Civil-military relations hit a new low Wednesday when Defense Secretary Mark Esper tried to throw cold water on President Donald Trump’s threats to deploy the military to quell nationwide anti-police protests and rioting.
“The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper said at a press conference today, according to CNN. “We are not in one of those situations now.”
His remarks contradicted Trump’s comments earlier in the week, when the president said he would take it upon himself to deploy the military to areas where local and state officials aren’t doing enough to prevent street violence.
“If a city or state refuses to take the actions necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them,” Trump said in a Rose Garden speech on Monday, reportsThe New York Times.
The Posse Comitatus Act generally prohibits the military from acting as domestic law enforcement. In order to put soldiers on city streets, Trump would have to invoke the Insurrection Act. That long-standing law gives the president the authority to deploy the military personnel to states overcome by domestic revolts or civil unrest.
State governments generally have to request the federal government’s assistance first, although there is some room for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act unilaterally if the execution of federal law is threatened. Today, Esper effectively said it wasn’t.
So far, no governors have requested federal military assistance, although 23 governors had activated their state’s National Guard as of Monday.
CNN reports that Esper’s comments have not gone over well with Trump, who has already expressed frustration with his defense secretary.
Regardless of his comments today, Politico reports that Esper has moved 1,600 active-duty Army troops into the Washington, D.C., area. Trump also activated D.C.’s contingent of the National Guard, which been helping to police protests in the city.
For the moment it appears that the property destruction and violent police crackdowns that have come with the last week of demonstrations are starting to die down. D.C.’s protest yesterday was drama-free.
Trump’s comments about deploying the military to handle protests can only threaten this tenuous peace.
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In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted around the country. Some of these have turned violent and resulted in injuries to citizens and police as well as looting and property damage.
Cities have implemented curfews and other restrictions on movement, further stoking tensions that were already present due to the coronavirus lockdown, the start of summer, and a 15 percent unemployment rate.
The last time the nation faced this level of social unrest was 1968, the year that Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.
To help us make sense of the current moment and figure out where it could lead, Nick Gillespie spoke with Omar Wasow, a political scientist at Princeton, who has studied how protests of the 1960s affected public opinion, social discourse, and voting patterns.
Will today’s protests make policing reform more or less likely? Is it possible that violence in the streets will boost Donald Trump’s reelection chances—just as events in 1968 helped put Richard Nixon in the White House?
Wasow’s research also looks at the nature of police misconduct, analyzing whether headline-grabbing incidents such as the horrific killings of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are the result of a few bad apples or a systemic problem with law enforcement in minority communities.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Photo: Joi Ito
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An official from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told Congress on Tuesday that the COVID-19 pandemic did not cause any countries to curtail shipments of pharmaceutical drugs to the United States—a bit of information that should serve to quell the nationalist panic over America’s health care supply chains.
“I’m not aware of any case where a country carried through on the threat to withhold medicines,” Douglas Throckmorton, the FDA’s deputy director for regulatory programs, told the Senate Finance Committee. Throckmorton said there was a “variety of factors that drove spot-shortages that were very serious” including a sudden surge in demand for drugs and domestic distribution issues.
Throckmorton was responding to a question from Sen. Pat Toomey (R–Pa.) who pressed him to explain why some pharmacies and hospitals in the U.S. experienced shortages of certain drugs in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. Toomey stressed that “the American public has an understandable concern” in knowing whether the country’s life-saving drug supply is dependant on foreign countries—including potentially adversarial countries like China.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, those fears were being stoked for political and financial purposes. In December, for example, a Politico article highlighted how China could “weaponize” its drug exports to America. “Medicines can be used as a weapon of war against the United States,” warned Rosemary Gibson, a senior fellow at the Hastings Center and the author of a recent book about China’s supposed stranglehold on America’s drug supplies.
Nationalists in politics and the media have seized on the narrative of China controlling America’s drug supply since the pandemic hit. Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has held hearings (including one where Gibson testified) and proposed legislation in response to what he called America’s “unacceptable” dependence on China. National Review editor Rich Lowry has written that “the U.S. should create every incentive for drug companies to at least move out of China into other foreign countries, and ideally come back here”—in other words, hand out huge subsidies to wealthy corporations—to make sure America isn’t cut-off from vital supplies in the event of another pandemic in the future.
Much of this fear was based on misleading statistics—like an oft-repeated claim that 80 percent of the ingredients used to make America’s medicines come from China. That number was based on a misreading of a government report that actually said no such thing. The rest of the drug-supply alarmism coming from the right appears to have been invented out of whole cloth. At the height of the pandemic’s disruption of Chinese manufacturing facilities in mid-February, the FDA checked with the producers of more than 180 imported drugs to assess the state of their supply chains. They found a potential shortage of exactly one drug.
Part of the reason why pharmaceutical supply chains were able to weather the coronavirus is that they are far more diverse and robust than Hawley and others would have you believe. While it is true that the majority of drugs Americans consume are imported, just 13 percent of the facilities certified by the FDA to make drugs for the United States are located in China. Last year, less than 1 percent of the finished drugs imported into the United States came from China—compared to 23 percent from Ireland.
And, as Throckmorton explained on Tuesday, where drugs are made matters less than whether they can get here when they are needed.
“It’s more important for me, as a U.S. federal drug official,” Throckmorton told the committee, “to make sure the drug is available from somewhere to meet the needs of the American public.”
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A week before protests and riots broke out in American cities as a response to the police killing of George Floyd, demonstrators were also out on the streets of Hong Kong.
Police misconduct is also a major concern in Hong Kong, and activists are demanding an independent investigation into the city’s once world-renowned police force for its brutal treatment of the demonstrators.
The Hong Kong protests that began in fall 2019 have had their moments of violence, with property damage and attacks on innocent bystanders.
Triggered by the gruesome video of Floyd’s murder, the U.S. protests are about the mistreatment of black Americans by law enforcement, while in Hong Kong, the issue is whether or not this bastion of political and economic freedom will maintain its autonomy from the authoritarian Chinese state.
The inciting incident last fall was the introduction of an extradition law that allowed China to transfer fugitives to the mainland.
China’s passage of a national security law that criminalizes the so-called subversion of state power has incited the latest round of unrest, prompting U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to tell Congress that Beijing’s actions mean that “Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China,” putting an end to the ‘one country, two systems’ model that was established in 1997 when the United Kingdom relinquished control of its former colony. On May 29, President Trump announced that Hong Kong’s special partner trading status would be revoked and that sanctions are forthcoming.
Days before China’s National People’s Congress rubber-stamped the new law, Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller interviewed Charles Mok, a pro-democracy Hong Kong legislator representing the tech sector, to discuss the impact of the new law and what will happen if China sends its own police force into the city to go head to head with protesters.
Edited by John Osterhoudt.
Photos: Mike Pompeo, Liu Jie Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Hong Kong Riot Police, Simon Jankowski/Polaris/Newscom; Charles Mok, Chen Xiaowei Xinhua News Agency/Newscom; Nation People’s Congress, CHINE NOUVELLE/SIPA/Newscom; Trump and Pompeo, Yuri Gripas/UPI/Newscom; Hong Kong Protestors Arrested, Willie Siau / SOPA Images/Sipa U/Newscom; Dennis Kwok, Dickson Lee/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Hong Kong Voters, Kyodo/Newscom; Hong Kong Tear Gas, Sam Tsang/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Hong Kong Protestors at Causeway Bay, Sam Tsang/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Starry Lee Wai-king, Dickson Lee/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Pro-beijing lawmakers, Edmond So/ZUMA Press/Newscom
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From yesterday’s order of a Pennsylvania appellate court in Hangey v. Husqvarna Professional Products, Inc.—unsurprising, but good to see, and illustrative of the broader legal principle:
[T]he request by Appellees (hereinafter referred to as “Husqvarna”) to essentially close the argument scheduled for June 3, 2020, and of the responses filed by Appellants (hereinafter “Hangey”) … is … DENIED for the following reasons:…
2. In Appellants’ answer filed on June 1, 2020, Appellants specify and assure that the alleged, confidential information will not be divulged at oral argument:
“[A]rguing counsel for plaintiffs does not intend to refer during oral argument specifically to the precise totals of Husqvarna’s annual sales throughout the United States during the years 2014 through 2016. Arguing counsel for plaintiffs will not refer to Husqvarna’s annual sales throughout the entirety of Pennsylvania during the years 2014 through 2016, as that data is simply not relevant to this appeal and has not even been mentioned in the briefing of this appeal. And arguing counsel for plaintiffs during oral argument only intends to refer generally, within a $10,000 range, to Husqvarna’s sales figures for Philadelphia County during the years 2014 through 2016. None of this information threatens to cause any competitive harm to Husqvarna ….”
3. In light of the staleness of the alleged confidential information, and of the limitations on its use as stated in paragraph 2 above, there are no compelling reasons to close the argument from the public.
4. We are mindful that the existence of a common law right of access to judicial proceedings and inspection of judicial records is beyond dispute. R.W. v. Hampe, 626 A.2d 1218, 1220 (Pa. Super. 1993). Pennsylvania courts have long recognized a constitutional right of public access to judicial proceedings based on Article I, Section 11 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, which provides that “[a]ll Courts shall be open.” Pa. Const. Art I, § 11. “The right of public access to judicial proceedings has an independent basis in the common law as well as in the United States Constitution.” PA ChildCare v. Flood, 887 A.2d 309, 312 (Pa. Super. 2005). In the words of our former colleague, the Honorable Richard B. Klein, the first amendment of the United States Constitution, when read together with the aforesaid provision in the Pennsylvania Constitution and the established common law, reference a “mandate” for open and public courtrooms. In re M.B., 819 A.2d 59, 61 (Pa. Super. 2003)….
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24-Year Old Dies While Rigging Explosives As Philly Terrorized In String Of ATM Blasts Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/03/2020 – 15:20
In among the clearest examples of an attempt at what could be considered domestic terrorism related to the ongoing riots so far, a 24-year-old man died Tuesday when he blew himself up while planting explosives on an ATM in Philadelphia.
Police and emergency medical personnel rushed the scene, where they found live explosives, according to Fox 29. While the safe was still intact, the machine’s electronic components were destroyed. Crucially the detonation occurred near an apartment complex and local businesses.
Image via CBS3 news
Though details remain somewhat murky, a CBS affiliate reported the man was also shot during the police response after being severely injured in his attempt to blow up the ATM. He likely still had explosive devices on him which police considered a threat.
Over the past days there’s been a string of blasts at ATMs and mini-marts throughout Philadelphia, amid broader George Floyd protest mayhem, looting, and increasing lawlessness in parts of the city.
It brings up the alarming prospect of other ATM or bank locations being rigged with dynamite or small bombs, and dangers to nearby pedestrians.
The details of the Tuesday morning incident, according to Philly Voice, are as follows:
The incident occurred around 6:15 a.m. on the 2200 block of North 2nd Street, just west of Norris Square Park. The ATM is located outside of Sidekicks Sports Bar.
Investigators said the victim was found with trauma to his upper body. He was transported to Temple University and later pronounced dead.
Multiple social media videos circulating show vandals attempting to steal money from ATMs at different locations using the highly dangerous ‘method’ of explosives.
According to FOX, police believe it’s an “organized” crime attempt, and it’s unclear whether the man who accidentally detonated himself was behind the other blasts, or how many are involved:
There were reports of similar explosions in other parts of the city as well, events that the city’s police commissioner reportedly labeled as “organized” and “coordinated.” Photos and videos posted to social media show some of the damage.
In one video, a group of men rush over following a small explosion. A crowd begins to gather at the scene, and eventually they take off.
— Silver Report Uncut™ 🇺🇸 (@silver_report) June 2, 2020
It started Monday night and continued into Tuesday night, where about a half dozen more were targeted in explosive attacks.
The organized nature of it further suggests there are potentially caches of explosive devices and small bombs located within the city among the conspirators.
It’s perhaps only a matter of time before the deadly weapons get turned directly on police, as has already happened in multiple cases in New York over the past days.
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Active-Duty Troops Deployed To Washington DC Are Returning To Their Home Base Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/03/2020 – 15:18
Active-duty troops brought in to help if needed with the civil unrest in the nation’s capitol are beginning to return to their home base, after two days of more peaceful demonstrations in Washington, D.C., defense officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The officials said that about 200 soldiers with the 82nd Airborne’s immediate response force will be the first to leave on Wednesday. The remainder of the active-duty troops, who have all been kept at military bases outside the city in northern Virginia and Maryland, will also get pulled home in the coming days if conditions allow. The active-duty troops were available, but were not used in response to the protests.
The departure of the troops comes as Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters Wednesday that current conditions do not warrant using military forces for law enforcement in containing the protests, angering the White House. Trump has in recent days talked about using the military to quell violent protests in U.S. cities.
About 1,300 active-duty troops were brought in to the Capitol region early this week as protests turned violent.
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Some of the same hospital workers who would have accused stay-at-home protesters of “killing granny” just weeks ago are now on video applauding thousands of left-wing demonstrators in New York.
“Hospital staff come out to applaud #GeorgeFloyd protestors in New York – demonstrators shout back ‘Thank You’,” tweeted journalist Sarah Walton.
The footage stands in stark contrast to photo ops endlessly hyped by the media which showed nurses and other health workers in masks blocking traffic at anti-lockdown protests throughout the country, such as the example below from Colorado.
The contrast between the two reactions underscores how coronavirus was completely politicized and that its dangers were greatly exaggerated. If the virus was so deadly and easily transmissible as we were told, why are health workers celebrating mass gatherings of people that increase the risk of the disease spreading?
A virus doesn’t behave differently based on the political beliefs of the person it infects. So why is someone only responsible for “killing granny” is they’re a Trump supporter as oppose to an Antifa radical?
The protests have also spread like a virus over to the UK, where despite the fact that UK police only killed 2 unarmed men in the whole of 2019 (one of whom was a terrorist), mass demonstrations have also hit London.
But while the media has since March denounced anyone who flouts or even questions the lockdown law, they had nothing but gushing praise for the thousands of Black Lives Matter protesters who have gathered in close proximity three times over the last week.
Police are still raiding and shutting down outdoor parties involving hundreds of people, but marches involving many thousands are allowed to go ahead unimpeded.
What’s the difference? Does the virus suddenly become ‘woke’ and refuse to spread at Black Lives Matter rallies.
All those cancelled weddings, missed funerals and never-to-be-had last moments with their loved ones that people were expected to endure, only to see other people doing this.https://t.co/BVNTO4tMGD
“It’s kind of amazing,” writes Ben Sixsmith. “For weeks we have been arguing about the minute details of viral transmission. Can you be outside? How often can you be outside? Can you be with other people? How many? And how much distance should you keep from each other? Then masses of people gather in cities across the world for a protest and the authorities do nothing. It just goes ahead.”
“The irony of protestors chanting ‘I can’t breathe’ as they raise the risk of catching and spreading a respiratory disease blows the mind. Granted, outdoor transmission is considerably rarer than indoor transmission – and, besides, most of these protesters are young and would be okay if infected with Covid-19. But after weeks of people having to miss surgeries, funerals, weddings and last moments with their loved ones, you would think people would have to have a good reason to organise an outright mass gathering.”
Anti-lockdown protests are bad, spread coronavirus and “kill granny”.
You will be publicly shamed if you take part.
BLM protests are good and don’t spread coronavirus at all.
You will be publicly shamed if you don’t take part.
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ECB Discloses Purchases Made Under Its Emergency QE Program Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/03/2020 – 15:01
Yesterday, for the first time, the ECB published its first bi-monthly breakdown of its holdings under the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) with information on the split by asset class as well as by country and average maturity for sovereign holdings along with similar details on the Asset Purchase Programme (APP) for May. With PEPP having become operational on 26 March 2020, Tuesday’s release also comprises four days of March purchases on top of April and May according to Goldman.
And while it was already clear that the ECB deviated from capital keys in its PSPP programme both in March and April, DB’s Jim Reid notes that this was not seen as clearly in the PEPP data though which is strange as the latter was set up to do this with the former not.
Specifically, the PEPP data shows allocations much closer to the ECB capital keys, with Italy benefiting the most from positive deviations from capital keys but only by +4.7% compared to roughly +20% in the PSPP in March and April. On the other hand, Germany’s share in PEPP was roughly in line with its capital key versus more than a -20% negative deviation in PSPP in March and April.
Total purchases under the emergency plan amounted to €234.7 billion at the end of May. Sovereign bonds comprised around 80% of PEPP purchases, broadly in line with the APP, with commercial paper being the largest private sector component. The ECB also spent €35.4 billion on commercial paper, and acquired more than 80% of that debt on the primary market.
Despite the ECB’s guidance on flexibility regarding the country allocation of sovereign purchases under PEPP, purchases were less skewed towards Italian and Spanish bonds than anticipated, particularly when compared to the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) as shown in the chart top, right. Italian bond purchases, for instance, ran close to 5% above Italy’s capital key share under both sovereign purchase programmes. Capital key deviations for France across both programmes largely offset each other, suggesting some substitutability between the allocation of purchases across PEPP and PSPP. Looking at PEPP and PSPP jointly, sovereign purchases were still skewed away from core jurisdictions in favor of peripheral bond markets broadly in line with expectations.
As Bloomberg notes, the numbers shine a light on how much more flexible the ECB’s €750 billion crisis program is in comparison to its regular quantitative-easing plan. The latter, which was recently questioned by Germany’s constitutional court, is constrained by limits on how much of each nation’s debt the central bank can hold, and a rule that requires purchases to be allocated proportionately across the region.
Drilling down further into the data, the ECB bought €37.4 billion of Italian debt since the plan started in late March. That means it bought a greater share of the country’s bonds than its capital key – based on the size of Italy’s economy and population – would have implied. The ECB also bought €4.7 billion of Greek debt so far, after it decided to include the country’s sovereign bonds in its emergency-purchase program despite the fact that Greece still carries non-investment grade. The move eased investors’ fears, with yields on 10-year notes dropping from around 4% before the announcement of the scheme to around 1.5% on Tuesday.
While PEPP purchases were conducted in a largely market-neutral fashion across the yield curve in most jurisdictions, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium saw a concentration on shorter maturities, likely including bills, above and beyond relative supply. Near-term redemptions of PEPP holdings will therefore mainly affect bond supply in these countries unless they are offset by reinvestments. The ECB is expected to announce reinvestments of PEPP holdings for the duration of net purchases at the upcoming Governing Council meeting this week.
The weighted average maturity of the ECB’s public-sector pandemic portfolio stood at 6.3 years, compared with 7.2 years for QE holdings.
While capital key deviations under PEPP surprised to the downside, combined purchases under PEPP and PSPP show a skew away from core markets towards the periphery broadly in line with most analysts’ expectations. That said, the release signals limited appetite for large, persistent capital key deviations for the time being.
Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau has said the ECB should go even further and remove the capital key from the program – not just temporarily but altogether – because it’s an “uncalled-for constraint.”
That said, although the bi-monthy cumulation of PEPP holdings may mask larger temporary capital key deviations, Goldman notes that the release signals that the ECB may be seeking to limit the persistence of such deviations.
Italian bond yields had risen sharply amid doubts about how the government would pay for battling the recession caused by the virus. They’ve fallen significantly since the ECB launched its purchases and European Union politicians moved closer to a joint fiscal response that may distribute some of the costs across the 27-nation bloc.
European policymakers have repeatedly said they’re ready to increase the size of the pandemic program and extend if it needed. Indeed, many expect the ECB to announce an expansion in their stimulus programs tomorrow, with many Wall Street economists expecting that the ECB will be announcing a doubling of the PEPP to €1.5tn and extend the minimum net asset purchase period until mid-2021, even though as a report from MNI on Tuesday suggested some on the committee are not ready to do this so there is room for disappointment.
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Tesla Worker In Buffalo Tests Positive For COVID-19 After Factory Re-Opens Tyler Durden
Wed, 06/03/2020 – 14:50
Elon Musk is finally getting his wish of being able to re-open his facilities around the U.S., scoring a huge blow against what he called “fascism” on the company’s latest three ring circus conference call.
Unfortunately, while good news for Musk, it’s not all good news for his employees. Case in point: after re-opening the company’s Buffalo plant, one employee has tested positive for COVID-19, making them the fourth Tesla employee in the U.S. to test positive, according to The Verge.
News of the test was shared with employees last week and Tesla found out about it during the week of May 18 to May 22. An employee for Panasonic, which shares the space with Tesla, tested positive back in March, prior to the shutdowns.
Tesla re-opened the Buffalo facility on May 19th after New York gave the region the green light. The factory is not back at full production, however, and “won’t be for a while” due to the 984 full-time workers it furloughed.
The plant says it’ll move forward with less than 500 employees for the time being. At the same time, Tesla has brought back many furloughed workers in California and Nevada after those factories re-opened. The company hasn’t responded to inquiries as to why it is doing things differently in New York.
The furloughs also place Tesla under the threshold for jobs it must maintain to qualify for state funding of the factory. Tesla told the state that it would exceed the 1,500 job requirement prior to the pandemic. Now, it has asked the state for another year to meet its goals. Tesla must pay $41.2 million back to the state if it doesn’t meet its jobs threshold.
And while Tesla distributed a letter this past week informing its California staff that they still need to show up for work even if it means violating recent curfews put it place to quell the George Floyd riots, the same effort doesn’t appear to be a priority at the company’s Buffalo plant.
Musk had said in April that Tesla was “gaining momentum with Solar Roof before COVID essentially shut us down, both from the ability to install and the ability to get permits.”
We can’t help but wonder if Musk has finally found his scapegoat to ditch the long-ignored Buffalo solar panel factory.
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