dailycaller | “Despite an obvious preference by Democratic leadership to focus on
the suburbs and former Republican voters rather than working-class
communities of color, progressives like Stacey Abrams, Rep. Omar and
Rep. Rashida Tlaib are showing us – through turnout results in their
states and cities – where Democrats must invest to build the party,” the
memo says.
“We’re not going to
be successful if we’re silencing districts like mine,” Tlaib said,
according to Politico. “Me not being able to speak on behalf of many of
my neighbors right now, many of which are black neighbors, means me
being silenced. I can’t be silent.”
“We
are not interested in unity that asks people to sacrifice their freedom
and their rights any longer,” Tlaib continued. “And if we truly want to
unify our country, we have to really respect every single voice. We say
that so willingly when we talk about Trump supporters, but we don’t say
that willingly for my Black and brown neighbors and from LGBTQ
neighbors or marginalized people.”
Progressives are pushing for power in
the Joe Biden administration, despite the criticism from moderate
Democrats. Tlaib reportedly wants to see a public educator and labor
advocates in top positions. Progressives and left-wing strategists don’t
want Biden to work across the aisle with Republicans, although Biden
has expressed his desire to create a sense of unity by doing so.
“If
[voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution
to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don’t have anything
else, they deserve to be heard,” Tlaib said, choking up as she expressed
frustration near the end of an interview this week. “I can’t believe
that people are asking them to be quiet.”
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
is calling for an “unapologetic agenda” that is distinct from the GOP
“instead of trying to play to notions of civility,” Politico reported.
Specifically, Ocasio-Cortez wants the Democratic Party to establish a
cohesive message on racism because “Democrats don’t want to talk about
race.”
straightlinelogic | The idea of individual rights protected by
the government was the foundation of the American experiment. It was
and has been imperfectly realized; it is an ideal and humanity rarely
attains its ideals. Government is and always will be the antithesis of
that still revolutionary ideal. The US government’s massive expansion
has been at the cost of the people’s liberty and has destroyed most of
their rights. That destruction has been ongoing since the beginning of
the republic and Trump has done nothing to stop or reverse i.
Philosophical insight and consistency are not among his virtues.
Nevertheless, a Biden administration will
be worse, much worse. The Democrats now openly aspire to the
collectivist ideal—the complete subjugation of the individual to the
state. We’ve gotten a preview of coming attractions with coronavirus
totalitarianism, which has obliterated the few freedoms and joys left to
Americans. For the millions of Americans who voted for him, including
me, Trump represented the last, best hope for what we consider the
American way of life.
There’s no going back, and the way forward
is for those who cherish the American ideals of individual rights,
freedom, limited government, the rule of law, and equality before that
law to break away from Washington’s and it’s aligned states’
corruptocracy and sunder the ties that bind us. Nations and governments
are not cast in stone for time and all eternity.
Certainly the bankrupt dis-United States
and its government aren’t. The bill is coming due for the debt orgy and
an unprecedented and catastrophic global economic cataclysm will take
down whomever is unlucky enough to be the president. A defeated Trump
would dodge that bullet. The resulting chaos will be unmanageable by a
government that produces only debt, can steal little or nothing from a
bankrupt economy, cannot borrow at anything but ruinous interest rates,
and which must cover its soaring budget deficits with scrip it either
prints or creates via computer entries, whether or not it outlaws real money (gold) or forces its increasingly worthless scrip to stay in the banking system.
At that time, an organized secession
movement has a real chance. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Collapse will be freedom’s staunchest ally if the moment is seized. It
won’t be easy and it won’t be without blood. Until it happens, prepare
for the worst, it is assuredly coming and coming soon, but work towards a
brighter future in a nation that does not yet exist.
For those who don’t want to wait, almost six years ago (January 7, 2015) I published “Revolution in America,”
which presents a nonviolent way to take down the government by
attacking it at its weakest point. It requires the collective action of
millions of people and at that time I believed the recommended course of
action would remain hypothetical. Things change. Although the hour is
late, any significant fraction of Trump’s rightfully enraged 71 million
voters could still put the plan into effect. The article merits a second
look. Please pass it, and this article, on.
Asia Times | US intel is very much aware of well-documented instances of election fraud. Among them: NSA software that infiltrates any network, as previously detailed by Edward Snowden, and capable of altering vote counts; the Hammer supercomputer and its Scorecard app
that hacks computers at the transfer points of state election computer
systems and outside third party election data vaults; the Dominion software system,
known to have serious security issues since 2000, but still used in 30
states, including every swing state; those by now famous vertical jumps
to Biden in both Michigan and Wisconsin at 4am on November 4 (AFP unconvincingly tried to debunk Wisconsin and didn’t even try with Michigan); multiple instances of Dead Men Do Vote.
The key actor is the Deep State, which decides what happens next.
They have weighed the pros and cons of placing as candidate a senile,
stage 2 dementia, neocon warmonger and possible extorsionist (along with
son) as “leader of the free world”, campaigning from a basement,
incapable of filling a parking lot in hs rallies, and seconded by
someone with so little support in the Dem primaries that she was the
first to drop out.
The optics, especially seen from vast swathes of the
imperial-interfered Global South, may be somewhat terrible. Dodgy
elections are a prerogative of Bolivia and Belarus. Yet only the Empire
is able to legitimize a dodgy election – especially in its own backyard.
Welcome to the New Resistance
The GOP is in a very comfortable position. They hold the Senate and
may end up picking up as may as 12 seats in the House. They also know
that any attempt by Biden-Harris to legislate via Executive Orders will
have…consequences.
The Fox News/ New York Post angle is particularly enticing. Why are
they suddenly supporting Biden? Way beyond internal family squabbles
worthy of the Succession saga, Rupert Murdoch made it very clear, via the laptop from hell caper, that he has all sorts of kompromat on the Biden family. So they will do whatever he wants. Murdoch does not need Trump anymore.
Nor, in theory, does the GOP. Former CIA insiders assure of serious
backroom shenanigans going on between GOP honchos and the Biden-Harris
gang. Trade-offs bypassing Trump – which most of the GOP hates with a
vengeance. The most important man in Washington will be in fact GOP
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Still, to clear any lingering doubts, a vote recount would be
absolutely necessary in all 6 contested states – WI, MI, PA, GA, NV and
AZ. Through hand counting. One by one. The DoJ would need to act on it,
immediately. Not gonna happen. Recounts cost a ton of money. There’s no
evidence Team Trump – on top of it short of funds and manpower – will be
able to convince Daddy Bush asset William Barr to go for it.
While relentlessly demonizing Trump for spreading “a torrent of
misinformation” and “trying to undermine the legitimacy of the US
election”, mainstream media and Big Tech have declared a winner – a
classic case of pre-programming the sheep multitudes.
theautomaticearth | With Biden you don’t get Biden, you get the entire cabal that went
after Trump, the Democratic Party, the media, the intelligence agencies.
And yes, Biden was and is very much part of that cabal. How people do
not find that a whole lot scarier than Donald Trump is beyond me.
If -and no that is not when- Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20
2021, that cabal will take over the country. And we’ve seen plenty
indications that they intend to make it impossible for the Republicans
to ever get one of their own elected as president again. Moreover they
will not be investigated for what they concocted over the past 4-5
years.
How the Hillary campaign and the DNC leaked things to the FBI, and
the FBI to the MSM, how they lied in courtrooms to get FISA applications
on Trump campaign people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. How
they set up Lt.-Gen. Michael Flynn so he wouldn’t be Trump’s National
Security Adviser, because Flynn knew too much.
It’s a scheme so full of illegal actions that it will be devastating
for the entire American political system if it is never investigated, or
even if it isn’t investigated very very thoroughly, by an impartial
party. And it won’t be if Biden becomes president.
The cabal wants you to think this is about Trump, and any given way
to get rid of him is justifiable no matter what, but that is a very
dangerous way of thinking. If crimes have been committed, they must be
brought into daylight and before a court.
Problem is, of course, that at least half the nation has no idea of
what’s been going on. Because they get their news and information from
those media that are in on the whole deal. They won’t know that the DNC
paid for the Steele Dossier, or that is was just a bunch of lies, or
that the FBI knew this even before Rosenstein appointed Mueller as
Special Counsel. All that has been kept away from them.
And yes, 4 years ago Trump said he would fight the swamp, but landed
right in the middle of it. Early in his presidency he found himself
surrounded by the likes of McMaster, John Kelly, Tillerson, and many
other swamp creatures, and today he still has people like Mike Pompeo.
But at least Trump is an outsider, and if anything can ever be done to
drain the swamp, it will have to come from an outsider. That it may take
more than 4 years is something we have to take for granted.
The swamp has fought back, and they may yet win. Joe Biden is the
face of that. But people who celebrate that victory should think again,
whether they like Trump or not. The swamp is not good for you, and it’s
not good for your country, your rights, your freedoms. Its entire MO is
to take all these away from you. This is not a partisan thing; the fat
ass of the swamp easily fits and sits across the divide.
oilprice |This is the amount of money to beinvested
in new power capacity globally over the next three decades. Most of
this—80 percent—will be poured into renewables. This certainly makes the
energy transition far from cheap, but no one—at least no one
reputable—ever said going green would be cheap. Yet the amount of
investments to be directed towards expanding wind, solar, and associated
systems will not be the only costs to be borne during the transition.
There may well be steep environmental costs as well.
BloombergnNEF,
which conducted the analysis that resulted in the investment estimate
for the next 30 years in energy, also said that between 2020 and 2050,
another $14 trillion will be invested in the grid, likely to adapt it
for a surge in solar and renewable power deployments, which, according
to the analysis, will constitute 56 percent of total global generation
capacity by 2050. And it will have spurred a mini golden age in mining.
Wind
power, like solar power, requires a lot of metals and other minerals to
produce essential components for the installations. Therefore, as the
demand for wind turbines and blades jumps, so will the demand for the
metals they are made of. It’s the same with the metals and minerals
necessary for the production of a solar panel.
Here’s just one example that could perhaps illustrate the trend: according to a 2017report
by the World Bank, demand for silver could soar from the then-current
24,000 tons annually to more than 400,000 tons. And that’s under a
best-case scenario that features a greater penetration of silver-free
thin-film PV panels in the energy mix, at the expense of crystalline
silicon panels that use silver. Under a worst-case scenario, demand for
silver could top 700,000 tons.
This
is quite an increase that will require a major expansion in mining and
mining is an energy-intensive, not particularly environmentally friendly
way of getting finite resources out of the ground, as investor Sam
Kovacs writes in anarticle
for Seeking Alpha addressing the challenges of the energy transition
from fossil fuels to renewables. Now add to silver a host of other
metals used in renewable energy installations, and the mining expansion
becomes even more substantial, adding economic, social, and
environmental costs to the transition.
Then there is energy storage. Without
it, the transition will simply not happen. In fact, some are
questioning whether it could happen given the current stage of
development of energy storage technology. Two years ago, anarticle
by James Temple for the Massachusetts Technology Review questioned the
viability of the energy transition precisely because of energy storage,
which, Temple argued, was still prohibitively expensive in light of the
scale, to which such storage would need to be developed.
theguardian |Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden
hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are
turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate
his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal
or ethical.
When Trump contracted Covid-19, his opponents feared he might benefit
from a sympathy vote. But Trump is not a normal president seeking
voters’ sympathy. He doesn’t do sympathy. He neither needs nor banks on
it. Trump trades on anger, weaponises hatred and meticulously cultivates
the dread with which the majority of Americans have been living after
the financial bubble burst in 2008. Obscenities and contempt for the
rules of polite society were his means of connecting with a large
section of American society.
The reason 2008 was a momentous year wasn’t just because of the
magnitude of the crisis, but because it was the year when normality was
shattered once-and-for-all. The original postwar social contract broke
in the early 1970s, yielding permanent real median earnings stagnation.
It was replaced by a promise to America’s working class of another route
to prosperity: rising house prices and financialised pension schemes.
When Wall Street’s house of cards collapsed in 2008, so did this postwar
social contract between America’s working class and its rulers.
After the crash of 2008, big business deployed the central bank money
that refloated Wall Street to buy back their own shares, sending share
prices (and, naturally, their directors’ bonuses) through the
stratosphere while starving Main Street of serious investment in
good-quality jobs. A majority of Americans were thus treated, in quick
succession, to negative equity, home repossessions, collapsing pension
kitties and casualised work – all that against the spectacle of watching
wealth and power concentrate in the hands of so few.
By 2016, the majority of Americans were deeply frustrated. On the one
hand, they lived with the private anguish caused by the permanent
austerity to which their communities had been immersed since 2008. And,
on the other, they could see a ruling class whose losses were socialised
by the government, which defined the response to the crash.
Donald Trump
simply took advantage of that frustration. And he did so with tactics
that, to this day, keep his liberal opponents in disarray. Democrats
protested that Trump was a nobody, and thus unfit to be president. That
did not work in a society shaped by media which for years elevated
inconsequential celebrities.
Even worse for Trump’s opponents, portraying him as incompetent is an
own goal: Donald J Trump is not merely incompetent. George W Bush was
incompetent. No, Trump is much worse than that. Trump combines gross
incompetence with rare competence. On the one hand, he cannot string two
decent sentences together to make a point, and has failed spectacularly
to protect millions of Americans from Covid-19. But, on the other hand,
he tore up Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement that took
decades to put together. Remarkably, he replaced it swiftly with one
that is certainly not worse – at least from the perspective of American
blue-collar workers or, even, Mexican factory workers who now enjoy an
hourly wage considerably greater than before.
Moreover, despite his belligerent posturing, Trump not only kept his
promise to not start new wars but, additionally, he withdrew American
troops from a variety of theatres where their presence had caused
considerable misery with no tangible benefits for peace or, indeed,
American influence.
consciousnessofsheep | The geology of US oil might have been
straightforward; the economics was a little trickier. In the course of
the Second World War, the USA supplied six out of every seven barrels of
oil consumed. Venezuela accounted for most of the seventh barrel; with
small contributions from British Persia and the Soviet Caucasus.
Germany’s oil sources had been inadequate to power its civilian economy;
and its failure to capture and bring online the Caucasus oil in 1942 is the primary reason why it lost the war.
The war-torn economies which emerged from
the ashes of war in 1945, then, were almost entirely dependent upon oil
from the USA. And this allowed an internal American oil cartel – the
Texas Railroad Commission – to extend its price fixing to the entire
world. So long as US oil made up a large part of global oil production,
and so long as US oil fields had excess capacity, the TRC could
regulate the global oil price. If prices began to rise too high, the
TRC would order companies to produce more oil. If prices sank too low,
the TRC would order production cuts. As a result, throughout the boom
years 1953 to 1973, the world oil price remained stable at around $25
per barrel (at today’s prices).
When the US conventional oil
fields peaked in 1970, the TRC lost its ability to prevent prices from
rising by expanding production. This was a boon for Middle East and
North African producers whose production costs were higher than those in
the USA. And although the first – 1973 – oil shock was in part a
response to western support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli war, sooner
or later the newly empowered OPEC was going to cut supply to drive up
prices.
It is an irony that a capitalist system
which claims to be built upon competition and free markets has proved
stable only in those periods when its source of value – energy – has
been controlled by cartels. Once OPEC-led price stability was regained
in the mid-1980s, the stage was set for the global debt-boom of the
1990s and early 2000s. And with the fall of the Soviet Union and the
apparent conversion of China to state capitalism, for a brief moment the
world seemed content.
Peak oil had not, though, gone away; it
had merely been postponed. Britain discovered this the hard way after
its North Sea deposits – which had once produced more oil than Kuwait –
peaked in 1999. By 2005 – the year global conventional oil
extraction peaked – Britain had become a net importer of oil and gas.
Today, Britain’s North Sea deposits produce 60 percent less oil than in
1999; and the projected price of the remaining oil is not enough to
cover the decommissioning costs.
By 2005 though, had we but known it at
the time, we had bigger problems to deal with. The experience of the
oil shocks of the 1970s convinced many peak oilers that once the peak of
global oil extraction had been reached, prices would rise remorselessly
as a consequence of supply and demand imbalance. This, indeed, is what
appeared to happen after the 2005 peak was reached:
By 2012, Michael Kumhof and Dirk V Muir
from the International Monetary Fund were anticipating global oil
prices of more than $200 per barrel by 2020. But that isn’t what
happened. Instead, from 2014 the oil price slumped and has been on a
steadily downward trend ever since. The reason is because there is more
to peak oil than geology and engineering.
Indeed, many peak oilers make the same
mistake as economists in treating oil – and energy in general – as being
just another relatively low-cost factor of production. The wage bill,
for example, is always far higher than the energy costs of running a
business. But as economist Steve Keen explains; “capital without energy
is a statue, labour without energy is a corpse.” Or as engineering
professor Jean-Marc Jancovici explains:
“energy is what quantifies change.” Nothing happens in the world
without energy. And when the cost of the world’s biggest primary energy
source – oil – begins to spike upward, the impacts are felt in every
area of our lives.
The story of the 2008 crash is usually
told in financial terms; and is used to blame the victims. The cause of
the crisis, we are told, was so-called sub-prime borrowers taking on
mortgages that they couldn’t possibly pay back. Except, of course,
prior to 2008 they had been paying them back. So what happened
to change their circumstances so that they could no longer repay
debts? The answer is interest rate rises. The banks had based their
lending on the assumption that the economy was stable; that inflation
would grow at around two percent; and that interest rates would remain
relatively low. With house prices supposedly guaranteed to keep rising,
and having securitised the risks,
banks – with the assistance of governments – could extend home
ownership to the masses. But from 2006, central banks had been raising
interest rates; tipping borrowers into default.
Why had the central banks been raising
interest rates? Because from 2005, inflation began to break out of the 1
to 3 percent band that they were charged with maintaining. According
to all of the textbooks they had been brought up on, the central bankers
had been taught that the way to bring inflation back under control was
to raise interest rates. But they – and the economics textbooks – were
wrong. What they believed to be inflation – too much currency chasing
too few goods – was actually an economy adjusting to its first
supply-side shock since the 1970s.
c-span | I DON'T PUSH BACK, I WITNESS, I OBSERVED, I THINK IT'S REALLY IMPORTANT THAT WE BECOME OBSERVERS OF OUR EMOTIONS, FEELINGS, EXPERIENCES, THE MORE THAT YOU CAN OBSERVE EVEN THE PART OF SHAME AND GUILT IS TO NOT NOT WANTING TO LOOK AT IT, NOT WANTING TO SEE IT BUT THE MOMENT THAT YOU TAKE TIME TO OBSERVE THE IMPACT, EVERYTHING THAT IT IS HAD ON YOU AND GIVE SPACE OBSERVING NOT JUST SHAME AND JOY NOT TO SHAME AND GUILT BUT JOY AND LOVE, WE SOMETIMES ASSUME THAT WE CAN FULLY FEEL LOVED AND JOY BUT SOMETIMES THERE'S SO PRACTICE IN SHAME AND GUILT THAT EVEN WHEN LOVE AND JOY COMES OUR WAY WE CANNOT RECOGNIZE IT AND SO I'M A BIG FIRM BELIEVER OF OBSERVING OUR FEELINGS, OUR EMOTIONS, OUR BEHAVIORS GIVING THEM SPACE SO YOU CAN HAVE MORE LANGUAGE AROUND WHAT IS HAPPENING, I PRACTICE WHAT IS CALLED GENERATIVE FOAM ONYX, MANY OF US IN THEIR MOVEMENT HAVE BEEN TRAINED IN IT OR HAVE GONE THROUGH THAT TRAINING AND IT'S REALLY AN OBSERVATION OF THE BODY AND EVERYTHING WERE GOING THROUGH A FINAL SWEEP IT SLEEP ENOUGH MY EYEBALL TWITCHES, I'M NOT TAKING ENOUGH WATER AND IF WE JUST TAKE A MOMENT TO OBSERVE INTO NOTICE, WE COULD HAVE MORE LANGUAGE ABOUT OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES, WHAT IS GOING TO WORK FOR US AND I THINK ABOUT THAT, THAT IS THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL, IMAGINE IF WE COULD COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS AND DESIRES, I THINK THAT'S WHY BLACK LIVES MATTER WAS SO PROFOUND FOR BLACK PEOPLE BECAUSE IT BECAME A THING THAT WE DID NOT REALIZE THAT WE NEEDED AS A COLLECTIVE TO GALVANIZE AROUND, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR TRAUMA, THE MORE THAT WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR RESILIENCE, WE CAN COLLECTIVELY UNDERSTAND OUR NEEDS, OUR DESIRES AND THE CLOSER WE CAN GET TO FREEDOM.
YOU WILL BE SHOCKED HOW MUCH YOU REMEMBER AS YOUR PROBED AND ASKED QUESTIONS. I REALLY SAT AND SAID LET'S START FROM THE BEGINNING AND WE WERE PRETTY MUCH IN CONVERSATION ON A DAILY BASIS LIKE AT THE CRACK OF DAWN AND SOME OF THE STORIES IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS TALKING TO GET TO THE NEXT STORY, A CHAPTER ON MY MIDDLE SCHOOL YEARS CALLED 12 WHERE I TALK ABOUT THE FIRST TIME I AM ARRESTED, THAT WAS NOT SOMETHING I PLANNED ON PUTTING IN THE BOOK I WAS NOT EVEN THINKING ABOUT THAT BUT I WAS TALKING A LOT TO KIND OF EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCES IN THE SCHOOL THAT I WENT TO, WHEN I WENT TO SUMMER SCHOOL, MY HOMESCHOOL, THE HOMESCHOOL MY NEIGHBORHOOD AND A COP CAME AND ARRESTED ME AND WAS LIKE WAIT A SECOND, WHAT HAPPENED AND I WAS LIKE 0 YEAH WHEN I WAS 12 I GOT ARRESTED AT SCHOOL AND SHE WAS LIKE OKAY THAT NEEDS TO GO IN THE BOOK, YOU'VE TALKED SO MUCH ABOUT YOUR SIBLINGS AND THE BOYS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD BUT YOU WERE ALSO CRIMINALIZED IN THE CRIMINALIZATION OF BLACK GIRLS AND WE HOLD ALL THE STORIES, WE STORE THEM, THEY DON'T LEAVE OUR BODIES, THEIR IN THERE SOMEWHERE AND WHEN THEIR UNLOCKED, I THINK THEY CREATE A LOT OF THINGS, OPPORTUNITY, SOMETIMES TOO MUCH FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE SURVIVORS ESPECIALLY OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND VIOLENCE, SOMETIMES YOU LOCK AWAY THE MEMORIES FOR SURVIVAL AND SAFETY AND OF THOSE ARE UNLOCKED WITHOUT GETTING THE SUPPORT CAN REALLY CAUSE A LOT OF HARM, I SAY THAT BECAUSE I'M NOT ROMANTICIZING THE MEMORY THAT I HAVE AND WHAT I UNLOCKED, I VERY MUCH GO TO THERAPY, I DO THERAPY TWICE A WEEK, I TRY MY HARDEST TO REALLY TAKE CARE OF MY EMOTIONAL HEALTH EVEN MY OWN HISTORY WITH COMPLEX PTSD, GIVEN WHAT I'VE GROWN UP WITH AND WITNESSED, THIS BOOK BUILDING OF THIS MEMOIR DID REMIND ME THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO ME AND MY FAMILY WAS REALLY, REALLY UNACCEPTABLE AND VERY DISTURBING INCREDIBLY TRAUMATIC AND I WILL PROBABLY NEED TO BE, NOT IN A JUDGMENTAL WAVE AND LIFELONG THERAPY BECAUSE OF IT, I WAS JUST TEXTING WITH MY MOM, DO YOU WANT TO GO TO THERAPY.
I AM VERY TRANSPARENT, I'M IN THERAPY HOPING SHALL BE LIKE MAYBE I'LL DO IT TO, WE DESERVE HEALING FROM WHAT IS HAPPENED TO US IN WHAT CONTINUES TO HAPPEN, WE DESERVE THE TIME AND SPACE, MY BIG DEMAND ON MY LAST BOOK TO HER I WAS SAYING IN EVERY CONVERSATION FIRST OF ALL I BELIEVE IN REPARATION BUT I THINK THERE SHOULD BE A WHOLE SECTION WHEN WE CREATE OUR REPARATION IMPACTED ENTER PACKAGE ON HEALING JUSTICE, EVERY SINGLE BLACK PERSON IN THEIR FAMILY SHOULD HAVE A DESIGNATED WHO CAN SUPPORT THEM UP WITH THEM THROUGH THE HISTORY OF TRAUMA THAT WE HAVE GONE THROUGH TO GET US CLOSER TO BEING WHOLE HUMAN BEINGS, WHEN YOU'RE TRAUMATIZED, YOU'RE NOT A WHOLE HUMAN BEING, YOUR ACTING FROM YOUR TRAUMA PLACE, WE DESERVE TO BE FULLY REALIZED HUMAN BEINGS, I THINK REPARATIONS WILL GET US THAT AN ACTIVE THERAPY, A LOT OF OTHER THINGS AS WELL THE ACTIVE THERAPY AS WELL.
RT | CNN host Van Jones is being hauled over the coals on social
media, facing accusations of hypocrisy for tearfully heralding the end
of Donald Trump’s presidency despite working with his administration.
After Democrat Joe Biden
was projected to have won the election on Saturday, the CNN commentator
launched into an emotional speech about how “it’s easier to be a parent this morning.”
“It’s easier to be a dad this morning. It’s easier to tell your kids, ‘Character matters, being a good person matters,’” he said.
The pundit then broke down into tears and continued: “And it’s
easier for a whole lot of people. If you’re Muslim in this country, you
don’t have to worry that the president doesn’t want you here. If you’re
an immigrant, you don’t have to worry if the president is going to be
happier to have babies snatched away or send dreamers back for no
reason.”
The clip was widely shared on social media and
many people, including NBA star LeBron James and actor Mark Ruffalo,
applauded Jones for his words.
However, thousands of others noted
that Jones’ remarks were markedly different from comments he previously
made about what Trump had done for the black community and the fact that
he worked with the administration.
Photos of Jones, who was an official in the Obama White House,
alongside members of the Trump administration and family racked up
thousands of likes on Twitter. News articles about Jones’ comments and
his ties to the administration were also widely shared.
Indeed, just over two weeks ago Jones said that Trump doesn’t get enough credit for his actions to help black people.
“I think it's really unfortunate because Donald Trump, and I get
beat up by liberals every time I say it but I keep saying it, he has
done good stuff for the black community,” Jones said on CNN.
“Opportunity
Zone stuff, black college stuff, I worked with him on criminal stuff, I
saw Donald Trump have African American people, formerly incarcerated,
in the White House, embraced them, treated them well. There is a side to
Donald Trump that I think he does not get enough credit for,” he added.
suntimes | In the book, Stuart cites a University of Chicago study that says Black teens create more online content than any other racial group. In February, the Sun-Times reported that less than 5 percent of workers at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Black.
Drill also crosses paths with hip-hop’s “Blog Era’ — a
period where local artists such as The Cool Kids and Kidz in the Hall
made names for themselves by releasing new content via music blogs
instead of relying on music industry gatekeepers, along with rappers
with strong, national DIY followings such as Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller,
Curren$y, and Gary, Indiana, native Freddie Gibbs, among others.
“These guys all blew up and had all these videos with
millions of plays, and all this notoriety and songs and mixtapes getting
downloaded,” said Andrew Barber, owner/creator of “Fake Shore Drive,” a
Chicago music blog. “But none of it counted toward the new
certifications that the RIAA has in place or the Billboard charts.”
Due to the subgenre’s reputation, many record companies refused to sign drill artists; their music was banned by venues.
“I just thought you need to have these ridiculous bar
guarantees and rental fees, and later in life I find out that was just a
Black thing, or a risk assessment type of thing, even though there was
never a risk,” said concert promoter and Complex Studios co-founder
Marques “Merk” Elliston, who says he partnered with Hologram USA to have
Chief Keef’s hologram perform at a Hammond, Indiana, venue before local
police shut it down citing safety issues. “That’s why you see the lack
of remorse for a lot of these people [venues].”
Due to those fears, some of the genre’s artists are opting to move away from the drama.
“It was a part of our lives; we saw it as normal,” said Bronzeville
native Sasha Go Hard, who is featured in the theme song for the Comedy
Central series “South Side.” “It became a trend to start dissing people.
… These are not just songs that people are making; it’s really
happening. It was easy for me to branch away from drill. I went a
different route by touring overseas and making EDM songs.” Fist tap Big Don
dailybeast | As his now infamous 2016 line about giving Trump a
chance—inadvertently echoed in Biden’s victory speech earlier Saturday
night—revealed, Chappelle’s politics have never been simple to
characterize. His public criticism of Hillary Clinton in the final days of that election were bad enough that he had to later clarify
that he was “not a Trump supporter.” His willingness to give Trump a
“chance” followed him for months, at least until he told Stephen Colbert
in 2017, “It’s not like I wanted to give him a chance that night.”
More recently, during an episode of David Letterman’s Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, Chappelle answered a question about Trump’s Muslim ban by offering up what easily could be considered a both-sides take on the two presidential candidates.
“You
don’t expect necessarily that empathy, compassion or cultural
astuteness from a guy like that,” Chappelle, who converted to Islam in
the early ‘90s, told Letterman. “What you’re sad about is that the chair
doesn’t have more humanity in it. But has that chair ever been that
humane? When Biden called Trump the first racist president ever, well clearly that’s not true. So how do I feel when I hear a white person say some stupid shit?”
As Letterman laughed, Chappelle answered his own question with a comical shrug.
“I would implore everybody who’s celebrating to remember, it’s good
to be a humble winner,” Chappelle said on Saturday. “Remember when I was
here four years ago? Remember how bad that felt. Remember that half the
country right now still feels that way. Please remember that.”
“Remember
that for the first time in the history of America, the life expectancy
of white people is dropping because of heroin, because of suicide,” he
continued. “All these white people out there that feel that anguish,
that pain, that man, they think nobody cares. Maybe they don’t.”
“Let
me tell you something: I know how that feels,” he added. “I promise
you, I know how that feels. If you’re a police officer and every time
you put your uniform on, you feel like you’ve got a target on your back,
you’re appalled by the ingratitude that people have when you would risk
your life to save them, believe me, I know how that feels.”
“But
here’s the difference between me and you,” Chappelle said. “You guys
hate each other for it. And I don’t hate anybody. I just hate that
feeling. That’s what I fight through. That’s what I suggest you fight
through. You’ve got to find a way to live your life. You’ve got to find a
way to forgive each other. You’ve got to find a way to find joy in your
existence in spite of that feeling. And if you can't do that…come get
these n---a lessons.”
tremr | Tada is correct
in his insistence on the need to approach politics from a partially
personological (rather than a purely systemic) approach. In order to
understand the roots of Oluo's deeply deficient and distorted
perspective, it is very important to understand that studies indicate major differences in narcissistic personality traits among individuals from different racial groups.
In
general, African Americans tend to exhibit the highest rates of
narcissistic personality traits, with East Asians (perhaps with the
exception of Tada) possessing the lowest levels of groups measured.
While some have suggested that the alleged "black self-esteem advantage"
that is well-known among social scientists, may explain these
heightened levels of narcissism, as a kind of compensatory attempt at
preserving self-esteem in the face of marginalization, other
marginalized groups, such as Hispanics, do not exhibit this heightened
self-esteem, throwing this hypothesis into question.
Such
a self-esteem advantage is likewise absent among East Asians, and East
Asians have lower levels of self-esteem than whites. Of course, since
East Asians, on average, have higher levels of income than Caucasians in
the U.S., we may rightly question whether it is proper to consider them
"marginalized" in any meaningful sense of the word. Virgil Zeigler-Hill
and Marion T. Wallace stated their "Overview and Predictions" in their
three studies as follows:
"Our
goal for the present studies was to examine whether racial differences
emerged for narcissism in a manner that was similar to the Black
self-esteem advantage. This was accomplished by conducting three studies
that compared the narcissism levels of Black and White individuals. The
present research extends the findings of Foster et al. (2003) by using
various measures of narcissism rather than relying solely on the NPI.
Also, the present studies accounted for factors related to narcissism
such as self-esteem level and socially desirable response tendencies in
order to clarify the nature of any racial differences in narcissism that
emerged. Given previous research concerning racial/ethnic differences
in narcissism as well as the fragile nature of the high levels of
self-esteem reported by Black individuals, we expected Black individuals
to report higher levels of narcissism than White individuals. Finally,
Study 3 included indicators of psychological adjustment so that we could
examine whether race moderated the association between narcissism and
psychological adjustment."
In
their second study, they found that "Black individuals possess higher
levels of narcissism than White individuals. The magnitude of the
differences varied across the facets of narcissism such that the largest
differences were found for those facets that captured grandiosity and
self-absorption...". Consistently across these studies, they found that
black individuals exhibit higher levels of narcissism than white
individuals. This is exactly what one would expect in a cultural context
in which activists in the Black Lives Matter movement insist that
blacks cannot be racist. Their claim is that the definition of "racism"
was changed a few decades ago, so that it can only be used to speak of
those whose systemic power allows them to express their prejudices
institutionally. Of course, the only reason they insist on this
definition is because of the tremendously negative emotional payload the
word "racism" has.
The
obvious underlying psychological motive in insisting that the
definition of "racism" can only refer to discrimination by those with
the institutional power to enforce their prejudices is that blacks
cannot be held accountable for their actions in spite of the fact that,
on an individual basis, they tend to engage in much higher rates of
race-based crime, and they likewise feel comfortable accusing whites of
being racist merely for being white, despite the fact that whites are
far less likely than blacks or Hispanics to engage in interracial crime
on an individual level. While systemic racism exists, we must emphasize
that in this post, we are merely following Tada's approach in looking at
racism from a purely personological perspective.
selfishactivist | For the last two years, I’ve been actively and covertly being bullied
by a group of people who have been engaging in accountability abuse and
smears about me in various local communities around Montreal and the
general area of the Pacific North West.
This has resulted in the loss of relationships with colleagues and
clients, as well as work and income that went along with those
relationships, including more recently being asked to step away from
facilitation at an ancestral skills gathering, after smears reached some
of their stakeholders.
During this time, I’ve also suffered from debilitating chronic
fatigue, chronic pain, and vertigo during this period, which has been
profoundly affected by the bullying. I’m luckily more resourced, in both
a psycho-emotional sense and financial sense, than other people in my
community, but I know many people in my community would not have been so
lucky and ended up permanently traumatized.
As I am coming out of the worst of my condition, I feel like finally
have the energy to address these matters more actively and take the
responsibility to protect myself and the people who are connected to my
work.
I want to specify that this note is a call for accountability from
those who have bullied me, with the understanding that accountability is
a path to repair.
Here, I want to share with you how I define what has been happening to me as accountability abuse and a form of defamation.
In the more-than-a-year period of constant secretive
communications of projections and fabrications about me being spread in
my local communities, I have received no direct contact or engagement
from any core parties about the actual claims of me, and therefore no
due process, no clarification, and no attempt at verification, all the
while I have suffered massive damage to my mental health and
relationships.
The innate lack of transparency and accountability of these claims
defines what I refer to as accountability abuse – abuses of power that
happen under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm, which
in turn abuses the spirit of accountability itself.
Adding to this problematic dynamic has been that the many community
members who were engaged by this campaign, many of whom are organizers
with ample social capital, would tell me that they cannot share who the
claimants or what the claims are because they deserve to be protected,
even while they pursued or enabled actions that harm me emotionally and
financially.
My feelings about this are very clear: it is problematic for people
to be able to say whatever they want about others under such protective
anonymity AND have their claims validated through belief and action – it
creates an extremely untransparent and unaccountable dynamic that is
easily manipulated. For myself, I would love to see our communities
adopt a standard that claims are deemed lacking actionable validity
until they are specifically backed up by information such as who is the
claimant and what they are claiming AND all parties are able to respond
to transparent information.
Survivors 100% deserve trauma-informed attention and be heard, that
is my core belief as a therapist, but we also need to be held
responsible for having courage, in order to facilitate real healing and
prevent traumatic patterns causing unnecessary harm through projection
and fabrication. What I have seen over and over again is that, without
such responsibility, survivor support turns into codependent coddling
that reifies trauma.
selfishactivist | I understand that for some people this may draw confusion because the
hall-of-fame of somatics in our minds is plastered with the images of
white teachers and innovators.
Yet, somatics remains an Asian cultural form in its modern roots.
Acknowledging this is similar to how we may appropriately recognize
funk and rock n’ roll as Black music. While robust polyrhythms and
boisterous dance circles are a feature of almost any culture if you
excavate deeper, it is undoubtedly Black people and their culture, i.e.
the collective work of their ancestors, that have kept alive these
Afro-diasporic traditions and gifted them to those of us who live in the
context of the modern post-colonial project.
Somatics, the practice of affecting change through felt-sense
interoception of the body, has a similar story. Since the post-war era
of the 1950s, and even before that on a smaller scale, Asian cultural
practices such as qigong, yoga, zen, energetic martial arts, energy
work, and Chinese medicine proliferated throughout the Western world,
often accompanied by a variety of Asian philosophical orientations from
Buddhism to Daoism.
The modern Western somatic modalities we have come to commonly know,
from Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi Method, Generative Somatics, Embodied
Leadership (Strozzi Institute), Feldenkrais, and so on, all derive their
foundational somatic practices from these Asian cultural traditions. In
more recent years, these embodiment tools that have been traditionally
accessed for individual healing are now more and more being accessed for
politicized collective healing.
Now, here is a question: with all this resourcing from our ancestors,
how much do people actually know about Asian cultures? Or even better,
how much can people humbly admit that they DON’T know? Because while our
ancestors’ treasures have been sending gifts to the West, there has
been very little understanding of who we are, what it is, the essence of
‘Asianness’ we embody, even within social justice circles that
purportedly are about exploring and celebrating that which is
marginalized.
The reality is, we have continuously been the last thought,
constantly triaged out of relevance using a metric that we know as the
hierarchy of oppression. And perhaps, there is some twisted validity in
the idea that things just aren’t as bad for us so we matter less.
But lying deeper than this surface logic is a problem that eats
itself. The supposedly semi-reasonable idea that we are the least
important issue in the problem of racism, doesn’t mean that healing
anti-Asianness can’t be the most critical key to solving the koan that
systemic oppression is.
My aspirations in cultural somatics have always been about addressing
this very core issue – to reclaim somatics, as an Asian cultural form,
as an Asian person. In my own first explorations of the work that I now
refer to as cultural somatics was a yearning to create a framework that
understands change, even social change, as wholly encapsulated in the
body and its innate mysterious non-dual nature, that flips and
synthesizes yin and yang in a constant process of alchemy.
This mattered to me deeply because in all honestly, I just had enough
of activist spaces that touted banners of ‘resistance’ and ’solidarity’
but consequently had no room for the distinctly Asian embodied
sensibilities of ‘yielding’ and ‘fluidity’ as power and resource. I
definitely have the first-hand experience of getting shut down for
suggesting that these may be also valuable strategies for ‘fighting the
enemy’.
feldenkrais |Relaxation: a concept that is often misunderstood
Let us look at the lower half of the jaw. Most people keep their mouths
closed when they are not speaking, eating, or doing something else with
it. What keeps the lower half of the jaw drawn up against the upper
half? If the relaxation that has now become so fashionable were the
correct condition, then the lower jaw would hang down freely and the
mouth remain wide open. But this ultimate state of relaxation is found
only among individuals born idiots, or in cases of paralyzing shocks.
It is important to understand how an essential part of the body such as
the jaw can be in this permanent state of being held up, supported by
muscles that work ceaselessly while we are awake; yet we do not sense that we are doing anything to hold up our jaw. In order to let our jaw
drop freely we actually have to learn to inhibit the muscles involved.
If you try to relax the lower jaw until its own weight opens the mouth
fully you will find that it is not easy. When you have succeeded you will
observe that there are also changes in the expression of the face and
in the eyes. It is likely that you will discover at the end of this
experiment that your jaw is normally shut too tightly.
Perhaps you will also discover the origin of this excessive tension.
Watch for the return of the tension after the jaw has been relaxed, and
you will at least discover how infinitely little man knows about his
own powers and about himself in general.
The results of this small experiment can be important for a sensible
person, more important even than attending to his business, because his
ability to make a livelihood may improve when he discovers what is reducing the efficiency of most of his activities.
No awareness of action in antigravity muscles
The lower jaw is not the only part of the body that does not drop down
as far as it can. The head itself does not drop forward. Its center of
gravity is well in front of the point at which it is supported by the
spine (it lies approximately between the ears), for the face and front part
of the skull are heavier than the back of the head. Despite this
structure the head does not fall forward, so obviously there must be
some organization in the system that keeps it up.
If we relax the muscles at the back of the neck completely, then the
head will drop to the lowest possible position, with the chin resting
on the breastbone. Yet there is no consciousness of effort while these
muscles at the back of the neck are contracted to hold up the head. If
you finger the calf muscles (at the back of the leg, at about the
middle) while standing, you will find them strongly contracted. If they
were entirely relaxed the body would fall forward. In good posture the
bones of the lower leg are at a small angle forward from the vertical,
and the contraction of the muscles of the calves prevents the body from
falling forward on its face.
We stand without knowing how
We are thus not aware of any effort or activity in the muscles that
work against gravity. We become aware of the antigravity muscles only
when we either interrupt or reinforce them, that is, when the voluntary
change is made in clear awareness. The permanent contraction that is
normally present before any intentional act is done is not registered
by our senses. The electrical impulses, which derive from different
sources within the nervous system, are involved. One group of these
produces deliberate action; the other group causes contraction in the
antigravity muscles until the work done by them exactly balances the
pull of gravity.
wikipedia | Feldenkrais was born in theRussian Empire(present-dayUkraine) city ofSlavuta. In 1918, he left his family, then living inBaranovichi,Belarus, to emigrate to Palestine.[1]There he worked as a laborer before obtaining his high-school diploma in 1925. After graduation, he worked as acartographerfor the British survey office. During his time in Palestine he began his studies of self-defense, includingJu-Jitsu. A soccer injury in 1929 would later figure into the development of his method.[2]
Just as the Germans were about to arrive in Paris in 1940, Feldenkrais fled to Britain with a jar of "heavy water" and a sheaf of research material with instructions to deliver them to the British AdmiraltyWar Office. Until 1946, he was a science officer in theAdmiraltyworking onAnti-submarine weaponryinFairlie, Scotland. His work on improvingsonarled to several patents. He also taught self-defense techniques to his fellow servicemen. On slippery submarine decks, he re-aggravated an old soccer knee injury. Refusing an operation, he was prompted to intently explore and develop self-rehabilitation and awareness techniques through self-observation which later evolved into the method. His discoveries led him to begin sharing with others (including colleagueJ. D. Bernal) through lectures, experimental classes, and one-on-one work with a few.
After leaving the Admiralty, he lived and worked in private industry in London. His self-rehabilitation enabled him to continue his judo practice. From his position on the international Judo committee he began to study judo scientifically, incorporating the knowledge he gained through his self-rehabilitation. In 1949, he published the first book on the Feldenkrais method,Body and Mature Behavior: A Study of Anxiety, Sex, Gravitation and Learning. During this period he studied the work ofG.I. Gurdjieff,F. Matthias Alexander,Elsa GindlerandWilliam Bates. He also traveled to Switzerland to study withHeinrich Jacoby.
In 1951, he returned to the recently formedIsrael. After directing theIsraeli ArmyDepartment of Electronics for several years, in 1954 he settled inTel Avivwhere he began to teach his method full-time. He began training Mia Segal as his assistant and his first student in 1957.[4][5]In the same year, he gave lessons in the Feldenkrais method toDavid Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, enabling him to stand on his head in a yoga pose.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s he presented the Feldenkrais method throughout Europe and inNorth America(including an Awareness Through Movement program for human potential trainers including atEsalen Institutein 1972). He also began to train teachers in the method so they could, in turn, present the work to others. He trained the first group of 13 teachers in the method from 1969–1971 in Tel Aviv. Over the course of four summers from 1975–1978, he trained 65 teachers inSan FranciscoatLone Mountain Collegeunder the auspices of theHumanistic Psychology Institute. In 1980, 235 students began his summer teacher-training course atHampshire CollegeinAmherst, Massachusetts. After becoming ill in the fall of 1981, after teaching two of the planned four summers, he stopped teaching publicly. He died on July 1, 1984. There are well over 2000 practitioners of his method teaching throughout the world today.
theanalysis | But what I’m getting at is a progressive people’s movement and the
progressives that have been elected to Congress, what should they be
demanding? What do real solutions look like?
Michael Hudson: What they should be demanding is something that cannot be done within
the existing two-party system. First of all, the way to keep down
housing prices and to get the cities and states out of their deficit is
to tax unearned income. Tax the land, have a real estate tax that’ll
collect all this rent that is being paid right now to the banks as
mortgage interest. Either you pay the banks the contractual interest
that they’re due on all of these loans, and you go broke. Or you realize
the banks have become averse to economic welfare. You have to let the
financial system go and replace it with banking and credit as a public
utility.
That’s what makes China so competitive. Why is China able to outstrip
American labor? The Chinese have almost; I’d say, an equal standard of
living from everything that I’ve seen there. Well, the reason is that
China is doing exactly what the United States did to become an
industrial power in the late 19th century. China has public utilities,
public enterprises providing basic needs, and basic public services at a
subsidized rate or freely, such as education, it’s free. Foreign labor
doesn’t have education debt like the United States. Education is free.
Health care is public. It’s provided freely. There’s no huge limit.
Paul Jay: Let me say, I think that’s not quite as rosy as it appears. My
understanding is that while health care is supposed to be free and
public, that you actually have to wind up having to pay doctors some
cash, or you really can’t get in to see them.
Michael Hudson: Yes, that is fair. I do acknowledge that fact. But the most important
public utility to answer the question that you brought up, the
important thing is that banking and finance in China is a public
utility. The government is the creditor. When there’s a pandemic like
this and companies cannot afford to pay the debts or have to lay off
labor, the government, as a banker, can say, OK, we’re just not going to
collect the debt and force you to go under and force you to lay off
your labor force.
It’s easy to cancel debts when you, the public, and the government
are the creditor. Because you’re canceling debts owed to yourself, and
that’s one of the main reasons why banking should be a public utility.
nakedcapitalism | The Financial Times comment section confirmed this take and criticized the pink paper’s account,
which mentioned but didn’t tease out the significance of Ma criticizing
the government for being leery of unsecured personal lending:
At the end of October, Mr Ma criticised China’s
state-owned banks at a financial summit in Shanghai. He suggested the
big lenders had a “pawnshop mentality” and that Ant was playing an
important role in extending credit to innovative but collateral-poor
companies and individuals.
From the Financial Times’ peanut gallery:
Hater of Simpletons
For those who didn’t know what happened : check the new
regulation which limits Ant’s leverage and enhances consumer protection,
which also limits Ant’s valuation as a “tech” company. That was the
main reason Jack fired at regulators in his speech [at the end of
October] – and to be honest, there was no way he didn’t know the
regulation long before the listing date and the speech (gov spent months
on a policy, if not longer and would consult industry leaders)! If the
IPO were not halted, investors would have suffered from major losses,
not to mention the high leverage (60x+) and ABS put Ant’s customers at
risk. Jack fired the speech to evade regulation and made sure HE made
enough money from the listing. Not investors, not Ant users. Being
sarcastic is easy. Try to get clear of what REALLY happened.
Now to the substance of the dispute, which led to the halt of the IPO
and will require Ant to substantially restructure its business. Ant
originates personal and small business loans to parties with little in
the way of assets. These loans command higher interest rates than more
conventional loans and from what we infer, “higher’ can mean “pretty
high”.
As we have written, China hasn’t been shy about using leverage to
boost growth, even though as we and others have written, over time, the
incremental lending has produced less and less in the way of GDP lift.
China has also had multiple mini-financial crises involving its “wealth
management products.” These are typically uninsured investments that
provide a fixed interest rate for a set period of time, typically five
years. They have often provided funding for state-level real estate
investments. Nevertheless, even if you allow for Michael Hudson’s view
that land should be taxed aggressively to limit real estate rentierism,
economists have found that borrowing to make productive investments in
businesses, equipment, and buildings adds to growth, while increases in
personal borrowing are a brake.
Another reason for China to take a dim view of personal borrowing is
that the government prioritizes wage growth and improving living
standards as its basis for legitimacy. There’s no reason, as in the US,
to use consumer borrowing to mask stagnant worker wages. And the Chinese
may even have recognized that overly financialized economies have lower
rates of growth than ones at a more modest level of financial
“deepening”. The IMF found that Poland was at the optimum level, but
argued that more finance might not create a drag if the sector was
well-regulated.
Mind you, we aren’t saying that China is a paragon of regulatory
virtue. They still allow for stunning amounts of margin lending against
stocks. And they’ve also sat pat as ghost cities, too often shoddily
built, continue to rise, a textbook case of trading sardines.1 But they appear to want to avoid having a finance-driven economy, and also appear to have learned from some of our mistakes.
Some of the writing was on the wall earlier. While Ant
was gearing up to launch its IPO, regulators had begun taking aim at the
company’s fast-growing microloan business, which provides short-term
credit to hundreds of millions of individuals and scores of small
businesses.
On Sept. 14, China’s banking and insurance regulator issued a private
notice to some commercial banks warning them about the risks of making
loans in partnership with third-party institutions, according to a copy
of the notice seen by The Wall Street Journal. It said banks should not
be outsourcing their loan underwriting and risk controls.
When Ant partners with banks to make loans, the lenders provide the
funding and bear the risk of defaults, while Ant collects fees for
facilitating the transactions.
Two days later, the regulator published a guideline that placed caps
on the volume of asset-backed securities that could be issued by
microlenders. Two subsidiaries of Ant have bundled many loans into
securities and sold them to raise funds for lending operations.
In other words, Chinese officials tried halting Ant’s practice of
originating risky individual/small business loans and selling them to
banks, both on the bank and Ant ends of the pipeline. That apparently
didn’t lead to a change of course at Ant or its allied banks or lead to
any change in appetite for its IPO.
theamericanconservative |“It was part of a strategy to signal
that Republicans intended to seriously contest the South for the first
time in over a century,” he writes. “[Ronald] Reagan was fetched at the
airport in Meridian by his state chairman, Congressman Trent Lott. Lott
had been president of the fraternity that stockpiled a cache of weapons
used to riot against the federal marshals protecting a black student
seeking to enter the University of Mississippi.” Perlstein reports that
it was Lott who urged the president: “If Reagan really wanted to win
this crowd over, he need only fold a certain two-word phrase into his
speech: states’ rights.”
Perlstein was once dismissively dubbed the “gonzo historian” by former New York Times
book review editor and rival chronicler of conservatives Sam Tanenhaus.
Indeed, Perlstein recalls the notorious Neshoba County Fair “states’
rights” speech and countless other anecdotes in his 1,100-page opus, Reaganland,
in downright Thompsonian fashion. It is his fourth installment of
mid-century, American conservative history and it is his best, besting
the magisterial Nixonland.
Perlstein, a hard lefty journo, might indeed take himself too
seriously, but at least he usually affords the same treatment to the
subjects of his histories.
Rather than a conventional
denunciation of the medial event in Reagan’s use of “the Southern
Strategy,” Perlstein actually does reporting. Perlstein reveals Reagan
didn’t really believe in what he was saying. “The way he carried out
Trent Lott’s suggestion doused the enthusiasm of a previously energetic
crowd,” Perlstein says. “And it was hardly worth it. The backlash was
immediate and caustic.”
But what did Reagan actually say?
“I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people,”
Reagan told the crowd. “I believe in people doing as much as they can
for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I
believe we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving
powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal
establishment.” And Reagan said: “I believe in states’ rights.” It was
considered by his critics as tantamount to Morse code to white
supremacists. Perlstein dresses up the story pages before with
paragraphs of dispatches on the dominance of racial vigilantism in the
region in the years before Reagan’s speech.
But
after his address, in the inferno of an August afternoon in central
Mississippi, Reagan won. Though reasonable points about black voter
suppression can be raised, in November, Reagan won Neshoba County, he
won Mississippi, and he won the United States Electoral College. And he
did so against a Deep Southern, Democratic incumbent president, which
was previously unthinkable. And the GOP hasn’t relinquished Mississippi
since—not even when neighboring Arkansan Bill Clinton and Tennessean Al
Gore dominated the Nineties.
Perlstein’s
chronicle is about the 40th president but, of course, can’t escape the
shadow of the 45th. Perlstein has called Donald Trump an heir to Reagan,
only stripped of the sunny optimism. A generation of global leaders,
usually liberal, championed democracy, only to see Palestine elect
Hamas, Egypt elect the Muslim Brotherhood, Mississippi go to Reagan,
Britain secede from Europe, and America annoit Trump.
Free To A Good Home
-
I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
-
Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
