- Liberal Van Jones Shreds Hillary: 'They Took a Billion Dollars and Lit it on Fire'
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
It appears the lack of momentum in removing the Orange God from the Oval office is beginning to take its toll on the left. As reality sinks in and the hard facts of life with Trump become apparent, the left are eating themselves.
CNN’s Van Jones shreds the Hillary campaign to pieces, only like a social justice warrior can.
“The Hillary Clinton campaign did not spend their money on white workers, and they did not spend it on people of color. They spent it on themselves,” Jones told a packed house at McCormick Place in Chicago. “They spent it on themselves, let’s be honest.”
“Let’s be honest,” Jones continued. “They took a billion dollars, a billion dollars, a billion dollars, and set it on fire, and called it a campaign!”
“That wasn’t a campaign. That’s not a campaign.”
Jones continued, attacking the Clinton campaign’s reliance on consultants and polling data that proved to be wrong.
“A billion dollars for consultants. A billion dollars for pollsters. A billion dollars for a data operation, that was run by data dummies who couldn’t figure out that maybe people in Michigan needed to be organized.”
“And now they want us to fight about whether black folks or white workers or Latinos or any other group should get the money,” Jones said. “First of all, you need to give the money back to the people, period.”
“Quit getting rich off people’s struggles,” Jones finished.
Van Jones has been redpilled to the divide and conquer politics of DC.
- Trump Jr. Rips into Comey: 'You're the Head of the FBI, You're Not Some Baby'
Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
Donald Trump took away James Comey’s job, now his son will take away any semblance of dignity he has left. In an interview with Judge Jeanine, Trump Jr. laced into Comey, mocking the former FBI head and flat out calling him ‘dishonest’ and of ‘bad character.’
“He has proven himself to be a dishonest man of bad character,” Trump Jr. told Jeanine Pirro on Fox News. “They spent 10 months chasing a rabbit down a hole with the sole purpose of taking down my father.
“We were vindicated.”
“Of all the things that were leaked, the only thing that wasn’t leaked was that Trump was never under investigation,” he said. “Because there is nothing there.
“How come that’s not leaked?
Trump Jr. hit Comey with a verbal gravity hammer, saying “I think his divisiveness, the way he handled things, everything that leads up to this that we’ve seen over the last few months, and now that we know how he handled the Loretta Lynch thing, explains perfectly why he totally should’ve been fired.”
Judge Jeanine posited the idea, in light of the revelation that Comey had leaked to the NY Times, the possibility that he had leaked to the media in the past.Trump Jr. concurred, “I think almost without question. He said he’s a leaker. You know, if he did it this time, how many time did he do it? I wish there was a follow up for that.
He added, “If the head of the FBI is saying ‘well if I was a stronger individual, I may…’, give me a break. You’re the head of the FBI. You’re not some baby, pretending, like, does anyone believe this? And if he is, he’s that guy? He’s not strong enough to say something that he believes is right that he goes and writes a memo and then leaks it to the NY Times? I mean, I can’t imagine anyone actually believing that that happened.” - The Fourth Turning: A Summer Of Rage And The Total Eclipse Of The Deep State
Authored by By Michael Hart and StockBoardAsset,
“If you do a worldwide survey of eclipse lore, the theme that constantly appears, with few exceptions, is it’s always a disruption of the established order,” said E. C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California. That’s true of both solar and lunar eclipses.
“People depend on the sun’s movement,” Krupp said. “[It’s] regular, dependable, you can’t tamper with it. And then, all of a sudden, Shakespearean tragedy arrives and time is out of joint. The sun and moon do something that they shouldn’t be doing.”
On August 21st of this year, the United States will witness its first total solar eclipse seen across the totality of the country in nearly forty years. For millennia, humans have gazed towards the skies in awe, observing that heavenly bodies move regularly and predictably with mathematical certainty, and this has inspired poets, philosophers, and other thinkers to ruminate on man’s relationship to the universe, and the possibility that human activity is ruled by laws and patterns independent of human activity.
Although many of these ideas that were fashionable hundreds of years ago, such as astrology, have been put to rest by contemporary scientific knowledge, perhaps there is value to be gleaned from entertaining the possibility that there are indeed larger forces and patterns governing human affairs. Against the backdrop of this cosmically anomalous event, are we on the cusp of a more temporal form of disruption this summer in the United States?
Since President Donald Trump’s stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, much of the press have made note of Steve Bannon’s interest in an influential book published in 1997 called, “The Fourth Turning: What Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous With Destiny.”
In this book, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe make the argument that our ideas about the nature of history, linear time, and progress are illusory, and that if we want a more accurate concept about the way that history unfolds, we would do well to study the ancient Greek concept of cyclical time. This concept views national and global historical phenomenon not as randomly occurring events, or the linear march of historical “progress,” but instead sees them as recurring archetypes placed into a larger tapestry of a greater repeating historical cycle.
According to Strauss and Howe, the relative geographic and historical isolation of the United States provides a unique opportunity to view this cycle unfolding regularly and predictably every 80 years.
This 80-year cycle can be divided into four stages or seasons, each lasting approximately twenty years:
- High– This initial stage occurs immediately following a period of crisis. The High is characterized by strong institutions, a sense of collective destiny, and a weakness of individuality. The most recent example of this would be the period of prosperity and conformity in the U.S. immediately following the conclusion of World War II.
- Awakening– The second stage, or turning, is a period of questioning established values and asserting one’s independence from established norms and morals, be they spiritual or political. This stage may be seen as a rebellion of the previous era’s emphasis on material wealth and conformity. The 1960’s, with the psychedelic revolution, anti-war protests, Civil Rights marches, and New Age spiritual movements can be seen as recent characteristics of this second stage, as well as Reaganomics and the mid-1980s Wall Street ethos.
- Unraveling– The emphasis on autonomy and the questioning of spiritual, political, and individual authority in the Awakening stage eventually destabilizes society, leading to the Third Turning, in which institutions are weak and untrusted while the subjective experience of the individual is emphasized. This stage can be thought of as the inverse of the initial High stage, where collective destiny is replaced by atomization. Recent symptom of this stage would be the culture wars, corporate malfeasance, a lack of faith in government, social justice movements, and political correctness.
- Crisis– In the Fourth Turning, a destabilizing event, usually involving warfare, leads to the destruction and reconstruction of institutions of power. In the face of destruction, Americans are forced to unite and forge a vision to restructure a disrupted society. This fourth stage can be seen as the inverse of the Awakening stage, and the authors cite World War II as the defining event of the most recent period of Crisis.
Strauss and Howe predicted that the next Crisis period that the U.S. would face would happen sometime around 2005 and end around 2025. Anyone who has been paying attention over the last decade would have a difficult time refuting this. The financial crisis of 2008 threw the planet into discord, and we are now just beginning to see some of the political ramifications of this. We may be reaching the apex of this crisis this summer, or at least we will witness a significant acceleration of it.
The institutions that once defined American stability are rapidly crumbling. Mounting debt, unsustainable consumerism, and illegal immigration are chipping away at once sturdy foundation of America.
And the robust civil discourse needed to solve these problems has been interrupted by advocates of social justice, sometimes violently. Recent small skirmishes between the two sides may be headed toward larger eruptions.
Some analysts are predicting a ‘Summer of Rage’, which will boil over in violent protests all across the United States. The DNC has called for a George Soros-financed ‘Resistance Summer’, in which protestors are encouraged to invade town halls, and organize rallies and neighborhood meetings to undermine President Trump. This will culminate in a national training being billed as a ‘Resistance Summer Camp’ to effectively train operatives inorganizing strategies.
Meanwhile, other leftist groups are calling for a day of ‘Impeachment Marches’ on July 2nd in dozens of major cities across the country. Their goal is to pressure congressional representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump.
Emboldened by a mainstream media apparatus which functions as a mouthpiece of Deep State interests, these activists are determined to overturn democratically elected officials and overturn law and order on the grounds that they personally disagree with the results.
As we have seen in recent months, Trump supporters, conservatives, and other patriots are not afraid to confront leftist activists in the streets, and this is likely to intensify as these DNC-backed groups become more desperate and confrontational in their tactics.
James Comey’s congressional testimony this week showed that the Trump administration is indeed attempting to break the old political order and its far-too-power Deep State. The cracks are surfacing now, and this will likely shatter and spill into many facets of social life outside of the realm of politics.
This shattering seems to be the apex, or perhaps the precursor to the major Crisis event described by Strauss and Howe in the Fourth Turning, and it is proving to be a global movement, as evidenced by the recent elections this week in the United Kingdom.
As the Soros-backed DNC footsoldiers wreak havoc in American cities this summer, and the old political order is eclipsed by what is shaping up to be a much more democratic order, we can expect these types of events to increase in frequency as well as intensity.
- 57% Of Americans Think Government "Works Better" When Women Get Involved
How are women viewed in different countries across the world? Views fluctuate massively depending on where you live with Russians particularly negative about women's responsibilities in the government or companies…
You will find more statistics at Statista
The data used in the infographic was compiled by Ipsos MORI.
Only 34 percent of people in Russia say things would work better if women held positions with responsibilities in government or companies while 69 percent say the role of a woman in society is to be a good mother and wide.
In India, views are far more mixed where a woman's role is in society is seen as a part of government and business as well as a good mother and wife.
In the United States, 57 percent of people think things would improve with more women in government and companies while 41 percent say the role of women is to be good mothers and wives.
- Next Generation Risks, Part 1: "Super EMP" Attack
Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
The global financial system’s ever-increasing leverage pretty much guarantees another crisis in coming years – unless it’s pre-empted by new weapons that can, in theory, shut down entire national banking systems, thus screwing up the best-laid plans of today’s savers and investors.
This series will consider some of them, beginning with the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. From The Wall Street Journal:
North Korea Dreams of Turning Out the Lights
Pyongyang doesn’t need a perfect missile. Detonating a nuke above Seoul—or L.A.—would sow chaos.
In 2001 Congress established a commission to study the danger of an electromagnetic pulse generated by the detonation of a high-altitude nuclear weapon. It concluded that while there would be no blast effects on the ground, critical electricity-dependent infrastructure could be rendered inoperable. The commission’s chairman, William R. Graham, has noted that several Russian generals told the commissioners in 2004 that the designs for a “super EMP nuclear weapon” had been transferred to North Korea.
Pyongyang, the Russian generals reported, was probably only a few years away from developing super EMP capability. According to Peter Vincent Pry, staff director of the congressional EMP commission, a recent North Korean medium-range missile test that was widely reported to have exploded midflight could in fact have been deliberately detonated at an altitude of 40 miles.
Was it a dry run for an EMP attack? Detonation at that altitude of a nuclear warhead with a yield of 10 to 20 kilotons—similar to those tested by North Korea—would produce major EMP effects and inflict catastrophic damage to unhardened electronics across hundreds of miles of surface territory. It is a myth that large yield nuclear weapons of hundreds of kilotons are required to produce such effects.
Although some analysts have dismissed the possibility of a successful North Korean EMP attack—either on South Korea or the United States—several factors could make it a more appealing first-strike strategy for Kim Jong Un’s nuclear scientists than a direct, missile-delivered nuclear strike. For one thing, accuracy is not a concern; the North Koreans simply need to get near their target to sow chaos. Nor would they need to worry about developing a reliable re-entry vehicle for their ballistic missiles.
Conventional wisdom aside, a North Korean EMP attack on the U.S. may also not be far-fetched. “North Korea could make an EMP attack against the United States by launching a short-range missile off a freighter or submarine or by lofting a warhead to 30 kilometers burst height by balloon,” wrote Mr. Graham earlier this month on the security blog 38 North. “Even a balloon-lofted warhead detonated at 30 kilometers altitude could blackout the Eastern Grid that supports most of the population and generates 75 percent of US electricity. Moreover, an EMP attack could be made by a North Korean satellite.” Two North Korean satellites currently orbit the earth on trajectories that take them over the U.S.
This is not mere theory. In 1962 the United States detonated a 1.4-megaton nuclear warhead over the South Pacific, 900 miles southwest of Hawaii. Designated “Starfish Prime,” the blast destroyed hundreds of street lights in Honolulu, caused electrical surges on airplanes in the area, and damaged at least six satellites. Only Hawaii’s undeveloped electric power-transmission infrastructure prevented a prolonged blackout. It was the era of vacuum-tube electronics. We are living in the digital age.
Some conclusions
Lots of actors in addition to North Korea have this capability. And we can’t stop it. Preventing a nuke-laden plane or balloon from detonating miles above a populated area is hard to the point of impossibility.
Banking and brokerage networks would be shut down – possibly for a long while – by such an attack, which means no access to ATM machines or credit card readers. People without ready cash would be stuck without access to life’s necessities. Meanwhile cars, which have in recent years become rolling computer networks, won’t run, making it hard to get to distant supplies.
The fiat currency of a system shut down in this way might or might not hold its value. This is uncharted financial territory so it’s not certain that cash under the mattress will be of use. And forget about cryptocurrencies in this scenario. Virtual money evaporates when the network on which it circulates goes down.
The solution?
Start upgrading to hardened electronics as part of a basic prepping program. That’s beyond the technical scope of this article, but Google it and you’ll find plenty of resources. And hold precious metals in small enough denominations to use as currency. One of history’s lessons is that gold and silver remain valuable whatever else is going on. If we’re destined to spend a few months back in the Middle Ages, spendable money will make the experience a lot more manageable.
- Tracking Hacking: Visualizing The World's Biggest Data Breaches
The graphic below shows a timeline of some of the biggest data breaches on record. As Visual Capitalist's Chris Matei notes, each bubble represents the number of records lost in any given breach, with the most sensitive data clustered toward the right side.
This data visualization comes to us from Information is Beautiful. Go to their site to see the highly-recommended interactive format that visualizes the same data, while providing additional details on each specific hack.
Courtesy of: Visual CapitalistBefore 2009, the majority of data breaches were the fault of human errors like misplaced hard drives and stolen laptops, or the efforts of “inside men” looking to make a profit by selling data to the highest bidder. Since then, the volume of malicious hacking (shown in purple) has exploded relative to other forms of data loss.
FROM MILLIONS TO BILLIONS
Increasingly sophisticated hacking has altered the scale of data loss by orders of magnitude. For example, an “inside job” breach at data broker Court Ventures was once one of the world’s largest single losses of records at 200 million.
However, it was eclipsed in size shortly thereafter by malicious hacks at Yahoo in 2013 and 2014 that compromised over 1.5 billion records, and now larger hacks are increasingly becoming the norm.
SMALL BUT POWERFUL
The problems caused by hacks, leaks and other data breaches are not just ones of scale. For example, the accidental 2016 leak of information from spam/email marketing service River City Media stands out at an alarming 1.37 billion records lost. However, sorting by data sensitivity paints a different picture. The River City leak – represented by the larger blue dot below – is surpassed in severity by hacks at Yahoo, at web design platform Weebly, and even at adult video provider Brazzers.
Much of the data lost in the River City hack was made up of long lists of consumer email addresses to be used for spam email distribution, while the other hacks listed compromised items like account passwords, banking information, addresses, phone numbers, or health records. While having your email address become the target for spam exploitation is a serious annoyance, the hacking of much more sensitive personal data has quickly become the norm.
The fact that more and more of our data is being stored “in the cloud” and among devices on the Internet of Things means that increasingly sensitive types of data are now more vulnerable than ever to being hacked. This looks to be even more cause for concern than the rapidly rising volume of records that have been exposed, whether intentionally or by accident.
- Did James Comey's Document Leaks Violate The FBI Employment Agreement?
Authored by Bre Payton via The Federalist,
Former FBI director James Comey's decision to leak FBI documents to a friend may have violated the FBI's employment agreement regarding unauthorized leaks.
During his testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, former FBI director James Comey revealed that he was the source of leaked memos about his conversations with Donald Trump surrounding the Russia investigation. Comey explained that he shared the memos with his friend, a professor at Columbia University, who then shared them with the New York Times, actions that may violate the FBI’s own employee agreement.
“My judgment was I needed to get [the memos] out into the public square,” Comey said.
“So I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. I didn’t do it myself for a variety of reasons, but I asked him to because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.”
By his own account, it seems that Comey may not have followed the agency’s employee agreement, which places numerous restrictions on the use of information or documents acquired during an individual’s employment by the FBI. Paragraphs 2, 3, and 4 of the FBI employment agreement appear to cover Comey’s distribution of content he says he created on government property in his capacity as a government official:
Paragraph 2 states that all materials acquired in connection with an employee’s official duties are property of the U.S. government and that such materials must be surrendered to the FBI upon an employee’s separation from the agency. Paragraph 3 states that employees are prohibited from releasing “any information acquired by virtue of my official employment” to “unauthorized individual[s] without prior official written authorization by the FBI.” Paragraph 4 of the agreement requires FBI employees, prior to disclosing or publishing information acquired during their employment, to submit the information to FBI authorities for review to determine whether it is authorized for public release.
So if Comey followed protocol and surrendered all government property, including the memos he produced in his capacity as an FBI employee, it would have been impossible for him to provide the memos to his friend. The fact that he was able to provide hard copies of the memos to both his friend and special counsel Robert Mueller suggests that Comey did not surrender them to authorities as required by the FBI employment agreement.
Page two of the agreement lists the types of information disclosures which are strictly prohibited. Included in the list of information that may not be released without prior written approval by the FBI is “information that relates to any sensitive operational details or the substantive merits of any ongoing or open investigation or case.” While the agreement states that unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a violation of the contract, information does not have to be classified in order to be prohibited from unauthorized disclosure. Comey claims that his memos were unclassified.
Comey’s claim that it would not have been proper to publicly disclose that Trump was not a target of any FBI investigation because the investigation was ongoing and facts could change flies in the face of his decision to provide to his friends records of his meetings about the investigation with the president. If he could not publicly note that Trump was not a target of an ongoing investigation, then why was he able to release FBI records related to that investigation to his friends for the purpose of having those details leaked to the public via the news media? In light of the FBI’s prohibition on publicly sharing documents or information related to ongoing investigations absent prior written authorization, Comey’s dual explanations make little sense.
The FBI employment agreement states that violating any of the included terms may result in termination, civil liability, revocation of security clearances, or even criminal sanctions.
- Meet The 22 Economists That Want To Kill Your Purchasing Power
After the Fed failed to spark any notable increase in aggregate demand despite keeping interest rates at zero for seven years, a group of economists is pressuring the central bank to rethink one of its most closely held-policy parameters.
The group of 22 economists, which includes Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, delivered a letter to the Fed on Friday pressuring it to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to reevaluate its policy targets in a way that’s transparent and also involves officials with a diversity of viewpoints. Ultimately, the group hopes the central bank will reevaluate its inflation target, which has stood at just below 2% since 2012.
Borrowing the reasoning from a paper published by the San Francisco Fed earlier this year called “Monetary Policy in a Low R-Star World,” the group argued that structural shifts in the US economy appear to have shifted the real rate of interest permanently lower – and that the US economy can now tolerate higher inflation as a form of compensation.
Here's a passage from the letter:
“Even if a 2 percent inflation target set an appropriate balance a decade ago, it is increasingly clear that the underlying changes in the economy would mean that, whatever the correct rate was then, it would be higher today. To ensure the future effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilizing the economy after negative shocks – specifically, to avoid the zero lower bound on the funds rate – this fall in the neutral rate may well need to be met with an increase in the long-run inflation target set by the Fed.”
Such a reassessment would be particularly appropriate now, the economists argue, because “the lack of evidence that moderately higher inflation would harm Americans’ standard of living is juxtaposed with the tremendous evidence that a tighter labor market would improve Americans’ standards of living.”
Some Fed officials have already expressed tentative support for raising the inflation target, or at least changing the system by which the central bank’s parameters are set.
Williams noted the need for the Fed “to adapt policy to changing economic circumstances” in his paper, and Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren has said that the Fed should adapt policy to changing circumstances. Vice Fed Chairman Stanley Fischer has praised the system adopted by the Bank of Canada, where policy targets are reviewed every five years, then re-set with the participation of the legislature.
The argument for why a central bank should aim to push consumer prices even higher might seem obtuse to some readers – so Kocherlakota explained his reasoning for signing the letter in a column published by Bloomberg.
Raising the inflation target would give the Fed more room to maneuver during the next slowdown by allowing it to focus on reining in inflation if benchmark rates are already low, Kocherlakota said. “If, for example, people expect inflation to be 3 percent, then a zero nominal rate translates into a negative 3 percent real rate — a full percentage point lower than the Fed could achieve if expected inflation were 2 percent.”
Experience suggests the Fed could use the support. During the most recent period of near-zero interest rates, the U.S. unemployment rate remained above 5 percent for nearly seven and a half years. And Yellen has suggested that, if another recession takes the Fed to the zero lower bound, the unemployment rate might stay above 5 percent for close to five years.
But while the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s seasonally adjusted CPI slumped to a 19-month low in April, other measures, like a gauge of consumer prices from PriceStat, have consistently recorded higher levels of inflation.
And regardless of what the rate of price growth is right now, the hard truth of the situation for many American workers is that real average wage growth is mired in the red while average household debt levels have climbed to record highs.
While many would welcome higher wages and better jobs, the relationship between inflation and employment – as Janet Yellen herself admitted – has seemingly broken down. Whether the central bank can successfully push inflation higher is up for debate; it has struggled in recent years – despite pumping trillions of dollars into the economy. But regardless, higher consumer prices are not what Americans need right now.
In addition to Stiglitz and Kocherlakota, the letter a signed by Dean Baker from the Center of Economic and Policy Research, Heather Boushey, from Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Brad DeLong, University of California, Berkeley, Joseph Gagnon, Peterson Institute, Lawrence Mishel, Economic Policy Institute, William Spriggs, Howard University, Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute, Gene Sperling, Obama Administration Economist, Jared Furman, Peterson Institute, Marc Jarsulic, Center for American Progress, Lawrence Bell, Johns Hopkins University, Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute, Tim Duy, University of Oregon, Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California, Mark Thoma, University of Oregon, Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan, David Blanchflower, Dartmouth College, Mike Konczal, Roosevelt Institute, Michael Madowitz, Center for American Progress.
*****
Read the full text of the letter below:
Dear Chair Yellen and the Board of Governors,
The end of this year will mark ten years since the beginning of the Great Recession. This recession and the slow recovery that followed was extraordinarily damaging to the livelihoods and financial security of tens of millions of American households. Accordingly, it should provoke a serious reappraisal of the key parameters governing macroeconomic policy.
One of these key parameters is the rate of inflation targeted by the Federal Reserve. In years past, a 2 percent inflation target seemed to give ample leverage with which the Fed could lower real interest rates. But given the evidence that the equilibrium interest rate had fallen substantially even prior to the financial crisis, and that the Fed’s short-term policy rate remained at zero for seven years without sparking any large acceleration of aggregate demand growth, a reassessment of this target seems warranted. Such a reassessment is particularly appropriate when the lack of evidence that moderately higher inflation would harm Americans’ standard of living is juxtaposed with the tremendous evidence that a tighter labor market would improve Americans’ standards of living.
Some Federal Reserve policymakers have acknowledged these shifting realities and indicated their willingness to reconsider the appropriate target level. For example, San Francisco Federal Reserve President John Williams noted the need for central banks to “adapt policy to changing economic circumstances,” in suggesting a higher inflation target, and Boston Federal Reserve President Eric Rosengren cited the different context in which the inflation target was set in emphasizing the need for debate about the right target. In May, Vice Chair Stanley Fischer highlighted the Canadian system of reconsidering the inflation target every five years, saying, “I can envisage – say, in the case of inflation targeting – a procedure in which you change the target or you change the other variables that are involved on some regular basis and through some regular participation.”
The comments made by Fischer, Rosengren, and Williams all underscore the ample evidence that the long-term neutral rate of interest may have fallen. Even if a 2 percent inflation target set an appropriate balance a decade ago, it is increasingly clear that the underlying changes in the economy would mean that, whatever the correct rate was then, it would be higher today. To ensure the future effectiveness of monetary policy in stabilizing the economy after negative shocks – specifically, to avoid the zero lower bound on the funds rate – this fall in the neutral rate may well need to be met with an increase in the long-run inflation target set by the Fed.
More immediately, new, post-crisis economic conditions suggest that a reiteration of the meaning of the Fed’s current target is in order. In its 2016 statement of long-run goals and strategy, the Federal Open Market Committee wrote: “The Committee would be concerned if inflation were running persistently above or below this objective.” Some FOMC participants, however, appear to instead consider 2 percent a hard ceiling that should never be breached, and justify their decision-making on that basis. It is important that the Federal Reserve makes clear – and operates policy based on – its stated goal that it aims to avoid inflation being either below or above its target.
Economies change over time. Recent decades have seen growing evidence that developed economies have harder times generating faster growth in aggregate demand than in decades past. Policymakers must be willing to rigorously assess the costs and benefits of previously-accepted policy parameters in response to economic changes. One of these key parameters that should be rigorously reassessed is the very low inflation targets that have guided monetary policy in recent decades. We believe that the Fed should appoint a diverse and representative blue ribbon commission with expertise, integrity, and transparency to evaluate and expeditiously recommend a path forward on these questions. We believe such a process will strengthen the Fed as an institution and its conduct of monetary policy, and help ensure wise policymaking for the years and decades to come.
The endgame, of course, is to pay off the old 'expensive' dollars with new 'cheap' dollars… quietly taxing the citizenry to death…
- The American Architects Of The South-African Catastrophe
Authored by Ilana Mercer via The Mises Institute,
Yes, it has happened. A mere 23 years after the 1994 transition, in South Africa, to raw ripe democracy, six years following the publication of a wide-ranging analysis of that catastrophe, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, a Beltway libertarian think tank has convened to address the problem that is South Africa.
The reference is to an upcoming CATO “Policy Forum,” euphemized as “South Africa at a Crossroad.” One of the individuals to headline the “Forum” is Princeton Lyman, described in a CATO email tease as having “served as the U.S. Ambassador to South Africa at the time of the transfer of power from white minority to black majority.” At the “Forum,” former ambassador Lyman will be discussing “America’s original hopes for a new South Africa and the extent to which America’s expectations have been left unfulfilled.” (Italics added.)
The chutzpah!
The CATO Institute’s disappointment in the South Africa the United States helped bring about is nothing compared to the depredations suffered by South Africans, due to America’s insistence that their country pass into the hands of a voracious majority. Unwise South African leaders acquiesced. Federalism was discounted. Minority rights for the Afrikaner, Anglo and Zulu were dismissed.
Aborted Attempts at South African Decentralization
This audacity of empire is covered in a self-explanatory chapter of Into the Cannibal’s Pot, titled “The Anglo-American Axis of Evil,” in which Lyman makes a cameo. (It’s not flattering.) From the comfort of the CATO headquarters, in 2017, the former ambassador will also be pondering whether “growing opposition will remove the African National Congress [ANC] from power.” The mindset of the DC establishment, CATO libertarians included, has it that changing the guard —replacing one strongman with another — will fix South Africa, or any other of the sites of American foreign-policy interventions.
So, what exactly did Princeton Nathan Lyman do on behalf of America in South Africa? Or, more precisely, who did he sideline?
Ronald Reagan, who favored “constructive engagement” with South Africa, foresaw the chaos and carnage of an abrupt transition of power. So did the South Africans Fredrick van Zyl Slabbert, RIP (he died in May 2010), and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi. The first was leader of the opposition Progressive Federal Party, who, alongside the late, intrepid Helen Suzman became the PFP’s chief critic of Nationalist policy (namely Apartheid). The second was Chief Minister of the KwaZulu homeland and leader of the Zulu people and their Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). At the time, Buthelezi was the only black leader with any mass following who could act as a counter to the ANC. These men were not “lunch-pail liberals” from the West, but indigenous, classical liberal Africans — one white, one black — who understood and loved the county of their ancestors and wished to safeguard it for their posterity.
Both Buthelezi and Slabbert had applied their astringent minds to power-sharing constitutional dispensations. Both leaders were bright enough to recognize democracy for the disaster it would bring to a country as divided as theirs; they understood that “a mass-based black party that received enough votes could avoid having to enter into a coalition and could sweep aside the minority vote.” Thus, Buthelezi espoused a multi-racial, decentralized federation, in which “elites of the various groups” would “agree to share executive power and abide by a system of mutual vetoes and spheres of communal autonomy.” Paramount to Buthelezi was “the preservation of the rights of cultural groups and the protection of minorities.” Slabbert studied a “new system that entrenched individual rights, encouraged power-sharing through a grand coalition of black and white parties, and gave a veto right to minorities in crucial issues.”
Although he eventually threw his intellectual heft behind simple majority rule, in better days, Slabbert had spoken with circumspection about “unrestrained majoritarianism,” expressing the eminently educated opinion that, were majority rule to be made an inevitable corollary of South Africa’s political system, the outcomes would be severely undemocratic. It’s worth considering that even Zimbabwe for its first seven, fat years of independence, allowed “white members of parliament [to be] elected on a special roll to represent white interests.”
Washington Destroyed South African Federalism Before It Began
In his tome, Partner to History: The US Role in South Africa’s Transition to Democracy (2002), Princeton Lyman, the American Ambassador to South Africa from 1992 to 1995, records the active role Americans performed in the transition to democracy, especially in “dissuading spoilers” — the author’s pejorative, it would appear, for perfectly legitimate partners to the negotiations. One such partner, introduced above, was Buthelezi; another was military hero and former chief of the Defense Force, Constand Viljoen.
Avoid “wrecking the process”: This ultimatum was the message transmitted to the Afrikaner general and the African gentleman, loud and clear. The United States, with Lyman in the lead, failed to lean on the African National Congress (Nelson Mandela’s goons) to accommodate a federal structure. It promised merely to hold a future South African government to its “pre-election commitments, including shared power and the protection of minorities.” Until then, the skeptical Buthelezi was instructed to trust the ANC to relinquish the requisite power. Enraged, Buthelezi threatened to take his case to the American people and “spotlight” the knavish confederacy between their government and the ANC. (Then, Republicans were generally with Buthelezi, Democrats with the ANC. These days, both parties are with the ANC.) Being the man Prime Minister, F. W. de Klerk was not, Buthelezi rejected the pressure and overtures from the West. “I am utterly sick of being told how wrong I am by a world out there,” he wrote to Lyman. The dispensation being hatched was “an instrument for the annihilation of KwaZulu.”
Viljoen, who represented the hardliner Afrikaners and the security forces, believed de Klerk had abdicated his responsibilities to this electorate. He planned on leading a coalition that would have deposed the freelancing de Klerk and negotiated for an Afrikaner ethnic state. Likewise, Buthelezi, whose championship of self-determination had been denied, was fed up to the back teeth with being sidelined. He and his Zulu impis were every bit as fractious as Viljoen; every bit as willing to fight for their rightful corner of the African Eden. For setting his sights on sovereignty, the Zulu royal and his following (close on twenty percent of the population) were condemned as reactionaries by the West (and by CATO’s point person).
Hardly a dog of an American commentator missed the opportunity to lift his leg in protest against Buthelezi, for making common cause with Afrikaner decentralists and against the ANC. “Wreckers” is how the gray eminence of American newspapers — The New York Times, also known as “Pravda on the Hudson” — dubbed the two leaders and the millions whom they represented. The two, alleged the Times in a 1994 editorial, were locked in an “unscrupulous alliance to disrupt the first elections in South Africa in which all races will have a vote.” Following the might-makes-right maxim — and committing a non sequitur in the process — Times editorialists demanded that the leaders of these African and Afrikaner ethnic minorities relinquish demands for sovereign status because their political power was at best “anemic.” Meanwhile the Times dismissed Buthelezi as a puppet in Pretoria’s blackface minstrelsy.
This was drivel. Buthelezi, a crafty leader who had rejected “the ignoble independence accorded to other homelands” within apartheid’s framework, was never a collaborator. Understand: For two centuries Africans and Afrikaners had been clashing and alternately collaborating on the continent. Shaka (1787–1828), Dingane (1795–1840), Mpande (1798–1872), Cetshwayo (1826–1884) — Buthelezi was heir to these Zulu kings who had been wheeling, dealing, and warring with Boers well before the inception of The New York Times.
Masters of mass mobilization, the ANC used the political tinderbox ignited in the ramp-up to the first democratic elections to great effect in discrediting the security forces, and claiming that the apartheid government was fomenting the intra-ethnic violence between Inkatha (Zulu) and the ANC (Xhosa). But while the ANC accused the security forces of arming Inkatha, the latter faction blamed the security forces for allying themselves with the ANC, especially when Zulu hostels and squatter camps were raided in response to ANC pressure. For the National Party government, the ongoing ethnic conflict was a lose-lose proposition.
But not for the savvy ANC.
Nelson Mandela harnessed the situation by accusing Prime Minister de Klerk of “either complicity or of not caring enough about black deaths” to stop black-on-black violence. The foreign press helped fuse fact with fancy by transmitting this claim, later to be dismissed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (That body eventually determined that there was “little evidence of a centrally directed, coherent and formally instituted third force.”) Nevertheless, a constellation of unfavorable circumstances was aligned against Buthelezi, who capitulated in the end.
Buthelezi was the intellectual bête noire of the communist ANC — and one of the few leaders in South Africa to mine the Western canon widely and wisely for what it teaches about liberty and the dangers of centralizing political power. He cited with characteristic passion and poignancy, in July 2009, a poem (“The Second Coming”) that W. B. Yeats wrote in January 1919:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned …In contrast to what South Africa became, the United States is a country where the constitution was supposed to thwart the tyranny of the majority. This averting was meant to occur by means of a federal structure, in which powers are divided and dispersed between — and within — a central government and the constituent states. Yet the Americans sided with the ANC — the consequence of which has been the raw, ripe rule of the mob and its dominant, anointed party.
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