Peter Myers Digest: Sep 4, 2023 The ADL

(1) Musk threatens to sue ADL for trying to kill X (Twitter) wth bogus allegations of anti-Semitism
(2) Twitter Poll on Banning ADL
(3) Why Elon Can’t #BantheADL Even if He Wanted To
(4) Globalists build factories in USA again, after decades of outsourcing to Asia
(5) As the Brics+ trade without the $, USA will be have to reduce its budget and trade deficits–and its bases

(1) Musk threatens to sue ADL for trying to kill X (Twitter) wth bogus allegations of anti-Semitism

https://www.rt.com/news/582379-musk-threatens-sue-adl/

5 Sep, 2023 00:31

Elon Musk threatens to sue Anti-Defamation League

The owner of X has claimed that the group tried to kill his social media platform by making bogus allegations of anti-Semitism

Billionaire Elon Musk has upped the ante in his feud with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), suggesting that he may have to sue the Jewish civil rights group for trying to destroy his X (formerly Twitter) social media platform through fraudulent claims of anti-Semitism.

“To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League,” Musk said on Monday in an X post. “Oh, the irony,” he added.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who bought Twitter last year for $44 billion and later renamed it X, blamed the ADL for a 60% drop in advertising revenue. He said the ADL had pressured advertisers not to use the platform by falsely associating X and its new owner with anti-Semitism. “They almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter,” he wrote.

Musk’s latest comments come two days after he suggested that he might poll X users on whether to ban the ADL from his platform. He posted the idea in response to a message from conservative Dutch activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who declared that people are fed up with “labeling everything we don’t like as hateful/racist/dangerous/far-right.” She added that people are no longer afraid of the ADL’s intimidation tactics. “Your labels have lost their power.”

The social media campaign to ban the ADL started after the group’s leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, met last week with X CEO Linda Yaccarino to discuss “rampant hate speech” on the platform. The ADL has accused X of failing to enforce its content moderation policies since Musk took over.

Musk, who has vowed to make X a bastion of free speech amid heavy censorship of conservative voices on other platforms, said he was “against anti-Semitism of any kind.” He quipped that if he wins his lawsuit, he will insist that the ADL drop the “anti” portion of its name, meaning it would be called the Defamation League.

The ADL has been sued for defaming people with false allegations in the past. In fact, a Colorado couple won a $10.5 million verdict against the group in May 2000. A year earlier, the ADL settled a suit in which it was accused of illegal spying. Cartoonist Ben Garrison sued the ADL in 2020, saying the activist group defamed him by falsely portraying him as anti-Semitic and racist.

Founded more than a century ago largely to stop attacks on the Jews, the ADL now describes itself as the “leading anti-hate organization in the world.” However, the group has been criticized for promoting critical race theory and other far-left ideologies in recent years.

(2) Twitter Poll on Banning ADL

https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-ponders-twitter-poll-on-banning-ADL-from-free-speech-site-after-bantheADL-trends

Elon Musk Ponders Twitter Poll on Banning ADL From ‘Free Speech’ Site

HELLSITE

The supposed free-speech warrior, who has reversed the Twitter bans of racist and antisemitic accounts, is now considering booting the civil rights group from the site.

Justin Baragona

Senior Media Reporter

Updated Sep. 03, 2023 3:01AM EDT / Published Sep. 02, 2023 4:54PM EDT

Days after<https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-boosts-antisemitic-propaganda-twitter-anti-defamation-league-1234817008/> boosting an antisemitic campaign to ban the Anti-Defamation League from X, owner and self-described <https://www.npr.org/2022/10/08/1127689351/elon-musk-calls-himself-a-free-speech-absolutist-what-could-twitter-look-like-un> “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk proposed polling the social media platform’s users on booting the civil rights advocacy group from the site formerly known as Twitter.

“Perhaps we should run a poll on this?” Musk <https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698061633686311073?s=20> tweeted on Saturday afternoon, responding to a <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Vlaardingerbroek> hard-right pundit boasting that #BanTheADL was trending.

The initial impetus behind the campaign appears to be a meeting ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt had with Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino about addressing the rampant hate speech on the site. After Greenblatt <https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/1696908233317769427> tweeted about their “very frank + productive conversation,” a <https://forward.com/fast-forward/559394/ban-ADL-twitter-campaign-musk/> number of prominent right-wing accounts pushed the hashtag #BanTheADL while claiming the group was stifling free speech.

Musk eventually engaged with Keith Woods, a YouTuber with <https://www.bitchute.com/video/A-43DqRdSH0/> connections to notorious white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer. Besides liking a post in which Woods said the ADL is “financially blackmailing social media companies into removing free speech on their platform,” Musk <https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1697655308946944257> also replied that the “ADL has tried very hard to strangle X/Twitter.”

While Musk’s feud with the ADL has been going on for a while now, it ramped up this spring when the group<https://www.thedailybeast.com/ADL-ceo-jonathan-greenblatt-says-musks-soros-tweet-will-embolden-extremists> called him out for comparing philanthropist George Soros—a long-standing boogeyman of the antisemitic right—to comic-book supervillain Magneto. After the organization said Musk’s behavior could embolden extremists, the edgelord billionaire <https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1658531953329463303> replied that they should “just drop the ‘A'” from ADL.

“ADL is unsurprised yet undeterred that antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other trolls have launched a coordinated attack on our organization. This type of thing is nothing new,” an ADL spokesperson told The Daily Beast on Saturday about the hashtag campaign.

“This onslaught comes following our participation in the 60th Anniversary of the March on Washington, where ADL proudly marched shoulder-to-shoulder with African-American leaders and those from other minority communities,” the spokesperson added. “It also follows a meeting with the leadership of X, formerly known as Twitter, that clearly upset these hateful groups.”

The ADL flack concluded: “Such insidious efforts don’t daunt us. Instead, they drive us to be unflinching in our commitment to fight hate in all its forms and ensure the safety of Jewish communities and other marginalized groups.”

(3) Why Elon Can’t #BantheADL Even if He Wanted To

https://news.gab.com/2023/09/why-elon-cant-BantheADL-even-if-he-wanted-to/

Why Elon Can’t #BantheADL Even if He Wanted To

Andrew Torba
September 2, 2023

Over the past few days a grassroots campaign popped up on X calling for the platform to ban the ADL. The campaign, united around the hashtag #BantheADL, has been trending on the platform for days with hundreds of thousands of posts.

This campaign comes after the CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, made a post gloating about his organization’s sheer power to control the platform that Elon Musk purchased for tens of billions of dollars last year. Although the #BantheADL campaign effectively highlighted the significant influence the ADL holds in regulating the flow of information online, it is essential to delve into the reasons why Elon Musk cannot remove the ADL from the platform or hinder their effective management of his company, even if he were inclined to do so.

First we have to understand a bit of the context for how a platform like X actually works and is able to exist on the internet along with the inside baseball of how the ADL flexes its power to control massive corporations without owning a single share.

X is built on the rails of multiple third-party services including, but not limited to the Google Cloud infrastructure among others. X has had a partnership with Google Cloud since 2018, and <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-patching-up-relationship?cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-tech&sref=10lNAhZ9> Bloomberg reports that this collaboration has incurred annual expenses ranging from $200 million to $300 million for the company. Jonathan Greenblatt has <https://gab.com/a/posts/110993693279595460> openly bragged about the ADL’s partnership with Google, YouTube, Facebook, and X, going so far as to change the algorithms of these companies to meet their demands.

With one phone call to Google the ADL can cripple X. If Google pulls the plug on the cloud hosting deal massive parts of X’s critical infrastructure will be down for a long time, possibly the entire platform would be taken offline with one click. We saw this<https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/11/parler-is-officially-offline-after-aws-suspension/> happen in 2020 with Parler when Amazon AWS pulled the plug and the platform was taken offline. They were never able to fully recover and recently shut the platform down completely after it sold to a third-party.

Going after the cloud hosting providers is just the start for the ADL’s ability to utterly destroy X. Next come the app store bans. With that same phone call to Google the ADL could easily highlight the hundreds of thousands of “antisemitic” posts on the platform and point the the #BantheADL posts as their prime example. Don’t put it past them. They likely have multiple studies going on behind the scenes tracking the “rise in hate” on the platform since Elon took over and will use this to present their case.

Without critical infrastructure and the app stores X would be in serious trouble, but Elon may be able to pull off a miracle and keep the platform online. Next come the advertisers. The ADL has close connections with all of the top Fortune 500 companies and will use their mafia-style power to get these companies to pull their ad dollars from X. This has already been going on since the moment Elon took over the platform. X is operating in a cash flow negative situation and <https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66217641> reports claim that ad revenue has fallen by a dramatic 50% since Elon took over.

That’s only the beginning. Next the ADL will contact the sitting members of Congress and the Biden White House. We’ll see Elon be summoned to testify in Congress about the rise in “misinformation” and “hate” on the platform since he took over.

Elon is in a unique position because he’s not only running X. He’s also running several other companies including SpaceX and Tesla, both of which require him to appease the Regime and stay within their favor. The ADL can and will go after not only X, but all of Elon’s companies. It’s no coincidence that the CEO of X is having meetings with the ADL just days after the <https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-spacex-discriminating-against-asylees-and-refugees-hiring> DOJ announced that they were suing SpaceX.

How do I know all of this? Because I lived it–and survived it by the grace of God.

The ADL has been attacking Gab and me for many years. Their smear campaigns against us successfully lobbied dozens of third-party services to deplatform us and cripple our infrastructure. Despite all of their efforts this didn’t stop us. We were able to rebuild our own servers, payment processing, and so much more in order to keep Gab online. It took many years and it wasn’t easy, but we are still standing.

The ADL has also come after me personally. They pay Google to promote their smear articles about me to the top of search results. They <https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/13/adl-gab-andrew-torba-capitol-riots/6652567002/> lobbied the DOJ to investigate me after January 6th, even though I wasn’t even in attendance. Jonathan Greenblatt went on national television and called me “one of the most toxic people in public life” effectively painting a target on my back.

None of this stopped me.

I don’t fear the ADL. I don’t answer to the ADL. I fear and answer only to God almighty.

The ADL has NO POWER over Gab which is why they hate us. It’s that simple. There is absolutely nothing they can say or do to get us to censor opinions they don’t like and it’s going to stay that way.

Elon has a choice. He can continue to allow this disgusting organization to run his company by proxy without his approval or he can fight back, take a stand like Gab has, and face the consequences head on. He can continue to have his CEO take groveling phone calls and enforce the <https://news.gab.com/2023/08/gab-emerges-as-the-true-speech-platform-contrasting-the-adls-strategy-for-x-twitter/> ADL’s strategy of freedom of speech but not freedom of reach or he can tell them to pound sand. If he can’t run his own business without permission from some ghoulish vampire at the ADL there’s no sense in running a business at all.

For me it was an easy decision.

Andrew Torba

(4) Globalists build factories in USA again, after decades of outsourcing to Asia

Why? Supply bottlenecks during Covid revealed the risk in depending on foreign supplies. If there’s a slowdown in China, that may be because the Globalists are now investing at home again – Peter M.

Construction Spending for Factories Soars, after Decades in the Doldrums

Construction Spending for Factories Soars, after Decades in the Doldrums

Sep 3, 2023

Driven by manufacturing plants for technologically advanced, high-value products. Automation is the great equalizer.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Spending on construction projects for manufacturing plants in the US started breaking out of its long doldrums in January 2021. That month, about $6 billion was invested in building factories, same as in January 2015. But then monthly construction spending for factories began to spike and in July set a new record of nearly $17 billion, a notch up from June, according to the Census Bureau on Friday.

Up by 186% over the 30 months from January 2021 through July 2023.
Up by 148% over the 24 months from July 2021 through July 2023.

At the current pace, companies are investing nearly $17 billion per month in building manufacturing plants, or about $203 billion a year!

We’ve been hearing it in the news and in corporate reports: Semiconductor plants, EV plants – Tesla, legacy automakers, and startup companies are plowing many billions of dollars into ramping up manufacturing – component makers, makers of computer, electronic, and electrical equipment, etc. The latter bunch are big drivers behind the surge of factory construction, according to an <https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/unpacking-the-boom-in-us-construction-of-manufacturing-facilities>analysis in June by the Treasury Department.

All of them are technologically advanced industries with high-value outputs. Forget T-shirts and plastic toys.

And all of them use highly automated factories. Industrial robots cost the same in the US as in China. They’re the great equalizer when it comes to costs.

There is still a huge amount of manufacturing in the US. By output, the US is the second largest manufacturing country behind China, and larger than Germany, Japan, and South Korea combined.

The problem is that the US has fallen far behind China, and that many industries are dependent on imports from China and other countries. When covid tangled up the supply chains, suddenly there were massive shortages of the most needed products, including semiconductors. So that was a wakeup call.

In addition, as trade relations between the US and China have soured, companies are seeing new risks in being dependent on China.

The majority of cars and trucks sold in the US are assembled in a factory in the US. All major foreign brands have assembly plants in the US, including BMW and Mercedes. Hondas built in the US have among the highest US content. Tesla makes vehicles in the US including for export. And yet, component shortages, triggered by semiconductor shortages, caused the worst vehicle shortages ever. So time to reevaluate things.

Total non-residential construction spending, which includes spending on manufacturing facilities, has surged as well, but not nearly as much. Since July 2021, it grew by 27%. Nonresidential construction spending is very seasonal (green); the 12-month moving average clarifies the trend (red):

Red-hot increases of construction costs in 2021 and 2022 are responsible for a portion of the increase in spending: A considerable portion or even all of the two-year 27% increase in total nonresidential construction spending may have been due to higher costs.

For example, over the same two-year period, the Producer Price Index (PPI) for nonresidential buildings surged by 29%.

But compared to the two-year 148% spike in spending for manufacturing plants over the two-year period, the 29% increase in the PPI would only explain a small portion. The rest is the surge in investment in US manufacturing plants.

Note how the PPI for nonresidential building construction began to flatten out in January 2023, with essentially no month-to-month increases through June, followed by a drop in July, which pulled down the year-over-year increase in July to 3.8%, the lowest since June 2021, from year-over-year increases in the 16% to 24% range in 2022:

Factory construction spending’s share of total nonresidential construction spending has doubled over the past two years, from a share of 8.9% in July 2021, which was roughly in line with the years before the pandemic, to a share of 17.4% in July 2023. This highlights the surge of factory construction beyond the effects of rising construction costs.

When compared to the 12-month moving average of total nonresidential construction, the share of spending on manufacturing plants soared to 20%:

There are lots of reasons behind the renaissance in factory building. The initial surge started in the spring of 2021. Over a year later, in July 2022, with the surge well underway, Congresses passed a package of subsidies for select manufacturing industries, such as semiconductor makers (they get up to $52 billion). But construction spending doesn’t immediately happen. The government takes its time in doling out money for these kinds of projects. And the factories themselves take time in planning and permitting before construction can even start. So a portion of those subsidies for factory construction are likely to show up here in construction spending in the future.

(5) As the Brics+ trade without the $, USA will be have to reduce its budget and trade deficits–and its bases

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/doomsday-for-the-buck-a-reserve-currency-is-no-longer-needed/

Doomsday for the Buck? “A Reserve Currency Is No Longer Needed”

Mike Whitney Interview with Paul Craig Roberts

AUGUST 28, 2023

Question 1– To what extent has the war in Ukraine accelerated the move to a new global realignment?

Paul Craig Roberts– It was Washington’s economic sanctions against Russia, the theft of Russia’s central bank reserves, and the theft of Venezuela’s gold, not the conflict in Ukraine, that weaponized the US dollar and resulted in global realignment.

The limited Russian intervention in Donbas was Putin’s belated eight-year-delayed response to the US coup that overthrew the government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed a government hostile to Russia and to the Russian population that had been incorporated into the Ukraine province of the Soviet Union by Soviet leaders. The intervention was forced on Putin by the United States’ buildup of a large Ukraine army poised to overthrow the self-declared Donbas republics.

By habit and convenience, the US dollar is used as world money to settle imbalances in international trade, but the sanctions woke the world up to the risks of using the dollar. Consequently, the BRICS suddenly expanded with membership extended to Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The organization now contains essentially the entirety of world oil production and 40-45% of World GDP.

Clearly, a realignment has already occurred.

Question 2– Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE have now all joined BRICS. How will this affect the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency? (Is this the end of the petrodollar??)

Paul Craig Roberts– Saudi Arabia announced the end of the petrodollar when it began accepting payment for oil in other currencies. The BRICS are working out how-to carry-on trade among themselves without use of the US dollar, which in effect brings to an end the role of the dollar as world reserve currency.

The BRICS might try to create a new reserve currency consisting of a weighted basket of their currencies. This is unnecessary and could lead to strains among BRICS members from disputes over the shares of each currency in the basket. A reserve currency is no longer needed. A reserve currency was needed at the end of WWII because the other industrialized economies were destroyed. As the US had the only intact economy, the role fell to the US dollar. Today this is not the situation. Central banks can keep their reserves in the form of the currencies of their trading partners.

What this means for Washington is that the US will begin having financing problems for its large budget and trade deficits. As long as the dollar was the world money, foreign central banks kept their reserves in US Treasury debt. As US budget and trade deficits grew, so did the reserves of the world banking system.

The situation is changing. If a dozen countries constituting about half of the world’s population and 40-45% of world GDP cease using the dollar, the foreign central bank market for US debt shrinks considerably. Having offshored its manufacturing, the US is import-dependent. Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.

Question 3– Can Washington allow this realignment to stand or should we expect to see a coup in Saudi Arabia where the US has five military bases and numerous CIA offices?

Paul Craig Roberts– I do not know if Washington has the ability to overthrow the Saudi government or whether Russia, China, and Iran would permit it. Remember, President Obama was going to overthrow Assad in Syria, but Putin did not permit it.

Question 4– The globalist dreams of the western oligarchs (WEF) appear to be coming to an end along with the so-called “rules-based order”. In your opinion, how important has Vladimir Putin been in spearheading the move towards a “new architecture for global security” and laying the groundwork for a new multipolar world order?

Paul Craig Roberts– What broke up Washington’s version of global order was the West’s cold shoulder to Putin’s effort to be a part of the world order on equal standing and not in a subservient position. It was Washington’s arrogance and foolishness that broke up the global order.

Question 5– Before he died, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the US would need to seek an accommodation with Russia and China to ease the transition away from the unipolar system. Here’s what he said:

“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture… the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, i t is no longer the globally imperial power….

the United States must take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence …can be contained without destroying the global order.…

a long and painful road toward an initially limited regional accommodation is the only viable option for the United States, Russia, China, and the pertinent Middle Eastern entities. For the United States, that will require patient persistence in forging cooperative relationships with some new partners (particularly Russia and China)…

The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant” global power until the emergence of America on the world scene…. During the latter part of the 20th century no other power even came close. That era is now ending. <https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/04/17/toward-a-global-realignment/> Toward a Global Realignment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest

Question 6- In your opinion, how should the United States deal with Moscow and Beijing? Is there a way that we can defend US interests while –at the same time– avoiding years of conflict and confrontation? What should our foreign policy objectives be?

Paul Craig Roberts– The neoconservatives’ goal of US hegemony prevents Washington from hearing Brzezinski’s advice. Washington’s chance to deal with Russia and China has passed. The question we face is how will Russia and China deal with Washington. The neoconservative monopoly on US foreign policy means that there are no other voices for Washington to hear, and American hegemony is out of the question.