January 13, 2016

The coddling of the conservative mind

from Salon:


The coddling of the conservative mind
Why baiting "politically correct" college students won’t save honorable conservatism or America. And what might

JIM SLEEPER


Look who’s complaining

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising — undirected by students, professors or deans but scripted, funded and promoted by people off-campus — that blames liberals for trying to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Speech codes. Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. We’ve all read and heard disturbing accounts of such measures’ ubiquity and oppressiveness on campus after campus, their students depicted as demanding them en masse and administrators as rushing to establish them.

I don’t expect these alarms to stop being sounded, or students to stop demonstrating, once the new semester is underway. But this is the time to consider what’s really driving not only the students, but the strong and largely successful campaign to condemn them.

“Our colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,” thundered Roger Kimball, the veteran conservative polemicist, strategist and chairman of the board of the William F. Buckley Program at Yale, introducing the columnist George Will last April at a black-tie “Disinvitation Dinner” sponsored by the program to dramatize Scripps College’s cancellation of its invitation to Will to be one of several conservative speakers it has been bringing to a lecture series.

....(snip)....

Look who’s been coddled

That counter-revolution was announced in 1951, early in the Cold War, when Buckley’s own “God and Man at Yale” urged Yale’s presumptively Christian-gentleman alumni to rescue their college, their faith and free enterprise from their professors’ incipiently totalitarian socialism. But Ivy alumni weren’t quite the splendid, steely gentlemen Buckley was conjuring up as his foil to leftist oppressors. John P. Marquand’s 1941 novel “H.M. Pulham, Esquire,” presented the vapid, all-too-representative meditations of a Harvard grad struggling to summarize his life thus far for the 25th reunion of his equally coddled, clueless, conformist classmates, all striding through life in a feignedly hearty but tightly correct lockstep.

Conservative business and social elites had been manufacturing moral and intellectual conformity for nearly a century before Marquand’s novel was published. “A thought would destroy most persons whom we know. Bring a thought into a chamber full of company, it would extinguish most of them. They are exposed as counterfeits and charlatans, as rats and mice, they who strutted, a moment ago, as the princes of the world,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, himself a Harvard graduate, in 1858. ...................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_coddling_of_the_conservative_mind/

January 13, 2016

Kshama Sawant Shows That Ordinary People Aren’t Afraid of Unapologetic Leftist Politics

Kshama Sawant Shows That Ordinary People Aren’t Afraid of Unapologetic Leftist Politics
BY JONATHAN ROSENBLUM, ALTERNET


When Vanessa Patricelli first heard Kshama Sawant speak, she thought the socialist was nuts.

It was November 2013. Sawant had just been elected to the Seattle City Council as a member of the Socialist Alternative party. And Boeing was threatening to cut thousands of jobs if its machinists didn’t give up their pensions and Washington State didn’t hand the company $8.7 billion in tax breaks.

Patricelli, a public hospital nurse active in her union, had joined a downtown Seattle rally for the Boeing machinists with labor leaders and allies. When Sawant took the microphone, she declared her solidarity with Boeing employees, adding that if the aerospace giant wanted to engage in “economic terrorism,” the workers should take over the factories and place them under democratic control.

“I come from a conservative background,” Patricelli told me later. “It was like, I’m with you, I’m with you… but workers running factories? Oh my god, she’s crazy-pants!”

Yet two years later, on election night 2015, Patricelli was celebrating Sawant’s reelection along with hundreds of union members, students, housing rights advocates, LGBTQ activists, and radicals of various stripes at the campaign’s party. .............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18751/seattle-socialist-kshama-sawant-leftists

January 13, 2016

Keiser Report: Bonfire of Misallocated Capital

Published on Jan 12, 2016

Check Keiser Report websitefor more: http://www.maxkeiser.com/

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the bonfire of the misallocated capital as everything from the S&P 500 to China’s Producer Price Index to South Africa’s rand signal a deflationary collapse. In the second half, Max interviews Lee Adler of WallStreetExaminer.com about distribution taking place in the stock market and why the IPO of Saudi Aramco could pull even more cash out of the economy.

January 13, 2016

The DNC Junta Is Continuing the Democratic Leadership Council Coup

The DNC Junta Is Continuing the Democratic Leadership Council Coup

Tuesday, 12 January 2016 00:00
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed




.....(snip).....

Now, considering the fact that Bernie Sanders does better than Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical matchup with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, you'd think that the establishment Democrats would be thrilled with these developments.

You'd think that the people who talk so much about "electability" and how important it is would be overjoyed that Bernie Sanders, a popular and electable candidate, is moving towards the Democratic nomination.

Apparently not.

Instead of celebrating the rise of a new star, establishment Democrats are freaking out about the possibility of Bernie Sanders winning both Iowa and New Hampshire.

Case in point: former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, Jr., who on MSNBC agreed with Joe Scarborough that establishment Dems could recruit John Kerry or Joe Biden to run if Bernie sweeps both early primary states. ...........(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/34370-the-dnc-junta-is-continuing-the-democratic-leadership-council-coup

January 12, 2016

The Oil Pricequake: Political Turmoil in a Time of Low Energy Prices

from TomDispatch:


The Oil Pricequake
Political Turmoil in a Time of Low Energy Prices

By Michael T. Klare


As 2015 drew to a close, many in the global energy industry were praying that the price of oil would bounce back from the abyss, restoring the petroleum-centric world of the past half-century. All evidence, however, points to a continuing depression in oil prices in 2016 -- one that may, in fact, stretch into the 2020s and beyond. Given the centrality of oil (and oil revenues) in the global power equation, this is bound to translate into a profound shakeup in the political order, with petroleum-producing states from Saudi Arabia to Russia losing both prominence and geopolitical clout.

To put things in perspective, it was not so long ago -- in June 2014, to be exact -- that Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, was selling at $115 per barrel. Energy analysts then generally assumed that the price of oil would remain well over $100 deep into the future, and might gradually rise to even more stratospheric levels. Such predictions inspired the giant energy companies to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in what were then termed “unconventional” reserves: Arctic oil, Canadian tar sands, deep offshore reserves, and dense shale formations. It seemed obvious then that whatever the problems with, and the cost of extracting, such energy reserves, sooner or later handsome profits would be made. It mattered little that the cost of exploiting such reserves might reach $50 or more a barrel.

As of this moment, however, Brent crude is selling at $33 per barrel, one-third of its price 18 months ago and way below the break-even price for most unconventional “tough oil” endeavors. Worse yet, in one scenario recently offered by the International Energy Agency (IEA), prices might not again reach the $50 to $60 range until the 2020s, or make it back to $85 until 2040. Think of this as the energy equivalent of a monster earthquake -- a pricequake -- that will doom not just many “tough oil” projects now underway but some of the over-extended companies (and governments) that own them.

The current rout in oil prices has obvious implications for the giant oil firms and all the ancillary businesses -- equipment suppliers, drill-rig operators, shipping companies, caterers, and so on -- that depend on them for their existence. It also threatens a profound shift in the geopolitical fortunes of the major energy-producing countries. Many of them, including Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela, are already experiencing economic and political turmoil as a result. (Think of this, for instance, as a boon for the terrorist group Boko Haram as Nigeria shudders under the weight of those falling prices.) The longer such price levels persist, the more devastating the consequences are likely to be.

A Perfect Storm

Generally speaking, oil prices go up when the global economy is robust, world demand is rising, suppliers are pumping at maximum levels, and little stored or surplus capacity is on hand. They tend to fall when, as now, the global economy is stagnant or slipping, energy demand is tepid, key suppliers fail to rein in production in consonance with falling demand, surplus oil builds up, and future supplies appear assured. ...............(more)

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176089/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_look_of_a_badly_oiled_planet/#more

January 12, 2016

Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence

Henry A. Giroux | Gun Culture and the American Nightmare of Violence

Sunday, 10 January 2016 00:00
By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis


Gun violence in the United States has produced a culture soaked in blood - a culture that threatens everyone and extends from accidental deaths, suicides and domestic violence to mass shootings. In late December, a woman in St. Cloud, Florida, fatally shot her own daughter after mistaking her for an intruder. Less than a month earlier, on December 2, in San Bernardino, California, was the mass shooting that left 14 people dead and more than 20 wounded. And just two months before that, on October 1, nine people were killed and seven wounded in a mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon.

Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death. Given the profits made by arms manufacturers, the defense industry, gun dealers and the lobbyists who represent them in Congress, it comes as no surprise that the culture of violence cannot be abstracted from either the culture of business or the corruption of politics. Violence runs through US society like an electric current offering instant pleasure from all cultural sources, whether it be the nightly news or a television series that glorifies serial killers.

At a policy level, violence drives the arms industry and a militaristic foreign policy, and is increasingly the punishing state's major tool to enforce its hyped-up brand of domestic terrorism, especially against Black youth. The United States is utterly wedded to a neoliberal culture in which cruelty is viewed as virtue, while mass incarceration is treated as the chief mechanism to "institutionalize obedience." At the same time, a shark-like mode of competition replaces any viable notion of solidarity, and a sabotaging notion of self-interest pushes society into the false lure of mass consumerism. The increasing number of mass shootings is symptomatic of a society engulfed in racism, fear, militarism, bigotry and massive inequities in wealth and power.

Over 270 mass shootings have taken place in the United States in 2015 alone, proving once again that the economic, political and social conditions that underlie such violence are not being addressed. Sadly, these shootings are not isolated incidents. For example, one child under 12 years old has been killed every other day by a firearm, which amounts to 555 children killed by guns in three years. An even more frightening statistic and example of a shocking moral and political perversity was noted in data provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which states that "2,525 children and teens died by gunfire in [the United States] in 2014; one child or teen death every 3 hours and 28 minutes, nearly 7 a day, 48 a week." Such figures indicate that too many youth in the United States occupy what might be called war zones in which guns and violence proliferate. In this scenario, guns and the hypermasculine culture of violence are given more support than young people and life itself. ..................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34349-gun-culture-and-the-american-nightmare-of-violence

January 12, 2016

Corporate-Credit Outlook Weakens to Worst Since Crisis, S&P Says

(Bloomberg) The outlook for corporate borrowers worldwide is the worst since the global financial crisis, according to Standard & Poor’s.

The proportion of issuers facing a potential downgrade at the ratings company surpasses possible upgrades by the most since 2009, according to a Jan. 11 report. The gap also widened the most since the financial crisis in the past six months, S&P said.

The corporate-debt outlook has darkened because of slower growth in China and a commodity rout that’s cut prices to the lowest since 1999. The slump has also driven corporate defaults to the highest since 2009 and led to investors demanding a 8.7 percent yield to hold junk bonds, the most in four years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data.

There may be “significantly” more ratings downgrades than upgrades in 2016, S&P analysts led by Melbourne-based Terry Chan wrote in the report.

S&P is considering cutting ratings at 17 percent of the companies it covers, as of December, the report said. That compares with possible upgrades for 6 percent of issuers. The 11 percentage-point gap is more than double the level in June 2014, the report said. .................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-12/corporate-credit-outlook-weakens-to-worst-since-crisis-s-p-says

January 12, 2016

Diaper sales set to soar in Louisiana

How did a little-known Democratic state representative manage to win a landslide election for governor in deep red Louisiana?

Easy. John Bel Edwards drew the reviled U.S. Sen. David Vitter as his opponent.

That’s not great news for Democrats hoping that Edwards’ stunning 56–44 Nov. 21 victory would illuminate a path in other challenging environments. Vitter, a political juggernaut for most of his 24-year career despite a prostitution scandal that would have destroyed a less talented—and less brazen—politician, collapsed in epic fashion. Edwards’ smart, character-based campaign certainly helped, but the election boiled down to a referendum on the archconservative Republican senator, who saw the writing on the wall and announced during his concession speech that he wouldn’t seek a third term in 2016.

Outside of Edwards’ initially small circle—his family and friends, some deep-pocketed trial lawyers, and organized labor, particularly teachers’ unions—few would have predicted the outcome when the season began. With Gov. Bobby Jindal AWOL in Iowa running his futile presidential campaign, Vitter was Louisiana’s most powerful, best-funded Republican. No Democrat had won statewide since 2008. Vitter himself easily won reelection in 2010 by fixating on Obama, at the height of Tea Party fervor and three years after news broke that Vitter’s phone number had appeared in the records of a Washington, D.C., call-girl ring. ..............(more)

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/12/david_vitter_a_final_farewell_a_stench_that_is_getting_ready_to_come_over_louisiana/

January 12, 2016

One-third of U.S. oil companies could face bankruptcy

(MarketWatch) Crude-oil prices plunged more than 5% on Monday to trade near $30 a barrel, making the specter of bankruptcy ever more likely for a significant chunk of the U.S. oil industry.

Three major investment banks — Morgan Stanley MS, -0.74% , Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS, -0.81% and Citigroup Inc. C, +0.02% — now expect the price of oil to crash through the $30 threshold and into $20 territory in short order as a result of China’s slowdown, the U.S. dollar’s appreciation and the fact that drillers from Houston to Riyadh won’t quit pumping despite the oil glut.

As many as a third of American oil-and-gas producers could tip toward bankruptcy and restructuring by mid-2017, according to Wolfe Research. Survival, for some, would be possible if oil rebounded to at least $50, according to analysts. The benchmark price of U.S. crude settled at $31.41 a barrel, setting a 12-year low. ................(more)

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/plunging-prices-could-force-a-third-of-us-oil-firms-into-bankruptcy-2016-01-11?dist=lcountdown

January 12, 2016

What Will China Dump Next, After Treasuries, to Keep Control?

What Will China Dump Next, After Treasuries, to Keep Control?
by Wolf Richter • January 11, 2016


[font color="blue"]“Practically boundless” future capital outflows.[/font]

“Beneath all of the financial turbulence there lurks, in my view, a credit crisis; I fear the worst now,” UBS economic adviser George Magnus told Bloomberg TV today. The reform agenda “has stalled,” he said, and “things are looking much bleaker for China going forward.”

And so on Monday, we got another flavor of it.

The Shanghai Composite index plunged 5.3%, to 3016, down 15% so far this year. The Shenzhen Composite fell 6.6%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 2.8% to 19888, below 20000 for the first time since June 2013, and down 30% from its April high.

Everyone had hoped that China’s “National Team” would jump into the fray and bail everyone else out, but it didn’t. And the People’s Bank of China didn’t offer any big new remedies either. But it did stabilize the yuan after it had dropped 1.5% against the dollar last week, and about 6% since mid-August.

In Hong Kong, interbank yuan lending rates broke all records since the Treasury Markets Association started compiling the data in June 2013, with the overnight Hong Kong Interbank Offered Rate spiking 939 basis points to 13.4%. ................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2016/01/11/what-will-china-dump-next-after-treasuries-to-keep-control/