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Richard Ebeling is a professor of economics at Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.

News outlets in the United States and in Europe have again been drawing attention to the oppression and persecution being suffered by the Uyghurs in the western region of China known as Xinjiang. Somewhere between one and two million of them have been rounded up and placed in reeducation camps by the Chinese government, with smuggled out stories telling of beatings, torture, organ-transplant harvesting, gang rape, and ideological indoctrination sessions, along with executions.

The Uyghurs are a combination of Muslim Turkic groups who number between 12 and 20 million. After at least two short lived attempts in the 1930s and 1940s to gain national independence from the Chinese governments that replaced the Manchu Dynasty after its fall in 1911, Xinjiang was once more politically joined to China following the coming to power of the Chinese communists under Mao Zedong in 1949.

The Uyghurs, like the Tibetans, and other minority groups in China, have been the victims of Chinese political and ethnic imperialism. The Chinese government has attempted to assure the political unification and integration of, especially, Tibet and Xinjiang by a policy of ethnic and cultural sterilization. For decades, the Chinese authorities in Beijing have instigated Han Chinese population migrations to these two areas to dilute and reduce to a demographic minority the Uyghur and Tibetan peoples within their own lands.

The Chinese government has attempted to persecute and eradicate the practice of Islam and Buddhism, respectively, among these peoples. The Chinese military has desecrated religious temples and places of worship, murdered and imprisoned religious leaders, forced women of both groups to marry Han Chinese to genetically cleanse Xinjiang and Tibet of their indigenous populations, and have restricted or prohibited the learning and speaking of the distinct local languages and practicing of cultural customs.

Though, of course, never said officially or publicly, the Chinese governments policy, to guarantee political solidarity and unity throughout each and every corner of the territory of China is to make the country one racially single group, the Han Chinese. A similar fate would mostly likely face the people of Taiwan, if the Chinese government succeeds in imposing unification on what it considers to be a renegade island-province of the Peoples Republic of China.

The government of Taiwan officially counts 95 percent of the islands population to be ethnically Han Chinese, with a handful of indigenous minority groups. However, in a variety of public opinion polls over the last decade, anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of those participating in the surveys considered themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. So even if the ethnic divide does not distinguish the mainland Chinese from the nearly 24 million people who live on the island, any forced integration following a Chinese government invasion of Taiwan would involve a cultural as well as ideological cleansing of subversive ideas, attitudes, and practices. A dress rehearsal is being witnessed in Hong Kong today.

While the Chinese government is currently being especially ruthless in imposing its rule over these areas under its political jurisdiction, it should not be forgotten that governments have always been jealous of ceding even one inch of any land under its control. Wars have been fought and rebellions have been put down over claims to territories said to be linked to the larger mother country due to history, race, language, culture, religion, or simple insistence that a piece of land, along with the people and resources upon it, is essential to that nations political survival, economic security and welfare, or national defense against external threats from surrounding governments.

When criticized for its domestic treatments of the Uyghurs or Tibetans, the Chinese authorities, like virtually every other government when similarly challenged for imposing itself on some portion of its population not wanting such generous and insisted upon paternalism, has declared that it is an uncalled-for foreign intervention into its internal affairs, which undermines that countrys right to national self-determination in deciding its own domestic affairs in its own way.

What is noticeable and important in all such references to self-determination and freedom from external intervention, is the meaning of national self-determination and one governments freedom from the interference of any other government in what and how it uses its political authority and force within the boundaries of its jurisdiction as demarcated on a map.

That is, it is the self-determination of a group or collective (usually defined by race, ethnicity, language, religion, culture or common history) that is referred and called for and defined as a nation. However, the meaning of a nation as a definable group of people has often been recognized as ambiguous and open to disagreement and debate. (See my article,The Meaning and the Mind of an American.)

It can be said that the modern notion and conception of a nation and national self-determination emerged out of the French Revolution. Prior to that, allegiance and loyalty was to the king who ruled over the state in which his subjects resided. But with the beheading of the French King, Louis XVI, in 1793, the new cry became that what bound people together was that joint membership within the nation-state in which they lived. This was joined with the democratic appeal that in the new nation, the people ruled themselves through those they appointed to political office.

Thus, through the theory and practice of democracy, it was now said, the nation was nothing but the expression of the freedom of the people to govern themselves without interference from others not part of the particular nation-state. Every people, it was argued, should be free to be self-governing, and not tied to a king or prince. They should be allowed to democratically make the choice to remain part of the nation-state in which they find themselves or break off and join some other nation-state to which they feel more kindred, or to form their own separate nation-state.

Since the monarchies, especially in the 19thcentury in central and eastern Europe were resistant to concede land and people over which they ruled, there were calls for wars of national liberation, some of which succeeded, but others that failed. In all of this there was one entity in these struggles whose autonomy and freedom to choose was most often submerged and lost in the fight for national self-determination: the individual and his right to liberty.

As the British historian, Alfred Cobban, expressed it concisely in his book onNational Self-Determination(1945), as the 19thcentury progressed, The emphasis was more on the sovereignty of the nation than on the rights of individuals. One of the starting principles upon which the rationale for democratic self-rule was based was that rights resided in individuals, to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. The ultimate sovereign in society was the individual with his right to peacefully go about his own personal affairs without interference and molestation, and to voluntarily associate and interact with all other free and sovereign individuals on the basis of mutual agreement and consent.

The purpose of governments, existing or being formed, in this classical liberal idea and ideal of peace and freedom was the securing and protecting of each individuals rights. Hence, liberal democracy was the institutional mechanism by which each of the sovereign persons within a country was free and safe from the aggressions of his neighbors or a neighboring nation by a political association for purposes of self-defense.

But even before the guillotine blade was dry of the blood from the severing of Louis XVIs head from his royal body, the individual Frenchman, from whom all rights flowed, was told that in the name of defending the revolution to secure those rights he needed to be subservient to and maybe sacrificed for the freedom of the French nation as a whole. The nation as a collective distinct from and superior to the individual person was in whose name was made the case of sovereignty and national self-determination.

Political nationalism replaced philosophical and political individualism as the basis for overthrowing oppressive rulers, especially those of a foreign monarch or people. Italy was to be unified and freed from the Hapsburg occupiers. The Greeks, Romanians, Bulgarians, and other distinct Balkan peoples were to be liberated from Turkish tyranny but squabbled with each other about where the boundary lines between them should be drawn. The Hungarians wanted to be free from the Austrian monarchy but did not want to give the same respect to other ethnic and linguistic peoples living on Hungarian territory. The Poles unsuccessfully rose up against their Russian rulers more than once but dreamed of a free Poland that would encroach on many other surrounding peoples.

Once established as sovereign nations, either before or after the First World War, each was jealous of its borders, often hungry for territorial expansion, and intolerant of ethnic and linguistic minorities within their respective nation-states. Especially were the governments of many of these newly formed nation-states suspicious and oppressive against those minorities.

Such minorities were forced to send their children to government schools in which the majoritys language was mandated as the form of written and spoken communication. Government business and commercial regulations and taxes were used to discriminate and penalize the minority groups.

Such minorities were pressured to leave, or in harsher situations expelled. Following a bloody and destructive war in 1919-1922 between the Greeks and the Turks over control of a large part of the Anatolian peninsula, 1.5 million Greeks were expelled from Turkey and 500,000 Turks were forced out of Greece, but only after. During the fighting, thousands of both Greeks and Turks were massacred as a form of revenge and ethnic cleansing.

After the cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of the Germans under the Nazi regime in World War II, with the murder of six million Jews, three million Poles, and many millions more of Russians and Ukrainians and other peoples across the continent, the governments of Eastern Europe took their revenge by brutalizing and expelling nearly 12 million Germans from countries where their ancestors had sometimes lived for centuries. (See my review of,A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans, 1944-1945.)

What was witnessed in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, as each of the ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups assaulted and mass murdered each other in the pursuit of national self-determination as defined by territories claimed by each collective group, including the expelling of each other from conquered lands, has had many antecedents in modern history.

Ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities are viewed as threats to the unity of the nation-state as identified by demographic markers of the dominant group. The minority may want independence or want to break off and politically join a neighboring nation-state that increases its territorial size and economic strength vis-a-vis the country containing such restive minorities. And, finally, it weakens the unifying sense of identity and shared destiny of the majority group.

There are many ideas that Europe has exported to and shared with the rest of the world over the centuries, especially during its period of colonial control of many parts of Asia and Africa, and the Americas. Among them have been liberalism, nationalism and socialism. Liberalisms legacy in some of these countries has been the ideal if not the actual practice of representative government, rule of law, and the idea of certain personal freedoms and civil liberties to be recognized and respected by the political authority.

But seemingly even more influential intellectual products imported from Europe by other parts of the world have been nationalism and socialism. China has adopted a blend of both. The Chinese communist leadership has successfully used both to establish and maintain its power. The 19thcentury wars that, particularly, Great Britain and France fought and won against the Imperial Chinese government, followed by defeats at the hands of the Japanese more than once, and the imposition of what was perceived as unequal treaties upon the Manchu monarchy that permitted foreign administered areas in port cities and the stationing of foreign military forces in the country, all created deep seats of resentment and feelings of humiliation among the growing educated segments of Chinese society in the 20thcentury.

At the same time, there has been little or no notion of Western-style individual liberty and limited government in the long stretch of Chinese history. And the few voices that captured glimmering of such ideas were few and without any noticeable influence. Instead, the country was burdened through the centuries with political absolutism, the weight of traditionalism, and an educational system based on blind memorization with little encouragement of creative and independent thought. (On a few past Chinese voices pointing in the direction of liberty, see my article,Tigers are Less Dangerous than Tax Collectors and Political Paternalists.)

Both the Nationalist (or Kuomintang) Party of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek before 1949 and the Communist Party under Mao Zedong and, now, Xi Jinping, have offered political ideologies based on national rebirths of the Chinese people, and a reclaiming of Chinas rightful place among the nations of the world. Indeed, Xi Jinping dreams a dream of China once more the Middle Kingdom of political, economic, and military greatness that will again be the nation around which the rest of the world revolves. (See my article,Economic Armaments and Chinas Global Ambitions.)

The other ideological ingredient in the Chinese mix has been socialism. Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek in the 1920s and 1930s placed emphasis on the collective interests of the nation coming before the independence and freedom of the individual citizen, and looked to the socialist experiment in Soviet Russia as a model from which to learn in rebuilding the new China. The free enterprise lessons to be learned from the freer market environment of a place such as Shanghai, which was governed as a practically free city under the protection of especially the British, Americans and the French between the two World Wars, was instead viewed with envy and anger. (See my article,The History of Shanghai as a Tale of Successful Capitalism.)

Mao and the Chinese communists combined the new nationalism, particularly in the face of resistance to the Japanese invasion and occupation of a large part of the Chinese mainland between 1937 to 1945, with the promise of a thorough renewal of the country in the aftermath of wars destruction through socialist ownership and central planning. That it was a huge human disaster as a result of compulsory collectivization, mass terror, forced labor camps, government created famines in the name of a Great Leap Forward for rapid industrialization, and then the societal cataclysm from ten years of the Cultural Revolution until Chairman Maos death in 1976, has all been swiped under the rug of history by Maos heirs. (See my reviews, ofLaogai The Chinese GulagandRed in Tooth and Claw: Twenty-six Years in Chinese Communist PrisonsandHungry Ghosts: Maos Secret FamineandMao: The Unknown Story.)

Chinas national socialism Socialism with Chinese Characteristics has combined the worst of both collectivist ideologies with a vast and minutely intrusive surveillance system of ever-watchful Big Brother. And one in which, the all-powerful state, according to one recentinternational surveyof peoples trust in their government recorded that among the Chinese polled, the communist regime is trusted by 82 percent of the population. A demonstration of the power of the closed society in which many if not most people only really know what the government wants them to know or in which the people asked were fearful of expressing any real doubts they may have about the regime they live under, or both.

But maintenance of such apparent unity in thought can only be assured, in the minds of the Communist Party leadership, when the nation is placed above the individual, when all are made subservient to the nations plan for making China great again, when all dissent and difference is purged from the national body. One leader, one Party, one Nation, one People.

That is why President Xi Jinpings long-run central plan for Chinas global hegemony to come a true legacy for a farseeing Chinese emperor in all but name can brook no multicultural diversity. Ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity is dissent from the common good and destiny of a chosen people. There is only one permissible national self-determination, and that is of a single Chinese people as a whole defined by one language, one ethnicity, one ideological and cultural identity, and one government-controlled and directed future.

The Uyghurs and Tibetans are alien and subversive bodies in the Chinese nation that must be absorbed or eliminated. Beginning with Mao and now with terrifying single-mindedness by Xi Jinping, the irradiation of these foreign elements are to be neutralized. This truly makes the Chinese political system an ideology of national socialism in the footsteps of others that have preceded it.

[Originally posted on American Institution for Economic Research (AIER)]

The Uyghurs as Victims of Chinese National Socialism was last modified: February 8th, 2021 by Richard Ebeling

Read the original:
The Uyghurs as Victims of Chinese National Socialism | The Freedom Pub - Somewhat Reasonable - Heartland Institute

The paranoid purge continues

The socialists need to convince us all now, that conservatives are domestic terrorists and white supremacists.

According to comrade Pelosi we are the enemy within Congress. The only hate speech allowed is that from the all-knowing socialists and big brother tech. I see that Facebook has recently canceled Pat Fischer comments on the Daily Record letters and defending her own. The comments from socialists too fake and nutty to write their own letters are all thats left in the comment section.

Im sure they are good people, just confused/conflicted. Intolerant socialists patting themselves on the back without dissent. No such thing as freedom of speech that does not agree with theirs. They always lose arguments when freedom is allowed to flourish. Freedom bad, government good. Females are males and males are females. We can build new energy sources, roads, and infrastructure without mining or fossil fuels. Vaccinate Gitmo prisoners first. Teach sex-ed in kindergarten. Make everyone else pay for worthless college indoctrination degrees and to have their children aborted. Rewrite history so we wont repeat it. And do it all for free. Now lets get loaded!

Not only do they need President Trump out of office, they need to destroy him and any others that believe America is great. Aint gonna happen socialists. Youre already so nervous you are now praising law enforcement. You are also vetting the National Guard for any that have supported Trump. You are pursuing a worthless unconstitutional impeachment and again on false accusations out of pure hatred. You have been inciting violence for the past four years! You talk of unity now?

That fence up around the Capitol is another one of your great ideas to unite us. Looks like any other totalitarian regime now. Heck, poor old Joe isnt even trying to run the office. You and your swamp are telling him what to do! We now have a fake president and fake news! If our elections have become corrupted, democracy of and for the people is finished. The socialists spent the last four years contesting our elections. With them in charge, we may never know now. Communist Russia and China are proud and happy America is last again. Oh well if it gets miserable enough in America, the illegals and others escaping socialism may decide to stay home instead.

We choose truth over facts J.Biden Doublespeak G.Orwell, 1984

Continued here:
Letter: The socialist agenda is running amok in the U.S. - Daily Record-News

Putin's popularity is fading (Pic: Herman von Rompuy/flickr)

The mass protests in Russia are a product of poverty, lack of democracy and inequality under president Vladimir Putin.

Russian average real incomes have fallen for five of the past seven years, and fell 3.4 percent last year alone. In 2020, the average Russian had 11 percent less to spend than in 2013and workers are the hardest hit.

A series of reports have shown that over the last 30 years Russia has become the most unequal country in the world.

A 2017 study found the richest 10 percent of Russians owned 87 percent of all the countrys wealth, compared with 76 percent in the US.

The reality for ordinary Russians is soaring unemployment, rampant coronavirus, totally inadequate healthcare and falling wages.

And if they speak out or demonstrate they face harsh repression.

As Putins popularity faded, new laws were passed last year cracking down on campaigning online, restricting protests even further and giving the police more powers.

Alexei Navalny has emerged as a central figure channelling opposition to Putin because of bitter battles inside the ruling class since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The end of the East European regimes was not a move from a type of socialism to capitalism. Since 1928 what existed in Russia was a new form of class society, state capitalism.

On the ruins of the defeat of the revolution of 1917, the state bureaucracy had become a new ruling class based on its control of the means of production.

So the move towards free market capitalism was a political reorganisation of the existing system, not a social revolution.

Chris Harman, then Socialist Worker editor, described the process as a move sideways from one form of capitalism to another. But the move to market capitalism from the late 1980s was used to hammer ordinary people.

Neoliberal

Joseph Stiglitz was once the chief economist and vice president of the World Bank. But he later turned against the neoliberal assault on Russia.

He said, The people were told that capitalism was going to bring new, unprecedented prosperity.

In fact, it brought unprecedented poverty, indicated not only by a fall in living standards, but by decreasing life spans and enormous other social indicators showing a deterioration in the quality of life.

The number of people in poverty in Russia rose to somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, with more than one out of two children living in families below the poverty line

Boris Yeltsin was the first post-Soviet president. His rule balanced between three groups.

One group was made up of former KGB and security service personnel who still had central roles in government.

They distrusted Yeltsin as likely to sell out to the West. In return he tried to sideline them.

Another group had family or other close personal links to Yeltsin.

Some were close to the former regime figures but wanted to not be directly associated with them. A third group was the oligarchs who grabbed many of Russias most lucrative business sectors. They profited as the shock therapy beggared tens of millions of ordinary people.

They gorged on the privatisations, sell-offs and general economic chaos that made bribery and looting possible for the most powerful.

Often they had links to the previous Communist regime but also looked to deal with Western multinationals and politicians. Take the example of Oleg Deripaska, who at one time was Russias richest man. In 2008 it was revealed that Peter Mandelson, Labour right winger and European Union commissioner, had met with Deripaska on his superyacht.

Mandelson was said to have given Deripaska trade concessions worth up to 50 million a year. George Osborne, then Tory shadow chancellor, also met Deripaska as did Andrew Feldman, the top Tory fundraiser.

The oligarchs were therefore partly enmeshed with the other Russian ruling elites, but also had separate interests. Putin, once he became president in 1999, did not trust them to follow his lead.

To consolidate his own power he began to clash with them and occasionally to liquidate themfinancially or physically. Its one reason why some of them ended up living in London, which they dubbed Moscow on Thames.

Navalny has emerged as a politician capable of falsely claiming to express some of the popular feeling against Putin. But he also speaks for sections of the rich who have been left out by Putin.

He has been through several political shifts. Navalny began as a classic neoliberal demanding the market should be let rip, privatisation rammed through everywhere and workers rights dismantled.

That wasnt very popular. So he rediscovered himself as a Russian nationalist, In 2006 he facilitated the annual Russian March which attracts antisemites, Islamophobes and fascists.

Protesters chant, Russia for the Russians and some speakers push homophobic and racist conspiracy theories. Swastikas were displayed on some of the demonstrations he supported.

In 2011 Navalny appeared in a video where he compared Muslim migrants to a cockroach infestation.

But building support through nationalism and racism is a crowded field. The fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky came third in the last parliamentary elections and has substantial support for his vile programme.

And the state itself champions hatred of Muslims and minorities.

The 19992000 battle of Grozny, just as Putin took over the presidency, saw the total destruction of the Chechen capital. It was meant as a terrifying warning to Muslims who demanded independence from the Russian state.

More recently the state has set up or manipulated terror attacks as a way of demonising Muslims and justifying extra state powers.

During a wave of protests against Putin ten years ago, Navalny discovered that more left wing ideas were popular.

He changed his pitch to the elastic concept of being anticorruption. Navalny also takes up issues such as pay rises for state workers and better pensions for all.

He is sometimes portrayed as a puppet of the West. Certainly Joe Biden has used the repression of recent protests to signal a more aggressive line against Russian than existed under Donald Trump.

Showing the traditional hypocrisy about democracy, the US state department rushed to condemn the attacks on Navalnys supporters.

Nationalist

But Navalny is more than a front for the US and the Nato nuclear alliance. He can survive politically at the moment only by continuing to put forward Russian nationalist views.

The emergence of a genuine left opposition to Putin is complicated by the fake oppositions which have repeatedly emerged. They cluster around neoliberalism or a desire to return to Stalinism.

The last major set of protests was in 2011, the snow revolution that followed rigged parliamentary elections.

They featured three main leaders. One was Navalny.

Also prominent was Boris Nemtsov, who had been a key supporter of Yeltsin including being vice president in the 1990s. He then became an outspoken critic of Putin.

But his opposition was on the basis of a return to the early days of a free market tearing into peoples liveshardly an attractive programme.

Nemtsov was then assassinated in 2015 two days before a planned demonstration over the impact of the financial crisis in Russia and against Russian involvement in Ukraines civil war.

Sergei Udaltsov played another important role. He is widely seen as the left opposition to Putin and heads the Vanguard of Red Youth.

But his leftism is a hankering for the old Soviet Union. Udaltsov poses with pictures of Stalin and defends the horrors of the 1930s, when all the gains of the 1917 revolution were wiped out.

It is the main parliamentary opposition to Putin, taking over 13 percent of the vote at thehighly controlled and corruptparliamentary election in 2016.

But it serves as an obstacle to the emergence of a real left. It generally props up Putin rather than opposing him. However sections of the Communists now seem ready to support Navalny.

The courageous protests in recent months deserve much better political representation than all the main forces that claim to be an opposition.

Neither reformed liberalism or a return to Stalinism will deliver what ordinary people need. The hope is that, as protesters take on Putin and his state thugs, more workers will be drawn into active opposition to the regime.

And that the real ideas of socialism and 1917 will be reborn on a mass scale.

Londongrad: From Russia with Cash: The Inside Story of the Oligarchs

by Mark Hollingsworth

9.99

Ukraine: imperialism, war and the left

International Socialism article by Rob Ferguson

bit.ly/UkraineISJ

Belarus: revolt in the shadow of Stalinism

International Socialism article by Tom Tengely-Evans

bit.ly/BelarusISJ

Originally posted here:
Why the protests in Russia? - Socialist Worker

TipRanks

How important are dividends to a stock investors profits? Speaking before the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) on October 15, 2007, investing guru John Bogle laid out the case: Over the past 81 years reinvested dividend income accounted for approximately 95 percent of the compound long-term return earned by the companies in the S&P 500. These stunning figures would seem to demand that mutual funds highlight the importance of dividend income. So in other words, dividends are pretty important! Of course, right now the average stock on the S&P 500 is only paying about a 2% dividend yield, which isnt a lot. If you want to do better than that, though, the REIT sector is a great place to begin your search for high-yield dividend stocks. REITs are companies that acquire, own, operate, and manage real estate portfolios, usually some combination of residential or commercial real properties, or their associated mortgage loans and mortgage-backed securities. Tax law requires that these companies return profits directly to shareholders, and most of them choose dividends as their vehicle of choice for compliance, resulting in frequent high dividend yields across the sector. The slowly ebbing COVID pandemic was hard on real estate managers, as tenants had trouble making rents and owners had trouble leasing vacant space. However, BTIG analyst Tim Hayes believes there are reasons to stay bullish on CRE properties specifically. "While we recognize the headwinds to commercial real estate (CRE) fundamentals and the potential risk to equity/earnings power, we believe there are several reasons to be constructive, especially with the sector trading at a discount to historical levels and offering attractive dividend yields at wide spreads to benchmark rates," Hayes commented. Against this backdrop, weve opened up the TipRanks database to get the latest stats on Hayes CRE choices. These are stocks that the analyst initiated Buy ratings on, pointing out their high dividend yield. We are talking about at least 9% here. Ares Commercial Real Estate (ACRE) The first dividend pick we are looking at is Ares Commercial Real Estate, a company focused on the commercial real estate mortgage sector. Ares boasts a diversified portfolio featuring office space, apartments, hotels, and mixed-use properties mainly across the Southeast and West. The company has over $2 billion invested in 49 separate loans, 95% of which are senior mortgage loans. At the end of October, the company released 3Q20 earnings (the last reported quarter), showing $22.4 million in total revenue, for a 13% year-over-year gain. The 45-cents earnings per common share was up 40% since the prior year. Furthermore, Ares closed a $667 million commercial real estate collateralized loan obligation, with firmed up funding on 23 senior loans. On the dividend front, Ares declared in December its 4Q20 dividend. The payment, at 33 cents per common share, was paid out on January 15 and is fully covered by current income levels. At current rates, the dividend annualizes to $1.32 and gives an impressive yield of 10.50%. Among the bulls is Hayes, who wrote: We believe shares of ACRE are unfairly discounted relative to other commercial mREITs given strong Ares sponsorship, a very healthy balance sheet, and limited exposure to at-risk assets. In his view, this leaves the company well positioned to face the headwinds from COVID-19. In line with these comments, Hayes rates ACRE a Buy, and his $13.50 price target implies a 10% upside from current levels. (To watch Hayes track record, click here) Only one other analyst has posted a recent ACRE review, also rating the stock a Buy, which makes the analyst consensus here a Moderate Buy. Shares are priced at $12.28, and their $12.75 average price target suggests room for modest ~4% growth. (See ACRE stock analysis on TipRanks) KKR Real Estate Finance Trust (KREF) Next up we have KKR, which operates in the commercial real estate sector, with almost half of its holdings in the states of New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. The company both owns and finances commercial properties; 83% of its activities are with apartment dwellings and office spaces in desirable urban locations. KKRs quality can be seen in the companys quarterly results. The liquidity position was strong KKR reported $700.6 million available at the end of 3Q20, the last quarter reported. The 56-cent EPS was up 7% sequentially, and 36% year-over-year. Further evidence of KKRs sound position came at the beginning of January, when the announced it had closed 7 new commercial loans in Q4, totaling $565.4 million. This level of activity is a clear sign that KKR is recovering from the pandemic-related economic turndown. The solid foundation put the company in position to continue its dividend which has been kept reliable for four years now. The most recent declaration, made in December, was for a 43-cent per common share dividend that was paid out in mid-January. That rate gives an annual payment of $1.72 per common share, and a robust yield of 9.7%. Covering KREF, Hayes is most impressed by the companys move back toward proactive loan origination, saying, We view 4Q20 origination activity to be in line with pre-pandemic production, and demonstrates a shift from defense to offense as transaction activity has picked up and the capital markets remain accommodative. We expect increased capital deployment to support earnings power and dividend coverage, and could potentially warrant an increase in the dividend as the macroeconomic outlook improves. To this end, Hayes gives KREF a Buy and sets a $19.50 price target that indicates ~6% growth from current levels. (To watch Hayes track record, click here) Wall Street has been keeping quiet on all things KREF, and the only other recent review also recommends a Buy. Put together, the stock has a Moderate Buy consensus rating. Meanwhile, the average price target stands at 19.26 and implies a modest ~5% upside. (See KREF stock analysis on TipRanks) Starwood Property Trust (STWD) For the third stock on Hayes list of picks, we turn to Starwood, a commercial mortgage REIT with a varied portfolio of first mortgages and mezzanine loans, in the $50 million to $500 million range. The company operates in the US and Europe, boasts a $5.9 billion market cap, and has offices in New York, London, and San Francisco. Starwoods high-end portfolio has brought it solid earnings, even during the corona recession of 2020. The company recorded $152 million in GAAP earnings for 3Q20, coming out to 53 cents per share, for gains of 8% sequentially and 6% year-over-year. With that in the background, we can note the companys dividend, which has been held steady at 48 cents per share for over two years. The last declaration was made in December, and the dividend was paid out on January 15. At the current rate, it annualizes to $1.92 and the yield is 9.23%. Once again, were looking at a stock that Hayes recommends to Buy. We view STWD to be one of the few blue chips in the commercial mREIT sector given its size, liquidity, best-in-class management team, strong balance sheet, and diversified investment platform which has consistently generated stronger ROEs than peers. To that end, STWD is one of few commercial mREITs that neither restructured its liabilities with expensive rescue capital nor cut its dividend since the onset of COVID-19, Hayes opined. Overall, there is little action on the Street heading STWD's way right now, with only one other analyst chiming in with a view on the company's prospects. An additional Buy rating means STWD qualifies as a Moderate Buy. However, the $21 average price target suggests shares will remain range bound for the foreseeable future. (See STWD stock analysis on TipRanks) To find good ideas for dividend stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.

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Multiple Championship-Winning Ninth-Grader Develops State-of-the-Art Chess Guidebook to Teach Beginning Players Powerful Techniques and Strategies -...

GM Alireza Firouzja hasn't given many interviews yet, but during a live broadcast of the Opera Euro Rapid tournament he opened up about a wide range of topics such as his experience in 2020, being respected as a top player, playing against GM Magnus Carlsen and GM Hikaru Nakamura, social media, and the future of OTB chess.

For about an hour, Firouzja appeared as a guest alongside IM Anna Rudolf and IM Levy Rozman during their broadcast on Nakamura's Twitch channel on Sunday, the second day of the Opera Euro Rapid tournament.

The segment, quite a cheerful and insightful interview, was separately uploaded to Nakamura's YouTube channel. Here you can watch it in full, and below you'll find a selection of quotes, sometimes slightly corrected for English grammar.

Still just 17 years old, Firouzja has been racing up the rankings and is now playing for first place in all the events he is participating in.As the youngest player in the world rated over 2700, he will be the world number 13 in the next FIDE rating list, when the results of the Tata Steel Chess Tournament are calculated. It feels like he's been around for many, many years already.

It's mind-boggling to remember that he scored his third grandmaster norm only three years ago, at the 2018 Aeroflot Openby the way one of many tournaments that has been canceled this year due to the pandemic.

Firouzja's breakthrough tournament was the World Rapid Championship in December 2018, when he finished in an astonishing sixth place as the 169th seed. A year later, he came in second behind Carlsen.

Shortly before, in early December 2019, Firouzja stopped representing Iran and nowadays plays under the FIDE flag while living in Chartres, France, about 90 km (56 mi) southwest of Paris.

"Everything is good here, in the city we live here in France," Firouzja told Rozman and Rudolf. "It is a very big pandemic going on now so there's not much to do. We are just staying at home."

He does speak a bit of French and interestingly, he is taking French lessons online with a teacher and revealed that he continued to do so during Wijk aan Zee.

Firouzja has been somewhat lucky as it comes to over-the-board chess during the pandemic as he got to play in almost all the top tournaments that did happen: Prague (which he won), Norway Chess (second place), and Tata Steel (shared third). "I have been, I think, the most active player in top chess!" smiled Firouzja.

He added: "It's very hard to find motivation even for working on chess because there are not many tournaments. I was a bit lucky that I got over-the-board tournaments for three months. A lot of people don't even have that."

Firouzja has been very active online as well, for example in the Magnus Carlsen Tour last year and in many Titled Tuesdays and the Speed Chess Championship here on Chess.com. In many of those events, he got to play the two most successful players of 2020: Carlsen and Nakamura.

"They are two very different players," he commented on that. "Everybody knows that it is harder for me to play against Hikaru in rapid and blitz than Magnus. I have much better results against Magnus. They are very different players with very different styles and they are both very good of course in all the formats. I never played Hikaru in classical but I hope I could play him once and we will see."

Asked why, Firouzja said: "Maybe because Hikaru beat me a lot when I was a kid! That fear is still there."

Everybody knows that it is harder for me to play against Hikaru in rapid and blitz than Magnus [...] Maybe because Hikaru beat me a lot when I was a kid!

As Rozman pointed out, Firouzja is of the new generation of players who meet the absolute top GMs online, sometimes in quite a few games, before playing them over-the-board. Another example is GM Nihal Sarin.

Firouzja only needed one super-tournament to get the full respect of his colleagues at the top, because he came second there: Norway Chess, in October 2020. However, he also said that he doesn't think about these things that much: "I am thinking about improving and have fun."

But however you want to look at it, Firouzja is the biggest upcoming star at the moment, and that comes with some pressure. Or not?

"I don't think it's pressure if you don't make it as pressure," Firouzja said. "The fact that at least I have a shot is a good thing for me, I can try, so it's good. I don't feel the pressure."

Rozman and Rudolf noted that it was a bit surprising not to see Firouzja playing in the Opera Euro Rapid, not even as a wildcard. Apparently, some forces behind the scenes made that impossible for this event. "We are still talking about some agreement, we are still in negotiations," was all Firouzja could say about it.

It probably means that one of the big players in the chess market might be interested in working closely with the Iranian prodigy. In that light, it makes sense for him to start becoming active on social media as well. As of this week, you can find Firouzja on Twitter and on Instagram, alongside the Twitch channel where he streams with his brother Mohammadreza.

"I understood that social media is also very much needed," said Firouzja. "Somebody like me, I have many fans, so I have to somehow try and reach them and be in touch with them."

It was also on Twitch where Firouzja first gave his reaction on the last-round incidentin Wijk aan Zee. Speaking to Rozman and Rudolf, Firouzja repeated his point of view: "There were many reports about what happened. I was a bit angry and everybody saw what happened. The organizer was not right and the fact that they apologized was very good, of course, as I said in my stream. I am happy about the fact that they understood their mistake. That's good, I think."

Firouzja had provided similar comments a few days ago on his Twitch channel.

Tata Steel is one of the most prestigious but also the longest tournament. It runs 16 days in total, and because of the quarantine period, Firouzja and his father came to the Netherlands more than a week before the start.

As it turns out, he was not a big fan of that and he hopes to see shorter top events in the future: "We were in Wijk aan Zee for one month and it's just crazy. Norway Chess is a very good step in the right direction, I think. They make the time control [shorter] and also [it takes fewer days]. That's very good. I think each top tournament has to be only one week if you want to make it more popular. And the game has to finish after four hours, I think, maximum."

If it was up to Firouzja, more tournaments would be rapid, which is his favorite time control."I like it a lot. You can't train it, you just have to play it by feeling. I think people who are very good at blitz are also good at rapid."

Besides the second half of the Candidates Tournament, now scheduled for the second half of April, it's unclear when we'll see the next big over-the-board tournament. However, close to the end of the interview, Firouzja (perhaps somewhat prematurely) revealed that the next Norway Chess tournament is happening in May. That probably means that, virus permitting, it's then and there that we'll see him behind the (physical) board again!

Excerpt from:
Alireza Firouzja: 'I am thinking about improving and having fun' - Chess.com