Freelance jobs are “feudalism,” says Democratic California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez.
She persuaded California’s legislature to pass a new law reclassifying freelance workers as employees. That means many people who hire them must now give them benefits like overtime, unemployment insurance, etc. Politicians said it would help freelancers a lot.
Of course, much of the media agreed. Vox called it “a victory for workers everywhere”!
Sigh. Young reporters just don’t understand that stifling economic freedom always creates nasty side effects.
Actually, more understand now, because they got a very personal lesson. Once the bill passed, Vox media cut hundreds of freelance writing jobs.
When Gonzalez was asked if she felt bad about that, she sneered, those weren’t “real jobs.”
The arrogance of politicians! People choose jobs. Freelancers like flexibility. Politicians have no right to say certain jobs aren’t good enough.
“You’re thinking you’re helping us, but you’re not,” says musician Ari Herstand in my new video. He says the anti gig-work law could “crash the California music economy.”
Why? Before the law passed, if he played a gig where he’d hire a drummer, bassist, and guitar player, “I just cut (each) a check for $200. Now, I have to take that drummer, put him on payroll, W2 him, get workers’ comp insurance, unemployment insurance. I have to pay payroll taxes. I also have to now hire a payroll company.”
All to hire musicians for one just night. The paperwork alone might cost more than the music.
The anti-gig-work law originally targeted rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, because unions claimed the companies abuse drivers.
But now many rideshare drivers are upset because the law takes away their freedom.
“I liked being independent!” said one. “I don’t want a boss to tell me when or where to drive.”
Herstand says Uber and Lyft drivers would often tell him: “I’m a photographer and this is my fourth side gig. I want to do this when I want to do this, and if now I’m an employee, and I’m W2’d, they’re going to dictate my hours. I don’t want that. (The law is) preventing us from doing what we want to do.”
The law upset independent truck drivers, too. After some nosily drove big rigs in front of the legislature, they got an exemption from the law. Other politically connected professions, like lawyers and realtors, got exemptions as well.
Now Herstand’s working on getting an exemption for musicians, too.
“Why is that good law?” I asked him. “An exception for whoever is clever enough to get to the politicians?”
“It’s definitely not the solution,” laughed Herstand. “‘Write us out of this law and help us out? Here’s money for your next campaign.’ No, that doesn’t seem like that’s a way to legislate.”
But that’s how it’s often done. The more rules politicians pass, the more money they extract from people who are regulated.
Now other politicians want to copy California’s law. New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have their own versions of gig economy bills. The House of Representatives wants to nationalize the law. And, this week, Democratic front-runner Joe Biden cluelessly said such a law “will give workers the dignity they deserve.”
Democrats do what unions ask them to do. Politico points out that just a few years ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) called gig work “a great service for people, giving people jobs. I don’t think government should be in the business of trying to restrict job growth.” He even joked that Uber drivers might earn more than he does.
But now he wants to outlaw most gig work and calls it “exploitive, abusive!”
It’s no surprise that Gonzalez’s biggest political donors are unions. She talks a lot about “protecting our union jobs.” But now that her bill is killing jobs, she wouldn’t agree to an interview.
Neither would the California unions, or any of 75 law professors, political scientists, sociologists, etc., who published a letter in support of the law.
Yes, we contacted all 75.
Herstand says that’s because the law now embarrasses its supporters, but politicians won’t repeal it because “no politician ever wants to admit they did something wrong.”
Two and a half weeks after Bernie Sanders slammed Michael Bloomberg for trying to “buy this election,” the former New York City mayor dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, having spent $570 million of his own money to win 61 delegates. Tom Steyer, the other billionaire in the race, did even worse, abandoning his campaign after spending more than $250 million and earning zero delegates.
Those spectacular failures should give pause to the politicians and activists who argue that money poses a grave threat to democracy—so grave that the Constitution must be amended to authorize limits on campaign spending. The Bloomberg and Steyer fiascoes show that no amount of money can buy victory for candidates who fail to persuade voters.
Bloomberg’s unprecedented ad blitz seemed to be effective at first, boosting his standing in national polls from around 3 percent in November to as high as 19 percent by early March. But when push came to shove on Super Tuesday last week, Democrats keen to replace President Donald Trump did not buy Bloomberg’s argument that he was the man to do it.
The arrogance embodied in Bloomberg’s strategy of skipping the early contests and debates, flooding the airwaves and internet with ads, and swooping in to rescue a party he joined less than two years ago goes a long way toward explaining why primary voters found him so unappealing. His disastrous performance during the first debate in which he participated surely didn’t help, and neither did his wooden demeanor or the generally uninspiring vibe of his TV spots, which one Democratic strategist described as “mediocre messaging at massive scale.”
Steyer, a hedge fund manager who had previously spent many millions of his personal fortune to support mostly losing Democratic candidates, saw almost no visible return on his investment in his own campaign. He was polling at 0 percent last July and by the time he dropped out in February had climbed all the way to 1 percent.
These meager to modest results are consistent with research on the role of money in congressional races. Although the candidate who spends the most generally wins, that pattern can be explained almost entirely by donors’ eagerness to back strong contenders.
For incumbents, who were reelected 91 percent of the time in the House and 84 percent of the time in the Senate last time around, it has proven remarkably difficult to show that spending more attracts more votes. Money matters most for challengers, which means that caps on spending are apt to help maintain the status quo rather than shake things up.
While “money isn’t speech,” as advocates of restrictions keep reminding us, money is necessary for speech to reach a wide audience, which is especially important for candidates who do not enjoy the manifold advantages of incumbency, including name recognition, constant visibility, good will earned through constituent service, and voters’ tendency to stick with the guy they know unless there is a compelling reason to take a chance on someone else. Restrictions on spending impair a candidate’s ability to get his message across, just as direct restrictions on the use of telephones, video equipment, computers, or the internet would, even though those technologies are not speech either.
Limiting access to the means of mass communication obviously would violate the First Amendment, and so does limiting their use by telling candidates how much money they can spend, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held. Yet Democrats are so obsessed with the supposedly corrupting impact of money in politics that they are ready to authorize such restrictions by fundamentally rewriting the law of free speech, as a constitutional amendment backed by every Democrat in the Senate and more than nine out of 10 Democrats in the House would do.
Contrary to the fears underlying that illiberal initiative, voters are perfectly capable of rejecting even the most powerfully amplified messages. Just ask Bloomberg and Steyer.
In the 1980’s, agenda-driven panic around the HIV epidemic set back the public health response by years…
Nothing is more viral than fear. Fear – fight or flight – is a terrible way to make decisions that call for time, science, and rational thinking. Want to screw up a public health crisis? Let fear drive.
Democrats, Pavlovian conditioned by years of believing everything Trump does is “an existential threat,” are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent danger. Make a joke of it—pandemic or Dempanic—but one’s political party should not affect how we respond to an epidemic.
“Our hyper-polarization is so strong that we don’t even assess a potential health crisis in the same way. And so it impedes our ability to address it,”saidsaid Jennifer McCoy, a Georgia State political science professor who studies polarization.
“I am not scared of Covid-19,” Abdu Sharkawy, an infectious disease expertat the University of Toronto in Canada,an infectious disease expert wrote.
“I am scared about the loss of reason and wave of fear that has induced the masses of society into a spellbinding spiral of panic.”
This is not about downplaying something serious. It is about preventing mistakes that will make things worse. Trump Derangement Syndrome might actually help kill us this time, as fear makes for poor public health decisions. Remember the 1980’s?
In 1981 the CDC reported five cases of a new pneumonia. The disease didn’t even have a name until the next year, and wasn’t isolated in the lab until 1984. AIDS would go on to kill over 500,000 Americans. Yet while a horrible disease and a miserable way to die, in retrospect “the problem with AIDS was really two epidemics—the real health epidemic and the epidemic of the mind,” said Boston’s WBZ-TV station manager Tom Goodgame, quoted in Time. Meanwell, The New York Timesconcluded, “in the 1980’s, fear spread faster than AIDS.”
America paid the price in lives.
The fear was measurable. In the mid-80’s 60 percent of Americans wanted HIV+ people to carry a card noting their status; one in three said employers should fire employees who had AIDS. Some 21 percent said people with AIDS should be isolated from the rest of society in leper colonies. Even a professional medical journal wrote, “A specter is haunting our streets — the specter of AIDS, a remorseless and incurable disease whose nature, transmission and effects still contain elements of mystery.”
Those mysteries are always the most dangerous elements in shaping public health policy via fear, and with AIDS, centered on exaggerating the problem. When early cases surfaced inside communities already viewed as modern day Sodoms, many sought to exaggerate the crisis from a quasi-religious point of view: God was smiting the gays. Tragically, too many felt the more who died of AIDS the better, and played up the deaths as “Judgement.” The rest of us, God-fearing, were safe. Homophobia manifested as fear crushed human compassion. It’s almost like hoping the current economy goes into recession, destroying the savings of millions of Americans, so Trump’s chances of reelection fall. Or one politician hoping the virus infects those at MAGA rallies.
In the 1980’s, the Reagan administration, with its political debt to newly-empowered evangelical voters, was indifferent at best toward the study or prevention of AIDS. Congress agreed; in 1987 it banned the use of federal funds for AIDS prevention and education that “promoted or encouraged, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.”
Years were lost as the virus spread, and too many died because of the delay in funding.
We were not innocent. In the mid-to-late 1980s “AIDS hysteria” was a familiar term in the media and public life, and popular comedians made crude jokes to amuse us. A study found “health care trainees and professionals demonstrated their level of empathy and caring for HIV/AIDS is negatively affected by the knowledge that the person being treated is homosexual.” A 1985 Time magazine story, “The New Untouchables,” focused on an incident in New York where parents refused to send their children to a school after one student was identified as HIV+. “What about somebody sneezing in the classroom? What about the water fountain? What about kids who get in a fight with a bloody nose? They don’t know!” said one frightened parent.
Gay activists also sought to drive public opinion through fear. The fear of a “heterosexual breakout” was employed to coax a Middle American audience toward political awareness. The community also exaggerated the crisis as spur to more government funding. In 1988, after New York revised its estimates of HIV+ citizens significantly downward, members of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power were arrested at a sit-in at the Health Department. Hecklers trailed the Health Commissioner demanding he resign. His home was picketed and spray-painted. There were death threats against him. Yet statistical studies some 30 years later showed even his lower numbers from the 1980s overestimated the extent of the epidemic by some 50 percent. The Commissioner had been right to tamp down the threat.
Activists justify their use of fear as the only way to have focused attention on the disease. But that ignores the tragic results of their actions. While funding did increase, much of the government’s early AIDS-prevention budget was used to raise awareness among hetero college students, women, and others who faced relatively low risk. Money was diverted away from the communities that needed it most.
Even today, AIDS and other fear-mongered diseases soak up a disproportionate share of research funds. Diseases that account for 84 percent of deaths in the U.S. get less than half of NIH funding. Cancer and HIV/AIDS in particular receive a disproportionately large amount, while chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity receive less funding relative to the costs they impose on society.
The worry is always the unknown, and on Day One of an epidemic nearly everything is unknown. Mistakes get made as protocols are created (in reality, field tested) on the fly. Japan, with an excellent universal health care system and a non-partisan public health bureaucracy, miserably mishandled a cruise ship quarantine, turning the boat into a virus incubator. Remember when people believed they should not shake hands with a gay man for fear of catching the disease? Only when science replaced fear did AIDS subside to where today the disease is a manageable element of public health.
“AIDS is grim enough without exaggeration,” cited one New York Times editorial 1987. It continued:
“Why has the truth disappeared so far from view? Perhaps because the chief interpreters of the data want to reflect their own messages. Public health experts see a unique chance to reduce all sexually transmitted diseases. Medical researchers demand $1 billion in new Federal spending against AIDS, hoping to refurbish their laboratories. Government epidemiologists, seeking to protect homosexuals and drug addicts, fear the Reagan Administration may acquire the notion that these are the only people at risk. Moralists see a heaven-sent chance to preach fire, brimstone and restricted sex. Homosexuals have no desire to carry the stigma of AIDS alone.”
While fear as a political manipulative tool is nothing new, the coronavirus panic appears at a new place in America. Social media encourages people Joker-like to pour fuel on fires. MSM pursues an unambiguous political agenda when it is not just peddling raw anxiety as a profit center. We are ever more diverse and ever more subreddit separated. It isn’t safe anymore for us to have common fears.
Wash your hands. Ask questions. But keep fear in check. As you encounter information focusing on worst-case scenarios, which seems to exaggerate unknowns, uses terms like surge, crash, skyrocket, Katrina, is more White House gossip than science, anything that starts with Report: ask yourself if the primary purpose is peddling fear — to sell you a product, to get you to click, to influence your vote. Socially isolate yourself from that source.
And stop reading political journalists to learn about a health issue.
Politico, currently bleating out Trump isn’t doing enough and is bungling what he is doing, was only recently criticizing Trump’s prescient travel ban for China travelers as ineffective, and worried it would antagonize Chinese leaders. I write this from New York, under a declared state of emergency. Yet for all the screaming headlines one finds the primary motivation for the declaration was simply “a more expedited purchasing and testing protocol.” It’s more about a better bureaucracy now than something with sirens and flashing lights now.
The numbers will go up until they start going down (new cases are declining in China and South Korea.) There is nothing investors fear more than uncertainty, kryptonite to the markets. Right now that is all there is and volatility in the markets will continue until uncertainty, and then fear, back off. Before you blame someone or something, figure out how to blame away the virus in China, Italy, Iran, and elsewhere where they don’t have Trump, and do have universal healthcare, sick leave or whatever other partisan talking point is being pushed. Panic is easy, a measured response hard. We need to make good decisions. Lives depend on it.
Two and a half weeks after Bernie Sanders slammed Michael Bloomberg for trying to “buy this election,” the former New York City mayor dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, having spent $570 million of his own money to win 61 delegates. Tom Steyer, the other billionaire in the race, did even worse, abandoning his campaign after spending more than $250 million and earning zero delegates.
Those spectacular failures should give pause to the politicians and activists who argue that money poses a grave threat to democracy—so grave that the Constitution must be amended to authorize limits on campaign spending. The Bloomberg and Steyer fiascoes show that no amount of money can buy victory for candidates who fail to persuade voters.
Bloomberg’s unprecedented ad blitz seemed to be effective at first, boosting his standing in national polls from around 3 percent in November to as high as 19 percent by early March. But when push came to shove on Super Tuesday last week, Democrats keen to replace President Donald Trump did not buy Bloomberg’s argument that he was the man to do it.
The arrogance embodied in Bloomberg’s strategy of skipping the early contests and debates, flooding the airwaves and internet with ads, and swooping in to rescue a party he joined less than two years ago goes a long way toward explaining why primary voters found him so unappealing. His disastrous performance during the first debate in which he participated surely didn’t help, and neither did his wooden demeanor or the generally uninspiring vibe of his TV spots, which one Democratic strategist described as “mediocre messaging at massive scale.”
Steyer, a hedge fund manager who had previously spent many millions of his personal fortune to support mostly losing Democratic candidates, saw almost no visible return on his investment in his own campaign. He was polling at 0 percent last July and by the time he dropped out in February had climbed all the way to 1 percent.
These meager to modest results are consistent with research on the role of money in congressional races. Although the candidate who spends the most generally wins, that pattern can be explained almost entirely by donors’ eagerness to back strong contenders.
For incumbents, who were reelected 91 percent of the time in the House and 84 percent of the time in the Senate last time around, it has proven remarkably difficult to show that spending more attracts more votes. Money matters most for challengers, which means that caps on spending are apt to help maintain the status quo rather than shake things up.
While “money isn’t speech,” as advocates of restrictions keep reminding us, money is necessary for speech to reach a wide audience, which is especially important for candidates who do not enjoy the manifold advantages of incumbency, including name recognition, constant visibility, good will earned through constituent service, and voters’ tendency to stick with the guy they know unless there is a compelling reason to take a chance on someone else. Restrictions on spending impair a candidate’s ability to get his message across, just as direct restrictions on the use of telephones, video equipment, computers, or the internet would, even though those technologies are not speech either.
Limiting access to the means of mass communication obviously would violate the First Amendment, and so does limiting their use by telling candidates how much money they can spend, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held. Yet Democrats are so obsessed with the supposedly corrupting impact of money in politics that they are ready to authorize such restrictions by fundamentally rewriting the law of free speech, as a constitutional amendment backed by every Democrat in the Senate and more than nine out of 10 Democrats in the House would do.
Contrary to the fears underlying that illiberal initiative, voters are perfectly capable of rejecting even the most powerfully amplified messages. Just ask Bloomberg and Steyer.
When it comes to buying into brands, consumers are spoiled for choice, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Katie Jones notes, the vast amount of options available makes it increasingly difficult for brands to build meaningful emotional connections with them.
But for the brands that do, the payoff can be huge.
Today’s graphic pulls data from MBLM’s 2020 Brand Intimacy Report and visualizes the top 10 brands that different generations connect with the most.
Can Emotion Be Measured?
Brands that tap into consumers’ emotions can establish higher levels of trust. This in turn creates a culture of loyalty that could ensure a unique standing in the market and long-term growth.
In fact, intimate brands that have a strong emotional bond with their consumers tend to outperform top companies listed on the S&P 500 and Fortune 500 in both revenue and profit. To measure how brands emotionally connect with consumers, MBLM looked at four key factors:
Users: The existing relationship between a brand and a consumer
Emotional Connection: The degree of positive feelings the user has for a brand, and the extent to which their personal values align with the brand’s values
Archetype: The six markers that are present among intimate brands, which include fulfillment, identity, enhancement, ritual, nostalgia, and indulgence
Stage: The degree of intensity in the relationship across three phases: sharing, bonding, and fusing
Intimacy Score: Based on these four components, a score is assigned, ranging from 0-100
The total score also reveals which brands rank the highest across different age groups. While there are some commonalities across each generation, can brands be all things to all people?
The Chosen One
There are very few brands that have the luxury of retaining loyal customers from different age brackets. Amazon, however, manages to transcend age. The retail giant appears in the top five for Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers—with the latter awarding the brand their #1 spot.
Every generation named “enhancement” as Amazon’s defining trait, meaning their lives have improved as a result of the relationship. The “ritual” trait also scored high, with users claiming the brand has become ingrained into their daily behavior.
Ranked: Top Brands by Generation
Gen Z and Millennials (18-34)
Sony-owned PlayStation holds the title for the most intimate brand among Millennials, climbing up from the 8th spot in 2019. Impressively, more than 50% of Millennials have an emotional connection to the brand, with men having a particularly strong affinity for it.
Having recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, the gaming brand’s success has been fueled by the increasing popularity of multiplayer and professional gaming, as well as new product innovation—with five of the ten best selling consoles owned by PlayStation.
Interestingly, when Gen Z (18-24) are singled out, Microsoft-owned Xbox ranks as #1, increasing its score to 73.5 in 2020 from 49.7 in 2018.
Gen X (35-54)
As the generational middle child, Gen X did not grow up with the same access to technology. However, their tech adoption is almost on par with Millennials, with similar adoption rates across tablet and smartphone ownership.
It is no surprise therefore, that Apple has captured the hearts of this generation, sitting proudly in first place. When the iPhone launched in 2007, this group was between 22-41 years old, so they have likely been loyal followers of the tech brand since its earlier days.
While this generation has no qualms about shopping online, 72% of them shop in brick and mortar stores and are satisfied with doing so—which may be part of the reason why retail giant Walmart joins Amazon in the top 10.
Baby Boomers (55-64)
Controlling almost 70% of disposable income in the U.S., Baby Boomers are arguably the most influential of all consumer groups.
While they feel the most emotionally connected to Amazon, it’s also true that Apple was another tech brand to win the affection of this age group.
This generation dominates almost 50% of consumer packaged goods (CPG) sales in the U.S.—which likely explains why the rest of their top brands are more traditional household names, such as Macy’s, Hershey’s, and Kellogg’s.
It is also clear from the ranking that this group values brands with nostalgic qualities, as well as the ability to provide them with moments of indulgence.
The Changing Brand Landscape
The brand and consumer relationship has shifted with the ages, but each generation’s unique value system has remained the most important piece of the puzzle.
It is worth noting that none of the Baby Boomer’s favorite brands appear in the ranking for those aged 18-24 (Gen Z). Are the preferences of younger generations signalling a cultural shift, in which we place more value on distraction rather than satisfaction?
Note: The 2020 Brand Intimacy Report covers an age range of 18-64. The way that the ranking is structured makes it difficult to reflect conventional demographic groups (e.g. Gen Z, the Silent Generation etc.)
“It takes a remarkable force to keep nearly a million people quietly indoors for an entire day, home from work and school, from neighborhood errands and out-of-town travel. It takes a remarkable force to keep businesses closed and cars off the road, to keep playgrounds empty and porches unused across a densely populated place 125 square miles in size. This happened … not because armed officers went door-to-door, or imposed a curfew, or threatened martial law. All around the region, for 13 hours, people locked up their businesses and ‘sheltered in place’ out of a kind of collective will. The force that kept them there wasn’t external – there was virtually no active enforcement across the city of the governor’s plea that people stay indoors. Rather, the pressure was an internal one – expressed as concern, or helpfulness, or in some cases, fear – felt in thousands of individual homes.”
– Journalist Emily Badger, “The Psychology of a Citywide Lockdown”
This is a test.
This is not a test of our commitment to basic hygiene or disaster preparedness or our ability to come together as a nation in times of crisis, although we’re not doing so well on any of those fronts.
No, what is about to unfold over the next few weeks is a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.
Most critically of all, this is a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—can survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.
Here’s what we know: whatever the so-called threat to the nation—whether it’s civil unrest, school shootings, alleged acts of terrorism, or the threat of a global pandemic in the case of COVID-19—the government has a tendency to capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state.
This coronavirus epidemic, which has brought China’s Orwellian surveillance out of the shadows and caused Italy to declare a nationwide lockdown, threatens to bring the American Police State out into the open on a scale we’ve not seen before.
If and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when we are forced to shelter in place— if and when militarized police are patrolling the streets— if and when security checkpoints have been established— if and when the media’s ability to broadcast the news has been curtailed by government censors—if and when public systems of communication (phone lines, internet, text messaging, etc.) have been restricted—if and when those FEMA camps the government has been surreptitiously building finally get used as quarantine detention centers for American citizens—if and when military “snatch and grab” teams are deployed on local, state, and federal levels as part of the activated Continuity of Government plans to isolate anyone suspected of being infected with COVID-19—and if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public—then we will truly understand the extent to which the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.
This is how it begins.
The coronavirus epidemic may well be a legitimate health concern, but it’s the government’s response to it that worries me more in the long term.
Based on the government’s track record and its long-anticipated plans for instituting martial law (using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems) in response to a future crisis, there’s good reason to worry.
This is not a government with a rosy view of the future.
Obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request, the training video titled “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity” provides a chilling glimpse of what the government expects the world to look like in 2030, a world bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
Add health contagions to the mix, and we’re arrived there, ten years ahead of schedule.
The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset and the way its views the citizenry. Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution and the rights of the citizenry: nothing at all.
In typical fashion, the government seems to consider the Constitution only when forced to do so. It complies with the dictates of the Constitution even less frequently. Indeed, the government’s efforts to systematically lock down the nation and shift us into martial law have not been stymied one iota by the restraints imposed upon it by the Constitution: when it’s not bulldozing its way through the Fourth Amendment, the government just sidesteps it (with the help of the courts).
So what should you expect if the government decides to declare a national state of emergency and institute a nationwide lockdown?
More of the same of what we’ve been seeing in recent years.
After all, like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons.Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.
This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.
It’s happening already.
The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.
We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.
Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.
Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.
And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats. Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.
We have made it way too easy for the government to lockdown the nation.
Consider that it was seven years ago when the city of Boston was locked down while police carried out a military-style manhunt for suspects in the 2013 Boston Marathon explosion.
Six years ago, the city of Ferguson, Missouri, was locked down, with government officials deploying a massive SWAT team, an armored personnel carrier, men in camouflage pointing heavy artillery at the crowd, smoke bombs and tear gas to quell citizen unrest over a police shooting of a young, unarmed black man.
Five years ago, the city of Baltimore was put under a military-enforced lockdown after civil unrest over police brutality erupted into rioting. More than 1,500 national guard troops were deployed while residents were ordered to stay inside their homes and put under a 10 pm curfew.
Three years ago, it was Charlottesville, Va., population 50,000, that was locked down while government officials declared a state of emergency and enacted heightened security measures tantamount to martial law, despite the absence of any publicized information about credible threats to public safety.
Fast forward to the present moment, with the world on the verge of a possible coronavirus pandemic, and growing numbers of Americans are already voluntarily sheltering in place in an effort to avoid falling ill.
Watching the events of the various lockdowns unfold, I couldn’t help but think of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s remarks during the Nuremberg trials. As Goering noted:
It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
It does indeed work the same in every country.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much for the American people to be terrorized into compliance by the government’s latest and greatest scare tactic, even if it means being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.
This continual undermining of the rules that protect civil liberties has far-reaching consequences on a populace that not only remains ignorant about their rights but is inclined to sacrifice their liberties for phantom promises of safety.
It may be that we’ve already gone too far down this road. However, don’t let this latest “crisis” cause you to panic to such an extent that you relinquish your fundamental right to make decisions for yourself and your loved ones and willingly surrender what remains of your freedoms.
This too shall pass.
Remember, a police state does not come about overnight.
Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, no matter how it starts, with a questionable infringement justified in the name of safety or a nationwide lockdown to guard against a global pandemic, it always ends the same: by pushing us one step closer to a future in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.
The Size Of America’s Immigrant Electorate Doubled Since 2000
With Super Tuesday swiftly approaching, Pew Research released some new data about the immigrant electorate in the United States.
The U.S. had approximately 12 million foreign-born eligible voters back in 2000 and that increased to 22 million by 2018. It is expected to grow even further this year, hitting 23.2 million. That’s a 93 percent increase since the turn of the century.As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, by the time Americans head to the polls in November, 9.8 percent of eligible voters will be foreign born, a record high. The U.S. born eligible voter population has also grown since 2000 but at a slower place, rising 18 percent from 181 million to 215 million by 2018.
The nation’s immigrant population has increased from 9.6 million (5 percent of the population) to 45 million (13.9 percent of the population) since the Immigration and Nationality Act became law in 1965.
The second is the rising share and number of immigrants becoming naturalized U.S. citizens.
Some 7.2 million immigrants naturalized and became citizens between 2009 and 2019 alone.
Today, people from Latin America (34 percent) and Asia (31 percent) make up the vast majority of immigrant eligible voters. Mexico comes first in terms of origin countries with 31 percent of the immigrant electorate or 3.5 million voters. The Philippines has the second highest absolute number with 1.4 million while India comes third with 1.4 million.
When you think of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you may not think it’s becoming a hotbed for coworking spaces filled with young professionals working remotely. The landlocked city with a population of about 400,000 people is often referred to as the “Oil Capital of the World.”
Thanks to a program called Tulsa Remote, that’s exactly what is happening.
The program, which is funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation – an influential Tulsa-based philanthropy, is attracting people to Tulsa by paying them $10,000 in cash, providing desk space and offering other perks. The program is one of the first of its kind in the U.S., with similar ones implemented in Vermont, Alabama and Kansas.
After seeing its population peak in 2016, Tulsa Remote is seen as a way to lure in talent to help reverse the declining population and boost the city’s economy.
“The last few years have been the slowest population growth [in the state] since the late ‘80s, early ‘90s,”said Chad Wilkerson, branch executive of the Kansas City Fed’s Oklahoma City Branch office. “A good amount of it is driven by the downturn of the energy sector in 2014 and 2015, and people seeking jobs elsewhere.”
Tulsa Remote is touting the city’s cost of living as its selling point to attract people from expensive coastal cities. The median home price in Tulsa is $157,200—43% below the national average, while the average rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $658 per month.
Tulsa Remote’s website even compares Tulsa’s cost of living to popular coastal cities that are facing affordability crises. Compared to San Francisco, the cost of living in Tulsa is 50% lower with the median home price 83% lower. Compared to Seattle, the cost of living and median home price in Tulsa are 38% and 68% lower, respectively. Compared to New York, the cost of living in Tulsa is a staggering 61% lower with the median home price 60% lower.
“The citizens of Tulsa have invested substantial public funds to build the types of things that we believe make Tulsa a more appealing place for a new generation of workers,” said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum.
“And the Tulsa Remote program is really a great way to introduce the very kinds of workers that we’re hoping to appeal to, to the city that we’ve been building for the last decade to appeal to them.”
Given some of the fastest-growing cities in the country are in states such as Texas, Arizona and Nevada, Tulsa Remote knows exactly what it’s doing by literally paying people to come work in a place that is significantly cheaper than most cities. Given Tulsa Remote is now accepting more workers than it did when it began in November 2018, it won’t be surprising to see more cities across the country introduce similar programs.m
US Home Flipping Soars Despite Profitability Plunging To 2011 Lows
While home-flipping activity soared to an eight-year high in 2019, profits cratered to an eight-year, according to a new report from Attom Data Solutions.
There were $32.5 billion in financed flips in 2019, up 21% from 2018 to a 13-year high. The $32.5 billion was the value of more than 245,864 single-family homes and condos that were flipped.
The number of homes flipped last year accounted for 6.2% of all homes sold across the country, an 8-year high. This is up from 5.8% of all homes sold in 2018.
With more and more Americans piling into the home-flipping game as mortgage rates decline, profit margins continued to deteriorate. The average flipper generated roughly $62,900 in gross profit last year, down 3.2% from $65,000 in 2018 and 6% from the peak of $66,899 in 2017.
“Home-flipping profits across the US dropped again in 2019 as the business of buying and selling houses absorbed its worst year since the housing market was mired in the fallout from the Great Recession. This happened as the cost of buying properties continued to rise faster than gains on resale,” said Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions.
“That’s not to say that the home-flipping industry is tanking or losing its allure for investors because home flipping rates are higher than they’ve been in eight years. But profits did continue to decline again for investors,” Teta said.
The average gross flipping profit of $62,900 translated into a 40.6% ROI for flippers. This was down from 45.8% ROI in 2018 and down from 51.4% ROI in 2017. The latest returns have declined to levels not seen since 2011.
We noted in Sept 2019 that “the end is near” for home-flippers. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller sat down with Bloomberg late last summer and said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if home prices started falling, and it could be accompanied by a recession.”
As there is simply no logic in why more people would get into the home-flipping game as profitability sags, maybe the jump in financed flips because of lax lending standards has ushered in a wave of dumb money trying to make a quick buck in a market that is waning.
Joe Biden delivered decisive Tuesday primary wins over Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), cementing the former vice president’s frontrunner status and dealing what might be a fatal blow to the democratic socialist’s campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Biden nabbed the crucial state of Michigan, which was a notable loss for Sanders, who managed a much-celebrated surprise victory in that state in the 2016 primary. Also among Biden’s haul are Mississippi and Missouri, the latter of which Sanders lost by a razor-thin margin—0.24 percent, to be exact—just four years ago.
Sanders and his surrogates have spent a considerable amount of airtime arguing that the Vermont independent is the best candidate to expand the Democratic electorate. “Now is the time for us to really double down on coalition building, positivity expansion, and focusing on the vision that Senator Sanders has for this country,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), one of his more high-profile supporters, said after his disappointing Super Tuesday showing.
But with that coalition diminishing significantly when compared to Sanders’ 2016 showing, that expansion is not looking likely. The democratic socialist senator has historically depended heavily on youth turnout, which has been especially low this cycle.
Biden’s strong rebound last week, when he won 10 of 14 Super Tuesday states, can be at least partially attributed to endorsements from South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.), both of whom suspended their candidacies to throw their support behind the former vice president. Sanders blamed Biden’s success on “the establishment” bogeyman, arguing that the Democratic machine had conspired against him. But his loss might have more to do with a Democratic Party that is not yet ready to embrace Sanders’ brand of socialism.
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