Steve Bull's Blog, page 63
March 28, 2024
Financial Flim-Flam Backs Imran Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate
Intelligence asset Imran Ahmed’s seedy money comes to light, although his lawyers won’t explain his false filings with the IRS.
The dark money that apparently birthed the censorship industry’s most critical “anti-disinformation” group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), recently came to light in an investigation by The Telegraph, which uncovered £700,000 in undeclared donations to British Labour Party politico Morgan McSweeney. And who’s McSweeney? He helped found CCDH in the UK in 2018—the same timespan when millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen were sending McSweeney secret money, triggering an investigation by Britain’s Electoral Commission.
As I first reported last October, Imran Ahmed is a Labour Party political operative who maintains close ties to intelligence agencies and began running CCDH from D.C. in 2021, when he started working closely with the Biden administration. That first year in D.C., Ahmed took in 75% of his donations from a dark money pass through, although new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents show Ahmed provided false information to the U.S. federal government to receive tax-exempt, nonprofit status.
“A finding that there is a materially incorrect statement on an application for tax exempt status should hopefully encourage the IRS to take a hard look,” said Dean Zerbe, a tax attorney with consulting firm Alliant, and a former Senate staffer who investigated corruption in the nonprofit industry.
While he was based in the U.K., Imran Ahmed ran both the CCDH and another Labour Party front group, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), to attack British leftists, to defund the Canary news site, and to remove Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party’s leftist leader. Both CCDH and SFFN wielded wide influence in British politics and posed as grassroots movements, until reporters at the Canary exposed the groups’ ties to Labour Party conservatives Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Taps running dry have become part of daily life in South Africa’s biggest city
Taps running dry have become part of daily life in South Africa’s biggest city
Residents of the township of Soweto, South Africa, queue for water on March 16, 2024 as Johannesburg experiences severe water shortages.Jerome Delay/AP
JohannesburgCNN —When Duane Riley turns on his taps, they shudder loudly from the air flowing through the pipes. There’s often no water trickling at all.
It’s ironic, because Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, has plenty of water at the moment — authorities and water companies just can’t seem to get it to where it’s needed.
“There have been times where we’ve had no water, but I’ve had a river gushing down my driveway, because there was a leak at the top of our street,” Riley told CNN. It took authorities 14 days to fix it, he said.
Joburgers — as residents here call themselves — are no strangers to water scarcity. South Africa is naturally dry, and the climate crisis has hit the nation many times with crippling drought.
Johannesburg is one of many of the world’s big cities that are dealing with a perfect storm of crumbling critical infrastructure, lack of maintenance, corruption and insufficient planning for population growth.
While drought can hurt the city’s reservoirs, the dams are currently full, authorities say. But climate change is making things worse in another way — officials say a weeks-long heat wave is boosting water demand in enormous volumes. In February, Southern Africa saw temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees Celsius (around 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.
At around 9 p.m., Riley’s home typically loses water until around six in the morning.
“But there have been multiple times where we’ve been without water for five, seven days,” he said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In Texas, the Heat Index Is Rising Faster Than the Temperature
A new study of summer weather in Texas finds the heat index — an indicator of how hot it feels outside — is rising much faster than the temperature.
The reason, scientists say, is that warming is leading to a rise in humidity. Historically in Texas, the relative humidity would fall when the temperature rose, making it possible to cool off by sweating. But now Texas is seeing high heat and high humidity together. On hot, muggy days, the air is so saturated with water that sweat sticks to the skin rather than evaporating. As a result, the weather feels much warmer than a thermometer alone would suggest.
In 1979, physicist Robert Steadman developed the heat index to indicate how such weather actually feels. But Steadman did not calculate the index for the high levels of heat and humidity routinely seen today. In 2022, scientists at UC Berkeley recalculated the heat index to account for more extreme weather. And in 2023, Berkeley physicist David Romps applied the updated heat index to the summer heat in Texas.
He found that while Texas has warmed by around 3 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) on average since the preindustrial era, on some scorching summer days last year it felt up to 11 degrees F (6 degrees C) hotter than it would have without climate change. His study was published in Environmental Research Letters.
Romps wrote that, compared to the temperature, the heat index offers “a more accurate picture of the extent to which global warming has increased heat stress.”
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXIV–Chasing Perpetual Growth On a Finite Planet
December 16, 2022 (original posting date)
Chitcen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.Chasing Perpetual Growth On a Finite Planet
A very brief contemplation (as I work on some longer ones) that shares my response to the following billboard that was shared on the Degrowth Facebook group I am a member of:
The insanity of such a message on a finite planet should be self-evident to all but sadly this is simply not so. I have found that the overwhelming majority of people actually don’t pause whatsoever to consider how absolutely ridiculous such messages are.
Most (all?) are so caught up in relatively meaningless distractions or real-life personal crises that the ruling caste’s misleading narratives surrounding perpetual growth and our technological ingenuity to bypass hard biogeochemical limits are accepted as gospel truth. And it doesn’t help that humans have a tendency to defer/obey ‘experts/authority’ and participate heartily in groupthink.
Combine these cognitive ‘distortions’ with the fact that the products of growth (e.g., new infrastructure, additional services, etc.) are visibly and quickly perceived yet the negative impacts of our attempts to sustain our exponential growth can be readily externalised and/or take many years to materialise, and it is near impossible to make accurate attributions regarding causal relationships.
But as Meadows et al. argue in The Limits to Growth: when response delays occur in an exponential growth environment, overshooting a system’s capacity to sustain itself is common as well as the collapse that inevitably follows. It’s simply a matter of time and pursuing business-as-usual behaviours…
Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXIII–Ruling Class Endgame For Everything: Wealth Generation and Wealth Extraction
December 9, 2022 (original posting date)
Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.Ruling Class Endgame For Everything: Wealth Generation and Wealth Extraction
Todays’ contemplation has been once again prompted by a great article posted by The Honest Sorcerer, this time the second part of some observations regarding the complex and evolving European energy and economic situation.
Well said!
One of the things I have come to believe is that the ruling caste of our world is driven primarily by one overarching motivation: the control/expansion of the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige.
Everything is leveraged towards this endgame. EVERYTHING!
The political/media arm of this caste spins/markets their policies/actions in ways to give the impression that they serve the masses, but this is simply a epiphenomena of their machinations. While some — even perhaps a majority — of their ‘ill-gotten’ wealth is directed towards ‘public’ services, much is siphoned off and directed up the power/wealth structures inherent in all complex societies to individuals/families within the privileged class. It is a skimming/scamming operation that takes no prisoners and encompasses all of society’s systems; in particular, our socioeconomic one where our financial institutions create credit/money-from-thin-air and then ‘invest’ it or charge interest for its use.
As the world’s current dominant hegemon, the United States does this ‘better’ and more broadly than everyone else.
What we seem to be experiencing with economic sanctions, energy infrastructure sabotage, false flag attacks, significant transfers of armaments and other military support, and finger pointing when events arise whose responsibility is in question, is a concerted effort by the United States and certain allies to not simply justify/rationalise/spin (re)actions but to assert and attempt to sustain its dominant role in global wealth-extraction/-generation.
Here I am reminded of a passage by Noam Chomsky from his 2003 book, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance:
Those who want to face their responsibilities with a genuine commitment to democracy and freedom — even to decent survival — should recognise the barriers that stand in the way. In violent states these are not concealed. In more democratic societies barriers are more subtle. While methods differ sharply from more brutal to more free societies, the goals are in many ways similar: to ensure the ‘great beast,’ as Alexander Hamilton called the people, does not stray from its proper confines. Controlling the general population has always been a dominant concern of power and privilege…Problems of domestic control become particularly severe when the governing authorities carry out policies that are opposed by the general population. In those cases, the political leadership may…manufacture consent for its murderous policies.
As we continue to bump into the hard reality of biogeophysical limits to growth on a finite planet and the diminishing returns that inevitably result, I expect we will witness much more of this consent manufacturing — along with concomitant ‘devolution’ towards increased tyranny across the globe, but especially within the alliance of the United States and its supporters that repeatedly claim to be fighting for liberty and democracy.
We will likely also experience increased intervention in various sociocultural arenas but especially the economic realm, particularly as it pertains to increasing exponentially the creation of fiat currency (possibly in digital form) to ‘paper’ over out-of-control price inflation — which will likely be ‘controlled’ via continuing statistical manipulations of its measurement (if its measurement continues at all), with the ‘success’ of fighting it spread far and wide by the propaganda arms of the State.
The situation is no better in the nations that are challenging US hegemony. Controlling one’s domestic population, through overt force or covert narrative manipulation, is — as Chomsky points out above — a dominant concern of the ruling caste in every complex society in order to garner necessary support from the hoi polloi.
These machinations and legitimisation activities, however, are completely and totally unsustainable upon a finite planet for they require constant energy and material resource inputs. And in a world experiencing ever-increasing stress due to constant expansion of the human experiment (both on a resource extraction and an ecological systems destruction front), things appear to be approaching a significant inflection point.
Here I will close with a review of what archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies with regard to peer polities caught in a competitive spiral while encountering the inevitable phenomenon of diminishing returns and the probability of global sociopolitical collapse.
“Collapse today is neither an option nor an immediate threat. Any nation vulnerable to collapse will have to pursue one of three options: (1) absorption by a neighbor or some larger state; (2) economic support by a dominant power, or by an international financing agency; or (3) payment by the support population of whatever costs are needed to continue complexity, however detrimental the marginal return. A nation today can no longer unilaterally collapse, for if any national government disintegrates its population and territory will be absorbed by some other.”
Past collapses have occurred in two different political situations: a dominant state in isolation or as part of a cluster of peer polities. With global travel and communication, the isolated dominant state has disappeared and only competitive peer polities now exist — this, of course, will eventually change as our complex global systems breakdown due to energy shortages.
Such polities tend to get caught up in spiraling competitive investments as they seek to outmaneuver others and evolve greater complexity together. The polities caught up in this competition increasingly experience declining marginal returns and must invest ever-increasing amounts leading to greater economic weakness.
Withdrawing from this spiral or collapsing is not an option without risking being subsumed by a competitor. It is this trap of competition that will continue to drive the pursuit of complexity regardless of human/environmental costs. Incentives and economic reserves can support this situation for a lengthy period as witnessed by the Roman and Mayan experiences where centuries of diminishing returns were endured.
Ever-increasing costs and ever-decreasing marginal returns typify peer polities in competition — a negative feedback loop that a State’s ruling caste will not abandon for fear of losing their privilege/power. This ends in either domination by one state and a new energy subsidy, or collapse of all.
“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.”
Be it from ecological overshoot (the root cause of all the above) or sociopolitical machinations of our ruling caste, the writing would seem to be on the wall for this latest hominid experiment we have, in a self-congratulatory manner, termed ‘wise man’…
March 27, 2024
The Fed’s Dovish Twist – Only Surprising on the Surface
Rate Cuts, Money Printer Go Brrr, and Biden
“The Federal Reserve is not only too big to fail, it’s too big to be held accountable.”
~ Thomas Massie
Last week at its Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, the Fed made it clear that it will go back to stoking inflation.
Leaving the Fedspeak aside, here’s the gist: The Fed wants to cut interest rates three times this year, each time by 0.25%, with the goal of reaching a range between 4.55% to 4.75%.
That’s the plan for 2024. But the Fed’s expectation is to lower them even further in 2025 and 2026.
Now, this is quite a turn… and quite an odd one at that in terms of the timing. First, you’ve got the stock market recently hitting all-time highs. Gold and Bitcoin are also hovering near their all-time highs.
And hold on a second, isn’t the Fed supposed to be fighting inflation? Didn’t it come in pretty hot recently?
It did.
The PCE (or Personal Consumption Expenditures) — the Fed’s preferred gauge for measuring inflation — jumped by 0.4% in January, hitting its fastest pace in almost a year.
The inflation report for December was not great either.
Leaving aside the fact that the whole core PCE thing is a sham because it excludes food and energy (the two things Americans depend on the most), the Fed, being all “data-dependent,” is shrugging off the data it doesn’t like.
Alright, that’s pretty noteworthy on its own, but that wasn’t the only jaw-dropping news from the Fed last week.
It came from Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself, who suggested that the central bank could ease quantitative tightening (QT) “fairly soon.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Expect a Financial Crisis in Europe With France at the Epicenter
The EU never enforced its Growth and Stability Pact or Maastricht Treaty rules. The crisis is coming to a head with France and Italy in the spotlight. The first casualty will be Green policy.
Image composite by Mish from the European Commission Compliance TrackerCompliance Rules
Deficit rule: a country is compliant if (i) the budget balance of general government is equal or larger than -3% of GDP or, (ii) in case the -3% of GDP threshold is breached, the deviation remains small (max 0.5% of GDP) and limited to one year.Debt rule: a country is compliant if the general government debt-to-GDP ratio is below 60% of GDP or if the excess above 60% of GDP has been declining by 1/20 on average over the past three years.Structural balance rule: a country is compliant if (i) the structural budget balance of general government is at or above the medium-term objective (MTO) or, (ii) in case the MTO has not been reached yet, the annual improvement of the structural balance is equal or higher than 0.5% of GDP, or the remaining distance to the MTO is smaller than 0.5% of GDP.Expenditure rule: a country is complaint if the annual rate of growth of primary government expenditure, net of discretionary revenue measures and one-offs, is at or below the 10-year average of the nominal rate of potential output growth minus the convergence margin necessary to ensure an adjustment of the structural budget deficit in line with the structural balance rule.Deficit Disaster Zones
France and Italy are major disasters right now on the budget deficit rule. France has a budget deficit of 7 percent and Italy 5 percent.
France needs to reduce its deficit by a whopping 4 percent of GDP!
Neither Italy nor Greece should have been allowed in the EMU (European Monetary Union – Eurozone) in the first place.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Collapse & Camping Skills?
Why I Talk About Operational Capabilities of Our Communities
Imagine a world where the grating buzz of civilization has quieted, where the conveniences we once took for granted—clean running water at the turn of a handle, shelves stocked with food at every corner, the comforting glow of streetlights guiding our way home—have faded into memory. In this world, the fabric of society has frayed under the weight of its own unsustainable practices, leaving communities to navigate the remnants of a system that can no longer support the basic needs of its populace. As essential infrastructure crumbles, the void it leaves behind becomes a breeding ground for uncertainty and danger.
In the absence of the societal order we’ve grown accustomed to, securing the necessities of life becomes a daily challenge. Imagine venturing out to tend to your garden, now a vital source of sustenance, with the constant vigilance that someone might lay claim to your hard-earned produce. Water sources become fiercely guarded treasures, as purity and access can no longer be taken for granted. The roads and paths we traverse in search of trade of resources and information, once safe and mundane, are now pathways rife with unpredictability, where encounters with those driven to desperation or opportunism could turn perilous.
This scenario is not spun from the threads of dystopian fiction but are indeed a reality in places around the world already, and these conditions are poised to become more widespread under the business-as-usual governance our societies face. It underscores the pressing need for skills and knowledge that our ancestors wielded with adeptness—skills that empower us to reclaim autonomy over our lives, ensure our security, and foster communities resilient enough to withstand the storms of change…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
On “hate,” “disinformation,” and the ever-expanding, ever metastasising establishment campaign to restrict free expression in the West
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser presents her repressive plan to “combat right-wing extremism” to the media.The minders of public discourse have developed two arguments about why ordinary people should not be allowed to say what they think on the internet. These are that the ignorant rabble, conversing freely, may tend to express that subset of dangerous, prejudicial and deeply unauthorised opinions known as “hate”; and that they may consume unauthorised theories and narratives about present political events, known as “disinformation.” “Hate” and “disinformation” are amorphous concepts that can denote almost anything, but they have come to work in roughly complementary ways. “Hate” encompasses all the things our rulers would prefer you not say, while “disinformation” denotes all the stuff our rulers would prefer you not read.
We are dealing here with an ad hoc cultural system designed to suppress undesirable political ideas. Presumably, our leaders would prefer simply to ban these ideas, but their liberal commitments make overt repression of this nature awkward for them, and so they have jerry-rigged this dumb Rube Goldberg contraption instead.
Via the Google ngram viewer, we can gain some notion of where this system came from and when it was first assembled. Here are the frequencies of “hate speech” and “disinformation” in print publications between 1975 and 2019:
“Disinformation” began its career in the latter stages of the Cold War as a way to describe adversarial propaganda. When Russia, other Warsaw Pact countries or later Iraq attacked Western “fascism” or “imperialism,” that was “disinformation.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, this usage persisted at somewhat lower fequencies. A lot of things were “disinformation” in these intervening years; superficial searching reveals uses like “corporate disinformation,” “tabloid disinformation,” “Republican disinformation,” and so on…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The battle for control of our minds – and the invaluable role of independent journalism
Journalists like myself were the first to break free of corporate media servitude. Now we face a backlash to disappear us by the very media establishment we threaten
The true costs of the West’s corporate media system have been hidden from view. It entails restricting control over information dissemination to a corporate elite. It depends on an advertising model that makes us the product, not the truth. And it necessarily promotes an economic model of endless consumption that, as should be all too clear, is destroying the planet.
Here is a short extract from a talk I gave about how journalists like myself were the first to break free of corporate media servitude, and how we now face a backlash to disappear us by the very media establishment we threaten:
[see link above to access]My full talk can be watched here:
