Author Archives: lawofmarkets

Classical economics and the unemployment rate in the United States

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As anyone who understands classical economic theory would understand – which might include around half a dozen people across the world today – “demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. That is John Stuart Mill’s Fourth Fundamental Proposition on Capital. The number of jobs in an economy is unrelated to the level of aggregate demand. This, I need hardly tell you, is in direct contradiction of the whole of modern macroeconomic theory. Which brings us to the latest jobs report in the United States. U.S. Economy Adds Record 2.5 Million Jobs in May, Unemployment Rate Falls to 13.3%.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the U.S. economy added 2.5 million jobs, the largest gain ever recorded and the unemployment rate fell to 13.3 in May.

Well economic good news of such a colossal dimension cannot be allowed to stand on its own so this is what the media reported on instead: Fake News: Media Rush to Decry Trump Quote on George Floyd During Jobs Report Presser – Except He Didn’t Say It

President Trump held a press conference/signing ceremony today at the Rose Garden where he talked about the good news revealed by the BLS’s report before signing a bill that will “give recipients of government small business loans during the coronavirus more flexibility in how they spend the money.”

During the speech he gave before signing the bill, Trump also talked about a number of issues including racial equality in the context of the death of George Floyd last Monday, which happened after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes.

CBS News is one of the few news outlets that actually reported Trump’s comments accurately while providing some context:

But black unemployment rose slightly from 16.7% in April to 16.8% in May, in a month the president declared a “tribute to equality” as the nation protests racial discrimination and police brutality. Mr. Trump also seemed to declare success after a week of protests that swept the nation.

“Equal justice under the law must mean that every American receives equal treatment in every encounter with law enforcement, regardless of race, color, gender or creed, they have to receive fair treatment from law enforcement,” the president said. “They have to receive it. We all saw what happened last week. We can’t let that happen. Hopefully, George is looking down right now and saying this is a great thing that’s happening for our country. This is a great day for him, it’s a great day for everybody. This is a great day for everybody. This is a great, great day in terms of equality.”

See for yourself.

Wouldn’t have mentioned it except this media lie was the first thing said to me by my wife this morning.

For added pleasure, you might also wish to read this as well: Paul Krugman Caught in Hilarious Self-Own After Furiously Spinning Conspiracy Theories About Good Jobs Report.

Disbanding the police is all the rage

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Impossible you say. Start here: Going All-In: Minneapolis City Council Considers Disbanding Entire Police Force…. Insane, right?

This “community policing” process is already taking place in many European communities the results create what are known as “no go zones.” Neighborhoods, and entire parts of cities, where local Sharia compliance enforcement officers have replaced the police force; and the rules, regulations and enforcement are detached from the larger social compact. Considering that Minneapolis has a large concentration of Somali Muslims within the local population, it makes sense this approach is now discussed for their city.

Minneapolis – […] Now the council members are listening to a city that is wounded, angry, fed up with decades of violence disproportionately visited upon black and brown residents. Various private and public bodies – from First Avenue to Minneapolis Public Schools – have essentially cut ties with the police department. Council members are trying to figure out what their next move is.

Their discussion is starting to sound a little more like what groups like Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective have been saying for years. On Tuesday, Fletcher published a lengthy Twitter thread saying the police department was “irredeemably beyond reform,” and a “protection racket” that slows down responses as political payback.

“Several of us on the council are working on finding out what it would take to disband the Minneapolis Police Department and start fresh with a community-oriented, nonviolent public safety and outreach capacity,” he wrote. (read more)

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, the man now in charge of the prosecution of Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis police officers involved in George Floyd’s death, is a very well known Muslim activist and supporter of the sharia doctrine.

And then this: Australia: Muslim leader says riots an “opportunity” for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia.

Australia: Muslim leader says riots an “opportunity” for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia

Meanwhile, non-Muslim leaders in the West demand that we all accept that no Muslims, no, not one, want to impose Sharia in Western countries, and declare that anyone who thinks otherwise is a greasy Islamophobe, a “fearmonger.”

“‘We will take over’: Australian leader of extremist Islamic group says US riots are an ‘opportunity’ for Muslims to seize global leadership and impose Sharia law,” by Stephen Johnson, Daily Mail Australia, June 3, 2020:

A controversial Muslim preacher is predicting Islam will replace the United States as the world’s dominant geopolitical force.

Ismail al-Wahwah, the Australian spiritual leader of hardline Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has suggested riots across the US would bring down the global superpower.

‘Who will take over if America fall?,’ he said a video on Wednesday night.

‘Someone can say Europe, someone can say China, speak about Russia some, but for me the message is, the one who have more values, true values, and that’s us Muslims.

‘I would be hypocrite if I say I’m not happy for what’s happening in America today.’

Mr al-Wahwah described the violent mass demonstrations across the US as an opportunity for Muslims to exploit – following the alleged murder of black man George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer.

‘It’s time to use this opportunity to stand up, and to come back and to take the leadership again,’ Mr al-Wahwah said.

‘We as a Muslim, we should take this opportunity to take the leadership again, I know it’s not easy job.

‘I know it will cost us much, but I know 100 per cent that we are able, we can do it.’

Hizb ut-Tahrir is global Islamist political party, active in 50 countries, that wants Islam imposed as a political system.

It has a goal of replacing world governments with a caliphate based on the rule of Sharia law.

The Islamist group’s ‘Draft Constitution of the Khilafa State’, a blueprint for how its caliphate would govern, advocates the killing of ex-Muslims, known as ‘apostates’.

Despite its fundamentalist Islamic ideology that endorses slavery and only allows Muslim men to rule, Hizb ut-Tahrir is claiming to be the party of civil rights and is convinced riots against police brutality would hasten the downfall of the US.

Ismail al-Wahwah, the Australian spiritual leader of Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has suggested riots across the US would bring down the global superpower

‘Do you think what’s happening in America will be the end of the Americans’ time? Yes,’ Mr al-Wahwah said….

You just wander around with your head in the clouds but there are lots of people out there with lots of plans that do not sound so impossible if you see what they are up to. Human rights. Free speech. Freedom of religion. All so last century.

Hayes on Keynes worksheet

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This is a review of another book on Keynesian economics just published. It is found on the SHOE list. The review is below, and below it are some idiocies that really are modern beliefs about Keynes that are fore square wrong however common they may be. The bits in bold are my own highlights.

M. G. Hayes, John Maynard Keynes. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020. xv + 195 pp. $25 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-5095-2825-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by A. Reeves Johnson, Department of Economics, Maryville College.

 

Mark Gerard Hayes, formerly of Robinson College, Cambridge, was a post-Keynesian economist who committed his academic life to the study of John Maynard Keynes. In his preface to John Maynard Keynes, Hayes reminisces that his over forty-year study of Keynes eclipses the time Keynes spent in his own scholastic pursuits.

Having invested an effective lifetime to become one of the trusted expositors of Keynes’s economics, it’s hard to imagine someone better suited than Hayes to distilling the economics of Keynes to less than 170 pages (graphs and tables included, no less). Even so, as an analytical biography written for undergraduates with or without formal training in economics, Keynes is an ambitious project. Its primary object is not solely to introduce readers to Keynes, but, specifically, to reiterate Keynes’s critique of classical economics in accessible language. But, Hayes is a veritable authority on Keynes, and his many years of devotion to the subject materialize in a refusal to take shortcuts. It should come as no surprise, then, that the exposition is rigorous, and, for many undergraduates, unsparing.

I note here that reviewing this work through the lens of an academic and an instructor on Keynes offers too little scope. The value of Keynes is understood by its ability to inform its intended audience. Therefore, to fairly assess this book, I offer the following review with its target readership in mind.

Keynes sets out with a brief statement of purpose and summary of the book’s trajectory in the opening chapter. Hayes then delves into classical thought in the form of a corn model in Chapter 2. The core argument is familiar, although its representation may not be. Marginal products determine the respective rates of utilization and of remuneration of labor and capital as profit-maximizing farmers organize production under conditions of diminishing returns. Hayes then delves into classical thought in the form of a corn model , echoing the dubious “continuity thesis” implicit in The General Theory. In any case, this chapter will be tough going for students unacquainted with mainstream economics, but provides a necessary transition to Keynes’s mature thinking.

Chapter 3 naturally turns to The General Theory and offers a concise and careful exposition of the principle of effective demand. Keynes’s non-standard concept of demand as income expected from production is first defined in order to underscore two fundamental features absent in the classical model: the role of future expectations shaping present behavior and the monetary nature of economic activity.

Hayes’s unique approach to the principle of effective demand is well-suited for undergraduates due to his manner of making concrete what Keynes left as abstract. Two instances stand out. For one, Hayes takes Keynes literally by designating the short term as one day. This firmly places the argument in historical time, while also promoting greater conceptual clarity than conventional definitions of the short term admit.

What’s most instructive about Hayes’s approach, though, is his tripartite classification of business into employers, investors and dealers. Keynes’s aggregate demand-supply framework is a constant source of confusion due, in no small part, to its anti-Marshallian rendering of supply and demand in which business appears on both sides of the aggregate market. But Hayes’s expository device disentangles aggregate supply from aggregate demand by mapping employers onto the supply curve, and dealers and investors onto the demand curve. Further, dealers play the critical role in finding, or not, the point of effective demand. In a skillful delineation of the multiplier, dealers adjust their daily inventories by selling spot to meet the increasing consumer demand while buying forward to replenish inventories. Whether the point of effective demand is reached ultimately depends on the fulfillment of dealers’ medium-term expectations, which, as Hayes notes, is unlikely given the uncertainty of consumer demand.

Chapter 4 extends further into The General Theory by fixating on Say’s Law and hence the theory of interest. As in the preceding chapter, Hayes sets out again by fixing ideas. Saving is income not consumed; income is the money value of net output; and, in aggregate, saving takes the form of physical goods. As the rate of interest is the rate on loans of money, an assumption shared by both loanable-funds theorists and Keynes, and saving represents a physical quantity of goods, the rate of interest is a matter of the supply and demand of money.

Hayes addresses liquidity preference after an interlude into Keynes’s investment theory. Because of the interest-centric perspective adhered to, a result of an analytical narrative that puts Say’s Law into the foreground, investment serves as a mere backdrop to discuss liquidity preference. Hayes does briefly address fundamental uncertainty and its relation to investment decisions, but there’s no mention of the marginal efficiency of capital nor its relation to the rate of interest.

Perhaps more troublesome, though, and bearing in mind the intended audience, is that Hayes repeats Keynes’s inconsistent usage of “investor” in The General Theory to mean both buyer of newly produced capital assets and holder of money, debts and shares. This inconsistency engendered confusion among Keynes’s readers; to reproduce it in an introductory text comes off as negligent. It’s all the more unfortunate to find it in a chapter intended to reveal the confusion between money and saving.

Chapters 5 and 6 take as their theme Keynes’s “long struggle to escape from habitual modes of thought and expression,” and especially as this escape concerns monetary theory. Hayes moves swiftly through technical aspects from A Tract on Monetary Reform and A Treatise on Money. Allusions to recent financial events enliven the prose and interrupt the brisk pace of Hayes’s analytical exposition to give the reader an appreciated respite. Still, these chapters, and especially Chapter 5, beset the reader with a kind of textual vertigo. Hayes juxtaposes Keynes’s early work against The General Theory, while enduring ideas (e.g., on the nature of money as debt) are interspersed between the two. These deficiencies don’t detract from Hayes’s extension of the principle of effective demand into the international sphere in Chapter 6, which deserves praise.

The book’s final two chapters assess Keynes’s legacy. Free from the burdens of crafting an analytical narrative, these final chapters establish an organic flow. Chapter 7 begins with a statistical comparison of the “Keynesian Era,” roughly the years 1951-1973, against other historical periods. Despite Hayes’s penchant for statistical inference on the basis of descriptive statistics, his broad-brush comparisons nicely segue to a consideration of how Keynesian was Keynes. Keynes’s policy positions, as borne out by the textual evidence, are then compared to his subsequent followers. Would Keynes be an advocate of Modern Money Theory and support a job guarantee program for developed countries? Almost certainly not. Keynes agrees with post-Keynesians that monetary policy is a rather ineffective instrument to manage the economy, right? No. Keynes’s primary policy proposal was to keep long-term rates low to encourage private and public investment. Linking Keynes’s thoughts on policy to current debates will no doubt interest those navigating today’s landscape.

Chapter 8 continues to dispel popularly-held beliefs on Keynes’s thinking. Hayes deflates the most pervasive myth of Keynes as the figurehead of lavish, even reckless, government spending programs. The unappreciated nuance concerns the ends to which government borrows. While increased borrowing for consumption is likely inevitable during recession, these deficits should be recovered over the course of the upswing. For Keynes, there is no permanent role for government consumption, in contrast to government investment.

The shortcomings I’ve cited relate almost exclusively to the disparity between the book’s elevated content and its targeted readership. Though easily digestible at times, I fear this book is beyond the grasp of undergraduates without training in economics. It will draw interest from dedicated neophytes, advanced students and academics looking for a concise and honest appraisal of Keynes’s work. Indeed, unlike other treatments that reveal more about their authors than the subject (Hyman Minsky’s John Maynard Keynes comes to mind), Hayes’s faithfulness to Keynes’s economics may well irritate some post-Keynesians for its, at times, conservative tone; while intriguing New Keynesians and others to notice that their concerns and positions on critical policy matters share a likeness with Keynes’s.

With his final work, Hayes confronted the onerous task of consolidating an encyclopedia of knowledge. But his passion for the subject cannot be abridged. While Hayes’s Keynes marks an end to a life of dedicated scholarship, in turn, it may mark the beginning for its readers.

 

These are specifics that I have highlighted.

Hayes then delves into classical thought in the form of a corn model. 

Perhaps more troublesome, though, and bearing in mind the intended audience, is that Hayes repeats Keynes’s inconsistent usage of “investor” in The General Theory to mean both buyer of newly produced capital assets and holder of money, debts and shares. This inconsistency engendered confusion among Keynes’s readers; to reproduce it in an introductory text comes off as negligent. It’s all the more unfortunate to find it in a chapter intended to reveal the confusion between money and saving.

Chapter 4 extends further into The General Theory by fixating on Say’s Law and hence the theory of interest.

Saving is income not consumed; income is the money value of net output; and, in aggregate, saving takes the form of physical goods.

Saving represents a physical quantity of goods, the rate of interest is a matter of the supply and demand of money.

Keynes’s primary policy proposal was to keep long-term rates low to encourage private and public investment.

Hayes deflates the most pervasive myth of Keynes as the figurehead of lavish, even reckless, government spending programs.

For Keynes, there is no permanent role for government consumption, in contrast to government investment.

 

The highlighted bits are from the review and below in unbolded type are my own comments.

Hayes then delves into classical thought in the form of a corn model.

Does anyone seriously believe that when Keynes was writing The General Theory that the economists he was dealing with were framing their arguments about anything at all on a corn model of growth and distribution?

 

Chapter 4 extends further into The General Theory by fixating on Say’s Law and hence the theory of interest.

If one is specifically intending never to understand the slightest thing about Say’s Law, focusing on the theory on interest is about as good a way to do it as one might find.

 

Keynes’s non-standard concept of demand as income expected from production is first defined in order to underscore two fundamental features absent in the classical model: the role of future expectations shaping present behavior and the monetary nature of economic activity.

Both of those supposed absences are not absent at all. Of course, if he never goes past Ricardo, then he would not know it. Is it possible to believe that classical economists saw no role for future expectations in shaping present behavior or that economic activity was affected by monetary factors. If you believe that, you are as ignorant as it is possible to be about the history of economic theory.

 

Saving is income not consumed; income is the money value of net output; and, in aggregate, saving takes the form of physical goods. As the rate of interest is the rate on loans of money, an assumption shared by both loanable-funds theorists and Keynes, and saving represents a physical quantity of goods, the rate of interest is a matter of the supply and demand of money.

That “saving represents “a physical quantity of goods” is absolutely correct since it is a definition. It is also the only sound way to conceive of saving since an economy is a process that allocates all of the productive resources in existence within an economy to their highest valued uses. By recognising at the same time that the rate of interest is a matter of the supply and demand for money is precisely the way in which all classical economists looked at the process of saving and investment. This is Wicksell and not Keynes (1936), although it is Keynes (1930).

 

Keynes’s primary policy proposal was to keep long-term rates low to encourage private and public investment.

In saving Keynes’s reputation he has to abandon what Keynes himself wrote. Nothing to do with public spending or short-term deficits. Over the side goes Can Lloyd George Do It? (1930).

 

Hayes deflates the most pervasive myth of Keynes as the figurehead of lavish, even reckless, government spending programs. The unappreciated nuance concerns the ends to which government borrows.

It was Keynes who wrote how fortunate the Egyptians had been in having pyramids to build or for the mediaeval economies to have been blessed with the construction of cathedrals. It was Keynes who suggested burying bank notes and then have them excavated to create jobs. Certainly not permanent spending on waste, but while the recession was on and while it was deep, Keynes certainly advocated all of that.

 

For Keynes, there is no permanent role for government consumption, in contrast to government investment.

There was no role for permanent government investment either. When at full employment, as Keynes wrote, classical principles would prevail.

 

Not only are the media lying to us about everything, everyone knows it

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Does anyone really believe that people supporting Black Lives Matter are not on the left? Does anyone anywhere seriously believe that the media ever say anything that would diminish the possibility of defeating Donald Trump in November? It is astonishing to witness it for myself, but everyone on the left lies.

I no longer ever have to discuss politics with anyone on the left since I know exactly what they will believe about every issue, and I will also know which issues they are worrying about at any moment in time, by watching the ABC or reading the local press. So this story is news to no one: The Media Are Lying To You About Everything, Including The Riots. But it’s no more noteworthy than to be told that in the middle of a battle, the other side will be aiming cannon shot at their enemies across the battle lines, and that every one of the soldiers lining up inside their trenches are one hundred percent behind their artillery.

Democracies work when both sides see politics as a contest between groups with different possible solutions to whatever happen to be the social issues of our time where both can and do contribute. Democracy does not work if those on one of the sides in a political struggle refuses to accept there is any merit at all in the proposals being put forward by the other side. That is where we find ourselves today. No one with an ounce of sense or reflection anywhere believes or believed any of the following, but everyone I know on the left will say that they do:

1) Russia tipped the scales of the American election in favour of Trump.
2) Global warming is an urgent issue that requires us to subvert our system of power generation.
3) Something happened in the Ukraine – who knows what? – that proved – again who knows what? – that Donald Trump should not be president.
4) The Chinese Virus did not originate in China, but wherever it arose, now requires us to shut down our economy until there is no longer even the slightest danger that anyone might die from its effects.
5) A black man was murdered by a white policeman right in front of large number of witnesses, many of whom were carrying mobile phones through which they could record the event, which has exposed massive racist beliefs across the United States and elsewhere that require major levels of civil disorder and rioting to achieve something, although no one exactly knows what that is.

How monstrously stupid people would have to be to believe any of this! Anyone with an IQ over around 95 is perfectly aware this is all just politics on behalf of some objective. They just want to win power for themselves and for their side. It’s all very well to demonstrate that they are wrong, but it will not the battles going on today. None of it is about reason and debate. We are into mob violence that transcends public discourse and reason.

There is no debate. The issue is to convince a vast majority they have much to lose and nothing to gain by lining up with these mobs, which are given support through institutional forces such as politicians on the left, the media and the academic world, all of whom know so far as each issue goes, the truth is not represented by what they say. They just believe there are bigger issues involved, although what they are cannot be explained.

What is essential for us is to demonstrate that those on the left have an agenda and mean to put their agenda into practice. What we must therefore do on our side is expose that agenda. All of this, from items 1 to 5 – are means for the left to achieve their ends that have nothing to do with political justice, racism or less pollution. If we neglect to highlight their agenda and continue to deal only with their tactical issues, we will be overwhelmed.

The argument must be based on explaining why are they lying and what are they trying to do? What must be the core of our own agenda is to explain why there is nothing gained for anyone by falling for the lies of the left. If they cannot see in the devastation wracking cities all over the United States that there is nothing but ruin in following the agenda of the left, then we will be swept into the dustbin of history sooner than you might ever have believed.

Remember, remember the fourth of June

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What to know about Tiananmen Square on the 30th anniversary of the ...

It may not rhyme but you should remember it all the same. These were protestors with a genuine mission, bravely seeking change in the face of a tyrannical government that sent tanks out onto the street. What they sought in China is what we already have but which so many of our own “protesters” are prepared to squander. For those on the streets in Beijing and elsewhere, this was known as the Chinese Democracy Movement. Our “protesters” here would be the ones ordering the tanks onto the streets in Beijing. They would be the ones who are trying to suppress the pro-democracy, pro-freedom protesters, no quotation marks there, in Hong Kong today. What you see below is from Wikipedia. It should be a reminder of what’s really at stake.

The Tiananmen Square protests, Tiananmen Square massacre, or the Tiananmen Square Incident, commonly known as the June Fourth Incident (Chinese: 六四事件; pinyin: liùsì shìjiàn in mainland China, literally the six-four incident), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing during 1989. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the ’89 Democracy Movement (Chinese: 八九民運; pinyin: bājiǔ mínyùn). The protests started on April 15 and were forcibly suppressed on June 4 when the government declared martial law and sent the military to occupy central parts of Beijing. In what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre (Chinese: 天安門大屠殺; pinyin: tiān’ānmén dà túshā), troops with assault rifles and tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military’s advance into Tiananmen Square. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

Set off by the death of pro-reform Communist general secretary Hu Yaobang in April 1989, amid the backdrop of rapid economic development and social changes in post-Mao China, the protests reflected anxieties about the country’s future in the popular consciousness and among the political elite. The reforms of the 1980s had led to a nascent market economy which benefited some people but seriously disaffected others, and the one-party political system also faced a challenge of legitimacy. Common grievances at the time included inflation, corruption, limited preparedness of graduates for the new economy,[8] and restrictions on political participation. The students called for greater accountability, constitutional due process, democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech, although they were highly disorganized and their goals varied.[9][10] At the height of the protests, about 1 million people assembled in the Square.[11]

As the protests developed, the authorities responded with both conciliatory and hardline tactics, exposing deep divisions within the party leadership.[12] By May, a student-led hunger strike galvanized support for the demonstrators around the country, and the protests spread to some 400 cities.[13] Ultimately, Deng Xiaoping and other Communist Party elders believed the protests to be a political threat and resolved to use force.[14][15] The State Council declared martial law on May 20 and mobilized as many as 300,000 troops to Beijing.[13] The troops advanced into central parts of Beijing on the city’s major thoroughfares in the early morning hours of June 4, killing both demonstrators and bystanders in the process.

The international community, human rights organizations, and political analysts condemned the Chinese government for the massacre. Western countries imposed arms embargoes on China.[16] The Chinese government made widespread arrests of protesters and their supporters, suppressed other protests around China, expelled foreign journalists, strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press, strengthened the police and internal security forces, and demoted or purged officials it deemed sympathetic to the protests.[17] More broadly, the suppression ended the political reforms since 1986 and halted the policies of liberalization in the 1980s, which were only resumed partly after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992.[18][19][20] Considered a watershed event, the protests set the limits on political expression in China up to the present day.[21] Its memory is widely associated with questioning the legitimacy of Communist Party rule and remains one of the most sensitive and most widely censored topics in China.[22][23]

Sweden has “got quite a long way to the same effect”

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Epidemiologist Who Triggered Worldwide Lockdowns Admits: Without Instituting Full Lockdown, Sweden Essentially Getting Same Effect

People enjoy the sunny weather in Tantolunden park in Stockholm on May 30, 2020, amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, whose bleak projections of future deaths from COVID-19 influenced governments around the world to institute massive lockdowns, admitted of Sweden, which did not institute harsh lockdowns, “It is interesting that adopting a policy which is short of a full lockdown – they have closed secondary schools and universities and there is a significant amount of social distancing, but it’s not a full lockdown – they have got quite a long way to the same effect.”

From here. What really happened in Sweden we may never know. But as CL points out, they have a new toy to play with so who cares?

This is how the world will be locked into a deep-state cage within a decade

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Protesters gather Tuesday, June 2, 2020 in Paris. Thousands of people defied a police ban and converged on the main Paris courthouse for a demonstration to show solidarity with U.S. protesters and denounce the death of a black man in French police custody.
Protesters gather Tuesday, June 2, 2020 in Paris. Thousands of people defied a police ban and converged on the main Paris courthouse for a demonstration to show solidarity with U.S. protesters and denounce the death of a black man in French police custody

From Sydney to Paris, World Outrage Grows at Floyd’s Death. One bad cop in one city in America, so what are you going to do about it? Why we are going to elect Joe Biden as President of the United States. That will fix things.

Australian news crew roughed up by DC police in midst of clearing the mall

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Here’s the full story: US protests: Police attack Channel 7 news team as Donald Trump walks from White House.

The attack took place as police cleared protesters to make way for US President Donald Trump, who was walking to the historic St Johns Church from the White House to take photos. Only minutes earlier, Mr Trump declared he will mobilise whatever is needed, including the US military, to restore order across the country.