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“I’m Against Him” – Welcome To Cartoon Nation

Submitted by Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The Rediscovery Of Men

This must account, at least in part, for the post-election hysteria among the social justice folk and their mentors at the Prog end of politics, especially those bent on suppressing or eliminating men. Of course, it’s only been the last year or so that their long-running animus became explicit, their writ against white men in particular. Before, it was all sub rosa, really just a byproduct of the campaign to uplift women, people-of-color, and the many theoretical gender categories vying for supremacy of the moral high ground. Hillary was expected to drive the final wooden stake through masculinity’s demonic heart… but something went wrong… and she was disarmed… and now this cheeto-headed monster in a red necktie is the president-elect. There must have been a clerical error.

Donald Trump was about as far from my sense of the male ideal as anything short of the Golem. His accomplishments in life — developing hotels that look like bowling trophies and producing moronic TV shows — seem as flimsy as the plastic golden heraldry plastered on his casinos. His knowledge of the world appears to be on the level of a fifth grader. He can barely string together two coherent sentences off-teleprompter. I was as astonished as anyone by the disclosure of his “grab them by the pussy” courtship advice to little Billy Bush. In my experience, it seemed a very poor strategy for scoring some action, to say the least. In a better world — perhaps even the America he imagines to have been great once — Donald Trump would be a kind of freak among men, a joke, a parody of masculinity.

But then consider the freak show that American culture has become in our time and it shouldn’t be surprising that a cartoon nation has ended up with a cartoon of a man as head-of-state. In fact, I doubt that there even is any remaining collective idea of what it means to be a man here in terms of the ancient virtues. Honor? Dignity? Patience? Prudence? Fuhgeddabowdit. The cultural memory of all that has been erased. The apotheosis of Trump may remind a few people of all that has been lost, but we’re starting from nearly zero in the recovery of it.

Consider also the caliber of the male persons who stepped into the arena last spring when the election spectacle kicked off. Only Bernie Sanders came close to representing honorable manhood — in the form of your irascible old “socialist” uncle from Brooklyn — while the rest of them acted like Elmer Fudd, Mighty Mouse, and Woody Woodpecker. And then when the primary elections ended, Bernie drove a wooden stake into his own heart in a bizarre act of political hara-kiri.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign was engineered from the get-go to complete the demolition of American manhood in what turned out to be a reckless miscalculation. “I’m with her (and against him).” Too much in recent American history has been against “him” and a great many of the hims out there began to notice that they were being squeezed out of the nation’s life like watermelon seeds. Most particularly, men were no longer considered necessary in whatever remained of the family unit. This went against the truth of the matter, of course, because nothing has been more harmful to everyday life than the absence of fathers. And this was connected to the secondary calamity of men losing their roles in the workplace — and the loss of self-respect connected with that. So the election awakened some sleeping notion that life was wildly out of balance in America. And being so out of balance, it swung wildly in the other direction.

The corrective to all this awaits a fiery passage through the coming tribulation that is about to start in the realm of money. You can be sure that many of the current popular assumptions about how the world works are about to change. It will present opportunities for men to start acting like men again — for instance, being on the side of the truth instead of reflexive mendacity.  Some real men could emerge from the smoldering rubble and begin a from-the-ground-up reassembly of the male spirit. Trump may end up being little more than a broken monument amid the rubble, a sort of golden calf the people constructed in desperation as they sought a way out of the wilderness.

But the blow-up in banking and finance could represent a final detonation of manhood, since so much testosterone is sequestered in the dark corners of Wall Street and the money centers like it. And when that happens men might be in disrepute for a thousand years.

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Stein Vows To Launch Recounts In More States To Ensure “Election Integrity”

After drawing criticism from almost everyone for her recount efforts in WI, PA, & MI, Jill Stein is doubling down saying that she “would support efforts elsewhere to uphold election integrity.”  Ironically, the only thing actually threatening our “election integrity” at the moment is Jill Stein’s recount effort.

 

Just yesterday we wrote a note asking why Jill Stein was pursuing these recount efforts (see “Is This The Democrats’ Real Strategy In Launching Recounts?“). 
Certainly there is practically no hope of switching the ~100,000
votes that would be needed for Hillary to win WI, MI and PA and even the
Obama administration and the Department of Homeland Security have confirmed that there is no evidence of election hacking.  Which left us to speculate that Stein is simply hoping to disrupt the electoral
college process to push the 2016 election into the hands Congress while
drawing the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency into question.

Now, this morning we have a direct confirmation from Stein that her campaign has absolutely no proof of election tampering.  Explicit confirmation that all the disaffected Hillary supporters have been duped.

 

Meanwhile, basking in the glory of her 15 minutes of fame, Stein has launched a tweet storm lecturing everyone on how to create a real “democracy.”

 

This is a good game…we have another:  “Jill Stein: Want Democracy? Don’t steal millions of dollars from disaffected Hillary supporters to challenge elections where you have no evidence of election tampering and no chance of changing the outcome.”

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The Engine Of Inequality: Privilege

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

This is what we're up against: a status quo that has institutionalized soaring inequality and rising poverty as the only possible output of defending the privileged few at the expense of the many.

We all know wealth/income inequality is soaring. I've published many entries on this topic (please see the three charts below as a refresher), and it's clear there are multiple sources of rising inequality: globalization and technology, which concentrate gains in relatively few hands, and inflation, which reduces the purchasing power of stagnating real wages.

But the dominant source of inequality is privilege–specifically, privilege that is institutionalized by the status quo.

This engine of inequality–institutionalized privilege–is the topic of my new book, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition).

The word "privilege" is tossed around rather loosely. What does it mean in economic and social terms? I differentiate between privilege, which is unearned, and advantaged, which is earned.

To reverse rising inequality, we must dismantle the institutionalized power of privilege and create universally accessible pathways to the advantages of building capital. A key part of my analysis is causally linking rising inequality, poverty and privilege.

Here is an excerpt of the book:

What Is Poverty?

That poverty is the lack of the material necessities of life is self-evident. The problem with this definition of poverty is that it naturally leads to the idea that the solution to poverty is to give people either material necessities and/or money to buy them. But this transfer is not a systemic solution to poverty, for it is based on a faulty understanding of poverty.

To understand poverty, we must first understand that an economy can be distilled down to two systems: ownership of income streams and the distribution of those income streams. Income flows from productive assets, i.e. the engines of wealth/value creation. Net income is simply the surplus between the cost of production (the inputs) and the value of what has been produced (the output).

There are various means of distributing this net income to participants in the economy: wages paid by owners of an income stream, income earned by individuals who own an engine of wealth, profits paid as dividends by owners of income streams, and wages paid by the State (i.e. government) from tax revenues collected from private income.

Productivity is a measure of how much output is generated from inputs. While there are various measures of wealth, the kind of wealth that matters in solving poverty are the engines of wealth that can be made more productive with investment, knowledge and innovation.

If we imagine the wealth in a pirate’s treasure chest—gold coins, precious stones, etc.—we find that this wealth is based on the relative scarcity of the items, not on their productivity. The precious stones are inert and do not generate goods and services. The productivity of precious stones is zero. These scarce items can act as money, but outside of an economy that generates and distributes income, their value is decorative.

In contrast, farmland and tools are productive assets, i.e. engines of wealth. The inputs of capital (land, tools, etc.) and labor yield an output with an economic value. Productive innovations leverage the inputs into higher yields. This increases the income and thus the value of the system of production.

This brief overview enables us to discern the systemic outlines of inequality and poverty: Economies with large surpluses but highly uneven distribution of the surplus will have relatively few very wealthy people and a much larger mass of poor people.

So what makes the distribution of income uneven? There are two basic dynamics:

1) the ownership of productive assets (the engines of wealth) is highly concentrated in a few powerful hands, or

2) the State harvests most of the economy’s surplus and distributes it to a small circle of politically powerful cronies.

In other words, poverty is the result of a highly asymmetric distribution of income from an equally asymmetric allocation of political power and productive capital.

We have seen that whenever ownership of the engines of wealth creation is concentrated in the hands of a few, the inevitable result is poverty. And if the State has unlimited power to expropriate private income streams, the result is highly unequal distribution of wealth as the State’s insiders scoop up the wealth.

Thus solving poverty distills down to (a) distributing new capital to disadvantaged households and their communities, and (b) then boosting the productivity of that capital.

This leads to two profound conclusions:

1) To solve poverty, ownership of the engines of wealth creation must be broadly distributed as new capital, and

2) The income generated by this broad ownership must be beyond the reach of an oligarchic State of entrenched cronies.

A systemic solution to inequality and poverty therefore has two parts: widely distribute the tools to build productive capital, and encourage innovation that boosts the productivity of those broadly distributed engines of wealth creation.

Historically, redistributive schemes to reduce poverty simply call for taking productive capital away from one person and giving it to another person. That these schemes fail is self-evident. A better, systemic solution to poverty is to distribute new capital—capital that has been created by the work and innovation of newly enfranchised owners.

As we see on a daily basis, technology is enabling the low-cost distribution of digital (intangible) capital that enables other forms of productive capital.

Tangible capital can be confiscated by the State. But intangible capital is less accessible, especially if it is distributed and held in highly decentralized and encrypted forms.

A just, transparently governed State will naturally earn the trust of its citizenry who will then voluntarily pay taxes to support the State’s functions. But poverty is not associated with just, transparently governed states; it is associated with exploitive autocracies, oligarchies and monopolies/cartels dominated by parasitic, privileged elites.

Poverty is permanent unless income-producing capital can be held by individuals, households and communities in forms that cannot be easily confiscated by a State that enforces the privileges of the few at the expense of the many.

(end of excerpt)

This is what we're up against: a status quo that has institutionalized soaring inequality and rising poverty as the only possible output of defending the privileged few at the expense of the many:

The institutionalized impoverishment of unprivileged students:

The institutionalized transfer of wealth to the top 0.1%:

The institutionalized decline of real income of the bottom 95%:

*  *  *

For what it's worth, my copy editor reckons this is my best book. It is, if nothing else, highly relevant to today's economic/social schisms. Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition).  Join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Check out both of my new books, Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print) and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform ($3.95 Kindle, $8.95 print). For more, please visit the OTM essentials website.

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Trump Says Millions Voted Illegally but Any Recount Would Be Pointless

Any hope that the prospect of occupying the White House would dampen Donald Trump’s fondness for conspiracist crap seems to have been misplaced. Likewise the hope that he would prove gracious in victory. After a brief burst of magnanimity on election night, he has reverted to form. “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide,” he bragged on Twitter yesterday, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Trump says any recount of votes in the presidential election is “a scam,” since it will not affect the outcome. Yet he also claims “millions of people” voted illegally. Can both propositions be true? Only if you assume, as Trump apparently does, that millions of illegal voters 1) exist and 2) favor Hillary Clinton.

A couple of weeks ago, Politifact found no evidence to back up reports by websites such as InfoWars, Milo, The New American, and Freedom Daily that more than 3 million votes were cast by noncitizens in this month’s election. The source of that claim, Republican activist Gregg Phillips, said it was based on an “analysis of [a] database of 180 million voter registrations,” but he declined to say where the information came from or how he had analyzed it.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told Politifact “the idea that 3 million noncitizens could have illegally voted in our elections without being detected is obscenely ludicrous.” Here is what Hasen told Politico about Trump’s claim that “millions of people” voted illegally:

There’s no reason to believe this is true. The level of fraud in US elections is quite low….We’re talking claims in the dozens. We’re not talking voting in the millions, or the thousands, or even the hundreds.

Politifact‘s Allison Graves noted that claims about widespread voting by noncitizens got a boost from a 2014 study estimating that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent voted in 2010. But the survey data on which that study was based were flawed because some respondents accidentally gave the wrong answer to a question about their citizenship. Three researchers who reinterviewed participants in the survey found that a small percentage changed their answers to that question. “It appears as though about 0.1-0.3 percent of respondents are citizens who incorrectly identify themselves as non-citizens in the survey,” they explained in The Washington Post last month. “With a sample size of 19,000, even this low rate of error can result in a number of responses that appear notable when they are not.”

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Trump Seems Likely to Throw Cold Water on the Thaw in U.S.-Cuba Relations

No thaw for you, RaulPresident-elect Donald Trump’s policy on the future of U.S.-Cuba relations has never been exactly made clear.

At various points during the Republican primary campaign, he described President Obama’s restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba as “fine” but then later described the approach as a “very weak agreement” that he would reverse as president “unless the Castro regime meets our demands.” But Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he had aspirations to open a hotel in Cuba, and Newsweek also reported that one of Trump’s companies did business with Cuba in the late 1990s, in violation of the embargo.

Now that Fidel Castro is dead, rumblings among Trump’s inner circle and some Republican heavyweights appear to indicate the next president intends to slow or even reverse some of the recent political and economic openings between the two countries.

RNC chairman and Trump’s incoming-chief of staff Reince Priebus told Fox News Sunday that he “absolutely” expects Trump to push back on the lifting of certain sanctions without some major changes from Raul Castro’s government. Priebus added, “Repression, open markets, freedom of religion, political prisoners—these things need to change in order to have open and free relationships, and that’s what president-elect Trump believes, and that’s where he’s going to head.”

Two of Trump’s bitterest rivals during the primary campaign, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz—both senators of Cuban descent—said yesterday that they would be in favor of rolling back the normalization of relations with Cuba.

Cruz said on ABC’s This Week that “what the Obama administration has done has strengthened Raul Castro,” while Rubio reportedly said, “now more than ever Congress and the new administration must stand with [the Cuban people] against their brutal rulers and support their struggle for freedom and basic human rights.”

What all these Republican bigwigs appear to be missing is that the half-century-long embargo did not defeat the Castros, or communism, or lead to any meaningful liberalization of economic or human rights on the island nation. If anything, it provided the Castros with a ready-made excuse that the source of Cubans’ poverty and isolation was yanqui imperialism.

Isolating the Castros hasn’t worked and is a self-spiting position from an American point of view. Allowing for more trade with Cuba will allow for more information to flow to the people, who when freed from the myopia caused by some of the strictest government censorship in the world will stand a better shot of overthrowing their tyrannical one-party system. Reverting to the previously failed position is worse than fighting the last war, it’s fighting the last losing war.

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Trump Victory Leads To Biggest Surge In Dallas Fed “Hope” In Past Decade

Dallas Fed business outlook survey soared to 10.2 in November (smashing expectations of +2.0) – the first expansionary print in 22 months.  Across the board exuberance was evident with 11 of the 15 components soaring double-digits. However, it is the post-Trump victory “hope” that really spiked – six month ahead expectations for increased business exploded by the most since 2007.

Hope triumphs…

 

But gains were seen across the entire survey..

 

We leave it to one of the Dallas Fed survey respondents to explain…

We are looking forward to the end of the disastrous socialist policies of the last eight years. Please reduce the regulation, taxes and government interference so we can compete globally. We hope the new administration makes good on its promises and, if so, it will increase our business expansion, hiring and investments.

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David Petraeus To Meet With Trump As Possible Secretary Of State Pick

Confirming media rumors that in addition to the ongoing battle between Romney and Giulianni for the position of Secretary of State, which had led to media fallout implicating Trump media aide Kellyanne Conway who allegedly “went rogue” by bashing Romney on Twitter and on the TV circuit over the weekend, Bloomberg reports that Trump is set to meet with General David Petraeus, whom he is now considering for the position of secretary of state.

As a reminder, the four-star general left government under a cloud for sharing classified documents during an extramarital affair. He is set to meet Trump “amid infighting among Trump’s advisers about who to pick for the post” in what may be yet another media distraction as the public response against Petraeus may be just as powerful as that against Romney. As a reminder, Kellyanne Conwaysaid Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she is “just astonished at the breathtaking volume and intensity of blow-back that I see” toward the possibility of Romney serving as the nation’s top diplomat.

As Bloomberg notes, if Petraeus wins Senate confirmation, it will represent one of Trump’s boldest appointments and a remarkable comeback for the 64-year-old general who won acclaim overseeing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq before serving as director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama. The Senate had voted 94-0 to confirm him for that post. However, shortly after Petraeus’s government career collapsed after revelations that he had an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, and shared classified documents with her.

He resigned from the CIA in November 2012 and avoided a criminal trial by agreeing to a plea deal in April 2015. It required him to serve two years on probation and pay a $100,000 fine on a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized possession of classified information.

To be sure, Trump has tried to mitigate Petraeus’ colorful past, saying during the presidential campaign that Petraeus’s violations paled compared to those of his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who shared classified information on a private e-mail server.

“Other lives, including General Petraeus and many others, have been destroyed for doing far, far less,” Trump said at a rally in October. “This is a conspiracy against you, the American people, and we cannot let this happen or continue.” 

Before the scandal, Petraeus was lauded as one of the most brilliant generals of his generation and the go-to choice of presidents George W. Bush and Obama. Bush tapped him in 2007 to lead the surge of 21,000 U.S. troops into Iraq to rescue the crumbling U.S. war effort there. He revamped U.S. strategy in Iraq to emphasize using counterinsurgency tactics and flooding Iraq urban centers with troops to protect them. The new strategy was credited with reducing violence in the country and sparing the U.S. a humiliating defeat.  Still, it is unclear how such an appointment would resonate with Trump’s core support base.

Since departing the public sector, Petraeus has been teaching and working as chairman of the KKR Global Institute, which analyzes global trends for KKR & Co., the New York-based investment firm. Obama’s administration continued to seek his occasional advice on strategy in Iraq. White House press secretary Josh Earnest noted his record of service in justifying the decision to still rely on his counsel despite the scandal.

Last week, in an interview with the BBC, Petraeus had said he would serve in the Trump administration if asked by the president-elect. “I’ve been in a position before where a president has turned to me in the Oval Office in a difficult moment, without any pleasantries, and said ‘I’m asking you as your president and Commander in Chief to take command of the international security force in Afghanistan,”’ Petraeus said. “The only response can be: ‘Yes, Mr President.”’

Despite Trump’s praise of Petraeus on the campaign trail, the two have not always aligned on policy issues. Petraeus disagreed gently with Trump on one issue during the campaign, rejecting the candidate’s criticism of the Pentagon for announcing in advance that it was readying the long-promised campaign to retake Mosul from Islamic State terrorists. That said, the former general had also clashed with Obama before the president took office. During a 2008 campaign visit to Iraq, the then-senator and Petraeus had a heated debate over troop levels in the country, according to a book by Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe.

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Venezuela Seizes Medicine from Catholic Charity, Skips Talks with Opposition as Starving Residents Flee Country in Boats

The Venezuelan tax authority seized medicine from a Catholic charity coming through a channel set-up by Vatican-mediated talks, claiming the shipment lacked the proper customs paperwork, declaring it “legally abandoned” and “adjudicated” it to the social security administration, Caracas Chronicles reports.

“You’d think that would make for some awkwardness at the next set of talks, right?” writes the Chronicles’ Francisco Toro. “Joke’s on you: the government’s not going to talks anymore, sucker!” Last week, the opposition said the Vatican-mediated talks were frozen after government officials ditched a scheduled meeting.

The opposition-controlled National Assembly launched an impeachment trial against President Nicolas Maduro last month, while the national election cancel rejected a bid for a recall vote against Maduro. The president’s approval rating fell below 20 percent, a new low. According to a New York Times report on starving Venezuelans attempting to reach Curacao by boat, more than 150,000 Venezuelans have fled the country in the last year.

“As more and more people search for food every day, the future of the country looks bleak: there is rising crime, massive emigration, investment flight and corruption,” France 24 reports. “Businesses are shuttering and tens of thousands of young people are dropping out of university, either to flee the country or to focus on helping their families survive.”

The Venezuelan bolivar lost 45 percent of its value this month alone. The largest bill, a 100, is worth 5 cents on the black market, and wallets are no longer useful to carry currency. Last month, the government hiked the minimum wage, food subsidies, and public sector pay in an effort to quell protests.

Maduro is headed to an OPEC meeting in Vienna this week, hoping to get a deal to cut oil production in a bid to raise prices and stave off economic collapse, OilPrice.com reports. China is putting in another $2.2 billion into Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, with the amount of oil exported to China rising to 800,000 barrels a day from about 550,000 barrels a day. It’s put in more than $60 billion in the last decade, OilPrice.com estimates.

Venezuela declared three days of mourning after the death of Fidel Castro, with Maduro visiting the Caracas Revolution Museum near the mausoleum for Hugo Chavez, who enjoyed a close relationship with and provided oil subsidies to Castro. Maduro said Castro “was and will continue to be a living legend for all he did and still has to do.” Cuba’s reliance on cheap Venezuelan fuel has contributed to an economic downturn in Cuba as Venezuela’s economy collapses.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s state prosecutor office announced it was charging 11 soldiers in the killing of 12 people found in a mass grave in Miranda that the opposition called a “massacre” that illustrated the country was descending into a dictatorship.

Two of Maduro’s wife’s nephews were convicted on drug trafficking charges in New York in what the Venezuelan president called an “imperialist attack” on his wife.

Related: Jim Epstein on the secret, dangerous world of bitcoin mining Venezuela in the latest issue of Reason magazine

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“Run, Hide, Fight” – Active Shooter Reported On Ohio State Campus

Ohop State police issued an alert at 0956ET of an active shooter on Ohio State Campus calling for a “shelter in place” order.

Ohio State Universiry emergency management had further suggestions…

Scary scenes once again…

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The Hyperinflationary Endgame: Venezuela Currency Crashes 15% In One Day

Just last week we were amazed to report that the Venezuela currency, the Bolivar, had crashed below 2,000 for the first time ever, losing 50% of its value in just two months as the Venezuela hyperinflation had entered its terminal phase.

As of this morning, the DolarToday.com website, maintained by a person the WSJ dubbed “Public Enemy No. 1 of Venezuela’s revolutionary government, Gustavo Díaz, a Home Depot Inc. employee in central Alabama” reports that having crossed the psychological 2,000 level just one week ago, the Bolivar has just plunged to a new all time low of 3,480.22 on the black market, dropping by 15% from its latest print of 2,972 reported on Friday of last week, and has lost 60% in its value just in the past month.

So for anyone still curious what hyperinflation in real time looks like, here is the visual answer.

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