Elephants perform for final time at Ringling Bros. AP (Furzy Mouse).
Fading risks of global recession Gavyn Davies, FT
Fed may need more powers to support securities firms during crises: Dudley Reuters. Like access to the discount window.
Freddie Mac may need another taxpayer bailout next week MarketWatch. Why are we hearing about this only now?
Fiscal and monetary policy can be uneasy bedfellows FT
Half of leading investors ignoring climate change: study Reuters
The Latest: Berkshire investors reject climate change report AP
The Right Time for Climate Action Project Syndicate
Oil Bulls Bet the Waning U.S. Shale Boom Will Curb Global Glut Bloomberg
Halliburton and Baker Hughes to Call Off $35 Billion Mega Oil Merger Fortune
Taking the Temperature of U.S. Jobs and Global Manufacturing WSJ
Asia’s factories stay sluggish, stimulus lacks traction Reuters
Buffett Says Hedge Funds Get ‘Unbelievable’ Fees for Bad Results Bloomberg. Yves: “Piling on when it is cheap to do so. This is the finance news version of a momentum trade.”
Goldman targets ‘mass affluent’ borrowers with unusual lending plan Reuters
Lousy 401(k) plans may spark more lawsuits CNBC
Deutsche Bank continues to be plagued by legal uncertainty FT
China Lending Inflates Real Estate, Stocks, Even Egg Futures NYT
TTIP Documents Revealed Süddeutsche Zeitung (MR).
According to the documents, Washington is threatening to prevent the easing of exports for the European car industry in order to force Europe to buy more U.S. agricultural products. The U.S. government concurrently has criticized the fundamental prevention principal of the EU Consumer Centre which protects 500 million Europeans from consuming genetically modified food and hormone-treated meat. The documents further reveal the fact that the U.S. has blocked the urgent European call to replace the controversial private arbitration tribunals, responsible for corporative lawsuits, with a public State model; instead, Washington has made a suggestion on the matter that had hitherto not been disclosed to the public.
Syraqistan
Iraqi Protesters to End Sit-In, Leave Baghdad’s Fortified Zone Bloomberg
The End of American Iraq: Poor Shiites invade Parliament over corrupt Spoils System Informed Comment (Re Silc).
Black Injustice Tipping Point
What Happened to Sandra Bland? The Nation
Legal bills mount as Ferguson stands by ‘failure-to-comply’ cases St Louis Post-Dispatch. Like the Bourbons, Ferguson’s tiny oligarchy has learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.
Bill Moyers in Conversation: Eddie Glaude Jr. on America’s Racial ‘Value Gap’ (audio) Bill Moyers
The movement to end mass incarceration is still too weak to win big Salon
2016
Hillary Clinton private email server problems split opinions FT. “‘This isn’t public corruption . . . this isn’t a venal crime,’ one person close to the Clintons told the Financial Times.” So what kind of a crime is it, then? And if a public official privatizing their official communications isn’t corrupt, what is? Who paid for those communications to be made and stored? The public. And now representatives of the public can’t see what is theirs because, as nobody, including this FT reporter, ever mentions, private individuals hired by Clinton deleted half of it.
Clinton Targets Appalachia Votes WSJ
The Clinton-Warren fantasy Politico
Bernie Sanders Says Superdelegates Should Follow Voters’ Will in Landslide States NYT
Sanders’ $26 million April haul a dip from past months CNN
Jane Sanders emerges as Bernie’s go-to messenger The Hill
Bernie’s World N+1
The Bernie Camp’s Really Bad Idea of a ‘Tea Party of the Left’ New York Magazine
Trump’s war with best and brightest Edward Luce, FT. Foreign policy/national security establishment not notable for its humility.
Donald Trump Holds 15-Point Lead Ahead of Republican Rivals in Indiana Poll WSJ
Trump gets outside help for potential GOP convention battle WaPo (Furzy Mouse).
Munger: Donald Trump’s behavior reflects a ‘form of sickness’ Yahoo News
Silver Flushes Secret Sauce Down Toilet, Now Projects Trump has 69% Chance MishTalk (E. Mayer). Mayer: “If only there had been a leveraged ‘short Nate Silver’ ETF, NC reader craazyman might well have finally gotten his fabled ten-bagger.”
Who’s Afraid of Communism? The New Republic
Democracies end when they are too democratic Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine. I’m so old I remember when Sully endorsing Obama was a big deal.
America Becomes What Its Founders Feared The National Interest
America now has nearly 5 PR people for every reporter, double the rate from a decade ago Muck Rack
Class Warfare
Airbnb is forming an alliance with one of the nation’s biggest labor unions WaPo (MR). SEIU.
How Uber’s political donations illustrate the divide between management and employees CrowdPac
CIA’s Recounting of Bin Laden Raid Gets Mixed Reaction Voice of America. Oddly, or not, the story doesn’t mention Seymour Hersh’s new book.
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
Nate Silver flushes secret sauce down toilet. One of the comments in that article reflected my sentiments: “Nate Silver is a corporate tool. His Secret Sauce will give you a severe case of diarrhea, because it is itself 100% unadulterated bulls*%t.
Bullshit has very healthy microbiota, Democratic Strategists recommend two tablespoons with each meal.
I’ll apologize in advance to readers who can’t unsee this, but perhaps the Democrat Party needs a fecal transplant?
Nate came up doing baseball, and he’s out of baseball for a reason in this age of analytics. Supposedly he didn’t grasp guys get better and worse, and amazingly enough, other teams adjust. Silver would double down.
human behaviour is not rational, let alone linear, 2nd or 3rd order. Therefore predictive modeling behaviors –like political whimsy, I’m geussing is way more challenging than even the more narrowly scoped aspects of sports performance.
If NSilver were so effective he should spend a few days at the horse racetrack, then retire and do something interesting with his time
Nate Silver is propaganda.
https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2014/11/17/11547/
Nate Silver and Election Fraud
Richard Charnin
Nate Silver never discusses Election Fraud, even though it has been proven systemic. I pointed this a few years ago in a reply to his post on why we should not believe exit polls. His knowledge of exit polls was (and apparently still is) non-existent. https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/a-reply-to-nate-silvers-ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit-polls/
Nate never discusses the fact that exit polls are always forced to match the bogus recorded vote. The pollsters admit that it is standard operating procedure. Their rationale is that the polls must always be wrong since they deviate so greatly from the recorded vote. Of course we never get to see the unadjusted exit polls until years later, if then. The 1988-2008 unadjusted presidential state and national exit polls showed that the Democrats won by an average of 52-42%. But the recorded vote had them winning by just 48-46%
……..
https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2016/04/29/election-fraud-my-response-to-joshua-holland/
Election Fraud: Response to Joshua Holland
Richard Charnin
Last week, actor and activist Tim Robbins tweeted on the exit poll discrepancies . And the media presstitutes went after him with a vengeance.
………….
To Nate:
#ExitPollGate
Carl Diggler’s take on Nate Silver (aka Nate Bronze) is right: he’s a numbers cuckhold.
Not even a schoolmarmish tirade from Andy Sullivan on the horrors of democracy and the evil of letting the grubby, stubby fingered working folk have their say can convince me that it would be right to vote for Donald Trump. But I’ll admit to getting a certain itchy feeling in my voting finger. I think it will pass though.
Within the bubble, Sullivan can actually believe our “democracy” has something remotely resembling “equality” anywhere in it. It’s a steaming load, and probably was when Plato wrote it, that tyranny comes from a surplus of democracy: it’s a good deal more likely it comes from the corruption of democratic institutions by plutocracy, then as now.
This election season is proving very entertaining. All the righteous best-and-brightest, who wrap themselves in flag and patriotism when it suits, are revealing themselves to be rank opportunists, or aristo-loving elitists, or bloviating party hacks. Which category fits Sullivan?
This anti-democracy, anti-freedom bs also seems well positioned to support the awful trade deals TTP and TTIP.
http://archive.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/12/dismissed_marijuana_charge_raises_judges_ire/
In a strongly worded memorandum issued Thursday, US Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings said the decision by Acting US Attorney Michael K. Loucks to dismiss a federal misdemeanor possession charge against Sullivan flouted a “cardinal principle of our legal system’’ – that all persons stand equal before the law.
Three other defendants charged with the same offense had to appear before Collings the same day as Sullivan, the judge noted. But Sullivan’s case was the only one prosecutors did not pursue, out of concern that the $125 fine carried by the relatively minor offense could derail his US immigration application.
“It is quite apparent that Mr. Sullivan is being treated differently from others who have been charged with the same crime in similar circumstances,’’ Collings wrote in the 11-page memorandum, adding that prosecutors’ rationale for the dismissal was inadequate.
““““““““““““the system works for andrew sullivan
So now I’ve finished Sullivan’s piece and he and Bloomberg have coordinated messages: demagogs right and left!
Somehow Hillary is the hope to save us because the Augean Stench of the Clinton Foundation is in fact “pragmatism.” Pace my previous comment, this isn’t about a surfeit of democracy, but its increasing absence in a “post constitutional” system Sullivan can’t see is already rotten to the core. Sanders pounding the proven effectiveness of New Deal policies is some how analogous to Trumps, shall we say, “less humane” rhetoric.
Delete Sullivan’s false equivalency between Sanders and Trump and replace that with a real parallel between Clinton and Trump and it makes a really good argument for Sanders.
Trump and Sanders are both against the TPP and TTIP. They are the only candidates this year who have come out against these and other bad trade deals. Cleary, that makes them demagogues (in the eyes of the pro-TPP crowd). /s
If it makes you feel any better, every time I see another DC pundit go into a tizzy over Donald Trump and his candidacy I feel the very same way.
I can’t stand the guy and yet I can’t help but think how wonderful it is that he makes the very serious people call for a fainting couch.
If Bernie fails I’m going to enjoy the general election. The hissy fits from the MOTU are highly amusing.
Re: Tea Party of the Left
The author seems to forget that a large portion of Bernie’s supporters are independents and not Democrats (at least not with a strong party connection), thus their surprise that they would work with *gasp* moderate Republicans who share an anti elitist view, like that somehow the Democrats haven’t become the party of the Suits (or Suites for that matter) and that their lip service to helping the plebs hasn’t worn itself thin. I know plenty of life long, card holding Republicans who are Feelin’ the Bern.
Only time, transparency in terms of funding and whether policy is driven by democratic means, will tell us about the next steps by Sanders peeps. And I still think trying to reform the mafia – both republican and demo parties is futile at best. It’s been THE failing of progs for a hundred years. Self-kettling.
But clearly the tea party was manufactured and funded by and for oligarchs.
To allow comparison of the two even in idle sports poly chat by the Sanders Progs is pure folly.
The Tea Party was indeed astroturfed but the strategy of purging the Republican party of moderates through the primary process was very successful. Now just the threat of a primary challenge is enough to keep wayward pols in line, especially at the state and local levels where a campaign can be run relatively inexpensively.
Whether this can work in purging corporate Dems is an open question. I believe it’s worth a try. In my state of Wisconsin legislative districts have been so heavily gerrymandered by Republicans that even incumbent Democrats don’t face opposition. In these districts I would like nothing better than to see a populist progressive opponent take them on, even better as a third party.
The Tea Party’s original complaint was the bailout of the banks in 2008. That wasn’t astroturf. They got taken over right quick (as did Occupy, imo) by astroturfer agents of the oligarchs because the original movement scared the crap out of them.
And in Seattle, the local leadership of Occupy (yes, People, there were leaders) were planning on meeting with the local leaders of the Tea Party….right before the FBI moved in.
TPTB couldn’t have both the left and the right revolutionaries actually meeting and discussing how much they had in common!
The Horseshoe Theory!
Does it involve non-Euclidean geometry?
A non-flat political earth where, to reach left, one goes right?
IIRC, the original rant (from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) was about Obama’s (pathetically minimalist) foreclosure policy. Things morphed quickly from there.
You’ll like this article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_socialist_alternative_20160501
I’m not 100% certain that Sanders would have got any traction as an independent and I know his supporters would have had to spend time and resources getting him on the ballot. The billionaire class that thinks it owns the two parties would have knee capped him earlier than they have IMO. However, I do agree that Sanders, as a Democrat was/is a long shot.
Whoever infiltrated the Tea Party and took over will definitely try to do the same to Sanders’ revolution.
Washington state Democratic Party held their next tier of delegate elections yesterday, and it was a fiasco. I ran to be a delegate but they were unable to tally the votes before we were kicked out of the school at 10PM. Their site says
WEEKS – Who knew this was so difficult?
There’s only one pigeon to relay results to headquarters.
And he’s getting spooked by all the predators there.
In the early 2000s I worked in journalism. Typical advice from senior writers included the fact that the way forward to greater income, better career was PR. I couldn’t make myself do it. When I left, the citydesk editor apologized for her lack of budget to pay stringers for articles.
Is everyone tired of the disinformation propaganda about the supposed Bin Laden raid that was so effectively used by Obama to gain re-election?
Bin Laden, according to numerous whistle blower accounts that are all over the internet, was a CIA asset (code name: Tim Osman) whose family was exceptionally close to the Bush family with mutual stakes in the Carlyle Group, a major neocon operation. In 2001, he had severe health problems, including terminal Marfan’s Disease. In December of 2001 he was being treated at a US naval medical facility, and died while there. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Pakistan. Fox News announced his death at that time, and Benazir Bhutto, the PM of Pakistan said, in a David Frost interview, that she knew where he was buried. She, perhaps not coincidentally, was assassinated two weeks later.
It is interesting to note that all the published videos of Bin Laden that were produced after 2001 show Bin Laden getting younger by the year with the gray in his facial hair disappearing, having a robust frame, rather than the frail one attributable to his health issues.
The same Fox News has perpetrated the myth on a constant basis since the raid, even providing a Seal claiming the “kill”. But interviews with neighbors of the compound where Bin Laden was killed, have claimed that Bin Laden’s presence there was a lie. Isn’t it strange that we saw Saddam’s hanging and dead body, but pics of a dead Bin Laden are classified?
What went down in all that from 9/11 to flying the key Saudis out of the country without questioning them to Tora Bora and beyond is unclear to me and I would imagine will never be known. Elites and bureaucracies not only know these days how to expunge and cover their records, I think they don’t even bother to write things in any but the most oblique language to provide endless plausible deniability and obfuscation. When I was plowing through Admiralty files from the 1930s in London no one writing those memos and letters had a thought in their head about me sitting there 60 years after the fact. They just spewed. Modern institutions are run by very different people with an eye always on responsibility and culpability. They are shaping the future narrative as they go along and covering their asses in the process. Recreating what happened 15 years ago is going to be tougher than recreating the actions of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
And then there was the “heroic” Seal Team Six.
Emphasis on the “was.”
Dead men tell no tales.
The Yuri Gregarin of our age.
The age of Terrorism.
All these articles on the anniversary of the supposed execution/killing of OBL are a totally top-down propaganda exercise. The general public is not saying, “gee,by golly, it’s the anniversary again—lets talk about the heroic raid”. For myself I doubt OBL was the individual killled that day—seems more like a rejected script for “24”.
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/05/02/cia-director-feels-the-28-pages-of-the-911-report-are-inaccurate/
As he further expanded upon his comments, Brennan only seemed to muddy the waters further. First of all, this report has been around for well over a decade. What does he mean that some of the information is “inaccurate or un-vetted” at this point? It’s understandable if the original report was still incomplete or in need of additional research back then, but surely every stone has been overturned by this point. The report could be updated with new, clarifying information. (And if that hasn’t already been done we need to be asking why.)
Brennan also repeats the administration line (in a slightly reworded form) that we should probably just accept the conclusions of the original committee in terms of their finding that there, “was no evidence that … Saudi government as an institution or Saudi officials or individuals had provided financial support to al Qaeda.”
========================================================
“What does he mean that some of the information is “inaccurate or un-vetted” at this point?”
A. That as a standard operating procedure, the US government employs the most incompetent people alive.
B. That as a standard operating procedure, the US government employs the most traitorous people alive, who think their oily friends are more important than attacks upon the US.
Marx said, “capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them…” updated to Saudi Arabia will sell us the oil so that terrorists can fly planes into our buildings….
So CNN in January 2002 (note that date carefully) interviewed one of their TV docs, Dr Sanjay Gupta, who spoke about the possibility that Bin Laden had renal failure and would need dialysis:
—Dr. Sanjay Gupta: Bin Laden would need help if on dialysis
Now I have a certain familiarity with patients undergoing dialysis, and they would be very lucky to last 14 years even with expert care in a modern hospital facility. Dialysis machines need upkeep and the dialysis units require regular deliveries of special (and expensive) fluids. There’s no way Bin Laden would have survived renal failure all those years in a cave in Pakistan or even a safe house.
Of course CNN and the other MSM don’t care to revisit their earlier reports on his medical condition — too much inconvenient truth.
If anyone is up for it, read the Letters from Abbottabad. There are obvious discrepancies in the timeline….there are two options, one is that they were written in code. Or two, they were written by someone else.
Interesting longitudinal demographic from Fabius:
https://fabiusmaximus.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/age-distribution-numbers.gif?w=625&h=352
An assumption I’ll challenge in their projection relates to the two constrictions, of births in the 1930’s and of men in the early 1940’s. Depressions and wars seem to me to be the causes, and the projections have a hard time accounting for such things.
Concern trolling this morning from Prof. K. on his blog on how Sanders can have a `positive legacy’.
Pro tip: if you spend your time labeling people you disagree with as `BernieBros’,
any advice you give as to how and when they should wind down their campaign
isn’t worth a remaindered copy of Conscience of a Liberal.
Toucan play at this game!
“Once you take this red pill, things will never be the same Junior.”
Buffet / Berkshire – one of the largest recipients of Subsidies: >$1Trillion in 2015. http://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=berkshire-hathaway&statesum=&fedsum=&company_op=starts&company=&major_industry=&free_text=&subsidy_level=&subsidy_op=%3E&subsidy=&face_loan_op=%3E&face_loan=&subsidy_type=&sub_year=2015&state=
I thought they reformed welfare?
The AirBnb/SEIU story is outdated. Fortunately, word of the deal caused a great amount of hue and cry among the union membership and the plan was scuttled:
https://skift.com/2016/04/21/agreement-between-airbnb-and-labor-unions-falls-through/
Awesome. I remember very well how SEIU funded anti-single payer efforts in 2009.
Clinton-Warren? So not just one but TWO former Republican war hawks? Warren may throw progressive bones to the masses but her silence during this campaign has shown us her true level of commitment to those ideas. Sanders and Trump both should find female VPs (is Gabbard legal being born in Samoa? And please God, not Palin) to diffuse any accusations of sexism or not being “for women” strongly enough and will also ensure that a woman finally ends up in the White House this election.
Wikipedia says that Gabbard was born in American Samoa, so that shouldn’t be a problem. If she had been born in independent Samoa, she would be ineligible, like Ted Cruz. Or maybe not, the law seems vague to me.
Trump couldn’t go two weeks without saying something sexist/insulting about his female running mate. His pattern is too fixed for that. He doesn’t like women who talk back or have any opinions different from his own. They are there to look nice and support his ego. No amount of lipstick is going to cover for the fact that he is a male chauvinist pig. Roll the dice on him compared to the atrocious Hillary Clinton if you will, but please don’t try to dress him up as anything but what we’ve seen him be for 30+ years.
Her silence is deafening.
It’s like ‘the truth, the whole truth, etc.’
If you don’t say all you know about noeliberalim in the past, say, for example, the last 8 weak, weak, weak years, then you are lying as well.
And we seem to hear silence everywhere.
To all those desperate to see a “woman in the WH” even if its at the ceremonial VP level I’d say this: Remember Thatcher. Her legacy killed the prospect of any other female UK Prime Minister for a generation after she was finally ejected in 1990.
As always – Be careful what you wish for.
Trump could always steal Carly Fiorina from Cruz.
Trump could name his wife as his running mate.
The set back is they will never be able to travel on the same plane. Come to think of it, Hillary might like that arrangement with Bill.
“On this corner, we have Hillary and Bill. On the other corner, Mr. and Mrs. Trump.”
Bill could be a stay at home VP! A Trophy Husband. The feminist crowd would get a kick outta that!
I think the VP also gets to be senate “whip”. I’d like to see Ms. Trump in that role. Dominatrix outfit, screaming senators… Rome didn’t peak in a day.
I know your remark is facetious but that wouldn’t work unless one of them moved to a different state of residence. It’s a Constitutional requirement.
She can move across the river to New Jersey, easy peasy.
The VP is not always ceremonial.
She is only a heart beat away, as the saying goes.
State Senator Talcom from the novel “Boylano.”
Both parents were American, so she’s legal:
Leaving aside the Clinton-Warren theory (which I think is pretty obviously a non-starter if only because Warren failed to endorse Clinton) the tone of the Politico article made me cringe. It read like an episode of The Bachelor. When will Americans start demanding political stories with actual content?
In Regard to the Clinton Email links:
Is there an “Official Acts” investigation also underway? There have been a handful of articles that seem to say there is and that subpoenas have been issued to the Clinton Foundation.
How many of Clinton’s aides were employed by both government and Clinton at the same time and failed to disclose that on their financial disclosure form?
There are evidently two kinds of immunity that Bryan Paligo could have gotten. Which kind of immunity did he get?
September 16th is the start of the trial for the hacker who years ago claimed he spent several hours a day reading Clinton’s top secret emails and then went out and gardened. Why, after two years of the hacker sitting in a Romanian jail serving the first two years of his seven year sentence did the US government decide to extradite him on December 31, 2015?
One news story said the US promised the Romanian government that the extradited hacker would be back in Romanian in no more than 18 months. What does that mean?
There is a FOIA going forward that seems to revolve around the private emails Clinton says she deleted. Does the wording of the government’s response indicate that the government has recovered some of the ‘private’ emails that Clinton says she deleted?
There is, indeed, a separate ‘public corruption’ criminal investigation by the FBI, looking into collusion between huge donations to the Clinton Foundation or huge speaking fees paid to Bill Clinton closely followed by State Department approval of arms sales, government contracts, waivers of regulations, and so on. The Clinton Foundation will probably be shut down by the government as it is not operating as a genuine charity at all. This public corruption investigation began in April, 2015.
It’s interesting to note that on the home page of the FBI website they list public corruption as the number one job they do for America. We’ll have to be patient to see if this is PR, or factual.
There is a third criminal situation Hillary must get sorted. Perjury before Congress. She was required to give all her government business emails to Congress once the Benghazi hearings began, which led Congress to the discovery that the State Department had zero emails for the former Secretary of State, on account of her having a private email server. Hillary handed over about 30,000 emails, and the rest she quickly deleted, stating under oath before Congress that they did not contain anything classified. Only yoga routines, wedding plans for Chelsea, cookie recipes, and stuff like that.
Note that the FBI ‘undeleted’ the 31,000 email Hillary deleted before Congress could see them, last September.
Congress also subpoenaed the emails of longtime Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal, whose main role for Hillary was providing intel on Libya. He turned over all emails he’d ever sent to Hillary, all sent through his wide open AOL email account, and Congress found fifteen emails from Sidney to Hillary which Hillary’s 30,000 emails did NOT contain. And these fifteen contained classified info Sidney had no clearance to even know about. He even revealed the name of an intel asset working in Libya. Because of all this, some make the case that Hillary lied under oath to Congress.
Which is only okay to do if you are the CEO of a multinational tobacco company. Otherwise, it’s a crime.
+1
Forgive me for nitpicking: Director of Central Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress about the NSA surveillance of Americans, so it’s not just tobacco executives who are permitted to give false testimony to Congress.
I did not know this. I post a link for others interested in this branch of the scandal:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/01/11/fbis-clinton-probe-expands-to-public-corruption-track.html
I know Fox but they actually do employ journalists!
Lots more bank CEO’s than tobacco…
The Flexians are just getting loads of leverage over the whole Hill-Billy show, so she’ll march to their tune.
That’s why the VP the Democratic Machine will force on her has to be a crook, because they can’t afford to threaten her without the leverage of another crook to step in and take over.
Purchasing managers turm glum:
It’s another reason why J-Yel has backed off on the rate hike plan: both Groaf and inflation are barely keeping their little heads above water.
Dr Hussman invents a vivid new image to illustrate our peril:
Mind the trap door, comrades. Abandon all hope, ye who fall through it. /sarc
He’s taking a narrow path less traveled by.
He’s probably talking about the gallows.
That’s why his investors have taken to calling him “Dr Hearseman,” as he ushers them to their financial funerals.
As Dr Kevorkian used to say … “call me Jack.” :-)
Give the guy a break. He is fighting the FED, and one day will land a punch right on the nose.
If there is a stag-flation, J-Yel will focus on the flation part, as in wage inflation, and not stag(nation).
So, in that scenario, her masters would demand that she hikes.
That’s my guess.
Isn’t manufacturing down to 8% of the economy now? What’s to worry. It’s peanuts.
Super delegates to follow the will of the vote in only landslide states?
Why? What makes them so exceptional?
And makes a state a landslide state?
59% winning percentage?
65%?
90%
And to ignore the voters’ will in non-slide states?
Why?
And will of the voters, for example, who voted in a senator in 2012, in far bigger numbers, including Independents, Greens and even Republicans in a 1) state- wide and 2) general election (compared to the number of voters in a district, in a primary, that might have been closed to Democrats) – what happens to their will?
And makes a state a landslide state?
Traditionally, 55-45 or more.
If we can’t count the super-delegates until the convention, to reach 2383 before the convention, a candidate has to win 58.8% of the non-super-delegate delegates (I think they are called pledged delegates).
If 55% of more is landslide, that means to clinch before the convention, one would need to have landslide victories in many, many states, probably almost all of them.
Makes sense if the message is targeted at superdelegates, though.
Survey Says: The USPS Is a Terrible Place To Work
…a shift to using more non-career employees has been a major USPS cost-saving tactic the past few years. That, coupled with stabilizing mail volumes and high turnover among the non-career workers, has caused the USPS’s hiring needs to explode – to the tune of 117,000 new employees last year and a projection for 125,000 newbies this year.
privatizing makes everything suck.
Puerto Rico falls through Dr Hussman’s trap door:
As usual, Congress doesn’t act until a full-blown crisis erupts. Maybe we can bail out Puerto Rico’s investors with Freddie Mac shares. Ah ha ha ha … sorry, it’s not funny.
Chapter 9 is not a “bailout”, and would seem like the logical solution…curious as to why this is not available?
Chapter 9 bankruptcy for Puerto Rico was mysteriously written out of congressional legislation in 1984 for reasons no one can seem to explain. John Oliver Explainer which is better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt-mpuR_QHQ
According to the John Oliver segment on Puerto Rico’s problems, a mysterious provision banning PR from claiming bankruptcy protection was slipped into a congressional bill some years ago. So, ‘logical’ yeah, but now ‘illegal.’
From NYT:
Evidently our legislative prodigies thought that if bankruptcy is made illegal, then it won’t happen.
Time for PRexit and her own sovereign currency?
Some would say so. But they are tiny minority in Puerto Rico.
Nearly 120 years as a U.S. territory produced the same results in Puerto Rico as Europe’s 70 years under U.S. military occupation: passivity and dependency, under a de facto colonialist arrangement.
“legislative prodigies” indeed…it’d be funny if the effects weren’t so tragic…and apparently the “prodigiousness” is contagious…e.g., “act-22” as catch-22, trying to remedy a fiscal problem by attracting tax-“avoiders”…
Fed may need more powers to support securities firms during crises: Dudley Reuters. Like access to the discount window.
Freddie Mac may need another taxpayer bailout next week MarketWatch. Why are we hearing about this only now?
just in time to influence the last primaries.
Is Goldamn expanding its depositer base in order to MF Global them? To use the new despoilers to bail them in so as to protect the older ones?
‘Goldamn’ … love it!
Goldamn those crooks.
Lol lotsa typos. Thanks autocorrect!
Can’t even get my own name right anymore. Time to go to bed…
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/world/americas/brazil-president-dilma-rousseff-impeachment-allies-alienated.html
It’s worth noting the numerous examples of Rousseff’s hippie-punching that made her so unpopular, combined with a bad economy, and unsurprisingly the right smelled blood and went for the kill.
One wonders what would have been Bill Clinton’s fate if the economy hadn’t been juiced by the internet/telecom boom in the 90s?
Hillary Clinton private email server problems split opinions FT. “‘This isn’t public corruption . . . this isn’t a venal crime,’ one person close to the Clintons told the Financial Times.” So what kind of a crime is it, then?
But it is pubic corruption since we know that at least some of the individuals Clinton was communicating with about “plans for Libya” were those who sought to profit from US intervention aka a coup.
Some Libyans intended to profit by being elevated to positions of power and control (Libya has big bucks in foreign banks and valuable assets) and some Americans sought to make serious Tubmans from “reconstruction” and privatization schemes.
And that’s what we know about. Half of it was deep-sixed.
Is Clinton guilty of this too???
Ooops. LOL. Freudian slip?
Bill certainly is.
can emails truly be deleted for good? I don’t think so
Yes, It involves brimstone. You don’t want to go there.
If it wasn’t a “venal” crime, what was it? Since, apart from theology, crime is worse than sin, if as a crime it wasn’t “venal” then it has to be “mortal.” But I do think that she should not be put to death for *it,* as she’s done much worse!
Bernie’s World N+1
This is a good long read not so much about Bernie’s foreign policy but about the decline of the anti-war movement in the U.S. Not sure I agree with everything but it makes the good point that there is now something of a movement, both domestically and internationally, pushing politicians to address economic issues but not a comparable anti-war movement pressuring politicians like Sanders to opposed neoliberal hawkishness.
And so the march to irrelevancy begins.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-leads-clinton-by-two-points-in-rasmussen-poll/ar-BBswIB2?li=BBnbcA1
It’s not even GE time and she’s already losing ground to Trump. Of note, she, according to this poll takes 8% of the GOP base vote, old Donny, however, captures 15% of the Democratic base(I guess these must be the votes the Democratic party decided didn’t matter this go round.)
“But you know polls this far out mean nothing.” And rasmussen is partisan.
What is really amusing to me is that I now see many of the people on the left who got amused the more the Republicans underestimated Trump making the same mistakes and assumptions. Clinton is going to slaughter him. He won’t be able to handle a debate with her. He has alienated so many people it will be a landslide. They know it will be a nasty dirty campaign, but have failed to recognize that you underestimate Trump at your own peril and that the public doesn’t have much use for the usual suspects and the usual games AND this includes a large portion of Democrats.
Odds may say that Trump is on borrowed time and his luck must run out, but I think anyone who counts on that before it has happened is, well, partisan and blind to recent history.
Hillary does not do criticism well. Just saying.
She’s not worried because she thinks her rich backers will slay Trump–not that this worked for Jeb or Rubio. That’s why she’s blowing off Sanders. She thinks she has it in the bag.
Her rich backers have been attempting to slay Trump for awhile now from the other side of the aisle.
Here’s the rub, the rich have gone out of the way to grab more and more, concentrating wealth, as a result there are not enough of them and way too many working poor who are going to vote the Donald.
As it is, I think if I were the really rich that I’d be worried that after the Donald that guillotines come next if they don’t let up on the greed.
Apparently Donald’s Trump Tower aerie is decorated in the style of the Bourbon monarchs so he digs the time period. He might get into guillotines. It will add a touch of nostalgia to the coming class uprising.
“Brass, glass and class” is how Trump expressed his design philosophy.
It requires legions of workers to clean, polish and lacquer all that brass.
It’s the New York City version of 19th century British lords, watching their gardeners rake the gravel in the long driveway, as the kitchen help polishes the silver.
It’s more honest though then the system we have right now where billion dollar corporations with CEOs that make millions regardless of success or failure tell full time workers their contributions to the business don’t warrant $30,000 a year because …..capitalism.
The wheels are coming off the bus. Many aren’t afraid of the s word anymore because there are enough of them who have been screwed over by capitalism to even remotely believe that it’s a fair system.
Getting ready to do some renovations on the house but first I have to clean out a significant amount of “stuff” that has accumulated over my many years in this old house. In doing so I ran across a print copy of this article from a March 2008 NYT article, and since it’s always nice to start the week with a laugh, I share it with the commentariat. Think of it as a literary, rather than visual, antidote. (The title and first sentence provide all that most of you will need for it to have the desired effect.)
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
A Card-Carrying Civil Libertarian
By JEFFREY ROSEN
IF Barack Obama wins in November, we could have not only our first president who is an African-American, but also our first president who is a civil libertarian.
I’m leaving out the link to avoid moderation hell, but if you’d like to read more (such as how much Obama opposes the Patriot Act) you can find the entire article easy enough just by searching the title.
Re Freddie bailout: From 2012 all earnings have reverted to the Treasury, bad enough, but its capital to be wound down to 0 by 2018 ?? That’s insane unless this means Fannie & Freddie are to be privatized by that date; a last ditch attempt to revive the US private MBS market ?
Question for more savvy mortgage finance mavens than I: Is it true that without F&F,the 30yr fixed rate mortgage (unique to the US?) becomes economically unsustainable ? That it would go the way of the Dodo and the synthetic mezzanine CDO squared ? I think Yves has written on this before but I can’t find the ref(s).
I read a counterpunch article, noting that Seattle City Councilperson Kshama Sawant is trying to get Sanders to run as the Green candidate, & supposedly Jill Stein is willing to consider to run as a Sanders/Stein ticket.
OTOH, I recall reading a notion of “sore loser laws”, where supposedly a candidate like Sanders that loses a primary of party A, is disallowed from running as a candidate of party B.
Is this truly the case, & if yes, how many states & EVs are impossible to obtain if Sanders were to run as the Green candidate?
They cannot apply because presidential primaries “elect” delegates, not candidates for the office those delegates will be voting on at the convention.
I don’t think Sanders is going to run third party. Kshama tried to convince him to run third party before the election cycle. I posted an article upthread under Eureka’s post about it.
I actually find it rather impressive how thoroughly and completely that TTIP leak is being buried by the MSM – far more of a black-out than the Panama Papers
Given how vast these media organizations are, that takes an astoundingly conditioned group of people to pull off. Despots around the world are no doubt rubbing their chins in awe and admiration at this utter display of obedience.
Saw my first Bernie bumper sticker with a Trump sticker on top of and partially obscuring it.
Don’t give up guy!
Bernie may still make it. It’s obvious who your number two choice will be if he doesn’t get the nomination.
Just what sort of industrial strength, triple distilled, KoolAid has Andrew Sullivan been drinking ? The people in early 21st century are the danger & not the plutos drowning any semblance of democratic process in unceasing torrents of $$$ !? He’s shocked, shocked, to find some kind democracy going on here. Maybe not the right kind but a far cry from the Beltway kabuki that’s been served these last 30 years. He stands rooted in fear that some tiny flake might be chipped away from his carapace of privilege.
Using Platos Republic as his Ur-text which the late Karl Popper IIRC took as one of two examples of the totalitarian enemies in The Open Society and Its Enemies ? You cannot get more revealing than that.
My cousin, Alfalfa, writes from North Carolina today:
“Hey, this new Bathroom Bill might open up a lotta new jobs down here. Maybe not as many as are leaving the state, but we’ll have to wait and see on that. I’m thinkin’ this Bathroom Bill can eliminate unemployment in North Carolina once and for all.
See, the strange thing about HB2 is that it’s got no language in it about enforcement. You know I ain’t no lawyer, but I know my way around courts and jails from lifelong experience, and I can tell you there never was a law written up anywhere that didn’t explain the crime it was against, and the punishment for gettin’ caught doin’ it. Laws always spell out the crime, the time, the fines, length of probation, and so on. But there’s not a word about what the crime is, or what punishment you get for doin’ it in this Bathroom Bill. Nothin’. It’s weird.
So all the folks who are dead serious about keeping this law forever and ever are hard at work figuring out how to enforce it. They talk ’round and ’round, but it always comes out the same: we need people waitin’ outside every public bathroom to check folks before they ever go inside. Check their birth certificate if they got it, check their photo ID if they got it with ’em, and if all else fails check their private parts right on the spot.
And there’s the beauty of it. This will create a whole new line of employment for thousands of people — Crotch Cops. They can’t be regular law enforcement because those people flat out won’t do it. They’ve already got unions and medical and pensions and careers and much better things to do than hang around bathrooms all day asking people to hike their drawers. Plus, they don’t even know what they’d arrest anyone for because the bill leaves all that blank. Regular cops refuse to even talk about this Bill, much less lift a finger to enforce it. I hear the idea was floated during roll call at the 4th Precinct in Raleigh the other day, and 89% of the duty roster called in with the flu the next morning. Is that clear enough? Real cops won’t touch it.
So Crotch Cops will have to be rent-a-cops, with pistols and sticks and tasers but no arrest powers. A high school diploma or GED is all that’s required, or at the least a note from their 6th Grade teacher saying that they’d got everything out of schoolin’ they’s ever gonna get. We call that ‘early graduation’ down here, and it’s more common than you’d think.
This being a right-to-work state, the pay for Crotch Cops will be as low as workin’ the counter at Mickey D’s or KFC, but then a Crotch cop gets to assert their Authoritah! That should attract quite a few people right there, and people is what we need. Every men’s room in the state will need a guy out front, and every women’s room will need a lady out front. Unisex bathrooms . . . maybe we can hire transgender people to guard those. Against whom or what, I can’t even guess. Doesn’t matter. This is all about saving the children.
Me, I figger the bigest drawback to this line of work will be having it on your resume at all. Future employers won’t want to hear how 12 years of ordering complete strangers to “Drop ’em!” somehow made you a people person. You’d be better off saying you worked for the TSA.”
Kinda makes you miss the “hello man” at Walmart.
How much time does Louis Beres spend ouside his Ivory Tower at Princeton, I wonder
Yes, I know some people who would rather sit on the couch and smoke a joint with a beer most of the time. But the vast majority of people I know work hard and have vital interests, even if they are not ones I share. So the fuck what if they don’t read a lot of books. This is beside the point. Beres seems to not understand that what he reads is not real–assigning value according to whether someone fits a certain profile (more often a profile that will financially benefit the profiler, as in slave labor). I can not wait for the day when all of these “lazy worthless bastards” really do sit down, and Professor Beres has to grow his own food, build his own shelter, construct his own printing press for his precious books.
Who does this ass think is going to take over if the masses are cut out of the equation? Does he not know that the Bush family all go to Yale, the Kennedy’s Harvard, that Bill and Hillary are Ivy Leaguers, and that Donald Trump is nothing if not a paragon of the “properties class”? Would he be happier with Bill Gates and George Soros and Mark Cuban and Bezos and the Steinbrenner brothers running the country? Come to think of it, don’t these people ALREADY run the country?
Snobs like this never imagine just who these “enlightened” elites are going to be–like Economists, they just assume them into the equation when they want to dismiss unwanted realities.
Re: ‘Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic.’
In short, no they don’t. When the people are continually lied to over matters large and small, over a course of decades, see their incomes drop over a course of decades, see that the social compact has been broken for decades, they are susceptible to demagogues. It’s not the system, it’s the conditions that are the problem. Of course, these things could be fixed, but they continue to be swept under the rug while the elites & ruling class double down on policies that are creating this political instability.
Also, does anyone else think the Baghdad protests have a staged quality? More ‘corruption’ protests, like Brazil? Iraqi Security Forces standing down after halfheartedly firing a tear gas canister or two? A few ‘young men’ tearing down concrete blast walls topped with razor wire? Without bulldozers? How? There should be panic among the U.S. military, since, according to Daily Beast, “There are at least 12 U.S. generals in Iraq…At U.S. headquarters inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, even majors and colonels frequently find themselves saluting superiors at a pace that outranks the Pentagon and certainly any normal military installation.” But no worries. Huh.
More staged corruption protests laying the groundwork for partition?
Sullivan and white/male/straight/CISgendered privilege. I read both the shoutout here and the piece in links.
(Sullivan kinda omits that since Plato thought Democracy tended toward tyranny, you should just cut to the chase by installing something very like a tyranny for all practical purposes from the get-go. Of course, those who believe themselves to already BE the philosopher kings hate the hypothetical Trump variant of tyranny because its the tyranny of the “wrong sort.”)
But I digress already. Wanted to talk about the present usage of privilege. (Sullivan is, of course, generally wrong about what he calls the BLM “left” or the gay “left.” Most of those activists are trying to address real and sometimes lethally real problems, and they themselves generally don’t use litcrit pseudosociological buzzwords in the pursuit of that goal. That’s largely the province of the generally upscale , would-be fierce “social justice warriors”, who love to attribute everything in the world to privileges other than Bourgeois privilege. )
These are the people who think that in picking up a highly simplified and popularized version of one of many available social critiques they have found the philosopher’s stone that obviates the need for further thought and allows them, in Bourdieu’s words, to “be a philosopher, an anthropologist, a sociologist and a psychologist, without actually being any of those things or knowing anything at all about all that.”
Now, the handful of initial theorists who initiated what became the narrative of privilege were themselves, to the extent I’ve read them, reasonably responsible in providing the requisite caveats about what a category error was, and that you couldn’t infer the relative position of a given individual in the hypothesized hierarchy from their mere membership in a race or a gender. But this seems to have gone out the window in the ham-handed hands of those who believe themselves to be SJWs. I’ve often heard and read blather which, taken at face value, would indicate that in a room containing only Paris Hilton, Herman Cain, and some whiteguy day laborer in his fifties living in a flophouse with a Murphy bed and a plywood door with a padlock on it the third person is far and away the most privileged person in the room. (And if anybody quibbles with this, rather than attempting to actually respond to the criticism, they will invariably instead engage in amateur psychoanalysis of what must be wrong with the person who made the criticism.) Really, just an elaborate effort to bulletproof one’s own position against all possible criticism and proclaim oneself “right by definition.”
Particularly on issues of race, I still prefer “black oppression” to “white privilege.” For the simple reason that when you say “oppression”, the clearly indicated course of action is to remove the oppression. When you speak of “privilege” (and what are called privileges are really things that pretend to be “rights” without actually be extended to all), the “problem” expressed that way could equally well be solved by the reduction of the formerly privileged to the status of the underclass, without doing anything at all for the underclass. Basically an enlargement of the underclass in the guise of egalitarianism.
It hasn’t escaped my attention that for those SJWs who don’t
propose to attack capitalist sources of oppression, their “critique”, such as it is, actually dovetails well with a certain line of conservative thought, and also with the preferences of a large subset of capitalists who feel that there are now enough other means of keeping the labor force disciplined that the enlistment of race and gender-based subalterns is no longer necessary and may be counterproductive to their interests. (Which goes a good way to explaining how you can continue to hold reasonably prestigious academic positions and rise within the profession while delivering variants of this critique, as long as you don’t annoy people by dragging class into it too often.) The bourgeoisie see privilege critiques as absolutely no threat whatsoever. A useful sandbox in which to let the kids harmlessly work the activism out.
The purveyors of this (at least those I’ve met) seem oblivious to the limitations of this stance as an organizing technique. Not to put too fine a point on it, but taking this at face value, if one does not propose in any serious way to attack the sources of class oppression, why in God’s name would you expect this to help recruit working class privileged folk to fight only against those aspects of the system from which they derive the only benefit they get at all? If you think this even might work, you might well be from those social strata that can afford noblesse oblige as their motivator. That’s not most people.
(None of the above rant is at all intended to deny that honkies in the aggregate do indeed have the better of it, and the males among the honkies. But there is a great gulf between those tediously obvious facts and this edifice of pseudotheory erected on top of them.)
Oops! Pop up ad at the top of this page, from “Trade Benefits America”, supporting TPP with a link to a canned support letter to send off to congressional reps. Major algo failure. Crack up!