The war on dissent.
"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself." - Salman Rushdie, 1991
The worst “fake news” almost always involves broad-scale deceptions foisted on the public by official (and often unnamed) sources, in conjunction with oligopolistic media companies, usually in service of rallying the public behind a dubious policy objective like a war or authoritarian crackdown.
Vietnam: [The Pentagon Papers] demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.
Afghanistan: John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”
Iraq: Great journalists like Seymour Hersh, who reported to us the tragedy of the Mai Lai Massacre and the horrors that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, are essential.
Ten years ago last week, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization published an exposé of US government wrongdoing on par with the above Hersh bombshell stories. Publication of the "Iraq War Diaries" showed us all the brutality of the US attack on Iraq. It told us the truth about the US invasion and occupation of that country. This was no war of defense against a nation threatening us with weapons of mass destruction. This was no liberation of the country. We were not “bringing democracy” to Iraq.
No, the release of nearly 400,000 classified US Army field reports showed us in dirty detail that the US attack was a war of aggression, based on lies, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed and injured.
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century
The government-created “war against disinformation” became the great moral crusade of its time. CIA officers at Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn, progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague, racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals. Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic National Committee, which declared online disinformation “a whole-of-society problem that requires a whole-of-society response.”
…The American press, once the guardian of democracy, was hollowed out to the point that it could be worn like a hand puppet by the U.S. security agencies and party operatives.
The press was supposed to be a check on government, and it has become a tool of the government as a check on the average citizen.
[Siegel] concludes with an escalating string of anxiety-provoking propositions. One is that our first windows into this new censorship system, like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, might also be our last, as AI and machine learning appear ready to step in to do the job at scale. The National Science Foundation just announced it was ‘building a set of use cases’ to enable ChatGPT to ‘further automate’ the propaganda mechanism, as Siegel puts it. The messy process people like me got to see, just barely, in the outlines of Twitter emails made public by a one-in-a-million lucky strike, may not appear in recorded human conversations going forward. ‘Future battles fought through AI technologies,’ says Siegel, ‘will be harder to see.'”
- Matt Taibbi, Tablet's Grand Opus on the Anti-Disinformation Complex
I became familiar with the website Tablet with this excellent piece from August 2021: Why Don’t They Believe Us?
Y’all should know who Gottlieb is by now. It is amusing that the other author, Michael R. Strain, is an “Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy.”
I can’t make this stuff up.
Penguin for Scale
CNBC Discovers the Fed’s H.4.1
Greg Weldon points out that the Fed balance sheet recently spiked $297 Billion in one week, the 4th largest weekly jump ever, more than any week in the 2008-2009 “the world is going to end unless we bail out Citigroup” era.
Only 3 weeks in March 2020 - when the Fed went totally insane - were crazier. Even with a modest drop of $27.8 billion this past week…
The Fed balance sheet is UP $366 Billion in March, 2023.
33 days until the Fed Decision®
For big investors, these derivatives — “zero-day-to-expiry” options, or 0DTE for short — offer a way to hedge short-term risk
Why can’t you degenerate retail investors be more like the big investors?
Before 2010, institutional landlords didn’t exist in the single-family-rental market; now there are 25 to 30 of them…
The Great Wall Street Housing Grab (March 2020)
Speaking of MIT, this below should be pinned to a cork board at the DOJ. These people are an economic crime scene:
I must have played the wrong piano
'cause it left me with, I don't know what
The Next Stage Of The Banking Crisis, Commercial Real Estate: James Davolos, Portfolio manager at Horizon Kinetics, and Sholom Jacobs, CEO and founder of Jacobs Real Estate Advisors.
Fundraising among non-traded real estate investment trusts in February 2023 sunk to just $489 million, a low not seen since August 2020, while reported monthly redemptions have exceeded $1.7 billion, an amount reflecting 351% of fundraising and about 1.6% of reported net asset value for the industry, according to the latest monthly report by Robert A. Stanger and Co. Inc.
“It turned out that one of the biggest risks to our business model was catering to a very tightly knit group of investors who exhibit herd-like mentalities,” said a senior executive at the [Silicon Valley] bank. “I mean, doesn’t that sound like a bank run waiting to happen?”
“They went for an extra [0.4 percentage points] of yield and blew up the bank”
Silicon Valley Bank Board of Directors
More details on these people can be found here.
Kay Matthews, Chair of the Board, SVB Financial Group and Silicon Valley Bank; Former Vice Chair of EY Americas and Partner, Ernst & Young
Greg Becker, President & CEO, SVB Financial Group; CEO, Silicon Valley Bank [Also a Class A Director, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco since 2019. That seat is now vacant!]
Eric A. Benhamou, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Benhamou Global Ventures
Elizabeth "Busy" Burr, Former President and Chief Commercial Officer, Carrot, Inc.
Richard Daniels, Former Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Kaiser Permanente
Alison Davis, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Fifth Era
Joel P. Friedman, Former President, Business Process Outsourcing, Accenture
Thomas King, Former Chief Executive Officer of Investment Banking at Barclays
Jeffrey N. Maggioncalda, Chief Executive Officer, Coursera
Mary J. Miller, Former Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, U.S. Department of Treasury
Kate D. Mitchell, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Scale Venture Partners
Garen K. Staglin, Proprietor, Staglin Family Vineyard
They were well compensated.
Signature Bank of New York’s Board of Directors This was way harder to find than it should’ve been.
This board was also well compensated.
It's not real, it's just passing time
It's not real, all I do is rhyme
Just heard someone say “Trucker Shortage”!
This world can be made beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield. When we have defined and isolated the evil thing, the colours come back into everything else. When evil things have become evil, good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good."
- G.K. Chesterton
Boards of those banks should have all compensation clawed back and be prevented from ever serving on a board again. Or defenestrated.
“It turned out that one of the biggest risks to our business model was catering to a very tightly knit group of investors who exhibit herd-like mentalities,” said a senior executive at the [Silicon Valley] bank. “I mean, doesn’t that sound like a bank run waiting to happen?”
“They went for an extra [0.4 percentage points] of yield and blew up the bank”
— Bulls and Bears make money and Pigs get slaughtered