Month: December 2017

Authored by Eric Lieberman via The Daily Caller,

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google parent company Alphabet, was appointed chairman of a Department of Defense program in 2016 that was established by former President Barack Obama’s administration.

A staunch supporter of the Democratic Party and critic of President Donald Trump, Schmidt still continues to lead the Defense Innovation Board (DIB), even well after the new administration took over in January. This begs the question: should Schmidt’s history of partisan advocacy and condemnation of Trump be a worrisome prospect for the current White House?

Regardless of the answer, Trump’s retention of Schmidt may be emblematic of more than political divisiveness within the current administration, like from “Obama holdovers.” In fact, it may be the opposite of unwanted internal discord and a sign of an underlying ethos for the Trump administration — diversity of thought.

“When you look at the composition of the initial Economic Advisory Board, it kind of reminds me of what Trump is doing here,” Justin Danhof, general counsel of the National Center for Public Policy Research and director of the Free Enterprise Project, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “He’s putting together a team of rivals. If you want to get to the best ideas, you can’t have everyone in the room thinking the same thing.”

Alphabet announced on Thursday that Schmidt will be stepping down in January, marking the seeming end to a 17-year-career at Google and its parent company. It’s quite likely that he will maintain economic and personal interests in the business, especially since he’s expected to stay on as a member of Alphabet’s board of directors and serve as an adviser.

The DIB was formally created in March 2016, and former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter later announced that Schmidt would be heading the organization. Other specifically chosen board members include famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, Wharton School of Business professor Dr. Adam Grant, Instagram COO Marne Levine, University of Texas chancellor and former Special Operations Command commander Navy Adm. William McRaven, among several others.

Some, like David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, saw Schmidt’s taking of the helm as somewhat disconcerting given the “open-door policy” the Obama administration allegedly had with one of the country’s most powerful companies.

“There needs to be a massive amount of oversight with this Board,” Williams told TheDCNF. “If the DOD is contemplating new technology to address a new defense need, will it be skewed toward a technology that benefits Google or one of the companies? Massive potential for conflicts of interest with real taxpayer implications.”

And it’s not just personal business affairs that are concerning to some — Schmidt’s own brand of politics could conceivably come into play, whether intentionally or subconsciously. He was spotted wearing a staff badge during then-Democratic candidate for president Hillary Clinton’s election night party. Not long after, Schmidt reportedly told an audience of employees that Trump is “going to do these evil things as they’ve done in the immigration area and perhaps some others.”

In correlation with his statements to employees, Alphabet also reportedly spearheaded the funding efforts for the legal brief signed by nearly 100 companies that objected to Trump’s temporary immigration ban.

But due to the work of the DIB — which mainly centers around projects like modernizing military bases and ensuring defense systems are sufficiently up to date — it appears that personal politics likely has a minimal impact.

“The Defense Innovation Board is focused on supporting the Department of Defense on issues, such as AI, data analytics, software acquisition, and shaping the culture of the DOD workforce. These issues know no partisan boundaries,” Navy Cmdr. Patrick Evans, who does press operations for the Pentagon, told TheDCNF. “DOD cares about enhancing lethality, strengthening alliances and partnerships, and reforming the Department. DIB is about advancing the Department and serving the American public, not politics.”

Google declined to comment on the record and referred TheDCNF to the DOD for any statements or insight.

A top representative for Google was sure to add, though, that Schmidt serves on the board in a personal respect, separate from his work at Alphabet or its subsidiaries.

Conversely, Schmidt could arguably be more than a good fit for the DIB given its overarching goals.

The program “seeks to advise the department on areas that are deeply familiar to Silicon Valley companies, such as rapid prototyping, iterative product development, complex data analysis in business decision making, and organizational information sharing,” Evans explains. “Then-Secretary Carter selected the board to represent a cross-section of America’s most innovative industries, drawing on technical and management expertise from across the country.”

Furthermore, Alphabet is a tech conglomerate that, along with other functions, serves as a corporate umbrella for several subsidiaries including Google. Most notably, Alphabet includes X lab, which serves as an incubator for startups, meaning the larger holding company also acts as a hub for technological research and development.

Williams says that “the idea of the DIB isn’t a bad one” because updating the government’s services and infrastructure is needed.

“The only concern is that there’s too much of an emphasis on tinkering rather than fundamental reforms, like ending big failing spending programs,” he added, implying that innovation may distract from more necessary changes, like deep cuts to costly expenditures.

Danhof says the DIB is a great idea, even with the prospect of it backfiring for Trump if board members resign out of political protest.

“If you think about how laggard the U.S. government is when it comes to innovation and technology breakthroughs, if you look at the backlog that’s at the VA [Department of Veteran Affairs], if Eric Schmidt could do even one thing to improve something like that, then I think that this should be cheered as a great success,” Danhof asserted. “President Trump should be cheered for thinking outside the box and going with someone who has spoken out against him, who is a political rival in a sense in that he supports the other party full lock, stock, and barrel. Trump is willing to look past all of that to try to find the best people to help this government operate better.”

While also commending Obama for the board’s creation, Danhof said having Schmidt stay on the board is a true sign of Trump’s acute business acumen since any good business operator or owner doesn’t hire people merely because they think the same way and are likable.

“You hire someone who’s the best person for the job,” Danhof continued. “If it’s how we technologically innovate, why wouldn’t you think of one of the founders of Google, even if he is against you in almost everything you say, think, or do in a political standpoint?”

via http://ift.tt/2lbmoY0 Tyler Durden

Authored by Giulio Meotti via The Gatestone Institute,

• The tragic dead end of French fake "secularism" is that it allows public expressions of the Islamic religion in France, but prohibits the Christian ones.
• Far from defending the Judeo-Christian values ??on which France, the West and Europe itself was founded — such as individual liberties, freedom of expression, separation of the church from the state and the judiciary, and equal justice under the law — President Macron recently launched an apology for Islam before Arab-Muslim dignitaries.
• The balance of Macron's recent frenetic trips to the Arab world: lavish contracts, apologetic words to Islamists, repentance of the French colonial past and silence on anti-Semitism and radical Islam. Meanwhile, in France, authorities were busy dismantling its Judeo-Christian heritage.
• Macron's special envoy for heritage, Stéphane Bern, proposed charging a fee to enter French cathedrals and churches — as if they were museums.

In Abu Dhabi, members of the victorious Israeli judo team were recently made to mount the winners' podium without their own anthem and flag. A few days later, French President Emmanuel Macron landed in Abu Dhabi, where he denounced as liars those who say that "that Islam is built by destroying the other monotheisms". Macron did not raise an eyebrow about the anti-Semitism and racism displayed by the Emirati authorities. Macron merely praised Islam in a country that punishes with death those Muslims who convert to Christianity or profess atheism.

At the French naval base in Abu Dhabi on November 8-9, addressing some businessmen, Macron insisted on the importance of the alliance with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an "essential partner with whom we share the same vision of the region and obvious common interests". Such effusion seems more than the usual language of diplomacy. Macron is now showing a strategic empathy and commitment to the Arab-Islamic world. Is this statement a prelude to submission?

Far from defending the Judeo-Christian values ??on which France, the West and Europe itself was founded — such as individual liberties, freedom of expression, separation of the church from the state and the judiciary, and equal justice under the law — Macron in the last few weeks launched an apology for Islam before Arab-Muslim dignitaries.

On December 7, Macron went to Qatar; next year, he will visit Iran on a trip that will make him the first French president to visit the Islamic Republic since 1971. In Doha, Macron and Qatar signed contracts worth about 12 billion euros ($14 billion). And there, in a country which openly promoted anti-Semitism in its book fair, Macron repeated that he disapproved of US President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

A few days later, at the United Nations, Macron's ambassador voted with the Arab and Islamic regimes; it was a crude betrayal of Europe's only democratic ally in the Middle East: Israel. In a single week, France voted twice to support Arab-sponsored resolutions against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, first at the UN Security Council then at its General Assembly. As Israel's Deputy Minister for Diplomacy Michael Oren said: "The UN denies Israel's bonds with Jerusalem". Macron's bonds with the Arab Islamic world, however, seem extremely strong.

This month alone, France voted twice in the United Nations to support Arab-sponsored resolutions against the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Pictured: French President Emmanuel Macron speaks at the UN General Assembly in New York, on September 19, 2017. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Back in Paris, Macron welcomed Jordan's King Abdullah II to the presidential palace and praised Amman's role as the "guardian" of the holy sites in Jerusalem. Abdullah's goal, however, is something else. As he openly says, he wants to prevent the "Judaization of Jerusalem" — which means fighting Israeli sovereignty over the holy city.

During his recent trip to Algeria, Macron, France's first head of state born after the Algerian War, called France's 132-year rule of Algeria "a crime against humanity". The French president had no words of pride for anything the French had done or left behind in Algeria. In an apparent gesture of reconciliation, Macron said that he was "ready" to return to Algeria the skulls of Algerian fighters killed in the 1850s by the French army, which are currently displayed at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.

This, then, was the balance of Macron's recent frenetic trips to the Arab world: lavish contracts, apologetic words to Islamists, repentance of the French colonial past and silence on anti-Semitism and radical Islam.

Meanwhile, in France, authorities were busy dismantling its Judeo-Christian heritage. A superior court recently ordered the removal of a cross from a statue of the Pope John Paul II in a town in Brittany, because the cross supposedly breached rules on secularism. The Conseil d'État, France's top administrative court, evidently decided that the cross violated a 1905 law imposing the separation of church and state. After that, the same Conseil d'État ordered a Nativity scene in the municipal hall of the town of Béziers to be torn down. Then, Macron's special envoy for heritage, Stéphane Bern, proposed charging a fee to enter French cathedrals and churches — as if they were museums.

A few days later, however, France's Macron displayed all the double-standards and empty rhetoric of this "secularism". The French authorities allowed Muslims in the Paris suburb of Clichy La Garenne to a hold a mass prayer on the street. That is why 100 French politicians and administrators took to the streets of Paris to protest against these prayers. "Public space cannot be taken over in this way", said Valérie Pécresse, president of the Paris regional council.

That is exactly the tragic dead end of French fake "secularism": it allows public expressions of the Islamic religion in France, but prohibits the Christian ones.

In Paris, Saudi Arabia, a major focus of Macron's foreign policy, is busy these days sponsoring "cultural initiatives". Saudi Arabia has been involved in the renovation of the Institute of the Arab World, located in Paris. Jack Lang, the institute's director, unveiled a plaque of gratitude to Saudi Arabia for the gift of five million euros that the kingdom made to the institute.

Then an unusual event took place in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the most important site to French Catholics. Beneath its immense vaults, a small group of men in traditional Saudi clothes viewed the sculptures there. The delegation was led by Mohammed al-Issa, Secretary General of the World Islamic League, appointed about a year ago as the head of this organization, based in Mecca and devoted to the promotion of Islam throughout the world. As the newspaper La Croix noted:

"Saudi Arabia is one of the most conservative Muslim countries in the world. No religion other than Islam is recognized there. Clergy other than Muslims do not have the right to practice there and the construction of places of worship other than mosques is prohibited".

So, Christian French authorities are opening their holiest sites to Islamists — as they do to everyone. These Saudis, however, prohibit others from practicing their faith in Saudi Arabia. This is "French suicide", as Éric Zemmour warns in his most famous book, Le suicide français.

The Saudi crown prince just bought Leonardo da Vinci's painting "Salvator Mundi," for a record $450 million at auction last month. Then, the United Arab Emirates tweeted that the painting "is coming to the Louvre Abu Dhabi", recently opened by Macron. What else of its heritage will Europe now sell?

via http://ift.tt/2zwSxhB Tyler Durden

Authore by Leonid Brershidky via Bloomberg.com,

During Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual press conference on Thursday, a friendly journalist asked Putin whether the escalating tension in relations with the U.S. and the crumbling of arms control treaties would draw Russia into an unsustainable arms race. "We will ensure our security without engaging in an arms race," the president replied, citing widely diverging dollar numbers for the U.S. and Russian defense budgets. 

That's a simplistic answer from a politician starting an election campaign (of sorts: Putin is headed for re-election in March without giving anyone else a chance). The more pointed question that should be asked is this: How, with a relatively small and decreasing military budget — 2.77 trillion rubles ($42.3 billion) for 2018, down from some 3.05 trillion rubles this year — is Russia is still a formidable military rival to the U.S., with its enormous and increasing budget of almost $692.1 billion in 2018, up from $583 billion this year? 

The equalizing value of the two countries' well-balanced nuclear deterrents is enough of a reason to avoid direct confrontation. But leaving that aside, Putin may well understand the nature of modern military challenges better than U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. legislators — and Russia's authoritarian system may be more efficient when it comes to military allocations. Note that Russia is now almost an equal to the U.S. as a power broker in the Middle East, where the Russian military has just helped Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad effectively win a civil war — in which the U.S. was helping the other side. At the same time, Russian defense spending numbers are deceptive. The country is far more militarized than its defense spending suggests. That level of security spending is only sustainable at the expense of Russia's future.

Trump's military spending hike, which makes it necessary to remove the existing cap on defense expenditure, is a dubious and likely outdated response to decreased global security.

Quite aside from the cost of maintaining the world's most powerful military, the U.S., according to the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, has spent at least $2 trillion on its wars since 2001. But, considering the less transparent costs, such as those of caring for veterans, war-related increases to the Department of Defense base budget and interest on the debt taken on to cover defense spending, it's closer to $4 trillion at the very least. The Afghan conflict has cost the U.S. at least $840 billion — more than four times Afghanistan's cumulative GDP since 2001. Since the 2018 U.S. defense budget contains additional funds for sending 3,500 more troops to Afghanistan, the results of the massive outlay over the years are clearly suboptimal.

Today's wars aren't fought with fat wads of money. The adversaries are mostly small, agile forces that aren't as well-resourced as nation states. Fighting them requires a combination of local knowledge, brute force applied only at important points in a conflict and ability to shift risks onto the shoulders of irregular fighters. Russia kept cutting its defense budget all through its participation in the Syrian war. Yabloko, an opposition party, earlier this year put the cost of the Syrian operation for Russia at about 140.4 billion rubles ($2.4 billion at the current exchange rate) since September, 2015; that's some 4 percent of what the U.S. allocated to overseas contingency operations in 2017 alone — and the outcome is as good as Russia could have expected.

The U.S. is pumping money into comparatively inefficient warfighting — and into preparing for the kind of large-scale war that's not likely to take place because of existing nuclear arsenals and unauthorized nuclear proliferation. Even North Korea, with its unknown but probably small nuclear capability, is dangerous enough to deter the U.S. from attacking. At his press conference, Putin made the point that the U.S. couldn't know for sure where to strike in North Korea — and if the Kim regime managed to get a single long-range, nuclear-armed missile in the air, the results could be catastrophic.

U.S. defense budgets, of course, feed a large, powerful domestic industry; even the indirect U.S. involvement in a conflict lifts the stock prices of major defense contractors, research has shown. In Russia, the biggest contractors are state-controlled; they have far less lobbying clout, and the technocratic Russian government has kept them on a short leash, though some of the military's purchasing decisions have served regional development rather than defense purposes. Such an arrangement, which would have been inefficient in most other industries, probably reduces wasteful spending in the budget-dependent military-industrial complex.

That said, in relative terms, Russia is spending more on force-related functions than the U.S. does. Trump's budget proposal allocated $71.8 billion to the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. Add that up with the defense spending, and the total security budget will stand at $764 billion, less than 19 percent of total federal spending. Russia will spend a combined 29 percent of its federal budget — some 4.8 trillion rubles — on defense and domestic security. That's probably not all of the security-related outlay either, as Mark Galeotti pointed out earlier this year: Even some of the education and development spending in Russia goes toward military goals.

In the U.S., federal law enforcement outlay is a fraction of defense spending. In Russia, the two areas of government expenditure are almost equal. That's the difference between a country with a relatively liberal domestic order and a near-dictatorship, which relies heavily on the suppression of dissent and must keep large law enforcement agencies under centralized control.

Russia could show the world how to spend efficiently on more than adequate defense — but instead it is engaged in an arms race against its own development. For years, it has been underfunding areas such as education and health, undermining what Putin told the press conference was his vision of the country's future — flexible, technology-driven, highly productive. Judging by Putin's answers to reporters on Thursday, he still prefers not to notice that.

via http://ift.tt/2le4wf8 Tyler Durden

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Dear Donors, thank you for your support in 2017. Although you have kept me working yet another year, I find it encouraging that there are some Americans who can think independently and who want to know. As Margaret Mead said, it only takes a few determined people to change the world. Perhaps some of you will be those people.

 

My traditional Christmas column goes back to sometime in the 1990s when I was a newspaper columnist. It has been widely reprinted at home and abroad. Every year two or three readers write to educate me that religion is the source of wars and persecutions. These readers confuse religion with mankind’s abuse of institutions, religious or otherwise. The United States has democratic institutions and legal institutions to protect civil liberties. Nevertheless, we now have a police state. Shall I argue that democracy and civil liberty are the causes of police states?

Some readers also are confused about hypocrisy. There is a vast difference between proclaiming moral principles that one might fail to live up to and proclaiming immoral principles that are all too easy to keep.

 

Liberty is a human achievement. We have it, or had it, because those who believed in it fought to achieve it. As I explain in my Christmas column, people were able to fight for liberty because Christianity empowered the individual.

 

The other cornerstone of our culture is the Constitution. Indeed, the United States is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the United States is a different country, and Americans a different people. This is why assaults on the Constitution by the regimes in Washington are assaults on America that are far worse than any assaults by terrorists. There is not much that we can do about these assaults, but we should not through ignorance enable the assaults or believe the government’s claim that safety requires the curtailment of civil liberty.

 

In a spirit of goodwill, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a successful New Year.

 

Paul Craig Roberts

The Greatest Gift For All

Christmas is a time of traditions. If you have found time in the rush before Christmas to decorate a tree, you are sharing in a relatively new tradition. Although the Christmas tree has ancient roots, at the beginning of the 20th century only 1 in 5 American families put up a tree. It was 1920 before the Christmas tree became the hallmark of the season. Calvin Coolidge was the first President to light a national Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

Gifts are another shared custom. This tradition comes from the wise men or three kings who brought gifts to baby Jesus. When I was a kid, gifts were more modest than they are now, but even then people were complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. We have grown accustomed to the commercialization. Christmas sales are the backbone of many businesses. Gift giving causes us to remember others and to take time from our harried lives to give them thought.

The decorations and gifts of Christmas are one of our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years.

In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice.

This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching that God so values the individual’s soul that he sent his son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations.

The result was a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by a diverse people who became one.

In recent decades we have lost sight of the historic achievement that empowered the individual. The religious, legal and political roots of this great achievement are no longer reverently taught in high schools, colleges and universities or respected by our government. The voices that reach us through the millennia and connect us to our culture are being silenced by “Identity Politics,” “political correctness” and “the war on terror.” Prayer has been driven from schools and Christian religious symbols from public life. Constitutional protections have been diminished by hegemonic political ambitions. Indefinite detention, torture, and murder are now acknowledged practices of the United States government. The historic achievement of due process has been rolled back. Tyranny has re-emerged.

Diversity at home and hegemony abroad are consuming values and are dismantling the culture and the rule of law. There is plenty of room for cultural diversity in the world, but not within a single country. A Tower of Babel has no culture. A person cannot be a Christian one day, a pagan the next and a Muslim the day after. A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.

All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak.

Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were exterminated in the 20th century by National Socialists in Germany and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority. In the beginning years of the 21st century, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in seven countries have been murdered and millions displaced in order to extend Washington’s hegemony.

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.” Washington’s drive for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.

Christianity’s emphasis on the worth of the individual makes such power as Lenin claimed, and Washington now claims, unthinkable. Be we religious or be we not, our celebration of Christ’s birthday celebrates a religion that made us masters of our souls and of our political life on Earth. Such a religion as this is worth holding on to even by atheists.

As we enter into 2018, Western civilization, the product of thousands of years of striving, is in decline. Degeneracy is everywhere before our eyes. As the West sinks into tyranny, will Western peoples defend their liberty and their souls, or will they sink into the tyranny, which again has raised its ugly and all devouring head?

via http://ift.tt/2kVJFxM Tyler Durden

A few weeks ago, the office of Council Member Helen Rosenthal of New York’s 6th District published the results of a business survey conducted on the Upper West Side that showed, among other things, that some 12% of retail store fronts lay vacant. 

Of the 1,332 storefronts that we surveyed, we identified 1,170 active businesses — 88%.

 

Twelve percent of storefronts (161) were unoccupied. Please note that “unoccupied” includes recently closed businesses, as well as new spaces that were not yet leased.

 

Of the major commercial streets, Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue had the highest percentage of empty storefronts. Broadway had the largest number of empty storefronts (57), followed by Amsterdam Avenue (44) and Columbus Avenue (32).

What’s worse, the survey results revealed that retail vacancies in certain areas of the Upper West Side have nearly doubled over the past 10 years.

Of course, the fact that bricks-and-mortar retailers are struggling is hardly a new phenomenon…here are just a couple of our recent posts on the topic:

• A Look At America’s Retail Apocalypse In Charts
• 2017 Will Be The Worst Year For US Retail In History
• Toys “R” Us Shocker: Bankrupt Toy Retailer To Close Up To 200 Stores Amid Collapsing Sales

The question is whether New York City retailers, who have direct access to the wealthiest, and most densely populated, shoppers in the world, are simply succumbing to the ‘Amazon Effect’ like the rest of the country or whether Manhattan landlords are contributing to their own demise by continuously hiking rents while ignoring softening demand in hopes that it goes away?  According to Rosenthal’s office, the ‘blissful ignorance of landlords’ theory should not be underestimated.

There are many reasons why businesses open and close in our community — major rent increases being a central one. A recent report from the office of State Senator Brad Hoylman cites two separate studies, one estimating that the average commercial rent in Manhattan increased by 34% from 2004 to 2014; and another showing that rents jumped by 42% in Manhattan from 2012 to 2015.

 

Our office is also aware of instances where building owners have plans to re-develop their properties and are not interested in renting to commercial tenants in the short term.

 

An added challenge throughout our city is the fact that a significant number of family-owned businesses do not have a successor ready to take over when the owner is ready to retire. Earlier this year, the New York City Public Advocate released a policy brief which reported that an estimated 3,700 businesses across the state close each year due to an owner’s retirement –leading to the loss of over 13,000 jobs annually.

 

Commercial vacancies are an issue throughout Manhattan. The New York limes reported this summer that sections of Broadway in SoHo had vacancy rates as high as 20%.

But, as The Guardian points out, the key to understanding New York’s soaring retail vacancies might lie in the changing make-up of the city’s landlords.  Unlike prior decades in which more buildings were owned by mom-and-pop operations, today’s Manhattan landlords are more likely to be large institutional investors and/or hedge funds that are unwilling to drop rents to match retail conditions and are more eager to get a markup on their portfolio by leasing to a large, recognizable, luxury tenant.

“It’s not Amazon, it’s rent,” says Jeremiah Moss, author of the website and book Vanishing New York. “Over the decades, small businesses weathered the New York of the 70s with it near-bankruptcy and high crime. Businesses could survive the internet, but they need a reasonable rent to do that.”

 

“They are running small businesses out of the city and replacing them with chain stores and temporary luxury businesses,” says Moss.

 

In Vanishing New York, Moss writes of the toll the evisceration of distinct neighborhoods through real estate over-pricing has on the city. “It’s homogenizing and changing the character of the city,” he says. Even where landlords are offering competitive leases, they are often for two or five years, not the customary 10.

 

“We’re seeing more stores front emptying, and we’re seeing a lot of turnover where you see spaces fill temporarily and then empty. And it’s continuing to get worse,” he says.

New York retail property agent Robin Zendell also says it’s just too simple to blame Amazon. “When you see [that] every corner has a bank or a pharmacy, and there is a gym on the second floor, there’s a simple reason for that: people can’t afford the rent. Why did restaurants go to Brooklyn? Because it’s cool? No, because it was cheap, and [because] restaurateurs were sick of giving investors’ money away so they could pay thir rent.”

Of course, while ‘greedy’ NY landlords are always a convenient scapegoat, we’re going to go out on a limb and suggest that a tripling of online sales as a percent of overall retail over the past 10 years may have something to do with Manhattan’s increasingly vacant store fronts…

via http://ift.tt/2BOjMKB Tyler Durden

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

The Christmas narrative of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable, where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus.

Unfortunately, Jesus was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. And when he grew up, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Yet what if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born and raised in the American police state?

Rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, etc.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they would have been turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he dared to step out of line while in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward with no access to family or friends.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. Currently, 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Either way, as I show in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Remember, what happened on that starry night in Bethlehem is only part of the story. That baby in the manger grew up to be a man who did not turn away from evil but instead spoke out against it, and we must do no less.

via http://ift.tt/2DbFoNm Tyler Durden

Famed NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden has just launched Haven, an app for people to transform any Android smartphone into a high-tech security system for detecting intrusions.

Snowden, while currently on the run from the CIA, hiding somewhere in Moscow until 2020, has found enough time to launch his new mobile security app last Friday for the sufficiently paranoid person (e.g. activists, dissidents, journalists, & etc).

"When the lead developer explained the project to his young children, they found another use for it: 'We’re going to catch Santa!' " https://t.co/Beangjk90g

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 23, 2017

Haven is designed to be installed on any Android smartphone, particularly inexpensive and older devices. It operates like a home surveillance system, leveraging on-device sensors to provide surveillance of physical areas. Sensors within the Android phone monitor motion, sound, vibration and light, watching for unwanted guests to notify a user. Combining Haven with an array of sensors in any smartphone, coupled with the most secure communications technologies like Signal and Tor, the app is providing Snowden and other activists around the world with a mobile security system.

The app was developed by Freedom of the Press Foundation, Guardian Project, and Snowden. According to the Guardian Project, the app’s prototype funding was provided by FoPF, and donations to support continuing work can be contributed through their site: http://ift.tt/2BAI2ju.

According to the Guardian Project, this is how the app works,

On-device sensors monitor for disturbance, and then logs the data:

• Accelerometer: phone’s motion and vibration
• Camera: motion in the phone’s visible surroundings from front or back camera
• Microphone: noises in the environment
• Light: change in light from ambient light sensor
• Power: detect device being unplugged or power loss

Further, the group explains why Haven is well suited for Android devices and does make the claim, a version for the iPhone is on the horizon.

If one of the sensors was triggered, a notification would be sent to one of the following platforms:

• SMS: a message is sent to the number specified when monitoring started
• Signal: if configured, can send end-to-end encryption notifications via Signal

 

My partner has been testing Haven for a few months with a spare phone. Every time you open the closet, it sends a picture by Signal. In addition to impressive intrusion detection capabilities, you can also use it to send helpful reminders! ? https://t.co/FHi1bjFsLP http://pic.twitter.com/IS58HzDVha

— lex.txt (@lex_is) December 22, 2017

As for Snowden, he remains in an asylum somewhere in Moscow until 2020 when his residence permit expires.

With the launch of Haven, it seems as Snowden is attempting to change the calculus of risk for when US authorities come hunting for him once more.

If all else fails, Snowden might have just invented a baby monitor for the broke millennial. 

via http://ift.tt/2kW5GfB Tyler Durden

Call it the holiday’s token bizarro incident: according to Florida Today, a 23-year-old man who told police he punched a Wells Fargo ATM because it gave him too much cash, was arrested after bank officials said the attack caused at least $5,000 in damages, which elevated the inexplicable and idiotic temper tantrum into a felony crime.

Michael Oleksik, 23, 5’11”, 155lbs, of Rockledge, FL; charges: Criminal mischief >$1000.

Cocoa police charged Michael Joseph Oleksik, of Merritt Island, on Friday with criminal mischief nearly a month into the investigation of a disturbance at the Wells Fargo bank branch at 834 N. Cocoa Boulevard, in Cocoa. According to authorities, Oleksik could be seen on surveillance video standing at the ATM, pummeling the electronic teller’s touch screen on Nov. 29.

A short time later, an apologetic Oleksik called the bank and told a manager that he punched the ATM because he was “angry the ATM was giving him too much money and he did not know what to do,” Florida Today reported. Oleksik then explained that he was in a hurry for work and apologized for the damage to the bank’s ATM.

While Oleksik’s behavior may appear irrational at first glance, a quick look at his arrest record, which reveals not only domestic violence charges, but also disorderly drug intoxication and resisting and intimidating a police officer, and suddenly his vendetta with the ATM makes sense.

Wells Fargo – clearly distraught at the treatment one of its ATM machines was subjected to – contacted the Cocoa Police Department and asked to press charges. Oleksik was arrested Friday and booked into the Brevard County Jail Complex in Sharpes.

via http://ift.tt/2DNtg65 Tyler Durden

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Mises Institute,

After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act.

Yale University’s Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review, condemns what he calls “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear: though Christmas generates a $50 billion gift-giving industry, a tenth to a third of that is sheer loss. Why? Because the recipient doesn’t always get what he wants. Given the chance, the recipient would have purchased something else.

All of this follows directly from his underlying theory. In neoclassical economics, the consumer is best off when he chooses, within his means, the highest-rank good or service on his “utility” scale. If he can afford a steak, and he has to settle for a hot dog because the restaurant is out of t-bone, he experiences dead-weight loss. It’s even worse if he has to pay the price of steak and gets a wiener instead.

So it is with gifts. They generate a net loss, this theory says, unless the recipient would have otherwise purchased, with his own cash, precisely what he unwraps. Of course, this is rarely the case. To provide empirical meat to his theory, Professor Waldfogel interviewed students. The students received an average of $438 in gifts, for which these kids reported they would have paid only $313 if they had done the shopping themselves. The gap narrows when the gift is from a friend, and widens when it’s from the family.

Imagine Mr. Waldfogel attending your next Christmas gathering. Aunt Janie gives her nephews soap-on-a-rope, and they all praise her for her generosity and thoughtfulness. The economist then prods the youngsters to ‘fess up that soap-on-a-rope isn’t so great after all, and with the $9.95, they would have bought the newest Spice Girls tape. He declares the gathering a waste and encourages the party to break up in the interest of everyone’s economic welfare.

Professor Waldfogel proposes that we could eliminate these losses, which could be as high as $13 billion per year, by giving money instead of gifts, and letting the recipient spend it as he chooses. But then why not take matters one step further? What is the point of all this shuffling around of cash in the first place? According to neoclassical theory, it would be far better if everyone just clung to his own bank account and spent his own money as he saw fit. Indeed, we’d all be better off economically if Christmas were merely abolished—heck, maybe the Congress should do it—until such time as we all have perfect knowledge of each other’s preferences and are willing to act on them.

Far from being one man’s opinion, this thesis is becoming a classic “extra credit” question on microeconomics tests. Waldfogel is only distinguished for having formalized the model and tested it against his own students’ experience. The conclusion allows economists to presume they are smarter than the mass of the buying public, which persists in the irrational habit of buying things for each other instead of sending money or, even better, just spending it on themselves.

So, what’s wrong with the theory? Plenty. It equates personal utility with dollars spent, the classic conflation of value and price. In fact, a gift is a special kind of good with its own value. For example, we value the soap from the Aunt precisely because of its tie-in with familial affection. Even if the recipient would never have bought it, his personal utility is enhanced by the knowledge that his extended family is thinking about him and cares enough to give.

The source matters. If soap were given by a classmate who complains that you are odoriferously challenged, the “gift” is an insult in disguise. It has negative value. “Rich gifts wax poor when the givers prove unkind,” writes Shakespeare, who seemed to have a more complete view of economics than Professor Waldfogel. Neither is the person who receives a gift purchased under duress likely to be grateful. People on long-term welfare, for example, tend to think of taxpayers as suckers.

A comment later published in the same journal picked up on this. The authors (one from Harvard, one from the University of Miami) also did an empirical test. They used a different method (asking students about prices of specific gifts, not whole bundles), a larger sample of students (209 instead of 78), and asked more detailed questions. The results were the opposite of Waldfogel’s. The authors showed that more than half valued the gift above its retail price, suggesting that Christmas giving actually represents a gain in social welfare.

Moreover, these authors found that gifts asked for were less valued than gifts that were not. This fits with experience: we’re pleased to get what we want, but especially appreciative when we like something we had not expected. Indeed, good gift shoppers think about this ahead of time. They buy someone a tie he would never buy for himself. They buy items the receiver might be too modest or frugal to purchase himself, even if he had the resources.

Some items are just gifts and nothing more: fancy soaps, paisley boxer shorts, blankets with school logos, coffee cups printed with witty slogans, and the like. That’s why there can be such things as “gift shops” as distinguished from regular stores. Gifts have a different value because they are altogether different goods. They embody not only themselves but also their meaning. Imagine if someone came to dinner, and instead of bringing a bottle of wine, gave you $15 and told you to spend it on anything you wanted. It’s just not the same.

For his part, Waldfogel responds by accusing the authors of biasing their results. The very nature of their survey questions encouraged students to report “sentimental value” instead of pure “material value.” Going back to the drawing board, and correcting for this and other supposed errors, Waldfogel surveyed another group of students—455 this time—and still found a dead-weight loss, less than before, but a substantial one nonetheless. Christmas is inefficient: that’s his story and he’s sticking to it.

Of course there is no way to decouple one kind of value from another kind of value, since all economic value is ultimately subjective. Surveys can’t reveal what people value; only action in the marketplace does that. What’s deeply odd about this wrangling is that everyone seems to agree that only the value to the recipient should matter. That leaves out the really crucial point of gift giving: that it benefits the giver as well as the receiver.

People feel good in being generous, especially towards family and friends. Giving is an act of charity and liberality, virtues people practice because they’re good for the soul. And even if they aren’t, economists should follow the rule of “demonstrated preference”: if a person gives a gift, it is because he preferred giving the gift to keeping his own money. The action is “utility enhancing” on its own terms. Why? Because it, as opposed to something else, took place. Value is revealed in the preferences people demonstrate voluntarily. A well-chosen gift also reveals something about ourselves: we care enough to make our affections known in a personal way.

Again, the problem of the welfare state presents itself. In its form of “charity,” people do not give voluntarily. So resistant are people to dumping billions of dollars on millions of freeloaders, that the government has to threaten them with fines and jail terms (that’s what taxation is) to get them to fork over this “gift.” No one demonstrates a preference for the welfare state (voting doesn’t count since people are not using their own resources to purchase the services for which they vote). This degree of redistribution has to be imposed. Taxation, in contrast to Christmas, is a clear example of a utility-reducing activity.

But economists of the neoclassical school have rarely bothered with such distinctions. Their theories leave little room for reflection on property rights, individual choice, and the distinction between market exchange and forced redistribution. For them, a mathematically determined standard of efficiency is the only test that matters. Not even an absurd conclusion—for instance, that giving gifts is inefficient—causes them to rethink their core theory.

Economists are hardly alone in this. Skeptics and opponents of the market economy have long had a beef with the idea of giving and charity, especially as it occurs at Christmas.

Perhaps the socialists have long understood something about Christmas that others, even advocates of the market, have overlooked. In the institution of the gift, we find a strong rationale for the establishment and protection of private property and the capitalist economy. In order to give, we must first produce, acquire, own.

G.K. Chesterton, a great defender of Christmas against English Puritans who regarded it as corrupt and pagan, observed that collective ownership would mean the end of voluntary giving. Moreover, he clarified, “giving is not the same as sharing: giving is the opposite of sharing. Sharing is based on the idea that there is no property, or at least no personal property. But giving a thing to another man is as much based on personal property as keeping it to yourself.”

And contrary to the complaints of materialism at Christmas, meaningful gifts can be as elaborate as gold, frankincense, and myrrh, or as humble as two fish and five loaves.

It’s no wonder, then, that history’s dreariest socialists have denounced Christmas. The economic core of its gift giving centers on private property, while its ethical core belies the claim that private property institutionalizes greed.

“There is the greatest pleasure in doing a kindness or service to friends or guests or companions,” wrote Aristotle in The Politics, “which can only be rendered when a man has private property. These advantages are lost by excessive unification of the state…. No one, when men have all things in common, will any longer set an example of liberality or do any liberal action; for liberality consists in the use which is made of property.”

As for intellectuals—economists no less—who have failed to understand this simple truth, it’s staggering to think of the dead-weight loss their ideas have imposed on society.

via http://ift.tt/2C6hVhn Tyler Durden