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Authored by Justin Spittler via CaseyResearch.com,

Last Monday, Donald Trump announced that he’s establishing a new, sixth branch of the military known as the “Space Force.”

It sounds like a joke. But Trump’s dead serious about this. Here’s what he said:

Our destiny beyond the Earth is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security…

When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space.

It’s one of the strangest stories I’ve ever come across. So, I called up Doug Casey as soon as I heard it, to get his take…

Justin: Doug, what do you think about the creation of a Space Force?

Doug: I thought there was an understanding amongst governments that they weren’t going to militarize space, as much as there’s an understanding that Antarctica won’t be militarized. Nice ideas. Ideally you want the smallest militaries possible, in the fewest places possible – instead of large militaries absolutely everywhere. In fact, my ideal would be to limit the size of the military to the head of state and his cabinet, and their area of operations to an octagon, or a small arena someplace.

But that’s unrealistic. Weak old men prefer to have foolish young men fight for them, at taxpayer expense.

That said, anything that can be militarized will be militarized in today’s world. So an American Space Force was inevitable. And there’s no point in kvetching about the inevitable. But it takes risks and expenses up to the next level.

Once space is militarized, the Space Force could – is intended to – destroy any or all of the thousands of satellites in space for communications, science, and all sorts of worthwhile things. Causing trillions of dollars of direct and indirect damage. But that’s far from the only thing that Space Force would do. Like any military organization, the purpose is to kill people and destroy property.

This news reminds me of the conversation we had a few weeks ago about the so-called “Rod from God.” That, again, is basically a tungsten rod, a foot in diameter and 20 feet long, that can be dropped from orbit. It would use only kinetic energy, so there’s no radioactive fallout. But it would be ultra-accurate, ultra-fast, ultra-stealthy, and as devastating as a small nuclear explosion.

Ever since the days of the cavemen, warriors have striven to control the high ground—and space is the ultimate high ground.

So this is ramping up the arms race in a big way. And I don’t see how you can stop it. Governments get in wars with each other for a living; it’s their raison d’etre. It’s been that way for thousands of years. No different from Game of Thrones, to use an analogy that’s more meaningful to the average sports fan.

So, the fact that they said they wouldn’t militarize space long ago meant nothing. It sounded good because nobody was in a position to do it. The cat’s out of the bag now.

Justin: How might other countries respond to this? Do you think they’ll announce plans for their own Space Forces?

Doug: Unquestionably – if they can get hold of the technology. You’ve got to look at who’s space-capable. The Russians are very space-capable. Now that the US has acted, they’re almost forced to do it as a simple matter of self-defense. The Chinese are also space-capable. So, they’ll do it as well. The Indians are becoming space-capable. And, of course, the Europeans. Soon we’re going to have two, three, many different forces in space.

It reminds me of the excellent Stanley Kubrick movie Doctor Strangelove, which is totally brilliant and one of my top ten favorites. It’s about the start of World War III.

You may recall that in the early ’60s, when it’s set, there was said to be a “missile gap” between the Soviets and the Americans. In the War Room, the Americans are discussing a gigantic megabomb the Russians have set off, and that there’s no way to survive but to hide in mine shafts. One general reflexively says, based on nothing, “Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!” So the Americans shift their efforts from building nuclear missiles, which are now worthless, to digging mineshafts—in order to ensure the survival of high government officials.

This is just the way these things happen. Somebody does A and somebody else has to do B to counter A. Then somebody else does C to counter B.

It’s part of the human condition. One group of chimpanzees around the watering hole discover that they can use sticks to brain their opponents. Then, chimpanzees on the other side of the watering hole figure how to put a rock at the end of the stick to make it more effective. Another group, watching them, decides sharpening the rock will give them a further edge. It becomes a question of who will strike first, while they’ve still got the edge.

Whenever we’re talking about governments and their militaries, the Golden Rule is “Do unto others—but do it first!”

That’s exactly what’s going to happen in space, now that Donald has decided to act as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, in a vain hope to MAGA. The situation will only escalate, the way the nuclear arms race did. Fortunately, we seem to have dodged that bullet… maybe. This race could be much more deadly.

But, as I said, it’s completely inevitable. At least until we change the basic human psyche, and clear it of its numerous aberrations. Or perhaps purge humanity of psychopaths, narcissists, and criminals. Or defang the institution of government, which naturally attracts those types. You have to remember that history is mainly a catalog of wars between governments.

So, there’s nothing to be done about this. Even if Trump doesn’t create a Space Force first, because the US Government is already bankrupt, the Chinese, Russians, Indians, or Europeans will do it. There’s no way out.

Justin: I can’t imagine that a Space Force will come cheap, either.

Doug: Of course not. This will evolve into another bloated military bureaucracy, that’s for sure. The Space Force is going take up lots more office space, full of cubicle dwellers. They’re going to hire scientists and engineers that would otherwise be creating useful things, not destructive weapons. The Space Force generals will lobby against the other five services, and the 17 or so Praetorian Agencies like the FBI and the CIA, for hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new resources. This won’t be good from an economic point of view.

Frankly, I’m not sure the government’s even equipped to handle this. After all, it’s not like they have much in the way of launch facilities anymore. They’re no longer in a position to launch—they had to subcontract to the Russians not long ago.

American capability has largely been passed over to the private sector—which is a good thing. NASA, which is supposedly a civilian agency anyway, is not what it used to be in the ’60s. It’s just another bureaucracy—it’s like the Post Office with rockets and telescopes. So, I imagine that they’re going to have to outsource a lot of this to the two US space exploration companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin—who will then become as corrupt and cost-plus as any other military contractor.

I’m very concerned by Trump’s wanting to spend more money on the military—which already almost equals that of all the world’s other militaries combined—when he should be cutting military spending by 50% to 90%. It’s very provocative. And will help bankrupt the US.

But it frankly won’t matter how much money Trump spends on any of this. That’s because the Chinese economy is going to be three times bigger than the US economy in 20 years. Wars are won or lost based on economic strength.

How do you fight an adversary that’s triple your size? You can’t, unless you’re writing a fairy tale. Or, at least, you’re an idiot to try. It would be very much like the Japanese trying to compete against the US in WW2. Not likely a winning proposition.

Recognize I’m not being defeatist in saying these things. The US could be fine 20 years from now—if it does the right things. But it’s not imitating itself from 100 years ago. Or Singapore today. It’s imitating Argentina under Perón and the Kirchners.

Justin: What might the introduction of a Space Force mean for international cooperation in space? Will the International Space Station and other joint efforts like this fall apart?

Doug: That’s a problem, isn’t it? Countries will probably stop cooperating on projects like the International Space Station once they start to view each other as military adversaries in space.

It’s not like you’d expect the Americans and the Chinese to do joint military exercises together today, or even scientific cooperation. The Americans and the Russians cooperated in space a few years ago. But once you militarize space, the odds are about as good as their doing joint military operations together in the Ukraine. They’re antagonists. And that atmosphere will transfer itself to space when we have Space Forces.

It’s not a good trend. It’s not going to win the US any friends, or stem its decline.

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Money is once again pouring into high-yielding, low quality asset-backed securities and collateralized loan obligations, as investors are once again taking significant risks in the euphoria-driven chase for yield. As Bloomberg reports, a decade after the great financial crisis, investors are again making the same mistakes that led us to financial turmoil in 2008. Thanks to suppressed volatility, and cheap debt investors are getting greedy and are seeking out higher yields.

According to the report, high yield ABS are on track this year to account for its biggest slice of the overall sector since before the financial crisis, rising to 1.5%, up from 0.3% in 2012. At the same time, the riskiest CLO notes are now a larger percentage of the market than they’ve been in two years.

The growing appetite for the lowest-rated bonds in the ABS and CLOs markets highlight the rabid demand for higher-yielding securities and those with floating rates that offer protection from inflation and tighter monetary policy. But this also leaves these markets more exposed at a time when many analysts see an economic slowdown on the horizon.

“From a debtholder’s perspective, I am very wary of these types of lower-rated tranches, as they have been shown to have much more spread volatility and much more rating risk,” said Jason Merrill, a structured finance analyst at Penn Mutual Asset Management, about the collateralized loan obligation and asset-backed securities markets.

While some of the asset backed securities are for personal loans, the bulk of investor interest is for high-yield securities in the automobile sector, whose subprime segment has deteriorated significantly in the past two years. Subprime auto ABS has less of a safety net than it did prior to 2008, as insurance has fallen off since the last financial crisis. However, this hasn’t stopped speculative investors with euphoric outlooks from blindly taking more risk:

The popularity of subprime auto ABS — especially the rise of B rated tranches — is a concern because there are fewer protections baked into the structures of the deals than before the financial crisis, S&P Global Ratings analysts said in a note Monday.

Bonds rated BB typically were insured in the 1990s, featuring important triggers to protect investors. But insurance hasn’t been used as a form of credit enhancement in this market since 2008, so the latest batch of subprime deals — many of which now go all the way down to B ratings — doesn’t have the same safety net, according to S&P.

The article also observes that the B-rated tier in the CLO market has grown to a total of 30% of all new issues. This is up from 17% last year and just 3% in 2016:

“When I consider the CLO downgrades that come across the wire, the vast majority of them are single-B to CCC downgrades,” said Merrill, whose firm has more than $24 billion of assets under management.

For example, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded the B2 rated tranche of a 2014 CLO managed by Invesco last week, while upgrading or affirming the ratings in the higher tiers.

The push into the lowest rungs comes amid record demand. New CLO deals may be on pace to reach an all-time high of $150 billion this year, according to Wells Fargo.

We have repeatedly reported on the implosion of the subprime auto market for the better part of the last year. In May, we showedthe rapid deterioration in the subprime auto market, which now looks worse than prior to the last recession. Specifically, delinquent subprime auto-loans are now higher than they were in the last recession, as shown in the chart below:

What’s interesting – and worrisome – is that consumers are defaulting on subprime auto loans when the economy is reportedly doing ‘very well’.

As a Zerohedge contributor wrote in early May – there are cracks under the economy’s foundation. And it’s like a bucket of cold water in the face of the mainstream financial media that’s pushing the ‘growth’ story. We must ask ourselves – “if things are going so well, why are subprime loan delinquencies at a 22-year high?” This was the same situation that led up to the 2008 housing crisis.

First, there was massive growth in mortgage-backed securities and mortgage debt. Then, the Federal Reserve – led by Alan Greenspan – began aggressively raising rates after years of low rates. Soon after, subprime loans started blowing up – which trickled into the prime loans. And eventually, everything was in chaos.

Thanks to the Fed, a near decade of ZIRP and three rounds of Quantitative Easing (which totaled over $3.8 trillion in printed money) – consumers became hooked on cheap auto loans.

One thing is for sure, pouring more money into riskier paper in a chase for yield is a mode of operation we have seen many times before and it always ends badly. Meanwhile, investors refuse to learn from past mistakes and, with the help of the Fed, we are doomed to repeat history again.

Maybe it is different this time.

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Via Political Calculations blog,

In February 2018, the ratio of the trailing twelve month averages of median new home sale prices in the United States to median household income reached an all time high value of 5.45, which is to say that the typical new home sold in the U.S. cost nearly 5 and a half times the annual income earned by a typical American household.

Since then, preliminary sales data indicates that the prices being paid for new homes have slightly declined in recent months, while median household income has inched upward, where as of May 2018, the median new home costs 5.41 times the median U.S. household income.

Looking at the data a little differently, we find that the growth of new home sale prices is indeed decelerating as incomes continue to grow.

That’s a small comfort however when we zoom out to look at the data over the entire history for which it is available, where new homes today are selling for somewhere between $90,000 to $100,000 more than what they would cost if homes were as affordable as they were in the years from 1987 to 1999. Or for that matter, from 1967 to 1986….

As for how U.S. housing prices got so far out of whack compared to what had been very long term, stable trends, it took a combination of fuel, oxidizer and a spark.

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Bitcoin has tumbled back below $6,000 in early Asia trading and the rest of the crypto space is following suit. No imediate catalyst for the move – aside from technical pressure – but tougher AML rules in South Korea and US Congress being told Bitcoin is a threat to the US election may have sparked it earlier in the week and this is follow-through.

Bitcoin can’t catch a bid off the weekend’s $6,000 slump…

And as usual, the rest of crypto is following (though we note that Bitcoin had been steady as the rest of crypto fell)…

As we noted, other than just momentum running through the psychological $6,000 barrier, there is little immediate headline catalyst.

But two stories of note this week may have helped drive some of the weakness.

As CoinTelegraph reports, South Korea’s top financial regulator has released a set of revised anti-money laundering (AML) guidelines for virtual currencies, according to a press release published this week.

The press release notes that the Financial Services Commission (FSC) conducted on-site inspections of three domestic banks – Nonghyup, Kookmin, and Hana Bank – the results of which prompted the update to AML guidelines.

The new guidelines note that cryptocurrency exchanges must conduct Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Enhanced Customer Identification (EDD) to ensure the trade purposes and funding sources of users are legitimate. If a business refuses or is unable to provide information for customer verification, the guidelines note that any transactions from that entity must be rejected or terminated.

According to the revised guidelines, crypto exchanges are also responsible for making certain that foreigners are not using local crypto exchanges, criminals are not using the personal accounts of other people to launder money, and that there are no suspicious transactions and payment processing, CCN news site writes.

And, as CCN reports, for a significant part of 2017 and even this year, social media platforms have taken a lot of heat over their alleged role in influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And for a period of time on Tuesday during a congressional hearing, cryptocurrencies were put in the same spot — at least with regards to the future.

According to Dueweke, the danger of using virtual currencies to influence the U.S. electoral process is acuter now considering that there are state actors who are hostile to the United States that are turning to cryptocurrencies as a way of bypassing the financial system of the West as well as its Anti-Money Laundering and Know-Your-Client regulatory requirements. Per Dueweke Russia was a particularly big threat.

“Considering that a large percentage of global criminal hackers and many cybercriminals are Russian or speak Russian (it is estimated that 25% of Darknet content is Russian),  and given Russia’s current state of tension with the United States and Europe, this development should be closely monitored,” Dueweke warned in his prepared testimony.

This comes about a week since the U.S. Secret Service’s Office of Investigations deputy director, Robert Novy, called on lawmakers to enact legislation which would curb the use of anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies or privacy coins. Novy was testifying before a Terrorism and Illicit Finance subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services.

So while many were worried about The Fed or regulators cracking down on cryptos – now it’s even worse – Congress will unleash the full FUD in their ignorance.

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Submitted by ECRI

The latest oil price spike may turn out to be a head-fake, because the economy is already slowing. While the oil cartel can try to fix the supply of oil, it can’t really control the demand side, which is dominated by the economic cycle.

This is clear to us at ECRI because of our enduring focus on cyclical relationships and, in this case, sensitive industrial material prices, including oil. We’ve long maintained a daily price index of these commodities that moves in concert with cycles in industrial growth. About half of the price inputs we monitor are traded on various commodity exchanges, while the rest are priced from commodity producers.

For the past few quarters a very unusual gap has opened up between the two groups, with the prices of non-exchange-traded industrial commodities, which most observers don’t watch, falling, and in some cases plunging. This behavior is in sharp contrast to the bullish sentiment shown, until more recently, by the strength in the prices of commonly-watched exchange-traded commodities. 

As the chart shows, because of their links to industrial growth, exchange-traded and non-exchange-traded commodity price inflation rates have historically moved very much in sync.

But the right-side of the chart shows exchange-traded commodity price inflation spiking up through early this year, driven by widely-watched industrial inputs like oil and copper, while non-exchange traded commodity inflation went straight down into negative territory, as the prices of raw materials like rubber and hides dropped precipitously. This is very unusual.

This undeniable weakness in the non-exchange traded commodity prices is in line with our March Bloomberg View Op-ed, The Global Economy’s Wile E. Coyote Moment, about the end of the 2016-17 synchronized global growth upturn. The current downturn in global industrial growth has caught many people off guard because they focus on exchange-traded commodities only. Doing so made it easier to think that demand wasn’t slowing because surging oil and primary metals prices had camouflaged what was really happening.

ECRI’s insight was that the rise in exchange-traded prices was not about demand, which we knew was slowing. Rather, it was about the confluence of a variety of supply shocks, which weren’t cyclical, and thus unsustainable.

Of course, Saudi Arabia and Russia had deliberately kept oil production in check to support oil prices. But also, aluminum and nickel prices had shot up on fears of U.S. sanctions on Russia. Copper prices had surged due to labor problems at major mines, and rule changes regarding Indonesian tin export permits had also caused supply shortages. Meanwhile, zinc prices were pushed up by the shutdown of major Australian, Irish and Canadian mines and China’s environmental clampdown, which had lifted lead prices. What’s more, those pollution controls also hurt the production of synthetic fabrics, which therefore couldn’t make up for the shortfall in Indian cotton exports caused by pink bollworms eating into the cotton supply. It really was this perfect storm of supply constraints – not the strength of global demand – that drove the earlier run-up in these exchange-traded commodity prices.

Stepping back, the real tip-off came from the earlier downturns in ECRI’s leading indexes of global industrial growth, which were then followed by the yawning gap between exchange-traded and non-exchange-traded commodity price inflation that opened up months ago. It’s only in recent weeks that exchange-traded commodity price inflation has turned down. It’s no coincidence that the Eurozone manufacturing PMI just dropped to a 1½-year low and its U.S. counterpart fell to a seven-month low.

Today, growth in the non-exchange-traded commodity prices remains negative, and growth in the exchange-traded commodity prices is closing the gap by dropping to an 11-month low. With the global industrial slowdown manifesting in all these very short-leading indicators, the market may soon start asking if global demand is all it’s cracked up to be.

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Out of control violence in Mexico has sparked a record increase in the country’s armored-car business, Reuters reports. Mexico recorded more than 25,000 murders by EOY 2017, the highest number “since modern records began,” with 2018 projections to be far worse than expected.

As a result of the violence across all 31 states, the Mexican Automotive Armor Association (AMBA), expects a 10 percent spike in car-armoring services this year to 3,284 cars, surging above the previous all-time high in 2012.

Reuters describes Mexican demand for car-armoring services as “small” relative to the 15,145 cars armored in Brazil, during FY’17. Reuters believes a 25 percent spike in demand for these unique cars in Brazil could be seen this year, as the country’s currency is in free-fall.

As Latin America implodes, car-armoring services have never been stronger. 

While demand for armored cars has soared in recent years, global automakers have taken notice and started bulletproofing vehicles on their Mexican production lines to capture more revenue that would otherwise be going to after-market armoring shops, explained Reuters.

Back in 4Q16, Audi identified Mexico and South America as a pilot market for offering the Q5 armored vehicle. The Audi Q5 Security is the world’s first SUV in the segment to be offered in an armored version from the factory. The automaker uses certified NiJ III-A class of ABNT NBR 15000 protective parts in the Q5 that is widely used in South America. That means the Q5 can resist attacks by handguns up to 44-magnum in caliber and thereby protects its passengers.

BMW, Jeep, and Mercedes-Benz have also recognized the need to offer armored cars in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

In particular, the BMW X5 has a range of three different levels of protection to increase its appeal to the Mexican market.

VIDEO: BULLETPROOF BMW X5 SECURITY PLUS SUV UNVEILED

After being attacked in recent years, Arturo Avila, who owns a private security firm, now travels in armored cars through the streets of Mexico City.

“One of the crimes that hurts us most is kidnapping, that’s what we’re afraid of,” he said, adding he changed his car every two years.

“About 1.5 million cars were sold in Mexico in 2017, but just a tiny portion were armored, since the cars remain a luxury for the affluent and for companies that require executives to travel in bulletproof vehicles with bodyguards,” Avila added.

The popularity of armored vehicles is soaring through all 31 states of Mexico, but still represents a small percentage of overall cars sold in the country. Demand for these special vehicles comes from large corporations and the wealthy, who are often targets by cartel gangs. Armored car providers are turning to rental and leasing agreements to make these vehicles more affordable, Reuters added.

Leading up to the Mexican presidential election this Sunday, about 113 politicians or candidates have been killed since September 2017. More than 1,000 candidates have dropped out of local races because they feared being gunned down. With cartel gang wars and out of control murders in Mexico, we believe the armored car industry is just starting to flourish in North and South America.

As global automakers now realize that there is money to be made in bulletproofing a car, it is only a matter of time before these cars hit the streets of the United States.

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Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

The United Nations is at it again with yet another report on how bad poverty is in the United States – and how things would improve greatly if the US raised taxes. This time, the UN denunciation of the US has raised the ire of US ambassador Nikki Haley who has called the report “patently ridiculous.”

Specifically, Haley was responding to a June 18 report by UN bureaucrat Philip Alston. Alston concluded that poverty rates in the US are among the worst in North America or Europe.

How did Alston come to this conclusion?

Well, first of all, it’s important to note that he didn’t collect any new information.

The report comes at the end of a two-week visit to the United States conducted back in December of 2017. At the time, Alston released a similar preliminary report.

The new report to the UN Human Rights Council is just an update of the old report.

Moreover, Alston could have easily authored the report had he just stayed home. The report is based simply on existing data already collected and published by agencies such as the US Census Bureau and the OECD. Amy undergraduate could have written a similar report using data he found online.

One example of this method is found in Alston’s reporting on poverty.

According to the report:

About 20 per cent of children live in relative income poverty [in the United States], compared to the OECD average of 13 per cent.

Here, Alston has essentially cut and pasted text from an existing OECD report. There’s nothing wrong with this, per se, except for the fact that Alston has implied he has recently completed a thorough survey of poverty in the United States — even though he clearly hasn’t.

This November 2017 report from the OECD reads:

[C]hild relative income poverty rates are very high – around 20% of children in the U.S. live in relative income poverty, compared to just over 13%, on average across OECD countries.

The report also includes this graph:

But there’s a problem here with Alston’s use of the data. The OECD report refers to “relative income poverty,” which isn’t what most people think it is. Most people would think a poverty rate should measure incomes against the cost of maintaining a certain basic living standard. But this “relative” poverty measure isn’t that sort of measure. It’s just a measure of how many people in a country make 50% or more of that country’s median income level.

So, if you have country with a very low median income, and a very low standard of living, it’s possible to have very low poverty rates — so long as most people make more than fifty percent of that country’s lousy median income level.

This allows the OECD to claim — as it does in the graph — that the US has higher poverty rates than Mexico.

In order to understand this more fully, let’s look at the OECD’s own measure of disposable median income for each of its member countries (2015 data) in Graph A:

These numbers include both ordinary wage income and also cash assistance from welfare programs. It is also adjusted for local purchasing power and rendered in international dollars.

Now, note in the footnote of the OECD graph above that you’re poor — regardless of where you are — if you make 50 percent of the local median income. So, 50 percent of the median income in Greece (with a median income of $13,000) or 50 percent of the median income in Norway (with a median income of $39,000) are both simply “poverty.”

But let’s look at just how huge these differences can be.  If we look at incomes at the 50 percent level for each country, we get in Graph B:

If you’re going to be poor by this measure, you’ll have a higher income in the US than in many other places. For example, the poor in the US at the median poverty level have incomes 34 percent higher than the median poor in Italy. When comparing the US and Spain, the US comes in at 40 percent higher.

Put yet another way, if you make $15,000 in the US, you’re poor. But if you make $15,000 in France, Germany, the UK, or Italy, you’re not poor. Why? Because the overall median incomes in those non-US countries are lower.

Basically, by this measure, poverty has little to do with what resources you have at your disposal. It’s more or a measure of how much you’re making compared to how much other people are making. It’s a measure of income inequality, not poverty. 

The problem with making comparisons this ways can also be illustrated by looking at the US poverty-level income compared to the median income from other countries. For example, the US poverty-level income is so high it’s at 70 percent of the median income in Spain and 67 percent of the median income in Italy in Graph C:

If you have a median poverty-level income in the United States, your income is 95 percent the size of the median income of all households in Portugal. Stated broadly, we might say that poor households in the US have pretty much the same income as the overall population in Portugal. Or, one might say the median poverty income level in the US is nearly two-thirds as high as the overall median income of everybody in the United Kingdom.

Clearly, if a poor household in the US has an income 40 percent higher than a poor household in Spain — then these two types of “poverty” are not the same.

Measuring Poverty by Actual Standards of Living

A more honest way to measure poverty would be to look at actual indicators of the standard of living. This would include household amenities, living space, labor-saving appliances, entertainment, and so on.

For example, living space in the US, even among the poor, is measurably more plentiful than elsewhere. As noted by Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation:

Housing space can also be measured by the number of square feet per person. The Residential Energy Consumption survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy shows that Americans have an average of 721 square feet of living space per person. Poor Americans have 439 square feet. Reasonably comparable international square-footage data are provided by the Housing Indicator Program of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements, which surveyed Housing conditions in major cities in 54 different nations. This survey showed the United States to have, by far, the most spacious Housing units, with 50 percent to 100 percent more square footage per capita than city dwellers in other industrialized nations.

America’s poor compare favorably with the general population of other nations in square footage of living space. The average poor American has more square footage of living space than does the average person living in London, Paris, Vienna, and Munich. Poor Americans have nearly three times the living space of average urban citizens in middle-income countries such as Mexico and Turkey. Poor American households have seven times more Housing space per person than the general urban population of very-low-income countries such as India and China.

As Rector notes, “There is a vast gap between poverty as understood by the American public and poverty as currently measured by the government.” This is due to a wide variety of reasons. One reason is that income surveys don’t count non-cash poverty relief programs. This means programs like Medicaid and food stamps aren’t included in the incomes of low-income households in America. That makes those incomes looked significantly lower than they are. 

Poverty measures also can’t take into account heads of household who have low incomes, but also don’t have a mortgage because they’re paid off their houses already. This is not an insignificant factor in measuring poverty among the elderly. 

All of this is important because in Alston’s report to the UN, he relies on US government data using the traditional poverty-rate measures. He then combines these with the OECD’s “relative” poverty measures to conclude that poverty is “shockingly” widespread in the United States. 

A closer look at the data, though, suggests things are more complicated. 

None of this is to say that poverty doesn’t exist anywhere. Of course is exists, and issues like homelessness and true poverty are real for some people. Sweeping claims like those by Alston tell us very little, however, about the real state of poverty in the US. 

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Jonathan Wheeler quit his job as a software engineer at Goldman Sachs earlier this year to start a non-profit foundation with a unique mission: Air drop $300 million worth of bitcoin into economically-depressed Venezuela.

As the official (unpublished) inflation rate has skyrocketed to 14,000%, Venezuelans’ affinity for bitcoin has intensified. Thousands of Venezuelans are reportedly mining crypto, benefiting from cheap, government-subsidized electricity. This fact isn’t lost on the government, which has arrested cryptocurrency miners and users, even as the country’s Treasury has launched the petro, Venezuela’s “oil-backed” cryptocurrency, which it has touted as the country’s financial salvation.

However, as CoinDesk pointed out in a recent profile, Wheeler is afraid to say too much about his project – which recently became involved with a handful of Venezuelans on the ground.

The former bank employee turned developer doesn’t want to say too much about his newest project, an effort he believes could soon help people living under one of the world’s most oppressive monetary regimes. That’s because he needs others to help him with his mission – getting bitcoin in the hands of Venezuelan citizens by way of a massive mobile airdrop.

The problem is that spilling too much intel could put those he’s working with in danger.

The Venezuela government routinely arrests people with deviating political opinions and has even gone as far as to ban technologies citizens have used to circumvent its censorship. That’s not to mention the fact that Venezuela’s government has already launched its own cryptocurrency, the petro, which it’s painted as key to its economic revival.

Wheeler has put together a team that’s developing a mobile app, called Azul, which he hopes will help him solicit the millions in donations the company will need to make its project successful. So far, Wheeler’s pitches to investors have elicited some interesting replies.

Wheeler’s original pitch, presented at the BitDev meetup in New York City in February, was to raise millions of dollars from venture capitalists. But as he and Crena have pitched investors, several have pressured them to launch a crypto token of their own through an initial coin offering (ICO).

According to Wheeler, the VCs said that with the market for crypto tokens so hot right now, he and his team would be able to raise much more money.

But Wheeler and his partner decided against the ICO route. Given that Venezuelans have  limited access to technology, he’s hoping to make claiming the money as simple as possible. Bitcoin is probably the best choice, Wheeler and his team believe – particularly since developers added the lightning network, which is intended to speed up transactions by moving some data off of the bitcoin blockchain.

“We’re focused on bitcoin because we think it’s the most viable solution with the most worldwide potential,” Wheeler said.

Wheeler is seeking a partnership with the Human Rights Foundation and the United Nations, and has discussed the consequences of injecting a pile of money into a country with a damaged economy. Asked why Venezuela, Wheeler shrugged, and replied “you’ve got to start somewhere.” But Venezuela is probably as good a candidate as any: Many Venezuelans are already familiar with bitcoin, thanks to the speed with which the country’s economy has collapsed. And the people are in dire need: Thanks to food shortages, 75% of Venezuelans lost at least 10 kilos last year, according to one study.

Can Wheeler save Venezuela from “the Maduro diet” with his bitcoin injection? Or will the Venezuelan government find a way to seize the money?

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Authored by Celine Ryan via Campus Reform,

A New York University educator recently asserted that current “calls for civility are just a power play by those who feel that white supremacy is under threat.”

Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

Simran Jeet Singh, a Henry R. Luce Post-Doctoral Fellow for Religion in International Affairs at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, made the claim Monday evening in two Twitter threads that appeared to be a response to widespread calls for civility after Maxine Waters publicly endorsed the mass harassment of members of the Trump administration this weekend.

Singh, who describes himself as an “anti-racist activist,” proposed in the first thread that “lecturing people of color about civility in this climate is an ultimate sign of privilege.”

“If you don’t know what it’s like to fight for your life every single day, then it might not be your place to tell us how to fight personal and systemic racism,” he asserts, later adding that “they mobilize and run these dehumanizing racist systems—and then they ask us to be more civil?”

“Civility is racially coded, too,” Singh explains in the second thread.  

“Europeans described those they colonized as uncivilized people’s (barbaric, backwards, savages) in need of civilizing,” he claims. “This logic was central to the colonial enterprise.”

According to the academic, the entire concept of “civility” is rooted in white supremacy, because “part of the colonial legacy is the continued representation of people of color as being less civil,” adding that “this stereotype continues to permeate our social imaginations.”

“Given how whiteness is rooted in European colonialism,” he says, “it is easy to see how and why whiteness aims to make an exclusive claim to civility.”

Singh concludes his remarks by arguing that “calls for civility are just a power play by those who feel that white supremacy is under threat.”

Singh also made headlines last summer, after posting a number of tweets disparaging Trump supporters, including a statement that “all Trump supporters tacitly condone racism” and a controversial photograph of his brother making two middle-finger gestures in front of then president elect Trump’s New York City residence.

Campus Reform reached out to Singh for comment, but has not received a response.

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