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The Need to Report Carbon Emissions Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

The Need to Report Carbon Emissions Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Climate change caused by carbon emissions might be one reason for such a terrible global COVID-19 pandemic scenario.

JPMorgan Chase, the first American bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency, also provided the most fossil fuel financing out of any bank in the world, according to a 2019 report titled “Banking on Climate Change.” The bank recently joined a chorus of other financial institutions and endowments that have declared that they will, going forward, be reluctant to provide funding to the fossil fuel industry — which energizes emerging digital technologies and companies — in order to mitigate the effects of climate change.

In a hard-hitting report released to clients on the same day as the World Health Organization published its 32nd coronavirus update, economists at JPMorgan Chase warned that human life "as we know it" could be threatened by climate change. Without action being taken, there could be "catastrophic outcomes."

Carbon pollution defies national borders and is inescapable. The true cost of climate change is felt when it penetrates deep into our respiratory and circulatory systems and damages our lungs, which are highly vulnerable to the coronavirus, according to a report prepared by the WHO. The economists at JPMorgan Chase state that “climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health and how long people live.”

In order to mitigate the effects of climate change, there needs to be a global tax on carbon, the report added. This stance echoes that of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which has said that greater reliance on environmental taxation is needed to strengthen global efforts to tackle the principal source of both greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution, particularly since society is now witnessing the implementation of digital currencies, artificial intelligence and blockchain technology worldwide. These new digital technologies require very high consumptions of electricity, which is currently produced with coal and fossil fuels that have adverse environmental impacts.

Global environmental tax policy

Environmental tax is used as an economic instrument to address environmental problems by taxing activities that burden the environment — like a direct carbon tax — or by providing incentives to lessen environmental burdens and preserve environmental activities — like tax credits or subsidies. It’s used as part of a market-based climate policy that was pioneered in the United States, which also includes cap-and-trade programs that attempt to limit emissions by putting a cap and price on them.

Environmental taxes are designed to internalize environmental costs and provide economic incentives for people and businesses to promote ecologically sustainable activities, such as reducing carbon emissions, promoting green growth and fighting climate change through innovation. Some governments make use of them to integrate climate and environmental costs into prices to reduce excessive emissions while also raising revenue to fund vital government services.

The top six global carbon emitters are: China, the U.S., the European Union, India, Russia and Japan. Their taxes on carbon emissions and subsidies for fossil fuels are as follows:

Global environmental tax policy

Carbon tax

Under a carbon tax regime, the government sets a price that carbon emitters must pay for each ton of greenhouse gases they emit. This encourages businesses and consumers to take the necessary steps, such as switching fuels or adopting new technologies, to reduce their emissions and avoid paying the tax. These taxes are favored because assigning a fee to carbon pollution is administratively simple when compared to addressing climate change by setting, monitoring and enforcing caps on greenhouse gas emissions and regulating emissions of the energy-generation sector. Environmental taxes include energy taxes, transport taxes, pollution taxes and resources taxes.

According to the OECD, outside of road transport, 81% of carbon emissions are untaxed, and tax rates are below the low-end estimate of climate costs for 97% of emissions. Coal, which is characterized by high levels of harmful emissions and accounts for almost half of carbon emissions from energy use in the 42 countries examined by the OECD, is taxed at the lowest rates or goes untaxed. Only 40 out of the 197 governments that have signed on to the first legally binding climate change agreement — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 2015 Paris Agreement — have adopted some sort of price on hydrocarbons, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs.

Carbon taxes have been implemented in 29 of the jurisdictions that have signed on to the Paris Agreement. A Scandinavian wave starting in the early 1990s saw carbon taxes legislated in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, among other countries. A second wave in the mid-2000s saw carbon taxes put in place in Switzerland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Portugal and the United Kingdom. In 2019, Canada, Argentina, South Africa and Singapore implemented a carbon tax. These tax rates range from $1 to $139 per ton.

According to the World Bank’s “Report of the High-Level Commission of Carbon Prices,” a carbon price/tax of between $50 to $100 per ton of carbon emissions would need to be implemented by signatories to deliver on Paris-Agreement commitments by 2030.

Tax credits

Through tax credits, subsidies and other business incentives, governments can encourage companies to engage in behaviors and develop technologies, including blockchain, that can reduce carbon emissions. These credits could combat the use of fossil fuels. For example, a new study by the Overseas Development Institute titled “G20 Coal Subsidies: Tracking Government Support to a Fading Industry” suggests that coal subsidies have increased threefold since the Paris Agreement, even though it commits its signatories to hold global warming to well below two degrees Celsius through significant greenhouse emission cuts.

According to the International Monetary Fund, as well as the International Energy Agency, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies worldwide would be one of the most effective ways of reducing greenhouse gases and battling global warming.

For example, Saudi Arabia has the world’s second-largest oil reserves that sustain 90% of its total public revenues, and is the primary swing oil producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. According to a study on the country, its energy subsidies in 2012 were $80 billion, representing 11% of the country's gross domestic product. Saudi Arabia has undertaken blockchain-oriented national projects aimed at diversifying and modernizing its economy by backing numerous financial-technology initiatives, including the world’s first state-backed bilateral cryptocurrency with the United Arab Emirates called “Aber,” which is Arabic for passing by, crossing or traveling on a road.

Paris Agreement climate change advocates

The urgency to wean off fossil fuels as a major energy source, given its negative consequences to the world's climate and human life — which has recently been forced into a digital quarantine lifestyle — wasn’t only written in the reports by the OECD and JPMorgan Chase, however. There have been many other climate change advocates penning action.

An op-ed jointly written by the heads of the Bank of England, which is seriously weighing the pros and cons of issuing a central bank digital currency denominated in pounds sterling, and pf France’s central bank, which plans to test plans a central bank digital currency for financial institutions this year, said that any company that does not change strategically to the new energy reality “will fail to exist.”

In an open letter, the founder and CEO of investment giant BlackRock — which is setting up a working group to evaluate its potential involvement in the Bitcoin (BTC) market, including investments in Bitcoin futures — said that “climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” And, investment advisors who manage nearly half the world's invested capital, amounting to more than $34 trillion in assets, urged G-20 countries to comply with the Paris Agreement to save the global economy $160 trillion. They pointed to the alternative, which is that noncompliance would result in damages of $54 trillion.

In a landmark German class-action lawsuit, hundreds of thousands of diesel car owners sought compensation over emissions test cheating from Volkswagen, a company in which digitalization impacts all areas of business: development, vehicle production and the entire work environment on the shop floor and in the office.

In the biggest settlement of its kind, the Brazilian oil company Petróleo Brasileiro — commonly referred to as Petrobras — settled a U.S. class-action lawsuit for $2.95 billion that resulted from the “Operation Car Wash” money-laundering investigation. A memo from the settlement stated that the company made materially false, misleading statements to U.S. investors about climate-related bribery, branding and lobbying payments — potentially also using cryptocurrencies — to politicians that were designed to control, delay or block binding climate-motivated policies in various countries, hindering the implementation of green-energy policies in the wake of the Paris Agreement.

In another class-action lawsuit, 17,000 Dutch citizens tried to stop Royal Dutch Shell from extracting oil and gas and force it to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions to zero by 2050. The company is in talks with a subsidiary of the Chinese oil and chemical giant Sinochem Group and Australian financial-services firm Macquarie Group to develop a blockchain platform, with the goal of reducing trade and settlement inefficiencies, improving transparency and reducing the risk of fraud in the oil industry.

A landmark legal opinion from the Dutch Supreme Court stated that the Dutch government, which has an upbeat blockchain and crypto action agenda, has explicit duties to protect citizens’ human rights in the face of climate change and must reduce emissions by at least 25% of 1990 levels by the end of 2020.

An article by a pioneering proteomics scientist said: “The need to dramatically reduce global emissions is a black swan moment that investors need to pay attention to” because of the significant near-term threat from climate change activism toward the top four global fossil fuel businesses — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, all of which recently formed a global blockchain consortium — that are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965, according to a recent report.

The writing has been on the wall for the oil markets for quite some time, given that fossil fuel energy was the worst-performing sector on the S&P 500 index in 2019. In 1980, the energy industry represented 28% of the index’s value, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Last year, it represented less than 5%. The shift away from oil loomed so large that Moody’s warned in 2018 that the energy transition represented “significant business and credit risk” for oil companies. Accordingly, on March 8, Saudi Arabia announced oil price cuts and plans to increase oil production after expanding its downstream oil operations by acquiring Royal Dutch Shell’s 50% stake in their refining joint venture Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery Company, referred to as SASREF, for $631 million.

This kick-started a global oil price war sending prices, along with world stock market prices and crypto prices — which showed minute-by-minute correlation with the stock market, negating its status as an uncorrelated investment asset — into a free fall that spiraled into a bear market at the fastest rate in history. The resulting global economic downturn has been unprecedented. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is seen as the benchmark index to gauge the health of the global economy, declined by 38% during mid-March before seeing a moderate recovery. This has been its worst month in 90 years and has been emblematic of those incurred during major recessions.

The magnitude of the stock and bond value losses that major corporations — 100 of which have been identified as being accountable for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — have sustained as a result of the ongoing global economic decline have been extraordinary, as they have occurred concurrently with the rapid, global spread of the lethal coronavirus in a border-blind fashion. This has led to lockdowns of countries and shutdowns of businesses, sending millions of out-of-work people to the unemployment lines, cut off from health care plans, and with a severe loss of pension and retirement plan assets.

Corporate internal carbon pricing

Public companies are generally required to disclose material information in their financial filings, including climate and related bribery, branding, and lobbying payments. Directors of these public companies are generally required to act in the best interests of the company and its shareholders, and to consider and manage material risks to a company’s business.

Shareholders are allowed to challenge companies and/or boards of directors for failure to do so under Rule 10b-5 of the Securities Exchange Act, which gives shareholders the right to file a lawsuit to recover economic losses sustained as a result of fraud related to the trading of their investments in stocks, bonds, tokens or initial coin offerings. As the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has stated, tokens and ICOs that feature and market the potential for profits based on the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others contain the hallmarks of a security under U.S. law.

Fraud can come in many forms: corporate misgovernance through tax evasion; a lack of effective internal controls over corruption prevention involving bribery, lobbying, bid-rigging and money laundering; or poor financial recordkeeping, including statements regarding future environmental liabilities and climate change impacts.

Companies are coming under growing pressure from shareholders, activists and investment advisors who want companies to be transparent about how the physical impacts of a changing climate will affect their business. They are bringing class-action lawsuits based on climate change.

Originally a uniquely American undertaking, and historically prohibited in most other countries, class-action lawsuits have ramped up and spread across 33 countries. As of January, the total number of climate change cases filed thus far has reached approximately 1,444, with some success.

The threat of multi-jurisdictional class-action lawsuits stemming from environmental liabilities motivated nearly 1,400 public- and private-sector organizations — including global financial firms responsible for assets in excess of $118 trillion — to support the work of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, which has aligned with the Business Leadership Criteria on Carbon Pricing issued by the United Nations Global Compact’s Caring for Climate initiative. Internal carbon pricing has emerged as an important tool to help companies manage climate risks and identify opportunities in the low-carbon economy transition.

In the past two years, there has been a particularly strong increase in corporate internal carbon-pricing initiatives in China, Japan, Mexico and the U.S. Studies estimate that the financial value at risk could be up to 17% of global financial assets, if not more. Digital companies, including crypto mining companies, that haven’t yet adopted an internal price/tax will soon have to do so as investors demand more and more insight into the risks of climate disruption, according to a report prepared by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.

Country-by-country reporting scheme

Multinational enterprises in 90 countries, which include crypto exchanges and crypto mining companies, also adhere to country-by-country reporting policies as a part of a tax-transparency initiative included in OECD’s “Inclusive Framework on BEPS” — BEPS being an acronym for “base erosion and profit shifting.”

Country-by-country reporting, or CBCR, requires tax administrations to collect and share with other tax administrations information about multinational enterprises that operate in their countries, including MNE group revenue, profit before tax and tax accrued. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants issued further nonbinding guidance in a practice aid on how to account for cryptocurrencies.

The goal is to give tax offices the information needed to assess if there is a risk that an MNE group is avoiding taxes through inappropriate transfer pricing or other means.

In the OECD’s March 6 CBCR-related public consultation, 21 of the 78 respondents requested that the OECD revise BEPS framework to adopt the first global standard on public tax disclosure, published in December 2019 by the Global Reporting Initiative, that brings tax transparency to thousands of MNEs by making CBCR disclosures publicly available.

One notable submission, signed by 33 U.S. Congresspeople, endorsed the GRI’s new CBCR standard by calling on the OECD to ensure CBCR reporting is “aligned with the GRI.” Meanwhile, members of the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced a tax-transparency bill that would require MNEs to publicly disclose key tax and financial information on a country-by-country basis.

The OECD’s scheduled second CBCR public consultation on March 17 was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Conclusion

One-third of the world’s population is now locked down in order to mitigate the global spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has already infected over 500,000 people and brings in its wake great losses in health and finance. This has led to a new quarantine lifestyle that necessitates increased digital social and business interaction. Even climate change protesters — who have swarmed the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, the United Nations Climate Conference, and the headquarters of Royal Dutch Shell — are holding digital climate change protest meetings via Twitter.

Digital technologies require a high consumption of electricity, which is currently mostly produced with fossil fuels that adversely impact the environment. A global shift toward green energy to meet Paris Agreement requirements is likely going to compel changes to the environmental tax policies and tax transparency reporting standards of digital companies, affecting their financing, technology, infrastructure and regulation. Because human life "as we know it" is threatened by climate change, catastrophic outcomes will only get worse if no action is taken. Carbon pollution, which heightens the coronavirus’s lethal impact, is border blind and inescapable.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Selva Ozelli , Esq., CPA, is an international tax attorney and certified public accountant who frequently writes about tax, legal and accounting issues for Tax Notes, Bloomberg BNA, other publications and the OECD.

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super…

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.

(Left) President Joe Biden delivers remarks on canceling student debt at Culver City Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 21, 2024. (Right) Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 27, 2024. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images)

With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.

The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.

Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).

Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.

When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.

High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.

There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.

Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.

The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.

More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.

St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.

Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.

In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.

2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.

Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.

Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 23:20

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The…

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

Doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Washington in a file image. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 22:10

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now…

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.

The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.

Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.

In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.

The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.

When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.

If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.

We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.

My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.

It goes like this:

1) lockdown,

2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,

3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,

5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,

6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,

7) businesses flee the city

8) cities fall into decay, and that results in

9) more surveillance and police state.

The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.

It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.

But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.

It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.

Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.

As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.

The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.

Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.

By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.

The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.

Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.

The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.

The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.

But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.

What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.

As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.

The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.

Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 16:20

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