Repressionomics: Get ready for the new permanent austerity

Government and corporations will again balance the costs of a long-term stimulus on the backs of the poor


Credit;PA


No prizes for stating that the economy is in crisis. By late-June, government debt was £1.9 trillion, more than the entire national GDP; a debt not seen since 1963, following six years of Tory mismanagement under Chancellor and later PM, Harold Macmillan. In the second quarter (April to June), GDP dropped by more than 20 percent. Another record was broken when government borrowing exceeded £127 billion. Economists predict that the deficit–i.e., expenses exceeding revenue–could top £370bn.

Analyst Nick Hubble calls the Tory solution a potentially “limitless stimulus” (paraphrasing). Others say that this approach amounts to a type of management called financial repression. And guess who will pay the price… again?

AUSTERITY AND COVID: “A MATCH MADE IN HELL”

Britain was the hardest hit of the G7 nations. The ex-hedge fund managing millionaire Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, claims that the UK tanked so badly because: “Social activities, like eating out, going to the cinema, shopping … comprise a much larger part of our economy than they do for most of our European comparative countries.”

But is this true? By the end of July, France’s GDP had fallen less than 14 percent and Germany’s just over 10. France’s household consumption expenditure is between $1.3 and $1.5 trillion, Germany’s is $2 trillion. The UK’s is not radically different ($1.7 and $1.8 trillion.)
Although Germany’s services sector comprises just over 60 percent of its GDP compared to the UK’s 70+ percent, the sector in France likewise constitutes over 70 percent of GDP.

So, by these measures Sunak’s claim is false. The BBC parroted the assertion regardless. A more plausible explanation is that the deep cuts imposed by the Tory-Liberal regime (2010-15) after the Financial Crisis (2007-09) weakened the UK’s resilience. An article by the Oxford Research Group calls COVID off the back of austerity “a match made in hell.”

After the Global Financial Crisis (2007-09), austerity was imposed across the European Union, but the UK’s measures were particularly harsh. The French government continued to fund its health system, introducing new taxes to pay for the budget. It “took steps to protect people with low incomes,” says the World Health Organization, for instance by increasing the national insurance contributions of wealthy people. In Germany, according to the Centre for European Economic Research: “the increase in the debt ratio overstates the cost of banking sector stabilisation because the public sector also acquired significant assets,” thereby preventing long-term austerity.

In the UK, Chancellor Osborne (who was almost certainly a millionaire at the time) cut the top rate of income tax, reduced the National Health Service budget, and decimated social security. By the time COVID struck, two-thirds of the so-called job recovery market comprised of what the Resolution Foundation calls “atypical work”: precarious small business ownership or unstable gig economy-type jobs.

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Fifty years of tax cuts for rich did not trickle down – study concludes


“REPRESSIONOMICS”?

So, how will the government—which is comprised of millionaires and funded by billionaires—manage the unfolding COVID crisis? Barclays notes that policymakers “will have to choose from overt debt reduction policies, such as austerity and taxation, to covert ones, such as financial repression and inflation.”

“Repressionomics” sees funds borrowed from the private sector to reduce government debt. The acquisition of private funds facilitates the continuation of low-interest rates for government spending. The measures are “repressive” in that savers earn less than at the rate of inflation. Ideologues are already pushing for this as the least-worst option. The Telegraph, for instance, finds reasons not to re-nationalise the Bank of England or spend on a massive, post-WWII-type infrastructure project, backed by government-secured jobs and housing. “That leaves the last option: financial repression.”

Contrary to the impression given by Barclays, financial repression and austerity are not mutually exclusive. Ad van Riet of the European Central Bank (ECB) confirmed that European technocrats “applied the tools of financial repression to restore stability after the euro area crisis,” following the Crisis of ‘07-09. But that didn’t stop the ECB from imposing austerity in the form of public spending cuts.

Corporations are not in the business of having their profits repressed. They will likely continue to defer the cost of lost profits to lower-level employees and pension holders. With embedded public spending cutbacks resulting from policies undertaken during the last decade, social security will continue to be meagre for the recently-redundant and retired. Nearly nine in ten pension funds saw a drop of up to 15 percent in the first quarter.

Harvard economist, Professor Lance Taylor, predicts that “profits from job losses will finance government borrowing for COVID-19 bailouts.” The former Chief Economist at Citi, Willem Buiter, says that even without protectionism, “the organisation of production and trade will emphasise planned redundancy.” Buiter cites only “painful ways to restore fiscal sustainability.” The rich and powerful have ways to offset the “pain” of lower-than-expected returns. “That leaves the familiar tools of public spending cuts and higher taxes,” says Buiter. However, corporations and wealthy individuals already create a “tax gap” of £35 billion.

PUSHING FOR A NEW AUSTERITY

In late-2019, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that “an awful lot” of austerity was “baked in” to the Tories’ supposedly generous manifesto. In April this year, millionaire Boris Johnson said: “I think this government will want to encourage that bounce back in all kinds of ways, but I’ve never particularly liked the term [austerity] and it’s certainly not part of our approach.” Notice that Johnson said he didn’t like the “term,” not the practice. Media read this as a pledge not to continue the trends set by millionaire PM David Cameron in 2010. But in reality, Chancellor Sunak has already confirmed that “tough times are here,” though not for people like him and Tory donors.

Talking to the Confederation of British Industry, former Chancellor and millionaire, Philip Hammond, says: “My personal view is that this government will be extremely reluctant to either increase taxes or reduce public spending.” Hammond concludes that this will push austerity further down the road: “I expect that the great majority of the burden of this crisis is going to be absorbed through increased borrowing and left on the table for future generations.”

THE USUAL SUSPECTS ARE LOBBYING FOR BELT-TIGHTENING

Matthew Lesh, head of research at the Adam Smith Institute, claims that government spending is too generous: “The Tories are caring less and less about fiscal responsibility. They are instead looking for a magic money forest.” Sajid Javid, the millionaire ex-banker and former Chancellor, recently published a report for the Tory-backing Centre for Policy Studies, recommending VAT and national insurance relief for employers, and “[n]ew fiscal rules to gradually eliminate the current budget deficit after the economy recovers.” Javid concludes: “When things have returned to some form of normality, fiscal conservatives may have to win the argument all over again.”

To prevent another decade of austerity, the grassroots must ensure that the Labour Party remains committed to socialist policies, otherwise it will repeat the mistakes of the austerity-lite leader Ed Miliband in 2015 and fail to gain a significant number of seats whenever the next General Election comes.

Related – Johnson’s infrastructure project will drive public wealth to private equity firms

 by T.J. Coles August 22, 2020 in Economics

WELL SAID COMRADE

Farage lashes out at Chinese Communist 

Party after he’s told to “stop talking sh*t”

A China state-affiliated reporter called him "Trump's puppet" and a "big joke in Europe".

 by Jack Peat December 20, 2020in Politics



Nigel Farage was locked into battle with China Daily reporter Chen Weihua after he told him to “stop talking sh*t” on social media.

The reporter, who works for the newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Chinese Communist Party, hit out at the Brexit Party leader after he outrageously blamed the country for Christmas being cancelled.

The comments came shortly after Boris Johnson issued a new “stay at home” order covering London and most of the south and east of England, and drastically restricted plans for Christmas mixing, in response to a new, fast-spreading strain of coronavirus.

“We cannot continue with Christmas as planned,” he said, much to the bemusement of Farage, who pointed the finger at China.

But he was quickly reproached by Weihua, who called him “Trump’s puppet” and a “big joke in Europe”.

He was widely lauded for the comments, with Meurig Parri saying “I don’t know who Chen Weihua is but he’s hit the nail on the head!”

Philip Wilmann added: “Well said from China with love… Wear a mask Nigel …. for the love of God!”

Geothermal is the electricity combating climate change

© Provided by Quartz

Jason Czapla is walking across a former lake bed in the middle of southern California. The ground simmers at our feet as little mud volcanoes disgorge piles of hot, sulfurous muck. The Salton Sea glitters in the distance, beckoning as the morning temperature approaches 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

Everything about this place, around a hundred miles from the Mexican border, feels like it’s about to combust. But for Czapla, a former petroleum engineer, there are few places he’d rather be.

“It’s the perfect storm in terms of a renewable energy project,” says the chief engineer for Controlled Thermal Resources, wearing a white polo shirt and dark sports glasses that hide the excitement in his blue eyes. “This is the best resource in the world.”

Czapla is in charge of a 7,380-acre plot owned by Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR). It’s a barren scrap of desert that ends abruptly in the great saline sea east of San Diego. For a geothermal engineer, it’s paradise.

© Provided by Quartz
Jason Czapla, chief engineer for Controlled Thermal Resources.

Two kilometers below the surface lies a mineral-rich cauldron of hot water where temperatures can exceed 390°C. As the Salton Sea recedes, opportunities to turn that into energy and profits are emerging. If California approves its permit, CTR will start operating its Hell’s Kitchen Lithium and Power project in 2023, one of the first new US geothermal power plants in almost a decade.

And it almost certainly will not be the last. Although the shores of the Salton Sea already hosts 10 geothermal plants—most of them built in the 1980s—geology, politics, and energy demand have aligned to make Hell’s Kitchen, and projects like it, a hot investment once again.

Over the last decade, California has poured billions of dollars into its renewable energy goals. It has scaled up wind and solar power beyond expectation, while virtually ignoring geothermal plants despite possessing the most productive geothermal fields in the US. Today, wind and solar provide more than 86% of California’s renewable capacity, while geothermal sources provide virtually the same amount as two decades ago.

But in a climate constrained world, geothermal, the “forgotten renewable,” is getting a second chance.

Subterranean’s shot

At the Earth’s iron core sits a nuclear furnace. Thanks mostly to decaying radioactivity left over from the birth of the planet, temperatures in Earth’s center, 4,000 miles below the surface, exceed those of the surface of the sun (6,000°C or 10,800°F). Over time, this heat migrates upward. Molten rock known as magma approaches the surface, carrying enormous heat.

The deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Researchers at Southern Methodist University estimate at a depth of 10 kilometers, temperatures under much of the western US surpass 300°C, well above what geothermal plants need to generate electricity. Much of this, theoretically, comes within reach of drills, the deepest of which have burrowed 12 kilometers down, mostly on scientific missions.
© Provided by Quartz

Subterranean map of estimated geothermal resources in the US.

MIT estimated just how much extractable energy lay below the US in 2006. Their best guess—200,000 exajoules—was so large that even releasing 2% could supply 2,000 times the primary energy needs for the entire country, without any technological improvements in drilling technology.

All we have to do is tap it.

That was the hope when the geothermal industry began. In 1960, the first commercial geothermal plant in the US opened at The Geysers in northern California. The 11-megawatt turbine, which drew up steam from natural formations, soon inspired other plants in Hawaii, Utah, Nevada, and—of course—California’s Salton Sea, a hotbed of early activity.

While the first geothermal plants drained reservoirs of their steam or water—and thus their generating potential—a new design in the 1980s, known as “binary plants,” let operators extract the heat while maintaining the generating potential. The average plant size was small (about 5 megawatts, just 3% the size of the average US coal plant), but capacity grew fast as Congress supported the technology amid the oil crisis of the 1970s. In spite of its enormous potential, the geothermal option for the United States has been largely ignored. 

Then, everything seemed to lose steam. Coal prices fell, leaving geothermal less competitive. Federal funding lagged behind. In 1980, the DOE requested $111 million for geothermal but received only $15 million. Between 2006 and 2019, the US spent only $1 billion on geothermal technology, roughly a tenth of what was spent on fossil fuels, and a third of the investment in solar. “In spite of its enormous potential,” say researchers at MIT, “the geothermal option for the United States has been largely ignored.”

Today, geothermal is a bit player in the US energy industry, supplying just 0.4% of the country’s electricity in 2019. Even California, home to the largest geothermal resources of any state, generates only 5.5% of in-state electricity from the resource.

But the renewables revolution that once scorned geothermal is now making it essential. Wind and solar, as cheap as they have become, can’t generate electricity all the time. Even paired with energy storage such as batteries, it can’t supply electricity long enough during peak periods.

A brief interruption in energy supply can cause a grid to collapse. So as more bargain-basement solar panels and wind turbines are installed, grid operators must find ways to ensure steady electricity, even if peak demand only occurs a few times per year. For states like California transitioning to a 100% clean power grid, finding a round-the-clock supply of electrons has taken on new urgency

.

© Provided by Quartz

A fractured system

On Aug. 14, 2020, California’s grid was on the verge of collapse. The hottest August day in more than three decades meant demand was rapidly outstripping supply. Thousands of megawatts of solar and wind power went offline as dark fell and the winds stalled. Natural gas plants failed to turn on as expected. Electricity imports from neighboring states dwindled amid the heatwave.

To prevent California’s grid from collapsing, operators in the control room of CAISO, California’s Independent System Operator managing the state’s electrical grid, were desperately dialing for megawatts, working the phones to secure spare power. Operators asked the US Navy to unplug ships from shore power and Tesla dialed back power to its factory.

It wasn’t enough.

That night, California endured its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years. Two million people saw their power cut off, and the state narrowly averted an even worse disaster. What happened on Aug. 14 is totally unacceptable. We are going to build the most reliable electrical grid in the country. 

The near-catastrophe seized the attention of policymakers who saw the grid’s instability as a threat to the state’s economy and decarbonization goals. The whole system, it seemed, was more fragile than previously believed. “What happened on Aug. 14 is totally unacceptable,” says David Hochschild of the California Energy Commission. “We are going to build the most reliable electrical grid in the country. As we move toward clean energy, one of the guiding principles going forward is a diversity of renewables.”

California aims to generate 60% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, and eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. To meet that goal, its grid needs far more carbon-free energy that’s available on demand. Two common options—nuclear and hydroelectric—face fierce political opposition. Few dam sites remain. California’s last nuclear plant, the 2,240-MW Diablo Canyon, will be decommissioned in 2025 (its second, the San Onofre nuclear power plant, was closed in 2013).

That has forced the state to build more natural gas plants or lithium-ion batteries to ensure a steady supply. Neither is ideal. Gas plants mean decades of higher emissions, while batteries can’t yet supply power for more than a few hours. That’s complicated California’s plans. Despite ordering 3,300 megawatts of new power capacity, the Public Utility Commission (PUC) has delayed the closure of four natural gas plants in 2019 to allow time for more generation and storage to come online.

Utilities weren’t prioritizing low-carbon baseload until now. “Geothermal fills a critical gap to complete the energy transition,” says Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton University, who estimates it could one day exceed the capacity of nuclear and hydropower. “Technical potential is not really the question. It is the economic question.”
Show me the money

Controlled Thermal Resources thinks it knows how to make money. Utilities, after years binging on cheap solar and wind, are scrambling to fortify the reliability of their power systems without adding to emissions.

Historically, geothermal looked like the expensive option. Geothermal power can cost about $140 per megawatt-hour, double the price of onshore wind, and nearly five times more than solar, according to the California Energy Commission. In 2017, Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, which holds rights to much of the Salton Sea’s geothermal field, finally abandoned a permit for a 215 MW plant after years of struggling to find buyers for its electricity. Geothermal is actually the cheapest when you add the externalities in. 

But that calculus ignored something critical: Wind and solar can’t provide baseload energy. A better way to calculate the cost to utilities is to measure the price of adding a particular megawatt to the grid. Electrons that can be turned on or off are worth more than those that can’t. Using this approach, the US Energy Information Administration says, new geothermal capacity in 2025 should cost just $37 per megawatt/hour, cheaper than almost every source besides solar photovoltaic ($36 per MWh).

“Geothermal is actually the cheapest when you add the externalities in,” says Dennis Kaspereit, vice president of the Geothermal Resource Group. Suddenly, new geothermal deals are being signed despite record low prices for wind, solar, and natural gas. Geothermal producers announced three agreements in California in 2020, and the largest—a 25-year, 40-megawatt deal valued at $627 million (pdf)—is for CTR’s Hell’s Kitchen project.

And that revenue is just the icing on the cake, says CTR’s Czapla. The company expects to make even more by extracting minerals. After CTR pumps up hot brine to generate electricity, it will extract lithium, absorbing the mineral like a sponge using a chemical process developed by a startup, Lilac Solutions, backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The water is pumped back underground into the same reservoir. Demand for lithium, critical for electric car batteries, is expected to grow 10-fold by 2030.

© Provided by Quartz
The geothermal plant in the Salton Sea owned by Controlled Thermal Resources.

While the time for profitable geothermal plants may finally have come for California, not every location is as lucky as the Salton Sea. The site sits above an accident of geology: More than 5 million years ago, a rift above the San Andreas fault slowly filled with layers of silt and sediment. This wedding cake of porous rock happens to lie above a red-hot magma chamber, creating the hot, salty brine suited to turn turbines and mine minerals.

Since engineers can’t wait millions of years for another Salton Sea to generate clean power, they’ve been working for decades on ways to do it themselves. They’re finally succeeding.
DIY geothermal

In 1974, the quest to create artificial geothermal fields began (pdf) officially kicked off when the Los Alamos laboratory patented a method to construct geothermal reservoirs in hot dry rock. They called it an Enhanced Geothermal System (EGS). Just three years later, engineers were drilling and blasting under Fenton Hill, New Mexico, laying the groundwork for every EGS effort to follow.

Creating new geothermal fields, it turns out, requires just the right mix of rock and heat. Luckily, those conditions exist almost anywhere—if you’re willing to drill. For every kilometer down into the Earth’s crust, temperatures rise about 25°C. “If you can figure out a way to tap that, you can get a phenomenal amount of energy,” says Will Fleckenstein, an engineering professor studying unconventional drilling at the Colorado School of Mines. “It’s essentially everywhere.”

When engineers at Fenton Hill drilled about 1 kilometer down, fractured the rock formations, injected water, and collected it again, they mimicked the natural process of extracting steam in water-rich formations like the Salton Sea. Over nine months, the system powered a modest 60 kW turbine from geology that had never produced electricity before.

Early efforts in the UK, Japan, and France, plagued by water losses and inadequate fracturing, struggled to replicate the feat. It wasn’t until the late 1990s, when Australian engineers drilled into even deeper rock with existing horizontal fractures, that EGS seemed feasible. Since then, researchers have successfully created huge EGS reservoirs. Projects at Desert Peak, Nevada (2013), Raft River, Idaho (2011), and Soultz-sous-Forets, France (2010) are now supplying a controlled flow of superheated water generating electricity at close to commercial prices. And existing geothermal fields are seeing output rise using these techniques.

Invest has followed these demonstration projects. DOE’s geothermal division saw its budget exceed $1 billion for the first time this year. The US has earmarked about $200 million through 2024 to commercialize EGS technology through its Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) program.

Private investment has started ramping up in anticipation. In the first half of 2020, global geothermal investments exceeded $675 million, six times more than the year prior, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (renewables investments overall rose only 5% during that time). Within five years, global geothermal production capacity is predicted to rise from 16 gigawatts to 24 GW, according to Rystad Energy.

CTR and its competitors alike stand to benefit if they can commercialize this technology. But the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research group, argues it’s not enough to secure geothermal’s role in the renewable energy mix. The industry needs far bigger projects, and far more of them, to travel down the experience curve, the steep price drop enjoyed by wind and solar as their industry went global. “We need five or 10 FORGE projects to sufficiently build on technological developments and to fail, innovate, succeed, and demonstrate—bringing down costs along the way,” it argues. “Geothermal energy isn’t limited by the potential resources, but by the cost of the technology to retrieve it.”

The success of geothermal is likely to mirror the story of fossil fuels it is poised to replace—particularly natural gas. The US shale oil boom, which turned the US into one of the world’s largest oil producers, only succeeded after decades of federal funding helped refine unconventional drilling and hydraulic fracking techniques. Once costs came down enough for companies to profit, the industry took off. Last year, unconventional oil accounted for 63% of total domestic production.

Today’s geothermal technology is in a similar spot. Shifting from conventional to enhanced geothermal demands public support that bring down the costs and incentivize more carbon-free electricity. Assuming the cost of unconventional drilling for heat falls (as it did for oil), geothermal energy’s practical potential could rise by a factor of 10, the DOE estimates. Without this support, the industry could remain a fringe player, expanding in a few states with strong renewables policies and easy accessible reservoirs, but never becoming the universal resources its advocates envision.

Those kinds of policy risks are the reason Controlled Thermal Resources is staking a claim in the US at all. “Our intent was originally to be part of the emerging geothermal industry set to happen in Australia,” Czapla says. But Australia saw four prime ministers cycle through in just five years, ending up with a conservative government that backed the fossil fuel industry and abandoned major climate efforts. “All the commitments to support renewable energy development went away,” says Czapla. “About two dozen companies publicly listed in Australia for geothermal development are not listed anymore.”

Without a welcoming home, CTR scoured the world for a place to set up shop. California offered a haven: rich geothermal reservoirs, major cities, plenty of transmission lines, and a legislative target to eliminate emissions ensuring decades of demand.

“Here,” Czapla adds, “you don’t have political risk.” All the company needs now, he says, is time.

FUNNY IT LOOKS LIKE AN ANTI MASK RALLY

‘This is not an anti-mask rally’: 200 vehicles participate in weekend Freedom Convoy in southern Alberta

Eloise Therien 1 hour ago

A convoy of approximately 180 vehicles left Taber, Alta., around noon Saturday, making their way toward Lethbridge. There, around 20 more joined the procession through Scenic Drive, Whoop-Up Drive, and University Drive.

YEP I WOULD SAY THIS HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH MASKS

© Eloise Therien / Global News One of the vehicles that participated at Saturday's Freedom Convoy through Lethbridge.

Steve —who organized the event and chose not to share his last name — said this was the third and final convoy this month.

"Each campaign has had different themes, and we've had multiple themes for each and every one," he explained.

As a local business owner, Steve said his main goal is to raise awareness for buying from small businesses and "saving Christmas" by lifting Alberta's current restrictions from Dec. 24 to Dec. 26.

"We've let people know that this is not an anti-mask rally, we encourage everyone to attend, because this lockdown has affected everyone."

While Steve's truck was equipped with a sign that read "Shop local, it matters more than ever," others donned messages such as "Masks Don't Save, Only Jesus Saves," "Lockdowns do more harm than good," and "Make Alberta Great Again."

Out of respect for gathering and social distancing restrictions currently in place, Steve said everyone participating remained in their vehicles and went their separate ways once the procession ended, avoiding an "in-person" element.

A total of approximately 800 vehicles participated in the three convoys.

THEIR IDLING ALONE WAS A MAJOR AIR POLLUTION EVENT BY UCP RENT A MOB OF SOUTHERN ALBERTA REDNECKS DOING A ROUND TRIP FROM TABER TO LETHBRIDGE WITH DIESEL SEMI'S

SEVEN DAYS IN MAY

Trump floated Michael Flynn's 'martial law' suggestion during Oval Office meeting: report


Photo via Gage Skidmore.
Jake Johnson and Common Dreams December 20, 2020

During a meeting at the White House on Friday, President Donald Trump reportedly asked his advisers about retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's recent suggestion that the administration impose martial law and use the military to conduct a "rerun" of the November presidential election.

According to the New York Times, which first reported the discussion Saturday, Trump's advisers pushed back against Flynn's proposal and other ideas the president floated during the meeting, including his suggestion that notorious right-wing attorney Sidney Powell be named special counsel for an investigation into baseless allegations of widespread "voter fraud." Flynn, who Trump pardoned last month, was reportedly present at the White House meeting.

In a tweet early Sunday morning, Trump—who is set to leave office in a month—denied that he raised Flynn's call for martial law, dismissing the Times story as "fake news" and "knowingly bad reporting."

The Associated Press reported that during the Friday meeting, the president's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani "pushed Trump to seize voting machines in his hunt for evidence of fraud."

While Trump is unlikely to do anything resembling what Flynn and Giuliani suggested, observers warned that the lame-duck president's willingness to entertain such proposals highlights the threat he still poses to democracy on his way out the door.00:00

"A week ago 126 of my Republican colleagues violated the Constitution by supporting Trump's attempt to steal the election," tweeted Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-N.J.), referring to GOP support for a Texas-led lawsuit that the Supreme Court rejected earlier this month. "How many support Trump's discussion of military dictatorship?"

Axios reported Saturday that senior Trump administration officials, whom the outlet did not name, are growing "increasingly alarmed that President Trump might unleash—and abuse—the power of government in an effort to overturn the clear result of the election."

"Their fears include Trump's interest in former national security adviser Michael Flynn's wild talk of martial law; an idea floated of an executive order to commandeer voting machines; and the specter of Sidney Powell, the conspiracy-spewing election lawyer, obtaining governmental power and a top-level security clearance," according to Axios.

In response to the Axios story, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) dismissed the Trump advisers' supposed alarm as "all for show," given that they've repeatedly enabled the president's past abuses.

"They have empowered him as he destroys democratic institutions and embarrasses the U.S. globally," Omar tweeted. "They are shameless."

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Seven Days in May is a 1964 American political thriller film about a military-political cabal 's planned takeover of the United States government in reaction to the president's negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The picture was directed by John Frankenheimer; starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas,... Nov. 4 2019

Tucker Carlson says COVID vaccines are 'anti-white' 

as anti-vaxxers urge folks to refuse them

Meaghan Ellis
Tucker Carlson draws Twitter's ire with more relentless insults on Dr. Jill Biden

Daniel Villarreal and The New Civil Rights Movement December 19, 2020

On Friday's installment of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the Fox News commentator accused the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of suggesting that COVID-19 vaccinations should be distributed based on race rather than need. Carlson's claims was a deliberate misrepresentation of a CDC presentation on the groups most needing vaccination.

In the presentation, the CDC said that healthcare personnel, adults ages 65 and older, people with high-risk medical conditions, and essential workers would be the first to receive vaccinations.

In explaining why these groups were chosen for vaccinations first, the CDC mentioned that essential workers tend to be poor people and people of color who can't work from home. People of color also tend to be underrepresented among people ages 65 and older (ie. They don't typically live as long). As such, inoculating essential workers who are largely poor and people of color will help reduce healthcare inequalities among these communities.

https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1340114067780984833

Always eager to whip up racial resentment and outrage, Carlson explained the presentation this way

"It is true that more lives would be saved if the elderly receive priority access to the vaccine. But here's the problem, quote, racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented among adults aged 65 and older. Therefore, the elderly should not be a top priority."

He continued, "In other words, it's entirely racial. They're making the decision based on race. Kathleen Dooling's presentation concluded that doling out life-saving medicine on the basis of skin color would quote mitigate health inequities. Of course, it would kill people, and she effectively concedes that. But the people who would kill come from a disfavored race, so it's not a big deal. It's been a very long time since anyone close to what we would consider the mainstream has endorsed eugenics that's exactly what that is — it's eugenics."

https://twitter.com/NikkiMcR/status/1340103950763253762

Media Matters writer Parker Molloy pointed out that Carlson has effectively made Dooling a target for harassment and death threats following his misrepresentation.

Democratic California Representative Eric Swalwell commented on Carlson's falsehoods by asking, "How many people did Tucker Carlson try and kill tonight?"

https://twitter.com/RepSwalwell/status/1340113381450264578


Atlantic science writer Ed Yong pointed out that people of color younger than age 65 are disproportionately dying from COVID-19 at higher rates, which explains why the CDC would want to inoculate them.

https://twitter.com/edyong209/status/1340077357839822848

MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes pointed out that Fox News is owned by Rupert Murdoch who himself received a COVID vaccine this week.

https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1340143861377748996


As Carlson peddles these dangerous distortions, anti-vaxxers are flooding Facebook and YouTube with videos training people how to refuse inoculations.

President-elect Joe Biden has said he won't make vaccines mandatory nationwide, although employers and states may require people to get vaccinated before allowing them back into workplaces, schools and colleges, USA Today reports.

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WHEN FACISM COMES TO AMERIKA

It has been said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

Becker1999 from Grove City, OH

Kirk Swearingen Kirk and Salon 

December 20, 2020

It has been said that when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.

This well-known line has been attributed to a number of people — most often to novelist Sinclair Lewis, but also to socialist leader Eugene V. Debs and even to populist Louisiana senator Huey Long — but none of them wrote or said it in precisely the way it has come down to us. It appears to be an aphoristic stone nicely polished by being handled by a lot of people.




To have it reflect our current situation, we need to roughen it up.

When Donald J. Trump was running for president in 2016, Lewis's novel "It Can't Happen Here," written quickly in 1935 as authoritarian leaders were rising in Europe, started to sell out. In it, populist demagogue "Buzz" Windrip, a Democrat (i.e., a pre-Civil Rights Act Democrat, who would be a Republican today), wins the presidency. As Beverly Gage describes it in a 2017 essay for the New York Times, Windrip — who was based on both Long and the anti-Semitic radio priest Father Coughlin — is not exactly Trump, but he's right "there" in a number of respects:

Trump, a man who received five deferments from military service, seems to think the Stars and Stripes is a great-looking lady he can molest. ("I don't even wait!") I suspect he is less handsy with the gal he clearly respects more, the good old Stars and Bars.


Oh, I forgot the tear gas and rubber bullets. So, we append further:

When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters.

OK, that's getting too long. But now, naturally, I'm remembering the time fascism was hiding in his bunker (no, not in 1945 Berlin — the more recent time, in Washington). No harm in trying it out, right?

When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.


But it just becomes less elegant, more ungainly — and so less memorable. There is so much one could add, beyond hiding in that bunker — incessantly watching "Fox & Friends," tweeting instead of working, lying like breathing — that the mind refuses to latch on to anything. There is no substance, just chaos.

Speaking of chaos, Trump and his gang of enablers have always reminded me of the year I spent in a fraternity. Somewhat to my surprise, I was elected pledge class president, and after a tumultuous year I tried my best to get a dozen young men through the seriously stupid, often dangerous and generally unhinged hazing of Hell Week, so they could, at last, become active members.

I don't care whether they were ever actually in a fraternity or not, but people like Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan and their boisterous, under-thinking ilk — really, nearly all of the Republicans in Congress — are precisely like a bunch of entitled and semi-educated frat boys who are simply used to getting their way. They insist on it, as toddlers will do. Donald Trump is the president of this house, which has to be Delta Iota Kappa, yes, the proud DIK House. To parrot a favorite Trumpian phrase, as everyone knows, those DIKs should have long ago been kicked off campus and had their charter revoked.

OK, now I have to get the frat-boy concept in. It naturally rides with the golf cart, and it expresses so much—about white privilege, about entitlement, about binge drinking and barfing and "boofing" and generally being obstreperous and having one's way with "the babes" — one way or another. (Ask Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh if you need explanation of any of that.)



When fascism comes to America, it will be sexually assaulting the flag, carrying a Bible upside down, riding in a golf cart with various frat-boy buddies, and enjoying the fact that tear gas and rubber bullets are in use against peaceful protesters — and then scurrying away to hide in a bunker.

Oh, and crying about being a victim and about people not liking him. Well, the phrase is already unwieldy enough and even I've grown weary of it.

I know some of you would quibble with my calling this fascism. You might call this neo-fascism or proto-fascism. But I'm too exhausted at this point to look those up. Call it über-fascism or Kentucky Fried fascism or Adderall fascism, or whatever else you'd like.

Of course none of this is funny. Well, maybe it's mordantly humorous, the way you might laugh involuntarily as unmarked militarized police started shooting rubber bullets your way during a peaceful protest in the United States of America.


Though thwarted to date, the Republican assault on the votes of more than 81 million citizens continues. Eighteen 18 Republican state attorneys general, 126 Republican members of Congress, and a bunch of dead-silent Republican senators have proven themselves more than happy to go along with it. So much for their fervent belief in states' rights, and that thing called the Constitution.

And, yes, for the past number of years all journalists writing op-eds about the dangers of putting the grandson of a man named Drumpf in charge of anything are a bunch of Sinclair Lewis' Doremus Jessups, trying desperately to fight a tyrant with a mere pen. One does what one must.

It's an extended Hell Week in America, at least until this guy is out of office. So you better bone up on that Greek alphabet and be ready to "drop trou" (ask Brett about that one, too). Listen up, plebes, they want you to come out on the other end as active members of something bigly, something terrific — something that's definitely not a democracy.

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How Dan Brown turned my parents into QAnoners

Adam Lewental and Salon December 20, 2020


If you haven't heard of the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon by now, perhaps it's irresponsible of me to tell you about it. Essentially, a member of a sketchy Internet forum alleged that he is a high level government official with secret information about a satanic cult run by Democrat pedophiles and their sex-trafficking associates. It's the same old antisemitic dogwhistle all over again, but with a fun new twist: President Donald Trump has surreptitiously dedicated his career, not to shady business practices, but to taking them down. And you can help him, if you can find and figure out the unspecified clues, such as the "strategic" spelling errors in the President's tweets (covfefe!). Despite being widely regarded by experts and intelligence officials as at best baseless and at worst a source of domestic terror, the QAnon movement continues to accrue members at an alarming rate. A recent article stated that roughly one-third of Republicans who had heard of QAnon believe it has merit.

How can so many disregard the clear and obvious facts printed in mainstream media in order to believe in an improbably vast conspiracy? For the same reasons that they fell in love with "The Da Vinci Code" 17 years ago. A palace intrigue of epic proportions. Codes and puzzles hidden in plain sight, with a a mysterious man acting as the augur. A shadowy organization involved in dark rituals with global stakes. And you, reader, are breathlessly tasked with solving the riddle in real time, using the clues, your natural intuition, and perhaps your internet search engine of choice.


When "The Da Vinci Code" was published in 2003, it f**king blew my 13-year-old mind. I was dazzled by Dan Brown's ability to create elaborate, heart-racing puzzles that were self-contained and yet felt like they reframed the world around me. Dan Brown also pioneered short chapters and constant cliffhangers, analogous to the techniques later used by social media companies to hopelessly addict us all (endless scrolling, intentionally delayed notifications, etc.).

Beyond that, Dan Brown asked plausible questions about familiar aspects of Western culture. Take, for instance, the lady on the iconic cover: I dare you to name a more renowned painting than the Mona Lisa. With a few pieces of obscure trivia or alleged historical interpretations, he could make compelling arguments that "things aren't always what they seem," especially when it comes to Catholicism. This struck me hard: a teenage boy trying to reconcile my own lack of faith within a pervasively theistic culture, as well as a burgeoning alienation from a power structure that seemed so self-serving. As my fiancée put it, "I think . . . I think Dan Brown taught me critical thinking."

And Dan Brown was successful by any given metric. "The Da Vinci Code" received a glowing review in the New York Times, sold 80 million copies worldwide (outsold that year only by "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"), and launched an immensely lucrative film franchise. Dan Brown himself earned spots in the Times 100 Most Influential People and Forbes Celebrity 100. The book exceeded traditional notions of literary success in a way that few do. You can probably find a copy of an "unauthorized guide" to "The Da Vinci Code" on all of your parents' bookshelves, with a title along the lines of "Decoding Da Vinci" or "Secrets of the Code" (I found two!). In fact, it's hard to think of a book that necessitates a compulsory explainer companion book outside of Ulysses, widely lauded as the best book of the century. "

This is why I was shocked to find upon revisiting the book as an adult that it is absolute, unadulterated trash. Just really poor, from top to bottom. Let's start with the basics: the actual quality of the writing. Not plot (we'll get there), the words themselves.
"The Knights Templar were warriors," Teabing reminded, the sound of his aluminum crutches echoing in this reverberant space.

Teabing reminded . . . Teabing reminded who? REMINDED WHO? Who is he reminding in this space that is so reverberant, it has echoes?

I am not the first to point out what a clumsy, awful writer that Dan Brown is. I am just maybe the last and most surprised to realize it. Unsophisticated 13-year-old me did not notice. I didn't have a frame of reference. I had not read the Pulitzer Prize winner that year (Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex"), or maybe from any year. I had not even read other less literary, but nonetheless well-regarded books published that year, like "The Kite Runner," "The Time Traveler's Wife," and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Maybe the book that I missed that year that would've been the most useful to reassessing my opinion of "The Da Vinci Code" was Lynn Truss's humorous take on grammar, "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves."

Reading the book as an adult, I couldn't wrap my mind around the success of the book. Presumably, many of the adults who kept "Da Vinci Code" a bestseller for 20 weeks in 2003 and well into 2004 had read some of these books, or really any book not for sale at the supermarket, and decided to look past the truly awful quality of the writing because of . . . the plotting?

Let me remind ("He reminded…") anyone who hasn't picked the book up in several decades, the plot is . . . also bad. Spoilers ahead. An art curator is murdered in the Louvre. With his dying breath, he leaves a long, long trail of clues to lead his granddaughter to her long-lost grandmother in order to find out *gasp* that she's a descendent of Jesus Christ and that her grandfather and his freaky sex cult have been hiding her! Robert Langdon, our everyman hero, but also an expert in . . . symbols . . . is enlisted to solve the "historical" and "challenging" riddles along the way. For instance, Langdon determines that the code to open the first safe is . . . the granddaughter's first name! Revealing that inside that safe is a slightly smaller safe. Riveting.

This isn't a knock on Dan Brown, or at least this isn't his greatest fault. He built a clumsy labyrinth based on half-heard conspiracy theories, well known hoaxes, and misunderstood speculation that came up in his most cursory of research to form the basis for a very modest pulpy thriller. He initially described the book as just "an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate." Many authors have made more money doing less.

What confused me is how "The Da Vinci Code" became a cultural phenomenon in its own right, even transcending Dan Brown himself. Take "Harry Potter," for instance. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a primer on traditional English magic practices with any of your friends' copies of "Harry Potter." Of course "Harry Potter" spun up a cottage industry of its own, but these were all dedicated to the world J.K. Rowling built, not the one she referenced. If "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" didn't feature the guy's name in the title (and a very liberal writing credit to J.K.), there would have been as much interest in it as in any "Harry Potter" fan fiction, which is to say, marginal and within a very specific community of "Harry Potter" fans. Yet the lowercase "Da Vinci code" became a standalone icon – the very idea that the art and institutions around us are filled with clues that have secret meanings (look at the eye on the dollar bill!). Dan Brown was just a cipher. He revealed that everything was connected, from Leonardo da Vinci to Isaac Newton to Jesus Christ (to the Illuminati, *gasp*, in the prequel), in a huge global conspiracy that is actively being covered up by the Catholic Church.

This idea was so pervasive that it overshadowed any attempts at objectivity. It didn't matter that "The Da Vinci Code" was actually Dan Brown's fourth book (not including the Boomer humor marriage books he wrote with his ex-wife), with themes generally including conspiracies, shadowy organizations, assassins, and sometimes aliens. It didn't matter that Dan Brown had none of the qualifications of his surrogate, Harvard University professor of "symbology," and had in fact been making children's music prior to his big success. It didn't matter that expert after expert chimed in, disputing every element of Christianity, art, history, and even some very easily verifiable geography. We still bought into the idea that Dan Brown's book revealed some sort of truth.

It appears that there were two drivers at work here: the first was great marketing. Dan Brown wrote "The Da Vinci Code" on the basis of some interesting idea he'd maybe heard or read in a conspiracy book that fit neatly within whatever thriller plot was already boiling in his brain. It's nothing more than what Michael Crichton has done dozens of times (although "Jurassic Park" was more likely to lead a younger reader into a STEM career than to spark a manhunt for the secret lab where scientists are cloning dinosaurs). At some point during the burgeoning success of the book, however, the marketing team at the publisher decided it would be more lucrative to lean into the demonstrably false idea that maybe, just maybe the tiniest amount of actual research had gone into validating any of the "historical" elements underlying the plot. I think this probably resonated with Dan Brown himself, who now started telling reporters that "the background [of the book] is all true," including all the secret societies and rituals, and that "The Da Vinci Code" could nearly stand alone as a piece of nonfiction.


The second element that catapulted "The Da Vinci Code" was the advent of Google. By 2003, the internet had made its way into the majority of American homes, and I would imagine that a Venn diagram of "The Da Vinci Code" readers crossed with internet users had very little space outside of the union. Additionally, by 2003 Google was quickly becoming "the internet," with 200 million searches conducted every day by the time of its highly anticipated IPO in 2004. Google transformed our relationship with the published word. What was once the domain of research experts was now public domain. Anyone could investigate any topic to their heart's content. Simultaneously, what had once needed to pass through layers of gatekeeping (editors, publishers, etc.) could now be posted for millions to read with the click of a button. Due to the workings of mysterious algorithms, that self-published diatribe may be presented on the front page of Google search results, alongside other works of known and unknown repute. Not only was it hard to tell the difference, but older generations coming to the internet didn't have the learned skepticism of my generation, who were constantly reminded that Wikipedia was not a reliable source. And so Joe Public gained the resources of the experts without the critical eye and training.

The reader no longer needed to rely on the experts to determine whether the book was a gimmick (and maybe couldn't trust the experts either, if the conspiracies are correct!). The reader could go to Google and find articles of undetermined quality and unverified accuracy in order to form their own opinion. The ultimate genius of "The Da Vinci Code" wasn't in its bad writing or its poor plotting; it was in the book's ability to allow the reader to LARP being an investigator and religious scholar to uncover arcane knowledge that "they" don't want you to know. This intent was further evidenced by the Internet forum ready codes and puzzles hidden within the book dust jacket itself, and was further validated by the Google-led cross-promotional "WebQuest" advertising campaign designed for the movie.

The QAnon phenomen has frequently been referenced as a bad Dan Brown plot. In fact, it is more than that; it is exactly a Dan Brown plot, where dumb and obvious codes are meant to mimic intellectualism. Like "The Da Vinci Code" readers, QAnoners don't want to feel like they're being told what to believe, especially not by a media that would have to be complicit for the conspiracy to be true in the first place. Instead, they use the critical thinking espoused by Dan Brown, which is that veracity can be defined by the existence and confirmation of sources, rather than the credibility of sources. This time, our parents aren't going to Google to sleuth for political sex cults, at least not initially. They're finding their information on Twitter and Facebook, the modern bastions for fantasy "confirmation bias" bait that corroborates what they already know, which is that conspiracies can be found if you're "woke" to them and "savvy" enough to disregard obvious truths. By the time their heart-racing hunt leads to Google, it doesn't matter that they're only finding references within references to since deleted forum posts or Alex Jones videos about lizard people, they've already gotten the dopamine rush of being in the know, of solving the challenging, obscure puzzle.

Unfortunately, the stakes are now quite larger than a book series outperforming the skill of its writer. A person who is just mildly receptive to the QAnon ideology may find themselves disillusioned with their inability to reconcile fact and fiction, leaving them further exposed to dishonest charges of "fake news" and unable to trust any subject matter expert who has dedicated their career to approaching as closely as possible to an objective truth. Whereas a QAnon enthusiast may become further entrenched in a destructive fantasy far removed from any shared reality, a vicious cycle that alienates them from anyone with an opposing viewpoint.

I am by no means suggesting that Dan Brown is exclusively responsible for problems inherent to the Age of Misinformation. However, the parallels between "The Da Vinci Code" and QAnon are hard to overlook. It's high past time, looking at my collector's edition Mickey Mouse wristwatch that had been a gift from my parents on my tenth birthday (as mentioned every 10 pages of "The Da Vinci Code"), for Dan Brown to make a statement.

ALSO HIS BOOKS CONTAIN CHAPTERS THAT ARE EXACTLY 2.5 PAGES LONG 

THAT IS NOT A CHAPTER THAT IS A TOC

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NOT GOOD FOR TOURISM

North Korea publicly executes fishing boat captain for listening to foreign radio

Fishermen going out in their boats from Mount Kumgang port in North Korea. File/ AFP

Gulf Today Report

In a tragic incident, a captain of a fishing boat has been executed publicly in North Korea for listening to foreign radio broadcast.

Radio Free Asia (RFA) brought the incident to light.

The man was believed to be in his 40s.

According to a section of a media, the execution happened in front of 100 other captains and fishing executives to instill fear among them that defying the authorities would result in such consequences.

The captain, whose name was not available, served in the military.

North Korean fishermen haul in their net near the port of Yanghwa. File/ AFP

He developed the habit of listening to foreign broadcast while at sea.

Sources associated with the case said that the captain once admitted to have been listening to US government media outlet for over 15 years.

An angry member of the company spread the information about his deeds to authorities.

The mariner was part of the North Korea President Kim Jong Un’s fishing team.

 

Kim Jong-un. GANGSTA

Kim had asked fishermen to increase their daily catch to fight off international sanctions.

Radio Free Asia Korean said on its Facebook page, “It is known that the captain of the North Korea's hamgyeongbuk-do Cheongjin city has been shot by the charges of listening to free Asia broadcasting over a long term.”

The captain was leading a fleet of 50 ships.

He confessed during internal investigation of listening to foreign radio broadcast for 15 years.

North Korea takes bizarre steps to bar its population from accessing information from outside world.

Violators are treated with strict punishment.