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The New State Of Play Post Biden/Putin

The New State Of Play Post Biden/Putin

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

Sometimes the significance of events doesn’t hit you until far after the event took place. One of the hardest parts of this job is knowing when…

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The New State Of Play Post Biden/Putin

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

Sometimes the significance of events doesn’t hit you until far after the event took place. One of the hardest parts of this job is knowing when not to write about a subject and let it sink in for a bit rather than burp out the first thing that comes to mind. It also helps to spend that time considering what others say on the subject.

The Saker’s thoughtful post on the outcome of the Biden/Putin summit is worth your time.  He rightly points out that the main outcome was a signal from Biden’s team, and handlers, that the hyper-aggressive war against Russia going on since 2013 is now over.

… what Biden did and said was quite clearly very deliberate and prepared. This is not the case of a senile President losing his focus and just spewing (defeatist) nonsense. Therefore, we must conclude that there are also those in the current US (real) power configuration who decided that Biden must follow a new, different, course or, at the very least, change rhetoric. I don’t know who/what this segment of the US power configuration is, but I submit that something has happened which forced at least a part of the US ruling class to decide that Obama’s war on Russia had failed and that a different approach was needed. At least that is the optimistic view.

I have some ideas about who actually ordered this shift in tone which has become readily apparent in the weeks since the meeting. More on that in a bit.

This summit was the signal of the major shift in policy.  Kissinger is no longer the driving force intellectually for U.S. foreign policy.  Divide and conquer hasn’t worked.

As Alex Mercouris brought up in my talk with him recently, the likely main offer made on Biden’s behalf by Jake Sullivan to his Russian counterpart, was to cut Russia in on the infrastructure deals in Africa if Russia would loosen ties to China. China is the new pivot for U.S. foreign policy.

If that offer was made then it was a calculated move to tell Putin that the U.S. was unserious about changing the dynamic between them.  I think there was a lot more said than just this. But Putin didn’t say it directly to Biden. This summit was a ceasefire in the war against Russia, a typical move to retrench and rethink options after a major defeat. That defeat was not ginnng up a war in the Donbass.  The two events are intimately connected.

In fact, that show of force and ultimatum by Putin to NATO (and more specifically The Davos Crowd) in Ukraine is what catalyzed this summit in the first place. Between that and the collapse of the COVID-19 narrative were all the excuse needed to publicly pivot U.S. aggression from Russia to China.

This was a major summit, with hundreds of people on both sides, as The Saker points out, that took months to put together. My initial reaction to it was that nothing substantive had changed. A ceasefire with Russia isn’t an end to the war with her so, what changed exactly.

That’s why I took some time to think things through.

In order to understand my broader point I’m about to make you have to see things from Davos’ point of view and their goals. I took the time to work through this in Part I of a recent podcast series I did to lay the background out (listen to it here).

Most importantly, keep in mind that Davos isn’t a monolithic organization under complete control of puppet master WEF Chair Klaus Schwab. It is, at best, a loose coalition of interested parties all looking for their piece of the globalist pie. And it only hangs together for as long as Schwab et.al. win and continue doing so.

Davos sees the best path now for them to complete their Great Reset agenda comes from placing the U.S. and China on an irrevocable path to war. Making a temporary peace with Russia is part of that plan. It’s also a major defeat for Davos.

Russia has refused to fight the war Obama’s started and MI-6 ran during the Trump Interregnum on Davos’ behalf. It played the long game of freezing the conflict in Ukraine while allowing the political attrition to take its toll on everyone involved. It also allowed Russia the time necessary to complete its strategic theater dominance in Eastern Europe now having hypersonic missiles capable of neutralizing any thought of NATO air superiority.

Culturally, Russians understand how to deal with this type of European aggression.  The Russian people have pride in themselves but are not nationalistic, i.e. they are not subsumed by cultural hubris the same way both China and Europeans/Americans are. This is a critical difference in understanding why events have played out as they have.

European/American ethnic hubris is nothing new. However, anyone who doubts my read on the Chinese in this respect, I only have to remind you of how easy it was to blow up Japanese/Chinese relations in 2012 over the Senkaku islands, which led to vandalism against Toyota and Honda dealerships… over nearly worthless rocks.

So, by this calculus, now that Ukraine refused to show up for the war Davos threw, war with Russia is off the table for the time being and the pivot to China commences.  You have to force an existential crisis on Russia to get them to fight and failing that there is no point in pursuing it directly.  Putin made the point very clearly that any aggression in the Donbass would be an act of war which would not end at the contact line in Gorlovka.

Their response would target the real enemy, NATO. And this is why both nothing changed and everything changed with this summit.

Davos is still going to run their script of destroying the U.S. and China by pitting them against each other while trying to pull off the full-blown remaking of Europe into a technocratic supranational police state. On that last part, they are more than 80% of the way there.

But, at the same time, the only reason for the European Union’s existence as it has been sold to Europeans is to prevent any further devastating wars fought on European soil. If Putin threatened a wider war with NATO he assured them Russia would this time win, then the whole rationale for the EU vaporizes like the first F-16 or logistics center hit by a Kinzhsal missile.

Rock meet hard place, Herr Schwab. For once someone else presented you with a no-win scenario.

So, in order to insure that Russia remains placated and happy to reopen somewhat normal relations with the EU, Biden was sent to Geneva to craft a face-saving summit and co-sign a simple statement committing to reopening arms control talks, coordinating on terrorism and not nuking Europe.

Part II of my podcast series went over in detail the whys and hows of the summit in much more detail.

The two exceptionalist-minded empires, the U.S. and China, make for much easier adversaries to spark into conflict because of the intense need for both sides not to lose face. For the U.S. as the global ‘hegemon’ losing face is a clear loss of potency. When you rule the hierarchy through dominance and fear, any moment of weakness is deadly.

It’s why Putin’s intervention in Syria, the freezing of the Donbass and reunifying with Crimea were so significant. They were a series of events which blew holes in the perception of U.S. potency. And since then it has been one brush fire after another which has not panned out.

As The Saker rightly points out in his article, Biden took a big hit with the Davos-controlled media for not “standing up to Putin.” And it was significant that that they even entertained that calculus no less made the diplomatic overtures. It’s why I feel my analysis of the situation is right. Only a real, credible military threat by Putin could have forced the outcome we saw at Geneva.

That said, weakening Biden and the U.S. only to sets the stage for when he or (more importantly) his Republican/mid-term successor has to confront China for real.

Now that I’ve laid that out, did anyone miss the Fed’s surprise hawkish statements released the same day as the Biden/Putin summit?  

Did anyone not notice the extreme reaction to the supposed nothingburger statements from the FOMC?  

All the Fed did was move a couple of dots on the rate forecast ‘dot-plot’ and bump IOER and RRP up by 5 basis points.

And yet the Euro crashed into the end of Q2 and opened Q3 still crashing.  And yet the Yen was thrashed. And yet, everyday more people jump on the bandwagon highlighting the huge run up in the Fed’s Reverse Repo Facility. Since that announcement what was a record amount of reverse repos at around $450 billion has more than doubled to just under a trillion.

Since the Fed no longer reports Excess Reserves of the banking system we have no idea how much has flowed into those either. In short, a measly 5 basis points drained at least half a trillion in dollar liquidity in less than two weeks.

And too many people can’t make the connection.

The dollar spiked to a significant bullish monthly reversal in June. The Fed followed up Powell’s statement with Bullard’s to ensure the technical reversal in the minds of currency and bond traders.  

And the question is why?

Just before the meeting I told my Patrons I thought at some point the Fed would have to come in and defend the U.S. dollar. Biden’s consistent trashing the dollar for Davos simply couldn’t stand forever.

I’ve written in the past about what Davos’ Great Reset plans are for the commercial banks, to scapegoat them for the next crisis and throw them to the angry Millennials they’ve taught to hate all things not-Marxist and be pilloried on the altar of egalitarian envy. And honestly, it’s not like these fucking people deserve anything less for what they’ve done to the world.

But at the same time, they still have allies and cards to play. And that means the Fed may align with Davos on some issues but not all of them. And I think it’s clear to everyone now that this is the plan and that plan is not workable.

The Fed is now ready, I think, to go to war with Davos over the future of money and they aren’t ready to hand over the keys to the candy store to a bunch of European commies, at least while also cutting Wall St. out completely of the New World Order.

Part III of the podcast series goes over the Fed’s moves and how it ties into what comes next.

The plan is pretty obvious at this point: hand over the keys to capital formation to the central banks and destroy all risk assessment. Commercial banks aren’t needed.  Only socially acceptable projects going forward will get funded. This is what Christine Lagarde wants with her new all-European Green Stock Exchange she introduced at Ankara last week.

But what’s clear to me now is that Davos went for the boob too fast on Prom Night at the Eschaton.  It’s too much, too soon and the acceleration is exposing its flanks.  Why would China and the U.S. go to war over COVID-19 and trade issues when they are being manipulated into it by a bunch of feckless Eurocrats with delusions of adequacy.

Why not turn on them first, at a minimum, wipe them out with a wave of your hand, i.e. 5 basis point rise in RRP, and remind everyone where the real power in the markets lies.

It’s hard to ignore what’s happened during the week of June 16th both geopolitically and monetarily.  There are no coincidences here.  If Powell hadn’t blown up the markets that week then I would be writing a different take on the Putin/Biden summit today.

But he did so I am.

So many people mischaracterize the Fed’s policies.  They miss the global significance of what they do by hyper-focusing on bad and misleading U.S. economic data. But the dollar is the global reserve currency, a point Martin Armstrong makes every single day, and that means Fed policy is made in the context of global capital shifts and politics.

Most analyst myopia comes from their training. They’ve trained a particular skillset and because of that miss the bigger picture. They get lost in the miasma of low-quality, conflicting and purposefully confusing domestic data and miss the bull rampaging through the political china shop.

What’s lacking, for example, in The Saker’s analysis of Geneva is looking at it, for the most part, from a monolithic Russia v. U.S. perspective, while ignoring the bigger picture of who is vying for control over the monetary system. This isn’t a rebuke, it simply isn’t his top priority.

But it is a rebuke of those trained in these areas to know better.

Geopolitics stems from control over the flow of capital, not the other way around.  So, when you see big changes on both fronts from one major player like the U.S. it means something. The U.S. changed it’s stance on Russia while also course correcting monetary policy and throwing markets into a tizzy on the same freaking day!  

That’s why you have to do the multi-variant analysis of ALL the players, not just the two dominant ones and analyze all of their motivations. This was a story so big I took two hours of podcasts to scratch the surface of it.

The bottom line is this: I maintain that Powell isn’t the same kind of globalist other Fed chairs have been, like Yellen and Bernanke. His private equity background marks him with a different mindset and set of priorities than his predecessors. That means he may be more willing to buck Davos when the time is right.

That understanding along with Davos’ needle-scratch mistakes has a lot of powerful people questioning the plan. It can easily explain why the cracks are beginning to widen as to who should actually be in charge after this is all done.

The real war now isn’t between the Empire and Zone B.  Or the Commies vs. the Conservatives.  It’s Davos against itself and we are now, unfortunately, caught in the middle between these factions.

All hierarchies built on force are meta-stable.  Up until recently Davos maintained its control because it competently managed all of the players, moving pieces where they needed them.  Now, they’ve made fatal errors — COVID, Trump, Brexit, NS2, Russia’s intransigence, the JCPOA, Syria, Ukraine, — and from where I sit it looks like the various factions are going all Knives Out on each other, quickly.

And as Daniel Craig said so eloquently in that movie, “I do suspect… foul play.”

I don’t doubt for a second Powell would crash the global economy in 2021 to protect Wall St. and back China down.  I also don’t think he was given the green light to do so by Biden. I think he was told to fire a warning shot by, for lack of a better term, Wall St.

If Davos listens to that in the same way the Brits listened to Russia’s warning shots at the HMS Defender in Crimean waters recently than the expect a full salvo at Jackson Hole. Can anyone say 25 basis points?  

Biden and Obama have been told to pull back and refocus on China by Davos, but those behind Powell are setting them up for a massive backlash for the mid-terms.  

The smartest thing for Xi Jinping to do during all of this is nothing. If he is truly interested in carving up the world and not replacing the U.S. with a Chinese hegemony then these next few months of turmoil in the West will prove that.

Given his recent actions and statements, however, the likelihood of that is slim.

The more things change…well, you know the rest.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 07/04/2021 - 18:00

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Government

Analysts issue unexpected crude oil price forecast after surge

Here’s what a key investment firm says about the commodity.

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Oil is an asset defined by volatility.

U.S. crude prices stood above $60 a barrel in January 2020, just as the covid pandemic began. Three months later, prices briefly went negative, as the pandemic crushed demand.

By June 2022 the price rebounded all the way to $120, as fiscal and monetary stimulus boosted the economy. The price fell back to $80 in September 2022. Since then, it has bounced between about $65 and $90.

Over the past two months, the price has climbed 15% to $82 as of March 20.

Oil prices often trade in a roller-coaster fashion.

Bullish factors for oil prices

The move stems partly from indications that economic growth this year will be stronger than analysts expected.

Related: The Fed rate decision won't surprise markets. What happens next might

Vanguard has just raised its estimate for 2024 U.S. GDP growth to 2% from 0.5%.

Meanwhile, China’s factory output and retail sales exceeded forecasts in January and February. That could boost oil demand in the country, the world's No. 1 oil importer.

Also, drone strokes from Ukraine have knocked out some of Russia’s oil refinery capacity. Ukraine has hit at least nine major refineries this year, erasing an estimated 11% of Russia’s production capacity, according to Bloomberg.

“Russia is a gas station with an army, and we intend on destroying that gas station,” Francisco Serra-Martins, chief executive of drone manufacturer Terminal Autonomy, told the news service. Gasoline, of course, is one of the products made at refineries.

Speaking of gas, the recent surge of oil prices has sent it higher as well. The average national price for regular gas totaled $3.52 per gallon Wednesday, up 7% from a month ago, according to the American Automobile Association. And we’re nearing the peak driving season.

Another bullish factor for oil: Iraq said Monday that it’s cutting oil exports by 130,000 barrels per day in coming months. Iraq produced much more oil in January and February than its OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) target.

Citigroup’s oil-price forecast

Yet, not everyone is bullish on oil going forward. Citigroup analysts see prices falling through next year, Dow Jones’s Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) reports.

More Economic Analysis:

The analysts note that supply is at risk in Israel, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Venezuela. But Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Russia could easily make up any shortfall.

Moreover, output should also rise this year and next in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, and Guyana, the analysts said. Meanwhile, global demand growth will decelerate, amid increased electric vehicle use and economic weakness.

Regarding refineries, the analysts see strong gains in capacity and capacity upgrades this year.

What if Donald Trump is elected president again? That “would likely be bearish for oil and gas," as Trump's policies could boost trade tension, crimping demand, they said.

The analysts made predictions for European oil prices, the world’s benchmark, which sat Wednesday at $86.

They forecast a 9% slide in the second quarter to $78, then a decline to $74 in the third quarter and $70 in the fourth quarter.

Next year should see a descent to $65 in the first quarter, $60 in the second and third, and finally $55 in the fourth, Citi said. That would leave the price 36% below current levels.

U.S. crude prices will trade $4 below European prices from the second quarter this year until the end of 2025, the analysts maintain.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

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How The Democrats Plan To Steal The Election

How The Democrats Plan To Steal The Election

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell via LewRockwell.com,

Biden and Trump have clinched the nominations…

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How The Democrats Plan To Steal The Election

Authored by Llewellyn Rockwell via LewRockwell.com,

Biden and Trump have clinched the nominations of their parties for President. Everybody is gearing up for a battle between them for the election in November. It’s obvious that Biden is “cognitively impaired.” In blunter language, “brain-dead”. Partisans of Trump are gearing up for a decisive victory.

But what if this battle is a sham? What if Biden’s elite gang of neo-con controllers won’t let Biden lose?

How can they stop him from losing? Simple. If it looks like he’s losing, the elite forces will create enough fake ballots to ensure victory. Our corrupt courts won’t stop them. They have done this before, and they will do it again, if they have to.

I said the Democrats have done this before.

The great Dr. Ron Paul explains one way they did this in 2020. The elite covered up a scandal that could have wrecked Biden’s chances:

“Move over Watergate. On or around Oct. 17, 2020, then-senior Biden campaign official Antony Blinken called up former acting CIA director Mike Morell to ask a favor: he needed high-ranking former US intelligence community officials to lie to the American people to save Biden’s lagging campaign from a massive brewing scandal.

The problem was that Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, had abandoned his laptop at a repair shop and the explosive contents of the computer were leaking out. The details of the Biden family’s apparent corruption and the debauchery of the former vice-president’s son were being reported by the New York Post, and with the election less than a month away, the Biden campaign needed to kill the story.

So, according to newly-released transcripts of Morell’s testimony before the House judiciary Committee, Blinken “triggered” Morell to put together a letter for some 50 senior intelligence officials to sign – using their high-level government titles – to claim that the laptop story “had all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

In short, at the Biden campaign’s direction Morell launched a covert operation against the American people to undermine the integrity of the 2020 election. A letter signed by dozens of the highest-ranking former CIA, DIA, and NSA officials would surely carry enough weight to bury the Biden laptop story. It worked. Social media outlets prevented any reporting on the laptop from being posted and the mainstream media could easily ignore the story as it was merely “Russian propaganda.”

Asked recently by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) why he agreed to draft the false sign-on letter, Morell testified that he wanted to “help Vice President Biden … because I wanted him to win the election.”

Morell also likely expected to be named by President Biden to head up the CIA when it came time to call in favors.

The Democrats and the mainstream media have relentlessly pushed the lie that the ruckus inside the US Capitol on Jan. 6th 2021 was a move by President Trump to overthrow the election results. Hundreds of “trespassers” were arrested and held in solitary confinement without trial to bolster the false narrative that a conspiracy to steal the election was taking place.

It turns out that there really was a conspiracy to steal the election, but it was opposite of what was reported. Just as the Steele Dossier was a Democratic Party covert action to plant the lie that the Russians were pulling strings for Trump, the “Russian disinformation campaign” letter was a lie to deflect scrutiny of the Biden family’s possible corruption in the final days of the campaign.

Did the Biden campaign’s disinformation campaign help rig the election in his favor? Polls suggest that Biden would not have been elected had the American electorate been informed about what was on Hunter Biden’s laptop. So yes, they cheated in the election.

The Democrats and the mainstream media are still at it, however. Now they are trying to kill the story of how they killed the story of the Biden laptop. This is a scandal that would once upon a time have ended in resignation, impeachment, and/or plenty of jail time. If they successfully bury this story, I hate to say it but there is no more rule of law in what has become the American banana republic.” See here.

But the main way the election can be rigged is by fraudulent “voting.” It’s much easier to do this with digital scanning of votes than with old-fashioned ballot boxes.

Dr. Naomi Wolf explains how electronic voting machines make it easier to steal elections:

“People could steal elections in this ‘analog’ technology of paper and locked ballot boxes, of course, by destroying or hiding votes, or by bribing voters, a la Tammany Hall, or by other forms of wrongdoing, so security and chain of custody, as well as anti-corruption scrutiny, were always needed in guaranteeing accurate election counts. But there was no reason, with analog physical processing of votes, to query the tradition of the secret ballot.

Before the digital scanning of votes, you could not hack a wooden ballot box; and you could not set an algorithm to misread a pile of paper ballots. So, at the end of the day, one way or another, you were counting physical documents.

Those days are gone, obviously, and in many districts there are digital systems reading ballots.” See here.

This isn’t the first time the Left has stolen an election. It happened in the 2020 presidential election too. Ron Unz offers his usual cogent analysis:

“There does seem to be considerable circumstantial evidence of widespread ballot fraud by Democratic Party forces, hardly surprising given the apocalyptic manner in which so many of their leaders had characterized the threat of a Trump reelection. After all, if they sincerely believed that a Trump victory would be catastrophic for America why would they not use every possible means, fair and foul alike, to save our country from that dire fate?

In particular, several of the major swing-states contain large cities—Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Atlanta—that are both totally controlled by the Democratic Party and also notoriously corrupt, and various eye-witnesses have suggested that the huge anti-Trump margins they provided may have been heavily ‘padded’ to ensure the candidate’s defeat.” See here.

In a program aired right after Biden’s pitiful State of the Union speech, the great Tucker Carlson pointed out that Biden’s “Justice” Department has already confessed that it plans to rig the election. It will do this by banning voter ID laws as “racist.” This permits an unlimited number of fake votes:

“If Joe Biden is so good at politics, why is he losing to Donald Trump, who the rest of us were assured was a retarded racist who no normal person would vote for? But now Joe Biden is getting stomped by Donald Trump, but he’s also at the same time good at politics? Right.

Again, they can’t win, but they’re not giving up. So what does that tell you? Well, they’re going to steal the election. We know they’re going to steal the election because they’re now saying so out loud. Here is the Attorney General of the United States, the chief law enforcement officer of this country in Selma, Alabama, just the other day.

[Now Carlson quotes the Attorney General, Merrick Garland:]

“The right to vote is still under attack, and that is why the Justice Department is fighting back. That is why one of the first things I did when I came into office was to double the size of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division. That is why we are challenging efforts by states and jurisdictions to implement discriminatory, burdensome, and unnecessary restrictions on access to the ballot, including those related to mail-in voting, the use of drop boxes and voter ID requirements. That is why we are working to block the adoption of discriminatory redistricting plans that dilute the vote of Black voters and other voters of color.

[Carlson then comments on Garland:]

“Did you catch that? Of course, you’re a racist. That’s always the takeaway. But consider the details of what the Attorney General of the United States just said. Mail-in balloting, drop boxes, voter ID requirements. The chief law enforcement officer of the United States Government is telling you that it’s immoral, in fact racist, in fact illegal to ask people for their IDs when they vote to verify they are who they say they are. What is that? Well, no one ever talks about this, but the justification for it is that somehow people of color, Black people, don’t have state-issued IDs. Somehow they’re living in a country where you can do virtually nothing without proving your identity with a government-issued ID without government-issued IDs. They can’t fly on planes, they can’t have checking accounts, they can’t have any interaction with the government, state, local, or federal. They can’t stay in hotels. They can’t have credit cards. Because someone without a state-issued ID can’t do any of those things.

But what’s so interesting is these same people, very much including the Attorney General and the administration he serves, is working to eliminate cash, to make this a cashless society. Have you been to a stadium event recently? No cash accepted. You have to have a credit card. In order to get a credit card you need a state-issued ID, and somehow that’s not racist. But it is racist to ask people to prove their identity when they choose the next President of the United States. That doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s a lie. It’s an easily provable lie, and anyone telling that lie is advocating for mass voter fraud, which the Attorney General is. There’s no other way to read it. So you should know that. You live in a country where the Attorney General is abetting, in fact calling for voter fraud, and that’s the only chance they have to get their guy re-elected.” See here.

Because of absentee ballots, the voting can be spread out over a long period of time. This makes voting fraud much easier. Mollie Hemingway has done a lot of research on this topic:

“In the 2020 presidential election, for the first time ever, partisan groups were allowed—on a widespread basis—to cross the bright red line separating government officials who administer elections from political operatives who work to win them. It is important to understand how this happened in order to prevent it in the future.

Months after the election, Time magazine published a triumphant story of how the election was won by “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”  Written by Molly Ball, a journalist with close ties to Democratic leaders, it told a cheerful story of a “conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes,” the “result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans.”

A major part of this “conspiracy” to “save the 2020 election” was to use COVID as a pretext to maximize absentee and early voting. This effort was enormously successful. Nearly half of voters ended up voting by mail, and another quarter voted early. It was, Ball wrote, “practically a revolution in how people vote.” Another major part was to raise an army of progressive activists to administer the election at the ground level.

Here, one billionaire in particular took a leading role: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg’s help to Democrats is well known when it comes to censoring their political opponents in the name of preventing “misinformation.” Less well known is the fact that he directly funded liberal groups running partisan get-out-the-vote operations. In fact, he helped those groups infiltrate election offices in key swing states by doling out large grants to crucial districts.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla, gave more than $400 million to nonprofit groups involved in “securing” the 2020 election. Most of those funds—colloquially called “Zuckerbucks”—were funneled through the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a voter outreach organization founded by Tiana Epps-Johnson, Whitney May, and Donny Bridges. All three had previously worked on activism relating to election rules for the New Organizing Institute, once described by The Washington Post as “the Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry.”

Flush with $350 million in Zuckerbucks, the CTCL proceeded to disburse large grants to election officials and local governments across the country. These disbursements were billed publicly as “COVID-19 response grants,” ostensibly to help municipalities acquire protective gear for poll workers or otherwise help protect election officials and volunteers against the virus. In practice, relatively little money was spent for this. Here, as in other cases, COVID simply provided cover.

According to the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), Georgia received more than $31 million in Zuckerbucks, one of the highest amounts in the country. The three Georgia counties that received the most money spent only 1.3 percent of it on personal protective equipment. The rest was spent on salaries, laptops, vehicle rentals, attorney fees for public records requests, mail-in balloting, and other measures that allowed elections offices to hire activists to work the election. Not all Georgia counties received CTCL funding. And of those that did, Trump-voting counties received an average of $1.91 per registered voter, compared to $7.13 per registered voter in Biden-voting counties.

The FGA looked at this funding another way, too. Trump won Georgia by more than five points in 2016. He lost it by three-tenths of a point in 2020. On average, as a share of the two-party vote, most counties moved Democratic by less than one percentage point in that time. Counties that didn’t receive Zuckerbucks showed hardly any movement, but counties that did moved an average of 2.3 percentage points Democratic. In counties that did not receive Zuckerbucks, “roughly half saw an increase in Democrat votes that offset the increase in Republican votes, while roughly half saw the opposite trend.” In counties that did receive Zuckerbucks, by contrast, three quarters “saw a significant uptick in Democrat votes that offset any upward change in Republican votes,” including highly populated Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.

Of all the 2020 battleground states, it is probably in Wisconsin where the most has been brought to light about how Zuckerbucks worked.

CTCL distributed $6.3 million to the Wisconsin cities of Racine, Green Bay, Madison, Milwaukee, and Kenosha—purportedly to ensure that voting could take place “in accordance with prevailing [anti-COVID] public health requirements.”

Wisconsin law says voting is a right, but that “voting by absentee ballot must be carefully regulated to prevent the potential for fraud or abuse; to prevent overzealous solicitation of absent electors who may prefer not to participate in an election.” Wisconsin law also says that elections are to be run by clerks or other government officials. But the five cities that received Zuckerbucks outsourced much of their election operation to private liberal groups, in one case so extensively that a sidelined government official quit in frustration.

This was by design. Cities that received grants were not allowed to use the money to fund outside help unless CTCL specifically approved their plans in writing. CTCL kept tight control of how money was spent, and it had an abundance of “partners” to help with anything the cities needed.

Some government officials were willing to do whatever CTCL recommended. “As far as I’m concerned I am taking all of my cues from CTCL and work with those you recommend,” Celestine Jeffreys, the chief of staff to Democratic Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich, wrote in an email. CTCL not only had plenty of recommendations, but made available a “network of current and former election administrators and election experts” to scale up “your vote by mail processes” and “ensure forms, envelopes, and other materials are understood and completed correctly by voters.”

Power the Polls, a liberal group recruiting poll workers, promised to help with ballot curing. The liberal Mikva Challenge worked to recruit high school-age poll workers. And the left-wing Brennan Center offered help with “election integrity,” including “post-election audits” and “cybersecurity.”

The Center for Civic Design, an election administration policy organization that frequently partners with groups such as liberal billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, designed absentee ballots and voting instructions, often working directly with an election commission to design envelopes and create advertising and targeting campaigns. The Elections Group, also linked to the Democracy Fund, provided technical assistance in handling drop boxes and conducted voter outreach. The communications director for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, an organization that advocates sweeping changes to the elections process, ran a conference call to help Green Bay develop Spanish-language radio ads and geofencing to target voters in a predefined area.

Digital Response, a nonprofit launched in 2020, offered to “bring voters an updated elections website,” “run a website health check,” “set up communications channels,” “bring poll worker application and management online,” “track and respond to polling location wait times,” “set up voter support and email response tools,” “bring vote-by-mail applications online,” “process incoming [vote-by-mail] applications,” and help with “ballot curing process tooling and voter notification.”

The National Vote at Home Institute was presented as a “technical assistance partner” that could “support outreach around absentee voting,” provide and oversee voting machines, consult on methods to cure absentee ballots, and even assume the duty of curing ballots.

A few weeks after the five Wisconsin cities received their grants, CTCL emailed Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, to offer “an experienced elections staffer that could potentially embed with your staff in Milwaukee in a matter of days.” The staffer leading Wisconsin’s portion of the National Vote at Home Institute was an out-of-state Democratic activist named Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein. As soon as he met with Woodall-Vogg, he asked for contacts in other cities and at the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Spitzer-Rubenstein would eventually take over much of Green Bay’s election planning from the official charged with running the election, Green Bay Clerk Kris Teske. This made Teske so unhappy that she took Family and Medical Leave prior to the election and quit shortly thereafter.

Emails from Spitzer-Rubenstein show the extent to which he was managing the election process. To one government official he wrote, “By Monday, I’ll have our edits on the absentee voting instructions. We’re pushing Quickbase to get their system up and running and I’ll keep you updated. I’ll revise the planning tool to accurately reflect the process. I’ll create a flowchart for the vote-by-mail processing that we will be able to share with both inspectors and also observers.”

Once early voting started, Woodall-Vogg would provide Spitzer-Rubenstein with daily updates on the numbers of absentee ballots returned and still outstanding in each ward­­—prized information for a political operative.

Amazingly, Spitzer-Rubenstein even asked for direct access to the Milwaukee Election Commission’s voter database:

“Would you or someone else on your team be able to do a screen-share so we can see the process for an export?” he wrote.

“Do you know if WisVote has an [application programming interface] or anything similar so that it can connect with other software apps? That would be the holy grail.”

Even for Woodall-Vogg, that was too much.

“While I completely understand and appreciate the assistance that is trying to be provided,” she replied, “I am definitely not comfortable having a non-staff member involved in the function of our voter database, much less recording it.”

When these emails were released in 2021, they stunned Wisconsin observers. “What exactly was the National Vote at Home Institute doing with its daily reports? Was it making sure that people were actually voting from home by going door-to-door to collect ballots from voters who had not yet turned theirs in? Was this data sharing a condition of the CTCL grant? And who was really running Milwaukee’s election?” asked Dan O’Donnell, whose election analysis appeared at Wisconsin’s conservative MacIver Institute.

Kris Teske, the sidelined Green Bay city clerk—in whose office Wisconsin law actually places the responsibility to conduct elections—had of course seen what was happening early on. “I just don’t know where the Clerk’s Office fits in anymore,” she wrote in early July. By August, she was worried about legal exposure: “I don’t understand how people who don’t have the knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election,” she wrote on August 28.

Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich simply handed over Teske’s authority to agents from outside groups and gave them leadership roles in collecting absentee ballots, fixing ballots that would otherwise be voided for failure to follow the law, and even supervising the counting of ballots. “The grant mentors would like to meet with you to discuss, further, the ballot curing process. Please let them know when you’re available,” Genrich’s chief of staff told Teske.

Spitzer-Rubenstein explained that the National Vote at Home Institute had done the same for other cities in Wisconsin. “We have a process map that we’ve worked out with Milwaukee for their process. We can also adapt the letter we’re sending out with rejected absentee ballots along with a call script alerting voters. (We can also get people to make the calls, too, so you don’t need to worry about it.)”

Other emails show that Spitzer-Rubenstein had keys to the central counting facility and access to all the machines before election night. His name was on contracts with the hotel hosting the ballot counting.

Sandy Juno, who was clerk of Brown County, where Green Bay is located, later testified about the problems in a legislative hearing. “He was advising them on things. He was touching the ballots. He had access to see how the votes were counted,” Juno said of Spitzer-Rubenstein. Others testified that he was giving orders to poll workers and seemed to be the person running the election night count operation.

“I would really like to think that when we talk about security of elections, we’re talking about more than just the security of the internet,” Juno said. “You know, it has to be security of the physical location, where you’re not giving a third party keys to where you have your election equipment.”

Juno noted that there were irregularities in the counting, too, with no consistency between the various tables. Some had absentee ballots face-up, so anyone could see how they were marked. Poll workers were seen reviewing ballots not just to see that they’d been appropriately checked by the clerk, but “reviewing how they were marked.” And poll workers fixing ballots used the same color pens as the ones ballots had been filled out in, contrary to established procedures designed to make sure observers could differentiate between voters’ marks and poll workers’ marks.

The plan by Democratic strategists to bring activist groups into election offices worked in part because no legislature had ever imagined that a nonprofit could take over so many election offices so easily.

“If it can happen to Green Bay, Wisconsin, sweet little old Green Bay, Wisconsin, these people can coordinate any place,” said Janel Brandtjen, a state representative in Wisconsin.

She was right. What happened in Green Bay happened in Democrat-run cities and counties across the country. Four hundred million Zuckerbucks were distributed with strings attached. Officials were required to work with “partner organizations” to massively expand mail-in voting and staff their election operations with partisan activists. The plan was genius. And because no one ever imagined that the election system could be privatized in this way, there were no laws to prevent it.

"Such laws should now be a priority.” See here.

Let’s do everything we can to publicize the steal. That way, we have a chance to prevent it.

Tyler Durden Wed, 03/20/2024 - 19:00

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Analyst revamps MicroStrategy stock price target after Bitcoin buy

Here’s what could happen to MicroStrategy shares next.

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How does Michael Saylor feel about bitcoin? We'll let him tell you in his own words.

"Bitcoin is a swarm of cyberhornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy," the executive chairman and co-founder of MicroStrategy  (MSTR)  once said.

Too subtle? Still not sure how the former CEO of the software intelligence company feels about the world's largest cryptocurrency? 

Maybe this will help.

"Bitcoin is a bank in cyberspace, run by incorruptible software, offering a global, affordable, simple and secure savings account to billions of people that don't have the option or desire to run their own hedge fund," Saylor said.

Okay, so the guy really likes bitcoin. And on March 19, the first day of spring, MicroStrategy took a bigger bite out of bitcoin when the company said it had bought 9,245 bitcoins for $623 million between March 11 and March 18.

MicroStrategy said it a completed a $603.75 million convertible debt offering — its second in a week — to raise money to buy bitcoin.

The company now holds about $13.5 billion of bitcoin, which adds up to more than 1% of the 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist, according to CoinDesk.

An analyst adjusts his price target for MicroStrategy

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Committed to developing bitcoin network

MicroStrategy said in a regulatory filing that it had paid roughly $7.53 billion for its bitcoin stash, an average of $35,160 per coin.

The company's stock fell on Tuesday, while bitcoin posted its biggest single-day loss since November 2022. MicroStrategy was off slightly to $1,416 at last check on Wednesday and bitcoin was up 2.3% to $63.607.

Related: Analyst unveils Nvidia stock price 'line in the sand'

Phong Le, MicroStrategy’s president and CEO, told analysts during the company’s Feb. 6 fourth-quarter-earnings call that "we remain highly committed to our bitcoin strategy with a long-term focus.."

"We consider MicroStrategy to be the world's first bitcoin development company," he said. "We are a publicly traded operating company committed to the continued development of the bitcoin network through activities in the financial markets, advocacy, and technology innovation."

MicroStrategy earned $4.96 a share in the quarter, beating the FactSet consensus of a loss of 64 cents, and light years beyond the year-ago loss of $21.93 a share.

Revenue totaled $124.5 million, compared with FactSet's call for $133 million and the year-earlier tally of $132.6 million.

During the call, Saylor told analysts that "2024 is the year of birth of bitcoin as an institutional-grade asset class."

MicroStrategy, he said, completed the first 15 years of the bitcoin life cycle, back when it was largely unregulated and misunderstood. 

"The next 15 years, I would expect, will be a regulated, institutional, high-growth period of bitcoin, very, very different in many ways from the last 15 years," Saylor said.

Crypto's dark days

"Bitcoin itself is performing well for a number of reasons, but one reason is because it represents the digital transformation of capital," he added.

Of course, life with bitcoin wasn't always sunshine and roses. 

More Wall Street Analysts:

We take you back now to those less-than-thrilling days yesteryear, when covid-19 was on the rampage and the price of bitcoin fell 30% from March 8 to March 12 2020.

By the end of 2021, bitcoin had fallen nearly 30%. And 2023 saw the cryptocurrency sector wracked with bankruptcy and scandal, with the likes of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried being convicted of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. 

SBF, as he has been known, is scheduled to be sentenced in Manhattan federal court on March 28. He faces a long stretch.

But bitcoin rose about 160% in 2023 and hit a record $73,750 on March 14.

Saylor recently said that his high hopes for bitcoin this year stemmed largely from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approving spot bitcoin ETFs and the upcoming bitcoin halving, where when bitcoin's mining reward is split in half.

MicroStrategy is the first bitcoin development company, Saylor told analysts, but perhaps not for long. 

"We've published our playbook, and we're showing other companies how to do it," he said.

TD Cowen analyst Lance Vitanza cited MicroStrategy's latest bitcoin acquisition when he adjusted his price target for the company's shares on March 20.

The analyst cut the investment firm's price target on MicroStrategy to $1,450 from $1,560 and affirmed an outperform rating on the shares. 

He says the shares remain an attractive vehicle for investors looking to gain bitcoin exposure.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

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