The Latent Fascism Of Today’s Anti-Fascists

Authored by Aaron Kheriaty via the Brownstone Institute,

"Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison." -Simone Weil

The terms “fascist” and “fascism” are continuously bandied about today. But those who use these words most seem to understand them least, such that many of today’s self-styled anti-fascists paradoxically take on the central features of fascism to an extraordinary degree.

We can see contemporary fascist tendencies manifesting on both ends of the political spectrum — not only among white supremacists but also in the character types described by Eugene Rivers as “trust fund Becky with the good hair revolutionary communist” or “white boy Carl the anarchist from the Upper East Side who is a junior at Sarah Lawrence.”

Fascism is obviously worth opposing, but to be truly anti-fascist requires an understanding of how this ideology manifests in history and what the word actually designates. Already by the end of World War II, George Orwell noted that the term “fascist” was used so indiscriminately that it had become degraded to the level of a swearword synonymous with “bully.”

Contrary to popular belief, fascism does not represent counterrevolutionary or reactionary opposition to progressive ideas in the name of tradition. Many thinkers advanced this mistaken interpretation during the postwar period, including, among others, Umberto Eco’s list of “Ur-Fascist” features published in the New York Review of Books in 1995, Theodore Adorno’s concept of the “authoritarian personality” described in his influential 1950 book of that title, Wilhelm Reich (1946) and Eric Fromm’s (1973) psychoanalytic interpretations of repressive systems, and Antonio Gramsci’s (1929) widely accepted myth that fascism was a counterrevolutionary movement of the “petit bourgeois.”

The common mistake of all these interpretations involves generalizing the idea of fascism to include any movement that is either authoritarian or inclined to defend the past. This interpretation stems from an axiological faith (that is precisely the right word) in the value of modernity in the wake of the French Revolution.

Modernity is taken to be an inevitable and irreversible process of secularization and human progress, in which the question of transcendence — whether broadly Platonic or Christian — has entirely vanished, and in which novelty is synonymous with positivity. Progress rests upon the ongoing expansion of technology and individual autonomy. Everything, including knowledge, becomes a tool to pursue affluence, comfort, and well-being.

According to this faith in modernity, to be good is to embrace the progressive direction of history; to be evil is to resist it. Since fascism is clearly evil, it cannot be a development of modernity itself but must be “reactionary.” On this view fascism includes all those who fear worldly progress, have a psychological need for a strong social order to protect them, venerate and idealize a past historical moment, and so endow a leader with immense power to instantiate this.

“According to this interpretation,” Augusto Del Noce wrote, “Fascism is a sin against the progressive movement of history;” indeed, “every sin boils down to a sin against the direction of history.”

This characterization of fascism is almost entirely mistaken and misses its central features. Giovanni Gentile, the Italian “philosopher of fascism” and Benito Mussolini’s ghostwriter, penned an early book on the philosophy of Karl Marx. Gentile attempted to extract from Marxism the dialectic core of revolutionary socialism while rejecting Marxist materialism. As the authentic interpreter of Marxist thought, Lenin naturally rejected this heretical move, reaffirming the unbreakable unity between radical materialism and revolutionary action.

Like Gentile, Mussolini himself spoke of “what is alive and what is dead in Marx” in his speech on May 1, 1911. He affirmed Marx’s core revolutionary doctrine — the liberation of man through the replacement of religion by politics — even while he rejected Marxist utopianism, which was the aspect of Marxism that made it a kind of secular religion. In fascism, the revolutionary spirit separated from materialism becomes a mystique of action for its own sake.

Scholars of fascism have noted both a “mysterious proximity and distance between Mussolini and Lenin.” In the 1920s Mussolini was constantly glancing in the rearview mirror at Lenin as a rival revolutionary in a kind of mimetic dance. In his will to dominate, Mussolini spontaneously identified himself with the Fatherland and with his own people; however, there was no trace in this of any tradition that he affirmed and defended.

In its origins and aims fascism is thus not so much a reactionary-traditionalist phenomenon, but a secondary and degenerative development of Marxist revolutionary thought. It represents a stage in the modern process of political secularization that started with Lenin. This claim may occasion controversy, but a philosophical and historical examination of fascism reveals it to be accurate.

We easily miss these features if we focus exclusively on the obvious political opposition between fascism and communism during the Spanish Civil War and World War II. The fact that their philosophies share common genealogical roots and revolutionary ideals means neither that Lenin was a fascist (he was not) nor that fascism and communism are the same thing (they are not and fought to the death to prove it). Keep in mind, however, that an enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Fascism understands itself to be a revolutionary and progressive manifestation of power. As in communism, fascism replaces traditional religious principles with a secular religion in which the future — rather than an idealized past or meta-historical ideals — becomes an idol. Politics replaces religion in the quest to liberate humankind. Contrary to popular characterizations, fascism makes no attempt to preserve a heritage of traditional values against the advance of progress (one only has to look at fascist architecture for confirmation of this). Instead, it proceeds as the unfolding in history of a wholly novel and unprecedented power.

Nazism was not so much an extreme form of fascism but the mirror image inversion of communism (the revolution in reverse). It added to fascism’s features its own origin myth, which necessarily had to reach back to pre-history. Its odious blood-and-soil socialist nationalism inverted Marxist universalism, but likewise resulted in the most extreme expression of colonialism. As with fascism and communism, Nazism was always ahistorical and entirely uninterested in preserving anything meaningful from the past.

Rather than looking back to history or to trans-historical values, fascism strains forward and advances by means of a “creative destruction” that feels entitled to overturn everything standing in its way. Action for its own sake takes on a particular aura and mystique. The fascist unflinchingly appropriates and commandeers various sources of energy — whether human, cultural, religious, or technical — to remake and transform reality. As this ideology presses its advance, it makes no attempt to conform to any higher truth or moral order. Reality is simply that which must be overcome.

Like the postwar interpreters of fascism mentioned above, many today mistakenly believe that fascism is grounded in strong metaphysical truth claims — that fascist authoritarian personalities somehow believe they possess a monopoly on the truth. On the contrary, as Mussolini himself explained with absolute clarity, fascism is entirely grounded in relativism:

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and for those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

The horrors of World War II were misdiagnosed by the postwar intellectuals’ mistaken interpretation of fascism and Nazism: these ideologies, and the bloodbath they unleashed, represented not the failure of the European tradition but the crisis of modernity — the outcome of the age of secularization.

What are the ethical consequences of fascism? Once value is attributed to pure action, other people cease to be ends in themselves and become mere instruments, or obstacles, to the fascist political program. The logic of the fascist’s “creative” activism leads him to deny other people’s personhood and individuality, to reduce persons to mere objects. Once individuals are instrumentalized, it no longer makes sense to speak of moral duties towards them. Others are either useful and deployed or they are useless and discarded.

This accounts for the extraordinary narcissism and solipsism characteristic of fascist leaders and functionaries: anyone who embraces this ideology acts as though he is the only person who really exists. The fascist lacks any sense of the purpose of law, or any reverence for a binding moral order. He embraces instead his own raw will to power: laws and other social institutions are mere tools deployed in the service of this power. Because the fascist’s action requires no ultimate end, and conforms to no transcendent ethical norm or spiritual authority, various tactics can be embraced or discarded at whim — propaganda, violence, coercion, desecration, erasure, etc.

Although fascists fancy themselves creative, their actions can only destroy. Taboos are torn down indiscriminately and at will. Symbols rich with meaning — moral, historical, religious, cultural — are ripped from their context and weaponized. The past is nothing but an ideological tool or cipher: one can rummage around in history for useful images or slogans to deploy in service of expansive power; but wherever it is not useful for this purpose, history is discarded, defaced, toppled, or simply ignored as though it never existed.

What are fascism’s stated ideals — what is it supposedly for? By design, this is never made entirely clear, except to say that novelty for its own sake assumes a positive value. If anything is held sacred it is violence. As in Marxism, the word “revolution” takes on an almost magical, mystical significance. But as I explained in Part II of this series, the ideology of total revolution only ends up strengthening the present order and the stronghold of the elites, by burning away those residual elements of tradition that make possible a moral critique of this order.

The result is nihilism. Fascism celebrates an optimistic (but empty) cult of victory through force. In a reactionary backlash, neo-fascist “anti-fascists” mirror this spirit by a pessimistic passion for the defeated. In both cases, the same spirit of negation prevails.

With this description in mind, we can understand why the word “fascism” logically boomerangs back on many of today’s self-styled anti-fascists. The practical upshot for our culture wars is not merely that the cure might be worse than the disease, but that the most radical “cure” in this case just is the disease. The danger is that a thinly veiled fascism — marching mendaciously under an anti-fascist banner — will overtake and absorb legitimate attempts to cure our ills, including ethically valid attempts to cure the cancer of racism or address other societal injustices.

The same faith in modernity that led to mistaken interpretations of fascism after World War II also forces contemporary history and politics into unhelpful categories. If we question this axiological faith in the idea of modernity, we can establish a clearer view of 20th-century ideologies and their current manifestations. This entails neither automatically identifying the modernist or progressive view as anti-fascist, nor equating all forms of traditionalism (at least potentially) with fascism.

In fact, the distinction between traditionalists (if I must use this unsatisfying term) and progressives is apparent in the different ways they oppose fascism. By tradition I don’t mean reverence for a static repository of fixed forms or a desire to return to an idealized period of the past; rather, I refer to the etymological meaning of that which we “hand on” (tradere) and thereby make new. A culture that has nothing of value to bequeath is a culture that has already perished. This understanding of tradition leads to a critique of modernity’s premise of inevitable progress — a groundless myth we should discard precisely to avoid repeating the horrors of the 20th century.

This critique of modernity, and the rejection of ethics as “the direction of history,” leads to other insights regarding our present crisis. Rather than the standard left-right, liberal-conservative, progressive-reactionary categories of interpretation, we can see instead that the real political divide today is between perfectists and anti-perfectists. The former believe in the possibility of complete liberation of humanity through politics, whereas the latter regard this as a perennial error grounded in a denial of inherent human limitations. The acceptance of such limitations is elegantly expressed in Solzhenitsyn’s insight that the line between good and evil passes first neither through classes, nor nations, nor political parties, but right through the center of every human heart.

We are all aware of the horrifying consequences that follow when fascism slides, as it readily does, into totalitarianism. But consider that the defining feature of all totalitarianisms is not concentration camps or secret police or constant surveillance — though these are all bad enough. The common feature, as Del Noce pointed out, is the denial of the universality of reason. With this denial, all truth claims are interpreted as historically or materially determined, and thus, as ideology. This leads to the assertion that there is no rationality as such — only bourgeois reason and proletariat reason, or Jewish reason and Aryan reason, or black reason and white reason, or progressive reason and reactionary reason, and so forth.

One’s rational arguments are then taken to be mere mystifications or justifications and are summarily dismissed: “You think such-and-such only because you are [fill in the blank with various markers of identity, class, nationality, race, political persuasion, etc.].” This marks the death of dialogue and reasoned debate. It also accounts for the literally “loopy” closed-loop epistemology of contemporary social justice advocates of the critical theory school: anyone who denies being a [fill-in-the-blank epithet] only further confirms that the label applies, so one’s only option is to accept the label. Heads-I-win; tails-you-lose.

In such a society there can be no shared deliberation rooted in our participation in a higher Logos (word, reason, plan, order) that transcends each individual. As happened historically with all forms of fascism, culture — the realm of ideas and shared ideals — is absorbed into politics, and politics becomes total war. From within this framework, one can no longer admit any conception of legitimate authority, in the enriching etymological sense of “to make grow,” where we also derive the word “author.” All authority is instead conflated with power, and power is nothing but brute force.

Since persuasion through shared reasoning and deliberation is pointless, lying becomes the norm. Language is not capable of revealing truth, which compels assent without negating our freedom. Instead, words are mere symbols to be manipulated. A fascist does not attempt to persuade his interlocutor, he merely overpowers him — using words when these serve to silence the enemy or deploying other means when words will not do the trick.

This is always how things begin, and as the internal logic unfolds, the rest of the totalitarian apparatus inevitably follows. Once we grasp fascism’s deep roots and central features, one essential consequence becomes clear. Anti-fascist efforts can succeed only by starting from the premise of a universal shared rationality. Authentic anti-fascism will therefore always seek to employ nonviolent means of persuasion, appealing to evidence and to the conscience of one’s interlocutor. The problem is not just that other methods of opposing fascism will be pragmatically ineffective, but that they will unwittingly but inevitably come to resemble the enemy they claim to oppose.

We can look to Simone Weil as an authentic and exemplary anti-fascist figure. Weil always wanted to be on the side of the oppressed. She lived this conviction with exceptional single-mindedness and purity. As she relentlessly pursued the idea of justice inscribed in the human heart, she passed through a revolutionary phase, followed by a gnostic phase, before she finally rediscovered the Platonic tradition — the perennial philosophy of our shared participation in the Logos — with its universal criterion of truth and the primacy of the good. She arrived here precisely through her anti-fascist commitments, which entailed a rebellion against every delusional deification of man. Weil emerged from the modern world and its contradictions the way a prisoner emerges from Plato’s cave.

After volunteering to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Weil broke with the illusory anti-fascism of Marxist revolutionary thought. Recognizing that, in the end, “evil produces only evil and good produces only good,” and “the future is made of the same stuff as the present,” she discovered a more enduring anti-fascist position. This led her to call the destruction of the past “perhaps the greatest of all crimes.”

In her last book, written a few months before she died in 1943, Weil elaborated on the limits of both fascist vitalism and Marxist materialism: “Either we must perceive at work in the universe, alongside force, a principle of a different kind, or else we must recognize force as being the unique and sovereign ruler over human relations also.”

Weil was thoroughly secular prior to her philosophical conversion and her subsequent mystical experiences: her rediscovery of classical philosophy occurred not through any sort of traditionalism, but by living the ethical question of justice with full intellectual honesty and total personal commitment. In pursuing this question to the end, she came to see that human self-redemption — fascism’s ideal — is actually an idol. Those who want to be truly anti-fascist would do well to explore Weil’s writings. I will give her the last word, which contains the seeds of the way out of our crisis. In one of her last essays, she offers us not a counsel of facile optimism, but a beautiful thought about our unconquerable receptivity to grace:

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.

Republished from The Simone Weil Center

Aaron Kheriaty, Senior Brownstone Institute Counselor, is a Scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, DC. He is a former Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, where he was the director of Medical Ethics.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 23:10

Chicago Mayor Wants $1 Billion More For Schools Even Though 43% Of Teachers Are Chronically Absent

By Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner of Wirepoints

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently traveled to Springfield with a big wish list of stuff he wants from state lawmakers. Among them, $1 billion in extra funding for Chicago Public Schools.

We have a host of reasons why his demand should be categorically rejected. Among them, CPS already spends $29,000 per student, Chicago teachers are already among the nation’s highest paid in big cities and the Chicago Teachers Union refuses to close the many empty, failing schools across the district. Not to mention that both CPS and CTU refuse to hold themselves accountable to students. Just 20% of minority CPS children can read at grade level and in math it’s even worse.

Now add to that the growing rate of teachers simply not showing up to school. The U.S. Department of Education’s definition of chronic teacher absenteeism is 10 or more absences in a school year.

In CPS, the share of teachers who are chronically absent has jumped to 43% from 28% just seven years ago. The jump can’t be blamed on the pandemic, as the rate of absenteeism was rising (from 28% to 36%) even before covid hit.

Teacher attendance has a heavy impact on student outcomes. From the Illinois State Board of Education’s Report Card:

“Teacher attendance is a “leading indicator” of student achievement, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Teachers with regular attendance provide continuity of instruction and attention to individual students. The National Bureau of Economic Research has shown that when teachers are absent for 10 days or more, student outcomes decrease significantly.”

Instead of asking for more money, Mayor Johnson should make sure his CTU brethren are actually in the classroom. He should then set dramatically higher reading and math proficiency targets that both he and teachers are held accountable for. 

And then the mayor should make those targets public.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 22:30

Your Tax Dollars At Work: In Two Years, $7.5 Billion Has Produced Just 7 EV Charging Stations

When people gripe about paying taxes and the government being a poor the absolute worst possible capital allocator, this is what they are talking about: $7.5 billion in investments for electric vehicles has - in two years - produced just 7 charging stations across four states. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by Biden in November 2021, allocated $7.5 billion for EV charging, the Washington Post writes. Of this amount, $5 billion went to states as "formula funding" for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program to establish a network of fast chargers along major highways.

Today, there's seven chargers with a total of just 38 parking spots. And, come on: when the Post is calling it out, you know the results have been horrible. 

The Post added that with the Biden administration's new emissions rules requiring more electric and hybrid vehicles, the slow pace of charging infrastructure development could hinder the transition to electric cars. Twelve additional states have awarded contracts for charging station construction, while 17 states have yet to issue proposals.

Alexander Laska, deputy director for transportation and innovation at the center-left think tank Third Way, told The Post: “I think a lot of people who are watching this are getting concerned about the timeline.”

The slow rollout of new EV chargers is partly due to higher standards compared to previous fast chargers. The U.S. has nearly 10,000 fast charging stations, including over 2,000 reliable Tesla Superchargers, but non-Tesla chargers often suffer from poor performance.

New Biden administration rules require chargers to be 97% operational, offer 150kW power, and be within one mile of highways. These standards are crucial but slow down progress due to complex rules, permitting challenges, and power demands. The NEVI program aims to boost fast charging capacity by 50% to reduce "range anxiety," but states must first build the chargers.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) wrote to the Biden Administration last month: “We have significant concerns that under your efforts American taxpayer dollars are being woefully mismanaged.”

“State transportation agencies are the recipients of the money. Nearly all of them had no experience deploying electric vehicle charging stations before this law was enacted,” Nick Nigro, founder of Atlas Public Policy added.

The Federal Highway Administration responded: “We are building a national EV charging network from scratch, and we want to get it right. After developing program guidance and partnering with states to guide implementation plans, we are hitting our stride as states move quickly to bring NEVI stations online.”

“More Americans are buying EVs every day — with EV sales rising faster than traditional gas-powered cars — as the President’s Investing in America agenda makes EVs more affordable, helps Americans save money when driving, and makes EV charging accessible and convenient," a White House spokesperson added.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 21:50

The Proof Of Censorship Is…Censored

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via the Brownstone Institute,

It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. 

The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind. 

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society. 

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it. 

Thanks to discovery from court cases, FOIA requests, whistleblowers, Congressional inquiries thanks to the very narrow Republican control, and some industrial upheavals such as what happened at Twitter, we are overwhelmed with tens of thousands of pages all pointing to the same reality. 

The censors developed a belief at the highest levels of control in government that it was their job to govern what information the American people would and would not see, regardless of the truth. The actions became truly tribal: our side favors banning gatherings, closing schools, says the Hunter Biden laptop is a fake, favors masking, mass vaccination, and mail-in voting, and denies the import of voter fraud and vaccine injury, whereas their side takes the opposite approach. 

It was a war over information, undertaken in total disregard for the First Amendment, as if it doesn’t even exist. Moreover, the operation was not only political. It clearly involved intelligence agencies that were already hip deep in the “all-of-society” pandemic response. 

“All of Society” means all, including the information you receive and are allowed to distribute. 

A vast swath of unelected bureaucrats took it upon themselves to manage all knowledge flows in the age of the Internet, with the ambition to turn the main source of news and sharing into a giant American version of Pravda. All of this occurred right under our noses – and is still going on today. 

Indeed, censorship is a full-on industry now, with hundreds and thousands of cut-outs, universities, media companies, government agencies, and even young people in school studying to be disinformation specialists, and bragging about it on social media. We are just one step away from a New York Times article – as follow-ups to their recent praise of the Deep State and also government surveillance – with a headline like “The Good Society Needs Censors.”

Incredibly, the censorship is so pervasive now that it is not even reported. All these revelations should have been front page news. But so captured is the news media today that there are very few outlets that even bother to report the fullness of the problem. 

Not receiving nearly enough attention is the new report from the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government of the US House of Representatives. 

Running nearly 1,000 pages including documentation (however many pages are purposely blank), we have here an overwhelming amount of evidence of a systematic, aggressive, and deeply entrenched effort on the part of the federal government, including the Biden White House and many agencies including the World Health Organization, to tear out the guts of the Internet and social media culture and replace them with propaganda. 

Among the well-documented facts are that the White House directly intervened in Amazon’s own marketing methods to deprecate books that raised doubts about the Covid vaccine and all vaccines. Amazon responded reluctantly but did what it could to satisfy the censors. All these companies – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon – became acquiescent to Biden administration priorities, even to the point of running algorithmic changes by the White House before implementation. 

When YouTube announced that it would take down any content that contradicted the World Health Organization, it was because the White House instructed them to do so. 

As for Amazon, which is like every publisher in wanting full freedom to distribute, they faced intense pressure from government.

These are just a few of thousands of pieces of evidence of routine interference from government against social media companies, either directly or through various government-funded cut-outs, all designed to enforce a certain way of thinking on the American public. 

What’s amazing is that this industry was allowed to metastasize to such an extent over 4-8 years or so, with no legal oversight and very little knowledge on the part of the public. It’s as if there is no such thing as the First Amendment. It’s a dead letter. Even now, the Supreme Court seems confused, based on our reading of the oral arguments over this whole case (Murthy v. Missouri). 

One gets the sense when reading through all this correspondence that the companies were more than a bit rattled by the pressure. They must have wondered a few things: 1) is this normal? 2) do we really have to go along? 3) what happens to us if we just say no?

Probably every corner grocery store in any neighborhood run by a crime syndicate in history has asked these questions. The best answer is to do what you can in order to make them go away. This is precisely what they did time after time. After a while, the protocol probably begins to feel normal and no one asks anymore the basic questions: is this right? Is this freedom? Is this legal? Is this just the way things go in the US?

No matter how many high officials were involved, how many in the C-suites of big companies participated, however many editors and technicians of the best credentials played along, there can be no question that what took place was an absolute violation of speech rights that very likely exceeds anything we’ve seen in US history. 

Keep in mind that we only know what we know, and that is severely truncated by the force of the machinery. We can safely assume that the truth actually is far worse than we know. And further consider that this censorship is keeping us from knowing the full story about the suppression of dissidents, whether medical, scientific, political, or otherwise. 

There might be millions in many professions who are suffering right now, in silence. Or think of the vaccine-injured or those who have lost loved ones who were forced to get the shot. There are no headlines. There are no investigations. There is almost no public attention at all. Most of the venues that we once thought would police such outrages have been compromised. 

To top it off, the censors are still not backing down. If you sense a lessening of the grip for now, there is every reason to believe it is temporary. This industry wants the entire Internet as we once conceived of it completely shut down. That’s the goal.

At this point, the best means of defeating this plan is widespread public outrage. That is made more difficult because the censorship itself is being censored. 

This is why this report from the US House of Representatives needs to be widely shared so long as doing so is possible. It could be that such reports in the future will themselves be censored. It could also be the last such report you will ever see before the curtain falls on freedom completely. 

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 21:10

Chevy Forced To Ditch Its Long-Running Malibu Model As Forced Transition To EVs Continues

One of Chevy's longest running vehicle models has now fallen at the hands of the company's transition to EVs. The Chevy Malibu will be no longer, according to a new report from Car and Driver. 

The Chevy Malibu, one of the longest-running and most successful vehicles in history, is being discontinued again. Chevrolet informed Car and Driver that production will end in November 2024 as the automaker invests $390 million in its Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas.

Car and Driver reports that GM will also pause production of the Cadillac XT4 in January to retool for the Ultium-based Bolt EV. Production will resume in late 2025, with the XT4 and Bolt EV sharing an assembly line.

Despite Chevy's shift towards crossovers and SUVs, the Malibu remained a steady presence, with over 10 million units sold across nine generations. However, its discontinuation comes as a surprise given GM's recent EV challenges, including missing the goal of selling 400,000 EVs by mid-2024 and reintroducing plug-in hybrids to North America.

"We've been somewhat lukewarm toward the Malibu in recent years, but we'll certainly lament the passing of such a longstanding nameplate. Who knows? Maybe GM will revive it as an EV in another 15 years," Car and Driver wrote. 

Meanwhile just days ago we published an article highlighting how Ford's $120,000 loss per vehicle makes it fairly clear that California (and the nation's) EVs goals are unreachable. 

On April 24, Ford reported it lost $132,000 for each of its 10,000 electric vehicles sold in the first quarter of 2024, according to CNN. The sales were down 20 percent from the first quarter of 2023 and would “drag down earnings for the company overall.”

The Epoch Times notes that the losses include “hundreds of millions being spent on research and development of the next generation of EVs for Ford. Those investments are years away from paying off.” Ford is the only major carmaker breaking out EV numbers by themselves. But other marques likely suffer similar losses.

Californians bought 1.78 million new vehicles in 2023, reported the California New Car Dealers Association. Multiply that number by $132,000 and you get $235 billion. That would bankrupt every car manufacturer, meaning they just would pull out of selling anything in the state.

The California government would have to set up socialist, government-owned companies to make the cars, like the infamous Yugo. Dubbed “the worst car in history,” it was sold in America in the 1980s and was made by the communist Yugoslav government just before the country itself broke up in 1991.

And compared to that...the not-especially-wonderful-looking Malibu wouldn't look that bad...

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 20:30

Gaza Truce Talks 'Back To Square One'

For several months running there have been a seeming myriad of sometimes contradictory headlines saying a Hamas-Israel truce is "close," or "nearing the finish line" or else "stalled" or also "progressing"... Friday saw truce talks come full circle with the following Hamas statement cited in Reuters:

The Palestinian militant group Hamas said on Friday efforts to agree to a ceasefire for the Gaza Strip were back at square one after Israel effectively rejected a proposal by international mediators.

Via AFP

The representatives of both sides for the 'indirect' talks in Cairo (and which are also mediated by Qatar) have gone home with nothing substantive having been advanced.

Israeli media also confirms the talks "appeared to break up with no discernable progress, as the terror group said it had no intention of budging from a proposal already rejected by Israel."

"A senior Israeli official said the Israeli team had also left after handing mediators a list of its reservations about the Hamas proposal," the report continues.

Earlier in the week Hamas issued a statement saying, "The ball is now completely in the hands of the occupation." So indeed neither side is backing away from their demands, and the stalemate has ensued.

A key point of contention has been Hamas' demand that Israel's military withdraw from the Gaza Strip in full and on a permanent basis in order to receive hostages back, while Israel has interpreted this to mean a mere temporary pause in fighting and removal of some forces.

Currently, Israel appears to be moving forward with the Rafah operation, and has the eastern part of the city surrounded. A main road dividing the eastern and western halves of the city has been captured by IDF tanks.

The UN has warned that humanitarian aid workers cannot access the surrounded part of the city. Rafah currently is home to some 1.3 million displaced persons, and aid workers fear that a massacre will result if there's a full ground operation.

In Refah today.
From the camera of journalist Hani Aburezeq. Rafah city, where 1 million Palestinians live. More than 300 thousand people left Rafah. The rest are getting ready to leave. Where they will go and how they will continue their lives is uncertain. pic.twitter.com/rv0AKDB3O9

— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) May 11, 2024

But the Netanyahu government has never backed off from its insistence that Hamas can only be finished off if the IDF goes into Gaza to take out the final brigades and commanders. 

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been seen pouring out of Rafah, but it's unclear where they will ultimately go. Egyptian security forces have had a heavy presence on the other side of the border, fearing that the Rafah crossing could be overrun. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 16:30

Average Credit Card Debt In US Now Soaring Past $6,500

Authored by Mary Prenon via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

This illustration picture shows debit and credit cards arranged on a desk in Arlington, Va., on April 6, 2020. (Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

A just-released report from Scholaroo indicates that the U.S. national average for credit card debt has escalated to $6,555, with New Jersey residents leading the nation with an average debt of $8,155 per credit card. Scholaroo, a national firm matching college students with potential scholarships, surveyed more than 2,000 people across the United States during the final quarter of 2023.

Coming in at a close second is Connecticut, with an average debt of $8,011 per credit card, followed by Maryland, New York, and Alaska—all with average credit card debts of more than $7,600 per card. Rounding out the top 10 states are Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Florida, and Hawaii, all with average credit card debts in excess of $7,400.

“New Jersey residents’ debt surpasses the national average by 24 percent, while Mississippi has the lowest average credit card debt, with debtors owing just $5,186—20 percent less than the national average,” the report states.

Kentucky and Indiana also fell on the lower side, with an average of $5,295.

(Source: Scholaroo)

Bruce McClary, senior vice president of membership and media relations for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC), told The Epoch Times that amount of debt is not surprising as many people are forced to use their credit cards just to stay afloat. “Things are so much more expensive than they were three years ago,” he said. “The runaway inflation is affecting grocery prices, and we’ve seen a roller-coaster ride for gasoline prices. Many people don’t have the money in their budgets for these added expenses and so they’re using credit cards and making minimum payments each month.”

Based in Washington, the NFCC was founded in 1998 as a nonprofit credit-counseling source for people who need help in managing their debts. Its recently released Harris poll also surveyed 2,000 adults nationwide and found similar outstanding debt values. But the overall results were even more surprising: Nearly 32 percent of Americans are just getting by financially, while 62 percent fear that government instability will hurt their finances in the next 12 months.

“The biggest concern is that if people continue to carry that much debt from month to month, making only the minimum payments required, it could take years to pay it off, and they’ll find it extremely difficult to save any money,” Mr. McClary said.

The Harris poll also indicated that 31 percent of Americans don’t pay all their bills on time and that only 42 percent have a budget and keep track of spending. Almost 40 percent of those surveyed are concerned that the money they have or will save won’t last.

The poll found that the most affected groups are people who are single, rent instead of own, are parents of children under 18, and have incomes of $50,000 or less.

“Today’s higher rents may also be responsible for this credit card debt situation,” Mr. McClary said. “Most are paying way more than the recommended percent of their income toward rent, so now they’re faced with managing the rest of their expenses like groceries, utilities, gas, medical bills, and more. They’re finding they have to rely on the credit cards to help make ends meet.”

As a result, many have already been priced out of the ever-skyrocketing housing market.

“Ten years ago, Seattle was one of those cities considered to be affordable, but there’s been such a tremendous increase in rents there that many people are no longer able to afford buying or even renting there,” Mr. McClary said.

The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) Consumer Advice Department recommends that those having difficulty making even the minimum monthly credit card payments first talk with the company to ask for its help.

“Your goal is to work out a modified payment plan that lowers your payments to a level you can manage,” the FTC’s website states. “Creditors may be willing to negotiate with you even after they write your debt off as a loss, as you will still owe that debt.”

The NFCC also provides renegotiation services with credit card companies to reduce the monthly interest rates, which can sometimes be as high as 20 percent.

“What we try to do is help people regain control of their unmanageable debt by looking at their income and financial obligations and work out a livable budget,” Mr. McClary said. “It’s like a tire finally getting some traction after spinning in the mud for so long.”

(Source: Scholaroo)

There seems to be no slowdown in Americans’ love of credit cards. According to the Scholaroo report, last year, almost 45.5 percent of the U.S. population opened at least one new credit card account, resulting in some 542.6 million new accounts by the end of 2023. While more than 50 percent of Americans prefer using debit cards for their day-to-day expenses, credit cards stand as the second most favored choice, with 36 percent of the population using them for their daily transactions.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 15:50

First F-16s To Arrive In Ukraine 'Within Weeks' From West, But Will It Matter?

A high-ranking UK military source has told London's daily Evening Standard newspaper that F-16 fighters will be delivered by the Western allies to Ukraine "within weeks". 

The official indicated that the aircraft are due to arrive by June, or at least July at the latest. The US previously authorized NATO countries to supply the US-made fighters to Kiev, at a moment Russia still controls the skies and has been degrading the country's energy infrastructure via frequent attacks. Zelensky previously called the decision by the Biden administration "a breakthrough". 

Even small NATO states like Denmark are reportedly involved in handing over a few of its F-16s. Others in the program include the Netherlands, Norway and Belgium. Some of the planes are currently reported to be at a training facility in Romania, as efforts to prepare Ukrainian pilots for aerial combat in the Western fighters appear in their final phases.

Romanian F-16 file image

The Dutch especially are playing a big part, having committed to delivering a total of 24 F-16s for Ukraine's armed forces.

But a big question remains at a moment it's been widely acknowledged that Ukraine is losing the conflict: will the US-made fighter jets make an actual difference at this late stage where Moscow is clearly dominant? The Evening Standard bluntly admits the following:

But US officials have privately said the jets will not be a game changer when they eventually arrive after months of training, given the strength of the Russian air force and its defense systems.

So essentially, aircraft worth multiple tens of millions of dollars each are being primed to get shot down in what will likely prove a major humiliation for the West. 

Putin has already vowed that his forces will prioritize taking out Western-supplied fighter jets. In March, the Russian leader said during an address to pilots, "We will destroy their warplanes just as we destroy their tanks, armored vehicles and other equipment, including multiple rocket launchers."

Significantly, he warned at the time that even bases in Western countries could be targeted if Ukraine flies sorties from them. "Of course, if they are used from airfields of third countries, they become a legitimate target for us, wherever they are located," Putin had said.

Beginning last summer the Kremlin began highlighting that F-16 fighter jets are capable of carrying tactical nukes which are in select NATO countries' possession. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for example at that time explained, "Moscow can’t ignore the nuclear capability of US-designed F-16 fighter jets that may be supplied to Ukraine by its Western backers. He went so far as to say that it will be seen as a threat from the West "in the nuclear domain."

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 15:10

Over 124 Pounds Of Cocaine And Fentanyl Seized In El Paso In 1 Week

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in the El Paso region seized more than 124 pounds of fentanyl and cocaine last week in four separate incidents, amid criticism of lax border policies.

On April 30, officers working at the Bridge of the Americas seized cocaine totaling 42.5 pounds, according to a May 3 press release from the CBP.  The drugs were found to be concealed inside a Hyundai Elantra vehicle allegedly driven by a 48-year-old American citizen. “The seizure was made when CBP officers monitoring the Low Energy Portal inspection system spotted anomalies in the appearance of the vehicle and advised primary CBP officers,” the release noted.

“A canine sweep of the car was positive and a Z-Portal (X-ray) scan of the car also revealed anomalies. CBP officers removed 18 cocaine-filled bundles from the rocker panels of the car.”

On May 1, CBP officers at the El Paso Ysleta Port of Entry captured 11.2 pounds of fentanyl that were concealed in a Seat Ibiza vehicle. The drugs were allegedly being transported by a 26-year-old Mexican national. CBP seized the fentanyl during an enforcement operation.

The vehicle in question was selected for a secondary exam, following which bundles of fentanyl were discovered in the central console area. In total, 15 packages were removed from the compartment, according to CBP.

Last week, two more cocaine seizures were made by El Paso CBP officers totaling 70.8 pounds. The arrested individuals were handed over to federal authorities.

“The drugs seized by our CBP workforce will not cause harm in the communities we share,” Hector A. Mancha, CBP El Paso’s director of field operations, said. “We are hard at work every day utilizing multiple tools to identify and stop those who attempt to circumvent our inspection process.”

The CBP’s drug seizures come as former President Donald Trump blamed the Biden administration’s open border policies for fueling fatal drug overdoses in the United States.

“This is country-changing, it’s country-threatening, and it’s country-wrecking,” he said during an event last month. “They have wrecked our country. But I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden’s border bloodbath ... it’s going to end on the day that I take office.”

On his campaign website, President Trump said he marshaled the full power of government during his administration to prevent the inflow of drugs into the country, driving down drug overdose deaths for the first time in three decades.

The former president “will impose a total naval embargo on cartels, order the Department of Defense to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations, designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and choke off their access to the global financial system,” the Trump campaign said.

“President Trump will get the full cooperation of neighboring governments to dismantle the cartels, or else expose every bribe and kickback that allows these criminal networks to preserve their brutal reign. He will ask Congress to ensure that drug smugglers and traffickers can receive the Death Penalty.”

The Biden administration said it was taking steps to counter the drug issue. In February, two senior administration officials said the United States and Mexico will boost data sharing to curb the inflow of synthetic drugs into America.

The agreements are part of a wide effort “to facilitate action against criminal organizations that traffic people, guns, and illicit drugs, including fentanyl into our communities.”

In a factsheet released last November, the White House said, ”The U.S. government, alongside our partners, will continue our efforts to prevent the production and trafficking of illicit synthetic drugs through multiple efforts, including the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats, which has brought together over 100 countries to collectively address the scourge of fentanyl.”

Fentanyl, China

The fentanyl crisis facing the United States is problematic since it is not solely a drug issue but a geopolitical concern as well. Much of the fentanyl entering the United States comes from China. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) attributes 97 percent of illicit fentanyl coming into the United States to entities operating in China.

In April, the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party published a report detailing how China is fueling the fentanyl crisis in the United States.

China “directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of illicit fentanyl materials and other synthetic narcotics through tax rebates,” it said. Beijing even gave “monetary grants and awards to companies openly trafficking” such drugs.

“There are even examples of some of these companies enjoying site visits from provincial PRC (People’s Republic of China) government officials who complimented them for their impact on the provincial economy.”

A review of seven Chinese e-commerce sites found more than 31,000 instances of Chinese firms selling illicit chemicals. China censors content about domestic drug sales “but leaves export-focused narcotics content untouched.”

“The fentanyl crisis has helped CCP-tied Chinese organized criminal groups become the world’s premier money launderers, enriched the PRC’s chemical industry, and had a devastating impact on Americans.”

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), synthetic opioids like fentanyl are the primary driver of overdose deaths in the United States.

Most of the illicit fentanyl in the United States is manufactured in Mexico from precursors bought from China, highlighting the importance of having full control over the border.

In an interview with The Epoch Times last year, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that Mexican cartels “have 100 percent operational control over our southern border.”

This month, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to use his executive authority to shut down the southern border to deal with the issue of illegal immigrants and drugs.

“To fight the drug smugglers and the individuals deliberately avoiding Border Patrol detection, you should prohibit Border Patrol agents from performing non-mission humanitarian duties so they can do their jobs,” said the senator.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 13:10

Watch: Bill Maher Upends Stormy Daniels' Testimony With 2018 Footage

Comedian Bill Maher just used footage from a 2018 interview with Stormy Daniels to reveal that she completely contradicted her own testimony in the Trump 'hush-money' trial last week.

After laying out how the Democrats have fumbled the ball on virtually every case against Trump, Maher turned his attention to Daniels, who he called a "bad witness."

"Because, let me show you a little video. This is when I had Stormy on in 2018, and first I asked her why she had sex with Trump... listen to that, and then listen to what she says after that."

Maher, in 2018, asked her: "Why did you fuck Donald Trump?" saying moments later "but you say it's not a 'me-too' case," referring to the flood of rape accusations against various men in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

To which Daniels replies: "It is not a 'me-too' case. I mean I wasn't assaulted, I wasn't attacked or raped or coerced or blackmailed. They tried to shove me in the 'me-too' box as part of their own agenda, and first of all I didn't want to be part of that because it's not the truth and I'm not a victim in that regard."

Maher then contrasts that statement with Daniels' testimony last week, saying "she's talking about he was 'bigger and blocking the way,' - it's all the me-too buzzwords.

During her testimony last week, Daniels claimed "There was an imbalance of power, for sure. He was bigger and blocking the way, but I was not threatened either verbally or physically," she said, also claiming that she 'blacked out.'

"She said there was an imbalance of power, for sure. My hands were shaking so hard. She said she blacked out. Blacked out? She's a porn star. You really think she blacked out? A porn star is used to having sex with people she does not know. That's the job. It's kinda like 'stormy, Bob, Bob, stormy, fuck!' So I just think she's not a good witness."

Watch:

Bombshell from Bill Maher as he uses previous footage from his own show to reveal how Stormy Daniels contradicted her testimony:
"Let me show you a little video: This is when I had Stormy on in 2018.
Maher: Why did you fuck Donald Trump?
Daniels: "I have no idea. It is not a me… pic.twitter.com/8PgGUv1K3O

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) May 11, 2024

As an aside, comedian and commentator @EricAbbenante of immunetothesystem.com has been on fire with great X threads of late. You may want to give him a follow.

Stormy Daniels denied everything in 2018. She's taken every position , as usual:https://t.co/1ZV7SfwWSQ

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) May 11, 2024

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 12:30

U.S. Representative Introduces Bill To End Federal Taxation On Gold And Silver

Via Money Metals,

Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) is seen at a campaign rally at the Westmoreland Fair Grounds in Greensburg, Pa., on May 6, 2022. | Gene J. Puskar/AP

U.S. Representative Alex Mooney (R-WV) has re-introduced sound money legislation to remove all federal income taxation from gold and silver coins and bullion.

The Monetary Metals Tax Neutrality Act (H.R. 8279) backed by the Sound Money Defense League, Money Metals Exchange, and free-market activists – would clarify that the sale or exchange of precious metals bullion and coins are not to be included in capital gains, losses, or any other type of federal income calculation. Gold and silver would be treated as a non-entity for tax purposes, putting it on par with the U.S. dollar.

Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA) and Randy Weber (R-TX) joined as original cosponsors.

“My view, which is backed up by language in the U.S. Constitution, is that gold and silver coins are money and are legal tender,” Rep. Mooney said.

“If they’re indeed U.S. money, it seems there should be no taxes on them at all. So, why are we taxing these coins as collectibles?”

Acting unilaterally, Internal Revenue Service bureaucrats have placed gold and silver in the same “collectibles” category as artwork, Beanie Babies, and baseball cards – a classification that subjects the monetary metals to a discriminatorily high long-term capital gains tax rate of 28%.

Sound money activists have long pointed out it is inappropriate to apply any federal income tax, regardless of the rate, against the only kind of money named in the U.S. Constitution. And the IRS has never defended how its position squares up with current law.

Furthermore, the U.S. Mint continuously mints coins of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium and gives each of these coins a legal tender value denominated in U.S. dollars. This formal status as U.S. money further underscores the peculiarity of the IRS’s tax treatment.

A tax-neutral measure, the Monetary Metals Tax Neutrality Act states that “no gain or loss shall be recognized on the sale or exchange of (1) gold, silver, platinum, or palladium minted and issued by the Secretary at any time or (2), refined gold or silver bullion, coins, bars, rounds, or ingots which are valued primarily based on their metal content and not their form.”

Under current IRS policy, a taxpayer who sells his precious metals may end up with a capital “gain” in terms of Federal Reserve Notes and must pay federal income taxes on this “gain.”

But the capital “gain” is not necessarily a real gain. It is often a nominal gain that simply results from the inflation created by the Federal Reserve and the attendant decline in the Federal Reserve Note dollar’s purchasing power.

Under Rep. Mooney’s bill, precious metals gains and losses would not be included in any calculations of a taxpayer’s federal taxable income.

“U.S. inflation is not caused by CEOs of grocery stores or by outside world leaders, it is caused by the Federal Reserve and federal policy,” said Jp Cortez, executive director of the Sound Money Defense League. “The federal government has a responsibility to remove disincentives for people seeking alternatives to the Federal Reserve note dollar to protect their savings.”

“The IRS does not let taxpayers deduct the staggering capital losses they suffer when holding Federal Reserve notes over time,” said Stefan Gleason, president of Money Metals Exchange, the U.S. company named Best Overall Precious Metals Dealer by Investopedia.com. “So it’s grossly unfair for the IRS to assess a capital gains tax when citizens hold gold and silver to protect them from the Fed’s policy of currency debasement.”

The Monetary Metals Tax Neutrality Act aligns with a broader national trend. With most states having already eliminated sales tax on the purchase of precious metals, state legislatures are increasingly introducing and approving measures to eliminate state income taxation of gold and silver.

Alabama and Nebraska each passed their version of this policy this year. Arizona, Arkansas, and Utah approved similar measures in recent years. And Iowa, Georgia, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas also considered income tax exemptions in 2024, with several approving the bill across multiple committees and chambers.

The text of the H.R. 8279 can be found here and additional information on its current status is located here.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 11:50

Ackman Badgered By Rich Wokes At Closed-Door Milken Session

At this week’s Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, while the financial elite discussed artificial intelligence and Elon Musk's latest ventures, a crucial and fiery debate on diversity unfolded behind closed doors. About 40 attendees, including influential Wall Street figures and senior executives of color, engaged in a heated discussion with hedge fund manager Bill Ackman over his controversial stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

In a private, invitation-only panel, Ackman - who's come under intense fire from the woke-industrial-complex, faced criticism for his public denunciation of DEI initiatives, which he has labeled as "inherently racist and illegal." The dialogue, which lasted about an hour, saw attendees harangue Ackman’s over his views, accusing him of attacking women's rights (as opposed to the trans movement?) and people of color in the U.S., Bloomberg reports. The panel included notable figures such as Jarvis V. Hollingsworth of the $200 billion Teacher Retirement System of Texas, and Dina DiLorenzo of Guggenheim Investments - which manages over $300 billion, among others.

Ackman’s comments at the panel echoed his previous criticisms, where he accused DEI staff at universities, including Harvard, his alma mater, of promoting divisive concepts. His views, articulated in a post on social media platform X, argue that DEI represents a political movement rather than genuine diversity efforts.

Ackman, the billionaire founder of activist investment firm Pershing Square Capital Management, began his high-profile assault against DEI initiatives last year after accusing elite colleges, including his alma mater Harvard University, of failing to respond to allegations of antisemitism on campus. At the panel this week, Ackman blamed DEI staff members for fostering ideas that deem some “oppressed” and others, including Jewish people, as “oppressors,” according to the attendees. -Bloomberg

Ackman joins notables such as Elon Musk, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former President Donald Trump in their criticism of DEI initiatives - which shred the concept of meritocracy and competitive results - a sentiment echoed by Argentine President Javier Milei and Citadel founder Ken Griffin at the conference - the latter of whom said he would continue withholding funds from Harvard until the school "recommits itself to meritocracy in a very public and profound way."

Pushing on Bill

According to the report, 'Most who spoke pushed the money manager to recast his attack on DEI, arguing that his message threatens to undercut diversity programs across America, the people said. At least one speaker said his attack on DEI reflected a poor understanding of the Civil Rights movement, including the Jewish community’s role in it, the people said. Others said they’d witnessed his previous efforts to support diverse talent and businesses, but that his message on DEI is being co-opted by those who seek to diminish opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds.'

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 11:10

Embracing Communist China Was Washington's Greatest Strategic Failure

Authored by James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer via RealClearPolitics.com,

From the war in Ukraine to the horrific terror attack on Oct. 7 and the subsequent conflict in the Middle East to the roiling waters of the South China Sea, the world today is in crisis. The causes are not found in Moscow or Tehran alone, but primarily in Washington and Beijing.

They are the consequence of two fundamental and interrelated grand strategic mistakes made by the U.S.

First, the failure to understand the threat from the People’s Republic of China.

Second, the failure to balance against it. As a result, the U.S. is at risk of losing its dominant position to an emboldened PRC working in cooperation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the mullahs in Iran.

Surveying the global unrest, Americans must comprehend three reasons why they face this dire strategic landscape.

First, U.S. elites did not perceive the threat due to the triumphalism of the “End of History” – the false assertion that modernizing nations like China were on the path to democratization and free market economics.

Great power conflict was seen as an artifact of the past. This hubris contributed to what we term “threat deflation,” where year after year U.S. decision-makers consistently dismissed or underestimated the threat from the PRC.

Second, U.S. business interests and financiers indefatigably sought economic gain from cooperation with Beijing. This facilitated China’s rise as it entered the West’s economic ecosystem, as did its admission to the World Trade Organization.

Their influence on the major U.S. political parties and at the highest levels of U.S. politics hindered the U.S. response and promoted the conceit of globalization. Thus emerged an “engagement school,” which asserted that by engaging the PRC, it would become wealthy, a “responsible stakeholder” in the international order, and even democratic. In essence, the U.S. willingly and enthusiastically taught, trained, and even equipped, its mortal enemy. Business interests and financiers funded our national security think tanks which contributed to a bias towards the engagement school, and thus to the threat deflation of the PRC.

Third, Deng Xiaoping, arguably one of the greatest strategists of the 20th century, advanced a brilliant political warfare strategy to promote threat deflation.

Deng’s strategy focused on U.S. and other Western elites, enriching them, and shaping their perception of the PRC and of the Chinese Communist Party, while using the enticement of a growing market to influence their behavior. For a generation, Chinese leaders masked their intentions and framed their expansion as economic, for the good of all, rather than strategic and for the benefit of the CCP.

Consequently, the PRC has risen and now employs its power to the detriment of U.S. national security through its worldwide actions, especially in the East and South China Seas and Taiwan, as well as through its proxies in Iran and Russia.

To meet this threat, Washington first needs to see the Communist China for what it is: an aggressive great power which seeks the overthrow of the U.S.

Second, the U.S. must support the education of strategists so younger generations may understand how to defeat the PRC. Education in the principles of power politics and the CCP’s ideology are essential to achieve victory.

Third, there must be sustained presidential leadership to define the enemy, educate the American people, and generate the necessary whole-of-government response.

Fourth, the failure of the intelligence community to identify China as an existential threat greatly weakened the ability of American national security decision-makers to identify and act against the threat. The fundamental assumptions regarding China’s behavior were informed by the engagement school of thought. Ultimately, and perversely, the intelligence community was aiding threat deflation for a generation. This must be reversed.

Fifth, U.S. military leadership did not recognize and prepare for China’s emergence as a formidable military power. It must also be held accountable for the current state of unpreparedness. Specifically, the failure of the U.S. Navy’s leadership to recognize the centrality of the maritime domain to the PRC’s grand strategy and its naval modernization efforts stands in stark contrast to pro-active performance of prior generations of admirals from World War II through the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Leadership needs to prioritize rebuilding the U.S. Navy to meet the PRC threat.

The U.S. aided the rise of its enemy. Now the Kremlin and Iran are operating in the strategic space that the PRC provides them. That space and Beijing’s aggression will only increase if the U.S. does not act to end its threat deflation, break the chokehold of the engagement school on the U.S. foreign policy establishment, and defeat the CCP by evicting it from power.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 08:30

Long-Awaited State Dept Review 'Absolves' Israel Of War Crimes

Via The Cradle

A US State Department report on Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip will be submitted to Congress on Friday and stop short of concluding Tel Aviv has "violated terms for the use of US weapons," according to US officials who spoke with Axios. 

The report, based on a months-long probe that assessed whether or not Israel has violated international law or stifled Gaza aid efforts, has triggered "contentious internal debate in the State Department."

Image: Associated Press

President Joe Biden agreed in February to issue a national security memorandum to examine the use of US weaponry by Israel in Gaza. The report set out to examine the use of weapons by Israel and six other states, according to Axios. 

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has been pressured by the US ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and the outgoing US humanitarian envoy to Gaza, David Satterfield, to conclude that Israel is not hindering aid efforts, despite recommendations to do so by USAID and the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. 

The two told Blinken in a memo that while Israel restricted aid in the past, it has since changed its policy after pressure from Biden. "Blinken's report is going to list a series of incidents that took place during the war in Gaza and note that they raised serious concerns about violations of international law by Israel," three US officials told Axios. 

They added that the report will be "very critical" and state that the State Department is still investigating specific incidents; however, "at the same time, Blinken will stop short of concluding that Israel has violated international law in the context of the national security memorandum."

"Blinken's report also adopted the conclusions of Lew and Satterfield and certifies that Israel isn't currently violating the national security memorandum when it comes to facilitating the delivery of US-supported humanitarian aid," another official confirmed. 

Some Republican lawmakers have criticized the national security memorandum and the upcoming report. Last week, 88 Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden saying there is "sufficient evidence" of Israeli restriction of aid into Gaza. 

Politico reported earlier this week that the release of the State Department report was delayed by several days at the last minute. Friday's report comes a day after Biden warned that his government would not support or provide weapons for an expanded Israeli assault on Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah. 

Back in November, there was a scathing 5-page 'dissent memo' circulated in the State Dept:

"The memo — signed by 100 State Department and USAID employees — urges senior U.S. officials to reassess their policy toward Israel and demand a ceasefire in Gaza" | Scoop: Internal State Dept. memo blasts Biden, U.S. policy on Israel-Hamas war https://t.co/V5MbZrWWsP

— David Doel (@daviddoel) November 13, 2023

Israel seized control of the Rafah border crossing on Tuesday morning and has been relentlessly bombarding the east of the city, killing dozens of civilians, including children. 

A US arms shipment to Israel has already been delayed over concerns about Rafah. Had the report corroborated the overwhelming evidence of Israeli war crimes and hampering humanitarian aid efforts, US military aid for Tel Aviv was at risk of drying up. As a result, supporters of Israel in Washington have pressured the State Department against such a conclusion. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 07:30

Racist Secession? Conservatives Escape Democrat-Run Baton Rouge With Creation Of New City

The battle started a decade ago with conservative parents in the eastern areas of Baton Rouge, Louisiana seeking the right to send their children to better public schools.  Their requests for a redistricting to build a new school in their area was denied by the city.  Year after year Louisiana public schools have been rated some of the worst performing schools in the US, not just in education but also in safety. 

Then there was the ongoing threat of rising crime combined with persistent Democrat controlled leadership; the policies of progressives directly contributed to repeat offenders being released onto the streets.  Conservative residents, feeling that Baton Rouge leaders had no intention of representing their interests or listening to their concerns, decided they had to take drastic measures to make a change.

The result was an effort of citizens in the east to break away from Baton Rouge entirely and create their own city, called St. George.  The problem for Democrats was that citizen proponents of the new city would be taking away access to their money, their businesses and their children.  This was apparently unacceptable.

The corporate media and elements of the Democratic Party immediately launched a propaganda effort to paint the breakaway community (and other movements like it) as "white flight" and a new form of segregation.  Their argument was that the petitions for St. George were racially motivated and a return to the Jim Crow era of Louisiana politics. 

Keep in mind, the St.George movement started in 2014, well before the full bore institution of woke propaganda in Democrat run public schools districts.  In hindsight, the people in eastern Baton Rouge timed their efforts perfectly and there are a lot of reasons to leave, as the city has only become worse in the past ten years.

Advocates for St. George argue that the move was never racially motivated, only policy motivated.  Everything Democrats touch eventually turns to rot.  This has been consistently proven with the top most violent cities in the US being managed by Democrats and the top worst cities for school safety in the US managed by Democrats.  Progressives have tried to deny this for years but they can't argue with the numbers; their only retort is that the issue is "more nuanced" than conservatives believe.

Racially speaking (if Democrats really want to go there), it's fair to point out that the worst hit areas for crime in cities like Baton Rouge are consistently in neighborhoods with a black demographic.  It's not racist to say this, it's just a reality.  Politically speaking, it makes sense that conservatives would want to protect their children from far-left ideological narratives now permeating public schools within progressive areas, as well as keep them safe from random violence.  The leftist position is essentially this: 

"You aren't allowed to shield your children from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training.  To try is bigotry and you must be stopped.  Woke ideology is not optional, it's a requirement." 

In other words, separation based on preference is considered "wrong" by Democrats.  This has been the underlying motivation for the progressive war on school voucher programs and public choice across the country.  Leftists are only able to survive when they can force people to participate in their systems.  Whenever individuals are given an alternative and an option to walk away most of them do.  Leftists don't like it because it makes them look bad and it moves delicious tax dollars out of their reach.  Democrats see taxes as a form of wealth redistribution rather than communities investing in their own infrastructure, and this often leads to egregious mismanagement of city funds.   

Let's not forget, these are the same people that constantly cry about conservatives supposedly threatening democracy, yet they are quick to criticize when democracy doesn't work to their benefit.  

Luckily, a majority in the Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the creation of St. George and the residents there have been given a chance to go their own way.  The media is calling it an attempt at "secession" and maybe it is, but is that really a bad thing?  Shouldn't different communities and people with different ideals be allowed to break away if they want and manage their own affairs in the way they prefer?  As long as they follow basic constitutional principles then there's no reason for Democrats to object, unless the issue is really all about control.  

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 07:00

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of  coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• The wild rise of Zillow Gone Wild: Samir Mezrahi posted his first outrageous house in 2020. Now he has 4 million followers and an HGTV show on the way. (Washington Post)

• Big Fridge: The hot business of cold storage: Diets, demographics, desertification: what trends aren’t growing the global cold chain? (Sherwood)

• The Price of Oil: The history of control and decontrol in the oil market: (Phenomenal World)

• I Wish I’d Never Become The NFL Weed Guy. There is a reason that ex-NFL players are four times more likely than the average American male to become addicted to opioids. “And you think weed was better than pills for recovery?” “I do. I weeded as needed.” I was proud of this quip, and it made it onto the show. Like Gore Vidal once said, never pass up an offer to be on TV. But for a kid who had spent his life chasing one dream—the NFL—I had just officially lost the plot. I was the NFL Weed Guy. (Defector)

• Meet the Woman Who Showed President Biden ChatGPT—and Helped Set the Course for AI: Arati Prabhakar has the ear of the US president and a massive mission: help manage AI, revive the semiconductor industry, and pull off a cancer moonshot. (Wired) see also The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production. Ezra Klein’s podcast conversation with Nilay Patel. “As the flood of A.I. comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people…will go up.” (kottke.org)

• Why We Love Music: Researchers are discovering how music affects the brain, helping us to make sense of its real emotional and social power. (Greater Good Magazine)

• How ‘feelings about thinking’ help us navigate our world: The pleasant feeling of knowing, the frustration of forgetting, and other ‘metacognitive feelings’ serve as unsung guides. (Psyche)

• Brad Parscale helped Trump win in 2016 using Facebook ads. Now he’s back, and an AI evangelist. “You’re going to see some of the most amazing new technology in artificial intelligence that’s going to replace polling in the future across the country,” said Brad Parscale in a dimly lit promotional video accentuated by hypnotic beats. (AP)

• New particle at last! Physicists detect the first “glueball” Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one. (Big Think) see also Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse: cosmic inflation theory has largely settled the once-daunting existential question of ‘How did the Universe begin?’ for most physicists. That is to say that, from a singular hot, dense and small starting point, the just-right conditions for the emergence of the Universe were met. This set the stage for the unfathomably rapid expansion of the Big Bang and the emergent laws of physics that we observe today. the first fraction of a second of the Universe, just before the Big Bang, is still a wide-open scientific frontier. (Aeon)

• He Sang ‘What a Fool Believes.’ But Michael McDonald Is in on the Joke. The singer and songwriter with a silky-smooth voice has written a memoir with Paul Reiser that recounts his story of pain and redemption with dashes of humor. (New York Times)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Savita Subramanian, Head of US Equity and Quantitative Strategy, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. She was Institutional Investor All America Research Team for the past 11 years.

The CapEx spending at MSFT, META, GOOG will eclipse $150 billion this year alone

Source: Base Hit Investing

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

~~~

To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

 

The post 10 Weekend Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

World’s Largest Floating Solar Farm Wrecked By A Storm Just Before Launch

Authored by Eric Worrall via Watts Up With That,

h/t Dr. Willie Soon; Who could have predicted acres of fragile floating structures would be vulnerable to bad weather?

Madhya Pradesh: Summer Storm Damages World’s Largest Floating Solar Plant at Omkareshwar Dam (Watch Video)

Indore: A summer storm on Tuesday damaged a floating solar plant at Madhya Pradesh’s Omkareshwar dam. The floating solar plant, situated in the backwater of the dam, is the biggest of its kind in the world. A joint venture between  Madhya Pradesh Govt and National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC), the project was nearly completed and ready for its launch. A part of the project became operational last week.

The project near the village of Kelwa Khurd, aimed at generating 100 MW of electricity, with additional capacities of 88MW at Indawadi and 90 MW at Ekhand village. However, on Tuesday, summer storms with the speed of 50kmph hit the project and threw the solar panels all around the place. No employee was fortunately injured.

…

Read more: https://www.lokmattimes.com/national/madhya-pradesh-summer-storm-damages-worlds-largest-floating-solar-plant-at-omkareshwar-dam-watch-video-a514/

A video of the disaster;

AL GORE please pick up the red emergency phone.

Storm destroys the world's largest floating Solar Panel Farm.

What Valedictorian engineer signed off on this stupidity.pic.twitter.com/zRBOREibGi

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 5, 2024

Anyone who has ever owned a boat, particular a large boat which gets left in the water, knows what a harsh environment the sea can be. Some kind of failure was inevitable. If it hadn’t been a storm, there are plenty of other things which could have gone wrong.

Greens keep telling us we can expect more frequent and extreme superstorms – so what is the point of building vulnerable floating structures?

Plastics tend to disintegrate under tropical sunlight, especially when in contact with water or water spray. Ultraviolet from the sun drives exotic chemical reactions, which leads to chemical breakdown.

Metal sitting in water is difficult to manage, even stainless steel is not immune to corrosion. All metal structures in contact with water need to be protected with sacrificial anodes or comparable protective measures. Electricity and metal are an especially bad combination, any electrical fault which causes a current to run through metal in contact with water can cause corrosion to occur thousands of times faster than normal.

Let us hope developers and politicians take the hint, and stop throwing our money at inherently flawed ideas like floating solar arrays.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 06:30

IPO Nearing? Elon Musk's Starlink In Hyper-Growth, Surprises Analysts With $6.6 Billion Revenue Projection 

We've asked the question: 

• Ready For IPO? Starlink Achieves Cash-Flow Breakeven

Followed by:

• SpaceX Prepares For Starlink IPO In 2024, Report Says

A new report from Quilty Space, first reported by SpaceNews, shows SpaceX's Starlink could be closer than ever to an initial public offering. The space internet company's 2024 forecasted revenue will top $6.6 billion. 

"Starlink's achievements over the past three years are mind-blowing," the report said, adding,  "We're projecting a revenue jump from $1.4 billion in 2022 to $6.6 billion in 2024."

To give you an idea of scale, SES and Intelsat, the two biggest geostationary satellite operators that just announced a merger, have a combined revenue of about $4.1 billion.

In 2019, SpaceX launched the first 60 Starlink satellites on the company's Falcon 9 rocket. Fast-forward to today, and Starlink has a constellation of nearly 6,000 satellites, over 5,200 operational, and nearly 3 million terminals across 75 countries. 

In November, Elon Musk posted on X, "Excited to announce that @SpaceX @Starlink has achieved breakeven cash flow!" 

Excited to announce that @SpaceX @Starlink has achieved breakeven cash flow! Excellent work by a great team.

Starlink is also now a majority of all active satellites and will have launched a a majority of all satellites cumulatively from Earth by next year.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2023

Quilty expects "Starlink to achieve positive free cash flow for the first time in 2024." 

Achieving positive free cash flow could be one of the major milestones Musk needs before debuting a Starlink IPO. He previously stated in 2022, "I'm not sure exactly when that [IPO] is, but maybe it will be like — I don't know, just guessing — three or four years from now." 

Last year, billionaire investor Ron Baron told CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin that SpaceX plans to IPO Starlink in 2027. 

Baron said, "We think that by the time they go public with SpaceX, with Starlink … in 2027 or so, four years, the company will be worth $250 billion to $300 billion."

CNBC reported that the latest valuation figure for SpaceX was around $180 billion in December. 

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 06:00

World's Oldest Central Bank Keeps Sounding Alarm On Fragility Of Cashless Economies

Authored by Nick Corbishley via naked capitalism,

At a time when the dominant narrative around cash is that its demise is all but inevitable, as well as broadly desirable, the 2024 payment report by Sweden’s Riksbank may offer a cautionary tale. 

In October last year, in More Good News for Cash in Europe, More Bad News for Digital Dollar in US, we reported that recent developments suggest that the trend away from cash and toward purely digital-only payment systems may not be quite as smooth or as seamless as some may have wished or expected. One of the developments we highlighted in that report was growing concern among central bankers and politicians in Sweden, one of Europe’s most cashless economies, about the unintended consequences of driving cash out of the economy:

Even by late 2020, Sweden had less cash in circulation than just about anywhere else in the world, at around 1% of gross domestic product, according to the latest available data. That compares with 8% in the U.S. and more than 10% in the euro area. As a recent piece in Interesting Engineering notes, Sweden is already “officially cashless”:

Cash is never needed, not even for small purchases like hot chocolate at a Christmas market in Stockholm. All vendors have a mobile payment chip-and-PIN card reader like the one offered by Stockholm-based mobile payments company iZettle, or they accept payments through the mobile application Swish. Swishing is perhaps the easiest way of payment for everyone.

The Risks of Going Fully Cashless

But now the country is beginning to realise that an almost exclusively digital payments system comes with significant risks, especially at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. In time-honoured fashion, the article in the UK Telegraph began with a spot of fearmongering about Vladimir Putin.

“People started to realise that it is very easy for Vladimir Putin to switch everything off,” Björn Eriksson, a retired police chief, former head of Interpol and leading cash advocate, told the Telegraph.  “At first we were arguing for vulnerable people, the elderly, women in abusive relationships who rely on cash… Now we are talking about national security. And it’s not only Putin, it could also be organised crime.”

In 2021, the Riksbank, Sweden’s central bank (and the world’s oldest), introduced a new directive obliging the country’s six largest credit institutions to continue providing their customers with certain basic cash services.

But while that may have meant that people in Sweden can continue to access cash from their local branch, it is becoming increasingly difficult to use it as fewer and fewer retail businesses accept notes and coins.

This is partly due to the greater convenience of handling digital payments while the card processing fees are substantially lower than the US. But it is also because most Swedes, including many pensioners, prefer to use cards or mobile payments. As a baker in Stockholm told the Telegraph, “the only people who bring cash to the shop are tourists. I feel bad for them because they just take the krona home, where it is useless.”

But even that trend may be reversing. According to Eriksson, a growing number of young people are joining the pro-cash movement — and mainly over privacy concerns.

Rediscovering the Benefits of Cash

Earlier this week, Heise Online, a German online news service that covers IT, telecommunications, and technology sectors, published a long, in-depth report about the Riksbank’s apparent rediscovery of some of the benefits of cash. The article also explores some of the Riksbank’s concerns about the potential fragility of a fully cashless payment system, as outlined in its 2024 Payments Report, published in March.

At a time when the dominant narrative around cash — as espoused by senior bankers, central bankers, big tech and fintech executives, politicians and economists, and of course, their ever-faithful servants in the media — is that its demise is all but inevitable, even in countries where cash is still King (Germany, Spain, Austria, Mexico, Thailand, Japan…), the Riksbank’s report may offer a cautionary tale. From the Heise Online piece (machine translated):

“The Swedish payments market has been digitized rapidly,” states the Riksbank. Cash and manual payment services have been replaced by cards, mobile phones and internet services. “As a result, payments have become faster, smoother and cheaper overall,” which the institute points out is “a positive development.” However, there are groups in society “who do not have access to digital payment services or find it difficult to use them and are therefore marginalized”. There are also “serious fraud problems that could undermine trust in the payment system.”

Digitalization also makes payments “more vulnerable to cyber attacks and disruptions to the power grid and data communication,” the bank points out. At the same time, the geopolitical developments of the past few years required “Sweden to have strong civil defense.” The developments suggested “that we should concentrate more than before on the challenges of digitalization.”

Put another way, cash does not crash. It does not fail in a power cut or seize up during a cyber attack (though, of course, ATMs might). By contrast, digital payment systems need a stable and continuous internet connection to process transactions. When these connections fail, the result is often chaos. Digital payment outages have caused significant disruption in a host of countries in recent years, including the US, the UK, Australia, Indonesia, Germany, Canada, Spain and Norway. Generally speaking, the more cashless the country, the greater the disruption.

Sweden’s Cashless Journey

Sweden is one of the world’s most cashless economies. In large part, its abandonment of cash was the result of technological and generational shifts. As payment technologies began to change in the first two decades of this century, most Swedish citizens began to prefer the speed, ease and convenience of digital payments.

They were also nudged heavily in that direction by commercial banks, which by 2016 had made 60% of their branches cashless, as a 2019 Riksbank working paper documents. This made it much more difficult for citizens to access cash and for businesses to deposit it, which in turn accelerated the uptake of digital payments and the abandonment.

Sweden’s legal tender laws also made it possible for the Riksbank to withdraw many of Sweden’s large denomination notes in circulation. For instance, the value of 1,000-krona notes (worth just over $90) in circulation declined gradually from SEK 48.4 billion in 2001 to SEK 21.4 billion in December 2012. Beginning in 2013, this decline accelerated, plunging to SEK 9.7 billion by December 2013.

After playing a part in the wholesale removal of cash from Sweden’s economy, the Riksbank is now trying to reverse some of the damage it has caused. It is not the only Scandinavian central bank to have flagged up the fragility risks of exclusively digital payment systems. In 2022, the Bank of Finland recommended that the use of cash payments be guaranteed by law. Like all Nordic countries, Finland is a largely cash-free economy. But like Sweden, it has begun to see the risks of going too far, too soon.

In March 2022, the central bank initiated a proposal for legislation to ensure a minimal level of cash-paid services. In October of that year, the Head of the Payment Systems Department and Chief Cashier at the Bank of Finland, Päivi Heikkinen, even advised households to make sure they have some cash on hand, just in case the country’s payments system were to go down. At the time, Finland had just applied to become a NATO member and the government was fretting about the risk of cyber attacks from Russia. In an interview with the national broadcaster, Heikkinen said her intention was not to ”fabricate catastrophic scenarios” — before saying that in the worst case scenario, the payments system could go down for a period of weeks.

In Sweden, the Riksbank is already taking countermeasures to try to guarantee a steady supply of cash, the Heise Online article notes:

It is improving the cash supply by setting up new offices where companies can collect and deposit cash. Having such cash depots in more locations across the country would reduce both the costs for businesses and the risk that cash would no longer be usable in the event of a disruption.

This is the only way to ensure “that everyone can pay”. In general, “stronger legal protection for cash” is necessary. Banks should be required to “accept cash deposits, including coins, from individuals.”

The Riksbank supports its demands with reference to an annual representative survey on the payment habits of Swedes. According to this, “cash is being used more frequently than before”. Almost half of respondents reported using cash in the past month, an increase of 15 percentage points compared to 2022.

This pro-active approach to bolstering the cash system contrasts sharply with what some central banks and governments are saying and doing in other Western or Western-adjacent countries. As we reported in August, Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies is mulling a number of legislative proposals calling for an end to the printing, minting and circulation of physical notes and coins. As the World Economic Forum trumpeted in 2022, Brazilians are adopting digital payments faster than anyone else.

In Australia, the government refuses to legally protect the use of cash in retail settings. The Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Michele Bullock, has even warned that as the running costs of processing cash for banks and businesses mount as a result of the declining share of consumer payments made using cash, it may become necessary to begin charging people for using cash in retail settings.

Granted, Australia is significantly larger and more sparsely populated than Sweden, making it much harder and more costly to transport money securely to all parts of the country, including remote parts of Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia. But whereas the Riksbank is talking about taking on a proactive role, together with other authorities and banks, to ensure that cash can be transported to and from retail outlets at reasonable prices, the RBA is talking about making consumers pay for the privilege of using cash. Meanwhile, Armaguard, Australia’s largest currency transport business, servicing around 90% of the cash-in-transit market, is warning of bankruptcy — unless the banks agree to pay more for its services.

Predictably, Bullock’s suggestion that citizens may one day have to fork over extra fees for the privilege of paying with cash — to protect the banks and retailers from the exorbitant costs of maintaining cash infrastructure — did not go down well with many Australians. While most citizens are using digital payments for most, if not all, of their purchases, millions still depend on cash in their daily lives.

What’s more, the very same Big Four banks Bullock wants to protect from having to part with extra money to fortify Australia’s cash network have posted record or near-record profits in recent times, in part because of surging interest rates but also because of the rising fees they charge on card payments. Those same banks received huge sums of cheap debt to tide them over during the COVID-19 pandemic while at the same time closing hundreds of branches and ATMs across the country.

In Sweden, as Heisse Online notes, more and more Swedes see the decline in cash consumption as a negative development — 44 percent in 2023 compared to 36 percent in the previous year:

The proportion of respondents who believe that they cannot get by without cash in today’s society has also increased compared to 2022. This could also be “an effect of increased crisis awareness due to the war in Ukraine,” the bankers speculate.

The need to pay in cash in certain situations such as at clubs, in corner shops and at flea markets is also mentioned, the report goes on to say. Some also emphasized that using cash made it easier for them to keep track of their finances. Older people generally find it much more difficult to get by without cash than younger people. In the 2023 survey, half of respondents said they wanted to pay cash but the store did not accept it. In 2022 the corresponding value was only 37 percent…

These numbers suggest that cash may be experiencing a mini-renaissance in Sweden, which would echo similar trends seen in other heavily cashless economies. For example, a recent survey down under by fintech company Waave revealed that as many as 71% of Australians are worried about the economy becoming completely cashless. Those most concerned include Baby Boomers (82%), regional Australians (77%), and lower income households earning less than $100k (75%) — a reminder of the oft-ignored class-war element of the War on Cash.

It’s not hard to see why concerns about the future of cash are on the rise down under. In recent months, three of Australia’s Big Four banks have removed over-the-counter cash withdrawals from some of their branches while increasing numbers of businesses, both large and small, are choosing to reject cash payments altogether. In Australia, it is perfectly legal for businesses to refuse to accept cash as long as they inform consumers of their stance before any “contract” for the supply of goods or services is entered into.

Aussie cash lovers recently expressed their displeasure with these trends through a “Draw Out Some Cash Day” on April 2. According to news.com.au, hoards of people were seen lining up to withdraw cash:

The movement, led by the Cash is King Facebook group, aimed to show banks and retailers there is still a demand for cash amid warnings the country will be “functionally cashless” by 2025.

Social media posts show “massive queues” of people, both young and old, lining up at various banks around the country, with one woman sharing she waited for up to an hour to get her hands on bank notes.

“All banks I passed today had queues out the door,” one person wrote on Facebook alongside a picture of people lining up outside a Commonwealth Bank branch.

Governments in other countries, including Ireland, Spain, Slovakia and Austria, are taking pro-active steps to protect the use of cash. Even the European Central Bank has called for a regulatory crackdown on all businesses and public bodies in the Euro Area that refuse to accept cash. At the same time, the ECB is proceeding in its digital euro project from the “investigation phase” to the “preparation phase.”

As I noted at the time, cash is still the most frequently used payment method in the Euro Area, though it is losing ground to cards. Even if, or when, the digital euro is launched, it will presumably coexist with cash for some time, at least until the digital euro gains a strong enough foothold. ECB President Lagarde has said that “cash is here to stay,” adding that European citizens “will have both options: cash and digital cash.” How long it stays that way will remain to be seen. My guess is that if the digital euro does gain a strong foothold, the ECB will begin financially incentivising its use while decentivising the use of cash.

In the UK, meanwhile, cash may even be staging a comeback of sorts after ten consecutive years of falling use. According to both UK Finance, the country’s largest bank association, and the British Retail Consortium Group, the most influential retail lobbying group, cash use increased in 2022, for the first time in a decade. Whether this rebound represents a genuine trend reversal or merely a dead cat bounce (apologies, as always, to feline lovers) remains to be seen. But the mere fact that cash use is growing at all despite concerted efforts by the government, banks and retailers to reduce its use is noteworthy.

So, too, is the fact that Sweden’s Riksbank is expressing reservations about the resilience of a fully cashless society. After all, the Riksbank was one of the first central banks in Europe to begin aggressively undermining the role of cash in the economy. That said, its U-turn on cash it is not as novel a development as is suggested by the Heise Online article. The Riksbank, the article claims in its introduction, “is suddenly emphasising the indispensable role of cash in secure, widely available payment systems. This is a change in strategy.”

That is somewhat misleading. As the German financial journalist Norbert Häring notes (in German) on his blog, while there has definitely been a sea change in strategy at the Riksbank, that change did not begin just now but rather eight years ago, “after the central bank, together with Sweden’s commercial banks, had done everything they could to undermine the use of cash.” Since early 2016 Sweden’s central bank has slowed the march towards a cashless society, as Häring reported at the time.

Now, the Riksbank is not just questioning the wisdom of moving to a fully cashless economy at this current moment in time; it is explicitly warning about the potential risks such a move might entail. At the same time, it is working on developing a CBDC — the so-called e-krona, now in its fourth and final pilot phase, looking at “how an e-Krona can be used offline for payments if electricity and telecommunications are not working.” Which begs the question: once the e-krona is ready to launch, which will presumably be sooner than most other CBDCs in the West, how will it co-exist with cash? That will have to be the subject of a future article, though readers’ suggestions are more than welcome in the meantime.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 05:30

Mapping Life Expectancy Around The World

Over the last two centuries there has been significant progress in human health and longevity. Initially, in the early 19th century, life expectancy did not surpass 40 years globally, reflecting harsh conditions like extreme poverty, limited medical care, and poor sanitation. By 1950, this figure had seen notable improvements, especially in regions like Europe, North America, and parts of South America, with averages rising above 60 years. Countries such as Norway boasted a life expectancy of 72 years, while others like Mali lagged at 26 years.

From 1950 to 2000, substantial strides were made particularly in Asia and Latin America, reflecting global efforts to improve health and living standards. According to the UN World Population Prospects 2022, these trends are expected to continue, projecting that by 2050, life expectancy at birth will surpass 80 years in most global regions. This infographic captures these transformative changes, presenting a hopeful outlook on the future of global health.

Visualizing this is Marcus Lu and Bruno Venditti of Visual Capitalist:

Continued:

The improvement in life expectancy can be attributed to various factors such as advancements in medical technology, better healthcare infrastructure, improved sanitation, access to clean water, and increased awareness about health and nutrition.

In Perspective With History

Although today it seems like rising life expectancy is a given, for much of history it’s worth noting that the situation was much more static.

As shown in the above chart, for most of human history life expectancy at birth actually sat in the 20-30 year range. It’s only since the mid-19th century that the aforementioned improvements (sanitation, clean water, etc.) allowed for the exponential and regular progress we see today.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/11/2024 - 05:00