Majorityrights News > Category: Economics & Finance

Please advertise this book if you can - Jez

75 Proud Years:  Pioneers and Progress of Rhodesia

As someone with an interest in Rhodesia, we thought you might like to know that we now have a reprint of this 1965 Rhodesian Government publication :

With an introduction by Ian Smith , the book covers the history of Rhodesia from 1890 to 1965 in some detail and surveys the enormous progress made in agriculture, commerce, industry and social development of benefit to both white and black Rhodesians.

With 124 pages, this A4-size softcover book is a facsimile copy of the original with contemporary advertisements and would be an invaluable addition to any collection of Rhodesiana .

The book costs £12.50 and p&p is £2.90 (with a 10% discount to former customers) .

To order a copy please contact us at :

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for payment details and other information .

JPost, “Lauder: Antisemitism and anti-Zionism are one in the same”, May 2017:

World Jewish Congress president outlines three-pronged approach for tackling Jew hatred.

Ronald S. Lauder at the 2017 JPost Annual Conference .. (photo credit:NOA GRAYEVSKY)

In a powerful speech at The Jerusalem Post annual conference in New York on Sunday, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder presented a clear message to Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists and Israel haters everywhere: anti-Zionism and antisemitism are one in the same.

“Being anti-Israel is being antisemitic, plain and simple,” Lauder said, pointing to the latest UNESCO vote that denied Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, and to rising levels of antisemitism on college campuses.

Lauder argued that anti-Zionism is antisemitism in a new form, one that has emerged in recent years.

“There’s also something new, antisemitism that tries to hide itself and anti-Zionism. People who want to destroy the world’s only Jewish state – having failed to destroy Israel militarily and economically – are now trying to destroy Israel politically and morally,” he said.

To combat these threats, Lauder laid out his organization’s three-pronged plan to combat these issues.

“The World Jewish Congress has a plan to meet these challenges. We at the WJC created three new divisions that are hard at work to defeat this new form of antisemitism. These efforts will form an ‘iron dome’ to defend Israel against anti-Semitism,” he asserted.

To that end, the WJC has launched a communications department to enable Jews in being “proactive and aggressive” against “enemies who define us.”

The organization has also assembled a team of top-tier lawyers to actively promote legislation against BDS, an initiative that has already seen some progress, with 19 states in the US passing anti- BDS laws.

As the third part of its plan, the organization is working to increase its presence on college campuses, where young Jews are most likely to encounter anti-Israel vitriol.

The speech came a day after the New York Times reported that Lauder was pushing US President Donald Trump to broker a deal with the Palestinians.

Lauder praised Trump in his remarks. “We have a new pro-Israel American President, Donald Trump,” he said.

“A man I’ve known almost 50 years. Let me tell you, Israel has a great and true friend.”

The impending failure of the Iran deal is being disingenuously blamed on the very moderate Iranians that ethno-nationalists would hope to empower in and of the deal - that failure being blamed on them, as opposed to who actually deserves the blame: primarily the Trump administration and its friends.

Daily Telegraph, “Iran presidential candidates lay blame for ‘failed’ nuclear deal on reformer Rouhani”, 13 May 2017:

President Hassan Rouhani faced accusations of a failed nuclear deal which has not benefitted the Iranian people, during the final televised debate with his rivals before the country’s presidential election next week.

The vote is being seen as largely a referendum on reformer Mr Rouhani’s outreach to the rest of the world following a landmark accord with global powers, which ended sanctions but bitterly divided the country.

The president is believed to be the frontrunner in the May 19 election but the failure of the 2015 accord to bring economic gains for the public has brought an opening that his main competitors, powerful conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi and hardline Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, have sought to exploit.

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Visigrad Post, “French-Polish relations undermined by Macron’s presidential campaign”

Poland – “You know the friends of Madame Le Pen, her allies: these are the regimes of misters Orbán, Kaczyński, Putin. These are not open and free democracies. Many freedoms are violated every day and, by this, so are our principles.” (Extract from Emmanuel Macron’s speech of May 1). Which freedoms exactly? We do not know, but this phrase made the headlines throughout Polish media this week.

The candidate has already been widely talked about on the banks of the Vistula the previous week with his promise to introduce sanctions against Poland within the first three months of his investiture. The sanctions are based on the relocation of Whirlpool – Ed. in Poland - but would relate to alleged non-compliance by Poland with the EU’s “principles”: “Regarding the Whirlpool case, within three months after election, a decision will be taken on Poland. I put my responsibility on the table on this subject,” declared the replacement candidate of Voix du Nord –  on April 27 by mentioning the use of Article 7 of the EU Treaty which provides for the suspension of a country’s rights as a Member State.

Even before being elected, the candidate Emmanuel Macron [...] managed to quarrel with Poland and Hungary, the two leading countries in Central and Eastern Europe. His [...] election to the presidency of the French Republic promises therefore complicated relations with the former Eastern Europe.

[...]

Polish President Andrzej Duda made it very clear on May 3 in an interview with Polish television TVP: “He will have to start work on getting Poland back to trust him and France”. The Polish Foreign Ministry reacted to Emmanuel Macron’s speech on May 1 in an official statement: “We are following with interest the election campaign in France because of the importance of this country for the future of the EU. In this context, we regret to note that once again during this presidential campaign in France, an Allied country that belongs like Poland to NATO and the European Union, a candidate for the highest office uses unacceptable comparisons and intellectual shortcuts that mislead public opinion. […] The values ​​and principles of free democracy are respected in Poland. Among the fundamental values ​​that have been present in the Polish culture and tradition for several hundred years, there is respect and tolerance for those with different political views […]. We expect the French President [...] to carry out an in-depth analysis before making judgments on the policies of other States and to clarify any doubts in the context of bilateral contacts”.

Wall Street Journal, “Trump Adviser Kushner’s Undisclosed Partners Include Goldman and Soros”, 3 May 2017

Investments show ties to major finance and technology names

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, didn’t identify on his government financial disclosure form that he is currently a part-owner of a real-estate finance startup and has a number of loans from banks on properties he co-owns, according to securities filings.

Mr. Kushner’s stake in Cadre—a tech startup that pairs investors with big real-estate projects—means the senior White House official is currently a business partner of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.GS 0.47%▲ and billionaires including George Soros and Peter Thiel, according to people close to the company.

The Cadre stake is one of many interests—and ties to large financial institutions—that Mr. Kushner didn’t identify on his disclosure form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.

Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer representing Mr. Kushner, said in a statement that his stake in Cadre is housed in a company he owns called BFPS Ventures LLC. His ownership of BFPS is reported in his financial-disclosure form, although it doesn’t mention Cadre.

Ms. Gorelick said the Cadre stake is described in a revised version of his financial-disclosure form that will be made public after it has been certified by ethics officials. She said Mr. Kushner has previously discussed his Cadre ownership with the Office of Government Ethics and that Mr. Kushner has “resigned from Cadre’s board, assigned his voting rights, and reduced his ownership share.” A spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Gorelick added that it is “very normal” for a financial disclosure form to be revised and that the form was prepared by Mr. Kushner’s lawyers on his behalf.

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Gary tax Asia to pay for black Welfare Cohn and Steve put the goyim to work Mnuchin

The Hill, 27 April 2017:

“Trump officials stage full-court press for tax plan”

The Trump administration on Thursday began a full-court press aimed at generating momentum for President Trump’s tax reform plan.

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The Trump administration also made efforts to rally support from influential conservatives. Mnuchin and White House economic adviser Gary Cohn on Thursday met with groups such as Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a group backed by the Republican mega-donors Charles and David Koch.

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The White House’s plan came in the form of one-page overview, and set down some significant markers, including lowering the top individual rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent and the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.

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Businesses have been excited about the prospects for tax reform since Trump was elected, and groups overall were pleased to see a plan that proposed lower rates for businesses and a move to a “territorial” system that doesn’t tax U.S. companies foreign earnings.

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We can be sure these tax proposals are going to run contrary to Jewish interests and their complicit, predatory right wing interests (of course not).

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In fact, Gary Cohn’s tax program is going to tax Asia in order to pay for American blacks ..and even to pay for all America’s SSD and SSI, which America’s wealthy should be paying their fair share for (either that, or have Americans come to terms with who they don’t want to live with and be bothered by).

Kumiko, “A view of Brexit from Asia: Britain as a Pacific trading power in the 21st century”, 6 Mar 2017:

I mean let’s be real, the Americans just somehow non-ironically elected a guy who came out with a speech 120 hours ago where he advocated what? This hilarious list:

a. 54 billion more drunkenly spent on defence spending targeted at nothing,
b. 1 trillion more for infrastructure spending for inner city no-go zones which will have pitiable return on investment,
c. More o’ dem social programmes for the poor baby Trayvons in Detroit who lost their jobs – despite them never having had a job – to the allegedly ‘bad bad’ people in Manila or ‘bad bad’ people in Ho Chi Minh City who are apparently ‘ripping’ you, because why? Because of course. Apparently according to Hunter Wallace, African-Americans are now more valuable to the Alt-Right than trade with Asian states is, so what the hell.
d. Free cash-money for Israel. Because Trump just loves Israel. Because his family is married into it. All of them will continue to studiously ignore that tendency.

So there I was, watching that mortifying clown-car of super-horrible policies unpacking itself into the international arena and I was asking – while I was drinking white rum directly from the bottle – a single question. Only one question.

“But Bernie—I mean, Trump, how are you planning to actually pay for any of this stuff, fam?”

The answer arrived shortly thereafter! The ‘answer’ is apparently:

a. Doubling-down on protectionist tariffs and incoherent ‘buy American’ sloganeering to socially reinforce it, a move which depends on the absurd and not-ever-happening idea that Asian economies will passively allow the United States to subject them to a tariff regime designed by Gary Cohn since certain commodities stocks have spiked up since 09 November 2016, and maybe if the markets reorder themselves around that, those positions can continue to grow. People can make instruments which tap into that expansion, and then people and the state itself can borrow against those instruments using some very fancy mathematical formulas to predict their performance. Detroit and other Rust Belt disaster zones will somehow magically be rebuilt, and the African-Americans will somehow crank out billions of widgets while somehow not being at all socially-dysfunctional, so that all of the big spending will totally somehow pay for itself. The formulas may or may not have documentation associated with them. The formulas may or may not even be based in any kind of rational thought. Your children can then repay the money to Goldman Sachs about 35 years from now. And all of that is to be done so that the allegedly heroic America can finally defeat the allegedly undead East Asia.

Wow, right? Really very much wow. I mean the whole Trump-style plan has literally never failed before except for like every single time ever.

I guess you could say that I disagree with the Israel-backed Trumpist manchild plan, because my geopolitical stances are all anti-Semitic in one way or another. You could say that I disagree with the Israel-backed Trumpist manchild plan because I am of course an Asian woman, which is another factor that makes me very scary and perhaps ‘evil’.

Financial Samurai, “Maximum Taxable Income Amount For Social Security (FICA)”

Uncle Sam The Tax ManFICA stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act and consists of a Social Security tax and a Medicare tax. This tax is very important for everyone to understand because so often we only think about federal tax rates and state income tax rates. The FICA tax is a big percentage of your total tax bill, especially for those making under six figures a year.

When I was making big bucks in finance, the tax bill was equally big bucks. The only saving grace was seeing my after tax paycheck increase after the maximum taxable income threshold for Social Security was breached each year. The tax amounts were jolting based on how inefficient the government was and still is with regards to spending our money.

For 2017, the maximum amount of taxable earnings for Social Security and Medicare is $127,500. In other words, an employee must pay 6.2% of any income up to $127,500 for 2017 = $7,905. But any dollar you make above $127,500 is free of the Social Security tax. Hence, a good goal for everyone is to make as much as they can over $127,500 as possible, right?

Not so fast. Given we have a progressive tax system in America with Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and deduction phaseouts, I’ve calculated that the optimal Adjusted Gross Income is roughly $250,000, +/- $50,000. At $250,000, $131,500 of the earnings is free from the 6.2% Social Security tax. Meanwhile, you still get most of your mortgage interest deduction, and only have to pay a slight amount of AMT, depending on the person. A $250,000 income is also high enough to live relatively comfortably in any part of the world.

Some might argue that the Social Security tax is regressive because it caps out at $127,500 in 2016. Why shouldn’t rich people pay more? Here’s the thing people might not understand. Social Security benefits cap out based on the maximum amount of Social Security tax contribution as well. It’s not like someone who is making $500,000, and not having to pay the 6.2% Social Security tax on $381,500 of his earnings is getting extra benefits based off his $500,000 income. He’s just getting the maximum Social Security payout amount when it comes time for him to collect based on the maximum taxable income amount he contributes.

The $500,000 income earner is already paying the highest marginal federal tax rate of 39.6% plus state taxes, if applicable.

RevealNews, “Trump no longer appears sympathetic to student debtors”, by Lance Willams, 14 April 2017:

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump said he sympathized with America’s 44 million student debtors and vowed to make their burdens easier.

The federal government should not be profiteering on the interest students pay on their federal loans, candidate Trump declared. (The U.S. will reap $66 billion in profit from student loans issued between 2007 and 2012, the Government Accounting Office says.)

Trump also promised to ensure that debt loads would be limited by students’ ability to repay. Student loans shouldn’t be “an albatross” hung for life around their necks, he said.

But since the election, the president has been quiet on student debt. And two recent moves suggest the administration is headed in the opposite direction, helping the student loan industry at the expense of borrowers. 

The most recent move came Tuesday, when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos scrapped a set of rules intended to shield borrowers from some of the worst abuses of the student debt collection industry.

Today, America’s student debt load is upward of $1.3 trillion – more than the nation’s credit card debt. As an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting concluded last year, student loans have become the worst kind of debt for Americans – and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.

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Reveal News, “White nationalist gets his money from cotton fields – and the government”, By Lance Williams 17 March 2017:

Topics: Accountability

Two weeks after last year’s presidential election, white nationalist Richard Spencer held forth on a cable news show about how white people built America.

“White people ultimately don’t need other races in order to succeed,” he told the audience of the black-oriented program, “NewsOne Now.”

The exchange grew heated as host Roland Martin questioned Spencer’s rhetoric: Didn’t slaves help build America? Wasn’t the nation’s 19th-century economic boom propelled by the slave labor that produced the world’s cotton on Southern plantations?

America’s rise was “not through black people” and “has nothing to do with slavery,” Spencer retorted. “White people could have figured out another way to pick cotton,” he said. “We do it now.”

He is in a position to know. Spencer, along with his mother and sister, are absentee landlords of 5,200 acres of cotton and corn fields in an impoverished, largely African American region of Louisiana, according to records examined by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The farms, controlled by multiple family-owned businesses, are worth millions: A 1,600-acre parcel sold for $4.3 million in 2012.

The Spencer family’s farms also are subsidized heavily by the federal government. From 2008 through 2015, the Spencers received $2 million in U.S. farm subsidy payments, according to federal data.

USDA farm subsidy payments to Spencer family companies, 2008-2015

Farm Payments

Dickenhorst Farms $1,014,558
Spencer Farms $524,655
Dickenhorst Trust $201,460
Sher-Di-Je Land $165,029
Poor Richard Partnership $98,878
A-Renee Partnership $78,016
Total $2,082,596

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group

Although Spencer has attracted extensive media attention as a leader of the so-called alt-right movement – particularly after he drew Nazi salutes at an event celebrating Donald Trump’s election – he never has explained publicly how he supports himself while actively promoting his agenda via conferences and media appearances. The finances of his nonprofit think tank, the National Policy Institute, are a mystery; the organization hasn’t filed a public report since 2013. On Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the IRS revoked the institute’s tax-exempt status.

Spencer, 38, is a dropout from a Duke University Ph.D. history program who emerged during the Trump campaign as one of the nation’s most visible white separatist agitators. In his writing, speeches and interviews, he has given an intellectualized explanation for how he came to advocate creating a whites-only “ethno state” in North America. While in graduate school, he has said, he was compelled by critiques of multiculturalism and political correctness and by demographic data indicating that whites are en route to minority status in the United States.

But the Spencer family’s business interests and geographic history suggest a different possible lineage for Richard Spencer’s racist politics. The family’s farm holdings are a legacy of its ties to the Jim Crow South, passed down by Spencer’s grandfather, who built the business during the turbulent civil rights era.

Spencer family land holdings in Louisiana
Farming company Parish Acreage
Dickenhorst Farms Tensas 1,888
Dickenhorst Farms East Carroll 967
Sher-Di-Je Land Tensas 1,186
A-Renee Partners Madison 753
Poor Richard Partnership Franklin 400
Spencer, Sherry Madison 90
Total   5,284

Sources: Louisiana Tax Commission parish tax rolls; parish assessment records

Spencer declined in an interview this week to discuss how much money he personally receives from cotton farming and government subsidies and whether that income funds his political activities.

“I’m not involved in any direct day-to-day running of the business,” he said, later adding: “I’m going to navigate the world as it is, and I’m not going to be a pauper.”

One Spencer family farming company, which holds title to 400 acres of land, is called the Poor Richard Partnership.

In the interview, Spencer also downplayed his family’s influence on his political views, saying, “My parents are very mainstream Episcopalian Republicans in Dallas.”

Although Spencer grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Dallas and now splits his time between Montana and Washington, D.C., his family lived in the South for generations. Records show his mother attended segregated schools as a girl in the small northeast Louisiana city of Monroe. Later, Spencer’s mother inherited farms in northeast Louisiana from her late father. Today, her two children are her business partners.

Spencer’s mother did not respond to an email and voicemails seeking comment for this story. In the past, she has said she does not share her son’s views. In an open letter sent to their local newspaper in December, Spencer’s parents, Sherry and Rand, said that while they love their son, “we are not racists. We have never been racists. We do not endorse the idea of white nationalism.”

The region that is home to the Spencers’ farms has a history of slavery and racism. Through the civil rights era, the Klan targeted black residents there with lynchings, cross burnings and other violence. In Tensas Parish, where the Spencers own 3,000 acres of farmland, blacks didn’t win the right to vote until 1964, according to Elvadus Fields Jr., mayor of the town of St. Joseph.

White supremacist views typically run in the family, said writer and race relations expert Cleo Scott Brown. Feelings of racial superiority often are passed “from generation to generation, because that’s what they believe,” said Brown, whose father – a civil rights leader in East Carroll Parish, where the Spencers own 900 acres of farmland – was shot and wounded during a 1962 voter registration drive, allegedly by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Agribusiness in the region today is heavily mechanized and provides few jobs. In 2013, CNN reported that East Carroll Parish suffers from the worst income inequality in the nation: The richest 5 percent of residents earned an average of $611,000 per year, 90 times what the poorest 20 percent earned. The parish’s population is 67 percent black.

Ownership of Spencer family farming companies

Farming company

Owners
Dickenhorst Farms Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister
Dickenhorst Trust Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Sher-Di-Je Land Dickenhorst Farms (Sherry Spencer, Richard Spencer and sister)
Spencer Farms Sherry Spencer
Poor Richard Partnership Sherry Spencer*
A-Renee Partners Sherry Spencer and daughter

*Records show that Richard Spencer has received subsidy income from the partnership but don’t identify him as an owner.

Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the Environmental Working Group; Louisiana secretary of state filings

Race relations have improved significantly in recent decades. But after Trump’s election, some white residents celebrated by draping their pickup trucks with Confederate flags and driving through the region’s towns, according to the Rev. Roosevelt Grant, head of the NAACP branch in Winnsboro, Franklin Parish, near another of the Spencers’ farms.

The Trump presidency, he said, “has caused people to pray more.”

Spencer’s maternal grandfather, Dr. R.W. Dickenhorst, established the family farming business. He was a radiologist who started a medical practice in Monroe in 1952 and became wealthy and socially prominent, according to local newspaper obituaries.

Racial segregation was a given in Monroe then. Blacks were barred from housing, schools and public facilities used by whites. White superiority “was the way of life; that was the way it was, and anyone challenging it was challenging God’s will,” said the Rev. Roosevelt Wright Jr., a local historian in Monroe.

Dickenhorst’s daughter, Sherry, who would grow up to be Richard Spencer’s mother, enrolled in all-white Neville High School in 1962, according to district records. In 1964, at the start of her junior year, integration of the school began, with a single African American student enrolling.

As Dickenhorst’s medical practice prospered, he bought farmland in northeast Louisiana on the Mississippi River’s west bank. He died decades later, in 2002, and his wife died the following year. By then, their only daughter was the wife of a wealthy Dallas eye surgeon and the mother of two grown children: Richard Spencer and his sister, who did not respond to an email and phone calls seeking comment.

Today, through Dickenhorst Farms and several related companies, Sherry Spencer, 68, and her two children jointly own most of the family farmland, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data compiled by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. Sherry Spencer is general partner of Dickenhorst Farms, and Richard Spencer and his sister are part owners, according to state and federal records. The family contracts out crop production to local farmers, a common practice in a region where corporations and absentee owners control much of the land.

The Spencer family’s farms are headquartered at a $3 million home in the ski town of Whitefish, Montana, where Sherry Spencer now lives. Also headquartered there: Richard Spencer’s think tank, his AltRight.com website and other white nationalist-related enterprises he controls, including a book publisher and web design outfit. Spencer also has lived in Whitefish in recent years ­– sometimes in his mother’s home, sometimes in a condominium she owns, according to documents and interviews.

The Spencers have received payments from two federal farm programs. One is the commodity subsidy program, intended to guarantee income for farmers who are helping to maintain supplies of certain crops deemed important by the government. The other is the conservation reserve program, which pays farmers for environmentally sound farming practices. Most of the $2 million paid to the Spencers has been in commodity subsidy payments for growing cotton.

Yet, Spencer has been bitterly critical of America and its government.

“This is a sick, disgusting society,” he declared in his speech at an alt-right gathering in Washington after the election, “run by the corrupt, defended by hysterics, drunk on self-hatred and degeneracy.”

Note: I have no necessary qualms with Spencer’s wealth (though ultimately, something like Bowery’s/ William Jennings Bryan’s progressive land taxation based on site value might be in order) nor do I have anything against his family’s alleged history of wanting to live separately from blacks. - DanielS