Donald Trump and the Return of Liberalism 12

Let me give you a definition of the word ‘liberal.’…Franklin D. Roosevelt once said…It is a wonderful definition, and I agree with him. ‘A liberal is a man who wants to build bridges over the chasms that separate humanity from a better life.’ – Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon was our last liberal president. – Noam Chomsky

“Imagine a president who expands affirmative action, actively promotes school desegregation, enacts important new laws in social welfare, environmental protection, occupational health and safety, and consumer protection, supports comprehensive health insurance and a system of guaranteed income for all citizens, and whose Justice Department opposes the RICO Act on the grounds that it gives the government powers that are much too broad and sweeping for prosecuting criminals. In 2011, such a president would be considered far to left of Barack Obama and far to the left of almost everyone in Congress. Forty years ago, such a president was called Richard Nixon.”-Matthew Lyons (“Right-Wing Movements 101“)

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Now that Donald Trump has won an upset electoral victory and will be assuming the office of the presidency in a couple of months, I am going to offer the unconventional and, certainly to many people, counter-intuitive opinion that it was Donald Trump rather than Hillary Clinton that was the most left-wing of the two major party candidates.

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King Midas in the Post-Modern Age: Sales of Indulgences in Academia 2

By Aleksey Bashtavenko

Academic Composition

“Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? —for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers?” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

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The Latin etymology of the word “religion” emphasizes the act of bringing the community together. In almost all European languages, the word that translates to English as “religion” derived from Latin ligare which meant to bind . As early as 1200 B.C, this word commonly described a sacred lifestyle, commending obedience to divine authority . Above all, religiosity centered on a paternalistic covenant between mankind and God where the former prided themselves on their capacity for total surrender to the higher power. Such circumstances immediately prompted the question of how such a supernatural force can be identified, and more importantly, who can guide mankind to its relationship with God. Although prophets such as Abraham or Moses were revered for having reported to encounter God directly, the mortal sinners were expected to interact with God through a vicar.

In the Catholic tradition, the pope was deemed to be God’s direct representative and in the Eastern Orthodoxy, the tsar served a similar purpose. Under these circumstances, it was presumed that to defy the patriarch of the church was to rebel against the Almighty Himself.

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Thinkers Against Modernity: A New Book from Keith Preston Reply

Available from Black House Publishing.

The prevailing sentiment of contemporary intellectuals is that the human condition has never been better. History is regarded as lengthy episode of oppression that human beings have gradually but steadily fought to overcome with considerable success. Evidence of these successes that are commonly offered include increased material consumption, better health and longer life expectancy, technological development and, above all, the ongoing triumph of “democracy” and “human rights.”

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Rest In Power anarchist comrade Michael Israel, killed fighting ‘Islamic State’ fascists in Rojava Reply

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Insurrection News

michael_israel

**UPDATE** via Kurdish Question

People’s Protection Units (YPG) volunteers, American Michael Israel (27) from Colorado and German Anton Neshek (Zana Ciwan), were killed by Turkish warplanes on 29 November according to another international volunteer fighting alongside the pair against the Islamic State group (IS/ISIS/ISIL), north of Raqqa. [updated].

On his Facebook page, the international volunteer, who was amongst the group killed by Turkish warplanes wrote:

“We were taking a small village when we got hit by Turkish jets in the night. Two of my friends, Anton and Michael were killed among many others. I’m staying to finish out my six months. Fuck Erdogan and Fuck Turkey.”

The YPG have informed both men’s families.

Another of Micheal Israel’s comrades posted the following message on his Facebook page:

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‘Sanctuary Campuses’ Invite a Federal Standoff Reply

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If we could get some “federal standoffs” involving “sanctuary campuses,” “sanctuary cities,” local law enforcement, Standing Rocking-like protesters, Black Lives Matter, Bundy Ranch-types, Waco-types, and Ruby Ridge -types, all going at the same time time, then we would have something.

By Alice Lloyd

The Weekly Standard

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, many colleges and universities vowed to become “sanctuary campuses” for students in the country illegally. The matter will take on a special urgency in the event that soon-to-be President Trump repeals the executive-ordered Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which “deferred” the enforcement of immigration laws for those who came here as children. The practical consequences of a “sanctuary campus” policy remain murky (as is often the case when college administrators take direction from student protesters). Will openly harboring illegal aliens jeopardize colleges’ federal funding, for instance? In an age of funding-backed executive overreach puppeteering campus policy, it would be dangerous to assume otherwise.

Asked whether an agenda-driven Trump administration could weaponize the federal agency against sanctuary campuses, the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess said, “The attorney general or Department of Education could declare them ineligible [for grants and federal aid]… Presumably.” Given the stated priorities of the incoming administration and the Obama administration’s pattern of funding-backed agency mandates to circumvent Congress, it’s no doubt a solid presumption.

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Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy 1

by • Left and Right, Uncategorized

I can’t say I’m particularly impressed with this article. It’s basically just a regurgitation of the standard liberal-left line that criticisms of political correctness are merely a case of right-wingers protecting their vested interests by spinning tall tales in order to divide the commoners and distract them from their supposed true interests (meaning liberalism or socialism). In fact, this is the standard response that the Left has always offered to ANY criticisms of leftist authoritarianism (e..g anti-Communists were really just apologists for Western imperialism and capitalist vested interests).

Reasonable people can disagree on how pervasive PC actually is when compared to competing philosophies (like neoconservatism, Christian fundamentalism, the alt-right or whatever). But it’s clear that PC has a very commanding presence in many institutions, particularly academia, most the mainstream media, self-style progressive corporations like Mozilla or Starbucks, mainline religion, etc. Of course, there’s also hard PC (the kind you find among lunatic SJWs on campuses) and soft PC (the kind Joe Biden or Tim Kaine probably believe in).

As a reviewer of my book on this topic recently said:

“Mr. Preston prefers the term “totalitarian humanism” over “political correctness,” though he explains it is not original to him. Its totalitarian nature is clear to anyone who, because of it, has had to face a threat to his job or a demand by a homeowners’ association to remove a Christmas tree, or certainly to anyone who has ever refused to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding.”

We could add to this many other examples such as the treatment of James Watson, Lawrence Summers, Kevin MacDonald, Norman Finkelstein, Brendan Eich, Tim Hunt, Ayaan Hirsa Ali, etc, etc. as well as the fact that alt right groups have to meet in public facilities under police protection. Or the banning of Chick-fil-A in Boston (an irony given the historic meaning of the phrase “Banned in Boston”). Not to mention actual violence carried out by antifa groups.

All of this is not equivalent to Stalinist or Nazi repression, but it’s an indication PC actually exists.

By Moira Weigel

The Guardian

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Too Much Stigma, Not Enough Persuasion 1

by • Left and Right, Uncategorized

A leftist writer describes how the Left has managed to shoot itself in the ass by acting like fools.

By Conor Friedersdorf

The Atlantic

The coalition that opposes Donald Trump needs to get better at persuading fellow citizens and winning converts, rather than leaning so heavily on stigmatizing those who disagree with them. Chief among the problems with stigma as a political weapon?It doesn’t work.

So I declared after election day. And today, to start exploring the subject more deeply, I offer a case study of stigma wielded both needlessly and counterproductively.

The backdrop is the intra-left debate about “identity politics.” Did they cost Democrats the 2016 election? Or not? Is that even the right question? The subject was on Bernie Sanders’s mind when a woman in the audience of a post-election speech he gave declared that she wanted to be the second Latina senator and asked for advice.

Sanders expressed agreement that the political process needs more people of color. Then, perhaps thinking of Hillary Clinton’s failed “I’m with her” campaign, he advised:

It is not good enough for somebody to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country, and is going to take on the big money interests… This is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.

Here’s where stigma begins to enter the picture. In The Washington Monthly, contributing writer Nancy LeTourneau argued that Sanders demeaned his Latina questioner.

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An Anarchist We Can Work With 2

by • Uncategorized

An discussion of yours truly by a reviewer from the far-right American Renaissance. This is by far the most accurate review of my work that has appeared outside of ATS circles.

By Ronald Neff

American Renaissance

Despite its title, only a few of the essays in this new collection by Keith Preston deal specifically with political correctness, an expression of an ideology that, as he puts it, “regards any limits on the pursuit of power in the name of equality and progress to be intolerable.” [p. 2] Mr. Preston is an academic, speaker, and writer, who runs the website attackthesystem.com. He calls himself an anarchist, but one quite different from Hans Hermann Hoppe, whose book Democracy: The God That Failed was reviewed in American Renaissance in January 2002. Mr. Preston is a left-wing anarchist, so race realists will tend to view him with suspicion, but he is well worth reading.

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Trump and the Decline of American Liberalism 1

by • Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Eli Zaretsky

Verso Books

According to Hillary Clinton, her defeat was caused by two interventions by James Comey, Director of the FBI. The first, eleven days before the election, announced the discovery of a new trove of emails. The second, two days before it, stated that they did not change his original view that Clinton should not be indicted. This explanation is reminiscent of historians who say that World War One would not have occurred if the Serbian carriage driver had continued past the pub in which the Archduke’s assassin was sitting. It erects a minor factoid into an explanation, at the cost of thinking historically and structurally about an epochal event.

Clinton’s shallow, instrumental, and non-reflective response exemplifies the thinking of American elites and intellectuals at the present time. It is not only that every columnist or so-called expert predicted the election incorrectly. More importantly, they had no idea of what was going on in the country. Paul Krugman described the Obama Presidency as a smashing success that had eliminated poverty and saved the economy. Charles Blow and Frank Bruni described the country as moving toward a multicultural, multiracial democracy, white people as an out-of-fashion retrograde minority. In general, all the commentators on the so-called progressive side seconded Obama and Clinton’s theory of “baby steps,” constantly repeating that the President can’t do much. Now just wait and see how much the President can do.

The fact that a fairly ignorant amateur like Donald Trump had a better sense of where the country was at than columnists and reporters reflects the dramatic weakness of the public sphere. Most striking is the absence of any critical or historical perspective — any understanding of where the US is at in terms of the history of the twentieth century and the dynamics of world capitalism. The New York Times — supposedly the national paper — has done many terrible things before, such as legitimating the war in Iraq, but they set a new low in their coverage of this election. They simply functioned as a mouthpiece for Clinton; nearly every headline for a year was a putdown of Trump’s personality or business record, in terms quite similar to those of her campaign, based on the idea that Trump had a bad temperament. This tactic, which proved dramatically ineffective, replicated the news coverage provided by MSNBC — supposedly the progressive answer to right wing talk radio and FOX news — which invariably spun its coverage of any news into a moral lesson of how stupid the right was.

The ignorance of the supposedly progressive elites reflected the transformation of American intellectuals in the 1970s. Earlier organic intellectuals, to use Gramsci’s phrase for intellectuals who performed a function within the capitalist system, had been critics of capitalism from within the system. But the rise of identity politics was associated with a rejection of the tradition of the left and an embrace of an essentially moralistic emphasis on language and behavior to the neglect of impersonal, structural forces. The leading force in the new emphasis on identity was the women’s movement. To be sure, the emergence of women’s liberation and gay liberation has been a signal advance of our time, but these movements are no substitute for a left. Naomi Klein has observed brilliantly that the defeat of Hillary Clinton should not be taken as a defeat of feminism, since Clinton was a Davos-centered neoliberal to whom most women could not relate. Yet the marriage of 70s feminism to neoliberalism was no accident and is only now beginning to be effectively undone by socialist-feminist women.

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What Trump Could Do With Executive Power Reply

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I’m beginning to think that Trump may end up being the best of all possible worlds for the causes of anarchism, libertarianism, or pan-secessionism. Keep in mind that Trump was only elected by about 26% of eligible voters, and about 19% of the residents of the US. A Trump administration will be perceived as a “right-wing, racist, reactionary, fascist” regime by the Left. I don’t think that’s an accurate perception of Trump. But the Left now has the cultural and political majority. Trump will have the majority of elite opinion against him, the majority of the educated classes, the majority of the poor and working class (only a minority of these voted for Trump), a super majority of young people, a super majority of racial minorities, state and local governments in the most populated areas and, apparently, even some law enforcement agencies. I’ve seen where the LAPD and Denver PD might refuse to assist if Trump tries to carry out the deportation of illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile, while Trump is not a fascist, he is a big government, big spending Republican, so he’s not likely to be popular with the libertarian, decentralist, states’ rights, fiscal conservative, etc. branches of the Right in the long run. I think he will also be a disappointment to social conservatives and religious conservatives since he obviously doesn’t give a shit about any of that. I also think the alt-right will be disappointed with him in that he’s just going to be a moderate Republican president, not a white nationalist. For example, whatever he ends up doing on immigration policy, he’s going to be to the left of Eisenhower on that issue.

So having a federal administration that the Left regards as fascist, that the right regards as “liberal,” and that much of the center regards as headed by an uncouth boor will be the best set of conditions we could expect to with which to build anti-state or decentralist movements. Meanwhile, I’m hoping Trump actually does some good like pursuing a Nixon-like detente with Russia and China, taking a generally hands off approach to the Middle East and Latin America, and some economic policies that reverse or at least slow down the slide of the US towards a Third World class system. And if Trump ends up engaging in a lot of banana republic style abuses of executive power, then it will be that much easier to make a case against the U.S. presidential system.

By Peter Van Buren

The American Conservative

The dangers many are now predicting under the Trump administration did not start on November 8. The near-unrestrained executive power claimed by the Obama administration, and issues left unresolved from the Bush administration, will be handed to the president-elect. Here’s what that means.

Torture

Obama did not prosecute or discipline anyone for torturing people on behalf of the people of the United States.

He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured almost all of the significant government documents on the torture program remain classified. He did not prosecute the Central Intelligence Agency official who willfully destroyed video tapes of the torture scenes. The president has not specifically outlawed secret prisons and renditions, just suspended their use.

As with the continued hunting down of Nazis some 70 years after their evil acts, the message that individual responsibility exists should stalk those who would do evil on behalf of our government. “I was only following orders” is not a defense against inhuman acts. The point of tracking down the guilty is partially to punish, but more to discourage the next person from doing evil; the purpose is to morally immunize a nation-state. Never again.

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Media Blackout As Millions Of Muslims March Against ISIS In Iraq Reply

by • Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized • Tags:

American Herald Tribune

Mint Press News

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Given the mainstream media’s constant sensationalized reporting on terror and Muslims in the Western world, the utter lack of coverage of Arbaeen’s march on Sunday and Monday revealed the double standard that exists in reporting on peaceful Muslims.

Monday marked the final day of the mourning for Imam Hussein who was martyred in a battle with the massive army of Yazid after refusing allegiance to the tyrant caliph. Yazid the caliph of Umayyad dynasty was promoting the same type of Islam as ISIS and Wahhabist preach today.

Millions of marchers participated in the annual Arbaeen Procession in Karbala. The marchers are said to come from over 60 countries, and most of them have marched all the way to Karbala from other Iraqi cities like Najaf and Baghdad in a show of devotion. Each year, Sunni Muslims and followers of other religious groups such as Christians join the journey to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein.

Arbaeen, or mourning, is a Shia Muslim tradition to mark the anniversary of seventh-century social justice leader Imam Husain. Arbaeen is commemorated 40 days after Ashura, the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Hussein (AS) and his companions in 680 AD. However, in light of ISIS terror attacks globally, several people took the controversial step of turning their march political in order to denounce terror in all forms.

Tens of thousands of Muslims have been killed and displaced by ISIS’s declared caliphate, an exponentially larger number than those killed in attacks in the West.

The occasion has found additional significance in recent years as it has become a rallying cry for the campaign against ISIS terrorists who have frequently targeted the pilgrims.

Iraqi troops have been deployed to ensure security for the pilgrims. The northern and western parts of Iraq have been plagued by gruesome violence ever since ISIS terrorists began a campaign of terror in the country in June 2014.

The terrorist campaign, however, has not dissuaded pilgrims from around the world from making the journey.

It is noteworthy to mention the mainstream media blackout of the millions people marched gathering in war torn Iraq, battling the ISIS, as a clear sign of biased reporting.

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Keith Preston: Trump trying to moderate his rhetoric 3

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Press TV. Listen here.

S President-elect Donald Trump is “moderating” the rhetoric he had adopted during the course of his campaign before he won the election, an analyst says.

During his long meeting with editors of The New York Times on Tuesday, Trump distanced himself away from some of the incendiary statements he had made before defeating his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton on November 8.

The billionaire businessman had described the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy,” but told The Times that it was “actually genius.”

He had called President Barack Obama “the worst president in US history,” but now he said he “liked him a lot” after meeting the president at the White House.

On Clinton’s email server scandal, Trump has vowed to put her in “jail,” calling her “guilty as hell,” however, he told The Times he has no intention of prosecuting the former secretary of state over her use of a private email server.


Trump speaks during a campaign event in Phoenix, Arizona, in July. (File photo)

“It’s clear what Donald Trump is trying to do is moderate his rhetoric considerably,” Keith Preston, the chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com, told Press TV on Wednesday.

“Because during the course of the campaign when he was running in the primaries particularly he would say a lot of inflammatory things, things that were clearly designed to appeal for the particular base that he was trying to reach, he was obviously trying to reach the rank-and-file voters of the Republican Party and a lot of the rhetoric that he was using during that period worked very well for him,” he continued.

“This is entirely predictable, if we go back and we look at Trump’s entire career as a public figure going back for decades, we see that he has always pretty much had the same kind of stances on key issues,” Preston added.

“He’s always been irrelatively liberal, he’s certainly more liberal than the normal Republican and in many ways he’s much more liberal than Hillary Clinton,” he noted.

In his interview with The Times, Trump did not rule out the possibility of man-made climate change, unlike in the past when he dismissed climate change as an expensive, money-making hoax.

He had previously vowed to pull the US out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, according to which about 200 countries will work to reduce global carbon emissions.

Beyond the Matrix – Keith Preston – Election Aftermath 3

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This airing we have Keith Preston joining us. Keith is the chief editor of AttacktheSystem.com and the host of the “Attack the System” online podcast series. He is the founder and director of American Revolutionary Vanguard, a contributing editor at AlternativeRight.com, and a former instructor of sociology. Keith is also a former regional delegate for the Industrial Workers of the World and a former member of the National Committee of the Workers Solidarity Alliance. We will be discussing the Election Aftermath. Beyond the Matrix with Richard Kary on Truth Cat Radio – November 14, 2016 ~

“Anarcho-Fascism”: An Overview of Right-Wing Anarchist Thought 12

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Uncategorized

This is the text of a lecture delivered to the H.L. Mencken Club on November 5, 2016.

The topic that I was given for this presentation is “Anarcho-Fascism” which I am sure on the surface sounds like a contradiction in terms. In popular language, the term “fascism” is normally used as a synonym for the totalitarian state. Indeed, in a speech to the Italian Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1928 Mussolini describe totalitarianism as an ideology that was characterized by the principle of “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

However, the most commonly recognized ideological meaning of the term “anarchism” implies the abolition of the state, and the term “anarchy” can either be used in the idealistic sense of total freedom, or in the pejorative sense of chaos and disorder.

Anarchism and fascism are both ideologies that I began to develop an interest in about thirty years ago, when I was a young anarchist militant who spent a great deal of time in the university library reading about the history of classical anarchism. It was during this time that I also became interested in understanding the ideology of fascism, mostly from my readings on the Spanish Civil War, including the works of Dr. Payne, whom I am honored to be on this panel with. And I have also looked into some of these ideas a little more since then. One of the things that I find to be the most fascinating about anarchism as a body of political philosophy is the diversity of anarchist thought. And the more that I have studied right-wing political thought, the more I am amazed by the diversity of opinion to be found there as well. It is consequently very interesting to consider the ways in which anarchism and right-wing political ideologies might intersect.

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Why the Left is Still Crying Wolf Over Trump Reply

by • Uncategorized

By Scott Alexander

A New York Times article from last September that went viral only recently: Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump. It asks whether Democrats have “cried wolf” so many times that nobody believes them anymore. And so:

When “honorable and decent men” like McCain and Romney “are reflexively dubbed racists simply for opposing Democratic policies, the result is a G.O.P. electorate that doesn’t listen to admonitions when the genuine article is in their midst”.

I have a different perspective. Back in October 2015, I wrote that the picture of Trump as “the white power candidate” and “the first openly white supremacist candidate to have a shot at the Presidency in the modern era” was overblown. I said that “the media narrative that Trump is doing some kind of special appeal-to-white-voters voodoo is unsupported by any polling data”, and predicted that:

If Trump were the Republican nominee, he could probably count on equal or greater support from minorities as Romney or McCain before him.

Now the votes are in, and Trump got greater support from minorities than Romney or McCain before him. You can read the Washington Post article, Trump Got More Votes From People Of Color Than Romney Did, or look at the raw data (source)

Trump made gains among blacks. He made gains among Latinos. He made gains among Asians. The only major racial group where he didn’t get a gain of greater than 5% was white people. I want to repeat that: the group where Trump’s message resonated least over what we would predict from a generic Republican was the white population.

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Donald Trump: Republican Business as Usual? Reply

by • Electoralism/Democratism • Tags:

So says long time leftist activist and professor James Petras.

By James Petras

Information Clearing House

November 18, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – Every aspect of this year’s US Presidential election has been fraught with myths, distortions, fabrications, wishful thinking and invented fears. 

We will proceed to discuss facts and fictions.

Electoral Participation

The mass media, parties and candidates emphasized the ‘unprecedented voter turnout’ in the elections.  In fact, 48% of the eligible voters abstained. 

In other words, nearly half of the electorate did not vote.  There were many reasons, including widespread disgust at both major party candidates and the weakness of ‘third parties’.  This includes disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters angry over the Democratic Party’s cynical manipulation of the primary nomination process.  Others were unable to vote in their neighborhoods because US elections are held on a regular workday, unlike in other countries. Others cast protest votes against economic programs or candidates reflecting their distrust and sense of impotence over policy.  Eligible voters generally expressed reservations over the gap between campaign promises and post campaign policies.  These political attitudes toward elections and candidates are deep-seated among those who ‘stayed home’.

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How the Left Can Survive Under Trump 3

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By Benjamin Studebaker

Over the last few days, many people have been panicking about what Donald Trump might do as president. There is a lot of fear. Because most commentators and academics are deeply hostile to Trump, many people writing about this are still deeply emotionally shaken by the result. This has tended to color the analysis and produce polemics. So today I want to take a step back and try to calmly, rationally assess what kind of threat Trump poses and what opportunities he creates. In this post we’ll focus on the threats, and in the next one we’ll talk about the opportunities

On the internet, many Trump supporters like to refer to him as “God Emperor”. They depict him as a heroic imperial figure:

Trump is a right nationalist, and during the campaign he said many things that seemed to evoke troubling periods in recent human history. This created a running narrative among Trump critics in which Trump is depicted as a Hitler figure. This peaked after he announced support for a ban on Muslims entering the country and asked an audience to raise their hands in a pledge of loyalty to him, creating a visual that reminded people of the Roman salute:

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Trump win is no catastrophe, it’s politics – Stephen Cohen Reply

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In a shocking upset, Donald Trump has defeated Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, marking the end of a bitter and divisive battle that has left the American political landscape shattered. What will the victory of the maverick candidate mean for the Washington establishment? And how will Trump transform the American society? Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus at Princeton University, author and contributing editor at “The Nation” magazine is on SophieCo to discuss this.

We Should Take Our Cues From Markets — Not Politicians Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations

Jp Cortez

I grew up a block away from the 7-train, where I’d take a short ride from the 90th Street station to the Willets Point—Shea Stadium station to watch my favorite team, the New York Mets.

Sitting in the stands as a young child, I learned quickly that there were a number of ways to obtain and interpret information. I could watch the umpire and immediately have known whether Al Leiter threw a strike or a ball. Another option was to watch the scoreboard and, with some delay, have known whether Derek Bell safely stole second base. I could listen to the cheers (or jeers) of the rowdy, biased people around me and know whether or not Mike Piazza had just hit another home run.

In baseball, there are efficient and inefficient ways to obtain information.  There are also false signals.  The same is true in financial markets and presidential elections.

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Make Money Great Again: Vote for Gold Reply

by • Economics/Class Relations • Tags:

By Guy Christopher, Originally Published on Money Metals Exchange

Who could possibly have predicted the astounding results of the November 8th presidential election?

A lot of folks, it turns out. Better than 60 million at last count. But that doesn’t include highly paid, and obviously over-paid, pollsters.

And it doesn’t include “journalists,” who showered their elitist agendas on television screens, in newsprint headlines and across cyberspace during the 17-month presidential campaign.

In short, those posing as experts predicting the future blew it. And they blew it “big league,” both before and after the election.

“No question – markets are going to tank all over the world,” said top experts at Yahoo Finance, during online, streaming coverage election night.

Stock markets instead went straight up for two days before modestly retreating.

Yahoo was not alone with that post-election financial advice. True to form, every business reporter in town got it dead wrong.

Curiously, not one dared repeat Trump’s constant drumbeat to his supporters – “stay out of this dangerous stock market!”

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Robert Stark interviews Keith Preston about Donald Trump and the Return of Liberalism 2

by • Uncategorized

LISTEN HERE!

trump-tower

Robert Stark and Alex von Goldstein talk to Keith Preston about his essay Donald Trump and the Return of Liberalism

Topics include:

The three waves of Liberalism, classical liberalism, reform liberalism, and neoliberalism
Neoliberalism, which is essentially a hybrid of capitalism and social democracy under the managerial state, starting under Jimmy Carter, and accelerating under Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., and Bill Clinton
Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was ‘Last Liberal President’

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