- How To Solve The Migrant Crisis (In 2 'Easy' Steps)
Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,
Nick Giambruno: The migrant crisis is tearing Europe apart. What’s your take Doug?
Doug Casey: I'm all for immigration and completely open borders to enable opportunity seekers from anyplace to move anyplace else.
With two big, critically important, caveats:
1) there can be no welfare or free government services, so everyone has to pay his own way, and no freeloaders are attracted; and
2) all property is privately owned, to minimize the possibility of squatter camps full of beggars.
In the absence of welfare benefits, immigrants are usually the best of people because you get mobile, aggressive, and opportunity-seeking people that want to leave a dead old culture for a vibrant new one. The millions of immigrants who came to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had zero in the way of state support.
But what is going on in Europe today is entirely different. The migrants coming to Europe aren’t being attracted by opportunity in the new land so much as the welfare benefits and the soft life. For the most part they are unskilled and poorly educated.
What we’re talking about here is the migration of millions of people of different language, different race, different religion, different culture, different mode of living. If you're an alien and you're 1 out of 10,000, or 1,000, or 100, you're a curiosity, an interesting outsider. But an influx of millions of migrants is only going to destroy the old culture, and guarantee antagonism—especially when the locals have to pay for it. In many ways, what’s happening now isn’t just comparable to what happened 2,000 years ago with the migration of the Germanic northern barbarians into the Roman Empire. It’s potentially much more serious.
Nick Giambruno: I think pretty much anywhere in the world, whenever there’s an influx of foreigners to the degree that it changes the demographics or upsets the local economic applecart, it’s obviously going to cause problems.
For example, the Chinese are wearing out their welcome in many parts of Africa.
We saw this ourselves when we went to Zimbabwe earlier this year. Their numbers have grown so much that there are numerous Chinese mini cities within Zim.
Many people in Zim aren’t too happy with the Chinese dumping cheap products and upsetting the local economy. When we asked our driver to take us through a rough neighborhood, all we saw was a seemingly endless market, as far as I can tell, completely filled with Chinese products.
Doug Casey: Incidentally, it’s supposed to be official Chinese policy to migrate about 300 million Chinese to Africa in the years to come. They’re employed in building roads, mines, railroads, and other infrastructure. The Africans like the goodies, but don’t like the Chinese. It has the makings of a race war a generation or so in the future.
Nick Giambruno: Getting back to the crisis in Europe…
It’s well known the gigantic bureaucracy in Brussels produces ridiculous regulations and dictates. The EU has reduced the standard of living of the average European.
Of course this is related to the migrant issue too. The EU has a quota system which is supposed to distribute migrants across the union. Not all EU countries are happy with this.
For example, Hungary doesn’t believe it should have to accept any migrants if it doesn’t want to. Brussels disagrees and says Hungary is obligated to take in its “fair share” of migrants.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban recently said:
“Hungary does not need a single migrant for the economy to work, or the population to sustain itself, or for the country to have a future…
…This is why there is no need for a common European migration policy – whoever needs migrants can take them, but don't force them on us, we don't need them…
…For us migration is not a solution but a problem… not medicine but a poison, we don't need it and won't swallow it.”
The Eurocrats are furious with Orban. Luxembourg has called for Hungary to be expelled from the EU.
It’s clear the migrant issue is fueling resentment to the EU. It was a major factor in the Brexit vote. The unprecedented inflow of migrants has also helped anti-EU political parties grow in popularity.
This whole mess looks to me to be a self-inflicted wound. What do you think?
Doug Casey: The EU is a huge aggravating factor with the migrant problem. Brussels is full of globalists and doctrinaire socialists who not only promote bad policies, but make the whole continent pay for the mistakes of its most misguided members.
All Western European governments are massive welfare states that provide free food, housing, medical care, schooling, and living expenses for citizens. And even for residents who aren’t citizens. Benefits like these will naturally draw in poor people from poor countries.
Millions of Africans will want to emigrate, especially to the homelands of their ex-colonial masters in Europe. The colonizers are now themselves being colonized. If I was an African from south of the Sahara, I'd absolutely try to get to Italy or Greece or France or Spain or on my way to Sweden to cash in on the largesse of these stupid Europeans.
I’m a fan of what’s left of Western Civilization. I hate to see it washed away. But that’s what will happen if the floodgate is opened.
Nick Giambruno: I really don’t feel that sorry for the Europeans either. They largely brought this mess upon themselves.
It’s no coincidence that migrants are flowing to the countries with the most generous welfare benefits. If there weren’t so many freebies in these countries, there wouldn’t be so many migrants showing up to collect them.
It’s obvious the welfare state plays a major role in this crisis.
It’s also obvious that idiotic military interventions are a major factor.
The Europeans were and are enthusiastic supporters of the U.S. military interventions in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan—and perhaps most consequentially for them—Libya.
Before his overthrow by NATO, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had an agreement with Italy, which is directly to Libya’s north, across the Mediterranean Sea.
Gaddafi agreed to prevent migrants heading for Europe from using Libya’s 1,100 miles of coastline as a transit point. It was an arrangement that worked.
So it’s no shocker that when NATO helped overthrow the Gaddafi government in 2011, the migrant floodgates opened.
Doug Casey: Unless the Europeans get in front of this situation, it’s not just some refugees from the Near East they’ll have to deal with. Especially with the economic chaos of The Greater Depression, it’s going to be millions from Africa, and then perhaps millions more from Central Asia, and even India and Bangladesh. The world is becoming a very small place. What will happen when scores of thousands of migrants set up a squatter camp someplace—with no food, shelter, or sanitary facilities. The situation is likely to be most stressful…
Some will say, “But you have to be charitable, you can’t just let them starve because they’ve had some bad luck.” To that I’d say an individual, or a family, can have some bad luck. But the places these people come from have had “bad luck” for centuries. Their bad luck is the consequence of their political, economic, and social systems. It makes no sense, it’s idiotic, to import—at huge expense—masses of people that have a culture of “bad luck.”
At the most, if someone wants to help them, they should help them with their own money.
Nick Giambruno: Then there are the so-called economists and think tanks that say bringing in a bunch of migrants will “stimulate” the economy…
Doug Casey: There are hundreds of think tanks in the U.S. alone, most located within the Washington Beltway who appear to believe that. They’re populated by partisan academics, ex-politicos, retired generals, and others circulating through the revolving doors of the military/industrial/political/academic complex. They’re really just propaganda outlets, funded by foundations and donors who want to give an intellectual patina to their views.
Think tanks, and their cousins, the lobbyists and the NGOs, are mostly what I like to call Running Dogs, who act as a support system for the Top Dogs in the Deep State. Their product is “policy recommendations,” which influence how much tax you have to pay and how many new regulations you have to obey. Think tanks are populated almost exclusively by what have been called “useless mouths.” They’re no friends of the common man.
The migration policies they’re promoting are creating chaos.
Nick Giambruno: I just spent weeks on the ground in Italy, a frontline state in the migrant crisis. I was investigating the upcoming referendum and how it could be the first domino to fall in the collapse of the EU.
I can say for sure that the migrant issue is one of the largest on the mind of the average Italian voter.
Each day on average, a couple thousand migrants—sometimes many more—arrive in Italy. They’re mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, but also a large number are from the Indian subcontinent.
While I was in Rome I saw many. Lots of them aggressively beg and hawk trinkets. People now lock their doors to their homes when before they might not have.
I witnessed, a number of times, young male migrants sitting in the handicap spot on trams, buses, and other public transportation, refusing to give up their seats for elderly Italian women.
It’s anecdotal, but it's hard to think of a way to wear out your welcome faster than for regular Italians to see an elderly woman have to struggle to stand on a bus while a migrant, perfectly capable of standing, comfortably sits.
While at the Milan train station I witnessed migrants shoving aside a clerk at the ticket check to forcibly board a train. I could see the look on the faces of the other Italian passengers. They were dumbfounded at how the migrants were blatantly choosing to not live by the rules of society and nobody was doing anything about it.
Then in Como—one of the swankiest places in Italy and where George Clooney maintains a residence—I saw how many hundreds of migrants have turned the train station into a filthy makeshift camp. It was a bizarre blend of extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
To say Italians are fed up is a gross understatement.
Most feel Italy has enough problems without trying to solve the problems of the world. They wonder why they are forced to subsidize the migrants—who receive over $80 a month from the state, far more than their annual income in their home countries—while they are suffering under extreme economic hardship.
Italians largely blame the EU and pro-EU politicians for this mess.
So Doug, what should be done about this mess that doesn’t, at the same time, feed the growth of the State?
Doug Casey: Immigration across political borders doesn't have to be a problem. It’s simply a matter of maintaining the property rights of all concerned.
Let me repeat, and re-emphasize, what I said earlier. The free-market solution to the migrant situation is quite simple. If all the property of a country is privately owned, anyone can come and stay as long as he can pay for his accommodations. When even the streets and parks are privately owned, trespassers, beggars, squatters, migrants, vagrants, and the like have a problem. A country with 100% private property, and zero welfare, would only attract people who like those conditions. And they’d undoubtedly be welcome as individuals. But “migration” would be impossible.
So, again, I'm all for open borders. Anybody should be able to go anywhere if they can support themselves. In a free market society, however, nobody's going to give you money just for existing. You have to produce goods and services in order to be able to buy food, shelter, and clothing.
This is how the migration problem could be solved. You don't need the government. You don't need the army. You don't need visas or quotas. You don't need laws. You don't need treaties to solve the migration problem. All you need is privately owned property and the lack of welfare benefits.
Nick Giambruno: I agree, but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon, except in our dreams. What do you think are some likely outcomes?
Doug Casey: Well, I agree; they’ll come up with some cockamamie political solution. But the good news is that it will speed up the disintegration of the EU. It never made sense from the beginning to try to get Swedes to live by the same rules as Sicilians, or Germans by the same rules as Portuguese. Not to mention that the rules are entirely arbitrary. Worse, almost all the rules result in economic transfers, with legislated winners and losers. Deals like that always lead to resentment, among both the winners and the losers.
The euro, meanwhile, will approach its intrinsic value at an accelerating rate and eventually cease to exist. The Esperanto currency was doomed from the beginning. It was not just an “IOU nothing,” like the U.S. dollar, but a “Who owes you nothing” since it’s not even backed by a specific government’s taxing power.
My prediction that the Continent will one day just be a giant petting zoo for the Chinese is intact—assuming the current wave of migrants approve.
On the bright side, the collapse of the EU will accelerate the disintegration of nation-states everywhere. There are about 200 nation-states in the world. The international “elite,” the “intelligentsia,” the members of the Deep State everywhere, and organizations like the EU in Brussels, would like to see a much smaller number of more powerful states. Orwell anticipated just three mega-states in his dystopia, 1984. But the actual trend is in the opposite direction.
It’s not just the UK seceding from the EU, but Scotland from the UK. The Basques and Catalans may eventually secede from Spain. Belgium, a totally artificial country, will eventually break up into Flemish-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia. France has half a dozen secession movements. Italy was only unified into its present form from scores of principalities, duchies, and baronies in 1861. It was the same with Germany until Bismarck in 1871. The break-up of the USSR in 1990 into 13 smaller states was a good start, but Russia itself is a small empire with dozens of distinct ethnic and linguistic groups. You will rarely hear about this in the mass media, but there are dozens of secession movements throughout Europe.
There will be an exodus of capital and people from Europe to parts of Latin America, plus to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This is, obviously, bad for Europe and good for the recipient countries, since the emigrants will be educated and affluent. In recent years, I might not have included Latin America, but things have changed. Argentina and Colombia are liberalizing economically. The continent isn’t involved in any entangling alliances, isn’t on the migration highway, and has low costs. Why a wealthy European would stay in that stagnant and unstable continent when he could live better, and mostly tax-free, at a fraction of the cost in Argentina is a mystery to me. If I was a European, I would be leaving Europe at this point.
- Paul Craig Roberts Rages "Washington Is Leading The World To War"
Authored by Paul Criag Roberts,
What must the world think watching the US presidential campaign? Over time US political campaigns have become more unreal and less related to voters’ concerns, but the current one is so unreal as to be absurd.
The offshoring of American jobs by global corporations and the deregulation of the US financial system have resulted in American economic failure. One might think that this would be an issue in a presidential campaign.
The neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony is driving the US and its vassals into conflict with Russia and China. The risks of nuclear war are higher than at any previous time in history. One might think that this also would be an issue in a presidential campaign.
Instead, the issues are Trump’s legal use of tax laws and his non-hostile attitude toward President Putin of Russia.
One might think that the issue would be Hillary’s extremely hostile attitude toward Putin (“the new Hitler”), which promises conflict with a major nuclear power.
As for benefitting from tax laws, Pat Buchanan pointed out that Hillary used to her benefit a loss almost as large as Trump’s and during the Arkansas years Hillary even took a tax deduction for itemized pieces of used clothing donated to a charity, including $2 for one of Bill’s used underpants.
The vice presidential “debate” revealed that the Democratic Party’s candidate is so ignorant that he thinks Putin, who is democratically elected and has enormous public support, is a dictator.
Here is what we know about the two presidential candidates. Hillary has a long list of scandals from Whitewater and Vince Foster to Benghazi and violation of national security protocols. She is bought-and-paid-for by the oligarchs on Wall Street, in the mega-banks, and in the military-security complex as well as by foreign interests. The proof is the Clinton’s $120 million personal fortune and the $1,600 million in their foundation. Goldman Sachs did not pay Hillary $675,000 for three 20-minute speeches for the wisdom they contained.
What we know about Trump is that the oligarchic establishment cannot stand him and has ordered the Ministry of Propaganda, a.k.a., the US media, to destroy him.
Clearly, Hillary is the candidate of the One Percent, and Trump is the candidate for the rest of us.
Unfortunately, about half of the 99 percent is too dumb to know this.
Moreover, if Trump were to end up in the White House, it doesn’t mean he could prevail over the oligarchy.
The oligarchy is entrenched in Washington with control over economic and foreign policy positions, think tanks and other lobbyists, and the media.
The people control nothing.
What does the world think when they see Donald Trump damned because he doesn’t want war with Russia or the American economy moved offshore?
Where in American politics do Washington’s European, British, Canadian, Australian, and Japanese vassals see leadership worthy of their sacrifice of sovereignty and independent foreign policy? Where do they even see a modicum of intelligence?
Why does the world look to the most stupid, vile, arrogant, corrupt and murderous government on the planet for leadership?
War is the only destination to which Washington can lead.
- Top Gold Forecaster: “As Quickly As Gold Fell" May "Rally Back” on Global Risks
Top Gold Forecaster Says “As Quickly As Gold Fell” May “Rally Back” on Global Risks
Gold’s largest plunge in 14 months may soon reverse according to gold’s top forecaster in Q3 according to Bloomberg:
Looming risks from the U.S. presidential election in November to Britain starting talks to leave the European Union next year may boost its role as a haven, said Barnabas Gan, an economist at Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. in Singapore. Increasing shale oil output in the U.S. is also likely to cool the surge in crude prices, curbing inflation, he said.
“As quickly as gold fell, as quickly gold could rally back,” Gan said in a report received Wednesday. “Weak inflationary pressures may once again lift gold prices back to their previous shine.” He was the most accurate forecaster of the metal in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg data.
Bullion slumped Tuesday on speculation that the period of easy monetary policy is ending. The European Central Bank was said to be building an informal consensus to wind down bond purchases gradually, while Federal Reserve officials called this week for higher U.S. borrowing costs amid signs of an improving economy. Oil prices have also been rising, stoking inflation worries and boosting the odds of a rate hike.
Little evidence has emerged of investors cutting holdings in exchange-traded funds. Assets climbed 3.1 metric tons to 2,036.5 tons Tuesday to hold near the highest level since 2013, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Some further downward pressure is still expected in the near term from an eventual victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential poll on Nov. 8, which would price the risk of dramatic policy uncertainty under Donald Trump out of the market, according to BMI Research. Over the long term, low real interest rates would ensure precious metals remain an attractive investment, it said in a report dated October 4.
Bullion may average $1,400 next year, BMI forecasts.
Gold forecasting is a mugs game at the best of times but given the uncertain geo-political situation, the fragile banking system and the very strong fundamentals for gold, it is hard to argue with Barnabas Gan of OCBC or BMI. Gold should be meaningfully higher in the coming months and into 2017 as investors diversify into gold. Or rather we are likely to see dollars, euros, pounds and other fiat currencies continue to be devalued versus gold.
Read full article here
Gold and Silver Bullion – News and Commentary
Wounded Gold Bull Market Steadies After Worst Slump in 3 Years (Bloomberg)
Gold edges up as bargain hunters step in after falls (Reuters)
Fed Hike Shouldn’t Shake Investor Faith in Gold, Says Mine Chief (Bloomberg)
Gold steadies after extending losses to lowest since June (Reuters)
Banks must face U.S. gold rigging lawsuit (Reuters)
Video: Gold’s “Path Of Least Resistance Is Up”, Silver More Potential (Bloomberg)
Deutsche Shows Banking Remains “Accident Waiting To Happen” – Wolf (IrishTimes)
Deutsche Bank Brings Too-Big-to-Fail Quandary Home to Merkel (Bloomberg)
Gundlach: “Deutsche Bank Will Be Bailed Out But What About Credit Suisse” (ZeroHedge)
Gold & Silver Smash Was Orchestrated To Bailout Shorts (KingWorldNews)
Gold Prices (LBMA AM)
06 Oct: USD 1,265.50, GBP 994.30 & EUR 1,131.23 per ounce
05 Oct: USD 1,274.00, GBP 1,001.11 & EUR 1,134.37 per ounce
04 Oct: USD 1,309.15, GBP 1,026.90 & EUR 1,172.21 per ounce
03 Oct: USD 1,318.65, GBP 1,023.40 & EUR 1,173.99 per ounce
30 Sep: USD 1,327.90, GBP 1,025.01 & EUR 1,187.67 per ounce
29 Sep: USD 1,320.85, GBP 1,016.92 & EUR 1,177.14 per ounce
28 Sep: USD 1,324.80, GBP 1,020.10 & EUR 1,181.06 per ounceSilver Prices (LBMA)
06 Oct: USD 17.76, GBP 13.98 & EUR 15.88 per ounce
05 Oct: USD 17.80, GBP 13.99 & EUR 15.86 per ounce
04 Oct: USD 18.74, GBP 14.68 & EUR 16.78 per ounce
03 Oct: USD 19.18, GBP 14.89 & EUR 17.07 per ounce
30 Sep: USD 19.35, GBP 14.92 & EUR 17.33 per ounce
29 Sep: USD 19.01, GBP 14.61 & EUR 16.95 per ounce
28 Sep: USD 19.12, GBP 14.69 & EUR 17.05 per ounce
Recent Market Updates– Gold Buying ‘Opportunity’ After Surprise 3.4% Drop
– Deutsche Bank “Is Probably Insolvent”
– GBP Gold Rises 1.3% as Sterling Slumps On ‘Hard Brexit’ Concerns, Up 36% YTD
– Why Krugman, Roubini, Rogoff And Buffett Hate Gold
– ECB Refused “To Answer Questions” – Deutsche Bank “Systemic Threat” Is “Not ECB Fault”
– Euro “Might Start To Unravel” If Collapse Of Deutsche Bank
– Do You Really Own Your Gold?
– “Gold Will Likely Soar To A Record Within Five Years”
– Savings Guarantee? U.N. Warns Next Financial Crisis Imminent
– Gold Up 1.5%, Silver Surges 3% – Yellen Stays Ultra Loose At 0.25%
– Trump and Clinton Are “Positive For Gold” – $1,900/oz by End of Year
– Gold Bugs Rejoice – Central Banks Think You’re On To Something
– ‘Hard’ Brexit Looms For IrelandLog In and Buy Now To Lock In Lower Gold and Silver Prices
- More Illegal Immigrant Voters Discovered In Philly – "Just The Tip Of The Iceberg"
Over the past few weeks, we’ve written frequently about allegations of voter fraud from around the country. The key swing state of Virginia, in particular, seems to be a hotbed of potential corruption as evidenced by the actions of 19 year old “Young Virginia Democrat”, Andrew Spieles, who allegedly acted alone to re-register a bunch of dead voters in his home state (see our post here). Then there were the efforts of Virginia’s governor, and long-time Clinton confidant, Terry McAuliffe to register 200,000 felons to vote.
But Virginia, isn’t the only state with questionable voter registration practices. Fraudulent voter registrations have been uncovered in Colorado, where dead people were found to be voting multiple years after their death, and in Washington where the Turkish-born, non-citizen who killed five people at the Cascade Mall massacre has apparently been voting for years.
Now, the latest voter registration fraud comes from the “City of Brotherly Love” where, according to LifeZette, an investigation by Joseph Vanderhulst, an attorney with the Public Interest Legal Foundation, revealed that 86 “non-citizens” have been registered to vote in Phildelphia for years with half of them casting ballots in at least 1 election. What’s worse, the only reason Philadelphia election officials were even able to identify the “non-citizen” voters was because they had self-reported that they were erroneously registered to vote after a trip to the DMV to get a drivers license. According to Vanderhulst’s investigation, the DMV “errs on the side of registering voters” if there are any discrepancies on their forms.
Vanderhulst said city officials indicated they err on the side of registering voters.
“If the checked [citizenship] boxes are blank, they still register them,” he said. “That’s how these people are getting on the rolls … It’s just too easy. Maybe it’s supposed to be easy — but the price of that seems to be no discretion on the front end.”
Of the fraudulently registered voters in Philly, 59 were registered as Democrats while 21 had no party affiliation and only 6 were registered as Republicans…which we suspect will come as a surprise to almost no one. But apparently this isn’t a new phenomenon in Philadelphia. Vanderhulst’s investigation found that dozens of illegally registered voters are discovered each year and many of them have participated in multiple election cycles.
- The city canceled 23 registered voters in 2015. Of that group, seven voted in past elections, and three had been registered for more than a decade.
- The city canceled 30 registered voters in 2014. Of that group, 18 had voted in past elections, and eight had been registered for at least a decade.
- The city canceled 33 registered voters in 2013. Of that group, 15 had voted in past elections, and six had been registered for at least a decade.
Of course, none of these recent cases of voter fraud had any impact on a U.S. appeals court that recently denied efforts by Kansas, Alabama and Georgia to add a proof-of-citizenship requirement to federal voter registration forms. Among other things, the court cited “‘precious little’ evidence of voter fraud by noncitizens.” Per the Washington Post:
A U.S. appeals court panel that barred Kansas, Alabama and Georgia from adding a proof-of-citizenship requirement to a federal voter registration form wrote Monday that federal law leaves it to a federal elections agency — not the states — to determine whether such a change is necessary.
The panel wrote that although the document requirement “unquestionably” hinders voter registration groups ahead of the November elections, there was “precious little” evidence of voter fraud by noncitizens, the problem the states said the measure is intended to fight.
“Permitting the states to dictate the contents of the Federal Form would undermine” its role as a ‘backstop, the two-judge majority wrote. “The Commission, not the states, determines necessity.”
Which begs the question, exactly how much evidence of illegal voting is officially required before states will be allowed to implement common sense rules to prevent fraud?
- Why Democracy Rewards Bad People
Submitted by Hans-Hermann Hoppe via The Mises Institute,
One of the most widely accepted propositions among political economists is the following: Every monopoly is bad from the viewpoint of consumers. Monopoly is understood in its classical sense to be an exclusive privilege granted to a single producer of a commodity or service, i.e., as the absence of free entry into a particular line of production. In other words, only one agency, A, may produce a given good, x. Any such monopolist is bad for consumers because, shielded from potential new entrants into his area of production, the price of the monopolist's product x will be higher and the quality of x lower than otherwise.
This elementary truth has frequently been invoked as an argument in favor of democratic government as opposed to classical, monarchical or princely government. This is because under democracy entry into the governmental apparatus is free — anyone can become prime minister or president — whereas under monarchy it is restricted to the king and his heir.
However, this argument in favor of democracy is fatally flawed. Free entry is not always good. Free entry and competition in the production of goods is good, but free competition in the production of bads is not. Free entry into the business of torturing and killing innocents, or free competition in counterfeiting or swindling, for instance, is not good; it is worse than bad. So what sort of "business" is government? Answer: it is not a customary producer of goods sold to voluntary consumers. Rather, it is a "business" engaged in theft and expropriation — by means of taxes and counterfeiting — and the fencing of stolen goods. Hence, free entry into government does not improve something good. Indeed, it makes matters worse than bad, i.e., it improves evil.
Since man is as man is, in every society people who covet others' property exist. Some people are more afflicted by this sentiment than others, but individuals usually learn not to act on such feelings or even feel ashamed for entertaining them. Generally only a few individuals are unable to successfully suppress their desire for others' property, and they are treated as criminals by their fellow men and repressed by the threat of physical punishment. Under princely government, only one single person — the prince — can legally act on the desire for another man's property, and it is this which makes him a potential danger and a "bad."
However, a prince is restricted in his redistributive desires because all members of society have learned to regard the taking and redistributing of another man's property as shameful and immoral. Accordingly, they watch a prince's every action with utmost suspicion. In distinct contrast, by opening entry into government, anyone is permitted to freely express his desire for others' property. What formerly was regarded as immoral and accordingly was suppressed is now considered a legitimate sentiment. Everyone may openly covet everyone else's property in the name of democracy; and everyone may act on this desire for another's property, provided that he finds entrance into government. Hence, under democracy everyone becomes a threat.
Consequently, under democratic conditions the popular though immoral and anti-social desire for another man's property is systematically strengthened. Every demand is legitimate if it is proclaimed publicly under the special protection of "freedom of speech." Everything can be said and claimed, and everything is up for grabs. Not even the seemingly most secure private property right is exempt from redistributive demands. Worse, subject to mass elections, those members of society with little or no inhibitions against taking another man's property, that is, habitual a-moralists who are most talented in assembling majorities from a multitude of morally uninhibited and mutually incompatible popular demands (efficient demagogues) will tend to gain entrance in and rise to the top of government. Hence, a bad situation becomes even worse.
Historically, the selection of a prince was through the accident of his noble birth, and his only personal qualification was typically his upbringing as a future prince and preserver of the dynasty, its status, and its possessions. This did not assure that a prince would not be bad and dangerous, of course. However, it is worth remembering that any prince who failed in his primary duty of preserving the dynasty — who ruined the country, caused civil unrest, turmoil and strife, or otherwise endangered the position of the dynasty — faced the immediate risk either of being neutralized or assassinated by another member of his own family. In any case, however, even if the accident of birth and his upbringing did not preclude that a prince might be bad and dangerous, at the same time the accident of a noble birth and a princely education also did not preclude that he might be a harmless dilettante or even a good and moral person.
In contrast, the selection of government rulers by means of popular elections makes it nearly impossible that a good or harmless person could ever rise to the top. Prime ministers and presidents are selected for their proven efficiency as morally uninhibited demagogues. Thus, democracy virtually assures that only bad and dangerous men will ever rise to the top of government. Indeed, as a result of free political competition and selection, those who rise will become increasingly bad and dangerous individuals, yet as temporary and interchangeable caretakers they will only rarely be assassinated.
One can do no better than quote H.L. Mencken in this connection. "Politicians," he notes with his characteristic wit, "seldom if ever get [into public office] by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged….Will any of them venture to tell the plain truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the situation of the country, foreign or domestic? Will any of them refrain from promises that he knows he can't fulfill — that no human being could fulfill? Will any of them utter a word, however obvious, that will alarm or alienate any of the huge pack of morons who cluster at the public trough, wallowing in the pap that grows thinner and thinner, hoping against hope? Answer: may be for a few weeks at the start…. But not after the issue is fairly joined, and the struggle is on in earnest…. They will all promise every man, woman and child in the country whatever he, she or it wants. They'll all be roving the land looking for chances to make the rich poor, to remedy the irremediable, to succor the unsuccorable, to unscramble the unscrambleable, to dephlogisticate the undephlogisticable. They will all be curing warts by saying words over them, and paying off the national debt with money no one will have to earn. When one of them demonstrates that twice two is five, another will prove that it is six, six and a half, ten, twenty, n. In brief, they will divest themselves from their character as sensible, candid and truthful men, and simply become candidates for office, bent only on collaring votes. They will all know by then, even supposing that some of them don't know it now, that votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense, and they will apply themselves to the job with a hearty yo-heave-ho. Most of them, before the uproar is over, will actually convince themselves. The winner will be whoever promises the most with the least probability of delivering anything."
- Algos, Barriers, Rumors: Some Theories On What Caused The Pound Flash Crash
As reported moments ago, just around 7:07pm ET, cable snapped and plunged by what some say may have been as much as 1200 pips, dropping from 1.26 to as low as 1.14 according to some brokers, before snapping back up.
What caused the move? While nobody knows the catalyst behind the flash crash yet, Bloomberg has compiled several potential explanations.
- “The GBP/USD slide could be due to erroneous order and/or flows related to stop-loss orders or options given USD/JPY or EUR/USD aren’t moving much”, says Toshihiko Sakai, Tokyo-based chief manager of FX and financial products trading at Mitsubishi UFJ Trust & Banking.
- “Looks like there was a large GBP sell order amid thin liquidity”, says Kyosuke Suzuki, head of FX and money-market sales at Societe Generale.
- Others believe that the massive move has been partly attributed to algos failing after traders targeted downside option barriers, say three Asia-based FX dealers. Traders typically place their nearest orders within 100 ticks of spot, which was at roughly 1.26 before today’s plunge.
- The drop accelerated as liquidity disappeared, and dealers failed to load bids into their trading platforms, say traders. In other words, your plain, garden variety algo-facilitated flash crash, where the bid side suddenly disappears as one or more “liquidity providers” turn themselves off.
- One trader told Bloomberg that his FX pricing aggregator of eight contributors blacked out for 30 seconds amid an absence of bids.
- Furthermore, multiple large option barriers in the over-the-counter market were triggered, including 1.25 and 1.20, say traders. Traders say they missed buy orders much lower down and had to scramble to cover inherited short positions, thus contributing to the roughly 500-point rally.
Hopefully we will have a clear, official, and accurate answer from regulators for the crash soon: investors faith in broken markets is already non-existent as it is. However, if the May 2010 flash crash is any indication, the reason behind the collapse may not be forthcoming until 2021, and even then it will be blamed on some spoofer, living in his parents’ basement.
Another question: whether any FX brokerages will need a bailout a la the infamous FXCM, in the aftermath of the Swiss National Bank revaluation of January 2015, as clients find themselves margined out and underwater even as cable is steadily recovering most, if not all losses.
Whatever the reason, however, Kuroda will take two.
“Can i leave the EU too?” pic.twitter.com/hoXLxZ7vY5
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 6, 2016
- "The Most Important Ever" Payrolls Preview (Again)
The distribution of guesses for tomorrow's "most important payrolls print ever" or at least until next month, skews modestly to the upside after the biggest spike in ISM employment ever this week jarred some economists to become more optimistic, and side with Goldman Sachs expecting a Fed-inspiring drop in the unemployment rate, rise in average hourly earnings, and better than expected payrolls of 190K. As a result, while consensus expects a NFP rebound from 151K to 172K, the whisper number is around 200k. Anything above this would send December rate hike odds surging to the all important 70% or above, bond yields spiking and equities at the mercy of whichever way the risk parity machines were calibrated tomorrow.
Others disagree: Southbay Research is leaning on the bearish side, nothing the following positive and negative factors ahead of tomorrow's report:
The Good
- ISM Non-Mftg: Surges to 57.1 from 51.4
- ISM Mftg: Up to 51.5 from 49.4
- PMI Services: Up to 52.3 from 51
- Chicago PMI: Up 54.2 from 51.5
The Bad
- ADP: Payrolls drop (Forecast September 155K)
- PMI Mftng: Slips to 51.5 from 52
- Construction: drops -0.7% versus -0.3% prior month
- Corporate Profits 2Q: -1.7% y/y versus -2.2% prior quarter
- Durable Goods Orders (ex Trans): -0.4%
Employment indicators:
- ISM Non-Mftg: Employment Index surges to 57.2 from 50.7
- ISM Mftg: Employment Index ticks up to 49.7 from 48.3
- PMI Services: Weakest employment levels in 4.5 years
- PMI Mftg: Employment consistent with 115K jobs
It is worth noting that conflicting data is the hallmark of inflection points. Furthermore, as Southbay notes, "Forget Manufacturing, Focus on Services." Here is the full bearish case:
Look past manufacturing data for two reasons: (1) no real news here – manufacturing continues to be stuck in a low gear and (2) manufacturing doesn't factor much into September payrolls.
Services will drive the September payrolls. Specifically Leisure & Hospitality jobs.
As Summer vacation ends, restaurants, hotels and recreational hot spots wind down and layoff seasonal workers. The nominal level of layoffs is driven by exactly two things: the number of workers added and the amount of customer foot traffic.
A Good reason to Expect Heavier Layoffs: On a trailing 12 month basis, the Leisure Hospitality sector has added about the same number of jobs as the prior year.
What is different this year is that Restaurant operators have lost confidence.
According to the National Restaurant Association, the Restaurant Performance Index turned negative in August. The last time it was negative was February: that kicked off the weakest level of Restaurant payrolls since 2012.
Sales expectations remain weak and barely expansionary. Consequently staffing expectations have shifted into contractionary territory
Expect layoffs to at least equal, if not exceed, last year's.
Bottom line: The biggest driver for September Payrolls is Restaurant payrolls, and they are looking weak.
Whatever the actual number, expect the consensus to be vastly wrong as the last few months have been "volatile" outliers to say the least:
Going back to the bullish, "whsiper" outlier, Goldman expects a 190k increase in nonfarm payroll employment in September, above consensus expectations for a 172k gain, and up from their preliminary forecast of 175k. Although payroll growth slowed to 155k last month, subdued employment gains are not uncommon in August, and the trend growth rate in payrolls still looks solid, with the trailing 3- and 6-month averages at 232k and 175k, respectively.
Some observations from GS:
Their above-consensus payroll forecast primarily reflects improving underlying labor market fundamentals during the course of the month. Initial jobless claims continued trending down towards post-crisis lows, and nearly all other employment indicators from the various regional and national manufacturing and service sector surveys turned up. The ISM non-manufacturing survey’s employment index had its largest gain on record. In addition, we expect a modest rebound in employment in Louisiana, which fell by nearly 8k last month, likely due to adverse weather conditions. Offsetting these improvements, we look for a decline in employment in the education sector (specifically, private education services and state & local government education employment), which has been growing at a roughly 30k pace over the last three months, well above the +8k monthly average since 2011. Employment in the education sector has been highly volatile during September in recent years (Exhibit 1), and monthly gains have averaged -7k since 2011.
Arguing for a stronger report:
- Job availability: The Conference Board’s labor differential—the difference between the share of consumers saying jobs are plentiful vs. hard to get—rose 2.3pt to +6.3, reaching a new post-crisis high
- Jobless claims: The four-week moving average of initial jobless claims during the survey week fell by 7k to 258k. The continued downtrend in initial claims suggests that layoff activity across the economy remains minimal. Insured unemployment, or continuing claims, fell by 81k between the August and September survey weeks, and currently sits at post-crisis lows.
- Service sector surveys: On balance, the employment components of service sector surveys improved in September. The ISM non-manufacturing report’s employment index registered its largest increase on record, rising 6.5pt to 57.2. The NY Fed (+5.3pt to +8.1, not seasonally adjusted) and Philly Fed (+9.3pt to +19.3) surveys also rose. Offsetting these increases were declines in the Richmond Fed (-7pt to +6) and Dallas Fed (-1.4pt to +4.4) surveys. Service sector employment rose 150k last month, and has increased 164k on average over the last six months.
- Manufacturing surveys: Almost all of the employment components of the various monthly manufacturing surveys improved in September. The ISM manufacturing (+1.4pt to 49.7), Philly Fed (+14.7pt to -5.3), Dallas Fed (+7.3pt to +2.3) and Kansas City Fed (+7 to -3) rose, while the Richmond Fed (-20pt to -13) declined. Manufacturing employment fell by 14k in August, and has declined by 7k on average over the last six months.
Arguing for a weaker report:
- ADP: ADP reported a 154k gain in private payroll employment in September, below a revised +175k increase in August. Service-sector job gains softened a bit to 183k, manufacturing employment was flat, and construction employment fell 2k. Despite the softening in ADP employment, we have found this to have somewhat mixed value as an input towards forecasting nonfarm payrolls.
- Online job ads: The Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online (HWOL) report showed a small 0.4% increase in new online job ads in September, while total jobs listed fell by 1.9%. However, we put only limited weight on this indicator at the moment in light of recent research by Fed economists that argued that the HWOL ad count—which has departed significantly from the job openings figures in the official Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)—has been influenced by price increases for online job ads.
- Job cuts: According to the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report, job cuts rose 17.4% on a seasonally adjusted basis in September, although they remain roughly 25% lower than their year ago levels.
We expect the unemployment rate to decline to 4.8% in August from an unrounded 4.922% in August. The headline U3 rate was unchanged in August but is up from a low of 4.7% in May, while the broader U6 underemployment rate held steady at 9.7%. The household survey showed a modest 97k increase in employment versus a 176k increase in the labor force. The labor force participation rate remained at 62.8%, close to where it has been since the beginning of the year.
Average hourly earnings for all workers are likely to rise 0.3% in August, in large part reflecting favorable calendar effects. As a result, we expect the year-on-year rate to rise to 2.7% from 2.4%. The broader wage data remain encouraging: our wage tracker—which aggregates four measures of wage growth—stands at 2.6% year-on-year, a sign that diminishing slack is boosting wage growth.
Separately, many commentators have highlighted this year’s decline in average weekly hours worked in the establishment survey, fearing that it signals weakness in labor demand. The decline in average hours appears to be relatively widespread across states and industries (Exhibits 2 & 3).
Although it is hard to find a basis for dismissing the decline in hours worked, the series can be a bit noisy on a month-to-month basis. Furthermore, falling hours appear at odds with fundamental payroll growth figures and other labor market indicators over the same horizon, and we thus would hesitate to take an overly negative signal from these series as of yet.
* * *
And finally, if you needed any advice on trading the print, it's simple – no matter what the print – wait until US markets open and buy it all with both hands and feet:
- A Look Inside Key West's Battle To Prevent Release Of GMO Mosquitos
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
We’ve all heard of the Zika virus. What you probably haven’t heard of is British biotechnology company Oxitec, purchased last year by billionaire Randal Kirk. A company that has released A. aegypti killing GMO mosquitos in at least Brazil, Malaysia, Panama and the Grand Cayman islands. The company also planned a release in the Florida Keys, but has thus far been stopped by a group of determined activists.
Bloomberg covered the story in a fascinating article published earlier today titled, Florida’s Feud Over Zika-Fighting GMO Mosquitoes.
What follows are excerpts from that piece:
On a Tuesday morning in September, under a sweltering tropical sun on the island of Grand Cayman, 140,000 mosquitoes flit around in four large coolers in the back of a gray Toyota minivan. Behind the wheel is Renaud Lacroix, a Ph.D. in biology and medical entomology who works for the British biotechnology company Oxitec. A colleague, Isavella Evangelou, crouches behind him in a tight space next to the coolers. The minivan is idling on the side of a dirt road in West Bay, a quiet neighborhood where iguanas and roosters dart in and out of the yards of small homes painted in Caribbean pastels. The time has come for the mosquitoes to fulfill the purpose for which they were genetically engineered: a kamikaze mission to eliminate their own species.
It takes over two and half hours, emptying container after container, to release all the mosquitoes into West Bay. They’ve been doing this three times a week since July; residents used to grimace when they drove by, but now they barely glance over. The procedure seems more disruptive to those of us in the van. Each time Evangelou opens a container, a fair number of mosquitoes escape the wind tunnel and start buzzing around our heads. “There will be a few fliers, yeah,” Lacroix says with a smirk.
Male mosquitoes, he reminds me, aren’t the ones that bite. Just about the only thing male mosquitoes do, he says, is seek out females, which do the biting. Oxitec is trying to leverage this mating instinct to help wipe out one particular species of mosquito: Aedes aegypti, carrier and spreader of some of the worst insect-borne diseases known to medicine—dengue, malaria, and Zika. The A. aegypti mosquito has evolved to survive even the most effective pesticides. It can lay 500 eggs in just a bottle cap’s worth of water, and it prefers to bite humans over animals, so it lives in places where no one thinks to spray, like under the couch.
The idea behind Oxitec’s experiment is that if enough genetically modified male A. aegypti mosquitoes are released into the wild, they’ll track down large numbers of females in those hard-to-find places and mate with them. The eggs that result from any union with an Oxitec mosquito will carry a fatal genetic trait engineered into the father—a “kill switch,” geneticists call it. The next generation of A. aegypti mosquitoes will never survive past the larval stage, never fly, never bite, and never spread disease. No mosquitoes, no Zika.
The approach was developed by founder Luke Alphey, a British geneticist specializing in vector control, or the elimination of disease-bearing creatures. Oxitec has applied the method in Brazil, Malaysia, and Panama, often with partial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and claims to have reduced the A. aegypti population in tiny test areas by at least 90 percent. That’s a far better percentage than spraying, which usually hits about 50 percent and has a tendency to breed resistance, requiring more and more spraying to get the same low result.
Chief Executive Officer Haydn Parry has called Oxitec’s method “a dead end” for the A. aegypti species. And, of course, in the age of Zika, such a dead end couldn’t be more desirable. Since the news emerged last spring that a spike in cases of microcephaly in Brazil appeared to have been caused by Zika, politicians and public-health officials from around the world have been beating a path to Oxitec’s door. U.S. officials were among them, even as Congress dithered all summer before finally, in late September, approving the funding of countermeasures to prevent large outbreaks. “I don’t think time is on our side,” Parry told a congressional committee in May. “I think the utmost urgency is required. I’ve just come from Puerto Rico, and we could have a catastrophe on our hands if we are not careful.” The big winner if Oxitec ends up enlisted to fight Zika in the U.S. would be Intrexon, a biotech company run by billionaire Randal Kirk, which acquired Oxitec for $160 million in the summer of 2015.
This August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Oxitec’s first stateside experiment, in Key Haven, Fla., an unincorporated area separated by a narrow stretch of water from Key West. In many respects, you couldn’t ask for a better test site in America. It’s secluded, tropical, and surrounded by water, which prevents new mosquitoes from entering the area. If the Oxitec method works in Key Haven, then Florida, and the country, could have a powerful tool to help stop an incipient public-health crisis.
There is, however, an obstacle. Oxitec has been trying to conduct a trial in the Keys for seven years, ever since a dengue outbreak there. Local opponents have thwarted those attempts for years, and now they’ve forced a pair of referendums, set for November, on the Key Haven test. Officials from the local Mosquito Control District have pledged to be guided by that vote—even if it means saying no to the FDA’s approved experiment, with a major Zika crisis looming over Florida. In public meetings, on local radio, and, of course, online, opponents have all but commandeered the conversation about mosquitoes and Zika in the Keys. They call Oxitec’s tactics unethical and underhanded. They call the company’s science untested, unproven, and unsafe. Above all, they’re worried about unintended consequences. Their not-so-affectionate name for the Oxitec mosquitoes: Frankenflies.
The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (MCD) is run by a board of five commissioners—elected officials, not bureaucrats—and commands a $10 million annual operating budget and 69 full-time employees. When there’s trouble, the board can decide more or less unilaterally how to deal with it. In 2009, when A. aegypti brought dengue to the Keys for the first time in nearly eight decades, the board responded with an aggressive approach that saw workers go door to door to persuade residents to eliminate standing water and take other preventive measures. The disease subsided, but only after 88 people were infected. That was when the Mosquito Control District went searching for something that might be capable of wiping out A. aegypti completely. Enter Oxitec.
In 2011 the MCD announced that all of the city of Key West—its 25,000 citizens, its millions of visitors—would be subject to a trial of Oxitec’s technology, overseen by the FDA. The MCD said the price tag would be less than $10 per resident, and it expected to break even on the investment by requiring less aerial spraying against the mosquito. The Keys, however, have no shortage of activists who know how to push back against government. Ed Russo is chairman of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, a group formed after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He’s also worked as a business consultant to Donald Trump, and recently wrote a short e-book titled Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero. (Trump was the first donor to the coalition.) Russo’s group was among those incensed that the MCD appeared to be fast-tracking the Oxitec experiment by having it overseen by the FDA, which would treat the GMO technology as an animal drug, rather than as a biopesticide, which might have required a complete environmental impact statement from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “If you even want to take down one tree in a wetland, you need an EIS,” Russo says. “And these clowns don’t want to do an EIS? And we’re considered anti-science?”
At a particularly heated community meeting with the MCD board in 2012, Russo asked a series of questions about Oxitec’s protocols and whether the MCD was prepared for problems. Russo says the board had no answers for him that day, and no answers over the next two months. Then the MCD announced that, after consulting with the FDA, it had decided to move the venue for the experiment. Instead of Key West, the proposed trial would be conducted in Key Haven, a small community of 144 homes on a neighboring island. “That’s when all the flags went up and the sirens wailed,” Russo says. “Would you let your family take part in a scientific experiment without your informed consent in writing? If you’re a prisoner in an institution in the United States, you are given that right.”
Mila de Mier, a real estate agent in the Keys, started a Change.org petition to “say no to genetically modified mosquitoes in the Florida Keys,” which eventually got 170,000 signatures from around the country. Activists worldwide offered support and expertise. It took de Mier years, and the threat of a lawsuit, to get the MCD to say how many A. aegypti mosquitoes it estimated were in Key Haven. When she secured the data, earlier this year, it indicated that there were practically none—or at least not enough to call for traditional spraying methods. De Mier, who’s emerged as a grass-roots leader of the resistance, says she realized that as successful as Oxitec’s method was said to be, it had never faced serious public scrutiny before coming to the U.S. “I saw what they did in Brazil,” she says. “They brought a truck around with a loudspeaker, and they made a song. ‘God sent you the mosquito to heal you.’ That was the public engagement.” (Oxitec does use vehicles with loudspeakers in Brazil, but it also distributes more scientifically based information.)
As Oxitec prepared its full proposal to the FDA, the company released more details, and others started asking questions. Meagan Hull, a longtime resident, wondered why, if Oxitec’s method was all about male GMO mosquitoes, did the company’s data say it also let loose some females in its test—about 1 per 1,000 males? Did those females mate, and breed, and bite? Had anyone studied the long-term effects of that? Wouldn’t some Keys residents almost certainly be bitten by a GMO mosquito? Even the males, some said, might create antibiotic resistance in the community, because all the mosquitoes Oxitec grows in its lab are doused during the larval stage with tetracycline, to bypass their kill switches and allow them to grow to adulthood. “The tetracycline’s going to cause resistance,” says John Norris, a local physician. “They care nothing about the fact that they are breeding resistant germs of no purpose.” He’s gotten more than a dozen local doctors to sign a letter objecting to the plan.
David Bethune, a computer programmer and artist, wondered why Oxitec seemed so sanguine about long-term effects. “We don’t understand how the science works, but we do understand that when you put a genetically modified organism into the wild, there are going to be other consequences than just reducing the population,” he says. Chief among them: What might take A. aegypti’s place in the ecosystem? Something stronger? “Just to say, ‘We’ve got it all worked out’ is really unnecessarily arrogant,” Bethune says. “We’re the little guinea pigs on an island that they thought of as Margaritaville. They thought that we would all be out having a cocktail and just not care?”
Then the Zika crisis emerged late last year, and the debate went off the rails. In January a Reddit thread, posted in a forum known for floating conspiracies, raised the possibility that it was Oxitec’s testing in Brazil that had caused the birth defects public health officials were attributing to Zika. The anonymous author posited that some of Oxitec’s GMO offspring do, in fact, survive and pass on their genes, blending with Zika to create a megavirus that brought about microcephaly. The entire notion has been disproved—chiefly because the concentration of birth defects in Brazil is located 400 miles from Oxitec’s test site, and the A. aegypti mosquito travels only a few hundred yards in its lifetime. But that hasn’t kept some opponents in the Keys from revisiting the question, even now.
“I have nothing against spraying whatsoever,” said Judy Martinez, another neighbor, at the same meeting. “But I am against monkeying around with Mother Nature. They’re going to kill us off, that’s what’s going to happen.” The resolution was ultimately voted down.
The Florida Keys Environmental Coalition takes no official position on the Oxitec-Zika conspiracy theory. But Barry Wray, the group’s executive director, is willing to keep the conversation going. “We’re witnessing the results of the microcephaly question gradually evolve,” he says. Wray is also happy to give oxygen to another roundly denied conspiracy theory—that the local government was won over by Oxitec in a less-than-aboveboard way. “There’s some more nefarious things that have occurred and are occurring right now, and I’m not at liberty to talk about those right at the moment,” he says.
Derric Nimmo, Oxitec’s head of public-health research, remains slightly baffled by the dissidents’ claims. “I’ve done town hall meetings, done board meetings, gone door to door,” he says; the exchanges are mostly cordial, but strained. “I’ve kind of turned into, rather by accident, a communication person for Oxitec in the Keys.” It’s not a natural fit for him. “I’m a scientist at heart. It’s my background, you know, a Ph.D. My postdoc was all about molecular biology in insects. And so I’ve had to learn to try and—not dumb that down, that’s the wrong word—to try to communicate that in a simple way that people can understand.”
He moves through the criticisms as quickly as he can. Even if some females are released, he says, they will have the same kill switch gene the males have, and their offspring will die in the larval stage. If the females do end up biting anyone, it would have the same impact as any ordinary mosquito bite; all the lab-bred mosquitoes are screened for disease before being released. The amount of tetracycline used on the mosquitoes is “extremely low,” he says, trivial next to what you’d find in, say, a typical pig farm. As for long-term impacts, the GMO mosquitoes never effectively reproduce, which means the entire system is closed. “Within six to eight weeks there’s no evidence of [Oxitec mosquitoes] in the wild at all,” he says.
During the 60-day public-comment period for the FDA’s review of Oxitec’s proposal, he says, “there were 2,700 comments, and the FDA, the CDC, and the EPA have looked at all of those, and they’ve said there’s nothing here scientifically valid that changes our minds.” Yet for years now he’s been forced into a rear-guard action.
The whole Reddit conspiracy theory drives Nimmo to distraction. “We’ve also had several articles from independent people, saying this is not true, but it does keep coming up, all the time. So we just have to keep answering it.”
The swelling controversy in the Keys was enough to force two separate referendums on Nov. 8—one for Key Haven residents and one for all of Monroe County, which contains the Keys and a portion of the Everglades. The results won’t be binding, but three of the five Mosquito Control District commissioners have promised to honor the will of the people.
Only 3 of the 5?
If the Keys scuttle the project, it may go against broader public opinion. A national survey released in February by Purdue University found that 78 percent of those surveyed supported using GMO mosquitoes to fight Zika. Last month a bipartisan group of 61 Florida state legislators issued a statement asking the FDA to use emergency powers to give them Oxitec right now. “What’s happened now is you have various mosquito districts saying, ‘Why can’t we use this technology?’ ” says Parry, Oxitec’s CEO. If the vote goes against Oxitec, “we would move the trial somewhere else,” he muses. “But obviously it would be more preferable and more convenient to do it where we planned to do it.”
“Broader public opinion” is entirely irrelevant in this case. The only people who should have a say are those living in the communities into which GMO mosquitos will be released. If people all over the nation are clamoring for this, finding a willing community shouldn’t be an issue.
In Grand Cayman, the government is moving forward. In a few years, A. aegypti might be eliminated from an entire island, the first time such a thing has happened. Maybe that will lead to something unexpected, or maybe it won’t. In the Keys, some would rather take their chances with Zika than risk the unknown. “We are setting a standard for the rest of the world,” de Mier says. “Today it’s a mosquito, tomorrow God only knows what is going to happen.”
Here’s the entire article: Florida’s Feud Over Zika-Fighting GMO Mosquitoes.
- "I Listened To A Trump Supporter… Now I Understand"
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Bltizkrieg blog,
The following article by David A Hill Jr is simply outstanding.
Here are some powerful excerpts from the piece: I Listened to a Trump Supporter
I talked at length with a Trump supporter I grew up around. I wanted to understand. I respected her growing up. I wanted to know why a person as kind and compassionate as I remember her is voting for someone like Donald Trump.
She was a family friend, a good person. In rural Ohio, everything was tight. Money, jobs. If you really needed quick cash, she’d put you to work doing landscaping. She’d pay fairly and reliably for the area.
She’s voting for Donald Trump. I disagree with her choice, but I understand why she rejects Clinton so fiercely, and why she’s been swept up in Donald Trump’s particular brand of right-wing populism. I feel that on the left, it’s increasingly easy to ignore these people, to disregard them, to write them off as racists, bigots, or uneducated. I think that’s a loss for everyone involved, and that sometimes listening can help you to at least understand why a person is making the choices they make, so you can work on the root causes. For her, the root cause isn’t racism. In fact, I remember her as one of the only people in the area who proudly hired black workers, in a place where that was a huge issue. She fought over that choice.
But that’s enough background. Let me relay a bit of what she told me.
She’s a person who built her business from the ground up. She wasn’t rich, but was very comfortable for the area. She had a nice house, a nice car, and was stable. She achieved the American dream of not having to struggle. Things changed during the housing crisis. A landscaping business requires customers who need landscaping, and people who don’t own homes just don’t need landscaping. In some of these neighborhoods, one in five people lost their homes. That almost immediately turns a successful landscaping business into a struggling one.
Then there was a domino effect. She couldn’t pay for her lawn-care equipment leases and loans. That hurt her work efficiency. Then, she lost her car. But that didn’t stop the payments. Then, she lost her house. She slowly had to let go all of her employees, until it was just her, hand-mowing lawns for cash the way you might expect a high school student in the summertime.
She told me that every week, it seemed there was another default letter, another foreclosure, another bank demanding more blood from her dry veins. To her, that pile of default notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar to Hillary Clinton’s top donor list.
She lost everything she worked so hard for. Obama swore he was going to help. The Wall Street bailout did seem to help Wall Street. But it did absolutely nothing for her. She turns on the news and sees how the Dow Jones is doing better than ever. But that didn’t bring her house and livelihood back. Liberals insist that Obama’s made her life better. But, now she’s driving a car that falls apart randomly while having to pay those same banks for a car she doesn’t own and never will. It’s difficult to convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is better. And it’s disingenuous to try. You can break down the specifics, sure. But when someone’s hungry, and you’re busy silencing their complaints by telling them how well world hunger is improving, you’re just going to upset them.
This is not a person who is stupid or racist. She knows Bush caused the economy collapse with his irresponsible tax policies and wars. But she saw liberals as fighting for the banks’ recovery, to hell with her needs. She sees in Hillary someone who celebrates that approach. Who measures US success by the success of multinational mega corporations?—?corporations who undercut and destroy local businesses. This is a person who grew up in a town with a friendly neighborhood general store, a locally-owned hardware store, farmers’ markets, florists, and auto shops. All of these businesses closed when Walmart moved into town. All their owners now work at that Walmart for a fraction of their previous wages, no benefits, and no hope for something better, something of their own. And now, she sees a free trade supporting former Walmart executive about to come in to office, and it feels like salt in her community’s wounds.
This is a wounded person. Insulting her or continuing to hurt her isn’t going to help. She’s swept up in Trump’s message because she feels someone’s finally listening. Right-wing populism is an awful thing. But desperate people with their backs against the wall will grasp on to whatever they feel will bring a change. Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable for these people.
Over the past few years, she tried getting back in her business. But a corporation moved in and is operating far cheaper, using undocumented immigrant labor. I should note: She specifically said she doesn’t hold it against the migrant workers. As she said, “They’ve got to take whatever jobs they can get. Just like we do. It’s not their fault. They didn’t choose to make prices so low that legal businesses couldn’t compete.” She was literally a “job creator”. And she wasbeing priced out by the very people Donald Trump insists are pricing her out. That hurts everyone, and it adds an air of authenticity to what he says.
I asked her if she supports Trump’s Mexico wall. She told me, “It doesn’t matter if I do. Hillary wants a wall, too. That wall’s gonna happen.” She wasn’t simply making this up. She’s heard this from many sources, Clinton being one of them. So to her, the idea of a border wall is a non-issue. I pressed her on the issue, and she said she thinks, “It’s a waste of money. If someone wants to cross the border, they’re gonna cross the border.”…
A few times, she seemed ashamed of things Trump’s said or done. I’d ask her to unpack her feelings. She said he sometimes upsets her, but “If you wait and wait for a flawless candidate, you’ll never find one.” She said she’d be much prouder to vote for Trump if he’d tone down his rhetoric.
This fits into my strongly held belief that people are looking for an excuse to vote for Trump. All he has to do to win is tone down some of his more heinous and idiotic tendencies.
I talked to her a bit about Bernie Sanders, to see what she thought of him. She told me, “He seemed like a nice enough guy. But I didn’t pay him much mind because there was no way he was gonna beat Clinton.” I talked with her about his platform, his policy proposals. She lit up. She told me, “It’s a real shame he didn’t make it.” She told me that if she knew him, his record, and his proposals, she’d have voted for him. I said that since the primary concluded, Hillary’s shifted some to adopt policies similar to his, and I asked if that changed her mind. She told me, “It doesn’t matter what she says. It matters what she’s done.”
No amount of insulting her from an ivory tower is going to change her mind. No amount of guffawing about her lack of education, her self-deception, her racism, or her internalized misogyny is going to change her mind. The only thing she’ll listen to is a promise of real change to the system that’s hurt her. If the Democratic Party can’t offer her a viable alternative, we’re going to see another neck-and-neck election in 2020, and in 2024, and in 2028.
These people need a populist answer. They need someone willing to listen to their very real concerns, and offer solutions that don’t look like Band-Aids on bullet wounds. If they had that on the left, we wouldn’t even be discussing Ohio as a “swing state”.
Right now, this is the discourse we’re seeing about Trump supporters. This only emboldens those attitudes. To people like her, this feels like the left is laughing at her for her unwillingness to get in line and support the things that have left her broke and broken.
The above excerpts are not the entire piece. You should read the whole thing: I Listened to a Trump Supporter.
The more deeply I think about this election, the more I agree that the above sentiments motivate Trump voters far more than feelings of racism or hate. As I noted in a piece published a few weeks ago, The Status Quo vs. Donald Trump:
This isn’t about me. This is about the American voter, and the more time passes, the more I understand the motivations of the vast majority of Trump supporters. It isn’t xenophobia or racism, it’s a vote against the status quo and the way they’ve strip mined and destroyed this country. It’s a FU vote and a major gamble, but it’s not as irrational or hateful as you might think.
This doesn’t mean that Trump won’t betray his supporters and prove to be the Republican version of Barack Obama, but it does mean that the dominant media narrative characterizing Trump supporters as a bunch of racist, uneducated brutes is pretty much just dishonest, elitist propaganda.
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