- Despite Depression, Greece Forced To Hike VAT, Add New Taxes
Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,
Greece remains in an economic depression interrupted by a few quarters of anemic growth.
Hiking taxes in a depression is one of the stupidest thing one can do, but Greece is set for another vote to do just that.
Prime minister Alexis Tsipras is once again prepared to kiss German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s behind, and his party will likely go along for the ride.
The wildcard IMF has yet to chime in on the economic stupidity of this hike.
Please consider Greece Set for Austerity Vote to Secure Bailout Cash.
Greece’s parliament is expected to vote late Sunday on a raft of fresh taxes and austerity reforms that the country must legislate to unlock further rescue loans, ahead of a crucial eurozone finance ministers meeting on Tuesday.
The bill includes the last portion of an austerity package worth €5.4 billion ($6.06 billion), or 3% of the country’s gross domestic product, which Greece has agreed on with its international creditors to implement by 2018 in exchange for fresh bailout funds under the terms of its third bailout deal.
The IMF has said it would only sign up to the Greek bailout if Germany agrees to debt relief. But German officials are seeking to delay any debt restructuring until the end of the current Greek bailout program in 2018, so that Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, would pass such measures only after Germany’s 2017 elections.
To meet its targets, Athens was asked to set up a “contingency mechanism” of additional austerity measures worth some 2% of GDP.
The measures being voted on Sunday include new taxes on fuel, tobacco, alcohol, Internet, pay TV, hotel stays, cars, changes in property tax, as well as a rise in the basic value-added tax rate, applied to most goods and services, from 23% to 24%.
The Greek parliament is also expected to vote on the fiscal brake mechanism that would automatically cut state spending if Greece misses its budget targets.
How much the next bailout tranche would be is still to be determined, but European Union officials indicate it could be €10 billion.
Another Humiliating Greece Cave-In
On May 14, I reported Greece “Demands” Debt Relief, Owes Troika €11+ Billion by July.
My comment: “Greece has caved in every time, and in the most humiliating ways. Greece even caved in on pension cuts last week. Why should anyone believe Greek demands now?”
€10 billion would be a lot of money, if the money went to Greece. But virtually none of it will go to Greece.
Greece Short-Term Debt Timeline
Somehow I expect the next tranche to be a “greater than expected” €11 billion. Perhaps €10 billion will suffice if Greece has €1 billion of its own to pony up.
Greece Long-Term Debt Timeline
Payments to the Troika stretch all the way to 2059, while assuming Greece can maintain a primary account surplus of 3.5% the entire way.
The IMF says this is impossible, while proposing a surplus of 1.5%, also impossible.
Politics of Debt Relief
The IMF wants debt relief now, but Germany wants the IMF to hold off until Merkel wins reelection.
Meanwhile, the Greek depression resumes.
These tax hikes are insane. The key question remains: Is the IMF bluffing about debt relief or not?
- "Everything Is Plunging" – China Commodity Carnage Continues
Hot on the heels of Trumpian-size tariffs imposed by The Obama administration on a desperately glutted and mal-invested steel industry, the entire panic-buying "well the market is always right", "China is recovering" narrative based rally in Chinese commodities has crashed back down to earth with an incredible thud. As one veteran trader in the China commodity markets put it "everything is plunging… except cotton," with Iron Ore, and Rebar down 7% today…
At least one industry executive "got it" – Baosteel's Zhang: "The price rebound is not beneficial to the overcapacity situation…. It will delay the shutdown of (inefficient) capacity."
How right he was…
Dalian Iron Ore has collapsed 30% in a month, down 7% today…
Steel Rebar has crashed 32% in a month, down 5% today… (it seems the brief BTFD support has completely collapsed)…
Hot Rolled Coil -28% in a month, down 6% today…
One word to describe mainland commodities: TIMBERRR???
— Simon Ting (@simonting) May 23, 2016
Makes one wonder what the world's only marginal-buyer-of-crude could do 'retaliate' to a nation imposing tariffs like that which is also dependent on a bounce in oil prices to supports its 'wealth-creating' stock market?
- Guess What Occupation Is Most Frequently Cited In The Panama Papers?
With all the anti-one-percenter rhetoric and tax-evading-evil-doer narratives spewing forth from the mainstream media mouthpieces of the establishment since The Panama Papers were exposed for all to see, it may come as a surprise to some to find out which cohort of the elites are the most populous among the tax-haven-creating documents…
The Politicians!
Which makes us wonder if this leak was indeed a plot to blackmail/expose the West's ruling class?
Nevertheless, one thing is very clear, as Luis Guillermo Valez explains via PanamPost, officials are hypocritically denouncing the strategies they practice themselves…
Why can’t tax evasion be a legitimate form of self defense? In some countries and circumstances, it is.
Despite what politicians want us to believe, tax havens exist because some countries have been turned into tax hellholes by officials bent on “social justice” and “income redistribution.” Sometimes, those same politicians top the list of “offshore” account holders trying to evade taxes.
“The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith had something to say about this kind of government revenue, namely that taxes are a lesser evil overall than other forms of paying for public services.
But to prevent taxes from harmful excess, Smith left to posterity the four principles of good taxation, which have been almost completely forgotten by politicians concerned with legislating taxation. Here is Smith’s wise warning:
Excessive taxation is a powerful stimulus to evasion, so penalties to offenders grow proportionally to the temptation that causes it. Contrary to the principles of justice, the law first raises the temptation to infringe it and then punishes the violators.
And if corruption and overspending is added to excessive taxation, the motives for tax evasion are complete. Once again Smith:
In all countries where there is a corrupt government, and where there is suspicion that it incurs in great expense and government revenue is improperly used, very often these laws that protect contributions are little respected
In the 1970s, I met a Canadian man called Bryan O’Connor. He used to deliver pizzas in Toronto and always carried a little notebook in which he religiously wrote down all the tips he received in his work, preventing the risk of missing a penny in his tax return.
I’ve never met anyone else like Bryan. I think he and Immanuel Kant are probably the only people in human history who voluntarily paid all their taxes. I’m sure Bryan has.
Nor do I believe that Jesus Christ was completely honest when answering the Pharisees about paying taxes. He said “give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” After all, the man had left behind the honorable carpentry work and did not seem to generate any taxable income. That’s probably why he was defeated in the famous vote competing with Barabbas, who– weapons in hand – had rebelled against the ominous tribute of Imperial Rome.
Since ancient times people have rebelled against taxes. The Roman provinces were often faced uprisings against fiscal depredations and their leaders’ abuses. The peasant wars in Germany, of which Frederick Engels, Marx’s buddy, has left a vivid account were tax rebellions.
The French Revolution began as the uprising of the Estates General against taxes, demanding a cheap government. Interestingly, the twentieth century, which saw a rapid growth in the size of governments and taxes, was free of riots and tax rebellions. And not because all taxpayers behaved like Bryan O’Connor.
Panama Papers: What about Modern Governments?
Though no less rapacious than prior ones, modern governments are more tempered and have given up on the most ominous tax collection practices: murder and torture.
However, it is not shocking to the majority’s opinion that there are a few who punish tax evasion with imprisonment. This is the case of Mexico, Chile, and Peru, Colombia’s partners in the Pacific Alliance, and whose shameful example the Colombian government proposed to imitate in the last tax reform.
Everyone, from the Leviathan-worshipping economists, politicians, and political scientists who serve them, to journalists, tax attorneys, and the public opinion sees the evader as a criminal and the government that punishes him as the defender of society, no matter how corrupt and abusive it may be.
In illo tempore, the evader was seen as a hero who faced a thief state. The inverted values of current times have a background of hypocrisy that nobody can deny.
In almost all countries, legislatures who enact taxes are composed mostly of professional politicians who, by granting special benefits, want to keep lobbyists and wealthy campaign donors happy.
Interest groups and political operators are willing to grant each other benefits with the hope that the general coffers will bear the costs.
Everything is a bargaining of crossed interests leading to casuistical and tangled tax regimes, completely away from the predicaments of solidarity, equity, and efficiency which ultimately are no more than a cover more for private interests.
The economists, lawyers, tax experts, and other technicians who advise governments in the design of structural tax reforms – which are periodically announced but never arrive – are generally also company advisers and wealthy individuals looking to reduce their effective taxation rate.
The middle class defends itself by under-invoicing or non-billing and making up liabilities and expenses on their tax returns. The poorest, who usually only are reached by indirect taxation, join the noisy protests of civil servants who live from taxes and always receive the support of politicians competing for their votes.
That is the common background of what is called the state, from which everyone wants to get a lot and contribute little. But yes, everyone denounces tax evasion.
Governments around the world – in their relentless fight against the tax evasion problem created by themselves with their fiscal voracity and performance – have unseemly decided to form an international coalition against so-called tax havens, while those same officials seek shelter for their good or ill-gotten fortune.
This new and sinister Statist International will be a major threat to capital mobility and individual freedom. However, because supposedly the offshore world only affects the rich, everyone applauds in a universal expression of envy and hypocrisy.
The problem of national and international evasion is not resolved with the creation of a universal tax police. Small, moderate, simple, and austere governments and fiscal systems adjusted to the four rules of Smith are the best antidote against tax evasion.
But in the current state of public opinion where people accept and demand – as Walter Lippmann would say– a large government that administers their affairs for them instead of a government that administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs, it is at best an anachronism to invoke the wise old Smith.
- Can Russia Survive Washington's Attack?
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
It is not only American generals who are irresponsible and declare on the basis of no evidence whatsoever that “Russia is an existential threat to the United States” and also to the Baltic states, Poland, Georgia, Ukraine, and all of Europe. British generals also participate in the warmongering. UK retired general and former NATO commander Sir Richard Shirreff, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe until 2014, has just declared that nuclear war with Russia is “entirely possible” within the year.
My loyal readers know that I, myself, have been warning for some time about the likelihood of nuclear war. However, there is a vast difference between me and the Western generals. I see the war as the consequence of the neoconservative drive for US world hegemony. The neoconservative drive for world hegemony is acknowledged by the neoconservatives themselves in their public position papers, and it has a 15 year record of being implemented in America’s many and ongoing wars in the Middle East and Africa. Although the Presstitute media does its best to keep our focus away from the known facts, the facts remain known.
The position of the Western generals is that “Russian aggression” is driving an innocent America/NATO to nuclear war.
Here is General Shirreff’s list of “Russian aggressions”: “He [Putin] has invaded Georgia, he has invaded the Crimea, he has invaded Ukraine. He has used force and got away with it. In a period of tension, an attack on the Baltic states… is entirely plausible.” Shirreff is talking about make-believe happenings that even if real would be taking place inside what were until recently Russia’s long-standing national boundaries.
General Shirreff strikes me as either uninformed or a dissembler. It is the United States and Israel who use force and get away with it. The Russian invasion of the former Russian province, Georgia, was a response to the American puppet government’s invasion of South Ossetia in which the American and israeli trained and equipped Georgian troops killed Russian peace-keeping troops and a large number of South Ossetian civilians while the Russian government was at the Beijing olympics.
It only took a small fraction of the Russian Army a few hours to roll up the American and Israeli trained Georgian Army. Putin had the former Russian province in his hand. He could have hung the American puppet president and reincorporated Georgia back into Russia, where if probably belongs, having spent all of modern history in that location.
But Putin did not see Georgia as a prize, and having made his point, let the Americans have their puppet state back. The president at the time, a scummy scoundrel, was thrown out of the country by Georgians and now serves the American puppet state of Ukraine, like so many others who are not Ukrainian. Apparently, Washington can’t find enough Ukrainians who will sell out their country for Washington and has to bring in foreigners to help Washington rule Ukraine.
There has been, alas, no Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin would not even accept the pleas of the Russian majority populations in the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk to be reincorporated back into Russia where they belong. If Putin actually wanted Ukraine, he doesn’t need to send in an army. He can take back the eastern and southern parts just by accepting the pleas of the people to again be a part of Russia.
The only plea that Putin accepted was that of the Crimeans, who with an extremely high turnout never experienced in “western democracies” voted 97.6 percent to rejoin Russia, where Crimea resided for longer than the US has existed, until Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic when both were provinces of the Soviet Union.
Little doubt that Putin accepted Crimea’s plea because Russia’s only warm water port and entrance into the Mediterranean Sea is Russia’s naval base in Crimea, and little doubt that Putin refused Donetsk and Luhansk in order to deflect Washington’s propagandistic charges, such as those of former general Shirreff. Putin reasoned, mistakenly in my view, that his refusal to accept Donetsk and Luhansk would reassure Washington’s NATO puppet states and lessen Washington’s influence over Europe. For the corrupt Europeans, facts are of no consequence. Washington’s money prevails.
Putin doesn’t understand the power of Washington’s money. In the entire West only money counts. There is no such thing as Washington’s word, government integrity, truth, or even empirical facts. There are only well-propagated lies. The entire West is a lie. The West exists for one reason only–corporate profits.
The retired general Shirreff claims, without any evidence, which is typical, that Putin “used force and got away with it.”
What force is the general talking about? Can he identify the force? The independent international observers of the Crimean voting report that it was completely fair, that there was no intimidation, no troops or any Russian intimidation present.
The former NATO general Shirreff believes that a Russian attack “on the Baltic states is entirely possible.” For what reason? The Baltic states, former provinces of the Soviet Union, comprise no threat whatsoever to Russia. The Russians have no reason whatsoever to attack the Baltic states. It was Russia that gave the Baltic states their independence. Just as it was Russia that gave Ukraine and Georgia their independence.
Imperial Washington is leveraging the reasonableness of the Russian government to put Russia in a propagandistic light. The Russian government has permitted itself to be put on the defensive and has given the attack to Washington.
Russia has not attacked anyone except the terrorist group ISIS. Allegedly, Washington is opposed to terrorism, but Washington has been using ISIS in an effort to overthrow the Syrian government with terrorism. Russia has put a halt to that. The question before us is whether the Russian government so desires to be accepted by the West that Putin sells out Syria to Washington/Israeli dismemberment in order to show that Russia is a good partner for the West.
If Russia doesn’t get over its affection for the West, Russia will lose its independence.
My understanding is that Russia has been resurrected as a Christian, morally principally country, perhaps the only one on earth. The question that the Russian people and their Russian government need, desperately, to ask themselves is: Do we want to be associated with the War Criminal West that disobeys not only its own laws, but also international laws?
The vast majority of the evil in the world resides in the West. It is the west with its lies and greed that has devastated millions of people in 7 countries during the new 21st century. This is the most threatening beginning of a new millennium in modern times.
Unsatisfied with its looting of the Third World, South America, Greece, Portugal, Latvia, Argentina, and now Brazil and Ukraine, the Western Capitalists have their sights set on Russia, China, India, and South Africa.
What a prize it would be to get Russia with all that vast expanse of Siberia that can be environmentally brutalized and destroyed for capitalist profits. The Russian government’s offering of free land in Siberia had better be limited to Russian citizens Otherwise, the land is likely to be bought up by the West, which will use its ownership of Russia to destroy the country.
The Russians and the Chinese are blinded by the fact that they lived for decades under oppressive and failed regimes. They look to the West as success. Their misreading of the West endangers their independence.
Neither Russia nor China seek conflict. It is a gratuitous and reckless act for Washington to send the message to Russia and China that they must choose vassalage or war.
- Erdogan Nears Absolute Power With Appointment Of Puppet Premier, Stripping MPs Of Immunity
When the news hit on May 5 that Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu would unexpectedly stand down from his post as a result of sharply escalating fighting behind the scenes over president Tayyip Erdogan’s relentless attempt to rule Turkey with virtually no checks and balances, the market was not happy, and the volatility of the Turkish Lira soared the most in the past decade.
Since then the Turkish market has modestly tamed, even if the Erdogan’s push for supreme control has done anything but, and during today’s congress of Turkey’s AKP, Erdogan confirmed an impotent lapdog, Binali Yildirim – a close ally for two decades and a co-founder of the ruling AK Party – as his new prime minister on Sunday, which as Reuters explained was “a big step towards the stronger presidential powers [Erdogan] has long sought.” In plain English, Turkey is unofficially a dictatorship, in which Erdogan is president only in title and in reality a supreme despot as there is no longer anyone who can politically challenge the president.
Concurrently, Erdogan also accepted the resignation of outgoing Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu on Sunday, hours after AKP elected Yildirim as his replacement.
In a speech to AKP delegates who earlier elected him party leader at a special congress, Yildirim, transport minister for most of the past decade and a half, left no doubt that he would prioritise the policies closest to Erdogan’s heart. His main aim, he said, was to deliver a new constitution and create an executive presidency, a change Erdogan says will bring stability to the NATO member state of 78 million, but which opponents fear will herald greater authoritarianism.
Yildirim, 60, said constitutional change was a necessity to legitimize the existing situation, tacit acknowledgment that Erdogan has extended the traditionally ceremonial role of the Turkish presidency. “The most important mission we have today is to legalize the de facto situation, to bring to an end this confusion by changing the constitution,” he said. “The new constitution will be on an executive presidential system.”
Erdogan meets with incoming Prime Minister Binali Yildirim.The constitutional change would give Erdogan unlimited power over virtually every aspect of governance.
As if proof were needed of where power in the party lies, delegates remained standing through a message from Erdogan read out at the start of the congress. Yildirim vowed that, under his leadership, the AKP’s way would be “Erdogan’s way“. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said Erdogan was the party’s one leader.
He has made clear he will pursue two of Erdogan’s biggest priorities – the executive presidency and the fight against militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the largely Kurdish southeast. “They are asking us when the anti-terror operations will end. I am announcing hereby that operations will end when all our citizens are safe,” Yildirim said in an emotional speech.
“Operations will continue without pause until the bloody-handed terrorist organization PKK ends its armed actions.”
Despite Erdogan’s attempts to silence any journalistic criticism by sending his biggest public detractors to prison, some dares to voice their displeasure with what is happening inside the NATO member and Europe’s close Asian ally:
“If they can succeed, this will be a transition period for the executive presidency,” journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, who is seen as close to AKP, told Reuters.
And now that the Turkish premier figurehead is known, investors’ eyes shift to the future of Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek, who according to Reuters is seen as one of the remaining anchors of market confidence. Erdogan, who favors consumption-led growth, has repeatedly railed against high interest rates in Turkey, saying they cause inflation, a stance at odds with mainstream economics. Without Simsek, investors fear, it will be less likely that the government will deliver on promises to liberalize the labor market, encourage savings and bring in more private investment.
Installing a puppet PM was not all Erdogan did in this busy week: just to make sure Erdogan can use the law to crack down on any of his political opponents, last Friday Erdogan’s puppet parliament agreed to strip its members of immunity, a move which will be used by Erdogan to prosecute members of the pro-Kurdish HDP, parliament’s third-biggest party, as well as anyone else he choose to take down.
He accuses the HDP of being the political wing of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the state. The HDP denies such links and says its parliamentary presence could be all but wiped out if prosecutions go ahead.
In other words, if any MP says or does something that the president disagrees with, said member of parliament will promptly find themselves under arrest and behind bars: a strong deterrent never to say or do anything that would displease the ascendant tyrant.
It is this stripping of immunity that Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would discuss with Erdogan on Monday when the two meet tomorrow in Istanbul, voicing disquiet at a measure meant to sideline the pro-Kurdish opposition.
Erdogan meets with Merkel in Ankara, Turkey February 8, 2016“Naturally some developments in Turkey are causing us grave concerns,” Merkel told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Sunday, one day before she meets Erdogan on the sidelines of a U.N.-sponsored humanitarian summit in Istanbul.
However, it’s not as if Merkel has any leverage or strings to pull. Quite the opposite: Merkel is facing accusations at home that she has become too accommodating of Erdogan as she tries to secure a European Union deal with Ankara to stem the flow of refugees from Turkey into Europe, the bulk of whom have gone to Germany.
Worse, the accusations are 100% accurate, because as of this moment the person who dictates the future of Europe is neither in Greece, nor in Great Britain, but is not even located in Europe in the first place (although that may change soon). This guy.
- Rapper Threatens To Kill Donald Trump If His "Momma's Food Stamps" Are Taken Away
Threats by prominent members of the black community against Donald Trump, either directly or indirectly, are nothing new.
Just under two months ago we reported about the latest social fallout incident from Trump’s rising popularity, when prominent Black Lives Matter activist and rapper Tef Poe tweeted a message for “white people”: if Donald Trump wins the presidency, “niggas” will ‘incite riots everywhere.’
“Dear white people if Trump wins young niggas such as myself are fully hell bent on inciting riots everywhere we go. Just so you know,” Poe tweeted. A screenshot of his since deleted tweet was captured below by the Daily Media.
To be sure, the antagonism among African-Americans toward Trump is well-known by now, and even CLSA’s noted commentator Chris Wood touched upon this in the latest edition of hs “Greed and Fear” newsletter.
However, a new and perhaps even more bizarre protest, not to mention death threat, against Donald Trump was revealed this weekend when Louisiana rapper Maine Muzik said during a YouTube video recording that he would kill presumptive presidential candidate Donald Trump if his “Mamma’s food stamps are taken away.” To wit:
I could go to war with whoever the fuck I want to, but I really want to go to war with Donald Trump because Donald Trump trying to take food stamps from my mamma and that’s all the fuck she’s got. As long as the motherfucking government let us keep food stamps… we gonna be good, but the first time this nigga pass a law talking about he taking Louisiana purchase, shit going to get ugly. I swear to god on every motherfucking chain I got, bitchez gonna go down.
You gotta understand them (inaudible) love Fruit Loops. They love that shit so if you take that shit nigga it’s coming with the madness and a nigga ain’t gonna play about that. Y’all take Donald Trump and let him know it’s up over here. We gonna declare war.
In his tirade he even went on to declare his allegiance to the Islamic State.
And I ain’t worried about ISIS because they just called me, they want me to fuck with them now… Ya, we got them drums bitch and grenades but I’m scared to throw them.
According to Vidmax, on the same week Muzik record this threat, he was visited by police for posting a video to his Instagram account where he and his gang showed off a stockpile of weapons.
Threats aside, the implications from this “heartfelt” video for Trump could be substantial: if indeed the republican candidate wants to shift to a more “centrist” position, all he would have to do is promise he won’t “take momma’s foodstamps” and Trump could quickly find himself not only supported by belligerent Louisiana rappers, but also take a decisive chunk out of Hillary Clinton’s primary ethnic voting group.
In the meantime, we expect more such videos which explain that for millions in potential voters, all it really boils down to is whether or not the foodstamps are taken away.
- Governments Create Monopolies And Cause Worker-Exploitation, Not Free-Markets
Authored by Richard M. Ebeling via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
The world is threatened with a renewed wave of anti-capitalism and anti-business sentiments and policies. Many who cheered the demise of Soviet communism in the early 1990s, presumed that this meant that, by default, the case for free markets and competitive enterprise had won in the battle of ideas. Over the last twenty-five years it has become clear that the same misguided arguments against free market capitalism constantly reemerge, like an ideological vampire waiting to rise from the intellectual grave and drain market freedom of its lifeblood by more government regulations and controls.
One of the most persistent of these misguided ideas is the belief that left on its own, competitive markets tend to bring about concentration of wealth, inequality of income, and “market power” to exploit workers and consumers of what justly should be theirs.
The most recent example of this is an article on, “Monopoly’s New Era,” by Joseph E. Stiglitz, the 2001 Nobel Prize winner in economics, which appeared on Project Syndicate website on May 13, 2016. Professor Stiglitz is one of those thinkers who seem to see a “market failure” at every turn and apparently has rarely found a government intervention he did not like.
Two Ways of Looking at the Market Process
He contrasts two differing views of the market economy. One view, an outgrowth of Adam Smith and those who followed in his intellectual footsteps over the last 250 years, argue that freedom, prosperity, and income equity are generally assured wherever the market is kept open and competitive, with minimal government impediments.
The other “school of thought” that he interestingly identifies with no one particular thinker of the past “takes as its starting point ‘power,’ including the ability to exercise monopoly control or, in labor markets, to assert authority over workers,” Stiglitz explains. “Scholars in this area have focused on what gives rise to power, how it is maintained and strengthened, and other features that may prevent markets from being competitive. Work on exploitation arising from asymmetries of information is an important example.”
Professor Stiglitz insists that this second approach has shown its insight and efficacy in the clear evidence of concentration of market control and income inequality in such sectors of the market such as finance and banking, cable television, health care, pharmaceuticals, agro-business, and a variety of others.
The truth and reality of this concentration of power and wealth conception of capitalism, Stiglitz argues, is also shown, historically, in labor markets, to the disadvantage of many “minority” groups. “Of course, historically, the oppression of large groups – slaves, women, and minorities of various types – are obvious instances where inequalities are the result of [market] power relationships,” he states.
His conclusion, therefore, should not be surprising. If competitive capitalism leads to it’s opposite – concentrated, monopoly capitalism – then government regulation and control is essential to preserve a free, prosperous, and “socially just” society. Or in the words with which Professor Stiglitz concludes his article: “But if markets are based on exploitation, the rationale for laissez?faire disappears. Indeed, in that case, the battle against entrenched power is not only a battle for democracy; it is also a battle for efficiency and shared prosperity.”
Karl Marx’s Theory of Worker Exploitation
The nineteenth century economist most famous for insisting that capitalism leads to concentration, monopoly and exploitation was, of course, Karl Marx. He is the leading thinker that Stiglitz avoids mentioning by name. Marx claimed to have unearthed “the laws of historical evolution” that by a necessity as irresistible as the physical laws of nature, place human history on a trajectory that transformed society from feudalism to capitalism and would have to culminate in the triumph of socialism and a post-scarcity world of communism.
Marx was insistent that businessmen are driven in the pursuit of profits to invest in laborsaving industrial machinery. This results in two consequences. First, in this competitive race for profits through industrialization, some private enterprisers would be driven to the wall and pushed out of business, with their companies bought up by those capitalists who had better weathered the market storm. As this process repeated itself, there would be fewer and fewer private enterprisers left standing, with the result of the private ownership of businesses remaining in fewer and fewer hands. Hence, market competition leads to the concentration of ownership and wealth in the hands of a diminishing number of enterprise owners, according to Marx.
Second, as machines replace workers, there are fewer and fewer jobs for all those needing employment to feed themselves and their families. The non-property owning workers – “the proletariat,” in Marxian jargon – are joined by the businessmen driven out of business due to that concentration of ownership and wealth.
Workers competing for a decreasing number of jobs bring about a lowering of wages and decreased living standards for the vast majority of the population. Thus, a growing material inequality emerges between most working members of society and the handful of property-owning wealthy capitalists, or as it has become fashionable to describe them nowadays, the “one percent.”
Finally, in the Marxian version of this theory, the workers rise up and overthrow the remaining handful of exploiting capitalists, and the new dawn of historical progressivism arrives: socialism, with the State owning, managing and centrally planning the resources and enterprises of the society in the name of “the people.”
Marx’s Errors and the Benefits from Classical Liberal Capitalism
Both economic theory and the actual events of economic history have shown the errors and absurdities in this and related theories over the last two hundred years. Rather than a bi-polar social world of a handful of “the rich” versus a human mass of “the poor,” industrial and financial capitalism saw the emergence of what has become known as “the middle class,” whose numbers came from the ranks of the poverty-ridden poor of the pre-capitalist era.
The political philosophy of classical liberalism that gained intellectual ground in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called for the end to absolute monarchy and the establishment of representative, but constitutionally limited government. It espoused the cause of ending the governmental privileges and favors bestowed on a narrow group of special interest groups surrounding and serving the king, including legal monopolies that prevented market competition.
Classical liberalism called for the end to slavery, the emancipation of women, and an equality of individual rights for all in society to life, liberty, and honestly acquired property before an unbiased and impartial rule of law.
Domestic and international trade barriers were reduced or abolished, opening the field to virtually unrestricted free market competition. A smaller and far less intrusive government brought about a lowered tax burden on all in the society, leaving more of the earned wealth by all in the hands of the private individuals whose efforts and energies had produced it.
Respect and enforcement of private property rights; competitive markets open to all those with entrepreneurial visions of how to manufacture and sell more, better and less expensive goods and services to consumers as the peaceful and honest means of pursuing the earning of profits; freed labor markets giving all the opportunity to search out gainful employment wherever the most attractive terms of earning a living seemed to offer itself; and a growing financial sector provided the means for making possible the expensive industrial investments that created jobs and expanded the productive capabilities of society.
Capitalism Created a Prosperous Middle Class from the Poor
The last point is, perhaps, worth emphasizing. Through most of human history, the vast majority of people who found themselves able to somehow save anything out of their meager earnings were fortunate if they could hide away a few gold or silver coins as a form of accumulated wealth.
But the development of modern banking now made it possible for even those of meager material means to put aside their modest savings in a financial institution offering an interest return on their deposits. These financial institutions could now pool together large amounts of savings from many modest savers. They funneled these people’s savings out to entrepreneurs who could never have funded their dreams of industrial enterprises out of their own incomes.
Out of the profits earned by the successful entrepreneurial borrowers came the monetary means to pay back what had been borrowed plus the interest payments agreed to, to start up or to expand their private enterprises. This interest income earned by the banks both paid the interest owed to the depositors and increased the capital of the banks to develop their ability to lend to a growing number of enterprising borrowers.
The increasing field of created and expanded private enterprises was made possible through the savings of “the workers,” themselves, and who thereby earned interest on their individual savings accounts, and through the plowing back of retained earnings into those enterprises by successful businessmen widened the number of businesses looking for workers to fill the growing number of jobs in the marketplace.
At the same time, investment in more and better machines, tools and equipment in those industrial enterprises were increasing the productivity of each worker employment, helped to increase the wages worth paying each worker hired in conjunction with the increased demand of more employers competing for workers in their businesses.
Of course, wages for all types of labor did not all rise at the same time and to the same degree. But looking over the decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, competitive and relatively free markets demonstrated the lie to all the naysayers like Karl Marx who claimed that “the workers” were doomed to poverty, destitution, and despair. Competitive capitalism did and has been raising increasing portions of mankind from wretched subsistence and starvation to unimaginable ease, comfort and convenience that even the richest and most successfully plundering kings and conquerors of the past could never have conceived.
Joseph Stiglitz and Asymmetric Information
Joseph Stiglitz, needless to say, is not a Marxist or a socialist, and it would be unfair to in anyway suggest that he is. His own variation on the injustice of capitalism and its potential for exploitation is partly based on his theory of “asymmetric information” and how it enables private enterprisers to take advantage of consumers and workers in society. Indeed, this theory helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001.
A core element in his theory is that individuals in the marketplace do not all possess the same type or degree of knowledge. Some people know things that others do not. And this “privileged” information can enable some to “exploit” others. For instance, the producer and marketer is likely to know far more about that product’s qualities, features and characteristics that he is offering on the market than most of the buyers possibly interested in purchasing it.
By withholding or not fully informing the potential buyer about all of the qualities, features and characteristics of his good, he may succeed in creating a false impression that makes the consumer have a greater demand for it and be willing to pay a higher price for it than would be the case if that consumer knew as much about the good as the seller knows.
Markets Integrate and Coordinate Decentralized Knowledge
There is no doubt that in a system of division of labor there is an accompanying division of knowledge, but this is a theme in theories of the market process long ago explained by economists in the “Austrian” tradition, especially Friedrich A. Hayek, who also received a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.
The Austrians have long emphasized that competition is a “discovery procedure” through which individuals find out things never known or imagined before. The peaceful rivalry of the marketplace creates the incentives for entrepreneurs to be unceasingly alert to profit opportunities to see possibilities that either others have missed or not thought of before. The unknown or barely perceived become seen and understood, and then taken advantage of in the form of new, better, and less expensive products offered to the consuming public.
The purpose of competitive markets and price systems is precisely to provide a way to integrate and coordinate the dispersed and decentralized knowledge in any society possessing a degree of complexity.
This same competitive market has also found ways to reduce and overcome the asymmetry of consumer versus seller knowledge concerning the qualities, features and characteristics of goods, as well, and thereby to reduce the potential and possibility of “exploiting” what the seller may know at the expense of the market buyers.
The Meaning of Search Goods and Judging the Quality of Products
In explaining how markets do this, economists sometimes distinguish between two types of goods offered and sold on the market: search goods and experience goods.
Search goods are those that can be examined and judged by the potential buyer before a purchase is made. For instance, suppose that a supermarket advertises that perfectly ripened bananas are available and on sale in their store. A consumer can enter the supermarket and fairly reasonably judge whether the quality of the good matches what has been promised in the advertising before buying it.
If examination shows that the bananas are either non-eatable green or over-ripened brown, the consumer can walk away without spending a penny on a product that has not met what was promised. By falsely or incorrectly advertising, or even unreasonably exaggerating in its advertising, the business runs the risk of not only losing that sale but the loss of its brand name reputation, threatening to see that consumer never return to that establishment again. Plus, that person can tell others what his “search” of the good came up with, potentially leading to those others not trusting that businesses advertising word without inspecting the good themselves.
This creates a self-interested incentive on the part of such sellers to practice “true in advertising,” or suffer the loss of some their regular customers upon whose repeat business their long-term profitability is dependent.
The Meaning of Experience Goods and Market Safeguards
Experience goods are those goods whose qualities, features and characteristics cannot really be fully known and appreciated without using the product in question for a period of time. Think of an automobile; you can go for a test drive, but your own best judgment of its safety, reliability and handling cannot be really known without driving the car in various weather and traffic conditions over a period of time. Or think of a bed mattress; you sit down and bounce on it, or stretch out and lay down on it in the furniture showroom, but you cannot really know if it will give you a comfortable and restful sleep every night until you’ve gone to bed on it for a period of time.
The same applies to many goods, such as household appliances, for instance. The competitive market’s response to this uncertain and imperfect knowledge on the part of potential buyers has been the seller and manufacture’s system of product warranties that enable the buyer to return the product over a period of time for his or her money back, or a replacement at no extra cost to the buyer.
It is, again, in the seller’s own self-interest to make sure that the product is what has been promised and is reliable in its working order and performance. Once more, the seller and manufacturer run the risk of losing their brand name reputation concerning quality and trustworthiness. Plus, if a warranty has to be fulfilled it is the manufacturer or seller who is forced to eat the cost of replacing the unit returned due to malfunction or failure to match buyer expectation, thus cutting into his own profit margin.
Market Uncertainty and Franchise Businesses
But what about those situations in which concern about repeat business or brand name reputation do not seem to be as present? For instance, suppose you are traveling on business or vacation and are passing through some town you are highly unlikely ever to see again.
You’re hungry for a meal or a place to stay for the night. How can you know about the quality of the meal in the local “Joe’s Greasy Spoon,” or the bedbug-free mattress in any of the rooms in the local “Bates Motel”?
The market has provided consumer information about the qualities, features and characteristics of such products and services to overcome this inescapable imperfect knowledge in the form of chain stores and franchises. You may never eat or sleep again in that particular town, but you will likely eat and sleep away from home somewhere at sometime again in the future.
The sight of the MacDonald’s “Golden Arches” or the sign for an IHOP (International House of Pancakes) anywhere, any place tells you the quality and variety of foods that you can have in any of their establishments, regardless of where its location in the United States or even the world. The same applies to seeing the sign for a Motel 6, or a Holiday Inn Express or an Embassy Suites, or a Hilton-family hotel.
You may never again go to that particular MacDonald’s or Holiday Inn, but if you travel you may very well eat or spend the night at some other chain franchise of that company. And that is the repeat business and brand name reputation that is important to the “mother company.” Thus, each chain store and franchise is required to meet standards of quality and variety that enables the consumer to have a high degree of confidence and reduced knowledge uncertainty of what he or she is getting when they enter any of these establishments regardless of where it may be located.
What makes this practice in the market consistently happen and successfully relied upon? Market competition and the self-interested profit motive.
“Perfect Competition” versus the Competitive Process
Professor Stiglitz sets up the straw man of what in economics is known as the “perfect competition” model. The presumption is that a market is only and truly “competitive” when it is filled with such a large number of sellers that each one is too small to influence the market price and in which each seller offers a product the quality of which is exactly the same ones sold by his competitors; and in which every buyer already knows all the same perfectly correct information as is known by all the sellers in those same markets.
Friedrich Hayek demonstrated the essential fallacies in this argument exacting 70 years ago when he delivered a lecture on “The Meaning of Competition” on May 20, 1946 at Princeton University. He explained that the very nature of a truly competitive market is precisely one in which rivals are attempting to improve the qualities of the products they offer to consumers and try to devise ways to make their products at lower costs precisely to be able to afford to offer them at lower prices to buyers to attract business way from their competitors. That is what makes market competition a dynamic, never-ending process of improved and less expensive goods and services available for the members of any society.
For economists like Joseph Stiglitz, trying to offer goods at prices different than your rivals or with qualities and characteristics differentiated from those sold by your competitors is a sign of “market failure,” of “imperfect” or “monopolistic” market practices. But for economists like Friedrich Hayek, such price and product rivalry and competition is the essential indication of the vibrancy of the competitive process at work.
Market competition in Hayek’s sense of the concept does not need a large number of rivals to be “truly” competitive. What is required are no political or legal barriers that stand in the way of potential competitors either at home or from abroad. From the economic point-of-view the market encompasses the world, regardless of where those who runs governments may have drawn lines on a political map.
Stiglitz’s “Market Failures” are Really Forms of Crony Capitalism
And this gets to the crucial and essential error in Professor Stiglitz’s argument concerning the concentration of “monopoly” power in the marketplace, and any resulting “unjust” inequality of wealth.
Every one of the examples that he lists as instances of such concentration of “market power” – finance and banking, cable television, health care, pharmaceuticals, agro-business – are all instances in which the competitive, free market has been interfered with by the paternalistic and regulatory hand of the government. It is not the market that has “failed” in these corners of the economy, but rather it is the presence and pervasiveness of the interventionist state.
But this, too, is typical of market critics such as Professor Stiglitz. They deceptively call “market failures” instances not of competitive free markets but of “crony capitalism” under which special interests have successfully interacted with politicians and bureaucrats to rig the market for their own benefit at the expense of both consumers and potential competitors who are legally prevented or hindered from entering sectors of the economy where they would like to try to gain market share and earn profits by offering better and lower priced goods than their privileged rivals are offering to those consumers.
Con Men Are Always with Us, Free Markets Constrain Them
Are there con men, hucksters and cheats? Of course there are. They existed in ancient Athens just as they exist today. There are always people who will try to dishonestly get what others have, when doing it that way seems easier and less costly than through honest production and trade.
The question is not whether human nature can be transformed to eliminate this aspect of human conduct. The question is, are their market institutions and incentives that can systemically reduce this type of behavior and, instead, generate more honest and properly informed human interactions?
And the answer is, yes. In fact, most of these positive incentive mechanisms have emerged and evolved out of the competitive market process, itself. These “market solutions” to the “social problem” of asymmetric information were discovered by market participants themselves to be profitable ways of gaining consumer trust and confidence and business, without any government command or imposition. Plus, their discovery and practiced institutional forms could never have been fully anticipated or imagined in their detail before and separate from the competitive market processes that generated them.
Once again, the “let-alone” principle of peaceful competitive market association has demonstrated itself to be superior to the presumption and arrogance of the governmental social engineer.
Worker Exploitation has Its Source in Government Intervention
Furthermore, if workers have been exploited in the past or present, and do not receive the full and proper value for the labor services they may render, this, too, has been the result of politically-sponsored or allowed “power” inside the market. Compulsory labor unions have manipulated and rigged labor markets, giving wage and work privileges and favors to some workers, but at the expense of other workers locked out of employment and income opportunities due to the “closed shop.”
Government imposed minimum wage laws have priced some low and unskilled workers out of jobs leaving them unemployed and possibly permanent wards of the government’s welfare state programs. Anti-competition regulations and related market restrictions (including burdensome taxes on business) have reduced the private sector’s ability and incentives to create jobs and invest in ways that raise the value of workers’ output over time.
If workers are “exploited” in the modern world, Professor Stiglitz should look at the very interventionist policies that he proposes and defends. They are the primary cause of the very conditions and injustices that he deplores, including the greater degrees of material inequality than would or need exist, if only the regulating and paternalistic state they he so much desires and admires were to get out of the way of the free market competitive process.
- China Has Quietly Bailed Out Over $220 Billion In Bad Debt In The Past 2 Months
Two months ago we were amazed to read that according to the latest “deus ex machina” proposed by the PBOC, China would “sweep away” trillions in bad loans by equitizing them in the form of debt-for-equity exchanges. This is how we tried to explain this unprecedented move on March 10 when Reuters first hinted it was coming:
This proposal entails nothing short of a nationalization on a grand scale, one which gives China’s impaired commercial banks – all of which are implicitly state controlled – the “equity keys” to the companies to which they have given secured loans, loans which are no longer performing because the underlying assets are clearly impaired, and where the cash flow generated can’t even cover the interest payments.
In effect, the PBOC is proposing the biggest debt-for-equity swap ever seen. What it also means is that since the secured lender, which is at the top of the capital structure will drop all the way down, it wipes out the existing equity and unsecured debt, and make the banks the new equity owners, and as such China’s commercial banks will no longer be entitled to interest payments or security collateral on their now-equity investment. Finally, while this move does free up loss reserves, it essentially strips banks of their security and asset protection which they enjoyed as secured lenders.
So why is China doing this? By equitizing trillions in bad loans, it frees up the corporate balance sheets to layer on fresh trillions in bad debt, the same debt that pushed these zombie companies into insolvency to begin with.
What this grand equitization does not do, is make the underlying business any more profitable or viable: after all the loans are bad because the companies no longer can generate even the required cash interest payment – as a result of China’s unprecedented excess capacity and low commodity prices which prevent corporate viability. It has little to do with their current balance sheet.
That, however, is irrelevant to the PBOC which is hoping that by taking this step it can magically eliminate trilliions in NPL from commercial bank balance sheets in what is not only the biggest equitization in history, but also the biggest diversion since David Copperfield made the statue of liberty disappear, as instead of keeping the bad loans on the asset side as NPLs, thus assuring at least some recoveries, the banks are crammed down and when the next NPL wave hits, their exposure will be fully wiped out as mere equity stakeholders.
So why are banks agreeing to this? Because they know that as quasi (and not so quasi) state-owned enterprises, China’s commercial banks are wards of the state and when the ultimate impairment wave hits and banks have to write down trillions in “equity investments”, Beijiing will promptly bail them out. Essentially, in one simple move, Beijing is about to “guarantee” trillions in insolvent Chinese debt.
In short, what the PBOC has proposed is the biggest “shadow nationalization” in history, one which will convert trillions in bad loans in insolvent enterprises into trillions in equity investments in the same enterprises, however without any new money actually coming in! Which means it will be up to new credit investors to prop up these failing businesses for a few more quarters before the reorganized equity also has to be wiped out.
We concluded as follows: “While this is surely “good” news for the very short run, as it allows the worst of the worst in China’s insolvent corporate sector to issue even more debt, in the longer run it means that China’s total debt to GDP, which is already at 350% is about to surpass Japan’s gargantuan 400% within a year if not sooner.”
It also means much more deflation, because Chinese corporations which were adding to China’s massive excess capacity bubble and which would have otherwise gone out of business, will remains in business as they no longer have to worry about funding interest (after being effectively nationalized by the state), and instead will pump output at historical levels.
* * *
To be sure, we did not think much more of this proposed grand nationalization in the past two months, because virtually everyone had spoken up against it: from pundits to analysts, even the media figured out what a naive plan this was.
And then today we learned that not only was China going through with this epic debt-for-equity swap, but it has already equitized over $220 billion in non-performing loans.
Note: these are not traditional, Chapter 11 prepacks where the debt is converted into equity and the debt holder gets the keys to the company. In this case, it is the Chinese government itself which indirectly via state-owned banks, has become the de facto owner of countless companies.
As the FT reports:
“Beijing has stepped up its battle against bad debt in China’s banking system, with a state-led debt-for-equity scheme surging in value by about $100bn in the past two months alone. The government-led programme, which forces banks to write off bad debt in exchange for equity in ailing companies, soared in value to hit more than $220bn by the end of April, up from about $120bn at the start of March, according to data from Wind Information.”
As we said two months ago, and as the FT now confirms, this is nothing short of a state-led bailout of virtually every troubled, overindebted industry.
The latest figures for the debt-to-equity swap, and a debt-to-bonds swap initiated last year, show a subtle bailout is already under way. “One can argue the government-led recapitalisation is already happening in an atypical way and thus reducing the need for recapitalisation in its written sense,” said Liao Qiang, director of financial institutions at S&P Global Ratings in Beijing.
Sorry Liao, but ever since the Global Financial Crisis, recapitalization in the “written sense” has meant a direct or indirect taxpayer funded bailout of the most insolvent sector. And that is precisely what China is doing.
To be sure, Beijing’s debt-to-equity strategy should be differentiated from the debt-to-bonds plan unveiled last year: under the latter program, up to Rmb4tn ($612bn) had been approved in 2015 for the debt-to-bonds swap, which has seen state-controlled banks trade short-term loans to companies connected to local governments in exchange for bonds with much longer maturities. The program relieved the pressure on local governments were that were forced to take out bank loans to proceed with public works projects in the absence of municipal bond markets.
However, the debt-to-equity project has received far less enthusiasm from analysts, who say that coercing banks to become stakeholders in companies that could not pay back loans will further weigh down profits this year. Instead of underpinning stability at banks, Mr Liao says the efforts undermine it.
The programmes are just two fronts in Beijing’s battle against bad debt. A third one was revealed recently when China started repackaging its massive NPLs in the form securitizations. As the FT writes, “the government is also reopening the market for securitising bad debt with two deals worth Rmb534m due this month. The efforts have even gone online, with debt managers hawking off bad loans on China’s biggest online retail site.”
The good news for China is that by swapping one bad asset into another, it may have confused the market long enough to buy a few quarters of time.
The bad news is that, as we first reported last November citing Fitch calculations, China’s bad debt “neutron bomb” is roughly 20% of total bank loans. Last week, CLSA’s Frarncis Cheung came up with his own calculation of China’s NPL program which he see as anywhere between 15% and 19%. Here is his analysis:
As analysts are now competing to come up with estimates of the real level of stressed loans in the China banking system and related shadow finance cycles, a good starting point can be found in the IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report published in April. This, based on a sample of 2,871 listed and unlisted nonfinancial Chinese companies, calculates that 15.5% of total commercial bank loans to the corporate sector are “potentially at risk”. This debt-at-risk ratio is defined as having an interest coverage ratio (EBITDA dividend by interest expenses) of below one. Assuming a 60% loss ratio, the IMF puts potential bank losses at 7% of GDP, a level which it still considers as “manageable” while noting that for this to remain the case “prompt action” to address excess capacity and the like needs to occur.
All this is perfectly reasonable. Still Francis Cheung makes the valid point in his report that the IMF has relaxed its criteria from when a similar exercise was done in 2014. Then the debt-atrisk estimate was done using an interest coverage ratio of less than 2x. Now it is 1x. If the same 2x threshold was employed in 2015 the debt-at-risk estimate would rise to 28% of total corporate loans. Meanwhile, Cheung estimates, using the latest listed A-share company data for 2015, China’s bad-debt ratio or NPL ratio at 15-19% based on companies’ interest coverage and debt sustainability.
In short, whether China’s NPL are 15%, 19% or even 28% of total debt, these are absolutely gargantuan amounts – recall that China will report roughly $35 trillion in bank assets this quarter.
To believe that any government, even that of China, will be able to cover up what is indeed the “neutron bomb” (as we first dubbed it) under the entire Chinese financial system with some rhetorical sleight of hand, and shifting non-performing assets from one bucket into another without actually addressing the underlying issue, namely collapsing of cash flow, is the height of stupidity and arrogance. Which probably explains why so many sellside banks see this as a viable plan.
- These Americans Are Preparing For War With Their Own Government
During the Oregon standoff, where a group of US citizens calling themselves the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, seized control of a federal wildlife refuge in protest of harsh sentences being given to members of a ranching family for allegedly allowing fires set on their property to spread on to federal land, Ron Paul posed a question: Is the event isolated, or a sign of things to come?
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the Oregon standoff was the latter.
As the Washington Post writes, there is a significant movement among US citizens that are demanding that the federal government adhere to the Constitution, and stop what they see as systematic abuse of land rights, gun rights, freedom of speech and other liberties.
One example of this movement is a group in Oregon that calls itself the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard. The group refers to themselves as patriots, and is made up of people from all walks of life. The organization describes itself as a “defensive unit against all enemies foreign and domestic”, mainly because they believe the government is capable of unprovoked aggression against its own people.
Deep in the heart of a vast U.S. military training ground, surrounded by spent shotgun shells and juniper trees blasted to shreds, the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard was conducting its weekly firearms training.
“The intent is to be able to work together and defend ourselves if we need to,” said Soper, 40, a building contractor who is an emerging leader in a growing national movement rooted in distrust of the federal government, one that increasingly finds itself in armed conflicts with authorities.
Those in the movement call themselves patriots, demanding that the federal government adhere to the Constitution and stop what they see as systematic abuse of land rights, gun rights, freedom of speech and other liberties.
Law enforcement officials call them dangerous, delusional and sometimes violent, and say that their numbers are growing amid a wave of anger at the government that has been gaining strength since 2008, a surge that coincided with the election of the first black U.S. president and a crippling economic recession.
Soper started his group, which consists of about 30 men, women and children from a handful of families, two years ago as a “defensive unit” against “all enemies foreign and domestic.” Mainly, he’s talking about the federal government, which he thinks is capable of unprovoked aggression against its own people.
The group’s members are drywallers and flooring contractors, nurses and painters and high school students, who stockpile supplies, practice survival skills and “basic infantry” tactics, learn how to treat combat injuries, study the Constitution and train with their concealed handguns and combat-style rifles.
“It doesn’t say in our Constitution that you can’t stand up and defend yourself,” Soper said. “We’ve let the government step over the line and rule us, and that was never the intent of this country.”
Law enforcement officials and watchdog groups are branding such organizations as anti-government extremists of course, and even trying to marginalize the groups by giving them nicknames such as “Y’all Qaeda” and “Vanilla Isis”, and the groups have even earned the designation of “domestic terrorists.” Despite the attempts to downplay the groups, the number of like minded organizations has grown from 150 in 2008 to about 1,000 now, and estimates peg the number of supporters in the hundreds of thousands. The movement had been emboldened by the 2014 standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada, where federal agents faced off with hundreds of armed supporters of Bundy in a dispute over the rancher’s refusal to pay fees to graze his cattle on federal land – the agents eventually stood down.
Law enforcement officials and the watchdog groups that track the self-styled “patriot” groups call them anti-government extremists, militias, armed militants or even domestic terrorists. Some opponents of the largely white and rural groups have made fun by calling them “Y’all Qaeda” or “Vanilla ISIS.”
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, said there were about 150 such groups in 2008 and about 1,000 now. Potok and other analysts, including law enforcement officials who track the groups, said their supporters number in the hundreds of thousands, counting people who signal their support in more passive ways, such as following the groups on social media. The Facebook page of the Oath Keepers, a group of former members of police forces and the military, for example, has more than 525,000 “likes.”
President Obama’s progressive policies and the tough economic times have inflamed anti-government anger, the same vein of rage into which Donald Trump has tapped during his Republican presidential campaign, said Potok and Mark Pitcavage, who works with the Anti-Defamation League and has monitored extremism for 20 years.
Much of the movement traces its roots to the deadly 1990s confrontations between civilians and federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and in Waco, Tex., that resulted in the deaths of as many as 90. Timothy McVeigh cited both events before he was executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, and said he had deliberately chosen a building housing federal government agencies.
Now a “Second Wave” is spreading across the country, especially in the West, fueled by the Internet and social media. J.J. MacNab, an author and George Washington University researcher who specializes in extremism, said social media has allowed individuals or small groups such as Soper’s to become far more influential than in the 1990s, when the groups would spread their message through meetings at local diners and via faxes.
The movement received a huge boost from the 2014 standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada, where federal agents and hundreds of armed supporters of Bundy faced off in a dispute over the rancher’s refusal to pay fees to graze his cattle on federal land.
When federal agents backed down rather than risk a bloody clash, Bundy’s supporters claimed victory and were emboldened to stage similar armed face-offs last year at gold mines in Oregon and Montana.
The latest confrontation that has taken place was in Burns, Oregon, where armed occupiers, led by Cliven Bundy’s sons, took over the headquarters building of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Ultimately, the standoff ended with multiple arrests, and even the death of the group spokesman Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, who was shot by the FBI after an incident at a roadblock in the area. BJ Soper, founder of the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard says he tries to be the calming voice of the growing movement, knowing there are many hot heads that fall within its ranks; a voice clearly much needed. After the standoff at the wildlife refuge, two members splintered off and went on to kill two police officers in Las Vegas, leaving a note saying “This is the beginning of the revolution.”
In January, dozens of armed occupiers, led by Bundy’s sons Ammon and Ryan, took over the headquarters buildings of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near rural Burns, Ore., an action that resulted in the death of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, an occupier who was shot by state troopers.
Soper has been in the middle of all of it. He says he has tried to be a more moderate voice in a movement best known for its hotheads. He spent a month living in his RV at Burns, trying to talk the occupiers into standing down.
Two days after Soper’s last visit to the refuge, Finicum was killed in an operation in which the Bundys were arrested. An independent local investigation concluded that the shooting was justified, although the U.S. Justice Department is investigating several FBI agents for possible misconduct. Soper considers Finicum’s death “murder.”
That kind of talk is “a big deal,” said Stephanie Douglas, who retired in 2013 as the FBI’s top official overseeing foreign and domestic counterterrorism programs. “Free speech doesn’t make you a terrorist just because you disagree with the government. But if you start espousing violence and radicalizing your own people toward a violent act, the federal government is going to take notice.”
Shortly after the Bundy ranch confrontation, two of Bundy’s supporters who had been at the ranch, Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers and a civilian and also died in a Las Vegas shooting rampage. Police said the couple left a note on the body of one the officers they had shot point-blank.
It said: “This is the beginning of the revolution.”
BJ Soper has described his reasons to to start the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard as being simply that he used to be oblivious to everything that was going on, but after the Bundy Ranch incident, he decided to get more involved and make a difference. Soper’s understandable skepticism about the government gets rather intense, taking views quite outside the norm, entertaining that the government had a hand in 9/11, that the government is mandating vaccines that cause autism, and that the United Nations wants to reduce global population through a program called Agenda 21. All of which spurred Soper’s desire to create the group, and prepare his family for any possible scenario through weapons training and emergency food storage.
“I lived like 90 percent of Americans, oblivious to everything that was going on, from the time I was 18 until the Bundy Ranch happened,” he said. “I just said, ‘I can’t sit back and do nothing. I’ve got to get involved.’ I feel responsible for where we’re at, because I’ve done nothing my entire life.”
His response was to start his Central Oregon Constitutional Guard, which he said was partly to protect against the government, but partly a way to get back to a simpler America.
“As a kid, life was easy,” he says on the group’s website. “No worries. Very little threats. I would ride my bike around all over the neighborhood for hours on end. Play with friends and show back up for dinner without worry.”
Critics say such talk is naive nostalgia for a 1950s America that wasn’t ever really such a homespun paradise in the first place. And they say the groups that have sprung up in response are far more dangerous than Soper and others want to make them seem.
“The idea that he needs to face down the government with weapons I think is really, really wrong,” Potok said. “They don’t really say that, but I think that is what is right under the surface.”
Soper’s research also led him to some of the Internet’s favorite conspiracy theories, including a purported U.N. plot to impose “One World Government.” And Soper, like most in the patriot movement, became a believer.
He suspects that the United Nations, through a program called Agenda 21, wants to reduce the global population from 7 billion to fewer than 1 billion. He said the federal government may be promoting abortions overseas as part of that plot, and also may be deliberately mandating childhood vaccines designed to cause autism because autistic adults are less likely to have children.
Soper said he could not rule out the possibility that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. He suspects that the government and the “medical community” have had a cancer cure for years but won’t release it because cancer treatment is too profitable for pharmaceutical companies.
“I’m not saying that’s the case,” he said, “but I like to look at all avenues.”
Soper knows those ideas sound crazy to many people, but, he said with a laugh, “It shows I just don’t trust my government.”
Alex McNeely, a 25 year old drywaller found the patriot group online, and joined the group to feel that he was helping defend the country. And in a textbook example of how words can cause many to take action, echoed the sentiment of many conservative pundits who claim Obama is a socialist who is trying to fundamentally change America. The group is conservative, and generally supports Trump, although anyone other than Hillary would suffice. One of the men indicted by the Bundy ranch case is Gerald DeLemus, who was New Hampshire co-chair of Veterans for Trump and was named by the Trump campaign as a New Hampshire alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention In Cleveland.
“There’s this D.C. mentality that if you stand up for your rights, you’re dangerous and anti-government,” said McNeely, who has an AK-47 assault rifle tattooed on his forearm. “But if I’m denied my rights, what else can I do? Am I just going to stand there and take it, or am I going to do something?”
In the Constitutional Guard, McNeely said, “I feel what we do is stand up for people who don’t have the means to stand up for themselves. I have an overwhelming desire to help people.”
McNeely considered joining the military when he graduated from high school, but he turned 18 the month Obama was elected in 2008, and, because of Obama’s “socialist” policies, “I wasn’t going to accept him as my commander in chief.”
“I don’t like that he wants to fundamentally change America,” McNeely said.
The group members are conservatives, do not like former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and generally support Donald Trump. Soper said he would prefer just about anyone over Clinton but would not cast a vote for president this year. He said he thinks casting his vote is “a waste of time” because Oregon’s politics are dominated by Democrats.
Everyone in the group keeps 30 days worth of food and emergency supplies on hand, and group members learn gardening and raising livestock. They camp, and learn survival tactics, including how to fashion a shelter, find food and water, and make a fire. The group is preparing for anything, and that includes economic collapse.
“I don’t know that it’s all that far-fetched that we have an economic collapse,” he said. “The dollar is a pretty scary investment anymore. China’s buying up all the gold. When people get hungry and thirsty and can’t feed themselves, they get desperate.”
Soper reiterates every chance that he gets that he does not want violence, however in his reality, he believes that if common sense doesn’t get restored in the government, people will get hurt.
“The last thing I want is violence” Soper said. “But I hope they see that if we continue down this path, we’re going to have more bloodshed in this country.”
As he writes his sheriff upon learning of the news that more people had been arrested in connection with the 2014 standoff at the Bundy Ranch, Soper airs his concerns, and ends the letter in a very dramatic fashion:
“People are being detained without due process” he said. “These are not our American values.”
“I pray we find some sense of it again, otherwise a very dark future awaits us, and it is not very far down the road.” Sheriff, he said, “People are going to die.“
As America becomes even more fragmented, more fractured, and more polarized, and, as both the GOP and Democratic primaries have shown, with ever more people calling for true change to take place, the establishment may be under pressure to finally act for change, even if the change is at first, very painful – something 8 years of relentless central bank intervention has desperately tried to prevent. If the government chooses not to act, a violent future may await America as the people themselves rise up once more to recreate what was once the freest and most admired nation on earth.
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