- The American "Melting Pot" Can Turn Into A Volatile Mixture At The Top
Authored by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
America has always fancied itself as a “melting pot” of ethnicities and religions that form a perfect union. The Latin phrase, E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one,” is even found on the Great Seal of the United States.
However, as seen in a recent blow-up between First Lady Melania Trump and now-former Deputy National Security Adviser Mira Ricardel, old feuds from beyond the borders of the United States can result in major rifts at the highest echelons of the US government.
On November 13, Ms. Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, fired off a tweet that read: “it is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she [Ricardel] no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House.” The White House announced Ricardel’s departure the next day, November 14.
Ricardel is a longtime friend and associate of national security adviser John Bolton, who brought her into the National Security Council from the Department of Commerce, where she served as Undersecretary for Export Administration. Ricardel reportedly angered Ms. Trump over seating arrangements on a flight by Ms. Trump to Africa two weeks ago. Ricardel, who was to accompany the First Lady, did not make the trip. Ms. Trump, in an interview conducted with ABC News during the trip, said there were people in the White House she did not trust. Apparently, Ricardel was one of them.
The bitter feud between Melania Trump and Mira Ricardel likely has its roots in their backgrounds in the former Yugoslavia. Ricardel was born Mira P. Radielović, the daughter of Peter Radielovich, a native of Breza, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia. Ricardel speaks fluent Croatian and was a member of the Croatian Catholic Church. Melania Trump was born Melanija Knavs [pronounced Knaus] in Novo Mesto in Slovenia, also in the former Yugoslavia. Villagers in the village of Sevnica, where Ms. Trump was raised, claim she and her Communist Party parents were officially atheists. Ms. Trump later converted to Roman Catholicism. She and her son by Mr. Trump, Barron Trump, speak fluent Slovenian. The Yugoslav Civil War, which began in earnest in 1991, pitted the nation’s ethnic groups against one another. There are ample reasons, political, ethnic, and religious, for bad blood between the Slovenian-born First Lady and a first-generation Croatian-American. The “battle royale” between Ms. Trump and Ricardel is but one example of a constant problem in the United States when individuals with foreign ties bring age-old inter-ethnic and inter-religious squabbles to governance.
Perhaps no one in recent memory brought such a degree of ethnic baggage to her job like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright’s Czech roots and the Yugoslav warrant issued for the arrest of her professor-diplomat father, Joseph Korbel, for the post-World War II theft of art from Prague, brought forth extreme anti-Serbian policies by the woman who would represent the United States at the United Nations and then serve as America’s chief diplomat. Albright’s hatred for Serbia was not much different than Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Polish heritage evoking an almost-pathological hatred of Russia, while he served as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser.
Albright’s bias against Serbia saw her influence US policy in casting a blind eye toward the terrorism carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army and its terrorist leader Hashim Thaci. That policy resulted in Washington backing an independent Kosovo, a state beholden to organized criminal syndicates protected by one of the largest US military bases in Europe, Camp Bondsteel.
Ties by US foreign policy officials to their countries of origin continued to plagued administrations after Carter. For example, Kateryna Chumachenko served in the Reagan White House and State and Treasury Departments and later worked for KPMG as “Katherine” Chumachenko. She also worked in the White House Public Liaison Office, where she conducted outreach to various right-wing and anti-communist exile groups in the United States, including the Friends of Afghanistan, on whose board Afghan refugee and later George W. Bush pro-consul in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, sat. Khalilzad, like Chumachenko, worked in the Reagan State Department. Chumachenko was married to Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” President Viktor Yushchenko, and, thusly, became the First Lady of Ukraine. Khalilzad became the Bush 43 ambassador to the UN, where he often was at loggerheads with Iran, Libya, Syria, and other Muslim states. As was the case with Albright and her anti-Serb underpinnings, it was difficult to ascertain whose agenda Khalilzad was serving.
After being fired from the White House, there were reports that Ricardel was offered the post of ambassador to Estonia. That Baltic country was no stranger to hauling foreign baggage into the US government. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a bow-tie wearing former Estonian language broadcaster for the Central Intelligence Agency-funded Radio Free Europe; long time resident of Leonia, New Jersey; could have just as easily ended up in a senior State Department position rather than President of Estonia. Such is the nature of divided loyalties among senior US government officials of both major political parties.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed Valdas Adamkus as the regional administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for the Mid-West states. Retiring from the US government after 29 years of service, Adamkus was elected to two terms as President of Lithuania.
One might ask whether Ilves and Adamkus were kept on the US government payroll merely to support them until they could return to their countries in top leadership positions to help lead the Baltic nations into NATO membership.
From 1993 to 1997, Army General John Shalikashvili served as Chairman of the Joint Chefs of Staff. Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw, Poland to a Georgian and Polish mother. During World War II, his father served in the Georgian Legion, a special unit incorporated into the Nazi German “SS-Waffengruppe Georgien.” General Shalikashvili served as commander of all US military forces during a time of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. It was no surprise that he was an avid cheerleader for NATO’s expansion to the East.
Natalie Jaresko served in positions with the State Department, the Departments of Commerce, Treasury, the US Trade Representative, and Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In 2014, she became the Finance Minister for Ukraine. Earlier, she served as a financial adviser to Yushchenko. The United States is not the only “melting pot” in North America that suffers from officials burdened by ethnic dual loyalties. Halyna Chomiak, the Ukrainian-born émigré mother of Canada’s Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, weighs heavily on Freeland’s ability to advance Canada’s interests over those of the nation of her mother’s birth.
Trump’s entire White House Middle East police team is composed of individuals who place Israel’s interests ahead of the United States. Trump takes his Middle East advice from principally his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a contributor to and member of the board of the “Friends of the IDF,” an American non-profit that raises funds for the Israeli armed forces. Kushner was named by Trump as a “special envoy” to the Middle East, while Jason Greenblatt, a former attorney with the Trump Organization, was named as special envoy in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Although the two positions appear to overlap, Kushner and Greenblatt, both Orthodox Jews who have little time for Palestinians, are on the same page when it comes to advancing the West Bank land grabbing policies of the Binyamin Netanyahu government in Israel. Trump thoroughly Zionized his administration’s Middle East policy with the appointment of another Israel supporter, David M. Friedman, as US ambassador to Israel. Friedman had been a bankruptcy lawyer with the Trump Organization’s primary law firm, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman.
Trump has nominated as US ambassador to South Africa, handbag designer Lana Marks, who was born in South Africa. Marks, who is known only to Trump from her membership in his Mar-a-Lago, Florida “billionaires club,” left South Africa in 1975, when the country was under the apartheid regime. Marks claims to speak Afrikaans, the language preferred by the apartheid regime, and Xhosa, the ethnic language of the late President Nelson Mandela. Because Marks embellished her professional tennis career by claiming, without proof, participation in the French Open and Wimbledon in the 1970s, her mastery of Xhosa can be taken with a grain of salt. So, too, can her ability to deal with the current African National Congress government led by President Cyril Ramaphosa, who had just been released from prison when Marks left the country in 1975. The claims and politics of Marks and every official and would-be US official who failed to shed their biases from their native and ancestral homelands, can all be taken with a metric ton of salt.
Melting pots are fine, so long as they truly blend together. However, that is not the situation in the United States as high government officials have difficulty in consigning the bigotry inherent in family folklore and beliefs to the family scrapbooks.
- President Trump's Next-Generation Marine One Lands At White House
Newly-released images show the next-generation Presidential helicopter, the Sikorsky VH-92A, conducting its first landing September on the White House South Lawn, Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) told USNI News last week.
A spokesman for the NAVAIR, which is overseeing development of the new presidential helicopter, said, on Sept. 22, the VH-92A flew over the National Mall and landed on the White House lawn for the first time.
As part of the Presidential Helicopter Replacement Program, Sikorsky was in 2014 awarded a $1.2 billion contract to build a fleet of six helicopters for transport of the US President.
The defense company has outfitted the VH-92A with an executive interior and military mission support systems, including triple electrical power and redundant flight controls.
Six VH-92A had been ordered by the Navy for delivery in 2017. Production of a further 17 aircraft is planned to begin in 2020. The total FY 2015 program cost is $4.7 billion for 23 helicopters, at an average price of $205 million per aircraft
The Drive website first reported the images.
NAVAIR said the landing and take-offs were part of a comprehensive test plan designed to ensure the aircraft meets all operational specifications. The Drive notes that the helicopter’s impact on the White House lawn is an integral part of the testing process.
The new helicopter will be ready for service in the second half of 2020. The White House Military Office will decide on when it will be used by the President, according to NAVAIR.
- Congressionally Mandated New Report Urges Massive US Military Increases
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The Commission on National Defense Strategy for the US has just released to Congress its report “Providing for the Common Defense”, and it opens:
“In the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017, Congress charged this Commission with providing an independent, nonpartisan review of the 2018 National Defense Strategy and issues of US defense strategy and policy more broadly.”
The report’s co-chairs, Eric S. Edelman and Gary Roughead, say in their accompanying letter to Congress, that “the United States will soon face a national security emergency.”
It doesn’t describe that “emergency,” but uses it to argue that ‘defense’ spending needs to soar and all other spending by the Government — especially for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other “entitlements” — needs to shrink, and/or recipient beneficiaries of those programs need to pay more, and taxes need to increase, so that this “emergency” can be dealt with. They say that the weapons-manufacturers and soldiers need more money, and that this military requirement is an “emergency” but other federal spending is not.
The Executive Summary says:
Rivals and adversaries are challenging the United States on many fronts and in many domains. America’s ability to defend its allies, its partners, and its own vital interests is increasingly in doubt. If the nation does not act promptly to remedy these circumstances, the consequences will be grave and lasting.
The document strongly urges expansion of the US regime’s policing of the world, in the interests of America’s international corporations.
(EDITORIAL COMMENTARY: Neither the U.N. nor any other international body, has appointed the US regime to police the world. Furthermore, the US regime is the most frequent invader of foreign nations; and always, at least since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, is invading on the basis of lies and in violation of international law. But, the US regime nonetheless — as in “Providing for the Common Defense” — anoints itself the ‘authority’ to be police, judge, jury, and executioner, over this entire planet. This US-Government intention is a well-recognized fact recognized by peoples around the world. Hitler’s Government likewise viewed itself in this way. US President Obama stated this self-anointed global authority for the US, by asserting that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation”, which means that every other nation is dispensable. Hitler agreed with that viewpoint for Germany, and frequently expressed it.)
On page 63 (80 of the pdf), “Providing for the Common Defense” states:
Embracing a Whole-of-Government
Approach to Strategic Competition
This Commission was charged with making recommendations regarding US defense strategy. Yet even if America were to fund the Department of Defense lavishly, and even if all the other recommendations in this report were to be implemented, that would not be sufficient to address the threats and challenges facing the country today. America’s two most powerful competitors — China and Russia — have developed national strategies for enhancing their influence and undermining key US interests that extend far beyond military competition.
It therefore urges placing the US Government on a war-footing, in virtually every governmental department.
On that same page, it states:
Looking ahead, policymakers must address rising government spending and decreasing tax revenues as unsustainable trends that compel hard fiscal choices… Congress should look to the entire federal budget, especially entitlements and taxes, to set the nation on a more stable financial footing. In the near-term, such adjustments will undoubtedly be quite painful. Yet over time — and probably much sooner than we expect — failing to make those adjustments and fully fund America’s defense strategy will undoubtedly be worse.
In other words, according to this congressionally mandated report: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, public health, safety-regulations, civilian infrastructure, and all other non-‘defense’ programs, must be severely slashed in order for the United States to be able to buy more of the machinery of mass-murder from Lockheed Martin and the other American manufacturers of the machinery of mass murder, which now form the basis for the American economy, of foreign conquests and coups, which must now be greatly escalated in order to keep America ’safe’ and those weapons-makers’ investors and executives happy. Similarly, America’s soldiers need more money. Furthermore:
Comprehensive solutions to these comprehensive challenges will require whole-of-government and even whole-of-nation cooperation extending far beyond DOD. Trade policy; science, technology, engineering, and math education; diplomatic statecraft; and other non-military tools will be critical — so will adequate support and funding for those elements of American power.
Their top (#1) “Recommendation” is:
The United States urgently requires rapid and substantial improvements to its military capabilities, built on a foundation of compelling and relevant warfighting concepts at the operational level of war.
“Recommendation” #9 states:
Deterring aggression in the Western Pacific will require using focused investments to establish a forward-deployed defense-in-depth posture. To deter a revanchist Russia, the United States and its NATO allies must rebuild military force capacity and capability in Europe.
#11 states:
The Air Force, Navy, and Army will all need capacity enhancements.
#24 urges:
Budget caps were — and still are — harmful to American defense.
In other words: If eliminating, or at least slashing, non-‘defense’ spending can’t be done, then the Government must go yet further into debt now, in order to be “Providing for the Common Defense.” If necessary in order to address the ‘defense’ ‘emergency’, everything else now must be sacrificed.
#31 is:
Congress should look to the entire federal budget, especially entitlements, as well as taxes, to set the nation on a more stable financial footing.
So: in case not enough money can be extracted from non-‘defense’, and from increasing the debt, then taxes — including taxes on the non-recipients of “entitlements” — must be increased, in order to be “Providing for the Common Defense.” That’s what an “emergency” is. Only the expenditures for soldiers and for the manufacturers of the machinery of mass murder are to be served, if sufficient extractions fail to materialize from those other sources.
The two chairmen, and the ten other members of the Commission, are all longstanding neoconservatives, supporters of all US invasions and coups and conquests. The first co-chair, the Republican Eric S. Edelman, for example, is so neoconservative that he condemns even neocon Democrats (such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) who pretend not to be neoconservative in order for them to be able to campaign effectively for the votes of Democrats in Presidential primaries. For example, here’s from Wikipedia’s article on Edelman:
In July 2007, Edelman attracted media attention for criticizing Senator Hillary Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.[10] In a private letter to Senator Clinton in response to a request made to the Pentagon in May 2007 for an outline [of] plans for withdrawing troops from combat in Iraq, Edelman rebuffed her request and wrote:[11][12]
“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.”
The Associated Press described his criticisms as “stinging”.[10] According to the Associated Press, Edelman’s comments were: “unusual, particularly because it was directed at a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee”.[10] The Associated Press pointed out that fellow committee member Republican Senator Richard Lugar had also called for discussions of withdrawing US troops from Iraq, but had escaped Edelman’s criticism. Clinton has said she is “shocked by the timeworn tactic of once again impugning the patriotism of any of us who raise serious questions” about the Iraq war.[13]
Senator Clinton needed that anti-neocon pretense in order for her to be able to campaign effectively for the votes of Democrats during the then-upcoming 2008 Democratic Party Presidential primaries. Edelman was that extreme a neocon: he demanded it even of a Democratic Party politician who would soon be running for that Party’s Presidential nomination and needing to fool her Party’s primary voters in order to have any realistic possibility to receive her Party’s nomination.
Edelman was nonetheless appointed by the US Senate on 12 August 2011 to be a Director of the Orwellianly (“Newspeak”) named US Institute of Peace, and he still is a Director of that pro-US-aggression propaganda-organization.
The other co-chair of this Commission, and of its report, Admiral Roughead, is a Director of Northrop Grumman, which is America’s fifth-largest manufacturer of mass-murdering machines, and he also is a writer for the neoconservative Brookings Institution, where, in February 2013, prior to the post-2014 soaring US ‘defense’ budgets, he co-authored a report, “National Defense in a Time of Change” saying:
Our spending [on ‘defense’] now constitutes 46 percent of the entire world’s allotment (IISS 2012, 31). The next highest is China, with a reported budget of $89 billion, although this figure is surely underreported and does not account for disparities in compensation, procurement, and infrastructure costs. A remarkable chasm of commitment to strong military forces exists between the United States and most other countries. Comparisons of defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product do not capture the magnitude of US spending nearly as well as do per capita expenditures, which give a snapshot weighted by population but absolute in terms of input. Our country spends $2,250 per person on our military forces every year; Russia spends $301 per person, Iran $137, and China $57 (IISS 2012, 467–473).
So, now that this Grumman Director is working under a President (Trump) who is even more neoconservative than was Obama (or maybe even than Senator Clinton), he’s screaming for yet more money for himself and his investors, in the form of increasing ‘defense’-contracts.
CONCLUSION
That’s whom America’s troops are actually fighting for — the owners, and their executives — people who want more money and don’t care about the millions of people around the world that they help to kill and the millions of others whose continuing lives they make hellish (including even some destitute Americans who need the social services that will be cut in order to fund purchases of yet more bombs and missiles).
America’s masters today are such psychopaths as this. Even 46% of the entire world’s military budget isn’t enough to satisfy them. Most individuals who become convicted and executed aren’t nearly as harmful as these people are, who ride so high the American nation, and (they demand) the entire world. They’re like Hitler’s Nazis, but on nuclear steroids. And the US Congress appointed this Commission.
- China's Orwellian Social Credit Score Will Monitor All Beijing Citizens In 2020
The “Beijing Further Optimization of the Business Environment Action Plan (2018-2020)” has just been distributed to all district committees, district governments, municipal party committees, local government ministries and commissions bureaus, various head offices, multiple people’s organizations, colleges, and universities.
The new report details Beijing’s ambitious plan to control each of its 22 million citizens based on a system of social scoring that punishes behavior it does not approve, with the full implementation of the program to be rolled out by 2020.
For some time, we have monitored China’s social credit initiative, but this new report marks one of the first times a specific timeframe of its full implementation has been released to the general public.
People with great social credit will get “green channel” benefits while those who violate laws will be punished with restrictions and penalties.
Some critics warn the new system is fraught with risks and could reduce humans to little more than a report card, said Bloomberg.
Hangzhou, the capital city of China’s Zhejiang province, rolled out its social credit system earlier this year, rewarding “pro-social behaviors” such as blood donations, healthy lifestyles, and volunteer work while punishing those who violate traffic laws, smoke and drink, and speak poorly about government.
By mid-Q2, China had blocked more than 11 million flights and 4 million high-speed train trips for people who had poor social credit scores, according to the National Development and Reform Commission.
According to the Beijing plan, different agencies will link databases to get a more detailed picture of every resident’s interactions across many financial and social platforms.
Bloomberg said the proposal calls for agencies including tourism bodies, business regulators and transit authorities to work together.
Tracking of individual behavior in China has become more accessible to the government with apps such as Tencent’s WeChat and Ant Financial’s Alipay, a central point for making payments, obtaining loans and organizing transport. These accounts are linked to mobile phone numbers, which in turn require government IDs.
Other technologies, including social media, facial recognition, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and smart cameras, will play a critical roll in this Orwellian social manipulation strategy.
In the next few years, every action of a citizen will leave a permanent digital fingerprint that the government will either assign a good or bad score based on how they view the action.
This type of social control has never been done before.
The final version of China’s national social credit system remains uncertain, but it now seems that a timeframe of full implementation is well understood
Watch the episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive, it pretty much explains that the social credit system is already here.
- Crudele: Assange's Indictment Could Cause Trouble For Democrats
Authored by John Crudele,
The Justice Department is about to indict Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. That’s according to various reports.
The Democrats are cheering because surely Assange will reveal some deep secrets about Russians and the last presidential election.
In the first place, the media of the world should be coming to Assange’s defense. He was, after all, breaking news just like the press does.
But there’s something else.
Assange hinted prior to the election that the Russians weren’t the source of all the Democratic Party e-mails he published. What if the leak was from inside the Democratic Party itself?
What if Assange’s testimony, when it is forced, shows that the leaker was a disgruntled anti-Hillary Clinton Democrat who happened to be mysteriously murdered in a case that hasn’t yet been solved?
That, my friends, is one of the shockers that could hit the press and the financial markets in the months ahead.
The Democrats should be careful what they wish for when it comes to Assange…
- After Giving $15 Million To Soros Orgs, USAID Fires Half Of Its West Bank Staff
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced that half of its West Bank and Gaza employees will be let go over the next few weeks, and that operations will completely cease by early 2019, according to Haaretz.
The humanitarian agency has been a longstanding presence in the region for nearly 25 years.
The Trump State Department notified USAID last week that they would need to present a list of 60 percent of its employees to be dismissed immediately – with a full shutdown to ensue shortly thereafter.
The U.S. federal government agency handles civilian assistance to various countries around the world. The USAID chapter in the West Bank and Gaza began operating in 1994, focusing mainly on economic issues including water, infrastructure, education and health. USAID has invested about $5.5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza in the construction of roads, schools, clinics and community centers. –Haaretz
The shutdown is thought to be linked to President Trump’s funding freeze for various Palestinian relief organizations, as dozens of USAID projects in the West Bank and Gaza were suspended – even those which were partially completed.
In the current budgetary year, the United States was projected to have transferred a total of $250 million in aid to various Palestinian organizations. $35 million of which was supposed to be allocated to the Palestinian Authority security forces and $215 million to economic development, humanitarian assistance and coexistence projects, some through USAID. Last August, the United States announced that the money would be diverted to matters were deemed higher priority to U.S. interests. –Haaretz
Meanwhile, approximately 180 employees operating out of the US Embassy in Israel have yet to receive budgeting for their 2018 and 2019 operations – while leftover funds have been diverted from projects to paying salaries and maintaining the organization. US Ambassador David Friedman has given USAID the cold shoulder over the past few months, according to Haaretz, citing officials involved in the matter, adding that Friedman has not held meetings with USAID officials on various projects.
In March, Fox News reported that USAID gave nearly $15 million to George Soros’ Open Society Foundation over Obama’s last four years in office alone, which conducts extensive work in the West Bank / Palestine region – however the funding was primarily for Soros operations in Albania and Macedonia.
According to the USAID website, the agency gave over $18 million to an Open Society Institute (OSI) program from 2005 – 2012 operating in the West Bank, which sought to place prospective Palestinian PhD students in United States partner universities with waived or reduced tuition.
These types of programs are coming to an end, however, at least at the US Taxpayer’s expense.
- Weissberg: Why Do College Administrators Lie About Race?
Authored by Robert Weissberg via The Unz Review,
Americans generally take a dim view of lying and liars. We venerate George-“I cannot tell a lie—Washington and those giving testimony in court must swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth and those lying under oath risk being be found guilty of perjury, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison in federal cases. Particularly relevant is how universities punish those falsifying research. All in all, while deceitfulness may be ubiquitous in today’s morally challenged environment, mendacity has yet to become a valued cultural norm.
Why, then, do so many university administrators, including presidents at elite schools, tell bold-faced lies regarding race-related issues? (We assume that campus administrators know that reality differs from what they assert and this, technically, makes them liars)
On the advice of counsel, I’ll prudently skip naming names but these lies are all too familiar: we don’t discriminate on race, affirmative action admittees are academically equal to non-AA admits, there are no racial quotas, African Americans are not disproportionately found at the bottom of class rankings, diversity enriches campus intellectual life, students of color struggle academically due to invisible white privilege, unconscious faculty bias, retention will work if we just supply adequate remediation, and on, and on.
These falsehoods are remarkable insofar as they often emanate from administrators who as faculty spent decades pursuing truth and nothing but the truth knowing that exposure as a cheat would be career-ending. Indeed, if federal research funds are used in bogus research, the culprit might face criminal changes and be forced to return the funds. Do professors receive an official lying license when moving from the Physics Department to the Provost’s Office? Does the administrative job description include a talent for knowing how to keep a straight face when telling former colleagues that standards are not being lowered in the latest drive to increase faculty diversity? Might the new big salaries of administrators be compensation for the awaiting humiliation that comes with public dishonesty, a sort of combat pay in today’s contentious universities?
Such lying cannot be a psychological pathology – over a decades-long career chronic dissemblers would never move up the academic greasy pole. Nor can this mendacity be dismissed as socially essential “little white lies,” for example, attributing a colleague’s death to heart failure, not alcoholism in an obituary.
Let me suggest that high-level mendacity can be best be explained by today’s academic incentive structure and, conversely, truth-telling is a liability save among very private conversations with trusted colleagues. Now for the Great Principle of PC Academic Advancement: only would-be administrators who boldly lie in public can be trusted since their future utterances are totally predictable; on the other hand, who knows what a truth-teller might say? Lie-flavored PC Kool-Aid is the “energy drink” that helps ambitious academics advance their careers when they opt for administrative positions. The truth-telling Dean is a loose cannon, and nobody wants a loose cannon making important decisions.
What search committee for Yale’s next president would invite a candidate whose letters of reference celebrate his uncompromising honesty regarding hot-button taboo topics, particularly those that might be deemed offensive to thin-skinned minority groups? Could this “Honest Abe” defeat a rival notable for his skill at deceiving agitated social justice warriors while misleading the press about a campus cheating scandal? Clearly a no brainer—chose the liar. When was the last time a campus had to call in the police because an administrator had lied about illegally admitting unqualified blacks?
Understanding this incentive structure begin with the pressures for social uniformity in any social groups including the university’s apparatchiki. Whether it is a fraternity or a university’s administrative elite, if 2+2=5 evolves into the dominating the orthodoxy, announcing 2+2=5 is the rite de passage for admission. There are worse humiliations–outlaw motorcycle gangs have initiation rituals where prospective members lie on the floor in full regalia while members urinate on them.
Keep in mind that private heresies are irrelevant; nobody cares about private options provided the PC gods are honored in public. The public profession of the PC faith is so easy and so gratifying on today’s campus that only a fool could resist, and who would hire a fool as school President?
And speaking of committee search requirements, what committee would list “courage” as a job pre-requisite? Hard to imagine the sentence, “Successful candidates must be willing to face hostile groups and forcefully defend the university’s core intellectual mission even if physically threatened.” A military background is bad enough in today’s wussy climate, but for a candidate to have personally led his troops into battle is, ironically. the kiss of death. Cowardice – draft dodging, for example – would be, to use admission-speak, a plus factor in assessing a resume.
Moreover, climbing up today’s administrative ladder entails serial lying with winning job candidates telling the most outrageous lies in the shortest time. Makes perfect sense since recruitment committees typically include representatives of campus grievance groups whose support is non-negotiable (grievance groups exercise a so-called “Polish Veto”). So many aggrieved constituencies, so little time and only a second-raters would just allude to the Queer Studies Department and stop at that; the winner in this mendacity derby would insist that Queer Studies is vital to the university’s historic mission and as President he/she would increase its funding. The upshot is, of course, that schools will hire only the best serial liars—no amateurs need apply.
The University of Chicago’s Robert Maynard Hutchins once opined that his job was to provide football for the alums, parking for the faculty and sex for the undergraduates. Today, perhaps second only to fund-raising, the university’s president’s paramount job is to keep the peace, and this often entails lying with great sincerity and this is especially true if grievances are inconsequential. Woe to the administrator who fails to give an Oscar-winning performance when campus Hispanics riot when served enchiladas prepared by white hillbillies in the school’s cafeteria.
Nor are there disincentives for lying on today’s “post-truth” academic environment. It would be professional suicide for a professor to call out the school’s president on the claim that affirmative action admittees are just as qualified as other students. Everybody has to “get with the program” and “mere” professors who object will pay the price. Sad to say, provided the mendacious administrator remains in the administrative world where dishonesty is socially sanctioned, he/she enjoys diplomatic immunity. In fact, a would-be top administrator can probably misrepresent past accomplishments but need not worry that former colleagues will tell tales. Colleagues who have drunk gallons of the PC Kool-Aid late into the night will not rat on each other.
Clearly, ridding the campus of the PC Pox will require hiring administrators who relish honesty but how do we measure this trait and convince others that telling the naked truth is vital to a university, even if this brings raucous discord? Should prospective administrators be required to take a test to assess their commitment to truth? Encourage military veterans who’ve earned at least a bronze star to apply? What about hiring only those close to retirement since they no longer care about being harassed for being blunt?
Assuming that current universities are worth rescuing from the PC plague, it is essential that truth-telling and courage be made integral to the administrator’s job description. Alas, given all the obstacles, particularly today’s robust market for clever liars, we must start modestly. To use administrative-speak, fans of truth and the courage to speak it might list these virtues as “two of many factors in a holistic assessment” alongside the usual criteria such as sexual preference and commitment to diversity. Indeed, with a little luck, a demonstrated passion for the truth and nothing but the truth and a willingness to express it might be considered a “tie breaker” or even a “plus factor” in recruiting university administrators.
- A Record Cyber Monday Could Be Too Little, Too Late For Retail Stocks
Earlier today we wrote how legacy retailers were struggling to adopt to Black Friday increasingly moving to a primarily e-commerce platform: we noted that not only did several “legacy” website by major retailers like Lululemon, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart suffer various revenue-sapping glitches, but also that Black Friday was likely to set new spending records even as mall traffic – at least for now – appeared roughly the same as last year. Incidentally, total spending for Black Friday is now expected to be $6.22 billion, a gain of 23.6% from last year, according to analyst estimates.
And with Thanksgiving weekend all but behind us, the focus now turns to Cyber Monday, the “official” e-commerce holiday that takes place the Monday after Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday is
a horrifying excuse to spend even money you don’t havea “holiday” that’s “celebrated” as everybody returns to work after Thanksgiving break and logs online to begin their holiday shopping.According to Bloomberg, shoppers are estimated to spend $7.8 billion this Cyber Monday, starting off holiday spending on the right track and setting fresh records. But the question of whether or not the Cyber Monday numbers will have an effect on retail names and the stock market in general still lingers. In the midst of a rising interest rate environment where discretionary spending is all but guaranteed to fall as the economy cools – amid an ongoing trade war – some believe that even record Cyber Monday numbers simply won’t be enough to move the needle.
DA Davidson analyst Tom Forte believes that the lingering consumer spending slowdown in 2019 is throwing a damp rag on any positive signs that will come with a strong holiday spending season: “many of the tariffs will likely be borne by consumers in the second half of 2019 in the form of higher prices on products. Higher interest rates may dampen spending on big-ticket items.”
Overall, US shoppers are estimated to spend $124.1 billion online in November and December this year, up an impressive 14.8% from last year, based on figures from Adobe Analytics. The growth rate is simply astounding, especially so many years after the first adoption of e-commerce. But the stock of legacy retailers like Walmart and Target, for instance, already appear to be priced to perfection and have inadvertently set expectations for themselves extremely high into both this year’s holiday season and into 2019. This makes it less likely that their market values are going to be profoundly affected by whatever the final retail holiday numbers end up printing.
The expectation is for total holiday sales to rise over 5% for the second year in a row – the first time this has happened since the housing crisis. Given that much of this spending is a result of cheap credit and macroeconomic numbers that have peaked, some investors are nervous that this clip can’t and won’t be sustained into the new year.
Of course, the Street still has its obligatory bulls, oblivious of the mess created over the past decade. For instance, Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, told Bloomberg: “the strong consumer and retail spending we are seeing now is coming off of this healthy foundation, which is much more sustainable than the credit bubble we saw 12 years ago.”
Maybe someone should inform Craig that our “healthy” foundation is actually the result of cheap capital and inflating asset prices (and thus, the “wealth effect”) and the money supply, and – in the process – also inform him that it wasn’t just a “credit bubble” that caused the last crisis, which has been merely papered over – with a few trillion papers – and has been hardly resolved.
One doesn’t need to be a Wall Street analyst or award-winning economist to realize that US consumers simply can’t keep sustain the rate of spending observed over the last 10 years. Furthermore, the US economy has yet to feel the last couple of aftershocks from recent rate hikes, while the cost of the ungodly amount of outstanding US debt continues to rise not only for consumers, but for corporations and municipalities, the economic machine is only going to grind slower in the years to come.
So enjoy the positive holiday spending headlines as they hit over the next few weeks; it is unlikely that they will be repeated this time next year.
- "We Are Living With Maximum Uncertainty" Fitts Fears "New Control System" Looms
Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,
Financial expert Catherine Austin Fitts has said for years that the economy was not going to crash, but be on a “slow burn.”
How long can they make this heavily indebted game last? Fitts says, “Our problem as investors is we don’t know…”
“If you look at all the information we need to make an intelligent assessment, we don’t have access to that information. I have said many times this is a military question. Who has the biggest weapons and who has the ability to deliver force and control? So, we are living with maximum uncertainty…
Clearly, we are headed into a new currency world that’s part of a new control system, but the answer is we don’t know when. My fear with many, many commentators is they are underestimating the power and endurance of the system. I am always getting yelled at because people think I am pro-empire. I am not saying I am pro-empire or I am for the things they are doing to keep it going.”
Fits adds that things are so uncertain that “the old system could go five years or five months.”
On introducing a new dollar, Fitts says:
“Even if they do introduce a dollar backed by gold, it’s going to start off with a small market share. They are very unlikely to do a big bang thing. These guys are prototypers.”
There is no doubt wealthy people around the world are buying gold. Why? Fitts says, “The reality is…in the worst case scenario, gold is a store of value because it is respected globally as a currency or money without the backing of a sovereign government.”
“What is the global currency that has backing without a sovereign government, and gold and silver are one of the few. I think it is one of the reasons I think wealthy people need to have a store of value for the worst case. It is central bank insurance. A core position in gold is not an investment, it is central bank insurance…We continue to see people have a core position in precious metals for the worst case.”
What is the worst case scenario? Fitts says, “The worst case scenario is we are dealing with very serious geophysical risk…”
“Throughout history, we have had things like Noah and the flood where civilization has almost gotten wiped out… There have been radical changes in policy to coalesce huge amounts of money under central control and do secret projects. Why? What is that about?…
I don’t know how the governance system on planet earth works. I don’t know why the government is shifting massive amounts of money out of the U.S. government and out of the U.S. economy and taking it dark.”
Fitts says, “Right now, we are choking on secrecy as a society…”
“If you look at all the people who got it wrong about the collapse, the reason they got it wrong is because all the information they needed to determine whether or not it was going to collapse was being kept secret even though they, as taxpayers, were financing it…
If we had transparency and we stopped with the secrecy, we could turn the red button green. . . .
The cost of secrecy is enormous …The cost of tyranny, the cost of oppression, the cost of Americans having lousy education and all this control, it destroys so much wealth…
You cannot have a successful civilization with this kind of secrecy.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Catherine Austin Fitts, Publisher of “The Solari Report.”
To Donate to USAWatchdog.com Click Here.
Catherine Austin Fitts says some of her favorite investments right now are land, precious metals and income producing real estate. There is free information and articles on Solari.com. There is much more information for subscribers. To subscribe to “The Solari Report” click here.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...