Tag: news

The Real Threat To Democracy Is Corrupting Wealth Inequality

The Real Threat To Democracy Is Corrupting Wealth Inequality

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the top few collect more than 97% of the income from capital. There aren’t any that top the USA, the world’s most extreme kleptocracy. We’re Number 1.

Imagine a town of 1,000 adults and their dependents in which one person holds the vast majority of wealth and political influence. Would that qualify as a democracy? Now imagine that 100 of the 1,000 adults own 90% of all the wealth, collect 97% of all the income from capital and have virtually all the political power. How can a society in which 90% of the populace is decapitalized, disenfranchised and demoralized by political powerlessness be a democracy?

This is America: a kleptocratic autocracy that serves the few at the expense of the many, strip-mining the bottom 90% under the guise of a fraudulent “democracy” in which only the few wield real power. Recall Smith’s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

That our elected government responds only to the super-wealthy and corporations has been well-established: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.

It’s also a fact that the top 10% get virtually all the gains from the nation’s capital, and this wealth is concentrated in the top 0.1%: Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.

Exactly how can a system of governance that is nothing but an invitation-only auction of political favors in which the top 0.1% own more than the bottom 80% be a functional democracy? The answer is it cannot. Politics and government have been reduced to protecting and enriching a neofeudal autocracy while claiming to serve the stripmined public.

This extreme concentration of wealth and power is not accidental; the government’s policies have generated this concentration of wealth which has hollowed out democracy. The super-wealthy didn’t siphon $50 trillion from those earning their living from labor on their own; government policies aided and abetted this vast transfer of wealth.

Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018: $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

The catastrophic consequences of this systemic concentration of wealth and power are also well documented. For example, Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Extreme inequality brings down societies, and America is now a society dominated by extreme inequality.

America is nothing but a vast moral cesspool that the public is told is a pristine pond of “democracy”. Self-enrichment is cloaked as “doing God’s work,” profiteering is sold as “value,” fraud is packaged as “finance” and rapacious monopolies are marketed as “enterprise.”

Institutions have become little more than rackets enriching insiders and the wealthiest few; they have lost moral legitimacy which is the fundamental foundation of democracy and a market-based economy.

As I explain in my new book Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States, moral legitimacy is the foundation of social cohesion. Once moral legitimacy has been lost, social cohesion unravels and the nation falls.

It wasn’t just bad luck that financialization and globalization hollowed out America’s economy and democracy and turned the bottom 90% into debt-serfs and tax donkeys; it was government policies implemented by elected officials and the appointed handmaidens of the super-wealthy. Virtually every major policy implemented by either party served the interests of the super-wealthy and corporations: tax cuts had trivial impacts on the bottom 90% while vastly increasing the wealth of the super-wealthy; the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of corporate “personhood” and “free speech” (a.k.a. the best government we can buy), and the evisceration of the rule of law for corporate fraud, collusion and embezzlement (“too big to fail, too big to jail”).

The Federal Reserve’s free money for financiers distributes gains on the order of 20-to-1 in favor of the super-wealthy: $2 trillion in gains for the bottom 90%, $40 trillion for the top tier.

The list is long and painful proof that the elected government of the United States serves the interests of the top few–a reality masked by expert PR and partisanship.

Partisanship reflects a core structural dynamic: America is now a two-tier society and economy. If you’re an executive at a big Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets and embezzle billions and you’ll never face any personal legal consequences such as being indicted, convicted and imprisoned. (Bernie Madoff’s conviction was a classic Soviet-style show trial to mask the fact that thousands of other white-collar criminals kept their ill-gotten gains and faced no consequences.)

But try being an employee at a local credit union and embezzle $5,000–a prison sentence is very predictable.

If a spoiled-rotten rich kid gets caught with drugs, Mommy and Daddy’s lawyer kicks into gear and gets a suspended sentence plea bargain. The kid from the bottom 90% gets a tenner in the Drug War Gulag. And so on.

America is also a regional two-tier economy/society. When a society kneels down and worships financialization and globalization, it gives all the political and financial power to the already-super-wealthy and corporations who get 97% of the gains from financialization and globalization.

Since the majority of already-super-wealthy and corporate managers reside in coastal metropolitan areas, the tide of new wealth flooding into the hands of the few boosts the economies of these select regions. The Brookings chart below may look like a chart of political polarization, and superficially that’s obvious: the 500 counties Biden won hold 70% of the nation’s GDP while the 2,500 counties Trump won hold 30% of the nation’s GDP.

The real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America and there’s very little commonality in the two economies. One benefited greatly from financialization and globalization, and the other was hollowed out and brought to its knees by financialization and globalization.

Since income and political power flow to capital, the disparity / inequality far exceed the 70/30 split depicted in this chart. The chart showing the soaring wealth of billionaires is a more accurate reflection of inequality in America.

What’s missing from the 70/30 map is the staggering percentage of residents in the wealthiest 500 counties who are precariats living paycheck to paycheck, the ALICE Americans: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.

Is there any wonder that stripmined Americans who sense their powerlessness are attracted to virulent partisanship? The more extreme the pendulum swing of wealth-power inequality, the more extreme the political blowback.

America’s political class has no plan to reverse this destructive tide. Our leadership’s “plan” is something they know well first-hand: bribery and complicity: just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the elites’ profitable pillaging of America and the planet.

The insurrection and coup happened long ago, when financialization and globalization hollowed out the real economy and disempowered the bottom 90%. When the whole rotten palace of corruption collapses in a putrid heap, look no further for the cause than the extremes of wealth-power inequality that rendered “democracy” a convenient facade for the stripmining of the bottom 90%.

Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the top few collect more than 97% of the income from capital. There aren’t any that top the USA, the world’s most extreme kleptocracy. We’re Number 1.

*  *  *

My new book is now available at a 20% discount this month: Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $8.95, print $20). If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/12/2022 – 17:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/336rm2h Tyler Durden

NCAA Recognizes Natural Immunity In Definition Of ‘Fully Vaccinated’

NCAA Recognizes Natural Immunity In Definition Of ‘Fully Vaccinated’

The NCAA has changed their guidelines to recognize natural immunity from a prior COVID infection as part of their definition of “fully vaccinated,” according to ESPN.

“The omicron variant has presented another surge of cases across the country,” said NCAA chief medical officer Brian Hainline. “This guidance was designed to align with the latest public health directives. Given how the pandemic continues to evolve, it’s important that staff on member campuses continue to work with their local and state health officials on protocols most suitable for their locations.”

There’s a catch, however, in that the “fully vaccinated” status will only include athletes who are “within 90 days of a documented COVID-19 infection.”

It’s unclear what “documented” means (positive home test?).

The NCAA still suggests a five-day quarantine period following a positive test, followed by five days of wearing a mask – in line with the CDC’s controversial new guidance.

Natural immunity

As Fee.org notes: “Some evidence, such as a medical study out of Israel published in October, suggests that people with natural immunity actually have more protection from COVID-19 than vaccinated individuals.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institutes of Health and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, was recently asked on CNN about the Israeli study—specifically if people naturally infected with COVID-19 had a lower risk of contracting the virus than those who received the vaccine. He declined to give a clear answer.

“I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that,” Fauci said. “That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response.” -Fee.org

Yet, according to Harvard Medical School professor Martin Kulldrff, “Based on the solid evidence from the Israeli study, the Covid recovered have stronger and longer-lasting immunity against Covid disease than the vaccinated.”

“Hence, there is no reason to prevent them from activities that are permitted to the vaccinated.“

Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/12/2022 – 16:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3qlUnzJ Tyler Durden

The U.S. Immigration System Needs To Do More To Help Uyghurs


zumaamericasthirtythree341020

The world has known for years now that Uyghurs, members of a Turkic ethnic group who number about 13.5 million and mostly live in China, are experiencing persecution by the Chinese government. A number of international observers and human rights advocates argue the Chinese government is attempting genocide, but Uyghurs looking for an escape from China’s brutality have had a difficult time securing relief through America’s refugee and asylum pathways, and their immigration struggles are shared by far too many vulnerable people seeking an escape to the United States.

Under U.S. immigration law, asylum seekers are people who are already present on American soil or at a port of entry and apply for the right to remain in the country. Refugees, on the other hand, apply for resettlement in the U.S. from abroad. Approval to stay in the U.S. under either category requires that applicants prove they have been “persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.” The two pathways are intended to help the world’s most vulnerable people escape danger.

In the past two fiscal years, however, the U.S. has admitted zero Uyghur refugees. Many Uyghurs who have been lucky enough to reach the U.S. through other pathways, like student and travel visas, also face an uncertain future—as Caroline Simon reported for Roll Call yesterday, there are “roughly 800 Uyghurs caught in the backlog of hundreds of thousands seeking asylum in the U.S.” Until they receive asylum, they can’t apply to sponsor stranded family members.

It’s undeniable that Uyghurs broadly fall into the categories outlined for refugees and asylum seekers. In the name of cultural erasure, they’ve been subject to mass sterilization, kept from speaking the Uyghur language, and forced to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Adrian Zenz, senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told NPR that China’s treatment of Uyghurs is “probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.”

Tursunay Ziyawudun, a Uyghur woman interviewed by Reason‘s Noor Greene, recounted that “she spent 11 months in jail for no stated reason.” Ziyawudun was arrested because of her ethnic background; in detention camps, she was tortured with electric equipment, beaten, and raped. The United Nations estimates that up to 1.5 million Uyghurs may be in Chinese internment camps, potentially facing the same treatment as Ziyawudun.

Despite well-documented and widely decried persecution, very few Uyghurs seeking sanctuary in the U.S. have secured approval to settle here. That’s partially a result of where they’re coming from. As Time magazine reports, “It’s next to impossible for Uyghurs in China, most of whom are under extraordinary state surveillance, to access refugee resettlement systems.”

Still, the State Department “says Uyghurs outside of China are currently able to access the refugee resettlement program.” Though the agency doesn’t publicly disclose how many applications are being processed, an estimated 1–1.6 million Uyghurs live outside China. “There are thousands of Uyghur refugees around the world who may be returned to China…if deported,” Tahir Hamut Izgir, a Uyghur asylum seeker in the U.S., told Voice of America.

The disappointing immigration relief for Uyghurs comes on the heels of a whole lot of political talk. Congress previously passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which imposed sanctions on “individuals and entities responsible for human rights abuses” against Uyghurs. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have referred to China’s persecution of Uyghurs as a genocide. Just last month, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, citing China’s “egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang,” the nominally autonomous region within China where the majority of the country’s Uyghurs live. Not long before that, the Biden administration recommended that at-risk Uyghurs receive priority access to U.S. refugee resettlement.

The plight of the Uyghurs waiting on immigration answers points to broader issues in America’s refugee and asylum infrastructure. For one, the U.S. has been taking in astonishingly low numbers of refugees lately, hitting a record low of 11,411 in fiscal year 2021. Over 667,000 asylum seekers are waiting for their cases to be resolved, and they face an average wait time of around 1,600 days, or 54 months. There’s also the issue of the “last-in, first-out” policy, under which asylum applicants who have arrived in the U.S. more recently are processed first. This means many people who have been present in the U.S. for years cannot petition for visas for family members, which propagates what the Center for Migration Studies of New York calls “the ‘other family separation’ crisis.”

Immigration relief for Uyghurs has enjoyed a fair deal of bipartisan support, with figures like Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) saying that “they probably have the most compelling case in the world right now for asylum.” But thousands of vulnerable people around the world could benefit if reforms proposed for Uyghurs—like quicker case adjudication and prioritizing applications from those most at risk—were applied more widely across the U.S. immigration system.

“I’m thankful that people care about what’s happening to my people,” Ziyawudun told Reason. “But I wish there was some kind of practical thing that could be done. Just speed up. Whatever you’ve been doing, just speed it up.” While immigration relief alone won’t solve the plight of the Uyghurs, speeding up those processes is something that the U.S. government should prioritize—and that sense of urgency should guide how we process other vulnerable people seeking refuge here.

The post The U.S. Immigration System Needs To Do More To Help Uyghurs appeared first on Reason.com.

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The U.S. Immigration System Needs To Do More To Help Uyghurs


zumaamericasthirtythree341020

The world has known for years now that Uyghurs, members of a Turkic ethnic group who number about 13.5 million and mostly live in China, are experiencing persecution by the Chinese government. A number of international observers and human rights advocates argue the Chinese government is attempting genocide, but Uyghurs looking for an escape from China’s brutality have had a difficult time securing relief through America’s refugee and asylum pathways, and their immigration struggles are shared by far too many vulnerable people seeking an escape to the United States.

Under U.S. immigration law, asylum seekers are people who are already present on American soil or at a port of entry and apply for the right to remain in the country. Refugees, on the other hand, apply for resettlement in the U.S. from abroad. Approval to stay in the U.S. under either category requires that applicants prove they have been “persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.” The two pathways are intended to help the world’s most vulnerable people escape danger.

In the past two fiscal years, however, the U.S. has admitted zero Uyghur refugees. Many Uyghurs who have been lucky enough to reach the U.S. through other pathways, like student and travel visas, also face an uncertain future—as Caroline Simon reported for Roll Call yesterday, there are “roughly 800 Uyghurs caught in the backlog of hundreds of thousands seeking asylum in the U.S.” Until they receive asylum, they can’t apply to sponsor stranded family members.

It’s undeniable that Uyghurs broadly fall into the categories outlined for refugees and asylum seekers. In the name of cultural erasure, they’ve been subject to mass sterilization, kept from speaking the Uyghur language, and forced to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party. Adrian Zenz, senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told NPR that China’s treatment of Uyghurs is “probably the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust.”

Tursunay Ziyawudun, a Uyghur woman interviewed by Reason‘s Noor Greene, recounted that “she spent 11 months in jail for no stated reason.” Ziyawudun was arrested because of her ethnic background; in detention camps, she was tortured with electric equipment, beaten, and raped. The United Nations estimates that up to 1.5 million Uyghurs may be in Chinese internment camps, potentially facing the same treatment as Ziyawudun.

Despite well-documented and widely decried persecution, very few Uyghurs seeking sanctuary in the U.S. have secured approval to settle here. That’s partially a result of where they’re coming from. As Time magazine reports, “It’s next to impossible for Uyghurs in China, most of whom are under extraordinary state surveillance, to access refugee resettlement systems.”

Still, the State Department “says Uyghurs outside of China are currently able to access the refugee resettlement program.” Though the agency doesn’t publicly disclose how many applications are being processed, an estimated 1–1.6 million Uyghurs live outside China. “There are thousands of Uyghur refugees around the world who may be returned to China…if deported,” Tahir Hamut Izgir, a Uyghur asylum seeker in the U.S., told Voice of America.

The disappointing immigration relief for Uyghurs comes on the heels of a whole lot of political talk. Congress previously passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which imposed sanctions on “individuals and entities responsible for human rights abuses” against Uyghurs. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have referred to China’s persecution of Uyghurs as a genocide. Just last month, the Biden administration announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, citing China’s “egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang,” the nominally autonomous region within China where the majority of the country’s Uyghurs live. Not long before that, the Biden administration recommended that at-risk Uyghurs receive priority access to U.S. refugee resettlement.

The plight of the Uyghurs waiting on immigration answers points to broader issues in America’s refugee and asylum infrastructure. For one, the U.S. has been taking in astonishingly low numbers of refugees lately, hitting a record low of 11,411 in fiscal year 2021. Over 667,000 asylum seekers are waiting for their cases to be resolved, and they face an average wait time of around 1,600 days, or 54 months. There’s also the issue of the “last-in, first-out” policy, under which asylum applicants who have arrived in the U.S. more recently are processed first. This means many people who have been present in the U.S. for years cannot petition for visas for family members, which propagates what the Center for Migration Studies of New York calls “the ‘other family separation’ crisis.”

Immigration relief for Uyghurs has enjoyed a fair deal of bipartisan support, with figures like Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) saying that “they probably have the most compelling case in the world right now for asylum.” But thousands of vulnerable people around the world could benefit if reforms proposed for Uyghurs—like quicker case adjudication and prioritizing applications from those most at risk—were applied more widely across the U.S. immigration system.

“I’m thankful that people care about what’s happening to my people,” Ziyawudun told Reason. “But I wish there was some kind of practical thing that could be done. Just speed up. Whatever you’ve been doing, just speed it up.” While immigration relief alone won’t solve the plight of the Uyghurs, speeding up those processes is something that the U.S. government should prioritize—and that sense of urgency should guide how we process other vulnerable people seeking refuge here.

The post The U.S. Immigration System Needs To Do More To Help Uyghurs appeared first on Reason.com.

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Lawsuit From Former Students Alleges Financial Aid Price Fixing at Elite Universities


studentloans

Sixteen elite universities, including Yale, Brown, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), are named in a lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit claims the named schools violated antitrust regulations by colluding to reduce institutional financial aid packages to students.

The lawsuit was filed by five former undergraduate students of three schools named in the suit. Former students Sia Henry (Duke), Michael Maerlander (Vanderbilt), Brandon Piyevsky (Northwestern), Kara Saffrin (Northwestern), and Brittany Tatiana Weaver (Vanderbilt) all attended their schools with the help of need-based financial aid. They claim in their lawsuit that all of their institutions currently belong or recently belonged to a member organization called the 568 Presidents Group, an association of universities founded in 1998 that the plaintiffs argue “has explicitly aimed to reduce or eliminate price competition among its members. As a result of this conspiracy, the net price of attendance for financial-aid recipients at Defendants’ schools has been artificially inflated.”

The 568 Presidents Group gets its name from Section 568 of the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994, which “sets forth the conditions under which financial aid officers from different colleges and universities may establish common approaches for awarding non-federal, or institutional, student aid.” The most significant provision in the law, and the one the plaintiffs say schools have violated, is that financial aid officials may only communicate across institutions about aid if they practice “need-blind” admissions, which means that they do not discriminate on the basis of an applicant’s ability to pay. In short, the group exists to provide a way for competing universities to work together to the maximum extent allowed by federal law. 

The 568 Presidents Group claims that cooperation between member schools has “result[ed] in a more accurate and reliable assessment of [a] family’s financial circumstances.” The website mentions the need for a standard way to value assets like rental properties owned by students’ families as well as liabilities like “unusually high medical and dental expenses” when determining who gets financial aid and how much. The group also says its methodology is “more equitable and institutional funds will be awarded in a way that supports the maximum number of students.”

But officials at several schools both inside and outside the group have said that its consensus methodology leads member schools to provide less generous financial aid packages compared to some of their peers outside the group. Caesar Storlazzi, Yale’s former director of student financial services, claimed after Yale left the group in 2008, but before it rejoined in 2019, that the methodology employed by the organization hampers the ability of institutions to help needy students.

“By leaving the 568 Group, Yale is now free to give families more aid than they would have gotten under the consensus methodology.” Storlazzi said in 2008. “In other words, the percentage of a family’s income and assets that Yale takes as a parental contribution is now lower than the percentage taken by 568 schools.”

Former Harvard director of financial aid Sally Donahue told the Yale Daily News in 2008 that Harvard never joined the cartel because the consensus methodology would’ve forced it to give need-based financial aid packages smaller than the school preferred.

An anonymous university president surveyed by the Education Conservancy in 2015 referred to the 568 Presidents Group as an “insider’s game” from a “bygone era.”

What’s more, the plaintiffs also allege that several members of the group are not actually 568-compliant because they openly favor the children of alumni and donors when making admissions decisions, and this awareness of applicants’ lack of need “disfavors” students who require institutional assistance to attend.

Iain Murray, the vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes that complex federal regulations surrounding student loans have created a landscape that allows this sort of behavior to proliferate.

“One of the problems with areas where there are complex federal regulations, as there are with student financial aid, is that it makes it much more difficult for market competition to work,” Murray told Reason in an email. “It’s easier to see price competition at work when there are fewer rules. I can’t say whether or not there has been price-fixing in this area, but it’d be easier to tell if that’s the case were federal rules less complicated.”

The ever-increasing cost of college has been a source of frustration and debate for both politicians and American families. Although the schools in the 568 Presidents Group allegedly offer less financial aid than other schools, this is hardly an issue specific to this cohort. There is mounting evidence that the proliferation of federally-backed student loans explains rising tuition costs. Federally-backed loans incentivize colleges to raise tuition costs, because they know families have access to subsidies. If the claims in the lawsuit are true, it suggests colleges are also operating in their own businesslike interests by limiting the number of truly poor students they admit and subsidize in order to minimize the amount of money they need to spend from their own coffers.

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Are You A “Terrorist”? Take This 50 Question Quiz And Find Out!

Are You A “Terrorist”? Take This 50 Question Quiz And Find Out!

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Could you be the kind of person that the government is looking for?  The U.S. Justice Department has just announced that it will be creating a brand new unit “to counter domestic terrorism”, and they are going to need something to show for all of the time, money and energy that they are going to be putting into this new project.  You may be tempted to think that they will be going after the people that have rioted and burned buildings hundreds of times all across this nation over the past couple of years, but that simply is not going to happen.  Instead, they are telling us that this new unit will specifically target “extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies”.  So if you have been critical of the Biden administration, any of our government agencies, or any of our top public health officials, you could be in really big trouble.

To help you out, I have created a 50 question quiz to help you determine if you are a “terrorist”.  Most of these questions are based on statements made by Biden administration officials or on specific government documents that have been publicly revealed.

So are you ready?

Here we go.  For each of the following questions, answer either “yes” or “no”…

#1 Do you ever criticize the government?

#2 Have you ever been banned, shadowbanned or censored on social media for a political opinion that you expressed?

#3 Are you a parent?

#4 Do you attend school board meetings?

#5 Have you ever expressed concern about the education of your children at a school board meeting?

#6 Do you believe in “conspiracy theories”?

#7 Are you suspicious of the FBI?

#8 Do you know who Ray Epps is?

#9 Do you wonder why Ray Epps has never been arrested?

#10 Are you unvaccinated?

#11 Have you ever questioned the efficacy of the COVID vaccines?

#12 Do you have a negative opinion of Dr. Fauci?

#13 Would you consider yourself to be a “constitutionalist”?

#14 Do you believe in “individual liberties”?

#15 Do you know what the 10th Amendment says?

#16 Have you ever referred to anyone in the Democratic Party as a “communist”?

#17 Have you ever referred to any public official as a “globalist”?

#18 Do you know what the “Great Reset” is?

#19 Would you consider yourself to be an opponent of the LGBT agenda?

#20 Have you ever said anything on social media that was critical of illegal immigration?

#21 Have you ever referred to yourself as a “patriot”?

#22 Have you ever used the wrong pronouns when addressing a member of the trans community?

#23 Do you believe that global leaders are conspiring to create a “New World Order”?

#24 Are you a “climate denier”?

#25 Are you opposed to Agenda 21?

#26 Have you ever belonged to a militia group?

#27 Are you worried about “gun control”?

#28 Are you ever critical of the IRS?

#29 Do you ever visit “extremist websites”?

#30 Have you ever attended rallies that promote “extremist causes”?

#31 Do you have “right-wing bumper stickers” on your vehicle?

#32 Would you consider yourself to be a “nationalist”?

#33 Do you believe that your “way of life” is under attack?

#34 Would you consider yourself to be an opponent of Critical Race Theory?

#35 Are you a “prepper”?

#36 Have you ever had any “survivalist training”?

#37 Would you consider yourself to be a “fundamentalist”?

#38 Do you believe that religion should influence politics?

#39 Are you “anti-abortion”?

#40 Are you a military veteran?

#41 Do you believe in a “right to bear arms”?

#42 Have you been involved in stockpiling ammunition?

#43 Have you ever protested at an abortion clinic?

#44 Do you have a negative opinion of the United Nations?

#45 Would you consider yourself to be an evangelical Christian?

#46 Do you ever have questions about the legitimacy of our elections?

#47 Have you lost faith in public health officials?

#48 Are you resentful when you are ordered to wear a mask?

#49 Have you ever said anything negative about the big pharmaceutical companies?

#50 Are you opposed to vaccine mandates?

If you answered yes to none of these questions, you are exactly the kind of citizen that the federal government wants and you have absolutely nothing to worry about.

If you answered yes to between one and ten of these questions, you have some anti-government tendencies but if you start watching CNN a lot more you can still probably turn things around.

If you answered yes to between eleven and thirty of these questions, you are clearly a “troublemaker” and you may be on your way to becoming a terrorist.  You are going to need to watch endless hours of MSNBC and playing glowing documentaries about Dr. Fauci over and over again will be very helpful as well.

If you answered yes to between thirty-one and fifty of these questions, there is no hope.  You are clearly a terrorist and the government is eventually going to be coming for you.

In fact, they are already holding exercises that simulate what it will be like to confront “extremists”.  The following is just one example…

A “realistic” guerrilla war will be fought across two dozen North Carolina counties in the coming weeks, with young soldiers battling seasoned “freedom fighters,” according to the U.S. Army.

According to MSN News, The two-week “unconventional warfare exercise” will be staged from Jan. 22-Feb. 4 on privately owned land. And it will be realistic enough to include the sounds of gunfire (blanks) and flares, the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School said in a news release.

Exact times, locations, and exercise specifics were not provided. However, advance publicity is intended to make sure civilians — including law enforcement officers — don’t mistake the fighting for terrorism or criminal activity, which has happened in the past.

Let me be serious for a moment.

I find all of this to be extremely sad.

We should be finding ways to come together as a nation, but instead the Biden administration just keeps finding ways to make our divisions even deeper.

A house divided will surely fall, and I am deeply concerned about the future of our country.

If we don’t find a way to unite as a nation, we simply are not going to make it.

Unfortunately, our leaders in Washington and the mainstream media just continue to stir up more anger and more hate, and that is a recipe for national suicide.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/12/2022 – 12:22

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3Fh1y0l Tyler Durden

Lawsuit From Former Students Alleges Financial Aid Price Fixing at Elite Universities


studentloans

Sixteen elite universities, including Yale, Brown, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), are named in a lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit claims the named schools violated antitrust regulations by colluding to reduce institutional financial aid packages to students.

The lawsuit was filed by five former undergraduate students of three schools named in the suit. Former students Sia Henry (Duke), Michael Maerlander (Vanderbilt), Brandon Piyevsky (Northwestern), Kara Saffrin (Northwestern), and Brittany Tatiana Weaver (Vanderbilt) all attended their schools with the help of need-based financial aid. They claim in their lawsuit that all of their institutions currently belong or recently belonged to a member organization called the 568 Presidents Group, an association of universities founded in 1998 that the plaintiffs argue “has explicitly aimed to reduce or eliminate price competition among its members. As a result of this conspiracy, the net price of attendance for financial-aid recipients at Defendants’ schools has been artificially inflated.”

The 568 Presidents Group gets its name from Section 568 of the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA) of 1994, which “sets forth the conditions under which financial aid officers from different colleges and universities may establish common approaches for awarding non-federal, or institutional, student aid.” The most significant provision in the law, and the one the plaintiffs say schools have violated, is that financial aid officials may only communicate across institutions about aid if they practice “need-blind” admissions, which means that they do not discriminate on the basis of an applicant’s ability to pay. In short, the group exists to provide a way for competing universities to work together to the maximum extent allowed by federal law. 

The 568 Presidents Group claims that cooperation between member schools has “result[ed] in a more accurate and reliable assessment of [a] family’s financial circumstances.” The website mentions the need for a standard way to value assets like rental properties owned by students’ families as well as liabilities like “unusually high medical and dental expenses” when determining who gets financial aid and how much. The group also says its methodology is “more equitable and institutional funds will be awarded in a way that supports the maximum number of students.”

But officials at several schools both inside and outside the group have said that its consensus methodology leads member schools to provide less generous financial aid packages compared to some of their peers outside the group. Caesar Storlazzi, Yale’s former director of student financial services, claimed after Yale left the group in 2008, but before it rejoined in 2019, that the methodology employed by the organization hampers the ability of institutions to help needy students.

“By leaving the 568 Group, Yale is now free to give families more aid than they would have gotten under the consensus methodology.” Storlazzi said in 2008. “In other words, the percentage of a family’s income and assets that Yale takes as a parental contribution is now lower than the percentage taken by 568 schools.”

Former Harvard director of financial aid Sally Donahue told the Yale Daily News in 2008 that Harvard never joined the cartel because the consensus methodology would’ve forced it to give need-based financial aid packages smaller than the school preferred.

An anonymous university president surveyed by the Education Conservancy in 2015 referred to the 568 Presidents Group as an “insider’s game” from a “bygone era.”

What’s more, the plaintiffs also allege that several members of the group are not actually 568-compliant because they openly favor the children of alumni and donors when making admissions decisions, and this awareness of applicants’ lack of need “disfavors” students who require institutional assistance to attend.

Iain Murray, the vice president for strategy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes that complex federal regulations surrounding student loans have created a landscape that allows this sort of behavior to proliferate.

“One of the problems with areas where there are complex federal regulations, as there are with student financial aid, is that it makes it much more difficult for market competition to work,” Murray told Reason in an email. “It’s easier to see price competition at work when there are fewer rules. I can’t say whether or not there has been price-fixing in this area, but it’d be easier to tell if that’s the case were federal rules less complicated.”

The ever-increasing cost of college has been a source of frustration and debate for both politicians and American families. Although the schools in the 568 Presidents Group allegedly offer less financial aid than other schools, this is hardly an issue specific to this cohort. There is mounting evidence that the proliferation of federally-backed student loans explains rising tuition costs. Federally-backed loans incentivize colleges to raise tuition costs, because they know families have access to subsidies. If the claims in the lawsuit are true, it suggests colleges are also operating in their own businesslike interests by limiting the number of truly poor students they admit and subsidize in order to minimize the amount of money they need to spend from their own coffers.

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Cody Wilson Thwarts Another Attempt To Stop Ghost Guns


ghost3

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is expected to adopt a new rule in the coming weeks with the potential to undermine the DIY gun industry: It will require that the metal parts that hobbyists used to manufacture their so-called ghost guns be registered as legal firearms.

Cody Wilson, the founder of the Austin-based Defense Distributed and a prominent figure in the DIY gun movement, has been planning a countermove that he says will allow his customers to circumvent the new rule: The company has modified its $500 home milling machine so that users no longer need to load it with the partially fabricated metal parts subject to the new rule.

Instead, they’ll be able start from scratch with a solid block of aluminum.

The newest version of the Ghost Gunner, a milling machine that’s roughly the size of home printers, will now be able to “take raw materials…in their primordial state…and turn them into guns,” Wilson tells Reason. Blocks of aluminum will not be subject to the new regulation.

It’s not the first time the federal government has tried to undermine Wilson’s business. In 2013, the State Department ordered him to take down plans posted to his website for his first 3D-printed gun, the Liberator. Wilson sued on First Amendment grounds, which led to a 2018 settlement with federal government, a media firestorm, and a 9th Circuit Court injunction against states trying to ban sharing of the files in 2021.

The new 100-page administrative rule issued by the ATF, which was published to the Federal Register in May 2021 for public review, will change the definition of a firearm to encompass “weapon parts kit[s]…designed to or [which] may readily be assembled, completed, converted, or restored.”

If adopted, it will mean that the federal government will require gun part kits sold online to bear the same serial numbers as do fully manufactured firearms, which could put most companies in the space out of business because customers won’t want to deal with the bureaucratic hurdles of registering their parts.

Wilson says that Defense Distributed is the only DIY gun company pivoting in the face of the upcoming rule, so its real impact will be to drive his competitors off the market. Biden is “giving us, the nation’s premier ghost gun company, a monopoly of the market,” Wilson says.

As justification for the forthcoming rule, the ATF cites an uptick in the number of homemade guns recovered at crime scenes, and the agency says it views unregistered firearms as a growing national security threat. After the Capitol riot, the Department of Homeland Security turned its focus to “homegrown domestic terrorism,” which the White House calls “the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.”

Wilson says the new regulation will have the opposite effect because it will mean that more DIY gunsmiths are buying blocks of aluminum instead of gun kits—the sale of which can be more easily surveilled by law enforcement.

“People are gonna make guns. They’re gonna choose gun privacy. They’re gonna choose ways to acquire weapons outside of government oversight,” he says.

Some critics have accused Wilson of helping to arm far-right activists, claiming that Defense Distributed is a part of a larger project meant to funnel weapons to militia groups aligned with those involved in the Capitol riots. His latest video marking the new product launch makes visual reference to January 6.

Wilson says that Ghost Gunners are being used by many different types of political groups.

“Our perspective has always been global,” he says. “And of course, there’s no level of control that I can affect to make sure that only the right-wing gets access to this equipment.”

When we saw news reports about the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ—the short-lived project started by far-left activists in Seattle—he says he noticed participants carrying homemade guns and wearing the “Come and Take It” patches made by Defense Distributed.

Wilson personally identifies with the “the post-political right” because they’re “the only people actually attempting to… resist this accumulation of centralized power control,” he tells Reason.

He elaborated on the concept of “post-political” in an April 2021 speech at the “Bear Arms ‘n’ Bitcoin” conference, in which he encouraged the audience to focus less on engaging in electoral politics or debate and persuasion and more on maintaining intellectual independence, political sovereignty, and creating things that constrain power in the real world.

“It’s not just that [U.S. politics are] performative, but it’s like, somehow cringeworthy and connected to a pseudo-reality that’s further and further away from what’s actually happening,” he says.

Wilson notes that the ATF’s latest move shows how disconnected the U.S. regulatory state is from reality.

“These people will high-five themselves, like, ‘Well, we solved kit guns and gun crime in America, right?'”

A complete federal ban on DIY guns is a nonstarter in Congress, Wilsons says, but that’s not the case at the state and local level. Defense Distributed is suing New Jersey’s attorney general in a Texas court for his attempts to ban the distribution of gun files, and multiple cities in California have banned the sale and distribution of ghost guns. Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed a law modeled on Texas’s new abortion law that would deputize private citizens to pursue lawsuits against individuals who distribute ghost gun kits.

But Wilson says that path is unlikely to ever be sufficient to halt the home production of firearms.

“There’s a world of things that are not gun parts. We will give you the technology to turn these things into guns and gun parts,” says Wilson.

Four years ago, Wilson’s personal legal troubles caused him to temporarily step back from his role at Defense Distributed. In 2018, he was indicted for paying for sex with a 16-year-old girl he met through a dating site for adults, though his legal team at the time argued he wasn’t aware that she was a minor who had lied about her age to sign up for the site. He ended up pleading guilty to a third-degree felony charge, was sentenced to seven years of probation, and had to register as a sex offender for that period.

“You can’t choose your messenger,” Wilson tells Reason. “I don’t presume to be a spokesperson for everything happening in the movement, which I clearly fathered. At the same time, when [Defense Distributed has] a technical innovation, I’m gonna show the way. I’m not gonna wait for you to figure it out or to commercialize it.”

A lesson that Wilson says he came away with from his prior fights with the federal government is that politicians and regulators care most about how they are perceived and that they will back down quietly—as long as those challenging their authority are careful not to publicly embarrass them too much.

The State Department agency previously responsible for regulating ghost gun files gave up its legal fights, which enabled Wilson to make the online library of gun files—DEFCAD—available once again. Regulation shifted to a division of the Department of Commerce, which allows DEFCAD to host, but not generate or sell, the files.

“They literally just wrote how we did DEFCAD into their regulations,” says Wilson. “So, there’s this process of accommodation. Power never admits that it loses, but it does have to tactically retreat.”

“Power is essentially impotent in these places.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller; camera by John Osterhoudt; additional footage by Mark McDaniel; intro graphics by Regan Taylor; additional graphics by Nodehaus.

Photos: Karen Ducey/ZUMA Press/Newscom

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Dollar Dumped After Soaring CPI, Crypto & Crude Jump

Dollar Dumped After Soaring CPI, Crypto & Crude Jump

Hot CPI and hawkish FedSpeak were just too much for BTFDers to hold on to gains. Highest headline CPI in 39 years, 9th straight month of real wage loss, and Fed’s Bullard going full-hawktard…

  • *Fed’s Bullard: Four Rate Rises in 2022 Now Appear Likely –WSJ

  • *Bullard: 2021 Liquidity Can Be Removed With Likely Little Disruption –WSJ

  • *Bullard: Early Start to Rate Hikes May Avoid More Hawkish Rate Path –WSJ

  • *Bullard: March Rate Rise Is Very Likely Amid High Inflation –WSJ

…and everyone knows you never go full hawktard…

Small Caps underperformed today, but all the majors followed a similar track – rallying immediately on the CPI print, all dumping at the cash open, BTFD’ers piling in as Europe closed, then from around 2pm ET (margin calls?), things faded. Nasdaq was the best performer with the Dow holding on to unchanged and S&P small green…

For context, the S&P has rallied in the first 30 minutes after the release in 9 of the last 13 months on CPI day (with no co-movement link to whether it was a beat or a miss), but as the chart below shows, that initial surge has (on average) tended to normalize…

Source: Bloomberg

Also of note, today was the weakest dollar response on a CPI day since Feb 2018…

Source: Bloomberg

Nasdaq bounced perfectly off its 200DMA, rallied all the way up to its 100DMA, then faded today…

Goldman’s Sentiment indicator is at the lowest level in 86 weeks… back to its worst since March 2020’s collapse…

The Dollar was monkeyhammered lower again today, tumbling to two-month lows and testing its 100DMA…

Source: Bloomberg

In bond-land, it was mixed today with the belly outperforming and the wings weakest (2Y and 30Y +2bps or so, 5-10Y -1bp)

Source: Bloomberg

But, things are changing, with 10Y yields down a couple of bp to 1.72% (and over 8bps off the 1.80% top we saw earlier this week).

Source: Bloomberg

Real Yields jumped higher on the day…

Source: Bloomberg

Goldman’s Chris Hussey suggests a myriad of factors may be behind a top forming in 10-year bond yields, including:

(1) a potential expectation that we will soon see a peak in US inflation (so the next trade is for easing pressures),

(2) the notion that several Fed funds rate hikes are already priced into markets, and

(3) the relative attractiveness of US yields relative to Europe and Japan (a factor that has been in the markets for years, putting a cap on long-term US yields).

Also today, we are seeing more signs that the latest virus wave may be close to a peak — an event that could provide some relief as supply chains reopen

Cryptos were also bid today with Bitcoin tagging $44k…

Source: Bloomberg

And Ethereum rallied up to $3400…

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin’s correlation with global stocks has surged back to its highest since Oct 2020…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar was clubbed like a baby seal back into the red for the year…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold continued its rebound, nearing $1830 once again…

WTI surged ahead today, topping $83 for the first time since early Nov 2021…

NatGas surged higher today amid arb-demand from Europe and a sudden cold-weather front. The 13% jump is the biggest daily spike since Nov 2018…

Finally, given the major rebound in oil prices, Biden’s SPR-release improvement in the retail gas price is likely over…

And that will likely mean this chart moves lower…

Get back to work, Mr.Biden.

Tyler Durden
Wed, 01/12/2022 – 16:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3GpXnjZ Tyler Durden

Prof. Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern) on the Emory Law Journal Controversy

From his Chronicle of Higher Education article (registration required):

It is now notorious that the Emory Law Journal commissioned and then tried to censor, as “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive,” an article that denied the existence of systemic racism. When the author refused to bowdlerize his piece, the journal rejected it. Two other contributors to the same issue of the journal withdrew their articles in protest. This has been portrayed as a familiar left/right fight, except for one detail: One of the authors who withdrew is on the left. Some have been asking, Who is that guy, and what was he thinking?

I’m that guy. I am urgently concerned about systemic racism, which I have written about extensively, but I withdrew to protest the illiberalism that has these student editors in its grip. That illiberalism is bad for the university and bad for racial equality. It reflects an increasingly influential conception of racial equality that is indifferent to the welfare of the people it purports to help. This isn’t a left/right thing.

The law journal had invited papers for a symposium honoring Michael Perry, one of the most important living constitutional theorists. An invitation of this sort normally includes a commitment to publish if basic scholarly standards are met. One invitee was the University of San Diego professor Larry Alexander, whose piece engaged with Perry’s work on racial discrimination. Alexander argued that the principal causes of Black poverty are not racism but the cultural factors that have produced family disintegration, which in turn have produced poor educational achievement and crime.

The Emory editors told Alexander that they would not publish his essay unless he deleted an entire section of his discussion. Their initial memo declared that “our comments are merely suggestions and you should feel free to incorporate or dismiss these suggestions as you see fit.” It noted that “as a prudential matter, the refutation of the presence of systemic racism might be a highly controversial viewpoint.” But when it became clear that Alexander would stick to that thesis, the editors evidently changed their minds. The next email was an ultimatum. It conceded that “there are fair points of intellectual disagreement that would not necessarily warrant the extreme action of withdrawing our publication offer.” But, they said, his piece was “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive.”

“Crucially,” they declared, “the discussion on racism is not strongly connected to your commentary on Professor Perry’s work, which is the focus of the issue and the purpose behind the publication opportunity offered.” (If you read the whole piece, you’ll see that this is obviously false.) …

I don’t agree with Alexander’s description of the world. I have fought with him in the past. (Jonathan Turley offers a good critique of his essay.) But it is a possible world, he offers evidence for it, and it is important to know whether he is right. The editors do not allege falsity or offer any evidence of scholarly dereliction. It’s been claimed that he resisted editing, but the editors did not ask for his claims to be better supported. They demanded the deletion of the entire final third of the article….

The editors think that academic work ought not to describe what the scholar takes to be reality if revealing or calling attention to that reality is “hurtful” and “divisive.” That notion, which is increasingly common, attacks the scholarly enterprise at its root….

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