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Social Conservatism, the GOP’s Key To Unlocking Black Votes? Don’t Believe It.
Walter Olson
Among politically active social conservatives, there’s a remarkably durable myth that Republicans can make inroads with black voters if only they hold fast to hard-line positions on issues like same-sex marriage. That notion cropped up again this week as part of a widely publicized letter to Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus in which thirteen officials with social-conservative groups threatened that their followers will leave the GOP or stay home in future elections unless the party pledges to continue its staunch line against gay marriage, a stance now widely unpopular in public opinion polls and among many Republican demographics such as those under 50.
The letter, which you can read here, portrays the issue as vital in GOP minority outreach, which they said should “focus on issues where there is mutual agreement like traditional marriage.” (It does not mention that black opinion, once lopsidedly opposed to same-sex marriage, has swung closer in polls to an even split on the issue). To support this claim, it cites real-world examples from three states: Illinois, Ohio, and my own state of Maryland.
On Ohio, the letter repeats longstanding claims that President George W. Bush’s campaign stance on marriage made the difference in his narrow Buckeye State win in 2004. My colleague David Boaz has already examined those claims in this space, and found the evidence surprisingly thin. The Illinois example, for its part, is self-evidently beside the point: the letter correctly notes that some minority elected officials in that state oppose same-sex marriage, but that does nothing to show that any Illinois blacks are ready to stop voting Democratic because of their concern for the issue.
That leaves Maryland. And in the course of analyzing last November’s Maryland vote in some detail, and writing a series of articles on the results of my research, I feel some confidence in saying that no one has been able to offer evidence that the ballot fight over same-sex marriage did the Maryland Republican Party any overall good with black voters in the state.
As I noted in this December article in The Blaze, Prince George’s County in suburban Washington, which has a substantial black majority among registered voters and has won national attention as a microcosm of black political trends, was hard fought territory in Maryland’s Question 6 fight. In the end, the county split about evenly, Question 6 trailing by just 1 point; the measure was carried to a 5-point statewide win by a strong showing elsewhere in the Baltimore-DC corridor, notably including many Republican suburbs.
Because P.G. is so large and has so many overwhelmingly black precincts, it afforded an opportunity to investigate whether black voters with socially conservative views are any more likely to vote Republican than those with more socially liberal inclinations. Toward that end, I identified those black-dominated precincts with the strongest social-conservative leanings, as measured by the size of the margins by which they disapproved Question 6. If the “GOP minority inroads” thesis was correctly identifying a genuine trend, you would expect to see signs of a healthy black crossover vote for GOP candidates in those precincts. Instead, the black precincts that most strongly opposed Question 6 were also among those where the GOP got buried most completely, with Mitt Romney getting only (in typical showings) 3, 5, or 6 percent of the overall vote. The down-ticket Maryland GOP candidates, who all happened to be strong social conservatives, were getting beaten just as decisively, including in Senate and House races where all the relevant candidates were white. The GOP’s social-conservative senate hopeful, for example – who ran well enough to carry 13 of 23 counties statewide against lackluster white liberal Sen. Ben Cardin – did even worse in P.G. than Romney, winning only 6 1/2 percent of the vote county-wide and a good bit less than that – as little as 2 percent in one precinct – in the most socially conservative black P.G. neighborhoods.
Republicans who imagine that catering to the most vehement social conservatives within the party will result in a harvest of new black votes are deluding themselves.
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War and Conflict • Egypt’s Black Bloc surges in popularity
Egypt’s Black Bloc surges in popularity
Black Bloc’s members are mostly young men who want to confront Muslim Brotherhood government and the country’s much-loathed Central Security Forces.
MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY / REUTERS
The Black Bloc is surging in popularity, particularly among young men who want to confront the Muslim Brotherhood government.
By: Jesse Rosenfeld Staff Reporter., Published on Sun Feb 24 2013
EXPLORE THIS STORY
CAIRO—Rocks and Molotov cocktails fly at police lines as co-ordinated teams of masked youth charge Mohammed Morsi’s presidential palace. After unleashing their payload, they fade away as security forces in riot gear respond with tear gas, birdshot and water cannons.Since the Jan. 25 second anniversary of the revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s own Black Bloc has emerged at the centre of regular clashes on the edges of Tahrir Square and at the presidential palace. The masked protesters are mimicking the tactics of western anarchists, including those who played such a prominent role in Toronto’s G20 riots in 2010.
In makeshift stalls around Tahrir, black balaclavas are on sale next to Guy Fawkes masks — adopted from the anti-authoritarian book and film V for Vendetta, the hacker group Anonymous and the Occupy protests. “We got the idea through an online connection between Egyptian and American youth,” says Mohammad Hattab (not his real name), a stocky middle-class man in his mid-20s. He is wearing a black balaclava with an Egyptian flag on the cheek.
“I am here because people are hungry and the police respond to us with beatings.”
BILLAL
A STREET KID IN HIS LATE TEENS
Networking primarily online, Egyptian Black Bloc Facebook pages have garnered more than 60,000 likes. It is a movement surging in popularity, mostly among young men who want to confront the Muslim Brotherhood government and the country’s much-loathed Central Security Forces.
Like their western counterparts, they are leaderless, organize in small groups and are incredibly agile. However, they are not ideological anarchists.Running down side streets from tear gas billowing in front of the Canadian Embassy during clashes in Cairo earlier this month, Hattab describes the bloc’s goals: “We want the constitutional court to replace (Morsi’s) regime. We want (a secular) civilian regime, one that understands the needs of the people and addresses their problems.”
The regular clashes between Black Bloc members and police have been spurred by discontent over a worsening economy and a constitutional process that strengthened Islamic influence and military power in the state. More than 60 people have been killed in protests since the anniversary of the revolution. “I am here because people are hungry and the police respond to us with beatings,” says “Billal,” a street kid in his late teens. Hattab said the Black Bloc was formed primarily to confront Muslim Brotherhood supporters who attacked December’s protests against the draft constitution. In some of its first public actions, the Black Bloc torched offices of the Muslim Brotherhood and the affiliated Freedom and Justice party while clashing with Islamist supporters.
In response, Egypt’s chief prosecutor ordered police to arrest anyone in black who was wearing a mask.
“This behaviour, to burn and destroy our offices, is a kind of terror. The people who did this are criminals,” says Muslim Brotherhood spokesperson Yasser Mehrez. Hattab says the movement’s goals are as open as the revolution that brought down Mubarak.
“We want bread, freedom and social justice,” he contends, repeating a slogan first uttered in Tahrir Square in 2011.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/ … arity.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Feb 24, 2013 11:51 am
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Current Wisdom: New Findings on Black Carbon Spell Trouble for Climate Models
Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger
The Current Wisdom is a series of monthly articles in which Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science, reviews interesting items on global warming in the scientific literature that may not have received the media attention that they deserved, or have been misinterpreted in the popular press.
Have climate models, which are claimed by our friends like Ben Santer, to accurately represent the climate of the 20th century gotten things right for the wrong reasons? New research on the role of carbon aerosols suggests that this may be the case. If it is, it does not bode well for the accuracy of forward projections made by the same climate models.
This would represent a classic case of “overfitting”— building a model with bells and whistles added and tuned so as to match the data at hand, but which then breaks down when trying to predict out-of-sample observations. This occurs because the overfitted model has been polished up to give the appearance of capturing the underlying behaviors driving the system—an appearance that is often good enough to fool even the model builders—but, in fact, the appearance is only skin deep, and the mechanisms driving things in the real world differ from those from which the model was built.
A recent paper by Dr. Tami Bond and colleagues finds that carbon aerosols—particulates released into that atmosphere from a variety of human activities including diesel engines, open cook stoves, poorly filtered coal burning, and open burning, etc.—have played a much larger role in impacting the climate than has been previously recognized (and included in climate models).
For instance, Bond et al. report that black carbon aerosol, or soot, is second only to carbon dioxide as the substance emitted by human activity that has the greatest warming influence on the climate—contributing a quarter (or perhaps even a bit more) to the current overall anthropogenic warming effect. Bond et al. find that the total warming impact from black carbon emissions is about 70% as large as that from carbon dioxide emissions.
These finding are similar to those reported a few years ago by Ramanathan and Carmichael but grossly dissimilar to those from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says that black carbon is responsible for only about 10% of the total anthropogenic warming influence.
Apparently, climate models incorporate even less of an influence from black carbon. According to Bond et al. “global atmospheric absorption attributable to black carbon is too low in many models, and should be increased by a factor of almost three.”
There are several interesting implications.
When divvying up the causes of the observed global warming over the past 50 years, a much larger percentage is now recognized to result from something other than carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Figure 1 shows our tally, based on the IPCC’s latest climate compendium, and the results from Bond et al.
Figure 1. Relative warming influence of the major anthropogenic emissions (whiskers are the 90% uncertainly bounds).
If you combine the results in Figure 1 with those recently reported concerning other (non -greenhouse gas) influences on the observed temperature history, you must conclude that carbon dioxide was responsible for less than one-third of the observed warming since the mid-20th century reported in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Further, the warming from all greenhouse gases amounts to something less than 60% of the total.
There seems a disproportionate amount of handwringing about the climate influence of carbon dioxide, when the climate influence on black carbon is nearly as great. And, of course, soot doesn’t come with the plant fertilization benefits that carbon dioxide emissions provide (see here for example).
Another eye-opening consequence of the Bond et al. finding is that the modeled climate change “fingerprints” are missing the influence of black carbon—which is now much larger (and consequently much more important) than has been recognized.
That “fingerprint” studies have proclaimed success at matching observed patterns of climate change with those projected by climate models run with anthropogenic atmospheric inputs—yet which omit black carbon—can only be a sign of overfitting.
All else being equal, if the black carbon absorption in climate models were to be increased by a factor of almost three (to better match the findings of Bond et al.), they would certainly predict far too much warming to have already occurred. But these models have already accomplished this without black carbon!
One potential reason is that “all else is not equal.” When black carbon is emitted, so is all sorts of other stuff, like sulfur dioxide and organic carbon. These tend to have a cooling impact on the climate, as they generally act to increase the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space.
According to Bond et al., although the amount of (warming) black carbon emitted into the atmosphere has been underestimated, so too has the amount of the (cooling) co-emissions. When everything is tallied up in net, the effect turns out to be very near zero.
One might argue that if the net impact is zero, it doesn’t matter that the climate models have the wrong amount of black carbon (and co-emissions) in them.
But this would be a far too generous and simplistic. The historical (in both time and space) characteristics of black carbon emissions, although not well known, are almost certainly different from the characteristics of historical emissions of greenhouse gases (and sulfate aerosols). The difference arises because the sources of the different types of emissions are, to an important degree, not the same.
Which means the behavior of the true climate system is different from the behavior of the (overfitted) model climate system.
Until you have a pretty good handle on the sources, and how they have changed over time (in magnitude and space), there is no way to way to get an accurate handle on projections, either in the past or the future.
So “fingerprint” studies which claim to find close correspondence between climate model projections and actual observations during the past 50 to 100 years are confused as to both causes and effects.
The bottom line of the Bond et al. study is that the relative impact of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions is much less than widely thought, the relative impact of black carbon is greater than thought, and climate models’ views of the past and projections of the future must therefore be tainted.
Tainted and confused models are the last thing we need for producing science-based policy.
Reference:
Bond, T.C., et al., 2013. Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment. Journal of Geophysical Research, in press, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50171/abstract
Ramanathan V., and G. Carmichael, 2009. Global and regional climate changes due to black carbon. Nature GeoScience, 1, 221-227.
Wigley, T.M.L., and B.D. Santer, 2012. A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming. Climate Dynamics, doi: 10.1007/s00382-012-1585-8
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Firearms • Fort Worth gun show crowd is likened to ‘Black Friday shopp
Fort Worth gun show crowd is likened to ‘Black Friday shoppers’
Posted Saturday, Dec. 22, 2012
BY SUSAN MCFARLAND
smcfarland@star-telegram.com
FORT WORTH — A long line of firearm buyers pushed their way into the Lone Star Gun Show when it opened at 9 a.m. Saturday for a two-day run, prompting comparisons to eager "Black Friday shoppers."
Vendors and customers alike said the crowds were motivated by fears that the White House will work to restrict assault weapons and curb gun show sales after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Demand was so high that prices soared, dealers and shoppers said.
Rod Balderman, who drove more than 250 miles from Houston to attend as a buyer, reported a 25 to 50 percent rise in cost for many weapons since the Dec. 14 mass killing.
Like many — but not all — at the Amon G. Carter Jr. Exhibits Hall, Balderman called it unfortunate that the Newtown tragedy might lead to tighter gun laws.
"The more gun-free zones there are, the more people left unprotected," he said.
He also bemoaned the fact that the Newtown shootings have led to higher prices for everyone.
In the middle of a show that attracted a number of nondealers selling guns without background checks, Devonne Hart of Arlington said legislators should ban such unregulated private sales.
Out of earshot was a man trying to make just such a private sale.
Mike Morgan of Mineral Wells sat in a chair holding a "For Sale by Owner" sign.
A double-barreled shotgun rested upright on a shoulder.
Morgan said he was selling because he had given up hunting for fishing. He came to the gun show now, he said, out of concern that if tighter controls are enacted, he might have a hard time selling the shotgun later — or someone might break into his home to steal it.
Initially thinking that it would fetch $2,000, Morgan lowered his price after a dealer gave him an instant appraisal for far less.
He ended up exchanging the shotgun for $600.
"I didn’t get what I wanted," Morgan said. "But I found out my gun wasn’t worth what I had thought."
Hart, a former military police officer, said he came to the show because he was curious about how the Connecticut shootings would affect sales and prices.
"They are taking advantage of the situation," he said. "Prices are up. The NRA and the right wing are scaring people into buying guns."
Hart said he believes in the right to bear arms but doesn’t think assault weapons based on combat designs should be in the hands of recreational gun owners.
Gun violence has no easy solutions, he said, although banning assault rifles and private sales at gun shows would be a start.
"Right now they are doing absolutely nothing," he said.
As for the National Rifle Association suggesting that each school should have an armed guard, Hart said: "That is just too much. I don’t want kids having access to guns or being caught in the crossfire between teachers."
Sanger resident Larry Davis is a gun owner who stopped by the exhibits hall on his way home from hunting.
Like Hart, he disagrees with the NRA’s proposal to post armed guards at all schools, but only slightly.
"I think it needs to be someone within the school, maybe a principal or vice principal," he said. "But the gun would have to be on their immediate person, not left in a desk or a purse where it doesn’t do any good."
Davis is sorry that the Newtown tragedy is becoming a political issue.
"It’s sad that the president has an agenda," Davis said of President Barack Obama’s new push for gun control.
"But do away with guns completely? He’s got a fight on his hands."
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/22 … rylink=cpy
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/12/22 … kened.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Dec 22, 2012 11:50 pm
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Education And Science • Black Hole Found, 17 Billion Times as Massive as Sun
Black Hole Found, 17 Billion Times as Massive as Sun
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/ … ve-as-sun/
You would probably not enjoy the galaxy NGC 1277. Never mind that it’s far — 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus. The problem is that at its center is a giant, giant black hole, 17 billion times as massive as our sun, so big that scientists calculate it makes up 59 percent of the mass of the galaxy’s disc.
Astrophysicists have long believed that there’s a black hole at the center of our Milky Way, but it probably accounts for something like 0.1 percent of the galaxy’s center. The one in NGC 1277, scientists report in today’s edition of the journal Nature, is the second largest they’ve ever observed, and it upends what they thought about how galaxies form.
Black holes, as you’ll recall, are objects in space so massive that their gravity consumes everything around them — stars, planets, matter, energy, even light. Earthly scientists can only observe their effect on the space around them, not see them directly. Be grateful we’re not close to one. They’re actually useful to astrophysicists in explaining the nice spiral shape of many galaxies — you need something massive in the middle for the stars to circle — but NGC 1277 is an extreme.
“This is a really oddball galaxy,” said Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin, a member of the team that made the find. “It’s almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.” Gebhardt and colleagues at the McDonald Observatory have been calculating the mass of different black holes — no small task considering their powerful gravity.
The researchers put together an animation of how stars in that distant galaxy would behave, whipping around the center to avoid falling in.
What would you see if you lived on a habitable planet in that far-away galaxy and could look toward the center? Probably nothing that makes sense to human eyes. Black holes have such powerful gravity that they distort the space around them.
Here’s hoping your planet is in a nice, stable orbit around a star far from the action. If not, you might be drawn right into the black hole, destroyed so quickly that –
SHOWS: World News
Statistics: Posted by DIGGER DAN — Sun Dec 02, 2012 6:47 am
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Firearms • Black Friday Gun Sales Hit New Record High
Black Friday Gun Sales Hit New Record High
Overwhelming demand crashes FBI background check center
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 27, 2012
Black Friday gun sales hit an all time record high last week with demand for new firearms so overwhelming that it caused outages at the FBI background check center on two separate occasions.
Fueled by fears that the Obama administration will go after gun rights during a lame duck term, the FBI reported 154,873 background check requests on Friday – a 20 per cent increase on last year’s record total of 129,166 checks.
The number of guns sold could actually be double or more that figure because only one background check is recorded per sale even if buyers purchase multiple firearms.
“With the recent election, some people are making buying decisions just in case something (new law) happens,” Don Gallardo, manager of Shooter’s World in Phoenix, told USA Today.
Gun stores noted that first time gun owners and women represented a significant number of those purchasing firearms on Black Friday.
Gun sales were so brisk that the FBI’s Instant Background Check center was overwhelmed with the volume of requests and crashed on two separate occasions. Some even saw the outages as an insidious way of providing “anti-gunners a clue about how to suspend the Second Amendment.”
President Obama indicated during the presidential debates that he would pursue an assault weapons ban, which second amendment activists see as merely the first step towards wider gun control regulation.
Obama also indicated that he would attempt to eviscerate the right to keep and bear arms during a White House meeting with gun control advocate Sarah Brady last year. During the meeting, Obama told Brady he was working “under the radar” on new gun control policy. Brady added that Obama assured her gun control was “very much on his agenda.”
But it’s not just Obama’s conduct on the domestic front that has second amendment activists concerned. The Obama administration’s willingness to sign up to a United Nations global arms treaty which threatens to outlaw guns in the U.S. is also driving firearms sales.
Final discussions on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) are set to take place in March next year. The New American notes that, “Section III, Paragraphs 7 and 8 of the Programme of Action mandate that if a member state cannot get rid of privately owned small arms legislatively, then the control of “customs, police, intelligence, and arms control” will be placed under the power of a board of UN bureaucrats operating out of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs,” opening the door to UN peacekeeping forces to disarm American citizens.
http://www.infowars.com/black-friday-gu … cord-high/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue Nov 27, 2012 1:09 pm
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Gold and Silver • Black Friday Mirage Hides U.S. Retail Depression
Black Friday Mirage Hides U.S. Retail Depression
Written by Jeff Nielson
Monday, 26 November 2012 14:21
Every year it’s the same “song and dance” from the U.S. propaganda machine. Right after the “Black Friday” post-Thanksgiving shopping-orgy in the U.S.; the numbers will be twisted to supposedly show that the U.S. retail sector is strong-and-healthy. That’s immediately followed by a rousing chorus of “happy days are here again.”
Then, once the dust settles after the holiday shopping season (and few of the Sheep are paying attention), it will quietly announce another disastrous year for U.S. retailers. What is so pathetic about this sham is that not only does this song-and-dance never change, but it’s all based upon the same transparent lie.
That lie concerns inflation. All “inflation” is produced by the money-printing of bankers. Indeed the term itself originated as short-hand for “inflating the money supply”; which is precisely what all money-printing does. However, that topic has been covered previously for interested readers.
Where inflation closely relates to retail sales is that any/all retail sales statistics are only relevant if inflation is totally stripped-out of any calculation. Reporting that consumers paid higher prices for goods tells us absolutely nothing about the health of U.S. retailers – which is the raison d’etre for this statistic.
Instead, the propaganda machine does precisely the opposite. Not only does it refuse to subtract inflation out of its “retail sales” calculation; but it refuses to even acknowledge its perversion of this statistic when it reports its data.
Here it’s important to note to readers that when I use the term “inflation” that I’m referring to actual inflation in the real world, and not the hyper-absurd U.S. “consumer price index.” One could write an entire book about how the U.S. government has systematically severed all ties between this statistic and the real world, however a single anecdote will suffice.
In the same month (this summer) that the World Bank was reporting global food prices soaring at an annualized rate of 120%, and Asian governments were meeting to discuss “the global food-price crisis”; the U.S. government proclaimed that inflation in the U.S. was (literally) 0%.
Zero percent inflation in the U.S.; 120% inflation in “the world.” You do the math.
Here another important point must be made. More than ever food-price inflation is “inflation.” Obviously for the billions of people around the world living in poverty and near-poverty, that reality has always been totally apparent. However, for the first time since the Great Depression that Truth has migrated to the West.
One in six Americans must now subsist on government “food stamps” in order to feed themselves properly(?). Tens of millions of other Americans struggle barely above that threshold. This is the inevitable result of the more-than-50% decline in wages for the Average American over the past 40 years, or (in other words) a greater-than-50% decline in their standard of living. Food-inflation is inflation.
By any conservative measurement, inflation across the West now rages somewhere between 10 – 20%. Here even the eminent John Williams of Shadowstats.com is guilty of failing to fully factor-in this reality in his own calculation of the (real) U.S. inflation rate. Mr. Williams only assigns food prices an ordinary weighting in his own inflation calculation, when (as I just explained) food-inflation must now be over-weighted in any inflation calculation.
The inflation-rate on a new Mercedes means nothing to the average person. The inflation-rate on a loaf of bread means everything. With readers now hopefully having a reasonable understanding of how inflation is currently impacting our lives, this brings us to the serial lies of the propaganda machine regarding U.S. retail sales.
Since retail sales figures include this 10 – 20% inflation (rather than stripping it out, as would be done by any reputable statistician), the arithmetic is simple. If retail sales were to be officially “flat” (i.e. a 0% increase), then this would translate into retailers selling 10 – 20% less goods – but simply at higher prices.
As of this moment, the propaganda machine is reporting that “total spending” over the “four-day Black Friday weekend” rose 13% over last year. This number is highly suspicious, given that just 48 hours earlier the same media were reporting that sales on “Black Friday” itself had fallen by 1.8% from last year – at physical retail stores. Note that the surge in online sales this year doesn’t come close to offsetting the fall in sales from “foot traffic”, given that online sales still account for less than 5% of total U.S. retail sales.
Even though U.S. shoppers were lethargic on Black Friday itself (when supposedly the best of the bargains are available); we’re led to believe they went on a “spending” rampage after Black Friday. But here we see the propaganda machine moving the goal-posts. “Total spending” is not the same thing as “retail sales.”
Going to a movie, or a bar, or a restaurant over the course of a long week-end is not “retail sales.” Clearly the propaganda machine is now pumping “total spending over the Black Friday weekend” to hide another Black Friday Massacre for U.S. retailers. As noted earlier, with actual retail sales flat (at best), this means that U.S. retailers sold between 10% and 20% less goods than one year ago. But that’s only the latest in a series of horrendous numbers.
In October, U.S. retail sales fell 0.3% that month alone – and without accounting for inflation. Translate that into an annualized figure, and adjust for inflation; and in the month prior to Black Friday U.S. retail sales were plummeting lower at an annualized rate somewhere between 13.6% and 23.6%.
Go a little further back and the numbers are even worse. Official retail sales fell for three consecutive months from April through June, again without adjusting for inflation. That’s an entire quarter of actual U.S. retail sales plummeting downward at a double-digit (annual) rate.
Meanwhile, in the surreal world of U.S. economic statistics; the propaganda machine itself regularly informs us that consumption is directly/indirectly responsible for 80% of U.S. GDP. With retail sales (the largest component of consumption) plummeting downward at a double-digit rate; it’s a mathematical impossibility for the U.S. economy to be generating positive GDP growth.
Of course since official U.S. GDP calculations are deflated with the same fantasy-numbers the U.S. government uses in its CPI calculation; U.S. GDP statistics are equally as accurate as U.S. inflation numbers – which is to say that they have no connection to the real world.
It must be noted that the collapse in the quantity of goods being sold by U.S. retailers is only one component of this U.S. retail depression. With wholesale costs soaring, and with U.S. consumers never having so little disposable income; profit margins for most retailers are being steadily squeezed.
Selling less and less goods each month is a terrible problem for U.S. retailers. Selling less and less goods for less and less profit is a certain road to bankruptcy.
With fewer Americans working each month, with those who are working making less than half the wages that workers earned 40 years earlier, and with consumers already loaded up to their eyeballs in personal debt; it’s no wonder that actual U.S. retail sales are plummeting downward at a depressionary rate. What is amazing is that anyone still believes the doctored numbers and absurd spin from the mainstream media.
http://bullionbullscanada.com/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Tue Nov 27, 2012 1:34 am
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Business • Black Friday grows longer but impact appears to be shrinkin
Black Friday grows longer but impact appears to be shrinking
BY DAVID ROEDER Business Reporter/droeder@suntimes.com November 24, 2012
Yes, Black Friday shopping is now woven into the national culture and it’s overshadowing the relatively relaxed Thanksgiving holiday. But just as the phenomenon seems to get larger, it’s strangely getting smaller.
For all the reports of people lined up in the chill and jostling each other for goods that remained safely on the shelves just a couple days ago, Black Friday’s role in the year-end shopping blowout is slipping.
The National Retail Federation projects that 147 million people will shop from Friday through Sunday, down from 152 million people from last year’s three-day Thanksgiving weekend.
The average shopper this weekend was still expected to spend slightly more money compared with last year, by the federation’s reckoning. It also estimates that total retail sales for November and December will be $586.1 billion, up 4.1 percent from a year ago.
So spending is still there, but retailers have expanded the season for getting it. At Sears and Kmart stores, for example, a “shop your way” online program began offering extras rewards last Sunday for people who order online and pick up the item at a store, said Ron Boire, executive vice president at Sears Holdings Corp.
Boire said the promotion spread out the holiday rush at its stores throughout the week. Sears stores still opened at 8 p.m. Thursday to catch the early birds. By Friday the aisles were busy but not frantic, Boire said.
“It was a different kind of shopper, more relaxed,” he said. But he added that “there’s no doubt that consumers are stressed out given the high levels of unemployment and, perhaps more importantly, underemployment.”
Also changing the retail landscape is technology. Each year, more people are accustomed to ordering online and using Internet tools to shop for the best deals.
Merchants stepped up their online promotions for the weekend and Cyber Monday, the term for the first Monday after Thanksgiving. That’s when an estimated 72 million people return to their work computer and use the generous bandwidths to order gifts, despite the cost in worker productivity.
A survey by BIGinsight found that 97 percent of online merchants planned promotions for sometime during Thanksgiving weekend vs. 90 percent last year. A record 85 percent said they have deals on Cyber Monday.
The incentives typically start with free shipping.
The retail federation has its own web site, CyberMonday.com, as a clearinghouse for the offers. The site also will offer, in Groupon-like fashion, “deals of the hour” through Monday.
For the brick-and-mortar stores, longer hours are a way to fight the battle for market share. Retail analysts say physical stores have an advantage over the cyber competition: When they promote an item by selling it at a loss, it draws shoppers who will buy other things. For online stores, shoppers stop with the single purchase.
Big-box stores such as Walmart and Toys R Us led the Black Friday creep into Thanksgiving by opening at 8 p.m. Thursday, despite criticism from some employees and patrons.
It’s not known how many people took advantage of the Thursday hours, but a survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs found 17 percent of 1,000 people questioned would do so.
As for Black Friday, 33 percent in the survey said they would shop that day, vs. 34 percent last year.
There was early evidence that the Thursday rush reduced business on Friday. Deloitte retail analyst Ramesh Swamy told Reuters, “People seemed to be shopping quite a bit, although in talking to mall management, it seemed that traffic was not as busy as last year.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/16582784-4 … nking.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Nov 24, 2012 2:39 pm
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Business • Black Friday grows longer but impact appears to be shrinkin
Black Friday grows longer but impact appears to be shrinking
BY DAVID ROEDER Business Reporter/droeder@suntimes.com November 24, 2012
Yes, Black Friday shopping is now woven into the national culture and it’s overshadowing the relatively relaxed Thanksgiving holiday. But just as the phenomenon seems to get larger, it’s strangely getting smaller.
For all the reports of people lined up in the chill and jostling each other for goods that remained safely on the shelves just a couple days ago, Black Friday’s role in the year-end shopping blowout is slipping.
The National Retail Federation projects that 147 million people will shop from Friday through Sunday, down from 152 million people from last year’s three-day Thanksgiving weekend.
The average shopper this weekend was still expected to spend slightly more money compared with last year, by the federation’s reckoning. It also estimates that total retail sales for November and December will be $586.1 billion, up 4.1 percent from a year ago.
So spending is still there, but retailers have expanded the season for getting it. At Sears and Kmart stores, for example, a “shop your way” online program began offering extras rewards last Sunday for people who order online and pick up the item at a store, said Ron Boire, executive vice president at Sears Holdings Corp.
Boire said the promotion spread out the holiday rush at its stores throughout the week. Sears stores still opened at 8 p.m. Thursday to catch the early birds. By Friday the aisles were busy but not frantic, Boire said.
“It was a different kind of shopper, more relaxed,” he said. But he added that “there’s no doubt that consumers are stressed out given the high levels of unemployment and, perhaps more importantly, underemployment.”
Also changing the retail landscape is technology. Each year, more people are accustomed to ordering online and using Internet tools to shop for the best deals.
Merchants stepped up their online promotions for the weekend and Cyber Monday, the term for the first Monday after Thanksgiving. That’s when an estimated 72 million people return to their work computer and use the generous bandwidths to order gifts, despite the cost in worker productivity.
A survey by BIGinsight found that 97 percent of online merchants planned promotions for sometime during Thanksgiving weekend vs. 90 percent last year. A record 85 percent said they have deals on Cyber Monday.
The incentives typically start with free shipping.
The retail federation has its own web site, CyberMonday.com, as a clearinghouse for the offers. The site also will offer, in Groupon-like fashion, “deals of the hour” through Monday.
For the brick-and-mortar stores, longer hours are a way to fight the battle for market share. Retail analysts say physical stores have an advantage over the cyber competition: When they promote an item by selling it at a loss, it draws shoppers who will buy other things. For online stores, shoppers stop with the single purchase.
Big-box stores such as Walmart and Toys R Us led the Black Friday creep into Thanksgiving by opening at 8 p.m. Thursday, despite criticism from some employees and patrons.
It’s not known how many people took advantage of the Thursday hours, but a survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs found 17 percent of 1,000 people questioned would do so.
As for Black Friday, 33 percent in the survey said they would shop that day, vs. 34 percent last year.
There was early evidence that the Thursday rush reduced business on Friday. Deloitte retail analyst Ramesh Swamy told Reuters, “People seemed to be shopping quite a bit, although in talking to mall management, it seemed that traffic was not as busy as last year.”
http://www.suntimes.com/news/16582784-4 … nking.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Nov 24, 2012 2:39 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Are Black Friday Riots A Preview Of The Civil Unrest That Is Coming When Society Breaks Down?
If Americans will trample one another just to save a few dollars on a television, what will they do when society breaks down and the survival of their families is at stake? Once in a while an event comes along that gives us a peek into what life could be like when the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is stripped away. For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York and New Jersey there was rampant looting and within days people were digging around in supermarket dumpsters looking for food. Sadly, “Black Friday” also gives us a look at how crazed the American people can be when given the opportunity. This year was no exception. Once again we saw large crowds of frenzied shoppers push, shove, scratch, claw, bite and trample one another just to save a few bucks on cheap foreign-made goods. And of course most retailers seem to be encouraging this type of behavior. Most of them actually want people frothing at the mouth and willing to fight one another to buy their goods. But is this kind of “me first” mentality really something that we want to foster as a society? If people are willing to riot to save money on a cell phone, what would they be willing to do to feed their families? Are the Black Friday riots a very small preview of the civil unrest that is coming when society eventually breaks down?
Once upon a time, Thanksgiving was not really a commercial holiday. It was a time to get together with family and friends, eat turkey and express thanks for the blessings that we have been given.
But in recent years Black Friday has started to become even a bigger event than Thanksgiving itself.
Millions of Americans have become convinced that it is fun to wait in long lines outside retail stores in freezing cold weather in the middle of the night to spend money that they do not have on things that they do not need.
And of course very, very few “Black Friday deals” are actually made in America. So these frenzied shoppers are actually killing American jobs and destroying the U.S. economy as well.
The absurdity of Black Friday was summed up very well recently in a statement that has already been retweeted on Twitter more than 1,000 times…
It has gotten to the point where it is now expected that there will be mini-riots all over the country early on Black Friday morning each year. The following are a few examples of the craziness that we saw this year…
-”Fights break out when stores open on Black Friday“
-”Black Friday madness at Georgia Wal-Mart“
-”Black Friday Frenzy: 2 Run Down in Washington, Man Pulls Gun in Texas“
-”Black Friday 2012: Rush at Victoria’s Secret Pink at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kan.“
-”Black Friday Shopping Hysteria From Around The Country [PHOTOS]“
-”Disturbance leads to scare at Westroads Mall“
-”Teens In Custody After Woodland Mall Fight“
-”Boy Robbed During Black Friday Shopping At Arundel Mills“
-”Shoppers Were So Obsessed With Black Friday Deals They Left Their Infants Unattended“
Fortunately, many Americans are starting to get fed up with Black Friday. In fact, one activist named Mark Dice actually went out and heckled Black Friday shoppers this year. I found the following You Tube video to be very funny, and I think most of you will too…
In the end, it is not that big of a deal that people want to fight with one another to save 50 dollars on a cell phone.
But this kind of extreme selfishness and desperation could become a massive problem someday if society breaks down and suddenly millions of extremely selfish and desperate people are scrambling for survival.
With each passing day our economy is getting even weaker, and the next wave of the economic collapse is rapidly approaching. What are people going to do when the next spike in unemployment hits us and nobody can find work?
To get an idea of where things are headed, just look at Europe. In both Greece and Spain the unemployment rate is over 25 percent and civil unrest has become almost a constant problem in both of those countries.
So what kind of riots will we see in the United States when the economy gets much worse than it is now?
Already there are signs of social decay all around us, and most Americans are completely unprepared for what will happen if a major disaster or emergency does strike.
Sadly, the reality is that most Americans live on a month to month basis. Most families do not have any emergency savings to speak of, and one recent poll found that 55 percent of all Americans only have enough food in their homes to survive for three days or less.
To me, that is an absolutely insane number.
We just came through a summer of extreme drought and global food supplies have dropped to a 40 year low. Our world is becoming increasingly unstable, and the global financial system could fall apart at any time. Most of us just assume that there will always be huge amounts of very cheap food available to us, but unfortunately that simply is not a safe assumption. The following is from a recent article in the Guardian…
Evan Fraser, author of Empires of Food and a geography lecturer at Guelph University in Ontario, Canada, says: “For six of the last 11 years the world has consumed more food than it has grown. We do not have any buffer and are running down reserves. Our stocks are very low and if we have a dry winter and a poor rice harvest we could see a major food crisis across the board.”
“Even if things do not boil over this year, by next summer we’ll have used up this buffer and consumers in the poorer parts of the world will once again be exposed to the effects of anything that hurts production.”
When I watch my fellow Americans trample one another to get a deal on a television or a video game, it makes me wonder what they would be willing to do if they went to the store someday and all the food was gone.
Desperate people do desperate things, and someday if there was a major economic breakdown in the United States I think the level of desperation in this country would be extremely frightening.
So what do you think? Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…
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