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In another sign that the field of zero emission transportation is accelerating, the company Nikola has announced plans to build a new truck factory in Arizona. These aren’t pick-ups or other light duty vehicles. The company’s Nikola 1 model is built for long hauls and heavy loads, with an electric drive train powered by a hydrogen fuel cell system.With plans for the new factory firming up, it looks like Nikola’s plan for hydrogen long haul trucking is on the road to realization. It’s also another sign that the trucking industry is slowly beginning to abandon the idea of “clean diesel” for a more sustainable future.Nikola’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric TruckThe latest announcement is certainly good news for Arizona. The new factory, located near Phoenix in the town of Buckeye, is expected to create 2,000 jobs and stimulate capital investment to the tune of $1 billion within the next six years or so.The news is also bad for Utah, which is losing Nikola’s current headquarters. The company plans to transfer its R&D work to Arizona as well as building trucks there.The company already has 8,000 trucks on pre-order, and so far it looks like everything is on track to have the factory up and running within two years.

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, The US Constitution On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”.  The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.  According to the GAO's Comptroller General, "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly."

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.  The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department's "failure to correct system deficiencies." The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year—end unsupported adjustments.  No information is given about these 170 transactions.  In addition many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments  were, according to the report, removed by the Army. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude. The July 2016 report states, "In addition, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS (The Defense Department Reporting System) removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during the Third Quarter." An appendix to the July 2016 report shows $2 trillion in changes to the Army General Fund balance sheet due to unsupported adjustments. On the asset side, there is $794 billion increase in the Army's Fund Balance with the U.S. Treasury.  There is also an increase of $929 billion in the Army's Accounts Payable. This information raises additional major questions. First, what is the source of the additional $794 billion in the Army's Fund Balance? This adjustment represents more than six times appropriated spending.  Second, do these transfers represent a flow of funds to the Army beyond those authorized by Congress? Third, were these funds authorized and if so when and by whom? Fourth, what is the source of these funds? Finally, the $929 billion in Accounts Payable appears to represent an amount owed for items or services purchased on credit. What entities have received or will receive payment?

The yuan is about to enter the IMF’s basket of reserve currencies this coming Saturday - alongside the US dollar, pound, euro and yen. This is no less than a geoeconomic earthquake. Not only does this represent yet another step in China’s irresistible path towards economic primacy; the Chinese currency’s inclusion in the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket will also lead central banks and hyper-wealthy funds – especially from the US – to increasingly buy more Chinese assets.At the first US presidential debate, Donald Trump took no prisoners, criticizing China’s currency manipulation. This is what he said:“You look at what China’s doing to our country in terms of making our product, they’re devaluing their currency and there’s nobody in our government to fight them… They’re using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing.”

Well, China is not “making our product”; the manufacturing process is Made in China – then exported to the US. Most of the profits benefit US corporations – everything from design, licensing and royalties to advertising, financing and retail margins. If the mantras manage to spell out a partial truth - the US has lost manufacturing jobs to China, China is the “factory of the world” – they don't spell out the hidden truth that those who profit are essentially major corporations.China does not “devalue their currency”; the People’s Bank of China periodically adjusts the yuan according to a very narrow band. The major practitioners of quantitative easing (QE) are actually the US, as well as Japan and the European Central Bank (ECB). And the currency of global consumer goods manufacturing continues to be the US dollar, not the yuan.

Beijing also is not “using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China.” This is all about balance of payments. What US consumers spend on Made in China products – many of them delocalized by US corporations – is pumped back to the US as capital inflows that keep interest rates down and help to support the Empire of Chaos’s global hegemony.

Eighty two percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth, according to a new Oxfam report released today.  The report is being launched as political and business elites gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ‘Reward Work, Not Wealth’ reveals how the global economy enables a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes while hundreds of millions of people are struggling to survive on poverty pay. Billionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of just 2 percent. The number of billionaires rose at an unprecedented rate of one every two days between March 2016 and March 2017. It takes just four days for a CEO from one of the top five global fashion brands to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her lifetime. In the US, it takes slightly over one working day for a CEO to earn what an ordinary worker makes in a year. It would cost $2.2 billion a year to increase the wages of all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is about a third of the amount paid out to wealthy shareholders by the top 5 companies in the garment sector in 2016.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia ’s oversight of money transfers from that account to Lebanon last year was among many failures cited by the Australian federal government’s financial intelligence agency in its nearly US$530 million fine of the bank on Monday. If approved, the fine—meant to settle a lawsuit brought by the agency and founded on breaches of the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Act—would be the largest corporate civil penalty ever paid in Australia. Australia’s banks have long held a reputation for being among the world’s safest for investors. But a series of scandals over the past year has rocked the country’s top financial institutions. Commonwealth Bank has seen separate penalties for conduct in alleged interest-rate rigging and bad governance. On Friday, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it would defend against criminal prosecution for alleged cartel conduct in a 2015 capital raising. A public inquiry into the sector, launched last autumn by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has heard accusations against Australia’s leading financial firms of inappropriate lending, collecting fees from dead customers for financial advice and lying to regulators. The tribunal has already claimed several big scalps. Beginning in late April, the chief executive, chairman and several board members at Australia’s largest wealth management company, AMP Ltd. , resigned after the company admitted it had misled regulators and been slow to compensate customers for fees charged for financial advice it didn’t deliver.

Disoriented investors now fear tighter regulation of a sector that has reliably returned a run of record annual underlying profits and solid dividends. The government has already beefed up penalties for corporate wrongdoing, including prison time, and strengthened the corporate regulator’s investigative powers. Commonwealth Bank shares recently tumbled to 5-year lows.

Those mistakes included not assessing the inherent risk of so-called intelligent deposit machines before mid-2015. Commonwealth Bank also didn’t limit the number of times that customers could deposit money each day, or create reports on thousands of deposits of A$10,000 (US$7,569) or more at the machines. These flaws created an architecture that money launderers could exploit, the financial-intelligence agency said.

South Korean prosecutors on Monday sought to arrest impeached president Park Geun-hye over a corruption scandal embroiling Park and her longtime confidante Choi Soon-sil. 

The Special Investigation Headquarters of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office, tasked with the probe into the scandal, stated that concerns remained about an attempt to destroy evidence as Park denied most criminal charges despite substantial evidence against her. Park was removed from office on March 10 when the Constitutional Court upheld a motion to impeach her. The first female South Korean leader became the first South Korean president ousted by impeachment. State prosecutors, who took over the investigation from special prosecutors this month, summoned the Park last week for questioning. However, Park denied the criminal charges that were brought against her. Park recognized and apologized for misjudgments. The arrest warrant was formally delivered to a Seoul court, which would review the evidence and decide whether the warrant can be issued. The decision would be made late Wednesday or early Thursday. If issued, Park would become the third South Korean ex-leader to be taken into custody. Two former military leaders were put behind bars in 1995 for charges of treason and corruption.

State and special prosecutors levied a total of 13 charges against Park, including bribery, abuse of power and the leakage of state secrets. The statement said Park abused power by using her “powerful status and authority as president” to extort money and valuables from businesses and infringe on the liberty of corporate management, while leaking official secrets. Park is also accused of colluding with her decades-long friend Choi Soon-sil, who is now in custody, to solicit tens of millions of U.S. dollars in bribes from Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong who is also arrested. The bribes were allegedly offered in return for getting assistance in the transfer of management control of Samsung Group to Vice Chairman Lee from his ailing father Chairman Lee Kun-hee. The younger Lee, an heir apparent of the country’s biggest family-controlled conglomerate, has effectively taken the helm of Samsung since his father was hospitalized after a heart attack three years ago. Choi is charged with extorting tens of millions of dollars from scores of conglomerates to establish two non-profit foundations she used for personal gains. Prosecutors already branded Park and Choi as criminal accomplices.

A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, Citizen's Income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income, or universal demogrant[2]) is a form of social security[3] in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere. An unconditional income transfer of less than the poverty line is sometimes referred to as a partial basic income. Basic income systems that are financed by the profits of publicly owned enterprises (often called social dividend, also known as citizen's dividend) are major components in many proposed models of market socialism.[4] Basic income schemes have also been promoted within the context of capitalist systems, where they would be financed through various forms of taxation.[5] Similar proposals for "capital grants provided at the age of majority" date to Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice of 1795, there paired with asset-based egalitarianism. The phrase "social dividend" was commonly used as a synonym for basic income in the English-speaking world before 1986, after which the phrase "basic income" gained widespread currency.[6

Contents  [hide]  1 Policy aspects 1.1 Transparency 1.2 Administrative efficiency 1.3 Poverty reduction 1.4 Basic income and growth 1.5 Freedom 1.6 Work incentives 1.7 Affordability 1.7.1 Key principles 1.7.2 Case studies 2 Pilot programs 3 Basic income and ideology 3.1 Economic perspectives 3.2 Georgist views 3.3 Right-wing views 3.4 Feminist views 3.5 Technological unemployment 4 Criticism 4.1 Economics research 4.2 Political debate 5 Worldwide 6 Advocates 6.1 Europe 6.2 The United States and Canada 6.3 Asia, Africa, Latin America, Oceania 7 Petitions and referendums 8 Public opinions 9 See also 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links

Technological unemployment[edit] Concerns about automation and other causes of technological unemployment have caused many in the high-tech industry to turn to basic income proposals as a necessary implication of their business models. Journalist Nathan Schneider first highlighted the turn of the "tech elite" to these ideas with an article in Vice magazine, which cited figures such as Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Peter Diamandis, and others.[47] The White House, in a report to Congress, has put the probability at 83% that a worker making less than $20 an hour in 2010 will eventually lose their job to a machine. Even workers making as much as $40 an hour face odds of 31 percent.[48] To better address both the funding concerns and concerns about government control, one alternative model is that the cost and control would be distributed across the private sector instead of the public sector. Companies across the economy would be required to employ humans, but the job descriptions would be left to private innovation, and individuals would have to compete to be hired and retained. This would be a for-profit sector analog of basic income, that is, a market-based form of basic income. It differs from a job guarantee in that the government is not the employer (rather, companies are) and there is no aspect of having employees who "cannot be fired", a problem that interferes with economic dynamism. The economic salvation in this model is not that every individual is guaranteed a job, but rather just that enough jobs exist that massive unemployment is avoided and employment is no longer solely the privilege of only the very smartest or highly trained 20% of the population. Another option for a market-based form of basic income has been proposed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) as part of "a Just Third Way" (a Third Way with greater justice) through widely distributed power and liberty. Called the Capital Homestead Act,[49] it is reminiscent of James S. Albus's Peoples' Capitalism[50][51] in that money creation and securities ownership are widely and directly distributed to individuals rather than flowing through, or being concentrated in, centralized or elite mechanisms.

A changing-places moment brought about by Russia-gate is that liberals who are usually more skeptical of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially their evidence-free claims, now question the patriotism of Americans who insist that the intelligence community supply proof to support the dangerous claims about Russian ‘hacking” of Democratic emails especially when some  veteran U.S. government experts say the data would be easily available if the Russians indeed were guilty. One of those experts is William Binney, a former high-level National Security Agency intelligence official who, after his 2001 retirement, blew the whistle on the extraordinary breadth of NSA surveillance programs. His outspoken criticism of the NSA during the George W. Bush administration made him the subject of FBI investigations that included a raid on his home in 2007. Even before Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing, Binney publicly revealed that NSA had access to telecommunications companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted some 15 trillion to 20 trillion communications. Snowden has said: “I have tremendous respect for Binney, who did everything he could according to the rules.”

I spoke to Binney on Dec. 28 about Russia-gate and a host of topics having to do with spying and America’s expanding national security state.

Bernstein: Your expertise was in the Soviet Union and so you must know a lot about bugging.  Do you believe that Russia hacked and undermined our last election?  Can Trump thank Russia for the result? Binney:  We at Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) published an article on this in July.  First of all, if any of the data went anywhere across the fiber optic world, the NSA would know.  Just inside the United States, the NSA has over a hundred tap points on the fiber lines, taking in everything.    Mark Klein exposed some of this at the AT&T facility in San Francisco. This is not for foreigners, by the way, this is for targeting US citizens.  If they wanted only foreigners, all they would have to do was look at the transatlantic cables where they surface on the coast of the United States.  But they are not there, they are distributed among the US population. Bernstein: So if, in fact, the Russians were tapping into DNC headquarters, the NSA would absolutely know about it. Binney: Yes, and they would also have trace routes on where they went specifically, in Russia or anywhere else.  If you remember, about three or four years ago, the Chinese hacked into somewhere in the United States and our government came out and confirmed that it was the Chinese who did it, and it came from a specific military facility in Shanghai.  The NSA had these trace route programs embedded by the hundreds across the US and all around the world.