Month: June 2021

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

We have seen in recent years that public attestations of being a racist have become more common among academics. Last year, we discussed the controversy over the acting Northwestern Law Dean declaring publicly to “I am James Speta and I am a racist.” He was followed by Emily Mullin, executive director of major gifts, who announced, “I am a racist and a gatekeeper of white supremacy. I will work to be better.” Recently, Brandeis’ Assistant Deans, Kate Slater, has triggered a similar controversy after declaring “all white people are racists.”  Some have gone further. At CUNY, the Law Dean Mary Lou Bilek cancelled herself for once referring to herself as a “slaveholder” in a meeting jn arguing for greater protections for minority students. Now, an Oklahoma State PhD student  and teacher Jessica Bridges has cancelled herself from teaching Spanish because she is white.

Bridges’ testimonial on Instagram was picked up by a couple conservative sites after she participated in a conference at Southern Connecticut State University’s “Virtual Women’s and Gender Studies Conference” in April. A “White Accountability & Anti-Racist Education” workshop had a session on “White Women’s Work: Lessons from Engaging in Antiracist Work.” Bridges used the occasion to read a statement of self-cancellation due to her race:

“Learning Spanish from a white woman … I wish I could go back and tell my students not to learn power or correctness from this white woman. I would tell them to stand in their own power. White isn’t right.”

I’m holding myself accountable to this journey. Part of my accountability is to continue to struggle and grapple with my internalized white supremacy. Dismantling white supremacy in society looks like dismantling in my heart, first. It means I’m not going to teach Spanish. Accountability is ongoing because there is not end to the process.”

Today, Oklahoma State University educator’s statements at a virtual conference of educators:

-“White people aren’t right”
-“Racism originates with and is perpetuated by white people”
-“Mourning her white morality”

This is what Critical Race Theory looks like in the classroom. pic.twitter.com/hH4u2f5idR

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) May 29, 2021

Under this theory, no white person should teach Spanish, a European language, to minority students.

Bridges also described how she corrected her “Latinx” students not to called themselves Hispanics because it was “the colonizers’ term” and they are not from Spain.

Another teacher at the conference declared that white teachers should only teacher in white schools.

Rather than teaching in minority districts, professor at SCSU thinks white teachers (because of their skin color) are best suited to stay in white districts and push Critical Race Theory ideas on white students. pic.twitter.com/ytQgGt3MNf

— Mythinformed MKE (@MythinformedMKE) May 30, 2021

The import of these comments is that we should return to a type of segregation of teachers by race with minority teachers teaching minority students or at schools with a majority of minority students. These views were received with approval from others at the conference.

While Bridges and the other teachers were discussing what sounded like voluntary acts of self-cancelled or selection, any such policy at a public school would violate the Constitution under the Fourteenth Amendment. It also contradicts the vision of Martin Luther King who famously declared “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Obviously, any teacher can self-cancel as an unqualified or inappropriate choice for a given subject or a given student population. However, the use of race as such a determinative criteria (without reference to the teacher’s other qualifications or skills) is deeply troubling.

The question is how far this theory extends.  Should white teachers self-cancel in teaching any other language to minority students? How about teaching race issues in law school or anthropology classes?  We have seen similar calls being made at universities.

We need to have a real discussion of the use of such racial classifications to bar (either by mandate or choice) professors from teaching in these areas. These are faculty who spent their lives researching and writing in areas due to a deep personal and intellectual connection. A high school teacher may be White but also be an extraordinary teacher of Spanish.

These teachers clearly feel deeply about correcting what they see as the hold of racism and white privilege in education. That would make for a wonderful and informative debate at universities, which should value a diversity of viewpoints. However, these conferences often seem to exclude opposing viewpoints on these issues. They often seem like echo chambers for the participants. I do not mean to make that assumption about all of the participants or sessions at this conference. However, this particular session would have benefited from greater diversity in viewpoints and an exploration of the implications of such racial classifications for education on the high school and university levels.

Authored by Mark Tapscott via The Epoch Times,

Worries about America’s slowing population growth are misplaced because simply having more people in the country is no guarantee of higher incomes for every individual, according to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) Director of Research Steven Camarota.

“It is clear that the simplistic argument that more population growth necessarily leads to more per capita economic growth, which is the kind of growth that matters, is not obvious and in fact the evidence seems to be the other way around,” Carmarota told The Epoch Times during a June 1 interview.

“The idea that you want lots of population growth is simply not supported by the evidence. You can argue for population growth for any number of justifications but the point here is that you can’t argue for it because it obviously leads to more economic growth,” Camarota said.

Camarota’s comments followed a wave of recent claims of supporters of increased immigration into the country that slowing or stagnant population meant less economic growth and more national security challenges.

Those claims were prompted by the U.S. Census Bureau’s April 26 announcement that the U.S. population growth rate of 7.4 percent since 2010 was the smallest since the Great Depression years of the 1930s.

The day after the Census Bureau data became public, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt quoted a 2010 analysis by The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson saying “I don’t know of a precedent for a dynamic country that has basically stopped growing. The examples in Europe and in Japan are warning signs, not beacons.”

Leonhardt also noted that liberal analyst Matthew Yglesias contends the United States must increase its population if it hopes to compete with China to remain the most powerful nation on earth.

“In Matthew Yglesias’s recent book ‘One Billion Americans,’ he argues that the U.S. should rapidly increase legal immigration to lift economic output. ‘America should aspire to be the greatest nation on earth,’ Yglesias, the author of a Substack newsletter, writes. The only realistic alternative for that role is China, an authoritarian country that is jailing critics and committing egregious human rights abuses,” Leonhardt reported.

On the same day, Deseret News Columnist Jay Evensen said “since 2019, the national debt has grown from $22.5 trillion to $28.2 trillion, and it’s on a steep upward trajectory. How well could the nation service that debt with a slow growth rate, let alone a declining population?

“How will Social Security survive as young workers shrink and retirees grow? How could the nation maintain a strong military with fewer soldiers and a declining base of taxpayers?”

And Brookings Institution Senior Fellow William Frey told the Washington Post’s Dan Balz on May 9, for example, that the new population figures can be turned around with more open immigration policies.

“I don’t think we need to think of ourselves as a country in decline if we open our gates and open our arms to this younger and more racially diverse population, through immigration and through investment in our people of color,” Frey said.

Camarota published a data-driven analysis on June 1 in which he argued there is little correlation in economic growth between population growth and per-capita income growth.

“In truth, there is no clear evidence that population growth necessarily improves a country’s standard of living,” Camarota wrote in his analysis.

“To be sure, a larger population almost always results in a larger aggregate economy. More workers, more consumers, and more government spending will make for a larger Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

“But the standard of living in a country is determined by per capita (i.e., per person) GDP, not the overall size of the economy. If all that mattered were the aggregate size of the economy, then a country like India would be considered vastly richer than a country like Sweden because it has a much larger economy. In reality, per capita GDP determines a country’s standard of living.”

Camarota compiled Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data for economic and population growth for countries designated by the World Bank as high-income nations.

“If population growth drove economic growth, then countries like Canada and Australia that have among the highest rates of immigration and resulting population growth should vastly outpace a country like Japan, which has relatively little immigration and whose population actually declined over the last decade,” Camarota wrote.

“And yet in the most recent decade for which we have data, (2010 to 2019), Japan’s per-capita GDP grew 10.5 percent, slightly better than both Canada’s 8.7 percent and Australia’s 9.9 percent,” he said.

Tesla’s global electric vehicle market share plunged to 11% in April from 29% in march, Credit-Suisse analyst Dan Levy wrote in a note Wednesday morning.

It marks Tesla’s lowest monthly global market share since January 2019. The “greater than usual drop” came between the last month in Q1 and the end of the first month of Q2. 

The company’s market share in the world’s largest auto market – China – collapsed to 8% in April from 19% in March. That drop should be no surprise given the collapse in sales numbers we reported for Tesla in China last month. “GM remained the share leader in China in April, with a 20% share, driven by continued volume traction of the low cost Wuling HongGuang Mini,” Levy’s note, summarized by Bloomberg, pointed out.

 

In Europe, the company posted EV market share of just 2% compared to 22% in March.

In the United States, market share fell to 55% versus 72% in March. 

While Tesla remains at the top of the heap in the U.S., there’s no telling how long that is going to last. The company is now facing stiff competition from legacy automakers and is dealing with backlash from both dropping features and raising prices on its models. 

It’s almost like being a car manufacturer isn’t as easy as Elon Musk once pitched to the investing public. 

Meanwhile, it isn’t as though global EV sales are slowing down. Penetration of EVs continues globally:

Levy noted that global EV sales in April represented 6.1% of total global new vehicle sales, still far ahead of the 2020 pace of 4.4%.

But Tesla’s registration numbers in places like the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland and Denmark appear to be lagging their pace in 2020:

Recall, we noted Tesla’s collapse in Chinese sales for April in a report we wrote in mid-May. The company’s growth in April “slowed precipitously” after weeks of controversy that started with a protest at the Shanghai Auto Show calling into question the quality of Tesla’s brakes. What followed was weeks of negative press in China, where state media decried the company as “arrogant” and urged it to focus on the quality of its vehicles. 

Data from April showed that just 11,949 Tesla vehicles were registered in the country, down sharply from the 34,714 registrations in March, according to Bloomberg.

In addition to that data from China Automotive Information Net, additional data from China’s Passenger Car Association showed that the company sold 25,845 Chinese-made vehicles in April, down from 35,478 in March. Separately, 14,174 EVs were exported, due to demand from Europe, the report noted.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Yesterday the Supreme Court issued two more unanimous decisions in Garland v. Dai and United States v. Cooley.  This follow two unanimous decisions last week.  The weekly display of unanimity is notable given the calls by Democratic leaders to pack the Court.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about how the heavy-handed campaigns might backfire with the justices. As we await important and likely divided decisions on issues like abortion, Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues seem to be sending a message that the Court is not so rigidly ideological as Democratic members and activists suggest.

In the Garland case, the court ruled (again) unanimously to reverse the Ninth Circuit in an opinion written by Justice Neil Gorsuch on the rule in immigration disputes regarding the credibility of noncitizens’ testimony.  cannot be reconciled with the terms of the Immigration and Nationality Act. In Cooley, the Court unanimously ruled in an opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer that a tribal police officer has authority to detain temporarily and to search a non-Native American traveling on a public right-of-way running through a reservation.

Last week, there were two unanimous opinions making this six 9-0 rulings in two weeks. Justice Sotomayor wrote the opinion in  United States v. Palomar-Santiago, an immigration decision that ruled for the government and against an immigrant. It also ruled unanimously in Territory of Guam v. United States, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas. The Court ruled in favor of Guam on the collection of funding from the U.S. government to remediate environmental pollution on the island.

This is an extraordinary litany of unanimous decisions and could in part reflect an implied message from the justices that this is a court that is not nearly as rigid and divided as suggested by Democratic members and activists.

Recently, Breyer warned against any move to expand the Supreme Court. He also rejected the characterization of the current Court as “conservative” or ideologically rigid. Breyer was swiftly denounced by figures like cable news host Mehdi Hasan who called him “naive” and called for his retirement. Demand Justice, a liberal group calling for court packing, had a billboard truck in Washington the next day in the streets of Washington warning “Breyer, retire. Don’t risk your legacy.” (Demand Justice once employed White House press secretary Jen Psaki as a communications consultant, and Psaki was on the advisory board of one of its voting projects.)

Other justices have denounced such court packing schemes. Shortly before she died, Ruth Bader Ginsburg publicly warned against the move: “If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’”

Nevertheless, Democratic members have continued to call the Court, to use Joe Biden’s words, “out of whack” due to the conservative majority.  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and more recently Sen. Richard Blumenthal have warned conservative justices of dire consequences for the Court if they did not rule with their liberal colleagues on high-profile cases expected in the next two weeks.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. not only endorsed the court-packing scheme but went even further to question why we should listen to just nine people on such important questions. She appeared to question the very basis for Marbury v. Madison — the case laying the foundation for the Supreme Court in our constitutional system. AOC challenged the role of the Court in overturning laws. She questioned “just, functionally, the idea that nine people, that a nine person court, can overturn laws that thousand– hundreds and thousands of legislators, advocates and policymakers drew consensus on.” She then added “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.”

The scheduling of these unanimous opinions may be the Court clearing its throat on these campaigns and threats.

The litany of unanimous rulings amplifies the fact that most cases are resolved with compromise and different alignments of the justices. There are always “big ticket” cases that produce more ideological divisions but they are the exception rather than the rule for the Court.  These are honest ideological differences and we want the justices to be consistent on their underlying principles. However, most of the work of the Court remains less ideologically driven on issues ranging from statutory interpretation to evidentiary rules.

There remains a bright-line preventing justices from speaking on political issues or controversies, though this rule is sometimes honored in the breach.  However, there are times when the justices speak loudest through their opinions, particularly when they speak with one voice. In these cases, the justices are discussing different subjects but they clearly want the public to see them speaking as one. One court. Unpacked and undivided.

Four months after the Reddit crew sparked a historic market-wide short squeeze across a handful of small and mid-cap companies, which knocked out some of the most respected hedge funds in the world with Melvin Capital requiring a multi-billion bailout from Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen, the squeeze is back sending heavily shorted names like AMC, whose short interest we pointed out last week was off the charts…

AMC short interest pic.twitter.com/w9oIsRK7cK

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 25, 2021

… and which has exploded higher, a squeeze which has now shifted over to names such as Bed Bath and Beyond and various other small and mid-cap names.

Of course, there is no mystery what’s behind this: just like in late January when the meme squeeze phenomenon first emerged, the common theme here is that all these stocks are extremely heavily shorted, and retail investors are seeking to squeeze the shorts once again and thus time with even more stimmy power.

To be sure, one look at the chart of the most heavily shorted names shows what’s going on.

And, just like in late January, we have compiled a list of the most heavily shorted names. It may come as a surprise to some that the former leaders here, GME and AMC are not even in the top 30.

So which companies are? Below we have screened for the most shorted Russell 2000 names (based on float as a % of short interest), and which we will use to constitute our latest and greatest short basket. If AMC is any indication, going long a basket of these names could turn out to be the trade of a lifetime.

As Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid points out in his latest “Chart of the day”, Bloomberg’s US financial conditions index has eased to fresh 14-plus year highs. This index looks at money markets, various credit spreads and equity markets.

However Bloomberg also compiles a financial conditions “plus” index where they include indicators of asset-price bubbles incorporating tech shares, housing markets and additional yield deviations from the mean.

As Reid notes, this “plus” index has really exploded higher over the last few weeks to comfortably be at record highs. When we add in combined fiscal deficits and Fed balance sheet expansion as a % of GDP one can easily see why financial conditions are so loose and bubbles have appeared in various places over the last few months.

So, yes, markets have never had it so good, but what comes next? As the DB credit strategist rhetorically concludes, “will policymakers regret such extreme stimulus in the quarters ahead? Much will depend on whether inflation comes roaring back as a result of the trends seen in the graph.”

A major oil refinery in Tehran is now engulfed in a huge blaze just hours after on Wednesday morning the Islamic Republic’s largest warship caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Oman under mysterious circumstances.

Iranian state Tasnim news in a breaking report has identified it as the Shahid Tondguyan oil refinery, considered among the country’s largest. 

#BREAKING: Another massive fire in #Iran today. Fars News’ Telegram account has just published video of a fire at an oil refinery in the Tehran area. Tasnim says it’s at the Shahid Tondguyan oil refinery. 1/2https://t.co/MACQV4FX6H pic.twitter.com/miJAzXlUcP

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) June 2, 2021

Coincidence? Or are we now witnessing a return to the summer of 2020 which saw tit-for-tat sabotage attacks on oil tankers, military and nuclear sites involving Israel and Iran? 

The timing is also interesting given Iran and the West appear on the verge of completing a restored nuclear deal in Vienna, which means the US would drop sanctions and allow Iran to pursue ‘peaceful nuclear energy’ development. Israel has vowed to do everything to prevent such a deal which Tel Aviv sees as providing a path to nuclear weapons. 

Multiple videos show a massive blaze in progress, billowing thick black smoke high over the Iranian capital… 

JUST IN – Shahid Tondguyan oil refinery in #Tehran, Iran on fire. pic.twitter.com/1fShagiyoA

— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) June 2, 2021

Iranian state TV has further described in an unconfirmed report that one of the emergency lines of liquefied gas erupted and caused the large fire. 

According to Reuters citing local officials, there’s been no reports of casualties. 

🎥حجم دود عظیمی جنوب‌شرق تهران در بر گرفته؛ دودی که ناشی از آتش‌سوزی در خط لوله انتقال گاز مایع پالایشگاه تهران اعلام شده pic.twitter.com/9PGTM8OfM8

— Mohammad Hasan Najmi (@mhnajmi64) June 2, 2021

And more limited details are as follows: “The fire struck the state-owned Tondgooyan Petrochemical Co. to the south of Tehran on Wednesday night. Firefighters believe it struck a pipeline for liquefied petroleum gas at the facility. That’s according to a report on Iranian state television. Associated Press journalists in central Tehran, some 20 kilometers away, could see the black smoke rise in the distance.”

developing…

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Mikhail Tukhachevsky was only 42 years old when Joseph Stalin promoted him to the highest possible military rank in the Soviet Union.

As “Marshall of the Soviet Union”, Tukhachevsky had near supreme authority over all Soviet military forces. And he had been personally tasked by Stalin to modernize the military and prepare for war.

But Tukhachevsky’s new authority didn’t last very long. Shortly after assuming his duties as Marshall, he was quietly reassigned to an unimportant post… and subsequently arrested.

The year was 1936. And Tukhachevsky was suspected of plotting with the Germans to overthrow Stalin and implement a military dictatorship.

Tukhachevsky was brutally beaten while in captivity, and he confessed to being a Nazi spy after two days of relentless torture.

He was branded a traitor and executed.

Tukhachevsky wasn’t the only one, either. This was a period in Soviet history called the Great Terror, in which an extremely paranoid Stalin purged the military of anyone who showed any sign of ideological dissent.

The rest of the officers were quick to show Stalin that they were worthy, loyal comrades. Soldiers routinely ratted each other out and put each other on phony trials where a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion.

During Tukhachevsky’s trial, one of the judges passionately recounted to the Soviet press how much he loathed traitors who were disloyal to Stalin:

“When I saw those scoundrels in the courtroom, I was shivering. A beast was in me. I didn’t want to judge them, but beat and beat them in a wild frenzy.”

This judge’s name was General Ivan Belov. And even though he tried so desperately to prove that he was a loyal party member by eagerly participating in the purge, Belov knew that the purge would eventually come for him:

“Tomorrow I shall be put in the same place [as Tukhachevsky].”

Belov was himself arrested, tried, and executed within eighteen months.

Over 36,000 Red Army officers were executed, sent to the gulag, or removed from command.

This included the vast majority of the upper ranks— people like Tukhachevsky who had designed the modern Red Army, and knew best how to run it.

The end result was that Stalin had severely weakened his own military, which is why the Soviets were totally unprepared when Hitler’s forces invaded a few years later.

In fact Stalin was at such a tactical disadvantage in the early days of World War II that he released many of the purged officers from the Gulag, and forced them back into the military to help fight off the Nazis.

Paranoid authoritarian leaders often fall victim to this impulse to demand ideological purity from their soldiers.

And in a bizarre way, this is what’s happening in the United States now that the Defense Department has ordered its own purge of “extremism” in the ranks.

Last month, the Secretary of Defense issued a memo on “Immediate Actions to Counter Extremism in the Military” and chose a man named Bishop Garrison to head the “Countering Extremism Working Group.”

What does Bishop Garrison consider “extremism”?

In 2019, he Tweeted about “misogynist, extremists, other racists” and said “If you support the President [i.e. Orange Man], you support that. There is no room for nuance with this.”

So according to Garrison’s definition of extremism, at least 74 million Americans are extremists, including about half of the soldiers in the US military.

In a June 2020 article, Garrison wrote that such extremism “must be cut out like the cancer it has been for so long.”

Now it will be Garrison’s responsibility to create a lengthy screening process that all new military recruits must pass, in order to identify “specific information about current or previous extremist behavior.”

A memo from March 2021 outlines the “Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD [Department of Defense]” and identifies symbols like the ‘OK’ hand gesture as potential signs extremism.

Just recently a brand new Space Force commander named Matthew Lohmeier was reassigned, because he stated that, “diversity, inclusion and equity industry and the trainings we are receiving in the military … is rooted in critical race theory, which is rooted in Marxism.”

Bishop Garrison can now wield supreme authority to cancel anyone in the military who expresses the wrong opinion.

Obviously I’m not suggesting that the US is turning into a Stalinist regime.

But it’s clear that the Defense Department’s priorities have shifted away from maintaining the most effective fighting force in the history of the world.

Now it’s all about Diversity and Inclusion, from Special Operations Command to the Central Intelligence Agency.

This is classic thinking for out-of-touch bureaucrats, most of whom have never been anywhere near a combat zone.

If they had, they’d understand that when the bullets start flying, no soldier in a foxhole gives a damn about the skin color of the guy next to him. All they care about is staying alive, keeping their fellow soldiers alive, and accomplishing the objective.

Yet now, at a time when the Chinese military is rapidly catching up to the West in terms of tactical prowess and weapons technology, and may already be far ahead in terms of cyberwarfare, the top priority in the US military is now social justice… and stamping out ideological dissent from its ranks.

The policy changes are pushing many members of the military to leave voluntarily, something the Center for a New American Security calls a “looming retention crisis.”

According to their report, an alarming number of talented military officers are leaving the service.

Having some bureaucrat accuse you of being an extremist, when all you’ve ever done is put your life on the line in service of your country, probably doesn’t help this retention problem.

It takes decades of careful design and intelligent decision-making for a nation to build an effective military.

But it only takes 5-10 years of lunacy like this to wreck it.

*  *  *

On another note… We think gold could DOUBLE and silver could increase by up to 5 TIMES in the next few years. That’s why we published a new, 50-page long Ultimate Guide on Gold & Silver that you can download here.