Via The Cradle,

Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has been forbidden from meeting with US government officials during his current trip to Washington by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to Israeli media reports.

Gallant set off for the US capital overnight on Thursday where, according to his official agenda, he will meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan.

“Minister Gallant will hold a security briefing for the ambassadors of the member states of the UN Security Council and will visit the procurement delegation of the Ministry of Defense in New York,” Galant’s office said in a statement. 

However, no meetings with US officials are part of Gallant’s agenda, as Netanyahu reportedly imposed a veto with the directive, “if I’m not invited to Washington, no one gets a meeting there.”

Since his return to power late last year, Netanyahu has been left out in the cold by US President Joe Biden, who has refused to invite the Israeli premier to the White House in a public show of discontent with the policies pursued by Jewish supremacist authorities from Israel’s governing coalition.

Israel’s Channel 12 news reported in March that Netanyahu vetoed two US visits to which Gallant was invited as he awaited his own invite.

Nonetheless, Gallant has previously met with senior US officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, on the sidelines of a NATO gathering in Brussels in June and earlier in the year in Israel. He also met with the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, in Israel this week.

No information was made available about their discussion; however, last week, western media reports revealed that Milley was traveling to Israel to “assess the army’s fitness and readiness” in the wake of widespread mutiny by volunteer reservists who oppose Tel Aviv’s planned judicial overhaul.

Meanwhile on the extreme opposite side of Biden’s Israel snub…

Nikki Haley is America Last:

“It’s not that Israel needs America, America needs Israel!” pic.twitter.com/91TnNsEsg5

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) August 24, 2023

Gallant and Netanyahu publicly butted heads over the judicial overhaul in March, as Gallant publicly called on the premier to scrap the contentious legislation. One day later, Netanyahu announced his decision to dismiss the defense minister.

However, Netanyahu had to walk back his decision two weeks later. “I decided to put the differences we had behind us,” he said during a televised speech on 10 April. “Gallant remains in his position and we will continue to work together for the security of the citizens of Israel.”

Australian investigative reporters have unearthed damning indications that Facebook’s fact-checking operation has been “hijacked’ by leftist activists.

The investigation by Sky News centers on fact-checking of reporting on a contentious referendum campaign that’s underway in Australia. The 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum — which Australians simply refer to as “the Voice” — calls for creating an entity called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice that would “make representations to the Parliament and the Executive Government … on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.” 

Facebook is manipulating the public almost everywhere on Earth.

That is why they won’t open source their algorithm. https://t.co/iO0PUO1joF

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 23, 2023

When Sky looked under the hood of Facebook’s fact-checking, it found conflicts of interest, fact-checking policy violations, an entity operating with expired fact-checking credentials, and facts that seemingly belie previous assurances by Facebook/Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. 

Facebook/Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg as long assured that Facebook’s fact-checking is orchestrated by a purportedly independent organization called the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN), which ensures an arms-length relationship between Meta and its fact-checkers. 

Sky, however, has discovered that an Australian university that’s among those fact-checkers, has a “secret commercial contract” with an Irish Meta subsidiary worth upwards of $740,000 a year, depending on how many fact-checks it churns out. That school, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), has frequently blocked and suppressed anti-Voice journalism on Facebook.

It gets worse. Though RMIT was previously certified in its fact-checking role by IFCN, that credential expired in December. The contract between RMIT and Meta authorizes Meta to void the deal if the school loses its certification, but Meta has allowed RMIT to keep on censoring content regardless. 

Our Facebook page is worthless now. It’s been throttled to death because of fact checks “paid for by grants from Facebook.” https://t.co/cWL2Szljkg

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) August 23, 2023

That state of affairs isn’t unique to Australian fact-checking: “[RMIT] is just one of 55 fact checking operations around the world which remain signatories of the IFCN despite having expired credentials,” reports Sky.  

RMIT’s fact-checks overwhelmingly target anti-Voice content. Between May 3 and June 23, every one of RMIT’s fact-checks about the Voice scrutinized content that bolstered the case for voting ‘no’ on the measure. 

Not surprisingly, RMIT’s “Fact Lab” is led by a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reporter that Sky describes as being “unashamedly partisan.”  The man, Russel Skelton “has published dozens of tweets criticising conservative viewpoints and the journalists he has been tasked with fact checking.”

Skelton has himself explicitly advocated for a “yes” vote on the Voice, and yet he is empowered to police content from opposing perspectives. That’s a violation of IFCN’s Code of Principles: 

“Save for the issues of accuracy and transparency, the applicant’s staff do not get involved in advocacy or publicise their views on policy issues the organization might fact check in such a way as might lead a reasonable member of the public to see the organization’s work as biased,”

One of RMIT’s fact-checkers, Renee Davidson, is also publicly pro-Voice, and reposted a tweet accusing anti-Voice politician Peter Dutton of engaging in “fear-mongering through racism.” 

Davidson violated another IFCN principle, by labelling as “false” a former member of parliament’s speculative opinion about the future implications of a ‘yes’ vote on the Voice. In a TV appearance, that former MP, Nicolle Flint, suggested that implementation of the Voice’s provisions could evolve into indigenous Australians operating in an independent political system. IFCN declares that fact-checkers in its system “do not fact check statements that speculate about future events (because no one can fact check the future!).”  Similarly, fact-checkers are supposedly barred from assessing opinions. 

“Australians have a right to debate issues around the Voice without feeling coerced – especially by large and well-funded bodies seeking to control the national debate,” says Sky News Australia‘s Jack Houghton. “This referendum is for Australians to decide, not a handful of trumped-up academic elites doing everything in their power to influence the vote.”

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden—and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As Vice President, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is the Congress to do now—un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one’s political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments, while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden’s denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

So Trump in 2019 had good reasons to ensure that none of the Bidens were still burrowed deeply into the Ukrainian payoff machine.

In contrast, Joe Biden had far less grounds to unleash the full powers of government against his probable 2024 rival ex-president Trump.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is not charging Trump with bribery of the Biden sort. He does not allege that Trump gave special foreign policy preferences for those foreigners who paid his family for such services.

Instead, Smith argues that Trump unlawfully took out classified presidential papers—although Joe Biden did nearly the same.

Biden kept quiet about his vast removal of classified documents for over a decade. Not until Trump was being investigated did Biden suddenly notify the government of his illegal removals.

In contrast, a combative and boisterous Trump fought openly and constantly with federal archivists over which of his papers at his Mar-a-Lago estate were truly classified.

Prosecutorial leaks floated all sorts of unproven nefarious agendas that had prompted Trump’s disputes over his presidential papers.

But no one to this day has seriously asked why senator and then Vice President Biden secretly and weirdly removed and kept such sensitive material for years.

Recent reports allege that Hunter Biden may have been treated with kid gloves by prosecutors, partly because Hunter’s lawyers had threatened otherwise to call Joe Biden to the stand as a favorable witness.

Government prosecutors under pressure from the White House apparently balked at  the nightmare of a befuddled president of the United States testifying under oath about the supposed innocence of the very guilty Hunter Biden.

In truth, the former drug addict Hunter has played lots of such strange games with his own family.

In his laptop communications, Hunter whined that no one in the family appreciated his hard work at family grifting.

He sounded petulant that his father forced him to fork over half his income to the Joe and Jill Biden household.

At time of universal scrutiny of Hunter, the last thing any sane first son might do would be to hawk his own childish paintings at exorbitant prices to those wishing to buy influence with his father the president.

In effect, Hunter was almost daring the White House to stop his blatant grifting artistry.

Instead, the Bidens moved Hunter into the White House, apparently to keep him under closer watch.

Hunter is still out of control. He could take the family down with him unless President Biden continues to shield him from prosecution.

Ironically, the double standard used by Biden and the media to hound Trump has only raised new questions of fairness.

Why had the Biden family—with its far greater legal exposure—never faced such serial indictments?

A Republican House of Representatives had ended prior Democratic protection given the Bidens.

And the Ukraine war has again turned attention to the Biden-Burisma connection and Hunter’s shaking down of Ukrainian officials.

Finally, Joe Biden can no longer work a full day. He mutters. He stumbles. He serially lies.

He hijacks solemn occasions commemorating national tragedies by trying to one up the grieving with his own self-absorbed stories—most of them irrelevant and narcissistic half-truths.

If a cognitively and criminally challenged Biden cannot finish his term, we will finally learn the full story of 15 years of Biden family corruption.

The Bidens will lose the only impediment—Joe Biden’s political machinations—left in the way of an honest, full-blown felony investigation into what is likely the most corrupt presidential family in American history.

It was the definition of selling the news (and pre-positioning for another Powell punch below the market belt).

After what many said was the biggest blowout in corporate earnings history, when Nvidia not only smashed estimates but projected Q3 results that were above the highest whisper number, the stock initially soared in the premarket, only to slump and completely fill the earnings gap, before closing up 0.1% (after trading as much as 10% higher overnight), and even dipping red after the close.

The broader market tracked NVDA’s slump tick for tick, and after an early attempt to push to fresh highs, a burst of selling quickly dragged spoos to session lows…

… with virtually all sectors (except banks) dragged kicking and screaming into the red.

Which is hardly a surprise in a market when just a handful of stocks are again leading the entire market: yes, the breadth on the Nasdaq is the lowest it has ever been.

Option traders did their best to keep the market from sinking, with delta sinking far more slowly than overall risk, at both the shorter-term, 0DTE time horizon…

… and across longer-dated options…

… but in the end, the selling just proved to powerful for a delta reversal or an attempted gamma squeeze.

While NVDA did its best to keep stocks in the green, other names did not, with woke Disney extending its recent rout, and tumbling to the lowest closing price since 2014 (March 18, 2020 saw a lower intraday print but even the covid low closes were higher than today).

Meanwhile, another woke icon (which pretends it doesn’t use child labor), Nike, suffered its 11th consecutive day of declines, extending the longest stretch without a green close on record.

And in a testament to US consumer weakness, not even the retail outlet for increasingly more Americans who keep drowning under Bidenomics, could hold its own and Dollar Tree plunged 13% to close at the lowest level since Dec 2021.

In addition to the micro considerations, we also had a continuation of systematic factors, and as futures tumbled below the key support level of 4,400 and triggered renewed systematic/CTA/vol-control selling as confirmed by the massive Market on Close sell imbalance to the tune of $3.5 billion, macro was also in the picture, with the Citi eco surprise index posting a modest rebound after suffering the biggest set of “bad news” since April, and rising modestly on today’s stronger than expected Initial Claims and Durables reports…

… which in turn triggered a rebound in yields after their sharp drop on Wednesday…

… and sent the 2Y yield back over 5% again.

And speaking of yoyo-ing rates, tomorrow’s Jackson Hole meeting (previewed extensively here) was certainly on investors’ minds, especially since we saw some easing in recent days, although within a range that hasn’t really budged much in the past years, despite Powell’s explicit warning one year ago that pain is coming…

… which so far it has failed to make an appearance.

Angst over what the Fed chair will say has also sent the dollar sharply higher, reversing all of yesterday’s big drop, and continuing the range trade seen in the past week.

Despite the bounce in the dollar, oil managed to eek out tiny gains, and remains in the middle of the past month’s range; where it goes next will depend on what, if any, stimulus China will release next.

Finally, while the BRICs did not reveal a gold-backed currency despite some speculation ahead of the meeting (which has added 6 new countries to the famous acronym), gold held yesterday’s gain, with silver going even better.

So with that in mind ahead of Powell’s speech tomorrow, we say: “Go Jerome” and let’s hope you get it right this time.

Authroed by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

Look on the WHO webpage and you’ll see a count of over 769 million confirmed cases of Covid-19, above 6,955,141 (as of this writing) cumulative deaths.

This is still a serious mortality rate, but as Matt Orfalea’s damning new video above shows, far short of what the same organization estimated at pandemic’s start.

We were told experts estimated a 3.4% death rate, which scared the pants off a lot of people, leading to fears of interaction with workers delivering food and all sorts of other behaviors.

I’m going to defer to Matt’s written research on this piece as well this week at the Orf Report (www.censorednews.substack.com), but a few quick notes on the above-described phenomenon:

It’s clear looking back now that “misinformation” during this period became synonymous with acts like “contradicting health officials,” or offering “information discarding what the health officials are saying,” or “using a hunch instead of listening to the global authority on public health,” as Anderson Cooper put it. My man Willie Geist of Morning Joe, whom I always liked, is seen here saying, “It’s not a time for Donald Trump to be calling in to cable shows.”

This was a key advance in the evolution of “misinformation.” Once Covid-19 arrived, defying health experts by having one’s own opinions or hypotheses was deemed a species of public deception, not just on the part of Donald Trump but among figures like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, also shown above. Like “AntiVax Barbie,” Jimmy Kimmel’s caricature of an antisocial menace who wore a cutoff tee reading “I CALL MY OWN SHOTS,” any person failing to accept what authorities said was quickly termed a “danger” by figures ranging from Kathleen Sibelius to Ben Rhodes to Brian Stelter.

This created a Catch-22 for people of all political persuasions. If disagreeing with “global health authorities” could be “dangerous,” even credentialed experts like Bhattacharya risked de-amplification or removal for advancing conflicting policy ideas that implied a different interpretation of facts. This phenomenon began with a pair of doctors in Bakersfield who were removed from YouTube for posting content that “disputes the efficacy of local health authority recommended guidance” on social distancing, among other things by suggesting death rates were not that high (“Millions of cases, small amounts of deaths”).

Episodes like this led to confusion over whether disagreeing on policy prescriptions like social distancing and lockdowns constituted “dangerous” speech, and this was observed in the often hyper-cautious coverage of New York Times reporters like David Leonhardt and even Apoora Mandavilli, who drew fire from readers and colleagues alike for reporting true numbers about the low impact of the disease on school-age kids, or relaying quotes with questions about booster efficacy. I heard from reporters during this time who didn’t know if they’d be cited for encouraging an end to lockdowns even if they just included a selectively less alarming facts about Covid-19.

As Orf shows above via his inimitable Newspeak-smashing style, the early apocalyptic predictions that so freaked out the population were eventually walked back by the same authorities. However, none of these furious opponents of questioning “experts” went back and corrected their records. This was once an expected convention even on TV media, where episodes like Dan Rather’s “At the time, CBS News and this reporter fully believed the documents were genuine” Bush-era self-mortification broadcast were considered necessary to retain public trust. Because the ostensible target of these early broadcasts was Trump, no one feels a need to correct anything, but people all over the world soon learned to hesitate to criticize health authorities — and for good reason, as yesterday’s news involving colleague C.J Hopkins showed.

This episode shows: not only can health authorities be wrong on facts, but they can use their supposed infallibility on facts to clamp down on policy criticisms as well, putting whole populations in the uncomfortable position of having to accept both numbers and policy answers on faith.

Thanks once again to Orf for a superior job of collecting material before it’s lost down our widening memory hole. Increasingly it looks like this is now a primary role of authority-era journalism, making sure we don’t give in to institutional pushes to forget what was said when, and by whom. This was a big one, and don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t.

Wagner supporters inside Russia have set up makeshift memorials as they mourn the loss of their leader Yevegny Prigozhin, even as speculation continues that he could still be alive.

More importantly, some are threatening a new ‘march of Moscow’ to express rage at ruling powers in Moscow and commanders in the defense ministry. August 24, it should be noted, is precisely two months since the Wagner uprising of June 23, which resulted in several deaths of regular Russian troops.

Wagner Telegram channels have reported Prigozhin’s death, and that of his right-hand man Dmitry Utkin in the same crash outside of Moscow Wednesday.

UK media has meanwhile referenced Wagner social media statements to suggest some among the mercenary outfit may be attempting to organize a new march or large-scale protest aimed at Moscow, or at least they’ve issued a new threat of a “march”:

A Wagner address last night, reported by the Sun, stated: ‘We directly say that we suspect the Kremlin officials led by Putin of an attempt to kill him!’.

‘If the information about Prigozhin’s death is confirmed, we will organize a second March of Justice on Moscow!‘

Meanwhile armed men claiming to be from the unit warned Putin in a video shared online: ‘There’s a lot of talk right now about what the Wagner Group will do. We can tell you one thing. 

‘We are getting started, get ready for us.’ 

In St. Petersburg, flowers were laid out in front of Wagner headquarters, with one mourner quoted as saying, “It’s like losing a father. He was everything to us.”

According to more from the scene:

Makeshift memorials appeared outside the private military group’s former headquarters around midnight Thursday, with footage showing mourners bringing flowers, candles and patches featuring Wagner’s skull logo.

Similar memorials were spotted in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, according to the news website Sota. At least one supporter staged a one-man picket in the city of Yaroslavl, the news website 7×7 reported.

“Guys, we just have no words right now,” said one masked man, who claimed to be a member of Wagner, according to AFP journalists. “Let’s support Yevgeny Viktorovich [Prigozhin] and all our commanders. We need your support now.”

Wagner fighter cries at the memorial to Prigozhin in Novisbirsk pic.twitter.com/2NwhAQb0pK

— Michael A. Horowitz (@michaelh992) August 24, 2023

On Thursday President Putin belatedly addressed the reported death of Prigozhin for the first time, vowing to see a criminal investigation through to completion, and hailing him as a “talented businessman” who made “mistakes”.

According to a state media translation of the fresh Putin remarks:

Yevgeny Prigozhin was a man of many talents who made a “significant contribution” to the struggle against neo-Nazis in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, commenting on the plane crash that reportedly killed the Wagner Group head.

Speaking with journalists at the Kremlin, Putin said that he had known Prigozhin since the early 1990s, and described him as “a man of complicated destiny.”

“He’d made serious mistakes in his life, but also got results. For himself as well as our common cause, when I asked it of him in these last months,” Putin added. He described Prigozhin as “a talented businessman” who worked in Russia as well as in Africa dealing with oil, gas, precious metals and gems.

Vladimir Putin confirms Yevgeny Prigozhin died when the Wagner founder’s plane crashed yesterday.

” I knew Prigozhin for a long time, from the early 1990s. He had a difficult path and made serious mistakes in his life. But he got results – for himself, and when I asked him.” pic.twitter.com/dYZTRVOW5q

— max seddon (@maxseddon) August 24, 2023

Meanwhile the US has said it believes the Wagner private jet was shot down with a surface-to-air missile that originated from within Russia. If true, this would point to Putin or the military chain of command having made the decision to take the plane out.

A disturbing report has emerged following the Maui fires which killed at least 114 and left up to 1,100 residents – many of whom are suspected to be children – unaccounted for.

According to AP, Lahaina residents who disobeyed government road barricades survived the fires, while many who heeded orders to turn around died in their cars and homes with no way out. Now, officials are facing public outrage over why the emergency sirens weren’t set off and why they prevented people from fleeing to safety.

So – no siren, no water, and barricades.

Early on as the fires spread, over 30 power poles were downed alongside the Honoapiilani Highway, located at the southern part of Lahaina. Officials then blocked the Lahaina Bypass Road, preventing law-abiding citizens from fleeing to the southern part of the island. The ones who made it disobeyed.

During a press conference, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier (formerly police chief in Las Vegas during the deadliest mass-shooting in US history) told reporters that officers never stopped residents from fleeing the area, however AP says that residents were turned away and discouraged from disobeying the barricade.

And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30.

One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their 4-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape. One man took an dirt road uphill, climbing above the fire and watching as Lahaina burned. He later picked his way through the flames, smoke and rubble to pull survivors to safety.

But dozens of others found themselves caught in a hellscape, their cars jammed together on a narrow road, surrounded by flames on three sides and the rocky ocean waves on the fourth. Some died in their cars, while others tried to run for safety. -AP

Echos of Uvalde – a Lahaina mother tried to save her son and was stopped by first responders who lied to her, claiming that the area had been cleared and no one was there.

She found his body two days later, hugging his dead dog. https://t.co/EoBurnCbEX pic.twitter.com/XTbteX3qxG

— Dr. Benjamin Braddock (@GraduatedBen) August 23, 2023

One couple, Nate Baird and Courtney Stapleton, told the outlet that they had loaded up the car with their two sons, Baird’s mother and a dog to escape the flames. After driving south, they swerved past cones and escaped to a neighboring town.

“Nobody realized how little time we really had,” said Baird. “Like even us being from the heart of the fire, we did not comprehend. Like we literally had minutes and one wrong turn. We would all be dead right now.“

According to Baird, if they had 10 more minutes they could have saved children who were left home alone in their neighborhood.

“The kids just don’t have a filter. So their son ran up and was just telling our son, you know, ‘This kid is dead. This kid is dead.’ And it’s like, all my son’s friends that they come to our house every day,” he said. “And their parents were at work, and they were home alone. And nobody had a warning. Nobody, nobody, nobody knew.”

Just to review, the local government in Maui didn’t use the sirens to alert residents to the fire, didn’t allow access to water to put out the fire, and blocked the only exits out of town.

This is one of the great scandals in American history. Many people should be in prison. https://t.co/aYihwUwoaO

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 23, 2023

Meanwhile, Maui Mayor Richard Bissen has been dodging questions he knows the answers to.

By Alex Kimani of OilPrice.com

The volume of natural gas flowing to LNG giant Cheniere Energy’s Corpus Christi export plant in Texas was on track to decline nearly 30% on Wednesday, a day after Tropical Storm Harold hit South Texas. According to Refinitiv data, gas volumes flowing to Corpus were on track to drop to about 1.5 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) on Wednesday from 2.1 bcfd previously.

At full capacity, the three liquefaction trains at the Corpus Christi LNG export plant are capable of chilling  2.4 bcfd of natural gas into LNG, enough to supply 12 million U.S. homes.

Although officials at Cheniere have declined to comment on plant operations, a  report by Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR), a subsidiary of Enverus, has provided estimates that should a hurricane hit the Gulf of Mexico, ~40% of oil and gas production would be shut in and take seven days to recover in a mid-impact case estimates while a high-impact case would shut in as much as 90% of production and take 16 days to recover. 

Although Tropical Storm Hilary has been gradually weakening, it continues to flood parts of Mexico, California and the Southwest U.S.

In more positive news, Cheniere has struck a deal with Germany’s BASF SE to supply the chemical giant with 0.8 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of LNG to the chemicals giant. The BASF deal is one of several long-term supply deals Cheniere has signed so far this year. 

Back in June, Cheniere signed a long-term LNG sale and purchase agreement with China’s ENN Energy Holdings. Under terms of the deal, ENN will purchase ~1.8M metric tons/year of LNG on a free-on-board basis at Henry Hub prices for a 20-year term, with deliveries to commence mid-2026 ramping up to 0.9 million tonne per annum (mtpa) in 2027. Cheniere has also entered another LNG sale and purchase agreement with Norway’s Equinor ASA that will see the Norwegian national oil company purchase 1.75M metric tons/year of LNG on a free-on-board basis for a purchase price indexed to the Henry Hub price, for a 15-year term.

Five days after a Georgia state Senator demanded a special emergency legislative session to investigate Fulton County DA Fani Willis over ‘weaponization of our justice system’ against former President Donald Trump, House Republicans have launched an investigation into Willis.

On Thursday, Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee sent Willis a letter demanding documents and information, including whether her office had been communicating with Biden DOJ grand inquisitor Jack Smith, the federal special counsel prosecuting Trump over alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“Your indictment and prosecution implicate substantial federal interests, and the circumstances surrounding your actions raise serious concerns about whether they are politically motivated,” reads the letter from Jordan (R-OH) to Willis.

“The indictment appears to be an attempt to use state criminal law to regulate the conduct of federal officers acting in their official capacities.”

In addition to asking for communications with Smith, Jordan asked for documents related to the DA office’s use of federal funds, and her communications with any officials in the federal executive branch.

Jordan asked Willis to provide the information by Sept. 7.

Trump is due to surrender at an Atlanta jail on Thursday evening to be booked in the case. Eighteen other people, including lawyers who promoted false claims about the 2020 election, also were indicted in the case.

The lion’s share of Jordan’s letter is dedicated to justifying why a congressional committee has the right to demand information about a state criminal investigation. –CNBC

While the House Judiciary Committee is typically limited to oversight concerning federal courts and federal officials, Jordan claims that Willis’ case falls under his committee’s purview because it concerns the actions of former federal officials.

Earlier this year, Jordan’s committee demanded similar information from Manhattan “Soros” DA Alvin Bragg, who has charged Trump with falsifying business records related to his porn start hush-money payoff.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This concentration of housing ownership by the wealthy is the direct result of Federal Reserve and federal policies that benefit the wealthy.

We’re told that sky-high rents and home prices are the result of a shortage of housing. The solution is simple: build more housing.

This sounds obvious, but the reality is the problem isn’t a shortage, it’s the concentration of housing ownership in the top 10%, the same 10% who own the majority of other income-producing assets like stocks and bonds.

The problem is the wealthy are hoarding housing as just another income-producing asset to accumulate because the central bank / economic-financial policies of the past few decades have favored capital over labor and the already-wealthy who bought assets when they were cheap.

The trillions of dollars in new credit have been asymmetrically distributed: the most creditworthy with the highest incomes and collateral are the top 10%, so they scooped up most of the credit. Since real estate is so heavily dependent on credit (20% down and 80% borrowed, not like stocks and bonds), this massive influx of low-cost credit led to the top 10% accumulating investment housing.

In other words, the asymmetric distribution of credit concentrated ownership of housing in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. The wealthy entered bidding wars for “surplus housing” with other wealthy, a bidding process based largely on who had access to the lowest-cost credit and whose existing wealth had ballooned up more in the central bank-generated Everything Bubble.

Those without existing credit-bubble-collateral or the free money issued by the Bank of Mom and Dad couldn’t compete.

Given these asymmetries in credit, collateral and family wealth, there was no way the wealthy wouldn’t end up with the lion’s share of “surplus housing,” just as they ended up owning the lion’s share of stocks, bonds, precious metals, cryptocurrencies, artwork, etc.

There are many sources of housing-hoarding. One is inheritance. The parents move into assisted living or pass on, and since the family was wealthy enough to help the kids buy their own homes at an early age, the parent’s home is “surplus capital” that stays in the family.

Another is corporate buying of rental properties. Steadily rising rents (see last chart below) make rental housing a low-risk, attractive investment, so corporations tapped their credit lines or the corporate bond market to snap up tens of thousands of rental homes. Since corporate costs of capital and management are lower than those available to households, corporations can afford to be less price sensitive. Individual buyers could be outbid by corporations.

A third source is the recent “investment craze” for short-term vacation rentals (STVR) as the wealthy heard stories of other wealthy people getting $10,000 a month from homes that fetched $2,000 a month as long-term rentals.

This differential unleashed a tsunami of home purchases by the wealthy seeking to maximize their gains on cheap credit and “excess capital” stagnating in their accounts earning near-zero interest.

In classic fashion, this land-rush frenzy to capture the outsized profits from STVR gobbled up all the housing inventory, creating credit-induced scarcity. Also in classic fashion, wealthy bidders began basing their bids not on $3,000 a month via long-term rental income, but $12,000 a month (in peak season) income from price-insensitive tourists via STVR.

The deluge of “revenge spending” unleashed after the pandemic lockdowns ended supercharged the greed and acquisition of housing for short-term vacation rentals. $12,000 a month was now chump-change; the price jumped to $15,000, and soon enough, this was a “bargain” that needed another boost higher.

Those desperate for vacations regardless of cost were the perfect customer base for rampant price-gouging, a.k.a. “maximizing return on investment.”

The true scale of this land-rush by the wealthy into STVRs is difficult to assess for various reasons. To get preferential mortgage and property tax rates, some new owners may have claimed residency or listed the new purchase as a second home. The only way to accurately assess the true scale is to tote up STVR licenses in locales that require STVR owners to obtain permits and pay annual registration fees.

Consider the facts displayed below. The current housing bubble arose as a direct result of the flood of stimulus issued by the Federal Reserve and Treasury post-pandemic.

Note the massive spike in investment purchases that resulted.

The third chart shows that the US population rose by 4 million 2019-2023 while housing expanded by 5 million units. Um, OK, where is the scarcity when housing per capita (per person) is at record highs?

The fourth chart shows that the prime home-buying cohort (ages 25-54) has flatlined since 2008, along with the number employed and thus able to obtain and pay a mortgage.

What skyrocketed wasn’t the number of employed home buyers–what skyrocketed was credit and central bank / government stimulus: the Fed balance sheet and holdings of mortgage-backed securities skyrocketed (fifth chart), directly goosing housing via lowering mortgage rates, and federal deficit spending.

The wealthy are hoarding housing because the system has incentivized dumping “excess capital and credit” into housing. This concentration of housing ownership in the wealthy is the direct result of Federal Reserve and federal policies that benefit the wealthy.

As longtime correspondent Suzanne S. put it: “I’m not sure we have a housing crisis as much as an ownership crisis.”

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