[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 04 November 2018 08:44.
“When higher rates trigger another recession, Trump can point an accusing finger at the central bank, absolving his own policies of liability and underscoring the need for a major overhaul of the Fed.”
Truthdig.com, “Trump’s War on the Fed”, 2 Nov 2018:
October was a brutal month for the stock market. After the Federal Reserve’s eighth interest rate hike, on Sept. 26, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 2,000 points, and the NASDAQ had its worst month in nearly 10 years. After the Dow lost more than 800 points on Oct. 10 and the S&P 500 suffered its first weeklong losing streak since Trump’s election, the president said, “I think the Fed is making a mistake. They are so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy.” In a later interview on Fox News, he called the Fed’s rate hikes “loco.” And in a Wall Street Journal interview published on Oct. 24, Trump said he thought the biggest risk to the economy was the Federal Reserve, because “interest rates are being raised too quickly.” He also criticized the Fed and its chairman in July and August.
Trump’s criticisms are worrisome to some commentators, who fear he is attempting to manipulate the Fed and its chairman for political gain. Ever since the 1970s, the Fed has declared its independence from government, and presidents are supposed to avoid influencing its decisions. But other Fed watchers think politicians should be allowed to criticize the market manipulations of an apparently out-of-control central bank.
Why the Frontal Attack?
Even if the president’s challenges are a needed check on the Fed, some question whether he is going about it in the right way. Challenging the central bank in public forces it to stick to its guns, because it must maintain its credibility with the markets by showing that its decisions are based on sound economic principles rather than on political influence. If the president really wants the Fed to back off on interest rates, it has been argued, he should do it with a nod and a nudge, not a frontal attack on the Fed’s sanity.
True, but perhaps the president’s goal is not to subtly affect Fed behavior so much as to make it patently obvious who is to blame when the next Great Recession hits. And recession is fairly certain to hit, because higher interest rates almost always trigger recessions. The Fed’s current policy of “quantitative tightening”—tightening or contracting the money supply—is the very definition of recession, a term Wikipedia defines as “a business cycle contraction which results in a general slowdown in economic activity.”
This “business cycle” is not something inevitable, like the weather. It is triggered by the central bank. When the Fed drops interest rates, banks flood the market with “easy money,” allowing speculators to snatch up homes and other assets. When the central bank then raises interest rates, it contracts the amount of money available to spend and to pay down debt. Borrowers go into default and foreclosed homes go on the market at fire-sale prices, again to be snatched up by the monied class. But it is a game of Monopoly that cannot go on forever. According to Elga Bartsch, chief European economist at Morgan Stanley, one more financial cataclysm could be all that it takes for central bank independence to end. “Having been overburdened for a long time, many central banks might just be one more economic downturn or financial crisis away from a full-on political backlash,” she wrote in a note to clients in 2017. “Such a political backlash could call into question one of the long-standing tenets of modern monetary policy making—central bank independence.”
And that may be the president’s endgame. When higher rates trigger another recession, Trump can point an accusing finger at the central bank, absolving his own policies of liability and underscoring the need for a major overhaul of the Fed.
Individuals can declare themselves bankrupt but it’s not so easy for nations. Argentina defaulted in 2001 and she is still suffering the consequences. The UK national debt currently stands at £1.8 trillion, which is almost as much as our GDP. The annual cost of this debt is £48 billion.
Few modern states earn more than they spend. The exceptions are oil-rich states with small populations, like Norway or Qatar. Most states spend more than they earn, particularly on fighting wars. They cover the deficit by borrowing from the banks and by selling bonds. This is known as the National Debt. Hilaire Belloc explained it in ‘Economics for Helen’:
“When these national loans began the Government honestly intended to pay back what they had borrowed. But the method was so fatally easy that as time went on, and the debt piled up and up until there could be no question of repaying it all: all the State could do was to pay the interest out of taxation. It remained indebted to private rich men for the principle, that is the whole original sum, and meanwhile, through further wars, this hold of the rich men upon all the rest of the community perpetually increased.”
Countries with vast natural resources and reserves of gold and foreign currencies, like the United States, can function with massive debts because the banks and bondholders trust them. But countries with no collateral can only borrow more money, for as long as they can.
When countries run out of credit they are reduced to starvation, unless some help is extended. Germany’s national debt was partly written off at the Lausanne Conference in 1932 and again at the London Conference in 1953. The Allies decided that it made more sense to get Germany back on her feet. At least, that way they would get some of their money back. It worked, and Germany cleared her debts as her economy recovered.
In 2000 a Canadian proposal for a debt moratorium was rejected by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but eventually, all national debts will have to be rescheduled, reduced or abolished. Creditors, including private bondholders, insurance companies and pension fund managers, will cling to the present system because they want their money back, but ultimately it’s unsustainable.
My parents came from widely diverse backgrounds, for my Father was a motor car tester, and my Mother was Governess to the children of a very senior army officer, I was born in the summer of 1924, and had a very reasonable education, initially at a state school, and then at ten years of age, to a well respected Grammar School in the Home Counties. At the age of 14, when I was on my way home from School, I came across a poorly dressed old man wheeling a pram on which he had fixed a wind-up gramophone and was playing a recording of a speech by Sir Oswald Mosley, who was addressing his audience as “my Blackshirt brothers”. I listened intently until the record was finished, and then thanked the old man, giving him a penny from my pocket. Arriving home, I explained to my Father what I had heard, and he told me how on one occasion he had gone up to London to make trouble at a Mosley meeting, but he had been so impressed that he had finished up cheering his support. I remember that. Before I was old enough to follow my Father’s example, the war was upon us. I was at University, and Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley were in prison under law 18B, together with scores of his senior officers. In fact, I never wore a black shirt myself.
After the war, they were all discharged from prison without being charged, and ‘Union Movement’ was formed. The new party had headquarters at an address in London and produced a newspaper called ‘Action’ with the front emblazoned with the Blackshirt emblem, a circle crossed by one flash, not two as in SS.
By this time I was making regular visits to London on business and would call into the London Office, and chat at length with Mr Raven Thomson, who was Editor of the newspaper. I used to make a contribution now and then to ‘Action’ and kept in touch. We had a group called ‘Friends of Union Movement’, and every now and again would attend a dinner in London, with ‘OM’ as speaker. He always spoke well, and his following was intensely loyal.
Of course, prompted by the Jewish lobby, things were made very difficult. We were obliged to drop ‘The European Salute’, and then the blackshirt emblem. The Home Office declared that the wearing of a black shirt constituted a uniform, and in spite of the fact that OM insisted that wearing the black shirt was merely to identify Party members during a commotion it was banned.
Raven Thomson died from the long-term effects of his brutal treatment during his stay in prison, and OM went to live in Orsay, France.
All these people have left their mark, and although several splinter movements have started up to maintain the creed, none have really been able to rally the public as OM was able to do.
This is not necessarily to do with their inadequacies, but the result of well organised, and Jewish funded publicity blocks that have prevented both reporting and any publicity leaking out, however small.
Once the administration was changed in Germany after the war, OM adopted a slogan “Europe a Nation”, which was his frequent cry. Were he to be here in 2016, he would have been aghast to note that the Jewish lobby is once again running things over there.
When OM retired into France he went there on the basis that eventually he would be called. He never was of course, which is a tragedy, for he would have been a brilliant statesman.
Nevertheless, he always kept his ear to the ground and clearly read the UK papers. This is made clear when some reporter named Peterborough reported on a rowdy meeting in Oxford, that the stewards had dealt with the rowdies as savagely as OM had done at his Olympia meeting. His reply is appended below.
“Sir, a note by Peterborough (May 14th) appears to compare the actions of stewards in defending my meeting at Olympia from attack, with the action of those recently attacking someone else’s meeting at Oxford. The difference is surely clear to any impartial mind.
Facts regarding Olympia are also on public record in contemporary Press reports and are now worth recalling. The attack on a perfectly legal meeting was openly organised and publicised for three weeks in advance, without any intervention of authority to prevent a flagrant breach of the law.
The assault of armed roughs was defeated by our young men who were accused of using their fists too vigorously. Soon after the occasion (the largest public meeting ever held in Britain) at Earls Court Exhibition Hall, was conducted in perfect order. Previously free speech had been systematically denied to anyone unpopular with Communism or the anarchic left. e.g. Sir Winston Churchill’s election meeting in Dundee when he was just out of hospital, reported in the Times under the heading “Mr Churchill shouted down.”
Authority was supine during a period when free speech ceased to exist. This was the origin of the Blackshirt movement, which opponents described as my “private army”. The means to defend ourselves were subsequently removed by special act of Parliament.
It then became more than ever, the duty of Government itself to maintain order, and in this duty, then and now, it conspicuously fails. In agreeing that no man should be allowed a private army, I suggest that Britain needs a Government with the will to maintain order which includes free speech for all. ”
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 25 October 2018 15:46.
Student Debt Slavery II: Time to Level the Playing Field
2018 by Ellen Brown
This is the second in a two-part article on the debt burden America’s students face. Read Part 1 here.
The lending business is heavily stacked against student borrowers. Bigger players can borrow for almost nothing, and if their investments don’t work out, they can put their corporate shells through bankruptcy and walk away. Not so with students. Their loan rates are high and if they cannot pay, their debts are not normally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Rather, the debts compound and can dog them for life, compromising not only their own futures but the economy itself.
“Students should not be asked to pay more on their debt than they can afford,” said Donald Trump on the presidential campaign trail in October 2016. “And the debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives.” But as Matt Taibbi points out in a December 15 article, a number of proposed federal changes will make it harder, not easier, for students to escape their debts, including wiping out some existing income-based repayment plans, harsher terms for graduate student loans, ending a program to cancel the debt of students defrauded by ripoff diploma mills, and strengthening “loan rehabilitation” – the recycling of defaulted loans into new, much larger loans on which the borrower usually winds up paying only interest and never touching the principal. The agents arranging these loans can get fat commissions of up to 16 percent, an example of the perverse incentives created in the lucrative student loan market. Servicers often profit more when borrowers default than when they pay smaller amounts over a longer time, so they have an incentive to encourage delinquencies, pushing students into default rather than rescheduling their loans. It has been estimated that the government spends $38 for every $1 it recovers from defaulted debt. The other $37 goes to the debt collectors.
The securitization of student debt has compounded these problems. Like mortgages, student loans have been pooled and packaged into new financial products that are sold as student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS). Although a 2010 bill largely eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student loan business, the “student loan industrial complex” has created a $200 billion market that allows banks to cash in on student loans without issuing them. About 80 percent of SLABS are government-guaranteed. Banks can sell, trade or bet on these securities, just as they did with mortgage-backed securities; and they create the same sort of twisted incentives for loan servicing that occurred with mortgages.
According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), virtually all borrowers with federal student loans are currently eligible to make monthly payments indexed to their earnings. That means there should be no defaults among student borrowers. Yet one in four borrowers is now in default or struggling to stay current. Why? Student borrowers are reporting widespread mishandling of accounts, unexplained exorbitant fees, and outright deception as they are bullied into default, tactics similar to those that homeowners faced in the foreclosure crisis. The reports reveal a repeat of the abuses of the foreclosure fraud era: many borrowers are unable to obtain basic information about their accounts, are frequently misled, are surprised with unexpected late fees, and often are pushed into default. Servicers lose paperwork or misapply payments. When errors arise, borrowers find it difficult to have them corrected.
Abuses and fraud in handling student loans have brought the Education Department’s loan contractors under fire. In January 2017, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Navient, one of the largest contractors, alleging that the company “systematically and illegally [failed] borrowers at every stage of [student loan] repayment.”
Getting a Fair Deal
The federal government could relieve these debt burdens, given the political will. A stated goal of the changes being proposed by the Trump Administration is to simplify the rules. The simplest solution to the student debt crisis is to make tuition free for qualified applicants at public colleges and universities, as it is in many European countries and was in some US states until the 1970s. If the federal government has the money to lend to students, it has the money to spend on their tuition (capped to curb tuition hikes). It would not only save on defaults and collections but could turn a profit on the investment, as demonstrated by the seven-fold return from the G.I. Bill. (See Part 1 of this article.)
Alternatively, the government could fund tuition costs and debtor relief with a form of “QE for the people.” Instead of buying mortgage-backed securities, as in QE1, the Fed could buy SLABS and return the interest to students, making the loans effectively interest-free (as were the $16+ trillion in loans made to the largest banks after the 2008 crisis). QE that targeted the real economy could address many other budget issues as well, including the infrastructure crisis and the federal debt crisis; and this could be done without triggering hyperinflation. See my earlier articles here, here and here.
Needless to say, however, the government is not moving in that direction. While waiting for the government to act, there are things students can do; but first they need to learn their rights. According to a new survey reported in November 2017, students are often in the dark about key details of their student loan debt and the repayment options available to them. To get started, see here and here.
Under the Borrower’s Defense to Repayment program, you can get your loans completely discharged if you can prove they were based on deception or fraud. That is one of the alternatives the Administration wants to take away, so haste is advised; but even if it is taken away, fraud remains legal grounds for contract rescission. A class action for treble damages against offending institutions could provide significant financial relief.
Students also have greater bankruptcy options than they know. While current bankruptcy law exempts education loans and obligations from eligibility for discharge, an exception is made for “undue hardship.” The test normally used is that paying the loan will prevent the borrower from sustaining a minimum standard of living, his financial situation is unlikely to change in the future, and he has made a good faith effort to pay his loans. According to a 2011 study, at least 40 percent of borrowers who included their student loans in their bankruptcy filings got some or all of their student debt discharged. But because they think there is no chance, they rarely try. Only about 0.1 percent of consumers with student loans attempted to include them in their bankruptcy proceedings. (Getting a knowledgeable attorney is advised.)
For relief as a class, students need to get the attention of legislators, which means getting organized. Along with degree mill fraud and contract fraud, a cause of action ripe for a class action is the student exclusion from bankruptcy protection, a blatant violation of the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If enough students filed for bankruptcy under the “undue hardship” exception, just the administrative burden might motivate legislators to change the law.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed rising federal deficits and debt on a bipartisan unwillingness to contain spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and said he sees little chance of a major deficit reduction deal while Republicans control Congress and the White House.
“It’s disappointing, but it’s not a Republican problem,” McConnell said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg News when asked about the rising deficits and debt. “It’s a bipartisan problem: unwillingness to address the real drivers of the debt by doing anything to adjust those programs to the demographics of America in the future.”
McConnell’s remarks came a day after the Treasury Department said the U.S. budget deficit grew to $779 billion in Donald Trump’s first full fiscal year as president, the result of the GOP’s tax cuts, bipartisan spending increases and rising interest payments on the national debt. That’s a 77 percent increase from the $439 billion deficit in fiscal 2015, when McConnell became majority leader.
McConnell said it would be “very difficult to do entitlement reform, and we’re talking about Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid,” with one party in charge of Congress and the White House.
“I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult if not impossible to achieve when you have unified government,” McConnell said.
Politically Unpopular
Shrinking those popular programs—either by reducing benefits or raising the retirement age—without a bipartisan deal would risk a political backlash in the next election. Trump promised during his campaign that he wouldn’t cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid, even though his budget proposals have included trims to all three programs.
Wall Street owns the country. That was the opening line of a fiery speech that populist leader Mary Ellen Lease delivered around 1890. Franklin Roosevelt said it again in a letter to Colonel House in 1933, and Sen. Dick Durbin was still saying it in 2009. “The banks—hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill,” Durbin said in an interview. “And they frankly own the place.”
Wall Street banks triggered a credit crisis in 2008-09 that wiped out over $19 trillion in household wealth, turned some 10 million families out of their homes and cost almost 9 million jobs in the U.S. alone. Yet the banks were bailed out without penalty, while defrauded home buyers were left without recourse or compensation. The banks made a killing on interest rate swaps with cities and states across the country, after a compliant and accommodating Federal Reserve dropped interest rates nearly to zero. Attempts to renegotiate these deals have failed.
In Los Angeles, the City Council was forced to reduce the city’s budget by 19 percent following the banking crisis, slashing essential services, while Wall Street has not budged on the $4.9 million it claims annually from the city on its swaps. Wall Street banks are now collecting more from Los Angeles just in fees than it has available to fix its ailing roads.
Local governments have been in bondage to Wall Street ever since the 19th century despite multiple efforts to rein them in. Regulation has not worked. To break free, we need to divest our public funds from these banks and move them into our own publicly owned banks.
Now Biggest Donor in all of US Politics, Sheldon Adelson Brings an Israel First Agenda to Washington
Adelson’s massive expenditures in federal elections this cycle are being made because he believes that Republican control of the House and the Senate is vital to maintaining right-wing and pro-Zionist policies and his influence in Washington and at the White House.
by Whitney Webb
WASHINGTON – According to publicly available campaign finance data, Sheldon Adelson – the conservative, Zionist, casino billionaire –is now the biggest spender on federal elections in all of American politics. Adelson, who was the top donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican Party in 2016, has cemented his role as the top political donor in the country after giving $55 million in recent months to Republicans in an effort to help the party keep its majority in both houses of Congress.
Adelson’s willingness to help the GOP stay in power is likely born out of his desire to protect the massive investment he placed in the party last election cycle. In 2016, the Republican mega-donor gave heavily to the Trump campaign and Republicans, donating $35 million to the former and $55 million to the top two Republican Super PACs — the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund — during that election cycle.
Adelson’s decision to again donate tens of millions of dollars to Republican efforts to stay in power is a direct consequence of how successfully he has been able to influence US policy since Trump and the GOP rode to victory in the last election cycle.
A New York Times article on Adelson, titled “Sheldon Adelson Sees a Lot to Like in Trump’s Washington,” notes that Adelson “enjoys a direct line to the president.” Furthermore, Adelson and Trump regularly meet once a month “in private in-person meetings and phone conversations” that Adelson has used to push major changes to U.S. policy that Trump has made reality — such as moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and cutting aid to Palestinian refugees, among others.
Adelson’s new title as the top spender in all U.S. elections shows that he, along with his wife, is willing to spend big to keep that direct line open in the months and years ahead. Citing sources close to the Adelsons, the Times writes that the Adelsons’ massive expenditures in federal elections this cycle are being made because he and his wife believe that “Republican control of the House and the Senate is so vital to maintaining these [right-wing and pro-Zionist] policies” and their influence in Washington and at the White House.
Sheldon Adelson arrives prior to US President Donald Trump’s speech at the Israel museum in Jerusalem, May 23, 2017. Sebastian Scheiner | AP
“Pleased as punch”
The fact that Adelson is “pleased-as-punch” with Trump’s performance as president should hardly come as a surprise, given that the president has fulfilled his campaign promises that were of prime importance to Adelson, while many of his other campaign promises – namely those that were populist or anti-war in nature – have rung hollow.
These Adelson-promoted policies include the moving of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which Adelson had aggressively promoted and even helped to finance, as well as removing the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal. Another recent policy move bearing Adelson’s fingerprints is the U.S. decision to withdraw its funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), as Adelson once infamously stated that “there’s no such thing as a Palestinian.”
Posted by DanielS on Sunday, 09 September 2018 22:27.
The Hill, “Trump: Japan ties could sour when ‘I tell them how much they have to pay”, 6 Sept 2018:
President Trump touted his good relations with Japan on Thursday but warned the relationship may sour over trade.
“Of course that will end as soon as I tell them how much they have to pay,” the president said of his strong ties with Japan in a call to Wall Street Journal assistant editor James Freeman.
Freeman shared the president’s remarks in a WSJ op-ed published Thursday. Freeman said Trump had called him shortly after the editor appeared in a segment on the Fox News Channel praising the president for the strong U.S. economy.
Trump’s comments about Japan come as the U.S. finds itself in a number of trade fights with allies and other countries.
Trump has slapped tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. And he has threatened new tariffs on auto imports. Japan’s trade minister in August warned the country could possibly retaliate.
Trump last week announced a trade deal with Mexico to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement. The U.S. is separately negotiating with Canada but both countries have dug in during the contentious talks.
Trump has warned he is willing to go ahead and sign the deal with Mexico if Canada does not get on board.
“[T]here is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal,” Trump tweeted last week.
Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has vowed his country is “not going to accept is that we should have to sign a bad deal just because the president wants it.”
Trump is also escalating a trade war with China. Trump has floated another $200 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.
Stratford, “Japan’s Built-in Resistance to Pressure”, 5 Sept 2018:
Past protectionist pushes by the United States prompted Japan to build up a degree of insulation that could help it weather the current tariff threat. Even as it pursued its Cold War-era strategy to build up the Japanese economy as a U.S. bulwark in the Pacific, the United States moved to protect the U.S. domestic sector from Japanese competition. In the 1970s, the United States piled pressure on Japan, which ultimately agreed to self-imposed voluntary export restrictions on automobiles, which lasted from 1981 to 1994. This squeeze on Japanese automakers spurred a flurry of joint ventures and the movement of Japanese production onto U.S. shores.
Between 1978 and 1989, the top seven Japanese carmakers each set up production in the United States — an acceleration that gathered momentum with production of Japanese cars climbing from 620,000 units in 1986 to 2.15 million by 1994. This trend of increased Japanese manufacturing in the United States has continued to strengthen. The number of vehicles manufactured by Japanese carmakers in the U.S. rose from 3.3 million to nearly 4 million between 2006 and 2016. And of the 20 most popular light-duty vehicles sold on the U.S. market, five were Japanese models containing upwards of 50 percent of components produced in the United States.
The strong onshore presence of Japanese production facilities will partly blunt the effectiveness of the tariff tactics as the United States presses Japan to enter a bilateral dialogue. Japan still holds out hope that it can persuade the United States to reverse course on its abandonment of the CPTPP. This trade agreement fits more into Japan’s overall strategy in the Asia-Pacific to counter China’s rise by pulling the Asia-Pacific region’s economy more closely into both the U.S. and Japanese orbits. During the most recent high-level meeting of U.S. and Japanese trade officials on Aug. 9 — more than two months after the auto tariff threat — Japan continued to seek a U.S. return to the CPTPP, and the United States continued to push for bilateral talks. Instead of caving to U.S. pressure, Japan has offered up expanded investment, increased purchases of U.S. natural gas and large-scale military procurements in hopes of mollifying Washington by chipping away at the trade deficit.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, right, visited Tokyo in May where he agreed with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to cooperate on investment in infrastructure projects overseas. Reuters
Asian Review, “Japan and China take first step toward joint infrastructure abroad”, 4 Sept 2018:
Thai high-speed rail among candidates to be discussed at inaugural committee this month
TOKYO—Japan and China are moving ahead with their plans to cooperate on overseas infrastructure projects, with a newly established public-private committee scheduled to hold its first meeting in late September in Beijing.
A high-speed rail project in Thailand is seen as the first candidate for cooperation.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang met in Tokyo in May and agreed to cooperate on infrastructure projects in third countries. Abe is considering visiting China in October and seeks to reach agreements on specific projects there.
Japan aims to avoid excessive competition with China on infrastructure projects by collaborating. Showing support for Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative could also lead to better bilateral ties. China, for its part, seeks to avoid being labeled overseas as a disreputable investor by bringing Japan on board.
The public-private committee’s first meeting will be led by Hiroto Izumi, special adviser to the prime minister, from Japan, as well as Gao Yan, a vice minister of commerce, and Ning Jizhe, a vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, from China. Senior officials from Japan’s top business lobby, Keidanren, will also participate.
The committee discussion will form the basis for a high-level bilateral forum on cooperation to take place when Abe visits China. Tokyo and Beijing are planning to sign memorandums of understanding on 20 to 30 projects then.
Socially constructing the non-social construction of right-wing, “politically incorrect objectivity.”
Cole-Stein is going to talk about how the porn-industry is “the last refuge of political incorrectness”, how “unlike the ‘Leftist’ controlled media, it simply and objectively caters to the desires of its ‘fan-base.”
Robert Stark: This-is-Robert-Stark. I am joined here with-uh, David Cole. Uh David, great having you back on the show.
David Cole-Stein: It’s a pleasure to be back, Robert! It really is. I enjoyed our first go-round and I’m looking forward to doing it again.
Robert Stark: And I’m also joined here with my ‘Alt-of-Center’ co-host, ah, Mathew Pegus.
Stark seems to provide/be provided with a different kosher co-host every few shows or so.
Mathew Pegus: Great to be here Robert. Thank you for having me.
David Cole-Stein: Speaking of ‘Alt’, I want to apologize to you, Robert; because I know, a couple months ago in one of my Taki-Mag pieces, I kind-of mischaracterized you in my description of you ...and you were very polite about it, you were very nice about it; but I don’t like when I do that, because, number one, I don’t like to make errors in print, but also I don’t like it when people mischaracterize me or affix labels to me that I don’t want or don’t deserve. So I want to just apologize to get things started here, one on one here: I’m very sorry - I think I called you “Alt-Righty.” ...and uh..
Robert Stark: Or like “Extreme Alt-Right” or “Hard-Core Alt-Right.” ...(chuckles)
David Cole-Stein: Uh, Ok. Yeah, rub it in! Go ahead! That, that, here - here’s a man trying to like, grovel; and you take that salt and you rub-it right in! Yes, I made a grievous error, a grievous error! and I apologize for it.
Robert Stark (chuckles): So uh, lets start with your recent article, “Lessons From My Porn-Girl” ..and just as kind of an overall theme, is how pornography is the one area in our culture where one is allowed to be ah, politically incorrect. So by-basically to start things off, by ‘porn-girl’ you’re referencing this woman that you used to know…
David Cole-Stein: Well, a woman who lived with me. A woman whose porn-name is Kirsten Lee; ah, her real name is Kera. That - I’m not outing anybody, she has, she has outed herself. So this is not me, ah doing anything (coughs) like outing or doxxing. Kera lived with me for almost two years and was pretty much my partner in crime. She was twenty one when I uh, met her and uh…and I, basically, my role in her life was to try to help her out of the porn-biz. It’s a business that has never interested me but it was fascinating during that first year that she and I were together before she got out of it because by the second year she was fully out. You know the, the amazing thing about a porn girl is that once you give them free rent and utilities and food, ah they no longer feel the need to seek money; ah and well, they can just get right out of porn at that point - it’s really a miraculous formula; uh, they, they, once they don’t have any needs or bills to pay or anything like that, well getting out of porn seems pretty simple at that point.
The White Left will emphasize this point of social safety net to help prevent mud-sharkery in the first place.
Robert Stark: So, you-you touch on the theme of how pornography is the one, the one uh, aspect of media where politically incorrect content is uh, not only tolerated but promoted; and garners massive amounts of hit-counts in profits. What was the specific case with her and her ah, politically incorrect attitudes about sexual relations in porn.
Cole-Burner Stain
David Cole-Stein
David Cole-Stein: Well I, um, I was amazed, really quite amazed by the people I mixed with during that first year while she was still knee deep, neck deep in the business. Uh, on racial matters, the kind of stuff that is the most taboo for the rest of us to talk about, on racial matters porn is just insanely honest. I’m not affixing a good or bad label to it, or healthy or unhealthy - just saying its incredibly honest: White girl comes in and White girl says, “I’m not going to blow an N-word”, and uh, and the producers of porn companies are like, ‘great, you don’t do the N-word porn’. Um, Kera, my porn-girl, made most of her money doing interracial stuff, because since she was so young and very thin and kind of pristine for lack of a better word; uh, it was kind of rare to have a White girl like that do interracial because ah, normally it was the older women who put on a few pounds who’d do the interracial; uh, but for a blond girl, blue eyes, twenty one years old and looking like she’s just come right-off the fiords, it was, she made a great-deal of money at that.
Note that Cole-Stein is marking a transition, there was a time when this didn’t happen, or not much among working class women and certainly not much in the public space. It is not a time in memorial truth of societal behavior; and it’s not as if it is a sheer discovered fan base - but he’s normalizing and institutionalizing it as a given fact apart from negotiative components of societal incentive - particularly, money and a Jewish anti-White agenda.
His argument - “a fan base”, as in, “this is what people agentively want” - is up against the involuntary high contrast tropism and need to gauge genetic distance and competition, not a mere expression of a ‘fan base’ catered-to. As a high contrast tropism, it is simply harder to ignore highly contrasting sounds and sights such as interracial; and the genetic call to grapple with the incitement to competition and deal with its vast, destructive genetic distance. It doesn’t necessarily mean this is what people want. Furthermore, there are elective, i.e., not merely catered-to, non-interracial taboos that are very popular also which can serve as an antidote to the destructive effects of this “catered-to” tropism.
David Cole-Stein (continues): But yet in her private life, she would never do interracial. That was the thing that fascinated me most was how she was able to compartmentalize the racial thing. When she’s at work and she gets $8,000 to go down on a black dude, well that’s just work, she just does it. And then when we’re out in club and some black guy tries to hit on her and maybe comment on her porn, and she’ll let loose just a stream of expletives, ah ‘you friggin’ N-word’, ‘you N-word this and N-word that’ (Stark giggles) uh, there’s, huh, in her mind, its just, hey, I’m at work, I’m at work and my work right now is blowin’ a black guy; and then when we’re out at a club later that night - hey, this is my private time, I don’t want to talk to a black guy…so..
It’s at work, ‘it’s ok then’. As with Hannah Arendt, he is shifting an ethnic basis for discrimination to the abstract, individual basis of “public and private.” He is trying to create a distancing effect, ‘this is play’ - to create a distancing effect from the actual participation of the actresses.
David Cole-Stein (continues): But the whole industry was just sort of honest that way. Ah, most of the women, would - including black girls too and the Latino girls - they were just very honest, ‘cuz you can talk about race in porn in a way that you can’t in real life. It’s, I make the point in my article - where else in American society right now can pay-scale be determined by your race? I mean, if any other business, if Amazon were to say, ‘we’re going to be paying uh, White programmers more than uh, Asian ones’, well of course it would be a huge thing and I’m not advocating that at all. But in porn, White girls who are willing to do black guys make more; uh, White girls who only want to do other White girls make the least. Because that’s, that’s, hell, any White girl will kiss another White girl these days, that’s ...in my day that was barely titillating and I think everyone kind of does that now.
So.. and then the Mexican dudes, there were some Arab dudes - and they get paid different based on race ..eh that doesn’t happen anywhere else. I mean, its kind of astounding when I was looking at it. I spent years writing about racial politics and racial law and discrimination laws. And I’m like, wow, this, this is the wild-west, this is a part of the entertainment industry - and a profitable one - that has yet to be touched by that Leftist hand of politically correct social justice bullshit.
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David Cole-Stein