The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom
By Glenn Greenwald | December 28, 2020
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Post reported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
Virtually every prediction expressed by those who pushed this doomsday narrative of Trump as a rising dictator — usually with great profit for themselves — never materialized. While Trump radically escalated bombing campaigns he inherited from Bush and Obama, he started no new wars. When his policies were declared by courts to be unconstitutional, he either revised them to comport with judicial requirements (as in the case of his “Muslim ban”) or withdrew them (as in the case of diverting Pentagon funds to build his wall). No journalists were jailed for criticizing or reporting negatively on Trump, let alone killed, as was endlessly predicted and sometimes even implied. Bashing Trump was far more likely to yield best-selling books, social media stardom and new contracts as cable news “analysts” than interment in gulags or state reprisals. There were no Proud Boy insurrections or right-wing militias waging civil war in U.S. cities. Boastful and bizarre tweets aside, Trump’s administration was for more a continuation of the U.S. political tradition than a radical departure from it.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
Whether the U.S. was a democracy in any meaningful sense prior to Trump had been the subject of substantial scholarly debate. A much-discussed 2014 study concluded that economic power has become so concentrated in the hands of such a small number of U.S. corporate giants and mega-billionaires, and that this concentration in economic power has ushered in virtually unchallengeable political power in their hands and virtually none in anyone else’s, that the U.S. more resembles oligarchy than anything else:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reported The Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” AP notes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
Employees are now almost completely at the mercy of a handful of corporate giants, far more trans-national than with any allegiance to the U.S., which are thriving. A Brookings Institution study this week — entitled “Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers” — found that “the COVID-19 pandemic has generated record profits for America’s biggest companies, as well as immense wealth for their founders and largest shareholders—but next to nothing for workers.”
These COVID “winners” are not the Randian victors in free market capitalism. Quite the contrary, they are the recipients of enormous amounts of largesse from the U.S. Government, which they control through armies of lobbyists and donations and which therefore constantly intervenes in the market for their benefit. This is not free market capitalism rewarding innovative titans, but rather crony capitalism that is abusing the power of the state to crush small competitors, lavish corporate giants with ever more wealth and power, and turn millions of Americans into vassals whose best case scenario is working multiple jobs at low hourly wages with no benefits, few rights, and even fewer options.
Those must disgusted by this outcome should not be socialists but capitalists: this is a classic merger of state and corporate power —- also known as a hallmark of fascism in its most formal expression — that abuses state interference in markets to consolidate and centralize authority in a small handful of actors in order to disempower everyone else. Those trends were already quite visible prior to Trump and the onset of the pandemic, but have accelerated beyond anyone’s dreams in the wake of mass lockdowns, shutdowns, prolonged isolation and corporate welfare thinly disguised as legislative “relief.”
What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.
Stay-at-home orders, lockdowns and social isolation have meant that we rely on Silicon Valley companies to conduct basic life functions more than ever before. We order online from Amazon rather than shop; we conduct meetings online rather than meet in offices; we use Google constantly to navigate and communicate; we rely on social media more than ever to receive information about the world. And exactly as a weakened population’s dependence on them has increased to unprecedented levels, their wealth and power has reached all new heights, as has their willingness to control and censor information and debate.
That Facebook, Google and Twitter are exerting more and more control over our political expression is hardly contestable. What is most remarkable, and alarming, is that they are not so much grabbing these powers as having them foisted on them, by a public — composed primarily of corporate media outlets and U.S. establishment liberals — who believe that the primary problem of social media is not excessive censorship but insufficient censorship. As Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) told Mark Zuckerberg when four Silicon Valley CEOs appeared before the Senate: “The issue is not that the companies before us today is that they’re taking too many posts down. The issue is that they’re leaving too many dangerous posts up.”
As I told the online program Rising this week when asked what the worst media failings of 2020 are, I continue to view the brute censorship by Facebook of incriminating reporting about Joe Biden in the weeks before the election as one of the most significant, and menacing, political events of the last several years. That this censorship was announced by a Facebook corporate spokesman who had spent his career previously as a Democratic Party apparatchik provided the perfect symbolic expression of this evolving danger.
These tech companies are more powerful than ever, not only because of their newly amassed wealth at a time when the population is suffering, but also because they overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party candidate about to assume the presidency. Predictably, they are being rewarded with numerous key positions in his transition team and the same will ultimately be true of the new administration.
The Biden/Harris administration clearly intends to do a great deal for Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley is well-positioned to do a great deal for them in return, starting with their immense power over the flow of information and debate.
The dominant strain of U.S. neoliberalism — the ruling coalition that has now consolidated power again — is authoritarianism. They view those who oppose them and reject their pieties not as adversaries to be engaged but as enemies, domestic terrorists, bigots, extremists and violence-inciters to be fired, censored, and silenced. And they have on their side — beyond the bulk of the corporate media, and the intelligence community, and Wall Street — an unprecedentedly powerful consortium of tech monopolies willing and able to exert greater control over a population that has rarely, if ever, been so divided, drained, deprived and anemic.
All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.
Russia can refuse to pay $50 billion bill to Yukos oligarchs, country’s top court rules, as foreign legal battle rages
RT | December 27, 2020
Moscow is set for a showdown with Western judges and 1990s Russian oligarchs, over a new ruling enabling the country to refuse to pay what is considered to be the biggest legal settlement in history, over a collapsed oil empire.
The Constitutional Court, one of Russia’s highest judicial authorities, ruled on Friday that the decision of an international tribunal in the long-running dispute over the now-dissolved energy giant Yukos is incompatible with Russian law. The case has been heard by a court in The Hague, which claims jurisdiction under the terms of the Energy Charter Treaty, and awarded the company’s former shareholders a $50-billion payout from the Russian government earlier this year. Moscow claimed a win in November on the other side of the Atlantic, when a US court, which had been hearing the case simultaneously, decided to throw it out.
However, as Russia signed but never ratified the Treaty, which hands powers to international tribunals, the Constitutional Court has now determined it is not bound by the terms of The Hague judgement. The ruling states that, while the country’s government of the day began the process of signing up to the pact in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national laws inferior to international agreements, or to “challenge the competence” of Russian courts. Therefore, the jurists conclude, adhering to the Dutch court’s demands would be “unconstitutional.”
The claimants in the case are oligarchs who lost cash when Yukos, once among Europe’s largest firms, collapsed. They say that a multi-billion dollar tax bill and the arrest of its CEO and founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on fraud charges amounted to state ‘appropriation’ of its assets. However, Russian authorities insist that the shareholders cannot be considered “legitimate,” and that the Dutch judges had steamrolled over the country’s laws against corruption and fraud when ruling in their favour.
As far back as July 2014, The Hague ordered Moscow to cough up $50 billion to compensate the plaintiffs. After exhausting the appeals process in February this year, Russia’s lawyers asked the Dutch Supreme Court to consider the case and overrule the decision. However, at the start of December, it similarly backed the oligarchs.
Russia has insisted that the judgements are “politically motivated,” and in December the country’s Justice Minister, Konstantin Chuychenko, told journalists that the case was part of a “legal war that has been declared on Russia.” He added that “Russia must adequately defend itself and, sometimes, even attack back.”
Now standing at around $50 billion, around the same ballpark as Russia’s annual military budget, the colossal settlement is thought to be the largest award in history. If the country now rejects the bill, it would spark one of the most serious impasses in international legal history, and leave Western states deciding whether to respect Russia’s constitutional ruling, or to enforce the demands by confiscating assets.
Yukos’ former shareholders have already sought to have Western governments take control of Russian property overseas as an insurance policy in case Moscow refuses to pay up. However, in November, a judge in the simultaneous hearing in the US refused that request, saying that “the Russian Federation is a sovereign country with economic tendrils that cross the globe, not an insecure potential debtor that must be required to post security lest there be no assets to seize at a later date.”
Not all countries have taken the same approach, however, and in 2015 Russia’s diplomats slammed France and Belgium for confiscating state cash in overseas banks, and even buildings, to be held as collateral in the case. Moscow again rejected the court’s authority and said their move was “an openly hostile act.” Tim Osborne, a British lawyer representing the former shareholders, said at the time that such seizures were necessary because Russia “has no regard for international law or the rule of law.”
At its height, Yukos produced 20 per cent of Russia’s oil, placing it firmly among the ranks of the world’s most valuable enterprises. It had been formed by the privatization of former state assets after the fall of the Soviet Union, with Khodorkovsky acquiring the assets for a fraction of their worth at an auction that one economist, Andrey Illarionov, called “the swindle of the century.”
Khodorkovsky claims his arrest on fraud charges and the subsequent collapse of Yukos was tied to his political activism and his personal animosity towards Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin, however, claims that the oligarch, once said to be Russia’s wealthiest man, had admitted his guilt to him privately in exchange for a pardon in 2013.
Khodorkovsky insists that he has renounced any claims to his former empire and that, should a settlement be reached in the Yukos case, he would not stand to benefit. However, Russian authorities are said to suspect that a number of claimants have close financial ties to the former oil magnate.
New York Can’t Buy Its Way Out Of Blackouts
By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~ PA Pundits ~ December 26, 2020
New York City will soon be home to the world’s biggest utility-scale battery system, designed to back up its growing reliance on intermittent renewables. At 400 MWh this batch of batteries will be more than triple the 129 MWh world leader in Australia.
The City of New York’s director of sustainability (I am not making this title up), Mark Chambers, is ecstatic, bragging: “Expanding battery storage is a critical part of how we advance momentum to confront the climate emergency while meeting the energy needs of all New Yorkers. Today’s announcement demonstrates how we can deliver this need at significant scale.” (Emphasis added)
In reality the scale here is incredibly insignificant.
In the same nonsensical way, Tim Cawley, the president of Con Edison, New York’s power utility, gushes thus: “Utility scale battery storage will play a vital role in New York’s clean energy future, especially in New York City where it will help to maximize the benefit of the wind power being developed offshore.”
This puts the Con in Con Edison.
Here is the reality when it comes to the scale needed to reliably back up intermittent renewables. For simplicity let us suppose New York City is 100% wind powered. Including solar in the generating mix makes it more complicated but does not change the unhappy outcome very much.
NYC presently peaks at around 32,000 MW needed to keep the lights on. If Mr. Biden makes all the cars and trucks electric it might be closer to 50,000 MW but let’s stick to reality.
This peak occurs during summer heat waves which are caused by stagnant high pressure systems called Bermuda highs. These highs often last for a week and because they are stagnant there is no wind power generation. Wind turbines require something like sustained winds of 10 mph to move the blades and more like a whistling 30 mph to generate full power. During a Bermuda high folks are happy to get the occasional 5 mph breeze. These huge highs cover many states so it is not like we can get the juice from next door.
So for reliability we need, say, seven days of backup, which is 168 hours. Here’s the math:
32,000 MW x 168 hours = 5,376,000 MWh of stored juice needed to just make it. Mind you for normal reliability we usually add 20% or so. Did I mention electric cars?
It is easy to see that a trivial 400 MWh is not “significant scale.” It is infinitesimal scale. Nothing. Nada. Might as well not exist.
More specifically, 5,376,000 divided by 400 = 13,440 so only 13,439 more to go.
On the other hand, this measly 400 MWh battery array may well cost half a billion dollars, which is significant, especially to the New Yorkers who will pay for it. No cost figures are given because the system is privately owned, but EIA reports that the average utility scale battery system runs around $1.5 million a MWh of storage capacity. That works out to $600 million for this insignificant toy.
So what would it cost to reliably back up wind power, at this MWh cost and NYC’s scale? Just over $8,000,000,000,000 or EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS. I have not seen this stupendous sum mentioned in the media. Perhaps Con Ed has not mentioned it.
Then too, New York State has the same problem. Only much bigger if New York City is included, which it often is.
But hey, maybe the cost will come down a few trillion. Not if we create a seller’s market by rushing into intermittent renewables, which is certainly where we are headed. After all, this is just New York City. Imagine what backing up America with batteries might cost. Don’t bother because it is impossible.
I should also add that we have no idea how to make 5 million MWh of batteries work together. The tiny 400 will be a challenge. It may not be possible.
Maybe fracked geothermal, the reliable renewable, is the answer. Or how about coal, oil, gas and nuclear power? Too bad they are all out of fashion.
All of this battery backup hype is a scam, and not just in New York either. The papers are full of this con, from coast to coast. The utilities know perfectly well that these loudly touted battery buys are a hoax, but they are getting rich building the wind and solar systems the politicians are calling for.
The voters are oblivious to these impossible numbers, since they are told that intermittent wind and solar are cheaper than reliable coal, gas and nuclear. Only when the sun shines bright and the wind blows hard, which is not all that often.
Reality is just sitting there, waiting. It can’t work so it won’t work. At this point it is just a question of how and when we find out the hard way.
Iran has prepared initial plan for gas exports to Afghanistan
Press TV | November 9, 2020
Head of the National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC) says the country has a plan in place for launching gas exports to neighboring Afghanistan.
“The initial plan has been prepared and diplomatic negotiations are ongoing,” said Hassan Montazer Torbati on Monday as he briefed reporters on the latest situation of Iran’s gas exports to neighboring countries.
Torbati said gas exports to Afghanistan would be commissioned to private contractors although he insisted that the government has already provided the full infrastructure needed for transfer of gas to its eastern neighbor.
Afghanistan is increasingly relying on Iran for its energy needs as the landlocked country moves to expand economic activity through opening a new trade route that passes through Iran to the Indian Ocean.
However, Iranian energy supplies, including electricity, are mostly available to western parts of Afghanistan where the security of transfer infrastructure can be properly guaranteed.
Iran has increased both the output and exports of natural gas in recent years despite a series of US sanctions that have specifically targeted the country’s energy sector.
Nearly a tenth of Iran’s current output of more than 700 million cubic meters of gas is exported, mainly through pipelines to Turkey and Iraq.
On exports to Turkey, where authorities have touted the discovery of a new gas reserves in the Black Sea, Torbati said Ankara would still need to import gas from Iran to respond to its growing energy demand.
He said talks on renewing a 25-year export agreement with Turkey that is set to expire in several years’ time would start in the near future.
India ramps up deepwater gas production
Oilprice.com | December 24, 2020
The beginning of production at what is now Asia’s deepest offshore natural gas field will increase the share of natural gas in India’s energy basket.
India set to strengthen natural gas production
A few days ago, Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and BP announced the start of production from the R Cluster, an ultra-deepwater gas field in block KG D6 off the east coast of India. RIL and BP are developing three deepwater gas projects in block KG D6: R Cluster, Satellites Cluster, and MJ. Together, RIL said it expects the projects to meet over 15 percent of India’s natural gas demand by 2023.
What makes the find even more newsworthy is that it is located at a depth of more than 2,000 meters, making R Cluster the deepest offshore gas field in Asia.
Production ramp-up
By the end of next year, it is expected to reach plateau gas production of about 12.9 million standard cubic meters per day (mmscmd), per MoneyControl.com.
These projects will utilize the existing hub infrastructure in KG D6 block. RIL is the operator of KG D6 with a 66.67 percent participating interest. BP holds a 33.33 percent participating interest.
R Cluster is about 60 kilometers from the existing KG D6 Control and Riser Platform (CRP).
Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited, said in a press release that production from the natural gas field marked a “significant milestone” in India’s energy landscape for a cleaner and greener gas-based economy.
Looking ahead
Incidentally, RIL’s partner in this project, BP has been in India for over a century. BP is one of the largest international energy companies in the country.
RIL expects the next project, the Satellites Cluster, to come onstream in 2021, followed by the MJ project in 2022.
RIL expects peak gas production from the three fields to be around 30 mmscmd (1 bcf/d) by 2023. That combined production is expected to account for about 25 percent of India’s domestic production. As such, the development will help reduce the country’s dependence on imported gas.
RIL and BP will get only US $4.06 a unit for the new gas they have started to produce from the eastern offshore KG-D6 field even though they have discovered a higher rate in an open market auction, the Business Standard reported.
The operators had pricing freedom. However, they cannot sell gas at a rate higher than the cap the government notifies every six months. The cap for six months to March 31, 2021, is US $4.06 per mmBtu.
There is also a steel perspective to the news. Essar Steel, Adani Group and state-owned GAIL in November 2019 bought the majority of the initial five million standard cubic meters per day of gas from the KG-D6 block, the Business Standard reported.
For 55 Percent Of Americans, 2020 Has Been “A Personal Financial Disaster”
By Michael Snyder | Activist Post | December 24, 2020
One of the big reasons why so many Americans are angry about the size of the “stimulus payments” in the COVID relief bill that Congress just passed is because this year has truly been a “financial disaster” for millions upon millions of people.
More Americans than ever before are just barely scraping by from month to month, and $600 is just not going to go very far. In 2020, small businesses have been getting slaughtered by the thousands, millions of Americans are in imminent danger of being evicted from their homes, and more than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed since the COVID pandemic first started. The U.S. has plunged into a brutal economic depression, and most of the country is desperately hoping that the federal government will do more to bail them out.
Of course the truth is that we can’t actually afford another 900 billion dollar “stimulus package” on top of all the other “stimulus packages” that were already passed this year.
We are already 27.5 trillion dollars in debt, and all of this reckless spending is putting us on a highway to hyperinflation.
But most Americans don’t really care that we are literally destroying our national finances. Most people are in desperate need of money, and the vast majority of them want checks from the government as soon as possible.
A OnePoll survey that was just released asked Americans about the current state of their finances, and that survey discovered that a whopping 55 percent of us consider this year to be “a personal financial disaster”…
While there is no question 2020 has been an unparalleled health challenge, many are not losing sight of how devastating the year was for their wallets as well. A new survey finds over half of Americans (55%) consider 2020 a personal financial disaster.
That is over half the country!
And for those that are employed, that same survey found that 62 percent are planning to take on a second job in 2021 in an attempt to make ends meet…
Among employed respondents (59% in total), seven in 10 say they need a raise at their job in order to make ends meet. Sixty-two percent plan on taking on a second job in 2021 to meet their financial goals next year.
That number can’t possibly be correct, can it?
Of course there aren’t that many jobs to go around. Already, there are millions upon millions of Americans that can’t find a “first job”. As I discussed the other day, we have got unemployed workers sleeping in lawn chairs or sleeping in their own vehicles because that is all they can afford at this point.
We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and this latest wave of lockdowns is making things even worse.
With so many Americans financially hurting, it shouldn’t be a surprise that millions of households are getting behind on their rent and mortgage payments…
One-in-seven renters with family incomes from $35,000 to $100,000 were not current on their rent in November. The overwhelming majority of these renters – 79.9% — expected to face eviction within two months. Similarly, 9.6% of homeowners with a mortgage were not current on their mortgage in November. And 56.1% of those homeowners expected they will be foreclosed on in the subsequent two months.
Congress keeps extending moratoriums on rent and mortgage payments, and that has been financially devastating landlords and mortgage holders.
At some point the moratoriums must end, and when that happens we are going to see a tsunami of evictions that will be absolutely unprecedented in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, many Americans are going very deep into debt in a desperate attempt to keep themselves afloat financially…
More than one-third of households with incomes between $35,000 and $100,000 borrowed from credit cards, other loans as well as from friends and family to pay for their current expenses in November. Soon, debt payments will come due, burdening families that still suffer from long-term unemployment and added health care costs. This could mean rising credit default rates as well as spillovers of economic pain to other households, from who people borrowed to pay their bills.
If economic conditions were to “return to normal” in 2021, most Americans would be able to weather this financial storm just like they did in 2008 and 2009.
But things are not going to return to normal next year.
Instead, this new wave of lockdowns is going to cause thousands of more businesses to close and will force millions more Americans on to the unemployment rolls.
What we are doing to our small businesses is absolutely criminal. At this point, small business revenues are down more than 32 percent nationwide since the month of January…
Small business revenues have also taken a hit nationwide. The national average is a decrease of 32.1 percent in small business revenue since January. Washington D.C. had the worst loss in the nation at 61.6 percent. Oregon small businesses lost 16.3 percent. Illinois small businesses saw 39.2 percent decline in revenue since January.
Every day, more small businesses are closing up shop permanently.
Millions of hopes and dreams have been brutally crushed, and there is nothing that our politicians can say or do that will bring those businesses back to life.
If you have lost a business or a job this year, then that would definitely qualify as one of the “personal financial disasters” of 2020.
And as you have seen in this article, you are far from alone.
Most of the nation is deeply hurting, and the road ahead is only going to get more challenging.
In the short term, “stimulus payments” from the federal government will definitely help tens of millions of suffering Americans.
But of course every additional dollar that our government borrows and spends just makes our long-term problems even worse.
A national economic meltdown has begun, and our politicians will try lots of things to mitigate the damage, but all of their “solutions” will only help temporarily.
This is going to be an exceedingly dark chapter for America, but most Americans still do not understand the true nature of the crisis that is now unfolding all around us.
Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Climate Lockdowns Are Coming: Part II
What About the Roads | October 16, 2020
In this three-part series we will exam the transformation from COVID lockdowns to climate lockdowns. In Part I we established a timeline of the dark side of the environmental movement and now we’ll be looking into the specifics of what a climate lockdown really means, and what impact current lockdown measures have had on the environment. In Part III we will see how it fits into the bigger picture of sustainable development as described by international organizations such as the United Nations and what can be done to derail this agenda.
As we saw in Part I of this series, the environmental movement has a dark streak running through it. Many of the architects of the movement hold a Malthusian, eugenics-obsessed view of the world and their fingerprints are all over the growing call for a global climate lockdown. A movement based on the best of intentions is once again being hijacked to centralize power and eviscerate human rights.
With that established it is time to closely examine what exactly Mariana Mazzucato is proposing when she threatens a climate lockdown. In her view, and those on whose behalf she writes, humanity must be willing to undergo a total restructuring of society at the hands of the elite in order to save the planet or continue to live in lockdown. The brave new world she envisions is a sort-of technocracy, a government based on the management of society by unelected technical experts. Ultimately, this vision is less about driving electric cars and switching to a plant-based diet and more about a hostile takeover of the world’s resources.
The Calls for A Climate Lockdown Begin
With Mazzucato’s questionable climate science already addressed it’s time to move on to investigating her criticisms of society as we know it. But first we need to understand where this message is coming from. Mazzucato’s story comes to us from Project Syndicate, a news organization which distributes “high-quality commentaries to a global audience.” The publishing of these commentaries is made possible by funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Mastercard Foundation, and the Google Digital News Initiative among others. Let’s just say her view doesn’t exactly represent the disenfranchised or any grassroots movement.
Mazzucato’s opinion piece is more of a threat than anything else. She believes we are living through a series of crises during the “disease of the Anthropocene,” an anti-human echo from her environmental forefathers, that center around the climate, economic and social inequality, and public health. Neither government nor the private sector are capable of addressing such catastrophic situations in her estimation so we must undergo a “green economic transformation” or else be locked down like prisoners until the problem is resolved.
What she has to say on what would happen during a climate lockdown itself is actually quite brief:
Under a “climate lockdown,” governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling. To avoid such a scenario, we must overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.
The brevity of this proclamation is curious as these propositions for reducing carbon emissions and “going green” are nothing new. Environmentalists have been advocating for these changes for decades now, though notably without the need for literally confining people to their homes. The bulk of the article is dedicated to the overhaul of the economy, revealing her true message to the masses.
The Future In Her Eyes
This transformation entails building whatever an “inclusive, sustainable” economy is and requires that government assistance to the private sector be reigned in. Not by stopping the public-private revolving door, upholding justice through the legal system, enabling a free market, or simply ending taxpayer bailouts, but continuing all of these practices so long as the government attaches strict conditions to how that money is used. Governments should also add new taxes on raw materials and legislate “job guarantees” into existence somehow. Under this system the political and economical elite still siphon off money from the lower classes, but by dictating that “firms need to listen to trade unions and workers’ collectives, community groups, consumer advocates, and others” this fascist system will solve the problem of inclusivity.
The state must also continue to steer the course of finance through investments. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 it wasn’t the cozy relationship between Washington and Wall Street that kept money circulating through the financial sector rather than entering the larger economy, but “bad investments” on the government’s part. Bad because they didn’t invest long term in eco-friendly energy like wind power or support green infrastructure projects according to her. She gives no explanation as to how these investments would allow money to flow into Main Street.
When looking for positive examples of state investments she cites New Zealand’s “Wellbeing Budget” and the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB). The Wellbeing Budget is the name given to the New Zealand federal government’s fiscal budget for the year 2019 and represented a shift away from making monetary decisions based on GDP and towards spending based on “wellbeing”. It made for an excellent public relations move which portrayed a government concerned about the wellness of its people but in reality transferred many budgetary decisions to experts and bureaucrats rather than elected officials, a hallmark of a technocratic society. New Zealand has enacted one of the world’s harshest lockdowns in the name of the coronavirus which may be why it gets a nod here.
The SNIB is set to launch by the end of 2020 and while she doesn’t mention it in her article, Mazzacuto has played a key role in developing this institution. This state-owned institution will offer grants, soft loans, credit guarantees and co-investments to companies in pursuit of certain missions. These missions are still being finalized but aim to mimic the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which center around climate change, shifting demographics, and economic inclusion. Like New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, the SNIB framework ultimately takes power out of the hands of the public and into the hands of a technocratic elite. The figures who will run the SNIB and direct it’s funds will be unelected and unaccountable to the public but will use taxpayer funds to steer the direction of the economy nonetheless.
These examples are the blueprints all nations should be using according to Mazzucato. In a follow-up interview with the Irish Times, she makes it unambiguously clear that central economic planning is the proper role of government:
This crisis, and the recovery we need, give us an opportunity to understand and explore how to do capitalism differently. This requires a rethink of what governments are for: rather than simply fixing market failures when they arise, they should move towards actively shaping and creating markets to take on society’s most pressing challenges… This will secure the direction of travel we want – green, sustainable, and equitable.
Given her connections to some of the world’s most powerful people it is highly unlikely that “we” refers to the common man. It seems clear that she is speaking on the behalf of the elite behind the scenes.
Mazzucato’s final claim, dropped out of nowhere and without citation or follow-up, is that an economy centered around renewable energy is the antidote to our otherwise disastrous future. She then menacingly reminds the reader that “radical change is inevitable,” so either go along with their plan, or face climate lockdowns while they do it anyway.
How Have Lockdowns Impacted The Climate So Far?
With much of the world under house arrest, carbon dioxide emissions declined in the first half of 2020 as one would expect. Correspondingly, air pollution dropped off in many industrialized areas. This was touted as a victory for the climate, especially when photos of the Himalayas, free of their usual smog in India, went viral. This was a relatively short-lived victory however as numbers began rising again in the second half of the year.
While air pollution dropped more plastic waste has ended up in our oceans than ever before. Disposable face masks have been worn, and disposed of, in the billions this year and are contributing to environmental degradation, littering in public places, and increasing the levels of microplastics in the oceans. Takeout dining has been a staple for many during lockdown which has meant single-use plastics have become more prevalent and sadly ended up in in the sea in increased numbers as well.
More studies and information will surely come out in the months and years ahead but as of now this is the picture we have of the climate in a locked down world and it isn’t very convincing that by continuing these practices the world will be free of man’s impact on it. The desire for clear skies, clean air, and habitable oceans are all noble and improvements can and will be made but the idea that in order to achieve these things we need society reshaped at the hands of a shadowy elite is still insane and speaks to a larger agenda at play.
The Big Picture
When looking into the environmental impact of lockdowns there is a chilling refrain in the mainstream media. The initial decrease in emissions is cheered on but the rebound is seen as a sign that while the current lockdowns are doing some good it just isn’t enough (see here, here, here, here, here, and here to see that message repeated).
What is needed according to these writers and groups is a reengineering of society. This Great Reset will come at the expense of the many, to the benefit of the few. In the final installment of this series we will see how climate lockdowns and the reconfiguration of society fits perfectly into the big picture that the elite have in mind.
Washington vetoes aid to Sri Lanka and paves the way for Chinese expansion
By Lucas Leiroz | December 22, 2020
Sri Lanka has become the scene of a new battle in the trade war between China and the US. The growth of the Chinese presence in the country has led Washington to a strong concern, materialized in Mike Pompeo’s visit to Colombo in October. But even the strong American pressure was not enough to prevent the advance of Chinese investments and this is taking the American government to a drastic measure: to cancel the development aid that it had promised to Sri Lanka.
The official statement about the end of the aid program came through the US Embassy in Colombo on Thursday, December 17. The Embassy confirmed that the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) fund that had been approved for aid to Sri Lanka will now be redirected to other strategic partners. According to Washington, Sri Lanka showed a lack of involvement and interest in the alliance – which is due to the fact that it continued to cooperate economically with China, in parallel with the US.
This agreement was part of a cooperation program between the US and Sri Lanka established during the previous government of Ranil Wickremesinghe in the last year of his term. At the time, Wickremesinghe faced strong resistance at the congress due to the lack of transparency about the nature of the agreement. Its critics say the terms are unclear and claim that the program could simply be an excuse to guarantee American military advance in the region. The MCC, however, says it is a cooperation program whose sole purpose is to help reduce poverty in the Asian country, without any political or military interest related to it. Currently, MCC has partnerships of this type with approximately 30 countries in different regions of the planet, totaling more than 13 billion dollars invested in these programs. In the case of Sri Lanka, the agreement provided for an investment of 480 million dollars.
Although Washington denies the political nature of the agreement, it is clear that it is a financial aid in exchange for political support and international alignment. The very end of the agreement proves this: simply because Sri Lanka has ties with China, Washington canceled the agreement. As we can see, the interest in “alleviating poverty” seems quite secondary to the interest in isolating China economically in the global trade war.
Relations between the US and Sri Lanka have deteriorated greatly over the past few months. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government has been characterized by a moderately pro-Chinese stance, which was enough to irritate Americans. The Trump Administration went to the extreme of banning the entry of Sri Lankan Army Chief, General Shavendra Silva, into American territory. Shavendra Silva is considered a national hero in his country but has entered the Washington blacklist due to alleged human rights violations that would have been committed on the battlefield during the civil war. Obviously, it is fair to punish someone for violating human rights, but strangely this denunciation by Washington only appeared after the beginning of the deterioration of relations between the two countries.
The definitive point of tensions occurred in October, when Washington tried to “recover” Sri Lanka by sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Colombo. During a 12-hour visit, Pompeo met with local authorities and made several public statements attacking China, saying that the only way for Sri Lanka to become a strong and sovereign country is through strategic cooperation with the US. On the same occasion, Pompeo said that Chinese behavior is “predatory”.
Also in October, US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Dean Thompson said that Sri Lanka needs to make some choices that would be necessary, albeit difficult – and said that such choices would be the only way to guarantee the country’s economic development. In other words, Thompson said that Sri Lanka needs to abdicate from relations with China in order to develop, which is absolutely unrelated to reality. China has already invested nearly 8 billion dollars in infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka. Colombo Port City and Hambantota Port are Chinese developments. Still, Beijing has been providing billionaire loans to Sri Lanka since 2005, with long repayment terms and even forgiving some debts. This is not the typical “predatory” behavior, much less seems that Sri Lanka’s abdication from ties with Beijing is a condition for development.
What happens, however, is that Washington continues to act with a war mentality. Sri Lanka accepts cooperation agreements with Washington and Beijing simply because it is a sovereign country with its own interests and does not want to take part in a trade conflict that does not concern it. Sri Lanka’s stance is sovereign and not aligned and the country will continue to make deals with any power that helps to deal with its main social problems. Washington will certainly put Sri Lanka on its blacklist from now on and impose sanctions and blockades, but it is the Americans who have the most to lose from it. Without American help, Colombo will seek even more Chinese support and Beijing will have a geographically strategic ally on its side, further reducing the American presence in Asia.
Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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From the Archives
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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