U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been seizing an increasing number of fake IDs, including driver’s licenses, in recent years. Most come from China and are good enough to fool an average person, an agency official said.
Fake IDs seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. (CBP)
In 2019, CBP seized more than 78,000 fake documents, an increase from almost 57,000 a year earlier, and some 26,000 in 2015. This year, the agency is on pace to intercept even more, with nearly 55,000 documents seized as of Aug. 10, according to data provided by CBP to The Epoch Times.
“The vast majority of fake IDs we seize are coming from China,” said CBP Memphis Port Director Michael Neipert in an emailed response. “Our CBP officers are highly effective in detecting fraudulent documents, so for us, these are obvious fakes. I do consider these to be high-quality fake IDs because they can definitely fool the average person.”
The majority “are of an age range that indicate that they are using these IDs to drink underage,” he said.
“Of greater concern are the fake IDs that do not fall into this category. We do seize some fake IDs that are clearly not intended for underage drinking. Obviously, fake IDs could be used for a wide range of nefarious activities. This is why we make it a priority to intercept these licenses and work with our investigative partners to ensure these offenses are prosecuted.”
At Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, CBP seized nearly 20,000 fake driver’s licenses through June 30.
“Take a look at these IDs—same person, different bio info,” CBP Chicago wrote on Twitter.
The IDs arrived from China, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and South Korea and were, in the majority of cases, headed for neighboring states, mainly for “college-age students,” the CBP stated.
One concern is that the bar code attached to the Michigan licenses actually worked.
The fraudulent identity documents can lead to identity theft and other issues, including fraud linked to immigration-related crimes such as human smuggling and human trafficking, the agency stated.
Fake IDs can also be used by individuals associated with terrorism “to minimize scrutiny from travel screening measures.”
In November 2019, the CBP said it intercepted more than 5,000 fake IDs, or the blank cards used to make them, in Louisville, Kentucky, sent from China. They were headed to various states nationwide, including New York.
One of the IDs was headed to a convicted child rapist located in New York. According to authorities, the individual “entices minors with alcohol and counterfeit IDs before engaging in illicit activity.”
Timothy Lemaux, CBP port director for Dallas-Fort Worth, warned people against seeking to obtain fraudulent identity documents overseas, as counterfeiters will access their personal information.
“What is most disconcerting about these interceptions, besides the volume in which we are experiencing, is the ease in which so many young people freely share their personal information with counterfeiters abroad,” Lemaux said in a statement, Fox News reported.
“We’ll continue to collaborate with local law enforcement to educate the public, and anyone who is contemplating purchasing a counterfeit ID online, on the potential dangers of sharing your personal, identifiable information with a criminal element.”
State Department Neuters Trump EO Barring Immigrant Workers As H-1B Visa Malarkey Continues Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/13/2020 – 18:55
On June 22, President Trump issued an Executive Order barring nearly all visa workers – a move he said would open up 525,000 American jobs.
And here is @POTUS’s Executive Order today. It will preserve about 525,000 jobs for Americans during the remainder of 2020. This is an #AmericaFirst policy… really it is putting AMERICANS First! https://t.co/JkxnV4jZMd
— Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli (@HomelandKen) June 22, 2020
Unsurprisingly, the #resistance found a way to neuter Trump’s order – and it didn’t even take a Democrat-appointed judge!
According to immigration attorney Charles Kuck, the State Department made an “extraordinary change in policy” on June 12 which completely undermines Trump’s Executive Order – and translates to “no significant ban in place for nonimmigrant visa holders.”
The new provisions are broad enough, if well argued, to essentially incorporate ANY job in America. The reality is, with these “exceptions” in place, there is no significant ban in place for nonimmigrant visa holders.
Another immigration lawyer, John Miano of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, told Breitbart “They have totally eviscerated the requirements” of the executive order. “There is no doubt about it — whoever created this is thumbing their noses at President Trump.“
“You can bet that the guys who did this are voting for [Joe] Biden,” he added.
Kevin Lynn, founder of US Tech Workers said “This is an insult to the President of the United States, it is an insult to working men and women of the United States.”
There are less than 90 days to go in the election. How can he persuade Americans he’s keeping any of this 2016 promises if he allows the State Department to nullify and gut the E.O. he signed to protect Americans from [outsourcing by Fortune 500 companies]? More than that — I think it is beginning to make Trump look stupid in front of the voters. He needs to call in Pompeoand talk to him about his job prospects because [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo does not seem to givea hoot about Americans’ job prospects.
Lynn met with Trump on August 3, along with several employees of the Tennessee Valley Authority, where the president told them he would block three staffing companies from outsourcing their jobs to H-1B workers.
“It doesn’t work that way. As we speak, we’re finalizing H1-B regulations so that no American worker is replaced ever again. H1-Bs should be used for top, highly paid talent to create American jobs, not as inexpensive labor program to destroy American jobs.” he said.
And according to pro-immigration attorney Greg Siskind, the exemptions are “expansive.”
More on the State Department’s ‘alterations’ to policy (via Breitbart):
The document says Trump’s directions:
… include exceptions, including an exception for individuals whose travel would be in the national interest, as determined by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or their respective designees. The list below is a non-exclusive list of the types of travel that may be considered to be in the national interest, based on determinations made by the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, exercising the authority delegated to him by the Secretary of State.
Pompeo is the Secretary of State. Carl Risch is the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs.
The list of exemptions is very wide:
Travel by technical specialists, senior level managers, and other workers whose travel is necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States … The petitioning employer has a continued need for the services or labor to be performed by the H-1B nonimmigrant in the United States.
Miano is an expert on visa worker laws and studied the long list of exemptions:
The first one on the list is what they needed to do to get the visas in the first place … Number 2, any of them can do that, no problem … Number 3 is totally meaningless — anyone can do that … ‘Financial Hardship’ for an employer is so loosey goosy that anyone can meet that … ‘Critical Infrastructure’ is basically anything.
Lynn was less formal;
This is effing b….. Who the f… came up with these exceptions? … You can drivea Mack truck through this …. The exemptions basically cover anyone on an H-IB or a J-1 or an L-1 …. Boom! They’re in … with all the exemptions, there is no EO — they’ve eliminated the EO through the exemptions.”
One of the most notable exemptions are for visa workers who have jobs at government agencies, usually via Indian-run staffing companies:
… individuals, identified by the Department of Defense or another U.S. government agency, performing research, providing IT support/services, or engaging other similar projects essential to a U.S. government agency.
The document also provides exemptions to foreign workers who have taken jobs from Americans in “critical infrastructure,” such as the TVA jobs blocked by Trump:
The applicant’s proposed job duties or position within the petitioning company indicate the individual will provide significant and unique contributions to an employer meeting a critical infrastructure need.Critical infrastructure sectors are chemical, communications, dams, defense industrial base, emergency services, energy, financial services, food and agriculture, government facilities, healthcare and public health, information technology, nuclear reactors, transportation, and water systems.
“The people who are doing this are ignoring the president,” said Miano. “I can only guess at their motivations, but we can say it is Deep State acting independently.”
“In a close election, with time running out, with [2016] expectations not met … Trump needs things to go smoothly from now till November, and this list clearly he has people in the State Department sabotaging him,” said Miano.
* * *
According to Lynn, “When word of this gets out to the public that every E.O. he writes is not worth the paper it is written on,” adding “Because through exceptions, they become get nullified by the Deep State, he loses the voters’ trust and confidence.”
“What good is a State Department that becomes the tool of corporations that want to displace Americans, when tens of millions of Americans are under extreme financial duress?”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3iIc0Dd Tyler Durden
Adbusters, the group credited with energizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, is now pushing a 50-day siege on the White House beginning on September 17.
This date is the same day the Occupy riots started in 2011. The group is an anti-consumerism magazine based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
On September 17, 2020 we will lay siege to The @WhiteHouse for exactly fifty days.
We need your wisdom and expertise to pull off a radically democratic toneshift in our politics.
You might call Adbusters the marketing wing of the revolution. It would be naive to think the use of the words “siege” and “occupation” are unintentional. They did occupy Wall Street for nearly two months from Zuccotti Park in New York City’s financial district. Protests continued through the first anniversary and have recurred at least annually since.
They have an activist wing, the Blackspot Collective. They claim they have 13,000 activists in their collective and are explicit in their desire to overturn liberal democracy. Liberal, in this case, refers to our foundational ideas—free speech, individual rights and freedoms, property rights, and objective reality—not left-wing politics.
You would also have to be pretty wet behind the ears to assume some of the agitators in Lafayette Park recently were not their operatives. It is highly likely they used the Peaceful Protestors™ as cover to collect intelligence about how federal law enforcement operates and to develop plans.
During the Occupy riots, NPR reported that Adbusters distanced themselves from the protests:
Adbusters is an anti-consumerism magazine based in Vancouver, British Columbia. This summer, it proposed a Sept. 17 “occupation” of Wall Street, and the idea caught fire.
Adbusters doesn’t claim any control over the protests. It wouldn’t give NPR an interview, for instance, for fear of overshadowing the movement. It sees itself more as an idea shop, sort of an “anti-advertising firm” that takes special glee in creating fake ads to subvert the message of real products
With the new activist arm, this type of distance from any outcome of the advertised “siege” becomes much more difficult. The two groups share a website and make their association quite clear.Adbusters has a manifesto, and so does Blackspot.
Adbusters provides the visual art to communicate ideas in what they refer to as The Metamematic Insurrection, or meme war:
In short, we must rethink almost all economic, political, and cultural precepts we’ve taken for granted for generations. We must breathe fresh life into progressivism, revive its mojo, and return it to the visionary force for change it once was.
Our strategy is to zero in on a new grand narrative, a once-in-a-millennium mind shift, a set of big ideas — metamemes — so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane and sustainable future is unthinkable without them.
In short, they are shooting for an economic, political, and cultural revolution. When you watch the latest rant on Adbusters’ website, the things they hate become clear. Capitalism, individual freedom, and private property are the things they seek to tear down. You can see this clearly in their featured video. The background narrative is comedian George Carlin, so it is only fair to provide a language warning:
It is interesting to note that woke CEO Jeff Bezos is featured. One has to wonder when these successful businessmen will understand there is no amount of virtue signaling that will save them from the mob. They are genuinely the frogs in the pot.
Now Blackspot is much more direct in their language. They are explicitly calling for a collectivist and intersectional revolution. Note the reference to tactical briefings. Attorney General Bill Barr is not overstating the organization and training these insurrectionist groups engage in:
Acting as one, we can overturn the failing neoliberal order, revitalize democracy and secure a sustainable future that computes. But only if we can summon the radical ideas and revolutionary spirit equal to overcoming these threats — existential threats that we all must face together.
We’re at a tipping point. The internet has reversed a centuries old power dynamic. Billions of us now hold the most revolutionary tool ever invented in the palms of our hands. Backed by collectives like ours, the streets have unprecedented power. After centuries of rule by kings, emperors, tyrants, mad men, fascists, communists, Maoists, military dictatorships, corporations and white supremacists like Donald Trump, we can now take charge of our own destiny and start calling the shots from below.
Today we are 10,000 strong. Tomorrow we will be 100,000. The day after next, we could amass a billion people — enough to spark a world revolution in how we live, love and think.
Hysterically, the primary campaign of an anti-consumerism magazine touts the products of capitalism and consumerism as the means to organize a revolution.
They’re filming the revolution with their iPhones and they are too steeped in their social-justice memes to see the irony.
This unrest is going to put Democrats in a precarious position in the lead-up to the election. The entire party establishment has allowed Peaceful Protestors™ in places like Portland and Seattle to engage in violence and destruction without consequence. After Americans witness 50 days of escalating insanity in the nation’s capital in the lead-up to the election, support for law and order is likely to increase.
The elites of the Democrat Party, including Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, are going to have to denounce these radicals if they want to have a prayer in the suburbs. With Black Lives Matter endorsing looting in Chicago over the past weekend, leading Democrats kneeling in deference to their demands becomes absurd.
To remain silent in the face of more Peaceful Protestors™ in our nation’s capital should not bring them the electoral success they seek. Groups like Blackspot are trying to tear down liberal democracy, capitalism, and Western culture. Establishment Democrats are steeped in both of these.
Insurrectionists may hate President Trump more, but only because he will not bend a knee. Rest assured, they only hate the Democrat establishment slightly less. Ultimately their revolution is less about justice than it is about power—and no establishment Democrat will inevitably be spared. They might want to take their eyes off their pursuit of power and recognize the real existential threat. It is not mainstream conservatives or even Donald Trump.
Given recent events, there is no reason to believe they will see the truth in that statement any time soon.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3apUPTG Tyler Durden
Senior editor, Ash Bennington, joins managing editor, Ed Harrison, to discuss secular stagnation, initial jobless claims, and the fiscal cliff. They begin by exploring Ed’s takeaways from his interviews with Milton Berg and Charlie McElligott, their contrarian stances, and how price signal distortion is pointing toward secular stagnation. Ed and Ash also parse the differences between seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims and how the treatment of the data shapes the way an investor understands employment trends during the pandemic. They wrap up their discussion by considering USPS funding, the lapse in fiscal aid, and the significant political tail risks ahead for this election cycle. In the intro, Peter Cooper reviews the latest initial jobless claims numbers and the plight of essential workers.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3fSI0T1 Tyler Durden
After more than two years of investigations, the DoJ has finally determined that Yale university’s discriminatory practices during the admissions process amounted to evidence of discrimination against white and Asian-American applicants, in violation of a federal civil rights statute.
The DoJ’s two-year investigation concluded that Yale “rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit.”
Not only did Trump’s DoJ pick up the previously rejected 2016 complaint, breathing new life into a movement to return US civil rights policy concerning collegiate admissions back to the standard from the Bush era, which was “race blind” admissions. After many years of squawking about that standard being unfair, the Obama Administration ushered in a new “affirmative action” policy that called for quotas. Trump officially reversed the policy in July 2018.
“Yale’s race discrimination imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants, including in particular Asian American and White applicants,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband, the head of the department’s civil rights division, wrote in a letter to the college’s attorneys.
The complaint was based on years of complaints from white and asian applicants who claim they were only rejected because their race made them “similar” to other applicants. Phrases like “she doesn’t have the right profile” – with “profile” being used as a kind of dog whistle for “she’s not the right race” – were uncovered in the records obtained by the DoJ from schools including Yale, Harvard and Dartmouth.
The findings detailed in a letter to Yale’s attorneys mark the Trump administration’s latest step in advancing its college admissions agenda (a low-key critical issue for many white suburban mothers, who spend dozens of hours stressing about their child’s academic future, as we learned during the College Admissions scandal, an extreme example of this instinct.
Prosecutors found that Yale has been discriminating against applicants to its undergraduate program based on their race and national origin and “that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.” The investigation found that Asian American and white students have “only one-tenth to one-fourth of the likelihood of admission as African American applicants with comparable academic credentials.”
“Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness, and division,” Dreiband said in a statement. “It is past time for American institutions to recognize that all people should be treated with decency and respect and without unlawful regard to the color of their skin.”
The investigation also found that Yale uses race as a factor in multiple steps of the admissions process and that Yale “racially balances its classes.”
As the AP reminds us, SCOTUS precedent has a narrowly defined procedure for how race can be factored in to promote diversity. Schools are responsible for showing why their consideration of race is appropriate.
Yale has previously denied that its admissions process discriminates against Asian Americans or any other ethnic group. Responding to the 2018 announcement of the investigation, Yale’s president said race is just one of “a multitude” of factors the school considers when weighing applications.
Yale denied the DoJ’s allegations – and remember, right now, allegations is all they are.
“Yale College could fill its entire entering class several times over with applicants who reach the 99th percentile in standardized testing and who have perfect high school grade point averages, but we do not base admission on such numbers alone,” President Peter Salovey wrote. “Rather, we look at the whole person when selecting whom to admit among the many thousands of highly qualified applicants.”
Over the previous 15 years, he said, the number of Asian American students in Yale’s incoming classes grew from 14% to 22%. He added that the school’s approach “complies fully with all legal requirements and has been endorsed repeatedly by the Supreme Court.”
The Justice Department has demanded that Yale immediately stop and agree not to use race or national origin for upcoming admissions.
This isn’t the first time the DoJ has tried to unilaterally pressure top colleges into eliminating the Obama-era “affirmative action” policies Harvard and other schools ahve also been found guilty of the same violations. The DoJ is now demanding that Yale must come up with a detailed plan to factor in race via the Trump administration’s guidleines, or simply revert back to the blind admissions of yore
Knowing the prevailing sentiments in the world of academia, we suspect they will resist the administration, at least at first, before trying to come to some kind of compromise.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2PSIEpi Tyler Durden
David Brock, the onetime anti-Clinton journalist turned Hillary Clinton ally and aggressive promoter of Democratic media narratives in recent decades, faces legal actions and disclosures portraying his organizations as working so closely with the Clinton campaign in 2016 that they broke the law.
The conservative Patriots Foundation alleges in a lawsuit being filed today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that an improperly porous relationship among four Brock-founded organizations amounted to illegal coordination with the Clinton campaign in violation of Federal Election Commission regulations. The best known of the four groups is Media Matters for America, which highlights what it calls media bias from the right. The other three are the American Bridge 21st Century PAC; the American Bridge 21st Century Foundation; and the Correct the Record PAC.
“American Bridge 21st Century PAC claimed that it was independent of the Clinton campaign so that it could make independent expenditures,” the Patriots Foundation said in a statement provided to RealClearInvestigations. “American Bridge is run by the same people who run Media Matters and Correct the Record, however, which we know coordinated with the Clinton campaign.
“They all work from the same offices,” the statement continued, “Brock was paid by all of them, American Bridge and Correct the Record shared at least 6 employees, and Correct the Record made in-kind contributions to American Bridge PAC. American Bridge’s supposedly independent activity was just as coordinated as Media Matters’ and Correct the Record’s activity – meaning that American Bridge’s [expenditures] were really excessive and illegal contributions to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
Representatives for the organizations did not respond to requests for comment (Correct the Record is now inactive). Nor did Brock himself or the Clinton campaign.
This past April, the Patriots Foundation filed an FEC complaint against Brock’s organizations. Since the agency hasn’t acted on it within a requisite 120 days, the Patriots Foundation is now suing the FEC as allowed under campaign finance laws. The Patriots Foundation also filed complaints with the IRS last spring regarding Media Matters and the American Bridge Foundation, but there is no legal remedy to force the IRS’s hand in court as with the FEC.
The tactics of Media Matters are generally acknowledged as politically aggressive in a way many see at odds with the organization’s 501(c)(3) nonprofit tax status, which stipulates nonpartisanship. In 2008, The New York Times described Media Matters as a “nonprofit, highly partisan research organization.” The Patriots Foundation alleges that in 2016 Media Matters ceased merely appearing to be partisan — it acted openly as an arm of the Hillary Clinton campaign. A December 2016 report in the liberal-leaning magazine the New Republic, highlighted by the group, substantiates this assessment:
The organization [Media Matters] had long ceased to be a mere watchdog, having positioned itself at the center of a group of public relations and advocacy outfits whose mission was to help put Clinton in the White House. … In our numerous conversations with past Media Matters staff, there was a consensus that in the lead-up to Clinton’s announcement of her candidacy in 2015, the organization’s priority shifted away from the mission stated on its website — “comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation” — and towards running defense for Clinton. The former staffers we spoke to largely felt that this damaged Media Matters’ credibility and hurt the work it did in other areas. “The closer we got to the 2016 election the less it became about actually debunking conservative misinformation and more it became about just defending Hillary Clinton from every blogger in their mother’s basement,” one former staffer told us. This was, moreover, a repeat of what Media Matters did in 2008, when there was a rift between staffers and management over the favoring of Clinton in her race against then-Senator Barack Obama.
Media Matters staffers recounted internal fights over the group’s devotion to Clinton. Employees were ordered to critique NPR’s Terry Gross for asking Clinton some questions about why it took her so long to support same-sex marriage.
Terry Gross: The NPR interviewer drew Media Matters criticism for hard questions put to Hillary Clinton. npr.org
But the staff reportedly felt Gross’ questions were fair, and according to the New Republic, “nearly everyone we spoke to who worked there at the time felt that a similar article would not have been written about a different politician.” Media Matters’ research director, Jeremy Holden ended up writing the story because other staffers were unwilling to put their name on it. Holden did not respond to a request for comment.
Media Matters employees were also reportedly frustrated by the organization’s obsession with defending Clinton at the expense of other liberal causes. “Former staffers pointed out several stories that fell within Media Matters’ ambit that should have been better covered. … On the site, there are 1,468 posts tagged with ‘Hillary Clinton’ as opposed to just 26 tagged ‘Bernie Sanders,’” according to the New Republic.
In addition to media reports, internal communications at the Clinton campaign further reveal that it was treating Media Matters as a campaign surrogate and coordinating with the group.
A campaign strategy memo released by WikiLeaks notes that the Clinton campaign reported using the Brock group to “muddy the waters” when it came to issues where Clinton was vulnerable by “working with MMFA to highlight examples of when the press won’t cover the same issues with Republicans.” Another email released by WikiLeaks has Clinton’s press secretary, Nick Merrill, planning to push back on a Vanity Fair story about Clinton campaign vice chair Huma Abedin, which hadn’t been published yet, saying, “We have MMFA, CtR, and core surrogates lined up, which we can expand on tomorrow.” Media Matters published a piece criticizing the Vanity Fair story the following day.
“CtR” in Merrill’s email refers to the Correct the Record PAC. The PAC has been dormant since the 2016 election cycle, but “coordinat[ed] directly with Clinton’s campaign,” Politico reported. The CTR PAC even took money directly from the Clinton campaign – during the 2016 election cycle CTR took in $8.5 million in donations, including a donation of $275,615 in 2015 from Hillary for America. From its inception, the PAC skirted rules that prevent such entities and campaigns from directly coordinating with campaigns by claiming all its activities were covered by an FEC exemption regarding public communications.
“Correct the Record believes it can avoid the coordination ban by relying on a 2006 Federal Election Commission regulation that declared that content posted online for free, such as blogs, is off limits from regulation,” notes a 2015 Washington Post report. “The ‘Internet exemption’ said that such free postings do not constitute campaign expenditures, allowing independent groups to consult with candidates about the content they post on their sites.” The Patriots Foundation FEC complaint strongly disputes that the operations of the CTR PAC were defensible under this interpretation, noting that the PAC spent money on polling and other activities that don’t constitute communications.
Organizationally, there also appears to have been not much separation between CTR and Brock’s other PAC, American Bridge. “During the 2016 election, Brock claimed that AB PAC remained independent of both the Clinton campaign and CTR PAC so that it could make independent expenditures in support of Clinton,” notes the Patriots Foundation FEC complaint. “However, he continued to collect a salary from both PACs, and disclosure reports show that the committees shared at least seven overlapping staff members at various times during 2016. Moreover, AB PAC reported making in-kind disbursements to CTR PAC in 2016.” (In addition to getting paid by both PACs, Brock drew a salary of $278,566 from Media Matters as well, 2017 tax records show.
Overall, the American Bridge Foundation was the largest donor to the AB PAC in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles. As a 501(c)4 nonprofit, the AB Foundation is not required to disclose its own donors. Other notable donors to the AB PAC include George Soros, who gave AB PAC $2 million between 2015 and 2016. Some of America’s biggest unions – the SEIU, AFL-CIO, NEA, AFT, and AFSCME – all made six-figure donations in the 2016 election cycle. And Win McCormack, the owner and publisher of the New Republic, gave $100,000 to the AB PAC five months before his publication ran the story on Media Matters’ troubles.
Not the First Time
The Patriots Foundation alleges that the legally required separation between the groups did not exist. The two organizations shared staff, office space, and equipment, but the AB Foundation stated in IRS filings the “two entities have entered into a cost-sharing agreement to allocate shared overhead costs so that neither entity is financially supporting the activities of the other.”
But other audited financial statements from the AB Foundation note they did “not have a formal agreement relating to the allocation of expenses between the two entities” and “allocations were made based on management and budget estimates.” Those estimates varied wildly. The AB Foundation gave the PAC some $2.9 million “for salary, rent, and expenses” in 2015; $720,000 in 2016; $4.5 million in 2017; and $3.3 million in 2018. In many of those years, the AB Foundation also claimed to owe AB PAC more than it paid, also by varying amounts.
This is not the first time one of Brock’s organizations has been challenged for running afoul of FEC regulations. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint regarding the Correct the Record PAC’s claim that it could coordinate with the Clinton campaign under the public Internet communications exemption. FEC attorneys agreed with the Campaign Legal Center but the FEC, which has been understaffed during the Trump administration, only had four of six members on the commission. The complaint was dismissed when the two GOP commissioners sided with the CTR PAC, leaving the commission deadlocked. The Campaign Legal Center is still litigating the matter.
The Patriots Foundation complaint is different in that it addresses the coordination across all of the Brock organizations, as well as the allegations American Bridge PAC inaccurately reported the operational costs it shares with the American Bridge Foundation.
The Patriots Foundation told RealClearInvestigations it is not seeking remedies from the FEC beyond what was outlined in its original complaint. That complaint asks the FEC to “elicit admission of the violations from each of the respondents, conduct a robust investigation to determine the scope of the alleged violations, bar respondents from continuing violative activities, and collect civil penalties in amounts commensurate with the gravity of these serious ongoing violations.”
The IRS action filed by the Patriots Foundation seeks to revoke the tax-exempt status of Media Matters and the AB PAC, and calls for both to be compelled to pay applicable taxes while improperly operating as tax exempt, plus applicable financial penalties, while referring both to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3kFwsWV Tyler Durden
La Nina Could Spark Active Hurricane Season As Trump Set To Drain FEMA Funds Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/13/2020 – 17:35
At the start of the 2020 hurricane season, we said: this “season could be above average, with 13 to 19 named storms.”
Already 40% through the season, nine storms have been named, with Tropical Depression Eleven could be the next one named on Thursday.
Bloomberg reports the hurricane season is about to go “from bad to worse with La Nina odds up.”
The odds the equatorial Pacific will remain neutral, or even spin up a La Nina, have risen in the last month, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said. In either state, the weather patterns over the Pacific actually decrease hurricane-killing wind shear across the Atlantic, allowing more storms to form and strengthen. –Bloomberg
Odds for La Nina have increased to 60% from 54% a month ago for the September to November timeframe.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Colorado State University said as many as 25 storms could form this year, which could be the highest number since 2005, when 28 were recorded and Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city of New Orleans, unleashing $125 billion in damage along the Gulf Coast.
With Increasing odds for a La Nina this fall, resulting in what could be a super active hurricane season. President Trump has redirected the use of funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster relief programs to pay tens of millions of unemployed, broke, and hungry Americans, devastated by the virus-induced recession.
As the odds of La Niña influence continue to grow in the Atlantic Ocean, here’s a recap of U.S. hurricane landfall frequency per ENSO phase since 1871. pic.twitter.com/7mcwngG1lV
But don’t worry about FEMA funds running out, the Trump administration is running record deficits and will have the Treasury issue bonds to fund the gap.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3fVukXJ Tyler Durden
Back in October, I published a blog post titled, “This Is What Monetization of the Debt Looks Like,” arguing that the Fed’s intervention in the repo market at the time was not a return to “quantitative easing,” as many critics suggested at the time, but simply the central bank acting as lender of last resort to the Federal Government. It was, in its purest form, a commitment to monetize that amount of debt that could not be absorbed by the market.
Now, nearly 10 months later, it appears that this commitment has only grown stronger.
What it really amounts to is “fiscal dominance,” a scenario in which a country’s debt grows so large that the central bank is forced to abandon whatever ostensible mandate it has been given for a new, unspoken one:
…print as much money as is required to fund the government and prevent a debt spiral.
It only takes a glance at the chart below to understand that the Fed is now being forced to play “follow the leader.” As former chief economist for the BIS William White put it,
“At some point, people realise that the government can’t support the debt burden without going back to the central bank to print more money. This is a tipping point.”
We have now reached that tipping point.
Investors should understand that this is a marked change from the monetary policy of the past in which the Fed could pursue its dual mandate without being hindered by fiscal policy. Fiscal policy is now officially taking the wheel and the dual mandate is taking a back seat. And if inflation does, indeed, make a comeback then the central bank’s ability to manage it could be severely hobbled by this new mandate to monetize the debt to whatever extent is necessary.
Perhaps this is why Jerome Powell keeps telling us he is committed to creating inflation: so when it does arise he can say (in his best Pee Wee Herman voice), “I meant do that.” Because the perception that the Fed has explicitly engineered inflation may prove to be its only hope at preventing hyperinflation.
At some point, though, it will become obvious to all that the Fed abandoned its mandate of stable prices, not because it believed it was the right thing for the economy but because the federal government rewrote the mandate for them, even if it wasn’t done explicitly.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/31PaFn1 Tyler Durden
A Preview Of The Fed’s Coming Direct Money Transfers: Brainard Says Fed Collaborating With MIT On “Hypothetical” Digital Currency Tyler Durden
Thu, 08/13/2020 – 16:55
One week ago, we published a remarkable interview with two former Fed economists – Simon Potter and Julia Coronado – who have tremendous impact and influence on prevailing thinking at the Federal Reserve, and who hinted at the Fed’s last ditch reflationary strategy: wiring digital money into the bank accounts of Americans, bypassing the reserve system entirely, and sparking an inflationary conflagration. As we said last Monday, “the two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments, which will be wired instantly to Americans.“
“One of the issues Congress had in passing the Cares Act is identifying who’s got mainly tip income, who doesn’t have sick days. If society wanted, you could use large datasets to direct fiscal transfers to those people.” – Bloomberg Interview with Coronado And Potter
And while this idea may have seemed absolutely ludicrous as recently as just one year ago, the fact that the just as ludicrous Helicopter Money is now de facto policy means that direct deposits of cash by the Fed into individual accounts is becoming increasingly probable, the only thing missing is the “digital currency” that would be used by the central bank.
Addressing this issue, on Thursday afternoon, Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard hinted once again at the coming monetary revolution when she said that the Fed is studying the opportunities and challenges presented by central bank digital currencies.
“To enhance the Federal Reserve’s understanding of digital currencies, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is collaborating with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a multi-year effort to build and test a hypothetical digital currency oriented to central bank uses.”
The objectives of our research and experimentation across the Federal Reserve System are to assess the safety and efficiency of digital currency systems, to inform our understanding of private-sector arrangements, and to give us hands-on experience to understand the opportunities and limitations of possible technologies for digital forms of central bank money. These efforts are intended to ensure that we fully understand the potential as well as the associated risks and possible unintended consequences that new technologies present in the payments arena.
In prepared remarks of a speech titled simply enough “An Update on Digital Currencies” and prepared for delivery Thursday at a Fed technology event, Brainard said that “a significant policy process would be required to consider the issuance of a CBDC, along with extensive deliberations and engagement with other parts of the federal government and a broad set of other stakeholders.”
The punchline: “It is important to understand how the existing provisions of the Federal Reserve Act with regard to currency issuance apply to a CBDC and whether a CBDC would have legal tender status, depending on the design. The Federal Reserve has not made a decision whether to undertake such a significant policy process, as we are taking the time and effort to understand the significant implications of digital currencies and CBDCs around the globe.”
So what would prompt the Fed to undertake this significant policy process? Why another crisis, of course.
For those who missed our comments on the recent interview with Potter and Coronado which lays out quite clearly just what is coming and what the motive is behind the Fed’s fascination with digital currencies, here are excerpts from our Aug 3 post again: From “The Fed Is Planning To Send Money Directly To Americans In The Next Crisis“
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We read with great interest a Bloomberg interview published on Saturday with two former central bank officials: Simon Potter, who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s markets group i.e., he was the head of the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team for years, and Julia Coronado, who spent eight years as an economist for the Fed’s Board of Governors, who are among the innovators brainstorming solutions to what has emerged as the most crucial and difficult problem facing the Fed: get money swiftly to people who need it most in a crisis.
The response was striking: the two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments, which will be wired instantly to Americans.
As Coronado explains the details, Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.
As Potter then elucidates, “it took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.”
And that, in a nutshell, is how the Fed will stimulate the economy in the next crisis in hopes of circumventing the reserve creation process: it will use digital money apps (which explains the Fed’s recent fascination with cryptocurrency and digital money) to transfer money directly to US consumers.
To be sure, the narrative is already set for how the Fed will “sell” this direct transfer of money to the rest of the world and the broader US population: as Coronado explains “it’s the most efficient from a macroeconomic standpoint in supporting spending and confidence. The fear of unemployment acts as an accelerant on a recession. There’s a shock—people are losing their jobs or worry about losing their jobs. They get very risk-averse. [By] getting money to consumers you can limit the depth and duration of a recession.”
And the kicker:
“you could actually generate real inflation. It could be beneficial for not only avoiding negative rates but creating a more healthy interest-rate market, a more healthy yield curve.”
So there you have it: the one thing that was missing from a decade of monetary tinkering by the Fed, the spark of inflation, will finally arrive as the Fed gives money to those most likely to spend it: the lower and middle classes of society.
But wait, there’s more: now that the Fed is implicitly focusing on racial inequality, and soon explicitly with Joe Biden going so far as to urge the Fed to fight “racial economic inequality” and former Minneapolis Fed president Kocherlakota writing an op-ed in which he said the Fed “should have a third mandate on racial inquality“, the stage is now set for the Fed to specifically release funds for those who have “suffered from inequality”, and once the time comes when the narrative allows to deploy reparations or direct funding to minorities, the Fed will be ready.
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Below we republish the Bloomberg Markets interview with Coronado and Potter because it lays out, very clearly, just what the next monetary stimulus will look like now that helicopter money is fully engaged and money is about to be sent by the Fed directly to those Americans the Fed finds to be “in need.”
BLOOMBERG MARKETS: How would recession insurance bonds work?
JULIA CORONADO: Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.
Julia Coronado
And so instead of these gyrations we’ve been going through to get money to households, it would happen instantaneously.
SIMON POTTER: It took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.
BM: Aside from speed, what are the main advantages of this approach?
JC: It’s the most efficient from a macroeconomic standpoint in supporting spending and confidence. The fear of unemployment acts as an accelerant on a recession. There’s a shock—people are losing their jobs or worry about losing their jobs. They get very risk-averse. [By] getting money to consumers you can limit the depth and duration of a recession. And you could actually generate real inflation. It could be beneficial for not only avoiding negative rates but creating a more healthy interest-rate market, a more healthy yield curve.
BM: What are the origins of the idea?
JC: The Bank of England has proposals for digital currency. And a number of people have talked about the need for monetary financing—the idea that the interest-rate tool is simply less effective in lower growth, slower credit growth economies. Helicopter money [making direct payments to the public] goes back to Milton Friedman, but Ben Bernanke revisited it. Some people proposed doing that through financing fiscal stimulus. We think going directly to consumers is more efficient than wading through that sticky fiscal process.
BM: This policy could be complementary to Treasury stimulus?
JC: It’s not a replacement for fiscal policy. It makes sense from a fiscal perspective, for example, to authorize unemployment insurance benefits for people who lose their jobs and other assistance for medical-care providers in the current situation.
SP: The central bank is not elected. It cannot make allocation decisions about fiscal transfers. It’s now being pushed to make allocation decisions around credit with the Treasury, because we believe this situation is so unique that the private sector cannot make those decisions itself. The simplest way to do this would be a lump sum. Not in the way Congress did it. We’d take the bluntness of monetary policy and say anyone who’s eligible should get the same amount of bonds.
Simon Potter
Fiscal controls could use the same infrastructure. The imperative to invest in it is high. Nearly all Treasury payments at some point touch the Fed because it’s the Treasury’s bank. The digital payment providers—called interface providers in the Bank of England proposal—would manage these accounts and link them to the Fed and Treasury.
BM: What are the objections from the Fed, and other challenges?
SP: The reaction from some of my former colleagues a while ago to the notion of helicopter money was not the most embracing. Some of those concerns have disappeared.
The two objections were related to the switch of deposits in normal times from the traditional banking system into digital accounts and the extra stress in crisis times as people want to get safe. An account with the central bank is safe because the central bank can always print money to honor that claim. A private bank can’t do that because their asset side has all kinds of credit on it. What we’ve created is a narrow bank-type model [narrow banks only take deposits and invest them in the safest assets] that’s small and fit for purpose, with a cap of $10,000 [per person].
JC: One challenge is making it profitable for digital providers. We want strict limitations on the fees so we’re reaching people that are underbanked, but we also want a public-private partnership with a diversity of competitors jumping into this market. Privacy is just as important, because one thing that might induce them is access to people’s data. As the Fed, are you blessing that, and what structure do you put around that?
SP: We’ll all have to deal with deep questions of privacy in the digital world. One of the issues Congress had in passing the Cares Act is identifying who’s got mainly tip income, who doesn’t have sick days. If society wanted, you could use large datasets to direct fiscal transfers to those people. But that’s a job for Congress.
BM: Have you seen similar trials elsewhere?
SP: Sweden is a leader in thinking about this in part because they had a large decline in cash use. China is testing versions of digital currency. Fintech firms in the U.S. are interested in this—there’s a stable coin version of our proposal. There’s easily sufficient innovation within the U.S. to do this. How to do it in a way that’s well regulated and serving the public purpose is something the Fed should focus on over the next few years. It would be a key accomplishment of the Fed and Treasury to get this infrastructure in place.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3iBZAwu Tyler Durden
In the age of #MeToo and BLM, the most ‘woke’ political party in the Land of the Free has chosen a guy with multiple sexual misconduct allegations as its presidential nominee; and a lady who locked up countless black people (many for victimless crimes) as its vice presidential nominee?
These are true statements, of course.
Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault a few months ago by a former staffer; he summarily dismissed the allegation, even though he told the Washington Post (prior to being accused) that women who accuse men of sexual assault should be believed:
“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real. . .”
On top of that, Biden has been accused by several other women of incredibly inappropriate behavior, bordering on the absurd.
Lucy Flores, for example, said that Biden– while he was still Vice President– came up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders, inhaled the scent of her hair, and then slowly kissed the back of her head.
Eva Murry said that Joe Biden complimented the size of her breasts when she was just 14 years old back in 2008: “Fourteen? You’re very well endowed for 14.”
There was also the 13-year old daughter of Senator Chris Coons; at Coons’ swearing-in ceremony in 2015, Biden was filmed pulling himself closer to her, gently grabbing her arm and moving his lips towards her head.
When he leaned in to kiss her forehead, she tried squirming away, looking extremely uncomfortable… at which point her mom had to politely intervene.
I mean, these stories are pretty much endless. At a minimum it’s seriously creepy.
Then there’s Kamala Harris, whose record as District Attorney involved convicting nearly 2,000 marijuana cases, averaging nearly 300 per year.
That’s high. Based on data from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, Harris’ annual marijuana conviction rate was only exceeded once (in 1993).
But more than that– as California’s Attorney General, Harris refused to support mandatory police body cameras. She did, however, support the death penalty.
She even insisted that a black death row inmate, Kevin Cooper, be executed, even though Cooper argued that DNA evidence would prove his innocence. Harris opposed allowing Cooper to present new evidence… until the New York Times finally wrote an article about his harsh treatment.
Back in 2011, the US Supreme Court ordered the State of California to release 33,000 prisoners, because its state prison system was ‘unconstitutionally’ overcrowded.
Harris was Attorney General at the time, and her office pushed back on the Supreme Court’s order, claiming that prison inmates (who are predominantly minorities) were cheap labor and needed to help fight wildfires.
And even the New York Times acknowledges that Harris “largely avoided intervening in cases involving killings by the police.”
Her inaction was so pronounced that protesters in her hometown of Oakland started distributing fliers saying “Tell Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute killer cops! It’s her job!”
In 2014 after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Harris (as California’s Attorney General) faced a lot pressure to investigate cases in her case where police had shot minorities.
She declined to do so, claiming, according to the New York Times, “it was not her job.”
You get the idea.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t comment on Harris’ ridiculous selection process.
In a normal, rational world, when you hire someone for a job, you choose whoever is the most highly qualified for the position.
That alone should be the deciding factor… not something as silly as DNA or sexual orientation.
I have hundreds of employees across my various businesses; every single person was put in their position solely because they were the best fit for the job.
Sovereign Man’s parent company is run by a woman. My bank is run by a woman. I have people of various races in senior positions.
And honestly I even hate writing this… I hate describing a great executive as ‘a woman’ or ‘minority’, because, who cares?
To even even bring up such pointless attributes about them denigrates their amazing talent. They were, in no way, hired to check a box. They were hired because they’re the most qualified.
And that’s supposed to be the priority when you hire someone… at least, in a normal, rational world.
But our world is not rational. And hiring someone based on qualifications is no longer a priority.
Joe Biden’s campaign highlighted this new priority of the day when he decided from the outset that his running mate must be a black female, effectively eliminating 93% of the population from consideration for the job.
Bear in mind, this is the person who could potentially become President should something happen to Biden. So it’s a fairly important job.
But rather than consider all possible candidates, he started with a narrow subset… because the priority now is what’s hanging (or not hanging) between someone’s legs, and the level of melanin in their skin.
Everything else (including actual qualifications for the job) come second.
Again, it shouldn’t matter. If the best qualified person for the job is a disabled, pansexual, non-binary Native American, then that’s the person who should be chosen.
I’ve been writing about this a lot lately– this idea that priorities have radically shifted.
Universities no longer prioritize well-rounded education. The media no longer prioritizes truth. Businesses can no longer prioritize profit. The government in no way prioritizes fiscal responsibility.
And as a I wrote yesterday, even the military can no longer keep national defense as its top priority.
Marxism and wokeness are now the priorities. And you can see it everywhere.
[ZH: we give the last word to @Barnes_Law who summed it all up very succinctly:]
“In order to appeal to disaffected black voters who might lean toward protest voting (Kanye) or not voting (2016), Democrats ingeniously picked the one black candidate whose parents are not from America, whose ancestors had slaves, and who spent her career locking up black men…”
