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sataniccapitalist · 5 years

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FEBRUARY 18, 2019

31 Actual National Emergencies

by PAUL STREET

A Wannabe Strongman’s Brown Menace Straw Man

Everyone with five functioning gray cells knows that the aspiring fascist strongman Donald Trump’s Declaration of a National Emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border is absurd.

There is no “national security crisis” of illegal immigration on the southern United States border.

Illegal crossings are not at “emergency” levels; they are at a fifty-year low.

Undocumented immigrants are not a crime and violence threat. They are less likely to commit crimes, violent ones included, than naturalized U.S. citizens.

Drugs come into the U.S. not through gaps in border fencing but primarily through legal ports of entry.

There is no big call for a completed U.S.-Mexico wall on the part of U.S. citizens on the southern border.

The United States military has not been “breaking up” and blocking “monstrous caravans” of illegal immigrants trying to harm the U.S.

The only crisis at the border is the humanitarian one created by Trump’s war on asylum-seekers and legal as well as technically illegal immigrants. The wannabe strongman has set up a ridiculous brown menace strawman in an effort to take an unprecedented step. He wants to use the National Emergencies Act to fulfill a ridiculous campaign promises to his white-nationalist base. He wants to make an end run around Congress to spend federal taxpayer on a project that lawmakers chose not to fund – a political vanity scheme that is opposed by 60 percent of the U.S. populace.

Actual National Emergencies

An irony here is that the United States today is in fact haunted by many actual and interrelated national emergencies. Here below are the top thirty-one that came to the present writer’s mind this last weekend:

1. Class Inequality. America is mired in a New Gilded Age where economic disparity is so extreme now that the top thousandth (the 0.1 percent, not just the 1 Percent) possesses more wealth than the bottom U.S. 90 percent and three absurdly rich U.S.-Americans – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – possess more wealth between them than the bottom half of the country.

2. Poverty. The nation’s 540 billionaires (Trump is one of them) enjoy lives of unimaginable opulence (Trump flew off to one of his resorts to play golf after declaring his “national emergency” – an “emergency” he foolishly said he didn’t actually have to declare) while 15 million children – 21% of all U.S. children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold, a measurement that has been shown to be drastically below the minimally adequate family budgets families require to meet basic expenses.

3. Plutocracy. “We must make our choice,” onetime Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies wrote in 1941. “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Consistent with Brandeis’s warning, the leading mainstream political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens find through exhaustive research that “the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans actually have had little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups – especially business corporations – have had much more political clout. When they are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the general public has been virtually powerless…Government policy,” Page and Gilens determined, “reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the preapproved, money-vetted candidates for federal office.” Economic power is so concentrated in the US today you can count on one hand and one finger the multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions that control the nation’s economic and political life: Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. “You have no choice,” George Carlin used to tell his audiences earlier this century, “You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear.”

4. Bad Jobs. Trump boasts of American job creation and low official unemployment rate (real joblessness is a different story) while deleting the fact that tens of millions of the nation’s workers struggle with jobs whose pay lags far behind employment growth thanks to declining unionization (down to 6.5% of the private-sector workforce due to decades of relentless employer hostility), inadequate minimum wages, globalization, automation, and outsourcing. A third of the nation’s workers make less than $12 an hour ($24,960 a year assuming full-time work) and 42% get less than $15 ($31,200 a year). Good luck meeting a family’s food, rent, childcare, medical, and car payment (car ownership is often required in a nation that lacks adequate public transportation) costs on those kinds of returns on labor power. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently reported that a record 7 million U.S.-Americans are three months or more behind on their par payments. As the Washington Post reports: “Economists warn this is a red flag. Despite the strong economy and low unemployment rate, many Americans are struggling to pay their bills. ‘The substantial and growing number of distressed borrowers suggests that not all Americans have benefited from the strong labor market,’ economists at the New York Fed wrote in a blog post. A car loan is typically the first payment people make because a vehicle is critical to getting to work, and someone can live in a car if all else fails. When car loan delinquencies rise, it is a sign of significant duress among low-income and working-class Americans.”

5. Corporate Media Consolidation is so extreme in the U.S. now that just six corporations – Comcast, FOX, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and AT&T – together own more than half of traditional U.S. media content print, film and electronic. The Internet giants Google, Facebook, and Amazon rule online communication and shopping. (It is isn’t just about “news and information” [Carlin], by the way. The corporate-owned mass media probably spreads capitalist, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and military-imperialist propaganda more effectively through its entertainment wing than it does through its new and public/political affairs wing. A movie like “American Sniper” beats CNN reporting bias when it comes to advancing the U.S. imperial project [see #s 28 and 29 below]. A film like Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino” beats the evening news when it comes to advancing racist mass incarceration and racial segregation [see #s 6 and 9 below]).

6. Racial Disparity and Apartheid. The U.S. Black-white wealth gap is stark: 8 Black median household cents on the white median household dollar. Equally glaring is the nation’s level of racial segregation. In the Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee metropolitan areas, for example more than three in every four Black people would have to (be allowed to) move from their nearly all-black Census tracts into whiter ones in order to live in a place whose racial composition matched that of the broader region in which they reside. These two statistical measures are intimately interrelated since housing markets distribute so much more than just housing. They also distribute access to jobs, good schools, green spaces, full-service groceries, safety, medical services and more that matters for “equal opportunity” and advancement.

7. Gender Inequality. Among full-time U.S. workers, women make 81 cents for every dollar a man is paid. The gap is worse in part-time employment since women more commonly work reduced schedules to handle domestic labor. Women ‘s median retirement savings are roughly one third of those of men. Households headed by single women with children have a poverty rate of 35.6 percent, more than double the 17.3 percent rate for households headed by single men with children. Women comprise just 27 percent of the nation’s top 10 income percent, 17 percent of the upper 1 percent, and 11 percent of the top 0.1 percent. By contrast, women make up nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of U.S. workers paid the federal minimum wage.

8. Native American Poverty. Thanks to the savage white-“settler” ethnic-cleansing of most of North America from the 16th century through 1900, Indigenous people make up just 1 percent of the U.S. population. The Native American poverty rate (28%) is double that of the nation as a whole and is particularly high in most of the commonly isolated and high-unemployment reservations where just more than a fifth of the nation’s Indigenous population lives. Native American life expectancy is 6 years short of the national average. In some states, Native American life expectancy is 20 years less than the national average. In Montana, Native American men live on average just 56 years.

9. Racist Mass Arrest, Incarceration, and Criminal Marking. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world, fueled by the racially disparate waging of the so-called War on Drugs. The racial disparities are so extreme that 1 in very 10 U.S. Black men is in prison or jail on any given day. One in 3 Black adult males are saddled with the permanent crippling mark of a felony record – what law professor Michelle Alexander has famously called “the New Jim Crow.” Blacks make up 12% of the U.S. population but 38% of the nation’s state prison population.

10. Trumpism/Fascism. The U.S. mass media focuses so heavily on the seemingly interminable awfulness of the creeping fascist Donald Trump (whose hideous nature is a ratings bonanza at CNN and MSNBC) that it is easy to lose sight of the fascistic horror of his authoritarian and white-nationalist supporters – roughly a third of the nation. The best social and political science research on Trump’s base reveals a fascist-like movementseeking a “strong” authoritarian “leader” who will rollback civil liberties and the gains won by women and racial and ethnic minorities since the 1960s. Trumpism wants to Make America more fully white-supremacist, patriarchal, and authoritarian (“great”) Again. Herr Donald’s disproportionately armed throng of die-hard devotees backs their Dear Leader no matter how terribly he behaves. It is a grave, creeping fascist threat to democracy.

11. The War on Truth. The aspiring fascist leader Trump made on average 15 false statements per day in 2018. He had stated more than 7,600 untruths as president by the end of last year. Trump lies constantly about matters big and small. He is a practitioner of what Chris Hedges calls “the permanent lie.” It is no small matter. In his description of this as “the most ominous threat” posed by Trump, Hedges quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt. “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth,” Arendt wrote in her classic volume The Origins of Totalitarianism, “is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” Trump is only the most extreme and egregious wave of fabrication in a vast sea of national deception. U.S.-Americans, once accurately described by Alex Carey as “the most propagandized people in the world,” are surrounded by duplicitous and misleading information and imagery. This constant barrage of falsehood – examples include the thoroughly untrue notion that the U.S. possessed a “great democracy” for the Trump campaign and Russia to (supposedly) “undermine” in 2016 – threatens to exhaust our capacity to distinguish fact from fiction.

12. Gun Violence. Fully 40,000 people died from shootings in the American “armed madhouse” in 2017 (we are still waiting for the grisly statistic for 2018). The U.S. was home to 322 mass shootings that killed 387 people and injured 1,227 in 2018. Twenty-eight mass shootings, killing 36 and wounding 92, took place in January of this year. A mass shooting killed five workers in Aurora, Illinois, on the very day (last Friday) that Trump declared his fake national emergency.

13. Sexual Violence. One in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be raped at some point in their lives in the U.S.

14. Illiteracy and Innumeracy. More than 30 million adults in the United States cannot read, write, or do basic math above a third-grade level.

15. Manufactured Mass Ignorance and Amnesia. Thanks to corporate control of the nation’s media and schools, U.S.-Americans are shockingly ignorant of basic facts relating to their own history and society. White U.S.-Americans are mired in extraordinary denial about the level of Black-white inequality and the depth and degree of discrimination faced by Black Americans today. U.S.-Americans in general know next to nothing about the criminal and mass-murderous havoc U.S. foreign policy wreaks around the world. This renders them incapable of understanding world politics and woefully vulnerable to nationalistic propaganda and militarism. Eleven years historian Rick Shenkman wrote a book titled “Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter.” Shenkman found that a majority of Americans: didn’t know which party was in control of Congress; couldn’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court; didn’t know the U.S. had three branches of government; believed George W. Bush’s argument the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had attacked America on 9/11. Ask an average U.S.-American when the American War of Independence or the Civil War or WWII were fought and why, what the Bill of Rights was, what fascism is past and present, or what the Civil Rights Movement was about, and you will get blank stares and preposterously wrong answers. A people that doesn’t know its history wanders without a clue through the present and stumbles aimlessly into the future. Real historical knowledge is a great democratic people’s weapon and it is in perilously short supply in the U.S. today.

16. The Israel and Saudi Lobbies. Israel’s power in U.S. politics and political culture is so absurdly exaggerated that a freshman Muslim U.S. Congressional Representative (Ilhan Omar) was recently subjected to a massive and bipartisan political assault absurdly charging her with “anti-Semitism” for daring to Tweet seven words suggesting the elementarily true fact that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) – a deep-powerful, deep-pockets public relations and lobbying organization committed to the advance of Israeli state interests – exercises money-lubricated influence on U.S. politics and policy. To visibly raise the question of Palestinian rights and Israel’s horrendous treatment of Arab peoples is to invite an onslaught from the Israel Lobby’s vicious and powerful attack-dogs. They’ve even been known to strip professors of tenure. Meanwhile, the despotic Saudi regime, possibly the most reactionary government on Earth, continues through money and other means to exercise huge influence on U.S. politics even as it senselessly crucifies the people of Yemen (with direct U.S. military assistance), cultivates terrorism across the Muslim world, and vivisects dissident journalists in its foreign embassies.

17. Neo-McCarthyism. The original Orwellian-American and Russia-mad McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s has been resurrected in the post-Soviet era with a curious partisan twist. Anti-Russian hysteria has been picked up by the Democratic Party, which has been eager to blame its pathetic failure to defeat Trump on Russia’s supposedly powerful “interference in our [unmentionably non-existent] democracy” in 2016 – and to deny its politicos’ role in provoking any such relevant Russian interference as may have occurred. On the Republican side, Trump (who was mentored by Senator Joe McCarthy’s onetime chief counsel Roy Cohn!) and other GOP leaders now routinely follow in the footsteps of Joe McCarthy by calling even cringingly centrist corporate-neoliberal Democrats and everything they propose “socialist.” One of the most horrific moments in Herr Donald’s sickening State of the Union Address came when the Orange Mother of all Malignant Assholes (OMoAMA) told the assembled federal officials to “renew” the nation’s “pledge” that “America will never be a socialist country.” Numerous Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy “We’re Capitalist and That’s Just the Way it is” Pelosi (net worth $71 million) and “progressive” U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren ($11 million) joined the GOPers in attendance in applauding that “pledge.” McCarthyism was always and remains a richly bipartisan disease.

18. Health Care and Health. The United States’ corporate-owned/-managed for-profit health care system is the most expensive in the world but ranks just 12th in life expectancy among the 12 wealthiest industrialized countries. The U.S. spends almost three times more on healthcare as do other countries with comparable incomes. Reflecting poor, commercialized and corporate-imposed food systems and lethally sedentary life styles, 58 percent of the U.S. population is overweight, a major health risk factor.

19. Bad Schools. The nation’s expensive but very unequally funded schools deliver terrible outcomes. Among the world’s 34 ranking OECD nations, U.S. schools are the fifth most expensive, but the U.S. ranks scores far below average in math. It ranks 17th among in reading and 21st in science.

20. Child Abuse. Childhelp reports that “Every year more than 3.6 million referrals are made to child protection agencies involving more than 6.6 million children. The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations – losing on average between four and seven children every day to child abuse and neglect…A report of child abuse is made very ten seconds.”

21. Depression and Substance Abuse. The United States, once described by onetime U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be” (in a speech supporting the Congressional authorization of George W. Bush to invade Iraq) has the third highest rates of depression and anxiety and the second highest rate of drug use in the world. “One in five adults in the U.S. experiences some form of mental illness each year,” according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. That estimate is certainly absurdly low.

22. Immigrant Workers Without Rights. Undocumented immigrants make up 55% of hired labor on farms, 15% of laborers in construction, and 9% in both industry and the service sector. “These workers,” CBS reported earlier this year, “play vital roles in the U.S. economy, erecting American buildings, picking American apples and grapes, and taking care of American babies. Oh, and paying American taxes.” Their technically illegal status makes them easily exploited by employers and undermines their ability to organize and fight for decent conditions both for themselves for other workers.

23. The Dreamer Nightmare. Eight hundred thousand people living in the U.S. were brought to the country as children by parents without U.S. citizenship. These “Dreamers’” legal status is stuck in limbo. They are not allowed to vote. They live in the shadow of possible future deportation, with their legal status treated as a partisan political football.

24. Vote Suppression. State-level racist voter suppression and de facto disenfranchisement is rife across the United States. Among other things, this has contributed significantly to the Republicans winning the presidency in 2000, 2004, and 2016. A “gentleman’s agreement” between the two reigning political parties pushes this critical problem to the margins of public discussion. (The Democrats have widely ignored the matter while they have obsessed for two years plus about Russia’s real or alleged role in the last election. Moscow’s influence was likely small compared to American-as-Apple Pie racist voter suppression in electing Trump.) “The United States,” political scientist David Schutlz noted on Counterpunch last year, “is the only country in the world that still does not have in its Constitution an explicit clause affirmatively granting a right to vote for all or some of its citizens.”

25. The Absurdly Archaic U.S. Constitution. Popular sovereignty, also known as democracy was the late 18thcentury U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare. They crafted an aristo-republican national charter brilliantly crafted to keep it at bay – in the darkly ironic name of “We the People.” Two and a third centuries later, their handiwork continues to do its explicitly un- and anti-democratic work through such openly authoritarian mechanisms as the Electoral College, the apportionment of two Senators to every U.S. state regardless of population, the distant time-staggering of elections, the lifetime presidential appointment and Senate approval of Supreme Court justices. The preposterously venerated U.S. Constitution is an ongoing 232-year old authoritarian calamity in dire need of a radical and democratic overhaul. It is long past time for the populace to declare a national emergency and call for a Constituent Assembly to draft a new national governing structure dedicated to meaning popular self-rule.

26. Trump and the Imperial Presidency. The OMoAMA (Trump) is by all indications a demented and malignant narcissist, a pure sociopath, and a creeping fascist. But the fact that someone as twisted, venal, sexist, and racist as Trump can pose dire threats to humanity in the first place is in no small part a function of the extreme powers that have accrued to the United States constitutionally super-empowered executive branch over the many decades in which the U.S. has reigned as the world’s most powerful state. The absurdly vast and authoritarian powers of the imperial presidency are an on ongoing national and global emergency.

27. Election Madness/Electoralism. In the early spring of 2008, the late radical American historian Howard Zinn wrote powerfully against the “Election Madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society including the left” in the year of Obama’s ascendancy. “An election frenzy seizes the country every four years,” Zinn worried, “because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls. …” Zinn said he would support one major-party candidate over another but only “for two minutes—the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth.” Then he offered sage counsel, reminding us that time-staggered candidate-centered major party electoralism is a very weak surrogate for real popular sovereignty, which requires regular grassroots organization and militancy beneath and beyond what his good friend Noam Chomsky has called“the quadrennial electoral extravaganza”: “Before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice. … We should not expect that a victory at the ballot box in November will even begin to budge the nation from its twin fundamental illnesses: capitalist greed and militarism. … Before [elections] … and after … we should be taking direct action against the obstacles to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. … Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.” The reigning “mainstream” US media and politics culture is fiercely dedicated to advancing the hegemony of the major party candidate-centered election cycle, advancing the deadly totalitarian notion that those two minutes in a ballot box once every four years – generally choosing among politics vetted in advance for us by the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire – is the sum total of “politics” – the only politics that really matters. Since the hidden corporate control of the US electoral politics on behalf of the center-right ruling class rules out victory for candidates who accurately reflect majority left-progressive public opinion, these ritual exercises in fake democracy deeply reinforce the fatalistic and false belief that most Americans are centrist and right-wing. The 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Iowa-New Hampshire circus is already sucking up vast swaths of cable news coverage and commentary while numerous pressing matters (like most of what is listed in the present essay) is largely ignored. It’s pathetic.

28. Guns Over Butter. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. rightly preached that the U.S. could not end poverty or escape “spiritual death” as long as it diverted vast swaths of its tax revenue to a giant war machine that “draw [s] men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.” Just over half a century after King said this, the United States gives 54 percent of its federal discretionary to the Pentagon System, a giant subsidy to high-tech “defense” (war and empire) corporations like Raytheon and Boeing. Six million U.S, children live in “deep poverty,” at less than half (!) the federal government’s obscenely inadequate poverty level, while the U.S, government maintains 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territoriesaround the world (Britain, France, and Russia together have a combined 30 foreign bases) and accounts for nearly 40 percent of all global military spending. It is deeply offensive that the progressive-populist (fake-“democratic socialist”) U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has repeatedly cited Scandinavian nations as his social-democratic policy role models without having the elementary Dr. Kingian decency to note that those countries dedicate relatively tiny portions of their national budgets to the military. It is disturbing but predictable that most Congressional Democrats voted for Trump’s record-setting $700 billion Pentagon budget last year. U.S. Americans must choose: we can have democracy, social justice, guaranteed free health care, well-funded public schools, and livable ecology or we can have a giant global war machine. We can’t have both.

29. Doctrinal Denial of U.S. Imperialism. Across the U.S. “mainstream” political and media spectrum, it is beyond the pale of acceptable discussion to acknowledge that the United States is a deeply criminal and imperialist power. The examples are endless. It is normative for U.S. cable talking heads, pundits, and politicians to discuss Eastern Europe or East Asia as if the Washington has as much right to influence developments there as Moscow and Beijing, respectively. Terrible developments in the Middle East and North Africa are routinely discussed by “mainstream “U.S. politicos, talking heads, and pundits as if the United States had not wreaked nearly indescribable havoc on Iraq and Libya and the broader Muslim world. Migrants seeking asylum from Central America are regularly reported and discussed with zero reference to the fact that the United States has inflicted massive and bloody devastation on that region for decades – and without mentioning the Obama administration’s support of a vicious right-wing coup in Honduras in the spring of 2009. Reporting on the current political crisis in Venezuela comes with complete Orwellian deletion of the United States’ role in crippling the nation’s democratically elected socialist government on the model of the Nixon administration’s campaign to undermine Chile’s democratically elected socialist government in the late 1960s and early 1970s. No serious discussion is permitted of the historical context of Washington’s longstanding intervention and regime-change operations across Latin America. The reigning Empire-denial is absurd.

30. Amazon. Google (lol) up its mind-boggling and many-sided monopolistic reach and then thank the New York City Left for stopping this public-subsidy-sucking, zero tax-paying corporate monstrosity from setting up its headquarters in the nation’s largest city.

31. Last but not at all least, Ecocide. The climate catastrophe poses grave existential threats to livable ecology and all prospects for a decent human future. It is a national and global emergency of epic proportions. It is the single biggest issue of our or any time. If this environmental calamity is not averted soon, nothing else that progressives and decent citizens everywhere care about is going to matter all that much. The United Nations Panel on Climate Change has recently warned that we have a dozen years to keep global warming to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which true cataclysm will fall upon hundreds of millions of people. Under the command of capital, we are currently on a pace to melt Antarctica by 2100. The unfolding climate disaster’s leading political and economic headquarters is the United State, home to a super-powerful fossil fuel industry with a vast, deeply funded lobbying and public relations apparatus dedicated to turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas Chamber.

Towards a Green New Deal

If a vicious and moronic creeping fascist like Donald Trump can declare a fake national emergency over a non-existent crisis in order to build a political vanity wall rejected by Congress and 60 percent of the population, perhaps a future decent and democratic government sincerely committed to the common good could declare a national emergency to address the all-too real climate crisis by moving the nation off fossil fuels and on to renewable energy sources while advancing environmentally sustainable practices and standards across economy and society. A properly crafted Green New Deal would also and necessarily address other and related national emergencies including the crises of financial oligarchy, bad jobs, inequality, poverty, plutocracy, racial inequality, mass incarceration, untruth, inadequate health care, fascism, poor schooling, mental illness, substance abuse, gun violence, militarism-imperialism, gender disparity, spiritual death, and much more. I plan in a future essay to elaborate on what it is meant by a “properly crafted Green New Deal.”

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PAUL STREET

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)

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stroud5aside · 5 years

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Friday 25 October - Stroud7 Are Champions of Division Two!!

On a day when the new Cheltenham Race Season commenced, it was ‘odds-on’ that it would be trumped by the FNL action tonight. And what a night it was with so many outstanding games!

PREMIERSHIP

There was vital action at the top and at the bottom of the Premiership and let’s start with the match that effected both ends of the table, the game between league leaders Breakaway Boys FC and relegation threatened Not So Athletic.

Breakaway dominated this game but with Scott at the top of his game, in the Not So Athletic goal, and the Unathletic guys defending as though their lives depended on it, this game was destined to be close. In the end there was only one goal in it as Breakaway won by a ‘short head’ with the only goal of the game, that was scored by Brad.

Stroud Old Boys maintained the chase behind Breakaway Boys and produced a masterful display as they swept Netsix and Chill aside, 10-1. With quality on display throughout this Stroud Old Boys team it is difficult to know who to single out. But in their ‘dazzling’ new kit, Kerr, Anthoney, Deano and Freems took it in turn to ‘outshine’ their opponents whilst Butch again looked very impressive between the sticks. With a game in hand on the leaders it is difficult to see anyone stopping them reclaiming the Premiership title.

Nawachusai FC have ‘jumped‘ back up to third, in their see-saw season, with an 8-4 victory over Coaley Crows. Nawachusai maybe ‘outsiders’ to finish in the medal positions this season but I wouldn’t ‘bet against’ them! As for the Crows, they in the ‘claws’ of relegation and need to ‘take flight’ if they are going to avoid the drop this time around!

There was a shock in store for SWR Youth FC, with the team at the bottom of the table, Lioncourt Legends, producing their best form of the season to beat them 8-3! Lioncourt were ‘outsiders’ to win this game before kick off but dug deep to win ‘against the odds’ with Ollie claiming 5 goals whilst Joe and George performed heroics at the back to keep Fin in check! As a consequence of this result SWR slipped to fourth whilst Lioncourt moved up to sixth place and out of the relegation places.

DIVISION ONE

Both the ‘fancied’ teams to be promoted to the Premiership met tonight in a fascinating contest. Without a goal in the first half Ebley Street Elite appeared to have the game won, with their goal in the second half, until Dylan hit the equaliser for the ‘stayers’ Adidas All Stars right at the death to make it a ‘dead heat’ at 1-1 on the final whistle! Ebley remain one point ahead of Adidas at the top but both look Premiership bound.

Walker Construction were is ‘festival’ mood tonight with a sparkling display against relegation threatened Hot Coles. Ryan looked a class act for Walker and but for Neil’s heroics in the Hot Coles goal, this result could have been much worse for them! But the ‘going’ was not good for Hot Coles and an ‘accumulator’ of goals meant that Walker won 10-2!

A much closer contest took place between The Spice Boys and the disco dancers, that make up Warehouse Warriors! This match was so close it needed a ‘photo-finish’ to decide the winner and Warehouse Warriors just about edged it, 2-1.

The ‘going’ has been ‘heavy’ for Vic Vets this season but tonight they went the ‘distance’ with Average Joe’s and turned the ‘form book’ on its head to achieve a credible 2-2 draw.

DIVISION TWO

Stroud7 are champions of Division Two in what has been a fantastic season for them. Jack and his team have been the outstanding performers, in this league, this season and remain unbeaten. Well done lads you are worthy champions.

But it could have been a different story tonight in what was a fantastic game against league newcomers and ‘colts’ S5. Stroud7 were ‘odds on’ to win before kick off but they really knew they had been in a game by the final whistle. In fact there was nothing to choose between the teams throughout with Louis outstanding in the S5 goal and Dean the pick of the players for S5. It looked like this game would end in a ‘dead heat’ until the champions scored 2 late goals to ‘put them in the money’ for all three points!

Automech Spanner’s claimed all three points and a 3-0 win against How I Met Your Mata, to allow The Legends to seriously enter the promotion race and medal poisons. And they took full advantage and defeated a below par Randwick Warriors 10-4. Oli and Chris were in fine form for The Legends and for Randwick, Jay made a very impressive debut in goal. The Legends had a ‘bumper’ second half with a 7 goal bonanza as Randwick had a bit of a ‘mare!’

Making Emile Of It were out of sorts tonight against a star ‘studded’ TGR. Harry scored 7 out of the 10 TGR goals in their 10-4 victory. There was a ‘Stewards Enquiry’ at the ‘finishing line’ but the result was allowed to stand!

CONFERENCE

There were no matches in the Conference as both games were ‘abandoned.’ As a consequence SWI FC and IF Legends both claimed all three Points and 3-0 wins. IF Legends have their ‘ears pricked’ at the top of the table but surely these ‘old nags’ won’t take have the ‘staying power.’ Besides there are also three other teams that will hope to go the ‘distance’ to become the first ever winners of the Conference! This title is very much for the taking!

Great night of football lads with some absolute ‘bumper’ games and just a few ‘novice’ performances! We are now in the ‘final furlong’ of this season and the ‘blinkers’ are off as we ‘canter’ towards the ‘finishing line!’

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todaybharatnews · 5 years

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via Today Bharat nbsp; SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar said that the large reduction in corporate taxes across the spectrum of all companies is perhaps the boldest reform in the last 28 years. India Inc. on Friday cheered the government's Rs 1,45,000 crore stimulus, which includes slashing corporate tax to 22 per cent for domestic companies, lower tax of 15 per cent for new manufacturing firms and measures to boost the capital market. "We welcome the Finance Minister's proposition of slashing corporate tax, scrapping surcharge on buyback announced before July 5 and expanding the scope of CSR spend," said Nagesh Basavanhalli, MD and CEO, Greaves Cotton Ltd. The biggest booster dose of the Modi 2.0 government is expected to give a major push to the sagging economy which clocked a 6-year low growth of 5 per cent in the April-June quarter of FY20. Anil Agarwal, Executive Chairman, Vedanta Resources, said that the government move will definitely prove to be a huge impetus for the manufacturing and infrastructure sector. "We are confident this step, in coming days, will boost economic growth so that Gross Domestic Products (GDP) can attain its true potential of 8-9 per cent," he said. Rajnish Kumar, Chairman of SBI said that the large reduction in corporate taxes across the spectrum of all companies is perhaps the boldest reform in the last 28 years. ldquo;Such a rate cut will boost corporate bottomline, facilitate a reduction in product prices. Additionally, the move to incentivise setting up new manufacturing units in India comes at the most opportune time for foreign companies who could be actively looking for opportunities to invest globally! This move could also materially lead to India effectively integrating with the global supply chain and a boost to Make in India campaign,rdquo; he added. Aditya Ghosh, CEO of OYO India and South Asia said, ldquo;This is a bold step to provide a fillip to the Indian economy. Just ahead of the festive season, the honourable Finance Minister by reducing the corporate tax rates, has given a triple booster dose to the economy as this will increase the retained earnings of the companies which will result in investible surplus for the future, shift India at par with its regional peers thereby removing one of the issues related to manufacturing and exports and maintain macroeconomic prudence by continuing to stimulate the investment cycle.rdquo; The new set of measures is also aimed at lifting market sentiment which has seen foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) pulling out their money from the capital market since the Union budget announcement of raising surcharge on them. The move to lower corporate tax, withdrawal of surcharge and other concessions seem to have hit the right chord with investors as it sent stocks at both the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) soaring. The lower corporate tax effected for 2019-20 through an ordinance is set to induce private investment and boost consumption, the two key growth engines. "India Inc. looks forward to a roller coaster festive season tax bonanza to ride the tide of positive sentiments. This positive sentiment will go long way in resurrecting dying economy, but we also hope that super tax on the individuals and HUF would also be further rationalised at 35 per cent from currently obnoxious rate of 42 per cent to uplift the end-users spirit," said Niranjan Hiranandani, Senior Vice President at industry body Assocham. Business and industry see the fresh measures helping them in beating the slowdown which has gripped the entire country for quite some time. With global headwinds continuing and the world economy slowing, the stimulus measures could not have been more timely. As the corporate tax rate has now been brought at par with many emerging economies and countries in South East Asia, industry captains hope it will make the Indian economy globally competitive. For companies going for fresh investments, there is a big incentive now as they will have to pay a lower tax of 15 per cent. It might be mentioned that lower corporate tax of 22 per cent will apply to those companies which choose not to take any other exemption or incentives. The companies making incorporate after October 1, 2019, would be eligible for lower 15 per cent tax. "Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman's Rs 1.45 lakh crore stimulus to reboot India is a bold move to unleash the animal spirit! This can certainly turn the tide for the economy amp; markets! Also, it's a move towards simpler low tax regime with no or minimal incentives exemptions (which are misused more than used)," said Nirmal Jain, Chairman, IIFL Group. While hailing the government move some of the experts highlighted the fiscal risks involved with it. "The tax reliefs announced are likely to put upward pressure on the fiscal deficit needing a revision in the government's borrowing target for the year. This would likely lead to upward pressure on bond yields but this could get mitigated if RBI chips in with an aggressive policy rate reduction," said Dheeraj Singh, Head of Investments amp; Fund Manager, Fixed Income, Taurus Asset Management Co. Ltd. As the new measures would cost the government Rs 1.45 lakh crore in revenue, many experts see this to have an impact on government spending. "Whilst it might take some time for the investments to materialise, it is a step in the right direction. One should also examine how this move impacts government spending," said Akila Agrawal, Partner amp; Head, Mamp;A, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. Sampath Reddy, CIO, Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance too, welcomed these measures, saying that this will help to revive the economy, and thereby change the course of market direction in the near term. However, his thoughts on the revenuersquo;s forgone echoed with that of Akilarsquo;s. ldquo;The revenue foregone from the tax rate cut and other relief measures is Rs. 1.45 lakh crore (~0.7% of GDP). With GST collections running already below target, this move is likely to cause a fiscal slippage on the governmentrsquo;s 3.3% fiscal deficit target for FY20. This is being reflected in the sharp spike in bond yields post the announcement. From a fixed income perspective, we presently prefer the shorter end of the yield curve,rdquo; he said. nbsp;

#IFTTT #Today Bharat

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arunangur · 5 years

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Though welfare measures for farmers would be the highlight of the upcoming interim Budget apart form an effort to stick to the fiscal road map despite a revenue shortfall, the middle-class can still expect some tax relief. Sources privy to the budget discussions said the basic exemption limit for personal income tax might go up to Rs 3 lakh from Rs 2.5 lakh and the upper threshold for deduction under Section 80C for assorted investments could move to Rs 2 lakh from Rs 1.5 lakh. The change in the basic exemption limit for the general category taxpayer will come with corresponding relaxation for senior citizens (between 60-80 years), who currently enjoy higher limit of Rs 3 lakh and more sops for super-seniors (above 80 years) the tax slabs for which are much less already.

The basic exemption limit was last raised in 2014-15 (from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh) as the Narendra Modi government's first Budget was approved by Parliament in early August, 2014. Even the Section 80 C limit was last revised in the same budget to Rs 1.5 lakh from Rs 1 lakh earlier. In all the five budgets presented by it, the Narendra Modi government has tinkered with the PIT structure ? apart from the 2014-15 budget, the changes were substantial in 2017-18, when the tax rate was reduced to 5% from 10% for income between `2.5 lakh and `5 lakh, and a super-rich surcharge of 10% was imposed on taxable income between `50 lakh and `1 crore. The move to modify the personal income tax (PIT) structure is despite the fact a committee of senior officials is formulating a new Direct Tax Code that involve real radical changes in the structure and its report is expected in end-February. "Some work is under way in this regard," a government official said, referring to the PIT structure, without disclosing any details. He added that the government is aware that salaried taxpayers need more substantial relief.

?The expectation is that basic exemption limit may be raised from Rs 3 lakh from Rs 2.5 lakh currently for individuals below 60 years of age and to Rs 3.5 lakh from Rs 3 lakh for those in 60-80 years age bracket,? Kuldip Kumar, partner and leader, personal tax, PwC India, said. He added that women taxpayers may get higher basic exemption of Rs 3.25 lakh or be brought even at par with senior citizens. In all the five budgets presented by it, the Narendra Modi government has tinkered with the PIT structure ? apart from the 2014-15 budget, the changes were substantial in 2017-18, when the tax rate was reduced to 5% from 10% for income between `2.5 lakh and `5 lakh, and a super-rich surcharge of 10% was imposed on taxable income between `50 lakh and `1 crore. The move to modify the personal income tax (PIT) structure is despite the fact a committee of senior officials is formulating a new Direct Tax Code that involve real radical changes in the structure and its report is expected in end-February. "Some work is under way in this regard," a government official said, referring to the PIT structure, without disclosing any details. He added that the government is aware that salaried taxpayers need more substantial relief. ?The expectation is that basic exemption limit may be raised from Rs 3 lakh from Rs 2.5 lakh currently for individuals below 60 years of age and to Rs 3.5 lakh from Rs 3 lakh for those in 60-80 years age bracket,? Kuldip Kumar, partner and leader, personal tax, PwC India, said. He added that women taxpayers may get higher basic exemption of Rs 3.25 lakh or be brought even at par with senior citizens.

It is also expected that deduction for interest paid on housing loan could be raised to Rs 2.5 lakh; this was raised by Rs 50,000 to Rs 2 lakh in the very first budget of the current government for 2014-15. Further, the government is also likely to propose certain changes to tax treatment of investments under New Pension Scheme (NPS) in the Finance Bill. In December, the government had announced a major pre-poll bonanza for 1.19 crore subscribers of NPS by making 60% of the NPS corpus withdrawal tax-free at the time of withdrawal against 40%, raised its contribution to 14% from 10% (of basic pay plus dearness allowance) for its staff and gave a choice to them to invest up to 50% of the corpus in equities, at par with private NPS subscribers. These will be carried out through the Bill. The government has reaped rich dividend from PIT which has grown by over 20% in 2016-17 and 2017-18 compared to 10% and 12.5% in 2014-15 and 2015-16 respectively. The PIT growth for the first nine months of the current fiscal is nearly 15%, against the year's target of around 20%. Similarly, the number of I-T e-returns filed — which consists nearly 95% of individual taxpayers — has grown sharply over the last four years with April-December of the current fiscal showing a growth of 42.5% y-o-y. This was preceded by increase of 28%, 22% and 27% in FY18, FY17 and FY16, respectively.

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melindarowens · 7 years

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Beat the Field by Shooting Par

The 117th US Open Championship gets underway today with the world’s best golfers competing for the title.

While golf fans around the world will tune in to see who will lift the trophy on Sunday, this investor will be watching to see how many of the competitors manage to break par.

Par is the number of strokes an expert golfer is expected to use to complete all the holes on a golf course. Besting this benchmark, or “breaking par,” is extremely difficult and the average golfer rarely comes close to it. About 20 to 25% of all golfers manage to break 90, a score of 18 shots worse than par.

Of course, the US Open tournament will feature the world’s best — Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, and Sergio Garcia, to name a few. Surely, members of this elite field will break par. Or will they?

With par as the benchmark, not all the pros will make the cut.

Breaking Par in Golf

In 2016, just four players managed to break par at the US Open. While champion Dustin Johnson shot four under par over the 72 holes played to win $1.8 million, the entire field — and remember, these are the world’s best golfers — combined to shoot a whopping 1,537 shots over par.

Last year was no fluke. While the golf world crowns an individual champion each year — Jordan Spieth, Martin Kaymer, Justin Rose and Webb Simpson have each won a US Open Championship in the past five years — a score of level par was the leading money winner over that same time period.

Source: CBS Sports, Golf Channel, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation

What is true in golf is also true in investing.

Most professionals — active managers of mutual funds, hedge funds, and pension plans — don’t outperform their benchmarks. As the graphic below indicates, roughly 90% of mutual funds have failed to outperform their respective US, international, and emerging market benchmarks over the past 15 years.

Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, as of 31 December 2016

While the evidence shows actively managed mutual funds fail to beat the market, this is hardly a surprise. Combined with managers of hedge funds, pension plans, and endowments, professional investors are the market. What’s the likelihood that any one manager can consistently outperform such a skilled, competitive, and highly-motivated playing field?

As in golf, the odds are low.

Using Morningstar’s database, mutual fund giant Vanguard Group recently analyzed the performance of all actively managed stock mutual funds from 2005 to 2010, ranking funds into five equal groups of 20%. The top 20% of performers — the “winners” — were followed for five years to answer the question: Do winners repeat?

Winners Don’t Repeat

Of the winning funds from 2010 to 2015, just 16% remained in the top 20% five years later. An almost equal number fell to the second, third, and fourth performance quintiles, while 36% either fell to the bottom quintile or were liquidated/merged. In other words, past winners were more than twice as likely to fall to the bottom in the next period or go out of business altogether than to remain top performers.

Remarkably, such long odds don’t stop investors from trying to outperform the market. Vanguard estimates that 85% of the global equity market — and more than 95% of the global bond market — is still actively managed in an attempt to beat itself.

Two related reasons may help explain why, in the face of such overwhelming evidence, investors continue to pursue beat-the-market strategies:

Human Nature: Overconfident about our own abilities, we believe we deserve better than the average person. Accordingly, we tend to think we’re better at picking investments or that we’re more adept at identifying managers who can.

Fees: Investors collectively pay more than $100 billion per year to hire managers who try to beat the market. Managers who outperform are rewarded with additional money from investors who believe past performance is an indicator of what’s to come. Since the payoff of winning in investing is huge, as it is in golf, it’s no surprise Wall Street promotes those rare winners to ensure the fee bonanza continues.

What if, instead of trying to beat the market, investors focused on outperforming other investors by earning investing’s equivalent to par?

Shooting Par Every Day

Index funds, those baskets of hundreds if not thousands of securities, shoot par every single day. By holding most, if not all, of the securities in any market segment, index funds aim to reliably deliver the average return of those markets — no more, no less.

Consider three Vanguard index funds — one each for US, international, and emerging market stocks — that are some of the lowest-cost index funds on the market today.

As the graphic below shows, over the past 10 years, these index funds have generally delivered returns in line with their respective market benchmarks and outperformed their actively managed peers.

Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices and Vanguard Group. Vanguard Index Funds represented by Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Admiral (VTSAX), Vanguard Total International Stock Index Admiral (VTIAX), and Vanguard Emerging Markets Stock Index Fund Institutional (VEMIX). Active funds are average (equal-weighted) returns for all actively managed funds in each market. Data as of 31 December 2016

Critics of indexing may argue that “average” in investing equals mediocrity. But in a market where most investors underperform, indexing isn’t average at all. It’s like par in golf, and not many investors consistently beat that.

So, if you tune into this year’s US Open Golf Championship, pay close attention to who triumphantly raises his arms after the final putt, and also to how many of golf’s elite manage to break par.

While it’s certain a new champion will emerge to lift the trophy, a final score of par will undoubtedly beat a majority of the field.

When it comes to long-term investing, par wins.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.

All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

Dougal Williams, CFA

Dougal Williams, CFA, is chief investment officer of Vista Capital Partners in Portland, Oregon. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon, with honors, with a B.A. in Economics and Spanish. Williams is a former board president and current member of CFA Society Portland.

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source http://capitalisthq.com/beat-the-field-by-shooting-par/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/06/beat-field-by-shooting-par.html

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everettwilkinson · 7 years

Text

Beat the Field by Shooting Par

The 117th US Open Championship gets underway today with the world’s best golfers competing for the title.

While golf fans around the world will tune in to see who will lift the trophy on Sunday, this investor will be watching to see how many of the competitors manage to break par.

With par as the benchmark, not all the pros will make the cut.

Breaking Par in Golf

Source: CBS Sports, Golf Channel, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation

What is true in golf is also true in investing.

Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, as of 31 December 2016

As in golf, the odds are low.

Winners Don’t Repeat

Two related reasons may help explain why, in the face of such overwhelming evidence, investors continue to pursue beat-the-market strategies:

What if, instead of trying to beat the market, investors focused on outperforming other investors by earning investing’s equivalent to par?

Shooting Par Every Day

Consider three Vanguard index funds — one each for US, international, and emerging market stocks — that are some of the lowest-cost index funds on the market today.

As the graphic below shows, over the past 10 years, these index funds have generally delivered returns in line with their respective market benchmarks and outperformed their actively managed peers.

So, if you tune into this year’s US Open Golf Championship, pay close attention to who triumphantly raises his arms after the final putt, and also to how many of golf’s elite manage to break par.

While it’s certain a new champion will emerge to lift the trophy, a final score of par will undoubtedly beat a majority of the field.

When it comes to long-term investing, par wins.

If you liked this post, don’t forget to subscribe to the Enterprising Investor.

Dougal Williams, CFA

Source link

from CapitalistHQ.com http://capitalisthq.com/beat-the-field-by-shooting-par/

#TrumpNews #CapitalistHQ.com

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