Coming Soon To The Shadow Docket? Immigrants Remain in Mexico, But Tenants Vacate Your Apartment.

Today, two emergency applications were filed with the Supreme Court. First, a group of landlords asked Circuit Justice Roberts to enter a temporary administrative stay of the eviction moratorium. He declined, but set a super-fast briefing schedule. The reply is due on Monday.

Second, the Acting Solicitor General asked Circuit Justice Alito to enter temporary administrative stay of the District Court’s injunction against the “Remain in Mexico” policy. As of 11:00 pm ET, Justice Alito has not taken any action–calling for a response or entering an administrative stay. The injunction will take effect at 12:01 am on Saturday–in about an hour.

One week from now, we may get a divided shadow docket ruling. Immigrants do not need to remain in Mexico, but tenants must vacate their apartments. Or, we get a unified shadow docket ruling. Immigrants must remain in Mexico, and tenants must vacate their apartments. Or, the Court squishes on both cases, and stays the Mexico injunction, but leaves the eviction moratorium in place.

We should know soon enough.

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It’s Time To Purge The “Experts”

It’s Time To Purge The “Experts”

Authored by Wesley Smith via The Epoch Times,

The United States’ military mission in Afghanistan has collapsed in chaos and ignominy. The catastrophe has many parents. But surely “the experts” upon which our leader relied bear much blame.

They were the ones who often failed to comprehend the power of religious belief and the role pride in Islam played in the Taliban’s unyielding commitment to victory. They were the ones who thought we could remake Afghanistan into a western liberal image. They were the ones who failed to comprehend the intractable tribal nature of Afghan society.

To say the least, Afghanistan has vividly exposed the utter stupidity of our vaunted foreign policy and national security experts. Our hapless Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for example, assured us that Kabul would not fall from “Friday to Monday.” He was right. It fell from Friday to Sunday.

And what are we to make of the vaunted internationalists at the United Nations? After President Biden’s godawful speech signifying nothing, the State Department held a press briefing, during which spokesman Ted Price reiterated an unintentionally hilarious United Nations Security Council statement urging the Taliban government to be “inclusive and representative—including with the full, equal and meaningful participation of women.” I’m sure the barbarians will get right to including women as soon as they are finished raping them.

The hubris of these whizzes might be tolerable if they were adept at technocracy. But they stink at it. Indeed, every American debacle in my lifetime has “the experts’” fingerprints all over it. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Vietnam. The farce of the missing Iraq WMDs. The list goes on and on.

What’s that you say? The Cuban Missile Crisis worked out very well? Indeed, it did. But that was because JFK ignored the advice of military experts to bomb Cuba.

What about the collapse of the Soviet Union? Once again, that salutary event was hastened because President Reagan ignored experts’ widespread disdain of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) program and forged ahead anyway, which helped break the communists’ treasury.

Look at China. Our China-hand experts were sure that if we boosted the country’s economy the Chinese people would demand increased freedom to go along with their improved standard of living. Not only did that demand not materialize—except in the now crushed Hong Kong citizens’ reaction to the loss of their once existing freedoms—but we are looking increasingly like China instead of it looking more like us.

Worse, we are now dependent on that tyranny for much of our manufacturing and mining of crucial natural resources like rare earth metals.

Great job, experts!

Foreign policy is far from the only field afflicted with debilitating expertitis.

The public health failures during COVID could—and no doubt will—fill several books. But the botched investigations and repeated mendacity surrounding the question of whether the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, are particularly enraging—not to mention the U.S. funding of “gain of function” research conducted there championed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Speaking of the hubris of the expert class, Fauci wrote last year that WHO and the UN should be empowered to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence” in order to avoid future pandemics. Considering their repeated record of abject failure, putting the international experts in charge of such an all-encompassing project would probably return us to the caves

And look what has happened in the medical sector where our experts are helping drive the transgender moral panic. Major medical journals and associations even promote puberty blocking for children despite its being, at best, entirely experimental and potentially physically harmful to the patients. Good grief, the American Medical Association even urges that we stop listing the sex of children on birth certificates!

And we haven’t even yet mentioned the misbegotten California public policies recommended by climate change experts that have reduced the once Golden State to a third world environment of rolling blackouts, out-of-control wildfires, and inadequate water storage because no new reservoirs have been built for decades—this, even though the state’s population grew exponentially. Good grief, farmers in the Central Valley have begun plowing under their precious almond trees!

Failure after dismal failure has caused mass distrust in the expert class and a concomitant collapse of confidence in our institutions.

This is a profound crisis. We need expertise. People who know what they are talking about and who can explain complicated issues to policy makers and the people are essential to the proper operation of sophisticated democratic societies.

But to do that job right, experts need to be apolitical. They need to provide as objective advice as they can when wearing their “expert” hats. Most of all, they need to put personal ideology aside in the performance of their duties and welcome heterodox opinions. For example, it wasn’t ideology that created the triumph of the moon landing. It was dispassionate excellence in rocket science and engineering.

The problem is that too many of our current “experts”—in foreign policy, law enforcement, science, education, the medical intelligentsia, the list goes on and on—have become highly politicized. Some even now think they should be deciders rather than advisers. That attitude doesn’t make policy more expertly based, it makes expertise more politically motivated, which is to say, it ceases being expert at all.

Creating a paradigm in which we can again safely rely on experts will require a great culling of the faux specialists now perched in powerful government and think tank sinecures. Frankly, mass resignations or firings may be the only efficacious remedy for what ails us. The time has come for that great sorting out to begin.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 23:00

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ATF Now Labels FRT-15 A Machine Gun, Turning Law Abiding Citizens Into Criminals

ATF Now Labels FRT-15 A Machine Gun, Turning Law Abiding Citizens Into Criminals

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) decided that Florida company Rare Breed Trigger, LLC’s special trigger is converting semi-automatic rifles into machine guns. 

FRT-15 is a drop-in trigger for an AR-15 rifle and forces the trigger to be reset. The force reset dramatically speeds up the rate of fire of the rifle. 

On July 26, the ATF sent a letter to Rare Breed stating the FRT-15 trigger has been classified as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and that Rare Breed needs to cease all sales. 

The ATF declared the Rare Breed trigger a mixture of parts designed and intended to convert a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. The ATF’s investigation found that the trigger allows a firearm to “shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, with a single continuous pull of the trigger.”

According to Baltimore-based The Machine Gun Nest, Rare Breed had to contact the ATF within five days of receiving the letter to develop a plan to address those so-called “machine guns” already distributed.

Rare Breed has challenged the ATF’s decision and is set to explain how their trigger mechanism still fits the definition of a semi-automatic weapon. 

The Machine Gun Nest said the ATF is going rogue again due to former President Trump setting dangerous precedence with the bump stock ban because the Biden administration could, at any moment, say an AR-15 is a machine gun. 

“While I’ve handled one [FRT-15], I understand that they still require one pull of the trigger to function. The user pulls the trigger, the weapon fires, and the FRT-15 forces a reset of the trigger. If the user keeps continuous force on the trigger, it will fire again,” The Truth About Guns’ Travis Pike said. 

Pike added, “This is not an automatic function by any means, and the weapon fires one shot per trigger pull.” 

In a video released by Rare Breeds, the company explains how the FRT-15 mechanism doesn’t classify a rifle as a machine gun. 

The Machine Gun Nest ends by saying, “When we have a law enforcement agency acting through executive fiat by just changing these rules and criminalizing people – it sets terrifying precedence – what if the CDC changed a rule that would criminalize you overnight? If you think this okay, then they haven’t come for something important to you yet – and this is the precedent that is giving the government too much power.” 

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 22:40

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McMaken: Did The Pentagon & The Generals Want This Disastrous War?

McMaken: Did The Pentagon & The Generals Want This Disastrous War?

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In early July, Ron Paul penned a column titled “It’s Saigon In Afghanistan,” invoking the imagery of the fall of Saigon in 1975, when US military helicopters scrambled to evacuate personnel from the roof of the US embassy. But Paul suggested that maybe the situation in Afghanistan was “perhaps not as dramatic” as the situation in Saigon forty-six years ago.

But that was six weeks ago.

Now, it looks like the end of the US’s war in Afghanistan may be in many ways every bit as chaotic as the US regime’s final defeat in Vietnam.

When Paul was writing his article in early July, we were already getting hints of the direction things were going. US forces abandoned Bagram Airfield in the middle of the night, and the US didn’t even tell its allies what was going on. Afghan officials discovered the US was gone hours later. Shortly thereafter, looters ransacked the base.

But that, it seems, was just the beginning. Over a period of a mere ten days, provincial capitals in Afghanistan have fallen one after the other. On Sunday, the Taliban entered the strategically key capital Kabul. The Taliban’s reconquest of the country was so fast that even the US regime’s spokesman admitted “the militants’ progress came much more quickly than the U.S. had anticipated.”

Now, after spending twenty years implementing “regime change” in Afghanistan, and after spending more than $800 billion—an official figure that’s likely far smaller than the real monetary cost—the US’s strategy in Afghanistan has completely collapsed.

Indeed, for the US’s local allies, the situation is far worse now than what it was in 2001. Those who were unwise enough to ally themselves with the Americans over the past twenty years now face reprisals from the Taliban. Death will likely be the result for many.

Not surprisingly, then, Afghanis in recent days have flocked to Kabul International Airport, desperate to find some way out of the country as the Taliban closes in.

It’s doesn’t take an immense amount of imagination to recall the images of those who were desperate to escape from the US embassy in Saigon.

Blame the Generals and the Pentagon

So now we reach the stage of figuring out who is to blame for this total strategic failure in Afghanistan.

Some politicians will try and use the US regime’s failure in Afghanistan to score points against the Biden administration. We already see it with some Republicans who still haven’t figured out that the American public long ago stopped caring about the war

It’s easy to see the partisan reasons for this, but if we want to honestly focus on who’s to blame for the utter waste of time and resources that was the war in Afghanistan, we have to look far beyond just a handful of civilian politicians.

Yes, much of the blame should go to the civilian bureaucrats, because they share an immense amount of the blame in bringing about this strategic blunder. George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Madeleine Albright are just a few of the politicos who encouraged the continuation of this lost war.

But the fact is the civilian war architects were encouraged and enabled every step of the way by Pentagon bureaucrats (i.e., the generals), who were only more than happy to have an excuse to pad their budgets and increase their relevance on Capitol Hill. As Ron Paul put it this week:

The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke.

And of course, the Pentagon allied itself with the “private” sector industries that supplied the materiel.

Paul continues:

The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots.

Or, as Timothy Kudo describes it,

Across two decades, our military leaders presented rosy pictures of the Afghanistan War and its prospects to the president, Congress, and the American people, despite clear internal debate about the validity of those assessments and real-time contradictory information from those fighting and losing the daily battle against the Taliban. Or, to put it in the words of John Sopko, the inspector general who issued a series of reports known as the Afghanistan Papers: “The American people have constantly been lied to.”

Nor did the military officers counsel caution or peace. Douglas MacGregor at the American Conservative correctly recalls:

All that can be said with certainty is that between 2001 and 2021, none of the senior officers expressed opposition to the policies of intervention and occupation strongly enough to warrant their removal. None felt compelled to leave the service and take their opposing views to the public forum.

When it became clear that the collective strategies and tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq were failing, not only General David Petraeus, but most of America’s senior military leaders chose to prevaricate and distort facts in public to show progress when there was none. How many American lives might have been saved had someone only told the truth will never be known.

Moreover, Petraeus and countless military technocrats continued to call for more military action while trying to place the blame on others. Doug Bandow sums it up:

Many of those once responsible for U.S. forces in Afghanistan while in authority have taken the lead in trying to perpetuate the mission. For instance, David Petraeus is busy trying to shield his reputation and shift blame to Biden as the Afghan project collapses. Joseph Dunford, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, recently co-chaired the congressionally mandated Afghanistan Study Group, which predictably insisted that the United States should stay in the country. What other conclusion was imaginable? As the entire geopolitical enterprise collapses, its promoters insist that American forces should stick around with no good purpose and no realistic plan of action.

Indeed, the incompetence of the US’s military leadership has been on clear display in recent weeks as the US-trained and US-armed military personnel have been impotent in the face of Taliban advances. The US’s military hierarchy was specifically tasked with training these Afghan forces, yet it’s now clear how well that directive was carried out.

Unwarranted Trust in Military Brass

The complicity of the military brass’s role has always been especially damaging, because the generals have long banked on the unwarranted amount of credibility they enjoy with the public. As Kudo notes:

The promise that victory was just around the corner proved intoxicating to presidents and politicians, not to mention everyday Americans, who blindly trusted anyone with four stars on his epaulettes. Despite the partisanship and institutional mistrust of the past two decades, the military consistently has been the most trusted institution in the country, rated highly by roughly 70 percent of Americans. Cloaked in near-universal trust, these officers repeatedly argued that an unwinnable war could be won.

Unfortunately, because of this, military personnel are likely to continue to be shielded from the criticism they deserve.

After all, there is a persistent habit among many Americans to repeat the narrative that all wars will be won if only the politicians listen to the generals, and “let the generals do their job.” One still hears this today from those who still engage in wishful thinking about the Vietnam War and who still cling to the idea that the war could have been won if only the military “experts” had been in charge. In actual experience, however, the lost war in Afghanistan is what we get when we listen to the generals. 

But don’t expect any meaningful reform. In the United States, when bureaucrats fail, they usually get rewarded with larger budgets, such as when the US’s “intelligence community” allowed 9/11 to occur right under its collective nose. The same is likely—at least in the short term—for the Pentagon. The generals will simply “pivot” to argue for ever-larger military budgets in the name of fighting China, Iran, Russia, and other perceived enemies. 

In other words, the generals and the civilian politicians are hard at work planning the next Afghanistan. Let’s just hope the taxpayers who pay for it all may be a little less naïve next time.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 22:20

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Semi Shortage Continues To Sting Auto Production, With VW And Toyota Cutting Output

Semi Shortage Continues To Sting Auto Production, With VW And Toyota Cutting Output

Both VW and Toyota have announced they are temporarily cutting output due to the ongoing global chip shortage, with Volkswagen being the latest to disclose the production pause. 

VW’s main plant in Wolfsburg is only going to be running on its early shift after summer break due to the lack of supply, Bloomberg reported this morning.

Its plant in Wolfsburg is the “world’s biggest car plant” and employs about 60,000 people. Audi is also pausing production temporarily, extending its summer break by one week, the report notes. 

Global shortages of semiconductors could wind up cutting worldwide production of autos this year by about 7.1 million vehicles, Bloomberg predicted this morning

IHS predicts that 2.1 million units could wind up being lost in the third quarter of 2021 alone. 

There is still little in the way of normalization to be optimistic about until the second quarter of 2022, IHS estimates. 

An IHS report stated: “The situation is still fraught with challenges. We are also seeing additional volatility due to Covid-19 lockdown measures in Malaysia where many back-end chip packaging and testing operations are performed.”

Toyota also said it was planning to temporarily stop 14 plants next month while lowering its production by 40%. 

Toyota Purchasing Group Chief Officer Kazunari Kumakura said this week: “Especially in Southeast Asia, the spread of Covid and lockdowns are impacting our local suppliers.”

The rise of the Delta variant in Southeast Asia has once again slowed production, just as most countries were getting ready to “officially” re-open, on the heels of numerous vaccines becoming available. 

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 22:00

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Democrats’ “Defund-The-Police” Debacle

Democrats’ “Defund-The-Police” Debacle

Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,

It’s easy to find politicians saying dumb things. Television news gives them plenty of coverage. Viewers like colorful voices, which are often the most extreme.

The resulting Kardashianization of politics doesn’t matter much unless these caricatures tarnish an entire political party, define its public perception, and compromise its chances of passing legislation and winning elections.

That’s the Democrats’ problem with “the Squad,” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

This problem arose again last week when squad member Cori Bush told a national TV audience how eager she is to defund the police. She said nothing to convince anyone who rejects her views. She probably made matters worse with her transparent hypocrisy, defending her right to hire expensive private security guards while advocating less police protection for everyone else.

Rep. Bush hasn’t learned the single most important lesson about being stuck in a hole: Stop digging. The St. Louis Democrat doesn’t dig with shovels, either. She bought an industrial-size excavator and went to work. The hole she’s digging is “defund the police,” and polls show she’s mining for fool’s gold. The defund movement may be popular with some wealthy (white) elites, activists on the extreme left and, at least temporarily, some African Americans in congressional districts like Bush’s, though its popularity even in those precincts will fade as violence continues to rise. Everyone else is already staunchly opposed. They fear, quite reasonably, that defunding will lead to more crime, not only because there will be fewer cops on the beat but because those who remain will limit their active policing because they lack political support.

A new poll, just completed by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies and Harris Poll, shows that 75% of respondents want more police and only 25% want less. About the same number, 72%, oppose defunding the police. A slight majority even favors restoring “stop and frisk” policies to “deter gun crime,” something New York did under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg before ending the practice because so many young minority men were being searched.

Pollster Mark Penn, co-leader of the Harvard/Harris survey, now says rising violence is the single most important issue for the 2022 midterms. “Crime is becoming the next crisis in America,” he concluded, “with overwhelming numbers seeing an increase in crime and Americans want stricter, not looser, enforcement of laws.” There’s no question which party has the advantage on that issue. The question for Democrats is: What can they do to recover?

Of course, many voters also want to see police reforms and greater transparency. Both are being put in place across the country. Most of all, Americans want police, prosecutors, and judges to do their respective jobs and protect them from predators. That means the left’s push to slash police funding has become a major electoral liability for mainstream Democrats, both nationally and locally. One sign that the political winds have changed is that two progressive cities, Seattle and Minneapolis, which gutted their police budgets last year, now want to increase them. They are not alone.

Cori Bush spit directly into that wind last week during her CBS interview. Correspondent Vladimir Duthiers asked Bush her response to critics who say it is hypocritical for you to support defunding police departments while she is spending lavishly on her own personal security.

Bush’s bizarre response: 

“They would rather I die? You would rather me die? Is that what you want to see? You want to see me die? You know, because that could be the alternative. So either I spent $70,000 on private security over the last few months, and I’m here standing now and able to speak, able to help save 11 million people from being evicted.”

As if that answer wasn’t bad enough, she added,

I have private security because my body is worth being on this planet right now. … I have too much work to do. There are too many people that need help right now for me to allow that.  So if I end up spending $200,000, if I spend 10, 10, 10 more dollars on it, you know what, I get to be here to do the work. So suck it up and defunding the police has to happen.”

The only way to summarize her response is:

“I’m far more important than ordinary people, which means protecting me is far more important than protecting them.”

That’s not an appealing message.

There’s nothing wrong with Bush wanting to stay alive. She might want to acknowledge that other people do, too. Since they can’t afford private security, they count on the police to help. She wants to deny them that help.

It is political malpractice for Cori Bush to embrace this kind of narcissism, hypocrisy, and cringing victimization on national TV. It’s even worse when your own party is scrambling to limit the self-inflicted damage done by the movement she advocates. Republicans will be happy to re-air that interview again and again. It’s that bad.

Voters now connect defunding the police with rising crime, and they connect both with the Democrats. Even though party leaders, including Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer, have repeatedly tried to distance themselves from progressive demands to cut police budgets, they haven’t succeeded in the public eye, at least not yet.

Why do Democrats have such trouble with the crime issue, despite unwavering support from the mainstream media? The problem is all that darn evidence. All the cities that actually did defund police are governed by Democratic mayors and city councils. All the lax prosecutors, so reluctant to charge violent offenders and brazen shoplifters, are self-proclaimed “Justice Democrats.” Almost all the local judges who release prisoners are Democrats. Almost all the support for “no cash bail” comes from Democrats and has been implemented in blue cities and states. Those policies, supported by leaders like Vice President Kamala Harris, put perps back on the streets only hours after they’ve been charged with violent crimes. It was the Democrats who held a national convention last year and didn’t mention the rioting and looting going on for months. To their credit, party leaders now have to routinely say they oppose defunding police. But no top Democrat — not Biden, not Schumer, not Pelosi — has been brave enough to flatly condemn the progressives who support it and take them on.  The public has noticed. Voters realize that strident demands to cut police budgets, eliminate cash bail, and reduce serious crime to misdemeanors are elements of a larger progressive wish list that would limit all facets of law enforcement and criminal punishment.

Many of those wishes are being granted. In city after city, police know they no longer have the support of top elected officials. They know many of their arrests won’t be prosecuted. The predictable result is that more police are retiring and those who remain are spending more time sitting in squad cars and less time chasing criminals. They know hoodlums can walk into a store, scoop up $950 worth of merchandise, and stroll out to their car with implicit permission from city officials. District attorneys in several major cities, all of them Democrats, consider these thefts only misdemeanors and won’t bother prosecuting. So, police figure, “Why bother trying to catch the robbers?”

The inevitable public revulsion poses a political challenge that goes well beyond one or two Squad members with bad ideas and bully pulpits. True, some have pushed the defunding agenda more aggressively than others, but voters believe the whole party is implicated. Now that moderate members want to change course, those on the left, like Cori Bush, want to keep digging and proudly shouting their message to the world. Their colleagues on the center-left haven’t figured a way to climb out of the hole.

Next November, voters will bury them even deeper if their main concerns are rising crime and lawlessness on the southern border. If that reckoning comes, Democrats will have only themselves to blame.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 21:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3syaxFD Tyler Durden

A “Summer Chill” Looms For Consumers As Child Tax Credits Fail To Boost Spending

A “Summer Chill” Looms For Consumers As Child Tax Credits Fail To Boost Spending

Last week we warned that the US economy was facing a “sudden negative change” as consumer spending was set to collapse, and we even warned that the retail sales data this week would be atrocious. Well it was, and whether due to the end of stimmy checks, the evaporation of savings, or a fresh round of Delta covid restrictions, suddenly the worst kept secret – that the US consumer is once again on the verge of tapping out – is fully in the public, leading to many prominent banks slashing their GDP forecasts for the current and future quarters, most notably Goldman which took a machete to its 8.5% Q3 GDP forecast and now sees just 5.5% even as it warns of a stagflationary burst of even higher inflation.

And with Goldman also pointing out – well after the fact, and well after its chief equity strategist hiked his S&P price target to 4,700 from 4,300 as if the two are now completely unlinked (spoiler alert: in today’s centrally planned markets they are) – that consumer spending declined 3% in just the past few weeks…

… other banks are joining in the fray, with Bank of America’s Michelle Meyer pointing out on Thursday that total card spending, based on BAC aggregated credit and debit cards, has hit a “summer chill” slowing to just 11% 2-year growth rate for the 7-days ending August 14th, while the 1-year growth rate is similarly at 11% as the 1 and 2-year rates have now converged for total spending although remain wide apart for a number of categories.

The charts below shows just how sharp the slowdown and normalization in spending has been in recent weeks as US consumers are reverting to their pre-covid spending patterns, albeit in a time when prices are exploding, and it is only a matter of time before we enter the “trapdoor” plunge phase once all accumulated purchasing power disappears.

According to Meyer, the main reason behind the moderation over the last several weeks has been due to a pullback in spending on leisure services, which are defined as travel (airlines + lodging), entertainment and restaurants/bars. The 2-year growth rate of this composite is running at 0.6% for the latest week, down from the recent high of 2.5% in late June.

A more detailed look shows a slowdown across virtually all leisure sectors, from airlines to lodging and entertainment, although one can see that spending on durable goods is also starting to take on water.

When netting out leisure service spending, BofA still sees a drop in the growth rate of spending from early July but some stability over the last few weeks. According to Meyer, the weakening in leisure services spending is responsible for just more than a quarter of the slowdown in total card spending over the last four weeks. Which also means that non-leisure spending is taking a big hit too as the next series of charts shows. Tangentially, as exhibit 28 shows, the pool bubble has also burst.

Finally, what about the stimmies? Well, with the bulk of Biden’s trillions now spent, there was a modest bounce in household spending when the welfare president started sending out child tax credit. However, while CTC recipients did spend in excess of others for 2 weeks after they got the check, they then fell below for the following two weeks as they spent the entire stimulus and then hunkered down more than non-recipient households until the next child tax credit.

One can’t help but dread what happens to the US economy – and society – when one day the stimmies, the universal basic income, the emergency benefits and so on, finally come to an end.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 21:20

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3zjXZV3 Tyler Durden

The Fall Of An American Empire

The Fall Of An American Empire

By Philip Cunliffe, senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent. His most recent books include Cosmopolitan Dystopia: International Intervention and the Failure of the West, as published originally in Spiked.

The fall of Kabul to Taliban forces on 15 August marks the end of a long cycle of international politics.

The original justification for the Western military intervention in Afghanistan back in 2001 was state failure. It was said that the absence of centralised public authority and power in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan provided shelter for the al-Qaeda terror network, allowing it to take root and launch terrorist attacks against the US.

According to the US national security adviser of the time, Condoleeza Rice, the security problem of the 21st century was not strong, expansionist states aggressing against their neighbours. Rather, it was weak, failing ones, whose disorder and disarray spread across borders, and through regions. These failing states therefore necessitated external intervention.

The disintegration of the Afghan government and army over the past few weeks exposes the folly of such an approach. After two decades of a nation-building effort that has cost many thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars, the US has succeeded only in substituting one failed state for another. And so it is now the Taliban that very clearly commands more authority around Afghanistan rather than the Kabul government. The US wasn’t building an Afghan nation state – it was building a failed state.

It is too easy to blame the Afghans themselves for the Taliban’s victory, as President Biden sought to do in his address to the nation. Doubtless the corruption of the new Afghan elite played a significant part in weakening the institutions of the US-backed Kabul regime. But given it was the US that was driving this state-building project with so much treasure and blood, an explanation of the Afghan state’s collapse cannot stop at the borders of Afghanistan. If Afghanistan was indeed a de facto province of an American empire, then the explanation for the fall of that province must be rooted in the core of the empire, not in its periphery. As Condoleeza Rice herself suggested throughout the early 2000s, the political project of state-building was always larger than Afghanistan itself – and, in truth, it always coincided with a staggered cycle of imperial decline.

The origin of state-building

The state-building policies and structures that emerged at the end of the 1990s were prompted less by the emergence of al-Qaeda-style terrorism than a much earlier political failure.

This failure centred on Western powers’ use of economic ‘shock therapy’, sanctions regimes and cruise-missile diplomacy to flatten the political and social order of the old Eastern bloc and Third World during the 1980s and especially the early 1990s. As these already battered states and societies, from the former Yugolslavia to vast swathes of Africa, were shredded by the rapid introduction of market economies, or pulverised by UN coalitions and humanitarian interventions, it became clear that Western powers had destroyed one order, but had failed to replace it. They realised that new institutions of centralised control had to be re-established to replace the old political order. They realised that, to function effectively, the operation of the market and globalised capitalism required a whole infrastructure of civil society, public institutions, regulatory agencies, laws and security apparatuses. State-building thus emerged as a corrective to the destructive excesses of the 1980s and early 1990s.

However, destroying old orders proved easier than building new ones – as Afghanistan has shown.

Although the al-Qaeda terror network had its base in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, its alliance with the Taliban was not a natural one. The Taliban of the 1990s might have been as doctrinaire as al-Qaeda, but it was comprised of poor and rural Afghans, who were largely ignorant of the outside world – theirs was a revolt of the village against urban modernity and technology as much as anything else. Hence the Taliban banned mobile phones, cameras and televisions when it swept into Kabul in 1996. Contrast that with the leader of the al-Qaeda network, Osama bin Laden. He was very much a modern Islamist in that he saw Islam as a source of ideological renewal for a godless modern world. He courted journalistic interviews and fired off his videotaped pronouncements and recordings to Al Jazeera.

Once the US decided, in 2001, that conquest rather than police and intelligence operations was to be its chosen modus operandi against terrorist cells like those of al-Qaeda, state-building was inevitable. The US invasion swiftly overthrew the ragtag militias of the Taliban, necessitating the creation of a substitute political order to replace the tribal coalition and rural theocracy that underpinned Taliban rule. This inaugurated the process of state-building in Afghanistan, built up in cooperation with the UN and an occupying NATO force.

State-building was not restricted to Afghanistan, however. It became a new imperial project to help cohere the West’s Cold War victory after the failures of the 1990s. State-building spawned a whole cadre of globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, constitutional experts, peacekeepers, administrators, counter-insurgency theorists, spooks and lawyers. In some cases, it even produced outright viceroys, with protectorates imposed on places such as Kosovo and East Timor.

Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president who has fled Kabul for the United Arab Emirates, is a case in point. He himself was a technocrat, whose academic training was in the anthropology of early modernisation. Indeed, the US military even drew anthropologists into its war effort in Afghanistan under the ‘Human Terrain’ programme.

Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani at a joint meeting of the US Congress with vice president Joe Biden, 25 March 2015, in Washington, DC.

State-building was nothing if not frenzied. Court houses were built, women’s NGOs funded, parliamentary buildings thrown up, and new police forces and armies assembled, sometimes from the militias of former warlords. War-torn capital cities throughout the Balkans and Africa became overnight boom towns with vast infusions of aid, while the rural hinterlands remained largely untouched, and often wracked by permanent insurgency and constantly collapsing ceasefires, as in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But, like the shock therapy of the 1990s, state-building quickly ran up against its own limits. While it was easy to throw up new buildings, and subsidise local elites and middle classes with NGO funds, it was harder to legitimise this new order. After all, these fragile new institutions were dependent on foreign armies, whether NATO forces or United Nations peacekeepers, to keep warlords and insurgents at bay. The state-builders were caught up in numerous binds: they wished to create long-lasting institutions of independent statehood, yet at the same time they expected these new institutions to enact Western rather than indigenous policymaking. Rather than representing their own citizens, these jerry-rigged new states were intended to act as transmission belts for policies concocted by Western policymakers and international agencies.

Humanitarian compassion and altruism were sufficient to justify state-building from the outside as a new civilising mission. Yet at the same time, devolving political responsibility to local institutions proved impossible. After all, painting a country’s inhabitants as victims of human-rights abuses may justify the external interventions in the first place. But victimhood, by its very definition, is no basis on which to build independent, politically self-sufficient nations.

The state-builders had long been aware of the problem of the lack of legitimacy of these new states. This generated a list of technocratic euphemisms such as ‘capacity-building’, ‘local ownership’, ‘partnership’, ‘bottom-up’ and ‘grassroots’. These tried to fill in for the very thing these states really lacked – namely, political legitimacy. Moreover, there was nothing behind these terms, not least because the problem ran deeper than how to make local populations connect to Western-led institutions.

Many analysts and eventually historians will pore over the fall of Kabul and the many contributing factors that led to the implosion of the US’s client state. Some will look to parse the inter-ethnic relations among Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pashtun Afghans. And others will try to trace the bank accounts through which the cronies of ex-president Ashraf Ghani siphoned off billions. But there is no avoiding the ultimate issue – the lack of political legitimacy that led to the collapse of the Afghan state has to be rooted at the core of the global political system, and not in a remote imperial outpost.

For all the death and hardship visited upon Afghanistan during this 20-year-long occupation, as long as state-building could be justified in humanitarian terms – defending the rights of Afghan women and children against rapacious fundamentalists, for instance – it could continue interminably. The war in Afghanistan has already lasted two decades, ran the thinking, so what’s a few more?

What ultimately undercut the war effort was not any battlefield loss to the Taliban, but Donald Trump. In his sloganeering for an ‘America First’ foreign policy, and in his efforts to delegitimise state security agencies and bureaucracies, he kept raising a single question to which no one had an answer – what was the US self-interest in these never-ending and supposedly altruistic interventions? Given the grandiloquent proportions to which US foreign-policy ambition had swollen, it was easily punctured by this simple but sharp question. Twenty years after the original invasion of Afghanistan, and nearly a decade after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, no one had any meaningful answer to Trump’s question.

The very election of Trump himself and the turbulence that shadowed his administration indicated a deeper problem for US foreign policy – the collapse of political legitimacy at the core of this new empire. How could the US expect to build legitimate states in the periphery of the international system, when its own domestic legitimacy was evaporating?

The decay of the political order

This problem was illustrated last summer, when the US government sent in Humvees – still painted in desert tan from decades of Forever Wars in the Middle East – to repress the looting and rioting that had broken out in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and lockdowns. This display of militarised policing in the midst of a pandemic that threatened to overwhelm ramshackle public-health systems revealed the source of the problem: the US itself is becoming a failing state. After all, it was now deploying its military force against its own citizens, an exercise of power without right. This hints at a domestic political order that is so hollowed out that only its instruments of global empire remain standing – an outsized central bank and an outsized war machine seeking to prop up the global order.

Indeed, successive US governments have spent a total of $2 trillion on the war effort in Afghanistan. And they have done so while infrastructure has crumbled and de-industrialisation accelerated at home. This demonstrates that, prior to Covid at least, war has become the only legitimate reason for large-scale public spending. Needless to say, much of this spending was recycled to private contractors and arms manufacturers as a de facto public subsidy for US capitalists.

The fact that the US state was unable to justify public spending, except in terms of maintaining global order through force, in turn exposed something else – the emptiness at the core of the global market system that had emerged after the Cold War.

As stated above, state-building was developed as a counterpart to the neoliberalism of the 1990s. It was intended to undergird the extension of the market into the developing world. Neoliberalism was expressly counterposed to the state and intended to curb, delegitimise and repress public power over the market. But, at the same time, neoliberalism was always dependent on state power to achieve these aims. As a result, neoliberalism succeeded in delegitimising public power and authority, while also relying on the state to expand the rule of the market. The justification for the exercise of state power and public authority shrivelled away, as the market itself could not generate its own legitimacy or justification in the face of stagnant wages, growing inequality and recurrent financial bubbles. Without an effective justification for the exercise of public power, political order itself inevitably decays: thus state failure is built into the logic of neoliberalism.

We can see the results today at the core of the global order in the US. There, political life is decaying into oligarchic rule from above and fragmented identity politics from below. And we can see it on the periphery, in places like Afghanistan, where this decay has resulted in warlordism and ethnic strife. This is the globalisation of what the critical theorist Max Horkheimer termed ‘racket society’, in which a social order, underpinned by law and universal principles, disintegrates into various large hierarchies offering protection in return for domination, and devoid of any sense of common interest or general will. In the US this is apparent in an emerging oligarchic state and the various identity groups it sponsors; in the periphery, it is apparent in the predominance of warlords, drug dealers, NGOs, kleptocrats, smugglers, terror networks, UN agencies, peacekeepers and occupying armies. State failure is the result of globalised neoliberalism.

Perhaps religious fervour and Islamic ideology will be sufficient to enable the new Taliban to offer an alternative to the warlordism and graft of the US-sponsored Ghani regime. Perhaps the Taliban racket will win out over the warlord-NGO-NATO racket, and a new proto-nation might even emerge.

In the US itself, however, there is no clear answer to the problem of the failing state. For example, the BLM movement not only exposed the declining legitimacy of the US state. It also amplified it in its call to ‘defund the police’ and abolish the forces of public order. BLM, for example, merely wants to turn over burned-down and increasingly violent inner cities to state-funded NGOs and social workers, which constitute the social base of the BLM movement. And so one racket substitutes for another.

Until we establish a cohesive political vision based on universal principles and a concept of general will that rises above the parochialism of identity groups and their associated rackets, little will change – our states will continue to fail.

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 21:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3j31UQ8 Tyler Durden

San Francisco Prepares To Suspend Cops And Firefighters Who Refuse To Disclose Vaccination Status

San Francisco Prepares To Suspend Cops And Firefighters Who Refuse To Disclose Vaccination Status

San Francisco is preparing to suspend nearly two-dozen employees with the police, fire, and sheriff’s departments who have refused to disclose their vaccination status, while hundreds of employees from other departments are about to be similarly put on notice, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Two police officers walk on Stockton Street near Union Square in San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2018.

The city sent notifications to 20 employees in the police, fire and sheriff’s departments for failing to meet an Aug. 12 disclosure deadline, while employees from other departments – including Public Health and the Municipal Transportation Agency, could receive similar letters next week.

The city is recommending a 10-day unpaid suspension for 11 Police Department employees, seven Fire Department employees and two employees in the Sheriff’s Department.

“The health and well being of city employees and the public we serve are top priorities during our emergency response to COVID-19,” reads the letter which was obtained by the Chronicle. “Your failure to comply with the vaccination status reporting requirement endangers the health and safety of the city’s workforce and the public we serve.”

The letters will arrive as San Francisco grapples with a surge in coronavirus cases fueled by the delta variant, with the unvaccinated making up the overwhelming majority of those who are hospitalized or killed by the virus. The data shows that the vaccines are extremely safe and very effective at preventing severe COVID-19.

San Francisco was the first large city in the country to require all municipal employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, unless they have a valid religious or medical exemption. All employees had to report their vaccination status to the city by Aug. 12, and those without valid exemptions must be inoculated 10 weeks after the Food and Drug Administration fully approves the vaccines. The Department of Human Resources already gave employees a two-week extension to report their status. -SF Chronicle

According to the report, the city says that failure to get the jab could eventually lead to firings

Tyler Durden
Fri, 08/20/2021 – 20:40

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/37Z2Uyz Tyler Durden

The Fifth Circuit Made Me Do It

Another national injunction, in another case called Texas v. United States, and again there’s hand-wringing by the judge who issues it. The judge indicates that he has serious reservations about the propriety of national injunctions, but he considers himself constrained by Fifth Circuit precedent. And so, because federal immigration law needs to be uniform, there’s a national injunction. You can read the opinion here. For the scope of the injunction, pages 151 to 156 are the relevant part. Brief observations (with no. 3 being the big one):

First, this is untenable situation. Very consequential decisions, setting policy for the entire federal government, are made without the judges making them even defending the remedial scope of their decisions as being correct–rather, the scope of the injunction is defended on the basis of circuit court precedent.

Second, the Biden administration needs to be more aggressive in going after the national injunction. Prudential arguments are not enough, and if the SG’s office doesn’t succeed in stopping the national injunction, it will stop most of what the administration tries to do (just like the end of the Obama administration and the entirety of the Trump administration).

Third, we need to rethink from the ground up the law of administrative remedies. For all the debate about the relationship of “vacatur” and “remand,” we missed the part that was really questionable. It wasn’t remand, it was vacatur. The misconception that judges act on rules or statutes is the conceptual mistake that drives a lot of national injunctions. For example, on p. 156, the court says:

Specifically, the Court enjoins (1) Section B of the January 20 Memorandum, and (2) the sections from the February 18 Memorandum entitled “Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Priorities” and “Enforcement and Removal Actions: Approval, Coordination, and Data Collection.” (Dkt. No. 1-2 at 4–8).

From any kind of traditional perspective on equity, this is just baffling. The court enjoins a section of a memorandum? People get enjoined. Injunctions protect people from people. Or require people to do things. And, as codified in FRCP 65(d)(2), injunctions can apply to people who act in concert with the people who are enjoined–not to texts that act in concert with the texts that are enjoined.

It matters what the injunction is and what it’s supposed to do, because–as John Harrison has shown–the remedies under the APA are supposed to be the ordinary remedies. There is no “set aside” remedy–that reference isn’t even in the APA section on remedies.

So, a cursory proposal: In the administrative context–

  1. injunctions should be used for protection: they should protect plaintiffs (or plaintiff classes) from the enforcement actions of government officers;
  2. when the problem is not with end-of-the-line enforcement, but rather is upstream, such as a failure in the process of creating a rule or policy, the proper remedy is not an injunction but mandamus, which has a different logic and is focused not on the protection of the plaintiff but on the officer’s performance of a legal duty;
  3. the fact that mandamus has its own limiting principles, such as the need to show a clear violation of a legal duty, means that some close to the line violations will not be remedied;
  4. point three is a feature of this proposal.

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