Are These Banksters Ecto Or Endo Parasites To You Peasant Hosts?

newindianexpress  | The UBS acquisition of Credit Suisse requires the Swiss National Bank to assume certain risks. It will provide a Swiss Franc 100 billion ($108 billion) liquidity line backed by an enigmatically titled government default guarantee, presumably in addition to the earlier credit support. The Swiss government is also providing a loss guarantee on certain assets of up to Swiss Franc 9 billion ($9.7 billion), which operates after UBS bears the first Swiss Franc 5 billion ($5.4 billion) of losses.

The state can underwrite bank liabilities including all deposits as some countries did after 2008. As US Treasury Secretary Yellen reluctantly admitted to Congress, the extension of FDIC coverage was contingent on US officials and regulators determining systemic risk as happened with SVB and Signature. Another alternative is to recapitalise banks with public money as was done after 2008 or finance the removal of distressed or toxic assets from bank books.

Socialisation of losses is politically and financially expensive.

Despite protestations to the contrary, the dismal truth is that in a major financial crisis, lenders to and owners of systemic large banks will be bailed out to some extent.

European supervisors have been critical of the US decision to break with its own standard of guaranteeing only the first $250,000 of deposits by invoking a systemic risk exception while excluding SVB as too small to be required to comply with the higher standards applicable to larger banks. There now exist voluminous manuals on handling bank collapses such as imposing losses on owners, bondholders and other unsecured creditors, including depositors with funds exceeding guarantee limit, as well as resolution plans designed to minimise the fallout from failures. Prepared by expensive consultants, they serve the essential function of satisfying regulatory checklists. Theoretically sound reforms are not consistently followed in practice. Under fire in trenches, regulators concentrate on more practical priorities.

The debate about bank regulation misses a central point. Since the 1980s, the economic system has become addicted to borrowing-funded consumption and investment. Bank credit is central to this process. Some recommendations propose a drastic reduction in bank leverage from the current 10-to-1 to a mere 3-to1. The resulting contraction would have serious implications for economic activity and asset values.

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen cannot have his brother, who thinks he is a chicken, treated by a psychiatrist because the family needs the eggs. Banking regulation flounders on the same logic.

As in all crises, commentators have reached for the 150-year-old dictum of Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street that a central bank's job is "to lend in a panic on every kind of current security, or every sort on which money is ordinarily and usually lent."

Central bankers are certainly lending, although advancing funds based on the face value of securities with much lower market values would not seem to be what the former editor of The Economist had in mind. It also ignores the final part of the statement that such actions "may not save the bank; but if it do not, nothing will save it."

Banks everywhere remain exposed. US regional banks, especially those with a high proportion of uninsured deposits, remain under pressure.

European banks, in Germany, Italy and smaller Euro-zone economies, may be susceptible because of poor profitability, lack of essential scale, questionable loan quality and the residual scar tissue from the 2011 debt crisis.

Emerging market banks' loan books face the test of an economic slowdown. There are specific sectoral concerns such as the exposure of Chinese banks to the property sector which has necessitated significant ($460 billion) state support.

Contagion may spread across a hyper-connected financial system from country to country and from smaller to larger more systematically important banks. Declining share prices and credit ratings downgrades combined with a slowdown in inter-bank transactions, as credit risk managers become increasingly cautious, will transmit stress across global markets.

For the moment, whether the third banking crisis in two decades remains contained is a matter of faith and belief. Financial markets will test policymakers' resolve in the coming days and weeks.

Understanding The Needless $300 Billion Gift Of Peasant $$ To Already Rich Oligarchs

geopoliticaleconomy  |  Many media reports have presented Silicon Valley Bank as a financial lifeline for start-up companies, but this portrayal is misleading.

Venture capitalist and private equity firms were SVB’s main customers, making up 56% of its loan portfolio at the end of 2022. Only around 20% of the bank’s loans went directly to start-ups and tech companies.

SVB’s “chief business was making loans through fund subscription lines to venture capital firms“, MarketWatch reported.

“The same venture capital investors that the bank had supported for years ended up killing it”, the website summarized.

Forbes cited an analyst who explained, “SVB is also not your average regional bank… They are a niche bank catering to the venture capitalist crowd and are not a traditional everyday consumer bank”.

Like SVB, Signature Bank worked closely with venture capital and private equity firms. Another important customer base consisted of cryptocurrency companies, which made up around 20% of total deposits.

The financial website Wall Street on Parade explained that Silicon Valley bank “was a financial institution deployed to facilitate the goals of powerful venture capital and private equity operators, by financing tech and pharmaceutical startups until they could raise millions or billions of dollars in a Wall Street Initial Public Offering (IPO)”.

Wall Street on Parade analysts Pam Martens and Russ Martens went even further, documenting how SVB was in essence bailed out by the US government throughout 2022, before it crashed.

They wrote (emphasis added):

To put it bluntly, this was a Wall Street IPO machine that enriched the investment banks on Wall Street by keeping the IPO pipeline moving; padded the bank accounts of the venture capital and private equity middlemen; and minted startup millionaires for ideas that often flamed out after the companies went public. These are the functions and risks taken by investment banks. Silicon Valley Bank – with this business model — should never have been allowed to hold a federally-insured banking charter and be backstopped by the U.S. taxpayer, who was on the hook for its incompetent bank management.

We say incompetent based on this fact alone (although there were clearly lots of other problem areas): $150 billion of its $175 billion in deposits were uninsured. The bank was clearly playing a dangerous gambit with its depositors’ money.

Adding further insult to U.S. taxpayers, the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco was quietly bailing out SVB throughout much of last year [2022]. Federal Home Loan Banks are also not supposed to be in the business of bailing out venture capitalists or private equity titans. Their job is to provide loans to banks to promote mortgages to individuals and loans to promote affordable housing and community development.

According to SEC filings by the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, its loan advances to SVB went from zero at the end of 2021 to a whopping $15 billion on December 31, 2022. The SEC filing provides a graph showing that SVB was its largest borrower at year end, with outstanding advances representing 17 percent of all loans made by the FHLB of San Francisco.

Silicon Valley oligarchs use cynical populist rhetoric to defend the Fed bailout

Despite the fact that SVB was linked with a virtual economic umbilical cord to Wall Street, some Silicon Valley oligarchs like David O. Sacks have cynically tried to portray the US government bailout as a blow to the big banks.

Sacks is a member of the infamous PayPal Mafia, which The Telegraph newspaper described as “the richest group of men in Silicon Valley“.

In a soft-ball interview on the Jimmy Dore Show, Sacks claimed the Fed bailout was needed to save a “vibrant regional banking system” from the big four banks that the government has deemed “systemically important” (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo).

Sacks did not mention that he has made many investments in Silicon Valley companies that stand to benefit from the Fed bailout.

Why Poverty Persists In America

NYTimes  | A fair amount of government aid earmarked for the poor never reaches them. But this does not fully solve the puzzle of why poverty has been so stubbornly persistent, because many of the country’s largest social-welfare programs distribute funds directly to people. Roughly 85 percent of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program budget is dedicated to funding food stamps themselves, and almost 93 percent of Medicaid dollars flow directly to beneficiaries.

There are, it would seem, deeper structural forces at play, ones that have to do with the way the American poor are routinely taken advantage of. The primary reason for our stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that we have not confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labor, housing and financial markets.

As a theory of poverty, “exploitation” elicits a muddled response, causing us to think of course and but, no in the same instant. The word carries a moral charge, but social scientists have a fairly coolheaded way to measure exploitation: When we are underpaid relative to the value of what we produce, we experience labor exploitation; when we are overcharged relative to the value of something we purchase, we experience consumer exploitation. For example, if a family paid $1,000 a month to rent an apartment with a market value of $20,000, that family would experience a higher level of renter exploitation than a family who paid the same amount for an apartment with a market valuation of $100,000. When we don’t own property or can’t access credit, we become dependent on people who do and can, which in turn invites exploitation, because a bad deal for you is a good deal for me.

Our vulnerability to exploitation grows as our liberty shrinks. Because undocumented workers are not protected by labor laws, more than a third are paid below minimum wage, and nearly 85 percent are not paid overtime. Many of us who are U.S. citizens, or who crossed borders through official checkpoints, would not work for these wages. We don’t have to. If they migrate here as adults, those undocumented workers choose the terms of their arrangement. But just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions doesn’t make those conditions any less exploitative. Sometimes exploitation is simply the best bad option.

Consider how many employers now get one over on American workers. The United States offers some of the lowest wages in the industrialized world. A larger share of workers in the United States make “low pay” — earning less than two-thirds of median wages — than in any other country belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to the group, nearly 23 percent of American workers labor in low-paying jobs, compared with roughly 17 percent in Britain, 11 percent in Japan and 5 percent in Italy. Poverty wages have swollen the ranks of the American working poor, most of whom are 35 or older.

One popular theory for the loss of good jobs is deindustrialization, which caused the shuttering of factories and the hollowing out of communities that had sprung up around them. Such a passive word, “deindustrialization” — leaving the impression that it just happened somehow, as if the country got deindustrialization the way a forest gets infested by bark beetles. But economic forces framed as inexorable, like deindustrialization and the acceleration of global trade, are often helped along by policy decisions like the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which made it easier for companies to move their factories to Mexico and contributed to the loss of hundreds of thousands of American jobs. The world has changed, but it has changed for other economies as well. Yet Belgium and Canada and many other countries haven’t experienced the kind of wage stagnation and surge in income inequality that the United States has.

Those countries managed to keep their unions. We didn’t. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a third of all U.S. workers carried union cards. These were the days of the United Automobile Workers, led by Walter Reuther, once savagely beaten by Ford’s brass-knuckle boys, and of the mighty American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations that together represented around 15 million workers, more than the population of California at the time.

In their heyday, unions put up a fight. In 1970 alone, 2.4 million union members participated in work stoppages, wildcat strikes and tense standoffs with company heads. The labor movement fought for better pay and safer working conditions and supported antipoverty policies. Their efforts paid off for both unionized and nonunionized workers, as companies like Eastman Kodak were compelled to provide generous compensation and benefits to their workers to prevent them from organizing. By one estimate, the wages of nonunionized men without a college degree would be 8 percent higher today if union strength remained what it was in the late 1970s, a time when worker pay climbed, chief-executive compensation was reined in and the country experienced the most economically equitable period in modern history.

It is important to note that Old Labor was often a white man’s refuge. In the 1930s, many unions outwardly discriminated against Black workers or segregated them into Jim Crow local chapters. In the 1960s, unions like the Brotherhood of Railway and Steamship Clerks and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America enforced segregation within their ranks. Unions harmed themselves through their self-defeating racism and were further weakened by a changing economy. But organized labor was also attacked by political adversaries. As unions flagged, business interests sensed an opportunity. Corporate lobbyists made deep inroads in both political parties, beginning a public-relations campaign that pressured policymakers to roll back worker protections.

A national litmus test arrived in 1981, when 13,000 unionized air traffic controllers left their posts after contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration broke down. When the workers refused to return, Reagan fired all of them. The public’s response was muted, and corporate America learned that it could crush unions with minimal blowback. And so it went, in one industry after another.

Today almost all private-sector employees (94 percent) are without a union, though roughly half of nonunion workers say they would organize if given the chance. They rarely are. Employers have at their disposal an arsenal of tactics designed to prevent collective bargaining, from hiring union-busting firms to telling employees that they could lose their jobs if they vote yes. Those strategies are legal, but companies also make illegal moves to block unions, like disciplining workers for trying to organize or threatening to close facilities. In 2016 and 2017, the National Labor Relations Board charged 42 percent of employers with violating federal law during union campaigns. In nearly a third of cases, this involved illegally firing workers for organizing.

SVB Israel Sizzle: OY VEY!!!

Tablet  | So what sort of investments did SVB make that went bad? One type of startup appears to have occupied a large amount of space on the bank’s balance sheet: eco-tech innovators, which traditionally require large upfront investments to get off the ground. According to the bank’s website, more than $3.2 billion of its funds were invested to finance companies in “clean tech, climate tech, and sustainability industry, including solar, wind, battery storage, fuel cell, utility storage and more.” The bank’s investment in such virtuous technologies is so massive that 60% of community solar financing nationwide involves SVB. Just last week, the bank hosted Winterfest, a shindig for the climate-tech sector, at the Lake Tahoe Ritz-Carlton.

In other words, the darling financial institution of the tech industry, which donates heavily and almost exclusively to the Democratic Party, is now bankrupt in part because it spent heavily on the Democratic Party’s pet causes. SVB’s demise was followed at the end of last week by the collapse of New York’s Signature Bank, which had former Democratic regulatory guru Barney Frank on its board, and which famously stepped into the political fray in January 2021 when it cut its long-standing ties with Donald Trump and urged the president to resign.

This may help explain why Democrat-supporting big-time investors are now pressing President Joe Biden to bail out SVB. But as the president announced, he doesn’t need to do almost anything to help the banks that fund his supporters and his party’s ideological agenda: For that, there are bank fees. According to a 2020 survey, bank fees are hitting record highs, with monthly service fees now at $15.50 on average for accounts that don’t meet an ever-increasing minimum monthly balance, now at an all-time high of $7,550.

Let’s put it simply: If you have a million dollars in the bank, you suffer no consequences. If you have $10 in the bank, you have to pay the bank $15 for the privilege of keeping it there, which means you owe the bank $5. Bank fees are among our most shockingly regressive forms of taxation. When the Biden administration promises that there’ll be no bailouts and that no one will lose any money from SVB’s collapse, what they mean is that the bailouts will be paid for by the poor, not by the banks.

What to make of all this? Two immediate lessons come to mind.

First, the collapse of FTX (which gave tens of millions to Democratic Party candidates and causes), SVB, Signature Bank, and the financial institutions that will surely follow isn’t part of some complex financial machination inscrutable to all but the savviest among us. It’s part of the very same rot that has already claimed our universities, our media, and other institutions crucial to the functioning of a civil society.

SVB was the financier of choice of one political party’s donor base. It overwhelmingly paid for projects that fit that party’s agenda. And it employed people who expended a lot of time and energy preaching its gospel: The bank’s head of financial risk management in the U.K., for example, Jay Ersapah, took to the internet enthusiastically to both identify herself as “a queer person of color” and announce that she had helped launch no less than six employee resource groups at SVB, designed to “raise the visibility of multiple dimensions of diversity.” As the saying goes, you get what you paid for.

These ideological convictions aren’t coincidences. They’re requirements. Just as you have to pledge your allegiance to the most woke of persuasions to get tenure, and just as you may no longer be a part of a major American newsroom unless you see yourself as fully committed to seeing virtually any Republican as an enemy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you may no longer be a part of the financial system unless you’re ready to support leftist candidates and causes.

The consequences of party control spreading from universities and media to professional organizations and financial institutions are now plain. It’s one thing when the ideological rot on campus leads to a gaggle of law students honking at a circuit judge; it’s another when the same convictions lead investors and regulators to slow-clap as billions vanish from their accounts, knowing that doing so is now a requirement of their jobs, and the costs will be passed on to taxpayers.

The second lesson that may be learned from SVB’s collapse applies only to Israelis, but it’s no less urgent: Sure, the Jewish state’s local customs and arrangements are flawed in many ways, but importing American-style politics and culture, at this particular moment in time, is a very bad idea. America is no longer a liberal bulwark against the storm. It is the storm. Emulating America means more contempt for voters, more erosion of norms in the name of abstract virtue, more mistrust, and, eventually, bankruptcy.

The solutions are simple: Keep politics in the parking lot. Keep banks focused on banking. Bring back trustworthy, nonpartisan regulation—the loss of which, in all fairness, was brought about as much, if not more, by Republicans as it was by Democrats. Resist the whole-of-society blob model you get when a political party merges with the tech industry and federal bureaucracies and leading newspapers and professional organizations and financial institutions and everyone become too big to fail. And realize that what’s true for the richest and most powerful country in history is even more true for Israel, a country where failure would be truly catastrophic—and is always just around the corner.

Norfolk Southern Has Track Safety Detection Systems That Are Not Maintained/Not In Use

freightwaves  |   One union of rail workers has questioned declining maintenance standards following the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which forced the evacuation of the 5,000-person town earlier this month. 

A device that can play a role in preventing derailments is the wayside hot-box detector. It uses infrared sensors to detect bearings, axles or other components of a rail car that are overheating, then uses radio signals to flag rail crews of any overheated components. 

The rail car that initiated the derailment had an overheated wheel bearing, according to a Tuesday report from the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB is still investigating the cause of the derailment and will publish a preliminary report in two weeks. 

Wayside hot-box detectors are typically placed every 25 miles along a railroad, according to a Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) report. Their use has contributed to a 59% decrease in train accidents caused by axle- and bearing-related factors since 1990, according to a 2017 Association of American Railroads study.

Declining head counts have led to these mechanisms receiving less preventative maintenance, according to an official from the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen union. 

The FRA has no regulations requiring the use or maintenance of hot-box detectors.

A hot-box detector in East Palestine notified the crew moments before the train derailed, according to the NTSB’s report. 

It’s unclear if any hot-box detector prior to East Palestine notified crews. A surveillance video shared on Facebook from an industrial facility in Salem, Ohio, about 20 miles from East Palestine, suggests the train’s axle was already on fire. 

Norfolk Southern did not respond to a request for comment, and the FRA declined to comment on the record. 

From 5 ‘electronic leaders’ to zero in derailment region

Specialized signalmen called “electronic leaders” specialize in maintaining devices like hot-box detectors.

As recently as three years ago, Norfolk Southern employed five electronic leaders in the area of its rail network that includes East Palestine. Today, it employs zero, according to Christopher Hand, director of research at the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen.

The area in question is Eastern Region North – Division B, shown in red on the map. It runs east to west from Mansfield, Ohio, to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and north to south from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Astabula, Ohio. It also includes rail track in Pittsburgh, as well as Youngstown, Ohio.

Chatbots Replace Clinicians In Therapeutic Contexts?

medpagetoday  |  Within a week of its Nov. 30, 2022 release by OpenAI, ChatGPT was the most widely used and influential artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot in history with over a millionopens in a new tab or window registered users. Like other chatbots built on large language models, ChatGPT is capable of accepting natural language text inputs and producing novel text responses based on probabilistic analyses of enormous bodies or corpora of pre-existing text. ChatGPT has been praised for producing particularly articulate and detailed text in many domains and formats, including not only casual conversation, but also expository essays, fiction, song, poetry, and computer programming languages. ChatGPT has displayed enough domain knowledge to narrowly miss passing a certifying examopens in a new tab or window for accountants, to earn C+ grades on law school examsopens in a new tab or window and B- grades on business school examsopens in a new tab or window, and to pass parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examsopens in a new tab or window. It has been listed as a co-author on at least fouropens in a new tab or window scientific publications.

At the same time, like other large language model chatbots, ChatGPT regularly makes misleading or flagrantly false statements with great confidence (sometimes referred to as "AI hallucinations"). Despite significant improvements over earlier models, it has at times shown evidenceopens in a new tab or window of algorithmic racial, gender, and religious bias. Additionally, data entered into ChatGPT is explicitly stored by OpenAI and used in training, threatening user privacy. In my experience, I've asked ChatGPT to evaluate hypothetical clinical cases and found that it can generate reasonable but inexpert differential diagnoses, diagnostic workups, and treatment plans. Its responses are comparable to those of a well-read and overly confident medical student with poor recognition of important clinical details.

This suddenly widespread use of large language model chatbots has brought new urgency to questions of artificial intelligence ethics in education, law, cybersecurity, journalism, politics -- and, of course, healthcare.

As a case study on ethics, let's examine the results of a pilot programopens in a new tab or window from the free peer-to-peer therapy platform Koko. The program used the same GPT-3 large language model that powers ChatGPT to generate therapeutic comments for users experiencing psychological distress. Users on the platform who wished to send supportive comments to other users had the option of sending AI-generated comments rather than formulating their own messages. Koko's co-founder Rob Morris reported: "Messages composed by AI (and supervised by humans) were rated significantly higher than those written by humans on their own," and "Response times went down 50%, to well under a minute." However, the experiment was quickly discontinued because "once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn't work." Koko has made ambiguous and conflicting statements about whether users understood that they were receiving AI-generated therapeutic messages but has consistently reported that there was no formal informed consent processopens in a new tab or window or review by an independent institutional review board.

ChatGPT and Koko's therapeutic messages raise an urgent question for clinicians and clinical researchers: Can large language models be used in standard medical care or should they be restricted to clinical research settings?

In terms of the benefits, ChatGPT and its large language model cousins might offer guidance to clinicians and even participate directly in some forms of healthcare screening and psychotherapeutic treatment, potentially increasing access to specialist expertise, reducing error rates, lowering costs, and improving outcomes for patients. On the other hand, they entail currently unknown and potentially large risks of false information and algorithmic bias. Depending on their configuration, they can also be enormously invasive to their users' privacy. These risks may be especially harmful to vulnerable individuals with medical or psychiatric illness.

As researchers and clinicians begin to explore the potential use of large language model artificial intelligence in healthcare, applying principals of clinical research will be key. As most readers will know, clinical research is work with human participants that is intended primarily to develop generalizable knowledge about health, disease, or its treatment. Determining whether and how artificial intelligence chatbots can safely and effectively participate in clinical care would prima facie appear to fit perfectly within this category of clinical research. Unlike standard medical care, clinical research can involve deviations from the standard of care and additional risks to participants that are not necessary for their treatment but are vital for generating new generalizable knowledge about their illness or treatments. Because of this flexibility, clinical research is subject toopens in a new tab or window additional ethical (and -- for federally funded research -- legal) requirements that do not apply to standard medical care but are necessary to protect research participants from exploitation. In addition to informed consent, clinical research is subject to independent review by knowledgeable individuals not affiliated with the research effort -- usually an institutional review board. Both clinical researchers and independent reviewers are responsible for ensuring the proposed research has a favorable risk-benefit ratio, with potential benefits for society and participants that outweigh the risks to participants, and minimization of risks to participants wherever possible. These informed consent and independent review processes -- while imperfect -- are enormously important to protect the safety of vulnerable patient populations.

There is another newer and evolving category of clinical work known as quality improvement or quality assurance, which uses data-driven methods to improve healthcare delivery. Some tests of artificial intelligence chatbots in clinical care might be considered quality improvement. Should these projects be subjected to informed consent and independent review? The NIH lays out a number of criteriaopens in a new tab or window for determining whether such efforts should be subjected to the added protections of clinical research. Among these, two key questions are whether techniques deviate from standard practice, and whether the test increases the risk to participants. For now, it is clear that use of large language model chatbots is both a deviation from standard practice and introduces novel uncertain risks to participants. It is possible that in the near future, as AI hallucinations and algorithmic bias are reduced and as AI chatbots are more widely adopted, that their use may no longer require the protections of clinical research. At present, informed consent and institutional review remain critical to the safe and ethical use of large language model chatbots in clinical practice.

Shame These Other Countries Are Sitting On Top Of OUR Resources...,

washingtontimes |  The world’s attention may be focused on the fighting in Ukraine and the posturing over Taiwan, but there’s plenty to worry about closer to home, the commander of U.S. military forces in Latin America said Thursday.

The U.S. is also willing to replace Russian military firepower now used by armies in Latin America so it can be shipped to Ukraine to help Kyiv fight off Russian invaders, Army Gen. Laura Richardson, the head of U.S. Southern Command, told a Washington think tank.

“We have a lot at stake. This region matters,” Gen. Richardson said. “It has a lot to do with national security. We need to step up our game.”

While leftist regimes Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are considered firmly in Moscow’s camp, Gen. Richardson said Washington is working with other countries in South America that still use military hardware that originated in Russia, which she called her “No. 2 adversary in the region.”

“A total of nine [countries] have Russian equipment in them and we are working to replace that Russian equipment with United States equipment,” Gen. Richardson said in the online conversation hosted by the Atlantic Council.

Gen. Richardson considers Russia and China, both of whom have reached out to Central and South American states in recent years, to be “malign state actors” in the region. 

“This is very concerning to me — to see the tentacles of the [People’s Republic of China] in the countries of the Western Hemisphere,” she said. “We are very much in a strategic competition in the Western Hemisphere.”

China’s ever-expanding footprint in South America has long worried U.S. strategists. Beijing’s trade footprint in the region has grown from $18 billion in 2002 to $450 billion now. The trade is predicted to be about $750 billion in the near future, she said.

Beijing has at least 30 port facilities scattered throughout the region, including five located on the Pacific and Atlantic sides of the Panama Canal. It operates a satellite tracking station in Argentina that reports to the People’s Liberation Army and has no oversight from local officials in Buenos Aires.

“I worry about these dual-use, state-owned enterprises that pop up” from China, Gen. Richardson said. “I worry about the dual-use capability, being able to flip them around and use them for the military.”

At least seven Chinese-owned banks are also operating in Latin America, making heavy infrastructure investments that outpace the U.S. presence. Much of the region is struggling economically and Beijing is willing to write checks now. Even with strings attached, it is a tempting deal that many are unable to pass up.

“The people are getting impatient. They need help now,” Gen. Richardson said. “We are just not investing in the region as we could or should be.”

Even as it struggles in Ukraine, Moscow continues to cultivate relationships with countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. High-level Russian delegations visited all three countries just before the invasion of Ukraine 11 months ago, Gen. Richardson said.

“They will keep up those relationships for as long as they can to keep their foothold in the region,” she said. “The more they can sow that insecurity [and] that instability, they can keep countries looking away from the United States and away from democracy.”

She said her third major concern in Latin America is the drug cartels and other transnational criminal organizations. The groups are responsible for about $310 billion worth of criminal activity in the region every year, including funds derived from narcotics trafficking and human smuggling.

“They sow insecurity and instability in the region, which allows the malign state actors such as [China] and Russia to move in and to flourish,” Gen. Richardson said.

The Colonial Audacity Of General Laura Richardson Is PRICELESS....,

The U.S. wants to take Russian military equipment from Russia’s Latin American allies and "donate it to Ukraine". pic.twitter.com/ghmjfGav1X

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) January 21, 2023

A year ago plans were put in motion to draw Russia into a fight in the Ukraine accompanied by economic ’shock and awe’ on the Russian economy that would cause Putin’s government to collapse . This would help initiate a process that would lead to the break up of the Russian Federation. These plans would have taken years to be drawn up. Doubtless western officials and NATO officers were  checking out real estate prices in Moscow in preparation for for their next assignments. So the Russians saw this as nothing less than an existential fight for their very existence. You can imagine how people in Washington would feel if there was a plan to break up the United States into a couple dozen smaller countries.

Well it didn’t work out that way and the Russian economy is doing just fine. So here is the problem. The Ukraine is about to get crunched and no matter what hodgepodge of old military gear we send to them, it won’t make a difference. This being the case, the collective west has now realized that the shoe is on the other foot. They now think that it is an existential fight for organizations like NATO. This being a NATO-Russia war, NATO finds that no matter what they do they are on the verge of defeat. They keep on escalating but it is the Russians that have escalatory dominance. Even if NATO decides to openly send troops to the Ukraine, it won’t do much good as they have run their arms and ammunition stockpiles down. Germany has two days worth of ammo for example while France has only four.

Sure there are threats to use nukes but where? Russia won’t be the first and so that leaves the US. They start bombing the Russian Federation and the same day the US is just glass. And this includes the Crimea and the Donbass along with the other new Oblasts. And are they really going to drop one in the Ukraine after all their speeches about trying to protect that country? Would they really just nuke the Ukraine? Maybe they could drop one in the Mediterranean as a warning – but have the entire planet get on their case. The trouble is nukes are the one weapon that you can’t use, no matter how many you have.

We are now arriving at the moment when the West discovers that the fraud is over, the shake-down has failed, and everyone can see it.

What then?

Our entire economy needs a make-over. That’s the best-case scenario; a strategy that will restore the West as a constructive, useful entity in world affairs. That’s a viable future.

The likelier scenario is that the predation currently aimed at Russia and China will get re-directed toward the global south (they’re more vulnerable) and, more intensively, on North and Central America.

The economy won’t get fixed, extraction and despoliation will continue at roughly the current pace, and we’ll continue at-speed into the environmental and economic collapse

WATCH: 🇺🇸 SOUTHCOM Commander Laura Richardson describes how Washington is actively negotiating the sale of lithium in the Lithium Triangle through its U.S. embassies. pic.twitter.com/uQTvpSRHAH

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) January 21, 2023

Brazilian President Lula da Silva Halts Privatization Of State Owned Companies

azerbaycan24  |  The national oil giant Petrobras will remain under government control © AFP / Carl De Souza

Brazil’s newly returned President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has scrapped plans to sell off eight state-run corporate giants, including the oil company Petroleo Brasileiro, known as Petrobras, Brazilian news website G1 reported on Monday.

Lula, who was at the helm from 2003 through 2010, was sworn in as Brazil’s president on January 1. Imprisoned for graft in 2018, Lula’s convictions were overturned in 2019, allowing him to defeat Jair Bolsonaro in October’s election.

The decision to remove state corporations from the list of state asset sales was one of the first official acts by the left-wing politician.

Aside from Petrobras, the order includes Pre-Sal Petroleo, the state firm responsible for the supervision and sale of the government’s share of oil and gas from production-sharing contracts, along with the postal service Correios, and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicacaooperator, which manages the federal government’s broadcast network.

The Brazilian social welfare system’s IT services enterprise Dataprev, state-owned nuclear company Nuclep, IT services corporation Serpro, and the Agriculture Ministry’s National Supply Company are also off the privatization list.

 The national oil giant Petrobras will remain under government control © AFP / Carl De Souza

Brazil’s newly returned President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has scrapped plans to sell off eight state-run corporate giants, including the oil company Petroleo Brasileiro, known as Petrobras, Brazilian news website G1 reported on Monday.

Lula, who was at the helm from 2003 through 2010, was sworn in as Brazil’s president on January 1. Imprisoned for graft in 2018, Lula’s convictions were overturned in 2019, allowing him to defeat Jair Bolsonaro in October’s election.

The decision to remove state corporations from the list of state asset sales was one of the first official acts by the left-wing politician.

Aside from Petrobras, the order includes Pre-Sal Petroleo, the state firm responsible for the supervision and sale of the government’s share of oil and gas from production-sharing contracts, along with the postal service Correios, and the Empresa Brasil de Comunicacaooperator, which manages the federal government’s broadcast network.

The Brazilian social welfare system’s IT services enterprise Dataprev, state-owned nuclear company Nuclep, IT services corporation Serpro, and the Agriculture Ministry’s National Supply Company are also off the privatization list.

The returning president has called for “ensuring a rigorous analysis of the impacts of privatization on the public service or on the market,” adding that state banks and major oil companies such as Petrobras would play a “key role” in the new economic cycle.

On Monday, the Sao Paulo stock index shed 3.24%, while Petrobras shares dropped around 6% as Lula’s inauguration speech sparked investor fears of interventionist government policies. The national currency – the real – saw its value slide by 1.5%.

Lula’s predecessor, the populist far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, led an administration mired in controversies ranging from corruption to environmental devastation. Lula’s own government was brought down by massive corruption in Petrobras, which led to the impeachment of his hand-picked successor in 2016.

 

Mexican Workers Assemble North American Automobiles In Mexico For $3.00/HR

NYTimes | “Everybody who sources from China understands that there’s no way to get around that Pacific Ocean — there’s no technology for that,” said Raine Mahdi, founder of Zipfox, a San Diego-based company that links factories in Mexico with American companies seeking alternatives to Asia. “There’s always this push from customers: ‘Can you get it here faster?’”

During the first 10 months of last year, Mexico exported $382 billion of goods to the United States, an increase of more than 20 percent over the same period in 2021, according to U.S. census data. Since 2019, American imports of Mexican goods have swelled by more than one-fourth.

In 2021, American investors put more money into Mexico — buying companies and financing projects — than into China, according to an analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute.

China will almost certainly remain a central component of manufacturing for years to come, say trade experts. But the shift toward Mexico represents a marginal reapportionment of the world’s manufacturing capacity amid recognition of volatile hazards — from geopolitical realignments to the intensifying challenges of climate change.

“It’s not about deglobalization,” said Michael Burns, managing partner at Murray Hill Group, an investment firm focused on the supply chain. “It’s the next stage of globalization that is focused on regional networks.”

That Mexico looms as a potential means of cushioning Americans from the pitfalls of globalization amounts to a development rich in historical irony.

Three decades ago, Ross Perot, the business magnate then running for president, warned of “a giant sucking sound going south” in depicting Mexico as a job-capturing threat to American livelihoods.

“The reality is that Mexico is the solution to some of our challenges,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, a Latin America specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Trade that is closer by from Canada or Mexico is much more likely to create and protect U.S. jobs.”

Given that the United States, Mexico and Canada operate within an expansive trade zone, their supply chains are often intertwined. Each contributes parts and raw materials used in finished goods by the others. Cars assembled in Mexico, for example, draw heavily on parts produced at factories in the United States.

Overall, some 40 percent of the value of Mexico’s exports to the United States consists of parts and components made at American plants, according to a seminal research paper. Yet only 4 percent of imports from China are American-made.

 

NAFTA Devastated Mexico's Rural Sector And Increased Mexican Poverty

citizen |  The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was sold to the people of all three countries with grand promises. Mexicans were promised NAFTA would raise their wages and bring Mexicans’ standards of living closer to the United States and Canada. Instead, after 25 years, real wages in Mexico are down from already low pre-NAFTA wages, two million Mexicans engaged in farming lost their livelihoods and lands, tens of thousands of small businesses have gone bankrupt as American big-box retailers moved in, and poverty remains widespread. And, Mexican taxpayers have paid foreign investors more than $204 million in compensation following Investor-State Dispute Settlement attacks.

Prior to NAFTA, 21.4 percent of Mexico’s population earned less than the minimum income needed for food, a share that has barely budged in the 25 years since NAFTA’s implementation. Today, over half of the Mexican population and over 60 percent of the rural population still fall below the poverty line, contrary to the promises made by NAFTA’s proponents. On the 10-year anniversary of NAFTA, the Washington Post reported: “19 million more Mexicans are living in poverty than 20 years ago, according to the Mexican government and international organizations.”

Before NAFTA, Mexico only imported corn and other basic food commodities if local production did not meet domestic needs. NAFTA eliminated Mexican tariffs on corn and other commodities. NAFTA terms also required revocation of programs supporting small farmers. But NAFTA did not discipline U.S. subsidies on agriculture. The result was disastrous for millions of people in the Mexican countryside whose livelihoods relied on agriculture. Amid a NAFTA-spurred influx of cheap U.S. corn, the price paid to Mexican farmers for the corn that they grew fell by 66 percent, forcing many to abandon farming. From 1991 to 2007, about 2 million Mexicans engaged in farming and related work lost their livelihoods. Mexico’s participation in NAFTA was conditioned on changing its revolutionary-era Constitution’s land reforms, undoing provisions that guaranteed small plots (“ejidos”) to millions of Mexicans living in rural villages. As corn prices plummeted, indebted farmers lost their land, which newly could be acquired by foreign firms that consolidated prime acres into large plantations.

According to a New Republic exposé: “as cheap American foodstuffs flooded Mexico’s markets and as U.S. agribusiness moved in, 1.1 million small farmers – and 1.4 million other Mexicans dependent upon the farm sector – were driven out of work between 1993 and 2005. Wages dropped so precipitously that today the income of a farm laborer is one-third that of what it was before NAFTA.” The exposé noted that, as jobs and wages fell, many rural Mexicans joined the ranks of the 12 million undocumented immigrants competing for low-wage jobs in the United States.

Predatory Capitalists Raiding The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves

The Biden administration has depleted the strategic reserve to levels not seen since the 1970s, and lifted exports permitted by Obama for the first time since Carter banned them, in an attempt to limit the rise in US gasoline and natural gas prices before the mid-term elections. Unfortunately, the oil companies have taken the reserves, refined them, and exported most of the resulting fuel, as this allowed them to increase their profits far above their normal larceny. Then, the administration has already committed to replace the reserves at market and given that the oil companies control the fuel price, we know that this will be at the highest price ever achieved in history. In this way, our politicians continue to enable their owners to make out like the looters they are, as usual, at public expense.

schiffgold |  Even as the August inflation data was coming out higher than expected, President Joe Biden was bragging about his “Inflation Reduction Act.” Peter Schiff appeared on NewsMax and argued that the president is putting Americans at risk just so he can improve his image as we approach election time.

Peter pointed out that one reason energy prices have come down is because the Biden administration dumped millions of barrels of oil from the strategic reserve into the market.

That’s not going to last. And if you look below the surface, we’re seeing an acceleration in food prices, in shelter, in health care — so, everything is really going up. We just have one thing right now that’s pulled back. But of course, energy prices are still up dramatically from where they were a year ago. So, the inflation tax is falling even more heavy on middle-class Americans now than it was a few months ago.”

Peter said the “Inflation Reduction Act” is inappropriately named. It should be called “The Inflation Acceleration Act.”

That is going to have consequences next year in helping push that inflation rate even higher than the inflation from 2022.”

As far as the strategic oil reserve goes, now Biden will have to refill it at a much higher price. Peter said he doesn’t think they’ll refill it at all.

I think more likely, they’re going to deplete the reserve until it’s empty. And then what are we going to do? Then we’ll have no oil to sell. And what if we have an actual emergency, and we have shortages? We won’t have any strategic reserve to fall back on.”

Peter reminded the audience that inflation is even worse than advertised because the CPI formula is rigged.

You really have to double the CPI to get the actual increase in prices that Americans are experiencing. Take one example, which is shelter, which I think rose about 6.1%, which really was the highest, I think, since the 1980s. If you look at the real cost of housing, … medium home prices are up 30% and mortgage rates have gone from 3.1 to 6.1. So, the cost of buying a home and paying a mortgage in the last two years is up by 84%. … And of course, rents are skyrocketing too. And so, what the government claims as the increase in the cost of shelter is just a small fraction of what Americans are actually paying for shelter.”

The anchor pointed out that interest rates need to rise above the CPI in order to tame inflation. Meanwhile, we’re already technically in a recession. Peter agreed we are in a recession, as much as the Biden administration and others, including the Fed, try to deny it.

We’ve already had two quarters of falling GDP. We’re about to have a third, because I think this quarter is going to be another negative quarter. And I think the fourth quarter will also be negative.”

And Peter said the anchor was also correct in asserting rates need to go much higher to tackle inflation.

 

Johnson And Johnson's New War On Consumer Protection

Hitler outlawed independent unions, removed safety and work hour regulations, and cracked down on any complaining workers. Plus, real incomes for the workers fell. He was doing what his boss's, the aristocracy and oligarchs of Germany wanted - he was always a creation of the German upper class wanting to take back the little gains that the working class had made.

An excellent book on this "Big Business and Hitler" by Jacques R. Pauwels, you can probably fund one of his talks on youtube as well.

The elites installed Hitler (made the Chancellor by Hindenberg against the wishes of the electorate) after the Nazi vote went down and more voters were moving to the left wing parties - producing a panic within the elites.

Fascism is the tool used by the elites when "liberal democracy" cannot be managed in such a way to provide the required outcomes. Just like in Italy, Spain and Portugal in the same period (also the military dictatorship in Poland). The elites attempted a fascist coup in France in the 1930s but it was defeated, then implemented fascism in Vichy France.

newyorker  |  Johnson & Johnson is one of America’s most trusted companies, and as Berg moved through her cycles of chemotherapy she kept thinking about a slogan for its body powder: “A sprinkle a day helps keep odor away.” For more than thirty years, she had taken that advice, applying the powder between her legs to prevent chafing. But that powder wasn’t like her chemo drugs: their side effects were awful, but they were keeping her alive. The powder felt, instead, like an unnecessary gamble, one she thought other people should be warned about.

Slippery to the touch and soft enough to flake with your fingernail, the mineral talc is found all around the world, in deposits that can be more than a billion years old. Such deposits are sometimes laced with actinolite, anthophyllite, chrysotile, and tremolite. These accessory minerals, better known in their fibrous form as asbestos, grow alongside talc like weeds in a geological garden. As early as 1971, Johnson & Johnson scientists had become aware of reports about asbestos in talc. They and others also worried about a connection between cancer and talc itself, whether or not it contained asbestos. By the time of Berg’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had designated talc containing fibrous particles a carcinogen and the genital application of any talc powder possibly carcinogenic. The F.D.A. had safety concerns, too, but its authority over products like baby powder was and remains, in the words of Ann Witt, a former senior official at the agency, “so minimal it’s laughable.”

Johnson & Johnson has always insisted, including to this magazine, that its baby powder is “safe, asbestos-free, and does not cause cancer”; however, a 2016 investigation by Bloomberg and subsequent revelations by Reuters and the New York Times, based in part on documents that surfaced because of discovery in suits like Berg’s, exposed the possible health risk related to its powders. Following those reports, tens of thousands of people filed suits against the company, alleging that its products had caused their cancers. In 2020, after juries awarded some of those plaintiffs damages that collectively exceeded billions of dollars, Johnson & Johnson announced that it would no longer supply the talc-based version of its product to American stores.

And then, quietly, the company embraced a strategy to circumvent juries entirely. Deploying a legal maneuver first used by Koch Industries, Johnson & Johnson, a company valued at nearly half a trillion dollars, with a credit rating higher than that of the United States government, declared bankruptcy. Because of that move, the fate of forty thousand current lawsuits and the possibility of future claims by cancer victims or their survivors now rests with a single bankruptcy judge in the company’s home state, New Jersey. If Johnson & Johnson prevails and, as Berg puts it, “weasels its way out of everything,” the case could usher in a new era in which the government has diminished power to enforce consumer-protection laws, citizens don’t get to make their case before a jury of their peers when those laws fail, and even corporations with long histories of documented harm will get to decide how much, if anything, they owe their victims.

WSJ Attacks The Railway Labor Act As "Semi-Fascist"

WSJ  |  To make life easier for the algorithms that will be coming for our jobs, we in the journalism business apply a template to labor disputes: management is bad, labor is good. Joe Biden molds his administration to simple stereotypes too. He defines himself as the most pro-labor president in history. The favor is not returned, apparently.

In the wee hours of Thursday, after anticipatory ripples of destruction were already spreading through the economy, an all-night effort by the White House barely averted a national rail strike, supposedly. The deal was dubbed “tentative,” but expect the unions to approve it. Leveraging the president for one last squeeze of the fruit, after all, was how they planned it from day one.

Mr. Biden’s skin in the game was real, and not just the risk to the economy and inflation but fear of voters going to the polls in a few weeks believing the country was slipping into 1970s-style chaos. But something else about this episode should also be plain: its nuttiness. The angst was absurdly disproportionate to the dollar value of the employee benefits at issue, which concerned sick days. A national crisis was spawned for no better reason than an 88-year-old legal throwback to a bygone era of (to borrow a recent Bidenism) semi-fascist corporatism, which is the exact flavor of the Railway Labor Act amendments of 1934.

This obsolete law forces big government, big labor and big business into bed in a way that hardly makes sense anymore in a mostly free-market economy. If not for the law’s legacy, a nationwide strike encompassing the whole of the rail transportation system (33 private companies) would be all but unthinkable, much less the industry’s leverage to force the White House to dance to the industry’s exceedingly penny-ante economic disputes.

In the briefest recap, under the antiquated railroad law, a Biden-appointed emergency board had already tried to split the difference between the 12 unions and 33 carriers, recommending a 24% pay hike and $5,000 in bonuses.

But rejecting the deal were the important engineers and conductors, who insisted on trying further to leverage Mr. Biden over something called attendance policy, which the board considered outside the negotiation’s statutory ambit.

Trains can’t run if crews don’t show up, at least until algorithms take over their jobs, which is not at all farfetched.

Brandon Say: "If You Don't Fully Submit To Your Corporatist Masters - You're Semi-Fascist!"

 washingtontimes |  Students of political and philosophical concepts are required to learn the definitions of socialism, democracy, republicanism, fascism — among many others. Libraries are filled with volumes written by thinkers and theorists explaining the origins of those ideologies and movements. And now President Biden has coined a new term we might add to that list: semi-fascism.

In remarks at a Democratic National Committee reception on Aug. 25, Mr. Biden said former President Donald Trump and his loyalists within the Republican Party represent a distinct threat to American democracy, a theme he has repeated while campaigning for Democrats ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

“And what we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA philosophy. It’s not just — it’s not just Trump. It’s the entire philosophy that underpins — it’s — I’m going say something — it’s almost like semi-fascism,” the president said. When asked to clarify what he meant, Mr. Biden, rather than define the term, said, “You know what I mean.”

The word “fascism” is everywhere on social media these days. And while some folks may use it as a slur to attack those with whom they disagree, a number of professional scholars have embraced the term to describe what they view as the dangerous rise of right-wing radicalism in American politics.

In this episode of History As It Happens, scholars Jeffrey Bale and Tamir Bar-On argue that it is historically inaccurate and politically dangerous to label Mr. Trump and the Republican Party as fascists. They are the co-authors of “Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right.”

“We believe the threat posed by fascism and the radical right in Western countries has been egregiously inflated and exaggerated ever since the end of World War II. If you listen to certain pundits, radical left-wing groups, or the self-appointed watchdog groups… they’re always presenting this image that fascism is on the march. They’re still living in the past like it’s the 1930s,” said Mr. Bale, an expert on violent political and religious extremists at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Whatever one thinks of Mr. Trump and his politics, they do not fit the definition of fascism, said Mr. Bar-On, a political scientist at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.

“Fascism is spoken about as if we should know what fascism is. There’s a whole body of literature on what constitutes fascism and it goes back to the period when fascists rose to power in the 1920s. At minimum, I would think that if you are a scholar, a journalist or a think tank, you should define what fascism is,” he said.

So what is fascism? What is semi-fascism? Listen to this episode of History As It Happens.