The New York Times is outraged, just outraged!— that US anti-tank missiles have been found in “unknown” Libyan rebel hands. Of course, when tons of American military hardware was covertly sent to al-Qaeda linked “rebels” fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and when those same weapons were later transferred to the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria, many of them no doubt used by ISIS and al-Nusra Front, the mainstream media didn’t find much to complain about. But now the “scandal” is being uncovered in 2019?
Currently, it’s the UN-backed government in Tripoli which finds itself on the receiving end of deadly accurate high-tech US-made weapons systems, according to the Times:
Libyan government fighters discovered a cache of powerful American missiles, usually sold only to close American allies, at a captured rebel base in the mountains south of Tripoli this week.
The four Javelin anti-tank missiles, which cost more than $170,000 each, had ended up bolstering the arsenal of Gen. Khalifa Hifter, whose forces are waging a military campaign to take over Libya and overthrow a government the United States supports.
Markings on the missiles’ shipping containers indicate that they were originally sold to the United Arab Emirates, an important American partner, in 2008.
It was only months ago that President Trump for the first time voiced public support to Haftar’s forces, which are engaged in a renewed civil war against the UN-supported Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. The president’s April comments signaled a complete reversal of US policy, given that up to that point the US had officially backed the GNA.
“We take all allegations of misuse of U.S. origin defense articles very seriously,” a State Department official said in a statement following the Javelin anti-tank missile recovery.
“We are aware of these reports and are seeking additional information. We expect all recipients of U.S. origin defense equipment to abide by their end-use obligations,” the statement continued.
When the world’s most capable shoulder-fired anti-tank guided missile falls into unknown rebel hands https://t.co/HWBZZn3WV4
The Times report noted further, “If the Emirates transferred the weapons to General Hifter, it would likely violate the sales agreement with the United States as well as a United Nations arms embargo.”
Gen. Haftar — who solidified control of Eastern Libya over the past two years and swept through the south early this year, has sought to capture Tripoli and seize military control of the entire country, with the support of countries like the UAE and France, but is strongly opposed by Turkey and most European countries.
Haftar has long been described by many analysts as “the CIA’s man in Libya”— given he spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia during Gaddafi’s rule.
He was inserted back onto the Libyan battlefield before Gaddafi’s eventual capture and field execution at the hands of NATO supported Islamist fighters in 2011.
#Libya: Weapons captured from #LNA when the #GNA captured Garyan, including M79 Osa, HMGs, a 9K113, and at least 4 FGM-148 Javelin!
Also included was Chinese GP-1 155mm Guided Artillery Shells, known to be in Libya & other arms marked as from the UAE.
The NYT offered further details of the US weapons recovered this week as follows:
Markings on the missile crates identify their joint manufacturer, the arms giants Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, and a contract number that corresponds with a $115 million order for Javelin missiles that was placed by the United Arab Emirates and Oman in 2008.
Again, isn’t it a little late for the mainstream media to somehow only now discover and care about the “scandal” of major US weapons systems in “unknown rebel hands”?
From Libya to Syria: Walkie talkie courtesy of Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Missile launcher courtesy of Hillary Clinton’s Libya War.
For a trip down memory lane, and to review just what Obama and Hillary’s original Libya war has wrought, see Dan Sanchez’s 2015 essay, “Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Xcdnyw Tyler Durden
In these Orwellian times, when it is revealed that yet another government agency is spying on us in yet another way, most of us aren’t one bit surprised. Being surveilled nearly everywhere we go (and even in our own homes) has become the norm, unfortunately.
Yesterday, it was revealed that the NSA improperly collected Americans’ call and text logs in November 2017 and in February and October 2018 – just months after the agency claimed it was going to delete the 620 million-plus call detail records it already had stockpiled.
But this article isn’t about that.
It is about something far more insidious.
When it comes to spying on people, the government has competition.
The Chinese government is currently implementing a social credit system to monitor its 1.3 billion citizens (China already has 200 million public surveillance cameras). Facial recognition technology and personal data from cell phones and digital transactions are being used to collect intimate details about people’s lives, including their purchasing habits and whom they socialize with.
The gathered data is used to create mandatory social credit ratings for every citizen. These ratings will score citizens’ “general worthiness” and provide those with higher scores opportunities like access to jobs, loans, and travel. Those with lower scores will not have access to those opportunities.
While the United States government has yet to implement such a system, companies in the country are, reports The Hill:
Consumer advocates are pushing regulators to investigate what they paint as a shadowy online practice where retailers use consumer information collected by data brokers to decide how much to charge individual customers or the quality of service they’ll offer.
#REPRESENT, a public interest group run by the Consumer Education Foundation in California, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday asking the agency to investigate what the group is calling “surveillance scoring” of customers’ financial status or creditworthiness. (source)
Companies are using Secret Surveillance Scores to evaluate you.
Major American corporations, including online and retail businesses, employers and landlords are using Secret Surveillance Scores to charge some people higher prices for the same product than others, to provide some people with better customer services than others, to deny some consumers the right to purchase services or buy or return products while allowing others to do so and even to deny people housing and jobs.
The Secret Surveillance Scores are generated by a shadowy group of privacy-busting firms that operate in dark recesses of the American marketplace. They collect thousands or even tens of thousands of intimate details of each person’s life – enough information, it is thought, to literally predetermine a person’s behavior – either directly or through data brokers. Then, in what is euphemistically referred to as “data analytics,” the firms’ engineers write software algorithms that instruct computers to parse a person’s data trail and develop a digital “mug shot.” Eventually, that individual profile is reduced to a number – the score – and transmitted to corporate clients looking for ways to take advantage of, or even avoid, the consumer. The scoring system is automatic and instantaneous. None of this is disclosed to the consumer: the existence of the algorithm, the application of the Surveillance Score or even that they have become the victim of a technological scheme that just a few years ago would appear only in a dystopian science fiction novel. (source)
These scores are used to discriminate based on income.
Written by lawyers Laura Antonini, the policy director of the Consumer Education Foundation, and Harvey Rosenfield, who leads the foundation, the complaint highlights four areas in which companies are using surveillance scoring: pricing, customer service, fraud prevention, and housing and employment.
“This is a way for companies to discriminate against users based on income and wealth,” Antonini told The Hill.
“It can range from monetary harm or basic necessities of life that you’re not getting.”
Antonini and Rosenfield argue that the practices outlined in the complaint are illegal – and that consumers are largely unaware that they’re being secretly evaluated in ways that can influence how much they pay online.
“The ability of corporations to target, manipulate and discriminate against Americans is unprecedented and inconsistent with the principles of competition and free markets,” the complaint reads. “Surveillance scoring promotes inequality by empowering companies to decide which consumers they want to do business with and on what terms, weeding out the people who they deem less valuable. Such discrimination is as much a threat to democracy as it is to a free market.”
Stores are using this scoring system to charge you higher prices.
The filing points to a 2014 Northeastern University study exploring the ways that companies like Home Depot and Walmart use consumer data to customize prices for different customers. Rosenfield and Antonini replicated the study using an online tool that compares prices that they’re charged on their own computers with their own data profiles versus the prices charged to a user browsing sites through an anonymized computer server with no data history.
What they found was that Walmart and Home Depot were offering lower prices on a number of products to the anonymous computer. In the search results for “white paint” on Home Depot’s website, Rosenfield and Antonini were seeing higher prices for six of the first 24 items that popped up.
In one example, a five-gallon tub of Glidden premium exterior paint would have cost them $119 compared with $101 for the anonymous computer.
A similar pattern emerged on Walmart’s website. The two lawyers found the site was charging them more on a variety of items compared with the anonymous web tool, including paper towels, highlighters, pens and paint.
One paper towel holder cost $10 less for the blank web user. (source)
To see screenshots of different “personalized” prices shown for items from Home Depot and Walmart, please see pages 12-16 of the complaint. The examples presented demonstrate just how much these inflated prices for common household goods can really add up.
The travel industry is particularly sneaky.
A few days ago, we reported on hidden fees that could be costing you big bucks. The travel industry is a particularly large offender when it comes to sneaky fees, and they are also implicated in this scheme:
Travelocity. Software developer Christian Bennefeld, founder of etracker.com and eBlocker.com, did a sample search for hotel rooms in Paris on Travelocity in 2017 using his eBlocker device, which “allows him to act as if he were searching from two different” computers. Bennefeld found that when he performed the two searches at the same time, there was a $23 difference in Travelocity’s prices for the Hotel Le Six in Paris.
CheapTickets. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that the online bargain travel site CheapTickets offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who are logged into an account with CheapTickets, compared to those who proceed as “guests.” We performed our own search of airfares on CheapTickets without being logged in. We searched for flights from LAX to Las Vegas for April 5 through April 8, 2019. Our searches produced identical flight results in the same order, but Mr. Rosenfield’s prices were all quoted at three dollars higher than Ms. Antonini’s.
Other travel websites. The Northeastern Price Discrimination Study found that Orbitz also offers reduced prices on hotels to consumers who were logged into an account (Orbitz has been accused of quoting higher prices to Mac users versus PC users because Mac users have a higher household income); Expedia and Hotels.com steer a subset of users toward more expensive hotels; and Priceline acknowledges it “personalizes search results based on a user’s history of clicks and purchases. (source)
There is an industry that exists to evaluate you and sell your data to companies.
The complaint also describes an industry that offers retailers evaluations of their customers’ “trustworthiness” to determine whether they are a potential risk for fraudulent returns. One such firm – called Sift – offers these evaluations to major companies like Starbucks and Airbnb. Sift boasts on its website that it can tailor “user experiences based on 16,000+ real-time signals – putting good customers in the express lane and stopping bad customers from reaching the checkout.”
The Hill contacted Sift for comment, and the company was not able to respond. But, back in April, a Sift spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that it rates customers on a scale of 0 to 100, likening it to a credit score for trustworthiness.
While credit scores can wreak havoc on a person’s ability to make big purchases (and sometimes, gain employment), they at least are transparent. Surveillance scoring is not. There is NO transparency for consumers, and Rosenfield and Antonini argue that companies are using them to engage in illegal discrimination while users have little recourse to correct false information about them or challenge their ratings.
We are being spied on and scored on a wide variety of factors.
“In the World Privacy Forum’s landmark study “The Scoring of America: How Secret Consumer Scores Threaten Your Privacy and Future,” authors Pam Dixon and Bob Gellman identified approximately 44 scores currently used to predict the actions of consumers,” the complaint explains:
These include:
The Medication Adherence Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to follow a medication regimen;
The Health Risk Score, which predicts how much a specific patient will cost an insurance company;
The Consumer Profitability Score, which predicts which households may be profitable for a company and hence desirable customers;
The Job Security score, which predicts a person’s future income and ability to pay for things;
The Churn Score, which predicts whether a consumer is likely to move her business to another company;
The Discretionary Spending Index, which scores how much extra cash a particular consumer might be able to spend on non-necessities;
The Invitation to Apply Score, which predicts how likely a consumer is to respond to a sales offer;
The Charitable Donor Score, which predicts how likely a household is to make significant charitable donations;
The Pregnancy Predictor Score, which predicts the likelihood of someone getting pregnant. (source)
The government isn’t doing anything to stop these practices.
Back in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop on a practice they call “predictive scoring” but the agency has done little since to reign in the practice. Antonini said that their complaint is pushing the agency to reexamine the industry and investigate whether it violates laws against unfair and deceptive business practices, according to The Hill:
“It’s far, far worse than when they looked at it in 2014,” she said. “There’s an exponentially larger amount of data that’s being collected about the American public that’s in the hands of data brokers and companies. Their ability to process that data and write algorithms have also improved exponentially.” (source)
We seem to be past the point of expecting our data to remain private, The Introduction to the complaint begins with a passage that sums up reality for us now:
This Petition does not ask the Commission to investigate the collection of Americans’ personal information. The battle over whether Americans’ personal data can be collected is over, and, as of this moment at least, consumers have lost. Consumers are now victims of an unavoidable corporate surveillance capitalism.
Rather, this Petition highlights a disturbing evolution in how consumers’ data is deployed against them. (source)
We can’t go anywhere without being surveilled now.
It is now impossible to shop in any large chain stores without being spied on. Stores are starting to use “smart coolers”, which are refrigerators equipped with cameras that scan shoppers’ faces and make inferences on their age and gender. And, a recent article from Futurism describes how security cameras are no longer being used solely to reduce theft:
“Instead of just keeping track of who’s in a store, surveillance systems could use facial recognition to determine peoples’ identities and gathering even more information about them. That data would then be out there, with no opportunity to opt out. (source)
A new ACLU report titled “The Dawn of Robot Surveillance” describes how emerging AI technology enables security companies to constantly monitor and collect data about people.
“Growth in the use and effectiveness of artificial intelligence techniques has been so rapid that people haven’t had time to assimilate a new understanding of what is being done, and what the consequences of data collection and privacy invasions can be,”the report concludes.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FE8ecD Tyler Durden
Pensions across the U.S. are falling deeper into a crisis, as the gap between their assets and liabilities widens at the same time that investment returns are falling, according to Bloomberg.
Chief Investment Officer Ben Meng told the board of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System last week: “For the next 10 years, our expected returns are 6.1%, not 7%.”
And if you think you’ve seen panic now, just wait until he finds out that Calpers’ target of 7% – lowered in 2016 – is still a pipe dream.
Put simply: the record, decade long bull market hasn’t been enough to save pensions. The average U.S. plan has only 72.5% of its future obligations in 2018, compared to more than 100% in 2001. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College attributes the deficit to “recessions, insufficient government contributions and generous benefit guarantees.”
Jean-Pierre Aubry, associate director said: “The really bad plans went heavily out of equities after the financial crisis.”
Pensions that aggressive bet on stock outperformed funds that moved money into alternative investment vehicles, like hedge funds.
Andrew Junkin, president of Wilshire Consulting, said: “Sometimes diversification, while it’s the right strategy, makes you look dumb.”
And this success isn’t a guarantee in the future, either.
Phillip Nelson, asset-allocation director at pension advisory firm NEPC said: “The discussion we have internally is over the next ten years is do you see an equal amount of Fed support and profit margins increasing by another 50% from this level? Both seem really unlikely to us.”
Public pensions have increased their exposure to PE to 10.2% on average in 2018. This is up from 5.6% in 2008, a trend that will probably continue. Many pension funds, like the Texas Teachers’ Retirement System, are hiring new staff to manage private equity. Their fund invests 40% of its portfolio in alternatives.
Mohan Balachandran, senior managing director of asset allocation at Texas Teachers said: “Our pension liability duration is 20-plus years. We felt that we could invest for the long-term in some of these vehicles where your money’s locked up for seven to 12 years.”
Now, about 85% of the 129 public pensions in the U.S. have cut return assumptions since 2014. These targets are expected to continue moving lower.
Keith Brainard, research director at the National Association of State Retirement Administrators said: “Each month and each quarter that goes by with low inflation and interest rates remaining low provides more ammunition to justify lower investment returns.”
And lower assumptions aren’t always well received by taxpayers, despite lowering the risk for pension funds. Often, they lead to money out of the pockets of taxpayers to cover the difference.
The Kentucky Retirement Systems’ plan for 123,000 employees in non-emergency jobs could be one of the worst off systems in the U.S. It currently only has $2 billion in assets for $15.6 billion in liabilities. The burden has resulted in government service cuts, pay freezes and a falling headcount.
Executive Director David Eager said: “We call it the death spiral. You can’t earn your way out of this.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LrI6p7 Tyler Durden
After getting curb stomped on the debate stage by Tulsi Gabbard, the campaign for Tim “Who the fuck is Tim Ryan?” Ryan posted a statementdecrying the Hawaii congresswoman’s desire to end a pointless 18-year military occupation as “isolationism”.
“While making a point as to why America can’t cede its international leadership and retreat from around the world, Tim was interrupted by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard,” the statement reads.
“When he tried to answer her, she contorted a factual point Tim was making — about the Taliban being complicit in the 9/11 attacks by providing training, bases and refuge for Al Qaeda and its leaders. The characterization that Tim Ryan doesn’t know who is responsible for the attacks on 9/11 is simply unfair reporting. Further, we continue to reject Gabbard’s isolationism and her misguided beliefs on foreign policy. We refuse to be lectured by someone who thinks it’s ok to dine with murderous dictators like Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad who used chemical weapons on his own people.”
Ryan’s campaign is lying. During an exchange that was explicitly about the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ryan plainly said “When we weren’t in there, they started flying planes into our buildings.” At best, Ryan can argue that when he said “they” he had suddenly shifted from talking about the Taliban to talking about Al Qaeda without bothering to say so, in which case he obviously can’t legitimately claim that Gabbard “contorted” anything he had said. At worst, he was simply unaware at the time of the very clear distinction between the Afghan military and political body called the Taliban and the multinational extremist organization called Al Qaeda.
More importantly, Ryan’s campaign using the word “isolationism” to describe the simple common sense impulse to withdraw from a costly, deadly military occupation which isn’t accomplishing anything highlights an increasingly common tactic of tarring anything other than endless military expansionism as strange and aberrant instead of normal and good. Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism. This removal of a desirable opposite of war from the establishment-authorised lexicon causes war to always be the desirable option.
This is entirely by design. This bit of word magic has been employed for a long time to tar any idea which deviates from the neoconservative agenda of total global unipolarity via violent imperialism as something freakish and dangerous. In his farewell address to the nation, war criminal George W Bush said the following:
“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”
A few months after Bush’s address, Antiwar’s Rich Rubino wrote an article titled “Non-Interventionism is Not Isolationism”, explaining the difference between a nation which withdraws entirely from the world and a nation which simply resists the temptation to use military aggression except in self defense.
“Isolationism dictates that a country should have no relations with the rest of the world,” Rubino explained. “In its purest form this would mean that ambassadors would not be shared with other nations, communications with foreign governments would be mainly perfunctory, and commercial relations would be non-existent.”
“A non-interventionist supports commercial relations,” Rubino contrasted. “In fact, in terms of trade, many non-interventionists share libertarian proclivities and would unilaterally obliterate all tariffs and custom duties, and would be open to trade with all willing nations. In addition, non-interventionists welcome cultural exchanges and the exchange of ambassadors with all willing nations.”
“A non-interventionist believes that the U.S. should not intercede in conflicts between other nations or conflicts within nations,” wrote Rubino. “In recent history, non-interventionists have proved prophetic in warning of the dangers of the U.S. entangling itself in alliances. The U.S. has suffered deleterious effects and effectuated enmity among other governments, citizenries, and non-state actors as a result of its overseas interventions. The U.S. interventions in both Iran and Iraq have led to cataclysmic consequences.”
Calling an aversion to endless military violence “isolationism” is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people “agoraphobia”. Yet you’ll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists. Gabbard supports most US military alliances and continues to voice full support for the bogus “war on terror” implemented by the Bush administration which serves no purpose other than to facilitate endless military expansionism; Trump is openly pushing regime change interventionism in both Venezuela and Iran while declining to make good on his promises to withdraw the US military from Syria and Afghanistan.
Another dishonest label you’ll get thrown at you when debating the forever war is “pacifism”. “Some wars are bad, but I’m not a pacifist; sometimes war is necessary,” supporters of a given interventionist military action will tell you. They’ll say this while defending Trump’s potentially catastrophic Iran warmongering or promoting a moronic regime change invasion of Syria, or defending disastrous US military interventions in the past like Iraq.
This is bullshit for a couple of reasons. Firstly, virtually no one is a pure pacifist who opposes war under any and all possible circumstances; anyone who claims that they can’t imagine any possible scenario in which they’d support using some kind of coordinated violence either hasn’t imagined very hard or is fooling themselves. If your loved ones were going to be raped, tortured and killed by hostile forces unless an opposing group took up arms to defend them, for example, you would support that. Hell, you would probably join in. Secondly, equating opposition to US-led regime change interventionism, which is literally always disastrous and literally never helpful, is not even a tiny bit remotely like opposing all war under any possible circumstance.
She’s not “antiwar” – she’s anti a US war. She’s totally pro the Russian air war in Syria and celebrated Russian air strikes that have killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians.
Another common distortion you’ll see is the specious argument that a given opponent of US interventionism “isn’t anti-war” because they don’t oppose all war under any and all circumstances. This tweet by The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan is a perfect example, claiming that Gabbard is not anti-war because she supports Syria’s sovereign right to defend itself with the help of its allies from the violent extremist factions which overran the country with western backing. Again, virtually no one is opposed to all war under any and all circumstances; if a coalition of foreign governments had helped flood Hasan’s own country of Britain with extremist militias who’d been murdering their way across the UK with the ultimate goal of toppling London, both Tulsi Gabbard and Hasan would support fighting back against those militias.
The label “anti-war” can for these reasons be a little misleading. The term anti-interventionist or non-interventionist comes closest to describing the value system of most people who oppose the warmongering of the western empire, because they understand that calls for military interventionism which go mainstream in today’s environment are almost universally based on imperialist agendas grabbing at power, profit, and global hegemony. The label “isolationist” comes nowhere close.
It all comes down to sovereignty. An anti-interventionist believes that a country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn’t have the right to conquer, capture, infiltrate or overthrow other nations whether covertly or overtly. At the “end” of colonialism we all agreed we were done with that, except that the nationless manipulators have found far trickier ways to seize a country’s will and resources without actually planting a flag there. We need to get clearer on these distinctions and get louder about defending them as the only sane, coherent way to run foreign policy.
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While the modern fortunes of people like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates seem stratospheric in size, even the world’s richest self-made billionaires had to crawl before they could walk.
After all, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins writes, the journey to becoming ultra-wealthy hinges on earning that very first $1 million – the initial pillar of wealth that helps provide the security and confidence to go all-in on later ventures and investments.
The Typical Journey
Today’s infographic comes to us from Slotsia, and it compares the timelines of the wealthiest self-made billionaires showing how long it took them to each earn their first $1 million.
As it turns out, joining the Two Comma Club is rarely an overnight endeavor.
On average, it took about eight years to get to the $1 million mark, with the most common age for hitting the milestone at age 36, and business ventures being the top source of this wealth.
Milestone Time, by Years
Of the top 100 billionaires on he planet, 65 of them are self-made – and here’s how long it took each of them to earn their first $1 million:
Impressively, about 25 self-made billionaires, including people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma, and Wang Jianlin, were able to make this initial fortune in under five years.
Meanwhile, other founders like Phil Knight of Nike, took 16 years to hit the mark.
Milestone Time, by Industry
While the set of data is limited, here’s how long it took to hit the first million based on industry:
Billionaires in the telecom and tech sectors were the fastest to $1 million, while those in fashion, construction, and manufacturing businesses took much longer to get to the promised land.
Of course, reaching the first financial milestone is only one step in a much longer journey.
For further reading, see how long it took for the world’s wealthiest to make the jump from millionaire to billionaire.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2X7jF2E Tyler Durden
If “caging kids” was okay for Obama, what makes it inhumane for Trump?
Now that the first round of Democratic debates are out of the way, it’s time to hammer down on the left’s constant caterwauling about the president’s immigration policies and caging of kids. The relentless barrage of insults aimed at Donald Trump for his cruelty and inhumane actions towards illegal aliens, families, and children is reminiscent of rabid wolves looking for their next victim. They are so far out of their minds with Trump Derangement Syndrome they can’t see the truth: These heinous tactics and polices were instituted before the Trump administration.
Democrats frequently praise former president Barack Obama but conveniently forget about his strict immigration policies, many of which they attribute to Trump today and call outrageous and cold-hearted. In a 2014 interview with ABC News, Obama talked about the impossibility of tracking all of the children who get sold into sex slavery and other nefarious endings and warns immigrants not to send their kids to America. “So, that is our direct message to the families in Central America, do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.”
2014 is not ancient history. Can someone please explain why this was not portrayed at the time as a morally abominable statement? pic.twitter.com/tUvMnFmxVs
Obama’s Detention Centers Vs Trump’s Concentration Camps
Recently, as Liberty Nation’s Jeff Charles reported, the dim-witted media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) compared the migrant detention centers to the horrific concentration camps of the Holocaust. “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border and that is exactly what they are,” she said. First, the young representative needs to learn the differences between the two – of which there are many. Second, we are using the exact same centers that were put into place under the Obama administration.
Thomas Homan was Obama’s executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly four years. He confirmed that these facilities were the former president’s conception.
“I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages,” he said. “That facility was built under President Obama under [Homeland Security] Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built.”
During an immigration conference on June 26, Homan cited an instance where the Democratic chairman had asked a Trump official if kids were still being kept in cages:
“I would answer the question, ‘The kids are being house in the same facility built under the Obama administration.’ If you want to call them cages, call them cages. But if the left wants to call them cages and the Democrats want to call them cages then they have to accept the fact that they were built and funded in FY 2015.”
About those cages: “It’s chain link dividers that keeps children separate from unrelated adults,” he said. “It’s about protecting children.”
Caged Migrant Children Photo Goes Viral As Left Rages At Trump…Except It Happened Under Obama https://t.co/0ZsJyQHqjz
While Democrats like Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) go around claiming that illegal immigrants shouldn’t be considered illegal, Obama had the opposite view.
“Even as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of laws,” he said in an address to the nation in Nov. 2014.
“Undocumented workers broke our immigration laws, and I believe that they must be held accountable. Especially those who may be dangerous.”
The left’s continued narrative of caging children and separating families is redundant and grossly exaggerated. They refuse to acknowledge any positives our president introduces, such as when he signed Executive Order #13841, ordering that detained families would not be separated unless the parents pose a danger to the child.
Democrats also ignore the very real threat of the invasion of hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens trying to force their way across our border daily. The left lost their minds when Trump declared a national emergency to combat the migrant war at our southern border. Obama faced opposition when he tried to implement stricter immigration control too:
“The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, but they’re the kind of actions taken by every single Republican president and every single Democrat president for the past half century. To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Xh46KD Tyler Durden
Heading into the end of the second quarter, 113 S&P 500 companies have issued EPS guidance for the quarter. Of these 113 companies, 87 have issued negative EPS guidance and 26 companies have issued positive EPS guidance.
The number of companies issuing negative EPS for Q2 is above the five-year average of 74. In fact, if 87 is the final number for the second quarter, it will mark the second highest number of S&P 500 companies issuing negative EPS guidance for a quarter since FactSet began tracking this data in 2006 (trailing only Q1 2016 at 92).
What is driving the unusually high number of S&P 500 companies issuing negative EPS guidance for the second quarter?
At the sector level, seven of the 11 sectors have seen more companies issue negative EPS guidance for Q2 2019 relative to their five-year averages. However, the Information Technology and Health Care sectors are the largest contributors to the overall increase in the number of S&P 500 companies issuing negative EPS guidance for Q2 relative to the five-year average.
In the Information Technology sector, 26 companies have issued negative EPS guidance for the second quarter, which is above the five-year average for the sector of 20.4. If 26 is the final number for the quarter, it will tie the mark (with multiple quarters) for the second highest number of companies issuing negative EPS guidance in this sector since FactSet began tracking this data in 2006, trailing only Q4 2012 (27).
At the industry level, the Semiconductor & Semiconductor Equipment (9) and Software (6) industries have the highest number of companies issuing negative EPS guidance in the sector. In the Health Care sector, 14 companies have issued negative EPS guidance for the second quarter, which is above the five-year average for the sector of 10.4. At the industry level, the Health Care Equipment & Supplies (8) and Life Sciences Tools & Services (5) industries have the highest number of companies issuing negative EPS guidance in the sector.
The term “guidance” (or “preannouncement”) is defined as a projection or estimate for EPS provided by a company in advance of the company reporting actual results. Guidance is classified as negative if the estimate (or mid-point of a range estimates) provided by a company is lower than the mean EPS estimate the day before the guidance was issued. Guidance is classified as positive if the estimate (or mid-point of a range of estimates) provided by the company is higher than the mean EPS estimate the day before the guidance was issued.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XhBbGt Tyler Durden
The European Central Bank’s recent move away from the exit from ultra-loose monetary policy has revived the debate on Europe’s potential “Japanification.”
The Japanese scenario is gloomy. Since the bursting of the Japanese bubble in the early 1990s, growth has been stagnating, wage levels have been falling, and an increasing number of people has been forced into precarious employment. The so-called Abenomics, an immense Keynesian spending program financed by the central bank, has failed so far to jumpstart the ailing economy. Instead, statistics are interpreted and designed creatively.
Fig. 1: GDP Per Capita Based on Working Age Population and Employed
Paul Krugman (2014) has argued that the development of real GDP per capita in Japan since the early 1990s hardly differs from those in the US and the euro area. He came to this result by using working-age population as a denominator for the calculation of GDP per capita. In Japan, due to low birth rates and low immigration, the number of people between 15 and 64 is declining rapidly. Therefore, the real GDP per working-age population (i.e., between 15 and 64) has increased significantly (Fig. 1). Many commentators now follow this calculation method, thereby putting Japanese economic policy in a good light. However, Japan’s three lost decades have forced particularly women and pensioners to enter or to remain in the labor market to maintain the standard of living for themselves and their families. The upshot is that GDP per person employed has stagnated since 1990 (Fig. 1), pointing to low productivity growth. Yet, productivity gains are the prerequisite for real wage increases.
Fig. 2: Real Wage Level and the Number of Employed in Japan
More recently, a dispute has raged over the Japanese real wage development. The issue drew nationwide attention because the real wage level has been trending downward since the 1998 Japanese financial crisis (Fig. 2). In 2004, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare had removed two thirds of large enterprises in Tokyo from the labor market statistics. Because the wage level is higher in Tokyo than in other parts of the country, the statistically measured real wage level declined substantially. As a positive side effect, the Japanese government saved social security expenditures which are paid to those, who have a personal income significantly below the average wage.
This statistical distortion, which was in conflict with Japan’s legal provisions for statistics, was secretly corrected in 2018. This caused a substantial rise of the real wage level, by 0.6%. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could praise the real wage increases as proof for the success of his Abenomics (Prime Minister of Japan and His Cabinet 2018). An impressive recovery of the Japanese economy was reported worldwide (see, e.g., Reuters 2018). But when a member of the ministry’s staff accidentally revealed the reasons, the Japanese opposition launched a controversial debate on the credibility of Japanese statistics. Finally, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare corrected the real wage increase for 2018 downward to 0.2%, while the opposition sees real wages still falling by -0.5%.
To contain the damage to the reputation of Japan’s government, Prime Minister Abe has announced that the unpaid social benefits of around half a billion dollars will be compensated. Yet, the reputation of the Japanese statistical offices and the formerly highly respected ministerial administration has suffered. Fumio Hayashi, president of the influential Japanese Economic Association (2019), expressed in an open letter to the government concerns that the country’s academic credibility is damaged. He offered support from highly renowned academics.
Whether this will help, remains questionable. Creative design of statistics cannot solve the persistent crisis. The core of the problem lies in a misguided economic policy that zombifies the Japanese economy and thus undermines prosperity. Instead, sound public finances and a stability-oriented monetary policy should strengthen Japan’s growth dynamics. That way, the country could become a positive role model for the member states of the European Monetary Union and the European Central Bank.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YobrV8 Tyler Durden
Though he brushed off reporters’ Khashoggi-related questions earlier in the day during G20 meetings in Osaka, Japan, President Trump finally addressed his raising the issue of the journalist’s murder with crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman during a private breakfast.
President Trump and crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman greet each other during the G20 ‘family photo’. Image source: AFP/Getty
When peppered with questions about the Oct. 2 murder during a later press briefing, Trump said he broach the subject with MbS directly.
“I did mention it to him very strongly,” Trump said.
“That was a bad event.”
He added, “I asked him what was happening.”
Given that Trump appeared to be defending MbS, he was asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta whether he feared “offending” Prince Mohammed. The president responded:
“No not at all,” he said, and added “I don’t really care about offending people.”
Trump then added a parting shot personally directed at Acosta: “I sort of thought you would know that” — which drew immediate laughter from the crowd.
G20 Press Conference @realDonaldTrump gives @acosta a shot when asked whether he pressed MBS on Khashoggi
Acosta – are you afraid of offending him on that subject?
Pres. Trump: Not at all. I don’t really care about offending people. I sort of thought you would know that
“I’m extremely angry and unhappy about a thing like that taking place,” Trump said, but he also claimed that “nobody has directly pointed a finger” at bin Salman, CNN reported.
However, a recent United Nations report, as well as the CIA itself did name the crown prince as likely authorizing the killing. Trump responded to a question of the CIA’s findings by saying he “cannot comment on intelligence”.
“We can declassify,” Trump said. “The truth is, I don’t want to talk about intelligence.”
The president also explained that the Saudis had found 13 people guilty as a result of their own investigation, in one of the clearest defenses from Trump yet of Riyadh’s official story which according to most observers has sought to carefully shield MbS from being found guilty of any wrongdoing.
Awkwardly, all of this comes just a week after the United Nations issued an over 100-page report finding “sufficient credible evidence” that the grisly murder of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul was on the direct orders of the crown prince and other Saudi high level officials.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RJPayP Tyler Durden
Official claims that grossly understate real-world inflation is a core feature of debt-serfdom and neofeudalism: we’re working harder and longer and getting less for our earnings every year, but this reality is obfuscated by official pronouncements that inflation is 2%–barely above zero.
Meanwhile, quality and quantity are in permanent decline. New BBQ grills rust out in a few years, if not months, appliance paint is so thin a sponge and a bit of cleanser removes the micron-thick coating, and on and on in endless examples of the landfill economy, as new products are soon dumped in the landfill due to near-zero quality control and/or planned obsolescence.
Free-lance writer Bill Rice, Jr. recently analyzed shrinkflation, the inexorable reduction in quantity:What Does Your Toilet Paper Have to Do With Inflation?Manufacturers have been engaging in “shrinkflation,” leaving consumers paying more for less, but stealthily.
In the guest post below, Bill looks at new car prices, and finds that official inflation for “new vehicles” from November 1983 to November 2013 measured only 43.8 percent… while actual car inflation (based on archived price records in Morris County, NJ) is 4.85 times higher than official CPI “new vehicle” inflation.
Prices for new cars sky-rocketed over 30 years (or did they?) A lesson in ‘hedonic adjustments’
By Bill Rice, Jr.
In addition to grocery and household staples, the Annual Price Survey of Morris County, NJ lists the prices of new cars for each year. I was curious to learn how the price of a car the year I graduated from high school (1983) compared to the price of a car 30 years later in 2013. (The MC Price Survey ended in 2014).
What did I learn? Well, I learned that car prices went up a LOT in 30 years. Between 1979-1983 the least expensive car available, at least from this price survey, averaged $6,366. By comparison, the least expensive car in 2009-2013 averaged $19,879. This is a nominal price increase of 212.3 percent.
Now here’s the head-scratcher. According to the BLS, inflation for all goods (CPI-U) from August 1983 to August 2013 increased by 133.4 percent — that is, far less than the sample of inexpensive cars from Morris County, NJ.
But that’s just part of the inflation story. The BLS also publishes indexes in the category of “new vehicles.” According to these indexes, inflation for “new vehicles” from November 1983 to November 2013 measured only 43.8 percent. That is, actual car inflation (based on archived price records in Morris County, NJ) is 4.85 times higher than official CPI “new vehicle” inflation.
How is such a huge discrepancy explained? Here, we detour into a discussion of hedonic adjustments, an eye-glazing topic for some, but where the rubber meets the road in any contemporary analysis of inflation.
In the latter part of the 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) decided to adjust new vehicle prices (and the prices of many other products such as computers) for “quality.” The rationale for this “improved methodology” is that new cars are clearly superior to older cars.
For example, newer models often include features that weren’t standard in earlier times/car models. Presumably today’s cars last longer than yesterday’s cars, require fewer repairs and even include life-saving features like air bags. In short, we get a lot more car for the buck than we did in 1983.
While the 2010 Buick Regal is certainly a better car than the 1980 Regal, is it really $17,160 better? Or: could I ask for a Regal with “just the basic stuff” that was standard in the 1980 version and then ask my sales person, “Can you knock $17,000 off the sticker price?” I could ask, I guess, but the answer would be no. (Another person, I discovered, asked the same-type questions).
While the merits of hedonic adjustments can be debated, what can’t be debated is the hard data produced by the BLS. Back in the day – before hedonic adjustments – new vehicles did experience price inflation, documented in the steep incline of CPI price indices for new vehicles from 1974 into 1997. However, beginning in March 1997, this graph suddenly pivots south. In recent decades, new vehicle prices have essentially been flat.
Indeed, in more years than not, the CPI index for new vehicles was negative, representing price deflation for new vehicles.
Anyway, I was not surprised to discover that a new car cost a whole lot more in 2013 than it did in 1983. I was, however, surprised to discover that, according to the BLS, inflation in the category of “New Vehicles” has been practically non-existent the past 21 years of my life.
See price comparisons below:
Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance writer in Troy, Alabama. He can be reached atwjricejunior@gmail.com.
