SelwynDuke.com

Trumping Trump: Political Victory Via Economic Destruction

By Selwyn Duke

Political winds are giving The Donald the Trump bump, with the real-estate mogul taking second place in polls on the 2016 presidential race. But economic winds are a different matter, with the brash businessman becoming the latest American targeted for destruction by the politically correct powers-that-be.

Donald Trump (shown), who officially declared his White House run June 16, recently took second place in national, New Hampshire, and Iowa polling for the GOP nomination (in Iowa he’s tied with renowned physician Ben Carson). But after making comments about the criminal nature of far too many illegal migrants, he has lost a certain place: in the hearts of some business interests. NBC dropped The Apprentice franchise and the Miss USA and Miss Universe beauty pageants, Spanish-language network Univision has also dropped Miss Universe, Macy’s has kicked his clothing line to the curb, and Mayor “Bolshevik” Bill de Blasio announced that NYC was reviewing its contracts with Trump.

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Obama Advisor Gruber in 2009: ObamaCare Unaffordable, Rationing (a.k.a. Death Panels) Inevitable

By Selwyn Duke

ObamaCare is technically known as the Affordable Care Act, but it has now been revealed that legislation architect Jonathan Gruber admitted in 2009 that the bill would be anything but affordable. In fact, he said it lacked cost controls and that, inevitably, certain individuals would have to be denied care — all while Barack Obama was telling voters just the opposite.

Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor, instantly became one of America’s most disliked elitists early last month when a 2013 video clip was uncovered in which he said that “a lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” had enabled ObamaCare to pass. Now an October 2009 policy brief, presented by the Daily Caller, provides more details of the deception.

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“Everything is Awesome” in America? So Says Liberal Writer

By Selwyn Duke

“Everything Is Awesome!” is the title of a recent Politico piece on the American economy by liberal Michael Grunwald. And although it’s not followed by LEGO song lyric “Everything is awesome when we're living our dream,” some would say he certainly is dreaming.

Much like the children’s movie Grunwald seems to be quoting, the author opens his piece with what many would say is pure fiction, writing, “Good news! The U.S. economy grew at a rollicking 5 percent rate in the third quarter.” Yes, that’s what the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis now tells us; what it’s not telling us is that the rate is the result of creative accounting. In fact, it’s a cooked figure that was predicted by Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden six months ago.

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Forget North Korea: Watch Out for Chinese Censorship of Hollywood

By Selwyn Duke

Pudgy and profligate little Kim Jong-un must be swelling with pride. With the FBI now concluding that North Korea was responsible for the recent computer hacking of Sony Corporation, it appears that Kim has succeeded in projecting power beyond his borders in, essentially, censoring a Western film. That work, of course, is The Interview, the Columbia Pictures action comedy portraying the rotund dictator in a negative light.

Many have castigated Sony — Columbia’s parent company — for capitulation. Pundit Linda Chavez likened the behemoth’s folding to Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba, writing that the two of them “are on the same page when it comes to appeasing dictators.” Political maven Newt Gingrich tweeted, “With the Sony collapse America has lost its first cyberwar. This is a very [sic] very dangerous precedent.” And both may be correct. Nonetheless, there is something certainly not unprecedented: Hollywood’s appeasement of dictatorial regimes.

Most movie-goers don’t know it, but many of the films on which they spend American dollars have been filtered by Chinese censors — by Beijing’s powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), to be precise.

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Obama Advisor Jonathan Gruber: Abortion Saves Government Money

By Selwyn Duke

ObamaCare conspirator Jonathan Gruber has gotten 15 minutes of fame by being America’s most cheeky liar of the moment. Now he’s getting bonus minutes for being, critics say, a cost-benefit-analysis abortionist — and, perhaps, an advocate for euthanasia.

At issue is a 1997 research paper Gruber co-authored entitled “Abortion Legalization and Child Living Circumstances: Who is the ‘Marginal Child’?” In it, he and his collaborators advance the thesis that abortion saves government money by killing off poor people — though he doesn’t quite put it in those stark terms. Quoting how the paper actually does put it while grilling Gruber during Tuesday’s Committee on Oversight & Government Reform hearing, Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said to the MIT economist, “On page 20 you conclude that ‘abortion legalization appears to be associated with an improvement in the average living circumstances and birth outcomes among a birth cohort.’ And on page 26, you state that your research indicates ‘that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare payments through 1994.’” The congressman then asked Gruber, “Is providing more access to abortion, is that a worthy social outcome to achieve cost savings for the government?”

To again put matters in stark terms, Massie was asking if it was good policy to kill certain unborn babies to save money.

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E-mails Reveal Obama’s Morality Police Are Targeting Lawful Businesses

By Selwyn Duke

It’s an example, in essence, of legislating from the bureaucratic cubicle. A House committee has discovered e-mails showing that officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation schemed to destroy lawful businesses they found morally objectionable.

The vehicle through which this is done is Operation Choke Point; this is an Obama administration effort ostensibly designed to “choke off” access to the U.S. financial system to illegal operations, but it’s also being applied to legal ones that certain ideologues personally dislike. Its primary target is the short-term lending industry, but its other victims include entities such as firearms and ammunition merchants, home-based charities, coin dealers, and purveyors of pharmaceutical drugs — lawful enterprises all.

The e-mails were revealed by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (HOGRC), which released a 20-page investigative report on Monday explaining how the FDIC worked hand-in-glove with the Department of Justice to implement Operation Choke Point.

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Prediction: Economic Collapse, Civil Unrest in America by 2016

By Selwyn Duke

Violence. Rioting. Looting. Economic collapse and civil unrest. This isn’t a dystopian movie plot, but something else according to an economist with a good track record for prognostication: America’s dark future.

The economist is Martin Armstrong, whose correct predictions include the 1987 Black Monday crash and the 1998 Russian financial implosion. And now he’s predicting civil unrest in America by 2016, precipitated by an economic collapse which he calls “the magic ingredient.” “Turn the economy down,” he continued, “and you get civil unrest and revolution.”

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Equal Work? Government Has No Idea What That is

By Selwyn Duke

“Equal pay for equal work!” the mantra goes. “Women get only 73 cents on a man’s dollar!” These are oft-heard slogans, and we may well hear them again during the fall campaign with the War on Women afoot. Now, going beyond the rhetoric, it’s not widely known but nonetheless true that the intersex pay gap is attributable to different career choices men and women make: women tend to choose less lucrative fields (e.g., soft sciences instead of hard ones), work shorter hours even when “full time,” are more likely to value personal fulfillment and job flexibility over money, are more inclined to take time off, generally have less job tenure and more often decline promotions. But while I’ve examined these factors at length in the past, the topic today is something more fundamental. This is that there would be a problem with even a well-intended equal-pay-for-equal-work scheme:

Hardly anyone knows what equal work is.

And the government hasn’t the foggiest idea.

The Obama Birth Dearth: Why Are People Having Fewer Kids?

By Selwyn Duke

Call it the Obama birth dearth. While the immigrant-fueled birthrate of the United States had recently been fairly robust, it has now dropped below replacement level. And demographers are unsure as to why. Writes Joseph Lawler at Washington Examiner:

The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

... [T]he total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86, the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off.

 

Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country's five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent.

One factor in the fertility decline demographers did foresee was a falling birth rate among Hispanics in America.

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The War on Men’s Wages

By Selwyn Duke

A market economy is absolutely the worst system in the world — except for all the rest. This isn’t just a play on Winston Churchill’s quip about democracy, it’s also true. Pity that we have to rely on those vice-ridden, flighty creatures called human beings to make decisions about what products and services we’ll enjoy. The only thing worse is having those decisions made by the subset of human beings called bureaucrats or politicians.

“Study: Hollywood execs have own 'war on women,' choking off major roles, salary from women,” reads the headline at Washington Examiner. At issue is a new report by the Women’s Media Center (WMC) — arch-feminista Gloria Steinem’s group — showing that in terms of warm-body count and amount of cold cash, women lag behind men in all corners of media and entertainment. We’re to find these data troubling and, as Time magazine wrote in a headline, “depressing.” In perhaps some comic relief, Time followed that note with the subtitle, “Jennifer Lawrence makes $11 million less than Adam Sandler.” Yeah, hey, pass the Prozac.

I don’t know, is it depressing that men do more dangerous jobs and suffer vastly more work-related injuries and deaths? Is it depressing that the whole workaday world, so unjustly dominated by men, was created by them in the first place? Is every difference among demographics that doesn’t happen to benefit “victim” groups to be thought depressing?

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