Month: September 2017

In a serious rebuke for President Trump (and perhaps moreso for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), ousted judge and alt-right favorite Roy Moore has won the Alabama Republican Primary by a landslide.

The Steve Bannon-backed candidate, who defied court orders to remove the Ten Commandments from his courtroom and refused to recognize gay marriage after the Supreme Court’s June 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, is leading by 13.8 points with 42% of the votes counted, but Bloomberg has now called the result…

• *MOORE DEFEATS STRANGE AS TRUMP-BACKED SENATOR LOSES GOP PRIMARY

Source: NYTimes

Interestingly, former Trump deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka, who backed Moore, said despite Trump backing the establishment favorite, a Moore victory strengthens Trump…

“But guess what happens – when Judge Moore wins on Tuesday, it will strengthen the president because now he’ll be able to go to the establishment GOP – to the swamp dwellers and say, ‘Hey guys, we are back on my agenda. This wasn’t worth it.’

 

So, the president is going to stay – he’s going to return to the Make America Great Again agenda. We just have to help him, and we’re going to do it from the outside by endorsing people like Judge Moore.”

*  *  *

As we detailed earlier, after weeks of increasingly bitter and expensive campaigning pitching Steve Bannon-backed former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (well-known anti-establismentarian) against President Trump-backed Senator Luther Strange (establishmentarian), judgment day has finally arrived.

Heading in the polls had Moore a strong favorite (but Strange showing well in recent weeks)

With polls having closed at 8pmET, early results favored Moore heavily.

However, as Politco reported this evening, President Donald Trump began distancing himself from a Luther Strange loss before ballots were even cast, telling conservative activists Monday night the candidate he’s backing in Alabama’s GOP Senate primary was likely to lose — and suggesting he'd done everything he could do given the circumstances.

Trump told conservative activists who visited the White House for dinner on Monday night that he’d underestimated the political power of Roy Moore, the firebrand populist and former judge who’s supported by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, according to three people who were there.

And Trump gave a less-than full-throated endorsement during Friday’s rally.

While he called Strange “a real fighter and a real good guy,” he also mused on stage about whether he made a “mistake” by backing Strange and committed to campaign “like hell” for Moore if he won.

Trump was encouraged to pick Strange before the August primary by son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner as well as other aides, White House officials said. He was never going to endorse Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks, who has at times opposed Trump’s agenda, and knew little about Moore, officials said.

*  *  *

HotAir.com explained earlier how to interpret the result (and the likely fallout)…

If Strange shocks the world, it’ll be Trump’s crowning glory as president (so far).

He’ll be credited for singlehandedly dragging a lackluster establishmentarian past a well-known populist in a very red state.

 

His influence over the Republican base will be seen as total and unassailable.

 

Not even the combined forces of Steve Bannon, Sarah Palin, Sebastian Gorka, Nigel Farage, and Breitbart could counter the gravitational pull of the MAGA north star, as it turned out.

If Strange doesn’t shock the world, if he goes down in flames despite Trump’s best efforts for him over the past two weeks, populism, not Trumpism, will be seen as dominant among the base.

Bannon will exult (privately) that he and Moore taught Trump a hard lesson, that he can’t expect rank and file Republicans to line up behind him unless he sticks to a populist agenda.

 

Depending on the margin, Trump may be left sweating out a way to spin the defeat.

• If Strange loses by a few points, it’s easy — “Big Luther got close with my help, ran a good race!”
• If he loses by 16, not so easy. Trump will blame McConnell and voter unhappiness at Senate paralysis on ObamaCare but a landslide loss for his guy is a rebuke any way you slice it.

*  *  *

So, it appears the trend looks like that last bullet point comes into play – watch for the blame game tweets.

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Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

For millennia, people believed that the sun revolved around the earth, appearing, as it did, on the eastern horizon in the morning and setting on the western horizon in the evening.

Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos is generally credited with the concept that the universe is heliocentric, with all the planets revolving around the sun. Yet it took a further eighteen centuries before Nicolaus Copernicus came along and convinced people that this was the case.

So, we can be forgiven if we educated modern-day people sometimes have difficulty in understanding that gold is the monetary sun.

Even those of us who have been tracking gold’s progress for decades frequently give in to the ease of quoting gold’s value in terms of fiat currency – most commonly in US dollars.

And yet, we have it the wrong way round. Gold is in fact the centre of the economic universe, and all the fiat currencies (including cryptocurrencies) revolve around gold.

But, isn’t this an exercise in hair-splitting? After all, does it really matter whether we acknowledge “orocentricity”? Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?

Well, no, it doesn’t. For those of us who deal frequently (or entirely) in US dollars, there would be an inclination to say that, for more than four years, gold has been essentially stagnant, varying no more than $200 an ounce. But, during that time, the US dollar has risen against major currencies. Although the price of gold has risen in this period, the US dollar has risen more.

More to the point, this has been no accident. A major effort has existed to repeatedly knock down the value of gold in relation to the dollar. This is only possible in an environment in which public faith in the banking system and the stock market remain high. As soon as those two confidence bubbles burst, the dollar will decline rapidly in relation to gold, and gold will once more return to its intrinsic value, just as it has done time and time again for over 5,000 years.

It’s interesting to note that, throughout history, banks and governments have fiddled with the value of currencies, from the devaluation of the denarius in ancient Rome, through the increased mixture of copper in the coins, to the successful introduction of paper currency in China in the seventh century. (The practice later took off in Europe in the seventeenth century and continues today.)

Over the millennia, mankind has used cattle, tobacco, seashells, even tulips as currency, yet each of these has failed at some point. More importantly, all paper currencies that have ever existed, except the current ones, have not only failed, but have gone to zero in worth.

Which brings us around to gold once more. The “barbarous relic,” as John Maynard Keynes called it, has easily outlived his opinion of it. But then, according to his contemporary, Friedrich Hayek, Mister Keynes was an exceptionally intelligent man who was so convinced of his superiority that he based all his economic theory on what he learned at Cambridge and never even bothered to attain a full education of Austrian economics, or even classical economics. Yet all world banks and governments today operate on the principles set down by the misinformed Mister Keynes.

Readers of this publication will be aware that the world is nearing an economic collapse of historic proportions. In attempting to understand the price of gold in the future, such notables as Eric Sprott, Peter Schiff, Jim Rickards, James Turk, Jim Sinclair, and many others have all predicted that gold would have risen to at least $5,000 by now.  Conversely, deflationist Harry Dent predicted that gold would drop below $750 by 2015.

Are all of these men fools? Far from it. They’ve merely been premature. As Eric Sprott has repeatedly stated, “I tend to confuse inevitable with imminent.” Even Harry Dent could conceivably still prove to be correct. A crash in the markets is almost certain to create an immediate downward spike in the price of gold, prior to the creation of currency by the central banks that would immediately follow, sending gold, eventually, to an unprecedented high price. Such a crash would predictably cause a gold mania. $5,000 is in no way an unrealistic number.

Will it stop there? Well, in spite of the fact that virtually no one is even considering the possibility now, gold could conceivably go to $50,000, $500,000, $5,000,000, or beyond. Whilst this would appear to be an absolute absurdity to us at present, if hyperinflation kicks in, in the US, as it has in so many previous cases of currency collapses, there is literally no limit to how high the price can go. (I keep on my desk a $100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwean bank note from 2008 as a reminder.)

If that’s the case, would it also be true that gold can’t be overpriced? In a word, no. Manias have a way of overshooting – creating prices that go far beyond common sense. In a mania, those who are knowledgeable keep their heads, whilst those who don’t understand the dramatic price rise tend to assume that there’s no limit as to how high it can go. They’re the creators of bubbles, and a bubble can exist in gold, as in any other investment.   

But a gold bubble, like any other bubble, would be temporary. Eventually, gold would return to its intrinsic value. It’s been said that 2,000 years ago an ounce of gold could buy a good toga and a pair of sandals. Today, an ounce of gold will still buy a good suit and a pair of shoes. If gold were to go to, say, $10,000 soon, it would be in a bubble. But, if, with inflation, the price of a good suit with shoes were to rise to $10,000, then gold would be quite comfortable at that level.

If gold rises well beyond the price of a suit and shoes as a result of a mania, those who know precious metals well will be seen to sell, and move the proceeds into something that’s underpriced at the moment. Gold will once again settle at a natural level.

Long after fiat currencies like the dollar, the euro, the SDR, bitcoin, etc. have gone the way of the dodo, gold will still be around and will remain the centre of the economic universe.

Although gold will outlive us all, we can, by understanding “orocentricity,” provide ourselves with an insurance policy against the ravages of currency failure.

*  *  *

For thousands of years, owning gold has been the ultimate way to store and protect your wealth. However, as the US speeds closer to widespread economic collapse, there are more steps you should take now to survive the turmoil with your wealth intact. You’ll find the details in our Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse. Click here to download your complimentary PDF copy now.

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As Hillary Clinton tours the country desperately trying to explain “What Happened” during the 2016 election, she aggressively ramped up her rhetoric game to an 11 during a recent interview with Charlie Rose.  After saying that Trump has authoritarian tendencies, Clinton went on to compare him to Putin and said that she can only hope he hasn’t “ordered the killing of people and journalists and the like.”

Clinton: “I don’t think he really values democracy, Charlie.”

 

Rose:  “He doesn’t value democracy? So he’s not a ‘democrat,’ little ‘d?'”

 

Clinton:  “No, he’s not, he’s a top-down guy.”

 

Rose:  “He’s an authoritarian?”

 

Clinton::  “He has tendencies toward authoritarianism.”

 

Rose:  “So, he’s no different than Putin?”

 

Clinton:  “Well, hopefully he hasn’t ordered the killing of people and journalists and the like.”

Of course, if Trump is truly that bad then it’s only a matter of time before he’s breaking federal laws, deleting emails subject to congressional subpoenas, destroying evidence with hammers and sending Melania out to meet privately with the Attorney General of the United States when criminal investigations are at risk of “going too far”…oh wait, that was Hillary.

Oh well, here is the clip anyway:

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Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The answer is not another $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay for another raft of declining-value credentials.

So let's say we want to set up a system to help students choose a career that fits their aptitudes and interests. What would we do? How about:

1. Give them zero (or superficial) aptitude and career-related tests.

2. Provide a few minutes with a counselor who knows nothing about them, their aptitudes or potential career-related interests.

3. Design the high school education system to provide near-zero knowledge of finance, debt, economics, how the economy functions and what the world of work demands of workers.

4. Denigrate (subtly or directly) non-college career options, channeling those who aren't sure into 4-year colleges, higher education paid with student loans designed to maximize profiteering.

5. Force them to choose a major or field of study at 17 or 18 years of age, despite their lack of real-world experience and objective knowledge of how the economy functions and their own aptitudes/character traits.

6. Disconnect this higher education from real-world work places so they exit higher education with little actual knowledge of the skills employers need.

7. When the student graduates after borrowing a fortune and discovers their diploma has low value in the marketplace or is in a field they've found they loathe, then suggest the "solution" is to borrow another fortune and invest more years in obtaining another credential.

This is the American education-career maze–ineffective, self-defeating, wasteful, irrational, and apparently designed to maximize student confusion, poor choices and profiteering by higher education and the student-loan racketeers.

As if this wasn't bad enough, what do we decide to teach our students if careers might be significantly different in 10 or 20 years? Yes, math, the basics of science and communication skills will remain useful as a foundation, but these basics aren't enough to prepare students for a fast-changing emerging economy/4th Industrial Revolution.

Clearly, it would be enormously beneficial to teach the skills needed to learn on one's own and adapt successfully to changing circumstances. The current system is a hierarchy of credentialing that enriches those dispensing and funding the credentialing.

Our system's response to those left behind, those with inadequate skills and those who chose unwisely is always: get another credential, at enormous expense. Nobody tells students that credentials are in over-supply and are therefore losing their value.

Value and profits flow to what's scarce and in demand. Trying to reach the top of the credential pyramid is a crowded race, and the losers are left with debt and wasted years they could have spent actually learning useful knowledge bases and skills–in effect, pursuing a self-directed path of accrediting yourself.

The education-career maze doesn't have to be so self-defeating, costly, convoluted or ineffective. My book The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy lays out a model of higher education based on workplace apprenticeships in all fields, from carpentry to chemistry to sociology, from Day One, a structure that dramatically lowers costs while providing an education based on real-world acquisition and use of knowledge and skills in the workplace, not sitting in a chair watching a lecture.

Technology is a core part of improving results while lowering costs by 90%. Consider this article: Imagine how great universities could be without all those human teachers.

I describe the process of accrediting yourself in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy, which also details the eight essential skills needed to navigate the emerging economy.

What's the emerging economy/4th Industrial Revolution? It's not so much the replacement of human labor by robots as the augmentation of human skills with technology, and the focus on a simple but profound source of value creation: what's scarce and in high demand? What's abundant and not in demand?

The point of my book is to lay out a pathway of learning how to learn on our own and acquiring the soft skills needed to collaborate, communicate and manage teams/projects effectively, regardless of the field of endeavor.

How can we expect young students with little life experience to choose wisely when they don't even understand how the economy works? The current education-career maze assumes that some basic math and science knowledge is all students need to figure out their role in a fast-changing economy that they don't even understand.

The inadequacy of our crazy-making education-career maze boggles the mind. We need to do much, much better, not just for our students but for our society. The answer is not another $1 trillion in student loan debt to pay for another raft of declining-value credentials. We need a new system, and fast. Solutions abound, but not within the current crazy-making education-career maze.

Here's a snapshot of the workforce's education level:

Even the most credentialed workers' earnings have stagnated:

And here's your wunnerful federal government, enforcing debt-serfdom on college students to maximize the profits of the student-loan racket:

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. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print, $5.95 audiobook) For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

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California, the state which single-handedly turned Elon Musk into the billionaire that he is today by forcing taxpayers to subsidize his unprofitable electric vehicle scam via “Zero Emission Vehicle” credits, is now considering a full ban of combustion-engine cars by as early as 2030. The potential ban was discussed by Mary Nichols of the California Air Resources Board, the same folks who decided to regulate cow farts last year, who told Bloomberg that Governor Jerry Brown has expressed interest in a ban.

Governor Jerry Brown has expressed an interest in barring the sale of vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines, Mary Nichols, chairman of the California Air Resources Board, said in an interview Friday at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. Brown, one of the most outspoken elected official in the U.S. about the need for policies to combat climate change, would be replicating similar moves by China, France and the U.K.

 

“I’ve gotten messages from the governor asking, ‘Why haven’t we done something already?’” Nichols said, referring to China’s planned phase-out of fossil-fuel vehicle sales. “The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California.”

 

California has set a goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050. Rising emissions from on-road transportation has undercut the state’s efforts to reduce pollution, a San Francisco-based non-profit said last month.

 

“To reach the ambitious levels of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we have to pretty much replace all combustion with some form of renewable energy by 2040 or 2050,” Nichols said. “We’re looking at that as a method of moving this discussion forward.”

 

“There are people who believe, including who work for me, that you could stop all sales of new internal-combustion cars by 2030. Some people say 2035, some people say 2040,” she said. “It’s awfully hard to predict any of that with precision, but it doesn’t appear to be out of the question.”

Of course, the irony that seems to be lost on Jerry Brown and Mary Nichols is that, according to Morgan Stanley, electric cars generate more CO2 than they save.  As a stark reminder to our left-leaning political elites who created these companies with massive taxpayer funded subsidies in the United States, Morgan Stanley pointed out that while electric cars don’t burn gasoline they do have to be charged using electricity generated by coal and other fossil fuels.

This is where Tesla, along with China’s Guoxuan High-Tech fall short.

 

“Whilst the electric vehicles and lithium batteries manufactured by these two companies do indeed help to reduce direct CO2 emissions from vehicles, electricity is needed to power them,” Morgan Stanley wrote. “And with their primary markets still largely weighted towards fossil-fuel power (72% in the U.S. and 75% in China) the CO2 emissions from this electricity generation are still material.”

 

In other words, “the carbon emissions generated by the electricity required for electric vehicles are greater than those saved by cutting out direct vehicle emissions.”

 

Morgan Stanley calculated that an investment of $1 million in Canadian Solar results in nearly 15,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide being saved every year. For Tesla, such an investment adds nearly one-third of a metric ton of CO2.

Meanwhile, despite Brown’s desire for “Hope & Change,” even the U.S. Energy Information Administration says that “renewables” will represent less than 20% of electricity generation in the U.S. by 2040.

Of course, the problem is that a California ban on combustion engine cars would effectively be the same as a full U.S. ban given the size of the California market. 

Embracing such a policy would send shockwaves through the global car industry due to the heft of California’s auto market. More than 2 million new passenger vehicles were registered in the state last year, topping France, Italy or Spain. If a ban were implemented, automakers from General Motors Co. to Toyota Motor Corp. would be under new pressure to make electric vehicles the standard for personal transportation in the most populous U.S. state, casting fresh doubts on the future of gasoline- and diesel-powered autos elsewhere.

The end result of this effort to ‘save the environment’ will be more expensive vehicles, landfills full of lithium-ion batteries and more coal-fired generation plants…but, somehow we suspect those ‘inconvenient facts’ are lost on our politicians and enviros who seem determined to subsidize Elon’s trip to Mars.

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Authored by Kyle Perisic via CampusReform.org,

A California State University, Fresno professor is defending his tweet stating that “Trump must hang,” which led to his suspension earlier this year.

Lars Maischak spoke publicly about the incident for the first time in an interview with Politico published Sunday, saying he was merely describing a possible outcome, and was not endorsing violence against President Trump.

Maischak tweeted, “To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better. #TheResistance #DeathToFascism.”

“You can’t honestly regret saying something that was true just because of the consequences,” Maischak, who openly identifies as a Marxist, told Politico.

 

“I’m with [Martin] Luther on that one. Here I stand, I cannot help it.”

Maischak then tried to spin the situation into an issue of “academic freedom” and not an incitement of violence by claiming he was just spitballing his ideas over a non-academic social media platform.

After the attack this summer on Congressman Scalise, Fox News referenced Maischak and other left-wingers and said that they “bear responsibility for unsettling political discourse that has crossed the line of civility and could spawn acts such as” the shooting.

Maischak, however, insisted that his tweets were intended for academic purposes only, saying he was only trying to highlight the historical fact that the leaders of fascist governments have often been executed by political opponents.

In addition to the tweet calling for Trump’s execution, Maischak also expressed a desire “for the execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.” The tweets were so serious that the FBI investigated Maischak because of them.

While the teacher’s union to which Maischak belongs doesn’t explicitly offer protections for social media use on a personal account, Fresno State’s Faculty Senate is reportedly developing a policy related to such issues, though claims it has nothing to do with Maischak’s case.

Meanwhile, Maischak has conspired that his suspension came as a result from pressure from conservative donors to the school.

Specifically, he believes that Michael Der Manouel—a Fresno State alumnus, donor to the school’s football team, and local talk radio contributor—pressured the school to prevent him from teaching during the spring semester, though his  only evidence of this claim is that Der Manouel and president of the school had a meeting together.

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Just in time for the weekend, the Associated Press reported on Friday that the Department of Homeland Security had notified 21 states earlier that day that their election systems had been targeted by malicious cyber actors. The states and DHS quickly jumped to the conclusion that Russia had ordered the cyberattacks, even though it was reported that the identity or identities of the perpetrators were inconclusive Yet, the news spread like wildfire after readers had been primed as reports of possible infiltartion of state election systems had circulated for nearly a year. Even so, for many states, the call Friday from the Department of Homeland Security was the first official confirmation that their election systems had, in fact, been targeted by hackers.

Federal officials said that in most of the 21 states, the targeting was preparatory activity such as scanning computer systems. Importantly, vote-talling systems were not targeted.

But in a stunning reversal – one which we doubt will put endless rumors of Russian cyberinterference to bed – the AP now reports that DHS has told Wisconsin that the Russian government was not involved in the cyber-targeting.

In an email to the state’s deputy elections administrator that was provided to reporters at the Wisconsin Elections Commission meeting on Tuesday, Homeland Security said that initial notice of Russian involvement was made in error. Also, as we noted at the time, the government did not originally assign blame to the Russians when news of the alleged "scanning" initially broke on Friday although most medias jumped at the opportunity to blame Putin.

Infuriated by the error, some state officials said that DHS should provide an expalanation for the errror, or at least issue an apology to state elections officials, who were understandbly unnerved by the news of Russian involvement.

“Based on our external analysis, the WI IP address affected belongs to the WI Department of Workforce Development, not the Elections Commission,” said the email from Juan Figueroa, with Homeland Security’s Office of Infrastructure Protection.

It wasn’t immediately known if Homeland Security made similar mistakes with any of the other 20 states. Figueroa did not immediately reply to an email seeking an explanation of how the mistake was made.

Homeland Security initially told the Elections Commission that the Russians scanned the state’s internet-connected election infrastructure, likely seeking specific vulnerabilities to access voter registration databases.

“Either they were right on Friday and this is a cover up, or they were wrong on Friday and we deserve an apology,” Mark Thomsen, the commission’s chairman, said in light of the new email.

Wisconsin’s chief elections administrator Michael Haas told AP that Homeland Security had assured the state that it had not been targeted – by Russians, or anybody else, for that matter.

“Wisconsin was not provided any information that indicated before the November election that Russian government actors were targeting election systems,” Haas said. He said one theory is that Homeland Security saw suspicious activity from IP addresses targeting state election systems in other states and assumed that was the intent in Wisconsin as well.

Others were apparently in shock: “It’s been a difficult process trying to piece all of this together,” said Wisconsin Elections Commission spokesman Reid Magney. “We’re trying to understand what happened.”

Furthermore, Wisconsin’s chief information officer, David Cagigal, told the elections commission that Wisconsin had never been told by Homeland Security, prior to the Friday notice, that Russians had targeted Wisconsin’s election system or anything else. Deputy information officer, Herb Thompson, said Homeland Security told the state in October to check on a certain IP address that the state had blocked from accessing its systems in August 2016.

“We have never seen any of those activities result in anything other than someone trying to turn the doorknob to see if a door is open,” Thompson said. “Those IP addresses we talked about, we had blocked, they were related to non-election systems.” Cagigal said, “Our systems were protected and we had no incidences.”

Still, the state's election commission has promised to improve security before the midterms next year. Reports that Russians may have targeted, or infiltrated, state voting systems have been circulating since late last year, when the Washington Post published a story about alleged Russian infiltration in Vermont, only to retract the story shortly after. 

While we doubt that this will be the last "Russia hacked the elections" fake news, it is reassuring that all this frenzied chaos will at least bring some security to America's voting systems. Security enhancements being considered include encrypting the entire voter registration database to protect the information and make it unusable to anyone who may be able to steal it and requiring two-factor authentication for the roughly 3,000 local and state officials who have access to the WisVote system.

Perhaps an appropriate question is why this wasn't done before?

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Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

Desperate to fill hours and hours of air time on 24-hour news channels, media corporations have made sure the discussion of the correct posture of National Football League players has been front and center. 

Apparently, before grown men can chase a little toy around a grassy field for a few hours, it's absolutely essential that they take part in a variety of pro-government rituals. This was not always the case, though, and prior to the twentieth century, it was hardly expected that a ballgame be preceded by a recitation of the national anthem or any other song of national allegiance.

Indeed, the current pantomime in which NFL players are expected to stand at attention for the national anthem is of extremely recent origin. As Tom Curran pointed out on Comcast Sportsnet, prior to 2009, football players "weren't on the field for the national anthem and instead generally remained in the locker room." 

And why did players start making a display of their "patriotism" in 2009? It turns out the government gave them taxpayer money to do so: 

In 2009, Barack Obama's Department of Defense began paying hundreds of thousands towards teams in a marketing strategy designed to show support for the troops and increase recruitments. The NFL then required all players and personnel to be on the sidelines during the national anthem, in exchange for taxpayers dollars. Prior, the national anthem was played in the stadium but players had the option of staying in the locker room before heading out to the field.

 

Furthermore, teams that showed "Veteran's Salutes" during games were paid upwards of $5.1 million dollars.

In total, 6.8 million in taxpayer money was doled out to sports teams – mostly NFL teams – for so-called "paid patriotism." 

When the Pittsburgh Steelers elected to stay in the locker room during the anthem this past Sunday, this was denounced by many as "boycotting" the national song, although this would have just been standard practice a decade ago. 

Playing the Anthem: A "Tradition" Promoted by War

Not surprisingly, if we look into the history of playing the national anthem at sporting events, we find war was an important factor. 

Before the First World War, playing the national anthem or sporting events was quite rare. No one expected it to be done, and hiring a band was expensive. 

According to mlb.com, the most conspicuous early use of the national anthem was at game 1 of the 1918 World Series during World War I. Unexpectedly, during the seventh-inning stretch, a military band played the national anthem in an effort to liven up a reportedly surly and war-wearied group of spectators.  

Use of the anthem spread from there. The anthem's use expanded even more during the Second World War, as Matt Soniak notes: 

During World War II, baseball games again became venues for large-scale displays of patriotism, and technological advances in public address systems allowed songs to be played without a band.

 

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was played before games throughout the course of the war, and by the time the war was over, the pregame singing of the national anthem had become cemented as a baseball ritual, after which it spread to other sports.

But even after the war, the habit of playing the anthem at every game was not firmly in place until the Vietnam war. 

In most cases, the use of the anthem was not directly subsidized as it was with the taxpayer-funded paid-patriotism scam. Usually, team owners quite voluntarily employed the anthem as a marketing gimmick. In times of war, team owners were happy to use the anthem as a type of advertising to make an emotional connection between the customers — i.e., the spectators — and the team's product. Wrapping a commercial product in the flag and apple pie to increase sales is hardly unique to pro sports. But pro sports may have used this tactic more successfully than any other industry. 

Unfortunately for the NFL, this tried-and-true marketing strategy may be backfiring as the teams' employees — and surely many spectators as well — see no problem with using the anthem ritual as an opportunity to make a political statement. The result has been a marketing nightmare for the league. 

Although this has been taken up by politicians such as Donald Trump as a matter of critical importance, it really should be viewed as just a private business matter. Tho Bishop has noted that, as private firms, each team should be free to discipline or fire any employee who might cause customer displeasure or a loss of revenue for the team. The question of course, is whether it might be even worse — in terms of earnings — for a team to eliminate its most talented athletes. That's a business decision the owners will have to make. 

Everything Is Political

To a certain extent, though, the pro sports industry has called down the current controversy on itself. Having wrapped their product in the political garb of Old Glory and the national anthem for decades, team owners are now having to pay the piper. Since many of their customers now expect pro sports to be political — but only political in a way that matches their particular ideology — team owners now face a headache that could have been totally avoidable. 

It didn't have to be this way. In recent years, many reasonable observers have complained that society is becoming increasingly politicized. Today, it's easy to find ways in which once apolitical activities have been ruined by ideological posturing. Late night talk shows are now essentially hard-left propaganda. Selling tacos is denounced as "cultural appropriation," and every Hollywood awards show is now a series of political speeches. In the case of professional sports, however, there's nothing recent about this sort of politicization.

For nearly a century, pro sports have been politicized through their habitual use of the American state's symbols and songs. The Pentagon knows this, which is why it so enthusiastically shoveled millions of dollars of taxpayer money at the NFL as part of an advertising blitz. But even back in 1918, the US government knew the potential of politicizing sporting events. This is why, during the 1918 World Series, the Navy made sure it had a recruiting station at Wrigley Field. 

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On Tuesday, as President Trump imposed another round of meaningless new sanctions on North Korea’s banks, Trump said that while he encouraged the world to work together to end the country’s nuclear program, the U.S. is “totally prepared” for a military option, which he said would be “totally devastating” for North Korea. Which at least provides some additional detail to what H.R. McMaster meant, when he said overnight that the U.S. has prepared “four or five different scenarios” for how the crisis with North Korea will be resolved, adding ominously that “some are uglier than others.”

“We are totally prepared for the second option — not a preferred option — but if we take that option it will be devastating I can tell you that,” Trump said during a joint news conference Tuesday at the White House with Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. “For North Korea that is called the military option. If we have to take it we will.”

Trump says the US is “totally prepared” for a military option against North Korea, which would be “devastating” https://t.co/BUXAL142gP http://pic.twitter.com/wpIdlx7V5q

— CNN International (@cnni) September 26, 2017

The president added that North Korea’s nuclear weapons threaten “the entire world with unthinkable loss of life” and “all nations must act now to ensure the regime’s complete denuclearization.”

Trump said his tough words for Kim Jong Un were a reply to the North Korean leader’s own words. “He’s saying things that should never, ever be said,” Mr. Trump said.

Trump also declared North Korea an “outlaw regime” and thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping for breaking banking ties with his Asian neighbor and for placing new restrictions on Pyongyang while enforcing new United Nations sanctions on Kim Jong Un’s regime.

“I applaud China’s recent action to restrict its trade with North Korea,” Trump added. “In particular I applaud China for breaking all banking relationships with North Korea. I want to thank President Xi.”

The U.S. Treasury Department stepped up measures Tuesday in the effort to choke off North Korea from the international financial system by imposing new penalties on banks and individuals linked to the country’s financial networks.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. designated eight North Korean banks and 26 North Korean nationals who act as representatives for the country’s banks, operating in China, Russia, Libya and the United Arab Emirates.

One day prior, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho escalated tensions by declaring that his country would be within its rights to shoot down U.S. warplanes flying in international airspace, arguing that Trump’s tough language at the United Nations last week amount to a declaration of war. That startled financial markets, coming just days after the Pentagon sent planes near North Korea’s border.

As discussed this morning, Trump’s National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said that the U.S. has gamed out four or five different scenarios for dealing with North Korea and “some are uglier than others.” Speaking at an event in Washington hosted by the Institute for the Study of War, McMaster said that “there’s not a ‘precision strike’ that solves the problem,” and “there’s not a military blockade that can solve the problem. What we hope to do is avoid war, but we cannot discount that possibility.”

Subsequently, speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that North Korea hasn’t made military moves to match its rhetoric. “While the political space is clearly very charged right now, we haven’t seen any change in the posture of North Korean forces,” Dunford said. “We watch that very carefully. We clearly posture our forces in the event of a provocation or a conflict.” Nonetheless, Dunford also said it’s best to assume that North Korea already has the capability to hit the U.S. mainland with a nuclear-armed ballistic missile and is likely to overcome any remaining engineering issues.

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