It turns out it isn’t just Jefferies, as we noted days ago…

In fact, all major banks across Wall Street look ready to “slash” bonuses for the upcoming holiday season, marking a direct pivot from the lavish bonuses they offered up last year, according to multiple sources. 

Bonus pools could be cut as much as 30% at banks like JP Morgan and Bank of America this year due to a slowdown in dealmaking and a tightening economic picture. 

Blooomberg noted this week that investment bankers could wind up getting hit the hardest: revenues for banks could be lower by 50% in 2023. Lower tier employees may see no bonuses at all, follow up reporting by the NY Post noted. 

At Goldman, the Post says traders are also facing cuts to their bonus pools despite the global markets division of the bank raking in $25 billion in 2022. Traders were informed their bonus pool would be cut by “a low double digit percentage” last week.

Some bankers could see bonuses cut as much as 45%, the report speculates. Many are just thankful to be keeping their jobs, it adds. 

Recall, days ago we noted that bankers at Jefferies are also being told to expect smaller bonuses. The firm has warned its staff that 2022 is going to be a “difficult compensation season”.

Jefferies chief executive Rich Handler and president Brian Friedman penned a memo that went out to employees last week, claiming that due to the bank’s aggressive hiring over the last 3 years, in combination with slumping deals, that bonuses would come in lighter than normal.

The letter says: “As always, we will do the right thing for the long-term success of everyone at Jefferies and to continuously invest in our people and our firm, so we can continue to build and prosper. Let’s just spell it out here: ‘This is going to be a more difficult compensation season at Jefferies, just like it will be for every firm in our industry.'”

It continues: “2019 was a decent year for Jefferies and our industry. Despite Covid, 2020 was a very good year and we all know 2021 was the type of year that comes along very rarely in a finance professional’s career.”

Authored by by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced he is seeking to ban all religions with ties to Russia. He claims the move is needed to “guarantee spiritual independence to Ukraine.” This law will target millions of Ukrainians who identify as Russian Orthodox.

During his nightly address on Thursday, Zelensky announced he was introducing legislation that would eliminate religious organizations affiliated with Russia from operating in Ukraine. He said this will make “it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian leader said it was necessary to purge the church to preserve the country’s spiritual independence. Adding, “We will never allow anyone to build an empire inside the Ukrainian soul.” Zelensky denounced Ukrainians continuing to attend the parishes as failing to overcome “the temptation of evil.”

He claimed a series of recent raids by Kiev’s intelligence found orthodox churches which remain connected with the Moscow Patriarchate have been acting as operatives for the Kremlin. In his address, Zelensky instructed his security forces to further target Russian Orthodox parishes.

At least two-thirds of Ukrainians identify as Eastern Orthodox Christians. At one point, the majority of Ukrainians attended parishes that followed the Moscow Patriarchate.

Some recent polls say that number has dwindled to under 15%. However, the polling was only conducted in territory that was controlled by Ukrainian forces. Zelensky has vowed to return those regions to Kiev’s authority.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, responded by slamming Zelensky’s move as authoritarian. “The current Ukrainian authorities have openly become enemies of Christ and the Orthodox faith,” he said.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via caitlinjohnstone.com,

NATO has doubled down on its determination to eventually add Ukraine to its membership, renewing its 2008 commitment to that goal in a meeting between the foreign ministers of the alliance in Bucharest, Romania this past Tuesday.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:

The Romanian city was where NATO initially made the promise to Ukraine back in 2008, and at the time, US officials acknowledged that attempting to bring the country into the alliance could spark a war in the region.

“We made the decision in Bucharest in 2008 at the summit,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday. “I was there … representing Norway as Prime Minister. I remember very well the decisions. We stand by those decisions. NATO’s door is open.”

In a joint statement, the NATO foreign ministers, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, said that they “reaffirm” the decisions that were made at the 2008 Bucharest summit.

NATO Doubles Down on Pledge to Eventually Admit Ukraine
NATO foreign ministers are holding a summit in Bucharest, where the alliance first made the promise in 2008
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #NATO #Ukraine #Russia https://t.co/mYqG1JHCQM pic.twitter.com/pU0uTHbv9u

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) November 29, 2022

It has become fashionable among the mainstream western commentariat to claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion, but as recently explained by Philippe Lemoine for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that’s a completely false narrative that requires snipping past comments made by Putin out of the context in which they were made. Many western experts warned for years in advance that NATO expansion would lead to a conflict like the one we’re seeing today, and they were of course correct.

The recent push to expand NATO in Ukraine along with nations like Finland and Sweden as justified by “Russian aggression” is a good example of what professor Richard Sakwa has called the “fateful geographical paradox: that NATO exists to manage the risks created by its existence.” As the late scholar on US-Russia relations Stephen Cohen explained years before the Ukraine crisis erupted in 2014, Moscow sees NATO as an “American sphere of influence,” and the expansion of NATO and NATO influence as expansion of that sphere. It reacts to this with hostility just as the US would react to China or Russia building up aggressive military alliances on its borders, and arguably with vastly more restraint than the US would.

Other future examples of Sakwa’s fateful geographical paradox are likely to include the push to reconfigure NATO into an alliance dedicated to “restraining” China, which of course means halting China’s rise on the world stage and working to constrict, balkanize and usurp it. A recent Financial Times article titled “Washington steps up pressure on European allies to harden China stance” gives new detail to this agenda:

The US is pushing European allies to take a harder stance towards Beijing as it tries to leverage its leadership on Ukraine to gain more support from Nato countries for its efforts to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.

According to people briefed on conversations between the US and its Nato allies, Washington has in recent weeks lobbied members of the transatlantic alliance to toughen up their language on China and to start working on concrete action to restrain Beijing.

US president Joe Biden identified countering China as his main foreign policy goal at the start of his administration, but his efforts have been complicated by the focus on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

But with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion in its 10th month, Washington was making a concerted effort to push China back up Nato’s agenda, the people said.

A defensive alliance doesn’t look to pick fights with a country on a different continent. This is some classic mission creep from NATO – or, more accurately, Washington.https://t.co/UWNsPuSXlD

— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) November 29, 2022

The “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization added China to its security concerns for the very first time this past June, and ever since it’s seen a mad push from Washington to ramp up aggressions against Beijing. Another Financial Times article titled “Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan” details a meeting between alliance members this past September:

They also discussed how Nato should make Beijing aware of the potential ramifications of any military action — a debate that has gained significance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amid questions about whether the west was tough enough in its warnings to Moscow.

The US has been urging allies, particularly in Europe, to focus more on the threat to Taiwan, as concerns mount that Chinese president Xi Jinping may order the use of force against the island.

Senior US military officers and officials have floated several possible timelines for military action, with some eager to increase the sense of urgency to ensure Washington and its allies are prepared.

Some are noticing that Washington’s eagerness to “increase the sense of urgency” on this front can easily wind up having a provocative effect which serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Bloomberg a month ago that Washington’s haste to prepare everyone for another major conflict could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”

“NATO should be renamed ASFP: the Alliance for Self Fulfilling Prophecies,” tweeted commentator Arnaud Bertrand of the alliance’s discussions about Taiwan.

“A defensive alliance doesn’t look to pick fights with a country on a different continent,” tweeted Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic. “This is some classic mission creep from NATO – or, more accurately, Washington.”

“Nato holds first dedicated talks on China threat to Taiwan”

NATO should be renamed ASFP: the Alliance for Self Fulfilling Prophecies…https://t.co/yU6OSiRhuu

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 30, 2022

When you ignore all the empty narrative fluff and really boil it down to the raw language of actual behavior, NATO’s existence really does seem to be premised on the circular reasoning that without NATO there’d be nobody to protect the world from the consequences of NATO’s actions. It goes out of its way to threaten powerful nations and then justifies its existence by their responses to those threats. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone, or, if you prefer, a self-licking boot.

And this is all happening as news comes out that European nations are beginning to notice they’re bearing a lot more of the cost of Washington’s proxy warfare in Ukraine than the US is, while the US reaps all the profits. In an article titled “Europe accuses US of profiting from war,” Politico reports:

Top European officials are furious with Joe Biden’s administration and now accuse the Americans of making a fortune from the war, while EU countries suffer.

“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior official told POLITICO.

The explosive comments — backed in public and private by officials, diplomats and ministers elsewhere — follow mounting anger in Europe over American subsidies that threaten to wreck European industry.

“Is Washington still our ally or not?”

The “geopolitical Commission” and official Brussels as a whole is apparently only learning now what critics have been saying since the beginning: America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.https://t.co/WFEBTdq9r2

— Clare Daly (@ClareDalyMEP) November 30, 2022

Washington is taking extreme risks and angering allies at this time because it’s getting to do-or-die time as far as preserving US unipolar hegemony is concerned. As Antiwar’s Ted Snider explains in a recent article, the US proxy war in Ukraine has never really been about Ukraine, and hasn’t even ultimately been about Russia. In the long run this standoff has always been about China, and about the desperate campaign of the US empire to preserve its unrivaled domination of this planet.

“The war in Ukraine has always been about larger US goals,” writes Snider. “It has always been about the American ambition to maintain a unipolar world in which they were the sole polar power at the center and top of the world.”

“Events in Ukraine in 2014 marked the end of the unipolar world of American hegemony,” Snider says. “Russia drew the line and asserted itself as a new pole in a multipolar world order. That is why the war is ‘bigger than Ukraine,’ in the words of the State Department. It is bigger than Ukraine because, in the eyes of Washington, it is the battle for US hegemony.”

“If Ukraine is about Russia, Russia is about China,” Snider writes. “The ‘Russia Problem’ has always been that it is impossible to confront China if China has Russia: it is not desirable to fight both superpowers at once. So, if the long-term goal is to prevent a challenge to the US led unipolar world from China, Russia first needs to be weakened.”

Snider quotes Lyle Goldstein, a visiting professor at Brown University, who says that “In order to maintain its hegemonic position, the US supports Ukraine to wage hybrid warfare against Russia…The purpose is to hit Russia, contain Europe, kidnap ‘allies,’ and threaten China.”

It Was Never About Ukraine
by Ted Sniderhttps://t.co/I8Khc5AGEA pic.twitter.com/VE3Ha6I9hG

— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) November 23, 2022

As the world becomes more multipolar and securing total control looks less and less likely, the empire is fighting more and more like a boxer in the later rounds who’s been down on the scorecards the entire fight: taking more risks, throwing wild haymakers, preferring the possibility of a knockout loss over the certainty of losing a decision.

We’re at the most dangerous point in humanity’s abusive relationship with US unipolar domination, for the same reason the most dangerous point in a battered wife’s life is right when she’s trying to escape. The empire is willing to do terrible and risky things to retain control. “If I can’t have you no one can” is a line that can be said to a wife, or to the world.

The importance of opposing these megalomaniacs, and their games of nuclear chicken, has never been higher.

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán warned on Friday that European policies advocating for mass joint borrowing among EU member states to continue funding Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion will have devastating consequences.

The Hungarian leader told “Good morning, Hungary!” that EU sanctions on Russian energy are bound to fail, and that “not only our children, but also our grandchildren will suffer the consequences” of a mass borrowing scheme proposed by the EU, adding that potentially insolvent states will require support as well.

Orban reiterated Hungary’s opposition, and suggested that agreements to support Ukraine should be at the national level via bilateral agreements between individual countries, ReMix reports.

He highlighted that Ukraine has now found itself in a situation whereby it is incapable of functioning as an independent nation because of the ongoing conflict, and while it needs help from its neighbors and allies in the short-term, it is not for Brussels to speak on behalf of all member states.

What’s more, Orban believes that any further sanctions on Russian gas or nuclear energy would have “tragic consequences,” and argued that Hungary should be exempt from such a decision. 

“We are facing a difficult winter, Ukraine is in an increasingly difficult situation, Russia is suffering difficulties, but its revenues from energy carriers are at their peak, so the policy of sanctions has not achieved its goal,” he said, explaining that while Hungary won’t be subject to an upcoming ban on European imports of Russian oil, it will still be affected by the “price-inflating effect of the sanctions.”

“We have always achieved our own national goals in the negotiations on sanctions, so we are participating in the discussion of the ninth package with good hopes,” Orban concluded, while noting that the “pressure is constant,” and that Hungary must “constantly fight to protect our interests.”

Authored by Alasdair MacLeod via Goldmoney,

In this article I examine the current state of the fight for hegemonic control between America on the one side, and Russia and China on the other. It is being fought on two fronts. Ukraine, the one in plain sight, is about to endure a winter without power and adequate food potentially leading to a humanitarian crisis.

The other front is financial with America facing a coordinated attack by Russia and China on its dollar hegemony. The Russians are planning a replacement trade settlement currency, which if it succeeds, could unleash a flood of foreign-owned dollars onto the foreign exchanges.

We have no way of knowing how advanced this plan is, but the indications point perhaps to a gold-based digital currency. Moscow establishing a new gold exchange, Asian central banks accumulating additional gold reserves, and Saudi Arabia seeking non-dollar payments for oil sales are all circumstantial evidence.

As well as these plans, there has been an underlying shift away from a long-term everything financial bubble, with the prospect of higher interest rate levels in time. The reasons for foreign ownership of fiat dollars are diminishing, and a successful new Asian trade currency will only add to the dollar’s woes.

Could this pressure compel America de-escalate Ukraine and sanctions against Russia? The argument to do so has become compelling. It is also a way to lower energy prices, giving central banks needed room for interest rate manoeuvre. 

Russia is making the most of winter

The evidence that Russia is intent on breaking the will of the Ukrainian people is mounting. As the snow begins to settle, Russia is knocking out the power generation necessary to keep people warm and alive. It is a modern variation on the medieval siege. But instead of surrounding a city or castle and starving the residents into submission, by making conditions impossible they expect the Ukrainians to leave.

Nearly eighty per cent of that unfortunate country’s population is Ukrainian, as opposed to Russian. But that is based on officially recognised national boundaries and is not adjusted for the regions Russia gained in the East, including Crimea, in 2014 and subsequently. That leaves a potential refugee problem of 34 million Ukrainians fleeing impossible energy-starved living conditions with scarce food as the cruel winter grinds on.

It takes two sides to make a proxy war. You wouldn’t believe it from the western media, but Putin has been careful to not escalate the situation into an official war and drawing NATO into direct confrontation. Instead, he is using the Ukrainian constitution which protects ethnic Ukrainians, but not minorities including Russian speakers. Effectively, they are denied human rights and gives Putin the excuse to rescue them.

This legal ethnicity in Ukraine’s constitution is unusual today, a feature shared with Nazi Germany. It allows the Russian propaganda machine to accuse the Ukrainian regime of being a Nazi state. Russia’s “special operations” were to rescue ethnic Russians in accordance with international law and explains why they have offered them Russian passports and safe passage from the Donbas and Kherson. Following acts such as the car bomb in Moscow which killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Putin ally, and the bombing of the Kerch bridge Putin has accused Ukraine of terrorist acts for which Russia seeks retribution. Again, anti-terrorist activity is a device to avoid a declaration of war while justifying further action.

As the winter progresses, 34 million Ukrainians will therefore face the choice of becoming refuges or dying of cold and starvation. Now that the snow has arrived, the Russians have started targeting Ukraine’s energy supplies. The timing is no accident and the EU’s leaders can now envisage the likely consequences. But in relying on NATO for their ultimate protection, the Brussels establishment does not see Nato’s policy changes as its responsibility and so by going along with American’s leadership they have neglected their own interests.

But the Americans now appear to understand the looming danger of winter with no power. Doubtless, this is what led William Burns, the CIA’s director to meet his opposite Russian intelligence chief in Ankara two weeks ago. The official story was that Burns was there to warn the Russians not to resort to nuclear weapons and to raise the issue of US prisoners.[i] But there is little doubt that this back-channel meeting was to explore compromises before America finds itself a party to the cruel sacrifice of the Ukrainian population in a proxy war.

Negotiations will not be a slam dunk

In the great game of geopolitical strategy, bringing the Americans to the negotiating table can be chalked up as a win for the Russians. But it is not just about a proxy war on Ukrainian soil. Both Russia and America have overriding objectives. The Russians want to secure their western borders, which means American military withdrawal from all border nations at the least — Lavrov has mentioned 300 miles being the missile range. The US will undoubtedly resist these demands, because to give up effectively on its post-war role as the protector of Europe through NATO would be an open admission of defeat on the world stage. It would mean the end of US global hegemony, which the Americans are desperately clinging on to. Furthermore, it is a defeat that would enhance Russia’s power not just in the Western European arena, but through its partnership with China over the entire Eurasian continent.

From the US’s point of view, negotiations with Russia will probably turn out to be an exercise in damage limitation — like the withdrawal from Afghanistan. She needs to get to the table before the situation deteriorates much further. And other than the Ukraine situation they have three pressing problems to consider:

• There is little doubt that the EU’s troubles will escalate this winter, with energy shortages, exorbitant food prices, and rocketing production cost likely to be the most severe test the EU has ever had to deal with. It comes at a time when the euro system faces instability which could take down major banks and expose the euro system itself as insolvent. Systemic risk would then almost certainly translate into an existential threat to the US banking system.
• The US is fighting not one but two new hegemons in Russia and China which have teamed up to form a new Asian-based world order with commodity and raw material suppliers worldwide. Purely on a population basis, a rapidly industrialising Asia with its associated interests in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, BRICS, the whole of Africa and large swathes of South America outnumber the North Americans, NATO members, Japan, South Korea, and some less certain US allies by at least six to one.
• The core of this Chinese-Russian partnership is determined to dispose of the dollar for trade settlement as far as possible. As one of the two parties behind the creation of the petrodollar, the Saudis are realigning themselves with the Asian trade bloc. Further moves in this direction are sure to undermine the dollar’s hegemony, the principal source of America’s power over other nations.

The EU dimension

You can tell that dissention is now evident in the EU, with the EU accusing the Americans of profiteering from the Ukraine war. This was from Politico earlier this week:

“The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons,” one senior official told POLITICO.[ii]

The article goes on:

“The explosive comments — backed in public and private by officials, diplomats, and ministers elsewhere — follow mounting anger in Europe over American subsidies that threaten to wreck European industry. The Kremlin is likely to welcome the poisoning of the atmosphere among Western allies. ‘We are really at a historic juncture,’ the senior EU official said, arguing that the double hit of trade disruption from U.S. subsidies and high energy prices risks turning public opinion against both the war effort and the transatlantic alliance. ‘America needs to realize that public opinion is shifting in many EU countries.’”

Realistically, America can only keep its principal EU allies on side if it addresses these concerns. Attributed almost entirely to sanctions against Russia at America’s behest and to Putin’s reactions to them, rising prices are creating political pressures on the ground likely to force politicians to seek an early end to sanctions. In this respect, time is on Russia’s side.

But it is not just in the EU that these pressures have arisen. The new global trend of rising prices is affecting the EU more than most, the European Central Bank having held its deposit rates in negative territory for a considerable period of time. Like other central bankers, ECB officials failed to plan for an exit route from interest rate suppression and are more badly wrong-footed than most central banks. It was a policy which encouraged commercial banks into risky territory.

Compressed lending margins forced major commercial banks to maintain profits by leveraging their balance sheets to record levels. The dead hand of negative rates, amounting to a tax on reserves held within the euro system was a burden on banks’ performance. While the increase in rates has initially been a profit bonanza for the banks, they are now exposed to losses from declining asset values and non-performing loans. And with the ECB’s deposit rate still only 1.5% when official price inflation is running at over 10%, far higher interest rates are inevitable. Unless somehow price inflation can be brought down significantly, the consequences will be to create huge losses for the banks from financial assets both on-balance sheet and in the form of collateral — losses that will wipe out shareholders’ capital.

The inflation problem is now manifest in an energy crisis arising from sanctions against Russia. To prevent the entire euro system being destabilised, the obvious short-term solution is to treaty with Russia. The removal of this source of rising prices would in turn reduce the outlook for euro interest rates, stabilising the entire euro system. We can be sure that the ECB and its network of national central banks will be pointing this out to their politicians.

Indeed, an ending of the sanctions would give stock markets and bond prices an almighty boost, at a time of growing concerns over a global recession. Let there be no doubt: the west’s policies against Russia are nothing short of suicidal. And politicians in Brussels would be blind not to see it.

The conflict between the US and the two Asian hegemons is escalating

From Russia’s point of view, America’s precipitative withdrawal from Afghanistan and the replacement of an unpredictable President Trump with an aging Biden, known to the Russians through his background in US foreign affairs, confirmed that America’s global influence was failing. For Russia, with Britain out of the EU it was a good time to escalate tensions between America and Western Europe to side-line America from Europe.

Putin has shown high level skills as a political operator — he had to have them in order to successfully navigate his way through the mess left by Yeltsin to a position of ultimate power. Before escalating the Ukraine situation, we can be certain he anticipated both American-led sanctions and calculated his response. That the Americans have tentatively signalled that they are now prepared to negotiate confirms the success of Putin’s Ukraine strategy. Now, with the onset of winter he can afford to wait. And the longer he waits, the greater the squeeze on Ukraine and the EU.

America is fighting this power game on two fronts: Russia and China. She cannot be too aggressive against China because the US is still mightily dependent on its economy. The US is resorting to selective technology bans and not much else. Having exported manufacturing supply chains to China and Southeast Asia, large US corporations cannot afford to see their supply chains undermined by aggressive foreign policies. Already, intentionally or not China is putting the squeeze on US corporates with its covid lockdown policy.

We can never be entirely sure of Chinese intensions, particularly with the enigmatic President Xi. With protests at lockdowns, western media portrays Xi’s administration as reverting almost to Maoist policies, a reversal of China’s recent march into capitalism. The treatment of Uyghurs offends us. But reform of covid policies was known to be on its way, and on Tuesday the announcement was made by China’s National Health Commission, giving new guidance to local administrations, which should ease lockdowns. 

The underlying problem for China’s government is that its economy is suffering a debt hangover from decades of overinvestment in domestic construction, secured by an exceptionally high savings rate. If the economy was left to its own devices, according to classical theory a debt crisis would destroy malinvestments and reallocate capital to more productive use. But with the large commercial banks under state control the policy will be more likely to ride through the transition of capital reallocation, whatever the cost.

The effect of a credit crunch is to heighten the urgency for state directed investment into other areas, particularly integration with other Asian nations. While we must not forget that there are significant political and cultural differences between China and Russia, American hegemony and trade policies have only served to tighten the bonds between them, so cross-border investment is an obvious priority.

The immediate economic consequences are damaging for China, with an economy which has become ex-growth. While this is a negative factor for the whole region, it could hasten pan-Asian integration to limit economic damage, and to take nations such as India, the Africans and now the entire Middle East further away from US hegemonic control. American allies in Southeast Asia will also be re-examining their foreign policies.

Looking through the immediate prospects for a global recession, we can see that the old world of stagnating economies is being separated from a new world of industrialisation. Independent developing nations are being drawn into the progressive camp, leaving a rump of failing nations living in the past.

So far, a confirmation of the end of US hegemony has been seen in the change of Saudi Arabia’s trade policy, whereby it has realigned itself to Russia and China, confirming its intention to join the BRICS organisation. With other Arab states following the Saudi lead, this confirms that the Gulf states see their future being bound up with the Russian and Chinese partnership. This is likely to be followed by nations in South-East Asia, which at the moment are sitting on the fence. But Indonesia’s recent hosting of the G20 meeting showed that the hosts appeared to be more worried about upsetting the Russians and Chinese than the US-led western alliance.

Member states of the European Union are beginning to face the same dilemma. They have gone along blindly with NATO policies without questioning them. The failure of NATO’s wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the consequences of the overthrow of Libya’s Ghaddafi have all led to Europe’s refugee problems. Now, the economic sacrifice of NATO alignment is plain to see. EU leaders are muttering darkly about how the Americans are profiting from Ukraine while Europe is paying the price. 

The dollar’s hegemony is under threat as well

We know from official announcements that the Russian Chinese partnership, specifically through their membership of the Eurasian Economic Union, is planning to cobble together a new trade settlement currency. Due to currency sanctions against Russia, a sense of urgency has been imparted to the project, with other nations in Asia realising that retaining western currencies in their central bank reserves carries risk of sanctions. These risks are not merely restricted to the immobilisation of reserves in western currencies, but also restrict trade. The consequences of sanctions policy have been to force Asian governments to rethink about trade security as well.

At this stage, all we can do is to draw together some threads to determine the likely form of the new trade settlement currency Sergei Glazyev, the senior Russian official tasked with the project has proposed. An official statement dated 16 June from the committee which he chairs included the following statement:

“Sergei Glazyev informed about presenting in the near future the concept for forming the common EAEU exchange market, which, in particular, would involve the unification of exchanges’ information systems and the nomination of prices in national currencies. “The agenda includes the transition to a new stable settlement currency based on a basket of national currencies and exchange-traded products, as well as the creation of our own stable pricing system. Such principles should be applied in work not only within the EAEU but also throughout the SCO,” the EEC Minister concluded.”[iii]

The objective is for the dollar to be replaced as the settlement medium of intra-national trade. And the idea is that this new trade settlement currency will be open to be joined by other nations. If this project is successful, then the dollar will lose its status as the reserve currency for participating nations. 

As described above, the project is impractical, appearing to be a political statement designed to gain early support for the project. Elsewhere, we see proposals to set up a new Moscow gold exchange, purportedly to replace access to the London bullion market now denied to Russia and its refiners. But again, we see that the moving light is the same Sergei Galzyev, this time telling us that the demand comes from Russia’s bullion industry.

If it is to work, Glazyev’s original proposal to Eurasian states cannot proceed. The inclusion of national currencies in some sort of daily fixing does n0t guarantee stability, and every time another SCO member decides to join a whole rebalancing exercise would have to take place. The same considerations apply to “exchange traded products”, which from other statements we can take to refer to commodities traded between members of the scheme.

From being an inherently defensive move against US dollar hegemony, subsequent confirmation of Saudi intentions to switch payments from dollars to unspecified Asian currencies changes priorities. From convincing a coterie of Eurasian states, Glazyev’s prize is to persuade the Saudis and other gulf energy suppliers as well to accept the new trade settlement medium. Only a gold-based currency fits the bill. With their Bedouin roots in physical coin, a gold-based trade settlement currency acceptable to the Saudis would have the added advantage of dealing a significant blow against the dollar. 

The more one considers the situation, one can only conclude that gold is the logical basis for such as scheme, and Glazyev’s involvement in the new Moscow gold exchange suggests he has reached a similar conclusion. If that’s the case, then it will be necessary to back a gold fixing scheme in such a way that participants can confidently retain balances in the new currency, even though it will almost certainly be digital in form.

Assuming that the scheme progresses towards fruition with gold representing commodity-based transactions generally, the requirement for retaining dollar balances will fall away. The impact on the dollar has to be our next topic.

Foreign dollar balances are simply enormous

As illustrated by the chart above, foreign ownership of financial assets including bank deposits totals nearly $30 trillion, down over $4 trillion since last December. Some of this is due to fluctuations in portfolio valuations, but clearly the foreign appetite for holding dollars is waning. If the Russia/China Asian bloc comes up with a viable trade settlement currency, both official ownership and private sector ownership of dollars will be less required, and ownership by foreigners will diminish further. 

Dollars will be sold for other currencies, to purchase bullion, or to build stocks of durable commodities. The global desire to sell dollars for other major fiat currencies was knocked on the head by currency sanctions against Russia. And we can be sure that the message about holding yen, euros, or sterling is widely received in all Asian nations. 

Therefore, US-led currency sanctions against Russia will probably backfire badly. With the dollar being sold for bullion and commodities, the value of dollars relative to bullion and commodities will obviously decline. It will be a trend readily understood by foreign holders, likely to drive the dollar down more rapidly than might be expected. 

It may be that the process has already started. So far this year, the dollar has gained against other major currencies due to the Fed having led other central banks into higher interest rates in an attempt to contain price inflation. Other central banks are now responding belatedly with their revised interest rate policies, and consequently the rising trend in the dollar’s trade weighted index has broken down from its previous uptrend. The chart below illustrates the dollar’s move so far.

Compounding the dollar’s problems are market suspicions that the Fed will be forced into a policy pivot as evidence of a recession mounts. While softening its line slightly the Fed still denies it, presumably for fear of encouraging yet higher consumer prices. Markets are betting that it is only a matter of time before the Fed is forced to call a halt to interest rate rises and reintroduce quantitative easing. The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note has fallen from 4.4% to 3.63%, while the CPI ‘sincrease slowed to 7.7% in October. 

Sanction-induced commodity and energy price rises have obscured a wider trend emerging from the end of the forty years of the financialisation of major western economies — the end of a prolonged everything bubble. Intractable government deficits are driving the debasement of currencies relative to the values of commodities. A new financial cold war between the hegemons is undermining the logic of supply chains across multiple jurisdictions. Just-in-time inventory management has become riskier. And while supply chain difficulties have lessened recently, the trade outlook has deteriorated, supply chain reform is on the cards, and commercial bank credit is long overdue its 10-year cyclical downturn. 

Managing foreign dollar liquidation

Assuming that foreigners act as outright sellers on a net basis rather than merely hedging existing positions, the buyers will be either the Fed in the case of official institutions selling, or commercial banks. 

When the Fed buys dollars, it reduces the liability side of its balance sheet, or redeploys repatriated dollars by buying assets. And since we are considering net selling by foreigners, those assets will be dollar-denominated assets in the domestic US economy. Whether the Fed reduces its balance sheet or buys domestic assets is a matter for economic and monetary policy.

Commercial banks will be acting principally for domestic US buyers, in which case there is no reduction in their aggregate deposit liabilities because the ownership of deposits merely changes. However, if they are not acting for domestic buyers but for themselves and deposits are being withdrawn, then they must reduce their balance sheet assets to match. They can do this by selling financial assets if they have them on their balance sheet, or by calling in loans. However, we know from US Treasury TIC figures that commercial banks have limited foreign currency loan exposure (i.e. balance sheet assets —in June, it was $687bn[iv]) and with other currencies having been weak they are unlikely to have unhedged on-balance sheet foreign currency financial asset liabilities in any quantity. Therefore, the bulk of private sector involvement is off-balance sheet and therefore the effect on outstanding commercial bank credit will be limited.

It would therefore appear to be mainly a problem for the Fed, and the impact on the dollar of foreign selling will only be lessened through the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet. The chart below gives a clue of what the relevant impacts are likely to be.

We have ascertained that commercial banks will not be buying dollars from foreigners in sufficient amounts to affect their balance sheets materially. Instead, if foreigners decide the world is moving away from the dollar, the Fed’s balance sheet currently standing at $8.6 trillion will be exposed to a contracting foreign dollar mountain of up to $30 trillion. There is a leverage factor in this which could be substantial.

A further problem for the monetary authorities is that they increasingly expect a recession, even though it appears to be slow in arriving. A recession is a contraction in commercial bank credit, against which the Fed would expect to compensate by the combination of an expansion of its balance sheet and the government increasing its budget deficit. In other words, after fifty-one years of the dollar being totally fiat, and the dollar seeing demand on the basis that it is the only reserve currency, the ending of that period at a time when the US economy is entering a recession is the worst combination of events possible.

This is probably the most compelling reason for the US Government to seek to de-escalate tensions over Ukraine and dismantle sanctions against Russia. It would or should have been on the CIA’s William Burns’s mind when he met his opposite Russian number in Ankara a fortnight ago.

[i] See https://www.reuters.com/world/russian-us-officials-holding-talks-turkey-kommersant-2022-11-14/

[ii] See https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-europe-ukraine-gas-inflation-reduction-act-ira-joe-biden-rift-west-eu-accuses-us-of-profiting-from-war/

[iii] See https://eec.eaeunion.org/en/news/sergey-glazev-imeyushchiesya-rezervy-rosta-neobkhodimo-konvertirovat-v-narashchivanie-vnutrisoyuznoy/

[iv] Line 1 minus line 2 at https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/tic/Documents/bctype.txt

Did you know that over two-thirds of national crops originated from somewhere else?

Humans have been selecting and growing crops for specific traits since the origins of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, shaping where and what crops are grown today.

However, as Visual Capialist’s Tessa di Grandi details below, now our food system is completely global and many of the world’s top producers of staple crops are in countries far from their historical origin. For example, Brazil is now the largest soybean producer in the world, though the crop is originally from East Asia.

The below infographic by Brazil Potash shows the historical origins of crops before they were domesticated across the globe and the main producers of our staple crops today.

Producers Of Staple Crops Today

Staple crops are those that are the most routinely grown and consumed. These can vary between countries depending on availability.

In 2020, sugarcane, maize, wheat, and rice made up around 50% of global crop production.

But when the production and distribution of staple crops are threatened, the consequences can be felt globally. Let’s take a look at the countries that were the top three producers of some of our staple crops in 2020.

As you can see from the data above, Brazil is the world’s largest producer of sugarcane and one of the top three producers of maize.

The Future of Food Security

Global food security depends on staple crops and the countries that produce them. As the global population increases, so does the need to grow more crops.

The FAO estimates that by 2050 the world will need to increase its food output by around 70% in order to feed an ever-growing population.

Early food security solutions were transplanting crops from other regions to supplement diets. Now crop yields must increase as the next evolution in strengthening our food security. Fertilizers are a vital step in this process and are an essential ingredient in the future of global food security. They provide vital nutrients that increase crop production and strengthen nutrition security.

Brazil Potash extracts vital potash ore from the earth for it to return to the earth as fertilizer, fortifying food and helping to maintain continuous growth in the agricultural sector.

Authored by Ian Miller via the Brownstone Institute,

“The Experts™” have repeatedly tried to deflect from the failure of their policies with misdirection.

The reason lockdowns didn’t work in the United States or the United Kingdom is because they weren’t strict enough, according to many in the expert community.

Of course, their excuses have been conveniently ignored as China’s repressive zero COVID lockdowns have continued, with horrific consequences.

Now that mass protests have broken out in the country that “The Experts™” revered for their COVID handling, there’s a massive effort to disregard their own previous advocacy.

This is perhaps best exemplified by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who clearly used authoritarian measures to suppress the protests in his own country, while now supporting Chinese demonstrations.

pic.twitter.com/FiFoIJJxqy

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 30, 2022

The bewildering lack of awareness of their own hypocrisy seems to be a feature of COVID-obsessed politicians and public health authorities.

Another similar, oft-repeated assertion is that the failure of universal masking can be explained by the type of masks being used by the public.

Even though the CDC and Dr. Fauci explicitly claimed that wearing anything to cover your face would be effective at preventing transmission, many have now quietly dismissed that messaging.

Fauci specifically said that “cloth coverings work,” not just surgical or N95s. Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams famously suggested that rolling up a t-shirt in front of your face would be effective protection.

Yet public health departments and the media are now highlighting the importance of “high quality,” “well-fitted” masks. 

Their desperation to justify masking has led to remarkably poor studies being released to support their anti-science messaging.

There is new research that has been released showing that masks are ineffective, regardless of type.

And it’s not just new research, it’s high quality research.

Finally, Another RCT on Mask Wearing

The Annals of Internal Medicine just published a randomized controlled trial comparing the ability of medical masks to prevent COVID infection to fit-tested N95s.

Importantly, this trial was conducted on healthcare workers who would be most likely to use masks appropriately.

To determine whether medical masks are noninferior to N95 respirators to prevent COVID-19 in health care workers providing routine care.

That trial design was also important as it was meant to determine whether or not N95 respirators were superior to “regular” surgical masks.

They examined 29 different health care facilities on multiple continents, from North America to Asia and Africa.

The percentage of healthcare workers testing positive for COVID in each group was tracked to determine how effective or ineffective higher-quality masking was in preventing infection.

Unsurprisingly, the results confirmed that there is essentially zero difference between surgical or N95 respirators when it comes to tests results.

In the intention-to-treat analysis, RT-PCR–confirmed COVID-19 occurred in 52 of 497 (10.46%) participants in the medical mask group versus 47 of 507 (9.27%) in the N95 respirator group (hazard ratio [HR], 1.14 [95% CI, 0.77 to 1.69]). An unplanned subgroup analysis by country found that in the medical mask group versus the N95 respirator group RT-PCR–confirmed COVID-19 occurred in 8 of 131 (6.11%) versus 3 of 135 (2.22%) in Canada (HR, 2.83 [CI, 0.75 to 10.72]), 6 of 17 (35.29%) versus 4 of 17 (23.53%) in Israel (HR, 1.54 [CI, 0.43 to 5.49]), 3 of 92 (3.26%) versus 2 of 94 (2.13%) in Pakistan (HR, 1.50 [CI, 0.25 to 8.98]), and 35 of 257 (13.62%) versus 38 of 261 (14.56%) in Egypt (HR, 0.95 [CI, 0.60 to 1.50]). There were 47 (10.8%) adverse events related to the intervention reported in the medical mask group and 59 (13.6%) in the N95 respirator group.

52 of 497 participants who wore medical masks got COVID-19, and 47 of 507 in the N95 group got COVID-19. 

No matter how “high quality” your mask is, it’s entirely irrelevant.

The researchers also took pains to ensure that the control and treatment groups shared as many similarities as possible.

They excluded workers who could not pass a fit test, had laboratory-confirmed COVID, or “had received 1 or more doses of a COVID-19 vaccine with greater than 50% efficacy for the circulating strain.”

Yet none of that mattered; there was no difference in outcomes between the medical and N95 level masks.

The N95s in use were even specifically fit tested and approved respirators, far from the KN95s commonly used by the general public.

“Health care workers randomly assigned to the N95 respirator group were instructed to use a fit-tested National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health–approved N95 respirator when providing routine care to patients with COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19.”

It didn’t matter.

Even more importantly, these disappointing results were from facilities with universal masking policies in place.

Everyone, in each health care facility, “for all activities,” was required to wear masks. 

The intervention included universal masking, which was the policy implemented at each site. This refers to the use of a mask when in the health care facility for all activities, whether patient related or not, including in workrooms, meetings, and treating persons that were not suspected or known to be positive for COVID-19.

It still didn’t work.

They even tracked potential exposure points, whether at home, in the community or in hospital exposures.

There was no difference.

What’s even more impressive about the futility of masking is that outside of Egypt, the observed results occurred before the more contagious Omicron variant emerged.

There were substantial differences in results between countries, which indicates the impact of N95s might have been further muted had it covered the Omicron period.

Canada, which was observed pre-Omicron, showed the biggest “benefit” to N95s, while post-Omicron Egypt was nearly identical. 

It’s possible that the mild difference in Canada could have been erased entirely if subjected to the Omicron era.

On top of being functionally useless, N95s were substantially more likely to result in adverse effects.

According to the results page, there were significantly more reported issues in the respirator group:

“There were 47 (10.8%) adverse events related to the intervention reported in the medical mask group and 59 (13.6%) in the N95 respirator group.”

This becomes even more noteworthy since compliance with respirator masking was lower.

“Adherence with the assigned medical mask or N95 respirator was self-reported as “always” in 91.2% in the medical mask group versus 80.7% in the N95 respirator group and as “always” or “sometimes” in 97.7% in the medical mask group versus 94.4% in the N95 respirator group.”

While still extremely high, health care workers “always” wore N95s 80.7% of the time instead of 91.2% for medical masks.

This is one of the many issues the “experts” now pushing for (now disproven) “higher-quality” masking should address.

Health care professionals who are trained to use N95s can’t always use them yet experience higher rates of adverse effects.

Imagine how much worse compliance would be among the general public, especially if 13% are suffering significant side effects.

Results Show Expert Incompetence

This is yet another randomized controlled trial to show that masks do not work.

It also confirms the DANMASK study conducted earlier in the pandemic, which proved there was no benefit from masking in COVID prevention.

Even the Bangladeshi study, comparing villages, showed there was no benefit to masking at a population level. They used statistical misdirection and purposeful p-hacking to try and generate a positive result, and still could only get to a ~10% reduction for those over 50.

No matter the quality, no matter the compliance, masks are entirely ineffective at preventing transmission or infection.

The participants in this examination lived and worked in environments where universal masking was a requirement.

It didn’t matter.

This also examined health care workers, who, in theory, would be using and disposing of medical or N95 level masks properly. 

There was no difference. 

Now imagine how much worse the results would look for mask fanatics if it examined the Fauci-approved cloth coverings. 

If “The Experts™” actually cared about following “the science,” or “the evidence,” this would once again be the nail in the coffin for masking.

More like the 40th nail in the coffin.

We have observational evidence through population-level comparisons that masks do not prevent the spread of COVID.

We also now have multiple randomized controlled trials confirming that masks do not prevent the spread of COVID.

And we have extremely well done comparisons of neighboring jurisdictions confirming it.

All the mask fanatics have is politically motivated wishful thinking, desperate advocacy from disproven CDC “studies,” and a commitment to avoiding reality.

Fauci and his health authority allies have lied to the public repeatedly about masking. The obsession with credentialism and appeals to authority within the media has resulted in tremendous, unjustified harm.

You’d hope that results like these would finally end their ridiculous posturing, but it’s abundantly clear they’re too dug in to ever relent.

But thankfully those paying attention now have even more ammunition in the fight for the inarguable scientific reality that masks do not work.

Authored by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,

In the event you missed last night’s thread of The Twitter Files, here it is:

1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 2, 2022

To give a short explainer, the talented Matt Taibbi posted internal Twitter documents around the 2020 presidential election which demonstrated how political operations – such as the Biden presidential campaign and the DNC – petitioned the company to remove “offending” tweets. Twitter complied. The Trump White House would make similar requests, but as Taibbi observe, “this system wasn’t balanced.” Instead, it was based on contacts. And as you can imagine, Twitter’s staff, especially at the highest levels, was far left and supported the Democrats.

What of the other Twitter Files? Elon has promised more transparency and Taibbi posted on his Substack that “there may be a few more big surprises coming.” Catch Taibbi and Walter Kirn, both of whom we’re big fans, explaining the Twitter Files on Episode 15 of “America This Week.”

But there’s a bigger story slowly emerging: the FBI’s involvement in political censorship.

As Miranda Devine observed today, there is much more to be divulged. Specifically, the FBI’s meddling in the 2020 election and the FBI’s pressure of social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, to essentially censor the Hunter Biden story. It’s the story of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, who recently testified he was part of that effort:

During the deposition, Chan said that he, along with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and senior Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officials, had weekly meetings with major social media companies to warn against Russian disinformation attempts ahead of the 2020 election, according to a source in the Missouri attorney general’s office.

These FBI warnings had to do with the potential Russian “hack and dump” or “hack and leak” of sensitive materials. And they may have contributed to Twitter’s assessment that the Hunter Biden materials may have been hacked, justifying Twitter’s censorship of the story.

FBI Director Christopher Wray actually took pride in these efforts, admitting to the agency’s involvement with social media companies “to make sure that their platforms are not used by foreign adversaries to spread disinformation and propaganda.” The censorship was directed from the top.

The Response

Not that any of this matters to much of the left. The clichés started once the story was posted. Twitter’s former former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, complained that the leaks were essentially “violence” and put the censors in danger.

The media’s response to the Twitter File story was equally predictable and boring. It was a non-story, it was public relations for the world’s richest man. They misrepresented the leak, ignored the merits, downplayed the significance of the Hunter Biden story by focusing on scandalous photos and not corruption and influence peddling and tax evasion and violations of federal law, and criticized Taibbi for posting the story on Twitter. Undertones of jealousy and resentment. As if we expected anything else. If their attacks are anything, they’re unoriginal. By this time we know what they’re gonna say before they say it.

Thankfully, we were able to see the documents for themselves. They’re damning, demonstrating the danger of the political control of social media. The DNC and Biden Team knew they had friends at Twitter who would do their bidding during the election. And Twitter lied to the FEC about that influence.

But that’s just at the surface. There’s something worse underneath it all, hidden from public: governmental influence and coercion over social media platforms, and the lies of the FBI to keep politically damaging – and true – material away from Americans.

It’s the massive “censorship enterprise” by the Federal Government. It’s the one-sided influence operation on American soil. (The CIA would be proud.) It was there in 2016, and it continued through the 2020 election to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. And it’s slowly coming into view. 

Subscribers to The Reactionary can read more here…

Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClear Politics,

The relentless attacks on Elon Musk since he purchased Twitter should be familiar to most Americans. It’s exactly what Democrats and their media and corporate allies did to demonize Donald Trump.

The McCarthyite formula is simple: Claim you are defending high-minded principles (Democracy! The rule of law! Civil discourse!) to justify efforts to delegitimize someone you’ve identified as a political opponent.

Democrats denied Trump’s presidency from day one; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden themselves declared for years that he had stolen the 2016 election. In the name of election integrity, Democrats turned a bogus conspiracy theory cooked up by Clinton’s campaign about Russian collusion into years of official investigations that undermined and tainted Trump. When Special Counsel Robert Mueller proved that a lie, Democrats immediately seized on a few innocuous sentences in a Trump phone call with a foreign leader to launch just the third presidential impeachment in U.S. history.

Those events are well-known, but ponder them for a moment. This was a soft coup, a nonviolent version of Jan. 6 that was far more dangerous than the Capitol riot. The effort to remove a lawfully elected president was planned and orchestrated by officials at the highest level of government and the media. While Jan. 6 was a one-off eruption of crazed anger, the false attacks on Trump edged our political discourse toward Orwellian Newspeak by presenting lies and smears as ringing defenses of sacred constitutional values.

The ongoing attacks against Musk are following the same playbook. The man once hailed by liberals as a genius for developing electric vehicles is now Public Enemy No. 1 because he says Twitter should allow more free speech. Ponder that as well: Musk’s enemies are casting him as a threat to the country because of his commitment to one of America’s most cherished freedoms.

Progressives have abandoned their longstanding anti-corporate stance to argue that an unelected, unaccountable company must aggressively censor the vox populi. We saw the same dizzying turnabout in Russiagate, where the left abandoned its historic defense of Russia to cast dealings with that nation as un-American (making Joe McCarthy their new “Uncle Joe”). 

Yes, Musk has restored Donald Trump’s Twitter account which the company’s previous leaders had disabled when he was president. But there is zilch, zero, nada evidence at this point that Twitter has become a toxic cesspool of hate. Nevertheless, that is the bogus claim being advanced by thought leaders including Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s journalism school.

Ponder the argument here that a corporation should have the power to remove the president of the United States from communicating through one of the nation’s prime networks. The same people who cheered that decision also thought it was appropriate for Twitter to help swing the 2020 election by prohibiting users from sharing blockbuster reports about Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, recorded on his laptop.

If one needs any more proof that principle has no part in the attacks on Musk, consider that while Apple has joined many other major companies in pulling its advertising from Twitter, it issued an update only for its Chinese users limiting a function commonly used by protestors as discontent was percolating against that country’s extreme COVID restrictions.

The attacks on Musk shed light on a darker mystery of American life: Why did the left attack Trump so savagely? Yes, Trump is a coarse, combative man who has the same relationship with truth as a used-car salesman. But that hardly makes him an outlier in our coarse, combative culture where, the left has long argued, truth and almost everything else we used to define as reality are just social constructs.

At bottom, they saw Trump – and now Musk – as a threat to their power and privilege. For all their talk of democracy and the will of the people, the left has always embraced a top-down approach in which a benighted few control society. Trump was the first president without political or military experience. He  was not just an outsider; he  also promised to expose the hypocrisy and self-dealing of the ruling class, both Democrats and Republicans (hence the rise of “Never Trump” Republicans).

The fact that this man with no political experience accomplished so much – including helping the economy hum, brokering a peace deal in the Middle East, calling out China’s ruthlessness, and creating conditions for the development of a COVID vaccine in record time – exposed the failures of our best and brightest. He wasn’t a threat to the nation, but to their authority.

The left sees Musk as a similar threat. For decades they have largely controlled the flow of information in prestige publications and network news divisions. The rise of social media gave them new mechanisms for defining national narratives, and for silencing those who disagreed with them through cancel culture and outright censorship. They see Musk’s promise to restore free speech on Twitter as a threat to this power. Whoopi Goldberg stated this baldly when she counseled liberals to walk away from Twitter until they figure out how to “get the control you need” of the platform.

Hence the effort to Trumpify Musk.

Ponder for a moment the ubiquity and ferocity of attacks on this one man and the outrageous effort to cast calls for censorship as ringing defenses of liberty. Consider too that this, like the treatment accorded Trump, has not just been normalized, but valorized.

When authorities lose the power to convince, they coerce. That is what is going on now as they tell us to shut up and submit. Please tweet that out.

Authored by Alan Dershowitz, op-ed via The Daily Caller,

The City of San Francisco is constitutionally prohibited from disqualifying job applicants on the basis of race. That is precisely what occurred to John Arntz who has held the job of San Francisco’s director of the Department of Elections for two decades.

He has been repeatedly praised for his excellent performance at this increasingly important job – important because of so many election challenges and doubts. Just two years ago, the election commission commended him for his “incredible leadership.”

But now they are essentially firing him because he is apparently of the wrong race to satisfy their “racial equity plan”.

This is what he was told:

“Our decision wasn’t about your performance, but after twenty years we wanted to take action on the City’s racial equity plan and give people an opportunity to compete for a leadership position.”

The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, disagreed:

“John Arntz has served San Francisco with integrity, professionalism and has stayed completely independent. He’s remained impartial and has avoided getting caught up in the web of City politics, which is what we are seeing now as a result of this unnecessary vote.”

“Over the last year John successfully ran four elections while navigating a pandemic that thwarted San Francisco into crisis response – all without a single issue. Rather than working on key issues to recover and rebuilt our City, this is a good example of unfair politicization of a key part of our government that is working well for the voters of this city.”

All of the 12 managers in his department asked that his contract be renewed. But in today’s woke world of identity politics, race trumps meritocracy. “Racial equity” plans are apparently more important than electoral integrity.

It well maybe that Arntz’s “equity” replacement will be as good as or better than him. There are, after all, highly qualified people of all races and backgrounds. But that is not the point. His contract would clearly have been renewed — he would not have been fired — if he were of an “acceptable” race.

But he is not, because he does not meet the criteria for the city’s “racial equity plan.”

To cover their legal rear ends (“CYA”) the panel has said that Arntz can “reapply” and be considered among the pool of candidates who do meet the criteria of racial equity, even though he does not! This “CYA” tactic does not even pass the giggle test.

It certainly does not pass the constitutional test, even the one that currently allows universities to place the thumb of racial diversity on the scale of admissions. That test is likely to be changed — perhaps disallowed — even in the context of private universities such as Harvard.

There is one important benefit to the San Francisco decision — at least as compared to university admissions decisions. The San Francisco panel did not try to disguise the racial criteria they are employing, whereas most universities go to great length to deny that race alone is often a dispositive factor in ranking applicants.

This will make it easier for the courts to hold San Francisco’s Arntz decision as a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

But even if this particularly outrageous decision is struck down as unconstitutional, many cities and other governmental units will continue to use race as a basis for hiring and firing employees. They will simply be less transparent about it than San Francisco was.

In the bad old days, race was often used to discriminate against black applicants. Today race is often used to discriminate in favor of black applicants. I guess that is some sort of progress. But real progress will be achieved only if and when race is no longer a factor that trumps meritocracy.

Only then will Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of how his children and ours should be judged become a reality.