal prison, worse than Coleman and hundreds of miles from your family. If you weren’t sent to another federal prison, there was another possible destination. When Coleman women had to be held in higher security housing, either because of a disciplinary infraction or for their own safety—or at least that was the justification—they could be sent to the nearby Sumter County Detention Center.
A county jail might sound like an upgrade from a federal lockup, but it was the opposite. None of their possessions and none of their commissary funds transferred with them, stranding them without any money. They couldn’t participate in programs that shaved time off their sentences. They also disappeared from the BOP website, since they were technically not in BOP custody, leaving their families with no idea where they were.
The Sumter County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment.
There were less official ways to keep women quiet, too. Correctional officers read their emails and monitored their phone calls.
“The officers would look up my [pre-sentencing information] report, and they would track where my husband was going, which facilities he was being transferred to,” Williams says. “They knew my kids’ names, my parents’ names. They knew where everybody lived. They threatened to use that information and tell various stories about me and what I’m doing in there, trying to hurt my reputation, trying to destroy my marriage, trying to hurt my chances of seeing my kids again when I got out.”
Ursiny says an officer once pulled up her family’s home on a computer and said, “Isn’t this your daughter’s house? Doesn’t she have a couple of kids? So just make sure when the investigators talk to you, say the right thing.”
As a result of all this, the guards at the Coleman camp ruled it as a little fiefdom. They controlled the cameras, they knew where the blind spots were, and they could dole out favors in the form of contraband. “They were definitely bringing in drugs,” Aloe says. “They were bringing in alcohol. I know they were bringing in G-strings and stuff.”
Rob Farlow was a Bureau of Prisons officer for eight years, seven of them at Coleman. He worked with the officers named in the lawsuit and PSI report. “I knew they were scumbags,” he tells Reason.
The rumors and red flags were hard to ignore, he says. Bureau of Prisons correctional officers bid on posts and shifts every three months, which are then doled out based on seniority, but Farlow noticed the officers at the women’s camp never seemed to request different posts or move, even after Farlow heard that investigators were starting to ask questions about them.
“I’m just thinking, Jesus, it’s been one year, two years, three years,” Farlow says. “Here we are, these guys are still there, and they’re still working in the same spot.”
The turning point for Ursiny came one day in 2016, when investigators came to ask her about allegations another woman had made about sexual misconduct by staff. She lied, like she always did. No one else would substantiate the woman’s story either, and the next day she was gone, transferred out.
It started to eat at Ursiny, though—the way that woman was treated and the way she was talked about.
“She was ridiculed and just spoken of so harshly by the officers and the inmates,” Ursiny remembers. “And after a while, you know, I have a conscience and I’m a mom. My God, if my daughter had gone through something like this—how can you just sit back and not say anything? How can you just allow that to happen?”
At the urging of other friends in Coleman, Ursiny finally went to prison staffers, including DeCamilla, to tell what she knew. DeCamilla initially tried to get her to wear a wire to catch the officers, but superiors shot down that plan, so he settled for asking her for a list of women she knew had been assaulted by staff.
Ursiny had been at Coleman for many years at that point, and a lot of women had passed through. She says that when she finished the list and handed it to DeCamilla, it had more than 100 names on it.
‘Like a Fly Trying To Move a Wall’
Other women were coming forward independently of Ursiny, too. As the allegations against Coleman officers accumulated, Carleane Berman and Miranda Williams were both sent to the Sumter County jail in late 2017 while BOP investigators tried to get them to talk.
Jail records show Berman was held in the county jail for three months. Williams ended up spending five months there, until her federal sentence was completed.
“It was maximum security, so we didn’t ever go outside,” Williams says. “It was one big room with, I think, a total of 24 women, four toilets, one shower, no warm water even.”
Online jail logs show that five plaintiffs in the eventual Coleman lawsuit were housed at some point in the Sumter County jail. They are all listed as “courtesy holds.” At least two of the future plaintiffs were in the jail when PREA auditors arrived for their 2018 inspection of Coleman to ensure the prison complex was in compliance with the anti-rape law.
The auditor noted without concern that “many of the offenders who reported abuse over the applicable audit period were no longer housed at the FCC.” The auditor appears to have been unaware that Coleman prisoners were being held in the Sumter County jail. “There were no inmates involuntarily segregated due to high risk of victimization,” the auditor wrote. Coleman passed its PREA audit.
But the internal affairs investigation was coming to a different conclusion. One by one over the course of 2018 and 2019, correctional officers were brought in for compelled interviews. Five confessed to sexually assaulting multiple female inmates.
“I have had a large number of sexual encounters with inmates while I was an officer at FCC Coleman,” Christopher Palomares admitted in an interview with Internal Affairs. “I would say there is over a 70 percent chance I received oral sex (blow job) from [REDACTED] in the visiting room. I have received oral sex from a number of inmates a number of times.”
DeCamilla wrote an email on May 21, 2019, to the federal prosecutor who put Ursiny in prison, in an attempt to get her an early release for her help:
“Sir, I am an investigator with the BOP at FCC Coleman Medium. Inmate Ursiny has been providing me with information pertaining to staff misconduct. Specifically, she alleged she was inappropriately touched by 2 staff members at Coleman. Inmate Ursiny was one of many other inmates who made the allegations about these two staff members sexually abusing them over the years. During the interview with one of the staff members, he admitted in his affidavit to sexually abusing 6 inmates at the female camp. Ursiny was one of those victims. The staff member was covered under a Form B at the time. This staff member identified by Ursiny and other inmates as sexually abusing them resigned 1 hour before he was to be interviewed. Ursiny is not looking for anything in return for the information she has provided, she is projected to be released on April 24, 2021. I just wanted to make you aware of her cooperation in assisting me in getting rid of two corrupt staff members at FCC Coleman. Thank you.”
But the same institutional pressure that kept inmates quiet kept honest guards quiet, too. If you made too much of a stink, Farlow says, the system would turn on you. He described DeCamilla’s efforts as “like a fly trying to move a wall.”
According to the lawsuit filed later by the women, DeCamilla was demoted and subsequently retired. “There’s only so much he could do without them putting the bull’s-eye on his back,” Farlow says.
Farlow believes President Joe Biden should pardon the victims and clear their records. “It’s a disgrace what happened to them,” he says. “They were sent to federal prison to do time, a certain amount of years. They weren’t sentenced to rape.”
‘Homewreckers, Thirsty Bitches, and Whores’
When the investigation of the Coleman officers concluded in 2019 after nearly three years without any criminal charges, the women moved on to other remedies. One of them had a family member who was a lawyer, and they began a series of meetings and furtive phone calls to start piecing together the claims for a lawsuit.
According to that lawsuit, there were unexplained delays whenever lawyers arrived at the prison for scheduled interviews with inmates. Ursiny says Coleman staff refused to leave the room during phone calls with lawyers.
Nevertheless, the lawsuit was filed in December 2019. It was notable not just for the allegations but for the number of plaintiffs and the fact that they had all gone on the record with their real names, some of them while still behind bars.
For those that were incarcerated at Coleman, Ursiny says retaliation started as soon as the lawsuit hit the docket. Ursiny says officers started calling the women who joined the suit “homewreckers,” “thirsty bitches,” and “whores.” She remembers one night a guard flipped on the lights in the dormitory and started screaming obscenities at them.
But once the lawsuit was filed, the rotten mess was out in the open. In a July 2020 response to the lawsuit, the U.S. government confirmed that five of the correctional officers accused of sexual assault had admitted in sworn interviews to the conduct. One of the plaintiffs told the Tampa Bay Times that she was raped punctually every Wednesday for six months.
The government still fought the Coleman women’s claims even then, though. In a confidential open settlement memorandum—destroyed at the conclusion of the lawsuit, but a copy was obtained by Reason—the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida argued that the actions of former correctional officers were outside the scope of their employment, even if they were in uniform when they committed them; therefore, it claimed, the U.S. government couldn’t be held liable for their conduct.
The memo also argued that some of the plaintiffs’ claims, including Berman’s and Williams’, were barred by a two-year statute of limitations, and that their fears of retaliation didn’t meet the “extraordinary circumstances” necessary to disregard the deadline. The memo went so far as to question their diligence in avoiding being raped: “There does not appear to be any evidence that Plaintiffs made any effort to seek protection from those former correctional officers through any of the mechanisms in place at BOP facilities or even after they were released.”
Nevertheless, the U.S. Attorney’s Office preferred to settle the case quickly and cheaply. Williams laughs when she remembers their initial play.
“The first offer that I received was $10,000, and [the magistrate judge] was like, ‘That’s a lot of money. You need to take that money and settle and move on with your life,'” she remembers. “Both me and Carly were like: No. First of all, it’s not even about the money. It’s about the principle of what happened and the fact that you guys aren’t even doing anything.”
All of the women Reason spoke with said the magistrate judge overseeing mediation of their lawsuit pressured them into settling.
“She told us you better take this, because if you don’t, it’s going to draw out,” Ursiny says. “She just painted the bleakest picture that you could ever paint. And my response to that was that I don’t really care because as far as I’m concerned, if I get anything, it’s found money, and it will definitely keep the public’s attention on this for a while.”
The judge may have believed she was saving the Coleman plaintiffs from a long and fruitless court battle—and she may have been right—but for the women it felt like another threat.
“She came right out and said, ‘Ms. Aloe, if you don’t take this offer, it won’t be good for you,'” Aloe remembers. “What do you do? You’re on federal probation and you’re being threatened by a federal judge. You take the offer.”
In May 2021, the lawsuit settled before it could go to discovery—the pre-trial phase where the government would have been required to disclose all of its records related to the abuse at Coleman. In the end, the federal government paid the Coleman plaintiffs about $1.5 million combined. Some got more; some got less. Carleane Berman’s share came out to about $40,000 according to the Miami Herald.
“Honestly, it was a waste of time in my opinion,” Williams says. “Our lawyers were horrible, the government attorneys were ridiculous. We just got so dehumanized.”
Williams hadn’t even really wanted to join the lawsuit. After her release from Coleman, as soon as she finished her time at a halfway house, she changed her phone number and moved to a different state. Williams is a “blocker,” she says; she blocks traumatic things out to keep functioning. But when Berman called her, she couldn’t say no.
“I had joined the lawsuit with Carleane because she asked me to, and I could tell that she just really needed support,” Williams says. “Now I’m the only one left that can tell what happened for both her and me.”
A Horrific Failure
Ron Berman remembers his daughter seeming as happy as he had ever seen her in the first few months following her release from Coleman in September 2019. He remembers that one day she called him because she had taken his fixer-upper sailboat out onto Florida Bay to see the sunrise. This was somewhat concerning, because she didn’t know how to sail. He had to give her instructions on how to get the boat back through the canals to his dock. He had hopes that she would make a fresh start, get a job, maybe go to college.
Ten months after she was released from Coleman and two months after the lawsuit settled, Carleane Berman died in Saratoga, New York, from a drug overdose. She was 27 years old.
“She was just always fun and upbeat,” Williams remembers, “and you could never tell how much she was hurting inside unless you were really, really close to her.”
The incarceration of Carleane Berman for a nonviolent drug crime was a horror and a failure in every way. It took her out of the hands of one criminal predator and delivered her to another. It made a mockery of the justice system. It failed to rehabilitate her. In the end, it left her destroyed.
After her death, Ron Berman was cleaning out his truck, which he had lent to her, when he discovered a folder with documents from the lawsuit. Berman hadn’t known about what happened to his daughter in federal prison. Carleane had hinted at it once, but he hadn’t pried. She would tell him when she was ready, he thought.
There were signs he wished he recognized in retrospect. His daughter, who had transferred to Coleman from a prison in Texas to be closer to her family, had abruptly told them to stop visiting and cut off communication shortly after she arrived at the camp.
Flipping through the court papers, Berman realized for the first time what his daughter and all the other women had really gone through at Coleman.
“I was in tears,” Berman says. “All the women, it just became one story. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. This just can’t be happening in my country.”
It’s not happening anymore to women at Coleman, at least. Coleman doesn’t house women anymore. It transferred all the female prisoners out of the camp in 2021, two days before a PREA auditor arrived. This meant none of the women at Coleman were available to be interviewed for the PREA audit.
The Bureau of Prisons may be lurching toward some semblance of reform. Last year, then–BOP Director Michael Carvajal announced he was stepping down. He was last seen running down a stairwell in the Capitol building, away from Associated Press reporters who’d uncovered systemic sexual abuse at another federal women’s prison in California.
The Biden administration tapped Colette Peters, former director of the Oregon state prison system, to replace Carvajal. Peters has a reputation as a reformer, but now she faces the task of trying to change the culture of one of the largest federal agencies. In April, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco told prison wardens gathered for a nationwide training session that sexual abuse in federal prisons must be rooted out.
As it stands, prison and jail staff rarely face legal consequences for substantiated sexual assault, according to data released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The data show that from 2016 to 2018, a period that overlaps with the abuse at Coleman, perpetrators of staff sexual misconduct were only convicted, sentenced, fined, or pleaded guilty in 6 percent of substantiated incidents in federal and state prisons.
The Justice Department is reportedly considering some steps to stop this from happening again. According to the Senate PSI report, the Justice Department inspector general is thinking of requiring the BOP’s Office of Internal Affairs to inform it of any evidence found in an administrative investigation “that could support a criminal investigation”—and to inform it before any interviews that would be protected by Garrity.
The BOP announced in December, shortly after the Senate PSI report was released, that it would prioritize applications for early release from victims of sexual misconduct. So far it has struggled to follow through on the promise. In April, an investigation by The Appealuncovered “sexual violence, retaliation, and other constitutional abuses” at another federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.
Congress continues to pressure the BOP from the outside, too. Sens. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.), Mike Braun (R–Ind.), and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) introduced the Federal Prison Oversight Act earlier this year. The bill would require the Department of Justice’s inspector general to conduct detailed inspections of each of the BOP’s 122 facilities and, more significantly, to create an independent Justice Department ombudsman to investigate complaints.
At the end of last year, Biden signed the Prison Camera Reform Act, which will require the BOP to fix its broken surveillance camera systems and improve their coverage.
Incarcerated victims of sexual assault will also have a new avenue for relief. In April, the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to approve updates to the federal sentencing guidelines that will make federal inmates eligible to apply for early release if they have been sexually or physically assaulted by BOP staff.
Meanwhile, the Coleman plaintiffs have been trying to piece their lives back together with varying success. One of the women interviewed by Reason says it took more than a year to start sleeping under blankets again. She had gotten accustomed at Coleman to not using sheets, because the cold kept her from drifting into too deep of a sleep. She didn’t want someone sneaking up on her.
Palomares got a job with the Florida Department of Corrections after resigning from the BOP. He lasted about six months at a state prison before the warden found out why he had resigned his previous job. According to records obtained by Reason, Palomares was fired for being less than truthful on his application, which required disclosure of any crimes, whether or not the case was prosecuted. He did not list the Coleman investigations.
As for Ron Berman, he is still working the phone and writing emails. He wants the statute of limitations on tort claims by federal inmates to begin after they’ve been released.
“My goal is very simple,” he says. “Those three individuals that raped my daughter, I want them in federal prison for life.”
In March, Berman met with several FBI agents and federal prosecutors to press them to prosecute the former correctional officers. In June, prosecutors asked him to write a letter explaining what he wanted from the Justice Department. “Unbelievable,” he texted. Did they even realize the scope of what had happened? Nevertheless, he will sit down and once again try to figure out how to tell this story.
*Correction: This sentence has been revised to clarify which guard assaulted Aloe while she had headphones on.
US To Arm Ukraine With Toxic Depleted Uranium Munitions
In the latest manifestation of the War State’s depraved indifference to human suffering in Ukraine, the United States will soon pour depleted-uranium munitions into its proxy war against Russia, according to an exclusive report from Reuters.
The shells, which are designed to penetrate enemy armored vehicles, will be used by US M-1 Abrams tanks that will begin arriving in Ukraine within the next several weeks. In March, the United Kingdom was first to announce it would give the controversial rounds to Ukraine, for use in British Challenger 2 tanks.
The ammunition is made from the byproduct of uranium that’s been processed for nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. In anti-tank use, depleted uranium is valued for its density, which is 1.7 times the density of lead. It’s used to manufacture dart-like sabot rounds that penetrate armor and then ignite when they contact the oxygen inside the targeted vehicle.
While the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) says the risk posed to civilians by the residue of depleted uranium (DU) rounds “was not significant,” a different study points to potential links between the ammunition and a variety of genuinely horrifying birth defects in Iraq. That study centered on the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, which was attacked by the US military in the early 90s and again in 2003.
When DU bullets hit an armored surface, they are burned by the high temperatures generated by the impact. This creates a very fine dust that is radioactive and chemically toxic. Through food and respiration, this toxic dust is absorbed by the body. In the body, the radiation and the chemical poison cause serious damage.
Many diseases can be caused: alteration and damage to the genome, malformations of the human body in the womb, impaired fertility in men and women, cancer in almost all organs, kidney failure and behavioral problems.
It bears emphasis that these rounds will be used by the Ukrainian military on land it’s purportedly seeking to “liberate” for the benefit of the civilians who live there and will be exposed to this hazard for many years to come.
The ammunition will be included in a new military aid package that will be revealed next week, Reuters reports. The new package will redistribute between $240 million and $375 million in American wealth to Ukraine, on top of the more than $135 billion poured into the proxy war so far.
This isn’t the first form of highly controversial ammunition the US government has pushed into the war in recent months. This summer, the Biden administration sent cluster munitions that are fired by 155mm artillery pieces. More than 100 countries are party to a treaty that bans the ammunition.
“Cluster bombs scatter small submunitions over large areas, making them especially hazardous for civilians,” wrote AntiWar.com’s Dave DeCamp in July. “Submunitions that don’t explode immediately on impact can kill or maim civilians for decades to come, as they have in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, where the US dropped hundreds of millions of bomblets during the Vietnam War.”
Last seek, Republican Senator Mitt Romney demonstrated the casual ghoulishness of Washington’s warmongers. The billions being poured into Ukraine, he said, “is about the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done. We’re losing no lives in Ukraine!”
The single most important thing we can do to strengthen America relative to China is to see Russia defeated in Ukraine. A weakened Russia deters the CCP’s territorial ambition, and halts Putin’s vision of reestablishing the old Soviet Union. Supporting Ukraine is in our interest. pic.twitter.com/X21GGs0lTW
Romney’s rhetoric is clearly part of a coordinated, bipartisan PR campaign aimed at boosting sagging support for the war. After a trip to Kiev and a meeting with Ukrainian President Zelensky, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal published an op-ed in which he first gushed about Zelensky’s “magnetic energy,” then crowed that Americans are getting their “money’s worth” because “not a single American service woman or man [has been] injured or lost.”
Given their disinterest in Ukrainian lives sacrificed for the neocon agenda, these warmongers surely don’t care if a generation of Ukrainian civilians is condemned to endure horrific birth defects and cancer from depleted uranium or losing limbs to cluster munitions.
These people don’t care about Ukrainians. And they don’t care about you.
The older I get the more time I spend asking the question, “Why does someone want me to know this?” Our media is so compromised that questioning the editorial bias of every issue is a full time job.
And I know that it is done on purpose to distract us from the real issues in some instances while advancing an agenda in others.
In 2023, the topic of de-dollarization has been all the rage. It’s been a non-stop barrage of hype and hyperbole. The din of de-dollarization talk became so loud in the lead up to the recent BRICS Summit that it drowned out what was really on the agenda for those few days.
This talk came from all sides, from the BRICS leaders themselves as well as the western press dominated by both British and Davos interests.
People fell all over themselves talking up the “BRICS gold-backed currency” trying to edge each other out in being ahead of the curve on this issue. After a while it became another moment to ask who benefits from all of this amplification?
I’ve been writing about these things for years, knowing that those who control the production of commodities would ultimately get tired of the wealth extraction schemes operated by the financialization masters in New York, London, and Zurich.
It was only a matter of time before they would make their move.
And I can tell you for real that I’ve never been amplified on any subject like this until such time as people in Moscow, Brussels and Beijing wanted this commentary out there.
Don’t take this for grousing, because it isn’t. It’s just an observation born of years of experience. I’ve come to understand what a lack of amplification means; that this is the story no one wants to be told.
So, this begs the question, why do they want it told now?
In many ways this is how I know I’m usually on the right track with respect to a particular issue. It’s my forever internalizing the baseball great Wee Willy Keeler who famously said that baseball is an easy game, “Just hit ’em where they ain’t.”
So, a lot of important someones wanted us to know about de-dollarization this year.
They had their reasons to promote this concept. And, as always, it has to do with influencing global capital flow while distracting the commentary from what was really on the agenda.
For Davos de-dollarization is just another attack vector on the United States.
By playing up the problems the US has domestically as well as geopolitically they create uncertainty. Capital hates uncertainty.
Throw in a purposefully-belligerent and incompetent “Biden” administration and you have a perfect cocktail of uncertainty which keeps capital markets globally distrustful of both the near-term policy mixed with the long-term trends.
Conclusion? The US is FUBAR.
Russia is at war with the West, so, of course, Vladimir Putin will talk his book on de-dollarization. He is the point man on the BRICS being “anti-dollar.”
There’s only this one little problem with all of this: The US dollar itself and the lack of alternative infrastructure for ditching it. Despite all of the jawboning and, frankly, propaganda on this subject, the reality is far, far different.
While everyone is talking de-dollarization, the real currency losing it’s position in global trade is the euro. But no one is talking about de-eruoization. I guess it doesn’t roll off the tongue as well?
According to the latest data from the SWIFT RMB Tracker, there is no currency that has lost more ground in global trade than the euro. In just over two years the euro has fallen from 39.5% of global payments outside the euro-zone to just 13.6%.
The dollar absorbed most of those payments with the British pound, Japanese yen and, yes, the Chinese renminbi taking up the rest.
So, the great distraction about de-dollarization is, in part, about paying no attention to the rapid demise of the euro and the emerging sovereign bond crisis that ECB President Christine Lagarde works everyday to paper over.
I’ve talked about this so much people are getting sick of it. (Here, Here, Here, and Here)
Eventually, however, no matter how hard they try to game the math, paint the tape and make deals to keep up appearances, markets are simply smarter than central planners.
So, with this in mind I fully expect over the next couple of months for the bond vigilantes to return with a vengeance now that Jerome Powell has everyone’s attention. He can further up his street cred with another 25 basis point raise in September, but honestly, he may not have to.
BRICS in the Wall
But, back to the BRICS. If de-dollarization wasn’t the point of the Summit this year, then what was?
Expansion.
And not just expansion for the sake of expansion, but geographically strategic expansion.
The BRICS formally added six countries — Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia. They could have added others and almost added Algeria if not for a last-minute veto by India on behalf of France.
Algeria is symbolic of the fight between Italy and France for access to African oil and gas. There can be no Ital-exit from the EU without Italy minimizing France’s influence in North Africa, shoring up its energy needs as collateral for a return to the lira.
Thankfully, with the help of Russia and China, the Africans are taking care of the Italians’ French Problem all on their own.
If there is one common theme beyond the geography (more on that in a bit) with all six of these countries it is their relationship with the supposedly former British empire. From the Arab states and Egypt to those that defied the Brits in the past — e.g. Iran and Argentina — these additions represent a power shift that is profound.
One look at the world map should make this point crystal clear.
Countries in Red are members of the alliance. Those in green have formally applied for membership and yellow are those that have openly expressed interest.
But it is the 5 countries clustered around the center of global trade that should grab your attention.
Because all talk of a BRICS common currency are nothing more than theatre if there isn’t a fully developed alternative financial supply chain to capture the profits and minimize currency risks and friction for all the members.
Taking them one by one let’s discuss.
Iran
So, let’s start with the easy one. Iran, in my book, has been the “I” in BRICS for years. Because with India constantly keeping everyone off-balance, much like Erdogan in Turkey, that incentivized Russia and China to invest heavily in Iran, as a counterpoint, making it the key to both China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Russia’s long-desired International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).
India dragged their feet for so long on their contracted work on the Iranian port at Chabahar, that Iran nullified the contract, handed it to China, who then finished the work in less time than it took for Iran to get India on the phone to complain about it.
This is the kind of pivotthat gets results. China and Russia have pledged hundreds of billions in investment and sales to Iran, supporting them after Former President Trump tore up the JCPOA and put on sanctions which didn’t work, unless Trump’s goal was to ensure what has transpired since.
This is further proof Trump doesn’t play 4-d chess.
Both the ports at Chabahar and Bandar Abbas now serve to get Asian trade, especially coming from Russia, exits beyond the choke points around the Mediterranean, Red, and Black Seas.
So, Iran was always going to be the first country added to the bloc. It quickly put India on notice to stop playing games.
Saudi Arabia
Adding Saudi Arabia and the UAE weren’t on anyone’s radar back during the Trump Interregnum, because Trump understood how important the Saudis were to the US maintaining its presence in the region.
The problem for Trump was that the Saudis knew he wasn’t a long-term solution in the US. All during his presidency events occurred that trace a line straight back to Obama’s foreign policy. Undermining Trump was the sole focus of Obama’s shadow government, especially our relationship with the Saudis.
With the successful intervention by Russia in Syria, and their own disastrous results in the War in Yemen, it was only a matter of time before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) came to his senses.
Saudi Arabia’s future was with the BRICS not the remnants of the British empire. As an aside here, I talk about Neocons all the time and the best way to think of them, beyond their hatred of pretty much the rest of the world, is to see them as the inheritors of the British empire’s foreign policy.
The US adopted this foreign policy a century ago under Woodrow Wilson (see my podcast with Richard Poe). Since then it’s been the one thing, aside from ruinous spending, that unites the Uniparty on Capitol Hill. Empire or bust. Looking at the ruin of our finances and domestic politics, “Bust” was the obvious outcome.
Saudi Arabia had no other option than to go along with its OPEC+ partner, Russia, if MbS wants the country to survive the end of its oil reserves.
UAE
The UAE addition is definitely part of the currency discussion. Dubai and Abu Dhabi have rapidly become centers for strategic commodities trading with very successful and deepening gold and oil trading. Dubai has its own crude oil benchmark. Even Moscow doesn’t have one of those (yet).
As Vince Lanci and I talked about at length in a recent appearance on Palisades Gold Raio (parts I and II here), in order to even talk about some form of gold-backed trade settlement system, there has to be a deep and liquid supply chain and financial industry in place to facilitate both that settlement and minimize the storage risks to gold and currency risks of the alliance members trading bilaterally without the dollar as the intermediate.
So, adding Dubai as one node in that network outside of China’s control was important to building trust there. Having multiple exchanges, vaults, and refineries simplifies everything. And, with that, minimizes the ‘convenience premium’ of using the US dollar and maximizing members’ use of local currencies with gold acting as the universal trust layer and a blockchain for back office and auditing functions.
So, first, you add the financial center, then you start really talking the whole “Gold-Backed BRICS Currency.” Order of operations matters folks.
The UAE was necessary to get India to even consider going along with Russia and China on this idea, which is why the UAE dirham will be the settlement currency between India and Russia on oil sales, and not the ruble. It both creates validity for a third party while also keeps India free from directly contravening US sanctions on buying Russian energy.
Argentina
It shouldn’t be underestimated how much the IMF and European corruption have wreaked havoc in Argentina over the years. This is another resource-rich country that has been kept under constant upheaval which now has the opportunity, like Egypt, to get out from underneath the IMF’s thumb, depriving vulture capitalists all across the west the opportunity to plunder the country one more time.
Adding Argentina should see the development money necessary to build out its significant shale reserves at Vaca Muerta make its way into the country. This stabilizes its foreign exchange reserves and access to the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) gives it an alternative to the IMF loan sharks.
The upcoming elections could quickly become a referendum on IMF requirements and capital controls.
Egypt and Ethiopia
Egypt is a fascinating turn of events, because Egypt’s financial weakness was the very thing to create a strategic opportunity for Russia and China to make President Al-Sisi a great offer. Use our New Development Bank and stiff the International Monetary Fund if they won’t negotiate a debt write-down.
Like what’s in front of Argentina, Egypt now has leverage in negotiations they didn’t have before.
Either way the IMF loses here, because Egypt has an alternative lender it can force a write-down by the IMF for the first time ever or they can just default. China is already willing to forgive $8 billion in Egypt’s debt while the IMF is holding fast only to restructuring.
And if you think Egypt doesn’t have this leverage here let’s not forget that the Suez Canal still handles 12% of global trade daily. The BRICS bloc now have a political ally that controls the Suez.
With Ethiopia, along with Russia’s deft diplomacy with both Eretria and China’s with Djibouti where they have port access, the BRICS now has effectively unfettered access to the Red Sea. The pressure will mount for Eretria and Djibouti to make peace with Ethiopia, thus opening up trade in eastern Africa.
Access to or circumventing the historic chokepoints to global trade has been a long-held goal of both Russia and China. And it looks like with these additions to the BRICS bloc, they have finally achieved that.
Meet the New Boss?
In my last article on geopolitics, I brought up the importance of physical collateral for the future of the West’s financial dominance, especially that of Europe. The main reason why I keep harping on why Europe is in such trouble is because it’s obvious now that those with physical collateral, including the US, are no longer interested in selling that collateral to a colonial-minded Europe at cut-rate prices.
Russia, under Putin, was happy to court the EU as energy partners because he thought it would secure Russia’s future from potential war with Europe. He was willing to sell Europe cheap gas to maximize the total profit to Russia, not directly measurable in things like GDP or trade balances.
Some capital is political. Some profits are social, despite crappy Marxist commentary to the contrary.
This is why he went along with Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s plea to build Nordstream 2, knowing it would incense the US/UK Neocons.
The peace dividend to Russia was just too big not to make a run at. Merkel’s betrayal of Putin over NS2 and the Minsk agreements are why we are in the mess we’re in today.
The Neocons struck geopolitical gold with blowing up Nordstream, depriving Germany and France of much needed gas. Things are so bad in Germany that they are now quietly dismantling their wind farms to rebuild coal-fired plants, going back to the one energy source they have in abundance in Europe.
Now Africa is in revolt against France. Last month it was Niger. This month it is Gabon. There is no way France can respond to all of these revolts on their own. They need outside intervention and it doesn’t look like it’s coming.
Queen Warmonger Vicky Nudelman went to Niger and was rebuffed. Reports are now circulating that she and her staff were caught completely by surprise with events in Africa and had no solutions, offers or even credible threats to bring to bear.
Pretoria was well aware of Nuland’s hawkish reputation, but when she arrived in Pretoria, the official described her as “totally caught off guard” by winds of change engulfing the region. The July putsch that saw a popular military junta come to power in Niger followed military coups in Mali and Burkina Faso that were similarly inspired by mass anti-colonial sentiment.
Though Washington has so far refused to characterize developments in the Nigerien capital of Niamey as a coup, the South African source confirmed that Nuland sought South Africa’s assistance in responding to regional conflicts, including in Niger, where she emphasized that Washington not only held significant financial investments, but also maintained 1,000 of its own troops. For Nuland, the realization that she was negotiating from a position of weakness was likely a rude awakening.
If you map Nuland to the UK/US Neocons who are not necessarily aligned with Davos then this report should shock you, because it tells us that neither are capable of moving into the power vacuum left by these juntas seizing power.
It says, with little equivocation, that all of the colonial powers of Europe are paper tigers. What started in Burkina Faso and Mali is spreading like wildfires set by Climate Change arsonists in Canada across Africa.
French President Emmanuel Macron can only scream impotently in Paris, Nuland can shake her fist screaming, “You’ll rue the day…,” and the US Dept. of Defense stands by and says exactly nothing.
At the same time clashes between Syrian Arab Army troops and US occupying forces east of the Euphrates River are back under the headlines.
Do you get the picture yet?
The fight for physical collateral is dovetailing perfectly with capturing control of the major trade routes. While the UK and their Neocon quislings are hell bent on starting WWIII over Ukraine, c.f. drone strikes on Russia’s Pskov airport from Latvia, the BRICS bloc understands that their best course of action is to continue building new relationships, networks, and pressuring the centuries-old colonial networks that have financed their power.
Staying out of a direct hot war simply makes good strategic sense. Attrition is a bitch, energetically.
Now they are being forced to expend their seed capital built up over these centuries on influencing events to their liking, and it’s clear they really don’t have the resources to do so for very long.
Against that backdrop, de-dollarization is the least of their worries.
It will be the thing that grinds away in the background, like Powell’s shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet, and will just emerge out of these events.
The choice the West is now facing is at what point do they stop fighting this and finally come to the negotiating table. Some factions, like the US military and the banking sector, have already made their intentions clear.
The others? Not so much.
When facing extinction, that’s when you find out where someone’s true loyalties are.
