90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, December 3, 2022

Visage à trois #631

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #808

California’s Reparations Plan Would Spend Almost Double The State’s Entire Budget On Race-Based Handouts

A reparations task force in California has estimated black residents are entitled to more than $223,000 each to compensate for racism and slavery.

A state-sponsored reparations task force in California has estimated black residents are entitled to $223,000 each to compensate for historical racism and slavery.

The package, to be paid by bankrupt taxpayers who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved, is estimated to cost upwards of half a trillion dollars. Just part of the “housing discrimination” reparations are estimated to cost around $569 billion, according to The New York Times on Thursday — and that’s only one of five areas “identified” by the task force for consideration. By comparison, California’s 2022-2023 state budget was $307.9 billion — just more than half of that figure. It’s unclear how the state, which already faces multibillion-dollar deficits, plans to drain the money from already heavily-burdened taxpayers.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the paper.

Eligibility for the payments will extend to descendants of African Americans who were enslaved or to any “free black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.”

“Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as black or African American,” the Times reported. “The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.”

The nine-member task force was created by legislation signed by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The panel is expected to release its final report to state lawmakers in Sacramento by the end of next year.

In March last year, Evanston, Illinois joined Asheville, North Carolina to pass reparations for black residents over slavery, an institution the U.S. eradicated more than 150 years ago.

While the details of Asheville’s reparations program are pending a report from a city commission, leaders in Evanston voted to distribute $400,000 among eligible black residents who can prove discrimination and...

Elon Musk’s Twitter released internal discussions about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story Friday night via journalist Matt Taibbi.

The documents reveal widespread internal and external concern at the suppression of the story, a decision made without CEO Jack Dorsey’s knowledge and spearheaded by Vijaya Gadde, then the head of Trust & Safety — Twitter’s top censor. The thread is ongoing at the time of this writing and can be found here:

The documents, mostly internal communications from Twitter and emails with external parties, showed widespread unease with the decision and concerns about how it could be explained to lawmakers and the public.

Several key points from the thread so far:

The decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story was made without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey
Trust & Safety chief Vijaya Gadde, long believed to be the driving force of censorship at the company, spearheaded the decision.
Numerous top Twitter employees, especially from the communications and policy teams — whose job is to maintain relations with lawmakers and the press — expressed concern at the decision.
Immediate warnings from Twitter’s Washington D.C. contacts followed, including an email from Democrat representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) who warned the decision had generated “huge backlash” on capitol hill, and expressed concerns about Twitter undermining the freedom to publish.

Aside from Rep. Khanna’s communications, which imagined a future in which newspapers would be unable to publish hacked evidence of war crimes, other Democrats reportedly complained that Twitter had not gone far enough in its censorship of the press.

“Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern,” said Taibbi.SUBSCRIBE

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An email from Carl Szabo, one of the tech industry’s top lobbyists in D.C., told Twitter that Democrat lawmakers he spoke to in the aftermath of the decision all believed “social media needs to moderate more,” and complained that the Hunter Biden story had been allowed to travel as far as it did.

Szabo summarized the concerns of Democrats: “They let conservatives muddy the water and claim the Biden campaign look corrupt even though Biden is innocent.”

When pushed on how government might legally press social media companies to censor, Democrat lawmakers reportedly said “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

This lines up with what Democrats attempted to do after Biden took office: use the power of the federal government to force more censorship on social media, including the infamous “disinformation governance board” of DHS. The Biden administration is now facing lawsuits from Republican attorneys general arguing it used its power to undermine the...

Visage à trois #630

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #804

BRICS Creates New Payment System To Bypass The Dollar

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is speeding up its design of a common payment system, which has been closely discussed for nearly a year with the Chinese under the stewardship of Sergey Glazyev, the EAEU’s minister in charge of Integration and Macro-economy.

Through its regulatory body, the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the EAEU has just extended a very serious proposal to the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) which, crucially, are already on the way to turning into BRICS+: a sort of G20 of the Global South.

The system will include a single payment card – in direct competition with Visa and Mastercard – merging the already existing Russian MIR, China’s UnionPay, India’s RuPay, Brazil’s Elo, and others.

That will represent a direct challenge to the western-designed (and enforced) monetary system, head on. And it comes on the heels of BRICS members already transacting their bilateral trade in local currencies, and bypassing the US dollar.

This EAEU-BRICS union was long in the making – and will now also move toward prefiguring a further geoeconomic merger with the member nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

The EAEU was established in 2015 as a customs union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, joined a year later by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Vietnam is already an EAEU free trade partner, and recently enshrined SCO member Iran is also clinching a deal.

The EAEU is designed to implement free movement of goods, services, capital, and workers between member countries. Ukraine would have been an EAEU member if not for the Maidan coup in 2014 masterminded by the Barack Obama administration.

Vladimir Kovalyov, adviser to the chairman of the EEC, summed it all up to Russian newspaper Izvestia. The focus is to establish a joint financial market, and the priority is to develop a common “exchange space:” “We’ve made substantial progress and now the work is focused on such sectors as banking, insurance, and the stock market.”

A new regulatory body for the proposed joint EEU-BRICS financial system will soon be established.

Meanwhile, trade and economic cooperation between the EAEU and BRICS have increased 1.5 times in the first half of 2022 alone.

The BRICS share in the total external trade turnover of the EAEU has reached...