Authored by Gonzalo Schwarz via RealClearPolitics.com,

The American Dream was built on a promise of equality – a promise of equality in terms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

During the 2024 election, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are both working overtime to say why Republicans or Democrats are better on the equality issue.

But what kind of equality?

Harris is known for promoting “equity,” while Trump is quick to invoke the American Dream but slower to define it.

And so, voters are left wondering.

Many of the policies uttered on the campaign trail are focused on equalizing outcomes – or, at the very least, equalizing starting points.

To use a Harris quote, “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”

She also proposes an opportunity agenda, promising to crack down on price gouging, raise the minimum wage, provide $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and increase the child tax credit, among other proposals. Pushback has been swift among economists and policy researchers, who cite the unintended consequences of price controls and other forms of government overreach.

Meanwhile, Trump insists on continuing his tariff policy and expanding the child tax credit. Cue similar pushback: In his case, the vast majority of economists and other experts agree about the negative impact of tariffs on economic growth.

In the end, what do American voters actually want?

The candidate who is most likely to win come November is the candidate who is more adept at selling equality as most Americans actually see it.

In a recent survey on the American Dream conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, we put the question to the test. We asked people if they think equality means equality before the law and having a fair chance to pursue opportunities regardless of where they started (equality to opportunity), if equality means that everyone starts in the same with people given tools to help them catch up with others (equalizing starting points), or if equality just means people ending up in the same place like candidate Harris has said.

Not surprisingly, Americans don’t believe that equality means everyone ending in the same place.

Only 4% of U.S. adults say so, while equalizing people’s starting points only garnered 18% of the respondent vote.

On the other hand, nearly two-thirds of Americans claim equality is actually about the equality of opportunity.

This holds true across age, income level, education, and even political leanings. 

Democrats and Republicans generally agree that proper policymaking is predicated upon support for equality of opportunity.

By Bernadette Giacomazzo of RetailWire

Macy’s has announced that it is closing a total of 55 stores by the end of 2024, in the faltering brand’s ongoing effort to revamp its business.

According to The Daily Mail, the company originally intended to close 50 underperforming stores by the end of the year, part of the 150 total locations it will close within three years. However, it now plans to close 55 before 2025.

The locations of the shuttering stores have not yet been announced, but speculation is abounding that the stores will include a location in Newington, New Hampshire, one in Traverse City, Michigan, and one in WestShore Plaza mall in Tampa, Florida. These stores are reportedly set to close after the winter holidays.

“The biggest things that have gone wrong at Macy’s are the quality of the stores and the product assortment,” GlobalData Retail analyst Neil Saunders said to the outlet.

“And so over the years customers have deserted it, sales have tumbled and store productivity has gone down. All the metrics have gone in the wrong direction.”

News of these closures comes shortly after Macy’s announced that it was diverting funds to its in-house brands in yet another effort to turn the proverbial ship around.

According to TheStreet, the shop has resurrected or introduced a number of other brands, including On 34th and State of Day, as part of its rehabilitation drive. It plans to launch a men’s collection before the end of the year, and a new kids’ brand will follow next.

But Macy’s significant rebrand goes beyond simply bringing back well-known brands. The mall mainstay is purportedly concentrating more on its well-known high-margin luxury products in an attempt to attract customers with a little more disposable income.

The company has said that it will focus its efforts on designer fragrances, which are more affordable than high-end handbags, for example, yet feature coveted brands like Chanel and Dior.

Some Macy’s stores already carry high-end fragrances from brands like Tom Ford, Creed, and Cartier. The company did, however, declare that it will have 42 outlets by the end of 2024 that would sell its high-end cosmetic products, with a focus on scent, as part of its aim to expand the availability of designer fragrances.

Additionally, Macy’s will soon offer store-in-store concepts that will mimic Target’s Ulta strategy and Kohl’s well-known and successful Sephora endeavor.

By Ann Daily Moreno of The College Fix

A recent complaint filed with the University of Washington alleges that Professor Robin DiAngelo, a white critical race theorist and alumnus of the school, plagiarized minority scholars and others, largely within her dissertation to earn a PhD in philosophy.

The 20-page complaint, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, outlines nearly a half-dozen scholars whose previous writings appear to have not been properly cited in DiAngelo’s work — despite her saying it’s vital to “always cite and give credit to the work of BIPOC people who have informed your thinking.”

Only one of the scholars whose work was allegedly plagiarized by DiAngelo responded to The College Fix’s request for comment — University of Melbourne professorial fellow Bronwyn Davies — whose work with co-author Rom Harré has been found in a couple of sentences within DiAngelo’s writing.

“Plagiarism is plagiarism and it is not acceptable,” Davies told The College Fix when reached for comment. “But in a thesis on Critical Race Theory, it would seem to be even more egregious.”

DiAngelo’s 2004 dissertation “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis” appears to lift two paragraphs from Northeastern University Asian-American Professor Thomas Nakayama, and his coauthor, Robert Krizek, without proper attribution, the Beacon reported.

The complaint also “describes dozens of cases in which DiAngelo, who rakes in almost $1 million a year in speaking fees, passed off the work of others as her own,” it added, pointing out that although DiAngelo cited her sources in the bibliography, she did not give proper attribution for in text-citations, according to the complaint, filed anonymously.

Davies describes herself as a “new materialist,” but said she is familiar with critical race theory and told The Fix she does not have “any particular dispute” with the ideology. She said it is “interesting” how the work she was doing 30 years ago is currently being used by critical race theory scholars like DiAngelo.

As for the sentences DiAngelo lifted, Davies told The Fix: “I think this falls within any definition of plagiarism, which is a pretty serious [offense] according to the rules of most universities.”

“However,” she added, “her failure to give proper attribution may not be intentional; it may be ignorance.”

“What I would like to say is that all academic work is in conversation, one way or another, with work that others have done or are doing,” she said.

“Weaving one’s own words together with the words of another involves both acknowledging they are not your own words … while not interrupting the flow of whatever idea it is you are trying to express.”

Davies said she does not have an opinion about any consequences DiAngelo should face, saying it’s up to the university.

However, Davies also said there is “a lot of trust” in publishing one’s ideas and she hopes that whoever reads her ideas will “gain new insights and benefits in their own thinking and writing.”

“Academic publishing is a huge global conversation that is often exciting, and invariably stimulates the production of new ideas and new conversations,” Davies told The Fix. “It makes me sad, and a little disappointed that, in this case, my place in the conversation has not been acknowledged—but only a little.”

Davies also said that she “wonders” about DiAngelo’s ethics since DiAngelo makes millions of dollars in events, but she is also “happy” her words could “still be helpful to the student in developing her own ideas.”

Reached for comment by The College Fix, University of Washington spokesperson Dana Robinson Slote stated campus leaders “are committed to the integrity of research conducted at the University of Washington.”

“Complaints such as this are confidential under institutional policy and relevant federal regulations. Therefore, I cannot speak to or verify the accuracy of any purported complaint, or excerpt from a complaint, that has allegedly been submitted.”

Slote refers to the university’s policies in University of Washington’s Executive Order 61.

Charleen Wilcox, spokesperson for the College of Education, where the alleged plagiarism took place and where DiAngelo currently serves as an affiliate associate professor, told The College Fix the school “does not have any comment at this time.”

DiAngelo, who has not yet replied to requests for comment, is the author of New York Times bestseller “White Fragility,” a book that DiAngelo says was written to help people of color.

DiAngelo has also been involved with the Seattle Office of Civil Rights, appointed as a leader in the mayor’s race and social justice initiative and has, in addition, reportedly made nearly $1 million per year from speaker fees and leading “anti-racism” trainings, some of which can be found on her website.

The Seattle Office of Civil Rights has not yet replied to a request for comment.

Stacey Lee, an Asian-American professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has also been apparently plagiarized by DiAngelo in her dissertation. DiAngelo changed only one sentence, as seen circulating on X and in the original complaint.

DiAngelo also lifts material from Stacey Lee, an Asian-American professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in which Lee summarizes the work of a third scholar, David Theo Goldberg. pic.twitter.com/950cH7gRg7

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) August 26, 2024

Some other scholars whom DiAngelo is accused of plagiarizing include classmate Kristin Gates Cloyes from her PhD program, Debian Marty, an emerita professor of communication at California State University, Monterey Bay, Cynthia Levine-Rasky, associate professor of Sociology at Queen University, and Harré, a philosopher and psychologist, died in 2019.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The US wants to deploy a previously banned missile system to Japan for military drills, Nikkei Asia has reported. The Typhon missile launcher is a ground-based system that can fire nuclear-capable Tomahawk missiles, which have a range of more than 1,000 miles.

Ground-based missiles with a range between 310 and 3,400 miles were banned by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which the US withdrew from in 2019. The Typhon also fires SM-6 missiles, which can hit targets up to 290 miles away.

The US deployed a Typhon system to the Philippines for military drills, a move that China viewed as a major provocation. The missile system was sent to the Philippines for several months. It was first deployed for the drills that started in April, and Manila said it would be pulled out in September, meaning it could still be there.

The Philippines said China expressed “very dramatic” alarm over the deployment of the Typhon system. Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Wu Qian said the deployment “put the entire region under the fire of the United States (and) brought huge risks of war into the region.”

US Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said on Wednesday that she told Japanese officials the US wanted to deploy the Typhon to Japan next. “We’ve made our interest in this clear with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces,” she said at a Defense News conference in Virginia.

Wormuth said the US would also look to keep it in Japan for several months. “Our goal…in the Army has been to really try to have as much combat-credible capability forward” in the Indo-Pacific west of the international dateline,” she said, according to Nikkei.

Wormuth claimed the deployment “strengthens deterrence” in the region and said the missile system has “gotten the attention of China.” She said there is “a lot of potential” for moving US troops and equipment around Japan’s southwestern islands, which are near Taiwan.

US officials say the US is building up its military presence near China in the name of deterrence, but the steps have only escalated tensions in the region, making a conflict more likely. Wormuth and other US officials are also openly planning for a direct confrontation with China despite the obvious risk of nuclear war.

Wormuth said last year that the US was preparing to fight and win a war with China. “I personally am not of the view that an amphibious invasion of Taiwan is imminent,” she said. “But we obviously have to prepare, to be prepared to fight and win that war.”

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”

– Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

It’s not easy being a child in the American police state.

Danger lurks around every corner and comes at you from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.

Out on the streets, you’ve got the menace posed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. In your neighborhoods, you’ve got to worry about the Nanny State and its network of busybodies turning parents in for allowing their children to walk to school alone, walk to the park alone, play at the beach alone, or even play in their own yard alone.

The tentacles of the police state even intrude on the sanctity of one’s home, with the government believing it knows better than you—the parent—what is best for your child. This criminalization of parenthood has run the gamut in recent years from parents being arrested for attempting to walk their kids home from school to parents being fined and threatened with jail time for their kids’ bad behavior or tardiness at school.

This doesn’t even touch on what happens to your kids when they’re at school—especially the public schools—where parents have little to no control over what their kids are taught, how they are taught, how and why they are disciplined, and the extent to which they are being indoctrinated into marching in lockstep with the government’s authoritarian playbook.

The message is chillingly clear: your children are not your own but are, in fact, wards of the state who have been temporarily entrusted to your care. Should you fail to carry out your duties to the government’s satisfaction, the children in your care will be re-assigned elsewhere.

This is what it means to go back-to-school in America today: where parents have to worry about school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.

Instead of being taught the three R’s of education (reading, writing and arithmetic), young people are being drilled in the three I’s of life in the American police state: indoctrination, intimidation and intolerance.

Indeed, while young people today are learning first-hand what it means to be at the epicenter of politically charged culture wars, test scores indicate that students are not learning how to succeed in social studies, math and reading. Rather, government officials are churning out compliant drones who know little to nothing about their history or their freedoms.

In turn, these young people are being brainwashed into adopting a worldview in which rights are negotiable rather than inalienable; free speech is dangerous; the virtual world is preferable to the real world; and history can be extinguished when inconvenient or offensive.

What does it mean for the future of freedom at large when these young people, trained to be mindless automatons, are someday running the government?

Under the direction of government officials focused on making the schools more authoritarian (sold to parents as a bid to make the schools safer), young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

• draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,

• overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,

• school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,

• standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,

• politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,

• and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

This is how you groom young people to march in lockstep with a police state.

As Deborah Cadbury writes for The Washington Post, “Authoritarian rulers have long tried to assert control over the classroom as part of their totalitarian governments.”

In Nazi Germany, the schools became indoctrination centers, breeding grounds for intolerance and compliance.

In the American police state, the schools have become increasingly hostile to those who dare to question or challenge the status quo.

America’s young people have become casualties of a post-9/11 mindset that has transformed the country into a locked-down, militarized, crisis-fueled mockery of a representative government.

Roped into the government’s profit-driven campaign to keep the nation “safe” from drugs, disease, and weapons, America’s schools have transformed themselves into quasi-prisons, complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

Students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water, in some cases getting them expelled from school or charged with a crime.

Not even good deeds go unpunished.

One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Having police in the schools only adds to the danger.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.

Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.

This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.

Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).

Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.

These police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.

Likewise, the harm caused by attitudes and policies that treat America’s young people as government property is not merely a short-term deprivation of individual rights. It is also a long-term effort to brainwash our young people into believing that civil liberties are luxuries that can and will be discarded at the whim and caprice of government officials if they deem doing so is for the so-called “greater good” (in other words, that which perpetuates the aims and goals of the police state).

What we’re dealing with is a draconian mindset that sees young people as wards of the state—and the source of potential income—to do with as they will in defiance of the children’s constitutional rights and those of their parents. However, this is in keeping with the government’s approach towards individual freedoms in general.

Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your emails and text messages and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugary soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: these are all outward signs of a government—i.e., a monied elite—that believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can.

This is tyranny disguised as “the better good.”

Indeed, this is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots.

This is what the world looks like when bureaucrats not only think they know better than the average citizen but are empowered to inflict their viewpoints on the rest of the populace on penalty of fines, arrest or death.

So, what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now but for the future of this country, when these same young people are someday in charge?

How do you convince someone who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, we must start by running the schools like freedom forums.

A cold front is set to sweep across the eastern half of the US, a reminder that planet Earth is not on fire as some leftist corporate media outlets repeat like a broken record for years, if not decades. Even if there is some warming, these media outlets fire up the propaganda cannons squarely at fossil fuels without, as of recently, even mentioning the 2022 eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, the largest underwater explosion ever recorded by modern scientific instruments, blasting an enormous amount of water and volcanic gases into the atmosphere that has been linked to the warming. 

“Big cold front coming this weekend. Sunday AM departure from normals here showing some areas 10+ degrees cooler. Some upper 50’s might reach the upper Gulf. Pumpkin Spice better be in stock and ready to go. Almost time to dig out the Halloween gear,” Mike’s Weather Page wrote on X. 

For the Lower 48, the 30-year, 10-year, and 5-year temperature averages peaked in mid-July and trended lower into September. 

Looking ahead, the 208th edition of the Farmers’ Almanac, titled “Wet Winter Whirlwind” and published last month, warned that “The Northeast is in the bullseye for a barrage of storms this winter…”

The weather prediction formula that Farmers’ Almanac uses revolves around a climate pattern known as La Niña, likely to emerge in September-November. 

Remember that the emergence of La Nina can impact weather conditions across the Lower 48 this coming winter season.

We suspect that as power bills become more unaffordable for working-class households, the number of folks burning wood should only increase to offset the costs. The heating season across the Lower 48 begins to emerge. 

According to 2023 data from Angi, the average cost of a cord of wood across the US is…

Don’t worry. The far-left corporate media will blame weather cooling on… 

Strong hurricanes? Global warming

Weak hurricanes? Global warming

No hurricanes? Global warming

Hot today? Global warming

Cold today? Global warming

Raining too much? Global warming

Drought? Global warming

— Some guy from TN (@SomeguyfromTN) September 2, 2024

Folks in the Mid-Alantic and Northeast regions might have to pull out their jackets from the closet this weekend.  

The judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal case has postponed his sentencing for the second time. According to Reuters, the new sentencing date has been pushed to November 26, after the presidential election on November 5.

Trump’s lawyers asked Judge Juan M. Merchan, who oversaw Trump’s seven-week trial earlier this year, to postpone the September 18 sentencing. They argued there wouldn’t be enough time for the defense to appeal Merchan’s upcoming ruling on Trump’s request to overturn the conviction, citing the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision on presidential immunity.

In May, Trump was convicted by a unanimous jury on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors said Trump signed off on the scheme to hide reimbursements to a lawyer who wired a $130,000 “hush money” payment to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied the encounter. 

The charges carry a maximum sentence of four years in jail. Most legal observers expect Trump to avoid jail time, given the alternatives to incarceration, including probation. 

Trump’s original sentencing was set for July 11, but it was delayed after he filed a motion to overturn his conviction, citing a landmark Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity. 

Trump attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove’s request for a postponement argued it would be inappropriate to sentence the former president this month since early voting in the presidential election has already begun.

“By adjourning the sentencing until after that election … the Court would reduce, even if not eliminate, issues regarding the integrity of any future proceedings,” they wrote.

🚨Its official – Trump won’t be sentenced in NY until after the election

If he wins, no jail time for his political persecution

If he loses, he’ll likely spend the rest of his life in jail as a political prisoner

These are the stakes pic.twitter.com/ztzt6e7mlT

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) September 6, 2024

*Developing…  

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Among the big winners of the Everything Bubble is–yes, I know you’re shocked–Wall Street.

Is the “Everything Bubble” about to pop? Let’s start with what we’re told: there is no bubble , all the assets soaring to unprecedented heights are reasonably priced at a “permanently high plateau” because of AI, scarcity of housing, scarcity of Ferraris, interest rates trending down, the Fed waving dead chickens around the campfire, people buying toothpaste, and so on: you name it, it’s a reason for assets to drift higher.

This all sounds rather splendid, but somehow the pump inflating the bubble goes unmentioned: it’s the money, Honey , the tens of trillions of yen, yuan, euros, dollars, pesos, etc., being borrowed or conjured into existence since the last spot of bother in 2008, where each unit of currency enters the global free-for-all chasing assets.

Thanks to historically low yields, cash is trash and the way to make a killing is to rotate from AI chip makers to Ferrari to Colgate, and then on to the next hot sector: maybe uranium, maybe bat guano, maybe a new doggy-themed crypto, maybe the next iteration of the yen carry trade, it doesn’t really matter because capital is digital and therefore mobile.

Hand-in-hand with the endless spew of new “money” and credit are financialization and globalization , which have transformed every asset into a fully globalized, commoditized asset that can be securitized, packaged, collateralized and leveraged in a financier’s Heaven of finance becoming the measure of all things .

The house across the street is no longer shelter: it’s a financialized asset that’s now part of a portfolio of rental properties owned (and leveraged) by some entity based in Dubai, which might securitize the portfolio and sell it to pension funds in Norway.

Or it’s one of dozens of short-term vacation rentals (STVR) in a wealthy family’s private wealth management portfolio.

The same holds true for every asset on the planet. Farmland isn’t for growing food–it’s for growing wealth as the global “scarcity” of places to stash capital drives its value out of the reach of those who would actually like to use the land to grow food.

For the wealthy, what’s abundant is credit, and what’s scarce is assets to soak up the sea of ​​capital sloshing around the wealth management funds, philanthro-capitalist foundations, and other outposts of the top 0.1%, which as this chart illustrates, have ridden the credit-fueled Everything Bubble to unprecedented heights of private wealth.

We’re told the bubble is a tide raising all boats, but this is, ahem,misinformation, as the bottom 50%’s share of the financial windfall remains a signal-noise of 2.6%.

The primary effect of the Everything Bubble is an extreme of wealth-power inequality. As the chart above illustrates, the wealthy got much richer while everyone else acquired more debt, ie the obligation to pay more of one’s earnings to the wealthy who own the mortgage, auto loan, student loan. etc.

There’s a funny little effect of extreme wealth-power inequality known as social disorder which can manifest in all sorts of equally funny ways, as popular uprising, wildcat strikes, opting out , civil disobedience, and various other ways of expressing no mas .

Here we see just how extreme the Everything Bubble has become in residential real estate, nearly doubling the insanity of the 2006 housing bubble. Recall that the Case-Shiller Index tracks the market price of the same houses over time, so there’s no way to game the statistics.

Among the big winners of the Everything Bubble is–yes, I know you’re shocked–Wall Street , as the broker-dealer index has outpaced even the bubblicious S&P 500 stock index.

The Everything Bubble is global , which means its deflation is going to hurt the entire global economy. Consider this chart reflecting the concentration of China’s household wealth in housing: almost 80% of all household wealth is in housing, a bubble which is now popping despite the authorities’ efforts to reinflate the bubble. Prices are off 25% to 37% in Tier 1 cities, and even more in Tier 2 and 3 cities.

The reverse wealth effect as the primary store of household wealth wilts will be monumental. Trust isn’t just personal? trust is the critical glue in markets and governance. Once trust is lost, it’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to win it back.

That the bloom is off the Everything Bubble Rose is visible in anecdotal evidence dribbling in from the real world: housing valuations in various markets are off 25% from their peak, housing inventories are rising, sales are slowing, restaurant chains are going belly-up , credit card debt is soaring to new heights, dollar-store stocks are cratering, and so on.

But hey, the real world doesn’t count? the only thing that matters is financialized assets going up. If the yen-quatloo pair is taking off, everything’s good.

There are a couple of funny things about amassing $315 trillion in debts globally to drive “growth”: one is the interest due on all that debt , which becomes unsustainable should yields rise, and inflation, which either pushes yields higher, making it impossible to continue funding “growth” with more debt, or it lays waste to the purchasing power of wage earners’ incomes, popping the bubble of free-spending consumption propping up the global economy and debt bubble .

Gordon Long and I explain these dynamics in our new podcast :

To summarize: will the Everything Bubble pop? Yes.

Will the authorities try to reinflate the bubble? Yes.

Will it work? No.

*  *  *

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

Intel and Japan are teaming up.

In fact, the Japanese national research institute is going to be teaming up with Intel to “build a research and development center in Japan for cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing technology”, according to a new report from Nikkei Asia.

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), under the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, will establish a new facility in three to five years equipped with extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) technology.

Intel will contribute its expertise in chip manufacturing using EUV. The center, the first of its kind in Japan, will allow equipment and materials manufacturers to pay a fee for prototyping and testing.

Nikkei reports that the initiative aims to strengthen Japan’s capabilities in the chip manufacturing sector, with total investment expected to reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) is crucial for semiconductor manufacturing at scales of 5 nanometers and smaller, allowing more transistors to fit on a chip and increasing computing power.

And EUV equipment is expensive, costing over 40 billion yen ($273 million) per unit, making it a significant investment for suppliers of materials and equipment.

The U.S. has tightened restrictions on EUV-related exports to China amid growing strategic competition with China, slowing the return of research data to Japan. Having EUV equipment available at a domestic research facility will reduce this barrier, according to the report. 

ASML Holding, based in the Netherlands, is the leading manufacturer of EUV lithography equipment. However, semiconductor production involves over 600 steps, requiring a broad range of specialized equipment and materials.

Japanese companies like Lasertec dominate the EUV inspection equipment market, and firms like JSR specialize in photosensitive materials for silicon wafer circuits.

Intel aims to strengthen ties with these Japanese suppliers through the new research center.

Authored by Jeffrey D. Sachs via Common Dreams,

Two former leaders of major South Asian countries have reportedly accused the United States of covert regime change operations to topple their governments. One of the leaders, former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, languishes in prison, on a perverse conviction that proves Khan’s assertion. The other leader, former Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina, fled to India following a violent coup in her country. Their grave accusations against the U.S., as reported in the world media, should be investigated by the UN, since if true, the U.S. actions would constitute a fundamental threat to world peace and to regional stability in South Asia. The two cases seem to be very similar. The very strong evidence of the U.S. role in toppling the government of Imran Khan raises the likelihood that something similar may have occurred in Bangladesh.

In the case of Pakistan, Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia and Central Asia, met with Asad Majeed Khan, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., on March 7, 2022. Ambassador Khan immediately wrote back to his capital, conveying Lu’s warning that PM Khan threatened U.S.-Pakistan relations because of Khan’s “aggressively neutral position” regarding Russia and Ukraine.

The Ambassador’s March 7 note (technically a diplomatic cypher) quoted Assistant Secretary Lu as follows: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” The very next day, members of the parliament took procedural steps to oust PM Khan.

On March 27, PM Khan brandished the cypher, and told his followers and the public that the U.S. was out to bring him down. On April 10, PM Khan was thrown out of office as the parliament acceded to the U.S. threat.

We know this in detail because of Ambassador Khan’s cypher, exposed by PM Khan and brilliantly documented by Ryan Grim of The Intercept, including the text of the cypher. Absurdly and tragically, PM Khan languishes in prison in part over espionage charges, linked to his revealing the cypher.

The U.S. appears to have played a similar role in the recent violent coup in Bangladesh. PM Hasina was ostensibly toppled by student unrest, and fled to India when the Bangladeshi military refused to prevent the protestors from storming the government offices. Yet there may well be much more to the story than meets the eye.

According to press reports in India, PM Hasina is claiming that the U.S. brought her down. Specifically, she says that the U.S. removed her from power because she refused to grant the U.S. military facilities in a region that is considered strategic for the U.S. in its “Indo-Pacific Strategy” to contain China. While these are second-hand accounts by the Indian media, they track closely several speeches and statements that Hasina has made over the past two years.

On May 17, 2024, the same Assistant Secretary Liu who played a lead role in toppling PM Khan, visited Dhaka to discuss the US Indo-Pacific Strategy among other topics. Days later, Sheikh Hasina reportedly summoned the leaders of the 14 parties of her alliance to make the startling claim that a “country of white-skinned people” was trying to bring her down, ostensibly telling the leaders that she refused to compromise her nation’s sovereignty. Like Imran Khan, PM Hasina had been pursuing a foreign policy of neutrality, including constructive relations not only with the U.S. but also with China and Russia, much to the deep consternation of the U.S. government.

To add credence to Hasina’s charges, Bangladesh had delayed signing two military agreements that the U.S. had pushed very hard since 2022, indeed by none other than the former Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the neocon hardliner with her own storied history of U.S. regime-change operations. One of the draft agreements, the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), would bind Bangladesh to closer military-to-military cooperation with Washington. The Government of PM Hasina was clearly not enthusiastic to sign it.

The U.S. is by far the world’s leading practitioner of regime-change operations, yet the U.S. flatly denies its role in covert regime change operations even when caught red-handed, as with Nuland’s infamous intercepted phone call in late January 2014 planning the U.S.-led regime change operation in Ukraine. It is useless to appeal to the U.S. Congress, and still less the executive branch, to investigate the claims by PM Khan and PM Hasina. Whatever the truth of the matter, they will deny and lie as necessary.

This is where the UN should step in. Covert regime change operations are blatantly illegal under international law (notably the Doctrine of Non-Intervention, as expressed for example in UN General Assembly Resolution 2625, 1970), and constitute perhaps the greatest threat to world peace, as they profoundly destabilize nations, and often lead to wars and other civil disorders. The UN should investigate and expose covert regime change operations, both in the interests of reversing them, and preventing them in the future.

The UN Security Council is of course specifically charged under Article 24 of the UN Charter with “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.” When evidence arises that a government has been toppled through the intervention or complicity of a foreign government, the UN Security Council should investigate the claims.

In the cases of Pakistan and Bangladesh, the UN Security Council should seek the direct testimony of PM Khan and PM Hasina in order to evaluate the evidence that the U.S. played a role in the overthrow of the governments of these two leaders. Each, of course, should be protected by the UN for giving their testimony, so as to protect them from any retribution that could follow their honest presentation of the facts. Their testimony can be taken by video conference, if necessary, given the tragic ongoing incarceration of PM Khan.

The U.S. might well exercise its veto in the UN Security Council to prevent such a investigation. In that case, the UN General Assembly can take up the matter, under UN Resolution A/RES/76/, which allows the UN General Assembly to consider an issue blocked by veto in the UN Security Council. The issues at stake could then be assessed by the entire membership of the UN. The veracity of the U.S. involvement in the recent regime changes in Pakistan and Bangladesh could then be objectively analyzed and judged on the evidence, rather than on mere assertions and denials.

The U.S. engaged in at least 64 covert regime change operations during 1947-1989, according to documented research by Lindsey O’Rourke, political science professor at Boston Collage, and several more that were overt (e.g. by U.S.-led war). It continues to engage in regime-change operations with shocking frequency to this day, toppling governments in all parts of the world. It is wishful thinking that the U.S. will abide by international law on its own, but it is not wishful thinking for the world community, long suffering from U.S. regime change operations, to demand their end at the United Nations.