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BLM Invades Affluent Portland Suburb, Demand Allegiance From Shoppers And Diners

BLM Invades Affluent Portland Suburb, Demand Allegiance From Shoppers And Diners

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/26/2020 – 13:32

BLM is back at it again – changing hearts and minds by marching into suburban Lake Oswego, Oregon – approximately eight miles south of Portland – to demand allegiance from shoppers and diners who will now surely vote for Joe ‘Racial Jungle’ Biden after recognizing their inner bigots.

According to SkyBluePortland.com, Breitbart and The Oregonian, the wealthy Portland suburb surrounding the 405-acre Oswego Lake was targeted by BLM, which distributed flyers promising to “fuck shit up” on Sunday.

According to The Oregonian, protest organizer Demetria Hester said “The march was about showing Lake Oswego residents that Black lives matter all the time, and about making racists uncomfortable.“

Approximately 100 protesters marched through the streets of downtown and into residential neighborhoods, according to KGW8. 

One of the Moms United for Black Lives carried a bullhorn and yelled at one man who was walking by: “Excuse me, Sir? Are you anti-racists? Can I get a Black Lives Matter?” He kept walking but it sounded like he answered, “Yes.”

She asked someone else, “How ’bout you?! Do Black Lives Matter?”

She then turned her sights on a woman sitting alone at a restaurant table on the corner.

The protesters surrounded the woman and mocked her as she recorded them with her phone. One of them said, “Damn! She’s super anxious!”

They asked her her name, and added, “Does your kid go to LO (Lake Osweg0) High? Do your kids go to LO High? Do they go to LO High?”

“Are they judgmental like you?” they continued. –Breitbart

So, vote for Joe?

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

Utah Legislator: If You Don’t Want to Be Attacked by Police Dogs, ‘Stay Home’

Jeffery-Ryans-kneeling

After body camera footage showed that a Salt Lake City police officer had sicced a dog on a cooperative suspect, an internal audit revealed what Mayor Erin Mendenhall described as “a pattern of abuse”: In two-thirds of the 27 cases where a police dog had bitten someone since 2018, the use of force was questionable enough to consider criminal charges against the officers. The scandal prompted state legislators to propose a bill that would codify the appropriate use of police dogs. But state Sen. Don Ipson (R–St. George) has a simpler solution: If people don’t want to be attacked by police dogs, he said last week, they should “stay home.”

Ipson made it clear that he was not keen on the proposed legislation. “I don’t have a lot of sympathy,” he told fellow members of the Utah Senate’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Committee. “We don’t want to harm the public. But if they don’t want to get bit, stay home.”

There are a few problems with Ipson’s stance. First of all, Jeffery Ryans, the 36-year-old man who was bitten in the incident that prompted Salt Lake City to review the use of police dogs, was smoking a cigarette in his own backyard when he was accosted by cops on April 24. They were there because someone had called 911 after hearing Ryans arguing with his wife, who had obtained a protective order against him. According to Ryans, he had moved back in with his wife weeks earlier at her invitation. She told him she had asked that the protective order be lifted, but he did not realize it was still in force because her request was pending.

Whatever the circumstances of the encounter, body camera footage obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune clearly showed that Ryans was cooperating with police when Officer Nickolas Pearce told his dog to attack. “Get on the ground!” Pearce shouted. “Get on the ground, or you’re going to get bit!” Ryans crouched, then kneeled on the ground with his hands in the air. Pearce nevertheless set the dog on Ryans, who said, “I’m on the ground! I’m on the ground! Why are you biting me? I’m on the ground! Stop! Ow! What the fuck?” But as far as Pearce was concerned, the dog was doing exactly what he was supposed to do. “Good boy,” Pearce said.

Last month Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill charged Pearce with second-degree aggravated assault, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Ryans “wasn’t resisting arrest,” Gill said. “He certainly wasn’t posing an imminent threat of violence or harm to anyone, and he certainly wasn’t concealed. He was fenced in an area and was being compliant.”

Even if Ryans was not on his own property when he was attacked, of course, Pearce’s use of force would have been excessive. “It is absolutely appalling that Sen. Ipson would make such a terrible statement in support of police violence,” Lauren Simpson, policy director at the Alliance for a Better Utah, said in response to the legislator’s comments. “Suggesting that people should just ‘stay home’ if they don’t want to experience police brutality is truly one of the more obscene things to be uttered recently by a sitting lawmaker in Utah.”

Contacted by the Tribune, Ipson revised his position. “Ipson apologized for misspeaking by saying Utahns should stay home if they want to avoid being bitten by police dogs,” the paper reports, “but he stood behind his underlying argument—which is that committing crimes puts people at risk of encounters with law enforcement.” And then, apparently, all bets are off.

“I’m 73 years old,” Ipson said. “I’ve never been threatened by a K-9 dog. If you don’t want to have a confrontation with a police officer or a K-9 dog…you don’t break the law.”

Ryans, who plans to sue the Salt Lake City Police Department, has a somewhat different perspective. The injuries that Pearce’s dog inflicted on his lower left leg, which caused infections as well as nerve and tendon damage, required multiple surgeries and lost him his job as a train engineer. “I felt like a chew toy,” he told the Tribune. “I didn’t know why this was happening to me. That’s what was going through my mind: Why?”

Ryans, who is black, thinks his race helps explain the police response. “People need to know black lives matter,” he said. “Everybody matters, but you can’t just treat people differently because of their religion or their skin color. I developed myself to get to where I’m at right now. I should have the same respect as others. We don’t get it.”

The attack on Ryans is reminiscent of a case that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard in 2018. Alexander Baxter, a burglary suspect arrested in 2014, alleged that Nashville cops sicced a police dog on him while he was sitting on the ground with his hands in the air. Even if that was true, the 6th Circuit ruled, the officers “did not violate clearly established law” and were therefore entitled to qualified immunity. In other words, the court said Baxter was not allowed to sue police under 42 USC 1983 for the same alleged behavior—siccing a dog on a nonresisting suspect—that Utah prosecutors thought was clearly felonious.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Baxter’s case. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. “I have previously expressed my doubts about our qualified immunity jurisprudence,” he wrote. “Because our §1983 qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text, I would grant this petition.”

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Twitter Goes Full Orwell, Censors All Topics “Likely To Be Subject To Election Misinformation”

Twitter Goes Full Orwell, Censors All Topics “Likely To Be Subject To Election Misinformation”

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/26/2020 – 13:13

Twitter is pulling out all the stops, with just 7 days left until the 2020 election. 

As if a complete and total coverup of the Hunter Biden story by the mainstream media and big tech wasn’t far enough; and as if every social media product and app you use annoyingly reminding you to vote on November 3 wasn’t enough, Twitter has now apparently gone “full Orwell” and, through a spokesperson, basically said they will prompt users with warnings on “topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation”.

The news hit Bloomberg around 12:30pm EST on Monday:

TWITTER WILL BEGIN TO SHOW PROMPTS TO U.S. USERS THAT ADDRESS TOPICS THAT ARE LIKELY TO BE SUBJECT OF ELECTION MISINFORMATION – TWITTER SPOKESPERSON

What are “topics that are likely to be the subject of election misinformation”, anyway? We’re guessing it can include any literally anything that would be detrimental to Democratic nominee Joe Biden, while negative press and conspiracies about President Trump are allowed to run amok at will.

For example, we pointed out the recent hypocrisy of Twitter allowing Rudy Giuliani’s alleged sexually explicit scene in the new Borat movie to run wild on Twitter, while video of a Presidential nominee’s son allegedly smoking crack while engaging in sex acts with a woman was promptly pulled from the platform. 

Around the same time, Twitter Support put up a Tweet calling the 2020 election “unlike any other in US history” and informing users it is going to prompt them about potentially delayed election results and voting by mail. 

The photo shows pictures of Twitter warning its users: “You might encounter misleading information about voting by mail” and “Election results might be delayed”. Both “warnings” seem suited to prepare the public for an onslaught of mail in voting (likely to favor Democrats) and a potential contested election (as a result of mail in voting that would likely favor Democrats). 

In fact, the ‘blue wave of tweet-blocks’ has already begun as Dorsey and his merry men (and women and other) chose to ban anyone from retweeting any tweet related to ‘voter fraud’ including none other than the head of Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton…

Ironically, the censored tweet links to a detailed video by Fitton discussing the perils of censorship…

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

Utah Legislator: If You Don’t Want to Be Attacked by Police Dogs, ‘Stay Home’

Jeffery-Ryans-kneeling

After body camera footage showed that a Salt Lake City police officer had sicced a dog on a cooperative suspect, an internal audit revealed what Mayor Erin Mendenhall described as “a pattern of abuse”: In two-thirds of the 27 cases where a police dog had bitten someone since 2018, the use of force was questionable enough to consider criminal charges against the officers. The scandal prompted state legislators to propose a bill that would codify the appropriate use of police dogs. But state Sen. Don Ipson (R–St. George) has a simpler solution: If people don’t want to be attacked by police dogs, he said last week, they should “stay home.”

Ipson made it clear that he was not keen on the proposed legislation. “I don’t have a lot of sympathy,” he told fellow members of the Utah Senate’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Committee. “We don’t want to harm the public. But if they don’t want to get bit, stay home.”

There are a few problems with Ipson’s stance. First of all, Jeffery Ryans, the 36-year-old man who was bitten in the incident that prompted Salt Lake City to review the use of police dogs, was smoking a cigarette in his own backyard when he was accosted by cops on April 24. They were there because someone had called 911 after hearing Ryans arguing with his wife, who had obtained a protective order against him. According to Ryans, he had moved back in with his wife weeks earlier at her invitation. She told him she had asked that the protective order be lifted, but he did not realize it was still in force because her request was pending.

Whatever the circumstances of the encounter, body camera footage obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune clearly showed that Ryans was cooperating with police when Officer Nickolas Pearce told his dog to attack. “Get on the ground!” Pearce shouted. “Get on the ground, or you’re going to get bit!” Ryans crouched, then kneeled on the ground with his hands in the air. Pearce nevertheless set the dog on Ryans, who said, “I’m on the ground! I’m on the ground! Why are you biting me? I’m on the ground! Stop! Ow! What the fuck?” But as far as Pearce was concerned, the dog was doing exactly what he was supposed to do. “Good boy,” Pearce said.

Last month Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill charged Pearce with second-degree aggravated assault, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Ryans “wasn’t resisting arrest,” Gill said. “He certainly wasn’t posing an imminent threat of violence or harm to anyone, and he certainly wasn’t concealed. He was fenced in an area and was being compliant.”

Even if Ryans was not on his own property when he was attacked, of course, Pearce’s use of force would have been excessive. “It is absolutely appalling that Sen. Ipson would make such a terrible statement in support of police violence,” Lauren Simpson, policy director at the Alliance for a Better Utah, said in response to the legislator’s comments. “Suggesting that people should just ‘stay home’ if they don’t want to experience police brutality is truly one of the more obscene things to be uttered recently by a sitting lawmaker in Utah.”

Contacted by the Tribune, Ipson revised his position. “Ipson apologized for misspeaking by saying Utahns should stay home if they want to avoid being bitten by police dogs,” the paper reports, “but he stood behind his underlying argument—which is that committing crimes puts people at risk of encounters with law enforcement.” And then, apparently, all bets are off.

“I’m 73 years old,” Ipson said. “I’ve never been threatened by a K-9 dog. If you don’t want to have a confrontation with a police officer or a K-9 dog…you don’t break the law.”

Ryans, who plans to sue the Salt Lake City Police Department, has a somewhat different perspective. The injuries that Pearce’s dog inflicted on his lower left leg, which caused infections as well as nerve and tendon damage, required multiple surgeries and lost him his job as a train engineer. “I felt like a chew toy,” he told the Tribune. “I didn’t know why this was happening to me. That’s what was going through my mind: Why?”

Ryans, who is black, thinks his race helps explain the police response. “People need to know black lives matter,” he said. “Everybody matters, but you can’t just treat people differently because of their religion or their skin color. I developed myself to get to where I’m at right now. I should have the same respect as others. We don’t get it.”

The attack on Ryans is reminiscent of a case that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit heard in 2018. Alexander Baxter, a burglary suspect arrested in 2014, alleged that Nashville cops sicced a police dog on him while he was sitting on the ground with his hands in the air. Even if that was true, the 6th Circuit ruled, the officers “did not violate clearly established law” and were therefore entitled to qualified immunity. In other words, the court said Baxter was not allowed to sue police under 42 USC 1983 for the same alleged behavior—siccing a dog on a nonresisting suspect—that Utah prosecutors thought was clearly felonious.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Baxter’s case. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. “I have previously expressed my doubts about our qualified immunity jurisprudence,” he wrote. “Because our §1983 qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text, I would grant this petition.”

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Morgan Stanley Models The Number Of Covid Infections In 2021: Here Are The Bull, Bear And Base Cases

Morgan Stanley Models The Number Of Covid Infections In 2021: Here Are The Bull, Bear And Base Cases

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/26/2020 – 12:51

At a time when the US just reported record numbers of new cases, some traders – and the general population – are starting to ask if the US economy faces a new round of lockdowns, especially under a Joe Biden administration (who frequently likes to remind his fans “listens to the scientists” which supposedly also includes such “experts” as Minneapolis Fed president who has been demanding a 6-week hard lockdown of the economy).

As BofA summarizes, US cases have now eclipsed the July peak as with the 7-day average of new daily cases topping 68k for the first time. The spread of the virus has been broad-based but there have been notable outbreaks in the Midwest. Compared to a week ago 35 states have recorded double digit growth in new cases. On the other hand, deaths remain stubbornly although these too have started to climb, increasing to just under 800 as of yesterday.

One should note at this point that as JPMorgan shows in the next two charts, over 70% of the increase in number of US cases has been due to increased testing:

Meanwhile, in the Euro area (where virtually everyone wears a mask so that excuse can’t be used), the second wave has continued unabated. The 7-day average of new daily cases has risen by 58% from a week ago to over 99k in the big 5 Euro Area economies, as of yesterday. Globally, the 7-day average of new daily cases has risen by over 21% from a week ago to 432.4k (there has been marked improvement in India, which has seen its 7-day average of new daily cases fall by 16% from a week ago and 43% from its peak to 52.9k).

Of course, there is a distinct possibility that with covid having long ago become a critical political issue in the upcoming election, a Biden win would mean that the pandemic promptly fades away from public attention on Nov 4 should Biden win. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen, but for now two key questions have emerged: will the surge in cases lead to new lockdowns, and what is the most likely trajectory of covid cases in 2021.

Addressing the first question, Bloomberg’s Ye Xie writes that “lower mortality and less stringent lockdowns than what we experienced in the spring suggest the resurgence of coronavirus in the U.S. and Europe may cause far less damage to the economy and markets than what happened in the early months of the pandemic” even if such an outcome would require more fiscal stimulus from the U.S., which implies more government debt and curve steepening.

The University of Oxford’s stringency index shows only marginal tightening of government restrictions in France, U.K., Germany and the U.S. recently. While the number of deaths has increased, the mortality rate is far lower than before.

The bottom line, and as the U.S. showed in the summer, “the economic recovery can continue amid a wave of new infections as people learn to social distance, wear masks and live with the virus.” His conclusion is that while the markets could have fared better than otherwise, “the resurgence of the coronavirus isn’t necessarily a game-changer.”

As for the second question, which involves a timeline of projected case counts, we go to Morgan Stanley which back in April built an epidemiological model to simulate the dynamics of the infection rate in the US.

According to the bank’s updated model R will exhibit an upward trend throughout the rest of 2020 both in the base and bear scenario, only to reach a mean value of between 1.3 and 1.5 in the base/bear case by YE20. Such an R value would lead to approximately ~130,000 – 200,000 new daily cases by the end of the year in the bank’s base/bear cases.

Here, a key assumption is that traditionally the spread of viruses is elevated in the fall compared to the summer principally due to more people being in enclosed spaces; the bank also caveats that its model does not account for any pharmacological intervention (such as vaccines) or strict lockdown measures that could potentially suppress the spread.

Finally, in the chart below, Morgan Stanley provides an updated Return to Work chart, which includes key events by date, along with bull, bear, and base case scenarios that detail the possible case count trajectory (the base and bear case come from the simulations in Exhibit 1, while the bull case is based on empirical model in Exhibit 2, which assumes similar trajectory as China and major EU countries during February to May with adequate interventions in place.)

Needless to say, a “bear” case which results in an exponential surge in new cases would almost certainly lead to another economic shutdown, especially under a Biden presidency.

 

 

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Amy Coney Barrett on Lochner and the 14th Amendment

sfphotosfour759820

According to the conventional wisdom, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett successfully bobbed and weaved her way through her recent Senate confirmation hearings without really sharing any of her substantive legal views. But Barrett did disclose one big thing: She thinks the Supreme Court got it wrong when it protected the constitutional right to economic liberty in the famous case of Lochner v. New York (1905).

On October 14, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) asked Barrett to “talk just a little bit about how a court could substitute its own views on economic policy for those of a law-enacting body, of a legislature or of Congress.”

“In the Lochner era,” Barrett replied, and “in Lochner itself,” the Supreme Court “was standing in the way of reforms for workers that legislatures were enacting.” Say a federal judge “had a preference for free trade, or if one had a preference for having no minimum wage,” she said. “To hold such a statute that did the opposite of your policy preference unconstitutional because it didn’t comport with your idea of the best economic policy would be to thwart the will of the people without warrant in the Constitution.”

Is that what happened in Lochner? Did the Supreme Court “thwart the will of the people without warrant in the Constitution”?

The Court did thwart those New York lawmakers who wanted to limit the number of hours that bakers were allowed to work each week. But since “clean and wholesome bread does not depend on whether the baker works but ten hours per day or only sixty hours a week,” observed the majority opinion of Justice Rufus Peckham, the working hours regulation deserved to be struck down as an illegitimate exercise of the state’s regulatory powers.

Unlike the rest of the Bakeshop Act, Peckham explained, which properly and legitimately regulated “washrooms and closets,” the height of ceilings, floor conditions, and “drainage, plumbing, and painting,” the hours limit involved “neither the safety, the morals, nor the welfare, of the public” and was thus “not, within any fair meaning of the term, a health law.” What is more, Peckham held, the provision violated liberty of contract, a constitutional right secured against state infringement by the 14th Amendment.

Peckham was correct about that. The original meaning of the 14th Amendment includes the right to economic liberty. As Rep. John Bingham (R–Ohio), the principal author of Section One of the 14th Amendment, told the House of Representatives, “the provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing rights, privileges, and immunities” includes “the constitutional liberty…to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of yourself, to the support of your fellow men, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil.”

Even those who opposed the 14th Amendment’s ratification said as much at the time—which is also good evidence of the amendment’s original public meaning. For example, Rep. Andrew Jackson Rogers (D–N.J.) complained to the House in 1866 that “all the rights we have under the laws of the country are embraced under the definition of privileges and immunities….The right to contract is a privilege….I hold if that ever becomes a part of the fundamental law of the land it will prevent any State from refusing to allow anything to anybody embraced under this term of privileges and immunities.” The “right to contract” was of course at the center of Lochner.

Despite what Barrett told Hawley, Lochner does in fact have a warrant in the Constitution.

Related: “Lochner Isn’t a Dirty Word.”

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Amy Coney Barrett on Lochner and the 14th Amendment

sfphotosfour759820

According to the conventional wisdom, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett successfully bobbed and weaved her way through her recent Senate confirmation hearings without really sharing any of her substantive legal views. But Barrett did disclose one big thing: She thinks the Supreme Court got it wrong when it protected the constitutional right to economic liberty in the famous case of Lochner v. New York (1905).

On October 14, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) asked Barrett to “talk just a little bit about how a court could substitute its own views on economic policy for those of a law-enacting body, of a legislature or of Congress.”

“In the Lochner era,” Barrett replied, and “in Lochner itself,” the Supreme Court “was standing in the way of reforms for workers that legislatures were enacting.” Say a federal judge “had a preference for free trade, or if one had a preference for having no minimum wage,” she said. “To hold such a statute that did the opposite of your policy preference unconstitutional because it didn’t comport with your idea of the best economic policy would be to thwart the will of the people without warrant in the Constitution.”

Is that what happened in Lochner? Did the Supreme Court “thwart the will of the people without warrant in the Constitution”?

The Court did thwart those New York lawmakers who wanted to limit the number of hours that bakers were allowed to work each week. But since “clean and wholesome bread does not depend on whether the baker works but ten hours per day or only sixty hours a week,” observed the majority opinion of Justice Rufus Peckham, the working hours regulation deserved to be struck down as an illegitimate exercise of the state’s regulatory powers.

Unlike the rest of the Bakeshop Act, Peckham explained, which properly and legitimately regulated “washrooms and closets,” the height of ceilings, floor conditions, and “drainage, plumbing, and painting,” the hours limit involved “neither the safety, the morals, nor the welfare, of the public” and was thus “not, within any fair meaning of the term, a health law.” What is more, Peckham held, the provision violated liberty of contract, a constitutional right secured against state infringement by the 14th Amendment.

Peckham was correct about that. The original meaning of the 14th Amendment includes the right to economic liberty. As Rep. John Bingham (R–Ohio), the principal author of Section One of the 14th Amendment, told the House of Representatives, “the provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing rights, privileges, and immunities” includes “the constitutional liberty…to work in an honest calling and contribute by your toil in some sort to the support of yourself, to the support of your fellow men, and to be secure in the enjoyment of the fruits of your toil.”

Even those who opposed the 14th Amendment’s ratification said as much at the time—which is also good evidence of the amendment’s original public meaning. For example, Rep. Andrew Jackson Rogers (D–N.J.) complained to the House in 1866 that “all the rights we have under the laws of the country are embraced under the definition of privileges and immunities….The right to contract is a privilege….I hold if that ever becomes a part of the fundamental law of the land it will prevent any State from refusing to allow anything to anybody embraced under this term of privileges and immunities.” The “right to contract” was of course at the center of Lochner.

Despite what Barrett told Hawley, Lochner does in fact have a warrant in the Constitution.

Related: “Lochner Isn’t a Dirty Word.”

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George Soros Targets Black And Latino Voters As Trump Gains Newfound Support

George Soros Targets Black And Latino Voters As Trump Gains Newfound Support

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/26/2020 – 12:29

Billionaire progressive activist George Soros is engaged in a late-minute push to boost voter turnout for Biden among black and latino voters in swing states, according to the Federal Election Commission, which reports $500,000 donations were given to both the Black PAC and the Somos PAC – which are aimed at encouraging voter turnout in black and latino neighborhoods.

And according to Just the News, Soros also donated millions into “strategic electoral efforts in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and Michigan through the Strategic Victory Find, which is a super PAC linked to the Democracy Alliance donor network, which he runs.”

Soros has already funneled about $70 million into the 2020 election cycle, more than doubling the amount he spent in 2016. Liberal billionaire donors, including former mayor of New York City and presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, have spent many millions this cycle to advance Democratic candidates in swing states and the rest. –Just the News

The Black PAC has spent significant funds supporting Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, along with Reps. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Elaine Luria of Virginia and Senate hopeful Cal Cunningham of North Carolina.

Meanwhile, aside from Soros, one of the Somos PAC’s largest benefactors is Bloomberg’s Florida Freedom PAC. Somos bills itself as the “first progressive, centralized hub for research, messaging, training, and mobilization” for latino voters in battleground states. The group has focused efforts on support for key Democrats, including Joe Biden, Arizona Senate candidate Mark Kelly and Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who is up for reelection in Florida’s 26th district.

Soros’s push for blacks and latinos comes as support for President Trump swells among these two groups. Even liberal pollster Nate Silver acknowledges that “Trump is performing slightly better than last time among college-educated white voters, and he has gained among voters of color, especially Hispanic voters and younger Black voters.“

One last point on where Trump has made gains among Black and Hispanic voters: He has done particularly well with Black and Hispanic men, which might speak to how his campaign has actively courted them. For instance, the Republican National Convention featured a number of Black men as speakers this year. And Politico talked with more than 20 Democratic strategists, lawmakers, pollsters and activists who explained that many Black and Latino men are open to supporting Trump as they think the Democratic Party has taken them for granted. -Five Thirty Eight

According to the report, Soros money has also made its way to the Chuck Schumer-affiliated Senate Majority PAC and the Nancy Pelosi-affiliated House Majority PAC.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TtAl53 Tyler Durden

A Look at America’s Most Corrupt Police

baltimore police department

If there’s a worst-case scenario for police corruption, it would look a lot like the tale told in I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.

The book, by the reporters Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg, pieces together the story of the 2017 Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) scandal, in which a federal investigation has so far led to the conviction of a dozen Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officers on charges of robbery, extortion, racketeering, filing false reports, and lying to federal grand juries.

At the center of the story is Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, the head of the GTTF. Jenkins was a hard-charging cop with a fat misconduct file and a talent for turning up illegal guns and drugs. His crew was filled with other bad apples, including one whose habit of excessive force and petty thievery was so well-known that he’s been name-dropped in local rap songs. In addition to committing massive overtime fraud, members of the GTTF padded their incomes by skimming seized cash and targeting drug dealers for robberies. As the book recounts in scenes recreated through court records, wiretap recordings, and interviews, the task force fabricated evidence, lied on search warrant affidavits, entered houses without warrants, and used GPS trackers to conduct illegal surveillance.

If this is making you think of the popular antihero from the TV show The Wire who robbed drug dealers, think again. Unlike the fictional Omar, Jenkins and his crew didn’t have a code of honor. They seized heroin and cocaine and moved it through their own connections. They planted guns and drugs on innocent people to cover up their mistakes. Sometimes they just did off-the-books home invasions, with no arrests and no paper trail. The titular “monster” is what Jenkins called big targets.

It’s no exaggeration to say the GTTF was a criminal enterprise using the Baltimore Police Department as a front.

Opposing Jenkins was Ivan Bates, a defense attorney in the city. Bates kept picking up cases involving GTTF members where the alleged facts didn’t add up and his clients insisted that they had been ripped off. He was diligent where his opponents, ensconced in a system tilted in their favor, were sloppy.

Looming over all the events in the book is the 2015 death at police hands of Freddie Gray, which led to a Justice Department investigation into unconstitutional policing in Baltimore. Investigators would end up sharing a wall with the GTTF’s office at BPD headquarters.

At the same time that Bates was on Jenkins’ trail, he was also defending the six police officers charged in Gray’s death. The lawyer saw the prosecution of those officers by Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, and her outrage over the case, as a cynical ploy: He and other defense attorneys had been bringing evidence of dirty cops to Mosby’s office for years and were ignored.

Freddie Gray’s death set off riots, and in the wake of the turmoil there was a spike in local homicides. A common narrative holds that the BPD simply withdrew from policing during this period. In fact, the police department took the leash off problem cops like Jenkins. “It’s time to go out there and do what you know how to do,” a deputy commissioner told BPD plainclothes units several months after the riots. Jenkins, whose career had nearly been derailed by a sustained misconduct complaint, was made head of the GTTF in 2016. 

The BPD brass wanted guns off the street, and it didn’t particularly care how that happened. Jenkins and his crew delivered.

Police departments around the country have used similar plainclothes units, often called “jump-out boys,” whose modus operandi is to drive up to groups standing around on the sidewalk, chase anyone who runs, and search anyone who doesn’t. A criminal defense lawyer in Washington, D.C., once told me that the unmarked SUVs of the Metropolitan Police Department’s vice and gun recovery squads were so common in the poorer wards of the District that when they rolled by, young men on the corner would reflexively lift up their shirts to show they didn’t have weapons stuffed in their waistbands.

Several major cities have gotten rid of jump-out squads after years of complaints about harassment and excessive force. The New York Police Department disbanded its plainclothes anti-crime unit this June. Baltimore got rid of its plainclothes units in response to the GTTF scandal in 2017.

The tactics aren’t limited to big cities, though. I reported in 2017 on a class-action lawsuit by several residents of Canton, Mississippi, who said the Madison County Sheriff’s Department (MCSD) used roadblocks and plainclothes units to illegally harass residents of black neighborhoods. One of the plaintiffs, a 62-year-old woman, said she was hosting a barbecue when several sheriff’s deputies jumped out of an unmarked car, detained and searched all her guests without a warrant, found nothing, and then left without explanation. The MCSD settled the lawsuit last year and entered into a court-enforced consent decree to reform its practices.

Woods and Soderberg’s book offers a detailed look at the pitfalls of relying on this type of policing. It destroys relations between police and communities—and if it’s not outright unconstitutional, it’s extremely susceptible to unconstitutional abuses and corruption.

Although I Got A Monster is meticulously reported nonfiction, the writing is good enough to generate a trainwreck fascination in watching Jenkins’ schemes start to spiral out of control. But amid a nationwide debate over policing reform, it’s more than just an outrageous true crime story. Woods and Soderberg show the bureaucratic and political incentives that allowed dirty cops to flourish within the Baltimore Police Department. Those incentives exist in many other cities, and it would be a mistake to take it on trust that departments elsewhere are immune to the temptations that let the Gun Trace Task Force fester.

I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg, St. Martin’s Press, 301 pp., $27.99

C.J. CIARAMELLA is a criminal justice reporter at Reason.

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Ranks Of The Long-Term Unemployed Growing

Ranks Of The Long-Term Unemployed Growing

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/26/2020 – 12:15

Via SchiffGold.com,

The mainstream spin on unemployment is that things are improving. The unemployment rate is coming down. The number of weekly jobless claims recently fell below 800,000 for the first time since government lockdowns in response to the pandemic went into high gear last March. But there are some troubling signs that undercut this good-news narrative. The number of long-term unemployed workers is steadily rising.

The ranks of the long-term unemployed – those out of work for 27 weeks or more – grew to 2.4 million in September, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s the highest number since the beginning of the pandemic. The last time we saw this kind of jump in long-term unemployment was during the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, the number of Americans out of work for 15 weeks to 26 weeks stands at 5 million.

To put the growing number of long-term unemployed workers into some historical context, long-term unemployment hit a record high of 6.5 million and made up 44% of all unemployed workers in March 2010. That was 10-and-a-half months after the official end of the Great Recession in the summer of 2009. Long-term unemployed workers already make up 20% of the total unemployed just 8 months after the US economy fell into recession.

“You had all these people who were long-term unemployed in the Great Recession, they trickled in,” Martha Gimbel, an economist and labor market expert at Schmidt Futures, told CNBC.

“But this is all hitting at once.”

Roughly 13.5 million Americans currently collect benefits under the various federal unemployment programs that expire at the end of 2020.

According to the August Job Opening and Labor Turnover Summary, there are roughly two unemployed people for every open job.

This data dovetails with our recent report that many “temporary” layoffs are becoming permanent job losses. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of job losses categorized as permanent grew by 345,000 to 3.8 million people in September. In other words, nearly 4 million people laid off by small businesses during the pandemic have no jobs to go back to.

There are plenty of signs that the job market won’t improve in the near future. Some states and cities are locking things down again as coronavirus cases rise. Regal Cinemas closed all of its locations earlier this month with no timetable for reopening. Disney announced plans to lay off 28,000 workers. US airlines are shedding jobs at a dizzying pace.

In a recent podcast, Peter Schiff said he thinks a lot of the people who have gone back to work in recent weeks will eventually find themselves in the unemployment line again.

I think a lot of these people who have been recalled, who have come back to work, I think ultimately their employers are going to realize, after the fact, that they don’t really need a lot of these workers, and a lot of these workers are going to be re-fired. Except next time it is going to be permanent, not temporary.”

There is also the looming prospect of more corporate bankruptcies and business closures, putting more pressure on the jobs market.  More than 420,000 small businesses have closed their doors permanently since the beginning of the pandemic. That represents a staggering 7.1% of all small businesses. Brookings estimates that the US economy has lost some 4 million jobs in the small business sector “that will only return with the creation of new businesses.” On top of all this, Goldman Sachs projects even more permanent job losses coming down the pike as a wave of mergers, acquisitions and corporate takeovers sweeps through the economy.

Lockdowns and the government/central bank response to the ensuing economic fallout may have permanently scarred the labor market and there are signs of deep wounds that won’t quickly heal. In a nutshell, a lot of people will likely never return to work.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3opb7mJ Tyler Durden