Total Surveillance, Zero Anonymity

Total Surveillance, Zero Anonymity

It’s been a helluva dystopian week when it comes to online censorship.

(If you’re a newer reader and you wonder why we’d take on such a topic in a financial e-letter, we devoted all 5 of our Bullets to the subject one day last summer.)

The trouble began on Monday — when New York’s governor announced she’s going full East Germany in the name of combating anti-Semitism.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was beefing up the Empire State’s “counterterrorism” efforts — including additional surveillance of social media.

“We’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts, what’s being said on social media platforms,” she said, “and we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people… All this is in response to our desire, our strong commitment to ensure that not only do New Yorkers be safe, but they also feel safe.”

The potential for abuse is obvious. “No details have been provided on limits or oversight. Just an incredibly bad idea,” tweeted Lee Zeldin, Hochul’s Republican challenger in the New York governor’s race last year.

Paradigm’s own Jim Rickards concurs: “State surveillance to suppress free speech. Where have we seen this before?”

The next day, the power elite’s favorite GOP presidential candidate looked in Hochul’s direction and said, “Hold my beer.”

Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley declared there should be no anonymity online. “Every person on social media should be verified, by their name. First of all, it’s a national security threat,” she told Fox News.

The rationale? “Misinformation,” of course. Banning anonymous accounts would get “rid of the Russian bots, the Iranian bots and the Chinese bots.”

Just to underscore the point, she said later in the day on the Ruthless Podcast, “I want everybody’s name.”

It’s not just the totalitarian energy that’s a wonder to behold — it’s also the cluelessness. After all, anonymous pamphleteering helped fuel the American Revolution. And once independence was won, the authors of the Federalist Papers used the pseudonym “Publius” while making their case for ratifying the Constitution.

This history, evidently, is lost on Ms. Haley. As former Cato Institute scholar Julian Sanchez tweeted, “Apparently to defend against authoritarian states, we must copy authoritarian states.”

Haley tried to walk it back the next day, only to sink into incoherence. “I don’t mind anonymous American people having free speech,” she said — while reiterating her insistence that all social media users should register by name.

With such a mask-off moment, “Haley did free speech a great service this week,” writes Politico media columnist Jack Shafer.

Well, at least for now. The problem comes later on — as the comedian and commentator Jimmy Dore points out in his Haley hot take…

Yeah, you know it’s true. The control freaks and power trippers like Nikki Haley and Kathy Hochul are just waiting for the right opportunity. After all, much of the text of the Patriot Act was sitting on a shelf in the years before 9/11, ready for deployment during a moment of crisis.

And speaking of 9/11…

Important Historical Document Nuked From the Web

Also this week, an influential mainstream media outlet literally created the digital equivalent of George Orwell’s “memory hole” from 1984.

It all began on Tuesday when a TikTok user named Lynette Adkins posted a video drawing attention to a screed issued by Osama bin Laden a few months after the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now and go read — it’s literally two pages — go read ‘A Letter to America,'” she said. “Come back here and let me know what you think. Because I feel like I’m going through like an existential crisis right now, and a lot of people are.”

The video instantly went viral.

Apparently for the Gen-Z set who did not experience 9/11 as adults, reading bin Laden’s letter was a red-pill moment.

Much as bin Laden did in his pre-9/11 fatwa in 1998, the letter laid out his three main grievances against the U.S. government: 1) the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites; 2) the ongoing U.S. bombing of Iraq throughout the 1990s; 3) U.S. support for Israel.

Suddenly, it all clicked for a generation that was never exposed to the propaganda that They hate us for our freedoms — and for Western decadence exemplified by McDonald’s and Madonna.

“My eyes have been opened,” said one of the replies to Adkins’ video. “We’ve been lied to our entire lives,” said another.

Unfortunately a handful of people took it too far — and sided with bin Laden’s twisted logic that everyday Americans deserved to die because they wouldn’t rise up and remove decision-makers like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush from power.

With that, The Guardian — the legacy British newspaper that’s built a substantial online presence in the United States — took down the bin Laden letter from the web page where it had sat for over 20 years.

The independent journalist Michael Tracey — reporting and tweeting from Israel this month — was astonished: “Maybe The Guardian ridiculously self-censored the letter (no doubt bringing even more attention to the letter) because they could be accused of ‘justifying terrorism’ or some such. Simply by publishing primary source materials. Can't have the youngsters reading too much of that.” [Emphasis ours]

Seriously, what’s next? Bin Laden’s speech from 2004 in which he said his aim was “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”? That, by the way, was the jumping-off point for our own 9/11 reflections earlier this fall.

It’s in this fraught environment that we at Paradigm Press just posted a highly controversial video — on social media.

The latest post on our new YouTube channel is an interview conducted by Rude Awakening editor Sean Ring. His guest is economic strategist Thorsten Polleit.

You’ll definitely want to check this out if you’re familiar with Jim Rickards’ “Biden Bucks” thesis. Except if anything, Mr. Polleit goes even further. He asserts that a “socialism virus” has spread from Europe to America — setting up the world to become dependent on a totalitarian money system, doing away with cash and even establishing a one-world government.

There’s more prosaic stuff in there, too — including a year-end forecast for the price of gold and why Polleit is none too keen on gold-mining stocks.

Point is, once you wander into topics like one-world government, you potentially start showing up on the radar of the “trust and safety” people at Big Tech companies.

As I said a few weeks ago, we made the decision to launch a YouTube channel with eyes wide open — and we would not censor ourselves to please the gods of “content moderation.”

This interview is probably our first serious test of the system. So give it a look now, on the off-chance it offends the gatekeepers…

… and if you have a YouTube account, please subscribe. As a reminder, we don’t try to sell you any of our newsletters or trading services with these videos. Our only aim is to make you more knowledgeable about how the markets and the economy really work.

Another Eye-Opening “Soft Landing” Chart

A brief postscript to our musings yesterday about the economy making a “soft landing”...

This is a chart showing the incidence of news articles mentioning a “soft landing.” You’ll notice a spike that preceded the dot-com recession of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2007–2009 — and another big one now. Pride goeth before a fall and all that…

The chart tracks neatly with the one we shared yesterday, showing the mentions of “soft landing” in company filings, presentations and earnings calls.

Again, there’s no guarantee that history will repeat. But given the number of Federal Reserve rate-raising cycles that have ended in recession… that’s the way to bet.

For a second straight day, the major U.S. stock indexes are consolidating their recent gains.

The S&P 500 is microscopically in the red, but still over 4,500. Paradigm’s Greg Guenthner characterizes this action as “a near-perfect pause in the melt-up rally.” For real: A 10% gain in 2½ weeks needs a breather.

Looking ahead, “Most market participants are significantly underinvested,” he wrote to readers of The Trading Desk a short time ago. “I'm talking about fund managers and Main Street investors alike. They will continue to chase into the holidays.”

Precious metals are also digesting their gains this week — gold at $1,983 and silver at $23.72.

Crude is rebounding nicely — up more than two bucks and back over $75. As for the cause of the recent swoon, oil-trading veteran Erik Townsend posits a compelling theory on his Macro Voices podcast: In light of U.S. sanctions on Russian and Iranian oil, there’s a whole lot of gray- and black-market crude sloshing around the world right now — way more than what shows up in the official numbers issued by governments.

One economic number of note: Housing starts grew a modest 1.9% in October, while permits are up 1.1%. That’s not horrible, given mortgage rates at 22-year highs: With an extreme lack of inventory in the market for existing homes, new construction looks attractive for anyone who can afford it.

Your Government in Action, Pentagon Edition

For the record: The Pentagon has failed an audit for the sixth year in a row.

Defense Department Comptroller Mike McCord delivered the news on Wednesday, acknowledging there’d been no meaningful improvements in its record-keeping since last year.

As Connor Echols writes at Responsible Statecraft, “Just one in four of the Pentagon’s auditing units received a clean bill of financial health, though auditors made some progress in accounting for the agency’s $3.8 trillion in assets. McCord said that a clean audit likely remains years away, according to Reuters. The Pentagon remains the only federal agency to have never passed an audit.”

Efforts to audit the Pentagon go back more than 30 years now — as we’ve chronicled every so often, including again last summer. And they’ve never gone anywhere.

In contrast — and as long as we brought up 9/11 today — the recordkeeping practices of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida gave new meaning to the word meticulous.

A decade ago, The Associated Press described how al-Qaida’s faction in West Africa tracked the tiniest expenses — soap, macaroni, superglue — on scraps of paper and Post-it notes. “For the smallest thing, they wanted a receipt,” recalled a storekeeper in Timbuktu, Mali.

"This habit,” said the article, “can be traced back more than three decades to when a young Osama bin Laden entered King Abdul Aziz University in Saudi Arabia in 1976 to study economics, and went on to run part of his millionaire father's construction company."

Back in present-day Washington, the House Oversight Committee can only grouse helplessly that the Pentagon’s “inability to adequately track assets risks our military readiness and represents a flagrant disregard for taxpayer funds, even as it receives nearly a trillion dollars annually.”

Pitiful…

The Cost of Living and Other Lies

One more reader wishes to rip on the Farm Bureau’s estimate of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 costing $61.17.

“I don’t know where they are shopping, but that price is so out of this world in your dreams WRONG!”

Dave Responds: “This year’s national average cost was calculated using 245 surveys completed with pricing data from all 50 states and Puerto Rico,” reads the Farm Bureau’s press release.

Reports TheDes Moines Register: “The shoppers checked prices in person and online using grocery store apps and websites. They looked for the best possible prices without taking advantage of special promotional coupons or purchase deals, the group said.”

Speaking of obscure statistical methodology, another reader weighs in on the official inflation numbers claiming a 34% annual drop in health insurance costs.

“Aren't your health insurance costs 34% lower? No? I found this tidbit in USA Today, of all places. The following sentence destroys whatever little trust I had in CPI numbers:

“‘Insurance rates are difficult to measure because of widely varying plans and so [the Department of] Labor bases its calculation on insurance company profits.’”

Dave responds: Good catch. Proof once again of the truism that sometimes the real news shows up in the 19th paragraph of an article — where almost no one will see it.

Have a good weekend,

 

 

 

 

Dave Gonigam
Managing editor, Paradigm Pressroom's 5 Bullets