Category: zerohedge

As the clock struck midnight in Spain, thousands of people poured into the city streets in the early hours of Sunday, celebrating the official end of the local coronavirus curfew. 

The 11 p.m. curfew was lifted in 13 of the country’s 17 regions at midnight. Footage from the beaches of Barcelona to the streets of Madrid saw thousands of young people dancing, hugging, and chanting “freedom.”  

As the clock struck midnight Barcelona residents poured into the street to celebrate the end of the local curfew. Spain ended a 6-month-long national state of alarm on Sunday following a decrease in virus cases and a boost in vaccinations. (AP Video/Renata Brito) pic.twitter.com/KadXj83d8m

— Renata Brito (@RenataBritoAP) May 9, 2021

Visca la meva gent de Barcelona. pic.twitter.com/CVABbffw40

— Coronavirus (@CoronaVid19) May 8, 2021

Madrid against curfew! pic.twitter.com/nEwXE34Osu

— conspiracyguy (@conspiracyguy9) May 9, 2021

After a strict stay-at-home order went into effect at the start of the virus pandemic in early 2020, the country’s second state of emergency kicked in last October. It granted people more freedoms but still, late-night curfews restricted social gatherings.

Nationwide, there are 198 cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 population. Some regions are experiencing higher rates, like Navarra, which will maintain restrictions until the spread is controlled. 

In Aragon, the cases stand around 297 per 100,000. Authorities are continuing the curfew in that region. In the Balearic Islands, where the infection rate is 59 per 100,000, the government will maintain the curfew.

The highest infection rate is seen in Basque Country, with an infection rate of around 463 per 100,000. However, efforts to maintain the curfew there were scrapped by the Basque High Court on Friday.

“I am a bit worried, although the most vulnerable people are already vaccinated, I think we should still be careful of the cases increasing again,” Natalia Pardo Lorente, a biomedical researcher at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, told CNN Sunday. “Even while the curfew was still active Friday, I saw large groups of people drinking in the Ciutadella, and it was after ten at night.

“Is there really a need to be gathering in groups of 100 people or more in parks? Why is it not enough to meet your close friends and that’s it?” Lorente added.

Spain has been hard hit by the pandemic. More than 3.5 million infections have been recorded, along with 78,000 deaths. Across Europe, Spain is the fourth-hardest hit country in Europe, behind France, the UK, and Italy.

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The shift of paradigm centred on the U.S. pivot away from West Asia naturally impacts on Iran’s JCPOA calculus…

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the idea that small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings, and though this, in itself, would be unlikely to cause a tornado, nonetheless small events can cause cascades of change within a complex system. And so to Europe, where Germany is changing. The Green Party is flapping its wings in the spatial void left by Merkel’s expected departure. And though the Party, some years ago, was almost wholly Corbinite (i.e. classic anti-establishment), today, beneath its liberal surface, the Green rhetoric is something different – It is fiercely North Atlanticist, pro-NATO and anti-Russian (even quasi neo-liberal).

Today, the European political zeitgeist is changing. It is soaking up the Biden ‘we must join together to curb Chinese and Russian behaviours’ meme. Of course, this shift cannot all be laid at the door of the German Greens; nonetheless, they seem destined to emerge with a pivotal role in the polity of the pivotal EU state, as the Green emergence becomes somehow iconic of the butterfly wing effect.

The language of a human rights ideology defined in a multitude of gender and diversity iterations has seized the Brussels discourse. Some might welcome this development in principle, viewing it as righting ancient injustices. However, it should be understood that it is rooted not so much in human compassion, but is firmly seated in power dynamics, and, what’s more, a particularly dangerous set of power dynamics.

One the one hand, the ‘Biden agenda’ is primarily about ousting a deeply-rooted constituency of Americans (Red America) permanently from power.

He says it explicitly.

And on the other, as Blinken repeats and endlessly insists, the U.S.-shaped rules-based order must prevail in the world. Biden’s ‘progressive values’ are but the tool to mobilise politics to achieve these ends. (Biden in his long Senate career was not noted for being progressive.)

The flapping of the German butterfly wing in Europe enables and facilitates Washington’s sought-after geo-strategic paradigm change. The Cold War, which has so seared itself into the American foreign-policy mindset, and implanted too its toxic residue of visceral Russophobia, just ignored China.

It was assumed that China’s turn toward a western-style economic model simply would flush away the communist colouring – via the agency of an emergent consumerist middle class. Now, Washington observes China unobtrusively to have shed its chrysalis only to reveal the unfolding wings of a superpower – both rivalling, and potentially besting, America. The Biden circles want now to focus America’s power entirely on outdoing and out-rivalling China.

Whereas Trump was obsessed by Iran, the Biden team is not. It is keener to pivot away from Trump’s passion with Iran (and the troublesome West Asia, more generally), to focus on bringing Europe to a different ‘pivot’– that of cultivating its hostility towards Russia (a project, led by Britain’s propaganda campaign, and by certain East European states who seem to have become ‘the tail’ wagging the EU policy ‘dog’). For Washington Beltway circles stuck in the old Cold War mindset, Russia remains a ‘minor economy and regional power’ that does not merit America’s full attention – unlike China, which is a major economic power, with military capabilities at the very least, on a par with those of the U.S.

It is seen to be enough (in DC) for Europe to be mandated to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of attrition against Russia, with the U.S. ‘leading from behind’ – as Obama did in Libya. Victoria Nuland, of Ukraine regime change fame, is now confirmed by the Senate as a top State Department official.

Why should Biden circles want Europe to pivot against Russia and China? Well, it is the old Mackinder rule: the heartland must never be allowed to unite. China and Russia (and Iran) must be kept apart, and be divided through ‘triangulation’, as Dr Kissinger used to say. First it was Afghanistan that was the ‘swamp’ in which Russia (then USSR) was to be mired; then Syria; and now it is to be the Ukraine that is supposed to keep Russia pre-occupied and on edge – Containment, whist the U.S. focusses on isolating China.

In this vein, the EU parliament, which ‘has no battalions’ (like the Pope, in the old quip), issued its Promethean ultimatum to Moscow: Should Russia again threaten Ukrainian sovereignty, the EU must make clear that the consequences for such a violation of international law and norms would be severe. MEPs agreed, “such a scenario must result in an immediate halt to EU imports of oil and gas from Russia, the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT payment system, and the freezing of assets and cancellation of visas for Europe of all oligarchs tied to the Russian authorities”.

But when it is observed that this very hostile resolution was carried by 569 votes to 67, it is clear that this exercise had considerable political heft behind it (a case of the Biden circles again ‘leading from behind’ perchance?). The EU, in the same week, also censored China for “endangering peace” in the South China Sea, and sent a naval expeditionary force there.

And so the Europeans are falling into line with Blinken’s demand for co-ordinated action and rhetoric on China and Russia, it would seem.

None of these events will have surprised Moscow or Beijing, which earlier resolved to resist western attempts at divide and rule. Nonetheless, these western ploys do entail high risk. The EU Ukrainian ultimatum, backed by such a huge parliamentary majority, hints that a further round of tensions over the Donbass is anticipated (and is being prepared).

This expectation surely lay behind the broadside out from the EU parliament. If so, they should know that Russia will not abandon Donbass to Kiev (Presiden Putin warned plainly that Russia’s red lines should not be mis-construed, in his recent address to the Federal Assembly). The EU resolution thus smacks of preparing of the ground for NATO intervention of some type.

No doubt, the EU sees its role as fore-staging its ‘values’ as a part of lending weight to its strategic autonomy ambitions being taken seriously. But this comes at a price. Ukraine is not under Zelensky’s control (there are other players – hotheads with different agendas). Anything can happen. The EU ultimately will be the one to pay the price for any outbreak of military hostilities.

And for what? Re-constituting warm relations with the Democrats (as in the old days)? It all speaks to short-termism, well shy of any discernable strategy.

And the risks are not just kinetic: Russia, China and U.S. do not seek military escalation, yet U.S. policies towards China (on Taiwan) and Russia (concerning Ukraine) may be taking them toward inadvertent confrontation.

They are economic too: Europe desperately needs Chinese investment and technology – and Russian gas – if its economy is not to collapse into prolonged recession. It was only ‘yesterday’, as it were, that EU leaders were singing the refrain of the EU should stand aloof from the heavy-weight mega-competition.

The political risk for the EU is that Biden’s political honeymoon may quickly run out of steam. His ramming radical legislation through Congress with no bi-partisan support is levered on a hangover from the pre-election era – of Democratic hatred for anything Trump. That sentiment however, is already draining away with the passage of time. Trump no longer monopolises the headlines. The carte blanche provided to Biden by this emotional animus to his predecessor may quieten and further erode, even before he attempts to move from the progressive end of the spectrum to the centre of politics – which he must do in good time for 2022 if he is to appeal to middle of the road Democrats, and not just his Leftist constituency.

Biden’s vulnerability in the 2022 mid-term elections is underscored by the fact that apart from his handling of the coronavirus, the majority of Americans disapprove of his performance in all other areas. The U.S. might whiplash off in a different direction, leaving the EU clinging to a stranded asset (Biden).

The shift of paradigm centred on the U.S. pivot away from West Asia naturally impacts on Iran’s JCPOA calculus too: With the U.S. pursuing a 5th generation full-spectrum ‘knock-back’ delivered to the China-Russia axis, Iran cannot (and will not) allow itself to be positioned as hors de combat, bogged down in lengthy negotiations over the JCPOA. The archetypal exemplar of the Imam at Kerbala will require Iran to adopt a principled stand with its allies – and with ‘the Axis’. Already, we see Saudi Arabia responding, in its own way, to the paradigm shift – through opening channels with both Tehran and Damascus.

So, to where will this lead? Significantly, Richard Haas and Charles Kupchan, from the ‘oracle’ that is the Council for Foreign Relations, argue that America, having renewed its standing, will ultimately itself have to pivot towards a new Concert of Powers. They write:

“Pax Americana is now running on fumes. The United States and its traditional democratic partners have neither the capability nor the will to anchor an interdependent international system and universalize the liberal order that they erected after World War II … Establishing a global concert would not be a panacea. Bringing the world’s heavyweights to the table hardly ensures a consensus among them. Indeed, although the Concert of Europe preserved peace for decades after it was formed, France and the United Kingdom ultimately faced off with Russia in the Crimean War. Russia is again at loggerheads with its European neighbors over the Crimean region, underscoring the elusive nature of great-power solidarity … The United States and its democratic partners have every reason to revive the solidarity of the West. However they should stop pretending that the global triumph of the order they backed since World War II is within reach”.

It seems hardly credible though, that Washington could make such an existential psychic transformation of ‘stopping pretending’ without first undergoing a major crisis. Is that what these authors anticipate – a Fourth Turning?

Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

Continuing his world tour doling out righteous lectures to the world, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday proclaimed — in a sermon you have to hear to believe — that few things are more sacred in a democracy than “independent journalism.” Speaking to Radio Free Europe, Blinken paid homage to “World Press Freedom Day”; claimed that “the United States stands strongly with independent journalism”; explained that “the foundation of any democratic system” entails “holding leaders accountable” and “informing citizens”; and warned that “countries that deny freedom of the press are countries that don’t have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems.”

The rhetorical cherry on top of that cake came when he posed this question: “What is to be afraid of in informing the people and holding leaders accountable?” The Secretary of State then issued this vow: “Everywhere journalism and freedom of the press is challenged, we will stand with journalists and with that freedom.” Since I know that I would be extremely skeptical if someone told me that those words had just come out Blinken’s mouth, I present you here with the unedited one-minute-fifty-two-second video clip of him saying exactly this:

That the Biden administration is such a stalwart believer in the sanctity of independent journalism and is devoted to defending it wherever it is threatened would come as a great surprise to many, many people. Among them would be Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and the person responsible for breaking more major stories about the actions of top U.S. officials than virtually all U.S. journalists employed in the corporate press combined.

Currently, Assange is sitting in a cell in the British high-security Belmarsh prison because the Biden administration is not only trying to extradite him to stand trial on espionage charges for having published documents embarrassing to the U.S. Government and the Democratic Party but also has appealed a British judge’s January ruling rejecting that extradition request. The Biden administration is doing all of this, noted The New York Times, despite the fact that “human rights and civil liberties groups had asked the [administration] to abandon the effort to prosecute Mr. Assange, arguing that the case . . . could establish a precedent posing a grave threat to press freedoms” — press freedoms, exactly the value which Blinken just righteously spent the week celebrating and vowing to uphold.

It was the Trump DOJ which brought those charges against Assange after then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo claimed in a 2017 speech that WikiLeaks has long “pretended that America’s First Amendment freedoms shield them from justice,” and then warned: “they may have believed that, but they are wrong.” Pomepo added — invoking the mentality of all states that persecute and imprison those who report effectively on them — that “to give [WikiLeaks] the space to crush us with misappropriated secrets is a perversion of what our great Constitution stands for. It ends now.” 

But like so many other Trump policies concerning press freedoms — from defending the Trump DOJ’s use of warrants to obtain journalists’ telephone records, to demanding Edward Snowden be kept in exile, to keeping Reality Winner and Daniel Hale imprisoned — top Biden officials have long been fully on board with Assange’s persecution. Indeed, they have been at the forefront of the effort to destroy basic press freedoms not just for WikiLeaks but journalists generally.

It was Joe Biden who called Assange a “high-tech terrorist” in 2010. It was the Obama administration that convened a years-long grand jury to try to prosecute Assange. It was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) who urged Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act years before Trump was in office. And it was Blinken’s colleague on the Obama national security team, Hillary Clinton, who praised the DOJ for its prosecution of Assange. All of this was intended as punishment for Assange’s revelations of rampant wrongdoing by the U.S. Government and its allies and adversary governments around the world.

How can you run around the world feigning anger over other countries’ persecution of independent journalists when you are a key part of the administration that is doing more than anyone to destroy one of the most consequential independent journalists of the last several decades? Indeed, as numerous journalists warned at the time, there were few, if any, administrations in U.S. history more hostile to basic press freedoms than the Obama administration in which Blinken previously served, including prosecuting double the number of journalistic sources under espionage laws than all previous administrations combined.

In 2013, while Blinken was serving as a high-level official in the State Department, the Committee to Protect Journalists did something very rare — issued a report warning of an epidemic of press freedom attacks by the U.S. Government — and said: “In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.” The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer said of the Obama administration’s press freedom attacks: “It’s a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn’t quite strong enough, it’s more like freezing the whole process into a standstill.” James Goodale, the New York Times’ General Counsel during the paper’s battle in the 1970s to publish the Pentagon Papers, warned that “President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.”

Even the specific “press freedom attack” Blinken referenced in that video interview — namely, Russia’s recent demand that media outlets linked to foreign governments such as Radio Free Europe register as “foreign agents” with the Russian government and pay fines for their failure to do so — is one which Blinken and his comrades have wielded against others for years. Indeed, Russia was responding to the U.S. Government’s previous demand that RT and other Russian news agencies register as “foreign agents” in the U.S., as well as the Biden administration’s escalated attacks just last month on news agencies it claims serves as propaganda agents for the Kremlin.

It is hardly new for the U.S. to dole out lectures which the rest of the world recognizes as complete farces. In 2015, then-President Obama was prancing around India giving lectures on the importance of human rights, only to cut short his trip to fly to Saudi Arabia, where he met numerous top officials of the U.S. Government to pay homage to Saudi King Abdullah, their long-time close and highly repressive ally whose totalitarian regime Obama did so much to fortify.

But galavanting around the world masquerading as the champion of press freedoms and the rights of independent journalists, all while working to extend the confinement and detention of one of the people responsible for much of the most important journalistic revelations of this generation beyond the decade he has already endured, is a whole new level of deceit. “Hypocrisy” is insufficient to capture the craven insincerity behind Blinken’s posturing.

It is always easy — and cheap — to condemn the human rights abuses of your enemies. It is much harder — and more meaningful — to uphold those principles for your own dissidents. Blinken, like so many who preceded him in that Foggy Bottom office, theatrically excels at the former while failing miserably at the latter.

We’re on the cusp of one of the most impactful generational shifts in history.

As it stands, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are America’s most wealthy and influential generation. But, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, even the youngest Boomers are close to retirement, with millions leaving the workforce every year. As Baby Boomers pass the torch, which generation will take their place as America’s most powerful?

In our inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI) for 2021, we’ve attempted to quantify how much power and influence each generation holds in American society, and what that means for the near future.

Download the Generational Power Report (.pdf)

Generation and Power, Defined

Before diving into the results of the first GPI, it’s important to explain how we’ve chosen to define both generations and power.

Here’s the breakdown of how we categorized each generation, along with their age ranges and birth years.

The above age brackets for each generation aren’t universally accepted. However, since our report largely focuses on U.S. data, we went with the most widely cited definitions, used by establishments such as Pew Research Center and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

To measure power, we considered a variety of factors that fell under three main categories:

• Economic Power

• Political Power

• Cultural Power

We’ll dive deeper into each category, and which generations dominated each one, below.

Overall Power, By Generation

Baby Boomers lead the pack when it comes to overall generational power, capturing 38.6%.

While Boomers hold the largest share of power, it’s interesting to note that they only make up 21.8% of the total U.S. population.

Gen X comes in second place, capturing 30.4% of power, while Gen Z ranks last, snagging a mere 3.7%. Gen Alpha has yet to score on the ranking, but keep in mind that the oldest members of this generation will only be eight years old this year—they haven’t even reached double digits yet.

Generational Power: Economics

Considering that Baby Boomers hold nearly 53% of all U.S. household wealth, it makes sense that they dominate when it comes to our measurement of Economic Power.

At 43.4%, the GPI shows that Boomers hold more economic influence than Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z combined. They make up a majority of business leaders in the U.S., and hold 42% of billionaire wealth in America.

Timing plays a role in the economic prosperity of Baby Boomers. They grew up in a post-WWII era, and spent their primary working years in a relatively stable, prosperous economy.

In contrast, Millennials entered the workforce during the Great Recession and have seen only tenuous economic and wage growth, impacting their ability to accumulate wealth. Combine this with crippling amounts of student debt, and it’s no surprise that Millennials have nearly 50% less wealth than other generations (Boomers, Gen X) at a comparable age.

Generational Power: Political

In addition to holding the most Economic Power in the GPI, Baby Boomers also rank number one when it comes to Political Power.

Boomers capture 47.4% of political influence. This generation accounts for 32% of all U.S. voters, and holds the majority of federal and state positions. For instance, 68% of U.S. senators are Baby Boomers.

Political spending on election campaigns and lobbying predominantly comes from Boomers, too. When it comes to money spent on lobbying, we found that 60% of the top 20 spenders were from organizations led by Baby Boomers.

In contrast, Millennials and Gen Zers barely make a splash in the political realm. That said, in the coming years, it’s estimated that the combined voting power of Millennials and Gen Z will see immense growth, rising from 32% of voters in 2020 up to 55% by 2036.

Cultural Power

There is one category where other generations gave Boomers a run for their money, which is in Cultural Power.

In this category, it’s actually Gen X that leads the pack, capturing 36.0% of Cultural Power. Gen X is especially dominant in press and news media—over half of America’s largest news corporations have a Gen Xer as their CEO, and a majority of the most influential news personalities are also members of Gen X.

Despite a strong showing in our culture category, Gen X falls short in one key variable we looked at—the digital realm. On digital platforms, Millennials dominate when it comes to both users and content creators, and Gen Z has growing influence here as well.

The Future of Generational Power

Generational power is not stagnant, and it ebbs and flows over time.

As this process naturally plays out, our new Generational Power Index and the coinciding annual report will aim to help quantify future shifts in power each year, while also highlighting the key stories that exemplify these new developments.

For a full methodology of how we built the Generational Power Index, see pages 28-30 in the report PDF. This is the first year of the report, and any feedback is welcomed.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The record-low number of deportations in the United States in April signals that the Biden administration is working toward abolishing immigration enforcement, the former acting chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says.

“It’s terrible. You got record numbers, people coming into the country illegally being released, and a record low of people being removed,” Thomas Homan, who headed the agency during the Trump administration, told The Epoch Times.

“But that’s by design, this isn’t an accident—they want to dismantle ICE. Rather than abolish them, which they had a tough time doing they’re just making them not effective. Looks like it’s working,” he added.

The end goal, according to Homan, is completely halting immigration enforcement.

“They want open borders because they think they’re going to be all future Democratic voters. This is about perpetual power of the government,” he said.

ICE and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has not been asked during recent briefings about the low number of deportations.

Only 2,962 deportations were carried out in April, according to the agency. That does not include expulsions made under Title 42 emergency powers amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

An ICE spokesman said via email earlier this week that the agency “has concentrated its limited law enforcement resources on threats to national security, border security, and public safety,” which has “allowed ICE to focus on the quality of enforcement actions and how they further the security and safety of our communities rather than the simple quantity of arrests and removals.”

Former acting ICE Director Tom Homan testifies at a House hearing in front of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, in Washington on July 12, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

A recent surge in illegal border crossings, meanwhile, has shown little signs of slowing down. Over 177,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended by border agents in April, according to preliminary numbers, with another 42,620 aliens evading authorities.

President Joe Biden upon entering office quickly reversed or dramatically altered key Trump-era measures aimed at curbing illegal immigration, including completely undoing the program that forced asylum seekers to wait outside the country for their claims to be heard. In February, ICE announced new interim guidelines for deportations that narrowed the agency’s focus to only three priority areas: national security, border security, and public safety.

If an illegal immigrant is encountered who doesn’t fall under one of the areas, an agent must seek approval from their field office before taking any action.

Republicans and some analysts said the low April numbers should not be a surprise given the narrowing deportation criteria.

“With the Biden Administration willfully ignoring the rule of law, it’s no wonder we have a crisis at our southern border,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) wrote on Twitter.

Andrew Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, a research institute that looks at how immigration impacts America, said the current restrictions on ICE incentivize illegal immigration.

“As bad as the situation at the border is, interior non-enforcement is, if anything, worse. But you don’t see children crowded into makeshift detention centers under foil blankets when ICE isn’t allowed to deport criminals,” he wrote in a blog post. “The current non-enforcement rules are the reason aliens are coming, though, because they send the signal that once those aliens get into the United States, they will get to stay.”

Skyrocketing lumber prices have more than tripled over the past 12 months and made the cost associated with building an average new single-family home significantly rise. The folks at Visual Capitalist dove deeper into the lumber price storm to find out how many new single-family homes $50k in lumber can build today versus the same period in 2020. 

To calculate each home, Visual Capitalist used the following parameters:

• Lumber requirements: 6.3 board feet (bd ft) per square foot (sq ft)

• Median single-family house size: 2,301 sq ft

• Total lumber required per single-family house: 14,496 bd ft

What they found was that $50k in lumber in 2015 could build 14.74 new single-family homes. By April 2020, the same price of lumber could build around 10.5 homes. And in May, after a meteoric rise in lumber prices, $50k in lumber could only build 2.11 homes. 

Here’s a visualization of what $50k in lumber can build in May 2021 versus May 2020. 

On Friday, lumber prices rose at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to over $1,700 per 1,000 bd ft, closing up 2.49% to $1,686, fresh record highs. The chart below is in a parabolic move – almost like Bitcoin or Etherum. 

Despite Weyerhaeuser Co., Georgia-Pacific LLC, West Fraser Timber Co., Ltd., among others, attempting to increase output, lumber prices continue to soar and will likely remain elevated until new capacity comes online or the housing market frenzy loses steam. 

All this talk about “transitory” inflation is non-sense, as Bank of America elegantly put it: “Buckle up! Inflation is here.” 

Authored by Janita Kan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

HR expert and author Jim Stroud says the impact of critical race theory (CRT) in workplace training could be detrimental to employees because it could lead to increased bullying and anxiety in the workplace.

The the quasi-Marxist theory has been heavily promulgated throughout academia, entertainment, government, schools, and the workplace in recent years and rose to new prominence following the rise of far-left groups such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Some workplaces have included concepts from the doctrine in their “racial and cultural sensitivity” training, which essentially teaches employees that the United States is fundamentally racist, or that one race is inherently superior to another race.

Stroud, who has 20 years’ experience in human resources and has written about CRT’s impact on the workplace, argues that such training could negatively impact workplace dynamics and teaches employees to mistrust each other.

“So imagine that you’re working in a space and the day before the training, everything was fine,” Stroud told NTD’s “The Nation Speaks.” “You work with your co-workers, you had good friendships, good team building exercises, everything is fine. After the training, you’re looking at your co-workers in a different way. You’re wondering, okay, I thought you were my friend but because of this training, I now believe that you’re oppressing me, so I don’t really know if we’re really friends. I don’t really know if we’re really working together. I don’t know if the reason why you refused me taking on some project is because my idea wasn’t valid or because you’re racist.”

Employees may also question whether they were chosen to work on a certain project because they were suitable for the job or because of some corporate policy aiming to fulfill at curbing discrimination stemming from intersectionality, he added. Intersectionality is the concept where different aspects of a person’s identity can expose them to overlapping forms of discrimination and marginalization.

“So I also think that it would bring about a lot of anxiety inside the workplace because if people disagree with critical race theory then you will be accused of being racist, which is what critical race theory does,” he said.

If an employee continues to deny that accusation, the CRT states that that individual is “all the more racist,” he explained. Eventually, this anxiety in some people could lead to hostile workplaces.

Stroud said that CRT is essentially a “movement to make racism acceptable,” saying it teaches the idea that “white people are born oppressors without redemption and that all minorities are oppressed.”

“It teaches that the most important thing about anyone is their skin color, not their character, not the things they do, not the personality, not even the environment that they inhabit,” he said. “That’s purely telling you that your worth and everything you are is measured in the color of your skin.”

The movement to push back on the expansion of CRT in schools and workplace training has fueled a heated debate on how cultural and racial sensitivity education should be conducted. Conservatives and Republicans have warned that the CRT movement is not about eliminating racism, and is simply pushing divisive concepts. Meanwhile, progressives and Democrats argue that the CRT approach would advance equity for all.

During his administration, President Donald Trump placed a ban on critical race theory training in federal workplaces, but President Joe Biden rescinded the measure. Instead, Biden has promoted policies that embrace the ideology, issuing an executive order stating that the federal government must pursue “a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all.”

Stroud said he believes that the best way for corporations who are grappling with partisan politics in their organization is to attempt to steer conversations away from politics, but he warned that this could prompt backlash, citing the example of employee exodus at software firm Basecamp. The technology company saw mass resignations after its CEO announced that its employees are banned from openly sharing their “societal and political discussions” at work.

In a blog post, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried explained that the discussions are “a major distraction,” “saps our energy,” and “redirects our dialog toward dark places.”

“It’s not healthy, it hasn’t served us well. And we’re done with it on our company Basecamp account where the work happens. People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can’t happen where the work happens anymore,” he said.

Stroud said he also hopes to see legislative measures that would make an individual’s political affiliation a protected class under state or federal discrimination laws in order to counter discrimination or bullying based on a person’s political beliefs.

“Hopefully by the time of the election, it’ll become law. I think will be tricky because talking about politics is is something that both sides need,” he said, adding that given the Democrat-controlled Congress, it is unlikely that such a law would pass.

The US economy is fragmented more than ever. Millions of Americans continue to suffer job loss and housing and food inequities. At the same time, 650 billionaires in the US saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion since the pandemic began. A Bloomberg analysis provides a deep dive into the unevenness of the recovery in a dozen cities. 

To capture the multi-speed track recovery for different races, social classes, and various metro areas, Bloomberg used unemployment data from a monthly Current Population Survey of approximately 60,000 households via the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau.

They found the recovery is patchy geographically: 

“For Asian Americans in San Francisco and Los Angeles, low tourism and high housing costs are weighing on their rebound, while Latinos in Phoenix have benefited from a strong construction sector.”

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve and the White House have vowed to continue unprecedented monetary and fiscal accommodations until employment metrics improve, such as Black national unemployment, wage growth for working-poor, and labor force participation for those without college degrees.

Janelle Jones, the top economist at the Labor Department, recently said there “no economic recovery can be complete if some communities are left behind.” But after trillions of dollars of monetary and fiscal injections, the recovery remains uneven: 

Bloomberg found the socio-economic collapse during the virus pandemic widened the non-seasonally adjusted White-vs.-Black unemployment gap nationally by 2.9 percentage points and the White-vs.-Hispanic gap by 2.3 points. In contrast, unemployment among Asians reverted to normal levels. 

On a more microscopic level, average jobless rates between January and March were 15.5% for Black people in Los Angeles and 3.5% for White people in Atlanta. 

Bloomberg pointed out Hispanic workers in Phoenix had better labor conditions than their peers nationally because service-related jobs were hiring more. 

For Blacks, Hispanic, and Whites in Houston, joblessness across the board was much worse than the national average, primarily because of the industry-wide downturn in oil and gas. On the other hand, Asians had the best labor conditions. 

Focusing on minorities, Black and Hispanic people in Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles face double-digit unemployment numbers. 

“Still, for more than half of minority groups, local unemployment rates have not fully recovered to March 2020 levels, when stay-at-home orders were first enacted, while some gaps have widened,” Bloomberg said. 

Combining the data above with other regional data such as home prices, job listings and small business loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, Bloomberg dives even further to show what minority metro areas have been left behind in the ‘frankenstein’ recovery (otherwise known as the “K-shaped” recover) produced by government and central bank. 

What’s clear is that government nor the central bank can demonstrate effective policies to lift all participants. One thing is sure, the billionaires got richer, and the bottom 90% of Americans got poorer. 

By Ye Xie, Bloomberg reporter and Market Live commentator

Three things we learned last week:

1. The U.S.-China relationship remains tense.

For anyone who expects an improvement in the U.S.-China relationship, it’s been a disappointing early start to the Biden administration. President Biden has kept almost all of Trump’s China economic policies, including tariffs, and restrictions on Chinese tech companies. He rallied U.S. allies to put pressure on China over issues from human rights to cybersecurity.

Under these circumstances, China has most likely been divesting from the dollar and U.S. Treasuries for “logical tactical reasons,” said Stephen Jen, co-founder of London-based Eurizon SLJ Capital. “If the risks of financial sanctions by the U.S. are rising, why would SAFE (China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange) hold so much U.S. Treasuries that could potentially one day be subject to confiscation or be frozen?” he said.

Indeed, China has sold Treasuries since 2018 when the trade war started. What’s interesting is that over the past year, its holding of long-term Treasury bonds have been steady, but its purchases of short-term bills surged to $76 billion, from $3 billion in February 2020, when the pandemic hit. The reason for the bill purchases is unknown, but it doesn’t look like a long-term commitment.

2. The weak jobs report supports the Fed’s dovish stance.

The shockingly weak U.S. jobs report was almost too bad to be true. It might have been because of technical factors such as seasonal adjustments or the lack of incentives for workers to return thanks to enhanced unemployment payments. But it certainly justifies the Fed’s cautious policy that it’s not the time to talk about removing stimulus. It’s likely to keep the dollar on the back foot.

Given the Fed now puts more weight on employment than on inflation under its new framework, the report should lower the markets’ sensitivity to this week’s inflation figure.

3. Strong data and currency give China a window to open capital markets.

China’s exports surged and the tourism spending during the Labor Day holiday shows consumption is recovering. The stable growth provides China a window to address some long-term structural issue, including cleaning up the debt overhang and opening up its capital account. Last week, China issued rules on Wealth Management Connect, which would allow investments across the border between Hong Kong and the nation’s southern region.

“While it is a small step in making investment abroad easier for qualified residents in Guangdong province, it is a big step toward China’s capital account liberalization experiment,” Citigroup’s economists led by Li-Gang Liu wrote.

By Nick Colas of DataTrek Research

This week we’re considering the concept of “Mastery”. The word can mean either “a high level of skill” or “control over something/ someone”. Steve Cohen and Jerry Seinfeld both have mastery of their respective crafts, for example. As different as trading and comedy may be, their process of gaining mastery is actually quite similar: work every day, no excuses. This builds “skill”, of course, but also confidence (i.e., mastery over self, and self-doubt).

Two stories about “mastery” to share with you:

#1: Steve Cohen. When I (Nick) got to SAC in 1999. I heard a story about how Steve had developed his style of catalyst-driven trading. When he left Gruntal and set up his own shop, he started by only trading one stock: IBM. He got to know the floor specialists who made the market, read all the analyst reports and financial filings, and traded only when he thought he had an edge on specific events. Once he was satisfied his process worked, he started scaling the business by adding traders and training them in this approach.

By the time I got to Steve’s shop, there was an additional process layer on top of “know your edge”: a specific daily trading profit goal. You started with, say, a $1,000 budget – make that profit every day for 30 days. It didn’t matter if you made it at the open, the close, or sometime in between. Once you made the grand, you basically took all risk off and started working on the next day’s trade ideas. Once you achieved a 30-day continuous string of profits, you set a new one – $2,000/day, say.

What if you stumbled at some point, and had a few days of losses as you ramped up your profit goal? Well, then you went back to the $1,000/day goal. You already knew how to do that, after all. String together a few weeks of those gains and try for $2,000/day again. We all met weekly with the in-house shrink, who helped us understand the psychology behind our successes and failures, but always in the context of that daily profit goal number.

Takeaway: Steve and IBM is a great example of mastery as “comprehensive knowledge” built through daily discipline, and the $1,000/day goal is mastery as “control over someone”, namely yourself.

#2: Jerry Seinfeld. Ok, not an investment guy, obviously, but he clearly has mastery over his craft. How did he do that? Here’s his hack, as described to a fellow comedian many years ago:

• “He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day.
• He told me to get a big wall calendar that had a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.
• After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.”

Takeaway: Just like Steve, Seinfeld sees mechanized, disciplined routine as the path to mastering a skill and mastering yourself. In his episode of “Comedians in Cars” with Dave Chappelle, the two have a long exchange about how it can take years to craft the perfect joke. One word might make all the difference, and the only way to find it is to search for it every day.

Wrapping up with a few other thoughts on the subject of mastery:

As Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right”. “Mastery of knowledge” gets so much attention in investing that it’s easy to shortchange “mastery of someone”, namely yourself. Behavioral finance covers some of this ground, but too often in a way that makes decision-making mistakes look unavoidable. The important thing is to keep trying to overcome them with a specific process, executed daily.

Small wins mean a great deal. The $1,000/day trading profit goal had two very specific purposes. First, it forced junior traders to learn P&L discipline and risk management – especially the idea of cutting losses early. Second, and just as important, it gave them confidence. There is nothing like a 30-day string of wins – in any field – to give you the impetus to keep crossing off the days on a Seinfeld-style calendar.

Achieving mastery – of knowledge, or self – is an ongoing process more than it is a destination unto itself. Back at SAC I knew a trader who would mark down the individual closing positions on his personal P&L software (not the fund’s books and records, of course) so that he showed a smaller daily gain (say $2 mm instead of $4 mm). Why? Because at the next day’s open his real-time P&L would always be positive by a million or two regardless of overnight volatility. He simply found it easier to make good decisions if he was “making money”. Unorthodox as that may sound, it reflects the right priorities – mastery is often as much a brain hack as it is based in empirical knowledge.

Final note: we obviously follow the daily approach to “mastery” at DataTrek, something that actually started in our prior gig right around 2010 when we first read about Seinfeld’s routine. To us, it made more sense than Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule (it takes that long to achieve a high level of skill) as described in his 2008 book “Outliers”. After +30 years on Wall Street, I have come to the conclusion that mastery is first and foremost a process, and one that requires daily, sustained attention. The minute you stray from that path, you quickly start to lose it. As Seinfeld said, “Your only job is to not break the chain”.

Sources:

Jerry Seinfeld’s Daily Routine: https://www.balancethegrind.com.au/daily-routines/jerry-seinfeld-daily-routine/