Ilargi: Why Trump Will Win In 2020, And Easily

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

July 7 2019, just another tequila Sunday. There are elections here in Greece, and the right wing will take over. Bad idea, because it will bring out the left wing resistance that have remained subdued while Syriza reneged on all their promises, but they were left wing, and how does left protesting left work exactly? They didn’t know. Better lay low. No more.

From now on in, it’s women and children first. And there are so many pent up grievances. Youth unemployment is still at 40%. While ever more Greeks are evicted from their homes through Airbnb alone. This ain’t gonna go well. That strong economy the right promises will be there exclusively for their own richer supporters, at the ever-increasing cost of the poor.

The US women’s soccer team just became World Champions again. That’s the last time in a very long time. Because traditional soccer countries now also have women’s teams. There’s a very peculiar division at the bottom of this. In Europe and South America and Africa, soccer is a men’s game.

In the US, baseball, hockey, basketball and American football have spent millions making sure soccer was turned into, and perceived as, a girly sport. Just so the best male athletes would not turn there. So the US, colleges, universities, have this decades-long tradition of women’s soccer. But they have no such tradition for men, while almost the entire rest of the world does.

That’s why the US women’s soccer team will never win again, and it’s also why the men’s team never will. No culture, no tradition, even as they easily could have them. This was very obvious to me in my Montreal days. In summer, in just about every city park, there were community and family gatherings of South- and Central Americans, and they were all playing soccer.

Still, Canada stinks at the game on an international level. Why? Because the hockey people don’t want the competition for male athletes. They cut it down wherever they can. All they would have to do is take the most promising 100 10-year old kids just playing in the parks in one city, and get them into a program. Within 10 years they’d have a national team that’s an international contender. Kids from Peru, Chili, Brazil, 100 different countries, and throw in the European kids that are there anyway. But no.

Still, I was going to talk about Trump again. Just to piss off the people some more who -stupidly- accuse me of supporting Trump.

Though it is sort of the same thing: Greek PM Tsipras is set to lose (no results yet as I write this) because he never did what he promised. US soccer is set to lose because other domestic sports don’t want it to be successful. People are -mostly- blind.

First I saw this UK ambassador to Washington, one Sir Kim Darroch, has sent “secret” cables (memos) to his government about how Trump’s administration is supposedly “inept, insecure and incompetent”, as well as “uniquely dysfunctional” and “divided”. “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”

“Differences between the US and the UK on climate change, media freedoms and the death penalty might come to the fore as the countries seek to improve trading relations after Brexit, the memos said.” Oh, fcuking yeah, the UK is such a shining light on climate change and press freedom, right?! Who’s holding a certain journalist, one Julian Assange, in a maximum security prison again?

“Mr Trump’s publicly stated reason for calling off an airstrike against Tehran with 10 minutes to go – that it would cause 150 casualties – “doesn’t stand up”, Sir Kim said. Instead, he suggested the president was “never fully on board”. When I read that line, I thought Sir Kim was not-even-so secretly in favor of attacking Iran. Was that just me?

Oh, and earlier today I was wondering if they ever hand out these Sir and Dame titles to people who are poor or even destitute but who work 25 hours a day for the people around them, to make sure they can alleviate the suffering in their communities as much as they can. Or does that mummified “Queen” of theirs only bestow that “honor” on the upper classes? No, I do not care, I think I know the answer. Inglan is a bitch.

And if I’ve ever seen a dysfunctional, “inept, insecure and incompetent” government, it’s the one that these secret memos were sent to. From Cameron to May to soon Boris Johnson, let get real.

Then also today there were all these news reports about Jeffrey Epstein on how he’s finally being charged with abusing dozens of underage on his planes and his estates. This has been going on for decades (who was in charge during those years). What is the media focus? Trump, of course. But Epstein was thrown out of Mar-A-Lago I think 12 years ago for hitting on an underage girl. Does that mean we know for sure Trump was never involved? Nope.

But we do know that Bill Clinton flew 26 times in a few years on Epstein’s ‘Lolita Express’ bringing helpss girls so faraway places. So maybe he should be the main focus here, not Trump. Then again, it’s too late in the game now, isn’t it? US -and UK- media have bet all their money on the anti-Trump game. They have lost everything so far, and then they double down, everything on red style.

I’m thinking: guys, you lost, time to find a new game plan. But they don’t have the flexibility nor the intelligence required. Aaron Maté wrote another scathing -must read- essay on theMueller Report , putting its credibiltiy at the same level as the Steele dossier, but one half of America doesn’t even want to see that. It only wants to see more damning reports, damn evidence, about their favorite orange piñata.

And no, talking about that does not make me a Trump supporter. Let’s say I’m looking at that like it were a game of soccer, and I point out to you that the other team has absolutely nothing while they’re already 10-0 down (that’s a very big score in soccer).

But a third thing i saw today really made me think Trump can’t lose in 2020. The Guardian of all places had a review of a book entitled American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War by Politico writer Tim Alberta, in which Trump effusively praises Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among other things by comparing her to Evita Peron.

“Trump says he first saw Ocasio-Cortez during her primary against Crowley, while watching TV with political advisers. “I see a young woman,” he says, “ranting and raving like a lunatic on a street corner, and I said: ‘That’s interesting, go back.’” Alberta then says Trump “became enamored” and “starstruck” by Ocasio-Cortez. “I called her Eva Perón,” Trump says. “I said, ‘That’s Eva Perón. That’s Evita.”

[..] Trump does row back on his praise, telling Alberta: “She’s got talent. Now, that’s the good news. The bad news: she doesn’t know anything. She’s got a good sense, an ‘it’ factor, which is pretty good, but she knows nothing. But with time, she has real potential.”

I still remain convinced that the one dimensional Trump haters, the same people who would accuse me of supporting him, don’t understand how or why that means he will win easily in 2020. Well, that, and they have nobody to put up against him. Joe Biden is not just a joke, he’s an old and stale joke. Kamala Harris is an attempt to cross Obama with Hillary. Bernie Sanders is a wonderful man, but he should be the campaign manager for a younger prospect, but who isn’t there.

And Tulsi Gabbard is being actively suppressed by the DNC, like Bernie Sanders four years ago. All the rest of the field are mere bystanders. It’s the exact same feeling of the GOP ‘contestants’ standing against Trump in 2016. They’re there to fill up space, and to create the illusion there’s an actual conversation or dialogue or contest happening.

Personally, I think it would be great if the Democrats have a valid candidate next year, at the level of Trump or better.

The Donald should have stayed in real estate. But instead he’s the President, and now everybody has to deal with that. And you don’t do that by continuing to blame him for everything that happens under the sun. That ‘tactic’ has failed for three years.

Those past 3 years of media bias against him, plus the Mueller report debacle, should have made this clear.

But what we see today is that neither the Democrats nor the press that supports them have anything to fight Trump with. While he compliments their main future asset for her talent, and for her likeness to a world-famous tragic actress-turned-politician and Broadway darling.

That’s why he’ll win.

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CBO Destroys Democrat Dreams Of Utopia; As Many As 4 Million Jobs Lost Under $15 Minimum Wage

Hiking Americans’ minimum wage to $15 per hour would give millions of Americans a raise but would kick a smaller share of people out of work (presumably never to return as their skills are now priced out of the market) according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office.

Effects of the $15 Option on Employment and Income.

According to CBO’s median estimate, under the $15 option, 1.3 million workers who would otherwise be employed would be jobless in an average week in 2025. (That would equal a 0.8 percent reduction in the number of employed workers.) CBO estimates that there is about a two-thirds chance that the change in employment would lie between about zero and a reduction of 3.7 million workers.

In addition, in an average week in 2025, the $15 option would increase the wages of 17 million workers whose wages would otherwise be below $15 per hour, CBO estimates. The wages of many of the 10 million workers whose wages would be slightly above the new federal minimum would also increase.

The $15 option would affect family income in a variety of ways. In CBO’s estimation, it would:

  • Boost workers’ earnings through higher wages, though some of those higher earnings would be offset by higher rates of joblessness;

  • Reduce business income and raise prices as higher labor costs were absorbed by business owners and then passed on to consumers; and

  • Reduce the nation’s output slightly through the reduction in employment and a corresponding decline in the nation’s stock of capital (such as buildings, machines, and technologies).

On the basis of those effects and CBO’s estimate of the median effect on employment, the $15 option would reduce total real (inflation-adjusted) family income in 2025 by $9 billion, or 0.1 percent.

The effects of those income changes would vary across families. Changes in earnings would mainly affect low-income families, but many higher-income families would be affected, too. The loss in business income would be mostly borne by families well above the poverty line. All consumers would pay higher prices, but higher-income families, who spend more, would pay more of those costs. And the cost of effects on the overall economy would generally accrue to families in proportion to their income, which means they would largely be absorbed by families with income well above the poverty threshold.

Taking those effects into account, CBO estimates that families whose income would be below the poverty threshold under current law would receive an additional $8 billion in real family income in 2025 under this option. That would amount to a 5.3 percent increase in income, on average, for such families. That extra income would move, on net, roughly 1.3 million people out of poverty. Real income would fall by about $16 billion for families above the poverty line; that would reduce their total income by about 0.1 percent.

Workers who would be affected by an increase in the minimum wage – through either lost employment or higher earnings – tend to come from groups in which low wages (defined here as less than $19 per hour) are common. Teenagers and adults without a high school diploma are relatively likely to earn low wages, but because they make up small shares of the working population, those groups together account for only about 20 percent of low-wage workers. Women are more likely to have low-wage jobs than men. Part-time workers are also disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs, but most low-wage workers are employed full-time (see Table 2).

Additionally, CBO warns this shift in the law will cause price-hikes (effectively reducing any gains from the employers’ wage gains) and potentially creating enough inflation to spook bonds and send the cost of capital (e.g. for young black people to get mortgages to buy homes) soaring. Bonds seemed to react this afternoon when the report hit…

Of course, the left’s army of progressive panderers is extremely busy with the spin, happy to proclaim with confidence that CBO nailed it on the estimates of how many will get pay rises and be “lifted out of poverty” but seems to also slam the CBO’s gross lack of accuracy on the job loss estimates.

EPI is unequivocal: CBO report shows broad benefits from higher minimum wage:

The key fact coming out of the report is that CBO finds that the benefits to low wage workers of a $15 minimum wage far exceed the costs. The report finds that a $15 minimum wage would increase the wages of millions of low wage workers, increase the average incomes of low and lower-middle-income families, reduce poverty, shift money from corporate profits to the wages of low-wage workers, and reduce inequality.

None other than Paul Krugman jumped in via Twitter:

“…I agree with EPI that CBO has given too much weight to dubious research…

[CBO] may have erred on the side of political caution…

The fact is that even if CBO is overstating the job effects, this is actually a very pro-hike report. Remember that the job number is for average employment in a given week; it doesn’t mean that anything like that number would be unemployed for long periods.”

We frankly have no idea what that last sentence means but cherry picking the CBO results you want seems the opposite of what one would expect from an ivory tower academician.

Of course, Jared Bernstein had to pipe-in…

“My quick take on the new CBO report on the impact of raising the federal minimum wage. It’s yet more evidence that even big increases should be largely expected to have their intended effects: raise low pay, lower poverty, lower inequality.”

So let us explain, the bottom line is simple, around 17 million people (or up to 27.3 million) will end up with an extra pack of cigarettes per day while sacrificing 1.3 million (and potentially 3.7 million) who will end up losing everything (and never to return as their skill-base would now be priced out of the market) and prices will go up for everyone.

But then again, it’s all about shared sacrifice right? And besides, Dems can just unleash more Universal Basic Income gifts to the 1.3 million lost to this “Raise The Wage Act” proposal.

Full CBO Report below:

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2LgX5TV Tyler Durden

CBO Says $15 Federal Minimum Wage Will Cost 1.3 Million Jobs

Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cost an estimated 1.3 jobs but would also lift more workers above the poverty line, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates in a report released Monday.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, though most states have minimum wage laws requiring higher pay. Earlier this year, House Democrats introduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025, and most Democrats in the 2020 presidential field have endorsed that plan. That plan builds on an unsuccessful Obama-era effort to set the federal minimum wage at $10.10 per hour.

If implemented by 2025, the CBO estimates, the $15 federal minimum wage would boost paychecks for 17 million workers who would otherwise earn less than $15 per hour. About 10 million workers who now earn about $15 an hour might see their paychecks increase slightly as well. The trade-off would be 1.3 million more people out of work. Those who lose their jobs (or are unable to find them in the first place) are likely to be lower-income workers, unskilled workers, and those with little work experience.

The CBO also ran projections for smaller minimum wage increases. If Congress hiked the minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2025, about 5 million workers would benefit from bigger paychecks and about 300,000 jobs would be lost. An increase to $10 per hour would benefit only 1.5 million workers and would have a negligible effect on employment levels (largely because 15 states already have minimum wages set at or above that level).

“For most low-wage workers, earnings and family income would increase, which would lift some families out of poverty. But other low-wage workers would become jobless, and their family income would fall—in some cases, below the poverty threshold,” the CBO concludes.

Democratic presidential candidates and others on the left will probably try to use the report to bolster the case for a higher minimum wage, claiming that the benefits outweigh the costs. The Employment Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, is already claiming the CBO “substantially overstates the costs” associated with higher wage mandates.

But it’s important to remember that any negative consequences—regardless of what they might be—will fall most heavily on workers with fewer skills or little experience. Someone who has a hard time finding a job that pays $8 an hour will be completely out of luck if employers are required to hire only workers who are worth $15 an hour.

It’s also important to remember that low-wage workers aren’t always from low-income families. Think of teenagers working summer jobs, for example, or students working part-time while they pursue higher education. In other words, some of the beneficiaries of higher minimum wages aren’t really what is traditionally thought of as “poor”—and the truly needy are more likely to lose out on entry-level jobs.

Having the feds set a minimum wage rate introduces additional problems. The law’s consequences in poorer, rural states will not be the same as its consequences in places with a higher cost of living. In other words, a $15 minimum wage will do more damage in Mississippi than in New York City. Forcing all American businesses to pay the same minimum wages makes little sense.

State lawmakers will make mistakes too, of course—California’s $15 per hour minimum wage means vastly different things depending on whether you live in Los Angeles or the poorer, rural counties of the state’s Central Valley, where unemployment is already high.

Eighteen states began 2019 with higher minimum wages than they had at the start of 2018, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state-level policies. Eight of those states automatically increase their minimum wages to track with the cost of living, while 10 others adopted increases because of specific legislation or ballot initiatives. Four other states have approved minimum wage increases during 2019.

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Just What Was That Stricken Russian Submarine Carrying?

Via Climateer Investing blog,

The Russians aren’t saying but this might be a clue:

Russian servicemen ‘averted planetary catastrophe’ during nuclear submarine accident, military official claims at funeral…

Kremlin refuses to reveal mission of vessel, citing state secrets.

That’s from The Independent over the weekend (HT: ZeroHedge)

The Barents Observer has been doing their best to figure out what’s going on, starting from their first report:

July 2 
Fire onboard nuclear-powered submarine, 14 sailors killed

July 3 
Fishermen witnessed nuclear submarine drama

July 3
Defense minster confirms fire onboard the «Losharik»

July 4
Report to the President: super-secret submarine «Losharik» will be repaired and taken back in service

The fire started in the battery compartment, but did not affect the reactor, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reports to Vladimir Putin…

Tragic, and potentially disastrous for the immediate area if the reactor casing had opened but not something you’d call “a planetary catastrophe”.

Among other reports we’ve seen (not verified so grain of salt) is that seven of the dead were captains, meaning whatever they were up to was pretty important.

The fact the Russians are repairing and returning the boat to its mission would also point in that direction.

So what was the submarine or its submersible – capable of 20,000 foot dives – carrying?

The best guess I’ve seen is a high-yield, 100 – 200 megaton, cobalt thermonuclear bomb.

A bomb that size, two to four times more powerful than the biggest ever exploded, the Soviet Tsar Bomba (limited to 50 MT to allow the delivery plane a chance to escape) a bomb that size is awful enough but if it is encased in cobalt it becomes the most lethal munition ever built.

Here’s MIT physicist Max Tegmark at the HuffPo in 2015: Dr. Strangelove Is Back: Say ‘Hi’ to the Cobalt Bomb!

I must confess that, as a physics professor, some of my nightmares are extra geeky. My worst one is the C-bomb, a hydrogen bomb surrounded by large amounts of cobalt. When I first heard about this doomsday device in Stanley Kubrik’s dark nuclear satire Dr. Strangelove, I wasn’t sure if it was physically possible. Now, I unfortunately know better, and it seems like it Russia may be building it.

The idea is terrifyingly simple: Just encase a really powerful H-bomb in massive amounts of cobalt.

When it explodes, it makes the cobalt radioactive and spreads it around the area or the globe, depending on the design. The half-life of the radioactive cobalt produced is about five years, which is long enough to give the fallout plenty of time to settle before it decays and kills, but short enough to produce intense radiation for a lot longer than you’d last in a fallout shelter. There’s almost no upper limit to how much cobalt and explosive power you can put in nukes that are buried for deterrence or transported by sea, and climate simulations have shown how hydrogen bombs can potentially lift fallout high enough to enshroud the globe, so if someone really wanted to risk the extinction of humanity, starting a C-bomb arms race is arguably one of the most promising strategies.

Not that anyone in their right mind would ever do such a thing, I figured back when I first saw the film. Although U.S. General Douglas MacArthur did suggest dropping some small cobalt bombs on the Korean border in the 1950s to deter Chinese troops, his request was denied and, as far as we know, no C-bombs were ever built. I felt relieved that my geeky nightmare was indeed nothing but a bad dream.

It’s not a new idea, The New York Times had a story in 1954,  “Now Most Dreaded Weapon, Cobalt Bomb, Can Be Built” which included this line:

It is this type of hydrogen bomb of which Albert Einstein said: “If successful, radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence annihilation of any life on earth will have been brought with in the range of technical possibilities.”

More recently, June 14, 2016 The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 72, 2016 – Issue 4: Security at sea, and under it published: Would Russia’s undersea “doomsday drone” carry a cobalt bomb?

Following the November 2015 “leak” of a classified slide purporting to show a Russian nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered drone intended to create long-lasting “zones of extensive radiological contamination,” both Russian and Western observers have suggested that Moscow may be developing a cobalt bomb.

While the underwater detonation of a massive cobalt or “conventional” nuclear weapon might create zones of long-lasting contamination, Russian decision makers would have little confidence that these areas would be in the intended locations, undermining the strategic case for such attacks. These findings suggest that the Kremlin is not pursuing radiological “doomsday bombs,” even though the nuclear-powered drone on the slide seems to be a real research project.

People smarter than I are speculating this might be what’s going on up in the Arctic.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2L8QURD Tyler Durden

CBO Says $15 Federal Minimum Wage Will Cost 1.3 Million Jobs

Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cost an estimated 1.3 jobs but would also lift more workers above the poverty line, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates in a report released Monday.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, though most states have minimum wage laws requiring higher pay. Earlier this year, House Democrats introduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025, and most Democrats in the 2020 presidential field have endorsed that plan. That plan builds on an unsuccessful Obama-era effort to set the federal minimum wage at $10.10 per hour.

If implemented by 2025, the CBO estimates, the $15 federal minimum wage would boost paychecks for 17 million workers who would otherwise earn less than $15 per hour. About 10 million workers who now earn about $15 an hour might see their paychecks increase slightly as well. The trade-off would be 1.3 million more people out of work. Those who lose their jobs (or are unable to find them in the first place) are likely to be lower-income workers, unskilled workers, and those with little work experience.

The CBO also ran projections for smaller minimum wage increases. If Congress hiked the minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2025, about 5 million workers would benefit from bigger paychecks and about 300,000 jobs would be lost. An increase to $10 per hour would benefit only 1.5 million workers and would have a negligible effect on employment levels (largely because 15 states already have minimum wages set at or above that level).

“For most low-wage workers, earnings and family income would increase, which would lift some families out of poverty. But other low-wage workers would become jobless, and their family income would fall—in some cases, below the poverty threshold,” the CBO concludes.

Democratic presidential candidates and others on the left will probably try to use the report to bolster the case for a higher minimum wage, claiming that the benefits outweigh the costs. The Employment Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, is already claiming the CBO “substantially overstates the costs” associated with higher wage mandates.

But it’s important to remember that any negative consequences—regardless of what they might be—will fall most heavily on workers with fewer skills or little experience. Someone who has a hard time finding a job that pays $8 an hour will be completely out of luck if employers are required to hire only workers who are worth $15 an hour.

It’s also important to remember that low-wage workers aren’t always from low-income families. Think of teenagers working summer jobs, for example, or students working part-time while they pursue higher education. In other words, some of the beneficiaries of higher minimum wages aren’t really what is traditionally thought of as “poor”—and the truly needy are more likely to lose out on entry-level jobs.

Having the feds set a minimum wage rate introduces additional problems. The law’s consequences in poorer, rural states will not be the same as its consequences in places with a higher cost of living. In other words, a $15 minimum wage will do more damage in Mississippi than in New York City. Forcing all American businesses to pay the same minimum wages makes little sense.

State lawmakers will make mistakes too, of course—California’s $15 per hour minimum wage means vastly different things depending on whether you live in Los Angeles or the poorer, rural counties of the state’s Central Valley, where unemployment is already high.

Eighteen states began 2019 with higher minimum wages than they had at the start of 2018, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state-level policies. Eight of those states automatically increase their minimum wages to track with the cost of living, while 10 others adopted increases because of specific legislation or ballot initiatives. Four other states have approved minimum wage increases during 2019.

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The Jeffrey Epstein Rabbit Hole Goes a Lot Deeper Than You Think

Like many of you, I’ve been following the Jeffrey Epstein story with horror, disgust and open eyes for several years. While it’s always been a creepy, twisted and completely bizarre saga, I was unaware of just how inexplicable and strange it is until I did some more digging earlier today.

I put a bunch of information together in a Twitter thread, and rather than reinvent the wheel, here it is:

continue reading

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Lawsuit Seeks Hunter Biden State Department Records Amid Allegations Of Nepotism

A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was filed on behalf of investigative journalist John Solomon, who seeks State Department records of communications with Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, and entities they are linked to – including Burisma Holdings, Rosemont Seneca Partners and/or Blue Star Strategies. 

According to investigations by journalist Peter Schweizer and others, the Bidens may have engaged in rampant nepotism, with Joe Biden accused of abusing his position as Vice President to help Hunter and his partners make millions of dollars in both Ukraine and China. 

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Hunter opened up about being a crackhead and accepting a ‘bribe’ from a Chinese energy tycoon in the form of a 2.8 carat diamond worth thousands of dollars, which he says wasn’t a bribe. 

The filing was made by the Southeastern Legal Foundation on behalf of Solomon, after the State Department failed to respond to a May 6, 2019 letter by the investigative journalist. 

As Mr. Solomon has reported, U.S. banking records show that Hunter Biden’s American-based firm Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts (more than $166k/month) from the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Hunter Biden. All of this occurred during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relationship with Russia.

Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor. His threat was so severe that Ukraine would have lost $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees sending Ukraine toward insolvency. So the question is – why? Why did Joe Biden demand the immediate firing of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin? And what did the State Department know about Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine and Ukraine’s investigations into those business dealings? –SLF

“[T]he now-completed Russia collusion investigation showed us, every American deserves the right to be presumed innocent until evidence is made public or a conviction is secured, especially when some matters of a case involve foreigners. The same presumption should be afforded to Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and Burisma in the Ukraine case,” said Solomon. 

“Nonetheless, some hard questions should be answered by Biden as he prepares, potentially, to run for president in 2020: Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work was performed for the money Hunter Biden’s firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who very publicly pursued Burisma?” 

The FOIA requests seek to answer the above questions. “Mr. Solomon’s questions, stemming from years-long investigative journalism, are powerful and legitimate inquiries into what the American public has a right to know about how and why Vice President Biden and the Obama administration conducted foreign policy in the last week of its tenure,” according to SLF executive director, Todd Young. 

“The well-documented series of events involving Ukraine begs for public disclosure.”

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iDowngrade Sparks Tech-Stock Slide As Dollar, Gold, Bonds Flatline

Jay Powell rehearsing his testimony to Congress…

The biggest market news, on a slow news day ahead of Powell’s testimony to Congress, was the downgrade of AAPL – which for once actually sparked some selling (down over 2% and back below $200)…

Apple fell after Rosenblatt Securities downgraded the iPhone maker to sell. That brought the total number of bearish analysts up to five among the 57 ratings tracked by Bloomberg, the highest number since at least 1997.

This weighed down Nasdaq immediately…

On the day, The Dow (weighed down by Boeing) and S&P outperformed the major US peers but all major US equity indices were down…

NOTE – the machines tried to ignite momentum off the opening lows but, for once, it failed.

Defensive stocks dominated trading today (just as they did on Friday)…

 

It was ugly overnight in China…

 

And European stocks were lower on the day…

 

Weakness in Europe was not helped by the collapse of Deutsche Bank after its massive restructuring…

 

US equities erased all those ridiculous rebound gains and caught back down to bonds, gold, and the dollar…

 

Most of the Treasury curve was modestly higher in yield today but the longer-end outperformed…

 

NOTE – yields spiked a little in the last hour as a CBO report on minimum wage hikes hit…

 

2s30s continues to flatten hard, now below the pre-FOMC levels…

 

And Debt Ceiling anxiety is starting to impact the T-Bill curve…

 

Before we leave bond-land completely, here’s a fun fact – Greek 10Y bond yields fell below US 10Y yields today for the first time since Oct 2007…

 

The dollar inched higher on the day but remains well off Friday’s spike highs…

 

The Turkish Lira tumbled after Erdogan fired the central bank chief…

 

Big positive jolt overnight in cryptos pulled them all green from Friday with Bitcoin and Ethereum leading…

 

Bitcoin tagged $12,000 this morning but couldn’t quite hold it, for now…

And Ethereum broke back above $300

 

Silver surprised with some outperformance as copper and gold dipped…oil dropped notably into the NYMEX close…

 

Gold fell back below $1400…

 

The Gold/Silver ration pulled back very modestly from 93x once again…

 

WTI snapped back below $58 as the NYMEX settle loomed…

 

Finally, in case you’re fed up with hearing about how awesome the economy is BUT we still need an “insurance cut” – here’s Gluskin-Sheff’s David Rosenberg to explain just how bad it actually is…

But, of course, we know fun-durr-mentals don’t matter anymore…

Powell better deliver or this entire ponzi will collapse.

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Does Justin Amash Libertarianism Have a Future?

He came, he saw, he did stuff, he formed the Freedom Caucus, he called for impeachment proceedings, he left the Freedom Caucus, he left the Republican Party, and now he’s making the media rounds amid speculation about his electoral possibilities for 2020. So was Justin Amash’s declaration of independence on balance a good thing?

Yes is the consensus on today’s Editors’ Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, though not without some bleak real-talk about the near-term viability of libertarian electoral politics. Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch engage with the critiques that libertarians don’t meaningfully exist, that libertarianism without populism is DOA, and that yet somehow libertarians have run economic policy for far too long. The group also discusses the Trump administration’s Census-citizenship gymnastics, the latest Nancy Pelosi/AOC flap, and what we can learn from revisiting the Tom Cruise flick Cocktail.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

Relevant links from the show:

“Justin Amash Declares Independence From Republican Party,” by Matt Welch

“Trump Taunts Amash as a ‘Dumb’ ‘Loser’ Who ‘Knew He Couldn’t Get the [GOP] Nomination,’” by Matt Welch

“Justin Amash Isn’t Just Rebelling Against Trump. He’s Fighting the Two-Party System,” by Peter Suderman

“Shock Poll: Amash Down 16 Points in Republican Primary,” by Matt Welch

“Libertarian Presidential Candidates, on a Possible Justin Amash Run: ‘That Would Be Amazing,’” by Matt Welch

“The Trump Administration’s Double Reversal on the Census Highlights the Difficulties of Dealing With a Mercurial President Who Rules by Tweet,” by Jacob Sullum

“Would Counting Illegal Immigrants Make the Census Pro–Democratic Party?” By Nick Gillespie

“Enumerated Powers and the Census Case,” by Ilya Somin

“SCOTUS Ruling on Adding a Citizenship Question to the Census Shows Wilbur Ross Was Defeated by His Own Lies,” by Jacob Sullum

“Census Citizenship Question Pushed for by GOP Gerrymanderer,” by Matt Welch

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Luongo: Epstein’s Arrest Tells Me Trump Is Now Out For Blood

Authored by Tom Luongo,

“Bernie Birnbaum is a horse of a different color, ethics-wise that is…

…as in he ain’t got none!”

— Johnny Caspar, “Miller’s Crossing”

Serial pederast Jeffrey Epstein is going to be arrested again. 

The big questions are why?  And why now?

I never doubted Donald Trump’s sincerity in wanting Hillary in jail.  But the reality is that Trump was not in any position to do so.  Until a few months ago.

When Attorney General William Barr ended the Mueller investigation back in February that was a turning point.  I talked about it back then in a piece called “The Old Political Order is Just Old.”

Mueller, his staff of hatchetmen, the Obama administration and the rest of the corrupt old-guard in D.C. fully expected to be allowed free rein to convict Trump politically of Obstruction of Justice based on an interpretation of Federal Statutes that could only be justified in the world of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report.

When that didn’t happen, they are now looking at potential blowback from a vain and vindictive man occupying the supposedly most powerful office in the world.

But is that really the case anymore? It seems John Bolton has been more president than Trump recently.

I was cautiously optimistic that Trump would turn the corner on his presidency now that Mueller, impeachment and the rest of it would lift from his shoulders.  His foreign policy maneuvers didn’t fill me with much, if any, confirmation of this hope. 

But domestically signs were there that he had stabilized the battlefield.

Epstein’s arrest tells me he’s now out for blood.

Because this goes directly to the heart of the matter.  Trump left the Clintons’ social circle in disgust and I’m convinced he ran to stop her corrupt sell out of the U.S.

Never forget that, while corruption is rampant in D.C., it is not all-pervasive.  It’s not a black and white thing.

William Barr may not be a Boy Scout or anything but even he, like Trump, has a disgust circuit.  And that circuit has a threshold. 

The level of corruption of the Departments of Justice, State, Treasury and the intelligence agencies needed to coordinate the RussiaGate hoax all to serve as Hillary’s revenge porn was too much for enough people.

And there are still plenty of people in all of those departments willing to step up now that the board state has changed.

Remember back when Trump said we should just leave Hillary be, she’s been through enough?  That wasn’t him capitulating to the Deep State, that was him offering her a way out.  He knew then what was going on but thought he was powerless to stop it, politically.

To go after her you go after the person who is her Achilles’ heel, Epstein through his association with Bill.  Because what if this isn’t just about Bill’s antics? 

But this is more than just Hillary and Bill.

This is likely far deeper a rabbit hole than anyone in D.C. wants to admit.   Don’t think for a second that Epstein hasn’t been blackmailing very prominent people for years. 

Because he has. And they are all now scared to death.

And Robert Mueller is up to his neck in this.  Because it was Mueller who helped Epstein mostly get off the hook the last time and had the court documents sealed.

Now that Mike Cernovich worked to get those documents unsealed, we have an arrest warrant a week later by a Justice Department led by someone, at this point, loyal to Trump.

Even if Barr and Trump have a marriage of convenience here, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that Epstein will no longer be able to hide behind Clinton bag men and will this time have to cut a real deal to stay out of gen pop.

This process will be slow and painful, but it will grind to the kind of conclusion that will only benefit Trump’s re-election bid.  It will be an epic drip feed of leaks, innuendos, implications, indictments and the rest.

Because there comes a point where the Alinsky method of accusing your enemy of the thing you do backfires when it’s raping 14-year-old girls. 

Once this thing gets a head of steam, once the #MeToo crowd gets a hold of this, there won’t be anyone left standing.  I always said Hillary would indict herself.  Her insane lust for power and revenge against her obstacles led us here. 

And it will lead her to the kind of shame and disgrace that befits her avarice.

When Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is out there signaling for her mother on this immediately, you know this is bad.

Pelosi doesn’t roll over for nothing folks. Think what you want about her but she’s a pitbull. And she rolled over on border wall funding last week.

This Epstein arrest is a testament to what happens when the pendulum swings too far in one direction.  Where despicable people get away with the most heinous acts simply because they are connected in a web of corruption and venality.

Maybe this is the moment of Peak Swamp?  Maybe it’s the moment where we can see things begin, ever so slightly to improve. 

Is it too little, too late?  Likely.  But something had to be done to keep our faith in our political and social institutions intact.  Because otherwise that way leads to only chaos and collapse.

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