California Professor: “As A White American, I Am, By Definition, Racist”

California Professor: “As A White American, I Am, By Definition, Racist”

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 19:00

Authored by Ophelie Jacobson via Campus Reform,

uring an online lecture focused on “Undoing White Supremacy in the Language Disciplines,” a professor from the University of California-Santa Barbara introduced herself as being “a white American” who is, therefore “by definition racist.” 

The professor encouraged audience members not to let anyone tell them they differently.

The September 11 webinar was put on by the University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral program in second language acquisition. UCSB Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics Mary Bucholtz was invited to “discuss the white-supremacist and colonial underpinnings of linguistics, applied linguistics, and the modern languages, both historically and in the present day.”

I am personally committed to continuing to learn how to be less racist. As a White American, I am by definition racist. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I know there is this sort of rhetoric of White people in the United States rejecting the label of racism but I think we need to acknowledge that, and do better,” Bucholtz said during the webinar.

Bucholtz started her presentation by describing white supremacy and its implications by saying “when I talk about the idea of white supremacy as a pandemic or as a disease, I don’t mean that as a metaphor.” However, she later says that “white supremacy is not a disease but a choice…”

The UCSB professor also took the time to discuss whether or not she thinks the word “White” should be capitalized. This comes amid the Associated Press updating its style guide to advise journalists to capitalize “Black,” but not “White.”

“I hate seeing when people capitalize ‘White..;’ it’s not the same kind of category. Also, white supremacists love capitalizing ‘White.’ So for me, it’s a political decision not to capitalize it and to recognize it as a construct that has built itself out of the racial system or at the top of the racial system by opting out of being racialized.”

She went on to say that white supremacy “is a system that White people have built in order to oppress everyone else” and that “White people are not experts on white supremacy…We are experts in acting it.”

At the University of Californa-Santa Barbara, Bucholtz is primarily affiliated with the Department of Linguistics, but she also works with the departments of Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, the Comparative Literature Program, the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, and the Gervitz Graduate School of Education. She is the author of multiple publications, including a book titled White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity and a journal titled The Public Life of White Affects.

During the virtual lecture, Bucholtz pointed out that she believes “the notion of non-racism doesn’t exist. You’re either racist or anti-racist. You can’t be neutral about racism.” She continued to talk about the deficiencies that minority students experience within the language classrooms by pointing out that “Black students in the United States are underrepresented in foreign language classrooms and when they are in those classrooms, they may not get the opportunity to learn racialized varieties that are most meaningful to them.”

Toward the end of her presentation, Bucholtz provided some questions for audience members to ask themselves and discuss amongst themselves as well.

Bucholtz shared a link at the end of her lecture to a Google Drive with documents and presentations on how to be “a White ally, apprentice, and accomplice” in the linguistics department.

Campus Reform reached out to Bucholtz but did not receive a response in time for publication.

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Nobel Prize Awarded To Scientists Who Help Identify, Cure Hepatitis C

Nobel Prize Awarded To Scientists Who Help Identify, Cure Hepatitis C

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 18:40

Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice, along with Briton Michael Houghton, have won the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday for their discovery of the Hepatitis C virus, which paved the way for a cure for the once-permanent liver infection known colloquially as “the junkie’s disease” for the alarmingly high rates of infection among IV drug users.

All three were honored for their “decisive contribution to the fight against blood-borne hepatitis, a major global health problem that causes cirrhosis and liver cancer in people around the world,” the Nobel jury said.

The WHO estimates there are around 70 million Hepatitis C infections globally, and the virus causes around 400,000 deaths per year. Though many of those infected can do years, even decades, without becoming aware of the infection, acute symptoms include jaundice, vomiting and fatigue.

Though the discovery of Hepatitis B netted a Nobel in 1976, the majority of blood-borne hepatitis cases remained unexplained, until the discoveries made by the three men both established the existence of Hep C, and the fact that it was the cause of practically all the unidentified cases of blood-borne hepatitis that wasn’t Hep A or Hep B.

In a series of tweets announcing the prize, the committee explained the specific innovations of each scientist.

The trio will share the prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1.1 million, 950,000 euros).

Of course, while the development for a cure for Hep C was one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the past decade, some of those cured, amazingly, have gone on to re-infect themselves via sharing of hypodermic needles used to inject narcotics. As the BBC points out, the bulk of those infected with Hep C are homeless, or chronic substance abuses – or belong to otherwise vulnerable populations.

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Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism

Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 18:20

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Every political ideology has three elements:

  1. a vision of hell with an enemy that needs to be crushed,

  2. a vision of a more perfect world, and

  3. a plan for transitioning from one to the other.

The means of transition usually involve the takeover and deployment of society’s most powerful tool: the state. For this reason, ideologies trend totalitarian. They depend fundamentally on overriding people’s preferences and choices and replacing them with scripted and planned belief systems and behaviors.

An obvious case is communism. Capitalism is the enemy, while worker control and the end of private property is the heaven, and the means to achieve the goal is violent expropriation. Socialism is a softer version of the same: in the Fabian tradition, you get there through piecemeal economic planning. 

The ideology of racism posits something different. The hell is ethnic integration and race mixing, the heaven is racial homogeneity, and the means of change is the marginalization or killing off of some races. Fascism imagines global trade, individualism, and immigration to be the enemy while a mighty nationalism is heaven: the means of change is a great leader. You can observe the same about certain brands of theocratic religious traditionalism

Each of these ideologies comes with a primary intellectual focus, a kind of story designed to occupy the mind. Think about exploitation. Think about inequality. Think about race theory. Think about national identity. Think about salvation. Each comes with its own language to signal one’s attachment to the ideology. 

Most of the above ideologies are well worn. We have plenty of experience to draw on from history to observe the patterns, recognize the adherents, and refute the theories. 

This year has given us a new ideology with totalitarian tendencies. It has a vision of hell, of heaven, and a means of transition. It has a unique language apparatus. It has a mental focus. It has signalling systems to reveal and recruit adherents. 

That ideology is called lockdown. We might as well add the ism to the word: lockdownism.

Its vision of hell is a society in which pathogens run freely. Its heaven is a society managed entirely by medical technocrats whose main job is the suppression of all disease. The mental focus is the viruses and other bugs. The anthropology is to regard all human beings as little more than sacks of deadly pathogens. The people susceptible to the ideology are the people with various degrees of mysophobia, once regarded as a mental problem now elevated to the status of social awareness. 

This year has been the first test of lockdownism. It included the most intrusive, comprehensive, and near-global controls of human beings and their movements in recorded history. Even in countries where the rule of law and liberties are sources of national pride, people were put under house arrest. Their churches and businesses were closed. The police have been unleashed to enforce it all and arrest open dissent. The devastation compares with wartime except that it was a government-imposed war on people’s right to move and exchange freely. We still cannot travel. 

And remarkably, after all of this, what remains missing is the empirical evidence, from anywhere in the world, that this shocking and unprecedented regime had any effect on controlling much less stopping the virus. Even more remarkably, the few places that remained fully open (South Dakota, Sweden, Tanzania, Belarus), points out Will Jones, “lost no more than 0.06% of their population to the virus,” in contrast to high deaths lockdown New York and Britain. 

Early on, most people went along, thinking that it was somehow necessary and short term. Two weeks stretched to 30 days which stretched to 7 months, and now we are told there will never be a time when we don’t practice this new public-policy faith. It’s a new totalitarianism. And with all such regimes, there is one set of rules for the rulers and another for the ruled. 

The language apparatus is now incredibly familiar: curve flattening, spread slowing, social distancing, targeted layered containment, non-pharmaceutical intervention. The enemy is the virus and anyone who isn’t living their life solely to avoid contamination. Because you can’t see the virus, that usually means generating a paranoia of The Other: someone unlike you has the virus. Anyone could be a super spreader and you can recognize them by their noncompliance. 

If Robert Glass or Neil Ferguson deserve to be called the founders of this movement, one of its most famous practitioners is Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes for Health. His vision of the future is positively shocking: it includes restrictions on who you can have in your home, the end of all large events, the end of travel, perhaps an attack on pets, and the effective dismantlement of all cities. Anthony Fauci explains: 

“Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues. In such a transformation we will need to prioritize changes in those human behaviors that constitute risks for the emergence of infectious diseases. Chief among them are reducing crowding at home, work, and in public places as well as minimizing environmental perturbations such as deforestation, intense urbanization, and intensive animal farming.

Equally important are ending global poverty, improving sanitation and hygiene, and reducing unsafe exposure to animals, so that humans and potential human pathogens have limited opportunities for contact. It is a useful “thought experiment” to note that until recent decades and centuries, many deadly pandemic diseases either did not exist or were not significant problems. Cholera, for example, was not known in the West until the late 1700s and became pandemic only because of human crowding and international travel, which allowed new access of the bacteria in regional Asian ecosystems to the unsanitary water and sewer systems that characterized cities throughout the Western world.

This realization leads us to suspect that some, and probably very many, of the living improvements achieved over recent centuries come at a high cost that we pay in deadly disease emergencies. Since we cannot return to ancient times, can we at least use lessons from those times to bend modernity in a safer direction? These are questions to be answered by all societies and their leaders, philosophers, builders, and thinkers and those involved in appreciating and influencing the environmental determinants of human health.”

Fauci’s entire essay reads like an attempted lockdown manifesto, complete with the fully expected longings for the state of nature and an imagined purification of life. Reading this utopian plan for a society without pathogens helps explain one of the strangest features of lockdownism: its puritanism. Notice that the lockdown particularly attacked anything that resembles fun: Broadway, movies, sports, travel, bowling, bars, restaurants, hotels, gyms, and clubs. Still now there are curfews in place to stop people from staying out too late — with absolutely no medical rationale. Pets are on the list too. 

If an activity is fun, it is a target. 

There is a moral element here. The thinking is that the more fun people are having, the more choices that are their own, the more disease (sin) spreads. It’s a medicalized version of Savoranola’s religious ideology that led to the Bonfire of the Vanities. 

What’s remarkable is that Fauci was ever in a position to influence policy through his closeness to power, and he did in fact have a strong influence over the White House in turning an open policy into a lockdown one. Only once the White House caught on to his real agenda was he removed from the inner circle. 

Lockdownism has all the expected elements. It has a maniacal focus on one life concern – the presence of pathogens – to the exclusion of every other concern. The least of the concerns is human liberty. The second least concern is the freedom of association. The third least concern is property rights. All of this must bow to the technocratic discipline of the disease mitigators. Constitutions and limits on government do not matter. And notice too how little medical therapeutics even figure in here. It’s not about making people get better. It’s about controlling the whole of life. 

Note too that there is not the slightest concern here for trade-offs or unintended consequences. In the Covid-19 lockdowns, hospitals were emptied out due to restrictions on elective surgeries and diagnostics. That suffering from this disastrous decision will be with us for many years. The same is true of vaccinations for other diseases: they plummeted during the lockdowns. In other words, the lockdowns don’t even achieve good health outcomes; they do the opposite. Early evidence points to soring drug overdoses, depression, and suicide. 

This is sheer fanaticism, a kind of insanity wrought by a wild vision of a one-dimensional world in which the whole of life is organized around disease avoidance. And there is an additional presumption here that our bodies (via the immune system) have not evolved alongside viruses for a million years. No recognition of that reality. Instead the sole goal is to make “social distancing” the national credo. Let us speak more plainly: what this really means is forced human separation. It means the dismantlement of markets, cities, in-person sports events, and the end of your right to move around freely. 

All this is envisioned in Fauci’s manifesto. The entire argument rests on a simple error: the belief that more human contact spreads more disease and death. In contrast, Oxford’s eminent epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta argues that globalism and more human contact has boosted immunities and made life vastly safer for everyone. 

The lockdowners have had surprising success in convincing people of their wild views. You only need to believe that virus avoidance is the only goal for everyone in society, and then spin out the implications from there. Before you know it, you have joined a new totalitarian cult. 

The lockdowns are looking less like a gigantic error and more like the unfolding of a fanatical political ideology and policy experiment that attacks core postulates of civilization at their very root. It’s time we take it seriously and combat it with the same fervor with which a free people resisted all the other evil ideologies that sought to strip humanity of dignity and replace freedom with the terrifying dreams of intellectuals and their government sock puppets. 

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Daily Briefing – October 5, 2020

Daily Briefing – October 5, 2020


Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 18:10

Senior editor Ash Bennington and managing editor Ed Harrison break down another day of risk-on sentiment as the market evaluates the state of President Trump’s health and the chances of another round of fiscal stimulus. Ed explores whether the term “depression” is appropriate, through the lens of his interview today with David Rosenberg. Ed and Ash then look at how duration risk and political gridlock might impact markets going forward. Lastly, Ash discusses his interview on Friday with Brian Estes, and looks forward to Live Q&A’s with Lyn Alden, George Goncalves, and Ted Seides on “The Exchange”: https://exchange.realvision.com/. In the intro, editor Jack Farley takes a look at movie theater chain Cineworld’s decision to shutter hundreds of theaters in the U.S. and U.K.

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Baltimore Museum To Sell Andy Warhol Painting To Fund “Diversity Initiatives” 

Baltimore Museum To Sell Andy Warhol Painting To Fund “Diversity Initiatives” 

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 18:00

The Baltimore Museum of Art is selling Andy Warhol’s “The Last Supper,” as well as two other paintings from renowned artists Clyfford Still and Brice Marden, to fund “diversity initiatives,” reported The Baltimore Sun

Warhol’s “The Last Supper” 

The museum could generate upwards of $65 million from the three sales. The paintings by Still and Marden will be sold by Sotheby’s this fall through public auction; the Warhol sale will be a private transaction.

The funds will be transferred into an endowment used to increase museum staff salaries and hourly wages, eliminate admission fees for special exhibitions, and offer evening hours to reach a more widespread audience. 

Museum director Christopher Bedford told The Sun that a “light bulb went off inside my head during the lockdown.” 

Bedford said, “I realized that it’s impossible to stand behind a diversity, justice and inclusion agenda as an art museum unless you’re living those ideals within your own walls. We can’t say we’re an equitable institution just because we buy a painting by [the African American multimedia artist] Kerry James Marshall and hang it on a wall.” 

He said, “what’s more important is to create and model the world of inclusion he depicts in his paintings.”

In the last two years, this is the second time the Baltimore museum has sold artworks to “enhance diversity initiatives,” The Sun said. A 2018 sale of seven works fetched more than $16.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

What’s concerning is the museum is selling off their collections in the name of funding “diversity initiatives.” More of less, it could be a cover as the museum might be facing financial hardships related to the virus-induced downturn in the economy. 

In August, we noted the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) warned a couple of hundred museums nationwide could be at risk of closing permanently within the next 16 months thanks to the virus pandemic. 

The survey results document extreme financial distress in the museum field. One-third (33%) of respondents were not confident they would be able to survive 16 months without additional financial relief, and 16 percent felt their organization was at a significant risk of permanent closure. The vast majority (87%) of museums have only 12 months or less of financial operating reserves remaining, with 56% having less than six months left to cover operations. Forty-four percent had furloughed or laid off some portion of their staff, and 41 percent anticipated reopening with reduced staff. – AAM said 

So what’s the real story behind the Baltimore museum unloading pricey artwork? Is their true intention to fund “diversity initiatives” or support operations, so the museum doesn’t go under? 

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John McAfee Arrested In Spain And Charged With Tax Evasion And Promoting Initial Coin Offerings

John McAfee Arrested In Spain And Charged With Tax Evasion And Promoting Initial Coin Offerings

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 17:51

A little over a year after former tech guru (and one-time presidential candidate) John McAfee was arrested in the Dominican Republican (aboard a yacht carrying high-caliber weapons, ammunition and military-style gear), and two months after a “fake arrest” for wearing a thong mask

… on Monday the eccentric millionaire was arrested – this time for real – in Spain, where he is awaiting extradition to the US after he was charged with tax evasion by federal prosecutors who allege McAfee hid cryptocurrency, a yacht, and real estate as part of a conspiracy to evade taxes, which he forgot to pay from 2014 to 2018.

At the same time the SEC also charged the former programmer for promoting investments in initial coin offerings (ICOs) to his Twitter followers without disclosing that he was paid to do so. McAfee’s bodyguard, Jimmy Watson, Jr., was also charged for his role in the alleged scheme.

McAfee’s last tweet is from September 12, in which he explained why he is not voting for anyone: “Why would I choose one person over another to control me? Slave masters are the same. We are numbers rather than people, irrespective of the master.”

Some more details as disclosed by the DOJ late on Monday:

An indictment was unsealed today charging John David McAfee with tax evasion and willful failure to file tax returns, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney D. Michael Dunavant for the Western District of Tennessee.

The June 15, 2020 indictment was unsealed following McAfee’s arrest in Spain where he is pending extradition.

According to the indictment, John McAfee earned millions in income from promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary. From 2014 to 2018, McAfee allegedly failed to file tax returns, despite receiving considerable income from these sources. The indictment does not allege that during these years McAfee received any income or had any connection with the anti-virus company bearing his name.

According to the indictment, McAfee allegedly evaded his tax liability by directing his income to be paid into bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchange accounts in the names of nominees. The indictment further alleges McAfee attempted to evade the IRS by concealing assets, including real property, a vehicle, and a yacht, in the names of others.

If convicted, McAfee faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison on each count of tax evasion and a maximum sentence of one year in prison on each count of willful failure to file a tax return. McAfee also faces a period of supervised release, restitution, and monetary penalties.

Concurrently, the SEC also charged McAfee for promoting investments in initial coin offerings (ICOs) to his Twitter followers without disclosing that he was paid to do so. McAfee’s bodyguard, Jimmy Watson, Jr., was also charged for his role in the alleged scheme.

According to the SEC’s complaint, McAfee promoted multiple ICOs on Twitter, allegedly pretending to be impartial and independent even though he was paid more than $23 million in digital assets for the promotions (of course, he was hardly alone in doing so, so we are confident the SEC will crackdown on all criminals equally regardless of their publicity status).

According to the SEC, when asked whether he was paid to promote the ICOs, McAfee denied receiving any compensation from the issuers. The complaint also alleges that McAfee made other false and misleading statements, such as claiming that he had personally invested  in some of the ICOs and that he was advising certain issuers.

The complaint alleges that Watson assisted McAfee by negotiating the promotion deals with the ICO issuers, helping McAfee cash out the digital asset payments for the promotions, and, for one of the ICOs McAfee was promoting, having his then-spouse tweet interest in the ICO. Watson was allegedly paid at least $316,000 for his role. According to the complaint, “while McAfee and Watson profited, investors were left holding digital assets that are now essentially worthless.”

McAfee and Watson also allegedly engaged in a separate scheme to profit from a digital asset security by secretly accumulating a large position in McAfee’s accounts, touting that security on Twitter while intending to sell it, and then selling McAfee’s holdings as the price rose.

“Potential investors in digital asset securities are entitled to know if promoters were compensated by the issuers of those securities,” said Kristina Littman, Cyber Unit Chief.  “McAfee, assisted by Watson, allegedly leveraged his fame to deceptively tout numerous digital asset securities to his followers without informing investors of his role as a paid promoter.”

This latest bizarre development probably means that McAfee’s hopes to become the next US president have been put on hold for the time being.

The full DOJ indictment is below:

Mcafee Unsealed Indictment 0 by Zerohedge on Scribd

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Ginsburg’s Nightmare: The Democratic Plan To Destroy The Supreme Court Of The United States

Ginsburg’s Nightmare: The Democratic Plan To Destroy The Supreme Court Of The United States

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 17:40

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in The Hill newspaper on the call for a litmus test for Supreme Court nominees and the packing of the Supreme Court with up to six new members to secure a majority. 

Both ideas were expressly denounced by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Indeed, to achieve these objectives, the Democratic members will have to tear down the very rule established by Ginsburg in her confirmation hearing.

The refusal of Vice President Joe Biden to answer repeated questions about his position on the packing of the Supreme Court is deeply troubling. This is a proposal raised not by the Republicans but his own running mate Kamala Harris and leading Democrats.  It would destroy the Supreme Court and voters should know if Biden would consider such an irresponsible act, particularly when he previously denounced it.

The refusal to stand against the proposal is a fundamental failure of leadership. Rather than confront the most extreme elements of his party, Biden has chosen to remain silent on a major issue in this election.

Frankly, that is not the Biden that many of us knew from his time in the Senate. He should take a stand against this pernicious idea and defend the institution, as he did in 2019.

Those arguing for proposal are not subtle. University of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter declared total license due to the failure to vote on Merrick Garland and now the effort to vote on Amy Coney Barrett:

“If they pack the court, the Democrats would be crazy not to do their own court packing.”

However, those are vacancies where the Senate used its constitutional power to withhold or hold a vote. I called for a vote on Garland but there was nothing unconstitutional in the withholding of the vote. Indeed, Ginsburg herself insisted that vacancies should be filled even in an election year in 2016. The fact is that, even if the Senate voted and rejected Garland, many of the same voices would still be supporting a court packing scheme.

The packing scheme would change the Court for the sole purpose of securing an ideological majority. It would create a new and fundamentally flawed Court — a sad reflection of our age of rage.

When asked about calls to expand the Court, Ginsburg said it would destroy the continuity and cohesion of the Court. She added to NPR last year:

“If anything would make the court look partisan, it would be that—one side saying, ‘When we’re in power, we’re going to enlarge the number of judges, so we would have more people who would vote the way we want them to.’” 

The greatest insult is that these individuals are using Ginsburg’s death to change the Court in the very ways that she opposed in her life.

Here is the column:

Subtlety has been a stranger to our politics. This is the age of rage, and there is little room for nuance. That is evident in the intense debate over the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Democrats have dispensed with any pretense in their calls to block her and pack the bench with more justices. What they want is a Supreme Court with litmus test confirmations where Senate votes are conditioned on pledges.

Several Democrats have said they will ask Barrett about her view of any challenge to Roe versus Wade, and cases like the pending challenge to the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, she faced such demands from Richard Blumenthal and others for her confirmation as a federal appellate judge, and several Democrats voted against her since she did not promise to uphold Roe. In their campaigns last year, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders pledged to nominate only those who would uphold Roe.

Hillary Clinton lashed out at Barrett and nominees of President Trump for failing to support particular cases. She has declared, “A number of them would not even say they agreed with Brown versus Board of Education or with other precedents. It is not just a question of choice. It is a question of whether we are going to continue the move toward progress.” Most of the nominees have insisted, as a rule, that it is unethical to comment on cases or issues that might come before them, and that practice is known as the Ginsburg rule, for the very justice who Clinton praised as a model.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed it was wrong to demand assurances on how justices will vote. In her confirmation hearing in 1993, she refused to give the answer that Blumenthal, Gillibrand, Sanders, Clinton, and others now demand from her potential successor. In calling to protect the legacy of Ginsburg, these politicians have to first tear down the Ginsburg rule. They demand that Barrett and other nominees commit to supporting specified cases while pushing them to reverse other cases, such as Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission on campaign finance.

I have criticized the Ginsburg rule, which is used by nominees to refuse giving more than elusive statements on their judicial philosophy. It has reduced critical confirmation hearings to formulaic exercises with silent nominees and bloviating members of the Senate. Nominees must be able to talk about their judicial philosophy and the basis for individual rights, without demands to hear their positions on pending cases.

What politicians are advocating today, however, is a direct litmus test. Not only will they vote against a nominee who opposes a particular case, but they will do so for a nominee who does not expressly support a case. Even if a nominee like Barrett has a foundation in the law, it is how she will vote on certain controversial cases instead of her views that will matter.

Such conditional votes were rejected before the Ginsburg rule. Presidents since Ronald Reagan have pledged not to apply litmus tests. Past sessions of the Senate under the control of both Democrats and Republicans have maintained it is wrong to demand assurances on certain cases and claims. Indeed, many current members of the Senate supported Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in refusing to discuss their views on abortion.

Once these demands are made for cases like Roe, other groups will call for similar litmus tests for cases such as Obergefell versus Hodges, which supports same sex marriage, or cases in favor of environmental or other rights. Conversely, while politicians speak of preserving the precedents, they have pressed nominees to commit to reversing cases like Citizens United. If forced to give such assurances in confirmation hearings, then justices could face later claims of perjury if they changed their minds or voted differently on the Supreme Court. Nominations would become a series of pledges of positions to secure votes in the Senate.

For the scheme to pack the Supreme Court proposed by Kamala Harris and others to work, there must be some kind of litmus test. Democrats have pledged to add new justices to ensure a bench that would vote on cases as desired. Absent such promises, the scheme is a futile exercise. The whole point is to force outcomes such as voting to uphold Roe. This rationale is reaching truly dystopian levels, with the former White House counsel John Dean insisting that, by creating a new ideological majority, Democrats would remove politics from the Supreme Court.

Litmus tests and the idea to pack the bench would not honor Ginsburg. They would instead destroy the Supreme Court she loved. These moves would obliterate an institution that has over history preserved the stability and continuity of our country. The Supreme Court has performed this vital role based on its legitimacy and authority with Americans that will surely evaporate if Democrats conduct litmus tests or pack the bench.

Joe Biden has been asked if he supports these calls to pack the Supreme Court and has refused to answer, despite denouncing such plans in the past. In the debate, when Chris Wallace pressed the issue, Biden declared, “Whatever position I take on that, it will become the issue, and the issue is the people should speak.” Many Americans would not vote for a candidate who considers, let alone supports, a scheme to pack the bench with more justices. Yet Biden refuses to give his position on an important issue raised by his own running mate and other leading Democrats this year.

Ginsburg articulated her rule because she saw litmus tests as unethical pledges. At the time, Democrats like Howell Heflin praised her position. Today, Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court and seek assurances from nominees on cases like Roe, which are two ideas staunchly opposed by Ginsburg. What is left behind is not principle but raw power, and both the Supreme Court and the country will be the worse for it.

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Iran Threatens To “Sink” UAE & Israel Over 3 Disputed Islands In Gulf

Iran Threatens To “Sink” UAE & Israel Over 3 Disputed Islands In Gulf

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 17:20

Recall that following last month’s historic UAE-Israeli peace deal, which marked the first time in history Israel inked a peace deal to open formal diplomatic relations with an Arab gulf state, Iran angrily reacted by telling UAE it’s “now made itself a target” in response to any future Israeli aggression

Iran interpreted the White House brokered agreement as yet more bolstering of what was already an increasing Gulf Sunni and Israeli alliance to break the so-called ‘Shia crescent’ – which is largely what regime change efforts targeting Syria’s Assad were all about.

It now appears Tehran is ready to heighten its own pressure campaign on its weaker but wealthier neighbor which sits just across the volatile Strait of Hormuz by pressing Iran’s claim over three small contested islands.  

On Monday the Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement asserting that the three Persian Gulf islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb are an integral part of the Islamic Republic

Crucially near-future plans to construct an Emirati oil pipeline with Israel starting from the Gulf were revealed, no doubt outraging Tehran that Israel ambitions are now so geographically close.

An Iran FM spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh ​​said Monday as quoted in state-run Fars News Agency: “Regardless of the amount of error that one of the neighboring countries commits, we are trying to return it to the right track of regional procedures according to the policy of good neighbors. The UAE has gone in the wrong direction in some areas for years.”

He continued, “Iran does not allow anyone to do anything on its borders and territories with regard to the three islands, and the three islands in the Persian Gulf have certainly been part of Iran, and these allegations do not create any rights for anyone and do not affect the exercise of Iranian sovereignty.”

From there he specially lashed out at encroaching Israeli influence in the Gulf region, given the recent peace deal with the UAE, threatening:

“The Zionist entity is in the gutter and is trying to drown everyone with it, and we hope that the UAE and the current government will not sink with the Zionist entity,” he said.

The leaders of Israel and the UAE signed historic bilateral agreements in Washington last month.

The three islands at issue are tiny, yet considered strategically very important given they overlook vital oil shipping transit in the Strait of Hormuz.

Both Iran and the UAE claimed sovereignty over them after the British government withdrew from the region in the late 1960s.

In 1971 Iran seized the islands by force upon British withdrawal and the establishment of the UAE after Britain’s administration ending in the Gulf. The Emirates says Iran’s administration of the islands remains illegitimate. 

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

Wall Street Agrees: A Democratic Sweep Is Great For Stocks

Wall Street Agrees: A Democratic Sweep Is Great For Stocks

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 17:00

It wasn’t that long ago when Wall Street – when it still seemingly could do simple math – was concerned what a Democratic sweep would mean for stocks: after all, Biden has made no secret of his plan to lift the domestic corporate statutory tax rate to 28% from 21%, reversing half of the Trump cuts, as well as implementing a number of other tax changes including an increased tax on global, low-tax, intangible (“GILTI”) income. In fact, back in June, none other than Goldman’s chief strategist David Kostin observed that what is keeping Goldman’s clients up at night, is precisely the possibility of a Democratic sweep, and Goldman went so far to calculate the $20 hit to 2021 EPS should Biden’s tax reversals pass.

All that started to changed about 3 weeks ago when bank after bank started publishing reports laying out increasingly more optimistic scenarios what a Blue Sweep would mean for the markets. The argument generally ran along the following lines: yes, stocks will suffer a brief hit once taxes jump, but the offsetting massive fiscal stimulus that would be greenlighted by Democrats will more than offset this hit.

The reason for the shift was simple: with poll after (Democrat oversampling) poll revealing a growing Biden lead, Wall Street analysts were given a simple task: prevent a disorderly selloff ahead of or during the elections.

This culminated when none other than Goldman, which just days earlier had hiked its mid-2021 S&P private target to 3,80, said last week that a Biden win would be just as good for stocks, if not better, than a Trump win… and all it would cost would be $7 trillion in extra fiscal stimulus. This is what we said:

… there is one scenario where Goldman’s projections could make some sense: that would be if the Biden tax hikes were accompanied by a new fiscal stimulus wave, one not prompted by another global cataclysm such as a covid pandemic.

It is this massive fiscal stimulus bombshell that Goldman assumes. As Kostin writes, “our political economists outline roughly $7 trillion in gross fiscal expansion spread out over several years that Biden has proposed, including roughly $2 trillion of front-loaded COVID-related stimulus as well as spending on infrastructure, healthcare, and other policies.

Well… sure. If you unleash an unprecedented, $7 trillion debt-funded spending spree in the US economy when it is no longer crippled by the covid shutdowns, you will certainly see a favorable response in the stock market. You might even get a modest pick up in inflation and bond yields (something which Goldman also opined on recently when it warned of a 50bps spike in 10Y yields should Democrats sweep on Nov 3). What was remarkable is that Goldman admitted that the sugar high from even a gargantuan $7 trillion fiscal stimulus would last at most 2 years, and be exhausted some time in 2023 at which point even more will be needed to keep stocks rising:

In 2023, however, the impulse becomes negative as the economy grows more slowly than would be the case absent the additional economic acceleration in the first half of the Biden administration.

One thing that few if anyone has touched upon is the US debt supernova that would accompany this historic debt tsunami: as we calculated last week, by 2023 total US debt should be around $40 trillion, while US GDP – thanks to the covid pandemic – will barely be above the 2019 levels, which means that “at some time in 2023 the wheel on the US fiscal bus will really fall off at which point the US becomes fully Japanified, and only full-blown helicopter money coupled with direct “digital dollar” deposits by the Fed into US household accounts, would allow the US to reach the end of the Biden administration in 2024 without total collapse in the process.”

For now, Wall Street’s pros have decided to leave all those considerations for some undetermined, future date, and instead are beating the drum on the markets nirvana that will be unleashed as soon as Biden defeats Trump.

Case in point, yet another report from Goldman’s Jan Hatzius today, in which the chief economist doubles down on a Biden win – using data from that “seer” Nate Silver who was catastrophically wrong in 2016 – and its consequences, and writes that “Tuesday’s presidential debate clearly did not help Trump in the polls. Former Vice President Biden is currently ahead by 8pp in the national polls, 6pp in the most likely tipping-point state Pennsylvania, and 3pp in Florida and Arizona, two nearly must-win states for Trump which—unlike the Midwestern swing states — should finish counting their votes around midnight and could therefore resolve the uncertainty earlier than widely expected.  In the Senate, Democrats now lead the polls in enough states to win at least 50 seats (which would leave them in control if Senator Harris wins the Vice Presidency and can therefore break ties). Thus, the polls suggest a “blue wave” in which Democrats gain unified control of Washington is becoming more likely.

So what would said Blue Wave do? Well, according to Goldman, such a blue wave would “likely prompt us to upgrade our forecasts. The reason is that it would sharply raise the probability of a fiscal stimulus package of at least $2 trillion shortly after the presidential inauguration on January 20, followed by longer-term spending increases on infrastructure, climate, health care and education that would at least match the likely longer-term tax increases on corporations and upper-income earners.”

In short, and as we noted above, yes taxes will go up and spending by the middle and upper classes will be hit, but the trillions in new debt will more than offset any tax-hike driven slowdown. This is shown in the chart below, which compares the impact on the US output gap between expected and proposed Biden policies.

There is one potential drawback from all this ludicrous debt issuance: inflation will make a triumphant return (in fact, as we observed last week, it already has). According to Hatzius, the rising probability of a blue wave “adds to our sense that markets may have become too complacent about Fed policy. Our FRB/US simulations suggest that a blue wave could pull forward the first hike by up to two years, mainly because of the higher inflation path.”

Worse, and confirmed our own observations from last week, Goldman next points out that even before any policy changes, core PCE inflation has already returned to its 20-year average of 1.6%, as the weakness during the spring was mostly driven by temporary covid-related disruptions that have now reversed on net. 

In short, if the inflation boost from fiscal expansion comes from a starting point that is closer to 2% than most observers expected just a few months ago, Hatzius warns that “markets may need to build in a risk premium for a more sizable overshoot.” Amusingly, while Goldman has been quick to adjust its near term economy and market forecasts in the case of a Blue Sweep, it has yet to change its baseline forecast of no hikes until early 2025, even though as the bank admits, “most of the risk is now on the side of an earlier liftoff and potentially a steeper path of normalization.”

We don’t need to tell readers what higher rates will do to stocks: for those who need a refresh course, see Q4 2018.

So while a blue wave sets the stage for the next market crash some time after 2023, the good news – per Goldman – is that a Democratic Sweep, despite a sizable increase in the corporate income tax rate by up to 7 percentage points “it would likely result insubstantially easier US fiscal policy, a reduced risk of renewed trade escalation, and afirmer global growth outlook. These shifts should be clearly positive for cyclical sectors, as well as firms that pay most of their taxes outside the United States.”

To be sure, Goldman wasn’t alone in turning bullish on a Democratic sweep. According to strategists from Barclays to Citigroup to JPMorgan, a clear-cut Blue Sweep could avoid a long and messy legal battle and provide certainty to markets that have been nervous about election risks, according to Bloomberg.

“Polls are shifting from a close election and prolonged uncertainty to more a dominant Biden and clean succession,” said Peter Rosenstreich, head of market strategy at Swissquote Bank SA. “That is reducing uncertainty and increasing risk appetite.”

“Markets seem have lowered the chance of prolonged uncertainty post-November 3,” Barclays Plc strategists Ajay Rajadhyaksha and Shawn Golhar wrote in a note Sunday. “Given that Vice President Biden has been ahead in most polls, this suggests that markets are assigning a bit more probability to his win and a bit less to a close and contested outcome.” Barclay’s dollar-neutral Biden currency basket has also risen in recent days, a sign of rising confidence in the former vice-president’s prospects.

JPMorgan’s head equity strategist Mislav Matejka also joined the chorus overnight: “A potential Biden victory should not be seen as a negative for markets, and could in fact lead to an internal rotation.”

Even the VIX curve, which has shown a remarkable hump around the Nov election date amid fears of a contested election, has since moderated somewhat with October’s contracts, which cover the polling date, are down 2% on Monday after jumping nearly 5% on Friday.

But nowhere was Wall Street’s newly found Biden euphoria more visible than in the Treasury curve, where yields for both 10Y and 30Y TSYs spiked to the highest since late August as noted earlier, while the 5s30s curve steepened to 124 basis points, the widest in more than a month, as investors pared holdings of havens.

That confidence, Bloomberg notes, combined with a continued economic recovery, will help support equity markets – and potentially even a rotation into riskier shares, according to Evercore ISI which decided to echo JPMorgan almost verbatim.

“Passage of fiscal package 4 plus a Democratic sweep would be a significant support for value and cyclicals near term,” strategists led by Dennis Debusschere wrote in a note Sunday.

In perhaps the least provocative hot take of all in the past days, Jefferies merely opined that just having a “clean” election would be bullish for stocks: “We do have sympathy with the idea that a clean election outcome is likely a positive event from here given the “chaos” risk overhanging markets,” Jefferies strategists wrote.

And now that Wall Street has uniformly decided that Biden will win and that Democrats will likely sweep, and that both of those events are bullish for stocks – similar to what virtually every analyst said in 2016 regarding a Clinton presidency, while agreeing that a Trump win would be disastrous for markets – we sit back and watch just how quickly the consensus will change on Nov 4 if and when there is another “shock” that nobody could have possibly predicted.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/30DlJUJ Tyler Durden

Senate Judiciary Hearing For Amy Coney Barrett To Take Place Oct 12-15

Senate Judiciary Hearing For Amy Coney Barrett To Take Place Oct 12-15

Tyler Durden

Mon, 10/05/2020 – 16:56

With Democrats unhappy, to say the least, that Mitch McConnell is pushing through the nomination process of Amy Coney Barrett despite two Republican members on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina,  testing positive to coronavirus, late on Monday Committee spokeswoman Taylor Reidy tweeted that the dates for Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearing have been set, and will start one week from today, Monday, Oct. 12 at 9am and continue through Thursday, Oct. 15.

A feed for next week’s hearing can be found here.

Once the hearings are concluded, Republicans plan to send her nomination to the full Senate by Oct. 22 and confirm her as soon as Oct. 26, eight days before Election Day “even if it meant breaking Senate norms and considering a lifetime judicial nomination by videoconference.”

But, as the NYT added, the latest outbreak raised the possibility that Republicans could lose their slim majority in the Judiciary Committee or on the Senate floor: “It gave Democrats, who were already objecting to Mr. Trump’s push to install a new Supreme Court justice so close to the election, a new reason to call for a delay. Seeing a potential opening, top Democrats called for the Senate to pause and assess the scope of the outbreak. They declared that a fully virtual hearing for a candidate for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court would be unacceptable.”

“It’s critical that Chairman Graham put the health of senators, the nominee and staff first — and ensure a full and fair hearing that is not rushed, not truncated and not virtual,” Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, and Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a joint statement. “Otherwise this already illegitimate process will become a dangerous one.”

On Friday evening, after Sen. Tillis announced his positive test result, Mr. Schumer renewed his call for delay, writing on Twitter that going forward with hearings would be “irresponsible and dangerous.”

“There is absolutely no good reason to do so,” he said.

Despite continued resistance by Democrats, Republican officials said they had no doubt that senators would find a way to muscle through the nomination over Democrats’ protests. Even so, Republicans cannot afford to have many members sidelined by illness, which could provide Democrats an opportunity to stall the proceedings. Two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have already raised objections to moving ahead before the election, reducing the wiggle room in the 53-47 Republican majority.

Some Republican advisers were pushing to scrap plans to keep the Senate in session next week, hoping to reduce the risk of more Republican senators becoming infected. But adjourning may not be in Mr. McConnell’s control. He had been in favor of allowing senators to go home, but Democrats trying to inflict pain on Republicans for their rush to fill the Supreme Court seat refused to go along, using parliamentary tactics to prevent it.

As for Judge Barrett, it emerged over the weekend that she had already had the coronavirus and recovered this year, potentially providing some immunity for her. But it was not yet clear whether she would continue her courtesy meetings with senators in person next week.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3lhp9nT Tyler Durden