another site
Flame out?
Former Olympic swimmer and swimming coach João Reinaldo Costa Lima Neto, aged 69, took a tumble as he carried the Olympic torch through the streets of Recife, Brazil… offering, perhaps, a glimpse of the debacle to come…
via http://ift.tt/1PaxjYs Tyler Durden
Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,
The U.S. has approximately $80 trillion of unfunded liabilities for social security, medicare and other entitlements sitting atop a work force that is rapidly aging and an economy that is lapsing into stasis. Yet in the midst of a campaign diatribe about Donald Trump’s alleged lack of preparation for the highest office in the land, the current White House occupant proved that in nearly eight years he has learned exactly nothing about the nation’s abysmal fiscal plight.
“And not only do we need to strengthen its long-term health, it’s time we finally made Social Security more generous and increased its benefits so that today’s retirees and future generations get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned,” Obama said in an economic call to arms in Elkhart, Indiana.
Don’t bother to say he must be kidding. After all, our President also claims the disaster known as Obamacare is a roaring success; and that he has created 14 million jobs—-when, in fact, there are fewer full-time, full-pay “breadwinner jobs” in America today than when Bill Clinton scuttled out of the White House 16 years ago.
Still, your don’t have to be even a know nothing about baby-boom demographics to recognize that the words “increase” and “social security benefits” will never again inhabit the same universe. To wit, there are about 50 million persons 65 or over at present, but this number will rise to 80 million by around 2040 and nearly 100 million a decade or two thereafter.
Moreover, as we keeping insisting, there is nothing in the OASDI trust funds except intergovernmental accounting confetti. Every dime that was ever collected from the social insurance taxes, which bring in more than $1 trillion per year in revenue, has already been spent on education grants, Federal salaries, aircraft carriers, cotton subsidies, windmill farms and thousands of other Washington boondoggles.
So that steep demographic curve in the chart above means only one thing. Namely, that to fund even the current wildly unaffordable benefit schedule, massive amounts of additional cash will have to be extracted from taxpayers, the bond market or other programs.
The graph below gives a hint of the magnitude of the cash shortfall that is already baked into the cake under current entitlements. Even under the optimistic economic forecasts of the government’s chief actuary, the OASDI funds will be running a $250 billion annual cash deficit before the next presidential term ends, and upwards of $1 trillion per year by 2040.
But the sheer mathematical impossibility of funding higher cash and medical benefits for what will soon by 80 million retirees is only part of Obama’s latest whopper. An even more egregious element was the notion that Washington ought to pony up “more generous and increased its benefits” because present and future retirees should “get the dignified retirement that they’ve earned.”
Well, no, they haven’t earned what they are getting now, let alone the gravy that Obama is proposing to spread on top. That’s because one of the great lies of Washington is that social security and medicare are “insurance programs” which workers earn by paying “premiums” in the form of taxes.
In fact, the whole rigmarole of trust funds and actuarial bookeeping is a just a smokescreen to provide political cover. These programs are actually intergenerational transfer payment schemes that shift massive amounts of funds from the working population to retirees.
As shown in the chart below, the average beneficiary of social security and medicare does not pay lifetime taxes that are even close to expected lifetime benefits. Thus, beneficiaries who retired in the 1980s paid only 34% of their lifetime benefits in taxes, and the cohort of retirees from 2010 and beyond will have paid only 75%.
The cases shown above are actually generous because they are based on a married couple each earning the average wage over their working lifetime.
In fact, the benefits schedule is heavily skewed in favor of lower wage workers, beneficiaries without working spouses and/or eligible children. At the very bottom of the wage scale, for instance, the so-called “replacement rate” is 90% of monthly earnings compared to an average of 40% for all beneficiaries; and, of course, the non-working spouse and child’s benefits are pure welfare add-ons that have nothing to do with earnings or taxes paid.
Finally, our clueless President managed to jam a third whopper into the single sentence quoted above. Namely, that any fiscal issue relating to the social security system is not a matter of the here and now, but embodies a prudential need “to strengthen its long-term health” in the by-and-by.
Now that’s some beltway baloney if there ever was such. The fact is, the whole OASDI system will be bleeding massive red ink during the next President’s term. Even the funny-money trust fund accounting will give out by 2026. At that point, and politically long before, the trust funds will be technically exhausted, meaning an automatic benefit cut of nearly one-third or upwards of $600 billion per year!
The Washington beltway narrative, of course, is far more sanguine. But that’s based on Rosy Scenario economic assumptions that will be soon blown away when the next recession makes its inevitable arrival.
For example, the so-called “trustees” of the social security system issued their annual report recently and the stenographers of the financial press dutifully reported that the day of reckoning when the trust funds run dry has been put off another year—-until 2034.
The takeaway was apparently——take a breath and kick the can. That’s five Presidential elections away!
Except that is not what the report really said. On a cash basis, the OASDI (retirement and disability) funds spent $859 billion during 2014 but took in only $786 billion in taxes, thereby generating $73 billion in red ink. And by the trustees’ own reckoning, the OASDI funds will spew a cumulative cash deficit of $1.6 trillion during the 12-years covering 2015-2026.
The question thus recurs. How did the “untrustworthies” led by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who signed the 2015 report, manage to turn today’s river of red ink into another 20 years of respite for our cowardly beltway politicians?
They did it, in a word, by redeeming phony assets; booking phony interest income on those non-existent assets; and projecting implausible GDP growth and phantom payroll tax revenues.
And that’s only the half of it!
The whole rigmarole of trust fund accounting enables these phony assumptions to compound one another, thereby obfuscating the fast approaching bankruptcy of the system. And, as will be demonstrated below, that’s what’s really happening—–even if you give credit to the $2.79 trillion of so-called “assets” which were in the OASDI funds at the end of 2014.
Stated differently, the OASDI trust funds could be empty as soon as 2026, thereby triggering a devastating 33% across the board cut in benefits to affluent duffers living on Florida golf courses and destitute widows alike. Needless to say, the army of beneficiaries projected for the middle of the next decade—what will amount to the 8th largest nation on the planet—- would not take that lying down.
So here follows an unpacking of the phony accounting edifice that obscures the imminent danger.
The place to start is with the one data series in the report that is rock solid. Namely, the projected cost of $15.5 trillion over the next 12 years to pay for retirement and disability benefits and the related (minor) administrative costs.This staggering figure is derived from the fact that the number of beneficiaries will grow from 59 million to 79 million over the next twelve years.
By contrast, the funny money aspect comes in on the funding side. The latter starts with the $2.79 trillion of “assets” sitting in the OASDI trust funds at the end of 2014, but as we indicated there is nothing there except government accounting confetti.
So when the untrustworthies claim that that social security is “solvent” until 2034 the only thing they are really saying is that this $2.79 trillion accounting artifact has not yet been liquidated according to the rules of trust fund arithmetic. And under those “rules” its pretty hard to actually accomplish that—-not the least due to the compounding of phantom interest on these phantom assets.
To wit, the 2015 report says that the OASDI funds will earn $1.2 trillion of interest income during the next twelve years. To be sure, the nation’s retirees and savers might well ask how Washington’s bookkeepers could manage to get the assumed 3.5% interest rate on the government’s assets compared to the 0.3% ordinary citizens earn on a bank account or even 2.2% on a 10-year treasury bond.
But that’s not the real scam. The skunk in the woodpile is actually the wholly unjustifiable assumption that nominal GDP and taxable wages will grow a rates sharply higher than recorded at any time during this century. For example, the trustees 5.1% nominal GDP growth assumption compares to just 2.7% over the last eight years, and they also assume that through 2026 there will be no recession.
That’s right. The untrustworthies report assumes a record business expansion of 207 months——or nearly 2X the longest recovery on record and 4X the average expansion cycle.
These projections of phony interest income and exaggerated revenues, in turn, ensure that the trust fund asset balance stays close to its current $2.7 trillion level in the years just ahead, and, mirabile dictu, permits it to earn upwards of $100 billion of “interest” each year.
Too be sure, beneficiaries could not actually pay for their groceries and rent with this sort of trust fund “income”. But it does keep the asset balance high and the solvency can bouncing down the road a few more years.
So here’s the thing. Plug in a realistic figure for GDP growth and payroll tax revenue increases and the whole trust fund accounting scheme collapses; the bouncing can runs smack dab into a wall of trust fund insolvency.
Needless to say, the law of compound arithmetic can be a brutal thing if you start with a delusional hockey stick and seek to bend it back to earth. In this case, the trustee report’s 5.1% GDP growth rate assumption results in $31 trillion of GDP by 2026. Stated differently, compared to only $3.5 trillion of nominal GDP growth in the last eight years we are purportedly going to get $14 trillion in the next 12 years.
But let’s see. If we have another recession before 2026 it will be difficult for nominal GDP growth to average even the current 2.7% per year trend over the next decade. Yet if that rate is somehow actually achieved, GDP would come in at just $24 trillion in 2026 or nearly 25% lower. Since OASDI payroll taxes amount to about 4.5% of GDP, it doesn’t take a lot of figuring to see that trust fund income would be dramatically lower in a $7 trillion smaller economy.
To be exact, the untrustworthies have goal-seeked their report to generate $1.43 trillion of annual payroll tax revenue 12-years from now. Yet based on a simple continuation of the deeply embedded GDP growth trend of the last eight years, payroll revenue would come in at only $1.10 trillion in 2026 or $325 billion lower in that year alone.
And here’s where the self-feeding illusion of trust fund accounting rears its ugly head. What counts is not simply the end-year delta, but the entire area of difference under the curve. That’s because every cumulative dollar of payroll tax shortfall not only reduces the reserve asset balance, but also cuts the phantom interest income earned on it.
So what happens under a scenario of lower payroll tax revenues is that the $2.7 trillion of current trust fund “assets” begins circling the accounting drain with increasing velocity as time passes. In effect, the permission granted to Washington to kick the can by this year’s untrustworthies report gets revoked, and right fast.
To wit, instead of a cumulative total of $13.2 trillion of payroll tax revenue over the next 12 years, the actual, demonstrated GDP growth path of the present era would generate only $11.2 trillion during that period. That $2 trillion revenue difference not only ionizes most of the so-called trust fund assets, but also reduces the ending balance so rapidly that by the final year interest income computes to only $25 billion.
Moreover, by 2026 trust fund revenue would be $400 billion per year lower owing to lower taxes and less phantom interest. Accordingly, the current modest projected trust fund deficit of $150 billion would explode to upwards of $600 billion after the last of the phony interest income was booked.
Needless to say, that massive shortfall would amount to nearly 33% of the projected OASDI outgo of $1.8 trillion for 2026. More importantly, instead of a healthy cushion of $2.4 trillion of assets (or two year’s outgo) as the untrustworthies projected last year, the fund balance would be down to just $80 billion at year-end 2026.
Now that’s about 15 days of the next year’s OASDI outlays. The system would go tilt.
Yes, Donald Trump may well need some tutoring on the issues. But better a few stray tweets than the incredulous whoppers being served up by the current incumbent.
via http://ift.tt/1XWRm3J Tyler Durden
As regular readers know, one of our favorite chartpacks to show “Obama’s recovery” is the one below, presented most recently just two days ago during Obama’s now almost weekly televised sermon of how the economy is great and anyone who disagrees is “peddling fiction”, which using simple Bloomerg data, summarize recent changes in key economic indicators including soaring federal debt and government dependency via food stamp use, surging healthcare costs and social inequality, plunging homeownership, income, and labor force participation, and – of course – driving it all, none of the president’s or Congress’ actions, but the Fed’s balance sheet, something even major banks admit is better known as “printing money” – money that ends up blowing one after another asset bubble unable to finds its way into the broader economy – a stigma that is now gone in a world in which helicopter money is seriously considered by lunatics in power.
To be sure, the charts do not in any way imply that Obama started any of these disastrous trends (with a few exceptions); they do however make it very clear that more than 7 years under president Obama, these same trends have not changed.
This means that while Obama may have inherited a bad economy, contrary to the endless propaganda, the economy has only gotten worse. One needs only to go on a very short drive through any of the neighborhoods of Obama’s native Chicago to get a clear realization of this sad fact (while wearing a bulletproof vest).
Then yesterday, we were pleasantly surprised to see that none other than Donald Trump used this very chart set to demonstrate a point, namely that “Obama’s legacy is an absolute disaster”, something we doubt many would disagree with.
“@TaylorEdwards99: THIS IS @POTUS‘S LEGACY! AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER!!! WE NEED @realDonaldTrump NOW!! #MAGA #TRUMP2016 http://pic.twitter.com/lBgZJg0zd1
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2016
However, one entity that would naturally be offended by nice simple charts which factually expose the failure behind both the propaganda and Obama’s attempt to jump start the economy, was Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, an outlet which has had a long-running vendetta with Donald Trump, and, apparently, the facts.
We were beyond amused when the WaPo’s decided to “fact check” these charts which are, well, based on facts sourced by the very government the WaPo so strenuously defends.
The purchased by Jeff Bezos website writes that “we have generally learned that there’s not much utility in fact-checking every tweet that springs to life from the imagination of Donald Trump or which receives his blessing via retweet. Tweets containing factual errors are not as plentiful as those containing exclamation points or disparagement, but they aren’t exactly rare. But on Thursday evening, Trump retweeted this one, and we — well, I — couldn’t let it stand.“
As author Philip Bump, who apparently has never encountered a Bloomberg terminal before, says, “there are nine little graphs embedded in there, with hard-to-read axes and unclear provenance for the numbers, all of which are meant to bolster one argument: Barack Obama’s presidency has been bad.”
Well, Philip, you can interpret the “bolstering” in any way you want, what you can’t however interpret are the facts – which is what those charts show. Of course, everyone can make up their own conclusion about what the ongoing economic deterioration means: one can even say that almost 8 years later, it is still “Bush’s fault.”
Alas, we were naive to assume that the WaPo can’t “fact-check” charts based on facts. Because that is precisely what they did. And in doing so it provided much amusement. Case in point, the author’s “analysis” of the Fed’s money printing by way of proxy of its balance sheet, something this “fact-checker” apparently couldn’t figure out. Instead, he said the following.
Money printing
This one is probably my favorite. I’m not going to get into the politics of the printing of money and why certain quarters object to the practice. Instead, I’m going to try to figure out what the 4 million figures on the vertical axis indicate — and what the numbers along the bottom are.
The Federal Reserve (naturally) has lots of data on money in circulation, including this chart of print orders by year since 1995. It doesn’t match the graph Trump tweeted.
Data.gov (a great resource, by the way) has the number of notes produced each year from 1980 to 2012 in various denominations. Combined, those numbers don’t result in 4-million-plus of anything — they add up to far more. The Department of the Treasury indicates that it produced 24.8 million notes a day in 2014.
So what is this graph? No idea. If you have an idea, let me know.
And there you have it: a WaPo fact-checker who is unable to immediately grasp that the “4 million figures on the vertical axis” have nothing to do with volume or value of notes printed, and everything to do with the size Fed’s balance sheet.
Oh, and Philip, it’s not million… it’s trillion with a T, feel free to “fact check” for yourself here.
Needless to say, realizing we are working with a “fact-checker” who is incapable of grasping out of context the simplest thing about the entire so-called recovery, namely that the S&P 500, pardon the “economy” has been driven not by the president or by Congress, but by the Fed and its balance sheet, something this “expert” couldn’t figure out from the context, we stopped reading there.
We are confident there are more pearls in the full article below; we hope readers are entertained.
* * *
Here is WaPo with “Donald Trump tweeted out 9 graphs proving that Obama failed. We fact-checked them.” If we had a standalone “tragicomedy” section, it would be published in it.
* * *
We have generally learned that there’s not much utility in fact-checking every tweet that springs to life from the imagination of Donald Trump or which receives his blessing via retweet. Tweets containing factual errors are not as plentiful as those containing exclamation points or disparagement, but they aren’t exactly rare.
But on Thursday evening, Trump retweeted this one, and we — well, I — couldn’t let it stand.
“@TaylorEdwards99: THIS IS @POTUS‘S LEGACY! AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER!!! WE NEED @realDonaldTrump NOW!! #MAGA #TRUMP2016 http://pic.twitter.com/lBgZJg0zd1
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2016
There are nine little graphs embedded in there, with hard-to-read axes and unclear provenance for the numbers, all of which are meant to bolster one argument: Barack Obama’s presidency has been bad.
Look, for example, at the graph at upper left, “Student Loans.” It’s almost impossible to make out the labels on the horizontal axis, but it’s clear that there simply aren’t any until the graph starts to rise.
Which is … a bit deceptive. So what I figured I’d do is try my best to recreate these charts with verifiable numbers, to see how this argument stacks up.
Student Loans
The vertical axis on this one tells us what we’re looking at. It passed “1.000” at some point recently; the third labeled section of the graph appears to demarcate 2010-2014. (The others, I think: 2000-2004 and 2005-2009.) If it passed 1 recently, then we’re talking about student loan debt, in dollars.
The Federal Reserve has data going back to the first quarter of 2006, allowing us to create a slightly more legible version of the graph
(We’ve highlighted 2009 on our charts to emphasize the point at which Obama took over.)
On an old page from 2012, we find the trend extending back a bit more. The trend, then, isn’t a big spike. It’s a steady increase since about 2006 — before Obama was president.
Food Stamps
Here, the horizontal axis extends a bit further back, still in those odd five-year chunks. What’s being tallied here is not “food stamps,” which makes no sense, but average participation over the course of each year, in millions. In other words, the average of how many people used the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) each month of the year.
That data is available from the USDA.
There was an uptick — one that began in 2008, which we’ll get to. But notice that the person who made this chart cut it off before the number started to (slowly) drop back down.
There’s a theme you’ll see present itself here: That Obama took office right after the recession began. As a result, he appears to perform poorly on some metrics, like this one. But that’s a natural result of the financial crisis that predated him: more people relied on supplemental assistance.
Federal Debt
…And the government took on more debt.
Notice that on the debt chart in the original, the horizontal axis has changed. No longer does it start in the 1980s — instead, it goes back to 1950. Yes, debt increased under Obama by a large amount. But, again, that increase began under his predecessor, George W. Bush, as an effort to address the financial crisis.
What’s more, comparing 1950 to 2000 makes little sense, since the value of the dollar wasn’t equivalent at that point. But compared to the other problems here, that’s relatively minor.
Money printing
This one is probably my favorite. I’m not going to get into the politics of the printing of money and why certain quarters object to the practice. Instead, I’m going to try to figure out what the 4 million figures on the vertical axis indicate — and what the numbers along the bottom are.
The Federal Reserve (naturally) has lots of data on money in circulation, including this chart of print orders by year since 1995. It doesn’t match the graph Trump tweeted.
Data.gov (a great resource, by the way) has the number of notes produced each year from 1980 to 2012 in various denominations. Combined, those numbers don’t result in 4-million-plus of anything — they add up to far more. The Department of the Treasury indicates that it produced 24.8 million notes a day in 2014.
So what is this graph? No idea. If you have an idea, let me know.
Health-care costs
You’ve probably noticed by now that the pink boxes in the Trump tweet generally approximate the period during which Obama was president. It varies a bit, but that’s generally the case.
So you’ll notice on this one that the creator of the charts cheats, making most of the graph a period during which Obama was president. It starts in 2007 and goes through 2015.
“Healthcare costs” is vague. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a tool that allows you to see expenditures under a number of scenarios since 1960 — but none of its charts appear to sync with the one Trump tweeted.
The Federal Reserve, as always, has some data. In this case, it’s health expenditures per capita. They’ve gone up steadily, at least through 2012. The Kaiser data shows about the same thing.
What’s Trump’s chart? I’m not sure. Notice that the vertical axis on it begins at 105, not zero, making the amount of change seem exaggerated. It’s possible that the figures are percentages, indicating how much costs were relative to the prior year. But while 2011 costs were 103.8 percent of 2010 costs in the Fed’s data, 2012’s was only 104.2 percent of 2011’s. So who knows.
Labor force participation
On this one, the creator of the graphs cheats again, showing a section of the vertical axis. But, for once, it’s clear what’s being talked about.
To calculate unemployment, the government looks at how many people in the labor force have jobs. People not in the labor force don’t come into play in that calculation, and so if people drop out of the labor force — stop looking for work or retire, for example — the unemployment rate can fall faster, because the number of unemployed people in the labor force will have fallen. (That’s precisely why the unemployment rate fell in May.)
This has been used as a counterpoint to Obama’s trumpeting of the plunging jobless rate.
And it’s accurate. Labor force participation has fallen since Obama took office.
Of course, one could also show how many new jobs were added, or the state of the unemployment rate. But given that this is, at last, accurate and comprehensible, we’ll let it slide.
Black inequality
This is an interesting one. The creator of these graphs uses calculations of what’s known as the “Gini coefficient” for black Americans, data that is again available from the Federal Reserve. What we’re talking about here isn’t inequality in the sense of racial justice; it’s income inequality.
The Gini coefficient estimates how far from a perfectly equitable distribution of income a group happens to be. The formulas for this are complex, so it’s nice that the Fed has already taken care of it.
Here are the coefficients for both whites and blacks since 2002, when the Fed data begins.
Notice that the variation is much more subtle in this chart. That’s because the vertical axis shows a wider range. Yes, income inequality increased, but not that dramatically.
Median family income
This one is refreshingly straightforward. Here’s what the Fed has to say.
This doesn’t match the Trump chart, mind you, and it’s not clear why. Oh well. Here’s the Fed’s data, if you want to look for yourself.
Home ownership
Another straightforward one! This is the percentage of houses that are owner-occupied.
Again, the rate has declined under Obama — a decline that began under Bush.
Why? In part because it was home ownership problems that precipitated the recession. Bad home loans and the rapid expansion of home ownership played key roles in creating the conditions that led to the economic collapse. As a result, home ownership rates dropped.
But this graph, at least, is fairly accurate, if a bit deceptive in where it places the blame. That’s not true for many of the others.
So why did Trump tweet it? Because, as has often been the case, the details are less important than the political point. If a bunch of graphs claim to show how Obama has been bad for the economy, boom. Retweet. If some jerk goes through each one and notes why it’s wrong or skewed, that doesn’t detract from the main point, which is that Obama is bad. If challenged, Trump can simply blame the originator of what he retweeted, which he has often proven willing to do.
And that, in a nutshell, is why fact-checking things like this is so often thankless.
* * *
We just want to add one small comment on the author’s conclusion (we skimmed that part). It’s “thankless”, Philip, because you just spent hours “checking” what are charts of facts, data that can be pulled up in seconds by anyone who has a bloomberg, and in minutes by everyone else.
What you ignored to say is that what you did is not actual “fact-checking” – because numbers are always and only numbers – but an attempt to manipulate your audience into deriving a specific set of conclusions precleared by the WaPo editorial board. This is why when we first created the chart, we let it speak for itself without any clarification – as none is needed – instead of having to “explain” it in a 1,000 word essay. Unlike you, we think our readers are smart enough to draw their own conclusions when presented with the facts. On the other hand, the fact that you provide “value” by wasting your time in a desperate attempt to brainwash your readers into believing your “fact-checked” conclusion probably explains why the once mighty Washington Post, which many, many years ago a truly powerful media outlet, and made presidents tremble and/or resign, was recently acquired for a fraction of the value of a tabloid like Buzzfeed.
via http://ift.tt/1U326w7 Tyler Durden
Seattle University has suspended Jodi Kelly, dean of the humanities program at Matteo Ricci College, in wake of student protests demanding her ouster.
In line with protesters at the other colleges, Seattle students are demanding far-reaching changes to the curriculum, which they say is traumatizing, marginalizing toward people of color, and rooted in white privilege.
Complaints against Kelly are a bit more specific. One student claimed that the dean used an ethnic slur during a private meeting. But Kelly maintains that she didn’t say the n-word in a derogatory way: she was actually recommending an autobiography by civil rights activist Dick Gregory. The book is titled Nigger.
Here is Kelly’s side of the story, according to The Stranger:
“The student asked for more diversified reading. I complied and pulled the book from my shelf. The title, as you know, could startle, so I relayed the story of Dick Gregory explaining to his maternal ancestors why he titled it that way. His response? “Dear Momma — Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word “nigger” again, remember they are advertising my book.”
“I am not in the habit of ever using that word… I believe it demeans us all.”
The student presented the meeting in a different light:
She said she met last spring with Kelly to ask for a more diverse, culturally responsive curriculum. In response, Kelly “used the n-word… she said it three or four times. The full word.”
In the student’s telling, Dean Kelly said the student could reclaim the word if she wanted to, citing a black comedian’s comments.
The student said she broke down after her meeting with the dean.
It’s impossible to tell whether the student was right to be offended or not. Gregory, the author of the autobiography, sided with the dean in an essay for Inside Higher Ed. Certainly, the situation calls to mind the witch-hunt against Andrea Quenette, who used the n-word while discussing her own racial blind spots with her class. Unless the college is sitting on additional evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Kelly, her suspension seems incredibly premature.
The students’ other demands are motivated by their collective sense of oppression:
Dissatisfaction, traumatization, and boredom are realities within our collective MRC experiences, as well as being ridiculed, traumatized, othered, tokenized, and pathologized. These experiences have been profoundly damaging and erasing, with lasting effects on our mental and emotional well-being. Additionally, the curriculum in MRC is unsatisfactory as a Humanities program. For students to have their personal and ancestral voices erased in curriculum and conversation, only to be told that their experiences of pain are insignificant, is psychologically abusive.
In light of this college environment, multiple cohorts of students in both the Humanities for Teaching and Humanities for Leadership majors have joined together to write our truths and demand systemic change.
They want the college to force professors to undergo sensitivity training and police microaggressions in the classroom, among other things.
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By EconMatters
Bonds, Stocks, Credit and Risk are all mispriced right now in Fed and Central Bank enabled financial markets – you can just see the money managers begging for the Fed not to hike rates on their enabled asses. A 4.7% unemployment rate and the Fed still cannot hike rates – 8 years is a complete business cycle folks.
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Hillary Clinton had a speech yesterday to discuss foreign policy, pardon, to stand at a podium and do nothing but criticize Donald Trump.
Clinton rattled off a bunch of random one-liners, which makes sense because the Clinton camp admitted earlier that it hadn't been able to determine just how to attack Donald Trump so it was simply going to try a bunch of things and see what caught on – yesterday was the ultimate platform for that strategy.
Criticisms leveled at Trump included things such as not wanting Trump to have access to the nuclear arsenal just in case "somebody got under his very thin skin", and belittling his actual foreign policy experience by calling it "dangerously incoherent", and saying "he says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia."
At one point Clinton said "Donald Trump's ideas are not just different, they are dangerously incoherent. They're not even ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies" which is all ironic if anyone watched the speech…
Trump's initial response was a quick ping on twitter…
Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter! She doesn't even look presidential!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2016
However later at a rally in San Jose, California (which turned nasty as anti-trump protesters resorted to violence against Trump supporters because… tolerance), Trump hit back at Hillary, and hit back hard.
"Hillary Clinton is missing 30,000 emails, they've been deleted. And remember I said I was a counter puncher, I am. After what she said about me today in her phony speech, it was a phony speech, that was a Donald Trump hit job. I will say this, Hillary Clinton has to go to jail ok, she has to go to jail. That was a phony hit job. She's guilty as hell."
"Remember Hillary Clinton used to hate Obama, she used to hate him. Bill Clinton hated him, Bill Clinton hated him. He called Bill Clinton a racist do you remember that? And Hillary Clinton hated Obama, now it's yes sir Mr. President sir, what would you like, what would you like me to say here sir?"
"The only reason she's behaving like this, and the only reason she's been dragged so far left, believe me, is she doesn't wanna go to jail over the emails ok. Believe me, that's the only reason – one simple reason."
* * *
Hillary just angered The Donald…
* * *
It also turns out that there are a lot of people interested in whether or not Hillary will be doing jail time as well…
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It turns out that a surprise visit from Gordon Ramsay is not the worst thing that can befall a chef. There’s also having your fingers chopped off by angry mobsters, being beaten senseless by a vengeful cop, getting slapped around by a Nazi father-in-law, having your son struck dumb after witnessing his mother’s death in a hit-and-run, and watching your entire restaurant burned down by a cokehead arsonist.
So it goes, anyway, in AMC’s new drama Feed the Beast, a sort of Old Testament version of The Joy Of Cooking as imagined by Job, in which pairing the lamb cooked in parchment with the wrong wine has consequences much more serious than a dismissive notice in Zagat’s.
Feed the Beast pairs David Schwimmer and Jim Sturgess (Cloud Atlas) as a couple of old friends forced by dire circumstances to repair a brutal rupture in their relationship and revive a dusty, discarded dream of opening a gourmet restaurant on the mean Bronx streets where they grew up. Television critic Glenn Garvin weighs in.
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Tonight at 10 p.m. ET I will be on HBO’s comedic current-affairs program Real Time with Bill Maher, sitting on a panel with Daily Beast Editor in Chief John Avlon and transcendent celebrity chef Eddie Huang. We are scheduled to discuss Hillary Clinton’s big foreign policy/Trump-is-crazy speech, the Trump University scam, Peter Thiel’s lawsuits against Gawker, and the electoral prospects of Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson. Other stuff will surely come up, too.
Make sure to go to the show’s website for Overtime questions as well! Here’s the Overtime segment from the last time I was on:
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Some anti-Trump protesters in San Jose eventually started to follow Donald Trump supporters back to their cars after a rally, attacking at least one young man, destroying property, and also attacking a police officer, as CBS San Francisco reports. It’s shameful stuff that says a lot more about the caliber of anti-Trump rhetoric from the mainstream left than anything about the rhetoric that supposedly triggered it. Violence against political speech arises from a milieu were all kinds of unfavored speech are treated as trauma or violence.
In this age of perpetual grievances, showing up to protest at the Trump rally has become a chic social signaling thing to do. Acting out at Trump rallies, including by threatening, harassing, and even physically assaulting Trump supporters, is a natural continuation of the culture of safe spaces and triggering speech being nurtured in college campuses around the country. It reveals the total flim-flam that academics and professional left-wing protesters have too often wrapped up in high-minded ideas about fighting the power structures or whatever else. Donald Trump today holds no political power. If he wins the presidency, he will pick up where President Obama left off. The same kind of people cheering anti-Trump protesters would recoil at anti-Obama protests. (Think: the type of people who called anti-war sentiment “sexist” when directed against female politicians who voted to bomb Syria.)
The Obama administration, for example, has conducted more deportations than any predecessor has. Obama has also expanded George W. Bush’s war on terror while dropping the terminology—the U.S. now kills military-aged Muslim males as a matter of routine with little in the ways of accountability measures or checks and balances. An authorization for the use of military force against the perpetrators of 9/11 and their “associated forces” is being used to justify the targeting of individuals who were far too young on 9/11 to have anything to do with it except sharing the same religion as the perpetrators.
Donald Trump displays a stunning disregard for constitutional limits on the presidency, but he’s not the only one. Hillary Clinton also regularly promises to work without Congress—just as Obama has done repeatedly during his presidency. She’s even insisted that she’ll curb Americans’ Second Amendment, dismissing the co-equal branches of government that are Congress and the Supreme Court.
And that gets to the heart of the matter. The definitions of safe spaces, triggering speech, “political correctness,” hate speech, and all kinds of related concepts dependsentirely on the perspective of the person wielding the definition. It’s about the rule of men genderbeings not the rule of law. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. All that mattered, Dumpty explained, is who was the “master” of the words.
That explains the way so many American leftists branded Charlie Hebdo as “punching down” in the wake of an Islamist massacre at their offices. That Hebdo consistently targeted nexuses of power, be they religious or secular, didn’t matter to American leftists, who were interpreting the event not based on its context but their own.
Reading about the Trump riots I’m reminded of an incident at the University of Oregon where a pro-life activist preacher was attacked by pro-choice students who insisted they were triggered. What if the pro-lifer said he, too, was triggered, by the millions of unborn babies that have been killed in the U.S. and around the world? It gives him no more right to attack the person or property of pro-choice activists than pro-choice activists have a right to physically attack those they disagree with.
Donald Trump could be one of the worst presidential candidates in history. Hillary Clinton is not much better. And as a former secretary of state and a U.S. senator who voted for war, she actually has blood on her hands already. If Donald Trump won, he could end up being a fascist. But the imperial presidency that makes that possible has been a decades-long project, made possible by both mainstream parties and their supporters, who worry about the centralization of power in the presidency and the abuses government can commit right up until the point when the president and the government start doing things of which they approve.
The U.S. war machine hasn’t gone anywhere in the last eight years, even if the left-wing anti-war movement largely has. Attacking Trump’s supporters because of the danger Trump poses as an imperial president is an exercise in blame-shifting. Those so concerned about what Trump might do to the country that they feel called to stalk and attack Trump supporters should take a long look in the mirror instead. It’ll have the added benefit of not building more support for Trump, as violence against his supporters certainly will.
Also see Jesse Walker’s late night Twitter rant for much needed context. As Walker, who has reported from Trump rallies, notes, Trump’s real world supporters aren’t the same as the online trolls that have come to represent him in an Internet-driven election cycle.
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What happened in Orlando stays in Orlando—unless you’re at the Libertarian Party’s National Convention where former Govs. Gary Johnson and William Weld were nominated as the Libertarian Party’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
Yesterday, I spoke with Ricochet’s Jon Gabriel and National Review’s Stephen Miller on their Conservatarians podcast about the LP, the thong guy (of course), Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the dwindling futures of traditional right-left politics. Take a listen by clicking below or go here for the full podcast page. Word to the wise: The podcast really takes off once they kick me off.
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