A fish rots from the head. In the Western world rot is accelerating. The rot in Washington is swiftly spreading to state and local governments and abroad to the Empire’s vassal governments.
Washington’s attack on journalism represented by the illegal arrest of Julian Assange has now spread to France. The US government’s policy of sanctions against sovereign countries that do not follow Washington’s orders has spread to the state of New York, where the governor has threatened sanctions against financial institutions that do business with the National Rifle Association.
In France the vassal president Macron has ordered three journalists — who revealed that Macron’s government knowingly and intentionally sold arms to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to be used for the slaughter of women and children in Yemen — to report for police questioning. The report proves that Macron’s government deliberately lied when it said it was unaware that French weapons were to be used for attack rather than defense use in violation of the Arms Trade Treaty of 2014. The journalists are under investigation by the French gestapo for “compromising national defense secrets.”
In other words, when the French government lies, it is a violation of national defense secrets to report it.
The entire Western world is adopting Washington’s approach to Assange and criminalizing the practice of journalism, thus protecting governments’ criminality. If you reveal a government crime, as Wikileaks did, you will be prosecuted by the criminal government for doing so. It is like permitting a criminal to prosecute the police and prosecutor who want him arrested.
With the First Amendment already under attack and targeted for elimination by Identity Politics for permitting “hate speech,” with the 10th Amendment destroyed by the war criminal Abe Lincoln, and with habeas corpus and due process destroyed by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes, only the Second Amendment still stands, and it is under attack from New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo revealed that his threat of sanctions against financial organizations has the purpose of putting “the NRA out of business. We’re forcing NRA into financial jeopardy. We won’t stop until we shut them down.” The tyrant Cuomo knows that the NRA cannot operate without a bank account and insurance coverage.
To be clear, Washington’s success in weaponizing government against the people has spread throughout the empire and down into the state governments of the United States.
When we add to this the mass spying on citizens made possible by the digital revolution, we have as the result the death of liberty.
To any longer speak of the “Western democracies” is to mouth a falsehood. There are exactly zero Western governments that can be held accountable by the people. There can be no accountable government without a free press. There is no economic freedom or freedom of association when businesses are punished for having business relationships with organizations that are targets of government oppression.
The “war on terror” was a disguise for an attack on the US Constitution, an attack that has succeeded. The worst act of treason in history is the US government’s destruction of the US Constitution.
The era of tyranny has begun. Elections cannot stop it.
Kaiser Health News reports that a record number of homeless people died across Los Angeles County last year, on bus benches, parks, hillsides, railroad track, and sidewalks.
Deaths skyrocketed 76% in the last five years, far outpacing the growth in the city’s homeless population.
As of 2018, the city’s total homeless population was about 53,000, an increase of 39% since 2014. The study said a majority of the people weren’t living in government shelters but rather on city streets.
Government officials and so-called experts have limited understanding of what the primary cause for the rise in deaths, but they said the opioid crisis could be a significant reason.
A closer examination of the deaths revealed where the homeless were dying.
About 33% died in hospitals and more than two-thirds died outside, in places like alleyways, sidewalks, parking lots, tent cities, parks, railroad tracks, and on freeway on-ramps.
Male deaths were much higher than female deaths, the study noted. Even though African Americans make up fewer than 10% of the county’s population, they accounted for 25% of the homeless deaths.
Substance abuse played a primary role in at least 25% of the deaths over the last five years, according to the coroner’s data.
The coroner’s exact cause of death “doesnt necessarily tell the whole story,” said Brian Elias, the county’s chief of coroner investigations, who was alarmed by the surge in homeless deaths.
Dr. Paul Gregerson, chief medical officer for JWCH Institute clinics in the Los Angeles area, provides medical assistance to the homeless, says that many of the disadvantage people died from heart disease, cancer, lung disease, diabetes, and infections.
There has also been a sharp increase in deaths of millennials who were homeless. For instance, the deaths associated with adults under 40 – more than doubled.
“We need to take action now,” said Rev. Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission shelter on the city’s infamous Skid Row. “Otherwise next year, it’s going to be more than 1,000.”
The report paints a grim picture of a public health crisis expanding like wildfire across Los Angeles.
As to why the report didn’t mention the root cause of homelessness on the West Coast is beyond our comprehension. One of the main drivers has been income inequality, derived from the financialization of the economy and excessive monetary policy over the last decade or more, has collapsed the middle class, leaving them on borderline poverty levels.
An “unprecedented” new study released on Thursday revealed that the U.S.-led bombing campaign on Raqqa, Syria in 2017 — which one military commander at the time claimed was the “most precise air campaign in history” — killed an estimated 1,600 innocent civilians while leveling the city on a scale unparalleled in recent decades.
The research collated almost two years of investigations into the assault on Raqqa, the groups said in a statement, and “gives a brutally vivid account” of the enormous number of civilian lives lost as “a direct result” of thousands of coalition air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes in Raqqa from June to October 2017.
The findings confirm that the U.S.-led coalition has admitted to just a fraction of the civilian carnage it has caused in Syria, even as it has boasted of the care it’s taken in avoiding such casualties and the precision of the Raqqa offensive.
According to the report:
US, UK and French forces also launched thousands of air strikes into civilian neighborhoods, scores of which resulted in mass civilian casualties.
In one tragic incident, a Coalition air strike destroyed an entire five-story residential building near Maari school in the central Harat al-Badu neighborhood in the early evening of 25 September 2017. Four families were sheltering in the basement at the time. Almost all of them – at least 32 civilians, including 20 children – were killed. A week later, a further 27 civilians – including many relatives of those killed in the earlier strike – were also killed when an air strike destroyed a nearby building.
“I saw my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me,” Ayet Mohammed Jasem, one of the few survivors of the later attack, told the investigators. “I’ve lost everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were supposed to save us, to save our children.”
At the time of 2017 assault on Raqqa it was U.S. Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townswend, commander of the coalition, who said, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare…The Coalition’s goal is always for zero human casualties.”
But the researchers argue the evidence belies those claims and, as part of the report, both groups demanded accountability for what was done to the city and its people.
Eyewitness statements and 1,000 named victims; massive open source analysis, and crowdsourced satellite imagery review of the destruction, all led @Amnesty and @airwars to conclude that at least 10 times more civilians died at Raqqa than @CJTFOIR concedes. https://t.co/uF6k3rLWmv
“The coalition needs to fully investigate what went wrong at Raqqa and learn from those lessons, to prevent inflicting such tremendous suffering on civilians caught in future military operations,” said Chris Woods, director of Airwars, in a statement.
Donatella Rovera, a crisis investigator for Amnesty, shared some of what she found in Raqqa in a video the group released along with the report.
“When I first came to Raqqa after the war, I knew that relentless American, British, and French bombardment killed civilians and destroyed much of the city,” Rovera said.
“What I came to discover was that little or no protection was afforded to the thousands of civilians who were trapped in the city,” she added. “Raqqa is the most destroyed city in modern times in terms of percentage. There is no part of Raqqa which has been left untouched.”
During their investigation, the groups also listened to the stories of survivors like nine year old Fatima Hussein Ahmad who lost her mother, Aziza, and three siblings in artillery strikes on their neighborhood, as well sustaining injuries that required the amputation of her right leg. “I was thrown over there by the explosion,” she told Amnesty during an interview from a burnt out home near where the attack took place. Almost two years later, she still cannot walk and uses a wheelchair donated by an NGO to get around. She told the researchers her only wish is to go back to school.
The interactive website contains a whole section of stories from the ground, including one of 32 people, 20 children among them, who were killed in an air strike near a school and another where civilians were targeted as they crossed a river with no way to escape.
The U.S. has claimed to have unleashed 30,000 rounds of artillery on the city during the offensive, while the U.K. and France helped to carry out thousands of air strikes. The U.S. strikes represent the equivalent of one strike every six minutes for four months.
“Many of the air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate, so it is no surprise they killed and injured many hundreds of civilians,” said Rovera.
“Coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth,” she added. “Amnesty International and Airwars call upon the Coalition forces to end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive.”
Civilians — who for four years had been essentially held captive in Raqqa by ISIS as the armed group set up checkpoints restricting movement, planted land mines in exit routes, and used residents as human shields — suffered fresh brutality from the U.S. and its allies as they claimed to be “liberating” the city.
The two groups interviewed about 400 survivors and surveyed 200 attack sites throughout the city, examining the ruins of residential buildings and neighborhoods.
Analyzing social media posts, satellite images, and other material, Amnesty and Airwars have identified the shellings that destroyed about 11,000 buildings and the names of more than 1,000 victims.
But even with access to the groups’ meticulous research, which they have shared with the coalition, military leaders have admitted to only 159 civilian deaths during the Raqqa campaign — 10 percent of the number determined by Airwars and Amnesty —despite the fact that the coalition does not carry out its own investigations.
The report comes ahead of an expected report from the Trump administration regarding civilian casualties that resulted from the coalition’s strikes.
“We hope to finally see an honest assessment of the devastating impact that U.S. lethal strikes have had on the civilians in Raqqa,” said Daphne Eviatar, director of Amnesty’s Security with Human Rights program. “The public deserves to know how many civilian casualties our government is responsible for, and the survivors deserve acknowledgement, reparations, where appropriate, and meaningful assistance to rebuild their lives.”
In news that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, retailers are now tracking not only where are you shop, but also where you sleep, according to a new Bloomberg article.
For instance, Hill Country Galleria in Bee Cave, Texas used information and location data from customers’ phones to determine that a lot of shoppers own pets. Using this data, it went on to install water fountains, babysitting stations and photo op stations for customers and their pets. As a result, the time customers spent in the mall grew by 40%.
One shopping Center in Chicago found it was drawing customers from Asian neighborhoods, so it filled one of its vacancies with a high-end Asian specialty grocery. And even Dunkin’ Donuts is getting in on the trend. It employed phone data to make sure that the 278 new stores it was opening wouldn’t steal customers from existing locations.
These few clues that retail owners are getting from customers’ phones are one of the last chances brick-and-mortar shops have at trying to salvage their industry. They’re buying this mobile phone data hand over fist in order to help determine where people shop, eat and see movies. They’re also looking to see where customers go before and after going to the mall. It helps them look at personal details and paint a picture of the demographic that shops with them. It also helps them advertise.
But aside from transforming the industry, this is raising privacy concerns. The idea of being tracked – surprise – makes some people uneasy (how that is not “all” is beyond comprehension). All the companies interviewed for the article said that they don’t use any information that can identify individuals, but due to lax regulation, they’re really on the honor system to keep their word. So, we’re absolutely positive they’re doing the right thing…
This new type of analysis is called location analytics and the worldwide industry is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2023 from $8.35 billion in 2017. More than half of the retailers surveyed last year said that they use these firms to collect the data.
lan McKeon, chief executive officer of Alexander Babbage, which packages and sells location data said: “Historically, we’ve only been able to look at theoretical behaviors of people. Now we can look at where we’re actually drawing from, and we discovered that the trade areas look nothing like we used to think they did.”
Smartphone apps gather data throughout the day, dropping pins on locations and collecting timestamps and device IDs. Aggregators buy this data and sell it to analytics companies that clean it up for retail to use. Packages for retailers run as low as $15,000. Aggregator UberMedia says it looks at 800 million active devices per month and has 14 trillion total location observations deriving from four and a half years of historical data. To help get details including the age, income and education of people, firms connect the phone’s location at night – i.e. when you’re home and in bed – with US census data.
“We don’t have any information about who owns the device, so the way that we contextualize the information is we look at where the phone sleeps at night,” McKeon continued.
And it isn’t just your location that is being tracked. Psychographic data, including a person‘s behavior and spending habits – as well as their social media chatter – is also being tracked.
Spatial.ai is a startup that studies online conversations and collects location data for 72 categories, helping businesses determine whether specific personality types correlate with sales. For instance, for “hipsters” these products often include antiques, vinyl records and coffee.
Shopping landlord Brixmor Property Group Inc. worked with the start up to identify a lot of talk about “girls night out” in the neighborhood of one of its shopping centers in Newtown, Pennsylvania. As a result, Brixmor opened a “female friendly organic concept” restaurant in the area. Brixmor CEO Jim Taylor said: “You get a much better sense of the commuting patterns of the community that utilizes your center, and it’s oftentimes quite revelatory.”
But privacy concerns remain. As the market is more competitive, providers have started to cut corners. Laura Schewel, CEO of StreetLight Data Inc. said her friend lost a potential client to a competitor because it refused to sell individual raw data, versus aggregated data, on groups of people.
Taylor concluded: “We don’t want to use technology in a way that erodes trust. As a shopping-center owner, you want to bring in vibrant uses that generate lots of sales, lots of traffic and allow you to grow rents over time.”
And yet one wonders just how much “trust” shoppers would have if the stores were honest and forthcoming, and disclosed all the different ways they strip their clients of their last shred of privacy.
In this week’s episode of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with China expert Anne Stevenson-Yang about the imminent dangers facing global financial markets in the event of a break in the renminbi-dollar peg.
In the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, it was generally understood that the Chinese were artificially depressing the value of the RMB vis-à-vis the USD, in order maintain an abnormally large current account surplus that would be recycled into western financial markets in the form of government securities, equities, real estate, etc. By recycling so much of the proceeds from trade back into foreign markets, the CCP managed to maintain a lower exchange rate than it otherwise would be, were it to convert those dollars back into renminbi.
In other words, China was suppressing the value of its currency. Bob Wittbrot calls this recycling process the “Boomerang Greenback.” This dynamic worked extraordinary well until the world went into recession around the time of the great financial crisis, which marked a peak in China’s current account. The CCP also met the crisis by expanding bank lending, easing credit, and fueling investment even further. In addition, by maintaining interest rates and the cost of capital well-below the rate of inflation during China’s multi-decade boom, the CCP has managed to keep households’ share of the economy at low enough levels to induce an overall high-savings rate for the country (by having less disposable income than would otherwise be expected for an economy this size, the average Chinese citizen spends less on consumption than he or she otherwise would, absent financial repression). This has been an additional shot in the arm for investment.
At some point post-2008 (judging from their foreign exchange reserves, this appears to have started somewhere around the start of 2014) China went from artificially suppressing the value of its currency to artificially supporting it. Unlike a country like Thailand, however, whose currency peg famously broke under the speculative attacks of foreign investors during the 1997-98’ Asian Financial Crisis, the Chinese have managed to avoid such a scenario on account of maintaining a closed capital account (exercising tight capital controls). Coupling that with a current account surplus, the CCP has been able to obtain the hard currency it has needed in the last 5 years or so in order to buy the various inputs required to run their economy and keep the cycle going.
The problem is that China generated a tremendous amount of money and credit since the GFC, in particular, and therefore risks a major devaluation in the value of the RMB should the country no longer be able to get the foreign exchange reserves it needs through a sustainable current account surplus. They are, at the moment, running a negative current account, a negative fiscal balance (of roughly 9% of GDP), their foreign exchange reserves are declining for the first time ever, while the country’s external debt has doubled in the last five years, increasing by an average of $70 billion per quarter since the beginning of 2017. More than half of this debt is short-term, which means it needs to be constantly rolled over. Up until the Fed paused it’s tightening cycle, the rising interest rates coupled with new tariffs on Chinese goods were creating a pincer-like effect on China’s economy and on its ability to maintain its peg, forcing it to fund more of its dollar needs through borrowing at ever higher interest rates.
China cannot maintain a credible peg between the RMB and the USD when its money supply is growing, by some calculations at more than 10x that of the United States over the last 10 years. This is a fundamental problem of accounting. If China were completely self-sufficient – if it had access to sufficient energy, food, base metals, etc. within its own borders – then its inability to obtain dollars would not be an issue. The problem is that it is desperately short these commodities as inputs for its manufacturing and domestic consumption. The recent drop in the price of oil helped them out a bit, but it has been rising again, just as China’s oil imports are surging. The country recently surpassed the United States as the world’s largest crude importer. For a nation with dwindling foreign exchange reserves, this is not a good trend. And, it isn’t even clear what the real FOREX numbers are in China. Official foreign exchange reserve put that number at $3.2 Trillion, but US treasury tick data shows that China owns a little bit less than $1.2 trillion in US Treasuries, which according to some people, suggests that their overall FOREX position is closer to $2 Trillion.
Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit fell to $49.4 billion in February, the lowest level since June 2018, and well below what economists had expected. A 20.2% drop in imports from China was the main driver behind the nearly 3.4% improvement in the trade deficit in February, data from the Commerce Department showed. The trade deficit has narrowed for two straight months now.
There seems to be a growing sense of awareness among many in China that all is not well with the country’s capital account. We have seen numbers suggesting that illicit capital has been flowing out of China (whether we are talking about precious stones, Bitcoins, or other means available to the wealthier citizens of China) in noticeably higher amounts since the mini-devaluation in August 2015. This is consistent with what we often see in countries ahead of a devaluation, default, or some other financial disturbance. Do China’s wealthy know something we don’t?
An ominous trend, indicating US consumers are in far worse shape than assumed by conventional wisdom, has re-emerged.
Regular readers may recall that two years ago we wrote that “Credit Card Defaults Surge Most Since Financial Crisis.” And while this deteriorating trend had more or less plateaued for much of 2018, it has taken another big step higher and as Bloomberg reports “red flags are flying in the credit-card industry after a key gauge of bad debt jumped to the highest level in almost seven years.”
According to advance data from Bloomberg Intelligence, which will soon flow through to the S&P/Experian Bankcard Default Index, after staying largely flat for much of 2017 and 2018, the first three months of 2019 saw a troubling jump in the nationwide credit card charge-off, or default rate to 3.82%, the highest in seven years or since the second quarter of 2012. At the same time, the number of loans 30-days past due, a leading indicator of future write-offs, jumped at all seven of the largest U.S. card issuers.
Some examples: Capital One said this week that its first-quarter U.S. card charge-off rate climbed to 5.04% from 4.64% at the end of 2018. At Discover Financial Services, which also reported results on Thursday, the charge-off rate rose to 3.5% from 3.23% in the prior quarter.
As for what is causing this sharp jump in charge offs, some credit card issuers blamed artificially increased FICO scores. As readers may recall, two weeks ago we asked if “Inflated” FICO Scores Will Be The Catalyst For The Next Meltdown” noting that credit score inflation “is the idea that debtors are actually riskier than their scores indicate, due to metrics not accounting for the “robust” economy, which may negatively affect the perception of borrowers’ ability to pay back bills on time. This means that when a recession finally happens, there could be a larger than expected fallout for both lenders and investors.”
There are around 15 million more consumers with credit scores above 740 today than there were in 2006, and about 15 million fewer consumers with scores below 660, according to Moody’s.
The problematic implication is that while FICO scores may represent a far stronger US consumer, the reality is just the opposite, as Capital One implied during its Thursday conference call, when Richard Fairbank, CEO of Capital One which is the country’s third-largest credit card issuer, warned that there’s been a “degradation” in credit quality for certain customers, adding that “some customers with negative credit events during the financial crisis are now seeing those problems disappear from their credit-bureau reports.” And yet, the same customers are just as unlikely to repay their credit card bill whether their FICO score is 750 or 680.
“We may be looking at data that might not paint the full picture of a consumer’s credit history,” Fairbank said during the Thursday earnings call with analysts. “Part of the context for our caution has been not only how deep we are in the cycle but, also, this is the time period when there is less information than there once was.”
Did someone say non-GAAP credit scores? Because that’s precisely what the artificially inflated FICO scores have become, and they are presenting an unreliable picture of a customer’s ability, or eagerness, to pay down their credit card debt. Hence the jump in charge offs.
Others echoing the warning included the CEO of Discover Card, Roger Hochschild, who said that “certainly, this has been one of the longest recoveries, so, in general, we have been contracting credit policy at the margin and tightening.” In an interview with Bloomberg, Hochschild said his company has been closing inactive accounts and slowing down the number and size of credit-line increases for both new and existing customers.
Almost as if those artificially higher non-GAAP FICO scores no longer represent reality… just like non-GAAP financial results.
Meanwhile, as Bloomberg adds, the credit card industry’s latest warnings build on developments in January, when fourth-quarter results showed charge-off rates near the lowest in decades were coming to an end, something we discussed at the time. As a result, competition for the highest-quality customers remains fierce, leading many issuers to spend more on marketing and rewards to gain market share with that group.
“If you think about lending products, there are always people who want to take your money,” Hochschild said. “You’re going for people who have many choices — they have existing cards, they could get any card they want. So our job is to make sure those are the ones we attract to Discover.”
But a growing wariness about the potential for a rise in bad debt has led many issuers to tighten underwriting and to make issuance of new credit more problematic, creating a vicious loop where those who need credit the most are also the least likely to get it.
That said, it’s certainly not a crisis yet: charge-offs remain not far from historic lows as banks benefit from low unemployment rates in the US. On the other hand, with overall interest rates in the US still near historic, record lows, the fact that charge offs are already surging is just another reason why the Fed will find it impossible to hike rates higher, and in fact, if the deteriorating default trend continues, the central bank may have no choice but to cut rates soon. And while that may kick the can for a few quarter, all such a goosing of US consumer will achieve, is make the next recession – and financial crisis – that much worse when it finally hits, because if American’s can make their credit card payment when unemployment is a record low and GDP is – allegedly – growing above 3%, one wonder what will happen when the next recession does finally hit.
Update2: San Diego Sheriff Bill Gore confirmed John Earnest as the suspect.
Update #7 @SDSheriff Bill Gore confirms the name of the shooting suspect as 19-year-old John Earnest (DOB 6/8/99). We didn’t find any prior law enforcement contact with Earnest. We’re looking into digital evidence and checking the authenticity of an online manifesto.
Update: The shooter has been confirmed as 19-year-old John T. Earnest.
Multiple Law Enforcement Sources Familiar w/the Investigation Tell NBC News that the Shooter (Synagogue in Poway, CA) is John T. Earnest (DOB: 6/8/99 – 19 yrs old)
NBC San Diego reports that “an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent who was in the synagogue at the time of the shooting opened fire on the suspect, missing the man but striking his vehicle.”
ARMED off duty law enforcement stopped the San Diego synagogue killer and saved many lives.
This is why every America should have the ability to arm themselves whenever they choose.
President Trump – who the synagogue shooter allegedly disavowed as a “Zionist” – called the shooting a hate crime and offered his “deepest sympathies.”
President Trump calls the shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California, a “hate crime” and “hard to believe.” He adds, “My deepest sympathies to all of those affected.” https://t.co/XVORtke1Bipic.twitter.com/sAjHV2o73q
Meanwhile, governor Gavin Newsom said in a tweet “Hate continues to fuel horrific and cowardice acts of violence across our state, country and world. It must be called out. CA stands with Poway.”
Charleston, Pittsburgh, Quebec, New Zealand — now our own Poway, California.
No one should ever fear going to their place of worship.
Hate continues to fuel horrific and cowardly acts of violence across our state, country, and world. It must be called out. CA stands with Poway.
As reported earlier, Earnest appears to have posted an “open letter” manifesto as well as a message on 8chan prior to the attack. See below for details.
***
One woman is dead and at least 3 other people have been injured after a gunman opened fire on a Poway, California synagogue on Saturday just before 11:30 a.m. on the last day of Passover.
The mayor of the northern San Diego suburb, Steve Vaus, confirmed the death to NBC 7just after 1:30 p.m.
The suspect – a 19-year-old man, was detained down the road from the synagogue, according to San Diego County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Aaron Meleen.
Update #5 @SDSheriff Bill Gore confirms one person was killed and three others were injured in the #synagogueshooting at Chabad of Poway. Our hearts go out to those affected by this incident.
19-year-old man was arrested in connection with the shooting by @SanDiegoPD.
According to local Steve Werby, who spoke with a Deputy Sheriff, has been monitoring the police radio bands, and whose wife was on scene, said that two children were injured, while two others are missing.
Shooting inside the Chabad of Poway, California. Just across city of San Diego border. During religious services. At least one person shot. 2 children injured. 2 children missing. My source is deputy sheriff via direct conversation, police band, and relative of person at Chabad. https://t.co/21RRgaJVmo
Werby also said that police were preparing to enter the home of the suspect, who lives with his parents – and that Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein lost two fingers in the attack.
All 4 victims of the Chabad of Poway shooting are now at Palomar Medical Center. Victims of the shooting at the synogogue include Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein who lost 2 fingers, another adult I know, and 2 minors. One minor age 11. #sandiego#poway#chabad#activeshooter#hatecrimehttps://t.co/FuCnODj8RK
He also tweeted: “According to an adult inside the synogogue during the shooting at Chabad of Poway synogogue, there were 6 or 7 shots, screams, then 6 or 7 more shots. Source is my wife who is talking to the adult.”
According to an adult inside the synogogue during the shooting at Chabad of Poway synogogue, there were 6 or 7 shots, screams, then 6 or 7 more shots. Source is my wife who is talking to the adult. #sandiego#poway#chabad#hatecrimehttps://t.co/6RRUn3dK3C
While currently unconfirmed – internet sleuths have tenatively identified the suspect a 19-year-old local John Earnest – who appears to have posted about the attack on the 8chan prior to the incident.
John Earnest’s manifesto has the writer DESCRIBE themselves as a 19 year old male.
Police just said the suspect is 19 years old.
There is also an “open letter” manifesto in which Earnest explains that he is a “man of European ancestry,” who says he also “scorched a mosque in Escondido a week after Brenton Tarrant’s sacrifice,” referring to last month’s New Zealand Mosque shooter which the manifesto says was the “catalyst for mer personally.”
Of note, there was an early morning arson at a nearby Mosque in Escondido, California on March 24th which remains unsolved. While several people were sleeping inside, one person who was awake spotted the flames and managed to put out the fire.
To my brothers in blood. Make sure that my sacrifice was not in vain. Spread this letter, make memes, shitpost, FIGHT BACK, REMEMBER ROBERT BOWERS, REMEMBER BRENTON TARRANT, filter the religious D&C, and filter the schizos who will inevitably call this a ‘false flag.’ Something to note, people grossly overestimate the police’s ability to solve ‘crimes’ such as ‘arson’ and ‘murder.’ Lots of threads about ‘Feds are talking to me guys because I post on 8chan, it’s so spooky’ are ‘organically’ popping up. What a load of shit meant to try to scare the goyim and prevent retaliation.
The author of the note claims to be a “a 19 year old nursing student from the depths of Commiefornia.”
For more live developments, follow journalist Nick Monroe’s thread by clicking on the tweet below:
“At least 4 people (including 2 children) shot during a #Passover holiday celebration at Chabad Poway synagogue in San Diego.” pic.twitter.com/NP3b7gteZU
The rich in America don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes, according to critics of capitalism and of inequality who propose a near doubling (to 70 percent) of the current top federal tax rate on personal income. Many such critics also demand a new wealth tax on previously earned income that’s been saved and invested. But what’s a “fair share?” Why is 70 percent the right and proper tax take? Why not 50 percent? Is today’s top rate of 35 percent inherently fair? Why not 10 percent?
Ask anyone who’s willing to define or defend “fair share” in this context — whether a tax expert, an editorialist, or a neighbor — and you’ll likely hear not hard facts and solid logic but a host of banal attitudes and platitudes. “Inequality is unjust!” Why? “Because it’s unfair!” Why? “Because so many people are in need today — and most people agree with me.” But why assume the status of needy or less rich people is caused by the rich? It just doesn’t follow. If the rich aren’t blameworthy for the poor lot of others, as a criminal would be for robbing and impoverishing a victim, what, in plain justice, could justify punitive taxation of the rich?
Part of the problem (and the emotionalism) is that many people today — especially the highly schooled (and highly paid) elites — doubt or deny the principle of desert. They believe no one is truly or fully responsible or deserving of their socioeconomic position or trajectory in life. “They didn’t earn it,” we hear, because so many others — whether parents, teachers, peers, or preachers — played a role. Well, if others played a role, are they deserving? If so, is desert in fact a valid principle? If so, why bother equating unequal possessions with ill-gotten gains? Those who most deny desert deny it most vehemently in the rich; in failing to see how anyone succeeds “on their own,” they fail the more so in seeing how truly great producers succeed.
Randomness and “luck” also are posited as causal in one’s socioeconomic status; but it’s a contradictory claim, since randomness, by definition, is the causeless (or unidentified). The causeless can’t be causal. Even when self-responsibility is conceded as a factor in people’s socioeconomic status, it’s usually assigned an insignificant role. Yet if no one truly “deserves” their status in life, or their possessions, logical consistency requires that the principle apply alike to the rich, poor, and middle. But it’s not applied that way these days; “social justice” now entails not desert but a denial of desert and the contradictory claim that while no one deserves anything, some people nevertheless “deserve” redistributed income and wealth.
In truth, in a free society with equal treatment before the law, different human endowments, talents, and productive capacities necessarily yield different socioeconomic outcomes. Since no human is omniscient or omnipotent, it isn’t necessary to assume that everything humans possess has been attained by perfect prescience, a perfect plan, perfect execution, or superhuman powers.
In the economic realm, if unequal people are left free to invent, create, produce, exchange, and consume wealth in mutual, voluntary exchange, to mutual advantage, what they come to possess is, thereby, presumptively just — legitimately earned — however unequal or dissimilar may be their possessions relative to the possessions of others. If society lacks freedom and wealth is seized, one should fight for more freedom, not punitive taxation.
Legitimately obtained possessions shouldn’t be condemned or seized by third-party passers-by who lack standing in trade. If it can be demonstrated — not merely assumed, according to the premise of a “zero-sum society” — that someone’s status or possessions have been attained by force, fraud, or political favoritism-cronyism, the proper remedy is to preclude and punish such wrongs, not to preclude or punish unequal possession or socioeconomic status per se. That requires a constitutionally limited government devoted to protecting individual rights, including property rights, not the opposite, more common type observed today, which variously violates rights, extends special favors, and applies the law (or taxes) unequally.
Guided by the principle of justice as desert, “fair share” in taxation requires that no person, group, or firm be singled out for punishment or favors, for higher tax rates or subsidies, based on differential economic prowess, earnings, or possessions.
Whether what’s taxed is income, sales, or wealth, the fairness test is satisfied when a single, uniform tax rate is applied equally to all; in contrast, a graduated tax code that imposes ever-higher rates the more one makes, spends, or owns — penalizing the richer because they are richer — fails the fairness test; it is punitive (unjust) taxation; it presumes guilt, not innocence; it assumes that great wealth is stolen, not produced. In fact, vast concentrations of wealth usually reflect vast and sustained success — necessarily by “big business” — in supplying and satisfying millions of customers.
The current U.S. federal income tax schedule isn’t uniform when it comes to rates. For example, the tax rate is only 12 percent for those making between $9,525 and $38,700 per year but 24 percent for those making between $82,500 and $157,500 and 37 percent for those making more than $500,000. There’s no good reason in ethics, logic, or economics why some people should pay two or three times the rate others pay; the graduated tax-rate schedule violates not only the precepts of fundamental fairness but also the equal-protection clause in the U.S. Constitution.
Of course, were all U.S. citizens in all income brackets subject to the same tax rate, the richer would still pay more in total taxes than would the less rich or poor. If the uniform rate was 20 percent, those earning $10,000 a year, $100,000 a year, and $1,000,000 a year would pay, respectively, $2,000, $20,000, and $200,000 per year. Those with 10 times the income of others would pay 10 times the total taxes, no more or less. It would be unjust to pay more or less than what’s proportionate. It’s also perfectly plausible that the richer should pay more in taxes not because of their greater “ability to pay” but because they depend more on legitimate government services (law and order, courts, military defense, private-property protection).
The unfair graduation in U.S. income tax rates isn’t mitigated in other parts of the tax code. The rich as much as the non-rich also pay sales taxes, estate taxes, property taxes, and taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Considering all federal taxes, the rich in America unfairly pay far more than their fair share, which implies that the real inequity that now requires a remedy is the fact that most non-rich Americans pay far less than their fair share of taxes.
The nearby exhibit shows that in 2015 the top 1 percent of income earners in America, representing 16 percent of total income, paid 27 percent of all federal taxes; if they had paid their “fair share,” they’d have paid only 16 percent of all taxes. They were forced to overpay by 11 percentage points. Similarly, those in the 81st to 99th percentiles of income earners, representing 37 percent of total income, paid 43 percent of all federal taxes; if they had paid their fair share, they’d have paid only 37 percent of all taxes, so they too overpaid (by 6 percentage points). Taken together, the top quintile of earners, representing 53 percent of total income, paid 70 percent of all federal taxes, or 17 percentage points above their fair share.
In contrast, the fourth quintile of earners paid only 17 percent of taxes despite earning 20 percent of all income (an underpayment of three percentage points); worse still, the lower three quintiles (representing 60 percent of all income earners) paid only 13 percent of all federal taxes in 2015, even while comprising 27 percent of all income. It’s patently unfair when more than half of income-earning Americans pay less than half of their fair share of federal taxes. Yet few elected officials care to rectify it. In unlimited democracies unconcerned with rights, a majority can easily freeload on a minority.
There’s nothing moral or “progressive” about a graduated tax schedule. It stunts economic progress by penalizing those who most contribute to it. It also defies the scientific progress made in economics in recent centuries, demonstrating that wealth is created, not stolen, and mainly by brains, not brawn. It’s no coincidence that the second plank in Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848) demanded “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” The demand was understandable perhaps, to the extent it was based on the false “labor theory of value,” which presumed that only manual labor created surplus value, while skilled, mental, and managerial labor were parasitical and larcenous. The Marxian-socialist scheme of graduated taxation, although common to this day, is no less false than the income theory it rests upon.
Surely, most economists should know better by now — that skilled, mental, and managerial labor is far more productive than is manual or menial labor. Not even the income obtained by investing is “unearned,” despite unjust tax-code jargon. Creativity, capital, corporations, and concentrations of wealth are indispensable to productivity, profits, and prosperity. But is this acknowledged today? Our “modern,” “progressive” tax code reflects not science or progress but a pre-scientific (zero sum) view of the origins (and inequality) of income and wealth. Yes, the size, scope, power, and spending of government should be reduced, but economists also should identify ways to make government financing, at any level, less punitive and more just.
While the people implicated in the “biggest college admissions scandal in history” have so far have been predominantly American – with photos of actresses like Lori Loughlin and ringleader William Rick Singer being plastered across the news – it turns out that the two families who shelled out the most money in the scandal were, not surprisingly, Chinese according to the Wall Street Journal.
One wealthy Chinese family paid an astounding $6.5 million to Singer, the scheme’s mastermind, while a second family was found to have paid $1.2 million. The family involved in the $6.5 million payment has not yet been identified; the $1.2 million payment was in exchange for 21 year old Sherry Guo’s admission to Yale University. Guo moved to Southern California from China to attend high school in the U.S.
Most of the other parents in the scandal paid between $250,000 to $400,000, making the huge sums out of China noteworthy to those investigating and following the scam. They are easily the largest sums reported thus far.
Ms. Guo had her eye on Columbia University or Oxford University but Singer insisted that she go to Yale, calling it a “sure thing”.
Guo learned English after arriving in California about five years ago and attended JSerra Catholic High School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., starting high school as an older student.
Ironically for the Yale “student”, her lawyer is trying to tuck her behind the defense of ignorance. Guo was “so unfamiliar with how people apply to schools in the U.S., Rick Singer’s instructions to her didn’t seem as out of place as they would to a student who grew up in the United States and has more of an expectation of free choice,” her lawyer said. Guo’s family was introduced to Singer by an LA-based financial adviser, who said that Guo’s family told Singer they wanted to make a “donation” to “one of those top schools” for his daughter’s “application.”
The next day, Singer contacted disgraced Yale Women’s Soccer coach Rudy Meredith, giving Meredith a resume and personal statements, including links to her art portfolio. Singer indicated he would “revise” the information to include a false history playing soccer and subsequently listed her as a member of a junior national team in China and co-captain of a soccer club in So Cal. Mr. Singer paid $400,000 to Mr. Meredith in exchange for having him designate the girl as a recruited athlete, nearly guaranteeing her a spot at the school.
Meanwhile, Guo had actually won awards for her artwork previously, with her former high school principal calling her an “unbelievable artist”. She was eventually admitted to Yale after being tagged as a recruited athlete last fall.
Unfortunately for the potentially gifted youngster, she is no longer at the university. The family has not been charged.
“I just don’t think the question of guilt is clear-cut in Sherry’s case, at all,” her lawyer said.
Guo is part of a larger trend of Chinese families bringing children to the U.S. for primary schooling in the hopes of helping them gain college admission down the line. She is the last on a long line of names that have been profiled as a result of the admissions scandal.
In retrospect, the prominent presence of Chinese families in the admissions scandal is hardly a surprise. Several years ago, numerous US banks got into hot water for hiring the offspring of Chinese oligarchs in exchange for “favors.” As one example, recall that back in late 2016, and after more than three years of digging into JPMorgan’s hiring practices in China, federal authorities determined that the bank hired the children of Chinese leaders as part of a quid pro quo to win business in the booming nation, clearing the way for a costly punishment. Well, somewhat “costly”: the punishment in question resulted in a $264 million settlement with the bank and its Hong Kong subsidiary; ultimately JPM was charged with orchestrating a long-running foreign bribery scheme. This issue, which strikes at the heart of whether JPMorgan violated United States law governing foreign bribery, became a focal point of the investigation and the ensuing settlement negotiations.
Having observed how it can be done at the corporate level, wealthy Chinese decided to reverse the approach, and proceeded with outright bribes targeting America’s most selective universities.
* * *
But back to the college admissions scandal, where last week we reported that former USC soccer coach Laura Janke was cooperating with prosecutors after pleading guilty.
Janke’s guilty plea stood in contrast with our prior update on the scandal, where we noted that some parents had decided to “punch back” and vigorously defend themselves in court. “I expect a lot more guilty pleas,” Diane Ferrone, a criminal defense lawyer in New York who isn’t involved in the case, told Bloomberg about a week ago.
16 parents were indicted in the scandal about 2 weeks ago. Several weeks before that, we noted that parents charged in the scheme were seeking out “prison life consultants” to find out what life would be like in the big house.
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