Iraqi Instagram model Tara Faris was killed by unidentified gunmen in Baghdad on Friday, according to local media reports cited by RT. Hers is the latest in a string of murders across the country targeting female activists; in each case, extremist groups are the main suspects.
She was reportedly shot and killed while in her car in a Baghdad neighborhood.
Faris, who was one of the most popular Iraqis on Instagram with 2.7 million followers, got her start as a beauty pageant contestant in 2015. She was born in 1998 to an Iraqi father and a Lebanese mother.
She had lived in Europe for a time before returning to Iraq, living in Erbil and Baghdad. Her murder is the latest in a string of assassinations which have targeted women, with some speculating that religious extremists could be behind the attacks.
Earlier this week, a female activist who helped organize protests in Iraq’s southern city of Basra was shot dead by masked gunmen.
Faris’ killing is the latest sign that – as one Twitter user put it – “women are not safe in Iraq”.
Women are not safe in Iraq, actually no one is safe in Iraq. She shouldn’t have left Kurdistan, where she previously lived a normal life.
The woman who charges she was gang-raped at a party where Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was present, Julie Swetnick, had a lawsuit filed against her by a former employer that alleged she engaged in “unwelcome, sexually offensive conduct” towards two male co-workers, according to court documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.
WebTrends, a web analytics company headquartered in Portland, filed the defamation and fraud lawsuit against Swetnick in Oregon in November 2000 and also alleged that she lied about graduating from Johns Hopkins University.
Swetnick alleged Wednesday that she was gang raped at a party where Kavanaugh was present in the early 1980s. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegation.
Swetnick is represented by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with President Donald Trump.
WebTrends voluntarily dismissed its suit after one month. Avenatti told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the case was ended because it was “completely bogus.”
Swetnick’s alleged conduct took place in June 2000, just three weeks after she started working at WebTrends, the complaint shows. WebTrends conducted an investigation that found both male employees gave similar accounts of Swetnick engaging in “unwelcome sexual innuendo and inappropriate conduct” toward them during a business lunch in front of customers, the complaint said.
Swetnick denied the allegations and, WebTrends alleged, “in a transparent effort to divert attention from her own inappropriate behavior … [made] false and retaliatory allegations” of sexual harassment against two other male co-workers.
“Based on its investigations, WebTrends determined that Swetnick had engaged in inappropriate conduct, but that no corroborating evidence existed to support Swetnick’s allegations against her coworkers,” the complaint said.
After a WebTrends human resources director informed Swetnick that the company was unable to corroborate the sexual harassment allegations she had made, she “remarkably” walked back the allegations, according to the complaint.
In July, one month after the alleged incident, Swetnick took a leave of absence from the company for sinus issues, according to the complaint. WebTrends said it made short-term disability payments to her until mid-August that year. One week after the payments stopped, WebTrends received a note from Swetnick’s doctor claiming she needed a leave of absence for a “nervous breakdown.”
The company said it continued to provide health insurance coverage for Swetnick, despite her refusal provide any additional information about her alleged medical condition.
In November, the company’s human resources director received a notice from the Washington, D.C. Department of Unemployment that Swetnick had applied for unemployment benefits after claiming she left WebTrends voluntarily in late September.
“In short, Swetnick continued to claim the benefits of a full-time employee of WebTrends, sought disability payments from WebTrends’ insurance carrier and falsely claimed unemployment insurance payments from the District of Columbia,” the complaint states.
Swetnick allegedly hung up the phone on WebTrends managers calling to discuss why she applied for unemployment benefits, according to the complaint. She then sent letters to WebTrends’ upper management, detailing new allegations that two male co-workers sexually harassed her and said that the company’s human resources director had “illegally tired [sic] for months to get privileged medical information” from her, her doctor and her insurance company.
WebTrends also alleged that Swetnick began her fraud against the company before she was hired by stating on her job application that she graduated from John Hopkins University. But according to the complaint, the school had no record of her attendance.
An online resume posted by Swetnick makes no reference to John Hopkins University. It does show that she worked for WebTrends from December 1999 to August 2000.
It’s unclear what transpired after the complaint was filed against Swetnick. One month after WebTrends filed the action, the company voluntarily dismissed the action with prejudice.
The complaint against his client was “[c]ompletely bogus which is why it was dismissed almost immediately,” Avenatti told TheDCNF in an email. “The lawsuit was filed in retaliation against my client after she pursued claims against the company.”
WebTrends did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In March 2001, three months after WebTrends dismissed its action, Swetnick’s ex-boyfriend, Richard Vinneccy, filed a restraining order against Swetnick, claiming that she threatened him after he ended their four-year relationship.
The massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake that shook the Indonesian island of Sulawesi unleashed a tsunami that destroyed property along the island’s Palu region.
Amid the chaos, a stunning video of the tsunami’s impact on the coastline was uploaded to social media. The footage shows hundreds of people running for their lives as pandemonium erupts.
Jadi tadi setelah #gempadonggala yang beritanya sudah banyak beredar itu temen saya masih bisa kontak adiknya. Tapi setelah itu dia dapat video ini, dan ga bisa hubungin keluarga dan teman-temannya. Mungkin sinyal mati semua. Jadi kalau ada info kabarin ya. pic.twitter.com/2HY4Yqg0ut
In another part of the video, water can be seen crashing towards the Baiturrahman Mosque and the Palu Grand Mall.
Officials said that waters have receded and details of casualties haven’t been released. A separate tsunami hit another city, Donggala.
Officials said houses were swept away and multiple families were reported missing. Communications in central Sulawesi were knocked out and rescue officials are having trouble reaching people. Officials expect to have more information in the coming days.
There’s a lot to unpack in the national psychodrama that played out in the senate judiciary committee yesterday with Ford v. Kavanaugh. Dr. Ford laid out what The New York Times is calling the “appalling trauma” of her alleged treatment at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh 36 years ago. And Mr. Kavanaugh denied it in tears of rage.
Dr. Ford scored points for showing up and playing her assigned role. She didn’t add any validating evidence to her story, but she appeared sincere. Judge Kavanaugh seemed to express a weepy astonishment that the charge was ever laid on him, but unlike other questionably-charged men in the grim history of the #Metoo campaign he strayed from his assigned role of the groveling apologist offering his neck to the executioner, an unforgivable effrontery to his accusers.
The committee majority’s choice to sub out the questioning to “sex crime prosecutor” Rachel Mitchell was a pitiful bust, shining a dim forensic light on the matter where hot halogen fog lamps might have cut through the emotional murk. But in today’s social climate of sexual hysteria, the “old white men” on the dais dared not engage with the fragile-looking Dr. Ford, lest her head blow up in the witness chair and splatter them with the guilt-of-the-ages. But Ms. Mitchell hardly illuminated Dr. Ford’s disposition as a teenager — like, what seemed to be her 15-year-old’s rush into an adult world of drinking and consort with older boys — or some big holes in her coming-forward decades later.
For instance, a detail in the original tale, the “locked door.” It’s a big deal when the two boys shoved her into the upstairs room, but she escaped the room easily when, as alleged, Mark Judge jumped on the bed bumping Mr. Kavanaugh off of her. It certainly sounds melodramatic to say “they locked the door,” but it didn’t really mean anything in the event.
Ms. Mitchell also never got to the question of Dr. Ford’s whereabouts in the late summer, when the judiciary committee was led to believe by her handlers that she was in California, though she was actually near Washington DC at her parent’s beach house in Delaware, and Mr. Grassley, the committee chair, could have easily dispatched investigators to meet with her there. Instead, the Democrats on the committee put out a cockamamie story about her fear of flying all the way from California – yet Ms. Mitchell established that Mrs. Ford routinely flew long distances, to Bali, for instance, on her surfing trips around the world.
Overall, it was impossible to believe that Dr. Ford had not experienced something with somebody — or else why submit to such a grotesque public spectacle — but the matter remains utterly unproved and probably unprovable. Please forgive me for saying I’m also not persuaded that the incident as described by Dr. Ford was such an “appalling trauma” as alleged. If the “party” actually happened, then one would have to assume that 15-year-old Chrissie Blasey, as she was known then, went there of her own volition looking for some kind of fun and excitement. She found more than she bargained for when a boy sprawled on top of her and tried to grope her breasts, grinding his hips against hers, working to un-clothe her, with his pal watching and guffawing on the sidelines — not exactly a suave approach, but a life-changing trauma? Sorry, it sounds conveniently hyperbolic to me.
I suspect there is much more psychodrama in the life of Christine Blasey Ford than we know of at this time. She wasn’t raped and her story stops short of alleging an attempt at rape, whoever was on top of her, though it is apparently now established in the public mind (and the mainstream media) that it was a rape attempt. But according to #Metoo logic, every unhappy sexual incident is an “appalling trauma” that must be avenged by destroying careers and reputations.
The issues in the bigger picture concern a Democratic Party driven by immense bad faith to any means that justify the defeat of this Supreme Court nominee for reasons that everyone over nine-years-old understands: the fear that a majority conservative court will overturn Roe v. Wade – despite Judge Kavanaugh’s statement many times that it is “settled law.”
What one senses beyond that, though, is the malign spirit of the party’s last candidate for president in the 2016 election and a desperate crusade to continue litigating that outcome until the magic moment when a “blue tide” of midterm election victories seals the ultimate victory over the detested alien in the White House.
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage rose for the fifth consecutive week to 4.72%, a high not seen since April 28, 2011 when it was 4.78%. The average 15-year rate rose to 4.16% from 4.11%, Freddie Mac said in a said in a statement on Thursday.
According to nationalized company, among the reasons listed for the continued rise in rates are: the robust economy, rising Treasury yields and the anticipation of more short-term rate hikes caused mortgage rates to move up.
Of course, the “robust economy” and higher rates are now turning against new homebuyers, as the highest rates in years make purchases of a home prohibitively costly to new buyers. The latest confirmation of the slowdown in housing came earlier today when the NAR reported that pending home sales declined to the lowest level in 7 months. Late last week, Bank of America went so far as to call the top in the US housing market in a note in which the bank urged clients to “call your realtor,” as the peak in home sales has been reached and “housing is no longer a tailwind.” It also confirmed what we wrote back in July in “Housing Market Headed For “Broadest Slowdown In Years.“
“Interest rates are rising because the economy is getting better,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com. “But the rising interest rates can start to take a toll on borrowers after a point. In the mortgage market, we’re starting to reach that point.”
Those potential homeowners who are hoping for conditions to change will have to wait: borrowing costs will continue rising throughout the year, with 30-year fixed rates hitting 5 percent before 2019, according to Danielle Hale, chief economist for Realtor.com. The 30-year average was 3.83 percent a year ago.
“Although this will take some of the pressure off home prices, it will come at the expense of home sales, which are already struggling,” Hale said, confirming that housing is now rolling over and what happens next could be ugly, if the events of 2007 are any indication.
Ten years after the crisis, financial regulation leaves taxpayers holding the bag for banks’ safety net…
Regulation is best understood as a dynamic game of action and response, in which either regulators or regulatees may make a move at any time. In this game, regulatees tend to make more moves in pursuit of safety-net subsidies than regulators can or do make to stop them. Moreover, regulatee moves tend to be faster and more creative, and to have less-transparent consequences than the moves that regulators make.
In modern times, banking crises have occurred when managers pursued concentrated risks that made their institutions increasingly vulnerable, but generated a series of substantial and long-lasting safety-net subsidies until things finally went south. As I explore in my new INET working paper, such subsidies can prove long-lasting because the regulatory cultures of almost every country in the world today embrace—in one form or another—three strategic elements:
Politically-Directed Subsidies to Selected Borrowers: The policy framework either explicitly requires—or implicitly rewards—institutions for making credit available to favored classes of borrowers at a subsidized interest rate. In recent crises, subsidized loans to homeowners played this role. However, the next crisis may feature loans to current and former students, pension funds, and state and local entities;
Subsidies to Bank Risk-Taking: The policy framework commits government officials to offer on subsidized terms explicit and/or implicit (i.e., conjectural) guarantees of repayment to banks’ depositors and other kinds of counterparties engaging in complex forms of bank deal making;
Defective Monitoring and Control of the Subsidies: The contracting and accounting frameworks used by banks and government officials leave no paper trail. They are careful not to make anyone directly accountable for reporting or controlling the size of these subsidies in a conscientious or timely fashion.
Taken together, the first two elements of the subsidization strategy invite commercial and investment banks to use the safety net to extract wealth surreptitiously from ordinary taxpayers. To keep subsidy-generating leverage high, the bulk of the subsidies banks receive are promptly paid out to top managers and to shareholders in the form of dividends and share repurchases. The rest is shifted forward and backward: mostly to large creditors and politically favored borrowers, but a few dollars might be reserved for like-minded academic researchers and community groups.
Favored borrowers are primarily blocs of voters (such as would-be homeowners) regularly courted by candidates for political office and traditional sources of outsized campaign support (such as bankers, landlords, builders, and realtors). Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen (2017) define a comprehensive concept of the “spectrum of political money” that captures a number of indirect and subtle ways that bankers (especially) put money into a politician’s pocket or election campaign. The direct ways include director’s and speaking fees, book contracts, jobs for family members, and stock tips, plus of course campaign contributions. Indirect channels comprise threatening to support an opponents’ campaign or laundering donations through law firms, charitable foundations, think tanks, community groups, and public-relations firms.
The third piece of the framework minimizes regulators’ exposure to blame when things go wrong. Gaps in the reporting system make it all but impossible for outsiders—particularly the press—to hold supervisors culpable for violating their ethical duties. These gaps prevent outsiders from understanding—let alone monitoring—the true costs and risks generated by the first two strategies. Few politicians and regulators want to subject the intersectoral flow of net regulatory benefits to informed and timely debate.
This weakness in accountability exists because the press is often content with regurgitating the content of agency press releases and because accounting systems do not report the value of regulatory benefits as a separate item for banks and other parties that receive them. In modern accounting systems, the capitalized value of regulatory subsidies is treated instead as an intangible source of value that, if booked at all (as it usually is in acquisitions), is not differentiated from other elements of what is called an acquired bank’s “franchise value.”
Of course, some of the subsidy is offset by tangible losses that politically influenced loans eventually force onto bank balance sheets and income statements. Although officials resist the idea, creating an enforceable obligation for regulators to estimate the ebb and flow of the dual subsidies in transparent and reproducible ways would be a useful first step in getting them under control. This would make it easier for watchdog organizations in the private sector to force authorities to explain whether and how these subsidies benefit taxpayers.
But Hasn’t the Dodd-Frank Act Changed All This?
The Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) is best understood as a collection of policy measures designed to weave its way respectfully through different industry lobbyists’ self-absolving alternative theories of the crisis to incorporate a (sometimes lame) treatment of the forces featured in each of them. What I find ironic in this massive and allegedly comprehensive legislation is that the particular problems that the banks’ testimony stressed all point to the interaction of the pair of implicit subsidies that my narrative highlights.
These subsidies are hidden in the systems used: (1) to finance housing investments on the one hand, and (2) to finance payouts from the US financial safety net on the other. In turn, the norms that make these subsidies durable are rooted in a generalized breakdown in professional ethics that the DFA does not treat at all. The professions of government service, accounting, financial management, credit rating, mortgage banking, derivatives broker-dealer making, and government regulation all have explicit or implicit codes of practice that (wink, wink) members of the profession are expected to follow to prevent client, user, or societal abuse and to preserve the integrity of that profession. In some countries and professions (especially medicine), violations of particular standards that impose predictable harm on other parties become a matter for law enforcement. So (I believe) it should be in finance.
Focusing Only on Bank Capital is a Loser’s Game
It is fiendishly difficult for incentive-conflicted leaders of regulatory agencies to control firms that capital markets perceive to be macroeconomically, politically, or administratively too difficult to close and unwind. For such megabanks, the Basel approach of setting capital requirements only against what have become well-understood and easily measurable exposures is massively inadequate. To mimic the methods by which private counterparties keep the other side’s opportunities for weaseling out of losses under control, capital requirements have begun to introduce small capital surcharges designed to increase both with an institution’s size and with the opacity of its deal making. But further reform legislation passed in 2018 benefits giant banks in two ways: by doing nothing new to rein in their ability to command safety-net subsidies when they are in distress and by expanding access to these subsidies for their custody activities. As always, an unreformed and elitist justice system continues to grant megabankers near-impunity for forcing the safety net—rather than their stockholders—to finance their firms’ deepest risk exposures.
Managers of temporarily well-capitalized banks are pressuring regulators to let them use dividends and stock repurchases to distribute as much of their current earnings as they can. Worse yet, regulators add their blessing to bankers’ bullsh*t claim that this is okay because low current levels of safety-net subsidies mean that safety-net subsidies are safely under control. While it is true that the value of safety-net guarantees is relatively low at U.S. megabanks today, this is because safety-net subsidies recede as a bank begins to build up its capital even a little. But the dialectical process I have outlined explains that, contrary to Adamanti and Hellwig (2013), increased capital requirements and incentive-conflicted stress tests cannot keep taxpayers’ loss exposure in megabanks under control for long. Whatever the level of capital requirements, the taxpayers’ stake increases when and as (notice I do not say if) bankers find new and better ways to hide leverage, tail risk and distress from their supervisors.
In principle, stress tests can compensate for some of the weaknesses in the design and implementation of capital requirements But in practice, stress tests focus narrowly on only a few very-specific scenarios. Because neither capital requirements nor stress tests measure taxpayer risks appropriately, stress tests merely add an overlay of bullsh*t to the perseverance of the citizenry’s hard-to-shake belief in the supervisory process. In any case, it looks as if regulators have stopped using these tests to assess the volatility of taxpayers’ stake in large banks. Beginning this year, the Fed appears to have repurposed the tests as a way to provide supervisory cover for captured regulators to permit the megabanks to use share buybacks and dividends to pay out enough of their accumulated profits to drive their safety-net subsidies up again.
Most commentators argue that U.S. megabanks are safer now that they were in 2007- 2008. But that is a superficial test. A more-important and unasked question is: For how long? Figure 1 tells us that the process of rebuilding megabanks’ leverage-driven tail risk by means of dividends and stock buybacks is already getting underway.
Figure 1: 2018 POST-CCAR SHAREHOLDER PAYOUTS FORECASTED FOR SELECTED US MEGABANKS AFTER STRESS TESTS
Equally worrisome, bank information systems do not even try to track taxpayers’ stake in banking firms and the regulatory, supervisory and justice systems remain focused on disciplining banks, rather than bankers.
On Friday the State Department announced it is evacuating all non-essential personnel from the US consulate in Basra, Iraq.
The drastic move comes after a month of heavy anti-Iran and anti-Iraqi government protests that have gripped the southern city, which has led to sectarian rioting and the burning of Shia militia buildings, as well as the torching of the Iranian consulate early this month. During the first week of September the US embassy in Baghdad’s green zone also came under attack by mortar fire, which US officials and military analysts blamed on Iran-backed militias.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited threats from Iran as the reason for ordering the Basra consulate evacuation, and in a separate statement a senior US official confirmed to CNN that the “ordered departure” was due to “security threats from Iran.”
Protesters in Basra torched Iraqi government buildings in early September. Image source: AFP
“US Embassy Baghdad will continue to provide consular services to US citizens in Basra,” the State Department said in its statement. It also issued an updated travel advisory for Iraq noting the removal of non-essential staff in the city.
Pompeo explained the evacuation order further as, “Threats to our personnel and facilities in Iraq from the Government of Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, and from militias facilitated by and under the control and direction of the Quds Force leader Qasem Soleimani have increased over the past several weeks.”
Pompeo further noted that “there have been repeated incidents of indirect fire from elements of those militias directed at our Consulate General in Basrah and our Embassy in Baghdad, including within the past twenty-four hours.”
The US Consulate in Basra, view from within the security perimeter:
US Consulate Basra, Image source: US Consulate Basrah/Facebook
“I have advised the Government of Iran that the United States will hold Iran directly responsible for any harm to Americans or to our diplomatic facilities in Iraq or elsewhere and whether perpetrated by Iranian forces directly or by associated proxy militias,” the Secretary of State said.
A number of Iraqi cities exploded in anti-government protests in the first week of September, which had strong sectarian element as largely Sunni demonstrations demanded the end of Iranian influence on the Baghdad government and the retreat of Shia Iran-backed militias.
“We will deal with them [foreign troops in Iraq] as occupying forces, and we will use our legitimate rights by employing all possible means to force them out of the country,” the Iraqi factions warned, adding that foreign troops were “in their sights”. The statement also alleged an “Anglo-American-led dirty and dangerous conspiracy to impose a devilish coalition” on the people of Iraq which seeks to weaken the government and make Baghdad a puppet of Brett McGurk, who is the White House appointed special envoy for the anti-ISIL coalition.
Meanwhile in a speech given before Friday worshipers in Tehran Iranian officials issued threats against the United States military, and laid down “red lines” against US allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Iran has blamed the US and its Gulf allies for sponsoring a terrorist attack on a military parade in the southwest city of Ahvaz last Saturday which killed 25, including IRGC personnel among the victims.
“If America does anything wrong, their bases around Iran would not remain secure,” Ayatollah Mohammadali Movahedi Kermani was quoted as saying by Mizan news agency while leading Friday prayers in Tehran.
And simultaneously the Fars news agency quoted Brigadier General Hossein Salami, deputy head of the IRGC, as saying in reference to the Saudis and Emirates:“If you cross our red lines, we will surely cross yours. You know the storm the Iranian nation can create.”
The Ragin’ Cajun, I believe, coined the phrase “Nuts and Sluts” to succinctly describe the tactic used by the elites I call The Davos Crowd to smear and destroy someone they’ve targeted.
Brett Kavanaugh is the latest victim of this technique. But, there have been dozens of victims I can list from Gary Hart in the 1980’s to former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Donald Trump.
“Nuts and Sluts” is easy to understand. Simply accuse the person you want to destroy of being either crazy (the definition of which shifts with whatever is the political trigger issue of the day) or a sexual deviant.
This technique works because it triggers most people’s Disgust Circuit,a term created by Mark Schaller as part of what he calls the Behavioral Immune System and popularized by Johnathan Haidt.
The disgust circuit is easy to understand.
It is the limit at which behavior in others triggers our gut-level outrage and we recoil with disgust.
The reason “Nuts and Sluts” works so well on conservative candidates and voters is because, on average, conservatives have a much stronger disgust circuit than liberals and/or libertarians.
This is why it always seems to be that anyone who threatens the global order or the political system always turns out to have some horrible sexual deviance in their closet.
It’s why the only thing any of us remember about the infamous Trump Dossier is the image of Trump standing on a bed in a Moscow hotel room urinating on a hooker.
The technique is used to drive a wedge between Republican voters and lawmakers and make it easy for them to go along with whatever stupidity is brought forth by the press and the Democrats.
And don’t think for a second that, more often than not, GOP leadership isn’t in cahoots with the DNC on these take-downs. Because they are.
But, here’s the problem. As liberals and cultural Marxists break down the societal order, as they win skirmish after skirmish in the Culture War, and desensitize us to normalize ever more deviant behavior, the circumstances of a “Nuts and Sluts” accusation have to rise accordingly.
It’s behavioral heroin. And the more tolerance we build up to it the more likely people are to see right through the lie.
It’s why Gary Hart simply had to be accused of having an affair in the 1980’s to scuttle his presidential aspirations but today Trump has to piss on a hooker.
And it’s why it was mild sexual harassment and a pubic hair on a Coke can for Clarence Thomas, but today, for Brett Kavanaugh, it has to be a gang-rape straight out of an 80’s frat party in a Brett Eaton Ellis book — whose books, by the way, are meant to be warnings not blueprints.
Trump has weathered both the Nuts side of the technique and the Sluts side. And as he has done so The Resistance has become more and more outraged that it’s not working like it used to.
This is why they have to pay people to be outraged by Kavanaugh’s nomination. They can’t muster up a critical mass of outrage while Trump is winning on many fronts. Like it or not, the economy has improved. It’s still not good, but it’s better and sentiment is higher.
So they have to pay people to protest Kavanaugh. And when that didn’t work, then the fear of his ascending to the Supreme Court and jeopardizing Roe v. Wade became acute, it doesn’t surprise me to see them pull out Christine Blasie Ford’s story to guide them through to the mid-term elections.
And that was a bridge too far for a lot of people.
The one who finally had enough of ‘Nuts and Sluts’ was, of all people, Lindsey Graham. Graham is one of the most vile and venal people in D.C. He is a war-mongering neoconservative-enabling praetorian of Imperial Washington’s status quo.
But even he has a disgust circuit and Brett Kavanaugh’s spirited defense of himself, shaming Diane Feinstein in the process, was enough for Graham to finally redeem himself for one brief moment.
When Lindsey Graham is the best defense we have against becoming a country ruled by men rather than laws, our society hangs by a thread.
It was important for Graham to do this. It was a wake-up call to the ‘moderate’ GOP senators wavering on Kavanaugh. Graham may be bucking for Senate Majority Leader or Attorney General, but whatever. For four minutes his disgust was palpable.
The two men finally did what the ‘Right’ in this country have been screaming for for years.
Fight back. Stop being reasonable. Stop playing it safe. Trump cannot do this by himself.
Fight for what this country was supposed to stand for.
Because as Graham said, this is all about regaining power and they don’t care what damage they do to get it back.
The disgust circuit can kick in a number of different ways. And Thursday it kicked in to finally call out what was actually happening on Capitol Hill. This was The Swamp in all its glory.
And believe me millions were outraged by what they saw.
It will destroy what is left of the Democratic Party. I told you back in June that Kanye West and Donald Trump had won the Battle of the Bulge in the Culture War. Graham and Kavanuagh’s honest and brutal outrage at the unfairness of this process was snuffing out of that counter-attack.
The mid-terms will be a Red Tide with the bodies washing up on the shore the leadership of the DNC and the carpet-baggers standing behind them with billions in money to buy fake opposition.
The truth is easy to support. Lies cost money. The more outrageous the lie the more expensive it gets to maintain it.
Because the majority of this country just became thoroughly disgusted with the Democrats. And they will have no one to blame but themselves.
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While it seems that trade disputes between the US, Mexico, and Canada are de-escalating, the trade conflict with China is not. President Trump ramped up the trade war on Monday as $200 billion in Chinese imports took effect. This is the third round of US tariffs on Chinese imports, a significant escalation of the conflict between the world’s two largest economies.
And caught in the middle of the crossfire are US retailers, who have spent a great deal of time on investor conference calls warning about imminent price hikes during the upcoming holiday season, which could send shock waves through the wallets of American consumers.
The chief executives from Walmart, Target, Gap Inc. and Best Buy, among others, have been some of the most vocal companies warning about “unavoidable” price hikes.
According to a letter from Robert Lighthizer, the US Trade Representative, tariffs on some $200 billion worth of Chinese imports took effect Monday. There are several hundred items on the list, including electronics, kitchenware, tools, and food. The taxes are set around 10 percent but will jump to 25 percent at the beginning of 2019.
The resulting margin compression will force retailers to either eat the cost of the tariffs or pass it along to consumers, right before the critical holiday season: “The new tariffs are bad news for the retail sector, especially as the latest round seems to extend the tax to a vast array of consumer goods,” GlobalData Retail Managing Director Neil Saunders said in comments emailed to Retail Dive.
“Many retailers will now be faced with a difficult choice of whether to pass the cost increases across to consumers or to take a hit on their margins. The exact response will vary from retailer to retailer but, both strategies are likely to be used.”
In a late cycle economic environment, tariffs are especially dangerous for retailers because it could exacerbate the effects of other rising costs, “including more spending on technology, elevated logistics costs, higher gas prices, and rising labor expenses. In short, additional tariffs are the last thing the retail sector wants,” according to Saunders.
The new duties are across a wide assortment of goods, from apparel to appliances, mainly covering consumer products. Retail Dive said some retailers are working with suppliers on how to respond to their impact, while others look to shift their manufacturing bases.
Reshifting supply chains takes time and are very costly. Some small and medium-sized companies could face financial hardship due to the disruptions.
“Of course, it’s also related to the ability of our vendors to observe the tariffs, and of course we are having negotiations, or over time, usually not in the short term but over time, to diversify the supply base,” Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly told investors last month, according to a conference call transcript. “So, it’s a complex undertaking.”
Before the holidays, low-margin consumer goods, price hikes are inevitable. “As we said many times, as a guest-focused retailer, we’re concerned about tariffs because they would increase prices on everyday products for American families,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said last month, according to a conference call transcript.
“In addition, a prolonged deterioration in global trade relationships could damage economic growth and vitality in the United States. Given these risks, we have been expressing our concerns to our leaders in Washington, both on our own and along with other retailers and trade association partners,” Cornell said.
Last week, Walmart sent a letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, warning that the trade war impact will soon lead to price hikes.
The result of $200 billion in new tariffs “will be to raise prices on consumers and tax American business and manufacturers,” Walmart said in the letter. “As the largest retailer in the United States and a major buyer of U.S. manufactured goods, we are very concerned about the impacts these tariffs would have on our business, our customers, our suppliers and the U.S. economy as a whole.”
In an interview last Thursday, Gap Inc. CEO Art Peck told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, the company is watching the trade situation closely, but implications are not as great for Gap because apparel is not on the list. The company has spent years diversifying its manufacturing plants across many countries. But Peck said a jump in prices would eventually hit the consumer’s wallet as a result of President Trump’s trade wars.
So from now until the rest of the year, retailers will factor in about 10% tariffs. But when 2019 comes around, the tariffs are set to rise to 25%. “Should an agreement between China and the U.S. not be found before the New Year, retailers could well start 2019 on a gloomy note,” Saunders warned.
An all-out trade war between the US and China is emerging as the most plausible scenario for 2019 and beyond, a risk that could severely impact US retailers and the American consumer.
And unlike in the past, the Federal Reserve has little room to encourage growth by reducing rates…
Ten years after the Great Recession’s onset, another long, deep downturn may soon roil the U.S. economy. The high level of asset prices today mirrors the earlier trend in house prices that preceded the 2008 crash; both mispricings reflect long periods of very low real interest rates caused by Federal Reserve policy. Now that interest rates are rising, equity prices will fall, dragging down household wealth, consumer spending and economic activity.
During the five-year period before the last downturn, the Fed had decreased the federal-funds rate to as low as 1%. That drove down mortgage interest rates, causing home prices to rise faster than 10% a year. When the Fed raised rates after 2004, the housing-price bubble burst within two years.
As housing prices plummeted, homeowners with highly leveraged mortgages found themselves owing substantially more than their homes were worth. They defaulted in droves, causing lenders to foreclose on their properties. Sales of the foreclosed properties forced prices even lower, leading the national house-price index to decline 30% in three years.
Banks that held mortgages and mortgage-backed bonds saw their net worths decline sharply. A total of 140 U.S. banks failed in 2009, and those that survived were terrified by how much further the market might slide. To avoid risky bets, they shied away from lending to businesses and home buyers and refused to lend to other banks whose balance sheets were also declining.
The fall in home prices from 2006-09 cut household wealth by $6 trillion. Coinciding with a stock-market crash, the erased wealth caused consumer spending to drop sharply, pushing the economy into recession. The collapse of bank lending deepened the decline and slowed the recovery to a sluggish pace.
Fast forward to today.
Homes aren’t as overvalued as they were in 2006, so there’s little chance of an exact replay of the 2008 crisis. The principal risk now is that a stock-market slowdown could shrink consumer spending enough to push the economy into recession. Share prices are high today because long-term interest rates are extremely low. Today the interest rate on 10-year Treasury notes is less than 3%, meaning the inflation-adjusted yield on those bonds is close to zero. The hunt for higher yields drives investors toward equities—driving up share prices in the process.
But long-term rates are beginning to rise and are likely to increase substantially in the near future. Though the 3% yield on 10-year Treasurys is still low, it’s still twice as high as it was two years ago. It will be pushed higher as the Fed raises the short-term rate from today’s 2% to its projected 3.4% in 2020. Rising inflation will further increase the long-term interest rate as investors demand compensation for their loss of purchasing power. And as annual federal spending deficits explode over the coming decade, it will take ever-higher long-term interest rates to get bond buyers to absorb the debt. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the yield on 10-year Treasurys exceed 5%, with the resulting real yield rising from zero today to more than 2%.
As short- and long-term interest rates normalize, equity prices are also likely to return to historic price-to-earnings ratios. If the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 regresses to its historical average, 40% below today’s level, $10 trillion of household wealth would be wiped out. The past relationship between household wealth and consumer spending suggests such a decline would reduce annual spending by about $400 billion, shrinking gross domestic product by 2%. Add in the effects on business investment, and this spending crunch would push the economy into recession.
Most recessions are short and shallow, with an average of less than a year between the start of the downturn and the beginning of the recovery. That’s because the Fed usually responds to recessions by cutting the federal-funds rate substantially. But if one hits in the next few years, the Fed will not have enough room to cut rates, as the fed-funds rate is expected to rise to only 3% by 2020. There also won’t be much room for a major fiscal intervention. Federal deficits are expected to exceed $1 trillion annually in the coming years, and publicly held federal debt is predicted to rise from 75% of GDP to nearly 100% by the decade’s end.
This means a downturn brought on in the next few years by rising long-term interest rates would likely be deeper and longer than your average recession. Unfortunately, there’s nothing at this point that the Federal Reserve or any other government actor can do to prevent that from happening.
