Real US corporate profits are a function of the dollar

The Long Now, Pt. 4 – Snip! (or Ben Hunt nails it)

"This is a picture of the billionaire CEO of a government-supported too-big-to-fail megabank, telling his 60 Minutes interviewer that he has no control over his compensation, as that’s determined by the CEO’s board of directors. Interestingly enough, this is also a picture of the billionaire Chairman of that board.

And it’s not just the billionaire CEO bank manager. It’s his centimillionaire lieutenant bank managers. It’s the dozens of decamillionaire sub-lieutenant bank managers. All of them made generationally rich from stock-based compensation in a company where the government guarantees their success. None of them entrepreneurs. None of them risk-takers with their own skin in the game. All of them … lifer managers of a too-big-to-fail bank.

But, hey, the stock is up! They’ve done a good job! What’s the problem, Ben?

That’s exactly the problem. The problem is that we have redefined capitalism to mean “the stock is up”. We have redefined capitalism to NOT mean Smith’s invisible hand or Schumpeter’s creative destruction or productivity-enhancing and risk-taking investments in the real economy. We have redefined capitalism to ONLY mean financial asset price inflation in the here and now. By any means necessary. So that’s what we get. From the Fed, from the White House, from corporate management … that’s what we get in the Long Now … an endless series of policies and decisions in service to capitalism-as-financialization, where capital markets are maintained as a political utility."

Link here.

Quantitative easing is MMT for the wealthy

Where is the Public Outrage About our Deadly $2 Trillion Quagmire Fueled with Lies?

"In the wake of 9/11, unblinking support for an ever-growing military became a fundamental part of patriotism and questioning it became treasonous. This sentiment was further fueled by our growing defense contractor industry, which received nearly half our military budget by 2018 ($358 billion). Our civilian foreign affairs resources turned into military assets. And with its 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF), Congress traded in its oversight role for that of enabler."

Link here.

Corporate tax cuts fund corporate profits with Federal/public debt

Top 1.0% of earners see wages up 157.8% since 1979

"Over the last four decades since 1979, the top 1.0% saw their wages grow by 157.8% and those in the top 0.1% had wages grow more than twice as fast, up 340.7%. In contrast those in the bottom 90% had annual wages grow by 23.9% from 1979 to 2018. This disparity in wage growth reflects a sharp long-term rise in the share of total wages earned by those in the top 1.0% and 0.1%."

Link here.

Two charts from S&P Global - foreign revenue for US corporations

Link here.

Indispensable No More? How the American Public Sees U.S. Foreign Policy

Its about fucking time . . .

"America’s unipolar moment which arrived after the end of the Cold War is no more. Policymakers like to think America plays by a different set of rules than – or even makes the rules obeyed by – other countries. But the American public can see how U.S. actions overseas can set the country back. In the eyes of its
citizens, the United States is losing its omnipotence, its moral leadership, its exceptionalism.

Pax Americana is unwinding. China’s rise certainly challenges it, but other phenomena do too. Technological changes, environmental crises, mass migrations, and the resurgence of ultranationalism and authoritarianism all complicate America’s international influence.

The question Washington now confronts is not how they will creatively respond to new challenges, but whether they will. If Washington chooses to believe nothing much has changed, that the international institutions and rules America championed will regain their legitimacy, that America’s military dominance
can help midwife democratic governments despite a few recent aberrations, then America risks giving the same old answers to new and urgent questions."

Link here.

Report outlines UAE's 'immensely influential' lobbying in US

The Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative (FITI), a program of the Center for International Policy, analyzed every Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) Supplemental  Statement filed in 2018 by organizations working on behalf of clients in the United Arab Emirates. From this analysis we found:

• 20 different firms served as registered foreign agents in the U.S. for clients in the UAE;
• Over $20 million in payments from UAE clients to these firms;
• 3,168 reported political activities done on behalf of the UAE by those firms;
• UAE foreign agents contacted more than 200 Congressional offices, 18 think tanks, and most mainstream media outlets;
• Considerable interactions between UAE foreign agents and think tanks funded by the UAE;
• Nearly $600,000 in campaign contributions from these firms and their registered foreign agents

UAE - bunch of motherfuckers.

Link here.

Ready, Fire, Aim: U.S. Interests in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria

"It is widely claimed that the United States was inadequately engaged in the Syrian maelstrom. Nonsense! Since 2014, we have spent well over $50 billion in appropriated funds to train, arm, and otherwise support various factions in the conflict, including some with direct links to al Qaeda. This fiscal year alone, DoD has budgeted $15.3 billion and the Department of State about $1 billion for Syria. In total disregard of international law, we have carried out well over 11,000 air and missile strikes against both government and rebel forces in Syria and deployed about 2,000 U.S. troops there to support secessionist factions. We cannot escape a considerable measure of moral responsibility for both the perpetuation of the conflict in Syria and some of the 200,000 undocumented and 375,000 documented Syrian dead, about 125,000 of whom have been verified as pro-government, 133,000 as anti-government, and 112,000 as noncombatant, neutral civilians. But we have made it clear we will not contribute to Syria’s reconstruction."

Link here.

Insane and Ill-Advised: Trump’s Future War with Iran, Part 1

''To better understand Iranian foreign policy, it is important to recognize that the history Iranians remember of their relations with America is very different from the history Americans remember. Americans’ memory centers on the hostage crisis; terrorist actions such as the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut (April 1983, 63 dead), U.S. and French peacekeepers’ barracks in Beirut (October 1983, 305 dead), and Iranian overseas terror attacks in the 1980s and 1990s; and Iran’s supply of advanced weapons to Shia militias as they targeted American servicemen in Iraq during the war there.

Younger Iranians’ memory, on the other hand, centers less on the coup against Mossadegh and more on the Iran-Iraq War — on the international community’s failure to condemn Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran, its support for Saddam even as he used chemical weapons against Iranian troops, Iraqi actions (including the gassing of Halabja and the missile attack on the frigate USS Stark) for which the U.S. blamed both sides, and the U.S. downing of the Iranian airliner. Nearly all of Iran’s neighbors and most of the great powers supported Saddam in one way or another. That led to a strong Iranian sense of isolation, including distrust of the international community, of international institutions, and especially of the United States."

Link here.

Supporting the stock market is official US government policy

Link here.

Israel's settlements: 50 years of land theft explained

Today, between 600,000 and 750,000 Israelis live in these sizeable settlements, equivalent to roughly 11 percent of the total Jewish Israeli population.

They live beyond the internationally recognised borders of their state, on Palestinian land that Israel occupied in 1967, comprising East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Since then, the Israeli government has openly funded and built settlements for Israeli Jews to live there, offering incentives and subsidised housing.

So why have these housing compounds caused so much rancour and been called a threat to the prospect of peace in the Holy Land?

Follow this journey to find out.

Link here.

I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family

Soon it was the only programming he ingested other than talk radio. He became addicted to the anger. He thought if he was angry at all the “injustices” Fox News presented to him he must be righteous. He grew more irritable. He banned watching any news other than Fox News in his presence and failure to adhere would lead to abusive emotional outbursts. Soon he lost his sense of humor. Everything became about punching down at gays and minorities. Then he started making derisive comments about Democrats during family functions when it was considered inappropriate. He declared his favorite show was “The Five”, which then led to it being required viewing at our dinner time. If any real life occurrence interferes with him viewing “The Five” our family would be subjected to hours of screaming and cursing. He then became more paranoid, claiming that power or cable outages were a plot by the Democrats (who secretly control everything).

Link here.

Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism

In general, religious beliefs tend to differ from empirical beliefs. Although people may think subjectively of religious belief as a true or false representation of how the world is, it is notable that certain religious beliefs do not generally update in response to evidence, and that conservatism is especially notable in the case of fundamentalist beliefs. Empirical beliefs are indications of how the world appears to us and are updated according to accumulated evidence. Fundamentalist religious beliefs, in comparison, do not track and predict variation in the world. Rather, they appear to track, and predict, social group-level commitments (Bulbulia & Schjoedt, 2012). For this reason, it has been hypothesized that religious beliefs encourage cooperative exchange (Bulbulia & Sosis, 2009b). This social-functionalist account also predicts that religious commitments are affected by the capacity for cognitive flexibility. To test this prediction, we hypothesized that impaired cognitive flexibility would result in greater religious resolve, which we operationalized using previously validated religious fundamentalism scales.

As implied earlier in the introduction, previous research indicates that certain forms of religiosity are associated with a preference for certainty and avoidance of uncertainty (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). In particular, fundamentalism is associated with the need for cognitive closure (Brandt & Reyna, 2010; Saroglou, 2002), which mediates the relationship between fundamentalism and prejudice towards value-violating outgroups, with close-mindedness and preference for order and predictability accounting for the effect (Brandt & Reyna, 2010). A need for cognitive closure represents the desire for predictability and rigidity instead of openness, and is correlated with conservative, conforming values (Calogero, Bardi, & Sutton, 2009; Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). Recently, a number of studies have found an inverse relationship between analytic thinking and religious disbelief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Norenzayan, Gervais, & Trzesniewski, 2012; Willard & Norenzayan, 2013). These studies describe analytic thinking as an underminer of religious beliefs which may either suppress default tendencies to form religious beliefs or inhibit culturally acquired concepts. Finally, it has been argued that religious beliefs arise from deficits in perceptual tracking of ecological variation (e.g. Foster & Kokko, 2009; Guthrie, 1993). Collectively, these findings predict that fundamentalism may be related to reduced cognitive flexibility and trait openness, and that these cognitive strategies critically rely on processing in the PFC.

The present findings contribute a piece to what is becoming an increasingly complex depiction of religious beliefs that will occupy investigators for many decades because of its historically key contribution to human social behavior. In summary, we found that adherence to fundamentalist religious doctrine is partly mediated by diminished flexible conceptual thinking and reduced openness and that the key cortical region supporting the representation of diverse religious belief as well as flexible conceptual thinking is the dlPFC.

Link here.

Watch the film the Israel lobby didn’t want you to see

The Electronic Intifada has obtained a complete copy of The Lobby – USA, a four-part undercover investigation by Al Jazeera into Israel’s covert influence campaign in the United States.

We are releasing the leaked film simultaneously with France’s Orient XXI and Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar, which have respectively subtitled the episodes in French and Arabic.

The film was made by Al Jazeera during 2016 and was completed in October 2017.

Link here.

The Sutta About Bahiya, Part 1

This time the Buddha relented and said, “Well then Bahyia, you should train yourself like this: Whenever you see a form, simply see; whenever you hear a sound, simply hear; whenever you smell an aroma, simply smell; whenever you taste a flavor, simply taste; whenever you feel a sensation, simply feel; whenever a thought arises, let it just be a thought. Then “you” will not exist; whenever “you” do not exist, you will not be found in this world, another world or in between. That is the end of suffering.”

In that moment of hearing this brief explanation of the Dhamma from the Buddha, Bahiya was immediately released from all forms of suffering generated by clinging, desiring, aversion and ignorance. The Buddha then went on his way.

----------------------------

Real practice is not about setting up some ideal of practice or the spiritual life; something to strive towards and attain in some distant future. This just creates more conflict in the mind between the so-called “ideal” and the actual and leaves us living in the future rather than learning how to live fully right here and right now. This is about doing what Bahyia did; having some willingness to honestly assess our lives and how we are living them and then to act directly and immediately on that information. This means a willingness to be attentive to our actual life as it actually unfolds in this moment. Begin to take a look and see where and when there is a gap between your understanding and how you are actually living in the light of that understanding. This practice alone can revolutionize our life.

Link here.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly-informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest-group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.

But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that—collectively—ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect. Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational advantages of elites. Yes, detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and status. Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives tend to know a lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is likely to be crucial to their own well-being? Most important, we see no reason to think that informational expertise is always accompanied by an inclination to transcend one's own interests or a determination to work for the common good.

All in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a more certain guardian of its own interests than any feasible alternative.

Link here.

Washington warned us about the Israeli lobby

Too bad America's "patriots" don't know their own history.  From George Washington's farewell address of 1796: 

"In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests. The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils. Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.

Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."

Link here.

Israel Is Not America’s Ally

There are few words in U.S. foreign policy debates used more frequently and with less precision than ally and alliance. Our politicians and pundits use these terms to refer to almost every state with which the U.S. has some kind of security relationship, and it always grossly exaggerates the nature and extent of the ties between our governments. The exaggeration in Israel’s case is greatest of all because it is routinely called our “most important ally” in the region, or even our “most cherished ally” in all the world. These are ideological assertions that are not grounded in any observable reality. Dozens of other states all over the world are better allies to the United States than the “most cherished ally” is, and they don’t preside over an illegal occupation that implicates the U.S. in decades of abuses and crimes against the Palestinian people living under that occupation, but none of them enjoys the lockstep, uncritical backing that this one state does. The effect of this constant repetition is to make the U.S.-Israel relationship seem extremely important to U.S. interests when it is not, and that serves to promote the “illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.” It is this illusion as much as anything else that prevents a serious reassessment of the relationship.

Link here.

Israel’s Stranglehold on American Politics

Israel’s lackeys in the political class, along with bankrupt courtiers in the U.S. press, including former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) employee Wolf Blitzer, are making a serious mistake, however, in refusing to acknowledge Israel’s outsized, transparent and often illegal meddling in the American political system and Israel’s brutal oppression of Palestinians. It is too obvious and too egregious to hide. The longer the ruling elites ignore this reality and censor and attack those such as Rep. Ilhan Omar who have the temerity to name this interference and the human rights abuses perpetrated by Israel, the more it gives credence to the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and white hate groups, many rooted in the Christian right, who are the real anti-Semites. Israel and its lobby, rather than protecting Israel and Jews, are steadily nullifying their moral and ultimately political force.

Criticism of Israel and the ideology of Zionism is not anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israel’s influence and control over U.S. foreign policy, and of Israeli efforts to silence those who champion Palestinian rights, is not anti-Semitic. Criticism of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians or its dangerous campaign to orchestrate a war with Iran is not anti-Semitic. The more Israel and the Israel lobby abuse the charge of anti-Semitism, a charge the Israel lobby has leveled against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, among many others, the more they lose their effectiveness against the dangerous anti-Semites whose ranks are growing within the far right and across the Muslim world.

Israel and its lobby do not care if its political allies, including those in the Christian right and the Trump White House, possess warped and racist attitudes about Jews. The Christian right and many of those in the White House, while embracing Zionism, are also anti-Semitic. President Donald Trump has called neo-Nazis “very fine people” and once tweeted an illustration of Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and with the Star of David superimposed near her face. The sole criterion of Israel and the Israel lobby in determining who to support and who to demonize is identifying who backs the far-right agenda of the apartheid state of Israel and who does not. Genuine anti-Semitism is irrelevant. For Israel, the world is divided along the fault line of Palestinian rights. Stand up for the Palestinians and you are an anti-Semite. Cheer their marginalization, oppression and murder and you are a friend of the Jews. Have Jewish leaders forgotten their own history? Anti-Semitism is wrong and dangerous not only because it is bad for the Jews, but because the dark forces of ethnic and religious hatred, used by Israel and the lobby against critics, are bad for everyone, including the Jews and the Palestinians. You open this Pandora’s box of evils at your peril.

Link here.

Margins, Not Revenue, Have Been The Main Driver Of EPS Growth This Cycle

Link here.

Mapped: Every Power Plant in the United States

Every year, the United States generates 4,000 million MWh of electricity from utility-scale sources.

While the majority comes from fossil fuels like natural gas (32.1%) and coal (29.9%), there are also many other minor sources that feed into the grid, ranging from biomass to geothermal.

Link here and here.

The Conservative Case for Antitrust

Fewer competitors leads to less competition and more collusion. There is nothing new under the sun. Even in the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations that, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” A little later John Stuart Mill echoed the sentiment, “Where competitors are so few, they always end by agreeing not to compete.”

Capitalism without competition is not capitalism.

Competition creates clear price signals in markets, driving supply and demand. It promotes efficiency. Competition creates more choices, more innovation, economic development and growth, and a stronger democracy by dispersing economic power. It promotes individual initiative and freedom. Competition matters because it prevents unjust inequality, rather than the transfer of wealth from consumer or supplier to the monopolist. If there is no competition, consumers and workers have less freedom to choose.

Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules that everyone agrees. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limits competition. All too often today, monopolies exist through lobbying, regulation and the helping hand of government.

Link here.

We need diplomacy not sanctions for peace in Syria

The truth is that the U.S. engagement from 2011 was misguided and doomed to fail. The U.S. goal was to overthrow Assad in order to end a regime backed by Russia and Iran. Yet, both countries were prepared to more than match Obama’s commitment of forces, especially with Russia’s intervention in 2015, rendering the U.S.-backed insurgents a complete failure. The misguided proxy war stoked by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other US allies eventually displaced more than 10 million people and led to the deaths of around half a million civilians and combatants.

Moreover, Operation Timber Sycamore supported Sunni jihadists favored by Saudi Arabia, and it was the splintering of those jihadist forces that led to the rise of ISIS in Syria. This was a classic boomerang effect, where the initial CIA action came back to haunt the U.S. in even more disastrous terms.

Link here.

Why Regulators Went Soft on Monopolies

The process of getting mergers approved appalls the mind. Firms hire Washington, D.C. K Street law firms and engage highly paid economists to argue that mergers will promote efficiencies and lower prices. The top economists in the field move back and forth from consulting firms such as Compass Lexecon or Charles River Associates to run the DOJ and the FTC. The economists create models arguing that mergers will lower prices. But once mergers are approved, prices mysteriously go up.

This naturally influences the work of well compensated pro-merger economists. Financial models rely on questionable assumptions of demand, costs, and the way firms will behave in the future. Numerous studies show that these assumptions turn out to be incorrect, and merger simulations do not accurately predict actual post-merger prices. In layman’s terms, “garbage in = garbage out.” Merging firms pay well, and economists are happy to perform on demand.

Since the early 1980s, economists have become wealthy moving in and out of government promoting mergers. Each time, they land at a cushy law firm or research firm that trades on their inside connections in government, and they return to government.

Link here.

Fed Blinks as Housing, CLOs Slump

Ben Bernanke noted in 2010 that “higher equity prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can spur spending.” The Fed's fixation with perception rather than data is illustrated by the way in which former Fed Chairs Bernanke and Yellen deliberate chose to inflate the value of financial and real assets to "stimulate" the economy. The WSJ’s Nick Timiraos reported last week:

“Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke often argued that it was the maturity and risk-profile of the Fed’s holdings, not the overall size of its reserves or securities portfolio, that determined how much it stimulated markets and the economy.”

The Fed’s dual mandate from Congress includes full employment and price stability. But to look at recent policy suggests members of the FOMC cannot read federal statute or do simple sums. Causing asset prices to soar by double digit rates is not price stability – it is inflation, plain and simple. Please, Chairman Bernanke, do show us where it says in the Federal Reserve Act that the FOMC is allowed to employ asset price inflation as a policy choice.

In the Orwellian newspeak of the Federal Reserve System, inflating the value of stocks, bonds and real estate to absurd levels is a form of economic “stimulus.” Never mind that this vast act of asset price inflation did not help the majority of Americans. Indeed, the biggest impact of the Bernanke/Yellen asset inflation seems to be preventing a whole generation of younger Americans from buying a new home.

Link here.

Exclusive poll: Americans want economic reform in 2020

Most Americans think the economic system is skewed toward the wealthy and the government should do more to fix it — and they're ready to vote for a candidate who agrees, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey survey.

Why it matters: The economy is usually the top priority for voters heading into a presidential election, and Democrats in particular — but also a strong majority of independents — are looking for big changes. By wide margins, they think unfairness in the economic system is a bigger problem than overregulation of the free market.

The big picture: Democrats and young adults are increasingly favorable to socialism.

As Axios' Felix Salmon noted, 18–24-year-olds in the survey view socialism (61% positive) more favorably than capitalism (58%), the only age group to do so. Older respondents tend to be far more wary of socialism.

Democrats are far more favorable toward socialism than independents and Republicans, as other surveys have found. 64% of Democrats in this survey say they have positive views of socialism, while 83% of Republicans and 61% of independents have negative views.

Men are much more bullish about capitalism (71% positive) than women (51%). Women, meanwhile, are slightly more favorable toward socialism (41% positive, vs. 36% for men).

Link here.

Top 10 Reasons Not to Love NATO

2. NATO is not a defensive institution. According to the New York Times, NATO has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.” This is an article of faith, based on the unsubstantiated belief that Soviet and Russian aggression toward NATO members has existed for 70 years and that NATO has deterred it rather than provoked it. In violation of a promise made, NATO has expanded eastward, right up to the border of Russia, and installed missiles there. Russia has not done the reverse. The Soviet Union has, of course, ended. NATO has waged aggressive wars far from the North Atlantic, bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. NATO has added a partnership with Colombia, abandoning all pretense of its purpose being in the North Atlantic. No NATO member has been attacked or credibly threatened with attack, apart from small-scale non-state blowback from NATO’s wars of aggression.



Link here.

Map shows how much Trump's approval ratings have changed in each state since he took office

Fool me once . . .

Link here.

"My goodbye letter to NBC," by Bill Arkin

From 1/2/19 . . .

Somewhere in all of that, and particularly as the social media wave began, it was clear that NBC (like the rest of the news media) could no longer keep up with the world. Added to that was the intellectual challenge of how to report our new kind of wars when there were no real fronts and no actual measures of success. To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one country in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous.

Link here.

US: Anti-IS Coalition Airstrikes Killed Over 1,000 Civilians

U.S.-led coalition airstrikes against Islamic State have killed over 1,000 civilians in Iraq and Syria since 2014.

In a monthly civilian casualty report, the Coalition detailed confirmed deaths of 1,139 civilians in airstrikes conducted since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve between August 2014 and November 2018.

Link here.

The Establishment Will Never Say No to a War

Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them. If you want the most recent proof of that, look at Yemen, where the Saudi policy of mass civilian deaths in a Sunni war on Shiites is backed by American arms and U.S. It’s also backed by American troops on the ground — in a secret war conducted by Green Berets that was concealed from Congress. There is no conceivable threat to the U.S. from the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and there was no prior congressional approval. Did you even know we had ground troops deployed there?

The same for liberal internationalism, which also never seems to die, however many catastrophes it spawns. There’s always an impending “massacre” somewhere to justify intervention, which is why we have been dutifully told that withdrawing from Syria would lead to a “slaughter” of the Kurds. Remember the massacre that gave Hillary Clinton a chance to launch another Middle Eastern war in Libya? How many more innocents were slaughtered after we toppled Qaddafi than those in danger before? And all because Clinton refused to learn a single thing from Iraq. (If Clinton had actually won in 2016, we would probably have far more troops occupying Syria today, and be digging in for the long haul, and we’d probably have even more troops in yet another doomed surge in Afghanistan. That goes some way to explaining why Clinton has a massive 31/62 negative approval rating in the latest, Democrat-friendly Quinnipiac poll, much worse than even Trump.)

Link here.

NATO Partisans Started a New Cold War With Russia

U.S. leaders managed to get relations with Russia wrong just a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. One of the few officials to capture the nature of the West’s bungling and how it fomented tensions was Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense during the final years of George W. Bush’s administration and the first years of Barack Obama’s. In his surprisingly candid memoirs, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, Gates recalls his report to Bush following the 2007 Munich Security Council, at which Russian President Vladimir Putin vented about Western security transgressions, including the planned deployment of a missile defense system in Central Europe.

“When I reported to the president my take on the Munich conference, I shared my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of the Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War . . . .” Yet even that blunt assessment given to Bush did not fully capture Gates’s views on the issue. “What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after [George H. W.] Bush left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake.”

Link here.

Hallucinogenic drug found in 'magic mushrooms' eases depression, anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer

The Johns Hopkins group reported that psilocybin decreased clinician- and patient-rated depressed mood, anxiety, and death anxiety. The compound increased quality of life, life meaning, and optimism. Six months after the final session of treatment:

• About 80% of participants continued to show clinically significant decreases in depressed mood and anxiety, with about 60% showing symptom remission into the normal range
• 83% reported increases in well-being or life satisfaction
• 67% of participants reported the experience as one of the top five meaningful experiences in their lives
• About 70% reported the experience as one of their top five spiritually significant lifetime events

Link here.