Salvini Faces A Political Minefield After EU Elections

Authored by Tom Luongo,

Since the moment Lega and Five Star Movement entered into a coalition government after 2018’s election, there has been a concerted external campaign to sow dissent between the two coalition members.

It seems a week doesn’t go by where I don’t see a headline saying that the end of the “Italian Government is Nigh” or some such nonsense.

Incessant poll watching, childish gotcha legal challenges and hair-splitting by European ‘journalists’ results in continuous speculation about when Lega leader Matteo Salvini will finally get tired of his left-of-center coalition partner and sweep away the government.

The votes were barely counted when the countdown to new elections in Italy began in the press. Salvini’s Lega took 34% of the vote while M5S just 17%.

It made Lega, along with Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party the two biggest single political parties in the European Parliament.

Salvini came out on Thursday and put some of those gremlins to bed. 
There will be no early election, in September we will be preparing the budget,” Salvini told reporters in parliament.

“If I wanted to bring down the government I wouldn’t spend night and day putting together policy proposals,” Salvini said. “There are so many things to do, I don’t want an early election.”

At the same time Bloomberg is reporting that Salvini is threatening to blow up the coalition if M5S doesn’t back his part of their agenda – a flat tax, infrastructure spending and increased political power for the northern Italian states.

It seems that they have for now.

The failing leadership of Luigi Di Maio of M5S could change things. Di Maio faces a vote on Tuesday to remain party leader. If he loses, Salvini may be forced to kill the coalition because Di Maio’s replacement will be unlikely to work with him, at least that’s the line Bloomberg is peddling.

The EU would like nothing more than for this to happen.

Because without M5S Salvini would be hard-pressed to form a new government committed to the types of reforms and confrontations with Brussels he needs to front unless Lega took close to a real majority.

Salvini would have to then go back to Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi who he crossed last year to form the coalition with Di Maio. And Berlusconi will do as he’s told.

His only other potential dance partner who wouldn’t make life miserable for him would be the Brothers of Italy who never score higher than 5%.

And M5S wouldn’t be happy with Salvini at all if he called for snap elections now. So, unless Lega’s poll numbers climb to 45% by the end of the year, Salvini may be stuck for a while. And this is why he’s not publicly looking for new elections.

Brussels will pounce on every small division between the two parties and attempt to separate them.

That’s why you keep hearing about it from the major press, they want to goad him, via his ego, into calling for elections.

Not only would it put Salvini in a coalition with people hostile to his sovereignist agenda, it would make him an even bigger target of media hatred.

It would give the goons in Brussels someone to conflate with the rest of the new “Far-Right Neo-Nazis” rising across Europe to scare the people with. Salvini, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen (who’s more leftist than half of the Greens I know) and, of course, Britain’s Nigel Farage are the new bogey(wo)men of 21st century Europe.

But is any of this division ever true?

In this case it’s likely more smoke than fire. Salvini and Di Maio are on opposite sides of some basic economic issues, but they have also both shown a great ability to craft a unified front to present to both Europe and Italians over the year of their partnership.

No relationship is without its problems. But that doesn’t mean that every time one mildly disagrees with the other that the government will come down tomorrow. But that’s the way it is presented daily.

In fact, their overcoming ideological differences is the very thing that makes them so dangerous. Because they have put those differences aside, somewhat, to tackle the bigger issues first – getting a better deal out of Brussels, and failing that, convincing the Italian people that there is no negotiating with the EU.

And that’s where their power truly lies, in exposing the intractable and tyrannical nature of the EU leadership and its rules. Showing Italians that no matter what is put forth the EU isn’t working for Italy’s best interests.

Despite their differences in ideology, Salvini and Di Maio are patriots first. And being able to successfully govern from a Euroskeptic position outside of the traditional Left/Right false divide sends a powerful message to the rest of that part of Europe rethinking its commitments to the EU.

Nigel Farage is doing the same thing in Britain with the Brexit Party. And it’s why he’ll win a General Election if Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn is stupid enough to call for one after last week’s results. I talked with Rory Hall at The Daily Coin about all of these issues earlier this week. (Listen here)

Looking at the markets’ response to the EU election results it is pretty clear that Europe’s political problems are taking center stage. The EU is already putting pressure on Italy’s capital markets threatening $4 billion in fines the Italians don’t have for potentially breaching budget rules if they go forwards with Salvini’s tax cuts.

Never forget that Germany’s idea of austerity is meant to keep the debtor nation on a drip feed of support in exchange for destroying the value of a nation’s wealth so it can be bought for pennies on the dollar to restructure the debt, c.f. Greece.

That’s the plan for Italy and the clowns in M5S better realize that Salvini is the best chance they have to get what they want or all of this will have been for nothing.

The euro continues to grind lower as Italian debt yields are rising quickly again. Germany’s economic data continues to deteriorate faster than expectations, and Donald Trump waits in the wings to tariff the world if anyone looks at him cross-eyed. Any further disruption of global trade by his Orangeness will only serve to send the dollar higher, debt quality to fade, costs to rise and credit markets to implode, if they aren’t already.

That’s the real struggle Salvini and M5S, no matter who is leading them face. Salvini knows this. The big question now is whether he can shepherd this coalition into an effective buttress against what the EU will throw at them between now and September’s budget talks.

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Libertarians Forged an Alliance With Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Was It a Deal With the Devil?

On the morning of March 14, 2016, in a tiny office in Rio de Janeiro, a libertarian businessman named Winston Ling met with Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing congressman running a longshot campaign to be president of Brazil. Some of Ling’s closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil’s libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition.

Three years later, Bolsonaro is president. Ludwig von Mises scholars, free market think tankers, and even anarcho-capitalists now occupy top-level positions in his administration, where they hope to slash the government bureaucracy of the nation ranked as the absolute worst by the World Economic Forum in the category of “burden of government regulation”—a country that goes beyond regulating the number of hours that workers spend on the job to micromanaging the size and make of the punch clocks used to record their arrivals and departures. “I’m losing all my guys to government,” says Hélio Beltrão, founder and president of the Brazilian Mises Institute, with a grin.

But other prominent libertarians are outraged over their former comrades’ willingness to ally themselves with a politician The Intercept has called “the most extreme and repellent face of a resurgent, evangelical-driven right-wing attempt to drag the country backwards by decades.”

Bolsonaro is not a libertarian; in many ways he is sharply un-libertarian. He has been working to make it easier for police to kill civilians with impunity. He has repeatedly praised the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He has flatly declared himself “in favor of torture.” And in 2002 he said, “If I see two men kissing in the street, I will hit them.”

“It shows that their commitment to individual liberty is actually not that strong,” says Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, a libertarian columnist at Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper. They want “a more authoritarian style of government that can bring about their economic policies more easily.”

Ling argues that the country didn’t have time to entertain fantasies of a truly principled free market politician rising to power. In 2016, when he met with Bolsonaro, the leftist Workers Party had controlled the presidency for 13 years. Brazil’s unemployment rate was approaching 12 percent, and the economy had contracted by more than 3 percent the prior year. “For me this was life or death,” he says. “I truly believed if someone else were elected president, Brazil would go down.”

The beginning of Bolsonaro’s presidency has been chaotic. The free marketeers have made some significant progress in cutting red tape but must also contend with powerful special interests that want to maintain the status quo. Concern is growing that their participation in Bolsonaro’s administration will damage the libertarian movement and help the Workers Party win back credibility. If Bolsonaro fails to meaningfully liberalize the economy, says Pedro Ferreira, a co-founder of the libertarian Free Brazil Movement, “we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

A Troublesome Alliance

Jair Bolsonaro is best understood as “Trump without the success in business,” says Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a Brazilian political scientist, career diplomat, and prominent pro-market intellectual. “He’s a populist, nationalist, xenophobe, [and] misogynist.”

A former Army captain with an undistinguished military career, Bolsonaro served 27 years in the National Congress before he was elected president, passing just two minor bills during his entire tenure.

He was best known for his incendiary public comments. In a 2011 interview, he told Playboy that he would be “incapable of loving a homosexual son,” preferring that a gay child “die in an accident.” In 2016, he said the “biggest mistake” of the dictatorship that used to rule Brazil “was to torture and not to kill.” In March, he asked the nation’s armed forces to commemorate the 55th anniversary of that coup.

In his first months in office, Bolsonaro’s most substantive policy proposal has been a draconian anti-crime package that includes more lenient treatment of police officers who kill while on duty.

Police shootings have been shockingly rampant in the country for a while. In 2017, law enforcement killed 5,144 civilians, or 14 people per day. In March 2018, two former Rio de Janeiro police officers were arrested on charges of murdering Marielle Franco, an openly gay city council member, by shooting her in the head with a submachine gun. According to Human Rights Watch, extrajudicial executions by cops are common. In 2003, Bolsonaro said that “as long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, those death squads, in my opinion, are very welcome.”

Yet Bolsonaro also has an uncanny ability to connect with voters, which is what drew Winston Ling’s attention. “Every time he came to a city, there was a huge number of people at the airport,” the businessman recalls.

The 63-year-old Ling is a founding figure in Brazil’s libertarian movement—or movimento liberal, since the Portuguese word liberal has retained its classical meaning—who helped establish two prominent think tanks in the 1980s. He and his siblings co-own a handful of companies started by their Chinese immigrant father, who made a fortune in the soybean and petrochemical industries.

At their initial meeting in 2016, Ling gave Bolsonaro a half-hour tutorial on the Austrian school of free market economics and left him with two books, Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law and Mises’ Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. (He chose those two, he recalls, because they’re “thin and easy to read”—and “politicians don’t read.”) He also offered to help Bolsonaro assemble a “council” of free market economists to join his campaign.

Bolsonaro accepted the offer, so Ling flew home to Shanghai and started working through his Rolodex. “Nobody wanted to meet him,” Ling recalls, because of Bolsonaro’s reputation as a populist firebrand and a homophobe. Then Ling got in touch with Paulo Guedes, who was “immediately very enthusiastic.”

A respected economist who earned a Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Chicago, Guedes has spent most of his career in finance. On November 13, 2017, he and Bolsonaro had a five-hour meeting at a Sheraton Hotel in Rio. Guedes set the ground rules: He would consider working with Bolsonaro only if given “carte blanche” over economic affairs. After winning the presidency in October 2018, Bolsonaro made Guedes “super minister,” putting him in charge of a new Ministry of Economy that consolidated the government’s departments of finance, planning, industry, and commerce. Guedes then appointed a group of young libertarians to high-level roles within the new department.

Guedes’ brief experience in politics 30 years ago may have discouraged him from working with candidates who are more like-minded but have little chance of electoral success. In 1989, he helped craft the economic platform of Guilherme Afif Domingos, who ran for president on the Liberal Party ticket. They put forward a proposal that Brazil privatize every state-owned company and then use the revenue to wipe out the federal debt. Domingos came in sixth. “And so Brazil became a paradise for rent seekers and hell for entrepreneurs,” Guedes later told Piauí magazine.

Guedes’ openness to working with Bolsonaro may also derive in part from the efforts of the “Chicago boys,” a group of free market economists (trained at Guedes’ alma mater) who had helped guide Chile’s economy under the dictator Augusto Pinochet beginning in the 1970s. Guedes had no direct involvement with this cohort, but he held a teaching job at the University of Chile in the early ’80s, and he has expressed admiration for its economic impact. Thanks to the Chicago boys, Pinochet lifted price controls, slashed red tape, sold off state-owned companies, eased occupational licensing rules, and launched a quasi-private pension system.

The Chicago boys’ agenda was derailed in 1982, when an ill-advised fixed exchange rate produced an economic crisis, but in the long run their reforms worked as intended. After the restoration of a democratic government in 1989, Chileans voted to continue their program of market liberalism. Three decades of spectacular growth followed. From 1987 to 2017, Chile’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew ninefold and its poverty rate declined from 11.7 percent to 0.7 percent.

Of course, Pinochet also overthrew a democratically elected president, censored the press, murdered an estimated 3,200 citizens, and tortured many more. He was willing to back many of the reformers’ ideas about economic liberty, but he violated other liberties in abhorrent ways.

Guedes’ defenders argue that there’s a fundamental difference between his work with Bolsonaro and the morally dubious alliance struck by the Chicago boys. Bolsonaro is “working within the democratic institutions of Brazil,” says Diogo Costa, a political scientist with a high-level position at the Ministry of Economy who has worked at the libertarian Cato Institute and Atlas Economic Research Foundation. “I don’t think [Guedes] would agree to sign on to a project that violated more fundamental principles.”

Some fear, on the other hand, that Bolsonaro will gradually erode those democratic institutions. His administration “is engaged in a constant war against every single institution that could serve as an opposition to his power,” says Fonseca, the libertarian Folha de S.Paulo columnist.

Pedro Menezes, a 25-year-old libertarian who writes for Gazeta do Povo and InfoMoney, has compared Bolsonaro to Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader of Venezuela, who dismantled institutional constraints on his power after being elected. Menezes is particularly troubled by Bolsonaro’s suggestion that he would consider packing the supreme court and lowering its mandatory retirement age, enabling him to appoint more justices.

Menezes decided to distance himself from his country’s libertarian movement after attending an October 22, 2016 event in São Paulo that was organized by the free market Leadership Training Institute. Bolsonaro, a longshot candidate at the time, was invited on stage to join in a dialogue with a group of prominent libertarians. A large contingent of his supporters showed up, baiting the audience with chants of “Ustra! Ustra! Ustra!”—a reference to the notorious Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, an army colonel who had arrested and tortured dissidents during the military regime.

Bolsonaro made outrageous comments during the event, according to Menezes, but his co-panelists treated him respectfully anyway. “I was so pissed I left in the middle,” he says. “It was this transformational moment for me.”

Other libertarian-leaning groups have kept their distance from Brazil’s new president. Partido Novo, a political party founded in 2011, backed the more orthodox libertarian candidate João Amoêdo in the 2018 election. And the young political movement Livres, which used to be part of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), broke off in January 2018, when Bolsonaro took over the larger group.

In an essay explaining his vote to separate from the PSL, the political scientist Costa wrote that “when populism enters through the window, freedom goes out the door.” But after Bolsonaro won the election and Costa was offered his position in the Ministry of Economy, he took it. “If I had to work [directly] under people who didn’t share my vision and values and were committed to a different agenda,” he says, “I wouldn’t have” accepted.

Brazil’s most influential libertarian organization is the Free Brazil Movement, which helped organize massive street protests in 2015 calling for the impeachment of Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff. (She was removed from office on August 31, 2016.) The group initially resisted supporting Bolsonaro in the 2018 election and tried to “build up more reasonable people,” says Ferreira, the organization’s co-founder. But Brazilians “wanted the more extreme option.” After debating the issue internally, the group allied itself with Bolsonaro toward the end of his campaign.

It was a “dire” situation, Ferreira argues, because if Bolsonaro had lost, the Workers Party would have regained the presidency. And so the group launched what it called the “Patriotic Journey,” sending its key representative to Brazil’s northeast region to convince voters that Workers Party policies would damage their way of life.

The movement’s charismatic spokesman, 23-year-old Kim Kataguiri, was elected to Congress in 2018, becoming the second youngest Brazilian currently serving. One of his first actions was to organize a 48-member “free market caucus” to support Guedes’ agenda. But now that Bolsonaro is in office, Kataguiri and his group have started criticizing the president when he violates their principles. In April, after Bolsonaro threatened to cancel a planned hike in gas prices to appease the truck drivers union, Free Brazil Movement co-founder Renan Santos compared him to former left-wing President Rousseff and called him “a truck driver’s bitch” on Twitter.

Paranoid Nationalism

Bolsonaro’s inner circle has embraced the one aspect of libertarianism that overlaps with its own ethos: opposition to socialism. But the critique is articulated in the language of a paranoid right-wing nationalism. In August 2018, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, met with former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon in New York City, announcing on Twitter that they were joining forces to fight “against cultural Marxism.” After his father was elected, Eduardo became the South American representative of Bannon’s “The Movement,” a project to promote populism and a nationalist agenda. “The greatest Brazilian philosopher alive,” according to Eduardo, is Olavo de Carvalho, a pipe-smoking septuagenarian who lectures on YouTube about the alleged dangers of globalism, feminism, and Islam, and who once claimed that Pepsi is sweetened with the cells of aborted fetuses.

Carvalho, who lives in Virginia, attended a dinner party at Bannon’s house in Washington, D.C., in January. His host expressed concern that “the face of Chicago”—meaning Guedes—could derail the nationalist agenda in Brazil. Carvalho reportedly denied that this would happen. When Bolsonaro made a trip to Washington, D.C., in March to meet with Trump, he attended a dinner at the Brazilian embassy and was seated between Bannon and Carvalho.

Bolsonaro’s foreign affairs minister (a position comparable to the American secretary of state) is Ernesto Araújo, a Carvalho disciple who believes the current administration will reverse the spiritual corruption caused by “a left-wing agenda” that includes “gender ideology” and “the taking over of the Catholic Church by Marxist ideology (with its attendant promotion of birth control).” Bolsonaro’s first education minister was a Carvalho recommendation, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, who proposed an Orwellian rewrite of school textbooks, mandating that they refer to Brazil’s military dictatorship as a “democratic regime of force.” After a disastrous three months, Bolsonaro replaced him with another Carvalho recommendation, conspiracy theorist Abraham Weintraub, who has suggested that the introduction of crack cocaine in Brazil was a left-wing plot.

But the biggest threat to Paulo Guedes’ free market agenda, according to the political scientist Almeida, might not be Carvalho or Araújo or Bannon. It’s the “industrialists of São Paulo” and the “agriculturalists of Mato Grosso”—crony capitalists with an economic stake in protectionism and regulation, who will wield influence in Congress to resist his policies. “I’m not sure how long Paulo Guedes will [tolerate] the defeats he’ll endure in this government,” Almeida says.

Starting Small

Bolsonaro is already demonstrating an unwillingness to risk political capital on meaningful reforms that hurt entrenched interests. But there’s cause for optimism that the new radicals in Brasília (the nation’s capital city) can cut red tape in significant ways. In April, the president signed a sweeping bill to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses. It exempts companies engaged in “low-risk” activities from licensing requirements, mandates that the government establish deadlines for responding to permit requests, and loosens the rules around initial public offerings, among other things. As a provisional decree, it went into immediate effect, but it will be invalidated if Congress doesn’t confirm it within 120 days.

Many of the Ministry of Economy’s initiatives don’t require congressional approval. For example: Attorney André Ramos, a self-described anarcho-capitalist who now directs the Department of Business Registry and Integration, has helped craft a proposal to make it easier to register a company in Brazil, further streamlining a process that was already improved dramatically by a digital government initiative predating Bolsonaro. In 2018, according to the World Bank, it took an average of 20.5 days to start a new business in the country—way down from 82.5 days the prior year. But there’s a long distance to go: In Chile, it takes just six days.

In a speech this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bolsonaro set the goal of moving Brazil into the top 50 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index over the next four years. (Its current ranking is 109 out of 190.) Fulfilling that mandate falls largely to Paulo Uebel, the Ministry of Economy’s 40-year-old “special secretary of debureaucratization, management, and digital government,” who oversees a staff of 1,200.

Uebel, who has held leadership positions at several libertarian think tanks, says his goal is to “simplify the lives of Brazilians” and to make the government stop “micromanaging the life of the entrepreneur.” He’s starting with the small stuff. If reformers go up against powerful special interests right away, Uebel says, “we’re probably going to lose.”

Kataguiri, now in Congress, agrees. “We’ll be able to approve some reforms, but these groups are very powerful,” he says. He expects “small and medium” successes, but nothing of the magnitude that “us [classical] liberals would like.”

As an example of the sort of changes his team is starting with, Uebel says he wants to eliminate the rules governing the size and functionality of the punch clocks that private sector employers are required to use when tracking workers’ hours. “Only two or three companies in Brazil provide this kind of punch clock,” Uebel says, and they lack political clout. More significant reforms, such as eliminating controls on workers’ hours—i.e., the restrictions that require a punch clock in the first place—would require a constitutional amendment that is highly unlikely to pass right now.

Uebel also plans to revise “over a thousand” federal procedures that currently require face-to-face meetings with government bureaucrats, allowing Brazilians to take care of more things online.

So what happens to the thousands of federal employees who would be replaced by websites if Uebel gets his way? They’ll remain on the payroll, because the authority to cut superfluous staff would require changing the constitution. Still, Uebel says he can thin the ranks through attrition.

Theoretically, the constitution does give the government authority to fire federal workers for poor performance, but Congress must first establish a legal framework for doing so. The Ministry of Economy will be working with lawmakers to craft such a bill, according to Wagner Lenhart, an attorney—and co-author of a book about Mises—who is now the “secretary of people management.” But legislation of this sort is sure to face enormous opposition from labor unions. Lenhart and Costa, who now heads Brazil’s Federal School of Public Administration, will also be pushing to substitute automatic promotion of government employees with a merit-based system.

What Next?

During the campaign, Bolsonaro deferred to Guedes on most questions related to economic policy. “In truth, I know nothing about the economy,” the president confessed to one reporter. “This is the difference between [Bolsonaro] and Trump,” says Ling. “The guy who thinks he knows everything will never be a libertarian.”

But a few months into his presidency, Bolsonaro is already overruling Guedes for political expediency. Tariffs in Brazil average 8.6 percent, or 17 times the Chilean rate; in the World Bank’s 2019 Doing Business survey, Brazil ranked 106 out of 190 on trade across borders. Brazil’s president has the authority to slash tariffs without congressional approval, and in February his administration announced an agreement with Mexico that liberalized the trade in light commercial automobiles. But Bolsonaro has also raised tariffs on powdered milk, announcing on Twitter that “everyone has won, in particular, the consumers of Brazil.”

Even before he was elected, Bolsonaro was citing the need for “responsible trade” and sympathizing with the “difficulties” that Brazilian companies face. Broad tariff reductions seem unlikely.

Guedes’ first major priority is to restructure Brazil’s fiscally insolvent pension system, which, because of an aging population, is projected to consume a staggering 26 percent of GDP by 2050. Standard & Poor’s downgraded Brazil’s credit rating last year based on its failure to pass pension reform: The system allows beneficiaries to retire at an average age of 58 and favors the better-off. The bottom 40 percent of the population gets just 18 percent of the paid benefits.

Guedes and Kataguiri are pushing for a unified system similar to Chile’s sistema previsional, which would replace the current intergenerational Ponzi scheme with an arrangement in which workers contribute to private savings accounts. The government would still provide a baseline benefit for those who are too poor to contribute, and current beneficiaries would be grandfathered into the old system.

But will it pass? The negotiations underway in Congress have been chaotic, and in April, Kataguiri was losing faith. “My outlook for the future,” he told The New York Times, is that “we won’t approve the pension reform, we will slip into a recession, and the government will be left hemorrhaging.”

Kataguiri’s souring outlook reflects the Free Brazil Movement’s shifting stance toward Bolsonaro. Ferreira, the group’s co-founder, reflects on simpler times when the Workers Party was in power and the group could be purely oppositional, explaining to its followers that “left-wing ideas were responsible for the [economic] crisis.” Now that the group is publicly associated with the president, it will be a public relations crisis for libertarians if his policies fail. “The left wing is going to come back at us,” says Ferreira. They could respond by pointing out that Bolsonaro isn’t really representative of their views, “but that’s really hard convincing to do.”

If Guedes succeeds more broadly, it could bring reductions in poverty and strong overall growth analogous to what the Chicago boys engineered in Chile. But it will come at a cost. The alliance that began three years ago on the initiative of Winston Ling, desperate to save Brazil from its worst economic crisis in modern history, was instrumental in electing a populist president who is doing significant damage to civil liberties. Brazil needs economic freedom, but it needs human rights too.

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Libertarians Forged an Alliance With Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Was It a Deal With the Devil?

On the morning of March 14, 2016, in a tiny office in Rio de Janeiro, a libertarian businessman named Winston Ling met with Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing congressman running a longshot campaign to be president of Brazil. Some of Ling’s closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil’s libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition.

Three years later, Bolsonaro is president. Ludwig von Mises scholars, free market think tankers, and even anarcho-capitalists now occupy top-level positions in his administration, where they hope to slash the government bureaucracy of the nation ranked as the absolute worst by the World Economic Forum in the category of “burden of government regulation”—a country that goes beyond regulating the number of hours that workers spend on the job to micromanaging the size and make of the punch clocks used to record their arrivals and departures. “I’m losing all my guys to government,” says Hélio Beltrão, founder and president of the Brazilian Mises Institute, with a grin.

But other prominent libertarians are outraged over their former comrades’ willingness to ally themselves with a politician The Intercept has called “the most extreme and repellent face of a resurgent, evangelical-driven right-wing attempt to drag the country backwards by decades.”

Bolsonaro is not a libertarian; in many ways he is sharply un-libertarian. He has been working to make it easier for police to kill civilians with impunity. He has repeatedly praised the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He has flatly declared himself “in favor of torture.” And in 2002 he said, “If I see two men kissing in the street, I will hit them.”

“It shows that their commitment to individual liberty is actually not that strong,” says Joel Pinheiro da Fonseca, a libertarian columnist at Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s largest newspaper. They want “a more authoritarian style of government that can bring about their economic policies more easily.”

Ling argues that the country didn’t have time to entertain fantasies of a truly principled free market politician rising to power. In 2016, when he met with Bolsonaro, the leftist Workers Party had controlled the presidency for 13 years. Brazil’s unemployment rate was approaching 12 percent, and the economy had contracted by more than 3 percent the prior year. “For me this was life or death,” he says. “I truly believed if someone else were elected president, Brazil would go down.”

The beginning of Bolsonaro’s presidency has been chaotic. The free marketeers have made some significant progress in cutting red tape but must also contend with powerful special interests that want to maintain the status quo. Concern is growing that their participation in Bolsonaro’s administration will damage the libertarian movement and help the Workers Party win back credibility. If Bolsonaro fails to meaningfully liberalize the economy, says Pedro Ferreira, a co-founder of the libertarian Free Brazil Movement, “we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.”

A Troublesome Alliance

Jair Bolsonaro is best understood as “Trump without the success in business,” says Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a Brazilian political scientist, career diplomat, and prominent pro-market intellectual. “He’s a populist, nationalist, xenophobe, [and] misogynist.”

A former Army captain with an undistinguished military career, Bolsonaro served 27 years in the National Congress before he was elected president, passing just two minor bills during his entire tenure.

He was best known for his incendiary public comments. In a 2011 interview, he told Playboy that he would be “incapable of loving a homosexual son,” preferring that a gay child “die in an accident.” In 2016, he said the “biggest mistake” of the dictatorship that used to rule Brazil “was to torture and not to kill.” In March, he asked the nation’s armed forces to commemorate the 55th anniversary of that coup.

In his first months in office, Bolsonaro’s most substantive policy proposal has been a draconian anti-crime package that includes more lenient treatment of police officers who kill while on duty.

Police shootings have been shockingly rampant in the country for a while. In 2017, law enforcement killed 5,144 civilians, or 14 people per day. In March 2018, two former Rio de Janeiro police officers were arrested on charges of murdering Marielle Franco, an openly gay city council member, by shooting her in the head with a submachine gun. According to Human Rights Watch, extrajudicial executions by cops are common. In 2003, Bolsonaro said that “as long as the state does not have the courage to adopt the death penalty, those death squads, in my opinion, are very welcome.”

Yet Bolsonaro also has an uncanny ability to connect with voters, which is what drew Winston Ling’s attention. “Every time he came to a city, there was a huge number of people at the airport,” the businessman recalls.

The 63-year-old Ling is a founding figure in Brazil’s libertarian movement—or movimento liberal, since the Portuguese word liberal has retained its classical meaning—who helped establish two prominent think tanks in the 1980s. He and his siblings co-own a handful of companies started by their Chinese immigrant father, who made a fortune in the soybean and petrochemical industries.

At their initial meeting in 2016, Ling gave Bolsonaro a half-hour tutorial on the Austrian school of free market economics and left him with two books, Frédéric Bastiat’s The Law and Mises’ Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow. (He chose those two, he recalls, because they’re “thin and easy to read”—and “politicians don’t read.”) He also offered to help Bolsonaro assemble a “council” of free market economists to join his campaign.

Bolsonaro accepted the offer, so Ling flew home to Shanghai and started working through his Rolodex. “Nobody wanted to meet him,” Ling recalls, because of Bolsonaro’s reputation as a populist firebrand and a homophobe. Then Ling got in touch with Paulo Guedes, who was “immediately very enthusiastic.”

A respected economist who earned a Ph.D. in 1978 from the University of Chicago, Guedes has spent most of his career in finance. On November 13, 2017, he and Bolsonaro had a five-hour meeting at a Sheraton Hotel in Rio. Guedes set the ground rules: He would consider working with Bolsonaro only if given “carte blanche” over economic affairs. After winning the presidency in October 2018, Bolsonaro made Guedes “super minister,” putting him in charge of a new Ministry of Economy that consolidated the government’s departments of finance, planning, industry, and commerce. Guedes then appointed a group of young libertarians to high-level roles within the new department.

Guedes’ brief experience in politics 30 years ago may have discouraged him from working with candidates who are more like-minded but have little chance of electoral success. In 1989, he helped craft the economic platform of Guilherme Afif Domingos, who ran for president on the Liberal Party ticket. They put forward a proposal that Brazil privatize every state-owned company and then use the revenue to wipe out the federal debt. Domingos came in sixth. “And so Brazil became a paradise for rent seekers and hell for entrepreneurs,” Guedes later told Piauí magazine.

Guedes’ openness to working with Bolsonaro may also derive in part from the efforts of the “Chicago boys,” a group of free market economists (trained at Guedes’ alma mater) who had helped guide Chile’s economy under the dictator Augusto Pinochet beginning in the 1970s. Guedes had no direct involvement with this cohort, but he held a teaching job at the University of Chile in the early ’80s, and he has expressed admiration for its economic impact. Thanks to the Chicago boys, Pinochet lifted price controls, slashed red tape, sold off state-owned companies, eased occupational licensing rules, and launched a quasi-private pension system.

The Chicago boys’ agenda was derailed in 1982, when an ill-advised fixed exchange rate produced an economic crisis, but in the long run their reforms worked as intended. After the restoration of a democratic government in 1989, Chileans voted to continue their program of market liberalism. Three decades of spectacular growth followed. From 1987 to 2017, Chile’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew ninefold and its poverty rate declined from 11.7 percent to 0.7 percent.

Of course, Pinochet also overthrew a democratically elected president, censored the press, murdered an estimated 3,200 citizens, and tortured many more. He was willing to back many of the reformers’ ideas about economic liberty, but he violated other liberties in abhorrent ways.

Guedes’ defenders argue that there’s a fundamental difference between his work with Bolsonaro and the morally dubious alliance struck by the Chicago boys. Bolsonaro is “working within the democratic institutions of Brazil,” says Diogo Costa, a political scientist with a high-level position at the Ministry of Economy who has worked at the libertarian Cato Institute and Atlas Economic Research Foundation. “I don’t think [Guedes] would agree to sign on to a project that violated more fundamental principles.”

Some fear, on the other hand, that Bolsonaro will gradually erode those democratic institutions. His administration “is engaged in a constant war against every single institution that could serve as an opposition to his power,” says Fonseca, the libertarian Folha de S.Paulo columnist.

Pedro Menezes, a 25-year-old libertarian who writes for Gazeta do Povo and InfoMoney, has compared Bolsonaro to Hugo Chávez, the late socialist leader of Venezuela, who dismantled institutional constraints on his power after being elected. Menezes is particularly troubled by Bolsonaro’s suggestion that he would consider packing the supreme court and lowering its mandatory retirement age, enabling him to appoint more justices.

Menezes decided to distance himself from his country’s libertarian movement after attending an October 22, 2016 event in São Paulo that was organized by the free market Leadership Training Institute. Bolsonaro, a longshot candidate at the time, was invited on stage to join in a dialogue with a group of prominent libertarians. A large contingent of his supporters showed up, baiting the audience with chants of “Ustra! Ustra! Ustra!”—a reference to the notorious Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, an army colonel who had arrested and tortured dissidents during the military regime.

Bolsonaro made outrageous comments during the event, according to Menezes, but his co-panelists treated him respectfully anyway. “I was so pissed I left in the middle,” he says. “It was this transformational moment for me.”

Other libertarian-leaning groups have kept their distance from Brazil’s new president. Partido Novo, a political party founded in 2011, backed the more orthodox libertarian candidate João Amoêdo in the 2018 election. And the young political movement Livres, which used to be part of the Social Liberal Party (PSL), broke off in January 2018, when Bolsonaro took over the larger group.

In an essay explaining his vote to separate from the PSL, the political scientist Costa wrote that “when populism enters through the window, freedom goes out the door.” But after Bolsonaro won the election and Costa was offered his position in the Ministry of Economy, he took it. “If I had to work [directly] under people who didn’t share my vision and values and were committed to a different agenda,” he says, “I wouldn’t have” accepted.

Brazil’s most influential libertarian organization is the Free Brazil Movement, which helped organize massive street protests in 2015 calling for the impeachment of Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff. (She was removed from office on August 31, 2016.) The group initially resisted supporting Bolsonaro in the 2018 election and tried to “build up more reasonable people,” says Ferreira, the organization’s co-founder. But Brazilians “wanted the more extreme option.” After debating the issue internally, the group allied itself with Bolsonaro toward the end of his campaign.

It was a “dire” situation, Ferreira argues, because if Bolsonaro had lost, the Workers Party would have regained the presidency. And so the group launched what it called the “Patriotic Journey,” sending its key representative to Brazil’s northeast region to convince voters that Workers Party policies would damage their way of life.

The movement’s charismatic spokesman, 23-year-old Kim Kataguiri, was elected to Congress in 2018, becoming the second youngest Brazilian currently serving. One of his first actions was to organize a 48-member “free market caucus” to support Guedes’ agenda. But now that Bolsonaro is in office, Kataguiri and his group have started criticizing the president when he violates their principles. In April, after Bolsonaro threatened to cancel a planned hike in gas prices to appease the truck drivers union, Free Brazil Movement co-founder Renan Santos compared him to former left-wing President Rousseff and called him “a truck driver’s bitch” on Twitter.

Paranoid Nationalism

Bolsonaro’s inner circle has embraced the one aspect of libertarianism that overlaps with its own ethos: opposition to socialism. But the critique is articulated in the language of a paranoid right-wing nationalism. In August 2018, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, met with former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon in New York City, announcing on Twitter that they were joining forces to fight “against cultural Marxism.” After his father was elected, Eduardo became the South American representative of Bannon’s “The Movement,” a project to promote populism and a nationalist agenda. “The greatest Brazilian philosopher alive,” according to Eduardo, is Olavo de Carvalho, a pipe-smoking septuagenarian who lectures on YouTube about the alleged dangers of globalism, feminism, and Islam, and who once claimed that Pepsi is sweetened with the cells of aborted fetuses.

Carvalho, who lives in Virginia, attended a dinner party at Bannon’s house in Washington, D.C., in January. His host expressed concern that “the face of Chicago”—meaning Guedes—could derail the nationalist agenda in Brazil. Carvalho reportedly denied that this would happen. When Bolsonaro made a trip to Washington, D.C., in March to meet with Trump, he attended a dinner at the Brazilian embassy and was seated between Bannon and Carvalho.

Bolsonaro’s foreign affairs minister (a position comparable to the American secretary of state) is Ernesto Araújo, a Carvalho disciple who believes the current administration will reverse the spiritual corruption caused by “a left-wing agenda” that includes “gender ideology” and “the taking over of the Catholic Church by Marxist ideology (with its attendant promotion of birth control).” Bolsonaro’s first education minister was a Carvalho recommendation, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, who proposed an Orwellian rewrite of school textbooks, mandating that they refer to Brazil’s military dictatorship as a “democratic regime of force.” After a disastrous three months, Bolsonaro replaced him with another Carvalho recommendation, conspiracy theorist Abraham Weintraub, who has suggested that the introduction of crack cocaine in Brazil was a left-wing plot.

But the biggest threat to Paulo Guedes’ free market agenda, according to the political scientist Almeida, might not be Carvalho or Araújo or Bannon. It’s the “industrialists of São Paulo” and the “agriculturalists of Mato Grosso”—crony capitalists with an economic stake in protectionism and regulation, who will wield influence in Congress to resist his policies. “I’m not sure how long Paulo Guedes will [tolerate] the defeats he’ll endure in this government,” Almeida says.

Starting Small

Bolsonaro is already demonstrating an unwillingness to risk political capital on meaningful reforms that hurt entrenched interests. But there’s cause for optimism that the new radicals in Brasília (the nation’s capital city) can cut red tape in significant ways. In April, the president signed a sweeping bill to reduce the regulatory burden on businesses. It exempts companies engaged in “low-risk” activities from licensing requirements, mandates that the government establish deadlines for responding to permit requests, and loosens the rules around initial public offerings, among other things. As a provisional decree, it went into immediate effect, but it will be invalidated if Congress doesn’t confirm it within 120 days.

Many of the Ministry of Economy’s initiatives don’t require congressional approval. For example: Attorney André Ramos, a self-described anarcho-capitalist who now directs the Department of Business Registry and Integration, has helped craft a proposal to make it easier to register a company in Brazil, further streamlining a process that was already improved dramatically by a digital government initiative predating Bolsonaro. In 2018, according to the World Bank, it took an average of 20.5 days to start a new business in the country—way down from 82.5 days the prior year. But there’s a long distance to go: In Chile, it takes just six days.

In a speech this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bolsonaro set the goal of moving Brazil into the top 50 in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index over the next four years. (Its current ranking is 109 out of 190.) Fulfilling that mandate falls largely to Paulo Uebel, the Ministry of Economy’s 40-year-old “special secretary of debureaucratization, management, and digital government,” who oversees a staff of 1,200.

Uebel, who has held leadership positions at several libertarian think tanks, says his goal is to “simplify the lives of Brazilians” and to make the government stop “micromanaging the life of the entrepreneur.” He’s starting with the small stuff. If reformers go up against powerful special interests right away, Uebel says, “we’re probably going to lose.”

Kataguiri, now in Congress, agrees. “We’ll be able to approve some reforms, but these groups are very powerful,” he says. He expects “small and medium” successes, but nothing of the magnitude that “us [classical] liberals would like.”

As an example of the sort of changes his team is starting with, Uebel says he wants to eliminate the rules governing the size and functionality of the punch clocks that private sector employers are required to use when tracking workers’ hours. “Only two or three companies in Brazil provide this kind of punch clock,” Uebel says, and they lack political clout. More significant reforms, such as eliminating controls on workers’ hours—i.e., the restrictions that require a punch clock in the first place—would require a constitutional amendment that is highly unlikely to pass right now.

Uebel also plans to revise “over a thousand” federal procedures that currently require face-to-face meetings with government bureaucrats, allowing Brazilians to take care of more things online.

So what happens to the thousands of federal employees who would be replaced by websites if Uebel gets his way? They’ll remain on the payroll, because the authority to cut superfluous staff would require changing the constitution. Still, Uebel says he can thin the ranks through attrition.

Theoretically, the constitution does give the government authority to fire federal workers for poor performance, but Congress must first establish a legal framework for doing so. The Ministry of Economy will be working with lawmakers to craft such a bill, according to Wagner Lenhart, an attorney—and co-author of a book about Mises—who is now the “secretary of people management.” But legislation of this sort is sure to face enormous opposition from labor unions. Lenhart and Costa, who now heads Brazil’s Federal School of Public Administration, will also be pushing to substitute automatic promotion of government employees with a merit-based system.

What Next?

During the campaign, Bolsonaro deferred to Guedes on most questions related to economic policy. “In truth, I know nothing about the economy,” the president confessed to one reporter. “This is the difference between [Bolsonaro] and Trump,” says Ling. “The guy who thinks he knows everything will never be a libertarian.”

But a few months into his presidency, Bolsonaro is already overruling Guedes for political expediency. Tariffs in Brazil average 8.6 percent, or 17 times the Chilean rate; in the World Bank’s 2019 Doing Business survey, Brazil ranked 106 out of 190 on trade across borders. Brazil’s president has the authority to slash tariffs without congressional approval, and in February his administration announced an agreement with Mexico that liberalized the trade in light commercial automobiles. But Bolsonaro has also raised tariffs on powdered milk, announcing on Twitter that “everyone has won, in particular, the consumers of Brazil.”

Even before he was elected, Bolsonaro was citing the need for “responsible trade” and sympathizing with the “difficulties” that Brazilian companies face. Broad tariff reductions seem unlikely.

Guedes’ first major priority is to restructure Brazil’s fiscally insolvent pension system, which, because of an aging population, is projected to consume a staggering 26 percent of GDP by 2050. Standard & Poor’s downgraded Brazil’s credit rating last year based on its failure to pass pension reform: The system allows beneficiaries to retire at an average age of 58 and favors the better-off. The bottom 40 percent of the population gets just 18 percent of the paid benefits.

Guedes and Kataguiri are pushing for a unified system similar to Chile’s sistema previsional, which would replace the current intergenerational Ponzi scheme with an arrangement in which workers contribute to private savings accounts. The government would still provide a baseline benefit for those who are too poor to contribute, and current beneficiaries would be grandfathered into the old system.

But will it pass? The negotiations underway in Congress have been chaotic, and in April, Kataguiri was losing faith. “My outlook for the future,” he told The New York Times, is that “we won’t approve the pension reform, we will slip into a recession, and the government will be left hemorrhaging.”

Kataguiri’s souring outlook reflects the Free Brazil Movement’s shifting stance toward Bolsonaro. Ferreira, the group’s co-founder, reflects on simpler times when the Workers Party was in power and the group could be purely oppositional, explaining to its followers that “left-wing ideas were responsible for the [economic] crisis.” Now that the group is publicly associated with the president, it will be a public relations crisis for libertarians if his policies fail. “The left wing is going to come back at us,” says Ferreira. They could respond by pointing out that Bolsonaro isn’t really representative of their views, “but that’s really hard convincing to do.”

If Guedes succeeds more broadly, it could bring reductions in poverty and strong overall growth analogous to what the Chicago boys engineered in Chile. But it will come at a cost. The alliance that began three years ago on the initiative of Winston Ling, desperate to save Brazil from its worst economic crisis in modern history, was instrumental in electing a populist president who is doing significant damage to civil liberties. Brazil needs economic freedom, but it needs human rights too.

from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2YYGua3
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The Limits Of American Destructiveness

Authored by Dmitry Orlov via Club Orlov blog,

US foreign policy has always been directed at wrecking anything that wasn’t deemed sufficiently American and replacing it with something more acceptable – especially if that something allowed wealth to flow into the US from the outside. Compromises were reserved for the USSR, but even there the Americans constantly tried to cheat. For everyone else there was just submission, which was usually tactfully disguised as a positive – a seat at the big table which offered better chances for peace, prosperity and economic and social development.

Of course, it was a simple enough matter to pierce this veil of hypocritical politeness and to point out that the US, living far beyond its means, has only managed to survive by looting the rest of the world, but anyone who dared to do so would be ostracized, sanctioned, regime-changed, invaded and destroyed—whatever it took.

The US establishment has lavished its wrath on anyone who dared to oppose it ideologically, but it reserved its most extreme forms of malice for those who dared commit the cardinal sin of attempting to sell oil for anything other than US dollars. Iraq was destroyed for this very reason, then Libya. With Syria the juggernaut bogged down and stalled out; with Iran it is unlikely to ever get started.

Even the spineless European politicians are now forced to admit that US policies are designed to enrich certain American interests at the expense of their constituents; they understand by now that further denial would cause them further harm at the polls. Most insultingly to the American ego, US attempts at making Russia and China submit are being greeted with shrugs, titters and eye rolls. And now anybody who wants to can openly criticize the US and scheme behind its back.

How times have changed! US politicians and officials have abandoned all attempts at maintaining decorum and no longer disguise their rapacious, grasping ways. Instead of veiled threats, they now deploy big lies and fake threats. Focusing on the manufacture and dissemination of fakes, they have been attempting to use them to coerce obedience. There are the fake threats—Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, Cuban—that are used to call for discipline within NATO and for compliance with US unilateral sanctions.

There are also the fake (or false flag) events—a Boeing shot down over the Ukraine by “pro-Russian rebels”; the Skripal poisoning; fake chemical attacks in Syria preposterously blamed on the government; damaged oil tankers in UAE blamed on Iran. These fakes are being used as an an excuse to wreck everything—international security and trade agreements, the systems for insuring that these agreements are adhered to, and world trade.

Before the Americans would do their best to wreck anything that wasn’t theirs, then work to replace it with something that was theirs; but now they have nothing to offer as a replacement for what they are destroying. The only thing the US can offer China is Chinese victory in the trade war. China does not need the US, and this point is being rather loudly pounded home, not just by the Chinese government but by private companies and individuals as well.

First, there is a flood of countersanctions. In particular, a halt to the export of rare earth minerals will shut down electronics manufacturing and with it the entire US high tech sector. Then there are the bonuses to those who buy Huawei products and punishments for buying anything American, up to and including eating at McDonald’s. iPhones have been all but banned—not by the government but by peer pressure. Taking a trip to the US is now a firing offense. There is now a good chance that, caught up in this patriotic uplift, the Chinese are being prepared to make any sacrifice for the sake of outright victory in their trade war with the US.

But do the Americans still have the power to destroy? When Saddam Hussein decided to start selling oil for euros, the CIA organized a provocation that caused him to invade Kuweit as punishment for stealing Iraqi oil. This allowed the US to organize a gigantic expeditionary force with divisions from a large number of countries, including Syria and Egypt and pretty much all of NATO. After a decade of Hussein festering in place, a somewhat smaller coalition dealt him the coup de grâce, destroying Iraq in the process. The victims of the American invasion and occupation outnumber Saddam Hussein’s victims by orders of magnitude. Later, the same thing was done to Muammar Qaddafi, for similar reasons, and Libya is likely to remain as a ruin. There, some sort of minor coalition was cobbled together.

But now the US finds that it urgently needs to knock out Iran because otherwise it will be too late. It is time to form a new coalition and Mike Pompeo has started racing around Eurasia. First off, he offended the Germans by canceling his state visit with Angela Merkel on a moment’s notice and without offering a reason. Instead, he flew to Baghdad—a perfect location for launching an attack on Iran, except that the Iraqi response was a message of solidarity with Iran, willingness to mediate the US-Iranian dispute, and consideration of a ban on US troops on Iraqi soil.

And so Mike flew to Sochi, where he met with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and, briefly, with Putin. Most likely, Putin told him where he can stuff his war plans, and so Mike canceled his planned trip to Moscow, to avoid having Sergei Lavrov wipe his feet on him again. And so Mike flew on to Europe, where he got a quick “no” on Iran from EU foreign policy head Federica Mogherini and an outright refusal to meet from the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Great Britain. And so Mike flew back to Washington. You can’t tell anything by looking at his smirking fat mug, but I am sure that he was crying on the inside.

US actions around the world can now be compiled into two lists.

  1. The first list is of what the US has succeeded or may yet succeed in wrecking.

  2. The second list is of what the US wants to or has been trying to wreck but won’t be able to.

There is no third list of what the US has managed to wreck and then make whole again. The challenge for the whole world is to move as many items as possible from the first list to the second list. There are many ways of going about doing this that do have a chance of working and one that doesn’t: negotiating with Americans. Because they lie and cheat and aren’t worth talking to.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/30Wn2fU Tyler Durden

Duterte Says He Used To Be Gay, But “Cured Himself” When He Met His Wife

Did Philippines President and alleged homophobe Rodrigo Duterte just pull an ‘American Beauty’?

The Philippines strongman, who is notorious for his unfiltered public comments (late last year, he accused “most” Catholic Priests of being closet homosexuals), made an unexpected “admission” during a visit to Japan.

During a speech on Thursday, Duterte outed one of his political opponents as a homosexual, and then he outed himself

Duterte

According to local media reports cited by RT, while bashing Senator Antonio Trillanes, an ardent critic of his rule, Duterte implored his audience to “ask any gay person who sees Trillanes move, they’ll say he’s gay.”

He went on to say that, in this respect, he and Trillanes are “similar.”

But…

Duterte said he “became a man again” after meeting his now ex-wife, and that he “cured himself” of homosexuality. He finished with a rather cryptic proclamation where he referred to himself in both the third and first person: “Duterte is gay. So I am gay, I don’t care if I’m gay or not.”

It’s not entirely clear what he meant by that (though if you have any theories, feel free to leave them in the comments), but it’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Duterte has discussed his sexuality in this half-joking, half-serious way. In 2017, he joked that he had considered becoming bisexual so he could “have fun both ways.”

Keep in mind, this is the same world leader who once shocked a crowd by recounting how he molested his family’s maid when he was a teenager, telling them that he once slipped his hand in her panties while she was sleeping, them ran off when she woke up.

This contrasts with Duterte’s reputation as an alleged homophobe, having once described US ambassador Philip Goldberg as a “gay ambassador” and a “son of a whore.”

Though Duterte claimed to be in favor of legalizing gay marriage in the conservative Catholic country early in his presidency, he has since changed his position, saying it would clash with the country’s civic and religious principles.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2wxnLpU Tyler Durden

America’s Allies In The Middle East Are The Real “Troika Of Tyranny”

Authored by Danny Sjursen via TonDispatch.com,

John Bolton claims that “socialist” states in Latin America are a threat. He’s lying to you.

American foreign policy can be so retro, not to mention absurd. Despite being bogged down in more military interventions than it can reasonably handle, the Trump team recently picked a new fight—in Latin America. That’s right! Uncle Sam kicked off a sequel to the Cold War with some of our southern neighbors, while resuscitating the boogeyman of socialism. In the process, National Security Adviser John Bolton treated us all to a new phrase, no less laughable than Bush the younger’s 2002 “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea). He labeled Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny.”

Alliteration, no less! The only problem is that the phrase ridiculously overestimates both the degree of collaboration among those three states and the dangers they pose to their hegemonic neighbor to the north. Bottom line: In no imaginable fashion do those little tin-pot tyrannies offer either an existential or even a serious threat to the United States. Evidently, however, the phrase was meant to conjure up enough ill will and fear to justify the Trump team’s desire for sweeping regime change in Latin America. Think of it as a micro-version of Cold War 2.0.

Odds are that Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, both unrepentant neocons, are the ones driving this Latin American Cold War reboot, even as, halfway across the planet, they’ve been pushing for warwith Iran. Meanwhile, it’s increasingly clear that Donald Trump gets his own kick out of being a “war president” and the unique form of threat production that goes with it.

Since it’s a recipe for disaster, strap yourself in for a bumpy ride. After all, the demonization of Latin American “socialists” and an ill-advised war in the Persian Gulf have already been part of our lived experience. Under the circumstances, remember your Karl Marx: History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.

And add this irony to the grim farce to come: You need only look to the Middle East to see a genuine all-American troika of tyranny. I’m thinking about the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the military junta in Egypt, and the colonizing state of Israel—all countries that eschew real democracy and are working together to rain chaos on an already unstable region.

If you weren’t an American, this might already be clear to you. With that in mind, let’s try on a pair of non-American shoes and take a brief tour of a real troika of tyranny on this planet, a threesome that just happen to be President Trump’s best buddies in the Middle East.

AMERICA’S FAVORITE KINGDOM

The Saudi royals are among the worst despots around. Yet Washington has long given them a pass. Sure, they possess oodles of oil, black gold upon which the United States was once but no longer is heavily dependent. American support for those royals reaches back to World War II, when President Franklin Roosevelt took a detour after the Yalta Conference to meet King Ibn Saud and first struck the devilish deal that, in the decades to come, would keep the oil flowing. In return, Washington would provide ample backing to the kingdom and turn a blind eye to its extensive human rights abuses.

Ultimately, this bargain proved as counterproductive as it was immoral. Sometimes the Saudis didn’t even live up to their end of the bargain. For example, they shut the oil spigot during the 1973 Yom Kippur War to express collective Arab frustration with Washington’s favoritism toward Israel. Worse still, the royals used their continual oil windfall to buildreligious schools and mosques throughout the Muslim world in order to spread the regime’s intolerant Wahhabi faith. From there, it was a relatively short road to the 9/11 attacks in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals (and not one was an Iranian).

More recently, in the Syrian civil war, Saudi Arabia even backed the al-Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda franchise. That’s right, an American partner funded an offshoot of the very organization that took down the twin towers and damaged the Pentagon. For this there have been no consequences.

In other words, Washington stands shoulder to shoulder with a truly abhorrent regime, while simultaneously complaining bitterly about the despotism and tyranny of nations of which it’s less fond. The hypocrisy should be (but generally isn’t) considered staggering here. We’re talking about a Saudi government that only recently allowed women to drive automobiles and still beheads them for “witchcraft and sorcery.” Indeed, mass execution is a staple of the regime. Recently, the kingdom executed 37 men in a single day. (One of them was even reportedly crucified.) Most were not the “terrorists” they were made out to be, but dissidents from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority convicted, as Amnesty International put it, “after sham trials that…relied on confessions extracted through torture.”

During the Arab Spring of 2011, the Saudi royals certainly proved anything but friends to the budding democratic movements brewing across the region. Indeed, its military even invaded a tiny neighbor to the east, Bahrain, to suppress civil-rights protests by that country’s embattled Shia majority. (A Sunni royal family runs the show there.) In Yemen, the Saudis continue to terror bomb civilians in its war against Houthi militias. Tens of thousands have died—the exact number isn’t known—under a brutal bombing campaign and at least 85,000 Yemeni children have already starved to death thanks to the war and a Saudi blockade of what was already the Arab world’s poorest country. The hell unleashed on Yemen has been dubbed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. It has already producedmillions of refugees and, at present, the world’s worst cholera epidemic.

Through it all, Washington stood by its royals time and again, with The Donald far more gleefully pro-Saudi than his predecessors. His first foreign excursion, after all, was to that kingdom’s capital, Riyadh, where the president seemed to relish joining the martial pageantry of a Saudi “sword dance.” He also let it be known that the cash would keep flowing from the kingdom into military-industrial coffers in this country, announcing a supposedly record $110 billion set of arms deals (including a number closed by the Obama administration and ones that may never come to fruition). Son-in-law Jared Kushner even continues to maintain a bromance with the ambitious and brutal ruling Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

In other words, with fulsome support from Washington, sophisticated American weapons, and a boatload of American cash, Saudi Arabia continues to unleash terror at home and abroad. This much is certain: If you’re looking for a troika of tyrants, that country should top your list.

AMERICA’S FAVORITE MILITARY AUTOCRACY

The United States also backs—and Trump seems to love—Egypt’s military ruler Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. At a press conference at the White House in September 2017, the president leaned toward the general and announced that he was “doing a great job.” Hardly anyone inside the Beltway, in the media, or even on Main Street batted an eye. Washington has, of course, long supported Egypt’s various tyrants, including the brutal Hosni Mubarak who was overthrown early in the Arab Spring. Cairo remains the second-largestannual recipient of American military aid at $1.3 billion annually. In fact, 75 percent of such aid goes to just two countries, the other being Israel. In a sense, Washington simply bribes both states not to fight each other. Now, that’s diplomacy for you!

So, how’s Egypt’s military using all the guns and butter the United States sends its way? Brutally, of course. After Mubarak was overthrown in 2011, Mohammed Morsi won a free and fair election. Less than two years later, the military, which abhors his Muslim Brotherhood organization, seized power in a coup. Enter General al-Sisi. And when Morsi supporters rallied to protest the putsch, the general, who had appointed himself president, promptly ordered his troops to open fire. At least 900 protesters were killed in what came to be known as the 2013 Rabaa Massacre. Since then, Sisi has ruled with an iron fist, extending his personal power, winning a sham reelection with 97.8 percent of the vote, and pushing through major constitutional changes that will allow the generalissimo to stay in power until at least 2030. Washington, of course, remained silent.

Sisi has run a veritable police state, replete with human-rights abuses and mass incarceration. Last year, he even had a show trial of 739 Muslim Brotherhood-associated defendants, 75 of whom were sentenced to death in a single day. He also uses “emergency” counterterrorism laws to jail peaceful dissidents. Thousands of them have gone before military courts. In addition, in US-backed Egypt most forms of independent organization and peaceful assembly remain banned. Cairo even collaborates with its old enemy Israel to maintain a stranglehold of a blockade on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which the United Nations has termed “inhumane.”

Yet Egypt gets a hall pass from the Trump administration. It matters not at all that few places on the planet suppress free speech as effectively as Egypt now does—not since it buys American weaponry and generally does as Washington wants in the region. In other words, a diplomatic state of marital (and martial) bliss protects the second member of the real troika of tyranny.

AMERICA’S FAVORITE APARTHEID STATE

Some will be surprised, even offended, that I include Israel in this imaginary troika. Certainly, on the surface, Israel’s democracy bears no relation to the political worlds of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Still, scratch below the gilded surface of Israeli life and you’ll soon unearth staggering civil-liberties abuses and a penchant for institutional oppression. After all, so extreme have been the abuses of ever more right-wing Israeli governments against the stateless Palestinians that even some mainstream foreign leaders and scholars now compare that country to apartheid South Africa.

And the label is justified. Palestinians are essentially isolated in the equivalent of open-air prisons in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—not unlike the bantustans of South Africa in the years when that country was white-ruled. In the impoverished, refugee-camp atmosphere of these state-lets, Palestinians lack anything resembling civil rights. They can’t even vote for the Israeli prime ministers who lord it over them. What’s more, the Palestinian citizens of Israel (some 20 percent of the population), despite technically possessing the franchise, are systematically repressed in a variety of ways.

Evidence of an apartheid-style state is everywhere apparent in the Palestinian territories. In violation of countless international norms and UN resolutions, Israel imposes its own version of a police state—functionally, a military occupation of land legally possessed by Arabs. It has begun a de facto annexation of Palestinian land by building a “security wall” through Palestinian villages. Its military constructs special “Jewish only” roads in the West Bank linking illegal Israeli settlements, while further fracturing the fiction of Palestinian contiguity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not only refused to withdraw those settlements or halt the colonization of Palestinian territory by Jewish Israelis, but during the recent Israeli election promised to begin the actual annexation of the West Bank in his new term.

Israeli military actions are regularly direct violations of the principles of proportionality in warfare, which means that the ratio of Israeli to Palestinian casualties is invariably absurdly disproportionate. Since last spring, at least 175 Palestinians (almost all unarmed) have been shot to death by Israeli soldiers along the Gaza Strip fence line, while 5,884 others were wounded by live ammunition. Ninety-four of those had to have a limb amputated. A staggering 948 of the wounded were minors. In that period, just one Israeli died and 11 were wounded in those same clashes.

Life in blockaded Gaza is almost unimaginably awful. So stringent are the sanctions imposed that one prominent official in a leaked diplomatic cable admitted that Israeli policy was to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse.” In fact, back in 2012, one of that country’s military spokesmen even indicated that food was being allowed into the blockaded strip on a 2,300-calories-a-day count per Gazan—just enough, that is, to avoid starvation.

Through it all, with President Trump at the wheel, Netanyahu can feel utterly assured of the near limitless backing of the United States. The Trump team has essentially sanctioned all Israeli behavior, thereby legitimizing the present state of Palestinian life. Trump has moved the US embassy to contested Jerusalem—admitting once and for all that Washington sees the holy city as the sole property of the Jewish state—recognized the illegal Israeli annexation of the conquered Syrian Golan Heights, and increased the flow of military aid and arms to Israel, already the number-one recipient of such American largesse.

Sometimes, in the age of Trump, it almost seems as if “Bibi” Netanyahu were the one guiding American policy throughout the Middle East. No wonder Israel rounds out that troika of tyranny.

WAG THE DOG?

Beyond their wretched human-rights records and undemocratic tendencies, that troika has another particularly relevant commonality as the United States reportedly prepares for a possible war with Iran. Two of those countries—Israel and Saudi Arabia—desperately desire that the American military take on their Iranian nemesis. The third, Egypt, will go along with just about anything as long as Uncle Sam keeps the military aid flowing to Cairo. Think of it as potentially the ultimate “wag the dog” scenario, with Washington taking on the role of the dog.

This alone should make Washington officials cautious. After all, war with Iran would surely prove disastrous (whatever damage was done to that country). If you don’t think so, you haven’t been living through the last 17-plus years of this country’s forever wars. Unfortunately, no one should count on such caution from John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, or even Donald Trump.

So settle into your seats folks and prepare to watch the empire swallow the republic whole.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2I9hNRq Tyler Durden

Nearly One-Quarter Of Americans Worry About Money ‘All Of The Time’

It’s a question that the financial press – not to mention millions of struggling Americans – have returned to time and time again (recently, it even received its own Vox explainer): If we are truly in the middle of an economic boom, then how come so many Americans, even members of the vaunted middle class, feel like they’re barely treading water?

According to the Fed, roughly 40% of Americans couldn’t cover an emergency $400 expense. Wage growth has been stagnant for decades. Meanwhile, our monetary policy makers point to a lack of inflation in the economy as an excuse for keeping interest rates on hold, even as the man on the street, and even a growing number of economists, contend that prices have been climbing much more quickly than the official data let on.

And we’re not just talking about the obvious factors like rising tuition, rent and health-care costs. It increasingly appears that the central bank is underestimating food inflation, even as the prices of many agricultural commodities remain in a slump (of course, Trump’s trade war isn’t helping).

To the growing list of distressing data points, we can now add one more: Gallup has published a poll showing that roughly 45% of Americans would rate their financial situation as “fair” or “poor” – and that a staggering 70% expected they would be financially better off. And while two-thirds of Americans say they have enough money to live comfortably, another one-third do not. But even more concerning is the 25% of respondents who say they’re constantly worried about not having enough money to cover their household expenses. Roughly the same number said they’re only just making ends meet.

In a ranking of Americans’ financial anxieties, the overwhelming majority of respondents said they’re at least a little worried about being able to afford health care costs and having enough money for retirement.

Health Care

Gallup synthesizes the polling data into what it calls a “Personal Financial Worry” index. This year, 22% of respondents said they were worried about six or seven of the seven items, qualifying them for the “highly worried” category. Another 24% worry about three to five items and are classified as “moderately worried.” The remaining 55% said they have few financial worries, while 30% – the group most likely to have a college degree, gainful employment and the ownership of stocks – are worried about none of the seven.

Gallup

Americans’ love affair with auto- and student-loans has helped push outstanding consumer credit above $4 trillion. Even though the pace of credit growth slowed last month, once the next recession comes, the number of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet will likely explode higher, while those who are already struggling might quickly find their backs against a wall.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2W6zczh Tyler Durden

Trade Wars: A Real-Life Game Of Thrones

Authored by Bruce Yandle via The American Institute for Economic Research,

It’s ironic, to say the least, that the Chinese government chose to deny a national broadcast of “Game of Thrones”’ last installment recently, signaling to both its own people and to the United States that the ongoing trade war is far from over.

After all, Mr. Trump’s much cherished trade wars are a game where one powerful leader confronts another – a game of thrones, so to speak, where skirmishes and battles occur and the innocent become victims in an inescapable field of combat.

Unlike marvelously created made-for-television episodes where someone usually emerges victorious, in trade wars, everyone loses.

Those Chinese who looked forward to seeing the final episode may have instead seen some of the last few weeks’ televised propaganda and concluded that the United States is not to be trusted. At the same time, Americans – Kansas grain farmers who previously shipped crops to China; South Carolina auto workers who built China-bound BMWs, Volvos, and Hondas; or ordinary U.S. Walmart shoppers paying slightly higher prices – are not doing quite as well as they were before Mr. Trump’s game of thrones started.

Of course, we’ve all heard the justifications: China has not played by the rules, its enforcement of intellectual property rights leaves much to be desired, and its government-owned enterprises are subsidized unfairly. But we must also recognize that the “victimized” American businesses who still chose to do business in China did so voluntarily. In spite of its well-known imperfections, they saw China’s marketplace as attractive and profitable.

Of course, it would be great if we could compel China to improve its practices without subjecting American workers and consumers to friendly fire. And we might all wish to call Camelot home. The situation is much like when a landowner buys a fine home at a discount next to an industrial plant and then brings suit to force a clean-up. One cannot voluntarily come to the nuisance and then expect a court of law to provide a windfall. But it doesn’t hurt to try.

Those who think that the ongoing trade wars with China and other countries are making America great should look closely at what is happening to U.S. industrial production, which has fallen for three of the last four months. They might consider falling retail sales. Or they might look at real-time GDP growth estimates from the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Atlanta, which are now registering less that 2.0 percent in real terms.

For a wider-ranging perspective, they might consider the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s monthly estimates of future growth for each of the 50 states. These show strong state economic growth generally disappearing, and forecast state recessions in a few places.

If we are engaged in a game of thrones, the data suggest we are losing.

Politicians are savvy. They have all of this information. So why would they deliberately choose policies that could cause damage to Americans’ economic prospects in an election year? Why would those responsible for securing the wellbeing of all Americans choose to favor specific special interest groups such as organized labor in the industrial north instead of working to secure prosperity for all Americans?

There are at least two answers to these questions:

First, perhaps the savvy people making these political choices are far better informed about the outcome of their game of thrones than the rest of us mortals. Based on the cards they are holding, they fully expect to win and make Americans stronger in the long-run, even though we are weaker in the immediate future.

Alternately, perhaps politicians who would risk a recession over a trade war, all while preparing to run for office, are fundamentally risk takers. After all, these are competitive people drawn to a high-stakes profession. They might prefer playing a game of thrones, seeking a resounding victory when it is not at all clear that they will win. If they succeed, the victory may taste sweeter, but in the meantime, the common folk are made poorer.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2EXVOfJ Tyler Durden

As Quant Funds Shutter, Stevie Cohen Doubles Down

It’s not just humans who have no idea how to trade this market: math PhD’s are just as clueless, and as a result quants are having a deja vu of December when they suffered jarring losses in a short period of time, just like their human peers.

For evidence, look no further than HBK Capital Management, which is closing its quant unit, adding to the recent pile up of hedge funds that wagered on algorithmic trading… poorly.

According to Bloomberg, the Dallas-based firm which manages a total of $8 billion, is liquidating a more than $400 million quant fund and returning capital to investors, based on a statement Friday. HBK is also cutting its allocation to a statistical arb fund. The quant strategy was one of seven that HBK employed, alongside corporate credit, emerging markets, event-driven equities, structured credit, developed markets fixed income and volatility.

“HBK’s decision was prompted by a reevaluation of its equity statistical arbitrage effort, which performed exceptionally well through 2014 but less well in recent periods,” according to the statement from the $10 billion firm. “Although recent performance compared favorably with many similar funds, it did not meet HBK’s return objectives.”

HBK is the latest fund to fall amid hard times, struggling to make money amid bouts of market volatility. Investors yanked $8 billion from quant funds in the first four months of this year, according to data from eVestment. That’s on top of the $19 billion they pulled in 2018.

Even iconic investors such as billionaire Cliff Asness who manages one of the world’s largest funds, has faced losses and redemptions, admitting earlier this month that quant stock selection has been “terrible.” Amplitude Capital, which lost money for two straight years and saw investor withdrawals, is returning outside money. And BlueMountain Capital Management is liquidating its $1 billion computer-driven portfolio and refocusing on human-run investing.

One of the main reasons for the quant underperformance: the nature of stock gyrations. As Bloomberg explained, risk appetite and economic growth expectations haven’t been strong enough to help revive a factor like value, which tends to be made up of cheaper and thus riskier equities. Others, like quality and low-volatility, have looked out of tune with the new year rally, even after they became expensive thanks to their haven appeal in late 2018.

Even the momentum factor, which had made money in eight of the last 10 years, plunged in 2019. The strategy of buying winners of the past year and selling its losers became loaded with more defensive bets in the fourth quarter, and they turned into laggards as the S&P 500 surged in the new year.

Despite the challenging conditions and his colorful remarks, Asness told the Morningstar conference in Chicago he intends “to stick like grim death” to his beliefs and work on improving his explanations to help investors.

Proponents argue that recent factor underperformance is statistically nothing out of the ordinary and needs to be considered in the long term. If and when portfolios rebound, these declines might seem like a blip in retrospect. Asness reckons stock valuations are currently stretched to levels not seen since the 1990s tech bubble — a signal that his strategies may be ready to pay off.

However as of mid May, and especially later into the month, the headache is that factor declines have been occurring in concert. Sanford C. Bernstein noted earlier this year that rising correlations in the field, which reached the highest in at least two decades, have made it harder for quants to generate idiosyncratic returns and stave off unwanted risks.

For instance, both value and momentum — two factors that in the past have moved in opposite directions — have dropped together in the last two quarters.

Yet one man’s meat is another man’s poison, because as many in the business are throwing in the towel on quant strategies, Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management is expanding its quant business with two money manager hires. Specifically, according to Bloomberg, Sergey Fein joined this week from ExodusPoint Capital Management, while Yang Lu, who previously worked at BlueMountain Capital Management. Both will be portfolio managers in the firm’s Cubist Systematic Strategies unit.

Fein joins after a little more than a year at ExodusPoint, which was co-founded in 2018 by Michael Gelband and was the biggest ever hedge fund launch. Fein previously co-founded quant fund R&F Capital Advisors, which shuttered in 2017 amid a slump for systematic strategies.

Lu was most recently at BlueMountain, where he co-ran the firm’s systematic hedge fund with Perry Vais. BlueMountain is liquidating its roughly $1 billion systematic portfolio to focus on human-run credit investing.

Point72, which now manages $13.5 billion and which has served as the basis for the show Billions on various occasions, “has seen its share of managers come and go as multistrategy hedge funds compete for talent.” The firm is seeking to raise an additional $1 billion this year after garnering $5 billion in outside capital when it launched in 2018. The fund has returned 7.4% in the first four months of 2019.

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IfXX6X Tyler Durden

Paul Craig Roberts Warns Western Supremacy Is On Its Way Out

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

On May 28 I wrote that “the Western world is collapsing so rapidly that I am afraid that I am going to outlive it”. My article was about the rising demonization of white people that is producing a collapse in their confidence. Inculcated guilt is making whites willing to accept discrimination against them in order to elevate Arab, African, and Hispanic migrants that greedy corporations and witless political leaders have brought into the country.  The Identity Politics of the Democratic Party works to the advantage of darker skinned migrants who present themselves as the victims of the white-faced victimizer.

Psychological and emotional collapse is not the only form of collapse underway in the US and Western world generally.  There is also economic and social collapse, especially in the United States.  Today America’s once great manufacturing and industrial cities, such as Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Flint Michigan, Gary Indiana, have lost 20% of their populations, largely due to the offshoring of US manufacturing.

Social collapse is evident in rising homelessness.  Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle have large homeless populations that encamp on city streets, parks, and upscale neighborhoods such as Venice Beach.

In Los Angeles feces and garbage in public streets have caused a plague of rats and fleas.  Dangerous sanitation conditions have caused medical authorities to predict “a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles”.  The flea-infested carpets in City Hall are being ripped out because of fear of a typhus outbreak brought on by rat infestation. 

Costs are mounting on already struggling taxpayers. For example, in Los Angeles in 2016 voters approved a $1.2 billion measure to finance 10,000 units of housing for the homeless. The initial cost three years ago was $140,000 per housing unit.  Now it is $500,000 per unit.  As one news report put it, “Spending a half-million dollars to build one basic rental unit to get one homeless family out of the rain” doesn’t come across as a viable idea.

Among the solutions being investigated are refugee camps and a rethinking of the policy of taking in millions of peoples from impoverished and unstable countries. We are impoverishing ourselves without making a dent in world poverty.  For every person the US takes in, tens of thousands remain.  Already areas of the US look and function like India of 100 years ago. 

Homeless alleviation is at least benefiting liberal and progressive organizations who are amassing money and power to fight homelessness at the expense of taxpayers. 

Rising violence is another indicator of social collapse. Over Memorial Day weekend 42 people were shot in Chicago. The violent MS-13 gang, formed originally by Salvadoran and Honduran migrants, has expanded its operation from California to Long Island and is now invading the Hamptons.  Residents are installing bullet-proof windows, steel doors, and safe rooms inside their homes for protection.

Another sign of social collapse is growing water problems. The Flint Michigan problem is well known, but there are many others with less publicity. Henry Ford Hospital and the Detroit Health Department report a drastic increase in levels of waterborne diseases.

This is just a taste of the accelerating social collapse.  Readers will write to inquire why I didn’t include x,y, and z and the health care crisis.  The answer is that this is an article, not a book.  

What we are experiencing is the failure of government at all levels.  Huge sums are being spent on wars and the fomenting of wars while Los Angeles faces the prediction of a typhus epidemic.  For two decades the US has spent trillions of dollars on wars in the Middle East in behalf of Israel. Washington calls it “the war on terror,” which is a cover story that hides the real agenda and motivation of violence that has killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of Muslims. One consequence of these senseless wars has been to radicalize Muslims against Americans and Europeans even as the US and Europe import millions of displaced Muslims into their countries. 

Countries without a homogeneous population are already disadvantaged by disunity, but to bring in massive numbers of peoples who have every reason to hate you is insanity.  Once here, the hatred is weaponized against white people by Identity Politics.

If a country decided to self-destruct, it would do precisely what the US and Europe have done.  This is the serious problem, not Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Russia, China.  It is likely the case that Identity Politics is now so entrenched in American institutions, such as the New York school system, that disunity is now a permanent feature of the United States.

The largely unacknowledged problems that the US faces would overwhelm even a unified country.  For a country as disunited as America, it is difficult to see any favorable odds.  

via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2MivItD Tyler Durden