The actress Felicity Huffman, accused of bribing SAT officials in order to improve her daughter’s chances of getting into an elite college, joined 13 other defendants in pleading guilty to all charges Monday.
“I am in full acceptance of my guilt, and with deep regret and shame over what I have done, I accept full responsibility for my actions and will accept the consequences that stem from those actions,” said Huffman. “I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues and the educational community. I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.”
Not among those pleading guilty: actress Lori Loughlin, who portrayed “Aunt Becky” on Full House, and is accused of making a $500,000 bribe to help her daughter gain admittance to the University of Southern California. The difference between Huffman’s tone and Loughlin’s could not be more stark: The latter actually signed autographs on her way to court last week.
Huffman has probably agreed to admit her guilt in exchange for a reduced sentence. Those involved in the conspiracy are likely facing hefty fines, community services, probation, and possibly short stints in prison. Most are wealthy enough that fines may not be a significant punishment—which is an issue, if the goal is to deter this kind of behavior in the future. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue that public safety necessitates locking up a bunch of non-violent first-time offenders—the U.S. needs to imprison vastly fewer people—and the humiliation and other consequences for the kids (including loss of enrollment) will certainly sting.
The bigger issue is what to do about the college admissions system itself. This scandal has revealed how the wealthy were able to cheat their way in by bribing standardized testing officials and taking advantage of the athletic-industrial complex. The sheer amount of bureaucracy evidently makes higher education an easy target for grifters. As I wrote in my previous article about the scandal, “Time to Put the College Admissions System on a Rocket and Shoot It Into the Sun”:
Indeed, athletic administrative bloat appears to be a significant contributing factor to the success of this scam. Many of the bribe-takers were coaches, and it’s fairly worrying they have so much sway over the admissions process. One downside of forcing universities to hire a bunch of administrators—something federal guidance has encouraged for decades—is that there are more potential targets for Singer’s schemes.
Unfortunately, colleges and universities routinely prioritize factors other than academic ability when making admissions decisions. Athletic considerations matter far too much, as do legacy connections. And of course, donating a new wing to the university’s hospital or library is a good way to make sure your kid gets a second look. Singer took things much further, but it’s a difference of degrees. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, “It may be legal to pledge $2.5 million to Harvard just as your son is applying—which is what Jared Kushner’s father did for him—and illegal to bribe a coach to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars,but how much of a difference is there, really? Both elevate money over accomplishment. Both are ways of cutting in line.”
The best remedy to this problem might be to admit that college is, to some degree, a scam. Note that these parents were evidently unconcerned that their kids—who were often coached to fake learning disabilities so they could get more time on the ACT and SAT—might struggle with their course loads. It’s because college is a joke, and it’s easy enough for an academically disinclined grifter—an Olivia Jade, if you will—to get by studying nonsense subjects. They’re paying for the experience and the diploma, not the actual education.
In yet another annoyance for the Trump Administration as it seeks to implement its immigration reforms to end what’s become an undeniable crisis at the southern border, a federal judge in San Francisco has issued an injunction blocking a Trump administration policy that would have returned non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases were pending.
NEW: A federal judge in California just issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from returning non-Mexican asylum seekers to Mexico while their immigration cases are pending — order takes effect April 12 at 5pm PST https://t.co/JN4IdHCwuSpic.twitter.com/PNFNbnSptV
San Francisco judges have been a persistent thorn in the administration’s side when it comes to immigration policy, contributing to the White House’s six percent win rate on legal challenges surrounding its policies.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2I7nGBa Tyler Durden
As the Trump administration cracks down on supporters of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, it is reportedly planning a new waiver system that could seriously restrict Cuba’s most important (and probably only) export to the US.
Top baseball talent.
Initially reported by WSJ and later confirmed by the White House, the Trump administration has informed MLB that it could impose a waiver system making it tougher for Cuban baseball players to play professional baseball in the US, citing “the dangers of doing business with Havana.”
“Major League Baseball has been informed of the dangers of dealing with Cuba,” a senior administration official said, adding that more details would be released on Monday.
In a sign of things to come, National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted on Sunday that “America’s national pastime should not enable the Cuban regime‘s support for Maduro in Venezuela.”
Cuba wants to use baseball players as economic pawns – selling their rights to Major League Baseball. America’s national pastime should not enable the Cuban regime‘s support for Maduro in Venezuela.
The crackdown follows an agreement struck between MLB and the Cuban government in December that allowed for the creation of a “safe, legal path” for Cuban players to travel to the US with their families and return to Cuba in the offseason.
Baseball and its players’ union reached an agreement with Cuba’s baseball federation in December designed to create a safe, legal path for players from the island nation to play professionally in the U.S. The pact called for Cuba to release players who had achieved certain age or professional service time requirements, allowing MLB teams to sign them directly. The team that acquired the player would then pay a fee to the Cuban federation—similar to arrangements MLB already had in place with Japan and South Korea. It also allowed players to travel to the U.S. with their families and return to Cuba in the off-season.
The decision to crack down on MLB’s relationship with Cuba could be part of a broader effort to punish what the administration calls the “Troika of Tyranny” – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
According to Rolling Stone, baseball has been Cuba’s national obsession since the mid-19th century, and has been played professionally on the island since 1878. But until very recently, Cuban players hoping to make it big in the US have had to defect from their homeland.
One of the best-known Havana-born players to make it big in MLB is Jose Canseco. In retirement, Canseco has earned notoriety on twitter for his sporadic market calls and economic analysis.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2WXeulZ Tyler Durden
Wherever one looks, it is evident that the post-war Establishment élites are on the backfoot.
They maintain a studied panglossian hauteur…
But whether it is in Britain, where a PM seems ready to sacrifice her own party’s future on the altar of maintaining the cosy nexus between big business and Brussels’ smug ambitions to be a global economic player, rivalling the US or China.
Or, whether it is Trump’s readiness to put America’s financial system into fiscal and debt jeopardy, in order to keep the cogs and wheels of the Military Industrial Complex whirring and spinning comfortably – at a time when US government over-spending already threatens to break dollar ‘trust’.
Or, whether it is Europe, where the abrupt ECB reversal marks a huge conceptual failure… [i.e. the destruction and transfer of wealth from Eurozone savers, to rescue debtors; and from the general public to the banks, government and large corporations to rescue their balance sheets]. This has contributed materially to having turned the Eurozone into an economic zombie, and having radicalised a large and hostile constituency.
Or, whether it is manifest with the EU’s evident befuddlement upon China’s tectonic ‘landing’ at Rome last month, heralding the shift of the global trade ‘plates’. Maybe the EU leaders do ‘get it’ – that the EU is already on the slipway, gliding down towards ‘new waters’, slipping towards its sibling separation from the erstwhile ‘parental home’ of the trans–Atlantic relationship, to a new life in which a Chinese partner features. But if so, strategic thinking is not evident.
Or, whether it relates to Washington’s foreign-policy Establishment’s surprise at China and Russia’s assertive ‘spanner’ thrust into the ‘game’ of regime change being played-out in Venezuela; or by NATO-member Turkey insisting to buy Russia’s S400s, despite Washington’s threats; or (unimaginably), by tiny Jordan and Lebanon actually saying ‘no’ to the US (over Kushner’s plan to strip King Abdullah of his custodianship of Jerusalem’s al-Quds, or in Lebanon’s case, by declining to wage sanctions ‘war’ on its co-citizens).
The studied ‘front’ persists, but the cracks show. What is significant, and so interesting, is that the resistance now is percolating into the ranks of the ‘Establishment’ itself. (The Establishment was never homogenous, but internal revolt within its ranks was always cauterised easily, and the wound quickly healed-over). Not now – at least not so easily.
All in all, the post-war élites are shaken: the reaction to the Mueller Inquiry outturn (by Establishment outlier Trump), and EU Michel Barnier’s outburst that there are mischief-makers (Nigel Farage in particular), who actually “want to destroy the EU from inside; and others from outside”- are but two symptoms of psychic fracture in an erstwhile, sealed Cartesian mental retort. Core concepts are being challenged on many fronts.
An ancient European war of two ‘visions’ – between old-style conservatives (with a small ‘c’) that are instinctively suspicious of grand, utopian projects, and who prize autonomy and native institutions – is rebelling against the contemporary embrace of millenarianism.
This has re-emerged most furiously with Brexit; with Macron’s Jupiter-like conceit; with the scorn and non-conformism coming out from Italy; and from the undisguised disdain for EU ‘values’ emanating from Warsaw, Budapest, and other Visegrad capitals. Is it truly feasible for the EU to maintain their unbending stance, as challenges proliferate?
Yet, in spite of this catalogue; in spite of all the evidence surrounding us that we stand at the edge of one of those substantive inflection points, we just amble on, continuing as usual – sure that we will muddle through, somehow ‘okay’.
But will we? Why the unfurrowed sanguinity? We may be entering global recession. Yet neither the Fed, nor the ECB, have the weapons to deal with it (as they freely admit), beyond reverting to more money-printing, interest rate suppression and asset purchases. What will be the outcome then, this time? The Central Banks will print (already collectively $1 Trillion this first quarter). In past rounds of monetary inflation, cheap Chinese imports did repress western inflation. We could ‘print’ the cash, with seemingly no adverse blowback. And China effectively ‘lent us’ its growth stimulus, too.
But the adverse blowback was always there, just less visible. The ‘printing’ represented a huge transfer of wealth from one component of the public – to another. Can the fabric of our polity really assimilate any greater inequalities, without tearing apart, without exploding? Are not the Gillets Jaunes flashing a red warning signal? Apparently not. Markets continue to soar away. For sure, the consequences however, to the inevitable (now fully locked-in) monetary authorities’ response to stagnation, this time will be that the 60% will sink closer to the economic ‘cliff edge’, (whilst the 40% fly high) – and the young will become the new long-term unemployed.
More fundamentally, the question is rarely asked: can America truly Be Made Great Again (MAGA), its military totally renewed, and its civil infrastructure refurbished, when starting out from a position today (year to date) where its shortfall of Federal revenue to expenditure is 30%; where its debt is now so great that the US may only survive by again repressing interest rates to a (zombifying) near zero?
And again, is it truly feasible to force manufacturing jobs back to a high-cost base America, from their low-cost, offshoring in Asia – against the backdrop of an America made progressively ‘higher-cost’, through its locked-in monetary inflation policies – except by crashing the value of the dollar to make this high cost base platform globally competitive again? Is MAGA realistic; or will the re-capture of jobs back to the US from the low-cost world end by triggering the very recession which the Central Banks so fear?
And as the post-war élites in America and Europe become more and more desperate to maintain the illusion of being the vanguard of global civilisation, how will they cope with the re-appearance of a ‘civilization-state’ in its own right: i.e. China? How will the EU respond to a Pentagon obsessed with China, China, China, when that China is building its BRI right into Europe? Will it – like America – opt for protectionism, and promote mergers and mega entities to compete with heavy US and Chinese corporations? Is Europe even capable of restraining the US, as the latter builds its military containment of China, and expects Europe to play along?
In Europe, the push-back against an entrenched élite French ‘system’ benefitting the few, and failing the many, threatens to upturn the political coherence of France. In the UK, Brexit threatens to blow the British political party system apart. Differences over the UK’s relationship with the EU have never been deeper, more salient, and more entrenched than they are now. The differences between the urban cosmopolitan élite of London and rest of the country have never been more marked. The question now of whether, and to what degree, Britain should belong to a Europe, which is (in Der Spiegel’s “a dominion … a central power exerting control over many different peoples … and as a German Reich in the economic realm” – has become a fundamental cleavage.
Brexit is becoming bigger than ‘Brexit’. Old party allegiances no longer operate, and are being surpassed. The two major parties are split. Formerly loyal activists are calling their party leaderships treacherous – or worse. The party signifier is no longer class, or historic family adherence: It is ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’.
Tectonic shifts like this, are rare. But when they do occur, they throw up the possibility of profound change and realignment. Many Britons are exiting loyalties and preferences in which they once had lived. New parties and new contenders are emerging. Existing parties are fracturing – or trying to reinvent themselves – as disdain for the parties and their leaders reaches epidemic proportions. All that seemed solid is melting into air, with profound consequences for the political future and even for the system of governance – as the UK parliament turned ‘rogue’, as parliament moved to usurp the prerogative of government.
Normally mild-mannered party members in Britain are saying in the wake of what has occurred in parliament this last week, that only a “political revolution” can restore legitimate governance to the UK. Incredible. Take this as one example:
“We stand agog at the daily, in fact hourly, political machinations of the Prime Minister, Parliament and the establishment. We have witnessed the rewriting of constitutional precedent, a blatant disregard for manifesto commitments, the bending of rules and lies on an industrial scale.
All this to keep the UK a prisoner of the EU system and a milch cow for Germany and Brussels bureaucracy. No heresy allowed in the new inquisition. What is astonishing is the apparent continued belief amongst our superior classes that “ordinary people” aren’t watching and understanding what is afoot.”
From some radical, perhaps? No it is a quote from the former Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, with 30 years’ experience of UK and EU government. Establishment personified. When the resistance start from within the élite, historically it suggests that we must expect a long conflict coming.
It may be satisfying to think that this is an insular British reaction to Brexit, of little wider import. But that would be wrong. We are on the cusp of inflection. Is not similar occurring in the US, with the ‘deplorables’ (as latter day ‘Confederates’) facing-off against the northern urban liberals, much as in the US Civil War?
Is not the stand-off taking place within the EU somehow a re-run of the struggles (by mostly Protestant) nation states, that were precisely opposed to the notion of an European Empire imposing its rigid ‘Lex Europa’ over diverse peoples, by a centralized and aloof, authority?
This is occurring at a moment when the US and European economies are fragile. Why is the inherent risk in all this so difficult to perceive, or acknowledge?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2KtJrwK Tyler Durden
One of three scam artists behind a $54 million ponzi scheme was sentenced to prison for her role in the biggest ‘green energy’ scams in US history, according to NBC New York.
Troy Wragg and Amanda Knorr in their Mantria Corp. offices in 2009
35-year-old Amanda Knorr of Hellertown, Pennsylvania received just 30 months in federal prison for a ponzi scheme involving her 2005 startup, Mantria, in which “many people lost their life savings,” according to assistant US Attorney Robert Livermore following Knorr’s sentencing.
Knorr co-founded a company called Mantria Corp., which with the help of a slick-talking Colorado “wealth advisor” raised millions for a supposed clean energy product called “biochar.”
Knorr and fellow Mantria co-founder Troy Wragg both graduated in 2005 from Temple University and within four years had raised $54 million from hundreds of investors. Most of the investors were wooed through seminars run by Wayde McKelvey, of Colorado.
Their pitch about producing biochar, however, turned out to be completely baked, according to prosecutors, and eventually proved to be a giant Ponzi scheme. –NBC New York
According to federal prosecutors, Mantria never came close to producing biochar at their Tennessee facility. At seminars run by “wealth advisor” Wayde McKelvy of Colorado, investors were told a different story. “These investors, husbands and wives nearing retirement, retirees looking to invest their savings, and other small-time prospectors, were wooed by the idea of big profits from clean energy: getting rich and saving the world,” according to the report.
McKelvy was convicted in October on charges of wire fraud and securities fraud, and is currently appealing his conviction. Wragg’s sentencing is set for June.
Co-conspirator Wayde McKelvy
“Instead of high returns, the over 300 victims of this fraud unwittingly invested in uninhabitable land and a bogus trash-to-green energy business idea based on bogus scientific methodology, said US Attorney William McSwain last October after McKelvy’s conviction.
The fraudsters were honored by former President Bill Clinton in a 2009 ceremony for the Clinton Global Initiative before the scam came to light. After Mantria was first charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for selling millions in unlicensed securities in 2009, the case was known as “the biggest green scam” in the history of the United States, according to the report.
Troy Wragg, right, on stage in 2009 with former President Bill Clinton during a ceremony of the Clinton Global Initiative.
Photo credit: Youtube via NBC New York
Of the $54 million thought to have been invested in Mantria, $17 million was returned to early investors to keep the Ponzi scheme going, while misleading new investors into thinking the venture was hugely profitable. By the time they were shut down by the SEC in 2009, Mantria had just $790,000 of the remaining $37 million.
“I live in a 1,200-square-foot [home],” he told Metro in the only interview he has given. “I don’t drive a Lamborghini.”
But the newspaper noted that he did drive around in a Mercedes SLK350 with a “MANTRIA” vanity license plate.
A class action lawsuit filed in federal court eventually recovered about $6 million for victims of the scheme. Another $800,000 was placed in a receivership, overseen by a Colorado accountant John Paul Anderson. –NBC New York
Anderson – the accountant tasked with dispersing funds recovered in the class action lawsuit, has yet to distribute the money which remains in receivership.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2FXK6Bf Tyler Durden
The most interesting Democrat running for president may just be Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old, gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
He visited Boston earlier this month, appearing before a crowd of more than 1,000 at Northeastern University. In more than a few moments, he was downright impressive.
Facing a question from a tenant-rights activist complaining about Northeastern fueling “gentrification,” he pivoted to an answer about affordable housing that included the words “rethinking exclusionary zoning.”
That is a big deal coming from a Democratic politician. Left-leaning economists and journalists such as Eduardo Porter, Paul Krugman, and Lawrence Summers have been making this point about zoning restrictions artificially constraining the supply of housing. It’s ideologically consistent with libertarian aversion to regulatory interference in free markets. But politicians have been slow to seize the issue.
And he talks about freedom. “We need to start to talk about freedom more on our side of the aisle,” he said, in response to a question about a faculty labor union, suggesting that benefits such as retirement and health care should move away from “being entirely dependent on your employer.”
Early though it is, though, it’s not too early to say that having Buttigieg in the presidential race urging “talk about freedom more” has the potential to be a positive development not just for the Democrats but for the country, writes Ira Stoll.
Ahead of a fifth day of talks between No. 10 and the opposition on Tuesday, the Daily Telegraph reports that Prime Minister Theresa May is considering amending her withdrawal agreement to include a Commons vote on authorizing a second ‘confirmatory’ Brexit referendum as a ploy to break the deadlock over a revised Brexit deal.
With the prime minister planning to head to Europe to meet with Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the word out of Brussels is that the Europeans are leaning toward a longer Brexit ‘flextension’ instead of the short-term Article 50 delay that May has formally requested,. However, the prime minister is still reportedly trying to hammer out a deal with the opposition ahead of a European summit that begins on Wednesday.
May reportedly discussed the possibility of the confirmatory vote with a few members of her cabinet during a meeting on Monday. Her team is confident that they would have the votes to win the vote.
Commons leader Andrea Leadsom was said to be “absolutely furious” over May’s negotiations with Labour.
Exclusive:
PM is considering giving MPs free vote on whether to hold 2nd referendum in bid to break Brexit deadlock with Labour
PM discussed offer with Cabinet ministers in No 10 today
Over the weekend, May reportedly discussed a compromise with Labour that would have included a “future lock” on any deal making it impossible for May’s successor to tear it up (some have jokingly referred to it as a “Boris lock”). But Labour was ultimately wary that such a deal could be reached. Meanwhile, Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer said last night that May’s negotiating strategy has mostly consisted of “telling us everything we had ever wanted” is already in her deal. Starmer added that negotiations were focused on a measure to vote on a second referendum, and the above mentioned ‘future lock’.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accused the prime minister of holding to her ‘red lines’, though there has reportedly been some progress on offering Labour continued alignment with EU ‘workers rights’ and ‘environmental protections.’
“The exchanges with the Government have been serious, but our shadow cabinet expressed frustration that the Prime Minister has not yet moved off her red lines so we can reach a compromise. The key issues that we must see real movement on to secure an agreement are a customs union with the EU, alignment with the single market and full dynamic alignment of workers’ rights, environmental protections and consumer standards.”
While May is convinced that she could win a vote on holding a second referendum, losing the vote wouldn’t be the first major miscalculation since she arrived at No. 10. Though, considering recent polling showing a majority of Brits just want to leave without a deal on Friday, even if it won the vote, a second referendum might not be the political slam dunk that Labour hopes it would be.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GaWuz9 Tyler Durden
When two Nashville police officers responded to a home burglary report in 2014, they found Alexander Baxter hiding in a basement. Baxter put his hands in the air. Nevertheless, the police unleashed a K-9 unit, which bit Baxter under his armpit.
Baxter sued the officers for excessive force, but in 2018 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, whether or not Baxter’s rights were violated, the officers were immune from his lawsuit. It wasn’t clearly established, the court said, that using a police dog to apprehend him while his hands were raised was unconstitutional.
The decision hinged on a notorious doctrine, known as “qualified immunity,” that protects police from lawsuits when reasonable officers wouldn’t know they were committing a constitutional violation. Now the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is asking the Supreme Court to reconsider not just Baxter’s case but the entire doctrine of qualified immunity, which has faced a growing bipartisan chorus of criticism.
The ACLU today filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the Supreme Court to not only review Baxter’s case but revisit the current standard for qualified immunity. “The costs of qualified immunity to the rule of law are real and significant,” the ACLU writes. “Because qualified immunity relies centrally on the question of when the unlawfulness of particular conduct has been ‘clearly established’—an inquiry for which a consistent standard has eluded federal courts for a generation—the jurisprudence of qualified immunity is beset with inconsistency.”
As The New Republicrecently noted, qualified immunity has recently come under criticism from both originalist and liberal judges. On the Supreme Court itself, arch-conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2017 that qualified immunity should be revisited in an appropriate case, and while liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor has bemoaned its effects on lawsuits over police shootings.
“As I have previously noted, this Court routinely displays an unflinching willingness to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity but rarely intervenes where courts wrongly afford officers the benefit of qualified immunity in these same cases,” Sotomayor wrote in a 2018 dissent.
U.S. Circuit Judge Don Willett wrote in a 2018 decision that, “To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.”
Reason‘s Damon Root described the Court’s 1982 decision in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, which established the current test for qualified immunity, as one of the five worst Supreme Court decisions of the past 50 years. It has caused an enormous number of civil rights lawsuits to be tossed. This January, for example, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted qualified immunity to a Georgia district attorney who allegedly defamed a wrongly convicted man in order to scuttle a bill in the state legislature that would have compensated him for his seven years behind bars.
“Although we conclude that Echols’s complaint states a valid claim of retaliation under the First Amendment, we agree with the district court that Lawton enjoys qualified immunity because Echols’s right was not clearly established when Lawton violated it,” the court wrote.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that two New York prison guards violated an inmate’s First Amendment rights when they put him in solitary confinement for nine months for refusing to become a snitch, but added that this right wasn’t clearly established at the time and therefore the guards were covered by qualified immunity.
The fuzzy definition of “clearly established” has led to confusion between courts. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s ruling that granted qualified immunity to a police officer who took intimate photos of a woman on his personal cell phone after she went to a police station to report a sexual assault.
“Qualified immunity undermines official accountability and lacks any sound legal basis,” ACLU attorney Emma Andersson tells Reason. “It weakens respect for the rule of law by widening the gap between rights and remedies, and it denies justice to the victims of many constitutional violations.”
Early strength in China gave way to an ugly day for small cap tech after Friday’s market vacation…
Spanish stocks lagged along with Germany’s DAX as UK, Italy, and France ended unchanged…
US Small Caps (Russell 2000) and Mega Caps (Dow Industrials) underperformed today as tech lifted Nasdaq and S&P…
AAPL bagged $200.00 for the first time since early November…
Dow was weak due to Boeing (accounting for more than the entire point loss of the index)…
GE also tumbled…
The S&P 500 Information Technology Sector reached a new record high today (taking out the Oct 3rd highs)…
Treasury yields rose modestly on the day but failed to erase Friday’s post-payroll yield drop (almost note huge Aramaco deal likely weighed on TSY complex sentiment)…
10Y holds above 2.50%…
The dollar extended its dump from 120 (Bloomberg Dollar Index)
Bitcoin and Ethereum extended recent gains as Bitcoin Cash held the big surge…
Bitcoin tagged $5350 intraday before fading…
WTI just won’t stop, but the dollar weakness spurred gains across commodity-ville today…
Gold gained modestly, with front-month futures back above $1300…
Finally, since October 3rd – the last time the S&P 500 was here – earnings expectations and macro-economic data have collapsed…
It was just days ago that we pointed out when celebrity “jeweler to the stars” Ben Baller, who had months prior gifted Elon Musk a $40,000 diamond encrusted Tesla ring, found himself involuntarily trapped inside of his Tesla Model X. Now, Baller is back on Instagram, proclaiming that his Tesla Model X is “not the car for [him] or [his] family” and also sharing that Tesla cancelled a scheduled meeting that the celebrity had with CEO Elon Musk.
A couple weeks ago, Baller took to social media to share his experience of being locked in his Tesla, exclaiming in a video:
“I wish this was a fucking joke. I’m locked inside my fucking Tesla. I know I’ve been the Tesla fan, I’ve said so many good things about Tesla. But I’ve been locked in the car now for 37 minutes fucking waiting for roadside assistance. The electronic door – the door is handled by the push button or the key or opening the door handle – and nothing’s fucking working.”
Prior to the incident, and ostensibly as a result of his “gift” and praise for Musk, Baller had already set up a meeting with Elon Musk for this upcoming Tuesday in the Bay Area at the company‘s headquarters.
But Baller recently took to Instagram to tell his followers that, subsequent to posting his complaint, his meeting with Elon Musk had been canceled by the company and that Musk’s assistant recommended that he contact her with future complaints, instead of posting them online.
Loosely paraphrased, “we cancelled your meeting because you publicly complained about our product online.”
In an Instagram post dated April 4, 2019, Baller writes that he will now be auctioning off the ring he made for Musk and donating all of the proceeds to charity. He also said that he turned his Tesla in after the incident and that it is “not the car” for him or his family.
To those who been asking about an update on #Tesla. I have to say, They reached back out to me somewhat quickly as it was a weekend and by Monday they did their due diligence and allowed me to terminate my lease early without any penalties or fees out of my pocket. Thank you for that.
FYI: Most leases for a Model X #P100D are $2000-$2400 a month and my lease was $1,078 a month. So it was in my best interest to keep the car as long as possible because a lease that low for a $165,000 car isn’t common.
But yeah. F that I’m good. Sorry for the rant. But I got thousands of DM’s even emails about an update of my situation. I’m going to auction off the ring and donate all proceeds to charity. And again. I’m not saying I’m against Elon or Tesla. I’m only saying it’s not the car for me or my family.
Baller wrote on his new Instagram post that due to being stuck in his Model X for 47 minutesand having to exit through the trunk, he was going to be switching vehicle brands. We’re not luxury car elitists, but that’s as good a reason as any to switch, we’re guessing.
Baller also talked about being frightened because his child, London, has severe asthma that has landed him in the emergency room over 26 times in the last 6 years. Fearing a deadly situation involving his child where he may get stuck in the car, Baller said he would “never allow my kids to ever get into a Tesla again”.
Tesla has been striking out with celebrities lately. Just days earlier, Sheryl Crow also found herself stuck inside of her Tesla in a parking lot, unable to get assistance. Her issue was handled directly by Elon Musk on Twitter, as we predicted it would be, and Baller’s issue was escalated directly to Elon Musk’s assistant, it appears.
But for the thousands of laypeople experiencing issues with their Teslas nationwide, who is helping them? And more importantly, how long can Tesla go if it loses the backing of the California and Hollywood liberal elite that have helped spearhead its cause and lend gravitas to Musk’s company to begin with?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GcwjZ7 Tyler Durden
The actress Felicity Huffman, accused of bribing SAT officials in order to improve her daughter’s chances of getting into an elite college, joined 13 other defendants in pleading guilty to all charges Monday.
The most interesting Democrat running for president may just be Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old, gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
When two Nashville police officers responded to a home burglary report in 2014, they found Alexander Baxter hiding in a basement. Baxter put his hands in the air. Nevertheless, the police unleashed a K-9 unit, which bit Baxter under his armpit.
