More than 150 organisations including Microsoft and Reddit and interest groups like Reporters Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have backed the plan [File: Simon Dawson/Reuters]
World wide web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has released an ambitious plan for online governance designed to counteract the growing prevalence of misinformation, data surveillance and censorship.
The Contract for the Web, created by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation, seeks commitments from governments and the industry to make and keep knowledge freely available.
“If we don’t act now – and act together – to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering” its potential for good, Berners-Lee said in a statement from his foundation on Monday.
Partners in the non-binding endeavour include Google and Facebook, whose data-collecting business models and sensation-rewarding algorithms have been blamed for exacerbating online toxicity.
The British engineer said the contract, developed in cooperation with dozens of experts and members of the public, is “a roadmap to build a better web”.
He called on governments to “strengthen laws and regulations” and companies “to ensure pursuit of profit is not at the expense of human rights and democracy“.
“Citizens must hold those in power accountable, demand their digital rights be respected and help foster healthy conversation online,” Berners-Lee added.
The Web Foundation
✔@webfoundation
The web is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had to transform our lives for the better.
But never before has the web’s power for good been more under threat.
More than 150 organisations including Microsoft and Reddit and interest groups like Reporters Without Borders and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have backed the plan.
Meanwhile, the governments of France, Germany and Ghana are on board, as are thousands of individuals.
The unveiling of Berners-Lee’s contract comes as leaders from government, business and civil society gather in Berlin, Germany for the four-day United Nations Internet Governance Forum.
“I will stand up for the preservation of the free internet that we have grown to know and love in recent decades,” German economy minister Peter Altmaier said in a statement ahead of the UN gathering.
Among the concerns that prompted the creation of the contract, Berners-Lee mentioned cyberbullying, uneven access to the internet worldwide and increased governmental control of domestic networks in countries including China, Iran and Russia.
“The trend for Balkanisation is really worrying and it’s extreme at the moment in Iran,” said Berners-Lee. “A strong government exhibits tolerance, the computer scientist added, for other voices, opposition voices, foreign voices to be heard by its citizens.”
The US House of Representatives on 20 November voted overwhelmingly in favour of measures aimed at supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, sending the bills to President Donald Trump for signature. Beijing has condemned Washington for passing the bill.
The United States is the biggest source of instability in the world, Reuters reported, citing senior Chinese diplomat Chinese State Councillor Wang Yi. The diplomat continued on by saying that US politicians are smearing China globally without providing evidence and using statecraft to stifle legitimate Chinese business interests.
The statement comes after the Chinese Foreign Ministry warned the US that its “erroneous actions” would hurt its interests in the autonomous city and urged Washington to stop meddling in China’s and Hong Kong’s internal affairs.
US President Donald Trump is expected to sign the legislation passed in the House of Representatives mandating US sanctions over alleged human rights abuses during protests in Hong Kong. The House passed two bills on Hong Kong on 20 November, a day after the Senate backed them in a vote. The bills seek to impose sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in alleged human rights abuse and ban exports of supplies to the city’s police that could be used to crack down on protesters.
In recent months, activists have roiled Hong Kong with demonstrations requiring that Beijing honour its promise to maintain the territory’s semi-autonomous status for 50 years following Britain’s 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to China.
Mass protests, triggered by a now-withdrawn controversial extradition bill, have been ongoing in Hong Kong since early June. The police have detained nearly 4,500 people since then and more than 1,500 residents and 400 police officers have been hospitalised after sustaining wounds in violent clashes.Fewer people are now taking to the streets after the extradition bill was withdrawn, but the protests remain violent and the demonstrators have expanded their demands.
Beijing has repeatedly claimed that the situation in Hong Kong is a result of foreign interference in China’s domestic affairs and expressed full support for the actions of the local authorities.
Editor’s note: This is not the first time Putin has said that dollar’s status as the world reserve currency is being eroded (and that America’s own weaponization of it was to blame). It is also not the first time he has communicated this is something that Moscow would welcome. It is the first time however that he has expressed the opinion that US dollar will exit the scene sooner rather than later. For the record Russia’s own de-dollarization is fast becoming a reality.
Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly summarized the shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics.
Ben Rickert@Ben__Rickert
Vladimir Putin: “The Dollar Enjoyed Great Trust Around The World. But For Some Reason It Is Being Used As A Political Weapon, Imposing Restrictions. Many Countries Are Now Turning Away From The Dollar As A Reserve Currency. US Dollar Will Collapse Soon.”
“The dominance of the greenback is the root cause of global financial and economic crises,” Justin Yifu Lin told Bruegel, a Brussels-based policy-research think tank. “The solution to this is to replace the national currency with a global currency.”
Warren Buffett once explained that “for 240 years it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start.”
We don’t mean to rain on his parade too much, but the following charts suggesttime is ticking, as the world transitions from dollars to non-fiat reserves…
Medical bankruptcy, which refers to situations where individuals were forced into bankruptcy because of medical bills, loss of income due to sickness or accident, or both, is widespread in the U.S.
Even Americans with insurance are not immune from the specter of medical bills. While the ACA limited deductibles and out-of-pocket payments, many insurance plans still require consumers to pay tens of thousands of dollars annually.
Similarly concerning, many Americans may incur bills ranging in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from so-called surprise bills.
Inaccurate provider directories can compound these problems, misleading patients to believe they seek care from a provider in their network.
Finally, evidence from ACA and commercial plans as well Medicare Advantage has highlighted problems with regard to “artificial local provider deserts,” situations in which providers are located in the area but excluded from the network. These situations might force patients into seeking costly out-of-network care fully aware of the potential financial consequences.
4. How do concerns about medical costs affect Americans beyond medical bankruptcy?
Avoiding needed medical care often has implications for people’s health and well-being. Of course, it may also ultimately force them to seek care in more expensive settings, like emergency departments or at advanced stages of the disease.
It may come as a surprise to some younger Americans, but the US did not always have income tax. In fact, one of the main catalysts behind the American Revolution and resulting War of Independence was the colonial protest against British taxation policy in the 1760s. Then, in the beginning, the independent nation collected taxes on imports, whiskey, and (for a while) on glass windows, even as states and localities collected poll taxes on voters and property taxes on land and commercial buildings. In addition, there were state and federal excise taxes. But all throughout, there was no official income tax for nearly a century and a half.
Yet while the United States imposed income taxes briefly during the Civil War and the 1890s, it was not until the 16th Amendment was ratified that the US permanently legalized a federal income tax in 1913. Incidentally, that was the same momentous year – just before the start of World War I – that another milestone event in US history took place: the birth of the Federal Reserve. Shortly thereafter, states also began collecting sales taxes in the 1930s.
Ever since then, the history of US taxation has been on of “optimal” outcomes, of progressive policies, and ultimately, of wealth redistribution according to whatever party or ideological bent was in control.
Yet no matter what one though of US tax policy, one thing was immutable: it was always and only in the hands of the Federal and State government to impose whatever taxation was deemed appropriate. For better or worse, tax was synonymous with politics.
… now wishes to formalize its wealth redistribution agenda, and effectively become a political force which determines who gets richer and who gets poorer.
As Bloomberg News reports today (now that it can no longer report on the travails of either its boss, Michael Bloomberg or his challengers for the Democratic primary even if it still has free reign to bash Donald Trump each and every day), Neel Kashkari, the former Goldman employee who was instrumental in the drafting of TARP and the bailout of the US financial system, and outspoken dove at the Minneapolis Fed, said “monetary policy can play the kind of redistributing role once thought to be the preserve of elected officials.” And as Bloomberg notes, “while that likely remains a minority view among U.S. central bankers, Kashkari has helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Fed communication this year.”
Needless to say, while Kashkari is all for deciding who gets what – arguably the most political of positions – he is very much against being subject to a periodic popular vote. Because, you know, the Fed knows best, and once you permit a democratic choice, the whole myth of an omnipotent Fed falls apart. As such, what Kashkari is proposing is despotism, pure and simple, one where a group of unelected career economists and various other bureaucrats has the final say on not only the price of money (determined by the Fed Funds rate), but also who ends up getting that money!
While the Fed sternly refuses to acknoleldge that the rotting cancer at the heart of its chronic inability to correctly diagnose the US economy (just over a year ago, we were a “long way away from neutral”… then just a few months later, the Fed flipped a U-turn and not only started slashing rates but launched QE4) is its inability to correctly measure inflation, and specifically admit that asset price inflation matters just as much as “economic” inflation…
… even as it chronically underestimates just how disproportionately more rising prices impact poorer Americans compared to richer ones (as we discussed previously here), it appears to be more than happy to propose expanding its role, and besides determining monetary policy, it is now generously willing to also opine on proper wealth distribution, read keeping rates low forever, and dooming all those who save to financial extinction.
Enter former Goldmanite and PIMCOite, Neel Kashkari, who believes he is the man best suited for the monumental task of singlehandedly deciding an outcome best left for the entire economy.
When Kashkari, a year into his job, launched an in-house effort in 2017 to examine widening disparities in the economy, yet clearly failing to realize the Fed’s own massive contribution to the record wealth inequality between the rich and poor, as it was the Fed’s policies that made those handful of Americans who owned financial assets richer than ever, while “redistributing” wealth away from savers and the rest of the American population, he was expecting to generate research that might inform lawmakers’ decisions, rather than the Fed’s.
“We had historically said: distributional outcomes, monetary policy has no role to play,” Kashkari told Bloomberg in an October interview. “That was kind of the standard view at the Fed, and I came in assuming that. I now think that’s wrong.”
For those confused by this word salad, what Kashkari now thinks is that it is right for the Fed to have a role in deciding distribution outcome!
The Bloomberg article then launches into an extended report of just how Kashkari hopes to legitimize his effort of elevating the Fed to the rank of supreme US despot, an emperor’s circle of unelected, career economists who take central planning in the US to a level the USSR never even conceived of, and we are confident readers can go through it on their own, especially since it includes such phrases as “paradigm shift” which is what the Bloomberg writer decided to throw in to indicate just how above the average reader he himself is, what we will say is this: trickle-down economics has failed every single time.
And now, instead of finally admitting that this core premise behind its 106 years of failed monetary policies which have made the bubble-bust mentality the norm and which guarantee that the next crash may well wipe out not only the Fed itself but western civilization as we know it, the Fed’s proposal is a “modest” one – give it even more power to determine who is rich, and who is poor, and asks just one thing: trust it that this time it will get it right.
Of course, the real motive behind Kashkari’s modest proposal is even more nefarious: the eventual fusion of monetary and fiscal policy, which in turn will greenlight the direct monetization of US debt by some super-governmental authority, call it the Treasury or whatever – one which we are confident will also be headed by a group of people who will never be subject to a popular vote – in hopes of allowing the US to effectively issue unlimited amounts of debt, i.e., launch MMT, in the process sparking enough inflation to finally inflate away America’s staggering debt load.
This will go on as long as the US Dollar maintains its reserve status, a process that will be vastly accelerated should Kashkari’s proposal – which one can comfortably argue is far more aligned with what Putin could desire in terms of destroying America’s superpower status than anything Trump has done to date – get solid footing among the “intellectual elite” of the United States.
Of course, long before the collapse of the dollar, it will also result in civil war, because if there is one thing the Fed knows how to do – and we say this without jest of sarcasm – is to make the rich even richer and the poor poorer. However, it is safe to say that US society is already nearing its breaking point, and should the Fed officially (rather than just unofficially) enter the wealth redistribution process, that would without doubt be the straw that finally breaks the American camel’s back.
Research into the use of cannabis as a treatment for opioid addiction is in its early stages, but conflicting studies raise questions about its effectiveness. (Blair Gable/Reuters)
A new study suggests cannabis could be a safer and more effective substitute for opioids in the treatment of chronic pain, but can it help fight the opioid crisis?
Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the B.C. Centre on Substance Use conducted over 5,000 interviews with 1,152 people who used heroin and other drugs and reported chronic pain at some point from June 2014 to June 2017.
The participants were largely from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and lead author M-J Milloy said the study aimed to discover “new interventions” that might “lower or address the risk of overdose” in heavy opioid users.
More than 12,800 apparent opioid-related deaths occurred in Canada between January 2016, when the federal government started tracking the data, and March 2019, according to the latest available statistics from the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Milloy said chronic pain is one of the “driving factors” of the opioid crisis, adding that many who can’t get effective pain relief can turn to the black market for opioids.
“This is the population that’s really suffering the worst burden of mortality in the crisis,” he said. “And there’s been some work suggesting that cannabis might be beneficial in the overdose crisis. So we’ve really tried to use our data to figure out if that is true.”
What they found was that daily cannabis use was associated with significantly lower odds of daily illicit opioid use, suggesting cannabis may serve as a substitute treatment in people with chronic pain.
The story went viral online this week and was picked up in publications in Canada and overseas, including the Daily Mail and The Sun in the U.K.
M-J Milloy was named inaugural professor of cannabis science at UBC last November. (Rafferty Baker/CBC)
While a spokesperson for the university says he receives no funding from any industry group, it is worth noting the cannabis company contributed $2.5 million to UBC and BCCSU for the professorship and research.
Milloy said the fact that his study looked at daily cannabis use raised a “valid concern” about the risk of addiction, but added it’s also linked to therapeutic benefits.
“A lot of people who are benefiting from cannabis are the people who are using it every day,” he said.
“We are very aware of the risk of harms. And I want to emphasize that none of us think that cannabis is a panacea or a silver bullet to knock out the overdose crisis. What we do think, though, is that it has tremendous potential.”
Conflicting research raises questions
A day after the UBC study was published, researchers at McMaster Universitypublished a review of almost 30 years’ worth of data in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that examined the use of cannabis as a replacement drug for people with opioid addictions.
Researchers looked at six studies involving 3,676 participants dating back to 1991 in an effort to determine the effects of cannabis use on opioid addiction during methadone treatment.
What they found was starkly different than the UBC study — there is no consensus among studies that cannabis use is associated with reduced opioid use.
“There’s a lot of hype and interest and hope that this could be a replacement. Could this be helping people with chronic pain or with opioid addiction?” said senior author Dr. Zainab Samaan, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster.
“The reality is that there are no good studies or good evidence to show us it’s beneficial.”
The research also found cannabis use did not result in patients with opioid addiction staying in methadone treatment longer.
Challenges to cannabis research
Samaan concedes that studying the positive or negative effects of cannabis is difficult, especially when studying drug users with addictions to multiple drugs.
“When you’ve got a mix of drugs and a population who are already addicted to drugs, it’s really hard to decipher,” she said. “What is the benefit, what is the harm?”
The McMaster study also concludes the overall quality of evidence was “very low,” with “critical issues of inconsistency and imprecision to moderate risk of bias.”
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone