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BMW has passed Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz in the U.S. for the first time since 2015 after not only blowing out its rival in the fourth quarter, but also bucking an ugly U.S. auto sales trend that we highlighted just days ago, where most manufacturers saw sales collapse to end 2019.

BMW sold 35,746 cars and SUVs in the month of December, finishing the year ahead of Mercedes by more than 8.700 units. The company’s revival in the U.S. can be attributed to filling out its SUV lineup with its massive X7 – after keeping dealers and customers waiting for the vehicle for nearly a decade, according to BNN.  

Mercedes, on the other hand, faced challenges with supplier bottlenecks at its lone U.S. assembly plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was only able to sell 316,094 vehicles in 2019 – just 135 more than the year prior, according to Bloomberg.

But it may not be a clean victory for BMW after all…

The SEC is continuing an investigation into BMW’s sales practices, as we reported on just weeks ago. The SEC is lookaing at whether BMW’s sales figures have been manipulated and whether or not the automaker has engaged in “sales punching”, a practice that encourages dealers to register cars despite them not being sold.

Meanwhile, we pointed out days ago that other auto manufacturers had an atrocious end to the year in terms of U.S. sales.

Fiat Chrysler sales for Q4 fell 2% despite “robust” demand for the company’s Ram pickup trucks. GM deliveries fell 6% in the quarter and Toyota saw sales fall 6.1% in December, handily missing estimates for a 0.8% gain. 

And Toyota wasn’t the only automaker that missed estimates in grand fashion: Honda was also expected to report a modest gain in sales, but posted an ugly 12% drop in sales for the quarter.

Expectations were lower for Nissan, who was expected to post a drop of 22.1% but missed even those pessimistic expectations by posting a monster 29.5% loss for the quarter. 

Authored by Onar Am via LibertyNation.com,

The leader of the Italian populist right-wing party, The League, and former Minister of Interior Matteo Salvini is one of Europe’s most controversial politicians. A recent poll shows that he is Italy’s most trusted party leader with 39% voter approval.

The Populist

Despite his popularity, the media and the political elite brands him as “far-right,” but since most people in the E.U. agree with his ideas and positions, center-right is a more appropriate term. More than anything, he is a populist. Populism can be neutrally defined as politics that is popular among ordinary people while despised and rejected by the ruling elites.

Matteo Salvini

As such, populism is not an ideology but a symptom of anti-democratic elitism. Voters only turn to populists when the establishment over a long period arrogantly refuses to listen to the will of the people. Salvini echoes the growing European discontent with the globalist project and the deconstruction of the nation-state.

Dramatic Entry And Exit

Salvini’s entry into the Italian government was as filled with drama as his exit. Initially, his party was called The Northern League and wanted the affluent northern parts of Italy to be a separate state. However, after growing Italian E.U. skepticism and worries about mass immigration, the party reinvented itself to become a national populist party against multiculturalism, eurocracy, and globalism.

In 2018, the two populist parties, The League and Five Star Movement, blasted onto the political stage by winning a substantial majority. Right-wing parties secured a whopping 70% of the votes. Neither of the two gained enough support on their own to form a government, so they joined in a coalition with Salvini as deputy prime minister and minister of interior.

Salvini immediately took steps to curb illegal immigration and was relentlessly attacked by the left. In August 2019, The League was so popular in Italy that Salvini called for a new election, citing inner friction with its coalition party as the reason. The Five Star Movement, which had fallen precipitously in the polls, decided to respond by breaking one of its core promises to its voters: Never collaborate with the left.

Salvini and his party were ousted from government and replaced by an unpopular center-left party as a coalition partner.

Not Game Over

Salvini lost power in Italy, but he may still have the last laugh. As a minister, he gained respect and popularity not only in Italy but all over Europe. He had proven that illegal immigration could easily be stopped by cracking down on N.G.O. human trafficking. During his administration, the Italian government also threatened to cut funding for the U.N. and invest at least €1 billion in North Africa to prevent migrants from trying to cross illegally into Italy.

These and other policies have rendered The League the most popular party, with the potential to govern alone, or possibly with the national-conservative Brothers of Italy.

However, much can still happen. The next general election may come as late as 2023, and by that time, Italy’s political landscape may have radically changed. The underlying issues and problems with migration and multiculturalism are not going away. All over the world, national populist parties are surging, and the most likely outcome of the next election is, therefore, that Salvini will be the next prime minister with a similarly robust mandate as Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the U.K.

Many have naturally predicted that the first two things to go following the Soleimani assassination will be American troops from Iraq and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Indeed Iran this weekend declared that its conformity to any remaining aspects to the deal will go out the window.

And in confirmation of Tehran’s Sunday “no limits” declaration that it will fully blow past uranium enrichment limits, German foreign minister Heiko Maas warned on Monday the killing of Soleimani marks the “first step towards the end” of the nuclear deal.

“What was announced is not in line with the nuclear agreement… [the situation] has not got easier, and this could be the first step towards the end of this agreement, which would be a big loss,” Maas told German public radio station Deutschlanfunk. “We will now weigh this up very, very responsibly,” he added.

Meanwhile the European signatories to the 2015 JCPOA, which have consistently attempted to salvage the deal since the US withdrew in May 2018, are urging Tehran to come back to its commitments. Britain, France, and Germany are demanding that Iran reverse the countermeasures adopted since the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal.

A joint statement from Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Angela Merkel issued a joint statement on Monday calling for the Islamic Republic to refrain from further “proliferation” and “to reverse all measures inconsistent with the JCPOA.”

However, as Bloomberg notes, “The statement was noteworthy for not mentioning Trump or the U.S. action explicitly.”

The Europeans seem to be largely paralyzed in the wake of the unexpected and brazen US action to take out Iran’s most important military general.

Bloomberg writes further:

What is clear is that it has taken more than 48 hours for Macron, the U.K.’s Boris Johnson and Germany’s Angela Merkel to issue a common stance calling for a reduction of tensions — showing they may be struggling to hold a united front.

Commenting on the European ambivalence Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Sunday: “Frankly, the Europeans haven’t been as helpful as I wish that they could be.”

The US top diplomat added: “The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well.”

Authored by Fan Yu via The Epoch Times,

Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, recently made several stops in Africa to monitor Chinese interests and bolster bilateral relations on the continent.

Yang, the director of the Office of Foreign Affairs and a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Politburo, also made sure to criticize those who accuse the Chinese regime of taking advantage of Africa and engaging in “neocolonialism.”

“Some people who are unhappy about the growing China–Africa relations have made groundless accusations to defame and attack our cooperation,” Yang said in a speech on Dec. 22, as reported by Xinhua News, the state-controlled media outlet.

“Those who attempt to undermine the traditional friendship between China and Africa will only fail.”

The Chinese regime has faced increasing criticism in recent years for its engagement with African countries. Over the past decade, Beijing has become the most important economic partner to Africa across trade, investment, financial aid, and infrastructure financing.

But the regime’s goals aren’t entirely altruistic.

The belief is that Beijing ensnares developing countries into accepting expensive loans, and when incompetent leaders can’t balance the budget to repay such loans, the regime imposes heavy punishment such as asset takeovers and other concessions.

More than 10,000 Chinese-owned firms are operating in Africa, with Nigeria, Zambia, and Tanzania attracting the most attention from Chinese companies, according to a 2017 report by consultancy McKinsey & Co.

“In manufacturing, we estimate that 12 percent of Africa’s industrial production—valued at some $500 billion a year in total—is already handled by Chinese firms,” according to McKinsey. “In infrastructure, Chinese firms’ dominance is even more pronounced, and they claim nearly 50 percent of Africa’s internationally contracted construction market.”

The Chinese regime’s most visible involvement in Africa is infrastructure development. Most of the new infrastructure projects—bridges, major highways, skyscrapers, and tunnels—are financed and built by Chinese firms, which use Chinese labor and Chinese materials.

‘Debt Trap’

France, the United States, and the UK have faced criticism for exploiting Africa historically. Today, that role is being played by the Chinese regime.

On the surface, the regime’s infrastructure investment in Africa is to assist in development and to increase commerce. But in providing so much financing, Beijing has the future fate of the continent under its thumb. Africa is central to the regime’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR, also known as Belt and Road) initiative in expanding geopolitical influence, which includes access to Africa’s oil, natural resources, and strategic location.

Between 2000 and 2017, Beijing loaned more than $140 billion to African countries, according to a report by Washington-based think tank Brookings Institute. Most of that lending has been concentrated in a few resource-rich countries. By sector, lending has been focused on the important and strategic industries of transportation, power grid, and mining.

The “debt trap” narrative isn’t going away. And what’s happened recently in Zambia bolsters such criticism against the CCP.

Zambia, which has had trouble paying the debt it owes the regime, reportedly has offered major state assets as collateral. The exact amount Zambia owes Beijing is debatable—the U.S. government claims the figure could be as high as $10 billion, but Zambia, according to a December 2018 Reuters report, claims that only $3.1 billion is owed.

The real debt figure is unknown, as “much of its debt to China has not been fully accounted for, an exercise the Lusaka exchequer is not anxious to complete, for fear of the alarm the figures would cause,” Africa Confidential reported.

Zambia held talks with the CCP regarding handing over ZESCO, the state utility company, to China as payment in kind, sources told the newsletter.

“China is already in control of the country’s broadcasting company, ZNBC. There are also fears the main airport in Lusaka could be the next target.”

Attitudes regarding China’s presence amid Zambian media is highly polarized, with an increasing number of headlines critical of Beijing’s motives, as well as the quality and longevity of Chinese-led projects.

Some African countries are beginning to push back against China’s predatory strategy.

In mid-2019, Tanzania suspended plans to team up with China to construct East Africa’s biggest port in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. China Merchant Holding International was slated to be the sole port operator.

Citing disagreements with Chinese investors over “exploitative and awkward” demands, Tanzanian President John Pombe Magufuli called off the project.

“They want us to give them a guarantee of 33 years and a lease of 99 years, and we should not question whoever comes to invest there once the port is operational. They want to take the land as their own but we have to compensate them for drilling construction of that port,” Magufuli told The Economic Times of India last year.

Beijing also demanded from Tanzanian government loss compensation during the project, as well as tax and customs duty waivers.

Tanzania’s rejection of the Chinese regime follows the cancellation of a Chinese-funded project in Sierra Leone in 2018.

A proposed $320 million airport—to be financed by Beijing—outside Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown was scrapped in late 2018, after the country deemed the project to be uneconomical and unnecessary.

Authored by Federico Pieraccini via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The murder of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, in the early hours of January 3 by US forces, only highlights the extent to which US strategy in the Middle East has failed. It is likely to provoke reactions that do not benefit US interests in the region.

To understand the significance of this event, it is necessary to quickly reconstruct the developments in Iraq. The US has occupied Iraq for 17 years, following its invasion of the country in 2003. During this time, Baghdad and Tehran have re-established ties by sustaining an important dialogue on post-war reconstruction as well as by acknowledging the importance of the Shia population in Iraq.

Within two decades, Iraq and Iran have gone from declaring war with each other to cooperating on the so-called Shia Crescent, favoring cooperation and the commercial and military development of the quartet composed of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Such ties, following recent victories over international terrorism, have been further consolidated, leading to current and planned overland connections between this quartet.

Local movements and organizations have been calling for US troops to leave Iraqi territory with increasing vigor and force in recent months. Washington has accused Tehran of inciting associated protests.

At the same time, groups of dubious origin, that have sought to equate the Iranian presence with the American one, have been calling for the withdrawal of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs) that are linked to Iran from Iraq. The protests from such groups appear to be sponsored and funded by Saudi Arabia.

With mutual accusations flying around, the US hit a pro-Iranian faction known as Kataib Hezbollah on December 29. This episode sparked a series of reactions in Iraq that ended up enveloping the US embassy in Baghdad, which was besieged for days by demonstrators angry about ongoing airstrikes by US forces.

The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, blamed this volatile situation on Iran, warning that Tehran would be held responsible for any escalation of the situation involving the embassy.

In the early hours of January 3, 2020, another tangle was added to the Gordian Knot that is the Middle East. Qasem Soleimani was assassinated when his convoy was attacked by a drone near Baghdad International Airport. The most effective opponents of ISIS and Wahabi jihadism in general was thus eliminated by the US in a terrorist act carried out in foreign country in a civilian area (near Baghdad International Airport). The champagne would have no doubt been flowing immediately upon receiving this news in the US Congress, the Israeli Knesset, Riyadh royal palace and in Idlib among al Nusra and al Qaeda militants.

It remains to be seen what the reasons were behind Trump’s decision to okay the assasination of such an influential and important leader. Certainly the need to to demonstrate to his base (and his Israeli and Saudi financiers) plays into his anti-Iranian crusade. But there are other reasons that better explain Trump’s actions that are more related to the influence of the US in the region; the geopolitical chess game in the Middle East transcends any single leader or any drone attack.

In Syria, for example, the situation is extremely favorable to the government in Damascus, with it only being a matter of time before the country is again under the control of the central government. General Soleimani and Iran have played a central role in ridding the country of the scourge of terrorism, a scourge directed and financed by the US and her regional allies.

In Iraq, the political situation is less favorable to the US now than it was back in 2006. Whatever progress in relations between Baghdad and Tehran has also been due to General Soleimani, who, together with the PMUs and the Iraqi army, freed the country from ISIS (which was created and nurtured by Western and Saudi intelligence, as revealed by Wikileaks).

It would seem that the US sanctions against Iran have not really had the intended effect, instead only serving to consolidate the country’s stance against imperialism. The US, as a result, is experiencing a crisis in the region, effectively being driven out of the Middle East, rather than leaving intentionally.

In this extraordinary and unprecedented situation, the Russians and Chinese are offering themselves variously as military, political and economic guarantors of the emerging Eurasian mega-project (the recent naval exercises between Beijing, Moscow and Tehran serving as a tangible example of this commitment). Naturally, it is in their interests to avoid any extended regional conflict that may only serve to throw a monkey wrench into their vast Eurasian mega-project.

Putin and Xi Jinping face tough days ahead, trying to council Iran in avoiding an excessive response that would give Washington the perfect excuse for a war against Iran.

The prospects of a region without terrorism, with a reinvigorated Shia Crescent, led by Iran at the regional level and accompanied by China and Russia at the economic (Belt and Road Initiative) and military level, offer little hope to Riyadh, Tel Aviv and Washington of being able to influence events in the region and this is likely going to be the top argument that Putin and Xi Jinping will use to try to deter any Iranian overt response.

Deciding to kill the leader of the Quds Force in Iraq proves only one thing: that the options available to Trump and his regional allies are rapidly shrinking, and that the regional trends over the next decade appear irreversible. Their only hope is for Tehran and her allies to lash out at the latest provocation, thereby justifying the regional war that would only serve to benefit Washington by slowing down regional unification under Iranian leadership.

We must remember that whenever the US finds itself in a situation where it cannot control a country or a region, its tendency is to create chaos and ultimately destroy it.

By killing General Soleimani, the US hopes to wreak havoc in the region so as to slow down or altogether scupper any prospect of integration. Fortunately, China, Russia and Iran are well aware that any conflict would not be in any of their own interests.

No drone-launched missiles will be enough to save the US from decades of foreign-policy errors and their associated horrors; nor will they be enough to extinguish the memory of a hero’s tireless struggle against imperialism and terrorism.

After the death of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani by a U.S. missile on Friday in Baghdad, the Iraqi government has voted in a non-binding resolution Sunday to expel U.S. troops from the country. Prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi could now take back the invitation that allows 6,000 troops to currently stay in Iraq.

But, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, while the U.S. presence in Iraq is sizable, other Middle Eastern countries host many more U.S. troops. The largest U.S. base in the Middle East is in Qatar. The country hosts around 13,000 U.S. troops, according to numbers compiled by the Washington Post. Located southwest of Doha, Al Udeid Air Base has proven crucial in the fight against ISIS. Qatar invested $1 billion in constructing the base and it’s also home to the the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center, responsible for coordinating U.S. and allied air power across the Middle East, particularly in airspace over Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The following infographic highlights just how important Qatar, along with Kuwait, is to the U.S. presence in the Middle East. Both countries hosts an estimated 13,000 U.S. troops.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Neighboring Bahrain is also vital to American interests in the region, home to the Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a substantial military presence at Isa Air Base. 7,000 troops are based there.

U.S. troops have been withdrawing from Syria after the Trump administration’s decision in October, which has decimated their numbers from an estimated 2,000 in September to currently around 800.

Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Cutting through the media noise and outright nonsense in assessing the upcoming election is going to be a necessity for anyone who wants to know what’s truly afoot.

Back in October, Moody’s Analytics assessed their confidence that Trump will win in 2020. While yet another impeachment fiasco has been advanced by Democrats, this time going as far as a vote in the lower house, Moody’s has not issued any change in their assessment. That’s probably because this impeachment charade is being seen for what it is.

Many of the figures being discussed otherwise in the news cycle are quite irrelevant. This is because they are national polls, when only the opinions of certain cross-sections within swing states can reasonably said to be of any significance. Republicans still back Trump, Democrats still oppose him.

Here are the three real reasons why Trump will win…

With no buzz, there’s no victory.

This is the most important, and deserves the most attention. The Democrat-controlled media establishment from the NYT, MSNBC to CNN, is abusing their push-poll powers to promote boring and centrist candidates. But it’s the genuine energy and enthusiasm of precinct walkers and phone bankers that matters more than most numbers.  Enthusiasm is contagious, and a lack of enthusiasm creates a vicious cycle.

DNC strategists and pollsters make the same error that almost every single top-down managed company makes in their own sales-team policies. They wrongly imagine that no matter the product they are selling, what makes a product sell is a direct consequence of the advertising dollars and deals with media. They believe that creating energy around a product is entirely a hyper-reality based simulacrum with little-to-no basis in the real world.

To the contrary, for most products it’s the word-of-mouth enthusiasm of consumers and potentials, along with the enthusiasm of the sales team that actually pushes sales. If the enthusiasm isn’t genuine, then it isn’t there. If there’s no buzz, there can be no victory.

So when it comes to a combination of union and NGO staffers, who have to mobilize dues paying members and volunteers to get out the vote, people cannot fake enthusiasm.

Obama won despite the country trending conservative across a number of matrixes since the victory of Bush I in 2000. This was because of the tremendous energy and excitement around his campaign based in the themes of hope and change. Obama posed as a very left-wing candidate who would not only be the first African-American president of the country, but moreover bring in socialized health-care and end the war in Iraq, and reverse decades old legislation that had hampered labor’s ability to organize.

Without Obama-level energy, it’s only natural that a conservative would beat someone who appeared liberal across social and ‘pc’ matters but was flat on labor and real economic justice matters. That’s because without an invigorated candidate running an economically ‘radical’ platform, the blue collar left and idealistic leftist students who form the backbone of a genuine grass-roots campaign can’t get excited.

In the present paradigm, Democrats can only win the White House when new voters come out to vote.

Democrats will probably lose no matter what, given the immutable facts around this election and the incumbent, but the way they are running their strategy so far will guarantee it is a Trump electoral college landslide bigger than 2016. Right now Democrats might only succeed in getting more Democrats to turn out in states they were already going to win.

And so strangely, in 2020 we might expect Democrats to win even bigger on the popular vote, simply because Hillary is not going to be candidate, and given how populous states like New York and California are, but lose harder on the Electoral College.

The any given Sunday rule still applies to elections, and so taken all together, the only chance Democrats do have to win is some combination of Sanders, Yang, and Gabbard.

The Impeachment is Galvanizing Trump’s base and Independents didn’t appreciate Pelosi’s moves

This is something like the opposite of the Democrat’s lack of an exciting candidate, and really explains why no candidate but Gabbard (who played the right card with her ‘present’ vote on impeachment’), can come out of this unscathed. Many polls seem to indicate that Trump’s numbers across numerous key matrixes improved surrounding the impeachment gambit.

In reality, this election will rest on a) independents who are in b) swing states. Independents are prone to the galvanizing excitement of partisans. Since Trump’s people are galvanized, and Democrats are not exciting their base, independents will go for Trump. That was also reflected in polling over impeachment itself.

Independents are not some 5 or 10% of the voting base that might just ‘push one candidate or other’ over a notch to victory. Independents make up a whole 38% of the electorate.

Only 41% of independents supported impeachment.

Looking at Pelosi’s statements and methods, it would appear that the process left Democrats looking extremely partisan to the detriment of getting the business of the country done. That business included the USMCA, the Mexico-Canada Agreement that redefines a host of matters previously mishandled by Bill Clinton’s tremendously unpopular NAFTA. Why this seems to be the case – Trump was in the process of getting his USMCA through congress, and with high support from organized labor. As we consistently explain, Democrats rely on organized labor not only for votes, but more critically for their entire ground campaigns, especially making phone calls to other voters, and precinct walking during the campaign and on Election Day. That labor always opposed NAFTA and generally supports the USMCA is critical. The key line in Pelosi’s post impeachment charade statement, regarding why they were not actually going to send the articles to the Senate and therefore complete the process of impeaching the president, was that she said specifically that they needed instead to prioritize passing the USMCA.

Imagine that for a moment. Because of the relationship between labor and the Democrat Party, it was necessary for Democrats to appear as its champion, even that it was their idea in the first place. This means that Democrats had the practical wisdom to understand that their impeachment charade did not appeal to blue collar Democrat voters, but in fact would work against them. What they needed in part in the impeachment, apart from implementing their strategy of a thousand cuts, was to energize college educated upper middle-class boomers, which form the bulk of the Rachel Maddow, and Democrat leaning mainstream media consumer demographic. While these people control work-place politics and effectively police water-cooler talk, this back-fires. Voting in the US is secret ballot – and so with this class in control of people’s ability to remain employed, unenthusiastic, rehearsed, regurgitated, manufactured ‘orange man bad’ utterances are more commonly heard than they are truly believed. People say one thing at work to keep their job, and then vote another way on Election Day.

But the USMCA fiasco surrounding the impeachment tells us a lot. Eight years of Bill Clinton and decades of his NAFTA has been symptomatic of the Democrat’s anti-labor politics. Democrats from that time onward invested their political capital into developing socialism. However, they didn’t develop this in the US, but in China – while in the US a crony class grew up and lined their own pockets from it all. This is something which is perhaps, in a strange turn of events, quite good for China and many other developing parts of the world including Africa. But that has come at the expense not of America’s wealthy ‘bourgeoisie’, but rather its own ‘working class’. Bill Clinton was supposed to work to reverse 12 years of Reagan-Bush, whose anti-labor policies amounted to one of the single greatest austerity campaigns in US history. And yet this was only to be outdone by Clinton’s outsourcing and off-shoring of jobs, and deregulation of the financial sector.

What has shown to matter least of all, and especially where Trump is concerned, are polls. And even here too, polls – when read correctly – point to a Trump victory.

There are also reasons why left-wing Democrats like documentary film maker Michael Moore also understand that Trump is likely to win. Needless to say, his fixation therefore on an impeachment succeeding, and his blanket support for Nancy Pelosi’s absurd and failing strategy, is also why even progressive Democrats like Sanders fail to understand why Trump is unbeatable. Their placing hopes in impeachment isn’t so much that impeachment is viable or likely, but from a sober and scientific approach, it’s only more likely than an electoral defeat of Trump at the polls given that the party stubbornly  insists on promoting Biden and Buttigieg.

“It’s the economy, stupid”

Sure, it will always be argued that the improved economy under Trump was in fact either related to impersonal forces of the global economy unrelated to Trump; sun spots, the invisible hand, or Obama policies whose fruits we are now only reaping. But voters never go for this reasoning. Partisans do, but voters don’t.

Democrats at best are going to point out that while employment numbers have improved, ‘never before have so many earned so little’. And while that’s true, we are dealing with a badly bruised and insecure American working class. Things right now appear to be going in the right direction, and so being able to find work even if it’s a lower salary than they had before their several-year unemployed stint, they are literally thanking the heavens, the stars, and even Trump, that today they have any job at all. And even here, Trump’s tax cuts put a few thousand dollars back in the pockets of households where the average combined income is about $70k. His even larger, but targeted, tax cuts for the rich in certain areas, due to the economic growth these cuts in part inspired, resulted in more tax revenues overall.

And yes, we get it – old black people like Biden. At least mainstream media reports on certain polls, whose methodologies we can’t see, report as much. What did that question actually look like? We think the push-poll went something like: “In the coming election, would you support Obama’s good friend and Vice President, a gay mayor, a neurotic Jew, a Hindu veteran who may have PTSD, Pocahontas, or a Chinaman good at math? Obama’s VP was Biden. Will you vote for Biden? Y/N”.

But still this figure is misleading, and doesn’t relate to Biden’s electability, but is supposed to get past this trope that he’s a racist – a meme trending surrounding the first few debates. Older black voters won’t turn swing-states, and older black voters aren’t part of an energized or energizing electorate for new voters. This means that the media’s reportage cycle on this ‘factoid’ is about virtue signaling to the above mentioned Rachel Maddow demographic that Biden is ‘progressive since black people like him’. Oh, you don’t like Biden? Well black people like Biden. Don’t you like black people?

And our jokingly hypothetical poll question aside, the reality isn’t far off. This targeted poll of black voters relates almost entirely back to labor union activism. The DNC controls organized labor, and Biden is the DNC’s choice. Black workers are extraordinarily over-represented in the public sector, and the public sector is extraordinarily over-represented in union membership. Older people are more likely to be involved in activism in their labor union, and as a consequence, older black people trend towards Biden more than other candidates. This factoid may trend well right now in media, but will have nothing to do with the outcome of the election except that it will guarantee Trump’s victory if Biden is the Democrat nominee.

And so we have it, our three primary reasons Trump will win: the lack of enthusiasm for the DNC’s picks, the increasing enthusiasm among Trump supporters which will be contagious (again), and the economic growth which, while favoring the rich, in fact did in this case ‘trickle down’.

Indonesia better hurry up and find a new capital city before its current one sinks into the swampwater and soil.

The death toll from some of the most devastating flooding that has rocked Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta has risen to 66, with two people still missing, according to local authorities cited by CNN.

Flooding that began when Indonesia was hit by some of the most powerful monsoons the country has seen in years. Thanks to its position along the “Ring of Fire”, Indonesia is regularly rocked by devastating tsunamis, earthquakes, eruptions and floods. But the flooding that kicked off the new decade forced thousands to flee their homes, or risk being trapped by landslides.

More than 173,000 residents were seeking refuge on Friday, and it’s very likely that things are going to get worse before they get better. Heavy rain and thunderstorms are forecast to continue for the coming days.

As CNN pointed out, the rainfall is some of the worst Jakarta has seen this century:

The current inundation is some of the worst the Indonesian capital has seen this century. Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency measured 15 inches (38 centimeters) of rain at an East Jakarta airport on January 1, the highest flood reading since 1996, Reuters reported.

Jakarta and the surrounding area of central Java, Indonesia’s largest island by population, are expected to be pummeled by up to 4 inches of rain in the next few days.

As search and rescue operations continue, the Red Cross has started spraying Jakarta with disinfectant to stop the spread of dangerous waterborne diseases. Photos from Jakarta and the surrounding area (which, with about 30 million people, is one of the world’s largest cities) show people wading through chest-high water, and using inflatable rafts to navigate city streets.

Around Jakarta, rescue workers and men in orange vests clearing trash and debris could be seen.

Unfortunately, Jakarta’s latest problems are just par for the course. As we pointed out last year, Jakarta is rapidly sinking into the swamp upon which it was built (the already saturated land makes it difficult for the soil to absorb rainwater, contributing to the flooding), and Indonesia is rapidly searching for a suitable location to build a new capital city.

This latest round of deadly flooding will no doubt spur the country to speed up that search.