An ugly night of data from China tonight suggests the ‘re-opening’ is not gathering pace:

• China May Retail Sales disappointed, rising 12.7% Y/Y; Est. 13.7% – which is a flashing red indicator. Given the boost from the Golden Week holiday, May retail sales rising just 0.4% from April speaks to how consumer sentiment has yet to show any significant improvement.

• China May Industrial Output slowed to a 3.5% rise Y/Y; Est. 3.5%

• China Jan.-May Fixed Investment rose less than expected, up 4% Y/Y; Est. 4.4%

• China Jan.-May Property investment tumbled 7.2% from a year earlier with the value of new home sales by the 100 biggest developers falling 14.3% in May.

And finally, and perhaps most problematically, the jobless rate for 16-to-24 year olds hits 20.8% in May, another all-time high that is four times the national rate which stands at 5.2%…

As Goldman noted, both cyclical and structural factors have contributed to the elevated youth unemployment rate in China. 

• On the cyclical front, the correlation between unemployment rate and services sector output gap is much stronger for the 16-24 age group compared with the 25-59 year-olds. NBS’s labor survey shows that services industries such as hotel and catering, education, and information technology sectors tend to hire more young workers. Services sector slackening before reopening therefore contributed to the high youth unemployment rate. The improvement in service sector activity growth in Q1 should lower youth unemployment rate in Q2 by 3pp based on our estimate. While the improvement in service activity growth implies rising demand for young workers, this increase in demand could be more than offset by strong supply seasonality. As we enter the graduation season, youth unemployment rate could rise by 3-4pp and peak in summertime (usually in July or August) before starting to decline from end of Q3, if we look at the seasonal pattern in 2018 and 2019 (prior to Covid).

• Structural imbalance is another reason behind the high youth unemployment rate. Despite the fact that a rising share of unemployed persons aged 16-24 years old have higher education, there appears to be misalignment of academic disciplines with business requirements. 

Ken Wong, Asia equity portfolio specialist at Eastspring Investments, said youth unemployment seems to be the big one:

“It impacts the consumption story and youth unemployment will probably continue to go up a bit more with fresh grads entering the workforce.”

The National Bureau of Statistics desperately tried to put some lipstick on this pig:

“The global environment is complex and grim, the domestic economy faces grave pressure of structural adjustment, and the economic recovery’s foundation is not yet solid.”

There is one silver- lining – the apparent oil demand rose 17.11% from a year ago in May

Critically, all of this puts more pressure on Beijing to unleash more stimulus (broader stimulus) and is sending the yuan lower…

Steven Leung, UOB Kay Hian executive director, says the data suggests more support will be needed from Beijing: “China has to announce more policies to aid the economy. Among the speculated supportive policies, markets are betting Beijing will roll out more policies to help the consumption sector given the big miss in retail sales. Those policies should be effective given Chinese citizens’ huge savings.”

Incidentally, China cuts it MLF rate by10bps earlier this evening, same as all the other secondary rate-cuts.

However, as The Wall Street Journal recently noted, the urgency to throw money at the problem could have reached its efficacy limits since after years of heavy borrowing, many in China are focused on paying down their debts this year—and the result could be weaker growth for a long time to come.

The issue isn’t the central government, whose debts are relatively low as a percentage of gross domestic product, but households, the private sector and local governments. Total debt as a share of GDP hit 295% in China last September, surpassing 257% in the U.S. and an average of 258% in the eurozone, BIS data show.

Consumers are hoarding cash, with many refusing to take out loans.

Other countries – most notably Japan –  have been through similar processes, almost always painful.

As WSJ goes on to note, economists at Société Générale in a recent report said Chinese policy makers need to learn lessons from Japan and prevent a deleveraging mind-set from becoming entrenched, by restructuring more debts or offering direct income support to households to boost consumption. If not, the economists warned, China could fall into a trap in which even zero interest rates wouldn’t stimulate growth.

“Such a danger seems increasingly relevant for China,” they wrote.

The bottom line is China’s economy is struggling; Beijing knows it but the best they can do are small piece-meal stimulus measures because China (more specifically the Chinese and their corporations) are already at their limit (even greater debt loads than the US).

Authored by Patrick Heuveline via TheConversation.com,

The big idea

People in the U.S. are dying at higher rates than in other similar high-income countries, and that difference is only growing. That’s the key finding of a new study that I published in the journal PLOS One.

In 2021, more than 892,000 of the 3,456,000 deaths the U.S. experienced, or about 1 in 4, were “excess deaths.” In 2019, that number was 483,000 deaths, or nearly 1 in 6. That represents an 84.9% increase in excess deaths in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021.

Excess deaths refer to the actual number of deaths that occur in a given year compared with expected deaths over that same time period based on prior years or, as in this study, in other countries.

In my study, I compared the number of U.S. deaths with those in the five largest countries in Western Europe: England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Those five countries make for a good comparison because they are nearly, if not quite, as wealthy as the U.S. and their combined population is similar in size and diversity to the U.S. population.

I also chose those countries because they were used in an earlier study from another research team that documented a 34.5% increase in excess deaths in the U.S. between 2000 and 2017.

The acceleration of this already alarming long-term trend in excess deaths in the U.S. was exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. experienced higher death rates from COVID-19 compared with similar countries. However, COVID-19 alone does not account for the recent increase in the number of excess deaths in the U.S. relative to comparison countries.

Why it matters

Rising living standards and medical advances through the 20th century have made it possible for people in wealthy countries to live longer and with a better quality of life. Given that the U.S. is the largest economic power in the world, with cutting-edge medical technology, Americans should have an advantage over other countries in terms of life span and death rates.

But in the last 50 years, many countries around the world have outpaced the U.S. in how fast death rates are declining, as revealed by trends in life expectancy.

Life expectancy is an average age at death, and it represents how long an average person is expected to live if current death rates remain unchanged throughout that person’s lifetime. Life expectancy is based on a complex combination of death rates at different ages, but in short, when death rates decline, life expectancy increases.

Compared to about 20 other high-income countries, since around the mid-1970s the U.S. life expectancy has been slipping from about the middle, or median, to the lowest rungs of life expectancy. So the relative stagnation in life expectancy in the U.S. compared with other countries is directly related to the fact that death rates have also declined more slowly in the U.S.

The U.S. has higher death rates than its peer countries due to a variety of causes. Cardiovascular disease prevalence has been an important driver of life expectancy changes across the globe in recent decades. But while death rates from cardiovascular disease have continued to decline in other parts of the world, those rates have stagnated in the U.S..

A key reason for this trend is the rise in obesity, as research shows that obesity increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. High prevalence of obesity in the U.S. also likely contributed to the relatively high death rates from COVID-19.

Another cause is that the U.S. has disproportionately high death rates from intentional injuries in the form of homicides, in particular those caused by firearms. Moreover, it also has high death rates from unintentional injuries, in particular drug overdoses.

People are being exposed to fentanyl without knowing it, and because the synthetic opioid is so highly potent, people are dying in unprecedented numbers.

What other research is being done

While these specific causes of deaths should clearly be health policy priorities today, there might be more fundamental causes to the elevated U.S. death rates.

In the early 1990s, young people in the U.S. between the ages of 15 and 34 were already dying at higher rates than their peers in other countries from a combination of homicides, unintentional injuries – in large part from motor vehicle accidents – and deaths from HIV/AIDS.

Research is underway to understand the more fundamental societal causes that may explain the vulnerability of the U.S. population to successive epidemics, from HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 to gun violence and opioid overdoses.

These include racial and economic inequalities, which combined with a weaker social security net and lack of health care access for all may help explain larger health and death disparities compared to European countries.

The 48-hour Reddit “Blackout” might be coming to an end today. However, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has managed to anger many Redditors this week as moderators closed thousands of subreddits to protest API price changes for third-party apps.  

On Monday, more than 8,000 Reddit communities went dark. Moderators of these forums say the move is to protest the company’s price increases for third-party developers to access its API. Developers such as Apollo, a popular third-party app, warned it would incur a $20 million charge under the new pricing and would shutter operations later this month.  

“We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor,” CEO Huffman wrote in an internal memo to staff on Monday, obtained by The Verge. 

“There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest, we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” the CEO said. He anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online Wednesday. 

Huffman concluded the letter by saying, “I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.” 

We suspect the API changes that go into effect on July 1 are a move by the company to increase a more diversified source of revenue ahead of a future IPO. It appears there’s no reversing course by Huffman. 

Here’s Reddit’s Huffman full letter to employees: 

Hi Snoos,

Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we’ll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The indictment of former President Donald Trump for holding military documents and obstructing the government from taking them is built on a novel legal theory that has multiple weaknesses, according to several lawyers and other experts.

The case has been portrayed in the media as being about Trump’s retaining classified documents from his presidency. However, the charges sidestep that issue and instead use a clause in the Espionage Act that criminalizes a failure to hand over national defense information. The indictment further alleges that Trump and staffer Waltine Nauta hid some documents when the government demanded them through a subpoena.

The alleged Espionage Act violations impose a high burden of proof and raise the question of whether the statute should have been applied to begin with and, if not, whether the underlying investigation should serve as a basis for obstruction charges, some lawyers told The Epoch Times.

“The key legal issue here is the interplay between the Presidential Records Act and the Espionage Act,” said Will Scharf, a former federal prosecutor.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 stipulates that after a president leaves office, the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) takes custody of all his official records.

The law allows former presidents to keep personal documents such as “diaries, journals, or other personal notes” not used for government business.

“If a former President or Vice President finds Presidential records among personal materials, he or she is expected to contact NARA in a timely manner to secure the transfer of those Presidential records to NARA,” NARA’s website states.

However, the Presidential Records Act isn’t a criminal statute. If a former president refuses to turn over some documents or claims obviously official documents as personal, the worst he could face is a civil lawsuit.

There’s little case law on such matters. In 2012, Judicial Watch tried to force former President Bill Clinton to turn over dozens of interview tapes he kept from his presidency. Clinton claimed the tapes were personal and the court sided with him. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, went so far as to argue that the court had no way to second-guess a president’s assertion of what is and isn’t personal.

“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records,” Jackson wrote.

However, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now arguing that former presidents can be charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for possession of documents that they kept from their presidencies.

“That’s a totally novel legal issue,” Scharf said. “It’s never been tested before. The Espionage Act has never been used to prosecute in this sort of a setting.”

Some lawyers believe the Espionage Act can’t be used this way because it wasn’t meant to be used in such a fashion. Before 1978, former presidents owned all documents from their presidencies, including any national defense information. There’s never been any suggestion that their holding on to such documents violated the Espionage Act.

“Congress has been very, very clear … that the act that applies to presidents and former presidents is the Presidential Records Act. The act that applies to everyone else is the Espionage Act, which has different requirements,” said Jesse Binnall, a lawyer that represented Trump in another matter.

Mike Davis of the conservative Article III Project voiced a similar opinion.

“Even if President declassifies his presidential records and takes them when he leaves office, he can still get charged under Espionage Act. … Promise that theory won’t fly with Supreme Court,” he said in a tweet.

Criminal Intent

Much of the indictment rests on the allegation that Trump kept national defense documents “willfully”—with criminal intent.

Yet the document falls short in providing evidence for such intent.

On May 11, 2022, the DOJ obtained a subpoena compelling Trump to turn over all documents with classification markings, including electronic ones.

One of the key claims is that Trump instructed Nauta to move boxes of documents around before his lawyer came to search the boxes for documents in response to the subpoena.

Nauta allegedly moved 64 boxes out of a storage room where Trump kept items and documents from his presidency and moved them to Trump’s residence at the resort. Nauta then moved back 30 boxes shortly before Trump’s then-lawyer, Evan Corcoran, searched the storage room for the subpoenaed documents, according to the indictment, which refers to security camera footage obtained from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort via a subpoena.

Read more here…

The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired, which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a “nightmare scenario.”

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. -Wired

“This report reveals what we feared most,” according to attorney Sean Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”

The government has been using ‘craven interpretations of aging laws’ to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance.

“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

During a March 8 hearing, Wyden pressed Haines to release the panel’s report – after Haines said it should “absolutely” be read by the public. On Friday, that’s exactly what happened after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released it amid a battle with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over various related documents.

“This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own money,” said EPIC law fellow, Chris Baumohl. “Congress must tackle the government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he said (referring to the ongoing political fight over the so-called “crown jewel” of US surveillance, per Wired).

The ODNI’s own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate, in the first place, being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.” -Wired

What’s more, the report notes that it’s relatively easy to “deanonymize and identify individuals” based on data that was originally been anonymized prior to its commercial sale. According to the report, the data can do things like “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records,” posing serious civil liberty concerns over how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.”

The report goes on to say that in times past, access to sensitive information about a person was part of a “targeted” and “predicated” investigation. That’s no longer the case.

“Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, [commercially available information] includes information on nearly everyone,” it reads, adding that both the “volume and sensitivity” of information available for the government to purchase has exploded in recent years thanks to “location-tracking and other features of smartphones” as well as the “advertising-based monetization model” that underpins much of the internet.

According to the ODNI, this data “in the wrong hands” could be used against Americans “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming” – all offenses that have been committed by intelligence agencies and the White House in the past.

“The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation,” reads the report.

Read the report below:

Amazon locked a Microsoft engineer out of his smart home devices for nearly a week after a delivery driver accused him of uttering a racial slur.

According to a June 4 blog post on Medium, Brandon Jackson found himself locked out of his Amazon Echo Show on May 25. When he contacted customer service, he was given the number of an Amazon executive – which he thought was a scam.

“When I connected with the executive, they asked if I knew why my account had been locked,” he wrote. “When I answered I was unsure, their tone turned somewhat accusatory. I was told that the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my ‘Ring doorbell.‘”

Jackson, who is black, said that the accusation was improbable, as many of the delivery drivers in his area are the same race – thus, the racial slur was “highly unlikely.”

Jackson tracked down the time that the driver would have dropped off his package (May 24 at 6:05 p.m.), and compared it  to footage from his home at the time of the incident – revealing that nobody was home at the time of the delivery. Instead, Jackson thinks that his Eufy automated doorbell said to the driver “Excuse me, can I help you?”

“The driver, who was walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message,” wrote Jackson, adding that even after he shared the evidence with Amazon, his account remained locked.

“Despite numerous calls and emails, it wasn’t until Friday afternoon [on May 26] that I received confirmation that the investigation had started,” he wrote, adding that it wasn’t until May 31 that access was finally restored.

In a statement to NTD News, Amazon said: “we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”

More via the Epoch Times;

Impact of the Lockout

While he was locked out of the Amazon account he typically used for his smart home devices, Jackson said he had already thought ahead about alternate ways to control his devices.

“I already had everything set up so if something did fail I have fallbacks so I wasn’t truly in the dark,” Jackson explained in a subsequent video post about the experience. “But I wrote [my blog post] from the perspective of someone who—what if they didn’t do all that.”

Jackson, who is an engineer at Microsoft and is relatively tech savvy, shared his concerns for owners of smart home devices who don’t have the same knowledge base and find themselves locked out in a similar incident.

He said the incident led him to lose trust in Amazon due to how it kept him locked out through the duration of the ordeal.

“I fully support Amazon taking measures to ensure the safety of their drivers. However, I question why my entire smart home system had to be rendered unusable during their internal investigation,” he wrote.

Jackson also argued that Amazon or other companies shouldn’t be able to block people from using the products they purchased because they expressed the wrong opinions.

“If you bought a toaster right, it doesn’t matter what you did, how bad of a person you were how good of a person you are, you still own the toaster at the end of the day right?” Jackson said. “And if you really did do something that was so horrible and bad that shouldn’t be Amazon or Google or Apple’s call to do anything about that. You know, we already have a system set up for that and that’s what you should be going through.”

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Consumer boycotts against “woke” corporations such as Target and Anheuser-Busch are the key to reversing race, gender, and environmental activism in corporate America, according to conservative groups.

That’s because customers ditching companies pushing left-wing policies have given conservative groups the traction they needed to fight them legally.

Scott Shepard is a Fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) and director of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project, a conservative shareholder activist group.

Shepard told The Epoch Times the tide is turning against environmental, social, and governance, or ESG.

“We’re seeing something very different this time. Because it’s not just the conservatives, who are always interested in this sort of thing, it’s the whole country,” Shepard said.

ESG, which started as guidelines, has now turned into heavy-handed mandates on controversial “social justice” ideologies, he said.

And a potential breach of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders will expose businesses to legal action like Shepard’s organization has started.

Even with companies losing billions of dollars, they continue to embrace the concept to the detriment of their shareholders, Shepard said.

Target came under fire for “Pride Month” merchandise, including rainbow-colored onesies for babies and “tuck-friendly” women’s swimsuits for men identifying as women in front-of-the-store displays.

Likewise, consumers boycotted Anheiser-Busch after the company provided transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney with a personalized can of Bud Light which subsequently went viral on social media.

Target and Anheuser-Busch both came out with statements as the boycotts intensified. But they fell short of apologizing or continued to support transgenderism and LGBT causes as consumers stayed away.

Target’s strategy was to blame threats from customers for removing some of the more “controversial” items from their “Pride Month” displays and relocating LGBT items to the back of the store.

Employees at a Target location in Tennessee, where some wore rainbow-flag gear, gave a mixed review on June 13 about how the boycott was impacting sales.

“Sundays and Mondays have been less busy. It’s noticeable if you work here long enough. The past few weeks have been slower,” one employee said.

“It’s kind of hard to say. Day-to-day things are different,” added another.

Anheuser-Busch came out with pro-America ads featuring Clydesdale horses traversing the country shortly after their campaign with Mulvaney.

“We never intended to be a part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer,” Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth said.

Besides Target and Anheuser-Busch’s continued support of Pride Month, business titans such as Citi, Bank of America, Cisco, HP, and Pfizer have all changed their social media icons to Pride-themed logos.

Billionaire Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner, and Shark Tank star, went so far as to call going woke “good for business” over the weekend.

Boycotts Kryptonite For Woke Firms

Shareholder lawsuits could be the key to stopping ESG—and prolonged consumer boycotts are making it possible by inflicting huge losses on “woke” companies, Shepard said.

On June 6, America First Legal (AFL) demanded Target’s corporate books and records amid the backlash against the retailer for selling Pride Month items aimed at children.

The law firm represents NCPPR, a free market public policy research group, where Shepard is a fellow.

AFL, headed by former Trump presidential adviser Stephen Miller, accused Target’s management of a “radical LGBT political agenda that has cost the corporation over $12 billion in market valuation since mid-May 2023,” according to a news release.

The boycotts hit the companies’ market capitalizations, meaning their value dropped on the stock market.

Target’s market capitalization fell from $72.52 billion to $58.61 billion between May 1 and June 10 and was downgraded on Wall Street twice.

Anheuser-Busch’s market cap slid even more—from $132.06 billion to $108.96 billion between April 3 and June 2 and was also downgraded.

Attorneys for AFL said its client has concerns about the possible financial risk posed by selling LGBT-related merchandise since Target admits its customer base is mainly made up of families.

“This dramatic and sudden loss to shareholders is a direct and predictable result of management’s calculated efforts to please its extreme leftist “stakeholders,” almost none of whom shop at Target, and evidence contempt for the corporation’s core customers,” AFL said in a statement.

Shepard said stock value losses demonstrate that “woke” corporate boards and executives care more about an ideology than their shareholders.

“I think it’s now clear people are paying attention,” he said.

“Aside from the hard-left activists, nobody wants trans issues aimed at children; nobody thinks that Target ought to play a central role in deciding whether our children are going to get drawn into all this nonsense,” Shepard said.

If CEOs and corporate board members continue to “pretend” going woke won’t make them broke, Shepard believes they will likely be sued personally.

He predicts executives will be forced to pay back the amount they cost shareholders out of their pockets by “running companies according to their own personal preferences, rather than according to objective, neutral rules of running a business.”

Why Executives Alienate Customers

Woke isn’t going away without a fight, according to Will Hild, executive director of Consumer’s Research, a nonprofit consumer protection group.

Consumer’s Research launched a public information campaign on BlackRock and recently created a “woke alert” for consumers. Those who sign up are notified when companies “cave to the woke mob—so you know the brands attacking your values.”

Read more here…

Massachusetts, where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, has now witnessed a revolt against LGBTQ indoctrination, staged by students at a public middle school. 

The action took place on June 2 at Marshall Simonds Middle School in the suburban Boston town of Burlington, in response to a Pride-themed “spirit day” organized by the school’s Spectrum Club, which is a group of LGBTQ students and their supporters.

The student body was encouraged to dress in rainbow colors and wear rainbow stickers. The school was decorated with Pride flags and posters, rainbow streamers, and “educational” posters.

School officials are in panic mode over kids revolting against “Pride Day”

Kids refused to wear colors and some even chanted that their pronouns are USA pic.twitter.com/xuNBlMCrdq

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 13, 2023

However, according to a letter sent to parents from the school’s principal, many students were not in the mood and created — wait for it — an “unsafe environment.” Her list of “specific acts of intolerance” included:

• “ripping of stickers and pulling down of banners”
• “handmade signs were torn off the walls and crumbled into water fountains”
• “groups of students were heard chanting ‘U.S.A. are my pronouns'” 
• “students glaring intimidatingly at faculty members showing pride”
• “students were shamed into removing their stickers or covering their clothing”

Reports indicate that some of the dissent sprang from the school’s failure to acknowledge Memorial Day. In her letter to parents, Perchase acknowledged that it her staff had made an “error.” Many students wore red, white and blue on the Pride day, with some taking their patriotic display to the next level with face paint.  

Parent Christine Steiner told WCVB that her daughter was offended by an “educational” poster that crossed the line from promoting tolerance of LGBTQ people to taking a shot at straight ones. The poster featured a quote from Tennessee Williams: “What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.” It also depicted two people waving rainbow flags; adhering to the woke rulebook, both were non-white. 

In response to the discord, Perchase said her administration had created a form so students could anonymously report alleged “hateful” incidents that took place that day.  

At a Monday night meeting of Burlington’s Select Board where the audience was dominated by parents of purported LGBTQ middle schoolers, Nancy Bonassera, co-chair of the Burlington Equity Coalition, demanded “consequences” for students who participated in the pushback against Pride.

Her group is also demanding that the school district fill a “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI) director position that’s been left vacant since last year. The also want the Burlington Select Board — comparable to a town council — to “reinstate the recently disbanded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion subcommittee.” 

Instead of all that, it’s time for more parents to ask why schools should be fostering celebrations of any flavor of sexuality. 

Massachusetts isn’t the only blue state to recently see students pushing back against LGBTQ indoctrination. Watch the reaction of students at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, California, when their teacher showed a Pride-flavored video — in a math class.  

…and be sure to listen for the girl asking what parents everywhere should be asking: “Why are you showing this to kids?”

Parents of kids at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, California say this video was played to their kids in math class. The kids clearly didn’t want to watch this pride video so the teacher threatened them with Saturday school to get them to watch it. pic.twitter.com/FUnB9DKYrN

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 11, 2023

By Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves

In the past week, several Twitter users have pointed to government data on retail sales of heavy-duty trucks as one reason why a recession is far off. 

Two examples: 

You want to know a Leading Indicator I use as a #recession warning? Here is a great one 👇

Heavy Weight Trucks sales have predicted every recession since 1973! 🚛

A steep decline is an early warning, that a recession is coming! Right now, Heavy Weight Trucks sales continue to… pic.twitter.com/ozNQKFaByS

— BACH (@MortensenBach) June 9, 2023

Heavy truck sales continue to increase.

Before the past 7 recessions we saw this decline well before the recession started.

You want to talk about leading indicators of a recession? I’ll take this every time.

Yet another clue a recession isn’t imminent like we keep hearing. pic.twitter.com/blLm0bLgiT

— Ryan Detrick, CMT (@RyanDetrick) June 8, 2023

The context of their posts is that because of robust truck orders, the freight market must also be robust. And since the freight market is robust, they believe, it means that the U.S. economy is also robust. They have good reason for believing this. After all, new truck orders are at very high levels and, in a normal cycle, there is a correlation between robust truck orders and freight demand. 

However, FreightWaves readers likely know better. The freight market is not robust. In fact, it is one of the most difficult freight markets in recent years, with comparisons to the 2009 economy among some fleet executives. 

The Twitter posters can be forgiven. 

They are likely just pulling random data charts and drawing their conclusions with little to no freight industry experience and little context. 

But why are new truck orders robust?

COVID screwed up the heavy-duty production cycle

There is a backlog of heavy-duty truck orders. Therefore, the data is not telling us what some think it does. 

In a normal economy, the health of the freight market is correlated with new truck order data. Not this time. The collapse in the freight market is well-documented from a range of sources, including leading industry surveys and bank reports on nationwide freight expenditure.

New truck orders are continuing at robust levels, while the freight market collapses. This shouldn’t happen, so why is this cycle different? 

Mid-sized and large fleets — 100 trucks or more — buy their trucks at regular intervals, regardless of the economy. In fact, some increase purchases during recessions — thanks to incentives from original equipment manufacturers and easy access to drivers. 

Forty-two percent of the trucks on the road are held by fleets with more than 100 trucks. 

From 2020-2022, mid-sized and large fleets were not able to get new truck allotments due to supply chain shortages and a strong retail truck market.

The mid-size and large fleets also held on to trucks longer than usual — two years longer than normal. Some fleets delayed orders in 2020 because of the unprecedented uncertainty and then continued to hold off in 2021 because of the inability to find truck drivers to “seat their trucks.” 

Now, truck drivers are much easier to find, uncertainty about an “apocalypse” is long forgotten and those trucks they held onto for two extra years are worn out.

The largest fleets also know that with the availability of truck drivers (so long “shortage”), they will be able to grow market share. So what is occurring in truck order data is not related to robust freight demand, but rather a bulking of orders from the COVID economy among mid-sized and large fleets. 

The OEMs are aware that the freight market is in recession. This is why they aren’t ramping up production to burn off the backlog. OEMs will keep production at current levels, hoping to time the cycle just in time for a rebound. 

It is possible that the truck OEMs will miss the recession this time around.

A Blinken trip to China has finally been confirmed, following the latest, albeit tense, phone call between the US Secretary of State and his Chinese counterpart Qin Gang. Both sides have said Blinken will be in Beijing on Sunday and Monday. Qin told Blinken in the Wednesday call the US must stop meddling in China’s affairs.

State Dept spokesperson Matthew Miller in a new statement describing the itinerary said, “Blinken will travel to Beijing, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and London, the United Kingdom, June 16-21.” He detailed: “While in Beijing, Secretary Blinken will meet with senior PRC officials where he will discuss the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the US-PRC relationship. He will also raise bilateral issues of concern, global and regional matters, and potential cooperation on shared transnational challenges.”

In prior recent exchanges with Blinken, the Chinese FM urged US to “show respect” and stressed it must stop undermining China’s interests. Blinken, for his part, has said the US wants “to avoid miscalculation and conflict” in restoring direct dialogue with Beijing.

The more forceful new remarks from Qin (compared with the somewhat muted US readout), included a call for Washington to “stop undermining China’s sovereignty, security and development interests in the name of competition.”

Of chief importance on the minds of Beijing officials is the newly inked trade agreement between the United States and Taiwan this month which seeks to “strengthen and deepen the economic and trade relationship between.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning at the time said the deal “gravely violates” Beijing’s “one-China” policy under which it views Taiwan as a wayward province and has vowed to retake it by force, if necessary. — UPI

This newly announced weekend trip by Blinken was supposed to happen in February, but that was abruptly canceled (or perhaps just “postponed”), following the Chinese “spy balloon” shootdown incident early that month and ensuing war of words and Chinese denials of wrongdoing.

Earlier this month, Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu told the Shangri-La Dialogue security summit that any potential future conflict between the United States and China would bring “unbearable disaster for the world”.

But he said both rival powerful countries should be able to grow together and to avoid confrontation. His words came as the US condemned what it called unsafe and aggressive maneuvers by a Chinese PLA Navy warship in the Taiwan Strait as the American destroyer USS Chung-Hoon conducted a ‘freedom of navigation’ transit on June 3rd. 

Lately, China has been ramping up its flights and naval maneuvers near Taiwan, and now somewhat routinely violates the Taiwan Strait median line. The US is at the same time sending more and more Navy warships through the strait, provoking Beijing.