April 2021 – Page 2

A Supreme Court Eminent Domain Case Both Sides Deserve to Lose

A number of people have asked me what I think about PennEast Pipeline Co. v. New Jersey, an important eminent domain case that was considered by the Supreme Court earlier this week. Normally, when an issue involving eminent domain reaches the Supreme Court, I’m all over it, writing analyses and often filing an amicus brief. Because current jurisprudence severely under-protects constitutional property rights in a variety of ways, in the vast majority of these cases I end up supporting the property owner against the government.

PennEast is different because the case is only superficially about property rights; the real focus is on the scope of state sovereign immunity from being sued by private parties in federal court. Both sides’ positions rest on highly problematic foundations. So much so that my reaction to the case is similar to Henry Kissinger’s take on the Iran-Iraq War: “It’s a pity they can’t both lose.”

The case arose because the federal government used its powers under the Natural Gas Act to delegate to the PennEast Pipeline Company the power to use eminent domain to condemn property it claims to need to build a pipeline through Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Some of the land PennEast wants to condemn is owned by the state of New Jersey (which opposes the construction of the pipeline).

When PennEast went to court to initiate condemnation proceedings against the state, New Jersey invoked its Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity against lawsuits by private parties in federal court. PennEast responded by arguing that Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity does not apply to lawsuits by the federal government, and that in this case PennEast should have the same powers as the feds do, because it is wielding a power delegated by Congress (the power of eminent domain).

While I am not categorically oppose to all uses of eminent domain for private pipeline construction, I do think there must be much tighter constraints on that power than exist today. All too often, state and federal courts allow such condemnations in situations where they are not for genuine “public uses” (as required by the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause and state constitutional equivalents), or not really necessary to build the project in question. In some cases, condemnations proceed even if it isn’t at all clear that the pipeline in question will actually get built. On top of that, state and federal governments routinely undercompensate landowners in eminent domain cases, often denying them even the “fair market value” compensation required by the Supreme Court precedent (which in itself is often inadequate because it fails to take account of the “subjective value” many owners attach to their land, over and above the market price). These problems can be especially severe when the condemnation is at the discretion of a private party, such as PennEast. That can make it even harder to ensure there is a genuine public use, and to guarantee that the land is truly necessary to build it. I go into many of these issues in greater detail in various previous writings on eminent domain, such as my book The Grasping Hand.

But if the PennEast side of the case is problematic, the same can be said for New Jersey’s side. The state’s position focuses not on constitutional flaws in the use of eminent domain, but on Eleventh Amendment sovereign immunity. In a series of dubious decisions, the Supreme Court has held that the Eleventh Amendment gives state governments immunity against lawsuits by private parties, with a few important exceptions such as lawsuits under the Fourteenth Amendment, authorized by Congress.

In reality, the text of the Eleventh Amendment doesn’t give states any such blanket immunity to lawsuits. It says only that “The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state” (emphasis added). That should in no way preclude suits against a state by its own citizens. In this case, at least two of the five firms that make up the PennEast consortium are New Jersey-based. Thus, the Eleventh Amendment should not preclude them from suing New Jersey. But Supreme Court precedent, in its distinct lack of wisdom, holds otherwise.

The principle on which New Jersey bases its position here also blocks a wide range of other lawsuits against states, including many that allege serious violations of constitutional and statutory rights. As one of my law school professors once put it, sovereign immunity is a form of “legalized barbarism,” because it is based on the idea that legal authority ultimately flows from the king (or some other ruler), who therefore “can do no wrong” under the law. This position is radically at odds with the more enlightened political theory underlying the US Constitution, which holds that ultimate authority flows from the people and their natural rights. Government is therefore subordinate to them, and is entirely capable of both “doing wrong” and being held to account for it in court—a principle established by the Supreme Court in it earliest major decision: Chisholm v. Georgia (1793).

The Eleventh Amendment was enacted as a reaction to Chisholm. But, significantly, the text only constrains lawsuits by citizens of other states and foreign countries. It doesn’t overturn the basic presumptions of the Constitution, beyond that. While space constraints preclude going into detail, I remain unpersuaded by arguments holding that sovereign immunity was somehow embedded in the Constitution even before the Eleventh Amendment, despite the conspicuous lack of any textual reference to it. As Justice James Wilson (who was also a leading framer of the Constitution) put it in his opinion in Chisholm:

To the Constitution of the United States, the term SOVEREIGN, is totally unknown…

In one sense, the term “sovereign” has for its correlative “subject.” In this sense, the term can receive no application, for it has no object in the Constitution of the United states. Under that Constitution, there are citizens, but no subjects. “Citizen of the United states.” “Citizens of another state.” “Citizens of different states.” “A state or citizen thereof.” The term, subject,occurs, indeed, once in the instrument; but to mark the contrast strongly, the epithet “foreign” is prefixed. In this sense, I presume the state of Georgia has no claim upon her own citizens. In this sense, I am certain, she can have no claim upon the citizens of another state.”

As Wilson explains, monarchs and other similar rulers might have a right of sovereign immunity against their “subjects.” But not so a republican government against its citizens.

In sum, PennEast pits broad federal authority to delegate the power of eminent domain to private firms against state sovereign immunity under the Eleventh Amendment. The lower court ruling in this case sided with the latter. But in truth, both are awful, both are antithetical to the Constitution, rightly understood, and both deserve to lose.

Sadly, that is unlikely to happen. In theory, I can imagine a ruling where the Supreme Court rejects New Jersey’s sovereign immunity defense, but also rules that the National Gas Act goes beyond the proper constitutional scope of federal eminent domain power. But that is highly unlikely, especially since the latter issue isn’t really before the Court.

There is one small exception to the general principle that both sides’ positions in this case are awful. As the Institute for Justice outlines in its amicus brief, the Supreme Court should reject the federal government’s argument (which goes beyond that of PennEast) to the effect that federal courts lack jurisdiction to consider “as applied” challenges to the use of eminent domain under the Natural Gas Act. To their credit, both PennEast and New Jersey actually agree the courts do have jurisdiction over such cases, as did the Third Circuit. The Supreme Court, hopefully, will do the same. That point aside, I wish a pox on the houses of both sides in this case.

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Biden Mulls Vax Mandate For All US Military After Huge Numbers Refused

President Biden told NBC News in an interview which broadcast Friday that he’s mulling ordering all US military personnel to get a COVID-19 vaccine as commander-in-chief. “I’m not saying I won’t” rule it out, he emphasized in the new interview.

This would also mean that anyone wanting to enter military service would have to receive the jab as a requirement to get in, which would likely cause a blow to military recruitment in the near-term. However, he didn’t outright say he’s ready to pull the trigger on the policy, which if enacted would constitute the largest federal government-ordered mandate in terms of forcing the vaccine on some 1.3 million active duty service members, not to mention over one million more reserve personnel.

Describing the decision as a “tough call” he suggested it was being hotly debated. “I don’t know. I’m going to leave that to the military,” Biden told NBC News’s Craig Melvin.

“I’m not saying I won’t. I think you’re going to see more and more of them getting it. And I think it’s going to be a tough call as to whether or not they should be required to have to get it in the military, because you’re in such close proximity with other military personnel.”

In follow-up to Biden’s comments, national security advisor Jake Sullivan confirmed that a DoD-wide vaccine mandate is “something the Department of Defense is looking at in consultation with the interagency process and [I] don’t have anything to add on that subject today.”

The whole debate was sparked in earnest when multiple headlines earlier this month took note of the large numbers of military members who were rejecting the vaccine.

For example, one recent USA Today report noted that nearly 40% of US Marines who have been offered a COVID-19 vaccine have refused to recieve it, according to Pentagon figures. And an earlier report in The Guardian described that “Reluctance to be vaccinated for Covid-19 is now rife in the US military, with about a third of troops on active duty or in the national guard refusing to be administered the vaccine.”

The Hill notes of the latest numbers as of this week that “Roughly 780,000 service members, or close to one-third of the total force, are partially or fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to the latest Department of Defense numbers.”

The broad reluctance among America’s military members to receive the jab probably has a lot to do with the vast majority being young, fit, and healthy — obviously far above the average American. And it’s clear at this point that this health demographic tends to experience fewer or minor symptoms if they get infected, if any symptoms at all.

Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Terry Adirim earlier this month tried to combat this mentality among military ranks, however, calling the wealth of anecdotal evidence in the end “not true”. But so far it still looks like a large chunk of armed personnel are not convinced that the vaccine is worth getting, hence the Pentagon mulling the mandate.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/30/2021 – 18:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3e5dzLK Tyler Durden

Florida Passes New Elections Bill Adding Restrictions To Vote-By-Mail And Ballot Drop-Boxes

Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

Florida’s Republican-controlled Senate on April 29 passed a new bill that places several restrictions around vote-by-mail and ballot drop boxes.

The bill, SB 90 (pdf), was passed in the state House 77-40 and in the Senate 23-17. It now goes to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign it.

If signed, it would require signature verification for voters, provided by a “wet signature” physically signed on paper kept on file, and access to drop boxes would be limited to early voting hours unless they are located at election supervisors’ offices. Drop boxes would also have to be monitored in-person by an elections official, and ID would be required when dropping off ballots.

Other aspects in the bill include limitations on who can return a finished mail-in ballot, preventing election officials from entering consent agreements, and requiring voters to request a mail ballot every election cycle, rather than every two, as under current law.

The legislation would also ban anyone from “engaging in any activity with the intent to influence or effect of influencing a voter” but allow election supervisors to provide “non-partisan assistance,” such as giving items, including food and water, to voters within the restricted zones.

The bill also requires supervisors to set and publish drop box locations 30 days before the election. Those locations cannot be moved for any purpose.

SB 90 was amended from a previous stricter version which had originally banned drop boxes completely.

DeSantis has previously expressed his support for enacting stronger election integrity protections and providing unprecedented election transparency for Florida residents.

Floridа Gov. Ron DeSantis during a meeting at the governor’s office in Tallahassee, Fla., on April 1, 2021. (The Epoch Times)

A spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis said he supports the bill, noting it “will ensure that Florida remains a national leader in election security, integrity and transparency,” ABC News reported.

Democrats, including state Rep. Anna Eskamani, responded to the Senate’s decision on Thursday, calling it a “Georgia-style voter suppression bill” on Twitter.

“It makes it harder to vote by mail, prohibits groups from passing out water to voters and tries to limit ballot boxes. I’m sad but proud of the Democratic Caucus for fighting so hard. Keep fighting,” Eskamani wrote.

Earlier this month, the state of Georgia passed more stringent voting laws which elicited widespread condemnation from Democrats, including President Joe Biden who branded it “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” and “an atrocity.”

The new law adds a host of new voting restrictions, including photo identification requirements for absentee voting, limits on the use of ballot drop boxes, and making it illegal to take food or water to voters in line. It also gives state lawmakers more control over elections.

Other states with GOP-controlled legislatures such as Arizona are also looking at making changes to their mail-in voting systems.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/30/2021 – 17:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/330mFmS Tyler Durden

From a Law Professor, About Anti-Racism Meetings

Prof. Robert Steinbuch (Arkansas-Little Rock) let me know about this, and I thought it was much worth passing along:

I am a law professor, a member of my school’s Diversity and Excellence Committee, and the Chairman of the Arkansas Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission. My school recently had an outside speaker present (virtually) the thesis of How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. It was an interesting discourse, because academics don’t honestly discuss race enough; academics talk race, for sure, but they don’t typically discuss race.

When we were able to get passed the obligatory, preliminary canned responses that take place in similar settings throughout the country, I found some of the dialogue valuable. We scratched the surface of a real substantive debate. It was an important beginning. More real discussion is needed.

Two components, however, offer teachable moments on where we can improve the operation of such events. Neither is entirely novel, but having experienced one for the first time, I realized more can be said on the topic, whether or not I ultimately succeed in expanding the conversation.

The first notable aspect of the discussion is that when we broke into Zoom subgroups, the invitee went from group to group instructing each member to recount his or her affirmative efforts at being Anti-Racist. Due to a purely technical problem, my presence in the subgroup wasn’t initially recognized (no irony intended)—even though I was there. When my image appeared to others, a colleague offered that I was in the meeting and volunteered on my behalf that I, as mentioned, chair the Arkansas Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission.

So, I wasn’t forced to decide what I would proffer as my Anti-Racist credentials—nor whether I would even do so. To be clear, there was no threat of formal punishment for non-compliance, but neither was the alternative of opting out even suggested. And in an environment where we typically bend over backwards to ensure that event participants are made comfortable, that absence seemed palpable.

Sadly, academics across the country engaging in such activities often don’t recognize the meaningful similarity between socially coerced statements of Anti-Racist activities and the anti-communist oaths of the McCarthy era—evincing the failure, regularly repeated, to appreciate tragic histories so often justified by good intentions. Indeed, the McCarthyites were actually right that Communism is evil—its adherents having directly killed tens of millions of people—notwithstanding that such proclamations might not be de rigueur today.

The McCarthyites were wrong, however, in forcing the public adoption of that view through sworn allegiance, as is well recognized today. Being allowed to be wrong, particularly in the political context, ironically leads to improved democracy and enlightenment. Learning good citizenship is not like memorizing multiplication tables. It must actually be done to be mastered.

Such community shaming exercises surely weren’t restricted to conservatives during the Red scare, but conservatives have been branded—perhaps not exclusively but certainly disproportionately—with that ignominy, nonetheless. While McCarthyites well deserve to share that label, in reality those actions were emblematic of the archetypal totalitarianism of both the far left and the far right during the last century that resulted in the most homicides in human history.

Indeed, Soviets and Nazis readily adopted mandatory oath taking and social shaming as methods of forced conformity in addition to imprisonment, torture, and murder. My father lived under the former during World War II; many other relatives died under the latter.

During that instance in which I was caught in Zoom’s version of Gene Roddenberry’s transporter buffer, I was afforded a fleeting moment to reflect on my options regarding what I perceived as a social conformity exercise: I feared that not responding would garner the now seemingly acceptable label of White Fragility, much like those who refused to chant the mantra of having never been a member of the communist party were effectively tattooed with a scarlet “R.”

Having researched for decades issues of sex-based disparities, I had long heard the cringeworthy claims of female fragility. Those are largely eschewed now, thank goodness. But the ease with which that very same collective pseudo-psychological emotional characterization is welcomed discourse regarding, in this case, a racial group underscores that under new leftist doctrine, majority-cohort membership alone justifies those in that class being saddled with the condemnation of inherent bias and collective wrongdoing.

Thus, this new claim of fragility is an epithet fundamentally designed to force a public accounting of one’s moral worth on a provided scale. Rather than the naked assertion that failing to swear allegiance itself demonstrates antagonism to the chosen philosophy, this technique is slightly more sophisticated.

In a world of “my truths,” emotional support peacocks, safe spaces, and other liberal delicateness, all of a sudden being uncomfortable with detailing one’s adoption of a pro-active Anti-Racist agenda—or, heavens forbid, having no such agenda at all—necessarily means that the non-speaker is a member of a cabal protecting systemic racism, so the claim goes, whether or not he or she even knows it, no less.

It needs saying, however, that not pursuing an Anti-Racist agenda does not necessarily make for a racist nor even a beneficiary of racism. Having grown up in a mixed race, working class neighborhood, I know plenty who have profited from no kind of privilege—ever-present attempts to cast them otherwise due to their cohort membership notwithstanding.

I once purely by chance sat next to two clergy in a restaurant. (This is not the beginning of a joke.) One said to the other that a third person wasn’t entitled to offer religious criticism because he wasn’t a member of their faith. That might work in a religious discourse (or it might not, in fact), but it fails in academic and political circles. That mindset produces race talk without race discussion. Bill Maher recently made a claim about race on his show, as he often does, and a guest disqualified Maher because he is White. Maher moved on. That’s just one example, but the phenomenon is ubiquitous today. That’s not race discourse.

Of course, this mechanism for creating bogeymen itself also isn’t new. Marxists equated capitalists with both power and wrongdoing. Nazis the same for Jews. The transformation here is minor: majority equals power and therefore subjects all within the group to opprobrium, regardless of individual behavior. Marxism sought the dictatorship of the proletariat; new-age leftists seek dictatorship of the self-identified oppressed. I persist in the seemingly unfashionable view that dictatorships of any kind are bad.

I shudder to imagine what I would have experienced if I were exposed to the sister activity, which I understand to have taken place during various university enlightenment assemblies and corporate wokeness sessions, of proclaiming one’s inherent racism. Well, to be fair, I’ve taken Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test several times, and I consistently test as slightly biased in favor of Blacks. I’m not sure, however, that this is the type of inherent bias that the left seeks for me to publicly own. It doesn’t fit the narrative presented in race talks. It would make, though, for interesting race discussion.

The second concern I faced was what, if in deciding to comply with the Anti-Racist auditing, I would choose to present. My colleague’s proffer on my behalf was the most obvious and the safest—but not my most significant Anti-Racist academic endeavor. That has been my effort to reduce racial disparities by recognizing the harm caused by mismatch resulting from highly race conscious admissions programs in higher education.

This unpopular and inconvenient truth is not generally welcomed discourse in our overwhelmingly leftist academia across the country. Yet, the data are compelling. Minorities starting law school with the “benefit” of large admissions preferences are far less likely as entering whites to become or remain attorneys.

Interestingly, the presenter broached this topic in forthrightly acknowledging that the law school entrance exam, the LSAT, is not inherently biased. As such, the lower scores on average exhibited by minorities thereon reflect a real deficit no doubt the function of a variety of societal forces. And my research, along with those of various others, demonstrate how not recognizing those shortfalls harms the very individuals that race-based admissions programs are purportedly designed to help. This was the good start of a productive conversation. (Similarly, a colleague described how a former dean who has long since left my institution belatedly conceded that my research, which he actively thwarted, raised a real issue. He never told me. I’d love to have that discussion too.)

We now easily acknowledge that Galileo was correct in rejecting heliocentrism, but it wasn’t easy to recognize his right to do so contemporaneously with both the Church’s expression that his view was heresy and the lack of understanding that he was, in fact, correct. Academics need to be heretical. We need to be able to freely say: “I disagree” or “I won’t engage in that activity.”

Indeed, that’s the lesson of Galileo: defend your beliefs unless they’re proven wrong, because sometimes your orphan ideas might turn out to be correct. We would do even better to celebrate those whose ideas were shunned even when they turned out, in the end, to be wrong. I hope that as we move forward in discussing important topics facing society such as Anti-Racism that we—particularly those formally in the business of education—don’t allow ourselves to be anti-academic.

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The U.S. Won’t Beat China by Being More Like China

President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office saw the executive using the COVID-19 pandemic to push for a huge and largely permanent expansion of the federal government.

But in his speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, Biden gave a preview of how his administration is going to justify the ever-greater growth of government power even after the pandemic wanes. The next crisis is all about China.

“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” he said. “And we’re falling behind in that competition.”

Later, invoking that competition again, Biden warned that China “is closing in fast.” Biden recalled telling Chinese President Xi Jinping that “we welcome the competition” and later promised that America would stand up to “unfair trade practices that undercut American workers,” and “won’t back away from our commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

The troubling thing about all this isn’t that Biden is calling attention to the abuses of the Chinese communist regime. Certainly, what is happening in Hong Kong and in Xinjiang and in Chinese-controlled cyberspace deserves the strongest condemnation from America’s political leaders and anyone who cares about human freedom.

No, the troubling thing is that Biden’s prescription for dealing with China often sounds like a plan for copying China’s economic policies. His address on Wednesday contained a long list of ways to give the government a firmer hand on the economy—raising taxes, removing choices from employers and workers, and sending power to Washington bureaucrats.

Since taking office, Biden has called for the passage of a bill that would revoke workers’ right to refuse to join a union in certain professions. He has refused to repeal former President Donald Trump’s tariffs that are a burden on the U.S. economy—in fact, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has argued that “the data shows that those tariffs have been effective.” And on Wednesday he promised to double down on protectionism and industrial policy, paid for with higher taxes on corporations.

This is misguided at best. At worst, it is tantamount to an admission of defeat. One doesn’t usually seek to copy those who are less successful, after all.

“Ultimately, the United States needs to outcompete China and the way we do that is through open markets and immigration—our traditional strengths,” Clark Packard, trade policy counsel for the R Street Institute, a free market think tank, tells Reason. “We’re not going to outcompete Beijing by hiding behind tariff walls, deploying sclerotic domestic subsidies to politically favored industries, and choking off immigration. In fact, that is a recipe for decline and stagnation.”

To be fair to Biden, he’s hardly alone in doing this. Far from it. Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) blocked the admission of refugees from Hong Kong last year because he believed it was an anti-China maneuver (in fact, it was quite the opposite). Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R–Ark.) have become the faces of the GOP’s new economic nationalism and its embrace of industrial policy. China is a convenient pretext for just about any pet policy, it seems.

And of course it was Trump who steered America toward this resurgence of industrial policy in the name of combating China. He imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports that were supposed to protect American metal manufacturers from foreign competition, supposedly causing a rebirth of steelmaking in America. Trump often claimed, without evidence, that his policies were responsible for six or seven (he has never been good at being consistent with his lies) new steel plants being built.

How’s all that working out now? American steel has become significantly more expensive since Trump’s tariffs were imposed, but those higher prices aren’t resulting in more plants being built or workers being hired. U.S. Steel announced Friday that it was canceling plans for a new manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania.

Biden and his advisers are more policy savvy than Trump’s team—though that’s not a high bar—but there’s little reason to think that the current administration will be able to make industrial policy work any better.

Take Biden’s “Buy American” plan—a pseudo-populist idea that he almost literally stole from Trump. It will guarantee that “American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs,” Biden said Wednesday.

That’s not a bad bumper sticker, but it is lousy policy. Buy American rules force the government to spend more money for the same products, effectively shortchanging taxpayers. The Buy American rules already on the books—Biden’s plan mostly amounts to tightening loopholes in them—increased costs for taxpayers by $94 billion in 2017.

On Wednesday, Biden said he wants America to have more wind turbines as a way to combat climate change. But he also said he wants those wind turbines to be built in Pittsburgh, not Beijing—in which case he’ll get fewer wind turbines to combat climate change. Which priority should prevail?

Markets do a fantastic job of sorting those priorities. Government has a much less impressive track record.

The very notion of defeating China is somewhat silly on its face, considering the many, many economic links between the world’s two largest economies. Neither America nor China would be as prosperous in a zero-sum world where the two have decoupled from one another.

So when Biden pumps up China as a foil or rival to the United States’ economic might, what he’s really doing is playing to populist feelings and stoking another crisis in the hopes of smashing opposition to his proposals. And as long as those proposals amount to “beat China by being more like China,” they will continue to deserve serious opposition.

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From a Law Professor, About Anti-Racism Meetings

Prof. Robert Steinbuch (Arkansas-Little Rock) let me know about this, and I thought it was much worth passing along:

I am a law professor, a member of my school’s Diversity and Excellence Committee, and the Chairman of the Arkansas Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission. My school recently had an outside speaker present (virtually) the thesis of How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi. It was an interesting discourse, because academics don’t honestly discuss race enough; academics talk race, for sure, but they don’t typically discuss race.

When we were able to get passed the obligatory, preliminary canned responses that take place in similar settings throughout the country, I found some of the dialogue valuable. We scratched the surface of a real substantive debate. It was an important beginning. More real discussion is needed.

Two components, however, offer teachable moments on where we can improve the operation of such events. Neither is entirely novel, but having experienced one for the first time, I realized more can be said on the topic, whether or not I ultimately succeed in expanding the conversation.

The first notable aspect of the discussion is that when we broke into Zoom subgroups, the invitee went from group to group instructing each member to recount his or her affirmative efforts at being Anti-Racist. Due to a purely technical problem, my presence in the subgroup wasn’t initially recognized (no irony intended)—even though I was there. When my image appeared to others, a colleague offered that I was in the meeting and volunteered on my behalf that I, as mentioned, chair the Arkansas Advisory Committee to the United States Civil Rights Commission.

So, I wasn’t forced to decide what I would proffer as my Anti-Racist credentials—nor whether I would even do so. To be clear, there was no threat of formal punishment for non-compliance, but neither was the alternative of opting out even suggested. And in an environment where we typically bend over backwards to ensure that event participants are made comfortable, that absence seemed palpable.

Sadly, academics across the country engaging in such activities often don’t recognize the meaningful similarity between socially coerced statements of Anti-Racist activities and the anti-communist oaths of the McCarthy era—evincing the failure, regularly repeated, to appreciate tragic histories so often justified by good intentions. Indeed, the McCarthyites were actually right that Communism is evil—its adherents having directly killed tens of millions of people—notwithstanding that such proclamations might not be de rigueur today.

The McCarthyites were wrong, however, in forcing the public adoption of that view through sworn allegiance, as is well recognized today. Being allowed to be wrong, particularly in the political context, ironically leads to improved democracy and enlightenment. Learning good citizenship is not like memorizing multiplication tables. It must actually be done to be mastered.

Such community shaming exercises surely weren’t restricted to conservatives during the Red scare, but conservatives have been branded—perhaps not exclusively but certainly disproportionately—with that ignominy, nonetheless. While McCarthyites well deserve to share that label, in reality those actions were emblematic of the archetypal totalitarianism of both the far left and the far right during the last century that resulted in the most homicides in human history.

Indeed, Soviets and Nazis readily adopted mandatory oath taking and social shaming as methods of forced conformity in addition to imprisonment, torture, and murder. My father lived under the former during World War II; many other relatives died under the latter.

During that instance in which I was caught in Zoom’s version of Gene Roddenberry’s transporter buffer, I was afforded a fleeting moment to reflect on my options regarding what I perceived as a social conformity exercise: I feared that not responding would garner the now seemingly acceptable label of White Fragility, much like those who refused to chant the mantra of having never been a member of the communist party were effectively tattooed with a scarlet “R.”

Having researched for decades issues of sex-based disparities, I had long heard the cringeworthy claims of female fragility. Those are largely eschewed now, thank goodness. But the ease with which that very same collective pseudo-psychological emotional characterization is welcomed discourse regarding, in this case, a racial group underscores that under new leftist doctrine, majority-cohort membership alone justifies those in that class being saddled with the condemnation of inherent bias and collective wrongdoing.

Thus, this new claim of fragility is an epithet fundamentally designed to force a public accounting of one’s moral worth on a provided scale. Rather than the naked assertion that failing to swear allegiance itself demonstrates antagonism to the chosen philosophy, this technique is slightly more sophisticated.

In a world of “my truths,” emotional support peacocks, safe spaces, and other liberal delicateness, all of a sudden being uncomfortable with detailing one’s adoption of a pro-active Anti-Racist agenda—or, heavens forbid, having no such agenda at all—necessarily means that the non-speaker is a member of a cabal protecting systemic racism, so the claim goes, whether or not he or she even knows it, no less.

It needs saying, however, that not pursuing an Anti-Racist agenda does not necessarily make for a racist nor even a beneficiary of racism. Having grown up in a mixed race, working class neighborhood, I know plenty who have profited from no kind of privilege—ever-present attempts to cast them otherwise due to their cohort membership notwithstanding.

I once purely by chance sat next to two clergy in a restaurant. (This is not the beginning of a joke.) One said to the other that a third person wasn’t entitled to offer religious criticism because he wasn’t a member of their faith. That might work in a religious discourse (or it might not, in fact), but it fails in academic and political circles. That mindset produces race talk without race discussion. Bill Maher recently made a claim about race on his show, as he often does, and a guest disqualified Maher because he is White. Maher moved on. That’s just one example, but the phenomenon is ubiquitous today. That’s not race discourse.

Of course, this mechanism for creating bogeymen itself also isn’t new. Marxists equated capitalists with both power and wrongdoing. Nazis the same for Jews. The transformation here is minor: majority equals power and therefore subjects all within the group to opprobrium, regardless of individual behavior. Marxism sought the dictatorship of the proletariat; new-age leftists seek dictatorship of the self-identified oppressed. I persist in the seemingly unfashionable view that dictatorships of any kind are bad.

I shudder to imagine what I would have experienced if I were exposed to the sister activity, which I understand to have taken place during various university enlightenment assemblies and corporate wokeness sessions, of proclaiming one’s inherent racism. Well, to be fair, I’ve taken Harvard’s Implicit Bias Test several times, and I consistently test as slightly biased in favor of Blacks. I’m not sure, however, that this is the type of inherent bias that the left seeks for me to publicly own. It doesn’t fit the narrative presented in race talks. It would make, though, for interesting race discussion.

The second concern I faced was what, if in deciding to comply with the Anti-Racist auditing, I would choose to present. My colleague’s proffer on my behalf was the most obvious and the safest—but not my most significant Anti-Racist academic endeavor. That has been my effort to reduce racial disparities by recognizing the harm caused by mismatch resulting from highly race conscious admissions programs in higher education.

This unpopular and inconvenient truth is not generally welcomed discourse in our overwhelmingly leftist academia across the country. Yet, the data are compelling. Minorities starting law school with the “benefit” of large admissions preferences are far less likely as entering whites to become or remain attorneys.

Interestingly, the presenter broached this topic in forthrightly acknowledging that the law school entrance exam, the LSAT, is not inherently biased. As such, the lower scores on average exhibited by minorities thereon reflect a real deficit no doubt the function of a variety of societal forces. And my research, along with those of various others, demonstrate how not recognizing those shortfalls harms the very individuals that race-based admissions programs are purportedly designed to help. This was the good start of a productive conversation. (Similarly, a colleague described how a former dean who has long since left my institution belatedly conceded that my research, which he actively thwarted, raised a real issue. He never told me. I’d love to have that discussion too.)

We now easily acknowledge that Galileo was correct in rejecting heliocentrism, but it wasn’t easy to recognize his right to do so contemporaneously with both the Church’s expression that his view was heresy and the lack of understanding that he was, in fact, correct. Academics need to be heretical. We need to be able to freely say: “I disagree” or “I won’t engage in that activity.”

Indeed, that’s the lesson of Galileo: defend your beliefs unless they’re proven wrong, because sometimes your orphan ideas might turn out to be correct. We would do even better to celebrate those whose ideas were shunned even when they turned out, in the end, to be wrong. I hope that as we move forward in discussing important topics facing society such as Anti-Racism that we—particularly those formally in the business of education—don’t allow ourselves to be anti-academic.

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“Let’s Kill Some Cops”: Antifa Infiltrated By Undercover Trump Supporter, Recorded Plotting Attacks

A Bay Area, California Trump supporter infiltrated a group of far-left Antifa activists in Sonoma County, and documented the ‘anti-fascist’ group coordinating to target conservatives.

For example:

Group leader: “It’s May Day, baby, like come out and take, take somethin’ over with us, I don’t, I don’t (bleep)-ing know.”
Member: “Let’s kill people. (laughs)”
Group Leader: “Let’s kill some cops.“
Member: “Yeah.”

In an exclusive report by ABC7, the Republican infiltrator provided a “target list” and recordings of the group’s planning sessions, which may be connected to recent acts of vandalism – including an incident at the former home of a defense witness in the Derek Chauvin trial.

Former Santa Rosa Police Officer Barry Brodd testified as a use of force expert in the George Floyd trial, defending the actions of Derek Chauvin.

Brodd testified on April 13, “I felt that Derek Chauvin was justified.”

Four days later, masked figures in black threw a severed pig head and pig blood at the house where Brodd used to live in West Santa Rosa.

Lt. Jeneane Kucker of the Santa Rosa Police Department told the I-Team, “I know that the victims, in this case, feel threatened. And they don’t feel safe in their home.” –ABC7

Brodd, as it turns out, hasn’t lived at the address in more than a year. Local police, meanwhile, think the same group of Antifa activists may be responsible for coating a statue in a nearby shopping plaza with blood, accompanied by a sign which read “oink oink.”

“So, I saw that they were here, I read their manifesto, and I could tell that they were a threat to the community, and somebody needed to do something about this,” said the conservative infiltrator.

According to the manifesto – posted online for SoCo (Sonoma County) Radical Action: “Do not hesitate, do not wait … the brick in the street is meant to be thrown! The paint in the can is meant to be sprayed! The cop in your head is meant to be killed!”

The Trump supporter was able to join the group through encrypted messaging act Wickr.

More via ABC7:

Infiltrator: “I said, ‘Comrade, you know, I, I want to smash the system the same as you,’ you know, make them not feel alone, because that’s what they really want to hear to know that there’s more people like them.”

He saved messages, documents, and recordings of their meetings.

The I-Team has learned the group’s leader who goes by the screen name “Marb” is a 25-year-old college student, who was arrested for “felony assault on a police officer” last year at this Oakland riot after the death of George Floyd; the district attorney declined to file charges. The Trump supporter says he made this recording in March, when Marb discussed naming the group “SoCo Antifa.”

Marb: “It was originally SoCo Antifa and people didn’t like that, people didn’t like that we called ourselves Antifa.”

Member: “Well, more than that, they were like, we’re gonna get on the FBI watch list. Remember?“
Marb: “Yeah.”
Member: “They apparently have an eye out for that.”

Marb also talked about that same hand statue being vandalized on other occasions.

Member: “Did someone use stencils? You know-“
Marb: “Freehand!”
Member: “Oh, really? Okay.”
Marb: “Yeah. It was actually a lot easier for this situation.“
Infiltrator: “So, this is the list here.“

What’s more, the infiltrator told ABC7 that he copied the group’s “target list” of people to “doxx” – posting private information including addresses and phone numbers in order to surveil them for potential acts of vandalism. For example, after Brodd’s testimony in the Chauvin trial, the Antifa group placed him at the top of the list. Within an hour, they attacked his former house.

“Hey y ‘all, late notice, but some comrades took action at a house owned by Barry Brodd and if someone could swing by in the morning and get pictures, our comrades would be very grateful!” posted Marb, after the attack on the wrong house.

The list also includes the head of the deputy sheriff’s union – part of what the group calls “killer deputies” – meaning officers involved in fatal confrontations as well as Trump supporters such as Sandy Metzger, head of Santa Rosa Republican Women Federated.

The recordings show the group has already checked out Metzger’s house.

Marb: “We went to Sandy Metzger’s house. (laughing)”

Member: “Yeah, we went to see the Metzger’s house, but it was too late at night to do any real observing.”

Marb: “We just wanted to see where it was.”

Member: “The place is huge.”

Once ABC7‘s Dan Noyes began investigating the group, they went into panic mode – writing in the encrypted chat: “Dan Noyes at ABC7 asking about SRA. …To firmly restate our position, nobody, myself included, should cooperate with press or cops.”

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/30/2021 – 17:20

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Taibbi: Will “Goldman Penis Envy” Crash The Economy Again?

Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

Nearly fifteen years ago, on December 10, 2006, the CEO of Senderra, a subprime mortgage lender owned by Goldman, Sachs, sent a grim report to its parent company. “Credit quality has risen to become the major crisis in the non-prime industry,” Senderra CEO Brad Bradley wrote, adding that “we are seeing unprecedented defaults and fraud in the market.”

Within four days, senior executives at Goldman decided to “get closer to home” by unloading risky mortgage instruments. They didn’t alert regulators, of course, but did save their own hides, with Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein soon after ordering subordinates to sell off the ugly “cats and dogs” in their mortgage portfolio.

Around the same time that Goldman was having its come-to-Jesus moment, rival Lehman Brothers was going the other way. In one meeting, the bank’s head of fixed income, Mike Gelband, pounded a table, telling the firm’s infamous Vaderqsque CEO Richard “Dick” Fuld and hatchetman-president Joe Gregory there was a $15-18 trillion time bomb of lethal leverage hanging over the markets. Once it blew, it would be the “grandaddy of credit crunches,” and Lehman would be toast.

Fuld and Gregory scoffed. They didn’t understand mortgage deals well and thought Gelband lacked nerve. “Be creative,” they told him, adding, “What are you afraid of?”

“We called it ‘Goldman Penis Envy,’” says Lawrence McDonald, former Lehman trader and author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. In telling the Gelband story, he explains that Fuld and Gregory were so desperate to beat out Goldman and become the richest men on Wall Street, they chased every bad deal at the peak of the speculative bubble.

“These tertiary financial institutions, in order to win business away from the big players, they have to continually juice their offerings, offer more leverage, more goodies,” says McDonald. “Dick and Joe, they wanted to do these banking deals, to steal Goldman’s business by offering more.”

In the end, Goldman got out just in time, and Lehman – which had scored record profits in every year from 2005 through 2007, pulling in $19.3 billion in revenue in 2007 alone – became a bug on the windshield of history.

In the triggering episode, Goldman was the first bank to smell a rat in AIG’s financial products division and demand collateral calls to AIG swaps, just before AIG imploded. Goldman ultimately got bailed out in its AIG dealings by the Fed and the taxpayer to the tune of a hundred cents on the dollar, while the collapse of Lehman’s portfolio of bonehead deals sent them into bankruptcy and helped trigger a global chain reaction of losses that cost Americans $10 trillion in 2008 alone.

It feels like déjà vu all over again. We’re in a frothy economy where banks are pouring money into the worst conceivable deals, upselling the most dubious clients in an effort to outdo each other, resulting in huge losses. Just like in 2008, the warning signs are being ignored.

The narrative started in January, when GameStop captured the public imagination. The struggling retail video game company, targeted by short-sellers, saw its share price shoot from $6 to $347 in a few months, spurring elation among Redditors and day-traders who’d bet the stock.

Wall Street pundits threw a fit over GameStop because for whatever else was going on there, there were outsiders trying to break into a rigged game, which was deemed unacceptable. Across the political spectrum, there were howls of outrage and calls for official probes of all involved, down to YouTuber-in-ski-hat Keith Gill, a.k.a. “Roaring Kitty,” who had the temerity to invest $745,991.

While GME gobbled headlines, other short-targeted companies saw wild jumps. GSX, a Chinese online tutorial firm shorts had circled since last year, moved from $46 on January 12th to $142 fifteen days later. Baidu, a Chinese Internet services firm some claimed used shady reporting practices, went from $133 in late November to $339 in February. Viacom, the most heavily shorted media stock, went from $36 on January 1st to an incredible $100 on March 22, in a rally that supposedly left investors “scratching their heads.”

There was no million-member army of Redditors to focus on in these cases. The rallies of Viacom, Baidu, Discovery, GSX, Tencent Music Entertainment Group, Vipshop Holdings, Farfetch, and IQIYI Incorporated — all targets of institutional short sellers — were at the center of an elaborate, multi-billion-dollar short squeeze play by a single SEC-sanctioned Jesus freak of an investor: Sung Kook “Bill” Hwang, head of a fund called Archegos.

Once fined $60 million and banned by the S.E.C., Hwang as a character is a compelling fusion of religious weirdness and old-fashioned manipulation. He claims he invests “according to the word of God,” and he’s “not afraid of death or money,” allowing him to be “fearless” and “free” from concern about consequence. “The people on Wall Street wonder about the freedom I have, actually,” he said two years ago, ominously.

Despite throwing off a crazy vibe strong enough that the average person would cross the street to get away, he was able to borrow gargantuan sums — billions — from the world’s biggest banking institutions, using them to place a string of long bets that single-handedly sent the share prices of major companies skyrocketing.

Firms like Goldman, Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, Japan’s Nomura, and Credit Suisse helped Hwang arrange his investments in the form of swaps. In return for collateral, banks would buy his targeted stock in four, five, six, even seven times the amount posted, then hold it on their own balance sheets. If the stock went up, the banks paid Hwang. If it went down, Hwang owed more.

The arrangement allowed Hwang to evade S.E.C. regulations requiring any investor who amasses more than 5% of any stock to issue a public filing as a beneficial owner. So enabled, Hwang quietly racked up more than 10% of the float of all his target companies, and as much as 30% interest in some of them, a setup that created massive systemic risk, but to the banks looked like an easy source of funding and management fees.

The current legend is that each of the banks thought they were the only ones doing the bad thing. Even the “smartest guys on the Street” at Goldman supposedly did not put two and two together, or wonder if Hwang was peddling the same trade to other shops. As a result, Hwang was allowed to keep bidding up and up until it all came crashing down in late March.

The end came after the CEO of Viacom, Bob Bakish — perhaps moved by a 73% jump in the firm’s share price — came to Goldman and Morgan Stanley on March 24th, asking to “discreetly” unload $3 billion in securities in an overnight sale. As one hedge fund analyst put it this week, this “might have been the what-the-fuck moment” for those two banks, who finally put two and two together.

Others scoff at the idea that firms like Goldman and Morgan Stanley didn’t see what was going on. “Even if they didn’t talk (and we know they do), they could all see the stock action as the prices ratcheted up over a relatively short period of time, and they could see each other’s increasing holdings albeit in the aggregate,” says Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets. “These guys are market makers, after all, and see the flow and have eyes and ears everywhere. Not credible.”

No matter how it happened, within a day after Bakish moved to sell those 20 million shares at $85 — the firm claimed, ludicrously in hindsight, that they were just raising money “for general corporate purposes, including investments in streaming” — the banks began demanding Hwang post more collateral. When he couldn’t meet his margin calls, the dealers one-by-one dumped his shares into the market, characteristically led by Goldman, which claimed to escape with “immaterial” losses thanks to its quick exit. “How are they always the only guys who don’t get carried out on a stretcher?” asks short-seller Marc Cohodes.

The Archegos story broke back on March 26th. Since then, Wall Street has been scrambling to contain both the financial and reputational damage. To date, the monetary hit to the banks alone is said to be $10 billion, but that number keeps rising, as Nomura and UBS only just this week disclosed a combined $3.7 billion in losses. Meanwhile, some analysts think the total loss in market value due just to this episode might ultimately be as big as $100 billion — one source thinks the number might be $200 billion.

Most of the straight-news coverage of Archegos has been of the “Who was that masked man?” variety, i.e. profiles of the terrible rogue trader who hit poor Wall Street like a weather event, a stroke of random luck. “He built a $10 billion empire. It fell apart in days,” was the New York Times offering, one of many stories to describe Archegos as a self-contained disaster.

The real issue isn’t Hwang but his banks. Just like 2008, some of the “tertiary” players rushed to give Hwang the extra “goodies” McDonald described, likely in the form of more leverage. The company destined to wear the historical dunce-cap this time a la Lehman looks like Credit Suisse, which has at least $5.5 billion in Hwang-related losses and has already fired investment bank chief Brian Chin and chief risk officer Lara Warner.

With firms like this in a race to shower even the most preposterous clients with unlimited funds, the grim reality of finance in the post-CARES Act era is that anyone with a tie and a business card can borrow enough to blow a $100 billion hole in the economy without being detected.

This raises the question: how many more Hwangs are out there? Not many people think he’s the only one.

“The system can’t take many more of these,” says McDonald.

“I think this guy [Hwang] is running the biggest Ponzi since Bernie Madoff, maybe bigger,” says Cohodes.

Like the failure of the two subprime-laden hedge funds that led to the collapse of Bear Stearns in 2008, Archegos exposed a rat’s nest of bad practices. Hwang was able to traipse through the system in part because Archegos is a “family office.” In theory, family offices provide a framework to manage money for individual wealthy families. In reality, it’s a loophole allowing mega-borrowers to be regulated less than the smallest retail consumers. As McDonald points out, if an ordinary person maxes out credit cards before a trip to Vegas, that person’s FICO score pings. Yet a tire-fire like Hwang buying swaps can make trades of a billion, even ten billion dollars without it registering anywhere.

This is the same problem we saw in 2008, when banks and hedge funds created mountains of theoretical risk (which became trillions in real losses) using derivative products like credit default swaps. Despite years of loud debates around the Dodd-Frank Act, the lack of even a basic tracking mechanism for such unexploded risk remains. “There are no leverage controls whatsoever. The only leverage control is market discipline,” sighs Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform.

Another common factor between 2008 and now is the hyper-availability of leverage, distributed on tap by Too Big To Fail Banks to all comers. Then the inappropriate borrower might have been an ordinary person buying too much house, or a company like AIG writing millions in synthetic mortgage insurance it never planned on honoring. This time it’s a known, SEC-sanctioned freak show taking out billion-dollar bank loans to bet on black at the roulette table. The issue isn’t that people like Hwang are out there, it’s that all of Hwang’s bankers went along with this game, hugely amplifying the irresponsible gambling.

“Hwang was basically using the balance sheets of Goldman and Morgan Stanley against the hedge funds,” says McDonald.

“Regulators have no chance,” says the hedge fund analyst. “Every time they tidy up one area, the rats just find a new hole to chew.”

The symbiotic relationship between banks that are overeager to lend and rapacious (or, in the case of Hwang, sociopathic) clients gambling with other people’s money is what blew up firms like Lehman. In order for those romances to happen, compliance officers can’t get in the way, and they don’t. The Hwang episode revealed that even in top-drawer firms, the dumbest people on the roster — usually, the salespeople on prime brokerage desks — have almost total autonomy.

Even Goldman placed Hwang on a “blacklist” as recently as 2018, yet suddenly reversed course and lent him enough money to make him the de facto owner of Viacom, suggesting that compliance even at the storied industry leader is a joke.

“A compliance dept at a big bank is nothing but a fig leaf,” says former Lehman lawyer and whistleblower Oliver Budde. “Things get flagged by line personnel, sure, but then they get overruled. If… internal rules are all being evaded, that does not matter if the boss says it is okay.”

With a few exceptions, financial professionals don’t mind being ripped as unethical. The dirty secret they do want covered up is that they’re not that smart. In the Covid-19 age especially, there’s a lot of subsidized mediocrity.

“All of these huge hedge funds have shitty performance, disguised by leverage,” says Cohodes. “If the markets go up 12% a year, you go up 5%, but you lever up seven times. Now it’s 35% and you’re getting three and thirty.” The top hedge funds charge 3% fees on assets under management and 30% of net gains.

That’s a great deal under any circumstances, but even better when 70-80% of your “performance” comes from being lent money by Goldman or Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, and even better still when you and your bank artificially drive up your gains together by pumping up the market. With limitless leverage, banks and hedge funds can in this way partner up to print themselves profits forever, until of course something goes wrong. With Archegos, something did go wrong — even on Wall Street, really dumb chasing really crazy eventually cracks up — but does anyone think there isn’t more?

Read the rest here…

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/30/2021 – 17:00

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The U.S. Won’t Beat China by Being More Like China

President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office saw the executive using the COVID-19 pandemic to push for a huge and largely permanent expansion of the federal government.

“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century,” he said. “And we’re falling behind in that competition.”

This is misguided at best. At worst, it is tantamount to an admission of defeat. One doesn’t usually seek to copy those who are less successful, after all.

Markets do a fantastic job of sorting those priorities. Government has a much less impressive track record.

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“The Social Contract Is Broken”: Why Millennials Who Lack Rich Parents Feel Increasingly Hopeless

The worsening precarity of the millennial generation has been a hot topic for the financial press over the last year, and it hasn’t failed to disappoint. Thinkpieces about crushing student loan debt, rising housing prices placing home-ownership further out of reach, and the soul-crushing intensity of formerly sought-after jobs in finance have abounded. And now, the Financial Times has launched a new series where it explores some of the biggest problems facing its millennial readers. And what the report discovered might come as a surprise to some. Picking up where that PowerPoint about the miserable working conditions of Goldman junior analysts left off, the FT reported that even millennials with strong resumes and “good jobs” who “did everything right” are “drowning in insecurity.”

As the FT sees it, millennials’ fate will depend largely upon whether they’re the progeny of wealthy families, or not. Those who can depend on “the bank of mom and dad” for an interest-free loan (or a generous inheritance) will always have an advantage in procuring the best homes, jobs and school placement as entry to the upper echelon of society still largely depends on having access to the best schools and alumni networks. Millennials who don’t enjoy these advantages will be forced to compete in a market set up to cater to those who do.

Source: FT

But while that conclusion is relatively self-evident, an even more surprising detail from the FT’s report is that once-safe careers in investment banking and private equity no longer convey the same promise of long-term security. As an example of these phenomon, the FT introduces Akin Ogundele, who works in London’s financial sector, and lives in the city with his wife and young family. The fact that he’s struggling to pay his bills in a rental flat, with little hope of affording his own home any time soon, has given him a “sense that the social contract is broken for his generation…” something that’s shared by many young people “and not just in London.”

Many of the story’s most striking examples are delivered with a quote. Here are a few of our favorites:

“If I carry on the way I am, I’m not sure what I’ll be able to pass down,” he says. “It can’t be good for the country — the disparities are just going to grow, the wealthy are going to grow wealthier and those that aren’t will get more and more removed.”
For Killian Mangan, who graduated during the pandemic last year and struggled to find a job, it feels as if “we are drowning in insecurity with no help in sight”. A twenty-something who works for a central bank says: “I sometimes have this feeling that we are edging towards a precipice, or falling in it already.”
A 30-something who works in private equity in the UK turns to collateralised debt obligations for a metaphor to describe the position of his generation. “The space I feel I occupy in the sociopolitical order is akin to being the first loss tranche in the debt stack,” he says. “Whenever anything bad happens I have no doubt that, because we lack political and economic clout, we will be left holding the bag.”
“At the moment, while the wealth is still held by older generations it shows up in the data as a difference between generations, but wealth doesn’t disappear, it’s going to flow down and [then] it moves on to being an issue about inequality within younger generations,” says David Sturrock, an IFS senior research economist. “It’s basically saying how much you stand to gain depends on who your parents are and the wealth they have.” Many developed countries share “a lot of the same dynamics”, he adds.
“I ate spaghetti for a month in 2009 because the company I worked for was owned by a private equity firm, which thought it best to cut me so it could buy out smaller competitors,” says Jim from California in the US. “They eventually hired me back for close to half the pay…way to develop talent, right?”
“After 30 or so rejections, I was chosen out of a pool of 2,500 applicants to undergo a psychometric test, followed by a video interview, followed by an assessment centre, followed by a week-long virtual scheme culminating in an interview before being offered a two-year training contract,” says Hadrien, a recent UK graduate. “We are competing with machines and bots, and an ever increasing population of skilled humans,” says another.

But while some might dismiss these quotes as more whining from millennials who have nobody but themselves to blame for being duped into taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a four-year liberal arts degree, the FT also peppered the story with data supporting this vision of a downwardly mobile fate.

It started with data showing fewer millennials will out-earn their parents.

Source: FT

And how feelings of career insecurity are shared by young people around the world, in both developing and emerging economies.

Source: FT

Millennials, meanwhile, struggling with a stubbornly low share of household wealth (partly a factor of the wealth-draining impact of student loans).

Source: FT

According to an editor’s note, the story is merely the first in a series about the myriad problems facing the millennial generation. While we’re sure its audience will appreciate the FT’s attempt to court more youthful readers, we suspect it might come off as a tad whiny. After all, millennials just had the opportunity to get in on one of the greatest wealth-creation engines of all time (crypto) while boomer CEOs were mostly left scratching their heads.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 04/30/2021 – 16:40

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