Majorityrights News > Category: Business & Industry

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.

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Discourse analysis of David Cole Stein’s (((narrative control))) as promoted through Robert Stark’s kosher forum.

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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Econintersect.com, “How China’s Mobile Ecosystems Are Making Banks Obsolete”, 24 Aug 2018:

by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt

Giant Chinese tech companies have bypassed credit cards and banks to create their own low-cost digital payment systems.

The US credit card system siphons off excessive amounts of money from merchants, who must raise their prices to cover this charge. In a typical $100 credit card purchase, only $97.25 goes to the seller. The rest goes to banks and processors. But who can compete with Visa and MasterCard?

It seems China’s new mobile payment ecosystems can. According to a May 2018 article in Bloomberg titled “Why China’s Payment Apps Give U.S. Bankers Nightmares”:

The future of consumer payments may not be designed in New York or London but in China. There, money flows mainly through a pair of digital ecosystems that blend social media, commerce and banking - all run by two of the world’s most valuable companies. That contrasts with the U.S., where numerous firms feast on fees from handling and processing payments. Western bankers and credit-card executives who travel to China keep returning with the same anxiety: Payments can happen cheaply and easily without them.

The nightmare for the US financial industry is that a major technology company - whether one from China or a US giant such as Amazon or Facebook - might replicate the success of the Chinese mobile payment systems, cutting banks out.

According to John Engen, writing in American Banker in May 2018, China processed a whopping $12.8 trillion in mobile payments in the first ten months of 2017. Today even China’s street merchants don’t want cash. Payment for everything is with a phone and a QR code (a type of barcode). More than 90 percent of Chinese mobile payments are run through Alipay and WeChat Pay, rival platforms backed by the country’s two largest internet conglomerates, Alibaba and Tencent Holdings. Alibaba is the Amazon of China, while Tencent Holdings is the owner of WeChat, a messaging and social-media app with more than a billion users.

Alibaba created Alipay in 2004 to let millions of potential customers who lacked credit and debit cards shop on its giant online marketplace. Alipay is free for smaller users of its platform. As total monthly transactions rise, so does the charge; but even at its maximum, it’s less than half what PayPal charges - around 1.2 percent. Tencent Holdings similarly introduced its payments function in 2005 in order to keep users inside its messaging system longer. The American equivalent would be Amazon and Facebook serving as the major conduits for US payments.

WeChat and Alibaba have grown into full-blown digital ecosystems - around-the-clock hubs for managing the details of daily life. WeChat users can schedule doctor appointments, order food, hail rides and much more through “mini-apps” on the core app. Alipay calls itself a “global lifestyle super-app” and has similar functions. Both have flourished by making mobile payments cheap and easy to use. Consumers can pay for everything with their mobile apps and can make person-to-person payments. Everyone has a unique QR code, and transfers are free. Users don’t need to sign into a bank or payments app when transacting. They simply press the “pay” button on the ecosystem’s main app and their unique QR code appears for the merchant to scan. Engen writes:

A growing number of retailers, including McDonald’s and Starbucks, have self-scanning devices near the cash register to read QR codes. The process takes seconds, moving customers along so quickly that anyone using cash gets eye-rolls for slowing things down.

Merchants that lack a point-of-sale device can simply post a piece of paper with their QR code near the register for customers to point their phones’ cameras at and execute payments in reverse.

A system built on QR codes might not be as secure as the near-field communication technology used by ApplePay and other apps in the U.S. market. But it’s cheaper for merchants, who don’t have to buy a piece of technology to accept a payment.

The mobile payment systems are a boon to merchants and their customers, but local bankers complain that they are slowly being driven out of business. Alipay and WeChat have become a duopoly that is impossible to fight. Engen writes that banks are often reduced to “dumb pipes” - silent funders whose accounts are used to top up customers’ digital wallets. The bank bears the compliance and other account-related expenses, and it does not get the fees and branding opportunities typical of cards and other bank-run options. The bank is seen as a place to deposit money and link it to WeChat or Alipay. Bankers are being “disintermediated” - cut out of the loop as middlemen.

If Amazon, Facebook or one of their Chinese counterparts duplicated the success of China’s mobile ecosystems in the US, they could take $43 billion in merchant fees from credit card companies, processors and banks, along with about $3 billion in bank fees for checking accounts. In addition, there is the potential loss of money market deposits, which are also migrating to the mobile ecosystem duopoly in China. In 2017, Alipay’s affiliate Yu’e Bao surpassed JPMorgan Chase’s government market fund as the world’s largest money market fund, with more than $200 billion in assets. Engen quotes one financial services leader who observes, “The speed of migration to their wealth-management and money-market funds has been tremendous. That’s bad news for traditional banks, where deposits are the foundation of the business.”

An Amazon-style mobile ecosystem could challenge not only the payments system but the lending business of banks. Amazon is already making small-business loans, finding ways to cut into banks’ swipe-fee revenue and competing against prepaid card issuers; and it evidently has broader ambitions. Checking accounts, small business credit cards and even mortgages appear to be in the company’s sites.

In an October 2017 article titled “The Future of Banks Is Probably Not Banks,” tech innovator Andy O’Sullivan observed that Amazon has a relatively new service called “Amazon Cash,” where consumers can use a barcode to load cash into their Amazon accounts through physical retailers. The service is intended for consumers who don’t have bankcards, but O’Sullivan notes that it raises some interesting possibilities. Amazon could do a deal with retailers to allow consumers to use their Amazon accounts in stores, or it could offer credit to buy particular items. No bank would be involved, just a tech giant that already has a relationship with the consumer offering him additional services. Phone payment systems are already training customers not to need bankcards, which means not to need banks.

Taking those concepts even further, Amazon (or eBay or Craigslist) could set up a digital credit system that bypassed bank-created money altogether. Users could sell goods and services online for credits, which they could then spend online for other goods and services. The credits of this online ecosystem would constitute its own user-generated currency. Credits could trade in a digital credit clearing system similar to the digital community currencies used worldwide, systems in which “money” is effectively generated by users themselves.

Like community currencies, an Amazon-style credit clearing system would be independent of both banks and government; but Amazon itself is a private for-profit megalithic system. Like its Wall Street counterparts, it has a shady reputation, having been variously charged with worker exploitation, unfair trade practices, environmental degradation, and extracting outsized profits from trades. However, both President Trump for the Republicans and Senator Elizabeth Warren for the Democrats are now threatening to turn Amazon, Facebook and other tech giants into public utilities. This opens some interesting theoretical possibilities. We could one day have a national non-profit digital ecosystem operated as a cooperative, a public utility in which profits returned to the users in the form of reduced prices. Users could create their own money by “monetizing” their own credit, in a community currency system in which the “community” is the nation or even the world.

Lew Rockwell.com, “Punishing Iran Will Cost A Fortune”, 11 August 2018:

President Trump keeps vowing to create more jobs in America.  But his actions often speak differently.  The most egregious example was Trump’s cancellation of the multi-national Iran nuclear treaty that had been welcomed by the world as a major step to Mideast denuclearization.

In abrogating the international treaty signed by the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China, the US humiliated its allies and rivals who were strongly in favor of the accord.  Iran had already handed 97% of its enriched uranium to Russia, shut down reactors and centrifuges, and allowed UN inspectors to run all over its nuclear facilities when Trump tore up the deal that had been under negotiation since 2015.

Iran has been under a harsh US-led trade embargo since its 1979 revolution that was designed to cripple its economy and military and drive the people to rebel against their government.  Washington used the same tactics – without success – against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

So intense is the Trump administration’s hatred for Islamic Iran that it decided to scrap the multinational nuclear deal that would have meant opening Iran to western commerce and a bonanza for US and European companies.  The key element of the deal was to have been the sale of some 210 commercial jet airliners to Iran by the US and the European Union, a deal worth some $40-50 billion, not counting future sales of spare parts.

The US embargo of Iran since 1979 has made it unable to modernize its commercial airline fleet.  Iran was denied modern aircraft, spare parts, engines and instruments, leaving it with decaying aircraft from the 1970’s.

The grim result of the US-imposed embargo has been 17 crashes of Iranian civilian aircraft with 1500 deaths.

Most of Iran’s commercial aircraft – a grab bag of old, mostly 25-year old Boeing, Airbus, Chinese and Soviet aircraft – are flying coffins.  Iran’s maintenance, training and air traffic control are substandard.  Flying over and around Iran’s lofty mountains is a challenge for the best of pilots, even for a handful of newer ATR turboprop aircraft.

Washington’s denial to Iran of Boeing Aircraft (and Airbus planes because they contain US-made parts), means the loss of tens of thousands of highly-paid jobs in the US and Europe.  Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claims he talked Trump into canceling the Iran nuclear deal and the Boeing orders.

It’s hard to validate Netanyahu’s claim but it is clear that America’s ever more powerful Israel lobby and its ally fundamentalist Christian Zionists played a key role in thwarting the Iran nuclear deal and sale of commercial aircraft.

We don’t yet know the full cost of lost American jobs and business to help keep Iran isolated.  But one could argue that part of the $20 billion lost should be counted as part of annual US aid to Israel.

Russia and China’s aircraft industries will soon be able to deliver modern passenger aircraft to Iran and accept payment in oil.  China’s C919 and ARJ21 are now nearing service. Russia’s Sukhoi Superjet 100 will be ready soon.  Trump could be cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Trump and his allies are trying to push Iran into a corner and provoke it to lash out at US forces that are poised around it.  A navel clash in the Gulf is the obvious pretext for war.

While the US goes after Iran, it has opened a new anti-Muslim front against old ally Turkey by imposing heavy duties on Ankara’s exports to the US and attacking the always vulnerable Turkish lira.  This, in turn, has set off a financial crisis across Europe, notably among EU banks that have large, soft loans made to Turkey.

Trump & Co. are trying to force Turkey to bend the knee and support US-Israeli-Saudi policy goals.  Turkey and Iran remain the last significant supporters in the region of the Palestinians.  Trump and the New York City real estate developers, and the money men who surround him, are determined to show the independent-minded Iranians and Turks who is the big boss.

By Eric Margolis

In a stagnant economy, a universal basic income can create the demand needed to clear the shelves of unsold products and drive new productivity. (Photo: Pixabay)

Truthout.org, “How to Fund a Universal Basic Income Without Increasing Taxes or Inflation”, Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt Blog

The policy of guaranteeing every citizen a universal basic income is gaining support around the world, as automation increasingly makes jobs obsolete. But can it be funded without raising taxes or triggering hyperinflation? In a panel I was on at the NexusEarth cryptocurrency conference in Aspen September 21-23rd, most participants said no. This is my rebuttal.

In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world’s best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 years. All human jobs were expected to be automated in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans. In theory, that means we could all retire and enjoy the promised age of universal leisure. But the immediate concern for most people is that they will be losing their jobs to machines.

That helps explain the recent interest in a universal basic income (UBI) — a sum of money distributed equally to everyone. A UBI has been proposed in Switzerland, trials are beginning in Finland, and there is a successful pilot ongoing in Brazil. The cities of Ontario in Canada, Oakland in California, and Utrecht in the Netherlands are planning trials; two local authorities in Scotland have announced such plans; and politicians across Europe, including UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, have spoken in favor of the concept. Advocates in the US range from Robert Reich to Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Luther King, Thomas Paine, Charles Murray, Elon Musk, Dan Savage, Keith Ellison and Paul Samuelson. A new economic study found that a UBI of $1000/month to all adults would add $2.5 trillion to the US economy in eight years.

Welfare can encourage laziness, because benefits go down as earned income goes up. But studies have shown that a UBI distributed equally regardless of income does not have that result. In 1968, President Richard Nixon initiated a successful trial showing that the money had little impact on the recipients’ working hours. People who did reduce the time they worked engaged in other socially valuable pursuits, and young people who were not working spent more time getting an education. Analysis of a similar Canadian trial found that employment rates among young adults did not change, high-school completion rates increased, and hospitalization rates dropped by 8.5 percent. Larger experiments in India have reached similar results.

Studies have also shown that it would actually be cheaper to distribute funds to the entire population than to run the welfare services governments engage in now. It has been calculated that if the UK’s welfare budget were split among the country’s 50 million adults, each of them would get £5,160 a year.

But that is not enough to cover basic survival needs in a modern economy. Taxes would need to be raised, additional debt incurred, or other programs slashed; and these are solutions on which governments are generally unwilling to embark. The other option is “qualitative easing,” a form of central bank quantitative easing in which the money flows directly into the real economy rather than simply into banks. In Europe, politicians are taking another look at this once-derided “helicopter money.” A UBI is being proposed as monetary policy that would stimulate productivity without increasing taxes. As Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former senior vice president of the World Bank, explains:

. . . [W]hen the government spends more and invests in the economy, that money circulates, and recirculates again and again. So not only does it create jobs once: the investment creates jobs multiple times.

The result of that is that the economy grows by a multiple of the initial spending, and public finances turn out to be stronger: as the economy grows, fiscal revenues increase, and demands for the government to pay unemployment benefits, or fund social programmes to help the poor and needy, go down. As tax revenues go up as a result of growth, and as these expenditures decrease, the government’s fiscal position strengthens.

Why “QE for the People” Need Not Be Inflationary

The objection to any sort of quantitative easing in which new money gets into the real economy is that when the money supply grows too large and consumer prices shoot up, the process cannot be reversed. If the money is spent on a national dividend, infrastructure, or the government’s budget, it will be out circulating in the economy and will not be retrievable by the central bank.

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Nation Revisited # 142 August 2018:

Enoch Powell

Fifty years after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, immigrants are still coming to the UK. The latest ONS figures show that last year there were 101,000 migrants from the EU and 227,000 from outside the EU.

Enoch Powell was opposed to the EU and immigration but he was not anti-European and he refused an invitation to stand for the National Front in 1974. At a speech which he delivered in French in Lyon in 1971 he stated:

“From boyhood, I have been devoted to the study of that Greek and Roman inheritance, which in varying measure is common to all that is Europe, and not only ‘Europe’ of the six or eight or ten but Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals – and beyond. I also claim that reverent enthusiasm for the history of my own country which commands an equal reverence for the past that has formed everything else which is European. The truest European, in my opinion, is the man who is most humbly conscious of the vast demands which comprehension of, even a little part of this Europe imposes upon those who seek it; for the deeper we penetrate, the more the marvellous differentiation of human society within this single continent evokes our wonder. The very use of the word ‘Europe’ in expressions like ‘European unity’, ‘going into Europe’, ‘Europe’s role in the world’ is a solecism which grates upon the ear of all true Europeans: only Americans can be excused for using it.”

Uber-nationalist parties are wrong to claim Enoch Powell as one of their own. They want to spend more on defence and the National Health Service but he resigned from Harold Macmillan’s government in 1958 over plans to increase public spending. They are nostalgic about the British Empire but he was in favour of Indian independence and critical of our mistreatment of Kenyan detainees during the Mau Mau Emergency. They despise foreigners but he was a classical scholar who spoke several languages.

The working men who marched in support of Enoch Powell lost interest when ‘The Sun’ and ‘The Daily Mail’ turned against him. But the influx of refugees from Africa and the Middle East is finally challenging the liberal consensus. Populist parties are now in government in Italy, Austria and Hungary, and powerful in France, Germany, Sweden and Poland.

At present, there is no solidarity on the issue. There’s no point in Germany sending Africans back to Italy or Greece because they landed there, or sharing them out amongst the nations of Europe. We need a common European migration and asylum policy and a combined Naval force to patrol the Mediterranean. Not long ago such a policy would have been unthinkable but since Angela Merkel took in a million refugees attitudes have hardened and deportation is firmly on the agenda.

The supporters of multi-culturalism got away with their mischief because global capitalism made most of us richer. We were too busy earning a living to worry about immigration, but its social consequences have had a profound effect on public opinion. Rising crime and terrorism are forcing Europe to get its act together; just as the UK is preparing to leave.

Plutocracy

Our system of government dates back to the days of stage coaches, three-cornered hats, and universal ignorance. Only the upper classes had the vote and bribery was the norm. Today, everybody can vote and they have all got smartphones in their pockets to inform them on any topic. It shouldn’t be so easy for charlatans to get elected but they still manage it.

We now have the technology to consult the electorate without calling a general election. Online referendums could be used to inform the government. This would make Parliament obsolete together with 650 MPs and over 800 members of The House of Lords. Those parliamentarians over retiring age could be pensioned off and the younger ones redeployed as traffic wardens.

Of course, no such reforms will be introduced. We will keep our ancient institutions with their obsolete rituals and carry on wasting millions of pounds. Our MPs will continue to shuffle into lobbies to be counted like sheep and our noble Lords will still frustrate their knavish tricks.

The big businessmen who really run this country are not impressed by public opinion and they see no reason to interfere with tradition. Somebody said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But that’s exactly what we do at every general election when we chose a government from the same assortment of nonentities as before.

The alternative to this madness is not a dictatorship but representative government. We should replace Parliament with a secure computerised system that couldn’t be got at by plutocrats.

The top ten British companies are amongst the most powerful in the world. They are; Royal Dutch Shell, HSBC Holdings, British American Tobacco, BP, Glaxo Smith Kline, Diageo, Astra Zeneca, Vodaphone, Unilever, and Glencoe. British businesses paid £43 billion in corporation tax in 2014-15 and contributed an unknown amount in ‘donations’ to political parties. We are not governed by elected MPs but by the appointed executives of major corporations who put profits before people.

It’s the duty of big business to make money for their shareholders but it’s the duty of government to protect workers’ rights and provide decent health care and social security. There are some excellent firms that look after their workers but most of them are only interested in making money. Karl Marx predicted that global capitalism would eventually turn into socialism but we haven’t got there yet. 

Fashions in Thinking

Without even realising it we all follow fashion to some extent. Short hair is currently in fashion for men but not so long ago long hair was the norm. We may not keep up with the latest styles but we find ourselves slowly adapting to them. Have a look at some old photographs of your friends and family and you will notice collar-length hairstyles, flared trousers, and floral shirts that you would not wear today.

Conformity starts in the playground and continues into old age. Women of a certain age try to be fashionable by wearing short skirts that would look better on a teenager. And it’s the same with social attitudes. Years ago black dogs and cats were often called ‘Nigger’, and black people usually appeared in films as servants. The original housekeeper in the Tom & Jerry cartoons was a black mammy but she eventually became Irish.

When John Tyndall launched ‘Spearhead’ magazine n 1964 he used his front page to described Africans as ‘sub-human’, but a year later the Race Relations Act was passed and AK Chesterton warned:

“The man who thinks that this war can be won by mouthing slogans about ‘dirty Jews and filthy niggers’ is a maniac whose place should not be in the National Front but in a mental hospital.”

Whatever our thoughts were in the Sixties, it’s likely that we have changed our minds. Not many people want to go back to the days when the glamorous model Ruth Ellis (pictured) was hanged for shooting dead her brutal lover, or when the brilliant codebreaker Alan Turing was hounded to his death by the authorities. Times have changed and most of us have changed with them.

This is often blamed on the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist scholars who set out to change public attitudes. But most of these reforms can be traced to the French Revolution, or even further back to the Sermon on The Mount. The Marxists did not invent social justice they just adopted it as a strategy.

Of course, people are influenced by propaganda. Smoking and drinking and driving are two positive examples of ‘social engineering’. The latest campaign pairs black and white couples in almost every TV commercial. This is not a government initiative but the latest fashion in thinking. Keen young account executives are persuading their clients that diversity sells products. The message to women seems to be, if you want a comfortable bed or a new kitchen, marry a black man.

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“Slavery by debt has continued to this day, and it is particularly evident in the plight of students.” (Photo: Michael Fleshman/cc)

Common Dreams:

“Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers On The Backs Of The Young”, by Ellen Brown

Higher education has been financialized, transformed from a public service into a lucrative cash cow for private investors.

The advantages of slavery by debt over “chattel” slavery – ownership of humans as a property right – were set out in an infamous document called the Hazard Circular, reportedly circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts during the American Civil War. It read in part:

Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.

Slaves had to be housed, fed and cared for. “Free” men housed and fed themselves. For the more dangerous jobs, such as mining, Irish immigrants were used rather than black slaves, because the Irish were expendable. Free men could be kept enslaved by debt, by paying them wages that were insufficient to meet their costs of living. On how to control wages, the Hazard Circular went on:

This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.

The government, too, had to be enslaved by debt. It could not be allowed to simply issue the money it needed to meet its budget, as Lincoln’s government did with its greenbacks (government-issued US Notes). The greenback program was terminated after the war, forcing the government to borrow from banks – banks that created the money themselves, just as the government had been doing. Only about 10% of the “banknotes” then issued by banks were actually backed by gold. The rest were effectively counterfeit. The difference between government-created and bank-created money was that the government issued it and spent it on the federal budget, creating demand and stimulating the economy. Banks issued money and lent it, at interest. More had to be paid back than was lent, keeping the supply of money tight and keeping both workers and the government in debt.

Student Debt Peonage

Slavery by debt has continued to this day, and it is particularly evident in the plight of students. Graduates leave college with a diploma and a massive debt on their backs, averaging over $37,000 in 2016. The government’s student loan portfolio now totals $1.37 trillion, making it the second highest consumer debt category behind only mortgage debt. Student debt has risen nearly 164% in 25 years, while median wages have increased only 1.6%.

Unlike mortgage debt, student debt must be paid. Students cannot just turn in their diplomas and walk away, as homeowners can with their keys. Wages, unemployment benefits, tax refunds and even Social Security checks can be tapped to ensure repayment. In 1998, Sallie Mae (the Student Loan Marketing Association) was privatized, and Congress removed the dischargeabilility of federal student debt in bankruptcy, absent exceptional circumstances. In 2005, this lender protection was extended to private student loans. Because lenders know that their debts cannot be discharged, they have little incentive to consider a student borrower’s ability to repay. Most students are granted a nearly unlimited line of credit. This, in turn, has led to skyrocketing tuition rates, since universities know the money is available to pay them; and that has created the need for students to borrow even more.

Students take on a huge debt load with the promise that their degrees will be the doorway to jobs allowing them to pay it back, but for many the jobs are not there or not sufficient to meet expenses. Today nearly one-third of borrowers have made no headway in paying down their loans five years after leaving school, although many of these borrowers are not in default. They make payments month after month consisting only of interest, while they continue to owe the full amount they borrowed. This can mean a lifetime of tribute to the lenders, while the loan is never paid off, a classic form of debt peonage to the lender class.

All of this has made student debt a very attractive asset for investors. Student loans are pooled and repackaged into student loan asset-backed securities (SLABS), similar to the notorious mortgage-backed securities through which home buyers were caught in a massive debt trap in 2008-09. The nameless, faceless investors want their payments when due, and the strict terms of the loans make it more profitable to force a default than to negotiate terms the borrower can actually meet. About 80% of SLABS are backed by government-insured loans, guaranteeing that the investors will get paid even if the borrower defaults. The onerous federal bankruptcy laws also make SLABS particularly safe and desirable investments.

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“Attribution of the 2018 heat in northern Europe” - key findings from the World Weather Attribution report -

* The heat based on observations and forecast is very extreme near the Arctic circle but less extreme further south.

* From past observations and models we find that the probability of such a heatwave to occur has increased everywhere in this region due to anthropogenic climate change, although in Scandinavia this increase was not visible in observations until now due to the very variable summer weather.

* We estimate that the probability to have such heat or higher is generally more than two times higher today than if human activity had not altered climate.

* Due to the underlying warming trend, even record breaking events can be not very extreme but have low return times in the current climate.

* With the global mean temperatures continuing to   increase heat waves like this will become even less exceptional.

The authors acknowledge that the report is not peer reviewed but are confident in their methodologies. Another report will be published before the end of the year.

Full report -

https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/analyses/attribution-of-the-2018-heat-in-northern-europe/

Obviously they haven’t heard that the alleged human contribution towards global warming is “fake news” and a “scam to transfer wealth from the developed world” (otherwise known as America) to the developing world (otherwise known as “shit holes”) and to argue otherwise is “poison to nationalism”. - Mancinblack