Saturday 11, December 2021
Assange’s crime was to damage Hillary Clinton
I’ve always wondered why the USA is so hell-bent on destroying Julian Assange.
He is of no danger to anyone, and probably never was.
It appears that the sexual assault crimes alleged against him in Sweden were a tissue of lies.
He has endured years of suffering, while holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Now the UK has agreed to extradite him back to face a trial in the USA.
It’s not a surprise that the establishment does not like him, but the
vehemence was hard to see, until I read
this.
It seems that revelations about corruption in the Democratic National Committee were considered so damaging to Hillary’s bid in 2016 that it cost her the election.
No wonder she wants to see him dead!
Probably, the US also wants to send a signal that it will hunt down any whistle-blower.
It seems to me that politicians in democratic regimes secretly wish they had the power over the media that their opposite numbers in dictatorships do.
Tony Blair in his autobiography hinted at a jealousy about how much Putin was feared, compared to the way he was treated by the public and the press in the UK.
There was a time in the 1990s that it seemed as though the Internet would destroy the power of the mass media.
Unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the case, and instead what we read is increasingly controlled by a handful of gigantic American firms.
There is a huge amount of misinformation around, and everyone has an axe to grind, but I feel that some background about what Assange did, and why it is so hated by the US establishment is lacking from the mainstream media.
For balance, maybe take a look at this from the veteral Australian journalist John Pilger, formerly an icon of the left.
REITs
Economists are always going on about short-run and long run effects (e.g. of changing the money supply).
The long run is about waiting for the labour market to clear.
The short run is the regime where sticky prices haven’t moved yet.
A lot of important prices are sticky.
Economists never seem to be very quantitative about timescales, but clearly office leases run for more than a year, maybe even five years without a rent review.
This means that the financial reports of REITs will not reveal the long-run reality of the post-pandemic year yet.
The guys at Land and Buildings see trouble ahead in the REIT space, and I sort of agree with them.
My guess is that working from home will be the sticky thing now.
Read more.
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