The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on the collateral consequences of a felony conviction several weeks ago. Its members are against ’em. And to some degree, so should we all be. There are too many collateral consequences to a felony conviction these days. Examples include laws that prevent ex-offenders from engaging in certain professions and rules that make it difficult or impossible for ex-offenders to live in public housing.
On the other hand, the Commission appears curiously naïve about the reasons behind some of these collateral consequences. They seem to think they are just gratuitous efforts to kick people who are already down. But high rates of recidivism are a fact. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, “Five in 6 (83%) of state prisoners released in 2005 across 30 states were arrested at least once during the 9 years following their release.” The average number of re-arrests is five. Some collateral consequences are genuinely useful in protecting the public.
For example, few would argue against laws that forbid those who have been convicted of the sexual abuse of a young child from working in a day care center. And maybe it’s not such a bad idea to invest in more halfway houses for recently released prisoners instead of immediately putting them in unsupervised public housing, where some ex-offenders will likely put innocent residents in greater danger.
Even so, there have to be limits. Some collateral consequences seem to be nothing more than the work of a special interest seeking to squelch competition. In West Virginia, for example, “waxing specialists” and “shampoo assistants” must demonstrate “good moral character” to a government board. Maybe it’s just me, but I like rather like shampoo assistants “with a past.”
What struck me most about the Commission’s report was its emphasis on laws that deny felons the vote. The report purports to be about how collateral consequences make it too difficult for ex-offenders to re-integrate and hence increase the likelihood of recidivism. And yet it devotes more pages to the deprivation of voting rights than to any other kind of consequence. And it uses by far the report’s most florid language to describe it, arguing that “denying this right to even a ‘subset of the population’ jeopardizes democracy for the entire population,” and that “the right to vote is the ‘essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” [Italics added.]
Curiously, this is the one collateral consequence that is unlikely to prevent re-integration. If one doesn’t have a job or a place to live, it is easy to see how one might be lured back into crime. Not being able to vote isn’t in that category at all.
Alas, it is a little hard to imagine that the Commission’s Progressive majority would have been as focused on voting if they had not been quite so convinced that ex-offenders tend to vote for left-of-center candidates. (Ditto for the lack of enthusiasm shown by Republican state legislators.)
If useful reform is going to happen, it makes sense to focus elsewhere.
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Authoritarian figures rarely rely on state power alone to accomplish their draconian ends. They often also mobilize the very thing that legitimate rulers are supposed to stop: private violence. That is part of how the Jim Crow South maintained its regime of racial apartheid after the abolition of slavery limited the scope of formal state action. And now President Donald Trump is dipping into that ignominious tradition to activate the white nationalists in his base to advance his border control objectives.
Trump did not pull the trigger in the El Paso carnage that killed 22 people and counting, but it’s hard to deny that he has helped foment the atmosphere in which the trigger was pulled. Trump kicked off his presidential run by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, of course. And in his rallies he teasingly encouraged his supporters to “rough up” dissenters who protested his incendiary rhetoric. Far from cooling such language after getting elected, he ramped it up. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants as an infestation and painted a lurid picture of an out-of-control southern border under attack by “invaders” that border patrol agents are powerless to stop because, as he laments, “we can’t let them [the agents] use weapons.” As New York‘s Eric Levitz points out, the unmistakable message to “trigger happy patriots” in all of this is that “we can’t use weapons” but “perhaps you should.”
That, of course, is precisely what the 21-year-old El Paso shooter, who reportedly wrote a manifesto that billed his attack as a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” did. Although he took matters much further than Trump intended with his inflammatory rhetoric, the same cannot be said for border militias steeped in white supremacist ideology that have increasingly been doing for Trump what Trump can’t do for himself.
For months now a slew of paramilitary outfits in border states have taken it upon themselves to patrol the southern border more aggressively than the government, constrained by due process and other concerns, can. “Having the most powerful person on Earth echo their hateful views may even give extremists a sense of impunity,” points out Louisiana State University’s Nathan P. Kalmoe.
Indeed, after Trump stoked fears of the Central American migrant caravan before the November midterms, about 100 volunteers from the Texas Minutemen, draped in camouflage suits, night-vision goggles, aerial drones, and semiautomatic weapons, holed up along the Rio Grande and conducted night vigils to supplement the border patrol. Meanwhile, the Arizona Border Recon, founded eight years ago by the notorious army veteran Tim Foley, has ramped up its raids in the Sasabe desert in search of drugs and border crossers over the last two years. And then there is New Mexico–based United Constitutional Patriots (UCP). It started patrolling the New Mexico border in February 2018 and videotaping its encounters with migrants. By its estimates, it has apprehended some 3,000 border crossers.
In one particularly egregious episode in April whose video the group brazenly circulated on social media to gain recruits, its “patriots” held 300 terrified asylum seekers—men, women, and toddlers—on their knees at gunpoint.
This was tantamount to an illegal hostage taking, and the backlash finally prompted the arrest of its leader—though not for holding up the migrants at gunpoint, but for impersonating a federal agent. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued a pro-forma disclaimer declaring that it “does not endorse” enforcement action by private groups. But if that’s the case, asks the ACLU’s Peter Simonson, how does the agency explain photos of two border patrol agents on horseback posing on either side of masked vigilantes? “All indications are that they had a collaborative relationship with UCP and never told the vigilantes to cease and desist, even though the vigilantes were dressed up to impersonate BP officers, badges and all,” he notes.
Even more shockingly, such actions have not made the group too radioactive for Trump and his allies. Indeed, notes Simonson, UCP is now working closely with We Build the Wall, an organization founded by Trump’s former ultra-nationalist advisors, Steve Bannon and Krish Kobach. We Build the Wall’s mission is to raise private funds to build Trump’s wall. A few months ago, without obtaining any permits, it erected a short wall on private land on New Mexico’s southern border and then illegally extended it across a federal road. The ACLU is challenging the extension, notes Simonson.
In the name of enforcing the law, these vigilante groups are breaking the law at every turn. Yet instead of facing the wrath of the administration, they are making friends in the highest circles; Bannon, after all, was the architect of Trump’s America First campaign and served in the White House, while Kobach headed his voter fraud commission and was a serious contender as Trump’s immigration czar.
By contrast, migrants who cross the border without proper authorization, a mere misdemeanor the first time around, are having their babies snatched from them under Trump’s zero tolerance border policies, a practice that has continued even after a court order barred it. At the same time, the administration is cracking down on the sanctuary movement. Immigration activists such as Arizona State University’s Scott Warren are being slapped with anti-harboring charges that carry a 20-year prison sentence merely for offering food and first aid to those crossing the harsh desert. Even advocates who merely speak out on behalf of the migrants aren’t being spared.
All of this is reminiscent not in scale but in kind of the Jim Crow era, when southern states (and some northern ones) relied partly on unofficial private actors rather than official government channels to enforce its ideology of apartheid, allowing the white establishment to perpetrate the worst atrocities with impunity. Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, blacks suffered 4,000 documented incidents of extrajudicial lynchings for everything ranging from unproven accusations of sexual assault to speaking disrespectfully to a white man. In one case, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia, lynched a black World War I army veteran just because he refused to take off his uniform.
Even as whites went scot-free for these unspeakable crimes, blacks faced harsh punishment for minor crimes such as violating anti-vagary laws that criminalized black unemployment in order to keep blacks working for whites. In other words, the state systematically perverted the rule of law so that a combination of state action and private actors could keep blacks under its thumb.
America isn’t the only country where this kind of thing has happened. To this day, Indian authorities rely on actual and tacit private violence to perpetuate the caste system. But America is supposed to be the country most dedicated to equality under the law. It is therefore distressing that Trump is violating that dedication by uncorking private movements and personal demons to further border objectives that he can’t openly promote through legitimate state means.
Of course the El Paso shooter is facing the full brunt of the law and is being treated like a domestic terrorist. But the fact that it took Trump two days to condemn him for his sick ideology signals to his ilk that while man’s law might be against them, higher law is with them, exactly as was happening under Jim Crow. Unless Trump fundamentally changes course, no one should be shocked at more vigilante action and El Paso–style shootings as his most militant supporters take his inflammatory rhetoric literally.
A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on the collateral consequences of a felony conviction several weeks ago. Its members are against ’em. And to some degree, so should we all be. There are too many collateral consequences to a felony conviction these days. Examples include laws that prevent ex-offenders from engaging in certain professions and rules that make it difficult or impossible for ex-offenders to live in public housing.
On the other hand, the Commission appears curiously naïve about the reasons behind some of these collateral consequences. They seem to think they are just gratuitous efforts to kick people who are already down. But high rates of recidivism are a fact. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, “Five in 6 (83%) of state prisoners released in 2005 across 30 states were arrested at least once during the 9 years following their release.” The average number of re-arrests is five. Some collateral consequences are genuinely useful in protecting the public.
For example, few would argue against laws that forbid those who have been convicted of the sexual abuse of a young child from working in a day care center. And maybe it’s not such a bad idea to invest in more halfway houses for recently released prisoners instead of immediately putting them in unsupervised public housing, where some ex-offenders will likely put innocent residents in greater danger.
Even so, there have to be limits. Some collateral consequences seem to be nothing more than the work of a special interest seeking to squelch competition. In West Virginia, for example, “waxing specialists” and “shampoo assistants” must demonstrate “good moral character” to a government board. Maybe it’s just me, but I like rather like shampoo assistants “with a past.”
What struck me most about the Commission’s report was its emphasis on laws that deny felons the vote. The report purports to be about how collateral consequences make it too difficult for ex-offenders to re-integrate and hence increase the likelihood of recidivism. And yet it devotes more pages to the deprivation of voting rights than to any other kind of consequence. And it uses by far the report’s most florid language to describe it, arguing that “denying this right to even a ‘subset of the population’ jeopardizes democracy for the entire population,” and that “the right to vote is the ‘essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” [Italics added.]
Curiously, this is the one collateral consequence that is unlikely to prevent re-integration. If one doesn’t have a job or a place to live, it is easy to see how one might be lured back into crime. Not being able to vote isn’t in that category at all.
Alas, it is a little hard to imagine that the Commission’s Progressive majority would have been as focused on voting if they had not been quite so convinced that ex-offenders tend to vote for left-of-center candidates. (Ditto for the lack of enthusiasm shown by Republican state legislators.)
If useful reform is going to happen, it makes sense to focus elsewhere.
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Authoritarian figures rarely rely on state power alone to accomplish their draconian ends. They often also mobilize the very thing that legitimate rulers are supposed to stop: private violence. That is part of how the Jim Crow South maintained its regime of racial apartheid after the abolition of slavery limited the scope of formal state action. And now President Donald Trump is dipping into that ignominious tradition to activate the white nationalists in his base to advance his border control objectives.
Trump did not pull the trigger in the El Paso carnage that killed 22 people and counting, but it’s hard to deny that he has helped foment the atmosphere in which the trigger was pulled. Trump kicked off his presidential run by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, of course. And in his rallies he teasingly encouraged his supporters to “rough up” dissenters who protested his incendiary rhetoric. Far from cooling such language after getting elected, he ramped it up. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants as an infestation and painted a lurid picture of an out-of-control southern border under attack by “invaders” that border patrol agents are powerless to stop because, as he laments, “we can’t let them [the agents] use weapons.” As New York‘s Eric Levitz points out, the unmistakable message to “trigger happy patriots” in all of this is that “we can’t use weapons” but “perhaps you should.”
That, of course, is precisely what the 21-year-old El Paso shooter, who reportedly wrote a manifesto that billed his attack as a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” did. Although he took matters much further than Trump intended with his inflammatory rhetoric, the same cannot be said for border militias steeped in white supremacist ideology that have increasingly been doing for Trump what Trump can’t do for himself.
For months now a slew of paramilitary outfits in border states have taken it upon themselves to patrol the southern border more aggressively than the government, constrained by due process and other concerns, can. “Having the most powerful person on Earth echo their hateful views may even give extremists a sense of impunity,” points out Louisiana State University’s Nathan P. Kalmoe.
Indeed, after Trump stoked fears of the Central American migrant caravan before the November midterms, about 100 volunteers from the Texas Minutemen, draped in camouflage suits, night-vision goggles, aerial drones, and semiautomatic weapons, holed up along the Rio Grande and conducted night vigils to supplement the border patrol. Meanwhile, the Arizona Border Recon, founded eight years ago by the notorious army veteran Tim Foley, has ramped up its raids in the Sasabe desert in search of drugs and border crossers over the last two years. And then there is New Mexico–based United Constitutional Patriots (UCP). It started patrolling the New Mexico border in February 2018 and videotaping its encounters with migrants. By its estimates, it has apprehended some 3,000 border crossers.
In one particularly egregious episode in April whose video the group brazenly circulated on social media to gain recruits, its “patriots” held 300 terrified asylum seekers—men, women, and toddlers—on their knees at gunpoint.
This was tantamount to an illegal hostage taking, and the backlash finally prompted the arrest of its leader—though not for holding up the migrants at gunpoint, but for impersonating a federal agent. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued a pro-forma disclaimer declaring that it “does not endorse” enforcement action by private groups. But if that’s the case, asks the ACLU’s Peter Simonson, how does the agency explain photos of two border patrol agents on horseback posing on either side of masked vigilantes? “All indications are that they had a collaborative relationship with UCP and never told the vigilantes to cease and desist, even though the vigilantes were dressed up to impersonate BP officers, badges and all,” he notes.
Even more shockingly, such actions have not made the group too radioactive for Trump and his allies. Indeed, notes Simonson, UCP is now working closely with We Build the Wall, an organization founded by Trump’s former ultra-nationalist advisors, Steve Bannon and Krish Kobach. We Build the Wall’s mission is to raise private funds to build Trump’s wall. A few months ago, without obtaining any permits, it erected a short wall on private land on New Mexico’s southern border and then illegally extended it across a federal road. The ACLU is challenging the extension, notes Simonson.
In the name of enforcing the law, these vigilante groups are breaking the law at every turn. Yet instead of facing the wrath of the administration, they are making friends in the highest circles; Bannon, after all, was the architect of Trump’s America First campaign and served in the White House, while Kobach headed his voter fraud commission and was a serious contender as Trump’s immigration czar.
By contrast, migrants who cross the border without proper authorization, a mere misdemeanor the first time around, are having their babies snatched from them under Trump’s zero tolerance border policies, a practice that has continued even after a court order barred it. At the same time, the administration is cracking down on the sanctuary movement. Immigration activists such as Arizona State University’s Scott Warren are being slapped with anti-harboring charges that carry a 20-year prison sentence merely for offering food and first aid to those crossing the harsh desert. Even advocates who merely speak out on behalf of the migrants aren’t being spared.
All of this is reminiscent not in scale but in kind of the Jim Crow era, when southern states (and some northern ones) relied partly on unofficial private actors rather than official government channels to enforce its ideology of apartheid, allowing the white establishment to perpetrate the worst atrocities with impunity. Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, blacks suffered 4,000 documented incidents of extrajudicial lynchings for everything ranging from unproven accusations of sexual assault to speaking disrespectfully to a white man. In one case, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia, lynched a black World War I army veteran just because he refused to take off his uniform.
Even as whites went scot-free for these unspeakable crimes, blacks faced harsh punishment for minor crimes such as violating anti-vagary laws that criminalized black unemployment in order to keep blacks working for whites. In other words, the state systematically perverted the rule of law so that a combination of state action and private actors could keep blacks under its thumb.
America isn’t the only country where this kind of thing has happened. To this day, Indian authorities rely on actual and tacit private violence to perpetuate the caste system. But America is supposed to be the country most dedicated to equality under the law. It is therefore distressing that Trump is violating that dedication by uncorking private movements and personal demons to further border objectives that he can’t openly promote through legitimate state means.
Of course the El Paso shooter is facing the full brunt of the law and is being treated like a domestic terrorist. But the fact that it took Trump two days to condemn him for his sick ideology signals to his ilk that while man’s law might be against them, higher law is with them, exactly as was happening under Jim Crow. Unless Trump fundamentally changes course, no one should be shocked at more vigilante action and El Paso–style shootings as his most militant supporters take his inflammatory rhetoric literally.
A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.
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“It doesn’t feel very safe” exclaimed one young Swedish lady following reports of a fourth rape in as many days in the Swedish city of Uppsala.
“I even bought a self-defense spray yesterday. I’ll have it in my hand when I go home myself. If something should happen, you are always prepared.”
And her fears (and preparation) are well-placed it appears as even the police admit they can’t protect everyone, warning women to walk in groups and to “think how to behave.”
“Women in town should not be worried, but must think how to behave,” the city’s police force said in a statement to newspaper Expressen.
“Feel free to walk on illuminated streets and not alone in alleys or parks,” they continued, adding that because officers “cannot be in all places, both men and women have to think ahead.”
Women’s rights groups criticized the warning, calling for a greater police presence on the streets:
“Reducing girls’ freedom of movement is a serious development,”activist Mariet Ghadimi told SVT Nyheter in March.
“It is a structural problem that restricts girls’ freedom and rights, and in the long run affects women generally.”
These are not isolated incidents as Sweden’s rape count has been rising since 2005, and jumped ten percent in 2017 alone. Between 2005 and 2017, rapes nearly doubled and sexual molestation incidents more than doubled.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/33thvij Tyler Durden
8chan may have been shut down, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe.
You see, all the people that used 8chan before it was shut down arestill out there. They might be on Twitter. They might be on Facebook. They might be ordering coffee at a Starbucks. They might be plotting some sort of far-right apocalypse. They might just be talking about movies on reddit. There’s no way of knowing.
We should all be terribly worried.
At least, according to The Guardian, who headline today:
First off, of course, 8chan was not a “far-right site”, it was a site with some “far-right” people on it.
There are hundreds of boards on 8chan, with thousands upon thousands of different posters. Boards could be created by anyone to discuss anything.
The vast majority were dedicated to perfectly ordinary topics. Video games, fashion, cars, movies. There were many much more specific, fetishy, niche and weird…but not “far-right”. The site didn’t have an ideology except “free speech”.
The general shifting of “free speech” from something we all take for granted to being described as a “far-right agenda” is one of the most worrying trends in modern politics.
The article is actually funny, not least for the total lack of web literacy on display:
Former members of 8chan have scattered across the internet after the far-right site was shut down over the weekend
This is simply ridiculous to anyone who knows anything about the nature of 8chan et al. There are no “members”. That, indeed, is the whole entire point of the place. It is anonymous and temporary. No usernames, no registration, no “membership”.
The press has a long history of simply not being able to grasp the way the internet works (as in the famous “Who is this 4chan?” CNN interview or Fox’s “internet hate machine” piece), but this is such basic ignorance of the topic at hand that I almost can’t believe it’s genuine.
Indeed, it might not be. It might be that portraying “8chan” as some sort of organized community plays into the media’s need to generate fear. This generates, “the problem”, which sets us up for…
THE REACTION
Having established that 8chan’s “far-right” “members” are out there in the ether, being terrifying, the article needs to get some feedback on what that means.
To do this they go to two “consultants”:
Joan Donovan, who runs the Technology and Social Change (TaSC) Research Project
Ben Decker the CEO of “Memetic Consultancy” (sic. It’s actually “Memetica”).
They are portrayed as two essentially different voices, as if we’re getting a spectrum of opinion. But the most cursory check on Donovan and Decker shows they are both research fellows at the Shorenstein Institute of the Kennedy School of Government. They aren’t separate. At all.
(NOTE: In fact, Memetica, Shorenstein, and other NGOs currently talking up the need for internet censorship are a ripe subject for a full-on exposé, and will be in the near future)
Not at all surprisingly, being research fellows for the same institute at the same university, Decker and Donovan absolutely agree on pretty much everything.
Primarily, that shutting down 8chan was a really good idea, but won’t – on its own – solve the “far-right” problem.
Apparently, all the people that posted on 8chan will NOT flee the internet forever, but will now just go and post somewhere else. Why anyone would need two Harvard-trained academics to tell them this, I don’t know.
Where will they go?
Well, other scary places of course. Like the “far-right forum” Gab, or back to 4chan or reddit. Some of them will be “absorbed” by the social media giants (meaning they will post on Twitter and Facebook), and some will post in discussions on encrypted message services like Telegram and Discord.
For some reason, Gab is a real bugbear for centrists, being regularly attacked simply for existing. Its one claim to infamy is that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter apparently had a Gab account…this, apparently, makes it a far-right social network.
Niche and independent networks are always attacked by-association in this way. The Dayton shooter and “MAGABomber” both had twitter accounts, and the Christ Church attack was live-streamed on Facebook…but they are not shut down.
THE SOLUTION
Having established that shutting down 8chan was brilliant, but more is needed, our two NGO representatives set out what else needs to be done:
One way to prevent 8chan users from migrating to alternative social media spaces like YouTube and Facebook would be to build a moat around the platforms to prevent inbound links from these sites,”
This is total, complete nonsense. 8chan is gone, so “preventing inbound links” from it is now moot. Secondly, users don’t click from 8chan to YouTube, or Facebook or whatever. That’s not how the internet works. This would never control users crossposting, or prevent people having different accounts on different platforms or anything like that.
All this would do is prevent people from linking to sources. It stops the flow of information, not users. If Ben is really a “social media consultant”, he knows that. He’s just dishonestly suggesting censorship on totally spurious grounds.
There is an inherent value in deplatforming the site as a whole and making it harder to be accessed because the nature of these communities makes it difficult to inoculate the spread of this toxicity.”
Just “deplatform” websites “as a whole” if they are “toxic”. That’s the solution. Who decides what’s “toxic”?
Well, obviously the government does. Duh.
That’s just the start though. Whilst these Harvard academics give us the problem a reaction and just a hint of “solution”, elsewhere on the Guardian we are presented with a full, detailed (final?) solution.
Julia Ebner – another researcher for yet another creepy-sounding NGO the “Institute for Strategic Dialogue” – headlines:
How do we beat 8chan and other far-right sites? The same way we beat Isis
Essentially, as CJ Hopkins has written, this is just a rebranding of the War on Terror for a modern age. More like a remake, actually, to use Hollywood parlance. The same themes, the same characters. New dialogue. Different casting.
Until law enforcement, and the media, treat these shooters as part of a terrorist movement no less organized, or deadly, than ISIS or Al Qaeda, the violence will continue.
(NOTE: The ISIS comparison is more than apt. Now would be a good time to remember just how phony and manipulated the ISIS narrative was. Catte did excellent work on this.)
Julia writes that what we need is:
a stronger international response to condemn political rhetoric that belittles, legitimises or even endorses the dangerous concepts and conspiracy theories of far-right extremists.
Translation – Governments cooperating to suppress free speech. “Conspiracy theories” can, and will, mean absolutely anything they want it to mean. The DNC fixing the primaries for Clinton, for example. Or the Skripals being poisoned by MI6. Press bias against Corbyn. Criticism of Israel, or even mentioning the “Labour Friends of Israel”. These can all be defined as “conspiracy theories”.
On top of this Julia wants:
an international definition of terrorism that is ideologically agnostic and includes not only traditional jihadi organisations but also loose far-right networks.
Translation – An international definition of terrorism that is loose enough to be deployed against anybody for anything.
“Terrorism” will become even more absurdly vague than it is now. These “loose far-right networks” will mean “anybody who posts on Gab”, or “anyone who thinks 9/11 was an inside job”. Joining certain Facebook groups, visiting certain websites (there was actually a meme about this one). Watching RT. She says “loose”, and she means it.
It will shock you how “loose” these networks are. You’re probably in one, right now, just for reading this article. Welcome to our “loose network of far-right extremists”.
Most importantly Julia thinks…
…governments will need to look beyond the big tech platforms and introduce legal frameworks that tackle the ongoing migration of extremists to the smaller alt-tech sites.
Translation – Banning certain opinions from the big platforms that cooperate with the state is not enough. We then need to move against the smaller, independent platforms that – unlike Google, Facebook and Twitter – refuse to toe the party line.
Censor Twitter, and shutdown any platform – like Gab or Parler – that attempts to fill the “free speech” market niche. The state machine will love that, because it gives it control of narrative and information flow, while the social media giants will love it because it essentially writes their monopoly into law. That’s a massive win-win.
In that sense it coincides perfectly with the famous Mussolini definition of fascism – “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
The establishment is signalling intent here – the way they always do when these opportunities are either presented to them, or created by them. Harness that fear, sense the opening, and drive the push through.
It’s all rather like that old joke – “Q: What do you call 1000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A: A good start.”
Q: What do you call one website shut down for allowing free speech?
A: Just the beginning.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Mb46Wz Tyler Durden
Back in 2016, when the first negative interest rate bonds first emerged, we offered readers with a glimpse of the NIRP future:
After an intense pow-wow between the administration, Congressional leaders and the Federal Reserve, the Negative Mortgage Rate Program (NMRP) is born. The program is simple. Homeowners will be paid to borrow. The Federal Reserve declares that the NMRP is a brilliant extension of NIRP (negative interest rate policy), because it will benefit everyone, not just the 1%ers.
Here’s how it works: No downpayment needed. 100% financing.
No payments needed. This is the reverse of the negative amortization loans during the subprime era. In other words, it is a negative negative amortization, or neg-neg-am loan. The loan balance will decrease instead of increase.
No need for mortgage insurance since, with no payments, there can be no defaults.
No qualifying needed, hence removing the entire cumbersome loan application process.
Your interest cost will be -$1,000 per year. In other words, your loan balance will be $99,000, if you make no payments at all. Using a commonly accepted 30 year term, the loan balance at the end of 30 years would be around $50,000, all without the borrower having to pay a dime in mortgage expense.
Well for Denmark, the future is now, because three years later and with over $15 trillion in negative-yielding debt around the world, Denmark’s third largest bank is now offering borrowers mortgages at a negative interest rate, effectively paying its customers to borrow money for a house purchase.
Jyske Bank said this week that customers would now be able to take out a 10-year fixed-rate mortgage with an interest rate of -0.5%, meaning customers will pay back less than the amount they borrowed, or precisely what we said would happen in our 2016 preview of the dystopian future.
What this means is that if you buy a house for $1 million and pay off your mortgage in full in 10 years, you would pay the bank back only $995,000. No mortgage payments would be due between the purchase and payoff date, so effectively a borrower only has to repay principal… with a small discount, guaranteeing that the bank loses money on the loan.
“It’s another chapter in the history of the mortgage,” Jyske Bank housing economist Mikkel Høegh told Danish TV, according to Copenhagen Post. “A few months ago, we would have said that this would not be possible, but we have been surprised time and time again, and this opens up a new opportunity for homeowners.”
“In practical terms… the negative interest rate will act as a ‘subsidy’ to the repayment. And the repayment portion will become smaller and smaller as the debt is reduced,” explained Høegh.
How is that possible? “Yes, I hardly understand it either. In fact, I said it can’t happen. But we have figured out how to have a negative rate mortgage” explained Høegh.
That said, even with a negative interest rate, banks often charge fees linked to the borrowing, which means homeowners could still pay back more.
As Insider notes, Jyske Bank’s negative rate is the latest in a series of extremely low interest offers from banks to Danish homeowners.
What is even more bizarre however, is that unlike most of its European peers, Danmarks Nationalbanken, Denmark’s central bank, has held its main lending rate positive at 0.05 percent since January 2015, whereas much of Europe and Switzerland have cut their rates in deep negative territory for the past 5 years.
And while negative rates on mortgages are only now becoming available to consumers, they have been available on short-term mortgage bonds in Denmark since May, according to Bloomberg. “It’s never been cheaper to borrow,” Lise Nytoft Bergmann, the chief analyst at Nordea’s home finance unit in Denmark, told Bloomberg.
* * *
So what happens next? This is what we concluded three years ago:
Before you call us nuts, this is actually already reality. The governments of Germany, Switzerland, Japan and others are charging savers for the privilege of lending them money. Why stop there? Let the people enjoy negative interest rates when they buy a house, or a car, or borrow for a college education. In fact, why bother with taxes. Just let the government borrow to operate. The more it borrows, the more it makes.
And here we are, with banks now praising – and paying – debtors, whose loans are automatically repaid, while crushing savers who have to suffer negative interest rates on their deposits.
As such, the next (il)logical step is to take upside down finance to its extreme, and unleash MMT – i.e., helicopter money – on the population, because with a record $246 trillion in global debt outstanding, the only way forward is through a grand reset, one which inevitably involves hyperinflating the debt away. And that – as Bernanke predicted when he explains how to avoid deflation in his famous 2002 speech – will require a literal “helicopter drop” of money. Luckily, with negative rates, money is now worthless so the final lap in the grand race to the bottom of currency devaluation should be relatively quick.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31yaSt7 Tyler Durden
The Cold War perception of space travel as being very human-oriented with man conquering Mars to build the Capitalist or Communist cities of tomorrow has been completely replaced by the reality that drones are much better suited for space exploration than humans. When it comes to military aviation the situation is similar. The strongest and weakest point of any pilot is his brain, which cannot stand the massive gravitational forces that ultra-modern fighter jets are capable of creating.
So it is no surprise that at some point the US, Russia and China will unveil a drone big enough and capable enough to replace any current generation bombers and fighters removing the limitations of the human body’s weakness to big gravity from military aviation.
And, as of a few days ago the Russians did just that.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation just released video to the public of a test of their new massive pilotless aircraft called “The Hunter”. This demonstration was conducted while the craft was receiving signals from a human pilot on land, but the Ministry claims they will soon be able to show off its fully-automated capabilities.
The Hunter is a big beast, the largest military “drone” ever produced if it gets put into production, weighing in at 20 metric tons giving it the ability to carry any payload that any other Russian fighter jet can in theory.
The natural media reaction to this unveiling will surely be that of “Russian Aggression” (how dare you snow slaves produce anything other than oil) or “Cold War 2.0” is happening right now (we are all possibly doomed). The latter option is far more relevant and interesting.
Although no one from the realm of journalism or analysis can really tell you the total truth of how the American Military Industrial Complex was able to outdo the Soviet equivalent there is a general view that the American side was able to trick the Russians into vastly overproducing and thus overspending on arms production. And this dealt a crippling blow to the USSR. But will the supposed Cold War 2.0 that we are in have the exact same results? Can the US basically make the Russians max out their credit cards to achieve victory… again?
Russia as it is today looks very weak compared to what it was during the Soviet period, but it has some major differences (and some would say advantages) that the USSR did not.
Firstly Russia is Capitalist, no matter what anyone tells you, systemically Russia is not bogged down at all by the demands of Communist dogma. The entire dynamic by which things are produced and run is different.
Secondly, there is no longer a hapless Warsaw Pact that needs to be trained, armed and run on Moscow’s budget.
21st Century Russia sells its developments for profit and at least in the case of Syria asks those like Assad to fight their own battles, perhaps with assistance, but Russia is very weary of repeating a Soviet-Afghan or Vietnam (from an American perspective) scenario.
The creation of a pilotless fighter jet is an example of logical military spending that is not in line with the Cold War failures of the USSR. As stated above because of human physical limitations new fighter jets will have to be drones in order to be competitive. This is just the nature and direction of war, creating this sort of project is a logical next step and justified spending. This is not the same as Brezhnev era reasoning that if the Americans have X number of ICBMs with nuclear warheads (enough to destroy the entire world) then we need to build X + 1000 ICBMs to show them who’s boss, while the populous has to resort to sewing their own clothing due to deficits.
No matter what the Mainstream Media (or Kiev’s Fascist Trolls) try to push onto social media, despite sanctions, things in Russia are fine. The stores are full of things, much of which is made in Russia, including food which Russia now exports more than it imports. Starving out Russia like the West did with sanctions on the Soviet Union during the Interwar Period is not going to go so well this time. The dynamic by which Cold War 2.0 will play out is simply not the same or as simple as making cool computer graphics to show to a treacherous hapless Gorbachev.
Yes Russia is being forced to spend to “keep up” with the much wealthier United States, but this time around it is able to do this in a much smarter way, with Capitalism on its side and no need to produce vast mountains of useless weapons to support lazy “allies” or show the Americans they have “more” or something, the logic of Cold War 2.0 is just simply different. This new Hunter drone project is a good example of this. It is something the Russian military actually needs, seems to work (thus far) and that isn’t breaking the national budget, and could be sold in a few years to Multipolarity fans with big bucks in nations that don’t develop advanced arms. If Russia continues on this reasonable path of development we are in for a long Mexican Standoff this time, and perhaps that is a good thing.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Z2MmyQ Tyler Durden
Illinois is running out of time to fix its public sector pension problem. A new report from Moody’s Investors Service identified the Prairie State as one of the two most likely to suffer during an economic downturn. Illinois towns and cities are already paring back government services to pay for generous benefits packages for retirees, and Chicago’s pension debt alone is larger than that of 41 states. That arrangement can’t last forever.
“The worst-case scenario is there’s another national recession, which would cause our pension funds to lose a bunch of their assets again,” says Adam Schuster of the Illinois Policy Institute. “As the assets shrink, the pension funds go into a financial death spiral. We might end up with some kind of Puerto Rico–style pseudo-bankruptcy or federal bailout. Everybody in the nation is now on the hook for Illinois politicians’ irresponsible decisions.”
The best-case scenario would involve repealing an automatic 3 percent raise that pensioners receive each year of their retirement and requiring workers to pay more into their own plans. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker would prefer to scrap Illinois’ flat income tax and replace it with a progressive tax scheme, which could cause even more people to flee the state. In May, Schuster spoke to Reason‘s Mike Riggs about the pension conundrum.
Q: If somebody had been paying attention 30 years ago, could they have anticipated this pension problem?
A: Thirty years ago would be just about enough time to stop some of the mistakes. We changed the state constitution in 1970 to add a pension protection provision, which essentially says that as of the day of hire, an employee’s benefit formula cannot be changed in any way. So it doesn’t only protect benefits that somebody has already earned. It protects the future growth rate of those benefits for life and gives the state legislature no flexibility to change them.
Q: What happened next?
A: In 1990, Illinois implemented a guaranteed 3 percent compounding cost of living adjustment. So a person’s pension goes up by 3 percent every year regardless of how much inflation there is in the economy. It basically doubles the size of somebody’s pension over the course of 25 years.
We also had a series of governors, both Republican and Democratic, who habitually shorted the system by putting in less than the required contribution. The reason they did that is that the required contributions were unaffordable and never would have been affordable because we overpromised the benefits.
Q: Do Illinois taxpayers know what’s going on?
A: I think there is pretty widespread knowledge about the problem, but there’s also a defeatist apathy. We’ve had five straight years of population loss. We’re losing our prime working-age adults, and poll results say that the No. 1 reason they’re leaving is that the taxes are too high here. And the No. 2 reason they’re leaving is job opportunities are better elsewhere, which is related to No. 1.
Q: What do public sector union leaders say about the pension crisis? How about union members?
A: I appreciate that you make that distinction, because I’ve found there is a huge disparity in how they react to this kind of thing. Union leaders, who are involved in politics and lobbying, are against having this conversation at all. But when I talk to regular rank-and-file union members, they actually think the plan we put forward is a very fair and very reasonable compromise.
Q: What is the short version of your plan?
A: It would amend our constitution so that instead of protecting the future growth rate, it would only protect the pension benefit that somebody has earned to date. So if you retired today, your annuity would be protected, but it would give the legislature flexibility to change retirement ages for younger workers and to change that 3 percent cost of living adjustment, for example.
Q: What happens if Illinois does nothing?
A: I don’t know if you followed at all the story of Harvey, Illinois, but it’s a South Chicago suburb, and they have one of the highest effective property tax rates in the nation. Even still, their police and fire pensions are so underfunded that in order to make their pension payment, they had to lay off dozens of current police officers and firefighters.
Q: That’s what people pay taxes for: government services!
A: Harvey was the canary in the coal mine. Down in Peoria, they’ve had to lay off municipal workers, people who plow the streets. In Rockford, they’re being told they need to sell their city water system. Municipalities around the state are laying off public safety workers today to pay for yesterday’s pensions.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
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Illinois is running out of time to fix its public sector pension problem. A new report from Moody’s Investors Service identified the Prairie State as one of the two most likely to suffer during an economic downturn. Illinois towns and cities are already paring back government services to pay for generous benefits packages for retirees, and Chicago’s pension debt alone is larger than that of 41 states. That arrangement can’t last forever.
“The worst-case scenario is there’s another national recession, which would cause our pension funds to lose a bunch of their assets again,” says Adam Schuster of the Illinois Policy Institute. “As the assets shrink, the pension funds go into a financial death spiral. We might end up with some kind of Puerto Rico–style pseudo-bankruptcy or federal bailout. Everybody in the nation is now on the hook for Illinois politicians’ irresponsible decisions.”
The best-case scenario would involve repealing an automatic 3 percent raise that pensioners receive each year of their retirement and requiring workers to pay more into their own plans. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker would prefer to scrap Illinois’ flat income tax and replace it with a progressive tax scheme, which could cause even more people to flee the state. In May, Schuster spoke to Reason‘s Mike Riggs about the pension conundrum.
Q: If somebody had been paying attention 30 years ago, could they have anticipated this pension problem?
A: Thirty years ago would be just about enough time to stop some of the mistakes. We changed the state constitution in 1970 to add a pension protection provision, which essentially says that as of the day of hire, an employee’s benefit formula cannot be changed in any way. So it doesn’t only protect benefits that somebody has already earned. It protects the future growth rate of those benefits for life and gives the state legislature no flexibility to change them.
Q: What happened next?
A: In 1990, Illinois implemented a guaranteed 3 percent compounding cost of living adjustment. So a person’s pension goes up by 3 percent every year regardless of how much inflation there is in the economy. It basically doubles the size of somebody’s pension over the course of 25 years.
We also had a series of governors, both Republican and Democratic, who habitually shorted the system by putting in less than the required contribution. The reason they did that is that the required contributions were unaffordable and never would have been affordable because we overpromised the benefits.
Q: Do Illinois taxpayers know what’s going on?
A: I think there is pretty widespread knowledge about the problem, but there’s also a defeatist apathy. We’ve had five straight years of population loss. We’re losing our prime working-age adults, and poll results say that the No. 1 reason they’re leaving is that the taxes are too high here. And the No. 2 reason they’re leaving is job opportunities are better elsewhere, which is related to No. 1.
Q: What do public sector union leaders say about the pension crisis? How about union members?
A: I appreciate that you make that distinction, because I’ve found there is a huge disparity in how they react to this kind of thing. Union leaders, who are involved in politics and lobbying, are against having this conversation at all. But when I talk to regular rank-and-file union members, they actually think the plan we put forward is a very fair and very reasonable compromise.
Q: What is the short version of your plan?
A: It would amend our constitution so that instead of protecting the future growth rate, it would only protect the pension benefit that somebody has earned to date. So if you retired today, your annuity would be protected, but it would give the legislature flexibility to change retirement ages for younger workers and to change that 3 percent cost of living adjustment, for example.
Q: What happens if Illinois does nothing?
A: I don’t know if you followed at all the story of Harvey, Illinois, but it’s a South Chicago suburb, and they have one of the highest effective property tax rates in the nation. Even still, their police and fire pensions are so underfunded that in order to make their pension payment, they had to lay off dozens of current police officers and firefighters.
Q: That’s what people pay taxes for: government services!
A: Harvey was the canary in the coal mine. Down in Peoria, they’ve had to lay off municipal workers, people who plow the streets. In Rockford, they’re being told they need to sell their city water system. Municipalities around the state are laying off public safety workers today to pay for yesterday’s pensions.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.
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