We’ve always heard the adage, “if you tell a lie big enough, and keep repeating it, more people will believe it.” I think the original version of that quote is attributed to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Although like with most historical references, Goebbels may never have said this.
Anyway, might as well say he did, eh? Easy enough.
‘Color-Blind’ Supreme Court Bars Consideration Of Race In College Admissions
The Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions.
In Thursday’s 6-3 decision (along ideological lines), the justices rejected arguments by Harvard College and the University of North Carolina that their admissions programs are warranted to ensure campus diversity.
The high court majority effectively overturned a 2003 decision, known as Grutter v. Bollinger, that had reaffirmed the right of universities to consider race as one of many admissions factors.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said that ruling “is, for all intents and purposes, overruled.”
As The Wall Street Journal reports, the ruling will force a reworking of admissions criteria throughout American higher education, where for decades the pursuit of diversity has been an article of faith.
Living as I do near Guadalajara I do not, thank God, see much television from the Great Squirrel Cage north of Mexico. When I do, I get the impression that America is four-fifths black and that all white women have black husbands. Whites apparently do not marry each other. My information is unreliable, but it appears that white men never marry black women. Latinos, as nearly as I can tell, do not exist, But there may be a few somewhere. Asians also fail to appear in this gush of blacks.
When I visit my bank’s website, there is the compulsory black man with the white wife on the opening page. Audible.com tries hard to sell me books about Harriet Tubman and has a page about its commitment to racial piety. Everything is about or for blacks. Judging by this prominence, they must be the brightest, most prosperous, and best educated in America, as well as the most numerous.
How long has it been since you have seen a corporate advertisement, or any kind of advertisement, in which there is a white couple with white children? Miscegenation is the requirement of diversity, which is a paradox as it means there will be no diversity, just a collection of brown people. Corporate advertisements increasingly consist of a black man with a white woman, or a white man with an Asian woman or sometimes a hispanic woman. The heads of corporations and the talking heads on TV are increasingly immigrant-invaders as are government officials, entertainers, and police. White people are being replaced in all visible forums.
Editor’s Note: Jayant Bhandari is a long time friend of Doug Casey’s. He advises institutional investors on investing in the natural resource sector. Jayant writes on political, economic and cultural issues for several publications. Jayant also runs a yearly philosophy seminar in Vancouver, Capitalism & Morality.
Value Traps and Economic Ignorance
A financial analyst is often, or at least should be, more of a psychologist than a financial expert. There are companies that I knew fifteen years ago that had inherent value a multiple of what their stocks were trading at. Today, there continues to be similar upside, except that upside targets and share prices are lower. What went wrong?
A problem reaches the far North faster than climate change can melt all the ice. [PT]
Such companies are often value-traps. A financially astute person might invest in them, hoping that eventually, the market will recognize the value. Unfortunately, some managements do not understand the concept of value-creation or are unfocused, innumerate, or crooked. One must learn early that even in the private sector, top leadership positions do not necessarily end up in the hands of the most competent people. I mostly analyze mining companies. An example of a value-trap is a Hong Kong-listed entity, G-Resources, which was a mining company in the past. Today, it has most of its value is in treasuries and cash, worth US$1,500 million. Its market capitalization (at a HK$0.05 share price) is, however, a mere US$200 million. I don’t see any hope of it ever going up to match its inherent value.An analyst must screen out the bad apples as quickly as possible. I want to address some areas in which companies actively destroy value.
Many mining companies, whose focus should be geology and mining engineering, spend too much time worrying about the commodity market. The commodity business is a specialization in its own right, and there is a reason why commodities are called “commodities”: It is hard — perhaps impossible — to project their future prices.
When mining companies project a future of scarcity, they show a lack of understanding of economics: About the elasticity of demand and supply and how futures and options markets take care of shortages through a complex web of hedging by suppliers and users. The extent to which a specific commodity can rise in price is limited, because at some point substitution kicks in.
A typical, but hugely erroneous graph provided by many companies.
Holier than Thou with ESG
Over the last couple of years, many companies have implemented ESG programs. And EDI, a recent advent, has gone into hyper-drive. Of course, only the acronyms are quoted, for every “woke” person should know what they mean. ESG stands for Environment, Social, and Government.
No one cares to explain how ESG is different from the need to follow legitimate laws. It has become a checklist, devoid of the spirit of ethical conduct, a way to earn brownie points by acting holier than thou.
From a recent presentation of Franco-Nevada – this is something now common across businesses, and is not meant to criticize it specifically.
ESG policies have institutionalized corruption, with NGOs, which should be working for the welfare of locals, taking fat checks from companies. ESG has encouraged locals to become whiners and has created space for crooked local leaders to emerge, with NGOs as mediators. ESG has become a vicious cycle of entitlements, grievances, corruption and dependence.
It is not the job of mining companies to do social work, for which they are not trained, skilled or competent. What they do is for marketing, propaganda, and virtue-signaling purposes, forcing their leadership to be hypocritical and spread such conduct downstream. Naïve investors, distant from on-the-ground realities, ultimately support this trend.
When conducting on-site visits, we analysts used to discuss the propaganda related to ESG. As time has gone by, we are talking less and less about this, for such discussion has come to be seen as politically incorrect. The new generation of analysts, people who have been brought up in the “woke” culture, cannot even see the game being played.
Condescension via EDI
EDI stands for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and is gaining momentum very rapidly. In a recent panel discussion I took part in, analysts were grilling mining companies. The first question a $8 million company faced was from a colored female who wanted to know why their board of directors lacked diversity.
Small companies simply do not have patience or the necessary leeway to get into virtue-signaling, although the damage that EDI causes to big companies is no less, even if it is hidden.
Since the time Justin Trudeau became the Prime Minister of Canada, it has become elitist to have top leadership reflecting society’s demographics.
Why should “minorities” and women be dependent on a specific section of society, which of course, are males of European ethnicity? By implication EDI constitutes evidence that people of color, women, and LGBTQs cannot stand on their own feet and rise in life through their merit. And if this is true, why not accept it?
EDI is the bigotry of low expectations, much worse than on-the-face racism, where you know at least what the bigotry is about. EDI is extraordinarily condescending toward the so-called under-privileged groups. I find it repulsive if someone thinks I should get an extra push because of my skin color. I wonder why more women, people of color, and LGBTQs are not rising up against the condescending approach, racism, and sexism inherent in EDI.
In India, where affirmative policy has a long history, I have no choice but to question how competent someone from the lower caste would be in a position of authority. Would I go to doctor from the lower caste? But similar thinking has to start in the West as EDI continues and grows. Suffering the most will be the competent people among the beneficiaries of EDI.
The true believers make the hollow concepts of ESG and EDI sound like the end of history. When I see too much of ESG/EDI in a company’s presentation, I move on without wasting any more of my time.
The path of political correctness and virtue-signaling that the West has undertaken always reminds me of South Africa, which at one point in time had First World infrastructure.
During my first visit to a company in Johannesburg more than a decade ago, I thought I had come to a car-show—the parking lot had some of the most expensive cars in the world. Black Economic Empowerment, their EDI, had enabled blacks to rise in the leadership hierarchy without any need for merit. As time has gone by, South Africa’s infrastructure has fallen apart. Power outages, lack of water supply, crime, potholes on the road, and a general lack of law and order have worsened continuously.
The Boeing 737 Max airplane suffered two fatal accidents. To what extent were the accidents attributable to design work had been done in low-cost, low work-ethic jurisdictions? Did those in leadership positions discuss the possibility of such risks, or was this deemed too politically incorrect?
To what extent were forest fires in California or the recent power outages in Texas a result of EDI, where people have been elevated to positions of authority despite a lack of competence? We will never know the specifics, for people in the West no longer say anything that might be seen as bigoted. Those who dare say something get booted out.
Errors accumulate with no one to challenge them. The ESG/EDI concepts pursued in the West are essentially copying the South African model of social change, which is anti-meritocratic and will destroy institutions and civilization.
Editor’s Note: All signs point to this trend accelerating until it reaches a crisis… one unlike anything we’ve seen before. That’s exactly why Doug Casey and his team just released this urgent video. Click here to watch it now.
International Man: Everywhere you look, ever-increasing government regulations create a serious obstacle to economic activity. There are too many regulations today, many with severe penalties. Most companies of even modest size now have a compliance department, along with numerous compliance officers and supernumeraries. That wasn’t the case a few decades ago.
It seems the compliance industry was created not by satisfying a demand in the marketplace, but rather by satisfying some rule a politician made arbitrarily.
How and why did this happen? What does this say about the economy and society?
Check out any professional and most college basketball teams. Their starting five, and most of their other 10 players, are black, as is 80% of the NBA. This does not come anywhere close to the diversity and inclusion sought by the nation’s social justice warriors. Both professional and college coaches have ignored and threw any pretense of seeking diversity and inclusiveness. My question to you is: Would a basketball team be improved if coaches were required to include ethnically diverse players for the sake of equity? I have no idea of what your answer might be but mine would be: “The hell with diversity, equity and inclusion. I am going to recruit the best players and do not care if most of them turn out to be black players.” Another question: Do you think that any diversity-crazed college president would chastise his basketball coach for lack of diversity and inclusiveness?
Not long ago, the British Army realized that it needed to completely revamp its recruiting campaign.
The younger generation simply wasn’t responding to the Army’s previous ‘Be All You Can Be’ style of advertising. So British leadership changed the recruiting message to keep up with the massive cultural shift that has been sweeping the world.
Their updated campaign focused on– you guessed it– diversity and inclusion.
Today, Democrats are pushing for amnesty and a path to citizenship not only for the DACA “Dreamers” but also the 11 million to 22 million other immigrants here illegally. Democrats may be found enlarging the electorate anywhere they can, even if it means allowing convicted felons and prison inmates to vote.
Is her racial diversity America’s greatest strength?
So we are told. Yet, even before America becomes a majority-minority nation, 25 years from now, recent changes in the composition of the country are going to impact both parties in 2020.
According to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, between 2010 and 2020, while America’s population grew by 20 million, our white population fell for the first time since the 1790 census.
White Americans fell as a share of the population in all 50 states, in 358 of 364 metropolitan areas, in 3,012 of 3,141 counties. During that same decade, our Black population grew by 3 million, our Asian population by 4 million and our Hispanic population by 10 million.
Hi Dumbshit American.Have you had enough of diversity and multiculturalism?If not, vote a Democrat president, and the second wave of peaceful protests will loot and burn down your homes and neighborhoods.Be sure you understand that diversity means no more white statues and white history, because they are racist.Multiculturalism means no more white civilization, which is racist. You may have to give up your language as well, because English is racist.
I have been telling you for years that you are living The Camp of the Saints.Having failed to become aware, you have no idea what is happening. When it finally dawns on you, it will be too late.
The University of California has been requiring prospective faculty members to affirm that they support diversity. This was Orwellian in its own right—reminiscent of the university system’s 1950s loyalty oaths, which required faculty to attest that they were not members of the Communist Party.
It now appears that at one campus, UC-Berkeley, the diversity initiative goes much further than previously understood. Whether a candidate has proposed a specific, concrete plan to advance diversity is now being used as a litmus test for some positions. No candidate who fails the test can even be considered for employment.
In Part 1 of this article I tried to link the greed and depravity of those pulling the strings behind the curtain of the Deep State with perpetual warfare being waged by the military industrial complex and the purposeful dumbing down of the populace so propaganda spewed by the Deep State’s media mouthpieces finds fertile ground. Pink Floyd’s lyrics from their existential album – Dark Side of the Moon – continue to resonate today, even more than they did in 1973.
Breathe
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
Leave, don’t leave me
Look around, choose your own ground
Long you live and high you fly Smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry And all you touch and all you see Is all your life will ever be
U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruled that Harvard University’s admission program was a Constitutional application of affirmative action. In other words, Harvard’s systematic discrimination against Whites and Asians was, according to the law, not discrimination against Whites and Asians. In addition to reaffirming the second-class status of Whites and Asians, she wrote, “It is somewhat axiomatic at this point that diversity of all sorts, including racial diversity, is an important aspect of education.”
