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[Dec 30, 2019] Economic Possibilities for Ourselves by Robert Skidelsky

Notable quotes:
"... In Praise of Idleness ..."
"... Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained ..."
"... Project Syndicate ..."
"... Rise of the Robots ..."
"... ad infinitum ..."
Dec 30, 2019 | robertskidelsky.com

The most depressing feature of the current explosion in robot-apocalypse literature is that it rarely transcends the world of work. Almost every day, news articles appear detailing some new round of layoffs. In the broader debate, there are apparently only two camps: those who believe that automation will usher in a world of enriched jobs for all, and those who fear it will make most of the workforce redundant.

This bifurcation reflects the fact that "working for a living" has been the main occupation of humankind throughout history. The thought of a cessation of work fills people with dread, for which the only antidote seems to be the promise of better work. Few have been willing to take the cheerful view of Bertrand Russell's provocative 1932 essay In Praise of Idleness . Why is it so difficult for people to accept that the end of necessary labor could mean barely imaginable opportunities to live, in John Maynard Keynes's words, "wisely, agreeably, and well"?

The fear of labor-saving technology dates back to the start of the Industrial Revolution, but two factors in our own time have heightened it. The first is that the new generation of machines seems poised to replace not only human muscles but also human brains. Owing to advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we are said to be entering an era of thinking robots; and those robots will soon be able to think even better than we do. The worry is that teaching machines to perform most of the tasks previously carried out by humans will make most human labor redundant. In that scenario, what will humans do?

The other fear factor is the increasing precariousness of wage labor – though this concern is seemingly belied by headline statistics suggesting that unemployment is at a historic low. The problem is that an economy at "full employment" now contains a large penumbra of what economist Guy Standing calls the "precariat": under-employed people who work less and for lower pay than they would like. A growing number of workers, seeming to lack any kind of job (and pay) security, are thus forced to work well below their ability.

It is natural that one would interpret the onset of precariousness as the first stage in a broader trend toward workforce redundancy, especially if one pays attention to alarmist predictions of the next category of "jobs at risk." But this conclusion is premature. The penetration of robotics into the world of work has not yet been sufficient to explain the rise of the precariat. So far, "cost cutting" in the West has largely taken the form of offshoring to the East, where labor is cheaper, rather than replacing humans with machines. But "onshoring" work that was previously offshored will offer cold comfort to workers if machines get most of the jobs.

ROBO-RAPTURE

According to the first view – let us call it "job enrichment" – technology will eventually create more, better human jobs than it destroys, as has always been the case in the past. Simple, mundane tasks may increasingly be automated, but human labor will then be freed up for more "interesting" and "creative" cognitive work.

In late 2017, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) published Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained , which claimed that as much as 50% of working hours in the global economy could theoretically be automated; the authors suggested, however, that not more than 30% actually would be. Further, they estimated that less than 5% of occupations could be fully automated; but that in 60% of occupations, at least 30% of the required tasks could be.

In line with the usual mainstream assessment, MGI believes that while there will be no net loss of jobs in the long run, the "transition may include a period of higher unemployment and wage adjustments." It all depends, the authors say, on the rate at which displaced workers are re-employed: a low re-employment rate will lead to a higher medium-term unemployment rate, and vice versa .

MGI's proposal for massive investment in education to lower the unemployment cost of the transition is also conventional. The faster the labor reabsorption, the higher the wage growth. Lower re-employment levels will cause wages to fall, with a greater share of the gains from automation accruing to capital, not labor. But the authors hasten to add:

"Even if the particulars of historical experience turn out to differ from conditions today, one lesson seems pertinent: although economies adjust to technological shocks, the transition period is measured in decades, not years, and the rising prosperity may not be shared by all."

This assessment is typical, and it has led many to call on governments to invest heavily in so-called "upskilling" programs. In a commentary for Project Syndicate , Zia Qureshi of the Brookings Institution argues that, "with smart, forward-looking policies, we can ensure that the future of work is a better job." In this view, automation is simply the continuation of the move toward more, higher-quality jobs that has characterized capitalist growth since the Industrial Revolution.

History is on the optimists' side. Mechanization has been the durable engine of productivity and wage growth as well as reductions in working hours, albeit usually with a considerable lag. Although the Roberts loom cost hundreds of thousands of handloom weavers their jobs in the nineteenth century, the broader wave of new industrial technologies enabled a much larger population to be maintained at a higher standard of living.

ROBO-REDUNDANCY

But, according to the second view – call it "job destruction" – this time is different. The programming of machines to perform ever more complex tasks with ever-increasing speed, accuracy, precision, and reliability will result in mass unemployment. In Rise of the Robots , author and entrepreneur Martin Ford addresses the techno-optimists head-on. "There is a widely held belief – based on historical evidence stretching back at least as far as the industrial revolution – that while technology may certainly destroy jobs, businesses, and even entire industries, it will also create entirely new occupations often in areas that we can't yet imagine." The problem, Ford argues, is that information technology has now reached the point where it can be considered a true utility, much like electricity.

It stands to reason that the successful new industries that will emerge in the years ahead will have taken full advantage of this powerful new utility and the distributed machine intelligence that accompanies it. That means they will rarely – if ever – be highly labor-intensive. The threat is that as creative destruction unfolds, the "destruction" will fall primarily on labor-intensive businesses in traditional areas like retail and food preparation, whereas the "creation" will generate new industries that simply don't employ many people.

On this view, the economy is heading for a tipping point where job creation will begin to fall consistently short of what is required to employ the workforce fully. We will soon reach the stage where the machine-driven destruction of existing human jobs far outpaces the creation of new human jobs, resulting in inexorably rising mass "technological unemployment."

THE UPSKILLING MIRAGE

Optimists' response to such concerns is that the workforce simply needs to be trained or upskilled in order to "race with the machines." Typical of this outlook is the following headline on a commentary published by the World Economic Forum: "How new technologies can create huge numbers of meaningful jobs." According to the author, concerns about "the looming devastation that self-driving technology will have on the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US" are "misdirected." Augmented-reality technology, we are told, can create loads of new jobs by enabling people to work from home. All that will be needed is training of the kind offered by "Upskill, an augmented reality company in the manufacturing and field services sectors," which "uses wearable technologies to provide step-by-step instructions to industrial workers."

The author, himself the co-founder of an augmented-reality company, goes on to argue that, "With the pace of technological progress only accelerating and with increasing specialization becoming the norm in every industry, reducing the time necessary to retrain workers is pivotal to maintaining the competitiveness of industrialized economies." There is no mention of the wages that will be offered to these "upskilled" workers in their "meaningful" new jobs. We are simply told that they will be relocated to "lower cost areas more in need of job creation." Only at the very end of the commentary does the author acknowledge that, in fact, "Technology is a force that has the potential to eliminate entire industries through robotics and automation, and for that we should be concerned."

The retraining argument should give us pause. In portraying upskilling as the solution to the labor displacement caused by new technologies, optimists rarely admit that if predictions about "thinking robots" turn out to be anywhere near true, workers would need to be trained in technical skills to an extent that is unprecedented in human history.

Moreover, the time it takes to upgrade the skills of the workforce will inevitably exceed the time it takes to automate the economy. This will be true even if claims about an imminent deluge of automation are greatly exaggerated. In the interval, there will be under- and unemployment. In fact, this has already been happening. Although automation is not yet bearing down on workers to the extent that has been predicted, it has nonetheless pushed more of them into less-skilled jobs; and its mere possibility may be exerting downward pressure on wages. There are already signs of the new class structure envisioned by the pessimists: "lovely jobs at the top, lousy jobs at the bottom."

A more fundamental question is what we mean by upskilling, and what its consequences might be. Often, heavy emphasis is placed on the importance of better technological education at all levels of society, as if all people will need to succeed in the future is to be taught how to write and understand computer code.

As the technology writer James Bridle has shown , this line of argument has a number of limitations. While encouraging people to take up computer programming might be a good start, such training offers only a functional understanding of technological systems. It does not equip people to ask higher-level questions along the lines of, "Where did these systems come from, who designed them and what for, and which of these intentions still lurk within them today?" Bridle also points out that arguments for technological education and upskilling are usually offered in "nakedly pro-market terms," following a simple equation: "the information economy needs more programmers, and young people need jobs in the future."

THE MISSING DIMENSION

More to the point, the upskilling discourse totally ignores the possibility that automation could also allow people simply to work less. The reason for this neglect is twofold: it is commonly assumed that human wants are insatiable, and that we will thus work ad infinitum to satisfy them; and it is simply taken for granted that work is the primary source of meaning in human lives. 1

Historically, neither of these claims holds true. The consumption race is a rather recent phenomenon, dating no earlier than the late nineteenth century. And the possibility that we might one day liberate ourselves from the "curse of work" has fascinated thinkers from Aristotle to Russell. Many visions of Utopia betray a longing for leisure and liberation from toil. Even today, surveys show that people in most developed countries would prefer to work less, even in the workaholic United States, and might even accept less pay if it meant logging fewer hours on the clock.

The deeply economistic nature of the current debate excludes the possibility of a life beyond work . Yet if we want to meet the challenges of the future, it is not enough to know how to code, analyze data, and invent algorithms. We need to start thinking seriously and at a systemic level about the operational logic of consumer capitalism and the possibility of de-growth.

In this process, we must abandon the false dichotomy between "jobs" and "idleness." Full employment need not mean full-time employment, and leisure time need not be spent idly. (Education can play an important role in ensuring that it is not.) Above all, wealth and income will need to be distributed in such a way that machine-enabled productivity gains do not accrue disproportionately to a small minority of owners, managers, and technicians.

[Dec 29, 2019] AI is fundamentall brittle

Dec 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

c1ue , Dec 29 2019 13:28 utc | 75

@William Gruff #40
The real world usage of AI, to date, is primarily replacing the rank and file of human experience.
Where before you would have individuals who have attained expertise in an area, and who would be paid to exercise it, now AI can learn from the extant work and repeat it.
The problem, though, is that AI is eminently vulnerable to attack. In particular - if the area involves change, which most do, then the AI must be periodically retrained to take into account the differences. Being fundamentally stupid, AI literally cannot integrate new data on top of old but must start from scratch.

I don't have the link, but I did see an excellent example: a cat vs. AI.
While a cat can't play chess, the cat can walk, can recognize objects visually, can communicate even without a vocal cord, can interact with its environment and even learn new behaviors.
In this example, you can see one of the fundamental differences between functional organisms and AI: AI can be trained to perform extremely well, but it requires very narrow focus.

IBM spend years and literally tens of thousands of engineering hours to create the AI that could beat Jeapordy champions - but that particular creation is still largely useless for anything else. IBM is desperately attempting to monetize that investment through its Think Build Grow program - think AWS for AI. I saw a demo - it was particularly interesting because this AI program ingests some 3 million English language web articles; IBM showed its contents via a very cool looking wrap around display room in its Think Build Grow promotion campaign.

What was really amusing was a couple of things:
1) the fact that the data was already corrupt: this demo was about 2 months ago - and there were spikes of "data" coming from Ecuador and the tip of South America. Ecuador doesn't speak English. I don't even know if there are any English web or print publications there. But I'd bet large sums of money that the (English) Twitter campaign being run on behalf of the coup was responsible for this spike.

2) Among the top 30 topics was Donald Trump. Given the type of audience you would expect for this subject, it was enormously embarrassing that Trump coverage was assessed as net positive - so much so that the IBM representative dived into the data to ascertain why the AI had a net positive rating (the program also does sentiment analysis). It turns out that a couple of articles which were clearly extremely peripheral to Trump, but which did mention his name, were the cause. The net positive rating was from this handful of articles even though the relationship was very weak and there were far fewer net "positive" vs. negative articles shown in the first couple passes of source articles (again, IBM's sentiment analysis - not a human's).

I have other examples: SF is home to a host of self-driving testing initiatives. Uber had a lot about 4 blocks from where I live, for months, where they based their self driving cars out of (since moved). The self-driving delivery robots (sidewalk) - I've seen them tested here as well.

Some examples of how they fail: I was riding a bus, which was stopped at an intersection behind a Drive test vehicle at a red light(Drive is nVidia's self driving). This intersection is somewhat unusual: there are 5 entrances/exits to this intersection, so the traffic light sequence and the driving action is definitely atypical.

The light turns green, the Drive car wants to turn immediately left (as opposed to 2nd left, as opposed to straight or right). It accelerates into the intersection and starts turning; literally halfway into the intersection, it slams on its brakes. The bus, which was accelerating behind it in order to go straight, is forced to also slam on its brakes. There was no incoming car - because of the complex left turn setup, the street the Drive car and bus were on, is the only one that is allowed to traverse when that light is green (initially. After a 30 second? pause, the opposite "straight" street is allowed to drive).

Why did the Drive car slam on its brakes in the middle of the intersection? No way to know for sure, but I would bet money that the sensors saw the cars waiting at the 2nd left street and thought it was going the wrong way. Note this is just a few months ago.

There are many other examples of AI being fundamentally brittle: Google's first version of human recognition via machine vision classified black people as gorillas: Google Photos fail

A project at MIT inserted code into AI machine vision programs to show what these were actually seeing when recognizing objects; it turns out that what the AIs were recognizing were radically different from reality. For example, while the algo could recognize a dumbbell, it turns out that the reference image that the algo used was a dumbbell plus an arm. Because all of the training photos for a dumbbell included an arm...

This fundamental lack of basic concepts, a coherent worldview or any other type of rooting in reality is why AI is also pathetically easy to fool. This research showed that the top of the line machine vision for self driving could be tricked into recognizing stop signs as speed limit signs Confusing self driving cars

To be clear, fundamentally it doesn't matter for most applications if the AI is "close enough". If a company can replace 90% of its expensive, older workers or first world, English speaking workers with an AI - even if the AI is working only 75% of the time, it is still a huge win. For example: I was told by a person selling chatbots to Sprint that 90% of Sprint's customer inquiries were one of 10 questions...

And lastly: are robots/AI taking jobs? Certainly it is true anecdotally, but the overall economic statistics aren't showing this. In particular, if AI was really taking jobs - then we should be seeing productivity numbers increase more than in the past. But this isn't happening: Productivity for the past 30 years
Note in the graph that productivity was increasing much more up until 2010 - when it leveled off.
Dean Baker has written about this extensively - it is absolutely clear that it is outsourced of manufacturing jobs which is why US incomes have been stagnant for decades.

[Dec 29, 2019] "The injustices and oppression suffered by these minority groups" are in the eyes of the beholder. The problem here is where lies the proper measure of conformance with the society ethics and norms for those "deviant" groups, because without this any redress is overdone it turns into its opposite. Converting bathrooms in schools into gender neutral is one example here.

Dec 29, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

Chetan Murthy 12.28.19 at 7:38 am .42

"the injustices and oppression suffered by these minority groups."

You are way too "woke" for your own good ;-)

The problem here is where lies the proper measure of redress, because overdone it turns into its opposite. Converting bathrooms in schools into gender neutral is one example here.

Moreover some groups are anti-social and need to be severely oppressed. One example is financial oligarchy, especially financial oligarchy under neoliberalism. The other is neocons as asocial group. I would love both of those groups oppressed, humiliated and ostracized.

Yet another is pedophiles as a social group, especially pedophiles that abuse the position of authority (gay catholic priests, teachers which seduce/coerce students, etc).

The idea that each minority group is somehow entitled to compensation for the injustices they suffered in the past or are suffering currently is probably a delusion. Much depends on a larger picture: what particular group gives to a larger society. If the group contribution is negative and the group resort to anti-social behavior then why the oppression is unjust ? It is just an immune reaction of the society. After all one view is that "Justice is the advantage of the stronger" (debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus.)

Also in some cases those groups are a minority for a reason.

[Dec 24, 2019] Christmas in Flyover Land - Kunstler

Notable quotes:
"... It's a Wonderful Life ..."
"... we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy ..."
"... Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks. ..."
Dec 24, 2019 | kunstler.com

All the people of America, including the flyovers, are responsible for the sad situation we're in: this failure to reestablish a common culture of values most people can subscribe to and use it to rebuild our towns into places worth caring about. Main Street, as it has come to be, is the physical manifestation of that failure. The businesses that used to occupy the storefronts are gone, except for second-hand stores. Nobody in 1952 would have believed this could happen. And yet, there it is: the desolation is stark and heartbreaking.

Even George Bailey's "nightmare" scene in It's a Wonderful Life depicts the supposedly evil Pottersville as a very lively place, only programmed for old-fashioned wickedness: gin mills and streetwalkers. Watch the movie and see for yourself.

Pottersville is way more appealing than 99 percent of America's small towns today, dead as they are.

The dynamics that led to this are not hard to understand. The concentration of retail commerce in a very few gigantic corporations was a swindle that the public fell for.

Enthralled like little children by the dazzle and gigantism of the big boxes, and the free parking, we allowed ourselves to be played.

The excuse was "bargain shopping," which actually meant we have sent the factories to distant lands and eliminated your jobs, and all the meaning and purpose in your lives -- and cheap stuff from Asia is your consolation prize. Enjoy

The "bones" of the village are still standing but the programming for the organism of a community is all gone: gainful employment, social roles in the life of the place, confidence in the future. For a century starting in 1850, there were at least five factories in town. They made textiles and later on, paper products and, in the end, toilet paper, ironically enough. Yes, really.

They also made a lot of the sod-busting steel ploughs that opened up the Midwest, and cotton shirts, and other stuff. The people worked hard for their money, but it was pretty good money by world standards for most of those years.

It allowed them to eat well, sleep in a warm house, and raise children, which is a good start for any society. The village was rich with economic and social niches, and yes, it was hierarchical, but people tended to find the niche appropriate to their abilities and aspirations -- and, believe it or not, it is better to have a place in society than to have no place at all, which is the sad situation for so many today.

Homelessness in America runs way deeper than just the winos and drug addicts living on the big city sidewalks.


BackRowHeckler December 22, 2019 at 10:50 pm #

It seems there's a major political party exactly working against a common American culture. They jeer at the thought of it. It seems to be the main platform, above all else.

Brh

Log in to Reply
Walter B December 23, 2019 at 3:23 pm #

It is a major party alright BRH, but it is no so much political as it is economic and socially stratified. They are opulent, self consumed and greedy as hell (literally). There can only be so many parasites sucking the lifeblood out of any herd of servant beasts, and they can only suck so long on their hosts before the poor beasts fall over and die. And that is the tipping point, where we lose enough life blood that we can no longer stand upright, but drop to the deck and are consumed. It is the classic Goose that laid the Golden Egg fairy tale being acted out in real life and coming to a neighborhood near you soon. Log in to Reply

sunburstsoldier December 22, 2019 at 11:22 pm #

Beautiful, thoughtful post Jim, yet to be honest it fills me with a sense of anxiety, and this is simply because the catastrophic events you forecast, although for the better in the long run (as they will compel a return to a world made by hand, or the recovery of human scale) will nonetheless bring much suffering to a lot of people ( including my own family). I would personally like to believe there is another way a more sustainable civilization could be attained than on the heels of societal collapse. I do believe the world is full of mystery, and that life itself is a series of unfolding miracles we lack the capacity to comprehend due to our limited perspective. Yet perhaps you are right and some type of collapse is inevitable before a new beginning can be made. If such be the case, as individuals we will be compelled to tap into inner potentials that will needed to meet the approaching apocalypse, potentials which currently lie dormant and undeveloped. Maybe in the process of doing so we will recover our wholeness as well.

[Dec 24, 2019] About embracing of all things LGBTQPIBN+

Dec 24, 2019 | www.theburningplatform.com

The globalist cabal controls the money, the promotions, the tenure, the continuance of careers. God help anyone who disagrees.

Pequiste Just maybe this embracing (that will sound bad in this context ) of all things LGBTQPIBN+, no matter how bizarrre or disgusting, is to usher into a position of great importance in the government, the likes of Pete Buttgeek?

[Dec 24, 2019] Sexual Perverts Are the New American Privileged Class - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Dec 24, 2019 | www.paulcraigroberts.org

The United Church of Christ in Ames, Iowa, for reasons unknown flew a LGBTQ flag/banner of sexual perversion. A 30 year old Hispanic immigrant took it down and burned it. For this "crime" he was sentenced to 16 years in prison!

In response to college kids or provocateurs burning the US flag during Vietnam War protests, the US Congress passed the 1968 Flag Act that permits those who burn or defile the US flag to be imprisoned, but not more than one year. What has happened to America that buring a flag of sexual perversion is 16 times more serious than burning the American flag? How can this be the case, and in a red state!? https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/crime-and-courts/2019/12/19/lgbtq-flag-burning-iowa-man-sentenced-church-banner-fire/2697139001/

Almost every day I read that another person has been fired from their job because they tweeted the fact that there are only two genders. One of the most recent is the firing in the UK of Maya Forstater, "the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable." This is more than a belief. It is a statement of fact, of truth. There is no scientific evidence of a third gender, much less evidence of the hundreds of genders that have been declared by utterly stupid people of no known intellectual capability or accomplishment. Hermaphrodites are considered to be abnormalities, a failure of nature. When a distinguisned author and a famous actor came to the defense of Maya Forstater, they were shouted down by a multiple of subhuman excrement. https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/12/20/the-witch-hunting-of-jk-rowling/

The Western World has lost its way. It was only a short time ago that a Google senior engineer, a white male, was fired because he posted a tweet or an email that spoke a truth that men and women are good at different things and excel in different areas. His statement of scientific fact violated the feelings of feminists, who maintain that there is no difference between the capabilities of men and women. If women aren't excelling in men's areas, it is ipso facto proof that women are being discriminated against. This claim doesn't work for men who are not excelling in women's areas. The men can't claim they are not doing as well in women's areas because they are discriminated against.

By making the claim that men and women are equal in every respect, feminists have destroyed women's sports. Men now have the transgendered right to self-declare themselves women and to compete against women in sports. Many women sports stars, such as Maria Sharapova, winner of five Grand Slam titles, have protested this absurdity, and have been denounced and forced to apologize for doubting that the males are really females even though the self-declared females have penises and testicles and the muscle strength of males.

The results of men competing as women in sports contests clearly show that the two genders are not equal in all respects as the ignorant dumbshit radical feminists insist. The attack on women does not come from men. It comes from feminists and the alleged transgendered.

What kind of society is the West in which absolutely ridiculous declarations take precedence over all known science and anatomical fact? How is it possible in the US, UK, and Europe for a person to be imprisoned for disbelieving that one's gender is independent of one's anatomical body?

A people this insane don't deserve to exist. The End must be Nigh.

[Dec 22, 2019] After the Eviction Notice

Dec 22, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

smoker , December 21, 2019 at 1:31 pm

Re: After the Eviction Notice

So disturbing, and this problem is only going to increase in the US as people realize they can no longer afford to rent anywhere, and there are millions of Boomers who rent, with no available affordable housing to move into, and no livable wage jobs (despite education) for those who would gladly continue working – due to an as yet to be headlined age discrimination which started during the dot.com boom Clinton/Gore ushered in, and exploded during Obama's reign. Sickeningly, in Silicon Valley, 35 year olds feel over the hill.

None of the candidates want to even address this rental housing issue (for all ages) with Federal Tax Policy even? Renters are the only ones who invest major sums of money into housing, with no equity whatsoever?

newcatty , December 21, 2019 at 3:38 pm

Yes, it is the canary growing fainter and struggling for life in the dark gloom of the coal mine. The most basic human requirement for survival is shelter, after food and water. Clothing is also in that category. The poor and homeless ( absolutely including the working poor) at first , when attention started to be given to the " national crisis and (in some people's minds) and national disgrace", was just, you know, the usual suspects. From hobos ( whom many saw as romanticized free spirits or stubborn old guys) to including the abandoned mentally ill, drug addicts, criminals, people with "something to hide", teens on the run from neglect or abuse to? The numbers of people who are essentially w/o shelter is not going to remain out of sight, out of mind. Now, we know that mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and grandchildren are homeless. And, if they are not, many are living in what , once upon a time, poor or desolate housing. Many are living in ,what was once called a boarding house, in a room with their kids. They supposedly have access to "common areas". This is not people who often even have more than a casual aquaintanceship with their "landlords". This is not the "Golden Girls" living the high life in sunny Florida with the owner, who is an adorable rascal. No doubt, some examples of older, single women housing together is a good fit for some.

Most older people on limited incomes don't live in a golden fantasy world. Besides young people not being able to afford outrageous rents, now include the older people. Couple this with the "reports" that there are people hungry in this country. Age has become no restrictor on this tragic fact. This can not stand. Trickle down the ,as was mentioned , breads and circuses in all of their guises. Cheap, junk fast food will become not so cheap when in dire poverty. Housing is just cold, hearted cash for the owners. Who gets to watch the circuses and gladiators ? Got cable tv( even if you personally choose not to not the point)? Afford the cost of any pro sports tickets ? Attend any cultural events that include paying for tickets? Yep, am not going to include the all American past time of watching a game at the local pub. Many people can not afford the luxury of the food and drinks OK, it's time to stop now with my pov. I am fortunate to not be in the above circumstances. Too many are, though.

smoker , December 21, 2019 at 5:40 pm

Your point of view seems valid to me.

God knows what's being planned behind closed doors for this increasing tragedy, the reality is too clear for Congress not to be aware of it. Meanwhile, I'm fully sure that amoral predators who are investing in those areas they're betting the homeless will be forced to dwell and die in, or choose to be euthanized at.

Meanwhile, Congress does absolutely nothing about putting a stop to obscenely biased, corrupted and deadly in its blatant discrimination AI, which is increasingly decimating millions of jobs, and virtually tagging people with social scores they'll never get out from under, no matter how false. This, ever since Obama glibly announced there would be many jobs lost, and some pain, due to technology The Technocracy . A Bipartisan, Horrid Congress accepted it as a necessary reality.

The Rev Kev , December 21, 2019 at 5:43 pm

The only thing missing was a police officer going in after with a drawn gun. When millions of people were being kicked out of their homes about a decade a go, I saw a photo that won an award at the time. It showed a cop, with pistol drawn, going into a house that had the family kicked out from it. Surrounding him was all the left overs from a family's life and it was very sad.

smoker , December 21, 2019 at 7:29 pm

It is heart rending. Even watching renters who leave before being evicted is heart rending, they're forced to throw away many belongings, like perfectly good mattresses and basic necessities. Lived at an apartment complex turned into ratty ass condos for mostly foreign property 'flippers' who continued renting them out, then 'flipping' them. The despair, fear, and loss during a huge job downturn was horrid to witness, as many had lived there over ten years. I was lucky to be on my feet somewhat at the time, no longer.

Every fricking sign, particularly in Silicon Valley, that advertises Apartment Homes ™ should be torn down and destroyed. The average US renters have always been treated as second class leechers, I've witnessed it my entire adult life, now they're being treated even worse.

Thanks Clinton/Gore, Obomber/Biden, Nanny Pelosi , et al; and we thought that was only the mark of Republicans busy at work.

smoker , December 21, 2019 at 9:12 pm

Thinking on this subject even more, it occurs to me why the powers that be are so invested in pitting each generation against the other. An empowered US renters' 'lobby' could be enormous. It would cross all age – along with race, gender, religion, and geographic – spectrums. Renters, along with the homeless are increasing in vast numbers of all ages. The last thing the powers that be would want, is for those vast millions to stick together against them, and age is the easiest barrier for the powers that be to keep renters separated by.

[Dec 14, 2019] To date (August 2019), the administration has replaced about 60 miles of dilapidated barriers with new fencing. And a major component of Trump's pledge -- that Mexico would pay for the wall -- hasn't been part of the equation. U.S. taxpayers have paid the cost.

Dec 14, 2019 | www.unz.com

Corvinus says: December 11, 2019 at 3:05 am GMT 400 Words

@Peripatetic Commenter "He has built more wall than the last three presidents and is on track to have one fully built by November next year. He has also reduced the amount of illegal immigration into the US."

To date (August 2019), the administration has replaced about 60 miles of dilapidated barriers with new fencing. And a major component of Trump's pledge -- that Mexico would pay for the wall -- hasn't been part of the equation. U.S. taxpayers have paid the cost.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2019/aug/30/donald-trumps-border-wall-how-much-has-really-been

"So right now, 78 miles have been built, have been built where there was an existing form of barrier," [Acting CBP Commissioner Mark] Morgan said, effectively admitting that none of the wall that has been constructed has been in new areas.

For the record, I have no problem with rebuilding and/or replacing our border wall. But Trump has failed to deliver on his campaign promise.

https://www.newsweek.com/cbp-no-new-border-wall-1472077

"If you want to bring money back into the country where it can do some good, you have to reduce taxes."

So what has been its level of effectiveness accomplishing that task?

https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-tax-cut-effects-20190529-story.html

Perhaps if Trump, like past presidents, would offer up his tax returns, we can see how much money he personally has "brought back" to our nation.

Of course, it would help that we stop outsourcing jobs. How has Trump fared here, besides having had his own merchandise made overseas?

https://www.citizen.org/news/trump-touts-pledge-to-americas-workers-anniversary-while-participating-firms-that-promised-new-american-jobs-outsource-trump-rewards-outsourcers-with-billions-in-contracts/

... ... ..

[Dec 14, 2019] As Dean Baker pointed out in his book Rigged, the neoliberal capitalism of America is rigged to benefit the top one percent

Dec 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Tomonthebeach , December 13, 2019 at 5:10 pm

As Dean Baker pointed out in his book Rigged, the neoliberal capitalism of America is rigged to benefit the top 1%. After all, they were the architects. Most Americans appreciate that. Nevertheless, the vast majority willingly wade into its rigged quicksand. All economies are rigged in the sense that there is a structure to it all. Moreover, the architects of that system will ensure there is something in it for themselves – rigged. Our school system does not instruct Americans on how their own economic system works (is rigged), so most of us become its victims rather than its beneficiaries.

Books by Liz Warren and her daughter offer remedial guidance on how to make the current US economic system work for the average household. So, in a sense, Liz comes across as an adherent to the system she is trying to help others master .

This seems to be a losing proposition for candidate Warren because most Americans want a new system with new rigging; not a repaired system that has been screwing them for generations.

[Dec 08, 2019] La Rouchefoucald: "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue"

Dec 08, 2019 | crookedtimber.org

In all of this, it's worth remembering the observation of La Rouchefoucald that "hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue". The accusation of virtue signalling represents the refusal of vice to pay this tribute.


Phil 12.05.19 at 10:10 am ( 2 )

... in my experience the kind of people who talk about VS also talk about 'clicktivism' and similar; in other words, a lack of effort or cost is particularly characteristic of VS (and, in their eyes, particularly repugnant).
nastywoman 12.05.19 at 11:13 am ( 4 )
...And what's about all these people who wear these: "I'm a Deplorable" – T-shirts?
SusanC 12.05.19 at 12:37 pm (no link)
I thought the concept was supposed to be (a)not actually doing anything to reduce a problem; while (b) making ostentatious signs that purport to show you care about it.

A better example might be attending an Extinction Rebellion protest without changing your own consumption/pollution causing activities.

I wonder if it somehow relates to the Mary Douglas cultural theory of risk?

If so, we might tentatively include, e.g. Making a big noise about terrorism without really considering yourself to be at risk from it

"Vice signaling" was a good joke; I think it captures a notion that the affiliation the person is attempting to signal is not a universally shared one,

SusanC 12.05.19 at 12:45 pm (no link)
For that matter, terrorism itself, in its typical modern form, could be regarded as vice signalling: ostentatiously commiting public acts of violence ostensibly in support of a political cause, without regard to whether the political cause is in fact being advanced by their actions.
cs 12.05.19 at 1:37 pm (no link)
... I would say the implication is about the ostentation and a kind of insincerity. Insincerity in the sense that the person displaying the rainbow flag wants to be seen as the kind of person who cares about gay rights, when maybe they don't actually care about it all that much. That isn't quite the same as hypocrisy I think.
MisterMr 12.05.19 at 2:02 pm ( 12 )
I'll try to give my economic based explanation for this, based on this paper from Piketty:

Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right:Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict

This paper has been cited here various times, however I'll drop this line from the abstract that summarizes the main finding:

Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher education voters, giving rise to a "multiple-elite" party systemin the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the "left", while high-income/high-wealth elites still vote for the "right"

chedolf 12.05.19 at 4:14 pm ( 18 )
Do you think the criticism of Pharisees who pray theatrically in public was exclusively an attack on hypocrisy?
Sashas 12.05.19 at 4:15 pm ( 19 )
I would add to Phil @2 a third option.
(a) You're a hypocrite.
(b) The thing you're signalling isn't actually a virtue.
(c) You're attacking me by reminding everyone of a virtue I don't have.
MrMister 12.05.19 at 4:34 pm ( 21 )
I think the old-fashioned term for virtue signalling is sanctimony, not hypocrisy. Notably, sanctimony is also compatible with genuine belief and/or commitment. It does connote that the committed person has a degree of self-love over their commitments, and that perhaps the frequency or intensity of their display of their commitments is caused by an underlying desire to experience that self-love whenever the opportunity arises.
Tohubohu 12.05.19 at 8:15 pm ( 26 )
Sanctimony–correct word, I think–puts me in mind of that old bumper sticker, "I brake for animals" of which I once saw an example tidily shortened to: "I bake animals".
Trader Joe 12.05.19 at 9:41 pm ( 29 )
The problem I have with the whole concept is the stereotyping and bias implicit in it.

When I see the Rainbow I'm supposed to think open minded, inclusive and left-thinking and that's fully o.k in the minds of liberals, but not in the minds of the Conservatives who see something else (which I'm not inclined to list).

When I see the MAGA I'm supposed to think closed minded, racist and right-thinking, but Conservatives would see hard-working Americans trying to make their country a better place.

Dr. Hilarius 12.05.19 at 10:24 pm ( 30 )
Displaying a rainbow flag or wearing a MAGA hat strikes me as visible tribal identification more than virtue signaling. I think MrMister's mention of sanctimony is closer to the truth. Another poster mentioned Pharisees and public prayer. Consider a meeting to discuss replacing culverts to allow better passage of spawning salmon. The participants represent various interested parties, private and government. The meeting is disrupted by a person who proceeds to lecture all present about the history of racism, broken treaties and Native American reverence for nature. This person is not Native American. The speaker assumes that his/her information is unknown to the audience. The information does nothing to advance the goal of culvert replacement nor does it do anything to right historic wrongs. The speaker gets to feel superior. This is high-grade virtue signaling.

It has been my experience that virtue signalling is often practiced on behalf of marginalized groups by people who do not belong to that group but presume to speak for them.

SamChevre 12.05.19 at 11:17 pm ( 32 )
I'll second several commenters above: "virtue signalling" isn't primarily an accusation of hypocrisy. The related accusations targeted at the right are "sanctimony" and "prudishness" more than hypocrisy. The accusation is that you care more about "being seen as the sort of person who supports X" than about X.
engels 12.06.19 at 2:19 am ( 37 )
I think it means making a political statement in order to look good, where good is understood in a moral sense. That's a real phenomenon, especially in our age of online narcissism/personal branding, and it probably does affect the liberal-left more than the right because left-liberal politics tends to be more morally inspired.

I wouldn't use the term myself (or SJW)

Bernard Yomtov 12.06.19 at 2:28 am ( 38 )
I agree with SusanC at 7 and cs at 10 that the term is mostly intended to suggest that you support some cause or other that you don't really care about, as a way to identify yourself, or establish bona fides, with some group.
steven t johnson 12.07.19 at 12:19 am ( 53 )
https://www.primalpoly.com/virtue-signaling-further-reading

https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/10/if-youre-not-continuously-outraged-you-must-be-a-horrible-person/

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/a-university-degree-is-a-signal-coming-through-loud-and-clear-to-employers-a6873881.html

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/are-you-guilty-virtue-signaling

https://areomagazine.com/2019/03/05/virtue-signal-or-piety-display-the-search-for-cognitive-identity-and-the-attack-on-social-bargaining/

https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/identitieswhat-are-they-good-for/articles/virtue-signaling

https://www.nas.org/blogs/dicta/are_colleges_wasting_endowment_funds_on_virtue_signaling

I'm so far behind I'm still bemused by the thought that a flag lapel pin, pledges of allegiance and praying in public, are all virtue signalling. The tie-ins to libertarian economics and evolutionary psychology are even more puzzling, but maybe that's because I think they're just ideological scams/Vavilovian mimicry trying to pass off nonsense as real ideas.

engels 12.07.19 at 10:41 am ( 57 )
I invented 'virtue signalling'. Now it's taking over the world
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/i-invented-virtue-signalling-now-its-taking-over-the-world/
mtraven 12.07.19 at 6:47 pm ( 62 )
Bartholomew did not invent "virtue signalling", of course: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/20/virtue-signalling-putdown-passed-sell-by-date
Donald 12.08.19 at 12:42 am ( 64 )
The term is related to " Social Justice Warrior".

[Dec 07, 2019] Even neoliberal economists seem to agree that the decline of labor power, the decimation of Unionism in the US, has had a devastating effect on the existing quality of life

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Mr. Bill , November 29, 2019 at 06:18 PM

Even Economists' seem to agree that the decline of labor power, the decimation of Unionism in the US, has had a devastating effect on the existing quality of life, the opportunity for economic mobility, and even longevity in the US. The society has been wringing it's hands over how to bring back the salad days of the strong middle class afforded by representative labor in the 50's and 60's.

Bernie Sanders platform represents all that was lost. There really is no difference between Sanders proposals and the union contracts of yore. The election of Sanders along with a unified Congress to enact his labor friendly proposals will restore the American middle class.

And America.

Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , November 29, 2019 at 06:48 PM
The Trojan horse of neo-liberal economics, and the defenestration of an independent press into an oligopoly of lies, was able sell labor arbitrage as beneficial. Underselling American production by Capitalists employing a Communist monopoly supplier of labor, at substandard income, health, safety, and environmental conditions, against American workers, was sold as benefit.

Forty years later, America is unrecognizable. Reduced to platitudes, paying homage to a long lost civilization.

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Mr. Bill... , November 30, 2019 at 06:41 AM
Yep, but before we could get there we first had to believe that corporate mergers were necessary and good to achieve economies of scale rather than merely to bestow unbridled monopoly power, monopsony power, and political power upon the biggest sharks in the tank. Mergers were about owning Boardwalk and Park Place and globalization was about collecting rents. Mergers crippled unions and globalization put them out of their misery with a final death blow.
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , November 30, 2019 at 06:42 AM
The old one, two, so to speak.
Paine -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , November 30, 2019 at 01:46 PM
Amen

CIO
R.I.P.

Paine -> Mr. Bill... , November 30, 2019 at 01:44 PM
Punchy lingo

" AN Oligarchy of lieS"

LOVELY PHRASE
makes me jealous

Last line
Pungent indeed :

Forty years later
America is unrecognizable

Reduced to platitudes

paying homage
to a long lost civilization

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 02:08 PM
How far do you live from Palm Beach, FA, the new permanent residence of our fearless orange leader?
RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , November 30, 2019 at 02:10 PM
Sorry, the abbreviation for Florida is FL. FA must stand for something else :<)
Paine -> RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 02, 2019 at 08:54 AM
I winter in Zero beach fla.

Former training town
for the Brooklyn Dodgers

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Paine ... , December 02, 2019 at 12:37 PM
Vero Beach is awesome, as is most of the FL coasts when there are no hurricanes in town. I checked Google Map and you are halfway between Daytona Beach and Ft Lauderdale and well away from that Miami place. If I lived there then I would be fishing for tuna, cobia, wahoo, and king mackerel every day.
Fred C. Dobbs , November 30, 2019 at 05:55 AM
2020 Democratic Candidates Wage Escalating Fight
(on the Merits of Fighting) https://nyti.ms/2Ds4OIC
NYT - Mark Leibovich - Nov. 30

For all the emphasis placed on the various divides
among the candidates, the question of "to fight or
not to fight" might represent the most meaningful contrast.

WALPOLE, N.H. -- Pete Buttigieg has a nifty politician's knack for coming off as a soothing, healing figure who projects high-mindedness -- even while he's plainly kicking his opponents in the teeth.

"There is a lot to be angry about," he was saying, cheerfully. Mr. Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., was seated aboard his campaign bus outside a New Hampshire middle school before a recent Sunday afternoon rally. He was sipping a canned espresso beverage and his eyes bulged as he spoke, as if he was trying to pass off as revelatory something he had in fact said countless times before.

"But fighting is not enough and it's a problem if fighting is all you have," he said. "We fight when we need to fight. But we're never going to say fighting is the point."

In fact, these were fighting words: barely disguised and directed at certain Democratic rivals. As Mr. Buttigieg enjoys a polling surge in Iowa and New Hampshire, he is trying to prevent a rebound by Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has leveled off in the polls after a strong summer, and contain Senator Bernie Sanders, whose support has proved durable.

Both are explicit fighters, while Mr. Buttigieg, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and some others warn that Democrats risk scaring off voters by relying too heavily on pugnacious oratory, and by emphasizing the need to transform America rather than focusing simply on ending the Trump presidency and restoring the country to some semblance of normalcy.

As Mr. Buttigieg has sharpened this critique, however, he has adopted a more aggressive tone himself -- a sly bit of needle-threading that has coincided with his rise. Mr. Biden, too, has combined cantankerous language about beating Mr. Trump "like a drum" with more uplifting rhetoric about "restoring the soul of America."

As Mr. Buttigieg spoke, Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders were holding rallies in which they could scarcely utter two sentences without dropping in some formulation of the word "fight." They spoke of the various "fights" they had led and the powerful moneyed interests they had "fought" and how they would "keep fighting" all the way to the White House.

Mr. Sanders touted himself as the candidate who would "fight to raise wages" and was "leading the fight to guarantee health care" and "fight against corporate greed." Ms. Warren (fighting a cold) explained "why I got into this fight, will stay in this fight and why I am asking others to join the fight."

Every politician wants to be known as a "fighter," even the placid young mayor who has promised to "change the channel" on Mr. Trump's reality show presidency and all the rancor that has accompanied it. But Mr. Buttigieg is also fighting against what he sees as the political trope of fighting per se. He is presenting himself as an antidote to the politics-as-brawl predilection that has become so central to the messaging of both parties and, he believes, has sapped the electorate of any hope for an alternative. "The whole country is exhausted by everyone being at each other's throats," Mr. Buttigieg said.

At a basic level, this is a debate over word choice. Candidates have been selling themselves as "fighters" for centuries, ostensibly on behalf of the proverbial "you." It goes back at least to 1828, when Andrew Jackson bludgeoned John Quincy Adams, his erudite opponent, with the slogan "Adams can write but Jackson can fight." Populists of various stripes have been claiming for decades to "fight for you," "fight the power," "fight the good fight" and whatnot, all in the name of framing their enterprises as some cause that transcends their mere career advancement.

In a broader sense, though, it goes to a stylistic divide that has been playing out for nearly a year in the battle for the Democratic nomination. The split is most acute among the top four polling candidates: you could classify Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders as the pugilists in the field, whereas Mr. Buttigieg, he of the earnest manner and Midwestern zest for consensus, fashions himself a peacemaker. Mr. Biden would also sit in the latter camp, with his constant promises to "unite the country" and continued insistence -- oft-derided -- that his old Republican friends would be so chastened by Mr. Trump's defeat that they would suddenly want to work in sweet bipartisan harmony with President Joe.

For all the emphasis placed on the identity and generational partitions between the candidates, the question of "to fight or not to fight" might represent a more meaningful contrast. "This has been a longstanding intramural debate," said David Axelrod, the Democratic media and message strategist, who served as a top campaign and White House aide to former President Barack Obama. "It's what Elizabeth Warren would call 'big structural change' versus what critics would call 'incremental change.'"

He believes the energy and size of the former camp has been exaggerated by the attention it receives. "I think sometimes the populist left is overrepresented in places where reporters sometimes spend a lot of time," Mr. Axelrod said. "Like on Twitter." ...

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , November 30, 2019 at 06:59 AM
Apparently what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire stays in Iowa and New Hampshire. Here in VA, which does not primary for the Democratic Party until Super Tuesday (March 3, 2020) the only message coming through from Dems is Dump Trump. Since VA went for Hillary in 2016, then it is unlikely that voters here will hold for Trump now, but not for lack of trying among staunch Republican Party financial backers.

Fortunately enough for me though is that my happy life does not hinge on national politics. VA will be a better place to live now that Republicans no longer control the state's legislature nor executive branches. Sorry about the country, but it must live with its own unique history of bad choices.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , November 30, 2019 at 03:46 PM
Here in MA, we pay particular attention to
our cranky neighbor NH because we know how
votes will go here at home, but not there.

NH is endlessly fascinating, and remote-ish.

With four electoral votes, it has one-third
more than Vermont. That's why it's important-ish.

Overall, the six New England states have an extra
twelve electoral votes, disproportionate to our
total population. Lately all Dem, except for a
stubborn pocket in Maine.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , November 30, 2019 at 03:56 PM
MA is also joined at the hip with NY,
sharing about a hundred miles of border,
and much political sensibility. It wasn't
always this way (except for the border part.)

I was growing up in western NY when Robert Kennedy
was foisted upon us as a Senator, mainly from NYC.
He with considerable NYC roots, but that god-awful
'Bahston' accent. In those days, western NY was
a GOP bastion, and still is to a lesser extent.

None the less, we are still joined at the hip.
Just not over the Yankees & the Red Sox.

ilsm -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 01, 2019 at 06:14 AM
Hillary Clinton was foisted on the "rest of NY" outside the NYC metro!

An argument to keep the elector college.

Boston is closer to Manhattan than Springfield is to Albany.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to ilsm... , December 01, 2019 at 07:20 AM
Literally, or figuratively>

Boston => NYC: 210 miles
Springfield => Albany: 86 miles

(I've noticed, you often get
things wrong. Whatever happened
to 'Knowledge & Thoroughness'?

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , December 01, 2019 at 06:22 AM
Thanks. My wife is from CT. Is CT even more true blue than MA. A quandary for me as she was raised devout Republican although her mother was a public school teacher.
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to RC (Ron) Weakley... , December 01, 2019 at 10:23 AM
All of New England is blue these days, except
for a portion of Maine. Only one GOPerson in
Congress these days, that being Susan Collins
of Maine, soon to be up for re-election.

'Sen. Susan Collins faces a potentially
difficult reelection campaign in 2020. ... J

Although (she does not yet have a primary challenger), Collins could be especially vulnerable if she breaks with Trump -- she's the most moderate Republican in the Senate and has had lukewarm intraparty support in the past, though it improved markedly after she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last year.' ...

Primary Challenges Might Keep These Republican Senators
From Voting To Remove Trump https://53eig.ht/36mLHgu

Paine -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 09:00 AM
New England has a sesionist
Past
The blue light federalists

The Hartford convention

Recall?

All that
pre anti slavery movement

A second source of
New england secessionist sentiment


Let's leave this beast

EMichael , November 30, 2019 at 06:31 AM
Wow, Mankiw.

"How to Increase Taxes on the Rich (If You Must)"

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mankiw/files/how_to_increase_taxes_on_the_rich.pdf

Suffice to say the two main characters are Sam Spendthrift and Frank Frugal.

geez

Paine -> EMichael... , November 30, 2019 at 08:47 AM
Household saving is an anachronic
Activity given modern credit systems

And effective macro management of the net rate of social accumulation

Paine -> Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 08:52 AM
New Housing and household durables
In as much as they increase
The labor productivity
of
Domestic production...
Are a worthy investment
Best financed with credit

The combo of productivity increases
and substitution of market products combined cut domestic labor time dramatically
Last century

More credit powered improvement to come

joe -> EMichael... , December 01, 2019 at 10:50 PM
He is protecting this text book, it is in the parenthesis (if you must).

His text book is a fraud, it explains very little about what is happening, contains nothing about irregular gains to scale, nothing about value added network effect, assumes the senate is a proportional democracy, never considers the regularity of generation default. The text should be shunned, it is ten years behind the mathematicians.

Paine -> joe... , December 02, 2019 at 08:35 AM
I read this joe scratch
and tremble

Is this mental caliban
In a profound sense
A fun house reflection of myself

Probably

Paine -> Paine ... , December 02, 2019 at 08:36 AM
But for the North star texts of Marx and Lenin
Julio -> Paine ... , December 05, 2019 at 10:28 PM
We are all mulpians now.
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to EMichael... , December 02, 2019 at 07:02 AM
Tax the Rich? Here's How to Do
It (Sensibly) https://nyti.ms/2NsILFP
NYT - Andrew Ross Sorkin - Feb. 25, 2019

Everyone, it seems, has ideas about new tax strategies, some more realistic than others. The list of tax revolutionaries is long. ...

Whatever your politics, there is a bipartisan acknowledgment that the tax system is broken. Whether you believe the system should be fixed to generate more revenue or employed as a tool to limit inequality -- and let's be honest for a moment, those ideas are not always consistent -- there is a justifiable sense the public doesn't trust the tax system to be fair.

In truth, how could it when a wealthy person like Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of the president, reportedly paid almost no federal taxes for years? Or when Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs who once led President Trump's National Economic Council, says aloud what most wealthy people already know: "Only morons pay the estate tax."

If you pay taxes, it's hard not to feel like a patsy.

A New York Times poll found that support for higher taxes on the rich cuts across party lines, and Democratic presidential hopefuls are offering plans to do it. But the current occupant of the Oval Office signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut into law, so the political hurdles are high.

Over the past month, I've consulted with tax accountants, lawyers, executives, political leaders and yes, billionaires, and specific ideas have come up about plugging the gaps in the tax code, without blowing it apart. ...

Patch the estate tax

None of the suggestions in this column -- or anywhere else -- can work unless the estate tax is rid of the loopholes that allow wealthy Americans to blatantly (and legally) skirt taxes.

Without addressing whether the $11.2 million exemption is too high -- and it is -- the estate tax is riddled with problems. Chief among them: Wealthy Americans can pass much of their riches to their heirs without paying taxes on capital gains -- ever. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, unrealized capital gains account for "as much as about 55 percent for estates worth more than $100 million." ...

The Congressional Budget Office estimates simply closing this loophole would raise more than $650 billion over a decade.

As central as this idea is to the other suggestions, it is not an easy sell. Three Republican senators introduced a plan this year to repeal the estate tax.

But this and other changes -- eliminating the hodgepodge of generation-skipping trusts that also bypass estate taxes -- are obvious fixes that would introduce a basic fairness to the system and curb the vast inequality that arises from dynastic wealth.

Increase capital gains rates for the wealthy

Our income tax rates are progressive, but taxes on capital gains are less so. There are only two brackets, and they top out at 20 percent.

By contrast, someone making $40,000 a year by working 40 hours a week is in the 22 percent bracket. That's why Warren Buffett says his secretary pays a higher tax rate.

So why not increase capital gains rates on the wealthiest among us?

One chief argument for low capital gains rates is to incentivize investment. But if we embraced two additional brackets -- say, a marginal 30 percent bracket for earners over $5 million and a 35 percent bracket for earners over $15 million -- it is hard to see how it would fundamentally change investment plans. ...

['Incentivizing investment'
leads to more income inequality.]

End the perverse real estate loopholes

One reason there are so many real estate billionaires is the law allows the industry to perpetually defer capital gains on properties by trading one for another. In tax parlance, it is known as a 1031 exchange.

In addition, real estate industry executives can depreciate the value of their investment for tax purposes even when the actual value of the property appreciates. (This partly explains Mr. Kushner's low tax bill.)

These are glaring loopholes that are illogical unless you are a beneficiary of them. Several real estate veterans I spoke to privately acknowledged the tax breaks are unconscionable.

Fix carried interest

This is far and away the most obvious loophole that goes to Americans' basic sense of fairness.

For reasons that remain inexplicable -- unless you count lobbying money -- the private equity, venture capital, real estate and hedge fund industries have kept this one intact. Current tax law allows executives in those industries to have the bonuses they earn investing for clients taxed as capital gains, not ordinary income.

Even President Trump opposed the loophole. In a 2015 interview, he said hedge fund managers were "getting away with murder."

This idea and the others would not swell the government's coffers to overflowing, but they would help restore a sense of fairness to a system that feels so easily gamed by the wealthiest among us.

There are a couple of other things worth considering.

Let's talk about philanthropy

Nobody wants to dissuade charitable giving. But average taxpayers are often subsidizing wealthy philanthropists whose charitable deductions significantly reduce their bills.

These people deserve credit for giving money to noble causes (though some nonprofits are lobbying organizations masquerading as do-gooders) but their wealth, in many cases, isn't paying for the basics of health care, defense, education and everything else that taxes pay for.

Philanthropic giving is laudable, but it can also be a tax-avoidance strategy. Is there a point at which charitable giving should be taxed?

I'm not sure what the right answer is. But consider this question posed by several philanthropic billionaires: Should the rich be able to gift stock or other assets to charity before paying capital gains taxes? ...

Finally, fund the Internal Revenue Service

The agency is so underfunded that the chance an individual gets audited is minuscule -- one person in 161 was audited in 2017, according to the I.R.S. And individuals with more than $1 million in income, the people with the most complicated tax situations, were audited just 4.4 percent of the time. It was more than 12 percent in 2011, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported.

The laws in place hardly matter: Those willing to take a chance can gamble that they won't get caught. That wouldn't be the case if the agency weren't having its budget cut and losing personnel. ...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 07:22 AM
'If you pay taxes, it's hard not to feel like a patsy.'

[I heartily disagree.]

'In 1927 in the court case of Compañía General de
Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue
a dissenting opinion was written by Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr. that included the following phrase ... :

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society '

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/13/taxes-civilize/

anne -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 07:59 AM
If you pay taxes, it's hard not to feel like a patsy.

-- Andrew Ross Sorkin

[ What a disgraceful, shameful phrase. ]

Paine -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 08:39 AM
Tax talk is for star chambers

In public call for spending

And back it by attacking all fuss budgets

The uncle debt load can be lightened
By sovereign rate management

It's part of uncles extravagant privilege
As global hegemon

Paine -> Paine ... , December 02, 2019 at 09:03 AM
Tax wealth not work
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Paine ... , December 02, 2019 at 09:20 AM
One can at least imagine that,
back in the day (long ago?),
wealth would have been taxed,
but then with the rise of the
middle-class, taxes were extended
to those who had *income* if not
much wealth. Perhaps just as the
wealthy were hiring lawyers and
accountants, and making generous
political 'contributions' to
avoid taxes generally.
Mr. Bill -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 04:43 PM
A 0.25% tax on financial transactions will supply $1.8 Trillion over the next 10 years,
Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 02, 2019 at 04:46 PM
The elimination of corporate loopholes would provide an estimated $1.25 Trillion over the next 10 years.
Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 02, 2019 at 04:50 PM
Cutting the bloated military budget by 5% would provide $0.5 Trillion over the next 10 years.

Returning to the Clinton top marginal tax rates would provide another $0.5 Trillion over the next 10 years.

Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , December 02, 2019 at 04:54 PM
It really comes down to priorities. Are we a democracy, or not. Health care, education, etc. for the citizens, or corporate welfare for the aristocracy.
anne , November 30, 2019 at 07:14 AM
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1200781466604621825

Paul Krugman‏ @paulkrugman

This New York Times article on rising mortality had me thinking about regional disparities. It's true that rising mortality is widespread, but the article also acknowledges that mortality in coastal metros has improved 1/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/health/life-expectancy-rate-usa.html

It's Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy
A new study shows that death rates increased for middle-aged people of all racial and ethnic groups.

6:19 AM - 30 Nov 2019

So I did some comparisons using the KFF health system tracker https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-life-expectancy-compare-countries/ and a JAMA article on life expectancy by state in 1990 and 2016 2/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2678018

The State of US Health, 1990-2016
Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Among US States

What we see is another red-blue divide. Compare population-weighted averages for states that supported Clinton and Trump in 2016, and you see very different trends 3/

[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKoJry8WoAAAU6E.png ]

This is NOT simply a matter of declining regions voting for Trump. Look at the 4 biggest states: in 1990 FL and TX both had higher life expectancy than NY, now they're well behind 4/

[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKoKPKzXsAANKK9.png ]

I'm not sure what lies behind this. Medicaid expansion probably plays a role in the past few years, and general harshness of social policies in red states may matter more over time. Divergence in education levels may also play a role 5/

What's clear, however, is that the US life-expectancy problem is pretty much a red-state problem. In terms of mortality, blue states look like the rest of the advanced world 6/

anne -> anne... , November 30, 2019 at 07:15 AM
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1199719100496449537

Paul Krugman @paulkrugman

I was struck by one line in this article: "Life expectancy in the coastal metro areas -- both east and west -- has improved at roughly the same rate as in Canada." Indeed, the American death trip has been driven by only part of the country 1/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/health/life-expectancy-rate-usa.html

It's Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy
A new study shows that death rates increased for middle-aged people of all racial and ethnic groups.

7:58 AM - 27 Nov 2019

And while the divergence is surely linked to growing regional economic disparities, there's a pretty clear red-blue divide reflecting state policies. Consider NY v. TX 2/

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2678018

[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKZCmPnXkAAjsOG.png ]

In 1990 Texas actually had higher life expectancy, but now NY is far ahead. Surely this has something to do with expanding health coverage, maybe also to do with environmental policies. 3/

In general, progressive US states have experienced falling mortality along with the rest of the advanced world. Red America is where things are different 4/

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to anne... , November 30, 2019 at 07:42 AM
The NYT article has a graphical map
'Falling Life Expectancy' - that shows
death rate (age 25-64) declines in only
two states (CA & WY) with small increases
in 11 other states (OR, WA, AR, UT, TX, OK,
SC, GA, FL, IL & NY). Increases in all other
states. Hence, shorter life expectancies
in most states, regardless of region.
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , November 30, 2019 at 07:52 AM
'US life-expectancy problem is
pretty much a red-state problem.'

If so (which I doubt), it's perhaps
because most states are 'red states'.

In the northeast, which is quite 'blue',
only NY is doing reasonably well on this.

In the deep (red) south, TX, FL, SC & GA
are also doing ok. As are TX and OK.

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , November 30, 2019 at 08:02 AM
Slight correction: It's AZ, not AR
that is in the small increase category.
In any case 8 of these 13 states are
'red' ones.
Julio -> Fred C. Dobbs... , November 30, 2019 at 11:50 AM
How does "death rate 25-64" relate to life expectancy? I would think it measures a different thing.
anne -> Julio ... , November 30, 2019 at 11:56 AM
How does "death rate 25-64" relate to life expectancy?

[ Think of the fierceness of AIDS in South Africa, which effected specific age ranges, and notice the change in life expectancy:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pCWX

January 15, 2018

Life Expectancy at Birth for China, India, Brazil and South Africa, 1977-2017 ]

anne -> Julio ... , November 30, 2019 at 12:02 PM
How does "death rate 25-64" relate to life expectancy?

[ Similarly, by dramatically improving the care of young children China dramatically improved life expectancy. This was and remains a failing for India, even though India had a far higher per capita GDP level than China before 1980. Amartya Sen has written about this:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=oWKW

January 15, 2018

Life Expectancy at Birth for China, India, Brazil and South Africa, 1960-2017

anne -> anne... , November 30, 2019 at 12:03 PM
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=oWL6

January 15, 2018

Life Expectancy at Birth for China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, 1960-2017 ]

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Julio ... , November 30, 2019 at 12:42 PM
Anne is correct. Death rate 25-64 is throwing out the disease susceptible childhood years, the suicides and automobile accidents of early adulthood, and also access to medical care for the increased disease risks of advanced ages. What is left tells a story of alcoholism, smoking, and fentanyl mostly along with healthcare access. Employment security matters in both healthcare access and incidence of depression including adult suicide and drug use along with a tendency to engage in risky activities just to pay the bills.
Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Julio ... , November 30, 2019 at 03:35 PM
JAMA (& others who have done similar studies)
are just looking at data. Draw your own
conclusions? The media will draw theirs.

Fair to say, these are people dying NOT of old-age.

Americans' Life Expectancy Drops For Third Year In Row, Signaling There's 'Something Terribly Wrong' Going On https://khn.org/MTAyNTQ4Mw via @khnews (Kaiser Health News)

Americans' Life Expectancy Drops For Third Year In Row, Signaling There's 'Something Terribly Wrong' Going On
Researchers say the grim new reality isn't just limited to rural deaths of despair, but rather the numbers reflect that many different people living in all areas of the U.S. are struggling. "We need to look at root causes," said Dr. Steven Woolf, the author's lead study. "Something changed in the 1980s, which is when the growth in our life expectancy began to slow down compared to other wealthy nations."

The New York Times: It's Not Just Poor White People Driving A Decline In Life Expectancy
As the life expectancy of Americans has declined over a period of three years -- a drop driven by higher death rates among people in the prime of life -- the focus has been on the plight of white Americans in rural areas who were dying from so-called deaths of despair: drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicide. But a new analysis of more than a half-century of federal mortality data, published on Tuesday in JAMA, found that the increased death rates among people in midlife extended to all racial and ethnic groups, and to suburbs and cities. (Kolata and Tavernise, 11/26)

The Washington Post: U.S. Life Expectancy: Americans Are Dying Young At Alarming Rates
Despite spending more on health care than any other country, the United States has seen increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people age 25 to 64, who should be in the prime of their lives. In contrast, other wealthy nations have generally experienced continued progress in extending longevity. Although earlier research emphasized rising mortality among non-Hispanic whites in the United States, the broad trend detailed in this study cuts across gender, racial and ethnic lines. By age group, the highest relative jump in death rates from 2010 to 2017 -- 29 percent -- has been among people age 25 to 34. (Achenbach, 11/26)

Los Angeles Times: Suicides, Overdoses, Other 'Deaths Of Despair' Fuel Drop In U.S. Life Expectancy
In an editorial accompanying the new report, a trio of public health leaders said the study's insight into years of cumulative threats to the nation's health "represents a call to action." If medical professionals and public health experts fail to forge partnerships with social, political, religious and economic leaders to reverse the current trends, "the nation risks life expectancy continuing downward in future years to become a troubling new norm," wrote Harvard public health professors Dr. Howard K. Koh, John J. Park and Dr. Anand K. Parekh of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. (Healy, 11/26)

---

Changes in midlife death rates across racial and ethnic
groups in the United States: systematic analysis of vital statistics
https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3096
British Medical Journal - August 15, 2018

Paine -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 09:06 AM
Are death rates for 70 to 90 types
still falling

That's where we need thinking out

Not the big 40
25 to 65
The big 40 are the main meat hunters
of the cohorts

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Paine ... , December 02, 2019 at 12:06 PM
(Seen on web so must be true.)

'Men 65 years and older today have an average
life expectancy of 84.3 years. Life expectancy
outcomes get even better among younger men and
women according to the CDC's data. For instance,
one in 20 women who are 40 today will live to
celebrate their 100th birthday.'

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , December 02, 2019 at 12:19 PM
(OTOH...)

CDC Data Show US Life Expectancy Continues to Decline https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20181210lifeexpectdrop.html

American Academy of Family Physicians - December 10, 2018

"The latest CDC data show that the U.S. life expectancy has declined over the past few years," said CDC Director Robert Redfield, M.D., in a Nov. 29 statement. "Tragically, this troubling trend is largely driven by deaths from drug overdose and suicide.

(CDC Director's Media Statement on U.S. Life Expectancy
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/s1129-US-life-expectancy.html via @CDCgov - about one year ago)

Three new reports from the CDC indicate that the average life expectancy in the United States has declined for the second time in three years.

Deaths from drug overdose and suicide were responsible for much of the decline, with more than 70,000 drug overdose deaths reported in 2017.

As a result of overall increases in mortality rates, average life expectancy decreased from 78.9 years in 2014 to 78.6 years in 2017.

"Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation's overall health, and these sobering statistics are a wake-up call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable." ...

More than 2.8 million deaths occurred in the United States in 2017, an increase of about 70,000 from the previous year. Death rates rose significantly in three age groups during that period (i.e., in those 25-34, 35-44, and 85 and older) and dropped in 45- to 54-year-olds, yielding an overall age-adjusted increase of 0.4 percent. That percentage represents a rise from 728.8 deaths per 100,000 standard population to 731.9 per 100,000.

The 10 leading causes of death remained the same from 2016 to 2017: heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, kidney disease, and suicide. Age-adjusted death rates increased significantly for seven of the 10 causes, led by influenza and pneumonia (5.9 percent), unintentional injuries (4.2 percent) and suicide (3.7 percent). Death rates for cancer actually decreased by 2.1 percent, while heart disease and kidney disease rates did not change significantly. ...

Drug overdose death rates increased across all age groups, with the highest rate occurring in adults ages 35-44 (39 per 100,000) and the lowest in adults 65 and older (6.9 per 100,000). ...

CDC Data Show US Life Expectancy Continues to Decline
https://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20181210lifeexpectdrop.html

anne , November 30, 2019 at 07:30 AM
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/free-market-drugs-a-key-part-of-elizabeth-warren-s-transition-to-medicare-for-all

November 29, 2019

Free Market Drugs: A Key Part of Elizabeth Warren's Transition to Medicare for All
By Dean Baker

Earlier this month, Senator Warren put out a set of steps that she would put forward as president as part of a transition to Medicare for All. The items that got the most attention were including everyone over age 50 and under age 18 in Medicare, and providing people of all ages with the option to buy into the program. This buy-in would include large subsidies, and people with incomes of less than 200 percent of the poverty level would be able to enter the Medicare program at no cost.

These measures would be enormous steps toward Medicare for All, bringing tens of millions of people into the program, including most of those (people over age 50) with serious medical issues. It would certainly be more than halfway to a universal Medicare program.

While these measures captured most of the attention given to Warren's transition plan, another part of the plan is probably at least as important. Warren proposed to use the government's authority to compel the licensing of drug patents so that multiple companies can produce a patented drug, in effect allowing them to be sold at generic prices.

The government can do this both because it has general authority to compel licensing of patents (with reasonable compensation) and because it has explicit authority under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act to require licensing of any drug developed in part with government-funded research. The overwhelming majority of drugs required some amount of government-supported research in their development, so there would be few drugs that would be exempted if Warren decided to use this mechanism.

These measures are noteworthy because they can be done on the president's own authority. While the pharmaceutical industry will surely contest in court a president's use of the government's authority to weaken their patent rights, these actions would not require Congressional approval.

The other reason that these steps would be so important is that there is a huge amount of money involved. The United States is projected to spend over $6.6 trillion on prescription drugs over the next decade, more than 2.5 percent of GDP. This comes to almost $20,000 per person over the next decade.

This is an enormous amount of money. We spend more than twice as much per person on drugs as people in other wealthy countries.

This is not an accident. The grant of a patent monopoly allows drug companies to charge as much as they want for drugs that are necessary for people's health or even their life, without having to worry about a competitor undercutting them.

Other countries also grant patent monopolies, but they limit the ability of drug companies to exploit these monopolies with negotiations or price controls. This is why prices in these countries are so much lower than in the United States.

But even these negotiated prices are far above what drug prices would be in a free market. The price of drugs in a free market, without patent monopolies or related protections, will typically be less than 10 percent of the US price and in some cases, less than one percent.

This is because drugs are almost invariably cheap to manufacture and distribute. They are expensive because government-granted patent monopolies make them expensive. We have this perverse situation where the government deliberately makes drugs expensive, then we struggle with how to pay for them.

The rationale for patent monopolies is to give companies an incentive to research and develop drugs. This process is expensive, and if newly developed drugs were sold in a free market, companies would not be able to recover these expenses.

To make up for the loss of research funding supported by patent monopolies, Warren proposes an increase in public funding for research. This would be an important move towards an increased reliance on publicly funded biomedical research.

There are enormous advantages to publicly-funded research over patent monopoly-supported research. First, if the government is funding the research it can require that all results be fully public as soon as possible so that all researchers can quickly benefit from them.

By contrast, under the patent system, drug companies have an incentive to keep results secret. They have no desire to share results that could benefit competitors.

In most other contexts we quite explicitly value the benefits of open research. Science is inherently a collaborative process where researchers build upon the successes and failures of their peers. For some reason, this obvious truth is largely absent from discussions of biomedical research where the merits of patent financing go largely unquestioned.

In addition to allowing research results to be spread more quickly, public funding would also radically reduce the incentive to develop copycat drugs. Under the current system, drug companies will often devote substantial sums to developing drugs that are intended to duplicate the function of drugs already on the market. This allows them to get a share of an innovator drug's patent rents. While there is generally an advantage to having more options to treat a specific condition, most often research dollars would be better spent trying to develop drugs for conditions where no effective treatment currently exists.

Under the patent system, a company that has invested a substantial sum in developing a drug, where a superior alternative already exists, may decide to invest an additional amount to carry it through the final phases of testing and the FDA approval process. From their vantage point, if they hope that a successful marketing effort will allow them to recover its additional investment costs, they would come out ahead.

On the other hand, in a system without patent monopolies, it would be difficult for a company to justify additional spending after it was already clear that the drug it was developing offered few health benefits. This could save a considerable amount of money on what would be largely pointless tests.

Also, as some researchers have noted, the number of potential test subjects (people with specific conditions) is also a limiting factor in research. It would be best if these people were available for testing genuinely innovative drugs rather than ones with little or no incremental value.

Ending patent monopoly pricing would also take away the incentive for drug companies to conceal evidence that their drugs may not be as safe or effective as claimed. Patent monopolies give drug companies an incentive to push their drugs as widely as possible.

That is literally the point of patent monopoly pricing. If a drug company can sell a drug for $30,000 that costs them $300 to manufacture and distribute, then they have a huge incentive to market it as widely as possible. If this means being somewhat misleading about the safety and effectiveness of their drug, that is what many drug companies will do.

The opioid crisis provides a dramatic example of the dangers of this system. Opioid manufacturers would not have had the same incentive to push their drugs, concealing evidence of their addictive properties, if they were not making huge profits on them.

Unfortunately, this is far from the only case where drug companies have not accurately presented their research findings when marketing their drugs. The mismarketing of the arthritis drug Vioxx, which increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes, is another famous example.

We can try to have the FDA police marketing, but where there is so much money at stake in putting out wrong information, we can hardly expect it to be 100 percent successful in overcoming the incentives from the large profits available. There is little reason to think that the FDA will be better able to combat the mismarketing of drugs, than law enforcement agencies have been in stopping the sale of heroin, cocaine, and other illegal drugs. Where you have large potential profits, and willing buyers, government enforcement is at a serious disadvantage.

It is also worth mentioning that the whole story of medical care is radically altered if we end patent monopolies on drugs and medical equipment, an area that also involves trillions of dollars over the next decade. We face tough choices on allocating medical care when these items are selling at patent protected prices, whether under the current system of private insurance or a Medicare for All system.

Doctors and other health care professionals have to decide whether the marginal benefits of a new drug or higher quality scan is worth the additional price. But if the new drug costs roughly the same price as the old drug and the highest quality scan costs just a few hundred dollars (the cost of the electricity and the time of the professionals operating the machine and reading the scan), then there is little reason not to prescribe the best available treatment. Patent monopoly pricing in these areas creates large and needless problems.

In short, Senator Warren's plans on drugs are a really huge deal. How far and how quickly she will be able to get to Medicare for All will depend on what she can get through Congress. But her proposal for prescription drugs is something she would be able to do as president, and it will make an enormous difference in both the cost and the quality of our health care.

anne , November 30, 2019 at 07:33 AM
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/nafta-was-about-redistributing-upward

November 29, 2019

NAFTA Was About Redistributing Upward
By Dean Baker

The Washington Post gave readers the official story about the North American Free Trade Agreement, diverging seriously from reality, in a piece * on the status of negotiations on the new NAFTA. The piece tells readers:

"NAFTA was meant to expand trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico by removing tariffs and other barriers on products as they were shipped between countries. The pact did open up trade, but it also proved disruptive in terms of creating new manufacturing supply chains and relocating businesses and jobs."

This implies that the disruption in terms of shifting jobs to Mexico to take advantage of low wage labor was an accidental outcome. In fact, this was a main point of the deal, as was widely noted by economists at the time. Proponents of the deal argued that it was necessary for U.S. manufacturers to have access to low cost labor in Mexico to remain competitive internationally. No one who followed the debate at the time should have been in the last surprised by the loss of high paying union manufacturing jobs to Mexico, that is exactly the result that NAFTA was designed for.

NAFTA also did nothing to facilitate trade in highly paid professional services, such as those provided by doctors and dentists. This is because doctors and dentists are far more powerful politically than autoworkers.

It is also wrong to say that NAFTA was about expanding trade by removing barriers. A major feature of NAFTA was the requirement that Mexico strengthen and lengthen its patent and copyright protections. These barriers are 180 degrees at odds with expanding trade and removing barriers.

It is noteworthy that the new deal expands these barriers further. The Trump administration likely intends these provisions to be a model for other trade pacts, just as the rules on patents and copyrights were later put into other trade deals.

The new NAFTA will also make it more difficult for the member countries to regulate Facebook and other Internet giants. This is likely to make it easier for Mark Zuckerberg to spread fake news.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/11/29/final-terms-nafta-replacement-could-be-finalized-next-week-top-mexican-negotiator-says/

Paine -> anne... , November 30, 2019 at 09:29 AM
Excellent worker slanted sarcasm

A Dean specialty


We have no public industrial policy
Because we have a private corporate industrial policy that wants full reign


Even toy block models like
ole pro grass liberal brandishes

Warn what heppens to trade good producing wage rates when
Proximate borders open
to potential products
Built with zero rent earning
raw fingered foreign wage slaves

Paine -> Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 09:36 AM
That is
What happens to
Domestic wages rates
and job totals
Not just wages
where wage rates
are sticky down

BUT also production itself
can move south of the border

Recall

Small town and rural new England
has recovered from a protracted
farm depression in the 19th century
And two industrial depressions
in the 20th

Depressions
That more or less wiped out
both sectors

Now we're post industrial
And recreational
Plus synthetic opiates


Paine -> Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 09:39 AM
Higher ed
and uncle Sam funded
medical high Hijinx

Are our salvation sectors
That is
For regular employable folks

Paine -> Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 09:43 AM
England with its
London FIRE monster core
Is
The other post industrial laputa
Like the Manhattan Washington metroplex

Pull the plug on those two

Global value extractors


And the American northeast
and jolly ole England
An both shrivel to second class regions

A just sentence in my mind

Paine -> Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 09:44 AM
Trump has moved to Florida

Big Apple watch out !

RC (Ron) Weakley said in reply to Paine ... , November 30, 2019 at 12:30 PM
"Excellent worker slanted sarcasm...

...Big Apple watch out !"

[Totally digging that comment chain from top to bottom. Made me smile :<) ]

[Dec 07, 2019] The NRS social grades are a system of demographic classification used in the United Kingdom

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to anne... , December 05, 2019 at 08:08 AM

(Wikipedia)

The NRS social grades are a system of demographic classification used in the United Kingdom. They were originally developed by the National Readership Survey (NRS)

Grade Social class ..... Chief income earner's occupation

A upper middle class ... Higher managerial, administrative or professional
B middle class ......... Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1 lower middle class .. Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional

C2 skilled working class Skilled manual workers
D working class ........ Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers
E non working .......... State pensioners, casual and lowest grade workers, unemployed with state benefits only

The grades are often grouped into ABC1 and C2DE; these are taken to equate to middle class and working class, respectively. Only around 2% of the UK population is identified as upper class, and this group is not separated by the classification scheme. ...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , December 05, 2019 at 08:22 AM
Hmmm. Social castes in 'Brave New World',
Aldous Huxley, 1931, British intellectual & author

(Wikipedia)

Alphas and Betas
Alphas and Betas are at the top of the caste system, and perform the more intellectual jobs. Unlike the lower castes, Alphas and Betas are not clones, allowing for more individual personalities. ...

Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons
The lower three castes do more menial and standardized work. ...

Paine -> Fred C. Dobbs... , December 05, 2019 at 10:30 AM
Designed humans

What an inevitable set
of devilish social choices
face us down that inevitably
travelled road

Paine -> anne... , December 05, 2019 at 10:35 AM
Effectively proles ?

The professionals are proles ...Effectively?

A fond analytic positivist
MINO
Marxian in name only
pipe dream

[Dec 07, 2019] Fake goverment statistics as interpreted by Dean baker

Dec 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , December 06, 2019 at 08:34 AM

http://cepr.net/data-bytes/jobs-bytes/jobs-2019-12
December 6, 2019

Economy Adds 266,000 Jobs in November, Unemployment Edges Down to 3.5 Percent
By Dean Baker

The share of women in payroll employment is likely to exceed 50 percent in December.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 266,000 jobs in November. While this figure is inflated by the return of roughly 50,000 striking GM autoworkers, upward revisions to the prior two months' data brought the three-month average to a solid 205,000. The unemployment rate edged down to 3.5 percent, returning to a 50-year low.

The job growth was widely spread across industries. Manufacturing added 54,000 jobs, somewhat more than the number of returning strikers. It appears that the sector may again be on a modest growth path, with the number of jobs up 13,000 from its level three months ago and 76,000 from its year-ago level. Food manufacturing is providing the bulk of these gains, adding 19,300 jobs in the last three months and 25,900 over the last year.

Health care added 45,200 jobs in November after adding just 11,900 in October. Job growth for the two months together falls slightly below the 34,500 average for the last year. Restaurants added 25,300 jobs, roughly its average for the last year. The high-paying professional and technical services sector added 30,600 jobs, after three months of weak growth.

Construction employment remains weak, with the sector adding just 1,000 jobs in November. Job growth has averaged just 5,600 a month since June. Support activities for mining, which has been losing jobs since February, lost another 5,700 jobs in November. Employment in that sector is now down 23,700 (6.6 percent) over the last year. Retail added 2,000 jobs for the month, but employment is still down 31,400 (0.2 percent) over the last year.

In spite of the strong job growth and low unemployment rate, there continues to be no evidence of accelerating wage growth. The average hourly wage increased 3.1 percent over the last year. The annual rate of growth over the last three months (September, October, and November), compared to the prior three months (June, July, August), was just 3 percent.

Women's share of payroll employment edged closer to 50 percent in November, with the figure now standing at 49.992 percent, up from 49.977 percent in October. This should mean that the share will cross 50 percent in December.

The data in the household survey was generally positive. The overall employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) remained at a recovery high of 61.0 percent for the third straight month. The EPOP for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54) also remained at its recovery high of 80.3 percent. The EPOP for prime-age men edged up 0.2 percent to 86.7 percent, a high reached in March, while the EPOP for women slipped 0.1 percentage point to 74.1 percent, which is still a full percentage point above its year-ago level.

The average duration of unemployment spells fell in November, as did the share of the long-term unemployed. There was a modest increase of 0.1 weeks in the median duration.

Perhaps the most disturbing item in this report was the dip in the share of unemployment due to voluntary quits from 14.5 percent to 13.3 percent. This is extraordinarily low, given the 3.5 percent unemployment rate. On the other hand, it is consistent with what we're seeing with wage growth, which remains modest, and with no evidence of acceleration.

Another discouraging item in the household data is the decline in the share of the workforce that chooses to work part-time. This fell by 15,000 in November. For the year average to date, this figure is up by less than 0.5 percent, meaning that it is dropping as a share of total employment. The share of voluntary part-time employment had increased sharply after the Affordable Care Act took effect, the recent decline is likely an indication of the increasing difficulty of getting health care coverage outside of employment.
[Graph]

This should be seen as a mostly positive report. The pace of job growth clearly has slowed some from its 2018 rate, but with the economy presumably approaching full employment, this was inevitable. The major downside is that workers seem to remain insecure about their employment prospects, as evidenced by the low quit rates and the relatively modest pace of wage growth.

anne -> anne... , December 06, 2019 at 08:40 AM
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mRhq

January 4, 2018

United States Employment-Population Ratio for Women, * 2007-2018

* Employment age 25-54


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=mRhs

January 4, 2018

United States Employment-Population Ratio for Men, * 2007-2018

* Employment age 25-54

anne -> anne... , December 06, 2019 at 08:41 AM
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lMlh

January 15, 2018

Real Median Weekly Earnings for men and women, * 2007-2018

* Full time wage and salary workers

(Percent change)


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lMlk

January 15, 2018

Real Median Weekly Earnings for men and women, * 2007-2018

* Full time wage and salary workers

(Indexed to 2007)

likbez -> anne... , December 07, 2019 at 01:39 AM
Anne,

The truth is that good, middle class jobs are very difficult to get. Almost impossible. You are very lucky being a retiree with Vanguard funds chest ;-)

Recent graduates are in a very bad position, with only graduates from Ivy league colleges resume not being instantly tossed into waist basket.

McJobs, Amazon warehouse jobs, Home Depot jobs, low level construction jobs (in $15-$20 per hour range), etc are available for graduates. But that's it. Looks like the USA is looking now like a big amazon warehouse.

People over 50 are actually doomed, if they lost the job, to much lower standard of living. Even if they are professionals.

likbez -> likbez... , December 07, 2019 at 01:43 AM
And please understand that this a period when baby boomer leave workforce. So theoretically this should be a very low unemployment period.

[Dec 04, 2019] Trump and Trade: He s Not All Wrong by Dean Baker

Notable quotes:
"... "Employment in the United States has increased steadily over the last seven years, one of the longest periods of economic growth in American history. There are about 10 million more working Americans today than when President Obama took office. ..."
"... "David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimated in a famous paper that increased trade with China did eliminate roughly one million factory jobs in the United States between 2000 and 2007. However, an important implication of his findings is that such job losses largely ended almost a decade ago. ..."
"... It is also worth noting that even though our trade deficit has declined from its 2006 peak (the non-oil deficit has recently been rising again), workers are constantly being displaced by imports. The Bureau of Labor Statistic reports there have been an average of 110,000 layoffs or discharges a month in manufacturing thus far this year. If just a quarter of these are trade-related, it would imply that more than 300,000 workers a year are losing their jobs due to trade. ..."
"... The second point is the wage effect, which can go beyond the direct impact of job loss. The oil market can give us a useful way of thinking about this issue. Suppose that Saudi Arabia or some other major producer ramps up its oil production by 1 million barrels of oil a day. This will put downward pressure on world prices, which will have the effect of lowering prices in the United States as well. This could mean, for example, that instead of getting $50 for a barrel of oil, producers in North Dakota will only get $40 a barrel. This will mean less money for workers and companies in the oil industry. In the case of workers, it will mean fewer jobs and lower pay. ..."
"... This can happen even if there is very little direct impact of trade. The increased supply of Saudi oil may result in some modest reduction in U.S. exports of oil, but the impact on price will be much larger. The analogous story with trade in manufactured goods is that the potential to import low cost goods from Mexico, China, or other countries can have the effect of lowering wages in the United States, even if the goods are not actually imported. ..."
"... Finally, the balance of trade will have an impact on the overall level of employment in the economy when the economy is below its full employment level of output. Until the Great Recession, most economists did not think that trade could affect the overall level of employment, but only the composition. This meant that trade could cause us to lose manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, but these job losses would be offset by gains in Silicon Valley and other tech centers. This could still mean bad news for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs, but the net effect for the country as a whole would still be positive. ..."
"... The Great Recession changed this view, as many economists came to believe that the United States is facing a period of secular stagnation: a sustained period in which lack of demand in the economy constrains growth and employment. In this context, the trade deficit is a major cause of the lack of demand since it is spending that is creating demand in other countries rather than the United States. If we could reduce the annual trade deficit by $100 billion then as a first approximation it will have the same impact on the economy as a stimulus of $100 billion. ..."
"... There is no generally accepted explanation as to why so many prime age workers would suddenly decide they didn't feel like working, but one often invoked candidate is the loss of manufacturing jobs. The argument in this story is that the manufacturing sector provided relatively good paying jobs for people without college degrees. With so many of these jobs now gone, these workers can't find jobs. If this argument is true, then it means that trade has cost the country a large number of jobs even if the economy is back at full employment. ..."
Oct 11, 2016 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne : October 11, 2016 at 06:46 AM , October 11, 2016 at 06:46 AM

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/trump-and-trade-he-s-not-all-wrong

October 11, 2016

Trump and Trade: He's Not All Wrong

Given his history of promoting racism, xenophobia, sexism and his recently exposed boasts about sexual assaults, not many people want to be associated with Donald Trump. However that doesn't mean everything that comes out of his mouth is wrong.

In the debate on Sunday Donald Trump made a comment to the effect that because of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade deals, "we lost our jobs." The New York Times was quick to say * this was wrong.

"We didn't.

"Employment in the United States has increased steadily over the last seven years, one of the longest periods of economic growth in American history. There are about 10 million more working Americans today than when President Obama took office.

"David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., estimated in a famous paper that increased trade with China did eliminate roughly one million factory jobs in the United States between 2000 and 2007. However, an important implication of his findings is that such job losses largely ended almost a decade ago.

"And there's no evidence the North American Free Trade Agreement caused similar job losses.

"The Congressional Research Service concluded in 2015 that the 'net overall effect of Nafta on the U.S. economy appears to have been relatively modest.' "

There are a few things to sort out here. First, the basic point in the first paragraph is absolutely true, although it's not clear that it's relevant to the trade debate. The United States economy typically grows and adds jobs, around 1.6 million a year for the last quarter century. So any claim that trade has kept the U.S. from creating jobs is absurd on its face. The actual issue is the rate of job creation and the quality of the jobs.

Here there are three issues to consider.

1) The direct job loss – the jobs that were displaced due to imports substituting for domestically produced goods and services;

2) The wage effects – the downward pressure on the wages of workers that retain their jobs that can result from job loss and also the threat of job loss;

3) The impact of a trade deficit on the level of demand in the economy.

Taking these in turn we now have some pretty solid evidence on some of the job loss attributable to trade. David Autor's work ** found that imports from China cost the economy more than 2 million jobs in the years from 2000-2007.

"Estimates of the net impact of aggregate demand and reallocation effects imply that import growth from China between 1999 and 2011 led to an employment reduction of 2.4 million workers" (page 29).

These are workers who are directly displaced by import competition. In addition, as the article goes on to note, there were more workers who likely lost their jobs to the multiplier effect in the local economies most directly affected by imports.

The impact of trade with China was more dramatic than trade with Mexico and other countries because of the huge growth in imports over a short period of time. However, even if the impact from trade with other countries was smaller, it still would have a substantial effect on the communities affected.

It is also worth noting that even though our trade deficit has declined from its 2006 peak (the non-oil deficit has recently been rising again), workers are constantly being displaced by imports. The Bureau of Labor Statistic reports there have been an average of 110,000 layoffs or discharges a month in manufacturing thus far this year. If just a quarter of these are trade-related, it would imply that more than 300,000 workers a year are losing their jobs due to trade.

Of course people lose jobs for other reasons also, like increased productivity. So the fact there is job loss associated with trade doesn't make it bad, but it is not wrong to see this as a serious problem.

The second point is the wage effect, which can go beyond the direct impact of job loss. The oil market can give us a useful way of thinking about this issue. Suppose that Saudi Arabia or some other major producer ramps up its oil production by 1 million barrels of oil a day. This will put downward pressure on world prices, which will have the effect of lowering prices in the United States as well. This could mean, for example, that instead of getting $50 for a barrel of oil, producers in North Dakota will only get $40 a barrel. This will mean less money for workers and companies in the oil industry. In the case of workers, it will mean fewer jobs and lower pay.

This can happen even if there is very little direct impact of trade. The increased supply of Saudi oil may result in some modest reduction in U.S. exports of oil, but the impact on price will be much larger. The analogous story with trade in manufactured goods is that the potential to import low cost goods from Mexico, China, or other countries can have the effect of lowering wages in the United States, even if the goods are not actually imported.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, a professor of industrial relations at Cornell, documented one way in which the potential to import can have the effect of lowering wages. She found *** that employers regularly used the threat of moving operations to Mexico as a way to thwart unionization drives. While most workers are not typically involved in unionization drives, it is easy to imagine this dynamic playing out in other contexts where employers use the real or imagined threat from import competition as a reason for holding down wages. The implication is the impact of trade on wages is likely to be even larger than the direct effect of the goods actually brought into the country.

Finally, the balance of trade will have an impact on the overall level of employment in the economy when the economy is below its full employment level of output. Until the Great Recession, most economists did not think that trade could affect the overall level of employment, but only the composition. This meant that trade could cause us to lose manufacturing jobs in the Midwest, but these job losses would be offset by gains in Silicon Valley and other tech centers. This could still mean bad news for the manufacturing workers who lost their jobs, but the net effect for the country as a whole would still be positive.

The Great Recession changed this view, as many economists came to believe that the United States is facing a period of secular stagnation: a sustained period in which lack of demand in the economy constrains growth and employment. In this context, the trade deficit is a major cause of the lack of demand since it is spending that is creating demand in other countries rather than the United States. If we could reduce the annual trade deficit by $100 billion then as a first approximation it will have the same impact on the economy as a stimulus of $100 billion.

From this perspective, the trade deficit is a major source of job loss. Our current trade deficit of $500 billion a year (@2.8 percent of GDP) is a major drag on demand and employment. For this reason, a politician would be absolutely right to cite trade as a big factor in the weakness of the labor market.

It is worth noting that many economists (including many at the Federal Reserve Board) now believe that the economy is close to its full employment level of output, in which case trade is not now a net cause of job loss even if it had been earlier in the recovery. There are two points to be made on this view.

First, there are many prominent economists, such as Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, who argue that the economy is still well below its full employment level of output. So this is at least a debatable position.

Second, if we accept that the economy is near full employment it implies that close to 2 million prime age workers (ages 25-54) have permanently left the labor market compared to 2007 levels of labor force participation. (The gap is close to 4 million if we use 2000 as our comparison year.)

There is no generally accepted explanation as to why so many prime age workers would suddenly decide they didn't feel like working, but one often invoked candidate is the loss of manufacturing jobs. The argument in this story is that the manufacturing sector provided relatively good paying jobs for people without college degrees. With so many of these jobs now gone, these workers can't find jobs. If this argument is true, then it means that trade has cost the country a large number of jobs even if the economy is back at full employment.

In short, there are good reasons for a politician to complain about trade as a major source of our economic problems. There is much research and economic theory that supports this position.

* http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/09/us/elections/fact-check-debate.html#/factcheck-25

** http://www.ddorn.net/papers/Autor-Dorn-Hanson-ChinaShock.pdf

*** http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=cbpubs

-- Dean Baker

[Dec 04, 2019] Perfect Storm Trump Admin To Cut 750,000 From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession

First they cut unemployment benefits. Now they are cutting food stamps. Great...
Dec 04, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

In a bid to end the massive welfare state, the Trump administration is expected to announce new measures Wednesday that would end food stamp benefits for nearly 750,000 low-income folks. The new rules will make it difficult for "states to gain waivers from a requirement that beneficiaries work or participate in a vocational training program," according to Bloomberg sources.

Republicans have long attempted to abolish the welfare state, claiming that the redistribution of wealth for poor people keeps them in a state of perpetual poverty. They also claim the welfare state is a system of command and control and has been used by Democrats for decades as a political weapon against conservatives, hence why most inner cities vote Democrat.

House Republicans tried to cut parts of the federal food assistance program last year, but it was quickly rejected in the Senate.

The new requirements by the Trump administration would only target "able-bodied" recipients who aren't caring for children under six.

Sources said the measure would be one of three enacted by the Trump administration to wind down the massive federal food assistance program.

The measures are expected to boot nearly 3.7 million recipients from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Though it comes at a time when employment is in a downturn, manufacturing has stumbled into a recession , and the US economy could be entering a mild recession in the year ahead. As to why President Trump wants hundreds of thousands of low-income folks off SNAP ahead of an election year while the economy is rapidly decelerating could be an administrative error that may lead to social instabilities in specific regions that will be affected the hardest. Then again, no turmoil could come out of it, and it's hailed as a success during the election year.

The Department of Agriculture estimates that the new measures could save the agency $1.1 billion in year one, and $7.9 billion by year five.

Nearly 36.4 million Americans in the "greatest economy ever" are on food stamps. At least half of all Americans have low-wage jobs, barely enough to cover living expenses, nevertheless, service their credit cards with record-high interest rates . The economy as a whole is undergoing profound structural changes with automation and artificial intelligence. Tens of millions of jobs will be lost by 2030. It's likely the collision of these forces means the welfare state is going nowhere and will only grow in size when the next recession strikes.

Cutting food stamps for low-income folks is the right move into creating a more leaner government, but there are severe social implications that could be triggered if the new measures are passed.

And while President Trump wants to slash the welfare state for poor people, his supply-side policies and bailouts of corporate America have been record-setting in some respects.

Actions by the administration clearly show that corporate welfare for Wall Street elites is more important than welfare for low-income folks. Perfect Storm: Trump Admin To Cut 750,000 From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession


naps8906 , 23 seconds ago link

this is one of the most shameful acts for any president, especially a billionaire. If he wants to save a billion/year, cut it from military. Or increase staff at SNAP to check for fraud, but this is really shameful. I think it would've been better to raise tariff on China and use that money to increase SNAP not decrease it

cheka , 1 minute ago link

i have a better way. over BMI = no taxpayer funded food handouts

taking money from the working class, at the point of a gun....to give free food to fat *****.....clown world

Wild Bill Steamcock , 4 minutes ago link

What's the need in cutting foodstamps? You can take every able-bodied recipient and have them work a reasonable number of hours per week in a fair exchange. Plenty of work to be had and you could do it WPA style where those of certain skills could apply them.

And if you want to cut welfare, START WITH CORPORATE WELFARE

Dr Anon , 4 minutes ago link

This is a positive development in terms of the nuclear family. Women can't just abscond with the kids and her husband's alimony if she knows she will have to actually get a job to pay for her own food. I'm sick of paying taxes to support whore women and their bastard children.

Zeusky Babarusky , 6 minutes ago link

"The Department of Agriculture estimates that the new measures could save the agency $1.1 billion in year one, and $7.9 billion by year five."

Today's Repo operation by the Fed is $70.1 Billion. The $1.1 Billion in annual savings due to this cut is about 1.5% of what the Fed pumped into the Repo market just today. I'm all for cutting out the fraud. If you can work, then you should work. Don't work? Don't eat! But our economy is a Service Sector for the most part now, and the wages suck for a big part in the Service Sector. Wages overall have been nearly flat for about 30 years. How about we cut the welfare **** to the banks, Wall Street? That would save trillions not just billions. Typical DC. Fix problems while ******* over the little people, and continuing corporate welfare all the while. This **** so needs to burn up!

same2u , 7 minutes ago link

In the meantime, the Fed keeps on giving to the billionaires and banksters...

Stock market is the food stamp program for the super rich...

Omega_Man , 6 minutes ago link

great... outsource manufacturing, sign new trade deals to off shore more jobs, ramp up the stock market for the rich, waste trillions on destabilizing other nations, give israel all they want, print money to infinity, ask for zero interest rate.. and a billion per year to feed poor people is too much.. Trump is in touch with the little guy

Trump will lose 2020... give the 750,000 guns and ammo and some food and water... and a map to DC... Soros can provide the buses...

Rusticus2.0 , 7 minutes ago link

In a bid to end the massive welfare state, the Trump administration is expected to announce new measures Wednesday that would end food stamp benefits for nearly 750,000 low-income folks

and yet Trump is crying for negative interest rates so the 0.1% can continue getting the welfare they deserve ?

Just Take It All , 7 minutes ago link

Do lampposts dream of central bankers?

Fishthatlived , 10 minutes ago link

A Bloomberg story? Isn't that guy running for President? What a coincidence.

NoDebt , 4 minutes ago link

The new rules will make it difficult for "states to gain waivers from a requirement that beneficiaries work or participate in a vocational training program," according to Bloomberg sources.

And... those are actually the OLD rules, which are still on the books, but which Obama waived by EO. I'm glad 750,00 are being cut from the roles.

NoDebt , 1 minute ago link

Trump Admin To Cut 750,000 From Food Stamps Ahead Of Recession

OK, so I have to ask: What recession? Well, the coming one, obviously! So let's logic this out. You wouldn't cut food stamps IN a recession (political suicide), so what's your alternative? You're either in a recession or you're on your way to the next one which will happen eventually, right? So, when would you be able to cut food stamps? I guess never by that logic.

RiskyBidness , 7 minutes ago link

If you like your foodstamps .You can't keep your foodstamps

[Dec 04, 2019] Your Uber Driver Is 'Retired' You Shouldn't Be Surprised by Paula Span

In other words older people are pushed to the boom of the ladder. To thankless jobs like Uber, and janitorial type of jobs.
Oct 25, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

Despite spending 40 to 60 hours a week picking up riders in his 2015 Subaru Forester, Mr. Ellenbogen is barely surviving financially. He had to give up his apartment and move into his mother's condo in Verona, N.J. He relies on Medicaid for health care.

"It's something I'm accepting because I'm in need of money," he said of his Lyft gig. "I'm capable of better things, but this is what's available to me."

Economists debate how to define this kind of employment, often categorized as "nontraditional jobs" or "alternative work arrangements," and how to calculate the proportion of the older work force engaged in it.

Popularly seen as the province of the young, it now provides work for a growing number of people in their 50s, 60s and beyond.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics includes independent contractors (who may be self-employed but well compensated) and estimates that 11.4 percent of those aged 50 to 62 have nontraditional jobs. The Government Accountability Office, using an even broader definition including part-timers, says the figure is 31.2 percent.

Among workers over 62, economists at The New School's Retirement Equity Lab have found that 9 percent were in "on-call, temp, contract or gig jobs" in 2015; the researchers believe the percentage has grown since then .

In a just-published report, the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College put the number of nontraditional job holders at about 20 percent of 50- to 62-year-old workers , using data from the national Health and Retirement Study.

Their study defines nontraditional jobs as those that provide no health insurance or retirement benefits. "They're probably low-paid," said Alicia Munnell, director of the center. "Some have erratic schedules."

... ... ...

The majority of those in nontraditional jobs at ages 50 to 62 rely on them for most of their employment, and their retirement income at 62 is 26 percent lower than that of employees holding traditional jobs. (Nontraditional jobholders have somewhat higher rates of depression, as well.)

... ... ...

Nontraditional jobs include food service and retail, as well as gig jobs; among the fastest growing categories are janitorial work, and personal care and health aide positions. "They're not easy on older bodies," Dr. Ghilarducci pointed out. "They require a lot of physical stamina."

... ... ...

Mr. Ellenbogen, for instance, has a master's degree in social psychology from the University of Vermont. After getting laid off from sales positions and finding a return to business coaching unprofitable, he became a commission-only sales rep for Home Depot, with no base salary or benefits.

The company let him go, he said, when retina surgery left him unable to drive for two months. After he recovered, the only work he could find was with Lyft, where about a quarter of drivers are over 50, the company reported last year.

Mr. Ellenbogen has searched for jobs on LinkedIn, on Indeed, in local newspapers. The New Start Career Network at Rutgers University has provided free weekly sessions with a coach.

Nothing has materialized, so Mr. Ellenbogen keeps driving, trying to delay claiming Social Security to maximize his benefits.

[Dec 01, 2019] Federal Prosecutors Initiate Criminal Probe of Six Opioid Manufacturers and Distributors

Fetanil smuggling from China also played an important role
Dec 01, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Federal Prosecutors Launch Criminal Probe of Opioid Makers, Distributors :

The investigation, if it results in criminal charges, could become the largest prosecution yet of drug companies alleged to have contributed to the opioid epidemic, escalating the legal troubles of businesses that already face complex, multibillion-dollar civil litigation in courts across the country. Prosecutors are examining whether the companies violated the federal Controlled Substances Act, a statute that federal prosecutors have begun using against opioid makers and distributors this year.

By using statutes typically used to target drug dealers, prosecutors are finally seeing these companies for what they are: drug pushers. This approach is unusual but not unprecedented, according to the Journal:

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors filed major criminal cases in Manhattan and Ohio that, for the first time, employed criminal statutes that are more commonly applied to drug dealers, legal experts say.

When prosecutors from the Southern District of New York announced criminal charges against a pharmaceutical distributor and two executives earlier this year, the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office said the case was unusual.

"This prosecution is the first of its kind," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in April, "executives of a pharmaceutical distributor and the distributor itself have been charged with drug trafficking."

CNBC notes in Federal prosecutors open criminal probe of opioid makers and distributors, report says :

The investigation marks a significant broadening of the federal government's focus on pinpointing which parties contributed to the opioid crisis.

The six companies to receive subpoenas from the US attorney's office for the eastern district of New York are: AmerisourceBergen Corp., Amneal Pharmaceuticals Inc., Johnson & Johnson, Mallinckrodt, McKesson Corp. and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., as reported by the WSJ, citing regulatory filings.

This investigation is in its early stages; whether or not other companies have thus far also received subpoenas is not apparent. As federal prosecutors proceed, they will likely widen their probe, drawing in more companies and individuals.

Separately, most states, as well as roughly 2,600 city, county, and municipal governments have sued major players throughout the opioids supply chain. Despite intense pressure on parties to settle, these negotiations have stalled and numerous lawsuits remain pending (see Four Companies Settle Just Before Bellwether Opioids Trial Was to Begin Today in Ohio .)

One manufacturer, Purdue Pharma has already filed for bankruptcy (see Purdue Files for Bankruptcy, Agrees to Settle Some Pending Opioids Litigation: Sacklers on Hook for Billions? ).

As yesterday's WSJ further reports:

Purdue separately faces civil and criminal probes from the U.S. attorneys offices in New Jersey, Vermont and Connecticut and U.S. Justice Department in Washington and has said that a proposed plan to turn over its operations to creditors is contingent on resolving the federal investigations .

Opioids have made it onto Trump's personal radar screen. AP reports in Trump donates 3rd-quarter salary to help fight opioid crisis:

President Donald Trump is donating his third-quarter salary to help tackle the nation's opioid epidemic.

A White House official says Trump has given the $100,000 he would be paid in the quarter to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, which oversees federal public health offices and programs, including the surgeon general's office.

The White House says the funds are being earmarked "to continue the ongoing fight against the opioid crisis."

Jerri- Lynn here. Well. Thanks for your concern!!

More from AP:

Trump has made tackling the misuse of opioids an administration priority. More than 70,000 Americans died in 2017 from drug overdoses, the bulk of them involving opioids.

Trump is required to be paid, but he has pledged to donate his salary while in office to worthy causes. Trump donated his second-quarter salary to the surgeon general's office.

This I didn't know.

Deaths of Despair

In separate news today, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study affirming that American life expectancy continues to decline, Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the United States, 1959-2017 .

The US trend is in contrast to the state of play in other advanced countries; US life expectancy began to lose pace in the 1980s, according to the JAMA study, and by 1998, had declined to a level below the OECD average. Since 2014, US life expectancy rates have declined for three consecutive years.

Naked Capitalism has covered the rise in "deaths of despair" extensively: the decline in US life expectancy, especially for poorer and less educated Americans, see these posts drawn from numerous examples: Stunning" Rise in Death Rate, Pain Levels for Middle-Aged, Less Educated Whites) ; Credentialism and Corruption: The Opioid Epidemic and "the Looting Professional Class" ; US Life Expectancy Declines in 2015: Unintentional Injuries Rise ; and American Life Expectancy Continues to Fall: Rise in Suicides, Overdose Deaths the Big Culprit .

The latest JAMA figures show that the decline extends throughout the country, as the New York Times reports in It's Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy :

But a new analysis of more than a half-century of federal mortality data, published on Tuesday in JAMA , found that the increased death rates among people in midlife extended to all racial and ethnic groups, and to suburbs and cities. And while suicides, drug overdoses and alcoholism were the main causes, other medical conditions, including heart disease, strokes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, also contributed, the authors reported.

From the JAMA study's abstract:

Findings Between 1959 and 2016, US life expectancy increased from 69.9 years to 78.9 years but declined for 3 consecutive years after 2014. The recent decrease in US life expectancy culminated a period of increasing cause-specific mortality among adults aged 25 to 64 years that began in the 1990s, ultimately producing an increase in all-cause mortality that began in 2010. During 2010-2017, midlife all-cause mortality rates increased from 328.5 deaths/100 000 to 348.2 deaths/100 000. By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases. The largest relative increases in midlife mortality rates occurred in New England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%) and the Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%). The increase in midlife mortality during 2010-2017 was associated with an estimated 33 307 excess US deaths, 32.8% of which occurred in 4 Ohio Valley states.

This trend has occurred despite the US spending the highest per capita on health of any country in the world – a point made in a JAMA editorial published simultaneously with the study, Confronting the Rise and Fall of US Life Expectancy.

Now, no one would dispute that the US health care system is a mess. From the NYT:

"The whole country is at a health disadvantage compared to other wealthy nations," the study's lead author, Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, said. "We are losing people in the most productive period of their lives. Children are losing parents. Employers have a sicker work force."

The study makes for depressing reading; you can download the full version for free by registering at the above link.

If you lack time for that, some summary from the NYT:

"Mortality has improved year to year over the course of the 20th century," said Dr. Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania. "The 21st century is a major exception. Since 2010 there's been no improvement in mortality among working-aged people."

Death rates are actually improving among children and older Americans, Dr. Woolf noted, perhaps because they may have more reliable health care -- Medicaid for many children and Medicare for older people. Jerri-Lynn here: my emphasis.

But the problem isn't wholly related to the dysfunctional US health care system. Extreme inequality doesn't just harm the poorest and weakest among us. Over to the NYT:

"The fact that it's so expansive and involves so many causes of death -- it's saying that there's something broader going on in our country," said Ellen R. Meara, a professor of health policy at Dartmouth College. "This no longer limited to middle-aged whites."

The states with the greatest relative increases in death rates among young and middle-aged adults were New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, West Virginia and Ohio.

Dr. Woolf said one of the findings showed that the excess deaths were highly concentrated geographically, with fully a third of them in just four states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana.

"What's not lost on us is what is going on in those states," he said. "The history of when this health trend started happens to coincide with when these economic shifts began -- the loss of manufacturing jobs and closure of steel mills and auto plants."

What do the billionaires and their toadies have to say to that?

And, to return to where I began, note that Ohio is ground zero for the opioids epidemic.


Matthew G. Saroff , November 27, 2019 at 1:57 pm

When are we going to start seeing asset forfeiture of the companies and the executives?

If a couple of senior execs end up having to wash dishes for a living, and having to rely on public defenders, and maybe there will be deterrence.

Also, maybe it will prompt a reevaluation of the asset forfeiture laws.

Ford Prefect , November 27, 2019 at 2:07 pm

A former Obama official was interviewed today about these investigations. When asked point-black on whether or not pharma executives should go to jail on these charges, there was tremendous hemming and hawing about the "goal is to prevent this from happening again in the future" which is the same stance regarding financial executives after the GFC. https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/783223378/feds-may-pursue-criminal-charges-against-opioid-makers

So the drug laws incarcerate millions of poor and minority people for minor drug possession offences but effectively running a drug cartel inside US corporations would not be worth jailing somebody for? No wonder people are simply ready to toss the entire system.

Annieb , November 27, 2019 at 5:28 pm

Here's an excellent article about fentanyl smuggling from China. The opioid crisis is not just about US companies. The larger question is why our government largely ignored fentanyl smuggling for years during the Obama administration despite warnings from DEA.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-china-fentanyl-20181019-story.html

albrt , November 28, 2019 at 2:59 am

"The larger question is why our government largely ignored fentanyl smuggling for years during the Obama administration"

Umm, because Barack Obama was one of the worst criminal accessories in the entire history of the world across every economic sector?

Do I win a prize for answering that question correctly?

David , November 27, 2019 at 2:42 pm

Terrific read. Thank you.

Pain patients who function quite well with medication are caught between the more strident of the War on Drugs Crusaders and the addicts who use opioids recreationally, causing most to think of anyone on pain medication as drug abusers. Pain patients using medication as prescribed are not drug abusers and a safe harbor needs to be created to protect this vulnerable population. They are genuinely in fear and despair has set in. They are consciously and openly stating an intent to commit suicide. We should not forget them as this war continues. They saw what Duarte promoted and understand they are powerless in a fight where their lives are at stake.

Cutting off the supply through criminal prosecutions of manufacturers will harm the most vulnerable. Perhaps that is the plan.

Synoia , November 27, 2019 at 3:12 pm

The issue appears to be "prescription" and "control"

You intimate the drugs will be removed from the market, as opposed to being subject to proper and necessary stringent controls.

The issue at hand with the manufacturers is: Have the Manufacturers caused bypass on controls. As I understand it, the drugs are not banned at this point in time.

The manufacturers appear to be investigated for promoting mis-prescription of their products.

Annieb , November 27, 2019 at 5:09 pm

Most deaths are caused by fentanyl overdose, and most fentanyl is imported from China through Mexico. The manufacturers are Chinese companies.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/09/04/757089868/fentanyl-as-a-dark-web-profit-center-from-chinese-labs-to-u-s-streets

The Obama administration didn't take serious action. Why?

https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/health/ct-hlth-obama-fentanyl-20190313-story.html

David , November 27, 2019 at 5:26 pm

There have been unintended consequences from the war on drugs. To your point, we have seen providers, insurers, and pharmacies set their own limits to avoid liability. Going after the risk-averse pharmaceutical manufacturers will force them to decide whether the profit is worth the risk of financial ruin and possible prison. And legitimate patients are caught in the middle.

Anecdotally, we have this result that impacts the most vulnerable – not the powerful, who will always get their drugs, whether they need them or not:

The misconception that opioid prescriptions lead to opiate addiction has been widespread, and overarching state and federal measures to combat the opioid overdose crisis are reaching a fever pitch. There's the Oregon Health Authority's (OHA) now-tabled proposal to force-taper all Medicaid patients on opioids for certain chronic pain conditions; Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Gardner's controversial proposal to limit all acute pain medication prescriptions to a seven day fill, which sparked massive pushback from the chronic pain and disability communities; and Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who favors a three-day fill limit. In contrast, the American Medical Association (AMA) has come out against arbitrary pill limits, as has a group called Health Professionals for Patients in Pain (HP3).

Very few opioid addictions begin with a patient who has a doctor's prescription: Up to 80 percent of people with an opioid addiction illegally obtained pills from another source like a friend or relative first. While the opioid overdose epidemic from illegal heroin and fentanyl is a serious problem, federal and state actions to decrease the number of opioid prescriptions and/or pills in circulation overall will have -- and are already having -- a hugely negative impact on chronic pain patients who take opioid medications. While the number of pain prescriptions has declined since 2010, the number of deaths due to overdoses involving heroin and synthetic fentanyl has increased.

According to Thomas Kline, MD, a physician in North Carolina who maintains a list of chronic pain patients who committed suicide after being forced off of their medications, the anti-opioid hysteria that has taken root in the medical field and the federal government has resulted in "people [being] killed."

https://talkpoverty.org/2019/05/17/chronic-pain-opioid-crisis

Protect the vulnerable in this clash.

notabanktoadie , November 28, 2019 at 2:44 am

+100

And I'm reminded of this besides Proverbs 31:6-9, etc.

even the compassion of the wicked is cruel. Proverbs 12:10

CoryP , November 28, 2019 at 6:15 am

"Very few opioid addictions begin with a patient who has a doctor's prescription".

This is very similar to the original marketing line of OxyContin, and I have a hard time believing it. But it's only a gut feeling along with vague memories of educational materials I've seen before but would have to look up.

I think there are pretty forceful (though not equally funded) agendas on both sides of the issue that would want to down- or over-play the impact of prescribed opioids.

Either way, I don't think it's necessary to use that quote in order to make the case that people in pain still deserve access to these drugs.

Yves Smith , November 28, 2019 at 6:38 am

Other sources flatly contradict this claim. This is from an article by a professor of medicine:

According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four in five new heroin users started out by misusing prescription painkillers, and 94 percent of opioid-addicted patients said that they switched to heroin because prescription opioids were more expensive and harder to obtain.

https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/oxycontin-how-purdue-pharma-helped-spark-opioid-epidemic/

And:

Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative, at Brandeis University, has worked with hundreds of patients addicted to opioids. He told me that, though many fatal overdoses have resulted from opioids other than OxyContin, the crisis was initially precipitated by a shift in the culture of prescribing -- a shift carefully engineered by Purdue. "If you look at the prescribing trends for all the different opioids, it's in 1996 that prescribing really takes off," Kolodny said. "It's not a coincidence. That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks." When I asked Kolodny how much of the blame Purdue bears for the current public-health crisis, he responded, "The lion's share."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain

CoryP , November 28, 2019 at 12:11 pm

Thanks. I knew I wasn't going crazy but don't always have references at hand.

CoryP , November 28, 2019 at 3:49 am

I work as a pharmacist in northern Ontario, where the opioid problem is quite acute. To be fair, this region had some insane narcotic prescribing habits -- dose/increases that seemed unreasonably high (since well before I started practicing 10 years ago).

Now we're seeing a combination of new grad physicians seemingly afraid to prescribe opioids, and older doctors either under investigation by their regulatory body, or retiring as fast as they can to avoid getting nailed.

Their patients in the (sadly frequent) worst case, suddenly find themselves without a doctor in an area which already has a shortage. Or they're put through a forced rapid taper off these meds which seems only a bit less stressful.

Chronic pain patients can definitely benefit from tapering their dose, as opioid-induced hyperalgesia is definitely a thing, and overdose risk increases with dose even taking into consideration tolerance.

A lot of patients with pain can benefit from methadone or Suboxone, which is often the only option remaining as addiction treatment centres are everywhere. But even if those drugs work for them there's still a lot of inconvenience and stigma attached to them.

I wish the attitude was more accomodating to the patients who have been on these huge doses for years. (usually in their 50s or 60s). Like, say to doctors "try not to get anybody else hooked on opiates, but be gentle with the patients that already are".

But it seems like the approach taken is mostly based on avoidance of liability. And the profits of addictions chains that provide dubiously valuable treatment.

I guess there's no perfect solution. It's a shitshow up here.

eg , November 28, 2019 at 4:16 am

Thank you for doing what you can -- it must be very stressful. I wouldn't blame those who fled such responsibility.

notabanktoadie , November 28, 2019 at 4:44 am

There's no perfect solution but certainly an ethical finance system is part of an optimum solution.

CoryP , November 28, 2019 at 5:32 am

Yeah, off the top of my head the biggest financial issues that could be helped by a government that gave crap would be:
1) increase the welfare/disability payments which have lost ground to inflation since the 90s I believe
2) do something for the awful living conditions and opportunities for our first nations reserves, which are (were?) the biggest centres of despair and addiction
3) free pharmacare would help, though our most vulnerable do already have coverage
4) actually fund mental health programs/psychotherapy

The vaunted Canadian healthcare system doesn't cover much that doesn't happen in a doctor's office or hospital. It's it's not heading in the right direction.

notabanktoadie , November 28, 2019 at 6:56 am

Not to discount generous welfare for the needy by any means but those things don't address the fundamental problem which is economic injustice.

CoryP , November 28, 2019 at 12:13 pm

It occurs to me now you might have meant something entirely different by 'finance system' but I was on a tangent.

notabanktoadie , November 28, 2019 at 5:31 pm

I did; the need for extensive welfare is, by itself, an indication of an unjust economic system.

The indicators are piling up, btw. The latest I've heard is the US birth rate is below replacement of the population.

notabanktoadie , November 28, 2019 at 12:52 am

What do the billionaires and their toadies have to say to that? Jerri-Lynn Scofield

Certainly toadies, intentional or otherwise, must include those who support unethical finance – the means by which so many jobs were outsourced in the first place.

Our finance system was designed or evolved to only create wealth – not to share it justly – and we are reaping the bitter fruit of that shortsightedness.

William Beyer , November 28, 2019 at 7:22 am

Can't wait to see how this will all be blamed on the Russians

Robpost , November 28, 2019 at 10:12 am

Better late than never, I suppose. But, to look only to preventing such things from recurring in the future is to give the current crop of miscreants a pass, as was done with torturing and financial crimes since the turn of the century.

JimTan , November 28, 2019 at 12:38 pm

A criminal probe is definitely appropriate. It's already been established that drug companies and their distributors have flooded the country with 76 billion opioid pills between 2006 through 2012. 76 billion pills amounts to approximately 33 opiate pills per year for every man woman and child in the United States during the 7 year time period covered in this article. And that's only oxycodone and hydrocodone – it doesn't include the various types of fentanyl.

That can't be a mistake.

Gordon , November 29, 2019 at 11:35 am

There is good evidence that providing treatment for the addicted rather than criminalising them is the way to go with a big fringe benefits in terms of less crime etc for the rest of the community, for example the work of Dr John Marks in Widness, England.

I haven't read the book mentioned but the Liverpool Echo tells of his success – until, that is, the US leaned on the UK to stop him.

Can anyone shed any light on why the US would do that?

Myron , November 30, 2019 at 7:55 pm

Methadone destroys your bones. They become brittle and crumble. Suboxone does very little for pain relief. Suboxone only blocks the craving for opioids. It is obvious most of you posters have little contact with addicts and rely on articles published by individuals who use govt' info to BS the population.

WHY have there not been at least Criminal Manslaughter charges filed against some of the actors in the dreadful life drama. The doctors, The manufacturers, the distributors. If I give scrip opioids to another and thy die from taking them , I will be charged with a Homicide.

[Dec 01, 2019] A Wicked Cocktail Of Corporate Greed, Social Media, Opioids Is Slashing US Life Expectancy Rates

Notable quotes:
"... Why is a guy much over 50 going to work for? **** that. 55 is pushing it for any sort of manual labor. ..."
"... Even top US citizen STEM grads can't find jobs. Or get interviews. That's pretty much all you need to know about how good the economy is. ..."
Dec 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

A Wicked Cocktail Of Corporate Greed, Social Media, & Opioids Is Slashing US Life Expectancy Rates by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/01/2019 - 22:30 0 SHARES

Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Following decades of increased life expectancy rates, Americans have been dying earlier for three consecutive years since 2014, turning the elusive quest for the 'American Dream' into a real-life nightmare for many. Corporate America must accept some portion of the blame for the looming disaster.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/N33X92zic5Y

Something is killing Americans and researchers have yet to find the culprit. But we can risk some intuitive guesses.

According to researchers from the Center on Society and Health, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, American life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other wealthy countries and is now in fact decreasing.

The National Center for Health Statistics reported that life expectancy in the United States peaked (78.9 years) in 2014 and subsequently dropped for 3 consecutive years, hitting 78.6 years in 2017. The decrease was most significant among men (0.4 years) than women (0.2 years) and happened across racial-ethnic lines: between 2014 and 2016, life expectancy decreased among non-Hispanic white populations (from 78.8 to 78.5 years), non-Hispanic black populations (from 75.3 years to 74.8 years), and Hispanic populations (82.1 to 81.8 years).

"By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases," wrote researchers Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker in a study that appears in the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

At the very beginning of the report, Woolf and Schoomaker reveal that the geographical area with the largest relative increases occurred "in the Ohio Valley and New England."

"The implications for public health and the economy are substantial," they added, "making it vital to understand the underlying causes."

Incidentally, it would be difficult for any observer of the U.S. political scene to read that passage without immediately connecting it to the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Taking advantage of the deep industrial decline that has long plagued the Ohio Valley, made up of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, Trump successfully tapped into a very real social illness, at least partially connected to economic stagnation , which helped propel him into the White House.

Significantly, thirty-seven states witnessed significant jumps in midlife mortality in the years leading up to 2017. As the researchers pointed out, however, the trend was concentrated in certain states, many of which, for example in New England, did not support Trump in 2016.

"Between 2010 and 2017, the largest relative increases in mortality occurred in New England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%, Massachusetts 12.1%) and the Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%), as well as in New Mexico (17.5%), South Dakota (15.5%), Pennsylvania (14.4%), North Dakota (12.7%), Alaska (12.0%), and Maryland (11.0%). In contrast, the nation's most populous states (California, Texas, and New York) experienced relatively small increases in midlife mortality.

Eight of the 10 states with the highest number of excess deaths were in the industrial Midwest or Appalachia, whereas rural US counties experienced greater increases in midlife mortality than did urban counties.

A tragic irony of the study suggests that greater access to healthcare, notably among the more affluent white population, actually correlates to an increase in higher mortality rates. The reason is connected to the out-of-control prescription of opioid drugs to combat pain and depression.

"The sharp increase in overdose deaths that began in the 1990s primarily affected white populations and came in 3 waves," the report explained: (1) the introduction of OxyContin in 1996 and overuse of prescription opioids, followed by (2) increased heroin use, often by patients who had become addicted to prescription opioids, and (3) the subsequent emergence of potent synthetic opioids (eg, fentanyl analogues) -- the latter triggering a large post-2013 increase in overdose deaths.

"That white populations first experienced a larger increase in overdose deaths than nonwhite populations may reflect their greater access to health care (and thus prescription drugs)."

In September, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, reached a tentative settlement with 23 states and more than 2,000 cities and counties that sued the company, owned by the Sackler family, over its role in the opioid crisis

Other factors also helped to drive up the U.S. mortality rate, including alcoholic liver disease and suicides, 85% of which occurred with a firearm or other method.

The United States spends more on health care than any other country, yet its overall health report card fares worse than those of other wealthy countries. Americans experience higher rates of illness and injury and die earlier than people in other high-income nations.

Researchers were perplexed but not surprised by the data as there existed clear signs back in the 1980s that the United States was heading for a cliff as far as longevity rates go.

So what is it that's claiming the life of Americans, many at the prime of their life, at a faster pace than in the past? The reality is that it is likely to be an accumulation of negative factors that are finally beginning to take a toll. For example, apart from the opioid crisis, there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand, which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades.

Today's real average wage – that is, after accounting for inflation – has about the same purchasing power it did about half a century ago . Meanwhile, in the majority of cases, increases in salary have a marked tendency to go to the highest-paid tier of executives.

In a report by Pew Research, "real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today."

One needs only consider the growing mountain of tuition debt now consuming the paychecks of many university graduates, many of whom have yet to land their dream 6-figure job from their relatively worthless liberal education, to better understand the quiet desperation that exists across the country.

At the same time, the exponential rise in the use of social media, which has been proven to trigger depression and loneliness in users, also deserves serious consideration. What society is experiencing with its massive online presence is a total overhaul as to the way human beings relate to each other. Presently, it would be very difficult to argue that the changes have been positive; in fact, they seem to be contributing to the early demise of millions of Americans in the prime of life.

Taken together, abusive labor practices that ignores workplace democracy, the epidemic of opioid usage, compounded by the anti-social features of 'social media' suggests a perfect storm of factors precipitating the rise of early deaths in the United States. Since all of these areas fall in one way or another under the control of corporate power, this powerful agency must find ways to help address the problem. The future success of America depends upon it.


ohm , 1 minute ago link

A Wicked Cocktail Of Corporate Greed, Social Media, & Opioids Is Slashing US Life Expectancy Rates

In short, capitalism

Pfeffernusse , 2 minutes ago link

With a college degree and half a brain things are still pretty good. They look pretty good for trades guys too, as long as they are honest hard workers. I just got a quote from some guy to dig up a 70 foot driveway and replace it with topsoil... $14,000. Nobody is hurting too bad where I am except serious white trash with no job skills. Well, blacks and latinos without job skills are hurting too, the difference is, they're resigned to their fate after 300+ years of getting abused. It's the Trump trailer trash who are mad that they aren't throwing around big money any more for stealing copper or whatever the **** these trash did before now.

Indelible Scars , 3 minutes ago link

Opioids have been around for 2500 years+. The culture is what has changed. For the worse.

systemsplanet , 3 minutes ago link

Slashing US Life Expectancy Rates

"We saved the Social Security Trust Fund by supporting programs to shorten American life spans"

- Leftist Bureaucratic Social Engineers

RDouglas , 5 minutes ago link

You think life expectancy has dropped off now? Give it 10 or 20 years. Fentynal+a cheap plastic mask with nitrogen or co2 emitter will be easily available on the internet...Most people over 50 are ill equipped to deal with burgeoning economic realities. I'm 51 and I see it all around me in NW Montana, dudes that are 50 or 100 pounds overweight, smoking, drinking whisky and taking pills, not showing up for work. The economy here is booming and yet there are men and women, mostly my age or older wandering around with tombstone eyes all day, bumming money in front of the grocery stores. I spend more time than I like in Portland OR, and it's even more apparent there. There are kids that panhandle, but 90% of the people camping on the street are 45+. Dis Eases of dispair.

dibiase , 2 minutes ago link

When the reality you live is has been engineered to be **** what would you expect.

Possibly a sane reaction to an insane world?

Indelible Scars , 1 minute ago link

Why is a guy much over 50 going to work for? **** that. 55 is pushing it for any sort of manual labor.

Demeter55 , 13 minutes ago link

When men abandon their families to pursue money and fame, their families move on, and then, when the men found they were chasing fool's gold, they despaired and died, since they had fucked themselves, their children and the women who were willing to love them.

There wasn't any reason to live, if one doesn't believe in repairing such social crimes, or second chances. And there's a time limit for such rehabilitation; wait too long to get smart, and your chances are gone.

I know of three such cases in my immediate family.

Helix6 , 14 minutes ago link

In "Democracy in America", Alexis de Tocqueville commented on Americans' obsession with money and means of procuring it. I would hypothesize that the deteriorating economic means of ordinary Americans is behind the increase in midlife mortality. The pursuit of money has resulted in a lifestyle that is not conducive to a happy and healthy life.

Rashomon , 13 minutes ago link

Stress kills.

Is-Be , 2 minutes ago link

Stress causes the body to release cortisol which responds by building up belly fat for the emergency times ahead. Sleep and stress reduction can reduce the waist line, slowly.

PedroS , 17 minutes ago link

"there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand, which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades." This cracked me up. companies are NOT Democratic and never should be.

dibiase , 15 minutes ago link

Actually workers unions are quite a capitalist concept. It's a shame they turned into what they are today.

Is-Be , 20 minutes ago link

Isn't Capitalism wonderful? We mandate that a company may not make a decision not in the interests of the shareholder. And then whinge because Big Pharma does just that. It makes drugs that maximize profits. Why did you expect anything different?

And what about insurance companies? How are shareholders of insurance companies served if the insurance companies pay up for claims? Anyway, let me present a physicians point of view , that the AMA represents the shareholders of Big Pharma, not the doctors. BTW. Black salve works against Big C. (I have to use euphemisms because it is illegal to utter the words "Cures Big C". Why? I dunno. ( Bloodroot , a common plant.)

How unpatriotic it would be to praise Unions! So I shan't. Instead I recommend Guilds. A complete monopoly of particular trades by their own Guild House. The guild controls the training of their members. It controls who gets to work where. It controls their accommodation and pension. It controls for the benefit of it's members. It is Vast.

It negotiates with politicians on protecting it's own interests by Law. (Hey, why should only multi-national companies lobby in their own interest!)

For instance. A electrical guild would negotiate a contract with a builders guild for cheap housing. (You scratch my back, I scratch yours.) It would negotiate with the teacher's guild for the correct education of their children.

Big international companies are going to love it. But why do we need to consider their emotions?

steverino999 , 21 minutes ago link

This rampant social illness is why Trump ran for President. He knew there were a lot of hurting people out there who needed to believe in something, anything, and most importantly he knew they would devour every scoop of manure he shoveled their way.

pitz , 24 minutes ago link

Even top US citizen STEM grads can't find jobs. Or get interviews. That's pretty much all you need to know about how good the economy is.

PedroS , 20 minutes ago link

Due to wholesale outsourcing of the jobs they planned for. You left that out so I helped you...

rejectnumbskull , 24 minutes ago link

U might be right...and I'm sad about it

free corn , 12 minutes ago link

Strongman or strong woman whoever leave the cage.

dibiase , 10 minutes ago link

Even better. A woman might be more cruel and demeaning to our enemies.

free corn , 31 minutes ago link

"real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today."

No big drama here considering growth in wealth inequality for the period.

Tillyoudrop , 35 minutes ago link

A Wicked Cocktail Of Corporate Greed, Social Media, & Opioids

Nope. What you listed is just a bunch of the symptoms not the root cause.

HRH of Aquitaine 2.0 , 38 minutes ago link

Alex Jones named it years ago: drugs, bad food, lack of good nutrition, lack of exercise, and mass demoralization.

misgivings , 9 minutes ago link

And increasing surveillance, 5G and AI - with no input from the sheep.

Oliver Klozoff , 39 minutes ago link

Of course the author conveniently avoids the main cause, neoliberalism, courtesy of the dems.

artistant , 40 minutes ago link

There's a spiritual decay gnawing away at America's soul.

The EveryThing Bubble , 40 minutes ago link

Stupid people are supposed to die

[Nov 30, 2019] American Life Expectancy Dropping Dramatically Thanks To White Working Class Male Suicides

Notable quotes:
"... Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News, ..."
"... a "distinctly American phenomenon," ..."
"... My voice is being silenced by free speech-hating Silicon Valley behemoths who want me disappeared forever. It is CRUCIAL that you support me. Please sign up for the free newsletter here . Donate to me on SubscribeStar here . Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. ..."
Nov 29, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

After increasing for decades, American life expectancy is now facing an alarming decline thanks mainly to suicides of white working age men.

A study published by the journal JAMA, found that life expectancy in America increased from 1959 to 2014 but that the number plateaued in 2011 and began decreasing in 2014.

"The study... found that the decline is mostly among "working-age" Americans, or those ages 25 to 64 ," reports Live Science .

"In this group, the risk of dying from drug abuse, suicide, hypertension and more than 30 other causes is increasing. "

The decline in life expectancy for working aged males has not been recorded in other developed countries and is a "distinctly American phenomenon," according to study co-author Steven H. Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.

According to Lisa Britton, CNN's coverage of the story omitted the crucial point that the decline was being driven by male suicides.

" CNN just did a piece on the declining life-expectancy rate in the US and failed to mention it's the MEN's rate that is declining! Women have maintained a steady rate although there's been an uptick in the women's overdose rate (The Wash Post turned their story into that) Wow," she tweeted.

As we discuss in the video below, the only demographic group that has seen a dramatic rise in suicides and "deaths of despair" is white, middle aged, working class men.

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https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rw1dNtDEA00

Despite this, the media and the culture still relentlessly blames that same demographic for both historical and contemporary societal ills, de-legitimizing their trauma under the rubric of "white privilege."

* * *

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sbin , 2 minutes ago link

Same thing happened when CCCP was collapsing.

USSA history doesn't repeat but seems very familiar.

[Nov 30, 2019] I think neoliberal globalization is similar to the early modern period where once prosperous peasant societies were destroyed by policies like the enclosure movement

Nov 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Reply

Livius Drusus , November 28, 2019 at 7:52 am

Re: The 'crisis of capitalism' is not the one Europeans think it is.

The article is basically correct but I also think that the author downplays how devastating these changes have been. It seems like he is arguing that the changes wrought by capitalism are merely a cultural problem. I think our problems are much worse than just people being uncomfortable with capitalism invading spheres of life previously left outside of the market, as important as that issue is.

I think this period is similar to the early modern period where once prosperous peasant societies were destroyed by policies like the enclosure movement. A recent article in The Guardian discussed this process.

With subsistence economies destroyed, people had no choice but to work for pennies simply in order to survive. According to the Oxford economists Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila Hopkins, real wages declined by up to 70% from the end of the 15th century all the way through the 17th century. Famines became commonplace and nutrition deteriorated. In England, average life expectancy fell from 43 years in the 1500s to the low 30s in the 1700s.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/22/progressive-politics-capitalism-unions-healthcare-education

Compare this to some current trends like the fall in life expectancy in the United States.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-11-26/life-expectancy-decline-deaths-of-despair

The author was discussing Europe so perhaps that explains why he seems to see this as a cultural issue, but I believe that the United Kingdom is also seeing a rise in deaths of despair and this trend might spread to the Continent in the future if things get bad enough.

My point is that the crisis of capitalism is worse than Branko Milanović makes it out to be. I worry that focusing on things like changing family structure falls into the hands of left-neoliberals who will say that people just need to be more "progressive" and accept changes to family life, which is hypocritical given that affluent people are actually doubling down on the nuclear family model (divorce rates have been dropping among the well-educated) and the advantages it brings when it comes to life outcomes. It is galling to hear liberals talk about dysfunction among working-class people as if it were progressive while they enjoy dual income "power marriages" and make sure their children are given massive advantages in upbringing.

More generally, the biggest problem is that most people never asked for these changes, they were forced on ordinary people by elites. It is ridiculous that in the 21st century humans have to just accept massive and often devastating changes to their lives without having any voice in the decision to make those changes.

A sense of powerlessness is also driving the widespread populist anger across many countries. At one time there were powerful labor unions and left-wing political parties that spoke for ordinary people but these have either declined or disappeared altogether so people are left looking for allies and populists like Trump and Salvini are happy to benefit from their anger and desperation.

anon in so cal , November 28, 2019 at 11:41 am

Trickle-Up Theory

""Mathematical models demonstrate that far from wealth trickling down to the poor, the natural inclination of wealth is to flow upward, so that the 'natural' wealth distribution in a free-market economy is one of complete oligarchy".

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/

[Nov 30, 2019] Globalisation as an alibi for the destruction of communities.

Nov 30, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

David , November 28, 2019 at 12:29 pm

I think he's confusing the commercialisation of everyday life with capitalism. The second is a result of the first looking for new ways of making money out of us, as traditional options like making things now seem less attractive. So the very fabric of life itself has now become an endless series of financial calculations, where we are all "customers" instead of citizens. Even the state now adopts the practices and the vocabulary of the private sector. But there's no reason why regulated capitalism can't coexist with traditional social patterns: it's a political choice to allow it to get its greasy fingers on some of the most important parts of our existence and turn them into financial opportunities.

The real story here is the decline of the extended family, which only really began after WW2. Previously (and in my experience up until at least the 1960s) different generations would do different things: grandparents would look after children, grandparents in turn would be looked after by younger members of the family, uncles would play football with the boys, aunties would take groups of children to the cinema. There wasn't any other way, really, in which the basic functions of life could be managed. Members of the family would often live within walking or cycling distance of each other. Much of this has now been monetised for profit, but of course only if you have the money to pay for it in the first place. We need to remember that the "nuclear family" is a very recent development and frankly, only works if you can somehow buy in the services the extended family used to provide (and people resent having to do that). And as much as anything else the rise of the nuclear family is the result of the financialisation of housing, and the destruction of public housing stocks, which together with the parallel destruction of traditional forms of community employment have frequently led to families being scattered all over the country, anywhere they can find jobs and accommodation.

I don't think globalisation has much to do with this, except as an alibi for the destruction of communities. And I do think it is relatively new, except in the sense that capitalism has always destroyed everything it touches. For example, clothing was often made within the family because ready to wear clothing didn't really arrive for ordinary people until about a century ago. Even then, unless you were wealthy, clothes would be altered to fit younger children, or modified to suit the latest fashions for adults. Likewise, well after WW2, many families grew vegetables in their back garden; and cars, washing machines and even valve radios could be repaired at home if you were reasonably handy.

PlutoniumKun , November 28, 2019 at 1:21 pm

Its an interesting feature of Asian capitalism in that its been able to 'free ride' on tight family bonds – extended families have allowed it to avoid the need to provide the sort of social safety net that even capitalists acknowledged was necessary in Europe to prevent social unrest (hence Christian Democracy). As Asian countries follow the west in gradually loosening family bonds (especially in China, where they seem far more delicate than in Japan/South Korea), etc, I'm curious to see how they'll deal with it.

Massinissa , November 28, 2019 at 1:25 pm

"(especially in China, where they seem far more delicate than in Japan/South Korea)"

I confess to not knowing as much about China as I should, or at least, not knowing much about family life there. Why do you suggest the bonds there are weaker? Some sort of systemic issue?

Danny , November 28, 2019 at 1:51 pm

"There?" Experience as a child in San Francisco witnessing classmates first of generation Chinese immigrant parents reflects the strength of patience and delayed gratification. Fifty pound three dollars sack of white rice per month, handful of wilted vegetables bought for pennies. Meat as a condiment, if at all, working jobs as waiters, busboys, or the real plum, boring job as warehouseman for government, the entire family living in one basement apartment. Clothing handed down, no car, nothing new bought. Social services and Great Society welfare provided by race or language based non-profits, or government, taken full advantage of for older parents with no reported income.

People from same village in China, possibly related, often not, pool their money, get down payment on apartment house, entire family moves into bigger apartment, basement rented to other newly arrived immigrants.

Meanwhile, affluent fourth generation American kids get high and do their own thing, pursuing a music or art career.

Fast forward fifty years. 70%+ percent of property in city owned by Chinese surnamed people. Children of original family now sitting on tens of millions of dollars of apartments, collecting huge rents out of starry eyed techbros and 'bras from Kansas.

Artists and musicians living in cars, if lucky enough to have one, or in a tent on the street.

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , November 28, 2019 at 2:52 pm

Your argument is completely racist!

(Oh, and completely true)

Real fundamental reason for the stunning rise of Asia: their values. Hard work, savings, family, education, and current pleasures foregone in favor of future gains.

The U.S. had a really cushy time, protected by two oceans, with highly navigable rivers, lots of arable land in a temperate climate zone, and legal structures in place that fostered industrialization. That enabled us to win WW II and then write the rules afterwards: everybody else had to work hard, earn a profit, then buy dollars before they could then buy a barrel of oil. Whereas we could just print oil. Such a tailwind! Kept us ahead for decades. But alas all good things must end.

The Rev Kev , November 28, 2019 at 6:29 pm

'Hard work, savings, family, education, and current pleasures foregone in favor of future gains.'

Yep, they use to be western values which you could find in the UK, the US, Australia, etc. In a mostly free economy they were winning values and helped people work their way up the social ladder.
In the rigged economy that we have these days, they do not work so well so a lot of people have given up on them. Of course if the economy goes south in a big way, they may once again become good traits to practice.

drumlin woodchuckles , November 28, 2019 at 10:48 pm

What enabled the USSR to win WW2 in Europe?

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , November 29, 2019 at 1:59 am

400,000 GM-made trucks didn't hurt. A massive and inhospitable, marshy terrain. A willingness to apply human cannon fodder. A military philosophy that said "quantity has a quality all its own". Willingness to scorch earth. Willingness to move more than 100,000 factories past the Urals. Dogged courage of the people.

skippy , November 29, 2019 at 3:07 am

"willingness to apply human cannon fodder"

Actually after the initial German advance was stalled the loss ratios for the Russians was better than the Allied forces.

A lot of the rest above suffers from the same optics issues.

PlutoniumKun , November 28, 2019 at 5:52 pm

In my experience China has become a much more atomised society since it embarked on its great experiment with high growth capitalism – exacerbated by the one child policy. Its a very difficult thing to measure I think, but while there certainly are very tight Chinese families, I think there are a lot of individual Chinese cast adrift in those huge cities without the cultural adaption to individualism which is normal in the west.

Some Guy in Beijing , November 29, 2019 at 2:46 am

This system is breaking quickly in Korea. The burden of caring for elders falls on the oldest son, and there's a lot of chafing at these responsibilities, especially now that women are equally represented in Korean academic and office spaces. Throw in the increasing age of marriage and childbearing and you get people aging faster than their offspring can build up a nest egg.

It's quite common to see elderly people doing bottom-of-the-barrel manual labor to survive in Seoul. In my neighborhood, an old couple living next door worked from sun-up to sun-down collecting cardboard with their moped-pulled cart. Collecting trash for recyling is almost entirely the domain of the over-50 set. Others sell vegetables on sidewalks, and some resort to Korea's various forms of sex work (I say only half-jokingly that prostitution is the bedrock of Korea's economy)

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 3:04 pm

I came across this recently, sorry if it was via NC! I found it very interesting, and it's pertnent to this family stuff.
Western Individualism Arose from Incest Taboo – Researchers link a Catholic Church ban on cousins marrying in the Middle Ages to the emergence of a way of life that made the West an outlier
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/western-individualism-arose-from-incest-taboo/

the church's obsession with incest and its determination to wipe out the marriages between cousins that those societies were built on. The result, the paper says, was the rise of "small, nuclear households, weak family ties, and residential mobility," along with less conformity, more individuality, and, ultimately, a set of values and a psychological outlook that characterize the Western world. The impact of this change was clear: the longer a society's exposure to the church, the greater the effect.
The West itself is not uniform in kinship intensity. Working with cousin-marriage data from 92 provinces in Italy (derived from church records of requests for dispensations to allow the marriages), the researchers write, they found that "Italians from provinces with higher rates of cousin marriage take more loans from family and friends (instead of from banks), use fewer checks (preferring cash), and keep more of their wealth in cash instead of in banks, stocks, or other financial assets." They were also observed to make fewer voluntary, unpaid blood donations.
The Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies of Western Europe and what the authors call "their cultural descendants in North America and Australia" have long been recognized as outliers among the world's populations for their independence of thought and other traits, such as a willingness to trust strangers.

(- I'm definitely not sure about that very last bit!)

Danny , November 28, 2019 at 3:37 pm

Contrast with this:
"When brothers dwell together and one of them dies and leaves no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married to a stranger, outside the family. Her husband's brother shall unite with her: he shall take her as his wife and perform the levir's duty. The first son that she bears shall be accounted to the dead brother.."

Keeping it in the family. Bet that led to a lot of fratricides

https://bir.brandeis.edu/bitstream/handle/10192/26070/Weisberg.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

a different chris , November 28, 2019 at 4:08 pm

No music, no art sounds great. No wonder the Chinese got to the moon first oh wait, they aren't even there yet.

Curious what you do if the brother is already married! Ok not that curious or I would try the link.

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 4:28 pm

Multiple Husbands | National Geographic (the husbands are brothers)
https://youtu.be/d4yjrDSvze0
4 minutes – fascinating. A viable birth rate control.
I've also heard of other groups where women marry brothers in regions where the men go off tending sheep and yaks etc for extended periods.

JBird4049 , November 28, 2019 at 9:33 pm

Polyandry is usually practice in places where it is **very** difficult to make a living; having multiple brothers marry one woman was sometimes the only to get the resources to have children. Otherwise, no children for anyone.

Ook , November 28, 2019 at 9:44 pm

I know of two cases where the husband died and the wife married the brother very quickly: one of these cases was my maternal grandmother, who had children already, and needed the support. This situation only seems unusual in the modern American cultural bubble.

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 1:13 pm

I'd say the real crisis of capitalism, or the world economic system, isn't the rise of inequality or the commodification of life (didn't Marx claim that capitalism tears up all pre-existing social relations?).
It's the climate emergency and environmental collapse, undermining the foundations on which the entire world economy rests. Without a planet to support us, we can't do much except die, and the economy is, in a way, the sum of what we do. Death of us, or at any rate our civilisation, means death of the economy.

jsn , November 28, 2019 at 4:17 pm

My thoughts too, there are several crises converging.

One is what Milanovic is onto, which I would name the commodification of cultural reproduction, which won't end well, on top of the exhaustion of fossil fuels based industrialization cubed by climate change.

It's easy to get preoccupied by one, another or the other, but in the end they are all an integrated reaction to humanity letting it's collective Ego remake the world according to the dictates of its' collective Id. But we do now have the collective knowledge and wisdom to confront this reality through a communicative infrastructure finally broad enough to address the scope of the challenge, if we can act quickly enough.

Norge , November 28, 2019 at 1:21 pm

Thank you.

ewmayer , November 28, 2019 at 3:41 pm

Ugh, another amp-infested link, this one sneaky, rather than a readily-visible trailing /amp, we have 'amp' sneaked in in place of the usual 'www' at start of the URL. Thanks, evil f*ckers at Google! Here is the original uncorrupted link the Guardian article:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/22/progressive-politics-capitalism-unions-healthcare-education

Winston Smith , November 28, 2019 at 7:52 am

I like the way AOC cuts through the BS

Geo , November 28, 2019 at 8:01 am

Same. She's really proving to be a welcome beacon of light illuminating the darkness that our politics has operated in for so long.

JohnnyGL , November 28, 2019 at 10:51 am

That clip of AOC is amazing. She's got a serious talent in public speaking and not just sounding good. She shows an ability to communicate important ideas and concepts that can change minds.

It's been very visible at her events for bernie, too.

Danny , November 28, 2019 at 1:53 pm

Cab drivers and bar tenders, like she was, have that skill.

inode_buddha , November 28, 2019 at 11:09 am

On the flip side of that coin, I'm pretty sure the BS doesn't like being cut thru. Will have to watch this space closely.

anon in so cal , November 28, 2019 at 11:54 am

Skeptical of AOC.

AOC voted to support Adam Schiff's H.R. 3494, which effectively constrains press freedoms and gives additional impunity to the CIA.

AOC voted against US troop withdrawal from Syria.

Seems inexplicable.

John k , November 28, 2019 at 3:37 pm

Maybe young and inexperienced in some cases.
Maybe pushed to go along in some cases in order to get a few crumbs from pelosi AOC base in congress remains small.
A little like complaints of Bernie maybe he's picking his fights, and maybe he's not perfect. But they're both way better than a lesser evil, and who else?

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 12:08 pm

She demonstrates her ignorance and political extremism yet again.
From the abstract of " The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital ," Costanza et al., 1996 – a paper which I've heard sort of started the field of ecological economics:
For the entire biosphere, the value (most of which is outside the market) is estimated to be in the range of US$16–54 trillion per year, with an average of US$33 trillion per year.
Thus we humans, being a part of the biosphere, are collectively worth less than US$16–54 trillion per year. And Costanza's a professor and vice chancellor, with a PhD. AOC's got a measly BA, so what does she know about the value of life?

JEHR , November 28, 2019 at 1:31 pm

xkeys: You forget the /s sign? What has a "measly BA" got to do with not "know(ing) about the value of life?" Having a PhD does not necessarily mean a person knows more than a non-PhD.

I would rather hear about AOC's "ignorance and political extremism" than your take on this or any subject.

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 2:12 pm

I had been wondering what this /s thing was, but I probably wouldn't have used it if I'd known. It seemed unnecessary.
Sorry if you took me seriously. I think she not only understands, but promotes the value of life. Unlike so many critters. It's great she's in there doing what she does. We need more like her – lots more, fast.

(I would like to hear from NC commenters if I've misunderstood Costanza. Does the paper really claim that humanity is worth less than $X trillion/year, as the abstract appears to imply? I've skimmed it for any unusual definitions of biosphere, but noticed none.)

Massinissa , November 28, 2019 at 2:38 pm

Don't feel bad, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to tell when people are being sarcastic on the internet because there are no verbal or gesticular cues to it the way there is in person to person contact. Thats why we use the /sarc tag to indicate sarcasm, because otherwise people may take the comment at face value. Its not required, of course, but not using it runs the risk of people taking the comment at face value, which is very easy to do because text doesn't convey context the way speech does.

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 3:18 pm

Yes, I'm going to use it in future!
I thought "a measly BA" would give the game away, but as you say, it's hard to tell on the net. It so happens I'm no respecter at all of academic qualifications in and of themselves. I've known too many idiots with degrees spouting patent nonsense for that. Eg most economists (NC's economists definitely excepted!)? And vice-versa.

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 3:32 pm

And I'd still love to know if Costanza really thinks it makes sense to talk about an economy without people, or if I've got it all back to front.

Massinissa , November 28, 2019 at 5:06 pm

Technically, neither Yves or Lambert are economists.

I wouldnt normally point that out, but Yves made a point of it one time.

Although, not being economists may help explain why they have such good sense!

xkeyscored , November 28, 2019 at 7:58 pm

It doesn't have to be Yves, Lambert or an economist. Just someone whose read enough of this stuff to have a handle on it. I just think it sounds utterly preposterous.
It makes some sort of sense to say that destroying 1% of the biosphere will result in $X/year loss. Could be a way of evaluating our options, for example.
That does not mean destroying 10% will result in $10 times X/year economic loss; probably more like $100 times X, whichever way you measure it.
Long before 90%, the only living things left would probably be the deep subterranean bacteria and archaea, which are relatively insulated from whatever we do to the air, land and oceans. I doubt if they'd have much room in their economy for dollars or GDP.
At 100% biosphere destruction, the earth is a lifeless planet by definition. Surely the real cost is infinite? And what conceivable meaning would a financial cost, price or value have by that stage?
Any offers?

pasha , November 28, 2019 at 1:45 pm

AOC is a breath of fresh air, and her ability to articulate complexity in simple terms always impresses me. she is as much an educator as a politician

Joe Well , November 28, 2019 at 7:55 am

Re: Aaron Maté on Democracy Now not talking about the faked chemical weapons scandal.

What has been happening with DN lately? It's like they're becoming a left MSNBC.

lupemax , November 28, 2019 at 8:55 am

Aaron is no longer with DemocracyNow. He now has a show "PushBack" on The Gray Zone. https://thegrayzone.com/pushback/ He also disagreed with DN about their coverage of the RussiaRussiaRussia hoax. IMHO I think DN just wants to be more about nostalgic and being more mainstream. I no longer rely on it for my news daily.

Joe Well , November 28, 2019 at 9:59 am

By "Aaron on DN" I meant, Aaron on the subject of DN.

I know this has the potential to be ageist, but I can't help wondering if this is yet another case of individuals and entire organizations "evolving" over time in a more conservative direction based on whatever pressures. The fact that The Intercept has totally eclipsed them, and in fact the entire left media, when it comes to major stories, should be a wakeup.

TsWkr , November 28, 2019 at 11:21 am

To add to that, I'd also recommend Taibbi and Katie Halper's new podcost "Useful Idiots". They've had some good guests so far, and lead the show off with some light-hearted commentary, but from a perspective outside of the acceptable range in most media.

BlueMoose , November 28, 2019 at 11:29 am

Thanks for the heads-up. Will give it a check for sure this weekend.

June Goodwin , November 28, 2019 at 12:03 pm

Yes. And krystal ball and Saager enjeti on the morning TV program rising / thehill.

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , November 28, 2019 at 2:57 pm

I think Krystal and Saagar are doing the best political commentary anywhere. Her post yesterday about the long knives coming for Bernie from the Obama and Hilary camps is just stellar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfRT7rs2Ea4

Joe Well , November 28, 2019 at 1:52 pm

Anyone think we almost don't need "outlets" anymore? Just individuals you trust and follow them wherever they go.

The Rev Kev , November 28, 2019 at 6:41 pm

I think that you may have a point. If I just followed the main news outlets, I would have a totally distorted view of what was going on in the world and being led to support causes that by rights I should be totally against. I too listen to NC, Jimmy Dore, Krystal & Saager, Katie Halper, Aaron Maté, Caitlin Johnstone and a bunch of others – all of them prophets without honour.

[Nov 28, 2019] Amazon and Class Warfare

Nov 28, 2019 | www.theatlantic.com

"Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees" [ The Atlantic ].

"[Candice Dixon] started the job in April 2018, and within two months, or nearly 100,000 items, the lifting had destroyed her back.

An Amazon-approved doctor said she had bulging discs and diagnosed her with a back sprain, joint inflammation, and chronic pain, determining that her injuries were 100 percent due to her job. She could no longer work at Amazon. Today, she can barely climb stairs.

Walking her dog, doing the dishes, getting out of her chair -- everything is painful. According to her medical records, her condition is unlikely to improve. So this holiday-shopping season, as Amazon's ferocious speed is on full display, Dixon is at a standstill.

She told Reveal in mid-October that her workers'-compensation settlement was about to run out. She was struggling to land a new job and worried she'd lose her home." • However, Dixon can take comfort in the knowledge that she's done her little bit to send Jeff Bezos to the moon. So there's that.

[Nov 14, 2019] Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Authoritarian Right-Wing Populism by Henry A. Giroux

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality. ..."
"... This apocalyptic populism was rooted in a profound discontent for the empty promises of a neoliberal ideology that made capitalism and democracy synonymous, and markets the model for all social relations. In addition, the Democratic proponents of neoliberalism, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, participated in the dismantling of the social contract, widening economic inequality, and burgeoning landscapes of joblessness, misery, anger and despair. ..."
"... Liberal democracies across the globe appeared out of touch with not only the misery and suffering caused by neoliberal policies, they also produced an insular and arrogant group of politicians who regarded themselves as an enlightened political formation that worked " on behalf of an ignorant public ." ..."
"... As a regime of affective management, neoliberalism created a culture in which everyone was trapped in his or her own feelings, emotions and orbits of privatization. One consequence was that legitimate political claims could only be pursued by individuals and families rather than social groups. ..."
Sep 26, 2019 | truthout.org

Part of the Series The Public Intellectual

Talk of a looming recession is heating up as the global economy slows and President Trump's tiff with China unsettles financial markets. As world trade contracts, stock markets drop, the manufacturing sector in the United States is in decline for the first time in a decade , and farmers and steel workers continue losing their income and jobs.

Rumors of a coming recession accentuate fears about the further deterioration of conditions faced by workers and the poor, who are already suffering from precarious employment, poverty, lack of meaningful work and dwindling pensions. A global economic slump would make living standards for the poor even worse. As Ashley Smith points out , levels of impoverishment in the United States are already shocking, with "four out of every ten families [struggling] to meet the costs of food, housing, health care, and utilities every month."

Just as the 2008 global economic crisis revealed the failures of liberal democracy and the scourge of neoliberalism, a new economic recession in 2019 could also reveal how institutions meant to serve the public interest and offer support for a progressive politics now serve authoritarian ideologies and a ruling elite that views democracy as the enemy of market-based freedoms and white nationalism.

What has not been learned from the 2008 crisis is that an economic crisis neither unites those most affected in favor of a progressive politics nor does it offer any political guarantees regarding the direction of social change. Instead, the emotions that fueled massive public anger toward elites and globalization gave rise to the celebration of populist demagogues and a right-wing tsunami of misdirected anger, hate and violence toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslims and people of color.

The 2008 financial crisis wreaked havoc in multiple ways. Yet there was another crisis that received little attention: a crisis of agency. This crisis centered around matters of identity, self-determination and collective resistance, which were undermined in profound ways, giving rise to and legitimating the emergence of authoritarian populist movements in many parts of the world, such as United States, Hungary, Poland and Brazil.

At the heart of this shift was the declining belief in the legitimacy of both liberal democracy and its pledges about trickle-down wealth, economic security and broadening equal opportunities preached by the apostles of neoliberalism. In many ways, public faith in the welfare state, quality employment opportunities, institutional possibilities and a secure future for each generation collapsed. In part, this was a consequence of the post-war economic boom giving way to massive degrees of inequality, the off-shoring of wealth and power, the enactment of cruel austerity measures, an expanding regime of precarity, and a cut-throat economic and social environment in which individual interests and needs prevailed over any consideration of the common good. As liberalism aligned itself with corporate and political power, both the Democratic and Republican Parties embraced financial reforms that increased the wealth of the bankers and corporate elite while doing nothing to prevent people from losing their homes, being strapped with chronic debt, seeing their pensions disappear, and facing a future of uncertainty and no long-term prospects or guarantees.

Neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality.

In an age of economic anxiety, existential insecurity and a growing culture of fear, liberalism's overheated emphasis on individual liberties "made human beings subordinate to the market, replacing social bonds with market relations and sanctifying greed," as noted by Pankaj Mishra. In this instance, neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality. The latter was the outcome of a growing cultural and political polarization that made "it possible for haters to come out from the margins, form larger groups and make political trouble." This toxic polarization and surge of right-wing populism produced by casino capitalism was accentuated with the growth of fascist groups that shared a skepticism of international organizations, supported a militant right-wing nationalism, and championed a surge of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic values.

This apocalyptic populism was rooted in a profound discontent for the empty promises of a neoliberal ideology that made capitalism and democracy synonymous, and markets the model for all social relations. In addition, the Democratic proponents of neoliberalism, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, participated in the dismantling of the social contract, widening economic inequality, and burgeoning landscapes of joblessness, misery, anger and despair.

At the same time, they enacted policies that dismantled civic culture and undermined a wide range of democratic institutions that extended from the media to public goods such as public and higher education. Under such circumstances, democratic narratives, values and modes of solidarity, which traded in shared responsibilities and shared hopes, were replaced by a market-based focus on a regressive notion of hyper-individualism, ego-centered values and a view of individual responsibility that eviscerated any broader notion of social, systemic, and corporate problems and accountability.

Ways of imagining society through a collective ethos became fractured, and a comprehensive understanding of politics as inclusive and participatory morphed into an anti-politics marked by an investment in the language of individual rights, individual choice and the power of rights-bearing individuals.

Under the reign of neoliberalism, language became thinner and more individualistic, detached from history and more self-oriented, all the while undermining viable democratic social spheres as spaces where politics bring people together as collective agents and critically engaged citizens. Neoliberal language is written in the discourse of economics and market values, not ethics. Under such circumstances, shallowness becomes an asset rather than a liability. Increasingly, the watered-down language of liberal democracy, with its over-emphasis on individual rights and its neoliberal coddling of the financial elite, gave way to a regressive notion of the social marked by rising authoritarian tendencies, unchecked nativism, unapologetic expressions of bigotry, misdirected anger and the language of resentment-filled revolt. Liberal democracies across the globe appeared out of touch with not only the misery and suffering caused by neoliberal policies, they also produced an insular and arrogant group of politicians who regarded themselves as an enlightened political formation that worked " on behalf of an ignorant public ."

The ultimate consequence was to produce later what Wolfgang Merkel describes as "a rebellion of the disenfranchised." A series of political uprisings made it clear that neoliberalism was suffering from a crisis of legitimacy further accentuated by the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump, support for the National Rally ( formerly known as the National Front ) in France, and the emergence of powerful right-wing populist movements across the globe.

What has been vastly underestimated in the rise of right-wing populism is the capture of the media by authoritarian populists.

As a regime of affective management, neoliberalism created a culture in which everyone was trapped in his or her own feelings, emotions and orbits of privatization. One consequence was that legitimate political claims could only be pursued by individuals and families rather than social groups. In this instance, power was removed from the social sphere and placed almost entirely in the hands of corporate and political demagogues who used it to enrich themselves for their own personal gain.

Power was now used to produce muscular authority in order "to secure order, boundaries, and to divert the growing anger of a declining middle and working-class," Wendy Brown observes . Both classes increasingly came to blame their economic and political conditions that produced their misery and ravaged ways of life on "'others': immigrants, minority races, 'external' predators and attackers ranging from terrorists to refugees." Liberal-individualistic views lost their legitimacy as they refused to indict the underlying structures of capitalism and its winner-take-all ethos.

Functioning largely as a ruthless form of social Darwinism, economic activity was removed from a concern with social costs, and replaced by a culture of cruelty and resentment that disdained any notion of compassion or ethical concern for those deemed as "other" because of their class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. This is a culture marked by gigantic hypocrisies, "the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events," widespread viciousness, "great concentrations of wealth," "surveillance overkill," and the "unceasing despoliation of biospheres for profit."

George Monbiot sums up well some of the more toxic elements of neoliberalism, which remained largely hidden since it was in the mainstream press less as an ideology than as an economic policy. He writes :

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimized, public services should be privatized. The organization of labor and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

In the neoliberal worldview, those who are unemployed, poor consumers or outside of the reach of a market in search of insatiable profits are considered disposable. Increasingly more people were viewed as anti-human, unknowable, faceless and symbols of fear and pathology. This included undocumented immigrants in the United States and refugees in Europe, as well as those who were considered of no value to a market society, and thus eligible to be deprived of the most basic rights and subject to the terror of state violence.

Marking selected groups as disposable in both symbolic and material forms, the neoliberal politics of disposability became a machinery of political and social death -- producing spaces where undesirable members are abused, put in cages , separated from their children and subject to a massive violation of their human rights. Under a neoliberal politics of disposability, people live in spaces of ever-present danger and risk where nothing is certain; human beings considered excess are denied a social function and relegated to what Étienne Balibar calls the "death zones of humanity." These are the 21st century workstations designed for the creation and process of elimination; a death-haunted mode of production rooted in the "absolute triumph of irrationality."

Economic and cultural nationalism has become a rallying cry to create the conditions for merging a regressive neoliberalism and populism into a war machine.

Within this new political formation, older forms of exploitation are now matched, if not exceeded, by a politics of racial and social cleansing, as entire populations are removed from ethical assessments, producing zones of social abandonment. In this new world, there is a merging of finance capital and a war culture that speaks to a moral and political collapse in which the welfare state is replaced by forms of economic nationalism and a burgeoning carceral state .

Furthermore, elements of this crisis can be seen in the ongoing militarization of everyday life as more and more institutions take on the model of the prison. Additionally, there is also the increased arming of the police, the criminalization of a wide range of behaviors related to social problems, the rise of the surveillance state, and the ongoing war on youth, undocumented immigrants, Muslims and others deemed enemies of the state.

Under the aegis of a neoliberal war culture, we have witnessed increasing immiseration for the working and middle classes, massive tax cuts for the rich, the outsourcing of public services, a full-fledged attack on unions, the defunding of public goods, and the privatization of public services extending from health and education to roads and prisons. This ongoing transfer of public resources and services to the rich, hedge fund managers, and corporate elite was matched by the corporate takeover of the commanding institutions of culture, including the digital, print and broadcast media. What has been vastly underestimated in the rise of right-wing populism is the capture of the media by authoritarian populists and its flip side, which amounts to a full-fledged political attack on independent digital, online and oppositional journalists.

While it is generally acknowledged that neoliberalism was responsible for the worldwide economic crisis of 2008, what is less acknowledged is that structural crisis produced by a capitalism on steroids was not matched by subjective crisis and consequently gave rise to new reactionary political populist movements. As economic collapse became visceral, people's lives were upended and sometimes destroyed. Moreover, as the social contract was shredded along with the need for socially constructed roles, norms and public goods, the "social" no longer occupied a thick and important pedagogical space of solidarity, dialogue, political expression, dissent and politics.

As public spheres disappeared, communal bonds were weakened and social provisions withered. Under neoliberalism, the social sphere regresses into a privatized society of consumers in which individuals are atomized, alienated, and increasingly removed from the variety of social connections and communal bonds that give meaning to the degree to which societies are good and just.

Establishment politics lost its legitimacy, as voters rejected the conditions produced by financialized capitalism.

People became isolated, segregated and unable " to negotiate democratic dilemmas in a democratic way " as power became more abstract and removed from public participation and accountability. As the neoliberal net of privilege was cast wider without apology for the rich and exclusion of others, it became more obvious to growing elements of the public that appeals to liberal democracy had failed to keep its promise of a better life for all. It could no longer demand, without qualification, that working people should work harder for less, and that democratic participation is exclusively about elections. What could not be hidden from many disenfranchised groups was that ruling elites produced what Adam Tooze describes as "a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even [more dangerous]."

As the global crisis has intensified since 2008, elements of a political and moral collapse at the heart of an authoritarian society are more obvious and find their most transparent expression of ruthlessness, greed and unchecked power in the rule of Donald Trump. As Chris Hedges points out :

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military "virtues" are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch . Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages.

The slide into authoritarianism was made all the easier by the absence of a broad-based left mass movement in the United States, which failed to provide both a comprehensive vision of change and an alignment of single-issue groups and smaller movements into one mass movement. Nancy Fraser rightly observes that following Occupy, "potential links between labour and new social movements were left to languish. Split off from one another, those indispensable poles of a viable left were miles apart, waiting to be counterposed as antithetical."

Since the 1970s, there has been a profound backlash by economic, financial, political and religious fundamentalists and their allied media establishments against labor, an oppositional press, people of color and others who have attempted to extend the workings of democracy and equality.

As the narrative of class and class struggle disappeared along with the absence of a vibrant socialist movement, the call for democracy no longer provided a unifying narrative to bring different oppressed groups together. Instead, economic and cultural nationalism has become a rallying cry to create the conditions for merging a regressive neoliberalism and populism into a war machine. Under such circumstances, politics is imagined as a form of war, repelling immigrants and refugees who are described by President Trump as "invaders," "vermin" and "rapists." The emergence of neoliberalism as a war machine is evident in the current status of the Republican Party and the Trump administration, which wage assaults on anything that does not mimic the values of the market. Such assaults take the form of fixing whole categories of people as disposable, as enemies, and force them into conditions of extreme precarity -- and in increasingly more instances, conditions of danger. Neoliberal capitalism radiates violence, evident in its endless instances of mass shooting, such as those that took place most recently in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. This should not be surprising for a society that measures power by the speed that it removes itself from any sense of ethical and social responsibility. As Beatrix Campbell puts it ,

The richest society on the planet is armed. And it invests in one of the largest prison systems in the world. Violence circulates between state and citizen. Drilled to kill, doomed to die: mastery and martyrdom is the heartbreaking dialectic of the manufacture of militarized, violent masculinity . The making and maintaining of militarised masculinities is vital to these new modes of armed conflict that are proliferating across the flexible frontiers of globalized capitalism, between and within states.

What has become clear is that the neoliberal agenda has been a spectacular failure . Moreover, it has mobilized on a global level the violent political, social, racial and economic energies of a resurgent fascist politics. Across the globe, right-wing modes of governance are appearing in which the line collapses between "outside foreign enemies" such as refugees and undocumented immigrants, on the one hand, and on the other, inside "dangerous" or "treasonous" classes such as critical journalists, educators and dissidents.

As neoliberal economies increasingly resort to violence and repression, fear replaces any sense of shared responsibilities, as violence is not only elevated to an organizing principle of society, but also expands a network of extreme cruelty. Imagining politics as a war machine, more and more groups are treated as excess and inscribed in an order of power as disposable, enemies, and [forced] into conditions of extreme precarity. This is a particularly vicious form of state violence that undermines and constrains agency, and subjects individuals to zones of abandonment, as evident in the growth of immigrant jails and an expanding carceral complex in the United States and other countries, such as Hungary.

As neoliberalism's promise of social mobility and expanding economic progress collapsed, it gave way to an authoritarian right-wing populism looking for narratives on which to pin the hatred of governing elites who, as Paul Mason notes , "capped health and welfare spending, [imposed] punitive benefit withdraws [that] forced many families to rely on food banks [and] withdraw sickness and disability benefits from one million former workers below retirement age."

Across the globe, a series of uprisings have appeared that signal new political formations that rejected the notion that there was no alternative to neoliberal hegemony. This was evident not only with the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, but also with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and support for popular movements such as the National Rally in France. Establishment politics lost its legitimacy, as voters rejected the conditions produced by financialized capitalism.

In the United States, both major political parties were more than willing to turn the economy over to the bankers and hedge fund managers while producing policies that shaped radical forms of industrial and social restructuring, all of which caused massive pain, suffering and rage among large segments of the working class and other disenfranchised groups. Right-wing populist leaders across the globe recognized that national economies were in the hands of foreign investors, a mobile financial elite and transnational capital. In a masterful act of political diversion, populist leaders attacked all vestiges of liberal capitalism while refusing to name neoliberal inequities in wealth and power as a basic threat to their societies. Instead of calling for an acceleration of the democratic ideals of popular sovereignty and equality, right-wing populist leaders, such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Hungary's Viktor Orbán defined democracy as the enemy of those who wish for unaccountable power. They also diverted genuine popular anger into the abyss of cultural chauvinism, anti-immigrant hatred, a contempt of Muslims and a targeted attack on the environment, health care, education, public institutions, social provisions and other basic life resources. As Arjun Appadurai observes , such authoritarian leaders hate democracy, capture the political emotions of those treated as disposable, and do everything they can to hide the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.

In this scenario, we have the resurgence of a fascist politics that capitalizes on the immiseration, fears and anxieties produced by neoliberalism without naming the underlying conditions that create and legitimate its policies and social costs. While such populists comment on certain elements of neoliberalism such as globalization, they largely embrace those ideological and economic elements that concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a political, corporate and financial elite, thus reinforcing in the end an extreme form of capitalism. Moreover, right-wing populists may condemn globalization, but they do so by blaming those considered outside the inclusive boundaries of a white homeland even though the same forces victimize them . At the same time, such leaders mobilize passions that deny critical understanding while simultaneously creating desires and affects that produce toxic and hypermasculine forms of identification.

Authoritarian leaders hate democracy and do everything they can to hide the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.

In this instance, an oppressive form of education becomes central to politics and is used as a tool of power in the struggle over power, agency and politics. What is at stake here is not simply a struggle between authoritarian ideas and democratic ideals, but also a fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible. This is evident, for example, in Trump's constant attack on the critical media, often referring to them as "'the enemy of the people' pushing 'Radical Left Democrat views,'" even as journalists are subject to expulsion, mass jailing and assassination across the world by some of Trump's allies.

Waging war on democracy and the institutions that produce it, neoliberalism has tapped into a combination of fear and cathartic cruelty that has once again unleashed the mobilizing passions of fascism, especially the historically distinct registers of extreme nationalism, nativism, white supremacy, racial and ethnic cleansing, voter suppression, and an attack on a civic culture of critique and resistance. The result is a new political formation that I have called neoliberal fascism, in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of a fascist past.

Neoliberal fascism hollows out democracy from within, breaks down the separation of power while increasing the power of the presidency, and saturates cultural and social life with its ideology of self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and regressive notions of freedom and individual responsibility.

What needs to be acknowledged is that neoliberalism as an extreme form of capitalism has produced the conditions for a fascist politics that is updated to serve the interest of a concentrated class of financial elite and a rising tide of political demagogues across the globe.

The mass anger fueling neoliberal fascism is a diversion of genuine resistance into what amounts to a pathology, which empties politics of any substance. This is evident also in its support of a right-wing populism and its focus on the immigrants and refugees as "dangerous outsiders," which serves to eliminate class politics and camouflage its own authoritarian ruling class interests and relentless attacks on social welfare.

A new economic slump would further fuel forces of repression and strengthen the forces of white supremacy.

In the face of a looming global recession, it is crucial to understand the connection between the rise of right-wing populism and neoliberalism, which emerged in the late 1970s as a commanding ideology fueling a punitive form of globalization. This historical moment is marked by unique ideological, economic and political formations produced by ever-increasing brutal forms of capitalism, however diverse.

Governing economic and political thinking everywhere, neoliberalism's unprecedented concentration of economic and political power has produced a toxic state modeled after the models of finance and unchecked market forces. It has also produced a profound shift in human consciousness, agency and modes of identification. The consequences have become familiar and include cruel austerity measures, adulation of self-regulating markets, the liberating of capital from any constraints, deregulation, privatization of public goods, the commodification of everyday life and the gutting of environmental, health and safety laws. It has also paved the way for a merging of extreme market principles and the sordid and mushrooming elements of white supremacy, racial cleansing and ultranationalism that have become specific to updated forms of fascist politics.

Such policies have produced massive inequities in wealth, power and income, while further accelerating mass misery, human suffering, the rise of state-sanctioned violence and ever-expanding sites of terminal exclusion in the forms of walls, detention centers and an expanding carceral state. An impending recession accentuates the antagonisms, instabilities and crisis produced by the long history and reach of neoliberal ideologies and policies.

A new economic slump would further fuel forces of repression and strengthen the forces of white supremacy, Islamophobia, nativism and misogyny. In the face of such reactionary forces, it is crucial to unite various progressive forces of opposition into a powerful anti-capitalist movement that speaks not only to the range of oppressions exacerbated by neoliberalism, but also to the need for new narratives that speak to overturning a system steeped in the machineries of war, militarization, repression and death.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education (Haymarket 2014), The Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), America's Addiction to Terrorism (Monthly Review Press, 2016), America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2017), The Public in Peril (Routledge, 2018) and American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism (City Lights, 2018) and The Terror of the Unforeseen (LARB Books, 2019). Giroux is also a member of Truthout 's Board of Directors.

[Nov 11, 2019] The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'.

Notable quotes:
"... The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along. ..."
Nov 11, 2019 | www.unz.com

Beckow , says: November 9, 2019 at 12:47 pm GMT

Recent class history of US is quite simple: the elite class first tried to shift the burden of supporting the lower classes on the middle class with taxation. But as the lower class became demographically distinct, partially via mass immigration, the elites decided to ally with the ' underpriviledged ' via identity posturing and squeeze no longer needed middle class out of existence.

What's left are government employees, a few corporate sinecures, NGO parasitic sector, and old people. The rest will be melded into a few mutually antagonistic tribal groups providing ever cheaper service labor. With an occasional lottery winner to showcase mobility. Actually very similar to what happened in Latin America in the past few centuries.

The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along.

alexander , says: November 9, 2019 at 11:38 am GMT
BUILDING OUT vs. BLOWING UP

China 2000-2020 vs. USA 2000-2020

Unlike the USA (under Neocon stewardship) China has not squandered twenty trillion dollars of its national solvency bombing countries which never attacked it post 9-11.

China's leaders (unlike our own) never LIED its people into launching obscenely expensive, illegal wars of aggression across the middle east. (WMD's, Mushroom clouds, Yellow Cake, etc.)

China has used its wealth and resources to build up its infrastructure, build out its capital markets, and turbo charge its high tech sectors. As a consequence, it has lifted nearly half a billion people out of poverty. There has been an explosion in the growth of the "middle class" in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now living comfortable "upwardly mobile" lives.

The USA, on the other hand, having been defrauded by its "ruling elites" into launching and fighting endless illegal wars, is now 23 trillion dollars in catastrophic debt.
NOT ONE PENNY of this heinous "overspending" has been dedicated to building up OUR infrastructure, or BUILDING OUT our middle class.

It has all gone into BLOWING UP countries which never (even) attacked us on 9-11.

As a consequence , the USA is fast becoming a failed nation, a nation where all its wealth is being siphoned into the hands of its one percent "war pilfer-teers".

It is so sad to have grown up in such an amazing country , with such immense resources and possibilities, and having to bear witness to it going down the tubes.

To watch all our sovereign wealth being vaporized by our "lie us into endless illegal war" ruling elites is truly heartbreaking.

It is as shameful as it is tragic.

SafeNow , says: November 9, 2019 at 6:01 pm GMT
That's fascinating about the declining "middle class" usage. A "soft synonym" that has gone in the opposite direction, I think, is "the community."
LoutishAngloQuebecker , says: November 9, 2019 at 6:31 pm GMT
The white middle class is the only group that might effectively resist Globohomo's designs on total power.

Blacks? Too dumb. Will be disposed of once Globohomo is finished the job.
Hispanics? Used to corrupt one party systems. Give them cerveza and Netflix and they're good.
East Asians? Perfectly fine with living like bug people.
South Asians? Cowardly; will go with the flow.

The middle class is almost completely unique to white people.

Racial aliens cannot wrap their minds around being middle class. They think I'm crazy for appreciating my 2009 Honda Accord. They literally cannot understand why somebody would want to live a frugal and mundane life. They are desperate to be like Drake but most end up broke. It will be very easy for GloboHomo to control a bucket of poor brown slop.

Svevlad , says: November 9, 2019 at 6:32 pm GMT
Ah yes, apparatchiks. The worst kind of person
Counterinsurgency , says: November 9, 2019 at 7:36 pm GMT
@Achmed E. Newman

There IS a black middle class, but a big chunk of that works for governments of all shapes and sizes.

Strictly speaking, there is no more "middle class" in the sense of the classical economists: a person with just enough capital to live off the income if he works the capital himself or herself. By this definition professionals (lawyers, dentists, physicians, small store owners, even spinsters [1] and hand loom operators in a sense) were middle class. Upper class had enough property to turn it over to managers, lower class had little or no property and worked for others (servants and farm workers, for example). Paupers didn't earn enough income per year to feed themselves and didn't live all that long, usually.

What we have is "middle income" people, almost all of whom work as an employee of some organization -- people who would be considered "lower class" by the classical economists because they don't have freedom of action and make no independent decisions about how the capital of their organizations is spent. Today they are considered "intelligentsia", educated government workers, or, by analogy, educated corporate workers. IMHO, intelligentsia is a suicide job, and is responsible for the depressed fertility rate, but that's just me.

Back in the AD 1800s and pre-AD 1930 there were many black middle class people. usually concentrating on selling to black clientele. Now there are effectively none outside of criminal activities, usually petty criminal. And so it goes.

Of course, back then there were many white middle class people also, usually concentrating on selling to white clientele. Now there are effectively none, except in some rural areas. And so it goes.

Counterinsurgency

1] Cottagers who made their living spinning wool skeins into wool threads.

Mark G. , says: November 9, 2019 at 8:20 pm GMT
@unit472 A lot of the middle class are Democrats but not particularly liberal. Many of them vote Democrat only when they personally benefit. For example, my parents were suburban public school teachers. They voted for Democrats at the state level because the Democrats supported better pay and benefits for teachers but voted for Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan at the national level because Republicans would keep their federal taxes lower. They had no political philosophy. It was all about what left them financially better off. My parents also got on well with their suburban neighbors. Suburbanites generally like their local school system and its teachers and the suburban school systems are usually careful not to engage in teaching anything controversial. A lot of the government employed white middle class would be like my parents. Except in situations where specific Republicans talk about major cuts to their pay and pensions they are perfectly willing to consider voting Republican. They are generally social moderates, like the status quo, are fairly traditionalist and don't want any radical changes. Since the Democrats seem be trending in a radical direction, this would put off a lot of them. Trump would be more appealing as the status quo candidate. When running the last time, he carefully avoided talking about any major cuts in government spending and he's governed that way too. At the same time, his talk of cutting immigration, his lack of enthusiasm for nonwhite affirmative action, and his more traditional views on social issues is appealing to the white middle class.
anon [201] • Disclaimer , says: November 9, 2019 at 8:33 pm GMT
Wealth held by the top 1% is now close to equal or greater than wealth held by the entire middle class.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-09/one-percenters-close-to-surpassing-wealth-of-u-s-middle-class

Something similar was seen in the 1890's, the "gilded age". This is one reason why Warren's "wealth tax" has traction among likely voters.

WorkingClass , says: November 9, 2019 at 11:55 pm GMT
The term middle class is used in the U.S. to mean middle income. It has nothing to do with class. Why not just say what you mean? Most of the middle class that we say is disappearing is really that rarest of phenomenons. A prosperous working class. The prosperous American working class is no longer prosperous due to the Neoliberal agenda. Free trade, open borders and the financialization of everything.

Americans know nothing of class dynamics. Not even the so called socialists. They don't even see the economy. All they see is people with infinite need and government with infinite wealth. In their world all of Central America can come to the U.S. and the government (if it only wants to) can give them all homes, health care and education.

Lets stop saying class when we mean income. Not using the word class would be better than abusing it.

Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.

Rosie , says: November 10, 2019 at 2:21 am GMT
@Audacious Epigone

Are we to the point where we've collectively resigned ourselves to the death of the middle class?

In the neoliberal worldview, the middle class is illegitimate, existing only as a consequence of artificial trade and immigration barriers. Anytime Americans are spied out making a good living, there is a "shortage" that must be addressed with more visas. Or else there is an "inefficiency" where other countries could provide said service or produce said product for less because they have a "comparative advantage."

Rosie , says: November 10, 2019 at 2:25 am GMT
@WorkingClass

Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.

I don't know about that anymore. Increasingly, "middle class" means Asian, with Whiteness being associated with the lower middle class (or perhaps "working class"). Sometimes the media uses the term " noncollege Whites," which I think is actually very apt. They are the ones who identify with Whiteness the most.

[Nov 06, 2019] JSOC and the Mexican drug lords. - 1st Published December 2009 - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Nov 06, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Freudenschade said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 02 February 2017 at 10:26 PM

TTG,

my grandfather's property in West Berlin was maybe 700 yards from the wall. With binoculars, I could get a good view from my second floor bedroom. Of course the Berlin Wall was a much more modest border than the inner German one.

Arguably, after upgrades were started in the late 60's, the inner German border became a very effective barrier. One thing that made it effective (and mind you, it was a border keeping people in more than a border keeping people out) was the exclusion zone extending 5km from the border. Only people with special permits could live and work there.

In order to make the border more practical, entire villages were razed and parts of th physical border were located back from the actual border to avoid difficult terrain. Throw in the land mines, booby traps and 50,000 or so troops guarding about 870 miles of the inner German border, and it came to an effective barrier.

So I don't want to say we can't "seal" the Mexican border. But I think the expense in land seizures, manpower, and land mines is likely a lot higher for the 2000 miles of our southern border than the 15-20 billion estimated for its construction.

AEL , 02 February 2017 at 10:01 PM
Bismarck says that politics is the art of the possible. Given the huge demand, stamping out drug running is impossible. For an adequate price, there will always be people willing to meet the demand. At best, you drive up the price and make successful runners incredibly rich.

Oh wait..

turcopolier , 02 February 2017 at 10:11 PM
AEL
Bismarck also said that genius lies in knowing when to stop. A near certainty of death would cause a lot of cartel leaders to think about it. pl
turcopolier , 02 February 2017 at 10:26 PM
dilber Dogbert

Like what? Sending an army of illegals? Declaring war? Nuclear attack? Smuggling drugs into the US? pl

dilbert dogbert -> turcopolier ... , 02 February 2017 at 10:31 PM
Dean Baker bruited this idea: http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/a-trade-war-everyone-can-win
"The alternative is simple: Mexico could announce that it would no longer enforce U.S. patents and copyrights on its soil. This would be a yuuge deal, as Trump would say."
The Twisted Genius -> Freudenschade... , 03 February 2017 at 12:17 AM
Freudenschade,

I agree sealing the border would be exorbitantly expensive. This would include not just a big,beautiful wall and the manpower to watch over that wall, but a massive surveillance and security presence along the Gulf, Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The expense would be similar to the cost imposed on the home front during WWII. It will require widespread sacrifice, probably a progressive tax structure similar to what we had during WWII. Maybe even rationing. Would that make America great and please the great deplorable mass?

Colonel Lang's idea of killing all the drug cartel leadership wherever we find them for an extended period of time would definitely be a cheaper proposition. I would call it the Rodrigo Duterte plan. I think making sure a lot of bankers end up sitting in their big leather chairs with bullet holes in their heads would do much to hasten the success of this plan.

Farooq said in reply to The Twisted Genius ... , 03 February 2017 at 08:56 PM
TTG,

Have you read this? I am interested in your comments.

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/05/americas_assassination_industrial_complex_how_the_drug_wars_of_the_90s_became_the_drone_wars_of_today/

Thanks

The Twisted Genius -> Farooq... , 04 February 2017 at 11:53 AM
Farooq,

The point of the article is that a strategy of leadership decapitation of an organization, whether it be a drug cartel or a jihadist group, does not lead to the destruction of the organization. The original decapitation strategy was based on the premise that the targeted organization was strictly hierarchical and could not function without an intact hierarchy. In fact, most of these target organizations evolved into more distributed organizations. We weren't quick to see this because we are also wedded to the need for a robust hierarchy in our organization. This is where the article ends, but the story continued.

Our strategy also evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan. JSOC strike missions became more than checking faces off a static organizational chart as a hit list. Each strike became an information gathering mission. That information was quickly analyzed into "actionable intelligence" resulting in ensuing JSOC strikes and more information gathering. This evolved into a rapid cycle with often several strikes in a night. This strategy struct at the enemy's growing resiliency and distributed organization. This is the present state of the art in JSOC operations.

[Nov 06, 2019] America Will Keep Losing Its Middle Class as Long as "The Free Market" Dominates the Economic Debate

Notable quotes:
"... By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute ..."
"... Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy ..."
"... When the government subsidize R&D here, what reason would there be for the resultant products that come from that R&D, be made here? In Canada the SRED (Scientific Research and Experimental Development) tax credits are used by companies to develop products that are then manufactured in China. No Canadian production worker will ever see an hour of labor from those subsidies. That result is baked into the R&D cake. ..."
"... As you point out, "many of the large International Corporations moved their software development and R&D offshore too". What stops them from co-mingling the subsidies and scamming the system for their benefit, since everything done to favor big business resolves to a scam on the peasants. ..."
Nov 06, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Posted on November 5, 2019 by Yves Smith By Marshall Auerback, a market analyst and commentator. produced by Economy for All , a project of the Independent Media Institute

National industrial policy was once something you might read about in today's equivalent of a friend's Facebook post, as hard as that might sound to believe. It was in newspapers; it was on the radio. Taxi drivers had opinions about it. That all changed in the last 35 years, when the rise and fall of the stock market and a shallow conversation about unemployment rates took over. Industrial policy became an inside-baseball conversation, and to the extent that it was discussed, it was through the prism of whether it imperiled the golden gospel and great economic distraction of our time, "the free market."

The decades of free-market propaganda we've been exposed to are basically an exercise in distracting the public from the meaningful choices that are now made behind closed doors. The two big political parties that outwardly represent symbolic issues like gun rights and school prayer spend the bulk of their time and political energy on complex industrial and regulatory questions.

But much like Nero fiddling while Rome burned, they'd better start considering the question of a national industrial policy before there's no industry left to manage. Manufacturing is now at its smallest share of the U.S. economy in 72 years, reports Bloomberg . Multinational supply chains undermine the negotiating power of workers, thereby exacerbating inequality.

Are there ways to bring back manufacturing, or should we just capitulate to a mindset that argues that these jobs are gone for good, that software retention is good enough, even as we shift what's left of our manufacturing sector overseas to sweatshop economies? That seems short-sighted. After all, it's pretty easy to steal IP; it's not so easy to steal an auto manufacturing facility. The real question is: In the absence of some sort of national industrial strategy, how do Western societies retain a viable middle class?

Decades of American middle-class exposure to favor China and other Asian countries' industrial capacity have foisted it right back from elite circles into our politics and the ballot box, in spectacular fashion, through the unlikely Donald Trump, who, in his typically blunderbuss fashion, has called attention to some serious deficiencies in our current globalized system, and the competitive threat posed by China to which we have remained oblivious for all too long.

Not that Trump's 19th-century protectionism represents the right policy response, but his concerns about Beijing make sense when you compare how much China invests in its own industrial base relative to the U.S.: Robert D. Atkinson and Caleb Foote of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation write that a recent Harvard Business School " study estimated that the Chinese governments (national, provincial, and local) paid for a whopping 22.2 percent of business R&D in 2015, with 95 percent of Chinese firms in 6 industries receiving government cash -- petrochemicals, electronics, metals and materials, machinery and equipment, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, and information technology."

In addition to the direct government grants on R&D, Atkinson and Foote estimate that "the Chinese R&D tax credit is between 3 and 4.6 times more generous than the U.S. credit. To match China's R&D tax credit generosity, the U.S. rate for the Alternative Simplified Credit would have to be increased from 14 percent to between 35 and 40 percent." Atkinson and Foote also note that " 97 percent of American federal government funding went to just three sectors: transportation equipment, which includes such as fighter jets, missiles, and the like ($14 billion); professional, scientific, and technical services ($5 billion); and computer and electronic products ($4 billion)."

Taken in aggregate, Atkinson and Foote calculate that "nearly 25 percent of all R&D expenditures in China come in the form of government subsidies to firms." That's the sort of thing that must enter the calculations of antitrust advocates when they call for breaking up big tech, without considering the ramifications to research and development, especially relative to their Chinese counterparts. (Statistically, as Anne Marie Knott and Carl Vieregger find in a 2016 paper "Reconciling the Firm Size and Innovation Puzzle," there are ample studies illustrating that R&D spending and R&D productivity increase with scale.)

Why does this matter? Robert Kuttner, writing at the Huffington Post at the inception of Barack Obama's presidency, made a compelling argument that many of America's great industrial enterprises did not simply spring up spontaneously via the magic of the "free market":

American commercial leadership in aerospace is no naturally occurring phenomenon. It reflects trillions of dollars of subsidy from the Pentagon and from NASA. Likewise, U.S. dominance in pharmaceuticals is the result of government subsidy of basic research, favorable patent treatment, and the fact that the American consumer of prescription drugs is made to overpay, giving the industry exorbitant profits to plow back into research. Throwing $700 billion at America's wounded banks is also an industrial policy.

So if we can have implicit industrial policies for these industries, why not explicit policies to rebuild our auto industry, our steel industry, our machine tool industry, and the industries of the next century, such as green energy and high-speed rail? And why not devise some clear standards for which industries deserve help, and why, and what they owe America in return?"

In fact, Kuttner describes a problem that well preceded Barack Obama. America's belief in national industrial planning has been undermined to the extent that the U.S. began to adhere to a doctrine of shareholder capitalism in the 1980s and beyond, a philosophy that minimized the role of the state, and gave primacy to short-term profitability, as well as production growth through efficiency (i.e., downsizing) and mergers. Corporate prioritization of maximizing shareholders' value and the ways American corporations have minimized long-term R&D expenditures and capital investment, all of which have resulted in the "unproductive disgorging of corporate cash profits -- through massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases -- over productive investment in innovation," write Professors Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad .

Although European companies have not gone quite as far down that route, their "stakeholder capitalism" culture has been somewhat subverted to the same short-term goals as their American counterparts, as evidenced via Volkswagen's emissions scandal and the erosion of workers' rights via the Hartz labor "reforms" (which actually undermined the unions' stakeholder status in the companies, thereby freeing up management to adopt many of the less attractive American shareholder capitalism practices). The European Union too is now belatedly recognizing the competitive threat posed by China . There's no doubt that the European political classes are also becoming mindful that there are votes to be won here as well, as Trump correctly calculated in 2016.

In the U.S., industrial policy is increasingly finding advocates on both the left (Elizabeth Warren's policy director, Ganesh Sitaraman ) and the right ( Professor Michael Lind ), via the convenient marriage of national security considerations and with international investment and trade. If trade policy is ultimately subordinated to national security concerns, it is conceivable that industrial policy could be "bi-partisanized," thereby giving primacy to homegrown strategic industries necessary to sustain viable national defense and security.

But this approach is not without risks: it is unclear whether the "national security-fication" of the industrial policy renaissance will actually enhance or hinder creativity and risk-taking, or merely cause these firms to decline altogether as viable civilian competitors vis a vis Beijing. The current travails of Boeing provide a salutary illustration of the risks of going too far down the Pentagon rat hole.

And there are a number of recent studies illustrating that the case for "dual-use" (i.e., civilian and military) manufacturing does not substantially enhance civilian industrialization and, indeed, may retard overall economic growth. On the other hand, as the venture capitalist William Janeway highlights in his seminal work, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy , there are advantages at times to being "[d]ecoupled from any direct concern with economic return [It allowed] the Defense Department [to] fund numerous alternative research agendas, underwriting the 'wasteful' search for solutions that inevitably accompanies any effort to push back the frontiers of knowledge." So there's a balance to be struck here. But, as Janeway notes , "the strategic state interventions that have shaped the market economy over generations have depended on grander themes -- national development, national security, social justice, liberation from disease -- that transcend the calculus of welfare economics and the logic of market failure."

Furthermore, to the extent that national security considerations retard offshoring and global labor arbitrage, it can enhance the prospects for a viable form of " national developmentalism ," given that both mean tighter labor markets and higher wages, which in turn will likely push firms toward upgrading R&D spending in order to upgrade on the high end of the technology curve ( as Seymour Melman argued years ago ), as well as enhancing productivity gains. As author Ted Fertik observes :

Higher productivity makes possible more generous welfare states, and helps national industries compete to supply the world with high-tech products. If technological leadership and a prosperous, patriotic citizenry are the surest guarantees of military preponderance, such an economic policy represents the best military strategy in an era of great power competition.

Both the left and the right are beginning to recognize that it makes no sense to make war on wage-earners while claiming to protect the same wage earners from Chinese competition. But governments need to do more than act as a neutral umpire, whose role never extends beyond fixing market failures. As Janeway has illustrated , governments have historically promoted the basic research that fueled innovation and nurtured the talent and skills that "became the foundation of the Innovation Economy"; "the central research laboratories of the great corporations were first supplemented and then supplanted by direct state funding of research." But in spite of providing the foundational research for a number of leading commercial products (e.g., Apple's iPhone), the government has proved reticent in considering alternative forms of ownership structure (e.g., a " government golden share ," which gives veto rights on key strategic issues, such as relocation, offshoring, special voting rights, etc.), or retaining intellectual property rights and corresponding royalty streams to reflect the magnitude of their own R&D efforts, as Professor Mariana Mazzucato has proposed in the past . At the very least, we need to consider these alternative ownership structures that focus entrepreneurial development on value creation, as opposed to capitulating to the depredations of rentier capitalism on the spurious grounds that this is a neutral byproduct of the market's efficient allocation of resources.

Within the U.S., national industrial policy also suits green advocates, such as Senator Bernie Sanders, whose Green New Deal plan , while failing to address domestic/local content, or manufacturing in the broadest possible sense, at least begins to move the needle with regard to the federal government building and owning a national renewable grid.

Likewise in Europe, German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier recently published a " National Industrial Strategy 2030 ," which, according to Dalia Marin of Bruegel think tank in Brussels , "aims to protect German firms against state-subsidized Chinese competitors. The strategy identifies key industrial sectors that will receive special government support, calls for establishing production of electric-car batteries in Europe, and advocates mergers to achieve economies of scale." It is striking that EU policymakers, such as Lars Feld of the German Council of Economic Experts , still apparently think it is a protectionist step too far to consider coordinating with the car companies (where there is already a high degree of trans-European policy coordination and international consolidation), and other sectors, to help them all at the same time -- as Beijing is now doing . Of course, it would help to embed this in a manufacturing-based Green New Deal, but it represents a healthy corrective to offshoring advocates who continue to advocate that their car industry should migrate to China, on the short-term grounds of cost consideration alone .

Essentially, the goal should be to protect the industries that policymakers think will be strategically important from outsiders, and to further integrate with allies and partners to achieve efficiencies and production scale. (Parenthetically, it seems particularly perverse right at this juncture for the UK to break away from all this continental European integration, and to try to go it alone via Brexit.) The aim should not be to protect private rent-seeking and increasing private monopolization under the guise of industrial policy, which, as Dalia Marin notes , is why EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager blocked the proposed merger between France's Alstom and Germany's Siemens. The two companies "rarely compete with CRRC in third countries, because the Chinese company mainly focuses on its home market." Hence, the grounds for creating " heavyweight champions " was really a cover for developing an oligopoly instead.

Much of the focus of negotiation in the seemingly endless trade negotiations between the U.S. and China has been on American efforts to dismantle the wave of subsidies and industrial support that Beijing furnishes to its domestic industries. This seems both unrealistic as well as being the exact opposite of what the U.S. should be doing if it hopes to level, or at least carve up, the playing field.

Likewise, the problem in both the EU and the U.S. is not the size of these companies generated by national developmentalism, but a size-neutral form of national regulation that precludes these companies from stifling competition. The goal of a truly successful and workable industrial policy should be to create an environment that supports and sustains value creation and that socializes the benefits of the R&D for society as a whole, rather than simply licensing it or selling it on to private companies so that it just becomes a vehicle that sustains rent extraction for private profits alone.

We are slowly but surely starting to move away from market fundamentalism, but we still have yet to make the full conceptual leap toward a sustainable industrial policy that creates an economy for all. At least this is now becoming a fit discussion as far as policy making goes, as many of the neoliberal shibboleths of the past 40 years are gradually being reconsidered and abandoned. That is a start.


Ignacio , November 5, 2019 at 6:13 am

Another way –and more precise in my opinion because it identifies the core problem– to frame the issue, would be this:

Why Trade Wars Are Inevitable

Repressed consumption in a few countries with sustained huge current account surpluses naturally drives manufacturing outside the US (and other deficit countries). Interestingly, Pettis says that those imbalances manifest today, not as a conflict between surplus/deficit countries, but between economic sectors: bankers and owners in surplus/deficit countries vs. the rest. According to Pettis this can be addressed internally in the US by tackling income inequality: Tax transfers, reduced health care & educational costs, raising minimum wages and giving negotiating power to unions. BUT BEFORE DOING THAT, THE US SHOULD IMPOSE CONTROLS ON FOREIGN CAPITAL INFLOWS (by taxing those) INSTEAD ON TARIFFS ON FOREIGN PRODUCTS. From the article:

It would have the additional benefit of forcing the cost of adjustment onto banks and financial speculators, unlike tariffs, which force the cost onto businesses and consumers.

If the US ever does this, other deficit countries, say the UK, France or Spain for instance, should do exactly the same, and even more abruptly if these don't want to be awash with foreign capital inflows and see inequality spiking even further.

Marshall Auerback , November 5, 2019 at 8:29 am

Not a bad way to frame the issue at all.

Winston , November 5, 2019 at 2:19 pm

It is financialization which is causing this. Please read Michael Hudson. As he has pointed out it is financialization that is key. There is a reason his book was titled "Killing the Host". Boeing's decline is also because of financialization.
https://evonomics.com/hedge-fund-activists-prey-companies/
How Hedge Fund Activists Prey on Companies

Private equity and hedge are responsible for US manufacturing decline since the 1980s, along with desire not to innovate-example why Deming's advice ignored by US automakers and absorbed by the Japanese-who then clobbered the US automakers.

Hudson also knows that rising expenses for homeowners reduced their consumption capacity. A main cause is rise in housing costs, education, and health.

Before manufacturing went to cheaper foreign shores, it went to the no union South. Has that made its workers better off? If so how come South didn't develop like Singapore? For a clue please read Ed Week article about what Singapore did and South failed to do.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/01/the_low-wage_strategy_continues_in_the_south_is_it_the_future_for_your_state.html
The Low-Wage Strategy in the South: Is It the Future for Your State?

Melman's main message is that focus on national security destroyed civilian sector. Today most of US Govt R&D spending still in defense sector, while R&D disappearing in private sector because of financialization.

Industrial strategy is useless for US unless housing costs come down, unless robots are used. Hudson has already pointed out US cannot compete with Germany because of housing cost differences. As Carl Benedikt Frey who focusses on tech has pointed out Midwest revolt was because most automation was there.
"Frey argues that automation, or what he calls the third industrial revolution, is not only putting jobs at risk, but is the principal source of growing inequality within the American economy."
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/technology-trap-more-automation-driving-inequality-89211

" there are more robots in Michigan alone than in the entire American west. Where manufacturing jobs have disappeared is also where US dissatisfaction is the greatest"
https://voxeu.org/article/automation-and-its-enemies
Automation and its enemies
Carl Benedikt Frey, Ebrahim Rahbari 04 November 2019

https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/news/2017/09/06/rise-of-the-robots-buffalo-retail-workers-should.html

Winston , November 5, 2019 at 4:19 pm

Major industrialized countries are also heavy users of automation. Forget idea that industrial policy will lead to jobs at scale used to.:

https://www.therobotreport.com/10-automated-countries-in-the-world/
10 Most Automated Countries in the World

https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/robots-japan-delivers-52-percent-of-global-supply
Robots: Japan delivers 52 percent of global supply
Japan is the world´s predominant industrial robot manufacturer

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/08/04/business/tech/japans-farming-industry-poised-automation-revolution/
Japan's farming industry poised for automation revolution

John Merryman. , November 5, 2019 at 9:18 am

I don't know that it's so much"free markets," as the financialization of the economy, where money has mutated free a medium of exchange and necessary tool, to the end goal of creating as much notational wealth, as the purpose of markets.
Money largely functions as a contract, where the asset is ultimately backed by a debt. So in order to create the asset, similar amounts of debt have to be generated.
For one thing, it creates a centripedial effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of the community, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Since finance functions the value circulation mechanism of society, this is like the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get. The Ancients used debt nubiles to reset this process, but we lack the long term perspective.
The other consequence is the government has been manipulated into being debtor of last resort. Where would those trillions go otherwise and could Wall Street function without the government soaking up so much excess money. The real elephant in the room is the degree public debt backs private wealth.

John Merryman. , November 5, 2019 at 10:49 am

Further note; Since this borrowed money cannot be used to compete with the private sector for what is a finite amount of profitable investments, it is used to blow up whatever other countries incur the wrath of our despots.
As Deep Throat explained, if you want to know what's going on, follow the money.

OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL , November 5, 2019 at 3:29 pm

Whenever I see the term "free markets" bandied about I know it's a framing that fits an ideology but in no way fits the actual facts.

Just like we now have two criminal justice systems, we now have two market systems: crony capitalism, and actual capitalism.

Crony capitalism is for Exxon Mobil; Verizon; Amazon; Raytheon; JP Morgan. Actual capitalism is reserved for the plebes, who get "creative destruction". Mom slipped and fell; the hospital bill arrived and there wasn't enough cash; so they took the house.

It's the obverse of the "socialism" argument. We have socialism across the length and breadth of the economy: more Federal dollars are spent subsidizing fossil fuels than are spent educating children. But heaven forbid Bernie should utter the "S" word, because he's talking about the kind of socialism for you and me.

John Merryman , November 5, 2019 at 5:43 pm

The problem is avoiding that us versus them polarity and show why what is going on is BS. That the markets NEED government debt to function and then waste that collective value. Not that government is some old nanny, trying to quell the 'animal spirits" of the market.
Maintaining infrastructure just isn't as glamorous as guns and bombs. Probably doesn't threaten to kill you, if you don't give it the money, either.
It should be obvious to most that simply pouring more vodka into the punch bowl does not create a healthy economy, just a bunch of vultures picking at the carcass.
Finance does function as the circulation mechanism of the body of the community, just as government, as its executive and regulatory function, is the central nervous system. We had private government before, called monarchy. Now finance is having its 'let them eat cake' moment.
As a medium, money is a public utility, like that other medium of roads. You can have the most expensive car out there, but you still don't own the road.
It's not that society should be either private, or public, but an intelligent mix of both.

rtah100 , November 5, 2019 at 7:20 pm

I want me some o' them debt nubiles! They sound like fun gals / guys/ humans. No wonder you're merry, man!

I'd also like a policy of debt jubilees and I imagine you would too. :-)

The Rev Kev , November 5, 2019 at 9:24 am

Just winging it a bit here but perhaps it might be an idea to map out money flows to help decide how to strengthen America's industrial health. As an example, it might be time to end some subsidies. I understand that there are deliberate tax breaks for corporations that move their manufacturing overseas. Cut them now for a start. Yeah, I know. Closing the barn door too late.
To free up cash for R&D, turn back the clock to 1982 and make stock buybacks once more illegal. Give tax credits to companies that pay for a younger generation of machinist's education. Have the Federal government match dollar-for-dollar money spent on R&D. If the government really wants to free up resources, bring out a law that says that it is illegal for the government to give any subsidies for any corporation with a net worth of $1 billion or more.
But we all know that none of this will ever happen as there are far too many rice bowls involved for this to be done – until it is too late. Oh well.

Leftcoastindie , November 5, 2019 at 11:04 am

"I understand that there are deliberate tax breaks for corporations that move their manufacturing overseas. Cut them now for a start. Yeah, I know. Closing the barn door too late."

Better late than never!

Personally, I think that is the only way to get a handle on this situation – Change the tax laws.

rd , November 5, 2019 at 9:52 am

Some thoughts:

1. Designate industries as targets to retain/recreate significant manufacturing capability in the US – semiconductors, flat screens, solar panels, and pharmaceuticals come to mind. Give them preferential protection with quotas, tariffs etc. instead of just shotgun tariffs. These industries should be forward looking instead of recreating mid 20th century.

2. Integrate this into NAFTA and maybe add Central American countries to it. If we need to use cheap labor, then do it in countries that otherwise provide illegal immigrants to us to build up their economies. Far better than sending the jobs to China, a major global competitor.

3. Fund big science such as NASA etc. A lot of discoveries come out that can then be commercialized with manufacturing inside the US and NAFTA.

Arizona Slim , November 5, 2019 at 9:29 pm

Seconded. Good thoughts, rd.

David J. , November 5, 2019 at 10:03 am

It's very refreshing to read articles of this kind. Thank you.

I'm recently retired and my career consisted of a healthy portion of managerial and executive responsibilities as well as a long denouement of flat out proletarian, worker-drone, pseudo-Taylorized work. (Think Amazon but not at Amazon.) I've experienced, in some detail, what I consider to be both sides of the post WWII dynamic as it relates to technology and who controls the shop floor. Now that I have some time on my hands I've decided to see if I can better understand what appears to be a central contradiction of modern industrial practice and especially what I believe to be misguided efforts by non-industrial corporations to employ industrial-work-process techniques in day-to-day practice.

I'm re-reading David F. Noble's 1984 book, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation , as well as Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy , as a beginning foray into this topic.

It does seem to me that we can do a lot better. A well developed industrial policy should include both a strategy for improving our productive capacity while simultaneously more fairly distributing the fruits of productivity more broadly throughout the population.

This article and the comments are very helpful in pointing the way.

Sam , November 5, 2019 at 10:42 am

For those who have used up their free access to Foreign Policy there's a non-paywalled version of the Pettis article on the Carnegie endowment website.

steven , November 5, 2019 at 12:11 pm

There is so much to like in this post I am going to concentrate on the few points with which I had problems:
1. Any time I hear an economist bemoaning policies which "may retard overall economic growth." I am tempted to just tune out. 'nega-growth', a variant of Amory Lovins' 'Nega-Watts' maybe. But surely not more military Keynesianism, speeded up planned obsolescence and just plain junk!
2. Then there is "the convenient marriage of national security considerations and with international investment and trade." If national security considerations involve insuring circuit boards for more exceptional (SIC) fighting machines like the F35 or for that matter more hydrogen bombs that might actually work, count me out. OTOH if they include, for example, insuring the country has the capability to produce its own medicines and generally any of the goods and services required for national survival, sign me up.

(national security) Then there is 'climate change', brought to us by Exxon Mobile and the century-long pursuit of The Prize in the Middle Eastern deserts.

lyman alpha blob , November 5, 2019 at 1:30 pm

The title hits the nail right on the head.

An anecdote regarding this free market for everything all the time mentality –

My small city's council recently debated whether to pay several tens of thousands of dollars for a "branding" campaign with a PR/marketing company who in the past has dealt with Conde Nast, so read high end clientele. My better half, who is a councilor, argued that spending all that $$$ to attract more tourists wasn't the best use of the city's funds and that we weren't a "brand" to begin with, but a city. We've already had big problems will illegal Airbnb's removing significant amounts of housing from the market and housing costs have skyrocketed in recent years while wages, of course, have not. The city had until relatively recently been a blue collar suburb but that has changed rapidly. My wife tried to make the case that the result of this "branding" was likely to push housing costs even higher and push more long time residents right of of town. The council is pretty liberal, whatever that means these days, and I don't believe there is a pro-business Republican among them. She was still on the losing end of a 6-1 vote in favor of the "branding".

Very good article, however I don't think trying to bring manufacturing back by framing it in terms of 'national security' is a good idea. Although the idea itself is correct, explicitly promoting it this way would just hand more power over to the national security industry and that has not served us well at all in the last two decades.

Susan the Other , November 5, 2019 at 2:53 pm

This was a great summary of rational thinking. Thank you MA. I've been almost depressed this last year or so by the relentless undermining of national sovereignty. Trying to replace it with everything from global supply chains to the ECB to Brexit-free-trade (even without Europe) to private property rights to you name it. Sovereignty is a very basic thing – we agree to it like we agree to our currency. And by that agreement we certainly imply an "Industrial Policy to create an economy for all." How this wisdom got systematically gaslighted is a whole nuther story. I'm glad China didn't get hooked.

Ford Prefect , November 5, 2019 at 3:06 pm

Make America Great Again.

Apparently, Americans don't need flag-making jobs as they will not Make America Great. Trump campaign making banners in China – moving fast to beat tariffs deadline. Although there is the possibility that these are for domestic consumption in China to help rally Chinese hackers to the cause of supporting the Trump campaign, including voting for Trump. That would prove there is No Collusion with Russia.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-2020-campaign-banners-are-being-proudly-produced-in-china-2018-07-25?mod=MW_story_top_stories

Jeremy Grimm , November 5, 2019 at 7:35 pm

This post started off suggesting it's time to toss the "the free market" and I would add that it's time to toss "free trade/globalization" too, but it shifted to discussions of R&D spending, cautions to anti-trust advocates, and considerations of industrial policy and national security.

If R&D spending and productivity increase with scale, and many sectors of the US economy are dominated by a handful of large International Corporations does that mean that US R&D spending and productivity are close to full-scale -- as are the Corporations? How does scaled-up R&D spending reconcile with "massive dividend payouts and unprecedented spending on stock repurchases" and the Corporate prioritization of "short-term profitability"? Should I read the claims about how R&D spending and productivity increase with 'scale' to mean the scale of the R&D spending -- not the scale of the firm? If so what sort of calculations should be made by "antitrust advocates when they call for breaking up big tech" if I separate the scale of a firm from the scale of the R&D spending? Does it matter where the R&D is done? Haven't many of the large International Corporations moved their software development and R&D offshore too? ["Software retention"? -- What "software retention"?]

"Likewise, the problem in both the EU and the U.S. is not the size of these companies generated by national developmentalism, but a size-neutral form of national regulation that precludes these companies from stifling competition." What sort of industrial policy will compel International Cartels to play nice with domestic small and medium-sized businesses? Will that industrial policy be tied with some kind of changes to the 'free market' for politicians, prosecutors, courts, and regulators?

If we sell it here, but we don't make it here any more then what kind of industrial policy will rebuild the factories, the base of industrial capital, skills, and technical know-how? It will take more than trade disputes or currency rate of exchange tricks, or R&D spending, or targeted spending on a few DoD programs to rebuild US Industry. Shouldn't an industrial policy address the little problem of the long distance splaying of industries across seas and nations, the narrowing and consolidation of supply chains for the parts used the products still 'made in the usa'? If the US started protecting its 'infant industry' I think that might impact the way a lot of countries will run their economies. This would affect a basis for our international hegemony. And if we don't protect our industry, which will have to be re-built and raised from the razed factory buildings scattered around this country, how would it ever reach the size and complexity needed to prosper again?

cnchal , November 5, 2019 at 10:05 pm

Lots of great questions, with no real answers.

When the government subsidize R&D here, what reason would there be for the resultant products that come from that R&D, be made here? In Canada the SRED (Scientific Research and Experimental Development) tax credits are used by companies to develop products that are then manufactured in China. No Canadian production worker will ever see an hour of labor from those subsidies. That result is baked into the R&D cake.

As you point out, "many of the large International Corporations moved their software development and R&D offshore too". What stops them from co-mingling the subsidies and scamming the system for their benefit, since everything done to favor big business resolves to a scam on the peasants.

[Nov 02, 2019] Eveen Obama slams 'wokeness'

Notable quotes:
"... America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity of her own people. ..."
"... @Alligator Ed ..."
Nov 02, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

identity politics icon himself

"This idea of purity and you're never compromised and you're always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly," Obama said, to some laughs from the crowd.
"The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws." he continued.

Obama cited college campuses and social media as a breeding ground for wokeness.

"One danger I see among young people particularly on college campuses," he said, "I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media, there is this sense sometimes the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that's enough."

Obama then directly poked fun at 'woke' keyboard warriors:

"Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb or then, I can sit back and feel good about myself: 'You see how woke I was? I called you out.'" he mocked.

Here are a few callouts.. @lizzyh7

People who do good stuff dont bomb 7 countries

-- Ruth Bader Joinersburg (@JuboktimusPrime) October 30, 2019

Or throw citizens in dog kennels for the oil companies.

Or hire lobbyists in nearly every single cabinet position.

#2 Go on ahead and mock all you want. Those of us who see you for what you are will never stop seeing it and calling you out on it. Boohoo mofo.

up 24 users have voted. --

America is a pathetic nation; a fascist state fueled by the greed, malice, and stupidity of her own people.
- strife delivery


Alligator Ed on Wed, 10/30/2019 - 7:47pm

snoop, give the guy a break

@snoopydawg He only filled 12 of the 13 Citigroup nominees. A real sell-out Neolib/neocon woulda done all 13.

13's an unlucky number? Yeah. So is number 44.

#2.1

People who do good stuff dont bomb 7 countries

-- Ruth Bader Joinersburg (@JuboktimusPrime) October 30, 2019

Or throw citizens in dog kennels for the oil companies.

Or hire lobbyists in nearly every single cabinet position.

Wally on Thu, 10/31/2019 - 9:05am
What's this Obama lovin' stuff, Alligator Ed?

@Alligator Ed

A veritable Mr. Aloha, huh?

In a nutshell, Obama is saying we all need a little more aloha spirit -- being respectful & caring for one another. Not being so quick to judge. Not seeing everything as black/white. I hope you'll join me in bringing the spirit of aloha to the White House. https://t.co/tYADx6Dzqs

-- Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 30, 2019

#2.1.1 He only filled 12 of the 13 Citigroup nominees. A real sell-out Neolib/neocon woulda done all 13.

13's an unlucky number? Yeah. So is number 44.

Cant Stop the M... on Thu, 10/31/2019 - 2:07pm
My comment elsewhere in this essay

@snoopydawg

should not be taken to mean disagreement with your excellent points here, snoop.

#2.1

People who do good stuff dont bomb 7 countries

-- Ruth Bader Joinersburg (@JuboktimusPrime) October 30, 2019

Or throw citizens in dog kennels for the oil companies.

Or hire lobbyists in nearly every single cabinet position.

Wally on Wed, 10/30/2019 - 4:14pm
Promises, promises

@lizzyh7

Obama made some pretty campaign finance promises in the 2008 primary, and then did an about-face during the general, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the usual suspects. Then he declined to prosecute the bankers. Let's not do that again.

-- Meagan Day (@meaganmday) September 24, 2019


Bernie Sanders on Elizabeth Warren's work for big corporations such as advising Dow Chemical:

"I'll let the American people make that judgment. I've never worked for a corporation. I've never carried their baggage in the U.S. Senate." pic.twitter.com/yV9TRw7jPB

-- BERNforBernie2020 (@BernForBernie20) October 29, 2019

#2 Go on ahead and mock all you want. Those of us who see you for what you are will never stop seeing it and calling you out on it. Boohoo mofo.

snoopydawg on Wed, 10/30/2019 - 9:08pm
Have you seen how the Bernie tweet is being played?

@Wally

People are defending Warbama's helping DOW screw women who had breast cancer out of their settlement. It's absolutely sickening to see people defending the indefensible. "She needed the experience." WTAF does that even mean?

#2.1

Obama made some pretty campaign finance promises in the 2008 primary, and then did an about-face during the general, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from the usual suspects. Then he declined to prosecute the bankers. Let's not do that again.

-- Meagan Day (@meaganmday) September 24, 2019

Bernie Sanders on Elizabeth Warren's work for big corporations such as advising Dow Chemical:

"I'll let the American people make that judgment. I've never worked for a corporation. I've never carried their baggage in the U.S. Senate." pic.twitter.com/yV9TRw7jPB

-- BERNforBernie2020 (@BernForBernie20) October 29, 2019

Cant Stop the M... on Thu, 10/31/2019 - 2:02pm
Barack is intelligent enough to know that the current brand

@lizzyh7

of identity politics is bullshit. He's offended enough by irrationality that he's willing to comment on that in public--now that he's out of the Presidency and doesn't have to win any more elections.

However, none of that would stop him (or did stop him) using that kind of identity politics to the hilt for his own political advantage.

#2 Go on ahead and mock all you want. Those of us who see you for what you are will never stop seeing it and calling you out on it. Boohoo mofo.

[Oct 31, 2019] A Union Is an Equalization of Power

Oct 31, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

"A Union Is an Equalization of Power" [ Portside ]. "When US workers try to unionize, roughly a third of their employers engage in retaliatory firings . A union organizer today has a one-in-five to one-in-seven chance of losing their job while trying to secure the ability to bargain collectively."

"Getty fire: Housekeepers and gardeners go to work despite the flames" [ Los Angeles Times ]. "Carmen Solano didn't know a brush fire had erupted Monday near the neighborhood where she worked. She simply left at 6 a.m. for her job cleaning a house on a street of multimillion-dollar homes. Carrying a red backpack filled with tortillas, bananas, water and her lunch, Solano arrived at the North Robinwood Drive home in a taxi shared with other housekeepers. 'There's a lot of smoke,' the driver said, as he dropped off the Guatemalan immigrant in the choking ash of the Getty fire. Normally, Solano works at the home on Wednesday, but the owner had asked her to come Monday. Dressed in a pink sweater and pink sweatpants, she rang the doorbell over and over. No response. By her feet, a jack-o'-lantern grinned. As she waited at the front door, she realized she'd either left her phone on her dresser at home or in the taxi. Solano was stranded. Ash rained down, speckling her braided hair white." • Not that her employers could have called her, before they left their multimillion-dollar home.

"Uber, Lyft, DoorDash launch a $90-million fight against California labor law" [ Los Angeles Times ]. "[A] trio of Silicon Valley sharing-economy companies on Tuesday unveiled a ballot measure to exclude many of those they pay for work from being considered benefits-earning employees. The proposal, which Uber, Lyft and DoorDash intend to qualify for the statewide ballot next November, states that an 'app-based driver is an independent contractor' as long as a series of conditions are met by a company. The initiative says drivers will be guaranteed a minimum amount of pay as well as insurance to cover work-related injuries and auto accidents. And it lays out details for healthcare subsidies, protections against on-the-job harassment or discrimination and a system to enforce some workplace rights." • Uh huh. No problem at all, having Silicon Valley goons write labor legislation.

[Oct 31, 2019] Open Borders A New Report Shows Almost 70 Million U.S. Residents Are Speaking Something Other Than English

Oct 31, 2019 | www.redstate.com

A few years ago, in response to the notion of a resolution naming English as the country's official language, a prominent Democratic politician said it wasn't necessary -- it's already obvious.

Is it set to remain so?

As noted by ConservativeReview.com, a report by the Center for Immigration Studies indicates there's a whole lotta people speaking somethin' else, at least at home.

Conservative Review submits an interesting proposal:

Imagine if the American people were told in 1980 that the non-English-speaking population in America would triple and rise to a level that is greater than the population of France.

That statement comes in response to CIS's implication of 67.3 million people speaking a foreign language at home in America.

As per numbers from the 2018 American Community Survey, that's roughly 21.9% of U.S. residents.

CR observes a powerful surge:

It's not just the sheer number of foreign language speakers that is shocking; it's the trend. The number has tripled since 1980 and doubled since 1990. The foreign-born population has grown seven times as fast as the native-born population since 1980. But even since 2010, when the foreign population had already ballooned, it has still grown twice as fast as the native-born population over the past eight years.

If you're curious about the distribution of ESL (or English as No Language) residents, in nine states, the digits top 25%:

California 45%
Texas 36%
New Mexico 34%
New Jersey 32%
New York 31%
Nevada 31%
Florida 30%
Arizona 28%
Hawaii 28%

How do things fare in the five largest cities? The buncha peeps eschewing the ways of America's motherland at home breaks down like this obtener una carga de LA Sorry -- I mean, get a load of LA:

Los Angeles 59%
Houston 50%
New York City 49%
Phoenix 38%
Chicago 36%

Among foreign-language use, in terms of popularity, Spanish dominates like the Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics: Español's grown 12% since 2010, and it hits the boards with approx. 62%.

In fact, there are more Spanish-speakers in the U.S. than in any Latin American country -- short of Mexico, Argentina, and Columbia.

Chinese snags 2nd place, with 3.5 million moving mouths.

The fastest growing languages: those from India and Islamic countries.

Arabic speakers have grown 46% in only eight years.

Since 2000, they've doubled.

If all this signals a mere skyrocketing of bilingualism, then good for America: It's becoming more sophisticated.

On the other hand, if it points to a cave-in of inglés , that's quite a different trajectory.

And with 2020 Democrats wanting to do away with that quaint notion of protected borders, we're not sure to have millions more mastering the King's any time soon.

It seems to me that language is one thing we need to share -- it's the way we connect, in order to be One Nation Under God.

Presently, we're on our way to One Nation Under Dios/bog/Déu/xudo/Deus/Bondye/Ilaah/Tanrı/ღმერთი/परमेश्वर/하나님/พระเจ้า/الله.

And while all those words are, of course, beautiful to know and use, that's gonna be one big-a** dollar bill.

[Oct 29, 2019] Blame the Policies, Not the Robots

Oct 29, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , October 26, 2019 at 11:59 AM

http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/blame-the-policies-not-the-robots

October 23, 2019

Blame the Policies, Not the Robots
By Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker - Washington Post

The claim that automation is responsible for massive job losses has been made in almost every one of the Democratic debates. In the last debate, technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang told of automation closing stores on Main Street and of self-driving trucks that would shortly displace "3.5 million truckers or the 7 million Americans who work in truck stops, motels, and diners" that serve them. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (Hawaii) suggested that the "automation revolution" was at "the heart of the fear that is well-founded."

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) argued that trade was a bigger culprit than automation, the fact-checker at the Associated Press claimed she was "off" and that "economists mostly blame those job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals."

In fact, such claims about the impact of automation are seriously at odds with the standard data that we economists rely on in our work. And because the data so clearly contradict the narrative, the automation view misrepresents our actual current challenges and distracts from effective solutions.

Output-per-hour, or productivity, is one of those key data points. If a firm applies a technology that increases its output without adding additional workers, its productivity goes up, making it a critical diagnostic in this space.

Contrary to the claim that automation has led to massive job displacement, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that productivity is growing at a historically slow pace. Since 2005, it has been increasing at just over a 1 percent annual rate. That compares with a rate of almost 3 percent annually in the decade from 1995 to 2005.

This productivity slowdown has occurred across advanced economies. If the robots are hiding from the people compiling the productivity data at BLS, they are also managing to hide from the statistical agencies in other countries.

Furthermore, the idea that jobs are disappearing is directly contradicted by the fact that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years. The recovery that began in June 2009 is the longest on record. To be clear, many of those jobs are of poor quality, and there are people and places that have been left behind, often where factories have closed. But this, as Warren correctly claimed, was more about trade than technology.

Consider, for example, the "China shock" of the 2000s, when sharply rising imports from countries with much lower-paid labor than ours drove up the U.S. trade deficit by 2.4 percentage points of GDP (almost $520 billion in today's economy). From 2000 to 2007 (before the Great Recession), the country lost 3.4 million manufacturing jobs, or 20 percent of the total.

Addressing that loss, Susan Houseman, an economist who has done exhaustive, evidence-based analysis debunking the automation explanation, argues that "intuitively and quite simply, there doesn't seem to have been a technology shock that could have caused a 20 to 30 percent decline in manufacturing employment in the space of a decade." What really happened in those years was that policymakers sat by while millions of U.S. factory workers and their communities were exposed to global competition with no plan for transition or adjustment to the shock, decimating parts of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That was the fault of the policymakers, not the robots.

Before the China shock, from 1970 to 2000, the number (not the share) of manufacturing jobs held remarkably steady at around 17 million. Conversely, since 2010 and post-China shock, the trade deficit has stabilized and manufacturing has been adding jobs at a modest pace. (Most recently, the trade war has significantly dented the sector and worsened the trade deficit.) Over these periods, productivity, automation and robotics all grew apace.

In other words, automation isn't the problem. We need to look elsewhere to craft a progressive jobs agenda that focuses on the real needs of working people.

First and foremost, the low unemployment rate -- which wouldn't prevail if the automation story were true -- is giving workers at the middle and the bottom a bit more of the bargaining power they require to achieve real wage gains. The median weekly wage has risen at an annual average rate, after adjusting for inflation, of 1.5 percent over the past four years. For workers at the bottom end of the wage ladder (the 10th percentile), it has risen 2.8 percent annually, boosted also by minimum wage increases in many states and cities.

To be clear, these are not outsize wage gains, and they certainly are not sufficient to reverse four decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality. But they are evidence that current technologies are not preventing us from running hotter-for-longer labor markets with the capacity to generate more broadly shared prosperity.

National minimum wage hikes will further boost incomes at the bottom. Stronger labor unions will help ensure that workers get a fairer share of productivity gains. Still, many toiling in low-wage jobs, even with recent gains, will still be hard-pressed to afford child care, health care, college tuition and adequate housing without significant government subsidies.

Contrary to those hawking the automation story, faster productivity growth -- by boosting growth and pretax national income -- would make it easier to meet these challenges. The problem isn't and never was automation. Working with better technology to produce more efficiently, not to mention more sustainably, is something we should obviously welcome.

The thing to fear isn't productivity growth. It's false narratives and bad economic policy.

Paine -> anne... , October 27, 2019 at 06:54 AM
The domestic manufacturing sector and emplyment both shrank because of net off shoring of formerly domestic production

Simple fact


The net job losses are not evenly distributed Nor are the lost jobs to over seas primarily low wage rate jobs

Okay so we need special federal actions in areas with high concentrations of off-shoring induced job loses

But more easily we can simply raise service sector raises by heating up demand

Caution

Two sectors need controls however: Health and housing. Otherwise wage gains will be drained by rent sucking operations in these two sectors

Mr. Bill -> Paine... , October 28, 2019 at 02:21 PM
It is easy to spot the ignorance of those that have enough. Comfort reprises a certain arrogance.

The aura of deservedly is palpable. There are those here that would be excommunicated by society when the troubles come to their town.

[Oct 24, 2019] Can Europe Be Saved From Demographic Doom by Alessandra Bocchi

Notable quotes:
"... Baudet also argues that establishment politicians push for immigration because they favor a globalized worldview under which national identities will disappear: "They genuinely believe we should move beyond religious and national identities to become global citizens." Baudet, however, thinks such policies would be disastrous, not only because they risk plunging Europe into "tremendous conflict," but also because they risk creating a "brain drain" from Africa and the Middle East. ..."
Oct 24, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

... ... ...

The leader of the Spanish Vox party, Santiago Abascal, argued that immigration is a political euphemism for the trafficking of cheap labor into Europe so that multinational companies and financial interests can increase their profits: "The establishment argues that our system must be maintained in the face of an aging population, but mass immigration renders work increasingly precarious." According to Abascal, the 2015 refugee crisis was used as a pretext to further the economic ambitions of Brussels bureaucrats at the expense of Europe's working population, especially its youth.

Baudet also argues that establishment politicians push for immigration because they favor a globalized worldview under which national identities will disappear: "They genuinely believe we should move beyond religious and national identities to become global citizens." Baudet, however, thinks such policies would be disastrous, not only because they risk plunging Europe into "tremendous conflict," but also because they risk creating a "brain drain" from Africa and the Middle East.

The solution to this problem, many of these conservative leaders say, is to provide motivation and assistance to Europe's young people so they have their own children. Abascal uses Hungary as a model, where , under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, families that have three or more children are given government grants to buy houses and no longer have to pay income tax. The state finances free nurseries, allowing women to re-enter the workforce without having to worry about childcare costs. In addition, Hungary has inscribed Christianity in its constitution to create a strong religious identity, providing its youth with a sense of direction and meaning.

The problem of low birthrates ultimately lies internally, within Europe's culture and social life. A young generation that doesn't aspire to have families and that's increasingly alienated from any sense of community has driven much of the crisis. Whether Europe can be salvaged and revived is yet to be seen.

Alessandra Bocchi is a freelance journalist focusing on foreign policy in North Africa, Europe, and the U.S. She has been covering the protests in Hong Kong. Follow her on Twitter @AlessaBocchi .

[Oct 23, 2019] The treason of the intellectuals The Undoing of Thought by Roger Kimball

Highly recommended!
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism, to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
Dec 01, 1992 | www.moonofalabama.org

On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.

When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals , 1 sums it up neatly.

The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."

According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions: precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions, class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close altogether.

Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.

J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement, or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action ."

In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success." It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds!

In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."

In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche. His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."

Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated "one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,

to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.

T he Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky, erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication, Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.

In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée 2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity."

Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.

True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the philosophy of the Enlightenment."

Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s] some recognition, not idolatry."

In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."

The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.

The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its current forms of debasement.

In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions.

The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes.

Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s.

Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment. Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine -- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .

The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."

The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),

because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality, the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.

It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.

W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its end or goal.

The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside, by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason of the intellectuals."

There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic" cult.

One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?

What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced? In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."

To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality" and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim, in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly think of objecting.

Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,

hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels (whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.

F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.

In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare."

Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:

A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller, are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.

The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its own terms.

When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity, is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.

For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this." The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."

What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.

"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars refuse to acknowledge.

There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.

Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men."

Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier: Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth." Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.

1 The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928. This translation is still in print from Norton.

2 La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).

Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)

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[Oct 20, 2019] Growing Secularism Is Pushing Religion, Traditional Values Aside, AG Barr Warns by Janita Kan

Notable quotes:
"... "Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic," he said. ..."
Oct 12, 2019 | aim4truth.org
Share U.S. Attorney General William Barr raised concerns about the increase in secularism in society in a speech on Oct. 11, speaking about how that has contributed to a number of social issues plaguing communities across the nation.

Barr, who delivered his remarks to students at the University of Notre Dame's law school, drew attention to the comprehensive effort to drive away religion and traditional moral systems in society and to push secularism in their place.

"We see the growing ascendancy of secularism and the doctrine of moral relativism," Barr said.

He said that the forces of secularism are using mass media and popular culture, the promotion of greater reliance on government intervention for social problems, and the use of legal and judicial institutions to eliminate traditional moral norms.

Barr explored several of the consequences of "this moral upheaval," highlighting its effect on all parts of society.

"Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic," he said.

"Over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses," he said. "But I won't dwell on the bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order has coincided, and, as I believe, has brought with it, immense suffering and misery."

Barr said religion has come under increasing attack over the past 50 years, underscoring how secularists are using society's institutions to systematically destroy religion and stifle opposing views.

"Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular orthodoxy but also to drown out and silence opposing voices," he said.

He said that people are moving away from "micro-morality" observed by Christians, a system of morality that seeks to transform the world by focusing on their own personal morality and transformation. Instead, he said the modern secularists are pushing a "macro-morality," which focuses on political causes and collective actions to address social problems.

"In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct become so high that society ultimately recoils and reevaluates the path it is on," Barr said.

"But today, in the face of all the increasing pathologies, instead of addressing the underlying cause, we have cast the state in the role as the alleviator of bad consequences. We call on the state to mitigate the social costs of personal conduct and irresponsibility. So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility but abortion; the reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites."

"The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage, and while we think we are resolving problems, we [actually] are underwriting them."

He also pointed out how the law has been used to "break down traditional moral values and establish moral relativism as the new orthodoxy," giving the example of how laws have been used to aggressively force religious people and entities to subscribe to practices and policies that are antithetical to their faith .

"The forces of secularism have been continually seeking to eliminate the laws that reflect traditional moral norms," he said.

Barr also highlighted the role of religion in society, saying it promotes moral discipline while it influences people's conduct.

"Religion also helps promote moral discipline in society. We're all fallen. We don't automatically conform our conduct to moral rules, even when we know that they're good for us. But religion helps teach, train, and habituate people to want what's good," he said.

"It doesn't do this primarily by formal laws -- that is, by coercive power -- it does this through moral education and by framing society's informal rules -- the customs and traditions which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages. In other words, religion helps frame a moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline."

Follow Janita on Twitter: @janitakan

[Oct 20, 2019] I read somewhere James Gandolfini [The Sopranos], actively did a lot of stuff for military veterans

Oct 20, 2019 | www.unz.com

Daniel Rich , says: October 17, 2019 at 5:16 am GMT

@Rurik O.T

I read somewhere James Gandolfini [The Sopranos], actively did a lot of stuff for [military] veterans.

eah , says: October 17, 2019 at 7:05 am GMT
@eah
Counterinsurgency , says: October 17, 2019 at 9:00 am GMT
@J. O. Step 1 in ending hunger in America:
Stop importing hungry foreigners who can't earn a living here.
Do that and somebody might take you seriously. As it is, you're morally despicable.

Counterinsurgency

[Oct 20, 2019] Putin sarcastic remark on Western neoliberal multiculturalism

Highly recommended!
Oct 17, 2019 | www.unz.com

"If minorities prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law.

Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell "discrimination"

-Vladimir Putin

[Oct 15, 2019] A new Homeland Security rule to screen out immigrants who are at risk of becoming dependent on government benefits was put on hold by a federal judge until there's a final decision whether the so-called green card wealth test is legal.

Oct 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , October 11, 2019 at 09:32 PM

(There's 'that word' again.)

Judge says Trump's immigrant wealth
test is 'repugnant,' blocks its enforcement
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2019/10/11/judge-says-trump-immigrant-wealth-test-repugnant/pecnue4UQPJ5jcZcp7t5IO/story.html?event=event25 via @BostonGlobe
Chris Dolmetsch and Edvard Pettersson - Bloomberg News - October 11

A new Homeland Security rule to screen out immigrants who are at risk of becoming dependent on government benefits was put on hold by a federal judge until there's a final decision whether the so-called green card wealth test is legal.

US District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan said Friday that the rule, which was set to go into effect Oct. 15, can't be implemented nationwide.

The rule, announced in August, replaces a current policy that says immigrants shouldn't receive more than half their income from cash benefits, such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income from Social Security.

Under the new more expansive definition, immigrants aren't supposed to use public benefits like Medicaid, public housing assistance, or food stamps for more than 12 months over a 36-month period. Immigration officials will consider an immigrant's age, health, education, and wealth to see if they are at risk of becoming a "public charge."

Immigrant rights' advocacy groups and several states have argued that the new rule conflicts with existing immigration laws and would drive up the cost of providing health care and other services to immigrants.

Daniels blocked the rule following a. August lawsuit filed by the states of New York, Connecticut and Vermont and the city of New York, which alleged that the policy specifically targets immigrants of color. He ruled that the Department of Homeland Security went beyond its authority under federal immigration law.

"Defendants do not articulate why they are changing the public charge definition, why this new definition is needed now, or why the definition set forth in the rule -- which has absolutely no support in the histroy of U.S. Immigration law -- is reasonable," Daniels said, calling the rule "repugnant to the American Dream of the opportunity for prosperity and success through hard work and upward mobility." ...

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to Fred C. Dobbs... , October 12, 2019 at 02:47 AM
(Previously...)

Reuters - October 7

Judge's order releasing Trump's tax returns and blasting 'repugnant' immunity claim put on hold https://reut.rs/30XyBSO

[Oct 15, 2019] Economist's View The Opportunity Cost of Computer Programming

Oct 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

From Reuters Odd News :

Man gets the poop on outsourcing , By Holly McKenna, May 2, Reuters

Computer programmer Steve Relles has the poop on what to do when your job is outsourced to India. Relles has spent the past year making his living scooping up dog droppings as the "Delmar Dog Butler." "My parents paid for me to get a (degree) in math and now I am a pooper scooper," "I can clean four to five yards in a hour if they are close together." Relles, who lost his computer programming job about three years ago ... has over 100 clients who pay $10 each for a once-a-week cleaning of their yard.

Relles competes for business with another local company called "Scoopy Do." Similar outfits have sprung up across America, including Petbutler.net, which operates in Ohio. Relles says his business is growing by word of mouth and that most of his clients are women who either don't have the time or desire to pick up the droppings. "St. Bernard (dogs) are my favorite customers since they poop in large piles which are easy to find," Relles said. "It sure beats computer programming because it's flexible, and I get to be outside,"

[Oct 13, 2019] American STD Cases Rise To Record High

Oct 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

fliebinite , 1 hour ago link

Maybe the fastest way to reduce STDs is to stop promoting homosexuality in our schools. Since HIV inhibitors were created and HIV virtually cured, the gay community has been in overdrive on the sexual practices that causes most of the STDs on the report. Just like the 80's the doctors in these studies suggest a massive increase in spending across everyone when in fact, you can reduce the rate of these diseases massively by targeting this subsector of society that continues these filthy practices.

"In 2014, gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men accounted for 83% of primary and secondary syphilis cases where sex of sex partner was known in the United States. Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men often get other STDs, including chlamydia and gonorrhea infections. HPV (Human papillomavirus) , the most common STD in the United States, is also a concern for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. Some types of HPV can cause genital and anal warts and some can lead to the development of anal and oral cancers. Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men are 17 times more likely to get anal cancer than heterosexual men. Men who are HIV-positive are even more likely than those who do not have HIV to get anal cancer."

https://www.cdc.gov/msmhealth/STD.htm

[Oct 08, 2019] Job Growth Remains Slow in September

Oct 08, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , October 04, 2019 at 09:24 AM

http://cepr.net/data-bytes/jobs-bytes/jobs-2019-10

October 4, 2019

Job Growth Remains Slow in September, but Unemployment Rate Falls to 3.5 Percent
By Dean Baker

Manufacturing employment hit a record low as a share of private sector employment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 136,000 jobs in September, after adding 168,000 in August. The 157,000 average for the last three months is considerably slower than the 179,000 average for the last year, but this slowing is expected in a tight labor market.

The September job growth led to a 0.2 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate to 3.5 percent, a fifty-year low. The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) rose 0.1 percentage point to 61.0 percent, a new high for the recovery that is 0.6 percentage points above the year-ago level.

The EPOPs for both prime-age (ages 25 to 54) men and women rose by 0.1 percentage point in September. The 74.0 percent rate for women is a new high for the recovery, although still below the peak of 74.9 percent hit in April of 2000. The 86.4 percent rate for men is 0.3 percentage points below the March level and 1.6 percentage points below the prerecession peak.

The unemployment rate for Hispanics fell to 3.9 percent, the lowest on record, 0.6 percentage points below the year-ago level. The unemployment rate for workers without a high school degree also fell sharply to 4.8 percent, 0.8 percentage points below the year-ago level. The share of unemployment due to voluntary quits, a measure of workers' confidence in their labor market prospects, jumped 1.7 percentage points to 14.6 percent, a level more typical for a strong labor market.

Other data in the household survey were more mixed. While the mean duration of unemployment spells edged down 0.1 weeks to 22.0 weeks, the median duration rose 0.5 weeks to 9.4 weeks. The share of long-term unemployed also rose by 2.1 percentage points to 22.7 percent.

The number of involuntary part-time workers edged down by 31,000. The number of workers choosing to work part-time also fell, dropping by 124,000 in September. The percentage of the workforce choosing to work part-time has been dropping over the last year, after rising sharply following the implementation of the ACA. This likely due to workers having greater difficulty getting health care outside of employment.

Another negative item is an increase in the number of multiple job holders, especially among women. The share of employed women who have multiple jobs rose to 5.9 percent, 0.5 percentage points above the year-ago level. The vast majority of these women report that they work a second job in addition to a full-time job.

The picture on the establishment side is more negative. Slower job growth is to be expected in a tighter labor market, but it has virtually stopped altogether on the goods-producing side. The goods-producing sector has added a total of just 2,000 jobs over the last three months, with construction adding 8,000 jobs, manufacturing adding 4,000, and mining and logging losing 10,000. A big part of this is the fallout from the trade war and the resulting drop in investment. Also, lower world oil prices are a big hit to the mining sector. The manufacturing share of private sector employment sunk to a new all-time low in September of 9.96 percent.

On the service side, job growth in the high-paying professional and technical services sector has slowed sharply in the last two months, added an average of 13,900, compared to an average of 23,900 over the last year. Restaurant employment has also slowed sharply, with the sector adding an average of just 1,500 jobs over the last four months. This should be expected in a tight labor market, where workers have higher-paying options. Retail lost 11,400 jobs in September, bringing its losses over the last year to 60,900, just under 0.4 percent of total employment.

A big job gainer in recent months is health care, which added 38,800 jobs in September after adding 37,200 in August. The sector has accounted for almost a third of job growth in the private sector over the last two months.

In contrast to the evidence of a tight labor market in the household survey, wage growth appears to be slowing slightly. The average hourly wage rose 2.9 percent over the last year, although the annualized rate of wage growth, comparing the last three months (July, August, September) with the prior three months (April, May, June), was a slightly higher 3.4 percent.

[Graph]

This is a generally positive report with some serious warning signs. The goods sector is very weak and likely to get weaker, according to a wide variety of measures of manufacturing. The evidence of slowing wage growth is also striking in a labor market with 3.5 percent unemployment.

[Oct 06, 2019] Devop created huge opportunities for a new generation of snake oil salesman

Highly recommended!
Oct 06, 2019 | www.reddit.com

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"We will utilize Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, Cloud technologies, python, data science and blockchain to achieve business value"

[Sep 26, 2019] The Two-Income Trap Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi

Notable quotes:
"... Meanwhile, greed -- once best known for its place on the list of Seven Deadly Sins -- became a point of pride for Wall Street's Masters of the Universe. With a sophisticated smile, the rallying cry of the rich and fashionable became "1 got mine -- the rest of you are on your own." ..."
Sep 26, 2019 | www.amazon.com

And yet America's policies were headed in the wrong direction. The big banks kept lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would gut families' last refuge in the bankruptcy courts -- the same bill we describe in this book. (It went by the awful name Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, but it should have been called the Gut the Safety Net and Pay OIT the Big Banks Act.). The proposed law would carefully preserve bankruptcy protections for the likes of Donald Trump and his friends, while ordinary families that had been crushed by debts from medical problems or job losses were thrown under the bus.

When we wrote The Two-Income Trap, it was already pretty clear that the big banks would win this battle. The fight kept going for two more years, but the tide of blame-the-unlucky combined with relentless lobbying and campaign contributions finally overwhelmed Congress.

In 2005, the Wall Street banking industry got the changes they wanted, and struggling families lost out. After the law was rewritten, about 800,000 families a year that once would have turned to bankruptcy to try to get back on their feet were shut out of the system.1

That was 800,000 families -- mostly people who had lost jobs, suffered a medical catastrophe, or gone through a divorce or death in the family. And now, instead of reorganizing their finances and building some security, they were at the mercy of debt collectors who called twenty or thirty times a day -- and could keep on calling and calling for as long as they thought they could squeeze another nickel from a desperate family.

As it turned out, the new law tore a big hole in the last safety net for working families, just in time for the Great Recession. Meanwhile, the bank regulators kept playing blind and deaf while the housing bubble inflated. Once it burst, the economy collapsed. The foreclosure problem we flagged back in 2003 rolled into a global economic meltdown by 2008, as millions of people lost their homes, and millions more lost their jobs, their savings, and their chance at a secure retirement. Overall, the total cost of the crash was estimated as high as S14 trillion.2

Meanwhile, America's giant banks got bailed out, CEO pay shot up, the stock market roared back, and the investor class got rich beyond even their own fevered dreams.3

A generation ago, a fortune-teller might have predicted a very different future. With so many mothers headed into the workforce, Americans might have demanded a much heavier investment in public day care, extended school days, and better family leave policies. Equal pay for equal work might have become sacrosanct. As wages stagnated, there might have been more urgency for raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and expanding Social Security. And our commitment to affordable college and universal preschool might have become unshakeable.

But the political landscape was changing even faster than the new economic realities. Government was quickly becoming an object of ridicule, even to the president of the United States. Instead of staking his prestige on making government more accountable and efficient, Ronald Reagan repeated his famous barb "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are Tin from the government and I'm here to help."'8 After generations of faithfulness to the promise of the Constitution to promote general welfare, at the moment when the economic foundations of the middle class began to tremble, our efforts to strengthen each other and offer a helping hand had become the butt of a national joke.

Those who continued to believe in what we could do together faced another harsh reality: much of government had been hijacked by the rich and powerful. Regulators who were supposed to watch out for the public interest shifted their loyalties, smiling benignly as giant banks jacked up short-term profits by cheating families, looking the other way as giant power companies scam mod customers, and partying with industry executives as oil companies cut comers on safety and environmental rules. In this book we told one of those stories, about how a spineless Congress rewrote the bankruptcy laws to enrich a handful of credit card companies.

Meanwhile, greed -- once best known for its place on the list of Seven Deadly Sins -- became a point of pride for Wall Street's Masters of the Universe. With a sophisticated smile, the rallying cry of the rich and fashionable became "1 got mine -- the rest of you are on your own."

These shifts played nicely into each other. Every' attack on "big government" meant families lost an ally, and the rules tilted more and These shifts played nicely into each other. Every attack on "big government" meant families lost an ally, and the rules tilted more and more in favor of those who could hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers. Lower taxes for the wealthy -- and more money in the pockets of those who subscribed to the greed-is-good mantra. And if the consequence meant less money for preschools or public colleges or disability coverage -- the things that would create more security for an overstretched middle class -- then that was just too bad.

Little by little, as the middle class got deeper and deeper in trouble, government stopped working for the middle class, or at least it stopped working so hard. The rich paid a little less and kept a little more. Even if they didn't say it in so many words, they got exactly what they wanted. Remember the 90 percent -- America's middle class, working class, and poor -- the ones who got 70 percent of all income growth from 1935 through 1980?

From 1980-2014, the 90 percent got nothing.9 None. Zero. Zip. Not a penny in income growth. Instead, for an entire generation, the top 10 percent captured all of the income growth in the entire country. l(X) percent.

It didn't have to be this way. The Two-Income Trap is about families that w'ork hard, but some things go wrong along the way -- illnesses and job losses, and maybe some bad decisions. But this isn't what has put the middle class on the ropes. After all, people have gotten sick and lost jobs and made less-than-perfect decisions for generations -- and vet, for generations America's middle class expanded. creating more opportunity to build real economic security and pass on a brighter future to their children.

What would it take to help strengthen the middle class? The problems facing the middle-class family are complex and far-reaching, and the solutions must be too. We wish there could be a simple silver bullet, but after a generation of relentless assault, there just isn't. But there is one overriding idea. Together we can. It's time to say it out loud: a generation of I-got-mine policy-making has failed -- failed miserably, completely, and overwhelmingly. And it's time to change direction before the entire middle class has been replaced by hundreds of millions of Americans barely hanging on by their fingernails.

Americas middle class was built through investments in education, infrastructure, and research -- and by' making sure we all have a safety net. We need to strengthen those building blocks: Step up investments in public education. Rein in the cost of college and cut out- standing student loans. Create universal preschool and affordable child care. Upgrade infrastructure -- mass transit, energy, communications -- to make it more attractive to build good, middle-class jobs here in America. Recognize that the modem economy can be perilous, and a strong safety net is needed now more than ever. Strengthen disability coverage, retirement coverage, and paid sick leave. And for heavens sake, get rid of the awful banker-backed bankruptcy law, so that when things go wrong, families at least have a chance at a fresh start. We welcome the re-issue of The Two-Income Trap because we see the original book as capturing a critical moment, those last few minutes in which the explanation of why so many hardworking, plav-by- tho-mlcs people were in so much trouble was simple: It was their own fault. If only they would just pull up their socks, cinch their belts a little tighter, and stop buying so much stuff, they -- and our country -- would be just fine. That myth has died. And we say', good riddance.

[Sep 26, 2019] Israel Worship Is White Nationalism For Boomers Too Cowardly To Demand Their Own Ethnostate by Amalric de Droevig

Notable quotes:
"... The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion ..."
"... there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there is. ..."
"... White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore. That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result. ..."
"... The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that psychic injury. ..."
"... White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another people's identity and future instead of their own. ..."
"... Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair in the white, Western mind. ..."
"... After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level . Israelis are optimistic about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving. ..."
"... that unwholesome obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots, learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said demand , ..."
"... Until whites have a story and a spirit of their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to extinction. ..."
Sep 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion. Nevertheless, whether organic or not, the boomer generation's excessive regard for Israel is today authentic and undeniable. A strong fealty to Israel is deeply entrenched amongst boomer-generation conservatives. Indeed, when it comes to defending Israel and its conduct, many of these types are like samurais on meth. They don't seem to care at all if their entire state or city should devolve into a semi-anarchic New Somalia, but god forbid some Somali congresswoman should lambaste the sacred Jewish state. That simply can't be countenanced here in the land of the free!

Mind you, this article is not meant to constitute a polemic against Israel, or Jewish ethnopolitics for that matter. The BDS movement is just as wrongheaded as Ziocuckoldry, in my humble opinion. Although there is much wrong with Israel, there is plenty right with it as well. Despite what the modern left may believe, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about a state like Israel, one rooted in history, in genes, in religion, and in race. States built around a shared ethnicity or a shared religion (or, as in Israel's case, an ample helping of both) are generally more stable and successful than diverse societies erected upon propositions most people and peoples don't really accept, or leftist values that have ideological quicksand for their foundations.

With that said, there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there is.

White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore. That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result.

The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that psychic injury. Because white boomers possess no group/tribal identity any longer, or collective will, or sense of race pride, or civilizational prospects, because they have been enserfed by a viciously anti-white Cultural Marxist overclass, they have opted to live vicariously through another race. White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another people's identity and future instead of their own. Indeed, just as the cuckold doesn't merely permit another man to penetrate his wife, but actually takes a kind of perverse pleasure in the pleasure of that other man, in large measure by fetishizing his dominance and sexual prowess, the Ziocuck likewise doesn't merely allow his civilization to be debased, he takes an equally perverse pleasure in the triumphs of other peoples and nations, and by so doing imagines, mistakenly of course, that America itself is still as free and proud a nation as those foreign nations he fetishizes.

Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair in the white, Western mind.

Through this sordid, vicarious identitarianism, threats to Jewish lives become threats to their own white lives. Jewish interests become tantamount to their own interests. It is a sad sight to behold anyhow, a people with no sense of dignity or shame, too cowed by political correctness to stand up for their own group interests, too brainwashed to love themselves, too reprogrammed to be themselves, idolizing alien peoples. Nevertheless, the need for belonging in place, time, and history, and for collective purpose, doesn't just go away because Western elites say being white signifies nothing but "hate". As white civilization aborts and hedonizes itself into extinction, as whites practice suicidal altruism and absolute racial denialism, atomized white individuals seek out other histories, other stories, other peoples to attach themselves to and project themselves onto.

White Americans have thus foolishly come to see their own destiny as inseparable from the destiny of a people whose destiny they don't really share. After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level . Israelis are optimistic about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving. As whites in America suffer from various epidemics of despair , their fellow white Americans seem more interested in the imaginary plight of Israelis who can't stop winning military skirmishes, embarrassing their Arab enemies, and unlawfully acquiring land and resources in the Levant. The actual, visceral plight of their own people seems almost an afterthought to most white Americans. The whole affair is frankly bizarre and shameful.

This peculiar psychological phenomenon of vicarious identitarianism is at least partially responsible for the Zioboomer's undying devotion to Israel. Furthermore, that unwholesome obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots, learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said demand , since the white race's many enemies have no intention of saving a place for them or willingly handing them a say in that future). Until whites have a story and a spirit of their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to extinction.

nymom , says: September 26, 2019 at 4:24 am GMT

Well you are almost right.

We can say Israel is the canary in the coal mine for the US. Might be closer to the truth

silviosilver , says: September 26, 2019 at 4:59 am GMT
A related phenomenon is Russia-cucking. White American conservatives who have seen through Jewish bullshit often seem to conclude that the racial predicament in America is hopeless, so they switch to Russia-cucking. Being pro-Russia is obviously more sensible than being pro-Israel, but it's nationalism by proxy all the same.

[Sep 25, 2019] Michael Hudson Asset-Price Inflation and Rent Seeking

Notable quotes:
"... The main culprit for the economy's falling growth rate and the general middle-class economic squeeze is debt - or more specifically, the burden of having to pay it back, with penalties, fees and lower credit ratings. The mainstream press depicts the rising market price of homes as a benefit to homeowners, a capital gam as if they almost were real estate speculators or capitalists in miniature, not wage-eamers running up debt. GDP statisticians include the rise hi valuation of owner-occupied real estate and the rising rents it saves homeowners from having to pay as adding to GDP. ..."
"... "What has occurred is an inversion of values about the proper aim of economies. Today, it is to get rich by means of a financialized rentier economy. From the point of view of rentiers and other investors, the production-and-consumption economy is the overhead. The costs of labor and capital are to be minimized by squeezing out more economic rent. By contrast, our approach treats the production-and-consumption sector as primary, and the FIRE sector and other rent extracting sectors as overhead." ..."
"... "Each debt is a credit on the other side of the balance sheet, because behind each borrower is a lender." ..."
Sep 25, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Those who praise the post-2008 economy as a successful recovery point to the fact that the stock market has soar ed to all-time highs, while the unemployment rate has fallen to a decade-low. But is the stock market a good proxy for how the overall economy is doing? The low reported unemployment rate sidesteps the predominance of minimum-wage jobs. part-time "gig'' work, and the fact that the Federal Reserve's Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 201S reports that 39% of Americans do not have $400 cash available for a medical or other emergency, and that a quarter of adults skipped medical care hi 2018 because they could not afford it. 1 The latest estimates by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that nearly half (48 percent) of households headed by someone 55 and older lack any retirement savings or pension benefits.2 Even in what the press calls an economic boom, most Americans feel stressed and many are chronically angry and worried. According to a 2015 survey by the American Psychological Association, financial worry is the "number one cause of stress in America today."3 The Fed describes them as suffering from '•financial fragility." What is fragile is their economic status and self-worth, teetering 011 the brink of downward mobility. Living hi today's fmancialized economy creates stresses that seem more damaging emotionally than living hi a poor country. America certainly is not a poor counfry, but it has become so debt-ridden, and its wealth and income growth so highly concentrated, that much of its population is emotionally worse off than that of almost any other country hi the world.

The U.S. economy's soaring wealth and income finds its counterpart on the liabilities side of the balance sheet. Rising stock prices have been fueled by corporate stock buyback programs and debt leveraging, not earnings from new tangible investment and employment. And rising real estate prices reflect the decline hi interest rates, enabling a given rental flow to be capitalized hito higher bank loans and market prices. Additionally, the wave of foreclosures 011 junk mortgages and debt- strapped new home buyers has reduced home ownership rates, forcing more of the population into a rental market, whose rising charges for housing have supported general real estate prices. Thus, these capital gains do not reflect a thriving economy, but a higher-cost one that is polarizing between creditors and debtors, property owners and renters, and the financial sector vis-a-vis the rest of the economy.

The main culprit for the economy's falling growth rate and the general middle-class economic squeeze is debt - or more specifically, the burden of having to pay it back, with penalties, fees and lower credit ratings. The mainstream press depicts the rising market price of homes as a benefit to homeowners, a capital gam as if they almost were real estate speculators or capitalists in miniature, not wage-eamers running up debt. GDP statisticians include the rise hi valuation of owner-occupied real estate and the rising rents it saves homeowners from having to pay as adding to GDP. But

2 William E. Gibson, "Nearly Half of Americans 55+ Have No Retirement Savings or Pension Benefits," AARP, March 28, 2019. https://www.aarp.org/retirement/retirement-savings/info-2019/no-retirement-money-saved.html

3 Source: American Psychological Association (2015). "American Psychological Association survey shows money stress weighing on Americans' Health Nationwide," February 4, 2015. http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/02/monev-stiess.aspx.

Steve H. , September 25, 2019 at 8:17 am

"What has occurred is an inversion of values about the proper aim of economies. Today, it is to get rich by means of a financialized rentier economy. From the point of view of rentiers and other investors, the production-and-consumption economy is the overhead. The costs of labor and capital are to be minimized by squeezing out more economic rent. By contrast, our approach treats the production-and-consumption sector as primary, and the FIRE sector and other rent extracting sectors as overhead."

"Each debt is a credit on the other side of the balance sheet, because behind each borrower is a lender."

[Sep 25, 2019] Capitalism, Alone: Four important -- but somewhat hidden -- themes by Branko Milanovic

Sep 25, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , September 24, 2019 at 10:26 AM

https://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/09/capitalism-alone-four-important-but.html

September 24, 2019

Capitalism, Alone: Four important--but somewhat hidden--themes

I review here four important, but perhaps not immediately apparent, themes from my Capitalism, Alone. The book contains many other, more topical, subjects that are likely to attract readers' and reviewers' attention much more than the somewhat abstract or philosophical issues briefly reviewed here.

1. Capitalism as the only mode of production in the world. During the previous high point of the British-led globalization, capitalism shared the world with various feudal or feudal-like systems characterized with unfree labor: forced labor was abolished in Austria-Hungary in 1848, serfdom in Russia in 1861, slavery ended in the US in 1865, and in Brazil only in 1888, And labor tied to land continued to exist in India and to a lesser degree in China. Then, after 1917, capitalism had to share the world with communism which, at its peak, included almost a third of the world population. It is only after 1989, that capitalism is not only a dominant, but the sole, system of organizing production (Chapter 1).

2. The global historical role of communism. The existence of capitalism (economic way to organize society) throughout the world does not imply that the political systems must be organized in the same way everywhere. The origins of political systems are very different. In China and Vietnam, communism was the tool whereby indigenous capitalism was introduced (explained below). The difference in the "genesis" of capitalism, that is, in the way capitalism was "created" in various countries explains why there are at least two types of capitalism today. I am doubtful that there would ever be a single type of capitalism covering the entire globe.

To understand the point about the different origins, one needs to start from the question of the role of communism in global history and thus from the interpretation (histoire raisonéee) of the 20th century (Chapter 3).

There are two major narratives of the 20th century: liberal and Marxist; they are both "Jerusalem"-like in the Russian philosopher Berdiaff's terminology. They see the world evolving from less developed toward more developed stages ending in either a terminus of liberal capitalist democracy or Communism (society of plenty).

Both narratives face significant problems in the interpretation of the 20th century. Liberal narrative is unable to explain the outbreak of the First World War which, given the liberal arguments about the spread of capitalism, (peaceful) trade, and interdependence between countries and individuals that ostensibly abhor conflict should never have happened, and certainly not in the way it did -- namely by involving in the most destructive war up to date all advanced capitalism countries. Second, liberal narrative treats both fascism and communism as essentially "mistakes" (cul de sacs) on the road to a chiliastic liberal democracy without providing much of reasoning as to why these two "mistakes" happened. Thus the liberal explanations for both the outbreak of the War and the two "cul de sacs" are often ad hoc, emphasizing the role of individual actors or idiosyncratic events.

Marxist interpretation of the 20th century is much more convincing in both its explanation of World War I (imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism) and fascism (an attempt by the weakened bourgeoise to thwart left-wing revolutions). But Marxist view is entirely powerless to explain 1989, the fall of communist regimes, and hence unable to provide any explanation for the role of communism in global history. The fall of communism, in a strict Marxist view of the world, is an abomination, as inexplicable as if a feudal society having had experienced a bourgeois revolution of rights were suddenly to "regress" and to reimpose serfdom and the tripartite class division. Marxism has therefore given up trying to provide an explanation for the 20th century history.

The reason for this failure lies in the fact that Marxism never made a meaningful distinction between standard Marxist schemes regarding the succession of socio-economic formations (what I call the Western Path of Development, WPD) and the evolution of poorer and colonized countries. Classical Marxism never asked seriously whether the WPD is applicable in their case. It believed that poorer and colonized countries will simply follow, with a time lag, the developments in the advanced countries, and that colonization and indeed imperialism will produce the capitalist transformation of these societies. This was Marx's explicit view on the role of English colonialism in Asia. But colonialism proved too weak for such a global task, and succeeded in introducing capitalism only in small entropot enclaves such as Hong Kong, Singapore and parts of South Africa.

Enabling colonized countries to effect both their social and national liberations (note there was never a need for the latter in advanced countries) was the world-historical role of communism. It was only Communist or left-wing parties that could prosecute successfully both revolutions. The national revolution meant political independence. The social revolution meant abolishment of feudal growth-inhibiting institutions (power of usurious landlords, labor tied to land, gender discrimination, lack of access to education by the poor, religious turpitude etc.). Communism thus cleared the path for the development of indigenous capitalism. Functionally, in the colonized Third World societies, it played the same role that domestic bourgeoisies played in the West. For indigenous capitalism could be established only once feudal institutions were swept away.

The concise definition of communism is hence: communism is a social system that enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism, regain economic and political independence, and build indigenous capitalism.

3. The global dominion of capitalism was made possible thanks to (and in turn it exacerbates) certain human traits that, from an ethical point, are questionable . Much greater commercialization and greater wealth have in many ways made us more polished in our manners (as per Montesquieu) but have done so using what were traditionally regarded as vices -- desire for pleasure, power and profit (as per Mandeville). Vices are both fundamental for hyper-commercialized capitalism to be "born" and are supported by it. Philosophers accept them not because they are by themselves desirable, but because allowing their limited exercise allows the achievement of a greater social good: material affluence (Smith; Hume).

Yet the contrast between acceptable behavior in hyper-commercialized world and traditional concepts of justice, ethics, shame, honor, and loss of face, create a chasm which is filled with hypocrisy; one cannot openly accept that one has sold for a sum of money his/her right to free speech or ability to disagree with one's boss, and thus arises the need to cover up these facts with lies or misrepresentation of reality.

From the book:

"The domination of capitalism as the best, or rather the only, way to organize production and distribution seems absolute. No challenger appears in sight. Capitalism gained this position thanks to its ability, through the appeal to self-interest and desire to own property, to organize people so that they managed, in a decentralized fashion, to create wealth and increase the standard of living of an average human being on the planet by many times -- something that only a century ago was considered almost utopian.

But this economic success made more acute the discrepancy between the ability to live better and longer lives and the lack of a commensurate increase in morality, or even happiness. The greater material abundance did make people's manners and behavior to each other better: since elementary needs, and much more than that, were satisfied, people no longer needed to engage in a Hobbesian struggle of all against all. Manners became more polished, people more considerate.

But this external polish was achieved at the cost of people being increasingly driven by self-interest alone, even in many ordinary and personal affairs. The capitalist spirit, a testimony to the generalized success of capitalism, penetrated deeply into people's individual lives. Since extending capitalism to family and intimate life was antithetical to centuries-old views about sacrifice, hospitality, friendship, family ties, and the like, it was not easy to openly accept that all such norms had become superseded by self-interest. This unease created a huge area where hypocrisy reigned. Thus, ultimately, the material success of capitalism came to be associated with a reign of half-truths in our private lives."

4. Capitalist system cannot be changed. The dominion of hyper-commercial capitalism was established thanks to our desire to permanently keep on improving our material conditions, to keep on getting richer, a desire which capitalism satisfies the best. This has led to the creation of a system of values that puts monetary success as its top. In many ways it is a desirable evolution because "believing" in money alone does away with other traditional and discriminatory hierarchical markers.

In order for capitalism to exist it needs to grow and to expand to ever new areas and new products. But capitalism exists not outside of us, as a external system. It is individuals, that is, us, who, in our daily lives, create capitalism and provide it with new fields of action -- so much that we had transformed our homes into capital, and our free time into a resource. This extraordinary commodification of almost all, including what used to be very private, activities was made possible by our internalization of the system of values where money acquisition is placed on the pinnacle. If this were not the case, we would not have commodified practically all that can be (as of now) commodified.

Capitalism, in order to expand, needs greed. Greed has been entirely accepted by us. The economic system and the system of values are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Our system of values enables hyper-commercialized capitalism to function and expand. It then follows that no change in the economic system can be imagined without a change in the system of values that underpins it, which the system promotes, and with which we are, in our everyday activities, fully comfortable. But to produce such a change in values seems, at present, to be an impossible task. It has been tried before and ended in the most ignominious failure. We are thus locked in capitalism. And in our activities, day in, day out, we support and reinforce it.

-- Branko Milanovic

[Sep 24, 2019] Google Employees Explain How They Were Retaliated Against For Reporting Abuse - Slashdot

Sep 24, 2019 | tech.slashdot.org

RightSaidFred99 ( 874576 ) , Monday September 23, 2019 @06:47PM ( #59228670 )

It's a real coincidence... ( Score: 4 , Interesting)

It's just such a coincidence that the people Google tends to hire would be so high maintenance. Just one of those weird things I guess. Google should keep hiring the same people, I'm sure it will turn out different!

On the other hand, as someone over 40 who isn't a dramatic, hysterical weirdo like at least 30% of those under 35 are, I'm liking my job prospects over the next 15 years as employers get sick of this shit and notice a pattern. Wonder if they'll make "reverse age discrimination" a thing.

Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) , Monday September 23, 2019 @07:14PM ( #59228786 )
Re:It's a real coincidence... ( Score: 5 , Interesting)
It's just such a coincidence that the people Google tends to hire would be so high maintenance. Just one of those weird things I guess. Google should keep hiring the same people, I'm sure it will turn out different!

I'm no fan of Google (anymore) but to be fair, Google employs 103,459 people as of Q1 2019. 45 people throwing a fit is an acceptable margin considering their overall size.

I agree their is an issue with ageism but I disagree with the idea that it would reduce the number of people throwing a fit because nutcases come in all ages.

swillden ( 191260 ) writes: < [email protected] > on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:37PM ( #59228890 ) Homepage Journal
Re:It's a real coincidence... ( Score: 5 , Interesting)
It's just such a coincidence that the people Google tends to hire would be so high maintenance. Just one of those weird things I guess. Google should keep hiring the same people, I'm sure it will turn out different!

OTOH, consider that Google has over 100K employees, and in a few months 45 such stories were collected... and the stories themselves cover a period of a couple of years. I don't want to minimize the issues suffered by any mistreated employee, but I find it hard to believe that any company could be so perfectly well-managed as to not have a couple dozen cases per year where employees were pretty badly treated. Or, as you imply, that a couple dozen employees might feel mistreated even when they aren't. I prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to the individuals.

As a Google employee myself I do have some concern about the alleged retaliation against the organizers of the walkout. That sort of thing could have a chilling effect on future protests (though I've seen no evidence of it so far), and I think that's a potential problem. It's important that employees feel free to protest actions by the company if a large enough percentage of them are bothered by it. Personally, I didn't join the walkout, but some others on my team did and I supported their action even though I didn't agree with their complaint.

On the other hand, as someone over 40 who isn't a dramatic, hysterical weirdo like at least 30% of those under 35 are, I'm liking my job prospects over the next 15 years as employers get sick of this shit and notice a pattern. Wonder if they'll make "reverse age discrimination" a thing.

FWIW, in my nearly 10 years with Google I've seen no evidence of age discrimination. A large percentage of new hires are straight out of college (mostly grad school), which does skew the employee population young, but I'm in my 50s and I've worked with guys in their 60s and one in his mid-70s. Of course, my experience is anecdotal.

jebrick ( 164096 ) , Monday September 23, 2019 @07:10PM ( #59228770 )
HR ( Score: 3 )

As many people find out, HR is for the company, not for the employee.

beepsky ( 6008348 ) , Monday September 23, 2019 @07:19PM ( #59228814 )
"Punished for reporting sexual jokes" ( Score: 3 , Interesting)

"Punished for reporting sexual jokes"

Please keep doing this. People without a sense of humor are the worst, especially when they're cunts who report everybody whenever they don't get the job

imidan ( 559239 ) , Monday September 23, 2019 @08:07PM ( #59228982 )
Re:"Punished for reporting sexual jokes" ( Score: 4 , Insightful)

I'm a straight white guy, and I have worked with a guy who was a never-ending source of sexual and racist "jokes." I never reported him, but after a couple of months, I wished every time I worked with him that he'd just shut the fuck up and do his job. Any tactful suggestion that he do just that was met with more laughing, sneering, "it was only a joke" or "no, you don't get it." Yes, I got it, man. Your shitty old boomer joke about how you hate your ugly wife but want to fuck her anyway just wasn't funny. God, it was like a goddamn clown show you couldn't turn off. It wasn't even so much that I was offended by his shit; it was that he seemed to genuinely believe he was hilarious, and if you didn't think so, too, you had to endure his constant, pathetic attempts to make you feel somehow inferior for not appreciating his humor.

Anyway. People who mistakenly think they have a sense of humor are, indeed, the worst.

Anonymous Coward , Monday September 23, 2019 @08:12PM ( #59229000 )
Re:LatinX? ( Score: 5 , Insightful)
No. Consider the words "latino" and "latina." These are gender specific. The fact that they specify gender is a great harm. A great deal of mental gymnastics are necessary to perceive that harm, but it is possible.

Yet in the same sentence they mention "female". You can't make this shit up.

Tailhook ( 98486 ) , Monday September 23, 2019 @07:31PM ( #59228868 )
Re:Gaslighting? ( Score: 4 , Insightful)

While gaslighting does indeed have a useful definition -- one that you can trivially learn for yourself and I won't repeat here -- that meaning won't be helpful in understanding the most common use of the word. Gaslighting is a term frequently used to blame someone else for the difficulty one suffers reconciling reality with the ones own cognitive dissonance.

AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) , Tuesday September 24, 2019 @04:52AM ( #59229990 ) Homepage Journal
Re:Gaslighting? ( Score: 2 )

It's a form of psychological abuse where the abuser acts as if something is true when it clearly isn't.

It's from a book where a character is driven mad by the people around her claiming the the gaslights are lit when she can clearly see that they are not. She starts to think that she must be losing her grip on reality if everyone else can see the gaslights but she can't.

It's not uncommon in abusive relationships, unfortunately.

[Sep 24, 2019] That's what being a social justice warrior is all about: Mass shaming.

Sep 24, 2019 | slashdot.org

MrKaos ( 858439 ) , Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:58AM ( #59202012 ) Journal

The Shaming has to End ( Score: 5 , Insightful)
That's not going to stop a PR disaster unless they do fire them. That's what being a social justice warrior is all about: Mass shaming.

Point and shame. That's how you destroy careers and the standards of excellence that makes a nation. No evidence required, don't bother reading the deposition, the personal is the political, ad hominem attacks from beginning to end for defending someone (Minsky) that wasn't accused of anything .

With metoo backfiring so that men don't trust being alone in an office with a woman, feminism is looking a lot like a hate movement with the way they throw accusations of sex crime around in order to get their hit of indignation to maintain their moral superiority. Guilt by association, career destroyed, court of opinion adjourned.

Considering what RMS contributed not only to freedom but economic wealth you can see these people don't care who they destroy and it doesn't matter if you are innocent of all charges once your reputation is destroyed. Getting even isn't equality.

That's why this shaming of men must end.

Kokuyo ( 549451 ) , Tuesday September 17, 2019 @03:50AM ( #59202094 ) Journal
Re:The Shaming has to End ( Score: 5 , Interesting)

There is another reason this must end.

If they piss off men long enough, they're going to hit back with real patriarchy.

I mean just look at MGTOW... Instead of just being careful when choosing a mate, as they should have been taught to be anyway, they're just going in the opposite extreme. A considerable pool of men deciding to be bachelors is neither good for those men psychologically, nor is it good for the species.

The backlash will be just as dumb as what we're seeing right now. This is a social equivalent of England and France laying the groundwork for the second world war in Versailles.

The eradication of accountability is going to come back to haunt us for decades to come.

Muros ( 1167213 ) , Tuesday September 17, 2019 @07:10AM ( #59202434 )
Re:The Shaming has to End ( Score: 4 , Interesting)
A considerable pool of men deciding to be bachelors is neither good for those men psychologically, nor is it good for the species.

I'm pretty sure studies have found that single men have better mental health than married men, but poorer physical health.

Penguinisto ( 415985 ) , Tuesday September 17, 2019 @11:30AM ( #59203456 ) Journal
Re:The Shaming has to End ( Score: 4 , Insightful)
I'm pretty sure studies have found that single men have better mental health than married men, but poorer physical health.

Depends on who you marry (no, seriously). If you are as choosy as the ladies are, you find yourself far better off in the long run.

Anonymous Coward , Tuesday September 17, 2019 @07:47AM ( #59202522 )
Re:Patriarchy ( Score: 5 , Interesting)
Never had a female president in the US

Last time I looked more than half the US population is female and President is elected, so how is that a sign of the patriarchy?

the vast majority of corporate management is male

Studies have shown that men are more willing to put career ahead of family in an effort to move up the ranks. What is stopping women from doing the same thing?

women are paid less for equal work

This has been debunked in numerous studies. Women are not paid less for equal work but are paid less in general precisely because they don't do equal work and because during salary negotiations at hiring time they are, on average, less forceful in demanding a higher starting salary.

These reports claiming otherwise are looking solely at titles - oh Jane the Jr. Java Developer makes less than Joe the Jr. Java Developer, obviously the company is paying women less.

Let's not consider, however, that Jane only works 9-4 so she can be home with her kids, won't pull weekend duties or be on call late night, whereas Joe is in at 7, leaves at 6, works on weekends to meet deadlines and carries a pager 1 week out of 4. Also, let's not consider that when being hired Joe negotiated up from the offered $68k start to a starting salary of $75k as a base and Jane simply accepted the offered $68k.

Both were given the exact same opportunities, but Joe works harder, more hours and was willing to negotiate a hgher starting wage.

But let's not let facts get in the way of a good attack narrative shall we?

they cannot be priests

Yes they can in many denominations, maybe not yours but others.

huge percentages of them have been raped

huge is an overstatement, studies show it around 20%. Also if you look at the statistics [wikipedia.org] not all rapes are against women and not all rapes of women are by men.

and the list goes on

As does the continued mis-information campaign.

Stoutlimb ( 143245 ) , Tuesday September 17, 2019 @08:10AM ( #59202578 )
Re:Patriarchy ( Score: 5 , Informative)

I would also like to add to your stats. Men in USA are raped more often and more brutally than women are. Yes, prison rape counts.

burtosis ( 1124179 ) writes: on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:12AM ( #59202814 )
Re:Patriarchy ( Score: 4 , Interesting)

If you approach any authority as a man and claim you were raped, not only will they likely laugh in your face, but probably harass you as well. Women are afraid of not being believed. Who really cares which gender is raped more often, is it too much to ask that the claims be taken seriously regardless of gender?

jcr ( 53032 ) writes: < [email protected] > on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @08:14AM ( #59202590 ) Journal
Re:Patriarchy ( Score: 5 , Insightful)

Never had a female president in the US

If you want a female president, try nominating a decent female candidate. That criminal narcissist the Democrats came up with last time couldn't even beat Trump, for fuck's sake.

-jcr

[Sep 22, 2019] This is what goes by "hate speech" in today's neoliberal societies

Sep 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

Anonymous [425] Disclaimer , says: September 22, 2019 at 1:05 am GMT

It's all so crazy. This is what goes by 'hate speech'. Truth is now hate. In a way, it makes sense because truth hates falsehood.

[Sep 22, 2019] Is the Unemployment Rate Tied to the Divorce Rate

Yes it is, but only for couples with low level of marital satisfaction.
Notable quotes:
"... They also looked at marital breakup more generally, focusing on when couples decided to end their relationships (not necessarily if or when they got divorced). Their findings revealed that when men were unemployed, the likelihood that either spouse would leave the marriage increased. What about the woman's employment status? For husbands, whether their wife was employed or not was seemingly unimportant-it was unrelated to their decision to leave the relationship. It did seem to matter for wives, though, but it depended upon how satisfied they were with the marriage. ..."
"... When women were highly satisfied, they were inclined to stay with their partner regardless of whether they had employment. However, when the wife's satisfaction was low, she was more likely to exit the relationship, but only when she had a job. ..."
Science of Relationships
The first study considers government data from all 50 U.S. states between the years 1960 and 2005.1 The researchers predicted that higher unemployment numbers would translate to more divorces among heterosexual married couples. Most of us probably would have predicted this too based on common sense-you would probably expect your partner to be able to hold down a job, right? And indeed, this was the case, but only before 1980. Surprisingly, since then, as joblessness has increased, divorce rates have actually decreased.

How do we explain this counterintuitive finding? We don't know for sure, but the researchers speculate that unemployed people may delay or postpone divorce due to the high costs associated with it. Not only is divorce expensive in terms of legal fees, but afterward, partners need to pay for two houses instead of one. And if they are still living off of one salary at that point, those costs may be prohibitively expensive. For this reason, it is not that uncommon to hear about estranged couples who can't stand each other but are still living under the same roof.

The second study considered data from a national probability sample of over 3,600 heterosexual married couples in the U.S. collected between 1987 and 2002. However, instead of looking at the overall association between unemployment and marital outcomes, they considered how gender and relationship satisfaction factored into the equation. 2

They also looked at marital breakup more generally, focusing on when couples decided to end their relationships (not necessarily if or when they got divorced). Their findings revealed that when men were unemployed, the likelihood that either spouse would leave the marriage increased. What about the woman's employment status? For husbands, whether their wife was employed or not was seemingly unimportant-it was unrelated to their decision to leave the relationship. It did seem to matter for wives, though, but it depended upon how satisfied they were with the marriage.

When women were highly satisfied, they were inclined to stay with their partner regardless of whether they had employment. However, when the wife's satisfaction was low, she was more likely to exit the relationship, but only when she had a job.

[Sep 22, 2019] Game of musical chairs became more difficult: the US economy seems to put out fewer and fewer chairs.

Notable quotes:
"... A good economy compensates for much social dysfunction. ..."
"... More than that, it prevents the worst of behaviors that are considered an expression of dysfunction from occurring, as people across all social strata have other things to worry about or keep them busy. Happy people don't bear grudges, or at least they are not on top of their consciousness as long as things are going well. ..."
"... This could be seen time and again in societies with deep and sometimes violent divisions between ethnic groups where in times of relative prosperity (or at least a broadly shared vision for a better future) the conflicts are not removed but put on a backburner, or there is even "finally" reconciliation, and then when the economy turns south, the old grudges and conflicts come back (often not on their own, but fanned by groups who stand to gain from the divisions, or as a way of scapegoating) ..."
"... "backwaters of America, that economy seems to put out fewer and fewer chairs." ~~Harold Pollack~ ..."
"... Going up through the chairs has become so impossible for those on the slow-track. Not enough slots for all the jokers within our once proud country of opportunities, ..."
"... George Orwell: "I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if they learned to spend their money more economically. ... If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly." ..."
"... Perhaps you are commenting on the aspect that when (enough) job applicants/holders define down their standards and let employers treat them as floor mats, then the quality of many jobs and the labor relations will be adjusted down accordingly, or at the very least expectations what concessions workers will make will be adjusted up. That seems to be the case unfortunately. ..."
Nov 23, 2015 | economistsview.typepad.com
Avraam Jack Dectis said...
A good economy compensates for much social dysfunction.

A bad economy moves people toward the margins, afflicts those near the margins and kills those at the margins.

This is what policy makers should consider as they pursue policies that do not put the citizen above all else.

cm -> Avraam Jack Dectis...
"A good economy compensates for much social dysfunction."

More than that, it prevents the worst of behaviors that are considered an expression of dysfunction from occurring, as people across all social strata have other things to worry about or keep them busy. Happy people don't bear grudges, or at least they are not on top of their consciousness as long as things are going well.

This could be seen time and again in societies with deep and sometimes violent divisions between ethnic groups where in times of relative prosperity (or at least a broadly shared vision for a better future) the conflicts are not removed but put on a backburner, or there is even "finally" reconciliation, and then when the economy turns south, the old grudges and conflicts come back (often not on their own, but fanned by groups who stand to gain from the divisions, or as a way of scapegoating)

Dune Goon said...

"backwaters of America, that economy seems to put out fewer and fewer chairs." ~~Harold Pollack~

Going up through the chairs has become so impossible for those on the slow-track. Not enough slots for all the jokers within our once proud country of opportunities, not enough elbow room for Daniel Boone, let alone Jack Daniels! Not enough space in this county to wet a tree when you feel the urge! Every tiny plot of space has been nailed down and fenced off, divided up among gated communities. Why?

Because the 1% has an excessive propensity to reproduce their own kind. They are so uneducated about the responsibilities of birth control and space conservation that they are crowding all of us off the edge of the planet. Worse yet we have begun to *ape our betters*.

"We've only just begun!"
~~The Carpenters~

William said...

"Many of us know people who receive various public benefits, and who might not need to rely on these programs if they made better choices, if they learned how to not talk back at work, if they had a better handle on various self-destructive behaviors, if they were more willing to take that crappy job and forego disability benefits, etc."

George Orwell: "I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if they learned to spend their money more economically. ... If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly."

cm said in reply to William...

A valid observation, but what you are commenting on is more about getting or keeping a job than managing personal finances.

Perhaps you are commenting on the aspect that when (enough) job applicants/holders define down their standards and let employers treat them as floor mats, then the quality of many jobs and the labor relations will be adjusted down accordingly, or at the very least expectations what concessions workers will make will be adjusted up. That seems to be the case unfortunately.

[Sep 22, 2019] Paul Krugman: Despair, American Style

Notable quotes:
"... In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true. ..."
"... the truth is that we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society... ..."
"... Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. ..."
"... What we are seeing is the long term impacts of the "Reagan Revolution." ..."
"... The affected cohort here is the first which has lived with the increased financial and employment insecurity that engendered, as well as the impacts of the massive offshoring of good paying union jobs throughout their working lives. Stress has cumulative impacts on health and well-being, which are a big part of what we are seeing here. ..."
"... Lets face it, this Fed is all about goosing up asset prices to generate short term gains in economic activity. Since the early 90s, the Fed has done nothing but make policy based on Wall Street's interests. I can give them a pass on the dot com debacle but not after that. This toxic relationship between wall street and the Fed has to end. ..."
"... there was a housing bubble that most at the Fed (including Bernanke) denied right upto the middle of 2007 ..."
"... Yellen, to her credit, has admitted multiple times over the years that low rates spur search for yield that blows bubbles ..."
"... Bursting of the bubble led to unemployment for millions and U3 that went to 10% ..."
"... "You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place." ..."
"... Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices ..."
"... It is not some unstoppable global trend. This is neoliberal oligarchy coup d'état. Or as it often called "a quite coup". ..."
"... First of all, whether a job can or is offshored has little to do with whether it is "low skilled" but more with whether the workflow around the job can be organized in such a way that the job can be offshore. This is less a matter of "skill level" and more volume and immediacy of interaction with adjacent job functions, or movement of material across distances. ..."
"... The reason wages are stuck is that aggregate jobs are not growing, relative to workforce supply. ..."
"... BTW the primary offshore location is India, probably in good part because of good to excellent English language skills, and India's investment in STEM education and industry (especially software/services and this is even a public stereotype, but for a reason). ..."
"... Very rough figures: half a million Chicago employees may make less than $800 a week -- almost everybody should earn $800 ... ..."
"... Union busting is generally (?) understood as direct interference with the formation and operation of unions or their members. It is probably more common that employers are allowed to just go around the unions - "right to work", subcontracting non-union shops or temp/staffing agencies, etc. ..."
"... Why would people join a union and pay dues when the union is largely impotent to deliver, when there are always still enough desperate people who will (have to) take jobs outside the union system? Employers don't have to bring in scabs when they can legally go through "unencumbered" subcontractors inside or outside the jurisdiction. ..."
"... Credibility trap, fully engaged. ..."
"... The anti-knowledge of the elites is worth reading. http://billmoyers.com/2015/11/02/the-anti-knowledge-of-the-elites/ When such herd instinct and institutional overbearance connects with the credibility trap, the results may be impressive. http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2015/11/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts-pop.html ..."
"... Suicide, once thought to be associated with troubled teens and the elderly, is quickly becoming an age-blind statistic. Middle aged Americans are turning to suicide in alarming numbers. The reasons include easily accessible prescription painkillers, the mortgage crisis and most importantly the challenge of a troubled economy. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention claims suicide rates now top the number of deaths due to automobile accidents. ..."
"... The suicide rate for both younger and older Americans remains virtually unchanged, however, the rate has spiked for those in middle age (35 to 64 years old) with a 28 percent increase (link is external) from 1999 to 2010. ..."
"... When few people kill themselves "on purpose" or die from self-inflicted but probably "unintended" harms (e.g. organ failure or accidental death caused by substance abuse), it can be shrugged off as problems related to the individual (more elaboration possible but not necessary). ..."
"... When it becomes a statistically significant phenomenon (above-noise percentage of total population or demographically identifiable groups), then one has to ask questions about social causes. My first question would be, "what made life suck for those people"? What specific instrument they used to kill themselves would be my second question (it may be the first question for people who are charged with implementing counter measures but not necessarily fixing the causes). ..."
"... Since about the financial crisis (I'm not sure about causation or coincidence - not accidental coincidence BTW but causation by the same underlying causes), there has been a disturbing pattern of high school students throwing themselves in front of local trains. At that age, drinking or drugging oneself to death is apparently not the first "choice". Performance pressure *related to* (not just "and") a lack of convincing career/life prospects has/have been suspected or named as a cause. I don't think teenagers suddenly started to jump in front of trains that have run the same rail line for decades because of the "usual" and centuries to millennia old teenage romantic relationship issues. ..."
Nov 09, 2015 | economistsview.typepad.com

"There is a darkness spreading over part of our society":

Despair, American Style, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are "down on America," and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions of his political enemies look ever more at odds with reality.

Yet there is a darkness spreading over part of our society. ... There has been a lot of comment ... over a new paper by the economists Angus Deaton (who just won a Nobel) and Anne Case, showing that mortality among middle-aged white Americans has been rising since 1999..., while death rates were falling steadily both in other countries and among other groups in our own nation.

Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves... Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and ... drinking... But what's causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?...

In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have "lost the narrative of their lives." That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we're looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.

That sounds like a plausible hypothesis..., but the truth is that we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading across Middle America. But it clearly is, with troubling consequences for our society...

I know I'm not the only observer who sees a link between the despair reflected in those mortality numbers and the volatility of right-wing politics. Some people who feel left behind by the American story turn self-destructive; others turn on the elites they feel have betrayed them. No, deporting immigrants and wearing baseball caps bearing slogans won't solve their problems, but neither will cutting taxes on capital gains. So you can understand why some voters have rallied around politicians who at least seem to feel their pain.

At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair.

bakho said...

There are a lot of economic dislocations that the government after the 2001 recession stopped doing much about it. Right after the 2008 crash, the government did more but by 2010, even the Democratic president dropped the ball. and failed to deliver. Probably no region of the country is affected more by technological change that the coal regions of KY and WV. Lying politicians promise a return to the past that cannot be delivered. No one can suggest what the new future will be. The US is due for another round of urbanization as jobs decline in rural areas. Dislocation forces declining values of properties and requires changes in behavior, skills and outlook. Those personal changes do not happen without guidance. The social institutions such as churches and government programs are a backstop, but they are not providing a way forward. There is plenty of work to be done, but our elites are not willing to invest.

DrDick -> bakho...

The problem goes back much further than that. What we are seeing is the long term impacts of the "Reagan Revolution."

The affected cohort here is the first which has lived with the increased financial and employment insecurity that engendered, as well as the impacts of the massive offshoring of good paying union jobs throughout their working lives. Stress has cumulative impacts on health and well-being, which are a big part of what we are seeing here.

ilsm said...

Thuggee doom and gloom is about their fading chance to reinstate the slavocracy.

The fever swamp of right wing ideas is more loony than 1964.

Extremism is the new normal.

bmorejoe -> ilsm...

Yup. The slow death of white supremacy.

Peter K. -> Anonymous...

If it wasn't for monetary policy things would be even worse as the Republicans in Congress forced fiscal austerity on the economy during the "recovery."

sanjait -> Peter K....

That's the painful irony of a comment like that one from Anonymous ... he seems completely unaware that, yes, ZIRP has done a huge amount to prevent the kind of problems described above. He like most ZIRP critics fails to consider what the counterfactual looks like (i.e., something like the Great Depression redux).

Anonymous -> sanjait...

You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place. Because preemptive monetary policy has gone out of fashion completely. And now we are going to repeat the whole process over when the present bubble in stocks and corporate bonds bursts along with the malinvestment in China, commodity exporters etc.

Peter K. -> Anonymous...

"liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate... it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people."

sanjait -> Anonymous...

"You want regulation? I would like to see

1) Reinstate Glass Steagall

2) impose a 10bp trans tax on trading financial instruments."

Great. Two things with zero chance of averting bubbles but make great populist pablum.

This is why we can't have nice things!

"3) Outlaw any Fed person working for a bank/financial firm after they leave office."

This seems like a decent idea. Hard to enforce, as highly intelligent and accomplished people tend not to be accepting of such restrictions, but it could be worth it anyway.

likbez -> sanjait...

" highly intelligent and accomplished people tend not to be accepting of such restrictions, but it could be worth it anyway."

You are forgetting that it depends on a simple fact to whom political power belongs. And that's the key whether "highly intelligent and accomplished people" will accept those restrictions of not.

If the government was not fully captured by financial capital, then I think even limited prosecution of banksters "Stalin's purge style" would do wonders in preventing housing bubble and 2008 financial crush.

Please try to imagine the effect of trial and exile to Alaska for some period just a dozen people involved in Securitization of mortgages boom (and those highly intelligent people can do wonders in improving oil industry in Alaska ;-).

Starting with Mr. Weill, Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin, Mr. Phil Gramm, Dr. Summers and Mr. Clinton.

Anonymous -> Peter K....

"2003-2005 didn't have excess inflation and wage gains."

Monetary policy can not hinge just on inflation or wage gains. Why are wage gains a problem anyway?

Lets face it, this Fed is all about goosing up asset prices to generate short term gains in economic activity. Since the early 90s, the Fed has done nothing but make policy based on Wall Street's interests. I can give them a pass on the dot com debacle but not after that. This toxic relationship between wall street and the Fed has to end.

You want regulation? I would like to see
1) Reinstate Glass Steagall
2) impose a 10bp trans tax on trading financial instruments.
3) Outlaw any Fed person working for a bank/financial firm after they leave office. Bernanke, David Warsh etc included. That includes Mishkin getting paid to shill for failing Iceland banks or Bernanke making paid speeches to hedge funds.


Anonymous -> EMichael...

Fact: there was a housing bubble that most at the Fed (including Bernanke) denied right upto the middle of 2007
Fact: Yellen, to her credit, has admitted multiple times over the years that low rates spur search for yield that blows bubbles
Fact: Bursting of the bubble led to unemployment for millions and U3 that went to 10%

what facts are you referring to?

EMichael -> Anonymous...

That FED rates caused the bubble.

to think this you have to ignore that a 400% Fed Rate increase from 2004 to 2005 had absolutely no effect on mortgage originations.

Then of course, you have to explain why 7 years at zero has not caused another housing bubble.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/FEDFUNDS

Correlation is not causation. Lack of correlation is proof of lack of causation.

pgl -> Anonymous...

"You are the guys who do not consider the counterfactual where higher rates would have prevented the housing bubble in 2003-05 and that produced the great recession in the first place."

You are repeating the John B. Taylor line about interest rates being held "too low and too long". And guess what - most economists have called Taylor's claim for the BS it really is. We should also note we never heard this BS when Taylor was part of the Bush Administration. And do check - Greenspan and later Bernanke were raising interest rates well before any excess demand was generated which is why inflation never took off.

So do keep repeating this intellectual garbage and we keep noting you are just a stupid troll.

anne -> anne...
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/10/29/1518393112

September 17, 2015

Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century
By Anne Case and Angus Deaton

Midlife increases in suicides and drug poisonings have been previously noted. However, that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality has, to our knowledge, been overlooked. If the white mortality rate for ages 45−54 had held at their 1998 value, 96,000 deaths would have been avoided from 1999–2013, 7,000 in 2013 alone. If it had continued to decline at its previous (1979‒1998) rate, half a million deaths would have been avoided in the period 1999‒2013, comparable to lives lost in the US AIDS epidemic through mid-2015. Concurrent declines in self-reported health, mental health, and ability to work, increased reports of pain, and deteriorating measures of liver function all point to increasing midlife distress.

Abstract

This paper documents a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013. This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Although all education groups saw increases in mortality from suicide and poisonings, and an overall increase in external cause mortality, those with less education saw the most marked increases. Rising midlife mortality rates of white non-Hispanics were paralleled by increases in midlife morbidity. Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function, all point to growing distress in this population. We comment on potential economic causes and consequences of this deterioration.

ilsm -> Sarah...

Murka is different. Noni's plan would work if it were opportune for the slavocracy and the Kochs and ARAMCO don't lose any "growth".

Maybe cost plus climate repair contracts to shipyards fumbling through useless nuclear powered behemoths for war plans made in 1942.

Someone gotta make big money plundering for the public good, in Murka!

CSP said...

The answers to our malaise seem readily apparent to me, and I'm a southern-born white male working in a small, struggling Georgia town.

1. Kill the national war machine
2. Kill the national Wall Street financial fraud machine
3. Get out-of-control mega corporations under control
4. Return savings to Main Street (see #1, #2 and #3)
5. Provide national, universal health insurance to everyone as a right
6. Provide free education to everyone, as much as their academic abilities can earn them
7. Strengthen social security and lower the retirement age to clear the current chronic underemployment of young people

It seems to me that these seven steps would free the American people to pursue their dreams, not the dreams of Washington or Wall Street. Unfortunately, it is readily apparent that true freedom and real individual empowerment are the last things our leaders desire. Shame on them and shame on everyone who helps to make it so.

DeDude -> CSP...

You are right. Problem is that most southern-born white males working in a small, struggling Georgia town would rather die than voting for the one candidate who might institute those changes - Bernie Sanders.

The people who are beginning to realize that the american dream is a mirage, are the same people who vote for GOP candidates who want to give even more to the plutocrats.

kthomas said...

The kids in Seattle had it right when WTO showed up.


Why is anyone suprised by all this?

We exported out jobs. First all the manufacturing. Now all of the Service jobs.


But hey...we helped millions in China and India get out of poverty, only to put outselves into it.


America was sold to highest bidder a long long time ago. A Ken Melvin put it, the chickens came home to roost in 2000.

sanjait -> kthomas...

So you think the problem with America is that we lost our low skilled manufacturing and call center tech support jobs?

I can sort of see why people assume that "we exported out jobs" is the reason for stagnant incomes in the U.S., but it's still tiresome, because it's still just wrong.

Manufacturing employment crashed in the US mostly because it has been declining globally. The world economy is less material based than ever, and machines do more of the work making stuff.

And while some services can be outsourced, the vast majority can't. Period.

Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices. The U.S. has one of the more closed economies in the developed world, so if globalization were the cause, we'd be the most insulated. But we aren't, which should be a pretty good indication that globalization isn't the cause.

cm -> sanjait...

Yes, the loss of "low skilled" jobs is still a loss of jobs. Many people work in "low skilled" jobs because there are not enough "higher skill" jobs to go around, as most work demanded is not of the most fancy type.

We have heard this now for a few decades, that "low skilled" jobs lost will be replaced with "high skill" (and better paid) jobs, and the evidence is somewhat lacking. There has been growth in higher skill jobs in absolute terms, but when you adjust by population growth, it is flat or declining.

When people hypothetically or actually get the "higher skills" recommended to them, into what higher skill jobs are they to move?

I have known a number of anecdotes of people with degrees or who held "skilled" jobs that were forced by circumstances to take commodity jobs or jobs at lower pay grades or "skill levels" due to aggregate loss of "higher skill" jobs or age discrimination, or had to go from employment to temp jobs.

And it is not true that only "lower skill" jobs are outsourced. Initially, yes, as "higher skills" obviously don't exist yet in the outsourcing region. But that doesn't last long, especially if the outsourcers expend resources to train and grow the remote skill base, at the expense of the domestic workforce which is expected to already have experience (which has worked for a while due to workforce overhangs from previous industry "restructuring").

likbez -> sanjait...

"Inequality has been rising globally, almost regardless of trade practices."

It is not some unstoppable global trend. This is neoliberal oligarchy coup d'état. Or as it often called "a quite coup".

sanjait -> cm...

"Yes, the loss of "low skilled" jobs is still a loss of jobs. Many people work in "low skilled" jobs because there are not enough "higher skill" jobs to go around, as most work demanded is not of the most fancy type.

We have heard this now for a few decades, that "low skilled" jobs lost will be replaced with "high skill" (and better paid) jobs, and the evidence is somewhat lacking. "

And that is *exactly my point.*

The lack of wage growth isn't isolated to low skilled domains. It's weak across the board.

What does that tell us?

It tells us that offshoring of low skilled jobs isn't the problem.

"And it is not true that only "lower skill" jobs are outsourced. Initially, yes, as "higher skills" obviously don't exist yet in the outsourcing region."

You could make this argument, but I think (judging by your own hedging) you know this isn't the case. Offshoring of higher skilled jobs does happen but it's a marginal factor in reality. You hypothesize that it may someday become a bigger factor ... but just notice that we've had stagnant wages now for a few decades.

My point is that offshoring IS NOT THE CAUSE of stagnating wages. I'd argue that globalization is a force that can't really be stopped by national policy anyway, but even if you think it could, it's important to realize IT WOULD DO ALMOST NOTHING to alleviate inequality.

cm -> sanjait...

I was responding to your point:

"So you think the problem with America is that we lost our low skilled manufacturing and call center tech support jobs?"

With the follow-on:

"I can sort of see why people assume that "we exported out jobs" is the reason for stagnant incomes in the U.S., but it's still tiresome, because it's still just wrong."

Labor markets are very sensitive to marginal effects. If let's say "normal" or "heightened" turnover is 10% p.a. spread out over the year, then the continued availability (or not) of around 1% vacancies (for the respective skill sets etc.) each month makes a huge difference. There was the argument that the #1 factor is automation and process restructuring, and offshoring is trailing somewhere behind that in job destruction volume.

I didn't research it in detail because I have no reason to doubt it. But it is a compounded effect - every percentage point in open positions (and *better* open positions - few people are looking to take a pay cut) makes a big difference. If let's say the automation losses are replaced with other jobs, offshoring will tip the scale. Due to aggregate effects one cannot say what is the "extra" like with who is causing congestion on a backed up road (basically everybody, not the first or last person to join).

"Manufacturing employment crashed in the US mostly because it has been declining globally. The world economy is less material based than ever, and machines do more of the work making stuff."

Are you kidding me? The world economy is less material based? OK maybe 20 years after the paperless office we are finally printing less, but just because the material turnover, waste, and environmental pollution is not in your face (because of offshoring!), it doesn't mean less stuff is produced or material consumed. If anything, it is market saturation and aggregate demand limitations that lead to lower material and energy consumption (or lower growth rates).

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, several nations (US and Germany among others) had programs to promote new car sales (cash for clunkers etc.) that were based on the idea that people can get credit for their old car, but its engine had to be destroyed and made unrepairable so it cannot enter the used car market and defeat the purpose of the program. I assume the clunkers were then responsibly and sustainably recycled.

cm -> sanjait...

"The lack of wage growth isn't isolated to low skilled domains. It's weak across the board.

What does that tell us?

It tells us taht offshoring of low skilled jobs isn't the problem."

This doesn't follow. First of all, whether a job can or is offshored has little to do with whether it is "low skilled" but more with whether the workflow around the job can be organized in such a way that the job can be offshore. This is less a matter of "skill level" and more volume and immediacy of interaction with adjacent job functions, or movement of material across distances. Also consider that aside from time zone differences (which are of course a big deal between e.g. US and Europe/Asia), there is not much difference whether a job is performed in another country or in a different domestic region, or perhaps just "working from home" 1 mile from the office, for office-type jobs. Of course the other caveat is whether the person can physically attend meetings with little fuss and expense - so remote management/coordination work is naturally not a big thing.

The reason wages are stuck is that aggregate jobs are not growing, relative to workforce supply. When the boomers retire for real in another 5-10 years, that may change. OTOH several tech companies I know have periodic programs where they offer workers over 55 or so packages to leave the company, so they cannot really hurt for talent, though they keep complaining and are busy bringing in young(er) people on work visa. Free agents, it depends on the company. Some companies hire NCGs, but they also "buy out" older workers.

cm -> cm...

Caveat: Based on what I see (outside sectors with strong/early growth), domestic hiring of NCGs/"fresh blood" falls in two categories:

Then there is also the gender split - "technical/engineering" jobs are overweighed in men, except technical jobs in traditionally "non-technical/non-product" departments which have a higher share of women.

All this is of course a matter of top-down hiring preferences, as generally everything is either controlled top-down or tacitly allowed to happen by selective non-interference.

cm -> sanjait...

"You could make this argument, but I think (judging by your own hedging) you know this isn't the case. Offshoring of higher skilled jobs does happen but it's a marginal factor in reality. You hypothesize that it may someday become a bigger factor ... but just notice that we've had stagnant wages now for a few decades."

I've written a lot of text so far but didn't address all points ...

My "hedging" is retrospective. I don't hypothesize what may eventually happen but it is happening here and now. I don't presume to present a representative picture, but in my sphere of experience/observation (mostly a subset of computer software), offshoring of *knowledge work* started in the mid to late 90's (and that's not the earliest it started in general - of course a lot of the early offshoring in the 80's was market/language specific customization, e.g. US tech in Europe etc., and more "local culture expertise" and not offshoring proper). In the late 90's and early 2000's, offshoring was overshadowed by the Y2K/dotcom booms, so that phase didn't get high visibility (among the people "affected" it sure did). Also the internet was not yet ubiquitous - broadband existed only at the corporate level.

Since then there has been little change, it is pretty much a steady state.

BTW the primary offshore location is India, probably in good part because of good to excellent English language skills, and India's investment in STEM education and industry (especially software/services and this is even a public stereotype, but for a reason).

Syaloch -> sanjait...

Whether low skilled jobs were eliminated due to offshoring or automation doesn't really matter. What matters is that the jobs disappeared, replaced by a small number of higher skill jobs paying comparable wages plus a large number of low skill jobs offering lower wages.

The aggregate effect was stagnation and even decline in living standards. Plus any new jobs were not necessarily produced in the same geographic region as those that were lost, leading to concentration of unemployment and despair.

sanjait -> Syaloch...

"Whether low skilled jobs were eliminated due to offshoring or automation doesn't really matter. "

Well, actually it does matter, because we have a whole lot of people (in both political parties) who think the way to fight inequality is to try to reverse globalization.

If they are incorrect, it matters, because they should be applying their votes and their energy to more effective solutions, and rejecting the proposed solutions of both the well-meaning advocates and the outright demagogues who think restricting trade is some kind of answer.

Syaloch -> sanjait...

I meant it doesn't matter in terms of the despair felt by those affected. All that matters to those affected is that they have been obsoleted without either economic or social support to help them.

However, in terms of addressing this problem economically it really doesn't matter that much either. Offshoring is effectively a low-tech form of automation. If companies can't lower labor costs by using cheaper offshore labor they'll find ways to either drive down domestic wages or to use less labor. For the unskilled laborer the end result is the same.

Syaloch -> Syaloch...

See the thought experiment I posted on the links thread, and then add the following:

Suppose the investigative journalist discovered instead that Freedonia itself is a sham, and that rather than being imported from overseas, the clothing was actually coming from an automated factory straight out of Vonnegut's "Player Piano" that was hidden in a remote domestic location. Would the people who were demanding limits on Freedonian exports now say, "Oh well, I guess that's OK" simply because the factory was located within the US?

Dan Kervick -> kthomas...

I enjoyed listening to this talk by Fredrick Reinfeldt at the LSE:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=3253

Reinfeldt is a center-right politicians and former Swedish Prime Minister. OF course, what counts as center-right in Sweden seems very different from what counts as center-right in the US.

Perhaps there is some kind of basis here for some bipartisan progress on jobs and full employment.

William said...

I'm sure this isn't caused by any single factor, but has anyone seriously investigated a link between this phenomena and the military?

Veterans probably aren't a large enough cohort to explain the effect in full, but white people from the south are the most likely group to become soldiers, and veterans are the most likely group to have alcohol/drug abuse and suicide problems.

This would also be evidence why we aren't seeing it in other countries, no one else has anywhere near the number of vets we have.

cm -> William...

Vets are surely part of the aggregate problem of lack of career/economic prospects, in fact a lot of people join(ed) the military because of a lack of other jobs to begin with. But as the lack of prospects is aggregate it affects everybody.

Denis Drew said...

" At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution. But while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I'm not sure whether they're enough to cure existential despair."


UNOINIZED and (therefore shall we say) politicized: you are in control of your narrative -- win or lose. Can it get any more hopeful than that? And you will probably win.

Winning being defined as labor eeking out EQUALLY emotionally satisfying/dissatisfying market results -- EQUAL that is with the satisfaction of ownership and the consumer. That's what happens when all three interface in the market -- labor interfacing indirectly through collective bargaining.

(Labor's monopoly neutralizes ownership's monopsony -- the consumers' willingness to pay providing the checks and balances on labor's monopoly.)

If you feel you've done well RELATIVE to the standards of your own economic era you will feel you've done well SUBJECTIVELY.

For instance, my generation of (American born) cab drivers earned about $750 for a 60 hour (grueling) work week up to the early 80s. With multiples strip-offs I won't detail here (will on request -- diff for diff cities) that has been reduced to about $500 a week (at best I suspect!) I believe and that is just not enough to get guys like me out there for that grueling work.

Let's take the minimum wage comparison from peak-to-peak instead of from peak-to-trough: $11 and hour in 1968 -- at HALF TODAY'S per capita income (economic output) -- to $7.25 today. How many American born workers are going to show up for $7.25 in the day of SUVs and "up-to-date kitchens" all around us. $8.75 was perfectly enticing for Americans working in 1956 ($8.75 thanks to the "Master of the Senate"). The recent raise to $10 is not good enough for Chicago's 100,000 gang members (out of my estimate 200,000 gang age minority males). Can hustle that much on the street w/o the SUBJECTIVE feeling of wage slavery.

Ditto hiring result for two-tier supermarket contracts after Walmart undercut the unions.

Without effective unions (centralized bargaining is the gold standard: only thing that fends off Walmart type contract muscling. Done that way since 1966 with the Teamsters Union's National Master Freight Agreement; the long practiced law or custom from continental Europe to French Canada to Argentina to Indonesia.

It occurred to me this morning that if the quintessential example of centralized bargaining Germany has 25% or our population and produces 200% more cars than we do, then, Germans produces 8X as many cars per capita than we do!

And thoroughly union organized Germans feel very much in control of the narrative of their lives.

cm -> Denis Drew...

"thoroughly union organized Germans"

No longer thoroughly, with recent labor market reforms the door has likewise been blown open to contingent workforces, staffing agencies, and similar forms of (perma) temp work. And moving work to nations with lower labor standards (e.g. "peripheral" Europe, less so outside Europe) has been going on for decades, for parts, subassembly, and even final assembly.

Denis Drew said...

Very rough figures: half a million Chicago employees may make less than $800 a week -- almost everybody should earn $800 ...

... putative minimum wage? -- might allow some slippage in high labor businesses like fast food restaurants; 33% labor costs! -- sort of like the Teamsters will allow exceptions when needed from Master agreements if you open up your books, they need your working business too, consumer ultimately sets limits.

Average raise of $200 a week -- $10,000 a year equals $5 billion shift in income -- out of a $170 billion Chicago GDP (1% of national) -- not too shabby to bring an end to gang wars and Despair American Style.

Just takes making union busting a felony LIKE EVERY OTHER FORM OF UNFAIR MARKET MUSCLING (even taking a movie in the movies). The body of laws are there -- the issues presumably settled -- the enforcement just needs "dentures."

cm -> Denis Drew...

Union busting is generally (?) understood as direct interference with the formation and operation of unions or their members. It is probably more common that employers are allowed to just go around the unions - "right to work", subcontracting non-union shops or temp/staffing agencies, etc.

cm -> Denis Drew...

Why would people join a union and pay dues when the union is largely impotent to deliver, when there are always still enough desperate people who will (have to) take jobs outside the union system? Employers don't have to bring in scabs when they can legally go through "unencumbered" subcontractors inside or outside the jurisdiction.

cm -> cm...

It comes down to the collective action problem. You can organize people who form a "community" (workers in the same business site, or similar aggregates more or less subject to Dunbar's number or with a strong tribal/ethnic/otherwise cohesion narrative). Beyond that, if you can get a soapbox in the regional press, etc., otherwise good luck. It probably sounds defeatist but I don't have a solution.

When the union management is outed for corruption or other abuses or questioable practices (e.g. itself employing temps or subcontractors), it doesn't help.

Syaloch said...

There was a good discussion of this on last Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl5kFZ-SZq4

Surprisingly, I pretty much agree with David Frum's analysis -- and Maher's comment that Trump, with his recent book, "Crippled America", has his finger on the pulse of this segment of the population. Essentially what we're seeing is the impact of economic stagnation upon a culture whose reserves of social capital have been depleted, as described in Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone".

When the going gets tough it's a lot harder to manage without a sense of identity and purpose, and without the support of family, friends, churches, and communities. Facebook "friends" are no substitute for the real thing.

Peter K. said...

Jared Bernsetin:

"...since the late 1970s, we've been at full employment only 30 percent of the time (see the data note below for an explanation of how this is measured). For the three decades before that, the job market was at full employment 70 percent of the time."

We need better macro (monetary, fiscal, trade) policy.

Maybe middle-aged blacks and hispanics have better attitudes and health since they made it through a tough youth, have more realistic expectations and race relations are better than the bad old days even if they are far from perfect. The United States is becoming more multicultural.

Jesse said...

Credibility trap, fully engaged.

Jesse said...

The anti-knowledge of the elites is worth reading. http://billmoyers.com/2015/11/02/the-anti-knowledge-of-the-elites/ When such herd instinct and institutional overbearance connects with the credibility trap, the results may be impressive. http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2015/11/gold-daily-and-silver-weekly-charts-pop.html

Fred C. Dobbs said...

White, Middle-Age Suicide In America Skyrockets
Psychology Today - May 6, 2013
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reading-between-the-headlines/201305/white-middle-age-suicide-in-america-skyrockets

Suicide, once thought to be associated with troubled teens and the elderly, is quickly becoming an age-blind statistic. Middle aged Americans are turning to suicide in alarming numbers. The reasons include easily accessible prescription painkillers, the mortgage crisis and most importantly the challenge of a troubled economy. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention claims suicide rates now top the number of deaths due to automobile accidents.

The suicide rate for both younger and older Americans remains virtually unchanged, however, the rate has spiked for those in middle age (35 to 64 years old) with a 28 percent increase (link is external) from 1999 to 2010. The rate for whites in middle-age jumped an alarming 40 percent during the same time frame. According to the CDC, there were more than 38,000 suicides (link is external) in 2010 making it the tenth leading cause of death in America overall (third leading cause from age 15-24).

The US 2010 Final Data quantifies the US statistics for suicide by race, sex and age. Interestingly, African-American suicides have declined and are considerably lower than whites. Reasons are thought to include better coping skills when negative things occur as well as different cultural norms with respect to taking your own life. Also, Blacks (and Hispanics) tend to have stronger family support, community support and church support to carry them through these rough times.

While money woes definitely contribute to stress and poor mental health, it can be devastating to those already prone to depression -- and depression is indeed still the number one risk factor for suicide. A person with no hope and nowhere to go, can now easily turn to their prescription painkiller and overdose, bringing the pain, stress and worry to an end. In fact, prescription painkillers were the third leading cause of suicide (and rising rapidly) for middle aged Americans in 2010 (guns are still number 1). ...

cm -> Fred C. Dobbs...

When few people kill themselves "on purpose" or die from self-inflicted but probably "unintended" harms (e.g. organ failure or accidental death caused by substance abuse), it can be shrugged off as problems related to the individual (more elaboration possible but not necessary).

When it becomes a statistically significant phenomenon (above-noise percentage of total population or demographically identifiable groups), then one has to ask questions about social causes. My first question would be, "what made life suck for those people"? What specific instrument they used to kill themselves would be my second question (it may be the first question for people who are charged with implementing counter measures but not necessarily fixing the causes).

Since about the financial crisis (I'm not sure about causation or coincidence - not accidental coincidence BTW but causation by the same underlying causes), there has been a disturbing pattern of high school students throwing themselves in front of local trains. At that age, drinking or drugging oneself to death is apparently not the first "choice". Performance pressure *related to* (not just "and") a lack of convincing career/life prospects has/have been suspected or named as a cause. I don't think teenagers suddenly started to jump in front of trains that have run the same rail line for decades because of the "usual" and centuries to millennia old teenage romantic relationship issues.

[Sep 22, 2019] The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Notable quotes:
"... If returns to experience are in decline, if wisdom no longer pays off, then that might help suggest why a group of mostly older people who are not, as a group, disadvantaged might become convinced that the country has taken a turn for the worse. It suggests why their grievances should so idealize the past, and why all the talk about coal miners and factories, jobs in which unions have codified returns to experience into the salary structure, might become such a fixation. ..."
Apr 12, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
RGC , April 12, 2017 at 06:41 AM
The Despair of Learning That Experience No Longer Matters

April 10, 2017

.....................

The arguments about Case and Deaton's work have been an echo of the one that consumed so much of the primary campaign, and then the general election, and which is still unresolved: whether the fury of Donald Trump's supporters came from cultural and racial grievance or from economic plight. Case and Deaton's scholarship does not settle the question. As they write, more than once, "more work is needed."

But part of what Case and Deaton offer in their new paper is an emotional logic to an economic argument.

If returns to experience are in decline, if wisdom no longer pays off, then that might help suggest why a group of mostly older people who are not, as a group, disadvantaged might become convinced that the country has taken a turn for the worse. It suggests why their grievances should so idealize the past, and why all the talk about coal miners and factories, jobs in which unions have codified returns to experience into the salary structure, might become such a fixation.

Whatever comes from the deliberations over Case and Deaton's statistics, there is within their numbers an especially interesting story.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-despair-of-learning-that-experience-no-longer-matters

[Sep 21, 2019] One-Third of American Workers Pay Is Being Stolen. Here's How by Paul Tripp

NOTE: Images deleted
It was neoliberalism that ensured the redistribution of wealth up -- this was an explicit goal.
Jewish bankers of course played their role but stress should be on bankers, not of Jewish. Financial oligarchy should be regulated as special type of organized crime.
At the same time the rise of question of particularion and role of Jews in financial sector is a dangerous sign . Jews are convenient scapegoats and were used as one in 1030th in Germany. We should not forget that. As Eric Fromm said: "When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak." ( Escape from Freedom )
Also: "Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege." ~Thomas Clement Douglas
Sep 21, 2019 | www.unz.com
Paul Tripp September 21, 2019 3,600 Words 24 Comments Reply

If you're a member of the working class, 1/3 of your pay has been stolen from you.

You would think this would be front page news every day until the problem is fixed. Not only is that a huge amount of money for a huge portion of the country, but you would expect our left leaning media to be all over this. There is no better evidence that capitalism, at least in its current state, is failing. If the left actually cared about the working class, if the wave of cultural Marxism that has spread through academia and the media was actually about the plight of workers oppressed by a distant and uncaring elite, no fact would be repeated more often than this.

And yet, aside from a handful of articles – such as one from the New York Times in 2011, and another from The Atlantic in 2015 – the issue hardly gets mentioned by the media. And even when it is mentioned, it is often editorialized in a way that distorts the problem and hides its root cause, if not outright lied about by a media with an agenda that has little to do with helping actual workers.

The evidence for the theft of 1/3 of the working class' pay comes primarily from a left wing think tank called the Economic Policy Institute, and comes from a comparison of productivity growth in the economy vs the average hourly pay of non-management workers. Their graph shows that worker pay increased steadily at basically the same rate at productivity from the 1948 until 1972. In 1972, productivity was up 92.2% from where it was in 1948 while the average worker's hourly compensation was up 91.3%. From 1972-3, productivity rose to 97.0% higher than its 1948 value while pay fell to only 91.0% higher than it was in 1948. Productivity and pay both fell from 1973-4, but productivity rose again from 1974-5 while pay declined for another year, widening the gap between productivity and pay growth to over 10% for the first time since 1948, a gap which would never close again.

Pay then rose more slowly than productivity for the rest of the 70s, fell during the 80s and early 90s, grew slowly again during the dotcom boom of the late 90s when productivity grew far more rapidly, and stagnated again for most of the 00s. Then from 2008-09, pay rose sharply by almost 8% of its 1948 value. In other words, during the housing market collapse, when wealthy investment bankers were losing a lot of money (and before they got it back during the bailout), workers' hourly compensation jumped up faster than productivity for the first time in decades – though not by nearly enough to close the gap, as productivity had risen by more than 100% more than pay by 2008. After the bailout, pay stagnated again, though according to many sources pay is increasing under Trump at a faster rate than it did for most of the past few decades.

However, for some reason, both the Economic Policy Institute's current graph and the New York Times graph put a line through 1979 to divide the era of regular pay growth and pay stagnation, despite the gap having grown to about 15% by then. It would seem that 1972-3, when pay growth stagnated and then fell for the first time in decades, would be a better place to put the line – and indeed, that is where The Atlantic's graph (and some older versions of EPI's graph) put it. Is there a reason for this obfuscation?

There is, of course, some disagreement over EPI's findings. Right wing sources like the Heritage Foundation claim that worker pay is actually rising at about the same rate as productivity. Their main disagreement with EPI's findings is due to the fact that EPI doesn't include management workers and self-employed professionals in their estimate of worker pay. When those groups are included, pay did in fact increase at almost the same rate as productivity – however, as the Heritage Foundation notes, only the top 20% of earners saw their earnings rise at a faster rate than productivity since the 70s, while the middle 60% saw far lower growth in their pay, so their findings are of little comfort to a majority of American workers, particularly the shrinking middle class.

One final analysis, this one from BLS data published by Pew Research and Statista, both of whom look only at wages and not productivity, actually suggests the situation may be even worse than EPI's data suggests – where EPI shows wages grew by about 25% of their 1948 value from 1972-2018, Pew shows worker pay peaking in 1973, falling from the mid 70s through the mid 90s, and rising slowly from the mid 90s until now with a significant jump during the 2008 recession. According to Statista, 2019 was the first year wages rose above their 1973 value – by about $0.05 cents an hour in 2019 dollars.

Basically everyone's data suggests the same thing. After seeing solid wage growth prior to the early 1970s, non-management worker pay stagnated from the mid 70s until the mid 90s, and rose more slowly than productivity from the mid 90s until now with the exception of one significant jump up during the housing market crash. The economic stagnation experienced by a solid majority of Americans, particularly the middle class, is the driving force behind a variety of economic, social, and political problems. It's among the reason why many Americans eat too much cheap overprocessed food, why young people are burdened with debt to pay for degrees to qualify for more complicated and demanding jobs that don't pay enough to pay off their student loans, and why more women are working outside the home and choosing not to marry as they can't find husbands capable of supporting them. It's the driving cause of both the left's growing agitation for more socialist programs to make up for their lack of fair pay and the new right's longing for a bygone era when the American economy was great because workers actually got paid what their productivity was worth. Finding the cause of this problem and solving it would relieve much of the growing polarization and political dissatisfaction that's growing among people who are too young to remember an era when workers got real raises every year.

The left blames this problem on a variety of factors that have little relationship to the actual wage data, such as declining union membership and minimum wage laws that don't keep up with inflation. Union membership has been declining since the early 1950s, so workers continued to get raises for the first two decades of declining union membership. And while minimum wage laws haven't kept up with inflation since about the same time worker pay began to stagnate, that's likely a symptom of the same problem rather than the cause. Nor can this be blamed on lower taxes on the rich, since this data looks at pre-tax income and 1/3 of your pay is being stolen before a single dollar of taxes is taken out.

The establishment right mostly tries to dismiss the existence of the gap, despite a variety of sources pointing to its existence and the Heritage Foundation's admission that middle class has indeed seen their pay stagnate even as their productivity rose. It might be tempting for some on the right to blame the problem on immigration, and changes in immigration policy in the 1960s did allow for an increase in the number of immigrants entering the country, but growth in immigration was slow until the late 80s and early 90s. By that time pay had already been stagnant for a while, so immigration doesn't seem to be the driving force keeping wages down, even if it may be a small factor. This doesn't negate the many other reasons many Americans want more control over immigration, such as preventing criminals from entering our country and protecting our cultural values by making sure immigrants share those values before letting them in, but we must look elsewhere to explain why worker pay is stagnant.

Other theories include the rise of automation, increased female participation in the workforce, and corporate greed. Blaming automation implies that automation was not happening from the 1940s through the early 1970s, or was at least not significant enough to affect worker pay until then, and that it has happened much faster since the 70s. There's no objective way to measure automation to test that theory, but as automation is one of the driving factors behind increased worker productivity, it seems like automation should be increasing the availability of goods and services to each worker. Shouldn't automation result in an economy where most people can get more stuff for less work, rather than the same amount of stuff for more work? There's no good explanation for why automation would result in stagnating worker pay, especially as jobs become more high tech and require a more educated middle class that should be able to demand higher wages relative to poorly educated and low skill workers. Instead, it is precisely that highly educated middle class who have taken the biggest hit to their wages. As for women in the workforce, much like the stagnant minimum wage, this appears to be more a symptom of a greater problem than the cause – the rise of second wave feminism in the 70s occurred as pay was stagnating, and was likely driven at least in part by women needing to work outside the home more to make up for their husbands' stagnant pay. And considering the significant increases in productivity and automation, workers ought to be able to provide for their families without needing their wives to work as there should be more resources available per worker today than there were a few decades ago when fewer women worked outside the home. As for corporate greed, corporations were just as greedy from the 1940s until the early 70s as they are today, and simply blaming greed does nothing to explain how the elite are able to siphon more money out of the economy today than they did decades ago. A better explanation is needed.

There was a major change in the way our economy is run that occurred in the early 1970s, just before worker pay stopped growing. That change occurred in 1971, just before pay stagnated from 1972-3. From 1944-1971, an international monetary agreement called Bretton Woods tied the value of the dollar (and many other currencies around the globe) to the value of gold, limiting the Federal Reserve and banking industry's ability to manipulate the money supply. During the Bretton Woods years, changes in the money supply and value of the dollar were primarily driven by market forces rather than by the decisions of bankers and economic elites. The Bretton Woods years overlap so perfectly with the period when worker pay kept up with productivity growth that the glaring lack of any mention of it by any of the think tanks and media outlets – left, right, or center – that have written about the gap between pay and productivity says a lot about the dishonesty of our media and academics.

Is Federal Reserve policy really capable of causing such a major economic shift? It certainly seems to be. Consider a recent study from economist Brian Barnier of FedDashboard.com that found that over 90% of stock market price fluctuation since 2008 has been due to Fed policy. If the Fed can cause that much of a shift in the market, it's likely that the Fed can cause a lot of other changes too. That same study found that from the end of WWII until the early 70s, GDP growth caused most of the change in the stock market – as it would normally be expected to. Then, in the mid 70s, the growth of debt based spending – enabled by the end of Bretton Woods which gave the bankers much greater ability to expand the money supply through loans – became the biggest factor in the stock market's movement, causing a solid majority of stock market movement over the next few decades, first through the expansion of consumer debt and credit cards, then by business loans and mortgages. Fiscal policy, primarily set by the Fed, has been the driving cause of stock market movement since shortly after the end of Bretton Woods, rather than market forces which were the driving cause of market changes under Bretton Woods. And the worst drop in worker pay came during the 1980s when Paul Volcker, who said that helping end Bretton Woods while he worked in Nixon's Treasury department was the most important decision of his career, was chairman of the Federal Reserve.

It's clear that Bretton Woods and the era when supply and demand ruled the market coincided with the steady rise of worker pay, while the era of Federal Reserve policy dominating the market has coincided with stagnant worker pay and wealth redistribution to the rich. Whether this is due to inflation, as workers who aren't as economically savvy as management and owners won't always realize that a raise that's equal to or less than inflation is not actually a raise at all, or due to the direct creation of wealth within the banking industry and by members of the investor class through fractional reserve banking and other tools enabled by the Fed, or a combination of those and other factors is not entirely clear, but it is certainly clear that there is a strong correlation between central bank meddling in the economy and stagnating worker pay. This justifies far more investigation, and we may not have all the answers to how the rich are gaming the system and screwing the working class without a full audit of the Federal Reserve. But there are two more questions we can ask now without waiting for that audit that may help shed light on who's responsible for the problem: who has been in charge of Federal Reserve policy for the past few decades, and where is the money going?

Remember that it was Paul Volcker who was both instrumental in ending Bretton Woods, enabling the rise of the Fed's dominance of the economy and redistribution of wealth, and who oversaw the largest decrease in worker pay in the past half century. There's one other thing you need to know about Paul Volcker, something that will help answer the question of who controls Fed policy and where the money is going. Paul Volcker shares something in common with four other recent Federal Reserve chairs during the period of wage stagnation and with an extremely disproportionate number of billionaires – Volcker was hereditarily (though not religiously) Jewish. Arthur Burns, who became chairman of the Federal reserve in 1970, the year before Volcker convinced Nixon to end Bretton Woods, was the first Jewish Federal Reserve chairman since World War 2 and ran the Fed through most of the 70s. Volcker took over the Fed in 1979 and was followed by three more Jews in a row: Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet Yellen. While it may be tempting to blame ties to corporate or banking interests instead, only Volcker and Greenspan had any history of working in corporate banking prior to working at the Fed; Burns, Bernanke, and Yellen had mostly academic and government advisory experience before their appointments to Federal Reserve chair. Last year, Trump appointed the first non-Jewish Fed chair since the 1970s, and that year was one of the best years for wage growth since the 1970s.

Just how wealthy have the Jews become while controlling our central bank, the most powerful financial regulatory agency in the country? Most estimates of Jewish wealth (including Jewish sources) find that over 1/3 of American billionaires are Jewish in a country that is less than 2% Jewish, meaning you're roughly 20 times as likely to be a billionaire if you're Jewish than if you're not. That overrepresentation is even greater at the top, where 5 of the 10 richest Americans are Jewish according to the Times of Israel. Coincidentally, Jews are overrepresented among the billionaire class by about the same amount as the portion of the working class' pay that's missing from their checks. And according to one estimate, Jews were 23% of the billionaire class in 1987; that year, workers were losing about 20% of what they should have been getting paid based on their productivity according to EPI, about the same percent as Jewish overrepresentation among the billionaire class. As the rich have gotten richer while the working class have gotten robbed, the rich have also gotten more Jewish.

Of course, not all Jews benefit from the Fed's theft of the working class. Rather, it's more likely that there is a Jewish financial cartel in much the same way there are Mexican drug cartels, an Italian mafia, Islamic sex slave grooming gangs and terror networks, and many other gangs whose identity is based partly on ethnic and religious affiliation. Volcker, as someone who both was and was not Jewish, was the perfect patsy – he was ethnically Jewish enough to be part of the tribe, but any backlash against him for his role in ending Bretton Woods and reducing worker pay could be deflected away from the Jewish financial cartel because he was a practicing Christian. Not all Jews have to be a part of this financial cartel for the people responsible for stealing 1/3 of the American working class' pay to be Jewish, and those that aren't should be just as upset about the actions of those that are as anyone else. While the idea of a Jewish financial cartel may come off as conspiratorial to some, two of the biggest news stories of the past year – Jeffrey Epstein and NXIVM – have been about Jewish billionaires (the Bronfmans in the case of NXIVM) running pedophilic sex slave trading networks which they used to blackmail and manipulate the rich, famous, and powerful. It's not much of a stretch to assume that part of the reason why they needed those criminal networks was to help cover up an even bigger ongoing crime.

But it is possible, if unlikely, that there is no Jewish financial cartel. In that case, however, the resulting assumption seems much worse for the Jewish people – that five different Jewish Federal Reserve chairs simply happened to accidentally oversee the stagnation of the American working class' pay as Jewish investment bankers capitalized on their fiscal policies after more than two decades of solid worker pay growth under non-Jewish Fed chairs. If that's the case, a five for five record of screwing over the working class is more than enough evidence that Jews should never be allowed near the halls of financial power in the United States ever again. But, as many lower and middle class Jews are hurt just as much by the financial theft that's been going on for decades, it would be far better to investigate the possible existence of the Jewish financial cartel and focus our attention on the people directly responsible for robbing a majority of Americans first, rather than directing our ire at all Jews.

Regardless of whether or not this Jewish financial cartel exists, a few things should be clear. First, the Federal Reserve needs a full audit and investigation to determine how corrupt the institution has become and whether they are directly enriching particular members of the billionaire class or just accidentally creating the kind of economy where rich and often Jewish investment bankers profit while the rest of us stagnate. Second, we need to seriously consider changing our monetary system, whether that means returning to a gold standard, a pseudo-gold standard such as Bretton Woods, or some other form of stable currency that limits the inflationary and wealth redistribution power of the banking industry. Third, Jewish control of our financial (not to mention political) institutions must be dismantled in much the same way our Jewish media and academics talk about dismantling white privilege, regardless of whether the problem turns out to be a specific criminal cartel comprised mostly of wealthy and powerful Jews or whether the problem turns out to be that the nature of the Jewish people is to manage the economy for the good of investment bankers and upper management, rather than for the good of the workers who produce and distribute the things we all rely on to survive and thrive. Americans deserve an economy that works for us as much as we work for it.


Thulean Friend , says: September 21, 2019 at 5:13 am GMT

Much of foreign investment is aimed at tax dodging rather than job creation, study finds. Almost 40 per cent of global foreign direct investment ends up in empty corporate shells, often tasked with cutting companies' tax bill

There is a systematic tax theft ongoing, all under the auspices of Woke Capitalism. But don't worry about this, let's distract you about non-existing identity controversies on gender, trannies, homosexuals, race, religion etc. And people fall for it.

Robert Dolan , says: September 21, 2019 at 5:29 am GMT
The FED is a jewish banking cartel. It is not federal. Greenspan admitted on Charlie Rose that, "There is no government agency that has power over The Federal Reserve."

Ron Paul spent his entire career trying to end the FED and wrote a great book with that title.

The FED causes a misallocation of resources, creates bubbles, funds wars for Israel.

I suspect that the government and financial sector have played a huge role in the decline of the white middle class and our falling birthrates.

I read "The Creature From Jekyl Island" many years ago and the story of the origin of the FED is quite fascinating.

MarkinPNW , says: September 21, 2019 at 5:53 am GMT
It's what started happening when Nixon took the US completely off the Gold standard, which facilitated the subsequent rise of the FIRE economy in place of real productive economic activity.

While individual productivity continued to rise, the fruits of that productivity got sidetracked into excessive growth of the FIRE economy.

p.s. Now that I've read the full article, I see I'm just giving a quick summary; the article just proves my point in much greater detail.

Miro23 , says: September 21, 2019 at 7:30 am GMT

Basically everyone's data suggests the same thing. After seeing solid wage growth prior to the early 1970s, non-management worker pay stagnated from the mid 70s until the mid 90s, and rose more slowly than productivity from the mid 90s until now.

In the early 1970's I remember the first Asian manufactured products starting to appear along with digitalization and the basic internet. The article could have highlighted the fact, since digitalization and the internet had a big part in making Asian outsourcing technically (and economically) viable.

As the article points out, elites and their top managers did well, and from this POV, they would do well, since they were the ones capturing the extra profitability (Western sales prices less Asian manufacturing costs). It was their workers who lost out as local manufacturing was shut down. Agreed that mass immigration also put a downward pressure on wages.

IMO Neoliberalism (economic liberalism) was the academic fraud that opened the political door to outsourcing – and it was Neoliberalism that allied with the extreme social liberalism of open frontiers (anti-racist), LGBT, Black/White guilt narratives etc.. Also agree that Jews were heavily involved in the "progressive" push for both types of liberalism and enabled the mass indebtedness (through the FED) that sustains it. If the government can't cover its social spending (or the cost of its wars), it gets into debt, and if a person has a minimum wage job then they're also heading into debt.

Franz , says: September 21, 2019 at 8:14 am GMT

Productivity and pay both fell from 1973-4, but productivity rose again from 1974-5 while pay declined for another year, widening the gap between productivity and pay growth to over 10% for the first time since 1948, a gap which would never close again .

The reason it happened right then and there:

The oil "embargo" of 1973, totally politically arranged but giving all the big industrial firms an excuse to freeze wages, stop hiring, and eventually ship jobs overseas.

As long as the "national bank" is a privately run corporation it cannot be fixed. It works for its members not for its nation. Keep in mind the steel and auto factories were owned by the same folks who run the Fed.

The entire nation started the slo-mo drop to our current status as incipient Third World member in 1973. This isn't really surprising: A fellow might have put a down payment on a house in 1955 with massive monthly mortgage payments like $140 and paid it off in funny money in the 1970s. Think of it as the "bonus" that many of the Greatest Generation got.

Bur after them, the lines all go negative. And not all of them were in a position to take advantage of the near-hyperinflation of the post-Vietnam period. It is certain, though, that even adjusting for inflation, house payments in the Fifties were cheaper than renting a flop is now. The Reagan "boom" was a goldmine for suburban yuppies, everyone else got the shaft.

Hail , says: Website September 21, 2019 at 9:59 am GMT

Volcker was hereditarily (though not religiously) Jewish

Does the author have any source for this claim at all?

Paul Volcker (b.1927)'s grandparents were all German(-born) Protestants; he was raised in a Lutheran church in the US, and as best I can tell remains a Lutheran today.

This allegation that Volcker is Jewish seems baseless, frivolous, and self-discrediting.

Truth3 , says: September 21, 2019 at 10:20 am GMT
The largest reasons for wage suppression relative to worker value (productivity is a measure of it) has to do with the steady takeover by Jews of Corporate Boards and Management since the late 1960's.

Eastern Banks (largely Jewish owned or led) exerted their influence in Corporate America by forcing their nominees onto Corporate Boards of the firms they lent to, or bought shares (or were granted) of.

Management became far more Jewish as the years progressed. In fact, without Jews in Management positions far in excess of representative ratios, Banks would simply not lend to 'White' corporations and the Greenmail and other tactics of the 1970's and 1980's were largely attempts by Jews to hijack Companies outright.

When CEO pay went from 10x worker pay to 100x or more, there was a reason for that Jewish GREED. Boards authorized extravagant CEO and other top Management position pay increases beyond all reason, why? Jews were selected at a 10x to 50x higher proportion for those slots. Hey, what's best for the tribe, right?

Off shoring was largely a Jewish phenomenon. Financial Globalism, it's Umbrella, is as well. Offshoring and Globalism suppresses American wages more than in any other country by far.

Lastly Wall Street sucks the wealth from American workers in countless ways. I have known Capital Giant VP's that spent their entire career raiding pension funds, or breaking up companies and throwing workers out by the millions to reap a few pennies on the dollar by selling off the main assets and looting the hidden ones. Who, do you think, dominated that practice? Jews.

The Jews SUCK in more ways than one.

Parfois1 , says: September 21, 2019 at 10:45 am GMT
In my lay understanding about the decline of wages since the 1970s, it is necessary to look at the whole picture – not pick and choose individual factors which, on their own, are not necessarily the answer. Obviously, the FRB has the power to affect most of those factors (setting interest rates, quantitative easing, controlling the money supply, etc.). Obviously the predominantly Jewish financial institutions as the FRB, Treasury and banks have the power to affect those factors. Obviously, and ultimately, the US Government and Congress also have the power to affect those factors.

Putting all together, the political system enables and promotes policies in favour of the corporate elite to the detriment of the wage-slaving working class. It has been so since aeons and it will never change until the wage-slaves assume the reigns of political power and enact policies for their benefit. Looking at the reasons for the diminishing purchasing power of wages is like missing the forest for the trees.

After all, one does not need to look at macroeconomic data, flow charts and whatnots to understand that a class based society is necessarily ruled by the ruling class for its own benefit, not for the benefit of the ruled underclass of wage slaves. Therefore, the plutocracy in power today is doing what the previous ruling aristocracy did before, and before that what the Patricians of Rome and the Citizens of Greece did: using political power for selfish ends.

Yes, there was a "golden era" of raising working class incomes from the end of WWII to the 1970s – the reconstruction boom in Europe and concomitant booming imports from the US. But that wage bonanza was predominantly due to the Cold War itself, namely to show off that Capitalism was capable of offering a decent wage to workers in order to tame the then popular appeal of Communism identified with the victorious USSR. Not to mention the shortage of the workforce following the carnage.

By the 1970s, the war was a fading memory, the counterculture movement was in full swing, the politicians treated the people and countries as their fiefdoms, the neoliberal doctrines taking root in academia and government. No need to pretend anymore that governments cared for the people. The mask came off and brutal Capitalism revealed its true nature: voracious greed for the plutocracy and large sinecural bribes for the political stooges.

Achmed E. Newman , says: Website September 21, 2019 at 11:10 am GMT
@anon I take back my AGREE – meant to DISAGREE (I thought there was a way to do that within a certain period, Ron?)

I agree with most of the article with a couple of exceptions. Immigration has been a BIG factor in the stagnation in real pay. Secondly, instead of "Jewish financial control" being dismantled how about just "financial control" period. Are you for sound money or not, Mr. Tripp?

skeptic23 , says: September 21, 2019 at 11:15 am GMT
Two facts are inescapably true:
1. The Fed has run the wealth-transfer mechanism
2. The identity of the people running the Fed

[Sep 15, 2019] Wall Street Ignores Cyclical Jobs Growth Downturn As Employment Indicator Hits Great Recession Levels

Notable quotes:
"... Most of the ads for good jobs are fake. ..."
"... Instead of submitting a general application, as used to be the case in the past, and have the ability to work with the company to find the role that works best. HR has ruined a lot of good companies and their recruiting processes by going to rigid job descriptions instead of just hiring smart people and letting them work. ..."
Sep 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

The Economic Cycle Research Institute's (ECRI) Lakshman Achuthan recently sat down with CNBC's Michael Santoli to discuss the jobs growth downturn. Keep in mind, this conversation was held on Wednesday, several days before Friday's disappointing jobs report.

Achuthan told Santoli there's a " very clear cyclical downturn in jobs growth, there's really no debating that, and it looks set to continue ."

Achuthan said January 2019 marked the cyclical peak in jobs growth, has been moving lower ever since, and the trend is far from over. Both nonfarm payrolls and the household survey year-over-year growth are in cyclical downturns, he said. While the economic narratives via the mainstream financial press continue to cheerlead that the consumer will lift all tides thanks to the supposedly strong jobs market, Achuthan believes the downturn in jobs growth will start to "undermine consumer confidence." And it's the loss in consumer confidence that could tilt the economy into recession.

He also said when examining cyclically sensitive sectors of the economy, there are already "questionable jobs numbers," such as a significant surge in the construction unemployment rate.

Achuthan said nonfarm payroll growth has plunged to a 17-month low, and the household survey is even weaker. He said the top nonfarm payroll line would be revised down by half a million jobs in the coming months, which would underline the weakness in employment.

Achuthan emphasized to Santoli that ECRI's recession call won't be "taken off the table. We've been talking about a growth rate cycle slowdown. We're slow-walking toward -- some recessionary window of vulnerability -- we're not there today -- but this piece of the puzzle [jobs growth downturn] is looking a bit wobbly. This is the main message that Wall Street is missing."

As Wall Street bids stocks to near-record highs on "trade optimism" and the belief that the consumer will save the day, in large part because of solid jobs growth. ECRI's Leading Employment Index, which correctly anticipated this downturn in jobs growth, is at its worst reading since the Great Recession .

And Wall Street's bet today is that the Fed can achieve a soft landing – as in 1995-96 – when it started the rate cut cycle the same month the inflation downturn was signaled by the U.S. Future Inflation Gauge (USFIG) turning lower.

However, this time around, the inflation downturn signal arrived in September 2018, the moment when the Fed should have started the cut cycle. With a ten-month lag in the cut cycle, belated rate cuts have always been associated with recession.

And now it should become increasingly clear to readers why President Trump has sounded the alarm about the need for 100bps rate cuts, quantitative easing, and emergency payroll tax cuts - it's because he's been briefed about the economic downturn that has already started.


GotAFriendInBen , 15 minutes ago link

Actually, MSM cheerleads rate cuts as the cure-all, instead of throwing shoes at Powell

Keyser , 41 minutes ago link

How do you continue to have jobs growth when the country is at full employment?

Typical ******** from C-NBC...

Alex Droog , 19 minutes ago link

The network that employs dotards like Jim Cramer to cheerlead the lemmings.

Build-It-Well , 1 hour ago link

Have we learned anything?

https://soundcloud.com/daniel-sullivan-505714723/little-saigon-report-170-have-we-learned-anything

Art_Vandelay , 1 hour ago link

I don't agree with him that the Fed can do anything to correct this, nor do they have an incentive to do so. The Fed is not on the consumer's side. They will appropriate funds to whoever they want to, just like 08, and give the middle finger to everyone else.

pitz , 1 hour ago link

Job quality is horrible, particularly for US citizen STEM workers. This has been the case since the downturn that began in the late 1990s. Trump needs to fully cancel the OPT program and almost eliminate the H-1B program. Major employers don't even bother considering US citizen STEM talent before they hire foreign nationals.

pump and dump , 1 hour ago link

Most of the ads for good jobs are fake.

pitz , 1 hour ago link

Yes, but they don't bother to come out and tell you its a fake ad. One of the tragedies of the online job application process is that it forces a person, with little to no knowledge of a company and its internals, to pick, out of potentially hundreds of roles, which one would be best for them.

Instead of submitting a general application, as used to be the case in the past, and have the ability to work with the company to find the role that works best. HR has ruined a lot of good companies and their recruiting processes by going to rigid job descriptions instead of just hiring smart people and letting them work.

ZD1 , 1 hour ago link

Congress first established the H-1B program with the The Immigration Act of 1990. It was supposed to be temporary.

Congress needs to abolish it.

Future Jim , 2 hours ago link

This seems to contradict the labor participation rate.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

J S Bach , 2 hours ago link

"Wall Street Ignores Cyclical Slave Growth Downturn As Enslavement Indicator Hits Great Recession Levels"

Ahhh... what truth a few seconds of editing can convoke.

The EveryThing Bubble , 2 hours ago link

It's all rigged folks

don't believe anything you read

[Sep 13, 2019] Clowns, AI and layoffs

Sep 13, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Bugs Bunny , September 13, 2019 at 4:25 pm

Clowns should be increasingly used in redundancy (layoff, firing) meetings until it becomes the norm and employers start to compete with each other to offer the best clown redundancy experience and promote it as a benefit.

It would also create clown jobs, which would probably require more clown schools, meaning that the tuition prices would go through the roof and young people dreaming of becoming redundancy clowns would either have to come from wealth or take out massive clown loans to fund their education for clown universities and grad schools. Shareholders can only take so much top line costs and Wall Street pressure would force corporations to improve return on investment and reduce redundancy clown labor expenses. Sadly, redundancy clowns would find themselves training their own replacements – HB1 clowns from "low cost" countries. Employers would respond to quality criticisms of the HB1 clown experience by publishing survey results showing very similar almost ex-employee satisfaction with the new clowns.

Eventually, of course, redundancy clowns will be replaced by AI and robots. It's just the future and we will need to think about how to adapt to it today by putting in place a UBI for the inevitable redundant redundancy clowns.

[Sep 10, 2019] Focus Voters' Anger on Corporations, Not Just Republicans Portside by Gordon Lafer

What changed in five years? Almost nothing other then the crisis of neoliberal is now deeper and involved trade war with China, the new, more dangerous, and unconstrained by any treaties stage of the arm race with Russia, and the attempt of Trump administration to economically strangulate and force color revolutions in Iran and Venezuela. Trump betrayed almost all his election promises much like Obama before him.
Jan 28, 2013 | portside.org

Economic decline produces fear, resentment, rage--and a politics that is combustible and unstable. Workers voice anger in many directions: against the banks and insurance companies, against public employees and immigrants. The economic elite works hard to ensure that resentment is directed at someone other than them, but it's a force not easily controlled.

... ... ...

When pollsters ask if we should sign a NAFTA-style treaty with Vietnam and Malaysia, no one is more opposed than Tea Partiers. Yet the base is rudely ignored; the interests of the Kochs and Waltons trump the nationalism of the rank and file.

The one-percenters control the party largely by keeping the base engrossed in non-economic issues: campaigns against abortion rights, gay marriage, and undocumented immigrants. The problem for the GOP is that now such campaigns seem likely to backfire.

... ... ...

The conservative base hates "free trade," for instance. If Democrats held press events in every district, standing in front of plants that shipped jobs overseas and challenging Republicans to disavow contributions from corporations that promote more NAFTAs, legislators would start feeling real pressure.

If this was followed by hearings on minimum wage, class size, and guest workers, we might do to the Chamber of Commerce what the right did to ACORN--make it toxic for politicians to be associated with it.

But Democrats will never take on this fight. Instead, they engage in a kind of political Stockholm syndrome, forever seeking opportunities to agree with the same corporate lobbies that fund their opponents.

Labor's job is not to make the Democrats into a better version of themselves. Our job is to do what the Democrats cannot.

WHAT WE CAN DO

There is no Master Plan that guarantees victory. But here are a few steps unions can take to move politics forward in 2013:

Focus on the states. The federal government is going to remain politically deadlocked. We should concentrate our resources where they can make the most difference.

Put workplace organizing at the center of our political operation. Our unique strength, workplace organizing, is also the most effective way to actually change people's minds.

When "paycheck protection" was first proposed, as a 1998 ballot initiative in California, it was supported by a majority of union members, who at first blush thought that requiring members' annual written permission to spend dues money on politics sounded reasonable.

Labor worked hard to explain that the real purpose was to silence workers' voice in politics. After the initiative was defeated, people who had started off supporting the measure but changed their minds were polled. Did they get their primary information from television, radio, mail, phone, or talking with a co-worker at work?

Talking with a co-worker was 20 points more effective than any other medium in changing people's minds.

PEOPLE CAN CHANGE

The core principle of union organizing is that people can change. Indeed, the work of organizing is almost nothing but that--helping scared people become brave, changing how people understand the boss and their own collective power.

But there's no place for such transformations in traditional electoral campaigns, where voters' preferences are treated as fixed and "messaging" is limited to superficial, poll-tested buzzwords.

Such campaigns do nothing to transform how people think about the economy, or to build organizations that last beyond elections. We need to initiate campaigns where we can engage in deeper education and build rank-and-file leaders in the process.

Since most unions' political staffs come out of electoral politics, they often don't understand workplace internal organizing. To do politics right, we must bring together political and organizing staffs that often operate on separate tracks.

Recruit members to serve as public ambassadors. Attacks on public employees are fueled by misleading propaganda about the nature of their work. Thus 80 percent of Americans think the public school system deserves a grade of "C" or lower, but the same number give their kid's school an A or a B.

In other words, when people encounter the reality of schooling up close, they appreciate the work teachers do.

If each local teachers union, for instance, recruited 50 members who each committed to giving five presentations to Rotary clubs, church groups, or neighborhood associations--describing in unscripted terms what their job is like--we could establish a more realistic understanding of teachers' work.

Such an undertaking would draw on our strength and leave the unions with stronger leaders when the campaign was done.

Campaign against the corporate lobbies. Unions need to do what Democrats cannot: run campaigns that directly challenge the corporate interests that stand behind the Republicans. We should promote common-sense reforms that benefit the vast majority even if unacceptable to big business.

Consider, for example, a proposal to undo state tax breaks for the rich and earmark the money for job creation or universal preschool.

As the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) does for the corporate right, we should identify a set of proposals that can be advanced in multiple states.

Run offensive ballot initiatives. The best vehicles for this are ballot initiatives, which avoid the messy and various reasons that people choose candidates. Note the failed recall of Scott Walker versus the successful referendum overturning Ohio's union-busting law.

It's easy for corporations to buy off legislators, but harder to sway the population on well-defined issues. In 2012 a number of red states passed progressive initiatives that directly contradicted the actions of their legislators. In deep red Idaho and South Dakota, for instance, voters overturned anti-teacher laws by wide margins.

While our recent political campaigns have shown what the labor movement is against, few non-members can say what we're for--and many members are hungry to go on offense. It's time to spell out our vision of how the economy should work.

Gordon Lafer is an associate professor at the University of Oregon's Labor Education and Research Center. A longer version of this article is in the Winter issue of New Labor Forum.

[Sep 09, 2019] Wages Have Stagnated for Low- and Mid-wage Workers and Pay Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Persist

Sep 09, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Joe , September 05, 2019 at 09:17 AM

https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/californias-workers-are-increasingly-locked-out-of-the-states-prosperity/

Wages Have Stagnated for Low- and Mid-wage Workers and Pay Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Persist
Earnings for California's workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades. In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1).

Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.

Much of this increase occurred in recent years, likely due to the rising state minimum wage as well as the improving job market. In contrast with the experience of low- and mid-wage workers, high-wage workers -- those at the 90th percentile -- saw their hourly earnings increase by 43%, after adjusting for inflation, from $40.19 in 1979 to $57.65 in 2018.

These hourly wage disparities translate into sizeable income gaps. Someone earning at the 90th percentile in 2018 would earn an annual salary of $115,300 if she worked full-time, year-round, while someone working just as much but earning at the 10th percentile would have an annual income of just $22,240. (As striking as this income gap is, disparities in wealth are even greater.)

-----

The Cal Budget Center reports bad news. I can hire construction workers for a buck above minimum wage, $11, vs the $10 they got in 1979. Why are they coming to California to live in poverty? For half of them, they were born in California , the other half were born in either Central America or the Northeast US.


ilsm -> EMichael... , September 05, 2019 at 01:38 PM

In wages you need to throw some salt in on the "average", like what is the median income to see the lumps (of inequality of) wage distribution.
anne -> Paine... , September 06, 2019 at 09:03 AM
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=oMXN

January 15, 2018

Average Hourly Earnings of All Construction Employees in California and United States, 2007-2018

[ Average hourly earnings for all construction employees in California in July 2019 was $37.17 and $30.72 through the United States. ]

likbez -> anne... , September 06, 2019 at 10:58 PM
Anne,

$37 looks way too high. This is around $74K a year.

What is the median wage?

Paine -> likbez... , September 07, 2019 at 02:28 PM
No what is the marginal non union crew wage

[Sep 09, 2019] What's the True Unemployment Rate in the US? by Jack Rasmus

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. ..."
"... The U-6 also includes what the labor dept. calls involuntary part time employed. It should include the voluntary part time as well, but doesn't (See, they're not actively looking for work even if unemployed). ..."
"... But even the involuntary part time is itself under-estimated. I believe the Labor Dept. counts only those involuntarily part time unemployed whose part time job is their primary job. It doesn't count those who have second and third involuntary part time jobs. That would raise the U-6 unemployment rate significantly. The labor Dept's estimate of the 'discouraged' and 'missing labor force' is grossly underestimated. ..."
"... The labor dept. also misses the 1-2 million workers who went on social security disability (SSDI) after 2008 because it provides better pay, for longer, than does unemployment insurance. That number rose dramatically after 2008 and hasn't come down much (although the government and courts are going after them). ..."
"... The way the government calculates unemployment is by means of 60,000 monthly household surveys but that phone survey method misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others working in the underground economy in the inner cities (about 10-12% of the economy according to most economists and therefore potentially 10-12% of the reported labor force in size as well). ..."
"... The SSDI, undocumented, underground, underestimation of part timers, etc. are what I call the 'hidden unemployed'. And that brings the unemployed well above the 3.7%. ..."
Sep 09, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

The real unemployment rate is probably somewhere between 10%-12%. Here's why: the 3.7% is the U-3 rate, per the labor dept. But that's the rate only for full time employed. What the labor dept. calls the U-6 includes what it calls discouraged workers (those who haven't looked for work in the past 4 weeks). Then there's what's called the 'missing labor force'–i.e. those who haven't looked in the past year. They're not calculated in the 3.7% U-3 unemployment rate number either. Why? Because you have to be 'out of work and actively looking for work' to be counted as unemployed and therefore part of the 3.7% rate.

The U-6 also includes what the labor dept. calls involuntary part time employed. It should include the voluntary part time as well, but doesn't (See, they're not actively looking for work even if unemployed).

But even the involuntary part time is itself under-estimated. I believe the Labor Dept. counts only those involuntarily part time unemployed whose part time job is their primary job. It doesn't count those who have second and third involuntary part time jobs. That would raise the U-6 unemployment rate significantly. The labor Dept's estimate of the 'discouraged' and 'missing labor force' is grossly underestimated.

The labor dept. also misses the 1-2 million workers who went on social security disability (SSDI) after 2008 because it provides better pay, for longer, than does unemployment insurance. That number rose dramatically after 2008 and hasn't come down much (although the government and courts are going after them).

The way the government calculates unemployment is by means of 60,000 monthly household surveys but that phone survey method misses a lot of workers who are undocumented and others working in the underground economy in the inner cities (about 10-12% of the economy according to most economists and therefore potentially 10-12% of the reported labor force in size as well). The labor dept. just makes assumptions about that number (conservatively, I may add) and plugs in a number to be added to the unemployment totals. But it has no real idea of how many undocumented or underground economy workers are actually employed or unemployed since these workers do not participate in the labor dept. phone surveys, and who can blame them.

The SSDI, undocumented, underground, underestimation of part timers, etc. are what I call the 'hidden unemployed'. And that brings the unemployed well above the 3.7%.

Finally, there's the corroborating evidence about what's called the labor force participation rate. It has declined by roughly 5% since 2007. That's 6 to 9 million workers who should have entered the labor force but haven't. The labor force should be that much larger, but it isn't. Where have they gone? Did they just not enter the labor force? If not, they're likely a majority unemployed, or in the underground economy, or belong to the labor dept's 'missing labor force' which should be much greater than reported. The government has no adequate explanation why the participation rate has declined so dramatically. Or where have the workers gone. If they had entered the labor force they would have been counted. And their 6 to 9 million would result in an increase in the total labor force number and therefore raise the unemployment rate.

All these reasons–-i.e. only counting full timers in the official 3.7%; under-estimating the size of the part time workforce; under-estimating the size of the discouraged and so-called 'missing labor force'; using methodologies that don't capture the undocumented and underground unemployed accurately; not counting part of the SSI increase as unemployed; and reducing the total labor force because of the declining labor force participation-–together means the true unemployment rate is definitely over 10% and likely closer to 12%. And even that's a conservative estimate perhaps." Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Jack Rasmus

Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published book, 'Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression', Clarity Press, August 2017. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and his twitter handle is @drjackrasmus. His website is http://kyklosproductions.com .

[Sep 07, 2019] The number of murders and armed robberies committed by people addicted to methamphetamine is "truly frightening", Western Australia's Chief Justice says.

Sep 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Joe , September 06, 2019 at 03:25 AM

Do Immigrants Threaten U.S. Public Safety? - Dallasfed.org


https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs13/13853/trans.htm

Mexico. Mexican criminal groups based in Mexico smuggle bulk quantities of methamphetamine via couriers traveling in private and commercial vehicles, usually equipped with hidden compartments, or by foot through and between land POEs along the Southwest Border. These criminal groups also smuggle small shipments (2 kg to 4 kg) via couriers aboard commercial flights and via mail services. Methamphetamine shipments often are transported to stash sites and staging areas, primarily in California and Arizona, before the drug is distributed locally, regionally, or nationally.

Methamphetamine transported from production areas in Mexico to the Southwest Border typically has been smuggled through and between POEs in California; however, recent data indicate that more methamphetamine may now be smuggled through or between POEs in Arizona than other Southwest Border states. According to EPIC seizure data, the combined amount of methamphetamine seizures from 2001 through 2003 at or between POEs in California (1,725 kg) was much higher than the amount seized at or between POEs in Texas (1,145 kg), Arizona (1,120 kg), or New Mexico (60 kg). However, in 2003 the amount seized in Arizona (640 kg) surpassed seizures in the other Southwest Border states including California (593 kg), Texas (484 kg), and New Mexico (16 kg) possibly because of specific law enforcement operations conducted in Arizona (see Figure 11).
-------
Pick an index then call it something vague like crime.

Are these immigrants importing meth? Mostly, immigrants crossing back and forth across the border.

How much crime does meth cause?
---
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-25/wa-chief-justice-says-ice-problem-truly-frightening/6261310

The number of murders and armed robberies committed by people addicted to methamphetamine is "truly frightening", Western Australia's Chief Justice says.

Justice Wayne Martin said 95 per cent of armed robberies and up to half of all murders could be attributed to people taking methamphetamine, also known as ice or crystal meth.
---
The number I hear is about half of all crime.

So, sure, pick a particular index, generate the result you want, and if it meets the delusional demands of Economist View then it is printed.

I didn't even need to read it, I already know what result he engineered, otherwise it never would have appeared here.

[Sep 07, 2019] Wages Have Stagnated for Low- and Mid-wage Workers and Pay Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Persist

Sep 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Joe , September 05, 2019 at 09:17 AM

https://calbudgetcenter.org/resources/californias-workers-are-increasingly-locked-out-of-the-states-prosperity/

Wages Have Stagnated for Low- and Mid-wage Workers and Pay Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Persist

Earnings for California's workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades. In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018. Much of this increase occurred in recent years, likely due to the rising state minimum wage as well as the improving job market. In contrast with the experience of low- and mid-wage workers, high-wage workers -- those at the 90th percentile -- saw their hourly earnings increase by 43%, after adjusting for inflation, from $40.19 in 1979 to $57.65 in 2018. These hourly wage disparities translate into sizeable income gaps. Someone earning at the 90th percentile in 2018 would earn an annual salary of $115,300 if she worked full-time, year-round, while someone working just as much but earning at the 10th percentile would have an annual income of just $22,240. (As striking as this income gap is, disparities in wealth are even greater.)
-----
The Cal Budget Center reports bad news. I can hire construction workers for a buck above minimum wage, $11, vs the $10 they got in 1979. Why are they coming to California to live in poverty? For half of them, they were born in California , the other half were born in either Central America or the Northeast US.

anne -> Paine... , September 06, 2019 at 09:00 AM
Correct for local living costs

[ Average hourly earnings for construction employees in California in July 2019 was $37.17. There is enough correction right here. ]

anne -> Paine... , September 06, 2019 at 09:04 AM
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=oMXN

January 15, 2018

Average Hourly Earnings of All Construction Employees in California and United States, 2007-2018

[ Average hourly earnings for all construction employees in California in July 2019 was $37.17 and $30.72 through the United States.

Understand? ]

EMichael -> Paine... , September 06, 2019 at 09:05 AM
And that has what to do with $11 an hour?

Granted there are other issues, but $11 an hour is a stone cold lie.

[Sep 04, 2019] US army now and then: Today s soldiers aren t too different than the slave legions of ancient Rome

Sep 04, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

VietnamVet , September 3, 2019 at 11:13 pm

This discussion avoids comparing society in the mid-19th century and today. It really isn't that long ago. I've lived through almost half of it. Except for officers most of the soldiers I served with were conscripted or enlisted because of the draft. In a war your choices are limited. If they were in the march, driving wagons, armed to the teeth, they were soldiers; no matter how they got there.

Today's volunteer Army most of the soldiers and contractors are there because they couldn't get a better job unless they are adrenaline junkies or psychopaths. The current neoliberal economy purposefully exploits people and the environment to make a profit. Today's soldiers aren't too different than the slave legions of ancient Rome. Perhaps, "warriors" isn't that much of a misnomer.

[Sep 04, 2019] Starving Seniors How America Fails To Feed Its Aging naked capitalism

Sep 04, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

https://eus.rubiconproject.com/usync.html

https://acdn.adnxs.com/ib/static/usersync/v3/async_usersync.html

https://c.deployads.com/sync?f=html&s=2343&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2019%2F09%2Fstarving-seniors-how-america-fails-to-feed-its-aging.html <img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" /> By Laura Ungar, who health issues out of Kaiser Health News' St. Louis office, and Trudy Lieberman, a journalist for more than 45 years, and a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. Originally published by Kaiser Health News .

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Army veteran Eugene Milligan is 75 years old and blind. He uses a wheelchair since losing half his right leg to diabetes and gets dialysis for kidney failure.

And he has struggled to get enough to eat.

Earlier this year, he ended up in the hospital after burning himself while boiling water for oatmeal. The long stay caused the Memphis vet to fall off a charity's rolls for home-delivered Meals on Wheels , so he had to rely on others, such as his son, a generous off-duty nurse and a local church to bring him food.

"Many times, I've felt like I was starving," he said. "There's neighbors that need food too. There's people at dialysis that need food. There's hunger everywhere."

Indeed, millions of seniors across the country quietly go hungry as the safety net designed to catch them frays. Nearly 8% of Americans 60 and older were "food insecure" in 2017, according to a recent study released by the anti-hunger group Feeding America. That's 5.5 million seniors who don't have consistent access to enough food for a healthy life, a number that has more than doubled since 2001 and is only expected to grow as America grays.

While the plight of hungry children elicits support and can be tackled in schools, the plight of hungry older Americans is shrouded by isolation and a generation's pride. The problem is most acute in parts of the South and Southwest. Louisiana has the highest rate among states, with 12% of seniors facing food insecurity. Memphis fares worst among major metropolitan areas, with 17% of seniors like Milligan unsure of their next meal.

And government relief falls short. One of the main federal programs helping seniors is starved for money. The Older Americans Act -- passed more than half a century ago as part of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society reforms -- was amended in 1972 to provide for home-delivered and group meals, along with other services, for anyone 60 and older. But its funding has lagged far behind senior population growth, as well as economic inflation.

The biggest chunk of the act's budget, nutrition services, dropped by 8% over the past 18 years when adjusted for inflation, an AARP report found in February. Home-delivered and group meals have decreased by nearly 21 million since 2005. Only a fraction of those facing food insecurity get any meal services under the act; a U.S. Government Accountability Office report examining 2013 data found 83% got none.

With the act set to expire Sept. 30, Congress is now considering its reauthorization and how much to spend going forward.

Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, only 45% of eligible adults 60 and older have signed up for another source of federal aid: SNAP, the food stamp program for America's poorest. Those who don't are typically either unaware they could qualify, believe their benefits would be tiny or can no longer get to a grocery store to use them.

Even fewer seniors may have SNAP in the future. More than 13% of SNAP households with elderly members would lose benefits under a recent Trump administration proposal.

For now, millions of seniors -- especially low-income ones -- go without. Across the nation, waits are common to receive home-delivered meals from a crucial provider, Meals on Wheels, a network of 5,000 community-based programs. In Memphis, for example, the wait to get on the Meals on Wheels schedule is more than a year long.

"It's really sad because a meal is not an expensive thing," said Sally Jones Heinz, president and CEO of the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association , which provides home-delivered meals in Memphis. "This shouldn't be the way things are in 2019."

Since malnutrition exacerbates diseases and prevents healing, seniors without steady, nutritious food can wind up in hospitals, which drives up Medicare and Medicaid costs, hitting taxpayers with an even bigger bill . Sometimes seniors relapse quickly after discharge -- or worse.

Widower Robert Mukes, 71, starved to death on a cold December day in 2016, alone in his Cincinnati apartment.

The Hamilton County Coroner listed the primary cause of death as "starvation of unknown etiology" and noted "possible hypothermia," pointing out that his apartment had no electricity or running water. Death records show the 5-foot-7-inch man weighed just 100.5 pounds.

A Clear Need

On a hot May morning in Memphis, seniors trickled into a food bank at the Riverside Missionary Baptist Church, 3 miles from the opulent tourist mecca of Graceland. They picked up boxes packed with canned goods, rice, vegetables and meat.

Marion Thomas, 63, placed her box in the trunk of a friend's car. She lives with chronic back pain and high blood pressure and started coming to the pantry three years ago. She's disabled, relies on Social Security and gets $42 a month from SNAP based on her income, household size and other factors. That's much less than the average $125-a-month benefit for households with seniors, but more than the $16 minimum that one in five such households get. Still, Thomas said, "I can't buy very much."

A day later, the Mid-South Food Bank brought a "mobile pantry" to Latham Terrace, a senior housing complex, where a long line of people waited. Some inched forward in wheelchairs; others leaned on canes. One by one, they collected their allotments.

The need is just as real elsewhere. In Dallas, Texas, 69-year-old China Anderson squirrels away milk, cookies and other parts of her home-delivered lunches for dinner because she can no longer stand and cook due to scoliosis and eight deteriorating vertebral discs.

As seniors ration food, programs ration services.

Although more than a third of the Meals on Wheels money comes from the Older Americans Act, even with additional public and private dollars, funds are still so limited that some programs have no choice but to triage people using score sheets that assign points based on who needs food the most. Seniors coming from the hospital and those without family usually top waiting lists.

More than 1,000 were waiting on the Memphis area's list recently. And in Dallas, $4.1 million in donations wiped out a 1,000-person waiting list in December, but within months it had crept back up to 100.

Nationally, "there are tens of thousands of seniors who are waiting," said Erika Kelly , chief membership and advocacy officer for Meals on Wheels America. "While they're waiting, their health deteriorates and, in some cases, we know seniors have died."

Edwin Walker, a deputy assistant secretary for the federal Administration on Aging, acknowledged waits are a long-standing problem, but said 2.4 million people a year benefit from the Older Americans Act's group or home-delivered meals, allowing them to stay independent and healthy.

Seniors get human connection, as well as food, from these services. Aner Lee Murphy, a 102-year-old Meals on Wheels client in Memphis, counts on the visits with volunteers Libby and Bob Anderson almost as much as the food. She calls them "my children," hugging them close and offering a prayer each time they leave.

But others miss out on such physical and psychological nourishment. A devastating phone call brought that home for Kim Daugherty, executive director of the Aging Commission of the Mid-South , which connects seniors to service providers in the region. The woman on the line told Daugherty she'd been on the waiting list for more than a year.

"Ma'am, there are several hundred people ahead of you," Daugherty reluctantly explained.

"I just need you all to remember," came the caller's haunting reply, "I'm hungry and I need food."

A Slow Killer

James Ziliak , a poverty researcher at the University of Kentucky who worked on the Feeding America study, said food insecurity shot up with the Great Recession, starting in the late 2000s, and peaked in 2014. He said it shows no signs of dropping to pre-recession levels.

While older adults of all income levels can face difficulty accessing and preparing healthy food, rates are highest among seniors in poverty. They are also high among minorities. More than 17% of black seniors and 16% of Hispanic seniors are food insecure, compared with fewer than 7% of white seniors.

A host of issues combine to set those seniors on a downward spiral, said registered dietitian Lauri Wright , who chairs the Department of Nutrition and Dietetics at the University of North Florida. Going to the grocery store gets a lot harder if they can't drive. Expensive medications leave less money for food. Chronic physical and mental health problems sap stamina and make it tough to cook. Inch by inch, hungry seniors decline.

And, even if it rarely kills directly, hunger can complicate illness and kill slowly.

Malnutrition blunts immunity, which already tends to weaken as people age. Once they start losing weight, they're more likely to grow frail and are more likely to die within a year, said Dr. John Morley, director of the division of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University.

Seniors just out of the hospital are particularly vulnerable. Many wind up getting readmitted, pushing up taxpayers' costs for Medicare and Medicaid. A recent analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that Medicare could save $1.57 for every dollar spent on home-delivered meals for chronically ill seniors after a hospitalization.

Most hospitals don't refer senior outpatients to Meals on Wheels, and advocates say too few insurance companies get involved in making sure seniors have enough to eat to keep them healthy.

When Milligan, the Memphis veteran, burned himself with boiling water last winter and had to be hospitalized for 65 days, he fell off the Metropolitan Inter-Faith Association's radar. The meals he'd been getting for about a decade stopped.

Heinz, Metropolitan's CEO, said the association is usually able to start and stop meals for short hospital stays. But, Heinz said, the association didn't hear from Milligan and kept trying to deliver meals for a time while he was in the hospital, then notified the Aging Commission of the Mid-South he wasn't home. As is standard procedure, Metropolitan officials said, a staff member from the commission made three attempts to contact him and left a card at the blind man's home.

But nothing happened when he got out of the hospital this spring. In mid-May, a nurse referred him for meal delivery. Still, he didn't get meals because he faced a waitlist already more than 1,000 names long.

After questions from Kaiser Health News, Heinz looked into Milligan's case and realized that, as a former client, Milligan could get back on the delivery schedule faster.

But even then the process still has hurdles: The aging commission would need to conduct a new home assessment for meals to resume. That has yet to happen because, amid the wait, Milligan's health deteriorated.

A Murky Future

As the Older Americans Act awaits reauthorization this fall, many senior advocates worry about its funding.

In June, the U.S. House passed a $93 million increase to the Older Americans Act's nutrition programs, raising total funding by about 10% to $1 billion in the next fiscal year. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that's still less than in 2009. And it still has to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate, where the proposed increase faces long odds.

U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Civil Rights and Human Services Subcommittee, expects the panel to tackle legislation for reauthorization of the act soon after members return from the August recess. She's now working with colleagues "to craft a strong, bipartisan update," she said, that increases investments in nutrition programs as well as other services.

"I'm confident the House will soon pass a robust bill," she said, "and I am hopeful that the Senate will also move quickly so we can better meet the needs of our seniors."

In the meantime, "the need for home-delivered meals keeps increasing every year," said Lorena Fernandez, who runs a meal delivery program in Yakima, Wash. Activists are pressing state and local governments to ensure seniors don't starve, with mixed results. In Louisiana, for example, anti-hunger advocates stood on the state Capitol steps in May and unsuccessfully called on the state to invest $1 million to buy food from Louisiana farmers to distribute to hungry residents. Elsewhere, senior activists across the nation have participated each March in "March for Meals" events such as walks, fundraisers and rallies designed to focus attention on the problem.

Private fundraising hasn't been easy everywhere, especially rural communities without much wealth. Philanthropy has instead tended to flow to hungry kids, who outnumber hungry seniors more than 2-to-1, according to Feeding America.

"Ten years ago, organizations had a goal of ending child hunger and a lot of innovation and resources went into what could be done," said Jeremy Everett, executive director of Baylor University's Texas Hunger Initiative. "The same thing has not happened in the senior adult population." And that has left people struggling for enough food to eat.

As for Milligan, he didn't get back on Meals on Wheels before suffering complications related to his dialysis in June. He ended up back in the hospital. Ironically, it was there that he finally had a steady, if temporary, source of food.

It's impossible to know if his time without steady, nutritious food made a difference. What is almost certain is that feeding him at home would have been far cheaper.

[Sep 02, 2019] Discrimination thru stupid job descriptions is catching up to the economy

Jan 11, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
cocomaan, January 10, 2017 at 4:04 pm

Coulnd't get the JOLTS, November 2016 links to work, but the skills gap is wild.

At an institution of higher ed I'm familiar with, both faculty and administrative positions continue to be unfilled. There are very few candidates even for entry level positions. Failed searches are now the norm. It's feast or famine: either people are perfect for the job and have many options, or have no related experience at all.

I wonder if the labor force participation rate is starting to catch up with the job market. That is, there are a lot of healthy adults who have dropped out of the workforce who would be the people you'd want in those positions.

Or that the job market is not nearly as liquid as they'd have you believe, and people can't relocate from where they are because of adult children who live with them, or things of that nature. All kinds of weird things now in the job market. I know someone who commutes a significant distance to work that has to look for another job because their workplace's health care plan only covers a geographic area close to that job.

alex morfesis , January 10, 2017 at 4:59 pm

Discrimination thru stupid job descriptions is catching up to the economy paying $12 per hour five years experience required nonsense job descriptions designed to help the accredited and credentialed have a leg up

There seem to be three types of employment categories

IMUO it is not a skills gap it is the demanding of irrelevant capacities and experience that almost always have very little to do with the actual tasks required

[Sep 02, 2019] Neoliberals often argue that people should be glad to lose employment at 50 so that people from other countries can have higher incomes

Notable quotes:
"... Neoliberals often argue that people should be glad to lose employment at 50 so that people from other countries can have higher incomes, and leftists often agree because hey "free movement" and because after all the professional class jobs aren't at risk ..."
"... "I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other world powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions, by re-negotiating trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people." ..."
"... No one has literally argued that people should be glad to lose employment: that part was hyperbole. But the basic argument is often made quite seriously. See e.g. outsource Brad DeLong . ..."
"... To the guy who asked- poor white people keep voting Republican even though it screws them because they genuinely believe that the country is best off when it encourages a culture of "by the bootstraps" self improvement, hard work, and personal responsibility. They view taxing people in order to give the money to the supposedly less fortunate as the anti thesis of this, because it gives people an easy out that let's them avoid having to engage in the hard work needed to live independently. ..."
"... Attempts at repairing historical racial inequity read as cheating in that paradigm, and even as hostile since they can easily observe white people who are just as poor or poorer than those who racial politics focuses upon. ..."
"... The extent to which "poor white people" vote against their alleged economic interests is overblown. To a large extent, they do not vote at all nor is anyone or anything on the ballot to represent their interests. And, yes, they are misinformed systematically by elites out to screw them and they know this, but cannot do much to either clear up their own confusion or fight back. ..."
"... The mirror image problem - of elites manipulating the system to screw the poor and merely middle-class - is daily in the news. Both Presidential candidates have been implicated. So, who do you recommend they vote for? ..."
"... My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education level rather than income. ..."
"... Eric Berne, in The Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, proposed that among the defining characteristics of a coherent group is an explicit boundary which determines whether an individual is a member of the group or not. (If there is no boundary, nothing binds the assemblage together; it is a crowd.) The boundary helps provide social cohesion and is so important that groups will create one if necessary. Clearly, boundaries exclude as well as include, and someone must play the role of outsider. ..."
"... I am somewhat suspicious of leaving dominating elites out of these stories of racism as an organizing principle for political economy or (cultural) community. ..."
"... Racism served the purposes of a slaveholding elite that organized political communities to serve their own interests. (Or, vis a vis the Indians a land-grab or genocide.) ..."
"... Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying hierarchy like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with ersatz status. ..."
"... For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community, but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations. ..."
Aug 01, 2004 | crookedtimber.org

Rich Puchalsky 08.04.16 at 11:40 am 177

fn: "Of course there is a subtext to these racist hate campaigns that someone else here raised and rich ran with a bit, which is the hatred of the unemployed. I think a lot of people voting leave imagine that the next thing on the agenda is slashing the dole to force poor white people to do the work the Eastern Europeans did. "

Yes, in part. In part, also, people imagine that poor citizens will get jobs that previously were done by migrants. This has a hatred of slackers element that is bad, but as economics, it's pretty well-founded that if you reduce the size of the labor pool relative to the population then unemployment will go down and wages will go up. Neoliberals often argue that people should be glad to lose employment at 50 so that people from other countries can have higher incomes, and leftists often agree because hey "free movement" and because after all the professional class jobs aren't at risk. But strangely enough some people seem to resent this.

Layman 08.04.16 at 11:48 am 178

Lupita: "I think Trump is afraid the imperial global order presided by the US is about to crash and thinks he will be able to steer the country into a soft landing by accepting that other world powers have interests, by disengaging from costly and humiliating military interventions, by re-negotiating trade deals, and by stopping the mass immigration of poor people."

... ... ...

Rich Puchalsky 08.04.16 at 12:03 pm

"I can't recall any particular instance where someone made this argument."

No one has literally argued that people should be glad to lose employment: that part was hyperbole. But the basic argument is often made quite seriously. See e.g. outsource Brad DeLong.

engels 08.04.16 at 12:25 pm

While this may be the effect of some neoliberal policies, I can't recall any particular instance where someone made this argument

Maybe this kind of thing rom Henry Farrell? (There may well be better examples.)

Is some dilution of the traditional European welfare state acceptable, if it substantially increases the wellbeing of current outsiders (i.e. for example, by bringing Turkey into the club). My answer is yes, if European leftwingers are to stick to their core principles on justice, fairness, egalitarianism etc

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/31/talking-turkey-over-welfare/

Lupita 08.04.16 at 2:42 pm

Large numbers of low-income white southern Americans consistently vote against their own economic interests. They vote to award tax breaks to wealthy people and corporations, to cut unemployment benefits, to bust unions, to reward companies for outsourcing jobs, to resist wage increases, to cut funding for health care for the poor, to cut Social Security and Medicare, etc.

The same thing has happened in Mexico with neoliberal government after neoliberal government being elected. There are many democratically elected neoliberal governments around the world.

Why might this be?

In the case of Mexico, because Peńa Nieto's wife is a telenovela star. How cool is that? It places Mexico in the same league as 1st world countries, such as France, with Carla Bruni.


Patrick 08.04.16 at 4:32 pm

To the guy who asked- poor white people keep voting Republican even though it screws them because they genuinely believe that the country is best off when it encourages a culture of "by the bootstraps" self improvement, hard work, and personal responsibility. They view taxing people in order to give the money to the supposedly less fortunate as the anti thesis of this, because it gives people an easy out that let's them avoid having to engage in the hard work needed to live independently.

They see it as little different from letting your kid move back on after college and smoke weed in your basement. They don't generally mind people being on unemployment transitionally, but they're supposed to be a little embarrassed about it and get it over with as soon as possible.

They not only worry that increased government social spending will incentivize bad behavior, they worry it will destroy the cultural values they see as vital to Americas past prosperity. They tend to view claims about historic or systemic injustice necessitating collective remedy because they view the world as one in which the vagaries of fate decree that some are born rich or poor, and that success is in improving ones station relative to where one starts.

Attempts at repairing historical racial inequity read as cheating in that paradigm, and even as hostile since they can easily observe white people who are just as poor or poorer than those who racial politics focuses upon. Left wing insistence on borrowing the nastiest rhetoric of libertarians ("this guy is poor because his ancestors couldn't get ahead because of historical racial injustice so we must help him; your family couldn't get ahead either but that must have been your fault so you deserve it") comes across as both antithetical to their values and as downright hostile within the values they see around them.

All of this can be easily learned by just talking to them.

It's not a great world view. It fails to explain quite a lot. For example, they have literally no way of explaining increased unemployment without positing either that everyone is getting too lazy to work, or that the government screwed up the system somehow, possibly by making it too expensive to do business in the US relative to other countries. and given their faith in the power of hard work, they don't even blame sweatshops- they blame taxes and foreign subsidies.

I don't know exactly how to reach out to them, except that I can point to some things people do that repulse them and say "stop doing that."


bruce wilder 08.04.16 at 5:50 pm

The extent to which "poor white people" vote against their alleged economic interests is overblown. To a large extent, they do not vote at all nor is anyone or anything on the ballot to represent their interests. And, yes, they are misinformed systematically by elites out to screw them and they know this, but cannot do much to either clear up their own confusion or fight back.

The mirror image problem - of elites manipulating the system to screw the poor and merely middle-class - is daily in the news. Both Presidential candidates have been implicated. So, who do you recommend they vote for?

There is serious deficit of both trust and information among the poor. Poor whites hardly have a monopoly; black misleadership is epidemic in our era of Cory Booker socialism.


bruce wilder 08.04.16 at 7:05 pm

Politics is founded on the complex social psychology of humans as social animals. We elevate it from its irrational base in emotion to rationalized calculation or philosophy at our peril.


T 08.04.16 at 9:17 pm

@Layman
I think you're missing Patrick's point. These voters are switching from one Republican to another. They've jettisoned Bush et. al. for Trump. These guys despise Bush. They've figured out that the mainstream party is basically 30 years of affinity fraud. So, is your argument is that Trump even more racist? That kind of goes against the whole point of the OP. Not saying that race doesn't matter. Of course it does. But Trump has a 34% advantage in non-college educated white men. It just isn't the South. Why does it have to be just race or just class?


Ronan(rf) 08.04.16 at 10:35 pm

"I generally don't give a shit about polls so I have no "data" to evidence this claim, but my guess is the majority of Trump's support comes from this broad middle"

My understanding is trumps support disproportionately comes from the small business owning classes, Ie a demographic similar to the petite bourgeoisie who have often been heavily involved in reactionary movements. This gets oversold as "working class" when class is defined by education level rather than income.

This would make some sense as they are generally in economically unstable jobs, they tend to be hostile to both big govt (regulations, freeloaders) and big business (unfair competition), and while they (rhetorically at least) tend to value personal autonomy and self sufficiency , they generally sell into smaller, local markets, and so are particularly affected by local demographic and cultural change , and decline. That's my speculation anyway.

T 08.05.16 at 3:12 pm

@patrick @layman

Patrick, you're right about the Trump demographic. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-working-class-support/

Layman - Why are these voters switching from Bush et al to Trump? Once again, Corey's whole point is that there is very little difference between the racism of Trump and the mainstream party since Nixon. Is Trump just more racist? Or are the policies of Trump resonating differently than Bush for reasons other than race? Are the folks that voted for the other candidates in the primary less racist so Trump supporters are just the most racist among Republicans? Cruz less racist? You have to explain the shift within the Republican party because that's what happened.


Anarcissie 08.06.16 at 3:00 pm

Faustusnotes 08.06.16 at 1:50 pm @ 270 -

Eric Berne, in The Structures and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups, proposed that among the defining characteristics of a coherent group is an explicit boundary which determines whether an individual is a member of the group or not. (If there is no boundary, nothing binds the assemblage together; it is a crowd.) The boundary helps provide social cohesion and is so important that groups will create one if necessary. Clearly, boundaries exclude as well as include, and someone must play the role of outsider. While Berne's theories are a bit too nifty for me to love them, I have observed a lot of the behaviors he predicts. If one wanted to be sociobiological, it is not hard to hypothesize evolutionary pressures which could lead to this sort of behavior being genetically programmed. If a group of humans, a notably combative primate, does not have strong social cohesion, the war of all against all ensues and everybody dies. Common affections alone do not seem to provide enough cohesion.

In an earlier but related theory, in the United States, immigrants from diverse European communities which fought each other for centuries in Europe arrived and managed to now get along because they had a major Other, the Negro, against whom to define themselves (as the White Race) and thus to cohere sufficiently to get on with business. The Negro had the additional advantage of being at first a powerless slave and later, although theoretically freed, was legally, politically, and economically disabled - an outsider who could not fight back very effectively, nor run away. Even so, the US almost split apart and there continue to be important class, ethnic, religious, and regional conflicts. You can see how these two theories resonate.

It may be that we can't have communities without this dark side, although we might be able to mitigate some of its destructive effects.


bruce wilder 08.06.16 at 4:28 pm

I am somewhat suspicious of leaving dominating elites out of these stories of racism as an organizing principle for political economy or (cultural) community.

Racism served the purposes of a slaveholding elite that organized political communities to serve their own interests. (Or, vis a vis the Indians a land-grab or genocide.)

Racism serves as an organizing principle. Politically, in an oppressive and stultifying hierarchy like the plantation South, racism not incidentally buys the loyalty of subalterns with ersatz status. The ugly prejudices and resentful arrogance of working class whites is thus a component of how racism works to organize a political community to serve a hegemonic master class. The business end of racism, though, is the autarkic poverty imposed on the working communities: slaves, sharecroppers, poor blacks, poor whites - bad schools, bad roads, politically disabled communities, predatory institutions and authoritarian governments.

For a time, the balkanization of American political communities by race, religion and ethnicity was an effective means to the dominance of an tiny elite with ties to an hegemonic community, but it backfired. Dismantling that balkanization has left the country with a very low level of social affiliation and thus a low capacity to organize resistance to elite depredations.

engels 08.07.16 at 1:02 am

But how did that slavery happen

Possible short answer: the level of technological development made slavery an efficient way of exploiting labour. At a certain point those conditions changed and slavery became a drag on further development and it was abolished, along with much of the racist ideology that legitimated it.


Lupita 08.07.16 at 3:40 am

But how did that slavery happen

In Mesoamerica, all the natives were enslaved because they were conquered by the Spaniards. Then, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas successfully argued before the Crown that the natives had souls and, therefore, should be Christianized rather than enslaved. As Bruce Wilder states, this did not serve the interests of the slaveholding elite, so the African slave trade began and there was no Fray Bartolomé to argue their case.

It is interesting that while natives were enslaved, the Aztec aristocracy was shipped to Spain to be presented in court and study Latin. This would not have happened if the Mesoamericans were considered inferior (soulless) as a race. Furthermore, the Spaniards needed the local elite to help them out with their empire and the Aztecs were used to slavery and worse. This whole story can be understood without recurring to racism. The logic of empire suffices.

[Sep 02, 2019] How Can Older Workers Compete In An Economy That Values Youth

May 28, 2016 | www.zerohedge.com

...

Workers of all ages are caught in a vice. Older workers need to keep working longer in an economy which values younger workers (and their cheaper healthcare premiums). Younger workers are caught in the vice of "you don't have enough experience" and "how do I get experience if nobody will hire me?"

Middle-aged workers are caught between the enormous Millennial generation seeking better jobs and the equally numerous baby Boom generation seeking to work a few more years to offset their interest-starved retirement funds. (Thank you, predatory and rapacious Federal Reserve for siphoning all our retirement fund interest to your cronies the Too Big to Fail Banks.)

Workers 55 and older are undeniably working longer. Here is the labor participation rate for 55+ workers:

... And here's why so many workers have to work longer--earned income's share of the GDP has been in a free-fall for decades as Fed-funded financiers and corporations skim an ever greater share of the nation's GDP.

I am 62, very much an older worker with a startling 46 years in the work force (first formal paycheck, 1970 from Dole Pineapple). (Thanks to the Fed's zero-interest rate policy, I should be able to retire at 93 or so--unless the Fed imposes a negative-rate policy on me and the other serfs.)

But I recall with painful clarity the great hardships and difficulties I experienced in the recessions of 1973-74, 1981-82 and 1990-91 when I was in younger demographics. My sympathies are if anything more with younger workers, as it is increasingly difficult to get useful on-the-job experience if you're starting out.

That said, here are some suggestions for 55+ workers seeking to find work in a very competitive job/paid work market.

1. Target sectors that haven't changed much. There's a reason so many older guys find a niche in Home Depot and Lowe's--power saws, lumber, appliances, etc. haven't changed that much (except their quality has declined) for 40 years.

The same can be said of many areas of retail sales, house-cleaning, caring for children, etc.

Everyone knows the young have an advantage in sectors dominated by fast-changing technology, so avoid those sectors and stick to sectors where your knowledge and experience is still applicable and valued by employers.

2. If at all possible, get your healthcare coverage covered by a spouse or plan you pay. Those $2,000/month premiums for older workers are a big reason why employers would rather hire a $200/month premium younger worker, or limit the hours of older workers to part-time so no healthcare coverage is required.

Telling an employer you already have healthcare coverage may have a huge impact on your chances of getting hired.

3. If you have any computer-network-social media skills, you can get paid to help everyone 55+ with fewer skills. Your computer skills may not be up to the same level as a younger person's, but they are probably far more advanced than other 55+ folks. Many older people are paying somebody $35/hour or more to help them set up email, fix their buggy PCs and Macs, get them started on Facebook, etc. It might as well be you.

4. Focus on fields where managerial experience and moxie is decisive. Even highly educated young people have a tough time managing people effectively because they're lacking experience. Applying biz-school case studies to the real world isn't as easy as it looks. (I found apologizing to my older employees necessary and helpful. Do they teach this in biz school? I doubt it.)

The ability to work with (and mentor) a variety of people is an essential skill, and it's one that tends to come with age and experience.

5. Reliability matters. The ability to roll with the punches, show up on time, do what's needed to get the job done, and focus on outcomes rather than process are still core assets in a work force.

Being 55+ doesn't automatically mean someone has those skills, but they tend to come with decades of work.

6. If nobody will hire you, start your own enterprise to fill scarcities and create value in your community. The classic example is a handyperson, as it's very difficult for a young person to acquire the spectrum of experience needed to efficiently assess a wide array of problems and go about fixing them.

#3 above is another example of identifying one's strengths and then seeking a scarcity to fill. Value, profits and high wages flow to scarcity. Don't try to compete in supplying what's abundant; seek out scarcities and work on addressing those in a reliable fashion.

Every age group has its strengths and weaknesses, and the task facing all of us is to 1) identify scarcities we can fill and 2) seek ways to play to our strengths.

Shizzmoney

That's easy: the elitist old people in power will start a war, force the young people into that war, where they will all be killed and the old people get their jobs.

Also, for those young people who protest the war, the government and corporate military security forces will detain and kill them, too.

Problem solved!

KnuckleDragger-X

Bob Seger: Ballad of the Yellow Berets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP6Xt3GBhdQ

Syrin

Exactly. Value youth? Is that why we saddle them with $250,000 worth of student loan debt and a degree in women's studies to find no jobs because we let in illegals and skilled workers with Visas from foreign countries? Seems like we hate our youth. Of course, they deserve it since they have been focused on being social justice fucktards rather than getting any marketable skills and paying attention to what the gov't is doing to their future. Schadenfreude.

deja

No, they are stupid enough to saddle themselves with $250,000 worth of student loan debt for a degree in womens' studies.

cougar_w

The OP doesn't make much sense to me. Most of the work people my age do, the young people either don't want or are not qualified for. Maintaining vital COBOL apps or air traffic controller software from the 70's? Really? And the ones are, they don't mind working with older employees and seem to enjoy our "gravity".

I work in IT so maybe things are a bit different. Grey beards are huge around here and always will be.

But this has been a challenge for centuries, young people have to find their own way and "their way" (being probably a dream from childhood or an inspiration from a college professor) might not be practical at first. They bounce around a little until marriage hits them and then they find something that works for supporting a family. Same as it ever was. The idea that "their way" is some kind of unswerving life's mission is usually part of the corporate "just do it" meme that sells $400 specialty running shoes. Yeah whatever, just figure it out actually, life will tell you what you are supposed to be doing, and who you are supposed to be doing it with.

GeezerGeek

The market for COBOL programmers had a sudden surge around Y2K, but only certain industries still maintain their old COBOL apps. Curiously, a certain computer/software has recently tried pushing a visual version of COBOL, much like Gates did when he came out with Visual Basic back in the early 1990s. I retired after 40 years in IT in 2011, so I am a bit out of touch where COBOL is concerned. Does anyone even teach it anymore in college? Maybe if someone modified it to create phone apps and games it would once again be popular.

Abbie Normal

Then it's a good thing I didn't follow my undergrad English Prof's advice and switch my major from science to arts, because he thought there was some "real intelligence" in my writing style that even his grad students lacked. Maybe I should look him up....

eatthebanksters

I have two buddies, one a 61 year old attonery who has never lost a case and the other a 59 year old facilities director. The lawyer has been seeking work for 6 years and has pretty much given up...he can't even get hired at lesser jobs because he is overqualified and 'will leave when something better comes along'. The facilities director has a great resume and knows his stuff but has been out of work for almost two years. He has come in 'second' more times than I can count. He is working od jobs and living with a friends mother, exchanging work on the house for rent and meals. Welcome to Obama's economy.

N0TaREALmerican

He'd work if he'd accept less money, but he feels "entitled to earn what HE thinks he's worth". Just another lazy old-fart who feels the world owns him something. Welcome to a competitive economy old-fart, nobody said life was fair. Stop bitching and work for less.

mary mary

If you ever need an attorney, you might look for an experienced attorney who worked so hard that he never lost a case.

If you ever inherit a zillion bucks and buy a bunch of properties, you might confer with an experienced facility manager who actually managed a bunch of properties.

I doubt an attorney who never lost a case achieved that record by going around saying, "somebody owes me something".

I doubt a facilities manager who managed a bunch of properties achieved that by going around saying, "somebody owes me something".

Baa baa

What a load of crap. Most will take anything. I know, I am one. Don't lecture me about being "entitled" you punk. Your post reeks of the entitlement generation. Slug through 50 years of working, rearing a family, kids to college... I am beginning to wonder if the hundreds of thousands spent on the education and well-being of your ingrate ass was a misallocation of funds.

corporatewhore

Give credit where credit is due. This inability to find work at an older age has been going on for years and can't be blamed on Obama. Senior buyers at Macy's, older workers at Monsanto or television weather people at KSDK in St Louis all suffer the same fate. Labor cost and benefits are all less for the younger generation no matter what level of experience or capability. We develop a mindset throughout our productive career that we are indispensable and worth it because of our knowledge, contacts and industry wherewithal. It's all an illusion and we are NOT prepared or equipped to face the reality at an older age that we are completely dispensable.

At an older age if you want meaning you have to find it and think out of the paradigm that you've been led to believe is real. No one owes you anything for your experience or wealth of knowledge. Figure it out and rethink yourself as to what you love to do and want to do not what you must do to make money.

At 58 in 2008 I was fucked over by my corporation and wallowed in miserableness and poverty while i worked every contact and firm I knew. Nothing resulted. I had to work 3 part time jobs until I earned 2 full time ones and work over 90 hours per week because I enjoy it. It is work that covers the bills and allows me to create what I want to work on for the future while I still can walk think and breathe.

Best advice to your children: Go in business for yourself because just as it happened to me, it will happen to you when you become 55.

Nobody For President

Thanks for that, corporate whore. That sounds like an honest reprise of an incredibly hard time in your life, and I totally agree. I'm telling all (4) my grandkids, from 7 to 20, to live your life, not someone else's. The oldest one gets it, and I think the other ones will also, if I live long enough, because I walked that walk.

I'm old, and work full time (more or less) and make a living - not a killing, but a living - at it.

nuubee

Good news old people, the economy currently doesn't value anything you can produce, unless you can print money.

Cautiously Pessimistic

You get up every morning
From your 'larm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above
And people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls who try to look pretty
And if your train's on time
You can get to work by nine

... ... ...

mary mary

MSM says Baby Boomers "have stolen everything", but in fact Baby Boomers are having to extend their careers because they're broke. This is the easily foreseeable result of 20+ years of the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low, making Baby Boomers suffer the double-whammy of (1) not having their deferred income (pensions) grow, while (2) inflation in fact continued at 6% annual, thanks also to the Fed keeping interest rates artificially low.

Yes, someone "have stolen everything". That someone is the owners of the Fed.

[Sep 02, 2019] Labor Union Approval Hits Decade Highs

So despite multibillion campaign to discredit union launched on the dawn of neoliberalism and continued by neoliberal MSM to that day the situation now starts slowly changing to the better.
commend demonstrates very well how libertarian/neoliberal discourse poisoned the minds in the USA and how brainwashed people are.
Sep 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com
United States , marking the 125th anniversary of the federal holiday and the unofficial end of summer. The holiday celebrates workers across the United States.

As Statista's Sarah Feldman notes , President Grover Cleveland signed the law in 1894 after agitation from union workers . Several municipal and state celebrations came before it officially became a national holiday, with union leaders organizing many of those early celebrations.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Since the late 19th and early 20th century, labor union support in the United States has fluctuated. It hit an all-time low in 2009 when Gallup recorded a 48 percent approval rate for unions. A decade later, unions now enjoy a 64 percent approval rate, rebounding by 16 percentage points. This is the third consecutive year that Gallup has recorded a union approval rate above 60 percent.

Additionally, over the past decade, while approval of labor unions has surged by about 16-17 percentage points across all parties, according to Gallup , Democrats are still more likely to support unions, with approval standing at around 80 percent among self-identified party supporters .

You will find more infographics at Statista

A little under half of Republicans now support unions, up from 29 percent of Republicans holding that position in 2009.


hooligan2009 , 5 minutes ago link

the stat should read "60% approve that labor unions are less and less relevant".

how else would you describe actual union membership of just 10%?

https://qz.com/1542019/union-membership-in-the-us-keeps-on-falling-like-almost-everywhere-else/

oh look

" The drop has been particularly steep in the private sector. Just 6.4% of workers in the private sector are unionized, compared with 16.8% in 1983. On the other hand, government employee unions, like those for teachers and postal workers, have remained fairly strong, with a small decline from about 37% of the workforce in 1983 to 34% in 2018.

frankthecrank , 5 minutes ago link

Union membership is on the rise as younger people realize how shitty their degrees are relative to what those degrees will pay.

Noob678 , 10 minutes ago link

Labor Unions are under the control of ZOG. You still lose, suckers!

[Sep 01, 2019] NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web by Bill Lessard

Notable quotes:
"... Being an unemployed techie myself, I cannot begin to describe what a godsend this book is. NETSLAVES finally reveals the truth about what it is to be part of what is likely the most under-appreciated sect of the working class. ..."
"... It is a comment on upper and middle management corporate business practices in general, and the dismal fate of the vast armies of workers used as cannon fodder since day one for the follies of unscrupulous robber barons; or morons who just happen to find themselves in the right place at the right time to make market killings; or Scrooges who will never learn what it is to have a heart. Baldwin and Lessard are heirs to the muckrakers of the early 20th Century. Corporate E-merica, take heed. ..."
Apr 16, 2003 | www.amazon.com
Arthur Lindsey III , April 16, 2003
A 246 Page "Support Group"

Being an unemployed techie myself, I cannot begin to describe what a godsend this book is. NETSLAVES finally reveals the truth about what it is to be part of what is likely the most under-appreciated sect of the working class.

The stale stories of "dorm-room success" have been supplanted by the pathetically sad/darkly humorous accounts of those who have been saddled with with million-dollar job titles, bleeding ulcers, and ramen noodle grocery budgets.

NETSLAVES is an entertaining and enligtening read, written by two men who have actually been passengers in every sewer pipe that is the new-media industry. This book is a must for every modern library, as it can be considered a "warning shot" for those with IT aspirations, or as a source of vindication for those of us who have been dismissed and trampled on. Bravo!

A customer, November 24, 1999

Handwriting on the Wall

NetSlaves tells it like it is for the millions of us on the business end of the IPO and monopoly screwdrivers. Apply these lessons to the law, publishing, automotive, chemical, airline industries, etc., etc. This book is not just a cerebral and satirical indictment of the internet industry.

It is a comment on upper and middle management corporate business practices in general, and the dismal fate of the vast armies of workers used as cannon fodder since day one for the follies of unscrupulous robber barons; or morons who just happen to find themselves in the right place at the right time to make market killings; or Scrooges who will never learn what it is to have a heart. Baldwin and Lessard are heirs to the muckrakers of the early 20th Century. Corporate E-merica, take heed.

[Sep 01, 2019] The Trump NLRB's Anti-Labor Day Capital Main

Sep 01, 2019 | capitalandmain.com

Employee rights advocates say this Labor Day's family barbecues and union solidarity picnics will take place in the shadow of a Trump administration that has quietly stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-labor members. The federal agency is far less well-known than the IRS or EPA, but its five presidential appointees issue rulings with often far-reaching consequences for America's working men and women. The NLRB was created in 1935 to oversee collective bargaining and protect labor standards; the majority of its current board have worked for years with pro-employer firms or on behalf of industry.

Under the Trump administration, says Henry Willis , a veteran employment rights attorney at Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers, "They are rolling back rights as fast as they can."

Even before Trump was elected president, labor advocates had long lamented an NLRB process weighted towards employers who have the power of the paycheck and an array of tactics to shut down union organizing drives. A 2009 study , published by the liberal Economic Policy Institute think tank, found that during 57 percent of union election processes, employers threatened to shut down their workplaces; and during 34 percent of those organizing drives, employers fired workers and used one-on-one meetings with employees to threaten them.

Study author Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, says those numbers have remained steady since 2009.

Moreover, Bronfenbrenner adds, when an administration changes it's not uncommon for boards to reverse some preceding labor decisions, but that "there's a different tone to this board in that it is reversing long-held law. Not just changing rules but reversing decisions that had been agreed upon for a long time."

In other words, the NLRB under Trump represents a tectonic shift in the way the agency has traditionally operated.

Bronfenbrenner cites a recent decision that allows employers to stop bargaining and call for a new union election each time a contract approaches expiration -- in effect, inviting company employees to decertify their union. "[Employers] can just say, 'I no longer believe the union has support, and then there will be an election," she says. "Employers can do that every single time a contract expires."

Willis, who litigates on the front lines, ticks off a list illustrating a piece-by-piece dismantling of employee rights.

"The current board has been attacking Obama board decisions on issues such as [establishing] who's an independent contractor and who's an employee," he says, referring to a January 2019 revision of the standard used to determine whether independent contractors are covered by the National Labor Relations Act, which, the NLRB proclaims on its website , was passed by Congress in 1935 "to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, and which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy."

The January decision makes it less likely that the contractors will be given the same rights as employees.

"That's a big issue," Willis says. "Especially with the gig economy."

Another 2017 NLRB decision upended the definition of bargaining units . An employer no longer has to recognize or bargain with smaller units within a single work location, forcing a union to do large-scale organizing.

Organizing a shoe department, Willis notes, is less daunting than organizing an entire department store.

The Obama NLRB strove to proactively extend protections to unorganized shops -- where workers are less likely to know their rights. "The Trump board is taking a reactionary approach -- pulling back wherever possible," Willis says.

* * *

Currently operating with a vacant seat , the five-member board consists of three Republicans and Obama appointee Lauren McFerran, and it's set to term out in December. Conservative interests have urged President Trump to wait until McFerran leaves and then to fill the two empty seats to lock in a unanimous pro-employer majority.

Also in the works is a restructuring of the NLRB that would centralize decision-making in Washington and bring decisions now investigated and adjudicated at the regional level under scrutiny there.

Trump general counsel appointee Peter Robb issued a 2017 memo directing NLRB regional offices to submit to his Division of Advice for review cases involving "significant legal issues . " In 2018 Robb announced an intention to reorganize the agency's 26 regional offices into a smaller number of districts that report directly to Robb -- who could then present the issues to the NLRB in a way to give cover to the board to reverse local decisions and create precedent.

"The current general counsel has been trying to shift decision-making power from the regions to D.C. and creating a new layer of administration to give him more control over how the regions handle unfair labor practice charges," says Willis. "It hasn't been carried out, but the general counsel certainly has a big foot and brings it down much more frequently these days."

It's not all bleak news for labor, however. Unions are now organizing and representing contract workers, including hundreds of thousands of janitors, whether or not the NLRB designates them as employees, says Bronfenbrenner.

She sees the most vibrant aspects today's labor movement in industries where the majority are women and men and women of color -- and notes that those constituencies were largely shunned by organized labor when it was at the height of its strength.

"Organized labor only started getting a move on when their density had gone down below down to 12 percent and that's a little late. If they had done it when their density was 50 percent or 45 percent, they could have used their bargaining power."

[Aug 31, 2019] Linux on your laptop A closer look at EFI boot options

Aug 31, 2019 | www.zdnet.com
Before EFI, the standard boot process for virtually all PC systems was called "MBR", for Master Boot Record; today you are likely to hear it referred to as "Legacy Boot". This process depended on using the first physical block on a disk to hold some information needed to boot the computer (thus the name Master Boot Record); specifically, it held the disk address at which the actual bootloader could be found, and the partition table that defined the layout of the disk. Using this information, the PC firmware could find and execute the bootloader, which would then bring up the computer and run the operating system.

This system had a number of rather obvious weaknesses and shortcomings. One of the biggest was that you could only have one bootable object on each physical disk drive (at least as far as the firmware boot was concerned). Another was that if that first sector on the disk became corrupted somehow, you were in deep trouble.

Over time, as part of the Extensible Firmware Interface, a new approach to boot configuration was developed. Rather than storing critical boot configuration information in a single "magic" location, EFI uses a dedicated "EFI boot partition" on the desk. This is a completely normal, standard disk partition, the same as which may be used to hold the operating system or system recovery data.

The only requirement is that it be FAT formatted, and it should have the boot and esp partition flags set (esp stands for EFI System Partition). The specific data and programs necessary for booting is then kept in directories on this partition, typically in directories named to indicate what they are for. So if you have a Windows system, you would typically find directories called 'Boot' and 'Microsoft' , and perhaps one named for the manufacturer of the hardware, such as HP. If you have a Linux system, you would find directories called opensuse, debian, ubuntu, or any number of others depending on what particular Linux distribution you are using.

It should be obvious from the description so far that it is perfectly possible with the EFI boot configuration to have multiple boot objects on a single disk drive.

Before going any further, I should make it clear that if you install Linux as the only operating system on a PC, it is not necessary to know all of this configuration information in detail. The installer should take care of setting all of this up, including creating the EFI boot partition (or using an existing EFI boot partition), and further configuring the system boot list so that whatever system you install becomes the default boot target.

If you were to take a brand new computer with UEFI firmware, and load it from scratch with any of the current major Linux distributions, it would all be set up, configured, and working just as it is when you purchase a new computer preloaded with Windows (or when you load a computer from scratch with Windows). It is only when you want to have more than one bootable operating system – especially when you want to have both Linux and Windows on the same computer – that things may become more complicated.

The problems that arise with such "multiboot" systems are generally related to getting the boot priority list defined correctly.

When you buy a new computer with Windows, this list typically includes the Windows bootloader on the primary disk, and then perhaps some other peripheral devices such as USB, network interfaces and such. When you install Linux alongside Windows on such a computer, the installer will add the necessary information to the EFI boot partition, but if the boot priority list is not changed, then when the system is rebooted after installation it will simply boot Windows again, and you are likely to think that the installation didn't work.

There are several ways to modify this boot priority list, but exactly which ones are available and whether or how they work depends on the firmware of the system you are using, and this is where things can get really messy. There are just about as many different UEFI firmware implementations as there are PC manufacturers, and the manufacturers have shown a great deal of creativity in the details of this firmware.

First, in the simplest case, there is a software utility included with Linux called efibootmgr that can be used to modify, add or delete the boot priority list. If this utility works properly, and the changes it makes are permanent on the system, then you would have no other problems to deal with, and after installing it would boot Linux and you would be happy. Unfortunately, while this is sometimes the case it is frequently not. The most common reason for this is that changes made by software utilities are not actually permanently stored by the system BIOS, so when the computer is rebooted the boot priority list is restored to whatever it was before, which generally means that Windows gets booted again.

The other common way of modifying the boot priority list is via the computer BIOS configuration program. The details of how to do this are different for every manufacturer, but the general procedure is approximately the same. First you have to press the BIOS configuration key (usually F2, but not always, unfortunately) during system power-on (POST). Then choose the Boot item from the BIOS configuration menu, which should get you to a list of boot targets presented in priority order. Then you need to modify that list; sometimes this can be done directly in that screen, via the usual F5/F6 up/down key process, and sometimes you need to proceed one level deeper to be able to do that. I wish I could give more specific and detailed information about this, but it really is different on every system (sometimes even on different systems produced by the same manufacturer), so you just need to proceed carefully and figure out the steps as you go.

I have seen a few rare cases of systems where neither of these methods works, or at least they don't seem to be permanent, and the system keeps reverting to booting Windows. Again, there are two ways to proceed in this case. The first is by simply pressing the "boot selection" key during POST (power-on). Exactly which key this is varies, I have seen it be F12, F9, Esc, and probably one or two others. Whichever key it turns out to be, when you hit it during POST you should get a list of bootable objects defined in the EFI boot priority list, so assuming your Linux installation worked you should see it listed there. I have known of people who were satisfied with this solution, and would just use the computer this way and have to press boot select each time they wanted to boot Linux.

The alternative is to actually modify the files in the EFI boot partition, so that the (unchangeable) Windows boot procedure would actually boot Linux. This involves overwriting the Windows file bootmgfw.efi with the Linux file grubx64.efi. I have done this, especially in the early days of EFI boot, and it works, but I strongly advise you to be extremely careful if you try it, and make sure that you keep a copy of the original bootmgfw.efi file. Finally, just as a final (depressing) warning, I have also seen systems where this seemed to work, at least for a while, but then at some unpredictable point the boot process seemed to notice that something had changed and it restored bootmgfw.efi to its original state – thus losing the Linux boot configuration again. Sigh.

So, that's the basics of EFI boot, and how it can be configured. But there are some important variations possible, and some caveats to be aware of.

[Aug 30, 2019] Over 50, Unemployed, Depressed and Powerless by D. A. Wolf

Notable quotes:
"... I know what it feels like to be marginalized because you're out of work. To be judged by others as if there's something wrong with you. To grow increasingly depressed, demoralized and despairing as three months turns into six months and that goes on for a year or more; as rejection after rejection becomes crushing, humiliating, and leaves you feeling worthless. ..."
"... All money-related impacts aside, you lose confidence. You wear out. You start to give up ..."
"... Now and then, an acquaintance will make an off-hand remark about those who borrow money or live on credit cards. The assumption is that credit purchases are frivolous, or that the person who racks up consumer debt does so out of irresponsibility and poor judgment. ..."
"... Never assume. Yours truly? I borrowed to put food on the table. I borrowed to pay for school supplies for my kids. I borrowed to enable them to take advantage of academic opportunities that they earned through their own hard work. I also counted my blessings. While I had no family to assist, my kids were healthy and doing well, I was basically healthy despite chronic pain, and I was able to use credit. Borrowing is a double-edged sword of course, especially if it continues for an extended period. But for my little household, debt was the only path to survival. For all I know, it will be again. ..."
"... These days? I still live on a tight budget, I dream of recovering from the years of financial devastation "someday," and I take every gig I can get. Willingly. I've gained new skills along the way and continue to refine them, I'm always looking for another project and thrilled when I nab one, and I'm accustomed to a 12- to 14-hour workday. I put in long hours throughout my corporate career and I have no problem doing so now. In fact, I'm grateful for these workdays and I take none of them for granted. Moreover, I suggest that few of us should take our sources of income as a given ..."
"... The longer that Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to report signs of poor psychological well-being," says the study. "About one in five Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression - almost double the rate among those who have been unemployed for five weeks or less. ..."
"... To be in this position - wanting to work, needing to work, knowing you still have much to contribute but never getting a foot in the door - is deeply frustrating, horribly depressing, and leaves us feeling powerless. Add up these elements and you have the formula for despair. ..."
"... One small act of compassion can breathe new hope into the worst situation. And here's what I know with 100% certainty. We may be unemployed, we may be depressed but we aren't powerless if we come together and try to help one another. ..."
Apr 30, 2016 | Daily Plate of Crazy

Are you over 50, unemployed, depressed and feeling powerless? For that matter, are you any age and feeling hopeless because you can't seem to land a job?

Frustrated Middle Age Man

The recession may be officially over, and for some segments of the population, things are looking up. But too many are still sinking or hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Long-term unemployment or underemployment has become a way of life.

This issue, for me, is personal.

I know what it feels like to be marginalized because you're out of work. To be judged by others as if there's something wrong with you. To grow increasingly depressed, demoralized and despairing as three months turns into six months and that goes on for a year or more; as rejection after rejection becomes crushing, humiliating, and leaves you feeling worthless.

All money-related impacts aside, you lose confidence. You wear out. You start to give up. And you don't even make it into the "statistics." It's been too long since your last employment relationship.

Overqualified, Over-Educated, Over 50

Despite my fancy educational background and shiny corporate career history, for a number of years I was unable to obtain work that was even remotely close to using my skills. Paying me a living wage? Let's not even discuss it. I must have applied to 100 positions over the course of several years, attended the usual networking events, and schmoozed every contact I could come up with.

No go. I suffered from the three O's: Overqualified, Over-educated and Over 50, though I may not have looked it. That last? If you ask me, age was the kicker. Throughout that period, as post-divorce skirmishes continued to flare (further complicating matters), I nonetheless took every project I could eke out of the woodwork, supplemented by debt.

Hello, bank bail-out? How about a few bucks for those of us who foot the bill in tax dollars?

The Borrowing Trap

Now and then, an acquaintance will make an off-hand remark about those who borrow money or live on credit cards. The assumption is that credit purchases are frivolous, or that the person who racks up consumer debt does so out of irresponsibility and poor judgment.

Never assume. Yours truly? I borrowed to put food on the table. I borrowed to pay for school supplies for my kids. I borrowed to enable them to take advantage of academic opportunities that they earned through their own hard work. I also counted my blessings. While I had no family to assist, my kids were healthy and doing well, I was basically healthy despite chronic pain, and I was able to use credit. Borrowing is a double-edged sword of course, especially if it continues for an extended period. But for my little household, debt was the only path to survival. For all I know, it will be again.

Fighting Your Way Back

These days? I still live on a tight budget, I dream of recovering from the years of financial devastation "someday," and I take every gig I can get. Willingly. I've gained new skills along the way and continue to refine them, I'm always looking for another project and thrilled when I nab one, and I'm accustomed to a 12- to 14-hour workday. I put in long hours throughout my corporate career and I have no problem doing so now. In fact, I'm grateful for these workdays and I take none of them for granted. Moreover, I suggest that few of us should take our sources of income as a given.

You know the expression - "There but for the grace of God go I." Misfortune can visit any one of us. Layoff. Accident or illness. Gray divorce. The phone call or email with no warning, saying "you're done" as you're replaced by someone 20 years younger.

And yes, I've internalized the wisdom of this little gem: "If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." But I also know it isn't always possible, and the secret to success is not as simple as hard work. It's aided by the assistance of others, not to mention - luck.

Unemployed and Depressed

Forbes reminds us of the clear links between unemployment and depression, which isn't to say that underemployment or hating your job is a picnic.

Forbes staff writer Susan Adams cites a Gallup poll as follows:

The longer that Americans are unemployed, the more likely they are to report signs of poor psychological well-being," says the study. "About one in five Americans who have been unemployed for a year or more say they currently have or are being treated for depression - almost double the rate among those who have been unemployed for five weeks or less.

She goes on to note:

The long-term unemployed, unfortunately, have good reason to be depressed. They suffer plenty of discrimination in the job market. A 2012 study by economist Rand Ghayad found that employers preferred candidates with no relevant experience, but who had been out of work for less than six months, to those with experience who had been job hunting for longer than that.

.... ... ...

I'm certain that many of you have fought your way back; I'm still fighting after years, but I have seen progress. Slower than I'd like, but progress all the same.

If someone helped you out, have you paid it forward by making connections for others?

Please do read this comment from Cindy. I have responded as best I can. I'm sure she would welcome your suggestions.

A Note on Despair

To be in this position - wanting to work, needing to work, knowing you still have much to contribute but never getting a foot in the door - is deeply frustrating, horribly depressing, and leaves us feeling powerless. Add up these elements and you have the formula for despair.

It's brutally hard to fight your way back from despair. But sometimes, an act of compassion can help.

I've been on the receiving end of those incredible kindnesses - from strangers, from readers, and from one friend in particular, herself too long living on the edge.

One small act of compassion can breathe new hope into the worst situation. And here's what I know with 100% certainty. We may be unemployed, we may be depressed but we aren't powerless if we come together and try to help one another.

... ... ...

[Aug 30, 2019] Over 50 and unemployed: Don t panic!

Highly recommended!
Don't panic is always a good advice. Following it is another story...
Notable quotes:
"... Using contacts, no matter how far in the past they rest, is nothing to be ashamed of! You've probably spent most of your life working, and meeting a lot of people along the way. ..."
"... Your resume should be tailored to each and every job you apply for. While it is important to showcase your talent and skills, how you present the information is equally important. ..."
Jan 03, 2012 | Palmetto Workforce Connections

When you find yourself over 50 and unemployed, the thought of finding another job may seem daunting and hopeless.

It is quite easy to become discouraged because many people fear being stereotyped because of their age, the tough job market, or the prospect of being interviewed by someone half their age. However, there are some things the older unemployed should keep in mind while on the job search. Using the following tips will increase your chances of a short job search and create an overall more pleasant experience.

  1. Quit telling yourself that no one hires older workers. This is simply just not true. In some cases older workers have to exert more effort to overcome discrimination, but this is certainly not the case for every employer. There are even entire websites with jobs posted specifically for older workers, and a quick Google search will render you a list of those websites. Take advantage of such resources!
  2. Take advantage of new technology. Learn to blog and micro-blog, via Twitter, about your profession and interests. You should even create a LinkedIn profile (a website similar to Facebook yet has a more career oriented function) to assist it meeting people in your desired field. All of which will help you stay fine tuned on your skills, while developing new ones. Learning to use social networking will indicate to potential employers that you can adapt to change and learn new things, particularly technology, fairly quickly.
  3. Use all those hard earned contacts. Using contacts, no matter how far in the past they rest, is nothing to be ashamed of! You've probably spent most of your life working, and meeting a lot of people along the way. It is completely acceptable to reach out to former colleagues, class mates, co-workers and employers for job possibilities. Using resources like Facebook or LinkedIn are great ways to find those long lost contacts as well. Chances are they would love to hear from you and help you out if possible.
  4. Don't clutter your resume. Your resume should be tailored to each and every job you apply for. While it is important to showcase your talent and skills, how you present the information is equally important. This means keep it straight to the point and relate your past experience to the skills necessary for the job you are applying for. Essentially, don't do a history dump of every job you've ever had, instead, make each word count!
  5. Don't act superior to the interviewer. It is likely that the people interviewing you will be younger than you. But this does not mean you should look down upon them. Obviously they have earned their position, and if you play your cards right, in due time, you will earn yours! Even if you've worked more years than your interviewer has been alive, it's not okay to tell him or her that you can "teach" them anything. A better idea would be to state your experience working in a multi-generational work place.

Use these tips to help make your job search less stressful and more positive. Whatever you do, don't throw in the towel before you've even tried. Your experience and knowledge will be recognized. All you need is the right employer to identify it.

[Aug 29, 2019] Over 50 and out of work Program seeks to help long-term unemployed

This is essentially a scam. Help in landing $13 per hour job is not a big achievement.
Notable quotes:
"... Older workers like Lane make up a larger percentage of the persistently jobless than ever before. Nearly 40 percent of unemployed workers are over the age of 45 - a 30 percent rise from the 1980s. ..."
"... P2E is an intensive, individualized five-week bootcamp that teaches job skills and works to build job-seekers' confidence and emotional health. "We acknowledge that there are serious emotional issues for people who'd been unemployed for that long," Carbone said. ..."
"... The privately-funded program makes deals with businesses who hire P2E graduates for "internships," a few-week trial period for the would-be employee, whose salary is subsidized by the WorkPlace. Often, it leads to full-time work. According to P2E, 80 percent of their participants have been granted trial periods, and of those, more than 85 percent have been hired by employers. ..."
"... This acceptance of a new economic reality is at the heart of P2E; the program isn't solving the problems of precarity, real-wage decline, or manufacturing losses so much as doing damage control. ..."
"... "I'd say 100 percent of the people who went through Platform are making less than they did previously," said Carbone. "We get them prepared for the fact that their standard of living will go down, that they probably have to change careers." ..."
Nov 16, 2013 | NBC News
When Bret Lane was laid off from his telecommunications sales job after 16 years, he wasn't worried. He'd never been unemployed for more than a few days since he started working as a teenager. But months passed, and he couldn't find a job. One day, he heard the Purina plant in his Turlock, Calif., neighborhood was hiring janitors for $14 an hour. When he arrived early at 4 a.m., he counted more than 400 people lined up to interview.

"That's when I realized things had gotten serious," said Lane, 53, who called being out of work "pure hell."

Lane's experience is hardly unique. As of September 2013, 4 million people had been unemployed for six months or more. The economy has been slow to regain the 8.7 million jobs lost during the Great Recession, making prospects grim for many of the long-term unemployed.

Older workers like Lane make up a larger percentage of the persistently jobless than ever before. Nearly 40 percent of unemployed workers are over the age of 45 - a 30 percent rise from the 1980s. And for this group, the job hunt can be particularly long and frustrating. Unemployed people aged 45-54 were jobless for 45 weeks on average, and those 55 to 64 were jobless for 57 weeks, according to an October 2013 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

Younger workers didn't have such a hard time, perhaps because many employers perceive them to be more energetic or productive than older workers, said Linda Barrington, an economist at Cornell University's Institute for Compensation Studies. Employers "acting on such inaccurate assessments or stereotypes is what benefits younger workers and disadvantages older workers," she said.

Addressing the emotional side of unemployment

An innovative program based in Bridgeport, Conn., is helping to get those who are over 50 and unemployed for long periods back into the market. Platform to Employment started in 2011 when a Connecticut job center called the WorkPlace was overwhelmed by calls from "99ers"-people who had been unemployed for 99 weeks, exhausting their unemployment benefits-many of whom were older workers.

The exact number of 99ers across the country is unknown; the Bureau of Labor Statistics hasn't distinguished between 99ers and those out of work for a year since 2010, an oversight that some say renders this group even more politically invisible. Already, the long-term unemployed face biases in hiring. It's both legal and common for employers to write "unemployed need not apply" on job postings.

There has been virtually no public policy tackling long-term unemployment since the recession hit, said P2E founder Joe Carbone, and his program seeks to fill that gap. "These people have lost access to opportunity, which is a basic American tenet," said Carbone. "We find a way to make them competitive and feel hopeful."

P2E is an intensive, individualized five-week bootcamp that teaches job skills and works to build job-seekers' confidence and emotional health. "We acknowledge that there are serious emotional issues for people who'd been unemployed for that long," Carbone said.

The privately-funded program makes deals with businesses who hire P2E graduates for "internships," a few-week trial period for the would-be employee, whose salary is subsidized by the WorkPlace. Often, it leads to full-time work. According to P2E, 80 percent of their participants have been granted trial periods, and of those, more than 85 percent have been hired by employers.

Accepting a new economic reality

Bret Lane washes out his coffee pot at his home after a shift at a call center in San Diego, Calif., on Oct. 31. Lane was laid off after 16 years as a salesman in telecommunications and was unemployed until he got a job at a call center. Sandy Huffaker / Getty Images for NBC News

The program has spread to 10 other cities across the United States, including San Diego, where Lane, a P2E graduate, has been employed full-time at a call center since May. After a year and nine months of unemployment, Lane sold his two-bedroom house, pared down his possessions to fit in a 5x10 storage unit, and drove to San Diego to live with his sister. That's when he saw an ad in the paper for Platform to Employment.

He learned how to make his online resume more searchable by adding keywords, as well as how to create an impressive LinkedIn profile. "It also occurred to me that I was being discriminated against" because of age, rather than being rejected for not being good enough. Lane now makes about half of his previous salary and still lives with his sister, but he's "happy to be working again."

This acceptance of a new economic reality is at the heart of P2E; the program isn't solving the problems of precarity, real-wage decline, or manufacturing losses so much as doing damage control.

"I'd say 100 percent of the people who went through Platform are making less than they did previously," said Carbone. "We get them prepared for the fact that their standard of living will go down, that they probably have to change careers."

This guidance is necessary, Barrington said. "A lot of [the long-term unemployed] came into the workforce still thinking you could work for the same company for your whole life," she said. "Someone has to sit you down and tell you that's not going to happen."

She added that businesses need to be reminded of the value of older workers, who often bring intangible skills, such as punctuality, responsibility, and "being able to write a memo," that younger employees may not yet have.

Heidi DeWyngaert, President of Bankwell, a holding company of several banks in Connecticut, said one of her banks hired an older worker from P2E who is succeeding on the job precisely for these reasons. "She's mature, reliable and responsible with a great attitude," said DeWyngaert.

The program has gained so much prominence that it's become competitive in its own right. Early last year, after P2E was featured on 60 Minutes, the Bridgeport office was flooded with inquiries. The program routinely gets 1,000 applicants for around 20 spots.

Hoping to spark a national conversation

Vanessa Jackson, 57, saw the segment and kept track of P2E's growth until it expanded to her area in Chicago. Jackson had been unemployed off and on since 2008, when she lost her $100,000 job as a marketing manager during a corporate downsizing. "I thought, of course, I would get another comparable job," she said.

But it didn't happen. She decided to get an MBA to "ride out the recession," but that just landed her more debt. She finally got a part-time job as a deli clerk, until she broke her arm and went on disability for 10 months. Her $300,000 401(k) account dwindled to $60,000. She sold her house in the suburbs and moved in with her boyfriend on the South Side of Chicago.

"It was the most desperate thing in the world," Jackson said. It pained her to remember the days when recruiters would tell her she was one of "the top African-American women in marketing."

P2E "revived my energy," she said. "It lifted the depression that was very much there."

Jackson now works part-time as a project coordinator at a home care service agency for $13 an hour, which she admits is inadequate for her level of education. Still, she almost missed out on the opportunity. When P2E came to Chicago earlier this year, she wasn't selected at first. "It felt like applying for a job in itself," she said. "I beseeched [Chicago program manager Michael Morgan]. He said 'I admire your ambition' and let me in."

Carbone is all too aware of P2E's limited reach. "We've helped hundreds of people, but that doesn't put even a small dent in the amount who need help," he said. Carbone hopes to spark a national conversation and, eventually, get the attention of Washington.

"Let's be clear," Carbone said. "I wouldn't be doing this if there were appropriate and relevant government policies."

[Aug 28, 2019] My Top 5 Movies About Unemployment

Apr 30, 2016 | Christianity Today
Erin Brockovich

2000 | Rated R
directed by Steven Soderbergh
Based on the true story of an unemployed mother of three who forced her way into a job as a legal clerk and built an anti-pollution case against a California utility company. Erin Brockovich has become a name for someone with tenacity and perseverance.

The Journey of Natty Gann

1985 | Rated PG
directed by Jeremy Kagan
Disney's family-friendly adventure demonstrates how tough the Great Depression was on kids, namely the teenage girl of the title who journeys across America to reunite with her father. Grounded by strong performances, including a young John Cusack, this gem serves as a fine introduction of a difficult subject to younger viewers.

Tootsie

1982 | Rated PG
directed by Sydney Pollack
This light-hearted, quirky comedy stars Dustin Hoffman as an unemployed actor who pretends to be a woman for a full-time role in a soap opera. Beneath the hilarity is a sobering reminder that landing a job sometimes requires thinking outside the box, to say the least.

Up in the Air

2009 | Rated R
directed by Jason Reitman
George Clooney is stellar as a veteran hatchet man who has lost his ability to form meaningful relationships, living a life on the road. Ultimately this is a poignant drama about identity and what defines us. If we are nothing more than our occupation, what remains when that is gone?

Russ Breimeier, a freelance film critic who lives in Indianapolis, was unemployed for two years until recently landing a part-time job.

[Aug 28, 2019] What do you call a 50 year old engineer?

Mar 03, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Synoia , March 3, 2016 at 10:25 am

Q: What do you call a 50 year old engineer?

A: Unemployed.

[Aug 27, 2019] The Death of the Professional: Are Doctors, Lawyers and Accountants Becoming Obsolete

Probably not. But the quantities necessary might diminish considerably...
Notable quotes:
"... Adapted from the new book The Future of the Professions by Richard Susskind & Daniel Susskind (Oxford University Press, 2015).Originally published at Alternet ..."
"... The proof is in how there is one premium cost if the medical provider is on their own and magically it is cheaper if theu are part of a group or hospital.. Same doctor same practices lower rates prima facia evidence of insurance company rate fraud ..."
"... Re solidarity, you might be surprised. One reason law school enrollments are down is that it is becoming public knowledge that employment for graduates in upwardly mobile career positions is way down ..."
"... Many are shunted into low level proletarian type legal work, churning out evidence for use in lawsuits owned and managed by large firms. Lawyers who do this earn less then a good paralegal with less job security and no benefits. ..."
"... So much of the 'grunt work' of professions – once the entry and training province of new graduates – is now being done overseas by shops that specialize in legal research, or reading x-rays, or accounting and tax preparation. ..."
"... The 'grunt work' that grounds one in the full knowledge of the profession and how it works is slowly removed from the profession. That omission leaves future practitioners with an incomplete understanding. ..."
"... This loss makes them more reliant on big data as both assistant and excuse/defense, and makes them less master craftsmen (if I may use the term without giving offense) and more the front-end interface of one-size-fits-all processes. Very good for corporate profits. Not so good for the professions or their clients. ..."
"... Long ago, firms started off-shoring basic, tedious, repetitive tasks, generally considered as unrewarding, such as software testing or error correction to India. The idea was to focus on "high added-value" jobs such as system architects or project management, and leave low-level operations, supposedly requiring less qualifications, to cheaper Indian contractors. Decades later, there is a shortage of qualified people for those high-skilled jobs - precisely because fewer and fewer young people have had the possibility ..."
"... The result? It is now necessary to import expensive project managers and system architects from foreign countries. ..."
"... Bottom line: the race to the bottom for wages is "on". ..."
"... Professionals would be the next logical choice of squeezing cost out of work; unions, middle management, big industry, airlines, manufacturing and construction have all paid their price at the alter of the 1%. ..."
"... I also agree with the concept of there being less for the bottom 90% to spend. And as more automation kicks in, there will be even less bad choice jobs for these folks to scramble for. Just waiting for truck drivers to be slowly replaced with auto-drive trucks. ..."
"... " . Prefer a fence at the top of the cliff to an ambulance at the bottom " ..."
"... The rich and the truly rich will always have skilled, artistic human professionals to serve their personally tailored bespoke needs. It is the rest of us who will be assigned the doctorobots, the lawyer machines, etc. ..."
"... Part of the "crapification of everything" except for managers and owners, it is part of their cost cutting plan. ..."
"... First they came for the blue collar workers, and I did nothing? Then they came for the white collar workers, and I did nothing? Now they are coming for the professionals, and they are laughing at my passivity? ..."
"... They have played all the classes, higher than the one they are currently discarding, and the remaining consumers are happy to throw their neighbors under the bus. But your turn will come. Karma. ..."
"... Once corporations start setting guidelines and dictating the drugs you can and can't use for treatment, do you think they'll do it according to what's cost effective and least risky for the patient based on current science or do you think they'll do it based on their own profits? ..."
"... The shift from reactive to proactive ..."
"... Proactive cannibalism ..."
Jan 09, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Posted on January 9, 2016 by Yves Smith Yves here. Many members of the top 10% regard their role in society as relatively secure, particularly if the are in a niche that serves the capital-deploying 1% or better yet, 0.1%. But a new book suggest their position is not secure. And trends in motion confirm this dour reading, such as the marked decline in law school enrollments, and the trend in the US to force doctors to practice out of hospitals or HMOs, where they are salaried and are required to adhere to corporate care guidelines. For instance, my MD is about to have her practice bought out, and is looking hard as to whether she can establish a concierge practice. Mind you, she appears regularly on TV and writes a monthly column for a national magazine [not that is how I found her or why I use her]. Yet she has real doubts as to whether she can support all the overhead. If someone with a profile can't make a go at it solo in a market like Manhattan, pray tell, who can?

Adapted from the new book The Future of the Professions by Richard Susskind & Daniel Susskind (Oxford University Press, 2015).Originally published at Alternet

The end of the professional era is characterized by four trends: the move from bespoke service; the bypassing of traditional gatekeepers; a shift from a reactive to a proactive approach to professional work; and the more-for-less challenge.

The Move From Bespoke (Custom) Service

For centuries, much professional work has been handled in the manner of a craft. Individual experts and specialists-people who know more than others-have offered an essentially bespoke service ("bespoke" is British for "custom"). In the language of the tailor, their product has been "made-to-measure" rather than "off-the-peg." For each recipient the service has been disposable (used once only), handcrafted ordinarily by a solitary scribe or sole trusted adviser, often in the spirit of an artist who starts each project afresh with a blank canvas.

Our research strongly suggests that bespoke professional work in this vein looks set to fade from prominence, as other crafts (like tailoring and tallow chandlering) have done over the centuries. Significant elements of professional work are being routinized: in checklists, standard form materials, and in various sorts of systems, many of which are available online. Meanwhile, the work that remains for human beings to handle conventionally is often not conducted by individual craftspeople, but collaboratively in teams, sometimes collocated, but more often virtually. And, with the advance of increasingly capable machines, some work may not be conducted by human beings at all.

Just as we witnessed the "death of gentlemanly capitalism" in the banks in the 1980s, we seem to be observing a similar decline in bespoke professionalism.

The Bypassed Gatekeepers

In the past, when in need of expert guidance we turned to the professions. Their members knew things that others did not, and we drew on their knowledge and experience to solve our problems. Each profession acted as a "gatekeeper" of its own, distinct body of practical expertise. Today this set-up is under threat.

We are already seeing some work being wrested from the hands of traditional professions. Some of the competition is coming from within. We observe professionals from different professions doing each other's work. They even speak of "eating one another's lunch." Accountants and consultants, for example, are particularly effective at encroaching on the business of lawyers and actuaries. We also see intra-professional friction, when, for example, nurses take on work that used to be exclusive to doctors, or paralegals are engaged to perform tasks that formerly were the province of lawyers.

But the competition is also advancing from outside the traditional boundaries of the professions-from new people and different institutions. We see a recurring need to draw on people with very different skills, talents, and ways of working. Practicing doctors, priests, teachers, and auditors did not, for example, develop the software that supports the systems that we describe. Stepping forward instead are data scientists, process analysts, knowledge engineers, systems engineers, and many more. Today, professionals still provide much of the content, but in time they may find themselves down-staged by these new specialists. We also see a diverse set of institutions entering the fray-business process outsourcers, retail brands, Internet companies, major software and service vendors, to name a few. What these providers have in common is that they look nothing like twentieth-century doctors, accountants, architects, and the rest.

More than this, human experts in the professions are no longer the only source of practical expertise. There are illustrations of practical expertise being made available by recipients of professional work-in effect, sidestepping the gatekeepers. On various platforms, typically online, people share their past experience and help others to resolve similar problems. These "communities of experience," as we call them, are springing up across many professions (for example, PatientsLikeMe and the WebMD communities in medicine). We say more about them in a moment. More radical still are systems and machines that themselves generate practical expertise. These are underpinned by a variety of advanced techniques, such as Big Data and artificial intelligence. These platforms and systems tend not to be owned and run by the traditional professions. Whether those who do so will in turn become "new gatekeepers" is a subject of some concern.

The keys to the kingdom are changing. Or, if not changing, they are at least being shared with others.

Jim Haygood ,, January 9, 2016 at 8:57 pm

'medium and large corporations are also struggling to deal with increasing regulation'

My claim is that large corporations don't "struggle to deal with" regulation - they write it.

Case in point, Obamacare was drafted by Liz Fowler, formerly of WellPoint.

alex morfesis , January 10, 2016 at 12:05 am

You nailed it on medical professionals would like to add, that at least here in flori duh there seems to be massive pricing fraud by malpractice and liability insurance providers which state regulators allow to continue to force small or single practitioners to join groups by financial obliteration at least in floriduh, there is the usual massive distortion suggesting insurance companies are paying out huge amounts when there in fact seems to be collusion amongst insurance companies neglecting the legal requirement to try to settle on good faith and end up forcing people to settle for pennies on the dollar yet the insurance companies keep picking the pockets of medical professionals

The proof is in how there is one premium cost if the medical provider is on their own and magically it is cheaper if theu are part of a group or hospital.. Same doctor same practices lower rates prima facia evidence of insurance company rate fraud

jrs , January 9, 2016 at 3:49 pm

Yes some of it is only logical though, if masses of the population see their income declining and yet the costs of medical care keeps increasing eventually noone can afford to see the doctor never mind the ACA etc.. And it can get to be this way with a lot of professional services less urgent and distorted than medical care, like soon noone can afford an accountant, you use turbo tax, a lawyer – no middle class people start to make their own wills. Many professions seek ever further protections of government for their guilds (more and more requirements to practice to try to preserve their privilege) and yet with nothing protecting the income of the other 80% (read: unions, that would be their role) unless they plan to only serve the fellow 20%

So solidarity? Yea, but making the solidarity argument with many (not all) members of such professions is a waste of time as they instinctively side with the 1s.

Local to Oakland , January 9, 2016 at 4:13 pm

Re solidarity, you might be surprised. One reason law school enrollments are down is that it is becoming public knowledge that employment for graduates in upwardly mobile career positions is way down

Many are shunted into low level proletarian type legal work, churning out evidence for use in lawsuits owned and managed by large firms. Lawyers who do this earn less then a good paralegal with less job security and no benefits.

ilporcupine , January 9, 2016 at 4:33 pm

It has been said Paralegals are being squeezed out, to make way for the huge increase in law graduates from prior class booms. Why not use cheap lawyers, with better credential, and desperate for employment?

flora , January 9, 2016 at 5:39 pm

So much of the 'grunt work' of professions – once the entry and training province of new graduates – is now being done overseas by shops that specialize in legal research, or reading x-rays, or accounting and tax preparation.

There are 3 downsides to this, in my opinion. New college grads have fewer entry slots. The 'grunt work' that grounds one in the full knowledge of the profession and how it works is slowly removed from the profession. That omission leaves future practitioners with an incomplete understanding.

This loss makes them more reliant on big data as both assistant and excuse/defense, and makes them less master craftsmen (if I may use the term without giving offense) and more the front-end interface of one-size-fits-all processes. Very good for corporate profits. Not so good for the professions or their clients.

guest , January 9, 2016 at 6:25 pm

Big Data is not a solution.

Your first two points (no entry-level jobs for beginners, no acquisition of professional basics) are essential - and their detrimental effects are already painfully felt in some professions.

Case in point: software development.

Long ago, firms started off-shoring basic, tedious, repetitive tasks, generally considered as unrewarding, such as software testing or error correction to India. The idea was to focus on "high added-value" jobs such as system architects or project management, and leave low-level operations, supposedly requiring less qualifications, to cheaper Indian contractors. Decades later, there is a shortage of qualified people for those high-skilled jobs - precisely because fewer and fewer young people have had the possibility to

(a) start in the profession at entry-level positions (when job postings all require qualifications as senior software engineer and five years experience, what do you do?)

(b) learn the ropes and practice the skills from the ground up (the necessary step before rising in the professional hierarchy).

The result? It is now necessary to import expensive project managers and system architects from foreign countries.

From what I read, the UK has been especially hit by this phenomenon, because it was particularly enthusiastic about off-shoring IT to India.

polecat , January 9, 2016 at 8:18 pm

Uhm ..oh wait uh ..I know .uh Brondo's got what plants need ..right?

Phil , January 10, 2016 at 2:34 am

Attorney's work is being automated and outsourced. For more on one aspect of outsourcing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html?_r=2

I can't find the cite, but last year I read that some of the Indian companies that American law firms have outsourced to are now moving offices "stateside" to hire American attorneys, here.

Bottom line: the race to the bottom for wages is "on". Add to this job automation that will only get more efficient, over time.
http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/news-release-oxford-martin-school-study-shows-nearly-half-us-jobs-could-be-risk-computerisation

armchair , January 9, 2016 at 5:17 pm

The Washington State Bar has initiated a legal technician program , and I find the timing questionable, even if the premise of the program is good-hearted. As the market is awash in underemployed, licensed attorneys, the Bar is going ahead and turning veteran paralegals into the people to undercut the market even further. It seems like bad timing to let someone who has years of experience, and no law school debt get over on a bunch law school grads who are facing a life of being hounded for their debts. I spoke to someone at the Bar who made a good defense, that the legal technician is like an ARNP. Only later did it occur to me that there are very few out-of-work doctors.

From another perspective, the legal technician answers another problem of the collapsing paralegal market. Much of the collapse has been driven by advances in document management, especially scanning that 'reads' the text and makes it searchable. But hey, here is a shiny new program. Go ahead and set up a parenting plan with your abusive ex for $75! What could go wrong?

The key to really get the legal field de-humanized would be robot judges and robotic juries. I hope someone is already working on it.

polecat , January 9, 2016 at 8:26 pm

Don't worry what's old is new again. At some point in the future we'll all be scratching glyphs on clay tablets .once the 2nd law of thermodynamics really kicks in ..plenty of work then!

armchair , January 9, 2016 at 9:02 pm

Work! What about George Jetson? The go west value system we are stuck with these days is almost perfectly incompatible with a future that requires very little human labor.

MyWag , January 9, 2016 at 5:33 pm

Professionals would be the next logical choice of squeezing cost out of work; unions, middle management, big industry, airlines, manufacturing and construction have all paid their price at the alter of the 1%.

Public sector unions are hanging on but as the majority of local & state taxpayers have less to give, these wages, benefits and especially pensions will be cut. Those earning less and less will gleefully pull down those public employees who are 'living like kings'.

I also agree with the concept of there being less for the bottom 90% to spend. And as more automation kicks in, there will be even less bad choice jobs for these folks to scramble for. Just waiting for truck drivers to be slowly replaced with auto-drive trucks.

This leads us to an enhanced confrontation at the Federal level on how to go forward. The earned income tax credit, a good concept also under siege, I believe, will have to be supplemented with a minimum guaranteed income.

By this time, 20 years, the DEMs will be the party of business and the GOP will be entirely dependent on fed govt subsidies. Oh the irony.

Brooklin Bridge , January 10, 2016 at 12:00 pm

By this time 20 years, the GOP will be saying, "I told you so", regarding Global Warming.

Ptup , January 9, 2016 at 6:12 pm

Reading Rise of a The Robots right now, and the law and accounting profession have and will continue to be hurt hard by computers armed with big data, and the education and medical profession are next. Has to be. It's already a travesty that education and medical costs continue to rise as incomes stagnate and drop, and that just cannot continue. Well, maybe it can, until all of those guns out there are used by the people as they rise up. Look at the buffoon who many are considering for the Republican nominee, more out of blind, misinformed anger, than anything. Scary.

RBHoughton , January 9, 2016 at 7:31 pm

" . Prefer a fence at the top of the cliff to an ambulance at the bottom "

You have a delightful way with words Yves. Many thanks.

different clue , January 9, 2016 at 9:19 pm

The rich and the truly rich will always have skilled, artistic human professionals to serve their personally tailored bespoke needs. It is the rest of us who will be assigned the doctorobots, the lawyer machines, etc.

James Koss , January 10, 2016 at 11:13 am

The French phrase "Everything changes and remains the same" remains true today.

Whereas today the top of society has its professionals to isolate and protect them from the remainder of the population and the rules nobility and the church had its knights, nobles, obedient serfs and peasants to fight and protect "their" nobility. Names and titles changed but the rules remained. Those who have will get those who don't will not.

Inverness , January 10, 2016 at 11:29 am

Correct. The same applies in education. The wealthy know what kinds of schools serve their children best: those with better teacher to student ratios, rich arts curricula, and a progressive approach to instruction. Just see what Obama's kids got at their fancy Quaker school. The rest get standardized lesson plans, big class sizes, deep cuts in music and the arts, and high-stakes testing.

They can privatize their lives; we cannot.

Disturbed Voter , January 9, 2016 at 10:42 pm

Part of the "crapification of everything" except for managers and owners, it is part of their cost cutting plan.

Why would you trust a medical system run by politicians and insurance companies a system promoted by those same managers and owners. Like hiring the Three Stooges as your plumber, electrician and roofer. Gullibility will be the death of us that and malice.

First they came for the blue collar workers, and I did nothing? Then they came for the white collar workers, and I did nothing? Now they are coming for the professionals, and they are laughing at my passivity?

They have played all the classes, higher than the one they are currently discarding, and the remaining consumers are happy to throw their neighbors under the bus. But your turn will come. Karma.

flora , January 10, 2016 at 2:19 am

In Oregon some doctors are unionizing to resist medical assembly line medicine.
From NYTimes:

Doctors Unionize to Resist the Medical Machine

"Dr. Alexander and his colleagues say they are in favor of efficiency gains. It's the particular way the hospital has interpreted this mandate that has left them feeling demoralized. If you talk to them for long enough, you get the distinct feeling it is not just their jobs that hang in the balance, but the loss of something much less tangible - the ability of doctors everywhere to exercise their professional judgment."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/business/doctors-unionize-to-resist-the-medical-machine.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

digi_owl , January 10, 2016 at 4:12 am

I find myself thinking about an episode of the original Connections series, that was produced in the 70s.

There it was mused about how corporate management would idle their days away waiting for the computer in the basement to crunch the numbers and come up with company decisions they were then to implement.

Instead what happened was that the professional managerial class, the MBAs, dug in while computers instead replaced the laborers via robotics.

Jesper , January 10, 2016 at 6:55 am

Or shorter: The common argument that 'we (by that I mean you) have to become more employable' is about to hit home among the people with long education. Will they recognize the similarity to what has already happened to others and/or will they themselves make themselves more 'employable'?

financial matters , January 10, 2016 at 8:11 am

I think one of the major consequences we are seeing as a result of a misguided professional system is the lack of basic legal services for millions of people. This resulted in people being thrown out of their homes as the result of very obvious fraud and yet having no recourse unless they were able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees.

I think the popular new series 'Making of a Murderer' emphasizes this problem. I don't think a show that emphasizes the problems that the very poor have with justice from the lack of being able to pay for legal services would have been this popular 10 years ago.

financial matters , January 10, 2016 at 8:17 am

I think this would require a 'single payer' legal system similar to the need for a single payer medical system.

Wade Riddick , January 10, 2016 at 8:53 am

Once corporations start setting guidelines and dictating the drugs you can and can't use for treatment, do you think they'll do it according to what's cost effective and least risky for the patient based on current science or do you think they'll do it based on their own profits?

What happens when they own their own pharmacies – as they're all scrambling to do right now – and try to jack up reimbursement through that unit too? Do you think patients were served when Philidor started (criminally) altering scripts and making substitutions?

For profit healthcare is really sickcare, isn't it? Why cure a disease when treating it brings in more revenue? Why sell cheap human insulin when you can patent a variety on the molecule, jack up the price and carve up the market?

Keep the sucker paying the vig

These guys aren't adopting better guidelines for treating chronic disease based on the best available science. In fact, as they corporatize they're getting worse. I've talked to these clowns. They're typically ten years behind the state of the art in their field. Patients do the reading and then they stare at us like we're morons. Fifteen years later they swear they knew the truth all along.

If these corporate suits are setting the guidelines for care, how come there's no common national board standard for care, no portfolio investment model approach where they model the disease with the best available experts, determine how to intervene in the various genetic pathways that are perturbed and then pick the simplest, cheapest methods/chemicals to try first?

That sounds like a pretty reasonable, scientific approach to treatment – but, if that's your standard, then these people are in breech of fiduciary duty left and right and it all has to do with that old canard "maximizing shareholder value." What about maximizing customer service? Corporate medicine will lead to tobacco-level deaths. I know doctors who have been personally injured in this system already. Corporations want to avoid risk to their profit – *not* their patient. Imagine what *those* mandatory arbitration clauses are going to look like. Imagine what the sequel to _Merchants of Doubt_ will look like in the era of corporate medicine and Supreme Court decisions that bust doctors' unions.

I'm still burning from Peter Thiel's comments on monopolies in the New York Times this morning. Does he have any clue how bad the service is in regional hospital cartels already and how fast prices are rising?

It's not even a matter of price in the drug markets now. It's basic availability. Aside from the persistent shortages of cheap, effective generics due to the kickback scheme in PMOs/PBMs, we now have explicit regulatory interference. The FDA has been moving to withdraw entire lines of medication from compounding pharmacies even when there's no rival big pharma product competing against them or any indication of patient risk. These are decades-old treatments. (It's the CDC's job to set treatment guidelines, by the way, not the FDA's).

It's just a knee-jerk reaction at this point to protect imaginary future profits, I suppose. You can't make up this stuff. The FDA has even imposed a 30% sales volume rule for "safety." It has nothing to do with purity or contamination of compounded products. If Tesla sold exploding cars, how would restricting 30% of their sales volume to California improve consumer safety? It's clearly a market-rigging reg – and it's because the corporate medicine lobby wants it.

What does this have to do with corporate medicine? Compounding pharmacies in big chain hospitals – which are often pitifully narrow in their professional scope – are all magically exempt (oligopolistic and more expensive too). Isn't that wonderful?

The current corporatization of medicine rests on the notion that the chief challenge faced by those of us with serious illnesses is that we simply don't read enough fine print or fill out enough paperwork.

If you think that corporations have done a fine job handling your retirement investments in this era of lax accounting standards, wait until you see what they do with your actual body.

Brooklin Bridge , January 10, 2016 at 1:00 pm

Exceptional comment!

Brooklin Bridge , January 10, 2016 at 12:18 pm

This article is based on the faulty perception that this is all normal benign efficiency working it's way out of an antiquated system, perhaps with a few -to be expected- hiccups. It isn't.

What we are experiencing is wholesale greed and corruption on an international scale working it's way into the core of our civilization like mold or cancer, and perverting technology as well as the process of social change and adjustment to that change – for it's exclusive benefit – as it goes. It is unconscionable that we could call this progress or adjustment in anything but the most cruelly ironic sense.

The shift from reactive to proactive my foot! 60 years ago doctors were getting out proactive messages far better than today via education, television, the media and so on. And they gave a damn!!! Today, insurance companies are devising ever new ways to minimize what they spend on your care, maximize what they charge you for it, and call it, "proactive." Proactive theft, or genocide for fun and profit, would be closer to the mark.

Brooklin Bridge , January 10, 2016 at 12:26 pm

Proactive cannibalism also comes to mind

[Aug 26, 2019] Overshoot The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change

Secular stagnation of the US economy might be parcially driven by high (above $50 per barrel) oil prices. That nessesarity generates high level of unemployment, especially chromic unemployment and "perma-temps".
Apr 08, 2005 | www.amazon.com

Amazon.com

By J. Mann on April 8, 2005

Masterpiece, offers solution for THE problem of our time/div> I am astonished at the quality of this book, which is about the eighth book in a personal reading program that included Paul Roberts' The End of Oil, Kenneth Deffeyes' Beyond Oil, Jared Diamon's Collapse, Cottrell's Energy and Society, Michael Klare's Blood and Oil, and others, all extremely good and relevant books.

The task this author undertakes is to help readers find a new perspective from which to constructively and usefully interpret inevitable and major changes the world around us. By taking this approach, the author is providing the very essential tool we need to cope with these changes.

The issue is our ecological footprint.

Catton uses the term "Age of Exuberance" to represent the time since 1492 when first a newly discovered hemisphere and then the invention of fossil-fuel-driven machines allowed Old-World humans to escape the constraints imposed by a population roughly at earth's carrying capacity, and instead to grow (and philosophize and emote) expansively.

He then reminds us that we are soon to be squeezed by the twin jaws of excessive population and exhausted resources, as our current population is utterly dependent on the mining and burning of fossil energy and its use to exploit earth's resources in general.

In spring 2005, the buzz about "the end of cheap energy" is reaching quite a pitch, and when and if the "peak oil" scenario (or other environmental limit-event) is reached, the impact on our social / political world will be enormous. Already the US is brandishing and using its superior weaponry to sieze control of oil assets; this same kind of desperate struggle may well erupt at all levels of society if we don't find a way to identify the problem, anticipate its consequences, and find solutions.

Catton offers a perspective based on biology / ecology -- not bad, since we are indeed animals in an ecology and we are indeed subject to the iron laws of nature and physics.

With this perspective we can avoid ending up screaming nonsense at each other when changes begin to get scary. My urgent recommendation is, read this G.D. book and do it now.

[Aug 26, 2019] A new assessment of the role of offshoring in the decline in US manufacturing employment

Notable quotes:
"... What has caused the rapid decline in US manufacturing employment in recent decades? This column uses novel data to investigate the role of US multinationals and finds that they were a key driver behind the job losses. Insights from a theoretical framework imply that a reduction in the costs of foreign sourcing led firms to increase offshoring, and to shed labour." [link above] ..."
"... It looks like 'free' trade fundamentalists like Krugman are going to have to revisit their ideology... ..."
"... How pathetic can Democrats get with thier anti-worker policies ..."
"... Late 90's US corporations went whole in to industrializing [extreme low wage] China... FOREX, federal deficits, ignoring the US worker, etc. were in the [sympathetic] mix. There is a chicken, which egg is not important. ..."
"... Personally, I think that Trump is exploiting the distress of the working stiff and not doing anything for him. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership has shown callous indifference toward the working stiff so Trump gets their votes, because at least he will acknowledge that there's a problem unlike kurt and his ilk. ..."
Aug 26, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

JohnH , August 23, 2019 at 03:37 PM

"A new assessment of the role of offshoring in the decline in US manufacturing employment," by Christoph Boehm, Aaron Flaaen, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar 15 August 2019
What has caused the rapid decline in US manufacturing employment in recent decades? This column uses novel data to investigate the role of US multinationals and finds that they were a key driver behind the job losses. Insights from a theoretical framework imply that a reduction in the costs of foreign sourcing led firms to increase offshoring, and to shed labour." [link above]

It looks like 'free' trade fundamentalists like Krugman are going to have to revisit their ideology...

As for kurt, expect him to continue to deny the fact that 'free' trade has cost a significant number of jobs and caused enough economic disruption to tilt the election to Trump in 2016.

Further, expect the Democratic leadership to continue to tout the benefits of 'free' trade without acknowledging its severe adverse effects, both economically and politically. And of course, as long as they never acknowledge the adverse effects, they will never have to address it which will allow Trump to continue to bludgeon them on the issue.

How pathetic can Democrats get with thier anti-worker policies


ilsm -> JohnH... , August 23, 2019 at 04:47 PM
Late 90's US corporations went whole in to industrializing [extreme low wage] China... FOREX, federal deficits, ignoring the US worker, etc. were in the [sympathetic] mix. There is a chicken, which egg is not important.

The US worker lost in the evolutions. Aside from Trump who has tried anything for the US working stiff?

JohnH -> ilsm... , August 23, 2019 at 05:06 PM
Personally, I think that Trump is exploiting the distress of the working stiff and not doing anything for him. Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership has shown callous indifference toward the working stiff so Trump gets their votes, because at least he will acknowledge that there's a problem unlike kurt and his ilk.
ilsm -> JohnH... , August 24, 2019 at 04:39 AM
Like Andrew Jackson taking on Charleston on Nullification?

[Aug 25, 2019] Chronic unemployment should not lead to despair. It is now a new normal. I recommend Stoicism , which is the way Greeks and Romans coped with their own decline

Notable quotes:
"... It has to be explained that Stoics believe that nothing external to the individual is secure, and thus the truly important thing is virtue, based on ethics and moral. ..."
"... Stoicism is the appropriate philosophy for what awaits us. It brings out the best of us and it eases the anguish. The illusion of control is our worst enemy. Matters are completely out of our control and Nature will deal with them as she pleases. ..."
Jan 09, 2016 | peakoilbarrel.com
Javier , 01/09/2016 at 5:29 am

I wholeheartedly agree that even a cursory look at things reveals the overwhelming scope of things and quickly leads to despair.

It doesn't have to lead to despair. I recommend Stoicism , which is the way Greeks and Romans coped with their own decline.

In the words of Seneca:

"Let Nature deal with matter, which is her own, as she pleases; let us be cheerful and brave in the face of everything, reflecting that it is nothing of our own that perishes." (De Provid. v.8)

It has to be explained that Stoics believe that nothing external to the individual is secure, and thus the truly important thing is virtue, based on ethics and moral. Virtue can not be taken from an individual whatever the circumstances, and helps him deal with adversity. That is what Seneca means with "nothing of our own that perishes" .

Stoicism is the appropriate philosophy for what awaits us. It brings out the best of us and it eases the anguish. The illusion of control is our worst enemy. Matters are completely out of our control and Nature will deal with them as she pleases.

[Aug 25, 2019] In defence of slakerism

Notable quotes:
"... This is probably the most innocuous manner in which your free labor adds to capitalist profit. The remainder of the film is devoted to showing far more sinister examples. ..."
"... We learn about the long hours some engineers working for a Japanese company put in just to keep pace with their workload. The company only decided to take ease up when the employees came in glassy-eyed and groggy in the morning after putting in unpaid overtime through the wee hours of the morning trying to complete a project on time. To make them more productive during normal working hours, the company cut off internet access and electricity after 7 pm. This did not stop the workers desperate to keep pace. They brought flashlights and portable routers with them and kept going. ..."
"... While engineers and computer programmers are notoriously gung-ho, other workers in more alienating occupations took other measures to get off the treadmill, namely suicide. The Japanese called this karoshi , or death by overwork. A restaurant manager forced to work 18 hour days could not take it any longer and jumped out of the upper story window of an office building. ..."
"... To subject workers to the clock's iron rule, it is necessary beforehand to make time-keeping itself an adjunct of the capitalist system. An hourglass is not suited to measuring activity in a 19 th century Manchester textile mill. ..."
"... Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. ..."
"... If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist. ..."
"... One of the biggest breakthroughs was the time-clock that was invented only five years after the adoption of standard time globally. The two advances in capitalist control meshed together perfectly. Standard time made it possible to regulate global trade and transportation and the time-clock made it possible to regulate the human beings that produced the commodities that steamships and locomotives transported. ..."
"... When I got back to NY, I reported to my job as a database administrator at Goldman-Sachs. There, time equaled money. I wore a beeper and got used to phone calls late at night. I could put up with that but I never got used to fellow programmers glaring at me when I left at 5 pm. Like the Japanese engineers, they had a can-do spirit that came with their identification with a company I hated. Leaving aside my feelings toward the company, I had been in information systems for 20 years at that point and had put in more unpaid overtime over the years than had put in as programmers. I was at the point in life when leisure time meant a lot to me, especially when it was devoted to recruiting engineers and programmers to work in Nicaragua. ..."
"... Amazon warehouse workers are forced to pee in bottles or forego their bathroom breaks entirely because fulfillment demands are too high, according to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover as an Amazon worker for his book, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain . Targets have reportedly increased exponentially, workers say in a new survey revealed over the weekend, and as result, they feel pressured and stressed to meet the new goals. ..."
Aug 25, 2019 | www.counterpunch.org

Slaves to the Clock by Louis Proyect As I have pointed out in previous reviews , Icarus, the New York film distributor, is far and away the most important source of anti-capitalist documentaries. In keeping with their commitment to class struggle cinema, "Time Thieves", their latest, hones in on the ways in which the capitalist system makes us slaves to the clock.

When I worked at a Boston bank in the early 70s, I kept Marx's words pinned to my cubicle wall:

The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it.

–Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

At the start of "Time Thieves", we see people of all ages at leisure enjoying themselves. After a minute or so, we see another cross-section of humanity trudging off to work or to school as narrator Sarah Davidson comments: "Under capitalism, time has become a resource with a huge economic value. And those profiting from it want as much of our time as possible. They even steal it from us."

Director Cosima Dannoritzer begins by showing the chaos that ensues when a new restaurant billed as completely staff-less opens up. Patrons save money by preparing the meals themselves, going one step further than the automats that enjoyed a heyday in the 30s through the 50s. In the kitchen, it is a miracle that those conned into trying this out did not lose a finger or suffer third-degree burns. I say conned because we soon learn that a restaurant workers union staged the whole thing to illustrate the importance of having trained professionals doing the work.

While this is an extreme case, how far are we from Jeff Bezos's automated version of Whole Foods when all you need is a smartphone and the willingness to do the work that clerks usually do but without pay? I got my first taste of this workerless future when I went to see Tarantino's latest at a multiplex on West 23 rd Street. There were only ticket-dispensing machines in the lobby that looked like ATMs. It might have saved me standing in a line to buy a ticket but I wasn't getting paid for my labor, as minimal as it was.

This is probably the most innocuous manner in which your free labor adds to capitalist profit. The remainder of the film is devoted to showing far more sinister examples.

We learn about the long hours some engineers working for a Japanese company put in just to keep pace with their workload. The company only decided to take ease up when the employees came in glassy-eyed and groggy in the morning after putting in unpaid overtime through the wee hours of the morning trying to complete a project on time. To make them more productive during normal working hours, the company cut off internet access and electricity after 7 pm. This did not stop the workers desperate to keep pace. They brought flashlights and portable routers with them and kept going.

While engineers and computer programmers are notoriously gung-ho, other workers in more alienating occupations took other measures to get off the treadmill, namely suicide. The Japanese called this karoshi , or death by overwork. A restaurant manager forced to work 18 hour days could not take it any longer and jumped out of the upper story window of an office building.

We meet immigrant poultry workers in the USA who were in constant surveillance every minute on the job, including being seen on CCTV on their way to a bathroom, where their minutes were closely monitored. This was part of a production system that was engineered to keep both workers and the animals they slaughtered as tightly controlled as those in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", a film way ahead of its time.

To subject workers to the clock's iron rule, it is necessary beforehand to make time-keeping itself an adjunct of the capitalist system. An hourglass is not suited to measuring activity in a 19 th century Manchester textile mill.

Among the experts, we hear from in this eye-opening documentary is Robert Levine, the author of "A Geography of Time". He points out that standard time did not exist until 1883. Different cities had their own timeframes. This did not matter much to those living in a particular city but as cross-country or cross-oceanic transportation systems became the norm as capitalism developed, it was an obstacle to predictable and efficient outcomes. In one case, a train departing from Chicago crashed into one departing from New York on a section of track that only allowed one-way traffic coordinated through telegraph communications. In one particularly bad year, there were 180 such crashes. As part of the film's narrative power, we see archival footage of the aftermath of one.

Eventually, there was a recognition that time had to be standardized globally. The Eiffel Tower beamed a signal that the day had started at 12:00 am globally and local participants in this system recorded it on a "time ball" that was visible throughout a city. You can see still one at the Titanic Memorial, a lighthouse at the intersection of Fulton and Pearl in lower Manhattan.

Today, time management is done through atomic clocks that are accurate to the millionth of a second.

In Chapter 10 of Capital, titled "The Working Day", Marx describes the importance of controlling the time workers spent in the hellish textile mills of his age.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.

If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.

As the decades advanced from the time Marx wrote these words, the bourgeoisie invested heavily in "scientific" methods that could sharpen the fangs of the vampire.

One of the biggest breakthroughs was the time-clock that was invented only five years after the adoption of standard time globally. The two advances in capitalist control meshed together perfectly. Standard time made it possible to regulate global trade and transportation and the time-clock made it possible to regulate the human beings that produced the commodities that steamships and locomotives transported.

The bosses were always looking for ways to make workers even more like robots. It was up to Frank and Lilian Gilbreth to come up with methods that have become universal in mass production today, even to the point of making Amazon warehouse workers feel like they are in the 9 th circle of hell. They were "efficiency experts" whose research into time-motion resulted in productivity gains for the boss even if it left workers with carpal tunnel syndrome, shattered nerves, bloody accidents and all the rest. The Gilbreths only hoped to reduce extraneous motions through ergonomically designed workspaces but the capitalists who introduced their methods never considered the need for allowing the workers to carry out a task in a reasonable amount of time. If you've seen Charlie Chaplin walking maniacally down the street with a monkey wrench in each hand trying to tighten the buttons on a woman's dress in "Modern Times", you'll get an idea of the effects that time-motion studies can produce.

I am sure that if you see "Time Thieves", you'll be reminded of how these things come into play wherever you live. In the late 1980s, I made a couple of trips to Nicaragua to do a needs assessment for Tecnica, the technical aid project to aid the Sandinistas. If we set up a meeting for a ministry official at 10 am, we'd understand that they might be operating on "Nicaraguan time", which meant they might show up at 10:15 or even later. They never apologized since that was the way things worked in Nicaragua, where time-motion studies, time-clocks, etc. never came into play in an agricultural society. Once the meeting started, however, they were as serious as a heart attack as Michael Urmann, the founder of Tecnica, used to say.

When I got back to NY, I reported to my job as a database administrator at Goldman-Sachs. There, time equaled money. I wore a beeper and got used to phone calls late at night. I could put up with that but I never got used to fellow programmers glaring at me when I left at 5 pm. Like the Japanese engineers, they had a can-do spirit that came with their identification with a company I hated. Leaving aside my feelings toward the company, I had been in information systems for 20 years at that point and had put in more unpaid overtime over the years than had put in as programmers. I was at the point in life when leisure time meant a lot to me, especially when it was devoted to recruiting engineers and programmers to work in Nicaragua.

In 1967, E.P. Thompson wrote an article for the journal "Past and Present" titled " Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism " that thankfully can be read here. It provides a sweeping historical overview on how we ended up on this treadmill.

To start with, pre-class societies had a different understanding of time that we do. The Nuers of Ethiopia, a nomadic cattle-raising people, have a "cattle clock", the round of pastoral tasks that define their day. The Nandi people of Kenya, who also are nomadic cattle-raisers, break down their day into half-hours with 5-5:30 am understood as when oxen go off to graze, 7-7:30 am for the goats going to graze, etc. The Cross River natives of Nigeria were reported to say things like "the man died in less than the time in which maize is not yet completely roasted." (Less than 15 minutes).

Fast forward to the 18 th century and everything has changed, at least where the peasants have been turned into proletarians as a result of the Enclosure Act or, in Africa, simply forcing men and women into mines and plantations at gunpoint.

In England, it was where time thievery was most advanced. The man who owned Crowley Iron Works found it necessary in 1700 to write a 100,000-word in-house penal code to keep the workers in line.

From Order 40:

I having by sundry people working by the day with the connivence of the clerks been horribly cheated and paid for much more time than in good conscience I ought and such hath been the baseness & treachery of sundry clerks that they have concealed the sloath & negligence of those paid by the day .

From Order 103:

Some have pretended a sort of right to loyter, thinking by their readiness and ability to do sufficient in less time than others. Others have been so foolish to think bare attendance without being imployed in business is sufficient . Others so impudent as to glory in their villany and upbrade others for their diligence .

To the end that sloath and villany should be detected and the just and diligent rewarded, I have thought meet to create an account of time by a Monitor, and do order and it is hereby ordered and declared from 5 to 8 and from 7 to Io is fifteen hours, out of which take i? for breakfast, dinner, etc. There will then be thirteen hours and a half neat service .

Not much has changed by the evidence of the Amazon warehouse:

Amazon warehouse workers are forced to pee in bottles or forego their bathroom breaks entirely because fulfillment demands are too high, according to journalist James Bloodworth, who went undercover as an Amazon worker for his book, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain . Targets have reportedly increased exponentially, workers say in a new survey revealed over the weekend, and as result, they feel pressured and stressed to meet the new goals.

"Time Thieves" is essential viewing to understand how all this came to pass. Currently, the film is being marketed to institutions like universities and libraries according to Icarus . I urge those in a position to make such a purchase to do so since the film will be of great value to sociology and political science students trying to develop a class analysis of a society turned to rot. Perhaps the film will become available eventually on Ovid , a consortium of distributors of such films that includes Icarus. Ovid is a very reasonably priced streaming service for documentaries, foreign-language films and indie productions that would be of keen interest to CounterPunchers. I have reviewed many of the films that can be rented there over the years and couldn't recommend them more highly. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by: Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.org and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

[Aug 25, 2019] Back then Allyssa Milano and others were telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the allegations.

Notable quotes:
"... I've always wondered if the whole MeToo movement was orchestrated by a hidden hand ..."
"... It seemed like the MeToo was weaponized ..."
"... Back then Allyssa Milano and others were telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the allegation ..."
Aug 25, 2019 | www.unz.com

Amanda , says: August 24, 2019 at 10:47 pm GMT

@Paul Tarsus Good question. Others have asked the same thing:

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/22/the-missing-howls-of-denunciation-over-major-sex-trafficking/

I've always wondered if the whole MeToo movement was orchestrated by a hidden hand – same for those horrible pussy hats they came out with after Trump was elected.

It seemed like the MeToo was weaponized and ready to go when Kavanaugh was nominated (and I'm not a fan–he's connected to Bush and the Patriot Act). They brought out Dr. Chrissy Fraud and Julie Swetnick (who seemed quite mentally unstable with her accusations that Kavanaugh was connected to gang rape parties).

Back then Allyssa Milano and others were telling us that we must believe all women (so now guilty until proven innocent), but those same women have been completely silent when one of Epstein's accusers said she was forced to have sex with Bill Richardson (D) and George Mitchell (D), both of whom denied the allegations.

And, of course, such accusations were barely mentioned in the MSM.

[Aug 24, 2019] DoJ 64% Of All Federal Arrests In 2018 Were Non-Citizens

Aug 24, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Non-citizens accounted for 64 percent of all federal arrests in 2018, according to new data released on Aug. 22 by the Justice Department. The surge was driven largely by immigration -crime arrests, which have soared to the highest level in at least two decades.

Federal authorities conducted 108,667 arrests for immigration crimes in 2018, up more than five times from the 20,942 arrests in 1998. Immigration arrests accounted for 95 percent of the total increase in the number of federal arrests over the past 20 years, the data shows.

That data also shows a flip in the percentage of arrests of noncitizens compared to arrests of U.S. citizens. In 1998, arrests of citizens accounted for 63 percent of the total arrests. By 2018, arrests of noncitizens had grown to 64 percent of the total.

In a press release accompanying the data, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) noted that while noncitizens accounted for 7 percent of the U.S. population, they committed 24 percent of all federal drug arrests, 25 percent of all federal property arrests, and 28 percent of all federal fraud arrests.

... ... ...

In terms of prosecutions, more than 78 percent of noncitizens were prosecuted for illegal reentry, alien smuggling, and misuse of visas. The most common prosecutions of noncitizens outside of immigration-related offense dealt with drugs, at 13 percent of the total, and fraud, at 4 percent.


cynicalskeptic , 1 hour ago link

a 95 % increase in immigration arrests.... they were getting arrested for BEING illegal immigrants, right?

so....that 64% of all Federal arrests statistic comes from arresting 'non-citizens' BECAUSE they were not citizens.

really a bogus statistical mash-up....

the question should be:

What percentage of serious crime is committed by non-citizens?

Faeriedust , 4 hours ago link

Weall, they say it right out. 78% of those noncitizen arrests were for illegal immigration, a "victimless" crime. Most prosecutions for robbery, murder, rape, assault, and even drug trafficking are prosecuted under state laws. They'd only move it to federal court specifically because non-citizens or cross-border activity was involved. So what this really says is, "Hey, folks. Trump is actually enforcing immigration laws." That's it. The only crimes that foreigners really commit more than citizens are immigration violations. That and, historically, organized criminal gangs have used connections in other countries, whether Mexico or Sicily, to escape American justice and facilitate smuggling of whatever's profitable.

Expendable Container , 4 hours ago link

'Mexico or Sicily'

Hey you forgot to mention safe haven Israel and the international Jewish Mafia (that call the Sicilian mafia 'the MICKY MOUSE MAFIA').

HyperboreanWind , 5 hours ago link

Fits the demographics of the invasion.

US: Noncitizens Commit Crime At 2.5X Their Population Share (2018)

"At least 21 percent of people convicted of non-immigration crimes in the United States between 2011 and 2016 were non-citizens -- 2.5 times their share of the population, a new study has shown."

http://newobserveronline.com/non-us-citizens-commit-crime-at-2-5x-their-population-share/

... ... ...

HyperboreanWind , 5 hours ago link

Not yet.

High Numbers Of Indian Nationals Crossing Into US At Southern Border (2019)

"In the 2018 fiscal year, 8,997 people from India were apprehended at the Southwest border -- more than triple the number from the year before, when 2,943 Indian migrants were apprehended."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/us/border-migrants-india/index.html

Arab Living In Mexico Smuggles 6 Yemenis Into US Via Southern Border (2018)

https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/arab-living-in-mexico-smuggles-6-yemenis-into-u-s-via-southern-border/

[Aug 23, 2019] Nobody here wants to hire an over 60 IT worker

Notable quotes:
"... I am lucky in that I lived very frugally my whole life as I have always feared what was coming, and what in my opinion has now come. I am retired, and have been for over 4 years, but not by choice. ..."
"... For me, the misery index is High. I am lucky that I am not in danger of homelessness, but I have to be very careful about what I spend as prices keep going up and up and most things I consume. Meaning, food, utilities, taxes, etc. These days food doesn't go up by cents, but rather usually a dollar at a time. Carrots at my local Costco just went from $6.99 to $7.99 for example. ..."
"... I think that for everyone but the top 10%, the Misery Index is High ..."
Aug 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

BoulderMike , , August 23, 2019 at 4:19 pm

From just outside Boulder, CO: John Edwards said "there are two Americas". I am thinking he was more than correct, but that it should be 4 Americas: the top ,1%, the rest of the top 10%, the people who were prudent and saved and are older who are suffering but still can afford to live, and the truly poor who can't come up with $400 in an emergency, which would include the homeless. I am lucky in that I lived very frugally my whole life as I have always feared what was coming, and what in my opinion has now come. I am retired, and have been for over 4 years, but not by choice. Nobody here wants to hire an over 60 IT worker.

I measure the "economy" and the it's health by what I refer to as the "misery index". It isn't measured in numbers but rather in how one feels about their life and the world around them. For me, the misery index is High. I am lucky that I am not in danger of homelessness, but I have to be very careful about what I spend as prices keep going up and up and most things I consume. Meaning, food, utilities, taxes, etc. These days food doesn't go up by cents, but rather usually a dollar at a time. Carrots at my local Costco just went from $6.99 to $7.99 for example.

I think that for everyone but the top 10%, the Misery Index is High . But, around here, it is I believe one of the more affluent areas of the country. People are buying up $1.5 million dollar houses like crazy, and tearing down $1 million dollar old houses to build new custom houses. Tesla's and Mercedes are everywhere. Google has taken over Boulder and the young Tech workers are numerous. My little town of about 10,000 people is building new homes on every square inch of available land. They are talking about another 500 new homes of close to a million dollars to well over a million dollars. Traffic is outrageous, and bad air pollution days seem to be more and more numerous these days.

So, "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times". Depends on who you are.

I think though that we are in the midst of a class war. The racial issues we are experiencing are to distract people and divide people. Divide people on race, divide people on age, divide people on ideology. No matter what, just divide people so while the common "man" is fighting each other, the rich plunder more and more.
Finally, from my perspective, as a student of history, especially Nazi Germany, and Russia under Stalin, I am more and more frightened each day by the acceptance of the Trump rhetoric. It is messianic and dangerous.

[Aug 23, 2019] The USA likely absorbed around 44 million immigrants from 2010 to 2017

Aug 23, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Kurtismayfield , August 23, 2019 at 4:15 pm

That NYT article is not for the proles.. it is for the ten percent. They want their hairdressers, lawn maintenance, nannies, and home health aides to make $10 an hour. It is better for them to have a lower class pool of people's to do this work. This is why the author didn't question the "$10-12 an hour for a CNA" statement. He/she wants that cheap labor for themselves.

marym , August 23, 2019 at 4:23 pm

Typo in the text for your link s/b 44.5 million. The report makes a further adjustment for illegal immigrants to obtain a total of "likely 46.4 million" immigrants. Then, from your link:

Between 2010 and 2017, 9.5 million new immigrants settled in the United States. New arrivals are offset by roughly 320,000 immigrants who return home each year and natural mortality of about 2ha90,000 annually among the existing immigrant population.2 As a result, growth in the immigrant population was 4.6 million from 2010 to 2017.

So net average about 12.6K per week, though the detail shows numbers increasing over the time span.

As far as "overloading the social systems, welfare and finances" it would be helpful to see some detail. There are often studies showing factors like the overall contribution of immigrant labor to the economy, and comparative immigrant uses of social services which illustrate these issues, pro and con. For example, a recently proposed change would make it more difficult for military veterans to obtain a green cards for themselves and their families if they had accepted public benefits, though some would argue that military service is a valuable contribution to the country.

A key consideration for me is that there are powerful politicians, and those who vote for them, who favor even the most inhumane versions of gutting or ending immigration who also favor gutting or eliminating social programs and workers rights for non-immigrants.

Monty , August 23, 2019 at 8:19 pm

facts schmacts!

Don't an overestimate in the order of magnitude interfere with our shared fight against The Others!

NotReallyHere , August 23, 2019 at 6:17 pm

This is NOT about immigration. Get the terms right and you can see the problem clearly. Allow others to define the vocabulary and you get the mess we are in where illegally trafficked, quasi-slaves are lumped together with legal immigrants.

The difference is rights. A legal immigrant has the right to a minimum wage, safe working conditions, a vote and all of the other protections afforded a native born citizen. And guess what, both government and corporations work hard to make legal immigration difficult. It costs thousands of dollars, takes years and if, at any time throughout that period you, or – more likely your now teenaged kid – makes a mistake involving law enforcement, then YOURROUT.

On the other hand we have human traffickers trawling around Guatemala, Nicaragua and probably rural Mexico selling the American dream for your teenage son. And all you have to do to get him trafficked to a life of luxury working fifteen hours a day in a battery chicken shed for 4 bucks an hour .. is to give over the deeds of your Guatemalan shack. So if kiddo doesn't work hard enough or, heaven forfend, says forget this and bails, then you're all homeless.

Get the difference?

anon in so cal , August 23, 2019 at 6:35 pm

Yes, "get the difference."

Unfortunately, open borders proponents are partly to blame for the terminological murkiness.
Pro illegal immigration advocates typically use slogans affirming the value of immigrants and immigration. They correctly note that immigrants make the country great, etc. No argument there. But they use these slogans and line of argumentation to advocate for illegal immigration. They deliberately conflate the two processes of legal and illegal immigration.

Summer , August 23, 2019 at 7:09 pm

"The difference is rights. A legal immigrant has the right to a minimum wage, safe working conditions, a vote and all of the other protections afforded a native born citizen "

They..the legal immigrants also often enjoy protections from their original country and dual citizenship. They have an escape route

Leaving the US citizen ass out with ZERO protections.

Carey , August 23, 2019 at 7:16 pm

"..Leaving the US citizen ass out with ZERO protections."

Thank you!

GERMO , August 23, 2019 at 7:45 pm

Just, ugh, to seeing rightwing talking point anti-immigrant comment thread on NC. Sorry. Thanks to anyone attempting to correct the stirring-up-of-reactionary-resentments with some critical thinking. Right now, I can't even.

Monty , August 23, 2019 at 8:21 pm

Superb satire!

NotReallyHere , August 23, 2019 at 7:57 pm

That's fair, but you pay taxes at full rate with no rights for a decade, then you pay thousands in legal fees to keep your legal status correct and you can't leave the job your in till you get the green card – which can take years.

The "right" to go back to your own country" is indeed true. But now you have American kids and likely/eventually American grandkids who know nothing of your "old country" – which is itself unrecognizable from when you lived there – and maybe that "right" is less valuable than you think.

Anyway, my aim was to point out the difference between a legal, organized system of immigration and a cynical nasty system of wage suppression using quasi- slavery. They are different things and conflating them serves to hide what is going on

[Aug 22, 2019] BOLD ENDEAVORS Lessons from Polar and Space Exploration

Notable quotes:
"... A lesson of use at job interviews, schools and even in families. I am thankful for an added knowledge and understanding of the many problems associated with these Endeavors. This book should be a "must" to all young people. ..."
Oct 16, 1999 | Amazon.com
Britta Sahlgren, October 16, 1999
An intriguing story of human relationships in the extreme.

Bold Endeavors by Jack Stuster proved to be a real page-turner! Since childhood reading about adventures and explorers had been my favorite literature. In this book the persons behind these endeavors came to life.

They were of flesh and blood and you as a reader took part of their everyday life, their hardships and personal problems. A thrilling experience. A lesson in the importance of relationships not only among people in isolation

A lesson of use at job interviews, schools and even in families. I am thankful for an added knowledge and understanding of the many problems associated with these Endeavors. This book should be a "must" to all young people.

[Aug 21, 2019] Losing a job in your 50s is especially tough. Here are 3 steps to take when layoffs happen by Peter Dunn

Unemployment benefits currently are usually is just six month or so; this is the time when you can plan you "downsizing". You do not need to rush but at the same time do not expect that you will get job offers quickly, if at all. Usually it does not happen. many advertised positions are fakes, another substantial percentage is already reserved for H1B candidates and posting them is the necessary legal formality.
Often losing job logically requires selling your home and moving to a modest apartment, especially if no children are living with you. At 50 it is abut time... You need to do it later anyway, so why not now. But that's a very tough decision to make... Still, if the current housing market is close to the top (as it is in 2019), this is one of the best moves you can make. Getting from your house several hundred thousand dollars allows you to create kind of private pension to compensate for losses in income till you hit your Social Security check, which currently means 66.
$300K investment in A quality bonds that returns 3% per year is enough to provides you with $24K per year "private pension" from 50 to age of 66 when social security kicks in. That allows you to pay for the apartment and amenities. The food is extra but with this level of income you qualify for food assistance.
This way you can take lower paid job, of much lower paid job (which mean $15 per hour), of temp job and survive.
And if this are many form you house sell your 401k remains intact and can supplement your SS income later on. Simple Excel spreadsheet can provide you with a complete picture of what you can afford and what not. Actually the ability to walk of fresh air for 3 or more hours each day worth a lot of money ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Losing a job in your 50s is a devastating moment, especially if the job is connected to a long career ripe with upward mobility. As a frequent observer of this phenomenon, it's as scary and troublesome as unchecked credit card debt or an expensive chronic health condition. This is one of the many reasons why I believe our 50s can be the most challenging decade of our lives. ..."
"... The first thing you should do is identify the exact day your job income stops arriving ..."
"... Next, and by next I mean five minutes later, explore your eligibility for unemployment benefits, and then file for them if you're able. ..."
"... Grab your bank statement, a marker, and a calculator. As much as you want to pretend its business as usual, you shouldn't. Identify expenses that don't make sense if you don't have a job. Circle them. Add them up. Resolve to eliminate them for the time being, and possibly permanently. While this won't necessarily lengthen your fuse, it could lessen the severity of a potential boom. ..."
Feb 15, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

... ... ...

Losing a job in your 50s is a devastating moment, especially if the job is connected to a long career ripe with upward mobility. As a frequent observer of this phenomenon, it's as scary and troublesome as unchecked credit card debt or an expensive chronic health condition. This is one of the many reasons why I believe our 50s can be the most challenging decade of our lives.

Assuming you can clear the mental challenges, the financial and administrative obstacles can leave you feeling like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Income, health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, bills, expenses, short-term savings and retirement savings are all immediately important in the face of a job loss. Never mind your Parent PLUS loans, financially-dependent aging parents, and boomerang children (adult kids who live at home), which might all be lurking as well.

When does your income stop?

From the shocking moment a person learns their job is no longer their job, the word "triage" must flash in bright lights like an obnoxiously large sign in Times Square. This is more challenging than you might think. Like a pickpocket bumping into you right before he grabs your wallet, the distraction is the problem that takes your focus away from the real problem.

This is hard to do because of the emotion that arrives with the dirty deed. The mind immediately begins to race to sources of money and relief. And unfortunately that relief is often found in the wrong place.

The first thing you should do is identify the exact day your job income stops arriving . That's how much time you have to defuse the bomb. Your fuse may come in the form of a severance package, or work you've performed but haven't been paid for yet.

When do benefits kick in?

Next, and by next I mean five minutes later, explore your eligibility for unemployment benefits, and then file for them if you're able. However, in some states severance pay affects your immediate eligibility for unemployment benefits. In other words, you can't file for unemployment until your severance payments go away.

Assuming you can't just retire at this moment, which you likely can't, you must secure fresh employment income quickly. But quickly is relative to the length of your fuse. I've witnessed way too many people miscalculate the length and importance of their fuse. If you're able to get back to work quickly, the initial job loss plus severance ends up enhancing your financial life. If you take too much time, by your choice or that of the cosmos, boom.

The next move is much more hands-on, and must also be performed the day you find yourself without a job.

What nonessentials do I cut?

Grab your bank statement, a marker, and a calculator. As much as you want to pretend its business as usual, you shouldn't. Identify expenses that don't make sense if you don't have a job. Circle them. Add them up. Resolve to eliminate them for the time being, and possibly permanently. While this won't necessarily lengthen your fuse, it could lessen the severity of a potential boom.

The idea of diving into your spending habits on the day you lose your job is no fun. But when else will you have such a powerful reason to do so? You won't. It's better than dipping into your assets to fund your current lifestyle. And that's where we'll pick it up the next time.

We've covered day one. In my next column we will tackle day two and beyond.

Peter Dunn is an author, speaker and radio host, and he has a free podcast: "Million Dollar Plan." Have a question for Pete the Planner? Email him at [email protected]. The views and opinions expressed in this column are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of USA TODAY.

[Aug 20, 2019] Trump Promised Massive Infrastructure Projects -- Instead We ve Gotten Nothing>

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure. ..."
"... Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me." ..."
"... Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration. ..."
"... He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that." ..."
"... In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation." ..."
"... That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money. ..."
"... This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money. ..."
"... Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend. ..."
"... Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases. ..."
"... I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat. ..."
"... Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him. ..."
"... Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses. ..."
Jul 26, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, when a reader was graciously driving me to the Department of Motor Vehicles (a schlepp in the wilds of Shelby County), she mentioned she'd heard local media reports that trucks had had their weight limits lowered due to concern that some overpasses might not be able to handle the loads. Of course, a big reason infrastructure spending has plunged in the US is that it's become an excuse for "public-private partnerships," aka looting, when those deals take longer to get done and produce bad results so often that locals can sometimes block them.

By Tom Conway, the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW) . Produced by the Independent Media Institute

Bad news about infrastructure is as ubiquitous as potholes. Failures in a 108-year-old railroad bridge and tunnel cost New York commuters thousands of hours in delays. Illinois doesn't regularly inspect , let alone fix, decaying bridges. Flooding in Nebraska caused nearly half a billion dollars in road and bridge damage -- just this year.

No problem, though. President Donald Trump promised to fix all this. The great dealmaker, the builder of eponymous buildings, the star of "The Apprentice," Donald Trump, during his campaign, urged Americans to bet on him because he'd double what his opponent would spend on infrastructure. Double, he pledged!

So far, that wager has netted Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes. And there's nothing on the horizon since Trump stormed out of the most recent meeting. That was a three-minute session in May with Democratic leaders at which Trump was supposed to discuss the $2 trillion he had proposed earlier to spend on infrastructure. In a press conference immediately afterward, Trump said if the Democrats continued to investigate him, he would refuse to keep his promises to the American people to repair the nation's infrastructure.

The comedian Stephen Colbert described the situation best, saying Trump told the Democrats: "It's my way or no highways."

The situation, however, is no joke. Just ask the New York rail commuters held up for more than 2,000 hours over the past four years by bridge and tunnel breakdowns. Just ask the American Society of Civil Engineers , which gave the nation a D+ grade for infrastructure and estimated that if more than $1 trillion is not added to currently anticipated spending on infrastructure, "the economy is expected to lose almost $4 trillion in GDP , resulting in a loss of 2.5 million jobs in 2025."

Candidate Donald Trump knew it was no joke. On the campaign trail, he said U.S. infrastructure was "a mess" and no better than that of a "third-world country. " When an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia in 2015, killing eight and injuring about 200 , he tweeted , "Our roads, airports, tunnels, bridges, electric grid -- all falling apart." Later, he tweeted , "The only one to fix the infrastructure of our country is me."

Donald Trump promised to make America great again. And that wouldn't be possible if America's rail system, locks, dams and pipelines -- that is, its vital organs -- were "a mess." Trump signed what he described as a contract with American voters to deliver an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his administration.

He mocked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton's proposal to spend $275 billion. "Her number is a fraction of what we're talking about. We need much more money to rebuild our infrastructure," he told Fox News in 2016 . "I would say at least double her numbers, and you're going to really need a lot more than that."

In August of 2016, he promised , "We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports that our country deserves. American cars will travel the roads, American planes will connect our cities, and American ships will patrol the seas. American steel will send new skyscrapers soaring. We will put new American metal into the spine of this nation."

In his victory speech and both of his State of the Union addresses, he pledged again to be the master of infrastructure. "We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, school, hospitals. And we will put millions of our people to work," he said the night he won.

That sounds excellent. That's exactly what 75 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said they wanted. That would create millions of family-supporting jobs making the steel, aluminum, concrete, pipes and construction vehicles necessary to accomplish infrastructure repair. That would stimulate the economy in ways that benefit the middle class and those who are struggling.

That contract Trump signed with American voters to produce an infrastructure plan in the first 100 days: worthless. It never happened. He gave Americans an Infrastructure Week in June of 2017, though, and at just about the 100-day mark, predicted infrastructure spending would "take off like a rocket ship." Two more Infrastructure Weeks followed in the next two years, but no money.

Trump finally announced a plan in February of 2018 , at a little over the 365-day mark, to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure. It went nowhere because it managed to annoy both Democrats and Republicans.

It was to be funded by only $200 billion in federal dollars -- less than what Hillary Clinton proposed. The rest was to come from state and local governments and from foreign money interests and the private sector. Basically, the idea was to hand over to hedge fund managers the roads and bridges and pipelines originally built, owned and maintained by Americans. The fat cats at the hedge funds would pay for repairs but then toll the assets in perpetuity. Nobody liked it.

That was last year. This year, by which time the words Infrastructure Week had become a synonym for promises not kept, Trump met on April 30 with top Democratic leaders and recommended a $2 trillion infrastructure investment. Democrats praised Trump afterward for taking the challenge seriously and for agreeing to find the money.

"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal , D-Mass., told the Washington Post, even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.

Almost immediately, Trump began complaining that Democrats were trying to hoodwink him into raising taxes to pay for the $2 trillion he had offered to spend.

Trump and the Republicans relinquished one way to pay for infrastructure when they passed a tax cut for the rich and corporations in December of 2017. As a result, the rich and corporations pocketed hundreds of billions -- $1 trillion over 10 years -- and Trump doesn't have that money to invest in infrastructure. Corporations spent their tax break money on stock buybacks, further enriching the already rich. They didn't invest in American manufacturing or worker training or wage increases.

Three weeks after the April 30 meeting, Trump snubbed Democrats who returned to the White House hoping the president had found a way to keep his promise to raise $2 trillion for infrastructure. Trump dismissed them like naughty schoolchildren. He told them he wouldn't countenance Democrats simultaneously investigating him and bargaining with him -- even though Democrats were investigating him at the time of the April meeting and one of the investigators -- Neal -- had attended.

Promise not kept again.

Trump's reelection motto, Keep America Great, doesn't work for infrastructure. It's still a mess. It's the third year of his presidency, and he has done nothing about it. Apparently, he's saving this pledge for his next term.

In May, he promised Louisianans a new bridge over Interstate 10 -- only if he is reelected. He said the administration would have it ready to go on "day one, right after the election." Just like he said he'd produce an infrastructure plan within the first 100 days of his first term.

He's doubling down on the infrastructure promises. His win would mean Americans get nothing again.

Arizona Slim , July 26, 2019 at 6:26 am

Paging Bernie Sanders: You need to be all over this Trump-fail. And sooner, rather than later.

The Rev Kev , July 26, 2019 at 6:40 am

The whole thing seems so stupid. The desperate need is there, the people are there to do the work, the money spent into the infrastructure would give a major boost to the real economy, the completed infrastructure would give the real economy a boost for years & decades to come – it is win-win right across the board. But the whole thing is stalled because the whole deal can't be rigged to give a bunch of hedge fund managers control of that infrastructure afterwards. If it did, the constant rents that Americans would have to pay to use this infrastructure would bleed the economy for decades to come.

I have seen this movie before. A State builds a highway, it then leases that highway to a corporation for a bucket of cash which it uses to bribe the electorate to win the next election or two. The corporation shoves brand new toll booths on the highway charging sky high rates which puts a crimp in local economic activity. After the lease is up after twenty years, the State gets to take over the highway again to find that the corporation cut back on maintenance so that the whole highway has to be rebuilt again. Rinse and repeat.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, can you imagine how history would have gone if they had been handed over to a bunch of corporations who would have built toll booths over the whole network? Would have done wonders for the American economy I bet.

Wukchumni , July 26, 2019 at 6:48 am

One of the things discussed at our town hall meeting the other night, was a much needed $481k public bathroom, and that was the low bid.

It has to be ADA compliant with ramps, etc.

$48,100 seems like it'd be plenty to get 'r done, as you can build a house with a couple of bathrooms, and a few bedrooms, a kitchen and living room for maybe $200k.

Ignacio , July 26, 2019 at 8:58 am

And if toll revenues don't come as high as expected, mother state will come to the rescue of those poor fund managers. I find it amazing that Trump uses the stupid Russia, Russia, Russia! fixation of democrats as an excuse to do nothing about infrastructure. Does this work with his electorate?

cnchal , July 26, 2019 at 7:09 am

Tom, grow up.

Promises by any narcissist mean nothing. You cannot hang your hat on any word that Trump speaks, because it's not about you or anyone else, but about him and only him.

Here is a heads up. If any infrastructure is done it will be airports. The elite fly and couldn't give a crap about the suspension and wheel destroying potholes we have to slalom around every day. They also don't care that the great unwashed waste thousands of hours stuck in traffic when a bridge is closed or collapses.

Carla , July 26, 2019 at 7:47 am

Well, fix the airports and you've still got Boeing, self-destructing as fast as it can. And Airbus can't fill all the orders no matter how hard it tries. Guess everybody will just have to . stay home.

WheresOurTeddy , July 26, 2019 at 7:16 am

Are all the coal jobs back? How about the manufacturing? NAFTA been repealed and replaced with something better yet? How's the wall coming and has Mexico sent the check yet? Soldiers back from Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria yet?

Got that tax cut for rich people and a ton of conservative judges through though, didn't he?

Katniss Everdeen , July 26, 2019 at 8:17 am

"It couldn't have gone any better," Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal, D-Mass., told the Washington Post, even though Neal was investigating Trump for possible tax fraud.

What a surprise. It's simply "amazing" that the insane status quo jihad that has been waged against Trump since he announced his candidacy had real consequences for the country. Who would have thought that calling ANY president ignorant, ugly, fat, a liar, a traitor, a cheater, an agent of Putin, a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, a bigot, an isolationist and an illegitimate occupant of the White House 24/7 since he or she won the election would make actual accomplishment nearly impossible.

The mere mention of his name on college campuses has even been legitimized as a fear-inducing, "safety"-threatening "microagression."

It's just so rich that having determined to prevent Trump from doing absolutely anything he promised during the campaign by any and all means, regardless of what the promise was or how beneficial it may have been, his numerous, bilious "critics" now have the gonads to accuse him of not getting anything done.

With all due respect to the author of this piece, the result he laments was exactly the point of this relentless nightmare of Trump derangement to which the nation has been subjected for three years. I tend to think that the specific promise most targeted for destruction was his criticism of NATO and "infrastructure" was collateral damage, but that's neither here nor there.

The washington status quo has succeeded in its mission to cripple a president it could not defeat electorally, and now tries to blame him for their success. Cutting off your nose to spite your face has always been a counterproductive strategy.

[Aug 20, 2019] The immigrant , whether skilled or much more likely unskilled, is the slave in this arrangement for whatever period of time he or she is paid significantly below what was, or what would of been, the prevailing real time local costs of labor without the immigration taking place or the immigrant being present.

Aug 16, 2019 | www.unz.com
Mevashir , says: August 14, 2019 at 11:49 pm GMT
@geokat62

Amazing Tony Martin lecture with David Irving

[Aug 17, 2019] Bankruptcy-related job losses are rising at rates not seen since 2009

Aug 17, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

im1dc , August 07, 2019 at 05:44 PM

"Bankruptcy-related job losses are rising at rates not seen since 2009"

Grim foreshadowing of what may come and quickly...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bankruptcies-cause-the-highest-number-of-job-losses-since-2009-when-the-us-was-in-the-depths-of-the-great-recession-2019-08-06

"Bankruptcy-related job losses are rising at rates not seen since 2009, invoking grim reminders of the Great Recession"

By Quentin Fottrell, Personal Finance Editor...Aug 7, 2019...8:24 p.m. ET

"The recent spate of bankruptcies in corporate America is taking its toll.

In the first seven months of the year, U.S.-based companies announced 42,937 job cuts due to bankruptcy, up 40% on the same period last year and nearly 20% higher than all bankruptcy-related job losses last year, a report released Tuesday concluded. Despite record-low unemployment, bankruptcy filings have not claimed this many jobs since the Great Recession.

"It is the highest seven-month total since 2009 when 50,258 cuts due to bankruptcy were announced," according to the report by outplacement and business coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "In fact, it is higher than the annual totals for bankruptcy cuts every year since 2009."...

[Aug 15, 2019] Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out

Aug 15, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

im1dc , August 14, 2019 at 03:48 PM

A MUST READ in its entirety

Be prepared to have your mind blown

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html

"Why a Banking Heiress Spent Her Fortune on Keeping Immigrants Out"

'Newly unearthed documents reveal how an environmental-minded socialite became an ardent nativist whose money helped sow the seeds of the Trump anti-immigration agenda'

By Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire...Aug. 14, 2019

"She was an heiress without a cause -- an indifferent student, an unhappy young bride, a miscast socialite. Her most enduring passion was for birds.

But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life's purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America's doors to immigrants.

She believed that the United States was "being invaded on all fronts" by foreigners, who "breed like hamsters" and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swelling masses in developing countries.

An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation's three largest restrictionist groups -- the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies -- as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views."...

[Aug 08, 2019] Revised Profit Data Are Good News But Don't Reverse Decades of Wage Stagnation

Notable quotes:
"... corporations were able to increase their share of income at the expense of labor, even with an unemployment rate below 4 percent. ..."
Aug 08, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , August 05, 2019 at 11:03 AM

http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/revised-profit-data-are-good-news-but-don-t-reverse-decades-of-wage-stagnation

August 5, 2019

Revised Profit Data Are Good News But Don't Reverse Decades of Wage Stagnation
By Dean Baker

In July, the U.S. Department of Commerce released data showing GDP growth had slowed sharply in the second quarter. Most economic reporting appropriately highlighted the data showing that we were not getting the investment boom that the Republicans had promised would result from their tax cut.

But there was also an important item in the annual GDP data revisions that many overlooked in the report: The revised profit data for 2018 showed that the profit share of corporate income had fallen by 0.4 percentage points from the prior year. This is a big deal for two reasons: It means that workers are now clearly getting their share of the gains from growth, and it tells us an important story about the structure of the economy.

On the first point, we know that the wages of the typical worker have not kept pace with productivity growth over the last four decades. While productivity growth has not been great over most of this period (1995-2005 was the exception), wages have lagged behind even the slow productivity growth over most of this period.

The one exception was the years of low unemployment from 1996 to 2001, when the wages of the typical worker rose in line with productivity growth. With unemployment again falling to relatively low levels in the last four years, many of us expected that wages would again be keeping pace with productivity growth.

The earlier data on profits suggested that this might not be the case. It showed a small increase in the profit share of corporate income, suggesting that corporations were able to increase their share of income at the expense of labor, even with an unemployment rate below 4 percent.

The revised data indicate this is not the case. The low unemployment rate is creating an environment in which workers have enough bargaining power to get their share of productivity gains and even gain back some of the income share lost in the Great Recession.

This brings up the second issue. Most of the upward redistribution over this period was not from ordinary workers to profits, but rather to high-end workers. The big winners in the last four decades have been CEOs, hedge fund and private equity partners, and at a somewhat lower level, highly paid professionals like doctors and dentists.

The shift to profits takes place only in this century after much of the upward redistribution had already occurred. One obvious explanation was the weak labor market following the Great Recession. With unemployment remaining stubbornly high, wages were not keeping pace with productivity growth or even inflation. An alternative explanation was that growing monopolization of major sectors (think of Google, Facebook and Amazon) was allowing capital to gain at the expense of labor.

The revised profit data seem to support the first story. In the last four years, the profit share has fallen by 3.2 percentage points. (It had dropped another percentage point in the first quarter of 2019, although the quarterly data are highly erratic.) At this rate, in four more years, the run-up in profit shares in this century will be completely reversed.

If the weak labor market following the Great Recession is the story of the rise in profit shares, there is still the problem of the run-up in profit share in 2003-2007, the years preceding the Great Recession. One explanation is that the profits recorded in these years were inflated by phony profits recorded by the financial sector.

Banks like Citigroup and Bank of America were recording large profits in these years on loans that subsequently went bad. This would be equivalent to a business booking large profits on sales to customers that did not exist. Their books would show large profits when the sales were recorded, but then they would show large losses when the business had to acknowledge that the customer didn't exist, and therefore write off a previously booked sale.

Profits that are based on sales to nonexistent customers don't come at the expense of workers, nor do profits that are booked on loans that go bad. (The subsequent recession was, of course, very much at the expense of workers.) For this reason, we should be somewhat skeptical of the shift from wages to profits in the years of the housing bubble.

In any case, the revised profits data are good news. They show a tight labor market is working the way it is supposed to. But this doesn't mean everyone is doing great. You don't reverse four decades of wage stagnation with four relatively good years.

However, things are at least moving in the right direction now, and that is good news. That has not generally been the case over the last 40 years.

[Aug 05, 2019] Gun homicides get far more attention in the popular press, but most gun deaths are the result of suicide

Aug 05, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs said in reply to ken melvin... , August 04, 2019 at 09:29 AM

(Are NRA members this suicidal?)

There are more gun suicides
than gun homicides in America
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/18000510/gun-suicide-homicide-comparison via
@voxdotcom - Nov 14, 2018

Nearly 23,000 people died by firearm suicide in 2016.

Gun homicides get far more attention in the popular press, but most gun deaths are the result of suicide. In 2016, the last year for which the CDC provides numbers, 22,938 people committed suicide by firearm, while 14,415 people died in gun homicides. ...

[Aug 01, 2019] A 26-year-old billionaire is building virtual border walls -- and the federal government is buying

Aug 01, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Fred C. Dobbs , July 30, 2019 at 06:53 AM

(Is this anything?)

A 26-year-old billionaire is building virtual border walls -- and the federal government is buying

Sam Dean - July 29, 2019

https://techxplore.com/news/2019-07-year-old-billionaire-virtual-border-wallsand.html

On a Friday afternoon in late July, a crowd of techies, military types and a few civilians deployed to the new Irvine, Calif., headquarters of Anduril Industries, a defense tech start-up, to sip hibiscus margaritas and admire the sensor towers and carbon-fiber drones on display. Dave Brubeck tinkled over the sound system, and the dress code skewed office casual and pastel, offset by the bright red pop of a lone "Make America Great Again" hat by the taco bar.

After an hour of socializing amid surveillance equipment, Palmer Luckey, the company's 26-year-old near-billionaire founder, mounted a stage for the ribbon-cutting. Luckey had wanted to use the company's namesake sword -- a legendary weapon in "The Lord of the Rings" wielded by the hero Aragorn -- for the ceremony. ...

Armed instead with large scissors, and wearing his trademark uniform of Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts and flip-flops, he dropped some Tolkien on the audience.

"Anduril," he said, leaning into the long Elvish vowels, "means Flame of the West. And I think that's what we're trying to be. We're trying to be a company that represents not just the best technology that Western democracy has to offer, but also the best ethics, the best of democracy, the best of values that we all hold dear."

Along remote stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, and on the perimeters of military bases around the world, Luckey's vision was already becoming reality. Customs and Border Protection is using Anduril's high-tech surveillance network as a "virtual wall" of interlinked, solar-powered sentry towers that can alert agents of suspicious activity, and the company has signed similar deals with U.S. and U.K. military branches. ...

likbez , August 01, 2019 at 09:07 AM
Much depends on the flow via particular area. If the flow is low this is probably a viable technological solution.

Cheaper then the physical wall as spacing between towers can be hundred yards or even more.

Solar powered towers is an interesting feature suitable for this particular area, where sun is abundant during the year.

Drones add flexibility of following intruders "from above" until they are captured, but how efficient they are at night remains to be seen. Again this presupposes a very low flow in the guarded area.

In any case the main task of walls and other entrance barriers is to slow down the flow not to eliminate it completely.

So that those who manage to penetrate the barrier can be dealt with more quickly and efficiently.

[Jul 31, 2019] America's Late-Stage Decadence

This is way too primitive thinking...
Jul 31, 2019 | www.strategic-culture.org

Doug Casey : The PC types say there are supposed to be 30 or 40 or 50 different genders -- it's a fluid number. It shows that wide swathes of the country no longer have a grip on actual physical, scientific reality. That's more than a sign of decline; it's a sign of mass psychosis.

There's no question that some males are wired to act like females and some females are wired to act like males. It's certainly a psychological aberration but probably has some basis in biology.

The problem is when these people politicize their psychological peculiarities, try to turn it into law, and force the rest of the society to grant them specially protected status.

Thousands of people every year go to doctors to have themselves mutilated so that they can become something else. Today they can often get the government or insurers to pay for it.

If you want to self-mutilate, that's fine; that's your business even if it's insane. To make other people pay for it is criminal. But it's now accepted as normal by most of society.

The acceptance of politically correct values -- "diversity," "inclusiveness" -- trigger warnings, safe spaces, gender fluidity, multiculturalism, and a whole suite of similar things that show how degraded society has become. Adversaries of Western civilization like the Mohammedan world and the Chinese justifiably see it as weak, even contemptible.

As with Rome, collapse really comes from internal rot.

Look at who people are voting for. It's not that Americans elected Obama once -- a mob can be swayed easily enough into making a mistake -- but they reelected him. It's not that New Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio once, but they reelected him by a landslide. All of the Democratic candidates out there are saying things that are actually clinically insane and are being applauded.

International Man : In fact, in the recent Democratic debate, candidate Julián Castro even mentioned giving government-funded abortions to transgender women -- biological men. It received one of the loudest bouts of applause from the audience.

That's not to mention that two other candidates spoke in broken Spanish when responding to the moderator's questions.

[Jul 28, 2019] Supreme Court Ruling Will 'Really Accelerate' Border Wall Progress DHS Chief

Jul 28, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

A Supreme Court decision to allow President Trump to redirect $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds towards his long promised border wall will "really accelerate" progress on the project, according to Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan in Sunday appearance on Fox News .

The 5-4 decision will allow for the construction of more than 100 miles of fencing - the most significant step yet, according to Bloomberg .

McAleenan said while the court's ruling was "a big victory" to build more of the wall, " we do remain in the midst of a border security crisis " with migrants flooding the region and that Congress must take more action to deter crossings.

"We made very clear the targeted changes in law that we need," McAleenan said. - Bloomberg

... ... ...

The wall segments in Arizona, New Mexico and California would give Trump a tangible achievement to tout in his re-election campaign. Until now, congressional and court resistance had thwarted significant progress toward a stronger barrier on the almost 2,000-mile frontier.

During his campaign, Trump said Mexico would pay for the wall. On Saturday he said the U.S. would be "fully reimbursed for this expenditure, over time, by other countries." He didn't say how. - Bloomberg

Drop-Hammer , 53 minutes ago link

'Accelerate border wall progress'-- give me a fuckin' break. Trump has had almost three years to secure the border but has done nothing but blame the Demotards and our ***-infested jewdiciary for why he can not perform his sworn constitutional duty as POTUS to protect our borders/citizens. Christ, he must think that he has to have their permission and go on bended knee before them with his begging bowl in hand. Trump is a god-damned waste. He is what he described politicians in his campaign-- All talk and no action.

I voted for the guy and supported him. I will not support him in the next go round. Time to get a fuckin' crazed loon Demotard in office to motivate us to cross the line and start the shootin'. I ain't gonna end up a slave to jews/niggers/beaners/muslims/hindus/illegal alien mudmen just because I am a normal Christian Heritage American white guy. **** that noise. I no longer slumber in The *** Matrix.

chubbar , 2 hours ago link

Trump should award contracts to 10 contractors and immediately disburse the funds so libtards can't stop the building.

100 miles isn't near enough and we've seen areas where replacement walls are being put up at over a mile a day by one contractor. He could get 10 contractors or more building a couple hundred miles a month. Trump needs to build faster!

[Jul 17, 2019] Donald Trump's false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime - The Washington Post

Jul 17, 2019 | www.washingtonpost.com

Donald Trump's false comments connecting Mexican immigrants and crime By Michelle Ye Hee Lee July 8, 2015

"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

–Real estate mogul Donald Trump, presidential announcement speech , June 16, 2015

"I can never apologize for the truth. I don't mind apologizing for things. But I can't apologize for the truth. I said tremendous crime is coming across. Everybody knows that's true. And it's happening all the time. So, why, when I mention, all of a sudden I'm a racist. I'm not a racist. I don't have a racist bone in my body."

–Trump, interview on Fox News' "Media Buzz," July 5, 2015

"What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican Government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc."

–Trump, statement about his June 16 comments, July 6, 2015

Several readers asked us to fact-check Trump's initial comment, which has drawn outrage from Latino groups and led to breakups with his corporate partners distancing themselves from the inflammatory remarks.

This posed a conundrum for The Fact Checker. We had fact checked most of his statements from his news conference announcing his effort to win the GOP presidential nomination, but many of those were in the realm of domestic and international policy. We tend not to wade into fact checking incendiary comments that some might label opinion.

But Trump's statement -- which he repeatedly has defended -- underscores public perceptions that can drive immigration policies. For example, the 2010 murder of a rancher by a suspected smuggler in an Arizona border city fueled public and political pressure on then-Gov. Jan Brewer to sign the controversial anti-immigrant Senate Bill 1070 into law.

What do the data tell us about the criminal threat of immigrants?

The Facts

Data on immigrants and crime are incomplete, but a range of studies show there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, first-generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans. (The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restrictive immigration laws, has a detailed report showing the shortfalls of immigrant crime data.)

Immigration and crime levels have had inverse trajectories since the 1990s: immigration has increased, while crime has decreased. Some experts say the influx of immigrants contributed to the decrease in crime rates, by increasing the denominator while not adding significantly to the numerator.

In his July 6 statement, Trump clarified that he was referring to cases where undocumented immigrants commit violent crimes or smuggle drugs. He pointed to the recent incident in San Francisco , where an undocumented immigrant and a repeat felon who had been deported five times to Mexico was arrested on suspicion of fatally shooting a woman.

Trump's campaign pointed to data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission , which tracks citizenship of offenders in federal prisons by primary offense, which is the offense with the longest maximum sentence when a person is convicted of multiple offenses. Of 78,022 primary offense cases in fiscal year 2013, 38.6 percent were illegal immigrant offenders. The majority of their cases (76 percent) were immigration related. Of total primary offenses, 17.6 percent of drug trafficking offenses and 3.8 percent of sex abuse were illegal immigrants. Of 22,878 drug crime cases, 17.2 percent were illegal immigrants.

But these numbers are not indicative of general crime trends of non-citizens. Federal prisoners made up 10 percent of the total incarcerated population in the United States in 2013. When asked how the data are indicative of the Mexican government sending criminals to the United States, or that there is a crime wave coming across the border, a Trump campaign adviser said: "The data speaks for itself."

The Congressional Research Service found that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants do not fit in the category that fits Trump's description: aggravated felons, whose crimes include murder, drug trafficking or illegal trafficking of firearms.


(Congressional Research Service)

CRS also found that non-citizens make up a smaller percentage of the inmate population in state prisons and jails, compared to their percentage to the total U.S. population.

[Jul 06, 2019] Neoliberal democrats for profit love of minorities

Nov 10, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com

JamesWonnacott , 10 Nov 2016 11:18

"And of course, they answer it by bashing immigrants and people of colour, vilifying Muslims, and degrading women."

Muslims, of course, never degrade women do they?

[Jul 06, 2019] The whole globalised neoliberal paradigm - allied to the metropolitan elite s obsession with identity politics at the expense of bottom-line issues - has been broken up by people who now realise centre-left politicians (Clinton/Obama) have presided over whole communities being gutted in the name of free trade (for free trade read labour arbitrage).

Notable quotes:
"... I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it. I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump. ..."
"... On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign ..."
"... And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself. And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite! ..."
"... Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared to face up to company executives. ..."
"... However, the right wing have very skilfully redirected the anger that SHOULD be directed at what Naomi cleverly calls the "Davos class" onto a very small "immigration" issue that we have in the UK today. ..."
"... It is not going to happen. The holier than thou, supremacist arrogance of the illiberal class, means they can never admit they were wrong. ..."
"... It's all about jobs, really, isn't it? There is a natural fear of 'the other', but if times are good and jobs (proper jobs, not ZHC) are plentiful, it feels less important. On the face of it, it seems odd that the most fear of immigration is in places where there isn't much immigration, but they're often places where there isn't much work either. ..."
"... Rights are important, but identity politics contain too much whimsy and focus on the self. ..."
"... Yes, but they're politically and economically cheap, don't require much thought, and you get to hang out with pop-stars. ..."
Nov 10, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com

dartmouth75, 10 Nov 2016 10:26

That ship has sailed. Bernie was the opportunity and it wasn't grasped. The moment for a 'left' alternative has been lost for a long time. The whole globalised liberal paradigm - allied to the metropolitan elite's obsession with identity politics at the expense of bottom-line issues - has been broken up by people who now realise centre-left politicians (Clinton/Obama) have presided over whole communities being gutted in the name of 'free' trade (for 'free' trade read labour arbitrage). I felt it in my bones that Trump would be elected - 55% of US households are worse off than they were in 2000, how on earth could anyone possibly think that that would result or a vote for the status quo.

KelvinYearwood , 10 Nov 2016 10:30

Well said Naomi.

I am an angry white male, and I am not a misogynist, as this paper would have it. I am fully aware of the appalling nature of Donald Trump.

On the other hand, I fully understand the bureaucratic nature of the Democrat Party, the embedded interests of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex in that bureaucracy, the dirty tricks that that bureaucratic machinery got up to in order to extinguish Bernie Sander's campaign.

I am aware of how that machinery has been ramping up a situation of global conflict, shamelessly recreating an aggressive Cold war Mk II situation with Russia and China, which is simply cover for the US racist colonial assumption that the world and its resources belongs to it in its sense of itself as an exceptional entity fulfilling its manifest destiny upon a global stage that belongs to its exceptional, wealthy and powerful elites.

And I am aware of how Hillary was so keen to service this reality and American image of itself. And to go beyond that, and bomb Libya for 6 months, killing thousands of civilians (Middle eastern unpeople) and, may I suggest, doing nothing whatsoever for the women of Libya. Quite the opposite!

Michael Moore, in a talk in which he predicted the victory of Trump before the election, notes how Trump went into an American car factory and told the executives of that company that if they relocated to Mexico, he would put a huge tax on their cars coming into America. Not all was misogyny in the vote for Trump. Whether he delivers on his threat or not, unlike the democrat bureaucratic machinery, he showed he was actually listening to working class Americans and that he was ;prepared to face up to company executives.

What has this paper got to say about Hillary and the Democrat Party's class bigotry – its demonstrable contempt for 10s of millions of Americans whose lives are worse now than in 1973, while productivity and wealth overall has skyrocketed over those 43 years.

What has this paper got to say about the lives of African American women, which have been devastated by Republican/Democrat bipartisan policy over the last 43 years?

What has Hadley Freeman got to say about Hillary's comment that President Mubarek of Egypt was "one of the family? A president whose security forces used physical and sexualised abuse of female demonstrators in the Arab Spring?

A feminist would need more than a peg on their nose to vote for Hillary – a feminist would need all the scented oils of Arabia. Perhaps Wahhabi funded Hillary can buy them up.

rebuydonkey , 10 Nov 2016 10:31

Great article. I think there needs to be a lot of soul searching in certain sections of the media and amongst the left wing political parties too. They don't have the correct approach to a rapidly changing ground swell of opinion. They are fast becoming out of touch - leaving a huge void for more conservative rhetoric (euphemism) to take over.

The failure to tackle immigration concerns across the west is the greatest example of comfy left wing elites being so far away from general consensus imo. The assumption that if you are concerned about immigration then you are a racist, xenophobic half wit appears rife amongst elites and the highly educated.

brianpreece -> rebuydonkey

I agree that this is a great article. And I agree that there is a coming migration crisis that we need to be very worried about, as the refugees from the Middle East try desperately for a better life away from conflict zones and poverty. However, the right wing have very skilfully redirected the anger that SHOULD be directed at what Naomi cleverly calls the "Davos class" onto a very small "immigration" issue that we have in the UK today.

The evidence for this is that in the EU referendum, the areas that were most strongly Leave were generally speaking those with few or no immigrants. I campaigned for Remain here in Stockport where there are very few immigrants and I also campaign regularly against privatisation in the NHS and over and over again, I am told that immigrants are the problem in an area which has virtually none. I don't think that people are concerned about immigration are half wits, but I think they've been manipulated.

"Fear the stranger" is an evolutionary response buried deep in our brains that we need to control with rationality and it's such an easy button for the right wing to push. I grew up in Northern Ireland so I saw this at first hand. My grandfather was a highly intelligent technocrat, but he was also an Orangeman. He did not seem able to understand that the Catholics he knew and were his friends were the same "them" that he demonised. All progressive people need now to find a way, as Naomi's article says, to repoint this anger to where it belongs. Sorry if this makes me a comfy left wing elite!

TeTsuo36 -> rebuydonkey

It is not going to happen. The holier than thou, supremacist arrogance of the illiberal class, means they can never admit they were wrong. Look at the past year here ATL and then BTL. Witness the absolute, unchanging and frankly extreme editorial line, in the face of massive discourse and well argued opposition BTL. Even now there are no alarm bells ringing in the back of their minds, they are right and everyone else is wrong. No attempt to understand, such is their unwavering belief in the echo chamber. You will only find an attempted programme of re-education in these pages. They will be still be doing it as Europe falls into the hands of the far-right.

zephirine -> brianpreece

I campaigned for Remain here in Stockport where there are very few immigrants and I also campaign regularly against privatisation in the NHS and over and over again, I am told that immigrants are the problem in an area which has virtually none. I don't think that people are concerned about immigration are half wits, but I think they've been manipulated. "Fear the stranger" is an evolutionary response buried deep in our brains that we need to control with rationality and it's such an easy button for the right wing to push.

It's all about jobs, really, isn't it? There is a natural fear of 'the other', but if times are good and jobs (proper jobs, not ZHC) are plentiful, it feels less important. On the face of it, it seems odd that the most fear of immigration is in places where there isn't much immigration, but they're often places where there isn't much work either.
ID3924525 , 10 Nov 2016 10:33

Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously. They have lost jobs. They have lost pensions. They have lost much of the safety net that used to make these losses less frightening. They see a future for their kids even worse than their precarious present.

Yes. But, in the meantime, the system has become so right-wing that it only permits a right-wing outburst - a Social-Democratic one is instantly discredited by the totalitarian media outlets.

There is no way to articulate an effective response to this attack within the system.

OhReallyFFS , 10 Nov 2016 10:34

As usual Klein seems to make more sense than anyone else.

This paper needs to decide where it's going to stand politically for the next few years.

Rights are important, but identity politics contain too much whimsy and focus on the self.

tomandlu -> OhReallyFFS 2 3

Yes, but they're politically and economically cheap, don't require much thought, and you get to hang out with pop-stars.

SaintTimothy , 10 Nov 2016 11:01

This article is spot on except that both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren jumped on the Clinton neoliberal train for reasons of political expediency. From now on, anything either of them say should be critically examined before being supported.

[Jul 06, 2019] In order to justify the unjustifiable (a corporate elite exploiting the world as their own private estate), they constructed an artificial equivalence to make it seem that their self-interested economic system was part and parcel of a package of 'democracy', 'multi-racial tolerance', 'LGBT tolerance' etc

Nov 10, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com

PaulDLion , 10 Nov 2016 11:43

In order to justify the unjustifiable (a corporate elite exploiting the world as their own private estate), they constructed an artificial equivalence to make it seem that their self-interested economic system was part and parcel of a package of 'democracy', 'multi-racial tolerance', 'LGBT tolerance' etc, so that people would be fooled into thinking that rejecting the economics meant rejecting all the other things too.

George Soros' "Open Society Foundation'" is a key offender here. The false consciousness thus engendered does indeed set the scene for fascism, but a genuine left opposition can and needs to be built and we can only hope that we can succeed in so doing.

[Jul 06, 2019] There is a fundamental difficulty here which progressives have not fully faced. It is that more open trade and welcoming immigration policies are, on the one hand, a progressive and moral good (we should feel solidarity with people from the global south; it feels wrong to bar them from our countries and stop them from benefiting from our economies)

Notable quotes:
"... On the other hand, more open immigration policies will mean more workers, which will of course take jobs away, especially from the poorest in our own societies. Similarly, more open trade will more jobs in poorer countries and fewer jobs here, again taking jobs, especially from the poorest in our societies. this is morally wrong: we should feel solidarity with our own poor. ..."
"... Further, more open immigration policies are what capitalism 'wants': more workers will necessarily drive wages down, and so produce greater profits for corporations and the rich, and therefore greater inequality in our society overall. ..."
Nov 10, 2016 | discussion.theguardian.com

HuckleAndLowly, 10 Nov 2016 10:03

There is a fundamental difficulty here which progressives have not fully faced. It is that more open trade and welcoming immigration policies are, on the one hand, a progressive and moral good (we should feel solidarity with people from the global south; it feels wrong to bar them from our countries and stop them from benefiting from our economies).

On the other hand, more open immigration policies will mean more workers, which will of course take jobs away, especially from the poorest in our own societies. Similarly, more open trade will more jobs in poorer countries and fewer jobs here, again taking jobs, especially from the poorest in our societies. this is morally wrong: we should feel solidarity with our own poor.

Further, more open immigration policies are what capitalism 'wants': more workers will necessarily drive wages down, and so produce greater profits for corporations and the rich, and therefore greater inequality in our society overall. Comfortably well-off liberals can appear and feel progressive by supporting more open immigration, while in fact this support aligns with capitalist policies that benefit them and exploit those who are worse off.

We need a progressive movement that can resolve this and square the circle.

ydobon -> HuckleAndLowly

Well said. ,

Well said.

olivercotts -> HuckleAndLowly

'We need a progressive movement that can resolve this and square the circle'.

A good point, but any idea how to progress?

HuckleAndLowly -> olivercotts

Honestly, no, beyond stressing the fact that more open and welcoming immigration policies are not unalloyed morally good things: they lead to lower wages for the poor and middle class, and lead to greater inequality, since lower wages translate into greater profits for corporations and their owners.

Perhaps if a progressive argument towards tempering and controlling immigration can be made, based on the fact that open immigration leads to greater inequality and in the end benefits the 1% the most, then we can get some sort of progress.

[Jul 04, 2019] Nearly half of global wages received by top 10%, survey finds: ILO says bottom half of all workers paid just 6% of total pay with wage inequality rising in developed world

Jul 04, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

Data is from 2004 to 2017.

Excerpt (first three paragraphs):

Nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by just 10% of workers, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), while the lowest-paid 50% receive just 6.4%.

The lowest 20% – around 650 million workers – get less than 1% of total pay, a figure that has barely moved in 13 years, the ILO analysis found. It used labour income figures from 2004 to 2017, the latest available data.

A worker in the top 10% receives $7,445 a month (£5,866), while a worker in the bottom 10% gets just $22.

Posted by: vk | Jul 4 2019 17:14 utc | 14

jayc @10

As a Can-knucklehead I am sad to say I agree 100%. In 2005, Kurt Vonnegut quoted Susan Sontag: "10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction."

Posted by: spudski | Jul 4 2019 17:19 utc | 15

[Jul 02, 2019] Yep! The neolibs hate poor people and have superiority complex

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good. ..."
"... Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable. ..."
"... At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes. ..."
"... The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords" have a harder time kicking them around. ..."
Apr 10, 2018 | www.theguardian.com

Originally from: Seven signs of the neoliberal apocalypse - Van Badham - Opinion - The Guardian

slorter, 27 Apr 2018 01:37

Both neoliberal-driven governments and authoritarian societies share one important factor: They care more about consolidating power in the hands of the political, corporate and financial elite than they do about investing in the future of young people and expanding the benefits of the social contract and common good.

Michael Yates (economist) points out throughout his book 'The Great Inequality', capitalism is devoid of any sense of social responsibility and is driven by an unchecked desire to accumulate capital at all costs. As power becomes global and politics remains local, ruling elites no longer make political concessions to workers or any other group that they either exploit or consider disposable.

At bottom, neoliberals believe in a social hierarchy of "haves" and "have nots". They have taken this corrosive social vision and dressed it up with a "respectable" sounding ideology which all boils down to the cheap labor they depend on to make their fortunes.

The ugly truth is that cheap-labour conservatives just don't like working people. They don't like "bottom up" prosperity, and the reason for it is very simple. "Corporate lords" have a harder time kicking them around.

Once you understand this about the cheap-labor conservatives, the real motivation for their policies makes perfect sense. Remember, cheap-labour conservatives believe in social hierarchy and privilege, so the only prosperity they want is limited to them. They want to see absolutely nothing that benefits those who work for an hourly wage.

You also need to remember that voting the coalition out, which you need to do, will not necessarily give you a neoliberal free zone; Labor needs to shed some the dogma as well.

bryonyed -> slorter , 27 Apr 2018 01:41

Yep! The neolib scum hate poor people and have complexes of deservedness.

[Jul 01, 2019] Kamala Harris as Hillary No.2 Her level of neocon warmongering in foreign policy probably will hurt her chances, but will bring a lot of donor money

Notable quotes:
"... Kamala Harris is multi-cultural, East Indian and Jamaican, globalist educated in the USA and Canada. To be elected and earn rewards she identifies herself as an African-American. ..."
Jul 01, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jun 30, 2019 6:16:41 PM | 51

Kamala Harris's Hillaryesque tweet re Trump meeting Kim at DMZ:

"This President should take the North Korean nuclear threat and its crimes against humanity seriously. This is not a photo-op. Our security and our values are at stake."

Comments on the thread are telling, and she's not fooling anyone.

VietnamVet , Jun 30, 2019 8:11:02 PM | 76

Thank goodness that there is one place where Globalism, Boeing, and Kamala Harris can be discussed. From the bottom, looking up, they are intertwined. Corporate media strictly ignores the restoration of the robber baron aristocracy, the supremacy of trade treaties, the endless wars for profit, the free flow of capital, and corrupted governments. The sole purpose is to make the rich richer at the expense of everyone else.

There are many tell-tale signs that this is an apt description of the world. With deregulation and outsourcing, there is no incentive to design and build safe airplanes. That costs money. Two 737 Max(s) crash killing 346. Workplaces are toxic. The life expectancy in the UK and USA is declining. The US dollar is used as a military weapon. Monopolies buy up innovation. Corporate law breaking is punished by fines which are added to the cost of doing business. There is no jail time for chief executives. The cost of storm damage is increasing. Families are migrating to survive. Nationalist and globalist oligarchs are fighting over the spoils. Last week the global economy was 10 minutes away from collapse by an American air attack on Iran.

Kamala Harris is multi-cultural, East Indian and Jamaican, globalist educated in the USA and Canada. To be elected and earn rewards she identifies herself as an African-American. Neo-Populism and France's Yellow Vests are the direct response to global capitalism that is supported by Corporate Democrats, New Labour Party, and Emmanuel Macron. The rise of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in response is no coincidence.

uncle tungsten , Jul 1 2019 8:07 utc | 121
snake #97

Why burden b when you can read this by Caitlin Johnston: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/kamala-harris-is-everything-the-establishment-wants-in-a-politician/

especially read this by Helen Hanna in the comments section:

kamala looked aside while wells fargo bank established 3 million fraudulent accounts while she was attorney general of california. she did nothing to punish them. she might as well be wearing a hillary mask. as someone who lived in the bay area for 31 years, i remember her on the 'matier and ross' interview program--her performance was juvenile and silly--- and i remember her being willing to join the parade of willie brown's cocaine addicted mistresses,. as number 21 and as a woman of color, she was a relief---not white, not skanky, no silver cocaine spoon around her neck while pretending to eat dinner at chez michel with willie, but why on earth would you want to join this parade and go out with this sleazy man whose kiton suits do not improve his image one bit, a politician who offended the san francisco public by his obnoxious habit of publicly flaunting his many skanky female hangers on, and reveling in their 'whiteness.' what a bad choice kamala made. remember that pelosi and feinstein wouldn't let willie brown anywhere near the inauguration podium of barack obama because these women did not want willie's offensive background to sully obama. willie had had an illegitimate child while 'serving as' mayor of san francisco, a city of 500 churches, mostly catholic. the catholic church continued to retain him in the role --'of counsel.' that was astounding to me, absolutely astounding.... willie also laundered drug money in a sutter street garage with his haberdasher, wilkes bashford, but dianne feinstein prevented him from being jailed. i can just see the sisterhood at temple emanuel where dianne feinstein worships--i can just see them admonishing her for even suggesting one of serial adulterer willie's former mistresses be the first woman president....is that why senator feinstein is keeping such a low profile lately? what i don't understand is why pelosi and feinstein keep bringing us these puppet-like women----hillary will always be bill's puppet and kamala will be willie's puppet. you cannot possibly choose two more sleazy, obnoxious men to be your superior.

[Jun 29, 2019] The working class of the most developed economies with higher wages continues to lose jobs as the multinational corporations offshore industrial production

Notable quotes:
"... This process will not be stopped nor reversed by the "great men" Putin, Trump nor the "benevolent society" China. Economic "nationalism" will likewise not resolve globalisation. These are myths. People organising and fighting back politically are still the only tools at our disposal. Globalisation makes the fight more difficult but doesn't eradicate the need for the class struggle. ..."
"... And this is not to say Putin isn't a historically "great" man nor that China is not a "benevolent" society. Clearly, in relation to decadent western models they are. But this is to say these categorisations are beside the point of battling global capitalist development. This only tends to obscure the need to fight back. ..."
Jun 29, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

donkeytale , Jun 29, 2019 10:29:45 AM | 137

[From Putin interview]

What happened in the US, and how did it happen? In the US, the leading US companies -- the companies, their managers, shareholders and partners -- made use of these benefits. [..] The middle class in the US has not benefited from globalisation; it was left out when this pie was divided up.

The Trump team sensed this very keenly and clearly, and they used this in the election campaign. It is where you should look for reasons behind Trump's victory, rather than in any alleged foreign interference.

Trump did indeed "use" this discontent to get elected. However, what has he, and Putin for that matter, delivered in the way of results to the "middle" class and what will their open pursuit of authoritarian fascism deliver in the future for the "middle" class?

The future course of globalisation is obvious. The past is prologue. The working (or middle) classes of the most developed economies with higher wage bases (US, EU) lose jobs and income as the multinational corporations offshore industrial production to lesser developed economies with lower wage bases (China, Asia "Tigers").

As China and the "Tigers" ascended the higher stages the same process occurs, offshoring to lesser developed economies (Vietnam, Sri Lanka).

Imperialism 101.

This is a historical process which evolves. It also lends itself to the destruction of the global environment which itself is hardly soemthing to cheer.

This process will not be stopped nor reversed by the "great men" Putin, Trump nor the "benevolent society" China. Economic "nationalism" will likewise not resolve globalisation. These are myths. People organising and fighting back politically are still the only tools at our disposal. Globalisation makes the fight more difficult but doesn't eradicate the need for the class struggle.

And this is not to say Putin isn't a historically "great" man nor that China is not a "benevolent" society. Clearly, in relation to decadent western models they are. But this is to say these categorisations are beside the point of battling global capitalist development. This only tends to obscure the need to fight back.

Reverence at MoA for Putin's baldly political rhetoric, which is neither particularly interesting nor original (neither the rhetoric or the reverence). Neither Putin, Trump or Xi lift a finger to challenge the globalist status quo. They are themselves charter members of the club.

This is all a political con game meant to anesthesize those who should know better and who should rise up in opposition or at least exhort the younger generations to rise up and challenge the oppressive systems.

Alas, the drugs seem to be working all to well....

[Jun 28, 2019] Identity politics remains the central element of the Democratic Party with Harris as flagbearer

Jun 28, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Originally from: We’ve Seen the Debates–And What Could Be Our Future The American Conservative

... ... ...

Those emotions erupted in the Thursday debate when Kamala Harris took on Biden for his earlier remarks about the old days of the Senate when he could work collaboratively with Southern segregationists such as Alabama's James Eastland. Harris said it was "very hurtful" to hear Biden "talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputation and career on the segregation of race in this country." She scored Biden also for working with such senators in opposition to busing for racial balance in schools during the 1970s.

"Do you agree today, do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?" she asked with considerable emotion in her voice. She added it was a personal matter with her given that she had benefited from busing policies as a young girl.

Biden retorted: "A mischaracterization of my position across the board. I did not praise racists." He added that he never opposed busing as a local policy arrived at through local politics, but didn't think it should be imposed by the federal government. "That's what I opposed," he said.

The exchange accentuated the extent to which racial issues are gaining intensity in America and roiling the nation's politics to a greater extent than in the recent past. Biden's point, as he sought to explain, was that there was a day when senators of all stripes could work together on matters of common concern even when they disliked and opposed each other's fundamental political outlook. That kind of approach could point the way, he implied, to a greater cooperative spirit in Washington and to breaking the current political deadlock suffused with such stark animosities. But that merely stirred further animosities, raising questions about whether today's political rancor in Washington can be easily or soon ameliorated.

[Jun 26, 2019] The Individual Costs of Occupational Decline

Jun 26, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. You have to read a bit into this article on occupational decline, aka, "What happens to me after the robots take my job?" to realize that the authors studied Swedish workers. One has to think that the findings would be more pronounced in the US, due both to pronounced regional and urban/rural variations, as well as the weakness of social institutions in the US. While there may be small cities in Sweden that have been hit hard by the decline of a key employer, I don't have the impression that Sweden has areas that have suffered the way our Rust Belt has. Similarly, in the US, a significant amount of hiring starts with resume reviews with the job requirements overspecified because the employer intends to hire someone who has done the same job somewhere else and hence needs no training (which in practice is an illusion; how companies do things is always idiosyncratic and new hires face a learning curve). On top of that, many positions are filled via personal networks, not formal recruiting. Some studies have concluded that having a large network of weak ties is more helpful in landing a new post than fewer close connections. It's easier to know a lot of people casually in a society with strong community institutions.

The article does not provide much in the way of remedies; it hints at "let them eat training" when programs have proven to be ineffective. One approach would be aggressive enforcement of laws against age discrimination. And even though some readers dislike a Job Guarantee, not only would it enable people who wanted to work to keep working, but private sector employers are particularly loath to employ someone who has been out of work for more than six months, so a Job Guarantee post would also help keep someone who'd lost a job from looking like damaged goods.

By Per-Anders Edin, Professor of Industrial Relations, Uppsala University; Tiernan Evans, Economics MRes/PhD Candidate, LSE; Georg Graetz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Uppsala University; Sofia Hernnäs, PhD student, Department of Economics, Uppsala University; Guy Michaels,Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, LSE. Originally published at VoxEU

As new technologies replace human labour in a growing number of tasks, employment in some occupations invariably falls. This column compares outcomes for similar workers in similar occupations over 28 years to explore the consequences of large declines in occupational employment for workers' careers. While mean losses in earnings and employment for those initially working in occupations that later declined are relatively moderate, low-earners lose significantly more.

How costly is it for workers when demand for their occupation declines? As new technologies replace human labour in a growing number of tasks, employment in some occupations invariably falls. Until recently, technological change mostly automated routine production and clerical work (Autor et al. 2003). But machines' capabilities are expanding, as recent developments include self-driving vehicles and software that outperforms professionals in some tasks. Debates on the labour market implications of these new technologies are ongoing (e.g. Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, Acemoglu and Restrepo 2018). But in these debates, it is important to ask not only "Will robots take my job?", but also "What would happen to my career if robots took my job?"

Much is at stake. Occupational decline may hurt workers and their families, and may also have broader consequences for economic inequality, education, taxation, and redistribution. If it exacerbates differences in outcomes between economic winners and losers, populist forces may gain further momentum (Dal Bo et al. 2019).

In a new paper (Edin et al. 2019) we explore the consequences of large declines in occupational employment for workers' careers. We assemble a dataset with forecasts of occupational employment changes that allow us to identify unanticipated declines, population-level administrative data spanning several decades, and a highly detailed occupational classification. These data allow us to compare outcomes for similar workers who perform similar tasks and have similar expectations of future occupational employment trajectories, but experience different actual occupational changes.

Our approach is distinct from previous work that contrasts career outcomes of routine and non-routine workers (e.g. Cortes 2016), since we compare workers who perform similar tasks and whose careers would likely have followed similar paths were it not for occupational decline. Our work is also distinct from studies of mass layoffs (e.g. Jacobson et al. 1993), since workers who experience occupational decline may take action before losing their jobs.

In our analysis, we follow individual workers' careers for almost 30 years, and we find that workers in declining occupations lose on average 2-5% of cumulative earnings, compared to other similar workers. Workers with low initial earnings (relative to others in their occupations) lose more – about 8-11% of mean cumulative earnings. These earnings losses reflect both lost years of employment and lower earnings conditional on employment; some of the employment losses are due to increased time spent in unemployment and retraining, and low earners spend more time in both unemployment and retraining.

Estimating the Consequences of Occupational Decline

We begin by assembling data from the Occupational Outlook Handbooks (OOH), published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which cover more than 400 occupations. In our main analysis we define occupations as declining if their employment fell by at least 25% from 1984-2016, although we show that our results are robust to using other cutoffs. The OOH also provides information on technological change affecting each occupation, and forecasts of employment over time. Using these data, we can separate technologically driven declines, and also unanticipated declines. Occupations that declined include typesetters, drafters, proof readers, and various machine operators.

We then match the OOH data to detailed Swedish occupations. This allows us to study the consequences of occupational decline for workers who, in 1985, worked in occupations that declined over the subsequent decades. We verify that occupations that declined in the US also declined in Sweden, and that the employment forecasts that the BLS made for the US have predictive power for employment changes in Sweden.

Detailed administrative micro-data, which cover all Swedish workers, allow us to address two potential concerns for identifying the consequences of occupational decline: that workers in declining occupations may have differed from other workers, and that declining occupations may have differed even in absence of occupational decline. To address the first concern, about individual sorting, we control for gender, age, education, and location, as well as 1985 earnings. Once we control for these characteristics, we find that workers in declining occupations were no different from others in terms of their cognitive and non-cognitive test scores and their parents' schooling and earnings. To address the second concern, about occupational differences, we control for occupational earnings profiles (calculated using the 1985 data), the BLS forecasts, and other occupational and industry characteristics.

Assessing the losses and how their incidence varied

We find that prime age workers (those aged 25-36 in 1985) who were exposed to occupational decline lost about 2-6 months of employment over 28 years, compared to similar workers whose occupations did not decline. The higher end of the range refers to our comparison between similar workers, while the lower end of the range compares similar workers in similar occupations. The employment loss corresponds to around 1-2% of mean cumulative employment. The corresponding earnings losses were larger, and amounted to around 2-5% of mean cumulative earnings. These mean losses may seem moderate given the large occupational declines, but the average outcomes do not tell the full story. The bottom third of earners in each occupation fared worse, losing around 8-11% of mean earnings when their occupations declined.

The earnings and employment losses that we document reflect increased time spent in unemployment and government-sponsored retraining – more so for workers with low initial earnings. We also find that older workers who faced occupational decline retired a little earlier.

We also find that workers in occupations that declined after 1985 were less likely to remain in their starting occupation. It is quite likely that this reduced supply to declining occupations contributed to mitigating the losses of the workers that remained there.

We show that our main findings are essentially unchanged when we restrict our analysis to technology-related occupational declines.

Further, our finding that mean earnings and employment losses from occupational decline are small is not unique to Sweden. We find similar results using a smaller panel dataset on US workers, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979.

Theoretical implications

Our paper also considers the implications of our findings for Roy's (1951) model, which is a workhorse model for labour economists. We show that the frictionless Roy model predicts that losses are increasing in initial occupational earnings rank, under a wide variety of assumptions about the skill distribution. This prediction is inconsistent with our finding that the largest earnings losses from occupational decline are incurred by those who earned the least. To reconcile our findings, we add frictions to the model: we assume that workers who earn little in one occupation incur larger time costs searching for jobs or retraining if they try to move occupations. This extension of the model, especially when coupled with the addition of involuntary job displacement, allows us to reconcile several of our empirical findings.

Conclusions

There is a vivid academic and public debate on whether we should fear the takeover of human jobs by machines. New technologies may replace not only factory and office workers but also drivers and some professional occupations. Our paper compares similar workers in similar occupations over 28 years. We show that although mean losses in earnings and employment for those initially working in occupations that later declined are relatively moderate (2-5% of earnings and 1-2% of employment), low-earners lose significantly more.

The losses that we find from occupational decline are smaller than those suffered by workers who experience mass layoffs, as reported in the existing literature. Because the occupational decline we study took years or even decades, its costs for individual workers were likely mitigated through retirements, reduced entry into declining occupations, and increased job-to-job exits to other occupations. Compared to large, sudden shocks, such as plant closures, the decline we study may also have a less pronounced impact on local economies.

While the losses we find are on average moderate, there are several reasons why future occupational decline may have adverse impacts. First, while we study unanticipated declines, the declines were nevertheless fairly gradual. Costs may be larger for sudden shocks following, for example, a quick evolution of machine learning. Second, the occupational decline that we study mainly affected low- and middle-skilled occupations, which require less human capital investment than those that may be impacted in the future. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our findings show that low-earning individuals are already suffering considerable (pre-tax) earnings losses, even in Sweden, where institutions are geared towards mitigating those losses and facilitating occupational transitions. Helping these workers stay productive when they face occupational decline remains an important challenge for governments.

Please see original post for references

[Jun 24, 2019] America To Weimar Germany Hold My Beer

Notable quotes:
"... a cosmetic surgeon in Baltimore is purportedly offering to lop off women's breasts -- including the breasts of teenage girls -- at a discount, to celebrate Pride month: ..."
"... Discount breast-lopping to celebrate a holiday -- is that not the most American thing ever? And you used to think two-for-one radial tire sales for Washington's Birthday were trashy! Can't you just feel the pride? ..."
"... A "pride month" sale on plastic surgery to mutilate children's breasts is the most "snapshot of America in 2019" story imaginable. ..."
Jun 24, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Our deranged media continue their propaganda offensive. Here is a Houston TV station celebrating the sexualization of a little boy, whose parents ought to be ashamed of themselves. We have completely lost our moral minds.

This is true:

I long thought the sexualization of little girls in beauty pageants had become gross, and until recently there seemed to be a growing consensus about that. Now the sexualization of little boys dressed as girls is a cause of great celebration. Count me out. https://t.co/j7nVQkRJEX

-- Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) June 22, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Meanwhile, a cosmetic surgeon in Baltimore is purportedly offering to lop off women's breasts -- including the breasts of teenage girls -- at a discount, to celebrate Pride month:

1. Latest leak from our source in the affirming parents Facebook group: Dr. Beverly Fischer in Baltimore, MD is offering a $750 discount on double mastectomies if booked during Pride month, according to this mother. pic.twitter.com/Od9w0TFXPp

-- 4thWaveNow (@4th_WaveNow) June 22, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

No kidding -- the surgeon tweeted this out herself:

June is PRIDE MONTH! Celebrate with a $750 discount on our Top Surgery procedure! #plasticsurgery #cosmeticsurgery #genderaffirmation #gendertransition #FTM #DrBevsBoys pic.twitter.com/6tuPy8tl1v

-- Dr. Beverly Fischer (@BeverlyAFischer) June 7, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Discount breast-lopping to celebrate a holiday -- is that not the most American thing ever? And you used to think two-for-one radial tire sales for Washington's Birthday were trashy! Can't you just feel the pride?

We are a sick civilization that deserves to be punished.

Nate J 19 hours ago

A "pride month" sale on plastic surgery to mutilate children's breasts is the most "snapshot of America in 2019" story imaginable. Welcome to the brave new world, where the neoliberal obsession with consumerism (and the reduction of all human experience to markets) meets prog-left social chaos. What an unholy union.

[Jun 23, 2019] As a matter of semantics, neo-liberalism delivered on the promise of freedom...for capitalists

Apr 10, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

marshwren , 10 Apr 2019 22:29

As a matter of semantics, neo-liberalism delivered on the promise of freedom...for capitalists to be free of ethical accountability, social responsibility, and government regulation and taxes...

[Jun 23, 2019] Two things characterize neo-liberalism. Deception and repression of labor.

Apr 11, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

mi Griffin , 11 Apr 2019 01:15

2 simple points that epitomize neo liberalism.

1. Hayek's book 'The Road to Serfdom' uses an erroneous metaphor. He argues that if we allow gov regulation, services and spending to continue then we will end up serfs. However, serfs are basically the indentured or slave labourers of private citizens and landowners not of the state. Only in a system of private capital can there be serfs. Neo liberalism creates serfs not a public system.

2. According to Hayek all regulation on business should be eliminated and only labour should be regulated to make it cheap and contain it so that private investors can have their returns guaranteed. Hence the purpose of the state is to pass laws to suppress workers.

These two things illustrate neo-liberalism. Deception and repression of labour.

[Jun 22, 2019] CNN Helen Thomas 'Jews don't have the right to take other people's land' - YouTube

Jun 22, 2019 | www.youtube.com
grantgalea , 7 years ago

I agree with you toria555 ,they have no right to persecute the Palestinians and another thing Jews are NOT the ONLY Semites. Helen Thomas is correct !

Todd Randall , 7 years ago

She's not an "antisemite" because she's a semite. Damn straight!

theTRUTHprincess , 7 years ago

helen = ultimate truth princess! may love surround her and all the others who take a stand in speaking up the truth

Scherzo7 , 7 years ago div clas

s="comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> I'm part Jewish, but consider myself Russian above everything else, as Russia is my home country. I don't entirely agree with this lady, but on some issues she's spot on. Twenty million Russian civilians were exterminated by Germans and millions of Chinese died at the hands of the Japanese, but how come we only hear about 6 million Jews all the time almost 70 years after the war? It's only evoked to victimize Israel, not to benefit Holocaust survivors in any way.

Fihelvete , 7 years ago

im german and i tell you STOP MILKING OUR MISTAKES!

eassaspades , 7 years ago

You're so brainwashed. The Zionist jews of Israel are treating the Palestinians like the jews were treated in Germany just before the holocaust. That's why you see the REAL jews protesting against their Israeli government and the occupation of Palestine

1980redkremlin , 7 years ago div tabindex="0" role="articl

Helen Thomas is old but that shouldn't mean the less intelligent interviewer should talk down to her. Thomas is right Israeli people should go back to Poland or Germany, they were pushed out of there unfairly sixty years ago. I think that she was misinterpreted because she should've added that second part. Likewise now Israel are doing the same thing to Palestine. I find it hard to sympathize with journalists and writers especially nowadays but Helen Thomas was wrongly interpreted in my view.

deeplake33 , 7 years ago

She spoke the truth & they didn't like it. What they would like to hear is continuous lies, then u get a pat on the back. Start talkin the truth & bam they're all over you. She exercised her freedom of speech & they shut her down.

999newaccount , 7 years ago div class="comm

ent-renderer-text-content expanded"> It's amazing how unable to process logic that stupid host woman is. Everything Helen Thomas said is obvious truth, but she acts as if she is hearing another language. "Oh but the Jews are sensitive because of WW2!" is literally her only response, as if that is justification for anything that's happened in the past 50 years. Why does this view persist in America? Are they all so afraid of offending Jewish people? They sure don't care about offending anybody else.

pfcfatmax2010 , 7 years ago div class="comm

ent-renderer-text-content expanded"> She is talking about the Zionist Jews. The is those Jews who own these networks trying to discredit a wonderful old woman for stating the truth. Israel is Zionism and its disgusting that the world turns their eye to the atrocities happening to the Palestinians.

My heart goes out to them. I pray that one day the world will open their eyes. I pray that I am alive to see it come to pass. Zionism is going to lead to WWIII and it so many are blind to that fact

Llyn Kidner-Williams , 7 years ago

Helen is my Heroine but she is talking to an idiot who does not know her own history.

asrafoo , 7 years ago div class="

comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> lol america is the exact place indians got almost wiped out and black got enslaved. should you give them a land some where? hell no !! please wtf and know what? they come back to germany with israeli pasports and gert german one too and every year they flood the streets with israeli flags no one attacks them! they could have stayed lol but now we might wonder what the fuck they really want!

Oscar Sun , 7 years ago

This lady has bigger balls than most American and European males combined.

britturk123 , 7 years ago

She may be old but she is not there for the taking. Although i disagree with the way helen spoke because israel exists and that is that, i think she is fighting against current injustices that are happening in palestein. Some people hate injustice and helen is not one to turn her back on what she believes in so kudos to her.

herdpoisoning , 7 years ago div tabindex="0" role="artic

le"> It is a sin against the Torah to support the "State of Israel" in any way. Thus, no Jews support Israel, only Zionists. Many Jews who lived in Palestine prior to the Zionist reign of terror (Irgun, Stern Gang) that drove the Palestinians (including those Jews who lived there peacefully, often communally with their Muslim and Christian neighbors) off the land ended up in New York, and are known now as the Neturei Karta. Google them and learn why Rabbis burn the Israeli flag for Purim.

Shery Awan , 7 years ago

@SaarVardi Let me show you the difference..... they [ the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger 'shoah' [a Hebrew word for catastrophe and a synonym for the Nazi Holocaust] because we will use all our might to defend ourselves." Israel's deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai told Army Radio on Friday, February 29, 2008

Yvonne Romano , 7 years ago

The shill reporter starts by saying....."well you have to PAY the price for FREE speech. "

John Verber , 7 years ago

v> @SaarVardi But using the "Holocaust" as a means and way to take land from someone else is wrong. The crap the Israeli army does to kids over there is wrong. Kids throw rocks at "TANKS" and the Israeli army breaks their arms. It's crazy. I'm a Native American the estimates are that we lost up to 20 million native Americans when the "white dudes" took over America...you don't see me crying about it. It sucks but just get over it and stop using it as a reason to do whatever you want.

John Verber , 7 years ago

v> @SaarVardi Jews yes have been living in the Palestine area forever. But they were a very small percentage of the population. After World War II, the "Big Three" sent all the Jewish refugee's and the one's calling for a Homeland to what is now Israel. Palestinians have whipped out actual land deeds, not archeological evidence. As you say the Jews were there before....yes again as a small percentage of the people within the area.

Caliq Summo , 7 years ago

v> @SaarVardi Mexico is not called Spain,and there live Mexicans (many from Indians), Most of South America people are Indians (Bolivia, Colombia...). U.S. is an other story: most of the space was empty but yes, there was an extermination (is that ok for you?) we are not in the 1500 or 1700, Israel is from 1947 (yesterday) and they are killing people right now. Israel was left empty in the Diaspora (70A.C.).You cant go back now and kill the people who's livin there for 2,000 years

[Jun 21, 2019] Trump Barters For Borders -- And Wins, Big Time by Ilana Mercer

Notable quotes:
"... Trump issued an executive order, according to which a schedule of tariffs will be implemented unless Mexico polices its borders and ups its dismal rate of deportation, currently at 10 to 20 percent. ..."
"... Beginning on June 10, " a 5 percent tariff was placed on all imports from Mexico, to be increased by five percentage points each month until it hits 25 percent in October." ..."
"... Lo and behold, Mexico quickly promised to arrest Central American migrants headed north. Agreements may soon materialize with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, to which Trump has already cut off foreign aid, in March ..."
"... How free and fair is trade anyway? Are unfettered markets at work when Canada, for instance, taxes purchases of American goods starting at $20, while America starts taxing Canadian goods at $1000? Hardly. ..."
"... There needs to be a huge turnaround in the number of illegals crossing the border if Trump wants to avoid being a one term president. It's hard to see the republicans staying relevant as well if the current numbers continue. They might hold the Senate for a little while but the presidency and a majority in Congress will be out of reach forever. ..."
"... In 2018, there were 70 million refugees, seeking safety from the world's conflict zone. One person was forced to flee their home because of war and violence every two seconds. ..."
"... Trump should have made reducing LEGAL immigration (and building the Wall to stop illegals) his #1 priority as soon as he was inaugurated. Instead, he dithered with personnel issues, then Obmacare (betrayed by rot-in-hell you bastard McCain), then tax cuts, Kavanaugh, loss of House, the End. ..."
Jun 21, 2019 | www.unz.com

If President Trump doesn't waver, his border deal with Mexico will be a victory. The Mexicans have agreed to quit serving as conduits to hundreds of thousands of central Americans headed for the U.S.A.

Despite protests from Democrats, stateside -- Mexico has agreed to significantly increase enforcement on its borders.

At first, Mexico was as defiant as the Democrats -- and some Republicans.

Democrats certainly can be counted on to argue for the other side -- any side other than the so-called sovereign people they swore to represent.

In fairness to the Democrats, Republicans are only notionally committed to the tough policing of the border. And certainly not if policing the porous border entails threatening trade tariffs against our neighborly narco-state. Some Republican senators even considered a vote to block the tariffs.

Nevertheless, to the hooting and hollering of the cretins in Congress and media, Trump went ahead and threatened Mexico with tariffs .

More than that. The president didn't just tweet out "strong words" and taunts.

Since Mexico, the party duopoly, and his own courts have forced his hand, the president proceeded to "retrieve from his arsenal a time bomb of ruinous proportions."

Or, so the Economist hyperventilated.

Trump issued an executive order, according to which a schedule of tariffs will be implemented unless Mexico polices its borders and ups its dismal rate of deportation, currently at 10 to 20 percent.

Beginning on June 10, " a 5 percent tariff was placed on all imports from Mexico, to be increased by five percentage points each month until it hits 25 percent in October."

Lo and behold, Mexico quickly promised to arrest Central American migrants headed north. Agreements may soon materialize with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, to which Trump has already cut off foreign aid, in March

It remains for Trump to stick with tough love for Mexico and the rest. If the torrent of grifters from Central America does not let up, neither should the tariffs be lifted or aid restored.

Trump's trade and tariff tactics are about winning negotiations for Americans; they're not aimed at flouting the putative free-market.

How free and fair is trade anyway? Are unfettered markets at work when Canada, for instance, taxes purchases of American goods starting at $20, while America starts taxing Canadian goods at $1000? Hardly.

Free trade is an unknown ideal, to echo Ayn Rand's observations. What goes for "free trade," rather, is trade managed by bureaucratic juggernauts -- national and international -- central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds generally exploit labor, despoil land and kill off critters as they please.

The American market economy is massive. Trump knows its might. The difference between the president and his detractors is that Trump is prepared to harness the power of American markets to benefit the American people.

But what of the "billions of dollars in imports from Mexico" that are at stake, as one media shill shrieked .

Give me a break. The truth about what Fake News call a major trading partner, Mexico, is that it's a trade pygmy -- a fact known all too well to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard.

The reason these leaders were quick to the negotiating table once a schedule of tariffs had been decided upon by the president is this. Via the Economist :

"Only about 15 percent of the United States' exports go to Mexico, but a whopping 80 percent of Mexico's exports head the other way. 'There is nothing we have in our arsenal that is equivalent to what the United States can do to us,' says Andrés Rozental, a Mexican former diplomat and minister."

Next, President Trump must compel Mexico to accept "safe third-country status." Translated, this means that the U.S. can expel any and all "asylum seekers" if they pass through Mexico, as Mexico becomes their lawful, first port-of-call.

Thinking people should realize that Trump's victory here is a Pyrrhic one. For what the president has had to do is convince the Mexican president to deploy his national guards to do the work American immigration police is not allowed to do.

The U.S. must turn to Mexico to police its border because the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has, to all intents and purposes, outlawed immigration laws.

Congressional quislings, for their part, have sat back and grumbled about the need for new laws. But as Daniel Horowitz argues convincingly, this is "a separation of powers problem." Unless the Trump administration understands that the problem lies with the lower-court judges [exceeding their constitutional authority] and not the law -- there will be no fix.

For President Trump, the executive order serves as a way around the courts' violation of the constitutionally enshrined federal scheme, within which the role -- nay, the obligation -- of the commander in chief -- is to defend the country.

Although they're temporary fixes, executive orders can serve to nullify unjust laws. As I argued in my 2016 book, "The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Reconstructed," executive orders are Trump's political power tool -- justice's Jaws of Life, if you will -- to be used by the Executive to pry the people free from judicial oppression.

Understand: The right of a nation to stop The World from flooding its communities amounts to upholding a negative right. In other words, by stopping trespassers at their borders, Americans are not robbing invaders of the trinity of life, liberty and property.

All Americans are asserting is their right to be left alone. What we are saying to The World is what we tell our disobedient toddlers every day, "No. You can't go there."

That's all.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016). She's on Twitter , Facebook , Gab & YouTube


Nehlen , says: June 21, 2019 at 4:29 am GMT

If you believe Mexico is going to squelch the flow of humans into America -- the same humans who are wiring $25BILLION per year back to family members in Mexico -- I've got a fleet of taco trucks with square tires to sell you.
SeekerofthePresence , says: June 21, 2019 at 4:56 am GMT
Do you really believe this "deal" will have a substantial effect? It is like holding up an umbrella to Noah's flood of migrants.
Whitewolf , says: June 21, 2019 at 5:18 am GMT
There needs to be a huge turnaround in the number of illegals crossing the border if Trump wants to avoid being a one term president. It's hard to see the republicans staying relevant as well if the current numbers continue. They might hold the Senate for a little while but the presidency and a majority in Congress will be out of reach forever.
Honor is Loyalty , says: June 21, 2019 at 6:26 am GMT
The more this nonsense carries on, the more I empathize with Stalin. Sometimes you gotta bulldoze your way through. Democracy produces nothing but obstacles. Time to put the keys into the caterpillar.
sarz , says: June 21, 2019 at 6:33 am GMT
I'd love to see what Ann Coulter would say on this and on Trump's total score on immigration.
Leon Haller , says: June 21, 2019 at 7:58 am GMT
I applaud this move by Trump, and will of course vote for him in 2020 (for a patriot, what is the alternative?). But unless we end the LEGAL immigration invasion, all this is for nought, and Trump will likely be the last non-leftist Republican President.

I have fought immigration for 40 years without success, except for CA Prop 187 in 1994, quickly overturned by a dirty Muslim immigrant Federal judge. Immigration of racial and cultural and (now it's clear to everyone, as I knew by the 80s in CA) ideological aliens is simple invasion, imperialism by non-military means. We needed Pat Buchanan in the 90s; instead, the stupid Christianists, with whom I used to argue in the 80s-90s-00s endlessly wrt their insane priorities, worried more about abortion and queers (how'd that work out, morons?) than alien conquest – with the obvious result that "globohomo" is stronger than ever – AND we have another 50+ MILLION race aliens voting 8-1 Democrat.

Sadly, Trump and the all-GOP 2017-18 Congress were America's very last chance to stop the invasion and save our (and the GOP's) future. Trump blew it, utterly. Now the USA as a unitary, Occidental, Constitutional, capitalist nation-state cannot be salvaged and/or restored. The only hope for American patriots is White conservative territorial ingathering and eventual racial secession and new sovereignty.

Bardon Kaldian , says: June 21, 2019 at 8:16 am GMT

Unless the Trump administration understands that the problem lies with the lower-court judges [exceeding their constitutional authority] and not the law -- there will be no fix.

This is the crux. And this is true, too..

Free trade is an unknown ideal, to echo Ayn Rand's observations. What goes for "free trade," rather, is trade managed by bureaucratic juggernauts -- national and international -- central planners concerned with regulating, not freeing, trade; whose goal it is to harmonize labor, health, and environmental laws throughout the developed world. The undeveloped and developing worlds generally exploit labor, despoil land and kill off critters as they please.

Renoman , says: June 21, 2019 at 8:22 am GMT
There are many times when a punch in the face is far more effective than diplomacy, this was one. Good for Donny, good for America.
Gracchus Babeuf , says: June 21, 2019 at 9:03 am GMT
In 2018, there were 70 million refugees, seeking safety from the world's conflict zone. One person was forced to flee their home because of war and violence every two seconds.
Greg Bacon , says: Website June 21, 2019 at 9:28 am GMT
"And I'll huff and puff and bow your house down," said the Big, Bad Wolf.

When stories about the record number of illegals flooding in stop hitting the news cycle, and we no longer get possibly Ebola infected Congolese with wads of $100 bills, I might believe your assumptions.

Africans Coming Across The Southern Border Have "Rolls Of $100 Bills"

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-17/africans-coming-across-southern-border-have-rolls-100-bills

Has Herr Trump huffed and puffed the same hot air towards the Congo?

Greg Bacon , says: June 21, 2019 at 9:42 am GMT
One more thought: Remember that hot air the Big, Bad Orange wolf blew that ICE was going to start rounding up millions of illegals on Tuesday? Here it is Friday and no action.

How many times will people fall for Trump's BS promises where nothing gets done or he backtracks?

Madame Mercer, I suspect the real reason behind your story is that Trump is the best POTUS for Israel since the traitor LBJ and that a certain group wants to keep Tubby the Grifter in the WH so he can keep acting as Israel's de facto real estate agent.

Realist , says: June 21, 2019 at 10:09 am GMT

Trump Barters for Borders -- and Wins, Big Time

Trump was won nothing big time. Including his election. His wins are miniscule. You are becoming an insufferable sycophant.

wesmouch , says: June 21, 2019 at 10:11 am GMT
The simpleton Mercer misses what is really going on. The re-election push is on and Trump will roll out "plans" to deal with immigration. They will never come into fruition as they are mere "boob bait for bubba". The drug cartels run Mexico and people trafficking is a bigger business than drug trafficking. If you think they are going to stop, you are as delusional as Ms Mercer. By the way the politicians work for the drug cartels in Mexico. Of course the advice that Mercer gave to South Africa led to the current situation where the ANC runs the country and whites are disenfranchised. But what else would you expect from a Jew who sell the goyim down the river every chance they get.
Leon Haller , says: June 21, 2019 at 10:26 am GMT
@sarz Grade: D+ (every other President since Kennedy: F)

Trump should have made reducing LEGAL immigration (and building the Wall to stop illegals) his #1 priority as soon as he was inaugurated. Instead, he dithered with personnel issues, then Obmacare (betrayed by rot-in-hell you bastard McCain), then tax cuts, Kavanaugh, loss of House, the End.

America is gone as not only a White nation, but within 25 years, even a semi-civilized and First World one. Diversity is what destroyed us. We could have integrated (more or less) the blacks, but the sheer numbers of mostly clannish nonwhite colonizers since 1968 has doomed us. America was its White, Christian, Anglo-Nordic majority. Without that majority, American dies.

On to the Ethnostate!

vinteuil , says: June 21, 2019 at 10:36 am GMT
@Gracchus Babeuf

I guess it's ok to bomb the crap out of other countries, but when those people try and get away from the hell created, that's supposed to be wrong.

Has the U.S. been bombing Central America, lately? I must have missed that.

[Jun 20, 2019] In the US they never called austerity and militarism to be human rights violations by Ajamu Baraka

Notable quotes:
"... As I have called to attention before , a monumental rip-off is about to take place once again. Both the Democrats and Republicans are united in their commitment to continue to feed the U.S. war machine with dollars extracted -- to the tune of 750 billion dollars -- from the working class and transferred to the pockets of the military/industrial complex. ..."
"... As seen, a state's legitimacy was based on the extent to which it recognized, protected and fulfilled the human rights of all its citizens and residents. Those rights included not only the right to information, assembly, speech and to participation in the national political life of the nation but also the right to food, water, healthcare, education, employment, substantial social security throughout life, and not just as a senior citizen. ..."
"... The counterrevolutionary program of the late 60s and 70s, especially the turn to neoliberalism which began in the 70s, would reject this paradigm and redefine the role of the state. The obligation of the state to recognize, protect and fulfill human rights was eliminated from the role of the state under neoliberalism. ..."
"... Today the consequences of four decades of neoliberalism in the global South and now in the cosmopolitan North have created a crisis of legitimacy that has made state policies more dependent on force and militarism than in any other time, including the civil war and the turmoil of the 1930s. ..."
"... Today, contrary to the claims of capitalism to guarantee the human right to a living wage ensuring "an existence worthy of human dignity," the average worker is making, adjusted for inflation, less than in 1973; i.e., some 46 years-ago. 140 million are either poor or have low-income; 80% living paycheck to paycheck; 34 million are still without health insurance; 40 million live in "official poverty;" and more in unofficial poverty as measured by alternative supplemental poverty (SPM). And more than half of those over 55 years-old have no retirement funds other than Social Security. ..."
Jun 20, 2019 | dissidentvoice.org

austerity has been a central component of state policy at every level of government in the U.S. and in Europe for the last four decades. In Europe, as the consequences of neoliberal policies imposed on workers began to be felt and understood, the result was intense opposition. However, in the U.S. the unevenness of how austerity policies were being applied, in particular the elimination or reduction in social services that were perceived to be primarily directed at racialized workers, political opposition was slow to materialize.

Today, however, relatively privileged workers who were silent as the neoliberal "Washington consensus" was imposed on the laboring classes in the global South -- through draconian structural adjustment policies that result in severe cutbacks in state expenditures for education, healthcare, state employment and other vital needs -- have now come to understand that the neoliberal program of labor discipline and intensified extraction of value from workers, did not spare them.

The deregulation of capital, privatization of state functions -- from road construction to prisons, the dramatic reduction in state spending that results in cuts in state supported social services and goods like housing and access to reproductive services for the poor -- represent the politics of austerity and the role of the neoliberal state.

This materialist analysis is vitally important for understanding the dialectical relationship between the general plight of workers in the U.S. and the bipartisan collaboration to raid the Federal budget and to reduce social spending in order to increase spending on the military. This perspective is also important for understanding the imposition of those policies as a violation of the fundamental human rights of workers, the poor and the oppressed.

For the neoliberal state, the concept of human rights does not exist.

As I have called to attention before , a monumental rip-off is about to take place once again. Both the Democrats and Republicans are united in their commitment to continue to feed the U.S. war machine with dollars extracted -- to the tune of 750 billion dollars -- from the working class and transferred to the pockets of the military/industrial complex.

The only point of debate is now whether or not the Pentagon will get the full 750 billion or around 733 billion. But whether it is 750 billion or 733 billion, the one sector that is not part of this debate is the public. The attention of the public has been adroitly diverted by the absurd reality show that is Russiagate. But this week, even though the budget debate has been disappeared by corporate media, Congress is set to begin debate on aspects of the budget and specifically on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Raising the alarm on this issue is especially critical at this moment. As tensions escalate in the Persian Gulf, the corporate media is once again abdicating its public responsibility to bring unbiased, objective information to the public and instead is helping to generate support for war with Iran.

The Democrats, who have led the way with anti-Iran policies over the last few decades, will be under enormous pressure not to appear to be against enhancing military preparedness and are likely to find a way to give Trump and the Pentagon everything they want.

Support for Human Rights and Support for Empire is an Irreconcilable Contradiction

The assumption of post-war capitalist order was that the state would be an instrument to blunt the more contradictory aspects of capitalism. It would regulate the private sector, provide social welfare support to the most marginal elements of working class, and create conditions for full employment. This was the Keynesian logic and approach that informed liberal state policies beginning in the 1930s.

The idea of reforming human rights fits neatly into that paradigm.

As seen, a state's legitimacy was based on the extent to which it recognized, protected and fulfilled the human rights of all its citizens and residents. Those rights included not only the right to information, assembly, speech and to participation in the national political life of the nation but also the right to food, water, healthcare, education, employment, substantial social security throughout life, and not just as a senior citizen.

The counterrevolutionary program of the late 60s and 70s, especially the turn to neoliberalism which began in the 70s, would reject this paradigm and redefine the role of the state. The obligation of the state to recognize, protect and fulfill human rights was eliminated from the role of the state under neoliberalism.

Today the consequences of four decades of neoliberalism in the global South and now in the cosmopolitan North have created a crisis of legitimacy that has made state policies more dependent on force and militarism than in any other time, including the civil war and the turmoil of the 1930s.

The ideological glue provided by the ability of capitalism to deliver the goods to enough of the population which guaranteed loyalty and support has been severely weakened by four decades of stagnant wages, increasing debt, a shrinking middle-class, obscene economic inequality and never-ending wars that have been disproportionately shouldered by the working class.

Today, contrary to the claims of capitalism to guarantee the human right to a living wage ensuring "an existence worthy of human dignity," the average worker is making, adjusted for inflation, less than in 1973; i.e., some 46 years-ago. 140 million are either poor or have low-income; 80% living paycheck to paycheck; 34 million are still without health insurance; 40 million live in "official poverty;" and more in unofficial poverty as measured by alternative supplemental poverty (SPM). And more than half of those over 55 years-old have no retirement funds other than Social Security.

In a report, Philp Alston , the UN's special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, points out that : the US is one of the world's wealthiest countries. It spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined.

However, that choice in public expenditures must be seen in comparison to the other factors he lays out:

For African Americans in particular, neoliberalism has meant, jobs lost, hollowed out communities as industries relocated first to the South and then to Mexico and China, the disappearance of affordable housing, schools and hospital closings, infant and maternal mortality at global South levels, and mass incarceration as the unskilled, low-wage Black labor has become economically redundant.

This is the backdrop and context for the budget "debate" and Trump's call to cut spendings to Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and even the State Department.

The U.S. could find 6 trillion dollars for war since 2003 and 16 trillion to bail out the banks after the financial sector crashed the economy, but it can't find money to secure the human rights of the people.

This is the one-sided class war that we find ourselves in; a war with real deaths and slower, systematic structural violence. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can be depended on to secure our rights or protect the world from the U.S. atrocities. That responsibility falls on the people who reside at the center of the Empire to not only struggle for ourselves but to put a brake on the Empire's ability to spread death and destruction across the planet.

Ajamu Baraka is a board member with Cooperation Jackson, the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He can be reached at www.AjamuBaraka.com Read other articles by Ajamu , or visit Ajamu's website .

[Jun 19, 2019] America s Suicide Epidemic

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes . What's more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides , even though the murder rate gets so much more attention. ..."
"... In some states the upsurge was far higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%). ..."
"... Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between 35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Globally , it ranks 27th. ..."
"... The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half of all such acts in this country. ..."
"... Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower among people in higher-income brackets. ..."
"... Evidence from the United States , Brazil , Japan , and Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases, so does the suicide rate. ..."
"... One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways) than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly higher . ..."
"... The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have labeled " deaths of despair " -- those caused by suicides plus opioid overdoses and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and its ripple effects do appear to matter. ..."
"... Trump has neglected his base on pretty much every issue; this one's no exception. ..."
Jun 19, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Yves here. This post describes how the forces driving the US suicide surge started well before the Trump era, but explains how Trump has not only refused to acknowledge the problem, but has made matters worse.

However, it's not as if the Democrats are embracing this issue either.

BY Rajan Menon, the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention Originally published at TomDispatch .

We hear a lot about suicide when celebrities like Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade die by their own hand. Otherwise, it seldom makes the headlines. That's odd given the magnitude of the problem.

In 2017, 47,173 Americans killed themselves. In that single year, in other words, the suicide count was nearly seven times greater than the number of American soldiers killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars between 2001 and 2018.

A suicide occurs in the United States roughly once every 12 minutes . What's more, after decades of decline, the rate of self-inflicted deaths per 100,000 people annually -- the suicide rate -- has been increasing sharply since the late 1990s. Suicides now claim two-and-a-half times as many lives in this country as do homicides , even though the murder rate gets so much more attention.

In other words, we're talking about a national epidemic of self-inflicted deaths.

Worrisome Numbers

Anyone who has lost a close relative or friend to suicide or has worked on a suicide hotline (as I have) knows that statistics transform the individual, the personal, and indeed the mysterious aspects of that violent act -- Why this person? Why now? Why in this manner? -- into depersonalized abstractions. Still, to grasp how serious the suicide epidemic has become, numbers are a necessity.

According to a 2018 Centers for Disease Control study , between 1999 and 2016, the suicide rate increased in every state in the union except Nevada, which already had a remarkably high rate. In 30 states, it jumped by 25% or more; in 17, by at least a third. Nationally, it increased 33% . In some states the upsurge was far higher: North Dakota (57.6%), New Hampshire (48.3%), Kansas (45%), Idaho (43%).

Alas, the news only gets grimmer.

Since 2008 , suicide has ranked 10th among the causes of death in this country. For Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, however, it comes in second; for those between 35 and 45, fourth. The United States also has the ninth-highest rate in the 38-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Globally , it ranks 27th.

More importantly, the trend in the United States doesn't align with what's happening elsewhere in the developed world. The World Health Organization, for instance, reports that Great Britain, Canada, and China all have notably lower suicide rates than the U.S., as do all but six countries in the European Union. (Japan's is only slightly lower.)

World Bank statistics show that, worldwide, the suicide rate fell from 12.8 per 100,000 in 2000 to 10.6 in 2016. It's been falling in China , Japan (where it has declined steadily for nearly a decade and is at its lowest point in 37 years), most of Europe, and even countries like South Korea and Russia that have a significantly higher suicide rate than the United States. In Russia, for instance, it has dropped by nearly 26% from a high point of 42 per 100,000 in 1994 to 31 in 2019.

We know a fair amount about the patterns of suicide in the United States. In 2017, the rate was highest for men between the ages of 45 and 64 (30 per 100,000) and those 75 and older (39.7 per 100,000).

The rates in rural counties are almost double those in the most urbanized ones, which is why states like Idaho, Kansas, New Hampshire, and North Dakota sit atop the suicide list. Furthermore, a far higher percentage of people in rural states own guns than in cities and suburbs, leading to a higher rate of suicide involving firearms, the means used in half of all such acts in this country.

There are gender-based differences as well. From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost four-and-a-half times higher in the first of those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last.

Education is also a factor. The suicide rate is lowest among individuals with college degrees. Those who, at best, completed high school are, by comparison, twice as likely to kill themselves. Suicide rates also tend to be lower among people in higher-income brackets.

The Economics of Stress

This surge in the suicide rate has taken place in years during which the working class has experienced greater economic hardship and psychological stress. Increased competition from abroad and outsourcing, the results of globalization, have contributed to job loss, particularly in economic sectors like manufacturing, steel, and mining that had long been mainstays of employment for such workers. The jobs still available often paid less and provided fewer benefits.

Technological change, including computerization, robotics, and the coming of artificial intelligence, has similarly begun to displace labor in significant ways, leaving Americans without college degrees, especially those 50 and older, in far more difficult straits when it comes to finding new jobs that pay well. The lack of anything resembling an industrial policy of a sort that exists in Europe has made these dislocations even more painful for American workers, while a sharp decline in private-sector union membership -- down from nearly 17% in 1983 to 6.4% today -- has reduced their ability to press for higher wages through collective bargaining.

Furthermore, the inflation-adjusted median wage has barely budged over the last four decades (even as CEO salaries have soared). And a decline in worker productivity doesn't explain it: between 1973 and 2017 productivity increased by 77%, while a worker's average hourly wage only rose by 12.4%. Wage stagnation has made it harder for working-class Americans to get by, let alone have a lifestyle comparable to that of their parents or grandparents.

The gap in earnings between those at the top and bottom of American society has also increased -- a lot. Since 1979, the wages of Americans in the 10th percentile increased by a pitiful 1.2%. Those in the 50th percentile did a bit better, making a gain of 6%. By contrast, those in the 90th percentile increased by 34.3% and those near the peak of the wage pyramid -- the top 1% and especially the rarefied 0.1% -- made far more substantial gains.

And mind you, we're just talking about wages, not other forms of income like large stock dividends, expensive homes, or eyepopping inheritances. The share of net national wealth held by the richest 0.1% increased from 10% in the 1980s to 20% in 2016. By contrast, the share of the bottom 90% shrank in those same decades from about 35% to 20%. As for the top 1%, by 2016 its share had increased to almost 39% .

The precise relationship between economic inequality and suicide rates remains unclear, and suicide certainly can't simply be reduced to wealth disparities or financial stress. Still, strikingly, in contrast to the United States, suicide rates are noticeably lower and have been declining in Western European countries where income inequalities are far less pronounced, publicly funded healthcare is regarded as a right (not demonized as a pathway to serfdom), social safety nets far more extensive, and apprenticeships and worker retraining programs more widespread.

Evidence from the United States , Brazil , Japan , and Sweden does indicate that, as income inequality increases, so does the suicide rate. If so, the good news is that progressive economic policies -- should Democrats ever retake the White House and the Senate -- could make a positive difference. A study based on state-by-state variations in the U.S. found that simply boosting the minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credit by 10% appreciably reduces the suicide rate among people without college degrees.

The Race Enigma

One aspect of the suicide epidemic is puzzling. Though whites have fared far better economically (and in many other ways) than African Americans, their suicide rate is significantly higher . It increased from 11.3 per 100,000 in 2000 to 15.85 per 100,000 in 2017; for African Americans in those years the rates were 5.52 per 100,000 and 6.61 per 100,000. Black men are 10 times more likely to be homicide victims than white men, but the latter are two-and-half times more likely to kill themselves.

The higher suicide rate among whites as well as among people with only a high school diploma highlights suicide's disproportionate effect on working-class whites. This segment of the population also accounts for a disproportionate share of what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have labeled " deaths of despair " -- those caused by suicides plus opioid overdoses and liver diseases linked to alcohol abuse. Though it's hard to offer a complete explanation for this, economic hardship and its ripple effects do appear to matter.

According to a study by the St. Louis Federal Reserve , the white working class accounted for 45% of all income earned in the United States in 1990, but only 27% in 2016. In those same years, its share of national wealth plummeted, from 45% to 22%. And as inflation-adjusted wages have decreased for men without college degrees, many white workers seem to have lost hope of success of any sort. Paradoxically, the sense of failure and the accompanying stress may be greater for white workers precisely because they traditionally were much better off economically than their African American and Hispanic counterparts.

In addition, the fraying of communities knit together by employment in once-robust factories and mines has increased social isolation among them, and the evidence that it -- along with opioid addiction and alcohol abuse -- increases the risk of suicide is strong . On top of that, a significantly higher proportion of whites than blacks and Hispanics own firearms, and suicide rates are markedly higher in states where gun ownership is more widespread.

Trump's Faux Populism

The large increase in suicide within the white working class began a couple of decades before Donald Trump's election. Still, it's reasonable to ask what he's tried to do about it, particularly since votes from these Americans helped propel him to the White House. In 2016, he received 64% of the votes of whites without college degrees; Hillary Clinton, only 28%. Nationwide, he beat Clinton in counties where deaths of despair rose significantly between 2000 and 2015.

White workers will remain crucial to Trump's chances of winning in 2020. Yet while he has spoken about, and initiated steps aimed at reducing, the high suicide rate among veterans , his speeches and tweets have never highlighted the national suicide epidemic or its inordinate impact on white workers. More importantly, to the extent that economic despair contributes to their high suicide rate, his policies will only make matters worse.

The real benefits from the December 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act championed by the president and congressional Republicans flowed to those on the top steps of the economic ladder. By 2027, when the Act's provisions will run out, the wealthiest Americans are expected to have captured 81.8% of the gains. And that's not counting the windfall they received from recent changes in taxes on inheritances. Trump and the GOP doubled the annual amount exempt from estate taxes -- wealth bequeathed to heirs -- through 2025 from $5.6 million per individual to $11.2 million (or $22.4 million per couple). And who benefits most from this act of generosity? Not workers, that's for sure, but every household with an estate worth $22 million or more will.

As for job retraining provided by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, the president proposed cutting that program by 40% in his 2019 budget, later settling for keeping it at 2017 levels. Future cuts seem in the cards as long as Trump is in the White House. The Congressional Budget Office projects that his tax cuts alone will produce even bigger budget deficits in the years to come. (The shortfall last year was $779 billion and it is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2020.) Inevitably, the president and congressional Republicans will then demand additional reductions in spending for social programs.

This is all the more likely because Trump and those Republicans also slashed corporate taxes from 35% to 21% -- an estimated $1.4 trillion in savings for corporations over the next decade. And unlike the income tax cut, the corporate tax has no end date . The president assured his base that the big bucks those companies had stashed abroad would start flowing home and produce a wave of job creation -- all without adding to the deficit. As it happens, however, most of that repatriated cash has been used for corporate stock buy-backs, which totaled more than $800 billion last year. That, in turn, boosted share prices, but didn't exactly rain money down on workers. No surprise, of course, since the wealthiest 10% of Americans own at least 84% of all stocks and the bottom 60% have less than 2% of them.

And the president's corporate tax cut hasn't produced the tsunami of job-generating investments he predicted either. Indeed, in its aftermath, more than 80% of American companies stated that their plans for investment and hiring hadn't changed. As a result, the monthly increase in jobs has proven unremarkable compared to President Obama's second term, when the economic recovery that Trump largely inherited began. Yes, the economy did grow 2.3% in 2017 and 2.9% in 2018 (though not 3.1% as the president claimed). There wasn't, however, any "unprecedented economic boom -- a boom that has rarely been seen before" as he insisted in this year's State of the Union Address .

Anyway, what matters for workers struggling to get by is growth in real wages, and there's nothing to celebrate on that front: between 2017 and mid-2018 they actually declined by 1.63% for white workers and 2.5% for African Americans, while they rose for Hispanics by a measly 0.37%. And though Trump insists that his beloved tariff hikes are going to help workers, they will actually raise the prices of goods, hurting the working class and other low-income Americans the most .

Then there are the obstacles those susceptible to suicide face in receiving insurance-provided mental-health care. If you're a white worker without medical coverage or have a policy with a deductible and co-payments that are high and your income, while low, is too high to qualify for Medicaid, Trump and the GOP haven't done anything for you. Never mind the president's tweet proclaiming that "the Republican Party Will Become 'The Party of Healthcare!'"

Let me amend that: actually, they have done something. It's just not what you'd call helpful. The percentage of uninsured adults, which fell from 18% in 2013 to 10.9% at the end of 2016, thanks in no small measure to Obamacare , had risen to 13.7% by the end of last year.

The bottom line? On a problem that literally has life-and-death significance for a pivotal portion of his base, Trump has been AWOL. In fact, to the extent that economic strain contributes to the alarming suicide rate among white workers, his policies are only likely to exacerbate what is already a national crisis of epidemic proportions.


Seamus Padraig , June 19, 2019 at 6:46 am

Trump has neglected his base on pretty much every issue; this one's no exception.

DanB , June 19, 2019 at 8:55 am

Trump is running on the claim that he's turned the economy around; addressing suicide undermines this (false) claim. To state the obvious, NC readers know that Trump is incapable of caring about anyone or anything beyond his in-the-moment interpretation of his self-interest.

JCC , June 19, 2019 at 9:25 am

Not just Trump. Most of the Republican Party and much too many Democrats have also abandoned this base, otherwise known as working class Americans.

The economic facts are near staggering and this article has done a nice job of summarizing these numbers that are spread out across a lot of different sites.

I've experienced this rise within my own family and probably because of that fact I'm well aware that Trump is only a symptom of an entire political system that has all but abandoned it's core constituency, the American Working Class.

sparagmite , June 19, 2019 at 10:13 am

Yep It's not just Trump. The author mentions this, but still focuses on him for some reason. Maybe accurately attributing the problems to a failed system makes people feel more hopeless. Current nihilists in Congress make it their duty to destroy once helpful institutions in the name of "fiscal responsibility," i.e., tax cuts for corporate elites.

dcblogger , June 19, 2019 at 12:20 pm

Maybe because Trump is president and bears the greatest responsibility in this particular time. A great piece and appreciate all the documentation.

Svante , June 19, 2019 at 7:00 am

I'd assumed, the "working class" had dissappeared, back during Reagan's Miracle? We'd still see each other, sitting dazed on porches & stoops of rented old places they'd previously; trying to garden, fix their car while smoking, drinking or dazed on something? Those able to morph into "middle class" lives, might've earned substantially less, especially benefits and retirement package wise. But, a couple decades later, it was their turn, as machines and foreigners improved productivity. You could lease a truck to haul imported stuff your kids could sell to each other, or help robots in some warehouse, but those 80s burger flipping, rent-a-cop & repo-man gigs dried up. Your middle class pals unemployable, everybody in PayDay Loan debt (without any pay day in sight?) SHTF Bug-out bags® & EZ Credit Bushmasters began showing up at yard sales, even up North. Opioids became the religion of the proletariat Whites simply had much farther to fall, more equity for our betters to steal. And it was damned near impossible to get the cops to shoot you?

Man, this just ain't turning out as I'd hoped. Need coffee!

Svante , June 19, 2019 at 7:55 am

We especially love the euphemism "Deaths O' Despair." since it works so well on a Chyron, especially supered over obese crackers waddling in crusty MossyOak™ Snuggies®

https://mobile.twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1140998287933300736
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=apxZvpzq4Mw

DanB , June 19, 2019 at 9:29 am

This is a very good article, but I have a comment about the section titled, "The Race Enigma." I think the key to understanding why African Americans have a lower suicide rate lies in understanding the sociological notion of community, and the related concept Emil Durkheim called social solidarity. This sense of solidarity and community among African Americans stands in contrast to the "There is no such thing as society" neoliberal zeitgeist that in fact produces feelings of extreme isolation, failure, and self-recriminations. An aside: as a white boy growing up in 1950s-60s Detroit I learned that if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had to do was to hang out with black people.

Amfortas the hippie , June 19, 2019 at 2:18 pm

" if you yearned for solidarity and community what you had to do was to hang out with black people."
amen, to that. in my case rural black people.
and I'll add Hispanics to that.
My wife's extended Familia is so very different from mine.
Solidarity/Belonging is cool.
I recommend it.
on the article we keep the scanner on("local news").we had a 3-4 year rash of suicides and attempted suicides(determined by chisme, or deduction) out here.
all of them were despair related more than half correlated with meth addiction itself a despair related thing.
ours were equally male/female, and across both our color spectrum.
that leaves economics/opportunity/just being able to get by as the likely cause.

David B Harrison , June 19, 2019 at 10:05 am

What's left out here is the vast majority of these suicides are men.

Christy , June 19, 2019 at 1:53 pm

Actually, in the article it states:
"There are gender-based differences as well. From 1999 to 2017, the rate for men was substantially higher than for women -- almost four-and-a-half times higher in the first of those years, slightly more than three-and-a-half times in the last."

jrs , June 19, 2019 at 1:58 pm

which in some sense makes despair the wrong word, as females are actually quite a bit more likely to be depressed for instance, but much less likely to "do the deed". Despair if we mean a certain social context maybe, but not just a psychological state.

Ex-Pralite Monk , June 19, 2019 at 10:10 am

obese cracker

You lay off the racial slur "cracker" and I'll lay off the racial slur "nigger". Deal?

rd , June 19, 2019 at 10:53 am

Suicide deaths are a function of the suicide attempt rate and the efficacy of the method used. A unique aspect of the US is the prevalence of guns in the society and therefore the greatly increased usage of them in suicide attempts compared to other countries. Guns are a very efficient way of committing suicide with a very high "success" rate. As of 2010, half of US suicides were using a gun as opposed to other countries with much lower percentages. So if the US comes even close to other countries in suicide rates then the US will surpass them in deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Firearms

Now we can add in opiates, especially fentanyl, that can be quite effective as well.

The economic crisis hitting middle America over the past 30 years has been quite focused on the states and populations that also tend to have high gun ownership rates. So suicide attempts in those populations have a high probability of "success".

Joe Well , June 19, 2019 at 11:32 am

I would just take this opportunity to add that the police end up getting called in to prevent on lot of suicide attempts, and just about every successful one.

In the face of so much blanket demonization of the police, along with justified criticism, it's important to remember that.

B:H , June 19, 2019 at 11:44 am

As someone who works in the mental health treatment system, acute inpatient psychiatry to be specific, I can say that of the 25 inpatients currently here, 11 have been here before, multiple times. And this is because of several issues, in my experience: inadequate inpatient resources, staff burnout, inadequate support once they leave the hospital, and the nature of their illnesses. It's a grim picture here and it's been this way for YEARS. Until MAJOR money is spent on this issue it's not going to get better. This includes opening more facilities for people to live in long term, instead of closing them, which has been the trend I've seen.

B:H , June 19, 2019 at 11:53 am

One last thing the CEO wants "asses in beds", aka census, which is the money maker. There's less profit if people get better and don't return. And I guess I wouldn't have a job either. Hmmmm: sickness generates wealth.

[Jun 19, 2019] Trump Can't Defend Our Border, So He Should Attack Iran! Wait -- What by James Kirkpatrick

So where is Trump Wall Mr. President?
Notable quotes:
"... Trump lays out non-interventionist U.S. military policy ..."
Jun 17, 2019 | www.unz.com

... ... ...

The border situation is so outrageous it appears like something out of a black comedy. "We are in a full blown emergency," said acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner John Sanders, "and I cannot say this stronger: the system is broken". [ 32% increase in migrants encountered or arrested at the southern border in May , by Priscilla Alvarez, CNN, June 5, 2019] Why is this happening? Migrants all over the world from Guatemala to Angola know the loopholes in immigration border enforcement imposed by a treasonous Leftist kritarchy , especially the claim of " credible fear " potentially qualifying people for asylum.

[ While everyone sleeps, the courts are abolishing all immigration enforcement , by Daniel Horowitz, Conservative Review, March 11, 2019] Thus, most migrants are not sneaking across the border: they are eagerly turning themselves in at ports of entry, knowing they will soon be released into the country on the promise, which they intend to break, that they will show up for adjudication.

These invaders are being dumped on local communities, seemingly randomly. Without notice, 350 Congolese were sent to San Antonio recently , leaving the city scrambling for interpreters. Mayors throughout Texas, even the Democrat mayor of Del Rio, are furious because dealing with invading migrants prevents local governments from spending money on streets, schools, and infrastructure. [ Democrat border mayor goes ballistic over 'dumping' of illegal aliens in his town , by Daniel Horowitz, ConservativeReview, June 17, 2019] But the same MSM that wants social media regulated in the name of banning anti-vaccine propaganda is silent about diseases brought by these new arrivals .

The Department of Homeland Security is actually facilitating the invasion, dropping off illegals by bus in communities in the Southwest. [ Five Years Later: Murrietta Residents That Blocked DHS Buses With Illegals Prepare For Round Two , by Beth Baumann, Townhall, May 21, 2019] Even alleged cartel members are claiming asylum right after their gunfights. [ Sinaloa cartel shootout in Agua Prieta leaves nearly a dozen people dead , by Lupita Murillo, KVOA4, June 11, 2019]

Remember, President Trump has the authority to solve this problem without Congress. The Supreme Court has already ruled that the president can impose a travel ban on certain countries . Conservative Review's Daniel Horowitz argues the president has inherent powers under Article II to exclude asylum applicants from entering the country, authority that has been reaffirmed by Congress and repeatedly sanctioned by the Supreme Court. [ No judge has jurisdiction to erase our border , ConservativeReview, November 26, 2018]

He also, as we have repeatedly outlined at VDARE.com, has inherent powers to build border defenses that would not require Congress .

But Trump won't do it -- partially because he has inexplicably surrounded himself with political foes who won't back strong action . Instead, he's blaming the Democrats for not undertaking the "simple" measure of closing the "loopholes."

Yet he has to know (at least I hope he does) that Democrats, who have radically shifted left on immigration in recent years, won't help. Besides, the Democrats' plan to simply import a new electorate is working -- for them.

The most optimistic explanation: Trump intends to use immigration as an election issue in 2020. Yet his fecklessness in office will be as unappealing to many voters as the Democrats' extremism. [ Trump Is Vulnerable to Biden on Immigration , by Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review, June 11, 2019] After all, Trump began his campaign vowing to solve the immigration problem almost exactly four years ago -- but essentially nothing has been done.

Instead, the president has been reduced to asking Mexico to solve our problem for us. He supposedly cut a deal with the Mexican government after threatening tariffs , but even that is in dispute. [ Mexico denies Trump's claim of secret concessions in deal , by Jill Colvin, Colleen Long, and Maria Verza, Associated Press, June 10, 2019] The president left powerful negotiating tools on the side, including, most importantly, a remittance tax . As in his dealings with Congress, the president insists on negotiating from weakness in his dealings with Mexico.

In contrast, in the Middle East the president has been extraordinarily bellicose. In April, the Administration revoked waivers that allowed certain countries to buy oil from Iran without violating U.S. sanctions [ U.S. Won't Renew Sanction Exemptions For Countries Buying Iran's Oil , by Bill Chappell, NPR, April 22, 2019]. In early May, the president imposed new sanctions on Iranian metals, a direct threat to the regime's economic viability. [ Trump sanctions Iranian metals, Tehran's largest non-petroleum-related sources of export revenue , by Amanda Macias, CNBC, May 8, 2019] Later that month, the president said a fight would mean "the official end of Iran" [ Trump threatens Iran With 'Official End' by Kenneth Walsh, US News and World Report, May 20, 2019].

The "maximum pressure campaign," as it has been called, puts Iran in the position of either accepting a humiliating surrender or striking out where it can [ Maximum pressure on Iran Means Maximum Risk of War , by Ilan Goldenberg, Foreign Policy, June 14, 2019].

... ... ...

There is also a deeper fundamental question. Our country is crumbling. The border is non-existent; entire communities are being overrun. There’s something perverse about even entertaining a dangerous and costly military intervention halfway around the world. It’s akin to a Roman emperor declaring he will conquer India while barbarians are crossing the Rhine.

President Trump ran on a policy of non-intervention and promised it even after being elected. [ Trump lays out non-interventionist U.S. military policy , by Steve Holland, Reuters, December 6, 2016] He repeatedly pushed back against efforts to get more deeply involved in Syria. He must now resist efforts to get involved in Iran, especially from those who may hint it will win him re-election.

[Jun 11, 2019] How neoliberalism created huge immigration flows: If you live in a vassal country like Ukraine, saddled with World Bank, IMF Debt and currency with ever-declining value pegged to the us dollar immigration might be the best option for you and your falmily.

Jun 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

fastfreddy , Jun 11, 2019 10:51:55 AM | 133

The MoA Week In Review - OT 2019-32

The common migrant cannot be tasked with improving the politics, the financial aspects, the pay scale, the opportunities for work, the safety of his family in his home country.

The USA has prepared his country the way that it endeavors it to be. That is a vassal, saddled with World Bank, IMF Debt and currency with ever-declining value pegged to the us dollar.

Often the US controls his country via election rigging, coups, military intervention, black ops, etc.

He must do that which best serves his family. That is find the most efficient solution - which is migration.

[Jun 11, 2019] Open borders and illegal immigration are NeoLiberal tactics to promote wage arbitrage.

Jun 11, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

MG , Jun 11, 2019 8:40:24 AM | 129

@donkeytale

You stated, "Let's also ignore the fact that the sons and grandsons of the unionised postwar generation for the most part subsequently rejected blue collar work no matter what the pay. This is a sign of decadence I will grant you, and I am guilty as charged. "

This canard doesn't hold up in the face of empirical evidence. One example: 20,000 waiting in line for lousy warehouse jobs at Amazon. The fact is, open borders and illegal immigration are NeoLiberal tactics to promote wage arbitrage. In California, those impacted the most by illegal immigration are African Americans. Whole sectors, such as hotel maintenance and janitorial service, had been unionized, and had principally employed black workers whose salaries enabled them to move into the middle class. The hotel industry welcomed the influx of illegal immigrants willing to work for drastically lower wages. Black workers were replaced and the union destroyed. Unfortunately, many in the US and globally have been so propagandized about illegal immigration that even mentioning illegal immigration gets one falsely labeled racist. in the US, Democrats use illegal immigration as a "demographic strategy," which enables Democrats to remain in power while remaining wholly loyal to Wall Street and doing nothing to ameliorate the misery of the bottom 90%.

[Jun 11, 2019] Pat Buchanan How Do We Remain One Nation One People

Jun 11, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

... ... ...

What we have here is a clash of values.

What one side believes is preserving the God-given right to life for the unborn, the other regards as an assault on the rights of women.

The clash raises questions that go beyond our culture war to what America should stand for in the world.

"American interests and American values are inseparable," Pete Buttigieg told Rachel Maddow.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Claremont Institute:

"We have had too little courage to confront regimes squarely opposed to our interests and our values."

Are Pompeo and Mayor Pete talking about the same values?

The mayor is proudly gay and in a same-sex marriage. Yet the right to same-sex marriage did not even exist in this country until the Supreme Court discovered it a few years ago.

In a 2011 speech to the U.N., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, "Gay rights are human rights," and she approved of U.S. embassies flying the rainbow flag during Pride Month.

This year, Mike Pompeo told the U.S. embassy in Brazil not to fly the rainbow flag. He explained his concept of his moral duty to the Christian Broadcasting Network, "The task I have is informed by my understanding of my faith, my belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior."

The Christian values Pompeo espouses on abortion and gay rights are in conflict with what progressives now call human rights.

And the world mirrors the American divide.

There are gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but none in Riyadh and Mecca. In Brunei, homosexuality can get you killed.

To many Americans, diversity -- racial, ethnic, cultural, religious -- is our greatest strength.

Yet Poland and Hungary are proudly ethnonationalist. South Korea and Japan fiercely resist the racial and ethnic diversity immigration would bring. Catalans and Scots in this century, like Quebecois in the last, seek to secede from nations to which they have belonged for centuries.

Are ethnonationalist nations less righteous than diverse nations likes ours? And if diversity is an American value, is it really a universal value?

Consider the treasured rights of our First Amendment -- freedom of speech, religion and the press.

Saudi Arabia does not permit Christian preachers. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, converts to Christianity face savage reprisals. In Buddhist Myanmar, Muslims are ethnically cleansed.

These nations reject an equality of all faiths, believing instead in the primacy of their own majority faith. They reject our wall of separation between religion and state. Our values and their values conflict.

What makes ours right and theirs wrong? Why should our views and values prevail in what are, after all, their countries?

Under our Constitution, many practices are protected - abortion, blasphemy, pornography, flag-burning, trashing religious beliefs - that other nations regard as symptoms of a disintegrating society.

When Hillary Clinton said half of all Trump supporters could be put into a "basket of deplorables" for being "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic," she was conceding that many Trump's supporters detest many progressive values.

True, but in the era of Trump, why should her liberal values be the values America champions abroad?

With secularism's triumph, we Americans have no common religion, no common faith, no common font of moral truth. We disagree on what is right and wrong, moral and immoral. Without an agreed-upon higher authority, values become matters of opinion. And ours are in conflict and irreconcilable.

Understood. But how, then, do we remain one nation and one people?

[Jun 08, 2019] Trump has spent more time at the Wailing Wall than on our southern border.

Jun 08, 2019 | www.unz.com

Ace , says: June 7, 2019 at 1:20 pm GMT

@Tired of Not Winning

... As a wag on ZeroHedge observed, Trump has spent more time at the Wailing Wall than on our southern border.

And while every month 100,000 invaders are released into the interior of the US.

[Jun 05, 2019] End of Discussion How the Left s Outrage Industry Shuts Down Debate, Manipulates Voters, and Makes America Less Free (and Fun)

Notable quotes:
"... This book covers our current inability to allow all voices to be heard. Key words like "racism " and "?-phobia" (add your preference) can and do end conversations before they begin ..."
"... Hate speech is now any speech about an idea that you disagree with. As we go down the road of drowning out some speech eventually no speech will be allowed. Finger pointers should think about the future, the future when they will be silenced. It's never wrong to listen to different point of view. That's called learning. ..."
"... A very clear and balanced portrait of the current political landscape where a "minority of one" can be supposedly damaged as a result of being exposed to "offensive" ideas. ..."
"... A well documented journey of the transformation from a time when people had vehement arguments into Orwell-Land where the damage one supposedly "suffers" simply from having to "hear" offensive words, allows this shrieking minority to not only silence those voices, but to destroy the lives of the people who have the gall to utter them. ..."
Aug 01, 2017 | www.amazon.com

Q Garcia , August 9, 2017

1984 is Here - Everybody's Brother is Watching

This book covers our current inability to allow all voices to be heard. Key words like "racism " and "?-phobia" (add your preference) can and do end conversations before they begin .

Hate speech is now any speech about an idea that you disagree with. As we go down the road of drowning out some speech eventually no speech will be allowed. Finger pointers should think about the future, the future when they will be silenced. It's never wrong to listen to different point of view. That's called learning.

.0 out of 5 stars A Professor's Review of the Outrage Circus (and the first non-Vine review :-)
Brumble Buffin , August 18, 2015
Tolerance gone astray

I became interested in this book after watching Megyn Kelly's interview with Benson (Google it), where he gave his thoughts on the SCOTUS decision to legalize same-sex marriage in all 50 states. He made a heartfelt and reasoned plea for tolerance and grace on BOTH sides. He hit it out of the park with this and set himself apart from some of his gay peers who are determined that tolerance is NOT a two-way street.

We are seeing a vindictive campaign of lawsuits and intimidation against Christian business people who choose not to provide flowers and cakes for same-sex weddings. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Thumbing your nose at this core American freedom should alarm us all. Personally, I'm for traditional marriage and I think the better solution would be to give civil unions the same legal rights and obligations as marriage, but that's another discussion.

So what about the book? It exceeded my expectations. Ham and Benson are smart and articulate. Their ideas are clearly presented, supported by hard evidence and they are fair and balanced. The book is a pleasure to read - - unless you are a die-hard Lefty. In that case, it may anger you, but anger can be the first step to enlightenment.

Steve Bicker , August 1, 2015
A Well Documented Death of Debate

A very clear and balanced portrait of the current political landscape where a "minority of one" can be supposedly damaged as a result of being exposed to "offensive" ideas.

A well documented journey of the transformation from a time when people had vehement arguments into Orwell-Land where the damage one supposedly "suffers" simply from having to "hear" offensive words, allows this shrieking minority to not only silence those voices, but to destroy the lives of the people who have the gall to utter them.

The Left lays claim to being the "party of tolerance", unless you happen to "think outside THEIR box", which, to the Left is INtolerable and must not only be silenced, but exterminated... A great book!

[Jun 05, 2019] America's Demise In One Simple Chart - The Path To A FIRE Economy

Notable quotes:
"... finance...is not value added....it is value SUBTRACTED! ..."
"... A job at McDonald's then was merely a job you had to make a little money on the side while attending colleges that were FREE to very low cost. Now, McDonald's is one of many low wage jobs in this GIG economy that are utilized as life sustaining. ..."
"... Production of debt instead of production of things. US is one of the largest producers of debt. Financialization as planned by the bankers. ..."
Jun 05, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

venturen , 2 hours ago link

finance...is not value added....it is value SUBTRACTED!

venturen , 3 hours ago link

when you can create $10 Trillion out of thin air and then give it to a select few...what did you think would happen. Instead of arresting the criminal bankers....we rescued them!

They are criminal by nature and are programmed to steal ever more! I know hundreds of NYC bankers and lawyers.....they are NOT NICE PEOPLE!

Handful of Dust , 2 hours ago link

+1,000

Between Bush and Obama bailing them out, and then destroying the middle class with regulations, Obamacare, ZIRP, offshoring, etc.....

CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago link

...Narcissists/sociopaths in America now outnumber empaths

exlcus , 2 hours ago link

America's Demise In One Simple Chart

This is one time that a ZH headline was not click bait. Not only is FIRE bigger than manufacturing, even .GOV is bigger than manufacturing now too. We're fucked, big time.

CatInTheHat , 2 hours ago link

Another boomer who lives in a state of alternate reality. Boomers were privy to government jobs and manufacturing in the US aplenty. They also were privy to government subsidies that don't exist today.

A job at McDonald's then was merely a job you had to make a little money on the side while attending colleges that were FREE to very low cost. Now, McDonald's is one of many low wage jobs in this GIG economy that are utilized as life sustaining.

Offshoring, the disappearance of government subsidies and social programs (thanks to boomers love for BILL CLINTON), wealth inequality (See the FED/Obama bank bailout/QE), stagnant wages, student loan debt, 22 TRILLION US DEBT, & 9/11 & 17 years of WAR & MORE WAR, has caused this country to become BANKRUPT.

Living in your parents basement, or with roommates, one paycheck from the streets to living on the streets is how it is for that kid YOU destroyed through your voting for sociopaths who took away the very jobs and entitlements YOU were privy to that no longer exist.

RasinResin , 1 hour ago link

I like your sarcasm, but the truth is something different entirely. Median home in 2000 - 164K. Now - 313K. Median income during the same period rose 3k. Clarified.

Handful of Dust , 1 minute ago link

If interest rates ever correct, those houses will be $164k again.

Expat , 3 hours ago link

LOL. All hail Donald! Our Real Estate Over-Lord and King of Low Interest Rates!

... ... ...

j0nx , 1 hour ago link

Bs. If they feared that then they wouldn't have ever raised rates effectively killing the refi market and putting downward pressure on prices for the past 2 years.

yogibear , 1 hour ago link

Production of debt instead of production of things. US is one of the largest producers of debt. Financialization as planned by the bankers.

desirdavenir , 1 hour ago link

Financialization as embraced by the boomers, eager to go for the fast money with no skills and no hard work.

CatInTheHat , 27 minutes ago link

Yeah it is. I wouldn't have a kid and raise it in this country today if my life depended on it. May be that's why birth rates in the US are at historic lows.

besnook , 1 hour ago link

if the country was run by shoe shine boys there would be shoe shine palaces on every corner and a law requiring everyone to get a shoeshine 3 times/day. the usa is run by banksters. you get the result described.

wonger , 1 hour ago link

ADP just missed by 153,000 jobs, bye bye real estate

HideTheWeenie , 1 hour ago link

Real Estate:They're mot making more of it ... Because they made too much of it.

BuyDash , 3 hours ago link

It happened in the blink of an eye. I told you, soon Caucasian areas will just start dying out. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Teja , 1 hour ago link

Curse of consumerist car-focussed societies everywhere. Same for Japan, China. Don't think that skin pigments will protect against it, though.

The only counter-trends are societies like the Amish, or maybe orthodox Jews. Their inoculation against most aspects of consumer society has the side effect of exponential population growth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Amish_population

TeethVillage88s , 1 hour ago link

Via Global Macro Monitor,

We originally posted this chart in February 2011 , which we just updated also breaking out the real estate industry from FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate). It is still just as shocking as it was back when we first produced it.

Economy Jumps The Shark. The U.S. economy jumped the shark in 1990 when FIRE overtook the manufacturing sector in terms of its contribution to GDP.

So... Finance Capitalism is real, Mises?

[Jun 03, 2019] A n example of identity stereotyping (in this case anti-Semitism)

Jun 03, 2019 | russia-insider.com

Walter 2 months ago ,

Rachel is the grand daughter of a Lithuanian (J) what else would you expect her to be but anti-Russia?

Isabella Jones Walter 2 months ago ,

The brilliant American physicist, Nobel prize winner, Richard Feynham was also descended from LIthuanian Jews.He had no time for any religion, and refused all aspects of Jewishness. He was a brilliant mant who contributed much to American Science.

Don't make generalisations based on race. Every race has demons and devil, and brilliant angels, and all points in between.

Jasaah 2 months ago ,

Rachel Maddow is garbage. She is godless and without any principles, honor, or dignity.

Unfortunately, she probably represents at least 50% of the US population these days.

- Orthodox Christian Palestinian

[May 20, 2019] Rapid DNA-Testing Reveals Third Of Migrants Lying About Family Relationship To Children

May 19, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Rapid DNA testing has revealed that almost 1/3 of illegal migrants apprehended at the southern US border were not biologically related to the children they were traveling with, nor were they cases of step-fathers or adoptive parents, according to the Washington Examiner .

The findings were a result of a pilot program conducted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in El Paso and McAllen, Texas.

The number of migrants tested and how they flagged people for testing is unknown, while the official added that some migrants refused the cheek-swab test and admitted that they aren't related to the children they were with after learning that their claim would be subject to DNA proof.

Border Patrol agents are seen processing a family unit in Texas earlier this month.

After analyzing the results of the pilot, the Department of Homeland Security will consider rolling out the rapid DNA tests on a broad-scale, according to ICE.

"This is certainly not the panacea. It's one measure," said the official.

One upside, the source said, was that in addition to verifying bogus relationships, it also verified many when Homeland Security personnel were unsure.

The Examiner reported in March the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were looking at adopting the test, made by a company called ANDE . On May 1, DHS announced it would launch a pilot of the program in instances where ICE Homeland Security Investigations agents could not verify a family unit's relationships. - Washington Examiner

In March, former DHS chief Kristjen Nielsen announced that border crossers have been using " child recycling rings " to trick US authorities .

"We've broken up child recycling rings -- if you can believe it -- in the last couple of months, which is where smugglers pick up a child, they give it to adults to present themselves as a family once they get over -- because, as you know, we can only hold families for 20 days -- they send the child back and bring the child back with another family. Another fake family," Nielsen told Fox News 's Tucker Carlson.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rEfma2hj2sU?start=232

Tags Social Issues

[May 17, 2019] Trump plans to invoke insurrection act to boot illegal immigrants

May 17, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Teamtc321 , 51 minutes ago link

Breaking:

=====================

President Donald Trump is planning on using the Insurrection Act to remove illegal immigrants from the United States, The Daily Caller has learned.

According to multiple senior administration officials, the president intends to invoke the "tremendous powers" of the act to remove illegal immigrants from the country.

"We're doing the Insurrection Act," one official said.

Under the Insurrection Act of 1807 , the president has the authority to use the National Guard and military in order to combat "unlawful obstruction or rebellion" within U.S. borders. The act was last invoked in 1992 by George H.W. Bush to quell the Los Angeles riots, and was also used by Eisenhower in 1957 to enforce school desegregation in the south.

An official expressed concerns that Trump's use of the act's powers would face legal challenges, pointing to the lawsuits against the president's travel ban from majority-Muslim countries. However, as the official noted, the travel ban ultimately prevailed in the Supreme Court.

In addition to the Insurrection Act, the president is also considering declaring the country full and insisting that the U.S. can no longer handle the massive influx of illegal immigrants. 2019 is currently on pace to reach the highest levels of illegal immigration in a decade.

"If you take a ship and it holds 1,000 people maximum -- one more person and the ship is going to collapse," the official explained. "The country is full."

"Our hospitals are full, our detention centers are full," they added."

https://dailycaller.com/2019/05/16/donald-trump-insurrection-act-illegal-immigration/

[May 15, 2019] Tariffs won't bring back manufacturing jobs...

The key factor here is that the USA is a neoliberal state which means profits before people and outsourcing to area with lower labor cost. Like leopard can't change its spots, neoliberalism can't change it "free movement of goods and labor" principles, or it stop being neoliberalism.
No jobs will come back to the USA as financial oligarchy is transnational body that uses the USA military as an enforcer for their gang. It does not care one bit about the common people in the USA.
May 15, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Originally from: Pepe Escobar Warns Over US-China Tensions The Hardcore Is Yet To Come

... ... ...

Where are our jobs?

Pause on the sound and fury for necessary precision. Even if the Trump administration slaps 25% tariffs on all Chinese exports to the US, the IMF has projected that would trim just a meager slither – 0.55% – off China's GDP. And America is unlikely to profit, because the extra tariffs won't bring back manufacturing jobs to the US – something that Steve Jobs told Barack Obama eons ago.

What happens is that global supply chains will be redirected to economies that offer comparative advantages in relation to China, such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Laos. And this redirection is already happening anyway – including by Chinese companies.

BRI represents a massive geopolitical and financial investment by China, as well as its partners; over 130 states and territories have signed on. Beijing is using its immense pool of capital to make its own transition towards a consumer-based economy while advancing the necessary pan-Eurasian infrastructure development – with all those ports, high-speed rail, fiber optics, electrical grids expanding to most Global South latitudes.

The end result, up to 2049 – BRI's time span – will be the advent of an integrated market of no less than 4.5 billion people, by that time with access to a Chinese supply chain of high-tech exports as well as more prosaic consumer goods.

Anyone who has followed the nuts and bolts of the Chinese miracle launched by Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping in 1978 knows that Beijing is essentially exporting the mechanism that led China's own 800 million citizens to, in a flash, become members of a global middle class.

As much as the Trump administration may bet on "maximum pressure" to restrict or even block Chinese access to whole sectors of the US market, what really matters is BRI's advance will be able to generate multiple, extra US markets over the next two decades.

We don't do 'win-win'

There are no illusions in the Zhongnanhai, as there are no illusions in Tehran or in the Kremlin. These three top actors of Eurasian integration have exhaustively studied how Washington, in the 1990s, devastated Russia's post-USSR economy (until Putin engineered a recovery) and how Washington has been trying to utterly destroy Iran for four decades.

Beijing, as well as Moscow and Tehran, know everything there is to know about Hybrid War, which is an American intel concept. They know the ultimate strategic target of Hybrid War, whatever the tactics, is social chaos and regime change.

The case of Brazil – a BRICS member like China and Russia – was even more sophisticated: a Hybrid War initially crafted by NSA spying evolved into lawfare and regime change via the ballot box. But it ended with mission accomplished – Brazil has been reduced to the lowly status of an American neo-colony.

Let's remember an ancient mariner, the legendary Chinese Muslim Admiral Zheng He, who for three decades, from 1405 to 1433, led seven expeditions across the seas all the way to Arabia and Eastern Africa, reaching Champa, Borneo, Java, Malacca, Sumatra, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz, Aden, Jeddah, Mogadiscio, Mombasa, bringing tons of goods to trade (silk, porcelain, silver, cotton, iron tools, leather utensils).

That was the original Maritime Silk Road, progressing in parallel to Emperor Yong Le establishing a Pax Sinica in Asia – with no need for colonies and religious proselytism. But then the Ming dynasty retreated – and China was back to its agricultural vocation of looking at itself.

They won't make the same mistake again. Even knowing that the current hegemon does not do "win-win". Get ready for the real hardcore yet to come.


Tachyon5321 , 35 minutes ago link

The Swine fever is sweeping china hog farms and since the start of 2019 200+ millions hogs have been culled. Chinese hog production is down from 2016 high of 700 million to below 420 million by the end of the year. The fever is not under control.

Soybeans from Ukraine are unloaded at the port in Nantong, in eastern China. Imports of soy used to come from the US, but have slumped since the trade war began. Should point out that the Ukraine soy production matures at a different time of the year than the US soybean. The USA planting season starts in Late april, may and june. Because of the harvest time differences worldwide the USA supplies 80% of the late maturing soybeans needed by October/Nov and December.

A propaganda story by the Asian Times

BT , 46 minutes ago link

Orange Jesus just wants to be re-elected in 2020 and MIGA.

Son of Captain Nemo , 52 minutes ago link

Perhaps this is one of the "casualties" ( https://www.rt.com/news/459355-us-austria-embassy-mcdonalds/ ) of economic war given the significance of China and just how important it is to the U.S. in it's purchases of $USD to maintain the illusion of it's reserve currency status and "vigor"...

Surprised this didn't happen first at the U.S. Embassies in Russia and China?... Obviously Ronald McDonald has turned into a charity of sorts helping out Uncle $am in his ailing "health" these dayz!...

SUPER SIZE ME!... Cause I'm not lovin it anymore!... I'm needin it!!!!

joego1 , 52 minutes ago link

If Americans want to wear shoes they can make them or have a robot make them. Manufacturing can happen in the U.S. **** what Steve Jobs told Oblamy .

ElBarto , 1 hour ago link

I've never understood this "jobs aren't coming back" argument. Do you really think that it will stop tariffs? They're happening. Better start preparing.

ZakuKommander , 1 hour ago link

Oh, right, tariffs WILL bring back American jobs! Then why didn't the Administration impose them fully in 2017? Why negotiate at all; just impose all the tariffs!?! lol

Haboob , 1 hour ago link

Pepe is correct as usual. Even if America tariffs the world the jobs aren't coming back as corporations will be unable to turn profits in such a highly taxed country like America would be. What could happen however is America can form an internal free market again going isolationist with new home grown manufacturing.

Gonzogal , 41 minutes ago link

You VERY obviously have ZERO knowledge of Chinas history and its discoveries/inventions etc USED BY THE WEST.

I suggest that you keep your eyes open for "History Erased-China" on Y Tube. The series shows what would happen in todays world if countries and their contributions to the world did not happen.

here is a preview: https://youtu.be/b6PJxuheWfk

[May 13, 2019] Americans probably don't understand Russia. Americans don't even mostly understand their own history.

Notable quotes:
"... Americans have made this clear twice: in the election of Donald J. Trump and in the equally unexpected rise of Ross Perot, an unprecedentedly successful Third Party candidate in the Nineties who rocketed to prominence by boldly condemning "the giant sucking sound of jobs going across the border to Mexico." ..."
"... Maybe, Perot would have done the same thing as Trump if he had made it to the White House. But people like Ann Coulter are popular because -- like Perot -- they articulate in no uncertain terms crucial, popular points that most politicians are just too cowering to even address verbally, much less redressing voters' grievances with any real action. ..."
May 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

Endgame Napoleon , says: May 9, 2019 at 9:26 pm GMT

Americans probably don't understand Russia. Americans don't even mostly understand their own history. With little education in our system of constitutional governance in formerly politically apathetic -- now Woke -- public schools bereft of civics classes, the lack of historical grounding is not surprising.

One thing Americans do understand, though, is the need to stop the mass flow of welfare-assisted immigration, curbing the illegal kind entirely and reducing the legal kind significantly. Americans have made this clear twice: in the election of Donald J. Trump and in the equally unexpected rise of Ross Perot, an unprecedentedly successful Third Party candidate in the Nineties who rocketed to prominence by boldly condemning "the giant sucking sound of jobs going across the border to Mexico."

It just does not matter what Americans want in our rigged system. Whatever we vote for, mostly for economic reasons but also a few other good reasons, Neoliberal economic Elites ignore it, pursuing their own economic interests once in office.

Maybe, Perot would have done the same thing as Trump if he had made it to the White House. But people like Ann Coulter are popular because -- like Perot -- they articulate in no uncertain terms crucial, popular points that most politicians are just too cowering to even address verbally, much less redressing voters' grievances with any real action.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/05/08/ann-coulter-the-way-we-were/

On the campaign trail, Trump cleverly sidestepped the issue of immigration with mocking comedy that could be conveniently repackaged in case of any victory. It was just a matter of interpretation: whether you heard more Build The Wall or more Big Beautiful Door in the wall in Trump's thunderous speeches. Trump's voters heard Build The Wall, and many did not show up to vote for Republicans in the midterms, whereas the Cheap Labor Lobby & the corporate donor class heard Big Beautiful Door.

[May 11, 2019] America s Industrial Gold Rush is Over

Notable quotes:
"... I see a lot of people saying, "They should just move to where the jobs are." 1) They would need accurate and defined information about where the jobs are that are looking for their skills 2) They would need some money to get there 3) They would need a place to stay and the rents and mortages are sky high 'where the jobs are' 4) They would have to be welcome. Two previous mass migrations within the USA come to mind: Black Americans out of the South and the dust bowl migrations to California. They were not welcomed with "open arms". ..."
"... I think the author understates the importance of Corporations being Good Citizens and Good Persons. ..."
"... My father was selected to go to Akron for training and if he passed the tests and did well in the training he might get a chance at Managing a Firestone Store. He was gone for weeks at a time for this process and was even required to go to Akron for more training after becoming a store manager. My father was an intelligent person but did not have a college degree. But I can see now that Firestone did an outstanding job training their store managers in all aspects of the job. Just think about that for a while. ..."
"... Corporations today hate themselves because its only about the money. I guess the point I am trying to make is this loss of Corporate Responsibility to the Nation and its Citizens was something that did exist but is now long gone. ..."
"... All across the West you can find old ghost towns. Towns that flourished until the gold or silver ran out of the local hill. The towns then were deserted. The similar thing can happen when a major employer runs out of "gold'. What the article ignores is all of the other reasons towns die. ..."
"... I would much rather rural stay rural and not become urban. There is more to the quality of life than a constant red hot economy. ..."
"... "The schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, liberals get elected and raise taxes, etc." One only needs to look at Kansas to see that this sentence is flawed. It needs to be changed and re-ordered to properly represent cause and effect. "Conservatives cut taxes, the schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, etc." ..."
"... The days of being qualified for good, well paying work without having more than a mediocre high school are in the past. This doesn't necessarily mean college because the trades require more education than ever before. Cutting school funding to pay for tax cuts is a loser's game. Trickle down economics has failed. ..."
May 11, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

I recently read and reviewed Tim Carney's excellent book Alienated America , a sort of combination of the "how we got Trump" genre with the sociological works of researchers like Robert Putnam and Charles Murray. Carney's exploration of the Trump phenomenon, and his grappling with the timeless question of economic security versus personal responsibility in regard to the formation of virtue, family, and community, are among the best you'll find. There is a deeper subtext in his book, however, that is not excavated. But first, a quick recap.

As in most treatments of inequality, geographic immobility, deindustrialization, and related issues, Alienated America features the requisite visits to faded old towns with ghostly main streets, and paeans to the blue-collar jobs that once allowed men with high school educations to comfortably own homes, raise families, and retire with pensions.

Through a long analysis, including a fascinating visit to a fracking camp in North Dakota -- awash in money but utterly lacking in neighborliness and community -- Carney concludes that wealth alone does not produce human flourishing. It is rather community and what social researchers call "civil society" that makes the American Dream possible. Obviously, money helps, but it is not sufficient, nor, in Carney's telling, even necessary.

... ... ...

Indeed, large numbers of human settlements never do, and never have . A one-dimensional, economically undiversified city is essentially a housing tract for a factory or a wharf or whatever industry drives its economy. What is left when that economic engine breaks down? A company town without a company. This is the fate that has befallen many of America's declining places, and it is hard to argue that this economic reality doesn't play a direct role in the decline of the family and of civil society. Is this a "materialist" explanation? Perhaps. But it may also be true.

There are those who admirably hope and work for revival, for restoration in places like Gary, Detroit, or any number of gutted small towns. But many of the buildings in these ghostly, empty blocks, even with their mighty and almost pleasantly timeworn facades, are far beyond the point where renovation is economical. For now, poverty is a sort of preservative. More money, for many hollowed-out cities, would simply mean more demolition.

To urbanist and declinist James Howard Kunstler, it may simply be the case that the national gold rush of petroleum-fueled industrial growth is over . If this is the case, the crisis of declining America is a structural, inexorable economic reality on the order of the Industrial Revolution itself.

... ... ...

The unwinding of rural and post-industrial America is a human tragedy, not to be written off, much less tacitly celebrated. Yet the facts of the post-industrial landscape may not care about remaining working-class feelings. This does not mean that any of these places " deserve to die ." But it may well mean that their collapse is beyond the ability of policy -- or church -- to alter.

Addison Del Mastro is assistant editor of The American Conservative . He tweets at @ad_mastro .

Tim , says: May 9, 2019 at 6:56 pm

Interesting and probably spot on. It doesn't take a degree in economics or history to understand how prosperity came and went; a passing knowledge of the 20th century will suffice. Dating back to the '20s we experienced a classic example of the boom/bust cycle, with the bust of the 30s lasting basically the entire decade. The good times rwith the onset of WWII and continued afterward because we, of all the major combatant nations, actually experienced minimal economic, social, and cultural disruption. The devastation elsewhere was sufficient to provide us a head-start worth a couple decades of strong growth. It wound down around the beginning of the 70s, coincident with the end of the Vietnam War. We retained some strong advantages, though, and they were sufficient to provide more growth – on paper at least – even as today's yawning income-distribution gap began to open up. The the Cold War ended and the days of free-trade saving the world (aka 'Globalism') commenced. It seemed great for awhile but now we're left holding an empty bag and the rest of the world has sidelined our old industrial workforce through off-shoring for the sake of cheaper labor. Nope, there's no turning back.
LarsX , says: May 9, 2019 at 9:30 pm
"Yet the facts of the post-industrial landscape may not care about remaining working-class feelings."

Well, somebody sure as hell better care about working-class feelings or Trump will only be act one.

JonF , says: May 10, 2019 at 6:20 am
Re: The revival of the American Dream requires the re-churching of America.

Maybe, but it also requires jobs paying a living wage that offer a reasonable degree of long-term security (It's the latter is lacking in short-lived fracking boom towns)

LouB , says: May 10, 2019 at 10:37 am
Having lived in the inner Chicago burbs since the mid 1970's I have watched Chicago turn from being an industrial powerhouse to a have and have not economy. If you're working in professional/service sector or part of the management of multinational globalist activity you're doing reasonably well. What's swept under the rug is that Chicago and their ilk hide the vast swaths of decayed blight and human warehousing with pretty downtown / privileged few neighborhoods. Most of our once great second city serves little purpose other than to provide housing for the poverty class. So called "Revitalization" only provides window dressing for the parade of the chosen few.

Prior to living in Chicago, my folks lived in a small city in western IL that was a poster child for the small town decay referred to above that Mr. Williamson thinks should die.

The town was famous for their productivity. Civic pride was evident in most all aspects of community life there. A major steel mill anchored the economy as well as numerous smaller hardware manufacturers. The steel mill went belly up, the hardware manufacturers became distributors of Asian made goods.

The gravy train just dried up. Times aren't so good now for the town that holds so many fond memories for me. Progress. I guess.

Kent , says: May 10, 2019 at 11:08 am
@hooly:

"Americans are the descendants of people who crossed oceans and continents for a better life, why are Americans who live in this dying towns so different? I just don't get it."

Because there is no longer a place with a better life. People left families and homes because life could be dramatically better someplace else.

An unemployed steel-worker used to making $60,000/year in a $100,000 house isn't going to find life somehow better making $8/hour as a barista in San Francisco with a $2000/month rent.

LT , says: May 10, 2019 at 11:31 am
I see a lot of people saying, "They should just move to where the jobs are."
1) They would need accurate and defined information about where the jobs are that are looking for their skills
2) They would need some money to get there
3) They would need a place to stay and the rents and mortages are sky high 'where the jobs are'
4) They would have to be welcome. Two previous mass migrations within the USA come to mind: Black Americans out of the South and the dust bowl migrations to California. They were not welcomed with "open arms".
Tick Tock , says: May 10, 2019 at 12:09 pm
First let me say that I agree with the author almost 90+%. But I think the author understates the importance of Corporations being Good Citizens and Good Persons. That is clearly what has happened to America. As the son of a former Firestone Store Manager, I can attest that Firestone trained all of their store managers in Akron, OH.

My father was selected to go to Akron for training and if he passed the tests and did well in the training he might get a chance at Managing a Firestone Store. He was gone for weeks at a time for this process and was even required to go to Akron for more training after becoming a store manager. My father was an intelligent person but did not have a college degree. But I can see now that Firestone did an outstanding job training their store managers in all aspects of the job. Just think about that for a while.

The Company cared what the Company looked like everywhere, not just in Akron, OH. There was almost no turnover in my father's store of employees. He was finally burnt out from dealing with the public in retail sales but they promoted him to District Manager a job that he kept till he passed away. No employer today gives a crap about any employee or any client. Of course you can't learn to love someone else till you learn to love yourself. Corporations today hate themselves because its only about the money. I guess the point I am trying to make is this loss of Corporate Responsibility to the Nation and its Citizens was something that did exist but is now long gone.

While some will surely say I am crazy, I strongly believe that a very high progressive tax rate on individuals and corporations would help to change this attitude and at least get money into circulation. We also have to remove the corrupt and criminal group that has taken over the US Corporations and with that the Governments both National and Local or the US is doomed.

Steve M , says: May 10, 2019 at 12:53 pm
All across the West you can find old ghost towns. Towns that flourished until the gold or silver ran out of the local hill. The towns then were deserted. The similar thing can happen when a major employer runs out of "gold'. What the article ignores is all of the other reasons towns die.

The schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, liberals get elected and raise taxes, etc. A town can survive with a big company leaving, but if all of the social factors cause the best, brightest and hardest working people to pull up roots and leave, maybe the town didn't die, it committed suicide.

Johann , says: May 10, 2019 at 2:36 pm
Spot on Daniel P. Donnelly!

I would much rather rural stay rural and not become urban. There is more to the quality of life than a constant red hot economy. And really, today, many rural areas are more rural than they were a generation ago. Yes, farms are bigger and so there are fewer people on more land and so many small rural towns have dried up. Personally, I love it. More room to hunt and fish, less hectic, more fresh air, and more freedom.

LFC , says: May 10, 2019 at 2:37 pm
"The schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, liberals get elected and raise taxes, etc." One only needs to look at Kansas to see that this sentence is flawed. It needs to be changed and re-ordered to properly represent cause and effect. "Conservatives cut taxes, the schools go to hell, the crime goes way up, etc."

The days of being qualified for good, well paying work without having more than a mediocre high school are in the past. This doesn't necessarily mean college because the trades require more education than ever before. Cutting school funding to pay for tax cuts is a loser's game. Trickle down economics has failed.

[May 06, 2019] Bernie's Degeneracy That's Democracy For Ya by Ilana Mercer

May 06, 2019 | www.unz.com

Multiculturalism means that you confer political privileges on many an individual whose illiberal practices run counter to, even undermine, the American political tradition.

Radical leaders across the U.S. quite seriously consider Illegal immigrants as candidates for the vote -- and for every other financial benefit that comes from the work of American citizens.

The rights of all able-bodied idle individuals to an income derived from labor not their own: That, too, is a debate that has arisen in democracy, where the demos rules like a despot.

But then moral degeneracy is inherent in raw democracy. The best political thinkers, including America's constitution-makers, warned a long time ago that mass, egalitarian society would thus degenerate.

What Bernie Sanders prescribes for the country -- unconditional voting -- is but an extension of "mass franchise," which was feared by the greatest thinkers on Democracy. Prime Minister George Canning of Britain, for instance.

Canning, whose thought is distilled in Russell Kirk's magnificent exegesis, "The Conservative Mind," thought that "the franchise should be accorded to persons and classes insofar as they possess the qualifications for right judgment and are worthy members of their particular corporations."

By "corporations," Canning (1770-1827) meant something quite different to our contemporary, community-killing multinationals.

"Corporations," in the nomenclature of the times, meant very plainly in "the spirit of cooperation, based upon the idea of a neighborhood. [C]ities, parishes, townships, professions, and trades are all the corporate bodies that constitute the state."

To the extent that an individual citizen is a decent member of these " little platoons " (Edmund Burke's iridescent term), he may be considered, as Canning saw it, for political participation.

"If voting becomes a universal and arbitrary right," cautioned Canning, "citizens become mere political atoms, rather than members of venerable corporations; and in time this anonymous mass of voters will degenerate into pure democracy," which, in reality is "the enthronement of demagoguery and mediocrity." ("The Conservative Mind," p. 131.)

That's us. Demagoguery and mediocrity are king in contemporary democracies, where the organic, enduring, merit-based communities extolled by Canning, no longer exists and are no longer valued.

This is the point at which America finds itself and against which William Lecky, another brilliant British political philosopher and politician, argued.

The author of "Democracy and Liberty" (1896) predicted that "the continual degradation of the suffrage" through "mass franchise" would end in "a new despotism."

Then as today, radical, nascent egalitarians, who championed the universal vote abhorred by Lecky, attacked "institution after institution," harbored "systematic hostility" toward "owners of landed property" and private property and insisted that "representative institutions" and the franchise be extended to all irrespective of "circumstance and character."

... ... ... "

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She is the author of Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed " (June, 2016). She's back on Twitter , after being suspended, and is also on Facebook , Gab & YouTube


imbroglio , says: April 27, 2019 at 1:24 pm GMT

The franchise should be granted by whom? You're forgetting the 800 pound gorilla and where he sits when he enters the room. Franchises and every other grant are granted by those who have the power to grant them.

Canning's "organic, enduring, merit-based communities" will emerge, in ghastly form, as the solipsistic constituencies of identity politics. Why do people like Omar laugh at America and Americans? "Here's a people so stupid as to clasp the adder to its breast. You're clasping? I'm biting."

Bernie is utopian. Utopians do terrible things if and when they have the power to do them. But you can't fault him for insincerity.

The younger Tsarnaev who hid out near my home town was doing what his older brother told him to do assuming that the bombing wasn't a false flag. Not an excuse. Only to say the kid had no political convictions and probably wouldn't bother to vote if he could.

anonymous [340] Disclaimer , says: April 27, 2019 at 2:01 pm GMT
Sanders is just a wine and cheese socialist, totally an armchair theorist. He has no background in actually doing anything besides being involved in politics which has provided a living for him. It's doubtful he could run a couple of Walmarts. This is his last go-around and he's out to see how much in contributions he can garner. Pushing the edge, theoretically of course, keeps him in the conversation. He's worthless but such is the state of politics where characters like him, Biden, and the rest of the Dem lineup could be taken seriously. Just one big clown show.
hamtok , says: May 5, 2019 at 6:15 pm GMT
@Jim Bob Lassiter Yes, but, his wife could steal money from a collapsing college to serve her daughter. Corruption must run in the family as Bernie has been conspicuously silent on this subject. He must feel the Burn!

[May 05, 2019] Are Women, Like New Zealand's Ardern -- Or Gays, Like U.S. Dems' Buttigieg -- REALLY Suited To Politics by Lance Welton

May 05, 2019 | www.unz.com

It is a simple fact that females are more "emotionally unstable" than males. Psychological analyses all agree that by the time females reach adulthood, they are significantly higher in the personality trait "Neuroticism" than are males of the same age. [See Age differences in personality traits from 10 to 65: Big Five domains and facets in a large cross-sectional sample , by C. Soto et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011].

Neuroticism is characterized by "feeling negative feelings strongly," with the opposite of Neuroticism being "Emotional Stability." Such "Negative Feelings" include sadness, anger and jealousy. But females score particularly strongly on "anxiety" -- possibly because, in prehistory, the children of anxious, protective mothers were less likely to get seriously injured. But the key point is that the stereotype is correct.

And people are also correct to think that women -- that is, those who, on average, score higher in Neuroticism -- will be less able to cope in the brutal world of power-politics.

Successful politicians -- the ones who get into their country's legislature but don't make it to the very top -- score significantly lower than the general public in Neuroticism, according to research published in the leading psychology journal Personality and Individual Differences . [ The personalities of politicians: A big five survey of American legislators , by Richard Hanania , 2017]

And this research reveals something very interesting indeed. These "successful politicians," while being more emotionally stable than most voters, score higher in the personality traits Extraversion ("feeling positive feelings strongly"), Conscientiousness ("rule-following and impulse control") and Agreeableness ("altruism and empathy").

But this does not tend to be true of those who reach the very top of politics -- and especially not of those who are perceived as great, world-changing statesmen. They tend to be highly intelligent but above average on quite the opposite personality traits – psychopathology and Narcissism [ Creativity and psychopathology , by F. Post British Journal of Psychiatry, 1994]. However, high Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Extraversion are true of successful politicians in general.

In much the same way, run-of-the-mill scientists are above average in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness but genius scientists combine being relatively low in these traits with stratospheric intelligence. This gives them creativity, drive and fearless to be original. [ At Our Wits' End , by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie, 2018, Ch. 6]

This is important, because these are typically female traits: women score higher than men in Agreeableness, Consciousness and Extraversion. This means that, in general, we would expect the relatively few females who do reach high political office to be fairly atypical women: low in mental instability and certainly moderately low in altruism, empathy or both -- think Margaret Thatcher , who according to Keith Patching in his 2006 book Leadership, Character and Strategy, was organizing her impending Bar Finals from her hospital bed having just had twins; or even Theresa May. Neither of these British Prime Ministers have (or had) neither of whom have particularly "feminine" personalities, though they may reflect (or have reflected) very pronounced Conscientiousness, a trait associated with social conservatism. [ Resolving the "Conscientiousness Paradox" , by Scott A. McGreal, Psychology Today , July 27, 2015]

But, sometimes, a female politician's typically anxiety will apparently be " compensated " for i.e. overwhelmed by her having massively high Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. This likely occurred in the case of Jacinda Ardern, who suffers from intense anxiety to the point of having being hospitalized.

This will become a problem in a time of crisis when, as happened with Ardern, such a politician will become over-emotional. This, combined with very high empathy, would seem to partly explain Ardern's self-identification with New Zealand's Muslims to the extent of donning a head scarf and breaking down in public.

But it also explains why females, on average, tend to be more left-wing than males and more open to refugees. They feel empathy and even sadness for the plight of the refugees more strongly than do men [ Young women are more left wing than men, study reveals, by Rosalind Shorrocks, The Conversation, May 3, 2018

This means that there will be a tendency for females to push politics Leftwards and make it more about empathy and other such "feelings." It also means that, in a serious crisis, they may well even empathize with the enemy.

In that gay men are generally feminized males, this problem help would to explain why people are skeptical of the suitability of homosexual men for supposedly "masculine" professions (such as politics) [ The extreme male brain theory of autism, by Simon Baron-Cohen, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2002], sometimes including political office. [ The Hidden Psychology of Voting, by Zaria Gorvett, BBC News , May 6, 2015]

Supporters of gay Democrat Pete Buttigieg 's campaign for his party's presidential nomination [ Protester Shouts "Sodom and Gomorrah" at Gay 2020 Dem Pete Buttigieg, by Tyler O'Neil, PJ Media, April 17, 2019] should, perhaps, take note . . .


freedom-cat , says: April 29, 2019 at 7:34 am GMT

What about Science and Technology? Are they suited for that? Maybe science could use a little more wisdom and conscientiousness.

J Robert Oppenheimer, the genius Physics professor, was known to be "temperamental" and not suited for high stress assignment. So, along with several other genius's, some who came over from Germany, he presided over the making of the A-bomb. Hallelujah just kidding.

There's an excellent book that covers J Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the A-bomb called "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer".
The guy was totally volatile and emotionally unstable. While in school he left a knife in an apple on his teacher's desk that he did not like.

After the bomb was dropped on JAPAN, in a documentary much later, he is shown with tears in his eyes quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds".

A couple decades or so later there were interviews of some of these guys who were part of the project and they were crying. They had the GENIUS to build such a monstrosity, but seemed to have failed to understand the impact it would make on the world; breaking down in tears when talking about it. They had no clue or ability of Foreknowledge. What would have happened if more women were on the team? Would we all be annihilated by now? Or maybe no a-bomb would have been made? Who knows .

Ray Woodcock , says: Website April 29, 2019 at 6:46 pm GMT
Interesting. And I appreciate the citations to sources. But I find that interpretation of psychiatric traits is a bit like reading tea leaves: there is a temptation to cherry-pick one's preferred quotes and conclusions. For me, this article would have been stronger if it had followed a recognized authority's path through the Big Five personality traits.
SOL , says: April 29, 2019 at 9:24 pm GMT
Feminism is dyscivic.
You can't handle the truth , says: May 1, 2019 at 4:29 am GMT
It seems rather unfair to pick a moron like Jacinda Ardern to represent all female politicians. And even though when it comes to foreign policy, I'll take a Tulsi Gabbard over any male politician like Rubio, Graham, Schumer, Pence, Trump, Pompeo, Bolton any day, I will have to say, in general, you're right, the crop of female politicians we've seen today do not inspire confidence in women as politicians, not just in the US but Merkel, May yikes. But women had been good heads of states in the past, like Margaret Thatcher and Queen Victoria. But they were the exceptions rather than the rule.

Also agree that gays make for bad politicians. Even though their moral degeneracy and drama queen antics make politics look like a natural fit, their extreme narcissism means they will always get sidetracked and can't stay focused. The only thing any gay man cares about is his gayness. Plus no one outside the western world will ever give them an ounce of respect. Picture Buttplug showing up in a muslim country as POTUS, with his husband! Either they'll get stoned to death which will get us into war or the US will be the laughing stock of the world. And then of course he'd have to go bomb some country just to prove his manhood, getting us into more unnecessary wars. No gays for politics, ever.

Anon [192] Disclaimer , says: May 1, 2019 at 4:32 am GMT
Are Homosexuals Suited for Politics?

Apparently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harden–Eulenburg_affair

https://www.google.com/search?q=lavender+mafia

Oh, you really meant to ask Are Homosexuals Suited for Governance?

Dan Hayes , says: May 1, 2019 at 4:49 am GMT
@freedom-cat freedom-cat:

There has been a very successful effort to paint Oppenheimer as a secular saint. But Princeton's John Archibald Wheeler stated that he never trusted Oppenheimer. So what? Because JAW was notorious for otherwise saying nice things about almost everyone else, especially his academic rivals. Also JAW happily and productively worked on the US H-bomb project which was embargoed by Oppenheimer and his many disciples.

SafeNow , says: May 1, 2019 at 4:49 am GMT
I agree with the point made above, that, in our nuclear age, behavior in a crisis is the most important personality trait. I think that men's crisis-calmness can suffer from macho/ego, and with women, from anxiety and panic. Democratic candidate Amy K reportedly throws things when angry, and to me, this is disqualifying. Assuming no nuclear destruction, the analysis is this: We have devolved into a gigantic banana republic/soft dictatorship; whose personality constellation is best suited to politics in a banana republic?
Thomm , says: May 5, 2019 at 4:34 am GMT
No female leader of any country, ever, has been particularly good, except one.

And that one was only because she was fortunate enough to be the PM of the UK at the same time as Ronald Reagan was President of the US. He was handholding every single decision of hers. Reagan was effectively running two countries (the #1 and #4 largest GDPs in the world at that time). At least she was smart enough to let him tell her exactly what to do.

Given this dataset, no, women are not suitable for very high political office.

Nicolás Palacios Navarro , says: Website May 5, 2019 at 4:39 am GMT
Is Ardern still wearing that hijab in order to cynically manipulate her insipid voters? Anyway

I have come to realize that women, on the whole, tend to be poorly suited to many traditionally male-doninated activities. Politics, for sure. Very few good, dependable female politicians come to mind. But the list at my immediate recall that are emotional, vapid, destructive slobs -- Angela Merkel, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Eva Perón, Michelle Bachelet, Isabel Allende Bussi, Annie Lööf, Anne Hidalgo, Ursula von der Leyen, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Rashida Tlaïb, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, et al -- seems practically limitless. Not only is the fairer sex not adept at political leadership, but they are ill-suited to even vote rationally. The weakness of Anglo-American men's resolve against the suffragettes was the beginning of the end.

Preeminent excellence seems to elude the grasp of women in a number of other careers. For whatever reason, there are few women writers of prose fiction that can equal the heights men have reached in that field. This despite the fact that the contemporary literary industry is overwhelmingly dominated by women. True, there are the rare instances of female literary transcendence in the guise of a Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst, Okamoto Kanoko, Murasaki Shikibu, Unica Zürn, and so on. But they tend to be the exceptions that prove the rule. (On the other hand, women seem naturally gifted at lyric expression, with great female poets existing since at least Sappho.)

Orchestral conducting, too, is a field wherein women cannot produce an equal or better of, say, a Furtwängler, Mengelberg, or Beecham. There are plenty of them around today -- all lousy. (To be fair, though, nearly all living conductors today -- male or female -- are lousy.)

Teacup , says: May 5, 2019 at 5:03 am GMT
I'm a university degree holding woman, of the traditional type with XX chromosomes, and since I was a teen some forty years ago, I've thought that men are better suited for politics. Not that a few women can't do it successfully (Thatcher and British Queens for examples) but that it's a profession far more suited to men, being as many are more naturally mentally strong, steady and rational, and not as given to bursts of emotion and utopian fancies as women can often be. In fact, I'd be delighted if only U.S. born citizen male property owners over the age of 25 were allowed to vote. How's that for being a Dissident?

[May 05, 2019] Does America Have an Economy or Any Sense of Reality by Paul Craig Roberts

Notable quotes:
"... We are having a propaganda barrage about the great Trump economy. We have been hearing about the great economy for a decade while the labor force participation rate declined, real family incomes stagnated, and debt burdens rose. The economy has been great only for large equity owners whose stock ownership benefited from the trillions of dollars the Fed poured into financial markets and from buy-backs by corporations of their own stocks. ..."
"... Federal Reserve data reports that a large percentage of the younger work force live at home with parents, because the jobs available to them are insufficient to pay for an independent existence. How then can the real estate, home furnishings, and appliance markets be strong? ..."
"... In contrast, Robotics, instead of displacing labor, eliminates it. Unlike jobs offshoring which shifted jobs from the US to China, robotics will cause jobs losses in both countries. If consumer incomes fall, then demand for output also falls, and output will fall. Robotics, then, is a way to shrink gross domestic product. ..."
"... The tech nerds and corporations who cannot wait for robotics to reduce labor cost in their profits calculation are incapable of understanding that when masses of people are without jobs, there is no consumer income with which to purchase the products of robots. The robots themselves do not need housing, food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, and medical care. The mega-rich owners of the robots cannot possibly consume the robotic output. An economy without consumers is a profitless economy. ..."
"... A country incapable of dealing with real problems has no future. ..."
May 02, 2019 | www.unz.com

We are having a propaganda barrage about the great Trump economy. We have been hearing about the great economy for a decade while the labor force participation rate declined, real family incomes stagnated, and debt burdens rose. The economy has been great only for large equity owners whose stock ownership benefited from the trillions of dollars the Fed poured into financial markets and from buy-backs by corporations of their own stocks.

I have pointed out for years that the jobs reports are fabrications and that the jobs that do exist are lowly paid domestic service jobs such as waitresses and bartenders and health care and social assistance. What has kept the American economy going is the expansion of consumer debt, not higher pay from higher productivity. The reported low unemployment rate is obtained by not counting discouraged workers who have given up on finding a job.

Do you remember all the corporate money that the Trump tax cut was supposed to bring back to America for investment? It was all BS. Yesterday I read reports that Apple is losing its trillion dollar market valuation because Apple is using its profits to buy back its own stock. In other words, the demand for Apple's products does not justify more investment. Therefore, the best use of the profit is to repurchase the equity shares, thus shrinking Apple's capitalization. The great economy does not include expanding demand for Apple's products.

I read also of endless store and mall closings, losses falsely attributed to online purchasing, which only accounts for a small percentage of sales.

Federal Reserve data reports that a large percentage of the younger work force live at home with parents, because the jobs available to them are insufficient to pay for an independent existence. How then can the real estate, home furnishings, and appliance markets be strong?

When a couple of decades ago I first wrote of the danger of jobs offshoring to the American middle class, state and local government budgets, and pension funds, idiot critics raised the charge of Luddite.

The Luddites were wrong. Mechanization raised the productivity of labor and real wages, but jobs offshoring shifts jobs from the domestic economy to abroad. Domestic labor is displaced, but overseas labor gets the jobs, thus boosting jobs there. In other words, labor income declines in the country that loses jobs and rises in the country to which the jobs are offshored. This is the way American corporations spurred the economic development of China. It was due to jobs offshoring that China developed far more rapidly than the CIA expected.

In contrast, Robotics, instead of displacing labor, eliminates it. Unlike jobs offshoring which shifted jobs from the US to China, robotics will cause jobs losses in both countries. If consumer incomes fall, then demand for output also falls, and output will fall. Robotics, then, is a way to shrink gross domestic product.

The tech nerds and corporations who cannot wait for robotics to reduce labor cost in their profits calculation are incapable of understanding that when masses of people are without jobs, there is no consumer income with which to purchase the products of robots. The robots themselves do not need housing, food, clothing, entertainment, transportation, and medical care. The mega-rich owners of the robots cannot possibly consume the robotic output. An economy without consumers is a profitless economy.

One would think that there would be a great deal of discussion about the economic effects of robotics before the problems are upon us, just as one would think there would be enormous concern about the high tensions Washington has caused between the US and Russia and China, just as one would think there would be preparations for the adverse economic consequences of global warming, whatever the cause. Instead, the US, a country facing many crises, is focused on whether President Trump obstructed investigation of a crime that the special prosecutor said did not take place.

A country incapable of dealing with real problems has no future.

[May 04, 2019] Someone is getting a raise. It just isn't you

stackoverflow.com

As is usual, the headline economic number is always the rosiest number .

Wages for production and nonsupervisory workers accelerated to a 3.4 percent annual pace, signaling gains for lower-paid employees.

That sounds pretty good. Except for the part where it is a lie.
For starters, it doesn't account for inflation .

Labor Department numbers released Wednesday show that real average hourly earnings, which compare the nominal rise in wages with the cost of living, rose 1.7 percent in January on a year-over-year basis.

1.7% is a lot less than 3.4%.
While the financial news was bullish, the actual professionals took the news differently.

Wage inflation was also muted with average hourly earnings rising six cents, or 0.2% in April after rising by the same margin in March.
Average hourly earnings "were disappointing," said Ian Lyngen, head of U.S. rates strategy at BMO Capital Markets in New York.

Secondly, 1.7% is an average, not a median. For instance, none of this applied to you if you are an older worker .

Weekly earnings for workers aged 55 to 64 were only 0.8% higher in the first quarter of 2019 than they were in the first quarter of 2007, after accounting for inflation, they found. For comparison, earnings rose 4.7% during that same period for workers between the ages of 35 and 54.

On the other hand, if you worked for a bank your wages went up at a rate far above average. This goes double if you are in management.

Among the biggest standouts: commercial banks, which employ an estimated 1.3 million people in the U.S. Since Trump took office in January 2017, they have increased their average hourly wage at an annualized pace of almost 11 percent, compared with just 3.3 percent under Obama.

Finally, there is the reason for this incredibly small wage increase fo regular workers. Hint: it wasn't because of capitalism and all the bullsh*t jobs it creates. The tiny wage increase that the working class has seen is because of what the capitalists said was a terrible idea .

For Americans living in the 21 states where the federal minimum wage is binding, inflation means that the minimum wage has lost 16 percent of its purchasing power.

But elsewhere, many workers and employers are experiencing a minimum wage well above 2009 levels. That's because state capitols and, to an unprecedented degree, city halls have become far more active in setting their own minimum wages.
...
Averaging across all of these federal, state and local minimum wage laws, the effective minimum wage in the United States -- the average minimum wage binding each hour of minimum wage work -- will be $11.80 an hour in 2019. Adjusted for inflation, this is probably the highest minimum wage in American history.
The effective minimum wage has not only outpaced inflation in recent years, but it has also grown faster than typical wages. We can see this from the Kaitz index, which compares the minimum wage with median overall wages.

So if you are waiting for capitalism to trickle down on you, it's never going to happen. span y gjohnsit on Fri, 05/03/2019 - 6:21pm

Carolinas

Teachers need free speech protection

Thousands of South Carolina teachers rallied outside their state capitol Wednesday, demanding pay raises, more planning time, increased school funding -- and, in a twist, more legal protections for their freedom of speech
SC for Ed, the grassroots activist group that organized Wednesday's demonstration, told CNN that many teachers fear protesting or speaking up about education issues, worrying they'll face retaliation at work. Saani Perry, a teacher in Fort Mill, S.C., told CNN that people in his profession are "expected to sit in the classroom and stay quiet and not speak [their] mind."

To address these concerns, SC for Ed is lobbying for the Teachers' Freedom of Speech Act, which was introduced earlier this year in the state House of Representatives. The bill would specify that "a public school district may not willfully transfer, terminate or fail to renew the contract of a teacher because the teacher has publicly or privately supported a public policy decision of any kind." If that happens, teachers would be able to sue for three times their salary.

Teachers across the country are raising similar concerns about retaliation. Such fears aren't unfounded: Lawmakers in some states that saw strikes last year have introduced bills this year that would punish educators for skipping school to protest.

[May 02, 2019] If The U.S. Economy Is So Great, Why Are So Many Workers Miserable

May 02, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

If The U.S. Economy Is So Great, Why Are So Many Workers Miserable?

by Tyler Durden Thu, 05/02/2019 - 17:45 2 SHARES Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Millennial and generation Z workers are becoming increasingly miserable with their jobs and careers. Since we are told several times a day by the media that the economy is booming, why are so many young workers so disastrously melancholy all the time?

The mental well being of the American worker hit an all-time low in 2018, according to a report by Barron's . That's a bit shocking considering the economy is booming and wages are rising, right? Well, wages aren't rising that much, and much of the consumer spending is being put on credit cards , creating a vicious cycle of depression and consumerism that will repeat for a lot of folks.

Americans Are Financially And Mentally Unstable: Crippling Debt Is Linked To Chronic Depression

"When you're struggling with your mental health it can be much harder to stay in work or manage your spending, while being in debt can cause huge stress and anxiety – so the two issues feed off each other, creating a vicious cycle which can destroy lives," said Helen Undy the institute's chief executive. "Yet despite how connected these problems are, financial services rarely think about our mental health, and mental health services rarely consider what is happening with our money."

So why are we constantly being told everything is fine? The mainstream media loves to say that the U.S. is nearly ten years into one of the longest economic expansions in history, unemployment is the lowest it's been in almost half a century, and employees have more job choices than they've had in years. But there's just one problem. That's not actual truthful when taking all of the data into consideration. Sure, unemployment is low the way the government calculates it, but there's a reason for that. 102 million Americans are no longer "in the workforce" and therefore, unaccounted for.

Michael Snyder, who owns the Economic Collapse Blog s ays: "Sadly, the truth is that the rosy employment statistics that you are getting from the mainstream media are manufactured using smoke and mirrors."

When a working-age American does not have a job, the federal number crunchers put them into one of two different categories. Either they are categorized as "unemployed" or they are categorized as "not in the labor force".

But you have to add both of those categories together to get the total number of Americans that are not working.

Over the last decade, the number of Americans that are in the "unemployed" category has been steadily going down, but the number of Americans "not in the labor force" has been rapidly going up.

In both cases we are talking about Americans that do not have a job. It is just a matter of how the federal government chooses to categorize those individuals. – Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog

That could partially explain the misery some are feeling, but those who have jobs aren't happy either. They are often reeling from student loan and credit card debt. Being depressed makes shopping feel like a solution, but when the bill comes, the depression once again sets in making this a difficult cycle to break for so many just trying to scrape by.

Depression and suicide rates are rising sharply and other than putting the blame on superficial issues, researchers are at a loss as to the real reason why. But could it possibly be that as the elite globalists continue to take over the world and enslave mankind, people are realizing that they aren't meant to be controlled or manipulated, but meant to be free?

There's something we are all missing all around the globe. Could it possibly be free will and a life of freedom from theft and violent coercion and force that's missing?


Sick , 31 minutes ago link

Freedom to assemble is gone. That would be the only way for the awake people to make a change. Unfortunately everyone is glued to their electronics

CashMcCall , 57 minutes ago link

When even your own article lies to everyone... so the modern person that does well are those who lie the best and are the best con artists. Trump is an example. Low talent High con.

Example the US unemployment number.

Only the pool of unemployed that is Presently eligible for unemployment benefits is counted in the Unemployment number. That means self employed, commissioned workers, contractors etc are not included in the pool of unemployment even if they are out of work because they are unemployment ineligible.

Thus, over time, as unemployment benefits are lost, the unemployment pool shrinks. This is called a mathematical regression. How far does it shrink? To the point of equilibrium which is roughly 4% in which new persons enter the work force to the same extent of those losing benefits and being removed and become invisible.

Thus, Unemployment is a bogus number grossly understating truthful Unemployment. This method was first used under Obama and persists today under the Orange poser.

Nepotism and Affirmative action

Why would this make people unhappy? Chronic underemployment. Advancement is mostly by nepotism or affirmative action the flip side of the same coin. The incoming Harvard Class this year was 30% legacy student... and 30% affirmative action and the rest be damned. Happy?

Feminism has gripped the workplace.

Men hate working for female bosses. They don't trust them, they don't trust their judgment which often looks political and never logical. Men feel those women were promoted because of gender.

I saw this years ago in a clean room at National Semiconductor. A woman was put in charge of a team of roughly 30 white nerd males. She was at them constantly for not locking doors behind them and other menial infractions. She could not comprehend the complexity of the work or how inspiration operates but she would nag them and bully them.

At another facility there was a genius that would come to work and set up a sleeping bag and go to sleep under his desk. He was a Unix programmer and system engineer. So when something went wrong they would wake him and he would get up, solve the problem and go back to sleep.

Then the overstuffed string of pearls showed up as the new unit boss. She was infuriated that somebody would dare sleep on the clock and so blatantly. So she would harass him and wake him. Then one day she got so mad she started kicking him while he was sleeping. He grabbed his sleeping bag and briefcase and stormed out.

Ultimately the woman's boss took her to task and explained to her that it didn't matter if that employee slept under his desk because when he worked to solve problems only he could solve he saved the company millions. She was fired. As a token stipulation the sleeping genius came back and a sign was posted on his desk. "Kicking this employee is grounds for immediate dismissal."

Usually the nerd walks and just gets replaced by some diversity politician and string of pearls then sets the tone by making the workplace ****. Women simply are not as intelligent as men and pretending they are just wrecks morale of the people who are really intelligent. The rise of the shoulder padded woman string of pearls bully is a scourge to one and all.

bizznatch14 , 2 hours ago link

Simple answer: because people are spineless and terrible negotiators.

Long answer: for years the adage has been "do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" or "find a good job and never leave" or "work your way to the top" or "be a hard worker, trust your leadership, keep your head down, and don't make waves."

********.

If you do what you love, you'll learn to hate it. Welcome to misery.

Upward mobility doesn't happen unless you leave. If you're a good little productive worker drone, management has no incentive to give you more than 1-3% raises every year to keep you 'loyal.' Once you've wasted 20 or so years being a robot, welcome to misery.

Nobody gets promoted unless you're a useless ***-kisser who fails to be productive and hasn't done anything egregious enough to get canned. Once you've been passed by for that promotion you want enough times, welcome to misery.

The people making the decisions at the top are the useless ***-kissers that can't do what you do but they talk a good game. Most of them are case studies in the Peter Principle. Once you realize that the 'top' consists of nothing but fuckwads, welcome to misery.

The only way to get ahead and get what you want out of a career is to develop the skills you need and market yourself top someone who'll pay you what you're worth.

Develop strong negotiation skills early, know your market value, and don't be afraid of change.

Employer loyalty is a farce; if you think your employer is loyal to you, I've got some oceanfront property in New Mexico to sell you.

Interested_Observer , 2 hours ago link

All the good jobs are being taken over by "imported labor" who are getting paid 1/2 of what Americans are getting paid.

There is no longer upward mobility unless you are part of an Indian Mafia.

Enjoy working for these freaks who treat everyone like crap?

[Apr 28, 2019] Prisoners of Overwork A Dilemma by Peter Dorman

Highly recommended!
This is true about IT jobs. Probably even more then for lawyers. IT became plantation economy under neoliberalism.
Notable quotes:
"... mandatory overwork in professional jobs. ..."
"... The logical solution is some form of binding regulation. ..."
"... One place to start would be something like France's right-to-disconnect law . ..."
"... "the situation it describes is a classic prisoners dilemma." ..."
Apr 28, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

The New York Times has an illuminating article today summarizing recent research on the gender effects of mandatory overwork in professional jobs. Lawyers, people in finance and other client-centered occupations are increasingly required to be available round-the-clock, with 50-60 or more hours of work per week the norm. Among other costs, the impact on wage inequality between men and women is severe. Since women are largely saddled with primary responsibility for child care, even when couples ostensibly embrace equality on a theoretical level, the workaholic jobs are allocated to men. This shows up in dramatic differences between typical male and female career paths. The article doesn't discuss comparable issues in working class employment, but availability for last-minute changes in work schedules and similar demands are likely to impact men and women differentially as well.

What the article doesn't point out is that the situation it describes is a classic prisoners dilemma.* Consider law firms. They compete for clients, and clients prefer attorneys who are available on call, always prepared and willing to adjust to whatever schedule the client throws at them. Assume that most lawyers want sane, predictable work hours if they are offered without a severe penalty in pay. If law firms care about the well-being of their employees but also about profits, we have all the ingredients to construct a standard PD payoff matrix:

There is a penalty to unilateral cooperation, cutting work hours back to a work-life balance level. If your firm does it and the others don't, you lose clients to them.

There is a benefit to unilateral defection. If everyone else is cutting hours but you don't, you scoop up the lion's share of the clients.

Mutual cooperation is preferred to mutual defection. Law firms, we are assuming, would prefer a world in which overwork was removed from the contest for competitive advantage. They would compete for clients as before, but none would require their staff to put in soul-crushing hours. The alternative equilibrium, in which competition is still on the basis of the quality of work but everyone is on call 24/7 is inferior.

If the game is played once, mutual defection dominates. If it is played repeatedly there is a possibility for mutual cooperation to establish itself, but only under favorable conditions (which apparently don't exist in the world of NY law firms). The logical solution is some form of binding regulation.

The reason for bringing this up is that it strengthens the case for collective action rather than placing all the responsibility on individuals caught in the system, including for that matter individual law firms. Or, the responsibility is political, to demand constraints on the entire industry. One place to start would be something like France's right-to-disconnect law .

*I haven't read the studies by economists and sociologists cited in the article, but I suspect many of them make the same point I'm making here.

Sandwichman said...
"the situation it describes is a classic prisoners dilemma."

Now why didn't I think of that?

https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/04/zero-sum-foolery-4-of-4-wage-prisoners.html April 26, 2019 at 6:22 PM

[Apr 28, 2019] AI is software. Software bugs. Software doesn't autocorrect bugs. Men correct bugs. A bugging self-driving car leads its passengers to death. A man driving a car can steer away from death

Apr 28, 2019 | www.unz.com

Vojkan , April 27, 2019 at 7:42 am GMT

The infatuation with AI makes people overlook three AI's built-in glitches. AI is software. Software bugs. Software doesn't autocorrect bugs. Men correct bugs. A bugging self-driving car leads its passengers to death. A man driving a car can steer away from death. Humans love to behave in erratic ways, it is just impossible to program AI to respond to all possible erratic human behaviour. Therefore, instead of adapting AI to humans, humans will be forced to adapt to AI, and relinquish a lot of their liberty as humans. Humans have moral qualms (not everybody is Hillary Clinton), AI being strictly utilitarian, will necessarily be "psychopathic".

In short AI is the promise of communism raised by several orders of magnitude. Welcome to the "Brave New World".

Digital Samizdat , says: April 27, 2019 at 11:42 am GMT

@Vojkan You've raised some interesting objections, Vojkan. But here are a few quibbles:

1) AI is software. Software bugs. Software doesn't autocorrect bugs. Men correct bugs. A bugging self-driving car leads its passengers to death. A man driving a car can steer away from death.

Learn to code! Seriously, until and unless the AI devices acquire actual power over their human masters (as in The Matrix ), this is not as big a problem as you think. You simply test the device over and over and over until the bugs are discovered and worked out -- in other words, we just keep on doing what we've always done with software: alpha, beta, etc.

2) Humans love to behave in erratic ways, it is just impossible to program AI to respond to all possible erratic human behaviour. Therefore, instead of adapting AI to humans, humans will be forced to adapt to AI, and relinquish a lot of their liberty as humans.

There's probably some truth to that. This reminds me of the old Marshall McCluhan saying that "the medium is the message," and that we were all going to adapt our mode of cognition (somewhat) to the TV or the internet, or whatever. Yeah, to some extent that has happened. But to some extent, that probably happened way back when people first began domesticating horses and riding them. Human beings are 'programmed', as it were, to adapt to their environments to some extent, and to condition their reactions on the actions of other things/creatures in their environment.

However, I think you may be underestimating the potential to create interfaces that allow AI to interact with a human in much more complex ways, such as how another human would interact with human: sublte visual cues, pheromones, etc. That, in fact, was the essence of the old Turing Test, which is still the Holy Grail of AI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

3) Humans have moral qualms (not everybody is Hillary Clinton), AI being strictly utilitarian, will necessarily be "psychopathic".

I don't see why AI devices can't have some moral principles -- or at least moral biases -- programmed into them. Isaac Asimov didn't think this was impossible either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

reiner Tor , says: April 27, 2019 at 11:47 am GMT
@Digital Samizdat

You simply test the device over and over and over until the bugs are discovered and worked out -- in other words, we just keep on doing what we've always done with software: alpha, beta, etc.

Some bugs stay dormant for decades. I've seen one up close.

Digital Samizdat , says: April 27, 2019 at 11:57 am GMT
@reiner Tor

Well, you fix it whenever you find it!

That's a problem as old as programming; in fact, it's a problem as old as engineering itself. It's nothing new.

reiner Tor , says: April 27, 2019 at 12:11 pm GMT
@Digital Samizdat

What's new with AI is the amount of damage a faulty software multiplied many times over can do. My experience was pretty horrible (I was one of the two humans overseeing the system, but it was a pretty horrifying experience), but if the system was fully autonomous, it'd have driven my employer bankrupt.

Now I'm not against using AI in any form whatsoever; I also think that it's inevitable anyway. I'd support AI driving cars or flying planes, because they are likely safer than humans, though it's of course changing a manageable risk for a very small probability tail risk. But I'm pretty worried about AI in general.

[Apr 16, 2019] Trump's Immigration Choice Kushner or Coulter

Notable quotes:
"... Jared is more focused on protecting Israel's expanding borders from Palestinians remaining in their homes and homeland, than protecting America's borders. ..."
Apr 15, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

President Donald Trump was elected on a platform of America policing its own borders, not the world. His reelection may depend on how well he has fulfilled those campaign promises, which distinguished him from the bipartisan political class he so eloquently described as the swamp.

So far, the results are not encouraging. While Trump campaigned against regime change in the Middle East, his administration has been coy about whether the authorization of military force to respond to the 9/11 attacks covers toppling the government of Iran mere days after labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. Meanwhile, the situation at the border is deteriorating, with the number of illegal crossings approaching the bad old days of the early to mid-2000s. More of these immigrants are likely staying in the country as the composition of new migrant inflows increasingly shifts from single men to families with children .

Single men can be more easily detained and quickly removed from the United States. Families with children and unaccompanied minors face a different set of rules -- and, as the White House learned last year, create a different set of political problems .

One key difference remains, however: on foreign policy, Trump is receiving advice almost exclusively from officials whose instincts run counter to the "America First" agenda from the 2016 campaign. On immigration and border security, there is more of a split . That's why there's so much at stake in Trump's recent immigration shake-up.

The ouster of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and her deputy Claire Grady has been widely reported as an example of senior advisor Stephen Miller consolidating control of his immigration portfolio. But it may not be Miller time just yet. The moves come after Jared Kushner, the senior advisor who is also Trump's son-in-law, has been pushing a plan to increase legal immigration .

Trump has praised Miller as "excellent," "wonderful," and "brilliant," but clarified that he alone runs the show on immigration. (It's possible that some of the sourcing for stories putting Miller's fingerprints all over the Nielsen sacking actually came from his own enemies inside the White House.) Trump described Kushner's unannounced immigration ideas as "very exciting, very important." The president recently called for increased immigration himself, ad-libbing this line in his last State of the Union address: "I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come legally."

Yet a bill Trump endorsed at the White House last year would eventually cut legal immigration in half. Freshman Senator Josh Hawley joined Trump-aligned Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue to reintroduce this bill in an apparent attempt to thwart Kushner's coming push to expand immigration. On the stump, Trump has railed against "chain migration" and picking immigrants by "lottery" rather than a "merit-based system." But like a lot of Republicans, he tends to focus on legality versus illegality, rather than the number and composition of immigrants entering the country overall.

There was a point last year when a sufficient number of Democrats -- mostly red-state senators up for reelection that November, like Hawley's since-vanquished opponent Claire McCaskill -- might have voted to fund Trump's border wall in exchange for the reinstatement of Barack Obama's amnesty for young illegal immigrants who arrived in the country as minors. The White House, on advice often attributed to Miller, floated a different compromise. Amnesty would be provided for an even larger number of young undocumented immigrants in exchange for the legal immigration reforms in the Cotton-Perdue RAISE Act and border security measures including wall funding.

Immigration Puts Trump's Legacy at Risk Blame Congress for Trump's Immigration Power Grab

Politically, trading the wall for Dreamers would have given Trump a high-profile border victory at the cost of a much smaller amnesty than the Gang of Eight plan. The failure to take that deal, assuming Democrats would have actually accepted it, will always be regarded as a mistake . On the merits, however, there were strong reasons to offset the amnesty with immigration cuts elsewhere while adopting reforms that would make it less likely we would be debating yet another legalization program for undocumented minors a few years later.

In one of the many examples of how this president has unsettled our politics, David Frum, author of the Never Trump screed Trumpocracy , endorsed precisely this policy mix in an important cover story for The Atlantic. Frum's piece appeared at roughly the same time that Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust , was excoriating Trump for failing to keep his immigration promises and filling his administration with people who constantly undermine them.

Frum, regardless of my other disagreements with him , has stuck to his skepticism of uninterrupted mass immigration despite his profound alienation from the Trump-era GOP. Coulter, ridiculed for her pro-Trump polemics during the campaign, has actually done far more to hold the president accountable than most denizens of MAGA-land (she was also more prescient about the election than most of those sneering at her). It was Frum, in a prior Atlantic piece, who credited Coulter, in a previous book, with opening Trump's eyes to the force of the immigration issue.

Trump and Coulter are now estranged over precisely this issue. The White House palace intrigue matters. Does Francis Cissna stay or go? Does Kris Kobach have a chance at DHS? Will Julie Kirchner join Miller or does Ken Cuccinelli come aboard ? But another question is even more important.

If given the chance for a wall and an amnesty do-over, is the average Trump voter closer to Kushner or Coulter?

W. James Antle III is editor of . 6 Responses to Trump's Immigration Choice: Kushner or Coulter?



newsflash April 14, 2019 at 8:46 pm

Trump -- ""I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come legally.""

I don't. I don't want that. I voted for you because I thought you were against it too, you ^^^^ing ripoff artist. Now I'm going to help get you the ^^^^ out of the White House.

Higdon Kirt , , April 14, 2019 at 8:59 pm
For the average voter, even the average Trump supporter, immigration is not as big an issue as many imagine. Among Trump supporters I know, gun rights, support of Israel, dislike of Hillary and the PC state in general all are more important than immigration. Kushner, being family, will beat Coulter on the immigration issue and it will make no difference to Trump's support level. As long as we have prosperity and just the right amount of tension at home and abroad in 2020, Trump will probably beat whatever array of Demo and third party candidate he has to deal with.
Bullwinkle J. Moose , , April 14, 2019 at 9:21 pm
Jared is more focused on protecting Israel's expanding borders from Palestinians remaining in their homes and homeland, than protecting America's borders.

America First, or Israel First???

sb , , April 15, 2019 at 12:35 am
Coulter. Hands down. And I have always been a 'lefty'.

Immigration shapes a nation more than any other driver (education, health, defense, etc), short of outright conquest by another nation.

Allow liberals their unconstrained 'open borders' importation of 'multi-cultural diversity', and you get colonised fast. Especially when migrants breed faster than locals. Look at Europe. Or Canada.

Lottery and chain migration must be canned, and retrospectively (ie deport past chain migrants) – they never had a claim to migrate in the first place. And institute random audits (with deportation) for fraudulent migration claims. With rising jail terms the more times they try to re-enter illegally.

You have to have spine to defend your nation. Trump may do. Coulter does. Kushner works for liberal capitalism, which wants a colonized US, flooded by cheap migrant labor.

Sam , , April 15, 2019 at 2:26 am
WELL OF COURSE IT'S GONNA BE MISTAH KUSHNAH
pax , , April 15, 2019 at 4:58 am
Kushner. Save Bibi calling Donald.

[Apr 13, 2019] For those IT guys who want to change the specalty

Highly recommended!
The neoliberal war on labor in the USA is real. And it is especially real for It folk over 50. No country for the old men, so to speak...
Notable quotes:
"... Obviously you need a financial cushion to not be earning for months and to pay for the training courses. ..."
"... Yeah, people get set in their ways and resistant to make changes. Steve Jobs talked about people developing grooves in their brain and how important it is to force yourself out of these grooves.* ..."
"... Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. ..."
"... The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a person in a wheelchair. ..."
"... IBEW (licensed electricians) has no upper age limit for apprentices They have lots of American engineers who applied in their 30s after realizing most companies want diverse HI-B engineers. ..."
"... At 40+, I still can learn advanced mathematics as well as I ever did. In fact, I can still compete with the Chinese 20 year olds. The problem is not mental horsepower, it's time and energy. I rarely have time to concentrate these days (wife, kids, pets), which makes it hard to get the solid hours of prime mental time required to really push yourself at a hard pace and learn advanced material. ..."
"... That's a huge key and I discovered it when I was asked to tutor people who were failing chemistry. I quickly discovered that all it took for most of them to "get it" was to keep approaching the problem from different angles until a light came on for them and for me the challenge of finding the right approach was a great motivator. Invariably it was some minor issue and once they overcame that, it became easy for them. I'm still astonished at that to this day. ..."
"... Sorry man, English teaching is huge, and will remain so for some time to come. I'm heavily involved in the area and know plenty of ESL teachers. Spain for me, and the level of English here is still so dreadful and they all need it, the demand is staggering and their schools suck at teaching it themselves. ..."
"... You have to really dislike your circumstances in the US to leave and be willing to find some way to get by overseas. ..."
"... We already saw this in South Africa. Mandela took over, the country went down the tubes, the wealthy whites left and the Boers were left to die in refugee camps. They WANT to leave and a few went to Russia, but most developed countries don't want them. Not with the limited amount of money they have. ..."
"... Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country except for blacks and rednecks I have met in the Philippines who were stationed there in the military and have a $1000 a month check. Many of them live in more dangerous and dirty internal third worlds in America than what they can have in Southeast Asia and a good many would be homeless. They are worldly enough to leave. ..."
Apr 13, 2019 | www.unz.com

Anonymous [388] Disclaimer , says: March 12, 2019 at 1:26 pm GMT

@YetAnotherAnon

" He's 28 years old getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled trades as well. What then?"

I know a UK guy (ex City type) who retrained as an electrician in his early 50s. Competent guy. Obviously no one would take him on as an apprentice, so he wired up all his outbuildings as his project to get his certificate. But he's getting work now, word gets around if you're any good.

Obviously you need a financial cushion to not be earning for months and to pay for the training courses.

Yeah, people get set in their ways and resistant to make changes. Steve Jobs talked about people developing grooves in their brain and how important it is to force yourself out of these grooves.*

I know a Haitian immigrant without a college degree who was working three jobs and then dropped down to two jobs and went to school part time in his late 40's and earned his degree in engineering and is a now an engineer in his early 50's.

*From Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp.330-331:

"It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing," Jobs said wistfully to the writer David Sheff, who published a long and intimate interview in Playboy the month he turned thirty. "Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare." The interview touched on many subjects, but Jobs's most poignant ruminations were about growing old and facing the future:

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. . . .

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.

The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

anonymous [191] Disclaimer , says: March 12, 2019 at 9:59 pm GMT
@The Anti-Gnostic

"fluid intelligence" starts crystallizing after your 20's". Nonsense, I had a great deal of trouble learning anything from my teen years and 20's because I didn't know how to learn. I went for 30 years and eventually figured out a learning style that worked for me. I have learned more and mastered more skills in the past ten years ages 49-59 than I had in the previous 30.

You can challenge yourself like I did and after a while of doing this (6 months) you will find it a lot easier to learn and comprehend than you did previously. (This is true only if you haven't damaged your brain from years of smoking and drinking). I constantly challenged myself with trying to learn math that I had trouble with in school and eventually mastered it.

The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a person in a wheelchair.

Anon [257] Disclaimer , says: March 15, 2019 at 4:29 am GMT
@YetAnotherAnon

IBEW (licensed electricians) has no upper age limit for apprentices They have lots of American engineers who applied in their 30s after realizing most companies want diverse HI-B engineers.

Upper age limits for almost every occupation disappeared decades ago in America because of age discrimination laws.

I can't see how any 28 year old could possibly be too soft to go into any kind of manual labor job.

jbwilson24 , says: March 15, 2019 at 9:31 am GMT
@anonymous Yeah, there was a recent study showing that 70 year olds can form neural connections as quickly as teenagers.
At 40+, I still can learn advanced mathematics as well as I ever did. In fact, I can still compete with the Chinese 20 year olds. The problem is not mental horsepower, it's time and energy. I rarely have time to concentrate these days (wife, kids, pets), which makes it hard to get the solid hours of prime mental time required to really push yourself at a hard pace and learn advanced material.

This is why the Chinese are basically out of date when they are 30, their companies assume that they have kids and are not able to give 110% anymore.

jacques sheete , says: March 15, 2019 at 11:14 am GMT
@anonymous

eventually figured out a learning style that worked for me.

That's a huge key and I discovered it when I was asked to tutor people who were failing chemistry. I quickly discovered that all it took for most of them to "get it" was to keep approaching the problem from different angles until a light came on for them and for me the challenge of finding the right approach was a great motivator. Invariably it was some minor issue and once they overcame that, it became easy for them. I'm still astonished at that to this day.

The brain is like a muscle, it needs to be constantly worked to become strong. If you waste it watching football or looking at porn your brain will atrophy like the muscles of a person in a wheelchair.

No doubt about it. No embellishment needed there!

s.n , says: March 15, 2019 at 11:42 am GMT
@The Anti-Gnostic

Yeah. He's 28 years old and apparently his chosen skillset is teaching EASL in foreign countries. That sector is shrinking as English becomes the global lingua franca and is taught in elementary schools worldwide. He's really too old and soft for his Plan B (military), and getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled trades as well. What then?

do you know anything first hand about the teaching- english- as-a- second- language hustle?

Asking sincerely – as I don't know anything about it. However I kinda suspect that 'native speakers' will be in demand in many parts of the globe for some time to come [as an aside – and maybe Linh has written of this and I missed it – but last spring I was in Saigon for a couple of weeks and, hanging out one day at the zoo & museum complex, was startled to see about three groups of Vietnamese primary-school students being led around by americans in their early 20s, narrating everything in american english . Apparently private schools offering entirely english-language curriculum are the big hit with the middle & upper class elite there. Perhaps more of the same elsewhere in the region?]

At any rate the young man in this interview has a lot more in the way of qualifications and skill sets than I had when I left the States 35 years ago, and I've done just fine. I'd advise any prospective expats to get that TEFL certificate as it's one extra thing to have in your back pocket and who knows?

PS: "It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship" – well, yes it can. Everyone knows that the best passport on earth is from Northwest Euroland, one of those places with free university education and free health care and where teenage mothers don't daily keel over dead from heroin overdoses in Dollar Stores .. Also more places visa-free

The Anti-Gnostic , says: Website March 15, 2019 at 2:37 pm GMT
@s.n

When you left the States 35 years ago, the world was 3 billion people smaller. The labor market has gotten a tad more competitive. I don't see any indication of a trade or other refined skillset in this article.

People who teach EASL for a living are like people who drive cars for a living: you don't do it because you're really good at teaching your native language, you do it because you're not marketable at anything else.

jeff stryker , says: March 15, 2019 at 3:20 pm GMT
@jacques sheete JACQUES

I think being Australian is the best citizenry you can have. The country is far from perfect, but any lower middle class American white like myself would prefer to be lower middle class there than in Detroit or Phoenix, where being lower income means life around the unfettered urban underclass that is paranoia inducing.

Being from the US is not as bad as being Bangladeshi, but if you had to be white and urban and poor you'd be better off in Sydney than Flint.

The most patriotic Americans have never been anywhere, so they have no idea whether Australia or Tokyo are better. They have never traveled.

s.n , says: March 15, 2019 at 11:42 am GMT
@The Anti-Gnostic

Yeah. He's 28 years old and apparently his chosen skillset is teaching EASL in foreign countries. That sector is shrinking as English becomes the global lingua franca and is taught in elementary schools worldwide. He's really too old and soft for his Plan B (military), and getting too old and soft for the entry-level grunt work in the skilled trades as well. What then?

do you know anything first hand about the teaching- english- as-a- second- language hustle?

Asking sincerely – as I don't know anything about it. However I kinda suspect that 'native speakers' will be in demand in many parts of the globe for some time to come [as an aside – and maybe Linh has written of this and I missed it – but last spring I was in Saigon for a couple of weeks and, hanging out one day at the zoo & museum complex, was startled to see about three groups of Vietnamese primary-school students being led around by americans in their early 20s, narrating everything in american english .

Apparently private schools offering entirely english-language curriculum are the big hit with the middle & upper class elite there. Perhaps more of the same elsewhere in the region?]

At any rate the young man in this interview has a lot more in the way of qualifications and skill sets than I had when I left the States 35 years ago, and I've done just fine. I'd advise any prospective expats to get that TEFL certificate as it's one extra thing to have in your back pocket and who knows?

ps: "It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship" – well, yes it can. Everyone knows that the best passport on earth is from Northwest Euroland, one of those places with free university education and free health care and where teenage mothers don't daily keel over dead from heroin overdoses in Dollar Stores ..

Also more places visa-free

s.n , says: March 16, 2019 at 7:23 am GMT
@The Anti-Gnostic

People who teach EASL for a living are like people who drive cars for a living: you don't do it because you're really good at teaching your native language, you do it because you're not marketable at anything else.

well that's the beauty of it: you don't have to be good at anything other than just being a native speaker to succeed as an EASL teacher, and thousands more potential customers are born every day. I'd definitely advise any potential expats to become accomplished, and, even better, qualified, in as many trades as possible. But imho the real key to success as a long term expat is your mindset: determination and will-power to survive no matter what. If you really want to break out of the States and see the world, and don't have inherited wealth, you will be forced to rely on your wits and good luck and seize the opportunities that arise, whatever those opportunities may be.

Thedirtysponge , says: March 16, 2019 at 4:01 pm GMT
@The Anti-Gnostic

Sorry man, English teaching is huge, and will remain so for some time to come. I'm heavily involved in the area and know plenty of ESL teachers. Spain for me, and the level of English here is still so dreadful and they all need it, the demand is staggering and their schools suck at teaching it themselves.

You are one of those people who just like to shit on things:) and people make a lot of money out of it, not everyone of course, like any area. But it's perfectly viable and good to go for a long time yet. It's exactly that English is the lingua Franca that people need to be at a high level of it. The Chinese market is still massive. The bag packer esl teachers are the ones that give off this stigma, and 'bag packer' and 'traveller' are by now very much regarded as dirty words in the ESL world.

Mike P , says: March 16, 2019 at 5:52 pm GMT
@Thedirtysponge

ESL teachers. Spain for me

There is a very funny version also with Jack Lemmon in "Irma la Douce", but I can't find that one on youtube.

jeff stryker , says: March 17, 2019 at 7:26 am GMT
@Thedirtysponge S.N. & DIRTY SPONGE

Most Americans lack the initiative to move anywhere. Most will complain but will never leave the street they were born on. Urban whites are used to adaptation being around other cultures anyhow and being somewhat street smart, but the poor rural whites in the exurbs or sticks whose live would really improve if they got the hell out of America will never move anywhere.

You have to really dislike your circumstances in the US to leave and be willing to find some way to get by overseas.

Lots of people will talk about leaving America without having a clue as to how hard this is to actually do. Australia and New Zealand are not crying out for white proles with high school education or GED. It is much more difficult to move overseas and stay overseas than most Americans think.

Except of course for the ruling elite. And that is because five-star hotels look the same everywhere and money is an international language.

We already saw this in South Africa. Mandela took over, the country went down the tubes, the wealthy whites left and the Boers were left to die in refugee camps. They WANT to leave and a few went to Russia, but most developed countries don't want them. Not with the limited amount of money they have.

Australia and NZ would rather have refugees than white people in dire circumstances.

Even immigrating to Canada, a country that I worked in, is much much harder than anyone imagines.

jeff stryker , says: March 17, 2019 at 7:37 am GMT
A LONGTIME EXPAT ON LIVING ABROAD

Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country except for blacks and rednecks I have met in the Philippines who were stationed there in the military and have a $1000 a month check. Many of them live in more dangerous and dirty internal third worlds in America than what they can have in Southeast Asia and a good many would be homeless. They are worldly enough to leave.

But most Americans whose lives would be vastly improved overseas think they are living in the greatest country on earth.

[Apr 12, 2019] Trump s Betrayal of White America by Alex Graham

Notable quotes:
"... Trump's failure here is his alone. Closing the border could be accomplished with a simple executive order. It has happened before: Reagan ordered the closing of the border when DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was murdered on assignment in Mexico in 1985, for instance. ..."
"... Trump's empty threats over the past two years have had real-world consequences, prompting waves of migrants trying to sneak into the country while they still have the chance. His recent move to cut all foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is another empty gesture that will probably have similar consequences. The funds directed to those countries were used for programs that provided citizens with incentives not to migrate elsewhere. (The situation was not ideal from an isolationist point of view, but a wiser man would have built the wall before cutting off the aid.) ..."
"... Trump's betrayal of American workers is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that one of the members of the advisory board of his National Council for the American Worker (which claims to "enhance employment opportunities for Americans of all ages") is the CEO of IBM, a company that has expressed a preference for F-1 and H-1B visa holders in its job postings. ..."
"... There are more former Goldman Sachs employees in the Trump White House than in the Obama and Bush administrations combined. ..."
"... It is hard to escape the conclusion that Trump is not actually interested in curbing immigration and reversing America's demographic decline. He is a con artist and a coward who is willing to betray millions of white Americans so that he can remain in the good graces of establishment neoconservatives ..."
"... As Ann Coulter has put it, "He's like a waiter who compliments us for ordering the hamburger, but keeps bringing us fish. The hamburger is our signature dish, juicy and grilled to perfection, you've made a brilliant choice . . . now here's your salmon. " ..."
"... Third, he put an end to American funding for Palestinians. This coincided with the passing of a bill that codified a $38 billion, ten-year foreign aid package for Israel. Trump also authorized an act allocating an additional $550 million toward US-Israel missile and tunnel defense cooperation. ..."
"... Trump's track record on Israel shows that he is capable of exercising agency and getting things done. But he has failed to address the most pressing issue that America currently faces: mass immigration and the displacement of white Americans. The most credible explanation for his incompetence is that he has no intention of delivering on his promises. There is no "Plan," no 4-D chess game. The sooner white Americans realize this, the better. ..."
"... We elected America's first Jewish president, nothing more" ..."
Apr 08, 2019 | www.unz.com
"Unlike other presidents, I keep my promises," Trump boasted in a speech delivered on Saturday to the Republican Jewish Congress at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. Many in the audience wore red yarmulkes emblazoned with his name. In his speech, Trump condemned Democrats for allowing "the terrible scourge of anti-Semitism to take root in their party" and emphasized his loyalty to Israel.

Trump has kept some of his promises. So far, he has kept every promise that he made to the Jewish community. Yet he has reneged on his promises to white America – the promises that got him elected in the first place. It is a betrayal of the highest order: millions of white Americans placed their hopes in Trump and wholeheartedly believed that he would be the one to make America great again. They were willing to endure social ostracism and imperil their livelihoods by supporting him. In return, Trump has turned his back on them and rendered his promises void.

The most recent example of this is Trump's failure to keep his promise to close the border. On March 29, Trump threatened to close the border if Mexico did not stop all illegal immigration into the US. This would likely have been a highly effective measure given Mexico's dependence on cross-border trade. Five days later, he suddenly retracted this threat and said that he would give Mexico a " one-year warning " before taking drastic action. He further claimed that closing the border would not be necessary and that he planned to establish a twenty-five percent tariff on cars entering the US instead.

Trump's failure here is his alone. Closing the border could be accomplished with a simple executive order. It has happened before: Reagan ordered the closing of the border when DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was murdered on assignment in Mexico in 1985, for instance.

Trump's empty threats over the past two years have had real-world consequences, prompting waves of migrants trying to sneak into the country while they still have the chance. His recent move to cut all foreign aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is another empty gesture that will probably have similar consequences. The funds directed to those countries were used for programs that provided citizens with incentives not to migrate elsewhere. (The situation was not ideal from an isolationist point of view, but a wiser man would have built the wall before cutting off the aid.)

The past two years have seen a surge in illegal immigration without precedent in the past decade. Since late December, the Department of Homeland Security has released 125,565 illegal aliens into the country. In the past two weeks alone, 6,000 have been admitted. According to current projections, 2019 will witness around 500,000 to 775,000 border crossings. Additionally, about 630,000 illegal aliens will be added to the population after having overstayed their visas. By the end of the year, more than one million illegal aliens will have been added to the population:

These projections put the number of illegal aliens added to the U.S. population at around one to 1.5 million, on top of the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens who are already living across the country. This finding does not factor in the illegal aliens who will be deported, die over the next year, or leave the U.S. of their own will. As DHS data has revealed, once border crossers and illegal aliens are released into the country, the overwhelming majority are never deported.

In February, Trump signed a bill allowing the DHS secretary to add another 69,320 spots to the current H-2B cap of 66,000. On March 29, DHS began this process by announcing that it would issue an additional 30,000 H-2B visas this year. The H-2B visa program allows foreign workers to come to the US and work in non-agricultural occupations. Unlike the H-1B program, a Bachelor's degree is not required; most H-2B workers are employed in construction, maintenance, landscaping, and so on. The demographic most affected by the expansion of the H-2B program will be unemployed working-class Americans. This flies in the face of Trump's promise to protect American workers and stop importing foreigners.

Trump has indicated that he has plans to expand the H-1B visa program as well. "We want to encourage talented and highly skilled people to pursue career options in the U.S.," he said in a tweet in January.

Trump's betrayal of American workers is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that one of the members of the advisory board of his National Council for the American Worker (which claims to "enhance employment opportunities for Americans of all ages") is the CEO of IBM, a company that has expressed a preference for F-1 and H-1B visa holders in its job postings.

Trump has been working on legal immigration with Jared Kushner, who has quietly been crafting a plan to grant citizenship to more "low- and high-skilled workers, as well as permanent and temporary workers" (so, just about everyone). Kushner's plan proves the folly of the typical Republican line that legal immigration is fine and that only illegal immigration should be opposed. Under his plan, thousands of illegal aliens will become "legal" with the stroke of a pen.

There is a paucity of anti-immigration hardliners in Trump's inner circle (though Stephen Miller is a notable exception). Trump has surrounded himself with moderates: the Kushners, Mick Mulvaney, Alex Acosta, and others. There are more former Goldman Sachs employees in the Trump White House than in the Obama and Bush administrations combined.

The new DHS secretary, Kevin McAleenan, who was appointed yesterday following Kirstjen Nielsen's resignation, is a middle-of-the-road law enforcement official who served under Obama and Bush and is responsible for the revival of the " catch-and-release " policy, whereby illegal aliens are released upon being apprehended. It was reported last week that Trump was thinking of appointing either Kris Kobach or Ken Cuccinelli to a position of prominence (as an " immigration czar "), but this appears to have been another lie.

Trump's failure to deliver on his promises cannot be chalked up to congressional obstruction. Congress. As Kobach said in a recent interview , "It's not like we're powerless and it's not like we have to wait for Congress to do something. . . . No, we can actually solve the immediate crisis without Congress acting." Solving the border crisis would simply demand "leadership in the executive branch willing to act decisively." Kobach recently outlined an intelligent three-point plan that Trump could implement:

Publish the final version of the regulation that would supersede the Flores Settlement. The initial regulation was published by the Department of Homeland Security in September 2018. DHS could have published the final regulation in December. Inexplicably, DHS has dragged its feet. Finalizing that regulation would allow the United States to detain entire families together, and it would stop illegal aliens from exploiting children as get-out-of-jail free cards. Set up processing centers at the border to house the migrants and hold the hearings in one place. The Department of Justice should deploy dozens of immigration judges to hear the asylum claims at the border without releasing the migrants into the country. FEMA already owns thousands of travel trailers and mobile homes that it has used to address past hurricane disasters. Instead of selling them (which FEMA is currently doing), FEMA should ship them to the processing centers to provide comfortable housing for the migrants. In addition, a fleet of passenger planes should deployed to the processing centers. Anyone who fails in his or her asylum claim, or who is not seeking asylum and is inadmissible, should be flown home immediately. It would be possible to fly most migrants home within a few weeks of their arrival. Word would get out quickly in their home countries that entry into the United States is not as easy as advertised. The incentive to join future caravans would dissipate quickly. Publish a proposed Treasury regulation that prohibits the sending home of remittances by people who cannot document lawful presence in the United States. This will hit Mexico in the pocketbook: Mexico typically brings in well over $20 billion a year in remittances , raking in more than $26 billion in 2017. Then, tell the government of Mexico that we will finalize the Treasury regulation unless they do two things to help us address the border crisis: (1) Mexico immediately signs a "safe third country agreement" similar to our agreement with Canada. This would require asylum applicants to file their asylum application in the first safe country they set foot in (so applicants in the caravans from Central America would have to seek asylum in Mexico, rather than Canada); and (2) Mexico chips in $5 billion to help us build the wall. The threat of ending remittances from illegal aliens is a far more powerful one than threatening to close the border. Ending such remittances doesn't hurt the U.S. economy; indeed, it helps the economy by making it more likely that such capital will be spent and circulate in our own country. We can follow through easily if Mexico doesn't cooperate.

It would not be all that difficult for Trump to implement these proposals. Kobach still has faith in Trump, but his assessment of him appears increasingly to be too generous. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Trump is not actually interested in curbing immigration and reversing America's demographic decline. He is a con artist and a coward who is willing to betray millions of white Americans so that he can remain in the good graces of establishment neoconservatives . At the same time, he wants to maintain the illusion that he cares about his base.

As Ann Coulter has put it, "He's like a waiter who compliments us for ordering the hamburger, but keeps bringing us fish. The hamburger is our signature dish, juicy and grilled to perfection, you've made a brilliant choice . . . now here's your salmon. "

Nearly everything Trump has done in the name of restricting immigration has turned out to be an empty gesture and mere theatrics: threatening to close the border, offering protections to "Dreamers" in exchange for funding for the ever-elusive wall, threatening to end the "anchor baby" phenomenon with an executive order (which never came to pass), cutting off aid to Central American countries, claiming that he will appoint an "immigration czar" (and then proceeding to appoint McAleenan instead of Kobach as DHS secretary), and on and on.

While Trump has failed to keep the promises that got him elected, he has fulfilled a number of major promises that he made to Israel and the Jewish community.

First, he moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump claimed that the move would only cost $200,000, but in reality it will end up being more than $20 million . The construction of the embassy also led to a series of bloody protests; it is located in East Jerusalem, which is generally acknowledged to be Palestinian territory.

Second, he pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal. Netanyahu claimed on Israeli TV that Israel was responsible for convincing him to exit the deal and reimpose sanctions on Iran. (Both Trump and Netanyahu falsely alleged that Iran lied about the extent of its nuclear program; meanwhile, Israel's large arsenal of chemical and biological weapons has escaped mention.) Third, he put an end to American funding for Palestinians. This coincided with the passing of a bill that codified a $38 billion, ten-year foreign aid package for Israel. Trump also authorized an act allocating an additional $550 million toward US-Israel missile and tunnel defense cooperation.

Fourth, he recognized Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights (in defiance of the rest of the world, which recognizes the Golan Heights as Syrian territory under Israeli occupation). Trump's Golan Heights proclamation was issued on March 21 and was celebrated by Israel. Trump's track record on Israel shows that he is capable of exercising agency and getting things done. But he has failed to address the most pressing issue that America currently faces: mass immigration and the displacement of white Americans. The most credible explanation for his incompetence is that he has no intention of delivering on his promises. There is no "Plan," no 4-D chess game. The sooner white Americans realize this, the better.


aandrews , says: April 10, 2019 at 3:17 am GMT

Kushner, Inc. Book Review Part I: The Rise of The Kushner Crime Family

Kushner, Inc. Book Review Part II: The Fall of The Kushner Crime Family

If you haven't picked up a copy of Vicky Ward's book, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump , you really should.

I haven't read Mr. Graham's essay yet, but I thought those two links would fit in nicely. I stay in a low boil, like it is, and having plodded through both those reviews, I can't stand reading too much on this topic at once.

Something's gotta give. Or are the brainless goy just going to let themselves be led off a cliff?

Oh, yes. There's an interview with Ward on BookTV .

Thinker , says: April 10, 2019 at 4:16 am GMT
Yep. Trump's a lying POS pond scum like the rest of the DC swamp that he said he was going to drain, turns out he is one of them all along. We elected America's first Jewish president, nothing more. He needs to change his campaign slogan to MIGA, Make Israel Great Again, that was the plan of his handlers all along.

What I want to know is, who are those idiots who still keep showing up at his rallies? Are they really that dumb?

Even Sanders came out and said we can't have open borders. I've also heard him said back in 2015 that the H1b visa program is a replacement program for American workers. If he grows a pair and reverts back to that stance, teams up with Tulsi Gabbard, I'll vote for them 2020. Fuck Trump! Time for him and his whole treasonous rat family to move to Israel where they belong.

jbwilson24 , says: April 10, 2019 at 4:51 am GMT
@Thinker " We elected America's first Jewish president, nothing more"

Afraid not, there's plenty of reason to believe that the Roosevelt family and Lyndon Johnson were Jewish.

Your major point stands, though. He's basically a shabbesgoy.

peterAUS , says: April 10, 2019 at 5:05 am GMT
@Dr. Robert Morgan

His "implicitly white" supporters would have abandoned him in droves, not wanting to be associated with a racist, thus pointing up the weakness of implicit whiteness as a survival strategy. And is it actually a survival strategy? A closer look at it makes me think it's more of a racial self-extermination strategy. After all, what kind of a survival strategy is it that can't even admit its goals to itself? And it's exactly this refusal of whites to explicitly state that they collectively want to continue to exist as a race that is the greatest impediment to their doing so. It's an interesting problem with no easy solution. How do you restore the will to live to a race that seems to have lost it? And not only lost its will to live, but actually prides itself on doing so? Accordingly, this "betrayal" isn't a betrayal at all. It's what American whites voted for and want. Giving their country away and accepting their own demographic demise is proof of their virtue; proof of their Christian love for all mankind.

You are definitely onto something here.

Still, I feel it's not that deep and complicated. It could be that they simply don't believe that the danger is closing in.

Boils down to wrong judgment. People who haven't had the need to think hard about serious things tend to develop that weakness.
I guess that boils down to "good times make weak men."

Hard times are coming and they'll make hard men. The catch is simple: will be enough of them in time ?

Real Buddy Ray , says: April 10, 2019 at 5:18 am GMT
@Thomm https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trumps-proposal-for-legal-immigration/499061/
JNDillard , says: April 10, 2019 at 5:20 am GMT
Switching to the Democrats is no solution. The DNC has proven itself to be a criminal organization through sabotaging Sander's campaign and then being instrumental in creating Russophobia, in collusion with Obama, the CIA, the FBI, and the DoJ. The DNC has rules in place stating that super delegates – elitists aligned with the DNC – can vote if one nominee does not win on the first ballot at the National Convention.

Because we have a HUGE number of hats in the Democratic ring, the chances that the nomination will not be decided on a first vote are extremely high, with the result being that the Democratic nominee is not going to be decided by voters in the primaries but by super delegates, i.e., the elitists and plutocrats.

Democracy exists when we vote to support candidates chosen by the elites for the elites; when we stop doing that, the elites turn on democracy. It is a sham; we will have a choice in 2020: between Pepsi and Coke. You are free to choose which one you prefer, because you live in a democracy. For more on the rigging of the democratic primaries for 2020, see

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/04/09/packed-primary-may-let-superdelegates-screw-progressives-again/

[Apr 01, 2019] Retail Layoffs Are 92% Higher In 2019, And Now Even Wal-Mart Is Quietly Closing Stores by Michael Snyder

Notable quotes:
"... "The decision to close our local stores is a difficult one," said Lifeway Chief Executive Officer Brad Waggoner. "While we had hoped to keep some stores open, current market projections show this is no longer a viable option." ..."
"... And yes, Internet retailing has been growing, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. retail sales. In addition, it is important to point out that Internet retailers had a very disappointing holiday season just like brick and mortar retailers did. ..."
"... Ultimately, the truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily slowing down in recent months. During the months of December, January and February, the amount of stuff being moved around the country by truck, rail and air was lower than during all of those same months a year earlier. The following comes from Wolf Richter ..."
"... Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get rougher for the U.S. economy in the months ahead. So more retail workers are going to get laid off, more stores are going to close, and there are going to be a lot more stories about our ongoing "retail apocalypse" in the mainstream media. ..."
Apr 01, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Just like we witnessed during the last recession, major retailers are laying off tens of thousands of workers, and it looks like this will be the worst year for store closings in all of U.S. history. Many are referring to this as "the retail apocalypse" , and without a doubt this is one of the toughest stretches for retailers that we have ever seen. But many believe that what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning . After all, if retailers are struggling this much now, how bad will things be once the next recession really gets rolling? Of course the truth is that things have been rocky for the retail industry for quite a few years, but the numbers are telling us that this crisis is really starting to accelerate.

According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, retail layoffs were up a whopping 92 percent in January and February compared to the same period a year ago. The following comes from NBC News

More than 41,000 people have lost their jobs in the retail industry so far this year -- a 92 percent spike in layoffs since the same time last year, according to a new report.

And the layoffs continue to mount, with JCPenney announcing this week it would be closing 18 stores in addition to three previously announced closures, as part of a "standard annual review."

Yes, competition from Internet commerce is hurting the traditional retail industry, but it certainly doesn't explain a 92 percent increase.

And very few retailers have been able to avoid this downsizing trend. At this point, even the largest retailer in the entire country has begun "quietly closing stores"

Walmart is closing at least 11 US stores across eight states.

The stores include one Walmart Supercenter in Lafayette, Louisiana, and Walmart Neighborhood Market stores in Arizona, California, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.

For decades, Wal-Mart has been expanding extremely aggressively.

They have plenty of cash, and so the only way that it would make sense for them to close stores is if they anticipated that we are heading into a recession.

Here is a list of the addresses where Wal-Mart stores are closing

Of course Wal-Mart is in far better shape than almost everyone else in the industry.

One of Wal-Mart's key competitors, Shopko, has just announced that they will be shutting down all of their stores

Shopko will liquidate its assets and close all of its remaining locations by mid-June.

The company was unable to find a buyer for the retail business and will begin winding down its operations beginning this week, the company said in statement released Monday. The decision to liquidate will bring an end to the brick-and-mortar business that began in 1962 with one location in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And personally I was very saddened to learn that Lifeway Christian Bookstores has also decided to close all their brick and mortar stores

Lifeway Christian Bookstores announced last week it would be closing the doors of all 170 brick and mortar stores, in a pivot to focusing on digital and e-commerce.

"The decision to close our local stores is a difficult one," said Lifeway Chief Executive Officer Brad Waggoner. "While we had hoped to keep some stores open, current market projections show this is no longer a viable option."

Whenever I do an article like this, I always have some readers that try to convince me that this is only happening because of the growth of Internet retailing.

And yes, Internet retailing has been growing, but it still accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. retail sales. In addition, it is important to point out that Internet retailers had a very disappointing holiday season just like brick and mortar retailers did.

Ultimately, the truth is that the U.S. economy has been steadily slowing down in recent months. During the months of December, January and February, the amount of stuff being moved around the country by truck, rail and air was lower than during all of those same months a year earlier. The following comes from Wolf Richter

Now it's the third month in a row, and the red flag is getting more visible and a little harder to ignore about the goods-based economy: Freight shipment volume in the US across all modes of transportation – truck, rail, air, and barge – in February fell 2.1% from February a year ago, according to the Cass Freight Index , released today. The three months in a row of year-over-year declines are the first such declines since the transportation recession of 2015 and 2016.

I have a feeling that when we get the final numbers for March that they will show that this streak has now extended to four months.

Right now, unsold goods are starting to pile up in U.S. warehouses at a rate that we haven't seen since the last recession. Many retailers that are barely clinging to life will simply not survive if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

Unfortunately, it appears that things are only going to get rougher for the U.S. economy in the months ahead. So more retail workers are going to get laid off, more stores are going to close, and there are going to be a lot more stories about our ongoing "retail apocalypse" in the mainstream media.

[Mar 31, 2019] The Conservation of Controversy Outraged students, helpless teachers, and the President's executive order by Joshua Blair

Notable quotes:
"... Professor Weinstein is an avowed liberal with a long history of progressive thinking. As a young man, he was the center of another controversy when he blew the whistle regarding the exploitation of black strippers by a college fraternity. Regardless, his refusal to participate in what can be described as a "no-white-people-day" ironically earned him the brand "racist" by the student body. He was essentially removed from the campus on the threat of physical harm. ..."
"... Bret Weinstein is on the left, politically, but the leftist students and administration attacked him for not being left enough . Imagine now, how the college may have treated a person who leaned right. As it turns out, there are quite a few examples. ..."
"... Dr. Peterson is a psychology professor, clinician, and best-selling author. He is also, perhaps, today's most controversial academic. He burst into the public consciousness after he opposed bill C-16 in Canada. The bill added gender expression and gender identity to the various protections covered by the Canadian Human Rights Act. ..."
"... One example comes from Queens University. While Dr. Peterson gave a lecture, student protestors broke windows, tried to drown him out with noisemakers and drums, and one protestor told others to burn down the building with Dr. Peterson and the attendees locked inside. ..."
Mar 23, 2019 | blog.usejournal.com

In March 2017, young people armed with baseball bats prowled the parking lots of Evergreen State College. They hoped to find Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, and presumably bash his brains in. Bret had caught the ire of the student body after he refused to participate in an unofficial "Day of Absence," in which white students and faculty were told to stay home, away from the campus, while teachers and students of color attended as they normally would. In prior years, people of color voluntarily absented themselves to highlight their presence and importance on campus. In 2017, the event's organizers decided to flip the event, and white people were pressured to stay away from the school.

In a letter to the school's administration, Bret explained why he opposed the idea:

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself
On a college campus, one's right to speak  --  or to be  --  must never be based on skin color.

When word of Professor Weinstein's objection got out, enraged student activists began a hostile takeover of the school, and the college president ordered the campus police force not to intervene. Professor Weinstein was told, in essence, that nobody would protect him from young people with baseball bats. The police warned Professor Weinstein that their hands were tied and that he should stay off campus for his own safety.

Professor Weinstein is an avowed liberal with a long history of progressive thinking. As a young man, he was the center of another controversy when he blew the whistle regarding the exploitation of black strippers by a college fraternity. Regardless, his refusal to participate in what can be described as a "no-white-people-day" ironically earned him the brand "racist" by the student body. He was essentially removed from the campus on the threat of physical harm.

And its core, the story of Bret Weinstein and Evergreen State College is about a college's descent into total chaos after someone presented mild resistance to a political demonstration.

Bret Weinstein is on the left, politically, but the leftist students and administration attacked him for not being left enough . Imagine now, how the college may have treated a person who leaned right. As it turns out, there are quite a few examples.


Before discussing what the Wilfrid Laurier University did to a woman named Lindsay Shepherd, it's important to know about Jordan Peterson.


Dr. Peterson is a psychology professor, clinician, and best-selling author. He is also, perhaps, today's most controversial academic. He burst into the public consciousness after he opposed bill C-16 in Canada. The bill added gender expression and gender identity to the various protections covered by the Canadian Human Rights Act.

Dr. Peterson objected to the bill because it set a new precedent  --  requiring citizens to use certain pronouns to address people with non-traditional gender identities. Dr. Peterson calls transexual people by whatever gender they project , as long as he feels like they're asking him to do so in good faith, but he's wary of people playing power games with him, and he saw something dangerous about the government mandating which words he must use. He believed that under C-16, misgendering a person could be classified as hate speech, even it was just an accident.

Having spent much of his life considering the dangers that exist at the furthest ends of the political spectrum  --  Nazi Germany on the far right, the Soviet Union on the far left  --  Dr. Peterson has developed a tendency to see things in apocalyptic terms. In bill C-16, he saw what he considered the seeds of a serious threat to the freedom of expression  --  a list of government-approved words  --  and decided it was a hill worth dying on.

He's controversial, verbose, discursive, sometimes grouchy, and almost incapable of speaking the language of television sound-bites. He makes it easy for critics to attack and misrepresent him  --  and ever since he took a stance against C-16, he's been subjected to student protests and journalistic hit-pieces.

One example comes from Queens University. While Dr. Peterson gave a lecture, student protestors broke windows, tried to drown him out with noisemakers and drums, and one protestor told others to burn down the building with Dr. Peterson and the attendees locked inside.

Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with his opinions, Dr. Peterson should have the right to express them without other people suggesting that he be murdered with fire. Furthermore, people should be able to talk about what he says.

Enter the case of Lindsay Shepherd.


While working as a teacher's aid at Wilfrid Laurier University, Lindsay Shepherd showed students two clips from public access television featuring Jordan Peterson debating someone over bill C-16. After showing the clips, she asked her students to share their thoughts.

Days later, the school called her into a meeting with a panel of three superiors. They said that they had gotten a number of complaints from students. Lindsay asked how many complaints they had received, and was told that the number was confidential.

The panel claimed that she had created a toxic environment by showing the clips and facilitating a discussion without taking a side against Dr. Peterson's view. They said it was as if she had been completely neutral while showing one of Hitler's speeches. The panel thought the clip probably violated the Human Rights Code, and they demanded Shepherd to submit all of her future lesson plans ahead of time so that they could be vetted.

Although one student expressed some concern about the class, the number of formal complaints that the administrators had received was actually zero.

During their discussion, Lindsay said:

The thing is, can you shield people from those ideas? Am I supposed to comfort them and make sure that they are insulated away from this? Is that what the point of this is? Because to me that is against what a university is about.

Lindsay found herself at the mercy of school administrators whose brittle spirits couldn't bear to present students with opinions that they might have found offensive. She had believed that universities were places where people could explore ideas. On that day, the panel showed her just how wrong she'd been.

And she caught it all on tape.

Over the past few years, the news has become littered with stories of schools overrun by children while hand-wringing professors and administrators do everything possible to placate them. Recently, a group called "The Diaspora Coalition" staged a sit-in at Sarah Lawrence. Their demands included, among other things, that they get free fabric-softener. The origin of their grievance was an op-ed published in the New York Times about the imbalance between left-leaning and right-leaning school administrators.

Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business, sums the phenomenon up tidily :

You get kids who are much more anxious and fragile, much more depressed, coming onto campus at a time of much greater political activism  --  and now these grievance studies ideas about, 'America's a matrix of oppression,' and, 'look at the world in terms of good versus evil.' it's much more appealing to them, and it's that minority of students, they're the ones who are initiating a lot of the movements

Every day, or at least every week, I get an email from a professor saying, 'you know, I used a metaphor in class and somebody reported me.' and once this happens to you, you pull back. You change your teaching style

What we're seeing on campus is a spectacular collapse of trust between students and professors. And once we can't trust each other, we can't do our job.

We can't risk being provocative, raising uncomfortable ideas. We have to play it safe, and then everybody suffers.

To understate it, President Donald Trump is a deeply troubling human being. However, he may have done a good thing on Thursday, March 21st, when he signed an executive order that requires public schools to "foster environments that promote open, intellectually engaging, and diverse debate."

Schools that don't comply may lose government-funded research grants.

In theory, the order will compel colleges to prevent scenes like those at Evergreen State and Sarah Lawrence. Schools will have serious financial incentives to protect their professors from mobs of unruly children. If all goes well, students will learn to engage with controversial opinions without resorting to baseball bats or demanding Snuggle Plus fabric softener.

One would be remiss if they didn't consider the hidden or unintended consequences of the new policy, though. The executive order is vague, and it gives no criteria for judging whether an institution complies with its requirements. Instead, the specific implementation is left for structures lower on the hierarchy to decide. Hopefully, nobody decides that Young Earth theories must be taught alongside evolution.

The policy could very well become a tool by which the dominant political party punishes schools that lean in the opposite direction. Since there is a 12-to-1 imbalance between liberals and conservative college administrators right now, it would be a Republican administration punishing liberal colleges.

This is hardly a perfect solution  --  but at least it's an effort to address the problem. The stability of our society depends on an endless balancing act between the left and the right. The political landscape of academia has tilted too far left, and it's clearly becoming insular and unstable. Now it's necessary to push things back toward the center.

Hopefully, this recent executive order does more good than harm.

Postscript

After the events at Evergreen State College, the school was forced to settle with Bret Weinstein and his wife, who was also a professor there. The college paid the couple $500,000. Enrollment at the college is said to have dropped "catastrophically."

After the events at Wilfrid Laurier University, the school released several letters of apology. It is being sued for millions of dollars by Lindsay Shepherd and Jordan Peterson.

Forty professors endorsed the demands made by the Diaspora Coalition at Sarah Lawrence, and several others endorsed challenging Samuel Abrams's tenure  --  Abrams being the person who wrote the op-ed that appeared in the New York Times.

[Mar 25, 2019] Why is Donald Trump blaming son-in-law Jared Kushner for not being able to secure wall funding?

Notable quotes:
"... Jared sold himself as the only man who could make a deal between Dems and the GOP. He pointed to "his" recent success with prison reform as proof of his bonafides. ..."
"... Of course, he blew it as usual. He told his side that Dems would vote for Trump's $5.7 billion "wall, or whatever you want to call it" -- and they didn't. He said the Dems would break ranks -- and they didn't. ..."
"... The Senate votes came, and the Trump proposal got FEWER votes than the Democratic proposal, which managed to get 6 GOP Senators to jump ship. Kushner had not only failed; he'd embarrassed the boss. ..."
"... Of course, it was Donald who appointed Jared, and gave him the reins on this critical project -- ignoring the fact that Pence had actually served in Congress, knew the players, and knew the game. Even after two years' worth of evidence that a political neophyte cannot solve all the nation's most intractable problems just because he sleeps with the boss's daughter, the First Con fell for a con man. ..."
"... They both got what they deserved. ..."
Mar 25, 2019 | www.quora.com

David W. Rudlin Answered Jan 29 · Author has 1.8k answers and 8m answer views

Jared sold himself as the only man who could make a deal between Dems and the GOP. He pointed to "his" recent success with prison reform as proof of his bonafides.

Of course, he blew it as usual. He told his side that Dems would vote for Trump's $5.7 billion "wall, or whatever you want to call it" -- and they didn't. He said the Dems would break ranks -- and they didn't.

It appears that Kushner talked to a few junior Dems, who were too wet behind the ears to tell the president's son in law that he needed to change his meds. He read their silence as meaning they were prepared to commit mutiny and, putting all his chips on that bet, stopped talking to both Pelosi (where the real power lies) and Schumer.

Then he told everyone he'd cracked it.

The Senate votes came, and the Trump proposal got FEWER votes than the Democratic proposal, which managed to get 6 GOP Senators to jump ship. Kushner had not only failed; he'd embarrassed the boss.

As others have said below, Trump always finds someone to blame for his mistakes. But in this case there were very good reasons for pointing the finger at Kushner.

Of course, it was Donald who appointed Jared, and gave him the reins on this critical project -- ignoring the fact that Pence had actually served in Congress, knew the players, and knew the game. Even after two years' worth of evidence that a political neophyte cannot solve all the nation's most intractable problems just because he sleeps with the boss's daughter, the First Con fell for a con man.

They both got what they deserved.

[Mar 22, 2019] America's Apartheid of Dollars

Notable quotes:
"... The divisions can always be jacked up. "My opponent is a white nationalist!" and so he doesn't just think you're lazy, he wants to kill you. Convince average Americans to vote against their own interests by manipulating them into opposing any program that might benefit black and brown equally or more than themselves. ..."
"... Listen for what's missing in the speeches about inequality and injustice. Whichever candidate admits that we've created an apartheid of dollars for all deserves your support. ..."
Mar 22, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The birth lottery determines which of those three bands we'll sink or swim together in, because there is precious little mobility. In that bottom band, 81 percent face flat or falling net worths ( 40 percent of Americans make below $15 an hour) and so aren't going anywhere. Education, once a vehicle, is now mostly a tool for the preservation of current statuses across generations, to the point that it's worth paying bribes for. Class is sticky.

Money, not so much. Since the 9.9 percent have the most (except for the super wealthy at least), they have the most to lose. At their peak in the mid-1980s, the managers and technicians in this group held 35 percent of the nation's wealth. Three decades later, that fell 12 percent, exactly as much as the wealth of the 1 percent rose. A significant redistribution of wealth -- upwards -- took place following the 2008 market collapse, as bailouts, shorts, repossessions, and new laws helped the top end of the economy at cost to the bottom. What some label hardships are to others business opportunities.

The people at the top are throwing nails off the back of the truck to make sure no one else can catch up with them. There is a strong zero sum element to all this. The goal is to eliminate the competition . They'll have it all when society is down to two classes, the 1 percent and the 99 percent, and at that point we'll all be effectively the same color. The CEO of JP Morgan called it a bifurcated economy. Historians will recognize it as feudalism.

You'd think someone would sound a global climate change-level alarm about all this. Instead we divide people into tribes and make them afraid of each other by forcing competition for limited resources like health care. Identity politics sharpens the lines, recognizing increasingly smaller separations, like adding letters to LGBTQQIAAP.

Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, herself with presidential ambitions, is an example of the loud voices demanding more division . Contrast that with early model Barack Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, who pleaded, "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

The divisions can always be jacked up. "My opponent is a white nationalist!" and so he doesn't just think you're lazy, he wants to kill you. Convince average Americans to vote against their own interests by manipulating them into opposing any program that might benefit black and brown equally or more than themselves. Keep the groups fighting left and right and they'll never notice the real discrimination is up and down, even as massive economic forces consume all equally. Consumption becomes literal as Americans die from alcohol, drugs, and suicide in record numbers .

Meanwhile, no one has caught on to the fact that identity politics is a marketing tool for votes, fruit flavored vape to bring in the kiddies. Keep that in mind as you listen to the opening cries of the 2020 election. Listen for what's missing in the speeches about inequality and injustice. Whichever candidate admits that we've created an apartheid of dollars for all deserves your support.

** The author doesn't really drive for Uber but his conversation with the Spaniard was real.


JeffK March 22, 2019 at 7:39 am

Mr Van Buren. This piece nails it. The Democrats made a huge mistake focusing on race and LGBTQ instead of class. Their stated goal should be to replace race based affirmative action with class-based programs.

If there is serious violence coming to America it will come during the next major recession/financial crisis. The ARs will come out of the closet when, during the next financial crisis, the elites are bailed out (again), yet the riff raff lose their homes and pickups to foreclosure.

I am very pessimistic in this area. I believe the elites, in general, are agnostic to SJW issues, abortion, job loss, BLM, religious liberty, and on and on. The look at the riff raff with amusement, sparring over such trivial things. Meanwhile, the river of cash keeps flowing to their bank accounts.

Imagine if the digital transfer of money was abolished. Imagine if everybody had to have their money in a local bank instead of in an investment account of a major bank. Imagine if Americans saw, day after day, armored vehicles showing up at local banks to offload sacks of currency that went to only a few individual accounts held by the very rich.

Instead, the elites receive their financial statements showing an ever increasing hoard of cash at their disposal. They see it, but nobody else does. However, if everybody saw the river of wealth flowing to the elites, I believe things would change. Fast. Right now this transfer of wealth is all digital, hidden from the view of 99.99% of Americans and the IRS. And the elites, the banking industry, and the wealth management cabal prefer it that way.

It's easy to propose the ultimate goal of the elites is to have a utopian society to themselves, where the only interaction they have with the riff raff is with subservient technicians keeping it all running. Like the movie Elysium.

https://youtu.be/QILNSgou5BY

Oleg Gark , says: March 22, 2019 at 8:22 am
When feudalism comes to America, it will be justified by Libertarianism. With government defined as the bad guy, there's nothing to stop the 1% from organizing everything to their own benefit.

On the other side of the political spectrum, identity politics emphasizes people's differences and tribal affiliations over their shared citizenship. This prevents them from making common cause.

Fundamentally, these trends make the body politic so weak that it becomes susceptible to takeover by authoritarians that represent narrow interests.

Johann , says: March 22, 2019 at 8:31 am
"His skin was clearly a few shades darker than mine, though he pointed out that was only because my relatives came from the cold part of Europe and he came from the sunny part."

The Spanish in Europe got their color from the Moorish invasion, not the sun.

More of my annoying trivia that has little to do with the subject of an article.

John D. Thullen , says: March 22, 2019 at 9:15 am
Welp, the Democratic Party, by and large, believes all Americans regardless of class, race, religion, and gender should have guaranteed equal access to affordable healthcare, a substantial minimum wage, education and the rest.

Stacy Abrams wants these items too, along with equal access to the voting franchise.

"Until slavery was ended in the United States, human beings were legally considered capital, just like owning stocks and bonds today. But the Spaniard knew enough about history to wonder what reparations would be offered to the thousands of Chinese treated as animals to build the railroads or the 8,000 Irish who died digging the New Basin Canal or the whole families of Jews living on the Lower East Side of New York who were forced to employ their children to make clothing for uptown "white" stores. Later in the same century, wages were "voluntarily" cut to the bone at factories in Ohio to save jobs that disappeared anyway after the owners had wrung out the last profits."

That would be an excellent point if your inner Spaniard concluded reparations should be offered to the others as well, but ends up being merely tendentious if he contends that no one gets reparations.

But will you like it if the Democratic Party makes that part of their platform too?

I was born in Middletown, Ohio alongside the elegiacal hillbillies, who, by the way, didn't care for the blacks on the other side of the tracks anymore than my Armco-employed grandfather did, and certainly the business owners who disappeared the jobs and cut wages while voting for the so-called free traders were of the same ilk.

I didn't know any Democrats among any of my family's circle and, by the way, Middletown might as well have been south of the Mason Dixon anyway for all the white Democrats in town who gave not a crap about their fellow black citizens, certainly not the business owners who disappeared the jobs while voting for the so-called free traders.

It was the Republican Party (Larry Kudlow, I'm gunning for you) who championed creative destruction and the red tooth and claw of unfettered worldwide competition without asking, in fact jumping for joy, what the unintended consequences would be because the consequences were intended smash the unions for all, cut wages and benefits and hand the booty to shareholders, move operations to lower-tax, lower wage, environmentally unregulated parts of the globe to manufacture them thar high margin MAGA hats for the aggrieved.

What a beautiful grift!

Hello, Marianas.

That Democrats jumped on the bandwagon is no credit to them, especially while assuming the prone position as the republican party frayed the safety net.

True, the republicans laid off everyone, regardless of race, gender, and class and then cut everyone's benefits.

How equable of them.

TomG , says: March 22, 2019 at 9:44 am
As the Spaniard rightly understood, one can look way back into our history and see that the moneyed class has always used identity politics in economic control games to divide and conquer. That the Republicans rail on this as some evil creation of the modern Democrat is laughable at best. That the sheep who follow the party mouth pieces of the moneyed class in this media age can still be so easily manipulated is rather pitiful. Making common cause for the general welfare has never really sunk in as an American value.

Divide and conquer remains our true ethos. As the dole gets evermore paltry the only seeming options remaining are common cause for a common good or greater violence. One requires us to find a contentment beyond the delusional American dream of becoming that 1 to 10%. The other just requires continued anger, division and despair.

JoS. S. Laughon , says: March 22, 2019 at 10:12 am
Ironically the view that race/culture isn't at all important and should be disregarded in view of the class division (a "distraction"), is pretty much endorsing the classic Marxist critique.
ProletroleumCole , says: March 22, 2019 at 10:27 am
It's easy to notice divide and conquer when it's hate against those of the same class but are of a different culture/race.

But what's *difficult* to notice is identifying with the elites of your race in a positive way.
A lot of people, especially with the onset of realityTV, tend to think rich people are just like them (albeit a little smarter). The methods and systems to keep power aren't considered. They're made non-threatening. So many billionaires and politicians act effete today to stoke this image.

Lynn Robb , says: March 22, 2019 at 10:31 am
"Whichever candidate admits that we've created an apartheid of dollars for all deserves your support."

So we're supposed to vote for Bernie Sanders?

Connecticut Farmer , says: March 22, 2019 at 11:30 am
" Whether your housing is subsidized via a mortgage tax deduction "

This jumped off the screen. I wonder how many people even realize that. Probably the same number who still believe that social security is a "forced savings".

Connecticut Farmer , says: March 22, 2019 at 11:47 am
Not to put too fine a point on it but clearly we are wasting our time arguing. As long as the current system of government remains in effect it will be same old same old.

Many changes are in order–starting with this archaic remnant of a bygone era called "The Two Party System".

Lert345 , says: March 22, 2019 at 12:05 pm
Spaniards are indeed Hispanic. The definition of Hispanic relates to a linguistic grouping – that is, relating to Spain or Spanish speaking countries. Your friend would indeed qualify for all sorts of preferences according to the definition.

As to being a POC, I could not locate any definition as to what threshold of skin tone qualifies someone as a POC. I wager none yet exists but will be forthcoming.

Johann

As for the skin tone of Spaniards, many in the south have the Moorish influence,however, in the rest of the country skin tones range from light beige to very fair. Rather similar to Italians, actually.

Dave , says: March 22, 2019 at 12:18 pm
First, kudos to Van Buren for getting a Seamless delivery while driving. That's not easy to coordinate. Second, I look forward to more conservative policies addressing poverty, drug addiction and access to health care. This article adds to the 10-year rant against what Democrats have done or want to do.

Like nearly every Republican of the last 10 years, Van Buren offers none here. But I'm sure once the complaining is out of his system, they will arrive.

david , says: March 22, 2019 at 12:31 pm
" Whether your housing is subsidized via a mortgage tax deduction "

Sorry, not taking your money is NOT subsidizing!

I thought this is a "conservative" idea to begin with? Apparently, it is not true even here.

Jealousy that others can keep their money is driving the worse instinct of many republicans.

Sigh.

Vincent , says: March 22, 2019 at 12:32 pm
Your Spaniard friend also has it all wrong. The real division line is between those willing to initiate coercion for their own self-righteousness and those who refuse to. Anyone that supports government is one-in-the-same, regardless of color or class.
LouB , says: March 22, 2019 at 12:35 pm
Thirty years ago I'd be asking who printed the canned response pamphlet to give prepared talking points to enable anyone to provide quick sharp tongued witty criticisms of anything they may encounter that didn't tow the party line.

Now I gotta ask where do I download the Trollware to accomplish the same thing.

Sharp article, thanks.

JonF , says: March 22, 2019 at 12:42 pm
The Moors were a tiny class of invaders who left rather little imprint on the Spanish genome. That was true of the Romans and the Goths as well. Spanish genes are mostly the genes of the pre-Roman population: the Iberians in the south (who maybe migrated from North Africa), Celts in the north, and the indigenous Basques along the Pyrenees.
WorkingClass , says: March 22, 2019 at 2:27 pm
Yes. And thank you. It's a class war and the working class, divided, is a one legged man in an ass kicking contest.
Carolyn , says: March 22, 2019 at 3:36 pm
Outstanding piece!
Dave , says: March 22, 2019 at 3:39 pm
What happened to "a rising tide lifts all boats"? We've been promised for decades that the wealth generated by those at the very top would "trickle down." This was a cornerstone of Reaganism that has been parroted ever since.

There have been naysayers who say that that theory was fantasy and that all we would have is increased wealth disparity and greater national deficits.

How peculiar.

Peter Van Buren , says: March 22, 2019 at 4:06 pm
A rising tide lifts all yachts.
-- author Morris Berman

[Mar 20, 2019] I am now of the opinion that 2018 will be the peak in crude oil production, not 2019 as I earlier predicted. Russia is slowing down and may have peaked

If so, economics will suffer and chances for Trump for re-election are much lower, of exist at all due to all his betrayals
In the fable of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," the wolf actually arrives at the end. Never forget that. Peak oil will arrive. We don't know when, and we are not prepared for it.
Shale play without more borrowed money might be the next Venezuela. .
Mar 16, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

I am now of the opinion that 2018 will be the peak in crude oil production, not 2019 as I earlier predicted. Russia is slowing down and may have peaked. Canada is slowing down and Brazil is slowing down. OPEC likely peaked in 2016. It is all up to the USA. Can shale oil save us from peak oil?

OPEC + Russia + Canada, about 57% of world oil production.

Jeff says: 03/14/2019 at 1: 50 pm

"I am now of the opinion that 2018 will be the peak in crude oil production, not 2019 as I earlier predicted. Russia is slowing down and may have peaked. Canada is slowing down and Brazil is slowing down. OPEC likely peaked in 2016. It is all up to the USA. Can shale oil save us from peak oil?"

IEA´s Oil 2019 5y forecast has global conventional oil on a plateau, i.e. declines and growth match each other perfectly and net growth will come from LTO, NGL, biofuels and a small amount of other unconventional and "process gains".

Iran is ofc a jocker, since it can quickly add supply. Will be interesting to see how Trump will proceed.

Carlos Diaz x Ignored says: 03/14/2019 at 3:23 pm

I am quite original in my opinion about Peak Oil. I think it took place in late 2015. I will explain. If we define Peak Oil as the maximum in production over a certain period of time we will not know it has taken place for a long time, until we lose the hope of going above. That is not practical, as it might take years.

I prefer to define Peak Oil as the point in time when vigorous growth in oil production ended and we entered an undulating plateau when periods of slow growth and slow decline will alternate, affected by oil price and variable demand by economy until we reach terminal decline in production permanently abandoning the plateau towards lower oil production.

The 12-year rate of growth in C+C production took a big hit in late 2015 and has not recovered. The increase in 2 Mb since is just an anemic 2.5% over 3 years or 0.8% per year, and it keeps going down. This is plateau behavior since there was no economic crisis to blame. It will become negative when the economy sours.

Peak Oil has already arrived. We are not recognizing it because production still increases a little bit, but we are in Peak Oil mode. Oil production will decrease a lot more easily that it will increase over the next decade. The economy is going to be a real bitch.

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/14/2019 at 4:57 pm
Carlos Diaz,

Interesting thesis, keep in mind that the price of oil was relatively low from 2015 to 2018 because for much of the period there was an excess of oil stocks built up over the 2013 to 2015 period when output growth outpaced demand growth due to very high oil prices. Supply has been adequate to keep oil prices relatively low through March 2019 and US sanctions on Iran, political instability in Libya and Venezuela, and action by OPEC and several non-OPEC nations to restrict supply have resulted in slower growth in oil output.

Eventually World Petroleum stocks will fall to a level that will drive oil prices higher, there is very poor visibility for World Petroleum Stocks, so there may be a 6 to 12 month lag between petroleum stocks falling to critically low levels and market realization of that fact, by Sept to Dec 2019 this may be apparent and oil prices may spike (perhaps to $90/b by May 2020).

At that point we may start to see some higher investment levels with higher output coming 12 to 60 months later (some projects such as deep water and Arctic projects take a lot of time to become operational, there may be some OPEC projects that might be developed as well, there are also Canadian Oil sands projects that might be developed in a high oil price environment.

I define the peak as the highest 12 month centered average World C+C output, but it can be define many different ways.

Carlos Diaz x Ignored says: 03/14/2019 at 7:18 pm
So Dennis,

Our capability to store oil is very limited considering the volume being moved at any time from production to consumption. I understand that it is the marginal price of the last barrel of oil that sets the price for oil, but given the relatively inexpensive oil between 2015 and now, and the fact that we have not been in an economical crisis, what is according to you the cause that world oil production has grown so anemically these past three years?

Do you think that if oil had been at 20$/b as it used to be for decades the growth in consumption/production would have been significantly higher?

I'll give you a hint, with real negative interest rates and comparatively inexpensive oil most OECD economies are unable to grow robustly.

To me Peak Oil is an economical question, not a geological one. The geology just sets the cost of production (not the price) too high, making the operation uneconomical. It is the economy that becomes unable to pump more oil. That's why the beginning of Peak Oil can be placed at late 2015.

The economic system has three legs, cheap energy, demographic growth, and debt growth. All three are failing simultaneously so we are facing the perfect storm. Social unrest is the most likely consequence almost everywhere.

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/14/2019 at 9:20 pm
Carlos,

If prices are low that means there is plenty of oil supply relative to demand. It also means that some oil cannot be produced profitably, so oil companies invest less and oil output grows more slowly.

So you seem to have the story backwards. Low oil prices means low growth in supply.

So if oil prices were $20/b, oil supply would grow more slowly, we have had an oversupply of oil that ls what led to low oil prices. When oil prices increase, supply growth will ne higher. Evause profits will be higher and there will be more investment.

Carlos Diaz x Ignored says: 03/15/2019 at 5:03 am
No Dennis,

It is you who has it backwards, as you only see the issue from an oil price point of view, and oil price responds to supply and demand, and higher prices are an estimulus to higher production.

But there is a more important point of view, because oil is one of the main inputs of the economy. If the price of oil is sufficiently low it stimulates the economy. New businesses are created, more people go farther on vacation, and so on, increasing oil demand and oil production. If the price is sufficiently high it depresses the economy. A higher percentage of wealth is transferred from consumer countries to producing countries and consumer countries require more debt. During the 2010-2014 period high oil prices were sustained by the phenomenal push of the Chinese economy, while European and Japanese economies suffered enormously and their oil consumption depressed and hasn't fully recovered since.

In the long term it is the economy that pumps the oil, and that is what you cannot understand.

Oil limits → Oil cost → Oil Price ↔ Economy → Oil demand → Oil production

The economy decides when and how Peak Oil takes place. If you knew that you wouldn't bother with all those models.

And in my opinion the economy already decided in late 2015 when the drive to increase oil production to compensate for low oil prices couldn't be sustained.

Schinzy x Ignored says: 03/15/2019 at 11:18 am
Carlos,

Your reasoning is close to mine. See https://www.tse-fr.eu/publications/oil-cycle-dynamics-and-future-oil-price-scenarios .

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/15/2019 at 3:01 pm
Carlos,

Both supply and demand matter. I understand economics quite well thank you. You are correct that the economy is very important, it will determine oil prices to some degree especially on the demand side of the market. If one looks at the price of oil and economic growth or GDP, there is very little correlation.

The fact is the World economy grew quite nicely from 2011 to 2014 when oil prices averaged over $100/b.

There may be some point that high oil prices are a problem, apparently $100/b in 2014 US$ is below that price. Perhaps at $150/b your argument would be correct. Why would the economy need more oil when oil prices are low? The low price is a signal that there is too much oil being produced relative to the demand for oil.

I agree the economy will be a major factor in when peak oil occurs, but as most economists understand quite well, it is both supply and demand that will determine market prices for oil.

My models are based on the predictions of the geophysicists at the USGS (estimating TRR for tight oil) and the economists at the EIA (who attempt to predict future oil prices). Both predictions are used as inputs to the model along with past completion rates and well productivity and assumptions about potential future completion rates and future well productivity, bounded by the predictions of both the USGS and the EIA along with economic assumptions about well cost, royalties and taxes, transport costs, discount rate, and lease operating expenses.

Note that my results for economically recoverable resources are in line with the USGS TRR mean estimates and are somewhat lower when the economic assumptions are applied (ERR/TRR is roughly 0.85), the EIA AEO has economically recoverable tight oil resources at about 115% of the USGS mean TRR estimate. The main EIA estimate I use is their AEO reference oil price case (which may be too low with oil prices gradually rising to $110/b (2017$) by 2050.

Assumptions for Permian Basin are royalties and taxes 33% of wellhead revenue, transport cost $5/b, LOE=$2.3/b plus $15000/month, annual discount rate is 10%/year and well cost is $10 million, annual interest rate is 7.4%/year, annual inflation rate assumed to be 2.5%/year, income tax and revenue from natural gas and NGL are ignored all dollar costs in constant 2017 US$.

Mario C Vachon x Ignored says: 03/15/2019 at 6:39 pm
You do incredible work Dennis and I believe you are correct. Demand for oil is relatively inelastic which accounts for huge price swings when inventories get uncomfortably high or low. If supply doesn't keep up with our needs, price will rise to levels that will eventually create more supply and create switching into other energy sources which will reduce demand.
Carlos Diaz x Ignored says: 03/15/2019 at 6:57 pm

Why would the economy need more oil when oil prices are low? The low price is a signal that there is too much oil being produced relative to the demand for oil.

You don't seem to be aware of historical oil prices. For inflation adjusted oil prices since 1946 oil (WTI) spent:
27 years below $30
13 years at ~ $70
18 years at ~ $40
10 years at ~ $90
5 years at ~ $50
https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart
And the fastest growth in oil production took place precisely at the periods when oil was cheapest.

You simply cannot be more wrong about that.

And your models are based on a very big assumption, that the geology of the reserves is determinant for Peak Oil. It is not. There is plenty of oil in the world, but the extraction of most of it is unaffordable. The economy will decide (has decided) when Oil Peak takes place and what happens afterwards. Predictions/projections aren't worth a cent as usual. You could save yourself the trouble.

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 7:33 am
Carlos,

I use both geophysics and economics, it is not one or the other it is both of these that will determine peak oil.

Of course oil prices have increased, the cheapest oil gets produced first and oil gradually gets more expensive as the marginal barrel produced to meet demand at the margin is more costly to produce.

Real Oil Prices do not correlate well with real economic growth and on a microeconomic level the price of oil will affect profits and willingness of oil companies to invest which in turn will affect future output. Demand will be a function of both economic output and efficiency improvements in the use of oil.

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 7:34 am
Thanks Mario.
Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 10:49 am
Carlos,

Also keep in mind that during the 1945-1975 period economic growth rates were very high as population growth rates were very high and the World economy was expanding rapidly as population grew and the World rebuilt in the aftermath of World War 2. Oil was indeed plentiful and cheap over this period and output grew rapidly to meet expanding World demand for oil. The cheapness of the oil led to relatively inefficient use of the resource, as constraints in output became evident and more expensive offshore, Arctic oil were extracted oil prices increased and there was high volatility due to Wars in the Middle east and other political developments. Oil output (C+C) since 1982 has grown fairly steadily at about an 800 kb/d annual average each year, oil prices move up and down in response to anticipated oil stock movements and are volatile because these estimates are often incorrect (the World petroleum stock numbers are far from transparent.)

On average since the Iran/Iraq crash in output (1982-2017) World output has grown by about 1.2% per year and 800 kb/d per year on average, prices have risen or fallen when there was inadequate or excess stocks of petroleum, this pattern (prices adjusting to stock levels) is likely to continue.

There has been little change when we compare 1982 to 1999 to 1999-2017 (divide overall period of interest in half) for either percentage increase of absolute increase in output.

I would agree that severe shortages of oil supply relative to demand (likely apparent by 2030) is likely to lead to an economic crisis as oil prices rise to levels that the World economy cannot adjust to (my guess is that this level will be $165/b in 2018$). Potentially high oil prices might lead to faster adoption of alternative modes of transport that might avert a crisis, but that is too optimistic a scenario even for me. 🙂

HHH x Ignored says: 03/15/2019 at 9:44 pm
China will be in outright deflation soon enough. Economic stimulus is starting to fail in China. They can't fill the so called bathtub up fast enough to keep pace with the water draining out the bottom. So to speak.

Interest rates in China will soon be exactly where they are in Europe and Japan. Maybe lower.

In order to get oil to $90-$100 the value of the dollar is going to have to sink a little bit. In order to get oil to $140-$160 the dollar has to make a new all time low. Anybody predicting prices shooting up to $200 needs the dollar index to sink to 60 or below.

The reality is oil is going to $20. Because the rest of the world outside the US is failing. Dennis makes some nice graphs and charts and under his assumptions his charts and graphs are correct. But his assumptions aren't correct.

We got $20 oil and an economic depression coming.

Peak Oil is going to be deflationary as hell. Higher prices aren't in the cards even when a shortage actually shows up. We will get less supply at a lower price. Demand destruction is actually going to happen when economies and debt bubbles implode so we actually can't be totally sure we are ever going to see an actual shortage.

We could very well be producing 20-30% less oil than we do now and still not have a shortage.

Oh and EV's are going to have to compete with $20 oil not $150 oil.

Lightsout x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 6:25 am
You are assuming that the oil is priced in dollars there are moves underway that raise two fingers to that.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/2174453/china-and-russia-look-ditch-dollar-new-payments-system-move

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 7:41 am
HHH,

When do you expect the oil price to reach $20/b? We will have to see when this occurs.

It may come true when EVs and AVs have decimated demand for oil in 2050, but not before. EIA's oil price reference scenario from AEO 2019 below. That is a far more realistic prediction (though likely too low especially when peak oil arrives in 2025), oil prices from $100 to $160/b in 2018 US$ are more likely from 2023 to 2035 (for three year centered average Brent oil price).

Dennis Coyne x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 9:56 am
HHH,

My assumptions are based on USGS mean resource estimates and EIA oil price estimates, as well as BIS estimates for the World monetary and financial system.

Your assumption that oil prices are determined by exchange rates only is not borne out by historical evidence. Exchange rates are a minor, not a major determinant of oil prices.

HHH x Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 6:50 pm
Dennis,

Technically speaking. The most relevant trendline on price chart currently comes off the lows of 2016/02/08. It intersects with 2017/06/19. You draw the trendline on out to where price is currently. Currently price is trying to backtest that trendline.

On a weekly price chart i'd say it touches the underside of that trendline sometime in April in the low 60's somewhere between $62-$66 kinda depends on when it arrives there time wise. The later it takes to arrive there the higher price will be. I've been trading well over 20 years can't tell you how many times i've seen price backtest a trendline after it's been broken. It's a very common occurrence. And i wouldn't short oil until after it does.

But back to your question. $20 oil what kind of timetable. My best guess is 2021-2022. Might happen 2020 or 2023. And FED can always step in and weaken the dollar. Fundamentally the only way oil doesn't sink to $20 is the FED finds a way to weaken the dollar.

But understand the FED is the only major CB that currently doesn't have the need to open up monetary policy. It's really the rest of the worlds CB ultra loose monetary policy which is going to drive oil to $20.

[Mar 20, 2019] What will happen if no energy source can cover the decline rate

Notable quotes:
"... "If that was to happen and no energy source can cover the decline rate, wouldn't the world be pretty fucked economically thereafter? Hence one can assume or take a wild ass guess that the decline after peak would resemble something like Venezuela. So not a smooth short % decline rate." ..."
"... Realistically the global economy is already in a tight spot. It started back in 2000 when Oil prices started climbing from about $10/bbl in 1998 to about $30/bbl in 2000. Then the World Major Central banks dropped interest which ended triggering the Housing Boom\Bust and carried Oil prices to $147/bbl. Since then Interest rates have remained extremely low while World Debt has soared (expected to top $250T in 2019). ..."
"... Probably the biggest concern for me is the risking risks for another World war: The US has been targeting all of the major Oil exporters. The two remaining independent targets are Venezuela & Iran. I suspect Venzuela will be the next US take over since it will be a push over compared to Iran. ..."
Mar 16, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

Ignored says: 03/16/2019 at 12:42 am

Iron Mike Asked:

"If that was to happen and no energy source can cover the decline rate, wouldn't the world be pretty fucked economically thereafter? Hence one can assume or take a wild ass guess that the decline after peak would resemble something like Venezuela. So not a smooth short % decline rate."

Energy is the economy, The economy cannot function without energy. Thus its logical that a decline in energy supply will reduce the economy. The only way for this not to apply is if there are efficiency gains that offset the decline. But at this point the majority of cost effective efficiency gains are already in place. At this point gains become increasing expensive with much smaller gains (law of diminishing returns). Major infrastructure changes like modernizing rail lines take many decades to implement and also require lots of capital. Real capital needed will be difficult to obtain do to population demographics (ie boomers dependent on massive unfunded entitlement & pensions).

Realistically the global economy is already in a tight spot. It started back in 2000 when Oil prices started climbing from about $10/bbl in 1998 to about $30/bbl in 2000. Then the World Major Central banks dropped interest which ended triggering the Housing Boom\Bust and carried Oil prices to $147/bbl. Since then Interest rates have remained extremely low while World Debt has soared (expected to top $250T in 2019).

My guess is that global economy will wipe saw in the future as demographics, resource depletion (including Oil) and Debt all merge into another crisis. Gov't will act with more cheap and easy credit (since there is no alterative TINA) as well as QE\Asset buying to avoid a global depression. This creating a wipesaw effect that has already been happening since 2000 with Boom Bust cycles. This current cycle has lasted longer because the Major central banks kept interest rates low, When The Fed started QT and raising rate it ended up triggering a major stock market correction In Dec 2018. I believe at this point the Fed will no longer seek any further credit tightening that will trip the economy back into recession. However its likely they the global economy will fall into another recession as consumers & business even without further credit tighting by CB (Central Banks) Because they've been loading up on cheap debt, which will eventually run into issues servicing their debt. For instance there are about 7M auto loans in delinquency in March of 2019. Stock valuations are largely driven by stock buybacks, which is funded by debt. I presume companies are close to debt limit which is likely going to prevent them from purchase more stock back.

Probably the biggest concern for me is the risking risks for another World war: The US has been targeting all of the major Oil exporters. The two remaining independent targets are Venezuela & Iran. I suspect Venzuela will be the next US take over since it will be a push over compared to Iran. I think once all of remaining independent Oil Exports are seized that is when the major powers start fighting each other. However is possible that some of the proxy nations (Pakastan\India),(Israel\Iran), etc trigger direct war between the US, China, and Russia at any time.

Notice that the US is now withdrawing from all its major arms treaties, and the US\China\Russia are now locked into a Arms race. Nuclear powers are now rebuilding their nuclear capacity (more Nukes) and modernizing their deployment systems (Hypersonic, Very large MIRV ICBMS, Undersea drones, Subs, Bombers, etc.

My guess is that nations like the US & China will duke it out before collapsing into the next Venezuela. If my assessment is correct, The current state of Venezuela will look like the garden of Eden compared to the aftermath of a full scale nuclear war.

Currently the Doomsday clock (2019) is tied with 1953 at 2 minutes:

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/past-announcements/

1953 was the height of the cold war. I presume soon the Doomsday clock will be reduced to less than 2 Minutes later this year, due to recent events in the past few weeks.

https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

"the world's nuclear nations proceeded with programs of "nuclear modernization" that are all but indistinguishable from a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo against the use of nuclear weapons."

" The current international security situation -- what we call the "new abnormal" -- has extended over two years now. It's a state as worrisome as the most dangerous times of the Cold War, a state that features an unpredictable and shifting landscape of simmering disputes that multiply the chances for major military conflict to erupt."

[Mar 18, 2019] Middle Class Once Meant Stability and Now Means Fragility

Notable quotes:
"... Was the American Middle Class a Cold War thing? ..."
"... The British middle class seems to have been mostly people living on investments -- not in the manorial style, but with enough to have a flat, and a servant -- in a style that you might associate with Sherlock Holmes. A middle class that included people with jobs definitely seems post-WWII, and, of course, since the wage stagnation starting in the mid 1970's, it's mostly ended by now. ..."
Mar 18, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Alissa Quart, Executive Editor, Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Cross posted from the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

feel that being middle class is not what it once was and that we are all running in place as fast as we can to stay the same, to quote Alice in Wonderland's Red Queen," Brenda Madison, an art director and graphic designer in Laguna Beach (Orange County), told me. "Never did I think I would worry that Social Security and Medicare may not be available in my future or that a medical injury or unexpected repair would bankrupt us."

She and her husband, now in their middle years, "are not sure we will be able to retire in our home."

Patricia Moore is a single mother of three who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles and a licensed vocational nurse working in hospice about to take the licensing exam to be a registered nurse. Due to a shortage of space, she sleeps on the couch and is "still struggling to make ends meet." Her rent is $1,598 a month, her pay is about $3,200, and her student loan payback is $375 a month. Moore recently has had to resort to a GoFundMe campaign so she could stay home with her daughter during a monthlong health crisis, and has at times had to donate plasma. She said she is unable to provide "the extras for her kids."

Moore began to enter her youngest son in focus groups in office buildings or hotels in neighborhoods like Beverly Hills. Sometimes he would make $75 an hour and the whole family would eat from buffets, the kind with cantaloupe, and maybe they'd also get a gift card. At first, he tested toys and then video games but also an MRI to map his brain. It was only because of these gigs that Moore could finally say, "Go buy yourself something," to her children.

The extreme cost of living has forced some California families to take unusual steps like this. As the Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported, a family of four in the San Francisco metropolitan area making $117,400 a year qualifies as "low income."

These were Americans for whom the meaning of middle-class life had altered from something stable to implied economic fragility.

Their burdens were the price of health and child care, educational debt or a housing market gone berserk. They wanted job security, pensions and Social Security and unions, but these things seemed like a fantasy out of a mid-century American novel like "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit." The middle class' long historical association with the status quo -- strongly identifying with institutions or corporations, rejecting restive discontent -- has made their new wobbliness all the more startling to them.

But when did that vulnerability start? Toward the end of the past century into this one, there was a rise in what author Barbara Ehrenreich has called a "fear of falling," an anxiety among the professional-managerial class about downward mobility. I think of fear of falling as the opposite side of the coin of American individualism and its historic promise of social and economic progress.

Since the 1980s, some members of the middle class have gone "from a kind of security to being reduced to the kind of economic unstable state that working-class Americans have had to experience forever," explained Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropologist at New York University who studies the middle-class financial experience. The office or academic job started to resemble the precarious work life that working poor Americans have long understood to be their lot, she said. And then there are the robots waiting in the wings to take their ostensible share of middle-class jobs, and soon.

This new fragility is one theory to explain the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Trump voters were sometimes mistaken for all hillbilly elegiac or Rust Belt proletariat. In truth, an estimated 38 percent of white people with bachelor degrees voted for the man -- closer to "office worker elegy." Indeed, as much as Trump's messaging has been jingoistic or racist, he has also been addressing middle-class anxiety when he continually repeated that the system is "rigged."

While some have protested that Trump's success has more to do with loss of status or rank bigotry, Johns Hopkins University sociologist Stephen L. Morgan has conducted studies that reveal one substantial motivator of the Trump vote was economic. He noted that a successful national Democratic candidate would be one who appealed "to people who have not fared well in the postindustrial economy," such as those in some once-prosperous areas of the Midwest.

Ordinary middle-class people's struggles can be, of course, ameliorated by broad shifts, such as adopting a form of universal basic income or a flat monthly cash stipend for familial caregivers of their young or elderly kin. And we should at least explore adopting Medicare for all, to address rising health care costs. We also need to more effectively push for longer paid parental leave -- or, in many cases, any paid parental leave.

But if we can't get relief from federal programs or our employers, we will need to craft local or state solutions. Retaining rent stabilization laws is key in our cities, as is building more affordable housing for, say, teachers and municipal workers, so they can continue to live in the places they serve.

Finally, I saw when reporting my book that, when squeezed, people revealed their financial woes to others, they tended to then recognize that their obstacles were partially systemic. That, in turn, meant they didn't simply internalize their real-world burdens into self-punishment. They seemed more able to patch together personal solutions -- small-scale child care fixes like sharing pickup with their neighbors, for instance.

Simply voicing hopes and difficulties, and making them audible for their leaders to name and address, is a small part of what must happen for things to change. Although for some, these needed transformations may seem to be coming too late.

As Madison put it, "We are trying not to think too much about the future."

This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and was first published by the San Francisco Chronicle .

ambrit , March 18, 2019 at 3:23 am

My ground level observations indicate that there is a lot of "denial" going on in the minds of the putative 'middle class.'

One major barrier to the public 'conversations' about the economic malaise affecting America today is the still prevalent custom of shaming the victims of bad luck. I see this tying all the way back to the Calvinist theological concept of "Election," which is an aspect of "Predestination." In effect, one suffers in life because the Deity chooses to make it so. Thus, those who do well in life can "legitimately" look down on those who suffer. It is a perfect excuse for callousness of heart.

We read Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" in class in my High School. Written around 1900, it still has merit as a descriptive and predictive tome.

Die wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism

Old ideas die hard.

marieann , March 18, 2019 at 9:44 am

"The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate."

Just so we know our place and stay there

Sanxi , March 18, 2019 at 12:24 pm

"Capitalism is a that system which has become that which the living are converted to the the living dead."

jrs , March 18, 2019 at 12:53 pm

Some of what is perceived as shaming, may just be understood as trying to understand how those with good professions etc. end up that way (and no I don't judge those without "good professions" – I don't think we choose our fate to any real degree see. It's just takes more to understand why is all). Now from the inside some good professions are not really, or have become so niche that that is the story but

Acacia , March 18, 2019 at 5:11 am

Mod: looks like some issue in the first paragraph

Amfortas the hippie , March 18, 2019 at 6:31 am

This:"Finally, I saw when reporting my book that, when squeezed, people revealed their financial woes to others, they tended to then recognize that their obstacles were partially systemic. That, in turn, meant they didn't simply internalize their real-world burdens into self-punishment. They seemed more able to patch together personal solutions -- small-scale child care fixes like sharing pickup with their neighbors, for instance."

commiseration is new, in my experience. not too long ago, one didn't speak about economic difficulties in polite company at least in the middle class(poor people, oth, sometimes do) that they're finding such behaviour is worrying, as it means the precariousness is spreading which causes cognitive dissonance, since it's counterintuitive according the the Narrative we're all supposed to cling to.
to wit, in my recent exposure to network tv in hotels and dr's offices, i note that -- like in the Matrix–a grand illusion of the late 90's is laid across the world.

I hear locally upper middle class soccer moms having lunch, and it's oneupmanship all around everything's fine, and we went to the most wonderful resort, in our new suv, and our son married a doctor and they honeymooned as missionaries (!) but it's all nonsense, and everyone knows it.(the quick flash of panic in their eyes, "will the card work?")

That was the norm not so long ago all the way down to the dregs of the former middle class. i see the rending of that pretension the misty veil of utopian just-worldism as what's at the root of so many of these dislocations an eruptions of late.

"Believe Real Hard" just doesn't cut it any more, and those soccer moms don't know how to think about it. Per Ambrit's reference to Calvinism, at some point reality intrudes and one must climb down from the pillar.

jefemt , March 18, 2019 at 9:03 am

Becoming They and The Other. It can't happen to me -- I am a Exceptional! ™ (and white). Could Compassion be on the horizon– on the wax as more and more realize they are in the global Lemming-fall rat-race to the bottom ?

kareninca , March 18, 2019 at 8:48 pm

They're not attending/joining churches because that costs money and they don't have the money. Once there are more "churches" that only cost what people can afford, more people will attend. Just a prediction.

sanxi , March 18, 2019 at 12:30 pm

Sadly first the great suffering must turn into the great awareness that it's not your fault than love oneself and compassion for all else

jrs , March 18, 2019 at 12:58 pm

it's not all illusions, a part of the population is doing pretty well, they take vacations and crap (who even has ANY paid time off anymore anyway? not me. even STAYCATIONS are off the table! Heck getting a cold is pretty much off the table ..). But others

But yea the Big Lie Narrative of these times is that the economy is doing well, Trump's economic performance will get him reelected (this economy is total garbage, so F trump and the horse he rode in on), unemployment is low and other BS.

The Rev Kev , March 18, 2019 at 6:32 am

Lots of sad reading here. But seriously – $117,400 a year qualifies as "low income."? I know that it is true but at the same time that is so stupid on the face of it. I do have to admit here to a weakness for nostalgia – especially for places that I have never experienced but have read about. Sometimes out of idle curiosity I might flick through a few videos like that on America in earlier times and you can see one such clip at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECFH3Pe21oQ or at this one at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOr1fIIHQFk

Having said this, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if neoliberalism had spluttered out during the 1970s as a nonstarter of an idea and instead a different timeline had formed. In this one, instead of wages flate-lining back in the 70s, they had kept apace with GDP like they had the previous thirty years. People, more secure in their wages, would never have embarked on the credit boom like they did when wages dropped. In this timeline too the rich are still taxed at 70% which mopped up all the surplus that would otherwise have instead gone on to founding think tanks and money in politics. With an affluent population, there was never was a need to import so much from China and the unions were still strong enough to stop industries being shipped off to there. It would have been a completely different America.

But that is another timeline and we are instead in one where people will soon be in a position where they have nothing else to lose. And that is a very dangerous proposition that. And they still have potentially a very powerful weapon – their numbers. And their votes.

russell1200 , March 18, 2019 at 9:00 am

The 70s were going to be a very tough decade: The loss of our huge post-WW2 advantages in manufacturing, oil shocks, a very expensive war to pay for, and Watergate probably fits in their somewhere.

I am not sure what we did in the 70s and after was exactly neoliberalism, but any restraint shown in the face of the new realities (Carter and his sweaters, Bush breaking his tax pledge) were massively unpopular, and I think that was going to be the case in general – regardless of what path we went down.

The very idea that neo-liberalism was the cause (as opposed to an interaction with) of the root problems I think is indicative of over optimism about our situation. Contrary, I do think it is very reasonable to say that neo-liberalism made the problems worse.

The distinction is important, you can reject our current situation and policies, and still not be particularly convinced that the opposing voices are being more realistic.

Carla , March 18, 2019 at 9:44 am

After reading "Democracy in Chains" by Nancy MacLean, I'm leaning toward neoliberalism as a cause. It kicked into high gear with Reagan's election in 1980, and Bill Clinton made sure there was no stopping it.

In reference to this from the original post: "In truth, an estimated 38 percent of white people with bachelor degrees voted for [Trump]," I have to say, I think you call those people Republicans, and don't kid yourself. They will do it again.

Sanxi , March 18, 2019 at 12:43 pm

Carla, thank you, exactly so. The technique of it all was quite insidious, as it was an appeal disguised and self righteous to greed to a two groups: baby boomers and their parents sociology primed for such pitches. Once that genie got out of the bottle there was no getting it back in.

polecat , March 18, 2019 at 1:12 pm

So, will the millenials kill-off the Genie for good .. or will they, in their turn, rub that lamp all the more, to parlay their 3 wishes towards other equally speciously sparklely endeavors ??

super extra , March 18, 2019 at 3:31 pm

we can't 'rub the lantern'; when those in power in 1981 set off down the neoliberal road, the conditions of their wish were fulfilled by debt-enslavement of everyone who came after them to support enriching those who clawed their way to the top.

the only millennial oligarch is Zuckerberg and I don't think anyone believes he is going to maintain his power even half as long as, say, Bill Gates. the only millenials who believe in neoliberalism are paid shills for the elite like Ben Shapiro or Charlie Kirk and by the same Zuckerberg:Gates ratio, they have less than half as much power as a Rush Limbaugh.

Neoliberalism is dead, we're in the gramscian interregnum, at this point I just hope and plead with the infinite that we get Bernie in 2020 instead of Cotton/Creshaw primarying Trump or something awful like that because the familyblogging Democrats refuse to pass the torch in favor of one more term of grift.

russell1200 , March 18, 2019 at 1:32 pm

Rev Kev, who I was responding to, correctly noted that the 1970s were when wages began to drop. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton of course come later. This doesn't mean that their policies were not problematic, but it does make it difficult to blame them as the causal agents of something that started in the 1970s.

If you want to blame Johnson/Nixon and their Vietnam War policies, that would make some sense, but they don't seem to me to be poster children for Neoliberalism with one being associated with the Great Society and the other the author of price controls to suppress inflation.

witters , March 18, 2019 at 6:48 pm

When things get a bit tough (and note that in the 70's for all the hype they were not in fact that tough – until govt policy of a NL kind stepped in) – then you have policy choices. If you go NL, then that is a choice, and causally so. (It was usual to hide this causality in TINA.)

scott 2 , March 18, 2019 at 9:15 am

Financialization of the housing market creates obscene rents, leading to less household formation, then the need to "do something" about population decline. Japan is 20 years ahead of us in that regard,

Dan , March 18, 2019 at 10:06 am

$117,400 a year qualifies as "low income"?

Indeed it does here in the SF Bay Area. The surprise of it all is part of the denial – the wife and I look at our family income (usually 10-20% less than that) and are straight up perplexed that it doesn't go as far as it "should". We certainly have a pleasant enough middle-class life, but it feels precarious in a way that we never expected. And we only have that because we have subsidized housing (we live in a house the family has owned for years, so are paying well below the insane market rates). If we had to pay market rates we would be poor, or close to it.

We certainly rant to one another about the systemic issues behind this situation, but there are a lot of California liberals who bitterly cling to questionable ideas like a balanced budget or Kamala Harris.

I've been wondering when I'll hear a candidate advocating lower home and rent prices – where I live we absolutely need that if we're to keep a semblance of civilization and democracy.

ambrit , March 18, 2019 at 11:53 am

You have hit on a major 'disrupter' of the body social. "Civilization and democracy" are being willfully sacrificed to the Gods of Profit. That betrayal is a core part of neo-liberalism.

Carla , March 18, 2019 at 5:27 pm

Re; lower home and rent prices. For the last 40 years, as the prosperous Great Lakes region became the rust belt, we who live here have been constantly told: if you want a job, just MOVE to where the jobs are.

Now are we allowed to say to the mortgage-or-rent-impoverished middle class folks who live on the coasts, "If you want lower house and rent prices, just move to where the lower priced houses and apartments are" ? We got plenty of room for y'all here, honest. And we're mostly midwest-nice, too.

Altandmain , March 18, 2019 at 5:34 pm

Unfortunately a candidate advocating for lower prices of housing will likely be defeated by thr NIMBY types.

JBird4049 , March 18, 2019 at 12:04 pm

But seriously – $117,400 a year qualifies as "low income."?

If you are very lucky, and I mean lucky , you might find an old junior one bedroom apartment for the low, low price of $1,500 a month. No patio, no dishwasher, no nothing except a parking spot. This is not exaggeration, sarcasm or humor, but reality. In some places in California it's closer to three thousand dollars.

Most of us Californians do not make even fifty thousand and, if we do, we have to live closer to the cities where the well paying jobs are. I keep waiting for the housing bust to arrive for last time the rents dropped as much as thirty percent. Hopefully, I will still be in my apartment, or at least in an apartment when that happens.

rd , March 18, 2019 at 1:49 pm

Another factor is cities not allowing for higher density housing. If somebody has a brownstone or something similar, they will fight tooth and nail against that 6 story apartment building that would allow a lot more people to live in the neighborhood. Under-investment in rapid mass transit also hurts workers commuting to jobs and forces far more cars on the roads and parking spaces.

Ed , March 18, 2019 at 7:36 am

Was the American Middle Class a Cold War thing?

pretzelattack , March 18, 2019 at 8:10 am

it was certainly precarious in the great depression, seems to thrive in boom periods. the white middle class, and some of the black middle class did well in the 50's and early 60's. that was when the us was economically at the pinnacle of the world, and i think that was because most of the other first world economies were rebuilding from the rubble of ww2.

Wukchumni , March 18, 2019 at 8:30 am

The only item I can think of that was an import from the Soviet Union and on retail shelves for sale here during the Cold War, was Stolichnaya vodka, and as far as the Peoples Republic of China goes, fireworks.

If I didn't finish the food on my plate, my parents would admonish me with tales of people starving to death in China, and indeed they were.

ambrit , March 18, 2019 at 11:16 am

For me as a child, the starvation place was Africa. I wonder about the psychological motivations that made our parents ignore the suffering right nearby in our own neighborhoods and focus instead on some far away place.

Today, that starvation is all around us. I personally feel guilty now that we cannot give very much to beggars and homeless etc. due to our own straitened circumstances. The myth of "The Exceptional Ones" (TM) is still a strong part of the social narrative today.

polecat , March 18, 2019 at 1:34 pm

I try to do my infinitesmal part, ambrit .. by taking any surplus from the garden, when there IS a surplus that is .. and donate it to the local foodbank. Last year it was 5 full lugs of grapes fresh off the vine, a few yrs before that it was an over abundance of beets. This season it might be potatoes THATs My lifestyle !

All on less than a $35,000 yr combined income. But that means no trips to Cancun, no new Car every couple of years, no DeathCare expenditures, and no mortgage.

I feel humbled every time I make a delivery, especially when I see families in obvious distress w/ young children .. looking for sustenance that they cannot otherwise afford to buy .. it breaks my heart.

ambrit , March 18, 2019 at 4:23 pm

Yes to that. We got a bumper crop of 'volunteer' Muscadines last year. They made good jelly. I should build a trellis or wire support network for the vines this year. With this weather, we should get another good crop.
Living the 'prepper' life has it's compensations.

polecat , March 18, 2019 at 6:31 pm

Our's were primarily muscat as well, what we donated. I ended up canning the rest, turning them into muscat conserves half of which we've already given away to friends and aquaintances. The other grapes, the Mars variety, became raisins, for home consumption.

Everyone should learn how to can .. cuz you never know when just-in-time .. just STOPS !

John Wright , March 18, 2019 at 11:06 am

re: American Middle Class Cold War thing?

Possibly this was a major influence. When the USA had identified large foreign enemies that must be countered (Russia and China) there was an impetus to build in America and keep the USA population engaged with the Russian and "Red" Chinese threat.

The USA was also an oil exporter until 1971, which allowed some control of oil prices.

Globalization was not prominent and I remember the poor quality Japanese tools of the 1960's (and Chinese manufactured stuff rarely seen by me (firecrackers?))

Furthermore we had two large countries that economically were not as advanced as the USA and were not viewed as particularly successful with their flawed Communist systems.

Effectively, China and Russia were playing the game with one hand tied behind their back.

This may also have allowed USA unions to be strong, increasing wages for union and non-union workers.

Perhaps the USA is currently making some other countries focus inwardly on their countries as the USA did in the 1950's and 1960's.

By forcing sanctions on various countries (Iran, Russia, Venezuela) the USA may make them less dependent on global resources and more like the more self sufficient USA of the 50's and 60's.

Mel , March 18, 2019 at 11:23 am

Very, very possibly. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, I'm reading a lot of fin de sičcle novels and literature, e.g. Booth Tarkington.

The British middle class seems to have been mostly people living on investments -- not in the manorial style, but with enough to have a flat, and a servant -- in a style that you might associate with Sherlock Holmes. A middle class that included people with jobs definitely seems post-WWII, and, of course, since the wage stagnation starting in the mid 1970's, it's mostly ended by now.

Harold , March 18, 2019 at 1:53 pm

Middle class always had servants because cost of labor was low. Middle class households sometimes had boarders & often elderly or unmarried relatives.

MisterMr , March 18, 2019 at 9:00 am

"While some have protested that Trump's success has more to do with loss of status or rank bigotry, Johns Hopkins University sociologist Stephen L. Morgan has conducted studies that reveal one substantial motivator of the Trump vote was economic. He noted that a successful national Democratic candidate would be one who appealed "to people who have not fared well in the postindustrial economy," such as those in some once-prosperous areas of the Midwest."

But this is circular reasoning, why would people in the "middle class" think that Trump's policies are better for them than Clinton's policies?

It's not like Trump is a sort of middle class guy himself, in facts H. Clinton is probably more "middle classey" than Trump.

Plus, what does the term "middle class" mean specifically? How are these people different from "working class" or small bourgoise?

Wukchumni , March 18, 2019 at 9:08 am

Middle class to me growing up, meant that the school custodian across the street and 3 doors down from us, could afford to buy a home, or you played little league with the son of a gas station owner, who made enough from his 2 service bays always full (cars weren't nearly as reliable in the 60's) to also own a home.

MisterMr , March 18, 2019 at 1:10 pm

Thanks for the answer.

My doubt about the middle class is this: it is a term that various schools/sociologists/economists used to mean very different things, so when someone speaks of the middle class it's difficult for me to understand what he/she is speaking about.

For example:

1) In marxism it generally means the small bourgoise, meaning the small shopkeeper, the farmer who owns his land etc;

2) at times, it just means people of the working class who have good jobs, that is different from the definition (1). The disappearence of the middle class just means the disappearence of good jobs;

3) sometimes (wrongly IMHO) "workers" are supposed to be only blue collar and only without high education, so "middle class" means people who have a degree and are white collars;

etc.

At times these categories can somehow mix but the class interest of someone who is a small business owner is different from the class interest of someone who has a good employee job which might be different from the interest of someone who could have a degree and a sucky white collar job.

So this very general idea of middle class is very confusing IMHO.

Carla , March 18, 2019 at 5:40 pm

@MisterMr -- I think that because EVERYTHING in the good ole US of A is about money, the understanding of a term like "middle class" becomes just about money, too.

When I was young (yes, a long time ago), I was given to understand that "middle class" meant basically people with white collar jobs or jobs that required some professional accreditation: teachers, nurses, lawyers, accountants, etc. "Working class" meant people with blue-collar jobs, even if some of them regularly made more money than a teacher or, say, a nurse. "Upper class" included high-earning professionals, CEO's, and of course those with inherited wealth. Poor, then as now, was the one thing you definitely didn't want to be.

But, as I said, money has obliterated all those fine distinctions of snobbery. Now there is only one: $.

JBird4049 , March 18, 2019 at 7:34 pm

The label of "Middle Class" in America can be used as either for the social class or for the economic class with the white collar workers generally being both and the blue collar workers being, before the 1950s, working class with working class wages. For about two decades the high and low ends of the income range collapsed with most people being squeezed into the economic middle class regardless of social class.

Now, income disparity has destroyed the economic middle class and the classic pyramid shaped map of the social and economic system reappearing. The tiny wealthy elites; the slightly larger service and professional class providing what the elites want; the small number of bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, religious workers and so that any large societies need just to function at all; the greatest numbers are the laboring class, and I don't mean the working class.

The mental map of most Americans is stuck on the almost flat pyramid of 1970 in which all classes were getting wealthier collapsing together economically, with the exception of the wealthy not gaining wealth at the same rate as the bottom 99%. Even the poorest blacks finally started to improve economically.

That picture is buried somewhere deeeep in our collective heads where the only real differences was what type of job you were going to have and where mistakes, failure, and disaster did not mean poverty. At worst, it meant a change of work or a temporary set back or a change of social class but not economic class.

Find that image in your head, yank it out, put a stake in its heart, burn it, and scatter the ashes. That picture died around 1973. Whatever the truth of that image it is long dead.

But too many people are trying to pretend that we are not living in a zero sum game of winner take all.

John Wright , March 18, 2019 at 11:17 am

Trump had the advantage that he was not tagged, directly or indirectly, with Bill Clinton's NAFTA, welfare reform or supporting "Free trade" that seemed to only work well in economists' minds (TPP).

Clinton also supported the Iraq War, Libya and other military adventures, and Trump couldn't vote for/against these operations that directly affected their communities.

Campaigning Trump called these wars "mistakes" while Hillary C would not.

Someone summed the election as "With Hillary you know you are screwed, with Trump you might not be."

MisterMr , March 18, 2019 at 1:12 pm

Thanks, however it is a fact that a situation of bad economy and increasing inequality, that ideally is supposed to be the main reason to vote left, is causing an upsurge in right-leaning populism instead.

And not only in the USA.

john Wright , March 18, 2019 at 3:02 pm

One could argue that the USA reluctantly moved left in the Great Depression while Nazi Germany and Italy moved right.

In the USA, recently the left has been cast as weak and ineffectual.

The left doesn't "bring home the bacon" in the minds of many.

Bernie is popular, but the knives are out from the establishment pols (of both parties) to do him in.

In the USA, moving to the populist right, to me, seems quite understandable.

jrs , March 18, 2019 at 3:46 pm

there is no populist right that brings home the bacon in the U.S. either as far as I can see. Theoretically there could be, but theoretically a lot of things, including much more plausibly and likely the rise of a left that brings home the bacon. IOW the trains don't even run on time now.

jrs , March 18, 2019 at 1:05 pm

Trump's economy is scarcely better than Obama's (depends on which year though, in the worst of the Great Recession only then was it worse). So if it's really about the economy: then Trump will lose the next election.

MisterMr , March 18, 2019 at 1:14 pm

IMHO it IS about the economy, but not in the direct sense we mean: if the economy goes on as it is, Trump will be able to spin it as good, whereas a democrat would be toast.

But I expect a recession to hit earlier, in which case I think Trump will not be re-elected.

Norb , March 18, 2019 at 9:28 am

Whenever I read articles illustrating the dawning awareness of the middling classes to their extreme precarious social status, I can't help but marvel at the audacity of elites jumping to the front of the protest line proclaiming their desire to "lead" the distraught masses. Even more so, those same distraught workers giving their oppressors the opportunity to do so. That is the definition of a dysfunctional society- rewarding failure. The elites might think themselves clever, and exceptional, for dreaming up such scams, but that dynamic alone goes a long way to explaining the rapid decline of America's prominence in the world.

America is consumed by a cynical rot that has firmly entered into the body politic. There is no easy way to excise this cancer, but the answer must lie in some form of national mission. The current American leadership have chosen a militaristic vision of conquest for the nation masked with a marketing program of bringing democracy to the world. This contradictory scam will not work, and there is ample evidence showing just how destructive and impotent this strategy truly is. The rest of the world is moving on, and if Americans don't wise up to the the destructive nature of their system, they will be left behind.

Corporations must be in the service of the nation, not the other way around. Corporations must be allowed to die and change, the nation, and its people must prevail over time. It is an obscene contradiction that the American system is reversing this dynamic. The people are allowed to die, while the corporations, and those that control them are allowed to persist.

As a working class American, my only desire at this point is for an American elite leadership that has a vision larger and broader than worshiping a bank account. If American workers don't demand a better leadership, history will show them to be worse than peasants, they will be proven to be willful consumerist dupes.

America is in an identity crisis- a cultural crisis. That does not bode well for the nation and makes it ill equipped to deal with other nations and the world's problems- let alone our own.

Summer , March 18, 2019 at 10:16 am

"The current American leadership have chosen a militaristic vision of conquest for the nation masked with a marketing program of bringing democracy to the world."

That train officially left the station around 1898.

Oso , March 18, 2019 at 1:27 pm

agree although the date closer to 1620 when the militaristic conquest of nations began.

Summer , March 18, 2019 at 2:25 pm

"masked with a marketing program of bringing democracy to the world."

For the USA, those thoughts didn't get put into action until post Civil War

Rod , March 18, 2019 at 11:41 am

"There is no easy way to excise this cancer, but the answer must lie in some form of national mission."

here lies the way to better angels and there is no shortage of things that must be done

diptherio , March 18, 2019 at 1:36 pm

As someone on social.coop said the other day, "they're not 'elites,' they are 'the predatory class'."

Joe Well , March 18, 2019 at 10:31 am

Thank you for posting this.

1. The author doesn't really explore how rent extraction through housing is the single biggest destroyer of American household wealth, with housing costs outpacing wages almost everywhere.

2. "Explore" Medicare for all? Build "affordable" housing, but only for certain deserving individuals like teachers?

It's disappointing that the author chooses to end this with such centrist Dem proposals.

There needs to be a right to housing, which means a right to build housing: abolish any zoning that excludes dense residential development. Seize land by eminent domain if necessary.

Jerry B , March 18, 2019 at 1:55 pm

===There needs to be a right to housing, which means a right to build housing: abolish any zoning that excludes dense residential development. Seize land by eminent domain if necessary===

Thanks Joe. While I am not an expert in housing, the lack of affordable housing seems to be tied to:

1. As you say zoning laws that exclude dense residential development.
2. Land Use regulations which are probably tied to #1 above.
3. The high costs incurred by residential developers in navigating the byzantine and bureaucratic maze of permits and regulations at the federal, state, and local levels.
4. The speculative nature of the housing market i.e. IMO the housing bubble is driven by monetary policies and the actions of "behind the scenes" lever pullers. If housing is treated as a commodity by the finance sector then the machinations of Wall Street can impact housing prices as they did in the 2008 crash.
5. To my point above, in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago there is a lot of empty office space and light industrial space. So excess supply would tell you that the prices for these properties should go down. Not the case. They are still expensive. If a homeowner is trying to sell their house they will lower the price until it is sold or not sell it. But the same rules do not apply to businesses.

To #5 above, again if we "believe" what we are told in Econ 101 about free markets and supply and demand then an excess supply should result in a downward price drop until the excess supply is cleared. God help me! I just typed the previous sentence from memory as if verbatim from my Econ 101 class 30 years ago!! #head on desk! So if office and industrial prices are not dropping then someone has to be holding the "bank notes" as is not concerned about if or when they sell.

Basically in short it seems zoning issues and cost issues are the big obstacles in dense residential development. I am not an advocate of relaxing regulations which could result in shoddy and unsafe construction but maybe there is a middle ground. Something needs to be done.

polecat , March 18, 2019 at 3:16 pm

It's not just dense housing, it ALL housing .. in terms of livability (environs with nature as an active component), and Affordable design/construction with energy efficiency in mind .. on a large enough scale to benefit the public ! There is, for all practical purposes none of that to be had. As it currently stands, you have to be richer than God to do ANYTHING other than the unimaginative and wasteful development that has been built up to this point.
So instead of "Where's My flying car??" .. the question might now more accurately be "Where's My passive solar, earthen-berm, strawbale, rammed-earth, or cob house/apartment???"

super extra , March 18, 2019 at 3:45 pm

4. The speculative nature of the housing market

to expand and maybe add onto this, AirBnb/vacation rentals + rental 'business as income' (at institutional eg Berkshire Hathaway and the associated securitized offerings as well as individuals and small biz creating the 'income stream' via LLC pass through) is a major driver affecting the speculation. What happened to all the foreclosures from a decade ago? They were turned into rentals, they still exist.

I am all for an affordable housing mandate, but not in an Obamacare fashion by building tons more housing at crappy inflated prices with some means-tested voucher all so the rentiers can keep their profits. Destroy the rentiers and make housing right, make it a policy that is enforced with regulations and limits on numbers of rental units.

Jerry B , March 18, 2019 at 6:49 pm

Thanks Super.

==AirBnb/vacation rentals + rental 'business as income' (at institutional eg Berkshire Hathaway and the associated securitized offerings as well as individuals and small biz creating the 'income stream' via LLC pass through) is a major driver affecting the speculation===

To your point there was a recent article on NC that discussed your comment above.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/08/wolf-richter-comes-second-wave-big-money-buy-rent-scheme.html

Across the street from the townhouse subdivision where my wife and I live is a subdivision of $275K – $350K houses. One of the more expensive houses was sold a year ago to a company that uses it for a rental.

I talked to the previous owner frequently while walking our dog, and he sold the house after it had been on the market for only about a month. As far as the previous owner was concerned the house sold for close to his asking price so he was happy. He had no concern about selling the house to a company that was going to use it for a rental. The previous owner had been living in that house in that neighborhood for 25 years and seemed to know most everybody in his subdivision. He and his wife raised their two sons in that house and also put a lot of time and effort into the landscaping around the house.

The rental company that bought the house does the absolute minimal landscaping of the house and barely mows the lawn on a semi regular basis. The company clearly does not have any regard for the "appearance" of the house or the neighborhood. Which is a shame because the other houses near it are well maintained which, due to the lack of landscape maintenance, makes the "rental company" house an eyesore as far as grass, weeds, etc. are concerned.

I do not begrudge the previous owner for selling to the rental company. His asking price was met so he was happy. And in the last few years, other houses in that subdivision have taken 1-2 years to sell. What I have an issue with is these vulture rental companies acting as mercenaries and treating houses and the neighborhood as so much fodder on a balance sheet.

One could also make the argument that without the rental company sticking it's nose where it does not belong, the (ahem, cough, cough) free market would have been allowed to work somewhat. By that I mean if this particular house had also taken a long time to sell like the others in that neighborhood, and had subsequent price reductions in order to sell it, then maybe the average housing price in that neighborhood/town/suburb would have gone down helping affordability.

justsayknow , March 18, 2019 at 11:03 am

From the Business Insider published today:

"In fact, the typical CEO made a whopping 312 times their median employees' salary in 2017, according to the Economic Policy Institute."

Note that is vs median salary not lowest paid.

The self serving disconnect between the management class and labor class is truly amazing.

Work is not valued. And the contribution to productivity is extracted and given to ownership. It's not income inequality we should emphasize but simple fairness. Let's call it Income Fairness.

anon y'mouse , March 18, 2019 at 11:35 am

"fairness" is too vague and insubstantial a concept around which to base any kind of rights, much less what some should get or we should do as a society.

we once thought it was "fair" as a society to enslave people. after we stopped that (and not because it wasn't "fair", but as a political move), we thought it was "fair" to continue to deny them many of their rights because they weren't "white".

huge numbers of us still think it is fair that people die from various issues caused by their "unwillingness to work" or "unwillingness to work smarter". how many times do people say "if you don't get more education, you can just shut up about earning enough to live on. working at McDonald's, you are slacking and therefore can not demand anything. go to school, fool!" people argue all of the time that a "living wage" is not fair, because a person who does low-value jobs isn't making enough money for their employer to justify the wage (basically, profit produced by that employee would either be nil or zero). and that is perfectly "fair" to these arguers.

fair is the idea that some deserve more and some less, due to something being "earned" by someone. it is a nice idea to teach children. real world morality is much more complicated than that, and a society of justice and laws and policies and bureaucracies can not be based around that. waaay too nebulous, and open to interpretation. everyone -knows what "fair" is- when they see it, because everyone's definition of "fairness" is different. as some kind of lofty ideal, it is fine. in practice, it is meaningless.

Robin Kash , March 18, 2019 at 11:57 am

Is this simply a Rip van Winkle account of the middle-class situation that has been well-reported and vigorously commented upon for some time? What am I missing?

ambrit , March 18, 2019 at 12:32 pm

The shift came when ol' Rip realized that the rumbling sound he heard was not the sound of the ghostly sailors bowling but the sound of distant cannon fire.

Another Amateur Economist , March 18, 2019 at 2:04 pm

The middle class stands upon the floor provided by the working class. And that floor is failing, as the human capital of society is gradually, but with increasing rapidity, plundered, from the bottom up.

The poor used to have more than they do now, and be less dependent on government redistributions of income.

Even the middle class owns less productive capital, as the small business owners who used to populate the main streets of American towns have been driven out of business by the Walmarts. Those businessmen were the social elites of their communities, giving those communities leadership, shape, structure and dimension.

Owning less productive capital, their communities pretty much hollowed out, the middle class have lost much of their self sufficiency, and have become increasingly dependent on the whims of distant oligarchs. First the Walmarts. Now the Amazons. And there will be even fewer resources available to support the necessary services local communities provide.

The middle class are right to be afraid. The distant oligarchs and their bankers will only allow so much debt before they pull out the rug.

Too bad no one paid attention what was happening to the working poor. Long ago, the 1% used to command 7% of the nation's income. Now they command 21%. That 14% had to come from someone.

rd , March 18, 2019 at 2:22 pm

With almost 40 years of work under my belt, I have been passing along some advice to my kids to help them navigate the current "middle class conundrums":

1. Owning a home is unlikely to make you wealthy. With just a few major city core exceptions, don't expect it to go up by more than inflation over the decades. So buy or rent just what you need and do real analysis of what you need and why.

2. Only live in a big expensive city if you need to for your chosen career. The smaller cities have a lot of opportunity for people with good work habits, even in the "Rust Belt" and the living costs are far lower.

3. College degrees are useful. Getting them with large debt loads is a bad idea though. Don't take on more student debt than about 2/3 of your expected starting salary for a four year degree and take on little or not debt for a 2-year degree.

4. Going to a name-brand school is worthwhile if you don't have to rack up significant extra debt. Otherwise, pick college and university by major and cost. Your internal traits make a far bigger difference than the school you went to.

5. Only go to graduate school if your desired career path requires it. Otherwise, you are losing years of earning power while incurring costs and debt. If you want a grad degree just for the joy of it, do it as night school as a hobby.

6. Start a Roth IRA with monthly contributions early, even if it is only $50/month. It builds habits and over the years will likely ensure you are in the top 25% in assets.

7. We are in a golden age of investing right now compared to 30 years ago. You can have worldwide, multi-asset class diversified investments at an annual expense ratio of 0.25% which was unheard of at the beginning of my career. So inexpensive Target Date funds or similar vehicles from companies like Vanguard mean you can do fire-and-forget investing while you focus on the rest of your life.

8. Don't assume the full value of a company or state pension will be there when you retire. These are rife with deliberate and accidental mismanagement and partial defaults are likely with many of them. Instead save so that you are not reliant on them for a basic acceptable standard of living.

8. You don't need financial advisors for investing, just to help you with personal finance instead. But that is not what they are usually selling, so 99% of the purported financial advisors are to be avoided as they are hazardous to your finances.

10. Try to get a positive cash flow in your life as early as possible to dramatically reduce stress. That is difficult if you have kids, large student loans, or large mortgage/rent costs, so those are the big decisions you need to make on life-finance balance.

Regarding Social Security, it is currently structured to provide 75% to 80% of its current benefits starting in 2034. That is still a significant safety net, but would require Congress to act to get it back to around 100%.

Medicare is just part and parcel of the US healthcare cost issues. If the US can get down to less than 14% of GDP in healthcare expenditures while providing universal coverage, then the Medicare/Medicaid funding issue effectively goes away. This is not impossible as the US is the only developed country that is above 14%.

rc , March 18, 2019 at 4:01 pm

Elizabeth Warren had a good speech at UC-Berkeley. She focused on the middle class family balance sheet and risk shifting. Regulatory policies and a credit based monetary system have resulted in massive real price increases in inelastic areas of demand such as healthcare, education and housing eroding purchasing power. Further, trade policies have put U.S. manufacturing at a massive disadvantage to the likes of China, which has subsidized state-owned enterprises, has essentially slave labor costs and low to no environmental regulations. Unrestrained immigration policies have resulted in a massive supply wave of semi- and unskilled labor suppressing wages.

Recommended initial steps to reform:
1. Change the monetary system-deleverage economy with the Chicago Plan (100% reserve banking) and fund massive infrastructure lowering total factor costs and increasing productivity. This would eliminate
2. Adopt a healthcare system that drives HC to 10% to 12% of GDP. France's maybe? Medicare model needs serious reform but is great at low admin costs.
3. Raise tariffs across the board or enact labor and environmental tariffs on the likes of China and other Asian export model countries.
4. Take savings from healthcare costs and interest and invest in human capital–educational attainment and apprenticeships programs.
5. Enforce border security restricting future immigration dramatically and let economy absorb labor supply over time.

Video of UC-B lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVL7QY0S8A&feature=youtu.be

Jerry B , March 18, 2019 at 5:26 pm

As I have said in other comments, I like Liz Warren a lot within the limits of what she is good at doing (i.e. not President) such as Secretary of the Treasury etc. And I think she likes the media spotlight and to hear herself talk a little to much, but all quibbling aside, can we clone her??? The above comment and video just reinforce "Stick to what you are really good at Liz!".

I am not a Liz Warren fan boi to the extent Lambert is of AOC, but it seems that most of the time when I hear Warren, Sanders, or AOC say something my first reaction is "Yes, what she/he said!".

[Mar 16, 2019] If we assume average EROEI equal 2 for shale oil then rising shale oil production with almost constant world oil production is clearly a Pyrrhic victory. Again, putting a single curve for all types of oil is the number racket, or voodoo dances around the fire.

Mar 16, 2019 | peakoilbarrel.com

likbez says: 03/16/2019 at 9:34 pm

likbez says:

03/16/2019 at 9:34 pm

Some arguments in defense of Ron estimates

1. When something is increasing 0.8% a year based on data with, say, 2% or higher margin of error this is not a growth. This is a number racket.

2. We need to use proper coefficients to correctly estimate energy output of different types of oil We do not know real EROEI of shale oil, but some sources claim that it is in the 1.5-4.5 range. Let's assume that it is 3. In comparison, Saudi oil has 80-100 range. In this sense shale oil is not a part of the solution; it is a part of the problem (stream of just bonds produced in parallel is the testament of that). In other words, all shale oil is "subprime oil," and an increase of shale oil production is correctly called the oil retirement party. The same is true for the tar sands oil.

So the proper formula for total world production in "normalized by ERORI units" might be approximated by the equation:

0.99* OPEC_oil + 0.97*other_conventional_oil + 0.95*shallow-water_oil + 0.9*deep_water_oil +0.75*(shale_oil+condensate) + 0.6*tar_sand_oil + 0.2*ethanol

where coefficients (I do not claim that they are accurate; they are provided just for demonstration) reflect EROEI of particular types of oil.

If we assume that 58% of the US oil production is shale oil and condensate then the amount of "normalized" oil extracted in the USA can be approximated by the formula

total * 0.83

In other words 17% of the volume is a fiction. Simplifying it was spent on extraction of shale oil and condensate (for concentrate lower energy content might justify lower coefficient; but for simplicity we assume that it is equal to shale oil).

Among other things that means that 1970 peak of production probably was never exceeded.

3. EROEI of most types of oil continues to decline (from 35 in 1999 to 18 in 2006 according to http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/eroeihalletal.png). Which means that in reality physical volume became a very deceptive metric as you need to sink more and more money/energy into producing every single barrel and that fact is not reflected in the volume. In other words, the barrel of shale oil is already 50% empty when it was lifted to the ground (aka "subprime oil"). In this sense, shale wells with their three years of the high producing period are simply money dumping grounds for money in comparison with Saudi oil wells.

4. The higher price does not solve the problem of the decline of EROEI. It just allows the allocation of a larger portion of national wealth to the oil extraction putting the rest of the economy into permanent stagnation.

5. If we assume average EROEI equal 3 (or even 5) for shale oil then rising shale oil production along with almost constant world oil production is clearly a Pyrrhic victory. Again, putting a single curve for all types of oil is the number racket, or voodoo dances around the fire.

NOTES:

1. IMHO Ron made a correct observation about Saudi behavior: the declines of production can well be masked under pretention of meeting the quota to save face. That might be true about OPEC and Russia as a whole too. Exceptions like Iraq only confirm the rule.

2. EROEI of lithium battery is around 32

[Mar 15, 2019] Patriots Turning To #YangGang In Response To Trump, Conservatism Inc. Failure by James Kirkpatrick

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Yang promises a universal entitlement, not dependent on income, that he calls a "freedom dividend." To be funded through a value added tax , Yang claims that it would reduce the strain on "health care, incarceration, homeless services, and the like" and actually save billions of dollars. Yang also notes that "current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally." ..."
"... Yang is justifying the need for such a program because of automation . Again, VDARE.com has been exploring how automation may necessitate such a program for many years . Yang also discussed this problem on Tucker Carlson's show , which alone shows he is more open to real discussion than many progressive activists. ..."
"... Indeed, journalists, hall monitors that they are, have recognized that President Trump's online supporters are flocking to Yang, bringing him a powerful weapon in the meme wars. ..."
"... it is ominous for Trump that many of the more creative and dedicated people who formed his vanguard are giving up on him. ..."
Mar 15, 2019 | www.unz.com

The dark horse candidate of the 2020 Democratic primary is entrepreneur Andrew Yang , who just qualified for the first round of debates by attracting over 65,000 unique donors. [ Andrew Yang qualifies for first DNC debate with 65,000 unique donors , by Orion Rummler, Axios, March 12, 2019]

Yang is a businessman who has worked in several fields, but was best known for founding Venture for America , which helps college graduates become entrepreneurs. However, he is now gaining recognition for his signature campaign promise -- $1,000 a month for every American.

Yang promises a universal entitlement, not dependent on income, that he calls a "freedom dividend." To be funded through a value added tax , Yang claims that it would reduce the strain on "health care, incarceration, homeless services, and the like" and actually save billions of dollars. Yang also notes that "current welfare and social program beneficiaries would be given a choice between their current benefits or $1,000 cash unconditionally."

As Yang himself notes, this is not a new idea, nor one particularly tied to the Left. Indeed, it's been proposed by several prominent libertarians because it would replace the far more inefficient welfare system. Charles Murray called for this policy in 2016. [ A guaranteed income for every American , AEI, June 3, 2016] Milton Friedman suggested a similar policy in a 1968 interview with William F. Buckley, though Friedman called it a "negative income tax."

He rejected arguments that it would cause indolence. F.A. Hayek also supported such a policy; he essentially took it for granted . [ Friedrich Hayek supported a guaranteed minimum income , by James Kwak, Medium, July 20, 2015]

It's also been proposed by many nationalists, including, well, me. At the January 2013 VDARE.com Webinar, I called for a "straight-up minimum income for citizens only" among other policies that would build a new nationalist majority and deconstruct Leftist power. I've retained that belief ever since and argued for it here for years.

However, I've also made the argument that it only works if it is for citizens only and is combined with a restrictive immigration policy. As I previously argued in a piece attacking Jacobin's disingenuous complaints about the "reserve army of the unemployed," you simply can't support high wages, workers' rights, and a universal basic income while still demanding mass immigration.

Yang is justifying the need for such a program because of automation . Again, VDARE.com has been exploring how automation may necessitate such a program for many years . Yang also discussed this problem on Tucker Carlson's show , which alone shows he is more open to real discussion than many progressive activists.

Yang is also directly addressing the crises that the Trump Administration has seemly forgotten. Unlike Donald Trump himself, with his endless boasting about "low black and Hispanic unemployment," Yang has directly spoken about the demographic collapse of white people because of "low birth rates and white men dying from substance abuse and suicide ."

Though even the viciously anti-white Dylan Matthews called the tweet "innocuous," there is little doubt if President Trump said it would be called racist. [ Andrew Yang, the 2020 long-shot candidate running on a universal basic income, explained , Vox, March 11, 2019]

Significantly, President Trump himself has never once specifically recognized the plight of white Americans.

...He wants to make Puerto Rico a state . He supports a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, albeit with an 18-year waiting period and combined with pledges to secure the border and deport illegals who don't enroll in the citizenship program. He wants to create a massive bureaucratic system to track gun owners, restrict gun ownership , and require various "training" programs for licenses. He wants to subsidize local journalists with taxpayer dollars...

... ... ...

Indeed, journalists, hall monitors that they are, have recognized that President Trump's online supporters are flocking to Yang, bringing him a powerful weapon in the meme wars. (Sample meme at right.) And because many of these online activists are "far right" by Main Stream Media standards, or at least Politically Incorrect, there is much hand-waving and wrist-flapping about the need for Yang to decry "white nationalists." So of course, the candidate has dutifully done so, claiming "racism and white nationalism [are] a threat to the core ideals of what it means to be an American". [ Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has a meme problem , by Russell Brandom, The Verge, March 9, 2019]

But what does it mean to be an American? As more and more of American history is described as racist, and even national symbols and the national anthem are targets for protest, "America" certainly doesn't seem like a real country with a real identity. Increasingly, "America" resembles a continent-sized shopping mall, with nothing holding together the warring tribes that occupy it except money.

President Trump, of course, was elected because many people thought he could reverse this process, especially by limiting mass immigration and taking strong action in the culture wars, for example by promoting official English. Yet in recent weeks, he has repeatedly endorsed more legal immigration. Rather than fighting, the president is content to brag about the economy and whine about unfair press coverage and investigations. He already seems like a lame duck.

The worst part of all of this is that President Trump was elected as a response not just to the Left, but to the failed Conservative Establishment. During the 2016 campaign, President Trump specifically pledged to protect entitlements , decried foreign wars, and argued for a massive infrastructure plan. However, once in office, his main legislative accomplishment is a tax cut any other Republican president would have pushed. Similarly, his latest budget contains the kinds of entitlement cuts that are guaranteed to provoke Democrat attack ads. [ Trump said he wouldn't cut Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare . His 2020 budget cuts all 3 , by Tara Golshan, Vox, March 12, 2019] And the president has already backed down on withdrawing all troops from Syria, never mind Afghanistan.

Conservatism Inc., having learned nothing from candidate Donald Trump's scorched-earth path to the Republican nomination, now embraces Trump as a man but ignores his campaign message. Instead, the conservative movement is still promoting the same tired slogans about "free markets" even as they have appear to have lost an entire generation to socialism. The most iconic moment was Charlie Kirk, head of the free market activist group Turning Point USA, desperately trying to tell his followers not to cheer for Tucker Carlson because Carlson had suggested a nation should be treated like a family, not simply a marketplace .

President Trump himself is now trying to talk like a fiscal conservative [ Exclusive -- Donald Trump: 'Seductive' Socialism Would Send Country 'Down The Tubes' In a Decade Or Less , by Alexander Marlow, Matt Boyle, Amanda House, and Charlie Spierling, Breitbart, March 11, 2019]. Such a pose is self-discrediting given how the deficit swelled under united Republican control and untold amounts of money are seemingly still available for foreign aid to Israel, regime change in Iran and Venezuela, and feminist programs abroad to make favorite daughter Ivanka Trump feel important. [ Trump budget plans to give $100 million to program for women that Ivanka launched , by Nathalie Baptiste, Mother Jones, March 9, 2019]

Thus, especially because of his cowardice on immigration, many of President Trump's most fervent online supporters have turned on him in recent weeks. And the embrace of Yang seems to come out of a great place of despair, a sense that the country really is beyond saving.

Yang has Leftist policies on many issues, but many disillusioned Trump supporters feel like those policies are coming anyway. If America is just an economy, and if everyone in the world is a simply an American-in-waiting, white Americans might as well get something out of this System before the bones are picked clean.

National Review ' s Theodore Kupfer just claimed the main importance of Yang's candidacy is that it will prove meme-makers ability to affect the vote count "has been overstated" [ Rise of the pink hats , March 12, 2019].

Time will tell, but it is ominous for Trump that many of the more creative and dedicated people who formed his vanguard are giving up on him.

[Mar 13, 2019] Pilots Complained About Boeing 737 Max 8 For Months Before Second Deadly Crash

Mar 13, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

Several Pilots repeatedly warned federal authorities of safety concerns over the now-grounded Boeing 737 Max 8 for months leading up to the second deadly disaster involving the plane, according to an investigation by the Dallas Morning News . One captain even called the Max 8's flight manual " inadequate and almost criminally insufficient ," according to the report.

" The fact that this airplane requires such jury-rigging to fly is a red flag. Now we know the systems employed are error-prone -- even if the pilots aren't sure what those systems are, what redundancies are in place and failure modes. I am left to wonder: what else don't I know?" wrote the captain.

At least five complaints about the Boeing jet were found in a federal database which pilots routinely use to report aviation incidents without fear of repercussions.

The complaints are about the safety mechanism cited in preliminary reports for an October plane crash in Indonesia that killed 189.

The disclosures found by The News reference problems during flights of Boeing 737 Max 8s with an autopilot system during takeoff and nose-down situations while trying to gain altitude. While records show these flights occurred during October and November, information regarding which airlines the pilots were flying for at the time is redacted from the database. - Dallas Morning News

One captain who flies the Max 8 said in November that it was "unconscionable" that Boeing and federal authorities have allowed pilots to fly the plane without adequate training - including a failure to fully disclose how its systems were distinctly different from other planes.

An FAA spokesman said the reporting system is directly filed to NASA, which serves as an neutral third party in the reporting of grievances.

"The FAA analyzes these reports along with other safety data gathered through programs the FAA administers directly, including the Aviation Safety Action Program, which includes all of the major airlines including Southwest and American," said FAA southwest regional spokesman Lynn Lunsford.

Meanwhile, despite several airlines and foreign countries grounding the Max 8, US regulators have so far declined to follow suit. They have, however, mandated that Boeing upgrade the plane's software by April.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who chairs a Senate subcommittee overseeing aviation, called for the grounding of the Max 8 in a Thursday statement.

"Further investigation may reveal that mechanical issues were not the cause, but until that time, our first priority must be the safety of the flying public," said Cruz.

At least 18 carriers -- including American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, the two largest U.S. carriers flying the 737 Max 8 -- have also declined to ground planes , saying they are confident in the safety and "airworthiness" of their fleets. American and Southwest have 24 and 34 of the aircraft in their fleets, respectively. - Dallas Morning News

The United States should be leading the world in aviation safety," said Transport Workers Union president John Samuelsen. " And yet, because of the lust for profit in the American aviation, we're still flying planes that dozens of other countries and airlines have now said need to grounded ." Tags Disaster Accident

[Mar 13, 2019] Boeing's automatic trim for the 737 MAX was not disclosed to the Pilots by Bjorn Fehrm

The background to Boeing's 737 MAX automatic trim
Mar 13, 2019 | leehamnews.com

The automatic trim we described last week has a name, MCAS, or Maneuvering Characteristics Automation System.

It's unique to the MAX because the 737 MAX no longer has the docile pitch characteristics of the 737NG at high Angles Of Attack (AOA). This is caused by the larger engine nacelles covering the higher bypass LEAP-1B engines.

The nacelles for the MAX are larger and placed higher and further forward of the wing, Figure 1.

Figure 1. Boeing 737NG (left) and MAX (right) nacelles compared. Source: Boeing 737 MAX brochure.

By placing the nacelle further forward of the wing, it could be placed higher. Combined with a higher nose landing gear, which raises the nacelle further, the same ground clearance could be achieved for the nacelle as for the 737NG.

The drawback of a larger nacelle, placed further forward, is it destabilizes the aircraft in pitch. All objects on an aircraft placed ahead of the Center of Gravity (the line in Figure 2, around which the aircraft moves in pitch) will contribute to destabilize the aircraft in pitch.

... ... ...

The 737 is a classical flight control aircraft. It relies on a naturally stable base aircraft for its flight control design, augmented in selected areas. Once such area is the artificial yaw damping, present on virtually all larger aircraft (to stop passengers getting sick from the aircraft's natural tendency to Dutch Roll = Wagging its tail).

Until the MAX, there was no need for artificial aids in pitch. Once the aircraft entered a stall, there were several actions described last week which assisted the pilot to exit the stall. But not in normal flight.

The larger nacelles, called for by the higher bypass LEAP-1B engines, changed this. When flying at normal angles of attack (3° at cruise and say 5° in a turn) the destabilizing effect of the larger engines are not felt.

The nacelles are designed to not generate lift in normal flight. It would generate unnecessary drag as the aspect ratio of an engine nacelle is lousy. The aircraft designer focuses the lift to the high aspect ratio wings.

But if the pilot for whatever reason manoeuvres the aircraft hard, generating an angle of attack close to the stall angle of around 14°, the previously neutral engine nacelle generates lift. A lift which is felt by the aircraft as a pitch up moment (as its ahead of the CG line), now stronger than on the 737NG. This destabilizes the MAX in pitch at higher Angles Of Attack (AOA). The most difficult situation is when the maneuver has a high pitch ratio. The aircraft's inertia can then provoke an over-swing into stall AOA.

To counter the MAX's lower stability margins at high AOA, Boeing introduced MCAS. Dependent on AOA value and rate, altitude (air density) and Mach (changed flow conditions) the MCAS, which is a software loop in the Flight Control computer, initiates a nose down trim above a threshold AOA.

It can be stopped by the Pilot counter-trimming on the Yoke or by him hitting the CUTOUT switches on the center pedestal. It's not stopped by the Pilot pulling the Yoke, which for normal trim from the autopilot or runaway manual trim triggers trim hold sensors. This would negate why MCAS was implemented, the Pilot pulling so hard on the Yoke that the aircraft is flying close to stall.

It's probably this counterintuitive characteristic, which goes against what has been trained many times in the simulator for unwanted autopilot trim or manual trim runaway, which has confused the pilots of JT610. They learned that holding against the trim stopped the nose down, and then they could take action, like counter-trimming or outright CUTOUT the trim servo. But it didn't. After a 10 second trim to a 2.5° nose down stabilizer position, the trimming started again despite the Pilots pulling against it. The faulty high AOA signal was still present.

How should they know that pulling on the Yoke didn't stop the trim? It was described nowhere; neither in the aircraft's manual, the AFM, nor in the Pilot's manual, the FCOM. This has created strong reactions from airlines with the 737 MAX on the flight line and their Pilots. They have learned the NG and the MAX flies the same. They fly them interchangeably during the week.

They do fly the same as long as no fault appears. Then there are differences, and the Pilots should have been informed about the differences.

  1. Bruce Levitt
    November 14, 2018
    In figure 2 it shows the same center of gravity for the NG as the Max. I find this a bit surprising as I would have expected that mounting heavy engines further forward would have cause a shift forward in the center of gravity that would not have been offset by the longer tailcone, which I'm assuming is relatively light even with APU installed.

    Based on what is coming out about the automatic trim, Boeing must be counting its lucky stars that this incident happened to Lion Air and not to an American aircraft. If this had happened in the US, I'm pretty sure the fleet would have been grounded by the FAA and the class action lawyers would be lined up outside the door to get their many pounds of flesh.

    This is quite the wake-up call for Boeing.

    • OV-099
      November 14, 2018
      If the FAA is not going to comprehensively review the certification for the 737 MAX, I would not be surprised if EASA would start taking a closer look at the aircraft and why the FAA seemingly missed the seemingly inadequate testing of the automatic trim when they decided to certified the 737 MAX 8. Reply
      • Doubting Thomas
        November 16, 2018
        One wonders if there are any OTHER goodies in the new/improved/yet identical handling latest iteration of this old bird that Boeing did not disclose so that pilots need not be retrained.
        EASA & FAA likely already are asking some pointed questions and will want to verify any statements made by the manufacturer.
        Depending on the answers pilot training requirements are likely to change materially.
    • jbeeko
      November 14, 2018
      CG will vary based on loading. I'd guess the line is the rear-most allowed CG.
    • ahmed
      November 18, 2018
      hi dears
      I think that even the pilot didnt knew about the MCAS ; this case can be corrected by only applying the boeing check list (QRH) stabilizer runaway.
      the pilot when they noticed that stabilizer are trimming without a knewn input ( from pilot or from Auto pilot ) ; shout put the cut out sw in the off position according to QRH. Reply
      • TransWorld
        November 19, 2018
        Please note that the first actions pulling back on the yoke to stop it.

        Also keep in mind the aircraft is screaming stall and the stick shaker is activated.

        Pulling back on the yoke in that case is the WRONG thing to do if you are stalled.

        The Pilot has to then determine which system is lading.

        At the same time its chaning its behavior from previous training, every 5 seconds, it does it again.

        There also was another issue taking place at the same time.

        So now you have two systems lying to you, one that is actively trying to kill you.

        If the Pitot static system is broken, you also have several key instruments feeding you bad data (VSI, altitude and speed)

    • TransWorld
      November 14, 2018
      Grubbie: I can partly answer that.

      Pilots are trained to immediately deal with emergency issues (engine loss etc)

      Then there is a follow up detailed instructions for follow on actions (if any).

      Simulators are wonderful things because you can train lethal scenes without lethal results.

      In this case, with NO pilot training let alone in the manuals, pilots have to either be really quick in the situation or you get the result you do. Some are better at it than others (Sullenbergers along with other aspects elected to turn on his APU even though it was not part of the engine out checklist)

      The other one was to ditch, too many pilots try to turn back even though we are trained not to.

      What I can tell you from personal expereince is having got myself into a spin without any training, I was locked up logic wise (panic) as suddenly nothing was working the way it should.

      I was lucky I was high enough and my brain kicked back into cold logic mode and I knew the counter to a spin from reading)

      Another 500 feet and I would not be here to post.

      While I did parts of the spin recovery wrong, fortunately in that aircraft it did not care, right rudder was enough to stop it.

      Reply
  1. OV-099
    November 14, 2018
    It's starting to look as if Boeing will not be able to just pay victims' relatives in the form of "condolence money", without admitting liability. Reply
    • Dukeofurl
      November 14, 2018
      Im pretty sure, even though its an Indonesian Airline, any whiff of fault with the plane itself will have lawyers taking Boeing on in US courts.
  1. Tech-guru
    November 14, 2018
    Astonishing to say the least. It is quite unlike Boeing. They are normally very good in the documentation and training. It makes everyone wonder how such vital change on the MAX aircraft was omitted from books as weel as in crew training.
    Your explanation is very good as to why you need this damn MCAS. But can you also tell us how just one faulty sensor can trigger this MCAS. In all other Boeing models like B777, the two AOA sensor signals are compared with a calculated AOA and choose the mid value within the ADIRU. It eliminates a drastic mistake of following a wrong sensor input.
    • Bjorn Fehrm
      November 14, 2018
      Hi Tech-Gury,

      it's not sure it's a one sensor fault. One sensor was changed amid information there was a 20 degree diff between the two sides. But then it happened again. I think we might be informed something else is at the root of this, which could also trip such a plausibility check you mention. We just don't know. What we know is the MCAS function was triggered without the aircraft being close to stall.

      Reply
      • Matthew
        November 14, 2018
        If it's certain that the MCAS was doing unhelpful things, that coupled with the fact that no one was telling pilots anything about it suggests to me that this is already effectively an open-and-shut case so far as liability, regulatory remedies are concerned.

        The tecnical root cause is also important, but probably irrelevant so far as estbalishing the ultimate reason behind the crash.

        Reply

[Mar 13, 2019] Boeing Crapification Second 737 Max Plane Within Five Months Crashes Just After Takeoff

Notable quotes:
"... The key point I want to pick up on from that earlier post is this: the Boeing 737 Max includes a new "safety" feature about which the company failed to inform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). ..."
"... Boeing Co. withheld information about potential hazards associated with a new flight-control feature suspected of playing a role in last month's fatal Lion Air jet crash, according to safety experts involved in the investigation, as well as midlevel FAA officials and airline pilots. ..."
"... Notice that phrase: "under unusual conditions". Seems now that the pilots of two of these jets may have encountered such unusual conditions since October. ..."
"... Why did Boeing neglect to tell the FAA – or, for that matter, other airlines or regulatory authorities – about the changes to the 737 Max? Well, the airline marketed the new jet as not needing pilots to undergo any additional training in order to fly it. ..."
"... In addition to considerable potential huge legal liability, from both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, Boeing also faces the commercial consequences of grounding some if not all 737 Max 8 'planes currently in service – temporarily? indefinitely? -and loss or at minimum delay of all future sales of this aircraft model. ..."
"... If this tragedy had happened on an aircraft of another manufacturer other than big Boeing, the fleet would already have been grounded by the FAA. The arrogance of engineers both at Airbus and Boeing, who refuse to give the pilots easy means to regain immediate and full authority over the plane (pitch and power) is just appalling. ..."
"... Boeing has made significant inroads in China with its 737 MAX family. A dozen Chinese airlines have ordered 180 of the planes, and 76 of them have been delivered, according Boeing. About 85% of Boeing's unfilled Chinese airline orders are for 737 MAX planes. ..."
"... "It's pretty asinine for them to put a system on an airplane and not tell the pilots who are operating the airplane, especially when it deals with flight controls," Captain Mike Michaelis, chairman of the safety committee for the Allied Pilots Association, told the Wall Street Journal. ..."
"... The aircraft company concealed the new system and minimized the differences between the MAX and other versions of the 737 to boost sales. On the Boeing website, the company claims that airlines can save "millions of dollars" by purchasing the new plane "because of its commonality" with previous versions of the plane. ..."
"... "Years of experience representing hundreds of victims has revealed a common thread through most air disaster cases," said Charles Herrmann the principle of Herrmann Law. "Generating profit in a fiercely competitive market too often involves cutting safety measures. In this case, Boeing cut training and completely eliminated instructions and warnings on a new system. Pilots didn't even know it existed. I can't blame so many pilots for being mad as hell." ..."
"... The Air France Airbus disaster was jumped on – Boeing's traditional hydraulic links between the sticks for the two pilots ensuring they move in tandem; the supposed comments by Captain Sully that the Airbus software didn't allow him to hit the water at the optimal angle he wanted, causing the rear rupture in the fuselage both showed the inferiority of fly-by-wire until Boeing started using it too. (Sully has taken issue with the book making the above point and concludes fly-by-wire is a "mixed blessing".) ..."
"... Money over people. ..."
Mar 13, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Posted on March 11, 2019 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans.

Yesterday, an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 157 passengers on board.

The crash occurred less than five months after a Lion Air jet crashed near Jakarta, Indonesia, also shortly after takeoff, and killed all 189 passengers.

Both jets were Boeing's latest 737 Max 8 model.

The Wall Street Journal reports in Ethiopian Crash Carries High Stakes for Boeing, Growing African Airline :

The state-owned airline is among the early operators of Boeing's new 737 MAX single-aisle workhorse aircraft, which has been delivered to carriers around the world since 2017. The 737 MAX represents about two-thirds of Boeing's future deliveries and an estimated 40% of its profits, according to analysts.

Having delivered 350 of the 737 MAX planes as of January, Boeing has booked orders for about 5,000 more, many to airlines in fast-growing emerging markets around the world.

The voice and data recorders for the doomed flight have already been recovered, the New York Times reported in Ethiopian Airline Crash Updates: Data and Voice Recorders Recovered . Investigators will soon be able to determine whether the same factors that caused the Lion Air crash also caused the latest Ethiopian Airlines tragedy.

Boeing, Crapification, Two 737 Max Crashes Within Five Months

Yves wrote a post in November, Boeing, Crapification, and the Lion Air Crash , analyzing a devastating Wall Street Journal report on that earlier crash. I will not repeat the details of her post here, but instead encourage interested readers to read it iin full.

The key point I want to pick up on from that earlier post is this: the Boeing 737 Max includes a new "safety" feature about which the company failed to inform the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As Yves wrote:

The short version of the story is that Boeing had implemented a new "safety" feature that operated even when its plane was being flown manually, that if it went into a stall, it would lower the nose suddenly to pick airspeed and fly normally again. However, Boeing didn't tell its buyers or even the FAA about this new goodie. It wasn't in pilot training or even the manuals. But even worse, this new control could force the nose down so far that it would be impossible not to crash the plane. And no, I am not making this up. From the Wall Street Journal:

Boeing Co. withheld information about potential hazards associated with a new flight-control feature suspected of playing a role in last month's fatal Lion Air jet crash, according to safety experts involved in the investigation, as well as midlevel FAA officials and airline pilots.

The automated stall-prevention system on Boeing 737 MAX 8 and MAX 9 models -- intended to help cockpit crews avoid mistakenly raising a plane's nose dangerously high -- under unusual conditions can push it down unexpectedly and so strongly that flight crews can't pull it back up. Such a scenario, Boeing told airlines in a world-wide safety bulletin roughly a week after the accident, can result in a steep dive or crash -- even if pilots are manually flying the jetliner and don't expect flight-control computers to kick in.

Notice that phrase: "under unusual conditions". Seems now that the pilots of two of these jets may have encountered such unusual conditions since October.

Why did Boeing neglect to tell the FAA – or, for that matter, other airlines or regulatory authorities – about the changes to the 737 Max? Well, the airline marketed the new jet as not needing pilots to undergo any additional training in order to fly it.

I see. Why Were 737 Max Jets Still in Service? Today, Boeing executives no doubt rue not pulling all 737 Max 8 jets out of service after the October Lion Air crash, to allow their engineers and engineering safety regulators to make necessary changes in the 'plane's design or to develop new training protocols.

In addition to considerable potential huge legal liability, from both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes, Boeing also faces the commercial consequences of grounding some if not all 737 Max 8 'planes currently in service – temporarily? indefinitely? -and loss or at minimum delay of all future sales of this aircraft model.

Over to Yves again, who in her November post cut to the crux:

And why haven't the planes been taken out of service? As one Wall Street Journal reader put it:

If this tragedy had happened on an aircraft of another manufacturer other than big Boeing, the fleet would already have been grounded by the FAA. The arrogance of engineers both at Airbus and Boeing, who refuse to give the pilots easy means to regain immediate and full authority over the plane (pitch and power) is just appalling.

Accident and incident records abound where the automation has been a major contributing factor or precursor. Knowing our friends at Boeing, it is highly probable that they will steer the investigation towards maintenance deficiencies as primary cause of the accident

In the wake of the Ethiopian Airlines crash, other countries have not waited for the FAA to act. China and Indonesia, as well as Ethiopian Airlines and Cayman Airways, have grounded flights of all Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, the Guardian reported in Ethiopian Airlines crash: Boeing faces safety questions over 737 Max 8 jets . The FT has called the Chinese and Indonesian actions an "unparalleled flight ban" (see China and Indonesia ground Boeing 737 Max 8 jets after latest crash ). India's air regulator has also issued new rules covering flights of the 737 Max aircraft, requiring pilots to have a minimum of 1,000 hours experience to fly these 'planes, according to a report in the Economic Times, DGCA issues additional safety instructions for flying B737 MAX planes.

Future of Boeing?

The commercial consequences of grounding the 737 Max in China alone are significant, according to this CNN account, Why grounding 737 MAX jets is a big deal for Boeing . The 737 Max is Boeing's most important plane; China is also the company's major market:

"A suspension in China is very significant, as this is a major market for Boeing," said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at aviation research firm FlightGlobal.

Boeing has predicted that China will soon become the world's first trillion-dollar market for jets. By 2037, Boeing estimates China will need 7,690 commercial jets to meet its travel demands.

Airbus (EADSF) and Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, or Comac, are vying with Boeing for the vast and rapidly growing Chinese market.

Comac's first plane, designed to compete with the single-aisle Boeing 737 MAX and Airbus A320, made its first test flight in 2017. It is not yet ready for commercial service, but Boeing can't afford any missteps.

Boeing has made significant inroads in China with its 737 MAX family. A dozen Chinese airlines have ordered 180 of the planes, and 76 of them have been delivered, according Boeing. About 85% of Boeing's unfilled Chinese airline orders are for 737 MAX planes.

The 737 has been Boeing's bestselling product for decades. The company's future depends on the success the 737 MAX, the newest version of the jet. Boeing has 4,700 unfilled orders for 737s, representing 80% of Boeing's orders backlog. Virtually all 737 orders are for MAX versions.

As of the time of posting, US airlines have yet to ground their 737 Max 8 fleets. American Airlines, Alaska Air, Southwest Airlines, and United Airlines have ordered a combined 548 of the new 737 jets, of which 65 have been delivered, according to CNN.

Legal Liability?

Prior to Sunday's Ethiopian Airlines crash, Boeing already faced considerable potential legal liability for the October Lion Air crash. Just last Thursday, the Hermann Law Group of personal injury lawyers filed suit against Boeing on behalf of the families of 17 Indonesian passengers who died in that crash.

The Families of Lion Air Crash File Lawsuit Against Boeing – News Release did not mince words;

"It's pretty asinine for them to put a system on an airplane and not tell the pilots who are operating the airplane, especially when it deals with flight controls," Captain Mike Michaelis, chairman of the safety committee for the Allied Pilots Association, told the Wall Street Journal.

The president of the pilots union at Southwest Airlines, Jon Weaks, said, "We're pissed that Boeing didn't tell the companies, and the pilots didn't get notice."

The aircraft company concealed the new system and minimized the differences between the MAX and other versions of the 737 to boost sales. On the Boeing website, the company claims that airlines can save "millions of dollars" by purchasing the new plane "because of its commonality" with previous versions of the plane.

"Years of experience representing hundreds of victims has revealed a common thread through most air disaster cases," said Charles Herrmann the principle of Herrmann Law. "Generating profit in a fiercely competitive market too often involves cutting safety measures. In this case, Boeing cut training and completely eliminated instructions and warnings on a new system. Pilots didn't even know it existed. I can't blame so many pilots for being mad as hell."

Additionally, the complaint alleges the United States Federal Aviation Administration is partially culpable for negligently certifying Boeing's Air Flight Manual without requiring adequate instruction and training on the new system. Canadian and Brazilian authorities did require additional training.

What's Next?

The consequences for Boeing could be serious and will depend on what the flight and voice data recorders reveal. I also am curious as to what additional flight training or instructions, if any, the Ethiopian Airlines pilots received, either before or after the Lion Air crash, whether from Boeing, an air safety regulator, or any other source.


el_tel , March 11, 2019 at 5:04 pm

Of course we shouldn't engage in speculation, but we will anyway 'cause we're human. If fly-by-wire and the ability of software to over-ride pilots are indeed implicated in the 737 Max 8 then you can bet the Airbus cheer-leaders on YouTube videos will engage in huge Schaudenfreude.

I really shouldn't even look at comments to YouTube videos – it's bad for my blood pressure. But I occasionally dip into the swamp on ones in areas like airlines. Of course – as you'd expect – you get a large amount of "flag waving" between Europeans and Americans. But the level of hatred and suspiciously similar comments by the "if it ain't Boeing I ain't going" brigade struck me as in a whole new league long before the "SJW" troll wars regarding things like Captain Marvel etc of today.

The Air France Airbus disaster was jumped on – Boeing's traditional hydraulic links between the sticks for the two pilots ensuring they move in tandem; the supposed comments by Captain Sully that the Airbus software didn't allow him to hit the water at the optimal angle he wanted, causing the rear rupture in the fuselage both showed the inferiority of fly-by-wire until Boeing started using it too. (Sully has taken issue with the book making the above point and concludes fly-by-wire is a "mixed blessing".)

I'm going to try to steer clear of my YouTube channels on airlines. Hopefully NC will continue to provide the real evidence as it emerges as to what's been going on here.

Monty , March 11, 2019 at 7:14 pm

Re SJW troll wars.

It is really disheartening how an idea as reasonable as "a just society" has been so thoroughly discredited among a large swath of the population.

No wonder there is such a wide interest in primitive construction and technology on YouTube. This society is very sick and it is nice to pretend there is a way to opt out.

none , March 11, 2019 at 8:17 pm

The version I heard (today, on Reddit) was "if it's Boeing, I'm not going". Hadn't seen the opposite version to just now.

Octopii , March 12, 2019 at 5:19 pm

Nobody is going to provide real evidence but the NTSB.

albert , March 12, 2019 at 6:44 pm

Indeed. The NTSB usually works with local investigation teams (as well as a manufacturers rep) if the manufacturer is located in the US, or if specifically requested by the local authorities. I'd like to see their report. I don't care what the FAA or Boeing says about it.
. .. . .. -- .

d , March 12, 2019 at 5:58 pm

fly by wire has been around the 90s, its not new

notabanker , March 11, 2019 at 6:37 pm

Contains a link to a Seattle Times report as a "comprehensive wrap":
Speaking before China's announcement, Cox, who previously served as the top safety official for the Air Line Pilots Association, said it's premature to think of grounding the 737 MAX fleet.

"We don't know anything yet. We don't have close to sufficient information to consider grounding the planes," he said. "That would create economic pressure on a number of the airlines that's unjustified at this point.

China has grounded them . US? Must not create undue economic pressure on the airlines. Right there in black and white. Money over people.

Joey , March 11, 2019 at 11:13 pm

I just emailed southwest about an upcoming flight asking about my choices for refusal to board MAX 8/9 planes based on this "feature". I expect pro forma policy recitation, but customer pressure could trump too big to fail sweeping the dirt under the carpet. I hope.

Thuto , March 12, 2019 at 3:35 am

We got the "safety of our customers is our top priority and we are remaining vigilant and are in touch with Boeing and the Civial Aviation Authority on this matter but will not be grounding the aircraft model until further information on the crash becomes available" speech from a local airline here in South Africa. It didn't take half a day for customer pressure to effect a swift reversal of that blatant disregard for their "top priority", the model is grounded so yeah, customer muscle flexing will do it

Jessica , March 12, 2019 at 5:26 am

On PPRUNE.ORG (where a lot of pilots hang out), they reported that after the Lion Air crash, Southwest added an extra display (to indicate when the two angle of attack sensors were disagreeing with each other) that the folks on PPRUNE thought was an extremely good idea and effective.
Of course, if the Ethiopian crash was due to something different from the Lion Air crash, that extra display on the Southwest planes may not make any difference.

JerryDenim , March 12, 2019 at 2:09 pm

"On PPRUNE.ORG (where a lot of pilots hang out)"

Take those comments with a large dose of salt. Not to say everyone commenting on PPRUNE and sites like PPRUNE are posers, but PPRUNE.org is where a lot of wanna-be pilots and guys that spend a lot of time in basements playing flight simulator games hang out. The "real pilots" on PPRUNE are more frequently of the aspiring airline pilot type that fly smaller, piston-powered planes.

Altandmain , March 11, 2019 at 5:31 pm

We will have to wait and see what the final investigation reveals. However this does not look good for Boeing at all.

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) system was implicated in the Lion Air crash. There have been a lot of complaints about the system on many of the pilot forums, suggesting at least anecdotally that there are issues. It is highly suspected that the MCAS system is responsible for this crash too.

Keep in mind that Ethiopian Airlines is a pretty well-known and regarded airline. This is not a cut rate airline we are talking about.

At this point, all we can do is to wait for the investigation results.

d , March 12, 2019 at 6:01 pm

one other minor thing. you remember that shut down? seems that would have delayed any updates from Boeing. seems thats one of the things the pilots pointed out when it shutdown was in progress

WestcoastDeplorable , March 11, 2019 at 5:33 pm

What really is the icing on this cake is the fact the new, larger engines on the "Max" changed the center of gravity of the plane and made it unstable. From what I've read on aviation blogs, this is highly unusual for a commercial passenger jet. Boeing then created the new "safety" feature which makes the plane fly nose down to avoid a stall. But of course garbage in, garbage out on sensors (remember AF447 which stalled right into the S. Atlantic?).
It's all politics anyway .if Boeing had been forthcoming about the "Max" it would have required additional pilot training to certify pilots to fly the airliner. They didn't and now another 189 passengers are D.O.A.
I wouldn't fly on one and wouldn't let family do so either.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 5:40 pm

If I have read correctly, the MCAS system (not known of by pilots until after the Lion Air crash) is reliant on a single Angle of Attack sensor, without redundancy (!). It's too early
to say if MCAS was an issue in the crashes, I guess, but this does not look good.

Jessica , March 12, 2019 at 5:42 am

If it was some other issue with the plane, that will be almost worse for Boeing. Two crash-causing flaws would require grounding all of the planes, suspending production, then doing some kind of severe testing or other to make sure that there isn't a third flaw waiting to show up.

vomkammer , March 12, 2019 at 3:19 pm

If MCAS relies only on one Angle of Attack (AoA) sensor, then it might have been an error in the system design an the safety assessment, from which Boeing may be liable.

It appears that a failure of the AoA can produce an unannuntiated erroneous pitch trim:
a) If the pilots had proper traning and awareness, this event would "only" increase their workload,
b) But for an unaware or untrained pilot, the event would impair its ability to fly and introduce excessive workload.

The difference is important, because according to standard civil aviation safety assessment (see for instance EASA AMC 25.1309 Ch. 7), the case a) should be classified as "Major" failure, whereas b) should be classified as "Hazardous". "Hazardous" failures are required to have much lower probability, which means MCAS needs two AoA sensors.

In summary: a safe MCAS would need either a second AoA or pilot training. It seems that it had neither.

drumlin woodchuckles , March 12, 2019 at 1:01 am

What are the ways an ignorant lay air traveler can find out about whether a particular airline has these new-type Boeing 737 MAXes in its fleet? What are the ways an ignorant air traveler can find out which airlines do not have ANY of these airplanes in their fleet?

What are the ways an ignorant air traveler can find out ahead of time, when still planning herm's trip, which flights use a 737 MAX as against some other kind of plane?

The only way the flying public could possibly torture the airlines into grounding these planes until it is safe to de-ground them is a total all-encompassing "fearcott" against this airplane all around the world. Only if the airlines in the "go ahead and fly it" countries sell zero seats, without exception, on every single 737 MAX plane that flies, will the airlines themselves take them out of service till the issues are resolved.

Hence my asking how people who wish to save their own lives from future accidents can tell when and where they might be exposed to the risk of boarding a Boeing 737 MAX plane.

Carey , March 12, 2019 at 2:13 am

Should be in your flight info, if not, contact the airline. I'm not getting on a 737 MAX.

pau llauter , March 12, 2019 at 10:57 am

Look up the flight on Seatguru. Generally tells type of aircraft. Of course, airlines do change them, too.

Old Jake , March 12, 2019 at 2:57 pm

Stop flying. Your employer requires it? Tell'em where to get off. There are alternatives. The alternatives are less polluting and have lower climate impact also. Yes, this is a hard pill to swallow. No, I don't travel for employment any more, I telecommute. I used to enjoy flying, but I avoid it like plague any more. Crapification.

Darius , March 12, 2019 at 5:09 pm

Additional training won't do. If they wanted larger engines, they needed a different plane. Changing to an unstable center of gravity and compensating for it with new software sounds like a joke except for the hundreds of victims. I'm not getting on that plane.

Joe Well , March 11, 2019 at 5:35 pm

Has there been any study of crapification as a broad social phenomenon? When I Google the word I only get links to NC and sites that reference NC. And yet, this seems like one of the guiding concepts to understand our present world (the crapification of UK media and civil service go a long way towards understanding Brexit, for instance).

I mean, my first thought is, why would Boeing commit corporate self-harm for the sake of a single bullet in sales materials (requires no pilot retraining!). And the answer, of course, is crapification: the people calling the shots don't know what they're doing.

none , March 11, 2019 at 11:56 pm

"Market for lemons" maybe? Anyway the phenomenon is well known.

Alfred , March 12, 2019 at 1:01 am

Google Books finds the word "crapification" quoted (from a 2004) in a work of literary criticism published in 2008 (Literature, Science and a New Humanities, by J. Gottschall). From 2013 it finds the following in a book by Edward Keenan, Some Great Idea: "Policy-wise, it represented a shift in momentum, a slowing down of the childish, intentional crapification of the city ." So there the word appears clearly in the sense understood by regular readers here (along with an admission that crapfication can be intentional and not just inadvertent). To illustrate that sense, Google Books finds the word used in Misfit Toymakers, by Keith T. Jenkins (2014): "We had been to the restaurant and we had water to drink, because after the takeover's, all of the soda makers were brought to ruination by the total crapification of their product, by government management." But almost twenty years earlier the word "crapification" had occurred in a comic strip published in New York Magazine (29 January 1996, p. 100): "Instant crapification! It's the perfect metaphor for the mirror on the soul of America!" The word has been used on television. On 5 January 2010 a sketch subtitled "Night of Terror – The Crapification of the American Pant-scape" ran on The Colbert Report per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Colbert_Report_episodes_(2010) . Searching the internet, Google results do indeed show many instances of the word "crapification" on NC, or quoted elsewhere from NC posts. But the same results show it used on many blogs since ca. 2010. Here, at http://nyceducator.com/2018/09/the-crapification-factor.html , is a recent example that comments on the word's popularization: "I stole that word, "crapification," from my friend Michael Fiorillo, but I'm fairly certain he stole it from someone else. In any case, I think it applies to our new online attendance system." A comment here, https://angrybearblog.com/2017/09/open-thread-sept-26-2017.html , recognizes NC to have been a vector of the word's increasing usage. Googling shows that there have been numerous instances of the verb "crapify" used in computer-programming contexts, from at least as early as 2006. Google Books finds the word "crapified" used in a novel, Sonic Butler, by James Greve (2004). The derivation, "de-crapify," is also attested. "Crapify" was suggested to Merriam-Webster in 2007 per: http://nws.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary/newword_display_alpha.php?letter=Cr&last=40 . At that time the suggested definition was, "To make situations/things bad." The verb was posted to Urban Dictionary in 2003: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=crapify . The earliest serious discussion I could quickly find on crapificatjon as a phenomenon was from 2009 at https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=10611 . I have found only two attempts to elucidate the causes of crapification: http://malepatternboldness.blogspot.com/2017/03/my-jockey-journey-or-crapification-of.html (an essay on undershirts) and https://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2017/04/complaints.html (a comment on refrigerators). This essay deals with the mechanics of job crapification: http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-job-crapification-works.html (relating it to de-skilling). An apparent Americanism, "crapification" has recently been 'translated' into French: "Mon bled est en pleine urbanisation, comprends : en pleine emmerdisation" [somewhat literally -- My hole in the road is in the midst of development, meaning: in the midst of crapification]: https://twitter.com/entre2passions/status/1085567796703096832 Interestingly, perhaps, a comprehensive search of amazon.com yields "No results for crapification."

Joe Well , March 12, 2019 at 12:27 pm

You deserve a medal! That's amazing research!

drumlin woodchuckles , March 12, 2019 at 1:08 am

This seems more like a specific bussiness conspiracy than like general crapification. This isn't " they just don't make them like they used to". This is like Ford deliberately selling the Crash and Burn Pinto with its special explode-on-impact gas-tank feature

Maybe some Trump-style insults should be crafted for this plane so they can get memed-up and travel faster than Boeing's ability to manage the story. Epithets like " the new Boeing crash-a-matic dive-liner
with nose-to-the-ground pilot-override autocrash built into every plane." It seems unfair, but life and safety should come before fairness, and that will only happen if a world wide wave of fear MAKES it happen.

pretzelattack , March 12, 2019 at 2:17 am

yeah first thing i thought of was the ford pinto.

The Rev Kev , March 12, 2019 at 4:19 am

Now there is a car tailor made to modern suicidal Jihadists. You wouldn't even have to load it up with explosives but just a full fuel tank-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgOxWPGsJNY

drumlin woodchuckles , March 12, 2019 at 3:27 pm

" Instant car bomb. Just add gas."

EoH , March 12, 2019 at 8:47 am

Good time to reread Yves' recent, Is a Harvard MBA Bad For You? :

The underlying problem is increasingly mercenary values in society.

JerryDenim , March 12, 2019 at 2:49 pm

I think crapification is the end result of a self-serving belief in the unfailing goodness and superiority of Ivy faux-meritocracy and the promotion/exaltation of the do-nothing, know-nothing, corporate, revolving-door MBA's and Psych-major HR types over people with many years of both company and industry experience who also have excellent professional track records. The latter group was the group in charge of major corporations and big decisions in the 'good old days', now it's the former. These morally bankrupt people and their vapid, self-righteous culture of PR first, management science second, and what-the-hell-else-matters anyway, are the prime drivers of crapification. Read the bio of an old-school celebrated CEO like Gordon Bethune (Continental CEO with corporate experience at Boeing) who skipped college altogether and joined the Navy at 17, and ask yourself how many people like that are in corporate board rooms today? I'm not saying going back to a 'Good Ole Boy's Club' is the best model of corporate governnace either but at least people like Bethune didn't think they were too good to mix with their fellow employees, understood leadership, the consequences of bullshit, and what 'The buck stops here' thing was really about. Corporate types today sadly believe their own propaganda, and when their fraudulent schemes, can-kicking, and head-in-the sand strategies inevitably blow up in their faces, they accept no blame and fail upwards to another posh corporate job or a nice golden parachute. The wrong people are in charge almost everywhere these days, hence crapification. Bad incentives, zero white collar crime enforcement, self-replicating board rooms, group-think, begets toxic corporate culture, which equals crapification.

Jeff Zink , March 12, 2019 at 5:46 pm

Also try "built in obsolescence"

VietnamVet , March 11, 2019 at 5:40 pm

As a son of a deceased former Boeing aeronautic engineer, this is tragic. It highlights the problem of financialization, neoliberalism, and lack of corporate responsibility pointed out daily here on NC. The crapification was signaled by the move of the headquarters from Seattle to Chicago and spending billions to build a second 787 line in South Carolina to bust their Unions. Boeing is now an unregulated multinational corporation superior to sovereign nations. However, if the 737 Max crashes have the same cause, this will be hard to whitewash. The design failure of windows on the de Havilland Comet killed the British passenger aircraft business. The EU will keep a discrete silence since manufacturing major airline passenger planes is a duopoly with Airbus. However, China hasn't (due to the trade war with the USA) even though Boeing is building a new assembly line there. Boeing escaped any blame for the loss of two Malaysian Airline's 777s. This may be an existential crisis for American aviation. Like a President who denies calling Tim Cook, Tim Apple, or the soft coup ongoing in DC against him, what is really happening globally is not factually reported by corporate media.

Jerry B , March 11, 2019 at 6:28 pm

===Boeing is now an unregulated multinational corporation superior to sovereign nations===

Susan Strange 101.

Or more recently Quinn Slobodian's Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.

And the beat goes on.

Synoia , March 11, 2019 at 6:49 pm

The design failure of windows on the de Havilland Comet killed the British passenger aircraft business.

Yes, a misunderstanding the the effect of square windows and 3 dimensional stress cracking.

Gary Gray , March 11, 2019 at 7:54 pm

Sorry, but 'sovereign' nations were always a scam. Nothing than a excuse to build capital markets, which are the underpinning of capitalism. Capital Markets are what control countries and have since the 1700's. Maybe you should blame the monarchies for selling out to the bankers in the late middle ages. Sovereign nations are just economic units for the bankers, their businesses they finance and nothing more. I guess they figured out after the Great Depression, they would throw a bunch of goodies at "Indo Europeans" face in western europe ,make them decadent and jaded via debt expansion. This goes back to my point about the yellow vests ..me me me me me. You reek of it. This stuff with Boeing is all profit based. It could have happened in 2000, 1960 or 1920. It could happen even under state control. Did you love Hitler's Voltswagon?

As for the soft coup .lol you mean Trumps soft coup for his allies in Russia and the Middle East viva la Saudi King!!!!!? Posts like these represent the problem with this board. The materialist over the spiritualist. Its like people who still don't get some of the biggest supporters of a "GND" are racialists and being somebody who has long run the environmentalist rally game, they are hugely in the game. Yet Progressives completely seem blind to it. The media ignores them for con men like David Duke(who's ancestry is not clean, no its not) and "Unite the Right"(or as one friend on the environmental circuit told me, Unite the Yahweh apologists) as whats "white". There is a reason they do this.

You need to wake up and stop the self-gratification crap. The planet is dying due to mishandlement. Over urbanization, over population, constant need for me over ecosystem. It can only last so long. That is why I like Zombie movies, its Gaia Theory in a nutshell. Good for you Earth .or Midgard. Which ever you prefer.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 8:05 pm

Your job seems to be to muddy the waters, and I'm sure we'll be seeing much more of the same; much more.

Thanks!

pebird , March 11, 2019 at 10:24 pm

Hitler had an electric car?

JerryDenim , March 12, 2019 at 3:05 pm

Hee-hee. I noticed that one too.

TimR , March 12, 2019 at 9:41 am

Interesting but I'm unclear on some of it.. GND supporters are racialist?

JerryDenim , March 12, 2019 at 3:02 pm

Spot on comment VietnamVet, a lot of chickens can be seen coming home to roost in this latest Boeing disaster. Remarkable how not many years ago the government could regulate the aviation industry without fear of killing it, since there was more than one aerospace company, not anymore! The scourge of monsopany/monopoly power rears its head and bites in unexpected places.

Ptb , March 11, 2019 at 5:56 pm

More detail on the "MCAS" system responsible for the previous Lion Air crash here (theaircurrent.com)

It says the bigger and repositioned engine, which give the new model its fuel efficiency, and wing angle tweaks needed to fit the engine vs landing gear and clearance,
change the amount of pitch trim it needs in turns to remain level.

The auto system was added top neutralize the pitch trim during turns, too make it handle like the old model.

There is another pitch trim control besides the main "stick". To deactivate the auto system, this other trim control has to be used, the main controls do not deactivate it (perhaps to prevent it from being unintentionally deactivated, which would be equally bad). If the sensor driving the correction system gives a false reading and the pilot were unaware, there would be seesawing and panic

Actually, if this all happened again I would be very surprised. Nobody flying a 737 would not know after the previous crash. Curious what they find.

Ptb , March 11, 2019 at 6:38 pm

Ok typo fixes didn't register gobbledygook.

EoH , March 12, 2019 at 8:38 am

While logical, If your last comment were correct, it should have prevented this most recent crash. It appears that the "seesawing and panic" continue.

I assume it has now gone beyond the cockpit, and beyond the design, and sales teams and reached the Boeing board room. From there, it is likely to travel to the board rooms of every airline flying this aircraft or thinking of buying one, to their banks and creditors, and to those who buy or recommend their stock. But it may not reach the FAA for some time.

marku52 , March 12, 2019 at 2:47 pm

Full technical discussion of why this was needed at:

https://leehamnews.com/2018/11/14/boeings-automatic-trim-for-the-737-max-was-not-disclosed-to-the-pilots/

Ptb , March 12, 2019 at 5:32 pm

Excellent link, thanks!

Kimac , March 11, 2019 at 6:20 pm

As to what's next?

Think, Too Big To Fail.

Any number of ways will be found to put lipstick on this pig once we recognize the context.

allan , March 11, 2019 at 6:38 pm

"Canadian and Brazilian authorities did require additional training" from the quote at the bottom is not
something I've seen before. What did they know and when did they know it?

rd , March 11, 2019 at 8:31 pm

They probably just assumed that the changes in the plane from previous 737s were big enough to warrant treating it like a major change requiring training.

Both countries fly into remote areas with highly variable weather conditions and some rugged terrain.

dcrane , March 11, 2019 at 7:25 pm

Re: withholding information from the FAA

For what it's worth, the quoted section says that Boeing withheld info about the MCAS from "midlevel FAA officials", while Jerri-Lynn refers to the FAA as a whole.

This makes me wonder if top-level FAA people certified the system.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 7:37 pm

See under "regulatory capture"

Corps run the show, regulators are window-dressing.

IMO, of course. Of course

allan , March 11, 2019 at 8:04 pm

It wasn't always this way. From 1979:

DC-10 Type Certificate Lifted [Aviation Week]

FAA action follows finding of new cracks in pylon aft bulkhead forward flange; crash investigation continues

Suspension of the McDonnell Douglas DC-10's type certificate last week followed a separate grounding order from a federal court as government investigators were narrowing the scope of their investigation of the American Airlines DC-10 crash May 25 in Chicago.

The American DC-10-10, registration No. N110AA, crashed shortly after takeoff from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, killing 259 passengers, 13 crewmembers and three persons on the ground. The 275 fatalities make the crash the worst in U.S. history.

The controversies surrounding the grounding of the entire U.S. DC-10 fleet and, by extension, many of the DC-10s operated by foreign carriers, by Federal Aviation Administrator Langhorne Bond on the morning of June 6 to revolve around several issues.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 8:39 pm

Yes, I remember back when the FAA would revoke a type certificate if a plane was a danger to public safety. It wasn't even that long ago. Now their concern is any threat to Boeing™. There's a name for that

Joey , March 11, 2019 at 11:22 pm

'Worst' disaster in Chicago would still ground planes. Lucky for Boeing its brown and browner.

Max Peck , March 11, 2019 at 7:30 pm

It's not correct to claim the MCAS was concealed. It's right in the January 2017 rev of the NG/MAX differences manual.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 7:48 pm

Mmm. Why do the dudes and dudettes *who fly the things* say they knew nothing
about MCAS? Their training is quite rigorous.

Max Peck , March 11, 2019 at 10:00 pm

See a post below for link. I'd have provided it in my original post but was on a phone in an inconvenient place for editing.

Carey , March 12, 2019 at 1:51 am

'Boeing's automatic trim for the 737 MAX was not disclosed to the Pilots':

https://leehamnews.com/2018/11/14/boeings-automatic-trim-for-the-737-max-was-not-disclosed-to-the-pilots/

marku52 , March 12, 2019 at 2:39 pm

Leeham news is the best site for info on this. For those of you interested in the tech details got to Bjorns Corner, where he writes about aeronautic design issues.

I was somewhat horrified to find that modern aircraft flying at near mach speeds have a lot of somewhat pasted on pilot assistances. All of them. None of them fly with nothing but good old stick-and-rudder. Not Airbus (which is actually fully Fly By wire-all pilot inputs got through a computer) and not Boeing, which is somewhat less so.

This latest "solution came about becuse the larger engines (and nacelles) fitted on the Max increased lift ahead of the center of gravity in a pitchup situation, which was destabilizing. The MCAS uses inputs from air speed and angle of attack sensors to put a pitch down input to the horizonatal stablisizer.

A faluty AofA sensor lead to Lion Air's Max pushing the nose down against the pilots efforts all the way into the sea.

This is the best backgrounder

https://leehamnews.com/2018/11/14/boeings-automatic-trim-for-the-737-max-was-not-disclosed-to-the-pilots/

The Rev Kev , March 11, 2019 at 7:48 pm

One guy said last night on TV that Boeing had eight years of back orders for this aircraft so you had better believe that this crash will be studied furiously. Saw a picture of the crash site and it looks like it augured in almost straight down. There seems to be a large hole and the wreckage is not strew over that much area. I understand that they were digging out the cockpit as it was underground. Strange that.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 7:55 pm

It's said that the Flight Data Recorders have been found, FWIW.

EoH , March 12, 2019 at 9:28 am

Suggestive of a high-speed, nose-first impact. Not the angle of attack a pilot would ordinarily choose.

Max Peck , March 11, 2019 at 9:57 pm

It's not true that Boeing hid the existence of the MCAS. They documented it in the January 2017 rev of the NG/MAX differences manual and probably earlier than that. One can argue whether the description was adequate, but the system was in no way hidden.

Carey , March 11, 2019 at 10:50 pm

Looks like, for now, we're stuck between your "in no way hidden", and numerous 737 pilots' claims on various online aviation boards that they knew nothing about MCAS. Lots of money involved, so very cloudy weather expected. For now I'll stick with the pilots.

Alex V , March 12, 2019 at 2:27 am

To the best of my understanding and reading on the subject, the system was well documented in the Boeing technical manuals, but not in the pilots' manuals, where it was only briefly mentioned, at best, and not by all airlines. I'm not an airline pilot, but from what I've read, airlines often write their own additional operators manuals for aircraft models they fly, so it was up to them to decide the depth of documentation. These are in theory sufficient to safely operate the plane, but do not detail every aircraft system exhaustively, as a modern aircraft is too complex to fully understand. Other technical manuals detail how the systems work, and how to maintain them, but a pilot is unlikely to read them as they are used by maintenance personnel or instructors. The problem with these cases (if investigations come to the same conclusions) is that insufficient information was included in the pilots manual explaining the MCAS, even though the information was communicated via other technical manuals.

vlade , March 12, 2019 at 11:50 am

This is correct.

A friend of mine is a commercial pilot who's just doing a 'training' exercise having moved airlines.

He's been flying the planes in question most of his life, but the airline is asking him to re-do it all according to their manuals and their rules. If the airline manual does not bring it up, then the pilots will not read it – few of them have time to go after the actual technical manuals and read those in addition to what the airline wants. [oh, and it does not matter that he has tens of thousands of hours on the airplane in question, if he does not do something in accordance with his new airline manual, he'd get kicked out, even if he was right and the airline manual wrong]

I believe (but would have to check with him) that some countries regulators do their own testing over and above the airlines, but again, it depends on what they put in.

Alex V , March 12, 2019 at 11:58 am

Good to head my understanding was correct. My take on the whole situation was that Boeing was negligent in communicating the significance of the change, given human psychology and current pilot training. The reason was to enable easier aircraft sales. The purpose of the MCAS system is however quite legitimate – it enables a more fuel efficient plane while compensating for a corner case of the flight envelope.

Max Peck , March 12, 2019 at 8:01 am

The link is to the actual manual. If that doesn't make you reconsider, nothing will. Maybe some pilots aren't expected to read the manuals, I don't know.

Furthermore, the post stated that Boeing failed to inform the FAA about the MCAS. Surely the FAA has time to read all of the manuals.

Darius , March 12, 2019 at 6:18 pm

Nobody reads instruction manuals. They're for reference. Boeing needed to yell at the pilots to be careful to read new pages 1,576 through 1,629 closely. They're a lulu.

Also, what's with screwing with the geometry of a stable plane so that it will fall out of the sky without constant adjustments by computer software? It's like having a car designed to explode but don't worry. We've loaded software to prevent that. Except when there's an error. But don't worry. We've included reboot instructions. It takes 15 minutes but it'll be OK. And you can do it with one hand and drive with the other. No thanks. I want the car not designed to explode.

The Rev Kev , March 11, 2019 at 10:06 pm

The FAA is already leaping to the defense of the Boeing 737 Max 8 even before they have a chance to open up the black boxes. Hope that nothing "happens" to those recordings.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-47533052

Milton , March 11, 2019 at 11:04 pm

I don't know, crapification, at least for me, refers to products, services, or infrastructure that has declined to the point that it has become a nuisance rather than a benefit it once was. This case with Boeing borders on criminal negligence.

pretzelattack , March 12, 2019 at 8:20 am

i came across a word that was new to me "crapitalism", goes well with crapification.

TG , March 12, 2019 at 12:50 am

1. It's really kind of amazing that we can fly to the other side of the world in a few hours – a journey that in my grandfather's time would have taken months and been pretty unpleasant and risky – and we expect perfect safety.

2. Of course the best-selling jet will see these issues. It's the law of large numbers.

3. I am not a fan of Boeing's corporate management, but still, compared to Wall Street and Defense Contractors and big education etc. they still produce an actual technical useful artifact that mostly works, and at levels of performance that in other fields would be considered superhuman.

4. Even for Boeing, one wonders when the rot will set in. Building commercial airliners is hard! So many technical details, nowhere to hide if you make even one mistake so easy to just abandon the business entirely. Do what the (ex) US auto industry did, contract out to foreign manufacturers and just slap a "USA" label on it and double down on marketing. Milk the cost-plus cash cow of the defense market. Or just financialize the entire thing and become too big to fail and walk away with all the profits before the whole edifice crumbles. Greed is good, right?

marku52 , March 12, 2019 at 2:45 pm

"Of course the best-selling jet will see these issues. It's the law of large numbers."

2 crashes of a new model in vary similar circumstances is very unusual. And FAA admits they are requiring a FW upgrade sometime in April. Pilots need to be hyperaware of what this MCAS system is doing. And they currently aren't.

Prairie Bear , March 12, 2019 at 2:42 am

if it went into a stall, it would lower the nose suddenly to pick airspeed and fly normally again.

A while before I read this post, I listened to a news clip that reported that the plane was observed "porpoising" after takeoff. I know only enough about planes and aviation to be a more or less competent passenger, but it does seem like that is something that might happen if the plane had such a feature and the pilot was not familiar with it and was trying to fight it? The below link is not to the story I saw I don't think, but another one I just found.

if it went into a stall, it would lower the nose suddenly to pick airspeed and fly normally again.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/know-boeing-737-max-8-crashed-ethiopia-221411537.html

none , March 12, 2019 at 5:33 am

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airplane-witnesses/ethiopian-plane-smoked-and-shuddered-before-deadly-plunge-idUSKBN1QS1LJ

Reuters reports people saw smoke and debris coming out of the plane before the crash.

Jessica , March 12, 2019 at 6:06 am

At PPRUNE.ORG, many of the commentators are skeptical of what witnesses of airplane crashes say they see, but more trusting of what they say they hear.
The folks at PPRUNE.ORG who looked at the record of the flight from FlightRadar24, which only covers part of the flight because FlightRadar24's coverage in that area is not so good and the terrain is hilly, see a plane flying fast in a straight line very unusually low.

EoH , March 12, 2019 at 8:16 am

The dodge about making important changes that affect aircraft handling but not disclosing them – so as to avoid mandatory pilot training, which would discourage airlines from buying the modified aircraft – is an obvious business-over-safety choice by an ethics and safety challenged corporation.

But why does even a company of that description, many of whose top managers, designers, and engineers live and breathe flight, allow its s/w engineers to prevent the pilots from overriding a supposed "safety" feature while actually flying the aircraft? Was it because it would have taken a little longer to write and test the additional s/w or because completing the circle through creating a pilot override would have mandated disclosure and additional pilot training?

Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger and his passengers and crew would have ended up in pieces at the bottom of the Hudson if the s/w on his aircraft had prohibited out of the ordinary flight maneuvers that contradicted its programming.

Alan Carr , March 12, 2019 at 9:13 am

If you carefully review the over all airframe of the 737 it has not hardly changed over the past 20 years or so, for the most part Boeing 737 specifications . What I believe the real issue here is the Avionics upgrades over the years has changed dramatically. More and more precision avionics are installed with less and less pilot input and ultimately no control of the aircraft. Though Boeing will get the brunt of the lawsuits, the avionics company will be the real culprit. I believe the avionics on the Boeing 737 is made by Rockwell Collins, which you guessed it, is owned by Boeing.

Max Peck , March 12, 2019 at 9:38 am

Rockwell Collins has never been owned by Boeing.

Also, to correct some upthread assertions, MCAS has an off switch.

WobblyTelomeres , March 12, 2019 at 10:02 am

United Technologies, UTX, I believe. If I knew how to short, I'd probably short this 'cause if they aren't partly liable, they'll still be hurt if Boeing has to slow (or, horror, halt) production.

Alan Carr , March 12, 2019 at 11:47 am

You are right Max I mis spoke. Rockwell Collins is owned by United Technologies Corporation

Darius , March 12, 2019 at 6:24 pm

Which astronaut are you? Heh.

EoH , March 12, 2019 at 9:40 am

Using routine risk management protocols, the American FAA should need continuing "data" on an aircraft for it to maintain its airworthiness certificate. Its current press materials on the Boeing 737 Max 8 suggest it needs data to yank it or to ground the aircraft pending review. Has it had any other commercial aircraft suffer two apparently similar catastrophic losses this close together within two years of the aircraft's launch?

Synoia , March 12, 2019 at 11:37 am

I am raising an issue with "crapification" as a meme. Crapification is a symptom of a specific behaviour.

GREED.

Please could you reconsider your writing to invlude this very old, tremendously venal, and "worst" sin?

US incentiveness of inventing a new word, "crapification" implies that some error cuould be corrected. If a deliberate sin, it requires atonement and forgiveness, and a sacrifice of wolrdy assets, for any chance of forgiveness and redemption.

Alan Carr , March 12, 2019 at 11:51 am

Something else that will be interesting to this thread is that Boeing doesn't seem to mind letting the Boeing 737 Max aircraft remain for sale on the open market

vlade , March 12, 2019 at 11:55 am

the EU suspends MAX 8s too

Craig H. , March 12, 2019 at 2:29 pm

The moderators in reddit.com/r/aviation are fantastic.

They have corralled everything into one mega-thread which is worth review:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/azzp0r/ethiopian_airlines_et302_and_boeing_737_max_8/

allan , March 12, 2019 at 3:00 pm

Thanks. That's a great link with what seem to be some very knowledgeable comments.

John Beech , March 12, 2019 at 2:30 pm

Experienced private pilot here. Lots of commercial pilot friends. First, the EU suspending the MAX 8 is politics. Second, the FAA mandated changes were already in the pipeline. Three, this won't stop the ignorant from staking out a position on this, and speculating about it on the internet, of course. Fourth, I'd hop a flight in a MAX 8 without concern – especially with a US pilot on board. Why? In part because the Lion Air event a few months back led to pointed discussion about the thrust line of the MAX 8 vs. the rest of the 737 fleet and the way the plane has software to help during strong pitch up events (MAX 8 and 9 have really powerful engines).

Basically, pilots have been made keenly aware of the issue and trained in what to do. Another reason I'd hop a flight in one right now is because there have been more than 31,000 trouble free flights in the USA in this new aircraft to date. My point is, if there were a systemic issue we'd already know about it. Note, the PIC in the recent crash had +8000 hours but the FO had about 200 hours and there is speculation he was flying. Speculation.

Anyway, US commercial fleet pilots are very well trained to deal with runaway trim or uncommanded flight excursions. How? Simple, by switching the breaker off. It's right near your fingers. Note, my airplane has an autopilot also. In the event the autopilot does something unexpected, just like the commercial pilot flying the MAX 8, I'm trained in what to do (the very same thing, switch the thing off).

Moreover, I speak form experience because I've had it happen twice in 15 years – once an issue with a servo causing the plane to slowly drift right wing low, and once a connection came loose leaving the plane trimmed right wing low (coincidence). My reaction is/was about the same as that of a experienced typist automatically hitting backspace on the keyboard upon realizing they mistyped a word, e.g. not reflex but nearly so. In my case, it was to throw the breaker to power off the autopilot as I leveled the plane. No big deal.

Finally, as of yet there been no analysis from the black boxes. I advise holding off on the speculation until they do. They've been found and we'll learn something soon. The yammering and near hysteria by non-pilots – especially with this thread – reminds me of the old saw about now knowing how smart or ignorant someone is until they open their mouth.

notabanker , March 12, 2019 at 5:29 pm

So let me get this straight.

While Boeing is designing a new 787, Airbus redesigns the A320. Boeing cannot compete with it, so instead of redesigning the 737 properly, they put larger engines on it further forward, which is never intended in the original design. So to compensate they use software with two sensors, not three, making it mathematically impossible to know if you have a faulty sensor which one it would be, to automatically adjust the pitch to prevent a stall, and this is the only true way to prevent a stall. But since you can kill the breaker and disable it if you have a bad sensor and can't possibly know which one, everything is ok. And now that the pilots can disable a feature required for certification, we should all feel good about these brand new planes, that for the first time in history, crashed within 5 months.

And the FAA, which hasn't had a Director in 14 months, knows better than the UK, Europe, China, Australia, Singapore, India, Indonesia, Africa and basically every other country in the world except Canada. And the reason every country in the world except Canada has grounded the fleet is political? Singapore put Silk Air out of business because of politics?

How many people need to be rammed into the ground at 500 mph from 8000 feet before yammering and hysteria are justified here? 400 obviously isn't enough.

VietnamVet , March 12, 2019 at 5:26 pm

Overnight since my first post above, the 737 Max 8 crash has become political. The black boxes haven't been officially read yet. Still airlines and aviation authorities have grounded the airplane in Europe, India, China, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and S.E. Asia in opposition to FAA's "Continued Airworthiness Notification to the International Community" issued yesterday.

I was wrong. There will be no whitewash. I thought they would remain silent. My guess this is a result of an abundance of caution plus greed (Europeans couldn't help gutting Airbus's competitor Boeing). This will not be discussed but it is also a manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Since the President has started dissing Atlantic Alliance partners, extorting defense money, fighting trade wars, and calling 3rd world countries s***-holes; there is no sympathy for the collapsing hegemon. Boeing stock is paying the price. If the cause is the faulty design of the flight position sensors and fly by wire software control system, it will take a long while to design and get approval of a new safe redundant control system and refit the airplanes to fly again overseas. A real disaster for America's last manufacturing industry.

[Mar 13, 2019] Boing might not survive the third crash

Too much automation and too complex flight control computer engager life of pilots and passengers...
Notable quotes:
"... When systems (like those used to fly giant aircraft) become too automatic while remaining essentially stupid or limited by the feedback systems, they endanger the airplane and passengers. These two "accidents" are painful warnings for air passengers and voters. ..."
"... This sort of problem is not new. Search the web for pitot/static port blockage, erroneous stall / overspeed indications. Pilots used to be trained to handle such emergencies before the desk-jockey suits decided computers always know best. ..."
"... @Sky Pilot, under normal circumstances, yes. but there are numerous reports that Boeing did not sufficiently test the MCAS with unreliable or incomplete signals from the sensors to even comply to its own quality regulations. ..."
"... Boeing did cut corners when designing the B737 MAX by just replacing the engines but not by designing a new wing which would have been required for the new engine. ..."
"... I accept that it should be easier for pilots to assume manual control of the aircraft in such situations but I wouldn't rush to condemn the programmers before we get all the facts. ..."
Mar 13, 2019 | www.nytimes.com

Shirley OK March 11

I want to know if Boeing 767s, as well as the new 737s, now has the Max 8 flight control computer installed with pilots maybe not being trained to use it or it being uncontrollable.

A 3rd Boeing - not a passenger plane but a big 767 cargo plane flying a bunch of stuff for Amazon crashed near Houston (where it was to land) on 2-23-19. The 2 pilots were killed. Apparently there was no call for help (at least not mentioned in the AP article about it I read).

'If' the new Max 8 system had been installed, had either Boeing or the owner of the cargo plane business been informed of problems with Max 8 equipment that had caused a crash and many deaths in a passenger plane (this would have been after the Indonesian crash)? Was that info given to the 2 pilots who died if Max 8 is also being used in some 767s? Did Boeing get the black box from that plane and, if so, what did they find out?

Those 2 pilots' lives matter also - particularly since the Indonesian 737 crash with Max 8 equipment had already happened. Boeing hasn't said anything (yet, that I've seen) about whether or not the Max 8 new configuration computer and the extra steps to get manual control is on other of their planes.

I want to know about the cause of that 3rd Boeing plane crashing and if there have been crashes/deaths in other of Boeing's big cargo planes. What's the total of all Boeing crashes/fatalies in the last few months and how many of those planes had Max 8?

Rufus SF March 11

Gentle readers: In the aftermath of the Lion Air crash, do you think it possible that all 737Max pilots have not received mandatory training review in how to quickly disconnect the MCAS system and fly the plane manually?

Do you think it possible that every 737Max pilot does not have a "disconnect review" as part of his personal checklist? Do you think it possible that at the first hint of pitch instability, the pilot does not first think of the MCAS system and whether to disable it?

Harold Orlando March 11

Compare the altitude fluctuations with those from Lion Air in NYTimes excellent coverage( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/16/world/asia/lion-air-crash-cockpit.html ), and they don't really suggest to me a pilot struggling to maintain proper pitch. Maybe the graph isn't detailed enough, but it looks more like a major, single event rather than a number of smaller corrections. I could be wrong.

Reports of smoke and fire are interesting; there is nothing in the modification that (we assume) caused Lion Air's crash that would explain smoke and fire. So I would hesitate to zero in on the modification at this point. Smoke and fire coming from the luggage bay suggest a runaway Li battery someone put in their suitcase. This is a larger issue because that can happen on any aircraft, Boeing, Airbus, or other.

mrpisces Loui March 11

Is is a shame that Boeing will not ground this aircraft knowing they introduced the MCAS component to automate the stall recovery of the 737 MAX and is behind these accidents in my opinion. Stall recovery has always been a step all pilots handled when the stick shaker and other audible warnings were activated to alert the pilots.

Now, Boeing invented MCAS as a "selling and marketing point" to a problem that didn't exist. MCAS kicks in when the aircraft is about to enter the stall phase and places the aircraft in a nose dive to regain speed. This only works when the air speed sensors are working properly. Now imagine when the air speed sensors have a malfunction and the plane is wrongly put into a nose dive.

The pilots are going to pull back on the stick to level the plane. The MCAS which is still getting incorrect air speed data is going to place the airplane back into a nose dive. The pilots are going to pull back on the stick to level the aircraft. This repeats itself till the airplane impacts the ground which is exactly what happened.

Add the fact that Boeing did not disclose the existence of the MCAS and its role to pilots. At this point only money is keeping the 737 MAX in the air. When Boeing talks about safety, they are not referring to passenger safety but profit safety.

Tony San Diego March 11

1. The procedure to allow a pilot to take complete control of the aircraft from auto-pilot mode should have been a standard eg pull back on the control column. It is not reasonable to expect a pilot to follow some checklist to determine and then turn off a misbehaving module especially in emergency situations. Even if that procedure is written in fine print in a manual. (The number of modules to disable may keep increasing if this is allowed).

2. How are US airlines confident of the safety of the 737 MAX right now when nothing much is known about the cause of the 2nd crash? What is known if that both the crashed aircraft were brand new, and we should be seeing news articles on how the plane's brand-new advanced technology saved the day from the pilot and not the other way round

3. In the first crash, the plane's advanced technology could not even recognize that either the flight path was abnormal and/or the airspeed readings were too erroneous and mandate the pilot to therefore take complete control immediately!

John✔️✔️Brews Tucson, AZ March 11

It's straightforward to design for standard operation under normal circumstances. But when bizarre operation occurs resulting in extreme circumstances a lot more comes into play. Not just more variables interacting more rapidly, testing system response times, but much happening quickly, testing pilot response times and experience. It is doubtful that the FAA can assess exactly what happened in these crashes. It is a result of a complex and rapid succession of man-machine-software-instrumentation interactions, and the number of permutations is huge. Boeing didn't imagine all of them, and didn't test all those it did think of.

The FAA is even less likely to do so. Boeing eventually will fix some of the identified problems, and make pilot intervention more effective. Maybe all that effort to make the new cockpit look as familiar as the old one will be scrapped? Pilot retraining will be done? Redundant sensors will be added? Additional instrumentation? Software re-written?

That'll increase costs, of course. Future deliveries will cost more. Looks likely there will be some downtime. Whether the fixes will cover sufficient eventualities, time will tell. Whether Boeing will be more scrupulous in future designs, less willing to cut corners without evaluating them? Will heads roll? Well, we'll see...

Ron SC March 11

Boeing has been in trouble technologically since its merger with McDonnell Douglas, which some industry analysts called a takeover, though it isn't clear who took over whom since MD got Boeing's name while Boeing took the MD logo and moved their headquarters from Seattle to Chicago.

In addition to problems with the 737 Max, Boeing is charging NASA considerably more than the small startup, SpaceX, for a capsule designed to ferry astronauts to the space station. Boeing's Starliner looks like an Apollo-era craft and is launched via a 1960's-like ATLAS booster.

Despite using what appears to be old technology, the Starliner is well behind schedule and over budget while the SpaceX capsule has already docked with the space station using state-of-art reusable rocket boosters at a much lower cost. It seems Boeing is in trouble, technologically.

BSmith San Francisco March 11

When you read that this model of the Boeing 737 Max was more fuel efficient, and view the horrifying graphs (the passengers spent their last minutes in sheer terror) of the vertical jerking up and down of both air crafts, and learn both crashes occurred minutes after take off, you are 90% sure that the problem is with design, or design not compatible with pilot training. Pilots in both planes had received permission to return to the airports. The likely culprit. to a trained designer, is the control system for injecting the huge amounts of fuel necessary to lift the plane to cruising altitude. Pilots knew it was happening and did not know how to override the fuel injection system.

These two crashes foretell what will happen if airlines, purely in the name of saving money, elmininate human control of aircraft. There will be many more crashes.

These ultra-complicated machines which defy gravity and lift thousands of pounds of dead weight into the stratesphere to reduce friction with air, are immensely complex and common. Thousands of flight paths cover the globe each day. Human pilots must ultimately be in charge - for our own peace of mind, and for their ability to deal with unimaginable, unforeseen hazards.

When systems (like those used to fly giant aircraft) become too automatic while remaining essentially stupid or limited by the feedback systems, they endanger the airplane and passengers. These two "accidents" are painful warnings for air passengers and voters.

Brez Spring Hill, TN March 11

1. Ground the Max 737.

2. Deactivate the ability of the automated system to override pilot inputs, which it apparently can do even with the autopilot disengaged.

3. Make sure that the autopilot disengage button on the yoke (pickle switch) disconnects ALL non-manual control inputs.

4. I do not know if this version of the 737 has direct input ("rope start") gyroscope, airspeed and vertical speed inticators for emergencies such as failure of the electronic wonder-stuff. If not, install them. Train pilots to use them.

5. This will cost money, a lot of money, so we can expect more self-serving excuses until the FAA forces Boeing to do the right thing.

6. This sort of problem is not new. Search the web for pitot/static port blockage, erroneous stall / overspeed indications. Pilots used to be trained to handle such emergencies before the desk-jockey suits decided computers always know best.

Harper Arkansas March 11

I flew big jets for 34 years, mostly Boeing's. Boeing added new logic to the trim system and was allowed to not make it known to pilots. However it was in maintenance manuals. Not great, but these airplanes are now so complex there are many systems that pilots don't know all of the intimate details.

NOT IDEAL, BUT NOT OVERLY SIGNIFICANT. Boeing changed one of the ways to stop a runaway trim system by eliminating the control column trim brake, ie airplane nose goes up, push down (which is instinct) and it stops the trim from running out of control.

BIG DEAL BOIENG AND FAA, NOT TELLING PILOTS. Boeing produces checklists for almost any conceivable malfunction. We pilots are trained to accomplish the obvious then go immediately to the checklist. Some items on the checklist are so important they are called "Memory Items" or "Red Box Items".

These would include things like in an explosive depressurization to put on your o2 mask, check to see that the passenger masks have dropped automatically and start a descent.

Another has always been STAB TRIM SWITCHES ...... CUTOUT which is surrounded by a RED BOX.

For very good reasons these two guarded switches are very conveniently located on the pedestal right between the pilots.

So if the nose is pitching incorrectly, STAB TRIM SWITCHES ..... CUTOUT!!! Ask questions later, go to the checklist. THAT IS THE PILOTS AND TRAINING DEPARTMENTS RESPONSIBILITY. At this point it is not important as to the cause.

David Rubien New York March 11

If these crashes turn out to result from a Boeing flaw, how can that company continue to stay in business? It should be put into receivership and its executives prosecuted. How many deaths are persmissable?

Osama Portland OR March 11

The emphasis on software is misplaced. The software intervention is triggered by readings from something called an Angle of Attack sensor. This sensor is relatively new on airplanes. A delicate blade protrudes from the fuselage and is deflected by airflow. The direction of the airflow determines the reading. A false reading from this instrument is the "garbage in" input to the software that takes over the trim function and directs the nose of the airplane down. The software seems to be working fine. The AOA sensor? Not so much.

experience Michiigan March 11

The basic problem seems to be that the 737 Max 8 was not designed for the larger engines and so there are flight characteristics that could be dangerous. To compensate for the flaw, computer software was used to control the aircraft when the situation was encountered. The software failed to prevent the situation from becoming a fatal crash.

A work around that may be the big mistake of not redesigning the aircraft properly for the larger engines in the first place. The aircraft may need to be modified at a cost that would be not realistic and therefore abandoned and a entirely new aircraft design be implemented. That sounds very drastic but the only other solution would be to go back to the original engines. The Boeing Company is at a crossroad that could be their demise if the wrong decision is made.

Sky Pilot NY March 11

It may be a training issue in that the 737 Max has several systems changes from previous 737 models that may not be covered adequately in differences training, checklists, etc. In the Lyon Air crash, a sticky angle-of-attack vane caused the auto-trim to force the nose down in order to prevent a stall. This is a worthwhile safety feature of the Max, but the crew was slow (or unable) to troubleshoot and isolate the problem. It need not have caused a crash. I suspect the same thing happened with Ethiopian Airlines. The circumstances are temptingly similar.

Thomas Singapore March 11

@Sky Pilot, under normal circumstances, yes. but there are numerous reports that Boeing did not sufficiently test the MCAS with unreliable or incomplete signals from the sensors to even comply to its own quality regulations. And that is just one of the many quality issues with the B737 MAX that have been in the news for a long time and have been of concern to some of the operators while at the same time being covered up by the FAA.

Just look at the difference in training requirements between the FAA and the Brazilian aviation authority.

Brazilian pilots need to fully understand the MCAS and how to handle it in emergency situations while FAA does not even require pilots to know about it.

Thomas Singapore March 11

This is yet another beautiful example of the difference in approach between Europeans and US Americans. While Europeans usually test their before they deliver the product thoroughly in order to avoid any potential failures of the product in their customers hands, the US approach is different: It is "make it work somehow and fix the problems when the client has them".

Which is what happened here as well. Boeing did cut corners when designing the B737 MAX by just replacing the engines but not by designing a new wing which would have been required for the new engine.

So the aircraft became unstable to fly at low speedy and tight turns which required a fix by implementing the MCAS which then was kept from recertification procedures for clients for reasons competitive sales arguments. And of course, the FAA played along and provided a cover for this cutting of corners as this was a product of a US company.

Then the proverbial brown stuff hit the fan, not once but twice. So Boeing sent its "thoughts and prayers" and started to hope for the storm to blow over and for finding a fix that would not be very expensive and not eat the share holder value away.

Sorry, but that is not the way to design and maintain aircraft. If you do it, do it right the first time and not fix it after more than 300 people died in accidents. There is a reason why China has copied the Airbus A-320 and not the Boeing B737 when building its COMAC C919. The Airbus is not a cheap fix, still tested by customers.

Rafael USA March 11

@Thomas And how do you know that Boeing do not test the aircrafts before delivery? It is a requirement by FAA for all complete product, systems, parts and sub-parts to be tested before delivery. However it seems Boeing has not approached the problem (or maybe they do not know the real issue).

As for the design, are you an engineer that can say whatever the design and use of new engines without a complete re-design is wrong? Have you seen the design drawings of the airplane? I do work in an industry in which our products are use for testing different parts of aircratfs and Boeing is one of our customers.

Our products are use during manufacturing and maintenance of airplanes. My guess is that Boeing has no idea what is going on. Your biased opinion against any US product is evident. There are regulations in the USA (and not in other Asia countries) that companies have to follow. This is not a case of untested product, it is a case of unknown problem and Boeing is really in the dark of what is going on...

Sam Europe March 11

Boeing and Regulators continue to exhibit criminal behaviour in this case. Ethical responsibility expects that when the first brand new MAX 8 fell for potentially issues with its design, the fleet should have been grounded. Instead, money was a priority; and unfortunately still is. They are even now flying. Disgraceful and criminal behaviour.

Imperato NYC March 11

@Sam no...too soon to come anywhere near that conclusion.

YW New York, NY March 11

A terrible tragedy for Ethiopia and all of the families affected by this disaster. The fact that two 737 Max jets have crashed in one year is indeed suspicious, especially as it has long been safer to travel in a Boeing plane than a car or school bus. That said, it is way too early to speculate on the causes of the two crashes being identical. Eyewitness accounts of debris coming off the plane in mid-air, as has been widely reported, would not seem to square with the idea that software is again at fault. Let's hope this puzzle can be solved quickly.

Wayne Brooklyn, New York March 11

@Singh the difference is consumer electronic products usually have a smaller number of components and wiring compared to commercial aircraft with miles of wiring and multitude of sensors and thousands of components. From what I know they usually have a preliminary report that comes out in a short time. But the detailed reported that takes into account analysis will take over one year to be written.

John A San Diego March 11

The engineers and management at Boeing need a crash course in ethics. After the crash in Indonesia, Boeing was trying to pass the blame rather than admit responsibility. The planes should all have been grounded then. Now the chickens have come to roost. Boeing is in serious trouble and it will take a long time to recover the reputation. Large multinationals never learn.

Imperato NYC March 11

@John A the previous pilot flying the Lion jet faced the same problem but dealt with it successfully. The pilot on the ill fated flight was less experienced and unfortunately failed.

BSmith San Francisco March 11

@Imperato Solving a repeat problem on an airplane type must not solely depend upon a pilot undertaking an emergency response! That is nonsense even to a non-pilot! This implies that Boeing allows a plane to keep flying which it knows has a fatal flaw! Shouldn't it be grounding all these planes until it identifies and solves the same problem?

Jimi DC March 11

NYT recently did an excellent job explaining how pilots were kept in the dark, by Boeing, during software update for 737 Max: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/world/asia/lion-air-plane-crash-pilots.html#click=https://t.co/MRgpKKhsly

Steve Charlotte, NC March 11

Something is wrong with those two graphs of altitude and vertical speed. For example, both are flat at the end, even though the vertical speed graph indicates that the plane was climbing rapidly. So what is the source of those numbers? Is it ground-based radar, or telemetry from onboard instruments? If the latter, it might be a clue to the problem.

Imperato NYC March 11

@Steve Addis Ababa is almost at 8000ft.

George North Carolina March 11

I wonder if, somewhere, there is a a report from some engineers saying that the system pushed by administrative-types to get the plane on the market quickly, will results in serious problems down the line.

Rebecca Michigan March 11

If we don't know why the first two 737 Max Jets crashed, then we don't know how long it will be before another one has a catastrophic failure. All the planes need to be grounded until the problem can be duplicated and eliminated.

Shirley OK March 11

@Rebecca And if it is something about the plane itself - and maybe an interaction with the new software - then someone has to be ready to volunteer to die to replicate what's happened.....

Rebecca Michigan March 12

@Shirley Heavens no. When investigating failures, duplicating the problem helps develop the solution. If you can't recreate the problem, then there is nothing to solve. Duplicating the problem generally is done through analysis and simulations, not with actual planes and passengers.

Sisifo Carrboro, NC March 11

Computer geeks can be deadly. This is clearly a software problem. The more software goes into a plane, the more likely it is for a software failure to bring down a plane. And computer geeks are always happy to try "new things" not caring what the effects are in the real world. My PC has a feature that controls what gets typed depending on the speed and repetitiveness of what I type. The darn thing is a constant source of annoyance as I sit at my desk, and there is absolutely no way to neutralize it because a computer geek so decided. Up in an airliner cockpit, this same software idiocy is killing people like flies.

Pooja MA March 11

@Sisifo Software that goes into critical systems like aircraft have a lot more constraints. Comparing it to the user interface on your PC doesn't make any sense. It's insulting to assume programmers are happy to "try new things" at the expense of lives. If you'd read about the Lion Air crash carefully you'd remember that there were faulty sensors involved. The software was doing what it was designed to do but the input it was getting was incorrect. I accept that it should be easier for pilots to assume manual control of the aircraft in such situations but I wouldn't rush to condemn the programmers before we get all the facts.

BSmith San Francisco March 11

@Pooja Mistakes happen. If humans on board can't respond to terrible situations then there is something wrong with the aircraft and its computer systems. By definition.

Patriot NJ March 11

Airbus had its own experiences with pilot "mode confusion" in the 1990's with at least 3 fatal crashes in the A320, but was able to control the media narrative until they resolved the automation issues. Look up Air Inter 148 in Wikipedia to learn the similarities.

Opinioned! NYC -- currently wintering in the Pacific March 11

"Commands issued by the plane's flight control computer that bypasses the pilots." What could possibly go wrong? Now let's see whether Boeing's spin doctors can sell this as a feature, not a bug.

Chris Hartnett Minneapolis March 11

It is telling that the Chinese government grounded their fleet of 737 Max 8 aircraft before the US government. The world truly has turned upside down when it potentially is safer to fly in China than the US. Oh, the times we live in. Chris Hartnett Datchet, UK (formerly Minneapolis)

Hollis Barcelona March 11

As a passenger who likes his captains with a head full of white hair, even if the plane is nosediving to instrument failure, does not every pilot who buckles a seat belt worldwide know how to switch off automatic flight controls and fly the airplane manually?

Even if this were 1000% Boeing's fault pilots should be able to override electronics and fly the plane safely back to the airport. I'm sure it's not that black and white in the air and I know it's speculation at this point but can any pilots add perspective regarding human responsibility?

Karl Rollings Sydney, Australia March 11

@Hollis I'm not a pilot nor an expert, but my understanding is that planes these days are "fly by wire", meaning the control surfaces are operated electronically, with no mechanical connection between the pilot's stick and the wings. So if the computer goes down, the ability to control the plane goes with it.

William Philadelphia March 11

@Hollis The NYT's excellent reporting on the Lion Air crash indicated that in nearly all other commercial aircraft, manual control of the pilot's yoke would be sufficient to override the malfunctioning system (which was controlling the tail wings in response to erroneous sensor data). Your white haired captain's years of training would have ingrained that impulse.

Unfortunately, on the Max 8 that would not sufficiently override the tail wings until the pilots flicked a switch near the bottom of the yoke. It's unclear whether individual airlines made pilots aware of this. That procedure existed in older planes but may not have been standard practice because the yoke WOULD sufficiently override the tail wings. Boeing's position has been that had pilots followed the procedure, a crash would not have occurred.

Nat Netherlands March 11

@Hollis No, that is the entire crux of this problem; switching from auto-pilot to manual does NOT solve it. Hence the danger of this whole system. T

his new Boeing 737-Max series are having the engines placed a bit further away than before and I don't know why they did this, but the result is that there can be some imbalance in air, which they then tried to correct with this strange auto-pilot technical adjustment.

Problem is that it stalls the plane (by pushing its nose down and even flipping out small wings sometimes) even when it shouldn't, and even when they switch to manual this system OVERRULES the pilot and switches back to auto-pilot, continuing to try to 'stabilize' (nose dive) the plane. That's what makes it so dangerous.

It was designed to keep the plane stable but basically turned out to function more or less like a glitch once you are taking off and need the ascend. I don't know why it only happens now and then, as this plane had made many other take-offs prior, but when it hits, it can be deadly. So far Boeings 'solution' is sparsely sending out a HUGE manual for pilots about how to fight with this computer problem.

Which are complicated to follow in a situation of stress with a plane computer constantly pushing the nose of your plane down. Max' mechanism is wrong and instead of correcting it properly, pilots need special training. Or a new technical update may help... which has been delayed and still hasn't been provided.

Mark Lebow Milwaukee, WI March 11

Is it the inability of the two airlines to maintain one of the plane's fly-by-wire systems that is at fault, not the plane itself? Or are both crashes due to pilot error, not knowing how to operate the system and then overreacting when it engages? Is the aircraft merely too advanced for its own good? None of these questions seems to have been answered yet.

Shane Marin County, CA March 11 Times Pick

This is such a devastating thing for Ethiopian Airlines, which has been doing critical work in connecting Africa internally and to the world at large. This is devastating for the nation of Ethiopia and for all the family members of those killed. May the memory of every passenger be a blessing. We should all hope a thorough investigation provides answers to why this make and model of airplane keep crashing so no other people have to go through this horror again.

Mal T KS March 11

A possible small piece of a big puzzle: Bishoftu is a city of 170,000 that is home to the main Ethiopian air force base, which has a long runway. Perhaps the pilot of Flight 302 was seeking to land there rather than returning to Bole Airport in Addis Ababa, a much larger and more densely populated city than Bishoftu. The pilot apparently requested return to Bole, but may have sought the Bishoftu runway when he experienced further control problems. Detailed analysis of radar data, conversations between pilot and control tower, flight path, and other flight-related information will be needed to establish the cause(s) of this tragedy.

Nan Socolow West Palm Beach, FL March 11

The business of building and selling airplanes is brutally competitive. Malfunctions in the systems of any kind on jet airplanes ("workhorses" for moving vast quantities of people around the earth) lead to disaster and loss of life. Boeing's much ballyhooed and vaunted MAX 8 737 jet planes must be grounded until whatever computer glitches brought down Ethiopian Air and LION Air planes -- with hundreds of passenger deaths -- are explained and fixed.

In 1946, Arthur Miller's play, "All My Sons", brought to life guilt by the airplane industry leading to deaths of WWII pilots in planes with defective parts. Arthur Miller was brought before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee because of his criticism of the American Dream. His other seminal American play, "Death of a Salesman", was about an everyman to whom attention must be paid. Attention must be paid to our aircraft industry. The American dream must be repaired.

Rachel Brooklyn, NY March 11

This story makes me very afraid of driverless cars.

Chuck W. Seattle, WA March 11

Meanwhile, human drivers killed 40,000 and injured 4.5 million people in 2018... For comparison, 58,200 American troops died in the entire Vietnam war. Computers do not fall asleep, get drunk, drive angry, or get distracted. As far as I am concerned, we cannot get unreliable humans out from behind the wheel fast enough.

jcgrim Knoxville, TN March 11

@Chuck W. Humans write the algorithms of driverless cars. Algorithms are not 100% fail-safe. Particularly when humans can't seem to write snap judgements or quick inferences into an algorithm. An algorithm can make driverless cars safe in predictable situations but that doesn't mean driveless cars will work in unpredictable events. Also, I don't trust the hype from Uber or the tech industry. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levandowski-waymo-uber-google-lawsuit.html?mtrref=t.co&gwh=D6880521C2C06930788921147F4506C8&gwt=pay

John NYC March 11

The irony here seems to be that in attempting to make the aircraft as safe as possible (with systems updates and such) Boeing may very well have made their product less safe. Since the crashes, to date, have been limited to the one product that product should be grounded until a viable determination has been made. John~ American Net'Zen

cosmos Washington March 11

Knowing quite a few Boeing employees and retirees, people who have shared numerous stories of concerns about Boeing operations -- I personally avoid flying. As for the assertion: "The business of building and selling jets is brutally competitive" -- it is monopolistic competition, as there are only two players. That means consumers (in this case airlines) do not end up with the best and widest array of airplanes. The more monopolistic a market, the more it needs to be regulated in the public interest -- yet I seriously doubt the FAA or any governmental agency has peeked into all the cost cutting measures Boeing has implemented in recent years

drdeanster tinseltown March 11

@cosmos Patently ridiculous. Your odds are greater of dying from a lightning strike, or in a car accident. Or even from food poisoning. Do you avoid driving? Eating? Something about these major disasters makes people itching to abandon all sense of probability and statistics.

Bob Milan March 11

When the past year was the dealiest one in decades, and when there are two disasters involved the same plane within that year, how can anyone not draw an inference that there are something wrong with the plane? In statistical studies of a pattern, this is a very very strong basis for a logical reasoning that something is wrong with the plane. When the number involves human lives, we must take very seriously the possibility of design flaws. The MAX planes should be all grounded for now. Period.

65 Recommend
mak pakistan March 11

@Bob couldn't agree more - however the basic design and engineering of the 737 is proven to be dependable over the past ~ 6 decades......not saying that there haven't been accidents - but these probably lie well within the industry / type averages. the problems seems to have arisen with the introduction of systems which have purportedly been introduced to take a part of the work-load off the pilots & pass it onto a central compuertised system.

Maybe the 'automated anti-stalling ' programme installed into the 737 Max, due to some erroneous inputs from the sensors, provide inaccurate data to the flight management controls leading to stalling of the aircraft. It seems that the manufacturer did not provide sufficent technical data about the upgraded software, & incase of malfunction, the corrective procedures to be followed to mitigate such diasters happening - before delivery of the planes to customers.

The procedure for the pilot to take full control of the aircraft by disengaging the central computer should be simple and fast to execute. Please we don't want Tesla driverless vehicles high up in the sky !

James Conner Northwestern Montana March 11

All we know at the moment is that a 737 Max crashed in Africa a few minutes after taking off from a high elevation airport. Some see similarities with the crash of Lion Air's 737 Max last fall -- but drawing a line between the only two dots that exist does not begin to present a useful picture of the situation.

Human nature seeks an explanation for an event, and may lead some to make assumptions that are without merit in order to provide closure. That tendency is why following a dramatic event, when facts are few, and the few that exist may be misleading, there is so much cocksure speculation masquerading as solid, reasoned, analysis. At this point, it's best to keep an open mind and resist connecting dots.

Peter Sweden March 11

@James Conner 2 deadly crashes after the introduction of a new airplane has no precedence in recent aviation history. And the time it has happened (with Comet), it was due to a faulty aircraft design. There is, of course, some chance that there is no connection between the two accidents, but if there is, the consequences are huge. Especially because the two events happened with very similar fashion (right after takeoff, with wild altitude changes), so there is more similarities than just the type of the plane. So there is literally no reason to keep this model in the air until the investigation is concluded. Oh well, there is: money. Over human lives.

svenbi NY March 11

It might be a wrong analogy, but if Toyota/Lexus recall over 1.5 million vehicles due to at least over 20 fatalities in relations to potentially fawlty airbags, Boeing should -- after over 300 deaths in just about 6 months -- pull their product of the market voluntarily until it is sorted out once and for all.

This tragic situation recalls the early days of the de Havilland Comet, operated by BOAC, which kept plunging from the skies within its first years of operation until the fault was found to be in the rectangular windows, which did not withstand the pressure due its jet speed and the subsequent cracks in body ripped the planes apart in midflight.

Thore Eilertsen Oslo March 11

A third crash may have the potential to take the aircraft manufacturer out of business, it is therefore unbelievable that the reasons for the Lion Air crash haven't been properly established yet. With more than a 100 Boeing 737 Max already grounded, I would expect crash investigations now to be severely fast tracked.

And the entire fleet should be grounded on the principle of "better safe than sorry". But then again, that would cost Boeing money, suggesting that the company's assessment of the risks involved favours continued operations above the absolute safety of passengers.

Londoner London March 11

@Thore Eilertsen This is also not a case for a secretive and extended crash investigation process. As soon as the cockpit voice recording is extracted - which might be later today - it should be made public. We also need to hear the communications between the controllers and the aircraft and to know about the position regarding the special training the pilots received after the Lion Air crash.

Trevor Canada March 11

@Thore Eilertsen I would imagine that Boeing will be the first to propose grounding these planes if they believe with a high degree of probability that it's their issue. They have the most to lose. Let logic and patience prevail.

Marvin McConoughey oregon March 11

It is very clear, even in these early moments, that aircraft makers need far more comprehensive information on everything pertinent that is going on in cockpits when pilots encounter problems. That information should be continually transmitted to ground facilities in real time to permit possible ground technical support.

[Mar 12, 2019] Not Looking Good -- Trump Attacks Coulter, Congressional GOP Cucking On Immigration by Washington Watcher

Mar 12, 2019 | www.unz.com

See, earlier by Ann Coulter: Trump's Failing On Immigration. Don't Ask Me To Lie About It

Three weeks ago, after Donald J. Trump abandoned the government shutdown and declared a national emergency to get some funding for his border wall, I asked: Did Trump Save His Presidency? Maybe -- IF He Doesn't INCREASE Legal Immigration . Unfortunately, and incredibly given his campaign promises , Trump has repeatedly said since then that he has indeed pivoted to increasing legal immigration -- reportedly under the influence of his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner . Trump may still be saved by the Party of Hysterical Screeching 's inability to accept even victory (because increasing legal immigration would be demographic victory for them) at his hands. But in the interim, without Presidential leadership, it appears likely that the Congressional Stupid Party will not take up the various measures that could stem America's immigration disaster -- above all, the Merkel-type catastrophe now unfolding on the southern border.

Weirdly, Trump abruptly attacked Ann Coulter , one of his earliest and most eloquent backers , on Twitter Saturday night, perhaps signaling he is repudiating the immigration patriotism he won on -- or perhaps that he knows Ann is right:

In reality of course, "major sections of the wall" have not been built. And the administration suffered yet another defeat in the courts last week over its attempts to enforce immigration law. [ In another blow to Trump, judge rules in favor of ACLU in family separations case , by Maria Sacchetti, The Washington Post , March 8, 2019] Trump is fighting, to his credit, but he simply is not winning on the border.

Coulter has consistently demanded the president implement the immigration platform he campaigne d on and her recent (admittedly savage) criticism isn't much different from what she has said since the beginning of Trump's tenure. See, recently Ann Coulter To Donald Trump: Hey, Commander! Start Commanding!

The difference lies in Trump himself. [ Anti-Immigration Groups See Trump's Calls for More Legal Immigrants as a Betrayal , by Michael D. Shear, The New York Times , March 8, 2019]

Jared Kushner is currently leading negotiations with the Cheap Labor Lobby to craft a bill that will likely increase guest worker visas. It's unclear what exactly will end up in this legislation, but it is guaranteed to enrage immigration patriots. [ Globalist Business Groups with Koch, Bush Ties Dominate Immigration Talks at White House , by John Binder, Breitbart , February 26, 2019]

Congressional Republicans also seem uninterested in immigration patriotism.

Many Republicans want to block President Trump's national emergency declaration on the border -- the one good thing Trump has recently done on immigration–because it goes against their " principles ." Thirteen House Republicans voted to block the executive order last month. "The president doesn't get to just declare an emergency for something that Congress has deliberated many times over the past several years," Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian, said of why he sponsored legislation to stifle the national emergency. [ Rep. Justin Amash: 'The President Doesn't Get To Just Declare an Emergency' , by Joe Seyton, Reason, February 26, 2019]. Amash was joined by a group primarily made up of squishy Republicans. [ Meet the 13 Republicans who rebuked Trump over his national emergency , by Bridget Bowman, Roll Call , February 26, 2019]

Trump's executive order is receiving even more pushback from Senate Republicans. Senators such as Shelly Moore-Capito (R-West Virginia) and Susan Collins think the national emergency is "concerning" and believe Trump already has enough wall money without the declaration. [ GOP wants Trump to back off on emergency , by Alexander Bolton, The Hill , March 6, 2019]

Four Republican Senators have announced their intention to vote for legislation to block the national emergency: Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, and usual Trump ally Rand Paul. More are likely to announce their support for this measure as the vote approaches this week. Pat Toomey and Todd Young, both who are close with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, want to propose resolutions to give cucky Republicans a way to voice their disapproval without voting with the Democrats.

The resolutions would convey the message that Republicans want border security, but don't want to take the necessary actions to fund said border security. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah wants to pass a resolution that would restrict the president's emergency powers and place a 30-day or 60-day time limit on how long they can be in effect without congressional approval.

McConnell announced Monday that he could not prevent passage of legislation blocking Trump's national emergency declaration. The New York Times declared this announcement as proof that Trump has lost influence within his own party. [ Trump's Grip Shows Signs of Slipping as Senate Prepares to Block Wall Emergency , By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Emily Cochrane, The New York Times , March 4, 2019]

The good news is that Trump will most likely veto this legislation and Congress doesn't have enough votes to override the veto. The President is also threatening senators who vote for the block with stiff consequences. [ Senate Republicans divided ahead of vote on disapproval of national emergency , by Ted Barrett, CNN , March 7, 2019] There is little chance the President will sign a bill that overrides his own action, even if his close advisers tell him to do so. Trump's instincts would never allow such behavior.

The bad news: it's a sign congressional Republicans have no will to support immigration patriotism at the moment. This is very bad considering the immigration bills that may come before them in the near future, including the possible White House measure on guest worker visas. House Democrats are set to introduce a new DREAM Act that will legalize at least 1.8 million illegals and extend Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals.

Congressional Republicans need to get their act together to kill these pieces of legislation. But they may be at the forefront in support of them. Last fall, multiple Republican senators, including the appalling Thom Tillis, proposed a bill that would double the number of H-2b visas and screw over low-skilled American workers. And last month, several Republicans -- alas, including supposed immigration patriot Tom Cotton -- championed the easement of some regulations on H-1b visas.

The better hope for killing a guest worker expansion lies with the Democrats. Anyone with a brain realizes this would be bad for American workers and benefits greedy corporations. Democrats have never been too fond of this plan, as evidenced by their skepticism about its expansion in the Gang of Eight Amnesty. [ Gang of 8 defends guest worker plan , by Seung Min Kim, Politico , May 13, 2013]. What better way to portray Trump as a phony populist in 2020 than to skewer him for this gift to the cheap labor lobby?

The House Democrats' proposed DREAM Act will probably go nowhere–unless Trump includes that idea in his immigration package. There are some positive signs that the White House won't do this; and that Republicans would block its passage. Kushner floated the idea of giving green cards for Dreamers in exchange for wall funding during shutdown negotiations earlier this year. That plan was firmly opposed by conservative senators who thought it was insanity [ A "go big" idea to end the shutdown , by Jonathan Swan, Axios , January 23, 2019]

Though Congress and the White House seem set on terrible immigration ideas, it's worth remembering there are alternative patriotic immigration proposals they could push. All of these ideas would not likely pass the current Congress, but they would shape the immigration debate in a positive direction ahead of the 2020 election.

El Chapo Act:

This bill proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz would confiscate the money of drug lords like Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and allocate it to building the wall. Cruz reintroduced the proposal in February and believes the government could obtain $14 billion out of El Chapo's drug profits through this law [ Sen. Ted Cruz's solution to border wall impasse: Make El Chapo pay for it , by Deanna Paul, The Washington Post , February 13, 2019]. This would be more money than Trump currently has for wall construction and would send a strong message to the cartels. The president himself has said Sen. Cruz's idea is "interesting." There is no reason Republicans shouldn't hold a vote on this bill and make Democrats stand up for drug cartels.

Kate's Law:

This bill, named after Kate Steinle who was murdered by an illegal alien, would institute harsher penalties for illegals caught re-entering the country. This measure passed the House in 2017, but it died in the (n.b. GOP-controlled)Senate [ Senate Has Not Voted On Kate's Law Five Months After It Passed The House With Bipartisan Support , by Will Racke, The Daily Caller , December 1, 2017].

Trump should resurrect the bill. Yes, it's passage is less likely with a Democrat-controlled House. That doesn't matter. The president needs to convey he still wants to crack down on illegal immigration and that his opponents favor criminal aliens over American citizens.

Along with the El Chapo Act, probably has the best chance at passage among the ideas the Trump admin could push as multiple Democrats voted for it back in 2017. There is still a chance enough Democrats would vote for it again to achieve passage.

No Sanctuary for Criminals Act:

This act would cut Sanctuary Cities off from federal law enforcement funds and it was also passed by the House in 2017, albeit by a smaller margin than Kate's Law. It also went nowhere in the (GOP-controlled) Senate. If Republicans want to highlight the chaos created by Democrat policies, they should revive this bill and remind Americans that Trump stands up for law and order. This act, however, does have less chance of passage as it was more strongly opposed by Democrats [ Dems block Senate vote on sanctuary cities , by Alexander Bolton, The Hill , February 13, 2018]

Mandatory e-Verify:

Requiring all American companies to use e-verify seems almost too good of an idea for Republicans. The bill explicitly protects American workers and puts the onus on employers to make sure they only hire those who are here legally. This should receive bipartisan support as both parties want to portray themselves as the true protectors of American workers.

House Republicans included the measure in their DACA deal last year, so they are aware of this proposal [ Goodlatte offers E-Verify mandate, farm worker fix for immigration bill , by John Bresnahan, Politico , June 26, 2018]. We just need one patriot Republican to stand up and offer mandatory e-Verify. This proposal also has a decent chance of passage.

Override the Flores Settlement:

This 1997 court decision has handcuffed the Trump administration's ability to enforce immigration law and is directly responsible for the current border collapse. It has allowed liberal judges to deem it unlawful for the government to detain illegal alien minors for more than 20 days. It also has allowed for these minors to have better access to asylum as they remain in America undetained. Some Republican lawmakers, including Ted Cruz, suggested legislative action in the last congressional session to correct this loophole [ The History of the Flores Settlement , by Matt Sussis, Center for Immigration Studies , February 11, 2019].

A bill to end this policy would not likely pass as many Republicans shrank from the Trump's family detention policies last summer [ Here Are the Republicans Opposing Migrant Family Separation , by Jeff Cirillo, Roll Call , June 19, 2018]. That doesn't change the fact that the Trump administration needs this legislation to avoid further court losses and to shift public discussion on family detention to focus on Democratic preference for illegal immigrants.

Eliminating birthright citizenship:

There is no way that this idea would pass Congress, but it does have the backing of the President and one prominent Republican senator. Trump said he may eliminate birthright citizenship by executive order and Sen. Lindsey Graham proposed a bill to do so right before the 2018 election. [ Lindsey Graham Seconds Trump Proposal to End Birthright Citizenship , by Niels Lesniewski, Roll Call , October 30, 2018]

Those plans, however, seem to have disappeared since then. But Trump still seems interested in the issue -- he mentioned it in his speech to CPAC -- and events may prompt the president to revisit the topic. A bill would cause an uproar within Congress and among the Republican caucus, let alone an executive order. And that's good. If Trump wants to have a serious discussion on citizenship and reduce the negative effects of mass immigration, then he must force this issue into the public square.

Javanka would likely oppose any such effort, so perhaps their White House influence would have to be minimalized from what it is today for this to happen.

The RAISE Act:

The RAISE Act would halve America's yearly immigration intake and structure our system to be more "merit-based." It would also cap annual refugee numbers at 50,000 and eliminate the diversity visa lottery. The bill was introduced by Sens. Tom Cotton and David Perdue with Trump's backing in August 2017. But (again, despite GOP control of Congress) nothing happened.

If Trump wants to show he still puts America first ahead of 2020, he could resurrect the RAISE Act. There is no chance it would pass, but it would force Republicans to run on the plan and win the seats necessary to pass it in Trump's second term.

These are some positive things Trump and Republicans can do. Whether they choose to do them is up to them.

It's not looking good.

Washington Watcher [ email him ] is an anonymous source Inside The Beltway.

[Mar 11, 2019] The university professors, who teach but do not learn: neoliberal shill DeJong tries to prolong the life of neoliberalism in the USA

Highly recommended!
DeJong is more dangerous them Malkin... It poisons students with neoliberalism more effectively.
Mar 11, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Kurtismayfield , , March 10, 2019 at 10:52 am

Re:Wall Street Democrats

They know, however, that they've been conned, played, and they're absolute fools in the game.

Thank you Mr. Black for the laugh this morning. They know exactly what they have been doing. Whether it was deregulating so that Hedge funds and vulture capitalism can thrive, or making sure us peons cannot discharge debts, or making everything about financalization. This was all done on purpose, without care for "winning the political game". Politics is economics, and the Wall Street Democrats have been winning.

notabanker , , March 10, 2019 at 12:26 pm

For sure. I'm quite concerned at the behavior of the DNC leadership and pundits. They are doubling down on blatant corporatist agendas. They are acting like they have this in the bag when objective evidence says they do not and are in trouble. Assuming they are out of touch is naive to me. I would assume the opposite, they know a whole lot more than what they are letting on.

urblintz , , March 10, 2019 at 12:49 pm

I think the notion that the DNC and the Democrat's ruling class would rather lose to a like-minded Republican corporatist than win with someone who stands for genuine progressive values offering "concrete material benefits." I held my nose and read comments at the kos straw polls (where Sanders consistently wins by a large margin) and it's clear to me that the Clintonista's will do everything in their power to derail Bernie.

polecat , , March 10, 2019 at 1:00 pm

"It's the Externalities, stupid economists !" *should be the new rallying cry ..

rd , , March 10, 2019 at 3:26 pm

Keynes' "animal spirits" and the "tragedy of the commons" (Lloyd, 1833 and Hardin, 1968) both implied that economics was messier than Samuelson and Friedman would have us believe because there are actual people with different short- and long-term interests.

The behavioral folks (Kahnemann, Tversky, Thaler etc.) have all shown that people are even messier than we would have thought. So most macro-economic stuff over the past half-century has been largely BS in justifying trickle-down economics, deregulation etc.

There needs to be some inequality as that provides incentives via capitalism but unfettered it turns into France 1989 or the Great Depression. It is not coincidence that the major experiment in this in the late 90s and early 2000s required massive government intervention to keep the ship from sinking less than a decade after the great unregulated creative forces were unleashed.

MMT is likely to be similar where productive uses of deficits can be beneficial, but if the money is wasted on stupid stuff like unnecessary wars, then the loss of credibility means that the fiat currency won't be quite as fiat anymore. Britain was unbelievably economically powerfully in the late 1800s but in half a century went to being an economic afterthought hamstrung by deficits after two major wars and a depression.

So it is good that people like Brad DeLong are coming to understand that the pretty economic theories have some truths but are utter BS (and dangerous) when extrapolated without accounting for how people and societies actually behave.

Chris Cosmos , , March 10, 2019 at 6:43 pm

I never understood the incentive to make more money -- that only works if money = true value and that is the implication of living in a capitalist society (not economy)–everything then becomes a commodity and alienation results and all the depression, fear, anxiety that I see around me. Whereas human happiness actually comes from helping others and finding meaning in life not money or dominating others. That's what social science seems to be telling us.

Oregoncharles , , March 10, 2019 at 2:46 pm

Quoting DeLong:

" He says we are discredited. Our policies have failed. And they've failed because we've been conned by the Republicans."

That's welcome, but it's still making excuses. Neoliberal policies have failed because the economics were wrong, not because "we've been conned by the Republicans." Furthermore, this may be important – if it isn't acknowledged, those policies are quite likely to come sneaking back, especially if Democrats are more in the ascendant., as they will be, given the seesaw built into the 2-Party.

The Rev Kev , , March 10, 2019 at 7:33 pm

Might be right there. Groups like the neocons were originally attached the the left side of politics but when the winds changed, detached themselves and went over to the Republican right. The winds are changing again so those who want power may be going over to what is called the left now to keep their grip on power. But what you say is quite true. It is not really the policies that failed but the economics themselves that were wrong and which, in an honest debate, does not make sense either.

marku52 , , March 10, 2019 at 3:39 pm

"And they've failed because we've been conned by the Republicans.""

Not at all. What about the "free trade" hokum that DeJong and his pal Krugman have been peddling since forever? History and every empirical test in the modern era shows that it fails in developing countries and only exacerbates inequality in richer ones.

That's just a failed policy.

I'm still waiting for an apology for all those years that those two insulted anyone who questioned their dogma as just "too ignorant to understand."

Glen , , March 10, 2019 at 4:47 pm

Thank you!

He created FAILED policies. He pushed policies which have harmed America, harmed Americans, and destroyed the American dream.

Kevin Carhart , , March 10, 2019 at 4:29 pm

It's intriguing, but two other voices come to mind. One is Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste by Mirowski and the other is Generation Like by Doug Rushkoff.

Neoliberalism is partially entrepreneurial self-conceptions which took a long time to promote. Rushkoff's Frontline shows the Youtube culture. There is a girl with a "leaderboard" on the wall of her suburban room, keeping track of her metrics.

There's a devastating VPRO Backlight film on the same topic. Internet-platform neoliberalism does not have much to do with the GOP.

It's going to be an odd hybrid at best – you could have deep-red communism but enacted for and by people whose self-conception is influenced by decades of Becker and Hayek? One place this question leads is to ask what's the relationship between the set of ideas and material conditions-centric philosophies? If new policies pass that create a different possibility materially, will the vise grip of the entrepreneurial self loosen?

Partially yeah, maybe, a Job Guarantee if it passes and actually works, would be an anti-neoliberal approach to jobs, which might partially loosen the regime of neoliberal advice for job candidates delivered with a smug attitude that There Is No Alternative. (Described by Gershon). We take it seriously because of a sense of dread that it might actually be powerful enough to lock us out if we don't, and an uncertainty of whether it is or not.

There has been deep damage which is now a very broad and resilient base. It is one of the prongs of why 2008 did not have the kind of discrediting effect that 1929 did. At least that's what I took away from _Never Let_.

Brad DeLong handing the baton might mean something but it is not going to ameliorate the sense-of-life that young people get from managing their channels and metrics.

Take the new 1099 platforms as another focal point. Suppose there were political measures that splice in on the platforms and take the edge off materially, such as underwritten healthcare not tied to your job. The platforms still use star ratings, make star ratings seem normal, and continually push a self-conception as a small business. If you have overt DSA plus covert Becker it is, again, a strange hybrid,

Jeremy Grimm , , March 10, 2019 at 5:13 pm

Your comment is very insightful. Neoliberalism embeds its mindset into the very fabric of our culture and self-concepts. It strangely twists many of our core myths and beliefs.

Raulb , , March 10, 2019 at 6:36 pm

This is nothing but a Trojan horse to 'co-opt' and 'subvert'. Neoliberals sense a risk to their neo feudal project and are simply attempting to infiltrate and hollow out any threats from within.

There are the same folks who have let entire economics departments becomes mouthpieces for corporate propaganda and worked with thousands of think tanks and international organizations to mislead, misinform and cause pain to millions of people.

They have seeded decontextualized words like 'wealth creators' and 'job creators' to create a halo narrative for corporate interests and undermine society, citizenship, the social good, the environment that make 'wealth creation' even possible. So all those take a backseat to 'wealth creator' interests. Since you can't create wealth without society this is some achievement.

Its because of them that we live in a world where the most important economic idea is protecting people like Kochs business and personal interests and making sure government is not 'impinging on their freedom'. And the corollary a fundamental anti-human narrative where ordinary people and workers are held in contempt for even expecting living wages and conditions and their access to basics like education, health care and living conditions is hollowed out out to promote privatization and become 'entitlements'.

Neoliberalism has left us with a decontextualized highly unstable world that exists in a collective but is forcefully detached into a context less individual existence. These are not mistakes of otherwise 'well meaning' individuals, there are the results of hard core ideologues and high priests of power.

Dan , , March 10, 2019 at 7:31 pm

Two thumbs up. This has been an ongoing agenda for decades and it has succeeded in permeating every aspect of society, which is why the United States is such a vacuous, superficial place. And it's exporting that superficiality to the rest of the world.

VietnamVet , , March 10, 2019 at 7:17 pm

I read Brad DeLong's and Paul Krugman's blogs until their contradictions became too great. If anything, we need more people seeing the truth. The Global War on Terror is into its 18th year. In October the USA will spend approximately $6 trillion and will have accomplish nothing except to create blow back. The Middle Class is disappearing. Those who remain in their homes are head over heels in debt.

The average American household carries $137,063 in debt. The wealthy are getting richer.

The Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates families together have as much wealth as the lowest half of Americans. Donald Trump's Presidency and Brexit document that neoliberal politicians have lost contact with reality. They are nightmares that there is no escaping. At best, perhaps, Roosevelt Progressives will be reborn to resurrect regulated capitalism and debt forgiveness.

But more likely is a middle-class revolt when Americans no longer can pay for water, electricity, food, medicine and are jailed for not paying a $1,500 fine for littering the Beltway.

A civil war inside a nuclear armed nation state is dangerous beyond belief. France is approaching this.

[Mar 09, 2019] The USA new class in full glory: rich are shopping differently from the low income families and the routine is like doing drags, but more pleasurable and less harmful. While workers are stuglling with the wages that barely allow to support the family, the pressure to cut hours and introduce two tire system

Notable quotes:
"... Buying beautiful clothes at full retail price was not a part of my childhood and it is not a part of my life now. It felt more illicit and more pleasurable than buying drugs. It was like buying drugs and doing the drugs, simultaneously."" ..."
"... "Erie Locomotive Plant Workers Strike against Two-Tier" [ Labor Notes ]. "UE proposed keeping the terms of the existing collective bargaining agreement in place while negotiating a new contract, but Wabtec rejected that proposal. Instead it said it would impose a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires and recalled employees up to 38 percent less in wages, institute mandatory overtime, reorganize job classifications, and hire temporary workers for up to 20 percent of the plant's jobs. ..."
"... Workers voted on Saturday to authorize the strike." • Good. Two-tier is awful, wherever found (including Social Security). ..."
Mar 09, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Guillotine Watch

"My Year of Living Like My Rich Friend" [ New York Magazine ].

"[S]hopping with T was different. When she walked into a store, the employees greeted her by name and began to pull items from the racks for her to try on. Riding her coattails, I was treated with the same consideration, which is how I wound up owning a beautiful cashmere 3.1 Philip Lim sweater that I had no use for and rarely wore, and which was eventually eaten by moths in my closet.

Buying beautiful clothes at full retail price was not a part of my childhood and it is not a part of my life now. It felt more illicit and more pleasurable than buying drugs. It was like buying drugs and doing the drugs, simultaneously.""

Indeed:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/dfO0TgcDUnI

Class Warfare

"Erie Locomotive Plant Workers Strike against Two-Tier" [ Labor Notes ]. "UE proposed keeping the terms of the existing collective bargaining agreement in place while negotiating a new contract, but Wabtec rejected that proposal. Instead it said it would impose a two-tier pay system that would pay new hires and recalled employees up to 38 percent less in wages, institute mandatory overtime, reorganize job classifications, and hire temporary workers for up to 20 percent of the plant's jobs.

Workers voted on Saturday to authorize the strike." • Good. Two-tier is awful, wherever found (including Social Security).

[Mar 09, 2019] Debbie Wasserman Schultz has threatened to have Sanders kicked out of the party unless he calls out Madura as a dictator

Jimmy Dore show is pretty educational... Why hasn't Schultz been charged for election fraud yet (she rigged the 2016 primary and then rigged her own race in Florida against Tim Canova.)? Just when you thought crooked Hillary and corrupt Debbie Wasserman-Schultz were finally silent and out of the picture, they keep coming back again and again and again...like a case of herpes.
Mar 09, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

The Rev Kev, March 6, 2019 at 6:36 pm

Nothing that Bernie will do can satisfy the Democrats. Said the other day he was wishy-washy over Venezuela but it was still not enough. Seems that Debbie Wasserman Schultz has threatened to have him kicked out of the party unless he calls out Madura as a dictator.

Film clip at-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnlEVf7oaVQ

Some language used.

polecat , March 6, 2019 at 7:23 pm

Well then, Sanders better be carrying a polished shield at all times never know when Debbie the medusa will lurch forward throwing that gazy DNC stink-eye in his direction !

[Mar 08, 2019] William Davies reviews 'Family Values' by Melinda Cooper LRB 8 November 2018

Mar 08, 2019 | lrb.co.uk

The phrase 'hard-working families', a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on 'JAMs' – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same time. Gordon Brown – who liked to cloak redistributive policies in communitarian, traditionalist rhetoric – is said to have been the first to use it, in 1995. The Blair, Brown and Cameron governments all repeatedly claimed to be on the side of hard-working families, tinkering with tax, benefits and public services as way of helping this opaque group to 'get on'.

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

[Mar 07, 2019] How Trump Happened by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Right now the title should "Can Trump happen again?" ;-)
But this is from 2016 and Professor Stiglitz missed the foreign policy and neoliberal globalization aspects of "Hillary vs Trump" battle. A vote for Hillary was a vote for continuation of wars of expansion of neoliberal empire.
It is unclear where is political force that can reverse neoliberal deregulation and neoliberal tax cuts. for example full set of taxes on all kind of income might help (so that dividends owners should pay Social security tax too) but currently is politically unfeasible, as control of Washington is in the hands of financial oligarchy which will not relinquish its power without a fight.
Notable quotes:
"... reforms that political leaders promised would ensure prosperity for all – such as trade and financial liberalization – have not delivered. Far from it. And those whose standard of living has stagnated or declined have reached a simple conclusion: America's political leaders either didn't know what they were talking about or were lying (or both). ..."
"... Thus, many Americans feel buffeted by forces outside their control, leading to outcomes that are distinctly unfair. Long-standing assumptions – that America is a land of opportunity and that each generation will be better off than the last – have been called into question. The global financial crisis may have represented a turning point for many voters: their government saved the rich bankers who had brought the US to the brink of ruin, while seemingly doing almost nothing for the millions of ordinary Americans who lost their jobs and homes. The system not only produced unfair results, but seemed rigged to do so. ..."
"... Support for Trump is based, at least partly, on the widespread anger stemming from that loss of trust in government. ..."
"... The simplistic neo-liberal market-fundamentalist theories that have shaped so much economic policy during the last four decades are badly misleading, with GDP growth coming at the price of soaring inequality. Trickle-down economics hasn't and won't work. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. The Thatcher-Reagan "revolution," which rewrote the rules and restructured markets for the benefit of those at the top, succeeded all too well in increasing inequality, but utterly failed in its mission to increase growth. ..."
"... The interests that have secured control of the US government -- again, the legislative and executive at the federal and state levels, in particular -- will not easily or readily let go of the power they have amassed, vis-ŕ-vis their control over the writing and execution of laws and regulations lesser mortals must live under but from which the elites are exempt (cf, banking crisis). ..."
"... Either we find a TR and FDR -- and the modern-day equivalent of their allies in Congress -- or our society will continue to erode. ..."
"... the balance of global power likely will continue to shift to the more pragmatic and less constrained Hobbesian forms of societal organization -- most likely some variant of strongman rule, with China at the vanguard, if Xi Jinping (or a competitor) is able to successfully consolidate power. ..."
"... we still lack the details and a roadmap towards a new economy. ..."
"... The vehicle for shifting the fruits of that growth has more to do with our free trade agreements than tax cuts. Corporations were just as greedy before we had free trade agreements but tariffs prevented the enrichment free trade opens up. That GDP increase would have happened without free trade as workers enjoyed higher wages. Which makes Trump correct after all. ..."
"... From shortly after the end of the War of 1812 until the Kennedy Round of tariff reductions in 1967 the United States was the most tariff protected nation on earth. ..."
"... How is it possible that two powerful families (Bush and Clinton) are nearly have a monopoly on becoming US presidents. ..."
"... Just twenty five years ago Mr. Robert McNamara came to Matsue, a Japanese city near where I live, to attend a US-Japanese conference. I was appalled to hear, as he said and I was in the audience, that the income of the American middle-class had not risen at all for the past twenty or so years. His words were less an explanation of what had been going on in the American economy and more a warning of what was going to happen in the Japanese economy. The rules need to be rewritten. ..."
"... The Americans shall be voting Trump for the same reasons they voted Bush Jr. The democratic [neoliberal] establishment failed miserably ..."
Project Syndicate

But several underlying factors also appear to have contributed to the closeness of the race. For starters, many Americans are economically worse off than they were a quarter-century ago. The median income of full-time male employees is lower than it was 42 years ago, and it is increasingly difficult for those with limited education to get a full-time job that pays decent wages.

Indeed, real (inflation-adjusted) wages at the bottom of the income distribution are roughly where they were 60 years ago. So it is no surprise that Trump finds a large, receptive audience when he says the state of the economy is rotten. But Trump is wrong both about the diagnosis and the prescription. The US economy as a whole has done well for the last six decades: GDP has increased nearly six-fold. But the fruits of that growth have gone to a relatively few at the top – people like Trump, owing partly to massive tax cuts that he would extend and deepen.

At the same time, reforms that political leaders promised would ensure prosperity for all – such as trade and financial liberalization – have not delivered. Far from it. And those whose standard of living has stagnated or declined have reached a simple conclusion: America's political leaders either didn't know what they were talking about or were lying (or both).

Trump wants to blame all of America's problems on trade and immigration. He's wrong. The US would have faced deindustrialization even without freer trade: global employment in manufacturing has been declining, with productivity gains exceeding demand growth.

Where the trade agreements failed, it was not because the US was outsmarted by its trading partners; it was because the US trade agenda was shaped by corporate interests. America's companies have done well, and it is the Republicans who have blocked efforts to ensure that Americans made worse off by trade agreements would share the benefits.

Thus, many Americans feel buffeted by forces outside their control, leading to outcomes that are distinctly unfair. Long-standing assumptions – that America is a land of opportunity and that each generation will be better off than the last – have been called into question. The global financial crisis may have represented a turning point for many voters: their government saved the rich bankers who had brought the US to the brink of ruin, while seemingly doing almost nothing for the millions of ordinary Americans who lost their jobs and homes. The system not only produced unfair results, but seemed rigged to do so.

Support for Trump is based, at least partly, on the widespread anger stemming from that loss of trust in government. But Trump's proposed policies would make a bad situation much worse. Surely, another dose of trickle-down economics of the kind he promises, with tax cuts aimed almost entirely at rich Americans and corporations, would produce results no better than the last time they were tried.

In fact, launching a trade war with China, Mexico, and other US trading partners, as Trump promises, would make all Americans poorer and create new impediments to the global cooperation needed to address critical global problems like the Islamic State, global terrorism, and climate change. Using money that could be invested in technology, education, or infrastructure to build a wall between the US and Mexico is a twofer in terms of wasting resources.

There are two messages US political elites should be hearing. The simplistic neo-liberal market-fundamentalist theories that have shaped so much economic policy during the last four decades are badly misleading, with GDP growth coming at the price of soaring inequality. Trickle-down economics hasn't and won't work. Markets don't exist in a vacuum. The Thatcher-Reagan "revolution," which rewrote the rules and restructured markets for the benefit of those at the top, succeeded all too well in increasing inequality, but utterly failed in its mission to increase growth.

This leads to the second message: we need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again, this time to ensure that ordinary citizens benefit. Politicians in the US and elsewhere who ignore this lesson will be held accountable. Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing to heed this message: societies divided, democracies undermined, and economies weakened.

markets aurelius OCT 15, 2016

I've yet to see such a succinct or well-presented analysis on the rise of Trump and the far-left and -right in Europe. Thank you.

Where I disagree with Prof. Stiglitz, however, is in the second point of his conclusion; to wit, "... we need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again, this time to ensure that ordinary citizens benefit. Politicians in the US and elsewhere who ignore this lesson will be held accountable. Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing to heed this message: societies divided, democracies undermined, and economies weakened." A political solution is impossible at this point in the USA since the legislative and executive branches of the have been completely captured by cartels, just as Hayek warned back in the '40s.

It took centuries of war -- civil and foreign -- to evolve the English common law and representative government from which America derived is greatest strengths. Included in that are the quaint cultural memes of civility and "fair play," which permeated all levels of society, not just sports; these norms were violated at great personal expense, in that it was difficult to gain the trust of one's fellow citizens if one violated them. However, it is not an immutable fact of nature such a system will persist throughout history. Truth be told, it is an outlier in the history of the world. Typically, and to this day outside the Anglosphere, most societies are spoils systems, in which the strong impose their will on the weak, and take the larger share of everything their societies produce. Some operate artfully (e.g., Mediterranean Europe), while others are just ham-handed (e.g., Russia, the Middle East). The ordering described by Hobbes more appropriately captures the state of affairs to a greater or lesser degree in these states.

It took a revolution, a civil war, and a century-long struggle post-civil war to evolve the US society to its modern, yet-to-be-fully-formed state. The interests that have secured control of the US government -- again, the legislative and executive at the federal and state levels, in particular -- will not easily or readily let go of the power they have amassed, vis-ŕ-vis their control over the writing and execution of laws and regulations lesser mortals must live under but from which the elites are exempt (cf, banking crisis).

Either we find a TR and FDR -- and the modern-day equivalent of their allies in Congress -- or our society will continue to erode. Either we fade into history as much of Europe did during the Dark Ages or we have another revolution.

While that's going on, the balance of global power likely will continue to shift to the more pragmatic and less constrained Hobbesian forms of societal organization -- most likely some variant of strongman rule, with China at the vanguard, if Xi Jinping (or a competitor) is able to successfully consolidate power.

Daniel Esmond OCT 15, 2016

I agree with nearly everything in Prof Stiglitz' analysis. However, I would like some details about the new 'rules of the economy'. There is a realisation in many circles that something has to change and the solutions advanced by the new populists are unworkable. But we still lack the details and a roadmap towards a new economy. While analysis like this one about how we got here are useful and enlightening, we need (desperately!) to move on and do something. I really would like to see a follow up of this article with Prof Stigliz outlining his plans for a new economic order.

James Murphy OCT 15, 2016

"But Trump is wrong both about the diagnosis and the prescription. The US economy as a whole has done well for the last six decades: GDP has increased nearly six-fold. But the fruits of that growth have gone to a relatively few at the top.."

The vehicle for shifting the fruits of that growth has more to do with our free trade agreements than tax cuts. Corporations were just as greedy before we had free trade agreements but tariffs prevented the enrichment free trade opens up. That GDP increase would have happened without free trade as workers enjoyed higher wages. Which makes Trump correct after all.

We are a trade deficient nation. As such the only way we lose a trade war is not to fight one. Aside from the short transition harm the American people would be better off with tariff protection as they were in the past.

From shortly after the end of the War of 1812 until the Kennedy Round of tariff reductions in 1967 the United States was the most tariff protected nation on earth. During that time absolutely none of the bad things you postulate actually happened. Free trade is an Ivory Tower theory that has never worked in the real world experience of the United States. We have more free trade today than we have ever had. Where are the blessings of those free trade deals? We abandoned free trade in 1967 and the real wages of blue collar workers peaked 5 years later never to come back.

Simon Barnard OCT 14, 2016
Rules of the economy do need to be rewritten and also do the rules of economic measurement.

Growth of GDP is not a valid measurement of whether or not an economy is healthy (or indeed growing). Should vast inequalities be created, that in turn cause social unrest, that in turn lead to a disintegration of society, this society may find it necessary to build a lot of prisons. The capital expenditure on these prisons will contribute to the GDP. Is it really healthier? Is this what is happening in the US? - it could be going that way.

So is it any wonder that people are looking for an alternative to the status quo, of which Hilary Clinton is certainly part of? NO.

Is Trump an alternative? DEFINITELY NO.

As Joseph Stiglitz put very well, he would make things still worse.

So I feel sorry for the USA having such a poor choice and I hope that soon we can change from the neo-liberal hegemony and develop a new one that will allow a progressive new choice to make itself available.

Vicky Lavendel OCT 14, 2016

The true questions is: How is it possible that two powerful families (Bush and Clinton) are nearly have a monopoly on becoming US presidents. And furthermore all presidential candidates who want to have a chance must be ultra rich (like Trump) or must have very wealthy donors (like Obama). Is this still a democracy or already an oligarchy? That Stieglitz doesnt ask this question might be a hint that he is part of this wealthy establishment as well.
Yoshimichi Moriyama OCT 14, 2016
The word liberalization is so dazzling that we are captured and made by it to be unable to see the reality; we are often duped by it. When we hear or see the word, we need to be very careful of what the speaker or writer actually means by it. Corporate and financial interests have made an extensive use of it to camouflage and promote their selfishness.

Just twenty five years ago Mr. Robert McNamara came to Matsue, a Japanese city near where I live, to attend a US-Japanese conference. I was appalled to hear, as he said and I was in the audience, that the income of the American middle-class had not risen at all for the past twenty or so years. His words were less an explanation of what had been going on in the American economy and more a warning of what was going to happen in the Japanese economy.
The rules need to be rewritten.

M M OCT 14, 2016
The Americans shall be voting Trump for the same reasons they voted Bush Jr. The democratic [neoliberal] establishment failed miserably. They had eight years to put things right and what did they do, not only maintaining the status quo which made inequality worse but created mayhem everywhere and the Clintons were part of it throughout the Obama tenure. So Mr. "Yes We Can" not only managed to increase inequality, re-introduce slavery (albeit in many new forms), help spread terrorism all over the place and this to state just a few examples.

... ... ...

[Mar 05, 2019] The ban on entry to the USA should be on all religious extremists including apartheid Zionists and Christian extremists. Religious extremists from all of the major religions have committed heinous atrocities

Feb 01, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com

libezkova -> pgl... February 01, 2017 at 08:40 PM

First of all, what is called "School of management" typically is a voodoo cult that should have nothing to do with university education ;-)

"He [Bush] signaled the shift [in strategy] in a speech here [in Pittsburgh] last week when he charged that Reagan had made 'a list of phony promises' on defense, energy and economic policy. And he labeled Reagan's tax cut proposal 'voodoo economic policy' and 'economic madness.'"

Compare with comments to "Ok To Bomb Them. But Don't Ban Them" ( http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46349.htm )

It's not the temporary ban on immigration that upsets people so much as singling out people from specific countries, whether Obama's Republican Congress in did it or Trump did it.

The ban should be on all religious extremists including apartheid Zionists and Christian extremists. Religious extremists from all of the major religions have committed heinous atrocities.

...And the Demo establishment lines up to attack Drumpf's ban; hoping to get some easy votes for corporatist neo-con hypocrites?

...The main purpose of all the noise against president Trump is to weaken him and then force him to take the positions the deep state wants him to take. Among the many problems he has he is only an apprentice.

[Mar 04, 2019] Trump calls for 21st century Glass-Steagall banking law

Notable quotes:
"... As Sen. Elizabeth Warren has famously said with respect to cabinet and other political appointments, "Personnel Is Policy." You can see the outline of the Trump administration's real policies being shaped before our eyes via his proposed cabinet appointees, covered by Politico and other sites. ..."
"... Sanders, Warren and others should hold Trump's feet to the fire on the truly populist things he said and offer to work with him on that stuff. Like preserving Social Security and Medicare and getting out of wars. ..."
Nov 11, 2016 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
allan November 10, 2016 at 2:35 pm

Trump calls for '21st century' Glass-Steagall banking law [Reuters, Oct. 26]

Financial Services [Trump Transition Site, Nov. 10]

Oddly, no mention of Glass-Steagall, only dismantling Dodd-Frank. Who could have predicted?

File under Even Victims Can Be Fools.

Chauncey Gardiner November 10, 2016 at 3:57 pm

Not surprised at all. The election is over, the voters are now moot. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren has famously said with respect to cabinet and other political appointments, "Personnel Is Policy." You can see the outline of the Trump administration's real policies being shaped before our eyes via his proposed cabinet appointees, covered by Politico and other sites.

Dr. Roberts November 10, 2016 at 4:03 pm

Also no mention of NAFTA or renegotiating trade deals in the new transition agenda. Instead there's just a bunch of vague Chamber of Commercesque language about making America attractive to investors. I think our hopes for a disruptive Trump presidency are quickly being dashed.

Steve C November 10, 2016 at 4:18 pm

Sanders, Warren and others should hold Trump's feet to the fire on the truly populist things he said and offer to work with him on that stuff. Like preserving Social Security and Medicare and getting out of wars.

As to the last point, appointing Bolton or Corker Secretary of State would be a clear indication he was just talking. A clear violation of campaign promises that would make Obama look like a choirboy. Trump may be W on steroids.

pretzelattack November 10, 2016 at 5:17 pm

sure he may be almost as bad as Clinton on foreign policy. so far he hasn't been rattling a saber at Russia.

Steve C November 10, 2016 at 6:25 pm

Newland also is pernicious, but as with many things Trump, not as gaudy as Bolton.

anti-social socialist November 10, 2016 at 4:23 pm

Yathink?
https://www.ft.com/content/aed37de0-a767-11e6-8898-79a99e2a4de6

Katniss Everdeen November 10, 2016 at 5:38 pm

I can't imagine how he's neglected to update his transition plan regarding nafta. After all, he's already been president-elect for, what, 36 hours now? And he only talked about it umpteen times during the campaign. I'm sure he'll renege.

Hell, it took Clinton 8 hours to give her concession speech.

On the bright side, he managed to kill TPP just by getting elected. Was that quick enough for you?

[Mar 02, 2019] The Trump presidency From the Manhattan underworld to the White House by Patrick Martin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Trump's "opposition" in the Democratic Party is no less hostile to democratic rights. They have focused their anti-Trump campaign on bogus allegations that he is a Russian agent, while portraying the emergence of social divisions within the United States as the consequence of Russian "meddling," not the crisis of capitalism, and pushing for across-the-board internet censorship. ..."
Mar 01, 2019 | www.wsws.org

"The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society ." -- Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France

What Marx described, in his analysis of the corruption of the bourgeoisie in France leading up to the 1848 revolution, applies with even greater force to the United States of 2019, where the bourgeoisie faces its own rendezvous with social upheaval and explosive class battles.

That is how a Marxist understands the spectacle of Wednesday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee, in which Michael Cohen, the former attorney and "fixer" for Donald Trump for more than a decade, testified for six hours about how he and his boss worked to defraud business partners and tax collectors, intimidate critics and suppress opposition to Trump's acitvities in real estate, casino gambling, reality television and, eventually, electoral politics.

What Cohen described was a seedier version of an operation that most Americans would recognize from viewing films like The Godfather: Trump as the capo di tutti capi, the unquestioned authority who must be consulted on every decision ; the children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, each now playing significant roles in the ongoing family criminal enterprise; Allen Weisselberg, CFO of the Trump Organization, the consigliere in charge of finance, mentioned by Cohen more than 20 times in the course of six hours of testimony as the man who facilitated Trump's schemes to evade taxes, deceive banks or stiff business partners.

Cohen himself was an enforcer. By his own account, he threatened people on Trump's behalf at least 500 times in a ten-year period, including business associates, politicians, journalists and anyone seeking to file complaints or gain reimbursement after being defrauded by one or another Trump venture. The now-disbarred lawyer admitted to tape recording clients -- including Trump among many others -- more than 100 times during this period.

The incidents recounted by Cohen range from the farcical (Trump browbeating colleges and even his military prep school not to release his grades or test scores), to the shabby (Trump having his own "charitable" foundation buy a portrait of himself for $60,000), to the brazenly criminal (deliberately inflating the value of properties when applying for bank loans while deflating the value of the same properties as much as twenty-fold in order to evade taxation).

One of the most remarkable revelations was Cohen's flat assertion that Trump himself did not enter the presidential race with the expectation that he could win either the Republican nomination or the presidency. Instead, the billionaire reality television "star" regularly told his closest aides, the campaign would be the "greatest infomercial in political history," good for promoting his brand and opening up business opportunities in previously closed markets.

These unflattering details filled the pages of the daily newspapers Thursday and occupied many hours on the cable television news. But in all that vast volume of reporting and commentary, one would look in vain for any serious assessment of what it means, in terms of the historical development and future trajectory of American society, that a family like the Trumps now occupies the highest rung in the US political system.

The World Socialist Web Site rejects efforts by the Democrats and the corporate media to dismiss Trump as an aberration, an accidental figure whose unexpected elevation to the presidency in 2016 will be "corrected" through impeachment, forced resignation or electoral defeat in 2020. We insist that the Trump administration is a manifestation of a protracted crisis and breakdown of American democracy, whose course can be traced back at least two decades to the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998-99, followed by the stolen presidential election of 2000.

The US political system, always dominated by the interests of the capitalist ruling class that controls both of the major parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, is breaking down under the burden of mounting social tensions, driven above all by skyrocketing economic inequality. It is impossible to sustain the pretense that elections at two-year and four-year intervals provide genuine popular influence over the functioning of a government so completely subordinated to the financial aristocracy.

The figures are familiar but require restating: over the past three decades, virtually all the increase in wealth in American society has gone to a tiny layer at the top. Three mega-billionaires -- Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates -- now control more wealth than half the American population. This process of social polarization is global: according to the most recent Oxfam report, 26 billionaires control more wealth than the poorer half of the human race.

These billionaires did not accumulate their riches by devising new technologies or making new scientific discoveries that increased the wealth and happiness of humanity as a whole. On the contrary, their enrichment has come at the expense of society. Bezos has become the world's richest man through the emergence of Amazon as the greatest sweatshop enterprise in history, where every possible second of labor power is extracted from a brutally exploited workforce.

The class of billionaires as a whole, having precipitated the global financial collapse of 2008 through reckless speculation and swindling in the sale of derivatives and other obscure financial "products," was bailed out, first by the Republican Bush, then by the Democrat Obama, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Meanwhile, the jobs, living standards and social conditions for the great mass of working people sharply declined.

As for Donald Trump, the real estate swindler, casino con man and reality television mogul is a living demonstration of the truth of Balzac's aphorism: "Behind every great fortune is a great crime."

Trump toyed with running for president on the ultra-right Reform Party ticket in 2000 after a long stint as a registered Democrat and donor to both capitalist parties. When he decided to run for president as a Republican in 2016, however, he had shifted drastically to the right. His candidacy marked the emergence of a distinctly fascistic movement, as he spewed anti-immigrant prejudice and racism more generally, while making a right-wing populist appeal to working people, particularly in de-industrialized areas in the Midwest and Appalachia, on the basis of economic nationalism.

As World Socialist Web Site editorial board Chairman David North explained even before the 2016 elections:

The Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States did not emerge from an American version of a Munich beer hall. Donald Trump is a billionaire, who made his money in Manhattan real estate swindles, the semi-criminal operations of casino gambling, and the bizarre world of "reality television," which entertains and stupefies its audience by manufacturing absurd, disgusting and essentially fictional "real life" situations. The candidacy of Donald Trump could be described as the transfer of the techniques of reality television to politics.

The main development in the two years since Trump entered the White House is the emergence of the American working class into major struggles, beginning with the wave of teachers' strikes in 2018, initiated by the rank and file in defiance of the bureaucratic unions. The reaction in the American ruling elite is a panic-stricken turn to authoritarian methods of rule.

The billionaire in the White House is now engaged in a systematic assault on the foundations of American democracy. He has declared a national emergency in order to bypass Congress, which holds the constitutional "power of the purse," and divert funds from the military and other federal departments to build a wall along the US-Mexico border.

Whether or not he is immediately successful in this effort, it is clear that Trump is moving towards the establishment of an authoritarian regime, with or without the sanction of the ballot box. As Cohen observed in his closing statement -- in remarks generally downplayed by the media and ignored by the Democrats -- he is worried that if Trump loses the 2020 election, "there will never be a peaceful transition of power."

Trump's "opposition" in the Democratic Party is no less hostile to democratic rights. They have focused their anti-Trump campaign on bogus allegations that he is a Russian agent, while portraying the emergence of social divisions within the United States as the consequence of Russian "meddling," not the crisis of capitalism, and pushing for across-the-board internet censorship.

The defense of democratic rights and genuine resistance to Trump's drive toward authoritarian rule must come through the development of an independent political movement of the working class, directed against both big business parties, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, and against the profit system which they both defend.

[Mar 02, 2019] The "Exceptional Nation" has now become the "Detestable Nation"!

Notable quotes:
"... The Puppet show display by Pence & Pompeo to rap Europeans over the knuckles for everything from not exiting the Iran Nuclear deal to not stopping the Nordstream pupeline & trying to contain Hiawei is blowing up in the Trump Administration's faces as these so called Allies or Vassals of the American Empire are refusing to tow the line? ..."
"... A failure for US oligarchy foreign policy is a win for the US and the rest of the world. ..."
Mar 02, 2019 | consortiumnews.com

KiwiAntz , February 20, 2019 at 6:31 am

The "Exceptional Nation" has now become the "Detestable Nation"!

The Puppet show display by Pence & Pompeo to rap Europeans over the knuckles for everything from not exiting the Iran Nuclear deal to not stopping the Nordstream pupeline & trying to contain Hiawei is blowing up in the Trump Administration's faces as these so called Allies or Vassals of the American Empire are refusing to tow the line?

Trump has alienated & disgusted it's Allies, so much that they can now see how deranged, unworkable & destructive is the Americans Foreign Policy & its bankrupt disfunctional , delusional Policies?

It's ridiculous, irrational & pathological hatred for Iran has shown that the US is the main Terrorist Nation on Earth not Iran who has never invaded anyone unlike the hypocritical US Empire!

Meanwhile in Sochi, the real Diplomacy for peace is taking place with Russia, Iran, Turkey & Syria having won the War against the US Empire & its cowardly, crony white helmeted, ragtag bunch of proxy Army misfits made up of Israel, ISIS, SDF & the Kurds now scurrying out of the Country like rats leaving a sinking ship!

And what was really laughable about VP Pences speech in Warsaw was the defeating silence to the pauses in that speech expecting people to clap on demand which never happened?

How embarrassing & really showed the lack of respect & utter contempt that everyone has for America these days!

Sam F, February 20, 2019 at 12:32 pm

A failure for US oligarchy foreign policy is a win for the US and the rest of the world.

Let's hope we see the end of NATO as an excuse for US bully tyrants to "defend" us with greedy aggression.

Perhaps that will lead to strengthening the UN and isolating it from the economic power of US tyrants.
The UN would be far stronger if it taxed its members instead of begging for support, on pain of embargo by all members, and monitored for corrupt influence.

[Feb 27, 2019] Mueller investigation was clearly was part of the leverage used to get control of Trump

Feb 27, 2019 | www.moonofalabama.org

Zachary Smith , Feb 26, 2019 1:37:24 AM | link

@Circe @100

Tump can go back and keep his job pleasing the Zionist elite that installed him.

So far as I'm concerned Hillary was the dream candidate for the apartheid Jewish state. That the Zionists have made a terrific rebound in capturing Trump seems to me to be another story entirely. At a guess, I'd say the job was done with a combination of flattery, bribery, and naked force.

I've tuned out the Mueller thing, but suspect it was part of the leverage used to get control of Trump. Again a guess, but I'd say Trump was totally in bed with the Russians - and everybody else with whom he thought he might run a scam. But this was "business", as in making promises and squeezing money out of them. Things like Trump University. With proper handling the cost of the failures would fall mostly on the "investors". And in the worst case, there was always the fifth or sixth bankruptcy.

Trump didn't expect to be president - that was a humongous publicity campaign financed by the Corporate Media. I don't think Pence was expecting anything besides getting some national exposure which might lead him becoming Senator from Indiana in 2018.

I'm very glad Hillary isn't perched in the White House, but the price of avoiding that has been higher than I expected. Speaking of the devil, I read some ugly stuff at the 2:00 news part of Naked Capitalism.

Clinton (2): "EX-CLINTON POLLSTER: Hillary will run if Biden doesn't -- or field is 'too far left'" [The American Mirror]. "After defending Clinton's credentials as 'one of the most experienced politicians around,' [Mark] Penn went on to say of the reported recent confabs between Hillary and declared candidates, "Those meetings are going to be somewhat awkward because she hasn't declared that she's not definitely running, and she, in fact, at the same time is looking over the field and I think will make a decision later in the year whether or not to run herself. Penn said the chances of Hillary running depends on how the field shapes up. 'If the party looks too far to the left and there's no front runner, she'll get in,' he said. 'I think if Joe Biden gets in, that probably means she won't run if he gets in. If he doesn't get in, I think the field will be open for her,' Penn said." • She's tanned, rested, and ready!

That fits right in with my belief that the corporate Dems would prefer Trump's second term or Pence's first term to any decent Democrat being elected. I'll be saying this over and over - while Sander's foreign policy credentials stink to high heaven, the prospect of him being "decent" in domestic matters isn't too awfully bad.

Jackrabbit , Feb 26, 2019 2:26:48 AM | link

Zachary Smith | Feb 26, 2019 1:37:24 AM | 102

Mueller [investigation]... suspect it was part of the leverage used to get control of Trump.
Well, the "Russia meddled" scare-mongering has worked well as a means of reviving anti-Russian McCarthyism. It even ensnared Wikileaks and Michael Flynn (both of whom were CIA/Deep State targets).

And, why would the Deep State allow an unvetted person to assume control of the Presidency? They are too careful for that. In fact, all recent President's have some connection to CIA: Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama. Felix Slater, an FBI informant worked for Trump for over a decade while informing on the Russian mob, and most of Trump dubious Russian oligarch connections are actually more loyal to Israel than Russia.

Trump didn't expect to be president
That's funny, given the fact that he bragged that he would win and that he was the ONLY populist running for the Republican nomination (out of 19 contenders!). And none of the other candidates (many of whom are seasoned campaigners) sought to alter their strategy when the saw Trump pulling ahead?!?!

Oh, and Hillary helped her friend Trump win when she alienated key constituencies (Sanders progressives, Blacks) and energized Trump's base by calling them "deploreables".

<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>

Oh, sorry, these things are supposed to be memory-holed. Hope you and MoA readers don't suffer from too much cognitive dissonance from such facts.

[Feb 26, 2019] It would seem that many of the Trotskyites of the past have now become neocons favouring capitalism and imperialist military intervention under guise of human rights promotion, as have some other communists

Notable quotes:
"... It would seem that many of the Trotskyites of the past have now become neocons favouring capitalism and imperialist military intervention under guise of "human rights" promotion, as have some other communists. ..."
Feb 26, 2019 | www.unz.com

Digital Samizdat , says: February 26, 2019 at 1:03 pm GMT

@Commentator Mike Today's system is a hybrid of a late finance-stage global capitalism and cultural–not economic–Marxism. Instead of class struggle, we have identity politics. Instead of the ownership of the means of production, we have tranny bathrooms.

So the right-wingers (like Peter Hitchens) who say that 'Marxism won' are half right culturally, not economically. What causes all the confusion (among the libertarian types especially) is that capitalism in reality does not in any way resemble how it ought to work according to libertarian theories and never did. But when you point out to them that capitalism never worked in practice to begin with, they answer: 'But true capitalism has never even been tried!' And of course, they're right. 'True' capitalism (i.e., what libertarian theory calls capitalism) really never has been tried, and for exactly the same reason that perpetual motion machines have never been tried either: they're impossible.

None of which means I'm a 'pure' socialist. I'm open to mixed-economies and new experiments. I usually characterize myself more as a national socialist, mostly to differentiate myself from the 'world revolution' Trotskyite socialists who now predominate on the far-left.

That means I also take some inspiration from some fascists and national-syndicalists, although I don't regard any of them as holy writ, either.

In my opinion, the number one success factor for a civilization is not what theory it professes, but rather who controls it. Theories will always have to be modified to suit the circumstances; but the character of a people is much harder to change.

China's prospering because it's controlled by Chinese engineers; our civilization is suffocating because it's controlled by Jew-bankers and Masonic lawyers. Get rid of them first, and we can debate monetary theory till we're blue in the face.

Commentator Mike , says: February 26, 2019 at 4:01 pm GMT

@Digital Samizdat

I think that applying the old concepts of Marxism is no longer possible in the west since there is hardly a genuine proletariat as a proper class any more with the deindustrialisation and the transfer of major industries to China and other Asian and Latin American countries.

On the other hand the lumpenproletariat has grown and will grow further with greater automation in industry.

Many more people are now unemployed, underemployed, in service industries, part-time and temporary jobs, or ageing old age pensioners and retirees.

With the greater atomisation of the individual, break up of families, greater mobility, the concept of classes rooted long-term in their communities seems less applicable. You could say most of the global proletariat is now in China.

It would seem that many of the Trotskyites of the past have now become neocons favouring capitalism and imperialist military intervention under guise of "human rights" promotion, as have some other communists.

Paul Edward Gottfried's "The Strange Death of Marxism" seems to offer some explanations but is not of much use in developing a new activism capable of taking on the system or providing a more viable alternative.

RobinG , says: February 26, 2019 at 4:29 pm GMT
@Commentator Mike

classical concepts of socialism and capitalism, and left and right politics

The left/right concept is no longer valid. For one thing, of what use is a $15. minimum wage (apparently a standard "left" plank) if there aren't any jobs? Take a look at Andrew Yang. At least he is posing the right questions.

Andrew Yang's Pitch to America – We Must Evolve to a New Form of Capitalism

[Feb 26, 2019] THE CRISIS OF NEOLIBERALISM by Julie A. Wilson

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism. ..."
"... Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. ..."
"... Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders' energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood" path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy. ..."
"... In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism. ..."
"... We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism. ..."
"... While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."' ..."
Oct 08, 2017 | www.amazon.com

Quote from the book is courtesy of Amazon preview of the book Neoliberalism (Key Ideas in Media & Cultural Studies)

In Chapter 1, we traced the rise of our neoliberal conjuncture back to the crisis of liberalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the Great Depression. During this period, huge transformations in capitalism proved impossible to manage with classical laissez-faire approaches. Out of this crisis, two movements emerged, both of which would eventually shape the course of the twentieth century and beyond. The first, and the one that became dominant in the aftermath of the crisis, was the conjuncture of embedded liberalism. The crisis indicated that capitalism wrecked too much damage on the lives of ordinary citizens. People (white workers and families, especially) warranted social protection from the volatilities and brutalities of capitalism. The state's public function was expanded to include the provision of a more substantive social safety net, a web of protections for people and a web of constraints on markets. The second response was the invention of neoliberalism. Deeply skeptical of the common-good principles that undergirded the emerging social welfare state, neoliberals began organizing on the ground to develop a "new" liberal govemmentality, one rooted less in laissez-faire principles and more in the generalization of competition and enterprise. They worked to envision a new society premised on a new social ontology, that is, on new truths about the state, the market, and human beings. Crucially, neoliberals also began building infrastructures and institutions for disseminating their new' knowledges and theories (i.e., the Neoliberal Thought Collective), as well as organizing politically to build mass support for new policies (i.e., working to unite anti-communists, Christian conservatives, and free marketers in common cause against the welfare state). When cracks in embedded liberalism began to surface -- which is bound to happen with any moving political equilibrium -- neoliberals were there with new stories and solutions, ready to make the world anew.

We are currently living through the crisis of neoliberalism. As I write this book, Donald Trump has recently secured the U.S. presidency, prevailing in the national election over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. Throughout the election, I couldn't help but think back to the crisis of liberalism and the two responses that emerged. Similarly, after the Great Recession of 2008, we've saw two responses emerge to challenge our unworkable status quo, which dispossesses so many people of vital resources for individual and collective life. On the one hand, we witnessed the rise of Occupy Wall Street. While many continue to critique the movement for its lack of leadership and a coherent political vision, Occupy was connected to burgeoning movements across the globe, and our current political horizons have been undoubtedly shaped by the movement's success at repositioning class and economic inequality within our political horizon. On the other hand, we saw' the rise of the Tea Party, a right-wing response to the crisis. While the Tea Party was critical of status-quo neoliberalism -- especially its cosmopolitanism and embrace of globalization and diversity, which was perfectly embodied by Obama's election and presidency -- it was not exactly anti-neoliberal. Rather, it was anti-left neoliberalism-, it represented a more authoritarian, right [wing] version of neoliberalism.

Within the context of the 2016 election, Clinton embodied the neoliberal center that could no longer hold. Inequality. Suffering. Collapsing infrastructures. Perpetual war. Anger. Disaffected consent. There were just too many fissures and fault lines in the glossy, cosmopolitan world of left neoliberalism and marketized equality. Indeed, while Clinton ran on status-quo stories of good governance and neoliberal feminism, confident that demographics and diversity would be enough to win the election, Trump effectively tapped into the unfolding conjunctural crisis by exacerbating the cracks in the system of marketized equality, channeling political anger into his celebrity brand that had been built on saying "f*** you" to the culture of left neoliberalism (corporate diversity, political correctness, etc.) In fact, much like Clinton's challenger in the Democratic primary, Benie Sanders, Trump was a crisis candidate.

Both Sanders and Trump were embedded in the emerging left and right responses to neoliberalism's crisis. Specifically, Sanders' energetic campaign -- which was undoubtedly enabled by the rise of the Occupy movement -- proposed a decidedly more "commongood" path. Higher wages for working people. Taxes on the rich, specifically the captains of the creditocracy.

Universal health care. Free higher education. Fair trade. The repeal of Citizens United. Trump offered a different response to the crisis. Like Sanders, he railed against global trade deals like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). However, Trump's victory was fueled by right neoliberalism's culture of cruelty. While Sanders tapped into and mobilized desires for a more egalitarian and democratic future, Trump's promise was nostalgic, making America "great again" -- putting the nation back on "top of the world," and implying a time when women were "in their place" as male property, and minorities and immigrants were controlled by the state.

Thus, what distinguished Trump's campaign from more traditional Republican campaigns was that it actively and explicitly pitted one group's equality (white men) against everyone else's (immigrants, women, Muslims, minorities, etc.). As Catherine Rottenberg suggests, Trump offered voters a choice between a multiracial society (where folks are increasingly disadvantaged and dispossessed) and white supremacy (where white people would be back on top). However, "[w]hat he neglected to state," Rottenberg writes,

is that neoliberalism flourishes in societies where the playing field is already stacked against various segments of society, and that it needs only a relatively small select group of capital-enhancing subjects, while everyone else is ultimately dispensable. 1

In other words, Trump supporters may not have explicitly voted for neoliberalism, but that's what they got. In fact, as Rottenberg argues, they got a version of right neoliberalism "on steroids" -- a mix of blatant plutocracy and authoritarianism that has many concerned about the rise of U.S. fascism.

We can't know what would have happened had Sanders run against Trump, but we can think seriously about Trump, right and left neoliberalism, and the crisis of neoliberal hegemony. In other words, we can think about where and how we go from here. As I suggested in the previous chapter, if we want to construct a new world, we are going to have to abandon the entangled politics of both right and left neoliberalism; we have to reject the hegemonic frontiers of both disposability and marketized equality. After all, as political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues, what was rejected in the election of 2016 was progressive, left neoliberalism.

While the rise of hyper-right neoliberalism is certainly nothing to celebrate, it does present an opportunity for breaking with neoliberal hegemony. We have to proceed, as Gary Younge reminds us, with the realization that people "have not rejected the chance of a better world. They have not yet been offered one."'

Mark Fisher, the author of Capitalist Realism, put it this way:

The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.4

I think that, for the first time in the history of U.S. capitalism, the vast majority of people might sense the lie of liberal, capitalist democracy. They feel anxious, unfree, disaffected. Fantasies of the good life have been shattered beyond repair for most people. Trump and this hopefully brief triumph of right neoliberalism will soon lay this bare for everyone to see. Now, with Trump, it is absolutely clear: the rich rule the world; we are all disposable; this is no democracy. The question becomes: How will we show up for history? Will there be new stories, ideas, visions, and fantasies to attach to? How can we productively and meaningful intervene in the crisis of neoliberalism? How can we "tear a hole in the grey curtain" and open up better worlds? How can we put what we've learned to use and begin to imagine and build a world beyond living in competition? I hope our critical journey through the neoliberal conjuncture has enabled you to begin to answer these questions.

More specifically, in recent decades, especially since the end of the Cold War, our common-good sensibilities have been channeled into neoliberal platforms for social change and privatized action, funneling our political energies into brand culture and marketized struggles for equality (e.g., charter schools, NGOs and non-profits, neoliberal antiracism and feminism). As a result, despite our collective anger and disaffected consent, we find ourselves stuck in capitalist realism with no real alternative. Like the neoliberal care of the self, we are trapped in a privatized mode of politics that relies on cruel optimism; we are attached, it seems, to politics that inspire and motivate us to action, while keeping us living in competition.

To disrupt the game, we need to construct common political horizons against neoliberal hegemony. We need to use our common stories and common reason to build common movements against precarity -- for within neoliberalism, precarity is what ultimately has the potential to thread all of our lives together. Put differently, the ultimate fault line in the neoliberal conjiuicture is the way it subjects us all to precarity and the biopolitics of disposability, thereby creating conditions of possibility for new coalitions across race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and class. Recognizing this potential for coalition in the face of precarization is the most pressing task facing those who are yearning for a new world. The question is: How do we get there? How do we realize these coalitional potentialities and materialize common horizons?

HOW WE GET THERE

Ultimately, mapping the neoliberal conjuncture through everyday life in enterprise culture has not only provided some direction in terms of what we need; it has also cultivated concrete and practical intellectual resources for political interv ention and social interconnection -- a critical toolbox for living in common. More specifically, this book has sought to provide resources for thinking and acting against the four Ds: resources for engaging in counter-conduct, modes of living that refuse, on one hand, to conduct one's life according to the norm of enterprise, and on the other, to relate to others through the norm of competition. Indeed, we need new ways of relating, interacting, and living as friends, lovers, workers, vulnerable bodies, and democratic people if we are to write new stories, invent new govemmentalities, and build coalitions for new worlds.

Against Disimagination: Educated Hope and Affirmative Speculation

We need to stop turning inward, retreating into ourselves, and taking personal responsibility for our lives (a task which is ultimately impossible). Enough with the disimagination machine! Let's start looking outward, not inward -- to the broader structures that undergird our lives. Of course, we need to take care of ourselves; we must survive. But I firmly believe that we can do this in ways both big and small, that transform neoliberal culture and its status-quo stories.

Here's the thing I tell my students all the time. You cannot escape neoliberalism. It is the air we breathe, the water in which we swim. No job, practice of social activism, program of self-care, or relationship will be totally free from neoliberal impingements and logics. There is no pure "outside" to get to or work from -- that's just the nature of the neoliberalism's totalizing cultural power. But let's not forget that neoliberalism's totalizing cultural power is also a source of weakness. Potential for resistance is everywhere, scattered throughout our everyday lives in enterprise culture. Our critical toolbox can help us identify these potentialities and navigate and engage our conjuncture in ways that tear open up those new worlds we desire.

In other words, our critical perspective can help us move through the world with what Henry Giroux calls educated hope. Educated hope means holding in tension the material realities of power and the contingency of history. This orientation of educated hope knows very well what we're up against. However, in the face of seemingly totalizing power, it also knows that neoliberalism can never become total because the future is open. Educated hope is what allows us to see the fault lines, fissures, and potentialities of the present and emboldens us to think and work from that sliver of social space where we do have political agency and freedom to construct a new world. Educated hope is what undoes the power of capitalist realism. It enables affirmative speculation (such as discussed in Chapter 5), which does not try to hold the future to neoliberal horizons (that's cruel optimism!), but instead to affirm our commonalities and the potentialities for the new worlds they signal. Affirmative speculation demands a different sort of risk calculation and management. It senses how little we have to lose and how much we have to gain from knocking the hustle of our lives.

Against De-democratization: Organizing and Collective Coverning

We can think of educated hope and affirmative speculation as practices of what Wendy Brown calls "bare democracy" -- the basic idea that ordinary' people like you and me should govern our lives in common, that we should critique and try to change our world, especially the exploitative and oppressive structures of power that maintain social hierarchies and diminish lives. Neoliberal culture works to stomp out capacities for bare democracy by transforming democratic desires and feelings into meritocratic desires and feelings. In neoliberal culture, utopian sensibilities are directed away from the promise of collective utopian sensibilities are directed away from the promise of collective governing to competing for equality.

We have to get back that democractic feeling! As Jeremy Gilbert taught us, disaffected consent is a post-democratic orientation. We don't like our world, but we don't think we can do anything about it. So, how do we get back that democratic feeling? How do we transform our disaffected consent into something new? As I suggested in the last chapter, we organize. Organizing is simply about people coming together around a common horizon and working collectively to materialize it. In this way, organizing is based on the idea of radical democracy, not liberal democracy. While the latter is based on formal and abstract rights guaranteed by the state, radical democracy insists that people should directly make the decisions that impact their lives, security, and well-being. Radical democracy is a practice of collective governing: it is about us hashing out, together in communities, what matters, and working in common to build a world based on these new sensibilities.

The work of organizing is messy, often unsatisfying, and sometimes even scary. Organizing based on affirmative speculation and coalition-building, furthermore, will have to be experimental and uncertain. As Lauren Berlant suggests, it means "embracing the discomfort of affective experience in a truly open social life that no

one has ever experienced." Organizing through and for the common "requires more adaptable infrastructures. Keep forcing the existing infrastructures to do what they don't know how to do. Make new ways to be local together, where local doesn't require a physical neighborhood." 5 What Berlant is saying is that the work of bare democracy requires unlearning, and detaching from, our current stories and infrastructures in order to see and make things work differently. Organizing for a new world is not easy -- and there are no guarantees -- but it is the only way out of capitalist realism.

Against Disposability: Radical Equality

Getting back democratic feeling will at once require and help us lo move beyond the biopolitics of disposability and entrenched systems of inequality. On one hand, organizing will never be enough if it is not animated by bare democracy, a sensibility that each of us is equally important when it comes to the project of determining our lives in common. Our bodies, our hurts, our dreams, and our desires matter regardless of our race, gender, sexuality, or citizenship, and regardless of how r much capital (economic, social, or cultural) we have. Simply put, in a radical democracy, no one is disposable. This bare-democratic sense of equality must be foundational to organizing and coalition-building. Otherwise, we will always and inevitably fall back into a world of inequality.

On the other hand, organizing and collective governing will deepen and enhance our sensibilities and capacities for radical equality. In this context, the kind of self-enclosed individualism that empowers and underwrites the biopolitics of disposability melts away, as we realize the interconnectedness of our lives and just how amazing it feels to

fail, we affirm our capacities for freedom, political intervention, social interconnection, and collective social doing.

Against Dispossession: Shared Security and Common Wealth

Thinking and acting against the biopolitics of disposability goes hand-in-hand with thinking and acting against dispossession. Ultimately, when we really understand and feel ourselves in relationships of interconnection with others, we want for them as we want for ourselves. Our lives and sensibilities of what is good and just are rooted in radical equality, not possessive or self-appreciating individualism. Because we desire social security and protection, we also know others desire and deserve the same.

However, to really think and act against dispossession means not only advocating for shared security and social protection, but also for a new society that is built on the egalitarian production and distribution of social wealth that we all produce. In this sense, we can take Marx's critique of capitalism -- that wealth is produced collectively but appropriated individually -- to heart. Capitalism was built on the idea that one class -- the owners of the means of production -- could exploit and profit from the collective labors of everyone else (those who do not own and thus have to work), albeit in very different ways depending on race, gender, or citizenship. This meant that, for workers of all stripes, their lives existed not for themselves, but for others (the appropriating class), and that regardless of what we own as consumers, we are not really free or equal in that bare-democratic sense of the word.

If we want to be really free, we need to construct new material and affective social infrastructures for our common wealth. In these new infrastructures, wealth must not be reduced to economic value; it must be rooted in social value. Here, the production of wealth does not exist as a separate sphere from the reproduction of our lives. In other words, new infrastructures, based on the idea of common wealth, will not be set up to exploit our labor, dispossess our communities, or to divide our lives. Rather, they will work to provide collective social resources and care so that we may all be free to pursue happiness, create beautiful and/or useful things, and to realize our potential within a social world of living in common. Crucially, to create the conditions for these new, democratic forms of freedom rooted in radical equality, we need to find ways to refuse and exit the financial networks of Empire and the dispossessions of creditocracy, building new systems that invite everyone to participate in the ongoing production of new worlds and the sharing of the wealth that we produce in common.

It's not up to me to tell you exactly where to look, but I assure you that potentialities for these new worlds are everywhere around you.

[Feb 22, 2019] Trump vs. the FBI Who are the good guys by Joe Jarvis

With Trump incoherence, impulsivity and appointment of Pompeo and Bolton it is really unclear who are the good guys and and who are bad guys.
Color revolution against Trump failed and that's a good sign, the sign of healthy political system. But it might well be that "The moor has done his duty, the moor can go"
Trump already undermined the credibility of neoliberal MSM and we should be glad to him for that. He also withdrawing troops from Syria (which were in the country illegally) but only after bombing Assad air forces half-dozen times on false premises.
Looks like he reached some progress in talks with China and Chine will buy more agricultural production from the USA. But the question to him is: if China already has the capacity to produce all those goods, how he think manufacturing will return to the USA.
He still is warmongering about Iran. And he initiated the regime change in Venezuela.
On domestic front he positioned himself as a clear neoliberal and bully -- king of "national neoliberalism" instead of national socialism of the past (what is funny is that many point of NSDAP program of 1920 are now far left to the Democratic Party platform, to say nothing about Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." -Frank Herbert, Author of Dune ..."
Feb 22, 2019 | www.zerohedge.com

by TDB Thu, 02/21/2019 - 12:24 5 SHARES By Joe Jarvis via The Daily Bell

The bad guys wear black hats. We're programmed to see things in black or white, right or wrong, good or evil. From what we are shown in movies and books from an early age, there is a protagonist and an antagonist.

Clever writers make it a little more complex, with the Boo Radleys and Snapes who are thought to be villains but turn out to be heroes. But generally, the characters fit largely into extremes: good guys or bad guys with little overlap: Harry Potter versus Voldemort.

But it's those characters on the edge who people can't get enough of. Like Walter White, the cancer patient who starts producing meth to leave some money behind for his family in the TV show Breaking Bad .

And that's probably because its an often unspoken truth that life is mostly gray, and not so black and white.

But the binary two choice meme has a function. It makes things a hell of a lot easier. And it prevents us from being crippled by indecision and inaction.

Of course, this is also easily exploited by bad guys

When I hear that the FBI considered attempting to oust Trump from the oval office, I am tempted to think, hey, Trump must not be such a bad guy.

According to a new book by former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, top FBI brass discussed using the 25th amendment to remove Trump, even though as the Wall Street Journal explains:

A President exercises his constitutional prerogative to fire the FBI director, and Mr. Comey's associates immediately talked about deposing him in what would amount to a coup?

The 25th Amendment was passed after JFK's assassination to allow for a transfer of power when a President is "unable" to discharge his duties. It is intended to be used only after demonstrated evidence of impairment that is witnessed by those closest to the Commander in Chief. It doesn't exist to settle political differences, or to let scheming bureaucrats imagine they are saving the country from someone they fear is a Manchurian candidate. The constitutional process for that is impeachment.

So if the horribly corrupt FBI doesn't like Trump, he must have something to offer. But this is only true in the binary world or pure good and evil. In the real world, evil often opposes evil, because they are different factions fighting for the same territory.

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." -Frank Herbert, Author of Dune

We usually end up supporting who we see as the lesser of two evils.

That's sort of like Walter White. He starts off as a timid science geek and devoted father and husband. He is attracted to the drug industry for apparently noble purposes. And he ends up poisoning a child, causing another child to be murdered, ordering an innocent assistant killed, and causing the death of his brother-in-law. Ultimately, Walter White admits he didn't become a massive meth producer for his family. He did it for the thrill, the glory, the power that came with it . We live in a world of Walter Whites, not Voldemorts.

J.K. Rowling made Voldemort pure evil. But to her credit, she demonstrated how easy it was for him to seize the reigns of power at the Ministry of Magic, and how all the bureaucrats and ministers simply started serving a new master. Some even rejoiced in their new authority, relishing the newfound power.

When it comes to Trump versus the FBI, the Wall Street Journal editorial laments, "This is all corrosive to public trust in American democracy."

So what do we do about it?

Rejoice!

The less trust we put in the political system, the better. All we can do is separate ourselves to the best of our abilities from far off bureaucrats and politicians.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb says in his book Skin in the Game , paraphrasing brothers Geoff and Vince Graham:

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

... ... ...

[Feb 18, 2019] Politicians jump ship as Jussie Smollett hate hoax sinks amid revelations

Feb 18, 2019 | www.rt.com

As the narrative of a 'racist, homophobic attack' on actor Jussie Smollett in Chicago continues to collapse, politicians and celebrities who fueled the outrage over the incident are quietly backing away and hoping no one notices.

[Feb 18, 2019] Tulsi Gabbard Smears Debunked by Jimmy Dore

The problem here is the progressive votes is split between Bernie, Warren, and Tulsi. That means that all three of them now can be eliminated be invertionaist Dems.
Notable quotes:
"... Tulsi Gabbard is scary to Republicans because a lot of us center-right folks would be tempted to support her ..."
"... Would love to see a Tulsi - Trump debate. She'd be a formidable opponent. ..."
Feb 18, 2019 | www.youtube.com

Kimberley Murphy , 1 week ago

I actually trust her more than Bernie. Bernie endorsed HRC, Tulsi did not. She stuck to morals. I respect that.

chadinem , 1 month ago

Tulsi Gabbard is scary to Republicans because a lot of us center-right folks would be tempted to support her.

CAY7607 , 1 week ago

Would love to see a Tulsi - Trump debate. She'd be a formidable opponent.

[Feb 17, 2019] What a crew we have today: Bolton is evil, Pompeo is a liar, Pence is a moralizing buffoon

And Trump?
Notable quotes:
"... At least Bolton embraces the fact that he is simply exerting power over others without the insufferable moralizing of a Mike Pence. ..."
Feb 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Chris Chuba , 4 hours ago

1. Bolton is evil, 2. Pompeo is a liar, 3. Pence is a moralizing buffoon.

I detest them all but who do I hate the least? I'm going to go with Bolton.

Since I believe that Pence is an honest man, it twists my mind how someone can stand on a stage and seriously believe that other countries have a moral obligation to obey the U.S. in who they do and don't do business with. How dare you undermine U.S. sanctions he thunders, and the look on his face, priceless.

At least Bolton embraces the fact that he is simply exerting power over others without the insufferable moralizing of a Mike Pence.

What a crew we have today.

[Feb 17, 2019] Beware of well dressed ladies who smell of Chanel #5

Well meaning idiot is the most dangerous type of idiots, if he is the king, who is still in power...
This use of "beautiful ladies" is the trick that centuries old... Children can also be used this way, especially girls...
Feb 17, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Persuading the king ...

I watched Trump's Rose Garden session in which he announced that he would sign the appropriation bill and also declare a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act. IMO he will win whatever court challenges are made because his authority to do this is clear in "black letter" law and the opposition will have to base their plaints on a judgment as to whether or not there is an emergency. IMO there is nothing in the constitution or law that makes the judgment or the courts competent to overrule his judgment in this case. If they don't like the National Emergencies Law, let the Congress repeal it.

On the other hand, Trump also told the world that because of a personal appeal by a woman from Idlib Province in Syria who came to see him in the Oval Office, he called Putin and argued him into calling off the preparations for a massive Russo/Syrian/Iranian offensive that would IMO have recovered Idlib for the SAG.

I am recalling here roughly what he said.

The lady's argument was that she believed that the millions who lived in the province would be killed or maimed in the process and all the towns destroyed. Her parents lived in the province. And, after all, she said, there are only 45,000 jihadis in the province. I was not in the room, but would be willing to bet that she was; well spoken, well dressed, and reasonably attractive. Trump was persuaded and Idlib remains a cancer in the side of the Syrian state, the Russians, having listened to Trump, attempted to create a de-militarized zone around Idlib Province within which the jihadis have consolidated power.

Some years ago I was asked to speak at a two or three day discussion of the Middle East at Mississippi State University. This is a big school. Attendance was in the thousands. On the program with me (or I with him) was, then TV personality, (later governor of Ohio) John Kasich. At a pre-conference dinner, Kasich sought to dominate the table talk and me (his principal competition) at this conference. There were numerous senior faculty present at table. Kasich sought to belittle whatever knowledge I might have of the MENA region and of the peoples and cultures there. In particular he said that I did not understand Islam at all because I said that the jihadis were among the various forms of Islam, a religion which I foolishly claimed had no central authority structure and in which the "true Islam" was not to be known except in the consensus (ijma') of various groups of Muslims.

Having heard him out, I explained to him my background and experience. He grew more and more sober, clearly unused to opposition. I asked him what the basis was for his opinion that the various jihadis were not real Muslims at all.

He told us that a number of beauteous Muslim ladies had been brought to see him. He said they were well spoken, well dressed (some in French couture clothing) and that they smelled good. This last was said after I asked him about it having run into this phenomenon before.

These ladies were all at pains to explain to him that the jihadis were outside Islam because they did not accept the ijma' of the scholars of whatever "school" (mathab) of Sunni Sharia these ladies adhered to.

The lesson - Beware of well dressed ladies who smell of Chanel #5. pl


PeterVE , 5 hours ago

Are you suggesting that President Trump could be influenced by an attractive, well spoken woman with an exotic accent? Maybe the Iranian Mullahs need to change their UN representative to get off Trump's s#*! list.
Barbara Ann , 3 hours ago
Great anecdote Colonel, interesting that Kasich's first instinct was to see you as "competition" in such a setting. I don't suppose you told him that, despite your evident ignorance, you were known by the name of a famous warrior poet in several ME countries - or inquired as to his own sobriquet as in these places? My guess is the women folk of Idlib province are not in the habit of frequenting the Oval Office, it would be interesting to know who arranged her visit.

Machiavelli does not seem to have commented on the specific matter of wariness of beauteous messengers. However, I'd expect his advice on such matters would echo your own, in the importance of evaluating a message independently of its perfume.

Pat Lang Mod -> Barbara Ann , 2 hours ago
That is very good. Antar thanks you. An Iraqi general once asked me how I came to be called that. He said, "you are not Black." I said that was true but that I lived with a woman whose sobriquet was Abla and after so much war my heart was black enough. He said that was true of them as well.
Pat Lang Mod -> Pat Lang , 19 minutes ago
Actually Abla and I were named by a Palestinian Arabic teacher who wanted his class to have working names that began with 'ain. He was from Bethlehem and owned a night club in San Francisco where he was occupied while not teaching Arabic at DLI in Monterey. The name stuck. He was killed in Kuwait by the Kuwaiti resistance who said he was a collaborator with the Iraqis. He was a marvelous 'oud player.
Keith Harbaugh , an hour ago
On the other side of the coin, I recall reading how HRC, when she was SecState, was convinced by well-spoken, well-dressed Westernized and Western-educated men from Libya and Syria that if only the U.S. would overthrow the "brutal tyrants" then ruling those nations, that then democracy and freedom would reign in those lands.
In particular, she was lobbied by one such Westernized Libyan just before she persuaded BHO to intervene in Libya, leading to the subsequent chaos.
BTW, for a reminder of who else pushed BHO to intervene in Libya,
see "Fight of the Valkyries" by Maureen Dowd, 2011-03-23.
Is calling such women stupid about things that matter sexist?
Thinking about how popular the values of Westernized people from the Islamic world are back in their native lands, there is the illustrative example of Benazir Bhutto .

Also BTW, the URL for this post currently is: https://turcopolier.typepad...
"my-entry"? Is this right?

The Beaver , 2 hours ago
Colonel

Here is that lady:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/...

She is with SAMS thus in cahoots with White Helmets

https://www.buckscountycour...

and their reactions about Douma

https://www.sams-usa.net/pr...

Pat Lang Mod -> The Beaver , 2 hours ago
She qualifies.
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , 3 hours ago
While not having the time nor energy at the moment to read much (even more post much), this statement from DJT just stunned me. And i am not easily stunned.
Some ppl including me thought of this possibility, to be precise that Ivanka and Jared fed him: You got to save those inocent people there! And he took the bait.

But then again i didnt truely want to believe that this is how the goverment of the biggest world power works. With all those gazillions of analysts, SIGINT HUMINT etc. at hand, briefings and what not..

Even more comically and tragic is, that he might just told the truth, and this is truly what happend.

IMHO this is how the neocons influence him: By presenting selective "information", and just like the MSM he falls for it. Be it his family or patriachic instincts or what ever the psychologic motivation:

He admitted that he was influenced by the same MSM methods he claims to fight, and in turn protecting the biggest gathering of international Jihahist in this century against their sure defeat.

MAGA = Make AlQaida Great Again! ;)

AFAIK this is how DJT stopped the funding of the FSA, when he was shown the video of the child the Zenki Jihadists beheaded. So it is not a single decision, but the M.O. of his style of decision making.

Under all that narcissistic, egomanic and sociopathic behaviour seems to be a human being, a quite emotional too. Too bad it seems to care more for single female Jihadists propagandists than for his campaign promise of fighting Jihadists..

Maybe Assads wife should make a undercover visit to DJT? ;)

EDIT: Typos

Pat Lang Mod -> DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , an hour ago
The problem with him is his abysmal ignorance of anything outside the world of business. This makes him vulnerable to nonsense like this.
Pat Lang Mod -> DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , 2 hours ago
What is with the "EDIT:Typos" thingy? We are all plain folk here. Basma Asad? A beautiful, well spoken creature. There is a certain strain of blond Syrian upper class woman who will just knock your socks off. This what Italians call "the thunderbolt." I went to visit one in the Maryland suburbs of DC. A relative asked me to go. She was that type. After she decided I wasn't going to do whatever it was she thought I would want to do she took me out to the garage where there were several big cats; tiger, leopard, puma, etc. in cages. I asked her why. She just shrugged and went back in the house.
mourjou , 3 hours ago
The woman concerned.
Dr Rim Al-Bezem is the president of the eastern chapter of the Syrian-American Medical Society (SAMS), an organization that provides training, medical equipment and medicine for a country decimated by the war.


From memory, SAMS only ever worked in the rebel-held areas .
And again from memory, she has been economical with the truth, by ignoring the doctors in west Aleppo and inflating the number of people in Aleppo. Yet again from memory, I think it never reached much above 2 million, 1.5 million in the west and 0.5 million in the east.

"Many of the doctors have left the country because they, too, have families. In Aleppo alone, there are 35 doctors left to treat the population of 5 million people," she said.

.

David Solomon , 3 hours ago
Colonel, I really enjoyed this piece. It may not have been intentional on your part, but it brought some joy to my day.

Regards,

David

[Feb 13, 2019] Microsoft patches 0-day vulnerabilities in IE and Exchange

It is unclear how long this vulnerability exists, but this is pretty serious staff that shows how Hillary server could be hacked via Abedin account. As Abedin technical level was lower then zero, to hack into her home laptop just just trivial.
Feb 13, 2019 | arstechnica.com

Microsoft also patched Exchange against a vulnerability that allowed remote attackers with little more than an unprivileged mailbox account to gain administrative control over the server. Dubbed PrivExchange, CVE-2019-0686 was publicly disclosed last month , along with proof-of-concept code that exploited it. In Tuesday's advisory , Microsoft officials said they haven't seen active exploits yet but that they were "likely."

[Feb 12, 2019] Older Workers Need a Different Kind of Layoff A 60-year-old whose position is eliminated might be unable to find another job, but could retire if allowed early access to Medicare

Highly recommended!
This is a constructive suggestion that is implementable even under neoliberalism. As everything is perverted under neoliberalism that might prompt layoffs before the age of 55.
Notable quotes:
"... Older workers often struggle to get rehired as easily as younger workers. Age discrimination is a well-known problem in corporate America. What's a 60-year-old back office worker supposed to do if downsized in a merger? The BB&T-SunTrust prospect highlights the need for a new type of unemployment insurance for some of the workforce. ..."
"... One policy might be treating unemployed older workers differently than younger workers. Giving them unemployment benefits for a longer period of time than younger workers would be one idea, as well as accelerating the age of Medicare eligibility for downsized employees over the age of 55. The latter idea would help younger workers as well, by encouraging older workers to accept buyout packages -- freeing up career opportunities for younger workers. ..."
Feb 12, 2019 | www.bloomberg.com

The proposed merger between SunTrust and BB&T makes sense for both firms -- which is why Wall Street sent both stocks higher on Thursday after the announcement. But employees of the two banks, especially older workers who are not yet retirement age, are understandably less enthused at the prospect of downsizing. In a nation with almost 37 million workers over the age of 55, the quandary of SunTrust-BB&T workforce will become increasingly familiar across the U.S. economy.

But what's good for the firms isn't good for all of the workers. Older workers often struggle to get rehired as easily as younger workers. Age discrimination is a well-known problem in corporate America. What's a 60-year-old back office worker supposed to do if downsized in a merger? The BB&T-SunTrust prospect highlights the need for a new type of unemployment insurance for some of the workforce.

One policy might be treating unemployed older workers differently than younger workers. Giving them unemployment benefits for a longer period of time than younger workers would be one idea, as well as accelerating the age of Medicare eligibility for downsized employees over the age of 55. The latter idea would help younger workers as well, by encouraging older workers to accept buyout packages -- freeing up career opportunities for younger workers.

The economy can be callous toward older workers, but policy makers don't have to be. We should think about ways of dealing with this shift in the labor market before it happens.

[Feb 11, 2019] Neoliberalism has caused 'misery and division', Bernie Fraser says Business The Guardian

Feb 10, 2019 | www.theguardian.com

Political ideologies appear to have contributed to inequality and disadvantage in Australia in that time, he argues.

Fraser in large part blames "neoliberalism" and its influence on policymaking for the "disconnect between Australia's impressive economic growth story and its failure on so many markers to show progress towards a better, fairer society".

"Favouring the market system ahead of the state system, and individual interests ahead of community interests, can lead to profoundly unfair social outcomes.

ss="rich-link"> More than three million Australians living in poverty, Acoss report reveals Read more

"Those unable to afford access to decent standards of housing, healthcare, and other essential services have to settle for inferior arrangements, or go without."

Fraser says charitable organisations see the effects of "real poverty" that result in "misery, anxiety and loss of self-esteem of mothers unable to put food on the table for their kids, of old and young homeless people, and the victims of domestic violence and drug overdoses".

Fraser summarises the key thrusts of neoliberalism as "the pursuit of the lowest possible rates of income and most other taxes and the maximum restraint on government interventions and spending programs".

Evidence in Australia and overseas shows the influence of neoliberalism on fiscal policy "and the misery and social polarisation that has come with it", he says.

The global financial crisis "should have" marked a tipping point, when the "idealised view of financial markets being self-regulating" was shattered. While Australia "avoided the worst traumas of the GFC" with prompt fiscal and monetary policy responses, in Europe "taxes were increased and spending programs slashed", resulting in a further five or six years of severe recession.

Fraser says that all political ideologies -- taken to extremes -- can be divisive and cause damage, including an ideology "based on a state system".

But the former Reserve Bank governor focuses on neoliberalism because it "remains in vogue". The Morrison government "continues to reaffirm its over-riding commitment to lower taxation, and to assert that this is the best way to increase investment, jobs and economic growth" - despite the lack of evidence to support the theory .

Although Fraser recognises that politics never can or should be taken out of policymaking, he suggests the best course is to "hammer away" at flaws of particular approaches.

For example, Fraser praises "the avoidance of costly tax cuts accruing to large corporations" as a positive development -- referring to the Turnbull government abandoning the big business component of its $50bn 10-year company tax cut plan.

He suggests the "quick done-deal" of Labor signing up to the Coalition's proposed acceleration of the cut to taxes on small and medium business was an example that "political interests are always lurking nearby".

In a separate presentation Keating -- who headed PM&C from 1991 to 1996 -- warns the government's promise to cap expenditure while simultaneously cutting taxes and returning the budget to surplus is based on overly optimistic assumptions of growth in GDP, wages and productivity.

ss="rich-link"> Why are stock markets falling and how far will they go? Read more

According to Keating, the government must stop assuming there have been no structural changes in the relationship between unemployment and the rate of wage increases.

He notes that predictions of a tightening labour market leading to higher wages are predicated on assumptions of growth averaging 3% or as much as 3.5%.

He will also say a sustained return to past rates of economic growth will be impossible unless we can ensure a reasonably equitable distribution of income, involving a faster rate of wage increases, especially for the low-paid.


Matt Quinn , 19 Oct 2018 12:33

Excellent that neoliberalism is being put under the spotlight. To fully understand it, and the root causes of its "thrusts", one need only refer to its history, helpfully chronicled by economist Mason Gaffney in his little known but devastating 1994 work The Corruption of Economics . It begins:

Neoclassical economics is the idiom of most economic discourse today. It is the paradigm that bends the twigs of young minds. Then it confines the florescence of older ones, like chicken-wire shaping a topiary.

It took form about a hundred years ago, when Henry George and his reform proposals were a clear and present political danger and challenge to the landed and intellectual establishments of the world.

Few people realize to what degree the founders of Neo-classical economics changed the discipline for the express purpose of deflecting George and frustrating future students seeking to follow his arguments.

It can be argued that the 20th century was a disastrous wrong-turn leading to the subversion of a rising economic democracy for the benefit of rent-takers. Unnecessary privation, war and destruction of the living world were it's necessary consequence, but it's not to late to revisit the keen insights of a (deliberately) forgotten genius like Henry George.

How Land Barons, Industrialists and Bankers Corrupted Economics , Dierdre Kent 2016.

In a nutshell, Land (aka nature) causes Wealth causes Money for some definition of wealth and money:
What Money is : Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy , Mosler 2010 P1.
What Wealth is : Progress and Poverty , Henry George 1879, esp intro, ch3, 17.
How we got to Now : The Corruption of Economics , Mason Gaffney 1994 p 29-44. Excellent Prologue by Fred Harrison: Who's Afraid of Henry George? .

For sincere and willing truth-seekers, this short list cannot fail to deeply reward even a cursory treatment.

petesweetbix -> FelixKruell , 19 Oct 2018 04:00
And you appear not to understand the difference between an "average" and a "median". The median measure the mid-point, above and below which 50% of the sample population falls. The average is just an average over all, and become increasingly different from the median, the more the inequalities (i.e., skewness of the distribution) increase. This is precisely what has happened in most western societies since the 1980s. The report mentions AVERAGE wealth, but this hides a large spread, with large increases at the top, while the bottom 10 to 20% in most western societies have almost nothing, and have not seen their new wealth increase for decades. How can it, if you don't own a house and don't have shares/super, etc.?? I think you are generalising too much from your own (probably limited) social circle and experiences.
MobileAtheist -> PieSwine , 17 Oct 2018 23:54
Your welcome, yes its an informative site, I might add, Neo-liberalism is only half the problem Globalisation goes hand in hand with it and both are supported if not controlled by the IMF, with the aim of crushing the working people of third world nations, and the ALP explicitly support Globalisation whilst emphatically deny involvement with Neoliberalism.
justdreamingguss , 17 Oct 2018 06:21
Wages have stagnated and corporate profits have soared! Privatisation of public assets and corporatization in this capitalist system, is the biggest fail of all times for the majority of our society! Back in my day, If there were two working, (Which there wasn't) my wage was enough to own my own house in 2.8 years.
The system is defunct and fucked!
justdreamingguss , 17 Oct 2018 05:52
Neoliberalism seems to be a nice name, conjured up by a nasty think tank. given to a system that enhances massive profits for the few. A system that allows public owned assets (Infrastructure) to be sold at devalued prices and a system where people are to be considered as a commodity, with those of no use to their system being skinned and left out to dry.
RUSiriUs , 17 Oct 2018 05:29
I have been hammering the same line for years now, it so good to have someone as articulate and respected as Bernie Fraser damning neoliberalism for what it is as an economic cover story for implementing right-wing ideology. Trickle down theory has been routinely assessed as a failure to deliver equity and as a result the LNP are polarising society.
HofBrisbane , 17 Oct 2018 04:34
When neoliberalism is broken down, it's just the same old chestnut of socialism for the privileged (via lobbying to create an environment best for rent seekers) and capitalism for the rest of us where if we fail, too bad so sad.
Friarbird , 17 Oct 2018 04:18
Neoliberalism is fraud.
It is the speedo wound back, that 'glorious beachside situation' under water, a pea-and-thimble trick to baffle and fleece the suckers.
Being the creation of Libertarians, it has their trademark ideological motivation, a visceral loathing of government, in whatever form.
That determination to demonise and even dismantle govt is made plain by Neoliberalism's numerous facilitating porkies, pushed as the unvarnished truth.
One example.
Neoliberal ideologues dogmatically insist the Commonwealth needs to somehow 'borrow' to fund the deficit.
This assertion has no basis in reality.
It is a whopper designed to serve the needs of ideology, nothing more.
For Neoliberal ideologues, this piece of deceit kicks two significant goals.
First, it enables them to depict govt as so inherently inefficient, so inept, it cannot even raise dollar one of the very currency which it is allegedly controls.
Down, down goes disgraced govt.
From where can it obtain the desperately-needed funds?
Here comes the second goal.
To fund the deficit, the C' wealth goes crawling, cap-in-hand, to the private sector.
Fearless, freedom-loving, shit-hot-and-shiny private sector !
But it's total myth.
The Commonwealth is a sovereign currency issuer.
Ergo sum, it always has its own money, AUD.
Saying it needs to borrow something it creates and controls-- and of which it has an infinite supply-- only makes sense as a propaganda-driven porkie.

It's like claiming you need to borrow somebody else's piss.

20reeds , 17 Oct 2018 03:28
Neoliberalism (ie rule market forces) is a binary system - it produces winners and losers.

The winners are those paid to lobby, write the legislation, secure the profits, get the shares, run the corporations, the banks, the accountancies, the insurers etc.

The losers are the majority us who remain outside in the cold. The winners are not going to change their ways and why should they - they hold the power and we the masses pose no threat to them.

Its way past time that those who are not winning in this binary game started to threaten the winners. This is what McManus is doing with her ACTU 'change the rules' campaign - it is seriously threatening the neoliberal agenda.

The Wentworth by-election is threatening the Morrison neoliberal coalition with annihilation and just might be the turning point for Australians to take back their democracy and their economy from the thieves who hold power.

Banter76 -> Lovedogg , 17 Oct 2018 03:12
No. With a couple of exceptions the communities that delivered the highest Brexit vote tended to have the least migrants.

I am advocating Social Democracy, a mixed economy where there is a private sector and a state sector and more state intervention to stop communities being 'left behind'. Investment in education & training and renationalisation of natural monopolies such as water and rail is what's needed in the UK.

For far too long all the mainstream MSM including the BBC and this paper have acted as a propaganda machine for the Neoliberal outsourcing of workers to undermine salaries while putting money into the off shore accounts of fat cats.

Meanwhile the Mail, Sky & Sun (Murdoch) and Express, LBC radio have jumped on the opportunity of a divided Britain to encourage hatred of the other.

Colinn -> FelixKruell , 17 Oct 2018 02:01
I used to buy crap chinese marine ply, my new supplier has Australian made, high quality marine ply for 2/3 the price. I always prefer to keep my money local.
2/3 of Australia isn't surviving, they're drowning, not waving.
It is about the 1% who think robbing the poor is good business. The strongest economy in Australia was when wage growth was good. Businesses only look at their small picture and the larger economy is none of their concern. Business has been able to buy politicians for their own profit, not the good of the country.
RobLeighton , 17 Oct 2018 01:58
Obviously, everything is horrible in Australia these days and is getting worse.
Even though Australia is ranked #3 on the Human Development Index out of some
192 countries and has an awesomely high per capita GDP. Australia is also among the
most respected, most reputable countries on the planet and has 3 cities in the top 10
of best cities in the world to live in. Other than that, it is horrible there.
Banter76 , 17 Oct 2018 01:31
"Favouring the market system ahead of the state system, and individual interests ahead of community interests, can lead to profoundly unfair social outcomes"

Australians take note. Neoliberalism has led to the rise of the far right in the UK and across EU countries. Doesn't help that people like Murdoch encourage finger pointing at foreigners while supporting the right-wing economic policies creating the massive division and job insecurity.

PieSwine -> CosmoCrawley , 16 Oct 2018 23:14
Neo-liberalism: low taxes to encourage employment; deregulation of labour market and business "red-tape" and privatisation of public assets and utilities. You may also throw in an unhealthy obsession with micro economics and interest rates.

All of which have been shown to have negligible impact on their stated goals (see lower taxes) and have been terrible for consumers, workers and society.

daveinbalmain -> Foxlike , 16 Oct 2018 23:09
Seventy years (give or take) have passed since the end of WW2.

In Europe, the first half of that period could broadly be described as social democracy, the second as neo-liberal.

To your point Fox, let's see the data on a simple line chart:

Real individual wages per capita
GDP per capita
National indebtedness
Private indebtedness

I'm willing to be corrected but I'd bet you London to a brick that the social democratic shits all over the neo-liberal from a great height when it comes to improvements in these core data.

HellBrokeLuce -> leon depope , 16 Oct 2018 22:26
That's it.. the world moved to the right back in the mid to late 80's ..as the Soviet Union collapsed ..and the wall came down.

Now both Russia and China are on the free market merry go round.. except that they keep controls on certain aspects .. of the economy, an iron fist control, taking advantage and abusing the free market to meet their own ends. Conservatism is about individualism .. as put forward by Howard.. aspirational to achieve for yourself.. Nothing to do with your community. That's why they hate the UN.. generally and particularly in regards to climate change.. the world acting as one community for the benefit of all communities.. So they want to build walls.. trade barriers... it's all characterized as impinging on the countries sovereignty.. The interesting thing is ..that back in the 80's ..the left was all about protectionism.. and isolationist policy. So to speak.. now Trump wants to turn back the clock.. 40 years or so. It's a bit late for that.

So...never give conservatism a chance. Actually..the inevitable consequence of climate change making the world re calibrate economics ..through sustainability, not greed first, will put and end to conservatism. It's a high price to pay.. but I have no doubt it will happen.

Pararto , 16 Oct 2018 22:25
Income is important, but it has been the progressive concentration of wealth that is causing the real damage and polarization. If we no longer belong in the same society, if we no longer care for others as being our own, if we no longer look at other living things as our relations, then we are looking into a catastrophic void.

[Feb 09, 2019] Hungary Shows the West the Path to Survival

Notable quotes:
"... It is clear that on immigration, Eastern Europe differs from the rest of the continent -- attitudes represented politically only through the populist right in the west are thoroughly mainstream in the east. ..."
Feb 09, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com

For starters, he talks about demography. Like many countries in Europe, Hungary's birthrates have plummeted. Orbán has commenced a campaign to raise them, with measures including generous maternity and paternity leave stipends, subsidies of up to 50 euros a month per child, tax write-offs, and housing assistance for couples that have three or more children. The government has also sent out questionnaires asking Hungarians whether they think the solution to Hungary's demographic crisis is stronger support for families or higher immigration. Katalin Novak, Orbán's minister of family and youth, explained unabashedly that the purpose of this was "to send a clear message to Brussels: the renovation of Europe is impossible without support for families and Hungary wants neither immigration nor a modification of its population." This sort of frankness from leaders in the wealthier West is inconceivable. At a press gathering I recently attended, a Macron minister holding a comparable post focused most of the conversation on the expansion of gay rights.

Of course, the other half of the demography subject is immigration. In an address during the fall of 2016 that still resonates, Orbán proclaimed that Europe is "in mortal danger":

The danger is "not attacking us the way wars and natural disasters do mass migration is a slow stream of water persistently eroding the shores. It is masquerading as a humanitarian cause, but its true nature is the occupation of territory. And what is gaining territory for them is losing territory for us. Flocks of obsessed human rights defenders feel the overwhelming urge to reprimand us . [A]llegedly we are hostile xenophobes but the truth is that the history of our nation is also one of inclusion, of the intertwining of cultures. Those who have sought to come here as new family members, as allies, or as displaced persons fearing for their lives have been let in to make a new home for themselves. But those who have come here with the intention of changing our country, of shaping our nation in their own image, have been met with resistance."

Faced with the Merkel Million Man Migration, Orbán ordered Hungary's army to build a fence.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Poster Boy For the False Europe How Brexit Burst the West's Immigration Taboos

Slovakia similarly refused to take in a quota of migrants dictated by Brussels and Berlin. The former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, wrote a short but excellent book, Europe All Inclusive , about the migration crisis in which he charged that Europe's western elites were supporting mass immigration explicitly to smash the remaining power of nation states so full European unification could be achieved. Poland has likewise refused EU demands to resettle refugees from the Mideast and North Africa.

It is clear that on immigration, Eastern Europe differs from the rest of the continent -- attitudes represented politically only through the populist right in the west are thoroughly mainstream in the east. This difference in political culture is so vast, it can be traced to many sources. A similar divergence surfaced before, during the Cold War, when Eastern Europeans stubbornly refused to allow Western European intellectuals to forget or ignore that communism was a malign and murderous system. Today, Eastern Europeans note that they have been already been the subjects of utopian projects to remake society according to a progressive vision -- and they have no desire for a repeat.

Encountering Eastern European resistance to progressive dogma for the first time is a bracing experience. I first had it during the mid-'70s, in a grad school lecture class at Columbia. A charming and generally well-liked democratic socialist professor would take admiring students through various sophisticated Marxist readings, leading inexorably to the conclusion that the collapse of "late capitalism" was inevitable and to be welcomed. This semester, there happened to be two Poles taking the class, one of whom was a woman who had been an imprisoned dissident. They seemed to know their Marx as well as the prof did: they were smart, they were vocal, and they were having absolutely none of it. It made for an exciting several months, and for me a memorable demonstration that Eastern Europeans were more or less immune to the guilt and self-hatred permeating much of the West.

Perhaps we are in for a reprise, when the people of the west learn once again from the east what is true and essential about their own societies. Of course, there are parallels between the communists' aspirations and the open borders diversity project. Both are genuinely revolutionary in their desire to destroy and remake Western societies according to models that have little viable precedent in human experience. Under this logic, the '60s and '70s can be seen as a kind of transitional phase, during which Western socialists looked longingly towards various Third World models -- China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua -- after they gave up on the Soviet Union and their own proletariats as viable revolutionary agents. Now progressives hope that social justice will bloom from the political chaos generated by demographic shifts.

Without the voices of Eastern Europe, the West might not have successfully resisted the first progressive onslaught. Once again, it needs the voices of the east to illuminate its path to survival.

Scott McConnell is a founding editor of and the author of Ex-Neocon: Dispatches From the Post-9/11 Ideological Wars.

[Feb 07, 2019] The Global Con Hidden in Trump's Tax Reform Law, Revealed

Notable quotes:
"... Last night, President Trump reserved a few minutes of his State of the Union address to praise his tax reform law, which turned a year old last month. To promote its passage, Mr. Trump and his congressional allies promised Americans that drastically lowered corporate tax rates would bring home large sums of capital that had been stashed overseas and finance a surge of domestic investment. ..."
"... Why would any multinational corporation pay America's 21 percent tax rate when it could pay the new "global minimum" rate of 10.5 percent on profits shifted to tax havens, particularly when there are few restrictions on how money can be moved around a company and its foreign subsidiaries? ..."
"... For starters, the law's repatriation deal did prompt a brief surge in offshore profits returning to the United States. But the total sum returned so far is well below the trillions many proponents predicted, and a large chunk of the returned funds have been used for record-breaking stock buybacks, which don't help workers and generate little real economic activity. ..."
"... Bottom line: the Trump tax cut is a giveaway to corporations that doesn't promote investment here ..."
Feb 07, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , February 06, 2019 at 04:05 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/business-economics/trump-tax-reform-state-of-the-union-2019.html

February 6, 2019

The Global Con Hidden in Trump's Tax Reform Law, Revealed
Why would any multinational corporation pay the new 21 percent rate when it could use the new "global minimum" loophole to pay half of that?
By Brad Setser

Last night, President Trump reserved a few minutes of his State of the Union address to praise his tax reform law, which turned a year old last month. To promote its passage, Mr. Trump and his congressional allies promised Americans that drastically lowered corporate tax rates would bring home large sums of capital that had been stashed overseas and finance a surge of domestic investment.

"For too long, our tax code has incentivized companies to leave our country in search of lower tax rates," he said, pitching voters in the fall of 2017. "My administration rejects the offshoring model, and we have embraced a brand-new model. It's called the American model."

The White House argued they wanted a system that "encourages companies to stay in America, grow in America, spend in America, and hire in America." Yet the bill he signed into law includes a sweetheart deal that allows companies that shift their profits abroad to pay tax at a rate well below the already-reduced corporate income tax -- an incentive shift that completely contradicts his stated goal.

Why would any multinational corporation pay America's 21 percent tax rate when it could pay the new "global minimum" rate of 10.5 percent on profits shifted to tax havens, particularly when there are few restrictions on how money can be moved around a company and its foreign subsidiaries?

These wonky concerns were largely brushed aside amid the political brawl. But now that a full year has passed since the tax bill became law, we have hard numbers we can evaluate.

For starters, the law's repatriation deal did prompt a brief surge in offshore profits returning to the United States. But the total sum returned so far is well below the trillions many proponents predicted, and a large chunk of the returned funds have been used for record-breaking stock buybacks, which don't help workers and generate little real economic activity.

And despite Mr. Trump's proud rhetoric regarding tax reform during his State of the Union address, there is no wide pattern of companies bringing back jobs or profits from abroad. The global distribution of corporations' offshore profits -- our best measure of their tax avoidance gymnastics -- hasn't budged from the prevailing trend.

Well over half the profits that American companies report earning abroad are still booked in only a few low-tax nations -- places that, of course, are not actually home to the customers, workers and taxpayers facilitating most of their business. A multinational corporation can route its global sales through Ireland, pay royalties to its Dutch subsidiary and then funnel income to its Bermudian subsidiary -- taking advantage of Bermuda's corporate tax rate of zero.

Where American Profits Hide

[Graph]

No major technology company has jettisoned the finely tuned tax structures that allow a large share of its global profits to be booked offshore. Nor have major pharmaceutical companies stopped producing many of their most profitable drugs in Ireland. And Pepsi, to name just one major manufacturer, still makes the concentrate for its soda in Singapore, also a haven.

Eliminating the complex series of loopholes that encourage offshoring was a major talking point in the run-up to the 2017 tax bill, but most of them are still in place. The craftiest and largest corporations can still legally whittle down their effective tax rate into the single digits. (In fact, the new law encourages firms to move "tangible assets" -- like factories -- offshore).

Overall, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act amounted to a technocratic sleight of hand -- a scheme set to shift an even greater share of the federal tax burden onto the shoulders of American families. According to the Treasury Department's tally for fiscal year 2018, corporate income tax receipts fell by 31 percent, an unprecedented year-over-year drop in a time of economic growth (presumably a time when profits and government revenue should rise in tandem).

These damning results, to be sure, don't make for a good defense of what came before the new law. In theory under the old system, American-based firms still owed the government a cut of their global profits. In practice, large firms could indefinitely defer paying this tax until the funds could be repatriated -- usually when granted a tax holiday by a friendly administration.

Over a generation, this political dance was paired with rules that made it relatively easy for firms to transfer their most prized intellectual property -- say, the rights to popular software or the particular mix of ingredients for a hot new drug -- to their offshore subsidiaries. Taken together, they created a tax nirvana of sorts for multinational corporations, particularly in intellectual-property-intensive industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. But it wasn't enough.

For their next trick, the companies worked with their political allies to favorably frame the 2017 tax debate. When he was the House speaker, Paul Ryan was fond of talking about $3 trillion in "trapped" profits abroad. But those profits weren't actually, physically, sitting in a few tax havens.

Dwarf Economies, Giant American Profits

[Graph]

They were largely invested in United States bank accounts, securities and bonds issued by the Treasury or other companies headquartered in the States. As Adam Looney -- a Brookings Institution fellow and former Treasury Department official -- has explained, companies that needed to finance a new domestic investment could simply issue a bond effectively backed by its offshore cash. (For instance, Apple could bring its "trapped" funds onshore by selling a bond to Pfizer's offshore account, or vice versa.)

Put plainly, they got the best of both worlds: Uncle Sam could tax only a small slice of their books while they traded with one another based on the size of the entire pie.

The scale of the tax shifting has become so immense that some economists believe curbing it could raise reported G.D.P. by well over a percentage point -- something Mr. Trump, who's been absorbed by opportunities to brag about the economy, should notionally welcome.

President Trump's economic advisers and the key architects of the bill on Capitol Hill must have known their reform wasn't going to end business incentives that hurt American workers. Honest reform would have meant closing corporate loopholes -- a move they originally promised to make.

Should the opportunity present itself, perhaps to the next president, there are a couple of viable options for a fundamental tax overhaul that wouldn't require reinstating the 35 percent corporate tax rate.

One of several possibilities is to return to a system of global taxation without the deferrals that enabled empty repatriations. That would mean profits sneakily booked tax-free in Bermuda would be taxed every year at 21 percent. Profits booked in Ireland -- or other low-tax nations -- would be taxed at the difference between Ireland's rate and America's rate.

It's an approach that would protect small and midsize American companies while cracking down on bad corporate actors with enough fancy accountants and lawyers to rig the game to their advantage. And it would be far better than the fake tax reform passed a year ago.

anne -> anne... , February 07, 2019 at 06:16 AM
https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1093271623212457985

Paul Krugman‏ @paulkrugman

This is very good from the essential Brad Setser, our leading expert on international trade and money flows. Bottom line: the Trump tax cut is a giveaway to corporations that doesn't promote investment here 1/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/opinion/business-economics/trump-tax-reform-state-of-the-union-2019.html

The Global Con Hidden in Trump's Tax Reform Law, Revealed

Why would any multinational corporation pay the new 21 percent rate when it could use the new "global minimum" loophole to pay half of that?

2:14 PM - 6 Feb 2019

@Brad_Setser also gets at something I've been trying to explain: corporate cash "overseas" isn't really a stash of money that can be brought home, it's an accounting fiction that lets them avoid taxes, with no real consequences for investment 2/

And this chart, showing the predominance of tax avoidance in overseas "investment", is a classic 3/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DywVXVvWsAAUvrh.jpg

[Feb 07, 2019] Government shutdown, Venezuela Donald Trump evolves into the best propagator of neoliberal fascism that tends to become a norm

Notable quotes:
"... The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel ..."
"... Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy ..."
"... Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country the ability to minimize the effects of the economic war ..."
"... So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of the West rushed to follow the decision. ..."
"... Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance. ..."
Feb 07, 2019 | failedevolution.blogspot.com

Even before the 2016 US presidential election, this blog supported that Donald Trump is a pure sample of neoliberal barbarism . Many almost laughed at this perception because Trump was being already promoted, more or less, as the 'terminator' of the neoliberal establishment. And many people, especially in the US, tired from the economic disasters, the growing inequality and the endless wars, were anxious to believe that this was indeed his special mission.

Right after the elections, we supported that the US establishment gave a brilliant performance by putting its reserve, Donald Trump, in power, against the only candidate that the same establishment identified as a real threat: Bernie Sanders.

Then, Trump sent the first shock wave to his supporters by literally hiring the Goldman Sachs banksters to run the economy. And right after that, he signed for more deregulation in favor of the Wall Street mafia that ruined the economy in 2008.

In 2017 , Trump bombed Syria for the first time, resembling the lies that led us to the Iraq war disaster. Despite the fact that the US Tomahawk missile attack had zero value in operational level (the United States allegedly warned Russia and Syria, while the targeted airport was operating normally just hours after the attack), Trump sent a clear message to the US deep state that he is prepared to meet all its demands - and especially the escalation of the confrontation with Russia.

Indeed, a year later, Trump built a pro-war team that includes the most bloodthirsty, hawkish neocons. And then, he ordered a second airstrike against Syria, together with his neocolonial friends.

In the middle of all this 'orgy' of pro-establishment moves, Trump offered a controversial withdrawal of US forces from Syria and Afghanistan to save whatever was possible from his 'anti-interventionist' profile. And it was indeed a highly controversial action with very little value, considering all these US military bases that are still fully operational in the broader Middle East and beyond. Not to mention the various ways through which the US intervenes in the area (training proxies, equip them with heavy weapons, supporting the Saudis and contribute to war crimes in Yemen, etc.)

And then , after this very short break, Trump returned to 'business as usual' to satisfy the neoliberal establishment with a 'glorious' record. He achieved a 35-day government shutdown, which is the "longest shutdown in US history" .

Trump conducted the longest experiment on neoliberals' ultimate goal: abolishing the annoying presence of the state. And this was just a taste of what Trump is willing to do in order to satisfy all neoliberals' wet dreams.

And now, we have the Venezuela issue. Since Hugo Chavez nationalized PDVSA, the central oil and natural gas company, the US empire launched a fierce economic war against the country. Yet, while all previous US administrations were trying to replace legitimate governments with their puppets as much silently as possible through slow-motion coup operations, Trump has no problem to do it in plain sight.

And perhaps the best proof for that is a statement by one of the most warmongering figures of the neocon/neoliberal cabal, hired by Trump . As John Bolton cynically and openly admitted recently, " It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela. "

Therefore, one should be very naive of course to believe that the Western imperialist gang seriously cares about the Venezuelan people and especially the poor. Here are three basic reasons behind the open US intervention in Venezuela:

  1. The imperialists want to grab the rich oil fields for the US big oil cartel, as well as the great untapped natural resources , particularly gold (mostly for the Canadian companies).
  2. Venezuela must not become an example for other countries in the region on social-programs policy, which is mainly funded by the oil production. The imperialists know that they must interrupt the path of Venezuela to real Socialism by force if necessary. Neoliberalism must prevail by all means for the benefit of the big banks and corporations.
  3. Venezuela must not turn to cooperation with rival powers like China and Russia. Such a prospect may give the country the ability to minimize the effects of the economic war. The country may find an alternative to escape the Western sanctions in order to fund its social programs for the benefit of the people. And, of course, the West will never accept the exploitation of the Venezuelan resources by the Sino-Russian bloc.

So, when Trump declared the unelected Juan Guaido as the 'legitimate president' of Venezuela, all the main neoliberal powers of the West rushed to follow the decision.

This is something we have never seen before. The 'liberal democracies' of the West - only by name - immediately, uncritically and without hesitation jumped on the same boat with Trump towards this outrageously undemocratic action. They recognized Washington's puppet as the legitimate president of a third country. A man that was never elected by the Venezuelan people and has very low popularity in the country. Even worse, the EU parliament approved this action , killing any last remnants of democracy in the Union.

Yet, it seems that the US is finding increasingly difficult to force many countries to align with its agenda. Even some European countries took some distance from the attempted constitutional coup, with Italy even trying to veto EU's decision to recognize Guaido.

Donald Trump is the personification of an authoritarian system that increasingly unveils its true nature. The US empire makes the Venezuelan economy 'scream hard', as it did in Chile in 1973. The country then turned into the first laboratory of neoliberalism with the help of the Chicago Boys and a brutal dictatorship. So, as the big fraud is clear now, neoliberalism is losing ground and ideological influence over countries and societies, after decades of complete dominance.

This unprecedented action by the Western neoliberal powers to recognize Guaido is a serious sign that neoliberalism returns to its roots and slips towards fascism. It appears now that this is the only way to maintain some level of power.

[Feb 07, 2019] Bernie arrived on the scene like a time traveler from an era before the unbreakable stranglehold of neoliberalism

If Trump runs of the defense of neoliberalism platform he will lose. But Trump proved to be a bad, superficial politician, Republican Obama so to speak, so he may take this advice from his entourage. Trump proved to be a puppet of MIC and Israel, his tax cuts had shown that he is a regular "trickle down" neoliberal. So he attraction to voters is down substantially. Now
Polling is unambiguous here. If you define the "center" as a position somewhere between those of the two parties, when it comes to economic issues the public is overwhelmingly left of center; if anything, it's to the left of the Democrats. Tax cuts for the rich are the G.O.P.'s defining policy, but two-thirds of voters believe that taxes on the rich are actually too low, while only 7 percent believe that they're too high. Voters support Elizabeth Warren's proposed tax on large fortunes by a three-to-one majority. Only a small minority want to see cuts in Medicaid, even though such cuts have been central to every G.O.P. health care proposal in recent years.
Notable quotes:
"... Insiders have suggested that Trump plans to explicitly run against socialism in 2020. In fact, in playing up the dangers of socialism, he may be positioning himself to run against Bernie Sanders in 2020. ..."
"... Sanders's rebuttal to Trump's address gave us a preview of how he plans to respond to the mounting attacks on socialism from the Right. President Trump said tonight, quote, "We are born free, and we will stay free," end of quote. Well I say to President Trump, people are not truly free when they can't afford to go to the doctor when they are sick. People are not truly free when they cannot afford to buy the prescription drugs they desperately need. People are not truly free when they are unable to retire with dignity. People are not truly free when they are exhausted because they are working longer and longer hours for lower wages. People are not truly free when they cannot afford a decent place in which to live. People certainly are not free when they cannot afford to feed their families. ..."
"... As Dr Martin Luther King Jr said in 1968, and I quote, "This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor." What Dr. King said then was true, and it is true today, and it remains absolutely unacceptable. ..."
"... In essence what we're seeing here is Bernie Sanders challenging the popular equation of capitalism with democracy and freedom. This is the same point Bernie has been making for decades. "People have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech," he said in 1976. This Cold War dogma swept the pervasive reality of capitalist unfreedom - from the bondage of poverty to the perversions of formal democracy under the pressure of a dominant economic class - under the rug. In a 1986 interview, Bernie elaborated: ..."
"... All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small "d." I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who's making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So, if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well. ..."
"... The rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the Soviet Union relieved the capitalist state's elite of the need to keep shoring up the equation between capitalism and freedom. Capitalists and their ideology had triumphed, hegemony was theirs, and socialism was no real threat, a foggy memory of a distant era. But forty years of stagnating wages, rising living costs, and intermittent chaos caused by capitalist economic crisis remade the world - slowly, and then all at once. When Bernie Sanders finally took socialist class politics to the national stage three years ago, people were willing to listen. ..."
Feb 06, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

Christopher H. , February 06, 2019 at 01:36 PM

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/02/trump-state-of-union-socialism

02.06.2019

Trump Is Right to Be Afraid of Socialism
BY MEAGAN DAY

... I think he's scared," said Ocasio-Cortez of Trump's socialism remarks. "He sees that everything is closing in on him. And he knows he's losing the battle of public opinion when it comes to the actual substantive proposals that we're advancing to the public." Given the remarkable popularity of proposals like Bernie's Medicare for All and tuition-free college and Ocasio-Cortez's 70 percent top marginal tax rate, she's probably onto something.

Insiders have suggested that Trump plans to explicitly run against socialism in 2020. In fact, in playing up the dangers of socialism, he may be positioning himself to run against Bernie Sanders in 2020. That would be a smart move, since Bernie is the most popular politician in America and could very well be Trump's direct contender in the general election, if he can successfully dodge attacks from the establishment wing of the Democratic Party in the primary.

Sanders's rebuttal to Trump's address gave us a preview of how he plans to respond to the mounting attacks on socialism from the Right. President Trump said tonight, quote, "We are born free, and we will stay free," end of quote. Well I say to President Trump, people are not truly free when they can't afford to go to the doctor when they are sick. People are not truly free when they cannot afford to buy the prescription drugs they desperately need. People are not truly free when they are unable to retire with dignity. People are not truly free when they are exhausted because they are working longer and longer hours for lower wages. People are not truly free when they cannot afford a decent place in which to live. People certainly are not free when they cannot afford to feed their families.

As Dr Martin Luther King Jr said in 1968, and I quote, "This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor." What Dr. King said then was true, and it is true today, and it remains absolutely unacceptable.

In essence what we're seeing here is Bernie Sanders challenging the popular equation of capitalism with democracy and freedom. This is the same point Bernie has been making for decades. "People have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech," he said in 1976. This Cold War dogma swept the pervasive reality of capitalist unfreedom - from the bondage of poverty to the perversions of formal democracy under the pressure of a dominant economic class - under the rug. In a 1986 interview, Bernie elaborated:

All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small "d." I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who's making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So, if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well.

For more than four decades, Bernie made these points to relatively small audiences. In 2016, everything changed, and he now makes them to an audience of millions.

The rise of neoliberalism and the fall of the Soviet Union relieved the capitalist state's elite of the need to keep shoring up the equation between capitalism and freedom. Capitalists and their ideology had triumphed, hegemony was theirs, and socialism was no real threat, a foggy memory of a distant era. But forty years of stagnating wages, rising living costs, and intermittent chaos caused by capitalist economic crisis remade the world - slowly, and then all at once. When Bernie Sanders finally took socialist class politics to the national stage three years ago, people were willing to listen.

Bernie has been so successful at changing the conversation that the President now feels obligated to regurgitate Cold War nostrums about socialism and unfreedom to a new generation.

Good, let him. Each apocalyptic admonition is an opportunity for Bernie, and the rest of us socialists, to articulate a different perspective, one in which freedom and democracy are elusive at present but achievable through a society-wide commitment to economic and social equality. We will only escape "coercion, domination, and control" when we structure society to prioritize the well-being of the many over the desires of the greedy few.

Mr. Bill said in reply to anne... February 06, 2019 at 03:29 PM

A lot of the opinion part of what Paul Krugman says, in this article, maybe, doesn't ring quite true, although I don't dispute the facts.

Poll after poll show that 75% of us agree on 80% of the issues, regardless of which political tribe we identify with.

I tend to think that the real problem is that neither the GOP, which represents the top 1% of the economically comfortable, nor the Democrats who represent the top 10%, are representative of the majority of Americans.

Frantically trying to slice and dice the electorate into questionably accurate tranches, ignores the elephant in the room, Paul.

[Feb 06, 2019] https://www.businessinsider.com/state-of-the-union-transcript-trump-full-speech-2019-2

Feb 06, 2019 | www.businessinsider.com

Wages are rising at the fastest pace in decades, and growing for blue collar workers, who I promised to fight for, faster than anyone else. Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps. The United States economy is growing almost twice as fast today as when I took office, and we are considered far and away the hottest economy anywhere in the world. Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century. African-American, Hispanic-American and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded. Unemployment for Americans with disabilities has also reached an all-time low. More people are working now than at any time in our history -- 157 million.

We passed a massive tax cut for working families and doubled the child tax credit.

We virtually ended the estate, or death, tax on small businesses, ranches, and family farms.

We eliminated the very unpopular Obamacare individual mandate penalty -- and to give critically ill patients access to life-saving cures, we passed right to try.

My Administration has cut more regulations in a short time than any other administration during its entire tenure. Companies are coming back to our country in large numbers thanks to historic reductions in taxes and regulations.

We have unleashed a revolution in American energy -- the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world. And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy.

After 24 months of rapid progress, our economy is the envy of the world, our military is the most powerful on earth, and America is winning each and every day. Members of Congress: the State of our Union is strong. Our country is vibrant and our economy is thriving like never before.

On Friday, it was announced that we added another 304,000 jobs last month alone -- almost double what was expected. An economic miracle is taking place in the United States -- and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous partisan investigations.

If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn't work that way!

... ... ...

Both parties should be able to unite for a great rebuilding of America's crumbling infrastructure.

I know that the Congress is eager to pass an infrastructure bill -- and I am eager to work with you on legislation to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting edge industries of the future. This is not an option. This is a necessity.

The next major priority for me, and for all of us, should be to lower the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs -- and to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.

Already, as a result of my Administration's efforts, in 2018 drug prices experienced their single largest decline in 46 years.

But we must do more. It is unacceptable that Americans pay vastly more than people in other countries for the exact same drugs, often made in the exact same place. This is wrong, unfair, and together we can stop it.

... ... ...

he final part of my agenda is to protect America's National Security.

Over the last 2 years, we have begun to fully rebuild the United States Military -- with $700 billion last year and $716 billion this year. We are also getting other nations to pay their fair share. For years, the United States was being treated very unfairly by NATO -- but now we have secured a $100 billion increase in defense spending from NATO allies.

As part of our military build-up, the United States is developing a state-of-the-art Missile Defense System.

Under my Administration, we will never apologize for advancing America's interests.

For example, decades ago the United States entered into a treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capabilities. While we followed the agreement to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms. That is why I announced that the United States is officially withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF Treaty.

Perhaps we can negotiate a different agreement, adding China and others, or perhaps we can't -- in which case, we will outspend and out-innovate all others by far.

As part of a bold new diplomacy, we continue our historic push for peace on the Korean Peninsula. Our hostages have come home, nuclear testing has stopped, and there has not been a missile launch in 15 months. If I had not been elected President of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea with potentially millions of people killed. Much work remains to be done, but my relationship with Kim Jong Un is a good one. And Chairman Kim and I will meet again on February 27 and 28 in Vietnam.

Two weeks ago, the United States officially recognized the legitimate government of Venezuela, and its new interim President, Juan Guaido.

... ... ...

Our approach is based on principled realism -- not discredited theories that have failed for decades to yield progress. For this reason, my Administration recognized the true capital of Israel -- and proudly opened the American Embassy in Jerusalem.

Our brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years. In Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly 7,000 American heroes have given their lives. More than 52,000 Americans have been badly wounded. We have spent more than $7 trillion in the Middle East.

As a candidate for President, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.

When I took office, ISIS controlled more than 20,000 square miles in Iraq and Syria. Today, we have liberated virtually all of that territory from the grip of these bloodthirsty killers.

Now, as we work with our allies to destroy the remnants of ISIS, it is time to give our brave warriors in Syria a warm welcome home.

I have also accelerated our negotiations to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan. Our troops have fought with unmatched valor -- and thanks to their bravery, we are now able to pursue a political solution to this long and bloody conflict.

In Afghanistan, my Administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban. As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism. We do not know whether we will achieve an agreement -- but we do know that after two decades of war, the hour has come to at least try for peace.

... ... ...

My Administration has acted decisively to confront the world's leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran.

To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed on a country.

[Feb 02, 2019] N.J. governor signs LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum bill into law

Feb 02, 2019 | www.nbcnews.com

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation on Thursday mandating that every school in the state teach students about "the political, economic, and social contributions" of LGBTQ people and people with disabilities.

The legislation, which will apply starting in the 2020-21 school year, requires that the boards of education for middle and high schools ensure that instructional materials, such as text books, include accurate portrayals of the contributions made by LGBTQ people and those with disabilities.

[Feb 02, 2019] Google Employees Are Fighting With Executives Over Pay

Notable quotes:
"... In July, Bloomberg reported that, for the first time, more than 50 percent of Google's workforce were temps, contractors, and vendors. ..."
Feb 02, 2019 | www.wired.com

... ... ...

Asked whether they have confidence in CEO Sundar Pichai and his management team to "effectively lead in the future," 74 percent of employees responded "positive," as opposed to "neutral" or "negative," in late 2018, down from 92 percent "positive" the year before. The 18-point drop left employee confidence at its lowest point in at least six years. The results of the survey, known internally as Googlegeist, also showed a decline in employees' satisfaction with their compensation, with 54 percent saying they were satisfied, compared with 64 percent the prior year.

The drop in employee sentiment helps explain why internal debate around compensation, pay equity, and trust in executives has heated up in recent weeks -- and why an HR presentation from 2016 went viral inside the company three years later.

The presentation, first reported by Bloomberg and reviewed by WIRED, dates from July 2016, about a year after Google started an internal effort to curb spending . In the slide deck, Google's human-resources department presents potential ways to cut the company's $20 billion compensation budget. Ideas include: promoting fewer people, hiring proportionately more low-level employees, and conducting an audit to make sure Google is paying benefits "(only) for the right people." In some cases, HR suggested ways to implement changes while drawing little attention, or tips on how to sell the changes to Google employees. Some of the suggestions were implemented, like eliminating the annual employee holiday gift; most were not.

Another, more radical proposal floated inside the company around the same time didn't appear in the deck. That suggested converting some full-time employees to contractors to save money. A person familiar with the situation said this proposal was not implemented. In July, Bloomberg reported that, for the first time, more than 50 percent of Google's workforce were temps, contractors, and vendors.

[Jan 31, 2019] Linus Torvalds and others on Linux's systemd by By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Notable quotes:
"... I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example) ..."
"... Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users. ..."
"... If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck. (Or you become a second class citizen, being told that you have to rely on GNOME extensions that may break on every single new version of GNOME.) ..."
"... As a result, many traditional GNOME users have moved over to Cinnamon, XFCE, KDE, etc. But as systemd starts subsuming new functions, components like network-manager will only work on systemd or other components that are forced to be used due to a network of interlocking dependencies; and it may simply not be possible for these alternate desktops to continue to function, because there is [no] viable alternative to systemd supported by more and more distributions. ..."
| www.zdnet.com

So what do Linux's leaders think of all this? I asked them and this is what they told me.

Linus Torvalds said:

"I don't actually have any particularly strong opinions on systemd itself. I've had issues with some of the core developers that I think are much too cavalier about bugs and compatibility, and I think some of the design details are insane (I dislike the binary logs, for example) , but those are details, not big issues."

Theodore "Ted" Ts'o, a leading Linux kernel developer and a Google engineer, sees systemd as potentially being more of a problem. "The bottom line is that they are trying to solve some real problems that matter in some use cases. And, [that] sometimes that will break assumptions made in other parts of the system."

Another concern that Ts'o made -- which I've heard from many other developers -- is that the systemd move was made too quickly: "The problem is sometimes what they break are in other parts of the software stack, and so long as it works for GNOME, they don't necessarily consider it their responsibility to fix the rest of the Linux ecosystem."

This, as Ts'o sees it, feeds into another problem:

" Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users.

If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck. (Or you become a second class citizen, being told that you have to rely on GNOME extensions that may break on every single new version of GNOME.) "

Ts'o has an excellent point. GNOME 3.x has alienated both users and developers . He continued,

" As a result, many traditional GNOME users have moved over to Cinnamon, XFCE, KDE, etc. But as systemd starts subsuming new functions, components like network-manager will only work on systemd or other components that are forced to be used due to a network of interlocking dependencies; and it may simply not be possible for these alternate desktops to continue to function, because there is [no] viable alternative to systemd supported by more and more distributions. "

Of course, Ts'o continued, "None of these nightmare scenarios have happened yet. The people who are most stridently objecting to systemd are people who are convinced that the nightmare scenario is inevitable so long as we continue on the same course and altitude."

Ts'o is "not entirely certain it's going to happen, but he's afraid it will.

What I find puzzling about all this is that even though everyone admits that sysvinit needed replacing and many people dislike systemd, the distributions keep adopting it. Only a few distributions, including Slackware , Gentoo , PCLinuxOS , and Chrome OS , haven't adopted it.

It's not like there aren't alternatives. These include Upstart , runit , and OpenRC .

If systemd really does turn out to be as bad as some developers fear, there are plenty of replacements waiting in the wings. Indeed, rather than hear so much about how awful systemd is, I'd rather see developers spending their time working on an alternative.

[Jan 29, 2019] 7th Circuit Rules Age Discrimination Law Does Not Include Job Applicants

Notable quotes:
"... By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans. ..."
"... Kleber filed suit, pursuing claims for both disparate treatment and disparate impact under the ADEA. The Chicago Tribune notes in Hinsdale man loses appeal in age discrimination case that challenged experience caps in job ads that "Kleber had out of work and job hunting for three years" when he applied for the CareFusion job. ..."
"... Unfortunately, the seventh circuit has now held that the disparate impact section of the ADEA does not extend to job applicants. .Judge Michael Scudder, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority 8-4 opinion, which reverses an earlier 2-1 panel ruling last April in Kleber's favor that had initially overruled the district court's dismissal of Kleber's disparate impact claim. ..."
"... hiring discrimination is difficult to prove and often goes unreported. Only 3 percent have made a formal complaint. ..."
"... The decision narrowly applies to disparate impact claims of age discrimination under the ADEA. It is important to remember that job applicants are protected under the disparate treatment portion of the statute. ..."
"... I forbade my kids to study programming. ..."
"... I'm re reading the classic of Sociology Ain't No Makin It by Jay MacLeod, in which he studies the employment prospects of youths in the 1980s and determined that even then there was no stable private sector employment and your best option is a government job or to have an excellent "network" which is understandably hard for most people to achieve. ..."
"... I think the trick is to study something and programming, so the programming becomes a tool rather than an end. ..."
"... the problem is it is almost impossible to exit the programming business and join another domain. Anyone can enter it. (evidence – all the people with "engineering" degrees from India) Also my wages are now 50% of what i made 10 years ago (nominal). Also I notice that almost no one is doing sincere work. Most are just coasting, pretending to work with the latest toy (ie, preparing for the next interview). ..."
"... I am an "aging" former STEM worker (histology researcher) as well. Much like the IT landscape, you are considered "over-the-hill" at 35, which I turn on the 31st. ..."
"... Most of the positions in science and engineering fields now are basically "gig" positions, lasting a few months to a year. ..."
Jan 29, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She is currently writing a book about textile artisans.

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided in Kleber v. CareFusion Corporation last Wednesday that disparate impact liability under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) applies only to current employees and does not include job applicants.

The case was brought by Dale Kleber, an attorney, who applied for a senior position in CareFusion's legal department. The job description required applicants to have "3 to 7 years (no more than 7 years) of relevant legal experience."

Kleber was 58 at the time he applied and had more than seven years of pertinent experience. CareFusion hired a 29-year-old applicant who met but did not exceed the experience requirement.

Kleber filed suit, pursuing claims for both disparate treatment and disparate impact under the ADEA. The Chicago Tribune notes in Hinsdale man loses appeal in age discrimination case that challenged experience caps in job ads that "Kleber had out of work and job hunting for three years" when he applied for the CareFusion job.

Some Basics

Let's start with some basics, as the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) set out in a brief primer on basic US age discrimination law entitled Questions and Answers on EEOC Final Rule on Disparate Impact and "Reasonable Factors Other Than Age" Under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 . The EEOC began with a brief description of the purpose of the ADEA:

The purpose of the ADEA is to prohibit employment discrimination against people who are 40 years of age or older. Congress enacted the ADEA in 1967 because of its concern that older workers were disadvantaged in retaining and regaining employment. The ADEA also addressed concerns that older workers were barred from employment by some common employment practices that were not intended to exclude older workers, but that had the effect of doing so and were unrelated to job performance.

It was with these concerns in mind that Congress created a system that included liability for both disparate treatment and disparate impact. What's the difference between these two concepts?

According to the EEOC:

[The ADEA] prohibits discrimination against workers because of their older age with respect to any aspect of employment. In addition to prohibiting intentional discrimination against older workers (known as "disparate treatment"), the ADEA prohibits practices that, although facially neutral with regard to age, have the effect of harming older workers more than younger workers (known as "disparate impact"), unless the employer can show that the practice is based on an [Reasonable Factor Other Than Age (RFAO)]

The crux: it's much easier for a plaintiff to prove disparate impact, because s/he needn't show that the employer intended to discriminate. Of course, many if not most employers are savvy enough not to be explicit about their intentions to discriminate against older people as they don't wish to get sued.

District, Panel, and Full Seventh Circuit Decisions

The district court dismissed Kleber's disparate impact claim, on the grounds that the text of the statute- (§ 4(a)(2))- did not extend to outside job applicants. Kleber then voluntarily dismissed his separate claim for disparate treatment liability to appeal the dismissal of his disparate impact claim. No doubt he was aware – either because he was an attorney, or because of the legal advice received – that it is much more difficult to prevail on a disparate treatment claim, which would require that he establish CareFusion's intent to discriminate.

Or at least that was true before this decision was rendered.

Unfortunately, the seventh circuit has now held that the disparate impact section of the ADEA does not extend to job applicants. .Judge Michael Scudder, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority 8-4 opinion, which reverses an earlier 2-1 panel ruling last April in Kleber's favor that had initially overruled the district court's dismissal of Kleber's disparate impact claim.

The majority ruled:

By its terms, § 4(a)(2) proscribes certain conduct by employers and limits its protection to employees. The prohibited conduct entails an employer acting in any way to limit, segregate, or classify its employees based on age. The language of § 4(a)(2) then goes on to make clear that its proscriptions apply only if an employer's actions have a particular impact -- "depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to deprive any individual of em- ployment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect[ing] his status as an employee." This language plainly demonstrates that the requisite impact must befall an individual with "status as an employee." Put most simply, the reach of § 4(a)(2) does not extend to applicants for employment, as common dictionary definitions confirm that an applicant has no "status as an employee." (citation omitted)[opinion, pp. 3-4]

By contrast, in the disparate treatment part of the statute (§ 4(a)(1)):

Congress made it unlawful for an employer "to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privi- leges of employment, because of such individual's age."[opinion, p.6]

The court compared the disparate treatment section – § 4(a)(1) – directly with the disparate impact section – § 4(a)(2):

Yet a side-by-side comparison of § 4(a)(1) with § 4(a)(2) shows that the language in the former plainly covering appli-cants is conspicuously absent from the latter. Section 4(a)(2) says nothing about an employer's decision "to fail or refuse to hire any individual" and instead speaks only in terms of an employer's actions that "adversely affect his status as an employee." We cannot conclude this difference means nothing: "when 'Congress includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another' -- let alone in the very next provision -- the Court presumes that Congress intended a difference in meaning." (citations omitted)[opinion, pp. 6-7]

The majority's conclusion:

In the end, the plain language of § 4(a)(2) leaves room for only one interpretation: Congress authorized only employees to bring disparate impact claims.[opinion, p.8]

Greying of the Workforce

Older people account for a growing percentage of the workforce, as Reuters reports in Age bias law does not cover job applicants: U.S. appeals court :

People 55 or older comprised 22.4 percent of U.S. workers in 2016, up from 11.9 percent in 1996, and may account for close to one-fourth of the labor force by 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The greying of the workforce is "thanks to better health in older age and insufficient savings that require people to keeping working longer," according to the Chicago Tribune. Yet:

numerous hiring practices are under fire for negatively impacting older applicants. In addition to experience caps, lawsuits have challenged the exclusive use of on-campus recruiting to fill positions and algorithms that target job ads to show only in certain people's social media feeds.

Unless Congress amends the ADEA to include job applicants, older people will continue to face barriers to getting jobs.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

The [EEOC], which receives about 20,000 age discrimination charges every year, issued a report in June citing surveys that found 3 in 4 older workers believe their age is an obstacle in getting a job. Yet hiring discrimination is difficult to prove and often goes unreported. Only 3 percent have made a formal complaint. Allowing older applicants to challenge policies that have an unintentionally discriminatory impact would offer another tool for fighting age discrimination, Ray Peeler, associate legal counsel at the EEOC, has said.

How will these disparate impact claims now fare?

The Bottom Line

FordHarrison, a firm specialising in human relations law, noted in Seventh Circuit Limits Job Applicants' Age Discrimination Claims :

The decision narrowly applies to disparate impact claims of age discrimination under the ADEA. It is important to remember that job applicants are protected under the disparate treatment portion of the statute. There is no split among the federal appeals courts on this issue, making it an unlikely candidate for Supreme Court review, but the four judges in dissent read the statute as being vague and susceptible to an interpretation that includes job applicants.

Their conclusion: "a decision finding disparate impact liability for job applicants under the ADEA is unlikely in the near future."

Alas, for reasons of space, I will not consider the extensive dissent. My purpose in writing this post is to discuss the majority decision, not to opine on which side made the better arguments.

antidlc , January 27, 2019 at 3:28 pm

8-4 opinion. Which judges ruled for the majority? Which judges ruled for the minority opinion?

Sorry,,,don't have time to research right now. It says a Trump appointee wrote the majority opinion. Who were the other 7?

grayslady , January 27, 2019 at 6:09 pm

There were 3 judges who dissented in whole and one who dissented in part. Of the three full dissensions, two were Clinton appointees (including the Chief Justice, who was one of the dissenters) and one was a Reagan appointee. The partial dissenter was also a Reagan appointee.

run75441 , January 27, 2019 at 11:25 pm

ant: Not your law clerk, read the opinion. Easterbook and Wood dissented. Find the other two and and you can figure out who agreed.

YankeeFrank , January 27, 2019 at 3:58 pm

"depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect[ing] his status as an employee."

–This language plainly demonstrates that the requisite impact must befall an individual with "status as an employee."

So they totally ignore the first part of the sentence -- "depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to deprive any individual of employment opportunities " -- "employment opportunities" clearly applies to applicants.

Its as if these judges cannot make sense of the English language. Hopefully the judges on appeal will display better command of the language.

Alfred , January 27, 2019 at 5:56 pm

I agree. "Employment opportunities," in the "plain language" so meticulously respected by the 7th Circuit, must surely refer at minimum to 'the chance to apply for a job and to have one's application fairly considered'. It seems on the other hand a stretch to interpret the phrase to mean only 'the chance to keep a job one already has'. Both are important, however; to split them would challenge even Solomonic wisdom, as I suppose the curious decision discussed here demonstrates. I am less convinced that the facts as presented here establish a clear case of age discrimination. True, they point in that direction. But a hypothetical 58-year old who only earned a law degree in his or her early 50s, perhaps after an earlier career in paralegal work, could have legitimately applied for a position requiring 3 to 7 years of "relevant legal experience." That last phrase, is of course, quite weasel-y: what counts as "relevant" and what counts as "legal" experience would under any circumstances be subject to (discriminatory) interpretation. The limitation of years of experience in the job announcement strikes me as a means to keep the salary within a certain budgetary range as prescribed either by law or collective bargaining.

KLG , January 27, 2019 at 6:42 pm

Almost like the willful misunderstanding of "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State "? Of course, that militia also meant slave patrols and the occasional posse to put down the native "savages," but still.

Lambert Strether , January 28, 2019 at 2:08 am

> "depriv[ing] or tend[ing] to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect[ing] his status as an employee."

Says "or." Not "and."

Magic Sam , January 27, 2019 at 5:53 pm

They are failing to find what they don't want to find.

Magic Sam , January 27, 2019 at 5:58 pm

Being pro-Labor will not get you Federalist Society approval to be nominated to the bench by Trump. This decision came down via the ideological makeup of the court, not the letter of the law. Their stated pretext is obviously b.s.. It contradicts itself.

Mattie , January 27, 2019 at 6:05 pm

Yep. That is when their Utah et al property mgt teams began breaking into homes, tossing contents – including pets – outside & changing locks

Even when borrowers were in approved HAMP, etc. pipelines

PLUG: If you haven't yet – See "The Florida Project"

nothing but the truth , January 27, 2019 at 7:18 pm

as an aging "stem" (cough coder) worker who typically has to look for a new "gig" every few years, i am trembling at this.

Luckily, i bought a small business when I had a few saved up, so I won't starve.

Health insurance is another matter.

I forbade my kids to study programming.

Lambert Strether , January 28, 2019 at 2:09 am

Plumbing. Electrical work. Permaculture. Get those kids Jackpot-ready!

Joe Well , January 28, 2019 at 11:40 am

I'm re reading the classic of Sociology Ain't No Makin It by Jay MacLeod, in which he studies the employment prospects of youths in the 1980s and determined that even then there was no stable private sector employment and your best option is a government job or to have an excellent "network" which is understandably hard for most people to achieve. So I'm genuinely interested in what possible options there are for anyone entering the job market today or God help you, re-entering. I am guessing the barriers to entry to those trades are quite high but would love to be corrected.

jrs , January 28, 2019 at 1:39 pm

what is the point of being jackpot ready if you can't even support yourself today? To fantasize about collapse while sleeping in a rented closet and driving for Uber? In that case one's personal collapse has already happened, which will matter a lot more to an individual than any potential jackpot.

Plumbers and electricians can make money now of course (although yea barriers to entry do seem high, don't you kind of have to know people to get in those industries?). But permaculture?

Ford Prefect , January 28, 2019 at 1:00 pm

I think the trick is to study something and programming, so the programming becomes a tool rather than an end. A couple of my kids used to ride horses. One of the instructors and stable owners said that a lot of people went to school for equine studies and ended up shoveling horse poop for a living. She said the thing to do was to study business and do the equestrian stuff as a hobby/minor. That way you came out prepared to run a business and hire the equine studies people to clean the stalls.

jrs , January 28, 2019 at 1:36 pm

Do you actually see that many jobs requiring something and programming though? I haven't really. There seems no easy transition out of software work which that would make possible either. Might as well just study the "something".

rd , January 28, 2019 at 2:21 pm

Programming is a means to an end, not the end itself. If all you do is program, then you are essentially a machine lathe operator, not somebody creating the products the lathe operators turn out.

Understanding what needs to be done helps with structured programs and better input/output design. In turn, structured programming is a good tool to understand the basics of how to manage tasks. At the higher level, Fred Brooks book "The Mythical Man-Month" has a lot of useful project management information that can be re-applied for non computer program development.

We are doing a lot of work with mobile computing and data collection to assist in our regular work. The people doing this are mainly non-computer scientists that have learned enough programming to get by.

The engineering programs that we use are typically written more by engineers than by programmers as the entire point behind the program is to apply the theory into a numerical computation and presentation system. Programmers with a graphic design background can assist in creating much better user interfaces.

If you have some sort of information theory background (GIS, statistics, etc.) then big data actually means something.

nothing but the truth , January 28, 2019 at 7:02 pm

the problem is it is almost impossible to exit the programming business and join another domain. Anyone can enter it. (evidence – all the people with "engineering" degrees from India) Also my wages are now 50% of what i made 10 years ago (nominal). Also I notice that almost no one is doing sincere work. Most are just coasting, pretending to work with the latest toy (ie, preparing for the next interview).

Now almost every "interview" requires writing a coding exam. Which other profession will make you write an exam for 25-30 year veterans? Can you write your high school exam again today? What if your profession requires you to write it a couple of times almost every year?

Hepativore , January 28, 2019 at 2:56 pm

I am an "aging" former STEM worker (histology researcher) as well. Much like the IT landscape, you are considered "over-the-hill" at 35, which I turn on the 31st. While I do not have children and never intend to get married, many biotech companies consider this the age at which a worker is getting long in the tooth. This is because there is the underlying assumption that is when people start having familial obligations.

Most of the positions in science and engineering fields now are basically "gig" positions, lasting a few months to a year. A lot of people my age are finding how much harder it is to find any position at all in these areas as there is a massive pool of people to choose from, even for permatemp work simply because serfs in their mid-30s might get uppity about benefits like family health plans or 401k

Steve , January 27, 2019 at 7:32 pm

I am 59 and do not mind having employers discriminate against me due to age. ( I also need a job) I had my own business and over the years got quite damaged. I was a contractor specializing in older (historical) work.

I was always the lead worker with many friends and other s working with me. At 52 I was given a choice of very involved neck surgery or quit. ( no small businesses have disability insurance!)

I shut down everything and helped my friends who worked for me take some of the work or find something else. I was also a nationally published computer consultant a long time ago and graphic artist.

Reality is I can still do many things but I do nothing as well as I did when I was younger and the cost to employers for me is far higher than a younger person. I had my chance and I chose poorly. Younger people, if that makes them abetter fit, deserve a chance now more than I do.

Joe Well , January 27, 2019 at 7:49 pm

I'm sorry for your predicament. Do you mean you chose poorly when you chose not to get neck surgery? What was the choice you regret?

Steve , January 27, 2019 at 10:12 pm

My career choices. Choosing to close my business to possibly avoid the surgery was actually a good choice.

Joe Well , January 28, 2019 at 11:47 am

I'm sorry for your challenges but I don't think there were many good careers you could have chosen and it would have required a crystal ball to know which were the good ones. Americans your age entered the job market just after the very end of the Golden Age of labor conditions and have been weathering the decline your entire working lives. At least I entered the job market when everyone knew for years things were falling apart. It's not your fault. You were cheated plain and simple.

Lambert Strether , January 28, 2019 at 2:14 am

> I had my chance and I chose poorly.

I don't see how it's possible to predict the labor market years in advance. Why blame yourself for poor choices when so much chance is involved?

With a Jobs Guarantee, such questions would not arise. I also don't think it's only a question of doing, but a question of sharing ("experience, strength, and hope," as AA -- a very successful organization! -- puts it, in a way of thinking that has wide application).

Dianne Shatin , January 27, 2019 at 7:46 pm

Unelected plutocrat and his international syndicate funded by former IBM artificial intelligence developer and social darwinian. data manipulation electronic platforms and social media are at the levels of power in the USA. Anti justice, anti enlightenment, etc.

Since the installation of GW Bush by the Supreme Court, almost 20 yrs. ago, they have tunneled deeply, speaking through propaganda machines such as Rush Limbaugh gaining traction .making it over the finish line with KGB and Russian oligarch backing. The net effect on us? The loss of all built on the foundation of the enlightenment and an exceptional nation no king, a nation of, for and by the people, and the rule of law. There is nothing Judeo-Christian about social darwinism but is eerily similar to National Socialism (Nazis). The ruling againt the plaintiff by the 7th circuit in the U.S. and their success in creating chaos in Great Britain vis a vis "Brexit" by fascist Lafarge Inc. are indicators how easy their ascent.
ows how powerful they have become.

anon y'mouse , January 27, 2019 at 9:19 pm

They had better get ready to lower the SSI retirement age to 55, then. Or I predict blood in the streets.

jrs , January 28, 2019 at 1:49 pm

I wish it was so. They just expect the older crowd to die quietly.

How is it legal , January 27, 2019 at 10:04 pm

Where are the Bipartisan Presidential Candidates and Legislators on oral and verbal condemnation of Age Discrimination , along with putting teeth into Age Discrimination Laws, and Tax Policy. – nowhere to be seen , or heard, that I've noticed; particularly in Blue ™ California, which is famed for Age Discrimination of those as young as 36 years of age, since Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed anyone over 35, over the hill in the early 2000's , and never got crushed for it by the media, or the Politicians, as he should have (particularly in Silicon Valley).

I know those Republicans are venal, but I dare anyone to show me a meaningful Age Discrimination Policy Proposal, pushed by Blue Obama, Hillary, even Sanders and Jill Stein. Certainly none of California's Nationally known (many well over retirement age) Gubernatorial and Legislative Democratic Politicians: Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Ro Khanna (or the lesser known California Federal State and Local Democratic Politicians) have ever addressed it; despite the fact that homelessness deaths of those near 'retirement age' have been frighteningly increasing in California's obscenely wealthy homelessness 'hotspots,' such as Silicon Valley.

Such a tragic issue, which has occurred while the last over a decade of Mainstream News and Online Pundits, have Proclaimed 50 to be the new 30. Sadistic. I have no doubt this is linked to the ever increasing Deaths of Despair and attempted and successful suicides of those under, and just over retirement age– while the US has an average Senate age of 65, and a President and 2020 Presidential contenders, over 70 (I am not at all saying older persons shouldn't be elected, nor that younger persons shouldn't be elected, I'm pointing out the imbalance, insanity, and cruelty of it).

Further, age discrimination has been particularly brutal to single, divorced, and widowed females , whom have most assuredly made far, far less on the dollar than males (if they could even get hired for the position, or leave the kids alone, and housekeeping undone, to get a job):

Patrick Button, an assistant economics professor at Tulane University, was part of a research project last year that looked at callback rates from resumes in various entry-level jobs. He said women seeking the positions appeared to be most affected.

"Based on over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men," according to an abstract of the study.

Jacquelyn James, co-director of the Center on Aging and Work at Boston College, said age discrimination in employment is a crucial issue in part because of societal changes that are forcing people to delay retirement. Moves away from defined-¬benefit pension plans to less assured forms of retirement savings are part of the reason.

Lambert Strether , January 28, 2019 at 2:15 am

> "Based on over 40,000 job applications, we find robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those near retirement age, but considerably less evidence of age discrimination against men," according to an abstract of the study.

Well, these aren't real women, obviously. If they were, the Democrats would already be taking care of them.

jrs , January 28, 2019 at 1:58 pm

From the article: The greying of the workforce is "thanks to better health in older age and insufficient savings that require people to keeping working longer," according to the Chicago Tribune.

Get on the clue train Chicago Tribune, because your like W and Trump not knowing how a supermarket works, that's how dense you are. Even if one saved, and even if one won the luck lottery in terms of job stability and adequate income to save from, healthcare alone is a reason to work, either to get employer provided if lucky, or to work without it and put most of one's money toward an ACA plan or the like if not lucky. Yes the cost of almost all other necessities has also increased greatly, but even parts of the country without a high cost of living have unaffordable healthcare.

Enquiring Mind , January 27, 2019 at 11:07 pm

Benefits may be 23-30% or so of payroll and represent another expense management opportunity for the diligent executive. One piece of low-hanging fruit is the age-related healthcare cost. If you hire young people, who under-consume healthcare relative to older cohorts, you save money, ceteris paribus. They have lower premiums, lower loss experience and they rebound more quickly, so you hit a triple at your first at-bat swinging at that fruit. Yes, metaphors are fungible along with every line on the income statement.

If your company still has the vestiges of a pension or similar blandishment, you may even back-load contributions more aggressively, of course to the extent allowable. That added expense diligence will pay off when those annuated employees leave before hitting the more expensive funding years.

NB, the above reflects what I saw and heard at a Fortune 500 company.

rd , January 28, 2019 at 12:56 pm

Another good reason for a Canadian style single payer system. That turns a deciding factor into a non-factor.

Jack Hayes , January 28, 2019 at 8:15 am

A reason why the court system is overburdened is lack of clarity in laws and regulations. Fix the disparity between the two sections of the law so that courts don't have to decide which section rules.

rd , January 28, 2019 at 2:24 pm

Polarization has made tweaks and repairs of laws impossible.

Jeff N , January 28, 2019 at 10:17 am

Yep. Many police departments *legally* refuse to hire anyone over 35 years old (exceptions for prior police experience or certain military service)

Joe Well , January 28, 2019 at 12:36 pm

It amazes me how often the government will give itself exemptions to its own laws and principles, and also how often "progressive" nonprofits and political groups will also give themselves such exemptions, for instance, regarding health insurance, paid overtime, paid training, etc. that they are legally required to provide.

Ford Prefect , January 28, 2019 at 2:27 pm

There are specific physical demands in things like policing. So it doesn't make much sense to hire 55 year old rookie policemen when many policemen are retiring at that age.

Arthur Dent , January 28, 2019 at 2:59 pm

Its an interesting quandary. We have older staff that went back to school and changed careers. They do a good job and get paid at a rate similar to the younger staff with similar job-related experience. However, they will be retiring at about the same time as the much more experienced staff, so they will not be future succession replacements for the senior staff.

So we also have to hire people in their 20s and 30s because that will be the future when people like me retire in a few years. That could very well be the reason for the specific wording of the job opening (I haven't read the opinion). I know of current hiring for a position where the firm is primarily looking for somebody in their 20s or early 30s for precisely that reason. The staff currently doing the work are in their 40s and 50s and need to start bringing up the next generation. If somebody went back to school late and was in their 40s or 50s (so would be at a lower billing rate due to lack of job related experience), they would be seriously considered. But the firm would still be left with the challenge of having to hire another person at the younger age within a couple of years to build the succession. Once people make it past 5 years at the firm, they tend to stay for a long time with senior staff generally having been at the firm for 20 years or more, so hiring somebody really is a long-term investment.

[Jan 23, 2019] The wall, barrier system or whatever you want to call it presently exists on a number of sections of the border

A lot of grandstanding over a minor issue.
Jan 23, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Concerning the partial shutdown and and the border barriers 1 - The banks, credit unions and any other financial institutions that can lend money are missing a chance to build a lot of good will in this situation. Good will is an item that any good business plan must take into account even of it is impossible to quantify on paper. Good will leads to more customers. Businesses want to acquire more customers. The 800k federal employees now on furlough have legislated assurance that their back pay will be quickly forthcoming when the pause ends. Sooo! Make them no interest loans in the amount of their postponed pay. You will not be sorry if you do that. I don't know if that could be extended to contract employees since the contract that includes their services may not insure back pay.

2 - The wall, barrier system or whatever you want to call it presently exists on a number of sections of the border. Pelosi, Schumer and the other Democrats who prattle about the "immorality" and uselessness of physical border defenses should be asked each and every day if they want the present border barriers demolished so that anyone can cross the border whenever they want and anywhere they want. California is the destination of choice of these economic migrants. If the border barriers are taken down, there will be IMO a mass migration into what is now the United States and especially into California from Latin American and then inevitably from all over the world. Ask the Democrats, every day if they want the existing border barriers taken down, Ask them! pl


TTG , 4 hours ago

The current fight over "the wall" and funding for that wall is pure politics on both sides. We are under a partial government shutdown for the sake of a symbol. Some kind of border barrier has been in existence since the 90s and the "Secure Border Act" of 2006 called for close to 700 miles of double fence barriers. Both Republican and Democratic legislatures and presidencies have maintained and added to this fencing as well as doubling the size of the CBP. According to a December 2016 GAO report on securing the SW border, the CBP spent $2.4 billion between 2007 and 2015 to deploy tactical infrastructure (TI) - fencing, gates, roads, bridges, lighting and drainage infrastructure distributed along the entire SW border area. That includes 654 miles of fencing and 5,000 miles of roads.

A total of $1.7 billion was appropriated in FY17 and FY18 for new and replacement barriers and fences. Most of those funds have been obligated to the Corp of Engineers and much of that has been awarded to contractors. Only a small percentage (6%) has been paid out for completed contracts. The following projects account for close to half of those funds:

- In New Mexico to replace 20 miles of fencing with bollard wall for $73 million. Contract was awarded in February 2018. Construction started in April 2018 and was completed in September 2018.

- In the Rio Grande Valley to build 8 miles of 18 foot bollard wall and replace existing levee wall for $167 million to begin in February 2019.

- In Arizona to build/replace 32 miles of "primary pedestrian wall" for $324 million to begin in April 2019.

- Near San Diego to replace 14 miles of 8-10 foot metal wall/fence with 18-30 foot tall bollard wall system for $287 million to begin in July 2019.

Trump's current demand for $5.7 billion covers an additional 243 miles of fencing mostly in the Rio Grande Valley. It'll probably be 2020 before a single bollard is set from that $5.7 billion and several years after that to issue the contracts and complete the construction. Given the shortcoming in the present border fences, that $5.7 billion would be better spent on replacing the present barriers in the most needed areas rather constructing new fence in less vulnerable areas. Just to maintain and replace what we have should require close to a billion dollars a year. I say again, this current battle over $5.7 billion for "the wall" is political posturing by both sides.

The more important demand made by Trump was the $800 million to address the humanitarian crisis on the border. These funds would provide for improved care/processing of refugees/asylum seekers, 2,750 more border agents and 75 more immigration judges. In my opinion, that would be a wise expense. I think there ought to be ten times that number of new border agents/officers to better address the refugee problem (humanitarian crisis) which will probably remain for many years. Climate change is making drought, hurricanes, floods and mudslides the new normal in Central America. The farming economy in this region, which includes southern Mexico is collapsing. Local governments are dysfunctional and impotent. These people are going to migrate or die in place.

If you want to declare a national emergency, we could use eminent domain to condemn and buy a lot of farmland at cost from corporate agribusinesses and start a "40 acres and a mule" program for refugee farm families and any native American family who desire a new start.

Mark Logan -> TTG , 2 hours ago
Have to agree. Trump only asked for $1.6 billion for his wall in his 2019 budget...and got it. He then decided to have a fight, one that he was loath to have when the Republicans held the majority in the House.

IMO Pelosi and co have also decided this is a good place to have a Waterloo. This isn't a struggle for a wall it's a struggle for dominance. They await a tide of public opinion to decide it.

Eugene Owens -> TTG , 3 hours ago
A pox on both their houses!
John P. Teschke , 9 hours ago
They should shut down the whole regime. The first things to be shut down should be the myriad of bases occupying foreign soil, particularly the bases that support the destabilization of middle eastern countries. ReplyShare › Twitter Facebook
James Thomas , 9 hours ago
I am on the left and I don't have a problem with the wall. That said, if you really want to reduce illegal immigration exit controls would be more effective (and much more cost effective). I went through a whole lot of trouble to get a work visa to work legally in Poland in the late 90s - and I wouldn't have bothered if Poland didn't have exit controls. Almost every country in the world has exit controls ... except for Canada and the US.
Pat Lang Mod -> James Thomas , 7 hours ago
You need a wide variety of techniques. This will of necessity include border barriers.
EdwardAmame -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
Oh cut it out. The wall is bullshit. If Trump was actually serious about illegal immigration he'd be pushing E-Verify for all US businesses to determine the eligibility of employees. But the GOP business lobby would never allow that so we get dog and pony shows like this so that Trump can act like he really means business.
Pat Lang Mod -> EdwardAmame , 14 minutes ago
Well, at last you have made a logical point. E-verify should be made mandatory. You would probably loose a lot of friends if it were. BTW, your many insulting comments today have caused me after many years to ban you.
ex-PFC Chuck , a day ago
With regard to #1 I'm not holding my breath. Fundamental to the financial sector's business model is opportunistic predation. As Michael Hudson relentlessly documents in his recently published and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year , it has been this way since money was invented in the ancient Near East over five thousand years ago. In today's world few banksters can be expected to forego invoking the fine print terms regarding the late fees and interest rate hikes, especially considering the fact the careers of the CEOs and CFOs of publicly traded companies live or die by the next quarterly earnings report.
https://amzn.to/2TfN2ht
Sadly Hudson's important book is getting little traction. He could only get this published on a print-to-order basis in spite of the fact he has about a dozen prior books to his credit. As a PtO book it will not be stocked by chain book stores.
MP98 , a day ago
They would never admit it, but of courser the Democrats want all the barriers gone and an open border.
There are approx. 22 mil. illegal aliens in this country and the Democrats want more and more.
Then they can push for amnesty (which the swamp Republicans, in their gross stupidity, will go along with) and PRESTO: 22 mil. plus entitled Democrat voters.
Who needs those redneck goober
MP98 , a day ago
They would never admit it, but of courser the Democrats want all the barriers gone and an open border.
There are approx. 22 mil. illegal aliens in this country and the Democrats want more and more.
Then they can push for amnesty (which the swamp Republicans, in their gross stupidity, will go along with) and PRESTO: 22 mil. plus entitled Democrat voters.
Who needs those redneck goober (white male)Trump voters, anyway?
Eugene Owens , 4 hours ago
http://www.hurriyetdailynew...
ex-PFC Chuck , 6 hours ago
As Philip Giraldi points out in a post a The Unz Review today, the Democratic establishment isn't opposed to walls per se. It depends on who's building it and for what purpose.

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi...

RaisingMac , 7 hours ago
Pelosi, Schumer and the other Democrats who prattle about the immorality and uselessness of physical border defenses should be asked each and every day if they want the present border barriers demolished so that anyone can cross the border whenever they want and anywhere they want The wall, barrier system or whatever you want to call it presently exists on a number of sections of the border.

In honor of Sen. Chuck 'Shomer', I vote that we call our border barrier a fence , just as Israel does:

Play Hide
Pat Lang Mod -> RaisingMac , 5 hours ago
You are repeating what I wrote? Tell the Dems, not me.
Lewis.Ballard , 10 hours ago
Sir: While not directly on point, I knuckled under and signed up with Disqus simply to say how much I have appreciated this committee of correspondence over the years. Seeing your post recently about conversing with Glubb Pasha was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.
Eric Newhill , 13 hours ago
IMO, we should sell coastal California to Mexico for $100 billion. Then use that money to build a wall from Oregon to Brownsville, TX. Solves two problems in one fell swoop.
It sure does seem like the lenders are missing an excellent opportunity for a nearly risk free public relations campaign as well as sales opportunities. Get these furloughed workers in the door and give them a furlough loan and then get them interested in home loans, auto loans...whatever they're qualified for. Should be a no-brainer.
Pat Lang Mod -> Eric Newhill , 11 hours ago
I would rather buy Baja California from Mexico.
peter hodges -> Pat Lang , 3 hours ago
We would still be stuck with LA and the Bay Area.
Pat Lang Mod -> peter hodges , 11 minutes ago
Why?
Stuart Wood , 16 hours ago
Trump, his wall, and the shutdown

Trump is our chief executive charged with the day to day running of the government and the proverbial "making the trains run on time" for government functions. All these functions work for him, not the legislative branch. His partial shutdown of the government reminds me of the classic film Blazing Saddles where the black sheriff, played by Cleavon Little, takes himself hostage by holding a gun to his own head to hold off a mob angry at having a black appointed sheriff for their town. It worked in the film. Let's hope it does not work in Washington.

Fred -> Stuart Wood , 14 hours ago
"This, I believe, is what the majority of the populace want." ... " his wall"
I believe that is why he won the election.
Harlan Easley -> Fred , 12 hours ago
Fred, just finished the book you recommended "A Disease in the Public Mind - Why We Fought the Civil War" by Thomas Flemming. The most balanced and fair nonfiction historical book I have read on this subject.

Also depressing because History is repeating itself. Not rhyming but repeating itself. The modern day abolitionist is convinced of their morale superiority over the deplorables. Just look at the Fake News regarding the Catholic School boys. One abolitionist said on Twitter that he wish they were dead along with their parents.

I hate the agenda of the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican Party but I hate these modern day abolitionist more since they desire to kill people just because they don't agree with their transgender, open borders anarchy, and taxes on the little guy for a Climate Change problem that doesn't exist. The Yellow Vest movement is a push back against this madness.

Instead of talking Medicare for All, jobs for everyone, prosperity, taking care of your countryman the political narrative is on bizarre subjects due to the Elite knowing Globalization is destroying huge sections of Western Civilization. The Yellow Vest have destroyed 60% of the Speed Cameras deployed to catch the little guy going 5 m.p.h. over the speed limit or running a red light that is timed to get you. It has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with raising money off the individuals who are already struggling to survive.

For the top 26 billionaires in the world to have as much wealth as the bottom 3.8 billion people in the world is barbaric. Globalization has led to drastic income inequality and the fuse is burning.

Fred -> Harlan Easley , 9 hours ago
Harlan,

Glad you read the book. I agree when you say " The modern day abolitionist is convinced of their morale superiority over the deplorables." I wrote an early piece about that existential angst of this newest generation. (Hard to believe it has already been two years.) https://turcopolier.typepad...

I think this generation is waking up to having 'been played' by the politicians. What is being missed in this latest effort to control the narrative is 1) Anti-Semitism in the Women's march which led many groups, inluding the DNC, to withdraw support. 2) A turnout that's roughly 90% lower than two years ago and a far, far cry from what was promoted. Others in random order: Unempolyment is way down. The stock market is up almost 10% since the shutdown began. Turmp is directing that the armed forces leave Syria (Afghanistan is probably next) and North Korea is making further move gestures towards actual denuclearization.

Eric Newhill -> Fred , 8 hours ago
What will be interesting to see, in the long run, is if the Democrats can keep the Hispanic vote. Being godless sodomites, the new age abolitionists are making war on Catholics and, it just so happens, that Hispanics, by and large, are serious about their Catholicism.
Pat Lang Mod -> Eric Newhill , 8 hours ago
Yes. It seems likely that the Hispanics will gradually gravitate to the GOP.
EdwardAmame -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
Maybe, but not the GOP that currently exists.
Harlan Easley -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
I don't see it. California proves otherwise. Texas and Georgia have become competitive because of illegal immigrants having American born kids. The abolitionist say demography is destiny and I tend to agree. Shows how racist they are. And how much they hate white people.

I see the Republican Party becoming noncompetitive to extinct over the next 20 years. And the Democrat Party separating into 2 parties. The Progressive Wing versus the Moderate Wing. Of course it could just all burned down before then and I wouldn't be surprised. I plan to read your book next and have no doubt I will enjoy it. I've read the free excerpts you provided and enjoyed them.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if future white generations in America do not emigrate to Russia. I hate to be pessimistic but the monkey brain of man is incurable and hate runs rampant. The modern day white abolitionist will be sideline to the trailer park but they are too stupid to see it.

We need a new party in America that is for all colors of citizens and an economic populist platform along with a social justice system that is vibrant.

The Democrat Party is the most vile/racist/bigoted party in the world right now. This modern abolitionist attitude that killed many innocent Iraqi's due to no fault of their own and believes they can dictate to countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, and Russia on how to live because they are gender neutral is going to come back and destroy them. Either through a home grown movement such as the Yellow Vest or worse to all of our detriment.

Eric Newhill -> Pat Lang , 5 hours ago
Sir, It may already be happening. An NPR/PBS/Marist January poll (that's not Fox/Breitbart) shows approval of the performance of Trump among Hispanics rising from 31% to 50% since the same poll was performed just prior to the shutdown. I can't figure out if Trump is a 10th level Jedi master or if it's a case of the one eyed man being king in the land of the blind.
Pat Lang Mod -> Stuart Wood , 15 hours ago
Ah, the hostage taking meme.
EdwardAmame -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
Trump says give me X number of $$s for my border wall (thought balloon over his head says "so I can get re-elected") or I shut down the gov't. What's to keep him from doing it again if the Dems cave this time?

On a side note: it's pretty appalling that you and your mostly Cuckoo bird commenters think this is the way the republic should be run. So sad what happened to this blog.

Greco , a day ago
We have Democrats like Sandy Ocasio-Cortez demanding the abolition of ICE. Is that one of so-called improvements to border security the Democrats are seeking with popular backing?

If left to their devices, the Democrats would happily do away with the border altogether. Don't take my word for it. Take the words of the two-time failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She gave a paid, private speech in Brazil where she claimed, "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere." That's all fine and dandy, I'm sure, but oddly she didn't make that proclamation publicly on the campaign trail.

EdwardAmame -> Greco , 6 hours ago
You are so full of shit. Dems want borders and they want border security based on real experience, not a mnemonic device dreamed up by Roger Stone to focus candidate Trump on immigration issues.
Stuart Wood , a day ago
I think you are putting words in Pelosi's and the democrats mouths. I have heard of none of them espousing getting rid of the border barriers. I believe they view a wall as a dumb idea but are for other improvements for border security. This, I believe, is what the majority of the populace want.
Pat Lang Mod -> Stuart Wood , 15 hours ago
Pelosi and any number of other leading Dems have said that border barriers are immoral. The logical conclusion from those statements is that ALL border barriers are immoral. If that is their position then they should advocate removal of existing barriers. If they do not, then they are politically self serving liars.
EdwardAmame -> Pat Lang , 6 hours ago
Bullshit. She said Trump's wall is immoral. My take is that what is immoral referred to using a gov't shutdown to get it.
Stuart Wood -> Pat Lang , 13 hours ago
No. Pelosi said the wall was immoral.
Pat Lang Mod -> Stuart Wood , 11 hours ago
She made it clear that she thinks all barriers are immoral and does not differetiate between the two. Ask her.
mike2000917 -> Stuart Wood , a day ago
The walls in place currently are highly effective. Five billion would put more walls in areas focusing illegal crossers into smaller zones.

The Democrats are all but endorsing open borders. Whether it's just to thwart Trump or if they actually want no borders, the affect is the same.

EdwardAmame -> mike2000917 , 6 hours ago
Tell that to the angry ranchers along the southern Texas borders who think trump's wall is a political stunt that will ruin them economically.

There is no illegal alien southern border crisis in 2019 -- and the migrant caravan that had so many republicans freaked out ultimately wound up in Tijuana, across the wall from San Diego. Because that's where migrant families wind up, at official points of entry so they can apply for asylum.

Pat Lang Mod -> mike2000917 , 15 hours ago
Thank you for your support. Now, tell the Democrat leaders that!
Pat Lang Mod -> Stuart Wood , a day ago
They should be asked.
Britam -> Pat Lang , a day ago
Sir;
The problem with the idea of banks building 'good will' is that the financial sector, by and large, has moved on from old fashioned business models to an 'enrich the insiders at everyone else's expense' model.
My local bank that I use has signs in the lobby directing workers discommoded by the shutdown to apply at the small loan desk. I do not know what incentives are on offer, but my unpleasant experience with the bank once before does not give me much hope of the bank acting altruistically.
William K Black, who headed part of the Federal response to the 'Savings and Loan' crisis in the 1980's has called this trend the building of a "criminogenic environment."
As for the wall fiasco, I would ask Chuck and Nancy; "Who do you consider as being Americans?" Then tell them to serve that group, no one else. The last time I looked, no one had abolished the Nation State.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Barbara Ann -> Britam , 14 hours ago
But that is exactly the problem; global corporations and their lobbyists are doing their utmost to abolish the Nation State. Nation states are a PITA, from the Globalist POV. They make regulations, have borders impeding the rampant denuding of talent pools and worst of all occasionally erect trade barriers to favor their domestic industries. All of this is harmful to the corporate profits of a global business. What we are witnessing in the US and elsewhere is the push back against this drive to maximize profits at the cost of huge sections of national populations.

Trump may be a billionaire businessman with worldwide interests, but real estate is different. It employs largely local labor and is not vulnerable to 'protectionist' government policies in the same way. This is key to understanding how a billionaire like Trump can think and act so differently to the Davos club and billionaires like Bezos.

Mrm Penumathy -> Barbara Ann , 13 hours ago
Totally agree with you. What I can't understand about these politicians from the democratic party or for that matter the main stream media is if we are so internationalized then why all the this drum beating about Russia Russia since we a re all a part of the nice international group of people. Don't they have as much stake who governs in this international brotherhood?
Pat Lang Mod -> Britam , 15 hours ago
My comment on the good will issue means that I am telling them what they would be wise to do.
Bill H -> Stuart Wood , a day ago
Then that is what they should say, rather than the prattle they are currently issuing. Apparently, unlike me, you completed the mind reading class in high school.
Pat Lang Mod -> Bill H , 15 hours ago
Yes, my mind reading skills are legendary.
Bill H -> Pat Lang , 12 hours ago
My mind reading comment was actually addressed to Stuart Wood for his remark about Pelosi and company that despite their words to the contrary, "I believe they view a wall as a dumb idea but are for other improvements for border security."

[Jan 22, 2019] Study the Maginot Line Before Building Any Walls by Eric Margolis

Notable quotes:
"... A Trump wall or barrier will cost far more than believed and be likely unfinished, with large gaps like the Maginot Line. Some better way of blocking the border must be found. If not, we may end up having to wall and garrison the Canadian border as well. ..."
Jan 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

`Good fences make good neighbors,' wrote American poet Robert Frost. But not according to President Donald Trump whose proposed Great Wall is supposed to protect the nation from hordes of rabid, murderous, drug crazed rapists and unwhites from south of the border.

I'm a life-long student of military architecture, with a particular passion for modern fortification, chief among which is France's own Great Wall, the magnificent and unfairly reviled Maginot Line.

Given the heated debate in America over Trump's proposed barrier along the Mexican border, it's worth looking back to the Maginot Line. It was supposed to have been France's savior after the bloodbath of World War I.

Proposed by Deputy André Maginot in the 1920's, the Line was supposed to cover key parts of France's frontiers with German and Italy. Due to the terrible losses of the Great War, France did not have enough soldiers to properly defend its long frontiers. So it made sense to erect fortifications to compensate for manpower weakness and to block surprise attacks from next door enemy forces.

The first large Maginot fort was built in the 1920's north of Nice to protect the Cote d'Azur from possible Italian attacks. Mussolini was demanding France return the Riviera coast to its former Italian rulers. Work on the principal Line along the German and Luxembourg borders began soon after. Phase one covered 260 miles from near the Rhine to Longuyon, a rail junction south of the Belgian border.

The Line consisted of hundreds of steel and concrete machine gun and anti-tank casemates with interlocking flanking fire. They were surrounded by upright rails designed to halt tanks and dense belts of interwoven barbed wire covered by machine guns. Artillery casemates with 75mm, 81mm and 135mm guns covered the fort's fronts and sides.

Within and behind the Maginot Line were based an army of specialized fortress troops and hundreds of field artillery guns. The era's most advanced electronic communications systems meshed the defenses together. The big forts were mostly buried 90 feet underground, proof from any projectiles of the era.

But the problem was that a wall or barrier is only effective so long as there are adequate troops to man it.

In the spring of 1940, France had deployed nearly a third of its field army behind the Maginot Line. But then the Germans staged a brilliant breakthrough north of the Line across the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes forest region. In 1938, a French parliamentarian named Perrier (from the French water family) had toured the Ardennes area and warned the military that it was very vulnerable to a German breakthrough. The generals scoffed at 'this civilian' and ignored Perrier's warning.

Sure enough, the German armored and infantry assault came right through this Ardennes weak point near Sedan, forcing a rapid retreat by French and British forces in the region that ended up at Dunkerque.

ORDER IT NOW

As outflanked Allied forces pulled back from the frontier, they exposed the northern flank of the Maginot Line. The French high command, fearing their armies around the Line would be encircled, ordered the interval forces to retreat towards the highlands of central France. The Line was thus denuded of its troops and artillery. These units, who were armed and trained for static defense, had to make their way cross country on foot. Most were captured en route by advancing German forces.

In spring 1940 the Line was unfinished with large gaps and open flanks due to budgetary constraints caused by the 1930's depression. The Germans drove through them, wisely avoiding most of big forts, and attacked the Line from the rear. Ironically, in 1944/45, German troops ended up defending the Maginot Forts from the advancing US Army.

The Line worked as planned, protecting vulnerable areas. But it was never extended to the Channel due to Belgium's high water table and reluctance to fortify behind the French ally. The Belgians believed their powerful forts near Liege would delay the Germans until the French Army could intervene. They were wrong.

The French public ascribed almost magical powers to the Line. It would keep them invulnerable they believed. Building the fortifications became a national works project during the Depression, rather like the US WPA labor program. But Adolf Hitler vowed he would go around the Line and chop it up. He did.

A Trump wall or barrier will cost far more than believed and be likely unfinished, with large gaps like the Maginot Line. Some better way of blocking the border must be found. If not, we may end up having to wall and garrison the Canadian border as well.


Rational , says: January 20, 2019 at 12:53 am GMT

INCORRECT COMPARISON; WALL WILL SURELY WORK.

Sir, you make an interesting point, but the comparison is not valid.

In the Maginot line case, France was being attacked by other COUNTRIES, i.e. govt. of other countries, with tanks and soldiers.

But, the US is being attacked by individuals, these criminal alien invaders. The Mexican govt. is not trying to invade us with troops and tanks; only the individuals with nothing but a big mouth.

Carlton Meyer , says: Website January 20, 2019 at 12:56 am GMT
This is a horrible analogy and the author knows it. He is correct, Trump's border wall would not withstand an attack by thousands of German troops with tanks. There is no mention of walls in Israel that no illegal immigrant can cross, nor the South Korean DMZ. Border security makes sense and is a tiny fraction of the huge budget our Department of Defense spends to protect the borders of our allies. Opponents are just naive or covert open borders globalists.

We don't needs a wall (or high barriers) along 90% of the border because those areas are too far from road access on Mexican side, nor do we need them along 99% of the Canadian border. One can visit the border or just look at youtube and see that we really need a first class barrier along 10% of the Mexican border. This will deter chaos in the easily accessible areas by replacing an assortment of old fences wobbly that even moms with kids can hop over.

https://youtu.be/9Hrdvo71Z1Q

anon1 , says: January 20, 2019 at 1:02 am GMT
Okay Mr., Margolis ..

What is YOUR solution to the problem of America's border with Mexico and controlling illegal immigration?

How diverse is the neighborhood you live in? How many unwhites live on your street?

Carlton Meyer , says: Website January 20, 2019 at 1:33 am GMT
I challenge Mr Margolis to cite just one incident where an illegal immigrant penetrated the Maginot Line. Otherwise, he should apologize for wasting our time with this horrible article. If he wants to discuss alternatives, like requiring e-verify, let's hear them.

How about self-funding border security. We all pay a TSA fee for every flight for security. Why not charge $10 to cross the border by foot, or $20 per vehicle. Many American bridges have hefty fees to cross, why not the border?

Alistair , says: January 20, 2019 at 2:06 am GMT
No wall is strong enough to protect against desperate people who flee from extreme violence and poverty; yet these people are NOT an invading army but broken families; single mothers with small kids who only seek peace and security for their children.

The problem of mass migration is not new; but the US leadership had always dealt with it with foresight which is lacking in the Trump Administration. America wouldn't have the problem of mass migration had the US fulfilled its own role as the world Superpower – so, dealing with the Latin America as the neighbours who need help to restore themselves to functioning states as opposed to walling them in their desperation.

Back in 1994, the Peso Crisis would have paralyzed Mexico as a functioning state but Bill Clinton administration had recognized that the US must help Mexican government from total collapse which would have resulted to flood of poor migrants to the southern borders of the USA – as such, under the leadership of president Bill Clinton, the US, Canada and IMF had structured a bailout loan-package to help the Mexican government to keep its economy afloat, that has not only prevented the mass migration of poor Mexicans workers to the southern borders of the USA but also helped the US exports to Mexico, so, helped the American economy as well.

We need similar approach to the rest of the Latin America, we need to help these countries to sustain and restore themselves to functioning states with relative security for families; because no wall is strong enough to protect against total desperation.

Giuseppe , says: January 20, 2019 at 3:38 am GMT
The wall will not be effective because illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America constitutes 5% or less of all immigration, see Ron Unz's recent article on the subject. The real problem is legal immigration: anchor babies, diversity lottery visa, H1-B visa, chain immigration, etc. The real problem is US immigration law, not lack of a physical barrier to illegal immigration. If a wall worked 100% of the time (it won't) you still would have 20 times the numbers in *legal immigration* that would continue to fail to be addressed. The Wall is a sop tossed to the masses by pandering politicians who don't have the will to address the overarching problem of legal immigration. General George Patton summed up the Maginot line pretty well, and it applies to the Wall: "Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man."
Svigor , says: January 20, 2019 at 5:38 am GMT
@Alistair All the left has to do is 1) disguise their invading army as refugees 2) play the fiddle constantly, shout "they're refugees!"

When they're fighting morons, anyway. No serious people would fall for this scheisse.

Svigor , says: January 20, 2019 at 5:42 am GMT
@Giuseppe The wall will be effective: at proving that America is actually capable of stopping immigration flow. Can't do something as simple and straightforward as building the wall, can't enforce immigration law.
The Alarmist , says: January 20, 2019 at 6:32 am GMT
The key point is that the Germans went around the Maginot Line: The wall itself worked.

My chateau is near Sedan; lovely wooded hilly place, and one would be forgiven for thinking an armoured assault through the Ardennes would surely fail, so why waste resources there? I hear the same sort of blather about parts of the US southern border.

peterAUS , says: January 21, 2019 at 12:02 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer

This is a horrible analogy and the author knows it.

Yep.

There is no mention of walls in Israel that no illegal immigrant can cross, nor the South Korean DMZ.

Yep. Especially the former.

All Trump has to do, re the wall is implement Israeli solution . Gander, goose.

As for the illegal immigration, also simple: JAIL the business owners who employ them; including one member of a household where an illegal is employed.

As for legal immigration, well one step at the time.

All this bullshit about this topic is truly funny. Funny how retards get hooked on it. Not people with agendas, oh they know what they are doing. But an average Joe getting so excited about the topic.
No wonder we are where we are.

I guess that's one of the usual "gullibility" games TPTBs play with the "deplorables". And win, obviously.

Anon [272] Disclaimer , says: January 21, 2019 at 1:15 am GMT
So Mexicans are going to go by boat caravans to Canada, which is going to let that happen, and then the caravans will cross the U.S.-Canadian border?

As far as Nazis in tanks coming in from Mexico, that's O.K. with me. The more Nazi soldiers, the better. Just keeping out the hordes of unskilled poor is enough.

Hail , says: Website January 21, 2019 at 1:27 am GMT
@Carlton Meyer

I challenge Mr Margolis to cite just one incident where an illegal immigrant penetrated the Maginot Line

Right.

Even keeping the problematic, apples-to-oranges migration-to-military analogy, consider this letter-to-editor in a Maryland local newspaper published Jan. 14, 2019:

The Maginot Line worked; it forced the Germans to attack elsewhere. Defeat could have been prevented, but the French failed to fully understand what a successful deterrent their wall was. France built the Maginot Line on the border between France and Germany from Switzerland to Belgium.

For political reasons (they didn't want to "offend" King Leopold) they stopped at Belgium instead of extending it to the North Sea. The French relied on the Dyle River and the Ardennes in Belgium to stop the Germans. Not extending the wall to the North Sea was the Maginot Line's Achilles Heel and caused the French defeat.

Sound familiar?

Grace Poole , says: January 21, 2019 at 3:18 am GMT
@Hail

At the outbreak of war France's border was protected by the impregnable Maginot Line. Belgium, demonstrating "The Triumph of Hope over experience," had declared itself neutral and forbade the extension of the Line along its border. This meant that an attack on France would come via Belgium.

The Allied plan, Plan D, was to advance into Belgium and there, because of overall superiority, defeat the Germans. [Isaac Leslie Hore-Belisha, Jewish British Secretary of State for War], far from happy with this Plan, wanted the original defence system strengthened. This was to be done by building 240 pillboxes (small forts).

The Army told him it would take 3 weeks to construct a pillbox. Belisha ascertained that it would take 3 days. Accordingly he brought to France a team of Civil Engineers to do this. Unfortunately the Army resented them and gave minimal co-operation.

Belisha now visited France, and attended a meeting of senior officers, which included the commander of the British force, Lord Gort.

A shocked Belisha found that the 1st item on the agenda was "Over which shoulder should a soldier carry his steel helmet when it was not on his head?" He also found that only 2 pillboxes had been constructed.

On his return he reported the situation to the Army Council, and informed the Prime Minister who said that if he wanted to sack Lord Gort he would support him. Belisha refused to do this. Instead he sent General Packenham Walsh to convey to Lord Gort the Army Council's disquiet at the state of his defences.

In doing this Belisha had committed a breach of etiquette. An officer can only be reprimanded by a senior. Packenham Walsh was junior to Lord Gort.

This faux pas increased the already deep hostility to Belisha to a blinding rage. Lord Gort referred to him as Belli; His Chief of Staff General Sir Henry Pownell now referred to him as a "Shallow brained, charlatan, political Jew boy". Michael Foot, later to become leader of the Labour party thought of him as "a shit". Chips Chanon a prominent socialite referred to him as "An Oily Jew".

An army song went:

"Onward Christian Soldiers,
You have nothing to fear
Israel Hore-Belisha will lead you from the rear,
Clothed by Monty Burton
Fed on Lyons Pies
Die for Jewish freedom
As a Briton always dies.
Other officers were referring to him as Horeb Elisha.

Aware of this viscous attitude the Chief of the Imperial General Staff visited France. On his return he supported the Armies attitude, and reported to the King who called in the Prime minister. On January 4th 1940 Belisha was sacked.

On May 10th the Germans attacked through Belgium, and the British Army following plan D advanced to combat the enemy. They were then completely out flanked

Oleaginous Outrager , says: January 21, 2019 at 12:26 pm GMT
But the problem was that a wall or barrier is only effective so long as there are adequate troops to man it.

True, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the failure of the Allies to stop the German invasion. By the way something, which part of the US's southern border is playing Belgium in this rather dubious comparison?

Joe Stalin , says: January 21, 2019 at 6:28 pm GMT
@Rational The Kaiser didn't use 1,000 volts, he used 2,000 volts for his electric fence:

The Hun used a stand alone 2,000 volt power generation plant for their fence. Widespread electric power in the USA means we could use 1:2 step down power transformers for an electrified fence.

Did the Kaiser's fence work as planned?

"As Germany invaded neutral Belgium, Belgians began to cross the border to the Netherlands en masse. In 1914 one million Belgian refugees were already in the Netherlands, but throughout the war, refugees kept coming and tried to cross the border. Many wanted to escape German occupation, others wanted to join their relatives who had already fled, and some wanted to take part in the war and chose this detour to join the forces on the allied front.

"Construction began in the spring of 1915 and consisted of over 200 km (125 mi) of 2,000-volt wire with a height ranging from 1.5 to about 3 m (5 to about 10 ft) spanning the length of the Dutch-Belgian border from Aix-la-Chapelle to the River Scheldt. Within 100–500 m (110–550 yd) of the wire, anyone who was not able to officially explain their presence was summarily executed.

"The number of victims is estimated to range between 2,000 and 3,000 people. Local newspapers in the Southern Netherlands carried almost daily reports about people who were 'lightninged to death'.

"The wire also separated families and friends as the Dutch–Belgian border where Dutch and Flemings (Dutch-speaking Belgians), despite living in different states, often intermarried or otherwise socialized with each other. Funeral processions used to walk to the fence and halt there, to give relatives and friends on the other side the opportunity to pray and say farewell.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_of_Death

The Anti-Gnostic , says: Website January 21, 2019 at 6:36 pm GMT
@Marat It's hard to shrink the State when it can continually import new constituents.
Colin Wright , says: Website January 21, 2019 at 9:35 pm GMT
@Gordo ' Actually I agree a wall is not needed, it is willpower that is needed. Without that a wall is useless, with it a wall is superfluous '

The wall has become a symbol -- as walls tend to be.

It's now secondary whether it actually stops anyone. If we build it, we have decided to retake control of our borders. If we don't, we have abdicated that control.

[Jan 22, 2019] A Tale of Two Walls by Philip Giraldi

Jan 22, 2019 | www.unz.com

The demand of President Donald Trump that congress should appropriate money to build a wall securing the nation's southern border has resulted in the longest federal government shutdown in history with no end in sight. There is considerable opposition to the wall based on two quite different perceptions of border security. The generally "progressive" view is that there is no border threat at all, that the thousands of migrants heading for the U.S. can be assimilated and indeed should be allowed entry because of U.S. government policies in Central America that have created the ruined states that the would-be immigrants have been fleeing.

There is certainly some truth to that argument, though it suggests that the United States should essentially abandon sovereignty over its own territory, which most Americans would reject. The alternative viewpoint, which has a much broader bipartisan constituency, consists of those who do feel that border security is a national priority but are nevertheless critical of building a wall, which will be expensive, possibly ineffective and environmentally damaging. They prefer other options, to include increased spending on the border guards, more aggressive enforcement against existing illegals and severe punishment of businesses in the U.S. that hire anyone not possessing legal documentation. Some also have argued in favor of a national ID issued only to citizens or legal permanent residents that would have to be produced by anyone seeking employment or government services.

Whether the wall will ever be built is questionable, but one thing that is certain is that there is more than enough hypocrisy regarding it to go around. Democratic Presidents including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama when campaigning have called for better border security, as have Democratic Congressional leaders who are now smelling blood and attacking Trump for seeking to do what they have long at least theoretically sought.

Apart from that, many of the Democrats who are currently criticizing the southern border wall on moral grounds have failed to apply the same standard to another infamous wall, that which is being built by Israel. Israel's "separation wall" is arguably being constructed at least in part using "aid" and charitable money provided by Washington while also being enabled politically by the U.S. government's acquiescence to the Israeli violations of international law. And if the moral argument for not having a wall to aid suffering refugees has any meaning, it would be many times more so applied to the Israeli wall, which is an instrument in the maintenance of apartheid in areas under Israeli control while also making permanent the stateless status of the more than one million Palestinian refugees, far more in number than the would-be immigrants marching through Mexico.

The Israeli wall is at many points larger and more intimidating than that planned by Trump, and it is also designed to physically and economically devastate the Palestinian population adjacent to it. Israel's wall is undeniably far more damaging than anything being considered for placement along the U.S.-Mexican border as it operates as both a security measure and a tool for confiscating more Arab land by including inside the barrier illegal West Bank settlements.

There are both physical similarities and differences relating to the two walls. Judging from prototypes, Trump currently appears to favor prefabricated mostly metal sections with barbed wire coils on top that would be high and intimidating enough to deter climbing over. The sections would be set in foundations sufficiently deep to deter most tunneling and there would be sensors at intervals to alert guards to other attempts to penetrate the barrier. Israel's wall varies in terms of structural material, including large concrete blocks 28 feet high in some areas while other less populated stretches that are considered low security make do with multiple lines of barbed wire and sensors. It is interesting to note that some Israeli companies have apparently expressed interest in building the Mexico wall and, as one of the many perks Israel receives from congress includes the right to bid on U.S. government contracts, they might well wind up as a contractors or subcontractors if the barrier is ever actually built.

As noted above, the principal difference between the U.S. wall and that of Israel is that the American version is all on U.S. land and is engineered to more or less run in a straight line along the border. The Israeli version is nearly 90% built on Palestinian land and, as it is designed to create facts on the West Bank, it does not run in a straight line, instead closing off some areas to the Palestinians by surrounding Arab villages. It therefore keeps people in while also keeping people out, so it is not strictly speaking a security barrier. Indeed, some Israeli security experts have stated their belief that the wall has been only a minor asset in preventing violence directed by Palestinians against Israelis.

If the Israeli wall had followed the Green Line that separated Israel proper from Palestinian land it would be only half the estimated 440 miles long that it will now be upon completion. The extra miles are accounted for by the deep cuts of as much as 11 miles into the West Bank, isolating about 9% of it and completely enclosing 25,000 Palestinian Arabs from areas nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority. One often cited victim of the barrier is the Palestinian town of Qalqilyah, with a population of 45,000, which is enclosed on all sides by a wall that in some sections measures more than 25 feet high. Qalqilyah is only accessible through an Israeli controlled military checkpoint on the main road from the east and a tunnel on the south side that links the town to the adjacent village of Habla.

The wall is therefore only in part a security measure while also being a major element in the Israeli plan to gradually acquire as much of the West Bank as possible – perhaps all of it – for Israeli settlers. It is a form of collective punishment based on religion to make life difficult for local people and eventually drive them from their homes.

The human costs for the Palestinians have consequently been high. A United Nations 2005 report states that :

it is difficult to overstate the humanitarian impact of the Barrier. The route inside the West Bank severs communities, people's access to services, livelihoods and religious and cultural amenities. In addition, plans for the Barrier's exact route and crossing points through it are often not fully revealed until days before construction commences. This has led to considerable anxiety amongst Palestinians about how their future lives will be impacted The land between the Barrier and the Green Line constitutes some of the most fertile in the West Bank. It is currently the home for 49,400 West Bank Palestinians living in 38 villages and towns."

Amnesty International in a 2004 report observed:

"The fence/wall, in its present configuration, violates Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law Since the summer of 2002 the Israeli army has been destroying large areas of Palestinian agricultural land, as well as other properties, to make way for a fence/wall which it is building in the West Bank. In addition to the large areas of particularly fertile Palestinian farmland that have been destroyed, other larger areas have been cut off from the rest of the West Bank by the fence/wall. The fence/wall is not being built between Israel and the Occupied Territories but mostly (close to 90%) inside the West Bank, turning Palestinian towns and villages into isolated enclaves, cutting off communities and families from each other, separating farmers from their land and Palestinians from their places of work, education and health care facilities and other essential services. This in order to facilitate passage between Israel and more than 50 illegal Israeli settlements located in the West Bank. "

Of course, the situation has become far worse for Palestinians since the two reports dating from 2004 and 2005. Israel has accelerated its settlement construction and the wall has expanded and shifted to accommodate those changes, making life impossible for the indigenous population.

Any pushback from the United States has been rare to nonexistent, with successive administrations only occasionally mentioning that the settlements themselves are "troubling" or a "complication" vis-ŕ-vis a peace settlement. The first direct criticism of the wall itself took place in 2003, when the Bush administration briefly considered reducing loan guarantees to discourage its construction. Then Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked "A nation is within its rights to put up a fence if it sees the need for one. However, in the case of the Israeli fence, we are concerned when the fence crosses over onto the land of others."

On May 25, 2005, Bush repeated his concerns , noting that "I think the wall is a problem. And I discussed this with Ariel Sharon. It is very difficult to develop confidence between the Palestinians and Israel with a wall snaking through the West Bank." In a letter to Sharon he stated that it "should be a security rather than political barrier, should be temporary rather than permanent and therefore not prejudice any final status issues including final borders, and its route should take into account, consistent with security needs, its impact on Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities."

Congress is, of course, Israeli occupied territory so its response was directed against Powell and Bush in support of anything Israel chose to do. Then Senator Joe Lieberman complained "The administration's threat to cut aid to Israel unless it stops construction of a security fence is a heavy-handed tactic. The Israeli people have the right to defend themselves from terrorism, and a security fence may be necessary to achieve this."

In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton declared her support for the wall by claiming that the Palestinian Authority had failed to fight terrorism. "This is not against the Palestinian people. This is against the terrorists. The Palestinian people have to help to prevent terrorism. They have to change the attitudes about terrorism." Senator Charles Schumer, also from New York, added "As long as the Palestinians send terrorists onto school buses and to nightclubs to blow up people, Israel has no choice but to build the Security Wall."

So, for many in Washington a legal and relatively apolitical wall by the United States to protect its border is a horrible prospect while the Israeli version built on someone else's land with the intention to damage the local Arab population as much as possible is perfectly fine. The reality is that America's Establishment, which is dominated by veneration of Israel for a number of reasons, is completely hypocritical, more prepared to criticize actions taken by the United States even when those actions are justified than they are to condemn Israeli actions that amount to crimes against humanity. That is the reality and it is playing out in front of us right now.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected] .

[Jan 21, 2019] Neoliberalism does not work well for the mojority of working people by Chris Becker

Notable quotes:
"... By Chris Becker. Originally published at MacroBusiness ..."
"... The problem with capitalism is when it is wedded to an ideology that has limited or perverted checks and balances. Inequality being the most dire and neglected outcome of perverting a system that does not punish the risk takers who fail. Witness the banking industry in the aftermath of the GFC. A properly tuned capitalistic system would have seen the majority of bankers incarcerated, there wealth confiscated by legal and just reparations and an overhaul of the financial sector. ..."
"... Make a system where the actors benefit by cheating and they will cheat – good people included. ..."
"... Sal si puedes. ..."
"... "This general irregularity must be placed within the irregular cycle of the working week (and indeed of the working year) which provoked so much lament from moralists and mercantilists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ..."
"... A rhyme printed in 1639 gives us a satirical version: ..."
"... You know that Munday is Sundayes brother; Tuesday is such another; Wednesday you must go to Church and pray; Thursday is half-holiday; On Friday it is too late to begin to spin; The Saturday is half-holiday agen. John Houghton, in 1681, gives us the indignant version: ..."
"... "When the framework knitters or makers of silk stockings had a great price for their work, they have been observed seldom to work on Mondays and Tuesdays but to spend most of their time at the ale-house or nine-pins . . . The weavers, 'tis common with them to be drunk on Monday, have their head-ache on Tuesday, and their tools out of order on Wednesday. As for the shoemakers, they'll rather be hanged than not remember St. Crispin on Monday . . . and it commonly holds as long as they have a penny of money or pennyworth of credit." ..."
"... "If you're not willing to kill everybody who has a different idea than yourself, you cannot have Frederick Hayek's free market. You cannot have Alan Greenspan or the Chicago School, you cannot have the economic freedom that is freedom for the rentiers and the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector to reduce the rest of the economy to serfdom." ..."
"... "In a libertarian society, there is no commons or public space. There are property lines, not borders. When it comes to real property and physical movement across such real property, there are owners, guests, licensees, business invitees and trespassers – not legal and illegal immigrants." ..."
"... "This is an outrageous betrayal of public trust -- but only what can be expected when private bankers are given a governing role in American monetary policy. In a sane world, private bankers would have no more voice than any other citizen in making that decision . It's time to throw these turkeys out of American monetary policy." ..."
"... "The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state." ..."
"... "The Trilateralist Commission is international (and) is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests BY SEIZING CONTROL OF THE POLITICAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power – political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical." ..."
Jan 18, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

By Chris Becker. Originally published at MacroBusiness

It's always interesting to hear mega-capitalists complain about the very system that provides them opportunity to turn their talents into Scrooge McDuck size piles of cash. Furthermore, it's usually the most successful that have the most liberal of views and Ray Dalio, head of hedge fund Bridgewater, has weighed in again.

From CNBC :

"Capitalism basically is not working for the majority of people. That's just the reality," Dalio said at the 2018 Summit conference in Los Angeles in November. Monday, Dalio tweeted a video of his Summit talk.

"Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the population's net worth is equal to the bottom 90 percent combined. In other words, a big giant wealth gap. That was the same -- last time that happened was the late '30s," Dalio said. (Indeed, research from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the National Bureau of Economic Research of wealth inequality throughout the 20th century, covered by The Guardian , bears this out.)

Further, Dalio points to a survey by the Federal Reserve showing that 40 percent of adults can't come up with $400 in the case of an emergency. "It gives you an idea of what the polarity is," Dalio said. "That's a real world. That's an issue."

"We're in a situation when the economy is at a peak, we still have this very big tension. That's where we are today," he said in November. "We're in a situation where, if you have a downturn, and we will have a downturn, I believe that -- I worry that that polarity will become greater."

Here's the full talk:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3kUQlAUoDPw

There is no actual problem with capitalism in and of itself. As a system, compared to other systems in the past, it has provided the greatest gains to the greatest number of people in the last two centuries of human development. To borrow a catchphrase, it's settled science, and in fact maybe one of the only theories of economics that actually holds water, given that communism, socialism and other market structures have failed time and time again.

The problem with capitalism is when it is wedded to an ideology that has limited or perverted checks and balances. Inequality being the most dire and neglected outcome of perverting a system that does not punish the risk takers who fail. Witness the banking industry in the aftermath of the GFC. A properly tuned capitalistic system would have seen the majority of bankers incarcerated, there wealth confiscated by legal and just reparations and an overhaul of the financial sector.

Captured regulatory authorities and legislative assemblies overturned the fundamental cornerstone of capitalism – if you fail, you take a loss – and turned it into an even more perverse form of socialism where the losers become winners and society bears the entire burden of their mistakes.

Dalio, like Buffet and Gates before him are pointing out the problems of extreme wealth, but this is not a new phenomenon. History shows that when income and wealth inequality become widely disparate, the forces of populism rise to shake the foundations. And inequality in the US and in the Western world is again reaching those heady heights where "unbridled" (read:captured) capitalism resulted in the Great Depression:

The concentration of wealth by capturing the full yield of capitalism without distributing any seeds is worse than ever as The Economist explains:

The 16,000 families making up the richest 0.01%, with an average net worth of $371m, now control 11.2% of total wealth -- back to the 1916 share, which is the highest on record. Those down the distribution have not done quite so well: the top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America's wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak -- and exactly the same share as the bottom 90% of the population.

Dalio is right to point out that an unworkable capitalist system, where the majority of the gains are kept by the few, creating an oligarchy that is inflexible to change, or risk, has not benefited the majority.

Lost in the amazing advances in the developing world which has embraced versions of capitalism over the last thirty years is that the average Westerner has gone nowhere in terms of wage growth and real wealth:


Similar forces have been in play in Australia:

Creating these instabilities, where it's extremely hard for someone to rise above the average wage, let alone no wage, is going to cost the whole system eventually if it is not reformed and brought back to the center where it belongs.


kimsarah , January 18, 2019 at 1:45 am

Here's a good example of today's capitalism:
https://wolfstreet.com/2019/01/17/another-retail-chain-owned-stripped-bare-by-sun-capital-goes-bankrupt/#comment-169787

james wordsworth , January 18, 2019 at 6:41 am

Capitalism "works" because it is a flawed system that steals from society. Limited liability corporations protect profits and socialize losses.

Companies get society provided benefits for well well below cost, but spend zillions avoiding contributing to their improvement (think infrastructure, public education, legal system). Consumers over consume because they are not charged the full cost of their consumption. So we get pollution, resource depletion and worker exploitation.

Capitalism is a wild stallion that can take you to places you would never get to on your own, but unharnessd it will likely also take you into a ditch. Capitalism needs to be harnessed by society. It needs to serve society. Society should not be serving capitalism.

The actions of the actors in a system can be predictable. Make a system where the actors benefit by cheating and they will cheat – good people included. Make a system that encourages good behaviour and people will be better.

The planet can not handle much more of capitalism's "success".

vidimi , January 18, 2019 at 7:36 am

capitalism works because those who benefit from it get to decide whether it works or not

Carla , January 18, 2019 at 8:13 am

YES!

WheresOurTeddy , January 18, 2019 at 12:41 pm

"To borrow a catchphrase, it's settled science, and in fact maybe one of the only theories of economics that actually holds water, given that communism, socialism and other market structures have failed time and time again."

Remember when capitalism started in earnest in the early Renaissance and the already established, competing ideology tried to strangle it in its crib and destabilize any state, no matter how small, that didn't hew to the orthodox economic and political hegemony? Oh right, me neither.

"Socialism didn't work" without acknowledging the entire resources of the European and American "first world" attempted to put down the USSR from 1917-1921, and undeclared covert war on any state with a constitution to the left of Harry Truman ever since is kind of a mitigating circumstance of "capitalism > socialism"

Ape , January 19, 2019 at 4:46 am

Not true. See the uk revolution, the dutch revolution, and the French. Each one was an attempt by capitalism to revolutionize a region and the feudal lords tried to strangle it.

But it slowly built basic accounting methods and legal social frameworks that ended up dominating the world.

Just like socialism has created legal structures that have changed basic sense with 2 steps forwards and 1 back. Who knows where it may go after a few more centuries of revolutions?

James , January 18, 2019 at 7:58 am

Make a system where the actors benefit by cheating and they will cheat – good people included.

That's the basic question in a nutshell. Can Capitalism ever be configured in such a way in which that doesn't happen? The historical record says no, not for long, "cheating" being a relative term anyway. Good capitalists will tell you they don't cheat, they simply redefine the legal meaning of the word to benefit their own interests, the law and its makers being simply another commodity to be bought and sold like any other.

notabanker , January 18, 2019 at 8:23 am

This debate on "capitalism" feels like the black mirror discussion of MMT.
MMT = Good because it is a theory that runs contrary to norms that have produced bad results.
Capitalism = Bad because it is the widely accepted theory that has led to bad results.

Reality is they are both amoral concepts that need to be applied appropriately to produce the desired results. Coming to consensus on what those results need to be is the issue.

Dalio is an interesting character. If he went public with this in November, you can bet he's been modeling it for years, made piles of money on it and he sees it at the end of its cycle. What he's not saying is how they've modeled it out for the next 5-10 years and what those outcomes entail, which is unfortunate.

Wandering Mind , January 18, 2019 at 9:54 am

I disagree with the characterization of both MMT and capitalism. MMT is mostly not theoretical, but descriptive. The system is operated as economists like Stephanie Kelton describe. What is not the "norm" is the open acknowledgement of the way in which the monetary system operates. That particular self-delusion is about 300 years old.

Capitalism is driven by the need to always expand. But what seems possible on the micro level is not possible on the macro level, at least not forever.

Grebo , January 18, 2019 at 1:25 pm

Capitalism is based on two kinds of theft. Private ownership of the gifts of nature is theft from the community. Appropriation of the surplus is theft from the workers.

I would not call that amoral.

KPL , January 18, 2019 at 8:35 am

This is the kind of lectures you will get when you bail out scoundrels. Scoundrels will blame capitalism when in reality these scoundrels define capitalism as "privatize profits and socialize losses". The temerity of these scoundrels is galling. These arsonists talk of capitalism. If capitalism had been allowed to do its job, many of these scoundrels would have been languishing in jails and the companies they run would have been dead and buried.

James , January 18, 2019 at 2:57 pm

Capitalism doesn't prescribe right or wrong in moral terms, only profits. The idea that markets could ever be self-policing is laughably misguided. We're living with that truth as we speak. Profits buy power and influence, which are then used to change the rules of the game to enable even more profits in a classic vicious cycle. Rinse and repeat until a clear winner emerges or the entire system collapses in a mass of warring factions. Looks like we've got the latter to me.

KPL , January 20, 2019 at 1:21 am

It is the bailouts (in the guise of saving the common man from something unimaginably worse, mind you) and the lack of accountability (no one going to jail, arsonists being asked to put out the fire etc.) that is simply covering capitalism with the moral hazard muck to an extent that capitalism is now unrecognizable. The rottenness of the system has been in the works since 1987 (Greenspan put) and has taken this long to germinate into a monster. Let us see how it ends!

The Rev Kev , January 18, 2019 at 8:37 am

Gotta be real specific in our terminology here. When you say Capitalism it is like saying Religion. Just as with Religion you have different flavours of it such as Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. you have also different types of Capitalism as well. I suppose that you can best describe the type of Capitalism that we have in place now as 'Crony Capitalism' though others may disagree. Another aspect of the type of capitalism that has evolved is that it is built on the premise of expansion as it came of age during the past two centuries when expansion was just the way it was.
Not only has this caused problems in a world of finite resources which we are pushing the envelope off but I have no idea what would happen when the Age of Expansion ends and we instead go into the Age of Contraction which will maybe last just as long. Another problem with our brand of Capitalism is that it never captures all the costs associated with a venture. An example? All those toxic sites that fracking will leave behind? The companies will never pay to clean that mess up but it will be done – maybe – by the taxpayer so of course those companies never add those costs into their accounts. A more sustainable form of Capitalism would be forced to calculate those costs into their accounts. Just because Capitalism is the way that it is does not mean that that is the way that it has to be.

MyLessThanPrimeBeef , January 18, 2019 at 11:20 am

A little bit of every -ism.

Looking back, it appears that when humans came out of Africa, they intermixed with Neaderthals, acquiring some of the local immunity DNA, among others, and that gave them survival advantages.

And the hybridization has enabled them to overpopulate the planet, with commentators of all kinds, including those wiser ones who are aware of the over-popluation problem and climate change.

So, in the same way, we should look to combining ideas and -isms.

Not just socialism all good, capitalism all bad, etc.

John steinbach , January 18, 2019 at 8:41 am

Wrong question. Capitalism isn't designed to "work", it's designed to exploit & destroy- individuals, communities, societies, and ecosystems.

The results are overwhelmingly obvious except to elites.

WheresOurTeddy , January 18, 2019 at 12:43 pm

oh it's obvious to them too, but as Upton Sinclair said, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

sierra7 , January 18, 2019 at 5:34 pm

Correct. Without "restraint", unbridled capitalism cannot be sustained; it will eventually devour the planet and render it uninhabitable. Unbridled capitalism is an animal uncaged. That uncaged animal today, globally is devouring the commons. "Capitalism" is now, "off the rails".

prodigalson , January 18, 2019 at 8:51 am

"There is no actual problem with capitalism in and of itself. As a system, compared to other systems in the past, it has provided the greatest gains to the greatest number of people in the last two centuries of human development. To borrow a catchphrase, it's settled science, and in fact maybe one of the only theories of economics that actually holds water, given that communism, socialism and other market structures have failed time and time again."

Precisely wrong. Capitalism is a donut machine, doing its job, and spitting out donuts, it's working exactly as it's supposed to. The externalities and corruption are part and parcel of the system. Saying that "pure" capitalism wouldn't have the impurities we see in the system is the exact same arguement socialists and communists could argue for their own systems. "Communism (or capitalism) (or socialism) failed because it wasn't pure enough", essentially. Capitalism takes the worst aspects of human nature, promotes them as virtues, then acts surprised when everyone starts acting like pirates and vampire squid.

cnchal , January 18, 2019 at 9:12 am

I know. That paragraph left me laughing.

What is funny is that the post author didn't get his or her own irony.

Tom Doak , January 19, 2019 at 5:11 pm

He probably gets it, he just put it in there as a disclaimer to keep himself from being shunned by his peers in the professional class.

tegnost , January 18, 2019 at 10:06 am

capitalism assumes rational actors will balance out its flaws. He claims socialism fails but the new deal had some elements of socialism which assuaged the winner take all nature of capitalism. Deregulation basically is unmaking the rules and the result is global casino capitalism, and that's a disease just as it would be in vegas or atlantic city. I am unsurprisingly not optimistic, we had a great chance to rein it all in, twice with obama (i say twice because I was cajoled into voting for him a second time because he was supposedly going to do something good in his second term when the poor man became unshackled from the need to be re elected [irony alert: if obama had made any effort to help regular "folks" he wouldn't have had any problem getting re elected and the dnc wouldn't have needed to cheat the voters and shove her republican leaning highness down our collective throats]) and a third time with b sanders, so that's 12 years of active enrichment of the worst fackers in the world, and now this article makes it seem like maybe they are worried but they won't do anything to rein in bezos, or fix student loans, or any of the other crises facing the population. Self driving tech is going to increase traffic and consumption, who here thinks waymo and uber will give up on the fantasy because they're worried about global warming? They're worried about patents. They're worried someone else will get the mountainous payoff. It's all about the self and there is no sign that hand wringing of the nature Mr Dalio is engaging in, as sensible and reasoned as it may be, is going to lead to any changes that result in concrete material benefits going to people who the upper class, for lack of a better word, hates. The only good mope is one with a catalog of unpayable debts, who works to survive all the while paying into their social security account so the worst fackers in the world can garnish it and put a bottom tranche on their greedy securitization schemes.

diptherio , January 18, 2019 at 10:43 am

My first thought was: climate change. If your system of producing goods and services leads to environmental destruction that interferes with the ability of the planet to harbor human life, well .I'd say that's a major problem with your system.

Massinissa , January 18, 2019 at 5:00 pm

To follow on Prodigalson's analogy, Its a machine that destroys the environment to creates donuts until there is no-one left alive to eat the donuts.

lyman alpha blob , January 18, 2019 at 11:06 am

+1

What you said, plus capitalism requires constant growth with finite resources which is frankly an insane expectation.

PKMKII , January 18, 2019 at 1:20 pm

The one difference with the purity argument is that the communist apologists are pointing to the impurity of the system. The tried systems were either too capitalist or too despotic or not despotic enough or too reformist or etc.They posit that the solution is just that the system needs to have the purity of the way their political theory describes a communist system.

The capitalist apologists, apropos, point to the impurity of the individual instead. The system cannot fail, as they don't even see it as a system, it is simply "human nature." The morality of the individuals at the top of the hierarchy determines all. If capitalism is failing, it is because of the bad choices of those individuals.

Massinissa , January 18, 2019 at 5:04 pm

"The morality of the individuals at the top of the hierarchy determines all. If capitalism is failing, it is because of the bad choices of those individuals."

That's incorrect, though. The system favors those willing to exploit others and the system as structured puts those people at the top of the pyramid. Anyone with morality cannot have outstanding success in rising to the top of the economic hierarchy in this system due to their morality being a major limitation, with the possible exception of being born into wealth.

Glen , January 18, 2019 at 3:06 pm

From my background as an engineer, I have come to the conclusion that economics is not a science and should be renamed as political economics as that is a much more descriptive.

All of the "isms" are constructs of the governing rules established by governing bodies (mostly national governments) and agreements between governing bodies. All of the "isms" depend on a means to enforce the rules. I know this is all obvious to anybody who has studied this stuff. It was not to me until I started paying attention in the late 90's, and ignored all the BS we get bombarded with on a daily basis.

The current set of rules (including the unwritten class rules where the rich and poor have different rules) guarantees the end of a human inhabitable world. It seems to me that we need to re-write the rules very quickly before we are overtaken by events.

Massinissa , January 18, 2019 at 5:05 pm

Perhaps we should just go back to what Economics used to be called: Political Economy.

That name got nixed because its not fancy sounding enough.

a different chris , January 18, 2019 at 8:55 am

>As a system, compared to other systems in the past, it has provided the greatest gains to the greatest number of people in the last two centuries of human development.

How do we actually know that? What was, during the peak years, an "average" Aztec's quality of life, for example? Let alone knowing what work/remuneration system he/she existed under. And in truth, the measurement itself is capitalism's measurement. It's like ranking everybody in the country by how hard they can throw a baseball. It's useful for winning at baseball, doesn't say anything about the country's metallurgical capabilities. Capitalism is best at Capitalism! Yea!

I actually think the biggest contributor to what they claim as "the greatest gains to the greatest number of people" is sewage treatment. Which I believe has been a government initiative, yes?

Now, I'm actually not comfortable kicking over the table. Universal Health Care and really high marginal tax rates would, in my model of the world (which may be completely wrong) work well enough. We would have to study not-so-Great Britain's problems when they tried the same thing, to be sure.

JCC , January 18, 2019 at 9:01 am

The embedded youtube video doesn't seem to match the theme of the article. Is this the one you meant to link to?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C43i3yclec

(Not that the embedded video wasn't worth taking the time to watch)

Jörgen in Germany , January 18, 2019 at 9:21 am

For me, the question is:
once capitalism is established, is it possible to rein it in? Will it not allways turn out to get out of control, to become the „real existing" capitalism. Is a capitalism „with a human face" a stable possibilty. Communism „with a human face" doesn't seem to be possible. Sytems have their own dynamics and tend to find a stable equlibrium, and for each there are only a finite number of stable states, probably defined by human nature. Power tends to concentrate.
In short: Is a capitalist system, in which the TBTF are allowed to fail, a realistic possibility?

Jack , January 18, 2019 at 9:26 am

"To borrow a catchphrase, it's settled science, and in fact maybe one of the only theories of economics that actually holds water, given that communism, socialism and other market structures have failed time and time again." Seems like the author is ignoring those successful socialistic countries like Denmark, Sweden, etc.

Massinissa , January 18, 2019 at 5:06 pm

They're social democracies, which aren't exactly socialist. They're democratic capitalist societies with some basic socialist elements.

Kurtismayfield , January 18, 2019 at 5:25 pm

Sorry, but the USA's biggest trading partner is a self declared Communist state. Anytime someone brings up the Communist boogeyman this needs to be given right back to them. Vietnam isn't doing so bad either. Of course what the Corporatists love is not the Communism but the Totalitarianism. You can still be Communist and be involved in a market economy, and China has plenty of state involvement in it's industry

greg kaiser , January 18, 2019 at 9:29 am

The FIRE sector makes money from money. Their interest and profits compound and concentrate wealth. That is the only possible outcome of capitalism.

Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit! That is the only possible outcome for the rest of the human race as a result of capitalist extractions.

Anarcissie , January 18, 2019 at 9:32 am

Seemingly a significant portion of the folk desire more stuff, regardless of the consequences. Capitalism provides more stuff for many of them, or can pretend to. Therefore they will continue to support it until it collapses. Sal si puedes.

NotTimothyGeithner , January 18, 2019 at 10:18 am

I'm pretty certain this is a case of the dopamine hit in lieu of economic security on the lower side of the income scale.

Sound of the Suburbs , January 18, 2019 at 9:39 am

Where did it all go wrong?

Economics, the time line:

Classical economics – observations and deductions from the world of small state, unregulated capitalism around them

Neoclassical economics – Where did that come from?

Keynesian economics – observations, deductions and fixes for the problems of neoclassical economics

Neoclassical economics – Why is that back?

We thought small state, unregulated capitalism was something that it wasn't as our ideas came from neoclassical economics, which has little connection with classical economics.

On bringing it back again, we had lost everything that had been learned in the 1930s, by which time it had already demonstrated its flaws.

Let's find out what capitalism really is again by going back to the classical economists.

We really need to get the cost of living back into economics.

Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)

Cutting taxes but letting the cost of living soar has been a pointless neoliberal exercise.

Let's find out what real wealth creation is again as they worked out in the 1930s.

It's measured by GDP that excludes the transfer of existing assets like stocks and real estate as inflating asset prices isn't creating real wealth. That fictitious financial wealth has a habit of disappearing as they realised after 1929.

We need to remember the problem with the markets they discovered in the 1930s.

https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-21-at-13.52.41.png

1929 – Inflating the US stock market with debt (margin lending)
2008 – Inflating the US real estate market with debt (mortgage lending)

Bankers inflating asset prices with the money they create from loans.

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy.pdf

Sound of the Suburbs , January 19, 2019 at 3:02 am

Michael Hudson has enlightened me as to the history of economics and I have added the other parts that were lost from the 1930s.

Sound of the Suburbs , January 18, 2019 at 9:49 am

What was that terrible existence like before capitalism?

https://libcom.org/files/timeworkandindustrialcapitalism.pdf

"This general irregularity must be placed within the irregular cycle of the working week (and indeed of the working year) which provoked so much lament from moralists and mercantilists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A rhyme printed in 1639 gives us a satirical version:

You know that Munday is Sundayes brother;
Tuesday is such another;
Wednesday you must go to Church and pray;
Thursday is half-holiday;
On Friday it is too late to begin to spin;
The Saturday is half-holiday agen.

John Houghton, in 1681, gives us the indignant version:

"When the framework knitters or makers of silk stockings had a great price for their work, they have been observed seldom to work on Mondays and Tuesdays but to spend most of their time at the ale-house or nine-pins . . .
The weavers, 'tis common with them to be drunk on Monday, have their head-ache on Tuesday, and their tools out of order on Wednesday. As for the shoemakers, they'll rather be hanged than not remember St. Crispin on Monday . . . and it commonly holds as long as they have a penny of money or pennyworth of credit."

Merrie England gave way to the dark satanic mills.

Capitalism is progress?

The Rev Kev , January 18, 2019 at 8:04 pm

Maybe because they had plenty of time to think while they were weaving but historically, if you had an active politically minded group, it was guaranteed that the weavers would be part of them. Until they got industrialized that is. Certainly that was true in Scotland in the 19th century.

DJG , January 18, 2019 at 9:58 am

The article is interesting, but do we truly have to be lectured by Becker?:

To borrow a catchphrase, it's settled science, and in fact maybe one of the only theories of economics that actually holds water, given that communism, socialism and other market structures have failed time and time again.

In other words, capitalism is dogma that has defeated the Arians. Try going to Wikipedia, put in "Panic of," and you will get fifteen major crashes in the U.S. economy from 1792 to 1930. That's fifteen crashes in 150 years. And this is a system that hasn't failed time and time again?

Mixed economies with strong government intervention and subsidies to the citizenry (the welfare state) have done quite well. The Venetian republic used that economic model for some 1100 years. There are alternatives to U.S. buccaneer capitalism and its endless slogans about its bestness.

whine country , January 18, 2019 at 10:15 am

Only in America:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AFDhxk97Xg

abynormal , January 18, 2019 at 2:17 pm

https://youtu.be/gAyWvNXLn0g

TroyMcClure , January 18, 2019 at 10:27 am

Nearly dropped my phone as I desperately texted Denmark to let them know their country had failed.

Jonathan Holland Becnel , January 18, 2019 at 11:50 am

Haha

jrs , January 18, 2019 at 1:58 pm

some might agree and then probably blame immigrants *eye roll*

But there are degrees of perceived "failure" and in the U.S. these are getting pretty extreme.

Partyless Poster , January 18, 2019 at 10:28 am

They are never honest about socialism, "its been tried and it failed"
Never mention that any country that dares go socialist will immediately be economically attacked by capitalist countries. Has it ever been given a chance where it wasn't?
I always thought it funny that capitalists always say socialism doesn't work but then why are they so desperately afraid of it.

monday1929 , January 18, 2019 at 1:45 pm

And why try to spread capitalism to your main enemies, China and Russia, instead of letting them languish with their inferior systems?

jrs , January 18, 2019 at 1:53 pm

it's not clear that China's present system isn't also capitalism. Russia neither only it's also particularly corrupt. It's a raw power contest with them and the U.S. government, not an ideological one,

Massinissa , January 18, 2019 at 5:09 pm

Russia has been capitalist since the wall fell, China since Deng Xiaopings reforms. Russia is just a regular capitalist country at this point, whereas China is State Capitalism (in fact, the only major extant example of such).

diptherio , January 18, 2019 at 10:57 am

What I find so frustrating about this kind of analysis is that it takes as given that "capitalism" is a thing, something actually existing in the real world. In reality, it's a sound we make with our mouths, and nothing more. At most it's a rather vague concept whose definition there does not seem to be any real agreement on. It's a shibboleth with no actual referent in the physical world.

I think words like "capitalism" and "socialism" get used as mental shorthand because most of us can't be bothered with the nuance of reality. The policies, norms, and systems we have in place now are there because they serve (or served) the interests of some person or group of people who had enough influence/power to get them put in place. Sheldon Adelson demanding the Feds regulate on-line gambling is a perfect example. Adelson doesn't give a rip whether having the gov't remove his competitors is "capitalism" or not. It's in his interests, and if he can flex enough muscle to get the Feds to go along, he'll get his way. What label you put on the outcome is irrelevant.

The strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Seems like that's been true in every large-scale society I'm familiar with, regardless of how they labled themselves.

Grebo , January 18, 2019 at 2:11 pm

A clear definition of capitalism is not to the advantage of capitalists, so we never hear one, except "private ownership of the means of production" which is not it.

People have been taught to think of capitalism simply as "the source of all good things" so by definition any alternative must be worse. No need to think about the details.

Ape , January 19, 2019 at 5:04 am

Capitalism is stock markets. The separation of labor and management from ownership by turning ownership into a financial commodity.

The difference between piracy and the dutch east india company? Capitalism.

jrs , January 18, 2019 at 2:33 pm

for leftists it seems it's often shorthand for the status quo, and the status quo economics and power relationships. So sure that's a catch all for the water us fishes hardly know we swim in.

They aren't wrong on the fact that any system that uses more resources than the earth produces WILL NOT and CAN NOT end well and that the only hope, if hope there is, is in reigning this in. And that probably, or at least probably if it is to be humane in any sense and not just be mass extermination, requires an economy geared toward human needs, not consumerism, not excess for anyone beyond what the world can produce.

Sometimes this system we live in produces more or less inequality, how much depends on how much the powerful are able to take, how much power they have to direct all wealth to themselves. Always it produces wage slavery, deprived as wage slaves are of their own subsistence other than by selling their labor. They might have more of less of a voice in the workplace, in the U.S. they have pretty much none. So the U.S. status quo is a powerless vast mass of people that must work for a living whose lives are dictated by economic powers beyond their control. And then there are the rentiers taking their cut from everyone working for a living as well. The returns just from owning property etc. – almost all real property being owned by a few large players.

Knute Rife , January 18, 2019 at 11:37 am

So capitalism is bad only because it has been wedded to perverse ideologies, but all other economic systems are bad inherently. Seems legit.

Susan the Other , January 18, 2019 at 11:46 am

What a blabbering rambling pointless airhead.

elissa3 , January 18, 2019 at 11:49 am

No, no, no NO!
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/11/principles-for-dummies/

AdamK , January 18, 2019 at 12:22 pm

The biggest failure of capitalism is environmental. In a system which everything is privatized except the externalities which are dumped on public plate with no way to pursue public interest and which will bring us down sooner than later. Inequality is at the core of the system, but it isn't the worst outcome. A system that produces much more than needed and pollutes the environment, we find ourselves sitting on piles of garbage and killing ourselves in the name of production efficiency. In a socialist system the public has potentially control over resources and could potentially divert resources to less destructive production, or make a conscious decision to stop altogether. Even if we, in this stage, distribute wealth equaly we won't be able to avert the environmental catastrophe that awaits us.

Kevin R LaPointe , January 18, 2019 at 12:34 pm

Capitalism has been historically a system of exploitation of the Masses, and remains so today, even after decades of attempts to reform it. Talk regarding the system has largely been of a circular and utopian nature since the collapse of the U.S.S.R.. The Center-Left coalition has been searching for a way to make Capitalism "work," i.e. make it palpable enough for the majority of people so as to keep the Owner Classes feeling secure. You can't fix what something is by its very nature, though. Capitalism is a socio-economic model for a Class based organizing of society; it's chief claim to progress was that it operated as a universal (neither religiously or ethnically demarcated) organizational structure outside of the hereditary based systems of feudalism that preceded it–though given projected trends for Wealth concentration one might find the later claim to be somewhat specious.

The Keynesian economists tried to make Capitalism work and they were axed back in the 70's, along with the older generations of the CED, the moment the owner classes felt secure again after the Great Crash. Unions, Regulatory Bodies, and the promises of a Great Society where undermined and attacked, dismantled, and largely turned into empty talking points. The triumph of Right Wing politics, aka the last four to five decades, should be observed as nothing short of absolute failure on the part of the Center-Left, Triangulationists (Neo-Liberals), and the Soft-Politics of Identity in providing substantive answers to systemic questions of exploitation of the Many by the Few. The Liberal Theory of Reform has ultimately proved to be very divergent from Reality, which has largely demonstrated that it takes both large scale emergent catastrophes (Great Depression), a militant population (Socialists, Fascists, Organized Labor, and/or Disgruntled Peasantry), and the acceptance or acquiescence of the Power Elites in order for Change to place. The gradualism of reformist policy has largely been debunked thanks to over a century of sloppy and mostly reactive implementation and subsequent repeal.

In the Western context, however, Capitalism is the softest form of Power enforcement, in that it is largely an idea that most in the society at least tentatively accept as the deterministic apparatus for "success" and "failure." Even intellectual debate is referred to as, "the Marketplace of Ideas." Once it is gone as viable option, the Elites have one of two options: submit to egalitarianism or resort to older forms of control.

To be more frank, we also need to start talking about actual material breaking points, rather than pretending that abstract "polarization" will continue on.

Ignacio , January 18, 2019 at 3:09 pm

For me the question is if the "system", broken as it is, is or isn't already repairable, and whether guys like this are really ready for the necessary steps.

PrairieRose , January 18, 2019 at 8:48 pm

Capitalism cannot survive without slave labor.

/lasse , January 19, 2019 at 6:29 am

Capitalism works! The problem are all those brainwashed by neoliberal propaganda nonsense, that capitalism is a system that will deliver to all and sundry, sort of market socialism.

Only a child could believe that?
That the minority of the elite that owns and control the means of production and not least the financial institutions would have identical interests with common people?

Some people still not get that neoliberalism is and was a counter revolution, by the capitalist class, on the postwar mixed economy that did spread economic growth to all and sundry. That it should generate welfare to everybody was just a propaganda ploy. Everyone who didn't engage in self-deception did see that from the beginning.

It have worked beyond any expectations, a total success for the few that owns this world. Some counter counter revolution on this aren't even remotely visible on the horizon. And if it would come the few will defend their progress with whatever it takes, if a bloodbath are required they won't hesitate.

Norb , January 19, 2019 at 12:55 pm

A Benevolent Dictator will be needed to displace capitalism as the means for supplying the goods and services needed for a survivable and sustainable society. A new enlightened elite conscious of rational needs instead of marketers and self-promoters.

Millions of individuals are beginning to extricate themselves, the best way they can, from this corrupt system. The die hard capitalists will be the last to notice that the world has changed around them. Climate change will make this a necessity. People not working together to ensure their common survival will be dead.

Capitalism depends on various forms of exploitation to persist. When the world has been ground down to such an extent that growth and exploitation cannot continue, those practiced in radical conservation have the best chance for survival. I just don't see slave societies meeting that requirement. Slaves can always sabotage the system if they don't fear for their lives. An elite spending their time and energies focused on preventing slave revolts won't have the luxury of abundance to pursue their follies- they will be too busy trying to survive themselves.

Maybe this has a silver lining. The future elite will be members of the community, not some sequestered and pampered minority granted the privilege to live in this seclusion- it just won't be possible any more.

Until then, learn practical skills and be kind.

templar555510 , January 19, 2019 at 5:22 pm

" .is going to cost the system eventually. " This is the reality .. Systems DO NOT reform themselves; they can't because they don't know how to. Something new has to emerge to fill the vacumm they create when they collapse.No one knows what that will be. So just be prepared . Hold to what you know to be true.

Kilgore Trout , January 19, 2019 at 6:27 pm

"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of us all." –J. M. Keynes

Govt Sachs , January 19, 2019 at 10:14 pm

"If you're not willing to kill everybody who has a different idea than yourself, you cannot have Frederick Hayek's free market. You cannot have Alan Greenspan or the Chicago School, you cannot have the economic freedom that is freedom for the rentiers and the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector to reduce the rest of the economy to serfdom." ~ Michael Hudson

Neoliberalism is extreme capitalism, the libertarian purists' dream that, if left unabated, would eliminate human rights, safety regulations and environmental protections. That's why they've taken Civics out of the educational curriculum. Why should people learn about rights in a future world of no citizenship?

And forget about freedom to roam. There would be restricted zones, less car ownership, more mass transit, less private property ownership. Why do you think the housing prices are so out of reach today?

"In a libertarian society, there is no commons or public space. There are property lines, not borders. When it comes to real property and physical movement across such real property, there are owners, guests, licensees, business invitees and trespassers – not legal and illegal immigrants." ~ Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute

They've already tried their experiment of replacing nations with privately owned "charter cities" in Honduras, but it didn't work, unsurprisingly. Co-ops must be restored in that region, which were very successful.

Private bankers can't control BOTH forms of money creation – government issuance of new currency and credit creation, but they do and have been in the US for the past 40 years now.

Gov't finance is being intentionally mismanaged because banks make money on loans (and deficits cut into their profits), so they suppressed wages and shut off fiscal policy gov't investment in order to force the nation to borrow credit. This has caused a massive private debt over the past 40 years, all dishonorably accrued because it never had to have happened in the first place. It should all be cancelled.

"This is an outrageous betrayal of public trust -- but only what can be expected when private bankers are given a governing role in American monetary policy. In a sane world, private bankers would have no more voice than any other citizen in making that decision . It's time to throw these turkeys out of American monetary policy."

We need to reclaim the State from the money lenders.

"The "nation-state" as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."
~ Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages, 1970

"The Trilateralist Commission is international (and) is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests BY SEIZING CONTROL OF THE POLITICAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power – political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical."
~ Barry Goldwater, With No Apologies, 1979

[Jan 17, 2019] The financial struggles of unplanned retirement

People who are kicked out of their IT jobs around 55 now has difficulties to find even full-time McJobs... Only part time jobs are available. With the current round of layoff and job freezes, neoliberalism in the USA is entering terminal phase, I think.
Jan 17, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

A survey by Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found on average Americans are retiring at age 63, with more than half indicating they retired sooner than they had planned. Among them, most retired for health or employment-related reasons.

... ... ...

On April 3, 2018, Linda LaBarbera received the phone call that changed her life forever. "We are outsourcing your work to India and your services are no longer needed, effective today," the voice on the other end of the phone line said.

... ... ...

"It's not like we are starving or don't have a home or anything like that," she says. "But we did have other plans for before we retired and setting ourselves up a little better while we both still had jobs."

... ... ...

Linda hasn't needed to dip into her 401(k) yet. She plans to start collecting Social Security when she turns 70, which will give her the maximum benefit. To earn money and keep busy, Linda has taken short-term contract editing jobs. She says she will only withdraw money from her savings if something catastrophic happens. Her husband's salary is their main source of income.

"I am used to going out and spending money on other people," she says. "We are very generous with our family and friends who are not as well off as we are. So we take care of a lot of people. We can't do that anymore. I can't go out and be frivolous anymore. I do have to look at what we spend - what I spend."

Vogelbacher says cutting costs is essential when living in retirement, especially for those on a fixed income. He suggests moving to a tax-friendly location if possible. Kiplinger ranks Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Florida as the top five tax-friendly states for retirees. If their health allows, Vogelbacher recommends getting a part-time job. For those who own a home, he says paying off the mortgage is a smart financial move.

... ... ...

Monica is one of the 44 percent of unmarried persons who rely on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income. At the beginning of 2019, Monica and more than 62 million Americans received a 2.8 percent cost of living adjustment from Social Security. The increase is the largest since 2012.

With the Social Security hike, Monica's monthly check climbed $33. Unfortunately, the new year also brought her a slight increase in what she pays for Medicare; along with a $500 property tax bill and the usual laundry list of monthly expenses.

"If you don't have much, the (Social Security) raise doesn't represent anything," she says with a dry laugh. "But it's good to get it."

[Jan 17, 2019] The function of the wall is not to block the access, but to slow it down and raise the cost of crossing for illegal immigrants. As such it has some value. Also those neoliberal Dems are eager to finance foreign wars and programs like F35 without any hesitation.

Jan 17, 2019 | angrybearblog.com

[Jan 17, 2019] I've grown very sceptical over the years about the whole issue of asylum. To me, the idea that an individual can cross a border illegally without a visa, or without even a passport, and then suddenly become quasi legal be declaring that they wish to seek asylum is a bit of a farce

Jan 17, 2019 | discussion.theguardian.com

GBM1982 -> honeytree , 29 Nov 2018 10:25

I've grown very sceptical over the years about the whole issue of asylum. To me, the idea that an individual can cross a border illegally without a visa, or without even a passport, and then suddenly become quasi legal be declaring that they wish to seek asylum is a bit of a farce. The situation becomes even more farcical when failed asylum seekers still aren't deported. As for humanitarian and ethical obligations, I don't really buy into that either because the demographics of the world are such that the West is at risk of losing its very identity if it feels "obliged" to accept everyone seeking asylum and/or work from the world's more troubled regions. I see the admission of refugees as a generous gesture, not as an obligation.

[Jan 14, 2019] Tucker Carlson Leaves Cenk Ugyur SPEECHLESS On Immigration

Notable quotes:
"... Chunk Yogurt is unaware that breaking into our country is a crime. He's talking about a secondary crime being committed by the illegals ..."
Jan 14, 2019 | www.youtube.com

WesleyAPEX 1 month ago

Chunk Yogurt is unaware that breaking into our country is a crime. He's talking about a secondary crime being committed by the illegals

Fernando Amaro 1 month ago

While Tucker uses logic and facts to make his arguments, Cenk uses feelings to support his. If anyone is still a follower of Cenk after this video, then Tucker is right, the level of delusion in society is staggering.

Western Chauvinist 1 month ago

Chunk really is a disingenuous slime ball. He brings up food as evidence of our "multiculturalism", it's such a moronic example. The fundamentals of culture that Tucker was speaking of include our beliefs enshrined in the constitution, freedom of speech, our egalitarianism, capitalism, the English language, ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit, all of the god-given rights we believe in, self defense, etc. It's very uniquely American and to have millions upon millions of Hondurans or Mexicans or whatever flood in, not assimilate, and change the language and the freedoms/god-given rights we believe in, that will displace OUR culture with theirs.... and clearly our culture is superior, if it wasn't then they'd be the one's with a rich country that we'd want to move to. Who gives a fuck if we like to eat tacos or pasta you greasy slime ball. Basically if Glob of Grease was right then there would be no such thing as assimilation.

CWC4 1 month ago

At the risk of sounding misogynistic I have to say listening to a liberal is like listening to a woman. No matter how wrong they are in their mind they're right. No matter how much logic & common sense you throw their way it's never enough for them to understand. That's what it be like watching these "debates". This is why a lot of the left when it comes to men are considered BETA. They have the skewed mind like that of a female, men appeal more to logic than emotional rhetoric like what Cenk was speaking from. This is why civilizations of the past have all gone the way of the dodo bird. Because they'll allow themselves to become so diverse to the point of collapse. It's funny too because all of the countries they beg us to allow in are some of the most segregated countries on the planet, such as Asia.

[Jan 14, 2019] Class Warfare

Jan 14, 2019 | www.versobooks.com

"Uses and Abuses of Class Separatism" [ Verso ]. "[T]here are at least two necessary and sufficient elements in a relation of production. There's a structural element and an individual element. The structural element is in the relation itself (externally-facing), like a ratio, for example, and the individual element is in how people experience and live the relation (internally-facing) .. The wage relation is a paradigm case of a relation of production. It's got structural elements, like the exploitative difference between amounts paid to workers compared to profits made by capitalists. It also has experiential elements, like how workers live their wage relations depending on their race, gender, nationality, sexuality, ability. Neither element is sufficient on its own for the relation of production. Neither is dependent on the other. Neither is a function of the other. Both are necessary and sufficient for the relation of production . Class separatists separate out the structural element of relations of production, name it "class", and then distinguish this element of relations of production from the individual elements, calling them "identity" . However, class separatists make a big mistake (maybe their biggest) when they think that structural elements cut across individual elements of relations of production. The way Black women live unequal housing relations is different than indigenous men, queer immigrants, or a straight white people. But class separatists go way too far and think that these individual elements of relations of production (which they tragically call "identity" just like liberals do) need not be foregrounded and given equal political weight in their thinking and organizing. Of course structural elements of relations of production, like rent prices or mold, cut across so many differences. But these elements don't cut across individual differences. The structural elements are lived through the individual elements. The individual differences are muscles to the structural bones in relations of production. If we try to cut across these muscles, we lose our movement power." • This article is part of an extremely heatlthy on-going polemic on the left, and well worth a read on that account (It's also written in English, and not dense jargon. (I do think that "separatists" has the wrong tone.)

"Labor exploitation also happens close to home" [ Supply Chain Dive ]. "Far too often, customers outsource their moral outrage, as well as their manufacturing, to their top tier suppliers. Turning a blind eye to these tragedies may be the easy choice, especially when the upstream supply chain is halfway around the world. But human trafficking and exploitation are not reserved to low cost countries. We need to acknowledge there are labor exploitations within our domestic supply chain. Knowingly or not, we use suppliers who take advantage of employees, provide poor working conditions and low wages, and purposefully violate laws and regulations. Where is the moral outrage of labor exploitation in the United States?" More:

I remember the employees at a printed circuit board facility with holes in their clothes and burns on their skin due to the acids they worked with. Employees in a small and crowded break room that was crawling with roaches eating their lunch. Workers jammed shoulder to shoulder on assembly benches without enough room to properly do their work. Machinists lacking eye and hearing protection. Barbed wire surrounding an outside break area. Exposed electrical wires and leaking pipes, and clean rooms that were far from clean.

Can't see this from the Acela windows, though!

[Jan 12, 2019] These US companies employ the most H-1B visa holders

Jan 12, 2019 | finance.yahoo.com

One of the most sought-after visa programs in the U.S., the H-1B, could see some significant changes in 2019, according to President Trump , including a potential path to citizenship for recipients of the non-immigrant visa.

The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to hire graduate-level workers in specialty occupations, like IT, finance, accounting, architecture, engineering, science and medicine. Any job that requires workers to have at least a bachelor's degree falls under the H-1B for specialty occupations.

Each year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) allots about 85,000 of the H-1B visas -- 65,000 for applicants with a bachelor's degree or equivalent, and 20,000 for those with a master's degree or higher.

As of April 2017, when Trump signed an executive order -- "Buy American and Hire American" -- it's become more difficult for U.S. companies to hire people via H-1B. It directs the Department of Homeland Security to only grant the visas to the "most-skilled or highest-paid beneficiaries."

Here's a look at the American companies (and industries) that benefited the most from the program in 2017.

Cognizant: The IT services business had a whopping 3,194 H-1B initial petitions approved in 2017, the most of any U.S. company by almost 600.

Amazon: In 2017, the e-commerce behemoth hired 2,515 employees via the H-1B visa program, according to data compiled by the National Foundation for American Policy . That was about a 78 percent increase from 2016, or 1,099 more employees.

Microsoft: Microsoft hired 1,479 workers through H-1B in 2017, the second most of U.S. companies -- an increase in 334 employees from the year prior, or close to 29 percent.

IBM: In 2017, IBM employed about 1,231 workers through the H-1B visa program.

Intel: The California-based company employed 1,230 workers through H-1B in 2017, 200 more workers -- or a 19 percent increase -- compared to 2016.

Google: The search engine giant had 1,213 H-1B initial petitions approved for fiscal year 2017, a 31 percent increase of about 289 from 2016.

[Jan 12, 2019] Protectionist Measure to Help U.S. Corporations at the Expense of U.S. Workers Tops Trump China Trade Agenda

Jan 12, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

anne , January 07, 2019 at 02:35 PM

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/protectionist-measure-to-help-u-s-corporations-at-the-expense-of-u-s-workers-tops-trump-china-trade-agenda

January 2, 2019

Protectionist Measure to Help U.S. Corporations at the Expense of U.S. Workers Tops Trump China Trade Agenda
By Dean Baker

Readers of this New York Times piece * on Robert Lighthizer, United States trade representative, and his negotiations with China may have missed this point. The piece said that one of Lighthizer's main goals was to stop China's practice of requiring that companies like Boeing and GE, who set up operations in China, take Chinese companies as business partners.

This is an effective way of requiring technology transfers, since the partners will become familiar with the production techniques of the U.S. companies. This will enable them in future years to be competitors with these companies.

If the U.S. government prohibits contracts that require this sort of technology transfer it will make it more desirable to outsource some of their production to China. This will be good for the profits of Boeing, GE, and other large companies but bad for U.S. workers. It will also mean that we will be paying more for products in the future than would otherwise be the case, since if Chinese companies would have been able to out-compete U.S. companies, it presumably means that would be charging lower prices or selling a better product.

It is also worth noting that the basic concern expressed by Lighthizer and others assumes that major U.S. corporations are unable to look out for themselves. They are not being forced to enter in contracts with China. This problem arises because they decide to invest in China, even with conditions requiring technology transfer.

We have a great story here where the government, and many analysts, think our largest corporations lack the ability to look out for their best interest. By contrast, when it comes to individual workers who are forced to sign away their right to have class action suits, or individual investors who can be fleeced by the financial industry, the current position of the government is that they can look out for themselves.

The NYT piece also does some inappropriate mind reading when it tells readers:

"Mr. Trump is increasingly eager to reach a deal that will help calm the markets, which he views as a political electrocardiogram of his presidency."

The reporter/editor does not know that Trump is "increasingly eager" or that he "views" the markets as "a political electrocardiogram of his presidency."

Good reporting says what politicians do and say. It does not report as fact their alleged opinions.

* https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/us/politics/robert-lighthizer-president-trump.html

Mr. Bill -> anne... , January 09, 2019 at 04:53 PM
As a people, we should look to the masters of mercantilism, Germany, and learn the lessons. How are they dealing with the tendency of corporations to hire the gulag communists to produce goods for sale in the advanced Western economies, like Germany and America.
Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , January 09, 2019 at 05:03 PM
Obviously, the communist government of China, which owns all production, has decided to not buy from the capitalists, but prefers to sell to them, only. Whoops.
Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , January 09, 2019 at 05:04 PM
Something in the scientific trade model seems to have been in error. Duh !
Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , January 09, 2019 at 05:08 PM
Everything is okay though, the top 1% of the capitalists are making their nut. The rest of us ? Who cares. That's capitalism.
Mr. Bill -> Mr. Bill... , January 09, 2019 at 05:14 PM
Capitalists love Communism ! No need for all the mess of democracy. Last man standing is a risible philosophy.

[Jan 04, 2019] The University of Michigan Has At Least 82 Full-Time Diversity Officers at a Total Annual Payroll Cost of $10.6M.

Jan 04, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ChiGal in Carolina , , January 4, 2019 at 6:01 pm

The University of Michigan Has At Least 82 Full-Time Diversity Officers at a Total Annual Payroll Cost of $10.6M.

so applying some crude arithmetic, 8 cost $1M meaning they are paid upward of 100k apiece? Or if it's differently apportioned the Chief Executive Officer of Diversity makes some unimaginably astronomical salary and the others are in the 60-80k range?

Maybe they are including a travel allowance as part of "payroll"? I know much of what they do is recruitment since back in the 90s my then-bf was one of only two -- count 'em, TWO -- Blacks in the entire graduate physical sciences division at the University of Chicago. He was in Computer Science (machine learning) and the other was in Chemistry. They would send him back to Atlanta where he gone to school at Morehouse and the University of GA.

a different chris , , January 4, 2019 at 6:18 pm

>they are paid upward of 100k apiece?

Don't forget that medical is a good 15K, prolly more like 18k, so "paid" is a fluid term here.

Not that there is anything wrong with your post, I just want to make sure our ridiculous medical costs get into every possible discussion :)

[Jan 04, 2019] Hard core neoliberals want no money paid to workers, but they demand government ensure consumers have lots of money to spend, far more money than they earn

Jan 04, 2019 | economistsview.typepad.com

mulp -> anne... , December 31, 2018 at 01:17 PM

Why can't Krugman, an economist, clearly explain the destruction of the nation by neoliberals destruction of economic theory, turning benefits into liabilities, and liabilities into benefit, but only asymetricaly???

Hard core neoliberals cleverly attacked Adam Smith and Keynes so stealthily that even Krugman rejects Adamm Smith and Keynes, and embraces free lunch economics.

No progressive today would support FDR or his advisors, including Eccles, who was much smarter than anyone running the Fed since about 1970.

Hard core neoliberals want no money paid to workers, but they demand government ensure consumers have lots of money to spend, far mote money than they earn. But, Hard core neoliberals do not want government giving consumers money to spend to generate high profits for Hard core neoliberals, but want the government to enable cHard core neoliberals get the free money to rent to consumers, and then government punish consumers for not being able to pay debt because they are not paid to work, because paying workers costs Hard core neoliberals too much.

Just read a editorial from the anti government control of economy Heritage demanding a branch of government, the Fed, control the economy, ie print more money, so businesses don't have to pay consumers to buy stuff, ie, pay higher wages.

Free lunch economics is a total failure, yet hard core neoliberals argue its working great, except [real] liberals keep pointing out its clear and obvious failures.

But hard core neoliberals should be thankful Krugman is not a liberal, but a free lunch progressive in near total agreement with free lunch Hard core neoliberals.

[Jan 03, 2019] May Day in a Neoliberal Society

Notable quotes:
"... "We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you." ..."
"... "No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today. Although the rally is included in American history textbooks, very few present the event accurately or point out its significance." ..."
"... Chicago Haymarket Massacre ..."
"... Working for Inclusive, Just, and Equal Alternatives in Asia and Europe. AEPF11 tackled strategies on major themes or People's Visions, representing the hopes of citizens of the two regions. These are: ..."
"... Resource Justice, Land Rights, Equal Access to Water, and Participation – Going Beyond Extractivism ..."
"... Food Sovereignty/Food Security – Beyond zero hunger ..."
"... Climate Justice – Towards Sustainable Energy Production and Use, and Zero Waste ..."
"... Socially Just Trade, Production and Investment ..."
"... Social Justice – Social Protection for All, Decent Work and Sustainable Livelihoods, Tax Justice and other egalitarian Alternatives to Debt and Austerity ..."
"... Peace Building and Human Security – Responses to Migration, and Fundamentalism and Terrorism ..."
"... Participatory Democracy, Gender Equality and Minority Rights ..."
"... http://www.aseminfoboard.org/events/11th-asia-europe-peoples-forum-aepf11 ..."
"... "We are increasingly experiencing corporate capture", whereby multinational and national corporations structure and determine our lives and livelihoods," ..."
Jan 03, 2019 | countercurrents.org

It is indeed ironic that the US, where May Day has its origin, government has never celebrated this day, but instead has declared it 'law and order day' since Eisenhower. This is indicative of contempt for workers by a capitalist-controlled state and the resolve to prevent labor from demanding a voice in public policy as it did in the 19 th century when it confronted a violently hostile employer backed by the state. Today, many Republican and Democrats openly and unapologetically acknowledge capitalist monopoly over public policy. Mick Mulvaney, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, unashamedly invited 1,300 bank executives to help him convert the agency that he heads into a pro-banking institution, more so than it is currently, by contributing money to politicians favoring banking deregulation and curbing consumer protection safeguards. "We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you're a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn't talk to you. If you're a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you."

An honest admission of the degree to which neoliberalism has triumphed, Mulvaney's speech was indicative of the degree to which capital is now in an open politically-normalized war against labor and society. This is no different than it was in the post-Civil War era when the nascent labor movement in America confronted the combined forces of both employers and the state in the struggle for living wages, safety, and varieties of employer abuses of workers, including children and women. An estimated 35,000 workers, mostly Italian and Irish immigrants, went on strike in Chicago on May 1, 1886 in what became known as the Haymarket Massacre. They demanded an 8-hour workday, fair wages, work safety, abolition of child labor, and the end to labor exploitation by management in the workplace. The response was the police striking workers and government adopting harsh measures against any worker trying to organize in the aftermath. William J Adelman, founder of the Illinois Labor History Society and Vice President, correctly stated: "No single event has influenced the history of labor in Illinois, the United States, and even the world, more than the Chicago Haymarket Affair. It began with a rally on May 4, 1886, but the consequences are still being felt today. Although the rally is included in American history textbooks, very few present the event accurately or point out its significance."

As Adelman pointed out, American society is more anti-labor than many other advanced capitalist countries, though anti-labor policies have spread globally under neoliberalism since the 1980s. While the police are not out killing workers as they were in the 19 th and early 20 th century, the contemporary neoliberal state has adopted policies intended to crush organized labor and silence any voice of dissent to the corporate welfare state. As a market-based institutional order impacting every aspect of society, including personal identity, neoliberal corporate welfarism has replaced social welfare capitalism. The neoliberal goal is to turn the clock back to the early stages of capitalist development when labor had no rights and the state's role was to act as a conduit for private capital accumulation. Although society's institutional evolution does not permit for a return to 19 th century social conditions, the trend is to erase as many of the vestiges of social welfare as possible in order to accelerate capital accumulation.

Whether neoliberalism operates under the pluralist model where vestiges of social welfare and diversity remain as part of the legal structure, or under the populist authoritarian model intended to erase pluralism and social welfare, the goal is capital accumulation through massive transfer of income from labor and the middle class to the richest tiny percentage in the world. Employers had no difficulty convincing the government to crush the labor movement in Chicago through violent means in the 1880s or to execute a number of labor leaders in the aftermath, thus sending a strong message to the world about the absence of workers' rights, civil rights, human rights and social justice. The infamous Chicago Haymarket Massacre left a legacy of the class struggle with reverberations around the world, exposing the myth of bourgeois democracy as representative of anyone outside the capitalist class. Anti-union and anti-labor policies were characteristic of the US government from Haymarket until the Great Depression when Roosevelt cleverly broadened the labor movement in order to co-opt if as part of the Democratic party, thus deradicalizing workers and subordinating the class struggle to capital, in return for a social welfare state.

Post-Vietnam War progressive opposition to the misanthropic neoliberal culture in most countries has been co-opted by pluralist neoliberal political parties claiming to represent all classes within the context of the existing social order. Every identity group, from minorities, women, elderly, alternative lifestyle, environmental groups, etc. is represented under the larger umbrella of a pluralist political party. Similarly, the conservative to rightwing identity groups, religious, nationalist, militarist, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, etc. are under the umbrella of the populist/authoritarian neoliberal political camp as in Trump's Republican Party. The left representing the working class – lower middle class included – has a very weak voice so marginalized a much in the historically anti-left America as in most of the Western World. Instead of joining the progressive leftist camp, the labor movement is itself co-opted by the neoliberal political parties of the pluralist or populist variety, thus society operates under a totalitarian canopy within which the choices are between the neoliberal pluralist or the populist pluralist parties, with variations in modalities, considering inherent conflicts among the political and financial elites choosing different camps. President Macron representing the pluralist neoliberal camp in France is just as militaristic and anti-labor as Trump representing the populist neoliberal camp in the US. Labor's representation in these governments is non-existent. Operating within the parliamentary system, France has an anti-capitalist non-revolutionary party, though it has not been put to the test and it has a very long way to go before it takes power.

In the neoliberal age that dominates life in all its aspects, the development of genuine socialism seems unattainable and people become fatalistic or apathetic. However, the contradictions of the neoliberal establishment, the countless of contradictions in the social order will produce the foundations of a new social order built on the ashes of the one decaying. The declarations of the Asia-Europe People's Forum in the last two decades point out some of the structural problems of the neoliberal status quo, as articulated by heads of state. However, these declarations remain mere rhetoric, as the 11th Asia-Europe Meeting Summit of July 2016 illustrates.

Working for Inclusive, Just, and Equal Alternatives in Asia and Europe. AEPF11 tackled strategies on major themes or People's Visions, representing the hopes of citizens of the two regions. These are:

http://www.aseminfoboard.org/events/11th-asia-europe-peoples-forum-aepf11

ASEM11 touches on some of the problems without analyzing their root causes, namely, globalist neoliberal policies that the same heads of state as signatories are pursuing. While agreeing on the interlocking nature of the crises of capitalism, and acknowledging such crises are the cause of greater social polarization – poverty, inequality, joblessness, and insecurity – they are not willing to abandon the very system that gives rise to the crises. While they readily admit that "We are increasingly experiencing corporate capture", whereby multinational and national corporations structure and determine our lives and livelihoods," they are unwilling to do anything about it. No government is doing anything to encourage genuine grassroots progressive movements, labor and social movements that would become the foundation for a new social order rooted in social justice. On the contrary, the goal is to prevent labor mobilization, progressive social organizations, unless of course they are co-opted and subordinate to the goals of neoliberalism. That the US does not celebrate May Day to honor workers is a reflection of the dominant culture's contempt for labor. For those countries that officially celebrate May Day while pursuing neoliberal anti-labor policies, the holiday has been reduced to about the same level of hypocrisy as any national Independence Day – oppression remains a reality for workers, while equality and social justice are a distant dream.

Jon V. Kofas , Ph.D. – Retired university professor of history – author of ten academic books and two dozens scholarly articles. Specializing in International Political economy, Kofas has taught courses and written on US diplomatic history, and the roles of the World Bank and IMF in the world.

[Jan 03, 2019] This is what keeps us working for the man by Joe Jarvis

Notable quotes:
"... only 1 in 3 US citizen STEM graduates can actually find jobs these days. ..."
"... US citizen are left submitting their resumes into black holes because the tech firms have placed their HR function into bunkers with near zero accessibility to the professional community who wants to offer their services. ..."
"... many bright minds, in the prime of their lives, instead of contributing, are sitting around trying to figure out where they're going to get their next meal. ..."
Jan 03, 2019 | The Daily Bell

by Joe Jarvis via The Daily Bell

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go,
I owe my soul to the company store.

Travis Merle wrote the song Sixteen Tons about working your life away in the coal mines and spending your whole paycheck–and then some–at the company store. You had no other options in the corporate mining villages of the early twentieth century.

The most famous version of the song came from Tennessee Ernie Ford. Sixteen Tons was covered by many others, including Johnny Cash, and even Elvis at some concerts though he never recorded it.

And South Park recently featured their own version in an episode called "Unfulfilled," about working for Amazon. Of course, South Park is a comedy cartoon series that parodies real-life events. They depicted Amazon fulfilment centers as the only available jobs in the small Colorado town. People worked in dangerous collaboration with machines, and went home to spend their entire paycheck on Amazon.

Jeff Bezos was depicted as a telepathic villain . He would tune in to various Alexa streams to gauge the mood of the town. And anyone who didn't do his bidding would have their Prime status revoked. Comparing Amazon to coal mines is funny because it exaggerates a fear in society. Everyone buys from Amazon, so the small businesses go under. And everyone working for the small businesses goes to work for Amazon.

South Park did the same thing with a Walmart episode about a decade back. Walmart possessed some unknown power which compelled people to shop there, they were powerless to resist. Even better if they could work there and get an employee discount despite the low pay.

And then Amazon came along to compete with Walmart .

... ... ...

Yes, deliver THE DAILY BELL to my inbox!

XXX 8 hours ago

Just when American workers were getting comfortable and were delivering productivity improvements, "corporate America" dropped the ball and started doing massive outsourcing and importation of H-1B workers. To such a severe extent that only 1 in 3 US citizen STEM graduates can actually find jobs these days.

Even top grads from top schools are ignored while the red carpet is rolled out to foreign national OPT and H-1B visa recipients. US citizen are left submitting their resumes into black holes because the tech firms have placed their HR function into bunkers with near zero accessibility to the professional community who wants to offer their services.

The loss to the economy due to such is enormous. So many bright minds, in the prime of their lives, instead of contributing, are sitting around trying to figure out where they're going to get their next meal.

XXX 10 hours ago remove link

Being your own boss sounds great, but in fact most people are not 'wired' for that. Which is a good thing, because any hierarchal organization requires that a few be leaders, with the majority being led. That's why tribes have one chief, nations have one King or President. It's why there is one judge who presides over a trial, why there is one teacher to a classroom, and why we have many times more soldiers than generals.

That is simply the reality. The folks who go on about how we should all become entrepreneurs and work for ourselves as a solution to the noxious employment situation we find ourselves in are ignoring that reality. A world of 'all chiefs and no Indians' just doesn't work, because most people are unable to function that way. That doesn't make them inferior, it doesn't make them suckers for working for 'the man'...that this is not currently working out too well is a function of the incompetent way we've been handling the whole employment-thing, not because too many are employed by others.

The ratio of leaders vs. followers is the way it is because that's what is needed for these systems to WORK. Furthermore, you find this in ALL of nature as well...the pack has ONE leader, the hive has ONE Queen, even among single-celled organisms, the mitochondria have assumed the leadership role and now control and direct all other cellular functions. We see this in the evolution of out own bodies, which consist of many different systems all operating under the leadership of organized neural cells in the brain. You will of course notice that these biological systems have something in common...they all work for the good of the WHOLE organism, not just a few parts. This is a missing piece in most human-run systems, and is likely a reason most people tend to mistrust them and want out.

There is nothing wrong with being a 'worker bee'! Not everyone in the church choir can sell a million albums...does that mean everyone else should just say the hell with it and disband their choirs? When company A makes one guy the CEO, should all the other employees quit in protest and go form their own companies? Then what is the CEO going to run? And who will work for all those new companies?

Anyone who thinks Americans have some kind of problem with 'work' needs to examine the MESSAGING our society is sending about work. I think the problem really lies there. Because competition without cooperation is just warfare. And boy, is THIS a society at war with itself or what?

XXX 12 hours ago

All large systems are hierarchical. Feudalism was hierarchical. So in that sense they are similar, although in corporations there are usually a lot more levels and a lot more people are 'not serfs', but something slightly higher up.

Hierarchies (as far as we know) are the only way to 'scale'. Look at any large system and you will see a hierarchy (roads, Internet, vascular system, government, military, and yes, corporations).

Hierarchical systems may have undesirable elements for some e.g. inequality, but until someone comes up with a different way to organize and run a large system, it is the only way. And, it was not 'designed', it is simply the natural outcome. As natural as the blood flowing in your veins. To 'blame' natural systems for perceived drawbacks is like blaming 'math'.

XXX 14 hours ago (Edited) remove link

This article indicates that we live within a system built and controlled by others and that our only choice is how we respond to that environment. Someone else writes the rules that favor them and the rest of us just have to live with it.

It's a political economy. Changing the rules changes the economy.

Metalredneck , 14 hours ago

I'm sure the resemblance to feudalism is a coincidence. /s

[Jan 03, 2019] Why France's Yellow Vest protests have been ignored by "The Resistance" in the U.S. by Max Parry

US "resistance" is as fake as it can be. It consists mainly of Clinton wing of DemoRats (in pocket of Wall Street) and neoliberal presstitutes in MSM.
Macron is seen as a former Rothschild banker who had the idea that he could 'modernise' France in the neoliberal Brussels way. According to the latest poll 61% of the French reject Macron's policies.
Jan 03, 2019 | www.unz.com

In less than two months, the yellow vests (" gilets jaunes " ) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowed President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands. Just as el uture EU designer was fortunate enough to have friends in high places. Schuman's clemency was granted by none other than General Charles de Gaulle himself, the leader of the resistance during the war and future French President. Instantly, Schuman's turncoat reputation was rehabilitated and his wartime activity whitewashed. Even though he had knowingly voted full authority to Pétain, the retention of his post in the Vichy government was veneered to have occurred somehow without his knowledge or consent.

... ... ...

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in Counterpunch, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, and more. Max may be reached at [email protected]


JLK , says: January 2, 2019 at 5:20 am GMT

Thierry Meyssan is reporting that Macron is more of a stooge for Henry Kravis (of the KKR corporate raider firm) than for the Rothschilds. He also alleges that Kravis has been funding ISIS/Daesh.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article204303.html

Rothschild made a comment the other day about the Italian government debt problem. French banks have heavy exposure. France has troops in Syria; has the French army been leveraged into a mercenary force for wealthy Zionists?

OMG , says: January 2, 2019 at 8:44 am GMT

Not a bad article 'though I have read more profound philosophical discussions about the underlying historical underpinnings to this movement. [see eg. http://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-ghost-of-1789-looms-over-france-and-europe/ .

The article by Angela Nagle which is linked to is, however, absolutely excellent and I thoroughly recommend reading it as a very powerful argument against unfettered immigration.

Justsaying , says: January 2, 2019 at 10:54 am GMT

Very perceptive to place "Resistance" between quotes. Resistance is non-existent in the US. True resistance requires an educated working class; instead the US has a amassed one of the most stupefied and brainwashed workers on the planet.

Alfred Barnes , says: January 2, 2019 at 11:17 am GMT

The Yellow Jackets movement isn't lost in the US, nor among those who support DJT. In fact, until the Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement, both grass roots organized, recognize they have a common enemy in the status quo, they will continue to conquered by it.

The merge of fiscal and social responsibility is something the NWO wants to avoid at all costs while they implement their global currency and totalitarian rule. Globalists want to replace God with the state.

Paul C. , says: January 2, 2019 at 12:28 pm GMT
@Jeff Stryker

France and the US, like most nations, are controlled by the parasitical zionist central bankers and their deep state apparatchiks. They continue to squeeze the native populations into poverty and servitude, while destroying their culture with open borders, facilitating 3rd world immigration. The zionist controlled MSM won't cover the Yellow Vest movement in hopes to keep awareness low. Many would like to see it gain a foothold in the US. Unfortunately, Americans have been subject to fluoridation of their water supply, unlike France, and thus are docile. The pharmaceuticals and vaccines have rendered them zombies.

[Jan 02, 2019] Sic Semper Tyrannis 150 Central Americans tried by force this week to enter the US illegally en masse

Jan 02, 2019 | turcopolier.typepad.com

150 Central Americans tried by force this week to enter the US illegally en masse Static.politico.com

"US agents have fired tear gas over the border into Mexico at migrants trying to enter the country illegally.

Around 150 Central Americans tried to make the crossing near the town of Tijuana to the south of California on New Year's Day.

One US official described the migrants as a "violent mob".

It comes as the US federal government remains shut down as President Donald Trump and Congress argue over funding for his proposed border wall." BBC

------------

The BBC does not seem to know that the US voluntarily admits over one million legal IMMIGRANTS per year. These people are automatically on a track to full citizenship after five years residence if they behave themselves, pay their taxes, do not commit criminal acts, etc. They can accelerate that process if they join the US armed forces and serve honorably.

The people now seeking to force their way across the border seem to think that they are justified in crashing across the US border with Mexico without regard to US law. To willingly cross the US border illegally is a misdemeanor crime. The US government has a duty under the constitution to defend the borders of the US against foreign invasion. How are foreign people trying to crash through the border not an invasion? Tear gas? Yes, it makes you cry and choke. The alternative is force escalating to deadly force.

The US listens to petitions for asylum from conditions that threaten life. The US does not recognize petitions for asylum based on poor conditions of local economy or crime in countries of origin. If the US did accept such petitions, most of the population of the planet would be eligible for asylum in the US.

The argument is raised that the US should make Central America an earthly paradise, a veritable Nebraska in which Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans would be content to abide. Well, pilgrims, as I have explained here several times, the US has been trying to do that in Latin America ever since the Kennedy Administration with minimal success. Do these little countries wish to surrender their sovereignty to the US so that we might perform our magic of enrichment and creation of actual democracy upon them? I think they do not. They approach our borders waving the various flags of their wretched countries even while asking for ASYLUM from those countries, countries that cannot run their own affairs well enough to make people want to stay home and live the good life Latino style.

Make no mistake. If these migrants, who think nothing of using little children as human shields, force surrender of control of immigration, there will be a tidal wave coming behind them. pl

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46739126

Continued

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