You can see it in the GDP numbers, even before they were revised. Globally synchronized growth was always less impressive than what it was made out to be. It’s as true overseas as in the US. The upswing was endlessly hyped, but there was so much less behind it in reality.
Reflation #2 was a whole lot better than Reflation #3, not that the second one made the difference. In this disparity, though, you can see why the bond market was never fooled. Globally synchronized growth never had a chance. It was even more empty than the 2014 predictions for overheating.
One big reason, in the American part of the system anyway, has been corporate profits. The Euro$ #3 downturn wasn’t just a manufacturing recession, more importantly it was also a profit recession. Small wonder the labor market slowed down following 2014. Even as the unemployment rate fell, however you want to measure hiring there was a clear lull (another reason why the LABOR SHORTAGE!!! was only ever present in anecdotes).
How much profits would have recovered from Euro$ #3 would have dictated the ultimate intensity of Reflation #3. Initial estimates have been suggesting that there was at least some rebound, small as it may have been.
The latest benchmark revisions to GDP, however, erase those hopes. Profits may never have recovered at all – interrupted yet again by “something.”
The GDP aggregate for corporate bottom lines is now thought to be a whole lot less especially over the last year and a half since Euro$ #4 showed up. The trend unleashed by Euro$ #3 may have been countered by renewed growth throughout 2016 and 2017.
At best, depending on the specific series, whatever little positive there might have been during Reflation #3 has now largely disappeared with 2018’s estimates trimmed substantially.
More than the headline GDP revisions, this new set of profit data really exposes the economy’s vulnerabilities heading further into the fourth downturn. Federal Reserve Chairman Powell and the FOMC have already singled out business investment as cause for downside concern. That’s not going to get any better with this sort of profit picture.
It is, though, the labor market which is most susceptible to this (more) ugly condition. The foundation for a second half rebound, even just keeping the economy afloat without getting worse, is predicated on a strong labor market. Companies that are booking less bottom-line income aren’t going to be hiring at the same pace.
This data underscores the concerns already showing up in the labor market data (apart from the unemployment rate).
Companies that are making less profits hire less (and maybe start to layoff some), workers sense that downward tilt and as consumers become more cautious in their spending. There’s the explanation for the housing data; a real lack of confidence.
It also explains why businesses are increasingly shy and even cutting back from capex. You don’t make as many new capital-intensive commitments if you aren’t making as much profit. In the same way you don’t add to staff, you might even cut back on capital expenditures the more this condition lingers.
Again, the revisions suggest even more forcefully the underlying economic vulnerabilities very different from the fundamental strength underlying Powell and his more optimistic (or less pessimistic) viewpoint.
This cannot just be a concern for the economy, either. Since profits are the basis for equity investing (in theory, don’t laugh), the fundamental stock condition looks more and more like the late nineties than anything resembling the early eighties.
Valuations are way, way out of line except in comparison to the dot-coms – precisely because like the late nineties there has been no profit growth. Investors have been betting, and continue to bet, that the economy eventually booms. The E part of PE, the thinking goes, will rise to meet the exceedingly high level of P at some point.
These revisions suggest it’s more rationalizing than rational. After all, 2014 was five years ago already. The longer this disconnect continues, does it make it more likely or less that E will shoot upward to justify current P? There was a small case to be made when 2018 profits were slightly higher than 2017 – that the positive trend might continue and then amplify as the Fed might be right about the inflation breakout and economic acceleration.
Going the other way in 2018 instead just confirms the next interruption. And that’s before getting to whatever full condition of Euro$ #4’s downturn might be in 2019. At the very least, it’s another couple years squandered.
Share prices rebounding from the landmine are staking everything on rate cuts to be the answer – even the initial bet on QE3 and QE4 hasn’t panned out. These vulnerabilities are a lot deeper than 25, 50, or even 75 bps on fed funds.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2K0QfA5 Tyler Durden
It’s the electric future utopia that we were all promised: entitled assholes stealing your electricity because they can’t read their futuristic car’s range indicator.
Here’s one “green energy” Earth-saving scenario to chew on: Your landscaper comes to your door early one morning asking you to move your car so that they can service your lawn. Except, your car is the in driveway. So you venture outside to see someone else’s Tesla, sitting on your lawn, with an extension cord running across your grass and plugged into the side of your home.
According to WPBF ABC, this is exactly what happened to Phil Fraumeni, who has lived at his house in Lake Worth, Florida for 20 years.
“It was plugged into my electric outlet on my house,” Fraumeni told the local news.
The car wasn’t stolen and the owner was later tracked down. He was told by the owner that he was visiting a friend in the neighborhood when the Tesla’s battery died.
“From what the boy said from midnight the night before, so 12 hours it was charging,” Fraumeni said.
Ultimately, Fraumeni was a good neighbor about the situation. He didn’t press charges and didn’t even charge the owner for the electricity.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YmYw5b Tyler Durden
“After watching seven hours of a spectacle that felt much more cruel than enlightening, I cannot avoid pondering a question which honestly gives me no joy to ponder: just how much damage has MSNBC in particular done to the left?”The Hill’s Rising star began, before excoriating her former employer’s “fevered speculations” about an “Infowars conspiracy theory” and the way it hosted people like Jonathan “maybe Trump has been a Russian asset since the 1980s” Chait and “conspiracy gadfly Louise Mensch” in search of ratings bumps.
“This whole setup has done more damage to the Democrats’ chances of winning back the White House than anything that Trump could ever have dreamed up,” Ball argued.
“Think about all the time and the journalistic resources that could have been dedicated to stories that, I don’t know, that a broad swath of people might actually care about?
Healthcare, wages, the teachers’ movement, whether we’re going to war with Iran? I’m just spitballing here.
I actually heard some pundit on Chris Hayes last night opine that independent women in middle America were going to be swayed by what Mueller said yesterday. Are you kidding me?
This is almost as bonkers and lacking in factual basis as that time Mimi Rocah said that Bernie Sanders is not pro-women because that was what her feelings told her. Rocah, by the way, a political prosecutor with no political background, is only opining at MSNBC because of her role in leading viewers to believe that any day now SDNY is going to bring down Trump and his entire family.”
Ball argued that the fact that MSNBC is doing so much damage to the Democratic Party in the name of ratings proves that MSNBC isn’t “on Team D in the same way that Fox News is on Team R”, saying they’re really just in it for the money. But this is where Ball gets it wrong. It is of course true that ratings are a factor, and that conspiracy theories can be used to sell advertising space, but MSNBC would have had a much easier time marketing conspiracy theories about Trump’s loyalties to Israel and Saudi Arabia, both of which would have had vastly more factual evidence to back them up. The only difference is that the US-centralized empire doesn’t have agendas that it wants to advance against those two countries.
Ball is correct that MSNBC doesn’t serve the Democratic party, but she’s incorrect that it serves only money. MSNBC, which is now arguably a more aggressive war propaganda network than Fox News, serves first and foremost the US national security state. And so do all the other western mainstream news networks.
Consider the way the Syrian province of Idlib is being reported on right now, to pick one of many possible examples. Al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib is the final stronghold of the extremist militant groups that the US and its allies flooded Syria with in a premeditated campaign to effect regime change, and Syria and its allies are fighting to recapture the region. They are using methods that are identical to those commonly used by the US and its allies, yet the bombing campaigns of the US-centralized empire receive virtually no critical coverage while western mainstream outlets like CNNand the BBC are churning out brazenly propagandistic pieces about the evils of the Assad coalition’s airstrikes.
“Civilians are dying in Idlib, just as they died in their thousands in recent US UK air strikes in eg Raqqa and Mosul,” political analyst Charles Shoebridge observed on Twitter today.
“The difference is that when it’s (often unverified) claims that Russia or Syria are doing the killing, US UK media make it front page news.”
One trick Al-Qaeda in #Syria has used extensively to get the US to intervene militarily is having children plead their case. Another trick, as seen in this CNN video, is to have people with American accents do it. Both have been effective with the naive.pic.twitter.com/xkIjmchCzw
This marked discrepancy is due to the fact that western mass media outlets serve not a political party, nor even money, but the power structures of the western empire. This is the real reason why Russia hysteria has been mainlined into mainstream consciousness day in and day out for three years. Not for ratings, not to hurt Trump, not to help the Democrats, but because Russia is viewed as a disobedient geopolitical adversary by the US-centralized power alliance. That’s all it’s ever been.
There are many gaping plot holes in the Russiagate narrative that outlets like MSNBC have been bashing everyone over the head with, but the most obvious and easily provable of them is the indisputable fact that Donald Trump has escalated tensions against Russia more than any US president in decades. You never hear anyone talk about this self-evident fact in all the endless yammering about Russia, though, because it doesn’t advance the agendas of either of America’s two mainstream parties, and it doesn’t advance the interests of US imperialism. Democrats don’t like acknowledging the fact that Trump has been consistently and aggressively working directly against the interests of Moscow, and Trump supporters don’t like acknowledging that their president is just as much of a neocon-coddling globalist as those they claim to oppose, so the war machine has gone conveniently unchallenged in manufacturing new cold war escalations against a nation they’ve had marked for destruction since the fall of the Soviet Union.
In a very interesting new Grayzone interview packed full of ideas that you’ll never hear voiced on western mass media, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov spoke openly about the various ways that Russia, China, and other nations who’ve resisted absorption into the blob of the US power alliance have been working toward the creation of a multipolar world. Ryabkov said other nations have been watching the way the dominance of the US dollar has been used to economically terrorize noncompliant nations into subservience by way of sanctions and other manipulations, with Washington expecting that the dollar and the US financial system will remain “the cardiovascular system of the whole organism.”
“That will not be the case,” Ryabkov said. “People will bypass, in literal terms. And people will find ways how to defend themselves, how to protect themselves, how to guarantee themselves against any emergencies if someone comes up at the White House or whatever, at the Treasury, at the State, and says ‘Hey guys, now we should stop what is going on in Country X, and let’s squeeze them out.’ And this country sits on the dollar. So they will be done the moment those ideas will be pronounced. So China, Russia and others, we create alternatives that we will most probably continue using not just national currencies, but baskets of currencies, currencies of third countries, other modern barter schemes.”
“We will use ways that will diminish the role of dollar and US banking system with all these risks of assets and transactions being arrested, being stopped,” Ryabkov concluded.
That, right there, is the real reason you’re being sold Russia hysteria today.
And it isn’t just on the matter of financial systems in which the unabsorbed powers are uniting against the imperial blob. Russia and China just carried out their first joint air patrol on Tuesday, drawing a hostile response from imperial vassals Japan and South Korea.
“Russian and Chinese bombers on ‘first’ joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region. The China-Russia alliance has become a reality and will last for long time,” reads a post by one Russian Twitter commentator in response to the news.
The emergence of this alliance, which the Chinese government has warned Washington is ‘not vulnerable to interference’, has been something the west has feared for a long time. A Pentagon white paper published this past May titled “Russian Strategic Intentions” mentions the word “China” 108 times. Some noteworthy excerpts:
“The world system, and American influence in it, would be completely upended if Moscow and Beijing aligned more closely.”
“The allies’ goal should be deterrence. At the same time, the US should bilaterally engage Russia to peel them away from China’s orbit.”
“He also encourages the development of the US’s ‘capability to effectively foster distrust and unease between the Russia Federation and China.’”
“Along with Beijing, Moscow seeks a multipolar world in which US hegemony comes to an end. As Alexander Lukin recently pointed out, the ‘common ideal of a multipolar world [has] played a significant role in the rapprochement between Russia and China.’”
“Russia and China were explicitly mentioned in the 2018 National Defense Strategy as the great powers with which the US is in competition. Both Russia and China have come a long way since the 1990s, and the ‘friendship’ that emerged in the immediate post-Tiananmen period and continued to grow over the years now today appears to be one of the strongest bilateral alliances on the planet.”
“Together, Russia’s tentacles on its former Soviet neighbors and Moscow’s strategic alliance with Beijing in pursuit of a multipolar world (in which the US is no longer the global hegemon) form the two main pillars upon which Putin’s grand strategy rests. All other aspects of its foreign policy behavior can be traced back to this dual-pronged grand strategy.”
I think you get the picture. From the Pentagon’s point of view, US hegemony good, Russia-China alliance very, very bad. Analysts like the white paper’s authors, and even The New York Times editorial board, have urged the drivers of US foreign policy to attempt to lure Moscow away from Beijing, the latter rightly perceived as the greater long-term threat to US dominance due to China’s surging economic power. But diplomacy has clearly been ruled out toward this end, with only a steadily escalating campaign to shove Russia off the world stage now deemed acceptable.
Russian and Chinese bombers on ‘first’ joint patrol in the Asia-Pacific region.
The #China–#Russia alliance has become a reality and will last for long time. pic.twitter.com/SpE7MRsXrk
This is all happening because after the USSR fell and America emerged as the undisputed ruler of a unipolar world, it was determined with the help of influential neoconservative think tankers that the US must maintain this unipolar paradigm at all costs. As soon as that view became the establishment orthodoxy, any threat to US hegemony was now interpreted as a threat to national security. An “attack” on America was no longer limited to physical attacks on US soil, or even on US allies and assets: any attempt to escape unipolarity is now treated as a direct attack on the empire.
This is why we’ve seen nations like Iraq, Libya and Syria spoken about by the propagandists as “enemies” as though they pose some kind of direct threat to the American people. There was never any actual threat to the physical United States, but those nations were not complying with the dictates of US hegemony, and that noncompliance was treated as a direct attack.
This “if you’re not obeying us you’re attacking us” mentality is ridiculous on its face and no right-thinking citizen would ever consent to it, which is why the consent manufacturers need to promote imaginary nonsense like weapons of mass destruction, a Russian “attack” on American democracy, and a conspiracy theory about the Kremlin infiltrating the highest levels of the US government. It’s got nothing to do with actual fears of those nations posing any threat to actual Americans. It’s about continuing to rule the world.
* * *
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There was a startling revelation in yesterday’s GDP revision: according to the preliminary Q2 GDP results, implied operating profits for the period totaled $1,900 billion, down 5% from Q1, which would represent the third consecutive quarterly decline, and off over 7% from the year ago levels, one the largest declines recorded in several years. Yet, as ugly as the Q2 numbers appear to be on the surface, what are even more troubling are the sharp downward revisions for the last two years. According to the annual GDP revisions operating profits for 2017 were lowered by $93 billion, or 4.4%, and profits for 2018 were reduced by a whopping $188 billion of 8.3%.
The revised corporate profit numbers show that contrary to conventional wisdom that corporate profits have been increasing, operating profits peaked in Q3 2014 and have been moving sideways ever since, before declining over the past year. Operating profits in the GDP accounts and S&P 500 operating profits over the long run track fairly close to one another, although there can be large differences in any given year. Yet, what is truly bizarre is that over the past 5 years operating profits have gone nowhere – and have in fact declined – while during this period S&P 500 prices have increased over 50%.
How is that possible? Simple: this is where the Fed steps in with the oldest trick in the book – multiple expansion.
As Goldman’s David Kostin writes in his latest Weekly Kickstart piece, markets are currently discounting 65 bp of easing by the end of 2019 and an additional 35 bp of easing by year-end 2020. Of course, as any Finance 101 textbook will explain, stock prices are a function of two things: profitability and interest rates. And since there has been no profit growth in five years, and virtually no profit growth is expected, the only variable that matters is interest rates, and from an investor’s standpoint, lower rates increase the value of equities, all else equal.
Which brings us to a startling observation: since there has been no EPS growth in 2019, more than 95% of the S&P 500’s YTD climb has been driven by an expansion in P/E multiples as 10-year US Treasury yields fell and the P/E multiple expanded from 14x to 17x. In other words, the reason why the S&P trades at all time high levels above 3,000 is just one: Jerome Powell.
Of course, every finance major knows the reason why low interest rates are positive for risk assets: simply stated, they increase the capacity of firms to pursue investment spending. As Goldman notes, S&P 500 investment for growth (capex, R&D, and cash M&A) grew by a median of 8% during the three quarters following the start of the past four Fed cutting cycles, while spending beyond the first three quarters was determined by the health of the US economy. Following the 1995 and 1998 “insurance” cuts, investment for growth continued to grow for 12 quarters after the Fed’s first cut. In contrast, investment cratered following the 2001 and 2007 cuts as the economy fell into recession. (Incidentally, Goldman is quick to note that its economists see a low probability of recession in the near term, which supports the bank’s view that investment will continue to grow, and estimates S&P 500 capex (+8%), R&D (+9%), and cash acquisitions (+13%) will all grow during 2019.)
Besides spending on investment, companies have another option of how to spend excess cash: namely, return it to shareholders via buybacks and dividends. How has such activity changed before and after prior rate cuts?
According to Goldman’s analysis, buybacks continued to rise following the 1995 easing, but stopped growing following the start of the other three cutting cycles. Dividends have historically been stable following past Fed easing, only declining in aggregate as the economy headed into the Global Financial Crisis. Intuitively, companies have shown more willingness to withdraw spending on share repurchases than dividends.
Of course, this time may well be different, as even without a rate cut, share repurchases have continued to surge during 2019 and are expected to surpass the 2018 all time high, rising above $1 trillion. According to high frequency data from the Goldman Sachs repurchase desk, buyback executions have risen 26% year/year through mid-July, and Although S&P 500 repurchase authorizations have declined by 20% vs. the year-ago period, companies retain capacity to repurchase stock under multi-year authorizations. AS a result, Goldman estimates S&P 500 buybacks will climb by 13% to a new all-time high of $940 billion this year.
Which brings us to a second startling observation: for the first time in the post-crisis period, companies are returning more cash to shareholders than they are generating in free cash flow. During 2017, non-Financial S&P 500 firms returned 82% of free cash flow to shareholders in the form of buybacks (net of equity issuance) and dividends compared to 104% during the 12 months ending 1Q 2019. As Goldman further notes, net buybacks and dividends surged by 30% during the past 12 months while free cash flow (FCF) increased by a comparably modest 10%. Meanwhile, growth in FCF was not constrained by a surge in capital expenditures; S&P 500 cash flow from operations (CFO) also rose by 10% during this period. And since companies spent more on shareholder distributions than they generated, companies had to draw on their cash balances to finance spending growth.
Which brings us to the most striking observation of the day: the $272 billion drop in non Financial cash balances in the LTM period represents the largest percentage decline since at least 1980 (-15%). As a percentage of assets, non-Financial cash balances have declined from 12.7% in June 2018 to 10.4% today – the lowest level since March 2010.
It’s not just cash that is plunging – this precipitous drop in cash balances has coincided with a sharp increase in corporate leverage. Four years after we first noted back in 2015 that stock buybacks were mostly funded by new debt issuance, when we published “The Amazing Chart Showing What All The Debt Issued This Century Has Been Used For“, showing that virtually all debt issued this century was used to fund buybacks, the trend continues and net leverage (net debt/EBITDA) for the median non-Financial S&P 500 stock climbed to a new all-time high in 2019. As Kostin writes, “part of the increase in net leverage reflects the sharp decline in cash balances, but gross debt outstanding also climbed by 8% during the past 12 months. Unless earnings growth accelerates materially, companies will likely continue to fund spending by drawing down cash balances and increasing leverage.“
Which brings us to one final observation: the polar opposite takes on how record corporate leverage is perceived on Wall Street.
On one hand, earlier this month in the latest Bank of America Fund Manager Survey, we found that a record 48% of professional investors say corporates are excessively levered, while noting that the number of OECD zombie companies (those companies with an interest coverage ratio below 1) is at new post-GFC highs (548).
That, however, is not the case according to Goldman, which counters by noting that the recent outperformance of stocks with weak balance sheets suggests investors are comfortable with elevated leverage ahead of expected Fed easing.
So which is it – investors are freaking out about leverage or they are comfortable with it?
Judging by the market, Goldman has the upper hand for now because while stocks with weak balance sheets underperformed those with strong balance sheets by 24 pp (-3% vs. +21%) from the start of 2017 until the end of 2018 as the Fed tightened monetary policy, more recently, weak balance sheets have outperformed strong balance sheets by 450 bp since the start of June (+12% vs. +8%) as expectations for Fed easing have strengthened.
In other words, not only has the Fed pushed the S&P to an all time high by massively expanding PE multiples, but it is explicitly forcing improper capital allocation, by forcing investors to put money in companies that will be the first to default once the next recession finally hits.
There is just one risk: the fact that the market is expecting too much easing from the Fed, and as Kostin notes, Goldman’s economists believe that the Fed will be less dovish than implied by market prices. On the other hand, now that Powell is a slave to the market – an outcome he dreaded back in 2012 – it will only take a modest drop in the S&P for the Powell Put to be triggered again, resulting in yet another rate cut.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2MjJDy8 Tyler Durden
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the fertility rate in the United States has never been lower than it is right now.
Unlike some of our other problems, this is not an immediate crisis because we definitely have plenty of people. The population of the U.S. is currently well over 300 million, and more immigrants keep pouring in with each passing day. So we are in no danger of running out of people, but the fact that Americans are choosing to have so few babies is yet another symptom of the social decay that is eating away at our nation like cancer. From a very early age, young Americans are being trained not to value marriage, parenthood and the traditional family unit.
As a result, we are on an extremely self-destructive path, and there is no way that we are going to have a positive future as a country unless we change course.
The fertility rate in the U.S. has been in decline for many years, and just when you thought that it couldn’t possibly go any lower, it did…
The general fertility rate in the United States continued to decline last year, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“The 2018 general fertility rate fell to another all-time low for the United States,” the researchers wrote in the report, published Wednesday.
In fact, a separate report that was put out by the National Center for Health Statistics in January revealed that our fertility rate has now fallen below replacement level…
In 2017, the total fertility rate for the United States continued to dip below what’s needed for the population to replace itself, according to a separate report published by the National Center for Health Statistics in January.
In other words, not factoring in immigration, our population would actually start shrinking if our fertility rate continued to stay at the current level.
So why is this happening?
Certainly our poisonous environment is a major contributing factor. Sperm counts are way down all over the western world, and that could soon become a massive problem. We are literally poisoning our reproductive systems by what we eat, by what we drink and by the air that we breathe, and our phones are perhaps the biggest danger of all. And now that 5G is being rolled out, many experts are sounding the alarm louder than ever. For much more on this, please see this article.
In addition, dramatic cultural changes have completely altered the way that Americans view parenthood.
Once upon a time, getting married and having lots of children was considered to be an integral part of the American Dream. But now our young people are being encouraged to put off marriage and parenthood, and they are constantly being told that “getting an education” and pursuing a “career” are far more important.
At the same time, the single life is continually being glamorized in popular music, on television and in the movies. Marriage is often portrayed as “the end of freedom”, and the idea that having children “can ruin your life” is relentlessly promoted.
As a result, the marriage rate in the U.S. has never been lower, the fertility rate in the U.S. is at an all-time low, and Americans are getting married for the first time later in life than ever.
Americans are among the most stressed populations in the world – on par with many countries in the developing world, according to a new survey on global well-being.
Some 55 percent of Americans reported feeling ‘a lot’ of stress within the past 24 hours, according to the Gallup poll of roughly 150,000 people around the globe – including more than 1,000 U.S. adults.
That puts Americans well above the global average of 39 percent.
And as I have discussed previously, “deaths of despair” in the U.S. are now higher than they have ever been before…
According to a shocking new report from the Commonwealth Fund, the suicide rate in the United States is the highest that it has ever been before. Sadly, the same thing can be said about the death rates from drug overdoses and alcohol. All three death rates are at an all-time record high, and yet our society is still fairly stable at the moment. So if we are seeing this many “deaths of despair” right now, what in the world are things going to look like when our society really begins to start crumbling? Today, Americans have literally thousands of different ways to entertain themselves, and yet we have never been unhappier. One out of every six Americans is taking psychiatric drugs, we are currently dealing with “the worst drug crisis in American history”, and people are killing themselves in record numbers. Nobody likes to be told that they are a failure, but it certainly appears that our nation has been on an extremely self-destructive path for a very long time.
Could it be possible that being an extremely narcissistic, selfish, self-centered and self-obsessed society is not the way to go?
Of course some women actually believe that they are staying childless for noble reasons. For example, it has become quite trendy for young women to say that they are never going to have children in order to fight climate change. The following comes from a BuzzFeed contributor named Ash Sanders…
When I first made the decision not to have a baby, in 2008, I did it because I couldn’t imagine bringing another human into a world already so overheated and overcrowded. I didn’t know anyone like me at the time. But in the intervening decade, the world’s climate change problem has escalated to a crisis, and people across the world are grappling with the question of whether to have children in such uncertain times. In February, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broke Instagram when she so much as raised the question. A few weeks later, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, on the opposite end of the spectrum, argued on the Senate floor that the solution to climate change is to “fall in love, get married, and have some kids.” Meanwhile, in the UK, environmental activist Blythe Pepino launched BirthStrike, a social media–focused movement that questions having children in the face of ecological crisis.
These women have become so brainwashed that they are actually willing to give up one of the greatest joys in life just so that they can show everyone around them how “dedicated” they are to the cause.
As I discussed in my most recent book, bad beliefs lead to bad decisions. When you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out, and we can see the evidence of that all around us.
Without strong family units, no society is going to survive for long.
Right now America is living on borrowed time, and we desperately need to return to the values that this nation was originally founded upon.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LLKMik Tyler Durden
Swedish prosecutors have unveiled the evidence they have collected to charge American rapper A$AP Rocky, and it definitely looks worse than the initial facts might have suggested.
In a series of photos, prosecutors revealed the extent of the injuries sustained by Mustafa Jafari, Rocky’s alleged victim – and they don’t look good.
In the photos, Jafari has deep lacerations on his arms, some of which required stitches. He sustained the cuts after a member of Rocky’s entourage slashed him with a broken bottle after the group had knocked him to the ground.
Videos that had surfaced on social media showed Jafari, who has one drug conviction on his record, following Rocky and two other men who have been charged in the incident. Jafari appeared to taunt and provoke the star, who initially tried to handle things with a cool head and deescalate the situation.
But things quickly escalated, and in one clip, Rocky can be seen violently throwing Jafari to the ground.
Rocky was in Stockholm to perform at the Smash hip-hop festival. He’s had to cancel the rest of his European tour after surrendering to Swedish police early this month.
Rocky was denied bail, and will be imprisoned until his trial, which is set to begin July 30, according to the Daily Mail, if he’s convicted of assault, he could be sentenced to up to two years in prison.
Magnus Stromberg, a lawyer for Jafari, said Rocky’s bodyguards grabbed his client by the neck and tried to drag him away as the brawl started. Prosecutors released a trove of documents on Friday, that also included allegations that Rocky pushed Jafari to the ground.
President Trump has expressed frustration with Sweden over the prime minister’s refusal to intervene in the legal process. In his latest tweet, Trump accused Sweden of ingratitude, and insisted that it focus on its “real crime problem.”
Give A$AP Rocky his FREEDOM. We do so much for Sweden but it doesn’t seem to work the other way around. Sweden should focus on its real crime problem! #FreeRocky
Anti-capitalists long ago lost the argument about whether or not capitalism is the most effective way to increase living standards. Thanks to the spread of a largely-capitalistic marketplace, global poverty rates have fallen precipitously, life expectancy has risen, and standards of living continue to rise. The greatest gains have been in the so-called “developing world.”
But this hasn’t stopped anti-capitalists from coming up with new reasons – reasons unrelated to overcoming poverty – as to why capitalism ought to be abandoned.
One common complaint along these lines is that the capitalist system — mostly through advertising — makes us miserable by convincing us we must continually compete with others to raise our economic and social status within society.
Perhaps the most famous and still-talked-about example of this capitalism-makes-you-miserable narrative is found in 1999’s film Fight Club. The film centers around characters who attempt to escape their dull, depressing lives otherwise ruined by a desire for capitalist excess. At one point, the character named Tyler Durden delivers a monologue concluding that consumers in the capitalist society are
slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes. Working jobs we hate so that we can buy sh-t we don’t need.
At the root of this contention is the idea that capitalism causes consumerism, and consumerism drives us to strive ever harder to attain higher levels of material comfort and social status. Rather than enjoying a simple care-free lifestyle, the argument goes, we sacrifice our free time and happiness to working long hours in pursuit of needless consumption and competition.
But is capitalism really to blame for this sort of thinking? Is the insatiable quest for higher social status something newly invented by modern market economies?
Hardly.
Unfortunately, the desire to be popular, desirable, and possessing of high levels of social status is not tied to any particular economic system. It is found in all societies, and was certainly not something that suddenly appeared as economies began to industrialize.
What capitalism and industrialization did do was create more options available to people seeking to improve their positions within the social hierarchy. In ages past, status was closely tied to one’s family lineage or to how much favor one enjoyed with the imperial court. In capitalist times, these old criteria have not vanished, but a new pathway to status was opened up: wealth obtained through success in the marketplace.
Social Status and Wealth Attainment in Pre-Capitalist Times
Prior to indistrialization, social mobility was — with only rare exceptions — open only to people who were already born into a relatively high social strata. Those who were born into the nobility or high-ranking levels of government bureaucracy could perhaps aspire to reach even higher levels of rank within the ruling classes.
The average peasant had no such hopes. For an average person in the pre-capitalist world, the methods of raising one’s status in society were few and exceedingly difficult.
In the ancient world, competition for social status was high-stakes and ever-present. Given the absence of a middle class and the grinding poverty experienced by the overwhelming majority of human beings in these times, those who had managed to rise above the peasantry fought hard to stay there.
The methods of maintaining and increasing status included:
Successful military service.
Winning favor with government officials through displays of personal loyalty.
Marriage into a family of higher social status.
Excellence in athletic competitions (most notably in Greece).
Military service was an especially fruitful means of increasing one’s social status. In the Neo-Assyrian empire, to list just one example,
To kill a prominent enemy was a conspicuous way for a soldier to distinguish himself and prove his loyalty to the king … [and this method was] explicitly highlighted as a method of raising a warrior’s profile.
Material rewards were meted out by rulers to “those who brought in the heads of high-ranking enemy leaders.”
Military service was a key factor in improving one’s fortunes throughout the ancient world, which is to be expected since warfare — and not commerce — was among the most easily available means to increase one’s wealth in a pre-capitalist world.
Overall, pathways to increasing wealth remained so limited, however, that gaining an inheritance was often seen as the most likely means of maintaining wealth and prestige. In ancient Rome, winning over a father’s favor to ensure inclusion in the old man’s will was often of paramount importance. Striking out on one’s own to earn one’s fortune was hardly a common narrative.
Inheriting wealth — wealth itself often gained in the first place through successful military service and political jockeying — remained of immense importance well into the Middle Ages. Moreover, in areas that practiced primogeniture, inheriting land was reserved to the first-born son. Other children then were forced to pursue other methods of attaining social status. This might be done through military service or by ascending through the ranks of the Catholic Church as a cleric. Especially successful clerics (in the worldly sense) could hope to become bishops and leaders of monasteries. Corrupt clerics, of course, could also enjoy the company of concubines while living in luxurious surroundings.
Women had fewer options. Until industrialization finally made it possible for women to attain some level of financial independence as merchants and laborers, women had two options to attain some level of financial security and social status: they could marry, or join a convent. Convents preferred educated women, however, so for many women, marriage was the only option. Women outside of Europe, of course, had it far worse than this in most cases.
Non-capitalist means of maintaining and advancing social status have never completely disappeared, and they have often persisted the longest and with the most strength in agricultural backwaters. These were often places where wealthy land owners continued to exercise significant control over access to wealth and social status.
In the British colonies of eighteenth-century North America, for example, homicides often resulted from duels and fights resulting from insults to “honor” and reputation. According to crime historian Randolph Roth, this was less common in New England where “most men believed they were as good as anyone else and could advance as far as they wanted.” Further south, however, things were different “because the planter elite had a near stranglehold on the social hierarchy.”
In these situations, the desire to protect one’s “honor” or reputation, did not stem from mere social convention. The ability to earn a decent living was often at stake, as it depended on approval from the gatekeepers of the social hierarchy.
Social Status in Socialist Systems
Nor are non-capitalist methods of gaining social status limited to pre-capitalist times.
Modern-day socialist societies are themselves characterized by widespread competition over social status — and the economic rewards that come with it.
In the old Soviet Bloc, for example, those who successfully won favor with the Communist Party — through displays or loyalty or through other types of political scheming — gained access to better jobs, better pay, and black-market goods unavailable to the average Soviet citizen.
In a place where private enterprise was largely a criminal offense, advancement through what communist social critic Milovan Đilas called “the New Class” became the only means of advancing one’s own social status. Failure to do so relegated one to a life of enduring all the shortages, deprivations, and famines experienced by the non-elite of the communist world. This type of social structure continues today in places like North Korea.
Chasing after Status and Wealth Now Isn’t as Bad as it Used to Be
Thanks to the rise of market economies, gone are the days when maintaining or improving one’s social status required slicing off the heads of enemies in battle, or flattering a mid-level Imperial Roman bureaucrat in the hope of attaining some level of comfort and security. Women need no longer get married to avoid becoming paupers. Children unlucky enough to not be the first-born son need not become soldiers or monks.
Rather than rely on duels, wars, and intrigue at the royal court, people in a capitalist economy can instead preserve and improve social status and wealth by engaging in peaceful trade in the marketplace.
Nonetheless, it appears this has not freed humanity from the nagging desire to continnually better one’s social status. But that’s hardly a reason to blame capitalism for a human impulse that pre-dates capitalism by countless millennia.
It may very well be true, of course, that the peasants of old were not troubled with the idea that they ought to be working ever harder to advance in social status and material comfort. But this is hardly to the credit of the pre-capitalist age. And it’s hardly a reason to pine for the allegedly care-free days of yore. Yes, in pre-industrial Europe, many people didn’t fret about whether or not they bought a new house in the “right” neighborhood. But they simply had no options to buy a new house in any neighborhood. If social climbing is known to be futile, why bother striving to do so? What is different now is that ordinary people in a capitalist society can actually hope to obtain the trappings of a relatively comfortable standard of living — and beyond.
Capitalism doesn’t force this way of thinking on anyone, of course. Capitalism merely makes advancement more within reach.
This is illustrated by the fact that not everyone choses to participate in the quest for status equally. Clearly, many people who have attained a moderate level of wealth and social status are content with their lot. On the other hand, many other people are never content with what they deem mere ordinary amenities. These people continue to strive to ever-higher levels of comfort and social status. Many do this to the point of working “jobs they hate” to “buy sh-t we don’t need.” This is hardly the fault of capitalism, however. It is just a reality of the human condition.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Mj0TmZ Tyler Durden
On Wednesday night, Supreme Court justice and heralded liberal and feminist hero Ruth Bader Ginsburg called her colleague Justice Brett Kavanaugh a “very decent” person as she talked about the “dysfunction” that surrounds the confirmation process for new justices, according to Business Insider.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings were extremely dramatic, as he faced allegations of sexual misconduct from numerous women that nearly derailed his appointment to the highest court in the U.S.
Ginsburg was taking part in a question and answer session with Duke Law professor Neil Siegel at an event for prospective law students at Duke University. The Q&A came after she delivered a speech on the 2018 Supreme Court terms and the late Justice John Paul Stevens.
During the Q&A, Siegel said to RBG:
“nominees for the Supreme Court are not chosen primarily anymore for independence, legal ability, [and] personal decency, and I wonder if that’s a loss for all of us.”
Ginsburg replied, defending both Kavanaugh and new colleague Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“My two newest colleagues are very decent, very smart individuals,” Ginsburg said.
She said the confirmation process for both was “far too divisive” and said that despite the fact that she was a “flaming feminist” in 1993, she was still confirmed by a 96-3 vote and the process was far smoother.
Ginsburg, in September, called Kavanaugh’s confirmation a “highly partisan show,” adding that her hope is that “patriots on both sides of the aisle” reject the dysfunction of the current confirmation process.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2ZeYNs8 Tyler Durden
Oberlin College refuses to take responsibility for its own administrators’ defaming and retaliating against a bakery whose race-neutral anti-shoplifting policy enraged Oberlin students.
Following a judgment of $25 million in damages and $6.5 million in attorney’s fees and expenses, the judge has agreed to stay the execution of his judgment – but it will cost Oberlin.
Judge John Miraldi ordered the Ohio liberal arts college to post a bond of more than $36 million to cover the judgment plus interest while Oberlin appeals. Without explaining his reasoning, he approved the exact amount the Gibson’s Bakery plaintiffs had asked Oberlin to pay in lieu of letting them collect on the judgment immediately.
The bond will remain in place until Aug. 19, though it will be extended until Sept. 9 if the college “timely” files its post-trial motions on or before Aug. 19, Miraldi wrote. He’ll rule on its motions by Sept. 9.
According to Legal Insurrection, which closely covered the trial and subsequent legal wrangling, the bond includes three years of interest.
Gibson’s had demanded a bond because Oberlin had raised doubts about whether it could pay “this sizeable judgment three years from now”:
At trial, and in its recent filing, the College represented that there was only $59.1 million of unrestricted endowment funds available to pay any dollar judgment and that $10 million of those funds had already been committed to pay down the College’s existing debt. [Trial Tr., June 12, 2019 at 95:13-21] There remains $190 million of existing debt on the College’s books. [Id.] The College has also testified that it has a significant operating deficit and that its deficit situation is not sustainable…. [Trial Tr., June 12, 2019 atpp. 86:1-6, 88:1-9]
Oberlin also highlighted its plunging enrollment at trial. Gibson’s warned that Oberlin could “attempt to continue using its available funds to pay down its other debts between now and the filing of a notice of appeal, thereby leaving less available to pay the judgment in this case.”
Legal Insurrection founder William Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor, wrote that it was “pretty clear” Judge Miraldi agreed “there is at least some meaningful risk that the Gibsons will not be able to collect without security.”
As he deadpanned, Oberlin “obviously doesn’t want its bank accounts, computer equipment, and er, Dean of Students’ office furniture, seized just as the freshman class was arriving.”
In case you’ve forgotten, Oberlin tried to intimidateLegal Insurrection during its lawsuit coverage by going to court in New York to seek its communications with the Gibson’s lawyers.
Police in Hong Kong fired tear gas and pepper spray into a crowd of demonstrators who were conducting an illegal protest of attacks last weekend carried out by suspected triad members, which left 45 people injured at the Yuen Long MTR station.
#UPDATE 🇭🇰 Hong Kong police fire tear gas at protesters holding a banned rally in the town of #YuenLong against suspected triad gangs who beat up pro-democracy demonstrators near the Chinese border last weekend, tipping the finance hub further into chaos. https://t.co/YgSxKYJb2Ypic.twitter.com/m6CyG2JdAB
Protesters wearing all black streamed through Yuen Long, even though police refused to grant permission for the march, citing risks of confrontations between demonstrators and local residents.
For the protesters, it was a show of defiance against both the police and the white-clad assailants who beat dozens of people July 21, including some demonstrators heading home after the latest mass protest in the Chinese territory’s summer-long pro-democracy movement. –ABC News
Probably the most ominous video to emerge so far: here sprinting riot police can be seen being cheered on by masked men clad in white – irrevocably associated with the mass Triad violence against innocents seen in Yuen Long last Sat. This could get really nasty. #反送中#AntiELABpic.twitter.com/k2GNMgtebo
This marks the eigth consecutive weekend of demonstrations in Hong Kong, which began as peaceful protests over a now-suspended extradition bill with mainland China, according to CNN.
Earlier Saturday, Hong Kong police stormed the Yuen Long subway station, knocking protesters to the ground and injuring others in an attempt to try and diperse the crowd. When that failed, crowd control measures were deployed.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YaTEET Tyler Durden
