It is sad that there are what you might call professional Catholics who make a living on their Catholicism, but in whom the spring of faith flows only faintly, in a few scattered drops. We must really make an effort to change this.
Distinction Matter - Subscribed Feeds
-
Site: Zero HedgeContracts Between US Universities, China Total More Than $2 Billion: InvestigationTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 20:45
By Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix
Report comes amid concerns about CCP’s influence, human rights violations...
American universities have entered more than $2.3 billion in contracts with China in the past decade amid on-going concerns about the influence of its communist government on U.S. higher education, a new investigation found.
These contracts included agricultural research regarding orange crops, trainings for airline pilots, and medical trials for a tumor treatment drug developed by a Chinese pharmaceutical company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The investigation uncovered approximately 2,900 contracts from 2012 and 2024 between Chinese businesses and about 200 U.S. public colleges and universities in all 50 states.
Some involved specialized training, such as $37 million in contracts between Chinese airlines and the University of North Dakota to train and license pilots.
Another $1.8 million in contracts with China’s Institute of Navel Orange at Gannan Normal University and the University of Florida involved researching tree genetics and diseases affecting citrus fruit, according to the investigation.
But others were less specific.
For example, “all three of China’s major government-owned oil companies have funded contracts for $100,000 or more at the University of Texas at Austin, which the school describes only as ‘research activity,’” the investigation found.
The report continued:
Some of the biggest-value China contracts feature franchise-type arrangements for overseas satellite campuses. New York University, which the Education Department database shows has been the largest single recipient of Chinese funding, reported two contracts totaling over $46.5 million for 2021 alone for its Shanghai branch.
The Juilliard School has disclosed over $133 million in such funding over more than a decade for its Tianjin Juilliard School near Beijing, appointed with some 120 Steinway pianos.
These partnerships have U.S. politicians, academics, and students concerned. The Chinese Communist Party has been accused of numerous human rights abuses, from free speech censorship to forced labor and torture to genocide of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority population.
According to the report:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies warn that China’s state has encouraged theft of technological secrets at universities, spread pro-Beijing propaganda, stifled campus debate and harassed students.
Beijing dismisses such characterizations. Its officials say ethnic Chinese students and professors have been unfairly targeted in the U.S., including on American campuses, and urged the U.S. to be mindful of its reputation for academic freedom. The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to detailed questions about the university contracts.
American defense officials raised similar concerns about China and artificial intelligence technology in a 2021 report by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
“China’s domestic use of AI is a chilling precedent for anyone around the world who cherishes individual liberty,” the report stated.
Meanwhile, the Athenai Institute, a bipartisan student-led organization, is urging U.S. universities to divest from Chinese government-controlled entities, The College Fix reported this month.
Lawmakers also have been taking action. In 2023, for example, Florida enacted a law restricting public universities and colleges “from accepting grants from or participating in partnerships or agreements” with China and other foreign countries “of concern.”
-
Site: Zero HedgeContracts Between US Universities, China Total More Than $2 Billion: InvestigationTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 20:45
By Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix
Report comes amid concerns about CCP’s influence, human rights violations...
American universities have entered more than $2.3 billion in contracts with China in the past decade amid on-going concerns about the influence of its communist government on U.S. higher education, a new investigation found.
These contracts included agricultural research regarding orange crops, trainings for airline pilots, and medical trials for a tumor treatment drug developed by a Chinese pharmaceutical company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The investigation uncovered approximately 2,900 contracts from 2012 and 2024 between Chinese businesses and about 200 U.S. public colleges and universities in all 50 states.
Some involved specialized training, such as $37 million in contracts between Chinese airlines and the University of North Dakota to train and license pilots.
Another $1.8 million in contracts with China’s Institute of Navel Orange at Gannan Normal University and the University of Florida involved researching tree genetics and diseases affecting citrus fruit, according to the investigation.
But others were less specific.
For example, “all three of China’s major government-owned oil companies have funded contracts for $100,000 or more at the University of Texas at Austin, which the school describes only as ‘research activity,’” the investigation found.
The report continued:
Some of the biggest-value China contracts feature franchise-type arrangements for overseas satellite campuses. New York University, which the Education Department database shows has been the largest single recipient of Chinese funding, reported two contracts totaling over $46.5 million for 2021 alone for its Shanghai branch.
The Juilliard School has disclosed over $133 million in such funding over more than a decade for its Tianjin Juilliard School near Beijing, appointed with some 120 Steinway pianos.
These partnerships have U.S. politicians, academics, and students concerned. The Chinese Communist Party has been accused of numerous human rights abuses, from free speech censorship to forced labor and torture to genocide of the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority population.
According to the report:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies warn that China’s state has encouraged theft of technological secrets at universities, spread pro-Beijing propaganda, stifled campus debate and harassed students.
Beijing dismisses such characterizations. Its officials say ethnic Chinese students and professors have been unfairly targeted in the U.S., including on American campuses, and urged the U.S. to be mindful of its reputation for academic freedom. The Chinese Embassy in Washington didn’t respond to detailed questions about the university contracts.
American defense officials raised similar concerns about China and artificial intelligence technology in a 2021 report by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.
“China’s domestic use of AI is a chilling precedent for anyone around the world who cherishes individual liberty,” the report stated.
Meanwhile, the Athenai Institute, a bipartisan student-led organization, is urging U.S. universities to divest from Chinese government-controlled entities, The College Fix reported this month.
Lawmakers also have been taking action. In 2023, for example, Florida enacted a law restricting public universities and colleges “from accepting grants from or participating in partnerships or agreements” with China and other foreign countries “of concern.”
-
Site: Community in Mission
On this fourth Sunday of Easter, we turn a corner of sorts. Up until now we have been reading of the resurrection appearances themselves. Today we begin to see how the risen Lord ministers to us as the Good Shepherd. In effect, the Lord gives us four basic pictures or teachings of how, as the King of Love, He shepherds us. Here, then, are four portraits of His love:
Passionate love – Jesus says, I am the Good Shepherd, a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. Purely gratuitous love is a hard thing to come by in human relationships. In one sense we are too needy to be able to give it purely. In another sense our motives tend to be a mixture of self-love and love of the other. This is our human condition, and few of us rise above it in a consistent way.
But Jesus loves us purely, gratuitously, and for our own sake. His love is passionate in the sense that it is sacrificial. He lays down His life for us, doing it though we are still sinners and often alienated from Him. He dies for us though we cursed, mocked, and ridiculed Him. He loves us and lays down His life for us though He gets nothing out of it.
Hired shepherds, on the other hand, work for pay; above all else they seek their own good. When there is a danger to the sheep, hired shepherds will not risk themselves to rescue the sheep. Theirs is a service based on pay; it is subordinated to their own needs and safety.
Only one Shepherd died for you. In this world there are many politicians, musicians, movie stars, and organizations that seek our loyalty, our votes, our membership, and our dues. They also make us promises in return, even as they want to influence us and exercise leadership over us. None of this is necessarily wrong. People form relationships and seek leaders for any number of reasons. But note this important difference: none of these leaders or “shepherds” ever died for you. Only Jesus died for you.
There remains this problem: many Christians have greater loyalty to political leaders, musicians, movies stars, and the like than to Jesus Christ. Too many people tuck their faith under their politics, giving greater credence to what popular figures say than to what Jesus says in His Word and through His Church.
Only Jesus died for you. Human beings too easily bring along their own needs and agendas. Only Jesus Christ loves you perfectly; only He died for you. Only He is deserving of the role of Chief Shepherd of your life.
Personal love – Jesus says, I know my sheep and mine know me. No one knows you the way Jesus Christ does, because He knew you before He ever formed you in your mother’s womb (cf Jer 1:4). He has always thought about you; He created you; He knit you together in your mother’s womb and every one of your days was written in His book before one of them ever came to be (cf Ps 139).
Jesus also says that His sheep know Him. And that is both our invitation and our call. We often like to quote the 23rd Psalm “The Lord is my Shepherd.” But this is not a slogan, nor is it merely a psalm of consolation. It is a psalm of confession: that I am one of the Lord’s sheep. The Lord says, “My sheep know me.” He does not say that we merely know about Him.
Do you know Him? To be in the Lord’s flock is to be in a life-changing, transformative relationship with the Lord. To know the Lord is to see our life changed by that very relationship. It is to know the voice of Jesus and be able to distinguish it from others. As Jesus says elsewhere: [The Shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice. (John 10:3-5). Are you smarter than a sheep? Do you run from other voices contrary to Jesus?
Now be very careful as well for many today have wanted to remake and refashion the true Jesus of Scripture and thereby distort his voice. On of the most common ways this is done is to screen our his less pleasant teachings such as when he warns (alot) about judgment and hell or says “woe.” Another was is to set up a false dichotomy between the Gospels and the Epistles. And thus it is often said that Jesus never said anything about homosexuality, etc. Yes, he did, in numerous places, through his apostles whom he commissioned to speak in his name. He said to them, “He who hears you hears me.” Further never wrote a book or a word. He entrusted his entire teaching to his apostles to preach, teach and write in his name.
The Gospels and epistles have the same level of authority and are inspired and authored by the same Holy Spirit. To say that Jesus never said something but only Paul (or James or John or Peter) is to set up a false dichotomy. To hear an apostle speak in either the Gospel (for the apostles and evangelists wrote the Gospels) or the epistles is always to hear Jesus who said: Whoever listens to you listens to me; whoever rejects you rejects me; but whoever rejects me rejects him who sent me. (Luke 10:16) and also, You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.” (Acts 1:8)
Be very careful therefore of those who try to distort the voice of Jesus by limiting it. The Apostles and Evangelists spoke for him in toto and Jesus continues to speak in the doctrinal teachings of the Church and the living voice of his magisterium which apply his word given through he apostles.
Persistent love – The Lord says, I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold, These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd. Jesus is not content merely to shepherd a few thousand Jewish disciples in the Holy Land. He wants His love to spread to the whole world. He wants to embrace and hold close everyone He has ever made. He wants to call every human person into a saving relationship.
Part of our journey as disciples, as sheep of the Lord, is to experience the call to evangelize. But that call will only take flight when Christ’s love for all people fills our heart.
Christ has a persistent love to embrace and hold everyone close to Him. Do you sense that love? He wants to draw others to Himself, through you. Many people leave the work of evangelizing and growing the flock to the priest. But shepherds don’t have sheep, sheep have sheep.
Powerful love – Jesus says, I lay down my life, in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, I lay it down on my own. I have the power to lay it down, and I have the power to take it up again.
We see how Jesus does this for Himself. But as Lord and Shepherd of our life He does it for us, too. Our old self was crucified and died with Him. We have also risen with Him to new life. And this life is the totally new and transformed life that Christ died to give us.
He has the power to crucify our old and sinful self as well as the power to raise it up again. And it is not merely our old self that rises; it is a new and transformed humanity that the Lord takes up on our behalf. He has the ability to do this, for His love powerful.
I am a witness of this and I pray that you are as well. He has the power!
Thus, as King of Love, Jesus the Risen Lord shepherds us with a love that is passionate, personal, persistent, and powerful. No one loves you more than Jesus does, with His Father and the Holy Spirit. He is the King of Love and He is your Shepherd.
Here is the final line of the beautiful hymn “The King of Love My Shepherd Is.”
The post Lord and Shepherd – A Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter appeared first on Community in Mission.
-
Site: Zero HedgeSecurities Analyst Jobs In China Are "Permanently" DisappearingTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 20:10
The days of million dollar analyst jobs in the securities industry in China look to be all but gone.
That was the topic of a new Bloomberg article last week which detailed exactly how the industry is "retrenching after years of expansion". Bloomberg's description of the industry's cutbacks is based on discussions with about 20 analysts and former analysts, who chose to remain anonymous or only use their first names.
These reductions are occurring amidst a prolonged market downturn that has lowered trading commissions and increased regulatory restrictions on research publications. It marks a significant shift from previous years when brokerages were actively recruiting and offering substantial salaries to top analysts.
Several senior analysts at Shanghai's state-owned Guotai Junan Securities resigned following pay cuts and stricter performance requirements, the article points out.
Another Shenzhen-based brokerage cut 40% of its analyst staff and reduced their 2023 bonuses by over 50%. Additional cost-cutting measures at other firms include decreased meal and travel budgets.
Sun Jianbo, a former chief strategist at China Galaxy Securities Co. who now runs China Vision Capital, told Bloomberg: “Now with the trading fees cut, the bubble in the research circle will also burst.”
“There’s no other way around. The only thing that matters now is to stay employed. So my approach is to grab a job first and see what comes next," said one 28 year old energy analyst named Anna.
She said her team was cut down from 7 analysts to 2.
Chinese brokerages have traditionally assessed their research analysts based on the trading commissions—referred to as "soft dollars" or paidian—they generate from clients, rather than the accuracy of their forecasts, Bloomberg writes.
This approach spurred the aggressive expansion of research teams and high salaries for analysts. According to China Vision Capital, the number of sell-side analysts in China has surged by almost 70% over the last decade, now exceeding 4,800.
Major firms like China International Capital and Citic Securities employ over 300 and nearly 200 analysts, respectively. Top-performing analysts, particularly winners of popular research contests like New Fortune, could earn up to 10 million yuan annually.
According to Brook Zhang of Bo Le Associates, analysts with ten years of experience might earn a basic salary of about 800,000 yuan, while those with five years can earn around 500,000 yuan, with bonuses ranging from three to 24 months of pay depending on market conditions.
However, the landscape is shifting due to recent regulatory changes reducing trading fees and discouraging the use of commissions for research payments. Additionally, investor interest in China's stock market has waned after three years of losses, diminishing demand for equity research.
This, along with a downturn in sectors like proprietary trading and investment banking and new restrictions on stock market practices, is driving brokerages to significantly cut costs.
“I think these cuts reflect a structural change in the securities business and are hence permanent,” concluded Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong. You can read Bloomberg's full report here.
-
Site: Zero HedgeSecurities Analyst Jobs In China Are "Permanently" DisappearingTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 20:10
The days of million dollar analyst jobs in the securities industry in China look to be all but gone.
That was the topic of a new Bloomberg article last week which detailed exactly how the industry is "retrenching after years of expansion". Bloomberg's description of the industry's cutbacks is based on discussions with about 20 analysts and former analysts, who chose to remain anonymous or only use their first names.
These reductions are occurring amidst a prolonged market downturn that has lowered trading commissions and increased regulatory restrictions on research publications. It marks a significant shift from previous years when brokerages were actively recruiting and offering substantial salaries to top analysts.
Several senior analysts at Shanghai's state-owned Guotai Junan Securities resigned following pay cuts and stricter performance requirements, the article points out.
Another Shenzhen-based brokerage cut 40% of its analyst staff and reduced their 2023 bonuses by over 50%. Additional cost-cutting measures at other firms include decreased meal and travel budgets.
Sun Jianbo, a former chief strategist at China Galaxy Securities Co. who now runs China Vision Capital, told Bloomberg: “Now with the trading fees cut, the bubble in the research circle will also burst.”
“There’s no other way around. The only thing that matters now is to stay employed. So my approach is to grab a job first and see what comes next," said one 28 year old energy analyst named Anna.
She said her team was cut down from 7 analysts to 2.
Chinese brokerages have traditionally assessed their research analysts based on the trading commissions—referred to as "soft dollars" or paidian—they generate from clients, rather than the accuracy of their forecasts, Bloomberg writes.
This approach spurred the aggressive expansion of research teams and high salaries for analysts. According to China Vision Capital, the number of sell-side analysts in China has surged by almost 70% over the last decade, now exceeding 4,800.
Major firms like China International Capital and Citic Securities employ over 300 and nearly 200 analysts, respectively. Top-performing analysts, particularly winners of popular research contests like New Fortune, could earn up to 10 million yuan annually.
According to Brook Zhang of Bo Le Associates, analysts with ten years of experience might earn a basic salary of about 800,000 yuan, while those with five years can earn around 500,000 yuan, with bonuses ranging from three to 24 months of pay depending on market conditions.
However, the landscape is shifting due to recent regulatory changes reducing trading fees and discouraging the use of commissions for research payments. Additionally, investor interest in China's stock market has waned after three years of losses, diminishing demand for equity research.
This, along with a downturn in sectors like proprietary trading and investment banking and new restrictions on stock market practices, is driving brokerages to significantly cut costs.
“I think these cuts reflect a structural change in the securities business and are hence permanent,” concluded Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong. You can read Bloomberg's full report here.
-
Site: Ron Paul Institute for Peace And Prosperity
Tom Philips was a great man whose generosity knew no bounds. He opened not only his then substantial pocketbook – having been a very savvy and successful entrepreneur – but also his own home with a single intent: to nurture a new generation of journalists who were not afraid to question the “conventional wisdom.”
His mission was to break the stranglehold that the Left Wing ideologues had on the national debate and in forming the “national consensus.”
He contributed his boundless energy to this life-goal which is eminently and essentially American: to help us foster a true political dialogue on the future of this country. To give us on the “other side” at least a fighting chance to have our views known.
I was at the time a (poorly paid) working journalist, the Editorial Page Editor of the Budapest Sun in Hungary, when Tom Phillips’ generosity and the late and very great Bob Novak’s keen eye identified me as someone worthy of his Journalism Fellowship in 1998.
I was working under a brilliant mentor at the Budapest Sun – Jim Michaels who was a former US Marine and the son of the then-Editor in Chief of Forbes Magazine – and from Jim I learned everything about journalism. Not the absurd “social active” journalism churning out ideological thugs from journalism schools across the country, but actual journalism which relies on honesty, humility, and a connection with your readers (customers).
I had been published plenty of times by the time I went to work for Jim Michaels, but it was Jim who kicked my ego in the face. I remember my first unsigned op-ed as editorial page editor. Maybe 1995. I submitted it to Jim who proceeded to turn it upside-down on its head. I had been too steeped in academia (useless grad school) and was thus unmoved by the need to appeal to the reader.
Jim ripped apart my op-ed and told me that I had “buried the lede.” “Do it over! Bring your point to the front! You have an obligation to the reader!” I was crestfallen because I thought I had written a tight piece putting those so-and-sos in their place.
For me at that time it was about settling scores rather than appealing to the reader.
To Jim, who was although a solid conservative, ideology didn’t matter. Journalism mattered. We had a several year tug-of-war at the Budapest Sun, but I am grateful to Jim Michaels for teaching me real, existing journalism.
And it was around this time I applied and was accepted as a Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow with the topic of, “Abandoning American Values in Post-Cold War US Foreign Policy.” It was all about how the Clinton Administration botched the enormous opportunity presented by the end of the Cold War to promote actual American values rather than the bogus “woke” agenda of his cronies who are, disgustingly, still with us.
The opportunity of a lifetime – a peace dividend, which is definitionally conservative – was squandered by the world of Strobe Talbott and Richard Holbrooke and all of those thugs. Toby Gati. Hillary. All of them.
Tom Phillips and Bob Novak saw value in this and to them I am eternally grateful.
The young journalists with whom I shared a couch in those days at Tom Philips’ magnificent McLean, VA, house for his autumn Phillips Foundation Fellows Retreats are people you would easily recognize in today’s conservative media. Some are doing good work and some in my opinion have fallen short. It’s not easy to make a living as a scribbler. And some of them have jumped on the Con. Inc. grift.
But that is always the risk.
Tom Phillips was all about investing in possibilities. I remember returning to several of the new classes of Phillips Fellows as an alumni and being surprised by some who were chosen. He did not invest solely in conservatives. He invested in people in whom he believed – guided by his advisors like the late John Farley, who I loved dearly and who continued to give me guidance for years including on how to start the Ron Paul Institute – and he did not have a rigorous ideological litmus test.
By the way, there are some who claim that I was not an actual journalist for some reason I have never understood. But through college and into my first professional job it was always working on a newspaper. Yes, I did spend eleven years on Capitol Hill working for Ron Paul, but I brought my fifteen years of journalism experience – including on-the-ground war reporting – to the job and it made me a far better Congressional staffer than had I been just an ideologue hired for my fealty for this or that party.
Read any of his powerful statements entered into the Congressional Record that were drafted by me informed by my journalistic background.
At the time Ron Paul had a rule that he would never hire anyone with Capitol Hill experience. He was way ahead of his time, but it was because he wanted people whose loyalty was to freedom and America rather than the swamp – a term that only later came to be fashionable.
Tom Philips was also way way way ahead of his time. He put his money where his mouth was. It took perhaps a quarter of a century after Tom’s investment in what can only be considered “alternative media” for the concept to not only take hold, but to wildly surpass the influence of the mainstream corporate media.
There is no direct connection that I know, but if you celebrate the brilliant success of a Tucker Carlson single-handedly defeating the mainstream drones like St. George slaying the dragon, you should thank Tom Phillips, whose vision and generosity one and a half generations ago paved the way for the relative freedom we are enjoying today.
It all started with Tom Phillips. One of the most unsung American heroes of our time.
Rest in peace, Mr. Phillips. Thank you for the wonderful opportunities your generosity provided me.
-
Site: RT - News
The top US diplomat plans to threaten Beijing over weapons-related exports
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to warn Chinese officials of consequences for exporting materials to Russia with potential military applications, when he travels to Beijing on Wednesday.
Blinken, who is scheduled to make stops in Beijing and Shanghai during a three-day trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), plans to meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. He will “reiterate deep concerns regarding the PRC’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base,” a US State Department spokesman told reporters.
At issue are China’s exports of machine tools, microelectronics, optics, and other products that could be used to make weapons amid the conflict in Ukraine. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen issued a similar warning when she visited China earlier this month.
“The concern there is that through Chinese support, Russia has largely reconstituted its defense industrial base, which has an impact not just on the battlefield in Ukraine, but poses a larger threat, we believe, to broader European security,” the State Department spokesman said. “So that’s deeply concerning to us. We’ll express those concerns to China, and we will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”
Read more US Treasury issues warning to ChinaThe State Department has warned that it will take “further steps as necessary” to deter China from aiding Russia’s defense industry. “We’re committed to taking the steps necessary to defend our national interests, and we’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that are taking steps in contravention to our interests and in ways that – as we’ve indicated here – severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe,” the spokesman said.
Blinken raised the issue when he met with G7 leaders earlier this week in Italy. He will not specify the potential punishments during talks in Beijing, but new sanctions could target Chinese financial institutions, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The US is being “very direct” about its concerns and will “hold China accountable” for its actions in providing dual-use technologies to Russia while trying to strengthen its ties with Europe, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said. “What we’ve tried to underscore with European and Chinese interlocutors is that these dual objectives are inconsistent, and that we want China to think very carefully about the way forward.”
READ MORE: Beijing criticizes proposed US sanctions
Chinese officials have maintained a policy of neutrality on the Ukraine conflict and have insisted that Beijing is not selling weapons to Russia. They have bristled at the allegations of violating Western sanctions imposed on Moscow.
“China regulates the export of dual-use articles in accordance with laws and regulations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told reporters earlier this week. “Relevant countries should not smear or attack the normal relations between China and Russia and should not harm the legitimate rights and interests of China and Chinese companies.”
-
Site: RT - News
The top US diplomat plans to threaten Beijing over weapons-related exports
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to warn Chinese officials of consequences for exporting materials to Russia with potential military applications, when he travels to Beijing on Wednesday.
Blinken, who is scheduled to make stops in Beijing and Shanghai during a three-day trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), plans to meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. He will “reiterate deep concerns regarding the PRC’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base,” a US State Department spokesman told reporters.
At issue are China’s exports of machine tools, microelectronics, optics, and other products that could be used to make weapons amid the conflict in Ukraine. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen issued a similar warning when she visited China earlier this month.
“The concern there is that through Chinese support, Russia has largely reconstituted its defense industrial base, which has an impact not just on the battlefield in Ukraine, but poses a larger threat, we believe, to broader European security,” the State Department spokesman said. “So that’s deeply concerning to us. We’ll express those concerns to China, and we will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”
Read more US Treasury issues warning to ChinaThe State Department has warned that it will take “further steps as necessary” to deter China from aiding Russia’s defense industry. “We’re committed to taking the steps necessary to defend our national interests, and we’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that are taking steps in contravention to our interests and in ways that – as we’ve indicated here – severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe,” the spokesman said.
Blinken raised the issue when he met with G7 leaders earlier this week in Italy. He will not specify the potential punishments during talks in Beijing, but new sanctions could target Chinese financial institutions, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The US is being “very direct” about its concerns and will “hold China accountable” for its actions in providing dual-use technologies to Russia while trying to strengthen its ties with Europe, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said. “What we’ve tried to underscore with European and Chinese interlocutors is that these dual objectives are inconsistent, and that we want China to think very carefully about the way forward.”
READ MORE: Beijing criticizes proposed US sanctions
Chinese officials have maintained a policy of neutrality on the Ukraine conflict and have insisted that Beijing is not selling weapons to Russia. They have bristled at the allegations of violating Western sanctions imposed on Moscow.
“China regulates the export of dual-use articles in accordance with laws and regulations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told reporters earlier this week. “Relevant countries should not smear or attack the normal relations between China and Russia and should not harm the legitimate rights and interests of China and Chinese companies.”
-
Site: RT - News
The top US diplomat plans to threaten Beijing over weapons-related exports
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to warn Chinese officials of consequences for exporting materials to Russia with potential military applications, when he travels to Beijing on Wednesday.
Blinken, who is scheduled to make stops in Beijing and Shanghai during a three-day trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), plans to meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. He will “reiterate deep concerns regarding the PRC’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base,” a US State Department spokesman told reporters.
At issue are China’s exports of machine tools, microelectronics, optics, and other products that could be used to make weapons amid the conflict in Ukraine. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen issued a similar warning when she visited China earlier this month.
“The concern there is that through Chinese support, Russia has largely reconstituted its defense industrial base, which has an impact not just on the battlefield in Ukraine, but poses a larger threat, we believe, to broader European security,” the State Department spokesman said. “So that’s deeply concerning to us. We’ll express those concerns to China, and we will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”
Read more US Treasury issues warning to ChinaThe State Department has warned that it will take “further steps as necessary” to deter China from aiding Russia’s defense industry. “We’re committed to taking the steps necessary to defend our national interests, and we’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that are taking steps in contravention to our interests and in ways that – as we’ve indicated here – severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe,” the spokesman said.
Blinken raised the issue when he met with G7 leaders earlier this week in Italy. He will not specify the potential punishments during talks in Beijing, but new sanctions could target Chinese financial institutions, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The US is being “very direct” about its concerns and will “hold China accountable” for its actions in providing dual-use technologies to Russia while trying to strengthen its ties with Europe, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said. “What we’ve tried to underscore with European and Chinese interlocutors is that these dual objectives are inconsistent, and that we want China to think very carefully about the way forward.”
READ MORE: Beijing criticizes proposed US sanctions
Chinese officials have maintained a policy of neutrality on the Ukraine conflict and have insisted that Beijing is not selling weapons to Russia. They have bristled at the allegations of violating Western sanctions imposed on Moscow.
“China regulates the export of dual-use articles in accordance with laws and regulations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told reporters earlier this week. “Relevant countries should not smear or attack the normal relations between China and Russia and should not harm the legitimate rights and interests of China and Chinese companies.”
-
Site: RT - News
The top US diplomat plans to threaten Beijing over weapons-related exports
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to warn Chinese officials of consequences for exporting materials to Russia with potential military applications, when he travels to Beijing on Wednesday.
Blinken, who is scheduled to make stops in Beijing and Shanghai during a three-day trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), plans to meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. He will “reiterate deep concerns regarding the PRC’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base,” a US State Department spokesman told reporters.
At issue are China’s exports of machine tools, microelectronics, optics, and other products that could be used to make weapons amid the conflict in Ukraine. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen issued a similar warning when she visited China earlier this month.
“The concern there is that through Chinese support, Russia has largely reconstituted its defense industrial base, which has an impact not just on the battlefield in Ukraine, but poses a larger threat, we believe, to broader European security,” the State Department spokesman said. “So that’s deeply concerning to us. We’ll express those concerns to China, and we will express our intent to have China curtail that support.”
Read more US Treasury issues warning to ChinaThe State Department has warned that it will take “further steps as necessary” to deter China from aiding Russia’s defense industry. “We’re committed to taking the steps necessary to defend our national interests, and we’re prepared to take steps when we believe necessary against firms that are taking steps in contravention to our interests and in ways that – as we’ve indicated here – severely undermine security in both Ukraine and Europe,” the spokesman said.
Blinken raised the issue when he met with G7 leaders earlier this week in Italy. He will not specify the potential punishments during talks in Beijing, but new sanctions could target Chinese financial institutions, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
The US is being “very direct” about its concerns and will “hold China accountable” for its actions in providing dual-use technologies to Russia while trying to strengthen its ties with Europe, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said. “What we’ve tried to underscore with European and Chinese interlocutors is that these dual objectives are inconsistent, and that we want China to think very carefully about the way forward.”
READ MORE: Beijing criticizes proposed US sanctions
Chinese officials have maintained a policy of neutrality on the Ukraine conflict and have insisted that Beijing is not selling weapons to Russia. They have bristled at the allegations of violating Western sanctions imposed on Moscow.
“China regulates the export of dual-use articles in accordance with laws and regulations,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning told reporters earlier this week. “Relevant countries should not smear or attack the normal relations between China and Russia and should not harm the legitimate rights and interests of China and Chinese companies.”
-
Site: Zero HedgeAmid Budget Shortfall, San Francisco Reexamines Tax Burden On Big BusinessesTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 19:35
Authored by Brian Back via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Facing mounting budget woes this election year, as spending far outpaces revenues, the City of San Francisco is scrambling to reform its infamously large and complex tax burden on business.
Several San Francisco companies have been mired in tax disputes with the city. Above, a view of downtown on Feb. 6, 2019. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)San Francisco’s five largest employers now account for nearly a quarter of the city’s total business tax revenue, according to an April 14 report in the San Francisco Examiner. If any were to relocate outside of the city, such would leave San Francisco—currently facing an $800 million budget deficit—vulnerable.
As such, Mayor London Breed and city officials are currently negotiating with business and labor leaders to devise tax reform measures for the November ballot that could simplify its tax code and even out the load on top businesses, the San Francisco Examiner reported.
In particular, city officials say they would like to see changes that would not incentivize businesses to move jobs out of San Francisco, since the city’s largest employers are required to pay a disproportionate amount of business taxes.
But shifting the tax burden elsewhere, such as increasing the city’s already large sales tax, could hurt a retail sector that has been decimated by a flurry of closures in recent years, analysts say.
City Controller Greg Wagner has said the complexity and number of new taxes passed by voters in recent years combined with a poor economy have increased tax disputes between the city and large businesses, according to Alyssa Sewlal, a spokesperson for his office.
Such disputes include a legal demand from General Motors for more than $121 million in tax refunds, as well as tens of millions of dollars in refund claims, and settlements and lawsuits on behalf of companies who say they were overtaxed such as Deloitte, Gap, WeWork, AppLovin, Chime Financial, and Block—formerly Square—since 2020, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
At the same time, the mayor’s office has been trying to direct more attention toward helping tourist-reliant businesses including hotels, restaurants, and arts and entertainment groups, including launching new small business grants and laying out plans to revitalize its downtown. Several such businesses have denounced the city’s street conditions, crime, costly permitting, and escalated taxes.
Factors such as a struggling office market aided by the rise of remote work, retail and commercial vacancies, poor recovery from the pandemic, and lagging tourism have played a role in revenues not keeping up with city spending that has increased significantly over the past decade.
Currently at $14.6 billion, San Francisco’s budget rivals most major U.S. cities. Because it is forecast to escalate by more than $1 billion over the next five years, the city will be on track to post a deficit surpassing $1 billion by 2027 barring major changes, the San Francisco Examiner reported.
City employee salaries, pension benefits, and health care costs are projected to increase by about $500 million within the upcoming four fiscal years, according to Ms. Breed’s office.
The mayor, who is up for re-election in November, told city departments in December they will be required to cut their budgets by about 10 percent in the upcoming fiscal year, and that they must also consider an additional 5 percent in cuts as a “contingency reduction.”
The city’s next budget, which goes into effect July 1, is scheduled to go before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a vote June 1.
-
Site: Henrymakow.comIf you believe in the differencebetween Good and Evil,you believe in God.( Updated from July 5. 2022)This continues Staying Sane in a World Gone InsaneSatanists have disconnected our GPS -- God Positioning SystemThey programmed us to hate what we most desperately need and desire.They made belief in God "uncool." We have been brainwashed to hate the word God.God is simply the difference between truth and lies; good and evil; ugliness and beauty, love and hate, natural and unnatural, heaven and hell, justice and injustice, & healthy and sick.God is the Moral Order inherent in the universe synonymous with these spiritual absolutes. God is PERFECTION!Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. Matt 5: 48The Satanist (Communist) agenda is to invert all of these, i.e. Evil is Good, and destroy anyone who stands in their way.Satanists blame God for all the evil in world. "How could God allow this to happen?"I've got bad news for you folks! God depends on us to fulfill his Design. We are angels in the bodies of apes sent tocreate Heaven on earth. We each have a Divine spark, (God's Plan) in our souls. We need only listen to our soul.Now is the time to declare, "I believe in God."It's time to disconnect from Satanist social unreality.It's time for humanity to unite in the ultimate and only Reality, the Spirit of God.It's cool to believe in God.It's also a sin qua non.--Related - Republicans Demand Answers To Biden's Blatantly Unconstitutional Plan To 'Promote Atheism'
Atheism (i.e. rejection of God) is SatanismSelf - i.e. higher Self or soul holds grasping ego in check.Jan 5, 2022 -- Satanists have banished God from His Creation better to take His place. We've been brainwashed to eschew the obvious: There is an awe-inspiring ...Feb 12, 2022 -- God is the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness, healthy and sick, natural and unnatural.Jan 21, 2020 -- We were designed to serve God, not ourselves. Only when society rededicates itself to God's service will it flourish. A spark of Divinity shines ...Apr 25, 2022 -- Can you still say you don't believe in God? from Feb. 12, 2022. by Henry Makow PhD.May 8, 2022 -- All true religion is love (worship, obedience) of God. Everything else is a satanist diversion. Van Morrison proves that great music can be ...Aug 7, 2020 -- by Henry Makow Ph.D. My article Sunday, ''God Told Moses to Murder Jewish Sinners'' touched a nerve with many readers. One, Lazar ...May 15, 2021 -- We've gone from a Christian dispensation which lifts the individual to God; to a Masonic Jewish one which seeks to dispossess and treat him ... -
Site: Zero Hedge"First Real Image" Of Chinese Supersonic Drone Attached To BomberTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 19:00
Aviation observers have spotted a supersonic unmanned aerial vehicle under the fuselage of a People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) bomber, Defense Blog reports. The new drone can conduct strategic aerial reconnaissance across southeast Asia.
Images of the WZ-8 reconnaissance drone attached to a Xian H-6 bomber surfaced on social media platform X last week. The rare sighting reminds us that PLAAF, the third largest air force in the world, is quickly modernizing its aircraft fleet to include drones as tensions with the US over Taiwan remain high.
Maybe this is the first real image of a WZ-8 under a H-6MW.
— @Rupprecht_A (@RupprechtDeino) April 19, 2024
(Image via @種花家de小姐姐 from Weibo) pic.twitter.com/XctC1mMjkaFirst revealed to the public in 2019, WZ-8 provides pre-strike targeting information and/or post-strike assessments. The drone can also conduct strategic aerial reconnaissance across southeast Asia, including Taiwan and South Korea.
In a separate Defense Blog report, citing classified papers obtained by The Washington Post, a fleet of WZ-8 drones are stationed in newly built hangars in the Lu'an airbase in eastern China. This base allows the supersonic drones to be easily deployed to Taiwan and South Korea for intelligence-gathering missions while flying at an altitude of 30 kilometers - untouchable to some of the world's most advanced air defense systems.
As the world's AI superpowers, China and the US, gear up for potential drone wars in the Indo-Pacific region, the rapid advancement of swarm technology will be critical for winning the next major conflict, along with hypersonic weapons. The deployment of these technologies comes as war rages on in Eastern Europe and flares up in the Middle East. Banker Jamie Dimon recently warned the world faces "risks that eclipse anything since World War II."
-
Site: Zero HedgeLord Of The Lies: A Pediatrician's Take On The Latest Child Gender-Transition ResearchTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 18:25
Authored by J. Edward Les, MD, via The Epoch Times,
Last week’s release of the Cass Review brought to memory the old jingle: “Liar, liar, pants on fire; your nose is longer than a telephone wire.” Commissioned four years ago to probe the practices of the Tavistock gender clinic in Britain, the report methodically assembles a damning indictment of the flimsy evidence used to “transition” children.
Its author, retired pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, is polite and professional, but she pulls no punches in exposing the false foundation upon which the entire edifice of “gender-affirming care” is built.
Drawing extensively on a series of systematic literature reviews and in-depth interviews with doctors, parents, and patients, she writes:
“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress… for the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to achieve this.”
Even social transitioning alone, she concludes, risks grave psychological harm for children.
And social transitioning is often a prelude to puberty blockers. Dr. Cass skewers the oft-cited narrative that blockers are harmless and reversible, pointing to evidence of permanent negative effects on bone density and neuropsychiatric functioning.
The report advises a U-turn from the “gender-affirming” construct of drugs and surgery toward a model of careful psychological counselling. Critically, this is the very “watchful waiting” approach that got Canadian psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker fired more than eight years ago as head of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
Dr. Cass delivers a scathing indictment of the shaky evidence for guidelines used by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, The American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Endocrine Society; and she exposes their repeated practice of using non-evidence-based guidelines to justify other non-evidence-based guidelines.
Not all lies are equal.
White lies are the (mostly) harmless sort we tell to spare someone’s feelings. Black lies are the malicious untruths told to gain unfair advantage or to cause harm to others.
But the “lord of the lies” is the “blue” lie: the sort of falsehood we tell each other and ourselves—often unknowingly—on behalf of our tribes.
Such as in William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies,” when a group of boys convinces themselves, without evidence, that there’s a beast in the forest—a delusion that turns deadly for Simon and Piggy.
In my view, blue lies underpin the gospel of “gender-affirming care,” which has led thousands of otherwise erudite medical professionals to discard the truth of the gender binary in favour of blatant interference with normal pediatric physiology.
It’s important to emphasize that blue lies typically aren’t told with intent to mislead, or from a place of malevolence; their proponents genuinely believe they are on the side of truth.
Combatting blue lies, therefore, is extraordinarily difficult. But not impossible.
Two strategies are key:
First, we need powerful insiders - not just members of the tribe, but prominent figures within it to awake to their errors and begin to speak up.
Such as when Finnish physician Riittakerttu Kaltiala, one of the architects of Finland’s youth gender transition program, stepped up last October to say:
“Gender transition has gotten out of hand. When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all life’s pains, that should be a warning to all of us that something has gone very wrong.”
Unfortunately, a common response to the Cass Review by gender-fluidity adherents has been to double down. Take Dr. Kristopher Wells, Canada Research Chair for the Public Understanding of Sexual & Gender Minority Youth:
“The flawed UK Cass Report was issued today and is exactly what was expected from a country that is virulently anti-trans,” he said on social media.
His is the sort of reaction that Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, writing about the horrors of frontal lobotomies, describes as “The Oedipus Trap”: a situation where “it can be so psychologically devastating to discover you’ve made a mistake… that you will do everything in your power to avoid recognizing it.”
Per Walter Scott: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”
Therefore, a second strategy - expertly employed by Dr. Cass - is crucial: the careful and patient exhibition of evidence, without hyperbole and without rancour.
The Cass Review exposes a tangled web indeed.
For her efforts, and for her courage, Hilary Cass deserves our deepest thanks.
* * *
Dr. J. Edward Les, MD, is a pediatrician in Calgary and a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
-
Site: Zero HedgeLord Of The Lies: A Pediatrician's Take On The Latest Child Gender-Transition ResearchTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 18:25
Authored by J. Edward Les, MD, via The Epoch Times,
Last week’s release of the Cass Review brought to memory the old jingle: “Liar, liar, pants on fire; your nose is longer than a telephone wire.” Commissioned four years ago to probe the practices of the Tavistock gender clinic in Britain, the report methodically assembles a damning indictment of the flimsy evidence used to “transition” children.
Its author, retired pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, is polite and professional, but she pulls no punches in exposing the false foundation upon which the entire edifice of “gender-affirming care” is built.
Drawing extensively on a series of systematic literature reviews and in-depth interviews with doctors, parents, and patients, she writes:
“The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress… for the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way to achieve this.”
Even social transitioning alone, she concludes, risks grave psychological harm for children.
And social transitioning is often a prelude to puberty blockers. Dr. Cass skewers the oft-cited narrative that blockers are harmless and reversible, pointing to evidence of permanent negative effects on bone density and neuropsychiatric functioning.
The report advises a U-turn from the “gender-affirming” construct of drugs and surgery toward a model of careful psychological counselling. Critically, this is the very “watchful waiting” approach that got Canadian psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker fired more than eight years ago as head of Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
Dr. Cass delivers a scathing indictment of the shaky evidence for guidelines used by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, The American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Endocrine Society; and she exposes their repeated practice of using non-evidence-based guidelines to justify other non-evidence-based guidelines.
Not all lies are equal.
White lies are the (mostly) harmless sort we tell to spare someone’s feelings. Black lies are the malicious untruths told to gain unfair advantage or to cause harm to others.
But the “lord of the lies” is the “blue” lie: the sort of falsehood we tell each other and ourselves—often unknowingly—on behalf of our tribes.
Such as in William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies,” when a group of boys convinces themselves, without evidence, that there’s a beast in the forest—a delusion that turns deadly for Simon and Piggy.
In my view, blue lies underpin the gospel of “gender-affirming care,” which has led thousands of otherwise erudite medical professionals to discard the truth of the gender binary in favour of blatant interference with normal pediatric physiology.
It’s important to emphasize that blue lies typically aren’t told with intent to mislead, or from a place of malevolence; their proponents genuinely believe they are on the side of truth.
Combatting blue lies, therefore, is extraordinarily difficult. But not impossible.
Two strategies are key:
First, we need powerful insiders - not just members of the tribe, but prominent figures within it to awake to their errors and begin to speak up.
Such as when Finnish physician Riittakerttu Kaltiala, one of the architects of Finland’s youth gender transition program, stepped up last October to say:
“Gender transition has gotten out of hand. When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all life’s pains, that should be a warning to all of us that something has gone very wrong.”
Unfortunately, a common response to the Cass Review by gender-fluidity adherents has been to double down. Take Dr. Kristopher Wells, Canada Research Chair for the Public Understanding of Sexual & Gender Minority Youth:
“The flawed UK Cass Report was issued today and is exactly what was expected from a country that is virulently anti-trans,” he said on social media.
His is the sort of reaction that Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle, writing about the horrors of frontal lobotomies, describes as “The Oedipus Trap”: a situation where “it can be so psychologically devastating to discover you’ve made a mistake… that you will do everything in your power to avoid recognizing it.”
Per Walter Scott: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”
Therefore, a second strategy - expertly employed by Dr. Cass - is crucial: the careful and patient exhibition of evidence, without hyperbole and without rancour.
The Cass Review exposes a tangled web indeed.
For her efforts, and for her courage, Hilary Cass deserves our deepest thanks.
* * *
Dr. J. Edward Les, MD, is a pediatrician in Calgary and a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
-
Site: RT - News
Cancelling sanctions relief and kicking out everyone else looks like a setup for an arranged marriage with Western oil giants
Six months ago, high oil prices in America amid Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas sent the Biden administration scrambling for more supply that it could control – and ideally profit from.
Washington couldn’t influence Russia and Saudi-led OPEC, or relent on the ideologically-driven sanctions idiocy, but it could at least maybe dial up or down the supply to mitigate domestic political fallout of any resulting price increases. So the White House considered the cards it could play, and offered Venezuela a deal to lift the American boot off its neck. It’s probably just a coincidence that the country happens to have the largest oil reserves on the planet – largely untapped.
There’s also the added bonus of rapprochement to counter China and Russia’s advances in Washington’s backyard, or mitigating the influx of migrants from Venezuela to the US as a result of people fleeing a country struggling under a seemingly endless embargo.
So Washington turned to the same Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro whom it indicted on “narcoterrorism” charges in 2020 – the same guy the US spent years delegitimizing by promoting another Venezuelan politician as the “real” president of the country. But instead of black-bagging him to collect the $15 million bounty they’re offering for information leading to his capture or conviction, the Americans made a deal with him.
Read more US reimposes Venezuela sanctionsThanks to the US, Maduro had a few problems, but maybe those could go away, if he’d be willing to play ball with America on its own terms. American oil giant, Chevron, scored a license to pump Venezuelan oil in November 2022 – a month after the sanctions waiver was implemented – and in exchange, the US would unblock some of Caracas’ oil sale cash that had been confiscated as a result of US sanctions. Until now, the US simply allowed Venezuelan state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to export oil to the US market while invoking sanctions to seize its profits through PDVSA’s American subsidiary, Citgo, confiscating billions in Venezuelan oil revenue. Where did all that cash go? To fund Washington’s regime change puppets, back when the entire Western world was referring to handpicked Juan ‘Who?’ Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
But since the Guaido project flamed out and Maduro was still in charge when the Ukraine conflict upended global oil markets through Western sanctions lunacy, the US sucked up any pride that it may have had left and said that it would let Venezuela get its hands on some of its own cash. Suddenly, Chevron was back plundering Venezuela’s black gold in exchange for Maduro promising to play nice in national elections. Just last month, Chevron announced a new drilling plan for Venezuela in a joint venture with PDVSA, with the goal of increasing output by 35% year-on-year by bringing new wells online. And a month before that, Chevron ramped drilling back up in the Orinoco Belt.
Six months later, Washington has now let the sanctions waiver expire, and any temporary business licenses to operate in Venezuela along with it. Not that Chevron has much to worry about. The Biden administration has underscored that oil companies’ continued licensing would be considered on a case-by-case basis. Which sounds like a convenient way for Washington to keep the market for itself, or at least decide who gets access. Everyone else gets scared off by sanctions.
Using sanctions as an instrument to control the global playing field isn’t new. It’s just getting harder to do amid increasing options as the rest of the world diversifies away from a Western-dominated global order. In February 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Russia’s Rosneft state oil company on accusations that it “brokered the sale and transport of Venezuelan crude oil” – something that the US will no doubt be cool with American competitors doing. “The United States is determined to prevent the looting of Venezuela’s oil assets by the corrupt Maduro regime,” then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, as the US was literally looting Venezuela’s oil assets and withholding the profits.
Read more US suspected of building ‘secret military bases’ in oil-rich Latin American regionSo what did Maduro do to give Washington an excuse to slap sanctions back on? Apparently it has to do with the disqualification of opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado from the presidential elections, set for July 2024. Disqualified by the Supreme Court for 15 years, Machado (whose candidacy has since been replaced by that of a former diplomat) is accused of involvement with “the corruption plot orchestrated by the usurper Juan Guaido,” and the marginalizing of the country which led to “dispossession of the companies and wealth of the Venezuelan people abroad, with the complicity of corrupt governments.” Machado did thank Israel for intervening in Venezuelan affairs by recognizing Guaido as the Western-selected interim president, and has argued in favor of the country’s National Assembly invoking an article that would allow it to authorize foreign missions inside Venezuela, arguing in favor of a “responsibility to protect” — the same provision that led to regime change in Libya under the slippery pretext of “humanitarian” intervention.
Washington wants Venezuelan elections to be as democratic, free, and fair as its own. Which are super clean. Just ask former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, who was railroaded in the 2016 primary by the Democratic National Committee in collusion with the campaign of his rival, Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, according to leaked documents posted online. Anything that Washington perceives to fall short of this stellar standard gives it an excuse to move the goalposts – once its own have had a chance to score some touchdowns.
While democratic failings are cited, maybe the waiver cancellation now has more to do with the fact that US oil prices have fallen, production has skyrocketed at home, and domestic demand is now low. Perhaps Venezuela’s untapped oil potential was too much of a good thing, and there wasn’t any point in demanding that Maduro set a table for everyone to dine when he could just be having a romantic tête-à-tête – or more like an arranged marriage – with Washington’s favorites. The party’s over for everyone else and they’re now kindly being asked to leave before the cops (or OFAC) show up.
-
Site: RT - News
Cancelling sanctions relief and kicking out everyone else looks like a setup for an arranged marriage with Western oil giants
Six months ago, high oil prices in America amid Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas sent the Biden administration scrambling for more supply that it could control – and ideally profit from.
Washington couldn’t influence Russia and Saudi-led OPEC, or relent on the ideologically-driven sanctions idiocy, but it could at least maybe dial up or down the supply to mitigate domestic political fallout of any resulting price increases. So the White House considered the cards it could play, and offered Venezuela a deal to lift the American boot off its neck. It’s probably just a coincidence that the country happens to have the largest oil reserves on the planet – largely untapped.
There’s also the added bonus of rapprochement to counter China and Russia’s advances in Washington’s backyard, or mitigating the influx of migrants from Venezuela to the US as a result of people fleeing a country struggling under a seemingly endless embargo.
So Washington turned to the same Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro whom it indicted on “narcoterrorism” charges in 2020 – the same guy the US spent years delegitimizing by promoting another Venezuelan politician as the “real” president of the country. But instead of black-bagging him to collect the $15 million bounty they’re offering for information leading to his capture or conviction, the Americans made a deal with him.
Read more US reimposes Venezuela sanctionsThanks to the US, Maduro had a few problems, but maybe those could go away, if he’d be willing to play ball with America on its own terms. American oil giant, Chevron, scored a license to pump Venezuelan oil in November 2022 – a month after the sanctions waiver was implemented – and in exchange, the US would unblock some of Caracas’ oil sale cash that had been confiscated as a result of US sanctions. Until now, the US simply allowed Venezuelan state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to export oil to the US market while invoking sanctions to seize its profits through PDVSA’s American subsidiary, Citgo, confiscating billions in Venezuelan oil revenue. Where did all that cash go? To fund Washington’s regime change puppets, back when the entire Western world was referring to handpicked Juan ‘Who?’ Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
But since the Guaido project flamed out and Maduro was still in charge when the Ukraine conflict upended global oil markets through Western sanctions lunacy, the US sucked up any pride that it may have had left and said that it would let Venezuela get its hands on some of its own cash. Suddenly, Chevron was back plundering Venezuela’s black gold in exchange for Maduro promising to play nice in national elections. Just last month, Chevron announced a new drilling plan for Venezuela in a joint venture with PDVSA, with the goal of increasing output by 35% year-on-year by bringing new wells online. And a month before that, Chevron ramped drilling back up in the Orinoco Belt.
Six months later, Washington has now let the sanctions waiver expire, and any temporary business licenses to operate in Venezuela along with it. Not that Chevron has much to worry about. The Biden administration has underscored that oil companies’ continued licensing would be considered on a case-by-case basis. Which sounds like a convenient way for Washington to keep the market for itself, or at least decide who gets access. Everyone else gets scared off by sanctions.
Using sanctions as an instrument to control the global playing field isn’t new. It’s just getting harder to do amid increasing options as the rest of the world diversifies away from a Western-dominated global order. In February 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Russia’s Rosneft state oil company on accusations that it “brokered the sale and transport of Venezuelan crude oil” – something that the US will no doubt be cool with American competitors doing. “The United States is determined to prevent the looting of Venezuela’s oil assets by the corrupt Maduro regime,” then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, as the US was literally looting Venezuela’s oil assets and withholding the profits.
Read more US suspected of building ‘secret military bases’ in oil-rich Latin American regionSo what did Maduro do to give Washington an excuse to slap sanctions back on? Apparently it has to do with the disqualification of opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado from the presidential elections, set for July 2024. Disqualified by the Supreme Court for 15 years, Machado (whose candidacy has since been replaced by that of a former diplomat) is accused of involvement with “the corruption plot orchestrated by the usurper Juan Guaido,” and the marginalizing of the country which led to “dispossession of the companies and wealth of the Venezuelan people abroad, with the complicity of corrupt governments.” Machado did thank Israel for intervening in Venezuelan affairs by recognizing Guaido as the Western-selected interim president, and has argued in favor of the country’s National Assembly invoking an article that would allow it to authorize foreign missions inside Venezuela, arguing in favor of a “responsibility to protect” — the same provision that led to regime change in Libya under the slippery pretext of “humanitarian” intervention.
Washington wants Venezuelan elections to be as democratic, free, and fair as its own. Which are super clean. Just ask former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, who was railroaded in the 2016 primary by the Democratic National Committee in collusion with the campaign of his rival, Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, according to leaked documents posted online. Anything that Washington perceives to fall short of this stellar standard gives it an excuse to move the goalposts – once its own have had a chance to score some touchdowns.
While democratic failings are cited, maybe the waiver cancellation now has more to do with the fact that US oil prices have fallen, production has skyrocketed at home, and domestic demand is now low. Perhaps Venezuela’s untapped oil potential was too much of a good thing, and there wasn’t any point in demanding that Maduro set a table for everyone to dine when he could just be having a romantic tête-à-tête – or more like an arranged marriage – with Washington’s favorites. The party’s over for everyone else and they’re now kindly being asked to leave before the cops (or OFAC) show up.
-
Site: RT - News
Cancelling sanctions relief and kicking out everyone else looks like a setup for an arranged marriage with Western oil giants
Six months ago, high oil prices in America amid Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas sent the Biden administration scrambling for more supply that it could control – and ideally profit from.
Washington couldn’t influence Russia and Saudi-led OPEC, or relent on the ideologically-driven sanctions idiocy, but it could at least maybe dial up or down the supply to mitigate domestic political fallout of any resulting price increases. So the White House considered the cards it could play, and offered Venezuela a deal to lift the American boot off its neck. It’s probably just a coincidence that the country happens to have the largest oil reserves on the planet – largely untapped.
There’s also the added bonus of rapprochement to counter China and Russia’s advances in Washington’s backyard, or mitigating the influx of migrants from Venezuela to the US as a result of people fleeing a country struggling under a seemingly endless embargo.
So Washington turned to the same Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro whom it indicted on “narcoterrorism” charges in 2020 – the same guy the US spent years delegitimizing by promoting another Venezuelan politician as the “real” president of the country. But instead of black-bagging him to collect the $15 million bounty they’re offering for information leading to his capture or conviction, the Americans made a deal with him.
Read more US reimposes Venezuela sanctionsThanks to the US, Maduro had a few problems, but maybe those could go away, if he’d be willing to play ball with America on its own terms. American oil giant, Chevron, scored a license to pump Venezuelan oil in November 2022 – a month after the sanctions waiver was implemented – and in exchange, the US would unblock some of Caracas’ oil sale cash that had been confiscated as a result of US sanctions. Until now, the US simply allowed Venezuelan state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to export oil to the US market while invoking sanctions to seize its profits through PDVSA’s American subsidiary, Citgo, confiscating billions in Venezuelan oil revenue. Where did all that cash go? To fund Washington’s regime change puppets, back when the entire Western world was referring to handpicked Juan ‘Who?’ Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
But since the Guaido project flamed out and Maduro was still in charge when the Ukraine conflict upended global oil markets through Western sanctions lunacy, the US sucked up any pride that it may have had left and said that it would let Venezuela get its hands on some of its own cash. Suddenly, Chevron was back plundering Venezuela’s black gold in exchange for Maduro promising to play nice in national elections. Just last month, Chevron announced a new drilling plan for Venezuela in a joint venture with PDVSA, with the goal of increasing output by 35% year-on-year by bringing new wells online. And a month before that, Chevron ramped drilling back up in the Orinoco Belt.
Six months later, Washington has now let the sanctions waiver expire, and any temporary business licenses to operate in Venezuela along with it. Not that Chevron has much to worry about. The Biden administration has underscored that oil companies’ continued licensing would be considered on a case-by-case basis. Which sounds like a convenient way for Washington to keep the market for itself, or at least decide who gets access. Everyone else gets scared off by sanctions.
Using sanctions as an instrument to control the global playing field isn’t new. It’s just getting harder to do amid increasing options as the rest of the world diversifies away from a Western-dominated global order. In February 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Russia’s Rosneft state oil company on accusations that it “brokered the sale and transport of Venezuelan crude oil” – something that the US will no doubt be cool with American competitors doing. “The United States is determined to prevent the looting of Venezuela’s oil assets by the corrupt Maduro regime,” then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, as the US was literally looting Venezuela’s oil assets and withholding the profits.
Read more US suspected of building ‘secret military bases’ in oil-rich Latin American regionSo what did Maduro do to give Washington an excuse to slap sanctions back on? Apparently it has to do with the disqualification of opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado from the presidential elections, set for July 2024. Disqualified by the Supreme Court for 15 years, Machado (whose candidacy has since been replaced by that of a former diplomat) is accused of involvement with “the corruption plot orchestrated by the usurper Juan Guaido,” and the marginalizing of the country which led to “dispossession of the companies and wealth of the Venezuelan people abroad, with the complicity of corrupt governments.” Machado did thank Israel for intervening in Venezuelan affairs by recognizing Guaido as the Western-selected interim president, and has argued in favor of the country’s National Assembly invoking an article that would allow it to authorize foreign missions inside Venezuela, arguing in favor of a “responsibility to protect” — the same provision that led to regime change in Libya under the slippery pretext of “humanitarian” intervention.
Washington wants Venezuelan elections to be as democratic, free, and fair as its own. Which are super clean. Just ask former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, who was railroaded in the 2016 primary by the Democratic National Committee in collusion with the campaign of his rival, Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, according to leaked documents posted online. Anything that Washington perceives to fall short of this stellar standard gives it an excuse to move the goalposts – once its own have had a chance to score some touchdowns.
While democratic failings are cited, maybe the waiver cancellation now has more to do with the fact that US oil prices have fallen, production has skyrocketed at home, and domestic demand is now low. Perhaps Venezuela’s untapped oil potential was too much of a good thing, and there wasn’t any point in demanding that Maduro set a table for everyone to dine when he could just be having a romantic tête-à-tête – or more like an arranged marriage – with Washington’s favorites. The party’s over for everyone else and they’re now kindly being asked to leave before the cops (or OFAC) show up.
-
Site: RT - News
Cancelling sanctions relief and kicking out everyone else looks like a setup for an arranged marriage with Western oil giants
Six months ago, high oil prices in America amid Western sanctions against Russian oil and gas sent the Biden administration scrambling for more supply that it could control – and ideally profit from.
Washington couldn’t influence Russia and Saudi-led OPEC, or relent on the ideologically-driven sanctions idiocy, but it could at least maybe dial up or down the supply to mitigate domestic political fallout of any resulting price increases. So the White House considered the cards it could play, and offered Venezuela a deal to lift the American boot off its neck. It’s probably just a coincidence that the country happens to have the largest oil reserves on the planet – largely untapped.
There’s also the added bonus of rapprochement to counter China and Russia’s advances in Washington’s backyard, or mitigating the influx of migrants from Venezuela to the US as a result of people fleeing a country struggling under a seemingly endless embargo.
So Washington turned to the same Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro whom it indicted on “narcoterrorism” charges in 2020 – the same guy the US spent years delegitimizing by promoting another Venezuelan politician as the “real” president of the country. But instead of black-bagging him to collect the $15 million bounty they’re offering for information leading to his capture or conviction, the Americans made a deal with him.
Read more US reimposes Venezuela sanctionsThanks to the US, Maduro had a few problems, but maybe those could go away, if he’d be willing to play ball with America on its own terms. American oil giant, Chevron, scored a license to pump Venezuelan oil in November 2022 – a month after the sanctions waiver was implemented – and in exchange, the US would unblock some of Caracas’ oil sale cash that had been confiscated as a result of US sanctions. Until now, the US simply allowed Venezuelan state oil giant Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) to export oil to the US market while invoking sanctions to seize its profits through PDVSA’s American subsidiary, Citgo, confiscating billions in Venezuelan oil revenue. Where did all that cash go? To fund Washington’s regime change puppets, back when the entire Western world was referring to handpicked Juan ‘Who?’ Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
But since the Guaido project flamed out and Maduro was still in charge when the Ukraine conflict upended global oil markets through Western sanctions lunacy, the US sucked up any pride that it may have had left and said that it would let Venezuela get its hands on some of its own cash. Suddenly, Chevron was back plundering Venezuela’s black gold in exchange for Maduro promising to play nice in national elections. Just last month, Chevron announced a new drilling plan for Venezuela in a joint venture with PDVSA, with the goal of increasing output by 35% year-on-year by bringing new wells online. And a month before that, Chevron ramped drilling back up in the Orinoco Belt.
Six months later, Washington has now let the sanctions waiver expire, and any temporary business licenses to operate in Venezuela along with it. Not that Chevron has much to worry about. The Biden administration has underscored that oil companies’ continued licensing would be considered on a case-by-case basis. Which sounds like a convenient way for Washington to keep the market for itself, or at least decide who gets access. Everyone else gets scared off by sanctions.
Using sanctions as an instrument to control the global playing field isn’t new. It’s just getting harder to do amid increasing options as the rest of the world diversifies away from a Western-dominated global order. In February 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Russia’s Rosneft state oil company on accusations that it “brokered the sale and transport of Venezuelan crude oil” – something that the US will no doubt be cool with American competitors doing. “The United States is determined to prevent the looting of Venezuela’s oil assets by the corrupt Maduro regime,” then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said, as the US was literally looting Venezuela’s oil assets and withholding the profits.
Read more US suspected of building ‘secret military bases’ in oil-rich Latin American regionSo what did Maduro do to give Washington an excuse to slap sanctions back on? Apparently it has to do with the disqualification of opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado from the presidential elections, set for July 2024. Disqualified by the Supreme Court for 15 years, Machado (whose candidacy has since been replaced by that of a former diplomat) is accused of involvement with “the corruption plot orchestrated by the usurper Juan Guaido,” and the marginalizing of the country which led to “dispossession of the companies and wealth of the Venezuelan people abroad, with the complicity of corrupt governments.” Machado did thank Israel for intervening in Venezuelan affairs by recognizing Guaido as the Western-selected interim president, and has argued in favor of the country’s National Assembly invoking an article that would allow it to authorize foreign missions inside Venezuela, arguing in favor of a “responsibility to protect” — the same provision that led to regime change in Libya under the slippery pretext of “humanitarian” intervention.
Washington wants Venezuelan elections to be as democratic, free, and fair as its own. Which are super clean. Just ask former presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, who was railroaded in the 2016 primary by the Democratic National Committee in collusion with the campaign of his rival, Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, according to leaked documents posted online. Anything that Washington perceives to fall short of this stellar standard gives it an excuse to move the goalposts – once its own have had a chance to score some touchdowns.
While democratic failings are cited, maybe the waiver cancellation now has more to do with the fact that US oil prices have fallen, production has skyrocketed at home, and domestic demand is now low. Perhaps Venezuela’s untapped oil potential was too much of a good thing, and there wasn’t any point in demanding that Maduro set a table for everyone to dine when he could just be having a romantic tête-à-tête – or more like an arranged marriage – with Washington’s favorites. The party’s over for everyone else and they’re now kindly being asked to leave before the cops (or OFAC) show up.
-
Site: RT - News
Placing the former president in jail for violating a gag order would only increase his poll numbers, Mark Preston has claimed
The possible arrest of former US President Donald Trump for violating his court-imposed gag order would trigger rioting and deal a potentially fatal blow to President Joe Biden’s re-election chances, CNN analyst Mark Preston warned on Friday.
Trump is currently on trial in Manhattan for allegedly misreporting ‘hush-money’ payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. Since last month, he has been forbidden from making public statements about Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg or the jurors working on the case, and from uttering anything that could interfere with the work of the court.
Nevertheless, the former president has spoken to reporters outside the Manhattan courthouse every day this week, and Bragg’s team claims that he has already violated this gag order at least seven times. In one instance, Trump took to his Truth Social platform on Wednesday to share a quote from Fox News host Jesse Watters, who claimed that “undercover liberal activists” were “lying to the judge in order to get on the Trump jury.”
Read more Man dies after setting himself on fire outside Trump trial (GRAPHIC VIDEOS)However, if the trial judge were to place Trump in a holding cell “for a few hours,” the end result would be “civil unrest across the country, certainly in some cities,” Preston said in a panel discussion with CNN host Jim Acosta.
“And two, politically, if I’m the Biden campaign, I don’t want to necessarily see him in jail, because that’s just going to get people more inflamed and more fired up,” he added.
The judge, Jaun Merchan, will hear arguments from the prosecution on Trump’s alleged violations of the gag order on Tuesday.
“People are allowed to speak about me, and I have a gag order, just to show you how much more unfair it is,” Trump said outside the courthouse on Friday. The former president blasted the order as unconstitutional, telling reporters that it "has to come off.”
Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee to challenge Biden in November’s presidential election. Despite the ongoing trial in Manhattan and three other criminal cases in the works, he is currently leading the incumbent in most polls by between one and ten points.
-
Site: Zero HedgeShipping Industry Pleads With UN For "Enhanced Military Presence" As Maritime Choke-Point Chaos SpreadsTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 17:50
Exactly one week ago, Iranian commandos seized a container ship affiliated with Israel as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. This action sparked new fears of another maritime chokepoint becoming disrupted as the crisis in the Middle East escalated. It also prompted a plea by the international shipping industry to the United Nations, urging an increase in military patrols along key shipping routes.
First reported by the maritime news website gGaptain, an open letter co-signed by 16 maritime industry associations and social partners, calls for urgent assistance and reminds countries about their responsibilities under international law.
"However, the incident this weekend, when the vessel MSC Aries was seized by Iranian forces at 06.37 UTC – 50 nautical miles north-east of Fujairah, United Arab Emirates on Saturday 13 April, has once again highlighted the intolerable situation where shipping has become a target. This is unacceptable," the signatories of the letter stated.
"Given the continually evolving and severe threat profile within the area, we call on you for enhanced coordinated military presence, missions and patrols in the region, to protect our seafarers against any further possible aggression," they said, adding, "The industry associations ask that all member states be formally reminded of their responsibilities under international law. And we ask that all efforts possible are brought to bear to release the seafarers and protect the safe transit of ships."
After the MSC Aries seizure in the Strait of Hormuz, we published a note titled "Heading For Supply Shock? Four Maritime Chokepoints Flash Red As Escalating Conflict Looms," outlining the maritime chokepoints, including the Suez Canal, Bab-El Mandeb Strait, and Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of all global trade flows, that are experiencing increased conflict.
In a recent note, MUFG provided a global snapshot of the world's maritime chokepoints.
The team at ING Global Markets Research warned last week, "Global shipping routes are already heavily impacted from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden because of ongoing geopolitical strife. If the Strait of Hormuz is in any way disrupted, the impact on oil and global trade could be huge."
Disruptions along critical maritime chokepoints in the Middle East are a direct result of the failed foreign policy decisions pushed by the Biden administration and former President Obama. Furthermore, the inability of Western militaries to secure the southern Red Sea through Operation Prosperity Guardian is a sign of weakness as the world fractures into a multipolar state of chaos.
-
Site: Zero HedgeShipping Industry Pleads With UN For "Enhanced Military Presence" As Maritime Choke-Point Chaos SpreadsTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 17:50
Exactly one week ago, Iranian commandos seized a container ship affiliated with Israel as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. This action sparked new fears of another maritime chokepoint becoming disrupted as the crisis in the Middle East escalated. It also prompted a plea by the international shipping industry to the United Nations, urging an increase in military patrols along key shipping routes.
First reported by the maritime news website gGaptain, an open letter co-signed by 16 maritime industry associations and social partners, calls for urgent assistance and reminds countries about their responsibilities under international law.
"However, the incident this weekend, when the vessel MSC Aries was seized by Iranian forces at 06.37 UTC – 50 nautical miles north-east of Fujairah, United Arab Emirates on Saturday 13 April, has once again highlighted the intolerable situation where shipping has become a target. This is unacceptable," the signatories of the letter stated.
"Given the continually evolving and severe threat profile within the area, we call on you for enhanced coordinated military presence, missions and patrols in the region, to protect our seafarers against any further possible aggression," they said, adding, "The industry associations ask that all member states be formally reminded of their responsibilities under international law. And we ask that all efforts possible are brought to bear to release the seafarers and protect the safe transit of ships."
After the MSC Aries seizure in the Strait of Hormuz, we published a note titled "Heading For Supply Shock? Four Maritime Chokepoints Flash Red As Escalating Conflict Looms," outlining the maritime chokepoints, including the Suez Canal, Bab-El Mandeb Strait, and Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of all global trade flows, that are experiencing increased conflict.
In a recent note, MUFG provided a global snapshot of the world's maritime chokepoints.
The team at ING Global Markets Research warned last week, "Global shipping routes are already heavily impacted from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden because of ongoing geopolitical strife. If the Strait of Hormuz is in any way disrupted, the impact on oil and global trade could be huge."
Disruptions along critical maritime chokepoints in the Middle East are a direct result of the failed foreign policy decisions pushed by the Biden administration and former President Obama. Furthermore, the inability of Western militaries to secure the southern Red Sea through Operation Prosperity Guardian is a sign of weakness as the world fractures into a multipolar state of chaos.
-
Site: RT - News
The failed US presidential candidate has claimed that her former rival wants to be like Vladimir Putin and other “strongman leaders”
Failed US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has claimed that Donald Trump, who defeated her in 2016, is a 'wannabe' strongman who aims to murder his political enemies.
Speaking on Democrat activist Mark Elias' podcast posted on Friday, Clinton said American voters had underestimated how “dangerous” Trump would be as president. She likened Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s US presidential election, to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin does what [Trump] would like to do – kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance,” Clinton said. “That’s what Trump really wants.”
Ironically, Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have themselves long been accused by some conservatives of eliminating people who pose a threat to their power or wealth. Investigative journalist Danny Casolaro coined the conspiracist term “Clinton Body Count” in the late 1980s, in reference to the allegedly mysterious deaths of people with connections to the Clintons. Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991 with his wrists slashed 10-12 times. His death was ruled a suicide.
Read more ‘A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin’ – Hillary ClintonClinton also has made a habit of linking Trump to Russia and Putin. Her presidential campaign helped trigger allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election by funding the since-discredited Steele dossier.
She told Elias that Putin is just one of the US adversaries whom Trump would like to emulate, and that his other role models include Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“We have to be very conscious of how he sees the world because in that world, he only sees strongman leaders,” Clinton said. “He sees Putin. He sees Xi. He sees Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Those are the people he is modeling himself after, and we’ve been down this road in our world history. We sure don’t want to go down that again.”
Read more Washington lives in denial over Putin’s victory while gaming its own electionsIf Trump is elected president again, Clinton warned, “it will be like having a dictator. I don’t say that lightly. Go back and read Project 2025. They’re going to fire everybody. The person in the government who knows about what may be the next pandemic? ‘Get rid of him, he didn’t vote for me, or I don’t like the way he looks.’”
She added: “It’s really important to think about what could happen to our world with Trump back in the White House – withdrawing us from NATO, not caring about what happens in Europe... the idea that he wants Ukraine to fail, the idea that he doesn’t want us to be able to surveil our enemies. I mean, this is a very scary prospect.”
Clinton expressed optimism that Trump will not be able to defeat incumbent President Joe Biden in November because Democrats will be running the election in key states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
Trump has maintained that all allegations against him are part of a politically motivated smear campaign. He dismissed the ‘Russiagate’ accusations as a hoax and witch hunt that aimed to sabotage his presidency and block him from forging better US relations with Russia.READ MORE: Hillary Clinton claims Trump will turn US military on Americans
-
Site: RT - News
The failed US presidential candidate has claimed that her former rival wants to be like Vladimir Putin and other “strongman leaders”
Failed US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has claimed that Donald Trump, who defeated her in 2016, is a 'wannabe' strongman who aims to murder his political enemies.
Speaking on Democrat activist Mark Elias' podcast posted on Friday, Clinton said American voters had underestimated how “dangerous” Trump would be as president. She likened Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in this year’s US presidential election, to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin does what [Trump] would like to do – kill his opposition, imprison his opposition, drive journalists and others into exile, rule without any check or balance,” Clinton said. “That’s what Trump really wants.”
Ironically, Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have themselves long been accused by some conservatives of eliminating people who pose a threat to their power or wealth. Investigative journalist Danny Casolaro coined the conspiracist term “Clinton Body Count” in the late 1980s, in reference to the allegedly mysterious deaths of people with connections to the Clintons. Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991 with his wrists slashed 10-12 times. His death was ruled a suicide.
Read more ‘A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin’ – Hillary ClintonClinton also has made a habit of linking Trump to Russia and Putin. Her presidential campaign helped trigger allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election by funding the since-discredited Steele dossier.
She told Elias that Putin is just one of the US adversaries whom Trump would like to emulate, and that his other role models include Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“We have to be very conscious of how he sees the world because in that world, he only sees strongman leaders,” Clinton said. “He sees Putin. He sees Xi. He sees Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Those are the people he is modeling himself after, and we’ve been down this road in our world history. We sure don’t want to go down that again.”
Read more Washington lives in denial over Putin’s victory while gaming its own electionsIf Trump is elected president again, Clinton warned, “it will be like having a dictator. I don’t say that lightly. Go back and read Project 2025. They’re going to fire everybody. The person in the government who knows about what may be the next pandemic? ‘Get rid of him, he didn’t vote for me, or I don’t like the way he looks.’”
She added: “It’s really important to think about what could happen to our world with Trump back in the White House – withdrawing us from NATO, not caring about what happens in Europe... the idea that he wants Ukraine to fail, the idea that he doesn’t want us to be able to surveil our enemies. I mean, this is a very scary prospect.”
Clinton expressed optimism that Trump will not be able to defeat incumbent President Joe Biden in November because Democrats will be running the election in key states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
Trump has maintained that all allegations against him are part of a politically motivated smear campaign. He dismissed the ‘Russiagate’ accusations as a hoax and witch hunt that aimed to sabotage his presidency and block him from forging better US relations with Russia.READ MORE: Hillary Clinton claims Trump will turn US military on Americans
-
Site: Zero HedgeSt. Louis University Hosts Dylan Mulvaney, Denies College Republicans Request For Event With Former NCAA Swimmer A Day LaterTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 17:15
By Adam Sabes of Campus Reform
St. Louis University plans to host transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to speak on campus next week and denied College Republicans’ request to host an event with a former NCAA swimmer a day later.
The event will be hosted by the St. Louis University Great Issues Committee on Monday, which is part of the school’s Student Activities Board, according to the St. Louis Post.
Mulvaney gained attention in April 2023 after a paid partnership with Bud Light, sparking heavy criticism from conservatives.
According to the report, St. Louis University College Republicans President Alexandra Leung said that administrators at the institution denied their request to host Paula Scanlan, a women’s sports activist.
Despite the event occurring a day after Mulvaney’s speech, the university said that its security couldn’t accommodate the event.
“Mulvaney’s comments have been deemed disrespectful and derogatory towards women and to SLU’s central mission,” said Leung.
While Leung says that Mulvaney’s message is at odds with the university’s catholic teachings, her College Republicans chapter has no plans to protest the event.
While St. Louis University didn’t disclose how much the speech costs, in Summer 2023, there was an honorarium of $40,000 for organizations interested in hosting Mulvaney for an event, according to YAF.
Just a few months prior, the University of Pittsburgh’s Rainbow Alliance secured $26,250 from its student government to host Mulvaney.
-
Site: Zero HedgeProject Much? Hillary Clinton Claims Trump Wants To 'Kill, Imprison His Opposition'Tyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 16:40
Hillary Clinton, who once suggested murdering Julian Assange and whose party is trying to imprison their chief political rival, suggested that Donald Trump wants to murder and imprison his political opponents.
Appearing on a podcast with Marc Elias, the Democrat super-lawyer who laid the legal groundwork for vote-by-mail in 2020 & was involved in the "Steele Dossier" purchase, Clinton suggested that "Putin does what [Trump] would like to do. Kill his opposition."
[Maybe they just committed suicide like Vince Foster and all those other associates?]
According to Hillary, who helped France murder Gaddafi (after he wanted a mere 5 billion euros / year to stop illegals from flooding into Europe), Trump "really" wants to "imprison his opposition, drive journalists into exile, rule without any check or balance."
"We have to be very conscious of how he sees the world because in that world, he only sees strong men leaders. He sees Putin. He sees Xi. He sees Kim Jong Un in North Korea," the failed presidential candidate continued. "Those are the people he is modelling himself after and we’ve been down this road in our, you know, world history. We sure don’t want to go down that again."
According to Hillary, if Trump "ever gets back near the White House again, it will be like having a dictator. I don’t say that lightly. Go back and read Project 2025. They’re going to fire everybody. The person in the government who knows about the next pandemic? Get rid of him."
Project much?
Watch (h/t Modernity.news):
Hillary Clinton claims that Trump wants to murder his political opponents and become a dictator like Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Report: https://t.co/AeDFUkcCvw pic.twitter.com/jk24sUk0Lm
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) April 20, 2024 -
Site: Zero HedgeProject Much? Hillary Clinton Claims Trump Wants To 'Kill, Imprison His Opposition'Tyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 16:40
Hillary Clinton, who once suggested murdering Julian Assange and whose party is trying to imprison their chief political rival, suggested that Donald Trump wants to murder and imprison his political opponents.
Appearing on a podcast with Marc Elias, the Democrat super-lawyer who laid the legal groundwork for vote-by-mail in 2020 & was involved in the "Steele Dossier" purchase, Clinton suggested that "Putin does what [Trump] would like to do. Kill his opposition."
[Maybe they just committed suicide like Vince Foster and all those other associates?]
According to Hillary, who helped France murder Gaddafi (after he wanted a mere 5 billion euros / year to stop illegals from flooding into Europe), Trump "really" wants to "imprison his opposition, drive journalists into exile, rule without any check or balance."
"We have to be very conscious of how he sees the world because in that world, he only sees strong men leaders. He sees Putin. He sees Xi. He sees Kim Jong Un in North Korea," the failed presidential candidate continued. "Those are the people he is modelling himself after and we’ve been down this road in our, you know, world history. We sure don’t want to go down that again."
According to Hillary, if Trump "ever gets back near the White House again, it will be like having a dictator. I don’t say that lightly. Go back and read Project 2025. They’re going to fire everybody. The person in the government who knows about the next pandemic? Get rid of him."
Project much?
Watch (h/t Modernity.news):
Hillary Clinton claims that Trump wants to murder his political opponents and become a dictator like Kim Jong Un in North Korea. Report: https://t.co/AeDFUkcCvw pic.twitter.com/jk24sUk0Lm
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) April 20, 2024 -
Site: The Remnant Newspaper - Remnant ArticlesNew from RemnantTV... In this episode of the Remnant Underground, Michael J. Matt blasts cringeworthy Christophobia from here to the UK. If they are so “progressive,” why is the “Follow the Science” crowd so obsessed with mocking Christianity? What are they so afraid of and why so desperate?
-
Site: Zero HedgeWhat Are Mises' Six Lessons?Tyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 16:05
Authored by Jonathan Newman via The Mises Institute,
Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow has become quite popular recently. The Mises Book Store has sold out of its physical copies, and the PDF, which is available online for free, has seen over 50,000 downloads in the past few days.
This surge in interest in Mises’s ideas was started by UFC fighter Renato Moicano, who declared in a short post-fight victory speech, “I love America, I love the Constitution...I want to carry...guns. I love private property. Let me tell you something. If you care about your...country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school.”
The “six lessons” he is referring to is Mises’s book, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, which was republished by our friends in Brazil under the title “As Seis Lições” (“The Six Lessons”).
If you are interested in what Mises has to say in this book, which is a transcription of lectures he gave in Argentina in 1959, here’s a brief preview, which I hope inspires you to read the short book in full. As a side note, if you are an undergraduate student who is interested in these ideas, the Mises Institute’s next Mises Book Club is on this text (pure coincidence!).
Lecture One: Capitalism
Mises begins his first lecture with an overview of the development of capitalism out of feudalism. Businesses began “mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses” instead of focusing on producing luxury goods for the elite. These big businesses succeeded because they served the needs of a larger group of people, and their success wholly depended on their ability to give this mass of consumers what they wanted.
Despite the amazing and undeniable increases in standards of living, even for a growing population, capitalism had its detractors, including Karl Marx, who gave capitalism its name. Mises says that while Marx hated capitalism and that Marx dubbed it thusly as an attack on the system, the name is a good one
because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it.
Prosperity is the result of providing for the future—more precisely it is the result of setting aside consumption today by saving and investing resources in production. Mises says that this principle explains why some countries are more prosperous than others. When it comes to economic growth, “there are no miracles.” There is only “the application of the principles of the free market economy, of the methods of capitalism.”
Lecture Two: Socialism
In the second lecture, Mises takes a closer look at Marx’s proposed system: socialism. Economic freedom means that people can choose their own careers and use their resources to accomplish their own ends. Economic freedom is the basis for all other freedoms. For example, when the government seizes whole industries, like that of the printing press, it determines what will be published and what won’t and the “freedom of the press disappears.”
Mises acknowledges that there is no such thing as “perfect freedom” in a metaphysical sense. We must obey the laws of nature, especially if we intend to use and transform nature according to our ends. And even economic freedom means that there is a fundamental interdependence among individuals: “Freedom in society means that a man depends as much on other people as other people depend upon him.” This is also true for big businesses and the entrepreneurs who lead them. The true “bosses” in the market economy are not those who shout orders to the workers, but the consumers.
Socialists despise the idea of consumer sovereignty because it means allowing mistakes. In their mind, the state should play the paternalistic role of deciding what is good for everyone. Thus Mises sees no difference between socialism and a system of slavery: “The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen—and this is what freedom means—is in a position to choose his own way of life.” In capitalism, this freedom makes it possible for people to be born into poverty but then achieve great success as they provide for their fellow man. This kind of social mobility is impossible under systems like feudalism and socialism.
Mises ends this lecture with a short explanation of the economic calculation critique of socialism. When the private ownership of the means of production is prohibited, then economic calculation is made impossible. Without market prices for factors, we cannot economize production and provide for the needs of the masses, no matter who oversees the socialist planning board. The result is mass deprivation and chaos.
Lecture Three: Interventionism
Interventionism describes a situation in which the government “wants to interfere with market phenomena.” Each intervention involves an abrogation of the consumer sovereignty Mises had explained in the two previous lectures.
The government wants to interfere in order to force businessmen to conduct their affairs in a different way than they would have chosen if they had obeyed only the consumers. Thus, all the measures of interventionism by the government are directed toward restricting the supremacy of consumers.
Mises gives an example of a price ceiling on milk. While those who enact such an intervention may intend to make milk more affordable for poorer families, there are many unintended consequences: increased demand, decreased supply, non-price rationing in the form of long queues at shops that sell milk, and, importantly, grounds for the government to intervene in new ways now that their initial intervention has not achieved its intended purpose. So, in Mises’s example, he traces through the new interventions, like government rationing, price controls for cattle food, price controls for luxury goods, and so on until the government has intervened in virtually every part of the economy, i.e., socialism.
After providing some historical examples of this process, Mises gives the big picture. Interventionism, as a “middle-of-the-road policy,” is actually a road toward totalitarianism.
Lecture Four: Inflation
There can be no secret way to the solution of the financial problems of a government; if it needs money, it has to obtain the money by taxing its citizens (or, under special conditions, by borrowing it from people who have the money). But many governments, we can even say most governments, think there is another method for getting the needed money; simply to print it.
If the government taxes citizens to build a new hospital, then the citizens are forced to reduce their spending and the government “replaces” their spending with its own. If, however, the government uses newly printed money to finance the construction of the hospital, then there is no replacement of spending, but an addition, and “prices will tend to go up.”
Mises, per usual, explodes the idea of a “price level” that rises and falls, as if all prices change simultaneously and proportionally. Instead, prices rise “step by step.” The first receivers of new money increase their demands for goods, which provides new income to those who sell those goods. Those sellers may now increase their demands for goods. This explains the process by which some prices and some people’s incomes increase before others. The result is a “price revolution,” in which prices and incomes rise in a stepwise fashion, starting with the origin of the new money. In this way, new money alters the distribution of incomes and the arrangement of real resources throughout the economy, creating “winners” and “losers.”
The gold standard offers a strict check against the inflationist tendencies of governments. In such a system, the government cannot create new units of money to finance its spending, so it must resort to taxation, which is notably unpopular. Fiat inflation, however, is subtle and its effects are complex and delayed, which makes it especially attractive to governments that can wield it.
In this lecture Mises also executes a thorough smackdown of Keynes and Keynesianism, but I’ll leave that for readers to enjoy.
Lecture Five: Foreign Investment
Mises returns to a principle he introduced in the first lecture, that economic growth stems from capital accumulation. The differences in standards of living between countries is not attributable to technology, the qualities of the workers, or the skills of the entrepreneurs, but to the availability of capital.
One way that capital may be accumulated within a country is through foreign investment. The British, for example, provided much of the capital that was required to develop the rail system in the United States and in Europe. This provided mutual benefit for both the British and the countries on the receiving end of this investment. The British earned profits through their ownership of the rail systems and the receiving countries, even with a temporary “unfavorable” balance of trade, obtained the benefits of the rail system including expanded productivity which, over time, allowed them to purchase stock in the rail companies from the British.
Foreign investment allows the capital accumulation in one country to speed up the development of other countries, all without a one-sided sacrifice on the part of the country providing the investment. Wars (especially world wars), protectionism, and domestic taxation destroy this mutually beneficial process. When countries impose tariffs or expropriate the capital that belongs to foreign investors, they “prevent or to slow down the accumulation of domestic capital and to put obstacles in the way of foreign capital.”
Lecture Six: Politics and Ideas
The classical liberal ideas of the philosophers of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries helped create the constrained governments and economic freedom that led to the explosion of economic growth Mises discussed in the first lecture. But the emergence of minority “pressure groups,” what we would call “special interest groups” today, directed politicians away from classical liberal ideals and toward interventionism. The groups that would benefit from various interventions lobby the government to grant them favors like monopoly privileges, taxes on competition (including tariffs), and subsidies. And, as we have seen, this interventionist spiral tends toward socialism and totalitarianism. The “resurgence of the warlike spirit” in the twentieth century brought about world wars and exacerbated the totalitarian trends even in the once exemplary nations.
The concomitant rise in government expenditures made fiat money and inflation too tempting. The wars and special projects advocated by the pressure groups were expensive, and so budget constraints were discarded in favor of debasement.
This, Mises says, explains the downfall of civilization. He points to the Roman Empire as an example:
What had taken place? What was the problem? What was it that caused the disintegration of an empire which, in every regard, had attained the highest civilization ever achieved before the eighteenth century? The truth is that what destroyed this ancient civilization was something similar, almost identical to the dangers that threaten our civilization today: on the one hand it was interventionism, and on the other hand, inflation.
Mises finds hope in the fact that the detractors of economic freedom, like Marx and Keynes, do not represent the masses or even a majority. Marx, for example, “was not a man from the proletariat. He was the son of a lawyer. … He was supported by his friend Friedrich Engels, who—being a manufacturer—was the worst type of ‘bourgeois,’ according to socialist ideas. In the language of Marxism, he was an exploiter.”
This implies that the fate of civilization depends on a battle of ideas, and Mises thought that good ideas would win:
I consider it as a very good sign that, while fifty years ago, practically nobody in the world had the courage to say anything in favor of a free economy, we have now, at least in some of the advanced countries of the world, institutions that are centers for the propagation of a free economy.
May we continue Mises’s project and fulfill his hope. What the world needs is “Menos Marx, Mais Mises.”
-
Site: Zero HedgeWhat Are Mises' Six Lessons?Tyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 16:05
Authored by Jonathan Newman via The Mises Institute,
Ludwig von Mises’s Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow has become quite popular recently. The Mises Book Store has sold out of its physical copies, and the PDF, which is available online for free, has seen over 50,000 downloads in the past few days.
This surge in interest in Mises’s ideas was started by UFC fighter Renato Moicano, who declared in a short post-fight victory speech, “I love America, I love the Constitution...I want to carry...guns. I love private property. Let me tell you something. If you care about your...country, read Ludwig von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian economic school.”
The “six lessons” he is referring to is Mises’s book, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, which was republished by our friends in Brazil under the title “As Seis Lições” (“The Six Lessons”).
If you are interested in what Mises has to say in this book, which is a transcription of lectures he gave in Argentina in 1959, here’s a brief preview, which I hope inspires you to read the short book in full. As a side note, if you are an undergraduate student who is interested in these ideas, the Mises Institute’s next Mises Book Club is on this text (pure coincidence!).
Lecture One: Capitalism
Mises begins his first lecture with an overview of the development of capitalism out of feudalism. Businesses began “mass production to satisfy the needs of the masses” instead of focusing on producing luxury goods for the elite. These big businesses succeeded because they served the needs of a larger group of people, and their success wholly depended on their ability to give this mass of consumers what they wanted.
Despite the amazing and undeniable increases in standards of living, even for a growing population, capitalism had its detractors, including Karl Marx, who gave capitalism its name. Mises says that while Marx hated capitalism and that Marx dubbed it thusly as an attack on the system, the name is a good one
because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it.
Prosperity is the result of providing for the future—more precisely it is the result of setting aside consumption today by saving and investing resources in production. Mises says that this principle explains why some countries are more prosperous than others. When it comes to economic growth, “there are no miracles.” There is only “the application of the principles of the free market economy, of the methods of capitalism.”
Lecture Two: Socialism
In the second lecture, Mises takes a closer look at Marx’s proposed system: socialism. Economic freedom means that people can choose their own careers and use their resources to accomplish their own ends. Economic freedom is the basis for all other freedoms. For example, when the government seizes whole industries, like that of the printing press, it determines what will be published and what won’t and the “freedom of the press disappears.”
Mises acknowledges that there is no such thing as “perfect freedom” in a metaphysical sense. We must obey the laws of nature, especially if we intend to use and transform nature according to our ends. And even economic freedom means that there is a fundamental interdependence among individuals: “Freedom in society means that a man depends as much on other people as other people depend upon him.” This is also true for big businesses and the entrepreneurs who lead them. The true “bosses” in the market economy are not those who shout orders to the workers, but the consumers.
Socialists despise the idea of consumer sovereignty because it means allowing mistakes. In their mind, the state should play the paternalistic role of deciding what is good for everyone. Thus Mises sees no difference between socialism and a system of slavery: “The slave must do what his superior orders him to do, but the free citizen—and this is what freedom means—is in a position to choose his own way of life.” In capitalism, this freedom makes it possible for people to be born into poverty but then achieve great success as they provide for their fellow man. This kind of social mobility is impossible under systems like feudalism and socialism.
Mises ends this lecture with a short explanation of the economic calculation critique of socialism. When the private ownership of the means of production is prohibited, then economic calculation is made impossible. Without market prices for factors, we cannot economize production and provide for the needs of the masses, no matter who oversees the socialist planning board. The result is mass deprivation and chaos.
Lecture Three: Interventionism
Interventionism describes a situation in which the government “wants to interfere with market phenomena.” Each intervention involves an abrogation of the consumer sovereignty Mises had explained in the two previous lectures.
The government wants to interfere in order to force businessmen to conduct their affairs in a different way than they would have chosen if they had obeyed only the consumers. Thus, all the measures of interventionism by the government are directed toward restricting the supremacy of consumers.
Mises gives an example of a price ceiling on milk. While those who enact such an intervention may intend to make milk more affordable for poorer families, there are many unintended consequences: increased demand, decreased supply, non-price rationing in the form of long queues at shops that sell milk, and, importantly, grounds for the government to intervene in new ways now that their initial intervention has not achieved its intended purpose. So, in Mises’s example, he traces through the new interventions, like government rationing, price controls for cattle food, price controls for luxury goods, and so on until the government has intervened in virtually every part of the economy, i.e., socialism.
After providing some historical examples of this process, Mises gives the big picture. Interventionism, as a “middle-of-the-road policy,” is actually a road toward totalitarianism.
Lecture Four: Inflation
There can be no secret way to the solution of the financial problems of a government; if it needs money, it has to obtain the money by taxing its citizens (or, under special conditions, by borrowing it from people who have the money). But many governments, we can even say most governments, think there is another method for getting the needed money; simply to print it.
If the government taxes citizens to build a new hospital, then the citizens are forced to reduce their spending and the government “replaces” their spending with its own. If, however, the government uses newly printed money to finance the construction of the hospital, then there is no replacement of spending, but an addition, and “prices will tend to go up.”
Mises, per usual, explodes the idea of a “price level” that rises and falls, as if all prices change simultaneously and proportionally. Instead, prices rise “step by step.” The first receivers of new money increase their demands for goods, which provides new income to those who sell those goods. Those sellers may now increase their demands for goods. This explains the process by which some prices and some people’s incomes increase before others. The result is a “price revolution,” in which prices and incomes rise in a stepwise fashion, starting with the origin of the new money. In this way, new money alters the distribution of incomes and the arrangement of real resources throughout the economy, creating “winners” and “losers.”
The gold standard offers a strict check against the inflationist tendencies of governments. In such a system, the government cannot create new units of money to finance its spending, so it must resort to taxation, which is notably unpopular. Fiat inflation, however, is subtle and its effects are complex and delayed, which makes it especially attractive to governments that can wield it.
In this lecture Mises also executes a thorough smackdown of Keynes and Keynesianism, but I’ll leave that for readers to enjoy.
Lecture Five: Foreign Investment
Mises returns to a principle he introduced in the first lecture, that economic growth stems from capital accumulation. The differences in standards of living between countries is not attributable to technology, the qualities of the workers, or the skills of the entrepreneurs, but to the availability of capital.
One way that capital may be accumulated within a country is through foreign investment. The British, for example, provided much of the capital that was required to develop the rail system in the United States and in Europe. This provided mutual benefit for both the British and the countries on the receiving end of this investment. The British earned profits through their ownership of the rail systems and the receiving countries, even with a temporary “unfavorable” balance of trade, obtained the benefits of the rail system including expanded productivity which, over time, allowed them to purchase stock in the rail companies from the British.
Foreign investment allows the capital accumulation in one country to speed up the development of other countries, all without a one-sided sacrifice on the part of the country providing the investment. Wars (especially world wars), protectionism, and domestic taxation destroy this mutually beneficial process. When countries impose tariffs or expropriate the capital that belongs to foreign investors, they “prevent or to slow down the accumulation of domestic capital and to put obstacles in the way of foreign capital.”
Lecture Six: Politics and Ideas
The classical liberal ideas of the philosophers of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries helped create the constrained governments and economic freedom that led to the explosion of economic growth Mises discussed in the first lecture. But the emergence of minority “pressure groups,” what we would call “special interest groups” today, directed politicians away from classical liberal ideals and toward interventionism. The groups that would benefit from various interventions lobby the government to grant them favors like monopoly privileges, taxes on competition (including tariffs), and subsidies. And, as we have seen, this interventionist spiral tends toward socialism and totalitarianism. The “resurgence of the warlike spirit” in the twentieth century brought about world wars and exacerbated the totalitarian trends even in the once exemplary nations.
The concomitant rise in government expenditures made fiat money and inflation too tempting. The wars and special projects advocated by the pressure groups were expensive, and so budget constraints were discarded in favor of debasement.
This, Mises says, explains the downfall of civilization. He points to the Roman Empire as an example:
What had taken place? What was the problem? What was it that caused the disintegration of an empire which, in every regard, had attained the highest civilization ever achieved before the eighteenth century? The truth is that what destroyed this ancient civilization was something similar, almost identical to the dangers that threaten our civilization today: on the one hand it was interventionism, and on the other hand, inflation.
Mises finds hope in the fact that the detractors of economic freedom, like Marx and Keynes, do not represent the masses or even a majority. Marx, for example, “was not a man from the proletariat. He was the son of a lawyer. … He was supported by his friend Friedrich Engels, who—being a manufacturer—was the worst type of ‘bourgeois,’ according to socialist ideas. In the language of Marxism, he was an exploiter.”
This implies that the fate of civilization depends on a battle of ideas, and Mises thought that good ideas would win:
I consider it as a very good sign that, while fifty years ago, practically nobody in the world had the courage to say anything in favor of a free economy, we have now, at least in some of the advanced countries of the world, institutions that are centers for the propagation of a free economy.
May we continue Mises’s project and fulfill his hope. What the world needs is “Menos Marx, Mais Mises.”
-
Site: RT - News
The House has again passed legislation that would shut down the video-sharing platform if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell it
The US House of Representatives has tied a law requiring Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to be sold or banned, to emergency spending on the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts.
The latest legislation targeting TikTok passed by a 360-58 House vote on Saturday. If approved it would give the video-sharing platform’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, nine months to sell the fast-growing business or risk having it barred from US app stores.
House lawmakers passed a similar bill in March, saying TikTok was a “national security threat” because of its Chinese ownership. Supporters of the legislation are betting that by bundling it with several emergency spending bills passed on Saturday – including military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan – they can force the Senate to approve it in an all-or-nothing vote.
US President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the TikTok bill into law if it passes both houses of Congress. He and his Senate allies may be unable to resist approving the bundled security legislation after struggling for six months to win passage of additional Ukraine aid in the Republican-controlled House.
Read more Beijing slams proposed US TikTok ban as ‘bandit logic’TikTok has lobbied against the legislation, saying it would trample the free-speech rights of its 170 million US users and harm the 7 million small businesses that rely on the platform. By combining the initiative with other bills, the House is “using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance,” the company said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) pushed through a wave of security-related bills on Saturday, including the various aid packages and legislation authorizing the Biden administration to liquidate seized Russian assets and give the proceeds to Ukraine.
The aid bills provide funding for $95 billion in emergency spending, including $61 billion for Ukraine. The Ukraine bill passed by a margin of 311-112 as unanimous support from Democrat lawmakers enabled Johnson to override opposition in his own party.
READ MORE: Trump comments on why he didn’t ban TikTok
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) called Saturday’s vote “despicable,” saying Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had become “Mike Johnson’s puppet master.” She added, “Not only is Mike Johnson a traitor to our conference, he’s a traitor to our country.”
-
Site: RT - News
The House has again passed legislation that would shut down the video-sharing platform if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell it
The US House of Representatives has tied a law requiring Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to be sold or banned, to emergency spending on the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts.
The latest legislation targeting TikTok passed by a 360-58 House vote on Saturday. If approved it would give the video-sharing platform’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, nine months to sell the fast-growing business or risk having it barred from US app stores.
House lawmakers passed a similar bill in March, saying TikTok was a “national security threat” because of its Chinese ownership. Supporters of the legislation are betting that by bundling it with several emergency spending bills passed on Saturday – including military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan – they can force the Senate to approve it in an all-or-nothing vote.
US President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the TikTok bill into law if it passes both houses of Congress. He and his Senate allies may be unable to resist approving the bundled security legislation after struggling for six months to win passage of additional Ukraine aid in the Republican-controlled House.
Read more Beijing slams proposed US TikTok ban as ‘bandit logic’TikTok has lobbied against the legislation, saying it would trample the free-speech rights of its 170 million US users and harm the 7 million small businesses that rely on the platform. By combining the initiative with other bills, the House is “using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance,” the company said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) pushed through a wave of security-related bills on Saturday, including the various aid packages and legislation authorizing the Biden administration to liquidate seized Russian assets and give the proceeds to Ukraine.
The aid bills provide funding for $95 billion in emergency spending, including $61 billion for Ukraine. The Ukraine bill passed by a margin of 311-112 as unanimous support from Democrat lawmakers enabled Johnson to override opposition in his own party.
READ MORE: Trump comments on why he didn’t ban TikTok
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) called Saturday’s vote “despicable,” saying Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had become “Mike Johnson’s puppet master.” She added, “Not only is Mike Johnson a traitor to our conference, he’s a traitor to our country.”
-
Site: RT - News
The House has again passed legislation that would shut down the video-sharing platform if its Chinese owner doesn’t sell it
The US House of Representatives has tied a law requiring Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to be sold or banned, to emergency spending on the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts.
The latest legislation targeting TikTok passed by a 360-58 House vote on Saturday. If approved it would give the video-sharing platform’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, nine months to sell the fast-growing business or risk having it barred from US app stores.
House lawmakers passed a similar bill in March, saying TikTok was a “national security threat” because of its Chinese ownership. Supporters of the legislation are betting that by bundling it with several emergency spending bills passed on Saturday – including military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan – they can force the Senate to approve it in an all-or-nothing vote.
US President Joe Biden has said that he will sign the TikTok bill into law if it passes both houses of Congress. He and his Senate allies may be unable to resist approving the bundled security legislation after struggling for six months to win passage of additional Ukraine aid in the Republican-controlled House.
Read more Beijing slams proposed US TikTok ban as ‘bandit logic’TikTok has lobbied against the legislation, saying it would trample the free-speech rights of its 170 million US users and harm the 7 million small businesses that rely on the platform. By combining the initiative with other bills, the House is “using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance,” the company said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) pushed through a wave of security-related bills on Saturday, including the various aid packages and legislation authorizing the Biden administration to liquidate seized Russian assets and give the proceeds to Ukraine.
The aid bills provide funding for $95 billion in emergency spending, including $61 billion for Ukraine. The Ukraine bill passed by a margin of 311-112 as unanimous support from Democrat lawmakers enabled Johnson to override opposition in his own party.
READ MORE: Trump comments on why he didn’t ban TikTok
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) called Saturday’s vote “despicable,” saying Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had become “Mike Johnson’s puppet master.” She added, “Not only is Mike Johnson a traitor to our conference, he’s a traitor to our country.”
-
Site: Euthanasia Prevention CoalitionAre you grieving the loss of a loved one through Medical Assistance in Dying (euthanasia)?
Compassionate Community Care and St John The Compassionate Mission are hosting a retreat day for hospitality, support, reflection and sharing for those who are hurting from losing a loved one (friend or family) through (MAiD) euthanasia.
Anyone who is grieving is welcome.
The event is: Saturday May 25, 2024 from 12 to 8 pm.
The location: 155 Broadview Ave., Toronto ON M4M 2E9
There is a suggested donation of $100. Meals are provided.
For more information and to register email: info@beingwith.org or outreach@stmarysrefuge.orgProject Anna and Simeon.
-
Site: RT - News
Moscow’s forces have destroyed five US-made Abrams in Ukraine and damaged another three, the newspaper has claimed
Expensive American M1 Abrams tanks delivered to Ukraine are increasingly falling prey to Russian drones that cost only a fraction as much, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Even “one of the most powerful symbols of American military might” is not invulnerable to the attacks, it said.
At least five US-supplied tanks out of the 31 provided by Washington have already been destroyed by Russia, the media outlet said, adding that three others were “moderately damaged.”
In most cases, the tanks have been destroyed by first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones, also known as loitering munitions. These drones are capable of maneuvering before hitting their targets.
In at least one instance though, an Abrams tank was taken out in a duel against a Russian T-72B3 main battle tank. The Russian military has published upwards of a dozen clips, mostly taken from drones, showing the destruction of US-supplied equipment.
Read more WATCH Russian kamikaze drone hit US-made Abrams tankAccording to the NYT, the tanks turned out to be “more easily taken out by exploding drones than some officials and experts had initially assumed.” The media outlet cited Austrian historian and military expert Colonel Markus Reisner, who described the situation as “unbelievable.” The paper also described the Russian UAVs as “highly-accurate, low-cost tank killers.”
The drones’ accuracy exceeds 90%, the NYT said, adding that they are also capable of hitting heavy armor in its weakest spots. The UAVs “can cost as little as $500,” the paper reported, and are capable of “taking out a $10 million Abrams tank.” The paper noted that there is no “easy, or single” way to defend a tank against a drone attack.
US-made Abrams tanks made their long-expected appearance on the front line in late February amid the Ukrainian effort to halt advancing Russian troops after the capture of the Donbass city of Avdeevka. A batch of 31 M1 Abrams tanks was pledged to Kiev early last year, ahead of the ultimately disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. The delivery was made in full by mid-October, when the ill-fated push had already largely been exhausted.
-
Site: RT - News
Moscow’s forces have destroyed five US-made Abrams in Ukraine and damaged another three, the newspaper has claimed
Expensive American M1 Abrams tanks delivered to Ukraine are increasingly falling prey to Russian drones that cost only a fraction as much, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Even “one of the most powerful symbols of American military might” is not invulnerable to the attacks, it said.
At least five US-supplied tanks out of the 31 provided by Washington have already been destroyed by Russia, the media outlet said, adding that three others were “moderately damaged.”
In most cases, the tanks have been destroyed by first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones, also known as loitering munitions. These drones are capable of maneuvering before hitting their targets.
In at least one instance though, an Abrams tank was taken out in a duel against a Russian T-72B3 main battle tank. The Russian military has published upwards of a dozen clips, mostly taken from drones, showing the destruction of US-supplied equipment.
Read more WATCH Russian kamikaze drone hit US-made Abrams tankAccording to the NYT, the tanks turned out to be “more easily taken out by exploding drones than some officials and experts had initially assumed.” The media outlet cited Austrian historian and military expert Colonel Markus Reisner, who described the situation as “unbelievable.” The paper also described the Russian UAVs as “highly-accurate, low-cost tank killers.”
The drones’ accuracy exceeds 90%, the NYT said, adding that they are also capable of hitting heavy armor in its weakest spots. The UAVs “can cost as little as $500,” the paper reported, and are capable of “taking out a $10 million Abrams tank.” The paper noted that there is no “easy, or single” way to defend a tank against a drone attack.
US-made Abrams tanks made their long-expected appearance on the front line in late February amid the Ukrainian effort to halt advancing Russian troops after the capture of the Donbass city of Avdeevka. A batch of 31 M1 Abrams tanks was pledged to Kiev early last year, ahead of the ultimately disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. The delivery was made in full by mid-October, when the ill-fated push had already largely been exhausted.
-
Site: RT - News
Moscow’s forces have destroyed five US-made Abrams in Ukraine and damaged another three, the newspaper has claimed
Expensive American M1 Abrams tanks delivered to Ukraine are increasingly falling prey to Russian drones that cost only a fraction as much, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Even “one of the most powerful symbols of American military might” is not invulnerable to the attacks, it said.
At least five US-supplied tanks out of the 31 provided by Washington have already been destroyed by Russia, the media outlet said, adding that three others were “moderately damaged.”
In most cases, the tanks have been destroyed by first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones, also known as loitering munitions. These drones are capable of maneuvering before hitting their targets.
In at least one instance though, an Abrams tank was taken out in a duel against a Russian T-72B3 main battle tank. The Russian military has published upwards of a dozen clips, mostly taken from drones, showing the destruction of US-supplied equipment.
Read more WATCH Russian kamikaze drone hit US-made Abrams tankAccording to the NYT, the tanks turned out to be “more easily taken out by exploding drones than some officials and experts had initially assumed.” The media outlet cited Austrian historian and military expert Colonel Markus Reisner, who described the situation as “unbelievable.” The paper also described the Russian UAVs as “highly-accurate, low-cost tank killers.”
The drones’ accuracy exceeds 90%, the NYT said, adding that they are also capable of hitting heavy armor in its weakest spots. The UAVs “can cost as little as $500,” the paper reported, and are capable of “taking out a $10 million Abrams tank.” The paper noted that there is no “easy, or single” way to defend a tank against a drone attack.
US-made Abrams tanks made their long-expected appearance on the front line in late February amid the Ukrainian effort to halt advancing Russian troops after the capture of the Donbass city of Avdeevka. A batch of 31 M1 Abrams tanks was pledged to Kiev early last year, ahead of the ultimately disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. The delivery was made in full by mid-October, when the ill-fated push had already largely been exhausted.
-
Site: RT - News
Moscow’s forces have destroyed five US-made Abrams in Ukraine and damaged another three, the newspaper has claimed
Expensive American M1 Abrams tanks delivered to Ukraine are increasingly falling prey to Russian drones that cost only a fraction as much, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Even “one of the most powerful symbols of American military might” is not invulnerable to the attacks, it said.
At least five US-supplied tanks out of the 31 provided by Washington have already been destroyed by Russia, the media outlet said, adding that three others were “moderately damaged.”
In most cases, the tanks have been destroyed by first-person-view (FPV) kamikaze drones, also known as loitering munitions. These drones are capable of maneuvering before hitting their targets.
In at least one instance though, an Abrams tank was taken out in a duel against a Russian T-72B3 main battle tank. The Russian military has published upwards of a dozen clips, mostly taken from drones, showing the destruction of US-supplied equipment.
Read more WATCH Russian kamikaze drone hit US-made Abrams tankAccording to the NYT, the tanks turned out to be “more easily taken out by exploding drones than some officials and experts had initially assumed.” The media outlet cited Austrian historian and military expert Colonel Markus Reisner, who described the situation as “unbelievable.” The paper also described the Russian UAVs as “highly-accurate, low-cost tank killers.”
The drones’ accuracy exceeds 90%, the NYT said, adding that they are also capable of hitting heavy armor in its weakest spots. The UAVs “can cost as little as $500,” the paper reported, and are capable of “taking out a $10 million Abrams tank.” The paper noted that there is no “easy, or single” way to defend a tank against a drone attack.
US-made Abrams tanks made their long-expected appearance on the front line in late February amid the Ukrainian effort to halt advancing Russian troops after the capture of the Donbass city of Avdeevka. A batch of 31 M1 Abrams tanks was pledged to Kiev early last year, ahead of the ultimately disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive. The delivery was made in full by mid-October, when the ill-fated push had already largely been exhausted.
-
Site: Zero HedgeElon Musk Says Tesla Will Fix "Incorrectly Low" Severance Packages For Laid Off EmployeesTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 15:30
Elon Musk stated last week that the severance packages given to some ex-Tesla Inc. employees during the company's largest workforce reduction were incorrectly too low.
Tesla announced on Monday that it is cutting over 10% of its 140,000-strong global workforce to prepare for a new phase of growth, according to CNBC.
Details on the layoffs were sparse, but in a company memo, Elon Musk said the move was part of a strategic shift towards robotaxi development, stepping away from plans for a more affordable electric vehicle.
Musk wrote in an email last week: “As we reorganize Tesla it has come to my attention that some severance packages are incorrectly low. My apologies for this mistake. It is being corrected immediately.”
Nico Murillo, a former production supervisor, told Bloomberg: “Tried to badge in, and the security guard took my badge and told me I was laid off. Sat in my car in disbelief.”
As we've noted, Tesla missed its Q1 delivery guidance and, so far in 2024, its stock has been decimated. For Q1 2024, Tesla produced over 433,000 vehicles and delivered 387,000. It marks the first annual Q1 delivery decline for the automaker since 2020.
Tesla's exact delivery number for the quarter was 386,810 vehicles, far below Bloomberg estimates of 449.080.
Tesla submitted a proxy statement for its June 13 shareholder meeting this week, requesting shareholders to approve relocating the company's state of incorporation to Texas and to ratify CEO Elon Musk's 2018 pay package, which was recently rescinded by a Delaware judge.
In the statement, Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm supports the move to Texas, noting that the company has been headquartered there since December 2021., per Yahoo.
“2024 is the year that Tesla should move home to Texas. We are asking for your vote to approve Tesla’s move from Delaware, our current state of incorporation, to a new legal home in Texas. Texas is already our business home, and we are committed to it,” Denholm said.
“In 2018, we asked for unbelievable growth and accomplishments. Elon delivered: Tesla’s stockholders have benefited from unprecedented growth under Elon’s leadership and Tesla has met every single one of the 2018 CEO pay package’s targets,” she continued.
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush added: “On the comp package which was already approved by shareholders at the time in 2018, this has been an area of contention among some investors but we would expect the 2018 package will be reapproved and the Delaware court ruling would be moot in essence as Tesla will now be moving to Texas.”
-
Site: Zero HedgeElon Musk Says Tesla Will Fix "Incorrectly Low" Severance Packages For Laid Off EmployeesTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 15:30
Elon Musk stated last week that the severance packages given to some ex-Tesla Inc. employees during the company's largest workforce reduction were incorrectly too low.
Tesla announced on Monday that it is cutting over 10% of its 140,000-strong global workforce to prepare for a new phase of growth, according to CNBC.
Details on the layoffs were sparse, but in a company memo, Elon Musk said the move was part of a strategic shift towards robotaxi development, stepping away from plans for a more affordable electric vehicle.
Musk wrote in an email last week: “As we reorganize Tesla it has come to my attention that some severance packages are incorrectly low. My apologies for this mistake. It is being corrected immediately.”
Nico Murillo, a former production supervisor, told Bloomberg: “Tried to badge in, and the security guard took my badge and told me I was laid off. Sat in my car in disbelief.”
As we've noted, Tesla missed its Q1 delivery guidance and, so far in 2024, its stock has been decimated. For Q1 2024, Tesla produced over 433,000 vehicles and delivered 387,000. It marks the first annual Q1 delivery decline for the automaker since 2020.
Tesla's exact delivery number for the quarter was 386,810 vehicles, far below Bloomberg estimates of 449.080.
Tesla submitted a proxy statement for its June 13 shareholder meeting this week, requesting shareholders to approve relocating the company's state of incorporation to Texas and to ratify CEO Elon Musk's 2018 pay package, which was recently rescinded by a Delaware judge.
In the statement, Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm supports the move to Texas, noting that the company has been headquartered there since December 2021., per Yahoo.
“2024 is the year that Tesla should move home to Texas. We are asking for your vote to approve Tesla’s move from Delaware, our current state of incorporation, to a new legal home in Texas. Texas is already our business home, and we are committed to it,” Denholm said.
“In 2018, we asked for unbelievable growth and accomplishments. Elon delivered: Tesla’s stockholders have benefited from unprecedented growth under Elon’s leadership and Tesla has met every single one of the 2018 CEO pay package’s targets,” she continued.
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush added: “On the comp package which was already approved by shareholders at the time in 2018, this has been an area of contention among some investors but we would expect the 2018 package will be reapproved and the Delaware court ruling would be moot in essence as Tesla will now be moving to Texas.”
-
Site: RT - News
If Olaf Scholz wanted to send Taurus missiles to Kiev, he could find a “technological solution,” CEO Michael Schoellhorn has said
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz could supply Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine without sending German military specialists to operate them, the head of Airbus’ defense division has told Der Spiegel. Scholz has insisted that the need for German personnel prevents him from sending the missiles to Kiev.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his officials have been asking Berlin for Taurus missiles for almost a year, but Scholz has thus far refused to consider the request. Speaking to the news agency dpa in February, the chancellor claimed that German military technicians would have to be deployed to Ukraine to operate the air-launched missiles, making them active participants in the conflict with Russia.
Airbus Defense and Space CEO Michael Schoellhorn believes that Scholz has no desire to give the missiles to Ukraine, and is using the need for German involvement as an excuse.
“The chancellor has decided on the issue. His argument is political,” Schollhorn told Der Spiegel in an interview published on Saturday.
Read more NATO should choose Ukraine aid over own defense – Stoltenberg“If there was the will to deliver, technological solutions would be found to use the Taurus in Ukraine without German participation,” he continued. “But I can understand the political arguments.”
Developed by Germany’s MBDA Deutschland and Sweden’s Saab Bofors Dynamics, the Taurus KEPD-350 is an air-launched cruise missile capable of carrying a 480kg warhead over a maximum distance of 500km. Armed with these missiles, Ukraine could launch strikes deeper into Russian territory than with British Storm Shadow or French SCALP-EG missiles, which have a maximum range of around 300km.
MBDA Deutschland’s parent company is owned by Airbus, BAE Systems, and Leonardo.
Kiev has specifically asked for Taurus missiles to strike the Crimean Bridge, one of several key transport links between the peninsula and the Russian mainland. In a conversation leaked in March, senior German military chiefs discussed how the missiles could be given to Ukraine for this purpose while concealing German involvement.
However, if Ukraine were to take delivery of the missiles, its air force would struggle to launch them. At present, only five aircraft – the Panavia PA-200 Tornado, Eurofighter Typhoon EF-2000, and McDonnell Douglas EF-18A+ Hornet – are capable of carrying Taurus missiles. The Ukrainian military would either have to develop adapters to allow its Soviet-era MiG-29 and Su-24 aircraft to fire them, or lobby the West to provide aircraft capable of doing so.
-
Site: Zero HedgeNot 'The Onion': New Guinea Academics Say Cannibals Would Be Offended By Biden's Tale Of Uncle Being EatenTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 14:55
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
Academics from Papua New Guinea say that the actual cannibals who live there would be extremely offended by Joe Biden’s made up story of his uncle being eaten by them during World War Two because they “wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”
As we highlighted earlier this week, Biden twice told the completely made up story as a way of attacking Donald Trump.
In reality his uncle wasn’t a reconnaissance pilot, wasn’t shot down over Papua New Guinea and definitely wasn’t eaten by cannibals.
It didn’t prevent the White House Press Secretary from calling doing her best to avoid admitting it was all lies, and calling it a “very proud” moment for Biden, before repeating the lie about Trump calling dead US veterans ‘losers’.
Press Secretary does her best to avoid admitting that Biden’s story about his uncle being shot down and eaten by cannibals was total made up horse shit. Then repeats the lie that Trump called fallen veterans ‘losers’pic.twitter.com/Kl9sv4sDMf
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) April 18, 2024The story gets more ridiculous, however.
The Guardian now reports that outraged Papua New Guinea academics have blasted Biden’s tale as “unacceptable” and “very offensive.”
‘Lost for words’: Joe Biden’s tale about cannibals bemuses Papua New Guinea residents https://t.co/bYFg7KAgg5
— Guardian news (@guardiannews) April 19, 2024Michael Kabuni, a political science lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, explained that cannibalism was historically practiced by some communities only in very specific contexts, such as after the death of a revered community member.
Kabuni noted that the native people only ever engaged in cannibalism as a sign of respect and that locals “wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”
“Taking it out of context, and implying that your [uncle] jumps out of the plane and somehow we think it’s a good meal is unacceptable,” Kabuni urged.
Allan Bird, governor of Papua New Guinea’s province of East Sepik, said he found Biden’s story “hilarious” and was “lost for words.”
* * *
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.
-
Site: Zero HedgeNot 'The Onion': New Guinea Academics Say Cannibals Would Be Offended By Biden's Tale Of Uncle Being EatenTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 14:55
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,
Academics from Papua New Guinea say that the actual cannibals who live there would be extremely offended by Joe Biden’s made up story of his uncle being eaten by them during World War Two because they “wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”
As we highlighted earlier this week, Biden twice told the completely made up story as a way of attacking Donald Trump.
In reality his uncle wasn’t a reconnaissance pilot, wasn’t shot down over Papua New Guinea and definitely wasn’t eaten by cannibals.
It didn’t prevent the White House Press Secretary from calling doing her best to avoid admitting it was all lies, and calling it a “very proud” moment for Biden, before repeating the lie about Trump calling dead US veterans ‘losers’.
Press Secretary does her best to avoid admitting that Biden’s story about his uncle being shot down and eaten by cannibals was total made up horse shit. Then repeats the lie that Trump called fallen veterans ‘losers’pic.twitter.com/Kl9sv4sDMf
— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) April 18, 2024The story gets more ridiculous, however.
The Guardian now reports that outraged Papua New Guinea academics have blasted Biden’s tale as “unacceptable” and “very offensive.”
‘Lost for words’: Joe Biden’s tale about cannibals bemuses Papua New Guinea residents https://t.co/bYFg7KAgg5
— Guardian news (@guardiannews) April 19, 2024Michael Kabuni, a political science lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, explained that cannibalism was historically practiced by some communities only in very specific contexts, such as after the death of a revered community member.
Kabuni noted that the native people only ever engaged in cannibalism as a sign of respect and that locals “wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”
“Taking it out of context, and implying that your [uncle] jumps out of the plane and somehow we think it’s a good meal is unacceptable,” Kabuni urged.
Allan Bird, governor of Papua New Guinea’s province of East Sepik, said he found Biden’s story “hilarious” and was “lost for words.”
* * *
Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.
-
Site: RT - News
The Senate has passed a controversial bill that enables the FBI to surveil Americans without warrants
The US Senate has expanded a law that enables the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans under the guise of protecting them from foreign threats.
The bill authorizing a two-year extension of the so-called Section 702 program of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was approved by a 60-34 vote in the early morning hours of Saturday. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the legislation, renewing the spying tool after it expired at midnight on Saturday.
Section 702 is ostensibly about surveilling the communications of foreigners for intelligence purposes, including detection of possible terrorist plots against the US. Many of the phone calls and messages that are tapped by Washington’s spying apparatus occur between foreigners and US citizens.
Read more Decades before Snowden, this American patriot waged war against illegal surveillance in the USThe FBI has accessed the 702 database of intercepted communications to investigate targeted Americans, such as Black Lives Matters activists, journalists, members of Congress, political donors, and possible participants in the January 2021 US Capitol riot. Such searches normally require investigators to secure a warrant, meaning a court has found probable cause to suspect that the targeted person has committed a crime.
Critics of the program had demanded that reforms be made before renewing Section 702 to protect US citizens from unconstitutional spying. A 2023 investigation by the US FISA court found that the FBI had illegally used its surveillance powers against American citizens more than 278,000 times in a 12-month period. Congress voted down an amendment that would have required warrants for probes of communications involving Americans.
“Section 702 has been abused under presidents from both political parties, and it has been used to unlawfully surveil the communications of Americans across the political spectrum,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “By expanding the government’s surveillance powers without adding a warrant requirement that would protect Americans, the House has voted to allow the intelligence agencies to violate the civil rights and liberties of Americans for years to come.”
Read more US government wanted backdoor to Telegram – founderSenate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) hailed the fact that the FISA program was reauthorized “in the nick of time,” just as it was expiring. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) said that failure to renew the spying powers could cause US officials to “miss a key piece of intelligence,” such as a threat to American troops stationed overseas or a potential terrorist attack.
Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) lamented the fact that lawmakers declined to pass his amendments to the FISA bill, which would have enabled the government to continue spying on foreigners while protecting the civil liberties of Americans. His proposal was voted down by an 82-11 margin.
“We could have ensured both constitutional rights and national security were protected,” Paul said. “Yet again, the Senate was asked to consider the question: ‘Can liberty be exchanged for security?’ And sadly, the majority of senators said, ‘Yes, it can.’”
-
Site: Zero HedgeHouse Passes $95 Billion Aid Package For Ukraine, Israel And Taiwan - But Not US BorderTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 14:18
The House on Saturday passed a set of foreign aid bills that would send $61 billion to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel, and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific region.
In total, the foreign assistance package totals $95 billion - which only passed after Speaker Mike Johnson cut a deal with Democrats in order to force it through by a vote of 311 to 112.
The Senate is expected to pass the package, which was negotiated in conjunction with the White House, marking a victory against conservative lawmakers who insisted on protecting the US border before sending money abroad to protect those of other countries.
“We cannot be afraid of our shadows. We must be strong. We have to do what’s right,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, said.
Democrats and some Republicans waved Ukrainian flags during the vote, a rare moment of bipartisanship in a bitterly and narrowly divided House.
“Traditional House Republicans led by Speaker Mike Johnson have risen to the occasion,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said. “We have a responsibility to push back against authoritarianism.” -Bloomberg
Earlier in the day, the House passed an $8 billion aid package aimed at countering Chinese aggression towards Taiwan, as well as a bill that would force Chinese-controlled ByteDance Ltd to divest from TikTok or face a US ban. The bill also allows for the confiscation of Russian dollar assets in order to help fund more assistance to Ukraine.
Speaker Johnson made it essentially impossible to vote for any of the bills before the House today without assisting in the effort to send $60 billion to Ukraine and up to $9 billion to Hamas.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 20, 2024
He also made it impossible to condition any of those things on U.S. border security.Breaking down the Ukraine aid - of the $61 billion, $13 billion will replenish US stockpiles of weapons, and $14 billion will go towards US defense systems for Ukraine. $7 billion will go toward US military operations in the region. We assume the remainder will go directly to Ukrainian oligarchs.
The Israel bill, which passed by a vote of 366 to 58, includes $4 billion for missile defense.
Notably absent was so much as a dime for the US border...
"Nothing is done to secure our border or reduce our debt," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whose outrage was shared with Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona, who say they're ready to boot Johnson from his Speakership.
"Ukraine is not even a member of NATO," Greene continued.
Who would have known!
-
Site: Zero HedgeHouse Passes $95 Billion Aid Package For Ukraine, Israel And Taiwan - But Not US BorderTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 14:18
The House on Saturday passed a set of foreign aid bills that would send $61 billion to Ukraine, $26 billion to Israel, and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific region.
In total, the foreign assistance package totals $95 billion - which only passed after Speaker Mike Johnson cut a deal with Democrats in order to force it through by a vote of 311 to 112.
The Senate is expected to pass the package, which was negotiated in conjunction with the White House, marking a victory against conservative lawmakers who insisted on protecting the US border before sending money abroad to protect those of other countries.
“We cannot be afraid of our shadows. We must be strong. We have to do what’s right,” House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, said.
Democrats and some Republicans waved Ukrainian flags during the vote, a rare moment of bipartisanship in a bitterly and narrowly divided House.
“Traditional House Republicans led by Speaker Mike Johnson have risen to the occasion,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said. “We have a responsibility to push back against authoritarianism.” -Bloomberg
Earlier in the day, the House passed an $8 billion aid package aimed at countering Chinese aggression towards Taiwan, as well as a bill that would force Chinese-controlled ByteDance Ltd to divest from TikTok or face a US ban. The bill also allows for the confiscation of Russian dollar assets in order to help fund more assistance to Ukraine.
Speaker Johnson made it essentially impossible to vote for any of the bills before the House today without assisting in the effort to send $60 billion to Ukraine and up to $9 billion to Hamas.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 20, 2024
He also made it impossible to condition any of those things on U.S. border security.Breaking down the Ukraine aid - of the $61 billion, $13 billion will replenish US stockpiles of weapons, and $14 billion will go towards US defense systems for Ukraine. $7 billion will go toward US military operations in the region. We assume the remainder will go directly to Ukrainian oligarchs.
The Israel bill, which passed by a vote of 366 to 58, includes $4 billion for missile defense.
Notably absent was so much as a dime for the US border...
"Nothing is done to secure our border or reduce our debt," said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whose outrage was shared with Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Paul Gosar of Arizona, who say they're ready to boot Johnson from his Speakership.
"Ukraine is not even a member of NATO," Greene continued.
Who would have known!
-
Site: Zero HedgeNPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded BroadcastingTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 14:00
Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics,
“I don't want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.
Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.
Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?
There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.
Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.
Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.
Because newsrooms now have so few dissenting voices, reporters and editors live inside the bubble and hardly notice their surroundings. If they do, they are determined to preserve that insularity.
The fragmentation of today’s media landscape encourages these strong, partisan stances. Newspapers, magazines, cable networks, and podcasts know the market is finely sliced. They have strong incentives to choose a narrow slice for themselves and appeal to it by confirming their audience’s bias, not challenging it. That’s as true for right-wing talk radio as it is for left-wing public radio.
Just as elite attitudes have moved further left, so have elite publications and broadcasts. Since the Democratic Party has trod that same path, even as Republicans have become more nationalist and populist, the bias in elite newsrooms has naturally moved further left. That includes outlets like NPR and PBS. Their audience drives EVs, not Ford F-150s.
What makes this bias a policy issue is that NPR, PBS, and their local outlets receive taxpayer money. They shouldn’t. It was justifiable for educational programming. It cannot be justified for news or entertainment.
Public funding for news programming is fundamentally wrong in a democracy when there are so many other ways to receive news and information. The problem is compounded when taxpayer money pays for coverage is partisan and biased. That’s not an issue for MSNBC or the New York Times. They are private businesses. They can do whatever they damn well please. Not so for NPR, PBS, and their local affiliates. They do receive taxpayer money.
When NPR faced criticism this week, it shot back with deceptive statistics, claiming less than 1% of its money is from the government. That’s three-card-monte accounting.
To understand why, we need to look at how Washington disburses taxpayer money for public TV and radio, some $500 million in the next fiscal year. That money doesn’t go directly to NPR. (Hence, the 1% claim.) They get it indirectly. First, the federal outlay goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private entity, as mandated in a 1967 law. The CPB sends nearly all that money to local public radio and TV stations as “community grants.” The stations then use part of that money to buy syndicated programs like NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
NPR last financial statement showed that about one-third of its revenue came from local stations’ purchasing NPR programs. A significant chunk of the money to make those purchases came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To hide that source of taxpayer funding for NPR was its three-card-monte trick.
The larger problem here is not the deception or partisan bias, bad as they are. It’s not the scale of public funding, either. The fundamental problem is that taxpayers should not be underwriting any domestic news organizations, for any amount. Reporting should be completely independent of city, state, and federal government so journalists can report political issues without fear or favor.
Government-funded broadcasting to foreign audiences is different. American taxpayers have legitimate reasons to fund the Voice of America and other channels, primarily to get honest news past the dictators’ censors. But the VOA is prohibited, by law, from broadcasting within the United States or creating programs for U.S. audiences. That’s entirely proper. The same logic should apply to news and news-interview programs from NPR and PBS and their local affiliates.
What about “educational TV”? There were good reasons for a publicly funded network devoted to that mission in the 1950s and 1960s. There were only three major networks and, of course, a genuine need for educational content. That non-political service lasted from 1954 until 1970. It was succeeded by the Public Broadcasting Service, which quickly dropped any mention of “educational.” Member stations of the old National Educational Television were folded into PBS. Their schedules now include a mix of entertainment, educational programs, news, and news interviews.
National Public Radio, by contrast, has never included much educational content. For years, it has been simply a left-wing alternative to right-wing talk radio. That would be fine only if all the funding were private. It’s not.
The evidence shows that the best educational TV, such as “Sesame Street,” does help children learn. So there are good reasons to continue underwriting such programs. Ideally, they should be provided free to anyone who wishes to broadcast them, post them on the web, or use them in class.
But there is no reason for federal, state, or city governments to own any broadcast channel, other than to broadcast public meetings and hearings. For everything else, including educational programs, there are countless channels on cable TV and YouTube.
A good example of what the government can properly fund are the wonderful videos about scientific discoveries, presented in accessible language by Fermilab’s Dr. Don Lincoln. The lab is funded by the government, and Dr. Lincoln conveys its work to the public by posting brief lectures on the web. He is doing what “educational TV” did in the 1950s. In the 2020s, programs like Dr. Lincoln’s can be posted online for the public to use, free. We don’t need public TV or radio to do it, and we don’t need their publicly funded podcasts.
If private institutions want to publish their own educational videos, either free or for sale, the world is open to them. Let “the Great Courses” do that by selling them online. Let “Prager University” do it. Let MIT broadcast its science courses. Let a million podcasts bloom. Privately.
If the federal government wishes to fund genuinely educational content, fine. It’s also fine to provide public services like weather information, which taxpayers already fund. But if the federal government, cities, or states wish to fund news and news interview programs, that’s not fine. Let private entities do it. Exclusively.
What should be done with existing public broadcasting frequencies on radio and television? Put them up for auction and put the money into the public treasury. If civic groups or philanthropies buy them, fine. If commercial enterprises buy them, that’s fine, too. The Department of Education can still fund education programs and make the content available to anyone who wishes to use it or broadcast on their channels. $500 million should buy a lot of new content each year.
What the government should not fund, produce, or broadcast are news or news-interview programs. The issue is not just political bias. The issue is that the heavy hand of government should not control any broadcast news within the U.S. Let the president, Cabinet secretaries, senators, and representatives hold press conferences. Let the White House, Pentagon, or State Department hold briefings. That’s more than enough to get their message out.
They don’t need to fund broadcast networks. That would be true even if their journalists and presentations were fair-minded. They aren’t, and that’s one more reason to end this public funding. But it is not the main reason. The main reason is that it is simply wrong for the government, with its deep pockets and coercive power, to control any broadcast network. Not in a free country.
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.
-
Site: Zero HedgeNPR Scandal Should Kill Taxpayer-Funded BroadcastingTyler Durden Sat, 04/20/2024 - 14:00
Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics,
“I don't want any yes-men around me,” said Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood producer famed for his movies and malapropisms. “I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.” The brass at National Public Radio must have heard Sam, but they add a slight amendment. We want only “yes-men” (they/them) and will boot anyone who dares to dissent.
Lest there be any doubt, NPR just proved it by suspending, without pay, the staffer who exposed the pervasive problems there. He dared to write publicly that that National Public Radio was uniformly ideological, deeply committed to its strident left-wing views, and determined to exclude any alternatives. For saying that out loud, they cut off Uri Berliner’s paycheck for five days. It’s their way of saying, “Thank you for your feedback.” Q.E.D.
Berliner, disgusted by NPR’s response, resigned Wednesday with a fiery statement: “I cannot work in a newsroom where I am disparaged.” Who could?
There are really two problems here, not one, and they go well beyond one journalist’s resignation. The first is political bias, which is a problem at all “elite” networks and newspapers, where “hard news” is heavily slanted. The second is that some of these outlets, notably NPR, PBS (the Public Broadcasting System) and their local affiliates, receive taxpayer funding.
Let’s take political bias first. It was once a cardinal rule of journalism that partisan or ideological viewpoints should be confined to editorials and opinion columns. The goal was to keep editorial views out of hard-news reporting, as much as possible. To do it, the editorial staff constantly fought with the business team, who wanted coverage to favor their advertisers.
Those days are long gone and so is even the ideal of unbiased coverage. We have returned to an earlier era when American newspapers were closely affiliated with political parties and local political machines and covered the news to favor them. Today’s newsrooms have revived that stance. They are as ideologically driven as a gender-studies class at Smith College. If you depart from that ideology, you are out, like Bari Weiss at the New York Times.
Because newsrooms now have so few dissenting voices, reporters and editors live inside the bubble and hardly notice their surroundings. If they do, they are determined to preserve that insularity.
The fragmentation of today’s media landscape encourages these strong, partisan stances. Newspapers, magazines, cable networks, and podcasts know the market is finely sliced. They have strong incentives to choose a narrow slice for themselves and appeal to it by confirming their audience’s bias, not challenging it. That’s as true for right-wing talk radio as it is for left-wing public radio.
Just as elite attitudes have moved further left, so have elite publications and broadcasts. Since the Democratic Party has trod that same path, even as Republicans have become more nationalist and populist, the bias in elite newsrooms has naturally moved further left. That includes outlets like NPR and PBS. Their audience drives EVs, not Ford F-150s.
What makes this bias a policy issue is that NPR, PBS, and their local outlets receive taxpayer money. They shouldn’t. It was justifiable for educational programming. It cannot be justified for news or entertainment.
Public funding for news programming is fundamentally wrong in a democracy when there are so many other ways to receive news and information. The problem is compounded when taxpayer money pays for coverage is partisan and biased. That’s not an issue for MSNBC or the New York Times. They are private businesses. They can do whatever they damn well please. Not so for NPR, PBS, and their local affiliates. They do receive taxpayer money.
When NPR faced criticism this week, it shot back with deceptive statistics, claiming less than 1% of its money is from the government. That’s three-card-monte accounting.
To understand why, we need to look at how Washington disburses taxpayer money for public TV and radio, some $500 million in the next fiscal year. That money doesn’t go directly to NPR. (Hence, the 1% claim.) They get it indirectly. First, the federal outlay goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private entity, as mandated in a 1967 law. The CPB sends nearly all that money to local public radio and TV stations as “community grants.” The stations then use part of that money to buy syndicated programs like NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
NPR last financial statement showed that about one-third of its revenue came from local stations’ purchasing NPR programs. A significant chunk of the money to make those purchases came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To hide that source of taxpayer funding for NPR was its three-card-monte trick.
The larger problem here is not the deception or partisan bias, bad as they are. It’s not the scale of public funding, either. The fundamental problem is that taxpayers should not be underwriting any domestic news organizations, for any amount. Reporting should be completely independent of city, state, and federal government so journalists can report political issues without fear or favor.
Government-funded broadcasting to foreign audiences is different. American taxpayers have legitimate reasons to fund the Voice of America and other channels, primarily to get honest news past the dictators’ censors. But the VOA is prohibited, by law, from broadcasting within the United States or creating programs for U.S. audiences. That’s entirely proper. The same logic should apply to news and news-interview programs from NPR and PBS and their local affiliates.
What about “educational TV”? There were good reasons for a publicly funded network devoted to that mission in the 1950s and 1960s. There were only three major networks and, of course, a genuine need for educational content. That non-political service lasted from 1954 until 1970. It was succeeded by the Public Broadcasting Service, which quickly dropped any mention of “educational.” Member stations of the old National Educational Television were folded into PBS. Their schedules now include a mix of entertainment, educational programs, news, and news interviews.
National Public Radio, by contrast, has never included much educational content. For years, it has been simply a left-wing alternative to right-wing talk radio. That would be fine only if all the funding were private. It’s not.
The evidence shows that the best educational TV, such as “Sesame Street,” does help children learn. So there are good reasons to continue underwriting such programs. Ideally, they should be provided free to anyone who wishes to broadcast them, post them on the web, or use them in class.
But there is no reason for federal, state, or city governments to own any broadcast channel, other than to broadcast public meetings and hearings. For everything else, including educational programs, there are countless channels on cable TV and YouTube.
A good example of what the government can properly fund are the wonderful videos about scientific discoveries, presented in accessible language by Fermilab’s Dr. Don Lincoln. The lab is funded by the government, and Dr. Lincoln conveys its work to the public by posting brief lectures on the web. He is doing what “educational TV” did in the 1950s. In the 2020s, programs like Dr. Lincoln’s can be posted online for the public to use, free. We don’t need public TV or radio to do it, and we don’t need their publicly funded podcasts.
If private institutions want to publish their own educational videos, either free or for sale, the world is open to them. Let “the Great Courses” do that by selling them online. Let “Prager University” do it. Let MIT broadcast its science courses. Let a million podcasts bloom. Privately.
If the federal government wishes to fund genuinely educational content, fine. It’s also fine to provide public services like weather information, which taxpayers already fund. But if the federal government, cities, or states wish to fund news and news interview programs, that’s not fine. Let private entities do it. Exclusively.
What should be done with existing public broadcasting frequencies on radio and television? Put them up for auction and put the money into the public treasury. If civic groups or philanthropies buy them, fine. If commercial enterprises buy them, that’s fine, too. The Department of Education can still fund education programs and make the content available to anyone who wishes to use it or broadcast on their channels. $500 million should buy a lot of new content each year.
What the government should not fund, produce, or broadcast are news or news-interview programs. The issue is not just political bias. The issue is that the heavy hand of government should not control any broadcast news within the U.S. Let the president, Cabinet secretaries, senators, and representatives hold press conferences. Let the White House, Pentagon, or State Department hold briefings. That’s more than enough to get their message out.
They don’t need to fund broadcast networks. That would be true even if their journalists and presentations were fair-minded. They aren’t, and that’s one more reason to end this public funding. But it is not the main reason. The main reason is that it is simply wrong for the government, with its deep pockets and coercive power, to control any broadcast network. Not in a free country.
Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.
-
Site: RT - News
Lawmakers have authorized $61 billion to support Kiev in its conflict with Russia
US lawmakers have passed an emergency bill granting more weapons and money to Ukraine. The bill, which grants Kiev a $61 billion war chest, had been stalled since last fall over concern that Washington was merely prolonging the conflict with Russia without offering a strategy for victory or a peace settlement.
The Ukraine, Israel and Indo-Pacific bills will be combined into a $95 billion emergency spending package to enable quick passage by the Senate and final approval by Biden.
Members of Congress cheered and waved Ukrainian flags as the votes were being counted, prompting an admonishment by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana). Johnson had blocked the legislation since last fall, given that most members of his party oppose prolonging the Ukraine conflict. Passed by a margin of 311-112 on Saturday, all Democrats and 101 Republicans voted in favor of the move.
Asked on Thursday why he had dropped his opposition to the bill, putting himself at risk of being ousted as House speaker, Johnson told reporters, “History judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now – a critical time on the world stage.” He tried to blunt opposition by labeling some of the Ukraine aid as loans.
Biden’s administration ran out of Ukraine funding earlier this year, after burning through $113 billion in previously approved aid packages. With weapons shipments from its biggest benefactor disrupted, Kiev has suffered ammunition shortages in recent months.
Biden has blamed Republican lawmakers for battlefield defeats -- including the fall of Avdeevka, a key Ukrainian stronghold, in February – saying “congressional inaction” led to “notable gains” by Russian forces.
Read more Zelensky acts to halt Ukrainian army gambling epidemicThe House also voted on Saturday to approve separate bills providing $26 billion in aid to Israel and $8 billion for Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific region allies. In addition, the emergency spending package includes $9 billion in humanitarian aid for civilians in Gaza and other war zones.
Representative Al Green (D-Texas) told reporters that lawmakers were coming together in a bipartisan way to overcome “pro-Putin obstructionists,” suggesting that only agents of Russian President Vladimir Putin oppose funding the Ukraine conflict.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who has called for Johnson to be replaced as speaker, called Saturday’s vote “despicable.” She added, “We should be demanding peace, not funding the military industrial complex’s blood-money wars, fueled by dead bodies in Ukraine.”
-
Site: Ron Paul Institute for Peace And Prosperity
The United States military has a tendency to park itself in a country and not budge even after its presence has proven catastrophic or the government of the country has demanded it leave. Well, here is some good news. Daphne Psaledakis at Reuters reported Friday that the US military will be leaving Niger, just over a month after the new government of the country demanded that action.
As I wrote in August of 2018, the presence of US troops in Niger, first brought to many Americans’ attention the year before when several US Special Forces troops were killed there, has been part of an increasing US military focus on Africa. While the US government appears set to have its military exit Niger, there is no indication of a larger planned exit from the continent.
The US military leaving Niger is a good start. How about also exiting from other countries such as Iraq and Syria whose governments have long demanded the US military leave, as well as ending decades long US military presences in countries including Germany, Japan, and South Korea? At a high economic cost, the US military in these countries does nothing to defend America. To the contrary, these troops abroad serve as tripwires to potentially ensnare the US into conflicts that otherwise would be none of its business. They also continually tempt politicians and military leaders who start thinking that as long as these troops are strung out across the globe they might as well be put to use — be employed to intimidate, kill, maim, and destroy.