US-backed self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaido has been barred from holding public office in Venezuela for 15 years by the Maduro government, Reuters reports, citing Caracas officials.
Venezuelan state comptroller Elvis Amoroso in public statements on Thursday said it was the maximum punishment allowable by law, and charged that Guaido had “inconsistencies in his personal financial disclosures and a spending record that did not match his level of income,” according to Reuters.
Image source: Getty
After the shock announcement it remained unclear what this means in terms of Guaido’s immediate fate as majority leader of the National Assembly.
Crucially Guaido’s being banned from public office came less than 24 hours after the opposition leader announced plans for his supporters to launch “tactical actions” starting next week as part of his “Operation Freedom” to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro.
He began publicly referencing the plan earlier this month at opposition rallies and described it as a “full-fledged revolution in all states of Venezuela simultaneously.”
¡Atención!
Anunciamos el inicio de la fase preparatoria de la #OperaciónLibertad para lograr el cese de la usurpación. Llegó el momento de la organización, la movilización y la estrategia para liberar a Venezuela.
This has even included talk of “Operation Freedom” operatives and mass protesters ultimately marching on the Miraflores presidential palace – home to President Maduro.
Tweeting with the hashtag #VamosOperaciónLibertad, Guaido further appealed to “constitutional forces” within the Venezuelan army to rise up and switch loyalties.
Washington’s very overt promotion of Guaido as “legitimate” leader of Venezuela has resulted in threats from Maduro himself to have Guaido arrested. White House efforts to ramp up pressure on Maduro included hosting a delegation headed by Guaido’s wife, Fabiana Rosales, at the White House on Thursday.
“Eighty percent of the population in Venezuela has no power. They are trying to break our morale,” Venezuela’s new Interim First Lady said at the White House today. “But let me tell you that there is light, and the light is here.”
Notably the White House called Rosales “Venezuela’s new Interim First Lady” in statements related to the event.
No doubt, Caracas is now sending its own firm message in banning Guaido for public office for 15 years, something sure to result in a swift US reaction.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HYZoYZ Tyler Durden
The Federal Reserve is an often misunderstood entity, not only in the mainstream, but also in alternative economic circles. There is this ever pervasive fantasy on both sides of the divide that the central bank actually “cares” about forever protecting the US economy, or at least propping up the US economy in an endless game of “kick the can”. While this might be true at times, it is not true ALL the time. Things change, agendas change, and sometimes the Fed’s goal is not to maintain the economy, but to destroy it.
The delusion that the Fed is seeking to kick the can is highly present today after the latest Fed meeting in which the central bank indicated there would be a pause in interest rate hikes in 2019. As I have noted in numerous articles over the past year, the mainstream media and the Fed have made interest rates the focus of every economic discussion, and I believe this was quite deliberate. In the meantime, the Fed balance sheet and its strange relationship to the stock market bubble is mostly ignored.
The word “capitulation” is getting thrown around quite haphazardly in reference to the Fed’s tightening policy. And yet, even now after all the pundits have declared the Fed “in retreat” or “trapped in a Catch-22”, the Fed continues to tighten, and is set to cut balance sheet assets straight through until the end of September. Perhaps my definition of capitulation is different from some people’s.
One would think that if the Fed was in retreat in terms of tightening, that they would actually STOP tightening. This has not happened. Also, one might also expect that if the Fed is going full “dovish” that they would have cut interest rates in March instead of holding them steady at their neutral rate of inflation. This has not happened either. In fact, I’m not exactly sure how anyone can claim with a straight face that the Fed has given up on Quantitative Tightening (QT). Despite the many assumptions out there that the Fed is going to reverse on interest rates, I believe this is wishful thinking and that the Fed will not reverse rates in 2019.
What I do see is the Fed using rhetoric and head fakes to give the impression that they plan to go dovish in the future. And, this is being wrongly interpreted as the Fed being dovish now. But why is the Fed doing this while also continuing to dump its balance sheet? In my view, it is because they are almost finished with the task they set out to accomplish with QT in the first place, and they now have to make it appear as though they want to accommodate as the system breaks down.
In my article ‘Party While You Can – Central Bank Ready To Pop The Everything Bubble’, I outlined a process or tactic which the Fed has used on many occasions in the past: The creation of economic bubbles through inflation and artificially low interest rates, followed by abrupt tightening and higher interest rates into economic weakness. This tactic is highly effective in accomplishing ONE GOAL – financial collapse.
It is the same strategy the Fed used at the beginning of the Great Depression. It is also what the Fed used to trigger the crash of 2008. And, in 2018-2019, the Fed is doing it again.
For over two years now the Fed has been instituting tightening measures after inflating perhaps the largest economic bubble in modern history, also known as “the everything bubble”. The Fed did this despite extreme weakness in economic fundamentals, and is continuing forward until the fourth quarter of this year despite nearly every sector of the economy showing steep declines or a greatly reduced pace of growth.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Fed announced it would be cutting assets until September just as the Treasury Yield curve inverted for the first time since 2007. The same thing happened just before the crash and recession that started in 2008. An inverted yield curve is generally a sure sign of a decelerating economy or recession/depression.
What bewilders me are the numerous claims in the mainstream and alternative media that the Fed is somehow oblivious to what it is doing. This is simply not true. Jerome Powell in his statements in the Fed Minutes of October 2012 explains plainly exactly what would happen if and when the Fed tightened policy into weakness. He essentially admits that a crash will occur.
Four years later in the wake of the Trump presidency, Powell somehow conveniently finds himself the Chairman of the Fed, and what does he do? He tightens policy into economic weakness fully aware of what would happen next. I’ll repeat this point again because I don’t think some analysts out there get it: The central bankers KNOW that they are causing a crash. They are doing it deliberately. The question we need to ask is, why?
Over the past ten years the Fed may have acted as a crutch for markets, but this was not their true goal. Rather, the 2008 credit bubble collapse was used by the bankers as a rationale to create an even bigger bubble; a bubble that now encompasses every aspect of our financial structure. QT was needed to pop this bubble, and so the Fed tightened.
For many months now the Fed has stated that the US economy is “strong” and “in recovery” despite the evidence at hand. In March, they did not reverse tightening; they only admitted in an indirect way that the economy is not in recovery. They have until September to finish using QT for a controlled demolition of the Everything Bubble. This is more than enough time.
As noted in recent articles, US housing, autos, credit, retail, and even employment are faltering, while prices in most necessities remain high or are climbing. All that is left is for stock markets to follow the fundamental indicators down (as they usually do). This trend started at the same time as the Fed’s tightening began. All that was needed to set the avalanche in motion were moderate rate hikes and asset cuts.
The timing of the current crash is perfect for the banking elites for a number of reasons. Most importantly, they now have a scapegoat to pin the crash on in the form of “populist movements”. I warned about this ploy way back in early 2016 before the Brexit vote and the presidential elections. It is the reason why I predicted the Brexit vote would succeed and that Donald Trump would be president. The elites needed someone to blame for the collapse of the everything bubble they have been planning for the past 10 years.
The Brexit has turned into a three ring circus, a major distraction from the ultimate intended end game which I have long believed will be a “no deal” scenario. A no deal event is being painted in the mainstream media as a kind of economic doomsday for Europe, and I believe it will be, but not for the reasons they describe. Europe has been set up for a fall, just like the US, for many years now. Government and corporate debt levels are at extreme highs and major banks in Germany and Italy are on the verge of implosion.
A hard Brexit is useful to the elites as a scapegoat for a crash that was going to happen anyway.The bankers don’t plan on facing the music, they want “populist” groups to get the blame.
Trump has been a very effective ally to the banking class. After loading his cabinet with these “swamp creatures”, he then went on to take full credit for the very stock market rally he originally criticized during his campaign as a fraudulent bubble created by central bank stimulus. Then, he started a trade war which has dragged on for many months. It has shown no signs of slowing, and, is providing excellent cover for the Fed as it pulls the plug on life support for the economy.
Trump’s exoneration in terms of the Mueller probe and the Russiagate farce was easy to see coming. I have been saying for the past two years that Trump will never be impeached (or never impeached successfully) exactly because the banking elites WANT him right where he is. Russiagate was meant to drive leftists even further into extremism, it was NOT meant to unseat Trump.
If the markets were to tank this year (in January I predicted they would retest December lows starting at the end of March through April), then Trump would get total credit in the mainstream for the crisis and the Fed would avoid the majority of the blame.
Once again, lets consider the timing of current events – The Fed is tightening until September but pretending as if it is backing off. The yield curve has inverted. Major fundamentals are dropping exponentially. At the same time, we have Europe on the verge of a fabricated crisis in the form of a potential no deal Brexit, and we have US trade negotiations which have been delayed once again, perhaps until June, maybe longer.
I don’t believe in the “perfect storm” as a matter of coincidence, but I do believe according to the evidence that perfect storms can be deliberately engineered. Bottom line, no matter what the mainstream says in the coming months, the Fed knew what it was doing.
There are many advantages to an engineered crash. As noted, it was going to happen eventually anyway. It is simply delusion to think that the central bank can prop up the system forever. We sometimes hear the claim that this was done in Japan, but the Fed increased its balance sheet to $4.5 Trillion dollars in the span of two years – it took the Bank of Japan decades to get to the same level. There comes a point in which stimulus and increased debt provides diminishing returns when trying to hide economic weakness, and the Fed has already hit that point.
The Fed is crashing the system now because they have sovereignty activists and nationalists to point the finger at. They are also crashing the system now because the everything bubble is at its peak. Corporate and consumer debt are at historic highs, and the bankers are looking to cause maximum damage. Finally, the banking establishment has loyalties to certain agendas which are far outside national interests, including the often mentioned Agenda 2030 and the “global economic reset”. These agendas call for greatly increased global centralization of economic power as well as geopolitical power; in other words, global governance.
No matter what the mainstream media says over the course of this year, I want readers to remember that this was a disaster at least ten years in the making. It is not something that suddenly fell out of the sky. It was not something that was unexpected or unpredictable. It was highly predictable to those with the eyes to see. It was NOT a mistake.
* * *
If you would like to support the work that Alt-Market does while also receiving content on advanced tactics for defeating the globalist agenda, subscribe to our exclusive newsletter The Wild Bunch Dispatch. Learn more about it HERE.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2FBI1L5 Tyler Durden
The wife of former Justice Department #4 official Bruce Ohr conducted extensive opposition research on Trump family members and campaign aides while working for Fusion GPS – the firm paid by the Clinton campaign to produce a ‘salacious and unverified’ Russian-sourced dossier which would later be used against Trump and his campaign.
(Getty Images; AP; The Epoch Times; Photo illustration by The Epoch Times
According to a newly released transcript of Nellie Ohr’s closed-door Congressional testimony, Ohr – who speaks fluent Russian, explored relationships between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russian organized crime, according to Fox News.
“I was asked to research Trump’s family broadly in connection with any—any Russian connections,” Ohr stated, adding that she “did some research on all of them, but not in much depth.”
Ohr explained that she researched Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, specifically their “travels.”
She added that she was looking “to see whether they were involved in dealings and transactions with people who had suspicious pasts, or suspicious types of dealings.” –Fox News
Also interesting from the transcripts is that Nellie passed Bruce research she had done for Fusion GPS on a memory stick.
Nellie Ohr was also tasked with researching former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former campaign aide Carter Page, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn – who had relationships in both Russia and Turkey. Earlier this year the Daily Caller revealed portions of Ohr’s committee interview, but the transcript was only made available Thursday.
Ohr worked with Fusion GPS between October 2015 and September 2016. She also admitted during testimony that she favored Hillary Clinton as a candidate, and would have been less comfortable researching her Russia ties (P. 105).
In 2010, she represented the CIA’s “Open Source Works” group in a 2010 “expert working group report on international organized crime” along with Bruce Ohr and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of demoted DOJ official, Bruce Ohr, not only worked for Fusion GPS, but has also represented the CIA’s “Open Source Works” group. https://t.co/u5HPgJwvWdpic.twitter.com/ZPhAIzR6wv
Meanwhile, some have wondered if Nellie’s late-life attraction to Ham radios was in fact a method of covertly communicating with others about the Trump-Russia investigation, in a way which wouldn’t be surveilled by the NSA or other agencies.
was Nellie Ohr’s late-in-life foray into ham radio an effort to evade the Rogers-led NSA detecting her participation in compiling the Russian-sourced Steele dossier? Just as her husband’s omissions on his DOJ ethics forms raise an inference of improper motive, any competent prosecutor could use the circumstantial evidence of her taking up ham radio while digging for dirt on Trump to prove her consciousness of guilt and intention to conceal illegal activities. –The Federalist
Bruce Ohr was demoted twice after the DOJ’s Inspector General discovered that he lied about his involvement with Simpson – who employed dossier author and former British spy, Christopher Steele.
Last August, emails turned over to Congressional investigators revealed that Steele was much closer to the Obama administration than previously disclosed, and his DOJ contact Bruce Ohr reported directly to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates – who approved at least one of the FISA warrants to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Steele and the Ohrs would have breakfast together on July 30, 2016 at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown Washington D.C., while Steele turned in installments of his infamous “dossier” on July 19 and 26. The breakfast also occurred one day before the FBI formally launched operation “Crossfire Hurricane,” the agency’s counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign.
Bruce Ohr was a key contact inside the Justice Department for ex-British spy Christopher Steele, who authored the anti-Trump dossier, which was commissioned by Fusion GPS and funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through law firm Perkins Coie.
The FBI relied on much of Steele’s work to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants against the Trump campaign—specifically Carter Page, redacted versions of the FISA warrants released last year revealed. –Fox News
On Monday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced that his panel would do a “deep dive” into the “other side” of the Trump-Russia investigation. He also called for the appointment of a new special counsel to look into abuse between the DOJ and Obama administration while investigating Donald Trump and his campaign.
On Wednesday, Trump vowed to release the full and unredacted FISA warrants and other documents that the FBI used to surveil his campaign and Page.
“I have plans to declassify and release. I have plans to absolutely release,” Trump said during a Tuesday night interview on Fox‘s “Hannity.”
“I have some very talented people working for me, lawyers, and they really didn’t want me to do it early on. … A lot of people wanted me to do it a long time ago. I’m glad I didn’t do it. We got a great result without having to do it, but we will. One of the reasons that my lawyers didn’t want me to do it, is they said, if I do it, they’ll call it a form of obstruction.”
“At the right time, we will be absolutely releasing.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Yvwqps Tyler Durden
As an outraged public continues to wonder why Empire star Jussie Smollett is no longer facing charges for allegedly faking a hate crime, the National District Attorney’s Association is criticizing prosecutor Kim Foxx for her decision to dismiss the case.
“When a prosecutor seeks to resolve a case through diversion or some other alternative to prosecution, it should be done so with an acknowledgment of culpability on the part of the defendant,” the organization said in a statement. “A case with the consequential effects of Mr. Smollett’s should not be resolved without a finding of guilt or innocence.”
The group raises some very valid concerns about Foxx, the state’s attorney. It was previously reported that Foxx recused herself from the Smollett case in February, but it appears she did not file the paperwork to do so officially. This meant that the judge could not appoint a special prosecutor to handle the case, and instead, Foxx’s offices continued to be principally involved in bringing Smollett to justice. Her recusal was in no sense meaningful.
This matters, because Foxx had been in contact with supporters and relatives of Smollett—including Tina Tchen, a former aide to First Lady Michelle Obama. The relative and Foxx ostensibly discussed getting the Chicago police to turn the entire matter over to the FBI, which Foxx attempted in vain to make happen.
Tchen is not the only political friend Smollett and Foxx have in common: Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), is another. Foxx has described Harris as mentor, and Harris appeared at a rally with Smollett and his sister, according to CBS Chicago.
There are obviously a lot of connections between politicians and Hollywood, and the existence of such connections does not prove that Foxx let Smollett off as some kind of favor. But Foxx herself has shot down one of the more plausible alternative explanations, which was that the case was simply not nearly as strong as the police had made it out to be. Foxx has maintained that the evidence was solid and that “this office believed that they could prove him guilty.” For some reason, they simply did not want to.
Foxx’s office has tried to spin the outcome as a win-win: Smollett forfeited a $10,000 bond and completed 16 hours of community service. But Smollett’s attorneys have correctly pointed out that no formal agreement was ever reached, and Smollett was never required to admit guilt.
It would have been perfectly appropriate to show Smollett leniency. In general, we should not send people to prison unless they pose some actual danger to society. Community service and some sort of fine is a perfectly reasonable conclusion to this case—but only alongside an admission of guilt. Smollett inflamed the entire nation at a time when many people are especially concerned that hate crimes are increasing and President Trump has something to do with it. On its face, what happened to Smollett seemed to confirm this misleading premise. If the prosecutors believed Smollett was guilty, and that they could prove it, then they really should have compelled him to acknowledge that there are no ski-mask-wearing “MAGA country” mercenaries prowling the streets of Chicago in the middle of the night.
According to Agriculture Secretary Sunny Purdue, there “may be as many as a million calves lost in Nebraska” due to the catastrophic flooding that has hit the state.
This is not a rumor, this is not an exaggeration, and this is not based on any sort of speculation. This number comes to us directly from the top agriculture official in the entire country, and it means that the economic toll from the recent floods is far greater than most of us had anticipated. You can watch Purdue make this quote on Fox Business right here, and it is important to remember that this number is just for one state. It is hard to imagine what the final numbers will look like when the livestock losses for all of the states affected by the flooding are tallied up. This is already the worst agricultural disaster in modern American history, and the National Weather Service is telling us that there will be more catastrophic flooding throughout the middle portion of the nation for the next two months.
Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts says that this is the worst flooding that his state has ever experienced. Ricketts originally told us that 65 out of the 93 counties in his state have declared a state of emergency, but that number has now risen to 74. Hundreds of millions of dollars of damage has been done in his state alone, and that is just an initial estimate.
It deeply offends me that the big mainstream news channels have spent so little time covering this disaster. This is the biggest news story of 2019 so far by a very wide margin, but because it happened in the middle of the country they are not giving it the attention that it deserves.
In the short-term, food prices will not rise too dramatically because the stores are selling the food that has already been produced. But as the months roll along, you will start to notice food prices steadily increase. Millions of bushels of wheat, corn and soybeans have been destroyed by the flooding so far, and thousands of farmers will not be able to plant crops at all this year. And the livestock losses that we have already experienced will be felt for many years to come.
Beef will never be lower in price than it is right now. So if you are a beef lover, you may want to stock up.
When the flooding initially came, it happened so fast that many farmers were powerless to do anything about it. In Sherman County, farmer Richard Panowicz says that ice and debris were “exploding from the river”…
“Within 15 minutes it was devastation,” Panowicz said, with water, ice and debris exploding from the river with nothing to stop it.
He described some ice chunks as 3 feet thick and the size of an extended-cab pickup.
Panowicz said a lot of the dead calves he’s picked up have had broken legs. Many of the carcasses were found by neighbors.
In other cases, farmers were faced with a heartbreaking choice between saving their animals or saving their neighbors. One farmer that rushed to help his neighbors ended up losing 30 calves to the floodwaters…
Before Mahon could think about his animals, he needed to help his neighbors. As the water rose, he rescued one with his tractor, the floodwater lifting it up and spinning him 180 degrees. He helped save three more people — including an 85-year-old woman and a 9-month-old baby — with a boat, he said.
Then he could start counting his losses. He estimated the flood carried away 30 calves and almost as many cows, nearly $50,000 out of his pocket. It might be more.
Can you imagine the grief that these farming families are enduring right now?
Many of them are financially ruined and will never be able to go back to farming again.
Dave Eaton’s family has been farming the same plot of land for 152 years. But now the Missouri River has swallowed his farm, and with much more flooding still to come, he anticipates that his farm with be underwater “all year”…
The farm has been in his family 152 years. He was born there. He’s been thinking about what he’s learned about the Missouri’s upstream reservoirs and the mountain snowpack, and what it means for his land.
“It’s not like I’m new to the area,” he said. “My gut feeling is we’re going to be under water all year.”
And he is definitely not the only one that has had his year ruined.
Panowicz says that the hay and silage that were meant to feed his cattle this season were soaked “in 3 to 4 feet of water”…
The hay and silage to feed his cattle are soaked after sitting in 3 to 4 feet of water.
Sand now covers much of the pastureland he uses to graze his herd of commercial Angus cows and purebred Charolais bulls.
And 40 of his recently born calves died in the flood.
So what is he supposed to do?
Some Nebraska ranchers will bravely try to rebuild, but for Panowicz it appears that the end has come…
“I’ll probably sell the (remaining) cows and calves and get out of the cattle business,” said Panowicz, 65. “I’ve been around cows since the early 1970s.”
I could go on and on, but I think that you get the point.
America’s farmers have been utterly devastated. America’s cattle producers have been utterly devastated. Food production is going to be way, way below expectations, and food prices are going to escalate dramatically in the coming months. This is the kind of scenario that I have been warning about, and this crisis is going to continue to get worse as all the snow from one of the snowiest winters on record melts. In Minnesota, there are still more than 20 inches of snow on the ground in some places, and all of that water has to go somewhere.
This is the biggest national crisis that has hit the United States in many years, but the mainstream media and millions of Americans that do not live in the affected areas still do not seem to get it.
Of course once food prices start getting painfully high at our supermarkets everyone will start complaining, but there will not be any easy solutions.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2uzv5jW Tyler Durden
It tells us something about California’s hamfisted implementation of the state’s new recreational marijuana law that L.A.’s mayor is now talking about spending millions more in police enforcement to fight a marijuana black market that likely wouldn’t exist if state regulations weren’t so terrible.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said he may ask for an increase in police and enforcement funding to shut down all the unlicensed, illegally operating pot shops in the city.
Why would a city that has legalized recreational marijuana consider a potential tenfold jump in police spending—from $3 million to $30 million—aimed at prosecuting marijuana offenders? Because L.A.’s regulations are so difficult to comply with that the city remains full of illegal pot businesses. Local media outlet The Hubnotes that while there are 178 legal pot shops in Los Angeles, the city has gone after more than 100 illegally operating shops and the city’s attorney has filed criminal charges against more than 500 defendants across a nine-month period.
Two big factors are contributing to this outcome. First, California’s legalization came with huge taxation authorities, and the cities that are allowing legal marijuana sales are also heavily taxing the industry in the hopes of raking in revenue. If you buy marijuana legally in Los Angeles, state and local taxes and fees add nearly 35 percent to the cost. Legal marijuana in Los Angeles actually costs more than it does in San Francisco, thanks to a 10 percent local excise tax.
The second factor, seemingly ignored by Garcetti in his call for a crackdown, is that L.A. has done a terrible job setting up the bureaucracy that allows people to get licenses to legally operate. The Los Angeles Times reported in February that people who have tried to open their shops legally have been thwarted by bureaucratic slow-rolling. Many applicants have been waiting for more than a year for permission to open their stores. Some have just given up and gone elsewhere. Others are simply taking advantage of the demand and the city’s inability to consistently control the market and operating unlicensed storefronts.
The result? 80 percent of California marijuana sales are happening on the black market rather through legal vendors. Licensed vendors understandably want Garcetti to do something about that, but rather than addressing high taxes and excessive red tape, he’s insisting there needs to be even more punishment.
Somehow, with recreational marijuana perfectly legal in Los Angeles, the city is embarking in a new expensive drug war.
Having seen Education Secretary Betsy DeVos slammed today as she tried to defend the department’s proposed budget cuts – including the elimination of funding for the Special Olympics – in a hearing before House lawmakers this afternoon, President Trump has – for the second time in a week – overridden his administration, telling a pool of reporters that the Special Olympics will be funded.
“The Special Olympics is not a federal program. It’s a private organization. I love its work, and I have personally supported its mission. Because of its important work, it is able to raise more than $100 million every year,” DeVos said in a statement.
“There are dozens of worthy nonprofits that support students and adults with disabilities that don’t get a dime of federal grant money. But given our current budget realities, the federal government cannot fund every worthy program, particularly ones that enjoy robust support from private donations,” she added.
According to Education Week, the proposal released earlier this month would gut at least 29 programs in an attempt to save some $7 billion, including the elimination of $17.6 million in funding for the Special Olympics, roughly 10 percent of the group’s overall revenue.
“We had to make some difficult decisions with this budget,” DeVos told a House subcommittee.
“Madam Secretary, I have to say, and maybe it’s offensive: Shame on you,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said per CNN.
But now, having faced widespread backlash from the decision, President Trump told reporters at the White House Thursday,
“I’ve overridden my people for funding the Special Olympics.”
DeVos said she “wasn’t personally involved” in pushing for elimination of the funding, but she defended it as her agency seeks to cut $7 billion from the 2020 budget.
This ‘override’ follows Trump’s decision to go against his administration’s plans to place further sanctions on North Korea.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YvrYae Tyler Durden
A federal judge ruled today that New York’s notoriously nonsensical law criminalizing “gravity knives”—which groups have said for years is used by New York City to selectively prosecute people, especially the working class and minorities, for carrying common folding knives—is unconstitutionally vague.
in response to a lawsuit by New York City sous chef Joseph Cracco, who was arrested and fined for carrying a pocket knife, U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty ruled that New York’s law banning gravity knives afforded police and prosecutors almost unlimited discretion to arrest and prosecute people for carrying knives commonly sold in stores across the state.
“The court recognizes that the District Attorney must have discretion to prosecute or not to prosecute criminal matters,” Crotty wrote in his opinion and order. “The combination here, however, of a statute that does not specify how Cracco can identify a gravity knife and a a practice of prosecuting possession of gravity knives in an unclear and inconsistent manner provides police and prosecutors ‘virtually unlimited’ or ‘unfettered’ discretion to enforce the gravity knife statute. Under such circumstances, and with the lens of Cracco’s past prosecution and intended future conduct, the gravity knife statute is unconstitutionally vague.”
The law was passed in 1958 to ban knives that relied on gravity to open and lock into place. It was intended to address knives modeled after World War II paratrooper knives that opened by depressing a button, whereafter the knife blade fell and locked into place by force of gravity. However, New York City police interpreted the statute to mean any folding knife that can be opened by a flick of the wrist.
Martin LaFalce, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, a legal aid group that has released several reports on the gravity knife law, says in an interview with Reason that the Cracco decision “recognizes the basic principle that criminal liability cannot turn on the flick of an officer’s wrist, and it’s impossible for New Yorkers to comply with the gravity knife statute.”
The law is applied almost exclusively in New York City and nowhere else in the state. A 2014 Village Voiceinvestigation found that between 2003 and 2013, the NYPD made 60,000 arrests for alleged gravity knife possession. Eighty-six percent of those arrested were black or Hispanic.
In 2014, a New York City man received a $7,500 settlement from the city for malicious prosecution after he was arrested for carrying a pocket knife that he’d purchased to comply with the state’s confounding laws, and which the staff at the store told him was perfectly legal. The Village Voicereported in 2015 that New York City paid out nearly $350,000 in malicious prosecution settlements involving gravity knives over the previous five years.
In Cracco’s case, he was returning home after work with his knife clipped to his pants pocket when he was stopped by NYPD officers. Cracco alleges that the officer who arrested him tried three or four times to flick open his pocket knife before finally succeeding.
Under today’s court ruling, if a police officer failed to flick open a knife on the first try, the knife would not be illegal.
“Under the old standard, in theory a police officer could attempt to open a folding knife many times, fail every time, and then on the final time, if the officer was able to, it would qualify as illegal,” LaFalce says. “To say that someone could go to jail under that standard is absurd.”
Yet that absurd standard led to thousands of people a year being arrested and prosecuted in New York City for carrying knives sold in hardware stores throughout the city.
In response to these issues, the New York state legislature twice passed bills in recent years that would have rewritten the gravity knife statute, yet Gov. Andrew Cuomo vetoed both bills.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office prosecutes the majority of gravity knife cases in the city, including Cracco’s. In a statement to Reason, Manhattan District Attorney’s office communications director Danny Frost said, “We are reviewing the decision.”
Boeing shareholders probably breathed a sigh of relief Thursday afternoon when the Oracle of Omaha himself declared that, although Boeing has “a lot of work to do, very promptly,” the airline industry as a whole is still “unbelievably safe.” Because Warren Buffett’s tentative vote of confidence in Boeing was the best news the company had all day.
Shortly after Boeing unveiled the fixes to the controversial MCAS anti-stall software on its 737 MAX 8 jets – software that is suspected of having contributed to two plane crashes that left more than 350 people dead – the family of a passenger who died on Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 has filed the first lawsuit against the aerospace company in a US federal court.
According to Reuters, the suit was filed by the family of Jackson Musoni, a citizen of Rwanda. He was one of 157 people who died during the March 10 crash. In a further bad look for the company, the lawsuit alleges that MCAS’s design was defective. That comes as Boeing has reconfigured the software to stop it from mistakenly triggering the nose-down behavior that is believed to have contributed to the two crashes. The company’s shares traded slightly higher on Thursday.
Boeing is still dealing with a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who was killed aboard the Lion Air crash, which took place on Oct. 29 when a 737 MAX owned by Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea just minutes after takeoff. The suit alleges that the 737 was “unreasonably dangerous” and is calling for what would be an embarrassing jury trial in Chicago, per Reuters.
But the lawsuit was the only disappointing headline for Boeing traders to digest. The WTO ruled on Thursday that the US had failed to comply with an earlier ruling calling for it to end illegal subsidies for Boeing, setting the stage for potentially damaging retaliatory damage from the EU, according to WSJ.
Meanwhile, the backlash over revelations that Boeing charged extra for certain safety features is intensifying after the acting head of the FAA and the secretary of the Department of Transportation sat for Congressional hearings. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a group of senators publicized a letter they sent to Boeing demanding that all “optional” safety features be included in every plane sold.
Safety features on jets that fly hundreds of passengers should never be sold as a la carte add-ons. Boeing should include all safety-critical systems necessary for safe operation as part of the standard cost to the airlines. pic.twitter.com/0RgySKIesG
That’s because the EU’s retaliation can be commensurate with the damage done to France’s Airbus, Boeing’s biggest rival, not to the benefit received by Boeing. Specifically, the WTO ruled that Washington State tax breaks for Boeing’s Renton factory, as well as a federal export-import tax break.
The WTO ruliing comes at a particularly sensitive time for US-EU trade relations, as Trump threatens to impose damaging tariffs on foreign cars, and the EU has refused the Trump administration’s demands to open its markets to more US agricultural goods.
The Export-Import Bank was mostly dead before being resurrected in 2015 as a shell of its former cronyist self, but now Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) is aiming to finish it off.
With a handful of Republican cosponsors backing him, Amash on Wednesday introduced the Export-Import Bank Terminiation Act of 2019. The bill would permanently close the federal credit agency that boosts foreign sales of politically favored corporations. Aircraft maker Boeing is the biggest beneficiary of the bank’s taxpayer-backed largesse, receving as much as 70 percet of all Export-Import Bank loan guarantees and 40 percent of all handouts in some years, while GE, Caterpillar, and the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation are other common beneficiaries.
“The Export-Import Bank is a prime example of Washington’s addiction to political cronyism,” Amash said in a statement. “Instead of allowing businesses to compete in a free market, politicians pick winners and losers. Meanwhile, taxpayers assume the financial risk for the bank’s federally backed loans while a few corporations pocket the profits.”
The main beneficiaries of the Export-Import Bank’s cronyism have done just fine for the past three years, during which time the bank has operated at far less than full capacity and has been blocked from handing out loans of more than $10 million. That should be a signal that the bank is not necessary, and that it could be abolished without hurting the economy.
“It shows that the world will continue to produce commercial planes even if Airbus and Boeing sales aren’t subsidized by taxpayers,” Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a Reason columnist, wrote in 2017. “That’s because the foreign airlines that received Ex-Im’s cheap loans could typically get credit and find lenders without an Ex-Im guarantee, could afford to buy planes without the subsidies, and didn’t decide to buy a plane based on the existence of the subsidies.”
Fiscally conservative Republicans, including Amash, have been waging war against the Export-Import Bank for years. The bank was briefly shut down when its charter expired in July 2015 during a congressional budget fight. Democrats used a discharge petition to restore the Export-Import Bank’s lending authority in December of the same year.
Since then, the Export-Import Bank has operated without a quorum of members necessary to approve larger loans. Still it shambles on, a cronyist zombie. Congress now has a chance to put it out of its misery.
As an outraged public continues to wonder why Empire star Jussie Smollett 
It tells us something about California’s hamfisted implementation of the state’s new recreational marijuana law that L.A.’s mayor is now talking about 
A federal judge ruled today that New York’s notoriously nonsensical law criminalizing “gravity knives”—which groups have said for years is used by New York City to selectively prosecute people, especially the working class and minorities, for carrying common folding knives—is unconstitutionally vague.
The Export-Import Bank was 
