Sunday, September 2, 2018
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Tucker Carlson says there's nothing free about this market, falls short of calling it an expression of global fascism
But who knows, maybe his forthcoming book connects the dots between the multinational corporations and their revolving door governments, and the central banking system which mediates the operation.
Here:
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS:
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is worth about $150 billion. That’s enough to make him the richest man in the world, by far, and possibly the richest person in human history. It’s certainly enough to pay his employees well. But he doesn’t. A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits. According to data from the nonprofit group New Food Economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year. Jeff Bezos isn’t paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars. Next time you see Bezos, make sure he says thank you.
Same with the Waltons. The Walton family founded Walmart. Collectively they’re worth about $175 billion. That’s more than the entire gross domestic product of Qatar, the oil-rich Gulf state. The Waltons could certainly afford to be generous with their workers. Instead, they count on you to take up the slack. In 2013, taxpayers sent more than $6 billion to Walmart’s workers, for food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.
And if you think that’s shocking, meet Travis Kalanick. He’s the youthful founder of Uber. His personal fortune is close to $5 billion. His drivers, by contrast, often make less than minimum wage. One recent study showed that many Uber drivers lose money working for the company. That’s not a sustainable business model. The only reason it continues is because of your generosity. Because you’re paying the welfare benefits for Uber’s impoverished drivers, child billionaires like Travis get to keep buying bigger houses and more airplanes. He’s someone else who definitely owes you a thank you note.
If you can think of a less fair system than that, send us an email. We’d love to hear it. It’s indefensible. Yet almost nobody ever complains about it. How come? Conservatives, like us, support the free market, and for good reason. Free markets work. But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulation to crush competition. There’s nothing conservative about that, just as there’s nothing conservative about most big corporations. Just the opposite. They’re the backbone of the left. Pick a leftwing cause that you think is hurting the country. Check the donor list, and you’ll find the name of some corporation. Often many corporations. Corporate America enables the progressive lunacy you see every night on this show. They’re funding the revolution now in progress.
That’s why liberals say nothing as oligarchs amass billions by soaking the middle class. Because they’ve been paid off. For example, you probably assumed the people who founded Walmart were conservative. Most of their customers certainly are. Yet the bulk of the Walton family backed Hillary Clinton in the last election. They gave the Democratic Party more than $700,000 during the 2016 cycle. Almost every billionaire in Silicon Valley did the same. In return, they got immunity from criticism, and you got to keep paying their employees. Not a bad deal for them.
There is one person in Washington who’s offended by this arrangement, and we’re sorry to say he’s wrong on pretty much everything else. But this is a weird moment, so you take allies where you can find them. Bernie Sanders, of all people, is trying to get your money back from Jeff Bezos. This is especially amazing since Bezos is on Bernie’s side on most things. They’re both leftwing activists. But on this question, Bernie’s right. He’s planning legislation that would force big corporations to return the taxpayer-funded welfare benefits you’ve paid to their workers. It’s not a perfect solution, and it probably won’t pass. No matter what they claim in public, liberals in Congress would never support something like that. Their loyalty isn’t to you. It’s to Uber and Jeff Bezos. But at the very least it might awaken a sleepy population to the new reality of activist corporate America. And that’s a good thing.
America has changed enormously in the last 20 years. A lot of people you thought were your allies are in fact working against your interests. They have contempt for you and your family, your customs and your faith. Included in this group, I’m sorry to say, are a lot of big corporations. They have no use for you or the country you grew up in. Stand in their way, and they’ll crush you. It’s all shocking enough that I recently wrote a book about it. It’s called “Ship of Fools,” and it explains what happened and who did it. The book is out in a month, the first week of October, but you can preorder a copy now, and I hope you will.
Andrew Yarrow: Over 20 million men are not employed, five times the official 4 million
Excerpted from his book Man Out, here:
We’re left with the reality that the percentage of men not employed today is about three times what it was during the Truman and Eisenhower eras: well over 20 million men. Not the four million officially deemed to be unemployed.
The unemployment level for men averaged 4.18 million in 2016 and 3.73 million in 2017.
Noah Smith embraces the Trump narrative: "There’s no doubt that the U.S. economy is in a boom"
Here for Bloomberg.
After examining several indicators, which, however, are not unequivocal for their interpretation despite saying "no doubt", Noah Smith comes down on the side of improved sentiment as the cause of the current "boom".
On that we agree. There's a boom in sentiment.
The problem is, too many people are importing that improved sentiment into their reading of the data, and into their choice of the data.
For example, Smith focuses on job openings to unemployed, which is a tiny measure (6.66 million in June) of what's really going on in the labor market. But the broadest measures of unemployment still show 15.9 million unemployed, underemployed, and no longer counted in the labor force. There is still huge slack in the labor market, which is one reason why wages for the vast majority of workers are not rising like they would in a real economic boom (2.7% y/y in July vs. in the 4s in 2006/7).
Similarly Smith discusses the percent of population employed aged 25-54, but clearly misses that it's most definitely not "back to 2006 levels" as he claims (H1 2018 is at 79.2%, still below the 2006 average of 79.8% and also below the average of either half of 2006). The broadest measure of the percent employed, on the other hand, still shows a huge gap between now and the pre-Great Recession average when over 6 million more were employed than are at present (60.5% now vs. 62.9% then, on average).
The case is similar with domestic investment.
Smith chooses to highlight "Shares of gross domestic product: Gross private domestic investment: Fixed investment: Nonresidential (A008RE1Q156NBEA)" to show that "investment as a percentage of the economy is at about the level of the mid-2000s boom". But the current level in H1 2018 at 13.7% is also identical to H2 2014. Was that indicative of a boom? Did we blink and miss it? How about in H1 2008 when it was again at 13.7%? Was that indicative of a boom? If so, why did the economy then promptly crash in H2 2008?
A broader measure of domestic investment, however, "Shares of gross domestic product: Gross private domestic investment (A006RE1Q156NBEA)", shows us well off the 2006 peak and even the more recent 2015 level. Whatever we call what we have right now, the current 17.7% is still far below the 19.8% level of H1 2006, which itself failed to equal the boom level of the year 2000 (19.9%).
With all that cash unleashed by the tax reforms and sloshing around in the economy, one would think things would look a lot better than this, which simply shows that most of that money indeed went elsewhere.
GDP has been temporarily goosed by the tax reforms in concert with a fresh gusher of federal deficit spending. But those are one-offs. They will not, and cannot, be repeated over and over again in short succession.
We know what comes next.
Friday, August 31, 2018
Democrats want you to know House candidate Abigail Spanberger was just monkeying around teaching at an Islamic school in DC
Democratic House candidate Abigail Spanberger suffers the kind of election year smear John McCain would recognize [thanks to a Postal Service error divulging the information]:
The Republican firm says it got the form by mistake from the Postal Service, where Spanberger once worked as a postal inspector. The Postal Service on Thursday apologized for its "human error."
That doesn't explain how a mistake of that magnitude occurred so rapidly. Spanberger requested her own personnel records months ago and hasn't received them. ...
Outraged Democrats, fearing other candidates remain at risk, have demanded a federal investigation. Without elaboration, the Postal Service says "a small number of additional requests for information from personnel files were improperly processed."
Ah, you can't get your own mail but somebody else can! The incompetent big government wanted by most Democrats, and too many Republicans, just keeps on giving.
Hm, the famous Chuck Berry wrote and recorded his fifth single "Too Much Monkey Business" in 1956
"Too Much Monkey Business" is a song written and recorded by Chuck Berry, released by Chess Records in September 1956 as his fifth single. It was also released as the third track on his first solo LP, After School Session, in May 1957; and as an EP. The single reached number four on Billboard magazine's Most Played In Juke Boxes chart, number 11 on the Most Played by Jockeys chart and number seven on the Top Sellers in Stores chart in 1956. -- Wikipedia
Listen to it here.
At the end of 2017 we still had 14 million more on food stamps than at the pre-Great Recession average
16.5% of the U.S. population was on food stamps on average in 2017, versus 11% on average from 1973-2008.
In 2017 over 42 million received food help from the program, but only 28 million would have had the average receiving help returned to 11%.
In the first five months of 2018 the percentage receiving help has fallen to 15.4% on average, implying a smaller gap of about 11.6 million.
The trend is in the right direction, but we are hardly back to normal.
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Hopeless Arizonans choose another immigration squish, A-10 pilot Martha McSally, to run for resigning Flake's US Senate seat
Republican McSally (AZ-2), who could be a man masquerading as a woman for all we know and appears to have been flying solo since the annulment of her marriage in 1999, faces openly bisexual Democrat Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-9) for the Senate seat in November.
As in many other states, independents may vote in Republican Party primaries in Arizona.
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Steep, sustained increases in new STD infections in the last five years, not seen for twenty
Reported here:
[N]early 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were diagnosed in the U.S. in 2017, surpassing the record set in 2016 by more than 200,000, CDC scientists reported Tuesday. ... CDC researchers found that gonorrhea diagnoses increased by 67 percent — from 333,004 to 555,608 — in just five years. ... Syphilis diagnoses, which rose by 76 percent, from 17,357 to 30,644, were mostly in men. ... The chlamydia rate held relatively steady with more than 1.7 million cases diagnosed in 2017, just a few percentage points above where it was in 2013.
Honest liberal Glenn Greenwald reminds the world about the media's chronic, systematic, reckless reporting of fake news
Including about CNN's latest lies about what Cohen's got on Trump, here in The Intercept:
When reporting on that story, I detailed just some of the similarly significant and false stories major outlets have published on this story over the last eighteen months, notably always in the same direction, pushing the same narrative interests:
- Russia hacked into the U.S. electric grid to deprive Americans of heat during winter (Wash Post)
- An anonymous group (PropOrNot) documented how major U.S. political sites are Kremlin agents (Wash Post)
- WikiLeaks has a long, documented relationship with Putin (Guardian)
- A secret server between Trump and a Russian bank has been discovered (Slate)
- RT hacked C-SPAN and caused disruption in its broadcast (Fortune)
- Russians hacked into a Ukrainian artillery app (Crowdstrike)
- Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states (multiple news outlets, echoing Homeland Security)
- Links have been found between Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci and a Russian investment fund under investigation (CNN)
Whatever words one wishes to use to defend the U.S. media’s conduct here, “rare” and “isolated” are not among those that can be credibly invoked. Far more accurate are “chronic,” “systematic” and “reckless.”
Agent admits FBI leaks info to get it into the news, reports about which are then used by FBI to get FISA warrants
The practice is similar to the FBI's common practice of identifying potential "terrorists" whom FBI agents then suborn to commit criminal acts by posing as terrorists themselves.
From the story here:
A top FBI special agent admitted to House committees last week that bureau officials were known to leak information to the press and then use the resulting articles to help obtain surveillance warrants.
Special Agent Jonathan Moffa, who worked with controversial former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, testified last Friday behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee.
A source with knowledge of his testimony confirmed to Fox News that Moffa said FBI personnel would use media reports based on information they leaked to justify applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants.
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