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.

Uninsured Bank Depositor Bailouts Make A Mockery Of "Too Big To Fail"

 nationalreview |  The 2008 financial collapse and resulting Wall Street bailout popularized the concept of “too big to fail” — the idea that certain institutions were so massive, and so intertwined with the rest of the financial system, that their failure could trigger a complete meltdown of the economy. 

Kinda insane that this entire debacle was potentially caused by @ByrneHobart's newsletter. Here's how the butterfly effect happened.

1) Byrne posts this article/Tweet calling out SVB's risk.
2) Pretty much every VC I know reads this newsletter
3) They all start to pay very,… https://t.co/zUSKF1ZW4J

— Evan Armstrong 📧 (@itsurboyevan) March 11, 2023

While I opposed that bailout on ideological grounds, I at least recognized the tremendous risk that the implosion of the nation’s major investment banks would pose for the broader financial system. But Sunday’s decision by regulators to bail out uninsured depositors of the failed Silicon Valley Bank would dramatically lower the threshold for federal intervention in financial markets. 

To be sure, there are reasons to believe the collapse of SVB carries broader consequences. While the FDIC guarantees deposits up to $250,000, the overwhelming majority of SVB deposits exceeded that amount. It was the bank of choice for many tech start-ups. Without access to their cash, those companies would have difficulty meeting payroll. Additionally, the sudden collapse of SVB could lead companies and individuals who have deposits in other similar financial institutions to withdraw their money starting on Monday, triggering more bank runs, and more bank collapses. 

While regulators are not stepping in to rescue SVB as an institution, the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and FDIC have announced that they will make sure that all depositors at SVB as well as another failed institution, Signature Bank, will have access to their money on Monday even if those deposits exceed the $250,000 threshold. In a statement, regulators promise, “No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.”  

Defenders of this decision will try to make it seem as if it’s an extraordinary, one-off decision by regulators, but in practice, it has created a huge moral hazard by signaling that the $250,000 FDIC limit on deposit insurance does not exist in practice. The clear signal it sends is that when financial institutions make poor decisions, the government will swoop in to clean up the mess. There are plenty of ways in which poor decisions made by financial institutions could have larger implications. But in 2008, the justification for intervention was systemic risk. 

This was not a case in which the whole economy would be threatened if an intervention were not taken. There would be disruption to a number of companies in the tech sector and their employees, as well as potential problems for similarly situated financial institutions. But the vast majority of banks are well capitalized right now, and there is no credible risk of this causing a complete financial meltdown. 

In fact, it isn’t even clear that depositors were going to be wiped out, absent federal intervention. When SVB was shut down, it still had real assets that were worth money, which can be sold to pay back investors. Due to poor risk management, what they were not able to do is avoid a panic in which a large number of depositors tried to withdraw their money at the same time, which is what happened last week. Under one estimate from a Jefferies analyst, when liquidated, SVB has the assets to pay off 95 percent of deposits. This is no doubt one reason why regulators are stating so confidently that they don’t expect this to cost taxpayers money. Another reason is that they claim any losses incurred would be repaid by “a special assessment on banks” which will inevitably end up being passed on to their customers. 

Anybody who considers themselves a free-market conservative should be especially concerned about this action. Regardless of the particulars, it will just add to the talking point that when Wall Street or well-connected tech companies are in trouble, the government swoops in to the rescue. And yet lawmakers won’t eliminate student debt, give away free health care, pay for child care, guarantee affordable housing . . . and insert whatever cause you like. If you support socialism for tech companies, don’t be surprised when you get it for everything else.

Journalists Lock Horns With State Sponsored Thought Police In Congress

zerohedge  |  As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the "weaponization" of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.

Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two "so-called journalists" as dangerous and a "threat" to former Twitter employees.

She claimed that Republicans brought "two of Elon Musk's ‘public scribes'" in "to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative - Elon Musk’s chosen narrative - that is now being parroted by the Republicans" for political gain.

“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:

“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”

“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.

“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”

Taibbi snapped back...

As Glenn Greenwald chimed in from Twitter: "To Democrats, "journalist" means: one who mindlessly and loyally endorses DNC talking points. "

Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:

“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.

“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”

Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system."

“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”

Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger's facts was to get personal...

The full hearing can be viewed below:

As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the 'Twitter Files' disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.

"Our findings are shocking," writes Shellenberger at his blog. "A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it."

Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on 'THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX' which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, 'contains some surprises.'

Oval Office Puppeteers Announce Formal Creation Of National Surveillance State

CTH  |  The “National Cybersecurity Strategy” aligns with, supports, and works in concert with a total U.S. surveillance system, where definitions of information are then applied to “cybersecurity” and communication vectors.  This policy is both a surveillance system and an information filtration prism where the government will decide what is information, disinformation, misinformation and malinformation, then act upon it.

In part, this appears to be a response to the revelations around government influence of social media, the Twitter Files.  Now we see the formalization of the intent. The government will be the arbiter of truth and cyber security, not the communication platforms or private companies.  This announcement puts the government in control.

All of the control systems previously assembled under the guise of the Dept of Homeland Security now become part of the online, digital national security apparatus. I simply cannot emphasis enough how dangerous this is, and the unspoken motive behind it; however, to the latter, you are part of a small select group who are capable of understanding what is in this announcement without me spelling it out.

Remember, we have already lost the judicial branch to the interests of the national security state.  All judicial determinations are now in deference to what is called broadly “national security,” and the only arbiter of what qualifies to be labeled as a national security interest is the same institutional system who hides the corruption and surveillance behind the label they apply.

We cannot fight our way through the complexity of what is being assembled, until the American People approach the big questions from the same baseline of understanding.  What is the root cause that created the system?  From there, this announcement takes on a more clarifying context – where we realize this is the formalization of the previously hidden process.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder did not create a weaponized DOJ and FBI; the institutions were already weaponized by the Patriot Act.  What Obama and Holder did was take the preexisting system and retool it, so the weapons of government only targeted one side of the political continuum.

This point is where many people understandably get confused.

Elevator Speech:

(1) The Patriot Act turned the intel surveillance radar from foreign searches for terrorists to domestic searches for terrorists.

(2) Obama/Biden then redefined what is a “terrorist” to include their political opposition.

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.

Railroad Workers Tried To Tell Us Last Year Until Biden And Congress SHUT THEM DOWN!!!

thenation  |  As public outrage has grown over the toxic fallout from last week’s fiery derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, the urgent questions behind this disaster echo the past year’s confrontations over working conditions in the lightly regulated rail industry. Indeed, the catastrophe in Ohio—together with another hazardous derailment in Houston, Tex., just a week later—drives home the steep costs in health and well-being that we all incur when we fail to heed rail workers’ calls for more regulation and adequate staffing mandates.

As rail workers sought to win basic guarantees of staffing support and sick leave from rail carriers long accustomed to selling labor short and winning major regulatory concessions from federal agencies, they stressed how the unsustainable demands placed on their working lives would result in disasters just like the one in East Palestine. The northeast Ohio village of about 5,000 people is 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh and 20 miles south of Youngstown; already those metropolitan areas are under alert for the air and water contamination originating from the Palestine derailment. And in Palestine proper, many residents are already reporting troubling health symptoms and dying area wildlife as they weigh the risks of remaining exposed to the toxic fumes and chemical leaks from the derailed tanker cars carrying hazardous materials.

In the immediate aftermath of the derailment, rail officials ordered that the vinyl chloride hauled by five of the Norfolk Southern cars in the 150-car train be burned off to prevent a still greater explosion—but that action sent hydrogen chloride and phosgene, two dangerous gasses, spuming into the air. EPA investigators have since identified other hazardous chemicals the train had been hauling, including ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and butyl acrylate. And the EPA has released a report saying that chemicals from the derailment have leached into the soil and water in the aftermath of the accident.

“We’ve been trying to share our concerns around this for a while now,” Ross Grooters, current rail employee and cochair of Railroad Workers United said. “It wasn’t a matter of if this was going to happen. It was a ‘when and where,’ and unfortunately, there’s a high likelihood that this will happen again, somewhere, if the root causes of the issues aren’t addressed.”

Rank-and-file workers organizing with Railroad Workers United (RWU) have waged high-profile pressure campaigns to improve rail safety and retain staffing. Jason Doering, an RWU organizer and a legislative representative of SMART Nevada, says that focusing industry and regulatory attention on the threat of derailments has been a continual challenge. Rail workers with Fight for Two Person Crews have been waging an allied campaign to lobby state and federal lawmakers to create and enforce standards for safer train staffing: a mandatory minimum of two person crews on freight trains. Last year, the Federal Railroad Administration proposed to reinstate a two-person crew rule and opened a public hearing in December 2022. During the public comment period for the rule change, more than 13,000 comments were logged in favor of it.

With the country’s attention now fixed on the disaster in East Palestine, reformers say that the time to act is now. “This is an opportunity for us to really identify safety risks in the industry,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department of the AFL-CIO (TTD). He noted that the TTD has been working on improving rail safety for workers and the communities in the path of freight traffic. “I think it’s something that you’ll hear from a lot of rail workers and people who’ve been seeing sort of the changes in the industry, the deterioration of the drastic reductions in workforce and the focus on speed over safety.”

What EXACTLY Were The FBI And Twitter Talking About At Their Weekly Meetings?

jonathanturley |  The internal company documents released by Musk reinforce what we have seen previously in other instances of Twitter censorship. A recent federal filing revealed a 2021 email between Twitter executives and Carol Crawford, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s digital media chief. Crawford’s back-channel communication sought to censor other “unapproved opinions” on social media; Twitter replied that “with our CEO testifying before Congress this week [it] is tricky.”

At the time, Twitter’s Dorsey and other tech CEOs were about to appear at a House hearing to discuss “misinformation” on social media and their “content modification” policies. I had just testified on private censorship in circumventing the First Amendment as a type of censorship by surrogate. Dorsey and the other CEOs were asked about my warning of a “‘little brother’ problem, a problem which private entities do for the government that which it cannot legally do for itself.” In response, Dorsey insisted that “we don’t have a censoring department.”

The implications of these documents becomes more serious once the Biden campaign became the Biden administration. These documents show a back channel existed with President Biden’s campaign officials, but those same back channels appear to have continued to be used by Biden administration officials. If so, that would be when Twitter may have gone from a campaign ally to a surrogate for state censorship. As I have previously written, the administration cannot censor critics and cannot use agents for that purpose under the First Amendment.

That is precisely what Musk is now alleging. As the documents were being released, he tweeted, “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.”

The incoming Republican House majority has pledged to investigate — and Musk has made that process far easier by making good on his pledge of full transparency.

Washington has fully mobilized in its all-out war against Musk. Yet, with a record number of users signing up with Twitter, it seems clear the public is not buying censorship. They want more, not less, free speech.

That may be why political figures such as Hillary Clinton have enlisted foreign governments to compel the censoring of fellow citizens: If Twitter can’t be counted on to censor, perhaps the European Union will be the ideal surrogate to rid social media of these meddlesome posters.

The release of these documents has produced a level of exposure rarely seen in Washington, where such matters usually are simply “handled.” The political and media establishments generally are unstoppable forces — but they may have met their first immovable object in Musk.

 

Why Do The Twitter Files Matter?

gizmodo  |  There is genuine news value to a story along the lines of “These Are the Emails That Led to Twitter Suppressing the Hunter Biden Laptop Story.” It is rare for a company as large and valuable as Twitter to account so thoroughly for wrongdoing, perceived or actual. The emails resemble the documents received in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They detail internal drama at a company whose power is on the order of a government agency, maybe greater. BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos tweeted, “Any news outlet would’ve loved to have this scoop! It’s just not a ‘scandal’ as teased.”

Twitter’s new owner considers it “the de facto public town square,” suggesting he believes in a level of public accountability. Again, not unlike a government agency. Though it is thrilling to receive once-hidden documents in response to a FOIA, it is also possible that those documents are boring, that they tell you what you already know. Such is the case with the Twitter files. We learned how Twitter came to its decision to block the Post’s story, but we did not learn a shocking new reason why. We knew Twitter suppressed the story before the release of these documents, and, for the most part, we knew who was involved.

Those people have since suffered professional punishment and left Twitter. Vijaya Gadde, the former chief legal officer who played a “key role” in the decision, according to Taibbi, was fired by Musk. Roth quit over Musk’s “dictatorial edict.” Borrman left before Musk arrived. Jack Dorsey, CEO at the time, is gone. When deciding to digitally quarantine the Post’s story, did those people act out of fealty to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party? Out of opposition to the Republican Party and hatred for Donald Trump? Out of distaste for the New York Post? Judging by the documents we have, we can’t say they did. Was it drastic interference in the political process and the press? It was. We already knew that.

Taibbi interviewed several anonymous ex-Twitter employees on the decision, all of whom expressed shock and outrage at the company’s actions: “Everyone knew this was f–ked,” he quotes one source. But since Taibbi doesn’t quote that expletive from the leaked emails, we can reason they included few or no quotes as sensational for his purpose. Ergo, we can deduce that those executives said little to support claims of nefarious purposes.

Outlets far more vested in the Hunter Biden story than Gizmodo also seem vexed by the release, and delivered the news below muted headlines. If the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop belongs to any one outlet, it belongs to the New York Post, which has never shied away from a blaring headline in its 221-year life. Yet the Post’s two Friday-night notifications about Musk’s actions were restrained. The first was a simple curtain-raiser about Musk’s promise: “Elon Musk to drop Twitter files on NY Post-Hunter Biden laptop censorship today.” The other was a “Read these documents”-style headline: “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Elon Musk’s Twitter drops Post censorship details.” Fox News’ push alert, delivered via Apple News, read “Elon Musk drops bombshell docs on Twitter censorship.”

Bombshell, bombshell, bombshell… what, exactly, is the bombshell? We’ve yet to hear it explode. Maybe we’ve heard too much about this story, and we’re missing the forest for the trees. Or maybe these documents detail a decision where the outcome was already well-documented.

On its website, the Post argues why you should care. Twitter is censoring things willy-nilly and concocting reasons to do as it goes along, its headline implies: “Hunter Biden laptop bombshell: Twitter invented reason to censor Post’s reporting.”

And yet, it is not shocking that Twitter used an ad hoc decision to moderate a piece of content from one of America’s most infamous tabloids. The social network had done that exact thing for years as it struggled with toxic users—violent white nationalists, virulent transphobes, harassers and bullies of all political stripes, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum et ad nauseam. The company never had a handle on content moderation, and it certainly doesn’t now, no matter how much Musk crows. Back in 2016, a lengthy investigative story published by Buzzfeed showed how Twitter had been struggling with abusive posters since its 2006 founding. Jack Dorsey and all his executives made things up as they went along, just like Musk.

Lastly, did the United States government run interference on a social media company for the former vice president? That would be shocking indeed, a bonafide bombshell. Musk himself said as much Friday: “Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.” That is true! And Taibbi once believed that is what happened. In August 2022, he tweeted: “The laptop is by the far the secondary issue. The real problem is the FBI stepping in to cut distribution of true story [sic],” as pointed out by Columbia professor and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufecki. But on Friday night, Taibbi rescinded the assertion: “There’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

The 4th Reich Has An AWFUL Lot Of Skeletons In Its Closet

kunstler  |  Barreling down to Christmas and the bitter butt end of a bad year, a primal fear of the deepening darkness makes people desperate — another reminder that human nature has not changed so much in ten thousand years, despite the discoveries of Prozac and plant-based meat. Yet Freud was right: death has its attractions for tormented minds. Thus, our nation appears to hasten to its own funeral.

       Can anyone actually grok how “progressive” thinking works these days? This faction now in charge of so many things has decided in the starkest terms that freedom of speech has got to go. For some years, the Party of Chaos had achieved such exquisite control of all national debate by seizing the dials and toggles of social media that they made reality itself their hostage.  The truth was only what they said it was, and anyone who said otherwise got banished, cancelled, and even destroyed.

     There seemed to be no way to overcome this death grip on the process of consensus, the formation of a coherent collective idea about what is going on in the world. And so, any number of scams could be run on the people of this land. They could rig elections in plain sight. They could surreptitiously suspend due process of law when it suited them. They could send national police thugs to your door at five-o’clock in the morning with riot guns, body armor, flash bangs, and bogus warrants. They could take your livelihoods, your freedom to move about, your childrens’ minds and bodies, and your dignity. Finally, they could take your life with false vaccines — and, unlike the Nazis in 1944, get the private sector to dispose of the corpses.

     And now a struggle ensues over the relationship between the truth and the making of a consensus. Elon Musk bought Twitter — the horror! — and methodically set about to liberate this new digital “public square” from insidious and nefarious manipulation. It’s not a trifling matter, of course, but it’s amusing to watch Elon play with our nation’s overlords; and even more entertaining to see these tyrants strain and bluster to justify their war against free speech. How did the cognitive elite, America’s thinking class, the law professors, the editors and pundits, the public intellectuals, the managers of most everything, ever find themselves so self-owned in idiocy?

     I wish I’d been a fly-on-the-wall in that meeting mid-week between Elon Musk and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple — the very same week that Apple disabled the Air-drop function on iPhones in China (slyly, by means of a new OS update), making it more difficult for street protesters to coordinate their movements against CCP lockdowns. Rumors were flying days before that the Lords of Tech would pull on Twitter the same kind of treatment they dealt to Parler two years ago, a then-rising rival app for Internet chatter that threatened to open up free debate. Apple and Google took Parler out behind the woodshed and shot it in the head — and nobody could do a damn thing about it. I have a hunch that Elon explained a few things to Tim Cook that made him think twice about another move like that.

Twitter is different than the upstart Parler was. Twitter was already established as the authorities’ official arbiter of approved thought in America. Under the old boss, Jack Dorsey, Twitter accomplished its thought management ends with a staff of thousands of mini-Stalins rooting out anything that smelled like opposition to the official narratives. (Elon fired the whole lot of them in short order.) It has been revealed since then that Twitter carried out censorship at the aggressive prompting of US deep state officialdom, the nagging, twanging, and strong-arming by bureaucrats from many federal agencies. Who knows (not yet, anyway) how many Twitter censors were actually put in-place by the government?

       So now, one big truth has come nakedly out in the open: the Left is against the First Amendment to the Constitution. Free speech, they say repeatedly now, makes our democracy unsafe. It can’t be allowed. They say that because they don’t have a better argument. The safety talking-point is a shopworn cliché from their grab-bag of Woke shibboleths that the public is sick of hearing. Anyone with half a brain can see how transparently dishonest and stupid it is. It’s not going over well, even among a people so sorely gaslighted as the USA in late 2022.

       Speaking of what is safe and what is not safe, one of the main deceptions the past three years has been the suppression of information about the Covid-19 vaccines that were foisted on the population — for many, made a requirement to earn a living. The old Twitter worked strenuously to bury any data and all news that suggested the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines were disabling and killing people. It has now reached a critical point, with so many suspicious “all-causes” deaths coming to the public’s attention. This is what the authorities are really afraid of: that the people will learn their government has carried out — by epic incompetence or true malice — something the looks like an attempted genocide.

 

Reality Is A Harsh Mistress When You've Spent Years Mistreating And Insulting Her

kunstler  |  It’s hard to overstate how damaging Twitter’s dark years of insidiously massaging public opinion have been to this country. Open debate could have clarified the fog of deliberate disinformation surrounding everything Covid-19. It would have been much harder for public health officialdom to gaslight America over the origin of the disease, and probably impossible to conceal the nefarious operations behind the Emergency Use Authorization, the suppression of effective early treatments, and the direct ties to drug companies’ profits. The result of that has been the broad deployment of dangerous and deadly pseudo-vaccines that have killed millions and disabled many more. The absence of honest debate has turned doctors into murderers and accomplices to genocide.

      The scope of this bureaucratic crime is really outside the experience of most Americans, who never imagined that their elected and appointed leaders would act against them with such rank dishonesty, cruelty, and bad faith. But there it is. And if Twitter continues to open up, the more likely that the responsible parties will be held accountable.

     Likewise, the now-pervasive Kafka-esque program of political persecution carried out against citizens by government officials, including the many seditious schemes of RussiaGate; the ongoing, escalating mischief around elections; and the use of the FBI and DOJ as a combined secret police and kangaroo court apparatus.

   You can add to all that turpitude, the wild irresponsibility of “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, our idiotic provocation of Russia in Ukraine, the surrender of America’s national sovereignty to the globalist Great Re-set cabal and its tools in the World Health Organization, and the domestic campaign by Woke Jacobins to sexually disorder the lives of American children.

    I think Elon Musk is right: the Mainstream News Media will now face a venue where its habitual lying is called out forcefully. You can already see The WashPo and CNN attempt to make small shifts in their coverage of events, which double as efforts to cover-up their past lying in the hopes that the public won’t notice that it happened.

    Nothing else so far has confronted the Left’s crusade to overturn American life so stoutly as Elon Musk’s reform of Twitter. It seems to be working. The Wokesters are acting like a gang on-the-run. Pretty soon they’ll be ratting out each other to save their skins. Reality is a harsh mistress when you’ve spent years insulting and mistreating her.

American Political Misleadership Dangerous To America And To The World

therealnews  |  In the months of July and September 1940 the French historian and future resistance fighter Marc Bloch, who fought in World War I and World War II, wrote a short book called L’Étrange Défaite or Strange Defeat. It was a searing condemnation of the French high command and political class which was responsible for the humiliating defeat and disintegration of the French army with the Nazi invasion of France. Bloch, who went underground to fight the Nazi occupiers, was executed by the Gestapo in 1944. 

Bloch’s book, published after the war, was the model for historian Andrew Bacevich’s book After the Apocalypse. Bacevich is no less censorious of the political and military class that has led the United States into one debacle after the next since Vietnam, a war he served in as a young officer. He argues they are woefully out of touch with reality, and unable to adapt to a changing world. Unless they are wrenched from power, the twilight of the American empire will be one filled with catastrophe after catastrophe. Andrew Bacevich joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss his book After the Apocalypse.

Andrew Bacevich is a retired army colonel and Emeritus Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. He is also the cofounder and president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

American Politicians Can Make A Name-Stealer Blush....,

BAR  |  It isn’t incompetence that keeps the democrats from fully realizing their political power. The terrible truth is that they prefer horse trading over the issues of importance to their donor class than they do meeting the needs of the people. Why does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi constantly speak of the need for a “strong republican party?” She needs a strong republican party, that is to say one which doesn’t resemble the January 6th rabble that frightened most of the nation. A more respectable and traditional republican party is one she can compromise with, and both sides of the aisle can represent the interests of the U.S. oligarchy while pretending otherwise.

Claims that every election is the most important in history, or a test of democracy, is a line meant for gullible rubes. They tell us so themselves. As president, Barack Obama presented republicans with a “grand bargain” of austerity so bad that Congressional Black Caucus member Emmanuel Cleaver referred to it as a “sugar coated satan sandwich.” As part of this plan Obama convened a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that was soon dubbed “the catfood commission.” Yet Obama hit the 2022 mid-term election campaign trail and condemned republicans for wanting to cut social security, which is exactly what he proposed doing ten years earlier.

Democrats raise millions of dollars for their presidential campaigns but come up empty in those state races which have a great impact on Americans’ lives. They don’t want to transform the country on behalf of the people. They are always on the side of their donor class and that is why the national leadership aren’t very concerned when republicans control state capitals. They will actually take a dive and then use their own corruption as a fundraising tool, pointing fingers at the republicans they have declared villains while secretly hoping they have to share power with them.

The inevitable result is senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia being in a close race with Herschel Walker, a former football player who mouths right wing, that is to say white wing, talking points on every issue. Warnock should have been further ahead but close races are guaranteed when there is no minimum wage increase while inflation runs rampant.

Of course inflation is high. Corporations gouge the public as much as they like because there is no major political party opposing them. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act won’t reduce inflation by itself, but clever marketing is one of the tools used to keep the people fooled about how politics really work.

Why are margins so close in the House and the Senate when the people prefer what democrats claim to offer? The democrats are the ultimate cynics. They know what the people want and campaign accordingly, but once in office use the senate parliamentarian, arcane rules, or the bad cops among them to say that their hands are tied. The charade is a perfect crime.

Whatever the outcome of the races still to be decided, it is clear that the people must look to themselves and not at Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or former president Obama, to guard their interests. They have different interests which are antithetical to those of the people. Electioneering fanfare cannot cover up this terrible but obvious truth.