another site
Beyond Meat is squeezing higher once again today to fresh ‘Volkswagen-ian’ highs…
Which has sent Beyond Meat’s market cap to almost $14 billion – as big as the world’s largest airline and also Conagra…
Some context:
BYND FY Revenue $88 million
AAL FY Revenue $44 BILLION
CAG FY Revenue $9.5 BILLION
So, spot the odd one out (NOTE – that is a log scale!!).
Here is the log-scale removed…
Beyond belief indeed!
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Oljj9C Tyler Durden
We can imagine Mark Zuckerberg, sitting ensconced in his bunker inside Facebook HQ, reading every new story about his one-time friend and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes’ campaign to force the breakup of Facebook, the company Zuckerberg worked so hard to build. ‘How ungrateful,’ Zuckerberg probably thinks to himself.
That’s because Hughes has emerged as what the Washington Post characterized as “one of [Facebook’s] biggest problems.” It started with a sweeping New York Times op-ed, where Hughes declared that Facebook ‘should be broken up’ and that while he still thinks Mark Zuckerberg is “a good, moral person”, as Chairman and CEO of Facebook, Zuckerberg has too much power.
While Facebook gladly paid $5 billion to settle allegations of privacy violations with the FTC, the company is firmly opposed to any kind of anti-monopoly actions. Its argument is simple: Since consumers use social media apps that aren’t controlled by Facebook (think Twitter and LinkedIn), it’s clear that Facebook doesn’t have a monopoly. And when asked about the status of his friendship with Zuckerberg after going public with his allegations, Hughes joked that Zuckerberg probably no longer considers him a friend.
The decision to publicly oppose Facebook in the op-ed was a difficult one, he said.
“I knew I would lose some friends over it. And that’s okay because some things are that important,” he said. “But it’s been nice on the other side of it, too, to have the argument out there, to speak my mind about what I think and believe.”
In a story about Hughes’ campaign to undermine the company he helped create, a company that netted him a fortune ($500 million at the time he cashed out his stake). Hughes left Facebook in 2007 to volunteer for the campaign of then-Senator Barack Obama.
But now, according to WaPo, Hughes has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill, visiting dozens of lawmakers and regulators at the DOJ and FTC, and presenting a 39-slide PowerPoint deck that he purportedly made himself outlining his argument about Facebook being a monopoly.
Hughes’ argument depends on the vast user base of Facebook and Instagram, and the company’s acquisitiveness, which helps to stifle competition by discouraging challengers.
Facebook’s wealth and power and massive user base have pushed it into monopoly territory, and its acquisitions of rivals have squashed competition. More than 2.7 billion people use Facebook or its other platforms, which include Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp, at least once a month, Facebook said Wednesday.
“I hope that my speaking out provides cover to a lot of other folks, whether former employees or current ones, to express ambivalence or concern about what’s going on,” Hughes said in an interview Thursday. “And I think there’s a lot to be concerned about.”
The former Facebook spokesman is also trying to convince other ex-employees with reservations about the company’s largess to speak out.
But the fact that a former executive are making these criticisms is a huge boon for trust-busters. It threatens not just Facebook, but the other tech giants of Silicon Valley. Hughes has effectively become the most effective lobbyist for the ‘break up Facebook’ crowd, and he’s doing all of this work for free.
And that’s bad news for Facebook, because breaking up big tech has become a bipartisan issue, embraced by President Trump and Dems like Elizabeth Warren.
To be sure, Hughes isn’t the only former Facebook executive or early investor to criticize the company: Sean Parker and Robert McNamee and other former senior executives have also criticized Facebook over its business practices, but they haven’t been lobbying for breaking up Facebook.
Hughes has reportedly been a useful resource for anti-trust lawyers who have been working on a new argument for breaking up Facebook.
Soon after, Hughes was contacted by two prominent antitrust scholars, Scott Hemphill of New York University School of Law and Tim Wu of Columbia Law School. The two academics and longtime collaborators had been developing an argument for breaking up Facebook in the form of the slide presentation. To them, the purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp represented a “plain-vanilla violation of antitrust law, just low-hanging fruit,” Wu said in an interview. They began to pitch lawmakers and regulators together.
Academics and lawmakers who have worked with Hughes say he has helped explain the motivations and viewpoints of key players at Facebook, including Zuckerberg – although Hughes says he has no specific insider knowledge. They say Hughes can frame the business practices of present-day Silicon Valley in ways that jibe with largely untested antitrust laws that were written for major oil and rail companies decades ago.
[…]
Hughes’s feedback shaped the scholars’ case, as he helped them understand how executives in Silicon Valley think about competition — it tends to be measured by viral growth rather than by size, said Hemphill, the New York University professor. At the time, the two professors were working on a roadshow, which they asked Hughes to join.
Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline say Hughes has helped inform his views about whether Facebook might be a monopoly.
“The thing that stuck with me…was he focused on Facebook’s revenue as a true measure of its role in the marketplace,” Cicilline recalled. “Facebook captures over 80 percent of all global social media revenue and controls 58 percent of the U.S. social media market. That’s significant.”
So, how will Zuckerberg counter Hughes? The company has hired an army of lobbyists in the wake of its twin scandals, data privacy violations and its failure to stamp out fake accounts. But given his resources, Hughes is going to be a difficult critic to discredit and stamp out.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OleMDO Tyler Durden
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,
OPEC and its Russia-led non-OPEC allies are in their third year of managing supply to the market, hoping to draw down high inventories and push up oil prices.
Early this month, the so-called OPEC+ coalition of partners rolled over their production cuts of a combined 1.8 million bpd into March 2020, as the resurging oil glut threatened to derail their continued efforts to manage the market.
OPEC is now considering using several metrics to assess where global oil (over)supply stands, including taking the five-year average of oil stocks in 2010-2014 instead of the most recent five-year average 2014-2018, which it currently reports in its monthly oil market reports and which the International Energy Agency (IEA) also takes as a benchmark to measure oil inventories.
Analysts warn that the 2010-2014 average metric will not give a correct comprehensive assessment of the oil market.
Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, warns that moving the goalposts doesn’t change the situation in the oil market. The glut is there, regardless of how OPEC wants to measure inventories.
“The important thing is that you can change the methodology but you cannot change the realities of the market,” Birol told Reuters, noting that the 2010-2014 average is a new perspective OPEC proposes to use, while the IEA has its own perspective.
On the sidelines of the OPEC+ meeting in Vienna earlier this month, Khalid al-Falih, the Energy Minister of OPEC’s largest producer and de facto leader Saudi Arabia, told Al Arabiya:
“With demand rising over the next nine months and the commitments from all the countries, including the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we are approaching the normal levels of supplies of 2010-2014. It is one of the options in front of us as a goal.”
“The rate of the last five years is another option, which we think is unsuitable. We will study the middle options between these two choices. In any case, we will make sure that the market is balanced with proportionate indicators,” al-Falih told the Arab broadcaster.
OPEC is set to use the 2010-2014 average as the main measure of oil market inventories, two sources told Reuters.
Analysts, however, are not convinced that this is the most sensible goalpost.
First, the 2010-2014 doesn’t include the enormous glut from the end of 2015 through most of 2016, as estimated by the IEA and analysts at Bernstein, and compiled by Reuters.
Second, measuring against 2010-2014 could further distort the current market supply assessment because oil demand back then was around 7 million bpd lower than it is now, Energy Aspects co-founder Richard Mallinson told Reuters.
Giving too much weight to a single metric “could result in actions that have unintended consequences,” Mallinson said.
Third, the IEA and OPEC tend to measure oil inventories in the developed economies of the OECD countries, while stockpiles in countries like China and India, for example, are difficult to assess to the point of being nearly impossible.
Whatever the goalposts may be, OPEC continues to struggle with an oil glut, and the cartel itself and the IEA both warn that non-OPEC supply growth could add to the glut next year.
OPEC’s own estimates in the Monthly Oil Market Report in July show that total OECD commercial oil stocks in May rose by 41.5 million barrels to stand at 2.925 billion barrels, which was 25 million barrels above the latest five-year average, from 2014 to 2018.
So even considering the years of the biggest glut in 2015-2016, there is glut on the market.
Using 2010-2014 as a benchmark could result in much higher oversupply estimates, potentially building the case for OPEC to continue its market management policies after March 2020, when the current deal expires.
According to the most recent demand and supply estimates, a larger glut is looming in 2020, with non-OPEC supply growth picking up the pace next year and demand growth seen faltering.
As things stand now, OPEC may have to extend the cuts yet again, if by March 2020 it’s still prioritizing ‘whatever it takes’ to cut global oversupply over fighting for market share and trying to sink U.S. shale.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YzMHwN Tyler Durden
Postmodernism is necessary for a politics of individual liberty.
That was the topic of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on June 17, 2019. It featured Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford University, and author Thaddeus Russell. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Hicks prevailed in the debate by convincing 34 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Arguing for the affirmative was Russell, whose 2011 book, A Renegade History of the United States, argues that cherished American freedoms come from the selfish desires of ordinary people. Renegade University, founded by Russell, offers courses on diverse subjects from postmodernism to the history of martial arts.
Hicks argued for the negative. He’s the executive director at The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2011) and Nietzsche and the Nazis (2010).
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.
Music: “Modum” by Kai Engel is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2JXY8WZ
via IFTTT
Postmodernism is necessary for a politics of individual liberty.
That was the topic of a public debate hosted by the Soho Forum in New York City on June 17, 2019. It featured Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford University, and author Thaddeus Russell. Soho Forum director Gene Epstein moderated.
It was an Oxford-style debate, in which the audience votes on the resolution at the beginning and end of the event, and the side that gains the most ground is victorious. Hicks prevailed in the debate by convincing 34 percent of audience members to change their minds.
Arguing for the affirmative was Russell, whose 2011 book, A Renegade History of the United States, argues that cherished American freedoms come from the selfish desires of ordinary people. Renegade University, founded by Russell, offers courses on diverse subjects from postmodernism to the history of martial arts.
Hicks argued for the negative. He’s the executive director at The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship. He is the author of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (2011) and Nietzsche and the Nazis (2010).
The Soho Forum, which is sponsored by the Reason Foundation, is a monthly debate series at the SubCulture Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.
Music: “Modum” by Kai Engel is licensed under a CC-BY creative commons license.
Produced by Todd Krainin.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2JXY8WZ
via IFTTT
Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime personal pilots have been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, according to the Wall Street Journal. The grand jury subpoenaes were served earlier this month following Epstein’s July 6 arrest at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on charges of sex-trafficking minors. He has pleaded not guilty to the yearslong scheme in which prosecutors allege the wealthy financier sexually abused dozens of young girls from 2002 to 2005, some of whom recruited other victims.
It is unknown how many of Epstein’s pilots were subpoenaed, or whether they are cooperating witnesses. According to court documents from prior cases, Epstein employed David Rodgers, Larry Visoski, Larry Morrison and Bill Hammond as pilots and flight engineers. Rogers, Visoski and Morrison have previously testified in civil depositions.
Testimony from the pilots could be used by federal investigators in their efforts to corroborate accounts from Mr. Epstein’s accusers. They could also provide detail on Mr. Epstein’s travels and his associates. Some of the pilots were responsible for keeping flight logs of passengers who flew on Mr. Epstein’s private jet, according to court filings. –Wall Street Journal
While prosecutors claimed that Epstein owns two private jets, the registered sex offender’s attorneys said in a court filing earlier this month that he owns one private jet, and “sold the other jet in June 2019.” Considering that he was arrested after returning from Paris in his Gulfstream G550, per Bloomberg, it suggests that Epstein sold his infamous and evidence-rich Boeing 272-200 known as the “Lolita Express” weeks before his arrest.
Women in civil lawsuits have accused Mr. Epstein of conspiring with his pilots and other associates from at least 1998 to 2002 to facilitate sex abuse and avoid law-enforcement detection. One woman has said in court filings that when she was a minor in 2000, Mr. Epstein transported her regularly on his private jet to be sexually exploited by his associates and friends. –Wall Street Journal
According to flight logs, former President Bill Clinton flew on the “Lolita Express” a total of 27 times. “Many of those times Clinton had his Secret Service with him and many times he did not,” according to investigative journalist Conchita Sarnoff – who first revealed the former president’s extensive flights on Epstein’s “lolita express” in a 2010 Daily Beast exposé.
Clinton claimed in a statement earlier this month that he only took “a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane” in 2002 and 2003, and that Secret Service accompanied him at all times – which Sarnoff told Fox News was a total lie.
“I know from the pilot logs and these are pilot logs that you know were written by different pilots and at different times that Clinton went, he was a guest of Epstein’s 27 times,” said Sarnoff.
Other famous guests include actor Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker, who flew with Clinton to Africa to tour HIV/AIDS project sites, according to New York Magazine in 2002, which notes how much Epstein revered the former president.
Lawyers for some of Epstein’s accusers alleged in a 2015 court filing that flight logs provided by Epstein pilot Rodgers were incomplete, and that they will corroborate their accusations of being trafficked by Epstein and his associates when they were underage.
“It would not be surprising to find that some of these flight logs…were likely designed to hide evidence of criminal activity—or perhaps later cleansed of such evidence,” wrote the lawyers.
Investigators may be interested in asking Mr. Epstein’s pilots whether they witnessed any efforts by Mr. Epstein to interfere with law enforcement, according to legal experts. In recent court filings, prosecutors have accused Mr. Epstein of tampering with witnesses, an allegation that Mr. Epstein’s lawyers denied in court.
Federal prosecutors in Miami and Mr. Epstein’s lawyers in 2007 negotiated over the possibility of Mr. Epstein pleading guilty to obstruction of justice, including for an incident involving one of his pilots, according to emails that became public in civil lawsuits. –Wall Street Journal
Interestingly, prosecutors confirmed that there are “uncharged individuals” in Epstein’s case. Aside from his close associate and Clinton pal Ghislaine Maxwell – his ‘madam,’ could the pilots be on that list?”
Epstein case update – the Govt confirms the Epstein investigation involves other people not yet charged.
“certain documents and materials that . . . would impede, if prematurely disclosed, the Govt’s ongoing investigation of uncharged individuals.” pic.twitter.com/TOiWqicxUB
— Techno Fog (@Techno_Fog) July 25, 2019
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GvZaHs Tyler Durden
The restrictionist right’s standing rap against non-Western immigrants is that they come from statist countries and lack the cultural DNA to assimilate into America’s system of free enterprise, democracy, and individual liberty. But it is the new right, following President Donald Trump’s lead, that is taking a hammer to the system. Conservatives who care for their movement’s integrity and their country’s identity ought to worry less about imaginary external threats and more about the real ones emerging from their own camp.
Restrictionist conservatives have long insisted that their problem with “mass immigration” from Mexico, Asia, and the Middle East isn’t that their natives are racially different but that they’re culturally different. They believe that Latinos come from statist polities and are therefore too susceptible to the lure of Big Government social programs and handouts, if not outright socialism. “Most of the millions of immigrants we have welcomed came from countries where the only government they knew was one that made all the decisions about economic and social policy,” lamented the late conservative doyen, Phyllis Schlafly. “The current level of legal immigration to America adds thousands of people every day whose views and experiences are contrary to the conservative value of limited government.” Meanwhile, conservatives warn that letting in too many Muslims will lead to blasphemy laws and fatwas dooming America’s commitment to religious liberty and free speech.
Even someone like the National Review‘s Charles C. Cooke, a libertarian-minded British immigrant who is far from a reflexive restrictionist, finds such concerns sufficiently compelling that he thinks it is entirely appropriate for the U.S. citizenship test to ask new entrants to attest that they are not communists or subversives and would respect religious liberty, even though, arguably, such inquiries about personal beliefs violate the spirit—if not the letter—of the U.S. Constitution.
Given how zealously the American right has guarded America’s core freedoms from foreigners, it is beyond ironic that it elected a president who tramples on them on a daily basis.
While conservatives have been worrying about importing socialism from abroad, Trump is foisting on the country what Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, a conservative hero (until now), considered its equally dangerous collectivist twin, economic nationalism.
Under the guise of America First, Trump has basically given up on the free market. He has dedicated his administration to concocting manifestly bogus national security rationales to slap tariffs on America’s trade partners that don’t agree to his terms for doing business. And then he has tried to placate American farmers and industries hurt by retaliatory tariffs with billions of dollars in countervailing handouts. He has tried to order companies such as General Motors to desist from shuttering unprofitable plants to keep his jobs numbers up. And in an even bigger affront to free market capitalism, Trump has tried to strong-arm companies such as FoxConn to set up shop where his base resides. In short, Trump is going beyond crony capitalism to command capitalism.
But it isn’t just the free market that Trump is trampling. He’s trampling free speech. Even as he lambasts immigrants from “shithole” countries, he echoes tinpot Third World dictators that call the press the “enemy of the people.” He routinely questions whether news he deems to be “fake” or “crooked” or “dishonest” ought to be constitutionally protected. And he has repeatedly fantasized, including at a recent social media conference at the White House, about siccing the regulatory state on big tech platforms that allegedly “censor” conservative viewpoints—a fantasy that his Department of Justice acted on this week when it opened an antitrust investigation against Google, Amazon and Facebook.
And now he’s getting personal. He attacked Somali-born Rep. Ihan Omar (D–Minn.) by name at a campaign rally and invited her to return to her country for criticizing his policies, beaming as the conservative faithful issued their own fatwa with chants of “send her back.”
One would have thought that conservatives would recoil in horror that Trump is turning his back on practically everything they have spent the last half a century fighting for and rededicate themselves to looking for ways to restore the “conservative value of limited government.” But one would be wrong. In a conservative version of wokeness, they are positively giddy about the possibilities for deploying state power that Trump has opened for them.
At a recent gathering of conservative luminaries in Washington, D.C., even as the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Wax lamented the failure of non-Western immigrants who litter and talk too loudly to culturally assimilate into America, Yarom Hazony, an Israeli citizen and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, who is fast becoming the intellectual godfather of the neo-right, intoned that it was time for conservatives to “declare independence…from what they call classical liberalism.” Given that Thomas Jefferson essentially relied on classical liberalism when he asserted in the Declaration of Independence that the government’s job was to protect the God-given and inalienable rights of individuals but otherwise leave them alone to pursue their life, liberty, and happiness as they saw fit, Hazony’s wording was explicitly calculated to invite conservatives to turn their back on America’s founding. But did the audience break into chants of “send him back”? No. It applauded in approval.
Not to be outdone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a former libertarian who has taken to delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons against the evils of market capitalism that would put the jeremiads of the loudest mullahs against the ills of capitalistic usury to shame, declared to a rousing ovation that the “main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose, does not come from the government, but the private sector.” If an immigrant had said anything like that, Schlafly would have wasted little time branding them unfit for America.
It gets worse.
The emerging consensus among smart-set conservatives is that if there is anything wrong with Trump’s protectionism, it’s that it is not radical enough. Trump, apparently, is still too concerned about global supply chains and productivity. What the country needs, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance argues, is an ambitious industrial policy dedicated to rebuilding the lost manufacturing base of the heartland, combined with massive infusions of government cash to reverse “family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline.” Conservatives, Vance believes, need to “be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods.”
It is not just the economic realm that conservatives want to remake by deploying “political power,” but the social as well.
New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari, a recently converted Catholic, electrified some conservative quarters when he suggested in First Things that it was time for Christian conservatives not just to dispense with politeness and decency when dealing with liberal enemies that have turned “elite institutes” into “libertine and pagan” strongholds, but also the bogus notion of state neutrality in matters of religion. Such notions, he suggested, were preventing them from using the government to “defeat [the liberal] enemy” and promote their faith in a bid to “[enjoy] the spoils in the form of a public-square reordered.” In plain English, Ahmari is spurring conservatives to dispense with this foolishness about separating church and state—so that they can use the state to impose their religion.
That conservatives are preaching a full-scale abandonment of America’s bedrock commitments to capitalism, democracy, religious pluralism, and individual liberty shows that even as they accuse immigrants of not assimilating in America, they themselves are dissimilating from America.
The vast majority of immigrants believe in America’s fundamental promise. If conservatives don’t, then they are the real problem. Immigrants may or may not be increasing littering in America, but conservatives are trashing it.
A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.
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In the past month there has been extensive speculation whether the Trump admin, as part of its desire to devalue the dollar against other currencies whose central banks are engaging in aggressive devaluation campaigns of their own, would pursue currency intervention as first Bank of America suggested last month, only to be followed by virtually every other research analyst, and culminating with a take from Standar Chartered’s Steven Englander who said that “The US Can Intervene To Weaken The Dollar… But What Would It Buy?”
To be sure there was ample reason for such speculation, not the least as a result of Trump’s own July 3 tweet in which he said that “China and Europe playing big currency manipulation game and pumping money into their system in order to compete with USA. We should MATCH...”
China and Europe playing big currency manipulation game and pumping money into their system in order to compete with USA. We should MATCH, or continue being the dummies who sit back and politely watch as other countries continue to play their games – as they have for many years!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 3, 2019
Fast forward to today, when it appears that the Trump administration has had some time to reconsider if it wants to engage in outright currency war against every other developed (and developing) nation, and moments ago speaking on CNBC, Trump’s chief advisor Larry Kudlow said that currency intervention is off the table:
“We have as a matter of policy ruled out currency intervention,” Kudlow said.
Kudlow also said that he does not agree that Trump “wants a weak dollar” and instead is concerned about foreign countries devaluing their own currencies.
In kneejerk reaction, the Bloomberg Dollar index, which had been depressed for the past few weeks amid speculation that the White House may in fact surprise markets with a new Plaza Accord, surged and has now erased all of its power FOMC losses, as the growing army of dollar shorts is once again crushed.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30ZwA97 Tyler Durden
The restrictionist right’s standing rap against non-Western immigrants is that they come from statist countries and lack the cultural DNA to assimilate into America’s system of free enterprise, democracy, and individual liberty. But it is the new right, following President Donald Trump’s lead, that is taking a hammer to the system. Conservatives who care for their movement’s integrity and their country’s identity ought to worry less about imaginary external threats and more about the real ones emerging from their own camp.
Restrictionist conservatives have long insisted that their problem with “mass immigration” from Mexico, Asia, and the Middle East isn’t that their natives are racially different but that they’re culturally different. They believe that Latinos come from statist polities and are therefore too susceptible to the lure of Big Government social programs and handouts, if not outright socialism. “Most of the millions of immigrants we have welcomed came from countries where the only government they knew was one that made all the decisions about economic and social policy,” lamented the late conservative doyen, Phyllis Schlafly. “The current level of legal immigration to America adds thousands of people every day whose views and experiences are contrary to the conservative value of limited government.” Meanwhile, conservatives warn that letting in too many Muslims will lead to blasphemy laws and fatwas dooming America’s commitment to religious liberty and free speech.
Even someone like the National Review‘s Charles C. Cooke, a libertarian-minded British immigrant who is far from a reflexive restrictionist, finds such concerns sufficiently compelling that he thinks it is entirely appropriate for the U.S. citizenship test to ask new entrants to attest that they are not communists or subversives and would respect religious liberty, even though, arguably, such inquiries about personal beliefs violate the spirit—if not the letter—of the U.S. Constitution.
Given how zealously the American right has guarded America’s core freedoms from foreigners, it is beyond ironic that it elected a president who tramples on them on a daily basis.
While conservatives have been worrying about importing socialism from abroad, Trump is foisting on the country what Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, a conservative hero (until now), considered its equally dangerous collectivist twin, economic nationalism.
Under the guise of America First, Trump has basically given up on the free market. He has dedicated his administration to concocting manifestly bogus national security rationales to slap tariffs on America’s trade partners that don’t agree to his terms for doing business. And then he has tried to placate American farmers and industries hurt by retaliatory tariffs with billions of dollars in countervailing handouts. He has tried to order companies such as General Motors to desist from shuttering unprofitable plants to keep his jobs numbers up. And in an even bigger affront to free market capitalism, Trump has tried to strong-arm companies such as FoxConn to set up shop where his base resides. In short, Trump is going beyond crony capitalism to command capitalism.
But it isn’t just the free market that Trump is trampling. He’s trampling free speech. Even as he lambasts immigrants from “shithole” countries, he echoes tinpot Third World dictators that call the press the “enemy of the people.” He routinely questions whether news he deems to be “fake” or “crooked” or “dishonest” ought to be constitutionally protected. And he has repeatedly fantasized, including at a recent social media conference at the White House, about siccing the regulatory state on big tech platforms that allegedly “censor” conservative viewpoints—a fantasy that his Department of Justice acted on this week when it opened an antitrust investigation against Google, Amazon and Facebook.
And now he’s getting personal. He attacked Somali-born Rep. Ihan Omar (D–Minn.) by name at a campaign rally and invited her to return to her country for criticizing his policies, beaming as the conservative faithful issued their own fatwa with chants of “send her back.”
One would have thought that conservatives would recoil in horror that Trump is turning his back on practically everything they have spent the last half a century fighting for and rededicate themselves to looking for ways to restore the “conservative value of limited government.” But one would be wrong. In a conservative version of wokeness, they are positively giddy about the possibilities for deploying state power that Trump has opened for them.
At a recent gathering of conservative luminaries in Washington, D.C., even as the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Wax lamented the failure of non-Western immigrants who litter and talk too loudly to culturally assimilate into America, Yarom Hazony, an Israeli citizen and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, who is fast becoming the intellectual godfather of the neo-right, intoned that it was time for conservatives to “declare independence…from what they call classical liberalism.” Given that Thomas Jefferson essentially relied on classical liberalism when he asserted in the Declaration of Independence that the government’s job was to protect the God-given and inalienable rights of individuals but otherwise leave them alone to pursue their life, liberty, and happiness as they saw fit, Hazony’s wording was explicitly calculated to invite conservatives to turn their back on America’s founding. But did the audience break into chants of “send him back”? No. It applauded in approval.
Not to be outdone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a former libertarian who has taken to delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons against the evils of market capitalism that would put the jeremiads of the loudest mullahs against the ills of capitalistic usury to shame, declared to a rousing ovation that the “main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose, does not come from the government, but the private sector.” If an immigrant had said anything like that, Schlafly would have wasted little time branding them unfit for America.
It gets worse.
The emerging consensus among smart-set conservatives is that if there is anything wrong with Trump’s protectionism, it’s that it is not radical enough. Trump, apparently, is still too concerned about global supply chains and productivity. What the country needs, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance argues, is an ambitious industrial policy dedicated to rebuilding the lost manufacturing base of the heartland, combined with massive infusions of government cash to reverse “family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline.” Conservatives, Vance believes, need to “be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods.”
It is not just the economic realm that conservatives want to remake by deploying “political power,” but the social as well.
New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari, a recently converted Catholic, electrified some conservative quarters when he suggested in First Things that it was time for Christian conservatives not just to dispense with politeness and decency when dealing with liberal enemies that have turned “elite institutes” into “libertine and pagan” strongholds, but also the bogus notion of state neutrality in matters of religion. Such notions, he suggested, were preventing them from using the government to “defeat [the liberal] enemy” and promote their faith in a bid to “[enjoy] the spoils in the form of a public-square reordered.” In plain English, Ahmari is spurring conservatives to dispense with this foolishness about separating church and state—so that they can use the state to impose their religion.
That conservatives are preaching a full-scale abandonment of America’s bedrock commitments to capitalism, democracy, religious pluralism, and individual liberty shows that even as they accuse immigrants of not assimilating in America, they themselves are dissimilating from America.
The vast majority of immigrants believe in America’s fundamental promise. If conservatives don’t, then they are the real problem. Immigrants may or may not be increasing littering in America, but conservatives are trashing it.
A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.
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via IFTTT
As stocks pushed back towards yet more record highs, President Trump just took the shine off the day by tweeting against two mega-tech companies…
First it was Google, following up on Peter Thiel’s recent accusations:
There may or may not be National Security concerns with regard to Google and their relationship with China. If there is a problem, we will find out about it. I sincerely hope there is not!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2019
And Alphabet is giving back its exuberant gains….
And the Trump tamped down exuberance in Apple:
Apple will not be given Tariff wavers, or relief, for Mac Pro parts that are made in China. Make them in the USA, no Tariffs!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2019
Sending Apple’s shares reeling…
How long before someone explains to Trump that “as goes Apple and Google so goes the US equity market?”
This is one of those days where the S&P 500’s rise comes down to a handful of stocks, well, really just one stock: Alphabet. The parent of Google accounts for ~60% of the index’s point gain.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Y7Nc1u Tyler Durden
