China Releases Video Of World’s Largest Three-Engine Utility-Attack Drone
A rising global superpower must have an advanced aerospace industry to sustain dominance. When it comes to drone development, China has been rapidly advancing the technology and exporting the aircraft across the world — taking precious market share away from the U.S.
Chinese media is reporting that Chengdu-based Tengden Technology Co. has developed the world’s largest and first three-engine drone — took off from an airfield in southwest China late last week.
Chengdu Daily said the design of the drone is a world-first. The wingspan of the aircraft stretches 60 ft., and the aircraft’s main body section is 33 ft. long. It’s equipped with three-piston engines, with one on each side of the wing, along with one mounted on the rear of the plane, allowing it to have a maximum takeoff weight of 3.2 tons and fly for 35 hours.
The drone has a flight ceiling of about 31,000 ft. with a top speed of about 200 mph, Chengdu Daily said, adding that the plane has been designed for airfields in plateau regions.
The pusher configuration, an engine mounted on the rear of the plane, allows it to carry more payload and take off from shorter runways.
The drone is a multifunction aircraft that will allow the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) to fly attack and surveillance missions.
Chengdu Daily said it could also be used for disaster relief, forest firefighting, geographic mapping, meteorological observation, and aerial communications relay.
Tengoen Technology expects the drone to be in series production in the near term for delivery to clients in the second half of 2021.
China has become the top country, controlling at least 70% of the world’s civilian drone market, via the Shenzhen-based drone giant SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd.
China’s military drones are also gaining market share across the world, with increased sales to Middle East countries.
China’s rapid ascension as a global superpower has been made part by its manufacturing hub, along with many advances in technologies, including artificial intelligence, automation, drones, and hypersonics. This has angered the Trump administration, who is threatening to ban all DJI products from federal agencies and has created fearmongering campaigns of how Chinese-made drones could be susceptible to hacks. Even the Pentagon has felt threatened by Chinese military drones because increased sales to the Middle East and other parts of the world have taken away market share from General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing
Imagine doing the same thing over and over again, with little progress and no relief. Sounds like most people’s vision of hell – or the Federal Reserve’s current predicament.
Since September, the central bank, through the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has been purchasing securities hand over fist to alleviate short-term pressures in the overnight money markets. It has used repurchase (“repo”) and reverse repurchase (“reverse repo”) agreements to provide liquidity and keep overnight borrowing rates from spiking.
But these complex money market operations already have caused the Fed to buy a net $400 billion worth of securities, after Chairman Jerome Powell shrank the Fed’s balance sheet by $700 billion. That “normalization,” which also included raising the federal funds rate through late 2018, is now effectively dead and the Fed’s balance sheet is growing again.
Powell and the Fed have repeatedly denied this is a new phase of “quantitative easing (QE),” three rounds of which added $3.6 trillion to the Fed’s balance sheet in the years after the financial crisis. And indeed, in the earlier rounds of QE, the central bank bought Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities of various maturities. The current buying has been focused on Treasuries with maturities of 12 months or less.
On the way: QE4
But that may not continue, says Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO and chief strategist at Quill Intelligence, a Dallas-based boutique research firm. Booth, who worked on both Wall Street and in the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has been a critic of Fed policies since the central bank pushed fed funds down to near zero and launched its three rounds of QE after the financial crisis. (She also was one of the few people to connect the dots between the housing bust and Wall Street before the crisis hit.)
Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO of Dallas-based research firm Quill Intelligence, says the Federal Reserve is on the cusp of enacting QE4, or may already be there.
Booth thinks we’re on the cusp of QE4, or may already be there.
“We’ve surpassed the $400 billion mark,” she said in a phone interview.
“They call it ‘not QE’ because it’s maturities of 12 months or less and therefore presupposed to roll over within 12 months.”
But as of now, she says, “we have a $100-billion-per-month run rate of ‘not QE.’ ”
Booth acknowledges there’s a qualitative difference between current operations and the Fed’s QE policy of buying longer-dated securities, particularly mortgage-backed bonds, which also helped boost the housing market. And the current efforts to stabilize the overnight money markets may run through at least April, after tax season.
But she thinks the Fed is laying the groundwork for securities purchases to continue after that.
“The Fed will tell you it’s all technical in nature,” she said.
“In their last minutes, they said that if they had to move into [longer] coupons, they would. So the table has been set.”
This all comes, Booth believes, amid a weakening economy.
“We’ve just had commercial and industrial lending turn negative on a year-over year basis,” she told me.
“Not only have banks become less willing to extend the commercial and industrial loans, there has also been less demand for them.”
“We’re probably in our third quarter of contracting industrial production. That’s a huge red flag for the economy,” she said.
Economists forecast gross domestic product (GDP) growth of around 2% this year, but just in case the economy weakens, the Fed might think it’s good to have some “not QE” insurance on hand.
In a recent speech, former Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said that “the effects of asset purchases on yields were long-lasting and economically significant,” resulting in an impact of 120 basis points (1.2 percentage points) in 10-year Treasury yields.
Record-high stock prices
But he also said “the expected effects of the programs were already incorporated into market prices by the time of the formal announcements,” which suggests to me that at least some of QE’s impact was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That implies that what investors think the Fed is doing is at least as important as what it’s actually doing, and I’m seeing a lot of chatter about QE4 over the last couple of days, a big reason why the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 hover near all-time highs.
Booth points out that by several measures, “outside of the year 2000 the stock market has never been as overvalued,” which means stock markets more than ever hinge on the Fed’s every move.
That’s why I think if there are any signs of economic weakness by spring — particularly in manufacturing and the industrial economy — the Fed will find a way to keep the bond buying going, while calling it anything but QE.
“We have certainly started to see some signs of slowing, and I think Jay Powell is trapped,” said Booth.
“The Fed is trying to keep a bucket filled with holes full.”
Baltic Dry Continues Epic Plunge As IMF Slashes Global GDP Forecast
The Baltic Exchange’s main sea freight index hit a nine-month low on Monday, dragged down by falling rates of capesize and panamax segments as world trade continues to slump.
The Baltic Dry Index, which tracks rates for capesize, panamax and supramax vessels that ferry dry bulk commodities across the world, dropped 25 points, or 3.3%, to 729 (according to Refinitiv data), the lowest level since April 2019:
The capesize index .BACI dropped 119 points, or 16.7%, to 593 – its lowest since April 23.The index registered its 27th straight session of losses, and also its largest daily percentage loss since early April.
Average daily earnings for capesizes, which typically transport 170,000-180,000 tonne cargoes including iron ore and coal, fell $592 to $7,760.
The panamax index .BPNI lost 4 points, or 0.5%, to 866.
Average daily earnings for panamaxes, which usually carry coal or grain cargoes of about 60,000 tonnes to 70,000 tonnes, declined $39 to $7,791.
The supramax index .BSIS remained unchanged at 560 points.
We’ve noted how the “front-loading” effect ahead of tariff deadlines ended in late 3Q19 when the first signs of a trade resolution emerged between the U.S. and China.
In the last four months, the Baltic index has crashed 70%, the most since 2008, and has confirmed our slowbalisation thoughts.
The chart below makes clear that the spike in shipping rates was a one-off event spurred by importers front-running tariffs in 2019, now that is over, shipping rates are plunging as a manufacturing recession in the U.S. deepens and across the world.
And it was no surprise to us Monday that the IMF slashed the global economic outlook for 2019 to 2.9% in October, the lowest since the financial crisis, and warned that global trade growth is “close to a standstill.”
The Baltic Dry Index is seen as a leading indicator that provides a clear view of the global demand for commodities and raw materials.
The IMF also downgraded its forecast for global GDP for 2020 and 2021, its sixth straight reduction, although in a sliver of optimism, global GDP in 2020 is now expected to post a modest rebound from 2.9% to 3.3%, (down from 3.4% in October) and to 3.4% in 2021 (down from 3.6%) as the IMF says “there are now tentative signs that global growth may be stabilizing, though at subdued levels.”
However, the IMF warned that there are “few signs of turning points are yet visible in global macroeconomic data.”
According to data from Digitalik, a resource that monitors Bitcoin’s position relative to the Stock-to-Flow model, as of Jan. 20, BTC/USD is exactly where it should be.
$8.6K Bitcoin sticks rigidly to forecasts
Stock-to-Flow measures the Bitcoin price using two factors: the stock — the number of Bitcoins in circulation — and the flow, which is the number of new Bitcoins entering circulation.
Bitcoin’s low emission rate relative to its existing supply – like gold – means Stock-to-Flow constitutes useful evidence in the argument that Bitcoin is “digital gold.”
The cryptocurrency’s run-up to $9,000 last week took it slightly over where Stock-to-Flow pricing forecasts suggested it might trade.
Bitcoin price versus Stock-to-Flow. Source: Digitalik/ PlanB
At press time, however, BTC/USD traded at $8,680 — just $150 above the forecasts.
BTC on track for $100,000 in 2021
As Cointelegraph previously reported, Stock-to-Flow’s creator, the analyst known as PlanB, originally suggested that Bitcoin would hover at an average of in the year before its block reward halving in May 2020.
At that point, a 50% reduction in the number of new Bitcoins released to miners each block would further limit the flow versus the existing stock. Thereafter, he has said, price performance should accelerate dramatically — by 2022, a single Bitcoin should be worth around $100,000.
In 2019, BTC/USD only temporarily diverged from Stock-to-Flow as it hit $13,800, only to fall below expectations for a similarly brief period in December.
SocGen Makes A Striking Discovery: For More Than Half The Market, It Already Feels Like A Recession
One week ago, Morgan Stanley brought the market’s attention to the “other one percent”, namely that handful of companies which have been responsible for the vast majority of market gains and market upside not only in 2019 but for much of the past decade. As the bank’s chief equity strategist, Michael Wilson wrote, in a world of low growth, limited pricing power and now rising costs, “it’s clear that bigger is better and scale matters” which is also the main reason why Morgan Stanley has been underweight US small caps since July 2018, a relative trade that is now up close to 20%.
As Wilson explained, small-cap companies can’t offset rising labor costs with technology as easily as large caps, nor do they have the same access to the record-low cost of capital. Additionally, rising regulatory and cyber costs over the past decade also favor larger-cap companies, who can spread such costs across a larger revenue base. “In short”, Wilson summarized, “the big get bigger as they continue to eat the small guy’s lunch” and added that this trend “is unsustainable and potentially a bigger risk to the economy and markets than the very important issue of individual income inequality.“
Of course, markets are fully aware of this dynamic, which is why small caps have underperformed so significantly over the past 18 months and, worse, over this entire cycle. But this phenomenon is manifesting itself in other ways: as the chart below shows, capital concentration is following corporate inequality like never before, and currently, the top five companies in the S&P 500 (the “other 1 percenters”) make up 18% of the total market cap.
“A ratio like this is unprecedented, including during the tech bubble”, Wilson concluded ominously, especially since we all know remember how the tech bubble ended. And yet, little has changed since the day right before the burst: during 2019, the net income concentration for the 1 percenters didn’t keep pace with their market cap concentration, similar to what happened during the 1999 concentration peak.
Wilson was also not shy assigning blame, and giving his view on what caused this unprecedented divergence:
I think this divergence is the result of the extraordinary liquidity being provided by the world’s central banks, which is flowing to the most liquid and largest names in the S&P 500. This also recalls 1999, when the Fed expanded its balance sheet at the end of the year and early in 2000 as a precaution against Y2K disruption.
Today, picking up on this topic of the “Other one percent” versus everyone else, SocGen’s quant team lead by Andrew Lapthorne presents a series of charts which add further arguments to the debate that the unprecedented divergence between a handful of companies and the rest of the market will end in disaster.
Lapthorne, who earlier today asked the $64 trillion question, “How Long Investors Will Ignore Record Valuations And Weak EPS” and whose answer may determine the fate of the stock market in 2020 (and onward), laid out the current market dynamic as follows:
The big change during 2019 was a significant rise in equity prices on the back of the Fed’s policy reversals at the start of the year, so whilst economic indicators, profits and bond yields continued to fall, equity markets ignored the fundamentals and charged ahead, finishing the year with a “not-QE” boost which benefited Growth stocks in particular.
This has left investors feeling bullish but also carrying incredible valuation problems and high expectations into 2020. The real yield on a global balanced portfolio hit 0% before any costs are deducted, US stocks hit all-time highs on an EV/EBITDA basis, bond proxies remain highly exposed to a higher bond yield and therefore improving economic sentiment, and growth stocks have hit valuation levels last seen at the peak of the late nineties tech boom. Even Value stocks – having rallied strongly in Q3 – are no longer ‘cheap’ in places like the US.
With that in mind, and we will shortly show charts to reinforce Lapthorne’s points, we proceed to the first point which the SocGen quant team makes, namely that the equity story of the last decade has been “the re-rating of the quality factor” (well they are a quant team so yes), a factor barely mentioned prior to the financial crisis.
In retrospect, this divergence probably should not be a surprise as the valuation discrepancy is in line with the drop in global economic activity with the valuation gap tracking global PMIs lower; add to this valuation risk if economic sentiment improves and one may reasonably ask why value has “only” dropped this muchL
Stepping away from the realm of factor investing, SocGen then looks at relative returns of bonds and stocks and points out that although bonds and equities remain negatively correlated on a day to day basis, this doesn’t prevent them from both making money at the same time, which they clearly have done in the past year when both bonds and stocks outperformed.
Hence the appeal of risk parity time strategies historically, and why ina world of near record low volumes, risk-parity funds are now the most all in they have ever been.
And since QE is fundamentally a mechanism to boost bond prices, it is also hardly surprising that stocks with the highest positive correlation to bonds have massively outperformed those that have had a negative correlation. As Lapthorne notes, “this valuation gap represents a major challenge to stock pickers. In a recovery, with rising bond yield this gap could narrow quickly. However, the assumption that the red-line will benefit if bond yield went lower in a recession is misplaced. Even “safer” stocks fall in a bear market and the valuation risk, might compound the declines.”
Which brings us to the report’s punchline, namely valuations and its assorted cross-sections.
Here, the first thing to note is that after tremendous gains for both stocks and bonds in 2019, the real yield on a global balanced portfolio has fallen to zero for the first time ever (and his is before costs)!
So will balanced yields go negative next? Well, nothing is impossible, but there is probably a limit: after all the striking stock price gains last year in the absence of profit growth have left equity valuations “seriously extended”, and as a result of continued massive re-leveraging, particularly in the US, has left US equities trading at record high EV/EBITDA valuations!
As noted above this has been mostly due to “growth” stocks, which have exploded higher in the past year, with their forward PE multiples not seen outside of the 2000 tech bubble. As a result, with both Quality and Growth stocks extremely expensive by historical standards and Value stocks having now rallied back to average valuations, Lapthorne concludes that “there is no obvious long only factor strategy in the US that stands out as attractive.”
Is this price surge justified by anything other than central bank easing and stock buybacks? Why, of course not, and here are the facts: both revenues (which as SocGen points out peaked and started to slump around the time equity prices dropped in 2018, and while stocks later rebounded in 2019, sales growth has continued its decline)…
… and pre-tax profits have been declining for the past several years, and while revenues still are fractionally in the green, profits are now declining year over year.
Commenting on these deteriorating trends, Lapthorne writes that “profits are declining and non-financial sales growth has fallen from 10%+ territory to around 4% per annum in the US. With costs rising faster than sales, margins are under pressure. Either sales growth must pick up or costs need to be cut to avoid negative.“
What is even scarier, and is why investors are paying particularly close attention to Q4 earnings season, is that a breakdown of US P&L shows interest costs and SGA expenses rising quicker than sales growth, putting downward pressure on margins. Meanwhile, the Trump tax benefit tailwind is likely to disappear this year, putting even more pressure on net income.
Scariest of all, however, is that despite near-record low interest rates, corporate interest expense has been rising steadily (as a result of the record stock of corporate debt), and any sudden spike in interest rate would quickly lead to a cash flow crisis as a disproportionately higher amount of cash from operations would go to paying down interest expense.
Which brings us to SocGen’s own take on “the other one percent” problem.
First, here is a chart measuring the biggest 160 US companies (top 5 in each sector by sales) versus all other stocks in the US. The gap between the biggest and the rest has never been bigger. Or, as SocGen puts it, “the five biggest US companies per sector are highly profitable, the rest are struggling (comparing the best 160 US companies RoE to the remaining 2500 companies).“
Curiously, this problem is especially acute in the US, which not only has the greatest percentage of loss making firms, but as one would expect, the bulk of the money-losing companies are concentrated outside the top 20%.
Surprisingly, this divergence is not so much a function of revenue growth or lack thereof, but an inability to absorb surging costs. As the next chart show, revenue growth is relatively stable for all corporate size groupings, which suggests that depressed profits are mostly a function of rising costs and SG&A, which smaller companies are unable to pass on to customers.
Sure enough, extending this analysis to the bottom line shows that EBIT for the bottom 50% of the S&P1500 (ex fins) is now the most negative it has been since the financial crisis!
Naturally, with reduced (or negative) profitability comes, lower (or negative) cash flow, and the result is that while the biggest companies enjoy a generous interest coverage cushion (EBITDA/Interest expense), coverage for the bottom 50% of all US companies in the S&P1500 ex fins is “terrible“, according to Lapthorne, who adds that “Either a rise in interest rates or a fall in profits will be damaging from here for the smaller half of the US market.”
The bottom line is simple: sliding revenues, an inability to pass on costs for more than half the stocks in the market, resulting in negative profits and sliding interest coverage, means that, as SocGen warns, the Merton “Distance to Default” is now at levels usually associated with recessions and much higher equity volatility. And as Lapthorne cautions in his parting words, “to see distance to default at recessionary levels, despite high equity prices and subdued equity volatility, leaves little room for either a rise in volatility or a fall in equity prices as investors found out in Q4 2018.“
Between Morgan Stanley and SocGen’s analysis on “corporate inequality” and “the other one percent“, the conclusion is that the entire S&P500 is now increasingly a reflection of the fundamentals and returns of a handful of gigantic tech companies, which have been ravenously repurchasing their shares for the past two years courtesy of Trump’s tax reform which allowed them to repatriate over a trillion in cash and use it to fund stock buybacks, and whose growth has attracted the bulk of new outside capital over the past year creating a virtuous loop.
Yet even as the market melts up and giddy investors go all in, seemingly without a care in the world, the biggest buyer of stocks in the past decade, corporations themselves, has quietly stepped back from its furious pace of stock buybacks, and as we showed yesterday, weekly announced buybacks are now running at the lowest in almost three years.
Trump-Greta Showdown Looms As Climate Dominates Agenda At Davos
As 3,000 of the world’s richest and most powerful people from 120 countries gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this year – the event’s 50th anniversary – President Trump and teen climate activist Greta Thunberg are set to cross paths again.
The annual forum will host around 1,700 business leaders – including CEOs from 8 of the 10 most valuable countries in the world, according to DW. The event will run from Tuedsay through Friday, during which there will be more than 350 sessions and workshops.
Thunberg, 17, is expected to once again shame world leaders (except Xi Jinping) into abandoning fossil fuel and committing taxpayer dollars to clean energy initiatives. She is slated to speak twice; once during an 8:30 a.m. panel, and again at 1 p.m. President Trump will speak at 11:30 a.m., and is expected to tout the US economy, his trade deal with China, and crack jokes about his ongoing impeachment.
Thunberg is expected to arrive Monday via train, while Trump will fly in on Marine One.
BBG TV reporting from Davos: “Climate change is the #1 thing everyone is talking about as soon as they step off their private jet” pic.twitter.com/HpiSk68Bic
Tuesday marks the first time since Trump and Thunberg will be present at the same event since last year’s UN climate change summit in New York.
“I think both voices are necessary,” said WEF Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab in a statement to the Associated Press. Of note, the WEF selected environmental concerns as the #1 long-term risk facing the world.
Last year, Thunberg told Davos participants that “our house is on fire,” while Schwab says the world is facing “a state of emergency.
“We do not want to reach the tipping point of irreversibility on climate change,” he said last week, adding “We do not want the next generations to inherit a world, which becomes ever more hostile and ever less habitable — just think of the wildfires in Australia.”
President Trump, a climate change skeptic, has taken to mocking Thunberg – tweeting in December: “Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!”
So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill! https://t.co/M8ZtS8okzE
The last time Trump and Greta crossed paths, the teenage activist – named TIME magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year – shot him a dirty look before chastising world leaders for ‘stealing’ her childhood. Greta told the BBC that she “would have wasted [her] time” talking to Trump, adding “Honestly, I don’t think I would have said anything because obviously he’s not listening to scientists and experts, so why would he listen to me.”
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: “This is all wrong…You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words—and yet, I’m one of the lucky ones.” https://t.co/YTVSvKxTkgpic.twitter.com/px90HghuQd
More than a few people have pointed out that Greta, a high school dropout, has led a life of privilege.
Thunberg drew sharp rebuke from both French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin after her UN stunt.
“Go and explain to developing countries why they should continue living in poverty and not be like Sweden,” said Putin.
Macron slammed Thunberg after she filed a legal complaintaccusing five countries of inaction on global warming in violation of the 30-year-old UN Convention on the Rights of a Child. Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey.
“All the movements of our youth — or our not-so-young — are helpful,” Macron told Europe1, adding “But they must now focus on those who are furthest away, those who are seeking to block the way.”
Perhaps Greta will eventually turn her guilt cannon towards China?
When W.E.B. Dubois patrolled his home with a shotgun after the 1906 Atlanta race riot, he was an aberration. But not how you think. Dubois reports that he was unusual among his contemporaries because until that point he did not own a gun.
Dubois’s gun purchase and his aggressive statements following the riot were not passion-of-the-moment things that he would regret. They were part of a continuing engagement of the practice and philosophy of armed self-defense. As editor of the NAACP’s flagship magazine TheCrisis, Dubois continued to champion armed self-defense as a core private interest. Indeed, in some instances, Dubois seemed to cast self-defense as a duty. After a lynching in Gainesville, Fla., he wrote: “No Colored man can read an account of the recent lynching in Gainesville without being ashamed of his people. Without resistance they let a white mob whom they outnumbered two to one, torture, harry and murder. In the last analysis lynching of Negroes is going to stop when the cowardly mob is faced by effective guns in the hands of people determined to sell their souls dearly.”
Dubois also offered an important caution that reflects the core principle of the black tradition of arms and models Martin Luther King’s admonition decades later about respecting the line between self-defense and political violence. In commentary following the 1919 Chicago race riot, Dubois urged robust self-defense with “bricks and clubs and guns.” But then he cautioned, “We must never let justifiable self-defense against individuals become blind and lawless offense against all white folk. We must not seek reform by violence.” In 1921, he invoked self-defense again as he urged blacks to migrate to the comparative safety of the North. He acknowledged that “troubles will ensue with white unions and householders. But we have learned how to meet it by un-wavering self-defense and by the ballot.”
In this respect, Dubois was no aberration within the early leadership of the NAACP. Walter White also would rise to pull heavy oars at the association. Walter White was from Atlanta. He was just a boy in 1906. While Dubois paced the floor with a shotgun, across town, Walter White sat with his father, both of them clutching guns. Later White wrote about his father’s somber caution as the two of them crouched in the dark peering out the parlor window of the family’s neat bungalow: “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts a foot on the lawn and then don’t you miss.”
The stories of Dubois and White begin chapters five and six of Negroes and the Gun. The decision to begin each chapter with a period leader who embraced armed self-defense might have been a problem. The instinct is that such things are rare. But actually the problem was the opposite.
The record is so thick that the difficulty was choosing who got top billing. Because they were of different generations, White and Dubois head separate chapters. But this meant that another NAACP stalwart, Louis Wright, the first black chairman of the NAACP and a graduate of Harvard Medical School, had to go deeper into the lineup. Louis Wright’s armed preparations come to us secondhand from Roy Wilkins, who writes: “Louis came from Atlanta. Like Walter he had been through the 1906 riot, and like Walter he had watched through the darkened windows of his home, gun in hand.”
The gun stories of Dubois, White and Wright make it easier to digest the fact that the NAACP cut its organizational teeth supporting black people who used guns in self-defense. The first major litigation that the NAACP supported was a case of armed self-defense by black sharecropper Pink Franklin against a planter who laid claim to him under a peonage contract. The NAACP took on the case in 1910, and by 1919, Pink Franklin, who had shot a planter and a deputy marshal in self-defense, walked free.
The saga of Sgt. Edgar Caldwell ended differently. Caldwell, a WWI veteran, shot and killed a trolley driver who was stomping him after throwing him from the whites-only section. The NAACP raised money for his defense with a plea in The Crisis: “We want 500 Negroes who believe in Negro manhood to send immediately one dollar for Caldwell’s defense.” His defense funded by the coins and bills of anonymous black folk, Caldwell survived two years on death row before he was executed. Under the deft editorial touch of Dubois, The Crisis spills over with reports and commentary that frame armed self-defense as a crucial private resource for blacks. Giving broader coverage to this material might easily have added another hundred pages to Negroes and the Gun.
One of the most important early cases supported by the NAACP anchors chapter six. Dr. Ossian Sweet had the grand ambition to move his family into a nice house on a neat corner lot in a white neighborhood. He was familiar with the risks. Several black families had been run out of their new homes by mobs. Sweet’s colleague, Dr. Al Turner, did not even get to spend the night in his new home. Turner was reviled among blacks as the story spread of him fleeing the scene, cowering on the floor of his chauffeured car.
Ossian Sweet feared both mobbers and the shame of being called a coward when he walked into his new home, carrying a sack full of guns and ammunition. It was not long before the mob gathered. Missiles flew. And by the end of it, one of the white men in the crowd was dead from Negro gunfire.
The NAACP hired Clarence Darrow to defend the Sweets and used the case to fuel a fundraising juggernaut. After Darrow wrestled the prosecution to a mistrial, the Sweets became national heroes among black folk. Their tour of NAACP branches raised enough money to pay Darrow, with surplus left to fulfill James Weldon Johnson’s dream of a standing fund that could support important litigation without pushing the organization to the brink of insolvency. This was the beginning of the storied NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Of course, the NAACP was not the only game in town. It was the progeny of disparate early organizations, and that diversity reflects the potential divisions within the early 20th century leadership. When Dubois exhorted black men to fight in WWI, A. Philip Randolph countered that he would not fight to make the world safe for democracy, but was more than willing to die at home to “make Georgia safe for the Negro.” Marcus Garvey represented another strand of thought and was disdained by both Dubois and Randolph. But on the question of armed self-defense, the three of them found basic agreement.
This reflects what we have long known. The principle of self-defense is near universal. It demands no sophisticated ideology. Even in the most civilized of societies, it is an essential practical allowance for self-help against imminent threats in situations where it is impossible for the state to act. As I will discuss tomorrow, this ancient principle runs like a torrent through the modern civil rights movement.
Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.
William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal.” …
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ts3og3
via IFTTT
When W.E.B. Dubois patrolled his home with a shotgun after the 1906 Atlanta race riot, he was an aberration. But not how you think. Dubois reports that he was unusual among his contemporaries because until that point he did not own a gun.
Dubois’s gun purchase and his aggressive statements following the riot were not passion-of-the-moment things that he would regret. They were part of a continuing engagement of the practice and philosophy of armed self-defense. As editor of the NAACP’s flagship magazine TheCrisis, Dubois continued to champion armed self-defense as a core private interest. Indeed, in some instances, Dubois seemed to cast self-defense as a duty. After a lynching in Gainesville, Fla., he wrote: “No Colored man can read an account of the recent lynching in Gainesville without being ashamed of his people. Without resistance they let a white mob whom they outnumbered two to one, torture, harry and murder. In the last analysis lynching of Negroes is going to stop when the cowardly mob is faced by effective guns in the hands of people determined to sell their souls dearly.”
Dubois also offered an important caution that reflects the core principle of the black tradition of arms and models Martin Luther King’s admonition decades later about respecting the line between self-defense and political violence. In commentary following the 1919 Chicago race riot, Dubois urged robust self-defense with “bricks and clubs and guns.” But then he cautioned, “We must never let justifiable self-defense against individuals become blind and lawless offense against all white folk. We must not seek reform by violence.” In 1921, he invoked self-defense again as he urged blacks to migrate to the comparative safety of the North. He acknowledged that “troubles will ensue with white unions and householders. But we have learned how to meet it by un-wavering self-defense and by the ballot.”
In this respect, Dubois was no aberration within the early leadership of the NAACP. Walter White also would rise to pull heavy oars at the association. Walter White was from Atlanta. He was just a boy in 1906. While Dubois paced the floor with a shotgun, across town, Walter White sat with his father, both of them clutching guns. Later White wrote about his father’s somber caution as the two of them crouched in the dark peering out the parlor window of the family’s neat bungalow: “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts a foot on the lawn and then don’t you miss.”
The stories of Dubois and White begin chapters five and six of Negroes and the Gun. The decision to begin each chapter with a period leader who embraced armed self-defense might have been a problem. The instinct is that such things are rare. But actually the problem was the opposite.
The record is so thick that the difficulty was choosing who got top billing. Because they were of different generations, White and Dubois head separate chapters. But this meant that another NAACP stalwart, Louis Wright, the first black chairman of the NAACP and a graduate of Harvard Medical School, had to go deeper into the lineup. Louis Wright’s armed preparations come to us secondhand from Roy Wilkins, who writes: “Louis came from Atlanta. Like Walter he had been through the 1906 riot, and like Walter he had watched through the darkened windows of his home, gun in hand.”
The gun stories of Dubois, White and Wright make it easier to digest the fact that the NAACP cut its organizational teeth supporting black people who used guns in self-defense. The first major litigation that the NAACP supported was a case of armed self-defense by black sharecropper Pink Franklin against a planter who laid claim to him under a peonage contract. The NAACP took on the case in 1910, and by 1919, Pink Franklin, who had shot a planter and a deputy marshal in self-defense, walked free.
The saga of Sgt. Edgar Caldwell ended differently. Caldwell, a WWI veteran, shot and killed a trolley driver who was stomping him after throwing him from the whites-only section. The NAACP raised money for his defense with a plea in The Crisis: “We want 500 Negroes who believe in Negro manhood to send immediately one dollar for Caldwell’s defense.” His defense funded by the coins and bills of anonymous black folk, Caldwell survived two years on death row before he was executed. Under the deft editorial touch of Dubois, The Crisis spills over with reports and commentary that frame armed self-defense as a crucial private resource for blacks. Giving broader coverage to this material might easily have added another hundred pages to Negroes and the Gun.
One of the most important early cases supported by the NAACP anchors chapter six. Dr. Ossian Sweet had the grand ambition to move his family into a nice house on a neat corner lot in a white neighborhood. He was familiar with the risks. Several black families had been run out of their new homes by mobs. Sweet’s colleague, Dr. Al Turner, did not even get to spend the night in his new home. Turner was reviled among blacks as the story spread of him fleeing the scene, cowering on the floor of his chauffeured car.
Ossian Sweet feared both mobbers and the shame of being called a coward when he walked into his new home, carrying a sack full of guns and ammunition. It was not long before the mob gathered. Missiles flew. And by the end of it, one of the white men in the crowd was dead from Negro gunfire.
The NAACP hired Clarence Darrow to defend the Sweets and used the case to fuel a fundraising juggernaut. After Darrow wrestled the prosecution to a mistrial, the Sweets became national heroes among black folk. Their tour of NAACP branches raised enough money to pay Darrow, with surplus left to fulfill James Weldon Johnson’s dream of a standing fund that could support important litigation without pushing the organization to the brink of insolvency. This was the beginning of the storied NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Of course, the NAACP was not the only game in town. It was the progeny of disparate early organizations, and that diversity reflects the potential divisions within the early 20th century leadership. When Dubois exhorted black men to fight in WWI, A. Philip Randolph countered that he would not fight to make the world safe for democracy, but was more than willing to die at home to “make Georgia safe for the Negro.” Marcus Garvey represented another strand of thought and was disdained by both Dubois and Randolph. But on the question of armed self-defense, the three of them found basic agreement.
This reflects what we have long known. The principle of self-defense is near universal. It demands no sophisticated ideology. Even in the most civilized of societies, it is an essential practical allowance for self-help against imminent threats in situations where it is impossible for the state to act. As I will discuss tomorrow, this ancient principle runs like a torrent through the modern civil rights movement.
Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.
William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King’s parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King’s home as “an arsenal.” …
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ts3og3
via IFTTT
Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., will be one of the seven Democratic impeachment managers prosecuting President Trump this week in his Senate trial. However, he seems a tad unclear on what the trial is about or at least what the defendant is facing as the allegations of impeachable conduct.
Crow declared on CNN’s State of the Union that Trump was really guilty of bribery. The problem is that bribery was rejected as an article of impeachment. Not only is it grossly unfair to go to trial while alluding to uncharged conduct, it is especially bizarre when the Supreme Court seems prepared to reaffirm the very case law that I cited earlier in rejecting such expansive interpretations.
On the show, Crow declared“Yeah, specifically he did attempt to bribe and coerce a foreign government official, in this case, the president of Ukraine.”
However, when asked if it was a mistake not to include a bribery article, Crow stated, “No, absolutely not.”
So it was appropriate not to charge him in an article of impeachment on bribery but it is appropriate to accuse him of that attempted crime before a trial?
I spent considerable time in my testimony and prior writings on why a bribery allegation was unfounded under current definitions and case law. I also testified against three other articles that were being touted by the House leadership. I was therefore pleased to see that the Judiciary Committee dropped previous claims of bribery, extortion, campaign finance and obstruction of justice as the basis for impeachment. I testified that the repeated assurances on these allegations from members, legal analysts, and my fellow witnesses were well outside the scope for these crimes. The Committee ultimately went forward with the only two articles that I believed were valid constitutionally in this situation: obstruction of Congress and abuse of power. However, it rejected my repeatedly effort to get the House to wait a couple months to prove these allegations and most importantly complete the record.
In an actual trial, the reference to uncharged criminal conduct would be viewed as patently improper. See e.g., United States v. De La Paz-Rentas, 613 F.3d 18, 25-27 (1st Cir. 2010) (finding prosecutors acting improperly in commenting that “the treachery of a renegade police officer who betrays his oath to protect the public” when “the defendants were not on trial for dereliction of duty and[, therefore,] the prosecutor had no business inviting the jury to focus on this aspect of their wrongdoing”).
The issue of uncharged conduct comes up fairly often in actual trials. It is usually however evidence of actual convictions. The suggestion of untried and uncharged crimes would be viewed as wildly inappropriate. Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) bars prosecutors from using these convictions as evidence of a defendant’s bad character. It states
(1) Prohibited Uses. Evidence of a crime, wrong, or other act is not admissible to prove a person’s character in order to show that on a particular occasion the person acted in accordance with the character.
(2) Permitted Uses; Notice in a Criminal Case. This evidence may be admissible for another purpose, such as proving motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident.
In this case, there was no charge, let along a conviction, for bribery. Moreover, even when a conviction is allowed, it is also subject to FRE 403 which bar evidence or arguments that produce or threaten greater prejudice than probative value at trial. The reference to bribery is clearly designed to prejudice the minds of senators — and the public — which references to an actual crime.
As a former partner at a large firm, Crow must clearly be aware of why such references are viewed as presumptively unethical and unfair. With House managers accusing the Republicans of acting as unethical jurors, the managers may want to avoid the same charge in their own arguments.
In an addendum to my prior post on this case, I argued that seeking en banc review is a tactical mistake. As I explained, should the plaintiffs prevail in front of an en banc court, this would likely send the case to the Supreme Court and a broader loss for the plaintiffs—a loss that could have significant repercussions for other climate change lawsuits in the courts.
Upon reflection, I may have been too critical of the plaintiffs’ tactical decision. Under the Ninth Circuit’s rules, en banc will only be granted if a majority of those judges in active service vote for such review. Given the current composition of the Ninth Circuit, obtaining a majority in support of en banc reconsideration would seem to be quite a heavy lift.
As of the time of this writing, there are 29 judges in active service on the Ninth Circuit. If one were to assume that the court would split along ideological lines on an en banc petition, the plaintiffs’ odds would seem pretty good, as 16 of the 29 judges were nominated by Democratic Presidents. Yet we should not expect such a split in this case for two reasons.
First, and most importantly, the plaintiffs’ arguments are sufficiently aggressive and outlandish that they may not even command majority support among Democratic nominees, let alone the whole court. Indeed, both judges in the panel majority were Obama nominees, and they both voted against the plaintiffs. Second, en banc review is generally disfavored. Most judges require something more than “the panel got it wrong” to justify en banc rehearing, and few are likely to vote in favor of a petition that asks the court to stretch the bounds of existing precedent. En banc rehearings are generally reserved for instances in which there’s a need to reconsider or clairfy prior circuit precedent, not pick a fight with prior Supreme Court decisions.
All this means that the plaintiffs are not risking too much by seeking en banc review. The petition is very unlikely to be granted, but there is an opportunity that the petition will provoke additional opinions endorsing the need for action on climate change, which may help the plaintiffs build additional support for their cause.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/37cz5s1
via IFTTT
