Just as Lighthizer and his band of merry trade-deals-men prepare to head to China for face-to-face talks, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reports that North Korea has fired an unidentified projectile from Wonsan.
In the months leading up to the 2016 election I had been predicting a Trump win based on a particular theory which I believe still holds true today – namely the theory that the global banking elites in power were allowing so-called “populist” movements in the US and Europe to gain political traction near the very end of the decade long “Everything Bubble”. Once populist groups were entrenched and feeling overconfident, the cabal would then tighten liquidity into existing economic weakness and crash the system on their heads. Populists would get the blame for an economic disaster that the central banks had engineered many years in advance.
Once enough suffering had been dealt to the populace, globalists and extreme leftists would arrive on the scene to offer anti-populism as a solution; meaning the centralization and socialization of everything on a scale never before witnessed except perhaps in the darkest days of the Bolshevik Revolution.
By extension, for a couple of years I have been examining the strange correlations between the background and policies of Donald Trump and the background and policies of Herbert Hoover; the Republican president that oversaw the great crash of 1929 and the beginning of the Great Depression.
One of Hoover’s first actions as president in response to the fiscal tensions of 1929 was to support increased tax cuts, primarily for corporations (this was then followed in 1932 by extensive tax increases in the midst of the depression). Then, he instituted tariffs through the Smoot-Hawley Act. His hyperfocus on massive infrastructure spending resulted in U.S. debt expansion and did nothing to dig the U.S. out of its unemployment abyss. In fact, infrastructure projects like the Hoover Dam, which were launched in 1931, were not paid of for over 50 years. Hoover ended up as a single-term Republican president who paved the way socially for Franklin D. Roosevelt, an thinly disguised communist and perhaps the most destructive president in American history.
It was Hoover and his “protectionist” policies that were blamed for the Great Depression (along with the gold standard), yet it was the Federal Reserve which created the entire calamity. The Fed’s policy easing in the 1920s led to the extensive bubble in banking and stock markets, and the Fed’s rate hikes and liquidity tightening in the early 1930’s exacerbated the crash and extended the depression for many years. Former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke even openly admitted that the Fed was responsible for the Great Depression in a speech made in honor of Milton Friedman in 2002. He stated:
“In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn.
Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
Of course, the Fed IS doing it again. For over a year and a half the Fed has been instituting liquidity tightening into economic weakness at the onset of the crash of one of the biggest financial bubbles in the history of the economic world. It is a bubble they created with the intention of deliberately imploding it, and the process has already begun. As I have noted numerous times, the crash in fundamentals is well underway, with almost every sector of the economy in retreat except the three indicators that the Fed and the government statistically manipulate: GDP, employment, and stock markets.
Trump is not innocent in this scheme, either. After months of rightly criticizing the Fed during his campaign for inflating a fake economy and stock market, Trump pulled a 180 on his supporters after becoming president and has now attached his administration so completely to the Everything Bubble (and stock markets in particular) that it is assured he and his conservative followers will take the blame as it collapses.
I am also not the only person noting the comparison between Trump and Herbert Hoover. Trump’s similarities to Hoover are being mentioned endlessly the past year in the mainstream and leftist media with a particular focus on the trade war. Trump’s trade conflicts are providing the perfect cover for the banking elites to pull the plug on the economy, while escaping any blame. The narrative is being set up for a crash and the plan is to make populists, nationalists and sovereignty activists the scapegoats.
So, the question is, if Trump is playing the role of a modern day Hoover, and the current crash in fundamentals is set to become another long term depression, then who is the next Franklin D. Roosevelt; the communistic president or political group to push America even further into the socialist fold?
It is hard to say at this time if Trump, like Hoover, will be a one term president. If the economic crash continues on its current pace then it is unlikely that Trump could secure a second term in 2020. That said, the advent of a shooting war with a country like Iran could conceivably change the dynamic even in the midst of a financial crisis.
Whether in 2020, or 2024, I believe Trump and the populist revolt will be replaced with a socialist fervor beyond anything we saw during the Obama Administration. Just as conservatives surprised the world in 2016, I believe the hard left will surprise the world in the next 5 years.
I find it rather suspicious the amount of media attention hard leftist politicians with little experience are receiving in the mainstream media these days. I am also suspicious of the amount of attention Donald Trump is paying to these same politicians in what appears to be another scripted wrestling match for the benefit of the public. Yes, I’m talking about the “four horsewomen of the Apocalypse” and the ongoing soap opera dramatics between them and Trump that continually keep these junior upstarts in the spotlight despite all reason.
It is perhaps very hard to notice right now in the middle of Trump fever, but I see the beginnings, the root or the seed, of a massive narrative change in the elevation of political extremists like Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, also known as “the squad”. Yes, they seem to be universally hated in Washington right now, and the abject failure of AOC’s “Green New Deal” makes it appear as if there is little support for their ideas, but again, look at how much attention these nobodies are accumulating…
I am reminded of the early hints of Barack Obama’s run for president even though he had little political experience compared to his opponents, most of it as a state senator. People running against him during his early career on the Democratic and Republican sides seemed to keep dropping out of the races due to sexual scandals. Then, Obama received overt attention from the mainstream media and even The Daily Show before he ever announced his run for the Oval Office. The build up was obvious for analysts that recognized the signals. Obama had been anointed by the elites.
AOC and “the squad” are being marketed in a very similar manner to Obama; as hopeful, young, vibrant, full of energy and ready to take on the world. The kind of cheesy, heart-clutching Disney movie sales pitch that Democrats and leftists go crazy for.
Today, comparatively “moderate” Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are falling all over themselves to promote “the squad” and get their political approval and support. It is clear that hard line leftists are dictating the conversation on America’s future governmental path, and that path is one of extreme centralization, globalization, and bureaucratic tyranny in the name of fraudulent environmental panic.
Interestingly, Elizabeth Warren is garnering attention lately with her warnings of coming economic calamity under the Trump Administration. Her observations are very obvious to most of us and not worth noting here; it’s nice that Warren is mentioning the prospect of economic danger in the mainstream, but she’s years late to the party. I would point out, though, that this marks a turning point in the 2020 election conversation. Suddenly, the Democrats are seriously talking about the potential for a financial crash – which says to me that the crash that is already happening today is about to accelerate even more in the next year. The globalists are setting the stage for the Democrats to say “See, we told you so”, as an election year approaches.
At this point, given her recent statements, I will have to predict that Elizabeth Warren is the intended Democratic candidate for the 2020 election.
It is important to remember that public sentiment is fickle, and can change so swiftly it boggles the mind. With the advent of a major economic disaster and maybe even a kinetic war that the US cannot sustain or win in the long run, the predictions of globalists and leftists that populist movements are a “crisis waiting to happen” would be fulfilled. Trump has no real control over the economy, of course, and the Fed determines when and how a financial bubble will pop; but that will not stop the majority from laying the blame on the feet of Trump and his political base. The introduction of hardcore socialism as the preeminent American ideal would be a much easier sell at that point.
In the middle of societal catastrophe, that which we once thought impossible becomes probable. I predict that the “four horsewomen of the Apocalypse” and their ilk are chosen by the globalists to take control of the US in the next decade after Trump and the populists are fully discredited in the eyes of more than half the country and the world. To be certain, there are many of us who will not accept open socialist/communist governance and all the tidings that come with it (including carbon controls and disarmament of the population), and I have no doubt civil war would erupt.
The point is, we should expect this outcome as one the globalists will force. The signs are visible now. The policies of these women, which are utterly insane and bankrupt of logic, are going to become the prevailing ideals of the next political revolution. Count on it.
* * *
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via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32NvTl1 Tyler Durden
For a few years now, “Antifa” activists have served as a good foil for their Trumpian counterparts and handy villains for Fox News segments. Now, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) wants to up the stakes. On Tuesday, he urged the FBI to open an investigation into whether Antifa as a group is breaking federal law.
Nevermind that Antifa activists are no more a formal organization than your average group text or a gaggle of happy hour regulars—Cruz wants to treat them like an official criminal enterprise, chargeable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
This should be worrying no matter how one feels about Antifa activists.
The label Antifa—short for anti-fascist—has been around a while, and was adopted by disparate groups and individuals on the left in the wake of Trump’s election. Some Antifa activists have engaged in unprovoked violence as a protest tactic; many more do not.
There is no official Antifa leadership, no formal party structures, no central planning board, no members. While Antifa “chapters” have sprung up in some U.S. cities, these groups have different origin stories, tactics, and goals, and are not sanctioned by any central Antifa leadership. There is no central Antifa leadership, and anyone can start a protest group in their city and call it, and themselves, Antifa.
Antifa is probably best described as a movement, in the same way that folks talk about “small-L libertarians” and the “liberty movement” to describe a branch of related activism and ideology independent from the Libertarian Party.
Cruz did not suggest that the FBI look into particular criminal acts committed by particular criminal actors who identify as Antifa. Instead, he wants the FBI to define the whole movement as a criminal enterprise, making anyone who adopts the label potentially liable for anything anyone else using the label does.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Cruz mentioned a recent Portland protest where journalist Andy Ngo was beaten up by black-clad activists, and an attempted attack on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Washington state. “I am concerned that these are not isolated instances but rather this is a pattern, an organization that is engaged in masked, anonymous, violent terrorism,” Cruz said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Cruz the agency is “absolutely concerned about violence committed on behalf of any ideology.” But “the key there,” said Wray, is that “the FBI doesn’t investigate ideology, we investigate violent criminal activity.”
Wray continued, essentially telling Cruz that you can’t just criminally investigate anyone associated with an ideological movement because a few proponents of that ideology have done bad things. The FBI definitely “considers Antifa more of an ideology than an organization,” Wray said.
The FBI has a history of investigating people based only on their ideology; readers can decide for themselves whether they want to accept its assurances that those days are in the past. It’s heartening, at any rate, to hear the bureau’s director at least pay lip service to the idea that law enforcement should focus on actual crimes rather than Wrongthink.
Cruz, however, isn’t satisfied with that. Comparing Antifa to the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia, he told Wray he would be sending him and the Department of Justice a letter asking for a RICO Act investigation.
Basically, the RICO Act enhances penalties for doing things that are already crimes if one does them as part of an organized criminal enterprise.
Cruz’s blatant political posturing about Antifa and RICO is especially concerning considering how Cruz talking points are prone to spreading across the GOP. None of us, no matter our ideologies, will be better off with more demands for corrupt and partisan investigations, nor from increasing pressure to make guilty-by-association the rule of law.
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Days after the House passed a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.)—a member of the much-embattled “Squad” targeted by Pres. Trump—upped the ante: “Now I think it should be $20,” she said.
Tlaib was addressing an event spearheaded by the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan and One Fair Wage, two organizations pushing for a higher minimum base pay for restaurant industry workers. While a $20 minimum wage would be problematic for a range of businesses, the restaurant industry, in particular, stands to lose the most from such proposals.
Employees at food and drink establishments typically work on a “tipped wage,” an hourly base rate that is lower than the minimum wage. Those workers can make up the rest of the hourly minimum wage in tips; if gratuities fail to bring an employee’s earnings to the equivalent of the minimum wage, employers are required to make up the difference. If employees make more than the hourly minimum wage in tips, they get to keep the extra income.
Not only does this model of pay give waitstaff the chance to accrue earnings above and beyondthe minimum wage, but it also allows restaurants of every variety to stay above water. In an industry with profit margins around 6 percent, employees who make a lot of tips also help keep the doors open and the stoves running.
The federal tipped minimum is currently $2.13 an hour. Tlaib’s proposal, which amounts to an increase of almost 940 percent, would spell trouble for many dining establishments, particularly those of the mom and pop variety, many of which would require a miracle to comply with Tlaib’s proposal and stay in business. A recent study released by two researchers from Harvard University’s Business School concluded that a median-rated restaurant on Yelp (3.5 stars) was 14 percent more likely to close with each additional dollar added to the tipped wage.
Some will obviously be fortunate enough to remain open—but many of their employees may not be so fortunate. Take Manhattan, for instance, which recently hiked the city’s tipped wage to $10 an hour. A corresponding survey released by the NYC Hospitality Alliance found that, in response to that increase, 75 percent of full-service establishments will cut employee hours in 2019, and 47 percent will eliminate jobs entirely.
And those jobs will likely belong to the most vulnerable economic group: those with the lowest skills, who, on paper, are supposed to benefit from minimum wage increases. A 2015 study from the University of Washington shows that restaurants subjected to tipped wage hikes do away with the more menial positions in favor of high-skilled labor.
“A server can bus their own table, but you can’t ask a busboy to open a bottle of wine and talk about what it can be paired with,” Susannah Koteen, who runs Lido Restaurant in Harlem, told CBS News in January.
The battle over tipped wages isn’t new, with similar fights having been waged in Seattle, Washington, and Maine, among other cities and states across the country. Washington, D.C., entered the fray last summer when activists—spearheaded by the Restaurant Opportunities Center and One Fair Wage—passed Initiative 77, which, had it been implemented, would have eliminated the tipped wage entirely in the District. (The initiative passed at the ballot box, but was overturned by the D.C. Council after an outcry from service industry professionals who objected to the law.)
“There seems to be this myth going around that most tipped employees in restaurants aren’t earning a livable wage; after 13 years in the industry, this baffles me completely,” wrote Ryan Aston, a local bartender, in a Washington Post op-ed. “I earn roughly $45 an hour with tips included; I don’t know a single server or bartender in the District whose wages have to be supplemented because they haven’t earned the minimum.”
Regardless, Tlaib wants a one-size-fits-all approach, one that mandates a sky-high federal wage and fails to account for specific industry needs.
“People cannot live on those kind of wages, and I can’t allow people to be living off tips, you know, relying on tips for wages. It’s just not enough to support our families,” Tlaib said at the event, dubbed “Server for an Hour.” But if a proposal like Tlaib’s were to pass, the workers she’s advocating for might be out of work entirely.
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Last quarter, in a period of growing concerns about its business model and growing fears about flagging end-user demand for its products after the company reported dismal Q1 deliveries with just 12,100 combined model S and X deliveries the lowest total since 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made investors wait, and wait, and then wait some more before releasing Q1 earnings at 5:13pm, roughly 1 hour after the customary release time (so that investors would have only 17 minutes to digest the report before rushing off to the conference call).
This time, with Tesla recently announcing that it delivered a record number of cars, or 95,200, in the second quarter, the odds for such a late report were virtually nil – especially with the stock rising 2% into earnings – but the big question was whether Tesla had aggressively front-loaded auto demand this quarter and whether it would reaffirm its prior guidance for delivering 360,000 to 400,000 cars in 2019, and alongside that, will Tesla maintain a ~20% gross margin. Perhaps even more important, what is the company’s cash burn especially after it raised $2.7 billion in stock and debt in May even as it warned that it risked running out of cash without “hardcore” cost cuts.
And so, at 4:47 pm – well later than its usual time between 4:10 and 4:20pm, and a clear hint that not all is well – Tesla did report Q2 earnings, which were as follows:
Revenue $6.35 billion, also far worse than the estimate of $6.43 billion
Adjusted loss per share pf $1.12, far worse than the estimate 31c
Free cash flow $614 million, better than the estimate $235.5 million
Adjusted automotive gross margin of 19%, better than the estimate +17.1%
Capital expenditure only $250MM, far below the estimate $583.9 million
And visually, revenues…
And EPS:
Speaking of the company’s liquidity situation, TSLA’s cash flow actually posted a dramatic rebound from the $920 million it burned in Q1, spiking to $614 million…
… but the reason for this is that CapEx came in far below estimates, with Tesla only spending $250 million on capital expenditures, more than 50% below the $583 million expected. As a reminder, last quarter Tesla also surprise by spending far less on CapEx, when it reported Q1 capital expenditure of only $279.9 million, with consensus expecting nearly double that that or $508.2 million, suggesting the company once again mothballed various expansion projects to mitigate the cash burn.
And speaking of future Capex, and the company’s growth prospects, perhaps the main reason why the company’s stock is tumbling is because of the following item in the outlook: “Our 2019 capex is expected to be about $1.5 to $2.0 billion, a reduction from prior guidance” with the market clearly seeing this as a hint that growth – and more specifically, spending on growth – is about to slow significantly.
The “good” news is that at least Tesla did not cut its production outlook yet, and said it is still on track to deliver between 360,000 and 400,000 vehicles this year.
Some more highlights from the company’s outlook:
This quarter, we are simplifying our approach to guidance. We are most focused on expanding our manufacturing footprint in new regions, launching new products and continuing to improve the customer experience, while generating and using cash sustainably. Local production and improved utilization of existing factories is essential to be cost competitive in each region.
We remain on track to launch local production of the Model 3 in China by the end of the year and Model Y in Fremont by fall of 2020. We are also accelerating our European Gigafactory efforts and are hoping to finalize a location choice in the coming quarters.
Looking at the all important demand number, Tesla’s customer deposits plunged again, dropping to $631 million from $768 million in Q1, the lowest number since Q1 2017, suggesting that the backlog of potential clients is rapidly shrinking.
And so between the major miss on the top and bottom line, and the capex miss and cut, the market’s patience with Tesla appears to have run out, and the stock is tumbling in the after hours.
Developing.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Y1PejR Tyler Durden
For a few years now, “Antifa” activists have served as a good foil for their Trumpian counterparts and handy villains for Fox News segments. Now, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) wants to up the stakes. On Tuesday, he urged the FBI to open an investigation into whether Antifa as a group is breaking federal law.
Nevermind that Antifa activists are no more a formal organization than your average group text or a gaggle of happy hour regulars—Cruz wants to treat them like an official criminal enterprise, chargeable under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
This should be worrying no matter how one feels about Antifa activists.
The label Antifa—short for anti-fascist—has been around a while, and was adopted by disparate groups and individuals on the left in the wake of Trump’s election. Some Antifa activists have engaged in unprovoked violence as a protest tactic; many more do not.
There is no official Antifa leadership, no formal party structures, no central planning board, no members. While Antifa “chapters” have sprung up in some U.S. cities, these groups have different origin stories, tactics, and goals, and are not sanctioned by any central Antifa leadership. There is no central Antifa leadership, and anyone can start a protest group in their city and call it, and themselves, Antifa.
Antifa is probably best described as a movement, in the same way that folks talk about “small-L libertarians” and the “liberty movement” to describe a branch of related activism and ideology independent from the Libertarian Party.
Cruz did not suggest that the FBI look into particular criminal acts committed by particular criminal actors who identify as Antifa. Instead, he wants the FBI to define the whole movement as a criminal enterprise, making anyone who adopts the label potentially liable for anything anyone else using the label does.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Cruz mentioned a recent Portland protest where journalist Andy Ngo was beaten up by black-clad activists, and an attempted attack on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Washington state. “I am concerned that these are not isolated instances but rather this is a pattern, an organization that is engaged in masked, anonymous, violent terrorism,” Cruz said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told Cruz the agency is “absolutely concerned about violence committed on behalf of any ideology.” But “the key there,” said Wray, is that “the FBI doesn’t investigate ideology, we investigate violent criminal activity.”
Wray continued, essentially telling Cruz that you can’t just criminally investigate anyone associated with an ideological movement because a few proponents of that ideology have done bad things. The FBI definitely “considers Antifa more of an ideology than an organization,” Wray said.
The FBI has a history of investigating people based only on their ideology; readers can decide for themselves whether they want to accept its assurances that those days are in the past. It’s heartening, at any rate, to hear the bureau’s director at least pay lip service to the idea that law enforcement should focus on actual crimes rather than Wrongthink.
Cruz, however, isn’t satisfied with that. Comparing Antifa to the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia, he told Wray he would be sending him and the Department of Justice a letter asking for a RICO Act investigation.
Basically, the RICO Act enhances penalties for doing things that are already crimes if one does them as part of an organized criminal enterprise.
Cruz’s blatant political posturing about Antifa and RICO is especially concerning considering how Cruz talking points are prone to spreading across the GOP. None of us, no matter our ideologies, will be better off with more demands for corrupt and partisan investigations, nor from increasing pressure to make guilty-by-association the rule of law.
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A current senior software engineer at Google has gone on record with Project Veritas to discuss how the company – and Silicon Valley big tech in general – has been sharply biased against conservatives since the 2016 US election.
Greg Coppola, who works on AI and the Google Assistant, believes we are “at a really important point in human history,” where ” we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people.”
“It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?” asks Coppola.
Coppola notes that Google algorithms can influence people’s opinions.
“I think we had a long period, of ten years, let’s say, where we had search and social media that didn’t have a political bias and we kind of got used to the idea that the top search results at Google is probably the answer. And Robert Epstein who testified before Congress last week, um, looked into it and showed that, you know, the vast majority of people think that if something is higher rated on Google Search than another story, that it would be more important and more correct. And you know, we haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda. I mean, it’s something that we’re only starting to talk about now.”
Asked about Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony to Congress in December 2018, where Pichai said Google’s algorithms are politically unbiased, Coppola said:
COPPOLA: “First of all, I report to Sundar of course. And I have a great deal of respect for him as a manager. I work on the Google Assistant, which really doesn’t have a political bias. Google Assistant is things like, hey, Google, set an alarm for nine AM, play some music, that type of stuff… I think it’s, you know, ridiculous to say that there’s no bias. I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is.”
According to Coppola, the company became more political just before the last presidential election:
COPPOLA: “I started in 2014. 2014 was an amazing time to be at Google. We didn’t talk about politics. No one talked about politics. You know, it was just a chance to work with the best computer scientists in the world, the best facilities, the best computers and free food. I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist… And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that. A small number of people do work on making sure that certain new sites are promoted. And in fact, I think it would only take a couple out of an organization of 100,000, you know, to make sure that the product is a certain way…
Coppola pointed out that he believes most Google employees are not politically-driven in their work, and that the company is actually very protective of its users’ private data despite public criticism of the company:
COPPOLA: “Most people’s job [at Google] is not political and doesn’t involve politics. I mean there’s a vast number of systems and a lot of them have nothing to do with politics like processing natural language… In fact, I would say that Google actually concerns of the assistant is taking much longer to build the assistant than it would otherwise need to because there is such a respect at Google for privacy and for user data. And I hope you leave this in and I hope people realize that there is really, I would say as an insider at Google there is a lot of interest put in taking care of people’s data and conversely it means that, you know the list of reputations of mappings from new site to some number representing their credibility is probably something I can access.”
The insider expressed concern about going public, but also offered solutions for how to remedy allegations of political bias at Google:
COPPOLA: “I think the biggest problem here is just the overall lack of transparency that we have in our products today. Um, for example, if we had open source software, we would know why each answer was arrived at.”
COPPOLA: Yeah, I mean, I have a job that pays well and has other benefits like working with very intelligent coworkers and really at the forefront of computer science. The Google Assistant is probably the most advanced artificial intelligence system anywhere in the world. Then for someone like me who’s been coding since I was a kid, um, it’s hard to find a job that pushes me to the limits the way working at Google does. But I guess I just, you know, I look at search and I look at Google News and I see what it’s doing and I see Google executives go to Congress and say that it’s not manipulated. It’s not political. And I’m just so sure that’s not true. That it’s, you know, it becomes a lot less fun to work on the product. So it affects you that much. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the thing about Google is if you leave, um, you know, any other salary at any other company will be lower. Hmm. So I do think it’s a sacrifice.”
COPPOLA: “I just want to say to all the non-programmers that I really don’t buy the idea that big tech is politically neutral, and I think we need to start incorporating that into whatever strategy we use to have a democracy going forward.”
Project Veritas will continue to investigate political bias at big tech companies. Insiders at technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter can contact Project Veritas via encrypted email at VeritasTips@protonmail.com
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30VJwgd Tyler Durden
When Mueller stepped down as special counsel at the conclusion of his investigation over the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, he made two important points in a public statement. One, he wanted his report to speak for itself. Two, he did not want to testify about the report, and if he were forced to do so, his testimony would not extend beyond the report’s contents.
Nevertheless, Mueller spent Wednesday testifying before members of Congress. The reviews are now in: He’s boring! His energy level is low! He keeps asking them to repeat the questions because he’s having a hard time hearing them! And he’s not answering their questions the way they want!
Mueller ended up walking back what sounded like a bombshell at first: That he would have recommended obstruction charges against Trump if Trump were not president (he did not make a finding because Trump is the president, but he laid out the evidence for Congress to consider).
“Robert Mueller Is Struggling,” is how Politico graded the 74-year-old’s testimony today. There are, naturally, loads of tweets about Mueller’s lackluster participation. Here’s just one:
Questions are being raised on @CNN about Robert Mueller’s performance so far. Friends and political allies who have known him for decades have expressed concern about his appearance today.
As one of many journalists who has watched this investigation play out, this is pretty much exactly what I was expecting. My interpretation of the disappointment today is that Democrats in Congress fervently hoped a compelling day of Mueller’s testimony would make impeaching Trump seem both more feasible and less political.
Mueller has made it very, very clear in his comments and in his report that it is the role of Congress to decide what to do with the facts he has laid out to them. That means if Democrats want to impeach Trump, they can’t use Mueller as a deus ex machina. They’ll have to beat Trump in 2020 or impeach him on other grounds.
It’s also not Mueller’s job to remove politics from the process of impeachment. He’s not there to protect either the Democrats or the Republicans from any political fallout that comes with removing a president from office (or, in the GOP’s case, refusing to). His job was to provide Congress with the facts he found related to Russian involvement in the 2016 election and Trump’s behavior surrounding his investigation. Congress has to decide what to do with those facts. While Mueller’s report carefully lays out evidence that could be used to make the case that Trump attempted to obstruct the investigation, Mueller has made it clear that his responsibility, at least with regards to Trump, ended with gathering those facts.
I don’t know what Mueller was thinking while he sat there, but it’s easy to imagine how exhausting and tiresome it must have been to endure today’s proceedings, likely knowing from the very start that the people questioning him were less interested in what he had to say—what he’d in fact already said—than in whether he’d say what they wanted him to say.
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That we fall for the fakes and cons is understandable, given that’s all we have left in the public sphere.
What do we mean when we say corporate media is fake? We mean it’s a carefully crafted con, a set of narratives, cherry-picked data and heavily massaged statistics (the unemployment rate, etc.) designed to instill the reader’s confidence in a narrative that serves the interests not of the citizenry but of a select few pillaging the citizenry.
Once upon a time in America, no adult could survive without a finely tuned BS detector. Herman Melville masterfully captured America’s culture of cons and con artists in his 1857 classic The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in The Con in Confidence (October 4, 2006).
An essential component of the American ethos is: don’t be a chump. Don’t fall for the con. And if you do, it’s your own fault. America in 1857 was a simmering stew of con artists, flim-flammers and grifters exploiting the naive, the trusting and the credulous, and that remains the case in 2019.
We now inhabit a world where virtually everything is a con. That “organic” produce from some other country–did anyone test the soil the produce grew in? It could be loaded with heavy metals and be certified “organic” because no pesticides were used during production. Are there any nutrients left in the soil or has it been depleted? What’s in the water used to irrigate the crops?
The point of the con in offshored “organic” is the higher prices fetched. This is why it’s critical to ask of every narrative, story, product and data set: cui bono, to whose benefit?
The employment/unemployment statistics are obviously a con. 93 million people aren’t even counted any more–they’re statistical zombies, no longer among the living workforce. If the unemployment rate were calculated on the number of full-time jobs and the true workforce (everyone ages 18 – 70 that isn’t institutionalized or in prison), the unemployment rate would not be the absurdly delusional 3.7% claimed by the bureaucratic con artists.
“Healthy choice” snacks: fake: loaded with the same low-quality ingredients and high salt content as junk food.
Social media privacy: fake: we really really really keep all your data private, except for what we sell to marketers for immense profits, which is, well, all of it.
Democracy: fake: the live entertainment of elections sells a lot of ads and enriches the corporate media, but nothing actually changes: the Deep State runs the federal government and Deep Pockets run state and local government.
Prosperity: fake: trillions of dollars in new currency and credit have inflated assets to absurd levels, all to create the illusion that everything’s getting better in every way, every day. (See chart below of the “everything bubble”: $1 million decaying bungalows, stocks at all time highs, etc. )
Melville understood that we want to be conned: we want to believe the elixir will make our aches and pains go away, that the new face in politics will clear out the rot of corruption, that rising prices for everything means we’re getting richer and so on.
Orson Welles’ weird and wonderful documentary F for Fake reminds us that a successful fake is essentially identical with the real thing: so the S&P 500 hitting 3,000 means we’re all getting more prosperous, right?
Despite all the craftsmanship, though, fake is still fake. And today virtually everything is fake, a con designed to trick or distract the marks (us) from the looting, plundering and predation of those running the con for their own self-interest.
That we fall for the fakes and cons is understandable, given that’s all we have left in the public sphere.
When Mueller stepped down as special counsel at the conclusion of his investigation over the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, he made two important points in a public statement. One, he wanted his report to speak for itself. Two, he did not want to testify about the report, and if he were forced to do so, his testimony would not extend beyond the report’s contents.
Nevertheless, Mueller spent Wednesday testifying before members of Congress. The reviews are now in: He’s boring! His energy level is low! He keeps asking them to repeat the questions because he’s having a hard time hearing them! And he’s not answering their questions the way they want!
Mueller ended up walking back what sounded like a bombshell at first: That he would have recommended obstruction charges against Trump if Trump were not president (he did not make a finding because Trump is the president, but he laid out the evidence for Congress to consider).
“Robert Mueller Is Struggling,” is how Politico graded the 74-year-old’s testimony today. There are, naturally, loads of tweets about Mueller’s lackluster participation. Here’s just one:
Questions are being raised on @CNN about Robert Mueller’s performance so far. Friends and political allies who have known him for decades have expressed concern about his appearance today.
As one of many journalists who has watched this investigation play out, this is pretty much exactly what I was expecting. My interpretation of the disappointment today is that Democrats in Congress fervently hoped a compelling day of Mueller’s testimony would make impeaching Trump seem both more feasible and less political.
Mueller has made it very, very clear in his comments and in his report that it is the role of Congress to decide what to do with the facts he has laid out to them. That means if Democrats want to impeach Trump, they can’t use Mueller as a deus ex machina. They’ll have to beat Trump in 2020 or impeach him on other grounds.
It’s also not Mueller’s job to remove politics from the process of impeachment. He’s not there to protect either the Democrats or the Republicans from any political fallout that comes with removing a president from office (or, in the GOP’s case, refusing to). His job was to provide Congress with the facts he found related to Russian involvement in the 2016 election and Trump’s behavior surrounding his investigation. Congress has to decide what to do with those facts. While Mueller’s report carefully lays out evidence that could be used to make the case that Trump attempted to obstruct the investigation, Mueller has made it clear that his responsibility, at least with regards to Trump, ended with gathering those facts.
I don’t know what Mueller was thinking while he sat there, but it’s easy to imagine how exhausting and tiresome it must have been to endure today’s proceedings, likely knowing from the very start that the people questioning him were less interested in what he had to say—what he’d in fact already said—than in whether he’d say what they wanted him to say.
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