Authored by Professor Josh Guetzkow via Jackanapes Junction (some emphasis ours),

SUMMARY

• CDC’s VAERS safety signal analysis based on reports from Dec. 14, 2020 – July 29, 2022 for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines shows clear safety signals for death and a range of highly concerning thrombo-embolic, cardiac, neurological, hemorrhagic, hematological, immune-system and menstrual adverse events (AEs) among U.S. adults.

• There were 770 different types of adverse events that showed safety signals in ages 18+, of which over 500 (or 2/3) had a larger safety signal than myocarditis/pericarditis.

• The CDC analysis shows that the number of serious adverse events reported in less than two years for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009 (~73,000 vs. ~13,000).

• Twice as many mRNA COVID-19 vaccine reports were classified as serious compared to all other vaccines given to adults (11% vs. 5.5%). This meets the CDC definition of a safety signal.

• There are 96 safety signals for 12-17 year-olds, which include: myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s Palsy, genital ulcerations, high blood pressure and heartrate, menstrual irregularities, cardiac valve incompetencies, pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrhythmias, thromboses, pericardial and pleural effusion, appendicitis and perforated appendix, immune thrombocytopenia, chest pain, increased troponin levels, being in intensive care, and having anticoagulant therapy.

• There are 66 safety signals for 5-11 year-olds, which include: myocarditis, pericarditis, ventricular dysfunction and cardiac valve incompetencies, pericardial and pleural effusion, chest pain, appendicitis & appendectomies, Kawasaki’s disease, menstrual irregularities, vitiligo, and vaccine breakthrough infection.

• The safety signals cannot be dismissed as due to “stimulated,” exaggerated, fraudulent or otherwise artificially inflated reporting, nor can they be dismissed due to the huge number of COVID vaccines administered. There are several reasons why, but the simplest one is this: the safety signal analysis does not depend on the number of reports, but whether or not some AEs are reported at a higher rate for these vaccines than for other non-COVID vaccines. Other reasons are discussed in the full post below.

• In August, 2022, the CDC told the Epoch Times that the results of their safety signal analysis “were generally consistent with EB [Empirical Bayesian] data mining [conducted by the FDA], revealing no additional unexpected safety signals.” So either the FDA’s data mining was consistent with the CDC’s method—meaning they “generally” found the same large number of highly alarming safety signals—or the signals they did find were expected. Or they were lying. We may never know because the FDA has refused to release their data mining results.

INTRODUCTION

Finally! Zachary Stieber at the Epoch Times managed to get the CDC to release the results of its VAERS safety signal monitoring for COVID-19 vaccines, and they paint a very alarming picture (see his reporting and the data files here, or if that is behind a paywall then here). The analyses cover VAERS reports for mRNA COVID vaccines from the period from the vaccine rollout on December 14, 2020 through to the end of July, 2022. The CDC admitted to only having started its safety signal analysis on March 25, 2022 (coincidentally 3 days after a lawyer at Children’s Health Defense wrote to them reminding them about our FOIA request for it).

[UPDATE: T Coddington left a link in comments to a website where he made the data in the Excel files more accessible.]

Like me, you might be wondering why the CDC waited over 15 months before doing its first safety signal analysis of VAERS, despite having said in a document posted to its website that it would begin in early 2021—especially since VAERS is touted as our early warning vaccine safety system. You might also wonder how they could insist all the while that the COVID-19 vaccines are being subjected to the most rigorous safety monitoring the world has ever known. I’ll come back to that later. First I’m going to give a little background information on the analysis they did (which you can skip if you’re up to speed) and then describe what they found.

BACKGROUND ON SAFETY SIGNAL ANALYSIS

Back in June 2022, the CDC replied to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the safety signal monitoring of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS)—the one it had said it was going to do weekly beginning in early 2021. Their response was: we never did it. Then a little later they said they had been doing it from early on. But by August, 2022, they had finally gotten their story straight, saying that they actually did do it, but only from March 25, 2022 through end of July. You can get up to speed on that here.

The analysis they were supposed to do uses what’s called proportional reporting ratios (PRRs). This is a type of disproportionality analysis commonly used in pharmacovigilance (meaning the monitoring of adverse events after drugs/vaccines go to market). The basic idea of disproportionality analysis is to take a new drug and compare it to one or more existing drugs generally considered safe. We look for disproportionality in the number of adverse events (AEs) reported for a specific AE out of the total number of AEs reported (since we generally don’t know how many people take a given drug). We then compare to existing drugs considered safe to see if there is a higher proportion of particular adverse events reported for the new drug compared to existing ones. (In this case they are looking at vaccines, but they still use PRR even though they generally have a much better sense of how many vaccines were administered.)

There are many ways to do disproportionality analysis. The PRR is one of the oldest. Empirical Bayesian data mining, which was supposed to be done on VAERS by the FDA, is another. The PRR is calculated by taking the number of reports for a given adverse event divided by the total number of events reported for the new vaccine or the total number of reports. It then divides that by the same ratio for one or more existing drugs/vaccines considered safe. Here is a simple formula:

So for example, if half of all adverse events reported for COVID-19 vaccines and the comparator vaccine(s) are for myocarditis, then the PRR is 0.5/0.5 = 1. If one quarter of all AEs for the comparator vaccine are for myocarditis, then the PRR is 0.5/0.25 = 2.

Traditionally, for a PRR to count as a safety signal, the PRR has to be 2 or greater, have a Chi-square value of 4 or greater (meaning it is statistically significant) and there has to be at least 3 events reported for a given AE. (This also means that if there are tons of different AEs reported for COVID vaccines that have never been reported for any other vaccine, it will not count as a safety signal. I found over 6,000 of those in my safety signal analysis from 2021.

Of course a safety signal does not necessarily mean there is a problem or that the vaccine caused the adverse event. But it is supposed to set off alarm bells to prompt closer inspection, as in this CDC pamphlet:

Ah yes, shared with the public — after first refusing to share the results and months of foot-dragging following repeated FOIA requests! We will see that the CDC has not done a more focused study on almost any of adverse events with “new patterns” (AKA safety signals).

SO WHAT DID THE CDC ACTUALLY DO?

The Epoch Times obtained 3 weeks of safety signal analyses from the CDC for VAERS data updated on July 15, 22 and 29, 2022. Here I will focus on the last one, since there is very little difference between them and it is more complete. The safety signal analysis compares adverse events1 reported to VAERS for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Dec. 14, 2020 through July 29, 2022 to reports for all non-COVID vaccines from Jan 1, 2009 through July 29, 2022.

PRRs are calculated separately for 5-11 year-olds, 12-15 year-olds and 18+ separately. For each age group, there are separate tables for AEs from all reports, AEs from reports marked serious and AEs from reports not marked as serious.2 Recall that a serious report is one that involves death, a life-threatening event, new or prolonged hospitalization, disability or permanent damage, or a congenital anomaly. I will focus on the reports for all AE’s.

They also have a table that calculates PRRs by comparing reports for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to reports for the Moderna vaccine and vice versa, again for all reports, serious reports only and non-serious reports. There were no remarkable findings in those tables, so I will not discuss them. [Edit: I forgot what Norman Fenton noted in his analysis: the overall proportion of reports with serious adverse events is 9.6% for Modern compared to 12.6% for Pfizer.] This isn’t that surprising since both vaccines are very similar and so should present relatively similar adverse events when compared to each other, and any differences are likely not large enough to be picked up by a PRR analysis. [Though the difference in the overall rate of serious adverse events, which are not specific to a particular type of event only how serious it is, was significant.]

The CDC seems to have calculated PRRs for every different type of adverse event reported for all the COVID vaccines examined – though it’s possible they only analyzed a subset. What seems clear is that, among the AEs they examined, the only ones included in the tables satisfy at least one of two conditions: a PRR value of at least 2 and a Chi-square value of at least 4 (Chi is the Greek letter χ and is pronounced like ‘kai’). When both conditions were met, they highlighted the adverse event in yellow, which appears to indicate a safety signal. There were no COVID vaccine AEs listed with fewer than 3 reported events, though for non-COVID vaccines there were many AEs listed that had only 1 or 2 reported since 2009. The CDC tables still include these and highlight them in yellow when the PRR is greater than 2 and the Chi-square value is great than 4, indicating these events are counted as safety signals.

WHAT SAFETY SIGNALS DID THE CDC FIND?

I’m going to divide this up by age groups and the Pfizer v. Moderna comparison. Let’s start with the 18+ group.

There are 772 AEs that appear on the list. Of these, 770 are marked in yellow and have PRR and Chi-square values that qualify them as safety signals. Some of these are new COVID-19 related codes, and we would expect those to trigger a signal since they didn’t exist in prior years to be reported by other vaccines. So if we take those off, we are left with 758 different types of non-COVID adverse events that showed safety signals.

I grouped these 758 safety signals into different categories. The figure below shows the total number of AEs reported for each of the major categories of safety signals:

Let’s dig into some of these categories to look at what types of AEs generated the most number of reports:3

You can peruse the adverse events using the Excel tables provided by the CDC, which were posted by The Epoch Times and Children’s Health Defense at the links at the top of this post.

What about The Children?

If there is anything that looks remotely like a bright spot in all of this is that the list of safety signals for 12-17 and 5-11 year-olds is much shorter than for 18+. There are 96 AEs that qualify as a safety signal for the 12-17 group and 67 for the 5-11. When we take out the new COVID-era AEs, there are 92 safety signals for 12-17 year-olds and 65 for 5-11 year-olds. Here are the most alarming ones:

I don’t know why the list of AE’s is so much shorter for these age groups. It could be that the list of AE’s for other vaccines for these age groups is much shorter, so in a case where AEs have been reported for the mRNA COVID vaccines but not for other vaccines, it will not be counted as a safety signal by definition.

COMPARISONS TO MYOCARDITIS & PERICARDITIS

We are told that the existence of a safety signal doesn’t necessarily mean the AE is caused by the vaccine, and I accept that premise. But the current practice seems to be to ignore safety signals, dismiss them as noise without any evidence, and stall any investigation into them as long as possible. The precautionary principle, however, dictates we should presume that a safety signal indicates causality, until proven otherwise. Since, it has been acknowledged that the mRNA COVID vaccines can cause myocarditis and pericarditis (often referred to as myo-pericarditis), we can take those AEs as a kind of benchmark, and propose that, at minimum, any AE with a signal of equal or greater size should be considered potentially causal and investigated more thoroughly.4

After dropping the new COVID-era AEs, there are 503 AEs with PRRs larger than myocarditis (PRR=3.09) and 552 with PRRs larger than pericarditis (PRR=2.82).5 This means that 66.4% of the AEs had a bigger safety signal than myocarditis and 77.3% were larger than pericarditis. You can see what those were by use this Excel file provided by the CDC and sorting the 18+ tab by the 12/14-07/29 PRR column (Column E). Then just look at which AEs have PRRs larger than the ones for pericarditis and myocarditis.

For 12-17 year-olds, there is 1 safety signal larger than myocarditis (it’s ‘troponin increased’) and 14 safety signals larger than pericarditis (excluding myocarditis), which include: mitral valve incompetence, bell’s palsy, heavy menstrual bleeding, genital ulceration, vaccine breakthrough infection, and a range of indicators of cardiac abnormalities.

For 5-11 year-olds, the comparison to myo/pericarditis is less germane, as they seem to suffer less from this side effect. But we can still make the comparison: there are 7 safety signals larger than pericarditis, including bell’s palsy, left ventricular dysfunction, mitral valve incompetence, and ‘drug ineffective’ (presumably meaning they still got COVID). There are 16 safety signals larger than myocarditis (excluding pericarditis), which in addition to those listed above also include: pericardial effusion, diastolic blood pressure increase, tricuspid valve incompetence, and vitiligo. Sinus tachycardia (high heart rate), appendicitis, and menstrual disorder come in just below myocarditis.

Now if we think of a safety signal as having both strength and clarity, then the PRR can be thought of as an indicator of how strong the signal is, while the Chi-square is a measure of how clear or unambiguous the signal is, because it gives us a sense of how likely the signal is due to chance alone: the larger the Chi-square value, the less likely the signal is due to chance. A Chi-square of 4 means there is only a 5% chance the observed signal is due to chance. A Chi-square of 8 means there is only a 0.5% chance of it being due to chance.6

For the 18+ group, there are 57 AEs with a Chi-square larger than myocarditis (Chi-square=303.8) and 68 with a Chi-square larger than pericarditis (Chi-square=229.5). Again, you can see what these are by going the Excel file linked above and sorting on Column D.

For the 12-17 group, there are 4 AEs with a larger Chi-square than myocarditis (Chi-square=681.5) and 6 larger than pericarditis (Chi-square=175.4).

For the 5-11 group, there are 22 AEs with a Chi-square larger than myocarditis (Chi-square=30.42) and 34 AEs with a Chi-square larger than pericarditis (Chi-square=18.86).

RESPONDING TO OBJECTIONS

Let’s dispense with some of the criticisms used to dismiss VAERS data, which will undoubtedly be raised if you try to bring the CDC’s analysis to people’s attention.

1. Objection: Anybody can report to VAERS. The reports are unreliable. Anti-vaxxers made lots of fraudulent reports. Nobody was aware of VAERS in the past, but now they are. So many people were afraid of the vaccine so they blamed all their health problems on it. Health workers were required by law to report certain adverse events, like deaths and anaphylaxis. Etc. Etc.

   All of these objections ultimately rely on the notion that VAERS reports for COVID-19 vaccines have been artificially inflated over previous years for one reason or another. The thing of it is, though, that the CDC has a method for distinguishing between artificial inflation and real signal. The idea is simple: if adverse events are artificially inflated, they should be artificially inflated to the same degree. Meaning, the PRRs for all of these safety signals should be about the same. But even a casual glance at the PRRs in the Excel file show they vary widely, from as low at 2 to as high as 105 for vaccine breakthrough infection or 74 for cerebral thrombosis. This method does not on the number of reports, but the rate of reporting for certain events out of all events reported. If anything, this method would tend to hide safety signals in a situation where a new vaccine generates a very large number of reports.

   The CDC has even done us the favor of calculating upper and lower confidence intervals, meaning that we can be at least 95% confident that two PRRs are truly different if their confidence intervals don’t overlap. So for example the lower confidence interval for pulmonary thrombosis is 19.7, which is higher than the upper confidence interval for 543 other signals. Artificially inflated reporting cannot explain why so many different adverse events have large PRRs that are statistically distinct from one another.

2. Objection: The safety signals are due to the huge number of COVID vaccines given out. Never before have we given out so many vaccine doses. By the end of July, the US had administered something like 600 million vaccine doses to people aged 18+. But the CDC analysis compares VAERS reports for these doses to all doses for all other vaccines for this age group since Jan. 1, 2009. But from 2015-2020 there were over 100 million flu doses administered annually to this age group alone. In previous work, I estimated 538 million doses of flu given to people 18+ from July 2015-June 2020. The number of flu and other non-COVID vaccines for this age group administered from Jan 1., 2009 through July 29, 2022 must be well over double this number, meaning VAERS reports for COVID vaccines are being compared to reports for at least double the number of doses for other vaccines. In addition to this, as already noted, the PRR methodology does not depend, strictly speaking, on the number of doses, but rather the rate of reporting of a specific AE out of all AEs for that vaccine.

3. Objection: the vaccines are mainly being given to older people who tend to have health problems, whereas other vaccines are given to younger people. This objection is dealt with, since the analyses are stratified by age groups. It might be still be somewhat valid for the 18+ group, except that in the safety signal analysis I did in the fall of 2021, I stratified by smaller age bands and still found safety signals. In any case, this objection is not enough to dismiss the safety signal analysis out of hand, but rather calls for better and more refined research.

4. Objection: The VAERS data is not verified and cannot be trusted. I’ll be the first person to agree that VAERS is not high quality data, but if it is completely untrustworthy, then how is it that the CDC uses these data to publish in the best medical journals such as JAMA and The Lancet? If the data were worthless, then these journals shouldn’t accept these papers. In that JAMA paper, they reported that 80% of the myocarditis reports met their definition of myocarditis and were included in the analysis. Many other reports simply needed more details for validation. Furthermore, the CDC has the ability and budget to follow-up on every report VAERS receives to get more details and even medical records to verify the report.

   So if myocarditis shows a clear signal in the CDC’s analysis, and 80% of those reports were apparently high quality enough to be included in a paper published in one of the world’s top medical journals, how is it possible that all the rest of the reports are junk? That all of the other safety signals are meaningless? Answer: it isn’t.

   And since we’re on the topic of safety signals that turned out to be real, it’s instructive to find appendicitis turn up as a safety signal in all 3 age groups, since a study published in NEJM based on medical records of over a million adult Israelis found an increased risk of appendicitis in the 42 days following Pfizer vaccination (but not following a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR test). That study also found an increase in lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes) after vaccination, but not after positive COVID test. Lymphadenopathy was another safety signal.

5. And that brings us to our last objection to be dispensed with: all of these AEs were due to COVID. There was an epidemic and so people were falling ill due to COVID and having all of these problems that were then blamed on the vaccine. Well to begin with, as we just saw, at least two of them (appendicitis and lymphadenopathy) do not appear to have increased risk ratios following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test, and we know that the mRNA vaccines increase risk of myo/pericarditis independent of infections. So how can we assume the rest of these are and dismiss them with the wave of a hand? We can’t. At minimum, they need further investigation. Furthermore, in the safety signal analysis I did in 2021, I dropped all VAERS reports where any sign of a SARS-CoV-2 exposure or infection was indicated on the report, and I still found large, significant safety signals.

PUTTING IT ALL INTO PERSPECTIVE

The Epoch Times article quotes my esteemed colleague and friend, Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Management and an world renowned expert in Bayesian statistical analysis: “from a Bayesian perspective, the probability that the true rate of the AE of the COVID-19 vaccines is not higher than that of the non-COVID-19 vaccines is essentially zero…. The onus is on the regulators to come up with some other causal explanation for this difference if they wish to claim that the probability a COVID vaccine AE results in death is not significantly higher than that of other vaccines.” (See his post on the CDC analysis here.) The same is true for all the safety signals they found.

The CDC’s VAERS SOP analysis document lists 18 Adverse Events of Special Interest says they are going to pay close attention to. In their 2021 JAMA paper (and similar presentations to ACIP), the researchers responsible for analyzing the millions of medical records in the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) using the ‘Rapid Cycle Analysis’ only studied 23 outcomes. A Similar analysis in NEJM from Israeli researchers focused on only 25 outcomes. Compare this to over 700 safety signals found by the CDC when they finally decided to look—and that’s not even counting all the adverse events that have never been reported for other vaccines so cannot ever show a safety signal by definition. How can the CDC say that these safety signals are meaningless if almost none of them have been studied any further? And yet we are assured that these vaccines have undergone the most intensive safety monitoring effort in history. It’s complete and utter hogwash!

*  *  *

Josh Guetzkow is a senior lecturer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Subscribe to his Substack here.

1) To be precise, the ‘adverse events’ are for ‘preferred terms’ (PTs) which is a type/level of classification used in the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), which is the classification system used by VAERS and in other pharmacovigilance systems and clinical research for coding reported adverse events. Not all preferred terms are a symptom or adverse event per se. Some refer to a specific diagnostic test that was done or a treatment that was given.

2) It’s not entirely clear how they divided these up, since there are clearly AEs that should be considered serious that don’t show up in the serious Excel table — though maybe they don’t come up simply because they are looking within serious reports. I believe that they just filtered the reports to include only serious reports or non-serious reports, then did the safety signal analysis on all the AE’s coded in those reports. The reason I think this is that I used the MedAlerts Wayback Machine, selected just the serious COVID-19 vaccine reports, and the numbers of total reports was very close to the one in the table provided by the CDC (MedAlerts actually had a bit less). The files obtained by the Epoch Times do not include much in the way of a description as to how the analyses were done, so I had to infer some details, which might be incorrect. I will try to note when I am drawing an inference about how the analysis was done.

3) Generally speaking, these figures show the top ten AEs in each category. In some cases I combined AEs that indicated the same thing, such as combining ‘heart rate irregular’ with ‘arrythmia.’ [UPDATE: Note that the charts of all categories, cardiac and thrombo-embolic events were updated on Jan 7, 2023. The reason is that I had previously categorized acute myocardial infarction as a cardiac issue and myocardial infarction as thrombo-embolic. To be consistent, I have now combined myocardial infarction and acute myocardial infarction into one AE category in the thrombo-embolic events (which made the total AEs reported for that category larger than for pulmonary ones) and then added a different cardiac AE to the cardiovascular AE category, ventricular extrasystoles, AKA premature ventricular contraction (PVC), which dependent on frequency and the presence of other cardiomyopathies is associated with sudden cardiac arrest.]

4) Note that using the myo-pericarditis signal as a yardstick doesn’t mean that these are the only signals that matter. To give one example, anaphylactic reactions don’t even show up in the list of safety signals, even though that was one of the very first risk of the vaccine that became apparent from day one of the vaccine rollout.

One potential objection to this benchmark is that it is too low of a bar, since myo-pericarditis appears to disproportionately affect younger men and so a proper safety signal should be stratified by age and gender then compared with myocarditis similarly stratified. I agree, and it is the CDC’s job to do that. But the fact is that any adverse reaction might disproportionately affect some subgroup of people, in which case the safety signal for that group would be similarly faint or diluted when we look at everyone together. So objection overruled.

5) In their Standard Operation Procedures document, the CDC said they would combine these and related codes together to assess a safety signal, but never mind – at least they finally got around to doing something.

6) In this context, the Chi-square is largely driven by the sheer number of adverse events: the more adverse events reported, including for the comparator vaccine, the larger the Chi-square. For example, the PRR for pericarditis and subdural haematoma is the same (2.82), but there were 1,701 incidents of pericarditis reported for mRNA COVID vaccines versus 221for the comparator vaccines, with Chi-square of 229.5. For subdural haematoma, these numbers are 162 verus 21, for a Chi-square of 21.2.

There’s been growing domestic pressure in Sweden for the country’s leadership to stand up to Turkey and not implement the kind of drastic changes in laws that Ankara is pushing in order for Sweden to become a NATO member. 

For example, a recent survey found almost 80% of Swedes believe the country shouldn’t compromise its legal principles, Bloomberg reported last week. Amid the pressure, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson days ago for the first time acknowledged that Turkey is asking too much. 

Kristersson said starting a week ago of Turkey’s security demands for it to joint NATO, “they also say that they want things that we cannot and do not want to give them.”

Since Sweden and Finland announced their bids to join the military alliance in May, citing the dangers of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkey has been the key holdout ‘veto’, complaining that the two countries and Sweden especially have played host to Kurdish “terrorists”. 

Ankara has since demanded sweeping changes, including the request that Sweden extradite individuals who are wanted in Turkey. Some of the Turkish requirements would require Sweden to even crackdown on the ability to protest among Kurdish groups, thus violating their own democratic and free speech laws.

Prime Minister Kristersson has admitted that at this point, “We cannot meet all of Turkey’s demands.”

He repeated the talking point in a Sunday press conference while standing alongside NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg:

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Turkey was asking too much in return for ending its obstruction of NATO membership for Sweden and neighboring Finland,  speaking Sunday at a security conference attended by NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg.

“Turkey has confirmed that we have done what we said we would do. But it also says that it wants things that we can’t, that we don’t want to give,” said PM Kristersson, adding, “We are convinced that Turkey will make a decision, we just don’t know when.”

The Swede said that decision will depend on his country’s ability “to show its seriousness,” as well as internal political factors in Turkey during an election year.

As for the Kurdish issue, Sweden in particular has long accepted an influx of Kurds from Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Over the past five years it’s been commonly estimated that Syrians (many of them Syrian Kurds hailing from border regions close to Turkey) make up about 9-10% of the total population of Sweden.

Given that in some cases these Kurds are political dissidents who have escaped the long arm of the Turkish government, Ankara has accused Stockholm of intentionally harboring criminals and supposed “terrorists”. 

Authored by Rick Moran via PJMedia.com,

South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir has been in office since the country became independent in 2011.

The 71-year-old had been rumored to be in ill health for months, but during a photo-op in December, Kiir was shown standing during the nation’s national anthem and wetting himself in a most embarrassing way.

Six staffers for the national broadcasting company in South Sudan were arrested by the security service. There were immediate complaints from the trade union representing the staffers that the law, which gives the government the power to hold someone for 24 hours before taking them before a judge, is being violated.

The staffers are being charged with having knowledge of the unauthorized release of “certain footage.”

“If there is a prima facie case of professional misconduct or offense then let authorities expedite an administrative or legal process to address the issue in a fair, transparent [sic] and in accordance with the law,” union chair Oyet Patrick Charles said.

A journalists’ union in #South_Sudan asserted Friday that six staffers with the national broadcaster are detained in connection with footage apparently showing the country’s president urinating on himself during an event. https://t.co/fXqyiAEQjP

— Patrick Heinisch (@PatrickHeinisc1) January 6, 2023

The Associated Press reports that “The presidential election was recently postponed again, this time to late 2024, amid the slow implementation of a 2018 peace deal ending a five-year civil war.”

There hasn’t been a presidential election in South Sudan since the independence, and Kiir claimed he did not want “to rush you into an election that will take us back to war,” he said.

The national security services in South Sudan are making a habit of arresting people and holding them indefinitely.

Reuters:

Muthoki Mumo, CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative, said the arrests match a “pattern of security personnel resorting to arbitrary detention whenever officials deem coverage unfavourable.”

“Authorities should unconditionally release these six SSBC employees and ensure that they can work without further intimidation or threat of arrest,” Mumo said.

So South Sudan’s agony will continue with a president who is at the very least incontinent and almost certainly losing the ability to lead his country.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The consensus among future historians will be inevitable: the 2020s started with a diabolic murder.            

Baghdad airport, January 3, 2020, 00:52 a.m. local time. The assassination of Gen.QassemSoleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic RevolutionGuards Corps (IRGC), alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi, by laser-guided AGM-114 Hellfire missiles launched from two MQ-9 Reaper drones, was, in fact, murder as an act of war.

This act of war set the tone for the new decade and inspired my book Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism, published in early 2021. 

The drone strikes at Baghdad airport, directly approved by the pop entertainer/entrepreneur then ruling the Hegemon, Donald Trump, constituted an imperial act engineered as a stark provocation, capable of engendering an Iranian reaction that would then be countered by, “self-defense”, packaged as “deterrence”.

The proverbial narrative barrage spun to saturation, ruled it as a “targeted killing”: a pre-emptive op squashing Gen. Soleimani’s alleged planning of “imminent attacks” against US diplomats and troops.No evidence whatsoever was provided to support the claim.

Everyone not only along the Axis of Resistance – Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Hezbollah – but across the Global South had been aware of how Gen. Soleimani led the fight against Daesh in Iraq from 2014 to 2015, and how he had been instrumental in retaking Tikrit in 2015. 

This was his real role – a true warrior of the war on terror, not the war of terror. For the Empire, to admit his aura glowed even across – vassalized – lands of Sunni Islam was anathema. 

It was up to then-Iraqi Prime MinisterAdil Abdul-Mahdi, in front of Parliament in Baghdad, to offer the definitive context: Gen. Soleimani, on a diplomatic mission, had boarded a regular Cham Wings Airbus A320 flight from Damascus to Baghdad. He was involved in complex negotiations between Tehran and Riyadh, with the Iraqi Prime Minister as a mediator, and all that at the request of President Trump.

So the imperial machine – following trademark, decades-long mockery of international law – assassinated a de-facto diplomatic envoy.

In fact two, because al-Muhandis exhibited the same leadership qualities as Gen. Soleimani, actively promoting synergy between the battlefield and diplomacy, and was considered absolutely irreplaceable as a key political articulator in Iraq.  

Gen. Soleimani’s assassination had been “encouraged” since 2007 by a toxic mixture of Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons -supremely ignorant of Southwest Asia’s history, culture, and politics – in tandem with the Israeli and Saudi lobbies in Washington.

Trump, blissfully ignorant of international relations and foreign policy matters, could not possibly understand The Big Picture and its dire ramifications when he had only Israeli-firsters of the Jared“of Arabia” Kushner kind whispering in his ear.  

The King is now Naked

But then everything went downhill.

Tehran’s direct response to Gen.Soleimani’s assassination, in fact quite restrained considering the circumstances, was carefully measured to not unleash unrestrained imperial “deterrence”.

It took the form of a series of precision missile strikes on the American-controlled Ain al-Assad air base in Iraq. The Pentagon, crucially, received an advance warning.

And it was precisely that measured response that turned out to be the game-changer.

Tehran’s message made it graphically clear – for the whole Global South to see – that the days of imperial impunity were over.

Any exceptionalist with a working brain would not fail to get the message: we can hit your assets anywhere in the Persian Gulf – and beyond, at the time of our choosing.

So this was the first instance in which Gen Soleimani, even after leaving his mortal coil, contributed to the birth of the multipolar world.

Those precision missile strikes on the Ain al-Assad base told the story of a mid-ranked power, enfeebled by decades of sanctions, and facing a massive economic/financial crisis, responding to a unilateral attack by targeting imperial assets that are part of the sprawling 800-plus Empire of Bases.

Historically, that was a global first –unheard of since the end of WWII.

And that was clearly interpreted across Southwest Asia – as well as vast swathes of the Global South – for what it was: The King is now   Naked.

Surveying the shifting chessboard

Three years after the actual murder, we may now see several other instances of Gen. Soleimani paving the way toward multipolarity.

There was a regime change at the Hegemon – with Trumpism being replaced by a toxic neoliberal-con cabal, infiltrated by Straussian neo-cons, remote-controlling a senile warmongering entity barely qualified to read a teleprompter.

This cabal’s foreign policy turned out to be supremely paranoid, antagonizing not only the Islamic Republic but also the Russia-China strategic partnership.

These three actors happen to be the three top vectors in the ongoing process of Eurasia integration.      

Gen Soleimani may have foreseen, ahead of anyone else except Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, that the JCPOA – or Iran nuclear deal – was definitely six feet under,  as the recent farce these past few months in Vienna made it clear. 

So he could have possibly foreseen that with a new administration under President EbrahimRaisi, Tehran would finally abandon any hope of being “accepted” by the collective West and wholeheartedly embrace its Eurasian destiny. 

Years before the assassination, Gen. Soleimanihad already envisaged a “normalization” between the Israeli regime and Persian Gulf monarchies.

At the same time he was also very much aware of the Arab League 2002 position – shared, among others, by Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon: a “normalization” cannot even begin to be discussed without an independent – and viable – Palestinian state under 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as capital.

Gen. Soleimani did see the Big Picture all across West Asia, from Cairo to Tehran and from the Bosphorus to the Bab-al-Mandeb. He certainly foresaw the inevitable “normalization” of Syria in the Arab world – and even with Turkey, now a work in progress.

He arguably had imprinted in his brain the possible timeline followed by the Empire of Chaos to completely ditch Afghanistan – though certainly not the extent of the humiliating retreat – and how that would reconfigure all bets from West Asia to Central Asia.

What he certainly didn’t know was that the Empire left Afghanistan to concentrate all its Divide and Rule/strategy of chaos bets on Ukraine, in a lethal proxy war against Russia. 

It’s easy to see Gen.Soleimani foreseeing Abu Dhabi’s Mohammad bin Zayed (MbZ), MbS’s mentor, placing his bets simultaneously on an Israel-Emirates free trade deal and a détente with Iran.

He could have been part of the diplomatic team when MbZ’ssecurity advisor Sheikh Tahnoonmet with President Raisi in Tehran over a year ago, even discussing the war in Yemen.

He could also have foreseen what took place this past weekend in Brasilia, on the sidelines of the dramatic return of Lula to the Brazilian presidency: Saudi and Iranian officials, in neutral territory, discussing their possible détente.  

As the whole chessboard across West Asia is being reconfigured at breakneck speed, perhaps the only developmentGen.Soleimani would not have foreseen is the petro-yuan displacing the petrodollar “in the space of three to five years”, as suggested by Chinese President Xi Jinping in his recent landmark summit with the GCC. 

I have a dream

The profound reverence towards Gen. Soleimani expressed by every layer of Iranian society – from the grassroots to the leadership – has certainly translated into honoring his life’s work by finding Iran’s deserved place in multipolarity. 

Iran is now solidified as one of the key nodes of the New Silk Roads in Southwest Asia. The Iran-China strategic partnership, boosted by Tehran’s accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)in 2002, is as strong geoeconomically and geopolitically as the interlocking partnerships with two other BRICS members, Russia and India. In 2023, Iran is set to become a member of BRICS+.

In parallel, the Iran/Russia/China triad will be deeply involved in the reconstruction of Syria – complete with BRI projects ranging from the Iran-Iraq-Syria-Eastern Mediterranean railway to, in the near future, the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline, arguably the key factor that provoked the American proxy war against Damascus.

Soleimaniis today revered at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, at the al-Aqsa mosque in Palestine, at the dazzling late baroque Duomo in Ragusa in southeast Sicily, at a stupa high in the Himalayas, or a mural in a street in Caracas.

All across the Global South, there’s a feeling in the air: the new world being born – hopefully, more equal and fair – was somehow dreamed of by the victim of the murder that unleashed the Raging Twenties.

Authored by Thaddeus McCotter via AmGreatness.com,

The gleaming promise of new technology and its uses blinded us to the insidious extent imperiled elitists would go to protect their unmerited power, wealth, and status. We were naïve. Yet, even if one could have foreseen the metastasizing tyranny brought about by the digital age, it would have strained credulity to watch Americans—especially the young—not merely acquiescing to it, but embracing it.

Though we are now inured to its novelty, it bears recollecting that from the late 20th century to the present, we have lived through a worldwide communications revolution. Profoundly affecting the individual and society, the full impact of this revolution remains unclear. Humanity’s ability to choose and pursue happiness has been empowered to an extent undreamt. In the palm of one’s hand, or upon one’s laptop or desk, and with just a stroke of a key, one can instantaneously communicate with family and friends a world away, conduct business, petition the government for the redress of grievances, or bring calumny upon a major corporation. In sum, the communications revolution is an historically unprecedented technological boon for personal empowerment, growth, enrichment, and self-government.

It is this last that alarms the elitists.

The elitists believe they are entitled to wield power for the purpose of governing their inferiors (i.e., the rest of us). To facilitate this inversion of our free republic’s design, the elitists require the complicity of a significant amount of the citizenry who, through acquiescence, apathy, and/or dependency, are more than willing to submit to the elitists’ control over their lives, be it wholly or in part. Thus, for the elitists, the communications revolution is an existential threat. The empowerment of sovereign citizens to self-govern and, be it singularly or collectively, increase their ability to control and curtail—i.e., to subordinate—the power of public and private sector elitists, had to be blocked through co-option and coercion; through a communications counterrevolution.  

Fear is the key. (Isn’t it always when trying to pry away the people’s rights?) Frightened elitists were able to project and impart their fear into their fellow citizens; once the unwarranted paranoia was sufficiently transferred to a critical mass of them, no social, political, legal, or constitutional bar would be insurmountable. There were foreign and domestic terrorists lurking around the corner, white supremacists scurrying about the block, hate and racism woven throughout our endangered democracy! 

So commenced and continues the coercive disempowering of the entire sovereign citizenry, as far too many frightened people voluntarily shed their rights and scramble into faux lifeboats bound up serf’s creek without a paddle. Free speech is on the verge of being viewed not as a God-given right but a clear and present danger. A danger only the elitists could prevent through their life-saving censorship—er, “content moderation.”    

Already, the elitists’ siren song has found fertile ground. The elitists’ indoctrination machine has seduced many of America’s youth to renounce what was once considered an intergenerational, innate yearning by young people to be heard and to reject censorship. But the elitists have tamed and muzzled the rising generation’s innate rebelliousness. Like a teacher handing out participation trophies to boost students’ unwarranted self-esteem, the elitists have granted laurels to collegiates for disempowering themselves, laurels these kids have accepted gratefully in exchange for their rights. Of course, they and everyone who submits to the self-censorship and abets the censorious silencing of dissent will be defenseless when the elitists come for them. But that will never happen, will it?

This is not a partisan issue, as every American has the God-given right to free speech. And every American is an equal participant in our free republic’s revolutionary experiment in self-government. The elitists’ communication counterrevolution proceeds apace—with the bitterly ironic collusion of Big Tech, which has betrayed its initial promise of providing and promoting personal empowerment and free speech—and with the support of much of the Left, which once championed free speech. Apparently, that was free speech only for themselves and those who aligned with their ideology. 

In the end, though, it makes perfect, despicable sense: Big Government, Big Tech, and the Left are elitists in common cause to convince the public that the greatest threat to Our Democracy™ is your freedom. Yet, this “democracy” is actually their oligarchy, the preservation of which is the elitists’ communications counterrevolution’s end game.

Yes, we should have seen it coming. Still, during the communications revolution, to have been blinded by the empowering possibilities and—hope against hope—to have believed individual liberty had ultimately triumphed over the state is to our eternal credit. Such idealism, independence, and faith are hallmarks of Americans; and, incidentally, why the elitists’ communication counterrevolution, finally, will fail.

Authored by George Ford Smith via The Mises Institute,

This will be brief, appropriate to the topic at hand.

It consists of a quote from Milton Friedman found in Joseph Salerno’s outstanding book, Money: Sound and Unsound:

If a domestic money consists of a commodity, [such as] a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money takes care of itself. (emphasis added)

Imagine that. If we have sound money, we don’t need the Fed. Or Congress. We just need sound money.

End of essay.

Postscript:

Economist Nouriel Roubini once attacked the gold standard:

Roubini raises the following question: If you are on a gold standard, or modified gold standard, what do you do in the event of a bank run—if you don’t have enough gold to fully back the currency?

Translated: What happens if the banks have created bogus IOUs for their depositors’ gold? Suggestion: Have them indicted for fraud. Gold doesn’t “back” anything. It is the money. The banks issue IOUs for the money. When they issue more IOUs than they have gold on hand, they’re cheating.

Murray Rothbard:

In my view, issuing promises to pay on demand in excess of the amount of the goods on hand is simply fraud, and should be so considered by the legal system . . .

This is legalized counterfeiting; this is the creation of money without the necessity of production, to compete for resources against those who have produced.

In short, I believe that fractional-reserve banking is disastrous both for the morality and for the fundamental bases and institutions of the market economy.

Roubini also says that a “gold standard limits the flexibility and range of actions that central banks can take.” He thinks it’s a shortcoming, but that alone should recommend it.

At the start of World War I, the belligerent governments went off the gold standard so they could fight the bloodiest war in human history. Gold, since it can’t be created on demand, would have severely limited the “flexibility and range of actions” governments could take. 

Sound money is not a product of central bank policy decisions. But who cares about sound money when you want to engage in massive human slaughter?

More recently, Roubini said, “The world is on a slow-motion train wreck.” 

The unmolested gold coin standard avoids train wrecks, “Dr. Doom,” by staying on track.

A gold standard doesn’t need Roubini. It doesn’t need Jerome Powell. It doesn’t need Congress. It doesn’t need the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. It doesn’t need the WEF, the FOMC, or AOC.

It just needs to be left alone.

The gold standard “requires nothing else than that the government abstain from deliberately sabotaging it,” Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Theory of Money and Credit.

What all the enemies of the gold standard spurn as its main vice is precisely the same thing that in the eyes of the advocates of the gold standard is its main virtue, namely its incompatibility with a policy of credit expansion. The nucleus of all the effusions of the anti-gold authors and politicians is the expansionist fallacy.

Credit expansion—inflation—is indispensable to a growing government. From Human Action:

The gold standard removes the determination of cash-induced changes in purchasing power from the political arena. Its general acceptance requires the acknowledgment of the truth that one cannot make all people richer by printing money. The abhorrence of the gold standard is inspired by the superstition that omnipotent governments can create wealth out of little scraps of paper.

If wealth could be created out of scraps of paper or their digital equivalent, world poverty would be a thing of the past.

Remember, the commodity money takes care of itself—and us too, if we let it.

A Minnesota adjunct professor was fired for showing a 14th-century panting of the Prophet Muhammad, despite taking extensive precautions before doing so.

The now-former professor at Hamline University, Erika López Prater, warned students in the syllabus that images of holy figures, including the Prophet Muhammad and the Buddha, would be shown during the course. She asked students to contact her with any concerns, and said nobody did.

In class, she told students right before the unveiling that the painting would be displayed in case anyone wanted to step out.

Then, after showing the image, she was fired, the NY Times reports.

Officials at Hamline, a small, private university in St. Paul, Minn., with about 1,800 undergraduates, had tried to douse what they feared would become a runaway fire. Instead they ended up with what they had tried to avoid: a national controversy, which pitted advocates of academic liberty and free speech against Muslims who believe that showing the image of Prophet Muhammad is always sacrilegious.

After Dr. López Prater showed the image, a senior in the class complained to the administration. Other Muslim students, not in the course, supported the student, saying the class was an attack on their religion. They demanded that officials take action. -NY Times

School officials told López Prater that her ‘services would not be needed’ next semester, and told students and faculty in an email that the incident was clearly Islamophobic.

According to an email so-signed by Hamline president Fayneese S. Miller, respect for Muslim students “should have superseded academic freedom.“

Meanwhile at a town hall, a Muslim who was invited to speak compared it to teaching that Hitler was good.

Free Speech Backlash

In response to the firing, an Islamic art historian wrote an essay defending López Prater and demanding that the university’s board investigate the matter. An associated petition has received over 2,800 signatures.

Free speech groups such as PEN America called it “one of the most egregious violations of academic freedom in recent memory,” and as the Times notes, “Muslims themselves debated whether the action was Islamophobic.”

That doesn’t matter to Miller, who defended the decision – saying: “To look upon an image of the Prophet Muhammad, for many Muslims, is against their faith,” adding “It was important that our Muslim students, as well as all other students, feel safe, supported and respected both in and out of our classrooms.”

The student who complained about the image, Aram Wedatalla of Sudanese origin, said she was blindsided by the image.

“I’m like, ‘This can’t be real,’” she said. “As a Muslim and a Black person, I don’t feel like I belong, and I don’t think I’ll ever belong in a community where they don’t value me as a member, and they don’t show the same respect that I show them.”

The image shown by López Prater is contained in one of the earliest Islamic illustrated histories of the world, “A Compendium of Chronicles,” written by Rashid-al-Din during the 14th century. It’s shown regularly in art history classes, and depicts a crowned Angel Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammad and delivering the first Quaranic revelation.

According to Christine Gruber, professor of Islamic Art at the University of Michigan who wrote the essay defending López Prater, the image is a “masterpiece of Persian manuscript painting.”

[S]imilar paintings have been on display at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And a sculpture of the prophet is at the Supreme Court.

Dr. Gruber said that showing Islamic art and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have become more common in academia, because of a push to “decolonize the canon” — that is, expand curriculum beyond a Western model. -NYT

“My perspective and actions have been lamentably mischaracterized, my opportunities for due process have been thwarted, and Dr. Everett’s all-employee email accusation that ‘undeniably… Islamophobic’ actions undertaken in my class on Oct. 6 have been misapplied,” Prater told the student paper.

Mark Berkson, the university’s department of religion chair and a professor of Asian religions, Islam, and comparative religion, wrote: “In the context of an art history classroom, showing an Islamic representation of the Prophet Muhammad, a painting that was done to honor Muhammad and depict an important historical moment, is not an example of Islamophobia.”

“Labeling it this way is not only inaccurate but also takes our attention off of real examples of bigotry and hate.”

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

As Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative enters its 10th year, a strong Sino-Russian geostrategic partnership has revitalized the BRI across the Global South…

The year 2022 ended with a Zoom call to end all Zoom calls: Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discussing all aspects of the Russia-China strategic partnership in an exclusive video call.

Putin told Xi how “Russia and China managed to ensure record high growth rates of mutual trade,” meaning “we will be able to reach our target of $200 billion by 2024 ahead of schedule.”

On their coordination to “form a just world order based on international law,” Putin emphasized how “we share the same views on the causes, course, and logic of the ongoing transformation of the global geopolitical landscape.”

Facing “unprecedented pressure and provocations from the west,” Putin noted how Russia-China are not only defending their own interests “but also all those who stand for a truly democratic world order and the right of countries to freely determine their own destiny.”

Earlier, Xi had announced that Beijing will hold the 3rd Belt and Road Forum in 2023. This has been confirmed, off the record, by diplomatic sources. The forum was initially designed to be bi-annual, first held in 2017 and then 2019. 2021 didn’t happen because of Covid-19.

The return of the forum signals not only a renewed drive but an extremely significant landmark as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in Astana and then Jakarta in 2013, will be celebrating its 10th anniversary.

BRI version 2.0

That set the tone for 2023 across the whole geopolitical and geoeconomic spectrum. In parallel to its geoconomic breadth and reach, BRI has been conceived as China’s overarching foreign policy concept up to the mid-century. Now it’s time to tweak things. BRI 2.0 projects, along its several connectivity corridors, are bound to be re-dimensioned to adapt to the post-Covid environment, the reverberations of the war in Ukraine, and a deeply debt-distressed world.

Map of BRI (Photo Credit: The Cradle)

And then there’s the interlocking of the connectivity drive via BRI with the connectivity drive via the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), whose main players are Russia, Iran and India.

Expanding on the geoeconomic drive of the Russia-China partnership as discussed by Putin and Xi, the fact that Russia, China, Iran and India are developing interlocking trade partnerships should establish that BRICS members Russia, India and China, plus Iran as one of the upcoming members of the expanded BRICS+, are the ‘Quad’ that really matter across Eurasia.

The new Politburo Standing Committee in Beijing, which are totally aligned with Xi’s priorities, will be keenly focused on solidifying concentric spheres of geoeconomic influence across the Global South.

How China plays ‘strategic ambiguity’

This has nothing to do with balance of power, which is a western concept that additionally does not connect with China’s five millennia of history. Neither is this another inflection of “unity of the center” – the geopolitical representation according to which no nation is able to threaten the center, China, as long as it is able to maintain order.

These cultural factors that in the past may have prevented China from accepting an alliance under the concept of parity have now vanished when it comes to the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Back in February 2022, days before the events that led to Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, Putin and Xi, in person, had announced that their partnership had “no limits” – even if they hold different approaches on how Moscow should deal with a Kiev lethally instrumentalized by the west to threaten Russia.

In a nutshell: Beijing will not “abandon” Moscow because of Ukraine – as much as it will not openly show support. The Chinese are playing their very own subtle interpretation of what Russians define as  “strategic ambiguity.”

Connectivity in West Asia

In West Asia, BRI projects will advance especially fast in Iran, as part of the 25-year deal signed between Beijing and Tehran and the definitive demise of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – or Iran nuclear deal – which will translate into no European investment in the Iranian economy.

Iran is not only a BRI partner but also a full-fledged Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) member. It has clinched a free trade agreement with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), which consists of post-Soviet states Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

And Iran is, today, arguably the key interconnector of the INSTC, opening up the Indian Ocean and beyond, interconnecting not only with Russia and India but also China, Southeast Asia, and even, potentially, Europe – assuming the EU leadership will one day see which way the wind is blowing.

Map of INSTC (Photo Credit: The Cradle)

So here we have heavily US-sanctioned Iran profiting simultaneously from BRI, INSTC and the EAEU free trade deal. The three critical BRICS members – India, China, Russia – will be particularly interested in the development of the trans-Iranian transit corridor – which happens to be the shortest route between most of the EU and South and Southeast Asia, and will provide faster, cheaper transportation.

Add to this the groundbreaking planned Russia-Transcaucasia-Iran electric power corridor, which could become the definitive connectivity link capable of smashing the antagonism between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

In the Arab world, Xi has already rearranged the chessboard. Xi’s December trip to Saudi Arabia should be the diplomatic blueprint on how to rapidly establish a post-modern quid pro quo between two ancient, proud civilizations to facilitate a New Silk Road revival.

Rise of the Petro-yuan

Beijing may have lost huge export markets within the collective west – so a replacement was needed. The Arab leaders who lined up in Riyadh to meet Xi saw ten thousand sharpened (western) knives suddenly approaching and calculated it was time to strike a new balance.

That means, among other things, that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) has adopted a more multipolar agenda: no more weaponizing of Salafi-Jihadism across Eurasia, and a door wide open to the Russia-China strategic partnership. Hubris strikes hard at the heart of the Hegemon.

Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Pozsar, in two striking successive newsletters, titled War and Commodity Encumbrance (December 27) and War and Currency Statecraft (December 29), pointed out the writing on the wall.

Pozsar fully understood what Xi meant when he said China is “ready to work with the GCC” to set up a “new paradigm of all-dimensional energy cooperation” within a timeline of “three to five years.”

China will continue to import a lot of crude, long-term, from GCC nations, and way more Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). Beijing will “strengthen our cooperation in the upstream sector, engineering services, as well as [downstream] storage, transportation, and refinery. The Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange platform will be fully utilized for RMB settlement in oil and gas trade…and we could start currency swap cooperation.”

Pozsar summed it all up, thus: “GCC oil flowing East + renminbi invoicing = the dawn of the petroyuan.”

And not only that. In parallel, the BRI gets a renewed drive, because the previous model – oil for weapons – will be replaced with oil for sustainable development (construction of factories, new job opportunities).

And that’s how BRI meets MbS’s Vision 2030.

Apart from Michael Hudson, Poszar may be the only western economic analyst who understands the global shift in power: “The multipolar world order,” he says,” is being built not by G7 heads of state but by the ‘G7 of the East’ (the BRICS heads of state), which is a G5 really.” Because of the move toward an expanded BRICS+, he took the liberty to round up the number.

And the rising global powers know how to balance their relations too. In West Asia, China is playing slightly different strands of the same BRI trade/connectivity strategy, one for Iran and another for the Persian Gulf monarchies.

China’s Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with Iran is a 25-year deal under which China invests $400 billion into Iran’s economy in exchange for a steady supply of Iranian oil at a steep discount. While at his summit with the GCC, Xi emphasized “investments in downstream petrochemical projects, manufacturing, and infrastructure” in exchange for paying for energy in yuan.

How to play the New Great Game

BRI 2.0 was also already on a roll during a series of Southeast Asian summits in November. When Xi met with Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit in Bangkok, they pledged to finally connect the up-and-running China-Laos high-speed railway to the Thai railway system. This is a 600km-long project, linking Bangkok to Nong Khai on the border with Laos, to be completed by 2028.

And in an extra BRI push, Beijing and Bangkok agreed to coordinate the development of China’s Shenzhen-Zhuhai-Hong Kong Greater Bay Area and the Yangtze River Delta with Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC).

In the long run, China essentially aims to replicate in West Asia its strategy across Southeast Asia. Beijing trades more with the ASEAN than with either Europe or the US. The ongoing, painful slow motion crash of the collective west may ruffle a few feathers in a civilization that has seen, from afar, the rise and fall of Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Arabs, Ottomans, Spanish, Dutch, British. The Hegemon after all is just the latest in a long list.

In practical terms, BRI 2.0 projects will now be subjected to more scrutiny: This will be the end of impractical proposals and sunk costs, with lifelines extended to an array of debt-distressed nations. BRI will be placed at the heart of BRICS+ expansion – building on a consultation panel in May 2022 attended by foreign ministers and representatives from South America, Africa and Asia that showed, in practice, the global range of possible candidate countries.

Implications for the Global South

Xi’s fresh mandate from the 20th Communist Party Congress has signaled the irreversible institutionalization of BRI, which happens to be his signature policy. The Global South is fast drawing serious conclusions, especially in contrast with the glaring politicization of the G20 that was visible at its November summit in Bali.

So Poszar is a rare gem: a western analyst who understands that the BRICS are the new G5 that matter, and that they’re leading the road towards BRICS+. He also gets that the Quad that really matters is the three main BRICS-plus-Iran.

Acute supply chain decoupling, the crescendo of western hysteria over Beijing’s position on the war in Ukraine, and serious setbacks on Chinese investments in the west all play on the development of BRI 2.0. Beijing will be focusing simultaneously on several nodes of the Global South, especially neighbors in ASEAN and across Eurasia.

Think, for instance, the Beijing-funded Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway, Southeast Asia’s first: a BRI project opening this year as Indonesia hosts the rotating ASEAN chairmanship. China is also building the East Coast Rail Link in Malaysia and has renewed negotiations with the Philippines for three railway projects.

Then there are the superposed interconnections. The EAEU will clinch a free trade zone deal with Thailand. On the sidelines of the epic return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to power in Brazil, this past Sunday, officials of Iran and Saudi Arabia met amid smiles to discuss – what else – BRICS+. Excellent choice of venue: Brazil is regarded by virtually every geopolitical player as prime neutral territory.

From Beijing’s point of view, the stakes could not be higher, as the drive behind BRI 2.0 across the Global South is not to allow China to be dependent on western markets. Evidence of this is in its combined approach towards Iran and the Arab world.

China losing both US and EU market demand, simultaneously, may end up being just a bump in the (multipolar) road, even as the crash of the collective west may seem suspiciously timed to take China down.

The year 2023 will proceed with China playing the New Great Game deep inside, crafting a globalization 2.0 that is institutionally supported by a network encompassing BRI, BRICS+, the SCO, and with the help of its Russian strategic partner, the EAEU and OPEC+ too. No wonder the usual suspects are dazed and confused.

Authored by Liz Wolfe via Reason.com,

Despite $80 billion in new funding, the agency is living up to its reputation of hassling low-income taxpayers over rich people…

On Wednesday, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data provided to it by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits performed by the agency in fiscal year 2022. Despite the infusion of new funding earmarked for the IRS via last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep.

“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” reported TRAC, noting that the poorest taxpayers are “easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”

In fact, “if one ignores the fiction of auditing a millionaire through simply sending a letter through the mail, the odds that millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent (1.1%) was actually less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage-earners whose audit rate was 1.27 percent!”

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, directed $80 billion worth of new funding over the next decade to the IRS so it could hire 87,000 new workers, purportedly to better target millionaire and billionaire scofflaws. The Biden administration and credulous journalists claimed that this would in no way increase audits for those making under $400,000 annually—suspect assurances not provided within the text of the actual bill. This increased capacity meant only those at the top would be targeted, supporters insisted. But this ignores how the IRS’s incentives work and how agencywide reform might be too heavy of a lift.

Correspondence audits—which are conducted via mail, and are the type frequently used when interacting with the poorest of taxpayers—are much easier and cheaper to conduct than other types of audits. Plus, the earned income tax credit is easy to get wrong. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that new hires with experience in the field will take almost three years of ramp-up time, with more junior new hires taking longer. The lag time between 2022’s infusion of funding, and legitimately increased capacity, will be enormous—if the agency can even snag the best in the industry when TurboTax and H&R Block will surely be swelling their own ranks. It makes sense that, given a dearth of experienced auditors not likely to be fixed soon, the agency would rely on the easiest and least time-consuming types of audits.

But be suspicious of the idea that an infusion of cash will solve longstanding problems within the IRS. This is, after all, the agency that sent $1.1 billion in child welfare payments to the wrong people over the course of merely five months during the pandemic. It’s the agency that was hacked back in 2015, resulting in the personal information of more than 700,000 taxpayers being compromised. It’s the agency that has been foolishly going after Americans who hold $10,000 or more in a foreign bank since 2010, never mind the fact that many of them are middle-class expats, not folks with yachts in the Mediterranean. And it’s the (leaky) agency that enabled the richest Americans’ intimate financial information to be thumbed through by ProPublica readers. It will take more than a little cash to fix all this, and, as the IRS’s competence and tenacity increase, so too will the tenacity of the vast infrastructure of accountants and lawyers hired by the rich to creatively minimize their tax burdens.

Though some libertarians may argue such an agency ought not to exist in the first place and cheer its relative ineptitude at going after the well-to-do, it’s decidedly absurd that the agency taxpayers just fed $80 billion to has, for another year, continued its assault on the poor.

By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

“Since the outbreak of the epidemic, we have always put people first and life first, adhered to scientific and precise prevention and control, optimized and adjusted prevention and control measures according to the time and situation, and maximized the protection of people’s lives and health,” said Xi Jinping, in a New Year’s address to his restive subjects, who had finally had enough and took to the streets, risking revolution.

“After arduous efforts, we have overcome unprecedented difficulties and challenges,” added Xi, surely awed by the power of one man atop a vast security apparatus to hold a nation of 1.4bln under lockdown, a testament to the overwhelming power of a modern surveillance state. In the history of humanity, no such thing had ever been attempted.

But it occurred in China of course, a nation where every so often a remarkable social/economic experiment takes place on a scale that is incomprehensible to the western mind. Its Great Leap Forward from 1958-62 led to many unexpected outcomes, one of which was the starvation of 40-50mm Chinese. The one-child policy from 1980-2015 was history’s greatest social experiment. No more brothers, no sisters, no aunts, no uncles. A generation of “missing women” has left today’s China with 723mm boys and just 689mm girls.

“While it is still a struggle, everyone is working hard with perseverance, and the dawn is ahead,” said President Xi to his nation of lonely, mostly only-children, emerging from the psychological torture of lockdown.

How such things manifest is anyone’s guess, the outcome of each grand experiment interweaving, compounding, echoing through generations.

Of course, it’s not all for the worse. No nation in history has lifted so many from extreme poverty, even if was in part self-inflicted. And through it all, amongst the key lessons learned, one is that to maintain control, the government must instill fear while delivering economic growth.

So having just discovered the limit of its ability to lockdown its people, the time has come to give them economic growth. “Let’s work harder, persistence means victory, and unity means victory,” said Xi Jinping, to his nation, humanity’s remarkable experiment.