Month: July 2019

Bitcoin Mania Reaches Iran As US Sanctions Tighten Noose On Economy

The Iranian Parliament Commission on Economy has recently approved cryptocurrency mining in the country amid US sanctions.

Governor of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), Abdolnaser Hemmati said that “a mechanism to mine digital coins were approved by the government’s economic commission and will later be put to the discussion at a Cabinet meeting.”

The Bitcoin craze has circulated around Iranian media, landing on front pages of newspapers and has been featured on television news shows across the country. Even some of the country’s top ayatollahs have been publicly discussing cryptocurrencies, according to the Associated Press.

Some government officials are concerned that the energy-intense process of mining Bitcoin is violating Iran’s system of subsidized electricity.

Hemmati said, cryptocurrency miners shouldn’t run illegal operations but rather contribute to the country’s economy.

“We do believe that the cryptocurrency industry should be recognized as an official industry in Iran to let the country take advantage of its tax and customs revenues.”

Cryptocurrencies are an alternative to fiat money printed by sovereign governments around the world. Central banks have limited authority over Bitcoin and other digital currencies because the coins trade outside of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, commonly known as SWIFT.

Mining coins in the country has become extremely popular thanks to government-subsidized energy; the cost per kilowatt-hour is some of the cheapest in the world. Miners avoid using Western rigs, which are too expensive, and opt for less expensive Chinese computers.

“It is clear that here has turned into a heaven for ‘miners, ‘” Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, Iran’s minister for information and communications technology, recently told AP in an interview. “The business of ‘mining’ is not forbidden in law, but the government and the Central Bank have ordered the Customs Bureau to ban the import of (mining machines) until new regulations are introduced.”

Ali Bakhshi, the head of the Iran Electrical Industry Syndicate, said the cost per kilowatt-hour for miners will be increased to 7 cents, a huge jump from the already going rate of a half-cent but still half the price versus Western energy markets.

Iran’s religious leaders have some concern that miners could try to circumvent paying extra for the electricity as well as using digital currency to hide or move money illicitly.

Tabnak News quoted three ayatollahs calling Bitcoin as either questionable or “haram,” suggesting it could be forbidden under Islam finance rules.

Jahromi said, religious leaders, have become more open to cryptocurrency after his staff advised them how it had value in the real economy.

“Some of our top clerics have issued fatwas that say Bitcoin is money without a reserve, that it is rejected by Islamic and cybercurrencies are haram,” Jahromi said. “When we explain to them, this is not a currency but an asset, they change their mind.”

Iran has been developing a rial-backed national cryptocurrency, able to avoid US economic sanctions.

A new study from the foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) insists cryptocurrencies are being used by Iran to bypass the America’s geopolitical supremacy.

The FDD study suggests that a rial-backed national cryptocurrency, particularly one tied to oil, could make it more difficult for Washington to enforce sanctions.

The world is evolving, shown through the adoption of cryptocurrencies in Iran, can circumnavigate Washington and the American financial sector who hold dominance in global finance. It could take at least a decade, but Iran is certainly laying the building blocks to operate its economy outside US control.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/314NjHY Tyler Durden

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Calls Court Packing a ‘Bad Idea’

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently sat down with Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio for a wide-ranging conversation. One of their most notable exchanges centered on the issue of court packing.

Several presidential candidates have said they want to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court in order to fill the bench with Democratic appointees. Ginsburg made it clear that she dissents from such proposals. “If anything would make the Court look partisan,” Ginsburg said, “it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.'”

Ginsburg also said that it “was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

Ginsburg’s opposition to court packing is no surprise. She is a serious jurist, after all, not a partisan hack. Of course she would look askance at such blatant meddling with the independence of the judiciary.

Ginsburg also knows her history. Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme was defeated in 1937 in large part thanks to the principled opposition of members of Roosevelt’s own party. In fact, one of Ginsburg’s judicial heroes, the progressive legal icon Justice Louis Brandeis (appointed by a Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson), helped to lead that opposition.

Brandeis was mostly in sync with the goals of Roosevelt’s New Deal. But the progressive jurist was deeply offended by Roosevelt’s desire to interfere with a co-equal branch of government. So, working mostly behind the scenes, Brandeis went on the counterattack. Perhaps his most important move was to put the court-packing plan’s chief congressional critic, Sen. Burton K. Wheeler (D–Mont.), in touch with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who had drafted a memo, signed by several justices, which made it clear that the Court not only opposed the president’s power grab but also rejected Roosevelt’s stated justifications as a self-serving sham. Wheeler unveiled that memo in the Senate to great political effect, and Roosevelt’s scheme died a well-deserved death shortly after that.

Ginsburg is now following in Brandeis’ admirable footsteps. She deserves credit for putting judicial integrity before partisan politics.

Related: “The New Deal Made Them ‘Right’: Remembering FDR’s principled liberal opponents.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ZoFxIU
via IFTTT

China’s Second Largest Auditor Accused Of Fabricating Data, Has IPOs Halted

For some unexplained reason, investors naively believe that in a country where, by now everyone knows that all the official government data is fake and manipulated and goalseeked to serve specific political goals, the corporate data is somehow more accurate or credible.

Hopefully that will now change, because as Shanghai’s Yicai Global reports, China’s securities regulator has suspended 43 IPOs and refinancings handled by the country’s second-largest accounting firm, including IPOs on the country’s new Star Market “Nasdaq-style” trading venue, as the company is probed for allegedly falsifying information.

Ruihua Certified Public Accountants, which audits almost a third of all listed companies in China, has been implicated in a scandal involving the infamous chemical maker Kangde Xin Composite Material, which we profiled back in January when we noted that the bankrupt company was reporting cash 15 times greater than due debt, up until the moment it defaulted.

Specifically, the accounting firm is accused of inflating profits by CNY11.9 billion (USD1.7 billion) from January 2015 to last December. As the CPA responsible for the company’s auditing all those years, Ruihua is also under scrutiny, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its website on July 26.

The Zhangjiagang, Jiangsu province-based firm is also suspected of bumping up its operating income through fictitious sales, exaggerated operating costs and fictional expenses on research, development and sales according to Yicai. If found guilty, the company and its controllers will be issued with the maximum penalty and will be banned for life from the stock market, the CSRC added.

In response, the Beijing-based accountancy denied any wrongdoing – of course – and said that is has fully performed its auditing duties regarding the chemical makers’ earnings report, it said in a statement yesterday.

Nevertheless, at least 29 IPO projects it was handling have been suspended, the CSRC said, and 10 of these were for main board IPOs, seven were for the small and medium-sized enterprise board, and 12 were for Shenzhen’s ChiNext board. One of Ruihua’s clients has actively withdrawn its IPO application. Furthermore, of the 511 companies awaiting regulatory review of their IPO applications, some 30 are audited by Ruihua and all of those have been turned down, according to financial information service provider Wind.

The accounting scandal has also spread to Shanghai’s new science and technology innovation board, the Star Market, which debuted a week ago today, and we profiled it here. It is probably not a shock that one day after the initial euphoria fizzled, the STAR market’s return have been disappointing as the buying enthusiasm from the first day disappeared, as did the easy gains.

Four of Ruihua’s clients, Beijing LongRuan Technologies, Beijing Transuniverse Space Technologies, Luoyang Jianlong Micro-Nano Materials and Shenzhen JPT Opto-Electronics have all been stopped from going public.

It’s not just IPOs that are being scrutinized – Ruihua’s refis have not been spared either. Seven listed companies’ refinancing plans have been halted as the CPA comes under investigation, the firms said on July 26. Two other public companies audited by Ruihua had to stop their refinancing for the same reason, they said in statements yesterday.

Another client of Ruihua is under investigation, this time by the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Despite CNY1.8 billion on its balance sheet, Furen Group Pharmaceutical was unable to issue cash dividends of CNY60 million. The bourse’s enquiry discovered over CNY1.7 billion missing, and that the Shanghai-based drugmaker only has CNY3.8 million in liquidity.

Last year, Guangdong Zhengzhong Zhujiang CPA’s IPO projects were also halted pending investigation.

The report of potential pervasive accounting fraud follows our report from Sunday that a major Chinese bank with over $100 billion in assets – Bank of Jinzhou – was bailed out over the weekend.

“For Baoshang Bank, the government took a state takeover, while for Bank of Jinzhou, the government introduced some state-owned strategic investors,” said Dai Zhifeng, analyst with Zhongtai Securities Co; in reality both were government rescues, only in the latest case Beijing used state-owned bank intermediaries.

We expect that the efficient market purists will soundly mock China for its wholesale data fabrication and fraud, but considering that US non-GAAP profits are at all time highs, while the US Government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis on Friday revised US corporate operating profits to a 5 year low, one wonder who is worse in fabricating and manipulating data – China or the US, and keep in mind that in the US accountants collectively participate in the non-GAAP fraud and regulators bless it by allowing such data manipulation to continue quarter after quarter.  At least China is pretending to do something about the problem.

Alas, at the end of the day the reality is clear: the “adjusted profit” data in both the US and China is not worth the paper it is printed on.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2K0KDFD Tyler Durden

Epstein Aside, Victoria’s Secret Faces Uphill Battle Selling Sexy In A #MeToo World

Victoria’s Secret has more than just a Jeffrey Epstein problem. The four-decade-old lingerie retailer faces pressure to market to an ‘increasingly broadened’ definition of beauty – including ‘rubenesque’ women and transgender individuals who just want to feel sexy. 

The company is currently doing Jeffrey Epstein damage control – after Epstein’s two-decade-long reign as a “close confidant, financial manager, and right hand” to the CEO of Victoria’s Secret parent company – L Brands’ Leslie Wexner, according to Bloomberg. And while he wasn’t an employee of Victoria’s Secret, Epstein had a major impact on the lingerie company over the years. 

Epstein also influenced the way the lingerie company operated, associating with the division’s chief marketing officer, Ed Razek. In 2005, for example, Razek was a guest at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, welcomed by young women who said they were working as models for Epstein. Razek told fellow guest William Mook, head of Mok Industries LLC in Columbus, Ohio, that Victoria’s Secret used Epstein models and that his girls were in “the major league,” according to Mook. –Bloomberg

Wexner and Epstein’s relationship officially ended in 2007, around 18 months after the financier was charged with several counts of sexual misconduct in Florida – to which he pleaded guilty to just one charge and spent 13 months jail with work release privileges (during which he is alleged to have continued to sexually abuse girls) in a sweetheart deal. Epstein was arrested in July on charges of sex trafficking minors, putting a fresh spotlight with the financier’s relationship to Victoria’s Secret and Wexner. 

What’s more, L Brands may not have had such a clean break from the convicted pedophile and his network. 

Epstein at one point had a $1 million investment in MC2 Model Management, according to a sworn deposition by a former company bookkeeper. MC2 is owned by Jean-Luc Brunel, a Frenchman who is alleged in a civil lawsuit to have brought girls as young as age 12 to the U.S. for sexual purposes and provided them to his friends including Epstein. Brunel even visited Epstein when he was first imprisoned in 2008. Victoria’s Secret continued to work with MC2-represented models after Wexner severed ties with Epstein. At least three MC2 models walked in Victoria’s Secret’s 2015 fashion show, and the agency’s models were at auditions in 2017 and 2018. They’ve also posed for its catalogs and website. In a 2014 letter to Brunel, his business partner, MC2 President Jeff Fuller, cited worries by Saks, Nordstrom, Macy’s, and other clients about Brunel’s friendship with Epstein. There was no mention of concern on the part of Victoria’s Secret. –Bloomberg

#MeToo

Looking forward, Victoria’s Secret “is increasingly at odds with society’s changing definition of beauty and the #MeToo movement, both of which are sparking a very different vision of how to portray women and their bodies,” according to the report – which notes that Wexner’s lingerie empire has shed $20 billion in market value since 2015. 

Can a male-dominated company that presents women as lingerie-clad “angels” successfully market to millennials and younger generations conditioned to shun any hint of misogyny, fat-shaming, mansplaining, gender assumption and patriarchal oppression? 

Founded in 1977 by Roy Raymond and bought five years later by Wexner for $1 million, the brand sold directly to women looking for push-up bras and sexy panties. As time went on, the brand became fused to a very specific notion of ‘sexiness’ – i.e. smoking hot, pouty-faced young women with tight, athletic bodies. 

As the brand grew, it still provided plenty of eye candy for men—especially through its glittery annual fashion show, which became a marketing coup and a much-anticipated event for the men who flocked to view it. The first was staged in New York’s Plaza Hotel in 1995 (the same year then-real estate developer Donald Trump was forced to sell the legendary hostelry to avoid bankruptcy) and included model Stephanie Seymour gliding down the catwalk. Models wore white and black bras and underwear, but not the large white angel wings that the models in subsequent shows would make famous. Over the years the extravaganza grew with more lights and pop stars. Supermodels such as Gisele Bündchen and Tyra Banks graced the stage. As such, it cast a sex-infused spotlight on a product that our grandmothers viewed as utilitarian and likely purchased from the old Sears catalog. –Bloomberg

With companies such as Abercrombie dropping its highly sexualized marketing – which had fallen out of favor with shoppers – can Victoria’s Secret market to a #MeToo world full of “sexy at any size” women and transgender individuals? Will they? 

Victoria’s Secret hasn’t strayed much from its uniformly tall and thin angels. Last November, Razek told Vogue magazine that, after consideration, he’d decided not to use transgender models in his fashion shows. “Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy,” Razek said, sparking some outraged celebrities and customers to call for his resignation. 

The failure to embrace changing norms about women and beauty may already be having an impact on Victoria’s Secret’s finances. Sales, which had been on a steady rise since 2010, fell to $7.4 billion in fiscal 2017—the first drop in seven years—and edged slightly lower again last year. Sales at stores open for more than 12 months, a closely watched measure in retailing, also slipped in 2018, with operating income at the unit tumbling 45%, to $512.4 million. –Bloomberg

As a result, L Brands has shut down dozens of underperforming locations – announcing in February the closure of 53 Victoria’s Secret locations in North America, over 3x its average. 

“Given the decline in performance at Victoria’s Secret, we have substantially pulled back on capital investment in that business,” said L Brands executives during a May earnings call. 

“Although results were consistent with our guidance, we are clearly not satisfied and are working hard to improve performance.” 

Earlier this year, Wexner told employees that he was taking a “fresh look” at everything, including brand positioning, marketing, and real estate, in an effort to recharge the business. One notable change: In May, Victoria’s Secret pulled its fashion show from network television after 23 years. Ratings bottomed out in 2018, with only 3.3 million viewers, down from the previous all-time low of 5 million the year prior. In a memo Wexner sent employees about “re-birthing” Victoria’s Secret, he said network TV is no longer the right fit for its signature fashion show, which is expected to move to streaming. –Bloomberg

Can Victoria’s Secret forge a sexy path forward without alienating shoppers attuned to ‘body-inclusive’ messaging? 

Rebel Wilson at the MTV Movie Awards, 2015

 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Yc6fHT Tyler Durden

Cal Berkeley Removed From ‘2019 Best Colleges’ Rankings For Lying About Alumni

Authored by Adam Sabes via Campus Reform,

The University of California-Berkeley has been taken off of the U.S. News 2019 Best Colleges rankings after U.S. News says it handed over incorrect alumni contributions data.

According to U.S. News, UC-Berkeley misreported alumni giving rates, telling U.S. News that the giving rate for fiscal years 2016 and 2017 was 11.6 percent when the actual rate of giving for 2016 was 7.9 percent.

UC-Berkeley also admitted to U.S. News that the incorrect reporting dates all the way to 2014, and was due to the university including alumni pledges for giving to the school, which is not what U.S. News uses in their ranking metrics.

A letter sent to UC-Berkeley by U.S. News states that the university included alumni pledges and tax-deductible charitable gifts in their submission, rather than including the number of alumni donors who gave “cash” gifts that qualified.

According to U.S. News, UC-Berkeley “greatly overstated” their alumni giving data, which counts for 5 percent of the ranking system that U.S. News uses to determine their list.

Because of this error, UC-Berkeley has been taken off of the list, and placed in the Best Colleges “unranked” category.

U.S. News states that the university will remain on the “unranked” column until the 2020 Best Colleges list is released, given that UC-Berkeley confirms the accuracy of the data submitted for that list.

For the next three years, the Chancellor and President of UC-Berkeley will have to certify the accuracy of the submissions given to U.S. News.

The 2020 Best Colleges rankings will be published in September, and U.S. News is requesting that UC-Berkeley certifies their submission by Aug. 5.

Prior to being taken off the list, UC-Berkeley held the number 2 spot, according to Forbes.

In addition to UC-Berkeley being taken off the list, the University of North Carolina-Pembroke, Mars Hill University, and Scripps College were also put in the “unranked” column.

Campus Reform reached out to UC-Berkeley but did not receive a comment in time for publication. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SNdPTy Tyler Durden

The Dismissal of Nicholas Sandmann’s Defamation Lawsuit Shows There’s a Difference Between Unfair Press Coverage and Libel

It seems clear that Nicholas Sandmann, the MAGA-hat-wearing high school student whose encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips on the National Mall last January was widely depicted as an example of smug bigotry among Trump supporters, got a raw deal, as Robby Soave has argued here. But there is a difference between unfair press coverage and libel, as the dismissal of Sandmann’s defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post shows.

In a ruling issued on Friday, U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman goes through the 33 statements in seven Post articles and three related tweets that Sandmann cited in his lawsuit and concludes that none qualifies as defamation under Kentucky law. Twenty-three of the statements did not refer to Sandmann specifically, instead describing the group of students from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky, who attended the March for Life that day. While Sandman was part of that group, the judge says, the statements were not “about” him and therefore do not meet a minimum requirement for defamation.

As for the rest of the statements, Bertelsman says, none constitutes an objectively false factual assertion, another requirement for defamation. One article, for example, said the students “exchanged taunts” with the group of Hebrew Israelites whose bigoted and inflammatory remarks provoked the confrontation on the Mall to which Phillips said he was responding. “What constitutes ‘taunting’ is a subjective matter of opinion,” Bertelsman says.

When the Post reported that “school officials and the Catholic Diocese of Covington released a joint statement condemning and apologizing for the students’ actions,” it was likewise noting the opinion of those officials (although it later corrected that characterization by noting that the officials had not actually apologized). When the paper quoted Phillips as lamenting that “my America is being torn apart by racism, hatred, bigotry,” it was also reporting someone’s opinion.

The expression on Sandmann’s face when Phillips was standing in front of him, which many people perceived as a “smirk” but he described as a smile intended to defuse the situation, is open to interpretation as well. And so on.

Perhaps most controversially, Bertelsman concludes that when Phillips told the Post he “felt threatened” after he was “swarmed” by the teenagers and claimed “that guy in the hat [i.e., Sandmann] stood in my way and we were at an impasse,” because “he just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat,” he also was expressing his own subjective reaction. “How Phillips ‘felt’ is obviously subjective,” Bertelsman writes, “and whether Phillips was ‘swarmed’ or ‘blocked’ is simply not ‘capable of being proved objectively incorrect.'”

Sandman’s defenders argued that Phillips, who initiated the encounter by “walking very close to Sandmann, beating his drum and singing within inches of Sandmann’s face” (as Bertelsman puts it), misrepresented the situation. But Bertelsman sees dueling interpretations and emotional reactions rather than a factual dispute:

The Court accepts Sandmann’ s statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not to impede or block anyone. However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being “blocked” and not allowed to “retreat.” He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but…they are opinion protected by the First Amendment.

Quoting a 2006 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit,which includes Kentucky, Bertelsman emphasized that “in determining whether a writing is libelous per se,” as Sandmann charged, “courts must stay within the four corners of the written communication.” The 6th Circuit continued: “The words must be given their ordinary, natural meaning as defined by the average lay person. The face of the writing must be stripped of all innuendoes and explanations.” It was the “innuendoes,” reinforced by the comments of pundits and social media users, that really damned Sandmann.

Sandmann also sued CNN and NBC over their coverage, and those cases are still pending.

Even if the Post‘s coverage fell short of libel, that hardly means it was a model of journalistic practice. After Sandmann filed his lawsuit, the Post admitted that its initial reporting was flawed. According to a March 1 editor’s note, “Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story—including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict.” The paper also noted that”an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos.”

As Bertelsman notes, the “additional video” was available online on January 19, the day after the incident, so the Post could have provided “a more complete assessment of what occurred” all along. By failing to do so, and by omitting the perspective of Sandmann and the other students from its early coverage, it reinforced the impression that they were the aggressors. The Post started to backtrack three days later, when it published a story headlined “Viral Standoff Between a Tribal Elder and a High Schooler Is More Complicated Than It First Seemed.” That same day, the Post also published a column by press critic Erik Wemple headlined “‘Fuller Picture’: How Major Media Outlets Handled Their Evolving Accounts of the Covington Story.” But those re-evaluations came after the Post presented Phillips’ account without contradiction and ran video of the incident under headlines like “Teens Mock and Jeer Native American Elder on the Mall.” Lots of people, including the school and church officials in Kentucky, jumped to unjustified conclusions in this case, and news outlets such as the Post encouraged them to do so.

There are obvious lessons here for journalists. But the case also illustrates a point that Donald Trump should (but won’t) take to heart: Journalism can be unbalanced, misleading, and even flat-out wrong without being legally actionable. That’s as it should be in a country that values freedom of speech, which requires tolerating all sorts of “fake news,” even when it hurts innocent bystanders. As painful as it is to be on the receiving end of irresponsible news coverage, the consequences would be far worse if the government ventured beyond the relatively narrow confines of defamation and tried to mandate fairness.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Yy9yEU
via IFTTT

The Dismissal of Nicholas Sandmann’s Defamation Lawsuit Shows There’s a Difference Between Unfair Press Coverage and Libel

It seems clear that Nicholas Sandmann, the MAGA-hat-wearing high school student whose encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips on the National Mall last January was widely depicted as an example of smug bigotry among Trump supporters, got a raw deal, as Robby Soave has argued here. But there is a difference between unfair press coverage and libel, as the dismissal of Sandmann’s defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post shows.

In a ruling issued on Friday, U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman goes through the 33 statements in seven Post articles and three related tweets that Sandmann cited in his lawsuit and concludes that none qualifies as defamation under Kentucky law. Twenty-three of the statements did not refer to Sandmann specifically, instead describing the group of students from Covington Catholic High School in Park Hills, Kentucky, who attended the March for Life that day. While Sandman was part of that group, the judge says, the statements were not “about” him and therefore do not meet a minimum requirement for defamation.

As for the rest of the statements, Bertelsman says, none constitutes an objectively false factual assertion, another requirement for defamation. One article, for example, said the students “exchanged taunts” with the group of Hebrew Israelites whose bigoted and inflammatory remarks provoked the confrontation on the Mall to which Phillips said he was responding. “What constitutes ‘taunting’ is a subjective matter of opinion,” Bertelsman says.

When the Post reported that “school officials and the Catholic Diocese of Covington released a joint statement condemning and apologizing for the students’ actions,” it was likewise noting the opinion of those officials (although it later corrected that characterization by noting that the officials had not actually apologized). When the paper quoted Phillips as lamenting that “my America is being torn apart by racism, hatred, bigotry,” it was also reporting someone’s opinion.

The expression on Sandmann’s face when Phillips was standing in front of him, which many people perceived as a “smirk” but he described as a smile intended to defuse the situation, is open to interpretation as well. And so on.

Perhaps most controversially, Bertelsman concludes that when Phillips told the Post he “felt threatened” after he was “swarmed” by the teenagers and claimed “that guy in the hat [i.e., Sandmann] stood in my way and we were at an impasse,” because “he just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat,” he also was expressing his own subjective reaction. “How Phillips ‘felt’ is obviously subjective,” Bertelsman writes, “and whether Phillips was ‘swarmed’ or ‘blocked’ is simply not ‘capable of being proved objectively incorrect.'”

Sandman’s defenders argued that Phillips, who initiated the encounter by “walking very close to Sandmann, beating his drum and singing within inches of Sandmann’s face” (as Bertelsman puts it), misrepresented the situation. But Bertelsman sees dueling interpretations and emotional reactions rather than a factual dispute:

The Court accepts Sandmann’ s statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not to impede or block anyone. However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being “blocked” and not allowed to “retreat.” He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but…they are opinion protected by the First Amendment.

Quoting a 2006 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit,which includes Kentucky, Bertelsman emphasized that “in determining whether a writing is libelous per se,” as Sandmann charged, “courts must stay within the four corners of the written communication.” The 6th Circuit continued: “The words must be given their ordinary, natural meaning as defined by the average lay person. The face of the writing must be stripped of all innuendoes and explanations.” It was the “innuendoes,” reinforced by the comments of pundits and social media users, that really damned Sandmann.

Sandmann also sued CNN and NBC over their coverage, and those cases are still pending.

Even if the Post‘s coverage fell short of libel, that hardly means it was a model of journalistic practice. After Sandmann filed his lawsuit, the Post admitted that its initial reporting was flawed. According to a March 1 editor’s note, “Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story—including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict.” The paper also noted that”an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos.”

As Bertelsman notes, the “additional video” was available online on January 19, the day after the incident, so the Post could have provided “a more complete assessment of what occurred” all along. By failing to do so, and by omitting the perspective of Sandmann and the other students from its early coverage, it reinforced the impression that they were the aggressors. The Post started to backtrack three days later, when it published a story headlined “Viral Standoff Between a Tribal Elder and a High Schooler Is More Complicated Than It First Seemed.” That same day, the Post also published a column by press critic Erik Wemple headlined “‘Fuller Picture’: How Major Media Outlets Handled Their Evolving Accounts of the Covington Story.” But those re-evaluations came after the Post presented Phillips’ account without contradiction and ran video of the incident under headlines like “Teens Mock and Jeer Native American Elder on the Mall.” Lots of people, including the school and church officials in Kentucky, jumped to unjustified conclusions in this case, and news outlets such as the Post encouraged them to do so.

There are obvious lessons here for journalists. But the case also illustrates a point that Donald Trump should (but won’t) take to heart: Journalism can be unbalanced, misleading, and even flat-out wrong without being legally actionable. That’s as it should be in a country that values freedom of speech, which requires tolerating all sorts of “fake news,” even when it hurts innocent bystanders. As painful as it is to be on the receiving end of irresponsible news coverage, the consequences would be far worse if the government ventured beyond the relatively narrow confines of defamation and tried to mandate fairness.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Yy9yEU
via IFTTT

Cuomo Signs Bill Decriminalizing Marijuana Use In New York

For years, New York State has lagged behind its progressive-minded peers in the area of marijuana prohibition. As states like California, Massachusetts, Vermont and even Maine passed bills legalizing the drug, members of the New York State legislature simply haven’t been able to overcome minor differences in ideology to pass a legalization bill of their own, leaving New York with some of the most draconian marijuana laws in the northeast.

Cuomo

But that’s all about to change – sort of. On Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill decriminalizing marijuana use a little over one month after the legislature failed to reach an agreement on a bill that would have legalized sales. But the decrim bill is the next best thing, supporters insist, arguing that it will help eliminate the racial disparities in arrests and sentencing, since it eliminates the hated “public view” loophole (which allows a cop to arrest a suspect who willingly takes a bag of marijuana out of his pocket, placing it in “public view”) while also making possession of anything up to one to an ounce punishable by a max fine of $50. Possession of between one and two ounces will be punishable of a fine up to $200, eliminating the possibility of jail time, regardless of an individuals criminal record.

The state assembly and Senate passed the decrim bill more than a week and a half ago.

Proponents of legalization still see decrim as insufficient, since users still wouldn’t have a legal source for marijuana, allowing criminal organizations to still profit off it.

Ten states and Washington, DC, have legalized marijuana, though DC and Vermont don’t allow sales.

Illinois will become the 11th state to legalize once Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs the recently passed legalization bill into law. Another 14 states have only decriminalized.

decrim

Courtesy of Vox

After signing the bill, Cuomo praised the legislation for helping to eliminate a source of discrimination against communities of color, according to NBC New York. Proponents estimate that as many as 600,000 New Yorkers will benefit from the legislation (which also provides for expunging past marijuana convictions).

“Communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by laws governing marijuana for far too long, and today we are ending this injustice once and for all,” Cuomo said.

“It’s not legalization,” he said on public radio previously. “But it is decriminalization and it’s a major, major accomplishment.”

The law will take effect 30 days from Monday.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/314EDBo Tyler Durden

Over-Taxed: The Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out, NJ Residents Flee In Droves

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

New Jersey residents are fleeing their state in droves thanks to the over taxation and immense financial burden placed on them by their socialist state government. In addition to the already sky-high federal tax that we are all forced to pay, those in New Jersey are struggling to make enough money to live after the state also steals a cut of their income.

The SALT (state and local tax) cap has hit high-tax states like New York, California, and New Jersey particularly hard because these states steal a higher portion of an individual’s income. As a result, affected residents have begun to move to other states – a trend that experts expect to accelerate, according to Fox Business.

“They can’t tax us anymore, the middle class is getting wiped out,” former “Saturday Night Live” cast member and New Jersey resident Joe Piscopo told FOX Business’ Neil Cavuto on Friday, adding that wealthy individuals are leaving the state “in droves.” This is always the case, as governments all seek to find ways to steal more from the producers to fund their corruption. This problem is only going to get worse too and New Jersey Democrats are attempting to pass a state wealth tax.

Democratic Governor Phil Murphy renewed a push to implement the state tax (with a top rate of 10.75 percent) on people with incomes over $1 million. However, amid disagreements with the state legislature, which threatened to shut down the state government, Murphy said he will sign a budget over the weekend. State Democrats sent Murphy a budget proposal last week, which did not include the tax increase on people with more than $1 million. Murphy, however, has been a strong advocate for implementing the tax and it has been one of his top campaign promises.

Therefore, most residents have a difficult time believing that the issue has been completely put to rest. So instead, they’ve taken action and made the decision to leave the state entirely taking their wealth with them rather than having it stolen by tyrannical fascists.

New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer was one of several lawmakers from states including New York, Illinois, and California who took to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to air out their grievances against the new SALT cap. Gottheimer called the cap a “double-taxation grenade” that was “lobbed at New Jersey and other high-tax states” by so-called “moocher states.” The average SALT deduction claimed in Bergen County, New Jersey, was more than $24,700 before the implementation of the cap. -Fox Business

Piscopo says that a handful of states in the U.S. are already socialist.  And those are the states people continue to flee in droves and are facing homeless epidemics.

“I’m telling you right now, If Gov. Murphy, if Steve Sweeney does a primary, and I don’t mean inside around the rest of the country, but this is huge in Jersey because Jersey, New York, and California are now socialist states,” he told FOX Business‘ Neil Cavuto on Friday.

In “Parasites on Parade,” Larken Rose (author of “The Most Dangerous Superstition” and “The Iron Web”) uses his own direct experiences with bureaucratic and judicial stupidity, intrusion and corruption to illustrate why, everywhere and at all times, in every situation and at every level, government sucks!

This snarky, flippant look at the mentality and tactics of various state busybodies also provides an important lesson regarding the true nature of political “authority,” and the problems and abuses it naturally creates. –  Parasites on Parade

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2GBwpJv Tyler Durden

“Half The Time, We Got A Recession”: This Is What Happens When The Fed Cuts Rates

Since the 1950s, the Fed has embarked on 19 easing cycles, including the unconventional easing measures adopted during the course of this economic recovery, according to Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chadha. However of these, 9 or almost half, saw the economy eventually slip into recession; not only that, but the latest three rate cut resulted in a recession within 3 months of the first cut.

How did the economy fare following these rate cuts?

First, the good news for “insurance” rate cuts such as the one coming up, is that mini easing cycles were distinguished by very quick turnarounds in growth (2-3 months) following the first cut. Such quick turnarounds in growth, which risk assets are currently already pricing in, suggests factors other than the easing of monetary policy played key roles in driving them.

In Deutsche Bank’s view, a resolution of the trade war remains key to a turn up in growth at the current juncture.

The episodes that ended in recession saw the ISM continue to weaken, eventually bottoming – 8 months after the Fed began cutting – at low levels (median 36). In these recession episodes, the S&P 500 saw a full bear market, typically falling -27% from peak to trough, with a bulk of the decline occurring after the Fed had started easing. Indeed, on average, the S&P 500 did not bottom until 5 months after the Fed started cutting.  The distinguishing characteristic of the episodes that did not end in recessions was that after a moderate further decline in growth (to a median ISM 48), on average within 2-3 months after the Fed began easing, growth rebounded quickly. The equity market typically fell -7% after the Fed began easing, but bottomed quickly with growth. The S&P 500 ended above the pre-easing level within 6 months each and every time, rising a robust 12% on average.

* * *

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the Fed always eased when the growth of leading indicators slowed sufficiently. To wit, the Fed always eased when the leading indicators (LEI) have declined over a 6 month period, even when the decline was small.

The LEI has stalled since September 2018 and its 6-month growth has now fallen to zero, on the cusp of turning negative.

So the Fed cutting rates this month as is widely priced in, would be exactly on cue. On average the Fed began easing around 8 months after the ISM peaked and had fallen to around 50, so the current pattern is also in line with the historical script. Typically though the Fed began cutting 4 months after the S&P 500 peaked. And by the time it did so, the market was down a median -12% from its peak. Of course, this time the market keeps rising and printing new all time highs, in an apparent outlier to historic data. Indeed, as Deutsche Bank notes, “a rate cut with the S&P 500 close to or at a record high as is the case currently is a strong exception to this pattern, having happened only once previously, in 1995.“

But Fed easing historically proved to be a mini cycle only half the time, with a very quick turn up in growth the distinguishing feature. As noted above, of the 19 Fed easing cycles in response to slowing growth, 9 or almost half, saw the economy eventually slip into recession. On average, the S&P 500 did not bottom until 5 months after the Fed started cutting. In mini easing cycle episodes, the S&P 500 ended above the pre-easing level within 6 months each and every time, rising a robust 12% on average. Such quick turnarounds in growth, which risk assets are currently already pricing in, suggests factors other than the easing of monetary policy played key roles in driving them.

Some more detailed observations from Chadha’s full note, starting with the observation that the Fed is cutting on cue, but…

1. Bond market priced in line, growth and risk assets for a significant rebound in growth

US 10y bond yields have tracked growth indicators like the ISM Manufacturing index closely through this cycle (correlation 69%). The decline in yields since last November has been in line with the slowing in growth.

Equities on the other hand, where the S&P 500 relative to its 200 day moving average (to normalize for trends) has been robustly correlated (63%) with growth indicators such as the manufacturing ISM over the last 20 years, has become  increasingly disconnected since early June and looks now to be pricing in a significant rebound, from 51.7 currently back up to around 57.

In fact, Morgan Stanley over the weekend noted that the disconnect between the economy and equity markets has never been this great.

In price terms, this puts the S&P 500 around 10% above fair value based on current growth. While the S&P 500 has risen to new cycle highs even as earnings have stagnated for the last 10 months, credit spreads both IG and HY are well wide of their tights reached last year. Credit spreads are also closely correlated with indicators of growth (composite ISM correlations over the last 20 years are -78% for HG and -83% for HY). That said, credit spreads are tighter than levels implied  by current growth and are also pricing in a significant rebound, albeit less than equities are.

In commodities, as Gold has broken above its 7-year range it has become a focal point of market attention. On a relative basis, the ratio of Industrial to Precious Metals, which closely follows the ISM manufacturing (77%)…

…and US 10y yields (85%), has moved in line.

2. Next up in the growth slowdown: earnings set to disappoint globally

With growth the main driver of earnings, global PMIs, especially in manufacturing, have been declining uninterruptedly since early 2018. In the US, the manufacturing ISM has been falling for the last 9 months, and is down from above 60 to 51.7. Export orders have been leading the ISM and point to an imminent dip in the manufacturing ISM below 50, i.e., into contractionary territory, as do other leading indicators like new orders. Growth in the LEIs is also on the cusp of turning negative. The next and critical read on growth comes from Q2 corporate earnings results reported over the next few weeks. The cuts have lagged persistently negative macro data surprises, with which they are generally well correlated and we see the cuts as too little. DB’s top-down model for US earnings, incorporating US and global growth and the US dollar, also suggests that consensus estimates are too high. So we expect either continued downgrades into or  disappointing results. Similarly, earnings estimates in Europe also look too optimistic and several companies have already issued negative guidance in recent weeks. Earnings estimates in Japan and in EM have fallen more significantly but remain vulnerable, with trends in growth and data surprises still headed downward

So As Jim Reid summarizes, history suggests a much higher probability of an imminent recession than markets do and also that we’re at quite a binary moment for markets as the Fed (and other central banks) embark on a fresh easing cycle.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Ka9MN1 Tyler Durden