russia-insider--2020-07-23--Google Bosses Have Far Too Much Power to Decide What Americans Know - Their Censorship Is Completely

Google Bosses Have Far Too Much Power to Decide What Americans Know - Their Censorship Is Completely Out-of-Control

Should the phone companies be able to permanently cut off your service if you say something they don ’ t like ?
Early yesterday morning I received a worried note from one of our regular columnists saying our website no longer came up in any Google search results .
Google and Facebook are the top gatekeepers to the global Internet , and in early May they had both purged us , with Facebook blocking our content and Google de-ranking all of our pages .
Google search results had previously placed many of our pieces very high , but now they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ included “ unz ” in the search string .
Thus , only those actually looking for us would ever find our content .
But this latest blow was even more severe , and now neither searches with nor without “ unz ” ever seemed to return any of our pages .
Google had apparently “ disappeared ” us from the entire Internet .
Despite the earlier Facebook and Google bans , our traffic had easily broken all records in June , with our uniquely alternative perspectives overcoming the setback inflicted by the Internet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mountain View had decided to turns its screws a little tighter .
As it happens , I was somewhat mistaken .
Later that day , I discovered a similar fate had befallen a very wide range of popular conservative and Republican-leaning websites , including those offering very mainstream and moderate perspectives : FoxNews host Tucker Carlson currently has the highest rated show in cable history , but Google had decided that his websites no longer exist : So apparently our “ controversial ” content had had little connection with our total disappearance from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ censor had decided we were some sort of conservative website , to be purged along with all the others .
I felt a little like the secret leader of the biggest Trotskyite network in the 1930s USSR , suddenly arrested in the middle of the night in an NKVD raid and thrown into a dank interrogation cell , where I desperately wondered “ Who had betrayed me ?
!
” But then I eventually discovered that 50,000 other people had been rounded up that same night , mostly for complaining that the bread @ @ @ @ @ @ @ remembered complaining about stale bread to someone the previous week… As it happens , Google ’ s sudden total removal of all those websites including our own turned out to be temporary , and the search results were soon returned to what they had been the day before , with our pages still merely de-ranked and almost impossible to find rather than entirely eliminated .
But the incident highlighted the absurd political and media power now allowed to a private company and its top executives .
Google ’ s share of the search @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both in the US and worldwide , and Facebook has almost an equally strong monopoly in social networking .
They are the gatekeepers to the Internet , and does it really make sense to allow them to have the power to “ disappear ” whatever websites or political candidates they don ’ t like ?
Should the phone companies be able to permanently cut off your service if you say something they don ’ t like ?
During the Golden Age of television , if one network had controlled 90 % of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been treated as a regulated monopoly , and required to behave in an even-handed and fair manner .
Shouldn ’ t Google and Facebook be held to the same standard ?
Patterns may or may not be indicate of ultimate causes , but our alternative media website had spent five years providing material of an extremely controversial nature without encountering any difficulties with Internet gatekeepers , while our traffic steadily rose .
Then , in late April I published an extremely popular article presenting the strong evidence that our disastrous Covid-19 outbreak was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reckless American biowarfare attack against China ( and Iran ) , and within days we had been purged by both Facebook and Google .
So it seems possible that the juxtaposition of these two occurrences may be more than purely coincidental .
Although our traffic has subsequently reached new heights , the Google ban was especially vexing to me , for reasons that I have noted : For the last ten years , my article The Myth of Hispanic Crime had regularly ranked # 2 among the 180 million search results Google returned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 60 million for “ Hispanic Crime , ” an achievement for which I had become inordinately proud .
But although comparable search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo still rank my piece near the very top , Google has completely “ disappeared ” it .
I think a reasonable measure of a topic ’ s importance is the total number of search results it returns .
Communism and Communists dominated the entire twentieth century and the political party of that name still holds sway in gigantic China .
So a search on “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a vast number but still somewhat below the total for “ Latino Crime.
” Imagine how an academic or journalist might feel if his article analyzing Communism had spent a full decade ranked # 2 across the entire Internet , but Google had then suddenly decided to blacklist it for reasons entirely unrelated to its intrinsic or objective quality .
Still , these unfortunate developments are hardly comparable to those experienced under some other regimes of the twentieth century .
I ’ ve finally gotten around to reading the The Black Book of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the USSR and the numerous other regimes which adopted a similar ideology , and although I ’ m only half way through the 800 pages , the mass-executions and wholesale imprisonments that found throughout make for rather depressing material .
Moreover , there are disturbing indications that our own tottering society is now heading in some extremely negative direction , a scenario in which de-rankings by Google would constitute only the most minor of petty grievances .
Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi has always been an extremely level-headed individual , but yesterday he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ A Nation Falling Apart , ” which included the statement “ There are a lot of indications that the American stratocruiser is about to crash.
” A few days ago , I had made some of these same points when I was interviewed at length by Luis Razo Bravo of the European Institute of Science in Management , who had studied during the 1980s under Richard Herrnstein of Harvard and whose other recent guests had included Charles Murray and the eminent theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss .

Should the phone companies be able to permanently cut off your service if you say something they don’t like?
Early yesterday morning I received a worried note from one of our regular columnists saying our website no longer came up in any Google search results.
Google and Facebook are the top gatekeepers to the global Internet, and in early May they had both purged us, with Facebook blocking our content and Google de-ranking all of our pages.
Google search results had previously placed many of our pieces very high, but now they no longer appeared at all unless one included “unz” in the search string. Thus, only those actually looking for us would ever find our content.
But this latest blow was even more severe, and now neither searches with nor without “unz” ever seemed to return any of our pages. Google had apparently “disappeared” us from the entire Internet.
Despite the earlier Facebook and Google bans, our traffic had easily broken all records in June, with our uniquely alternative perspectives overcoming the setback inflicted by the Internet giants. So apparently the Monopolist of Mountain View had decided to turns its screws a little tighter.
As it happens, I was somewhat mistaken. Later that day, I discovered a similar fate had befallen a very wide range of popular conservative and Republican-leaning websites, including those offering very mainstream and moderate perspectives:
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/techwatch/corinne-weaver/2020/07/21/updated-google-blacklists-newsbusters-conservative-sites
https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/21/google-appears-to-test-its-ability-to-blacklist-conservative-media-ahead-of-election/
FoxNews host Tucker Carlson currently has the highest rated show in cable history, but Google had decided that his websites no longer exist:
http://www.tuckercarlson.com/
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/tucker-carlson-tonight
So apparently our “controversial” content had had little connection with our total disappearance from the Internet. Instead, a Google censor had decided we were some sort of conservative website, to be purged along with all the others.
I felt a little like the secret leader of the biggest Trotskyite network in the 1930s USSR, suddenly arrested in the middle of the night in an NKVD raid and thrown into a dank interrogation cell, where I desperately wondered “Who had betrayed me?!” But then I eventually discovered that 50,000 other people had been rounded up that same night, mostly for complaining that the bread they recently bought had been stale…and I remembered complaining about stale bread to someone the previous week…
As it happens, Google’s sudden total removal of all those websites including our own turned out to be temporary, and the search results were soon returned to what they had been the day before, with our pages still merely de-ranked and almost impossible to find rather than entirely eliminated. But the incident highlighted the absurd political and media power now allowed to a private company and its top executives.
Google’s share of the search engine market is nearly 90%, both in the US and worldwide, and Facebook has almost an equally strong monopoly in social networking. They are the gatekeepers to the Internet, and does it really make sense to allow them to have the power to “disappear” whatever websites or political candidates they don’t like? Should the phone companies be able to permanently cut off your service if you say something they don’t like?
During the Golden Age of television, if one network had controlled 90% of the American audience, it surely would have been treated as a regulated monopoly, and required to behave in an even-handed and fair manner. Shouldn’t Google and Facebook be held to the same standard?
Patterns may or may not be indicate of ultimate causes, but our alternative media website had spent five years providing material of an extremely controversial nature without encountering any difficulties with Internet gatekeepers, while our traffic steadily rose. Then, in late April I published an extremely popular article presenting the strong evidence that our disastrous Covid-19 outbreak was probably the unintentional blowback from an exceptionally reckless American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran), and within days we had been purged by both Facebook and Google. So it seems possible that the juxtaposition of these two occurrences may be more than purely coincidental.
Although our traffic has subsequently reached new heights, the Google ban was especially vexing to me, for reasons that I have noted:
For the last ten years, my article The Myth of Hispanic Crime had regularly ranked #2 among the 180 million search results Google returned for “Latino Crime” and the 60 million for “Hispanic Crime,” an achievement for which I had become inordinately proud. But although comparable search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo still rank my piece near the very top, Google has completely “disappeared” it. I think a reasonable measure of a topic’s importance is the total number of search results it returns. Communism and Communists dominated the entire twentieth century and the political party of that name still holds sway in gigantic China. So a search on “Communism” returns 163 million results, a vast number but still somewhat below the total for “Latino Crime.” Imagine how an academic or journalist might feel if his article analyzing Communism had spent a full decade ranked #2 across the entire Internet, but Google had then suddenly decided to blacklist it for reasons entirely unrelated to its intrinsic or objective quality.
Still, these unfortunate developments are hardly comparable to those experienced under some other regimes of the twentieth century. I’ve finally gotten around to reading the The Black Book of Communism, that authoritative 1997 account of the USSR and the numerous other regimes which adopted a similar ideology, and although I’m only half way through the 800 pages, the mass-executions and wholesale imprisonments that found throughout make for rather depressing material.
Moreover, there are disturbing indications that our own tottering society is now heading in some extremely negative direction, a scenario in which de-rankings by Google would constitute only the most minor of petty grievances. Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi has always been an extremely level-headed individual, but yesterday he published an extremely popular column evocatively entitled “A Nation Falling Apart,” which included the statement “There are a lot of indications that the American stratocruiser is about to crash.”
A few days ago, I had made some of these same points when I was interviewed at length by Luis Razo Bravo of the European Institute of Science in Management, who had studied during the 1980s under Richard Herrnstein of Harvard and whose other recent guests had included Charles Murray and the eminent theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss.


russia-insider--2020-07-23--Monopolies Are Becoming the Norm Even in Niche Parts of the US Economy

Today I ’ m going to write about a bunch of niche industries in which there are rising amounts of market concentration , largely due to financiers on Wall Street executing a strategy called a ‘ roll-up.
’ Roll-ups happen in sectors that , like cheerleading , you wouldn ’ t immediately imagine as dominated by corporations with market power .
I write a lot about big tech and private equity , but when I say monopolies are everywhere in our economy , I truly mean everywhere .
I ’ ll go into weird areas , like the businesses of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and mail sorting software .
First , some house-keeping .
I did a podcast for Team Human titled “ Make America Ours Again.
” Also , my book Goliath is now available in the UK .
Roll-Ups and Add-Ons and Buy-Outs , Oh My About ten to fifteen years ago , I noticed that American life was getting harder in a bunch of subtle ways .
More and more , dealing with problems , like hidden fees on hotel reservations , medical billing issues with my doctor , or problems with gift cards @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and automated phone trees .
Same with filling out human resources forms at work .
Many of my interactions with businesses as either a worker or consumer seemed to be coming straight out of the movie Office Space .
I didn ’ t really understand why until my physical therapist , a wonderful and smart businesswoman , told me about how her industry of independently owned practices was being bought out by a private equity firm .
The service her small practice offered was great , with her therapists focused on dealing with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the private equity firm , she told me , was gradually buying out competitors in and around Maryland and DC , and corporatizing them .
Health insurers made it tough to get reimbursements , so this private equity firm had better bargaining leverage .
Corporatized therapy meant checklists and mistreating patients , ignoring their pain and getting them out the door ( which would likely drive some of them to take opioids ) .
These twin pressures , of rising market power and concentrated finance , seemed a good explanation for degraded service @ @ @ @ @ @ @ What my therapist described in her specific area actually a trend .
Two days ago , FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra issued a comment suggesting the FTC pay more attention to small mergers across the economy , with a specific focus on private equity firms who engage in this kind of practice , which is known as a ‘ roll-up.
’ In a roll-up , usually in markets with lots of competitors and somewhat low barriers to entry , a private equity firm will buy small privately held companies and combine them into one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” in the same line of business to acquire market power .
Chopra noted roll-ups in physicians practices in anesthesiology and emergency medicine , as well as opioid treatment centers and insurance brokerages .
He observed that “ 68 % of private equity buyouts are add-ons from previous acquisitions , ” which is to say that most acquisitions by private equity firms are attempts to expand market power for companies they already own .
A quarter of these acquisitions , in fact , are “ tied to an investment with at least five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of private equity firms making transactions every year , that ’ s a lot of attempts to increase market power .
In part , rolling up an industry is a way to raise prices or acquire bargaining power , as my physical therapy described .
But even without the ability to build sustainable barriers to entry , there is a strong rationale .
Doing a roll-up is designed to take advantage of how capital markets value bigger companies versus small ones , or what is called multiple expansion .
Buying a small family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its cash flow ( or what is known in annoying accounting-speak as earnings before interest , taxes , depreciation , and amortization , abbreviated as EBITDA ) , putting it into a conglomerate that financiers then call a ‘ platform ’ or ‘ market leader ’ , means you can often sell the much bigger company for eight to ten times that cash flow later on .
Is the new bigger corporation more or less profitable ?
It depends on the industry .
But multiple expansion is largely a result of storytelling by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the ten year period where corporate asset values keep increasing .
There is an entire roll-up expert field , with thousands of private equity firms that are looking for industries to roll-up , some of which are successful and some of which are not .
I ’ m going to describe a few of them , in weird industries .
After going through these , you will understand why life , as a consumer , worker , or businessperson , is getting harder .
You will also see some of the strategies @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and how how to stop and reverse it .
The portable toilet market would seem to be somewhat difficult to monopolize .
Renting porta potties is traditionally a working class business , with small regional players owned by families who work in and around construction and event promotion , and then sell to those industries .
It relies on dealing with chemicals and sewage , and also being reasonably good at sales .
There are some economies of scale involving route density , because sending trucks out to plumb and clean boxes does @ @ @ @ @ @ @ per hour .
But scale isn ’ t that important , and it ’ s not a complex industry .
“ At the end of the day , it ’ s a four-foot-square box , ” as one salesman put it .
“ And guess what ?
People take a shit in it !
” The average portable toilet costs $ 400-1000 and then goes out to rent for $ 200+ a day , though there are luxury versions for weddings and higher-end events .
The would-be monopolist in this space is called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by a billionaire named Tom Gores , who controls a Beverly Hills-based private equity firm named Platinum Equity .
( There ’ s another private equity roll-up play in the space called “ Johnny on the Spot.
” ) United Site Services is , as a contact of mine put it , “ financial engineering at its finest.
” a company that has been tossed around by private equity firms several times .
USS has acquired over 25 smaller companies over the past three year , and openly shops for more acquisitions .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ website under “ Our Growing USS Family.
” Would-be monopolists aren ’ t actually any good at the underlying business , but are excellent at financial engineering .
You see this most evidently when a truculent business owner simply refuses to sell , and chooses to compete .
Here ’ s what happened when one “ port-a-potty king ” in New York City , Charlie Howard , got an offer from United Site Services to buy his business , which is named Call-A-Head , but refused .
One of his rivals , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sell out .
“ Within days , according to Charlie , the toilet giant was calling Call-a-Head ’ s clients , offering a 30 percent discount on rentals , ” which , if true , is of course a means of engaging in predatory pricing .
Howard saw United Site Services as “ a lot of college-educated people from Harvard ” and “ bean counters , ” which is what private equity is .
Job review sites seem to confirm Howard ’ s impression .
Job boards for United Site Services are full @ @ @ @ @ @ @ buying out a business for which they worked , and then treating the employees badly , trying to monopolize regional markets , as well as just generally doing a bad job integrating acquisitions .
What is the strategy here from the perspective of Platinum Equity ?
Will United Site Services monopolize regions of portable toilets ?
Maybe , maybe not .
But it show all the fancy nonsense about economic efficiency and capital market fluidity is just that ; our financial managers are spending huge amounts of time and capital working on rolling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so they can flip the business at a higher multiple to some other private equity firm .
Despite all the financial engineering , there are no network effects or economies of scale .
It ’ s just renting boxes people shit in .
Another area , perhaps among the most gruesome and cruel businesses , is the market for providing phone services to prisoners .
These companies charge between $ 10-15 for inmates to receive a single phone call , and then offer a kickback to the jail in return .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an industry , since it largely operates by extracting money from the families of prisoners , who are already among the poorest and most powerless people in America , in order to finance their own imprisonment .
There are three major competitors in this market , Global Tel*Link ( GTL ) , Securus Technologies , and 3Cinteractive Corp .
Both Securus and GTL are owned by private equity .
Securus in fact is owned , once again , by billionaire Tom Gores ’ s Platinum Equity , which is trying to roll up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Detroit Pistons and does a lot for charity ) .
Right after buying Securus , Gores had the corporation try to buy 3Cinteractive , one of its remaining competitors , but regulators blocked the acquisition .
No matter , all three major firms were recently sued for price-fixing , so even if they can ’ t merge , they allegedly do collude .
I suspect there are roll-ups in jail services space , like payment cards and video-conferencing .
Another industry that is undergoing the roll-up strategy are dentist practices , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leveraged buy-out giant KKR through a company called Heartland Dental .
It ’ s a similar story as United Site Services , with regional practices bought up and turned into a corporate chain , though there ’ s a better argument for a monopoly play .
Scale for dentistry enabled better negotiating bulk with insurance companies .
`` Look at what happened to pharmacy and it ’ s going to go that way in dentistry , '' said the CEO of Heartland Dental .
`` We can be where Walgreens is in 20 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ corporatizing dentistry is corrupting it ; “ In 2013 , a U.S. Senate committee found that some company-controlled dental clinics were providing unnecessary procedures to children in order to collect more money from Medicaid.
” The Ultimate Fighting Championship ( UFC ) is the preeminent mixed martial arts league in the United States , owned by private equity giants KKR , Silver Lake Partners , Ari Emanuel ’ s Endeavor , and MSD Capital .
There is a bitter antitrust suit that has been going on for years about how the UFC monopolized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of income .
Mixed martial arts started becoming popular in the late 1990s , with a variety of leagues offering pay packages to stars , somewhat similar to boxing .
As with cheerleading , another private equity fueled roll-up I ’ ve written about , you wouldn ’ t think that mixed martial arts is prone to monopolization ; all you need is a stage and some fighters , right ?
But in 2006 , UFC began a merger wave to take its competitors out of the business .
As it gained power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the top fighters to basically become exclusive to it , denying the other leagues any ability to get access to talent .
It would also intentionally counter-program against rivals , purposely staging fights on the same nights as its rivals so as to force them to lose money , and the UFC would pressure sponsors of fighters for other leagues to drop out .
The strategy worked .
UFC was able to buy out its rivals , purchasing World Extreme Cagefighting ( “ WEC ” ) and World Fighting Alliance , as well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of others .
Eventually in 2011 , it merged to monopoly with the remaining major promoter , “ Strikeforce , ” which was a deal the Obama administration should have , but did not , block .
UFC even forced Mark Cuban ’ s HDNet , which was hosting some fights , to shut down its fight business .
Soon it had most of the major fighters .
In November 2008 , the President of UFC actually celebrated his monopolization publicly on YouTube , posting a video listing the various competitors he had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a mock tombstone listing their names , and saying “ I ’ m the grim reaper , motherf***ers.
” The real cost of the monopolization is on fighters , who get 20 % of the take for any fight , and have few other real options .
These fighters are classified as independent contractors , and have been apparently prohibited from speaking out against safety protocols by the UFC during the pandemic .
In 2017 , private equity firm Thompson Street Capital Partners bought technology firm BCC Software , which provides the kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Such software is helpful for businesses who have to use the post office to get millions of pieces of mail out there .
These are an endless number of niche business to business sectors most of us never see , high-end mailing software is just one of them .
The United States Post Office allows bulk mailers to send mail at lower postage rates so long as they do some of the USPS 's work for them , which is to say match the complex codes that map out how mail gets delivered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 100,000 envelopes that are all alphabetized by the mailer 's last name , you would put the right numbering on these envelopes and bundle them in trays or sacks with similar classifications .
As a mailer , you get better discounts if you 're cutting out more of the USPS 's work , and sorting things so the USPS doesn ’ t have to is a big part of that work .
This kind of sorting is a complex undertaking , and the Post Office ’ s physical mail delivery network changes in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ due to floods , new or closed facilities , and so forth ; so keeping up with the Post Office is necessarily complex .
Though the market for this software is complex , there are basically three top-flight software packages that help bulk mailers do this work , and they are very expensive .
One was created by Satori Software , one by Presort , and one by BCC Software .
First , Satori bought Presort in 2012 , and then BCC Software bought Satori in 2019 .
Stakeholders assumed this last merger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would surely see it as creating an illegal monopoly .
But as usual , enforcers were napping , so all of a sudden , the three top-flight industrial mail sorting software are now owned by one private equity holding company .
From what I understand , the monopoly is quite an unhappy place now , and customers have little to no bargaining power .
What to do ?
None of these roll-ups have to happen .
Government enforcement of merger law would help of course , as would clear rules by the FTC @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In certain markets the government can step in and make the product .
For postal sorting software , the USPS could itself produce the software , and for others , like prison phone services , jails should just buy it from a regular telecom company and give it to prisoners for free .
It would also help if it were much easier to bring and win private antitrust suits , so that we don ’ t have to rely on inept government enforcers .
There ’ s nothing inevitable about any of this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a moment where we the people are still confused about what kind of power we have through politics .
But if we realize that roll-ups are often ( though not always ) just a means of cheating , and that they are happening so often and in so many industries , we can begin to fight back against that vague and accurate sense that everything seems to ineluctably get worse .
The alternative , of doing nothing , is deeply problematic .
If we tilt too far in the direction of concentrating power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and less like a democratic order .
In fact , monopolies are the building bloc of aristocracy , and always have been .
Fortunately , we ’ ve been in this situation before , and have clawed our way out .
In 1796 , Thomas Paine , the voice of the American Revolution , wrote a vicious open letter to George Washington criticizing his administration .
Pain wrote , “ Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement .
The lands obtained by the revolution were lavished @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator ; injustice was acted under the pretense of faith ; and the chief of the army became the patron of the fraud.
” In the ‘ Revolution of 1800 , ’ the Democratic-Republican Party defeated the Federalist Party , in the first peaceful transition of national power via an election in modern history .
In other words , the battle over corporate power has always been with us .
I hope the next administration and next Congress actually starts to actually get into the fight .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ for this issue .
If you notice any weird monopolies or roll-ups , let me know or post them in the comments .
And now a few other , short items .
Amazon Could Be Fined $ 1 Billion , Pays Just $ 134k for Violating Sanctions with Iran and Syria : A few days ago , the Treasury Department ’ s Office of Foreign Assets Control ( OFAC ) fined Amazon $ 134k for violating sanctions with Iran , Syria , and Crimea from 2011-2018 .
Weirdly , OFAC noted that “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the apparent violations was $ 1,038,206,212.
” That is a HUGE difference .
OFAC is one of the more powerful parts of government , and it doesn ’ t mess around , because sanctions are one of the few levers that still work and work quite well .
Sanctions compliance penalties reached a decade-high level last year .
As an example , a cosmetics company did an internal audit last year , realized inputs for one of its products were coming from North Korea , and told OFAC ; it was still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because Amazon would have litigated and lobbied aggressively , it looks like OFAC went easy on the online giant .
It is remarkable how even the most aggressive parts of the U.S. government are afraid of Amazon .
7-Eleven Franchises Become Sharecroppers : Franchise law is fascinating and weird .
There ’ s an interesting story about how 7-Eleven franchises are being screwed by the franchisor with regards to the Paycheck Protection Program loans .
In order to qualify for loan forgiveness , franchises must show they spent a certain percentage on payroll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem is , the 7-Eleven franchisor includes rent payments in an overall payment called the ‘ 7-Eleven Charge , ’ which includes rent , supplies , and whatever other business costs the franchisor wants to be paid for .
And 7-Eleven corporate won ’ t break out what percentage of that goes to rent , so local franchises can ’ t apply for loan forgiveness .
“ 7-Eleven does not allocate which portion of the Charge is attributable to the lease or the other items encompassed by the Charge , ” it told @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of the American small business world , but increasingly it ’ s just another mechanism to turn seemingly independent businesspeople into dependents on a far-away corporate headquarters .
Thanks for reading .
Send me tips , stories I ’ ve missed , or comment by clicking on the title of this newsletter .
And if you liked this issue of BIG , you can sign up here for more issues of BIG , a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce , innovation and democracy .
If you really liked it , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy .
UPDATE : I fixed a few things .
There are some regional economies of scale in porta potties , though they are not extensive .
And private equity firms value portfolio companies based on cash flow ( or earnings before interest , taxes , depreciation , and amortization known as EBITDA ) .

Today I’m going to write about a bunch of niche industries in which there are rising amounts of market concentration, largely due to financiers on Wall Street executing a strategy called a ‘roll-up.’ Roll-ups happen in sectors that, like cheerleading, you wouldn’t immediately imagine as dominated by corporations with market power. I write a lot about big tech and private equity, but when I say monopolies are everywhere in our economy, I truly mean everywhere. I’ll go into weird areas, like the businesses of mixed martial arts, portable toilets, and mail sorting software.
First, some house-keeping. I did a podcast for Team Human titled “Make America Ours Again.” Also, my book Goliath is now available in the UK.
And now…
Roll-Ups and Add-Ons and Buy-Outs, Oh My
About ten to fifteen years ago, I noticed that American life was getting harder in a bunch of subtle ways. More and more, dealing with problems, like hidden fees on hotel reservations, medical billing issues with my doctor, or problems with gift cards, meant working through increasingly annoying bureaucracies and automated phone trees. Same with filling out human resources forms at work. Many of my interactions with businesses as either a worker or consumer seemed to be coming straight out of the movie Office Space.
I didn’t really understand why until my physical therapist, a wonderful and smart businesswoman, told me about how her industry of independently owned practices was being bought out by a private equity firm. The service her small practice offered was great, with her therapists focused on dealing with the patient’s pain. But the private equity firm, she told me, was gradually buying out competitors in and around Maryland and DC, and corporatizing them. Health insurers made it tough to get reimbursements, so this private equity firm had better bargaining leverage. Corporatized therapy meant checklists and mistreating patients, ignoring their pain and getting them out the door (which would likely drive some of them to take opioids). These twin pressures, of rising market power and concentrated finance, seemed a good explanation for degraded service in a small but important industry.
What my therapist described in her specific area actually a trend. Two days ago, FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra issued a comment suggesting the FTC pay more attention to small mergers across the economy, with a specific focus on private equity firms who engage in this kind of practice, which is known as a ‘roll-up.’ In a roll-up, usually in markets with lots of competitors and somewhat low barriers to entry, a private equity firm will buy small privately held companies and combine them into one conglomerate, continuing to buy “add-ons” in the same line of business to acquire market power.
Chopra noted roll-ups in physicians practices in anesthesiology and emergency medicine, as well as opioid treatment centers and insurance brokerages. He observed that “68% of private equity buyouts are add-ons from previous acquisitions,” which is to say that most acquisitions by private equity firms are attempts to expand market power for companies they already own. A quarter of these acquisitions, in fact, are “tied to an investment with at least five add-ons.” Given that there are thousands of private equity firms making transactions every year, that’s a lot of attempts to increase market power.
In part, rolling up an industry is a way to raise prices or acquire bargaining power, as my physical therapy described. But even without the ability to build sustainable barriers to entry, there is a strong rationale. Doing a roll-up is designed to take advantage of how capital markets value bigger companies versus small ones, or what is called multiple expansion. Buying a small family owned business for three to four times its cash flow (or what is known in annoying accounting-speak as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, abbreviated as EBITDA), putting it into a conglomerate that financiers then call a ‘platform’ or ‘market leader’, means you can often sell the much bigger company for eight to ten times that cash flow later on. Is the new bigger corporation more or less profitable? It depends on the industry. But multiple expansion is largely a result of storytelling by financiers to a small club of investors and the ten year period where corporate asset values keep increasing.
There is an entire roll-up expert field, with thousands of private equity firms that are looking for industries to roll-up, some of which are successful and some of which are not. I’m going to describe a few of them, in weird industries. After going through these, you will understand why life, as a consumer, worker, or businessperson, is getting harder. You will also see some of the strategies and legal underpinnings for this trend, and how how to stop and reverse it.
1) Portable Toilets
The portable toilet market would seem to be somewhat difficult to monopolize. Renting porta potties is traditionally a working class business, with small regional players owned by families who work in and around construction and event promotion, and then sell to those industries. It relies on dealing with chemicals and sewage, and also being reasonably good at sales. There are some economies of scale involving route density, because sending trucks out to plumb and clean boxes does allow each truck to service more locations per hour. But scale isn’t that important, and it’s not a complex industry. “At the end of the day, it’s a four-foot-square box,” as one salesman put it. “And guess what? People take a shit in it!”
The average portable toilet costs $400-1000 and then goes out to rent for $200+ a day, though there are luxury versions for weddings and higher-end events. The would-be monopolist in this space is called United Site Services, which is owned by a billionaire named Tom Gores, who controls a Beverly Hills-based private equity firm named Platinum Equity. (There’s another private equity roll-up play in the space called “Johnny on the Spot.”) United Site Services is, as a contact of mine put it, “financial engineering at its finest.” a company that has been tossed around by private equity firms several times. USS has acquired over 25 smaller companies over the past three year, and openly shops for more acquisitions. They even list their acquisitions on their website under “Our Growing USS Family.”
Would-be monopolists aren’t actually any good at the underlying business, but are excellent at financial engineering. You see this most evidently when a truculent business owner simply refuses to sell, and chooses to compete. Here’s what happened when one “port-a-potty king” in New York City, Charlie Howard, got an offer from United Site Services to buy his business, which is named Call-A-Head, but refused. One of his rivals, who ran a business Mr. John, did sell out. “Within days, according to Charlie, the toilet giant was calling Call-a-Head’s clients, offering a 30 percent discount on rentals,” which, if true, is of course a means of engaging in predatory pricing. Howard saw United Site Services as “a lot of college-educated people from Harvard” and “bean counters,” which is what private equity is.
Job review sites seem to confirm Howard’s impression. Job boards for United Site Services are full of angry ex-workers accusing the company of buying out a business for which they worked, and then treating the employees badly, trying to monopolize regional markets, as well as just generally doing a bad job integrating acquisitions.
What is the strategy here from the perspective of Platinum Equity? Will United Site Services monopolize regions of portable toilets? Maybe, maybe not. But it show all the fancy nonsense about economic efficiency and capital market fluidity is just that; our financial managers are spending huge amounts of time and capital working on rolling up a business based on renting toilets so they can flip the business at a higher multiple to some other private equity firm. Despite all the financial engineering, there are no network effects or economies of scale. It’s just renting boxes people shit in.
2. Prison Phone Services
Another area, perhaps among the most gruesome and cruel businesses, is the market for providing phone services to prisoners. These companies charge between $10-15 for inmates to receive a single phone call, and then offer a kickback to the jail in return. It’s almost hard to believe this is an industry, since it largely operates by extracting money from the families of prisoners, who are already among the poorest and most powerless people in America, in order to finance their own imprisonment.
There are three major competitors in this market, Global Tel*Link (GTL), Securus Technologies, and 3Cinteractive Corp. Both Securus and GTL are owned by private equity. Securus in fact is owned, once again, by billionaire Tom Gores’s Platinum Equity, which is trying to roll up the port-a-potty business (he also owns the Detroit Pistons and does a lot for charity). Right after buying Securus, Gores had the corporation try to buy 3Cinteractive, one of its remaining competitors, but regulators blocked the acquisition. No matter, all three major firms were recently sued for price-fixing, so even if they can’t merge, they allegedly do collude. I suspect there are roll-ups in jail services space, like payment cards and video-conferencing.
3. Dentistry
Another industry that is undergoing the roll-up strategy are dentist practices, and this time it’s led by leveraged buy-out giant KKR through a company called Heartland Dental. It’s a similar story as United Site Services, with regional practices bought up and turned into a corporate chain, though there’s a better argument for a monopoly play. Scale for dentistry enabled better negotiating bulk with insurance companies. "Look at what happened to pharmacy and it’s going to go that way in dentistry," said the CEO of Heartland Dental. "We can be where Walgreens is in 20 years.” Of course, part of corporatizing dentistry is corrupting it; “In 2013, a U.S. Senate committee found that some company-controlled dental clinics were providing unnecessary procedures to children in order to collect more money from Medicaid.”
4. Mixed Martial Arts
The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is the preeminent mixed martial arts league in the United States, owned by private equity giants KKR, Silver Lake Partners, Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor, and MSD Capital.
There is a bitter antitrust suit that has been going on for years about how the UFC monopolized the business, and thus deprived fighters of income. Mixed martial arts started becoming popular in the late 1990s, with a variety of leagues offering pay packages to stars, somewhat similar to boxing. As with cheerleading, another private equity fueled roll-up I’ve written about, you wouldn’t think that mixed martial arts is prone to monopolization; all you need is a stage and some fighters, right?
But in 2006, UFC began a merger wave to take its competitors out of the business. As it gained power, the UFC allegedly forced all of the top fighters to basically become exclusive to it, denying the other leagues any ability to get access to talent. It would also intentionally counter-program against rivals, purposely staging fights on the same nights as its rivals so as to force them to lose money, and the UFC would pressure sponsors of fighters for other leagues to drop out.
The strategy worked. UFC was able to buy out its rivals, purchasing World Extreme Cagefighting (“WEC”) and World Fighting Alliance, as well as rival promoter Pride and a host of others. Eventually in 2011, it merged to monopoly with the remaining major promoter, “Strikeforce,” which was a deal the Obama administration should have, but did not, block. UFC even forced Mark Cuban’s HDNet, which was hosting some fights, to shut down its fight business. Soon it had most of the major fighters.
In November 2008, the President of UFC actually celebrated his monopolization publicly on YouTube, posting a video listing the various competitors he had put out of business, holding up a mock tombstone listing their names, and saying “I’m the grim reaper, motherf***ers.”
The real cost of the monopolization is on fighters, who get 20% of the take for any fight, and have few other real options. These fighters are classified as independent contractors, and have been apparently prohibited from speaking out against safety protocols by the UFC during the pandemic.
5. Mail Sorting Software
In 2017, private equity firm Thompson Street Capital Partners bought technology firm BCC Software, which provides the kind of complex software for industrial-strength mailing. Such software is helpful for businesses who have to use the post office to get millions of pieces of mail out there. These are an endless number of niche business to business sectors most of us never see, high-end mailing software is just one of them.
The United States Post Office allows bulk mailers to send mail at lower postage rates so long as they do some of the USPS's work for them, which is to say match the complex codes that map out how mail gets delivered. So rather than just dumping off 100,000 envelopes that are all alphabetized by the mailer's last name, you would put the right numbering on these envelopes and bundle them in trays or sacks with similar classifications. As a mailer, you get better discounts if you're cutting out more of the USPS's work, and sorting things so the USPS doesn’t have to is a big part of that work.
This kind of sorting is a complex undertaking, and the Post Office’s physical mail delivery network changes in tiny ways every week. Routes change due to floods, new or closed facilities, and so forth; so keeping up with the Post Office is necessarily complex. Though the market for this software is complex, there are basically three top-flight software packages that help bulk mailers do this work, and they are very expensive. One was created by Satori Software, one by Presort, and one by BCC Software. First, Satori bought Presort in 2012, and then BCC Software bought Satori in 2019. Stakeholders assumed this last merger would be blocked, as antitrust enforcers would surely see it as creating an illegal monopoly. But as usual, enforcers were napping, so all of a sudden, the three top-flight industrial mail sorting software are now owned by one private equity holding company.
From what I understand, the monopoly is quite an unhappy place now, and customers have little to no bargaining power.
What to do?
None of these roll-ups have to happen. Government enforcement of merger law would help of course, as would clear rules by the FTC against a host of anti-competitive practices. In certain markets the government can step in and make the product. For postal sorting software, the USPS could itself produce the software, and for others, like prison phone services, jails should just buy it from a regular telecom company and give it to prisoners for free. It would also help if it were much easier to bring and win private antitrust suits, so that we don’t have to rely on inept government enforcers.
There’s nothing inevitable about any of this, we just happen to live in a moment where we the people are still confused about what kind of power we have through politics. But if we realize that roll-ups are often (though not always) just a means of cheating, and that they are happening so often and in so many industries, we can begin to fight back against that vague and accurate sense that everything seems to ineluctably get worse.
The alternative, of doing nothing, is deeply problematic. If we tilt too far in the direction of concentrating power, our society begins to look less and less like a democratic order. In fact, monopolies are the building bloc of aristocracy, and always have been.
Fortunately, we’ve been in this situation before, and have clawed our way out. In 1796, Thomas Paine, the voice of the American Revolution, wrote a vicious open letter to George Washington criticizing his administration. Pain wrote, “Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement. The lands obtained by the revolution were lavished upon partizans; the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator; injustice was acted under the pretense of faith; and the chief of the army became the patron of the fraud.” In the ‘Revolution of 1800,’ the Democratic-Republican Party defeated the Federalist Party, in the first peaceful transition of national power via an election in modern history.
In other words, the battle over corporate power has always been with us. I hope the next administration and next Congress actually starts to actually get into the fight.
So that’s the main essay for this issue. If you notice any weird monopolies or roll-ups, let me know or post them in the comments. And now a few other, short items.
Amazon Could Be Fined $1 Billion, Pays Just $134k for Violating Sanctions with Iran and Syria: A few days ago, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) fined Amazon $134k for violating sanctions with Iran, Syria, and Crimea from 2011-2018. Weirdly, OFAC noted that “the statutory maximum civil monetary penalty amount for the apparent violations was $1,038,206,212.” That is a HUGE difference.
OFAC is one of the more powerful parts of government, and it doesn’t mess around, because sanctions are one of the few levers that still work and work quite well. Sanctions compliance penalties reached a decade-high level last year. As an example, a cosmetics company did an internal audit last year, realized inputs for one of its products were coming from North Korea, and told OFAC; it was still fined $1 million. Yet, because Amazon would have litigated and lobbied aggressively, it looks like OFAC went easy on the online giant. It is remarkable how even the most aggressive parts of the U.S. government are afraid of Amazon.
7-Eleven Franchises Become Sharecroppers: Franchise law is fascinating and weird. There’s an interesting story about how 7-Eleven franchises are being screwed by the franchisor with regards to the Paycheck Protection Program loans. In order to qualify for loan forgiveness, franchises must show they spent a certain percentage on payroll, rent, or utilities. The problem is, the 7-Eleven franchisor includes rent payments in an overall payment called the ‘7-Eleven Charge,’ which includes rent, supplies, and whatever other business costs the franchisor wants to be paid for. And 7-Eleven corporate won’t break out what percentage of that goes to rent, so local franchises can’t apply for loan forgiveness. “7-Eleven does not allocate which portion of the Charge is attributable to the lease or the other items encompassed by the Charge,” it told its franchises. Franchising is a huge part of the American small business world, but increasingly it’s just another mechanism to turn seemingly independent businesspeople into dependents on a far-away corporate headquarters.
And that’s the issue.
Thanks for reading. Send me tips, stories I’ve missed, or comment by clicking on the title of this newsletter. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
UPDATE: I fixed a few things. There are some regional economies of scale in porta potties, though they are not extensive. And private equity firms value portfolio companies based on cash flow (or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization known as EBITDA).


russia-insider--2020-07-23--New Kosovo Indictment Is A Reminder Of Bill Clinton's Serbian War Atrocities

President Bill Clinton ’ s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder , torture , kidnapping , and other crimes against humanity .
In 1999 , the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to fifteen hundred civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias .
That war , like most of the pretenses of US foreign policy , was always a sham .
Kosovo president Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It charged Thaci and nine other men with “ war crimes , including murder , enforced disappearance of persons , persecution , and torture.
” Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being “ criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders ” and the indictment involved “ hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian , Serb , Roma , and other ethnicities and include political opponents.
” Hashim Thaci ’ s tawdry career illustrates how antiterrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers .
Prior to becoming Kosovo ’ s president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Kosovo Liberation Army ( KLA ) , fighting to force Serbs out of Kosovo .
In 1999 , the Clinton administration designated the KLA as “ freedom fighters ” despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid .
The previous year , the State Department condemned “ terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.
” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden .
But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify US killing .
Senator Joe Lieberman ( D-CN ) whooped that the United States and the KLA “ stand for the same values and principles .
Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.
” And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler , every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign .
Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo .
But to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA ’ s atrocities disappear .
British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign “ was not a purely military operation : NATO also destroyed what it called ‘ dual-use ’ targets , such as factories , city bridges , and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade , in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender.
” NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces , hospitals , and other civilian areas .
Cluster bombs are antipersonnel devices designed to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dropped more than thirteen hundred cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo , and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute .
Bomb experts estimated that more than ten thousand unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire .
In the final days of the bombing campaign , the Washington Post reported that “ some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones , as Clinton ’ s ‘ finest hour.
’ ” The Post also reported @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO ’ s intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton ’ s own conscience….The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose , and he feels ‘ almost cheated ’ that ‘ when it was his turn he didn ’ t have the chance to be part of a moral cause.
’ ” By Clinton ’ s standard , slaughtering Serbs was “ close enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ moral cause.
” Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign , Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine : “ Whether within or beyond the borders of a country , if the world community has the power to stop it , we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.
” In reality , the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate .
In reality , the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ word “ genocide ” to get a license to kill .
After the bombing ended , Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “ with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.
” In the subsequent months and years , American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing , slaughtering Serb civilians , bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims .
Almost a quarter million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them .
By 2003 , almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian .
But Thaci remained useful for US policymakers .
Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo , Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the “ George Washington of Kosovo.
” A few months later , a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the report alleged that Thaci ’ s inner circle “ took captives across the border into Albania after the war , where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys , which were sold on the black market.
” The report stated that when “ transplant surgeons ” were “ ready to operate , the [ Serbian ] captives were brought out of the ‘ safe house ’ individually , summarily executed by a KLA gunman , and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.
” Despite @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011 , 2012 , and 2013 , where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton .
Maybe that was a perk from the $ 50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci ’ s regime signed with the Podesta Group , comanaged by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta , as the Daily Caller reported .
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo , where a statue of him was erected in the capital , Pristina .
The Guardian newspaper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a left hand raised , a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses .
In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia , 24 March 1999.
” It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women , children , and others killed in the US bombing campaign .
In 2019 , Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former secretary of state , Madeline Albright , visited Pristina , where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” as they posed for photos with Thaci .
Clinton declared , “ I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing ( by Serbian forces ) and for freedom.
” Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom “ for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region.
” Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era .
Actually , the only honorific that Albright deserves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s war on Serbia was a Pandora ’ s box from which the world still suffers .
Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph , it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq , for the Obama administration to bomb Libya , and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria .
All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries .
Bill Clinton ’ s 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into attacking Iraq .
The fact that Clinton and other top US government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder , torture , and organ trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America ’ s political elite .
Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land ?

President Bill Clinton’s favorite freedom fighter just got indicted for mass murder, torture, kidnapping, and other crimes against humanity. In 1999, the Clinton administration launched a 78-day bombing campaign that killed up to fifteen hundred civilians in Serbia and Kosovo in what the American media proudly portrayed as a crusade against ethnic bias. That war, like most of the pretenses of US foreign policy, was always a sham.
Kosovo president Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity by an international tribunal in The Hague, in the Netherlands. It charged Thaci and nine other men with “war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.” Thaci and the other charged suspects were accused of being “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders” and the indictment involved “hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents.”
Hashim Thaci’s tawdry career illustrates how antiterrorism is a flag of convenience for Washington policymakers. Prior to becoming Kosovo’s president, Thaci was the head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting to force Serbs out of Kosovo. In 1999, the Clinton administration designated the KLA as “freedom fighters” despite their horrific past and gave them massive aid. The previous year, the State Department condemned “terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden.
But arming the KLA and bombing Serbia helped Clinton portray himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many shameless members of Congress anxious to sanctify US killing. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CN) whooped that the United States and the KLA “stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” And since Clinton administration officials publicly compared Serb leader Slobodan Milošević to Hitler, every decent person was obliged to applaud the bombing campaign.
Both the Serbs and ethnic Albanians committed atrocities in the bitter strife in Kosovo. But to sanctify its bombing campaign, the Clinton administration waved a magic wand and made the KLA’s atrocities disappear. British professor Philip Hammond noted that the 78-day bombing campaign “was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an attempt to terrorize the country into surrender.”
NATO repeatedly dropped cluster bombs into marketplaces, hospitals, and other civilian areas. Cluster bombs are antipersonnel devices designed to be scattered across enemy troop formations. NATO dropped more than thirteen hundred cluster bombs on Serbia and Kosovo, and each bomb contained 208 separate bomblets that floated to earth by parachute. Bomb experts estimated that more than ten thousand unexploded bomblets were scattered around the landscape when the bombing ended and maimed children long after the ceasefire.
In the final days of the bombing campaign, the Washington Post reported that “some presidential aides and friends are describing Kosovo in Churchillian tones, as Clinton’s ‘finest hour.’” The Post also reported that according to one Clinton friend “what Clinton believes were the unambiguously moral motives for NATO’s intervention represented a chance to soothe regrets harbored in Clinton’s own conscience….The friend said Clinton has at times lamented that the generation before him was able to serve in a war with a plainly noble purpose, and he feels ‘almost cheated’ that ‘when it was his turn he didn’t have the chance to be part of a moral cause.’” By Clinton’s standard, slaughtering Serbs was “close enough for government work” to a “moral cause.”
Shortly after the end of the 1999 bombing campaign, Clinton enunciated what his aides labeled the Clinton doctrine: “Whether within or beyond the borders of a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” In reality, the Clinton doctrine was that presidents are entitled to commence bombing foreign lands based on any brazen lie that the American media will regurgitate. In reality, the lesson from bombing Serbia is that American politicians merely need to publicly recite the word “genocide” to get a license to kill.
After the bombing ended, Clinton assured the Serbian people that the United States and NATO agreed to be peacekeepers only “with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.” In the subsequent months and years, American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serb civilians, bombing Serbian churches and oppressing any non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Mr. Clinton promised to protect them. By 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in Kosovo in 1999 had fled and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic Albanian.
But Thaci remained useful for US policymakers. Even though he was widely condemned for oppression and corruption after taking power in Kosovo, Vice President Joe Biden hailed Thaci in 2010 as the “George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe report accused Thaci and KLA operatives of human organ trafficking. The Guardian noted that the report alleged that Thaci’s inner circle “took captives across the border into Albania after the war, where a number of Serbs are said to have been murdered for their kidneys, which were sold on the black market.” The report stated that when “transplant surgeons” were “ready to operate, the [Serbian] captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.”
Despite the organ trafficking charge, Thaci was a star attendee at the annual Global Initiative conference by the Clinton Foundation in 2011, 2012, and 2013, where he posed for photos with Bill Clinton. Maybe that was a perk from the $50,000 a month lobbying contract that Thaci’s regime signed with the Podesta Group, comanaged by future Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as the Daily Caller reported.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, where a statue of him was erected in the capital, Pristina. The Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton “with a left hand raised, a typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999.” It would have been a more accurate representation to depict Clinton standing on a pile of corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the US bombing campaign.
In 2019, Bill Clinton and his fanatically pro-bombing former secretary of state, Madeline Albright, visited Pristina, where they were “treated like rock stars” as they posed for photos with Thaci. Clinton declared, “I love this country and it will always be one of the greatest honors of my life to have stood with you against ethnic cleansing (by Serbian forces) and for freedom.” Thaci awarded Clinton and Albright medals of freedom “for the liberty he brought to us and the peace to entire region.” Albright has reinvented herself as a visionary warning against fascism in the Trump era. Actually, the only honorific that Albright deserves is “butcher of Belgrade.”
Clinton’s war on Serbia was a Pandora’s box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and most of the media portrayed the war against Serbia as a moral triumph, it was easier for the Bush administration to justify attacking Iraq, for the Obama administration to bomb Libya, and for the Trump administration to repeatedly bomb Syria. All of those interventions sowed chaos that continues cursing the purported beneficiaries.
Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing of Serbia was as big a fraud as George W. Bush’s conning this nation into attacking Iraq. The fact that Clinton and other top US government officials continued to glorify Hashim Thaci despite accusations of mass murder, torture, and organ trafficking is another reminder of the venality of much of America’s political elite. Will Americans again be gullible the next time that Washington policymakers and their media allies concoct bullshit pretexts to blow the hell out of some hapless foreign land?


russia-insider--2020-07-23--Top Russian Scientist Explains Why 2nd COVID Wave Impossible in Moscow, Herd Immunity Approaching

Pavel Volchkov is an exceptional voice among the Russian scientists now dealing with the corona virus ( Covid-19 ) pandemic .
The current Covid-19 policy administrators in Moscow are of the same academic generation but they have trained as doctors ; Volchkov is a geneticist .
They have spent their formative careers inside Russian institutions ; Volchkov spent more than ten years in the US , at the University of Chicago then at Harvard .
Volchkov is the head of the Genome Engineering Lab ( GEL ) in Moscow ; it is one of more than fifty laboratories which are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Technology ( MIPT ) .
The institute is the third-ranked science teaching university in Russia .
Volchkov specializes in the technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 .
The first acronym stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats ; the second for CRISPR-associated complex protein 9 ; for meaning and diagrams , click to open .
The purpose of the technology is to engineer or edit genome sequences in living organisms , in the short run for defence against deadly viruses , and in the longer term to remodel medical diagnostics and the treatment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ read this .
In this interview , published on July 6 in Izvestia , Volchkov presents the evidence for his conclusion that a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is no longer possible in Moscow because , he argues , immunity has already reached between 40 % and 60 % of the population , and continues to grow as rapidly as testing reaches the limit of the city ’ s population .
The Swedish research paper on T-cell immunity to which Volchkov refers can be read separately here .
According to the authors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and phenotypic landscape of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in a large cohort of unexposed individuals as well as exposed family members and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19.
” By “ large cohort ” , the Swedes meant a sample of 208 .
Within this sample , 31 had mild symptoms of Covid-19 infection but were not hospitalised ; another group of 30 were family members exposed to infected individuals but not testing positive or showing symptoms ; 80 were selected from voluntary blood donors without Covid-19 testing ; 40 had been hospitalised @ @ @ @ @ @ @ care .
– Pavel Yuryevich , from your point of view , how many people in Moscow already have immunity to SARS-CoV-2 ?
Recently , an article was published by Swedish scientists who conducted a study of T-cell immunity , the results which I personally have long been waiting for .
They analyzed a large number of biological samples by conducting an expensive ELISPOT analysis ( Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSpot – T-cell detection method ) .
It turned out that even those who did not have IgG antibodies had T-cell immunity .
And there are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the population than those with antibodies .
– What does this mean ?
If in Moscow 20 % of people are officially recorded with high titers of IgG antibodies , then you can safely add another 20 % -40 % to this figure .
It turns out that about half of Moscow residents are immune to coronavirus .
They will not get sick anymore .
– Recently , articles appeared that showed that antibodies are lost … And that ’ s fine .
They ought to be lost .
This always happens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , IgM , IgA antibodies .
Their volume in the blood begins to fall six months to a year after meeting with the infection .
There are so few of them that their number is impossible to detect by any test .
What is the purpose of antibodies ?
Here the virus flew into the respiratory tract , infected a group of cells , created a small local focus ( with a mild course of the disease ) .
The immune system recognized these cells and localized them – it is like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ China .
It turns out that a large number of antibodies do not seem to exist , but the immunity has formed and worked .
However , it is concentrated in T- and B-memory cells .
When the infection again occurs to a person , the immune system recognizes it , and the cells will begin to produce antibodies .
– Does it make sense then to test for IgG antibodies ?
There is .
This test is cheap and gives us a cut-off .
This cut-off now is 20 % .
So @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to three times .
It ’ s hard to say the exact number ; for this you need to conduct a large-scale study using expensive ELISPOT analysis , as the Swedes did .
– Is it possible to say that the “ herd ” immunity that everyone has been talking about for so long has already taken shape in Moscow ?
For the multi-million city , today ’ s figures in the region of 700 new infected cases per day indicate that [ immunity ] has formed .
If we really had only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , then when we opened restaurants and shops , we would expect a much larger number of infected people .
– But after all , at this figure ( 700-plus people per day ) you can remain for a long time .
Or not ?
What is your prediction ?
I think this figure will now begin to decline and will reach zero at the end of August .
It is clear that for quite a long time in the capital there will be cases imported from regions that began to “ pick @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the day .
– So there won ’ t be a second wave ?
For Moscow , it is already impossible .
Now people who have formed natural immunity in the capital are 40 % -60 % .
If the dynamic continues , their number will increase by the end of August to 80 % –90 % .
– And in other cities of Russia , is the second wave a possibility ?
Only in those which are quite isolated , and where there has been an extremely low level of infection .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If you have already burned the grass , then the burned-out areas can not catch fire again .
Do you know how firefighters fight fire ?
They take and burn the front of the strip to stop the fire .
This strip is our immunity buffer .
– But what about the fact that the virus mutates and the body may simply not recognize it ?
In any case , it does not mutate very quickly .
Even the seasonal flu virus needs several years to re-infect you .
And then in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — and the flu has eight of them — will be re-sequenced , that is , replaced by parts from another influenza virus .
Coronavirus is single-segment – it can not change in that way .
– But can it recombine ?
Maybe .
But this event is much rarer .
It must take at least a couple of years for it to be able to return and cause you some kind of pathology .
And still , it won ’ t be comparable to the first time .
Somehow at least the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it will work .
And a secondary immune response will develop .

Pavel Volchkov is an exceptional voice among the Russian scientists now dealing with the corona virus (Covid-19) pandemic.
The current Covid-19 policy administrators in Moscow are of the same academic generation but they have trained as doctors; Volchkov is a geneticist. They have spent their formative careers inside Russian institutions; Volchkov spent more than ten years in the US, at the University of Chicago then at Harvard.
The Moscow metro system is very crowded. The fact that people are using it and COVID is not surging means something.
Volchkov is the head of the Genome Engineering Lab (GEL) in Moscow; it is one of more than fifty laboratories which are part of the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology (MIPT). The institute is the third-ranked science teaching university in Russia.
Volchkov specializes in the technology known as CRISPR-Cas9. The first acronym stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats; the second for CRISPR-associated complex protein 9; for meaning and diagrams, click to open. The purpose of the technology is to engineer or edit genome sequences in living organisms, in the short run for defence against deadly viruses, and in the longer term to remodel medical diagnostics and the treatment of serious diseases; for background, read this.
In this interview, published on July 6 in Izvestia, Volchkov presents the evidence for his conclusion that a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is no longer possible in Moscow because, he argues, immunity has already reached between 40% and 60% of the population, and continues to grow as rapidly as testing reaches the limit of the city’s population.
The Swedish research paper on T-cell immunity to which Volchkov refers can be read separately here. According to the authors, “we systematically mapped the functional and phenotypic landscape of SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses in a large cohort of unexposed individuals as well as exposed family members and individuals with acute or convalescent COVID-19.” By “large cohort”, the Swedes meant a sample of 208. Within this sample, 31 had mild symptoms of Covid-19 infection but were not hospitalised; another group of 30 were family members exposed to infected individuals but not testing positive or showing symptoms; 80 were selected from voluntary blood donors without Covid-19 testing; 40 had been hospitalised for low-level treatment; 27 required intensive care.
– Pavel Yuryevich, from your point of view, how many people in Moscow already have immunity to SARS-CoV-2?
Recently, an article was published by Swedish scientists who conducted a study of T-cell immunity, the results which I personally have long been waiting for. They analyzed a large number of biological samples by conducting an expensive ELISPOT analysis (Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSpot – T-cell detection method). It turned out that even those who did not have IgG antibodies had T-cell immunity. And there are two to three times more such people in the population than those with antibodies.
– What does this mean?
If in Moscow 20% of people are officially recorded with high titers of IgG antibodies, then you can safely add another 20%-40% to this figure. It turns out that about half of Moscow residents are immune to coronavirus. They will not get sick anymore.
– Recently, articles appeared that showed that antibodies are lost …
And that’s fine. They ought to be lost. This always happens. There is a half-life of IgG, IgM, IgA antibodies. Their volume in the blood begins to fall six months to a year after meeting with the infection. There are so few of them that their number is impossible to detect by any test. What is the purpose of antibodies? Here the virus flew into the respiratory tract, infected a group of cells, created a small local focus (with a mild course of the disease). The immune system recognized these cells and localized them – it is like the city of Wuhan that was closed in China. It turns out that a large number of antibodies do not seem to exist, but the immunity has formed and worked. However, it is concentrated in T- and B-memory cells. When the infection again occurs to a person, the immune system recognizes it, and the cells will begin to produce antibodies.
– Does it make sense then to test for IgG antibodies?
There is. This test is cheap and gives us a cut-off. This cut-off now is 20%. So we can multiply this amount by two to three times. It’s hard to say the exact number; for this you need to conduct a large-scale study using expensive ELISPOT analysis, as the Swedes did.
– Is it possible to say that the “herd” immunity that everyone has been talking about for so long has already taken shape in Moscow?
For the multi-million city, today’s figures in the region of 700 new infected cases per day indicate that [immunity] has formed.
If we really had only 20% of the residents with immunity, then when we opened restaurants and shops, we would expect a much larger number of infected people.
– But after all, at this figure (700-plus people per day) you can remain for a long time. Or not? What is your prediction?
I think this figure will now begin to decline and will reach zero at the end of August. It is clear that for quite a long time in the capital there will be cases imported from regions that began to “pick up” the coronavirus relatively late in the day.
– So there won’t be a second wave?
For Moscow, it is already impossible. Now people who have formed natural immunity in the capital are 40%-60%. If the dynamic continues, their number will increase by the end of August to 80%–90%.
– And in other cities of Russia, is the second wave a possibility?
Only in those which are quite isolated, and where there has been an extremely low level of infection. In the big cities, definitely not. If you have already burned the grass, then the burned-out areas cannot catch fire again. Do you know how firefighters fight fire? They take and burn the front of the strip to stop the fire. This strip is our immunity buffer.
– But what about the fact that the virus mutates and the body may simply not recognize it?
In any case, it does not mutate very quickly. Even the seasonal flu virus needs several years to re-infect you. And then in the event that part of its segments — and the flu has eight of them — will be re-sequenced, that is, replaced by parts from another influenza virus. Coronavirus is single-segment – it cannot change in that way.
– But can it recombine?
Maybe. But this event is much rarer. It must take at least a couple of years for it to be able to return and cause you some kind of pathology. And still, it won’t be comparable to the first time. Somehow at least the immune system recognizes it, which means it will work. And a secondary immune response will develop.


russia-insider--2020-07-24--Russian Space Chief Questions NASA Plans, Praises Partnership With China

`` Today relations between Russia and China are very good . ''
The chief of Russia 's space corporation , Dmitry Rogozin , offered less-than-flattering comments about NASA 's Moon program in a recent interview with a Russian tabloid newspaper , Komsomolskaya Pravda .
Asked about Russia 's interest in sending humans to the Moon and possibly partnering with NASA , Rogozin dismissed the Artemis program .
He responded : `` Frankly speaking , we are not interested in participating in such a project . ''
The Russian space chief has publicly complained for some time that NASA has chosen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He has also compared US efforts to build a sustainable program of exploration on the surface of the Moon to American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq .
`` It 's more of a political project for the US now , '' Rogozin said of Artemis .
`` With the lunar project , we are seeing our US partners move away from the principles of cooperation and mutual support that have developed with cooperation on the ISS .
They see their program not as international but as similar to NATO . ''
NASA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than two decades on the International Space Program .
Although NASA is clearly leading development of the Artemis lunar exploration program , it has begun to discuss deep partnerships with Japan , Canada , and several European countries to extend the space station partnership .
Russia 's space program does not currently have any concrete role in NASA 's plans to explore space beyond low Earth orbit .
NASA is talking to Russia about building an airlock for the Lunar Gateway , a small space station in orbit around the Moon , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from settled .
In the interview , Rogozin talked much more effusively about collaborating with China on future exploration projects .
`` We respect their results , '' Rogozin said , adding that the Asian nation `` is definitely our partner '' moving forward .
`` Today , relations between Russia and China are very good , '' he said .
`` Both on the level of our presidents and on the level of political leadership in general . ''
Rogozin said China has shared its exploration plans with Russia .
However , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ detail publicly .
The country is expected to develop the super-heavy lift Long March 9 rocket later this decade , a booster that would provide the lift capacity needed to send Chinese taikonauts to the Moon in the 2030s .
Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica , covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA .
A certified meteorologist , Eric lives in Houston .

"Today relations between Russia and China are very good."
China's Vice Premier Wang Yang (standing) and Russia's then-Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin at Russian-Chinese talks at Constantine Palace in 2016.
The chief of Russia's space corporation, Dmitry Rogozin, offered less-than-flattering comments about NASA's Moon program in a recent interview with a Russian tabloid newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Asked about Russia's interest in sending humans to the Moon and possibly partnering with NASA, Rogozin dismissed the Artemis program. He responded: "Frankly speaking, we are not interested in participating in such a project."
The Russian space chief has publicly complained for some time that NASA has chosen a 2024 landing date for political reasons. He has also compared US efforts to build a sustainable program of exploration on the surface of the Moon to American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
"It's more of a political project for the US now," Rogozin said of Artemis. "With the lunar project, we are seeing our US partners move away from the principles of cooperation and mutual support that have developed with cooperation on the ISS. They see their program not as international but as similar to NATO."
“Definitely our partner”
NASA has successfully worked with Russia for more than two decades on the International Space Program. Although NASA is clearly leading development of the Artemis lunar exploration program, it has begun to discuss deep partnerships with Japan, Canada, and several European countries to extend the space station partnership.
Russia's space program does not currently have any concrete role in NASA's plans to explore space beyond low Earth orbit. NASA is talking to Russia about building an airlock for the Lunar Gateway, a small space station in orbit around the Moon, but US officials suggest those talks are far from settled.
In the interview, Rogozin talked much more effusively about collaborating with China on future exploration projects. "We respect their results," Rogozin said, adding that the Asian nation "is definitely our partner" moving forward.
"Today, relations between Russia and China are very good," he said. "Both on the level of our presidents and on the level of political leadership in general."
Rogozin said China has shared its exploration plans with Russia. However, China has not shared those plans in detail publicly. The country is expected to develop the super-heavy lift Long March 9 rocket later this decade, a booster that would provide the lift capacity needed to send Chinese taikonauts to the Moon in the 2030s.
ERIC BERGER
Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.


russia-insider--2020-07-24--With Constitutional Changes, Russian Lawmakers to Legally Ban Marriage & Adoption by Sodomites

Before the Constitutional changes , the rules were only regulations which could be changed by bureaucrats .
Now they will become law , and backed by the clear language in the Constitution , permanent .
Seven Russian senators have introduced a package of bills that would prohibit same-sex marriage , ban gay couples from adopting children , and prevent people from getting married after gender reassignment .
Led by Senator Elena Mizulina , the head of the Senate 's committee on updating the country 's ‘ Family Code ’ , the proposals follow in the footsteps of Russia 's constitutional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ union between a man and a woman .
In March , the country 's Constitutional Court deemed the changes to be lawful , but insisted that it does not remove the state 's obligation to respect differences , including in regards to sexual orientation .
“ The bill stops the practice of marriage between two people of the same sex , as well as those who have had a sex-change , and subsequently prevents these couples from adopting children , ” Senator Mizulina said .
The proposed bill would amend Article 14 of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which contains the reasons why someone is not allowed to marry .
As things currently stand , this article does not list two people of the same gender as an impediment to marriage .
Although the country does not register same-sex marriages , there have been at least two occasions when those married abroad have been recognized as a couple in Russia .
Earlier this year , President Vladimir Putin announced that as long as he was the leader of Russia there would be no “ parent number 1 ” and “ parent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ father ” and “ mother .
”

Before the Constitutional changes, the rules were only regulations which could be changed by bureaucrats. Now they will become law, and backed by the clear language in the Constitution, permanent.
Seven Russian senators have introduced a package of bills that would prohibit same-sex marriage, ban gay couples from adopting children, and prevent people from getting married after gender reassignment.
Led by Senator Elena Mizulina, the head of the Senate's committee on updating the country's ‘Family Code’, the proposals follow in the footsteps of Russia's constitutional amendments which officially defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
© Sputnik / Evgenii Odinokov
In March, the country's Constitutional Court deemed the changes to be lawful, but insisted that it does not remove the state's obligation to respect differences, including in regards to sexual orientation.
“The bill stops the practice of marriage between two people of the same sex, as well as those who have had a sex-change, and subsequently prevents these couples from adopting children,” Senator Mizulina said.
The proposed bill would amend Article 14 of Russia's ‘Family Code’, which contains the reasons why someone is not allowed to marry. As things currently stand, this article does not list two people of the same gender as an impediment to marriage. Although the country does not register same-sex marriages, there have been at least two occasions when those married abroad have been recognized as a couple in Russia.
Earlier this year, President Vladimir Putin announced that as long as he was the leader of Russia there would be no “parent number 1” and “parent number 2,” but a “father” and “mother.”