Tag: socialism

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Reader says Democrats, support terrorist and cop killers in varying degrees of enthusiasm

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It appears to be a case of the support for this killer having morphed from a relatively small number of radical lefties, to the overall umbrella of the Democrat Party. I’m sure there are a few that don’t support her, but I suspect if you asked most Democrats, they would support her in varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Groups who want the public to believe they ‘do good works’ supports a murderer………….. well, that kind of kills the do-good mantra now doesn’t it? We as a society have reached critical mass – murderers are supported, hard working tax payers who want to keep more of their take home pay ridiculed, people who are able but don’t work coddled and given every benefit to scam the system, illegal immigrants given equivalent rights to citizens – these are just a few issues, but they speak to the bizarre world we now live in.

Also, Democrats honored the Puerto Rican terrorist who led the terrorist attacks that killed many in NYC, including a man whose son now live in Glen Rock.

The same terrorist whose sentence Barack Obama commuted in his final days as President. The same terrorist who still refuses to express any remorse for him terrorist activities.

https://nypost.com/2017/06/11/puerto-rican-terrorist-rides-on-parade-float-with-mark-viverito/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/commentary/ct-oscar-lopez-rivera-bombings-clemency-20170119-story.html

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IS THE SILICON VALLEY DYNASTY COMING TO AN END?

theendisnearish

IS THE SILICON VALLEY DYNASTY COMING TO AN END?

Ethical lapses at some of the tech industry’s biggest companies suggest a chilling reality of what really matters in the world’s most rollicking economy.

It has been said that Silicon Valley, or the 50 or so square-mile area extending from San Francisco to the base of the peninsula, has overseen the creation of more wealth than any place in the history of mankind. It’s made people richer than the oil industry; it has created more money than the Gold Rush. Silicon chips, lines of code, and rectangular screens have even minted more wealth than religious wars.

Wealthy societies, indeed, have their own complicated incentive structures and mores. But they do often tend, as any technological entrepreneur will be quick to remind you, to distribute value across numerous income levels, in a scaled capacity. The Ford line, for instance, may have eventually minted some serious millionaires in Detroit, but it also made transportation cheaper, helped drive down prices on countless consumer goods, and facilitated new trade routes and commercial opportunities. Smartphones, or any number of inventive modern apps or other software products, are no different. Sure, they throw off a lot of money to the geniuses who came up with them, and the people who got in at the ground floor. But they also make possible innumerable other opportunities, financial and otherwise, for their millions of consumers.

Silicon Valley is, in its own right, a dynasty. Instead of warriors or military heroes, it has nerds and people in half-zip sweaters. But it is becoming increasingly likely that the Valley might go down in history not only for its wealth, but also for creating more tone deaf people than any other ecosystem in the history of the world.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/is-the-silicon-valley-dynasty-coming-to-an-end

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Venezuela Reminds Us That Socialism Leads to Dictatorship

Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela is one place where Friedrich Hayek’s most dire warnings remain relevant.

Marian Tupy | April 4, 2017

Manaure Quintero/NurPhoto/Sipa U/NewscomOn March 29, the Supreme Court of Venezuela dissolved the country’s elected legislature, allowing Venezuela’s top court to write future laws. The court is filled with allies of Venezuela’s socialist president, Nicolas Maduro, while the legislature is dominated by Maduro’s opponents, and the court’s ruling was seen as the latest step on Venezuela’s descent into a full-fledged dictatorship. But following international outcry—as well as the appearance of cracks within Maduro’s own party—the court reversed itself just a few days later, on April 1.

https://reason.com/archives/2017/04/04/from-socialism-to-dictatorship

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Socialism for the Uninformed

Bernie Sanders

By Dr. Thomas Sowell

May 31, 2016  5 Min Read

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist “exploitation,” shouldn’t it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.

https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/05/16/socialism-for-the-uninformed

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Nearly 95% of all new jobs during Obama era were part-time, or contract

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Investing.com  | Dec 21, 2016 12:23AM ET

Investing.com — A new study by economists from Harvard and Princeton indicates that 94% of the 10 million new jobs created during the Obama era were temporary positions.

The study shows that the jobs were temporary, contract positions, or part-time “gig” jobs in a variety of fields.

Female workers suffered most heavily in this economy, as work in traditionally feminine fields, like education and medicine, declined during the era.

The research by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that the proportion of workers throughout the U.S., during the Obama era, who were working in these kinds of temporary jobs, increased from 10.7% of the population to 15.8%.

https://m.investing.com/news/economy-news/nearly-95-of-all-job-growth-during-obama-era-part-time,-contract-work-449057

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Working Paradise Venezuela’s new decree: Forced farm work for citizens

Venezuela meltdown

Venezuela’s new decree: Forced farm work for citizens

by Patrick Gillespie, Rafael Romo and Osmary Hernandez   @CNNMoney

A new decree by Venezuela’s government could make its citizens work on farms to tackle the country’s severe food shortages.

That “effectively amounts to forced labor,” according to Amnesty International, which derided the decree as “unlawful.”

In a vaguely-worded decree, Venezuelan officials indicated that public and private sector employees could be forced to work in the country’s fields for at least 60-day periods, which may be extended “if circumstances merit.”

“Trying to tackle Venezuela’s severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas’ Director at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

President Nicolas Maduro is using his executive powers to declare a state of economic emergency. By using a decree, he can legally circumvent Venezuela’s opposition-led National Assembly — the Congress — which is staunchly against all of Maduro’s actions.

According to the decree from July 22, workers would still be paid their normal salary by the government and they can’t be fired from their actual job.

 

https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/29/news/economy/venezuela-decree-farm-labor/

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Soros, Alarmed by Trump, Pours Money into 2016 Race

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The billionaire has already spent or pledged $13 million to help Hillary Clinton and other Democrats this year.

The liberal New York financier George Soros, whose effort to unseat President George W. Bush in 2004 shattered political spending records, is returning to big-ticket giving after an 11-year hiatus.

Soros has spent or committed more than $13 million to support Hillary Clinton and other Democrats this election cycle, already more than his total disclosed spending in the last two presidential elections combined.

Soros has expressed alarm over the past few months at the candidacies of Republicans Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. In a statement last week about a new group he’s funding to increase voting by Latinos and immigrants in the election, he again mentioned the two candidates by name.

“The intense anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric that has been fueled by the Republican primary is deeply offensive,” Soros said in the statement. “There should be consequences for the outrageous statements and proposals that we’ve regularly heard from candidates Trump and Cruz.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-03-15/soros-alarmed-by-trump-pours-money-into-2016-race

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Obama’s economy: The fierce debate

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By Peter Schroeder and Jordan Fabian – 02/10/16 06:00 AM EST

Seven years after President Obama’s inauguration, the debate about whether he saved the economy or held back its recovery is in full swing.

Obama has been taking a final-year victory lap, touting a national unemployment rate that has fallen to 4.9 percent as the latest sign of success for his economic stewardship.

Yet critics in Obama’s orbit, including Democratic congressmen and a former member of his Cabinet, suggest more could have been done if Obama had worked harder with lawmakers and members of his administration.

Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.) — one of two Democrats still in office out of the 11 who voted against the stimulus
legislation — said the White House made zero effort to bring him, or other centrist Democrats, on board in the fight over the stimulus.

“They just wrote us off, I think,” he said. “I can’t even tell you who in the administration is supposed to be lobbying me.”

It’s a criticism of Obama that has remained steady for his entire presidency: He doesn’t work well with others, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, who disagree with him.

“This is very much a my-way-or-the-highway White House, and this is a president who would rather win the argument than get something done,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, head of the American Action Forum and the top economic adviser to Obama’s Republican opponent in 2008, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

Obama allies say such criticism is unfair and blame Republicans for failing to work with Obama since day one.

“There’s no question that had Congress enacted the president’s economic proposals, the economy would be in a stronger position today,” said Alan Krueger, a Princeton economist who was a top economic adviser to Obama.

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/economy/268856-obamas-economy-the-fierce-debate

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The world can’t afford another financial crash – it could destroy capitalism as we know it

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A new economic crisis would trigger a political backlash in Britain, Europe and the United States which could drag us all down into poverty

By Allister Heath

10:24PM GMT 10 Feb 2016

They bounce back after terrorist attacks, pick themselves up after earthquakes and cope with pandemics such as Zika. They can even handle years of economic uncertainty, stagnant wages and sky-high unemployment. But no developed nation today could possibly tolerate another wholesale banking crisis and proper, blood and guts recession.

We are too fragile, fiscally as well as psychologically. Our economies, cultures and polities are still paying a heavy price for the Great Recession; another collapse, especially were it to be accompanied by a fresh banking bailout by the taxpayer, would trigger a cataclysmic, uncontrollable backlash.

The public, whose faith in elites and the private sector was rattled after 2007-09, would simply not wear it. Its anger would be so explosive, so-all encompassing that it would threaten the very survival of free trade, of globalisation and of the market-based economy. There would be calls for wage and price controls, punitive, ultra-progressive taxes, a war on the City and arbitrary jail sentences.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/12151115/The-world-cant-afford-another-financial-crash-it-could-destroy-capitalism-as-we-know-it.html

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Obama’s $10 oil tax proposal would Primarily Hurt the Poor

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file photo by Boyd Loving

Nathan Bomey, USA TODAY9:26 a.m. EST February 5, 2016

Consumers will likely pay the price for President Obama’s proposed $10 tax per-barrel of oil, an administration official and a prominent analyst said Thursday.

Energy companies will simply pass along the cost to consumers, Patrick DeHaan, senior petroleum analyst for GasBuddy.com, which tracks gas prices nationwide, said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Obama is set to propose the tax when he reveals his budget next week, as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions and generate billions of dollars for mass-transit investments and self-driving vehicles. The new tax would be phased in over five years, and would apply to both domestic and imported oil.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/02/04/president-obama-oil-tax-gasoline/79835274/

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Sorry, liberals, Scandinavian countries aren’t utopias

By Kyle Smith

January 11, 2015 | 6:00am

Want proof that the liberal social-democratic society works?

Look to Denmark, the country that routinely leads the world in happiness surveys. It’s also notable for having the highest taxes on Earth, plus a comfy social safety net: Child care is mostly free, as is public school and even private school, and you can stay on unemployment benefits for a long time. Everyone is on an equal footing, both income-wise and socially: Go to a party and you wouldn’t be surprised to see a TV star talking to a roofer.

The combination of massive taxes and benefits for the unsuccessful means top and bottom get shaved off: Pretty much everyone is proudly middle class. Danes belong to more civic associations and clubs than anyone else; they love performing in large groups. At Christmas they do wacky things like hold hands and run around the house together, singing festive songs. They’re a real-life Whoville.

In the American liberal compass, the needle is always pointing to places like Denmark. Everything they most fervently hope for here has already happened there.

So: Why does no one seem particularly interested in visiting Denmark? (“Honey, on our European trip, I want to see Tuscany, Paris, Berlin and . . . Jutland!”) Visitors say Danes are joyless to be around. Denmark suffers from high rates of alcoholism. In its use of antidepressants it ranks fourth in the world. (Its fellow Nordics the Icelanders are in front by a wide margin.) Some 5 percent of Danish men have had sex with an animal. Denmark’s productivity is in decline, its workers put in only 28 hours a week, and everybody you meet seems to have a government job. Oh, and as The Telegraph put it, it’s “the cancer capital of the world.”

So how happy can these drunk, depressed, lazy, tumor-ridden, pig-bonking bureaucrats really be?

https://nypost.com/2015/01/11/sorry-liberals-scandinavian-countries-arent-utopias/

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globalised anxiety

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Battered, bruised and jumpy — the whole world is on edge

Gideon Rachman

Not one global power is optimistic and even in America, which should be cheering, the mood is sour

In 2015, a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s major power centres. From Beijing to Washington, Berlin to Brasília, Moscow to Tokyo — governments, media and citizens were jumpy and embattled.

This kind of globalised anxiety is unusual. For the past 30 years and more, there has been at least one world power that was bullishly optimistic. In the late 1980s the Japanese were still enjoying a decades-long boom — and confidently buying up assets all over the world. In the 1990s America basked in victory in the cold war and a long economic expansion. In the early 2000s the EU was in a buoyant mood, launching a single currency and nearly doubling its membership. And for most of the past decade, the growing political and economic power of China has inspired respect all over the world.

Yet at the moment all the big players seem uncertain — even fearful. The only partial exception that I came across this year was India, where the business and political elite still seemed buoyed by the reformist zeal of prime minister Narendra Modi.

By contrast, in Japan, faith is fading that the radical reforms, known as Abenomics, can truly break the country’s cycle of debt and deflation. Japanese anxiety is fed by continuing tensions with China. However, my main impression from a visit to China, early in the year, is that this too is a country that feels much less stable than it did even a couple of years ago. The era when the government effortlessly delivered growth of 8 per cent or more a year is over. Concerns about domestic financial stability are mounting, as the upheavals in the Shanghai stock exchange over the summer revealed.

However, the main source of anxiety is political. President Xi Jinping’s leadership is more dynamic but also less predictable than that of his predecessors. Fear is spreading among officials and business people, who are scared of being caught up in an anti-corruption drive that has led to the arrest of more than 100,000 people.

https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c523a45a-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3viP0CjOB

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U.S. economy set to grow less than 3% for the 10th straight year

US President Obama waves from a golf cart in Kailua

Published: Dec 22, 2015 10:08 a.m. ET

The economy expanded a touch slower in the third quarter than previously reported, revised government figures show, but the path of growth is still the same: The U.S. running well below the historical norm more than six years into a recovery.

Gross domestic product — the sum of all the activity in an economy — increased at a 2% annual pace from July to September, according to the government’s latest update. Previously the Commerce Department had said the U.S. grew at a 2.1% rate after a 3.9% increase in the second quarter.

The slight downgrade was triggered by a larger trade deficit and a smaller buildup in inventories than earlier estimates showed.

The U.S. expanded at a 2.2% rate through the first nine months of the year, and the economy is projected to grow at a similar pace in the fourth quarter that ends on Dec. 31. If so, the economy will have failed to reach 3% growth for the 10th straight year, marking the slowest stretch since the end of World War II.

Historically the economy has expanded at a 3.3% rate.

The government’s second update on GDP growth reflected a somewhat worse trade picture in the late summer and early fall. Exports rose a slower 0.7% instead of an earlier 0.9% estimate. And imports climbed 2.3% instead of 2.1%.

Companies also rebuilt inventories somewhat less than the government had tallied.

The value of inventories increased $85.5 billion, down from a prior $90.2 billion estimate. Inventories had jumped by $113.5 billion in the second quarter when the economy expanded at a much faster 3.9% clip.

Spending on home construction rose at a faster 8.2% pace in the third quarter instead of 7.3%, the revised Commerce Department figures show.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/third-quarter-gdp-growth-trimmed-to-2-2015-12-22

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Obamanomics : Middle class Americans ‘no longer majority’

US President Obama waves from a golf cart in Kailua

Middle class Americans ‘no longer majority’

Anmar Frangoul | Special to CNBC.com
CNBC.com

Middle class Americans are now outnumbered by those above and below them and are “falling behind financially”, according to new analysis of government data by the Pew Research Center.

The beginning of 2015 saw 120.8 million adults living in middle-income homes, compared with 121.3 million Americans living in lower and upper income households, a significant shift that “could signal a tipping point.”

According to Pew’s report, the 21st century has seen “middle-income Americans” fall behind financially. The median income of middle income households fell by 4 percent between the year 2000 and 2014, while median wealth – assets minus debts – fell by 28 percent between 2001 and 2013.

In 2015, 9 percent of Americans were seen as being in the highest income tier, “more than double the 4 percent share in 1971.” The percentage of American adults in the lowest income tier has also risen, from 16 percent in 1971 to 20 percent in 2015.

In 2015 12 percent of adults were living in the upper middle tier, up from 10 percent in 1971. Nine percent were seen as being in the lower middle tier, unchanged from 1971.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/10/middle-class-americans-no-longer-majority.html

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Obamacare Is Falling Apart

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Insurers are bolting from the exchanges.

Shikha Dalmia | December 1, 2015

President Obama has been hammered for his failure on ISIS in the wake of the Paris attacks. But there’s at least bitzcelt / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-NDone bright spot for him in that criticism: At least it deflected the spotlight from the unfolding catastrophe that is Obamacare.

Indeed, last month brought arguably the worst news for the program since the healthcare.gov debacle: UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest insurer, announced that it might quit Obamacare’s exchanges next year. Should UnitedHealthcare act on this threat, there may not be enough (red) tape in the desk drawer of even future President Hillary Clinton to put the Obamacare Humpty Dumpty back together again.

United announced during an investor briefing Thursday that it was expecting a whopping $425 million hit on its earnings this year, primarily due to mounting losses on its Obamacare exchange business. “We cannot sustain these losses,” United CEO Stephen Hensley declared. “We can’t really subsidize a marketplace that doesn’t appear at the moment to be sustaining itself.”

Avik Roy, who serves as GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s health care advisor, suspects United may just be the first domino to fall. Other commercial insurers, such as Aetna, Anthem, and Cigna, have raised premiums by double digits and still say they can’t make the numbers work in their favor. Hence, they have withdrawn from counties where their losses were particularly acute.

For-profit companies that have shareholders breathing down their necks don’t have much latitude to absorb losses. But even companies that don’t face similar profit-maximizing pressures can’t escape the basic dilemma confronting the industry. For example, state filings of the non-profit Blue Cross Blue Shield show that the company barely broke even in the first half of 2015. In Texas last year, BCBS collected $2.1 billion in premiums and paid out $2.5 billion in claims. If Obamacare’s condition worsens, such companies will have to scale back their participation too.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/12/01/obamacare-is-falling-apart-limb-by-limb