Update (Tuesday):

After canceling almost 3,000 flights on Monday, Southwest Airlines Co. canceled thousands more on Tuesday due to adverse weather conditions and inadequate staffing. 

Late Monday night, Chief Executive Officer Bob Jordan spoke with WSJ, who said, “In all likelihood, we’ll have another tough day tomorrow as we work our way out of this.” He added: “This is the largest-scale event that I’ve ever seen.” 

Flight tracker FlightAware shows as of early Tuesday morning, the Dallas-based carrier canceled 2,510 flights, accounting for 62% of its schedule today. 

Southwest released a statement about the continued travel chaos:

“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our Customers and Employees in a significant way that is unacceptable.”

Southwest’s cancellations prompted the US Department of Transportation to review. The agency was concerned about the airline’s “unacceptable” rate of cancellations, delays, and lack of customer service. 

USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service. The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.

— TransportationGov (@USDOT) December 27, 2022

Shares of Southwest fell 3.5% in US premarket trading to $34.81 on the continuation of flight cancelations which may extend through Wednesday. 

*   *   *

Southwest Airlines Co. canceled nearly 3,000 flights on Monday as a historic winter storm and inadequate staffing made for a perfect storm of holiday chaos the day after Christmas. 

As of 9 PM on Monday, Southwest had canceled 2,882 flights – or 70% of its schedule, according to flightaware.com. Overall, 82% of Southwest flights were either canceled or delayed. By airport, Denver International saw 24% of flights canceled, while 29% were delayed.

Tomorrow is also slated to be a total mess, with over 2,400 Tuesday flights canceled.

Is it time for @USDOT to require Southwest the ability to rebook on other airlines during IROPS?

— Ross Feinstein (@RossFeinstein) December 27, 2022

“Yikes, @SouthwestAir! This is clearly a meltdown,” tweeted former TSA official Ross Feinstein, who’s been monitoring the situation.

.@SouthwestAir has now canceled 60% of their operation tomorrow, Dec. 27.

Today, Dec. 26, they have canceled 70% of their operation, and that number is increasing. https://t.co/TLaJRmE2NU

— Ross Feinstein (@RossFeinstein) December 27, 2022

@cbschicago @nbcchicago @ABC7Chicago @fox32news What is happening with Southwest at MDW? Cancelled flights for no flight staff, no customer service, exorbitant wait times on hold, people stranded, how are people getting their baggage from cancelled flights? Insanity. pic.twitter.com/KVPiIIFy9x

— Mary Harlow (@HarlowCRNA) December 26, 2022

A Southwest official, Chris Perry, told NPR that the disruptions are a result of the ongoing winter storm, and that the company “stabilize and improve its operation” as the weather improves.

From Houston, Texas, and Tampa, Fla., to Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colo., passengers are sharing photos and video of overwhelmed baggage claim areas and long lines at reservation counters. At Southwest, the customer service phone line’s hold times averaged more than two hours, sometimes reaching four hours, according to Colorado Public Radio. -NPR

“I’m okay with these travel situations and fly on by myself when it’s just me, but when my one-year-old has to suffer through it because of ineptitude and mismanagement, that becomes personal,” said Southwest passenger Joshua Caudle, adding “I’m never going to do this with that company again.”

James Baker, a #Southwest passenger, was flying from Sacramento to Buffalo for Christmas. His Buffalo flight ended up being canceled. Now he’s trying to get back home, but has been stuck in Denver for days. @DenverChannel pic.twitter.com/8a9RIE85uD

— Brandon Richard (@BrandonLRichard) December 26, 2022

Big mess at BWI this morning. Over 100 flights cancelled so far this morning. People have been waiting in line at the Southwest ticketing counter for hours. Some people tell me they’ve waited since 2:30 this morning. People are sleeping all over the airport. @wbaltv11 pic.twitter.com/DPiIOdWwJG

— Breana Ross (@breanarossWBAL) December 26, 2022

Other problems include “connecting flight crews to their schedules,” according to Perry, who said this has made it difficult for employees to participate in crew scheduling services and get reassignments.

A Southwest passenger who says she was attempting to fly from Missouri to Denver said she missed spending Christmas with her family after several delays and cancellations to flights out of the Kansas City International Airport. Despite her being grounded, her luggage was sent to Denver without her, she wrote on Twitter. -NPR

“This is really as bad as it gets for an airline,” said Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, calling it a “full-blown meltdown.”

“We’ve seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle, especially after a storm, but there’s pretty clear skies across the country.”

Southwest Airlines Disaster

Houston Hobby Airport

12/25@SouthwestAir #SouthwestAirlines #Southwest #southweststolechristmas #Houston pic.twitter.com/iO6ummEi6P

— JT (@jtmma567) December 26, 2022

Still stranded at the Vegas airport (24+ hrs, multiple canceled flights) This is the @SouthwestAir rebooking line. It wraps around and then goes all the way to the end of the room. It also doesn’t move #Southwest #southweststolechristmas #southwestAir pic.twitter.com/OmCCuqLRn9

— Evan Knupp (@EvanKnupp) December 26, 2022

Two months after terminating its sneaker partnership with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, German sportswear company Adidas has been holding the bag of more than a half billion dollars worth of Yeezys, a new report from the Financial Times revealed. 

Current and former executives confirmed unsold Yeezy shoes in Adidas warehouses are worth $530 million in potential revenue. They said Adidas is trying to find ways to sell the shoes under its own brand to avoid a massive impairment charge. 

Adidas severed ties with Ye on Oct. 25, citing the rapper’s antisemitic comments that got him booted from multiple social media platforms. Corporate America also canceled Ye, including  JPMorgan, the fashion magazine Vogue, the luxury fashion brand Balenciaga, talent agency CAA, and studio MRC. 

FT pointed out that Adidas execs were worried for years that the sportswear company was overly reliant on the Yeezy brand. Last year Ye’s brand contributed an estimated $1.8 billion in annual revenue for the company, about 7% of total revenue. 

One research analyst said Adidas never told investors “how big it [Yeezy brand] was and how important it was to growth … they didn’t want to highlight how reliant they’ve become on the brand.” 

Even before Ye’s departure, Adidas sounded the alarm in early October about profits. It was the second time the company mentioned profit warnings since July. Waning consumer demand in China and western markets has led to an abundance of inventory piling up at the company’s warehouses. 

Shares in Adidas, trading in Germany, are down 60% since the peak in mid-summer 2021. 

Adidas better get cracking at building a new portfolio of influencers to sell all that inventory. 

Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

Japan plans on beginning the extraction of rare earth metals from the region around Minamitorishima Island in 2024 as the country attempts to wean away from depending on China for critical resources.

Work on developing extraction technologies for the endeavor will begin next year. The rare earth-rich mud is located on a seafloor at a depth of 6,000 meters. As such, Tokyo has to first develop technologies to extract at such depths. Deep-sea mining faces several technical hurdles. Unlike oil and gas which gush out from a hole, mud needs to be taken out using methods like pumping.

Rare earths refer to 17 rare metals essential in modern components like semiconductors, electric motors, solar panels, etc. At present, Japan imports almost all its rare metals, with China accounting for 60 percent of the supply.

“Japan will curb excessive dependence on specific countries, carry forward next-generation semiconductor development and manufacturing bases, and secure stable supply for critical goods, including rare earths,” Japan’s most recent National Security Strategy states, according to Nikkei Asia.

Between August and September, researchers succeeded in pumping out mud deposits from a depth of 2,470 meters. In its second supplementary budget for fiscal 2022, the Japanese national legislature approved 6 billion yen ($44 million) for research and development into extracting rare earths.

Rare Earths in Japan

Mud that is rich in rare earth elements and yttrium (REY) has several advantages like “high rare earth element content (especially the heavy rare-earth elements [HREE] from Eu to Lu), huge amounts, a paucity of radioactive elements (U and Th), and easy extraction and recovery. Therefore, the mud is expected to be viewed as a highly promising new mineral resource,” states a 2018 study published in Nature.

Eu refers to Europium, Lu to Lutetium, U to Uranium, and Th to Thorium. In 2013, REY-rich mud with deep-sea sediments containing 2,000 parts per million (ppm) to over 5,000 ppm was found in the Japanese Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) around Minamitorishima Island.

The team calculated the REY content for the region to be in excess of 16 million tons of rare earth oxides and believes the area has the potential to supply certain rare earths on a “semi-infinite basis” to the world.

The region is estimated to be capable of supplying Yttrium for 780 years, Europium for 620 years, Terbium for 420 years, and Dysprosium for 730 years, the authors said.

US Move

Japan’s push to cut back dependence on China for the supply of rare earths is a policy that is also being pursued by Washington. The U.S. Department of Defense is taking steps to make sure that American defense firms are decoupled from China as much as possible.

In September, the Pentagon halted deliveries of fifth-generation F-35 jets once it came to light that a magnet used in the aircraft was made from an alloy of samarium and cobalt with origins in China.

A month after the jets were put on hold, a defense official signed a waiver to resume deliveries. The Chinese state-run media outlet Global Times called the waiver proof of America’s dependence on Chinese rare earth products, and validation that Beijing can bring the U.S. military to heel by limiting the export of such resources.

Meanwhile, attempts are ongoing to create rare earth metal alternatives to bypass Chinese control over the elements. In October, it was reported that scientists from the University of Cambridge, along with their colleagues from Austria, discovered a method to make magnets without the use of rare earths.

The cold blast this holiday weekend across the eastern half of the US exposed the fragility of power grids as soaring heating demand spiked peak total loads to record high in many areas while supplies were tight. Grid operators and utilities told tens of millions of Americans to conserve power — some conservation efforts are still ongoing Christmas morning. Christmas Eve was a mess for many customers in the Southeast states, including North Carolina and Tennessee, as utilities implemented rolling blackouts. 

Fossil fuels and nuclear power generation mix across the eastern US saved grids from collapse. Unreliable renewables, such as solar and wind, were just a tiny fraction of the power mix. 

What’s idiotic is the decarbonization campaign to decommission nuclear and fossil fuel generators for renewables. This weekend’s grid chaos is a wake-up call. America has a severe grid problem sparked by the ‘green’ movement. Thank the climate alarmist, woke corporations, and progressive politicians for ushering in so-called green reforms that have transformed once-stable grids into a third-world country prone to rolling blackouts anytime temperatures fall below freezing. 

Readers have been well informed of our view that advanced nuclear reactors will play a critical role in decarbonizing electricity in the US by providing carbon-free energy, and it is a much better form than solar and wind assets. 

Perhaps forward-thinking utilities will wise up and even warm up to next-generation nuclear reactors for power generation. 

One such design is for a sea-based nuclear reactor that is transportable and can be connected to grids at a moment’s notice. 

Canada’s Prodigy Clean Energy and America’s NuScale recently released a conceptual design for the transportable and sea-based small modular reactor (SMR), which “can generate safe, affordable, and reliable electricity at grid-scale at any coastal location worldwide,” with the design to be used “for engagement with utilities, regulators, and shipyard manufacturers.”

This means a portable and sea-based nuclear power plant that is considered “safe” will connect to shore-based power grids to increase power capacity. 

“Utilisation of a transportable marine facility will enable us to deploy the NuScale Power Module at more locations around the world,” John Hopkins, NuScale Power President and CEO, wrote in a statement.

Instead of grids waiting 5-7 years or more to construct a new nuclear power plant — the SMR is a ‘plug and play’ access to electricity and heat supply for grids. 

Similar technology is already in use in Russia. The world’s first floating nuclear power plant was commissioned in Pevek, Chukotka region in the Russian Far East in 2020. 

Floating nuclear power plants could be the answer to plugging the energy gap on grids after progressives have been hellbent on decarbonizing fossil fuel generators. Capacity needs to increase as electric vehicles on highways are steadily increasing. If not, Americans should get used to rolling blackouts.  

The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide has hit a new record at 533, according to an annual report by press fredom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders.

The total number is up from 2021, when 488 journalists were imprisoned, according to the RSF’s Annual Press Freedom Review published last week.

“More than a quarter of them were imprisoned during the year,” according to the Paris-based watchdog which has kept records on imprisoned reporters since 1995.

More than half of those jailed are in five countries; China (110), Myanmar (62), Iran (47) Vietnam (39) and Belarus (31) – with 32 of the 47 in Iran having been arrested since protests broke out in September over the death of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in police custody while breaching the country’s strict dress code.

Of the imprisoned, just over 1/3 have actually been convicted of a crime, while the remaining 2/3 are being held without trial.

“Some of them have been waiting for their trial for more than 20 years,” said the RSF.

In Myanmar, to be a journalist is “effectively a criminal offense” since the 2021 military coup, which led to the roundup and imprisonment of 62 journalists.

“Dictatorial and authoritarian regimes are filling their prisons faster than ever by jailing journalists,” said RSF secretary-general, Christophe Deloire in a statment.

What’s more, in the past two years, 57 journalists have been killed – eight reporting on the war in Ukraine, and five of them from non-combatant countries.

According to the RSF, almost 80% of media professionals killed around the world were “deliberately targeted in connection with their work or the stories they were covering,” such as coverage of corruption or organized crime, Quatari government-owned Al Jazeera reports.

The number of female journalists in prison is also at an all-time high worldwide, rising from 60 to 78 since 2021, largely due to greater numbers entering the profession.

The NGO awarded its Prize for Courage on Monday to Iranian journalist Narges Mohammadi, who has been repeatedly imprisoned over the past decade.

Three-quarters of jailed journalists are concentrated in Asia and the Middle East, said the RSF.

According to Deloire, the new record “confirms the pressing and urgent need to resist these unscrupulous governments and to extend our active solidarity to all those who embody the ideal of journalistic freedom, independence and pluralism.”

Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,

Germany is returning to coal as it faces its worst energy crisis in decades, even as it officially pursues its climate change goals.

The central European nation is consuming coal at the fastest pace in almost six years, as it becomes one of the few countries to increase imports of the fuel in 2023, reported Bloomberg.

One of the oldest and cheapest sources of energy, coal, has made a comeback after soaring energy costs worldwide, particularly in Europe, which is suffering from an acute economic crisis due to declining relations with Moscow.

A few coal plants were temporarily reactivated in Europe this year because of gas shortages after being closed or mothballed to weather the current energy crisis.

Global coal consumption hit a record high of over 8 billion tonnes this year, said the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Despite the spike in coal use in the European Union, carbon emissions for November were at their lowest in 30 years, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Germany Faces Severe Energy Crisis

Germany’s Green Party and the coalition government in Berlin, which it is part of, planned on phasing out coal by 2038 but is now pushing for an earlier target of 2030.

However, the Russian war with Ukraine and the ensuing loss of the majority of Europe’s natural gas supplies have led to a revival of the venerable fossil fuel.

Europe’s largest economy is attempting to balance the short-term priority of boosting its energy security while keeping with its long-term “net-zero emissions” goals.

Steam gushes out of the cooling tower of the Isar 2 nuclear power plant in Essenbach, Germany, on Sept. 13, 2022. (Jan Woitas/dpa via AP)

Approximately 36.3 percent of the electricity on the German power grid between July and September of this year came from coal-fired power plants, up from 31.9 percent in the third quarter of 2021, according to German statistics office Destatis.

The German statistics agency reported that coal-to-power generation output rose by 13.3 percent year over year to 42.9 TWh in the same period, while overall German power output, at 118.1 TWh during that time by 0.5 percent.

The IEA said that Germany saw the highest rise in coal consumption, with a rise of 19 percent, or 26 million tonnes, over last year.

Meanwhile, energy from natural gas rose slightly in Germany, despite the higher prices, while wind and hydro output were low.

Berlin Delays Shutting Down Nuclear And Coal

Domestic nuclear output fell during the third quarter after Germany reduced the number of its active reactors to three from six a year earlier due to Berlin’s decision to phase out the technology following the Fukushima disaster.

Back in October, Chancellor Olaf Scholz overruled his coalition by keeping the three remaining nuclear plants online until, at the latest, mid-April 2023.

“Only in Germany, with 10 gigawatts, is the reversal at a significant scale. This has increased coal power generation in the European Union, which is expected to remain at these higher levels for some time,” according to the IEA’s annual coal market report on Dec. 16.

Due to maintenance problems at French nuclear power plants, Germany has become, for the first time this year, a net exporter of electricity to France, said Destatis.

Nuclear reactor capacity in France is now at about 68 percent, from 50 percent last month, according to Bloomberg.

The IEA said that as French nuclear output recovers and electrical production from renewable energy in Germany increases, the country would likely return to being a net energy importer within a few years.

However, the German government had issued a waiver to keep open 1.6 GW of lignite-fired power plants through March 2024, instead of closing them by the end of 2022 as planned, Reuters reported.

The decommissioning of 2.6 GW of hard coal and 1.2 GW of lignite power plants in Germany have now been postponed.

Berlin has also created a “gas replacement reserve” with a total capacity of 11.6 GW, including 1.9 GW of lignite and 4.3 GW of hard coal power plants which will remain online until 2024, according to the IEA report.

“The coal phase-out ideally by 2030 is not in question,” a spokeswoman for the German Economy Ministry said in a statement to Bloomberg.

“Against the backdrop of the crisis situation, the most important thing is that we have apparently succeeded in consuming significantly less energy in 2022, especially natural gas.”

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

Bolsonaro reduced Brazil to resources-exporter status; now Lula should follow Argentina’s lead into Belt and Road…

Ten days of full immersion in Brazil are not for the faint-hearted. Even restricted to the top two megalopolises, Sao Paulo and Rio, watching live the impact of interlocking economic, political, social and environmental crises exacerbated by the Jair Bolsonaro project leaves one stunned.

The return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for what will be his third presidential term, starting January 1, 2023, is an extraordinary story trespassed by Sisyphean tasks. All at the same time he will have to

• fight poverty;

• reconnect with economic development while redistributing wealth;

• re-industrialize the nation; and

• tame environmental pillage.

That will force his new government to summon unforeseen creative powers of political and financial persuasion.

Even a mediocre, conservative politician such as Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of the wealthiest state of the union, Sao Paulo, and coordinator of the presidential transition, was simply astonished at how four years of the Bolsonaro project let loose a cornucopia of vanished documents, a black hole concerning all sorts of data and inexplicable financial losses.

It’s impossible to ascertain the extent of corruption across the spectrum because simply nothing is in the books: Governmental systems have not been fed since 2020.

Alckmin summed it all up: “The Bolsonaro government happened in the Stone Age, where there were no words and numbers.”

Now every single public policy will have to be created, or re-created from scratch, and serious mistakes will be inevitable because of lack of data.

And we’re not talking about a banana republic – even though the country concerned features plenty of (delicious) bananas.

By purchasing power parity (PPP), according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Brazil remains the eighth-ranked economic power in the world even after the Bolsonaro devastation years – behind China, the US, India, Japan, Germany, Russia and Indonesia, and ahead of the UK and France.

A concerted imperial campaign since 2010, duly denounced by WikiLeaks, and implemented by local comprador elites, targeted the Dilma Rousseff presidency – the Brazilian national entrepreneurial champions – and led to Rousseff’s (illegal) impeachment and the jailing of Lula for 580 days on spurious charges (all subsequently dropped), paved the way for Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.

Were it not for this accumulation of disasters, Brazil – a natural leader of the Global South – by now might possibly be placed as the fifth-largest geo-economic power in the world.

What the investment gang wants

Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr, a former vice-president of the New Development Bank (NDB), or BRICS bank, goes straight to the point: Brazil’s dependence on Lula is immensely problematic.

Batista sees Lula facing at least three hostile blocs.

• The extreme right supported by a significant, powerful faction of the armed forces – and this includes not only Bolsonarists, who are still in front of a few army barracks contesting the presidential election result;

• The physiological right that dominates Congress – known in Brazil as “The Big Center”;

• International financial capital – which, predictably, controls the bulk of mainstream media.

The third bloc, to a great extent, gleefully embraced Lula’s notion of a United Front capable of defeating the Bolsonaro project (which project, by the way, never ceased to be immensely profitable for the third bloc).

Now they want their cut. Mainstream media instantly turned to corralling Lula, operating a sort of “financial inquisition,” as described by crack economist Luiz Gonzaga Belluzzo.

By appointing longtime Workers’ Party loyalist Fernando Haddad as finance minister, Lula signaled that he, in fact, will be in charge of the economy. Haddad is a political-science professor and was a decent minister of education, but he’s no sharp economic guru. Acolytes of the Goddess of the Market, of course, dismiss him.

Once again, this is the trademark Lula swing in action: He chose to place more importance on what will be complex, protracted negotiations with a hostile Congress to advance his social agenda, confident that all the lineaments of economic policy are in his head.

A lunch party with some members of Sao Paulo’s financial elite, even before Haddad’s name was announced, offered a few fascinating clues. These people are known as the “Faria Limers” – after the high-toned Faria Lima Avenue, which houses quite a few post-mod investment banks’ offices as well as Google and Facebook HQs.

Faria Lima Avenue in San Paulo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Lunch attendees included a smattering of rabid anti-Workers’ Party investors, the proverbial unreconstructed neoliberals, yet most were enthusiastic about opportunities ahead to make a killing, including an investor looking for deals involving Chinese companies.

The neoliberal mantra of those willing – perhaps – to place their bets on Lula (for a price) is “fiscal responsibility.” That frontally clashes with Lula’s focus on social justice.

That’s where Haddad comes up as a helpful, polite interlocutor because he does privilege nuance, pointing out that only looking at market indicators and forgetting about the 38% of Brazilians who only earn the minimum wage (1,212 Brazilian real or US$233 per month) is not exactly good for business.

The dark arts of non-government

Lula is already winning his first battle: approving a constitutional amendment that allows financing of more social spending.

That allows the government to keep the flagship Bolsa Família welfare program – of roughly $13 a month per poverty-level family – at least for the next two years.

A stroll across downtown Sao Paulo – which in the 1960s was as chic as mid-Manhattan – offers a sorrowful crash course on impoverishment, shut-down businesses, homelessness and raging unemployment. The notorious “Crack Land” – once limited to a street – now encompasses a whole neighborhood, much like junkie, post-pandemic Los Angeles.

Rio offers a completely different vibe if one goes for a walk in Ipanema on a sunny day, always a smashing experience. But Ipanema lives in a bubble. The real Rio of the Bolsonaro years – economically massacred, de-industrialized, occupied by militias – came up in a roundtable downtown where I interacted with, among others, a former energy minister and the man who discovered the immensely valuable pre-salt oil reserves.

In the Q&A, a black man from a very poor community advanced the key challenge for Lula’s third term: To be stable, and able to govern, he has to have the vast poorest sectors of the population backing him up.

This man voiced what seems not to be debated in Brazil at all: How did there come to be millions of poor Bolsonarists – street cleaners, delivery guys, the unemployed? Right-wing populism seduced them – and the established wings of the woke left had, and still have, nothing to offer them.

Addressing this problem is as serious as the destruction of Brazilian  engineering giants by the Car Wash “corruption” racket. Brazil now has a huge number of well-qualified unemployed engineers. How come they have not amassed enough political organization to reclaim their jobs? Why should they resign themselves to becoming Uber drivers?

José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, the new head of the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), may carp about the region’s economic failure as even worse now than in the “lost decade” of the 1980s: Average annual economic growth in Latin America in the decade up to 2023 is set to be just 0.8%.

Yet what the UN is incapable of analyzing is how a plundering neoliberal regime such as Bolsonaro’s managed to “elevate” to unforeseen toxic levels the dark arts of little or no investment, low productivity and less than zero emphasis on education.

President Dilma in da house

Lula was quick to summarize Brazil’s new foreign policy – which will go totally multipolar, with emphasis on increasing Latin American integration, stronger ties across the Global South and a push to reform the UN Security Council (in sync with BRICS members Russia, China and India).

Mauro Vieira, an able diplomat, will be the new foreign minister. But the man fine-tuning Brazil on the world stage will be Celso Amorim, Lula’s former foreign minister from 2003 to 2010.

In a conference that reunited us in Sao Paulo, Amorim elaborated on the complexity of the world Lula is now inheriting, compared with 2003. Yet along with climate change the main priorities – achieving closer integration with South America, reviving Unasur (the Union of South American Nations) and re-approaching Africa – remain the same.

And then there’s the Holy Grail: “good relations with both the US and China.”

The Empire, predictably, will be on extreme close watch. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan dropped in to Brasilia, during the fist days of the World Cup soccer tournament, and was absolutely charmed by Lula, who’s a master of charisma. Yet the Monroe Doctrine always prevails. Lula getting closer and closer to BRICS – and the expanded BRICS+ – is considered virtual anathema in Washington.

Jake Sullivan and Lula in Brasilia on November 28. Photo: Ricardo Stuckert

So Lula will play most overtly in the environment arena. Covertly, it will be a sophisticated balancing act.

The combo behind US President Joe Biden called Lula to congratulate him soon after the election results. Sullivan was in Brasilia setting the stage for a Lula visit to Washington. Chinese President Xi Jinping for his part sent him an affectionate letter, emphasizing the “global strategic partnership” between Brazil and China. Russian President Vladimir Putin called Lula earlier this week – and emphasized their common strategic approach to BRICS.

China has been Brazil’s top trade partner since 2009, ahead of the US. Bilateral trade in 2021 hit $135 billion. The problem is lack of diversification and focus on low added value: iron ore, soybeans, raw crude and animal protein accounted for 87.4% of exports in 2021. China exports, on the other hand, are mostly high-tech manufactured products.

Brazil’s dependence on commodity exports has indeed contributed for years to its rising foreign reserves. But that implies high concentration of wealth, low taxes, low job creation and dependence on cyclical price oscillations.

There’s no question China is focused on Brazilian natural resources to fuel its new development push – or “peaceful modernization,” as established by the latest Party Congress.

But Lula will have to strive for a more equal trade balance in case he manages to restart the nation as a solid economy. In 2000, for instance, Brazil’s top export item was Embraer jets. Now, it’s iron ore and soybeans; yet another dire indicator of the ferocious de-industrialization operated by the Bolsonaro project.

China is already investing substantially in the Brazilian electric sector – mostly due to state companies being bought by Chinese companies. That was the case in 2017 of State Grid buying CPFL in Sao Paulo, for instance, which in turn bought a state company from southern Brazil in 2021.

From Lula’s point of view, that’s inadmissible: a classic case of privatization of strategic public assets.

A different scenario plays in neighboring Argentina. Buenos Aires in February became an official partner of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative, with at least $23 billion in new projects on the pipeline. The Argentine railway system will be upgraded by – who else? – Chinese companies, to the tune of $4.6 billion.

The Chinese will also be investing in the largest solar energy plant in Latin America, a hydroelectric plant in Patagonia, and a nuclear energy plant – complete with transfer of Chinese technology to the Argentine state.

Lula, beaming with invaluable soft power not only personally when it comes to Xi but also appealing to Chinese public opinion, can get similar strategic partnership deals, with even more amplitude. Brasilia may follow the Iranian partnership model – offering oil and gas in exchange for building critical infrastructure.

Inevitably, the golden path ahead will be via joint ventures, not mergers and acquisitions. No wonder many in Rio are already dreaming of high-speed rail linking it to Sao Paulo in just over an hour, instead of the current, congested highway journey of six hours (if you’re lucky).

A key role will be played by former president Dilma Rousseff, who had a long, leisurely lunch with a few of us in Sao Paulo, taking her time to recount, in minutiae, everything from the day she was officially arrested by the military dictatorship (January 16, 1970) to her off-the-record conversations with then-German chancellor Angela Merkel, Putin, and Xi.

President Dilma Rousseff during a bilateral meeting with the president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, at the G20 Saint Petersburg summit in 2013. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

It goes without saying that her political – and personal – capital with both Xi and Putin is stellar. Lula offered her any post she wanted in the new government. Although still a state secret, this will be part of a serious drive to polish Brazil’s global profile, especially across the Global South.

To recover from the previous, disastrous six years – which included a two-year no man’s land (2016-2018) after the impeachment of president Dilma – Brazil will need an unparalleled national drive of re-industrialization at virtually every level, complete with serious investment in research and development, training of specialized work forces and technology transfer.

There is a superpower that can play a crucial role in this process: China, Brazil’s close partner in the expanding BRICS+. Brazil is one of the natural leaders of the Global South, a role much prized by the Chinese leadership.

The key now is for both partners to establish a high-level strategic dialogue – all over again. Lula’s first high-profile foreign visit may be to Washington. But the destination that really matters, as we watch the river of history flow, will be Beijing.

Authored by Dorothy Li via The Epoch Times,

A professor at the University of Idaho filed a defamation lawsuit against a TikTok personality, who published dozens of videos linking the professor to the killing of four students at the campus last month, court documents show.

The deaths of the four University of Idaho students remain unsolved after their bodies were found in a three-story house near the campus on Nov. 13. Police said each victim was stabbed multiple times and some had defensive wounds. The authorities have made no arrest, nor did they identify a suspect in the case.

Ashley Guillard, a purported crime sleuth with over 108,000 followers on the short-video platform, published “many videos on TikTok falsely stating that Plaintiff Rebecca Scofield participated in the murders because she was romantically involved with one of the victims,” read the complaint filed on Dec. 21.

“Guillard’s statements are false. Professor Scofield did not participate in the murders, and she had never met any of the victims, let alone entered a romantic relationship with them,” according to the lawsuit filed in Idaho’s federal district court.

Guillard, who consults Tarot cards and other readings to obtain information about murders, made the accusation against the history professor on Nov. 22, the lawsuit alleges.

“I don’t care what y’all say …Rebecca Scofield killed [the four students] … REBECCA WAS THE ONE TO INITIATE THE PLAN…” Guillard wrote in a video on TikTok.

Scofield, an associate professor who served as the chair of the history department, “did not commit or in any way participate in the murders of the four students,” the complaint states.

Scofield was with her husband in Portland, Oregon, visiting friends during the time when the four students were killed, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit states that Scofield had never taught any of the victims.

“Although the University of Idaho is a relatively small university, she does not recall ever meeting any one of these students.”

The document added the professor had also never met Guillard before.

The TikTok app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken on July 13, 2021. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

Cease-and-Desist Letters and Response

According to the lawsuit, Scofield’s lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to Guillard on Nov. 29, stating Guillard’s claims were baseless and demanding her to take the videos down.

Yet Guillard didn’t stop posting videos. In a video published on Dec. 1, Guillard said, “I’m not worried about Rebecca Scofield suing me because she will be using her resources to fight four murder cases.”

“She ordered the execution,” Guillard added, according to the complaint.

On Dec. 8, Scofield’s second cease-and-desist letter was sent to Guillard, “again demanding that Guillard take down her defamatory posts and that Guillard stop making defamatory TikTok,” according to the complaint.

Guillard’s videos have been viewed “millions of times” and amplified her account “at the expense of Professor Scofield’s reputation,” the lawsuit said.

Guillard’s TikToks have caused the professor “significant emotional distress,” the lawsuit said. “She fears that Guillard’s false statements may motivate someone to cause harm to her or her family members.”

The professor’s lawsuit is seeking a trial by jury and compensatory and punitive damages.

Guillard responded to the lawsuits with more videos on the platform. In one video, Guillard wrote, “Rebeca Scofield will regret this lawsuit.” In another, she said, “I’m ON FIRE with excitement! SEE YOU IN COURT REBECCA SCOFIELD!!”

The Epoch Times has contacted Scofield’s lawyer and Guillard for comment.

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

Who watches the watchers?

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. 

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement.

“As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” 

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.” 

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda. 

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and “misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.

Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was. 

Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself. 

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his own involvement with the Russian collusion hoax. 

Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election. 

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.

Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified. 

While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on a number of occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:

As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ, and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.

 McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.

Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists. 

Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”  

Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints=—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes. 

The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution. 

Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s own admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.

Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information. 

The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year old-law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions. 

During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed. 

Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper. 

Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.

The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s own preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016. 

In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.” 

Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy” means of denying Trump the presidency: 

I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.

To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.” 

“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,”  Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.

What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, or mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence? 

What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?

The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption. 

Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.

Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI. 

There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau. 

The three reforms most commonly suggested include:

1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections;

2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or

3) break-up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas. 

The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes. 

The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax. 

Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics. 

We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

Authored by Ron Paul via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

Those hoping for a Christmastime government shutdown were once again disappointed when Congress passed a 4,000-page, $1.7 trillion omnibus appropriations bill that few, if any, Representatives and Senators read before voting on. The Republican leadership celebrated this bloated monstrosity because it spends $858 billion on warfare while “only” spending $772.5 billion on welfare.

No one should think Republican insistence on more warfare than welfare spending means Democrats oppose the warfare state. Under President Biden and a Democrat-controlled Congress, “defense” spending has increased by 4.3 percent over the last two years. Similarly, every Republican President in recent years—including two who had a Republican-controlled Congress for at least part of their term—supported huge increases in welfare state spending. Most Democrats only pretend to oppose warfare and most Republicans only pretend to oppose welfare to appease their parties’ respective bases.

The Omnibus appropriates a $44.5 billion giveaway to Ukraine. This brings the total US spending on Ukraine’s military to over $100 billion – approximately 50 percent more than Russia’s entire military budget! This money is spent in a conflict that does not affect US security, yet one that would likely have not occurred were it not for prior US meddling in the region.

The Omnibus bill provides $11.3 billion for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a $569.6 million increase and $524 billion above the President’s request. According to the Democratic leadership, the funding increase is so the FBI can better fight “extremist violence and domestic terrorists.”

The public recently learned what the FBI considers an appropriate way to fight “extremism,” with the release of emails between Twitter officials and the FBI. These memos show the Bureau was working with Twitter—and almost certainly other social media companies—to suppress certain stories, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, and points of view, such as skepticism regarding masks, lockdowns, and vaccine mandates. The bureau even used taxpayer funds to reimburse Twitter for the costs of implementing these “requests.” Government officials working with private companies to silence American citizens is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

This is hardly the first time the FBI has violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. In fact, since its founding the Bureau has targeted political activists and leaders such as Martin Luther King, whose agenda was considered “extreme” or “dangerous” by the Bureau’s corrupt leadership. The idea of a national police force with the power to target Americans because of their political beliefs would have horrified the drafters of the Constitution. The federal government has no constitutional authority over criminal law except for cases of piracy, counterfeiting, and treason. Libertarians, constitutional conservatives, and progressives who still care about civil liberties should join together to defund the FBI.

The fiscal year 2022 omnibus appropriations bill expands government, reduces liberty, and increases government debt, forcing the Federal Reserve to monetize more debt leading to more price inflation. Our political elites prioritize militarism abroad and authoritarianism at home over addressing the problems facing the American people like the Federal Reserve’s destructive monetary policy. This will fuel growing discontent with the political system.

As the economy continues to worsen and the attempt to run the world continues to result in failures, the discontent will grow until the welfare warfare system collapses and, hopefully, a new error of liberty peace and prosperity dawns.