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https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/01/bernie-sanders-hasnt-quite-captured-what-wall-street-does-its-actually-a-fraud-monetization-system-with-a-money-printing-unit-called-the-new-york-fed/

Bernie Sanders Hasn’t Quite Captured What Wall Street Does: It’s Actually a Fraud-Monetization System with a Money-Printing Unit Called the New York Fed

Senator Bernie Sanders has come closer than anyone on the Presidential campaign trail in defining what Wall Street actually does. Sanders has repeatedly stated at his rallies that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.”

That analysis is correct but abbreviated. Sanders needs to go further. It’s not just Wall Street’s business model that has left the United States with the greatest wealth inequality since the Roaring Twenties (a time when Wall Street investment banks were also allowed to own deposit-taking banks). It’s how Wall Street is monetizing that fraud that poses an existential threat to the solvency of the United States and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

The attempted WeWork Initial Public Offering (IPO) of last year was a classic example of how Wall Street can put lipstick on a pig, pass it off as a hot new startup company, and sell its shares, which were overpriced by about $40 billion, to unwary public pension funds and mutual funds that dominate millions of Americans’ 401(k) plans. The IPO failed to materialize simply because alternative media sent the dirty details of the offering viral, forcing business media to cover the story.

Rather than being a hot new tech startup with oodles of potential, WeWork was a money-losing real estate leasing company with a grifter as its CEO. That, however, didn’t stop two of the largest law firms, Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett, from representing the company and the underwriters, respectively, and it didn’t stop two of the biggest firms on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, from trying to unload the dog of a deal on investors for a hefty underwriting fee.

That’s what we mean by monetization of fraud. (See The Dickensian Tale of the WeWork IPO.)

Now you may be thinking that WeWork might have been just an aberration where due diligence slipped through the cracks by a bunch of overworked bean counters. Unfortunately, this is the way that Wall Street has been issuing IPOs for a very, very long time.

In 2003 the Securities and Exchange Commission settled charges against ten of the largest Wall Street firms over how their research analysts had been issuing fraudulent reports to the public on IPOs. The analysts were sending internal emails to colleagues calling the offerings “dogs” and “crap” while telling the investing public that these were great companies with bright futures and putting a “buy” recommendation on the stock.

Those fraudulent research reports and “buy” recommendations led to a $4 trillion bust in the stock market, known as the dot.com crash. While public pensions and individuals investors suffered enormous losses, the Wall Street analysts and their bosses got to keep their fat bonuses.

This is another example of long-running monetization of fraud schemes on Wall Street.

The epic financial collapse on Wall Street in 2008 was, reduced to its basic terms, simply the end game of Wall Street banks’ efforts to monetize their frauds. Insiders at the major Wall Street banks had told their bosses that the mortgage underwriting department was issuing mortgage loans to people who could not possibly afford to repay the loan. They warned their bosses to reject the loans. But they were overruled because the Wall Street banks had a grander scheme: they would make money securitizing the loans; they would make more money creating synthetic derivatives to bet on the loans; they would make even more money shorting the loans based on their insider knowledge that the loans were doomed to default; and they would make even more money allowing hedge funds to pay them to assemble these dogs into new securitizations so that they hedge funds could make billions shorting the pile of dung. (See here, here and here.)

The 2008 crash and the ensuing Great Recession were the worst economic disasters in the United States since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure, millions more lost their jobs as a result of the economic contraction, and trillions of dollars of household wealth was wiped out.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) issued a report attempting to capture for the American people what had gone so wrong on Wall Street and how Federal regulators and Congress had failed to catch the corruption in time to prevent the epic crash. If you were asked to give a one-sentence explanation for what happened on Wall Street from the findings of the FCIC report, you could do no better than this: Wall Street was monetizing fraud.

The dot.com bust in 2000 and the epic financial crash in 2008 were both the well-documented result of Wall Street monetizing its fraud and its execs and traders getting to keep the multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses that ensued from that fraud monetization.

The reason that Wall Street continues to be allowed by Congress to pursue its fraud monetization schemes is that Wall Street has captured both Congress and its federal regulators. A significant number of members of Congress are beholding to Wall Street to fund their political campaigns. Without that funding, the incumbent doesn’t stand a chance against their opponent, who will tell Wall Street what they want to hear and grab Wall Street’s funding. Federal regulators are either looking to return to their seven figure jobs on Wall Street or are auditioning to get one.

The revolving door has now even corrupted the accounting profession that audits our publicly-traded companies, as recently reported in-depth by The Project On Government Oversight. (See “How Accountants Took Washington’s Revolving Door to a Criminal Extreme.”)

But what would happen if a criminal network actually obtained a government power to financially resuscitate itself after each of its crime waves? Wouldn’t that make it the most dangerous threat to national security?

On April 9, 2019, the nonprofit Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, released a study titled: “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” It should have made headlines on the front pages of every major newspaper in the U.S. Instead, it was effectively ignored by mainstream media.

The report notes this:

“Of the more than $29 trillion in bailouts, just the six biggest banks in the country (the ‘Six Megabanks’) received more than $8.2 trillion in lifesaving support from American taxpayers during the 2008 financial crash, or nearly one-third of the total bailouts provided to the entire financial system. This was a massive transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street to prevent the bankruptcy of just six banks, supposedly because they were vital to the economic security and prosperity of Main Street Americans.”

Who provided the bulk of that $29 trillion in bailout money to resuscitate banks engaged in serial frauds? It was the New York Fed, another captured regulator with one critically important and critically dangerous difference from other regulators: it has the ability to electronically create money out of thin air.

As a sign of just how brazen and disastrously broken the U.S. financial system has become, with no hearings in Congress, with no blaring headlines on the front pages of newspapers, the New York Fed turned on its money spigot to Wall Street again on September 17, 2019. It was the first time this has happened since the financial crisis. For the past four months the New York Fed has been spewing hundreds of billions of dollars each week to Wall Street’s trading houses, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average up by 3,000 points, with no accountability to anyone or explanation as to why Wall Street needs or deserves this money.

Americans must engage in demanding accountability from their elected, and as yet uncaptured, members of Congress.

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https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/02/within-a-matter-of-months-the-feds-balance-sheet-will-hit-8-trillion-these-charts-tell-the-re

Within a Matter of Months, the Fed’s Balance Sheet Will Hit $8 Trillion; These Charts Tell the Rest of the Story

Every Thursday, at approximately 4:30 p.m., the Federal Reserve provides a report on its balance sheet as of the prior day. It’s known as the H.4.1 report or the Wednesday Level report.

On Thursday, September 4, 2008, the Fed’s H.4.1 report showed a $935 billion balance sheet as of Wednesday, September 3, 2008. That was 12 days before iconic financial institutions on Wall Street began to blow up in what became the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. As of last Wednesday, February 17, 2021, the Fed’s balance sheet stood at $7.6 trillion – an increase of 712.83 percent in less than 13 years.

The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 and such a staggering growth in its balance sheet has not occurred at any other period in U.S. history — not during the Great Depression, not even during or after World War II.

What has changed the course of economic history in the United States and put the country on a debt-fueled disaster course is the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the bailouts, both monetary and fiscal, that have followed ever since, together with the unwillingness of Congress to confront this reality.

The charts above showing the unprecedented growth in the federal debt and federal debt versus GDP since the Wall Street crash of 2008 confirm this thesis.

Among the many factors that have kept the U.S. locked on this destructive debt path are the following:

The failure by Congress to separate the giant federally-insured banks from the Wall Street casino, that is, to restore the Glass-Steagall Act, thus making perpetual Wall Street bailouts unnecessary;

The failure by Congress to strip federally-insured banks of the ability to hold tens of trillions of dollars notionally in dangerous derivatives, thus making perpetual bailouts unnecessary;

The fear by the Fed of allowing another stock market crash because consumers might retrench from spending if their 401(k)s implode;

The failure by Congress to restore corporate pension plans to workers, thus allowing loyal, productive U.S. workers to live in dignity in their retirement years and de-linking the wealth effect from the stock market and 401(k) plans;

The failure by Congress to conduct meaningful forensic investigations into how Wall Street’s Dark Pools, High Frequency Traders, and mega banks have joined forces to become a fraud monetization system and institutionalized wealth transfer mechanism, creating the worst wealth and income inequality in U.S. history.

Time is running out for Congress to act.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2021-02-22/doctors-vitamin-d-erode-trust/

By putting Big Pharma’s patents before patients, doctors will further erode trust in experts

I have spent the past several years on this blog trying to highlight one thing above all others: that the institutions we were raised to regard as authoritative are undeserving of our blind trust.

It is not just that expert institutions have been captured wholesale by corporate elites over the past 40 years and that, as a result, knowledge, experience and expertise have been sidelined in favour of elite interests – though that is undoubtedly true. The problem runs deeper: these institutions were rarely as competent or as authoritative as we fondly remember them being. They always served elite interests.

What has changed most are our perceptions of institutions that were once beloved or trusted. It is we who have changed more than the institutions. That is because we now have far more sources – good and bad alike – than ever before against which we can judge the assertions of those who claim to speak with authority.
Hanging out together

Here is a personal example. When I started work as an editor at the foreign section of the Guardian newspaper in the early 1990s, there were few ways, from the paper’s London head office, to independently evaluate or scrutinise the presentation of events by any of our correspondents in their far-flung bureaus. All we could do was compare the copy they sent with that from other correspondents, either published in rival newspapers or available from two or three English-language wire services.

Even that safeguard is far less meaningful than it might sound to an outsider.

The correspondents for these various publications – whether based in Bangkok, Amman, Moscow, Havana or Washington – are a small group. Inevitably they each bring to their work a narrow range of mostly unconscious but almost identical biases. They hang out together – like any other expat community – in the same bars, clubs and restaurants. Their children attend the same international schools, and their families socialise together at the weekends.
Similar pasts

Correspondents from these various newspapers also have similar backgrounds. They have received much the same privileged education, at private or grammar schools followed by Oxford or Cambridge, and as a result share largely the same set of values. They have followed almost identical career paths, and their reports are written chiefly to impress their editors and each other. They are appointed by a foreign editor who served a decade or two earlier in one of the same bureaus they now head, and he (for invariably it is a he) selected them because they reminded him of himself at their age.

The “local sources” quoted by these correspondents are drawn from the same small pool of local politicians, academics and policymakers – people the correspondents have agreed are the most authoritative and in a position to speak on behalf of the rest of the local population.

Nowhere in this chain of news selection, gathering, editing and production are there likely to be voices questioning or challenging the correspondents’ shared view of what constitutes “news”, or their shared interpretation and presentation of that news.
Working in the guild

This is not the news business as journalists themselves like to present it. They are not fearless, lone-wolf reporters pursuing exclusives and digging up dirt on the rich and powerful. They comprise something more akin to the guilds of old. Journalists are trained to see the world and write about it in near-identical terms.

The only reason the media “guild” looks far less credible than it did 20 or 30 years ago is because now we can often cut out the middleman – the correspondent himself. We can watch videos on Youtube of local events as they occur, or soon afterwards. We can hear directly from members of the local population who would never be given a platform in corporate media. We can read accounts from different types of journalists, including informed local ones, who would never be allowed to write for a corporate news outlet because they are not drawn from the narrow, carefully selected and trained group known as “foreign correspondents”.

A partial picture

In this regard, let us consider my own area of specialist interest: Israel and Palestine. Jewish settlers in the West Bank have been beating up and shooting at Palestinian farmers trying to work their land or harvest their olives for more than half a century. It is one of the main practical means by which the settlers implement an ethnic cleansing policy designed to drive Palestinians off their farmland.

The settlers have thereby expanded their “municipal jurisdictions” to cover more than 40 per cent of the West Bank, territory under Israeli occupation that was supposed to form the backbone of any future Palestinian state. This settler violence is part of the reason why Palestinian statehood looks impossible today.

But until a decade or so ago – when phone cameras meant that recorded visual evidence became commonplace and irrefutable – you would rarely have had a way to know about those attacks. Correspondents in Jerusalem had decided on your behalf that you did not need to know.

Maybe the correspondents refused to believe the accounts of Palestinians or preferred the explanations from Israeli officials that these were just anti-Israel lies motivated by antisemitism. Or maybe the correspondents thought these attacks were not important enough, or that without corroboration they themselves risked being accused of antisemitism.

Whatever the reason, the fact is they did not tell their readers. This absence of information meant, in turn, that when Palestinians retaliated – in acts that were much more likely to be reported by correspondents – it looked to readers back home as if Palestinian violence was unprovoked and irrational. Western coverage invariably bolstered racist stereotypes suggesting that Palestinians were innately violent or antisemitic, and that Israelis, even violent settlers, were always victims.
Unreliable experts

This problem is far from unique to journalism. There are similar issues with any of the professions – or guilds – that comprise and service today’s corporate establishment, whether it is the judiciary, politicians, the military, academics or non-profits. Those supposedly holding the establishment to account are usually deeply invested, whether it be financially or emotionally, in the establishment’s survival – either because they are part of that establishment or because they benefit from it.

And because these self-selecting “guilds” have long served as the public’s eyes and ears when we try to understand, assess and hold to account the corporate elites that rule over us, we necessarily have access only to partial, self-justifying, establishment-reinforcing information. As a result, we are likely to draw faulty conclusions about both the establishment itself and the guilds that prop up the establishment.

Very belatedly, we have come to understand how unreliable these experts – these guilds – are only because they no longer enjoy an exclusive right to narrate to us the world we inhabit. The backlash, of course, has not been long in coming. Using the pretext of “fake news”, these institutions are pushing back vigorously to shut down our access to different kinds of narration.
Plague of deficiency

All this is by way of a very long introduction to a follow-up post on an article I wrote last week about the failure of doctors to press governments to finance proper, large-scale studies on the treatment of hospitalised Covid patients with Vitamin D – an important immunological hormone created by sunlight on our skin.

The role of Vitamin D on our general wellbeing and health has come under increasing scrutiny over the past two decades after it was discovered that it is the only vitamin for which there is a receptor in every cell in our body.

Long before Covid, researchers had begun to understand that Vitamin D’s role in regulating our immune systems was chronically under-appreciated by most doctors. The medical profession was stuck in a paradigm from the 1950s in which Vitamin D’s use related chiefly to bone health. As a consequence, today’s recommended daily allowances – usually between 400IU and 800IU – were established long ago in accordance with the minimum needed for healthy bones rather than the maximum needed for a healthy immune system.

Today we know that many people in northern latitudes, especially the elderly, are deficient or severely deficient in Vitamin D, even those taking government-approved, low-level supplements. In fact, it would be true to say there is a global plague of Vitamin D deficiency, even in many sunny countries where people have lost the habit of spending time outdoors or shield themselves from the sun.

Denied a platform

The doctors and researchers who have been gradually piecing together the critically important role of Vitamin D are the medical equivalent of the dissident journalists who try to present a realistic picture of what goes on in Israel-Palestine.

Because Big Pharma can make no serious money from Vitamin D, researchers into the sun hormone have struggled to raise funds for their work and have mostly been denied corporate platforms from which to publicise the stunning findings they have made. Until recently, corporate medicine simply ignored most Vitamin D research, relegating it to the supposedly fringe science of “nutrition”, which is why most doctors know little or nothing about it.

With the outbreak of Covid, when these Vitamin D studies should finally have come into their own, researchers found themselves shunted further into the margins. Just as journalists, politicians and human rights groups trying to tell you real things about Israel get labelled antisemites, anyone trying to tell you real things about Vitamin D gets labelled a crank, conspiracy theorist or Covid denier.

The desperate need for Covid treatments has not led to intensified interest in Vitamin D among most doctors, even though it is very cheap, almost completely safe even in large doses, and has been shown to help in damping down immune over-reaction of exactly the kind killing Covid patients.

Rather, the opportunity for Big Pharma to develop a magic bullet to treat Covid has led to an intensified campaign to discredit Vitamin D research.
Vitamin D minefield

In writing last week’s article, I stepped into the Vitamin D minefield fully expecting to receive as much flak as I do when I report on Israel-Palestine. What I was not prepared for is that the flak would be much worse.

I won’t rehearse the arguments I made in my earlier post. You can read it here.

Contrary to the claims of some of those seeking to discredit my article, I didn’t argue that Vitamin D is a proven cure for Covid. I argued in favour of three far more cautious positions that ought to be supported unequivocally by anyone concerned about the large and rising Covid death toll:

    that given the exceptionally promising results of studies into Vitamin D and Covid, it is criminally negligent for governments not to be funding further, large-scale research as a priority to confirm or reject those findings;
    that doctors, given their singular credibility on medical matters with the public, have a responsibility to lead that campaign of pressure on governments, especially when those same governments appear entirely beholden to Big Pharma.
    and that, given the minimal cost and complete safety of using Vitamin D on patients, it ought to be used on the precautionary principle until further research is carried out.

Governments off the hook

Instead lots of people, doctors included, did the exact opposite. They shifted the focus away from where it should be – on governments to fund proper research – on to a recent Barcelona study on Vitamin D that I had highlighted in my previous article. That research confirmed on a large scale dramatic and highly beneficial outcomes for hospitalised Covid patients.

Critics wanted to nitpick over flaws in the study’s design. I received endless complaints that randomisation in the study was done by ward rather than by individual patient – a less satisfactory approach and one more likely to allow doctors in attendance to know who was being treated with Vitamin D and who wasn’t.

Other critics were exercised by an anomaly: that in the Vitamin D group slightly more patients died than had been admitted to intensive care. Critics surmised that the doctors involved in the study had been influenced in their treatment protocols by knowing who was in the Vitamin D group.

It is not that these are groundless criticisms. Most studies have design flaws, especially poorly funded ones that are being carried out on the hoof in a hospital as its doctors struggle to avoid being overwhelmed with Covid patients.

The study’s relatively minor flaws, however, do not invalidate its findings – after all, rigid adherence to double-blind protocols is unlikely to be a major factor in determining whether patients recover from Covid. Rather, those flaws underline the need to push for an even more robustly designed study, properly funded by governments, and the use in the meantime of Vitamin D in hospitals on the precautionary principle.
Study taken down

But there is another reason to be troubled by the chorus of criticism, much of it led by doctors, of the Barcelona research. The study was published as a pre-print by the Lancet, meaning it was awaiting peer review. This is standard practice for important studies to get them into the public domain and encourage debate. And yet after a campaign of pressure on the Lancet, the editors hurriedly took down the study. They effectively pre-empted the peer review process because of the noisy campaign against the study.

The double standards at play were all the more glaring because shortly after I published last week’s post I was inundated with correspondents praising another new study on Vitamin D, this one carried out in Sao Paulo in Brazil. The findings were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

It was soon apparent why this study had attracted so many cheerleaders, especially among the medical establishment. The Brazil study has been used specifically to discredit the Spanish study, suggesting that Vitamin D has no beneficial outcome for hospitalised Covid patients. Some 17 doctors and researchers were directly involved in the Brazil study, and additionally it passed the scrutiny of a handful of other medical experts who edit the Journal.

And yet despite the wealth of medical expertise involved, even I could work out that the study was worthless from the descriptions provided by doctors promoting it on social media. The major flaw in the Brazil study is so gross that anyone who knows anything about Vitamin D can spot it. The authors and the Journal’s editors are apparently so ignorant about Vitamin D that they even reveal their error in the study title.

‘Medical insanity’

Of course, I don’t expect anyone to trust my assessment of a medical study into Vitamin D, so I will defer to an acknowledged medical expert on these matters, Dr Alex Vasquez, whose video assessment not only confirmed the major flaw in the study I had spotted but alerted me to a plethora of other serious failings. As he sighs his way through his presentation in growing exasperation, he intermittently describes the study as “garbage”, “stupid”, “unethical and “medical insanity”. He may be being too kind.

That the study is so bad suggests one of three logical possibilities:

a) profound medical incompetence by a wide array of doctors;

b) a conspiracy of some sort by these doctors to deceive their readership;

c) or far more likely, a groupthink cultivated in these doctors by a lifetime of working in the service of corporate medicine that has left them ignorant, dismissive and unconsciously hostile to a supposed “nature cure” like Vitamin D.
Catastrophic flaws

I recommend you watch the whole 40 minutes of Dr Vasquez’s video to get a true sense of how outrageously bad this Brazil study is, even though it is published by the Journal of the American Medical Association and is being widely promoted by doctors, chiefly as a way to dismiss the more robust Spanish study.

But on the assumption you don’t watch it, here is a brief overview of the most catastrophic flaws in its design:

    The doctors gave patients a single dose, one that barely qualifies as a high dose despite the study description, that earlier research on Vitamin D, conducted four years ago, proved doesn’t work. In other words, they designed a study that was entirely unnecessary because the outcome was known beforehand. The research was a complete waste of everybody’s time and a betrayal of the patients who took part because nothing could be learnt from it.
    Even worse, the form of Vitamin D the researchers gave the patients needs 10 days to become available in their bodies, far too late to help these seriously ill patients in their battle against Covid. Another form, calcifediol, which is available for use by the immune system immediately, should have been given instead, as it was in the Spanish study.
    In addition, not only was the wrong form of Vitamin D given but it was administered to patients 11 days after the onset of their symptoms – a huge time lag that, as Dr Vasquez observes, would ensure that many established drug treatments – for illnesses such as influenza, for example – would be guaranteed to fail too.
    The combined delay in treatment and the delay in the Vitamin D becoming active meant the patients had to wait three weeks before their Covid was being treated in any meaningful way. But that was the point at which the study ended and an assessment was drawn about Vitamin D as an ineffective treatment.

Patents over patients

The wildly differing receptions these two studies have received should raise serious suspicions.

One, the Barcelona study, has flaws but none serious enough that its dramatic finding – a finding supported by other studies – should be discounted: that dosing with active Vitamin D is likely to offer significant benefits to hospitalised Covid patients. And yet this study is being nitpicked to death and has been pulled from publication by the Lancet as though it is a danger to public health.

Meanwhile, a thoroughly worthless Brazil study, so bad even non-doctors like me can see what is wrong with it, is being lauded and promoted. It is attracting almost no criticism, no scrutiny by doctors apart from those who have been marginalised, and is being weaponised to discredit the far more serious Spanish study.

What we are seeing here is entirely unrelated to evidence-based medicine. Rather this is guild politics at its worst. Medical protectionism. It is a turf war. Describe it any way you wish. But this has nothing to do with medicine, public health, fighting Covid, or savings lives.

The very different treatment of these two studies suggests instead that the majority of doctors – like the majority of journalists, politicians and academics – have been captured by corporate interests. Whether they understand it or not, many doctors are in thrall to guild interests, defined by Big Pharma, that benefit not patients but patents and profits. Doctors have largely been trained into complicity with a medical money machine.

This is not just bad science. It is self-sabotage. As public trust wanes in all types of expertise and authority, widespread disenchantment fuels the rise of charlatans like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro.

We long ago lost trust in journalists and politicians. Academia now appears cloistered and irrelevant, while judges all too readily flaunt their privilege. All seem divorced from the concerns of ordinary people.

With a pandemic raging, doctors should be uniquely favoured. Now is a time when they can prove that they at least are deserving of our trust, that they are fighting for our interests, not corporate interests. Instead they risk following these other professions into guild protectionism and disdain for those they took an oath to help.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/02/26/us-bombs-syria-and-ridiculously-claims-self-defense/

US Bombs Syria And Ridiculously Claims Self Defense

On orders of President Biden, the United States has launched an airstrike on a facility in Syria. As of this writing the exact number of killed and injured is unknown, with early reports claiming “a handful” of people were killed.

Rather than doing anything remotely resembling journalism, the western mass media have opted instead to uncritically repeat what they’ve been told about the airstrike by US officials, which is the same as just publishing Pentagon press releases.

Here’s this from The Washington Post:

The Biden administration conducted an airstrike against alleged Iranian-linked fighters in Syria on Thursday, signaling its intent to push back against violence believed to be sponsored by Tehran.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the attack, the first action ordered by the Biden administration to push back against alleged Iranian-linked violence in Iraq and Syria, on a border control point in eastern Syria was “authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to ongoing threats.”

He said the facilities were used by Iranian-linked militias including Kaitib Hezbollah and Kaitib Sayyid al-Shuhada.

The operation follows the latest serious attack on U.S. locations in Iraq that American officials have attributed to Iranian-linked groups operating in Iraq and Syria. Earlier this month, a rocket attack in northern Iraq killed a contractor working with the U.S. military and injured a U.S. service member there.

So we are being told that the United States launched an airstrike on Syria, a nation it invaded and is illegally occupying, because of attacks on “US locations” in Iraq, another nation the US invaded and is illegally occupying. This attack is justified on the basis that the Iraqi fighters were “Iranian-linked”, a claim that is both entirely without evidence and irrelevant to the justification of deadly military force. And this is somehow being framed in mainstream news publications as a defensive operation.

This is Defense Department stenography. The US military is an invading force in both Syria and Iraq; it is impossible for its actions in either of those countries to be defensive. It is always necessarily the aggressor. It’s the people trying to eject them who are acting defensively. The deaths of US troops and contractors in those countries can only be blamed on the powerful people who sent them there.

The US is just taking it as a given that it has de facto jurisdiction over the nations of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and that any attempt to interfere in its authority in the region is an unprovoked attack which must be defended against. This is completely backwards and illegitimate. Only through the most perversely warped American supremacist reality tunnels can it look valid to dictate the affairs of sovereign nations on the other side of the planet and respond with violence if anyone in those nations tries to eject them.

It’s illegitimate for the US to be in the Middle East at all. It’s illegitimate for the US to claim to be acting defensively in nations it invaded. It’s illegitimate for the US to act like Iranian-backed fighters aren’t allowed to be in Syria, where they are fighting alongside the Syrian government against ISIS and other extremist militias with the permission of Damascus. It is illegitimate for the US to claim the fighters attacking US personnel in Iraq are controlled by Iran when Iraqis have every reason to want the US out of their country themselves.

Even the official narrative reveals itself as illegitimate from within its own worldview. CNN reports that the site of the airstrike “was not specifically tied to the rocket attacks” in Iraq, and a Reuters/AP report says “Biden administration officials condemned the February 15 rocket attack near the city of Irbil in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish-run region, but as recently as this week officials indicated they had not determined for certain who carried it out.”

This is all so very typical of the American supremacist worldview that is being aggressively shoved down our throats by all western mainstream news media. The US can bomb who it likes, whenever it likes, and when it does it is only ever doing so in self defense, because the entire planet is the property of Washington, DC. It can seize control of entire clusters of nations, and if any of those nations resist in any way they are invading America’s sovereignty.

It’s like if you broke into your neighbor’s house to rob him, killed him when he tried to stop you, and then claimed self defense because you consider his home your property. Only in the American exceptionalist alternate universe is this considered normal and acceptable.

This sort of nonsense is why it’s so important to prioritize opposition to western imperialism. World warmongering and domination is the front upon which all the most egregious evils inflicted by the powerful take place, and it plays such a crucial role in upholding the power structures we are up against. Without endless war, the oligarchic empire which is the cause of so much of our suffering cannot function, and must give way to something else. If you’re looking to throw sand in the gears of the machine, anti-imperialism is your most efficacious path toward that end, and should therefore be your priority.

In America especially it is important to oppose war and imperialism, because an entire empire depends on keeping the locals too poor and propagandized to force their nation’s resources to go to their own wellbeing. As long as the United States functions as the hub of a globe-spanning power structure, all the progressive agendas that are being sought by what passes for the US left these days will be denied them. Opposing warmongering must come first.

Standing against imperialism and American supremacism cuts directly to the heart of our difficulties in this world, which is why so much energy goes into keeping us focused on identity politics and vapid energy sucks which inconvenience the powerful in no way whatsoever. If you want to out-wrestle a crocodile, you must bind shut its mouth. If you want to take down a globe-spanning empire, you must take out its weapons. Opposing warmongering and killing public trust in the propaganda used to justify it is the best way to do this.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/shadowland/

Shadowland

The State of the Union speech is a somewhat squishy national ritual. Since Franklin Roosevelt, presidents have delivered it early each year in-person to a joint session of congress, with every other dignitary in government on hand — except for one cabinet officer designated the “lone survivor,” who sits it out elsewhere in case, say, the Capitol gets blown up. Before Woodrow Wilson, presidents customarily sent over a written message. Article II, Section 3, Clause 1 of the constitution only stipulates that a president “from time to time” shall report to Congress on how the nation is doing.

Lately, it’s mostly just a made-for-TV special, like the Oscars, allowing a lot of familiar faces to preen before the cameras for the home-folks. Ronald Reagan introduced the gimmick of showboating heroes or victims of this-and-that seated up in the galleries, which has naturally devolved into a maudlin, cringeworthy feature of the show. But often presidents use the occasion to drop a ripe phrase on the big audience that captures the spirit of the moment: “The era of big government is over” (Bill Clinton); “the axis of evil” (G. W. Bush); FDR’s “four freedoms.” In 2020, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced an instant op-ed closer feature to the proceedings, ripping up Mr. Trump’s speech behind his back in a striking display of pique, much applauded by the avatars of rising Wokesterdom, who had only days earlier seen their half-assed impeachment attempt flop.

Kinda looks like our current president, Joe Biden, will skip the grand show this year. Too busy playing “Mario Kart” with the grandkids, or something like that. The Washington press corps has given him a pass on it, apparently. There’s no chatter, no buzz on the cable channels or in The New York Times, though a few newsies have begun to whine about Mr. Biden’s general unwillingness to hold a routine press conference with freely-pitched questions — not hand-picked, vetted ones, as the president’s handlers have insisted.

How long will it be before the public realizes that Mr. Biden is being strictly concealed from view by his managers? And how long can they keep it up? A few more weeks, maybe, I’d guess. What did they think they were doing when they engineered the election of this empty suit, this blank cartridge, this political mannequin, this man-who-isn’t-there? Of all the hundred-million-odd adults over 35-years-of-age in this country, they picked this empty vessel to lead in a year of obvious crisis?

Apparently so — an act so collectively insane it makes you shudder to think about it. Like, the Democratic Party really thought this was a good idea? And who’s calling the shots behind this false front? Some committee chaired by Susan Rice? With directives coming into the Oval Office by messenger from Barack Obama’s Kalorama fortress, with, say, Eric Holder, Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod, John Brennan, and a few others charting the daily play-by-play?

So, you suspect that something weird like that is going on? I sure do. And I also suspect that when the truth comes out, the Democratic Party will have to face some pretty harsh music. Just the other day the public learned that 30 House Democrats are seeking to limit Mr. Biden’s sole authority over the launch codes for our nuclear missile arsenal. That doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence. Does White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki look like a cornered animal going about her daily briefings? The ongoing spectacle of the missing head-of-state is inching beyond embarrassing.

And then, what do the people of this country think when it becomes necessary to throw the switch on the 25^th Amendment and remove poor Ol’ Joe from office on account of being simply unfit to continue serving? I’ll tell you what they’ll think: that the Democrats knowingly put an unfit man in high office. They’ll understand that they got played, scammed, hustled. They’ll be mighty pissed off. They may seek to learn a bit more about exactly how this happened, especially the sketchy mechanics of the November 3^rd vote that put Ol’ Joe in the White House. Even some Democrats may demand answers. Of course, the cruelest scene in this scenario will be the big manufactured hoo-hah celebrating Kamala Harris as the first female president — which in itself may be difficult to pull off, since so many Democrats have declared there’s no such thing as two sexes.

Meanwhile, you better pray for the bond market and, in turn, the equities markets, and, in turn, the whole shootin’ match of the economy (whatever remains of it, that is). Yesterday the benchmark ten-year US Treasury peeked above the dangerous 1.5 percent mark. What this tells you is that world is expecting the dollar to go down substantially and with that, the value of US Bonds, which foreign holders will seek to dump on a market not eager to buy them up, meaning the Federal Reserve will have to step in and buy them, meaning they will have to create a shitload of new dollars out of thin air to do that, which will drive down the purchasing power of each dollar, which will further inflame the world’s urge to dump devaluing US bonds — a vicious feedback that could crash the banking system just as Covid 19 begins fading away to nothing.

Oh, and note: rising interest rates on US Treasuries will force the government to pay much more to service our massive debts. That will negate any of the fiscal ambitions of Kamala Harris’s shadow government — unless the committee running America decides to utterly destroy the US Dollar. The bait-and-switch game playing out in the White House is just an overture to all that.

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https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-bombhole-era-0cb

The Bombhole Era 

An excerpt from the new edition of “Hate Inc.” 

The new paperback edition of Hate Inc. has gone to print (for details about where to find the book, click here). The excerpt below is from the new chapter in the book, looking back at the Trump years. Thanks to Leighton Woodhouse for his great work on the animated video above. From the new foreword:

A UTOPIA OF DIVISION
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/4598095214928566760/8814868857073362073
News in the Trump years became a narrative drama, with each day advancing a tale of worsening political emergency, driven by subplots involving familiar casts of characters, in the manner of episodic television. It worked, but news directors and editors hit a stumbling block. If you cover everything like there’s no tomorrow, what happens when there is, in fact, a tomorrow?

The innovation was to use banner headlines to saturate news cycles, often to the exclusion of nearly any other news, before moving to the next controversy so quickly that mistakes, errors, or rhetorical letdowns were memory-holed.

The American Napoleon generated controversies at such a fantastic rate that stations like CNN and MSNBC (and Fox too) were able to keep ratings high by moving from mania to mania, hyping stories on the way up but not always following them down. The moment the narrative premise of any bombshell started to fray, the next story in line was bumped to the front.

News outlets paid off old editorial promises with new headlines: Ponzi journalism.

This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.

This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.

A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters. They wanted to be in the trenches of information discovery. Audiences were choosing powerful highs over lasting ones.

Moreover, if after publication another shoe dropped in the form of mitigating information, audiences were disinterested, even angry. Those updates were betrayals of the entertainment contract, like continuity errors. Companies soon learned there was a downside to once-mandatory ethical practices. Silent edits at newspapers became common, and old standards like the italicized editor’s note at the bottom of the page letting you know this or that story had been “updated” began to disappear.

The political impact of all this was that the news watcher in the Trump years became more addicted to the experience of being outraged, while retaining less about specific reasons for outrage. Audiences remembered some big stories and big themes, but stopped digesting each story on its own, rarely bothering to look back at the meaning of various manias after they’d died down.

As George Orwell understood when he created the “memory hole” concept in 1984, an institution that can obliterate memory can control history. In the Trump era, news audiences volunteered to stop the disobedient act of remembering.

They brought a pure, virginal belief to watching news, and agreed to unquestioningly accept any new versions of the past put forward. This was Hate Inc. brought to its logical conclusion. Fox and MSNBC already knew how to monetize anger by setting audiences against one another. The innovation of the Trump era was companies learned they could operate on a sort of editorial margin, borrowing credibility for unproven stories from audiences themselves, who gave permission to play loose with facts by gobbling up anonymously-sourced exposes that tickled their outrage centers.

Mistakes became irrelevant. In a way, they were no longer understood as mistakes.

Video link - Bombholed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIAWggqZQmE&feature=emb_imp_woyt

....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56330.htm

Blame for EU-Russia Impasse

There’s nothing like a good dose of truth to get some people’s hackles up. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the European Union it was “an unreliable partner” and then the floodgates of fury opened.

Lavrov was speaking to the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell while he was on an official visit to Moscow. It was a fair comment by the Russian top diplomat considering the facts of Europe’s servile deference to Washington’s anti-Russia policies, as well as the EU’s arrogant assumption to interfere in Russia’s sovereign affairs.

But the furious reaction to Lavrov’s remark alleged that Russia was “humiliating” the EU. The bloc is threatening to impose more sanctions on Moscow, to which the Kremlin has said it is ready to sever relations with the EU if it goes ahead with moves to damage the Russian economy.

Lamentably, Russia and the EU should be natural partners. After all, Russia is the largest country on the continent of Europe and there is huge trade flows between them, especially in the critical energy sector of Russian oil and gas.

However, since the EU enlarged its membership over many preceding years to the current number of 27 states, it can be adjudged to have acquired a more complicated, incoherent and feckless policy towards Russia. A major factor has been the membership of Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Those states joined the EU in 2004 along with six others in what was the biggest expansion episode for the bloc.

Poland and the Baltic states are characterized by politics of intense animosity towards Russia, or what may be called Russophobia. The history of the Soviet Union, their collaboration with Nazi Germany, and the Red Army’s liberation of quisling states all contribute to a dominant reactionary politics in Poland and the Baltic countries. One which is marked by resentment and contempt for Russia.

It is notable that when Josep Borrell returned from his recent trip to Moscow it was mainly politicians from the above states who led the calls for his resignation and the imposition of more sanctions on Russia.

It is these countries which have pushed a whole host of anti-Russia viewpoints, including claims that Moscow has nefarious plans for aggression and posing as an imminent security threat. Washington has taken full advantage of this Russophobia to increase its influence over Europe. Poland and the Baltic states are big proponents of NATO force build-up along Russia’s borders. They also are vehemently opposed to further development of Russian gas supplies through the Nord Stream 2 project while touting for American alternative Liquefied Natural Gas, even though the latter would be much more expensive for consumers, industry and businesses.

The irrational antagonism towards Russia is such that politicians from Poland and the Baltic states are even opposed to the EU registering the use of the Sputnik V vaccine despite its proven efficacy and the outstanding supply problems for vaccinating the EU population. This obdurate mindset is tantamount to cutting your nose off to spite your face.

Mick Wallace, an Irish independent Member of the European Parliament, says the Polish and Baltic politicians are “obsessed” with spouting negative views about Russia. He says though that their influence on European policy is “zero” since France and Germany are the main drivers of policy. Nevertheless, they are an irritant in relations with Russia.

Historically, Wallace says the EU admitted those Eastern European states to its ranks for two reasons: to boost European corporate profits by accessing a pool of cheap labour; and, two, to facilitate the expansion of NATO and the all-important military-industrial complex.

But a “price” for these purported gains was the detriment it would produce for European-Russian relations.

This is reflected in European hypocrisy and duplicity. On the one hand, the EU needs Russia for fueling its societies and economies. On the other hand, anti-Russian bigotry and prejudices are given vent from reactionary, rightwing member states.

Moscow is right to tell the duplicitous Europeans they are unreliable.

Because they are. Reliably unreliable. It is not Russia which is seeking to sever relations. It is the European Union which has constantly undermined and thwarted relations. It takes two to tango.

And understandably Russia has got fed up with being constantly tripped by EU duplicity.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56345.htm

Why I Don’t Criticize Russia, China, Or Other Unabsorbed Governments

Depending on whose political echo chamber I happen to be arguing with on a given day, one common criticism I run into a fair bit which many of my readers have surely also encountered is that I put all my energy into criticizing the foreign policy of the United States and its allies.

“You’re not anti-war, you’re only anti-AMERICAN wars!” they say, as though they’re delivering some kind of devastating slam-dunk point. “If you’re so antiwar, why don’t you criticize Assad’s war in Syria? If you’re such an anti-imperialist, show me where you’ve ever once criticized Russian imperialism, or Chinese imperialism?”

The argument being that someone who opposes US-led warmongering isn’t really motivated by a desire for peace and an opposition to war unless they’re also voicing opposition to all other violent governments in the world. If you’re only criticizing US imperialism and not the imperialism of other nations, you must be motivated by something far more sinister, perhaps a hatred for the United States of America.

I have three responses to this feeble line of argumentation, which I’ll list here for the benefit of anyone else who’d like to make use of them:

1. People making this argument never apply its own logic to themselves.

Nobody criticizes all misdeeds by all governments everywhere in the world. If you run into someone making this “you have to criticize all bad governments or your criticisms are invalid” argument on Twitter, just do an advanced search for their Twitter handle plus “Duterte” or “Sisi” or one of the other US-allied tyrants who the mainstream media haven’t spent years demonizing, and you’ll find that they’ve never made a single mention of those leaders the entire time they’ve had that account.

What this proves, of course, is that they don’t actually practice the belief that all misdeeds by all governments are equally worthy of condemnation. What they actually practice is the belief that one ought to criticize the governments they hear their television criticizing: Russia, China, Syria, Iran, etc. The governments the US State Department and the CIA don’t like. The disobedient governments. The governments which have resisted absorption into the blob of the US-centralized empire.

They don’t put the logic of their own argument into practice because it is impossible to put into practice. Everyone’s only got so much time in the day, so you have to choose where to put your focus. I personally choose to put my focus on the single most egregious offender in warmongering and imperialism. Which takes us to:

2. The US empire is by far the worst warmongering imperialist force on the planet.

US-led regime change interventionism is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful. This is an indisputable fact. Imperialists get very frustrated when I take my stand there in arguments online, because it is an unassailable position. That’s usually when the ad hominems start flying.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56345.htm, but such is the nature of propaganda. It is true that other governments do evil things; as far as I can tell this becomes pretty much a given as soon as a government is allowed to have a military force and keep important secrets from its citizenry. Obviously Russia, China and other unabsorbed governments are no exception to this rule. But the US is worse, by orders of magnitude.

No other nation comes anywhere remotely close. No other nation is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and engaged in dozens of undeclared military operations. No other nation has cultivated a giant globe-sprawling empire in the form of tightly knit alliances with powerful murderous governments like the UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia. No other nation is constantly laboring to sabotage and undermine any government which refuses to be absorbed into military and economic alliance with it using sanctions, staged coups, covert CIA operations, color revolutions, economic manipulations, propaganda, the arming of dissident militias, and launching full-scale military invasions. Only the US and the nations that its cancerous empire has metastasized into are doing anything like that on anywhere near the scale.

So since I, like everyone else, only have enough time in the day to oppose so many different evils in the world, I choose to pour my energy into opposing the single most egregious offender. An offender which doesn’t get nearly enough opposition, in my opinion. 

3. I have a special responsibility for the evils of the empire in which I live.

When asked in an interview why he spends the bulk of his time criticizing his own government, Noam Chomsky replied:

“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”

When people here in Australia ask about what I do for a living, I sometimes jokingly tell them I write about Australian foreign policy, which means that I write about US foreign policy. I’ve written many times about how Australia functions as Washington’s basement gimp, an impotent vassal which functions as little more than a US military/intelligence asset in terms of meaningful international affairs.

So all I really am doing here is applying Chomsky’s philosophy to the reality of an empire in which sovereign nations do not exist to any meaningful extent; as a member of a state within that empire I focus on US government malfeasance in the same way I would if I were living in Alaska or Hawaii.

All I’m doing is pointing my personal skill set at what I see as the biggest problem in the world: a murderous empire in which I happen to reside and therefore bear special responsibility for opposing. Which is simply the only sane stand for anyone to take, in my opinion.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56338.htm

NATO’s Mission Impossible

NATO defense ministers were this week reportedly trying to thrash out a new, updated mission for the military alliance. Less charitably, the organization is desperately seeking to find a purpose for its continuing existence.

The 30-nation military bloc has a combined annual spend of over $1 trillion, with the United States accounting for nearly three-quarters of that budget, allocating around $740 billion alone on its military.

The videoconference held this week is the first time that the new Biden administration has officially engaged with NATO allies. Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, addressed the forum to lay out President Biden’s supposed priority of reinvigorating relations with allies, which had become frayed during the previous Trump administration.

But the message sounds pretty much like the same old Washington mantra: NATO members have to spend more, more, more in order to counter the alleged threats from Russia and China. It’s like listening to a broken record or digital loop.

The only difference is one of style, not substance. Whereas Trump was abrasive and acerbic in telling NATO members to cough up, the Biden administration is more polite in its rhetoric, cooing about the importance of the “transatlantic partnership” and promising to be more collegiate in strategic decision-making.

Essentially, however, it’s the same old racket of America goading European nations to spend more money to prop up the military-industrial complex which is the life-support machine for defunct capitalism. The Americans need Europeans to keep buying their warplanes and missile systems in order to keep US capitalism functioning.

It’s quite a tough sell though, in this global climate of economic hardships and immense, burgeoning social challenges. How to justify spending $1 trillion every year on non-productive war machines?
Well, of course, the cheerleaders for NATO – principally the Americans – have to reinvent enemies like China and Russia in order to justify the existence of such an extravagant militarized economy which would otherwise be rightly seen as an insanely detrimental drain on nations’ resources.

Nevertheless, the bogeyman charade has increasingly serious conceptual shortcomings. First and foremost it is not true: neither Russia nor China are enemies seeking to destroy Western nations. Secondly, the charade does not stand up to logic. The total NATO military spend is about four times the combined budgets of Russia and China. Yet we are expected to believe that these two countries are threatening a bloc of 30 nations despite the former spending a fraction on military.

Another conceptual problem for NATO salesmen is that the organization was born nearly eight decades ago at the start of the Cold War. Today’s world is vastly different, reflecting an increasing multipolar integration of economies, politics and communications.

Just this week, new trade figures show that China has overtaken the United States as the number one trading partner with the European Union.

China, Russia and the trend of Eurasian economic cooperation is the future of global development.
And the Europeans – despite still occasional deference to Washington – know that. At the end of last year, the European Union concluded a landmark investment accord with China which came about in spite of Washington’s objections.

Indeed, the days are numbered for America bullying and extorting its NATO allies through peddling scary stories about foreign enemies. The world can no longer afford such crass wasting of resources amid so many other more important social needs. It is becoming politically impossible to continue selling the NATO racket.

The “evil world” depicted by American conspiracists/politicians does not correspond to the reality that most other people can recognize. Yes, there are diehard Cold War mindsets lurking in Europe, such as NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the Russophobic politicians of Poland and the Baltic states. But they a flaky minority on the margins.

Common sense awareness among most citizens is exposing NATO to be a relic of the past that has no purpose in today’s world and with all its pressing social needs. Germany and France, the most powerful drivers of Europe’s economy, are less enamored with Washington, even under a seemingly more friendly Democrat president.

The Biden administration may sound slightly more plausible and genial compared with its Trump predecessor. But demanding others to spend more on useless militarism and to antagonize vital trading partners China and Russia is mission impossible for the US-led NATO. The contradictions in NATO’s cognitive dissonance with the real world are so palpable it is no longer credible nor viable as an organization.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb21/poisoned-America2-21.html

What Poisoned America?

The list of suspects is long: systemic bias, special interests dominating politics, political polarization, globalization and the offshoring of productive capacity, over-regulation, the rise of rapacious cartels and monopolies, Big Tech's gulag of the mind, the permanent adolescence of consumerism, permanent global war, to name a few.

The question boils down to this: what problems cannot be addressed by the status quo? Most of the ills listed above can be addressed with existing mechanisms of governance and adaptation. For example, consider systemic bias. The U.S. Armed Forces have demonstrably led the way in dramatically reducing systemic bias via performance-based advancement. The rest of America would do well to copy these organizational improvements.

Many of the other ills could be addressed within current systems of governance--antitrust, etc.

The two that appear impervious to reform are 1) soaring wealth-income-power inequality and 2) the dominance of special interests. In both cases, the corporate foxes are guarding the hen house, so any reforms with real teeth are watered down to PR by those reaping the vast majority of the financial gains. Corporate profits are in the billions while you can buy elected officials' cooperation for mere millions. There is no way to get around that asymmetry.

I would propose an even deeper systemic poison: zero-interest yield on capital. For a variety of reasons, the yield on capital is either zero or less than zero if we factor in inflation. We now earn (heh) 0.1% on our cash while inflation is somewhere between the "official" rate of 3% and more real-world measures between 5% and 10%.

This is a significant change from the days when savings (in savings and loans institutions) earned 5.25% by regulation.

While ordinary capital earns nothing (or less than zero), the capital and income of the top 0.01% has rocketed to unprecedented levels. This vast asymmetry is poisoning America, and the financial system, from the Federal Reserve on down, is incapable of addressing it other than making it even more distorted and destructive by doing more of what's failed spectacularly.

To understand why yields on capital have fallen to zero while wealth-income has flowed to the top elites, we need to look at wages share of the economy and capital's share of the economy. Wages share (i.e. labors' share) has been falling for the past 45 years, while corporate profits and the wealth of America's top tier has soared. (see chart below)

It is not coincidence that as interest rates fell to zero the wealth and income of the top 0.01% soared while ordinary wage income fell 10% when adjusted for the purchasing power of the earnings.

A recent report prepared by the RAND Corporation, Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018, documents that $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to owners of capital from the bottom 90% of American households in the past 45 years.

What happens when the purchasing power of the earnings of the bottom 90% declines for decades? (Even high-earners such as doctors have experienced a decline in the purchasing power of their earnings since 1975.) Households cannot borrow as much money as they once could because their earnings simply don't go as far; there is less disposable income to support more debt service.

What happens when corporate profits skyrocket as jobs are offshored and corporations arbitrage all the goodies of globalization? The corporations don't need to borrow as much money as they have trillions in profits to work with.

In other words, demand for credit stagnates while at the same time, the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with near-zero rate credit. Demand has stagnated along with wages while supply has rocketed into the trillions thanks to unprecedented central bank credit creation.

The reason why central banks have slashed rates to zero is obvious: if the bottom 90% can't borrow more money at 5% to consume more goods and services, they can certainly borrow more at 1.5% because the interest part of their monthly payment drops significantly.

And sure enough, crushing rates to near-zero has triggered refinancing/housing bubbles and generated high auto-truck sales based on a few dollars down and 1.9% auto financing.

In other words: as the purchasing power of wages has relentlessly declined, the "fix" is to substitute debt for earnings. The fact that eventually stagnating earnings cannot support more debt at any rate of interest is inconvenient, so it's been ignored.

Zero-interest rates has played out differently in Corporate America: since capital is so cheap to borrow, why not borrow a few billion dollars at 1.5% and use the money to buy back shares of the company's stock, which generates a hefty 10% annual increase in the share price? Indeed, why not?

And why not use that cheap capital to automate tasks to reduce costly American labor and move even more staff overseas to low-wage nations? Indeed, why not? Maximizing profits demands it, and the near-zero cost of capital incentivizes it.

The net result of near-zero yields on capital? The top 0.1% own more wealth than the bottom 80%. Roughly 75% of all income gains have gone to the top 0.01%.

This extreme asymmetry has poisoned American society and its economy. This immense distortion in the cost of capital can best be understood by asking: what happens when a resource is free?

The answer is that it's squandered. But the squandering is only part of the problem.

Consider what happened when air and water were "free". Both the air and water became toxic waste dumps, and American rivers infamously caught on fire. The same is true of "free" capital: America's financial system is nothing more than a toxic waste dump of extreme speculation, fraud, collusion, corruption and rampant profiteering.

The rivers are on fire but the Federal Reserve's plan remains the same: keep the cost of capital at "free" so the extremes of speculation can run to failure. The run to failure will be as extreme as the asymmetries that have poisoned America. 

....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/56344.htm

Next Up: Global Depression

A few days after the Covid pandemic was officially announced last year on 1/23/20, I prepared a chart projecting the course of the pandemic. In my view it still stands, with two updates: "vaccines months away" has been updated to "mass vaccinations months away" and "Wave 2" has been updated to "Wave 4." (see chart below)

The end-point--global depression--is up next. Very few are prepared for this eventuality because they put their faith in 1) central banks pursuing an insane folly and 2) a fragile, brittle global economy that was already teetering on the edge of destabilization before the pandemic.

Here's the central banks' insane folly in a nutshell: to create new enterprises and jobs, we'll blow the world's greatest speculative bubble into an even greater speculative bubble. So in other words, we'll further enrich the top layer of the Financial Aristocracy who own the vast majority of the assets we're pushing to the moon, and by some inexplicable magic, adding trillions of dollars, yuan, yen and euros to the wealth of this elite will somehow launch a thousand new thriving enterprises which will magically hire 500,000 new workers every month.

Can we be honest for a split second and admit that the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus look plausible compared to this insane proposition? Since there's a tiny window of honesty open, let's also admit that adding a booster rocket to the wealth-income inequality that is undermining democracy, society and the economy is exactly what we'd choose to do if our goal was destroying America. Yet this is precisely what the entire Federal Reserve policy sets out to do: boost wealth-income inequality to new extremes.

Meanwhile, global supply chains that were optimized for Globalization Heaven are incredibly brittle and fragile as a result of the optimization. Optimizing for maximizing profit means getting rid of redundancies, buffers, quality control and ramping dependence on offshore suppliers to 100%.

If you set out to design a global supply system that would fail catastrophically, creating self-reinforcing shortages of essentials and key components, you'd choose the system now teetering on the edge of implosion. Optimization is wonderful for boosting profits when everything is priced to perfection and functioning to perfection, but when reality intrudes, you find you've stripped out all those costly, unnecessary bits that enabled the supply chain to deal with a spot of bother.

Unfortunately for the central bankers, their policy of giving trillions in free money for financiers and speculators is suffering from diminishing returns: where $100 billion once had a significant effect on financial markets, now $1 trillion no longer has any effect at all, and so the only dose that causes the patient's eyelids to flicker briefly is $3 trillion--no wait a minute, make that $5 trillion, nope, not enough, make it $10 trillion, yikes, still not enough, pump in $20 trillion!

I prepared a chart (below) which depicts how diminishing returns on inflating speculative asset bubbles leads the global financial system to a cliff from which there is no return.

Though few seem to be aware of it, we're tottering on that cliff edge. The final manifestation of central bankers' insane folly is the promise that endless wealth can be yours if only you join the speculative extremes racing over the cliff. Maybe the immense herd of speculators will all magically grow wings once they're in free-fall; that's no more insane than counting on speculative asset bubbles to magically create real enterprises and jobs.

This madness is now global, so next up: global depression. The story of the past year hasn't changed: blowing an even bigger speculative asset bubble is the sure cure; the latest "fix" to the pandemic will make it go away forever and ever, and everything that was broken before the pandemic will magically be restored by the magic of ever larger and more precarious speculative asset bubbles.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/techno_censorship_the_slippery_slope_from_censoring_disinformation_to_silencing_truth

Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope from Censoring ‘Disinformation’ to Silencing Truth

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell

This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.

Then the internet censors got involved and went after extremists spouting “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden, and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shunned for appearing to disagree with the majority.

By the time the techno-censors went after extremists spouting “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists. Still, few spoke out.

Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices such as Donald Trump, Alex Jones, David Icke and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

The question is not whether the content of their speech was legitimate.

The concern is what happens after such prominent targets are muzzled. What happens once the corporate techno-censors turn their sights on the rest of us?

It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

We are on a fast-moving trajectory.

Already, there are calls for the Biden administration to appoint a “reality czar” in order to tackle disinformation, domestic extremism and the nation’s so-called “reality crisis.”

Knowing what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like Trump or any of the others who are being muzzled, nor do you have to agree or even sympathize with their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship would be dangerously naïve.

As Matt Welch, writing for Reason, rightly points out, “Proposed changes to government policy should always be visualized with the opposing team in charge of implementation.”

In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Welcome to the age of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best. Certainly, Facebook and Twitter have become the modern-day equivalents of public squares, traditional free speech forums, with the internet itself serving as a public utility.

But what does that mean for free speech online: should it be protected or regulated?

When given a choice, the government always goes for the option that expands its powers at the expense of the citizenry’s. Moreover, when it comes to free speech activities, regulation is just another word for censorship.

Right now, it’s trendy and politically expedient to denounce, silence, shout down and shame anyone whose views challenge the prevailing norms, so the tech giants are lining up to appease their shareholders.

This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority—exactly the menace to free speech that James Madison sought to prevent when he drafted the First Amendment to the Constitution—marching in lockstep with technofascism.

With intolerance as the new scarlet letter of our day, we now find ourselves ruled by the mob.

Those who dare to voice an opinion or use a taboo word or image that runs counter to the accepted norms are first in line to be shamed, shouted down, silenced, censored, fired, cast out and generally relegated to the dust heap of ignorant, mean-spirited bullies who are guilty of various “word crimes” and banished from society.

For example, a professor at Duquesne University was fired for using the N-word in an academic context. To get his job back, Gary Shank will have to go through diversity training and restructure his lesson plans.

This is what passes for academic freedom in America today.

If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).

No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.

We are almost at that point now.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

Nothing good can come from techno-censorship.

Again, to quote Greenwald:

Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation. The promise of the internet from the start was that it would be a tool of liberation, of egalitarianism, by permitting those without money and power to compete on fair terms in the information war with the most powerful governments and corporations. But just as is true of allowing the internet to be converted into a tool of coercion and mass surveillance, nothing guts that promise, that potential, like empowering corporate overlords and unaccountable monopolists to regulate and suppress what can be heard.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Therefore, it is important to recognize the thought prison that is being built around us for what it is: a prison with only one route of escape—free thinking and free speaking in the face of tyranny.

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https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/79314/understanding-the-dangers-of-innovation-zones-and-smart.html

Understanding The Dangers Of Innovation Zones And Smart Cities

Following the news that Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak plans to launch so-called “Innovation Zones” where tech companies can create their own cities and governments, privacy advocates are responding with fear and concern.

During his State of the State address in mid-January, Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak noted that the state is suffering because of the COVID-19 restrictions and the effect on tourism. Sisolak called on the launch of “Innovation Zones”, a plan aimed at bringing companies working on “groundbreaking technologies” to Nevada and turning the state into the “epicenter of this emerging industry and creating the high paying jobs and revenue that go with it.” However, in these Innovation Zones, corporations are given the power to collect taxes, and essentially, operate as a quasi-independent government.

While the full plan for the Innovation Zones has yet to be released, The Las Vegas Review-Journal obtained a draft copy of proposed legislation which would grant tech corporations previously unheard of powers within the jurisdiction of these zones. The draft of the legislation states that traditional local governments are “inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries.” In response, the draft calls for an “alternative form of local government”.

This “alternative form of local government” will be built around the use of innovative technologies, including:

• • Blockchain
  • Autonomous technology
  • Internet of Things
  • Robotics
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Wireless technology
  • Biometrics
  • Renewable resources

While the zones would at first operate under the authority of the county in which they are located, the legislation describes how tech companies could use Innovation Zones to form their own separate government that would act as the equivalent to a county authority. These zones would have the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and local court systems, and provide government services. The zone would have a board of supervisors with the same powers as a board of county commissioners.

During his State of the State address, Sisolak noted that Blockchains, LLC was committed to developing a “smart city” east of Reno which would run on blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is essentially a digital ledger that cannot be altered. The concept was first popularized because of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Digital tech experts have been predicting for years that blockchain technology would revolutionize our world by integrating with various industries. Some blockchain enthusiasts believe the technology could remove the need for centralized institutions, like banks and governments. Others worry that the use of blockchain will lead to a future where every interaction is logged on a public blockchain.

Blockchains CEO Jeffrey Berns has been promoting his vision of a blockchain smart city since 2018, when the company purchased 67,000 acres of land in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, which also houses Google and Tesla. Berns first revealed his plans for the blockchain city in November 2018 at the Prague Blockchain Week event.

“Imagine a world where anybody, anywhere can collaborate, establish the rules of that collaboration, enforce those rules, exchange value, and do it all on the blockchain,” Berns said during his talk. “No government. No bank. No corporation. Just trusting in math.”

While Berns claims to be concerned with the growth of Big Tech companies and aims to use blockchain to eliminate the need for banks, corporations, or governments – ideas which are popular among libertarians and crypto-anarchists – his company also describes a vision where all life is placed on the blockchain. The Blockchains website describes how smart devices could be connected to a blockchain:

“By connecting smart devices to a blockchain – from smartphones and computers to internet-enabled cars, smart locks, advanced manufacturing machines, and security systems – we can facilitate marketplaces, payment services, or even a sharing economy for the Internet of Things. This makes possible not just peer-to-peer transactions, but even machine-to-machine payments for services, from tollbooth payments to battery storage, consumption, and trading. Best of all, because these interactions are on a blockchain, they will not rely on financial intermediaries or be subject to the security risks inherent in centralized data storage systems.”

Of course, blockchains are a tool. As with any tool their purpose is defined by the person wielding or creating the tool. A blockchain can be created with privacy, transparency, and speed in mind. Additionally, a developer could create a blockchain where every interaction is stored and publicly available for any company, government, or individual to see. What matters is how the technology is applied. Berns may care about privacy and have a desire to eliminate centralized authorities, but not all blockchains are equal and it seems inevitable that less savory actors will come along and attempt to use blockchain, Innovation Zones, and “smart cities” for the purposes of monitoring and controlling the population within the city.

For example, it has been reported that the infamous Bill Gates and his investment firm Belmont Partners purchased a 25,000-acre plot of land near Arizona for $80 million. Gates and Belmont Partners plan to built a smart city named “Belmont”. Details on what exactly will take place within Belmont are scarce, but Gates has said he intends to grow the population to nearly 200,000 people in the coming years. However, based on Gates’ role in the COVID-19 operation, his plans to control farmland, block out the sun, genetically engineer the food supply, and vaccinate the world, it seems unlikely that Belmont will be a place that values privacy and individual liberty.

The Danger of Smart Cities and the Lack of Privacy Protections

The smart city trend is apparently rising as more corporations and local governments are seeking to partner together in various types of special economic or innovation zones. India has pledged to build 100 smart cities, Africa is seeing $100 billion pumped into at least 20 projects, and China reportedly has as many as 500 of its own smart city pilots. Saudi Arabia has also jumped into the fray with Neom, a $500 billion project that could one day rival Silicon Valley. The city will be larger than New York City and is being promoted as the center for “the next era of human progress”.

Clearly, smart cities are not going away. However, what is often not mentioned is that these smart, autonomous cities also involve massive invasions of privacy, and in some cases, giving up the right to drive or own a vehicle.

One current example of a so-called “smart city’ is the Songdo International Business District (Songdo IBD), a 1,500 acre stretch of land along the Incheon waterfront, just 20 miles southwest of Seoul, South Korea. The project was built from the ground up on reclaimed land at a cost of about $35 million. The Guardian previously described Songdo as, “a place where the garbage is automatically sucked away through underground pipes, where lampposts are always watching you, and where your apartment block knows to send the elevator down to greet you when it detects the arrival of your car. Sensors in every street track traffic flow and send alerts to your phone when it’s going to snow, while you can monitor the children’s playground on TV from the comfort of your sofa.”

Songdo was designed not simply as a smart city, but a “ubiquitous city”, a smart city with “ubiquitous” technology. A city where computers and sensors are built into the buildings and streets, sensors are gathering information on daily life, traffic, and energy consumption. As WorldCrunch described it, “In Songdo, everything has a “U” in front of it: U-traffic, U-safety, U-governance, U-health, and of course U-entertainment. The “U” stands for “ubiquitous,” omnipresent. In other words: Big Brother is here.”

According to the “International Case Studies of Smart Cities: Songdo, Republic of Korea”, Songdo offers a number of safety and environmental measures to make life safer and more sustainable. However, there is no mention of privacy protections or the implications of having a living city that is connected to the grid and listening to it’s citizens on a daily basis. The report states that, “Songdo U-City collects 24-hour real-time data from on-site equipment such as CCTV, various sensor devices, traffic detectors.”

Additionally, there is a central command center where all “footage from crime prevention, disaster prevention, environment, and traffic surveillance cameras” is monitored to provide useful information to the citizens. Internet of Things sensors installed in houses and building are also designed to provide “real-time information to users, of how much energy has been consumed and what measures can be taken to minimize utility bill.” The plan for Songdo also envisions a driverless city where residents use ride sharing services like SOCAR exclusively.

Again, there is no mention of privacy or data protections for the residents of Songdo. However, we already have examples of how a lack of privacy protections can be disastrous for residents of Smart Cities.

Quayside is a planned smart city that has been in the works since 2016. Located on 12 acres of waterfront property southeast of downtown Toronto, Canada, Quayside represents a joint effort by the Canadian government agency, Waterfront Toronto, and Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. Sidewalk Labs claims Quayside will solve traffic congestion, rising home prices and environmental pollution. Unfortunately, residents of Quayside will be using a centralized identity management system through which they access public services, such as library cards and health care. This means their data will be highly centralized, leaving it open to access by hackers and law enforcement. In fact, Quayside has consistently faced pushback due to a failure to build-in the necessary privacy protections.

At least two officials involved in the project have resigned. Saadia Muzaffar resigned from Waterfront Toronto in protest after the board showed “apathy and a lack of leadership regarding shaky public trust.” In October 2018, Ann Cavoukian, one of Canada’s leading privacy experts and Ontario’s former privacy commissioner, also resigned from the project. Cavoukian was brought on by Sidewalk Toronto as a consultant to help install a “privacy by design” framework. She was initially told that all data collected from residents would be deleted and rendered unidentifiable. She later learned that third parties would have access to identifiable information gathered at Quayside.

“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “I have to resign because you committed to embedding privacy by design into every aspect of your operation.”

The fears around Quayside grew in late October 2019, when The Globe and Mail reported that previously unseen documents from Sidewalk Labs detailed how people living in a Sidewalk community would interact with and have access to the space around them. This experience in the proposed smart city largely depends on how much data you’re willing to share, which could be used to reward or punish people for their behavior.

Although the document – known internally as the “yellow book” – was designed as a pitch book for the company and predates Sidewalk’s formal agreements with the City of Toronto, it does provide a vision of what the Google sister company would like to do. Specifically, the document details how Sidewalk will require tax and financing authority to finance and provide services, including the ability to “impose, capture and reinvest property taxes.” The company would also create and control its public services, including charter schools, special transit systems and a private road infrastructure.

The document also describes reputation-based tools that sound disturbingly similar to the social credit system we have seen in TV shows like Black Mirror and those unfolding in modern China. These tools would lead to a “new currency for community co-operation,” effectively establishing a social credit system. Sidewalk could use these tools to “hold people or businesses accountable” while rewarding good behavior with easier access to loans and public services.

In response to the document leaks, Sidewalk spokesperson Keerthana Rang said, “The ideas contained in this 2016 internal paper represent the result of a wide-ranging brainstorming process very early in the company’s history.”

Perhaps due in part to the push back against privacy invasions, in November 2019 Sidewalk Labs released a 482-page Digital Innovation Appendix stating that none of Quayside’s systems will incorporate facial recognition, and that Sidewalk Labs won’t sell personal information or use it for advertising. Sidewalk Labs says it will require explicit consent to share personal information with third parties.

Whether Sidewalk Labs, Blockchains LLC, Bill Gates, and others’ involved in the creation of Smart Cities will respect individual privacy remains to be seen. Regardless, the importance of these protections cannot be overstated. In April 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union released a guide detailing important questions that should be asked by city officials seeking to join the Smart City craze. The guide, “How to Prevent Smart Cities from Turning to Surveillance Cities”, was written by Matt Cagle, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

In a previous interview, Cagle told me that “smart city technology can be a wolf in sheep’s clothing” because “it can be another way for the government to amass information that it may not have wanted to collect for law enforcement purposes.”

“This technology is often going to be collected by companies that have developed it,” Cagle continued. “So it’s really important for the city and the community to be on the same page about who’s going to own this data as we go forward with this project, who’s going to be able to sell this data, and at the end of the day are communities in control of these technologies.”

Smart Cities Are Only The Beginning

In early February, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the government will invest $8.8 billion into South Korea’s “smart city” project nationwide by 2025. “The key to smart cities is to establish an intelligence-type city operation system by utilizing urban data collected from CCTVs and sensors,” Moon said in his speech at the Smart City Integrated Operation Center of Songdo. “First, (the government) will realize ‘smart cities’ nationwide more speedily and digitalize the public infrastructure, like roads and railways.”

With the exporting of smart city models from Korea and recent announcements about building a smart “eco-city” in Singapore, it appears the smart city trend is not going anywhere. For the moment, these innovation zones and smart cities are simply marketing tools designed to bring people and money to the newly created cities. They are voluntary, with people freely choosing to live there and to leave if they are unhappy. However, with the understanding that the goal is to turn all cities into “smart cities”, we need to ask what happens if the smart grid is everywhere and there is nowhere to go.

In a future where all towns and cities are outfitted with the latest smart tech, fighting to maintain privacy and freedom of movement is crucial. It’s also important to understand the “innovation zones”, “special economic zones”, and “smart cities” in the context of the World Economic Forum’s “The Great Reset” vision. How do these emerging technologies and concepts play a role in fomenting the centralized, authoritarian vision imagined by the talking heads at the WEF?

In my next investigation I will further illustrate how the push for Smart Cities is directly related to Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and the push towards a Great Reset.

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Smart Cities/ mass surveillance of everything, everywhere, all the time....Big Brother on steroids