Hedge fund managers continue to mine all sorts of “alternative data” in order to try and gain trading edges. This now includes seeking out consumer habits from devices like Fitbits, Rokus and Teslas, according to Bloomberg.
As we have reported on before, alternative data is being bought hand over fist by hedge funds like Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management and Ken Griffith’s Citadel. Many are even paying large sums for it.
Michael Marrale, chief executive officer of M Science said:
“There is not one major hedge fund or asset manager that doesn’t have data initiatives underway or that are not using alternative data in some way.”
Spotting trends in consumer habits is a big business and JP Morgan estimates that the market for big data could reach more than $200 billion by next year. Even then, the data needs to be analyzed, scrubbed, organized and aggregated to be of use.
There has been “incredible demand” for this data, according to Marrale.
So what exactly are hedge funds looking at?
First, they are looking at Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, which have both become so ubiquitous that they are often taken for granted. Capturing the signals that these networks emit can show “when and where new things appear in the world,” said Hugh O’Connor, director of data sourcing and partnerships at Eagle Alpha.
This can help firms keep tabs on the number of video streaming devices or fitness trackers being used, the length of time consumers spend on them and their locations. Data providers can also capture when your new ride is hitting the road if you have bought a Tesla Model 3 and use its Bluetooth enabled media.
Location tracking data can also be pulled from mobile phones and show the number of people carrying devices at a particular location. This can help distinguish how many people are frequenting retailers, supermarkets or fast food joints. Alternative data firms can also monitor app downloads to see how popular they are, where they are occurring and when they are being used to make purchases.
Hedge funds also are scraping the internet for data, sifting through sites to create bespoke collections of public data. They look at things like pricing trends on flights and hotels and inventory figures for products sold on sites like Amazon.
Twitter sentiment is also being watched: hedge funds track key words or phrases on social media sites to gauge what consumers are thinking about the newest products from companies like Apple and Nike. This can be mapped to companies and provide clues about popularity of products or services.
Credit card data is also being used to track what and how much people charge and which sites accept online payment services. This data has immense potential, so it can be more expensive than other alternative data.
aniel Goldberg, founder of Alternative Data Analytics said:
“Credit card data can range from $150,000 to over a million dollars a year, depending on certain characteristics such as the level of granularity.”
Firms also collect information on job postings, changes in salary and employee reviews of companies from sites like Glassdoor. From this material, they can see if a tech giant starts seeking new talent from a different industry, which may suggest a new product or service. They can also check for the removal of job postings, which can sometimes signal corporate distress.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Y7yNT1 Tyler Durden
With what most everyone is calling a stunningly disjointed and extremely disappointing presentation before Congress by Special Counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, it is becoming increasingly clear that the effort to achieve regime change through impeachment is going to fail. Democrats are going to have to rely on the traditional electoral means to remove President Trump from office in 2020.
This is the way it should be. Achieving regime change through impeachment would have converted the United States into a standard banana republic.
Ever since Trump became the GOP nominee for president, Democrats, the national-security establishment, and the liberal elements of the mainstream press did everything they could to ensure that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, was elected president.
Once Trump became president, however, his opponents refused to accept the electoral outcome and began trying to remove him from office through impeachment.That’s where the anti-Russia brouhaha came into play.
During the campaign, it was increasingly clear that Trump and Clinton were on opposite sides of the Russia controversy. Trump desired to establish friendly relations with Russia, which was exactly what Russia wanted.
But that’s not what the national-security establishment wanted. Ever since the sudden and unexpected end of the Cold War, the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA — the three principal components of the national-security state — did everything they could to make Russia, once again, an official enemy of the United States. Clinton was squarely on the side of the national-security establishment.
That’s why the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA kept the Cold War dinosaur NATO in existence instead of dismantling it. It’s also why they had NATO begin absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact, enabling U.S. forces and missiles to be stationed ever closer to the Russian border, violating assurances that U.S. officials had given Russia not to expand toward Russia. That’s what the effort to absorb Ukraine into NATO was all about, knowing full well that Russia would respond by protecting its longtime military base in Crimea.
Everything was oriented toward making certain that the United States and Russia would never be on friendly terms. Everything was instead oriented toward making Russia, once again, another Cold War official enemy of the United States.
Why is that the goal of the national-security establishment? Because it needs a justification for its own existence and its own ever-growing power and influence. That justification comes in the form of official enemies, ones that can keep Americans fearful. In that way, the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA can say, “Keep flooding us with U.S. taxpayer money because we are the ones who are keeping you safe from America’s official enemies. Keep giving us totalitarian-like powers over you so that we can keep you safe.”
Of course, Russia isn’t the only official enemy. There is also China, which increasingly is being presented as a Cold War-like “hegemon” that is supposedly threatening U.S. “national security.”
And then there are the smaller official enemies, like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, the Taliban, the Muslims, the terrorists, ISIS, the drug dealers, and the illegal immigrants, all of which, we are told, are threats to “national security.”
As a candidate, Trump was threatening to upend this racket, at least with respect to Russia and perhaps also by threatening to bring an end to America’s forever wars and its policy of regime-change wars. That posed a grave threat to the national-security establishment, which had been grafted onto America’s federal governmental system after World War II to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union, America’s World War II partner and ally whose principal member was Russia.
Trump’s friendly attitude toward Russia could not be permitted to stand, not as a presidential candidate and especially not as a U.S. president. That’s when the anti-Russia brouhaha was launched, which accused Trump of being an agent of the Russians, just as some people accused President Eisenhower of being a communist agent of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
It was a ridiculous accusation from the get-go but its primary purpose was to enable Trump’s opponents to remove him from office long before the next election in 2020. It was designed to be regime change through impeachment.
Once Mueller’s investigative team, despite years of intense investigation, was unable to come up with convincing evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy, however, Trump’s detractors fell back on a secondary plan for regime change though impeachment — “obstruction of justice,” a federal crime that is so nebulous and subjective that it is the federal version of “disorderly conduct,” a “crime” that local officials use to target people they don’t like. The sham nature of this alternative theory for regime change was exposed through its supporters refusal to seek Trump’s impeachment for real crimes, such as killing people overseas through illegal undeclared wars and illegal assassinations. With Mueller’s dismal performance before Congress, this alternative attempt at regime change appears to be dead in the water as well.
While Trump’s enemies have been unsuccessful in removing him from office through impeachment, they have, unfortunately, been successful in having him become an opponent of Russia, China, and all of the other official enemies of the U.S national-security state. Not only has Trump continued the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, he has kept up hostile relations with Russia, initiated a destructive trade war with China, and ratcheted up the U.S. wars on Muslims, the terrorists, the illegal immigrants, the drug dealers, ISIS, and the Taliban. He has also ensured that ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess continues flooding into the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, no matter how much more debt this adds onto the backs of American taxpayers.
In other words, Trump, like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, has been absorbed into the national-security state blob. They have won. Trump has become one of them. That’s the real success of the unsuccessful effort to remove Trump from office through impeachment regime change.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Zc9Pyn Tyler Durden
Experian, a consumer credit reporting company, has published a new study that determined the top 25 US Zip codes with the highest mortgage balances in 1Q19.
The study outlined how a bulk of the balances reside in California, with 17, and the remaining are evenly split between New York and Connecticut. New York City alone has four Zip codes with the highest mortgage balances in the nation.
Home prices in these areas are in bubble territory. And compared to the average cost of a new home in the US, approximately $377,200 in May 2019, each of these areas are sitting at price extremes that could revert to a more reasonable level when the next downturn strikes.
These areas have one advantage than the rest of the country: higher incomes. So when the credit crunch hits forced by the economic downturn, people with high mortgage balances can weather the storm to an extent but will eventually be overwhelmed and will have to liquidate homes at discounts which will drive downside momentum in prices.
The lowest income among these high net worth areas was $108k in 1Q19, more than $25,000 higher than the national average of $79,622.
The methodology behind the study is based on an Experian-created statistically relevant aggregate sampling of their consumer credit database.
The study determined ZIP code 90210, Beverly Hills, California, had the highest mortgage balance overall. The balance was $1,528,236, with an annual income average of $157,359 and an average credit score around 740.
Number 25, the lowest mortgage balance on the list, is ZIP code 95070, Saratoga, California, had a mortgage balance of $805,813, with an annual income of $172,029, and a credit score of around 780.
*chart
Experian’s data showed the average FICO Score among all top 25 ZIP codes with the highest mortgage balances in 1Q19 was 756, that’s about 53 points higher than the national average of 703.
The data also showed outstanding mortgage balances have jumped in the last several years, now reaching $9.5 trillion.
US mortgage lending rates have been diving since November 2018, in anticipation of an economic slowdown. The 30-year mortgage interest rates went from 5.17% in November 2018 to 4.08% in July.
Even though rates have significantly declined in the past couple quarters, this has not translated into a rebound in housing markets across the top 25 Zip codes, nevertheless, the rest of the country. The housing market is stalling – be prepared for a possible top.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YfMWc5 Tyler Durden
“Dulce et Decorum est” is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously in 1920. The Latin title is taken from Ode 3.2 of the Roman poet Horace and means “it is sweet and fitting …”. It is followed there by “pro patria mori”, which means “to die for one’s country”.
“The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again.”
– Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August
If you have not read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August you should do so, it is one of the great, accessible works of history. Tuchman details with great clarity the diplomatic failures, miscalculations and political logics that ensnared the imperial powers of Europe into the cataclysm of the Great War. It was the book that Kennedy drew upon when navigating the Cuban missile crisis. Just over a century since the guns fell silent in Europe, and nearly fifty years since nuclear holocaust was averted, the world is teetering on what might very well be the largest regional, potentially global, conflict since the second world war.
The United States is a warfare economy, its primary export is violence and it is through violence that it creates the demand for its products. The markets of the Empire are the failed states, grinding civil conflicts, escalating regional tensions and human immiseration created by gun-boat diplomacy. In true entrepreneurial spirit, the United States has repeatedly overestimated its abilities to control the course of events and underestimated the complexities of a market predicated on violence. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century the American Imperium has proven itself as incompetent as it is vicious. After nearly two decades of intensifying conflicts, a fundamentally broken global economy and a dysfunctional political system, Washington has turned feral, lashing out against decline.
The points of instability in the global system are various and growing, and the only geo-political logics that the Imperium appears to be operating under are threats, coercion, and violence. It is at this moment, with the most erratic president in the country’s history, surrounded by some of the most extreme neo-conservative voices, that the United States has been belligerently stumbling across the globe. In the past few months we have witnessed a surrealistic reimagining of the Latin American coup, the medieval melodrama of Canadian vassals taking a royal hostage from the Middle Kingdom and British buccaneers’ privateering off the coast of Gibraltar. The Imperial system is in a paroxysm of incoherent but sustained aggression.
It has long been clear that if another Great War were to emerge, it would likely begin in the Middle East. Just over a century later, we have found ourselves amidst another July crisis of escalating military and diplomatic confrontations. European modernity immolated itself in the Balkans though miscalculation, overconfidence and the prisoners dilemma of national prestige. The conditions of the contemporary Middle East are no less volatile than those of Europe when the Austro-Hungarian Empire decided to attack Serbia. If anything, conditions are far more complex in a region entangled with allegiances and enmities that transgress and supersede the national borders imposed in the wake of the first world war.
The United States’ withdrawal from the JCPOA and the stated aim of reducing Iranian oil exports to zero has enforced a zero-sum logic between the American Imperium and Persia. With each move and counter move the two countries are further entangled into the dynamics of a conflict. Much like the run up to July 28th 1914, tanker seizures, drone shoot downs, sanctions, military deployments and general bellicosity reinforce the rational of the opposing sides and make it harder to back down without losing face and appearing weak.
Due to the asymmetry of the two powers the Iranians have the fewest options for de-escalation while the American establishment perceives the least incentive. This dynamic is further exacerbated by major regional powers agitating for a conflict they believe they will benefit from. Indeed, the slide to war might be inexorable at this point, the momentum of historical causality may have already exceeded the abilities of those in power to control. Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins that desperately wanted to avoid war and were nonetheless impotent to avert disaster. There is nowhere near such intimacy, communication and motivation in our current context.
If war with Iran erupts, the Pax Americana will come to an end and humanity will fully enter a new historical epoch. The most unlikely scenario is an easy victory for the United States, yet even this outcome will only exacerbate the decline of the Empire. The other great powers would expedite their exit from the dollar system and drastically increase investment into the means to counter American hegemony. Likewise, victory would further reinforce Washington’s hubris, generating more serious challenges to the Imperial order and making the US prone to take on even bigger fights. Ironically, easy military success would almost assure the outbreak of a third world war in the long-term.
War with Iran would likely ignite violence in Israel-Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, re-energise and expand the ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen as well as generate sectarian violence and domestic insurgencies across the Middle East. Under such conditions regional actors would likely utilise a dramatically intensifying conflict as cover for their own agendas, for example with a renewed Turkish assault on the Syrian Kurds. The conditions for rapid escalation are extremely high in which non-linear dynamics could easily take hold and quickly outstrip any attempts to maintain control of the situation.
Pyrrhic victory for either side is the most likely outcome, making the parallels to the Great War all the more salient. Global conflagration is a possibility, but with “luck” the fighting could be contained to the region. Nonetheless, amplified refugee crises, supply chain disruptions and immense geopolitical realignments will cascade out of such an event. Undoubtedly, there would be concerted efforts to abandon the dollar system as quickly as possible. Furthermore, rapid increases in the price of oil would all but grind the global economy to a halt within a matter of months, tipping citizenries already saturated with private debt into financial crises.
Furthermore, the entanglement of the military-industrial complex, the petrodollar reserve currency system and the omni-bubble generated by quantitative easing has left the Empire systemically fragile. Particularly, the bubble in non-conventional fuels precipitated by QE, depressed oil prices with scaled down exploration, R&D and maintenance makes the possibility of a self-reinforcing collapse in the American energy and financial systems extremely plausible. It is a Gordian knot which war with Persia would leave in fetters.
The most likely long-term outcome of a war with Iran would be the economic isolation and political fragmentation of the United States. What is assured is that whatever world results it will not look anything like the world since 1945. The first world war collapsed the European world system, dynasties that had persisted for centuries were left in ruins and the surviving great powers crippled by the overwhelming expenditures of blood and treasure. We are on the precipice of another such moment. The American world system is fundamentally dependent upon the relationship between warfare, energy dominance and debt.
Conflict is required to maintain control of the energy markets which prop up a financialised economy. A dynamic that puts the nation deeper in hock while amplifying resistance to financial vassalage. Losing energy dominance undermines the country’s reserve currency status and weakens the Empires ability to generate the debt necessary to sustain the warfare economy. Likewise, the system of national and international debt peonage parasitizes global populations to work against their own best interests. This fuels resentment and resistance which further drives the warfare economy. It is, in the inimitably American expression, a “self-licking ice cream cone.”
On August 3rd 1914, one week into the war, the British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously remarked that “the lamps are going out across Europe and we shall not see them relit in our lifetime.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we face similar, terrifying prospects. Indeed, we could witness the collapse of democratic societies for a very long time to come. If we have any hope of averting calamity we need to generate loud opposition to imperialist warfare.
This does not mean some hackneyed anti-war movement based on past glories and the parochialism of domestic politics, but earnest effort to find common cause in resisting the insanity of those that seek profit in our collective suffering. This means working with people that we have very deep disagreements with by respecting our mutual opposition to the masters of war. It also means serious commitment to strategies such as tax and debt strikes as expressions of non-consent as well as other peaceful means of direct action. Indeed, it is from a place of agreement that we can potentially rebuild civil discourse and renew our trust in the ability of democratic institutions to mediate our quarrels. Perhaps it is too late to change course, but how sweet and fitting it is to face madness with dignity.
“What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? …power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. ”
“Kings are the slaves of history.”
– Tolstoy, War and Peace
* * *
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32Ua5Es Tyler Durden
Before taking office, Mnuchin sold his stock portfolio and plowed the proceeds into diversified stock and bond funds. Mnuchin dodged paying taxes on capital gains upfront, thanks to a provision in the tax code that makes it simpler for private citizens to transition into public service. Forbes wasn’t sure how much Mnuchin avoided paying.
Mnuchin, however, didn’t liquidate his real estate portfolio. He and Linton own at least six homes, including a mansion in New York City worth nearly $30 million. In the Hamptons, he has a $13 million vacation home, owned by an entity called Beach View LLC.
In Washington, D.C., Mnuchin bought a $13 million mansion, which the Rock Creek Drive Revocable Trust purchased 13 days after Donald Trump took office.
In Hollywood, Mnuchin has a Bel-Air mansion worth $31 million. Local records show the Bel Air Trust owns the spread. But local news outlets have placed Mnuchin as the owner.
There’s another mansion worth $12 million held by the entity called HMBAP LLC., an entity in which Mnuchin disclosed owning a multimillion-dollar interest.
Federal filings show he has a mansion in Los Angeles, owned by Beverly Drive LLC. That company sold a home in Beverly Hills for $11 million in 2017. It’s unclear what the entity holds today.
Through WG Hay 1978 Trust, Mnuchin and Linton disclosed an interest in commercial real estate in Scotland. Another trust, called Rockshiel Trust, has residential real estate in the country.
Mnuchin also sold land in Mexico last year for about $10 million.
Given the extent, the Trump administration has called for major interest rate cuts and quantitative easing, despite no real economic crisis that can be seen, it certainly points to the idea that Mnuchin’s and Trump’s real estate empires are a conflict of interest when it comes to determining policy.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MfOuk0 Tyler Durden
A recent visit suggests that the repercussions of the 2011 nuclear disaster aren’t over…
The 2020 Olympic torch relay will commence in Fukushima: a place more often associated with a 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster than international sports. That’s no accident: the location is meant to convey a narrative of recovery, and the idea that Fukushima is a safe place to visit, live–and of course, do business. Olympic baseball and softball games, also to be held in Fukushima just 55 miles from the meltdown, are meant to hammer the message of these “Recovery Olympics,” as Tokyo 2020 organizers have branded them, home
But after a visit to Fukushima, their claims seem questionable at best. In fact, the entire setup is a profoundly cynical act of “post-truth” politics. Fukushima is not yet safe, and no amount of sunny rhetoric from Olympic bigwigs as well as Japanese politicians, can make it so.
We traveled to Fukushima on a bus full of journalists, filmmakers, and activists from around the world. We were accompanied by professor Fujita Yasumoto who carried a dosimeter, a device that charts the levels of radiation. With two hours to drive before hitting Fukushima, his dosimeter read 0.04; anything above 0.23, he told us, was unsafe. The needle jumped further as we approached the nuclear plants and attendant cleanup operations. Outside the Decommissioning Archive Center, it moved into unsafe territory with a 0.46 reading before spiking to a truly alarming 3.77 as we approached Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 reactor, one of three that melted down. The Olympic torch run is currently scheduled to pass through some of these high-contamination areas.
As we entered Fukushima, we started to see what looked like black Hefty garbage bags, filled with radioactive topsoil that had been scraped up by workers, most of whom, we are told, travel great distances to Fukushima to work. Thousands of these bags—which locals call “black pyramids”—are piled on top of one another, but the toiling workers aren’t wearing hazmat suits. Some of the piles of bags have vegetation popping out. The sight of the plants poking through the toxic muck could be taken as a sign of hope, but, for others, they’re a portent of danger, raising fears that the wind will blow the most contaminated parts of the topsoil into the less radiated parts of the city.
No one here we met is buying Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s line from 2013 when he tried to assuage the concerns of voters at the International Olympic Committee by telling them that things in Fukushima were “under control.” Hiroko Aihara, an independent journalist based in Fukushima, said to us, “The government has pushed propaganda over truth. This has people in Japan divided as to how serious it is. But for the people who live here, the crisis and the cleanup and contamination continue.”
The scientific studies about how safe Fukishima are at the moment are in great dispute. National travel guides put the area that is unsafe at only 3 percent of the prefecture. However, as Scientific American wrote, “In its haste to address the emergency, two months after the accident the Japanese government raised the allowable exposure from 1 mSv annually, an international benchmark, to 20 mSv. Evacuees now fear Abe’s determination to put the Daiichi accident behind the nation is jeopardizing public health, especially among children, who are more susceptible.”
We also spoke with Masumi Kowata. She is a remarkable individual, and the only woman on the 12-person Okuma Town municipal council in Fukushima. She is also the only person on the council who is speaking out on the dangers of nuclear power. Kawata was living in Fukushima when Abe made his grand pronouncement. She said, “Things were absolutely not ‘under control’ and nothing is over yet. The nuclear radiation is still very high. Only one small section is being cleaned. The wider region is still an evacuation zone. There is still radiation in the area. Meanwhile, we’re [hosting] the Olympics.”
The cynicism of branding this “the Recovery Olympics” can also be seen in the streets of Fukushima. Numerous people are still displaced and living outside the prefecture; they’re in the tens of thousands, although the exact total has not been determined. Whatever the number, there is no question that the part of the prefecture surrounding the nuclear meltdown feels empty. In a country with a remarkable lack of dilapidated buildings, they conspicuously blot the landscape in Fukushima. What was destroyed by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown hasn’t been rebuilt. Many businesses also have been “abandoned by owner,” an all-purpose explanation for the state of things. Both homes and businesses—with the crumbling signs for the titans of Japanese corporate culture—Sony, Mitsubishi and Honda—sit vacant.
Despite this bleak scene, Kowata somehow brims with fighting energy. “The local people have come to me and told me to tell the world what is actually happening,” she said. “That’s where I get my strength. There are people getting sick. There are people who are dying from stress. The world needs to know.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZcRils Tyler Durden
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s doddering performance on Wednesday in front of two House panels really put a bow on what a farce the effort to take down Donald Trump has been from the start.
After listening to Mueller stammer his way through simple questions regarding his own 448-page report on Russian interference, it’s abundantly clear that the former FBI Director was nothing more than a paper tiger whose hand-picked team of ‘attack dog’ Democrat attorneys drew as much blood as they possibly could – yet were unable to find evidence to support the grand lies we’ve been forced to endure for nearly three years.
Summing up the last three years is a Twitter thread by The Federalistco-founder and former congressional staffer, Sean Davis.
We were told that the evidence of alleged Russian collusion was rock solid, the work of America’s top intelligence agencies. In reality, it was pure fiction cooked up by a Clinton-funded foreign contractor on the payroll of a sanctioned Russian oligarch.
We were told our nation’s intel agencies would never use false information to justify secret surveillance of American citizens. In reality, DON and the FBI peddled lies to the FISA court that were cooked up by a foreign spook and a DOJ official’s wife, both funded by Clinton.
Finally, we were told that America’s top cops and spies would never foment a coup to overturn election results they didn’t like. We now know the most powerful unelected people in government cooked up lies as part of an orchestrated scheme to overthrow the duly elected president.
In preparation for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, who recently had won re-election, Washington, DC, was festooned in flags, including the so-called Betsy Ross Flag, with 13 stripes and 13 white stars in a circle against a blue background. But that was sooo 2013, which was still an “unwoke” era by today’s “higher” standards.
The Nike Company recently planned to unveil a new sneaker in time for the July 4 holiday, a red, white, and blue air-shoe that had the image of the Betsy Ross Flag on the back. The company manufactured and shipped the shoes, but before their release date, suddenly Nike recalled all of them. Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who became a counterculture star because he kneeled during the playing of the National Anthem before professional football games, is now on the Nike payroll, and he objected because the flag was created in 1776 – and slavery in the 13 Colonies at the time was legal. Thus, he argued, Nike would have been endorsing an era of slavery.
Almost immediately, each of the candidates running for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party endorsed Nike’s move, claiming that the venerable flag suddenly had become the very symbol of White Supremacy. Why? Because Americans flew it in 1776 when slavery was in the land, so by that measure alone, it stands for systematic racism, and no Democrat presidential candidate wants to be called a racist.
Nike has become a leader in what now is called Woke Capitalism, which involves firms taking on the mantle of promoting the progressive version of social justice. One recalls when Google fired engineer James Darmore last year because he publicly aired his views on some aspects of affirmative action that Google practiced. Darmore’s views hardly were controversial to most Americans and he did not use disparaging language toward women and minorities, but even that was too much for Google, which openly considers itself to be a Woke company — and Darmore to be a beyond-comprehension bigot.
As I noted a year ago in writing about Political Correctness in the American workplace, many US firms have adopted a practice that is not unlike something we have seen in communist countries, such as the former USSR, the Eastern Europe countries before their own “liberation,” China, and North Korea. I was reminded of how workplaces become politicized when I was teaching at a university in China last month. The president of the school of international business hosted a luncheon for those of us teaching in his program, and when he arrived, a woman accompanied him that I assumed was his wife.
She was not his spouse; instead, she was the political officer of the Communist Party of China and she was embedded in the school. In fact, the university is full of political officers who operate behind the scenes but are there to keep party discipline. Today, companies like Nike, Google, Microsoft and others don’t need a communist party to impose their own totalitarian-like discipline upon workers. These companies are Woke and want to make sure everyone else knows it, and if someone wishes to be hired and remain employed at one of these firms, then uttering or declaring politically-incorrect thoughts either at work, on social media, or somewhere else is going to lead to being on the unemployment line. Thus, one can be sure that the ranks of these tech firms are honeycombed with informers and outright spies who are examining their colleagues and employees to see who among them might not be sufficiently pro-LGBTQ+ or pro-choice, and who should be cast out into the outer darkness for wrong thinking.
However, as Rod Dreher of The American Conservative writes, the Woke firms are not just satisfied with policing their own employees for un-Woke attitudes and thoughts. These companies also are imperialistic in pushing their social and political views elsewhere and not being afraid to use threats when challenged. For example, Dreher points out that when some states recently passed strict limits on abortion on demand, more than 200 CEOs of companies like Ben & Jerry’s, Yelp, and Bloomberg signed an advertisement in the New York Timescondemning the new laws and claiming they were “bad for business.”
The focus of my article last year was the problem of businesses becoming bureaucratic in their drive for social justice, but the issues are much more far-reaching now than just the policies that govern the human resources offices of these firms. While the drive to create a workplace atmosphere not unlike what would have existed under the Stasi in the former East Germany is turning many corporations into pockets of “soft totalitarianism,” they don’t stop at their own property lines in their zeal to “reform” US society.
Nike’s snub of the Betsy Ross Flag because of alleged “slavery” connotations and the decision by Nabisco to display Oreos wrapped in coverings that celebrates transgenderism and the use of special pronouns have especially bothered Dreher, who writes:
So now the Colonial-era US flag is the equivalent of the Confederate flag for failed NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, whose eccentric preferences allow him to decide what kind of shoes Nike can sell.
This is the stupidest thing. Now we have to despise Colonial America to be in good graces with the Woke Police. I hope Nike loses a ton of money on this. They deserve to. Despicable people, capitulating to this crap. I respected Kaepernick’s right to protest on the field, and honestly, I’m not even mad at him for this, however childish it may be. It’s the fault of the woke executives at Nike, who are so afraid of being unwoke that they are embarrassed by their own country’s historic flag. I would walk barefoot over broken glass before I would buy another pair of Nike shoes.
The cultural left has captured the bureaucracies at American corporations. One thing we hear a lot from our friends on the left is that Big Business is conservative, and would never do anything that would hurt its bottom line. Wrong! I have seen personally how companies will do politically correct things that actually hurt their business model, but that win its management pats on the back among their social cohort. These documents I looked at today assert — assert, do not argue — that the total politicization of the company’s culture is critical to its business success … and then go on to describe a program that is almost certainly going to cause major problems with teamwork, cohesiveness, and conflict. These documents are a recipe for creating intense anxiety and suspicion within the company. It’s as clear as day. You cannot imagine why any sensible company would embrace these principles and techniques, which can only hurt its ability to compete. But there it is, in black and white.
Shares of Nike are rising after former NFL star and activist Colin Kaepernick convinced the company to pull its “Air Max 1 USA” sneakers from store shelves. Kaepernick’s concern over the shoe’s “Betsy Ross Flag” designs connection to an era of slavery resonated with investors, as Nike has seen a 2% stock increase and added nearly $3 billion in market value since cancelling the kicks.
Forbes continues:
Playing the long game with Kaepernick seems to be fruitful for the company amidst earlier short term stock market pain CultureBanx reported. Let’s look at the big picture, Kaepernick has been on Nike’s endorsement roster since 2011, but hadn’t been featured in one of their ads in two years before appearing in September 2018. The company received more than $43 million worth of media exposure from the ad, according to Apex Marketing Group.
Social issues and a brand’s bottom line go hand in hand for millennials. A total of 15,191 investors on Robinhood added Nike to their portfolios when Kaepernick’s ad was released, according to Business Insider. Additionally, Nielsen reported 38% of African Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 and 41% of those aged 35 or older said they expect the brands they buy to support social causes.
In other words, there seems to be a sizable group of investors that want to see this sort of thing from an American firm in which the company attacks what have been venerable symbols of the country’s existence. What was not long ago considered to be a benign American icon suddenly is labeled as a Nazi Swastika, according to commentators on MSNBC. One wonders what next will be in Woke Capitalism’s crosshairs — but it will be something that at least right now is not even considered to be controversial.
Likewise, we see no letup in the push for Woke Capitalism. Ross Douthat of the New York Times speculates that part of the leftward move for American capitalism mirrors what once was called the Treaty of Detroit, in which US automakers agreed to labor contracts with the United Auto Workers that in the long run proved harmful to those companies. He writes:
The system defined by the so-called Treaty of Detroit, the labor-management agreements struck between Walter Reuther and the Big Three automakers, was well-intentioned but also self-interested, a necessary-seeming concession to political trends that might have threatened corporate independence and profits even more.
Douthat labels the current corporate “wokeness” as being what he calls the Treaty of Palo Alto, writing:
But there are other ways to compromise besides on wages, and at an accelerating pace our corporate class is trying to negotiate a different kind of peace, a different deal from the one they struck with New Deal liberalism and Big Labor. Instead of the Treaty of Detroit we have, if you will, the Peace of Palo Alto, in which a certain kind of virtue-signaling on progressive social causes, a certain degree of performative wokeness, is offered to liberalism and the activist left pre-emptively, in the hopes that having corporate America take their side in the culture wars will blunt efforts to tax or regulate our new monopolies too heavily.
In other words, he says that perhaps some of the zealous “wokeness” of some companies is trying to keep in the good graces of lawmakers that call for the breakup of firms like Facebook and Google, appeasing them so that they will be less likely to inflict harm upon them. Perhaps that has something to do with it, but Douthat agrees that at least some of the new attitudes are the result of ideology. He writes:
Much of this signaling is sincerely motivated. I’m sure that lots of people in the corporate ranks at Delta or Alamo sincerely abhor the N.R.A., just as most of the people who demanded James Damore’s firing from Google or Brendan Eich’s ejection from Mozilla regarded both men as beyond-the-pale bigots.
But a certain amount of cynicism is also in order. It’s worth noting, for instance, how Tim Cook’s willingness to play the social justice warrior when the target is a few random Indiana restaurants that might not want to host hypothetical same-sex weddings does not extend to reconsidering Apple’s relationship with the many countries around the world where human rights are rather more in jeopardy than they are in the American Midwest.
It was a beautiful summer afternoon today in Warsaw. Sitting on a terrace in one of the city’s squares, I found myself talking to an executive who works for a local branch of a US-based multinational company. When he found out that I’m working on a book about “soft totalitarianism,” he told me about the culture inside his corporation.
Like most American and Western European corporations here, he said, his firm pushes LGBT Pride heavily inside its corporate culture. It is very difficult to resist if, like him, you have religious or moral qualms about it. It is getting to the point where silence is not sufficient: you must affirm.
This new corporate workplace enforcement of limited worldviews only is different in degree than what used to pass for the loyalty oaths in totalitarian states. These “woke” workplaces remind me of religious institutions (including a few where I have taught) in which the employees had to hold to certain beliefs about Jesus, the Bible, and Christian doctrine in general. However, the purpose of those colleges was to help train people in the Christian faith; they were religious in nature, and they were run by people who held to certain doctrinal beliefs. Furthermore, like-minded people tend to self-select to such institutions.
Google, IKEA, and even Ben & Jerry’s (for all its left-wing fervor) are not religious institutions, or at least they were not established in order to better train their workers and customers in “the woke faith.” Yet, that is exactly what they are doing; the latest iterations of the Sexual Revolution serve as their doctrines and their leaders seem increasingly determined to produce something akin to a Holy Priesthood of Woke from the ranks of employees.
Whether it is affirming the latest consonant to the LGBTQ+ list, using new sets of “pronouns” to address the sexual identity of individuals, or supporting the sexualization of children, the woke corporate workplace has moved well beyond trying to help one’s employer make a profit. In fact, it seems that places like Google would rather have mediocre employees who are “woke” than excellent employees who are Christians. At that point, we are dealing with a totalitarian mentality, and free markets cannot easily coexist with such thinking.
Furthermore, many American and international businesses have become almost hopelessly politicized. WhenGoogle executives are recorded as saying they plan to manipulate the algorithms they create to influence the 2020 presidential election in order to elect the “right” candidate, we are dealing with something well beyond even the most politicized actions of companies during the New Deal when the federal government saw no limits on the desire of the Roosevelt administration to interfere with the marketplace.
Perhaps the most important question we can ask, however, is this: Can Woke Capitalism on its own become a coercive or even totalitarian force in our society? Before answering such a question (if it is possible to clearly answer it), we should recall that people on the Left have been making such predictions for decades regarding corporations and their power over Americans. John Kenneth Galbraith’s books are full of that stuff, and those of us who have reached our senior citizen years heard such claims from the alleged threat from General Motors to the power of IBM to Microsoft. Evil corporate geniuses apparently wanted to control the world — but they could not even control their own marketplaces. Nabisco may display their “pronoun” Oreos, but that doesn’t mean everyone will buy them. That should provide food for thought.
There are some caveats. Douthat writes:
In certain ways the Peace of Palo Alto won’t be fully tested until the next time the Democrats hold real power, when we’ll get to find out whether the left’s antimonopoly forays have any follow-through, whether more than a token portion of the Trump corporate tax cuts will get rolled back — or whethercorporate wokeness will suffice as a concession to the new spirit of liberalism, enabling the easy post-1980s relationship between corporate America and the Democratic Party to endure.
As I see it, the verdict on Woke Capitalism is mixed. Rod Dreher sees it as an existential threat to freedom and that the coercion (adopt our beliefs or be fired) that is part of the Woke Workplace will spill into greater society and be further used by governments that have no commitment to individual freedoms. That could be the case, although no matter what sets of beliefs toward the Sexual Revolution may guide corporate boardrooms, no business firm can get away from the fundamentals of private property, prices, and profits and losses. What Mises wrote in Bureaucracy 75 years ago about the need for these things still holds, and no amount of bluster and coercion can change those facts.
It is highly unlikely that Woke Big Business on its own can turn the USA into a totalitarian society. Historically speaking, business policies have followed the lead of governments, not the other way around. At worst, firms like Google and Microsoft might aid governments in the expansion of surveillance and the implementation of tools of totalitarianism.
There is one huge difference between businesses (even Woke Capitalism) and government: business firms cannot engage in the kind of coercion that is the lifeblood of government rule. While Americans might still believe that corporations one day will rule the world, creating a Rollerballdystopia, there is a reason that such scenarios are depicted in fiction, and that is because they are fiction. Government coercion and brutality, unfortunately, are quite real. While one can fear what is happening in corporate boardrooms and executive offices, one always should fear government more.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YofS1G Tyler Durden
