Neumann To Step Down As WeWork Considers Mass Layoffs
After a whirlwind few weeks during which he cancelled a long-expected IPO after media reports suggested that equity market investors believed WeWork’s valuation to be closer top $10 billion than the Soft Bank-backed $47 billion announced earlier this year, WeWork’s “charismatic” but “unorthodox” CEO Adam Neumann is reportedly stepping down from the CEO role. This follows earlier reports that said he was considering it.
Also, the Information reported earlier this afternoon that WeWork’s bankers discussed ways to cut costs with the company, which centered around layoffs of as many as 5,000 employees one-third of CEOs.
Markets keep flirting with new highs following the recent rate cuts by the ECB and the Fed and keep rallying on trade optimism in the face of disappointing global economic data. While the bear case remains challenging in face of a stubborn bid, the market script, for now, remains similar to 2007. And that script does not preclude new highs. Recall in 2007 markets rallied to new marginal new highs following the September rate cut before peaking in early October.
One sector may be key to watch in the days and weeks ahead: $BKX, the bank index. While it recently rallied along with markets it remains stuck inside its larger range:
The bank index has horribly underperformed $SPX in 2019, a very pronounced divergence:
Blame falling yield and an inverted yield curve. But buy doing so one must acknowledge that we can observe another similarity to the bull run in 2006-2007:
Back then $SPX disconnected from the banking index for most of 2007 as $SPX has done in 2019.
For new highs to convince and give sense of sustainability the banking index needs to follow suit. A bull market without banks participating is suspect.
Now one may make a counter argument and point to a bank such as $JPM which is breaking out to new highs:
Is that in itself indicative of anything? Allow me to retort by pointing to Goldman Sachs as an example in 2007:
It too broke out to new highs in October 2007 even after the market had already peaked. Did it mean anything? No.
How’s Goldman stock doing these days?
For now it looks to be forming a bearish rising wedge in 2019 following a topping pattern built in 2018.
Bottomline: Nothing’s proven one way or the other. The banking sector as a whole has to convince here and so far it hasn’t. And until it does any new highs, if they materialize, have to be viewed with extreme caution. Continued failure on the side of the banking sector to break higher would suggest that new highs won’t sustain. The bank index may hold the key to the bull market’s future.
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Rivals Slam Trudeau As PM Pulls Out Of Election Debate Amid ‘Blackface’ Scandal
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is clearly hoping to minimize his time in the spotlight after being hit with an embarrassing “blackface” scandal just one month before election day. In that spirit, the PM has decided to skip a debate on foreign policy with his rivals, prompting the organizer, Munk Debates, to cancel the event.
The chairman of the organization, Rudyard Griffiths, told the Globe and Mail that the debate was cancelled because of Trudeau’s refusal, seeing as he would be the only one on stage with any foreign policy experience.
“It’s really unfortunate that Canadians are not going to have a standalone debate on foreign policy this election,” Mr. Griffiths said.
It’s not difficult to imagine how Trudeau’s rivals might use a debate about foreign policy to attack Trudeau about his ‘blackface’ scandal. At this point, any events that aren’t tightly controlled by Trudeau and his campaign are probably off limits, or best avoided, as Trudeau and his party struggle to regain their lead in the polls with only weeks to go until election day.
In that spirit, Trudeau has only agreed to participate in three debates this campaign season, down from 5 during the 2015 campaign, and has already refused to take part in the Maclean’s/Citytv debate earlier this month.
Instead, Trudeau will participate in two televised debates organized by a government commission (established by Trudeau’s Liberal government, so there’s a good chance he might be able to get the questions in advance) – one in English, and one in French – as well as another debate hosted by French-language network TVA.
But as Griffith said, it’s truly unfortunate that Trudeau forced the cancellation of the foreign policy debate. Because if there was ever an election where foreign policy was relevant to the lives of Canadians, this is it.
“With everything that’s going on the world, if there ever was a moment, if there ever was a time, to really focus on the competing foreign-policy platforms of the various parties contending for government, now is that moment.”
Griffin also criticized the ‘commission’ that will organize two of the debates, saying it has become a tool for the PM to avoid real scrutiny.
“It seems like the commission has become a vehicle for an incumbent prime minister to actually avoid other debates and that it’s actually working against this whole process of opening the election,” he said.
During his first run, Trudeau was criticized for his debate performances, during which he came off as amateurish and unprepared.
Conservative campaign spokesman Simon Jefferies also criticized Trudeau for pulling out of the foreign policy debate: “It’s a shame that voters won’t have the opportunity to hear political leaders discussing issues of global importance because Justin Trudeau was too afraid to defend his record of failure.”
But will it be enough for Trump to overcome the two major scandals weighing on his campaign? That remains to be seen.
Saudi Arabia’s comments about its hydrocarbons industry have long been regarded by industry experts as being as believable as China’s comments about its economic growth: that is, not at all. Saudi Arabia’s skill in lying is definitely improving, though, from the outright transparent lies about its level of oil reserves, spare capacity, and why the omni-toxic Aramco should nonetheless be valued at US$2 trillion.
Its latest lies – along the lines of ‘everything is fine after the attacks and we will be back to full production really quickly’ – are relatively nuanced.
“The Saudi statements may not contain any direct falsehoods as such but nor are they entirely being fulsome with the truth,” Richard Mallinson, senior energy analyst for Energy Aspects, in London, told OilPrice.com last week.
The stage was set for the Saudis’ latest lying extravaganza with the aerial attacks on its massive Abqaiq oil processing facility and Khurais oil field launched, according to various sources, by Houthi ‘rebels’ in Yemen or by Iranian operatives in Yemen or in Iran. The effect of the combined attack on Abqaiq and Khurais caused the temporary suspension of 5.7 million barrels per day (bpd). This equates to well over half of Saudi Arabia’s actual crude oil production capacity, not the capacity figure that Saudi has plucked out of nowhere for geopolitical power purposes in recent years, and resulted in the biggest rise in oil prices in a single day ever.
Once the hedge funds, who had handily positioned themselves long some days before the attacks, had taken their profits, and younger traders remembered that the U.S. can release vast amounts of oil at the drop of a hat from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep the price of oil – and, crucially ahead of an election year, the highly correlated and politically enormously sensitive gasoline pump price in the U.S. down – oil prices came down again, obviously.
A number of interesting things happened from the Saudi Arabian side as the prices went up and then went back down again. The first of these, as OilPrice.com was informed repeatedly by senior oil traders throughout the day, was the lack of real understanding that senior Saudi officials seem to have on how the oil market works or any details of Saudi’s own oil industry.
“I used to think the Saudis thought all of us [oil traders] were idiots, with all the rubbish they used to come out with and thought we’d believe, but recently it’s occurred to me that they genuinely don’t know anything about the oil industry, so they don’t understand that other people actually do know what they’re talking about and this has also been one of the reasons for the constant delaying of the Aramco sale, by the way,” one senior oil trader based in Asia told OilPrice.com.
The Aramco sale to one side for another time (although OilPrice.com has exclusively previously highlighted all of the lies pertaining to it), one particularly striking comment came from Saudi Arabia’s new oil minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, just after the attacks. He stated that the Kingdom plans to restore its production capacity to 11 million bpd by the end of September and recover its full capacity of 12 million bpd two months later.
“It was extremely telling that he spoke of ‘capacity’ and later of ‘supply to the market’, as these are terms that Saudi tends to use in order to avoid talking about actual production, as capacity and supply are not the same thing at all as actual production at the wellheads,” said Energy Aspects’ Mallinson.
“What Saudi is trying to do by not revealing the true picture is to protect its reputation as a reliable oil supplier, especially to its target clientele in Asia, so we have to take all of these comments with a hefty pinch of salt,” he added.
So hefty a pinch of salt as to be mountainous in the case of its capacity and corollary spare capacity figures. The country has stated for decades that it has a spare capacity of between 2.0-2.5 million bpd, implying – given actual production during virtually all of this time averaging less than 10 million bpd – total production capacity of 12.0-12.5 million bpd. This level, though, or anywhere near it, has never been even remotely tested, with the highest production ever recorded being just over 11 million bpd in November last year.
This is despite the all-out oil price war that Saudi started in 2014 against U.S. shale producers to try to destroy the industry through low prices caused by flooding the markets with oil.
“If the Saudis had anything near 12 million barrels per day capacity, that would have been the time to pump it but all it managed was just under 10 [million bpd] with 10.5 [million bpd] managed for just one month over that two-year period [2014-2016 before Saudi reversed it strategy],”
Additionally, the EIA defines spare capacity specifically as production that can be brought online within 30 days and sustained for at least 90 days, whilst even Saudi Arabia has said that it would need at least 90 days to move rigs to drill new wells and raise production to the mythical 12 million bpd or 12.5 million bpd level. Many serious oil market players now do not believe that the Saudis have anywhere near 2 million bpd of spare capacity, as it would imply production of 12 million bpd plus. Instead, many now believe that the Saudis have sustainable spare capacity of no more than around 0.5-1.0 million bpd.
Whatever Saudi’s actual capacity, there is absolutely no way that it can have made any accurate assessment of how long it would take to get back to any particular capacity level either – another lie. “Engineers we have spoken to have said that following an incident like this it would take several weeks just to assess the damage, never mind to begin doing anything about it, rather than the few days that the Saudis have taken and then announced the actual timeline – and a very short timeline at that – to bring back various stages of capacity,” said Energy Aspects’ Mallinson.
“Instead, what the Saudis will do to keep exports up is draw down supplies to its domestic industry and reduce the amounts it is sending to domestic refineries – one big refinery, SASREF, is conveniently bringing forward its planned maintenance for later in the year to now – and we hear very mixed reports which of the other refineries are operating at regular rates,” he added.
“But some buyers are already being warned of delays, some are being offered swaps with other grades and so on,” he underlined.
Specifically, a number of customers of Saudi’s Arab Light and Arab Extra Light grades – the grades most affected by the recent attacks – have been offered Saudi’s Arab Medium or Arab Heavy as substitute grades. OilPrice.com understands from oil trading sources. This even applies to Saudi’s number one target country, China. A number of refineries have been told by Aramco that their rolling orders for Arab Extra Light crude cannot be supplied for the time being but can be switched for either Arab Medium or Arab Heavy, depending on the set-up of the refinery. Others, looking for their usual monthly supply of Arab Light have been told that this will be switched to Arab Heavy as a substitute for September loading at least.
The other measure that Saudi is taking – which it has vehemently denied but OilPrice.com can confirm from various oil trading sources and from sources in the Iraq Oil Ministry – is looking to buy Iraq oil grades, which are close to the key export grades that Saudi ships to various destinations, including Asia. “Aramco Trading Company has been aggressively checking prices and lot sizes for Iraqi crude with various [oil] trading houses since the attacks and are looking are shorter-term potentially rolling contracts,” one trading source told OilPrice.com last week.
“A number of the Iraqi grades are close in specifications to their Saudi counterparts, and part of this activity by Saudi to fill customer supply quotas for these grades is to make sure that the demand we are still seeing for such Iranian grades from Asia, but mainly China, is not boosted to make up for the shortfall from Saudi.,” a senior source who works closely with Iraq’s Oil Ministry told OilPrice.com.
The supreme irony, of course – as OilPrice.com has repeatedly underlined, and as many in the oil markets now know, although apparently not the Saudis – is that a cornerstone strategy used by Iran to circumvent current U.S. sanctions against it (as was also the case in the previous period of sanctions) is to rebrand its oil into Iraqi oil, which is extremely easily done, both at the massive and porous border between the two or via various pipeline and shipping routes.
It may well be, then, that Saudi Arabia ends up boosting the bank accounts of the very people that it thinks was behind the attacks on its own oil infrastructure, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – a staunch and active supporter of Yemen’s Houthis – through its various oil-industry associated businesses by buying Iranian oil, albeit with the stickers changed on the barrels.
Insider Selling Hits 20 Year High As Stock Buybacks Soar
When it comes to the “fair value” of stocks, nobody knows it better than insiders, who tend to aggressively offload shares any time they see the price of their equity holdings as generously high. This, however, may be a problem for the broader market because according to research from Smart Insider, the market is now the most overbought since the first dotcom bubble, as “executives across the US are shedding stock in their own companies at the fastest pace in two decades, amid concerns that the long bull market in equities is reaching its final stages.”
As the FT reports, corporate insiders – typically CEOs, CFOs, and board members, but also venture capital and other early state investors – sold a combined $19BN of stock in their companies through to mid-September. Annualized, this puts them on track to hit $26BN for the year, which would mark the most active year since 2000, when executives sold $37bn of stock amid the giddy highs of the dotcom bubble. That 2019 total would also set a post-crisis high, eclipsing the $25bn of stock sold in 2017.
For those wondering which insiders are scrambling to part with their equity holdings, the answer is simple: virtually everyone – from the VCs behind bungled, rushed IPOs of companies such as WeWork, Uber and Lyft, to iconic stakeholders including members of the Walton family, who have sold a combined $2.2BN of shares in the Walmart retail empire. Executives at Estée Lauder, the cosmetics giant, and clothing group Lululemon Athletica also appear among the most active sellers, according to Smart Insider.
The reason investors care about insider stock sales is that it has traditionally been a handy marker for the confidence of executives in their own companies’ prospects, and the broader valuation of the market. Spikes in selling indicate that top figures in boardrooms around the country are taking advantage of high valuations in the US stock market.
Troy Gayeski, co-chief investment officer for SkyBridge Capital, said that recent moves by central banks to ease monetary policy, in response to deteriorating economic data, are a sign that companies can expect profits to fade.
“In management, you know the boom times are over in terms of record profitability. Why wouldn’t you take money off the table?” Mr Gayeski said.
For those countering that insiders tend to always sell, the truth is that insiders not only paused stock sales late last year when the worst December for US stocks since 1931 sent the market to a brief -20% drop, which ended the year down about 6 per cent, at which point insiders turned buyers. However, since then, the S&P 500 has come roaring back, rising by almost 20% as central banks around the world turned dovish, cut rates and have expanded their direct liquidity injection; and the insider selling has exploded.
But if the insiders are selling who is buying? The answer will come as a surprise to exactly no one. As Bank of America explains, “despite what is usually a seasonally weak time for buybacks, corporate buybacks remained strong last week, driven by Tech for the fourth week in a row.” As a result, cumulative buybacks YTD are already up +20% YoY compared to 2018 which was already a record year for stock buybacks, meaning 2019 will be another record, while rolling 4-wk avg. buybacks are +122% YoY, the highest of any point this year.
To summarize:
Companies issue record amounts of debt
Companies use the debt to repurchase record amounts of stock
Insiders sell (near) record amounts of stock to their own company, even as retail investors buy everything with the S&P at all time high
And that’s why billionaires – like Jamie Dimon – are richer than you.
Data from Coin.dance – corroborated by other sources – indicates that the network’s hash rate plummeted yesterday from over 98,000,000 TH/S to 57,700,000 TH/s.
Mystery flash crash remains unexplained
The flash drop remains unexplained as of press time and is all the more striking given the Bitcoin network’s record-breaking string of new all-time high hash rates throughout summer.
Just five days ago, Cointelegraph had reported that Bitcoin’s hash rate had passed a record 102 quintillion hashes in a historic milestone.
As previously noted, the hash rate of a cryptocurrency — sometimes referred to as hashing or computing power — is a parameter that gives the measure of the number of calculations that a given network can perform each second.
A higher hash rate means greater competition among miners to validate new blocks; it also increases the number of resources needed for performing a 51% attack, making the network more secure.
By press time, Bitcoin’s hash rate has somewhat recovered back to almost 88,300,000 TH/s — yet remains well below its earlier records.
Throughout summer, cryptocurrency analysts had argued that the network’s record-breaking streak of all-time hash rate highs was a bullish indicator for the top coin’s price performance.
In a tweet posted this August, Bitcoin investor Max Keiser had claimed that:
“Price follows hashrate and hashrate chart continues its 9 yr bull market.”
But, sure enough, Bitcoin is sliding today after that drop in the hash-rate:
Source: Bloomberg
Altcoins are getting hit worse however…
Source: Bloomberg
Back in November 2017, Bitcoin had seen a sudden hash rate downturn of almost 50%, accompanied by slowed transaction processing times, a price dip, and even miners’ short-lived switch over to the forked network, Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
PredictIt odds of President Trump’s impeachment by the end of his first term have soared in the last 12 hours in heavy volume.
About 14 hours ago, volume started pouring in, increasing the odds from about 35% to almost 60% in the overnight hours.
Tuesday morning, the odds have traded from 40% to 60% range – consolidating after a massive ramp.
As of Tuesday morning, nearly 150 House Democrats are supporting impeachment action after “President Trump repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter at a time when Ukraine was desperate for military aid from the United States,” said Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog.
The political storm surrounding President Trump’s admitted call for Ukraine’s President to investigate Joe Biden may have been what sparked impeachment odds to spike.
According to Politico, sources have been telling them that the possibility of impeachment proceedings is “approaching a certainty.”
“But House Democrats have been pulling together a wide-ranging case to impeach President Donald Trump on a series of alleged past and ongoing crimes against the country — a set of charges that goes far beyond the Mueller report — and all signs point to a possible public inflection point later this week, when acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire testifies before the House Intelligence Committee.”
“The dam could break on Thursday,” one senior House Democratic aide, whose boss has not endorsed impeachment, told NBC News.
Multiple senior House Democrats and congressional aides told The Washington Post that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been strategizing on whether the time is right to impeach President Trump.
Pelosi has been assessing the mood of her caucus members about whether they believe the allegations that Trump urged the Ukrainian president to investigate a political opponent is enough to start impeachment proceedings.
The sudden jump in PredictIt impeachment odds of the president could have been led by Washington insiders who are in the know.
As shown below, heavy volume started pouring in yesterday evening and into the overnight.
The odds of President Trump being impeached by year-end appear to be in a new bull market.
With E-mini S&P 500 futures contracts near record highs, the market has yet to price in an impending political storm in Washington. Add the threat of impeachment to the market’s long list of troubles.
Tesla, Musk Omitted Key Aspects Of SolarCity Acquisition From Ernst & Young, Shareholder Lawsuit Claims
Newly unsealed court documents published by PlainSite on Monday reveal that shareholders are accusing Tesla of improperly valuing its acquisition of SolarCity, providing “flawed analysis and misleading investors”, according to CNBC. They also allege that Tesla withheld key information about its acquisition of SolarCity from Ernst & Young.
The lawsuit was filed in 2016 and is one of the more notable legal actions proceeding against Tesla and Elon Musk, who also face lawsuits regarding solar panel fires and Autopilot deaths – in addition to the ongoing defamation lawsuit by Vern Unsworth.
Tesla commented that the allegations lodged against it are: “…based on the claims of plaintiff’s lawyers looking for a payday, and are not representative of our shareholders who support our mission and ultimately voted in favor of the acquisition.”
The company continued, stating: “The accusations made in the plaintiff’s brief are false and misleading, as Tesla and SolarCity published all material information in its proxy and other public filings for all shareholders to consider before deciding on the transaction. Providing clean, renewable energy generation through solar has been a critical part of our mission ever since 2006, and our acquisition of SolarCity has enabled and continues to enable a significantly faster path to achieve our goals.”
But the newly unredacted documents show a “tangled” personal and financial relationship between Musk and his investments.
The suit alleges:
“Prior to the Acquisition, Musk described Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX as a ‘pyramid’ atop which he sat; it was ‘important that there not be some sort of house of cards that crumbles if one element of the pyramid . . . falters.’”
As a reminder, Musk had invested SpaceX money in SolarCity. Notable aspects of that investment were “hidden” from auditors Ernst & Young before the acquisition, shareholders claims.
The brief says that SpaceX had put about $165 million into SolarCity as non-recourse bonds and that SolarCity failed to disclose to Ernst & Young how quickly they would have to make two substantial payments related to these bonds back to SpaceX.
Shareholders also claim that even though Musk recused himself, he was never separated from the dealmaking process. To make that point, they argue that Musk and his first cousin, Lyndon Rive, spent time “hatching out a plan to save the solar company from a liquidity crisis while on vacation in Lake Tahoe in early 2016”. Shortly thereafter, Tesla’s CFO put together a proposal to acquire SolarCity.
The filing stated: “The Board did not reject Musk’s proposal, as represented in the Proxy. Instead, the Board ‘authorized management to gather additional details and to further explore and analyze’ a SolarCity acquisition.”
Ernst & Young went on to claim that the solar company was insolvent shortly after Tesla closed its $2.6 billion acquisition.
The brief also claims that a “majority” of Tesla’s board members had financial interests on both sides of the deal. Elon and Kimbal Musk, Antonio Gracias, and Steve Jurvetson, for example, were all Tesla board members at the time of the acquisition and were also early backers and board members of SpaceX.
As CNBC also points out:
Ira Ehrenpreis, a long-time Tesla board member, held a board seat at SolarCity after funding it via his venture firm, Technology Partners. Kimbal Musk is Elon Musk’s brother. And Lyndon and Peter Rive, co-founders of SolarCity, are first cousins of Elon and Kimbal Musk.
Court filings also claim that a “fairness committee” put together at Evercore, who was hired to analyze the deal, failed to issue an opinion on the deal. Filings also claim that Lazard, another financial adviser, solicited bids for SolarCity and couldn’t find a single one. PlainSite has also sought to unseal additional redacted court documents relating to the case.
Recall, just yesterday we documented a Colorado resident who had their solar panels catch fire on top of their home.
We had already documented howWalmart is suing Teslafor solar panels that allegedly caught fire on the roofs of not one, not two – but seven different Walmart stores. We also documented how Amazon followed suit with complaints about its solar panels spontaneously igniting.
Last month we noted several homeowners who reported horror stories about their residential solar panels catching fire.
Finally, in early September, we posted a podcast with a solar panel expert who explained exactly how SolarCity’s panels work and what he believes is making them defective, along with his analysis of the Tesla acquisition and ongoing lawsuit.
With the revelation by an intel community “whistleblower” that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry “Impeach!” is being heard anew in the land.
But revisiting how this latest scandal came about, and how it has begun to unfold, it is a good bet that the principal casualty could be the former vice president. Consider:
In May 2016, Joe Biden, as Barack Obama’s designated point man on Ukraine, flew to Kiev to inform President Petro Poroshenko that a billion-dollar U.S. loan guarantee had been approved to enable Kiev to continue to service its mammoth debt.
But, said Biden, the aid was conditional. There was a quid pro quo.
If Poroshenko’s regime did not fire its chief prosecutor in six hours, Biden would fly home and Ukraine would get no loan guarantee. Ukraine capitulated instantly, said Joe, reveling in his pro-consul role.
Yet, left out of Biden’s drama about how he dropped the hammer on a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor was this detail.
The prosecutor had been investigating Burisma Holdings, the biggest gas company in Ukraine. And right after the U.S.-backed coup that ousted the pro-Russian government in Kiev, and after Joe Biden had been given the lead on foreign aid for Ukraine, Burisma had installed on its board, at $50,000 a month, Hunter Biden, the son of the vice president.
Joe Biden claims that, though he was point man in the battle on corruption in Ukraine, he was unaware his son was raking in hundreds of thousands from one of the companies being investigated.
Said Joe on Saturday, “I have never spoken to my son about his various business dealings.”
Is this credible?
Trump and Rudy Giuliani suspect not, and in that July 25 phone call, Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to reopen the investigation of Hunter Biden and Burisma.
The media insist there is no story here and the real scandal is that Trump pressed Zelensky to reopen the investigation to target his strongest 2020 rival. Worse, say Trump’s accusers, would be if the president conditioned the transfer of $250 million in approved military aid to Kiev on the new regime’s acceding to his demands.
The questions raised are several:
Is it wrong to make military aid to a friendly nation conditional on that nation’s compliance with legitimate requests or demands of the United States? Is it illegitimate to ask a friendly government to look into what may be corrupt conduct by the son of a U.S. vice president?
Joe Biden has an even bigger problem: This issue has begun to dominate the news at an especially vulnerable moment for his campaign.
Biden’s stumbles and gaffes have already raised alarms among his followers and been seized upon by rivals such as Cory Booker, who has publicly suggested that the 76-year-old former vice president is losing it.
Biden’s lead in the polls also appears shakier with each month. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has just taken a narrow lead in a Des Moines Register poll and crusading against Beltway corruption is central to her campaign.
“Too many politicians in both parties have convinced themselves that playing the money-for-influence game is the only way to get things done,” Warren told her massive rally in New York City: “No more business as usual. Let’s attack the corruption head on.”
Soon, it will not only be Trump and Giuliani asking Biden questions abut Ukraine, Burisma and Hunter, but Democrats, too. Calls are rising for Biden’s son to be called to testify before congressional committees.
With Trump airing new charges daily, Biden will be asked to respond by his traveling press. The charges and the countercharges will become what the presidential campaign is all about. Bad news for Joe Biden.
Can he afford to spend weeks, perhaps months, answering for his son’s past schemes to enrich himself through connections to foreign regimes that seem less related to Hunter’s talents than his being the son of a former vice president and possible future president?
“Ukraine-gate” is the latest battle in the death struggle between the “deep state” and a president empowered by Middle America to go to Washington and break that deep state’s grip on the national destiny.
Another issue is raised here – the matter of whistleblowers listening in to or receiving readouts of presidential conversations with foreign leaders and having the power to decide for themselves whether the president is violating his oath and needs to be reported to Congress.
Eisenhower discussed coups in Iran and Guatemala and the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and the Taiwan Strait. JFK, through brother Bobby, cut a secret deal with Khrushchev to move U.S. missiles out of Turkey six months after the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba.
Who deputized bureaucratic whistleblowers to pass judgment on such conversations and tattle to Congress if they were offended?
