Mapping China’s Global Debt-Serfdom-ification

Mapping China’s Global Debt-Serfdom-ification

According to research recently published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, there are seven countries in the world whose external loan debt to China surpasses 25 percent of their GDP. Three (Djibouti, Niger and The Republic of the Congo) are located in Africa, while four (Kyrgyztan, Laos, Cambodia and the Maldives) are in Asia.

Yet, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the world map of debt to China amassed through direct loans (excluding debt holdings and short-term trade debt) shows that a majority of countries heavily in debt to China are in Africa, but that Central Asia and Latin America follow close behind.

Infographic: The Countries Most in Debt to China | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

While China’s overseas lending is coordinated by the country’s centralized government, it is often poorly documented, which the researchers of the paper were trying to change.

They found that debt by direct loans started to grow immensely only around 2010 and that loans by China often come at higher rates and with shorter grace periods for the receiving country than comparable loans from the OECD or the World Bank.

The authors also caution that countries heavily in debt to China are at risk of defaulting.

In the 1970s, a lending boom which consisted of similar contracts offered by U.S., European and Japanese banks had led to this outcome for a number of developing countries which were trying to improve their infrastructure, according to the research.

Meanwhile, external debt to China through portfolio holdings is concentrated in developed nations and passes the threshold of 10 percent of GDP for Germany and the Netherlands. It amounts to between 5 and 10 percent of GDP in the U.S., Canada, France, the UK and Australia.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 22:45

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Three Deep State Confessions On Syria

Three Deep State Confessions On Syria

Authored by Brad Hoff via The Libertarian Institute,

First, all the way back in 2005 — more than a half decade before the war began —  CNN’s Christiane Amanpour told Assad to his face that regime change is coming. Thankfully this was in a televised and archived interview, now for posterity to behold.

Amanpour, it must be remembered, was married to former US Assistant Secretary of State James Rubin (until 2018), who further advised both President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“Mr. President you know the rhetoric of regime change is headed towards you from the United States… They’re granting visas and visits to Syrian opposition politicians,” Amanpour told Assad in a 2005 CNN interview

Next, a surprisingly blunt assessment of where Washington currently stands after eight years of the failed push to oust Assad and influence the final outcome of the war, from the very man who was among the early architects of America’s covert “arm the jihadists to topple the dictator” campaign.

Myself and others long ago documented how former Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford worked with and funded a Free Syrian Army commander who led ISIS suicide bombers into the battlefield in 2013.

Amb. Ford has since admitted this much (that US proxy ‘rebels’ and ISIS worked together in the early years of the war), and now admits defeat in the below recent interview as perhaps a reborn ‘realist’.

And finally, not everyone is as pessimistic on the continuing prospects for yet more US-led regime change future efforts as Robert Ford is above. Below is an astoundingly blunt articulation of the next disturbing phase of US efforts in Syria, from an October 31 conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

“The panel featured the two co-chairs of the Syria Study Group, a bi-partisan working group appointed by Congress to draft a new US war plan for Syria,” The Grayzone’s Ben Norton wrote of the below clip:

She made it a point to stress that this sovereign Syrian land “owned” by Washington also happened to be “resource-rich,” the “economic powerhouse of Syria, so where the hydrocarbons are… as well as the agricultural powerhouse.”

With images now circulating of Trump’s “secure the oil” policy in effect, which has served to at least force pro-interventionist warmongers to drop all high-minded humanitarian notions of “democracy promotion” and “freedom” and R2P doctrine as descriptive of US motives in Syria, the above blunt admissions of Dana Stroul, the Democratic co-chair of the Syria Study Group, are ghastly and chilling in terms of what’s next for the suffering population of Syria.

We are “preventing reconstruction aid and technical expertise from going back into Syria,” she stressed in her statement. 

America is not finished, apparently, and it’s likely to get a lot uglier than merely seizing the oil.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 22:25

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China Auto Sales Fall 6% In October As Global Auto Recession Shows No Signs Of Slowing

China Auto Sales Fall 6% In October As Global Auto Recession Shows No Signs Of Slowing

China has been spearheading the global recession in the automotive industry and, as one more month has come to pass, there are still no signs of the bleeding letting up.

As the U.S. and China continue to grapple with solving “Phase 1” of the allegedly upcoming trade deal, pressure remains on the automobile industry globally. For October, China retail passenger vehicle sales were lower by 6% year over year to 1.87 million units, according to the Passenger Car Association. October SUV retail sales also fell 0.7% y/y to 853,130 units.

Additionally, individual OEM data for China for October has also started to trickle in. Names like Toyota, Nissan and Mazda all posted low single digit drops for the month, while Honda was able to squeeze out a positive month.

Auto data aggregator Marklines reported:

  • Nissan announced on November 6 that it sold 139,064 units in October in China, reflecting a 2.1% y/y decrease in sales.
    • October sales of the 7th-generation Altima, Sylphy, Tiida, Qashqai and Kicks increased. Year-to-date (YTD) sales from January to October totaled 1,230,047 units, reflecting a 0.6% y/y decrease.
  • Toyota sold 131,700 units in October, reflecting a 2.9% y/y decrease.
    • YTD sales totaled 1,313,000 units, reflecting a 7.2% y/y increase.
  • Honda announced that its October sales were 147,716 units, reflecting a y/y increase of 6.5%.
    • Sales of the Accord, Crider, Vezel, Civic, CR-V and XR-V exceeded 10,000 units. The Civic topped 20,000 units in monthly sales for the fifth consecutive month from June to October. Sales of the Accord, Odyssey, CR-V, Inspire and Elysion, all of which are equipped with the SPORT HYBRID, a highly efficient double-motor hybrid power system, totaled 15,373 units. YTD sales totaled 1,271,286 units, reflecting a 15.2% y/y increase.
  • On November 6, Mazda announced that sales in October reached 19,882 units, reflecting a 9.1% y/y decrease. YTD sales totaled 181,624 units.

Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, China’s Passenger Car Association said on Friday that NEV deliveries fell for a fourth straight month, down 45% in October as a result of subsidy cuts occurring while the global consumer remains under pressure. 

China is considering cutting back on subsidies for electric vehicles, which have been the sole silver lining (if you can even call it that) over the last 12-18 months for the industry. The country has accounted for about half of the world’s sales of EVs and the last time the government cut subsidies, it triggered the first drop in EV sales on record.

That drop could arguably come at the most devastating time for China and the rest of the global auto industry, should it happen now. 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 22:05

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America’s Endless Wars: “At West Point, Graduation Day Felt More Like A Tragedy Than A Triumph”

America’s Endless Wars: “At West Point, Graduation Day Felt More Like A Tragedy Than A Triumph”

Authored by US Army Major Danny Sjursen (ret.) via TheNation.com,

Patches, pins, medals, and badges are the visible signs of an exclusive military culture, a silent language by which soldiers and officers judge each other’s experiences, accomplishments, and general worth. In July 2001, when I first walked through the gate of the US Military Academy at West Point at the ripe young age of 17, the “combat patch” on one’s right shoulder – evidence of a deployment with a specific unit – had more resonance than colorful medals like Ranger badges reflecting specific skills. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks ushered in a series of revenge wars “on terror,” the vast majority of officers stationed at West Point didn’t boast a right shoulder patch. Those who did were mostly veterans of modest combat in the first Gulf War of 1990–91. Nonetheless, even those officers were regarded by the likes of me as gods. After all, they’d seen “the elephant.”

We young cadets arrived then with far different expectations about Army life and our futures, ones that would prove incompatible with the realities of military service in a post-9/11 world. When my mother—as was mandatory for a 17-year-old—put her signature on my future Army career, I imagined a life of fancy uniforms; tough masculine training; and maybe, at worst, some photo opportunities during a safe, “peace-keeping” deployment in a place like Kosovo.

Sure, the United States was then quietly starving hundreds of thousands of children with a crippling sanctions regime against autocrat Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, occasionally lobbing cruise missiles at “terrorist” encampments here or there, and garrisoning much of the globe. Still, the life of a conventional Army officer in the late 1990s did fit pretty closely with my high-school fantasies.

You won’t be surprised to learn, however, that the world of future officers at the Academy irreparably changed when those towers collapsed in my home town of New York. By the following May, it wasn’t uncommon to overhear senior cadets on the phone with girlfriends or fiancées explaining that they were heading for war upon graduation.

As a plebe (freshman), I still had years ahead in my West Point journey during which our world changed even more. Older cadets I’d known would soon be part of the invasion of Afghanistan. Drinking excessively at a New York Irish bar on St. Patrick’s Day in 2003, I watched in wonder as, on TV, US bombs and missiles rained down on Iraq as part of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s promised “shock and awe” campaign.

Soon enough, the names of former cadets I knew well were being announced over the mess hall loudspeaker at breakfast. They’d been killed in Afghanistan or, more commonly, in Iraq.

My greatest fear then, I’m embarrassed to admit, was that I’d miss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn’t long after my May 28, 2005, graduation that I’d serve in Baghdad. Later, I would be sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan. I buried eight young men under my direct command. Five died in combat; three took their own lives. After surviving the worst of it with my body (though not my mind) intact, I was offered a teaching position back at my alma mater.

During my few years in the history department at West Point, I taught some 300 or more cadets. It was the best job I ever had.

I think about them often, the ones I’m still in touch with and the majority whom I’ll never hear from or of again. Many graduated last year and are already out there carrying water for empire. The last batch will enter the regular Army next May. Recently, my mother asked me what I thought my former students were now doing or would be doing after graduation. I was taken aback and didn’t quite know how to answer.

Wasting their time and their lives was, I suppose, what I wanted to say. But a more serious analysis, based on a survey of US Army missions in 2019 and bolstered by my communications with peers still in the service, leaves me with an even more disturbing answer. A new generation of West Point educated officers, graduating a decade and a half after me, faces potential tours of duty in… hmm, Afghanistan, Iraq, or other countries involved in the never-ending American war on terror, missions that will not make this country any safer or lead to “victory” of any sort, no matter how defined.

A NEW GENERATION OF CADETS SERVING THE EMPIRE ABROAD

West Point seniors (“first-class cadets”) choose their military specialties and their first duty-station locations in a manner reminiscent of the National Football League draft. This is unique to Academy grads and differs markedly from the more limited choices and options available to the 80 percent of officers commissioned through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS).

Throughout the 47-month academy experience, West Pointers are ranked based on a combination of academic grades, physical fitness scores, and military-training evaluations. Then, on a booze-fueled, epic night, the cadets choose jobs in their assigned order of merit. Highly ranked seniors get to pick what are considered the most desirable jobs and duty locations (helicopter pilot, Hawaii). Bottom-feeding cadets choose from the remaining scraps (field artillery, Fort Sill, Oklahoma).

In truth, though, it matters remarkably little which stateside or overseas base one first reports to. Within a year or two, most young lieutenants in today’s Army will serve in any number of diverse “contingency” deployments overseas. Some will indeed be in America’s mostly unsanctioned wars abroad, while others will straddle the line between combat and training in, say, “advise-and-assist” missions in Africa.

Now, here’s the rub: Given the range of missions that my former students are sure to participate in, I can’t help but feel frustration. After all, it should be clear 18 years after the 9/11 attacks that almost none of those missions have a chance in hell of succeeding. Worse yet, the killing my beloved students might take part in (and the possibility of them being maimed or dying) won’t make America any safer or better. They are, in other words, doomed to repeat my own unfulfilling, damaging journey—in some cases, on the very same ground in Iraq and Afghanistan where I fought.

Consider just a quick survey of some of the possible missions that await them. Some will head for Iraq—my first and formative war—though it’s unclear just what they’ll be expected to do there. ISIS has been attritted to a point where indigenous security forces could assumedly handle the ongoing low-intensity fight, though they will undoubtedly assist in that effort. What they can’t do is reform a corrupt, oppressive Shia-chauvinist sectarian government in Baghdad that guns down its own protesting people, repeating the very mistakes that fueled the rise of the Islamic State in the first place. Oh, and the Iraqi government, and a huge chunk of Iraqis as well, don’t want any more American troops in their country. But when has national sovereignty or popular demand stopped Washington before?

Others are sure to join the thousands of servicemen still in Afghanistan in the 19th year of America’s longest ever war—and that’s even if you don’t count our first Afghan War (1979–89) in the mix. And keep in mind that most of the cadets-turned-officers I taught were born in 1998 or thereafter and so were all of three years old or younger when the Twin Towers crumbled.

The first of our wars to come from that nightmare has always been unwinnable. All the Afghan metrics—the US military’s own “measures for success”—continue to trend badly, worse than ever in fact. The futility of the entire endeavor borders on the absurd. It makes me sad to think that my former officemate and fellow West Point history instructor, Mark, is once again over there. Along with just about every serving officer I’ve known, he would laugh if asked whether he could foresee—or even define—“victory” in that country. Take my word for it, after 18-plus years, whatever idealism might once have been in the Army has almost completely evaporated. Resignation is what remains among most of the officer corps. As for me, I’ll be left hoping against hope that someone I know or taught isn’t the last to die in that never-ending war from hell.

My former cadets who ended up in armor (tanks and reconnaissance) or ventured into the Special Forces might now find themselves in Syria—the war President Trump “ended” by withdrawing American troops from that country, until, of course, almost as many of them were more or less instantly sent back in. Some of the armor officers among my students might even have the pleasure of indefinitely guarding that country’s oil fields, which—if the United States takes some of that liquid gold for itself—might just violate international law. But hey, what else is new?

Still more—mostly intelligence officers, logisticians, and special operators—can expect to deploy to any one of the dozen or so West African or Horn of Africa countries that the US military now calls home. In the name of “advising and assisting” the local security forces of often autocratic African regimes, American troops still occasionally, if quietly, die in “non-combat” missions in places like Niger or Somalia.

None of these combat operations have been approved, or even meaningfully debated, by Congress. But in the America of 2019 that doesn’t qualify as a problem. There are, however, problems of a more strategic variety. After all, it’s demonstrably clear that, since the founding of the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in 2008, violence on the continent has only increased, while Islamist terror and insurgent groups have proliferated in an exponential fashion. To be fair, though, such counter-productivity has been the name of the game in the “war on terror” since it began.

Another group of new academy graduates will spend up to a year in Poland, Romania, or the Baltic states of Eastern Europe. There, they’ll ostensibly train the paltry armies of those relatively new NATO countries—added to the alliance in foolish violation of repeated American promises not to expand eastward as the Cold War ended. In reality, though, they’ll be serving as provocative “signals” to a supposedly expansionist Russia. With the Russian threat wildly exaggerated, just as it was in the Cold War era, the very presence of my Baltic-based former cadets will only heighten tensions between the two over-armed nuclear heavyweights. Such military missions are too big not to be provocative, but too small to survive a real (if essentially unimaginable) war.

The intelligence officers among my cadets might, on the other hand, get the “honor” of helping the Saudi Air Force through intelligence-sharing to doom some Yemeni targets—often civilian—to oblivion thanks to US manufactured munitions. In other words, these young officers could be made complicit in what’s already the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.

Other recent cadets of mine might even have the ignominious distinction of being part of military convoys driving along interstate highways to America’s southern border to emplace what President Trump has termed “beautiful” barbed wire there, while helping detain refugees of wars and disorder that Washington often helped to fuel.

Yet other graduates may already have found themselves in the barren deserts of Saudi Arabia, since Trump has dispatched 3,000 US troops to that country in recent months. There, those young officers can expect to go full mercenary, since the president defended his deployment of those troops (plus two jet fighter squadrons and two batteries of Patriot missiles) by noting that the Saudis would “pay” for “our help.” Setting aside for the moment the fact that basing American troops near the Islamic holy cities of the Arabian Peninsula didn’t exactly end well the last time around—you undoubtedly remember a guy named bin Laden who protested that deployment so violently—the latest troop buildup in Saudi Arabia portends a disastrous future war with Iran.

None of these potential tasks awaiting my former students is even remotely linked to the oath (to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”) that newly commissioned officers swear on day one. They are instead all unconstitutional, ill-advised distractions that benefit mainly an entrenched national security state and the arms-makers that go with them. The tragedy is that a few of my beloved cadets with whom I once played touch football, who babysat my children, who shed tears of anxiety and fear during private lunches in my office might well sustain injuries that will last a lifetime or die in one of this country’s endless hegemonic wars.

A NIGHTMARE COME TRUE

This May, the last of the freshman cadets I once taught will graduate from the Academy. Commissioned that same afternoon as second lieutenants in the Army, they will head off to “serve” their country (and its imperial ambitions) across the wide expanse of the continental United States and a broader world peppered with American military bases. Given my own tortured path of dissent while in that military (and my relief on leaving it), knowing where they’re heading leaves me with a feeling of melancholy. In a sense, it represents the severing of my last tenuous connection with the institutions to which I dedicated my adult life.

Though I was already skeptical and antiwar, I still imagined that teaching those cadets an alternative, more progressive version of our history would represent a last service to an Army I once unconditionally loved. My romantic hope was that I’d help develop future officers imbued with critical thinking and with the integrity to oppose unjust wars. It was a fantasy that helped me get up each morning, don a uniform, and do my job with competence and enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, as my last semester as an assistant professor of history wound down, I felt a growing sense of dread. Partly it was the realization that I’d soon return to the decidedly unstimulating “real Army,” but it was more than that, too. I loved academia and “my” students, yet I also knew that I couldn’t save them. I knew that they were indeed doomed to take the same path I did.

My last day in front of a class, I skipped the planned lesson and leveled with the young men and women seated before me. We discussed my own once bright, now troubled career and my struggles with my emotional health. We talked about the complexities, horror, and macabre humor of combat and they asked me blunt questions about what they could expect in their future as graduates. Then, in my last few minutes as a teacher, I broke down. I hadn’t planned this, nor could I control it.

My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets—unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears—moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.

Three years have passed. About 130 students of mine graduated in May. My last group will pin on the gold bars of brand new army officers in late May 2020. I’m still in touch with several former cadets and, long after I did so, students of mine are now driving down the dusty lanes of Iraq or tramping the narrow footpaths of Afghanistan.

My nightmare has come true.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 21:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/33uFywF Tyler Durden

California’s Housing Nightmare Is Only Getting Worse

California’s Housing Nightmare Is Only Getting Worse

When historians look back on contemporary California, one thing they’ll be bound to make note of is that the state’s developers bet on the wrong model.

Endless, suburban sprawl is coming back to haunt California in ways both major and minor. In densely populated communities across the state, traffic is horrible thanks to underdeveloped public transportation (this is especially true in LA). Most residents have accepted that deadly, devastating wildfires are just part of the deal now – bound to recur endlessly until the state’s population shrinks to the point that it no longer intermingles with the state’s vast swaths of woodland.

But it’s not just the apocalyptic images of fiery doom that have some of the state’s residents rethinking their decision to settle in California. The wildfires have had all kinds of ancillary effects: In parts of the state, PG&E is essentially shutting down large portions of the power grid in disruptive distributed blackouts intended to lower the fire risk.

Another impact has been the impact on California’s housing market. In a state where stiff regulations have strangled efforts to build more affordable housing, the median price or a house now tops out at around $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the five most expensive residential housing markets in the US – Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orang County and San Diego (LA comes in 7th).

When adjusted for cost of living, California’s poverty rate is the worst in the country. The state accounts for 12% of the US population, but houses a quarter of its homeless.

For both owners and renters, Cali requires the highest share of household spending.

As Bloomberg explains, the path to this point was paved with bad local policy decisions made by the unaccountable Democrats who have ran the state for decades. They include: Outdated zoning laws and tax laws that benefit longtime homeowners at the expense of everybody else.

Earlier this week Apple announced that it would commit $2.5 billion to combat the housing crisis in California (a sum that seemed paltry compared to the immense value of the San Francisco real-estate market). Other tech giants who have long called the state home said they would pitch in to try and boost housing.

And in many ways, the rest of the country is becoming more like California, not less. During the longest economic expansion on record, the US built far fewer homes than in the past.

The working poor have always struggled with home ownership, but in California, it’s a problem for the working class as well. In Silicon Valley, teachers are having such a hard time affording rents that Facebook just pledged $25 million to build subsidized apartments for them.

Another Bay Area town decided to retrofit an old firehouse into barracks for its cops after they started taking turns sleeping in their cars.

Even the relatively wealthy are considered “cost burdened” in California.

The so-called NIMBYs who remain firmly in control of most local governments in California are often anti-development, and successfully shut down housing developments under the guise of protecting the environment or preserving “neighborhood character.”

Back in the 1970s, parts of the state were down-zoned, reducing the allowable population density, and encouraging sprawl.

Then there’s Proposition 13, a measure approved in the late 1970s that limits property tax increases on properties until they’re sold, meaning millions of homeowners are paying taxes on far less than their property is worth. Meanwhile, a bill seeking to allow more development in areas near employment and transport hubs is struggling for support in the California legislature.

At this point, the same unaccountable democrats who have long been beholden to the wealthy NIMBYs who dominate state politics will decide whether California changes its ways. But how much faith can we possibly place in them?


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 21:25

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4 Reasons Why Socialism Is Becoming More Popular

4 Reasons Why Socialism Is Becoming More Popular

Authored by Alexander Zubatov via The Mises Institute,

The newfound openness of large numbers of Americans to socialism is, by now, a well-documented phenomenon. According to a Gallup poll from earlier this year, 43% of Americans now believe that some form of socialism would be good thing, in contrast to 51% who are still against it. A Harris poll found that four in ten Americans prefer socialism to capitalism. The trend is particular apparent in the young: another Gallup poll showed that as recently as 2010, 68% of people between 18 and 29 approved of capitalism, with only 51% approving of socialism, whereas in 2018, while the percentage among this age group favoring socialism was unchanged at 51%, those in favor of capitalism had dropped precipitously to 45%.

The same poll showed that among Democrats, the popularity of socialism now stands at 57%, while capitalism is only at 47%, a marked departure from 2010 when the two were tried at 53%. A YouGov poll from earlier this year showed that unlike older generations, which still preferred capitalist candidates, 70% of millennials and 64% of gen-Zers would vote for a socialist.

The question is why socialism now? At a time when the American economy under Trump seems to be chugging along at a nice clip, why are so many hankering for an alternative? I would suggest four factors contributing to the situation.

Factor #1: Ignorance of History

The first cause of socialism’s popularity, especially among the young, is an obvious one: having grown up at a time after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Europe’s Eastern Bloc and China’s transition to authoritarian capitalism, “these kids today” — those 18 to 29 year-olds who were born around the last decade of the 20th century — don’t know what socialism is all about. When they think socialism, they don’t think Stalin; they think Scandinavia.

Americans’ — and especially young Americans’ — ignorance of history is well-documented and profound. As of 2018, only one in three Americans could pass a basic citizenship test , and of test-takers under the age of 45, that number dropped to 19%. That included such lowlights as having no clue why American colonists fought the British and believing that Dwight Eisenhower led the troops during the Civil War. Speaking of the war during which he actually led the troops, many millennials don’t know much about that one either. They don’t know what Auschwitz was (66% of millennials in particular could not identify it). Twenty-two percent of them had not heard of the Holocaust itself. The Battle of the Bulge? Forget it. Go back further in time, and the cluelessness just keeps deepening. Only 29% of seniors at U.S. News and World Report’s top 50 colleges in America — the precise demographic that purports to speak with authority about America’s alleged history of white supremacy — have any idea what Reconstruction was all about. Only 23% know who wrote the Constitution. So much for any notion that this is the most educated generation ever.

Closer to the theme — socialism — the same compilation of survey results includes the attribution of The Communist Manifesto’s “from each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” to Thomas Paine, George Washington or Barrack Obama. Moreover, among college-aged Americans, though support for socialism is pretty high, when these same young adults are asked about their support for the actual definition of socialism — a government-managed economy — 72% turn out to be for a free-market economy and only 49% for the government-managed alternative (yes, it looks from those numbers like there are a lot of confused kids who are in favor of both of the mutually exclusive alternatives). As compared to about a third of Americans over 30, only 16% of millennials were able to define socialism, according to a 2010 CBS/New York Times poll. And though I haven’t seen polling on this, I’d be willing to bet that a good bunch of these same students, if asked to say what the Soviet Union was, would have no clue or peg it as some sort of vanquished competitor of Western Union.

Compounding the problem still further is that the history that students are being taught increasingly falls into the category of “woke” history , America’s history of oppression as imagined by the influential revisionist socialist historian Howard Zinn . When socialists are writing our history books, the end result is preordained.

Given such ignorance and systematic distortion of history, is it any surprise that millennials who never lived through very much of the 20 th century don’t think socialism is all that bad?

Factor #2: Government Bungling

When we try to explain the socialist urge, we cannot lose sight of the fact that our government keeps interfering in the economy in ways that give people every reason to think the system is corrupt and needs to be trashed.

Take the skyrocketing cost of college, for instance. On the surface, this looks like greedy capitalist universities just keep on raising tuition, and since most college kids and their parents can’t pay the sticker price, almost 70% take out loans , saddling young people trying to start their careers with a mountain of debt (almost $30,000 on average). This results in all those socialist promises of free college or loan forgiveness sounding dandy. Underneath the surface, however, a huge part of the problem is federal grants and subsidized loans. If the government stopped footing a large part of their bill, more students and parents would be forced to pony up, which would mean, in turn, that colleges would not be able to keep hiking their prices without seeing a precipitous drop in enrollment. They would, instead, be forced to price themselves at some level that applicants could realistically pay, making college more affordable for a large segment of the American middle class.

Another simple example of the problem is Obama’s Emergency Economy Stabilization Act of 2008, colloquially known as the big bank “Bailout.” When kids grow up seeing government tossing out free lifelines to businesses that get themselves in dire straits, cause a massive financial crisis and, in the process, lose ordinary folks lots of jobs and homes, we can’t blame them for concluding that the system is rigged.

There are many more examples where these came from — our government frittering away trillions on foreign wars that increase instability throughout the world and end up costing us even more as we scramble to clean up our own messes is one expenditure that comes readily to mind — but the point is this: the more the government interferes in the economy to help out vested interests, the more reason many of us will see to ask government to interfere in the economy to help out the rest of us. The more reason we give anyone to think that capitalism means crony capitalism, the more they’ll clamor for socialism.

Factor #3: Universities’ Ideological Monoculture

The supporters of socialism are not simply the young, but rather, disproportionately those among the young who are college-educated. And the more college they have, the hotter for socialism they get. According to a 2015 poll , support for socialism grows from 48% among those with a high school diploma or less to 62% among college graduates to 78% among those with post-graduate degrees. Those on the left probably stop thinking hard about now and jump immediately to the conclusion that support for socialism is just a natural outgrowth of big brains and elite educations. But there is, in fact, a less obvious but ultimately far more compelling explanation that also manages to account for the general fact that more education correlates with more leftism: something — something bad — is happening at universities themselves to pull students toward the (far) left.

We have already seen above that what’s not happening at universities, even elite universities, today is a whole lot of education in important subjects like history. What we are getting instead is a lot of groupthink and indoctrination. Universities have always skewed a bit left. But beginning in the early to mid 1990s (for reasons I’ve explained in some detail elsewhere ), ideological diversity began to vanish entirely, as the leftward deviation turned tidal. As documented in a 2005 paper from Stanley Rothman et al., as of 1984, 39% of university faculty were left/liberal, and 34% were right/conservative. By 1999, those numbers had undergone a seismic shift: faculty was now 72% left/liberal and 15% right/conservative. Since 1999, the imbalance has become starker still. A comprehensive National Association of Scholars report from April 2018 from Prof. Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College, tracking the political registrations of 8,688 tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of U.S. News & World Report’s 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges for 2017, found that “78.2 percent of the academic departments in [his] sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.” Predictably, given the composition of the professoriate, survey data also indicates that students’ political views drift further leftward between freshman and senior year.

In light of this data, it should not be a surprise to us that students who have gone to college in this age of ideological extremism have come out radicalized and … socialized.

Factor #4: Coddled Kids

The young have always been more inclined to embrace pipe dreams — a lack of familiarity with the complicated way in which the world actually works, coupled with the college fix described above, will do that to most anyone — but there is a reason the mindset of today’s young’uns is particularly susceptible to the red menace. In last year’s The Coddling of the American Mind, the prominent social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff describe the species of overprotective parenting and instilling of baseless and uncritical self-esteem by parents and educators alike that came to prevail as kids were growing up in the 90s and 00s. When we are raised in the belief we are wonderful just as we are, we never learn the critical life skills of self-soothing, working through anxiety, facing obstacles and overcoming adversity. The predictable result, as Haidt and Lukianoff observe, is a demand to be safeguarded — safe spaces, free speech crackdowns and so on. The state appears to many as the appropriate institution to provide this sort of “safety.”

If these four are the primary causes of socialism’s rapid surge in our midst, then the next logical question is what to do about it.

There is no easy answer, of course, but I would suggest that the radicalization of academia is the lynchpin issue. If we could succeed in reversing that tsunami, many dominoes would fall: we would be addressing the university monoculture that systematically distorts research, sends students veering hard left and graduates generations of left-orthodox clones who find their way into journalism, government, education, entertainment and other influential sectors driving public opinion and shaping the other three downstream issues factoring into socialism’s rise: government policy, educational philosophy and the manner in which history is taught. Many have observed that our universities are in crisis, but that crisis also represents an opportunity to avert the much larger socialist cataclysm that threatens to engulf us all.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 21:05

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Visualizing Walmart’s Domination Of The US Grocery Market

Visualizing Walmart’s Domination Of The US Grocery Market

One wouldn’t expect the grocery department of a big box retailer to spark debate, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes, Walmart’s high market concentration in the grocery space is doing just that.

By now, Walmart’s rise to the top of the retail pyramid is well documented. The Supercenters that dot the American landscape have had a dramatic ripple effect on surrounding communities, often resulting in decreased competition and reduced selection for consumers. Today, in some communities, Walmart takes in a whopping $19 for every $20 spent on groceries.

Today’s map, based on a report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, looks at which places in America are most reliant on Walmart to put food on the table.

The Weight of Walmart

Walmart has an unprecedented amount of control over the food system, now capturing a quarter of every single dollar spent on groceries in the United States.

Walmart isn’t just a major player — in some cases it’s become the only game in town. In a few of the communities listed in the report, Walmart commands a 90% market share and higher.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 20 towns dominated by Walmart in America:

While it’s more likely for a small town to become dominated by a single grocer, Walmart’s clout isn’t exclusive to rural America. Even in Springfield, Missouri — with a regional population of half a million people — the big box retailer still boasts a sizable market share of 66%.

Super Market Concentration

Under guidelines established by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, markets in which one corporation captures more than 50% of revenue are defined as “highly concentrated.” Walmart’s market share meets or exceeds this measure in 43 metropolitan areas and 160 smaller markets around the United States.

In some states, this trend is even more pronounced. In Oklahoma, for example, 86% of the state’s population lives in a region where Walmart has the majority market share in the grocery sector. In Arkansas — the home state of the megaretailer — half the population lives in this “highly concentrated” grocery market situation.

This degree of market concentration means that a retailer could cut certain products or manipulate prices without fear of losing customers. Worse yet, a company could close up shop and leave thousands of people without adequate grocery access.

An Interesting Caveat

There is a flip side to this story, however.

Walmart has shown a willingness to expand their grocery business to areas that were considered “food deserts” (i.e. low-income areas without easy access to a supermarket).

In a 2011 initiative, the retailer committed to open or expand 1,500 supermarkets across America to help give more people access to fresh food.

With the ground game clearly won, America’s largest grocer is now focused on dominating the next frontier of the grocery market – delivery. Stiff competition from companies like Amazon and Instacart will keep Walmart’s online market concentration in check for the time being.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 20:45

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Nobel Prize Winner Suggests Blasting Nuclear Waste With Lasers

Nobel Prize Winner Suggests Blasting Nuclear Waste With Lasers

Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

Many have made strong arguments for the potential of nuclear power to be the clean energy solution of the future. As the need to curb carbon emissions grows more dire, the ultra-efficient, zero-emissions energy provided by nuclear looks like a more and more obvious solution. 

There are some major drawbacks, however, to nuclear energy. Of course, there is the ever-present concern of a nuclear meltdown that has kept civilians and politicians alike extremely wary of widespread nuclear energy production in the wake of high-profile tragedies like those at Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. While the death toll from nuclear disasters is actually quite low, the long-term damage from these tragedies endures. In Japan, the government has been using so much water to keep the reactors at Fukushima from overheating since the 2011 disaster that they have run out of space to store it and have even considered dumping the radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. As for Chernobyl, well…you’ve all seen the miniseries.

And then there is the major issue of nuclear waste. As efficient and carbon-free as it is, nuclear power certainly isn’t the cleanest form of energy production, thanks to its extremely hazardous byproducts that can stay radioactive for millions of years. Making matters worse, there is still no scientific consensus on how to solve this issue. In the United States, the burden of paying to store and maintain nuclear waste deposits falls on the taxpayers, and the price tag is massive. As Oilprice reported last year in a report aptly titled “The Crushing Cost Of Nuclear Waste Is Weighing On Taxpayers,” keeping us safe from our own nuclear waste is extremely costly and will only grow more expensive the more waste we create. “Now, that price tag has reached a whopping $7.5 billion,” we reported, “and that number is only going to keep growing.” 

But now, for the first time, there may be a solution to the previously unsolvable nuclear waste issue.

Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou has proposed a novel solution that smacks of science fiction and revolves around blasting nuclear waste with lasers.

Morou and his research partner Donna Strickland won their Nobel Prize in 2018 for their work with Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA), a revolutionary invention that creates extremely rapid and ultra-powerful laser pulses with lots of different potential applications.

“The original research focused on applications like laser machining and eye surgery,” reports ExtremeTech, “but scientists could also use it to observe atomic processes that happen at almost unfathomable speeds. If we could speed it up a bit more, Mourou says CPA could have a use in processing nuclear waste, too.”

According to Mourou’s hypothesis, CPA could turn even the most nuclear waste we have sitting in secure storage facilities around the world, where it will otherwise remain radioactive for millions of years, into a substance so safe you could hold it in the palm of your hand. Of course, the CPA process will require a bit of tweaking to get to this point of capability.

“Currently, CPA can produce laser pulses as brief as one attosecond — that’s a billionth of a billionth of a second. To transmute nuclear waste into something safe, Mourou says you’d need to increase the pulse rate by roughly 10,000 times,” says ExtremeTech.

“That might sound like a tall order, but CPA itself was an order of magnitude increase over previous lasers. Another innovation like CPA, and we could be in the ballpark.”

The method would work by blasting nuclear waste with a laser pulse so strong and fast that it could knock protons out of the nuclei of dangerous substances like uranium 235 and plutonium 239, rendering them harmless. If this technology, which other experts agree makes sense in theory, could actually be invented and applied in the next couple of decades, it would be difficult to overstate the impact it would have on our energy sector and, indeed, the entire world. In order to avoid the fast-approaching tipping point for catastrophic climate change, we need to decarbonize fast and starting right now. Solving the problem of nuclear waste would make that a whole lot safer and more attainable. 


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 20:25

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Hong Kong Student Dies From Injuries In First Fatality Linked To Protests

Hong Kong Student Dies From Injuries In First Fatality Linked To Protests

In what appears to be the first death of a protester stemming from the aggressive police tactics, a young student has died after sustaining a serious head injury during a fall from the third floor of a car park to the second while police carried out an aggressive dispersion operation to end a protest

According to the SCMP, Chow Tsz-lok, a second year computer science undergraduate student at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology fell from the car park in Tseung Kwan O as police fired off rounds of tear gas on Monday.

After being sent to Queen Elizabeth Hospital early on Monday morning, the student had been in a coma for several days as the swelling from a head injury intensified. Two operations undertaken to save his life failed, and he died Friday morning after his condition took a turn for the worse late Thursday. A cause of death wasn’t given.

At the time of death, sources said the pressure inside the victim’s skull had built up to five times normal levels because of the injuries.

A statement by HKUST released on Friday urged students to “stay calm and exercise restraint during this difficult moment” and avoid “conflicts or even tragedies” – fearful that protesters might tear apart the campus after blaming police for Chow’s death. All classes will be cancelled Friday in honor of Chow.

The university also repeated a warning for students to stay away from protests.

Unfortunately, security camera footage released on Wednesday by Link Reit, the owner of the Sheung Tak Estate car park where Chow took his fatal spill, didn’t capture his fall, leaving the exact circumstances behind his death a mystery.

The death occurred during the middle of end-of-semester graduation ceremonies for the university. During one graduation ceremony, some masters students wore black masks and held up their palms on stage – a gesture of support for the protest movement’s five demands.

HKUST President Wei Shyy shed tears during a ceremony where they briefly honored Chow after his death.

Another student who only gave his last name, Wong, told the SCMP that he was shocked by his fellow student’s death and said the graduation ceremonies should be cancelled: “It’s no longer a happy occasion for some graduates.”

Even Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam offered her sympathies to Chow and his family, and said the case needed to be investigated.

It’s still unclear whether the clashes between police and protesters had anything to do with Chow’s death. With no surveillance footage, it’s likely to remain a mystery.

Still, protesters are already calling it the first fatality linked to the demonstrations (and the police response). That label looks likely to stick. And demonstrators are already calling for more rallies in retaliation for Chow’s death.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 20:05

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Paul Craig Roberts: “A Successful Coup Against Trump Will Murder American Democracy”

Paul Craig Roberts: “A Successful Coup Against Trump Will Murder American Democracy”

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

President Trump calls it a witch hunt, but it really is a coup against American democracy. The Democrats who want Trump impeached don’t realize this. They just want Trump impeached because they don’t like him. The impeach Trump people don’t understand that if the coup against the elected president succeeds, every future president will know that if he attempts to “drain the swamp” or bring any changes not acceptable to the ruling elite, he, too, will be destroyed. Voters who want real change will also get the message and give up trying to elect a president or members of the House and Senate who will be responsive to voters. It will mean the end of democracy and accountable government. Unhindered rule by the Deep State and associated elites will take democracy’s place.

It is unfortunate that progressives do not understand this. Progressives want real change and Trump impeached, but these desires are at variance with one another.

Few, if any, of the impeach Trump crowd are paying any attention to the fabricated case against Trump that has taken the place of the Russiagate fabrication that failed. They could not care less what the case is or whether it is a fabrication. Dislike of Trump suffices.

Nevertheless, let’s look at the fabricated case.

First of all, the alleged whistleblower is not a legitimate whistleblower. He is Eric Ciaramella, a CIA officer with a second-hand complaint who met with House Intelligence (sic) chairman Adam Schiff a month ahead to orchestrate the event. Ciaramella served on Obama’s staff when VP Joe Biden was point man for Ukraine. Ciaramella also worked with CIA Director John Brennan, the architect of “Russiagate,” and with a Democratic National Committee operative who encouraged Ukraine officials to come up with dirt on President Trump.

All of this and more has caused the “whistleblower” to withdraw from testifying.

Desperate for a substitute, Democrats have come up with tainted career bureaucrats who favor military aid to Ukraine and a hard line toward Russia. Bill Taylor a US diplomat in Ukraine claims that Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, said that US military aid to Ukraine was conditional on Ukraine reopening the government’s investigation into the Ukrainian company, Burisma, an investigation that VP Joe Biden had closed down. Burisma is the company that paid as much as $1.75 million to Biden and his son.

Taylor claims that another bureaucrat, Tim Morrison, told him that Sondland communicated the “quid pro quo” to an aide to Zelensky.

Sondland rejects the claims by Taylor and Morrison.

A Ukrainian born rabid anti-Russian US Army officer serving on the National Security Council, Alexander Vindman, also offers two cents of unverified quid pro quo claims. Vindman’s motive seems to be that President Trump is inclined to follow a different policy toward Ukraine than Vindman prefers.

This is the extent of the case against Trump. Amazingly weak considering that Ukrainian president Zelensky has stated publicly that there was no quid pro quo and that the released transcript of the Trump-Zelensky conversation shows no quid pro quo.

Now for the issue of the alleged quid pro quo. It seems that everyone on both sides of the argument takes for granted without a second of thought that if there was a quid pro quo, there was an offense, possibly one sufficiently offensive to warrant impeachment. This is utter ignorant nonsense.

Quid pro quos are endemic in US foreign policy and always have been. The US government offered Ecuador president Lenin Moreno a $4.2 billion IMF loan in exchange for revoking Julian Assange’s asylum. Moreno took the deal.

Washington offered the Venezuelan military money to overthrow President Maduro. The military refused the offer.

Dozens of examples come readily to mind. Research would produce enough to fill a book.

What do you think the sanctions are that the US president places on countries? They are punishments that Washington imposes for not accepting Washington’s deal.

As for a quid pro quo deal between the US executive branch and president of Ukraine, we have VP Joe Biden’s boast that he got the Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was investigating corruption in the firm that had purchased US protection by putting Biden’s son, Hunter, on Burisma’s board. Joe Biden brags in front of the Council on Foreign Relations that he gave the Ukrainian president 6 hours to fire the prosecutor or forfeit $1 billion in US aid. 

As Biden was US Vice President at the time and is currently the leading Democratic candidate for the US presidential nomination, he is clearly guilty of what Trump is accused. Why is only Trump subject to investigation? If an offense that is merely suspected or alleged suffices for impeaching a president, why isn’t a known and admitted and bragged about offense reason to disqualify Biden from being president?

One would think that a question this obvious would be the topic of debate. But not a word from the presstitutes, Democrats, or Republicans.

Finally, there is the question of the whistleblower law. If this interpretation sent to me by a reliable source is correct, there is no basis in law for the alleged whistleblower complaint.


Tyler Durden

Fri, 11/08/2019 – 19:45

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