Via Consortium News/ProPublica,

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead, in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four year period. 

The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

• At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or appeared to target people for no clear reason.
• A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty intelligence by the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence-gathering services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
• The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians. He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said: ‘We are sorry. … We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
• The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special operations forces soldiers working with the C.I.A. often joined them. The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and where no militants are present at all.”
• Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to kill.”

• Because the Zero Units operated under a CIA program, their actions were part of a “classified” war, with the lines of accountability so obscured that no one had to answer for operations that went wrong. And U.S. responsibility for the raids was quietly muddied by a legal loophole that allows the C.I.A. — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the agency for their operations — to act without the same level of oversight as the American military.
• Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers said they don’t believe Congress was getting a complete picture of the C.I.A.’s overseas operations. Lawyers representing whistleblowers said there is ample motivation to downplay to Congress the number of civilians killed or injured in such operations. By the time reports get to congressional oversight committees, one lawyer said, they’re “undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”
• U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long relied on night raids by forces like the 02 unit to fight insurgencies around the globe. The strategy has, again and again, drawn outrage for its reliance on sometimes flawed intelligence and civilian death count. In 1967, the C.I.A.’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense public blowback. Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971 Pentagon study found only 3 percent of those killed or captured were full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid operations.
• Eyewitnesses, survivors and family members described how Zero Unit soldiers had stormed into their homes at night, killing loved ones at more than 30 raid sites Billing visited. No Afghan or U.S officials returned to investigate. In one instance, a 22-year-old named Batour witnessed a raid that killed his two brothers. One was a teacher and the other a university student. He told Billing the Zero Unit strategy had actually made enemies of families like his. He and his brothers, he said, had supported the government and vowed never to join the Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure.
• Little in the way of explanation was ever provided to the relatives of the dead — or to their neighbors and friends — as to why these particular individuals were targeted and what crimes they were accused of. Families who sought answers from provincial officials about the raids were told nothing could be done because they were Zero Unit operations. “They have their own intelligence and they do their own operation,” one grieving family member remembered being told after his three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike and night raid. “The provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and some sugar” as compensation for the killings. At medical facilities, doctors told Billing they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S. investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured in the raids. Some of the injured later died, quietly boosting the casualty count.

In a statement, C.I.A. spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.” She said any allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed and, if valid, the C.I.A. and “other elements of the U.S. government take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about Zero Unit operations.

With a forensic pathologist, Billing drove hundreds of miles across some of the country’s most volatile areas — visiting the sites of more than 30 raids, interviewing witnesses, survivors, family members, doctors and village elders.

To understand the program, she met secretly with two Zero Unit soldiers over the course of years, wrangled with Afghanistan’s former spy master in his heavily fortified home and traveled to a diner in the middle of America to meet with an Army Ranger who’d joined the units on operations.

She also conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former Afghan and American government officials, Afghan commanders, U.S military officials, American defense and security officials and former C.I.A. intelligence officers, as well as U.S. lawmakers and former oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers, civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence analysts, representatives of human rights organizations, doctors, hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses and family members — some of whom are not named in the story for their safety.

While America’s war in Afghanistan may be over, there are lessons to be learned from what it left behind. Billing writes:

“The American government has scant basis for believing it has a full picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new country against some new threat.”

Read her full report here.

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

The evidence strongly suggests that a combined interest rate, economic and currency crisis for the US and its western alliance will continue in 2023.

This article focuses on credit, its constraints, and why quantitative easing has already crowded out private sector activity. Adjusting M2 money supply for accumulating QE indicates the degree to which this has driven the US tax base into deep recession. And the wider effects on credit in the economy should not be ignored. 

After a brief partial recovery from the covid crisis in US government finances, they are likely to start deteriorating again due to a deepening recession of private sector activity. Funding these deficits depends on foreign inward investment flows, which are faltering. Rising interest rates and an ongoing bear market make funding from this source hard to envisage.

Meanwhile, from his public statements President Putin is fully aware of these difficulties, and a consequence of the western alliance increasing their support and involvement in Ukraine makes it almost certain that Putin will take the opportunity to push the dollar over the edge.

Credit is much more than bank deposits

Economics is about credit, and its balance sheet twin, debt. Debt is either productive, in which case it can extinguish credit in due course, or it is not, and credit must be extended or written off. Money almost never comes into it. Money is distinguished from credit by having no counterparty risk, which credit always has. The role of money is to stabilise the purchasing power of credit. And the only legal form of money is metallic; gold, silver, or copper usually rendered into coin for enhanced fungibility.

Credit is created between consenting parties. It facilitates commerce, created to circulate existing commodities, and to transform them into consumer goods. The chain of production requires credit, from miner, grower, or importer, to manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer and customer or consumer. Credit in the production chain is only extinguished when the customer or consumer pays for the end product. Until then, the entire production chain must either have money or arrange for credit to pay for their inputs. 

Providers of this credit include the widest range of economic actors in an economy as well as the banks. When we talk of the misnamed money supply as the measure of credit in an economy, we are looking at the tip of an iceberg, leading us to think that debt in the form of bank notes and deposit accounts owed to individuals and businesses is the extent of it. Changes in the banking sector’s risk appetite drive a larger change in unrecorded credit conditions. We must accept that changes in the level of officially recognised debt are merely symptomatic of larger changes in payment obligations in the economy. 

The role of credit is not adequately understood by economists. Keynes’s General Theory has only one indexed reference to credit in the entire book, the vade mecum for all macroeconomists. Even the title includes “money” when it is actually all about credit. Von Mises expounds on credit to a considerable degree in his Human Action, but this is an exception. And even his followers today are often unclear about the distinction between money and credit.

Economists and commentators have begun to understand that credit is not limited to banks, by admitting to the existence of shadow banking, a loose definition for financial institutions which do not have a banking licence but circulate credit. The Bank for International Settlements which monitors shadow banking appears to suspect shadow banks of creating credit without the requirement of a banking licence. There appears to be a confusion here: the BIS’s starting point is that credit is the preserve of a licenced bank. The mistake is to not understand the wider role of non-bank credit in economic activity.

But these institutions, ranging from insurance companies and pension funds to various forms of financial intermediaries and agents, unconsciously create credit by allowing time to elapse between a commitment giving rise to an obligation, and its settlement. Even next day settlement is a debt obligation for a buyer, or credit extended by a seller. Delivery against settlement is a credit obligation for both parties in a transaction. Futures, forwards, and options are credit obligations in favour of a buyer, which can be traded. And when a broker insists a client must have a credit in his account before investing, or to deliver securities before selling, credits and obligations are also created.

Therefore, credit has the same effect as money (which is very rarely used) in every transaction, financial or non-financial. All the debts in the accounts of businesses are part of the circulating medium in an economy, including bills of exchange and other tradable obligations. And at each transfer a new credit, debt, or right of action is created, while others are extinguished.

A banking system provides a base for further credit expansion because all credit transactions are ultimately settled in bank notes, which are an obligation of the note issuer (in practice today, a central bank) or through the novation of a bank deposit, being an obligation of a commercial bank. Banks are simply dealers in credit. As such, they facilitate not just their own dealings, but all credit creation and expunction. 

The reason for making the point about the true extent of credit is that it is a mistake to think that the statistical expansion, or contraction of it, conventionally measured by the misnamed money supply, is the true extent of a change in outstanding credit. Central banks in particular act as if they believe that by influencing the height of the visible tip of the credit iceberg, they can simply ignore the consequences for the rest. 

It is also worth making this point so that we can assess how the economies of the western alliance will fare in the year ahead — the American-led NATO and other nations adhering to its sphere of influence. With signs of bank credit no longer expanding and, in some cases, contracting, and with price inflation continuing at destructive levels and a recession threatened, it is rarely so important to understand credit and its role in an economy. 

We also need to have a true understanding of credit to assess the prospects for China’s economy, which appears to be set on a different course. Emerging from lockdown and in the light of favourable geopolitical developments while the western alliance is tipping into recession, the prospects for China’s economy are rapidly improving.

Interest rates in 2023

That the long-term trend of declining interest rates for the major fiat currencies over the last four decades came to an end in 2021 is now beyond question. That this trend fostered a continuing appreciation of asset values is fundamental to an understanding of the consequences. And that the expansion of bank credit supporting a widening plethora of financial credit has stopped, is now only beginning to be register. If we look at the quarterly rate of change in US M2 money supply, this is now evident.

Since the Bretton Woods agreement was abandoned in 1971, there has not been as severe a contraction of US dollar bank credit as witnessed today. It follows a massive covid-related spike when the US Government’s budget deficit soared. And its rise and fall is contemporaneous with a collapse in government revenues and soaring welfare costs.

In fiscal 2020 (to end-September), the Federal Government’s deficit was $3.312 trillion, compared with revenue of $3.42 trillion. It meant that spending was nearly twice tax income. Some of that excess expenditure was helicoptered directly into citizens’ bank accounts. The rest was reflected in bank balances as it was spent into public circulation by the government. Furthermore, from March 2020 the Fed commenced QE at the rate of $120bn per month, adding a total of $2.6 trillion in bank deposits by the end of fiscal 2021. 

Deflating M2 by QE to get a feel for changes in the aggregate level of bank deposits strictly related to private sector origination tells us that private sector related credit was already contracting substantially in fiscal 2020—2021. This finding is consistent with an economy which suffered a suspension of much activity. This is illustrated in our next chart, taken from January 2020.

In this chart, accumulating QE is subtracted from official M2 to derive the red line. In practice, one cannot make such a clear distinction, because QE credit goes directly into the financial sector, which is broadly excluded from the GDP calculation. Nevertheless, QE inflates not just commercial bank reserves at the Fed, but their deposit liabilities to the insurance companies, pension funds, and other members of the shadow banking group. A minor portion of QE might relate to the commercial banks themselves, which for practical purposes can be ignored.

Through QE, state-origination of credit effectively crowds out private sector-origination of credit. A Keynesian critic might dismiss this on the basis that he believes QE stimulates the wider economy. That may be true when a monetary stimulus is first applied, since it takes time for market prices to adjust to the extra quantity of credit. Furthermore, QE stimulates financial market values and not the GDP economy, only affecting it later in a roundabout way.

But when QE eventually leaks out into the wider economy, it leads to higher prices for consumer goods, confirmed by the dramatic re-emergence of consumer price inflation. Furthermore, regulated banks are limited in their ability to create credit by balance sheet constraints, so to accommodate QE they are necessarily restricted in their credit creation for private sector borrowers.

Given the far larger quantities of non-bank credit which depend for its facilitation on bank credit, the negative impact on the economy of banks becoming risk averse is poorly understood. It is ignored on the assumption that state-origination of credit through budget deficits stimulates economic activity. What is less appreciated is that QE has already driven the non-government portion of the US economy into a deepening recession, yet to be reflected in government statistics. Furthermore, that the extra credit burden on the commercial banking system has exceeded their collective balance sheet capacity is confirmed by the Fed’s reverse repo facility, which offers deposit facilities additional to the commercial banking system. Currently standing at $2.2 trillion, it represents the bulk of excess credit created by QE since March 2020.

Adjusted for QE, the falling level of private sector deposits in the M2 statistic is consistent with an economic slump, only concealed statistically by the expansion of state spending and the loss of the dollar’s purchasing power. The economic distortions arising from QE are not restricted to America but are repeated in the other advanced economies as well. The only offset to the problem is an increase in private sector savings at the expense of immediate consumption and the extent to which they absorb increasing government borrowing. That way, the consequences for price inflation would have been lessened. But in America, much of the EU, and the UK, savings have not increased as a proportion of GDP, so there has been little or no savings offset to soaring budget deficits.

A funding crisis is in the making

Returning to the US as our primary example, we can see that national monetary statistics are concealing a slump in economic activity in the “real economy”. This real economy represents the state’s revenue base. On its own, this is going to lead to higher government borrowing than expected by forecasters as tax revenues fall and welfare commitments rise. And interest expense, already estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost $442bn in the current fiscal year and $525bn in fiscal 2024, are bound to be significantly higher due to unbudgeted extra borrowing.

Officialdom still assumes that a recession will be mild and brief. Consequently, the CBO’s calculations are unrealistic in what is clearly an unfolding economic slump given the evidence from bank credit. Even without considering additional negative factors, such as bankruptcies and bank failures which always attend a deep recession, borrowing cost estimates are almost certainly going to be far higher than currently expected.

In addition to domestic spending, the western alliance appears to be stepping up its war in Ukraine against Russia. US Defence spending is already running at nearly $800bn, and that can be expected to escalate significantly as the conflict in Ukraine worsens. The CBO’s estimate for 2024 is an increase to $814bn; but in the face of a more realistic assessment of an escalation of the Ukraine conflict since the CBO forecast was made last May, the outturn could easily be over $1,000bn. 

To the volume of debt issuance must also be added variations in interest cost. Bond investors currently tolerate negative yields in the apparent belief that falling consumer demand in a recession will reduce the tendency for consumer prices to rise. This is certainly the official line in all western central banks. But as we have seen, this “transient inflation” argument has had its timescale pushed further into the future as reality intervenes. 

This line of thinking, which is based on interpretations of supply and demand curves, ignores the plain fact that a general fall in consumption is tied irrevocably to a general fall in production. It also ignores the most important variable, which is the purchasing power of a fiat currency. It is the loss of purchasing power, which is primarily reflected in the consumer price index following the dilution of the currency by its debasement. In the absence of a sheet anchor tying credit values to legal money there is the thorny question of its users’ confidence being maintained in it as the exchange medium. Should that deteriorate, not only have we yet to see the consequences of earlier QE work their way through to undermining the dollar’s purchasing power, but the cost of government borrowing is likely to remain higher and for longer than official forecasts assume. 

Funding difficulties are ahead

We can now identify sources of ongoing credit inflation, which at the least will serve to continue to undermine the dollar’s purchasing power and ensure that a rising trend for interest rates will continue. This conclusion is markedly different from expectations that the current catalogue of problems facing the US authorities amounts to a series of one-off factors that will diminish and disappear in time.

We can see that in common with the Eurozone, Japan, and the UK, the US financial system will be required to come up with rising levels of credit to fund government debt, the consequence of continuing high levels of budget deficits. Furthermore, after a brief respite from the exceptional levels of deficits over covid, there is every likelihood that these deficits will increase again, particularly in the US, UK, and the PIGS grouping in the Eurozone. Not only do these nations have a problem with budget deficits, but they have trade deficits as well. This is bad news particularly for the dollar and sterling, because both currencies are overly dependent on inward capital flows to balance their governments’ books.

It is becoming apparent that with respect to credit policies, the authorities in America (and the UK) are faced with mounting funding difficulties to resolve. We can briefly summarise them as follows:

• Though they have yet to admit it, despite all the QE to date the evidence of a gathering recession is mounting. It has only served to conceal a deteriorating economic condition. The Fed is prioritising tackling rising consumer prices for now, claiming that that is the immediate problem.

• Along with the US Treasury, the Fed still claims that inflation is transient. This claim must continue to have credibility if negative real yields in bond markets are to endure, a situation which cannot last for very long.

• Monetary stimulus is confined by a lack of commercial banking balance sheet space. Further stimulation through QE will come up against this lack of headroom. 

• With early evidence of a declining foreign appetite for US Treasuries, it could become increasingly difficult to fund the government’s deficits, as was the case in the UK in the 1970s.

This author has vivid recollections of a similar situation faced by the UK’s monetary authorities between 1972—1975. In those days, the Bank of England was instructed in its monetary policy by the Treasury, and often its market related advice was overridden by Treasury mandarins lacking knowledge of financial markets. During the Barbour boom of 1971—1972, the Bank suppressed interest rates and encouraged the inflation of credit. Subsequently, price inflation started to rise and interest rates belatedly followed, always reluctantly conceded by the authorities.

This rapidly became a funding crisis for the government. The Treasury always tried to issue gilt-edged stock at less than the market was prepared to pay. Consequently, sterling’s exchange rate would come under pressure, and with a trend of rising consumer prices continuing, interest rates would have to be raised to get the gilt issue of the day subscribed. Having reflected a deteriorating situation, bond yields then fell when it was momentarily resolved. The crunch came in Autumn 1973, when the Bank of England’s minimum lending rate was increased from 9% on 26 July in steps to 13% on 13 November. A banking crisis suddenly ensued among lenders exposed to commercial property, and a number of banks failed. This episode became known as the secondary banking crisis.

As bond yields rose, stock markets crashed, with the FT30 Share Index falling from 530 in May 1972, to 140 in January 1975. The listed commercial property sector was virtually wiped out. In an air of crisis, inept Treasury policies continued to contribute to a growing fear of runaway inflation. Long maturity gilt issues bore coupons such as 15 ¼% and 15 ½%. And finally, in November 1976, the IMF bailed Britain out with a $3.9bn loan. 

Today, these lessons for the Fed and holders of dollar denominated financial assets are instructive. Future increases in interest rates were always underestimated, and as the error became apparent bond yields rose and equities fell. While the Fed is notionally independent from the US Treasury, the Federal Open Market Committee’s approach to markets is one of control, which was not so much shared by the Bank of England in the 1970s but reflected the anti-market Keynesian view of the controlling UK Treasury. 

In common with all other western central banks today, official policy at the Fed is to deny that price inflation is related to the quantity of credit. It is rare that money or credit in the context of a circulating medium is even mentioned in FOMC policy statements. Instead, interest rate setting is the dominant theme. And there is no acknowledgement that interest rates are primarily compensation to depositors for loss of purchasing power — a dangerous error when national finances are dependent on foreigners buying your treasury bonds. 

Foreign ownership of dollars and dollar assets

In the 1970s, sterling’s troubles were compounded by a combination of trade deficits and Britain’s dependence on inward (foreign) investment. In short, the nation was, and still is savings deficient. Consequently, at the first sign of rising interest rates foreign holders recognised that the UK government would drag its heels at accepting reality. They would turn sellers leading to perennial sterling crises.

Today, the dollar has been protected from this fate because of its status as the world’s reserve currency. Otherwise, it shares the same characteristics as sterling in the 1970s — twin deficits, reliance upon foreign investment, and rising yields on government bonds. 

According to the US Treasury’s TIC statistics, in the 12 months to September last, foreign holders purchased $846bn long-term securities. Breaking these figures down, private sector foreigners were net buyers, while foreign governments were net sellers. This reflects the difference between the trade deficit and the balance of payments: in other words, importers were retaining and investing most of their dollar payments on a net basis.

Table 1 shows the most recent position. Over the last year, the total value of foreign long-term and short-term investments in dollars (including bank deposits) fell by $3.531 trillion to $30.270 trillion. $2.532 trillion of this decline was in equity valuations, and with the recent rally in equity and bond markets, there will be some recovery in these numbers. But they are an indication of market and currency risks assumed by foreign holders of these assets if US bond yields start to rise again. And here we must also consider relative currency attractions.

The decline of the petrodollar and rise of the petroyuan

It is in this context that we must view Saudi Arabia’s move to replace petrodollars with petroyuan. Through its climate change policies, the western alliance against the Asian hegemons has effectively told its oil and natural gas supliers in the Gulf Cooperation Council that their carbon fuel products will no longer be welcome in a decade’s time. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Middle East sees its future trade being with China, along with her associates in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian economic Union, and the BRICS. Saudi Arabia has indicated her desire to join BRICS. Along with Egypt, Qatar, Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia are also on the list to become dialog partners of the SCO.

 Binding the membership of the SCO together is China’s plans to accelerate a communications and industrial revolution throughout Asia, and with a savings rate of 45% she has the capital available to invest in the necessary projects without undermining her currency. While America stagnates, China’s economy will be powering ahead.

There are further advantages to China’s plans with respect to the security and availability of cheap energy. While the Asians pay lip service to the western alliance’s insistence that fossil fuels must be reduced and then eliminated, in practice SCO members are still building coal-fired power stations and increasing their demand for all forms of fossil fuel. Members, associates, and dialog partners of the SCO, representing over 40% of the world’s population now include all the major oil and gas exporters in Asia.

The economic consequences are certain to impart significant advantages to China and her industrialisation plans, compared with the western alliance’s determination to starve itself of energy. While it will take some time for the Saudis to fully declare the petrodollar dead, the signal that she is prepared to accept petroyuan is an important one with more immediate consequences. We can be sure that besides geopolitical imperatives, the Saudis will have analysed the relative prospects between the two petro-currencies. They appear to have concluded that the risk of loss of the yuan’s purchasing power is at least no greater than that of the dollar. And if the Saudis are arriving at this conclusion, we can assume that other Asian governments holding dollars in their reserves will as well.

Russia is likely to stir the currency pot

With the western alliance increasing its support and involvement in the Ukraine proxy war, the military pressure on Russia is mounting. If President Putin has learned anything, it should be that military attempts to secure Eastern Ukraine carry a high risk of failure. Furthermore, with the alliance bringing more lethal weaponry to bear on his army, his prospects of military success are declining.

Compounding his military problems is the recent decline in oil and gas prices, particularly of the latter which has taken the energy squeeze off the EU. There can be little doubt that the greater these negative factors become, the greater the pressure on Putin to resort to a financial solution.

Putin’s strategy is likely to be simple and has already been telegraphed in his speech to the delegates at the St Petersburg Economic Forum last June. In short, he understands the weakness for the dollar’s position and by extension those of the other alliance currencies. Ideally, a cold snap in Middle and Eastern Europe will help lift oil and gas prices, increasing the prospects for price inflation, thereby bringing renewed pressure for interest rates in the alliance currencies to rise. This will lead to renewed losses on US and EU bonds, further falls in equities, and therefore dollar liquidation by foreigners. The eventual outcome of Triffin’s dilemma, a final crisis for the reserve currency, is certainly in the wings.

With the situation in Ukraine likely to escalate, Putin can ill afford to delay. On another front, he has authorised Russia’s National Wealth Fund to invest up to 60% in Chinese yuan and 40% in physical gold. This is probably a move to protect the fund from Putin’s view of future currency trends and from their declining value in gold. It is consistent with what the Saudis are doing with respect to getting out of dollars into yuan, and probably some gold bullion through the Shanghai International Gold Exchange. If this demand for gold extends beyond both Russia and Saudi Arabia, then the mechanism for dollar destruction could be accelerating demand for gold from multiple governments and entities in the Russian Chinese axis.

SpaceX’s powerful Falcon Heavy rocket will attempt to put two US military satellites into geosynchronous orbit on Saturday evening. 

Weather for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is predicted to be favorable for this evening. Launch time is expected at 5:55 pm EST.

Looking forward to seeing Falcon Heavy fly tonight! Launch is schedule for 5:55 pm Eastern just after sunset. Should be spectacular! pic.twitter.com/bXLdKWaewG

— Michael Baylor (@nextspaceflight) January 14, 2023

The partially classified mission for the Space Force is called USSF-67. The rocket’s payload is two military satellites that support communications and technology demonstration experiments. 

The most recent Heavy launch was in early November. Its classified payload was for the Space Force. Today’s launch will be the fifth Heavy launch, and three more are planned for the first half of 2023. 

In addition to the Heavy launches, SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launched 60 times in 2022. A lot of attention has turned to SpaceX to help propel the American space race. 

Weeks ago, CNBC reported SpaceX raised $750 million in a new round of funding that values the company at $137 billion. 

SpaceX was just considered a possible option for astronauts leaving the International Space Station as their return to Earth could be jeopardized by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that sprang a coolant leak. 

*  *  *

Watch the launch live here:

Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

California, which has been reeling under the grip of drought, has received respite due to the multiple storms that hit the state and elsewhere in the past weeks, helping it deal with drought conditions in several regions and filling up many of the smaller reservoirs.

“A long-term drought, dating back to the 2019–2020 winter, continues across California, the Great Basin, and parts of the Pacific Northwest,” according to the National Drought Summary on Jan. 10.

“However, the intense precipitation in California the past few weeks—particularly late December and early January—has significantly reduced drought intensity in California. Most of the state saw a 1-category improvement this week.”

According to the Jan. 12th drought map for California, regions classified as facing extreme drought conditions, dubbed “D3,” have almost disappeared from the interior areas of the state.

In just a single week, the portion of the state facing D3 conditions declined from 27.1 percent to 0.32 percent. Regions classified as facing severe drought, D2, fell from 71.14 percent to 46 percent during this period.

During the past couple of weeks, 24.5 trillion gallons of water fell in California owing to a series of atmospheric river storms. Since Dec. 26, 2022, seven atmospheric rivers have dumped up to 30 inches of rain in some regions of the state.

Filling Up Reservoirs

The heavy rains have resulted in small reservoirs getting filled in several communities across California. In, for example, the Marin Municipal Water District, in the north of the state, all seven reservoirs recently hit 100 percent capacity.

Four of the 10 reservoirs owned by the Santa Clara Valley Water District are also full. Seven reservoirs run by the East Bay Municipal Utility District are 84 percent full. However, the largest reservoirs are not yet full, officials warn, because drought conditions in the state are not yet over.

The Oroville reservoir up north in Butte County, the second-largest reservoir in California, is only 49 percent full, which is 90 percent of its historical average. Shasta Lake is only 44 percent full, which is 77 percent of its historical average.

“The sum of the state’s six largest reservoir stores increased from 5 million as of Nov. 30, 2022, to 7.3 million as of Jan. 10, 2023 (from 54 percent of long-term average to 74 percent of long-term average),” the National Drought Summary said.

“Only one of the six largest reservoirs is near its long-term average, and three of them hold only 43–61 percent of their long-term averages as of Jan. 10.”

Drought Conditions Elsewhere

A study published in the journal Nature last year found that the past 22 years have been the driest period in the American Southwest’s last 1,200 years. To completely get rid of drought conditions in the region, multiple seasons of precipitation at 120–200 percent of the normal levels are estimated to be needed.

The current storm conditions are not, however, a guarantee that California’s drought conditions would end soon. In December 2021, the conditions were very wet, which raised hopes that the drought was ending. However, the months of January, February, and March ended up being the driest in California’s recorded history.

The same happened in 2013, when a wet December was followed by a very dry January and February. Though big snow totals are welcome, there is still a “long way to go before the critical April 1 total,” said Sean de Guzman, manager of the snow surveys and water supply forecasting unit at the California Department of Water Resources, according to a news release on Jan. 31.

“It’s always great to be above average this early in the season, but we must be resilient and remember what happened last year. If January through March of 2023 turns out to be similar to last year, we would still end the water year in severe drought with only half of an average year’s snowpack,” he said.

Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

I have been trying to tackle the “fringe” issues (read: the issues the mainstream won’t give way on) regarding Covid since the pandemic first began in 2020. So far, I think I’ve done a decent job in helping flesh out many “conspiracy theories” about Covid that instead, have turned out to be “conspiracy facts”.

Among them, I’ve written about managing our Orwellian response to Covid, the notoriously sensitive nature of PCR testing, the CDC moving its data goalposts, the likely nature of Covid coming from a lab leak (here and here and here) and the U.S.’s role in said leak and the media’s hysterical coverage of ivermectin.

Additionally, for those that haven’t heard it yet, in an attempt to continue the “other side” of Covid discourse, I published a new podcast with Dr. Peter A. McCullough, who has dozens of peer-reviewed publications on Covid-19 and has commented extensively on the medical response to the COVID-19 crisis in The Hill, America Out Loud, and cable networks like ABC and Fox News. 

I am always happy to welcome new content from The Brownstone Institute, one of the last few beacons of common sense left in the world of actual journalism.

This week they published a new piece on Covid and our response to it, called We Must Have The Truth. I reached out to the publication last year and requested permission to share their content when I enjoy it, in full, with my readers, which they kindly granted. If you’re interested in the topic – or simply just having a grasp on the objective truth – I believe it is a “must read”.

The article is written by Pat Fidopiastis, who is a Professor of Microbiology at California Polytechnic State University.

On April 2, 2020, a paddle boarder was chased by authorities and taken into custody. This event should have caused unanimous outrage over the absurdity of what happened – law enforcement arrested a lone paddle boarder on Santa Monica Bay for the crime of “flouting coronavirus closures.” 

Traditional voices that could have questioned unscientific authoritarian policy instead provided cover. The Los Angeles Times justified law enforcement’s ridiculous response by quoting a scientist who made the claim (presumably with a straight face): “..[SARS-CoV-2] could enter coastal waters and transfer back into the air.” Setting aside the absurdity of this and every other justification for closing beaches, hiking trails, and parks, think of the narrative it perpetuated — the virus is so insidious that even those who dared to paddle board alone on the ocean might somehow spread it to the rest of us. 

The paddler’s arrest was an early indication that something had changed in our country. A “new normal” was spawning from the chaotic, unscientific, politicized pandemic messaging mainly coming from biased news media and the once venerable Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The result was bitter contempt between two sides of the COVID-19 debate that metastasized into a deep distrust for science. 

In an understatement of the century, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky recently summed up her agency’s role in promoting distrust in science by stating that they did not “reliably meet expectations.” Thus, it’s pretty clear that for their part, nothing much will change. Dr. Fauci proclaimed that because he “represents science” any criticism of him is a direct attack on science. Translation, we shouldn’t expect any productive capitulation from him either. 

Although the CDC acknowledged playing a role in the growing distrust in science, none of their professed forms of atonement, such as promising to share data faster and doing a better job of translating science into policy will restore trust without a process that includes honest debate. 

Over the past two years, the CDC cherry-picked data from articles rushed to print in their own journal (Morbidity Mortality Weekly Report) to justify a lot of bad policy, including masking schoolchildren, which is still happening today, or pushed the completely unscientific assertion that vaccine immunity is superior to natural immunity. 

On the other hand, they buried data showing that upon reinfection, vaccinated people without prior COVID-19 diagnosis were at greater risk of hospitalization than the unvaccinated with prior COVID-19. 

Dr. Walensky also boldly stated that, “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” The untruthful messaging that vaccination stopped infection and transmission was justification for an appalling trend of people mocking the COVID-19-related deaths of the unvaccinated. 

It’s unlikely the families targeted by such attacks will hear any apologies, even though Dr. Fauci’s four shots did not protect him from reoccurring COVID-19, or that Dr. Birx admitted that inflated vaccine efficacy claims were based on hope, not science. 

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At the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci told us not to buy masks because they do not work. When the politics changed, Fauci reversed himself and became the proponent of wearing not just one mask – but several. Dr. Fauci’s excuse for the flip-flop was his only truth on the matter – he admitted that he lied, albeit “nobly.”

For his encore, Dr. Fauci confidently opined on the level of vaccine uptake required for herd immunity. Eventually he admitted to guessing at numbers to frighten people into compliance. To be clear, Dr. Fauci used deception, not science, to support his version of public health policy. 

Anybody who was “on the fence” about trusting Fauci, the self-proclaimed embodiment of “the science,” should have been forcefully pushed off after his attempts to obfuscate when testifying to Congress on whether the US government funded “gain of function” research that very likely created SARS-CoV-2. 

The loss of trust was greatly amplified by activist scientists and most of the news media. Dr. Fauci refused to say anything critical of the nationwide social justice protests that might have discouraged people from participating in behaviors known to spread respiratory viruses. 

However, scientists and news sources eagerly reported alleged death tolls purportedly caused by Trump rallies, while claiming “no evidence of protest spread.” 

How could scientists determine whether the protests caused any disease transmission or death if contact tracers were not allowed to ask if someone attended a protest?

The weaponization of science to censor, persecute, delegitimize, and threaten those who had differing opinions has never happened on this scale in this country. 

Fig. 1. Comparison of daily per capita cases between Texas (orange), which lifted its mask mandate in March 2021, California (red), and New York (Green), which continued their masking policies. 

Even President Biden capitalized on the politicization of mask-wearing by accusing the elected leader (and by extension the citizens) of Texas of “Neanderthal thinking” for removing the mask mandate in 2021. Meanwhile, states such as California and New York were praised for “following the science.” 

A simple comparison of the epidemic curves between these states did not justify the divisive rhetoric (Fig. 1). But rather than have these conversations, it was easier to just slander dissenters and censor intelligent discussion. 

As the old saying goes, “a lie is halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.” Thankfully, the truth finally has its boots on and is catching up on many fronts, such as the questionable effectiveness of mask mandates. 

The “Neanderthal thinking” jab was uttered around the time the news media, outraged by Governor Ron DeSantis’ steady leadership in Florida, hoped to get “Ron DeathSantis” trending on social media. 

Not surprisingly, the data told a different story about Florida (Fig. 2). It’s clear that “follow the science” was just a slogan. Politics, lies, and vindictive moral superiority are baked into our nation’s COVID-19 policy.

Fig. 2. Age-adjusted COVID-19 deaths in Florida and California. The circles are proportional to state population. Although these states adopted dramatically different policies, they had comparable outcomes.

Trust in science might never be restored in people who lost their livelihood to unscientific lockdowns or vaccine mandates. But, here’s some advice for people like Dr. Walensky and Dr. Fauci to get back some of the trust.

1) Go back to the basics of Public Health: “Voluntary measures are more likely to induce cooperation and protect public trust than coercive measures, and are more likely to prevent attempts to avoid contact with the healthcare system.” 

2) Invite dissenting experts to the table for open policy debate. Excess malaria and opioid deaths in young people, while millions of children were thrusted into acute starvation, are examples of significant COVID-19 policy failures. Great Barrington Declaration scientists warned about such collateral damage, but were maligned and censored. At the very least, the public would have benefitted from a different perspective on the risk of catching COVID-19 from ocean spray. 

3) Vindictive moral superiority is terrible public health messaging. Heed the advice from an article in The Atlantic: “Viruses are not moral agents, and infection is not a personal failure.”  

4) Sincerely apologize to people who were fired, maligned, censored, or physically harmed, then tell us your justification for ignoring counter data and continuing policy that encouraged these unnecessary outcomes.

5) none of the above will matter if public health officials do not tell the truth, including the nuance, and trust that the American people can handle it. George Santayana famously said, “Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Let’s hope we’ve learned from our mistakes, because given the state of the world right now, we cannot afford to repeat them. 

About The Brownstone Institute

The Brownstone Institute is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization founded May 2021. Its vision is of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force including that which is exercised by public or private authorities. This vision is that of the Enlightenment which elevated learning, science, progress, and universal rights to the forefront of public life. It is constantly threatened by ideologies and systems that would take the world back to before the triumph of the ideal of freedom.

The motive force of Brownstone Institute was the global crisis created by policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. That trauma revealed a fundamental misunderstanding alive in all countries around the world today, a willingness on the part of the public and officials to relinquish freedom and fundamental human rights in the name of managing a public health crisis, which was not managed well in most countries. The consequences were devastating and will live in infamy.

About the Author

Pat Fidopiastis is a Professor of Microbiology at California Polytechnic State University.

In a case of odd bedfellows, environmental groups and Republican politicians are calling for a pause in offshore wind farm development following a string of whales washing up dead on New Jersey and New York beaches.  

Seven whales have turned up dead in little over a month. The latest victim, a 20- to 25-foot juvenile Humpback whale, turned up in Brigantine, New Jersey on Thursday afternoon, close to a Coast Guard station. 

“The wave of dead whales is the ocean sounding the alarm, and we must heed the warning,” said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Jersey-based Clean Ocean Action, after the sixth whale washed up in Atlantic City on Jan. 7 with signs of head trauma. “[The wind farm development] is too much, too fast. It’s outrageous and our ocean deserves better.” 

On Friday, Congressman Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) announced he would seek a federal investigation. “Ocean life is being put at risk as our governor and president force through their Green New Deal policies, without giving full consideration to their real-world impacts.

Drew sits on the House Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee. New Jersey Republican state Senator Vince Polistina called for a pause in the offshore construction:

“The work related to offshore wind projects is the primary difference in our waters, and it’s hard to believe that the death of (seven) whales on our beaches is just a coincidence.”

For others officials, though, it’s damn the whales, full speed ahead. Democratic New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, on Friday said that, while “this is tragic, obviously,” suspicions that tie the dead whales to the wind farm development were “unfounded and premature.” 

New Jersey has been on a quest to distinguish itself as the top offshore-wind state on the east coast. The Garden State has already approved three offshore wind farms and is soliciting more requests. 

Clean Ocean Action says the installation of offshore windmills usually involves exploration of the sea floor using low-frequency sounds in the same frequency that whales use, with the risk that they could become disoriented or otherwise harmed.  

Earlier this week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it was unaware of any humpback whale having previously been confirmed as a victim of offshore wind projects. Among other human perils, whales can fall victim to ship strikes…but could sonar disorientation increase that risk? 

The Marine Mammal Stranding Center said it can take months to figure out a beached whale’s cause of death. In the meantime, expect Governor Murphy to continue racing to bolster New Jersey’s green energy credentials.  

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A vaccine adviser to the Food and Drug Administration is questioning whether young, healthy people should get new COVID-19 boosters, arguing those shots should be used for older individuals.

“I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later,” wrote Dr. Paul A. Offit, an FDA vaccine panel adviser and professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in New England Journal of Medicine on Jan. 11.

In his article, Offit cited two studies suggesting that bivalent boosters, which target the original COVID-19 strain and two Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA. 5, do not “elicit superior immune responses.”

“Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail?” he asked. “The most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5.”

Offit noted that based on those studies, “boosting with a bivalent vaccine is likely to have a similar effect as boosting with a monovalent vaccine” but stressed that “booster dosing is probably best reserved for the people most likely to need protection against severe disease.”

Another doctor appeared to agree with Offit’s conclusions regarding “imprinting.” Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told U.S. News that “it may be that people’s immune systems are so primed to respond to the ancestral strain spike protein that a reformulated booster is unable to fully stimulate the immune system because it has been ‘imprinted’ by the original version of the virus.”

More Details

Data and studies have shown that older adults and people who have compromised immune systems are most at risk of developing severe COVID-19 symptoms, hospitalization, and death. Children, meanwhile, have long been shown to have the lowest chance of death, hospitalization, or developing severe symptoms since the pandemic started.

Both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FDA said that everyone over the age of 6 months get updated boosters at least two months after their last doses of the vaccine. The bivalent boosters were authorized under emergency use for children aged 6 months to 4 years on Dec. 9.

Meanwhile, a small number of Americans have received the updated boosters, according to the CDC. As of Jan. 4, some 15 percent of individuals aged 5 and older received the bivalent shots, while about 38 percent of adults aged 65 and older have gotten them.

That same CDC data also shows that about 80.9 percent of all Americans received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine since they were rolled out two years ago, while 69 percent have completed their initial, “primary series.”

An FDA spokesperson Abigail Capobianco responded to Offit’s article this week, telling NBC News that Offit allegedly used “selective” data to reach his conclusions and that “we strongly believe that the totality of the available evidence continues to support the use of these vaccines in all age groups.”

Read more here…

Well, it looks like you can score one for all of the “conspiracy theorists” who have said they don’t like “smart” appliances in their home because they feel like they were being spied on.

And you can tell those writing off these concerns that intimate photos of some Roomba tester vacuums have magically turned up on Facebook after being ascertained by Venezuelan gig workers.

One woman even found photographs of herself on the toilet, taken by her robot vacuum. What a time to be alive!

Breitbart reported last week that gig workers had posted pictures online where they were discussing “work-related matters”. One photo was a woman sitting on a toilet seat with her shorts pulled down to her mid thighs – it was taken by her Roomba J7 series robot vacuum, the report says.

The photos were sent to iRobot by Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers to label AI data used to train artificial intelligence, the report says. Users had agreed to “participate in the data collection” as part of a testing. They signed consent forms but now say they feel “misled” about the true nature of the consent. 

Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told Brietbart: “There is a real concern about whether the company is being deceptive if people are signing up for this sort of highly invasive type of surveillance and never fully understand… what they’re agreeing to.”

The MIT Technology Review conducted an investigation and determined it to be gig workers in Venezuela. There were also photos of a child and a woman using the restroom, the report says. iRobot has terminated its agreement with ScaleAI in response to the investigation.

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot is caught red-handed in an email illegally seeking help from students to aid her reelection campaign in  return for class credits…

Looking for Enthusiastic Students 

Please consider Lightfoot Campaign Asks CPS Teachers to Encourage Students to Help Her Win Reelection in Return for Credit.

The email says participants in the “externship program” would be expected to contribute 12 hours per week to the Lightfoot campaign and students could earn “class credit.”

“We’re simply looking for enthusiastic, curious and hard-working young people eager to help Mayor Lightfoot win this spring,” according to an email obtained by WTTW News.

After WTTW News published details about the emails, generating a wave of criticism from other candidates in the race, Lightfoot’s campaign put out a second statement that said the campaign would “cease contact with CPS employees” out of an “abundance of caution.”

Less than two hours later, Lightfoot’s campaign issued a third version of the statement:

“All [Lightfoot for Chicago] campaign staff have been reminded about the solid wall that must exist between campaign and official activities and that contacts with any city of Chicago, or other sister agency employees, including CPS employees, even through publicly available sources is off limits. Period.”

As mayor of Chicago, Lightfoot appoints not only the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools but also the members of the Chicago Board of Education. Chicago’s ethics ordinance prohibits the use of public resources, including email accounts, for non-official purposes.

Common Practice

Two Questions For Lightfoot

• If it’s a common practice Mayor, can we please see some other examples?

• On the assumption that fraud, influence peddling, bribes and other corruption are indeed common in Chicago, what about your campaign pledge?

Why the Desperation?

In the opinion poll from Fox 32, Garcia won 28 percent; Vallas was at 19 percent; Lightfoot was at 15 percent and businessman/philanthropist Willie Wilson was at 13 percent. Other contenders were in single digits.

Hoot of the Day

Lightfoot ran for mayor in 2019 on a platform promising to root out corruption at City Hall and toughen the city’s ethics regulations in an attempt to break the grip of the city’s “corrupt political machine.”

Lightfoot should be locked up, but won’t be. Nonetheless, you can kiss her goodbye. It’s a 9-person race and she will not be one of the final two.

But don’t expect anything in Chicago to improve, because it won’t. I suspect many of the other candidates are even worse. One is from the teacher’s union, guaranteed to be no improvement.

*  *  *

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In a move that was entirely to be expected given that Brazil’s new far left leadership has been railing against massive pro-Bolsonaro, anti-Lula protesters as “terrorists” – Brazil’s Supreme Court on Friday ordered a formal investigation of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been living outside the country, in Orlando, Florida.

Though the Biden White House after days of speculation has repeatedly underscored it has yet received no extradition request for Bolsonaro, there have been growing calls among US progressive lawmakers to cancel his visa and boot him from the United States.

New left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his top officials have pointed the finger at the man popularly dubbed ‘Brazil’s Donald Trump’ for stoking election denial and fueling riots in the country, most notably last week’s storming of Brazil’s Congress building and other facilities.

Bolsonaro supporters, who have alleged widespread election fraud, have also held frequent protests outside military facilities, demanding that the armed forces intervene to overthrow a ‘false election’.

The Oct.30 election, which was the second round, saw Lula take 50.9% of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 49.1%. The closeness of the results sparked anger and unrest among pro-Bolsonaro crowds.

Estimates of those arrested for breaking into Brazilian Congress on Jan.8 range from 700 to over 1,300 – with authorities reportedly continuing to investigate those who trespassed on the federal property.

And now the ratcheting rhetoric and legal case being built against Bolsonaro could possibly result in his own arrest if he were to return home to Brazil, given that his minister of justice has just been arrested: 

Brazil’s former Minister of Justice and Public Security Anderson Torres, who was in charge of security in Brasilia during the invasion of government buildings last week, has been arrested on suspicion of “omission” and “connivance”.

Torres, who was former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro’s justice minister, was arrested after returning to Brazil on Saturday after a vacation in Florida, the same US state that Bolsonaro had travelled to after losing the election to current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

📸 | #Brazil‘s former Justice Minister Anderson Torres, who was in charge of public security in Brasilia during the invasion of government buildings a week ago, was arrested in Brasilia on Saturday on suspicion of “omission” and “connivance”. pic.twitter.com/jMqfBevluz

— EHA News (@eha_news) January 14, 2023

The new justice minister, Flavio Dino, had issued an ultimatum last week: Torres could either return of his own will or face formal extradition proceedings. Torres days later returned to Brazil to hand himself in, where he’s expected to fight the charges.

All of this is seen as part of the Lula government’s war to root out “Bolsonaristas” as they see the movement as a threat to Brazil’s democracy, and many are saying it has parallels to Jan.6 in the US.