2020 Hindsight, 2021 Foresight: Year-End Musings

Into the Unknown Region. John Michael Greer, Ecosophia. Dec. 30, 2020

For most of the fourteen years I’ve been blogging, it’s been a habit of mine on the last post of the old year (or, now and then, the first post of the new one) to offer predictions for the year ahead. I won’t be doing that this year. I think it’s quite possible to predict some of what we can expect next year. Just now, though, it seems more important to me to focus on the things we can’t know yet, because some of them will play a crucial role in the future taking shape before us.

It’s an unsettling thing, this journey we make into an unknown future. Scientists craft equations, politicians demand answers from supposedly qualified experts, advertisers convene focus groups, mystics seek visions, astrologers chart the heavens, conspiracy theorists convince themselves that the world really is under somebody’s control: these are all attempts to extract the future from the grip of the unknown and unknowable. That grip becomes particularly uncomfortable when some of the things that are unknowable ended up that way because of human action of one kind or another—and of course that’s very much the case just now.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of these riddles as we brace ourselves for tomorrow night’s plunge into the unknown territory of 2021.

The first one that comes to mind is the gaggle of vaccines against the Covid-19 coronavirus now being injected into long lines of recipients in countries around the world. The corporate media here in the US, at least, has been insisting at the top of its electronic lungs that “the vaccine” (there are of course several of them) is safe and effective. The stark truth is that nobody knows. It takes one to two years of repeated tests and long-term assessments to figure out if a vaccine is safe and effective, and the Pfizer vaccine—the first one approved in the US and Britain—got a total of eight weeks of hurried testing before it was approved for sale. It’s quite common for problems with pharmaceuticals—even horrific problems—to take months or years to surface, and the Pfizer and Moderna products belong to a type of vaccine—mRNA vaccines—that have never before been successfully used on human subjects, so no one anywhere knows what will happen when millions of people take them.

One thing that interests me is the shrill tone of the claims being made by the media about the supposed safety and efficacy of the vaccines. For some years now, the comfortable classes in today’s America have lost track of the fact that control over the public narrative does not equal control over the facts underlying the narrative. For what it’s worth, I suspect that the positive-thinking pandemic Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled ably in her book Bright-Sided plays a large role in setting the stage for this situation. Convince yourself that something is true, and the universe has to play along: that’s the mentality of a frighteningly large share of the privileged in America these days.

As the song has it, though, it ain’t necessarily so. Tens of thousands of people who plunged into flipping houses in the runup to the 2008 crash, convinced that the Law of Attraction guaranteed them wealth they didn’t earn, had to declare bankruptcy when their dreams ran face first into the laws of economics. Quite a few of them got shrill, too, when the housing crash pointed out the problems in their ideology, and the strident tone of media pronouncements about the vaccines reminds me rather forcefully of that earlier collision with reality.

We don’t know yet if a similar fate awaits the pundits and politicians who are loudly insisting that coronavirus vaccines must be safe, when neither they nor anyone else knows if this is true or not. The vaccines might all be safe; in that case, well and good. One or more of them might have the kind of nasty side effects that have caused hundreds of pharmaceuticals that were approved by the authorities to be pulled from the market in a hurry. One or more of them might be one of the great pharmaceutical disasters of our time, up there with thalidomide and Fen-Phen. We simply don’t know, and since the social-media barons have made it clear that they plan on censoring any discussion of the vaccines that doesn’t toe the pharmaceutical industry party line, we may not know for months or years.

The political implications of all this deserve attention, however. The corporate media and the scientific establishment in general have nailed what little remains of their fraying credibility to these vaccines. A great many people no longer believe anything that the authorities say about health care, and they have good reason for their disbelief—do I really have to remind anyone of the way that Barack Obama insisted that the ACA would make health insurance prices go down, and of course you’ll be able to keep your doctor and your existing plan? If one of the current crop of coronavirus vaccines turns out to have harmful or fatal side effects, the massive crisis of confidence in establishment science and medicine that has been building for decades now may just go kinetic—metaphorically or otherwise. But we simply don’t know.

Let’s move on. Another thing we don’t know about 2021 is exactly what policies the incoming Biden administration will pursue once Biden takes office in January. I assumed during the election campaign that if Biden won, he would lead a headlong flight back to the disastrous mix of neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy that the younger Bush set in motion and Obama copied with such clueless enthusiasm: that is to say, the policies that made Donald Trump inevitable. It’s quite possible that Biden (or rather, his handlers) will still do this, but there are several curious details that suggest an alternative view.

One of the signature elements of his environmental platform, for example, is a program to fund energy-conservation retrofits on American buildings, providing a great many working-class jobs in the process. I admit I was rather startled to see that on Biden’s platform, as it’s something I pushed fairly hard back when I was writing extensively on energy issues. It seems improbable that anyone on Biden’s team would stray far enough from the airtight bubble of approved thinking to reach the fringes where archdruids lurk, so I’m assuming that this is a coincidence. At the same time, the fact that Biden’s flacks have even noticed that working class Americans might be concerned about jobs suggests a degree of attention to the hard realities of life in today’s America that’s become vanishingly rare among our clueless elites.

One of the lessons that the Democratic Party spent the last four years desperately trying not to learn is that what working class Americans want is plenty of full time jobs at decent pay. That’s all they want, and it’s the only thing they’ll accept; give them that and they’re happy, don’t give them that and it doesn’t matter what else you offer them. It’s because the bipartisan consensus welded into place before Trump ignored that enduring reality of American politics that so many people in the upper midwest who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 decided to take a chance on Trump in 2016.

Biden, it bears remembering, will face a tremendously difficult situation when he starts his term in a little less than a month. He won election with paper-thin majorities in the battleground states, with even more than the usual evidence of election irregularities; his party lost more than half its majority in the House; he doesn’t have the faintest ghost of a mandate, and he’s facing heat from both sides—on the one hand, the ranting ideologues on the leftward end of his party, who hate him nearly as much as they hate Trump; on the other, a furious Republican Party that considers his presidency illegitimate and has a long list of grudges from the last four years of Democratic antics, which they will take out on him at the first opportunity. (You know as well as I do, for example, that the moment the GOP regains control of the House, Biden will face impeachment—unless they do the smart thing, that is, and target Harris first.)

Very nearly the only thing Biden and his handlers can do that might get him through this mess is to move toward the center the moment the inauguration ceremony is over. That will require him to throw the left wing of his party to the wolves and make common cause with moderates on both sides of the aisle—basically, the same thing Bill Clinton did, and Barack Obama did too, once the 2010 midterms taught him that catering to the far left was a recipe for political disaster. One thing that could strengthen Biden’s position in a big way is doing something to address the needs of working Americans—not, please note, telling them what they ought to want and then trying to browbeat them into accepting it (the usual behavior of the privileged left), but listening to them and then giving them at least some of what they ask for.

If he does that, he might be able to build enough of a coalition of moderates from both parties to fix some of the serious issues that beset this country just now, find common ground among the issues that so many ordinary Americans want to see addressed, and end up with a successful presidency despite the odds. I have no idea whether that will happen, and neither does anyone else outside the inner circle of Biden’s handlers. I’m open to the possibility that Biden will exceed my expectations—it’s quite literally impossible for him to fall below them—but we’ll simply have to wait and see.

Let’s move on. Another unknown, an important one, surfaced the other day on that charmless soapbox of the Anglo-American elite, the BBC news website. I’m not easily surprised by the babblings of the mass media these days, but this article had me staring open-mouthed, because the BBC—and even more to the point, the collection of UN environmental flacks their reporter was quoting—actually admitted in public that if the world is going to do anything significant to curb anthropogenic climate change, the well-to-do are going to have to change their lifestyles so that they produce only a fraction of the carbon dioxide pollution they currently emit.

You have to be aware of the recent history of climate change activism to understand just how astounding this utterance is. For the last few decades, celebrity activists have been busy giving new relevance to the word “hypocrite” by loudly insisting that we all have to do something about climate change, while continuing to lead the kind of personal lifestyle that dumps more CO2 into the atmosphere each year than the entire population of a midsized African city. The hypocrisy reached fever pitch as celebrity environmentalists flew in their private jets to high-profile meetings on climate change, where they waxed rhetorical about how the world had to use less carbon, while demonstrating their utter unwillingness to use less carbon themselves.

Where celebrities led, inevitably, the comfortable classes followed. Back when I was a speaker on the peak oil circuit, I noted with wry amusement how many of the upper middle class people who loved to talk about how awful climate change would be if we all didn’t pitch in and change their ways would backpedal frantically if you suggested that maybe they should lead the way by decreasing their own bigger-than-average carbon footprints. Their idea of changing the world always amounted to pushing off as many costs as possible on the working classes and the global poor, while treating their own lifestyles as sacrosanct. Notice, as one example out of many, how often climate change activists fixated on banning coal mining, which provides jobs for millions of working class people worldwide, while never mentioning the equally gargantuan pollution generated by nonessential air travel. It was fine to make coal miners lose their jobs, but heaven help you if you suggested that the well-to-do give up vacationing in Mazatlan or Bali!

Once the raw hypocrisy became so blatant that it started attracting critical attention, I predicted here and elsewhere that the comfortable classes would doubtless dump climate change as a fashionable issue and find some other issue that they could use to play virtue-signaling games and load more costs onto working people. (That duly happened—have you noticed that office fauna have been able to work from home during the current epidemic, thus continuing to draw their salaries, while people who work in factories, shops, and other lower-class venues have been laid off instead? Once again, the middle classes get coddled and the working classes get screwed.) Yet here we are, and the BBC is busy announcing that the well-to-do are going to have to do the unthinkable and rein in their absurdly extravagant lifestyles for the sake of the planet.

I suppose it’s just possible that after years of hard work analyzing the ecology of our planet and the sources of the carbon pollution that’s messing up its climate, it suddenly occurred to the experts consulted by the United Nations that it’s going to be hard to cut carbon emissions unless the people who produce a disproportionate share of those emissions do something to change that. I confess, though, that I find this hard to believe. My guess is that the political blowback against the pet policies of the clueless well-to-do has reached a high enough pitch that the organs of the establishment have been forced to notice it, and have realized that it will no longer work to insist that “shared sacrifice” means that the working poor are loaded with all the costs and the middle and upper classes get all the benefits.

That’s an issue, of course, because it’s not just environmental policy that’s been twisted out of shape along those lines. For decades now, across the board, nearly every policy that’s been pushed by the establishment here in the US and in most other industrial nations has benefited the middle classes at the expense of the working classes. That’s why we’ve gone from the situation in 1960, when one working class income could support a family comfortably, to the situation in 2020, when one working class income won’t keep a family off the street. Those changes weren’t accidental, nor were they inevitable; they were the results of readily identifiable policies pushed by a bipartisan consensus, and defended by government, corporate, and media flacks with a disingenuousness that borders on the pathological.

The difficulty we’re in now, of course, is that a very large number of people are aware of this, and they’re far from happy about it. Here in the United States, a vast number of citizens—quite probably a majority—believe that they live under a senile kleptocracy propped up by rigged elections and breathtakingly dishonest media, in which their votes do not count and their needs will not be addressed by those in power. What’s more, they have more than a little evidence to support these beliefs, and strange to say, another round of patronizing putdowns by the mouthpieces of the well-to-do is unlikely to change their minds. The resulting crisis of legitimacy has become a political fact of immense importance.

A few years back, my fellow blogger and more than occasional debating partner Dmitry Orlov wrote a series of essays (later collected into his book Reinventing Collapse) pointing out that the United States is vulnerable to the same sort of sudden political implosion that overtook the Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991. His point has lost none of its sharpness since then. When political theorists of an earlier generation noted that governments exist by the consent of the governed, they were stating a simple fact, not proposing an ideal; a government, any government, survives solely because most of the people it rules play along, obeying its laws and edicts no matter how absurd those happen to be. If they withdraw that consent, the existing order of things comes tumbling down.

As we saw some thirty years ago, the most effective way to get people to withdraw their consent from the government that claims to rule them is to show them, over and over again, that their needs and concerns are of no interest to a self-aggrandizing elite, and that they have nothing to hope for from the continuation of the present system and nothing to lose if it falls. A very substantial share of Americans, and a significant number of people in other Western industrial countries, have already had that experience and come to those conclusions—and the enthusiasm displayed by the comfortable classes for shoving off the costs of change on the impoverished majority while seizing the benefits for themselves has played a huge role in that state of affairs.

As a result, it’s entirely possible that at some point in the near future, when next the United States faces a serious crisis, most Americans will shrug and let it fall, as most Soviet citizens did when the Soviet Union hit its final crisis in 1991. Keep in mind that the vast majority of active duty US police and military personnel—the final bulwark of any regime in crisis—voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, and might not be in any hurry to come to the rescue of a system that treats them with the same casual contempt it turns on everyone outside the circles of privilege. It’s entirely possible, in other words, that ten years from now people will talk about the former United States the way they talk about the former Soviet Union.

Will that happen in 2021? It’s impossible to say, and one of the reasons it’s impossible to say is that it depends, among other things, on the other unknowns discussed already in this essay. If the Covid-19 vaccines turn out to be safe and effective; if the Biden administration moves to occupy the abandoned center of American politics and gives working Americans some reason to think that their concerns have some chance of being addressed by those who claim the right to rule them; if the privileged classes in the United States and elsewhere finally notice that policies like those they favor reliably end with some equivalent of tumbrils and guillotines, or at least the irrevocable collapse of the system that provides them with their comfortable lifestyles—why, then, things could swerve in a different direction entirely.

On the other hand, if one of those inadequately tested vaccines turns out to have bad outcomes for a significant share of the millions of people lining up to receive them, or if Biden’s talk about providing jobs for working Americans turns out to be just as dishonest as Obama’s promises about his health care legislation, or if the clueless elites keep on believing that they can pursue their pet policies at the expense of everyone whose labor keeps the system going—or, gods help us, all of these at once—then we may just find ourselves plunging into a chaotic future for which very few of us are prepared. For the moment, though, we just don’t know.

With that in mind, I’d like to encourage my readers to stay watchful, stay nimble, keep your pantries well stocked with necessities, and remember that all those yammering faces on glass screens are there to sell you something you don’t want to buy. I’ll be taking January off blogging, as usual, so we’ll resume this conversation on the first Wednesday in February. Until then, be safe, and may the powers that guide your destiny bring you good things.

A 2020 Retrospective: Looking Back in Foresight. Prof Steve Keen. Dec. 30, 2020.

I made the macabre joke at the end of my post on losing David Graeber, that “Now we know why we speak of 20:20 vision, and 20:20 hindsight. We thought it was an ophthalmologist’s crazy numbering system. In fact, it was a warning from a time traveler.” That year is about to pass, and we’ll soon look back on 2020 in hindsight—as we once did on 1920, when the Spanish Flu ended.

Will we be any the wiser? I unfortunately expect that the wish to see this year in the rear vision mirror will translate into a wish to “return to normal”, where normal is defined as “what was happening before 2020”. However, that pre-2020 normal itself was based on so many unsustainable trends—most significantly of all, the unsustainable trend of human exploitation of the biosphere. 2020 will probably be looked back upon as the year in which the unsustainability of those trends was first made apparent by Covid-19. But we humans are likely not to learn that lesson, given our desire to escape the pain this year has caused.

Some Twitter correspondents have wondered whether The Roaring Twenties were a similar response, after the privations forced upon America by the Spanish Flu. I think there’s wisdom in that thought, and I do expect we’ll attempt likewise. But we will be bereft of the low levels of private debt, and low relative levels of the stock market, that made that euphoria possible in 1920.

This will mainly be a personal reflection on 2020, but I can’t not post the following chart, showing the level of margin debt and the stock market valuation over the last century. When the Spanish Flu ended, the stock market was at almost its lowest level in history (it hit that level just six months later) and margin debt was comparable to today’s levels, which are six times the post-WWII median of about 0.5% of GDP, but exploded during the 1920s to 13% of GDP (after adjusting pre-WWII data slightly to match post-WWII records).

Especially when combined with the historically high levels of private debt, I simply can’t see the 2020s being anything like the 1920s. Instead, I think it will be the decade where our foolishness in trusting economists on climate change comes back to bite the economy big-time.

For me, 2020 has been a year of enormous change, all driven by Covid-19. I began the year in Amsterdam, where I had bought a flat with my partner Nisa. I’ve ended it in Bangkok, where we fled in March to escape the Netherlands, which has been as much of a shit-show on Covid-19 as the UK or Sweden—and we formalized our relationship by getting married yesterday.

We’ll now look to buy a place here, for both personal and climate-change related reasons. One reason I bought in Amsterdam was that, on some metrics, it was better placed than any other country in Europe to cope well with climate change. The Dutch are the best in the world at managing water, both in terms of keeping it out with dykes, and in managing it in agriculture; and as by far the world’s leading exporter of food in per capita output terms, they were likely to cope better with the climate-change-driven breakdown of agriculture.

Then they made a complete fist of Covid-19, I expect by falling for the same “herd immunity” nonsense as did Sweden, though not as explicitly. This country of 17 million has as bad a record on Covid-19 as the UK.

I was lucky to have the option of moving to Thailand, given Nisa’s nationality: though she has lived in The Netherlands for over 25 years, she is still a Thai citizen, and moving here was straightforward for her. I made the move initially thinking that it would slow down how quickly I would get the virus, thus giving more time for a vaccine to be developed. Until the recent huge outbreak in a Burmese-migrant-worker enclave on the outskirts of Bangkok, it looked like I had instead drawn the Ace of Hearts from the pack, by choosing somewhere that had eliminated the virus completely.

Even with the recent outbreak—which also illustrates the weakness, in our “spaceship Earth” world, of treating any subgroup as something we can just exploit without consequences—I think Thailand will succeed in eradicating its second wave, as The Netherlands blunders into its third.

There are family reasons for having a home here as well—we live in the same suburb as Nisa’s eldest son, and several sisters—but for me it’s also another climate change hedge. Though Thailand is likely to suffer from higher heat thanks to global warming, it isn’t projected to suffer from the “35°C wet bulb” crisis that will hit the Indian subcontinent.

It is also a net food exporter, and the food supply chain is a lot shorter, even in Bangkok, than for any Western city—including Amsterdam. So that implies relative safety, if food supplies are challenged—and prices rise dramatically as a result.

Places like the UK, which imports about 30% of its food, are likely to be severely challenged when food exporters are hit by climate change breakdowns of major weather systems.

My main reason for wanting hedges against climate change, apart from the merely selfish motivation, is that it seems I’m the person who is best placed to expose the fraud that has underpinned the sanguine forecasts of the economic impact of climate change made by Neoclassical economists like Nordhaus. I want to pursue that all the way from academic articles like “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change” to being an expert witness if, as I hope, they are eventually prosecuted under the developing laws against ecocide.

Looking forward(?) to 2021, I’ll be developing more research to support that critique of Nordhaus and friends, as well as working on monetary policies to address climate change. I have been invited to write a review paper on economic analysis of climate change Proceedings of the Royal Society A, which I’ll start as soon as I finish the first draft of The New Economics: A Manifesto for Polity Press.

I had hoped to finish that book before the end of the year—that is, in less than two days’ time! I’m close, but I won’t make it. However, I think I’ll have it done by the end of the first week of January, and I’ll post that first draft here (for patrons only).

Next cab off the rank—probably simultaneously with Royal Society paper—will be a policy paper on carbon rationing. Having read the drivel on carbon pricing by economists like Nordhaus, I’m convinced that carbon pricing is far too little, far too late, and rationing of carbon (with tradeable Universal Carbon Credits) is the only feasible monetary means to slow down climate change. ....

2020: the year the elites failed upwards

After months of repeated errors and deceptions, experts and institutions are more powerful than ever

Dave Collum's 2020 Year In Review, Part 1: "Willfully Ignorant"

David B. Collum, Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology - Cornell University 

"David Collum is willfully ignorant."

~ Mountain Man (@Pjas77)

Introduction

Imagine, if you will, a man wakes up from a year-long induced coma—a long hauler of a higher order—to a world gone mad. During his slumber, the President of the United States was impeached for colluding with the Russians using a dossier prepared by his political opponents, themselves colluding with the FBI, intelligence agencies, and the Russians. A pandemic that may have emanated from a Chinese virology laboratory swept the globe killing millions and is still on the loose. A controlled demolition of the global economy forced hundreds of millions into unemployment in a matter of weeks. Metropolitan hotels plummeted to 10% occupancy. The 10% of the global economy corresponding to hospitality and tourism had been smashed on the shoals and was foundering. The Federal Reserve has been buying junk corporate bonds in total desperation. A social movement of monumental proportions swept the US and the world, triggering months of rioting and looting while mayors, frozen in the headlights, were unable to fathom an appropriate response. The rise of neo-Marxism on college campuses and beyond had become palpable. The most contentious election in US history pitted the undeniably polarizing and irascible Donald Trump against the DNC A-Team including a 76-year-old showing early signs of dementia paired with a sassy neo-Marxist grifter with an undetectable moral compass. Many have lost faith in the fairness of the election as challenges hit the courts. Peering through the virus-induced brain fog the man sees CNBC playing on the TV with the scrolling Chiron stating, “S&P up 12% year to date. Nasdaq soars 36%.” The man has entered The Twilight Zone.

A nutty Chem prof from Cornell

Has interesting stories to tell

The year 2020

Had crazy-a-plenty

T’was a year that was crafted in hell

~ @TheLimerickKing

Putting ideas on paper is the best way to organize them in one place, and getting everything in one place is essential to understanding ideas as more than the gut reactions they often hide as.

~ Morgan Housel (@morganhousel), columnist on why we write

Every year I ponder not writing a review. One of the voices in my head was pleading with me, “Don’t write it. There is nothing to be gained.” A much louder voice that chimes in seconds before every major decision that I make, however, was saying, “Fuck it. Let’s do it.” Someday I may drop the mic but not yet. I personally benefit because my life’s experiences and observations—those wild moments and funny-assed one-liners—don’t get shoved down (or up) the memory hole. I get boluses of serotonin. Mike “Mish” Shedlock referred to 2019’s version as “Satirical, Comedic, Insulting…” as part of a thorough Collumoscopy. ref 1 To the guy who keeps emailing me urging me to clean it up so his daughters can read it, save your breath. They are either too young, which means they should be reading the Harry Potter series written by that transgender-bashing cis white billionaire, or probably have long since rounded the bases and are getting kinky with their boyfriends in ways that would curdle your blood. I also write this for Gerry (and his kids)…

Collum is a whiny moron…You would interview someone like that, a Trump-supporting climate denier…he’s a total idiot who needs to FOAD [fuck off and die]. He simply refuses to acknowledge facts…

~ Gerry Muller, my most audacious hate mailer, responding to Jim Kunstler for his audacity.

The title is a takeoff on the website entitled, “WTF Happened in 1971”, which uses 50 graphics to document that the world changed abruptly in 1971. ref 2 (The gold bugs know why.) It is undeniable that 2020 will be a year of abrupt change as well—a phase change so to speak—but to what future is unclear. We all squandered inordinate kilos of ATP trying to understand events in ways that would not make us happier people and for which an answer key eventually would be forthcoming.

We have to be very careful about how we spend our time…be very careful about not being manipulated into narrative after narrative….The Eye of Sauron is focused on climate, covid, and race. I’m not going to get caught up in it…Everything we get distracted onto we don’t make better.

~ Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray), author of The Madness of Crowds

This year posed challenges writing the damned thing, some common and others unique. Of course, I don’t have the luxury of casually surveying a year. Ya can’t be Toobin’ all day and patch it together in your spare time. Ya gotta Stephen-King the mother. Why not write it quarterly? Simple: it takes my beautiful mind that long to spot patterns in random noise and deconvolute the chorus of voices in my head. Also, nobody—and I mean nobody—in their right mind wants to rehash the events of 2020. The annual YIR is always about human folly, but how much folly is there when we’re all living in our basements (Joe)?

I tease Dave about his “Technical Analysis Wizardry,” because I want him to write a children’s book on charting. Still, I can’t deny that he often captures the market zeitgeist in one tweet.

~ Tony Greer (@TGMacro), TGMacro

Keeping it light was a Herculean task. I kept getting pulled by Lord Vader toward a revenge mindset, which I have curbed with only partial success. Epithet-rich allusions to baseball bats kept getting smuggled into the prose stemming from undiagnosed coprolalia, the acute swearing component of Tourette’s Syndrome. Some commenter after a podcast said (paraphrased), “This guy sure wants to put a hurt on a lot of people.” Indeed. The sense of frontier justice runs deep in the entire Collum clan. Horse thieves beware. I don’t need anger management; I need people to stop pissing me off. Ad hominem attacks are reserved for the total douche bags.

Writers are desperate people, and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

~ Charles Bukowski, American Poet

I was inadvertently ready for the pandemic in some odd ways. I love medieval history, had just finished a book on the Black Death in the fall of 2019, and was pondering immunology when Covid-19 struck. Ah, the first contention: I refuse to capitalize the whole thing because COVID-19 makes no sense linguistically—it’s not correct for an acronym or proper name—and using all caps is shouting and distracts from other attempts at emphasis. SHOULD I TYPE LIKE THIS? I don’t care what everybody else on the planet does. They are wrong. Screw ‘em. I appear to have gotten Covid-19 at birth; I have been tasteless and urged by friends and family to social distance since childhood. Obviously I should wax philosophically about the Covid-19, right? But what do you say to 350 million basement-dwelling bunker monkeys who are now expert epidemiologists and virologists with rock-solid opinions of what parts of the pandemic sucked the saltiest balls? I dedicate far less page space to the pandemic or the elections than you might expect.

It is so much better to tell the truth than to just shut up.

~ Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray), author of The Madness of Crowds

The YIR poses risk—possibly considerable risk—every year, but this year is special. No guff no glory I guess. There are a ton of social justice crazies (SJCs) out there. In the 65th year of my personal sitcom, the writers keep hurling absurdities to keep the series running, but I got canceled anyway. No, not by Covid-19 (unless this is The Sixth Sense) but by the diversity-industrial complex otherwise known as the Klan of the Kancel Kulture (KKK), virtuously broadcasting to the world that I am a seriously twisted bastard. It is hard to argue with that. However, if people in visible positions feel they cannot speak up right now, when will they speak up? On their deathbeds? If a 65-year-old tenured professor can’t express unpopular ideas, who can? A 9-to-5-er who could be fired in a heartbeat has no voice. I will keep spewing drivel because somebody has to do it.

Factoid: You cannot breathe with your tongue sticking out of your mouth.

Stuff your tongues back in your mouths you idiots. Of course you can. I have become increasingly aware that we are all looking through our own lens with an emerging plotline that is self-consistent with our own unique narrative. As described in The Social Dilemma, the narrative is shaped nefariously by ideologically dubious weasels in Silicon Valley running their MK-Ultra experiments on us through mass and social media. As I jam more pixelated pseudo-factoids into my noggin, doubts about their veracities are debilitating. How is it that smart blokes can peer at the same data and draw diametrically opposite conclusions? If I offered you $1000 to convince just one person—one person—that they were wrong about Russia collusion, the Biden laptop, election fraud, or the merits of sheltering, could you do it? Didn’t think so. Some of us must be, as Gerry would say, whiny morons who should simply FOAD, but we all have our truths that we will defend, Goddammit! This annual tome is, necessarily, the World According to Dave. At times it will sound narcissistic, but it’s not. [Editor’s note: yes it is.] It wanders through a range of topics in no way statistically weighted to their global importance but presented in a Michael-Lewis way sniffing out the story beneath the story. What my four regular readers would tell you is that I try to write about what others are not pondering. I don’t always find the rotting corpse, but I am attracted to foul odors.

Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap

The Year in Review (YIR) is broken into two parts with individual sections hot-linked in the contents below. The whole beast can be downloaded as a single PDF here.

Contents

Part 1

    Introduction

    Contents

    My Personal Year

    Conspiracy Theories

    Decade in Review

    Investing

    Gold

    Wealth Creation

    Valuations

    Broken Markets

    Bailouts

    Healthcare

    Link in Part 1

Part 2

    Epilogue–Epstein

    Epilogue-Climate Change

    Rise of the Cancel Culture

    The Tweet and Cancel

    The Buffalo Shove: The Real Story

    College Life

    Political Correctness—Adult Division

    Group Statements and Identity Science

    Anatomy of the Riots

    The Death of George Floyd

    Covid-19: Just Opinions

    Where to from Here?

    Acknowledgments

    Books

    Links in Part 2

2020-12-28

COVID-19 notes:

We Must Adopt a “Zero Covid” Strategy to Defend Against new and old Coronavirus Variants

 

I’m A Scientist. I Can’t Even Get My Own Family And Friends To Follow COVID-19 Rules.

They know it’s a real and highly contagious virus, and they know about the guidelines. They’re just deciding not to follow them.

 

These nursing home chains have the highest COVID-19 death rates in Ontario, data analysis finds

Regular Related Fare:

 

House passes bill to increase $600 stimulus checks to $2,000. It now goes to the Senate.

Tuomas Malinen: Can the world economy ‘Japanificate’?

Why The Second Stimulus Won’t Have Much Economic Impact 

 

Regular Fare:

Magna in Electric-Car Parts Joint Venture With LG Electronics

 

US Home Prices Accelerate At Fastest Pace Since 2014

 

 

 

MMT Fare:

Joan Robinson, in her book Introduction To The Theory Of Employment, 1933:

CREATION OF MONEY THROUGH A BUDGET DEFICIT

A budget deficit financed by borrowing from the Central Bank has effects similar to those of gold-mining. We have already seen how a budget deficit influences incomes. If there is an increase in government expenditure without any corresponding increase in tax receipts there will be an increase in incomes and activity. This is true equally whether the government borrows from the public or from the Central Bank. If the borrowing is from the public there is no further effect to be considered. But if borrowing is from the Central Bank, then on top of the direct effect of the deficit upon income there is the effect of an increase in the quantity of money. For the Central Bank, in lending to the government, increases the ” cash” of the banks, just as it does by buying securities or by buying gold. The direct effect of the deficit comes to an end as soon as the budget is balanced, but the effect upon the quantity of money remains as a permanent legacy.

The increase in the quantity of money, which takes place cumulatively as long as the deficit is running, will tend to produce a fall in the rate of interest and (unless confidence has been badly shaken) the effects of an increase in investment, induced by lower interest rates, will be superimposed upon the direct effects of the budget deficit in increasing consumption.

At first there will be a drag upon the fall in the rate of interest because the direct effect of the budget deficit in increasing incomes raises the demand for money, since the requirements of the active circulation depend upon the level of income. But the increase in demand for money will be very slight (so long as money wages do not rise) compared to the increase in supply, and it is a once-andfor-all effect, while the increase in the supply of money is cumulative.

…

The whole difference between a budget deficit financed by creating money and one financed by ordinary borrowing lies in this reaction upon the rate of interest.

 

 

 

Other Fare:

Discovery Supports a Surprising New View of How Life on Earth Originated.

 

 

[Not] Fun Fare:

Octopus punches fish in the head (just because it can)

 

Many drivers, some stranded since Saturday, risk spending Christmas parked by the side of an English road. Sikh humanitarian group Khalsa Aid is set to return to the congested M20 today to distribute 2,500 Domino’s pizzas among them.

 

 

Pics of the Week:

California’s epic wildfires in 2020 took deadly aim at the state’s most beloved trees.

EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:

 

Other Political Fare:

The Threat of Authoritarianism in the U.S. is Very Real, and Has Nothing To Do With Trump

The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom.

Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.

…

The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.

…

What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies. That the wealth of their primary owners and executives — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai — has skyrocketed during the pandemic is well-covered, but far more significant is the unprecedented power these companies exert over the dissemination of information and conduct of political debates, to say nothing of the immense data they possess about our lives by virtue of online surveillance.

…

All of these authoritarian powers will, ironically, be invoked and justified in the name of stopping authoritarianism — not from those who wield power but from the movement that was just removed from power. Those who spent four years shrieking to great profit about the dangers of lurking “fascism” will — without realizing the irony — now use this merger of state and corporate power to consolidate their own authority, control the contours of permissible debate, and silence those who challenge them even further. Those most vocally screaming about growing authoritarianism in the U.S. over the last four years were very right in their core warning, but very wrong about the real source of that danger.

 

 

2020-12-28 COVID Catch-up Fare

Year -end message from Ilargi at Automatic Earth: Thank You 2020

We started covering the coronavirus early on, in January, and never looked back. Many people got their first exposure to the virus through us (pun very much intended). What developed throughout 2020 was not just a solid reader-base, but also a maturing comments section, that taught me as much as it did readers. Thank you for that. The comments from medical professionals and others became a strong part of the entire story. And it was by no means a one-sided thing; opinions were always all over the place, as they should be.

That’s the big problem in my view that we face these days: our media have become one-dimensional, the exact opposite of what they should be. This became clear through the Trump era, and the incessant hammering of one actor vs the deafening silence about all others in the same theater and on the same stage.

And we see that again today: try, if you can, to find in the MSM a critical opinion about lockdowns, or facemasks, or about the newly-fangled vaccines. It’s very hard if not impossible. This one-dimensionality hides behind “the science”. Which is something that doesn’t really exist, as we know because scientists in different countries contradict each other, as do those in the same country, and scientists even often contradict themselves.

If you want people to “follow the science”, you need to convince them that this is the right thing to do. You can’t just force them to do it. Or, rather, you can try that for a short period of time, and then they will come after you. People don’t live their lives in one dimension; they can’t.

Are facemasks useful? Sure, in crowded indoor spaces. But outdoors? I have yet to see the first evidence of that, and I do read an awful lot. Let’s inject some nuance here: if there is a risk of 1 in 100,000 that someone gets infected outdoors, it that worth forcing 99,999 people to put facemasks on? Or would you rather ask them to wear those where it demonstrably matters?

Are lockdowns useful? Sure, but they can only ever be emergency measures, short and “sweet”. Because they risk destroying entire economies and societies. Lockdowns should only be used when there are no other measures available anymore.

But we haven’t exhausted the scope of all other measures, not at all. There are no governments promoting the large scale use of vitamin D, or the proper use of hydroxychloroquine, and Chris Martenson even sees his videos about ivermectin banned from YouTube. As all three substances show great promise in preventing infections, and/or limiting the consequences of being infected.

We’ve been reduced to one-dimensional lives. By now, politicians and “scientists” would rather see everyone be infected, and then “cured” by a vaccine, then not get infected in the first place. In one dimension, the world easily gets turned upside down. You just wouldn’t be able to see it, because you need three dimensions to recognize what “upside down” looks like.

The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines may work very well, but we don’t know, because we haven’t researched that. Which, if you want to “follow the science”, is a very strange thing to do. Of course, we would all like the virus to be gone, but ignoring the science doesn’t look like the way to achieve that. And that’s what we’re doing: we’re not following the science, we’re ignoring it where that fits our[their] purposes.

We don’t know if the Pfizer vaccine protects you from being infected, we don’t know if it keeps you from infecting others, but we do know governments and airlines are talking about requiring evidence that you’ve received a dose. But for what purpose, then, exactly? Just to let all the MPs and CEOs people claim they did what they could?

-Too- many people have lost their jobs and their businesses without any country seriously having tried to stop people from becoming infected through the use of vit. D, HCQ, ivermectin. Many of these jobs and businesses will never come back. Is this worth it? Maybe if we could say we tried everything we could, but we obviously haven’t.

We sold our souls to the “science” and then to the vaccine. Which are two very, very different things.

If there’s ever been a time to ask questions, it must be now. About lockdowns, facemasks and viruses, about people, communities, societies, economies. That we are being pressured into not asking those questions, makes them even more necessary.

Anyway, those are all issues and questions that will need to be addressed in 2021, we’ve run out of 2020 time. It’s just that it wouldn’t have been necessary; we could easily have done much if not most of it this year. But we have become information-poor, and by design to boot.







An Internal Medicine Doctor and His Peers Read the Pfizer Vaccine Study and See Red Flags [Updated]. via naked capitalism. Dec. 14, 2020.

Right off the bat – I am as weary and concerned about this pandemic as anyone. What my little rural area has been through in the past three weeks or so has been nothing short of harrowing. This virus has the ability to render patients about as sick as I have ever seen in my life, while leaving more than half the population with minimal if any symptoms. The patients who are sick are often very sick. And instead of slow and steady improvement like we normally experience, most of these patients are assigned to a long and hard slog. Multiple complications arise. This leads to very diminished throughput in the hospital. The patients literally stack up and we have nowhere to put the new ones coming in who themselves will be there for days or weeks. On top of that are the constant donning and doffing of PPE and intense emotional experiences for the staff, who are themselves becoming patients or in this small town have grandma or Aunt Gertrude as a patient.

To put it bluntly, I want this pandemic over. And now. But I do not want an equal or even worse problem added onto the tragedy. And that is my greatest fear right now. And medical history has demonstrated conclusively over and over again: brash, poorly-thought-out, emotion-laden decisions regarding interventions in a time of crisis can exponentially increase the scale of pain and lead to even worse disasters.

I am not an anti-vaxxer. I have given tens of thousands of safe and tested vaccines over my lifetime. I am very familiar with side effects and safety problems associated with all of them. That is why I can administer them with confidence. I am also an optimist, so all of the cautions I discuss below are the result of experience and the information made public about the Pfizer vaccine, not a temperamental predisposition to see the glass as half empty.

I know this piece is long, but I wanted to completely dissect the landmark New England Journal of Medicine (from now on NEJM) publication of the first Pfizer vaccine paper. I am replicating the method of my mentor in Internal Medicine, a tall figure in 20th Century medicine. He was an internationally recognized authority and his name is on one of the foundational textbooks in his specialty. He was a master and he taught me very well, including the fundamentals of scientific inquiry and philosophy, telltale signs of sloppy or dishonest work, the order in which you should dissect someone’s work, and the statistics involved.

When I have a new medical student doing rotations with me, I give them a collection of reading. At the very top is Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption from the New York Review of Books in 2009 by Marcia Angell, MD. She was the editor-in-chief of the NEJM, the very journal that published this Pfizer vaccine paper.

Dr. Angell’s article is the Cliffs Notes version of much longer discussions she had about corruption, corporatism, managerialism, profiteering, greed, and deception in in the medical profession. Patient care and patient concerns and indeed patient lives in her mind have been absolutely overcome by all of these other things. It is a landmark paper, and should be read by anyone who is going to interact with the medical community, because alas, this is the way it is now. I view this paper the exact same way I view Eisenhower’s speech about the military industrial complex. What she said is exactly true, and has only become orders of magnitude worse since 2009.

And now the paper.

Unfortunately, this study fromPfizer in the latest NEJM, and indeed this whole vaccine rollout, are case studies in the pathology Agnell described. There are more red flags in this paper and related events than present on any May Day in downtown Beijing. Yet all anyone hears from our media, our medical elites, and our politicians are loud hosannas and complete unquestioning acceptance of this new technique. And lately, ridicule and spite for anyone who dares to raise questions.

I have learned over thirty years as a primary care provider that Big Pharma deserves nothing from me but complete and total skepticism and the assumption that anything they put forth is pure deception until proven otherwise. Why so harsh? Well, to put it bluntly, Big Pharma has covered my psyche with 30 years of scars:

• As a very young doctor, I treated an extraordinary middle-aged woman who had contracted polio as a toddler from a poorly tested polio vaccine rolled out in an “emergency.” Tens of thousands of American kids shared her fate
• The eight patients I took care of until they died from congestive heart failure that had been induced by a diabetes drug called Actos. The drug company knew full well heart failure was a risk during their trials. When it became obvious after the rollout, they did everything they could to obfuscate. Actos now carries a black box warning about increased risk of heart failure
• The three women who I took care of who had been made widows as their husbands died of completely unexpected heart attacks while on Vioxx. I have no proof the Vioxx did this. But when Vioxx was finally removed from the market, the mortality rate in the US fell that year by a measurable amount, inconsistent with recent trends and forecasts. Merck knew from their trials that Vioxx had a significant risk of cardiovascular events and stroke, and did absolutely nothing to relay that danger in any way. Worse, they did everything they could to muddle information and evade responsibility once the truth started to come out
• The dozens upon dozens of twenty and thirty-something patients who have been rendered emotional and spiritual zombies by the SSRIs, antipsychotics and amphetamines they have been taking since childhood. Their brain never learned what emotions were, much less how to process them and we are left with empty husks where people never developed. The SSRIs and antipsychotics were NEVER approved for anyone under 18. EVER. While there are some validated uses for stimulants in children, they are obviously overprescribed, as confirmed by long-standing media reports of their routine use as a study/performance aid. It is all about the lucre.
• The hundreds and hundreds of 40-60 year olds who have been hollowed out from the legal prescribing of opioids. All the while the docs were resisting this assault, the drug companies and the paid-off academics and medical elites were changing the rules to make physicians who did not treat any pain at all with opiates into evil Satan-worshippers. And they paid for media appearances to drive across the point: OPIATES ARE GOOD. WE HAVE MADE THEM SO YOU CANNOT GET ADDICTED. And here we are now with entire states taking more opioids than in the waning days of the Chinese Empire, and we all know how that story ended. All this misery so a family of billionaires can laugh its way to the bank.

I carry all these people and more with me daily. I would not be doing a service to their memory if I allowed myself to be duped into writing another blind prescription that was going to add yet another scar.

I will dissect the important parts of this paper exactly as my mentor described above taught me. He performed years of seminal research. He was a nationally-known expert in his field.

In medicine, especially in top-tier journals like NEJM, landmark papers are always accompanied by an editorial. These editorials are written by a national expert who almost always has “peer-reviewed” the source material as well. This is how the reader knows that an expert in the field has looked over the source material and that it supports the conclusions in the paper. My mentor did this all the time. The binders all over his office were the actual underlying data that he scrutinized to confirm the findings. There is no way on earth to print and publish the voluminous source material. Editorial review was one sure way all to assure that someone independent, with appropriate experience, confirmed the findings. This was onerous work, but he and thousands of others did it because this is the very essence of science. He was scrupulous in his editorials about findings, problems, and conclusions. It was after all his reputation as well.

My first lesson from him: READ THE EDITORIAL FIRST. It gets the problems in your head before you read the statistics and methods, etc. in the actual paper. It gives you the context of the study in history. It often includes a vigorous discussion of why the study is important.

Admittedly, over the past generation, as the corporatism and dollar-counting has taken over my profession and its ethics, this function of editorial authoring has become at times increasingly bizarre and too-obviously predisposed to conclude with glad tidings of joy, especially if pharmaceuticals are involved.

So I read the editorial first. You can find it on the NEJM webpage, in the top right corner.

And, amazingly, it is basically a recitation of the same whiz-bang Pfizer puffery that we have all been reading for the past few weeks. There really is not much new. Furthermore, it is filled with words like “triumph” and “dramatic success”. Those accolades have yet to be earned. This vaccine has not yet even been released. Surely, “triumph” is a bit premature. Those words would NEVER have been used by my mentor or similar researchers in his generation. They would have been focused on the good, the bad and the ugly. A generation ago, editorial reviewers saw their job as informing the reader and making certain the clinicians that were reading knew of any limitations or problems. ....

....

Let’s take a closer look at Figure 2 on page 7 where adverse events are reported in a table form. Please note: this is a very busy image, and in the browser version, with very low resolution graphics that are profoundly difficult to read (they are a bit clearer if you download the PDF). This is a time-tested pharmaceutical company tactic to obscure findings that they do not want you to see. My mentor warned me about ruses like these years ago, and finding one raises the possibility that deception is in play.

....

I want to reiterate my concern that over the past generation, as my profession has lost its way, its medical journals have turned into cheering sections for Big Pharma rather than referees and safety monitors. We all should relish the great things medical science is doing, but we should be doing EVERYTHING we can to minimize injury and death. Too often our journals have become enablers of Big Pharma deceiving our physicians and the public. Unfortunately, this paper and its editorial look troublingly like a case study of this development.

....

But here we have our Pfizer vaccine paper. We have 300,000 fatalities in the USA alone and millions of cases. We have whacked our economy, we are in the depths of a national emergency. And we have a paper, the first, that may offer a glimpse of hope. Certainly this would be a landmark paper, and certainly it was treated in that manner? Right?

One would think that the doctors of America would have this study explained to them by a world-known vaccinologist? NOPE…..Maybe a virologist? NOPE….. Maybe a leading government official? Dr. Fauci? Dr. Birx? Dr. Osterholm? NOPE…..Maybe an expert in coronaviruses? NOPE…

We get the Pfizer ad glossy editorial treatment from Eric Rubin MD, the editor-in-chief of the NEJM. And Dr, Longo, an associate editor. Dr. Longo is an oncologist. Dr. Rubin is at least a recognized infectious disease doctor, but his specialty based on my Google search is mycobacterium, not virology. Again, one would normally anticipate for a paper of this importance, the editorial would be from someone with directly on point expertise.

Why would this fact been important to my mentor? (and I had the privilege of hearing him trash a paper in an open forum about a very similar issue, a paper introducing a drug to the world that later was the disaster of the decade, Vioxx) Why is this important to me and all the other physicians in my review group here in flyover country yesterday?

Because the choice of authorship of the editorial leads you to one of only several conclusions:

• Pfizer would not release the source data because of proprietary corporate concerns and no self-respecting expert would review without it

• Pfizer knew there are problems and did not want anyone with expertise to find out and publicize them

• The editors could not find a real expert willing to put their name on a discussion

• Drs. Rubin and Longo are on some kind of journey to Vanity Fair and wanted their names on an “article for the ages”

• This is a rush job, and no one had time to do anything properly, and so we just threw it all together in a flash

Readers, pick your poison. If anyone can think of a sound reason, please let me know. I am all ears.

But let’s open up the can of worms a bit more. Pfizer supports NEJM. Just a brief swipe through of recent editions yielded several Pfizer ads. A Pfizer ad appeared on my NEJM website this AM. I do not know how much they pay in advertising but appears to be quite a bit.

Americans, have we devolved so far in our grift that it is now appropriate for the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF of our landmark medical journal to be personally authoring “rah rah” editorials about a product of a client that supports his journal with ad dollars? And he has the gall to not present this conflict on his disclosure form? Really? Am I the only one worried about this type of thing?

Now we travel from the can of worms to the sewer. And this impacts every single one of us. I want you to Google the names of the people on the FDA committee that voted 17-4-1 two days ago to proceed with the Emergency Use Declaration. Go ahead – Google it. On that list, you will find the name Eric Rubin, MD. Why yes indeed, that is the very same Eric Rubin MD who wrote this editorial. Who is the Editor-in-Chief of the NEJM. A publication that certainly takes ad dollars from Pfizer. And he was one of the 17 to vote for the Pfizer product to be immediately used in an emergency fashion. Oh yes, oh yes he was.

Am I the only one who can recognize that Pfizer and other pharma companies may have some influence on Dr. Rubin thanks continued support of his employer, the NEJM? Am I the only one concerned that Dr. Rubin’s “rah rah” editorial may have been influenced by Pfizer? Is anyone else troubled that the Editor-in-Chief of the NEJM, supported by Big Pharma advertising dollars, is sitting on an FDA board to decide the fate of any pharmaceutical product? Is this not the very definition of corruption? Or at least a severe conflict of interest? I strongly suspect that a thorough evaluation of members of that committee will reveal other problems. As my grandmother always used to say, “There is never just one roach under a refrigerator.”

2020-12-21

COVID-19 notes:

 

America Is Running Out of Nurses

 

Pandemic Is Starting to Hit North American Meat Plants Again

Closely-held Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader, said Thursday it was temporarily shutting down its beef processing plant in Ontario due to “an abundance of caution as our local workforce deals with the community-wide impacts of Covid-19.” It hasn’t yet decided when it will reopen. “This is not just a Cargill spread, but community-wide spread in Guelph”.

 

London Begins Emergency Lockdown as U.K. Fights New Virus Strain

 

Regular Related Fare:

 

Senate Proposal Would Retroactively Shield Corporations From All COVID Lawsuits

 

COVID-19 RELIEF DRAFT BILL PROVIDES $100 BILLION “DOUBLE-DIP” TAX DEDUCTION FOR THE WEALTHY

No stimulus checks, but big tax giveaways for well-connected business owners.

 

"Amazing" Hypocrisy: Democrats Make Wreck of Covid-19 Relief Negotiations

Democrats stonewalled all year on a new pandemic relief package. Now they're proposing a new plan that undercuts even Republican proposals, and screws everyone but - get this - defense contractors

… As for that $748 billion bill? According to the senior Democratic aide, who pointed to comments made by Mitt Romney, it includes $560 billion in offsets, “repurposed from March’s CARES Act.”

In other words, the aide says, “The $748 billion deal is really just $188 billion in new money.” Given all the high-flown rhetoric the Party devoted before Election Day to rejecting aid packages they deemed heartlessly small, the hypocrisy, he says, is “amazing.”

If you include the $160 billion package for state and local aid, the new deal offers a maximum of $348 billion in new money

 

The Tax Time Bomb That Congress Can Defuse

This is significant anti-stimulus at the worst possible time. In effect, the one-time stimulus check and unemployment boost will be offset, for millions of people, by the lack of an expected refund and even tax liability. That blunts the impact of those relief measures.

 

FDR Knew Exactly How to Solve Today’s Unemployment Crisis

A self-funding national infrastructure bank modeled on the “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt would help solve not one but two of the country’s biggest problems. Millions of Americans have joined the ranks of the unemployed, and government relief checks and savings are running out; meanwhile, the country still needs trillions of dollars in infrastructure. Putting the unemployed to work on those infrastructure projects seems an obvious solution, especially given that the $600 or $700 stimulus checks Congress is planning on issuing will do little to address the growing crisis. Various plans for solving the infrastructure crisis involving public-private partnerships have been proposed, but they’ll invariably result in private investors reaping the profits while the public bears the costs and liabilities. We have relied for too long on private, often global, capital, while the Chinese run circles around us building infrastructure with credit simply created on the books of their government-owned banks.

 

Joe Carson: Plunge In Retail Sales Shows Vulnerable Consumer: Personal Savings Rate Is Overstated

 

 

Regular Fare:

 

The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich.

“Our research shows that the economic case for keeping taxes on the rich low is weak,” “Major tax cuts for the rich since the 1980s have increased income inequality, with all the problems that brings, without any offsetting gains in economic performance.”

 

Steve Keen: Discussing a Modern Debt Jubilee

Jubilees were common in antiquity. The Lord’s Prayer did not originally say “And forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us”, but “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors”. But an old-fashioned Jubilee would reward those who gambled with borrowed money, and thus effectively penalise those who did not. It would also effectively bankrupt the banks, since their assets—our debts—would fall, while their liabilities—our deposits—would remain constant.

A Modern Debt Jubilee gets around both problems by:

·         Giving everyone, whether they borrowed or not, exactly the same amount of money; and

·         Replacing risky private debt as an income earning asset for banks with riskless Jubilee Bonds.

The basic mechanics in a Modern Debt Jubilee are:

·         Every adult gets an identical sum of money;

o    Those in debt must pay their debt down by that amount;

o    Those that are not in debt—or have less debt than the Jubilee amount—must buy newly-issued shares directly from corporations;

o    Corporations must use the revenue from share sales to pay down corporate debt;

·         Jubilee Bonds are sold by Treasury to banks; and

o    Interest payments on Jubilee Bonds (partly) compensate for the fall in interest payments on household and corporate debt.

The end-result of a Modern Debt Jubilee is:

·         Debtors are not unfairly advantaged over savers (debtors have less debt, while savers get new debt-free assets);

·         Private debt, both household and corporate, falls, while equity (share ownership) rises;

·         The amount of money does not change a great deal (it changes only by the interest on Jubilee Bonds); and

·         Banks remain solvent, because their assets rise as much as their liabilities, and they gain equity from the interest on Jubilee Bonds.

As with a government deficit, the government doesn’t need to borrow the money given to debtors and savers: the Jubilee creates the money, in the same manner that a deficit creates money. ..

 

 

Bubble Fare:

 

Hussman: A Good Response to a Bad Situation

In traditional financial theory, interest rates are a key component of valuation models. When interest rates fall, the discount rate used in these models decreases and the price of the equity asset should appreciate, assuming all other model inputs stay constant. So, interest-rate cuts by central banks may be used to justify higher equity prices and CAPE ratios. Thus, the level of interest rates is an increasingly important element to consider when valuing equities. Many have been puzzled that the world’s stock markets haven’t collapsed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn it has wrought. But with interest rates low and likely to stay there, equities will continue to look attractive, particularly when compared to bonds.” – Shiller, Black & Jivraj, Project Syndicate, November 30, 2020

The opening quote above seems almost obvious. That’s the problem. It’s actually a striking example of the insidious and exquisitely circular logic that I believe will prove disappointing and possibly even catastrophic for investors over the coming decade. What follows may help to clarify the situation.

Before going on, I should start by saying that I’ve got great admiration for Robert Shiller. Even three decades ago when I was completing my doctorate at Stanford, I avidly embraced his work, including his studies on excess volatility. He has originated an impressive range of useful tools, including the Case-Shiller housing price indices. As the tech bubble was peaking in 2000, I doubt that any 30-something in finance was more pleased to see Shiller become a widely-quoted figure in the financial markets. All of that is important to say, before I tear into this particular metric.

Frankly, I suspect Shiller lent his name to the Project Syndicate piece. His independent work is more careful, while his recent collaborations have increasingly read like apologetics for historically untenable valuations. I hope he will quickly call such loans due, lest they affect his otherwise remarkable reputation.

A security is nothing more than a claim to some future set of expected cash flows. The more you pay today for that stream of future cash flows, the lower return you will receive over time. Right now, bond market investors are paying just over $91 today in return for an expected $100 payment from the U.S. Treasury a decade from now. That works out to an annual return averaging nearly 0.9%.

Suppose you don’t like the idea of making less than 1% annually on your investment for a decade. Let me tell you something that’s absolutely true, and will make the investment in Treasury bonds seem vastly more attractive:

Yes, bond prices are high. But they’re fairly-valued relative to interest rates.

That statement might seem funny, if it wasn’t both a) the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, and b) essentially the same argument that’s being made to justify the most extreme stock market valuations in U.S. history. Obviously, bonds are always “fairly-valued” if their own rate of return is used for comparison. But it’s such a circular argument that it lacks intrinsic meaning, and it’s certainly not what investors hear. What they hear, when someone says “fairly-valued,” is that investors can expect future returns to be somewhere in the range of historical norms, or at least historical experience. That’s not what’s being said at all.

What’s actually happening today is that investors are so uncomfortable with near-zero bond market valuations that they’ve priced nearly every other asset class at levels that can be expected to produce near-zero, or negative, 10-12 year returns as well.

So understand this. When people say that extreme stock market valuations are “justified” by interest rates, what they’re actually saying is that it’s “reasonable” for investors to price the stock market for long-term returns of nearly zero, because bonds are also priced for long-term returns of nearly zero. I know that’s not what you hear, but it’s precisely what’s being said. 

Saying that low interest rates ‘justify’ extreme stock market valuations is like saying that poking yourself in the eye ‘justifies’ slamming your thumb with a hammer.

Suppose that I create a valuation measure by taking the yield on my bond, and “correcting it by for interest rates” by subtracting out bond yields. Now, that seems ridiculous, but it’s very close to what’s going on when people try to “adjust” stock market valuations for the level of interest rates and use phrases like “fairly valued” and “attractive.” When both assets are at extreme valuations, this comparison, at best, says only that the dismal expected return on one asset is expected to exceed the really dismal expected return on the other asset. Why not just compute the two implied rates of return and compare them directly?

Look. It’s certainly descriptive to say that low interest rates tend to go hand-in-hand with high stock market valuations, and that high interest rates tend to go hand-in-hand with low stock market valuations. The problem with “correcting” valuations for that regularity is that it implies that both obscenely elevated prices and wildly depressed prices are equivalent “fair value” situations. In the eye-poke, thumb-slam world, yes, there’s a certain truth to that. It’s just that in the high interest rate, low valuation situation, investors face outstanding prospects for long-term returns. In the low interest rate, high-valuation situation, investors face dismal prospects all around.

To illustrate this, the chart below shows a scatter plot of the Shiller P/E, the 10-year Treasury yield, and the subsequent 10-year average annual total return of the S&P 500. Yes, low rates and high CAPE multiples tend to go together. Unfortunately, low or negative stock market returns over the following decade are also an inescapable part of that 3-dimensional combination.

 

Tesla, the Largest-Cap Stock Ever to Enter S&P 500: A Buy Signal or a Bubble?

 

 

 

Quote of the Week: 

“there’s nothing like an epic stock market bubble that warms the hearts and softens the minds of men to ideas that would otherwise be impossible.  One idea du jour, for example, is that low interest rates justify high valuations.  Another is that the Fed can permanently inflate stocks using its seemingly unlimited supply of credit. These ideas, and many others, are nearing their expiration date.” 

 

 

(not just) for the ESG crowd:

 

Corporate Bonds: Is it time to deny debt to companies not aligning to the Goals of the Paris Agreement?

 

All the Stuff Humans Make Now Outweighs Earth’s Organisms

according to a new paper in the journal Nature, at around 1.1 teratonnes (or 1,100,000,000,000 metric tons), anthropogenic mass now outweighs Earth’s dry biomass. That means all the living organisms, including vegetation, animals, and microbes. More incredible still, at the start of the 20th century, our anthropogenic mass tallied up to only 3 percent of the planet’s biomass but has over the past 100 years grown at an astonishing rate: Annual production now sits at 30 gigatonnes, or 30,000,000,000 metric tons. At this rate, in just 20 more years, anthropogenic mass will go from currently weighing slightly more than total dry biomass to nearly tripling it.

 

 

Other Fare:

The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations

Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already.

That’s the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across the Milky Way. Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of a famous equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake wrote in 1961. The Drake equation, popularized by physicist Carl Sagan in his “Cosmos” miniseries, relied on a number of mystery variables — like the prevalence of planets in the universe, then an open question.

This new paper, authored by three Caltech physicists and one high school student, is much more practical. It says where and when life is most likely to occur in the Milky Way, and identifies the most important factor affecting its prevalence: intelligent creatures’ tendency toward self-annihilation.

 

Fun Fare:

How the Grinch stole a pandemic Christmas

He was sure every Who in the town was resistant / To keeping their gatherings socially distant. / “And they’re cooking their turkeys!” he yelped with anxiety. / “The year 2020 has crippled society!”

 

EXTRA [controversial or non-market-related] FARE:

 

COVID Fare:

 

An Internal Medicine Doctor and His Peers Read the Pfizer Vaccine Study and See Red Flags [Updated]

 

While the World is on a vaccine frenzy, the Indian Government is distributing a home Covid Kit with Zinc, Doxycycline and Ivermectin. The cost: $2.65 per person.

 

Media in other parts of the world share different information than what you find in US-dominated mainstream sources, such as:

‘Quadruple Therapy with Ivermectin is effective in treating COVID-19’

and, yes, you can find that type of information in non-mainstream Western sources: 

Yes, hydroxychloroquine is scientifically proven against COVID-19…. Part II

Here I do a historical reflection on science and I show all the irrefutable evidences of the functioning of the taboo medicine.

 

A retrospective comparison of drugs against COVID-19

Highlights

• Hydroxychloroquine is an efficient candidate drug against COVID-19.

• Oseltamivir can be prudently considered in combination therapy.

• Drug repurposing is a promising way to combat SARS-CoV-2 infection.

• Comparison of drug effects against COVID-19 is instructive in the pandemic.

 

Physician Specialists Urge CDC to Consider A Safe & Powerful Treatment For COVID-19.

 

Epidemiologist At Yale Provides Testimony On Hydroxychloroquine For Treating COVID-19

 

Virus 1 – Media 0

It would appear that today is THE day to question the vaccines being rolled out by the billions, but the media tell us we’re not supposed, or allowed, to do that. Take your shot and shut your face.

But the “approved” vaccines so far, the Pfizer and Moderna ones, are based on an entirely new and untested technology, messenger RNA. Could they work, could they be a new frontline for medicine? Yes, perhaps they could. But shouldn’t their mid- and long term effects be assessed? Of course they should. mRNA is being treated like GMOs, which lobby to be declared safe as soon as someone doesn’t drop dead in the first hours. While we’re playing games across generations with our own genetic material.

And at the same time that the mRNA vaccines are being rushed through, potentially much less questionable approaches, like vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are said to need much more research before they can be rolled out. That looks like there’s a game being played, and the MSM are a big player in it. Nothing to do with reporting the news, but with only a part of it.

We’re getting lost in a -dark?- web of opinions disguised as news. We can not ask the questions that we know everyone should ask. The Moderna mRNA vaccine was approved in the US the other day as it was simultaneously found to offer immunity for just 2 months. And on the basis of that, vaccination passports are being prepared for all of our societies. While we might find much better protection in vitamin D, HCQ and ivermectin. Or the Russian and Chinese vaccines. But those must not be discussed.

 

 

Political [more election B.S.] Fare:

 

Peter Navarro releases 'The Immaculate Deception,' a report about the 2020 presidential election

"From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket," the report states.

 

The Gyre Widens (nothing new here, I just love the style in which JHK writes…)

The mind-numbing weirdness of Joe Biden’s insertion into the election of 2020 — like the furtive groping of an intern in a cloakroom — only signals the Democratic Party’s reckless drive to self-destruction, dragging the republic over the edge of an abyss with it. How did this hollowed-out figure of a grifting old pol find himself pretending to national leadership, and in an historic moment of crisis that goes far beyond the mere wrecking of an election? Who wanted him there so badly, and why? My guess would be Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and John Brennan anxious to stay out of prison, heading a long list of officials present and former who committed crimes trying desperately to protect them, with accessories aplenty across the aisle. That’s what this four-year coup has been about, snowballing criminality, culminating in an orgy of blatant ballot fraud.

…

Just as impeachment concluded in failure, Mr. Biden got smoked in the early primaries, only to triumph mysteriously in the March Super Tuesday voting. After all, a primary is the party’s own election, and they can engineer it however they want. So, they contrived to elevate someone already criminally culpable in the mind of any citizen paying attention and capable of adding two-and-two to get four. Weird, a little bit?

…

The trouble is, Mr. Trump actually does have the evidence, and he intends to use it after four years of being remorselessly fucked around by his antagonists. So, the nation is at the point in this long, winding drama that has become a fight to the death and there will be no rituals of torch-passing just to keep up appearances that everything is functioning normally. Mr. Trump has the evidence of widespread, yes widespread, ballot fraud. He is the president, after all, and he has all the information. As he’s said more than once, he’s caught them all. And they know it.

Escobar: When Deplorables Become Ungovernables

Beyond the raucous altercations on whether the presidential election was fraudulent, these are the key factual points.

1.        A series of rules in mostly swing states were changed, through courts, bypassing state legislatures, without transparence, before the election, paving the way to facilitate fraud schemes.

2.        Biden was de facto coronated by AP, Google and Twitter even before the final, official result, and weeks before the electoral college vote this past Monday.

3.        Every serious, professional audit to determine whether all received and tabulated votes were valid was de facto squashed.

In any Global South latitude where the empire did “interfere” in local elections, color revolution-style, this set of facts would be regarded by scores of imperial officials, in a relentless propaganda blitz, as evidence of a coup.

On the recent Supreme Court ruling, a Deep State intel source told me, “the Supreme Court did not like to see half the country rioting against them, and preferred the decision be made by each state in the House of Representatives. That is the only way to handle this without jeopardizing the union. Even prominent Democrats I know realize that the fix took place. The error was to steal too many votes. This grand theft indicts the whole system, that has always been corrupt.”

…

A perverse form of blowback is already in effect as informed global citizens may now see, crystal clear, the astonishing depth and reach of Deep State power – the ultimate decider of what happens next in Dystopia Central.

Both options are dire.

1.        The election stands, even if considered fraudulent by nearly half of U.S. public opinion. To quote that peerless existentialist, The Dude, there’s no rug tying the room together anymore.

2.        Was the election to be somehow overturned before January 20, the Deep State would go Shock and Awe to finish the job.

In either case, The Deplorables will become The Ungovernables.

 

 

Other Political Fare:

 

The Revolutionary Struggle Is A Fight Between Movement And Inertia

There’s a feud on the American political left right now which (as usual) breaks down more or less along the lines of center-left “Bernie in the primary, Clinton/Biden in the general” progressives angrily opposing a push towards meaningful change from those further to the left.

It all started when comedian and lefty commentator Jimmy Dore made a video arguing that House progressives should refuse to re-elect Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker unless she puts Medicare for All to a floor vote. Dore’s argument has been endorsed by many high-profile voices on the left, and it has also been attacked as self-defeating and unreasonable by many others

…

I haven’t seen any convincing arguments why Dore’s suggestion should not be implemented, but I have seen many strong arguments for why it should, like this one for Current Affairs by Briahna Joy Gray or this one by Rising‘s Krystal Ball. The pandemic and a Democrat-controlled House presents a once-in-a-century opportunity to shove hard toward getting Americans the same healthcare rights afforded to everyone else in every major country on earth and forcing all House Democrats who oppose it to expose themselves to their constituents instead of passing the blame to the Republicans. With things getting more and more desperate, waiting for the next once-in-a-century opportunity to even begin pushing is a ridiculous proposition.

The entire revolutionary struggle, ultimately, is a battle between movement and inertia. Wherever you’ve got a political status quo that needs changing you’ll find revolutionary-minded forces pushing toward change and guardians of the status quo making clever-sounding arguments for why the smart strategy is to remain motionless. When the status quo is destructive and unsustainable, as this one unquestionably is, the ones pushing for movement are always on the correct side of the debate.

 

Congressional Democrats Are Raking in Huge Donations from War Profiteers

 

The Canadian Government Talks About Peace — But It’s Investing in War

Canada likes to see itself as a benign global actor, but its extensive history of military intervention tells a different story. A $70 billion upgrade of the Canadian navy now carried out by Justin Trudeau will strengthen its capacity for military action as a US sidekick in world affairs.

… Canada’s real track record in world affairs bears very little resemblance to the smug and self-satisfied stories it tells about itself. Instead of proffering olive branches, it is spending $100 billion to strengthen its navy’s capacity for throwing its weight around, all in support of US imperialism and Canadian corporations abroad. And with no sign of dissent coming from the Canadian political class, that pattern of duplicity looks set to continue.

 

Why They're Denying You Healthcare And Financial Support During A Pandemic

 

[Political] Quotes of the Week:

Ian Welsh: “Biden is one of the architects of the neoliberal order. It’s really impossible to overstate how he was there all the way, doing all the worst things. The way the world and America runs is his legacy, why would he listen to his political enemies, the people he helped destroy in the 70s and 80s, who he drove into the political wilderness with his allies who followed the so-called Third Way?... There’s going to be a lot of gaslighting during the Biden regime. A lot of pretending that he’s doing left wing things, when he isn’t... Biden doesn’t want to do most progressive or left wing things. He doesn’t agree with them…. Biden’s career is about destroying left-wingers, even very mild left wingers, then bulldozing over their bodies in the New Deal mass grave he helped created. That’s who he is, that’s his legacy and he believes in it.”

 

Big Thoughts Fare:

 

After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics

Elon Musk’s rockets may capture headlines, but the strategy that Latour has dubbed “escape,” or “exit,” is a dead end. And that fact is evident not only to the EU, but also to China and the most powerful voices of global capital as well. There is every reason to think that profound shifts are breaking the impasse that has defined our reality for the last thirty years. This is not to say that we do not face a divided and unequal world set on a disastrous course, but rather that the key players and the terms of the negotiation are shifting.

…

Recall Latour’s searing analysis of the origin of our contemporary crisis in Down to Earth:

It is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else. Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a … world in which all humans could prosper equally. From the 1980s on, the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world … to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity … hence deregulation; they have decided that a sort of gilded fortress would have to be built—hence the explosion of inequalities; and they have decided that, to conceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world, they would have to reject absolutely the threat at the origin of this headlong flight—hence the denial of climate change.

This is not diplomatic talk. This is an indictment worthy of a climate Nuremberg. On Latour’s merciless reading, the exit-eers are the enemy of all. Those who build rocket ships signal all too clearly their intentions

[Somewhat] Satirical Fare:

CJ Hopkins: Year Zero

GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions. The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.”

….

If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine.

If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids.

If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election.

And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible.

It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact.

 

[Surprisingly, Not] Satirical Fare: 

A CIA Officer Has a Headache. Media Blame Russia.

The Washington Post editorial board (12/9/20) took the news to its logical endpoint, combining the Moscow, Havana and Guangzhou cases, together with other discredited Russiagate theories, to demand that President-elect Joe Biden must “call out” Russian President Vladimir Putin. Given that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous doomsday clock—symbolizing the risk of the destruction of the planet through nuclear weapons—to the closest it has ever been to midnight, upping tensions with Russia would be reckless in the extreme. For the single-minded Post, however, Putin’s denials are actually further proof of devious, “asymmetric warfare” being waged against America. The problem with this whole narrative, journalistically, is that with tremendously high stakes it relies largely on the testimonies of US officials, many of them anonymous, who have a clear incentive to lie and defame three countries with whom the United States is currently ramping up tensions.

 

[Probably] Satirical Fare:

Health Canada announces that dudes who wear shorts all winter will get vaccine last

 

R.I.P. Fare: 

Leo Panitch passed away. Panitch was Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy at York University.

The Long Shot of Democratic Socialism Is Our Only Shot. An Interview with Leo Panitch.