Tag: finance

Submitted by David Galland via GarretGalland.com,

Our education begins within a few minutes of arriving on planet Earth. That’s when we begin to learn that crying and carrying on is rewarded with coddling and nourishment.

That particular lesson stays with us throughout our lives, more so with some people than others. I especially love watching red-faced yuppies trying to argue canceled airline flights back into service.

We also are educated by the physical world. Running barefoot and stepping on a tack/bee/piece of glass/thorn/etc. teaches us the importance of protective garments. As does our first time staying out too long shirtless in the sun.

Of course, our family members and friends also play an important role, teaching us the difference between wrong and right. Of course, as often as not, those concepts are subjective. Is it really “wrong” to question your elders? Or “right” to fall to your knees in prayer to an invisible superhuman at bedtime?

Maybe, maybe not. But not being privy to the hard data proving either point in our formative years, we are expected to take these various ideas on board without questioning. And, for the most part, we do.

It is also clear that having a poor role model can have long-term deleterious results. A single mother on welfare who is addicted to crack is unlikely to instill in Junior a strong moral compass or the work ethic needed to get ahead in a competitive world.

Regardless, while still in the proverbial short pants, we are one day bundled up and sent off to begin our formal education. This is where things get interesting.

Moving along, it seems appropriate to drop the virtual needle on Pink Floyd’s classic, Another Brick in the Wall.

Bricks in the Wall

Once our parents hand the keys to our brains to professional teachers, any number of factors come to play in our education.

For starters, every graduating class of future teachers contains those who sit in the front and those who hide at the back. If you’re lucky, your formative years won’t be shaped by a guy with “Dopey” as a college nickname.

And that’s not the worst roll of the dice. In my early schooling, I had a perennially pissed-off teacher by the name of Mr. Hirata. That I still remember his name is the direct result of his pulling a handful of my hair out by the roots in front of the class. My crime? Tossing a small glob of rice at another student during lunch break.

Likewise, in the education of my own children, there was an intensely passive-aggressive female teacher (at least I think she was female) who clearly disliked boys. Not the best setting for my son, and another brick in the wall that ultimately led my wife and me to homeschool the kids.

But stupidity, an excess of emotions, or gender bias are not the worst traits an educator might possess. While those may affect a subset of the student body, leaving them with a poor opinion of their educational experience, the real threat comes from bad ideas accepted by academics as good ideas.

I subscribe to the theory that ideas are like living viruses: a strong idea, once released into the ether, will take hold and gain currency. The stronger the idea, the more likely it is to spread.

Unfortunately, even terrible ideas can spread virulently. The classic of the genre being Karl Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

That particular idea has literally cost millions of lives. Incredibly, despite having been proven false time and again since its first utterance, it continues to spread.

Violence as Policy and Other Insanities

Throughout history, bad ideas such as those espoused by Marx have taken hold in the public arena and become institutionalized. This despite the inherent violence required by a system where individuals are forced to be subservient to the state.

The iconic socialist revolutionary, Che Guevara, made the case that in a true socialist revolution, large swaths of the population had to die.

“Is it possible or not, given the present conditions in [the Americas] to achieve socialist power by peaceful means? We emphatically answer that, in the great majority of cases, this is not possible. The most that could be achieved would be the formal takeover of the bourgeois superstructure of power and the transition to socialism of that government that, under the established bourgeois legal system, having achieved formal power will still have to wage a very violent struggle against all who attempt, in one way or another, to check its progress toward new social structures.”  

—Che Guevara, Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution, 1962

You may recognize that doctrine being applied eight years after it was written in Pol Pot’s regime. More than 20% of the population died horribly in the reeducation camps where they were sent to learn how to think correctly. Or die. Actually, mainly die.

If mass murder as policy isn’t about as bad an idea as ever stalked the land, I don’t know what is. Yet, there is still a large demand among the clamoring masses for T-shirts and posters emblazoned with Che’s beret-bedecked cabeza. You know, because he’s sooo cool.

But I drift.

The point I am laboring toward is that once bad ideas infest the educational system, they invariably jump the intellectual barriers and end up in the political system.

It is thus that the low-information processors have so tightly embraced the Chicken Little idea that the sky is falling due to the degradation of the environment, and that the governments of the world have responded by spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting a fiction.

This despite all the flashing fluorescent signs that the idea holds no water. If it did, why the pivot from “global warming” to the catch-all broader notion of “climate change”? And why is there a steadfast refusal by leading climate alarmists to publicly debate scientists who dispute the theory?

But that is just one small example of a long list of bad ideas that have crossed the blood-brain barrier.

Here’s another. Not all that long ago, some bright light decided that voluntarism should be injected into the schools. For example, making it a class project to read to old folks or play with stray dogs down at the local animal shelter. Harmless enough activities designed to “teach” the young to be more civic-minded. Well, that idea has morphed from a one-off activity to being mandatory for graduation.

And rather than providing the simple lesson that people can do a bit of good in their local community by volunteering, it has become indoctrination to advance Marx’s mantra.

We know a nice enough family back in the States that can never just go on vacation. Rather, they feel compelled to head off to some backwater to do good works, paying for their “holidays” with donations dunned from friends and family members.

The Epidemic of Bad Ideas

Slapping together an abbreviated list of the bad ideas now sweeping aside intelligent thought across the land—both in the US and in most countries where people have too much time on their hands, we come up with:

• Mother Earth Is Dying. What a dismal and stupid perspective. And doubly stupid because the same morose idea has infested the human imagination time and time again over the millennia. In the past, Gaia’s purported assassins have taken the form of overpopulation, a new ice age, air pollution, swine flu, holes in ozone layers, dying bees, or whatever the hell.

  Speaking as someone who has visited all points of the compass on planet Earth, if there’s a problem humanity faces, it is underpopulation. Case in point, my partner Olivier Garret’s sainted mother lives in the countryside about 20 minutes from Paris. Despite the area being populated since men and apes were dating, there are rolling green hills and forests as far as the eye can see.

  Dear readers in England might get a kick out of this illustrative quote from Paul Ehrlich, the dimwitted father of modern doomsday predictions:

  “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
  —Speech at British Institute for Biology, September 1971

  Proving how hard it is to kill off bad ideas, to this day Ehrlich remains the president of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology.

• All Cultures Are Good. You have to be naive in the extreme to accept this notion as true. Is an Islamic theocracy on par with living in a secular democracy where, for example, women have basic rights? Is African tribalism as an organizing system as valuable as one based on the rights of the individual to pursue life, liberty, and happiness? Is the Indian caste system really okay?

  In my opinion, the idea that individual cultures should be preserved like museum pieces is one of the most dangerous ideas afflicting modern man. That which separates us does not make us stronger.

• Capitalism Is Bad. Wake up and smell the Starbucks! Or some other brand determined to unseat Starbucks by offering better coffee at a better price. Though far from perfect—and, sorry to break it to you, but like Santa Claus, there is no such thing as a perfect economic system—minimizing government interference in the free exchange of goods and services works best at elevating the quality of life for the greatest number of people.

  Conversely, despite Marx’s quip, the systems that work worst are invariably based on some group of elites using the cover of “public good” to pull the levers on a command economy.

• Political Correctness. Talk about a slippery slope. Today, virtually any action or word can be seen to “micro-aggress” against some sensitive soul. In response, universities and governments feel compelled to take active measures to protect those same souls.

  The end result has to be a Gordian knot of soul-draining policies, regulations, and other complexities. Oh wait, why should it be a Gordian knot? Why not Gordiana or some other gender-neutral name? Sexist bastards!

• White People Are Bad and a Dying Breed. And that goes double for white men, eeeww! Sorry toots, but in the US 75% of the population is Caucasian, and just under half of that number are men. And it’s not just in the US that whites make up the demographic majority, by a wide margin. That is also the case in Canada, Australia, the UK, Europe, Russia, and many other countries. It may surprise you to learn that here in Argentina, the number is closer to 90%, and it’s even higher than that in Costa Rica, among many others.

  The idea that white people will effectively fade away anytime soon crashes and burns in the face of demographic facts. Regardless, focusing on the color of a person’s skin in making policy is, per my comments above, looking for ways to separate us humans, and so I am 100% against it. As far as the notion that white people are somehow bad, that’s just naked racism.

I could go on. However, as the sun is high in the sky, it is time to move on to other tasks.

As I slide toward the exit, I will sum up by expressing my concern that parts of the world, in particular the United States, are now cartwheeling down the slippery slope toward disaster. A disaster caused by the epidemic of bad ideas that have germinated in the educational system and subsequently taken root in the halls of political power.

Of course, not everyone has been equally infected. Individuals with common sense and an inclination toward facts and the scientific method are largely immune and can only view with alarm the zombie-like madness caused by bad ideas.

With the body politic so deeply divided, I really don’t see how a serious sociopolitical crisis can be avoided.

Trump’s inauguration, happening today, very well may serve as a starter pistol in unleashing the physical manifestation of the extraordinary conflict in the ideas held by approximately equal contingents of the population.

I will watch this particular parade closely and with deep concern, but very definitely from afar, here in the warm and pacific climes of the Argentine outback.

Don’t forget to duck.

(For those of you who want to read a scholarly dissertation about the takeover of the US educational system by socialists and progressives—two sides of the same coin—the National Association of Scholars recently released a comprehensive study entitled, “Making Citizens—How American Universities Teach Civics.” It’s long, but worth a scan.)

Here Come the Clowns

Mother, May I? Our clowny entry this week provides additional support for the contention that an epidemic of bad ideas has spread across the land.

In the United Kingdom where the bureaucrats have, at least until recently, seemed keen to pattern their regulatory regime to achieve a society that rhymes with Orwell’s 1984, a woman was called to the bench and made to pay a fine of £80 (US$98) for the offense of pouring a cup of coffee down the drain.

One can only hope that, with Brexit, the dogma-blinded cretins in the bureaucracy there will be chased back into the shadows.

via http://ift.tt/2jXmfpw Tyler Durden

Amid cooling global attitudes towards international institutionalism and open border, anti-sovereign state political policies, George Soros has found himself facing an increasingly resilient and international resistance to his non-profit organizations and NGOs.

On January 17, 2016 Macedonian Newspaper Republika reported the January 16th launch of a domestic initiative to investigate and resist the influence of George Soros aligned NGOs and political parties within Macedonia.  Co-founder Nikola Srbov cited the “take over of the entire civil sector and its abuse and instrumentalization to meet the goals of one political party” as the reason for the movement’s founding. Srbov was quoted by Czech publication Svobodné Noviny as calling for all “freedom-minded citizens” regardless of ethical origin or religion to join in “the fight against the civilian sector, which is designed and managed by George Soros.”

The news breaks less than a month after EU officials criticized Macedonian VMRO DPMNE party leader Nikola Gruevski for comments he made accusing Macedonia’s election commission of allowing “foreign ambassadors” to interfere in their work. In late December, Macedonia’s Public Revenue Office began to send financial inspectors to the Open Society Foundation’s offices along with 20 other NGOs. They insisted that the inspections were not related to Gruevski’s comments.

Macedonia’s moves to restrict the influence of George Soros-aligned organizations come just days after an announcement by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban that his government would use “all the tools at its disposal” to crack down on non-governmental organisations bankrolled by the Hungarian-born business magnate and investor.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundation works globally to promote liberal ideals and generate support for open-border, liberal institutionalist policies around the world. Soros is well known for funneling millions of dollars into the U.S. Democratic Party to support Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential Election.

via http://ift.tt/2iUYMDu William Craddick

That didn’t take long.

Earlier this week we reported that after 19 straight months of continued acceleration in home prices, China’s latest housing bubble may have finally burst (again) after December prices in the 70 cities tracked by the NBS, rose by 12.7%, below the 12.9% annual growth rate in the previous month – the first annual decline in nearly 2 years.

 

 

Fast forward to Friday, when at least two
major Chinese private providers of home price data stopped
publishing the figures, just as the housing market is stating to cool off at a dramatic pace across all Tier cities. According to Reuters, the
China Index Academy, a unit of U.S.-listed Fang Holdings, has stopped
distributing monthly housing price index data for 100 cities that it
usually issued at the start of the month. The academy said it had suspended distribution indefinitely, without giving a reason for the suspension.

“I don’t know who exactly is making the order, and it’s not mandatory,” said a source with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be identified as the topic is a sensitive one.

Home price data from private providers tends to show sharper increases than official data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which publishes monthly and annual percentage changes in 70 major cities. It also overextends on the downside, which according to official data, has now begun, and may explain the self-imposed censorship.

Since last summer, in an attempt to cool the overheating housing market, China’s government had levied curbs on buying and ownership to rein in soaring prices and limit asset bubble risks. E-house China, another influential private real estate consultancy also indefinitely suspended its monthly housing price index for 288 cities.

“Judged by current conditions, we won’t publish it in the future,” said Cherilyn Tsui, a public relations officer at CRIC, the consultancy’s real estate research branch. “We stopped distributing prices data a few months ago. At first it was just no external distribution, but now even internally we don’t distribute any more,” she told Reuters.

While Tsui said she did not know the reason for the halt, she added that data on sales volumes and inventories would still be published.

“Housing prices are an extremely sensitive matter right now,” a second source with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Perhaps the reason is that having created a massive bubble to the upside, Beijing is hoping to delay the descent in prices  in order to attain a smooth landing at a time when China is already faced with record capital outflows, a plunging currency and all time high levels of debt.

E-house’s last data release in November said new home prices in Beijing and Shanghai rose 1.32 percent and 1.09 percent in October, respectively, on the month. The NBS reported an increase of 0.5 percent. In light of the slowdown reported by the official data, one can surmise that the December print would have been quite dire.  In China Index Academy’s last data release in December, new home prices in Beijing and Shanghai rose 0.84 percent and 0.88 percent in November, while the NBS reported prices unchanged.

The NBS usually publishes price data around the 19th of the month, and private providers issue it earlier.

Meanwhile, the NBS denied it had ordered the data suspension. “We didn’t ask that. It’s not true,” an NBS representative told Reuters by telephone, when asked if it had asked private real estate consultants to halt distribution.

Why would one doubt the sincerity of Chinese government organization? Perhaps the same reason that also last week, China – facing daily smog alerts and a population which has grown weary and angry of Beijing’s unwillingness to address the issue – ordered its local weather bureaus to stop issuing smog alerts.

Which brings us back to a question we asked earlier in the week: if, as circumstantial evidence shows, the Chinese housing bubble has finally hit its inflection point and is headed downward, prompting the momentum chasers to flee, the question is whether the Chinese stock market is about to once again become the bubble choice du jour, as happened in mid to late 2014 and early 2015, when the bursting of the home bubble pushed the housing speculators into the stock market with scary, if entertaining, consequences. And, as we concluded, “it may not be a bad idea to buy some deep out of the money calls on the Shenzhen composite, as that is the place where the most degenerate of Chinese gamblers eventually congregate to every time the housing bubble bursts, only to be reincarnated two years down the line.”

News like today’s only validates our suspicion that Chinese stocks are about to soar yet again.

 

via http://ift.tt/2jyGzh2 Tyler Durden

Submitted by George Shapiro and Jacob Shapiro via MauldinEconomics.com,

What will the year ahead look like for Europe? 2017 will be another chapter in the European Union’s slow unraveling… a process that has been underway for over a decade.

The EU is a union in name only. The transfer of sovereignty to Brussels was never total, and member states are independent countries… each with their own interests at stake.

Here are the major forces at work.

1. The Italian Crisis

Italy’s banking crisis has played a key role in the destabilization of its domestic politics. The main problem is the Italian banking sector’s high rate of non-performing loans (NPLs). Approximately 17% of all loans from Italian banks are NPLs, according to the European Banking Authority. The bank currently making headlines, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, had 45 billion euros ($47.4 billion) worth of NPLs and other doubtful loans when its problems came to light in 2016.

But the issue here is not simply money. The balance sheets of Italian banks don’t exist in a vacuum. If the European Central Bank were to bail out Italy, it would mean, in effect, that all of Europe would be paying for the bailout.

Greece, which had austerity forced upon it, would cry foul. The German public would object, and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s position would be severely weakened.

2. Declining German Exports

The major economic issue we expect to see in 2017 is a decline in German exports. The latest World Bank data shows that Germany’s exports-to-GDP ratio is 46.8%.

Neither China nor Russia will be increasing demand for German goods due to their own economic woes. And while Germany has managed to survive thus far by increasing exports to the UK and the US, this is not sustainable. This affects not just Germany, but all of Europe.

The EU is built around a massive exporter: Germany. That makes the EU vulnerable to drops in demand for German exports. It also creates a particular kind of political relationship between Germany and the rest of the EU. This is especially true for countries that are markets for German goods and those that are in the German supply chain.

This dependency and economic architecture has worked in the past. But now, it faces two key challenges. The first is how to increase demand for the products in question (which is not in any single country’s control). The second is that many of Europe’s economies are still struggling due to the 2008 financial crisis.

The EU’s growing socio-economic problems, in turn, are leading to increased nationalism. We saw this manifest in Brexit in 2016. In 2017, this dynamic already is affecting elections in France and Germany. The conversation has shifted from an internationalist position to a nationalist one—even for those who historically have been most committed to the EU (like Merkel).

3. The Security Question

Security will be an issue for the EU… and here, too, member states’ interests diverge. Some countries are more concerned with refugees than others, and Brussels is still unable to present a universally accepted plan for dealing with the refugee crisis.

There is also the question of Eastern Europe. It wants its security prioritized as it faces an increasingly aggressive Russia. Western Europe is less concerned with Russia on a daily basis and more concerned about Islamic terrorism.

Meanwhile, a Trump presidency is about to shine a very bright light on the future of NATO. This will mean hard choices for many European countries.

The security issues are not as serious as the economic and political issues for Europe right now. But they loom in the background and feed the strain on the EU rather than unite member states in common cause.

The Weakening of the EU

When we look at Europe today, we see less of a move toward EU dissolution than the gradual ignoring of EU directives. At the beginning of last year, George wrote the following, and it remains the general frame through which we view events in Europe:

The EU will survive, and one day you will be able to visit a dusty office in Brussels, much like the European Free Trade Association’s offices in Switzerland, where it still exists. [The EFTA was a British-led alternative to the European Community in the late 1950s and ’60s that is irrelevant today despite the continued existence of its offices.] I am sure the staff will be doing something, writing directives that no one will follow, or even care to object to. I once expected ‘Götterdämmerung,’ the ‘Twilight of the Gods,’ to move the EU. Today I became convinced, not that the EU couldn’t continue this way, but that it really isn’t continuing in any significant way.

Italian banks, German exports, nationalism affecting domestic elections, and divergences on security issues will be the main issues in 2017. But these are really just small parts of a much larger forecast that is slowly hulking toward fruition.

*  *  *

Now, for a limited time, you can download this free report from Mauldin Economics detailing the rocky roads that lie ahead for three globally important countries in 2017—and how the economic fallout from their coming crises could affect you. Top 3 Economic Surprises for 2017 is required reading for investors and concerned citizens alike. Get your free copy now.

via http://ift.tt/2iLEPnB Tyler Durden

Wasting precious little time, Trump returned from the evening’s inaugural ceremonies and got straight to work in the Oval Office signing his first executive order to roll back portions of Obamacare.  While details are scarce, per CNN, press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters the action was meant “to ease the burden of Obamacare as we transition from repeal and replace.”

JUST IN: Pres. Trump signs documents allowing retired Generals Mattis and Kelly to be sworn into Cabinet and an executive order on Obamacare http://pic.twitter.com/yNUQe9vuJe

— ABC News (@ABC) January 21, 2017

Executive order just signed by @POTUS relates to #Obamacare. http://pic.twitter.com/dTaX6QEZBS

— Steve Herman (@W7VOA) January 21, 2017

 

Meanwhile, Trump’s Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, has also sent a memo to all federal agencies to initiate an immediate freeze on all new regulations.

Press secy @seanspicer also says WH Chief of Staff Reince Priebus directing federal agencies to initiate immediate regulatory freeze.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 21, 2017

 

And here is the brief statement from Sean Spicer:

 

As someone once told Republicans: “There are consequences to elections.”

via http://ift.tt/2j4lEnA Tyler Durden

CNN just can’t stop lying! The purveyors of #FakeNews have once again been caught, twice, peddling propaganda on Inauguration day.

First, Nancy Sinatra called them out for a bullshit tweet suggesting she wasn’t happy with Trump’s use of a Frank Sinatra song during the Inauguration:

 

Second, CNN published a bullshit article suggesting a low turnout compared to Obama:

 

Sorry assholes, someone threw this up on Reddit about an hour ago:

Hey $TWX, can you get your bitch on a leash?

via http://ift.tt/2jX2oXs ZeroPointNow

Last Friday night, the Valparaiso Family YMCA in Indiana abruptly stopped airing CNN on its televisions in the facility’s wellness and exercise area.  According the the Chicago Tribune, the decision was made by the Y’s CEO, Robert Wanek, after dozens of complaints were lodged from guests regarding CNN’s obvious “political bias” and constant reporting of “fake news.”

“It’s the No. 1 problem we have in the wellness area,” Koeppen told me. “Trying to please everyone, which I’m sure you can appreciate.”

 

On Monday morning, she said YMCA officials had a meeting about the complaints. It culminated with a press release statement later that day from Robert Wanek, CEO of the Valpo Y.

 

“In order to eliminate perceived political bias associated with national news outlets, the Valparaiso Family YMCA will only be showing local news channels in the future,” he said.

 

I asked Wanek to better explain exactly what happened last Friday night to prompt this change in TV viewing which, as far as I know, has been the same for many years.

 

“I cannot pinpoint the change origins, only to add that we get dozens of requests to change channels every day from numerous interest groups,” he replied.

 

The move from the Indiana Y came just one day after Trump’s now infamous on-air spat with CNN’s Jim Acosta over an “intelligence” dossier that CNN reported on but later was revealed to be completely “fake news.”

 

Of course, not everyone was happy with the decision to change the channel on CNN which had been playing in the Valparaiso Family YMCA for 15 consecutive years.

So, I asked, no more national news networks such as CNN, C-Span, MSNBC or FOX News will be aired inside the Y for members?

 

No, he replied. “Only Chicago channels. Actually, we never had FOX news, just Fox 32.”

 

Not all Y members, including me, are in favor of this rather abrupt decision.

 

“The policy that the YMCA has just put out is a victory for those who complained,” said Greg Quartucci of Valparaiso, who’s been a Y member for more than 15 years. “CNN has been on a TV at the Y for those 15 years, and I am disappointed that the Y removed CNN because of complaints.”

 

Quartucci said Y staff members told him that CNN was removed due to complaints about “fake news” from other members.

 

“I suggested (Wanek) play all news channels, but he would not relent,” Quartucci said.

Perhaps it’s time for CNN’s President Jeff Zucker to revisit his assessment that CNN’s “credibility is higher than ever.”

via http://ift.tt/2kbSbKb Tyler Durden

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

It cannot be merely coincidental that the incomes and wealth of the top 5% have pulled away from the stagnating 95% in the 25 years dominated by neocon-neoliberalism.

One unexamined narrative I keep hearing is: "OK, so neocon-neoliberalism was less than ideal, but Trump could be much worse." Let's start by asking: would Syrian civilians agree with this assessment? The basic idea in the "OK, so neocon-neoliberalism was less than ideal, but Trump could be much worse" narrative is that the modest problems created by neocon-neoliberalism will pale next to what Trump will do, implying jackbooted Waffen SS troops will soon be marching through America on Trump's orders.

This narrative is yet another example of American parochialism: since neocon-neoliberalism didn't cause American cities to be bombed and its institutions demolished, it's really not that bad.

Try telling that to the Iraqis, Libyans and Syrians who have been on the receiving end of neocon-neoliberalism policies. The reality is very unpleasant: for those targeted by America's neocon-neoliberalism, nothing worse is imaginable, because the worst has already happened.

The cold reality is America's 25 years of neocon-neoliberalism has been great for the top 5% and an unmitigated disaster for everyone else in the U.S. and the nations it has targeted for intervention.

Those defending the Democratic Party's 16 years of neocon-neoliberalism (Clinton and Obama) and the Republican Party's 8 years of neocon-neoliberalism (Bush) are defending a system that benefited the few at the expense of the many.

Rather than admit the past 25 years have been catastrophic for the bottom 95%, the apologists speak darkly of fantastical visions of a Nazi America as a diversion to the grim truth that they have blindly supported an evil Empire that has stripmined the bottom 95% in America and laid waste to entire nations abroad.

Neoconservatism's malignant spores hatched in the Reagan years, and spread quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Stripped to its essence, Neoconservatism is American Exceptionalism turned into a global entitlement: it's our right to intervene anywhere in the world we choose to defend what we perceive as our interests, and it's our right to impose our version of democracy and a market economy on other peoples.

Self-interest melds seamlessly with moral superiority in neocon-neoliberalism. The moral justification is: since ours is the best possible system, we're doing you a favor by tearing down your institutions and imposing our system on you. The self-interest is: garsh, the "market" we imposed extracts your resources and benefits our banks and corporations. Amazing, isn't it, how "free markets" benefit everyone?

But not equally. The claim of neoliberalism is: everything is transformed for the better when it is turned into a market. Once buyers and sellers can meet in a transparent marketplace, everybody prospers and everything becomes more efficient.

Stripped to its essence, neoliberalism is: the markets we set up are rigged to favor those at the top. All that talk about free markets is just public-relations cover to mask an intrinsically rigged quasi-market that has features of "real" markets while beneath the surface, it's rigged to the advantage of big players at the top of the wealth-power pyramid.

Neoconservatism and neoliberalism are both inherently global, and so globalization is the necessary outcome. There is no market that cannot be skimmed for outsized profits once it has been globalized, and so once bat guano becomes a global tradeable commodity, Goldman Sachs establishes a bat guano trading desk. (This is a spoof, but you get the point.)

Neoconservatism entitles the U.S. to have an "interest" (as in profitable interest) in every nook and cranny of the planet. Policy changes in Lower Slobovia? It's in our "interest" to monitor those changes and intervene if the policies are "not in our interests."

Neocon-neoliberalism is brilliantly evil because it masks its true objectives behind such warm and fuzzy PR. Those looking for enemies of the people will find them not on the streets of America in cartoonish display but in the corridors of financial and policy power.

Dear apologists of the status quo: do you understand you're defending this?

Notice how the wealth of the bottom 90% nosedived once neocon-neoliberalism became the de facto policy of Democrats and Republicans alike. No wonder Obama's two terms seemed like Bush terms 3 and 4–in terms of a continuation of neocon-neoliberalism, they were.

Yes, profound changes in technology, automation, and geopolitics have influenced finance and wealth, but it cannot be merely coincidental that the incomes and wealth of the top 5% have pulled away from the stagnating 95% in the 25 years dominated by neocon-neoliberalism:

 

via http://ift.tt/2jJfaLX Tyler Durden

“no more years…”

 

Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

via http://ift.tt/2iLltPs Tyler Durden

Just hours after President Trump was sworn into office, amid Chuck Schumer's jabs over HUD, the Senate has confirmed retired Marine General James Mattis as defense secretary and retired Marine General John Kelly as homeland security secretary. They were both expected to be confirmed easily, and were, but Democrats promised fights over several other nominees.

Mattis was the first to be confirmed by a vote of 98 to 1… (as The Hill reports)

 The Senate on Friday easily confirmed James Mattis to be President Trump’s secretary of Defense, hours after Trump’s inauguration.

 

Mattis, a retired Marine general who most recently served as commander of U.S. Central Command, is highly respected by both Republicans and Democrats for his military service.

 

He retired from the military in 2013, meaning he needed a waiver to bypass a law that says Defense secretaries must be out of uniform for at least seven years.

 

Congress easily passed the waiver last week, and Trump signed the waiver legislation as his first act as president.

 

Some Democrats had expressed concern about granting Mattis the waiver, citing the need to maintain civilian control of the military. But the concerns were not enough to prevent Mattis from becoming Pentagon chief.

Followed shortly afterwards by Kelly…

• *SENATE HAS VOTES TO CONFIRM KELLY FOR DHS, VOTE ONGOING

As Munr Kazmir wrote recently, not only is Kelly a 45-year Marine whose impeccable credentials made him a four-star general, he’s also a man who understands the real threat. Much like President-elect Trump, General Kelly sees the Southern border as our Achilles heel and the easiest way for those wishing to do us harm to get into this country and perpetrate an attack. With Kelly at the helm, the border will be made secure and that threat will be destroyed.

 

General Kelly has also shown the kind of guts the position of running the DHS demands. He strongly opposed President Obama’s statements about closing the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, realizing that having so many suspected terrorists hellbent on destroying the United States roaming free would pose a grave problem. He ruled Gitmo with an iron fist and ensured that it served its intended purpose.

 

And make no mistake, General Kelly will also stand up to President-elect Trump if he feels has to.

 

Back in January, the General told the Military Times, “The one thing I was always told is you absolutely have to tell truth to power … the decision makers have got to have ground truth,” adding that, “Otherwise, the decisions they make could be flawed — and that can be dangerous.”

Both Mr. Mattis and Mr. Kelly are retired Marine Corps generals. Federal law requires a seven-year waiting period between active duty and serving as the secretary of defense; Congress passed legislation last week granting a waiver to Mr. Mattis and Mr. Trump signed it on Friday.

As Reuters reports, most of Trump's nominees will eventually be confirmed.

Under a rules change orchestrated by Democrats when they held a Senate majority, his selections need just 50 votes to pass the Senate, not the 60 that used to be required for a nomination to advance in the chamber.

 

Seven members of President Barack Obama's Cabinet were confirmed the day he took office, a number Republicans hoped to match for Trump. Schumer said the Obama nominees had completed their paperwork and ethics reviews while all of Trump's choices had not.

 

Underscoring the bitterness over the confirmation process, Schumer also said Democrats wanted roll call votes on Mattis and Kelly, rather than allowing their confirmation by voice vote.

While Republicans sought to confirm a third national security nominee on Friday, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas, the president’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, Democrats planned to delay his approval, noting that he had not even been approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee as of Friday. As Bloomberg reports, three Democratic senators — Ron Wyden of Oregon, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — objected to what they characterized as an overly speedy push to confirm Mr. Pompeo.

“The importance of the position of CIA Director, especially in these dangerous times, demands that the nomination be thoroughly vetted, questioned and debated,” the senators said in a statement.

The skirmish over nominees set a grim tone for the first day of Senate under the new president.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, chastised Democrats for delaying nominees, pointing out that the Senate had cleared seven such cabinet officials on President Obama’s first day in office in 2009.

Democrats responded that Mr. McConnell had refused to even allow a hearing to be held for Mr. Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Merrick M. Garland, during his last year in office.

“For those who have forgotten the record of the Republicans in the Senate when it comes to delaying nominations, Exhibit A will continue to be the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, on the senate floor, adding, “That vacancy continued for political reasons regardless of the fact that it created at least a hardship and some confusion on the highest court of the land. It went on for 10, 11 months and it continues to this day.”

*SENATE WILL VOTE MONDAY ON POMPEO NOMINATION

via http://ift.tt/2iUfJya Tyler Durden