Month: July 2018

After reporting earlier this month that the Securities and Exchange Commission had joined the federal investigation into Facebook over its failure to disclose Cambridge Analytica’s misues of user data, the Wall Street Journal revealed on Thursday exactly what the agency is investigating.

In keeping with its mission to police securities markets, the SEC is looking into whether Facebook’s failure to warn investors about the potential for third-party developers to misuse their data represents a violation of disclosure laws.

The SEC has shown greater interest in recent months in probing data-security breaches and lapses. The agency has taken the position, most recently in a case filed against Altaba Inc., Yahoo Inc.’s successor company, that public companies must disclose material data leaks or breaches they know about. Telling investors that such incidents could happen isn’t good enough.

The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are also probing the data leak and how Facebook and other parties handled it. The FTC is probing whether Facebook violated terms of an earlier consent decree requiring the company to get user consent for collecting personal data and sharing it with others.

The SEC is probing whether Facebook should have disclosed to shareholders its knowledge of the Cambridge Analytica violation in 2015, when it learned that Aleksandr Kogan, a professor at the University of Cambridge, had improperly shared data in 2014 for as many as 87 million Facebook users with Cambridge Analytica.

Essentially, the crux of the SEC investigation is whether the fact that Cambridge Analytica improperly used Facebook user data represented material information that should’ve been disclosed to investors.

Facebook officials believed in 2015 that what they discovered wasn’t material information for investors, because the data shared with Cambridge Analytica wasn’t as sensitive as other types of user data that Facebook keeps, such as some users’ payment information, a person familiar with the matter said. The Cambridge Analytica data included information on people who downloaded a personality-test app Mr. Kogan developed as well as some details about those people’s friends.

One former SEC enforcement attorney told WSJ that if Facebook was “making money” from its developer relationships, then not disclosing the misuse could “raise red flags.”

John Reed Stark, a former SEC enforcement attorney who is now a cybersecurity consultant, said the agency could find fault with how the company reported the incident. “If Facebook is earning revenue from contracts with third-party vendors that misuse private member data, yet failing to disclose that these contracts potentially violate global and U.S. privacy laws as well as whatever terms of use Facebook maintains with its members, this could raise a red flag for the SEC,” Mr. Stark said.

While securities laws violations are never ideal, Facebook has much bigger things to worry about than an SEC fine which – judging by its treatment of the financial services industry – will amount to a few hundred million dollars, at most. The company should be far more concerned with the other agencies that are investigating the Cambridge Analytica “data breach”. These include the FBI – which of course has the power to bring criminal charges – and the FTC – which could theoretically bring trillions of dollars in fines against Facebook for data privacy violations.

In other words, while the SEC can at most give Facebook a slap on the wrist, the other agencies participating in the investigation have the authority to potentially bring down the company.

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Authored by Bill Bonner via BonnerAndPartners.com,

Clowns to the left of us… jokers to the right… what a hoot it is to watch them jump and howl.

Trade barriers… LGBT bathroom policies… the Dow… Elizabeth Warren… Rudolph Giuliani… unemployment… QT [quantitative tightening]… Canadians sneaking across the border to buy our shoes – there’s no shortage of louche entertainment in yesterday’s events.

But what about tomorrow? We learn from the papers that computers can beat us at chess, write better essays, and drive our cars.

So far, so good.

Identified Undesirable

Alas, these same computers can also pick our face out of a crowd… cancel our credit cards… and take away our passports. Using algorithms and Big Data, they can also identify us as “undesirable”… or worse.

That’s when your editor sees the scaffold going up in front of him… and there is the hangman approaching with a noose in his hands.

Last week, a couple of reports added to his soucis.

First, the IRS announced that it would block passports for 362,000 Americans who are late on their taxes.

From where in the Constitution does the tax collector get the right to confine citizens who have never been convicted of a crime? We don’t know.

We believe our own accounts with the IRS are in good order. But the “tax code” had 74,608 pages in 2016; there is plenty of room for disagreement, ambiguity, and interpretation.

Our own tax return is more than two inches thick. It is prepared by professionals.

Could they make a mistake? Of course, they could. Could the IRS make a mistake… or worse, intentionally try to make life difficult for us?

It would never do such a thing, you say.

In 2013, the IRS apologized for targeting conservative groups for extensive auditing. It admitted that it had given especially harsh treatment to groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names and promised it wouldn’t do it again.

Of course, it won’t. And it won’t make mistakes, either.

Targeted by Spooks

Already, in addition to the IRS’s “no passport” list are the feds’ “no fly” and “hit” lists.

An interesting feature of these lists is that you never know if you are on them… or why. The feds don’t have to prove anything.

An interesting case arose recently wherein a man found out, apparently by accident, that the feds were trying to kill him.

He went to a wedding in the Middle East… and in came a missile attack. Who were they shooting at? Then, he realized it was him! He thought it was an accident; the spooks had mistaken him for someone else.

But there was nowhere to go to appeal… no court in which he could prove his innocence.

The whole matter was hidden from view, behind a sordid screen of “national security.”

Meanwhile, in May, China officially began its “social credit” system. The idea is to amalgamate electronic sources of information on each of its 1.4 billion citizens and then target them for rewards or punishments, depending on their scores.

The Week magazine was on the case:

Government documents show a plan to block poorly scored citizens from air or rail travel for up to a year, though perhaps less for minor infractions like leaving a bike parked on a footpath. More than 7 million citizens have already been blocked from travel, Human Rights Watch reports, for offenses like “insincere” apologies.

For the first time in history, the internet, with its electronic surveillance, and the collusion of data accumulators – Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others – make it possible for the authorities to control and manipulate every aspect of life.

Algorithms can now do what used to require whole squads of spooks, snitches, and sinister agents.

Did you ever attend a meeting of the group Americans for Limited Government? Did you ever talk to a known undesirable? Do you believe Congress is run by a bunch of incompetent crooks? Do you read the Diary? Are you insincere?

Put away the waterboards. Send the torches and pliers back to the tool shop. There is no longer any need to ask, let alone to torture. The feds already know everything.

Deep State Paradise

The National Security Agency (NSA) has been monitoring our telephone conversations for years. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others know what we do, what we want, and even what we think. And now, Big Technology is working with the feds to use this data to control us.

Again, back in China… The New York Times:

In some cities, cameras scan train stations for China’s most wanted. Billboard-size displays show the faces of jaywalkers and list the names of people who don’t pay their debts. Facial recognition scanners guard the entrances to housing complexes. Already, China has an estimated 200 million surveillance cameras – four times as many as the United States.

That’s just one piece of the system. The data flow in from GPS, social media, credit cards, banks, job sites – just about everywhere.

Then, the feds can manipulate outcomes simply by editing the “news”… or denying access to important services… or applying individualized rewards or penalties. Even highway tolls can be adjusted for each car, depending on what behavior the authorities want to modify.

The New York Times again…

“This is potentially a totally new way for the government to manage the economy and society,” said Martin Chorzempa, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“The goal is algorithmic governance,” he added.

Just 18 years ago, America’s five largest corporations were companies that provided essential goods and services – ExxonMobil, General Electric, Ford, General Motors, and Walmart.

Now, the five largest corporations all truck in data: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, and Facebook.

And they are using this data – in collusion with the feds – to create a Deep State paradise.

“But what do I have to fear,” asks the good citizen? “I don’t do anything wrong. I have nothing to hide.”

Here at the Diary, we have a sunny disposition and undying faith in public officials. What do we have to worry about? After all, the “government is all of us,” Hillary Clinton assured us. It would never do anything that wasn’t for our own good, would it?

We are serene… and overjoyed, of course. With so much new control, the Deep State will help us be better people… never jaywalking… never speeding… never trying to save on our taxes… and certainly, never, ever criticizing our democratically elected leaders, no matter what numbskulls they appear to be.

In short, it will work like a lobotomy, helping us be model citizens.

We’re all for it. Sincerely.

NSA, are you listening?

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The United States has petitioned the UN to reprimand Russia and China for allegedly selling oil products to North Korea in violation of caps placed on petroleum sales as part of a larger sanctions package, reports the Wall Street Journal. 

The U.S. State Department called on Russia and other U.N. members to “strictly implement” sanctions on North Korea while working “more closely together to shut down U.N.-prohibited activities, including ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum and the transport of coal from North Korea.”

Chinese vessels were “caught red handed” last year by US spy satellites illegally selling oil to North Korea last year in around 30 transactions involving Chinese vessels, while a Hong Kong ship  was seized in December after it was seen transferring oil to the Kim regime. The images allegedly showed large Chinese and North Korean ships transacting in oil in a part of the West Sea closer to China than South Korea. The surveillance photographs even showed the names of the ships.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported in December that ‘two senior Western European security sources’ confirmed Russian tankers have supplied fuel to North Korea on at least three occasions in recent months by transferring cargoes at sea.

Reuters‘ sources said the Russian-flagged tanker Vityaz was one vessel that had transferred fuel to North Korean vessels.

Yaroslav Guk – director at the company which owns the Vityaz, Alisa Ltd, said the vessel did not have any contact with North Korean ships, according to Reuters. 

“Absolutely no, this is very dangerous,” Guk told Reuters by telephone. “It would be complete madness.”

Reuters‘ sources say otherwise: 

The transfers in October and November indicate that smuggling from Russia to North Korea has evolved to loading cargoes at sea since Reuters reported in September that North Korean ships were sailing directly from Russia to their homeland.

“The Russian vessels made transfers at sea to the North Koreans,” the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told Reuters. The source said the transfers of oil or oil products took place on several occasions and were a breach of sanctions.

A second source, who independently confirmed the existence of the Russian ship-to-ship fuel trade with North Korea, said there was no evidence of Russian state involvement in the latest transfers.

“There is no evidence that this is backed by the Russian state but these Russian vessels are giving a lifeline to the North Koreans,” the second European security source said. –Reuters

Two more Russia flagged tankers made similar journeys llast October and November, leaving from the ports of Slavyanka and Nakhodka “into open seas where they switched off their transponders,” according to shipping data. 

Meanwhile, last September Reuters reported that a minimum of eight North Korean vessels had left Russian ports loaded up with fuel and headed for home despite declaring other destinations in a ploy to get around the sanctions. 

A Russian shipping source with knowledge of Far Eastern marine practices said North Korean vessels had stopped loading fuel in Russia’s Far Eastern ports but that fuel is delivered at sea by tankers using ship-to-ship transfers, or even by fishing vessels. –Reuters

The Russian Foreign Ministry hit back, saying that they were observing sanctions against North Korea, while the Russian Customs Service would not comment to Reuters on Wednesday when asked if Russian ships had supplied fuel to North Korea.  

North Korea needs imported fuel to continue operating its struggling economy, while it also requires oil for it’s intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear program. 

“The vessels are smuggling Russian fuel from Russian Far Eastern ports to North Korea,” said the first security source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

China also denied reports that it was selling oil to North Korea in violation of the UN sanctions – after President Trump said he was unhappy that Beijing had allowed oil to reach North Korea. 

According to documents seen by Reuters, the US proposed that the UN Security Council blacklist 10 vessels for illicitly trading with North Korea – accusing them of “conducting illegal ship-to-ship transfers of refined petroleum products to North Korean vessels or illegally transporting North Korean coal to other countries for exports.”

In February, we reported that the Trump administration was coordinating with key Asian allies to crack down on ships suspected of violating sanctions imposed on North Korea, according to Reuters.

The joint effort between the U.S. Coast Guard and regional partners including Japan, South Korea, Australia and Singapore, would go further than ever before to physically block deliveries of banned weapons, components for its nuclear missile program and other prohibited cargo. Suspected violators could be targeted on the high seas or in the territorial waters of countries which cooperate with the coalition. Up to now, suspect ships have been intercepted on a far more limited basis. 

Depending on the scale of the campaign, the U.S. was even considering devoting a portion of air and naval power from the Pacific Command – though the plan would stop short of a full naval blockade according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

While suspect ships have been intercepted before, the emerging strategy would expand the scope of such operations but stop short of imposing a naval blockade on North Korea. Pyongyang has warned it would consider a blockade an act of war. –Reuters

North Korea is suspected of being just a few months away from having an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland, a program which has continued despite heavy sanctions which have been sidestepped by smuggling and ship-to-ship transfers of banned goods. 

“There is no doubt we all have to do more, short of direct military action, to show (North Korean leader) Kim Jong Un we mean business,” said a senior administration official.

“Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters in February. “The United States will leverage our economic strength to enforce President Trump’s directive that any company that chooses to help fund North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs will not be allowed to do business with anyone in the United States.”

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Update: The University of Kansas took down a defaced American flag and placed it in an art museum on Wednesday after receiving backlash from the community.

Conservative students on campus expressed disdain on social media over the flag on Tuesday, resulting in community members filing complaints to the university. Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer alongside Secretary of State Kris Kobach, both Republicans, also called on the university to take down the flag.

*  *  *

The University of Kansas is hosting a display on campus featuring an American flag that has been smeared with black paint by an artist as a commentary on “the current political climate.”

As Campus Reform’s Grace Gottschling reports, the artist is being featured at KU as part of an ongoing project sponsored by Creative Time, a New York based organization focused on three core values:

“art matters, artists’ voices are important in shaping society, and public spaces are places for creative and free expression.”

The flag, “untitled (flag 2),” was designed by German artist Josephine Meckseper and is being displayed in several locations across the United States, including KU, Cornell University, Texas State University, Rutgers University, and the University of South Florida. 

Meckseper’s design is the only one in the project that has involved altering the American flag.

“The flag is a collage of an American flag and one of my dripped paintings which resembles the contours of the United States,” Meckseper explained on the Creative Time website. 

“I divided the shape of the country in two for the flag design to reflect a deeply polarized country in which a president has openly bragged about harassing women and is withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol and UN Human Rights Council.”

“The black and white sock on my flag takes on a new symbolic meaning in light of the recent imprisonment of immigrant children at the border,” Meckseper added.

The project, which began in June 2017, called “Pledges of Allegiance” features 16 artists and focuses on one artist’s work each month. Each artist designed a flag to highlight “an issue the artist is passionate about, a cause they believe is worth fighting for, and speaks to how we might move forward collectively,” according to the project description. 

“Conceived in response to the current political climate, Pledges of Allegiance aims to inspire a sense of community among cultural institutions and begin articulating the urgent response our political moment demands,” a nearby plaque states.

“As a born and raised Kansan and somebody that loves being apart of this university and loves being a Jayhawk, I find this to be the exact opposite of what it means to call yourself a Jayhawk,” Ian Ballinger, a communications major at KU, told Campus Reform. 

“Unfortunately you see universities across the country being overrun by far left activists and postmodernists,” Ballinger added.

“This display is not representative of what the University of Kansas, the school I grew up loving and still love to this day, stands for.”

“As a U.S. Navy veteran and student at the University of Kansas currently seeking my Master’s degree, I find the ‘artwork’ that currently flies at Spooner Hall heinous and abhorrent,” Ian Appling told Campus Reform.

“I do strongly believe in the United States’ Constitution and swore an oath to defend it, which includes the individual citizen’s right to use our flag in an expression of freedom of speech.”

“With that being said, this desecrated American flag is currently flying on a public University’s campus, where Kansas and Federal taxpayer money is sent to provide an unbiased center of learning and discourse,” Appling pointed out.

“Any public space or property that shows bias of this proportion should have all taxpayer funds indefinitely suspended until proper action is completed, formal apologies sent out, all faculty involved should be thoroughly investigated, and examples made.”

Campus Reform reached out to Creative Time, but was directed back to its original statement. Spokespersons for KU have not responded to inquiries from Campus Reform.

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Two months ago, we brought to your several very concerning quotes from some of the nation’s top restructuring bankers, of which the most dire warning came from Bill Derrough, the former head of restructuring at Jefferies and the current co-head of recap and restructuring at Moelis who admitted that: “I do think we’re all feeling like where we were back in 2007. There was sort of a smell in the air; there were some crazy deals getting done. You just knew it was a matter of time.”

What he is referring to is not just the overall level of exuberance, but the lunacy taking place in the bond market, where CLOs are being created at a record pace, where CCC-rated junk bonds can’t be sold fast enough, and where the a yield-starved generation of investors who have never seen a fair and efficient market without Fed backstops, means that the coming bond-driven crash will be spectacular.

“Even if there is not a recession or credit correction, with the sheer volume of issuance there are going to be defaults that take place,” said Neil Augustine, co-head of the restructuring practice at Greenhill & Co. He is right: as we showed recently using the following chart from Credit Suisse, after languishing around 1%-2% for years, default rates have jumped the most in 5 years, and are now “ticking higher.”

Fast forward to today when another Wall Street legend, Jim Millstein, the banking veteran who was the restructuring chief at the U.S. Treasury Department during the 2008 financial crisis and who yesterday agreed to sell his restructuring firm to Guggenheim Partners,  said the next economic downturn could now strike in less than two years, and in an interview with Bloomberg TV, warned that the US trade wars currently being waged are likely to “reduce business investment, increase costs to consumers and producers in the U.S. and reduce the sales opportunity for U.S. producers.”

Previously, Guggenheim’s CIO Scott Minerd said he expects a recession within two years, citing mounting corporate debt that would likely spur more defaults and a sharp decline in employment, and in a tweet earlier this week warned that “Markets are crazy to ignore the risks and consequences of a #tradewar. This rally in #stocks is the last hurrah! Investors should sell now, speculators may do better in August.”

However, besides some rather vague concerns about a broader economic slowdown, Millstein also listed the specific catalyst for the next crisis: the record amount of piled up debt that has been piling up on corporate balance sheets in the past decade during periods of record low rates.

He said that the mounting wall of debt in corporate America could spur a downturn because higher interest rates constrain investments, and warned that the excessive use of leverage in the technology and industrial industries make them vulnerable if the economy worsens, calling the convergence of so many negatives a “perfect storm.”

“This is a very scary scenario,” he said. “There’s going to be real financial distress.”

To those unfamiliar with the dynamic, here is what happened: since 2009, the amount of debt accumulated by global, non-financial junk-rated companies has soared by 58% representing $3.7 trillion in outstanding debt, the highest ever, with 40%, or $2 trillion, rated B1 or lower. Putting this in contest, since 2009, US corporate debt has increased by 49%, hitting a record total of $8.8 trillion, much of that debt used to fund stock repurchases. As a percentage of GDP, corporate debt is at a level which on ever prior occasion, a financial crisis has followed.

The coming debt deluge is also the reason why Guggenheim was eager to purchase Millstein’s restructuring advisory firm: when the next recession hits, traditional banking revenue streams will collapse leaving restructuring advisories as the only winner.

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Authored by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

The kookification of the “mainstream” continues, with none other than Jonathan Chait – the most conventional sort of boring corporate liberal – producing an unhinged diatribe purporting to prove that Donald Trump has been a Russian agent since 1987 – and that his path to the presidency was paved by his Russian handlers, who were planning it all along. And not to be outdone, formerly rational person Marcy Wheeler, whose investigations as “emptywheel” won her some renown, is now claiming that she not only has definitive proof of Trump’s collusion with the Kremlin, but that, as a result, she was forced to turn one of her sources into the FBI for some vague cloak-and-dagger-ish reason.

I looked in on the Chait production, and came upon his reiteration of the Alfa Bank computer link – this was a story, you’ll recall, that claimed there was a stream of communications between this “Kremlin-connected” bank and the Trump organization. This, we were told, was almost certainly Vladimir Putin sending instructions to his zombie-agents in the Trump White House. Yes, this was actually the story, backed up by several computer “experts” – except it turned out to be advertising spam. Chait repeats this story, adding it on top of the several dozen other conspiracy factoids he throws in the mix – but without mentioning that the computer signals were simply ad-bots. On the basis of this, and a string of other “interactions” with Russians, we are supposed to believe that the omnipotent Russian intelligence agencies hatched a plot 30 years ago to put Trump into the White House. This is a conspiracy theory that’s so shoddy and far-fetched that not even Alex Jones would touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Which brings us to an interesting question: do these people really believe their own craziness?

In some instances, it’s pure psychopathology. That’s the case, I believe, for Marcy Wheeler, Louise Mensch, and the more active online Twitter-paranoids. These people have been so shocked by the unexpected – the election of Trump – that they have been forced into a dubious mental state bordering on insanity.

However, in the case of Jonathan Chait, it’s pure viciousness and cynicism. He even says of his own theory that it’s “unlikely but possible.” It’s just a show for the suckers. The same is true for most of the other journalists who have enlisted in #TheResistance and given up any pretense at objectivity: they are simply doing what they do best, and that is taking dictation from their spookish sources. The treatment of Russia-gate in the media parallels precisely what occurred with Iraq’s storied “weapons of mass destruction” – reporters are taking it all on faith, and they don’t even necessarily believe it. Thus the biggest hoax since Piltdown Man is reported as “fact.” And of course all this is coming to the fore as Trump takes on NATO and our European “allies.”

For anti-interventionists, Trump’s trip to Europe could not be more timely or enlightening. He went to the NATO meeting with a few admonitory tweets up front, complaining that America pays far more than a fair share of the alliance’s monetary costs, and no sooner does he get off the plane than he notes that for all the anti-Russian rhetoric coming out of our allies, the Germans are cuddling up to the Russians on the energy front with the Nord Stream II pipeline. Merkel shot back that Germany is, after all, an independent country and can do what it likes. True, but then why the weird contradiction between claiming that Russia is a military threat and also setting up the mechanism of energy dependence?

Before getting on the plane for his European sojourn, the President reiteratedhis longstanding position:

“We pay far too much and they pay far too little. The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable.”

And the cost is not just measured in monetary terms: there’s also the incalculable cost of risking war, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which obligates us to come to the aid of a NATO ally that’s under attack, or at least that claims to be under attack. In which case, the government of tiny Montenegro, with a population of a bit over half a million, could declare that the Russians are trying to pull off a coup, and US troops would be in country “defending” it against an incursion that may not even exist.

Take a look at the Euro-weenies squirming in their seats at that “bilateral breakfast,” which was turned into a lecture by the President about why the burden of empire should not fall only on our shoulders. Pompeo and Kay Bailey Hutchinson don’t look happy, either, but that’s just too bad, now isn’t it? The President is speaking truth to the once high-and-mighty – and more power to him!

Meanwhile, the main event is going to be in Helsinki: NATO is just a sideshow. After all, militarily the alliance is really nothing but the United States and a few Brits: the Europeans carry little actual weight. The really serious business will take place with Putin, although there is a relentless propaganda campaign in progress to prevent Trump from making the Helsinki summit a success.

What must be addressed in Helsinki is the backsliding of both countries when it comes to preventing a nuclear catastrophe. The program to find and secure loose nukes, which became a problem after the breakup of the Soviet Union, needs to be renewed, in addition to the mutual disarmament agreements that have fallen by the wayside, with the US and the Russians re-arming. As tensions between Washington and Moscow rise, the possibility of a nuclear conflict increases, along with the chances of an accidental nuclear exchange. The nuclear death machine is on automatic, with all kinds of scenarios where it could be set off by something other than an enemy attack: a terrorist strike in Washington, D.C., or anywhere, involving nuclear material, or simply a computer software glitch. Americans would be horrified to learn just how close we are to an extinction event.

The Trump-haters would rather the President fail than give him credit for securing the peace. They would much prefer to wage a new cold war with Russia than put an end to the horrific threat of utter annihilation that’s cast a dark shadow over the world for all this time. In  preferring universal ruin to the vindication of their enemies, they fit the very definition of what it means to be evil.

Trump is out to transform US foreign policy by – finally! – recognizing the reality that’s been in place since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The old structures that served us when Communism was thought to be a threat to Europe are no longer functional, and haven’t been for quite some time. NATO today is nothing but a gigantic subsidy to two major beneficiaries: our European “allies” and the big arms manufacturers such as Boeing, Raytheon, etc. The current arrangements allow the European welfare states to huddle under the US nuclear shield while dispensing all kinds of goodies to their citizens. It’s quite a racket for all concerned: as NATO countries must continually update their military equipment to meet rising standards, American taxpayers are footing most of the bill.

Whether Trump succeeds in getting the incubus of NATO off our backs, or not, this outmoded institution is bound to wither away no matter who is in the White House, for the simple reason that it no longer serves any useful purpose. Those howls of outrage you’re hearing are all coming from self-interested parties being cut off from the gravy train – and, as such, all that noise should be music to our ears.

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As it turns out, The DOJ isn’t ready to let a federal judge’s decision to kill its challenge to the AT&T-Time Warner merger go unchallenged. A month after the judge’s ruling was handed down – and after the judge effectively warned the federal government not to appeal – the DOJ has done just that, reviving the federal government’s fight to block the $85 billion ‘vertical integration’ deal.

BREAKING: Justice Department to appeal AT&T and Time Warner merger approval – court filing pic.twitter.com/arTpmjDNdi

— Reuters Business (@ReutersBiz) July 12, 2018

The news sent shares of AT&T lower just under 1% in the after-market:

Investors will now be looking out for more information regarding what aspect of the judge’s ruling the DOJ will choose to challenge.

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