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Lockdown: a deadly, failed experiment

By FRASER MYERS | Spiked |  December 27, 2020

The country this year which has been most ravaged by Covid-19 – losing a shocking 1,600 people in every million to the virus at the time of writing – is Belgium.

That might come as something of a surprise. You could be forgiven for thinking it was America, thanks to Trump’s alleged ignorance of science. Or what about Britain, which locked down ‘too late’ because of its government’s short-lived but foolish belief in freedom? Or Brazil, whose right-wing leader complained that lockdowns and masks were for ‘fags’? If not those, then surely Sweden, where there has famously been no hard lockdown at all?

But no, it’s Belgium. There’s nothing particularly unusual about Belgium’s response. Nothing that diverged significantly from the consensus. It did the same thing as everyone else around the same time as everyone else. It even garnered praise for its testing capacity.

There’s one caveat: Belgium’s unparalleled death rate might be down to how the deaths are counted. Some say Belgium is merely the ‘most honest’ country – while others have accused officials of overcounting and including all kinds of deaths not caused by Covid.

But go down the list of deaths per million and you find more places you might not expect. Hard-hit Italy is in second place, but it was the first to get hit in the West so we should let them off. Then there’s Slovenia, which was relatively unscathed in the spring. After that, it’s Peru. Peru announced one of the earliest lockdowns in the world on 16 March – also the first in Latin America. The restrictions were some of the most stringent on the planet, enforced by the military. Masks were made mandatory in public. But by May, two months in, cases began to jump considerably. This was despite the country doing ‘everything right’ and ‘right on time’. There was some easing of the lockdown from June onwards. But social gatherings were still illegal in August, by which point 200 people were still dying per day.

Elsewhere in Latin America, Argentina experienced a similar mid-lockdown explosion in cases and deaths. Its lockdown began on 20 March and was supposed to be short and sharp. It ended up becoming the longest continuous lockdown in the world. In June, Time magazine hailed Argentina’s success in containing the virus. But not long after, cases began to surge. The deadliest day of its pandemic was on day 145 of lockdown.

Lockdowns have become central to any discussion of Covid-19. The assumption that lockdown is the only way to prevent Covid deaths has become embedded in mainstream thinking. Apparently, the only permitted questions are if we are locking down early enough, hard enough or for long enough. Lockdown has similarly become the default response to rises in cases (though sometimes these now take local rather than national form). But the conventional wisdom that more lockdown means fewer deaths simply does not hold true in the real world. There is globally no association, let alone causation, between lockdowns and Covid deaths.

And yet the harms of the policy are extreme. Developed countries have this year experienced record drops in economic output. Britain, for instance, has experienced its worst recession in 300 years (since the Great Frost of 1709, if you were wondering). The burden of this has fallen overwhelmingly on the poorest in society, while billionaires have watched their wealth multiply. In the developing world, the World Bank estimates that an additional 150million people will fall into ‘extreme poverty’.

Children have born a disproportionate brunt of the lockdowns – even though children face very minor risks from Covid and school closures are not associated with reduced transmission. Nevertheless, an estimated 1.5 billion children – 87 per cent – have been affected by school closures around the world. There is now an obscene gulf in access to education between rich and poor, between the privately and state educated, and between those with access to home learning via the internet and those without.

The effect on broader health has been similarly catastrophic. Hospital appointments, operations and screenings have been cancelled, often in cases where capacity was nowhere close to being reached. Patients took ‘stay at home’ messages far too much to heart and didn’t get serious illnesses checked out, including cancers which could have been detected and stopped. The number of Brits waiting for routine hospital treatment has risen from 1,613 to over 160,000 this year – a hundredfold increase.

In the developing world, where Covid itself has had a much lesser impact than in the West, lockdowns have disrupted an estimated 80 per cent of programmes aimed at treating tuberculosis. In 2019, TB killed 1.4million people worldwide. But this year, thanks to a 25 per cent reduction in case detections, 1.7million deaths have been projected.

One of the greatest costs – which cannot be quantified in lives lost or dollar signs – has been to freedom. And this goes deeper than the (hopefully) temporary curbs on everyday life. Our entire culture of freedom has collapsed. We now need and expect the state’s explicit permission for whatever limited activities we can do. Even Christmas can now be cancelled by the state.

None of this is to say we can throw off all the restrictions tomorrow and everything will be fine. But it is striking just how little questioning there has been of either the efficacy or the harms of the defining policy of the pandemic. Even if the lockdown debate becomes academic at some point in the new year, and despite the fact that lockdown has clearly failed, there is a danger lockdown becomes the default policy for the next pandemic – if not for some other threat. And there will be another one.

We cannot let this deadly, failed experiment be repeated. 2020 must be the last year of lockdown.

January 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Great Reset: Tiny Houses Pushed as Solution to Climate Change

By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | December 29, 2020

Social engineers are pushing tiny 200-sq-ft Ikea houses as the solution to climate change in another example of how our living standards are set to be lowered.

In an article entitled ‘Ikea tiny homes can help fight climate change by giving small footprints a big toehold’, Carl Pope, former head of the Sierra Club, gushes over the micro-homes (basically trailers) that sell for $47,550.

“Housing is an important source of climate pollution — directly responsible for about 5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States plus their electricity. Given Ikea’s emphasis on recycled and reusable materials, the company seems likely to accelerate some important shifts in the housing market. Ikea will also almost certainly take advantage of what it learns in the “tiny” segment of the building market to establish a foothold in the broader, potentially highly green, manufactured building space,” writes Pope.

While solar panels would struggle to heat larger homes, this isn’t an issue for the tiny homes, so long as you’re content living in a box.

“The use of rooftop solar panels to generate power and the replacement of propane heating with a heat pump run by those solar panels is likely to become the standard in many states for manufactured homes,” he adds. “They will gravitate toward all-electric mobile homes because propane is a significant factor in the threat of fires to mobile home parks.”

“When utopia is achieved, we will be forced to live in tiny playhouses — for our own good, because living in a rabbit hutch will improve the weather,” writes Dave Blount.

“Winter could mean praying for sunny weather so that the heat comes on. That way we will be cozy and snug when we are placed under house arrest the next time a virus comes around.”

Houses are now becoming so unaffordable for debt-stricken millennials that young people are also now literally living in decorated sewer pipes.

They’re called OPod Tube Houses and literally consist of reclaimed bits of industrial piping renovated inside with other left over pieces from building sites to make them into micro apartments.

As we previously highlighted, last year CNN promoted the idea of young people living in ‘pods’ in the center of huge cities where they have no privacy.

December 29, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Saudi FM to visit Pakistan to discuss strained bilateral ties

MEMO | December 29, 2020

Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan Al-Saud will lead a high-level delegation, including business leaders, in a visit to Pakistan next month in an effort to discuss recently strained relations, according to the Pakistani daily the Express Tribune.

The kingdom’s Energy Minister Abdulaziz Bin Salman will join the delegation to discuss the establishment of a Saudi oil refinery in Pakistan.

Al Saud will hold talks with his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, in addition to meeting President Arif Alvi and Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The visit comes amid tense relations between Riyadh and Islamabad since August when Qureshi criticised the Saudis over their lack of support on the issue of Kashmir over which Pakistan and rival India both claim in its entirety.

The Pakistani diplomat even stated that Islamabad would be “compelled” to “call a meeting of Islamic countries that are ready to stand with us”.

However, the Saudis who interpreted the statement as a veiled threat to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which is dominated by Riyadh, responded by requesting the earlier repayment of a $3 billion loan to Pakistan made two years ago and refused to renew deferred oil payments scheme which part of the loan agreement worth another $3.2 billion. Earlier this month, long-term ally China agreed to help Pakistan repay the debt.

Earlier this year Beijing also helped Pakistan repay $1 billion to the Saudis meaning Pakistan has thus far repaid $2 billion with $1 billion outstanding.

Meanwhile, the Saudis have been developing ties with India despite its traditional ties with Pakistan, with a historic visit by the head of the Indian military to Riyadh earlier this month aimed at strengthening their bilateral ties, particularly in defence.

Read also:

Railway link from Turkey to Pakistan, through Iran to start in 2021

December 29, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

Russia ready to ‘fight off’ Western attempts to seize its assets in $50bn battle with oligarchs over collapsed Yukos oil empire

RT | December 29, 2020

Any hope of a quiet 2021 for Russia has been dashed as one of the country’s top officials warns it faces a series of court battles that risk confrontation with the West, including a fight over the world’s largest legal bill.

In an interview published by Moscow news agency Interfax on Tuesday, Deputy Justice Minister Mikhail Galperin said that litigation over the collapsed Yukos oil empire and fallout from Russia’s 2014 reabsorption of Crimea means that “a tough year” is on the cards.

The long-running dispute over Yukos, once among Russia’s leading energy firms and one of the most valuable companies in the world, has been raging for years. However, it now appears to be coming to a head as the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which claims it has jurisdiction in the case, prepares to hear an appeal from Russia’s lawyers. A legal settlement of more than $50 billion, thought to be the largest in history, hangs in the balance.

“Of course, we’re not sitting idly, waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision,” said Galperin. “Every day, we’re defending our national interests in this case in different ways. Legal battles related to the Yukos case are taking place not only in the Netherlands, but in other jurisdictions as well.”

Those who lost money in the collapse of the Yukos empire insist that the arrest of its CEO on fraud charges and a colossal bill in back-taxes amounted to state appropriation.

Russian authorities argue that previous rulings in foreign courts on the side of the claimants failed to take into account Russia’s anti-corruption laws, and claim that the investors weren’t “bona fide.” Moscow also insists that only Russia’s courts have jurisdiction, as the Energy Charter Treaty under which the case is being brought was signed but never ratified.

Galperin added that the country’s “main legal argument is that Russia never agreed for the case to be heard by an international court of arbitration, which means that the judges had no mandate to consider the lawsuit Yukos ex-shareholders filed against Russia.”

Last week, one of Russia’s highest judicial authorities ruled that the country should disregard any judgement coming from overseas tribunals. They state that, while the government of the day took steps to join the Energy Charter Treaty in 1994, they did not have the authority to make national laws subject 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.”

However, if the verdict goes in favor of Yukos’ former shareholders, refusing to pay the bill could have substantial repercussions for Russia, with the claimants already calling for the confiscation of the country’s assets overseas as collateral.

Galperin, however, is confident that Russia could avoid cash and property falling into the hands of the oligarchs who have brought the case. “Since 2014,” he said, “they have made multiple unscrupulous attempts to seize not only state property, but also assets that belong to Russian companies in Western Europe. We have successfully repelled all these assaults.”

“While we can’t rule out that in 2021 YUKOS ex-shareholders will continue their legal battle in a number of countries, I can tell you without unnecessary bravado that we are fully prepared to fight off any attempts to seize our property in any country of the world.”

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands is expected to hear the case in February next year, while simultaneous battles have also been fought in US and British courts. The row comes at a time when tensions between Russia and the West are growing, with Moscow’s diplomats arguing that verdicts against the country have been “politically motivated.” In December, Justice Minister Konstantin Chuychenko told journalists that the case is part of a “legal war that has been declared on Russia.”

As well as the Yukos case potentially reaching a dramatic climax, Galperin expects that his ministry will have their hands full next year with at least two other international disputes. As early as January, the European Court of Human Rights is expected to announce a decision on a legal fight between Moscow and Kiev over disputed Crimea. There is a further $8 billion claim from a Ukrainian energy firm that insists it lost its assets when the peninsula was reabsorbed into Russia. The same court will also rule on a case brought by Georgia over events in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008.

December 29, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , , | Leave a comment

While giving Americans $600, Congress sets aside $600 MILLION to fight Russia & China

RT | December 28, 2020

The omnibus spending bill US President Donald Trump eventually agreed to sign gives Americans a pittance, but over $600 million to “counter the influence” of Russia and China and “promote democracy” in Europe and Asia.

The 5,593-page legislation bundled the coronavirus “stimulus” with general 2021 spending. It faced heavy criticism from across the US political spectrum last week, for funding all sorts of pet projects while giving Americans only a $600 individual payment. That’s half of what they got in April, and the only direct assistance to mitigate the economic damage of state-imposed lockdowns.

A million times that much was earmarked for US propaganda and diplomatic efforts aimed against Beijing and Moscow, however. According to Congress, “not less than $290 million” is to be made available for the “Countering Russian Influence Fund.” The funds shall be used to, among other things, “support democracy programs in the Russian Federation and other countries in Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia.”

One activity specifically listed is the promotion of “internet freedom” – coming from a country where Silicon Valley companies ruthlessly censor what one can think and say online.

No less than $20 million will go “to strengthen democracy and civil society in Central Europe,” including “transparency, independent media, rule of law, minority rights, and programs to combat anti-Semitism.”

Another $300 million was earmarked for the “Countering Chinese Influence Fund” to be used against the “malign influence of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party and entities acting on their behalf globally.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo may well have written those provisions himself. In a major speech in July, he denounced Beijing as a threat to “our people and our prosperity” and called for a generational struggle against the CCP. Just a week before Congress voted on the bill, he also claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin was “a real risk to those of us who love freedom.”

“We have lots of folks that want to undermine our way of life, our republic, our basic democratic principles. Russia is certainly on that list,” Pompeo told Fox News host Mark Levin on December 18.

Trump had initially refused to sign the bill, demanding that Congress cut back on the programs called out by critics and increase the individual payment to $2,000 per person. He then signed it on Sunday, saying he expected Congress to approve the increase as well as respond to several other priorities he raised.

Democrats have already said they will reject any cuts to the omnibus, however, while there is no indication the Republican-led Senate will actually do anything Trump asked.

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

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.

December 28, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

December 27, 2020 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

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.

December 27, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Economics | , | Leave a comment

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.

December 27, 2020 Posted by | Economics | , | Leave a comment

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.

December 27, 2020 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism

By Michael Rectenwald – Mises – 12/16/2020

The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)

In his book, COVID-19: The Great Reset, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab writes that the covid-19 crisis should be regarded as an “opportunity [that can be] seized to make the kind of institutional changes and policy choices that will put economies on the path toward a fairer, greener future.”1 Although Schwab has been promoting the Great Reset for years, the covid crisis has provided a pretext for finally enacting it. According to Schwab, we should not expect the postcovid world system to return to its previous modes of operation. Rather, alternating between description and prescription, Schwab suggests that changes will be, or should be, enacted across interlocking, interdependent domains to produce a new normal.

So, just what is the Great Reset and what is the new normal it would establish?

The Great Reset means reduced incomes and carbon use. But Schwab and the WEF also define the Great Reset in terms of the convergence of economic, monetary, technological, medical, genomic, environmental, military, and governance systems. The Great Reset would involve vast transformations in each of these domains, changes which, according to Schwab, will not only alter our world but also lead us to “question what it means to be human.”2

In terms of economics and monetary policy, the Great Reset would involve a consolidation of wealth, on the one hand, and the likely issuance of universal basic income (UBI) on the other.3 It might include a shift to a digital currency,4 including a consolidated centralization of banking and bank accounts, immediate real-time taxation, negative interest rates, and centralized surveillance and control over spending and debt.

While every aspect of the Great Reset involves technology, the Great Reset specifically entails “the Fourth Industrial Revolution,”5 or transhumanism, which includes the expansion of genomics, nanotechnology, and robotics and their penetration into human bodies and brains. Of course, the fourth Industrial Revolution involves the redundancy of human labor in increasing sectors, to be replaced by automation. But moreover, Schwab hails the use of nanotechnology and brain scans to predict and preempt human behavior.

The Great Reset means the issuance of medical passports, soon to be digitized, as well as the transparency of medical records inclusive of medical history, genetic makeup, and disease states. But it could include the implanting of microchips that would read and report on genetic makeup and brain states such that “[e]ven crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”6

On the genomic front, the Great Reset includes advances in genetic engineering and the fusion of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.

In military terms, the Great Reset entails the creation of new battle spaces including cyberspaces and the human brain as a battle space.7

In terms of governance, the Great Reset means increasingly centralized, coordinated, and expanded government and “governmentalities,” the convergence of corporations and states, and the digitalization of governmental functions, including, with the use of 5G and predictive algorithms, real-time tracking and surveillance of bodies in space or the “anticipatory governance” of human and systems behavior.8

That being said, “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as the New York Times has suggested,9 the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking”10 of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders”11 and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.

In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared destiny,” among other euphemisms.12 Together, such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism13 (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).

I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in their thrall. The mass of humanity, the planners would have it, will live under an economic stasis of reduced expectations, with individual autonomy greatly curtailed if not utterly obliterated. As Mises suggested, such planners are authoritarians who mean to supplant the plans of individual actors with their own, centralized plans. If enacted, such plans would fail, but their adoption would nevertheless exact a price.

Author:

Contact Michael Rectenwald

Michael Rectenwald was a professor of liberal studies at New York University (retired).

December 26, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Economics, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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