Month: December 2017

Authored by Kevin Haley via The Daily Caller,

As the Christmas holiday weekend set in, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee released a report revealing the Senate has spent $1.5 million on workplace harassment settlements since 1998.

The data, provided by the Office of Compliance, a little known administrative body that has quietly settled dozens of complaints against congressional offices, provides little by way of details, beyond an itemized list of violations and the corresponding settlement.

GOP Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, who chairs the Rules Committee, said further particulars cannot be made public, in order to respect the confidentiality afforded to victims.

“While the Rules Committee has been eager to provide this information in a transparent manner, it has been our priority to protect the victims involved in these settlements from further harm,” the senator said in a statement attending the report.

 

“I am pleased that we have received assurances from Senate Legal Counsel that the release of this data does not violate confidentiality and as such, are able to make it public.”

The report distinguishes between claims made against member-led offices and “other Senate employing offices.”

Individual Senate offices have paid out nearly $600,000 in discrimination and harassment settlements, while other Senate employers paid out over $850,000. Listed violations include sex, age, and race discrimination, as well as violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The largest settlements involved instances of race discrimination.

The report does not include information about the alleged offenders, victims, or relevant incidents. In releasing the data, the Committee noted the Senate does not keep records respecting individual settlements, and is therefore reliant on the OOC’s data.

“It should be noted that the Senate – unlike the House – does not have its own records of individual settlements and therefore cannot independently verify the accuracy of the data provided by the OOC,” the report reads.

via http://ift.tt/2DffesQ Tyler Durden

Anyone who consumes even a modest dose of mainstream media is probably convinced by now that the GOP will lose both the Senate and House in 2018 followed by the White House in 2020 (assuming Trump is even able to avoid impeachment, that is).  As evidence of that fact, political pundits from MSNBC to CNN frequently point to the following chart of Trump’s plunging approval ratings…

…and the ‘stunning’ loss of Roy Moore in Alabama which Democrats apparently still view a ‘referendum’ on the Trump administration rather than a referendum on pedophilia.

Be that as it may, the British diplomats who advise Theresa May on how to manage the US-UK “special relationship” say the predictions of a Trump downfall are nothing more than wishful thinking and that the Prime Minister should prepare for the Trump presidency to be extended through 2024.  Per The Telegraph:

Donald Trump is on course to win re-election in 2020, senior British diplomats believe, as he approaches his first full year in office.

 

They think that despite a string of negative headlines the US president has largely kept his support base onside since entering White House.

 

Possible Democratic contenders are seen as either too old – such as Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden – or lacking in the name recognition needed to defeat Mr Trump.

 

There is also a belief the US president has curbed some of his most radical policy instincts since taking office, such as ignoring Nato or pulling out of Afghanistan.

In addition to the irrelevant approval ratings, senior British diplomats also have doubts as to whether there are any viable Democratic front-runners who have what it takes to win.  Apparently they’re not convinced that a 76-year-old Socialist senator from Vermont nor a gaffe-prone Joe Biden, who has sought his party’s nomination twice (1988 and 2008) and failed, are great contenders.

Meanwhile, they think younger potential candidates – such as Cory Booker, the New Jersey senator, or Kamala  Harris, the California senator – are “yet to be tested” on the national political stage.  That said, we vaguely recall that similar predictions were made about a first-term senator from Illinois back in 2008.

And, while difficult to find, there are also some American journalists willing to admit that polling data is just as irrelevant now as it was in October 2016 and that predictions of Trump’s early demise are a bit premature.

They are not alone. Joshua Green, the author Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, believes the US president can win again.

 

Mr Green said: “He could absolutely win again in 2020. I don’t know why anybody, based on the track record of political predictions over the last three or four years, would presume to say otherwise.”

 

“If you look at his favourability ratings, his ‘is the country on the right track or wrong track’ numbers, it’s not that different now to what it was a year ago.”

 

“Trump was elected president with a very unpopular view [of him] nationally. It hasn’t gone that much worse.”

 

“A lot depends on where the country is in two-and-a-half years and what he is able to accomplish between now and then.”

To Green’s point, for those who have forgotten, here’s a look back at how the Washington Post saw the election playing out on October 22, 2016, just a few weeks before election day…

via http://ift.tt/2C5XvVr Tyler Durden

The last time the yield on a 2-Year TSY auction was as high as it was today – 1.922% to be specific, tailing the When Issued 1.899% by 0.3bps – was just a few days after Lehman Brothers failed, with one difference: back then it was sliding, while now the rate on 2Y paper is surging, up from just 1.21% at the start of the year, and up from 1.765% just last month thanks to the latest Fed rate hike.

The Bid to Cover was only 2.515, a steep drop from last month’s 2.725% and well below the 2.88 6-auction average; it was the lowst BTC since last December’s 2.436%.

The internals were just as ugly, with the Indirect takedown sliding to 39.97% – the first sub-40% award since last December, and far below the 49.2% 6MMA. Directs were awarded 14.5%, below the 17% in November and 16.3% 6 month average, leaving Dealers with the bulk of the work, and award, at 45.5%, the highest since the 58% dealers took down in December of 2016, and far above both last month’s auction (41.2%) and the 6 month average (34.5%).

And yet, while today’s 2Y auction was just as ugly as the 3Month Bill auction earlier, it was so for different reasons, chief of which were year end window dressing as well as concerns about rising rates in the coming year. Overall, however, should 2018 buyside demand remain as lousy as it was in today’s various Bill and Note auctions, the Fed may soon have no choice but to return to the market and monetize some more debt.

via http://ift.tt/2l1cN6B Tyler Durden

Via Political Calculations blog,

The city of Philadelphia's controversial soda tax is providing a lot of material for serious scientists to evaluate the effects of arbitrarily imposing a tax on the distribution of a range of naturally and artificially-sweetened beverages. Since we're near the end of the tax's first year of being in effect, we thought we'd focus upon one of the more interesting findings to date.

Consumers are primarily the ones paying the tax

Thanks to the quirks of geography and development, some parts of the terminals at Philadephia's international airport fall within Philadelphia's city limits while other parts do not, which means that Philadelphia's Beverage Tax is imposed in some parts of the airport while not in others. Cornell University's John Cawley recognized that situation would make for a natural experiment for assessing some of the impact of the tax, where they collected data for soda sales at the airport in the period of December 2016 through February 2017, which provides a window into how both prices and sales changed as the tax went into effect on 1 Janaury 2017. Here's a summary of the research's findings:

The research, co-written with Barton Willage, a doctoral candidate in economics, and David Frisvold of the University of Iowa, appeared Oct. 25 in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

Philadelphia’s tax of 1.5 cents per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages is one of several passed by cities throughout the United States. The goal is to increase prices and dissuade people from drinking soda to benefit their health. These taxes have been controversial; Cook County, Illinois, recently repealed its tax, which had only been in place a few months.

 

The Philadelphia tax (and one in Berkeley, California) are levied not on consumers but on distributors. That’s because lawmakers are trying to change consumers’ behavior but want, for political reasons, to avoid taxing consumers directly. So they levy the tax farther up the supply chain, said Cawley, who is co-director of Cornell’s Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors and Disparities.

 

Until now, it has been unclear just how much of Philadelphia’s tax on distributors would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher retail prices. Distributors could just pay it themselves to avoid a decrease in sales, Cawley said. “Or producers like Coke and Pepsi could say, ‘We’re not going to let cities use this tax to decrease our sales; we’re going to bear the brunt of it. We’ll just sell our soda cheaper to distributors, and that’s how we’ll keep retail prices the same,’” he said.

 

But in Philadelphia, just 36 days after the tax went into effect, stores raised their retail soda prices by a whopping 93 percent of the tax. “I was surprised by how much of the Philadelphia tax was passed on to consumers in such a short period time,” said Cawley.

 

And some untaxed airport stores, technically located in Tinicum, Pennsylvania, also raised their prices by exactly the amount of the tax after the taxed stores did, the study found. “It was impossible to predict in advance whether the untaxed side of the airport would limit the pass-through of the tax on the Philadelphia side, or whether the untaxed side would take advantage of Philadelphia’s tax to raise prices themselves,” says Cawley.

 

The 93 percent “pass-through” to Philadelphia consumers was significantly higher than occurred in Berkeley, California; previous research (including some by Cawley and Frisvold) showed that only 43 to 69 percent of the Berkeley tax was passed on to soda drinkers there.

This finding is highly significant because although Philadelphia directly imposes the tax on beverage distributors in the city (the de jure incidence of the tax), in reality, the tax is predominantly falling upon consumers, who are the ones who are primarily paying the tax (this is the de facto incidence of the tax).

The true incidence of the tax matters because it potentially affects the legality of the tax and how it is imposed. The imposition of a similar soda tax in Chicago was largely derailed because courts in that state recognized the de facto nature of the tax, while courts in Pennsylvania have so far dismissed the real world incidence of the tax in upholding Philadelphia's soda tax. Pennsylvania's state supreme court has not yet announced whether it will hear an appeal of the case.

Meanwhile, the pass-through of 93% of Philadelphia's soda tax to consumers at Philadelphia's International Airport falls on the high side of our own observations throughout 2017, where overall, we've found that two-thirds of Philadelphia's soda tax is being passed through to consumers.

Confounding factors for soda prices on the Tinicum-side of the airport

We should however recognize that the market represented by Philadelphia's International Airport is not generally representative of the market for beverages in the city, where the airport cannot be considered to provide a genuinely free market for competition. For example, the city of Philadelphia, which manages the airport, is able to severely restrict the number of vendors that may do business at the airport.

Restricting the ability of outside vendors to freely enter into the market represented by Philadelphia's international airport allows the approved vendors who sell soft drinks outside of Philadelphia's city limits at the airport to hike the prices of the sweetened beverages they sell without the potential penalty of losing business to competitors charging lower prices, with the vendors and their employees pocketing the difference thanks to their city-granted, monopoly-like business privilege.

On average, in December 2016 before the tax was implemented, the mean price per ounce of cola was 12.37 cents on the untaxed side and 12.53 cents per ounce in the taxed side. By February 2017, that price had increased to 12.93 on the untaxed side and 13.92 on the taxed side. Thus, the price had risen significantly more on the taxed side.

 

The investigators calculated that overall, 55.3 percent of the tax was passed along to consumers. In the taxed stores, however, 93 percent of the tax was passed to consumers by February.

 

One might query why the stores in the untaxed part of the airport also raised prices? Probably because they could, and it would simply add to their profits.

That would make logical sense, but there's more to the story, where the common conflating factor of the intervention of Philadelphia's city government is also at work. Here, the role of the city in jacking up prices for consumers at parts of the airport outside of the city's limits was confirmed by the mayor's office.

Mike Dunn, a spokesman for Mayor Kenney, said Friday that vendors on the Tinicum side who have raised their prices since Jan. 1 did so for a different reason. Three out of the 37 vendors in Tinicum received permission to change prices this year, Dunn said, and all did so as part of a voluntary program that allowed them to raise all prices by 10 percent in exchange for paying their employees more.

 

All airport merchants will be required to pay a minimum hourly wage of $12.10 when they enter new concession contracts, Dunn said, but three vendors on the Tinicum side elected to begin early.

That dynamic adds an interesting wrinkle to Cawley's initial research findings, one where he should already have the detailed data indicating the amount of prices changes of soda at all airport locations to be able to resolve, where it should be easy to identify the vendors that increased their soda prices by the 10% that was blessed by the mayor's office. How soda prices changed at the remaining vendors will then give us an ideal of the extent to which those other vendors took advantage of the opportunity to gouge their customers within the closed market of the Philadelphia International Airport during the first two months of the tax going into effect.

It's a question to which we don't yet know the answer that will be exciting to find out, hopefully in 2018!

via http://ift.tt/2pzuFKF Tyler Durden

As North Korea vociferously condemns the US and the United Nations after the Security Council passed yet another round of sanctions against the restive regime, Russia is continuing to test ICBMs in preparation for a violent conflict on the neighboring Korean Peninsula while simultaneous calling for both sides to seek mediation.

Last night, Russia’s Strategic Missile Force tested the RS-12M Topol intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the Kapustin Yar practice range in the southern Astrakhan Region, the TASS News Agency reported Tuesday.

"On December 26, 2017, a combat team of the Strategic Missile Force test-fired an RS-12M Topol intercontinental ballistic missile from the Kapustin Yar state central combined arms training range in the Astrakhan Region," Russia’s Defense Ministry said.

 

"The launch was aimed at testing perspective armament for intercontinental ballistic missiles," the ministry said.

 

"During the tests, specialists obtained experimental data that will be used in the interests of developing effective means of overcoming anti-ballistic missile defense and equipping the perspective grouping of Russian ballistic missiles with them," the Defense Ministry said.

As we explained last week, the latest round of sanctions aims to curb the North Korean energy trade – something both China and Russia have been reluctant to sign off on in the past. This suggests that two of the North’s erstwhile benefactors are becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility that a deadly, destabilizing conflict could erupt on the peninsula.

The new restrictions are meant to slash North Korea’s imports of refined petroleum products, further restrict shipping and impose a 12-month deadline for expatriate North Korean workers to be sent home, according to Bloomberg.

 

"Under the new sanctions, oil exports will be limited to their current level, which has already begun to result in shortages around the country," the NY Times added. "Countries around the world will be ordered to expel North Korean workers, a key source of hard currency. Nations would also be urged to inspect all North Korean shipping and halt ship-to-ship transfers of fuel, which the North has used to evade sanctions."

In response, the North (once again) swiftly condemned the sanctions as an “act of war”, and threatened to “further consolidate its self-defensive nuclear deterrence."

Circling back to the launch, RS-12M Topol intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the Kapustin Yar practice range in the southern Astrakhan Region, the Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday.

According to TASS, the Kapustin Yar practice range was chosen because it allows testing perspective armaments capable of overcoming anti-ballistic missile defenses – a tacit reference to the US ABM systems that dot Eastern Europe and South Korea.

After the North’s latest ICBM test, Russia announced on Wednesday that North Korea's latest intercontinental ballistic missile launch constituted a "provocative act". Though Russia also called on both sides to "stay calm.” Russia has carried out ICBM tests with increasing frequency in recent months, while also deploying troops to its border to act as a bulwark should an armed conflict break out.
 

via http://ift.tt/2zz7Q9E Tyler Durden

Via The Daily Bell

In response to the tax bill which will lead to a lot more money in her pocket, Abigail Disney, heiress to the Walt Disney Company fortune, said she would be donating that tax break to a worthy cause of her choosing.

No, wait. That’s not it at all. She got in front of a camera and made a video complaining that other wealthy people and corporations won’t be forced to keep handing over quite as much of their money to the government now.

The video by Now This, which has 29 million views on Facebook as of today, features Disney trying to rile everyone up about how she and her private jet-owning friends will be taxed at a lower rate, how she can pass on assets tax-free to her children, and that health insurance won’t be forced on people when the individual mandate goes away in 2019.

“I know that we heard that the swamp was getting drained,” she says, “but given how this bill was written, I think it’s looking a lot like a nightmare from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean.’”

Even more telling than Disney’s cringe-worthy product placement jokes are the comments by viewers, arguing the merits or downsides of the particular tax plan, and engaging in ad hominem attacks, economic projections, and general complaints about “the wealthy.”

Sure, we could bicker about the exact way and amount we are taxed, picking apart the arguments Disney made in her video. For example, can she really say she is getting a “huge handout from Congress” if it was her money to begin with?

Can we conclude that “we know that wealth does not trickle down,” or should we ask one of the Walt Disney Company’s 195,000 employees, none of whom were earning a living off of Walt and Roy when the brothers were in “near-total poverty in the rural midwest”?

What exactly does Disney think is the right percentage to be taxed?

But these small details about who should owe what are exactly what the powers in government want us to be quibbling about. What Disney should actually be infuriated about, what she should “hope I’m making you angry” about, is that the ruling elite gets to make decisions about how her money is spent. They get to take it from the person who has it and use it in ways they see fit, to fund their pet projects, reward their donors, buy votes, and pad their wallets.

“No one who votes for this tax bill will be voting with your life in mind,” Disney said. “But you will pay for it.”

Well, that is one thing you got right, Ms. Disney.

The other thing that should just baffle and enrage us is Abigail Disney’s complete lack of confidence in her own ability to do good with her wealth. If she feels she does not deserve to hold on to her money, can’t she just donate that huge chunk of cash she “didn’t earn” instead of asking the government not to give it to her? Then the money would be going directly to the people or organization she felt deserved it the most, without going through the government bureaucracy: an incompetent middleman at best — and a bloated, corrupt, tyrant at worst.

In fact, in a great twist of irony, I have heard anecdotally of many individuals who plan to use their tax break to donate to their favorite liberal causes, a sort of middle finger to the GOP for . . . allowing individuals the financial autonomy to support organizations they deem worthy?

Wait, you mean the sky is not falling? Individuals with extra money in their pockets can voluntarily give it away to causes that are important to them without forcing their will onto the population as a whole? You sure showed those Republicans.

Even if Disney decided that straight-out charity wasn’t her thing, her investment of her “extra” money in real estate, another private jet — heck, even the world’s largest collection of Mickey Mouse bobbleheads — could only help the economy.

“More than anything, without a thriving and healthy middle class, there are no consumers for what Disney creates,” Disney laments, yet she can’t think of a single way the middle class might be helped except by rich people getting less of a tax cut.

Disney praises her grandfather and great-uncle Roy and Walt Disney for their “gumption, guts, and brilliance,” which ultimately led to a thriving company that is worth $92 billion today. People wait in line to see its movies, buy up its merchandise, and gladly pay exorbitant prices to visit the Happiest Place on Earth. But to hear her talk about “the 1 percent,” all the CEOs must just be greedy idiots when it comes to personal spending and could never use their business expertise to build up a nonprofit or finance a startup.

Meanwhile, Disney bemoans the United States’ “suffocating education system, a dying infrastructure, and a national debt that will be at least $1.5 trillion bigger.” But sure, let’s go ahead and give more money to a ruling elite that has been unable to keep the roads paved and the education system properly financed, all the while grossly overspending its budget and passing on its debt to future generations.

Guess what roads are always perfectly paved? The private ones leading into Disney World.

I wouldn’t put so much stock into what one misguided person with a soapbox has to say, except that her view is obviously echoed by so many. And it’s worse than not being an economically sound position. It’s a violent and immoral one too.

Because Disney, and others like her, are trying to frame themselves as the good guys, the ones looking out for the poor and weak in our society. But if that were the case, they would be content with giving away their own wealth and promoting worthy causes. Think of how many people she could influence with a Now This video aimed at feeding hungry children or providing low-cost health care to the destitute.

But that’s not good enough for her. It’s not good enough unless other people are forced, under violence or the threat of violence, to pay for the things that she thinks are the most important.

And judging by the general attitude of almost everyone I encounter in person or online, this is a pervasive idea: people must team up and force other people to do the right thing — the right thing as defined by their team.

Disney says in the video, “if democracy is just a bunch of people advocating for their own self-interest, instead of the interest of the greater good, then we’re not a democracy, we’re anarchy.”

She is using the words “democracy” and “anarchy,” but I do not think she knows what they mean. Democracy IS just a bunch of people advocating for their own self-interest. It is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. It is might makes right.

On the other hand, anarchy must look out for the interests of other people in order to coexist in society. Yes, each person can act in a self-interested way, but never to the point of coercion of another. There is nothing anarchical about using the government to force your will on others.

We have to turn the conversation away from the specifics of the tax bill and onto the elephant in the room: that most of the population approves of taking another person’s money at gunpoint in a manner and for an amount agreed upon by a majority. Filtered through government, most people are able to stomach this egregious act of violence.

That’s the real “Pirates” nightmare, Abigail.

via http://ift.tt/2DStwkk TDB

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Oriental Review,

Politico published an explosive investigative report which alleges that the Obama Administration politically interfered to obstruct a far-reaching criminal justice operation against Hezbollah in order to facilitate the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The exposé is extensive and covers a wide array of purported activities over a ten-year period all across the US, Latin America, West Africa, Europe, and the Mideast, though the point of this analysis isn’t to summarize what’s contained in the report or to judge its veracity, but to interpret the significance of it being made public at this point in time. The codename given to the investigation into Hezbollah’s global economic network was “Operation Cassandra”, and it alleges to have discovered the mechanics behind the group’s self-sustaining financial ecosystem, some of which supposedly dealt with organized criminal activities such as drug trafficking and money laundering.

Politico’s bombshell wasn’t just the alleged facts that it uncovered, but the claims from some of the operation’s participants that the Obama Administration was undermining their work because it feared that taking action against Hezbollah would endanger Washington’s efforts to clinch the 2015 nuclear deal with the group’s patrons in Tehran. If true, then this would represent a major split within the American “deep state”, or permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies, because it suggests that the State Department and possibly even the CIA were conspiring to subvert the law enforcement duties of the FBI and DEA on behalf of the President.

The implications behind this revelation could be enormous, and at the very least they seem to confirm Republican accusations that the Obama Administration was selling out domestic security interests in order to pursue the risky and now-failed foreign policy gambit of co-opting Iran through a tacit alliance with its ruling “moderate” elites. Seeing as how some of Obama-era “deep state” figures involved in this scandal might still be working with the government, the Trump Administration could use Politico’s report as the pretext for “cleaning house” and removing or professionally neutralizing some of its institutional opponents. It’s speculated that this is what Tillerson has been trying to do for months now, but the latest findings could add a renewed sense of impetus to his efforts.

In addition, apart from the obvious consequences that this revelation could have in further worsening American-Iranian relations and reversing the Obama-era trend towards a rapprochement, there’s another international aspect that needs to be looked at, and that’s the effect that the report will have on the US’ policy towards Latin America.

Politico alleges that “Operation Cassandra” uncovered a diverse criminal network stretching all across the hemisphere, and whether fully true or partially exaggerated, this news could be used to tighten the US’ security arrangements with its regional partners in complementing the theater-wide asymmetrical counteroffensive of “Operation Condor 2.0” that’s been ongoing ever since the 2009 coup against leftist Honduran President Manuel Zelaya.

Relatedly, the allegations of Venezuelan government complicity in Hezbollah’s trans-hemispheric conspiracy could form the basis for new sanctions against the Bolivarian Republic.

All told, this developing scandal might take a while to fully unfold, but it can still be expected to influence the course of the “deep state’s” War on Trump and the US’ policy towards Latin America to one extent or another by the time that it’s all said and done with.

via http://ift.tt/2pD4R03 Tyler Durden