Biden & G-7 Push World Into “Nightmare Scenario”

Biden & G-7 Push World Into “Nightmare Scenario”

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

The West’s Malthusian neoliberal political order is rapidly collapsing…

Led by U.S. President Joe Biden, the Group of Seven (G-7) economic powers announced plans to ban the transport of Russian oil sold above a certain price with the goal of hurting Russia enough so that it ends its war against Ukraine. “There is only one way out: for Putin to accept that his plans in Ukraine will not succeed,” said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

The G-7’s plan is to impose a price cap on Russian oil through the regulation of petroleum shipping, banking, and insurance.

The proposal is, in a word, ludicrous.

Russian President Vladimir Putin would never agree to a price cap. He would likely withhold oil from the market in the same way he has been withholding natural gas from Europe, driving up prices. Putin would then sell oil to countries including China and India at a 30-40% discount, as he has been doing, or larger. Russia produces oil at a price of just $3-$4 per barrel and Russian firms can profit with oil prices at $25-$30 per barrel. And while it’s true that there is a near-monopoly in shipping insurance, Russia has been creating alternatives to it.

Neither China nor India are likely to agree to the cap unless G-7 nations imposed severe “secondary sanctions” against them, which could escalate into a mutually destructive trade war. But even if they did formally comply, the two nations could easily cheat, as several analysts quickly noted on Twitter.

“A price cap will never work,” said one.

“Every refiner will bid price cap…. India and China… will cheat and pay above the cap and win all they want as [the] other option is twice the price. Nobody will know they paid it, either. Russia ends with more revenue.”

Defenders of the oil price cap proposal point to a similar oil price cap mechanism that President Bill Clinton led the United Nations Security Council to impose on Iraq in 1995, as part of the U.N.’s “oil-for-food programme,” which allowed Iraq to sell its oil in exchange for food and medicine. It was meant to serve the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people while preventing Iraq’s then-president, Saddam Hussein, from increasing military capabilities. Oil buyers put money into an escrow account run by a private bank. Some of the money was then distributed to Iraq, some was for war reparations to Kuwait, and some was for U.N. operations.

But the Iraq oil-for-food scheme became famously corrupt and had to be shut down. And while the U.N. Security Council was united on Iraq, it is today divided over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China, India and 33 other nations refuse to condemn Russia’s invasion, and China and India are, as noted, the largest buyers of heavily-discounted Russian oil.

Russia’s response to Western financial sanctions are further proof that an oil price cap can’t work. Biden in March said sanctions were “crushing the Russian economy” and that “the ruble is reduced to rubble.” But high energy prices have meant that Russia is making more money than ever, the ruble is at a seven-year high against the dollar, and China’s benefiting from discounted Russian oil. As such, the attempted bans on Russian oil are proof that the G-7’s latest price cap idea would backfire. Putin would simply reduce oil and gas exports to punish participating nations and further drive up prices.

“It is a nightmare scenario,” noted an oil trader.

The response to the G-7 Russian oil price cap proposal has been near-uniformly negative, even from economists sympathetic to the Biden administration and some G-7 leaders. “This is going to fail,” tweeted the head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The G7 won’t enforce it on India, and China will retaliate until a workaround is reached.” Italy’s Prime Minister urged the oil price cap to include a natural gas price cap, and French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed a price cap on all oil, not just Russian oil. “The U.S.,” noted Politico, “which originally proposed the narrower Russian price cap, and is currently the world’s biggest oil producer, was blindsided by the French plan.”

In other words, the G-7 is in chaos. Last fall, G-7 leaders claimed climate change was the most important issue in the world, demanded that government subsidies to fossil fuels be phased out, and tried to deny African nations fossil fuels. Now, G-7 nations are subsidizing energy, waiving energy taxes, and burning more coal than they have in years. In the three decades since the Cold War, G-7 leaders have heralded a new global order based on free markets and neoliberal ideology. Now, they are proposing price-fixing and the creation of a Western energy cartel.

The bottom line is that there will be no Western energy cartel, nor even a price cap on Russian oil or gas. Global energy markets are far too globalized for an oil price cap to work. Russia, China, India and at least 33 other nations would circumvent it, and as soon as they did, the West would be forced to abandon it, too, given the crippling effect it would have on Western economies. Indeed, simply attempting to impose a global oil price cap would wreak havoc. Noted Bloomberg, “politicians are likely to quietly abandon the concept after agreeing to explore it.”

What, then, is going on? Why are President Biden and the G-7 pushing the West ever closer to a “nightmare scenario” of energy shortages and recession?

The Great Reset looms…

Subscribe to Michael Shellenberger to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives…

Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/30/2022 – 17:10

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‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ Is How You Get 53 Dead Migrants in the Back of a Truck


A tractor-trailer against a map of San Antonio, Texas

On Monday, dozens of bodies were found in a tractor-trailer outside San Antonio, Texas, in an incident that left 53 migrants dead. They included 27 Mexicans, 14 Hondurans, seven Guatemalans, and two Salvadorans who had been packed in stifling conditions. Some victims were as young as 13. The tragic episode is now thought to be the deadliest smuggling incident on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was quick to blame the Biden administration’s “open border policies” for the incident. He and other immigration hardliners favor the “prevention through deterrence” enforcement strategy, which holds that unauthorized migration will dwindle or eventually stop if the act of migrating is simply made difficult enough.

But what they fail to mention is the black market created by a supposedly impenetrable border. Eliminating safe, legal, and predictable migration pathways doesn’t stop immigration from happening. It just funnels migrants into more dangerous crossings and riskier methods of reaching American soil. Willing to attempt the passage no matter the cost, those migrants often look to smugglers as their best option.

That’s exactly what happened earlier this week. The migrants found dead in the tractor-trailer perished because prohibition doesn’t work, and bad actors are empowered to take advantage of the high profits that come with an illicit market.

Migrant-smuggling networks have become more sophisticated as immigration enforcement has ramped up. “In the past, smuggling organizations were mom and pop. Now they are organized and tied in with the cartels,” Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations San Antonio, told CNN. “So you have a criminal organization who has no regard for the safety of the migrants. They are treated like commodities rather than people.”

Smuggling is a lucrative business. Migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador pay smugglers roughly $1.7 billion each year to reach the U.S., according to research from the Migration Policy Institute, World Food Programme, and Civic Data Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s largely a result of high demand and the difficulties that smugglers navigate as they transport people north. As the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh pointed out in 2014:

The price of smuggling is an indication of the effectiveness of immigration enforcement along the border. The first effect of increased enforcement is to decrease the supply of human smugglers. As the supply of human smugglers decreases, the price that remaining human smugglers can charge increases. Before border enforcement tightened in the early 1990s, migrants typically paid about $725 (2014 dollars). Currently, unauthorized migrants from Central America are paying around $7500.

By 2008, Nowrasteh writes, “18 percent of apprehended unlawful immigrants reported hiring a human smuggler”—a nearly six-fold increase compared to 1999. Now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls human smuggling “a daily occurrence” on the southern border. As more people turn to smugglers—or cross into the U.S. on foot without their help—deadly events will only increase. The remains of over 550 migrants were found at the border in 2021, and 2022 is on track to be even worse.

The majority of migrants attempting to cross the southern border into the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic have been expelled under Title 42, a public health measure that allows immigration officials to immediately turn away noncitizens and bar them from applying for asylum. Though “the number of encounters at the border fell by half in fiscal year 2020 compared to the previous year,” writes The Marshall Project, “the number of encounters that required a rescue operation doubled to the highest rate in at least a decade.” What’s more, “the death rate also nearly doubled during the same period, from 35 to 62 migrants found dead for every 100,000 migrants encountered.”

Simply clamping down the border further won’t work. And some of the specific policy responses to this week’s tragedy might not do much to solve the underlying issues that result in migrant deaths. Abbott has promised to step up truck inspections at the border, but several immigration experts interviewed by NPR, including a former Department of Homeland Security investigator, “believe the migrants were not likely brought over the border from Mexico in the truck.” It isn’t uncommon for migrants to first cross the border on foot, evading Border Patrol checkpoints, and later board a truck.

Research has shown that improving access to legal immigration pathways like temporary work visas helps reduce unauthorized migration. After spending so much time emphasizing the benefits of hardline immigration enforcement, policy makers would do well to remember that such an approach is as deadly as it is ineffective.

The post 'Prevention Through Deterrence' Is How You Get 53 Dead Migrants in the Back of a Truck appeared first on Reason.com.

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‘Prevention Through Deterrence’ Is How You Get 53 Dead Migrants in the Back of a Truck


A tractor-trailer against a map of San Antonio, Texas

On Monday, dozens of bodies were found in a tractor-trailer outside San Antonio, Texas, in an incident that left 53 migrants dead. They included 27 Mexicans, 14 Hondurans, seven Guatemalans, and two Salvadorans who had been packed in stifling conditions. Some victims were as young as 13. The tragic episode is now thought to be the deadliest smuggling incident on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was quick to blame the Biden administration’s “open border policies” for the incident. He and other immigration hardliners favor the “prevention through deterrence” enforcement strategy, which holds that unauthorized migration will dwindle or eventually stop if the act of migrating is simply made difficult enough.

But what they fail to mention is the black market created by a supposedly impenetrable border. Eliminating safe, legal, and predictable migration pathways doesn’t stop immigration from happening. It just funnels migrants into more dangerous crossings and riskier methods of reaching American soil. Willing to attempt the passage no matter the cost, those migrants often look to smugglers as their best option.

That’s exactly what happened earlier this week. The migrants found dead in the tractor-trailer perished because prohibition doesn’t work, and bad actors are empowered to take advantage of the high profits that come with an illicit market.

Migrant-smuggling networks have become more sophisticated as immigration enforcement has ramped up. “In the past, smuggling organizations were mom and pop. Now they are organized and tied in with the cartels,” Craig Larrabee, acting special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations San Antonio, told CNN. “So you have a criminal organization who has no regard for the safety of the migrants. They are treated like commodities rather than people.”

Smuggling is a lucrative business. Migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador pay smugglers roughly $1.7 billion each year to reach the U.S., according to research from the Migration Policy Institute, World Food Programme, and Civic Data Design Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That’s largely a result of high demand and the difficulties that smugglers navigate as they transport people north. As the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh pointed out in 2014:

The price of smuggling is an indication of the effectiveness of immigration enforcement along the border. The first effect of increased enforcement is to decrease the supply of human smugglers. As the supply of human smugglers decreases, the price that remaining human smugglers can charge increases. Before border enforcement tightened in the early 1990s, migrants typically paid about $725 (2014 dollars). Currently, unauthorized migrants from Central America are paying around $7500.

By 2008, Nowrasteh writes, “18 percent of apprehended unlawful immigrants reported hiring a human smuggler”—a nearly six-fold increase compared to 1999. Now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls human smuggling “a daily occurrence” on the southern border. As more people turn to smugglers—or cross into the U.S. on foot without their help—deadly events will only increase. The remains of over 550 migrants were found at the border in 2021, and 2022 is on track to be even worse.

The majority of migrants attempting to cross the southern border into the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic have been expelled under Title 42, a public health measure that allows immigration officials to immediately turn away noncitizens and bar them from applying for asylum. Though “the number of encounters at the border fell by half in fiscal year 2020 compared to the previous year,” writes The Marshall Project, “the number of encounters that required a rescue operation doubled to the highest rate in at least a decade.” What’s more, “the death rate also nearly doubled during the same period, from 35 to 62 migrants found dead for every 100,000 migrants encountered.”

Simply clamping down the border further won’t work. And some of the specific policy responses to this week’s tragedy might not do much to solve the underlying issues that result in migrant deaths. Abbott has promised to step up truck inspections at the border, but several immigration experts interviewed by NPR, including a former Department of Homeland Security investigator, “believe the migrants were not likely brought over the border from Mexico in the truck.” It isn’t uncommon for migrants to first cross the border on foot, evading Border Patrol checkpoints, and later board a truck.

Research has shown that improving access to legal immigration pathways like temporary work visas helps reduce unauthorized migration. After spending so much time emphasizing the benefits of hardline immigration enforcement, policy makers would do well to remember that such an approach is as deadly as it is ineffective.

The post 'Prevention Through Deterrence' Is How You Get 53 Dead Migrants in the Back of a Truck appeared first on Reason.com.

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Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory Reportedly Outputting 5,000 Vehicles Per Week

Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory Reportedly Outputting 5,000 Vehicles Per Week

Just hours after reports of hundreds of people being laid off at Tesla’s San Mateo, Autopilot focused, office, it appears the company is up and running at full capacity at its new Gigafactory in Texas. 

That’s because electrek reported this week that the company is now cranking out as many as 5,000 vehicles per week from its new Texas location, though the report questions whether or not that is a “sustainable” rate. 

The factory also added production of the Model Y Long Range on top of the Standard Range version, the report says. The automaker is staying mum on the details of its production coming from its new factory, it continues.

The Texas Gigafactory has been one of the the company’s most important recent investments. The company is finally, after starting production of the Model Y back in 2021, starting to gradually ramp up deliveries of vehicles built in its Texas factory. 

The company’s goal is reportedly to produce 10,000 vehicles per week by the end of the year. 

electrek’s sources told them that “Tesla has managed to ramp up production since adding a new version of the Model Y, Model Y Long Range, and it now produces several thousand vehicles per week” at the factory. 

They were also told Tesla was capable of producing at least 2,000 Model Ys per week from the factory. Some buyers taking delivery of the Model Y Long Range from the factory are being told that their models have the old 2170 cell batteries, and not the company’s new ones. 

Drone footage appears to show that Tesla is getting “hundreds of cars out every day,” the report concluded. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/30/2022 – 16:50

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Abolishing the Filibuster To Protect Abortion Rights Would Clear the Way for Republicans To Ban Abortion


President Joe Biden speaking on stage holding a microphone

Last week’s overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) by the U.S. Supreme Court was made possible, at least in some small ways, by what then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) did in November 2013.

Seeking a short-term political win, Reid followed through on what both Democrats and Republicans had taken turns threatening to do for the better part of the past decade: abolishing the filibuster for judicial nominees. And the move did indeed pay some short-term dividends, as Democrats were able to use their Senate majority to push through a bunch of circuit court judicial nominations that had been stalled by GOP filibuster threats.

Over the longer term, however, that maneuver turned into a clear win for Republicans. They took back control of the Senate in 2014, took the presidency in 2016 (in no small part because many conservatives held their nose to vote for Donald Trump in the hopes that he would appoint good judges), then expanded the filibuster-exemption to include the Supreme Court justices, and appointed most of the five-justice majority that ended the federal control over abortion policy.

Having apparently learned nothing from this experience, prominent Democrats including President Joe Biden are once again endorsing changes to the filibuster—changes which, if approved, would probably open the door to a future Republican-controlled Congress banning abortion nationwide.

Asked Thursday about the potential to scrap the filibuster in order to pass a law through Congress protecting access to abortions, President Joe Biden said he’d back that kind of effort. “I believe we have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law, and the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that,” Biden said during a press conference [Is there a link for this we can add?] in Madrid, Spain, where he is attending a NATO summit. “And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights; it should be—we provide an exception for this.”

As the president admits, this is not the first time he’s voiced support for carving away at the filibuster. After years (many, many years) of championing the Senate’s 60-vote threshold as an important aspect of its proper functioning, Biden called in January for the Senate to scrap the filibuster in a narrow way to allow Democrats to overhaul federal election procedures.

But the problem with changing the rules for the elections bill or an abortion bill is the same as the one for abolishing the filibuster for judicial nominees: There’s no way to actually do this in a narrow sense. One side doesn’t get to break the norms by claiming it’s “only just this once” or only for a special reason. Once the filibuster for judicial nominations was scrapped, there was no doubt that it would soon be abolished for Supreme Court nominations too. The same will happen if Democrats kill the legislative filibuster—no matter how good of a reason they might think they had.

Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And the Senate is (whether fairly or not) tilted in favor of Republicans. It would be beyond foolish for Democrats to willingly walk into this same trap twice in the span of a decade.

Yet, that is exactly what some Democrats are doing. During an appearance this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) said Biden should “entertain” adding more justices to the court and should “forcefully come out in ending the filibuster in the United States Senate,” which could give Congress a chance to codify abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and other issues. (She also somewhat bizarrely claimed that the court had been taken over by “the Confederate south” in the era before the Emancipation Proclamation, which would be a shocking development indeed).

Luckily, for Democrats, the legislative filibuster is likely to survive the post-Roe madness for the same reason it survived the earlier effort to pass the elections bill: Enough Senate Democrats recognize what a mistake it would be.

“Eliminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.) warned in a speech on the Senate floor in January, effectively ending the Democratic plot to take down the filibuster at the time.

She might as well have been talking about abortion rights—if Democrats want to protect a woman’s right to choose, they’ll likely need to use the filibuster in the near future. Indeed, Republicans are already planning on as much.

“Don’t worry about a national abortion ban. Why? ‘Because of the filibuster,'” an unnamed Senate leadership aide told Puck reporter Julia Ioffe this week, adding that “a lot of Senate Democrats are about to rediscover their love of the filibuster.”

But only if it is still there when they need it.

The post Abolishing the Filibuster To Protect Abortion Rights Would Clear the Way for Republicans To Ban Abortion appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Astonishing Implications Of Schedule F

The Astonishing Implications Of Schedule F

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Donald Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.” 

It sounds boring.

Actually, it would have fundamentally changed, in the best possible way, the entire functioning of the administrative bureaucracy that rules this country in a way that bypasses both the legislative and judicial process, and has ruined the checks and balances inherent in the US Constitution. 

The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883, has designed policy, made policy, structured policy, implemented policy, and interpreted policy while operating outside the control of Congress, the president, and the judiciary. 

The gradual rise of this 4th branch of government – which is very much the most powerful branch – has reduced the American political process to mere theater as compared with the real activity of government, which rests with the permanent bureaucracy. 

Any new president can hire the heads of agencies and they can hire staff, which are known as political appointees. These 4,000 political appointees ostensibly rule 432 agencies (as listed by the Federal Register) as well as some 2.9 million employees (aside from the military and postal service) that effectively inhabit permanent jobs. This permanent state – sometimes called the deep state – knows the ropes and the processes of government far better than any temporary political appointee, thus reducing the appointed jobs to cosmetic positions for the press to hound while the real actions of government take place behind the scenes. 

From 2020 and onward, the American people got to know this administrative state well.

  • They ordered us to wear masks.

  • They deployed their influence to close small businesses and churches.

  • They limited how many people we could have in our homes.

  • They festooned our businesses with plexiglass and told everyone to stay six-feet apart.

  • They demanded two weeks of quarantine when crossing state borders.

  • They decided which medical procedures were elective and non-elective.

  • And they finally demanded compliance with vaccine mandates at the penalty of job loss. 

None of this was ordered by legislation. It was all invented on the spot by the permanent staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We had no idea they had such power. But they do. And that same power which allowed those egregious attacks on rights and liberties also belongs to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the rest. 

Donald Trump came into office with the promise of draining the swamp, without understanding entirely what that meant. He gradually came to realize that he had no control over most of the affairs of government, not because he had no patience for the legislative process but because he had no ability to terminate the employment of most of the civilian bureaucracy. Nor could his political appointees control it. The media, he gradually came to realize, echoed the priorities and concerns of this administrative state due to long-established relationships that led to nonstop leaks that spread false information. 

In May of 2018, he took his first steps to gain some modicum of control over this deep state. He issued three executive orders (E.O. 13837, E.O. 13836, and E.O.13839) that would have diminished their access to labor-union protection when being pressed on the terms of their employment. Those three orders were litigated by the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) and sixteen other federal labor unions. 

All three were struck down with a decision by a DC District Court. The presiding judge was Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was later rewarded for her decision with a nomination to the Supreme Court, which was affirmed by the US Senate. The prevailing and openly stated reason for her nomination was said to be mostly demographic: she would be the first black woman on the Court. The deeper reason was more likely traceable to her role in thwarting actions by Trump which had begun the process of upending the administrative state. Jackson’s judgment was later reversed but Trump’s actions were embroiled in a juridical tangle that rendered them moot. 

Following the lockdowns of mid-March 2020, Trump became increasingly frustrated with the CDC and Anthony Fauci in particular. Trump was profoundly aware that he had no power to fire the man, despite his epicly terrible role in prolonging Covid lockdowns long after Trump wanted to open up to save the American economy and society. 

Trump’s next step was radical and brilliant: the creation of a new category of federal employment. It was called Schedule F. 

Employees of the federal government classified as Schedule F would have been subject to control by the elected president and other representatives. Who are they? They are those who met the following criteria:

Positions of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character not normally subject to change as a result of a Presidential transition shall be listed in Schedule F. In appointing an individual to a position in Schedule F, each agency shall follow the principle of veteran preference as far as administratively feasible.

Schedule F employees would be fired. “You’re fired” was the slogan that made Trump TV famous. With this order, he would be in a position to do the same to the federal bureaucracy. The order further demanded a thorough review throughout the government. 

Each head of an executive agency (as defined in section 105 of title 5, United States Code, but excluding the Government Accountability Office) shall conduct, within 90 days of the date of this order, a preliminary review of agency positions covered by subchapter II of chapter 75 of title 5, United States Code, and shall conduct a complete review of such positions within 210 days of the date of this order.

The Washington Post in an editorial expressed absolute shock and alarm at the implications:

The directive from the White House, issued late Wednesday, sounds technical: creating a new “Schedule F” within the “excepted service” of the federal government for employees in policymaking roles, and directing agencies to determine who qualifies. Its implications, however, are profound and alarming. It gives those in power the authority to fire more or less at will as many as tens of thousands of workers currently in the competitive civil service, from managers to lawyers to economists to, yes, scientists. This week’s order is a major salvo in the president’s onslaught against the cadre of dedicated civil servants whom he calls the “deep state” — and who are really the greatest strength of the U.S. government.

Ninety days after October 21, 2020 would have been January 19, 2021, the day before the new president was to be inaugurated. The Washington Post commented ominously: “Mr. Trump will try to realize his sad vision in his second term, unless voters are wise enough to stop him.”

Biden was declared the winner due mostly to mail-in ballots. 

On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as The Hill reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.” 

How many federal workers in agencies would have been newly classified at Schedule F? We do not know because only one completed the review before their jobs were saved by the election result. The one that did was the Congressional Budget Office. Its conclusion: fully 88% of employees would have been newly classified as Schedule F, thus allowing the president to terminate their employment. 

This would have been a revolutionary change, a complete remake of Washington, DC, and all politics as usual. 

Trump’s EO 13957 was a dagger aimed directly at the heart of the beast. It might have worked. 

It would have gotten us closer to the restoration of a Constitutional system of government in which we have 3 – not 4 – branches of government that are wholly controlled by the people’s representatives. It would have gone a long way toward gutting the administrative state of its power and returning the affairs of state to the people’s control. 

The action was stopped dead due to the election results. 

Whatever one’s view of Trump, one has to admire the brilliance of this executive order. It shows that Trump had come to understand the problem and actually innovate a fundamental solution, or at least the beginnings of one. The “deep state” as we’ve come to know it would have been curbed, and we would have taken a step toward recreating the system that existed before the Pendleton Act of 1883. 

Many efforts have been deployed through the years to regain constitutional control over the permanent bureaucracy. An example is the Hatch Act of 1939 which forbids employees of the government to work for political campaigns. That act turned out to be toothless – one does not need to work for a campaign in order to skew one’s labor in the direction of always granting the federal government more power and control – and largely made irrelevant in the succeeding decades. 

Trump came to office promising to drain the swamp but it was very late in his term before he figured out the means at his disposal to do just that. His final effort took place merely two weeks before the election that was decided in favor of his opponent Biden, who quickly reversed this action just two days following the deadline of an ordered review that would have reclassified, and thus gained control over, a sizable portion of the administrative state. 

With Executive Order 12003 (“Protecting the Federal Workforce”), Biden saved the deep state’s bacon, leaving the efforts finally to drain the swamp to another day and another president. 

Still, Executive Order 13957 exists in the archives as a possible path forward to restore checks and balances in the US system of government. A new Congress can also take such steps at least symbolically. 

Until something takes place to restore the people’s control of the administrative state, a sword of Damocles will continue to hang over the entire country and we will never be safe from another round of lockdowns and mandates. 

Should a genuinely reformist president ever take office, this executive order must be issued on the very first day. Trump waited too long but that mistake need not be repeated. 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/30/2022 – 16:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Wvuxlt8 Tyler Durden

Abolishing the Filibuster To Protect Abortion Rights Would Clear the Way for Republicans To Ban Abortion


President Joe Biden speaking on stage holding a microphone

Last week’s overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) by the U.S. Supreme Court was made possible, at least in some small ways, by what then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) did in November 2013.

Seeking a short-term political win, Reid followed through on what both Democrats and Republicans had taken turns threatening to do for the better part of the past decade: abolishing the filibuster for judicial nominees. And the move did indeed pay some short-term dividends, as Democrats were able to use their Senate majority to push through a bunch of circuit court judicial nominations that had been stalled by GOP filibuster threats.

Over the longer term, however, that maneuver turned into a clear win for Republicans. They took back control of the Senate in 2014, took the presidency in 2016 (in no small part because many conservatives held their nose to vote for Donald Trump in the hopes that he would appoint good judges), then expanded the filibuster-exemption to include the Supreme Court justices, and appointed most of the five-justice majority that ended the federal control over abortion policy.

Having apparently learned nothing from this experience, prominent Democrats including President Joe Biden are once again endorsing changes to the filibuster—changes which, if approved, would probably open the door to a future Republican-controlled Congress banning abortion nationwide.

Asked Thursday about the potential to scrap the filibuster in order to pass a law through Congress protecting access to abortions, President Joe Biden said he’d back that kind of effort. “I believe we have to codify Roe v. Wade in the law, and the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that,” Biden said during a press conference [Is there a link for this we can add?] in Madrid, Spain, where he is attending a NATO summit. “And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights; it should be—we provide an exception for this.”

As the president admits, this is not the first time he’s voiced support for carving away at the filibuster. After years (many, many years) of championing the Senate’s 60-vote threshold as an important aspect of its proper functioning, Biden called in January for the Senate to scrap the filibuster in a narrow way to allow Democrats to overhaul federal election procedures.

But the problem with changing the rules for the elections bill or an abortion bill is the same as the one for abolishing the filibuster for judicial nominees: There’s no way to actually do this in a narrow sense. One side doesn’t get to break the norms by claiming it’s “only just this once” or only for a special reason. Once the filibuster for judicial nominations was scrapped, there was no doubt that it would soon be abolished for Supreme Court nominations too. The same will happen if Democrats kill the legislative filibuster—no matter how good of a reason they might think they had.

Once it’s gone, it’s gone. And the Senate is (whether fairly or not) tilted in favor of Republicans. It would be beyond foolish for Democrats to willingly walk into this same trap twice in the span of a decade.

Yet, that is exactly what some Democrats are doing. During an appearance this week on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) said Biden should “entertain” adding more justices to the court and should “forcefully come out in ending the filibuster in the United States Senate,” which could give Congress a chance to codify abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and other issues. (She also somewhat bizarrely claimed that the court had been taken over by “the Confederate south” in the era before the Emancipation Proclamation, which would be a shocking development indeed).

Luckily, for Democrats, the legislative filibuster is likely to survive the post-Roe madness for the same reason it survived the earlier effort to pass the elections bill: Enough Senate Democrats recognize what a mistake it would be.

“Eliminating the 60-vote threshold will simply guarantee that we lose a critical tool that we need to safeguard our democracy from threats in the years to come,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.) warned in a speech on the Senate floor in January, effectively ending the Democratic plot to take down the filibuster at the time.

She might as well have been talking about abortion rights—if Democrats want to protect a woman’s right to choose, they’ll likely need to use the filibuster in the near future. Indeed, Republicans are already planning on as much.

“Don’t worry about a national abortion ban. Why? ‘Because of the filibuster,'” an unnamed Senate leadership aide told Puck reporter Julia Ioffe this week, adding that “a lot of Senate Democrats are about to rediscover their love of the filibuster.”

But only if it is still there when they need it.

The post Abolishing the Filibuster To Protect Abortion Rights Would Clear the Way for Republicans To Ban Abortion appeared first on Reason.com.

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The FBI Kept Tabs on Mort Sahl’s Jokes About It, and Hoover Thought Sahl Was a ‘Sick Man’


Picture of Mort Sahl speaking overlaid on black background with red text

Government records show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover thought standup comedian Mort Sahl was a “very sick man,” and that the feds kept close tabs on Sahl’s jokes about them, believing that he and like-minded comedian Lenny Bruce were receiving material from “communistic” sources.

Sahl, whose barbed political commentary paved the way for generations of anti-establishment comedians, died last October at 94. His FBI files, obtained by Reason through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the FBI was quite sensitive to Sahl’s frequent jabs at it and Hoover.

A 1960 memo from the FBI’s Los Angeles field office to Hoover, headlined “Criticism of F.B.I.,” recounts Sahl’s appearance on a local TV station, which included a long, involved joke about the FBI protecting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on a visit to Chicago. 

One assumes that Sahl’s delivery was funnier. The memo included a rundown of Sahl’s background and political activity, such as performing at American Civil Liberties Union galas and a fundraiser for Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman, two Americans charged with sedition for articles they wrote during the Korean War.

A newspaper columnist named Jack O’Brian advised the FBI that Sahl and fellow comic Lenny Bruce were “what is known in the trade as ‘sick’ comedians who capitalize on jokes that were anti-Republican, anti-Eisenhower, anti-Democratic and anti-semitic.” (Bruce and Sahl were both Jewish.)

O’Brian also told the FBI that Bruce and Sahl “had been receiving script and material from a source believed to be communistic.” The source is never identified, but Sahl, if he were available to comment, might wryly note that he often appeared onstage with a newspaper tucked under his arm.

The feds ultimately decided not to talk to Sahl about his offending jokes, fearing he would publicly roast them.

“According to reliable sources of the Los Angeles Division, familiar with personalities in the entertainment world, SAHL is a vicious, outspoken, ‘sick’ comedian. Accordingly, it is felt that an interview with him concerning his televised skit on 7/26/60 would be of no avail and could result in embarrassment to the Bureau. No further action is being taken in this matter UACB [unless advised contrary by the Bureau].”

Sahl’s name pops up in FBI records again in 1970, this time in a background check of a potential nominee for a federal judgeship. The subject’s youngest sister was married to Sahl, a black spot on the otherwise positive findings.

“Mort Sahl in the past has ridiculed the FBI, law enforcement, and high public officials, beyond the bounds of good humor,” the memo says. “On a nationally televised show during March of 1969, he made some remarks concerning the Director and the FBI which were not in good taste. The Director noted that ‘Sahl is a very sick man.'”

The FBI’s keen interest in Sahl wasn’t unusual. The Bureau under Hoover was notoriously paranoid, and it kept files on any public figure that disparaged its good reputation, even as it went about burgling and illegally wiretapping Hoover’s political enemies. Hoover ruled the FBI as his own fiefdom, and even Sahl had to tip his hat to his long reign, joking in 1972: “There’s a great deal of comfort in knowing that the man who’s chasing your son today chased your father in the Palmer raids.”

The post The FBI Kept Tabs on Mort Sahl's Jokes About It, and Hoover Thought Sahl Was a 'Sick Man' appeared first on Reason.com.

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Micron Plunges After Catastrophic Guidance Confirms Worst Fears

Micron Plunges After Catastrophic Guidance Confirms Worst Fears

The quarter may be over, but the selling is extending to the afterhours session where the closely watched semiconductor bellwether just reported earnings which were not that bad. The problem is the guidance: it was catastrophic, and sent the stock sharply lower after hours.

First, a look at the just concluded third fiscal quarter:

  • Adjusted revenue $8.64 billion, +16% y/y, meeting the estimate $8.64 billion
  • Adjusted EPS $2.59 vs. $1.88 y/y, beating the estimate $2.45
  • Adjusted gross margin 47.4% vs. 42.9% y/y, missing the estimate 47.9%
  • Cash flow from operations $3.84 billion, +7.8% y/y, missing estimate $4.42 billion

But while the historical numbers may have been good, the guidance was an absolute disaster, disappointing on the top line, the bottom line and margin – The company now sees:

  • Adjusted revenue $6.8 billion to $7.6 billion, missing the consensus estimate of $9.14 billion by about $2 billion!
  • Adjusted EPS $1.43 to $1.83, missing the estimate $2.57 by about 40%!
  • Adjusted gross margin 41% to 44%, wildly missing the estimate 47.9%, and confirming that margin pressure is here and is real.

CEO Sanjay Mehrotra was almost as laconic as RH CEO Gary Friedman yesterday, saying that “recently, the industry demand environment has weakened, and we are taking action to moderate our supply growth in fiscal 2023. We are confident about the long-term secular demand for memory and storage and are well positioned to deliver strong cross-cycle financial performance.”

“Weakened?” We would say the industry demand has fallen off a cliff. As for being positioned for the long-term, the market begs to differ, sending the stock as much as 7% lower as it braces for much worse horror stores in the coming weeks when the horror Q2 earnings seasons begins in earnest…

 

 

Tyler Durden
Thu, 06/30/2022 – 16:16

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/rWLqtiA Tyler Durden

The FBI Kept Tabs on Mort Sahl’s Jokes About It, and Hoover Thought Sahl Was a ‘Sick Man’


Picture of Mort Sahl speaking overlaid on black background with red text

Government records show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover thought standup comedian Mort Sahl was a “very sick man,” and that the feds kept close tabs on Sahl’s jokes about them, believing that he and like-minded comedian Lenny Bruce were receiving material from “communistic” sources.

Sahl, whose barbed political commentary paved the way for generations of anti-establishment comedians, died last October at 94. His FBI files, obtained by Reason through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that the FBI was quite sensitive to Sahl’s frequent jabs at it and Hoover.

A 1960 memo from the FBI’s Los Angeles field office to Hoover, headlined “Criticism of F.B.I.,” recounts Sahl’s appearance on a local TV station, which included a long, involved joke about the FBI protecting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on a visit to Chicago. 

One assumes that Sahl’s delivery was funnier. The memo included a rundown of Sahl’s background and political activity, such as performing at American Civil Liberties Union galas and a fundraiser for Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman, two Americans charged with sedition for articles they wrote during the Korean War.

A newspaper columnist named Jack O’Brian advised the FBI that Sahl and fellow comic Lenny Bruce were “what is known in the trade as ‘sick’ comedians who capitalize on jokes that were anti-Republican, anti-Eisenhower, anti-Democratic and anti-semitic.” (Bruce and Sahl were both Jewish.)

O’Brian also told the FBI that Bruce and Sahl “had been receiving script and material from a source believed to be communistic.” The source is never identified, but Sahl, if he were available to comment, might wryly note that he often appeared onstage with a newspaper tucked under his arm.

The feds ultimately decided not to talk to Sahl about his offending jokes, fearing he would publicly roast them.

“According to reliable sources of the Los Angeles Division, familiar with personalities in the entertainment world, SAHL is a vicious, outspoken, ‘sick’ comedian. Accordingly, it is felt that an interview with him concerning his televised skit on 7/26/60 would be of no avail and could result in embarrassment to the Bureau. No further action is being taken in this matter UACB [unless advised contrary by the Bureau].”

Sahl’s name pops up in FBI records again in 1970, this time in a background check of a potential nominee for a federal judgeship. The subject’s youngest sister was married to Sahl, a black spot on the otherwise positive findings.

“Mort Sahl in the past has ridiculed the FBI, law enforcement, and high public officials, beyond the bounds of good humor,” the memo says. “On a nationally televised show during March of 1969, he made some remarks concerning the Director and the FBI which were not in good taste. The Director noted that ‘Sahl is a very sick man.'”

The FBI’s keen interest in Sahl wasn’t unusual. The Bureau under Hoover was notoriously paranoid, and it kept files on any public figure that disparaged its good reputation, even as it went about burgling and illegally wiretapping Hoover’s political enemies. Hoover ruled the FBI as his own fiefdom, and even Sahl had to tip his hat to his long reign, joking in 1972: “There’s a great deal of comfort in knowing that the man who’s chasing your son today chased your father in the Palmer raids.”

The post The FBI Kept Tabs on Mort Sahl's Jokes About It, and Hoover Thought Sahl Was a 'Sick Man' appeared first on Reason.com.

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