Most of now-former special counsel Robert Mueller’s public statement to the press last week seemed to fall under the category of “Fair enough.” After all, the man did nearly two years of work, he kept largely silent throughout, and he alternately was called a hero or a dog.
So the day Mueller resigns, he chooses to make a fairly brief statementputting a button on all of it, and at the same time declining to take any questions, before gliding back into private life.
But there’s at least one comment Mueller made that nags at me. It’s when he said, “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”
Mueller must have had his reasons for shading his commentary in that way rather than in the other direction: If they’d found adequate evidence to implicate Trump in a crime, or even “collusion,” they would have said that, too.
The statement Mueller chose to give carries with it an implication that his team looked for evidence of President Trump’s innocence but simply could not find it. With that in mind, I thought of a short list of questions I’d like to ask Mueller, if ever permitted to do so:
What witnesses did you interview and what evidence did you collect in an attempt to exonerate Trump or prove him not guilty? (I believe the answer would be, “None. It’s not the job of a special counsel or prosecutor to do so.” Therefore, was Mueller’s comment appropriate?)
Does it concern you that the FBI claimed “collection tool failure” in stating that 19,000 text messages between former FBI employees Lisa Page and Peter Strozk had been deleted and were unavailable for review by the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general? Is it worth investigating how the inspector general was able to recover the messages, when the FBI said it could not? Does the FBI lack the technical expertise, or the will? Isn’t it a serious issue that should be addressed, either way?
Along the same lines, do you think it strange or inappropriate that the DOJ wiped text messages between Strzok and Page from their special counsel cell phones? The deletions happened shortly after they were ejected from the team and before the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General could review them — at a time when all had been informed that their actions were under review. Did technicians attempt to recover the messages? Were the circumstances of the deletions thoroughly investigated?
When did you first learn that the FBI and DOJ signed off on and presented unverified, anti-Trump political opposition research to a court to get wiretaps on an innocent U.S. citizen? Doesn’t this violate the strict procedures enacted while you were FBI director, intended to ensure that only verified information is seen by the court? Who will be held accountable for any lapses in this arena?
Do these issues point to larger problems within our intelligence community, in terms of how officials operate? Does that put you in a position where there’s a conflict of interest since you were in charge of the FBI when prior surveillance abuses were identified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court? Did you consider disclosing this potential conflict and stepping aside, or referring any issues that overlap with your interests?
What steps did you take after Strzok and Page were exposed, to try to learn if other investigators on your team likewise were conflicted? Did you take action to segregate the work of these agents and any potential biases they injected into your investigation and team? Wasn’t their behavior a beacon to call you to follow an investigative trail in another direction?
Did you become concerned about foreign influence beyond Russia when you learned that a foreign national, Christopher Steele, claimed to have obtained opposition research from Russian officials connected to Putin — and that the FBI and DOJ presented this material to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain wiretap approvals?
Were you aware that some Democratic Party officials acknowledged coordinating with Ukraine in 2016 to undermine Trump and his associates and to leak disparaging information to the news media?
Is it true that you applied for the job as FBI director but Trump rejected you, the day before then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed you as special counsel to investigate Trump? Does that put you in a potentially conflicted position?
Do you think Donald Trump is guilty of a crime? If so, then do you believe he is perhaps the most clever criminal of our time since he was able to conceal the evidence despite all the government wiretaps, investigations, informants, surveillance and hundreds of interviews spanning several years?
Clearly, Robert Mueller hopes he has closed the book on his public statements about his investigation. If he has his way, he will not discuss the case further on the record. But his parting shot raised plenty of questions.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2IfD3VI Tyler Durden
My reward for ten years of blogging is a guest post here. In all seriousness, I’m very grateful to Eugene and his co-conspirators for giving me the opportunity to write about my contribution to Our American Story.
Some of the essays in the book preach the faith that what makes our national experience special are the universal ideals of liberty and equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete by the Constitution. My essay takes the opposite view. What made the United States distinctive was its political pragmatism. The emblem of that approach is Benjamin Franklin, the Founder who is rarely invoked by the Supreme Court. (Though, as Randy would surely point out, the Chief Justice did cite Franklin’s line about “death and taxes” in his opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act.) Franklin famously said at the close of the Constitutional Convention that he supported the proposal in spite of its many flaws. And his literary alter ego in Poor Richard’s Almanack once explained: “In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it.”
Why do I say that our true national creed is pragmatism? Part of the answer is that this was the conclusion of the leading European commentators on the United States well into the twentieth century. Let me give you three examples. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked: “Nothing has made me admire the good sense and the practical intelligence of the Americans,” he wrote, “more than the way they avoid the innumerable difficulties deriving from their Federal Constitution.” Walter Bagehot, the founding editor of The Economist and author of a classic book on The English Constitution, wrote in the 1860s: “Americans now extol their institutions and so defraud themselves of their due praise . . . If they had not a genius for politics, if they had not a moderation in action singularly curious where superficial speech is so violent . . . the multiplicity of authorities in the American Constitution would long ago have brought it to a bad end. Sensible shareholders, I have heard a shrewd attorney say, can work any deed of settlement; and so the men of Massachusetts could, I believe, work any constitution.” And James Bryce, who served as Britain’s Ambassador to the United States from 1907-13, said that he was dubious of what he called the “tools” provided by the Constitution, but “[t]he defects of the tools are the glory of the workman.” What he meant was that “the American people have a practical aptitude for politics, a clearness of vision and capacity for self-government never equaled in any other nation.” “Such a people,” Bryce concluded, “can work any Constitution.”
I doubt that any foreign observers would say the same thing about the United States now. Political practice today more closely resembles Jefferson’s uncompromising ideals rather than Franklin’s common sense. Indeed, we are approaching the point where Barry Goldwater’s adage: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” will be a description and not a slogan. The problem with even the best ideals is that they become dangerous fictions when taken literally. (Jefferson himself said many crazy things but almost always acted cautiously.)
Since a shared identity probably must be rooted in the nation’s Founding, my modest suggestion is that we elevate the Founder who was not a lawyer or a theorist. Franklin’s experience came from the most practical of pursuits–first as a publisher, then as a scientist, and finally as a diplomat. He was the pioneer of what we now call civic society in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia. As Franklin said in his proposal for what became the University of Pennsylvania, education should cultivate “an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends and family.” So should politics.
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“Trade tensions have re-emerged at a critical moment in the global cycle. Corporate confidence is weak, and we argue that the outcome of trade talks will be key to the global growth outlook.”
JPMorgan piled on, saying the probability of a U.S. recession in the second half of this year has risen to 40% from 25% a month ago, while Barclays now expects a worst case scenario of a recession in 9 months.
All of which is a major problem for global manufacturing as Markit reports thatGlobal PMI surveys, led by the US plunge, signalled that manufacturing downshifted into contraction during May, down an unprecedented 13 straight months.
Business conditions deteriorated to the greatest extent in over six-and-a-half years, as production volumes stagnated and new orders declined at the fastest pace since October 2012. The trend in international trade continued to weigh on the sector, with new export business contracting for the ninth month running. Business optimism fell for the second month in a row and to its lowest level since future activity data were first collected in July 2012.
This real-economy shift fits with the market’s recent regime change:
“The overall market reaction of equities down and yield curves flatter shows a broad re-pricing lower of global growth expectations,” Goldman Sachs’ strategist Ron Gray wrote in a report.
“Macro data have not been very supportive and the 2018 narrative of slowing global growth has re-emerged.”
Markit continues, noting that downturns continued in the intermediate and investment goods industries, which both saw output and new orders fall further during May. Although the consumer goods sector fared better in comparison, with production and new business rising, rates of expansion eased.
For as long as there has been human language, humans have been using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom, from personal relationships between two people to international relationships between government agencies and the public.
This has made it very difficult to figure out what’s going on, both in our lives and in the world. Here are some tips for navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether that be the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal interactions or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:
1 — Understand the fact that humans are storytelling animals, and that whoever controls the stories controls the humans. Mental narrative dominates human consciousness; thought is essentially one continuous, churning monologue about the self and what it reckons is going on in its world, and that monologue is composed entirely of mental stories. These stories can and will be manipulated, on an individual scale by people we encounter and on a mass scale by skillful propagandists. We base our actions on our mental assessments of what’s going on in the world, and those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control.
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
2 — Be humble and open enough to know that you can be fooled. Your cognitive wiring is susceptible the same hacks as everyone else, and manipulators of all sorts are always looking to exploit those vulnerabilities. It’s not shameful to be deceived, it’s shameful to deceive people. Don’t let shame and cognitive dissonance keep you compartmentalized away from considering the possibility that you’ve been duped in some way.
3 — Watch people’s behavior and ignore the stories they tell about their behavior. This applies to people in your life, to politicians, and to governments. Narratives can be easily manipulated and distorted in many different ways, while behavior itself, when examined with as much objectivity as possible, cannot be. Pay attention to behavior in this way and eventually you’ll start noticing a large gap between what some people’s actions say and what their words say. Those people are the manipulators. Distrust them.
4 — Be suspicious of people who keep telling you what they are and how they are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about them. Be doubly suspicious of people who keep telling you what you are and how you are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about you.
5 — Learn to see how trust and sympathy are used by manipulators to trick people into subscribing to their narratives about what’s going on. Every manipulator uses trust and/or sympathy as a primer for their manipulations, because if you don’t have trust or sympathy for them, you’re not going to mentally subscribe to their stories. This is true of mass media outlets, it’s true of State Department press releases which implore you to have sympathy for the people of Nation X, and it’s true of family members and coworkers. Once you’ve spotted a manipulator, your task is to kill off all of your sympathy for them and your trust in them, no matter how hard they start playing the victim to suck you back in.
6 — Be suspicious of anyone who refuses to articulate themselves clearly. Word salading is a tactic notoriously used by abusive narcissists, because it keeps the victim confused and unable to figure out what’s going on. If they can’t get a clear handle on what the manipulative abuser is saying, they can’t form their own solid position in relation to it, and the abuser knows this. Insist on lucid communication, and if it’s refused to you, remove trust and sympathy. Apply this to people in your life, to government officials, and to 8chan propaganda constructs.
7 — Familiarize yourself with cognitive biases, the glitches in human cognition which cause us to perceive things in a way that is not rational. Pay special attention to confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and the illusory truth effect. Humans have an annoying tendency to seek out cognitive ease in their information-gathering and avoid cognitive dissonance, rather than seeking out what’s true regardless of whether it brings us cognitive ease or dissonance. This means we tend to choose what we believe based on whether believing it is psychologically comfortable, rather than whether it’s solidly backed by facts and evidence. This is a weakness in our cognitive wiring, and manipulators can and do exploit it constantly. And, again, be humble enough to know that this means you.
8 — Trust your own understanding above anyone else’s. It might not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than letting your understanding be controlled by narrative managers and dopey partisan groupthink, or by literally anyone else in a narrative landscape that is saturated with propaganda and manipulation. You won’t get everything right, but betting on your own understanding is the very safest bet on the table. It can be intimidating to stand alone and sort out the true from the false by yourself on an instance-by-instance basis, but the alternative is giving someone else authority over your understanding of the world. Abdicating your responsibility to come to a clear understanding of what’s going on in your world is a shameful, cowardly thing to do. Be brave enough to insist that you are right until such time as you yourself come to your own understanding that you were wrong.
9 — Understand that propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. Everyone’s constantly talking about what’s wrong with the world, but hardly any of those discussions are centered around the fact that the public been manipulated into supporting the creation and continuation of those problems by mass media propaganda. The fact that powerful people are constantly manipulating the way we think, act and vote should be at the forefront of everyone’s awareness, not relegated to occasional discussions in fringe circles.
10 — Respect the fact that the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. Think of all the military advancements that have been made in the last century to get an idea of how sophisticated this science must now be. They are far, far ahead of us in terms of research and understanding of the methods of manipulating the human psyche toward ends which benefit the powerful. If you ever doubt that the narrative managers could be advanced and cunning enough to pull off a given manipulation, you can lay that particular doubt to rest. Don’t underestimate them.
11 — Understand that western mass media propaganda rarely consists of full, outright lies. At most, such outlets will credulously publish the things that are told to them by government agencies which lie all the time. More often, the deception comes in the form of distortions, half-truths, and omissions. Pay more attention to discrepancies in things that are covered versus things that aren’t, and to what they’re not saying.
12 — Put effort into developing a good news-sense, a sense for what’s newsworthy and what’s not. This takes time and practice, but it lets you see which newsworthy stories are going unreported by the mass media and which non-stories are being overblown to shape an establishment-friendly narrative. When you’ve got that nailed down, you’ll notice “Why are they acting like this is a news story?” and “Why is nobody reporting this??” stories all the time.
13 — Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it comes to developing your narrative navigating skills. Like literally any skill set, you’ll suck at it for a while. If you learn you’ve been wrong about something, just take in the new information, adjust appropriately, and keep plugging away. Don’t expect to have mastered this thing before you’ve had time to master it. Like anything else, if you put in the hours you’ll get good at it.
14 — Find reliable news reporters who have a good sense for navigating the narrative matrix, and keep track of them to orient yourself and stay on top of what’s going on. Use individual reporters, not outlets; no outlet is 100 percent solid, but some reporters are pretty close on some specific subjects. Click this hyperlink for an article on one way to do build a customized and reliable news stream. Click this hyperlink for a list of all my favorite news reporters on Twitter right now.
How To Make A Solid, Customized News Stream That Isn’t Manipulated By Silicon Valley
15 — Don’t let paranoia be your primary or only tool for navigating the narrative matrix. Some people’s only means of understanding the world is to become intensely suspicious of everything and everyone, which is about as useful as a compass which tells you that every direction is north. Spend time in conspiracy and media criticism circles and you’ll run into many such people. Rejecting everything as false leaves you with nothing as true. Find positive tools for learning what’s true.
16 — Hold your worldview loosely enough that you can change it at any time in the light of new information, but not so loosely that it can be slapped out of your head by someone telling you what to think in a confident, authoritative tone. As Carl Sagan once said, “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
17 — Speaking of confident, authoritative tones, be suspicious of confident, authoritative tones. It’s amazing how much traction people can get with a narrative just by posturing as though they know that what they’re saying is true, whether they’re an MSNBC pundit or a popular conspiracy Youtuber. So many people are just plain faking it, because it works. You run into this all the time in debates on online political forums; people come at you with a supremely confident posture, but if you push them to present their knowledge on the subject and the strength of their arguments, there’s not actually anything there. They’re just accustomed to people assuming they know what they’re talking about and leaving their claims unchallenged, and it completely throws them off when someone doesn’t buy their feigned confidence schtick.
18 — Be aware that sociopaths exist. There are people who, to varying degrees, do not care what happens to others, and these are the types of people who will use manipulation to get their way whenever it serves them. If you don’t care about truth or other people beyond the extent to which you can use them, then there’s no disincentive to manipulating.
19 — Be aware of projection, and be aware of the fact that it cuts both ways: unhealthy people tend to project their wickedness onto others, while healthy people tend to project their goodness. Don’t let your goodness trick you into thinking there aren’t monsters who will deceive and manipulate you, and don’t let sociopaths project their own sinister motives onto you by telling you how rotten you are. This mixes a lot of good people up, especially in their personal lives. Not everyone is good, and not everyone is truthful. See this clearly.
20 — Be suspicious of those who excessively advocate civility, rules and politeness. Manipulators thrive on rules and civility, because they know how to manipulate them. Someone who’s willing to color outside the lines and get angry at someone noxious even when they’re acting within the rules makes a manipulator very uncomfortable. Often times those telling you to calm down and behave yourself when you are rightfully upset are manipulators who have a vested interest in getting you to adhere to the rules set they’ve learned to operate within.
How To Wake Up
“I’ve been putting off writing this article all year, but readers keep asking for it, and since I’ve been writing about mass enlightenment a lot lately I figure I might as well slip it in now.”#enlightenment#spiritualityhttps://t.co/gmxHh267LX
21 — Meditation, mindfulness, self-inquiry and other practices are powerful tools which can help you understand your own inner processes, which in turn helps you understand how manipulators can manipulate you, and how they manipulate others. Just be sure that you are using them for this purpose, not for escapism as most “spiritual” types do. You’re trying to become fully aware of what makes you tick mentally, emotionally and energetically; you’re not trying to become some vapid spiritual bliss bunny. The goal isn’t to feel better, the goal is to get better at feeling. Better at consciously experiencing your own inner world.
22 — Be relentlessly honest with yourself about your own inner narratives and the various ways you engage in manipulation. You can’t navigate your way through the narrative control matrix if you aren’t clear on your own role in it. Look inside and consciously take an inventory.
23 — Understand that truth doesn’t generally move in a way that is pleasing to the ego, i.e. in a way Hollywood scripts are written to appeal to. Any narrative that points to a Hollywood ending where the bad guy gets karate kicked into lava and the hero gets the girl is manufactured. Russiagate and QAnon are both perfect examples of an egoically pleasing narrative with the promise of a Hollywood ending, either by Trump and his cohorts being dragged off in chains or by the “white hats” overcoming the Deep State and throwing all the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in prison for pedophilia. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.
24 — Try to view the world with fresh eyes rather than with your tired old grown-up eyes which have taught you to see all this as normal. Hold an image in your mind of what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world would look like; the sharp contrast between this image and the world we have now allows you see through the campaign of the propagandists to normalize things like war, poverty, ecocide, and impotent electoral systems which keep seeing the same government behavior regardless of who people vote for. None of this is normal.
25 — Know that the truth has no political party, and neither do the social engineers. All political parties are used to manipulate the masses in various ways, and nuggets of truth can and do emerge from any of them. Thinking along partisan lines is guaranteed to give you a distorted view. Ignore the imaginary lines between the parties. You may be certain that your rulers do.
26 — Remain always aware of this simple dynamic: the people who become billionaires are generally the ones who are sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This class has been able to buy up near-total narrative control via media ownership/influence, corporate lobbying, think tank funding, and campaign finance, and are thus able to manipulate the public into consenting to agendas which benefit nobody but plutocrats and their lackeys. This explains pretty much every major problem that we are facing right now.
The Legal Narrative Funnel That’s Being Used To Extradite Assange
How warped interpretations of technicalities in Ecuadorian, British and American law allow for a journalist to be imprisoned for telling the truth while keeping the illusion of democracy.https://t.co/OaBVDeuyax
27 — Understand that nations are pure narrative constructs; they only exist to the extent that people agree to pretend that they do. The narrative managers know this, and they exploit the fact that most of us don’t. Take Julian Assange, perfect example: he was pried out of the embassy and imprisoned by an extremely obvious collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely independently of one another. Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations, the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene, the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just so happened to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it’s with military interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned governments.
28 — Understand that war is the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together. Without the carrot of military/economic alliance and the stick of military/economic violence, the US-centralized empire would cease to exist. This is why war propaganda is constant and sometimes so forced that glaring plot holes become exposed; it’s so important that they need to force it through, even if they can’t get the narrative matrix around it constructed just right. If they ceased manufacturing consent for the empire’s relentless warmongering, people would lose all trust in government and media institutions, and those institutions would lose the ability to propagandize the public effectively. Without the ability to propagandize the public effectively, our rulers cannot rule.
29 — Remember that when it comes to foreign policy, the neocons are always wrong. They’ve been so remarkably consistent in this for so long that whenever there’s a question about any narrative involving hostilities between the US-centralized power alliance and any other nation, you can just look at what Bill Kristol, Max Boot and John Bolton are saying about it and believe the exact opposite. They’re actually a very helpful navigation tool in this way.
30 — Notice how the manipulators like to split the population in two and then get them arguing over how they should serve the establishment. Arguing over whether it’s better to vote Democrat or Republican, arguing over whether it’s better to increase hostilities with Iran and Venezuela or with Syria and Russia, over whether you should support the US president or the FBI, arguing over how internet censorship should happen and whom should be censored rather than if censorship should happen in the first place. The longer they can keep us arguing over the best way to lick the imperial boot, the longer they keep us from talking about whether we want to lick it at all.
31 — Watch out for appeals to emotion. It’s much easier to manipulate someone by appealing to their feely bits rather than their capacity for rational analysis, which is why any time they want to manufacture support for military interventionism you see pictures of dead children on news screens everywhere rather than a logical argument for the advantages of using military violence based on a thorough presentation of facts and evidence. You see the same strategy used in the guilt trips they lay on third-party voters; it’s all emotional hyperbole that crumbles under any fact-based analysis, but they use it because it works. They go after your heart strings to circumvent your head.
32 — Pay attention to how much propaganda goes into maintaining the propaganda machine itself. This is done this because propaganda is just that central to the maintenance of dominant power structures. Much effort is spent building trust in establishment narrative management outlets while sowing distrust in sources of dissent. You’ll see entire propaganda campaigns built around accomplishing solely this.
* * *
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My reward for ten years of blogging is a guest post here. In all seriousness, I’m very grateful to Eugene and his co-conspirators for giving me the opportunity to write about my contribution to Our American Story.
Some of the essays in the book preach the faith that what makes our national experience special are the universal ideals of liberty and equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete by the Constitution. My essay takes the opposite view. What made the United States distinctive was its political pragmatism. The emblem of that approach is Benjamin Franklin, the Founder who is rarely invoked by the Supreme Court. (Though, as Randy would surely point out, the Chief Justice did cite Franklin’s line about “death and taxes” in his opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act.) Franklin famously said at the close of the Constitutional Convention that he supported the proposal in spite of its many flaws. And his literary alter ego in Poor Richard’s Almanack once explained: “In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the want of it.”
Why do I say that our true national creed is pragmatism? Part of the answer is that this was the conclusion of the leading European commentators on the United States well into the twentieth century. Let me give you three examples. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked: “Nothing has made me admire the good sense and the practical intelligence of the Americans,” he wrote, “more than the way they avoid the innumerable difficulties deriving from their Federal Constitution.” Walter Bagehot, the founding editor of The Economist and author of a classic book on The English Constitution, wrote in the 1860s: “Americans now extol their institutions and so defraud themselves of their due praise . . . If they had not a genius for politics, if they had not a moderation in action singularly curious where superficial speech is so violent . . . the multiplicity of authorities in the American Constitution would long ago have brought it to a bad end. Sensible shareholders, I have heard a shrewd attorney say, can work any deed of settlement; and so the men of Massachusetts could, I believe, work any constitution.” And James Bryce, who served as Britain’s Ambassador to the United States from 1907-13, said that he was dubious of what he called the “tools” provided by the Constitution, but “[t]he defects of the tools are the glory of the workman.” What he meant was that “the American people have a practical aptitude for politics, a clearness of vision and capacity for self-government never equaled in any other nation.” “Such a people,” Bryce concluded, “can work any Constitution.”
I doubt that any foreign observers would say the same thing about the United States now. Political practice today more closely resembles Jefferson’s uncompromising ideals rather than Franklin’s common sense. Indeed, we are approaching the point where Barry Goldwater’s adage: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” will be a description and not a slogan. The problem with even the best ideals is that they become dangerous fictions when taken literally. (Jefferson himself said many crazy things but almost always acted cautiously.)
Since a shared identity probably must be rooted in the nation’s Founding, my modest suggestion is that we elevate the Founder who was not a lawyer or a theorist. Franklin’s experience came from the most practical of pursuits–first as a publisher, then as a scientist, and finally as a diplomat. He was the pioneer of what we now call civic society in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia. As Franklin said in his proposal for what became the University of Pennsylvania, education should cultivate “an inclination joined with an ability to serve mankind, one’s country, friends and family.” So should politics.
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One day after James Bullard opened the door for the “patient” Fed to start cutting rates and sending yields and the dollar sliding, moments ago the Fed Chair doubled down on dovishness when in opening remarks delivered to the Chicago Fed, Powell confirmed the Fed’s openness to cut interest rates if necessary, stating that the Fed’s unconventional tools are now conventonial and will “likely be needed in some form in the future” as he pledged to keep a close watch on the escalating trade war between the US and some of the world’s largest economies.
Sparking a renewed dovish kneejerk reaction was Powell’s flashing red headline that the Fed will “act as appropriate” to sustain the expansion, while affirming the the Fed is closely monitoring implications of trade negotiations for the US economic outlook as the Fed does not know how or when trade issues will be resolved.
“We are closely monitoring the implications of these developments for the U.S. economic outlook and, as always, we will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion, with a strong labor market and inflation near our symmetric 2% objective,” Powell said in Chicago.
In a surprising twist, Powell said that with the economy growing, unempolyment low and inflation stable “it’s time to rethink long-run strategies.” Powell also hinted that both QE and ZIRP, and perhaps NIRP are on deck, stating that interest rates so close to zero “has become the preeminent monetary policy challenge of our time,” and admitting that “perhaps it is time to retire the term ‘unconventional’ when referring to tools that were used in the crisis. We know that tools like these are likely to be needed in some form” in the future.”
Translation: not only is the Fed ready to cut rates, but it may take “unconventional” tools during the next recession, i.e., NIRP and even more QE.
Referring to “trade negotiations and other matters,” the Fed Chair said that “we do not know how or when these issues will be resolved.”
As Bloomberg notes, Powell’s speech was dedicated to the Fed’s yearlong goal of reviewing its monetary policy strategies, tools and communication practices. “With the economy growing, unemployment low, and inflation low and stable, this is the right time to engage the public broadly on these topics.”
Curiously, just hours before Powell’s speech, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans brushed aside the idea the Fed needed to cut rates in response to market pressure, in a surprisingly hawkish speech.
Powell, however quickly reversed the market sentiment, and his clearly dovish turn sent both the dollar…
… and 10Y yields sharply lower…
… before both rebounded to pre-comment levels in a kneejerk reaction which we doubt will be sustained.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/31hFHDc Tyler Durden
Most 2020 presidential candidates support government-mandated paid family leave. On the surface, that sounds like a good policy. Supporters are quick to point out that only the U.S. and Papua New Guinea don’t require businesses to provide time off with compensation for new parents.
Patrice Lee Onwuka, a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum, says this argument is “disingenuous.”
As she told John Stossel, most full-time American workers already receive paid leave.
“About 17 percent of workers have paid parental leave…but you jump to 60, 70, 80 percent when you consider people have sick time off, overtime, or all-encompassing personal time.”
These benefits are voluntarily provided even to lower-level employees.
“Why would CVS and Walmart provide this voluntarily?” Stossel asks.
“For an employer to attract…good talent or retain their talent, they need to offer benefits that really resonate with workers,”Onwuka explains. “Paid maternity and paternity leave is one of those benefits.”
“Politicians are so arrogant, Stossel said, “that they now tell people that mandating leave for all employees will be ‘good for business.’ Somehow they don’t know that business knows better what’s good for business.”
In truth, mandated leave turns out to be not only bad for business but bad for most women.
“If we look at how the rest of the world has provided very generous, mandated paid leave plans,” Onwuka says, “we see that it actually has a negative impact on women.”
Why would that be? Because mandatory leave makes companies fearful of hiring young women. “If an employer has a young woman in front of him of childbearing age,” says Onwuka, “he’s thinking, ‘OK, I have to provide paid time off. I have a potential other employee who’s a male.”
Comparing Europe to America, Onwuka explains, “American women are twice as likely to be in senior level positions, managerial positions, then women in Europe….It’s very much tied to these mandates around paid leave and paid time off.”
The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WK360r
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Following its surprising bounce in factory orders in March, April was expected to see contraction (echoing the collapse in PMIs) and it did (dropping 0.8% MoM) and durable goods orders tumbling 2.1% MoM in their final April print.
Factory Orders were revised lower for March (from +1.9% to +1.3%) which prompted April’s 0.8% decline to look slightly better than the expected 1.0% decline.
Ex-Transports, factory orders rose just 0.3% MoM in April and new orders ex-defense for April fall 0.9% after rising 0.5% in March.
However, away from the noise and oscillation of the monthly data, year-over-year, US Factory Orders grew at just 1.0% – the slowest rate of growth since Trump was elected.
And judging by PMIs, this is about to get a lot worse.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2ERM72d Tyler Durden
Most 2020 presidential candidates support government-mandated paid family leave. On the surface, that sounds like a good policy. Supporters are quick to point out that only the U.S. and Papua New Guinea don’t require businesses to provide time off with compensation for new parents.
Patrice Lee Onwuka, a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum, says this argument is “disingenuous.”
As she told John Stossel, most full-time American workers already receive paid leave.
“About 17 percent of workers have paid parental leave…but you jump to 60, 70, 80 percent when you consider people have sick time off, overtime, or all-encompassing personal time.”
These benefits are voluntarily provided even to lower-level employees.
“Why would CVS and Walmart provide this voluntarily?” Stossel asks.
“For an employer to attract…good talent or retain their talent, they need to offer benefits that really resonate with workers,”Onwuka explains. “Paid maternity and paternity leave is one of those benefits.”
“Politicians are so arrogant, Stossel said, “that they now tell people that mandating leave for all employees will be ‘good for business.’ Somehow they don’t know that business knows better what’s good for business.”
In truth, mandated leave turns out to be not only bad for business but bad for most women.
“If we look at how the rest of the world has provided very generous, mandated paid leave plans,” Onwuka says, “we see that it actually has a negative impact on women.”
Why would that be? Because mandatory leave makes companies fearful of hiring young women. “If an employer has a young woman in front of him of childbearing age,” says Onwuka, “he’s thinking, ‘OK, I have to provide paid time off. I have a potential other employee who’s a male.”
Comparing Europe to America, Onwuka explains, “American women are twice as likely to be in senior level positions, managerial positions, then women in Europe….It’s very much tied to these mandates around paid leave and paid time off.”
The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.
from Latest – Reason.com http://bit.ly/2WK360r
via IFTTT
Reality has begun to dawn across Wall Street’s Economists. This year isn’t going to go the way everyone thought. Even as late as last November and December, the optimism was still sharp about how what was taking place at that moment would be nothing more than a transitory soft patch. They still listened to Jay Powell.
Given a Fed that continues to tighten against the backdrop of increasing Treasury supply, J.P. Morgan forecasts 10-year yields will rise to 2.95% by the second quarter of 2019 and to 3.2% by the end of the year.
Incredibly, these projections were put together on December 20, 2018. Powell had just recently reiterated his strong economy view, the one requiring more rate hikes, the Fed pause still only whispers at that point. Curve collapse was a triviality, apparently, in the face of central bank backbone.
The same bank’s same strategists have now thrown in the towel. Not all the way, at least not yet. They are now calling for much lower rates on the “strength” of at least a couple rate cuts.
According to Bloomberg, the bank is now predicting the 10-year will be just 1.75% by the end of 2018 and 1.65% by next March. Pretty stark contrast compared to what JPM’s CEO was saying at this same time last year.
Even so, as the article notes, this isn’t something they think should be feared. Oh no, there’s a lot to be optimistic about, a lot still left in the tank because the Fed will be on the move!
Despite their new forecasts, JPMorgan’s strategists warned against jumping on the current Treasuries rally, saying that they maintain a neutral call for duration. “We are hesitant to initiate longs given the pace of the rally over the last two weeks and the substantial uncertainty that remains around the path forward for trade policy.”
For their part, JPMorgan equity strategists led by Mislav Matejka still see the potential for gains in global stocks before the next American recession, bolstered by policy support and, in the U.S., buybacks.
If you think trade wars and rate hikes are what led us to this point, then the prospects for a trade deal and rate cuts lend themselves an upside out. If enough can go right, still the soft patch. After all, according to this view, the economy would otherwise be booming.
This remains the background case for most Economists. One appearing on BloombergTV was far more direct in revealing himself this way:
“It’s just a mindless bond market rally — once it gets going, it gets going,” the chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank said in a recent interview with Bloomberg TV. “I don’t know who’s trading these markets. It doesn’t feel like its [sic] trading completely logically here.”
This is the distilled wisdom of the mainstream view, this serious malpractice on the part of the media. All throughout the past few years, it has been reported as fact that the US economy was booming; and even more so why it was. QE had worked, therefore the monetary and financial system cannot be at anyone’s issue.
This view was reported as fact despite the fact that it was the contrary, minority position. This wasn’t how it was ever presented, of course, how it was only ever Economists and central bankers who held to it. The long end of the bond curve, indicating the thinking for the vast majority who matter, never once felt the economy was anywhere near the conditions necessary for taking off.
The various financial curves are treated as out-of-the-way niches, some mysterious triviality about which only a few cranks bother to keep track. Jay Powell is described as a towering figure, the man upon whose opinion everything else flows. It is entirely the other way around.
The bond market is what runs the world. Always has. Therefore, even in 2017 this idea the global economy was about to take off was never more than wishful thinking. If the bond market was against it, that skepticism was always the base case in reality. The bond market in addition to being much larger than stocks could ever hope of being, it is made up of agents whose actual practice (and survival) brings them in close contact to the real money of the real economy.
Economists never had any real market support for their view. Not at any point.
And this is why people have such a hard time understanding the way the world goes. When you are taught the backward, mainstream version, the bond market doesn’t make any sense. “It doesn’t feel like it’s trading completely logically here.” Except, the curves have been making the most sense, and have been most consistent in data therefore forecasting than any other place.
Curves are important notices for every economic situation, but you only hear about them when they are inverted. This isn’t some brand new disagreement. MUFG Union Bank’s Economist is of a blue line believer.
The bond market appreciates only too well what the dotted line has meant all along. Nothing has changed since August 2007. There was only ever a much higher likelihood something would go wrong before it could ever go right. In a nutshell, that’s just what May 29 represented – the very thing that went wrong and proved, all over again, how QE was at best an asset swap and at worst a harmful monetary head fake.
You can’t fix a broken monetary system with a head fake. You can try, but in the end you’d only confuse Economists.
With rate cuts becoming more and more the accepted base case even among these people, you really have to go back to the curves and see the last few years evolve exactly how they predicted. The Economists are already partway to admitting this as true. They’ve already gone from BOND ROUT!!! to rate cuts.
This was no trivial journey. BOND ROUT!!! always meant something specific, the inarguable case of recovery. It would’ve been the point at which central bankers had finally convinced the market the liftoff was more than emotional pleading. I wrote last March, with hysteria raging:
In my view, it’s perfectly clear today that to believe the paradigm is changing is to do so from the same blind position of monetary illiteracy. That’s why it’s been to this point nothing but hype.
To now see the mainstream shift toward rate cuts, it doesn’t matter that they will try to say these will help. By the very fact they have given up on the BOND ROUT!!! it shows the boom was only ever hype. Never happened.
There’s was never the majority position. The recovery was always, always the long shot. It was only presented the other way around by a financial media that does the public a tremendous disservice. The bond market never once climbed aboard the boom. And once you see that, you cannot help but appreciate the very real dangers of 2019.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2HUJ6Qy Tyler Durden
