Steve Bull's Blog, page 1381
April 10, 2017
Populism In Our Time – “The Status Quo Is The Fundamental Problem”
“Be even more suspicious…of all those who employ the term we or us without your permission. This is another form of surreptitious conscription, designed to suggest that we are all agreed on our interests and identity.”
– Christopher Hitchens
Merriam-Webster defines populist as “a believer in the rights, wisdom and virtues of the common people”, and when the word is capitalized: “a member of a U.S. political party formed in 1891 primarily to represent agrarian interests and to advocate the free coinage of silver and government control of monopolies”. The first definition seems to be the very point of representative government; the latter what happens when representative government is no longer representative.
The use of the word “populist” among professional politicos implies an off-the-run candidate or leader with ill-intent – an irreverent voice deigning to challenge established institutions by speaking directly to the deplorable rabble, bypassing the narrative perpetuated by vast political and media infrastructures. Those inclined towards transitive logic might infer that governments and the Fourth Estate propose, but are not structured and do not work, to serve the rights, wisdom and virtues of commoners.
We won’t get idealistic about democracy or the gaping separation between political rhetoric and execution. In non-revolutionary times (about 99.9% on a timeline) governments serve the privileged. It is what they do. Political leaders throw bones to commoners, providing bread, circuses and welfare – distractions eminently better than brioches chucked at them by Marie Antoinette, but decidedly worse than most people’s conception that their government abides by the principle of equal access for all.
Liberal democracies are like major medical insurance policies. They will, in the end, protect freedom and most liberties, but they do not provide preventative health care. (Indeed, as their promotion of systemic debt shows, they are not above distributing the fiscal equivalent of cigarettes to their citizens.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Pension Crisis In U.S. and Globally Is Unavoidable
Pension Crisis In U.S. and Globally Is Unavoidable
There is a really big crisis coming.
Think about it this way. After 8 years and a 230% stock market advance the pension funds of Dallas, Chicago, and Houston are in severe trouble.
But it isn’t just these municipalities that are in trouble, but also most of the public and private pensions that still operate in the country today.
Currently, many pension funds, like the one in Houston, are scrambling to slightly lower return rates, issue debt, raise taxes or increase contribution limits to fill some of the gaping holes of underfunded liabilities in their plans. The hope is such measures combined with an ongoing bull market, and increased participant contributions, will heal the plans in the future.
This is not likely to be the case.
This problem is not something born of the last “financial crisis,” but rather the culmination of 20-plus years of financial mismanagement.
An April 2016 Moody’s analysis pegged the total 75-year unfunded liability for all state and local pension plans at $3.5 trillion.
That’s the amount not covered by current fund assets, future expected contributions, and investment returns at assumed rates ranging from 3.7% to 4.1%. Another calculation from the American Enterprise Institute comes up with $5.2 trillion, presuming that long-term bond yields average 2.6%.
With employee contribution requirements extremely low, averaging about 15% of payroll, the need to stretch for higher rates of return have put pensions in a precarious position and increases the underfunded status of pensions.
With pension funds already wrestling with largely underfunded liabilities, the shifting demographics are further complicating funding problems.
One of the primary problems continues to be the decline in the ratio of workers per retiree as retirees are living longer (increasing the relative number of retirees), and lower birth rates (decreasing the relative number of workers.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Wonderland
There are times in the course of events when a society cannot tell what the fuck is going on, or what to do about it, and this is one of those moments in history here in the USA. The quandaries of life on the home front — how to make a living, how to care for ourselves and loved ones — get shoved aside by misadventures in foreign lands with their own quandaries. One delusion leads to another until you enter a zero gravity of the mind. Case in point du jour: Syria.
The persistent hyperRussomania of the US Dem-Prog alliance and its sob-sisters in the media seeks to make a bad situation worse in Syria and probably for the worst reasons. How many Americans have even the dimmest idea what’s going on in Syria, who the cast of characters there represent, and where the USA fits into all of it?
There is the head of government, one Bashar al Assad (son of the previous president, Hafez al Assad). The Assads had run Syria as a mostly secular Arab state until the civil war within Islam, Sunni against Shia, spilled out of Iraq. The Assads belonged to the tiny Alawite sect of the Shia. They comprise only 13 percent of the Syrian population, which has a Sunni majority. Under the Assads, Syria has tilted toward Iran, the Shia home state, and away from the Sunni Arabs elsewhere in the neighborhood. Russia has cultivated Iran and support its “friends,” the Assads.
A mash-up of Sunni jihad armies fights the Assad government in Syria’s civil war. These are Isis, al Qaeda, and Jabhat al Nusra. The US government had made official noise about supporting the more “moderate rebels” in the Syrian conflict. Who are they exactly? Do you have a clue? Which army among those three rebel groups are “moderates?” And what is their moderate goal under jihad?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
