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Billionaires’ ‘pandemic profits’ alone could pay for $3K stimulus checks to EVERY American – report

RT | December 9, 2020

American billionaires made so much money during the Covid-19 pandemic that their profits since March are enough to give every US resident a $3,000 check without cutting into their pre-virus wealth, a new report shows.

Over the last nine months, the 651 billionaires who call the US home have increased their wealth by a whopping $1.06 trillion, according to a report published Tuesday by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies. Far from being negatively impacted by the pandemic-related economic shutdowns, the country’s super-rich seem to have thrived amid the policies that have plunged so many ordinary Americans into poverty.

The billionaires’ wealth grew so much that they could cut “every man, woman and child in the country” a $3,000 stimulus check and “still be richer than they were nine months ago,” ATF executive director Frank Clemente said in a Tuesday press release.

The report tracked the fat-cats’ profits from March 18, the approximate start date of the economic shutdowns, through December 7. The vast majority accelerated their accumulation of wealth even as ordinary Americans saw their life savings slip through their fingers, losing jobs, businesses, and loved ones to the one-two punch of the coronavirus and the political response.

After nine months of raking in the cash, the billionaires’ total wealth had soared 36 percent to over $4 trillion – nearly twice the $2.1 trillion in wealth held by the poorest 50 percent of Americans.

The monstrous cash-pile amounts to double the two-year budget gap of all state and local governments, a figure estimated to reach $500 billion thanks to the devastating effects of the economic shutdowns on tax revenues. It even approaches the massive sum the federal government spends on Medicare and Medicaid – $644 billion and $389 billion in 2019, respectively, the report claims.

While most working- and middle-class Americans received a single stimulus payment of $1,200 as part of March’s CARES Act pandemic bailout, a promised second stimulus check has failed to materialize. The expanded unemployment program that doled out $600 per week to newly-jobless Americans came to an end in July, and while President Donald Trump issued an executive order to bridge the gap with a less generous $300 weekly payment, Congress has thus far refused to pass a second Covid-19 bailout package even as the rest of the bailout programs are set to expire at the end of the year.

One of the chief beneficiaries of the fiscal explosion has been Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune increased 63 percent since March as locked-down Americans turned to online shopping to meet their needs. The retail tycoon faced sharp criticism over his company’s alleged mistreatment of Amazon warehouse workers in the early days of the pandemic, but had he distributed his $71.4 billion windfall among Amazon’s employees, workers would have received $88,000 each while leaving their boss just as rich as he was before the coronavirus outbreak.

And Bezos, said to be the richest man in the US, wasn’t even the most blessed by Covid-19. That title goes to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, whose wealth grew by an eye-popping 542 percent – from “just” $24.6 billion in March to $143 billion by December. Musk is about to get quite a bit richer, too, after his StarLink satellite company won a Federal Communications Commission auction to deliver bandwidth to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.

Senate Democrats circulated a letter earlier this week demanding another $1,200 stimulus payment be part of the Covid-19 aid package currently being debated in Congress. The party has balked at a Republican-authored bailout proposal that would exclude individual payments and include a five-year liability shield for corporations – a measure Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders derisively dubbed a “get out of jail free card to corporations.”

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

Tenants, Landlords Face Imminent Crisis As Pandemic Lifelines Expire

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 12/08/2020

January is going to be a mess. America’s small-time landlords, along with their tenants, are in trouble as safety nets are set to expire. Tenants haven’t paid rent in months, with a looming eviction moratorium expiring at the end of December. According to Reuters, the lack of rental income for landlords has also been troublesome, with many skipping mortgage payments, potentially resulting in a firesale of properties in the year ahead.

For 12 million Americans and their families – this Christmas will be their worst – as the extended unemployment benefits that have kept many of them afloat are set to expire later this month. Then on New Year’s Day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium expires, which could result in a massive wave of evictions in the first half of 2021.

At the moment, $70 billion in unpaid back rent and utilities are set to come due, according to a new report via Moody’s Analytics Chief Economist Mark Zandi.

Last month, Maryland utility companies began to terminate customers with overdue bills, many of which were unable to pay because of job loss due to the coronavirus downturn.

New research from the Aspen Institute warns 40 million people could be threatened with eviction over the coming months as the real economic crisis is only beginning.

According to Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the Kansas City Regional Housing Alliance, landlords are also in deep turmoil. She said more than 40% of the landlords surveyed in her coalition said they will have to sell their units because of the lack of rental income.

“They are sheltering our citizens free of charge, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Johnson-Cosby. “This is their retirement income.”

She said small landlords are frightened to speak out about non-paying tenants because social justice warriors and their “Cancel Rent” groups have attacked landlords.

“What they don’t realize is that if they run us out and we fail, it will be private equity and Wall Street firms that buy up all our properties, just like they did with houses after the last foreclosure crash.”

Reuters interviewed Clarence Hamer, who may have to sell his house in the coming months because his “downstairs tenant owes him nearly $50,000.” He owns a duplex in Brownsville, Brooklyn – and without those rental payments, Hamer has been unable to pay his mortgage.

“I don’t have any corporate backing or any other type of insurance,” said Hamer, a 46-year-old landlord who works for the city of New York. “All I have is my home, and it seems apparent that I’m going to lose it.”

Hamer is not alone – millions of Americans are headed for a “dark winter” as they could be evicted or lose their homes in the coming months as government safety nets are set to expire.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, stimulus talks quickly faded after it was reported that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell touted his own plan rather than a bipartisan compromise for a deal.

John Pollock, a Public Justice Center attorney and coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, recently said January could bring a surge of eviction and homelessness,” unlike anything we have ever seen” before.

December 9, 2020 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

Owner of LA bar closed by Covid-19 restrictions decries ‘slap in the face’ as film company allowed to set up dining nearby

RT | December 5, 2020

A Los Angeles bar owner barely held in her tears of outrage after discovering tents meant for feeding a movie crew erected right next to her restaurant, which was shut down and banned from serving outdoors due to Covid-19 rules.

“Tell me that this is dangerous, but right next to me as a slap in my face – that’s safe?” Angela Marsden says in a video pointing to two outdoor spaces, hers and that serving a movie company. The short clip, which highlights how small businesses in California are left behind and going under while large companies apparently get the green light to march on, has gone viral and won a massive outpouring of support.

Marsden owns Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill, a restaurant in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. Like many other establishments, it was forced to shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, despite Marsden investing a reported $80,000 into making her facility safer.

As such, she was furious when she discovered that a movie company had been allowed to set up tents to feed employees right in front of her bar, which has an outdoor dining area of its own. The film industry is considered essential by Los Angeles County and was allowed to operate despite coronavirus risks.

“I am losing everything. Everything I own is being taken away from me. And they set up a movie company right next to my outdoor patio!” Marsden said. “They have not given us money and they have shut us down. We cannot survive! My staff cannot survive!”

Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill has been running in the neighborhood for over four decades, but unless it opens by February, Marsden may have to shut it down for good, she told local media. She and several other small business owners are organizing a protest against what they see as unfair treatment by Mayor Eric Garcetti and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The situation however is hardly unique for California. Throughout the US authorities have been deciding which forms of entertainment are essentials and which are not.

For example, the comedy show Saturday Night Live brought back a live audience in October in a move not in line with health guidelines. They got round the rules by compensating people for watching the show, which technically made them paid employees.

But some larger productions are still suffering. In New York, Broadway remains closed and isn’t currently slated to reopen until at least 2021. The Metropolitan Opera on Wednesday announced the cancellation of its entire 2020-21 season due to the pandemic, an ominous sign for the performing arts.

December 5, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics | , | Leave a comment

Betting other people’s money on green

Climate Discussion Nexus | December 2, 2020

With pandemic lockdowns crushing the private sector, it’s obviously time to launch an ambitious redesign of our economy. Or so they tell us. And “they” are not just the architects of the Great Reset whose plans, we noted last week, offer a strange mix of cosmic ambition and predictable futility. But “they” also includes those who keep insisting, against all evidence, that there are vast commercial opportunities in this new economy. If that were true it would mean we don’t need sweeping government intervention, just the same old profit motive and efficient capital markets. Unfortunately neither profits nor efficient capital markets seem to enter the picture. Yahoo! Finance just noted that “The chief executive officers of eight Canadian pension funds, collectively representing about $1.6 trillion in assets under management, are calling for a green recovery from the COVID-19 economic slump.” But every single one of those massive funds is… a government agency gambling with other people’s money. Every one.

We’re talking state capitalism not the private kind because the CEOs who signed the letter in question run “AIMCo, BCI, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, CPP Investments, HOOPP, OMERS, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and PSP Investments.” All stuffed with public-sector money and insulated by government guarantees from the cost of any failed investment in magic beans. Unlike, say, taxpayers.

In case some of those pension funds are not familiar to you, HOOPP is the “Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP)” whose website boasts that “As one of Canada’s largest defined benefit pension plans, we are dedicated to providing retirement security to more than 380,000 healthcare workers in Ontario.” As for AIMCo, aka “Alberta Investment Management Corporation”, its website touts first “New Commitments to Diversity & Inclusion” then “Investors Collaborate on Climate Change Mitigation”. Not return on equity. So you’re not astonished to learn from their 2019 Annual Report that they call themselves “Alberta’s investment manager” and that their shareholder, in the singular, is… “the Government of Alberta”. Or that they are “a non-profit, crown corporation responsible for investing on behalf of most of Alberta’s public sector employees and, through the Heritage Fund, on behalf of all Albertans.”

Shall we continue? Let’s. Sure enough, BCI is the “British Columbia Investment Management Corporation” aka “The Investment Manager of Choice for British Columbia’s Public Sector”. Obviously the Caisse de depot is a branch of the Quebec government. It claims its clients are “41 depositor groups. Most are pension plans and public and parapublic insurance plans which, together, pay out benefits to more than two million Quebecers each year.” But of course its real client is the government of Quebec, which appoints the Board of Directors and mandates the Caisse to generate money for the government’s pension plans “while at the same time contributing to Quebec’s economic development” in, you understand, an independent manner.

Where are we? Ah yes, CPP Investments, whose name speaks for itself, though we might add that it is “one of the world’s largest investors in private equity”. So it is not your grandfather’s capitalism we’re seeing here.

Then there’s OMERS, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, a branch of the Ontario government that, Wikipedia notes, “has become one of the largest institutional investors in Canada”. And as its own website notes, it runs a “defined benefit pension plan” so if the market returns aren’t there, well, the government will come to the rescue with however many billions are needed.

We don’t have to tell you that the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is another of these parastatal behemoths. But we should mention that PSP Investments is… yes… the “Public Sector Pension Investment Board”, a branch of the federal government that is also “one of Canada’s largest pension investment managers” and once again oversees defined-benefit plans.

We dwell on the “defined-benefit” aspect here because it is vital to understand that these outfits are free to gamble with other people’s money for two vital reasons. First, by law their beneficiaries get paid whether the investments work out or not. And second and related, they are free from the sort of scrutiny normal investment firms face from clients concerned about losing their savings if the fund bets heavily on trendy exotic ideas because their clients are not those whose pensions they manage but governments that can just raise taxes, borrow against other people’s assets or, for the federal government, print the stuff to make up for any failure to find a pot of gold at the end of the green rainbow.

This consideration deserves emphasis because when you hear “institutional investors” you might well be inclined to think, well, if sober money managers taking care of Canadians’ hard-won savings are into this stuff it must not be trendy or exotic. Green must be blue chip. But no. It’s just more of the public-sector song and dance you pay for whether you like it or not.

Except for one nasty thing: The bigger they are the harder they fall. Especially now, with public sector balance sheets a soggy red mess, if one or more of these major holders of often badly underfunded public-sector pension assets should bet the wind farm on something that goes thud, as alternative energy generally does, it may not be possible for the government or governments in question to find the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars needed to make up the losses. (The CPP, the Chief Actuary of Canada has said, must earn a real rate of return of 4% for 75 years to cover projected payouts. Good luck with that mate. And as Andrew Coyne has been tireless in exposing, what was once a small outfit pursuing a “Wealthy Barber” plan of passive investment with 164 employees and administrative costs of $118 million has since 2006 become a bloated behemoth whose 1,661-strong host of managers costing $3.3 billion a year pursue risky ventures around the world. So they’re riding the gravy train even if we’re not.)

There is this meme out there that big companies are extra-right-wing entities that send lavish cheques to deniers and oppose regulation. But it’s not true. Like GM, which just switched from Trump’s position on California’s strict new emissions to Biden’s, many are smooth operators convinced they can game the system. They may find, as carmakers in Europe are already finding, that feeding the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last is just exactly as bad an idea as it sounds. But in any case private companies no longer dominate financial markets. Public and parapublic entities do.

As a result, the only meaningful shareholder revolt possible here is that of citizens. And just imagine trying to make OMERS’ investment strategy a key election issue. But it matters, because that CEOs’ letter is full of trendy verbiage like “The pandemic and other tragic events of 2020 have revealed pre-existing business strengths and shortcomings with respect to social inequity, including systemic racism and environmental threats.” And so all your chips, as a taxpayer and as a retired or even current public employee, are on the notion that a Great Reset is a fiscal winner.

December 3, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Economics | | Leave a comment

Nursing Homes and Covid Fatalities: The Empirical Relationship

By Stephen C. Miller | American Institute for Economic Research | December 2, 2020

In the search for strategies in dealing with Covid-19, policymakers have preferred broad-based interventions like curfews or business, school, and church closures in order to slow or stop the spread. In the argument over the consequences of these measures, a crucial question has been lost. Where precisely is the greatest risk of severe outcomes from contracting the virus? We’ve known from the beginning of the pandemic that SARS-CoV-2 disproportionately impacts the sick and aged, but what precisely does that imply about policy?

A particularly dangerous setting is Long Term Care Facilities (LTCs). LTCs account for over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths, almost 40% of the total in the United States. To better understand the variance in outcomes across the country, I looked at differences in state-level deaths per capita as reported by the COVID Tracking Project versus the number of LTC residents in each state.

The share of a state’s population in such facilities could be a better predictor of severe outcomes from the virus than nonpharmaceutical interventions such as curfews, closures, and mask mandates. State case and death totals in nursing homes, as they are often reported, give an impression of how deaths are spread across the country. But those data typically do not include a population adjustment, and do not allow for comparisons between states based on their population’s vulnerability.

Vermont and North Dakota both have relatively small populations, 624,000 and 762,000, respectively, and the median age is substantially higher in Vermont. However, North Dakota has more than twice as many people in nursing facilities as Vermont does. States report LTC deaths differently from each other; in New York, for example, deaths in LTCs are undercounted, as staff and residents who die after being transported to a hospital are not counted as part of the total. State outcomes are only comparable to the extent that the data are reported the same way.

One obvious difference to look at is the median age in each state. However, plotting each state’s median age against Covid-19 deaths shows no peculiar vulnerability (see Chart 1). If anything, there is a slight negative correlation (not statistically significant) between a state’s median age and its Covid-19 death rate. How is this possible? Median age is different from the number of vulnerable aged people in a state. To focus on the most vulnerable requires looking at nursing home populations.

Chart 1: Covid-19 Death Rates vs. Median Age by State

I gathered data from each state and correlated Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people with the relative size of the population in Certified Nursing Facilities, as estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation. How do population-adjusted deaths correlate with the state-by-state ranking of numbers of long-term care facilities? The results are noisy, but more conclusive than is seen with many NPIs or by looking at each state’s median age, showing a clear positive relationship between the two measures (statistically significant at the 1 percent level).

Chart 2: Covid-19 Death Rates by Proportion of Each State’s Population in Nursing Facilities

What does this imply for public health? Primarily, we should focus on the key objective: protecting the elderly and the sick in these homes from the virus. We’ve known since March that Covid-19 was a problem in these facilities. Why did governors require nursing homes to readmit these patients who were still testing positive for Covid-19, instead of protecting LTC residents from that risk?

Why were they so anxious to shut down schools and concerts attended by healthy young people — or just healthy people in general — while disregarding a vastly greater and more obvious risk? Instead of demanding stricter rules for everyone, governors should look to improve safety in nursing homes.

The data further suggest that certain states continue to have challenges ahead; namely those with a large share of residents in nursing homes. In particular, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, and the Dakotas need to focus intensely on these institutions.

While not all deaths are preventable, we have a moral obligation to engage in focused protection rather than continue one-size-fits all approaches to public health. To the extent that resources for testing, vaccines, health care worker time, and federal grants are scarce, they should be focused on the most vulnerable, and few are more vulnerable than nursing home residents.

Stephen C. Miller is the Adams Bibby Chair of Free Enterprise and an Associate Professor of Economics in the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University.

December 2, 2020 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

IMF refuses to help Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz | December 1, 2020

Ukraine’s economic situation is getting more and more complicated. The country is going through a moment of great crisis, from which it hoped to mitigate the effects by receiving emergency financial aid from the International Monetary Fund. However, the IMF now refuses to provide a large part of such emergency aid and launches Kiev into a danger of financial collapse. Now, the country must look for other ways to end this fiscal year after facing a large debt in its budget.

The new support program for Ukraine, approved by the IMF Board of Governors in early June, provides for the sending of 5 billion dollars over a period of one and a half years. Kiev has already received the first payment, valued at 2.1 billion. The remaining amount was expected to be sent in four installments of around 700 million dollars each one, in late June and late September, with two revisions next year. However, there will be no further installment until the end of 2020. Therefore, Ukraine must work within the current amount and meet its targets, which is truly complicated, if not impossible.

According to Yaroslav Zhelezniak, the first vice-chairman of the Ukrainian Parliament’s Financial and Fiscal Policy Committee, more than a billion dollars are missing – adding to the amount already collected – for the state to be able to pay the so-called “protected expenses”, which are those that according to Ukrainian national law cannot be cut, such as salaries, pensions, defense industry, among others. In any event, spending considered “secondary” would be canceled, but now, with the IMF’s delay, Kiev will not even be able to afford its protected expenses.

The accumulation of debts with protected expenses is precisely the greatest current threat to the Ukrainian state, as it represents a structural danger not only for finances but also for all strategic sectors affected by the lack of resources. For reasons of confidentiality, current Treasury information does not show which specific items of protected expanses have stopped receiving funding, but currently protected sectors account for 80% of all budgetary expenses.

As for unprotected items, everything is clear: simply, nothing is paid. In November, nothing outside the strategic sectors was financed from the Ukrainian state budget. That is, the authorities simply decided not to pay service providers and public-private partnerships in November. Obviously, this was a forced choice: without money available, there is no way to pay. However, it is undeniable that the social consequences of such default will be severe and will only further weaken Ukraine.

Given this scenario, the draft budget for 2021 has already been rewritten by the Council of Ministers. The new version was approved at an extraordinary meeting on 26 November and sent to Parliament for evaluation. In particular, the first budget plan for 2021 was one of the reasons for the refusal by the IMF of the aid to Ukraine, considering that the project had a deficit forecast of 6%, instead of the 5.3% agreed with the IMF. In the revised version, the deficit was reduced to 5.5%. This required increasing revenues and cutting expenses. Still, Ukraine remains hopeful of receiving aid with such a reduction.

In the draft of the second version of the 2021 budget, GDP growth remains estimated at 4.6%. However, it is important to note that this forecast appeared in the middle of the year, when nothing was known about the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Ukraine and the current crisis, which means that the calculations must be updated. Currently, the World Bank expects Ukrainian GDP growth of less than 1.5%, contrary to the optimism of Kiev’s experts.

It is interesting to note how Ukraine has struggled over the past six years to establish a political and economic orientation totally focused on the interests of Western powers, having been completely abandoned by such powers during its most fragile moment. In recent years, Kiev has entered a crisis that is already considered by many experts to be the worst since World War II. And the positioning of its western allies in the face of this scenario of imminent national collapse has been an absolute omission. Washington, for example, constantly announces military cooperation projects with Ukraine valued at millions of dollars, providing equipment and human resources, but at least in the past five years no effective financial aid project to the Ukrainian state has been established, having been limited to one small participation in European aid announced in 2014.

Amid the pandemic and the rise of economic isolationism, Ukraine will only be more and more alone. Perhaps the best path to follow is a general review of state priorities. For example, why include the defense industry in protected expenses when the country is experiencing a deep social crisis? It would be more strategic – and in line with the humanitarian values that Kiev claims to defend – to retreat in military spending and invest capital in partnerships with the private sector that can improve the lives of the Ukrainian people. This is currently the only possible way to Kiev.

Lucas Leiroz is a research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

December 1, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | | Leave a comment

Informal British-Turkish-Ukrainian alliance is emerging in the Black Sea

By Paul Antonopoulos | November 30, 2020

Trade agreements between the UK and Turkey are “very close,” Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said during a visit to Britain in July. London’s endeavour to secure post-Brexit trade agreements reflects on the status of its economic relations with Turkey. A UK-Turkey trade agreement is important for both countries, not only commercially, but also geopolitically as it can extend into the Ukraine against Russia, particularly in the Black Sea.

The trade agreement is crucial because the EU’s relationship with Turkey and the UK have deteriorated. Brussels and Ankara clash over the erosion of democratic controls and balances in Turkey, and also because of its increasingly dynamic foreign policy in Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean against Greece and Cyprus. Turkey’s relationship with the U.S. has also intensified, especially since Ankara bought the Russian S-400 missile defense system despite opposition from Washington and NATO. With it appearing imminent that Joe Biden will become the next U.S. President, relations between Washington and Ankara are set to deteriorate further.

This makes the UK one of Turkey’s few remaining friends in the West, and for Ankara a trade deal would signal a close economic and political relationship with a major European power that still wields international influence. For its part, the UK was willing to cultivate a good relationship with Ankara in the context of a “Global Britain” that it wants to build after Brexit.

When it was still a member of the EU, the UK was one of the leading supporters of Turkey’s membership into the bloc. London has also taken a much more discreet stance than other European capitals in condemning President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the deteriorating domestic situation. When Turkey launched a military operation in Syria in 2019, the UK was initially reluctant to condemn Ankara unlike other NATO members, just like what happened when Turkey intervened in Libya.

It was always inevitable that a post-Brexit UK would have strengthened relations with Turkey, especially as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson often boasts that his paternal great-grandfather, Ali Kemal, was a former Ottoman Minister of the Interior.

Johnson describes the Gülen movement, once allied to Erdoğan but now considered a terrorist organization by Ankara, as a “cult.” He also supports Turkey’s post-coup purges that resulted in the detainment of over half a million Turkish citizens, not only from the military, but also from education, media, politics and many other sectors.

It appears that Johnson’s post-Brexit “Global Britain” has Turkey as a lynchpin for its renewed international engagement with the world, and this poses immense security risks for Russia, especially in the Black Sea.

Erdoğan was outraged when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suspended arms shipments to Turkey because of its involvement in Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia. This was a major blow to the TB2 Bayraktar drones that are highly valued by Erdoğan as he uses them in his military adventures in not only Libya, Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, but also in the Aegean in espionage acts against so-called NATO ally Greece. He has even set up a drone base in occupied northern Cyprus to oversee the Eastern Mediterranean.

The so-called “domestically produced” Bayraktar drones have been exposed for using parts from nine foreign companies, including a Canadian one. Although Erdoğan was outraged by Trudeau’s decision, he found a British company to replace Canadian parts. Britain’s decision to be involved in the Bayraktar drone program is all the more controversial considering five of the nine foreign companies involved have withdrawn their support because of Turkey’s role in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.

Although the growing unofficial alliance for now appears to be in the fields of economics and military technology, alarming reports are emerging that British troops will be stationed in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv Port on the Black Sea.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the BBC that if British troops “land there and stay, we will not mind either. From the first day of the Russian aggression, Britain has been close and provided practical support, and not only militarily.”

Post-Brexit Britain will not weaken its maximum pressure against Russia, and rather it appears to be increasing its campaign. Britain, as a non-Arctic country, is attempting to bully its way into Arctic geopolitics by undermining Russian dominance in the region. However, Britain’s campaign of maximum pressure creates instability on Russia’s vast frontiers, including in Ukraine and the Black Sea.

With this we can see an informal tripartite alliance emerge between the UK, Turkey and Ukraine.

Kiev has formed a venture with Ankara to produce 48 Turkish Bayraktar drones in Ukraine. This also comes as Ukraine’s Ukrspetsexport and Turkey’s Baykar Makina established the Black Sea Shield in 2019 to develop drones, engine technologies, and guided munitions. In fact, Turkey will allow Ukraine to sell Bayraktar drones it produces, which will now contain British parts after several foreign companies withdrew from the drone program. It is not known whether Bayraktar drones can currently be produced because of the mass withdrawal of foreign companies, but we can expect Ukrainian and British companies to eventually fill the voids left behind.

Both Turkey and Ukraine cannot challenge Russian dominance in the Black Sea alone, and it is in their hope that by closely aligning and cooperating that they can tip the balance in their favor, especially if Britain will have a military presence in Mykolaiv Port. Ukraine still does not recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea, Britain maintains sanctions against Moscow because of the reunification, and Turkey continually alleges that Russia mistreats the Crimean Tatars.

Erdoğan uses Turkish minorities, whether they be in Syria, Greece or Cyprus, to justify interventions and/or involvement in other countries internal affairs. Erdoğan is now using the Tatar minority to force himself into the Crimean issue while simultaneously helping Ukraine arm itself militarily. With Turkish diplomatic and technological support, alongside British diplomatic, technological and perhaps limited military support, Ukraine might be emboldened to engage in a campaign against  Crimea or disrupt Russian trade in the Black Sea.

It certainly appears that an informal tripartite alliance is emerging between the UK, Turkey and Ukraine, and it is aimed against Russia in the Black Sea to end the status quo and insert their own security structure in the region on their own terms.

Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst. 

November 30, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Dr Malcolm Kendrick: First Hand Experience – the Lowdown on Lockdown!

View video at Bitchute

Dr. Malcomb Kendrick | November 28, 2020

This YouTube interview is me, speaking to Ivor Cummins, and discussing many things COVID. Lockdown, the weird statistics, the absolute lack of any real science, the crushing of dissent, and suchlike.

I have known Ivor for years, as he has been a long-term critic of the dietary guidelines, and a fervent supporter of the low carbohydrate high fat (LCHF) diet as a way of treating type II diabetes.

I find it interesting that many of the people I know who are critical of the mainstream thinking on diet and heart disease also find themselves critical of the mainstream response to COVID. I like to think this means we are all highly intelligent, with a clear understanding of the scientific method. Maybe we are all just stroppy buggers, who like a bit of controversy. I think that is for others to decide.

November 28, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Eat Your Lemon!

By Israel Shamir • Unz Review • November 26, 2020

The G20 leaders have reached a consensus of a magnitude previously observed at Warsaw Pact summits. News in brief: they want to vaccinate us, and then, before we become restless, switch to combating global warming. If we survive masks and vaccines, austerity will kill off the survivors.

Remember, before the pandemic there was Greta? Greta will return, as soon as everyone gets a jab. This Save-The-World program appeals to a significant part of humanity, including Russians, Europeans, Americans. First, a jab to save us; then, save the planet from warming. So much of this world-saving is straight out of a comic strip. Now let us take time to look at what is happening.

While you were spending your weekend preparing for Thanksgiving, the leaders of twenty of the world’s leading countries held their Online Summit. Usually they come together, talk, discuss problems on the sidelines – this time it was all online. Although the summit was formally hosted by Saudi Arabia, Zoom is Zoom – the hosts of the summit had few opportunities to show off their hospitality. And there was little controversy. The leaders generally agreed with each other.

The main dissenter – the Orange Monster, aka President Trump – could have shoved a cane into the spokes of the-too-fast-by-half-chariot, but he had no time for them. He was immersed in his battle for the White House in the courts, and in his spare time he played golf.

The previous G20 summit took place in March, and there they decided to open the gates for lockdown and destroy the world, as we knew it. Before March, the Covid obsession was still a minority interest. Russians just laughed about it. After the March G20 decision, it became the top priority. The November Summit affirmed the March decisions, and went further, much further.

While President Putin stressed at the summit that the main danger to the world is unemployment, poverty, and economic depression of unprecedented scale, other speakers gave the impression that they were satisfied with the current situation, because it allows everything to be rebuilt. Build back better, is the slogan of Joe Biden:

For some, Covid is a plague, but for our leaders it is an Overton window. I’d advise them to eat a slice of lemon before speaking. This, of course, will not help against Covid, but at least it will wipe the blissful smiles off their faces. (“Eat a slice of lemon before speaking”, was advice given to a lady who complained of getting too much male attention in Italy).

The Chinese leader Xi proposed introducing worldwide QR codes so that without them people could not irresponsibly roam the planet. Nobody objected, but they did not support this initiative either. Xi is afraid that the wily Westerners will impose their own sanitary passports allowing only people injected with Western vaccines to travel. This possibility worried Putin, too, as Russia has developed two or three of their own vaccines. If the Chinese and Russian vaccines aren’t recognised by Europe, their people won’t be able to travel.

The WHO fancied that this virus was not the last; there will be more pandemics, and only vaccinations, masks and generous contributions to its budget will save us. They also promised a new wave of Covid in January, and then another, and so on until the earth will be covered with vaccines. To help poor countries, the leaders declared that the repayment of debts may be postponed, and that vaccines will be supplied to the impecunious nations for free. Free for them, but you will pay for them. (Not that they need it. Poor countries do not suffer of Covid. China’s neighbour Mongolia, despite open border with China, had no Covid. Poor Cambodia, ditto. Africa, none, excepting South Africa. )

The EU representatives called for Global Rebuilding – Build Back Better. That is, we will rebuild everything, but better and in way which is inclusive, green, sustainable. And much more expensive. And at your expense. The struggle for the climate is austerity under another name; it calls for a radical drop in living standards. We shall tighten our belts, and we will regret that Covid did not relieve us from unnecessary torment.

In past forums, Trump has constantly spoken out against the fight against warming, but this time he resigned himself. And his likely successor, Joe Biden, has already pledged to return America to how it was with the WHO and the Paris climate agreement.

So the worldwide rebuilding, perestroika seems to be as inevitable as Gorbachev’s in 1986. The Russian perestroika killed more people than Stalin’s Gulag; it destroyed the livelihood of millions. The wealth of the Russian people has been looted by Messrs Abramovich, Deripaska et al. From the earliest days of these changes, a minority of Russians weren’t optimistic about the outcome, but they were marginalised and their voices were silenced. Now the same is in store for the disaffected and dissidents – if all 20G take this disastrous route, this is well-nigh unavoidable. I do not know what is worse, the Covid lockdown or climate austerity, but there is no need to decide for we shall have both.

A few numbers regarding climate austerity. The Russian perestroika reduced CO2 emissions by 5 per cent year after year for ten years. The Great Depression was even better: a 10 per cent drop in emissions year after year. Millions of Americans died (The Grapes of Wrath), and nobody told them they were saving the planet. Optimistic researchers with the Global Carbon Project say the emissions should be cut by 5.5 per cent per year over the next 45 years. This is a deadly collapse; what we have now is a preview of what they have in store for us and our children. (You can check the numbers here).

The Chinese do not mind this, as they do not mind lockdowns, face recognition and social rating. Their popular film The Wandering Earth shows a world that fights global warming the Chinese way and depicts a future so grim that 1984 looks Utopian beside it. Even so it was still considered a positive and encouraging film by the Chinese audience. We should not accept Chinese methods of fighting diseases or climate change or indeed general governance. They are too different.

If they insist on fighting global warming, let us begin with them personally. Let Gore and Greta and their followers live ecologically on average salary. It is not difficult to live green if you are a millionaire. Do it on the average income. After you pay electricity, water, rates, transport, school you won’t even think of paying much more for making your car “green” and CO2-neutral. You’d be happy to survive as it is. I’d make it a law: every green activist should surrender his assets for safekeeping and manage his green life on the average income for at least one year.

The summit called for further digitalisation, for increased information flows across borders, for a combination of distance learning with conventional learning. Perhaps some digitalisation is unavoidable, but do we need more of it? We need more freedom, and digitalisation appears to be strongly repressive. It is a good tool for tyranny. Any tyrant of old, be it Hitler or Borgia, would be able to achieve much more in union with Zuckerberg. We need to stop the data giants, tax them to the hilt, make their life miserable, change their CEO by users’ vote at least once a year.

Distance schooling is probably the worst innovation of its kind. And rich folks know it well. In New York, the public schools were barred, but private schools operated normally all right, because distance schooling is no better than learning by watching telly. It also kills social fabrics and habits, making children boorish and unable to communicate. It is unnecessary, for children practically do not suffer of Covid. The main reason of going distant is to make our children even more stupid than they are likely to become anyway after watching YouTube. Another reason is to make them asocial and unable to act together against their betters. It should be outright forbidden, not encouraged.

A detailed declaration was prepared and drawn up before the summit and confirmed by the leaders. It also contains approval of the previous March declaration which began the triumphant march of lockdowns around the world.

Of course, the summit did not make binding decisions – only declarative ones, but they were detailed and unambiguous. Vaccinations, a perpetual fight against pandemics, smoothly turning into a fight against global warming, more austerity accompanied by QR codes on a global scale. What we have is what we shall have, this is what they decided. Masks are now and forever:

The leaders agreed to strengthen the WTO (the United States will return to as it was before under Biden) and strive to create a unified global tax system. The IMF (International Monetary Fund) will be at the centre of efforts to coordinate cryptocurrencies in relation to debtor countries, banks and other financial institutions. Some analysts were expecting a departure from the dollar as a reserve currency, but this has not yet been debated.

In the ongoing discussion between liberal globalism and nationalism, the G20 went for globalism and liberalism on steroids. Though President Trump still hopes to conclude the elections in his favour, the G20 already went the Biden way. It is difficult to understand, as the WTO, IMF, WHO are universally disliked by Russians, Americans and many Europeans, too. This is a sad and discomforting decision.

Humanity has made a big step towards unity at this summit. I am not sure it is worth rejoicing. Disagreement is a dangerous thing and leads to wars, but unanimity can be even more dangerous if it is the unanimity of experts and not peoples.

A comforting thought before you despair: declarations of unity were adopted earlier, in particular, when the League of Nations and the UN were created, but then disagreements took over, and a blessed diversity of opinions came back. I do not think we are ripe for that much of unity.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

November 26, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Thanksgiving Rebellion of 2020

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | November 25, 2020

The Centers for Disease Control warned us not to travel or meet in multigenerational gatherings during Thanksgiving. Which is to say: government tried to make Thanksgiving, probably the most iconic of all American holidays, practically disappear from the calendar this year.

They didn’t put it that way exactly. Thanksgiving is not canceled but merely “postponed” — a strange thing to say about a holiday that has a fixed day of the year and surely the one that most means “family” to people.

What they said was you need to go through a 7-point checklist that most everyone would fail. You have to check local cases (never mind that cases aren’t deaths and cases might not even be cases), check hospital capacity as if you will be stricken down like in the movie Contagion and thereby be turned away at the door, observe local quarantine rules that bespot the whole country, do not travel with someone not in your household, make sure no old people will be at the gathering, make sure never to get closer than 6 feet to another human being, and…OK this is all ridiculous. It’s fear porn, distributed by “science.”

And it’s true that our airports are getting scarier by the day with all the convoluted quarantine rules. Imagine showing up back home and knowing that you are barred from even so much as visiting a convenience store. Plus people really do not know the rules because they change by the day and hour.

The governor of Washington State proclaimed that “Gatherings have grave consequences right now.” (He was obsequious and deferential toward mass protests in June: BLM = good; Thanksgiving = bad.)

The governor of Vermont has pledged to interview any student coming back to school about whether they had gatherings outside their home. If so, they get thrown out for two weeks. Probably the track-and-trace machinery will go into place.

In Texas, the health department ran ads all over radio claiming that something as innocent as a small birthday party will spread the coronavirus, based on a now-famous case in which no one was either hospitalized or died but all got immunities.

The ads even deployed the voices of young children (“we feel guilty for gathering”) bemoaning that they got the dreaded disease which in fact has an infinitesimally small to nonexistent risk to children.

And so on it goes, the entire country pounded with anti-Thanksgiving propaganda via every public messaging source. On an 80s-style radio station in Texas, one I heard while driving, the music all proclaimed the glories of parties, dancing, defying authority, standing up against evil, taking big risks, and living large. But the ad breaks hectored people to stay home and stay safe and not have any fun. The contrast was striking, to say the least.

This bureaucratic hydra of federal, state, and local governments tried to delete Thanksgiving. And this is at a time of unprecedented sadness and depression when people are most in need of family and companionship. This is absolutely cruel.

What the heck has become of us? Well, Americans being Americans, they rebelled.

“According to the American Automobile Association,” writes Jason Riley, “there could be as many as 50 million Thanksgiving travelers this year, only 10% less than in 2019.” I saw the same at the two airports I visited. They were about 75% as busy as the old days but still bustling. Rental cars were in high demand. Americans will not be locked down on Thanksgiving.

Riley further writes:

This is a form of mass civil disobedience like nothing the country has seen since the 1960s. Some of it is born of Covid fatigue, to be sure. But the endless parade of politicians flouting their own rules surely has also played a role. It began shortly after the spring lockdowns and if anything has become more commonplace, even farcical.

Riley points out that the politicians themselves do not follow their own ridiculous rules. Like the Soviet apparatchiks of old, they believe that the theater of dictatorial compliance is for the worker and peasants but not for themselves. The “vanguard of the proletariat” has a special exemption from the rules they make for others.

They live well. Everyone else: line up at the food bank.

There is a reason why so many Americans are not buying it anymore. It’s become rather obvious that this is less about health and science than it is about social/economic/political control, regardless of the costs.

This becomes obvious once you see through the incredibly foggy blizzard of data, studies, official pronouncements, and furrowed-browed scientists Skyping into network news shows. The real underlying story here is that lots of people in powerful positions believe that they should be in charge of your life and know better how to make choices over health and safety than you do.

Once you see it this way, you stop being intimidated by their alleged authority and experience and start living your life again. After all, it is not the case that the governments have special access to health wisdom that is denied to you and yours. By now, you have read the risks, seen the problems with the posture of certainty of the supposed experts, and observed the way they utterly fail to consider the downsides of shutting businesses, schools, sports, and the arts.

Consider the following editorial in one of three of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet in the UK. The article pits Martin Kulldorff of the Great Barrington Declaration against Massachusetts General Hospital’s Rochelle Walensky. Martin points to the carnage of lockdowns and a more humane solution to the presence of disease. Walensky’s entire argument against basic exercise of public health of the past is as follows:

“The Great Barrington Declaration is predicated on the idea that you know who is going to get sick and you can somehow isolate and protect them, but there is absolutely no evidence that we can do this”, she said. She pointed out that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that up to 40% of Americans have some kind of co-morbidity that makes them vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19. Identifying all these people is not straightforward. “No-one is suggesting that lockdowns should be the default position. They are a last resort. But if we just let the virus run free without mitigation strategies, such as masking, our hospitals will overflow and that would mean we would no longer be able to take care of the population’s health across the board.”

Notice her insistence that “we” cannot achieve intelligent risk assessment of the population. By we, she means experts such as herself. And she is right! They cannot. And that’s the whole point. That needs to be left to individuals. Central planning does not work for all the reasons that F.A. Hayek explained: the necessary knowledge to make intelligent decisions is decentralized and not available in useful forms for elite overseers or anyone else.

As for lockdowns as a last resort, please: they were used as a first resort in the presence of a virus that turned out to be far less severe than the models predicted. It is barely a disease at all for large swaths of the population. The fatality demographics are overwhelmingly concentrated on a low-life-expectancy population in a world where people are living longer than ever. The average age of death from Covid exceeds average life spans.

Then finally we get the invocation of the overflow problem. Hospitals cannot scale, she alleges. Why? Restaurants, bars, stores, office buildings, and supply and demand for a billion other things scales just fine. It’s a matter of increasing supply to match increased demand – a core economic problem and answer. Why does this not apply to medical services too?

Do you see what is going on here? We have a medical doctor who is pronouncing on economics and she doesn’t even know it. She sums up the problem we have had this entire year. Many health officials have stepped outside their role to become central planners of the entire society and economy. They never explained why people should grant them this power. They just took it for themselves by intimidating fearful and ignorant politicians to do their bidding.

With all due respect to the good doctor, I would translate her statement to the Lancet as follows: “You people out there are too stupid, fat, and unhealthy to be in charge of your lives; that’s where I come in!”

And the carnage is everywhere. I had hoped when I came to Texas to find a society that had long ago gone back to normal. What I find instead is heartbreaking. In this town, half the local businesses seem to be boarded up. The one movie theater for the whole county is bankrupt and closed. Most of the independently owned shops are dead. The shopping mall is barely surviving, and the masked employees are demoralized and seeing their doom.

Who survives? The big-box chain stores in town. Wal-Mart seems fine and so does Home Depot. These companies are well-capitalized enough to survive. I’m glad for them but there is something unjust about all of this. The lockdowns benefited elites at the expense of everyone else.

This small and wonderful town is now sad and broken – thanks to people like Dr. Walensky who undoubtedly had the best of intentions. She lives in Boston. I’m right now in rural Texas. The people who surround me have had their lives shattered by her and her fellow intellectuals who bear no real consequence for being wrong.

So, yes, she is correct that she does not have the capacity to know who is vulnerable and who is not. No one knows that with certainty. The solution is not to lock the whole of society down until the virus magically goes away. That is not public health. That is an unprecedented imposition of top-down brutalism.

The battle over lockdowns and public health is the struggle of our lives, the greatest crisis in generations. But the problems and solutions are not different from the ones that have consumed intellectuals for centuries. What institutions better manage society in good times and in bad: governments (run by experts, with power and resources) or free people acting with intelligence and creativity as best they can? One might have supposed we had the answer to this question already. But human beings forget. Then the tragic lessons have to be learned all over again.

November 25, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

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